firehose

 pigeons in san francisco dont give a SHIT about people anymore. theyve got their own problems. a pigeon in san francisco sees like a million people a day and one more of em standing two feet away while theyre walking on a table outside means absolutely nothing until that person literally just. reaches out and grabs em. right off the table. heres a diagram

OED Word of the Day: picayune, n. and adj. A worthless or contemptible person; a trivial or unimportant matter or thing

An anonymous reader writes: Amazon has a new plan to keep self-published authors honest: they're only going to pay them when someone actually reads a page. Peter Wayner at the Atlantic explores how this is going to change the lives of the authors — and the readers. Fat, impressive coffee table books are out if no one reads them. Thin, concise authors will be bereft. Page turners are in.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Now that I’ve returned to the US and have parked myself in front of the computer again, people are asking me what I think of Amazon’s plan to tweak the way its Kindle Unlimited system pays KDP Select authors. In the past, Amazon would designate a certain amount of cash ($3 million this June, according to this Verge article, although in the comments Annie Bellet quotes a higher figure) as a payment pot, and all KDP Select authors participating in Kindle Unlimited would get a small bit of the pot if someone who downloaded their book read more than 10% of it. This predictably led to authors making short books in order to get to the 10% mark as quickly as possible, and equally predictably diluted the effectiveness of the tactic. It also made authors of longer works complain quite a lot, as they had to compete with bite-sized books for the same tiny bit of the pot.

As a result, Amazon is now tweaking its system so that instead of getting paid when one reaches that 10% marker, KDP select authors will get paid for each page read — a move that will, within the context of the KU system, at least, address the “small book vs. big book” disparity. The system will also define a standard “page” so fiddling with margins and type size won’t fool it, and somehow track how much time you spend on each page, so just clicking through all the pages as quickly as possible won’t do the trick (this makes me wonder what Amazon defines as a decent amount of time to read a page). The short version is: You get paid for what your readers read. If your readers don’t read the whole book, you don’t get paid for the whole book.

I have a lot of questions about how this will play out in theory — will an author get paid if you re-read a book? What about if you go back and re-read a page? Does that count? Doesn’t this mean that authors of “Choose Your Own Adventure” books get really screwed? Not to mention any author who is writing anything other than a page-turning narrative? — but ultimately any objections or praise I might have for this new Amazon model is irrelevant, because of a simple fact:

Amazon is still making KDP Select authors compete against each other for a limited, Amazon-defined pot of money, and no matter how you slice it, that sucks for the authors.

Why? Because Amazon puts an arbitrary cap on the amount of money it’s possible to earn — and not just a cap on what you, as an author, can earn, but what every author in the KDP Select system participating in Kindle Unlimited can make. Every KDP Select author participating in Kindle Unlimited can not, among all of them totaled up, make more than what Amazon decides to put into the pot. Why? Because that’s the pot. That’s how much Amazon wants to splash out this month. And the more pages are read in the month, the smaller any bit of the pie that you might get for your pages read becomes. It’s a zero-sum game for every KDP Select author participating in Kindle Unlimited. Next month, who knows what the size of the pot will be? You don’t — only Amazon does. But whatever amount it is, it’s an amount designed to benefit Amazon, not the individual authors.

This is a bad situation for the authors participating — bad enough that ultimately the minutiae of how the money is allocated is sort of aside the point, because the relevant point is: You will never make more for your work than Amazon wants you to make. And yes, just Amazon, as the work KDP Select authors put on Amazon are exclusive to Amazon.

I’m not one of those people who believes Amazon is glowy-red-eye evil — I remind people again that I’ve rather happily had a fruitful relationship with its Audible subsidiary for a number of years — but Amazon is looking out for Amazon first, and when it does, it’s not an author’s friend. There is no possible way in this or any other timeline that I would ever, as a writer, participate in the sort of scheme that Amazon runs with its KDP Select authors on Kindle Prime. I don’t approve of putting a cap on my own earnings (particularly one I have no say on), and I don’t approve of being in a situation where my success as an author comes by disadvantaging other authors, or vice versa. In the system in which I currently participate (i.e., the open market), there is no limit to the amount I can make, and no limit to what any other author can make. It’s a great system! I support it, and so should you.

So, yeah: By page, or by percentage, KDP Select authors on Kindle Unlimited still can’t make more than Amazon says they can. That sucks, and that’s the long and short of it.

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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The right to bear arms is a pillar of the US Constitution and many Americans defend it in the strongest terms.

One key argument for gun ownership is that it allows citizens to protect themselves and their families, and to prevent greater harm to society—potentially by killing an assailant. These types of killings are known as “justifiable homicides.”

But a June report (pdf) from the Violence Policy Center, a Washington DC-based non-profit organization that advocates for gun control, reveals an important problem with that rationale.

The report tracks American homicides over five years, concluding that “justifiable” killings—defined in the report as the killing of a felon, during the commission of a felony, by a private citizen—made up just 2.5% of the total number of firearm fatalities. Between 2008 and 2012, 42,419 people were killed by other people in the US using guns. Of those, just 1,108 were killed in self-defense. (The report’s totals do not include any gun-related deaths that were listed as accidents or suicides.)

The study also found that a large percentage of homicides ruled justifiable did not involve strangers. In 2012, for example, 35.5% of the victims of justifiable homicides “were known to the shooter.” This would seem to refute the popular scenario used by self-defense advocates, in which an armed individual is forced to fight off a random attacker.

Just a few days after another fatal mass shooting, the US is once again undergoing a period of soul-searching. But as Australian comedian Jim Jefferies recently pointed out, maybe Americans need to finally admit that the classic self-defense argument simply isn’t strong enough to support the current state of affairs.

At the very least, statistics like those offered by the Violence Policy Center should prove to Americans that current gun policy reflects how much some people still like their guns—but not any real necessity.

ourlovecanlastforeve writes: A few days ago Sprint announced their intent to stop throttling certain customers' bandwidth in the wake of the FCC fining ATT $100,000,000 for doing the same. Sprint has now begun circulating an internal memo to their front-line reps that the 12-month warranty on non-branded accessories, a featured selling point, will be eliminated. Additional rumors are emerging that Sprint may increase prices on unlimited data plans and stop offering wireline long distance service.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Courtney shared this story from Super Opinionated.

