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"Haley’s social media post also included photos of her and her children hugging her husband and holding a “Welcome Back Dad” sign.

Haley wished her husband farewell during a ceremony at The Citadel, a military college in Charleston, in June 2023. His deployment came during the height of her GOP presidential run before she dropped out of the race last month.

Michael Haley, her husband of 27 years, had been a familiar face on the campaign trail in Haley’s previous runs for political office. His absence on the campaign trail this year prompted former President Trump to mock Haley for not having her husband by her side — despite him being deployed."

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"blend the two worlds, musically"

— Soul | "Finding Soul" Conversation | Essence Festival (2020)

After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.

Aldous Huxley

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getting JOMO from using Tumblr til I see this new therapist

"The ways in which she is cynical and the things that she's scared of are really relatable, you know. And life is scary at times, life hurts, things can be painful, and everyone has moments of like, "Ugh, it's too much. I'd rather opt out." I like the phrase JOMO, which is the opposite of FOMO. The Joy Of Missing Out. That's kind of where 22 is residing at the beginning. Lot of JOMO."

— Tina Fey on her character 22 in the Disney Pixar film Soul (2020), "Pretty Deep for a Cartoon" featurette

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posts tagged despair

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"I don't know if you realize this, but you are also just putting people into boxes that fit your political ideology. You'll be happier if you stop looking at the world as if everything is right or left. Despite what people who profit from anger say, most things aren't political." — Arnold Schwarzenegger post (21 Apr 2023) replying to "only woke and stupid leftists are raging about this blue check"

^ agree or disagree with former governor Schwarzenegger in the above but I am appending this to relax the grandhotelabyss post for my own blog.

are you a TERF

No. Picture the political spectrum as a circle. The TERF occupies a dot where a determinist version of the materialist left, according to which one's consciousness flows entirely from one's class (or in this case sex-class) position, meets the leftmost wing of a conservatism according to which it is too dangerous to destabilize supposedly long-settled social categories. Now picture a dot on the circle positioned 180 degrees from the TERF dot, where the postmodern (or whatever) left, with its conviction that discourse precedes and constructs (though never seamlessly) identity, meets the Nietzschean right, for whom identity is an aesthetic artifact crafted by the aristocratic personality. I occupy that dot, more or less. Opposites resemble each other, as we know, so people sometimes think I'm "gender critical" because I have expressed reservations about handing gender nonconformity entirely over to the doctors and the experts, as if one needed in every case the imprimatur of the lancet to transfigure one's self, and because I have scrutinized certain linguistic interventions, the "they/them" convention in particular and compulsory pronoun-sharing in general, on the grounds that they act in practice as bureaucratic reifications of the identity they promised to emancipate from absolute definition. I don't mean to say no one should seek gender medicine (this is America, not some half-fascist Nordic social democracy, so you should get whatever procedure you want and can afford) or that there are no politics to pronouns (I have in fact defended on aesthetic grounds neopronouns, the abolition of pronouns, and the deliberate rendering-illegible of "he" and "she" as alternatives to "they/them" with its unavoidable hint of a stable third sex)—just that the point of all this agitation, as I understood it in my youth, was to free up the complexity of the human psyche and its possible outward expression from the trammels of top-down socio-techno control. Which means, again, that my position is opposite the TERF one: some people have seen TERF ideology in the utterances of at least one character in my latest novel, and I don't see why one character out of many characters in a large fiction shouldn't articulate an ideology if that ideology is appropriate to her sensibility or context, but I invite you to consider two phrases used without irony in the objective third-person narration: "her penis," "the girl's penis." I've admittedly never read a J. K. Rowling novel, but I don't think you're going to find those phrases in one.

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"Don't turn off what turns me on"

Dua Lipa and St. Vincent onstage at the 61st annual GRAMMY Awards

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"Why do Recessionist Millennials have so much anxiety??"

