Taylor Swift is what I would call a “kindergarten feminist”. A kindergarren feminist, at least to me, is a person that is just learning the ways of feminism and are just learning and advocating about the basic feminist principles and issues (think about empowering women, pay gaps, etc.). Now there is nothing wrong with being a kindergarten feminist (cause I mean we all have to start somewhere), but being a kindergarten for too long is a problem.
A child goes to kindergarten to learn the basic material that will be needed in order to accel later in their school career (think about reading, counting, knowing the alphabet, shapes, etc.). These are things that a child needs to firmly grasp in order to succeed and not be left behind by their peers. Feminism is much like this in the respect that you need to firmly grasp the basic material in order to properly advocate for the movement.
When you have grasped the basics and have passed all the tests you are psuhed to the next level to learn more things. You are pushed along because you no longer need to learn the basics because you already know them. You are pushed along because it’s time for you to start building the house now that the foundation has been placed down. So why stay in kindergarten if you no longer need to? There is nothing more for you to learn. There is nothing you can gain. Staying there is pointless.
Taylor Swift (and many other celebrities) have finished kindergarten with honors, but they have not moved on. Their knowledge ends at pay gaps, body positivity, sexism in the media, etc. They either don’t know or don’t acknowledge other very important issues that feminism also deals with (think transgender women, women of color, disabled women, queer women, etc.). This is why staying a kindergarten feminist for too long is a problem. Your ignorance of the issues is not allowing you to grow as a feminist. You are ignoring a vast majority of issues that women face everyday. You are not helping anyone (including yourself) by not continuing with your education.
here’s why i am going to need everybody to shut the fuck up about how they think economic inequality is more important than racism. here is why i need fucking occupy wallstreet type white people to stop fucking derailing RACIAL demonstrations.
THE CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM TARGETS BLACK BODIES NOT ACTUAL CRIMINALS
Kate Meckler, a real-estate broker who is worth millions, shoplifted $2,000 worth of clothing from Saks in NYC. That’s felony larceny. She was apprehended verbally by security, she apologized was convicted of a misdemeanor,disorderly conduct. No jail time.
Kayla Phillips, a (ridiculously beautiful) successful model bought a $4,500 dollar Celine bag from Barney’s in NYC (because she is ballin like that). Kayla was followed by three officers who violently slammed her to the ground and attempted to arrest her for shoplifting.
Socioeconomic inequality is real and important but at the end of the day you can be rich rich rich as fuck but if you’re black you will still be treated as subhuman. Kate Meckler didn’t get off scott free because she is rich, she did because she is WHITE. Kayla was treated much worse for a crime she didn’t even commit, and her wealth did not save her from that, she suffered police violence anyway.
Joe is an NFL cornerback for the Cleveland Browns. Jacob, his younger brother, is Joe’s biggest fan. Jacob also happens to have a cognitive disorder that limits his speech and language capabilities. Via the Special Olympics and activism, the two are inspiring people everywhere — and the story of how Joe saved Jacob’s life is just the beginning.
The Arrowhead Bridge connected West Duluth to Superior’s Billing’s Park neighborhood across the St. Louis River for 57 years. Built by the Arrowhead Bridge Co., it opened on March 15, 1927. The company charged a toll to cross the bridge until 1963, when Minnesota and Wisconsin state officials paid $200,000 to make it a toll-free public bridge.
The Arrowhead Bridge was dismantled in 1985 after the opening of the Richard I. Bong Memorial Bridge.
right now. MFP is feeling sick. Not just “eh, it’s a cold, I’ll be okay,” but like “I may be coughing and/or vomiting blood and the pain in my belly is excruciating, help!” When she called me in the middle of the night to ask for my help, I realized that there wasn’t much I could offer her, nor really much anyone else could either.
See, the only options available to many folks in the US all include the potential to kill you. Is the thing you’re dealing with is going to kill you in moments unless you get some kind of help? Then call 9-1-1, get an ambulance to take you to the Emergency Room, and get billed for the ride to the hospital and the ER visit. Oh, and they’ll have to run some kind of test or other, especially if what you’re dealing with isn’t immediately obvious… and bill you for those tests, too. Sure, your health insurance — if you have any — might cover a small part of the overall cost, but you’ll still be left with payments to make. So when you’re considering that emergency call, you’re also considering whether you’ll be able to make your rent on time, whether you can keep the gas and electricity turned on, what items you’re going to have to pawn in order to cover the cost of that call.