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First came the new coffee shops—two of them—in 2009. Newcomers had been trickling in for a few years, but that’s when the gentrification of New York’s Crown Heights began to attract wider attention (paywall). Next up: The hipster bars, the fancy pizza, the new real estate brokers, all speaking to the neighborhood’s transformation. Twenty-four years ago, this Brooklyn neighborhood was the scene of ugly race riots, fueled by long-simmering tensions between black and Jewish residents. But by 2012, the area had become typical of the gentrification that’s overtaking so many of the world’s largest cities as they assume the mantle of economic growth drivers.

Often, at least in America, we think of regular people as the agents of change—the artist, the boutique coffee shop owner, the tech startup. But as much as gentrification is an organic process, fueled by opportunity seekers and bargain hunters, it’s developers and financiers who have become the savvy midwives of change. Once they detect the early signs of gentrification, they bring on the serious money.

In the case of Crown Heights, the serious money came from BFC Partners and Goldman Sachs’ Urban Investment Group, which teamed up with local blogger-cum-developer Jonathan Butler to transform a former Studebaker service station into 1000 Dean, a development project that is a wannabe entrepreneur’s dream. The various parts of the building could almost serve as the essential gentrification checklist. Artisanal beer hall? Check. Hipster coffee house? Event space? Gourmet food options? Yes, check. Grouped together as Berg’n, all share the ground floor of 1000 Dean, with Butler’s trendy Brooklyn Flea joining in the winter months.

Butler ran the Brooklyn real estate blog Brownstoner for years before selling it recently, and has always obsessed over real estate. He noticed the old warehouse for sale in a commercial zone, surrounded by residences that were beginning to command higher prices, and saw its potential. Hipsters debating which ramen burger to buy may be surprised that a major Wall St. bank and big local developer are responsible for their brunch options. On the floors above Berg’n are small offices rented by local community groups, startups, non-profits. Butler says he isn’t picky about the office tenants. But this kind of establishment does attract a certain kind of person, he admits. It also attracts federal tax credits for helping create jobs.

Goldman has said it’s looking to make “catalytic” investments in up and coming neighborhoods. In a May 2015 document, it identified 1000 Dean as a project that can target small businesses and creative professionals, and “act as an anchor for future development and investment in Crown Heights.” It invested more than $26 million in equity and debt in the project, according to figures Goldman provided to Quartz. And it has gone on to invest in other Crown Heights property: A building that houses a church community space and housing for formerly homeless veterans on Utica Avenue in Crown Heights.

The revitalization of Crown Heights is paying off. While it suffered worse than Brooklyn as a whole during the recession, it has staged a healthy recovery, overtaking the borough in median residential sales prices during the fourth quarter of last year.

Last year Starbucks opened a store on Franklin Avenue, a sign of property value growth to come, according to a Zillow analysis that showed surrounding home values rise after a Starbucks enters a neighborhood.

“[Developers] are trying to find a coffeehouse, a sandwich shop, enough different variety of retail establishments that it creates a key center of gravity for that community,” Zillow chief economist Stan Humphries tells Quartz. “The entry of a coffee shop into a location provides a signaling function to other types of investors…that this neighborhood has now arrived and is now open for business in a way that it was not before.”

Ro Gupta was at Berg’n with his 18-month-old daughter on a recent Friday, to meet a friend. “I really like the idea of a multipurpose space like that,” Gupta said as he waited for his ramen burger, and his daughter played with the buzzer. “It’s kind of a default place that has whatever you’re into, whatever part of the day.” Instead of just a place to hang out, there’s food for lunch, coffee for the afternoon, beer for after work.

The idea of driving development in an area by attracting trendsetters is not a new one; in fact urban planners took to calling it The Soho Effect in recognition of the revitalization of that New York City neighborhood after artists began moving into empty lofts in the 1970s. David Walentas bought up SoHo property just as property values began to show signs of life. He then spent decades carefully plotting the redevelopment and gentrification of Brooklyn neighborhood, Dumbo. It combines artist lofts, office space, artisan workshops, craft-based retail and residential properties to transform an old rundown former industrial warehouse district into one of the city’s fastest-growing neighborhoods (with fast-growing prices to match). Walentas told Rochester Magazine his secrets in 2013:

“When you’ve got vacant (retail) space and you give it away, it’s not costing you anything and it generates activity. We gave space to young kids, entrepreneurs who wanted to open shops (in DUMBO), and they built them out themselves.” In addition, “People don’t want to be in a neighborhood that doesn’t have amenities or where they can’t buy things. So whatever you can do to make the ground floor attractive benefits all the floors above it.”

That lesson has clearly been taken to heart by Crown Heights’ developers, though Butler tells Quartz that he doesn’t think there’s a recipe (and his tenants pay for space).

Now, even real estate brokers are getting in on the act.

Recently, in Harlem, brokers banded together to open coffee shops in areas where they’re trying to sell or lease apartments, in the knowledge that a bottom-floor coffee shop is a draw.

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IT'S NOT HARD to find stories about Kundin Nadew—the man city officials call Portland's most persistent “rogue” cabbie.

Since his city permit was revoked in 2012 following a drunk driving arrest, the city says Nadew has made a habit of illicit incursions into Portland from Beaverton, where he's legally allowed to drive a cab. He's been fined more than $25,000 for taking illegal fares within Portland city limits over the last three years.

The city's cab drivers know Nadew's dark mini van, with its makeshift taxi light and conspicuous lack of a proper taxi plate, and sometimes will film him tooling around Portland streets. In a video shot earlier this month, Nadew wags his finger out the van's driver's side window as he foully berates a Green Cab trainee filming him.

“Fuck you, mother pussy!” he yells in broken English. “You mother pussy cab!” Then he drives off.

It's not behavior any employer would relish, but Nadew recently got a fresh shot at legitimacy in Portland's private for-hire transportation world. The city won't let him legally drive a cab, so Nadew got a job with Uber.

CONTINUE READING>>>

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Happy Fathers Day | Via

Lasrick writes: Lawrence Krauss muses on the hoopla surrounding Pope Francis' encyclical on climate change, and finds the document lacking: 'It is ironic that while the scientific community has long tried to raise warning signals and induce action to address human-induced climate change, an encyclical from the pope on this subject is being taken by many as an ultimate call to action on this urgent issue.'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The CW is reportedly in the early stages of developing a solo "Hawkgirl" television series.

