#made me very resistant to the fact that i may still be connected to feminity and girlhood

[thehealingsystem]

It's so wild to me that as a community we're still so hostile to multigender and genderfluid people existing in gay and lesbian spaces.

You...are aware that people who are both men and women are allowed to be gay, right? And lesbian? Their other genders doesn't cancel their connection to womanhood, or manhood, or whatever else they id with. They are allowed to be gay despite their fem-alignment, and they are allowed to be lesbian despite their masc-alignment.

It comes from these weird online spaces that the standard to be gay or lesbian is to be a "non-woman" or a "non-man," which is inherently transmultiphobic and...extremely ahistorical. And completely misunderstands nonbinary identity. So if you're both then you just don't belong anywhere I suppose.

[ryanmeft]

Movie Review: Reminiscence

At just under two hours, Reminiscence has everything it needs and little it doesn’t. It presents us with a Miami flooded by climate change, slowly being consumed by the sea, and an elite who took advantage of a war presumably caused by the rising waters to enrich themselves, leaving the poor in the dust…or in this case, the surf. In this setting, many people choose to live inside their own memories via machines clearly inspired by the Animus of the game series Assassin’s Creed. They are not living their ancestors’ lives but their own, returning to the sunny days and lost lovers of a dead world.

Facilitating this ultimate nostalgia trip are Nick (Hugh Jackman) and “Watts” (Thandiwe Newton). She is the mechanical whiz, operating the complex apparatus for a series of mostly working class clients---a wheelchair-bound, drug addicted veteran, a lost and wandering lover unable to move on. He’s the Memory Master, whose calming voice, even tone and expertise in the human mind allow clients a guided tour to the synapses they want to visit. They give away too much to really turn a profit, but it hardly matters since everyone is dirt poor anyway. Then in walks a slinky nightclub singer named Mae (Rebecca Ferguson), with whom Nick begins a passionate relationship. When Mae disappears, his life quickly unravels as he becomes obsessed with finding her.

Nick spends his time in his own memories, which is dangerous, trying to figure out where Mae could have gone. Cleverly, we do not see the actual relationship at any point, or her disappearance---unless I miss my guess, every single shot of Mae in the film takes place inside Nick’s mind. It’s a smart bit of compression: we only need to know that she is missing, and to waste time showing her vanish would only stretch a film that is better the tighter it is wound. Eventually, Nick will learn things about his love: that she has led many lives, has been connected to underworld figures and their sordid business, and that she may be involved in less than savory things herself. The plot involves a ruthless land baron (Brett Cullen), a sizzingly charismatic-yet-sleazy drug dealer (Daniel Wu) a D.A. (Natalie Martinez)  who is trying to nail her targets via digging through the memories of their henchmen, and a corrupt cop (Cliff Curtis) who is key to the mystery.

There were some very specific things I appreciated about director Lisa Joy’s script, things which may very well mean nothing to most people but which I want to talk about. I liked that the causes and nature of the war, which most of the characters participated in, is never given some long expository scene for the audience---people who live in an actual world don’t spend time explaining things that have happened in it, and people who have been in a war don’t talk about it as if they’re telling stories. I liked that Newton’s Watts was a dyed-in-the-grease mechanic sort, that her and Nick’s relationship does not follow standard screenwriting paths, and that the urge to overtly feminize her is resisted.

I liked the movie’s visual sense. I liked that fights have weight and meaning and intent, that Jackman’s Nick, despite being a former soldier is not a bad-ass, and that after decades of increasingly superheroicized cartoon action you can still make a movie where real bodies react to real hits. I have not seen much Westworld, Joy’s claim to fame, but she and her team, including the show’s cinematographer Paul Cameron, use environment well. They place a seedy part of Miami full of low-rent clubs and shuttered buildings along streets that run with water, opting not to go for the all-out devastation often seen in such films and which would in fact take decades. It is a more haunting world for that, just a mite more ruined than our own, traces of our past still very much around but also very much dead and gone.

The film is not being well-received by critics, who claim it is not inventive enough with the settings. At the risk of angering people who actually get paid to write reviews, I have to say I really thought the professionals were more perceptive than that. It does not take much awareness to recognize the movie is a noir thriller with a gentle science fiction overlay, and that the setting they demand “more” out of is not in the least the point of the story. It is a genre exercise, but a skillful, well-acted, well-shot, gorgeously framed one with real characters and not cyphers, and it distresses me that in a world where franchises like Star Wars can microwave old ideas, repackage them and earn rave reviews, we seem to demand movies without such easy brand recognition give us more to earn their precious stars.

The critics are correct: Joy could have made the movie they think she should have, had she wanted to. She didn’t want to, though. She wanted to make a taut thriller in the vein of L.A. Confidential or Red Rock West, perhaps not up to those standards but able to hold its own. There are scenes that go differently than genre tropes might lead you to expect, and the cast is so assured and confident that even some too-repeated lines aren’t a big deal. Superficially, the film is being compared to everything from Blade Runner, from whose original cut it lifts an unfortunate tendency toward over-narration, to the films of Bogart, mostly to suggest it is merely a pastiche of better ideas taken from other places. Even if that were true---and I do not think it is---memory is essential to art. Should I be mad that Joy occasionally borrows a stray idea, in a world where movies made entirely of other people’s thoughts get more praise?

Verdict: Highly Recommended

Note: I don’t use stars, but here are my possible verdicts.

Must-See

Highly Recommended

Recommended

Average

Not Recommended

Avoid like the Plague

You can follow me on Twitter here, if you want more posts about film and video games and sometimes about manscaping:

https://twitter.com/RyanmEft

All images are property of the people what own the movie.