And if that thing you’re dealing with isn’t going to kill you right now, and you don’t get it checked out and treated at the ER… well, you can make an appointment with your regular doctor! Oh, you mean you don’t have a regular doctor? Or what if your “regular doctor” consistently refuses to listen to your actual complaints and instead pushes an agenda down your throat? “If you would just lose some of that weight… you should try antidepressants, they’ll make all the difference… if you didn’t sleep around you wouldn’t have to worry about these kinds of things…” and on the lists go. And if you’re one of the lucky few to have a doctor who listens to you, you might be waiting for a month in order to see them anyway! “Okay, let’s see,” says the receptionist, “The next available appointment is in 6 weeks, at the crack of dawn. Will that work for you?” Whether it “works for me” is irrelevant. And by the time I get to that appointment, I may well have taken care of the problem on my own, or I’m dead.
This system is so completely broken. I don’t know what to do besides feel both powerless and angry (and have no target for my anger.) What can anyone do?!
The problem comes from people whose opinions are actually misconceptions. If you think vaccines cause autism you are expressing something factually wrong, not an opinion. The fact that you may still believe that vaccines cause autism does not move your misconception into the realm of valid opinion. Nor does the fact that many other share this opinion give it any more validity…
You can be wrong or ignorant. It will happen. Reality does not care about your feelings. Education does not exist to persecute you. The misinformed are not an ethnic minority being oppressed. What’s that? Planned Parenthood is chopping up dead babies and selling them for phat cash? No, that’s not what actually happened. No, it’s not your opinion. You’re just wrong.
This whole article. Education does not exist to persecute you. (via redcloud)
“In other words, you can form an opinion in a bubble, and for the first
couple of decades of our lives we all do. However, eventually you are
going to venture out into the world and find that what you thought was
an informed opinion was actually just a tiny thought based on little
data and your feelings. Many, many, many of your opinions will turn out
to be uninformed or just flat out wrong.“
Research from CSAIL at MIT have produced a computer vision method of accurate object recognition using a normal camera, a method which could assist future robotics:
John Leonard’s group at CSAIL specializes in SLAM, or simultaneous
localization and mapping, the technique whereby mobile autonomous robots
map their environments and determine their locations.
Last week, at the Robotics Science and Systems conference, members of
Leonard’s group presented a new paper demonstrating how SLAM can be
used to improve object-recognition systems, which will be a vital
component of future robots that have to manipulate the objects around
them in arbitrary ways.
The system uses SLAM information to augment existing
object-recognition algorithms. Its performance should thus continue to
improve as computer-vision researchers develop better recognition
software, and roboticists develop better SLAM software.
Mixamo got bought out by Adobe... as part of the merge, they've turned off all their billing systems... which means almost everything they have is now free.
"Fuse" is their (free) character modeling / texturing / creation tool that is miles ahead of the old Autodesk Character Generator -- from there, you send the character mesh out to their Auto-Rigger cloud service (also free) with 60+ bone skeletons and facial blend shape support -- and with every (free) account you register, you get 20 (free) animations, and you can potentially make unlimited free accounts. This is a complete character art solution from mesh to skin weights to rigging to animation, for free. It's pretty impressive, and you can easily make a game that looks like a prestige AAA FPS from late 2013. (These assets don't have the accuracy of photoscanned models or DX11 procedural hair, but they're very well crafted.)
Tentatively, they're going to shutdown this infrastructure on December 31, 2015 (I think, according to a cryptic e-mail I got a few months ago) when they've finalized more of the merge with Adobe, so make sure you grab as much stuff as possible while you can.
To celebrate, look at the brunch hunk I made in Fuse (above) and exported out to Unity. Again, it's pretty high resolution stuff with no restrictions. Make use of it for your games while you can.