Failed attempts at establishing a Father’s Day

In 1911, Jane Addams proposed a city-wide Father’s Day in Chicago, but she was turned down.^[8]

In 1912, there was a Father’s Day celebration in Vancouver, Washington, suggested by Methodist pastor J. J. Berringer of the Irvingtom Methodist Church. They believed mistakenly that they had been the first to celebrate such a day.^[1] They followed a 1911 suggestion by the Portland Oregonian.^[8]

Harry C. Meek, member of Lions Clubs International, claimed that he had first the idea for Father’s Day in 1915.^[1][8] Meek claimed that the third Sunday of June was chosen because it was his birthday (it would have been more natural to choose his father’s birthday).^[8] The Lions Club has named him “Originator of Father’s Day”.^[1] Meek made many efforts to promote Father’s Day and make it an official holiday.^[1][8]

Link

Wrong team, news!

The New York Mets lost to the Toronto Blue Jays on Thursday. CBS New York tried to relay that fact, but accidentally put in the Toronto Maple Leafs instead of the Blue Jays. The Maple Leafs noticed:

The "Ny" Mets are not our favourite squadron. #TMLtalk pic.twitter.com/5Ggusf4of8

— Toronto Maple Leafs (@MapleLeafs) June 19, 2015

You laugh now, but this only makes me want to see what it'd be like if hockey players played baseball. The fights would probably be cooler that way.

This was a bad idea.

The Orem Owlz, a Pioneer League affiliate of the Los Angeles Angels, canceled a "Caucasian Heritage" promotion scheduled for Aug 10 on Friday night. Plans for the event included Wonder Bread, Seinfeld and a vertical leaping challenge. Yeah ...

The Orem (Utah) Owlz, a minor league affiliate of the Angels, hosting a "Caucasian Heritage Night" in August. pic.twitter.com/gl3o3MFwQw

— Martin (@Heisenbergkamp) June 19, 2015

The Owlz apologized in a statement:

Minor League Baseball, and the Orem Owlz, is about baseball, togetherness and family fun for all fans of all races, religions, and orientations. Our goal in this promotion, like any of our promotions, is to have fun and make fun of everyday normalcies. Our night was to include wonder bread on burgers with mayonnaise, clips from shows like Friends and Seinfeld and trying to solve the vertical leaping challenge. We understand, in light of recent tragic events, that our intentions have been misconstrued. For that, we sincerely apologize.

Fans and media on Twitter were a noooot really in love with the idea of this celebration of whiteness.

So, my Orem Owlz t-shirt is retired now.

— Jesse Spector (@jessespector) June 19, 2015

Glad the Orem Owlz are canceling what was a pretty stupid idea to begin with: "Caucasian Heritage Night" http://t.co/OUkhzuU2CI

— Matt Brown (@MattSBN) June 19, 2015

What do you give away at Caucasian Heritage Night? Wifebeater Shirts and 79 Chevy Pickups? @OremOwlz #askingforafriend

— Shon (@shoninutah) June 19, 2015

Rachel Dolezal throwing out the first pitch on Caucasian heritage night or nah @OremOwlz?

— Feral Devitt (@phaserstopun) June 19, 2015

The Salt Lake Tribune reports the Owlz communications director resigned before Friday night's game.

Joey Zanaboni, who was hired by the Owlz as the director of media and communications and play-by-play radio announcer before the season, quit before Friday's game in Ogden against the Ogden Raptors. Zanaboni is the sports information director at Coahoma Community College, in Clarksdale, Miss.

And if it isn't clear why this was a bad idea, here you go:

"There were so many mistakes at so many different levels here," said Keith Strudler, director of the Marist College Center for Sports Communication, in Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

"We celebrate all sorts of different groups to recognize the diversity of this country, and some of the struggles that people have gone through," he said. "And when you celebrate privileged populations that have always been privileged, it marginalizes and mocks those that lack that power."

Miles Morales became one of the more popular versions of Spiderman in Marvel’s Ultimate Universe, and now, Marvel Comics is bringing Morales back in the aftermath of the Secret Wars series. Morales will headline Spider-Man when it relaunches this fall.

Read more...

Lil Wayne performed in Ann Arbor on Friday night, and he ended up getting a Michigan football jersey out of it.

The rapper has already rooted for nearly every NBA team ... maybe it's time to move on to the Big Ten?

.@LilTunechi - Proud to be a fan of my man Lil Wayne. Hope you like the jersey as much as we like seeing you in it! pic.twitter.com/itjd1ZSf9T

— Coach Harbaugh (@CoachJim4UM) June 20, 2015

In the photo with Wayne are two former Michigan quarterbacks: Denard Robinson, now a running back with the Jacksonville Jaguars, and Jack Kennedy, now a rapper, who opened for Wayne on Friday night.

Harbaugh signed the jersey with:

To Wayne

Proud to be a fan of yours! Go Blue!

Jim Harbaugh

A 2013 video has emerged showing Saints linebacker Junior Galette striking a woman with a belt, according to a report.

New Orleans Saints linebacker Junior Galette has been caught on video fighting with multiple people and striking a woman twice with a belt, according to Larry Holder of NOLA.com. In the video, which was posted on March 25, 2013, Galette is seen fighting a man and whipping him with a belt before turning on onlookers.

Why the fight took place at all and the identities of the other people involved in the video, which can be seen on YouTube here, are both unknown at this point. We do know that the NFL and the Saints are aware of the video and Galette's involvement, according to Holder. Neither the Saints nor Galette's agent Alvin Keels had any response to Holder's request for a comment.

It's unclear for how long the NFL and the Saints have been aware of the video and Galette's involvement. That said, Galette is already dealing with issues pertaining to his off-field conduct -- he was arrested for simple battery involving domestic violence in January. An unnamed 22-year-old woman alleged that Galette beat her, but the charge was dismissed after doubts were raised as to the woman's status as a member of the household.

Once that charge was dropped, she filed a civil suit against Galette on the same day, but there has been no movement on the case since March. Galette is supposed to meet with NFL brass later this month to discuss his off-field conduct, according to Holder.

Witty, blunt and beloved, Tumblr user coketalk has spent the last six years building a devoted fan following and a carefully cultivated anonymous career as an advice columnist and lifestyle blogger. On Monday she was deleted for DMCA violations and the Tumblr community lashed out.

Link

The following was originally posted on Shakesville and has been republished here with permission.