[betsynagler]

The Next Thing We Don’t Get To Talk About

Adolescence was kind of a mystery when I was a tween. Actually, we didn't call tweens “tweens” in the late 70s/early 80s, sort of the Iron Age of coming up with clever, merged names for stuff, and there were lots of other things of whose names we did not speak. My mother was a full-fledged feminist at that point, but a large part of her era’s brand of feminism was about minimizing the differences between men and women. Maybe this is why I didn't know anything about getting my period — heck, I don't think I even knew it was going to happen — until I read Are You There God? It's Me Margaret. In fact, there's a fair amount I wouldn't know about the world if it weren't for Judy Blume. Not that I enjoyed her books, which also included vivid details about wet dreams (Then Again, Maybe I Won't) and teenaged sex (Forever, a book of which I think I may only have read the “good” pages — the ones my friends dog-eared so they could share them, or maybe read them over again alone in their rooms, which was something that never occurred to me to do since masturbation was another thing nobody ever told me about). I didn't like them, partly because even at that age I could tell that “literary” was not a primary value considered by the dog-ear-and-share teen set, but mainly because those books scared the shit out of me. I was an immature kid, a year younger than most of the girls in my grade, and I’d been very happy in the dark, thank you. I didn't want to know about any of this stuff, which seemed entirely gross and overwhelming. Trying to figure out why girls wore skirts when they could wear infinitely more comfortable shorts or overalls was way too complicated for me, I certainly couldn't imagine celebrating when I started bleeding out of my vagina. In fact, I don't know anyone who did, in spite of what Judy wrote. And while my mom was helpful about it when I finally had it (late. I was 14 or 15, which seemed eons after everyone else), she didn't use tampons, so I still had to figure all of that out by myself. But to me, being a teenager was basically about feeling stupid nearly all the time, so to have this one additional thing I was utterly clueless about just seemed normal.

Little did I know how many more holes there were in my knowledge (a lot of it, coincidentally, regarding orifices). I didn't start masturbating until my 20s, since I basically didn't even know I had a clitoris until I was introduced to it by my first real boyfriend at age 21, so I guess that's when I started to understand and pay attention to my sex drive, but I still didn't notice any connection between it and my cycle. Once I got on the pill, I was very regular, and didn't have period symptoms like moodiness or bloating or cramps, so, aside from taking birth control and my uneventful annual gynecological checkup, I never had a need to think about what was going on in my uterus at all besides the usual monthly messiness. Until, that is, my 30s. That's when the hormones hit the fan. It didn't help, no doubt, that my mid-30s was when my midlife crisis started — and yes, I do mean this one, the one that's still going on. I know that probably sounds precocious, and I certainly don't have plans to die at age 68, but that's when I started thinking about my biological clock — or, once again not at all precociously, even realized I had one. So that's when I really had to start considering what the heck I was doing with my life: what my current relationship was all about, where my career was going or not going, and how I was going to make the rest of my life happen — the one that I'd always imagined would start when I sold my first screenplay or made my first feature and then continue successfully from there to all the other things I wanted like kids, money, property ownership. Because it clearly was not happening so far.

As you might imagine, the first step in all that was therapy, and it was my therapist who introduced me to the term “perimenopause.” As in, “Maybe part of the reason you’re moody and depressed is that you're going through perimenopause.” Which is not something that a woman who is hoping to have several more years of fertility wants to hear, even if she doesn't know what it is, exactly, because it has the word “menopause” in it, and that is definitely bad. So my gynecologist gave me tests for my hormones and everything looked normal, but still, I could feel that it wasn’t — or at least, not the normal that I’d been used to. If I wasn't having perimenopause, I was definitely having something, because all of this stuff was happening to me. For one thing, my sex drive had definitely gotten stronger. I wanted sex every day, if not more than once a day, even if my boyfriend didn't. Which was weird. I hadn't been taught that that degree of desire would ever be, well, me. Yes, I'd missed regular sex during the nine years I hadn't had a boyfriend, and that was why I’d learned to masturbate and occasionally made bad choices about men. Still, my need to get laid had never been so strong that I’d made really bad choices, like I knew it drove a lot of other people to do. Now, suddenly, I felt like I could relate a little more to those who felt driven by their genitalia. I had chalked it up to the fact that I was having good, regular sex, after being starved of it for so long, but I was starting to realize that there was more to it than just the horniness. I was also a lot moodier — depressed, anxious, irritable — and it was indeed a lot worse around my period.

I resisted the idea that this was happening for a long time, because it’s the worst type of stereotype that women are ruled by their cycles and made irrational, “hysterical” by our hyster-areas, rather than the way that society beats us down and makes us hate ourselves. But it was impossible not to notice that it wasn’t just these outside forces having an impact on me, something was going on inside me too. And it did seem like, finally, some of my friends were talking about it — like we were finally realizing, in our 30s, it was time to pay attention to what was actually going on with us, rather than what everyone told was supposed to be going on. And of course there was the Internet, although, as usual, whether that was helping or hurting was something of a toss up. You sure could find a lot about how women were at their sexual peak in their 30s, because that was hot, but scientifically established research about all of this other female hormonal business? Not really. So this became my major introduction to the fact that not just my body, but the mind and emotions attached to it, that I always thought of as wholly independent and under my control, were going to change as I got older whether I liked it or not. I could pretend it wasn't happening, or I could accept it and find ways to cope.

Little did I know that there was to be even more stuff for me to find out, a lot of it had to do with having babies, or not having babies. The pain women go through during childbirth, the likelihood of maternal mortality, how many things can go wrong — these were all things I only discovered when friends started having children or trying to get pregnant. I found out only long after it happened that two of my friends had come pretty close to dying during childbirth — and then they each went on to have more kids! This floored me. Then I had four miscarriages/non-viable pregnancies myself and wrote about it, and all my friends were suddenly telling me about their experiences with that. I mean, it was as if these were things we were all just supposed to go through and then shut up about, because nobody wanted to hear the gory details. Post-#metoo, it strikes me as being very similar to sexual harassment and assault. Women have always just been expected to suffer through all sorts of things and never complain, never talk. Because a large part of our value was in how well we lived up to all of the roles of womanhood — ingenue, sex kitten, helpmate, housewife, caretaker, subordinate but necessary breadwinner — without letting our personhood get in the way.

And now, finally, menopause. Which is like all of these things but also worse, because it also has to do with getting old, and that is something, as women, we can never talk about. Again, it's supposed to be each woman’s dirty little secret, hidden by hair dye, Botox, and plastic surgery. Aging is a process that happens to literally every human being, but yet again, women are made to feel like there's something wrong with us when we can’t stop time. And then, to add insult to injury, we stop being fertile, which means we lose the final thing we had going for us if we weren't hot or good cooks: we could at least make babies. Then, we get all of the fun symptoms that go along with that: hot flashes, lowered libido, dry vaginas, mood swings, irregular periods…You thought you hated your period before, but at least with most of us it was predictable, now it's not even that. Some women bleed a lot more, some bleed more often, like every three weeks or so instead of four, but not exactly, so you always have to be prepared, carrying your not-so-little bag of tampons and mini-pads around basically 24-7. And the moodiness becomes practically a month-round thing too (and it's not just grumpiness at never knowing when you're going to start bleeding — although can you imagine men putting up with that? Offices filled with middle-aged, menopausal men — upper management at any corporation, perhaps the entire insurance industry — would basically cease to function).