I'm documenting this resource as a "PSA" because making the tools of photorealism accessible and widespread helps (a) sabotage game industry machinery that privileges fidelity as something valuable, (b) re-contextualizes realism as a stylistic choice rather than a "default" marketing tactic.
A friend of mine not from the United States said to me the other day, and this is pretty much a direct quote, “Seriously, dude, your country is scaring the shit out of the rest of us with this Donald Trump thing.” To assure him and others, a few points, covered by others to be sure but worth repeating.
1. The election is 15 months away. Relax, lots will happen between now and then.
2. And what’s going to happen is that the GOP primary voters will eventually settle down and vote for Jeb Bush (or maaaaaybe Scott Walker), who will go on to be defeated by Hillary Clinton in the general election. While it’s a quantum physics universe and anything can happen, realistically, this is how it’s going to go down.
3. But in the meantime, why shouldn’t potential GOP voters have their fun with Trump? Rich assholes are amusing, for a while. This is like that time in high school when you ditched your regular friends for a couple of weeks to hang out with that kid whose parents bought him a Camaro and let him take the speedboat out on the lake by himself and have keg parties at his house when they weren’t around. Eventually you figured out that no one at his parties was actually his friend, they were just there for the beer, and the reason he took you out on the speedboat was because he had no one else to hang out with, because he confused having a lot of money with having a bearable personality. And eventually you went back to your old friends and that was that. Which is to say: Jeb Bush, ’16.
4. But what if I’m wrong? What if Trump waltzes away with the GOP nomination? Well, first, that would be hilarious, and second, then he gets squashed by Hillary in the general, by a much wider margin than she would have against Bush or Walker, in part because then 2016 would see the largest Hispanic voter registration drive ever, and having Donald “racist against Hispanics” Trump as the GOP banner carrier would basically set back Republican attempts to court Hispanics by probably thirty or forty years. It would be entirely deserved too, so there’s that. He’d also have at least some mainstream GOP folks holding their noses and voting for Hillary, I expect.
5. All of which is to say that no one, not even potential GOP voters, expect Trump to get the nod, even as they poll him highly and want him to stay in the race. He’ll make trouble, and he’s making the GOP really uncomfortable by gleefully exposing the fact that so many members of their potential voter base lap up dumbed-down racist populism. But with the latter, Trump didn’t create the demand for dumbed-down racist populism, he’s just exploiting it, and with the former, well, again, this is the time in the election schedule where trouble looks kind of fun. But at the end of the day, most GOP voters will line up behind the person they think has the best chance of actually getting into the White House. That ain’t Trump.
6. Last point? What the GOP really hates about Trump is that if they somehow manage to push him out of the GOP voting pool, they know that means Trump isn’t defeated, he’s just pissed off. It’s entirely possible that his response to being punted will be to run as an independent. If he does, there’s a good chance he’ll peel off four or five percent of the presidential vote: Not enough to win, but more than enough to doom the GOP flag bearer, since it’ll be the GOP from which he’s taking votes. This won’t matter much in my estimation because I don’t expect whoever the GOP runs this election to win, but I wouldn’t expect the GOP to be as sanguine about it.
Basically, the GOP is screwed either way, when it comes to Donald Trump. And Donald Trump will never, ever be president. I could be wrong about this. But I really really don’t think I am.
I said something in bed to my lover yesterday that kind of took me aback later. I had my fingers in his mouth and was delighting in how soft and gentle he was, fucking my cunt beautifully while I fucked his mouth with my hand, when I blurted out “god, I wish I had a cock so I could know how you give a blow job”. It was in the context of having some mid-coitus dirty talk about sex we wanted to have, and I just suddenly really, really wished I could experience this sensation that I just never could.
I’m pretty high femme and have never really questioned my gender. While I have an assortment of cocks, none of them feel on some level like MY cock. I use the right dick for the job, typically, rather than gravitating to one that feels most like mine. I enjoy strap on fucking and watching someone use their mouth on my dildo, but it still feels very much like a dildo to me. Which is fun, and I enjoy it, but I don’t get off on strapping it on- my anatomy isn’t really ideal for it.