Content Note: rape, abortion, forced pregnancy, homophobia, gender policing, descriptions of violence.

We need to talk about the Mad Max: Fury Road Furiosa #1 comic and how awful it is. Huge content notes on this post, like, in big block capitals and neon letters because this issue is triggery and terrible, and really aptly illustrates just how awful MMFR could have been if it were made without intentionally setting aside lazy (and terrible) narratives about women and rape in order to be better than that. Also, I would honestly recommend going into this post with the mindset that this comic is some kind of terrible non-canon spinoff, because I don’t want to ruin MMFR for anyone. And I want to hat-tip Lindsay Ellis for bringing it to my attention.

Here is the comic (and link here and here):

In case you can’t see the accredited artists on the left, it says:

Miller
Lathouris
Sexton
Jones
Kudranski
Spicer

On the inside cover, we get full names and job titles:

George Miller [Story]
Nico Lathouris [Script]
Mark Sexton [Script, Art]
Tristan Jones [Art]
Szymon Kudranski [Art]
Michael Spicer [Color]

And here we stop to reflect on the fact that a movie which has generated so much feminist hype is now being credited for its backstory to what appears to be an entirely-male story and art team. Okay then. I’m just going to take us through a page-by-page analysis rather than try to organize my thoughts by topic, partly because there are so many topics here that I don’t know where to start. And I’ll note that Kindle comics don’t have page numbers, so these are my own page numbers that might be off from the print version.

Page 1 sets the conceit for the narrative: an older person who appears to be a man sits in the water-room of the wives’ old chambers, narrating their history to an assembled group of children. The crowd-shot, like most crowd-shots, seem to have a lot of male faces in there! (And lining the walls, which I cropped.) I doubt that the male authors of this comic intended this framing device to symbolize their male avatar addressing a comic-book audience that they expect to be disproportionately male, but haha it sure is ironic in retrospect.

And this is partly what I mean about “lazy narratives”: I’ve seen this story before. We all have, I’m willing to guess. The “what you’re about to see is being narrated by an old dude to the new generation” thing has been done to death. But it’s particularly rankling in a movie that was about women defining their lives. Why isn’t one of the wives here? Or one of their daughters? Why is this Generic Old Sagely Dude #238,157 and why does it feel like it’s been lifted wholesale from a pre-fab’d story framing device?

Page 2 tells us how the wives were educated and had access to books and music and history lessons: Immortan Joe gave those things to them.

See, and here I spent the movie assuming that the women were educated about stuff because they’d lived rich and interesting lives before being captured by Joe. Toast knew how to load guns, whereas one of the other women (Dag? I can’t recall) had an old saying about the bullets being “death seeds” (“plant one and a man dies”). This made the women different people: Toast obviously had some experience with guns that the others didn’t, Dag or whichever one it was had soaked up homey old sayings from her mother, and so on. It also preserved the fact that women pass information to each other.

Here in the comic, women pass information to each other, but only because a man authorized the “history woman” to teach his wives. And this is so laughably infuriating to me already, this idea that women only whisper secrets and warnings and hopes and dreams and histories to each other because a man told them to. Even the idea that a man knows when information-exchange is taking place between women. This is the root, I think, of why so many works don’t pass Bechdel: because the male authors don’t imagine that women talk to each other, and even when they do stretch their imaginations to encompass female conversations, authors assume that they, as men, know what those conversations are about.

Deeper than that, this whole framing device seems to exist to explain the apparent “mystery” of why the wives had knowledge about things outside their prison cell. Mystery solved! They were given a “history woman” by Joe, thus reducing all their knowledge to coming indirectly from their captor. Except that, to me (and I’m guessing other women in theaters), there was no “mystery” as to why the women knew things; they knew things because they were people.

Page 3 describes this “history woman” as “Miss Giddy” and notes that “knowledge has a way of igniting dissent… and inciting revolution”. So, haha, okay, the wives didn’t escape because they were people who said “hey, being raped and held captive is rotten eggs, let’s change that”, they had to have seeds of rebellion planted by the giver-of-knowledge who was, herself, given by their captor. I am not a fan of that narrative at all.

Page 3 is also great because it has a image of a medic giving one of the wives a vaginal exam. His face is pressed between her knees while his hand grips her leg, and then the panel itself is framed by the woman’s legs so that we, the reader, can see the medic looking up at us and, behind him, Joe and Rictus. The whole art on this page… I don’t even really want to post it, because it’s graphic and violent and triggery to me, and I really don’t feel like the subject matter was handled with sensitivity. When you are using a woman’s legs to frame your comic panel, I’m not sold on you treating her as an object any less than the men in the room who are assaulting her.

Page 4 explains why Page 3 was “necessary”: the vaginal exam is to check when the wives are ovulating. Why is this something Joe would check for? Is he only raping them during the ovulation window? (The book flirts with answering this “yes” without committing to it.) Does that mean he reallyis interested firstly in reproduction with his captives? (More on that later.) The real reason seems to be so that Rictus can try to rape Angharad and now Joe needs a reason to give the wives another gift: their protector, Furiosa. (Isn’t it great how literally all the wives’ agency has now been reduced to Joe giving them everything ever? More on that later.)

Page 8 has Furiosa show up, and hey, remember how the movie had women working together (like people do) without being catty or hating each other? Well, we’re going to fall back on lazy narratives about women, because the women who have apparently grown up in the apocalypse and have presumably seen a shaven head or two before now gawk at Furiosa. “Is it a woman?” one of them asks, because apparently a tough woman is now so rare in the apocalypse that it is just that surprising to see one. After hearing that she’s there to protect them, one of the wives marvels “but who’s going to protect us from her?” What.

Page 9 shows the women bathing and preparing for a visit from Joe while Furiosa muses over the preparations. And this is just terrific: “He liked them bathed. Hair brushed and tousled. Cheeks pinched into a blush. Lips darkened with soot. Skin whitened with talc. Perhaps… he wished to be reminded of his war boys.” This will come up again later in the book, and I would have thought that the one villain who would be free of the trope that villains are gay (or effeminate, or Oedipal, or whatever code-whistle du jour) would be a villain who keeps a harem of wives. But, no, Joe is either a depraved bisexual or gay because he’s a villain and that’s how you know.

Page 10 has a rape scene while Furiosa watches and makes an unhappy face.