All of this is normal for women, but you'd never know it from popular culture. Except for the occasional joke about hot flashes and the movie Something's Got To Give, menopause doesn't exist there. So how are we supposed to know that what we're going through is what everyone else is going through? Not just to get advice or support, but even to get a sense whether or not something is wrong. I mean, how soon you're supposed to call your doctor if you have a Viagra mishap? We all pretty much know that now because it's been the punchline in so many rom coms and sitcoms and other kinds of coms. Menopause? Still too icky to make jokes about, apparently. If men don't experience it, I guess it's not “universal” enough to be funny.

I think some of this has changed. My friends who have girls certainly talk to them about a lot more than we talked about with our parents. But I still think the message of our culture is that our experiences of womanhood, the good and the bad, the sad and the fucking hilarious because it's so terrible, are not worth sharing — unless they‘re a turn-on, which, I’m sorry, most things in life just aren’t. I have to wonder, when are we going to stop internalizing the message that what happens to us just doesn't matter as much as what happens to them?

[jonathanalumbaugh]

Weekly Digest

Dec 16, 2017, 3rd issue.

A roundup of stuff I consumed this week. Published weekly(ish).

Read

Whoever your graphic design portfolio site is aimed at, you have to remember that people’s time and attention is limited. Employers, to take one example, may look at dozens of portfolios in the space of 10 minutes. So you only have a few seconds to really grab their attention and enthuse them.

—8 great graphic design portfolio sites for 2018

Paying for more than 3,500 daily drinks for six years, it turns out, is expensive. The NIH would need more funding—and soon, a team stepped up to the plate. The Foundation of the NIH, a little-known 20-year-old non-profit that calls on donors to support NIH science, was talking to alcohol corporations. By the fall of 2014, the study was relying on the industry for “separate contributions to the Foundation of the NIH beyond what the NIAAA could afford,” as Mukamal put it in an e-mail to a prospective collaborator. Later that year, Congress encouraged the NIH to sponsor the study, but lawmakers didn’t provide any money. Five corporations—Anheuser-Busch InBev, Diageo, Pernod Ricard, Heineken, and Carlsberg—have since provided a total of $67 million. The foundation is seeking another $23 million, according to its director of development, Julie Wolf-Rodda.

—A MASSIVE HEALTH STUDY ON BOOZE, BROUGHT TO YOU BY BIG ALCOHOL

When Starbucks (SBUX) announced that it was closing its Teavana tea line and wanted to shutter all of its stores, mall operator Simon Property Group (SPG) countered with a lawsuit. Simon cited in part the effect the store closures might have on other mall tenants.

Earlier this month, a judge upheld Simons' suit, ordering Teavana to keep 77 of its stores open.

—America's malls are rotting away

The Dots claims to have a quarter of a million members and current clients include Google, Burberry, Sony Pictures, Viacom, M&C Saatchi, Warner Music, Tate, Discovery Networks and VICE amongst others.

—Aiming to be the LinkedIn for creatives, The Dots raises £4m

The Cboe's bitcoin futures fell 10 percent Wednesday, triggering a two-minute trading halt early Wednesday afternoon.

—Bitcoin futures briefly halted after plunging 10%

Through a very clever scheme, the people behind Tether can continue to send Bitcoin into the stratosphere until it reaches a not-yet-known breaking point. 

—Bitcoin Only Has One Way To Go If This Is True

—Bitcoin Price Dilemma: Bull and Bear Paths in Play

—Botera – Free Font

"He is being a huge assh*le and avoiding you so it literally forces you to be the one to break up with him because he's too much of a coward to do it himself. GOD, I HATE GUYS."

—"Breakup Ghosting" Is the Most Cowardly Way to End a Relationship

—Britain rejected the EU, and the EU is loving its new life

“Although the science is still evolving, there are concerns among some public health professionals and members of the public regarding long-term, high use exposure to the energy emitted by cellphones,” Dr. Karen Smith, CDPH Director and State Public Health Officer, said in a statement.

—California Warns People to Limit Exposure to Cellphones

There is a way CSS can get its hands on data in HTML, so long as that data is within an attribute on that HTML element. 

—The CSS attr() function got nothin’ on custom properties

“The recent coverage of AI as a single, unified power is a predictable upshot of a self-aggrandizing Silicon Valley culture that believes it can summon a Godhead,” says Thomas Arnold 

—Former Google and Uber engineer is developing an AI 'god'

Here are two facts: 1) Throughout the tail end of Matt Lauer’s tenure at NBC’s Today, ABC’s Good Morning America beat it in the ratings, and 2) In the two weeks since Lauer was kicked to the curb for sexual misconduct and replaced by Hoda Kotb, Today’s viewership has surpassed GMA’s by a considerable margin.

Here are two opinions: 1) No one ever really liked Matt Lauer, but tolerated him as you would a friend you’ve known for 20 years but have nothing in common with anymore, 2) Hota Kotb makes everything better.

—A Funny Thing Is Happening to Today Now That Matt Lauer Is Gone: Its Ratings Are Going Up

The game challenges you to build an empire that stands the test of time, taking your civilization from the Stone Age to the Information Age as you wage war, conduct diplomacy, advance your culture, and go head-to-head with history’s greatest leaders.

—Get the newest game in 'Sid Meier’s Civilization' series for 50% off

Amazingly, despite the mind control and hypnosis, the girl resisted being totally drawn into her father’s “cult of three.” But she suffered from self-loathing and took to self-harm as a coping mechanism.

—Girl’s father tortured her for a decade to make her ‘superhuman’

The most searched for dog breed was the golden retriever.

—Google's top searches for 2017: Matt Lauer, Hurricane Irma and more

"A few months ago, I started collecting stories from people about their real experiences with loneliness. I started small, asking my immediate network to share with their friends/family, and was flooded with submissions from people of all ages and walks of life.

"The Loneliness Project is an interactive web archive I created to present and give these stories a home online. I believe in design as a tool to elevate others' voices. Stories have tremendous power to spark empathy, and I believe that the relationship between design and emotion only strengthens this power.