Our childhood/teen years: *Columbine massacre and then growing up hearing of it constantly, Y2K scare, Aaliyah's death from a plane crash (widely publicized), 9/11 (about 2 weeks after that), war in Iraq, war in Afghanistan, lots of disturbing horror movies (especially Final Destination movies), always being told about "Stranger Danger," Hurricane Katrina, financial collapse, other mass shootings, Mayan apocalypse scare...*

Do I need to go on?? 🙃

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from "Austin Powers at 25: 10 Things You Didn’t Know About the Landmark 1990s Comedy" by Stephen Silver (2022) —

Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery was a big part of Cool Britannia Cool Britannia was a cultural moment in the second half of the 1990s, coinciding with Tony Blair’s arrival as prime minister, in which British culture became cool around the world again. Austin Powers was a key part of this, as was Four Weddings and a Funeral, as were bands like Oasis and Blur, and of course the Spice Girls. Both Austin Powers and The Spice Girls heavily featured British flags in their iconography.

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Kelly LeBrock in Weird Science (1985)

"And it's a whole lot better than it got credit for. It's about overcoming who you are and needing something like a woman to step out of a computer and sort of show you how to live life." — man

"The whole premise of the movie, where they're trying to create this perfect woman out of a computer and to specifications. This is really an Internet-era fantasy. Everyone's looking for the perfect porn site for them. And that's what these guys were doing. So, it really anticipates the Internet and the way that it would be used." — man

"I remember being kind of disappointed that it wasn't just like softcore porn. Where she just shows up and is, you know, an object for them to entertain themselves with. It was like like 'aww there's a lesson in this' y'know." — Diablo Cody

from "It's Alive! Resurrecting Weird Science" 2008 featurette

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Made a first appointment for next week with a new therapist (finally.) This marks the occasion. Just as the present now will later be past, the future shall be the present

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Here I choose to highlight the gulf between intentional offense and being offended.

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Posting 4/10 tracks from the mix CD I was contemplating making for myself. Stopped myself after concluding ppl would probably find that weird

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The Apollo 11 astronauts found a creative way to ensure their families

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I got to be on the periphery of a fascinating conversation earlier that was all over the place but the part that stood out was the, “That was the year Adele blocked Lana from getting to number one all year. I love Adele but it was just sort of bullshit”. And it’s a fascinating thing to me in so many ways. I did not know that happened in any sense because chart success means not much at all to me but I know the stan culture that has come up online this really matters to people. For some reason. That reason being social media has been manipulated by marketing to encourage people to build their entire identity around what they consume, so that their own personal value is tied to the success of whoever star they hitch their wagon too. It’s deeply unhealthy and not in the kids today sense of it but in the you’re being manipulated and it’s hollowing out your sense of self and makes you even easier to manipulate down the line. It’s not really a mistake there is a direct pipeline from lonely nerd who cares too much about a thing to alt-right shithead. Anyway, that part is fascinating but so is just the idea that Adele had done something to Lana Del Rey, which is both a symptom of the above stan culture but also a cultural narcissism that is also encourage. It’s healthier to realize very few people do things to you, you aren’t that important, but it’s easier to become outraged, which frankly feels good after a while, you get the dopamine hit of righteous indignation, if you believe someone has done something to you. Adele just happened to make an album in the same year. Anyway, it wasn’t that big a deal but it did stand out and people were impassioned about a lot of silly stuff as I sat to the side and just churned over in my head the things that were said and revealed. It all feels appropriate to be associated with Lana though who is maybe the embodiment of manufactured artifice sold as authenticity. She fascinates me in that she seemed to know what the world was becoming before most people and got ahead of it. There has been constant backlash against her since. It comes in waves. She wasn’t what she pretended to be (which was a mix of a 1940’s Hollywood star and 1970’s Grindhouse sleaze in the year 2011, who would have guessed that was not something she came by naturally) to maybe she’s kind of a shitty person. None of these should be surprises but people like the comforting lie I suppose. I am not here to lift her up or tear her down I suppose because she is more interesting as a landmark in pop culture to me. I quite like her music. I may not quite like who she is if I met her and I don’t know her, nor do I presume to from her music. She will always represent a pop culture shift to me, to a more aware and somehow more nescient culture at the same time. And to stick on theme that conversation happened but really the reason she is being posted is then I was thinking about just how hot she is and really she was chose for completely carnal reasons. Today I want to fuck Lana Del Rey.

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Went to see Dune Part Two in a theater yesterday. I found the topics and themes explored more interesting this time around. Though I would like to pause and take a break in these long (over 2¼h) movies.

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