I enjoy sucking his cock, more than most. I’ve had some awful experiences with blow jobs, and cis men who grabbed my head and forced me to choke on their dick til I teared up, or who pressured me into giving them head when I just wanted to sleep. But with this lover, it feels like a way to treat him, to let him lie back while I pleasure him. Frankly even when I’m giving him a blow job he’s quite active, so I’m getting fingered and squirting and all sorts of deliciousness.
Feeling the velvety wetness of his mouth around my fingers, though, and knowing how much I enjoyed having his tongue on my clit… I just felt this sudden overwhelming desire to know how his penis-owning lovers feel. My clit is pretty small and hard to stimulate with a mouth alone, so sucking on it in a similar fashion is difficult to achieve. I want to be able to rub our dicks together and really FEEL it, not just get a mental rush. All I have is my imagination.
But I feel bad, admitting that it crosses my mind. When I was poking around to see what other women said about this feeling, it was about “having a dick for a day” in a way that feels kind of… dismissive or touristy of trans experiences. It’s not about masculinity, either, which a lot of women jumped to- I’m quite happy being femme and I don’t think having a penis would change that. It’s more this… wistfulness, I guess, to know how it feels to orgasm into someone’s mouth, to feel my foreskin (because of course I’d be uncut) played with, to rub my cock over a willing tongue.
I feel shy even writing about this. It feels so frivolous to even think about this when transphobia is so deadly and constant and real. I guess really I’m just curious- do any of my readers have similar experiences? Do you interact with those feelings, and if so, how?
Georges de la Tour, “Cheater with the Ace of Diamonds” (1635), oil on canvas, 106 x 146 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris (Image via Web Gallery of Art)
On Wednesday, Reuters reported that hackers have threatened to expose the identities of thousands of users at the adultery website Ashley Madison, whose slogan is “Life is short. Have an affair” — a breach that “could be disastrous for one whose business model is based on complete confidentially.”
Children are the most desirable opponents at Scrabble as they are both easy to beat and fun to cheat.
—Fran Lebowitz
Oh, fraud that cannot cheat the bee,
Almost thy plausibility
Induces my belief,
Till ranks of seeds their witness bear,
And softly through the altered air
Hurries a timid leaf!
—Emily Dickinson, “Indian Summer, XXVII”
Who came up with the term cheating, anyway? A cheater, I imagine. Someone who thought liar was too harsh. Someone who thought devastator was too emotional. The same person who thought, oops, he’d gotten caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
― David Levithan, The Lover’s Dictionary
To cheat a man is nothing; but the woman must have fine parts indeed who cheats a woman!
—John Gay, The Beggar’s Opera
There can never be such a thing as a free market, because it is human nature to cheat, monopolize, and buy off others so as to corner the market.
—Jane Smiley
Does anyone who will listen up
To our victories and dumb defeats
Knows they all take you to the cleaners
If you come between the cheats.
—Amy Winehouse, “Between the Cheats”
Peace, n. In international affairs, a period of cheating between periods of fighting.
—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary
A face peered. All the grey night
In chaos of vacancy shone;
Nought but vast Sorrow was there–
The sweet cheat gone.
—Walter de la Mare, “The Ghost”
You can’t cheat an honest man; never give a sucker an even break, or smarten up a chump.
The US National Archives recently published hundreds of photographs of Vice President Dick Cheney, President George W. Bush, and other members of the White House staff during September 11, 2001. (via US National Archives/Flickr)
This week, commercializing museums, map of literary road trips, designing masculinity, McDonald’s in Alaska, new Tokyo Olympic logo, John Waters says don’t smoke, and more.
For-profit art dealers are organizing shows for nonprofit museums. Museum professionals are organizing shows for commercial art fairs and galleries. Museum collections are being monetized, rented out for profit to other museums and private corporations. Corporations are co-organizing museum shows.
Nonprofit status subsidizes museums through the public tax code. The status was invented more than a century ago to foster diversity of independent thought, free from the narrow economic demands of business or the ideological commands of government. Today, that independence is being corrupted as the wall separating art museums from business activities is crumbling.
In fact, so commonplace is the boundary-blurring that few any longer notice. A new normal is in the making.