—Graphic designer tackles issue of wide-spread loneliness in moving campaign

While the Windows 10 OpenSSH software is currently in Beta, it still works really well. Especially the client as you no longer need to use a 3rd party SSH client such as Putty when you wish to connect to a SSH server.

—Here's How to Enable the Built-In Windows 10 OpenSSH Client

In America we have settled on patterns of land use that might as well have been designed to prevent spontaneous encounters, the kind out of which rich social ties are built. 

—How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult

Today was "Break the Internet" day, in which many websites altered their appearance and urged visitors to contact members of Congress about the pending repeal (see the gallery above for examples from Reddit, Kickstarter, GitHub, Mozilla, and others).

—How Reddit and others “broke the Internet” to support net neutrality today

“He’s the Usain Bolt of business for Jamaica,” Richards said. “For each Jamaican immigrant, Lowell Hawthorne is me, he’s you. He was the soul of Jamaica, the son of our soil, and all of our struggles were identified with him.”

—How the Jamaican patty king made it to the top — before ending it all

—How to break a CAPTCHA system in 15 minutes with Machine Learning

After the trap has snapped shut, the plant turns it into an external stomach, sealing the trap so no air gets in or out. Glands produce enzymes that digest the insect, first the exoskeleton made of chitin, then the nitrogen-rich blood, which is called hemolyph.

The digestion takes several days depending on the size of the insect, and then the leaf re-opens. By that time, the insect is a "shadow skeleton" that is easily blown away by the wind.

—How the Venus Flytrap Kills and Digests Its Prey

Back at The Shed, Phoebe has arrived. She's an intuitive waitress who can really get across the nuances of our menu, like how – by serving pudding in mugs – we're aiming to replicate the experience of what it's like to eat pudding out of a mug. 

—I Made My Shed the Top Rated Restaurant On TripAdvisor

In order to create a candlestick chart, you must have a data set that contains open, high, low and closevalues for each time period you want to display. The hollow or filled portion of the candlestick is called “the body” (also referred to as “the real body”). The long thin lines above and below the body represent the high/low range and are called “shadows” (also referred to as “wicks” and “tails”). The high is marked by the top of the upper shadow and the low by the bottom of the lower shadow.

—Introduction to Candlesticks

The object in question is ‘Oumuamua, an asteroid from another star system currently zipping past Jupiter at about 196,000 miles per hour, too fast to be trapped by the sun’s gravitational pull. First discovered in mid-October by astronomers at the Pan-STARRS project at the University of Hawaii, the 800-meter-long, 80-meter-wide, cigar-shaped rock is, technically speaking, weird as hell—and that’s precisely why some scientists think it’s not a natural object.

—Is This Cigar-Shaped Asteroid Watching Us?

I tried out LinkedIn Career Advice and Bumble Bizz over the course of a work week and compared them in terms of how easy they are to use and the kind of people they introduce you to.

—I tried LinkedIn's career advice app vs. dating app Bumble's version and discovered major flaws with both

“The Bitcoin dream is all but dead,” I wrote.

—I Was Wrong About Bitcoin. Here’s Why.

—Jessen's Orthogonal Icosahedron

In the study, depressed patients who got an infusion of ketamine reported rapid relief from suicidal thoughts—many as soon as a few hours after receiving the drug.

—Ketamine Relieved Suicidal Thoughts Within Hours in Hospital Study

We are trying to create an Open Source Website that searches through an open database of Interactive Maps focused on learning in a linear way. It leverages all of world’s knowledge in a unique way. It takes the Wikipedia model of curating knowledge but applies it to curating links in a meaningful and visual way.

—Learn Anything White Paper

"It was a very new word [in 1841]," Sokolowski said. "[Noah Webster’s] definition is not the definition that you and I would understand today. His definition was, 'The qualities of females,' so basically feminism to Noah Webster meant femaleness. We do see evidence that the word was used in the 19th century in a medical sense, for the physical characteristics of a developing teenager, before it was used as a political term, if you will."

—Merriam-Webster's word of the year for 2017: 'Feminism'

The Wall Street Journal issued a new note on its style blog earlier this week, suggesting the publication not write about millennials with such disdain.

"What we usually mean is young people, so we probably should just say that," the new WSJ note reads. "Many of the habits and attributes of millennials are common for people in their 20s, with or without a snotty term."

—'Millennials': Be Careful How We Use This Label

As of writing, the CoinDesk's Bitcoin Price Index (BPI) is at $16,743 levels. The world's largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization has appreciated 0.72 percent in the last 24 hours, going by CoinMarketCap data.

—No Stopping? After New High, Bitcoin Price Eyes $20k

People who tested as being more conscientious but less open were more sensitive to typos, while those with less agreeable personalities got more upset by grammatical errors.

"Perhaps because less agreeable people are less tolerant of deviations from convention," the researchers wrote.

Interestingly, how neurotic someone was didn't affect how they interpreted mistakes.

—People Who Constantly Point Out Grammar Mistakes Are Pretty Much Jerks, Scientists Find

Hydrogen particles are made up of an electron and a proton. Exciton particles, then, are made up of an electron that’s escaped and the negative space it left behind when it did so. The hole actually acts like a particle, attracting the escaped electron and bonding with it; they orbit each other the same way an electron and a proton would.

—PHYSICS BREAKTHROUGH: NEW FORM OF MATTER, EXCITONIUM, FINALLY PROVED TO EXIST AFTER 50-YEAR SEARCH 

For reasons that people are now trying to determine, this weekend the internet turned its collective gaze to a short story called “Cat Person.”

Response to the story has varied from praise for its relatability to flat dismissal to jokes about how everyone is talking about a—Who’da thunk it?—short story of all things.

—The reaction to “Cat Person” shows how the internet can even ruin fiction

—Regular Icosahedron

—Repeal Day Poster – Summit Brewing Co.

[Dr. Simon Bramhall of the UK] pleaded guilty to charges that he etched his initials, “SB,” onto the livers of two transplant patients with an argon beam in 2013. Bramhall admitted the assaults in a hearing in Birmingham crown court on Wednesday, according to several news outlets.