Page 11 has the wives cleaning up the morning after. Toast mentions that “where he puts it” on her isn’t procreative sex, and I believe (based on other cues and context) that we’re meant to read this as anal rape, so that’s obviously fantastic. I don’t know how to unpack everything so far: Joe seems to only visit the wives when they are ovulating, and he prefers his war boys, but he anally rapes the black woman he keeps captive (so why does he need to confine his visits to ovulation?).

There are so many layers of terrible in that, and none of it needed to be here. Not to mention, a lot of it just plain feels reused from other Miller vehicles; the medic later says that Joe is going to “rawdog” the women, which makes no sense in context! Are there enough rubbers in the apocalypse to retain that term? Really?? Anyway, Capable starts yelling at Furiosa and asking her if she enjoyed the show last night and why she won’t protect them (Page 12).

All of this is awful, and it’s just such a world-building mess. If the women have been free before now and have rich histories and experiences enough to talk a big game about freedom and standing up to tyranny, then why did they even need the “history woman” to plan seeds of rebellion for them? Why couldn’t she have just been a woman assigned to take care of them, and their friend, and information exchanged organically within the group without it being a flowdown from Immortan Joe?

And if they haven’t been exposed to the concept of freedom (and later the book will try to claim that they’ve never had to live on the outside, which… just… no?), then why are they scolding Furiosa for being no more free than they are? The whole thing comes across as massively catty and unreasonable and “emotional”. Not actual emotional, like human beings are, but “girl emotional” where they just lash out unreasonably at the wrong people in order to create conflict. These are, in short, not the women I saw in the movie who dealt with Max in a calm and collected fashion.

Page 13 gives us another triggery medical exam and the announcement that Angharad is pregnant.

Page 14 has the wives berating Furiosa some more. (Did I mention that they call her “just like them [the men], except you’ve got no balls”? Thank you, male authors, that sounds totally like the women I know sound. That is definitely how we insult, yes. //sarcasm)

Page 15 shows Angharad spiralling into a silent depression while Furiosa watches with meaningful eyes.

Page 16 has the “history woman”, Miss Giddy, tell Furiosa that she’s concerned for the women and that they will perish without a leader. Calling all Exceptional Women, can we get an Exceptional Woman on line 1, please?

Page 17 has Furiosa realizing the extent of Angharad’s depression, and rushing to the scene of Page 18 which is holy shit a graphic panel of Angharad trying to give herself an abortion by herself and there is blood everywhere and I’m not going to show the image because it’s awful. Furiosa leaps forward and grabs the coat hanger wire and possibly backhands Angharad (the art style makes it hard to tell) and the other wives rush in hearing the noise.

Which leads us to Page 19 in which Furiosa backhands all the wives and then explains to them that they have the best life ever and should be totes grateful and here is where I am just throwing my kindle at the wall hard enough to leave a mark because who wrote this shit and why was this allowed to be published.

Page 20 continues the berating, with Furiosa telling the wives that they have “no humility… no gratitude!” and omg did someone ask the MRA boycotters to write this book without having seen the movie? Like, was that how this happened? The wives snark back, because if there’s one thing women are, it’s catty and they say that Furiosa only knows war and killing (non-sequitur!) and Furiosa says oh yeah “and what were you just doing?” and it’s such an oh snap moment for the authors that I’m almost kind of awkwardly embarrassed for them that it wasn’t an oh snap moment for me, because abortion and war are not the same things. But apparently Furiosa is a rampant forced-birther, and obviously that just makes her an even better heroine. *headdesk*

Page 21 reveals what we’d all been secretly hoping: that Furiosa had a rape backstory, yay! Awesome! (Not awesome!)

So now Furiosa isn’t just a woman who led a different life than they had and had different twists of fate that led her to become a war-rig driver; she’s the exact same as them and then either earned her way out or got kicked out. Considering how she just read them the riot act for not liking their captivity, I’m assuming she was kicked out; considering her forced-birth stance, I’m putting money on her being infertile and being a “failed” wife. (A previous panel also mentioned babies that hadn’t made it, with the implication that this was pre-Angharad and the others.) So obviously that’s great if the writers are going in that direction, that Furiosa is an infertile failed wife who just really misses those nice baths.

Page 22 introduces the “my baby is not going to be a warlord” concept and can I just say that when I saw those words painted in the movie, I read them a little differently than these authors have here. Angharad is using the words here to say this specific baby will not be a warlord, whereas I had read that in a more broad sense that the babies we have, should we chose to have them, will not be warlords. Whether or not abortion is a choice made by one or more of the wives once they are free, I didn’t expect that they would all necessarily choose to keep and raise Joe’s children. (Indeed, Dag expresses ambivalence over the whole thing in a way that resonated with me.) There is this tendency of some male authors to forget that a woman can want children but not this particular child at the same time. Or, indeed, that a woman can not want to have warlord-children and not want to have children at all!

The movie narrative felt inclusive to me of differences between the wives: whether they wanted to keep Joe’s baby, or wanted to abort/adopt out of their current pregnancy and have children later with someone else, or wanted no children at all, they all were united in not wanting to bear warlords. Now the comic has twisted that to be a statement about a specific child, making the women’s flight for freedom just as much about “protecting” that child from warlord-training as it was about making reproductive choices on their own.

Page 23 has Capable apologizing to Furiosa, and explaining that all her cattiness was based in envy. Ugh.

Page 24 has the wives talking about the green place (though Furiosa doesn’t reveal her history and acts like she doubts a green place exists). Page 25 asks about her arm (“bad things happened”), and reveals that she was taken and that her mother died. Page 26 has Dag entertaining the wives by pretending to be Joe, then the medic shows up to take the women to Joe for the evening; he notes that Furiosa is getting protective and forgetting her place. Page 27 has Joe being catered to by the wives while they sing and play music.

Page 28 has Joe telling Cheedo to come “sit on daddy’s lap”, and I guess now is the time to bring up that several mentions have been made to her being young and not ovulating yet, and that Joe hasn’t started raping her yet. Now he declares his intentions to do so.