Presenting Old Masters BuzzFeed, where ridiculous BuzzFeed headlines (usually lists) meet Old Master paintings:
One of the central issues of Esquire’s content during and after the war was that masculinity was constantly under threat, mostly from women and the increasingly stratified corporate work system. At the same time as domesticity was supposedly squeezing men into submission, so too was corporate work culture.
Atlas Obscura has a great map of literary road trips, from Mark Twain’s Roughing It (1872) to Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (2012):
We went into Fairbanks a few times each year; whenever we flew in a visit to McDonald’s was almost guaranteed. Everyone from the villages went to McDonald’s if they could: eating there meant participating in a world we, kids from “the bush” (a general way of referring to rural Alaska), didn’t feel like we had access to, but could only admire from afar. Going into Fairbanks and eating at McDonald’s conferred status.
This graphic showing traffic fatalities per 100,000 people in select world cities is surprising (via @adbafo) :
Required Reading is published every Sunday morning ET, and is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.
Life has been less-than-ideal for quite some time, too, and I’ve been struggling with severe depression on top of no longer having a therapist (has it really been two whole months now?) and dealing with several other majorly shitty things…
I mean, I don’t know if much of anyone reads this besides the few folks who see me in person on a semi-regular basis, and they see a lot more of my posts on Facebook anyway; I seem to do more blog posts on there than I do on my actual blog. I don’t know.
Anyway, I got a letter in my email early this morning. It was from someone I never expected to hear from again. It has been over 3 years since I last saw or spoke to him, and those were far less than pleasant interactions. I referenced him here before as a toxic person, as an “Equal-Opportunity Hater.“ What he wrote makes me reconsider those labels…
He spoke of regrets.
He wrote of recognizing stupid mistakes, about missing an old friend, about knowing what he did was wrong and feeling sorry for it.
And he wondered about starting again. He acknowledged that things couldn’t be what they were, that he wasn’t sure he wanted that anyway. He left a couple options for contacting him, and closed with only one request: that I let him know that I got the letter, whether I ever wanted anything to do with him again or not.
What do you do when a ghost writes you a letter? That’s what it felt like I was considering after I read his message. I thought about the time I reached out to someone from my past, trying to get in touch with the family from whom I took my last name as a token of gratitude. It’s scary. It’s really damned scary to reach out to the past, to not know how you’ll be received, if at all. It was frightening enough for me that when I made the attempt, I took someone along with me for moral support.
Unlike DE-B who I also talked about in the post I linked above, EOH — now renamed to Role-Playing Junkie or RPJ for short — seems to get what went wrong… or at least that things did go wrong. She wrote to me trying to minimize and excuse, trying to explain again why I shouldn’t be offended, why I was still to blame, listing all the things I did wrong. Not a great way to say, “Hey, maybe we can be friends!” He wrote to me trying his best to say, “Look, I fucked up, and I know it. Can we maybe try this again, differently, better?”
I replied to him tonight. I did what I could to let him know honestly how I feel about things; I attempted to express my understanding of what he wrote, and to convey my empathy for how difficult a task it must have been to reach out. He mentioned a specific incident that he particularly remembered, and how much that weighed on him — and I referenced the same incident and its weight on me. I gave some details that I’m not sure he had known, and I quoted back to him some of his own words from a short time before which had been particularly hurtful — the bit mentioned in my other post about stuffing myself under a subway train.
I let him know that I’m open to seeing where things go, but that I had one minimum request from him, too: that he use my name in interacting with me. That’s been a really difficult thing for him. He first met me back when we were both geeky dudes at the junior college, and I can’t imagine it was easy for him to handle watching me change. At this point, though, he’s the only person besides my parents who has never used my name, including all of the group of friends and acquaintances who I knew though him, including the rest of his immediate family. And I can’t begin a friendship or rekindle an old one with someone who is unable or unwilling to talk to me instead of somebody that he used to know.
We’ll see what happens. I’ve left my contact info with him, and done what I can to let him know I’m interested in making an attempt… wish me luck, I guess?
Y’all still wanna vote for this old white feminist thot
ewwww….
Hills, you’re the worst.
“I mean if we’re honest, for a lot of well-meaning, open-minded white people, the sight of a young black man in a hoodie still evokes a twinge of fear,” Clinton said.