—SB WUZ HERE: Surgeon pleads guilty to burning initials into patients’ organs

I get what you’re doing. Really, I do. You’re trying to shit on people’s musical tastes to either appear more well-versed in music than them or you just want to see the shocked look on people’s faces as you besmirch their favorite band. And listen, I don’t blame you for either. They’re both fun activities that I partake in on the reg. If you name me a band you like, I will find a hundred different ways to judge you on your taste. If the band happens to feature a white guy with dreads, make it three hundred. But The Beatles, dude? The fucking Beatles? You are really scraping the barrel if you are knocking people for liking The Beatles, you moron. 

—Shut Your Dumb, Stupid Mouth about the Beatles Being Overrated

—Sonakinatography I Movement #III for Multi-Media

The font the menu is written in can convey similar messages; for instance an italic typeface conveys a perception of quality. But using elaborate fonts that are hard to read could also have another effect – it could alter how the food itself tastes.

A study conducted by researchers in Switzerland found that a wine labelled with a difficult-to-read script was liked more by drinkers than the same wine carrying a simpler typeface. Spence’s own research has also found that consumers often associate rounder typefaces with sweeter tastes, while angular fonts tend to convey a salty, sour or bitter experience.

—The secret tricks hidden inside restaurant menus

On Allison Benedikt, Lorin Stein, and the perils of extracting universal principles from fairytale endings...

“My career, at the time, was in his hands,” Allison Benedikt wrote at Slate this week, about the beginning of her relationship with John Cook, her husband of 14 years. They were colleagues at a magazine when they first kissed, and he was her senior. That kiss took place “on the steps of the West 4th subway station,” Benedikt writes, and Cook did it “without first getting [her] consent.” The piece is an intervention into the conversation on office sexual harassment, with Benedikt fearing “the consequences of overcorrection” on this issue.

—So You Married Your Flirty Boss

“We encourage the use of Teslas for commercial purposes and we’ll work proactively with these customers to find charging solutions that work best for them,” the statement said.

—Tesla Tells New Taxi, Uber Drivers Not to Use Its Superchargers

The deep web refers to anything you can’t access in a search engine, either because it’s protected behind a password or because it’s buried deep within a regular website. The dark web is a subsection of the deep web that you can only access with a special browser like Tor to mask your IP address.

—Things You Can Do on the Dark Web That Aren't Illegal 

—This Graphic Explains Just How Crazy The Cryptocurrency Bubble Is

One such study published in the journal Neuroimage and highlighted on PsyBlog actually found that some forms of daydreaming cause measurable changes in the brain. This suggests that, done right, daydreaming actually requires attention and control.

—This Is the Correct Way to Daydream, According to a Harvard Psychiatrist

"VR can be stored in the brain's memory center in ways that are strikingly similar to real-world physical experiences," said Stanford's Bailenson, author of the forthcoming book "Experience on Demand," about his two decades of research on the psychological effects of virtual reality. "When VR is done well, the brain believes it is real."

—The very real health dangers of virtual reality

Respect for children means respect for the adults that they will one day become; it means helping them to the knowledge, skills, and social graces that they will need if they are to be respected in that wider world where they will be on their own and no longer protected. For the teacher, respect for children means giving them whatever one has by way of knowledge, teaching them to distinguish real knowledge from mere opinion, and introducing them to the subjects that make the mind adaptable to the unforeseen.

—The Virtue of Irrelevance

—You Will Lose Your Job to a Robot—and Sooner Than You Think 

Watched

—Jessen's Orthogonal Icosahedron

[billcoberly]

The Silliest Take of the Week: 1/29/17

Three weeks going! I’m already beating the odds I gave myself in my description of this project. 

Let’s get right to it! We’ve got some nice, spicy takes here this week.

Silliest Twitter Meltdown, Unless It’s Ironic Performance Art, In Which Case: Best Twitter Ironic Performance Art

Tim Marchman, A Short Series of Tweets, Twitter, 1/24/2017

This probably isn’t technically a Silly Take, but given that it exists at the intersection of Silly Internet Things; Political Nonsense; and Internet Tough Guy Posturing, I think it’s well within the #STOW ambit.

Apparently Senator Ted Cruz has organized a weekly-ish basketball game with some other Senators. Ex-Gawker sportsblog Deadspin thought this was funny, and asked for photographic proof of Ted Cruz playing basketball, which is a very Deadspin thing to do. Ted Cruz (or a social media manager working for Ted Cruz, but who cares) responded to a tweet about this with a picture of Duke University basketball player Grayson Allen, who looks sort of like Cruz. Deadspin’s social media person responded in typical Deadspin style:

Ted Cruz in turn responded with an Anchorman gif (”Boy, that escalated quickly!”) and that should probably have been it. 

But for Deadspin editor Tim Marchman, this was Too Much, Too Far, and Not Acceptable. (Please note that Marchman is not the one who drafted the initial call for pictures of Senator Cruz playing basketball). Instead, Tim Marchman gave us a series of nine tweets, the most important of which are below:

Now, a part of me hopes that this is Mr. Marchman being deliberately ridiculous in order to take the heat off of a woman (Ms. Feinberg, who drafted the original call for pictures) who was undoubtedly getting a disproportionate and awful amount of hate from Dudes on the Internet, who are, let there be no mistake, The Worst. If that’s the case, then good work, Mr. Marchman, and I apologize.

But I just want to revel for a moment in the gloriousness of “Unsurprising that not one Ted Cruz-supporting cuck/Twitter user is willing to face me in the UFC octagon.” I don’t know if I could find a better way to distill the silliness that is Internet Tough Guy Posturing into <140 characters. If Marchman is being ironic, then I admire his precision. My guess is that he’s not being ironic, given that 100% of the 11 tweets on his twitter feed consist of him whining about this dustup and two contextless RTs of weird things Curt Schilling once said.

Also, as always happens with Internet Tough Guy Posturing, and as several right-wing websites were happy to point out, some people who are apparently Actual Soldiers And/Or UFC Fighters and who like Ted Cruz have offered to take Marchman up on his challenge.

Don’t engage in Internet Tough Guy Posturing, folks. You look silly, and there’s always somebody out there who is bigger than you are and willing to call your bluff.

Most Predictably Tiresome Response to Angry Protests

David French, “This Is What Post-Christian Dissent Looks Like,” National Review, 1/27/2017.

People on the Left are very mad about Donald Trump. Previously, people on the Left were comically excited about Barack Obama. This, according to David French, has something to do with the fact that we’re not very Christian any more:

“This is post-Christian politics to its core. This is the politics one gets when this world is our only home, and no one is in charge but us. There is no sense of proportion.”

Finally:

“Eight years ago, all too many on the left thought that light had come into the darkness. Now they believe the darkness has overcome the light. In reality, the false dawn preceded the false dusk. Our Republic is still built to last, and the hysterical reaction threatens to be worse than the man who triggered it.”

I’ve tried to reread this a few times to figure out the connections French wants to make between protests and whatever the hell “post-Christian dissent” is, but all I can get out of this piece is a long, wet raspberry noise. So, in conclusion: shut up, David.

See also George Will, “Trump and academia actually have a lot in common,” The Washington Post, 1/27/2017.

Most Cringe-Inducing Set of Editorial Retractions

Moira Wegel, “How Ultrasound Became Political,” The Atlantic, 1/24/2017

I’m not willing to suggest that this whole article is really a Silly Take -- its thesis is that the development of ultrasound technology was a useful tool for pro-life advocates and lawmakers, particularly in the context of those condescending laws that require doctors to show women ultrasounds of their fetuses before they have an abortion. There may well be some value in this train of thought, and I certainly learned some things reading this article. 

That is, I thought I learned some things, until I saw the amazing and ever-growing list of corrections that had to be made to this article after it was published. Now I’m not sure I learned anything from this article, because I’m not sure the author of this article can be trusted to be sure what color the sky is:

“*This article originally stated that there is "no heart to speak of" in a 6-week-old fetus. In fact, the heart has already begun to form by that point in a pregnancy. The article also originally stated that an expectant mother participating in a study decided to carry her pregnancy to term even after learning that the fetus was suffering from a genetic disorder, when in fact the fetus was only at high risk for a genetic disorder. The article originally stated, as well, that Bernard Nathanson headed the National Right-to-Life Committee and became a born-again Christian. Nathanson was active in, but did not head the committee, and was never a born-again Christian, but rather a Roman Catholic. The article originally stated that many doctors in 1985 claimed fetuses had no reflexive responses to medical instruments at 12 weeks. Finally, the article originally stated that John Kasich vetoed a bill from Indiana's legislature, instead of Ohio's legislature, after which the article was incorrectly amended to state that Mike Pence had vetoed the bill. We regret the errors.“

It’s not every day that an article for The Atlantic manages to mix up “born-again” Christians with Roman Catholics, misstate facts about fetal development, and get royally confused about who the governor of Ohio is. A little bit of fact-checking goes a long way, folks.

Biggest Grudge Against an Anodyne Celebrity

Amy Zimmerman, “Taylor Swift’s Spineless Feminism,” The Daily Beast, 1/23/2017

Taylor Swift mostly doesn’t have public political opinions, and Amy Zimmerman has gotten weirdly mad about this before for The Daily Beast. I think about Taylor Swift about as often as I think about throw pillows -- they seem nice enough, and some people seem to have surprisingly strong opinions about them, but I can’t see a lot of need for them in my life. But for Amy Zimmerman, the fact that Taylor Swift hasn’t taken a public position on Donald Trump is a Big Problem that must be Written About At Length.

Look, I have read some legit critiques about Swift’s brand of feminism before, and I’m not really looking to come out swinging for T-Swift. But it’s weird to get this worked up about a pop star’s apparent lack of opinions:

“Courtesy of the Instagram, we learned that Swift endorses democracy and cold-shoulder blouses. But in terms of candidates, it was impossible to deduce if she’d voted for Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, or Jill freaking Stein.” 

who cares who taylor swift voted for, amy

After citing the fact that T-Swift has a small group of neo-Nazi fans who like her because she looks like their ideal woman, Zimmerman says:

“If you’re not overtly on board with the resistance, then you’re tacitly chill with being proclaimed an Aryan goddess.” 

Other good moments are when she gets confused about Swift ex-boyfriend Tom Hiddleston’s acting career:

“Tom Hiddleston has played many roles, from Thor to Taylor Swift’s boyfriend.”

And look, this doesn’t matter, but Tom Hiddleston didn’t play Thor. Snark about anodyne celebrities looks even more petty if you can’t be bothered to get basic facts right.

Finally:

“In hindsight, [Hiddleston’s speech] proves that HiddleSwift may have been more compatible than we ever thought. Can’t you just picture the face of watered-down feminism and 2017’s proudest white savior, taking a break from swapping spit to congratulate one another on staying so woke?” 

Blech.

The Silliest Take of the Week: 1/29/2017

Filip Bondy, “How Vital Are Women? This Town Found Out as They Left to March,” The New York Times, 1/22/2017.

Here’s the pitch: Filip Bondy wants to show that women are important. This is a good thing: women are important. 

Here’s the problem: Filip Bondy wants to show that women are important by highlighting the plights of their poor, abandoned husbands who had to take care of the kids by themselves for --

listen, if you need to take a moment to collect yourself, that’s fine, this is pretty shocking --

these husbands had to take care of their kids for twelve full hours while the women went away to march for some weird chick thing. Can you imagine? Really goes to show how important women are.

Do you think I’m overstating things? Here is the thesis paragraph:

“In their wake, they left behind a progressive bedroom community with suddenly skewed demographics. Routines were radically altered, and many fathers tried to meet weekend demands alone for a change. By participating in the marches and highlighting the importance of women’s rights, the women also demonstrated, in towns like Montclair, their importance just by their absence.”

those poor bastards, having to meet weekend demands alone

“Usually, these chores and deliveries were shared by both parents, in a thoroughly modern way. On this day, many dads were left to juggle schedules on their own.”

the humanity

“Steve Politi, a sports columnist for The Star-Ledger of Newark, missed the Rutgers men’s basketball game on Saturday to stay home with his two children. He did the soccer-game thing, set up play dates (arguably, cheating a bit) and warmed up some leftover pizza for lunch. He also cleaned the refrigerator.”

the refrigerator, Linda, the refrigerator -- I cleaned the goddamn refrigerator while you were marching for uteruses or whatever, I deserve more respect around here

“After his dutiful Saturday, Mr. Coyle went off to play tennis on Sunday morning. It was part of the deal he had struck with his wife.”

a fair and equitable bargain. Mr. Coyle is truly a just sovereign over his household.

“The buses returned late Saturday night from Washington to a quiet, heartfelt welcome. By Sunday morning, most of the women were back to their routines in Montclair. The JaiPure Yoga Studio reported full attendance, and many fathers exhaled in relief.”

“and in that instant, all returned to normal. the seas ceased to boil, the locusts retreated over the horizon, and the wailing of children could no longer be heard. the villagers mourned their dead, but exulted in the knowledge that the women were home, and finally, all would be well again.”

Maybe, just maybe, if you’re trying to write an article about how women are cool and neat and important and Trump is bad, don’t manage to make it sound like men having to stay with their kids for a Saturday is some kind of Great, Heroic Sacrifice.

--

Thanks for reading! And thanks to Braden, Amanda, Tim, and Joel for submitting Silly Takes. As always, don’t forget to send your favorite ridiculous takes to sillytakes@gmail.com, and have a great week!

[recalculatingthegenderwar]

Feminist resistance to Le Pen shows (yet again) feminism is not “just about equality”

Whenever feminists want to disavow feminist misdeeds or bigoted feminist dogma, they often claim that feminism is “just about gender equality”. I have been adamant that feminism is not “just about equality”, but is a real world political ideology with a variety of (often very bigoted) beliefs and assertions.

We see this in the current French Prime presidential election. Marine Le Pen is the only female candidate and would be the first president in French history if elected. If feminists are “just about gender equality” it’s hard to see how Le Pen’s candidacy could be viewed as a bad thing. But it is.

At least by Femen, a large French based feminist organization. A Femen protester rushed the stage while Le Pen was giving a speech. Her security promptly tackled the protester. Definitely the right course of action considering it just as easily could have been an assassination attempt. This isn’t the first time Femen have disrupted Le Pen’s rallies.

In case you are unfamiliar, Femen is a “radical” feminist organization that seems both endlessly desperate for attention and a hair’s breath from becoming a terror group. Unfortunately, their more sinister misdeeds (several instances of physical assault, faking kidnappings, desecrating national landmarks, threatening to mutilate men, etc) are ignored by most news media, who are too busy gawking at their signature topless protest stunts.

Femen is also not exactly raging against the machine in France. I don't know a lot about France, but seems to be a very pro-feminist country. Not only is abortion legal, but it is state-funded. In fact, the French government may actually be criminalizing pro-life websites. There are laws requiring 50% of parliament members be women and similar quotas for private French companies. France has even outlawed private paternity testing, so father's cannot legally find out if they are actually raising their own biological offspring. Supposedly to protect women from being honest and accountable with their husbands families. Seriously, a French man will be arrested if he tries to find out if he is actually raising his own biological children.

Femen’s leader Inna Shevchenko (although its a matter of debate who is really pulling Femen’s strings) wrote an op-ed condemning Le Pen about a month ago:

“Even though the list of female political leaders is still short, they have made a huge contribution to feminism. Angela Merkel, Dalia Grybauskaite, Nicola Sturgeon, Hillary Clinton are among them.”

Notice that female Prime Minister Theresa May from the U.K.’s Conservative Party isn’t mentioned. Shevchenko doesn’t care about female leaders or female representation in politics. She only cares about pushing feminist ideology. It’s not about what feminism can do for women, its about what women can do for feminism:

“But a win by certain female presidential candidate would be a disastrous loss for feminism and women's rights.”

Shevchenko goes on to make a paper-thin case against Le Pen that basically amounts to claiming that she is anti-Islam (even though Femen is too) and will be anti-abortion (even though it doesn’t sound like Le Pen will be). The only real feminist argument against Le Pen is that she may support outlawing certain forms of Muslim dress, which would affect women. I'm personally against such a ban, but its over simplistic to say such a ban is inherently anti-women. You could make the argument that if these forms of Muslim dress aren't outlawed in France, then women (and men) will be forced to wear them by the local Muslim community. Ironically, such a ban may promote freedom of dress more than restrict it.

Le Pen’s political positions aren’t the point here. Step back and appreciate the madness of this. A major feminist organization is viciously campaigning AGAINST the election of potentially France’s first female president.

Feminism is a creature of left wing politics

I’m not familiar enough with the feminist landscape in France to know whether or not Femen’s opinion is shared by other French feminist organizations. I certainly haven’t been able to find any feminists who are really excited about the possibility of Le Pen as a France’s first female president. You would think that Le Pen might have established a reputation as feminist heroine when she (very politely) declined a meeting with a prominent Muslim leader when told she could only meet with him if she wore a veil.

In comparison, feminists were foaming at the mouth to elect Hillary Clinton, despite compelling evidence her husband is a serial sexual abuser of women and Hillary herself may have helped cover it up. U.N. feminist cover-girl Emma Watson (a U.K. citizen) gave Hilary Clinton a U.N. endorsement during the 2016 American presidential race simply because Clinton was a women.

"But I don't know if I would have believed if you had told me 2 years ago, before I made my HeForShe speech, that we might have the first female president of the United States. Please don't let me down America!"

Le Pen would be the first female president of France, but I doubt that Emma Watson will be giving Le Pen any U.N. endorsement. Note that while Watson did give a little lip service to conservative prime minister Theresa May during her speech this was already after May had been elected. I can't find any evidence that Watson has given any significant political support to Theresa May.

If you want a more extreme example, take former U.S. Secretary of State and feminist icon Madeleine Albright. While campaigning for Hillary Clinton, Albright warned "There's a special place in hell for women who don't help each other!" The not so subtle implication was that American women owed Clinton their vote simply because Clinton is a women.

I don't imagine French feminists are threatening women with eternal damnation if they don't vote for Le Pen. Feminism is a creature of the political left. Its seem like feminism is eager promote (and possibly co-opt) the left-wing position on political positions that have only a tenuous connection to women's rights (immigration, minimum wage, climate change, etc). Some may counter that feminists can have various political opinions outside of simple gender equality. This is true, but you can no longer say these political positions aren’t a part of feminism when feminist organizations hold them and support them as a part of feminism. This is especially true when no feminist organizations hold the counter political position. Can you name that influential pro-life feminist organization? I can't either. It's especially damning that feminism's support for women ends the moment they flirt with anything remotely right-wing or even just not left-wing.

[elizabethleslie7654]

Modern Men: Shells of Their Former Glory

all kinds of cool jewelry and no shipping or getting mobbed t the mall

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Check out Part One in the series if you haven’t read it already.

Men in the modern age retain some of their previous glory of times long past, but only in small, isolated, and largely separate (think completely outside of or only retaining tangential connections to) current society. These men are the infantry and special forces troops, loggers, factory workers, etc in 90%-plus male professions that retain (by necessity) some of their masculine traits and culture. These are often lower paying jobs, or at least jobs that aren’t cushy six-figure air-conditioned office (re: soul sucking) jobs. However, men as a whole aren’t so lucky.

Men are largely trending in a negative direction in many ways. Firstly, it has been a recent topic of discussion that men indeed are becoming bigger and bigger pussies over time. It isn’t just your Dad being a hardass. Recently discussed on Tucker (Fox) and throughout other sources, men’s testosterone levels have been dropping steadily for decades. If you’ve seen the “try guys” at Buzzfeed, who I would argue adequately represent a large swath (plurality?) of our current western society (and other developed nations, re: Japan, etc), had testosterone levels that are lower than that of men near death at age 80. In fact I have a family member near 70 who had total T levels near 100 ng/dcl higher than the highest Buzzfeed guy. Fucking degenerates. But also it’s unclear if any of the blame lies with these men. Do they lift weights? Are they vegan (faggots)? Do they have any masculine influences that may help them raise their T? Were they fucked at birth due to genetics? I am unsure on this issue, but am sure that the blame that lies with them is not 0%. However I do know that the advent and almost inescapable use of plastics is also not 0% to blame. Plastics are everywhere and are undoubtedly responsible for some of the decline in T because they have chemicals that cause a disruption in the natural testosterone levels of men. Soy production has largely increased in recent years and also shares some blame (not 0%). I would also argue that a failure to eat meat by some men or families may also contribute to the problem. The increasing difficulty of men to succeed in increasingly feminized schools (more on this later) is also contributing to this problem, as it is shown that men who make less than their partners (which is more likely as women continue to be lifted up in school, college, and corporate America) mark a drop in their testosterone. I would also argue that a loss of the male competitive (re:masculine) spirit is to blame as well, via competitions between men raising testosterone. If men were encouraged to compete via inter and intra-group competition, I whole heartedly believe we would see less of a decrease in masculinity and testosterone, and as a result a much healthier society in many ways.

Because men are trending in a negative direction both biologically and culturally (via castration of the masculine spirit) many are no longer able or willing to resist the more destructive elements of our society that warp perceptions, traditions, and allow for subversion of 100s of years of success and 1000s of years of breeding and family lineage. This may be due in part to the failing polarization of women, creating women that are more androgynous or even masculine presenting than many men. As women become less of a prize and motivation to conquer foes, explore the unknown, and risk it all, we see less men willing to do so (and as a result, women further become less polarized creating an awful feedback loop). And I honestly don’t blame them. I encourage all to fight against it, revolt against this modern world. But needless to say I understand if they choose not to. It is very difficult to fight for and prepare for a person, situation, or moment that, with every passing day, seems less likely to come. However, we must not lose hope and must continue to re-forge a path that was lost or forgotten well before we took our first breath.

Men have lost their ability to express affection for other men for fear of being called gay through a conscious and concerted effort. While I do not support homosexuality, I do feel as though masculine friendship, which is capable of bonding on levels that women are incapable of comprehending, is beneficial to both the individual man and society in ways that are so long lost they are difficult for someone like me (who has only seen a glimpse of what I imagine it was like) to truly comprehend. I once read a biography on Lincoln, and he was cited as consistently expressing literal love for one of his pen pals. I do not long for this time again but rather wish to illustrate that efforts have been made to limit the bonding of men into groups (specifically white groups) from forming because an atomized (see lonely and addicted to drugs) society is easier to control. Make no mistake, some of this is by accident, but largely it is by design.

There has been a concerted effort to feminize, delegitimize, and biologically castrate (re: dropping sperm counts) men at both the societal and individual level. When this started is unclear, but at the very least it began in part when men allowed (yes, they allowed, as they were the only ones who could vote at the time) women to gain suffrage. This was truly the beginning of so many woes of our society. A very easy, non-controversial point that can be made about this is that government spending immediately ballooned (and hasn’t stopped since). The problem that women’s suffrage caused is that it has plunged our country (and the world really) on a journey that is being steered by radical and suicidal empathy. Men are naturally more rational and more logical, as well as more capable of handling the stresses of the world. This is the way God designed them. He designed them to provide, protect, to project the future and plan for it. He designed them to be hard and heavy handed (when needed) and to keep his children and women in line to ensure their safety and the continuation of the generations after generations of knowledge that had been earned through blood and sweat. Because men (most of them) do need to exist in society they have had to conform to the newly ingrained standards that are largely feminine (re: care based morality). This blue-pill conditioning starts at a young age.

Many men are largely even unaware of their conditioning, but make no mistake, they are under the guise of it. Even those well down the red-pill rabbit hole are still undoing the conditioning they’ve endured through largely feminized schools (both in structure, culture, and literal composition with approx. 70% of school teachers being women) and an over-emotional, feels-based society. But sadly even those who have begun their deconditioning will find that society writ large will actively fight and punish you for simply noticing. Notice that men are usually better at certain things? Sexist. Notice some races commit disproportionate amounts of crime? Racist. Heaven forbid you mention race and IQ you white nationalist.

These listed problems are problems with men because men have traditionally been and are designed to be the arbiters of frame (a dictation of reality) both in the micro and macro. Men have truly lost the frame on nearly every level. The only acceptable masculine sphere allowed anymore is that of hookup sex in which men are still allowed to measure their manhood via any yard stick (notch count). However, if you desire to step into a relationship (re:marriage), have kids, and want your daughters to be better than the 10’s of Stacy’s and Becky’s you (or another Chad) ran through, you’re suddenly a controlling misogynist for desiring to limit their degeneracy. Women used to be dismissed, and rightfully so, as hysterical (the root of the word was from Greek meaning uterus) and hyper emotional. We used to acknowledge that women had different (not always bad) ways of thinking and reasoning. It used to be obvious that a man was better for work and battle than women. And conversely, we fully acknowledged women’s clear advantage in regards to infant and child rearing (and homemaking). Why would women give up a free ride (re:stay at home mom) for the corporate grind? I am convinced that this has also been a concerted effort. But regardless I see men as responsible for retaking the frame because they are intended to be the leaders and are less susceptible to the propaganda that is bombarding people at all levels of society. If we are to have any hope moving forwards, it must be men that lead the charge. However, this process won’t be easy and it won’t happen quickly.

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