Dag yells at him and tries to protect Cheedo, and of all the reasons she could have brought up for wanting to protect her friend, she yells, “She’s the only thing here not infected by your poison!” which. Sigh. I’m not going to say that a rape victim couldn’t internalize rape narratives, because it happens all the time, but this feels like a very horrible male-centric view of this situation: Dag and the other women are “infected” by having been pierced by Joe’s penis, but Cheedo is pure because she is a virgin. This is really a disgusting narrative to perpetuate in a book about sexual victimization because rape survivors (like myself) get to read this and hear that penetration makes us infected by poison. That other rape survivors feel that way, not just society, and we probably should feel that way too.

And… the thing is, these authors aren’t writing history. They’re writing fiction. Is it realistic that Dag might have internalized that she is “dirty” for being raped? Sure, that happens all the time. Is it necessary that she use this particular reason to save her friend? No! She could have saved Cheedo for literally any other reason. The fact that Dag focuses on “virgin” as Cheedo’s most important trait makes me uncomfortably suspect that the authors focused on “virgin” as Cheedo’s most important trait. And while depiction is not necessarily endorsement, this is never pushed back on again; no one ever revisits this idea that, no, you really aren’t poisoned for having been raped. Dag doesn’t receive acceptance, and so neither do we in the audience.

Page 29 has Joe viciously raping Dag in revenge, while Furiosa stops the wives from intervening. Despite the fact that since Angharad is visibly pregnant and his favorite, she might well have been able to intervene effectively. Page 29 also has Joe detailing a list of everything he’s given his ungrateful wives in case we’ve forgotten since the last five minutes that they owe their education to him. Page 30 has Furiosa tell the women about the green place while they make rapturous faces and say “take us there” without any sense of planning or cooperation going into this. Just an Exceptional Woman and her cargo.

I’m going to here note as a bit of a breather that by far the most lines in this comic go to Angharad and Dag, who are the two blond women of the group. Toast, who is a biracial black woman, seems to have only one speaking part that I can find: the scene where she says Joe doesn’t have procreative sex with her. Cheedo, who is Maori and Chinese, is a virgin who exists in order to be extra-super-victimized and then protected by a blond woman (who is then raped in retaliation). Capable, the redhead of the group, is envious and emotional and shouty. So our blond women are people and heroes and center stage, and our women of color are highlighted as extra rape-victimy while having far fewer lines of dialogue.

Page 31 has Joe show up with chastity belts as punishment for Dag speaking against him last night. It doesn’t flow narratively and seems to be the authors feeling that they needed to jam that detail in as a plot point on a flowchart instead of as just another symptom of their abuse. It’s great (and by great I mean awful) that all these little details are coming together to be the wives’ fault rather than just something Joe did to them because he’s a horrible patriarch-monster obsessed with controlling womens’ reproduction. In Page 32 he fires Furiosa, apparently because the chastity belts mean that the women don’t need to be protected from men any more. I guess the idea that Rictus might bring bolt cutters with him is just too outlandish for Joe to consider.

Page 33 has the wives talking and oh, I was wrong, Toast does get to talk here. Cheedo says the chastity belts are “my fault. stupid, stupid, stupid,” and Toast agrees with her. Stellar. Dag says that she hates the baby inside her and that it’s an “ugly baby” and Angharad scolds her. “Don’t say that. It’s going to be beautiful.” Ugh. Can male authors seriously not encompass that a pregnant woman might not want to be pregnant? Do they think pregnancy hormones are mind-control Borg nanites?

Page 34 has Angharad insisting that “Furiosa showed us to be strong… as women! We are not things!” So, oh wonderful, the wives didn’t realize they weren’t things to be owned until they met a badass Exceptional Woman and aspired to be the same as her. Silly me, here thinking all this time that the movie was about how there is no one Right/Best way to be a woman and that we are all valuable for our diversity. Nope, apparently we’re all just trekking down a sliding scale from Victim to Heroine.

Page 35 has Furiosa showing up in the middle of the night and this is just stellar writing:

Furiosa: Get dressed. We’re leaving… now.

Wives: Are we going to the green place?

Furiosa: No questions. […talks about going to the green place…] One question remains–do you want this?

This is, for the record, how men talk to me as a woman. Order me around, order me to be silent, and then ask for my consent kind of late after the fact and designating a time in which I am magnanimously allowed to speak. This is not how people talk to each other when they feel mutual respect. This is not how people talk to each other when they are cooperating and planning an escape plan together. This is how a dog herds sheep or a person loads cargo. And thus evaporates any sense from the movie that these women were equals working together in order to escape as a group. Furiosa is an Exceptional Woman saving the others, the end.

Page 36 has them leave Miss Giddy behind because she’s too old for the journey. Cheedo says that she doesn’t want to go, that she wants to stay here with Miss Giddy, and I hate this so much. The movie had Cheedo wrestling with understandable fears under terrible duress, but now that fear that a horrible death might be worse than a terrible life has been expanded to her not wanting to leave in the first place. And this juxtaposes in awful ways with her being the one virgin among the wives; there is an implication here that she hasn’t been raped enough to want to escape.

Page 38 clarifies that Giddy wrote the “our babies will not be warlords” on the walls and floors because apparently this book hadn’t ruined the movie enough for me that I just was not allowed to go on imagining the wives writing out their rebellion in their own hand.

And there you go! “How to Ruin an Amazing Movie in 40 Pages Or Less!”

Okay, so let’s unpack this just a little further, and I’m sorry that this is getting long.

First of all, this comic is ridiculously rapey, especially given that the movie attained a lot of feminist acclaim precisely because it wasn’t rapey. It was a movie about sexual victimization without showing any rape on-screen. I’ve already seen dudes defending the comic with pretend-surprise and things like “gosh, you mean the rapey guy was raping those women all this time! I’m shocked!” But the thing is, we didn’t need to see rape in order to know that rape was going on. That was true for the movie; it is true for any backstory comics.

Indeed, by showing the rape and sexual assault over and over again in this book, that will likely overwhelm the wives’ valid complaints about freedom and reproductive freedom. It doesn’t–or shouldn’t–matter whether Joe is treating them “well” or whether he’s hurting them. They aren’t free, they deserve to be free, the end. The added rape sequences only serve to provide a validity prism for the audience: yes, the apocalypse out there is rotten, but it really was sufficiently terrible enough in Joe’s captivity to justify wanting to leave.

The fact that the authors felt that the wives needed to justify wanting to be free, and the fact that Joe and Furiosa spout the same dialogue about the wives being unaware of how tough life is outside, how ungrateful they are for all he’s given them, how much better off they are with him–all lines that abusers regularly employ against us, their victims–is disturbing to me as a reader. The time spent “justifying” wanting to escape into the apocalyptic wastes paradoxically undermines itself. I, a survivor of rape and abuse, never found it odd that the wives would rather risk starvation in the desert than continue on in that situation, but the awareness that I am now apparently supposed to think it was odd just reminds me that “I don’t want to be abused” is considered a selfish luxury in our society, rather than a human right worth dying for.

Apparently my freedom is something I should sell for water and shade, and I should only give that up if the abuse is bad enough. In the movie, the chastity belts read to me as one more symptom of the wives’ captivity; in the book, the chastity belts become a symbol of why they had to leave. The dynamic of freedom is completely changed, and not for the better. And the juxtaposition of the virginal wife not wanting to escape, presumably because she hasn’t been raped yet, reinforces that bizarre message that freedom is (and should be) negotiable for water. That message is so incredibly alien to the movie I thought I watched.

My second problem with the comic is that the women aren’t working together as a group of diverse equals. This was something else in the movie that made sense to me; the way the women worked together fit perfectly well with my own life and history and friendships. Yet again, the authors behind this comic seemed to find that cooperation strange, almost suspicious, and have apparently decided that these women needed a history of being catty and seeing each other suffer and deciding to work together in order for that cooperation to be valid. Because that’s the natural progression of female relationships, right?

The wives could have (and this would have seemed vastly more realistic to me) been actually interested in Furiosa when she first was assigned them. “You’re a warrior? You drive a war rig? What is that like? How is it better than this? How is it worse than this?” Then we would have seen actual backstory and gotten to actually known these characters. Instead of being sold a tepid rape story that we’ve all seen before, instead of going through the reused progression of cattiness and fighting, instead we could have had a glimpse at their lives through the framing that they wanted to give us. Not as a fly on the wall hovering through rape scenes as we adjust our validity prisms, but as a respectful listener hearing the stories that these women wanted to tell each other, and us.

But the narrative doesn’t treat them with that respect, and so they don’t treat each other with respect either. Furiosa’s gender is doubted and questioned, as is her place as a warrior, all to set her up as an Exceptional Woman. The women ask her to take them away (probably in part because that is movie-canon and the authors were stuck with it!) but in manner that has almost no agency: Furiosa spins a tale for them of the green place and their adoring faces beam up at her in rapturous wonder. This isn’t the tale of Capable and Knowing (haha, see what I did there?) women making plans together and executing an amazing prison break; this is the tale of Furiosa stomping up the stairs and saying “come with me if you want to live.”

Even the knowledge of the women is stripped from them in this story; they didn’t learn and grow and become three-dimensional characters because that’s what women do and have been doing since time began. No, they learned things because “daddy” let them. They met Furiosa because “daddy” assigned her as their protector. All the amazing things that the women do in the movie now flow from the graciousness of Imperator Joe, and the “ironic” moral seems to be that if he had been just a little bitworse of a patriarch, then he would have won.

The backstory of the wives was always going to be a story about rape, just as their story in the movie was about rape. But this was a chance to show a narrative that discussed rape on women’s terms, in women’s voices, rather than just splaying their legs all over the page as if a woman truly is the object that her rapist would reduce her to. This could have been a story about them using their knowledge and taking their freedom, rather than being passively given their knowledge and ushered, silenced and unquestioning, to freedom. This could have been a story about agency, respect, curiosity, friendship, love, rebellion, and vibrant humanity.

Instead we got a washed-over plot about rape and captivity and in-fighting, until an Exceptional Woman rises to be The Leader. Nothing original, nothing we haven’t seen before, and nothing that evokes the amazing spirit of the movie I loved.

My name is Ana Mardoll. I love reading, writing, and crafting of any kind. I’m blessed with a devoted husband, loving parents, and two spoiled rotten cats. I am a writer, a reader, a reviewer, a woman, a feminist, disabled, infertile, and queer. Not necessarily all in that order. I don’t have enough hours in the day by half. You may contact me at AnaMardoll at gmail, though I am not able to answer email quickly or regularly due to disability issues.

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SyFy’s latest space opera, Killjoys , began last night, and over the course of the first episode, and there’s an entire season’s worth of material packed into forty minutes. Clearly, we’re in for a treat with this show.

Read more...

Following the recent conclusion of Marvel’s Thor series, in which readers discovered that the secret identity of the new Goddess of Thunder was in fact , many fans of the series were eager to see where Thor would go next. Tying in with the Secret Wars event, series writer Jason Aaron returns with Thors #1 – a story meant to continue the threads of new!Thor’s heroic journey, but one that fails to be remotely as empowering as her solo series.

Jason Aaron has made no secret of his love of detective and mystery stories, and his recent Marvel work – Thor and Original Sin – have been underpinned by their use of detective work, secret identities and whodunit logic to bring a sense of dramatic suspense to the punch-first-ask-questions-never world of superheroes. Thors attempts to take these elements to the next level with a fantastical spin on the crime procedural genre – think of it as CSI: Asgard, in which every cop carries their own hammer.

Focussing on the border guards that have a nasty habit of popping up in other Secret Wars series whenever someone needs banishing, the series follows the Battleworld’s finest as they walk their beats, solve crimes, and drink mead. When a string of grisly and unsolvable murders turn out to all feature the same woman – Jane Foster – as the mysterious victim, the Ultimate-Universe Thor and Beta Ray Bill have to crack the case in order to keep their hammers.

So let’s just address the most pressing concern of that recap: Jason Aaron decided to follow up the empowering story of Jane Foster becoming Thor and finding her place in both Asgardian and human society with a story that features her being murdered – repeatedly. Presumably the Goddess of Thunder featured in Thor will enter the story at a later point; but, so far, all we know is that someone is tracking down alternative universe versions of Jane Foster, brutally murdering them, and leaving their bodies to rot. How about that for inclusion?

At no point in this issue do we learn anything about any of these women as characters, about their lived experiences or their perspectives on these brutal crimes. Our empathy is never encouraged by the narrative to align with them. Instead, the focus surrounds the Ultimate-Thor, Thorlief (a coconut for anyone who can crack the naming conventions going on here), and his determination to solve this crime for pretty self-involved/white knight reasoning. There’s an incredibly half-hearted ‘we must find justice for these women’ speech that feels like it was directly lifted from an episode of an off-brand CSI imitator, but the major threat spotlighted is that Thorlief could lose his hammer (read as: Thor status/privilege) if he isn’t able to find the killer. To transition from Jane Foster being revealed as the Goddess of Thunder in Thor #8 to her maggot-infested corpse serving a clumsy plot device for threatened male entitlement within the space of a single issue goes beyond problematic – it’s baffling.

This is where Aaron’s use of the crime procedural format starts to smokescreen a lot of the plot and characterization issues in play. While it’s true that this storyline wouldn’t feel out of place in a show like CSI, that doesn’t give the creative team a free pass to replicate the associated gender and cultural biases that come along for the ride. The issue’s obsession with pastiche appears to have created a smokescreen effect for the sheer inappropriateness of the story. (This may well be why the image of five Jane Fosters in body bags wasn’t quite the canary in the coalmine moment it ought to have been for the editorial team.) The formulaic storyline of an innocent woman being brutally murdered and the hardboiled detective having to track down her killer in order to gain abstract justice isn’t just unimaginative – it reduces female characters to object status as men fight to protect or desecrate their bodies.

Just because crime procedurals regularly employ storylines like this doesn’t mean they’re good or interesting or respectful to ‘minority’ characters. At this stage of cultural saturation they’re just normalized, and so audiences have grown numbs to the shock of gratuitous female mutilation and excessive male violence dressed up as redemptive justice. Aaron’s use of this particular trope in such an unimaginative and predictable fashion is precisely what makes it so damaging: stripping Jane Foster of her legacy as a brave and meaningful character down to unknown victim in order to fit the cliché’s constraints upon women.

You can even view it as fridging taken to the logical extreme. If quintessential fridging sees male characters motivated by the death of female companions, then Thorlief’s quest for justice in the name of the poor, helpless female victims allows Aaron to skip the actual ‘have a somewhat-meaningful relationship with a female character’ part and jump straight to ‘She’s dead, Jim.’

A more imaginative use of this trope could have resulted in a much more engaging narrative which also continued Jane’s story in a way that maintained her strength and agency. While she’s just become the Goddess of Thunder, she’s also dealing with her cancer diagnosis (which is being aggravated by her heroic duties), and so her mortality is undoubtedly on her mind. Imagine if it was Jane Foster having to investigate a series of her own murders? Not only would that reassert her agency, but it would also offer opportunities for a more interesting detective-victim connection because, hey, they’re all the same person. There were other ways to tell this story without taking feminism out into the woods and cracking it over the head with a shovel.

And while Aaron’s use of this cliché might have been less explicit in isolation, the issue’s compounding of crime procedural stereotypes proves equally uncomfortable. Loki features as a homeless madman informant of Beta Ray Bill’s – ticking the ‘eccentric hobo who helps them crack the case’ trope. Storm features as the only female Thor in the entire issue. (Did someone say ‘token’?) Not only does she suffer verbal abuse from an older Thor (‘drunken and grizzled detective who doesn’t play by the rules!’) who argues she should be facially branded to remind everyone she’s a mutant, but also has to put up with Thorlief hitting on her while at work? She’s also dressed in a shoe-string swimming costume outfit with a headdress that looks like a Thanksgiving turkey at Coachella, it’s all very bad.

The only glimmer of joy within the entire issue is when Throg cameos as the Thor Corps’ resident forensic pathologist; but so many terrible crime clichés are trotted out in succession that Thors #1 feels like it’s in danger of buckling under its lack of self-awareness. By themselves, each of these tropes has the potential to be interesting or rewarding if they were engaged with in an original way (except the homeless informant one, bin that.) Instead, the one-note translation of them – complete with their racist, sexist, and privileged biases unscathed – proves to be utterly unrewarding for the reader.

After all the goodwill earned with readers by Thor and its exploration of Jane Foster’s taking on of the heroic mantle, Jason Aaron decides to progress this story by murdering multiple alternate versions of the character in gruesome, anonymous ways and tasking an upstanding man with saving her living counterparts in order to save his own privilege. I am a great admirer of Aaron’s work, but the use of lazy tropes to transform iconic, progressive characters like Jane Foster, Loki, and Storm into fundamentally inappropriate, one-dimensional characters is a massive step backwards for a series that follows on from Thor.

Perhaps the most systemic issue of this series (and Marvel’s publishing strategy as a whole) is precisely how newer readers are meant to navigate this tonal change. For ‘alternative’ comic fans that got involved with the series following the introduction of the Goddess of Thunder, Secret Wars might not mean a lot, but a new Thor series on shelves by the same writer would most likely seem to be a safe bet. Just imagine discovering and loving an empowering, resilient determined hero like Jane Foster as Thor, only to then see her be brutally murdered and replaced with (for all intents and purposes to new readers) the ‘original’ Thor again. While the Jane Foster that readers have followed in Thor is alive in Secret Wars (following the events of the main series), how on earth are people that only want to read her adventures supposed to know that?

Marvel’s massive diversity push has been a great success in its initial stages (Spider-Butt aside), but now that the publisher has a number of imaginative, diverse, and rewarding female series running, the question is how to successfully merge these with the rest of the publishing line. It’s all well and good to create safe spaces for alternative readers in books like Thor or Ms. Marvel, but if you then progress these characters by placing them in situations where they’re treated as badly as female comic characters have been historically (murdered, mutilated, sexually harassed etc.) then you’re not championing inclusion at all. We’ve got our safe spaces, Marvel; but why is the rest of your world still so dangerous?

Adam Sorice is a literate graduate turned grown-up who writes about pop culture when he’s not describing himself in the third person. His writing engages with all the key feminist icons of our time: Lady Gaga, Sailor Moon, Elsa from Frozen and, naturally, Thor. To read more of his work, check out his blog or follow him on Twitter.

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lornacrowleys:

stvr-gvzr:

lornacrowleys:

tumblr psa: dont use ouija boards!!! you never know what kind of spirits you’re inviting into your life

me: nice try but none of u can stop me from using this glow in the dark hasbro piece of garbage 2 ask oscar wilde for fashion advice

my advice: do not fuck with the spirit world, don’t take it lightly, you’re young and naive and completely unaware of how any of it works. This is one thing you don’t want to find out you were wrong about the hard way. 

well thats all very nice and weirdly condescending but i just spirit-skyped jane austen & she says you’re a fucking square