Hillary’s statement raises a number of questions, first of which is: does Hillary Clinton feel a twinge of fear at the sight of a young black man in a hoodie?
Or, if you want to come at the issue from a different angle: Is she “honest?” What about “well-meaning?” Does Hillary Clinton view herself as being “open-minded?” If so, her remarks seem to very clearly suggest that she may in fact feel a twinge of fear at the sight of a young black man in a hoodie.
Then again, given the conditions she listed — honest, well-meaning, and open-minded — perhaps Hillary didn’t have herself in mind at all.
A new study published in PLOS ONE has found that 99% of women who have had abortions report that in retrospect, the abortion was the right decision for them at the time. 99%! This is only news because conservative Christian anti-choice advocates are constantly trying to convince women that they’re going to regret their decision, sometimes going even so far as to suggest that getting an abortion raises your chances of depression and suicide, which is simply not true.
It’s so stupid that we need this research to fight for women’s access to basic and necessary healthcare that demonstrably makes the world a better place. In countries where abortion is restricted or illegal, the same number of women get abortions, but more women die getting them. Blocking access to abortion saves no “unborn babies” and kills more “definitely-born” women.
I nearly said, “adult women,” right there, but let’s be honest: way too many of the people dying from lack of access to abortion aren’t even adults yet. They’re teens who were either raped or just didn’t get the sex education, and it’s funny how often those three statistics go together: rape, no sex education, and dying from lack of decent health care.
It’s so obvious that legal abortion is beneficial that it’s absurd we have to say, “Look! Science shows us women who have abortions don’t regret them!” What if we used that metric as a way to block access to other things?
Like tattoos! Some research suggests that as many as 37% of people regret getting tattooed. So obviously we should outlaw them. Or maybe even something more permanent, let’s see, like the everlasting vow of marriage! Some research suggests as many as 99% of people regret getting married, though only about 50% of them actually get divorced. Perhaps we should just do away with it altogether.
Wait, there must be something even more permanent to compare this to. I know: having a child! I can’t find any peer-reviewed research surveying parents about their regret, but according to Dr. David Bellhouse at Western University of Canada, the advice columnist Ann Landers once polled her large readership to find out “If you had it to do over again, would you have children?” 10,000 people responded and 70% of them said no.
To be fair, though, Good Housekeeping decided to poll their readers with the same question, and 95% of them said yes.
That’s a wide spread, but it means our lowest number of regretul parents is 5%. That’s not very much, but it’s still five times more than the number of regretful abortion patients. That’s it! Let’s outlaw childbirth. That should go well.
“Suddenly even hardcore law-and-order enthusiasts are realizing the criminal code is so broad and littered with so many tiny technical prohibitions that a determined enough police officer can stop and/or arrest pretty much anybody at any time.
[…]
Law-and-order types like to lecture black America about how it can avoid getting killed by “respecting authority” and treating arresting cops like dangerous dogs or bees.
But while playing things cool might prevent killings in some instances, it won’t stop police from stopping people without reason, putting their hands on suspects or jailing people like Bland for infractions that at most would earn a white guy in a suit a desk ticket. That’s not just happening in a few well-publicized cases a year, but routinely, in hundreds of thousands or even millions of incidents we never hear of.
That’s why the issue isn’t how Sandra Bland died, but why she was stopped and detained in the first place. It’s profiling, sure, but it’s even worse than that. It’s a systematic campaign to harass people, using misdemeanors and violations as battering ram – a campaign that’s been going on forever, and against which there’s little defense. When the law can be stretched to mean almost anything, obeying it is no magic bullet.”
I said something in bed to my lover yesterday that kind of took me aback later. I had my fingers in his mouth and was delighting in how soft and gentle he was, fucking my cunt beautifully while I fucked his mouth with my hand, when I blurted out “god, I wish I had a cock so I could know how you give a blow job”. It was in the context of having some mid-coitus dirty talk about sex we wanted to have, and I just suddenly really, really wished I could experience this sensation that I just never could.
Christopher Knight of the LA Times is disturbed by the “relentless commercialization” of museums in the US:
