Sophianotloren

Check out my hot new book: Wetware: Cyberpunk Erotica ($3.89)

• On Thursday Death and Taxes reported the open letter that artist Molly Crabapple wrote to Lena Dunham about why she won’t work with her as long as she’s got her name on a letter to Amnesty International urging it to reverse its stance on sex work. (To wit: Dunham supports the continued criminalization of sex work despite numerous studies showing how harmful these policies are to sex workers.) Now Dunham has responded to her critics by doubling down on her well-intentioned but misinformed stance.
  Lena Dunham doubles down on her dangerous opinions about sex work + Hollywood Actresses Oppose Amnesty International Sex Worker Vote; Sex Workers and Their Supporters Tell Them Kindly to STFU (Death and Taxes + The Mary Sue)

• Bowing to a public outcry, the Indian government said it would lift a days-old ban on hundreds of porn sites after critics accused the government of encroaching on personal freedoms. However, few are reporting that access to the blacklisted sites was not actually restored by the telcos. India had issued an order to ban 857 websites, strangely most of which are MILF porn sites, well-known tube sites and other very random porn URLs. India’s porn block also targeted torrent sites, CollegeHumor and 9Gag, and other non-porn choices like Barstool Sports, PopURLs and YouRather. The full list was posted online by the Centre for Internet & Society.
  India rescinds ban on Internet porn after public outrage, ridicule + Porn in India is actually still banned (Los Angeles Times, Independent UK)

• Verizon, one of the largest communication technology companies in the world, has filed the first cybersquatting claim for a .porn domain name. Adam Rothman of Roslyn, N.Y., registered Verizon.porn on June 4; however the site hasn’t been exploited and remains parked. Stephen Winyard, director and vice president of ICM Registry, which offers .xxx, .porn, and .adult, as well as the upcoming .sex, domains, told XBIZ that “brands can choose prevention or cure.”
  Telecom Fights to Scoop Up Verizon.porn Domain (XBIZ)

• A Netflix for porn? That sounds irresistible — especially for online media trying to keep up their page-view counts late in the summer, when nothing is happening at all. That’s why dozens of outlets were eager to take the bait when Pornhub, a site known for hosting thousands of free porn clips, pitched them the Netflix-for-porn idea. There’s only one problem: It’s a bogus story.
  No, Pornhub Did Not Just Launch the Netflix of Porn (Variety)

Gratitude to our sponsor in Spain, women-run Lust Cinema.

• In 200 Years of Sex British health website DrEd.com dove into the entire corpus of dirty words in literature, both fiction and nonfiction, to explore the way certain words having to do with “venereal” matters have appeared, faded, or been associated with new companion words over the last two centuries.
  How Sex Talk in Literature Has Changed Over 200 Years (NAME)

Thank you to our sponsor, Nubile Films.

• We’ve told you before about Malibu Media, the porn company that has filed more than 3,500 lawsuits against alleged illegal online sharers of its adult content, thus earning its “copyright troll” badge with ease. Malubu is also known as X-Art, a company I refuse to do business with. But the company doesn’t want that term being used against it in court. In a case that’s been going on for three years, Malibu recently filed a motion [PDF] asking a federal court to block the defendant from using terms that it believes “would be unfairly prejudicial.”
  Noted Porn Copyright Troll Asks Court To Block Use Of Terms Like “Porn” & “Copyright Troll” (Consumerist)

• Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows 10 gave one user an unwanted porny surprise after installing the new software – the update automatically made his porn image collections into a slideshow and used it as a screensaver — then discovered by his wife, who apparently wasn’t okay with it. The OS auto-pulls screensaver slideshow images from the ‘My Pictures’ folder, evidently without warning.
  Wife sees husband’s hardcore porn slideshow thanks to Windows 10 upgrade (Geek.com)

• Great headline, epic stock art, and an actually interesting article: “What is a Good Looking Penis?” That was the title of a recent scientific study. No, seriously – researchers investigated what women look for in a penis, and there seems to be a lot more to it than just size and girth.
  Scientists Reveal What The Perfect Penis Looks Like (IFL Science)

Thank you to our sponsor in France, Explicite Art.

Learn all about writing and selling erotica from a seasoned pro, Rachel Kramer Bussel: https://t.co/nr76piJROG @raquelita

— LitReactor.com (@LitReactor) August 6, 2015

• HBO has ordered a pilot about the early porn biz called “The Deuce,” which now has James Franco attached as the star.
  James Franco Attached to HBO Pilot on Early Porn Biz (XBIZ)

• Kennston Productions is striving to change how consumers see trans men content. With their launch of FTM.porn they are giving consumers the opportunity to find any kind of FTM porn they want — gay, straight, queer or solo FTM porn. This blog-based site updates every few days with a new set from one of Kennston’s sites or other FTM sites.
  Kennston Productions Launches FTM.porn (XBIZ)

• Britain’s independent police watchdog agency said on Monday that it would investigate an allegation that the police in Wiltshire had dropped a criminal investigation in the 1990s when the subject threatened to go public with accusations that the former Conservative prime minister Edward Heath had sexually abused children.
  British Police to Review Sex Abuse Claims Against Ex-Premier Edward Heath (NYT)

• Ex Machina, written and directed by Alex Garland, is a hard sci-fi flick addresses big ideas while remaining a rather intimate film. It is also an intense psychosexual thriller with a classic mad scientist element. Link warning for spoilers.
  Exclusive: Alex Garland on the ending of Ex Machina (Blastr)

Thank you to our sponsor and friends, Pink Label TV.

China Now Clamping Down on Amateur Porn http://t.co/6Xo9be4cVn pic.twitter.com/KBZ6B7FVHf

— XBIZ (@XBIZ) August 6, 2015

• Ela Darling is the creative director, star, and co-owner of VRtube, a burgeoning VR porn company and lab for development in the emerging tech space of virtual reality. The company started with VR porn, expanded into the market with the first-ever real-time VR porn video game, and this week launched an interactive VR camera, the launch of which marked the first ever Oculus Rift-enabled 3D virtual reality live cam offering.
  What It’s Like to Be the First VR Cam Girl (Vice)

• Among the NFL documents unsealed by a federal judge in the Tom Brady “Deflategate” appeal is a fact sheet on HIV and AIDS given to all players. And the document acknowledges that some of its players may have sex with men.
  NFL includes sex between men as part of AIDS awareness (Outsports)

• Warning for sexual trauma survivors: Despite Bill Cosby’s best legal efforts to fight it, a Los Angeles judge has ordered comedian Bill Cosby to give a deposition in a lawsuit by a woman who says she was molested as a 15-year-old at the Playboy Mansion in the 1970s. L.A. County Superior Court Judge Craig D. Karlan ruled that Cosby, 77, must be interviewed under oath Oct. 9 as part of a civil suit filed by Judy Huth. In the latest Bill Cosby revelation, he admitted to having seven prescriptions for Quaaludes in order to use them for sexual encounters with women.
  Bill Cosby ordered to give deposition in Los Angeles sex abuse lawsuit (LA Times)

• Warning for sexual trauma survivors: When Carter Reynolds (who commands an army of 4.3 million fans on the short-form video platform Vine) showed up at Vidcon last week the conference hotel received so many death threats that Reynolds was promptly and unceremoniously banned. “I’m NOT a rapist,” he tweeted to his 2.4 million followers. “Don’t believe everything you read on the Internet.”
  Inside the underage sex scandal that’s tearing Vine apart (Washington Post)

As a dedicated coffee drinker, I'm excited to read new @circletpress #coffee #erotica book! http://t.co/YSnyifkxeh pic.twitter.com/4HXjnTi0lM

— Rachel Kramer Bussel (@raquelita) August 8, 2015

The post Sex News: Verizon dot porn, X-Art copyright trolls, Molly Crabapple vs. Lena Dunham, India unresolved appeared first on Violet Blue ® :: Open Source Sex - Journalist and author Violet Blue's site for sex and tech culture, accurate sex information, erotica and more..

HOUSTON — Twentieth-century kinetic and light art has long been the redheaded stepchild of the art world. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston’s (MFAH) Cosmic Dialogues: Selections from the Latin American Collection is part of an emergent shift toward inclusivity driven by identity politics and the rising centrality of media art. Mari Carmen Ramírez, curator of Latin American art and director of the International Center for the Arts of the Americas at the MFAH, is well known for her feisty and brilliant development of an alternative narrative of modernism. With shows like Heterotopias at the Reina Sofiá in Madrid in 2000 and Inverted Utopias at the MFAH in 2004, Ramírez has been working to redirect the discourse about art of the Americas beyond Socialist Realism and the phenomena of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. She has gone to great lengths to set the thinking about modernism on a new path, raising the ire of many when she said of Kahlo, “she wasn’t such a great painter either.”

Like her exhibitions of the early 2000s, which highlighted the work of then lesser-known conceptualists Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark, Cosmic Dialogues directs attention to the forgotten mobile-makers and light-casters of the mid 20th century. Hungarian-born Argentinean Gyula Kosice’s water-based works take center stage, alongside skeins of wire by the German-born Venezuelan Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt), Argentinean Julio Le Parc’s hallucinatory light mobiles, Argentinean Gregorio Vardanega’s cascading and luminous geometries, Argentinean Martha Boto’s boxy optical displacements, and Abraham Palatnik’s motorized and colored shape-shifters. Most of the artists shown are modernists, with the exception of two Gen Xers: the Argentinean Gustavo Díaz (b. 1969) and the Mexican Pablo Vargas Lugo (b. 1968).

While it is something of a standby summer exhibition that will not travel and draws on works from the permanent collection, it is stellar nonetheless because it showcases works that are rarely exhibited. The show is a bold representation of the direction Ramírez has taken the MFAH’s collection of Latin American art and an intriguing statement on the ghostlike but timely resurgence of mid-20th century Constructivism, geometric abstraction, Op, New Tendencies, kinetic, and light art.

Work is shown across several galleries with varied lighting that accentuates the Rorschach play between light and dark on opposite walls, like those holding Díaz’s fastidious drawings of lines, bits, and pixels across from Lugo’s coins embedded in large and long frames of grey-black felt. Though the title is overloaded with ironic references, Díaz’s “Development of a Darwinist Worm-type Viral Code from a Square while Prigogine and Sol Lewitt Converse in the Existentialist Remainders” (2011) appears weightless. Drawing meets sculpture as Díaz makes patterns of cloud-like circuits and striations across the wall. Turning the wall into a linear landscape of pixelated and raised orthogonal forms, the drawing passes from flat to box-shaped acrylic.

Kinetic light art, the pieces’ movements driven by motors, the museum’s HVAC system, and passersby, occupies a dark gallery at the center of the exhibition. Mounted here are works of art rarely seen much less fully understood in their necessary four dimensions. Images online or in books of Kosice’s “Luminscent Circles and Line of Moving Water” (1968) and “Movable Drop of Water” (1980), Palatnik’s “Chromo-kinetic Set” (1962), Boto’s “Electronic Optic” (1965), and Vardanega’s “Chromatic Spaces Turning in a Sprial” (1968) never do justice to the work. It is virtually impossible to get your mind around these works without seeing them in person. How is one ever to know that Le Parc’s “Continuous Light Mobile or Unceasing Light Mobile” (1960–66) looks from afar like digital ellipses moving on a screen or light box but upon approach reveals itself to be discs dangling on strings cast in light without experiencing it in the full dimensionality of walking through space?

Kosice’s visionary “Hydrospatial City” (1946–72) is given its own gallery, where it is installed under a type of dappled light ideal for acrylic sculpture. The centerpiece of the exhibition, it is a utopian statement consisting of 19 three-dimensional space habitat models and seven two-dimensional light boxes imagining everyday life in outer space. The habitats are half and full orbs, hung from the ceiling, ringed like planets, and populated with tiny, crystal-headed humans to establish scale. The light boxes house protruding sculptural reliefs in the form of plastic half-spheres and constellations of small mirrors and dots, some of which have photographs collaged inside. One even shows a tiny photograph of Kosice himself. Presented to and rejected by NASA scientists, Kosice’s theoretical city was modeled on a philosophy about the ebb and flow of water. He envisioned an architecture in space that surged like water, without boundaries. The orbs were to be habitats without division: there would be no separation between kitchen, bathroom, living room, dining room, or bedrooms. Kosice’s “Descriptive Memories: The Habitats of the Hydrospatial City” reveals that the unbounded flow of form spread to the programming of spaces as well. The floating orbs aimed to encourage an expansive functionalism of the flesh, their individual elements conceived by the artist as “a pearl in the great vagina of the world” and a “place to say mamma.”

Cosmic Dialogues foregrounds a forgotten body of work from the middle of the 20th century. The work in this show is part of the deeper history of media art (what was formerly known as “new media art”), which by and large receded into the crevices of history because of its essentially genetic relationships to technology and science. By “technology,” I mean the greater military industrial complex and the defense-based development of communication infrastructure (for instance, the internet); and by “science” I mean the cognitive, behavioral, and psychological sciences. After championing kinetic, robotic, and software art in the late 1960s, curator and critic Jack Burnham ultimately rued these types of work, claiming in 1980 that they were too cumbersome, expensive, and closely affiliated with the US military. This art’s mechanization and laboratory-like connection to the Gestalt, cognition, and perception made it antithetical to linguistic and performance-based conceptualism. These works became tainted by suspect political economy and branded as pure kitsch while conceptual art came to the fore because of its politically correct, anti-military position, and anti-capitalist bravado.

This stance of resistance seems naïve if not romantic now that we, in the US at least, are perpetually at war. There is no Archimedean point from which to stand in resistance and wag a moralizing finger at the world. And media art needs a history, of which kinetic and light art are essential parts. It has been 35 years since Burnham’s regrets, and even longer since the postwar neo-avant garde. Cultural mores have changed. So, as the taste-making of Clement Greenberg loses more of its monolithic authority and we are forced into a world where the formative presence of the military industrial complex is simply normative, we can look with open eyes and deliberative minds at this work, taking pleasure its plays of light and mechanized movements.

Cosmic Dialogues: Selections from the Latin American Collection continues at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (1001 Bissonnet, Houston, Texas) through August 23.

At Hyperallergic, Allison Meier offers a history of the oldest multicolor printed book, recently digitized and published online by the Cambridge University Library system.

The manual [the 17th-century Manual of Calligraphy and Painting (Shi zhu zhai shu hua pu)] is the earliest known book with polychrome xylography, where each image involved several printing blocks with different colors of inks, giving the completed print the appearance of having been painted by hand.

Related Posts:

• A Ghost Story’s Ghost Story
• Machiavelli: Prince of Comedy
• Hoaxing History
• Why We Write with Words
• The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Steve Stern

Filed under: Gender & Class, Inequality

A little trifle to start your Monday morning out right…

North Carolina’s former Transportation Secretary is also a former general and current “novelist,” if you can count anything you’re about to read as actual writing. Indyweek combed through his novels for some of the best lines. I compiled some of my favorites here.

• “I killed children smaller than you in Rwanda. I am Cheetah.”
• Sure he loved Asian women but there was no replacement for a girl-next-door American knockout such as the one standing in front of him right now.
• “If we’re going to one day get married like we’ve talked about, I don’t want you having all these man-hating feelings.”
• Mahegan noticed she had placed a gold necklace around her neck, which suspended a large gold C on the torn T-shirt above her moderate breasts.*
• “On the outside you’re this reasonably hot chick with quirky connections to the sheriff and other locals, plus in DC and the Pentagon.”
• Streaks of blood and muck angled across his face like a football player’s black eye. For a moment, he felt like a Croatan warrior, bare-chested, camouflaged, and defeating the scheming interlopers.
• His hand was so far up his ass he couldn’t see straight.
• The alcohol had flipped a switch in his brain, sending an electrical current to his penis, thereby relinquishing all control to the lower appendage for the time being.

*Now I know how I’m going to describe my breasts on my Ashley Madison profile. Thank you, A.J. Tata!!

tfa95dbs:

Death and the Maiden.

Marianne (Preindlsberger) Stokes.

221bitssmallerontheoutside:

losto-vae:

The way we perceive time and history is so weird
I get so tripped out when I think about how Cleopatra lived closer tot he iPhone being invented than she did to the Great Pyramids being built. Or how Stonehenge would have already been ruins when Jesus walked the earth or how Oxford University is older than the Aztec Empire or how Anne Frank and MLK were born in the same year like man this it’s all so crazy

this fucked me up

rasec-wizzlbang:

rasec-wizzlbang:

I just found out there’s a Black Sabbath cover band who dresses up as McDonalds characters
they’re called Mac Sabbath

On Friday, Dr. Frances Kelsey passed away at the age of 101. She was the Food and Drug Administration official who changed the way drugs were tested and marketed to the general public when she began asking questions about the safety of thalidomide.

Read more...

taylor-and-ed-laying-in-bed:

elizabeththevampireslayer:

kissingandcoffee:

sneakyfeets:

HAHAHA HOLY SHIT WE WERE LOOKING AT PICTURES OF SURGERIES IN CLASS AND ALL THE GUYS WERE HOOTING AT THE SLICED BREAST ONES AND THEN THE TEACHER SWITCHED TO A PENIS PIC WHERE IT WAS CUT OPEN AND SOME 300LB JOCK DOUCHEBAG FAINTED RIGHT OUT OF HIS CHAIR BOYS ARE WEAK BOYS ARE FUCKING WEAK

you mean to tell me

that there was a god damn CUT OPEN BOOB

IN SURGERY

AND BOYS WERE STILL SEXUALISING IT

FUCKING MOTHERFUCKING FUCK DOES NO ONE SEE HOW FUCKED UP THIS IS

When I took human anatomy, all the boys were *thrilled* to hold the breast implants, but when the professor brought out the jar of preserved penises we had no male volunteers to handle them. THEN she brought out the penis that had been dissected to show the different canals (it split into three more-or-less even sized pieces) and I think 3 boys went straight down like a sack of potatoes. Several more followed when she started pulling it apart and holding it up for the whole class to see. It was like that scene in Dracula Dead and Loving it where Mel Brooks is trying to gross out the med interns. Like, literally. It was hilarious.

Bonus: my anatomy professor (who is a woman) informed me that she had not once, in her 20 years of teaching the class, had a female fainter. Women are hardcore.

hersheywrites:

trappunzelll:

imaginebackwards:

keoooooooo:

jatel0:

For The Masses:

http://gen.lib.rus.ec

http://textbooknova.com

http://en.bookfi.org/

http://www.gutenberg.org

http://ebookee.org

http://www.manybooks.net

http://www.giuciao.com

http://www.feedurbrain.com

http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=380

http://www.alleng.ru/ 

http://www.eknigu.com/ 

http://ishare.iask.sina.com.cn/

http://2020ok.com/

http://www.freebookspot.es/Default.aspx

http://www.freeetextbooks.com/

http://onebigtorrent.org/

http://www.downeu.me/ebook/

http://forums.mvgroup.org

http://theaudiobookbay.com/

More Here

no one coulda reblogged this a month ago when i spent 500

momentsbymarcus

Look at KB coming through

Every time you see this, reblog it. There is always someone in college that will see this.

renaissance-art:

Cappella Caracciolo di Vico

cyberqueer:

EVERYONE ELSE CAN GO HOME 

Hovertext: Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go kill off some weak baby gazelles.

New comic!
Today's News:

I hate when I get like this…

I don’t eat because I forget to. I flake out on friends or don’t make plans to begin with, I have no way to tell for sure if I’m skipping out on stuff because I’m too depressed to handle it or if I’m making excuses because I don’t want to do things that would pull me out of it.

It hits and hits hard when I’m not expecting it, and the slightest stupid little thing can throw me from “doing okay, even cheerful” to “visibly morose and feeling like shit with zero motivation to do anything at all.”

And I have had some seriously fucked-up things happen lately, but after I was already falling down into this.  Monday night when I was drinking to forget, I got hit on (or so I thought) by a really cute girl I was flirting with at the bar.  She was with a couple guys, and while during conversation she did make a couple of really really horrible racist statements (generalizations like “Mexicans are all dirty and even if sometimes hard-working, they’re only here to steal our Welfare” and “Blacks are all the ones doing criminal things, shooting and robbing, you see it on the TV every single day but if you try to say anything, then ‘No! That’s racist!”), she seemed otherwise okay. Guess I can see the “impaired judgment” at work there, with the alcohol in my blood.  Should have been a Big Red Flag not to get involved.  I managed to get drunk enough that I totally spaced out on letting a friend know what I’d decided for my plans that night, left him hanging when I said I might come over and crash…

She invited me back to her place a couple blocks away, and here I’m thinking “score! Hot chick taking me back for a few more drinks and maybe even some sex!” As we’re walking, she tells me in passing that this is actually the apartment that she rents for her two teenage sons, and that the 19-year-old is there… so, great.  No sexytimes, that’s for sure.  Then after we get there she mentions that she’s seen me before, I’d complimented her shoes at the coffee shop next to the bar we’d been in.  (I didn’t get the chance to tell her that in all likelihood my compliment was what I knew I could get away with, because what I’d wanted to say was more like “You have an incredibly sexy body; want to take me home and fuck?”)

Then she starts telling me that she could tell I was trans* — and launches into this disgusting spiel about how I was such a cute man, and “oh, you know I’ve been in the fashion industry, I know, I get it, I’ve seen ones like you” but wonders how I could possibly be attracted to women, and “if that’s the case why wouldn’t it make more sense to just be the handsome, lovely, beauti– well, handsome man you are, I can see it in you!”  Follow with many more backhanded “compliments” and bullshit like “I mean, I can see it — oh, I could cut your hair off, put you in some slacks, mmm! You’d look so good! Or, y’know, I could just leave you kinda like that (gestures at me) and.. well, you could look kinda good that way too…”

Much more crap while she tried to wrap her head around my repeated statements that I am ethically non-monogamous, prompting over and over again about “But can’t you see yourself with The One Person who will be your everything?  I mean, sure, there’s companionship and such that you can get from a few folks but what about The One True Ultimate Settling Down?” and trying to sell me on a very specific version of “You have to figure out what it is that you want, and you have to write it down this specific way… like, say, companionship, you have to write down about the guy of your dreams — or, okay, I suppose the girl or whatever, but The Guy that you want to be with and put it where you look at it every day… so what do you want?” Then back again to pushing her ideals of heterosexual monogamy on me, erasing my trans* identity, erasing my lesbian identity, erasing my non-monogamous identity, everything about me was irrelevant to her as she kept “asking” me what I want from life and then telling me how to get what SHE wanted FOR my life.

When we went in to sleep, almost 2am, she opened the incredibly soft queen-size futon mattress — best bed I’ve been on for years, better than a waterbed even, “the cheap $200 thing from Costco” she called it — and brought me blankets far heavier than I prefer, but still functional… and she went to sleep on the small bed in the next room, opposite her son.  Then came the New-Age ambient music, not pleasant to me at all, and turned up way too high — interrupted occasionally by the Pandora commercials.  (“Look around your office. Is anyone playing music on a boombox?  No! Like any well-adjusted member of a workplace in the modern technology age, they’re streaming music, from The Cloud! So why can’t your PBX be the same way?” Gag-a-rific.)  She fell asleep almost immediately… and snored. Loudly.  I was exhausted enough that I drifted off for a few, but woke at about half past 3 and stayed awake for several more hours, probably close to 7am when I finally dozed off.

I awoke to her puttering around the house in nothing but a bath towel — salt in the wound when she’s got such an amazing body and I wasn’t going to get anywhere near it, when I had thought that was the reason she invited me back to her place.  I’d been nothing but shameless in my flirting and explicit as possible with my intentions (any of my friends who’ve been out drinking with me can likely attest to my open and up-front style, especially when I’ve got a bit of booze in me!) so I was pleasantly surprised to think that this might be one of the extremely rare occasions where someone was receptive to that.  So, she’s wrapped tight in her towel, offers me a clean towel and a brand-new bar of soap, to take a shower (“sorry it’s so tiny, I really am!” she apologizes, for the shower big enough to fit 2 or 3 people comfortably without touching, with the separate tub to the side) and goes to make coffee for two in her cappuccino machine — or that may have been the home espresso maker.  I’m not sure which one was which, since there were a couple high end coffee-drink gadgets side-by-side.  Then we walked back to the coffee shop and I bid her farewell.

This is, mind you, after Saturday night, when I went to a farewell party for a good friends’ housemate… and after being gone for almost an hour waiting for my order at a nearby restaurant (I’d had no food that day, and wanted to eat before drinking much) I got back just barely before things wound down.  So, here I am, making conversation around a campfire, and this guy I’ve just met starts trying to “solve” my (non-)problem of how to make myself financially stable after I’ve just told him that my first priority is finding a place to live — crashing in a friends’ guest room isn’t a long-term solution — and trying to dig out the “answer” of what marketable skills I have (“surely there’s something you can do on a consistent basis for reliable income!”) I try to tell him that I’m grateful that he wants to help, but that I’ve had this conversation before, many times, and that my priority is finding housing; I then tell him (as I do with most others) about some of the difficulties I’ve faced in trying to find a stable place — being robbed at gunpoint twice in less than 6 months out in East Oakland, under a slumlord who had literally cut cables so that we could not access the internet at home, and more — and he cuts me off to say, “Look, I don’t want to hear your sob story; just shut the fuck up and do something about it already! You’re capable, intelligent, obviously not disabled, just quit bitching about how bad you’ve got it and make the changes you need! You’ve got this!”

Oh, and I’ve had someone who’s expressed significant interest in fucking me — and if she could get her shit together instead of “break out the Selsun Blue, Head & Shoulders won’t cut it” level of flakiness, I’d be thrilled.  But she can’t seem to grasp the concept of “If you don’t give me any advance notice, I’ll likely be occupied with other things.”  When she tells me she’s busy the next night and can’t meet up, she still seems puzzled and disappointed when she texts me the next night and asks if I’m around and want to hang out, and I tell her I’d love to, but I scheduled with her lack of availability in mind and now I can’t change my obligations to other people.  She asks me in the morning if I want to hang out that night — more specifically that it would be awesome to have me over for sex, but doesn’t respond to my repeated queries of “what time? When were you thinking of? Just wanted to know what kind of scheduling!  If I don’t hear from you by 4pm I’ll have to make other plans…” And when she called me at 4:05 and I’d made up my mind to tell her off, and she gave me an unprompted list of “I recognize these are the things I’ve done that are problematic, and here are the changes I can make to do better in the future” I was shocked.  My gut said it was lip service, but it didn’t take much of anything from me to hear her say all the right things, give all the right answers and at least appear to be genuinely contrite.  So I figure maybe there’s a chance after all… until two days later (tonight) when she sends me a text message at 7 in the fucking evening to ask “do you have plans tonight?”  I didn’t bother answering.  When she called at 8:30, I had stepped away from my phone (it was charging across the room) so I genuinely missed the call, but I’m not sure I would have answered anyway.

It’s tough when right now she’s the only woman around who’s actively offering pussy to me, but then she can’t get things together enough to do more than just offer.  There are a couple others — Smash for example, and the previously-unnamed Hands — who have shown interest and made offers, but aren’t currently available… self-care always comes first, before any other considerations, and I wouldn’t dream of trying to interfere with either of them doing exactly that right now.  It’s still hard when I’m aching for that contact and knowing I don’t have it.

Look at the clock… there’s my prompt to finish, along with inspiration the post title.  Damn near enough — It’s 3am.

Filed under: General

detail

jvtart:

eat me

Author: Pai Osias Source: Mobile Web (M2)

RT @Iifeonmars: This week in fragile masculinity http://t.co/sMkXvW8maW

"Fail-Safe" Edition.

In Sidney Lumet's classic 1964 Cold War thriller, a series of escalating miscalculations and mechanical failures causes a group of American Vindicator bombers to believe that World War Three has started.  So, in accordance with what they believe their orders to be, they leave their fail-safe points ("Fixed points in the sky on the perimeter of the Soviet Union.  The planes will fly to those points and orbit until they get a positive order to go in.") and begin their nuclear bomb run.

Target: Moscow.

As you can imagine, recalling the bombers suddenly becomes the most urgent priority of the United States government.

But there is a problem.

A key part of every flight crew's training has been a clear and unequivocal order to ignore any attempt to turn them back once they've flown past their fail-safe points, no matter what.  Once past the point of no return, the very fate of Western civilization depends on treating any recall instructions, no matter how convincing or sincere, as enemy trickery:

Fox News: I order you and the other wingnuts to return to Fox News at once!

GOP Base: Sir, you trained us to revel in racism and misogyny.  You trained us to think that shit's hilarious.  You trained us that being rich means being right.  You trained us to ignore facts and logic and history.  You trained us that anyone who tells us otherwise is a stinking Libtard Socialist or a feminazi or a RINO traitor!

Fox News: I know that, but...

GOP Base:  What you're telling us, we've been specifically ordered not to do!

Fox News: Damn it, wingnuts, this is Fox News!

/ End Communication/

...

This is, as I have called this primary before--cuckoo bananas. With a handful of comments directed at Fox News, he's got his followers turned against Megyn Kelly, a smart conservative broadcaster whose centerfold looks and lawyer's instinct have made her pretty popular (and she is receiving an enormous amount of sexist shit right now)and Erickson, an influential conservative blogger who is nobody's idea of a champion of political correctness, might as well be a born-again social justice warrior in the eyes of some Trump folks. 

Well, um. That escalated quickly.

...

Two big stories now: Trump's obvious implosion, and Hillary's quiet one. Effects may take a while to be visible, but will be devastating.

— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) August 9, 2015

Will be doing Meet the Press, This Week and Face the Nation Sunday morning. Enjoy!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 9, 2015

.@realDonaldTrump stirred up controversy again last night. He'll talk to @jaketapper tomorrow morning on #CNNSOTU pic.twitter.com/n7Hvc1cpcF

— State of the Union (@CNNSotu) August 8, 2015

And so right across the board, the Sunday shows were larded with pundits speculatin' nineteen different kinds of bullshit about what's really going on and why:

On ABC,  reliable Beltway fingerpuppet, Matthew Dowd, can always be counted on to bring a jug of his Both Siderist home brew to the party...

MATTHEW DOWD, ABC NEWS POLITICAL ANALYST: Well, Donald Trump, as we've discovered, is very unshamable. He can't be shamed in the course of this. And I'm sorry doesn't seem to be a part of his lexicon. I think here - the - Donald Trump represents a whole group of voters that are totally disinfected from both parties who are sick and tired of the Washington establishment.

FAGEN: They are willing to call him out. But this - this just feels like that summer fling in high school that your parents tell you not to do but you can't help yourself. But by the time we get back to school, I think Donald is going to be fading well into - into the background of this race.

HEILEMANN: Well, you know, George -- I -- you probably remember I did a couple of weeks ago on New Hampshire and did a focus group with people who liked Donald Trump a lot or leaning towards Donald Trump. And I gave them a lot of negative information about Trump, like as if they knew: single-payer health care, donations -- all of that stuff. And they didn't care. They were not moved off their enthusiasm for Trump. In fact, they kept rationalizing, finding it...

TRUMP: Well, I have leverage. I do have leverage. And I like having leverage. I'm a businessman. I'm a natural businessman. I have made over $10 billion in net worth.

I have some of the great assets of the world. And I do like leverage. But I'm not talking so much in terms. I am right now leading by a lot. It's not just by a little bit. I'm leading by a lot. I'm going against some people that I have great respect for. In many of the cases, I have great respect for them.

But I think I'm going to win. I think I have much better energy than they do and I have a much better ability to negotiate with the rest of the world and deal with the rest of the world than they do. So, I just think that having -- I'm leading as a Republican. I want to keep it that way. I would much rather run as a Republican. Running as a Republican is the best way to beat Hillary, who was a terrible secretary of state...

DICKERSON: Let me ask...

TRUMP: ... and has a terrible track record. And I don't even know if she's going to be able to be in, because what she's done with the e-mails is so ridiculous that it's probably criminal.

TRUMP: Because I'm very much into the whole thing of helping people and helping women.

Women's health issues are such a big thing to me and so important. And I have many women that work for me. I was one of the first persons -- people in the construction industry in New York to put women in charge of projects. I have it even today. And I have many women in high positions.

I have gotten a lot of credit for that. I have so many women working for me and so many women in high positions working for me. And I have gotten great credit for it.

DICKERSON: Is there specific women's issue you're thinking of?

TRUMP: Well, no, I just heard Jeb Bush last week blow 53 percent of his vote. This is worse than what Romney did when he blew 47 percent of the vote with his ridiculous statements.

I watched Jeb Bush last week talking about women's health issues like they don't exist. I couldn't believe what he said.

DICKERSON: So, you think...

TRUMP: And I'm exactly the opposite. I will be phenomenal to the women.

I want to help women. What Jeb Bush said last week, I thought, was totally out of order. Then he came back a day later and he said, oh, I misspoke.

Well, that's an awfully bad thing to misspeak about. I just don't think you misspeak that way. So, I thought what he did was terrible. I heard that statement, and I thought it was terrible.

Shuck Todd:  Wha...what you just heard...  I mean he...he...doesn't.  He seems to have an allergy to apologizing.  Ya know, I ... I ... I, ya know, I think we all think we know what type of... I... I... ya know.  But it...doesn't.  It doesn't seem to apply to him.  Voters aren't int...

David Brooks:  Just listening to that interview it struck me I'm listening to a religious zealot (smirk) and the god he worships is Donald Trump.  And anybody who is against the god is a blasphemer who must be cast out of the Inquisition.  And so what I think he's done with each of these things is create a fortress around himself...

But we're supposed to talk about Donald Trump, and not David Brooks, right?

Because Trump is a scary monster.

A super creep.


Whereas Brutus is an honourable man;

So are they all, all honourable men--

Good point by Dayen here:

The Tea Party, the very movement whose energy Trump has tapped into so successfully, was founded on the principle of not having to “subsidize the loser’s mortgages.”

Businesspeople defaulting on each other never raised this kind of ire: only if ordinary people wanted to allocate losses in the greatest crisis since the Depression onto the banks who caused it did the rage emerge.

When Congress made an effort to change the bankruptcy laws, these same banks howled in protest. Members of the Obama administration, despite expressing support for the idea of allowing judges to modify primary mortgages during the 2008 campaign, decided to sit on their hands and let senators drowning in bank cash kill the idea, leading Sen. Dick Durbin to pronounce about Congress that the banks “frankly own the place.”

In fact, everyone would have benefited from relieving primary mortgage debt, the absence of which led to at least 6 million foreclosures. Economists Amir Sufi and Atif Mian have shown how the post-recession recovery was markedly slower because of the failure to discharge debt, which depressed consumer spending. This huge policy mistake created an unnecessary drag on the economy and made miserable the lives of millions, all so banks didn’t have to bear some of the pain of the post-housing bubble fallout.

Colorado’s Animas River suffered a pollution episode late last week, when an EPA effort to deal with mine waste backed up behind an underground dam actually breached it instead, leading to an acid spill into a tributary of this beautiful river. The EPA screwed up here, but they are not the real problem, as Jonathan Thompson points out. Rather, the Colorado mountains have thousands of underground mines that leach heavy metals and acids and it’s very difficult for the government to create a comprehensive response to that. Sometimes some old wood timbers will fall down and create an underground dam. Eventually, the water pressure will blow away those timbers and spills will result. However, today’s mining companies and owners of some of these properties are fighting against having them declared a Superfund site, thus bringing the government to bear as strongly as possible. While that would hurt property values–and there’s little people in the Colorado mountains care about more than property values–doing so is the best move in the long run.

Let me recommend the excellent 2004 book by Gillian Klucas on Leadville to get at these issues in a more in depth perspective.

Angel Dust from the 80’s was highly addictive and drove people to crime and insanity while imparting superhuman strength, making it especially demonic and a threat to civilization as we knew it.  The media was full of stories of people crashing through glass windows while high on PCP or flipping over cars and requiring 10 people to hold them down. (No I am not confusing these stories with “The Hulk”, which was a TV series from the 70’s, though it may have inspired such portrayals.)

Though the panic and hysteria over Angel Dust have died down, we are still undoing the damage caused by such Drug War propaganda.  These days we are subjected to similar stories about ‘spice’, ‘bath salts’ and ‘flakka’.  Let’s not repeat the same mistakes, or we’ll end up with mandatory minimums again and renewed DEA funding and swat style home invasions and a national prescription monitoring database that forces more people into the dangerous heroin market.

Maia Szalavitz exposed the abusive and corrupt ‘troubled teen’ addiction industry of the 90’s which was another beneficiary of this agenda.  She continues to deconstruct the propaganda in her more recent work showing that: the way people act on drugs is highly dependent upon their expectations of the experience as opposed to the pharmacology of the drug itself; behavior is dependent on media portrayals (news reports, tv shows and movies); crackdowns adversely affect people who legitimately need the drugs, making the lack of the drug as much a contributor to morbidity as ‘addiction’; addiction is not caused by overprescribing; addicts’ antisocial/criminal behavior usually precedes the drug use (which then gets the blame for it); and the Drug Court Caliphate is usually ineffective if not dangerous.

She also cowrote neuroscientist Carl Hart’s autobiography High Price (2013), which challenged the prevailing “Drugs are the cause of all our social ills” orthodoxy.   More recently she debunked a New York Times story, “Heroin Takes Over a House,” about heroin use in Staten Island and pointed out that drug abuse and overdose were caused by social and economic factors (including criminality), not simply ‘addiction’.  For example, people often overdose on drugs not because of ‘cravings’ but because they are illegal and they don’t want to get caught with the drugs in their possession, nor do they want to waste them.  The only option is to use them, and this can be lethal.  Thus “treatment” programs are less effective than decriminalization.

Nevertheless prominent media outlets continue to pump out addiction boogey-man propaganda.  NPR’s All Things Considered recently did a story about a rash of deaths in the homeless population in Anchorage, Alaska.   Melissa Block asks, “What is the pull of this drug and why is it so appealing and so addictive?”  The interview makes clear that the deaths were a mass suicide: “You couldn’t tell who was unresponsive and who was just enjoying a sunny day.”  There is a hint that this phenomenon is normal: “To lose seven people in July and August is unheard of.”  And finally they admit that they have no actual cause of death so it is premature to blame spice.  Yet the title of the story invokes the drug panic: “Don’t Use It, Don’t Try It, Don’t Smoke It!”  Another issue here is that spice isn’t actually a drug; it is a process of spraying chemicals onto plant leaves, and the chemicals are always changing due to DEA crackdowns — meaning that the victims were unlikely to be physiologically or psychologically dependent on whatever killed them.

Alaska is in the process of decriminalizing pot and this will certainly help to alleviate the problem as the drug becomes more easily available.  Nevertheless, the ‘homeless population in Alaska’ is undoubtedly a very troubled group and a history of mass suicides is not unexpected, or at all suggestive of an epidemic of addiction to the drug du jour.

Melissa Block is an experienced and incisive reporter, yet she completely buys into the ‘addiction’ meme.  Typically in such cases a stepper is pushing this propaganda at a higher level. Whether they are consciously aware of the agenda is an open question,  but they left in more than enough self-invalidating clues that it’s hard not to laugh once you see it.  Sadly, left unchallenged this kind of propaganda is likely only to make the situation worse.

Szalavitz was recently selected as a Soros Fellow.  She and the DPA, which receives the bulk of its funding from Soros, are the only 2 forces that openly counter these fonts of drug war propaganda.  Nothing they do is unapproved by the foundation, meaning that Soros either understands that addiction is a lie, or more likely, doesn’t realize that these attacks undermine his interests.  (He is a strong supporter of expensive mental illness and addiction treatment, so a change of heart on these religions is unlikely.)

Given that deaths by overdose are caused mostly by intentional suicide not addiction, it is easier to see the insanity of Ken Anderson’s disastrous call for media promoting drug combinations that can kill you, and Stanton Peele and NIDA’s recommendations for more ‘mindfulness training’.  These will of course only make the problem worse.  Just because they may be ‘anti-AA’, that doesn’t mean they are helpful.  Anderson humorously blames the ‘media’ when in fact the situation would be far worse if they actually did what he suggested.  And to be clear, I don’t blame the media for these stories, except to the extent they censor comments that point out the absurdities and lies in them or by  the  commentators on them.  I actually find them quite funny.  I only wish more people would challenge them.  Recently pain patients have been finding their voice in response to the “My child died of drug addiction!” propaganda.

Here are some recent examples:

• Picking Painkillers: Treating What Hurts Without Triggering an Addiction – U.S. News & World Report
• Cheap Fix: Heroin’s Resurgence: ‘And then he decided not to be’ – Washington Post
• Flakka – The new drug that causes users to rip off their clothes and attack with super-human strength – Washington Post
• Is Crystal Meth the New Crack Cocaine? – The Fix
• Why America Can’t Kick Its Painkiller Problem – Time
• Time Magazine Releases Cover Story on Pain Killers – National Pain Report
• Tim Woodward: Lessons from three years in drug court – Idaho Statesman
• Colorado Springs mom goes cold turkey behind bars to kick drug habit – Gazette
• NYC sees surge in synthetic pot use, with dire consequences – Gazette – “An internal NYPD memo issued last month warned officers that some people strip off their clothes, become impervious to pain and go berserk if confronted, and advised to call for backup and use a Taser if necessary to get them off the street.”

bastardlybrendan:

bonerfart:

aber-flyingtiger:

blazepress:

If the Titanic sunk today.

Because smartphones would resist the rigours of falling into the North Atlantic, apparently  

one of those people survive and sell their footage to media for shitloads of money, that’s just good business. maybe if some of yall old fucks had the internet you could have googled how to make a boat that doesn’t fuckin sink

You know what I fucking love about this fucking picture? 
When I was a kid I was fucking obsessed with the Titanic. I am talking borderline autistic special interest levels of fucking obsessed.
AND I JUST SO HAPPEN to still have my first edition copy of A Night To Remember by Walter Lord.

In this book is a small section of photographs and whatnot to do with the Titanic. And there is one particularly fucking relevant one that I have taken the liberty of snapping for you all:

This man, Leo Hyland, sat in a lifeboat and watched as the ship went down. He did this sketch because he wanted to capture that moment in an image so people would understand what happened. So that they can see what he saw in that moment. 
It is a most fundamental form of human goodness to wish to share our experiences and our feelings with others and to connect with them. It is no less noble to document your life through a smartphone than it is through a sketchpad. 
If you’re on a boat that fucking sinks and you survive? Show me your pictures to show you were there and you survived to tell your story.

Fuck these preening, pseudo-intellectual ballbags that say otherwise, because they quite clearly don’t have a fucking clue what they’re talking about other than trying to express the stance that they think they’re better than other people because they don’t have a facebook and have literally fuck all to say or show about their lives other than an inflated sense of self-importance and worth.  

treasures-of-imperial-russia:

Portbuket of diamonds, gold, silver and enamel. Dates back to the 1770’s, currently in the Kremlin