underemployment
The internet! Where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives!
And you can never tell, until their hand grips your arm too tight, and they don’t let you pull away, and you realize it’s late, and you’re alone in their apartment, and the first feeling isn’t fear or panic, but that wave of resigned disappointment. Because how were you supposed to know?
But this myth we build and perpetuate or the rapist as Not Like Us is almost one of self-defense—to allow us to have functioning relationships with seemingly normal men, not admitting to ourselves how many of them have, would, could, or will rape, given the circumstances.
Realizing that Not Like Us is a myth is a huge contributor to the difficulty of being a straight girl. Once you accept it and understanding just begins to dawn, that any man you know—whether you love him or care for him or find him stupid and obnoxious—has the potential to rape. It’s overwhelming and frightening, and so, so depressing.
Neil Peart: 2nd Worst Lyricist Ever.This article is a win if only for this one line:
“Among those who’ve read The Hobbit 38 times, [Robert] Plant has probably slept with the most women.”
(It also contains this glorious business:
“He’s the type who’s sensitive, wears glasses, likes long conversations, winter, standing by himself at weddings and disregarding his ex-girlfriends’ restraining orders. He’s the frontman for Washington-state indie-rock softies Death Cab for Cutie, and he’s got five albums of come-ons so abstruse the ladies will barely notice him tugging on their ankles.”)
I love TV, but I do not have cable; commercials are the worst. Now, apparently, PSAs are about a billion times more terrible than advertisements. This is insane. Shocking, and nauseating, and horrifying, and fucking gross.
The Associated Press: Agent: Michael Vick re-signs with Nike
Apparently Nike’s consumer has no fucking soul.
The Horrible Ramadan Servant Exodus
Oh, “Rich People Things,” I’ve missed you so.
internet marvelous internet
Usually I don’t let facebook into my life so much, but the other day I let it “find my contacts” from gmail, and what do you know it discovered my great-aunt Dona, who lived in Guam and Haiti via the Peace Corps. This is one of the facts I know about her, instead of say facets of her personality; when your parents are the black-sheep travelers of their families, having moved 2- and 3,000 miles away from them (respectively), you don’t get many opportunities to visit. I don’t know anyone else she’s friends with, as I’ve only met one of her adopted children once and apparently no one else in the family has discovered her yet (my dad’s family, from SE TX, is all over facebook. Even my second cousin/first cousin once removed, whatever the difference is). At 74 Aunt Dona is my oldest facebook friend. So I wonder: can anyone beat a 1935 birth date?
Tonight’s foolishness.
If slide no. 1 didn’t make you laugh then you have no sense of humor. IT’S ALL ABOUT YOU! fucking HILARIOUS.
Umberto Eco: The lost art of handwriting
My child(ren?) won’t suffer through dance classes or Scouts; my child(ren) will be forced to participate in esoteric activities like calligraphy classes.
Why oh why, three decades on, have our transliterations not stabilized?
Posts like thing make me love sexpigeon more than anything. Triple-heart favorited forever.
lexical gaps are everywhere
OK, what’s the expression for: when you’re reading an article and you think, God, this writer is a douche, and you look at his photo and it rings a tiny faraway bell in your head, so you click through to read his bio and the bell rings closer, and it’s bigger, and you stop reading and think a minute, looking at his photo and closing your eyes to place where, exactly, you have seen that doucherrific smirk before, and the bell is bigger and closer and consequently loud as a damn fire alarm because YOU REALIZE: of course, you’ve met him before! He’s a friend of a friend from their MFA program! And the first time you met him, and had a drink with him and his terrible parents, you thought, This guy is a douche, and the second time you met him that week you were visiting your friend, you thought, This guy is a super-douche! How does my friend stand him? What does calling this awful person his friend say about my friend, whom I’ve never considered awful until right now, when I realized he chose to spend time with this guy, his buddy, his peer? You forget about him for three years, this jerk—there are so many jerks—and then one day you’re reading an article and there he is, smugging all over an interesting publication you’ve accidentally fallen in love with.
What’s it called when that happens?
kfan:
NO WAY, KOTTKE.
Shit is about to get extremely serious on the vampire front. Friends, if you liked Infinite Summer, you are going to die for Infinite Dracula. Spend the month of October reading about vampires as God or the Anti-Christ or whoever intended, with the original story by Bram Stoker. Claire Zulkey and I will be your guides.
Please join us! It’ll be to die for wait, frak. OK.
Please join us, we’re Cullen your name, mwa ha ha ha ha.
1. YES PLZ fun times ahead.
2. In my tumblr feed, this ended up right below the bestofwikipedia entry for Wizelsucht. Ha ha indeed, FANNING.
LRB · Walter Benn Michaels: What Matters
So it’s class, not race, that makes so many blue-collar white people vote Republican, i.e., completely against their own interests?
This essay is so sharp. I love to talk about class, it makes people so much more uncomfortable than race, anymore. And by “people” I of course mean my post-racial peers, obviously.
when 2 become 1
On my way home from the East Bay today, looking insane, trying not to fall asleep on bart, I was terrified Sexpigeon would get into my car and my insanity would be captured online. Terrified. We all go through West Oakland and it was getting-off-work time for normals; my internet-dreamed odds of ending up a casualty of circumstance were extremely high, you understand.
What’s the difference between internet-reality and reality, anymore? Very little, is the answer.
San Francisco Public Library, in its push to demolish two historic library branches and inappropriately to renovate at least two other historic branches, violated the public’s right to obtain public information and make public comment, according to San Francisco’s official open government watchdog group, the Sunshine Ordinance Task Force (SOTF).
And the Board of Appeals, just before it heard an appeal of the Ortega Branch demolition permit, enforced newly-created rules of reduced access to its office files that were unlawful, the SOTF found.
Fortunately, as these violations are publicly adjudicated, awareness is growing about bad plans and planning process, as well as the City’s many valuable branch library buildings.
Our efforts have helped alert architectural preservationists to the value of Park Branch library and helped lead to a scheduled Sept. 2 discussion at the Historic Preservation Commission (HPC) on whether to landmark the City’s Park Branch library and some half-dozen Appleton and Wolfard libraries, of which North Beach and Ortega branches are examples, and both of which are scheduled for demolition and replacement by new buildings.
Park Branch, built by the City in 1909 without Carnegie money, is San Francisco’s oldest library building. It has a generous open floor plan 100 feet long by 41 feet wide, soaring 23-foot high ceiling, built-in perimeter book shelves, and enormous windows on all four sides that allow great quantities of daylight to flood in. The branch is scheduled to close for renovation for a year, starting immediately after its 100th birthday party Oct. 29. The eight Appleton and Wolfard libraries in the city were built in the 1950s and 1960s, also providing much light and usually a windowed connection with a park or garden.
” -Landmarking libraries | San Francisco Bay View
It’s important to remember that you cannot do anything, change anything, make anything or hide anything in San Francisco’s public space without some interested party bringing your shit to light.
Anonymity and covert action is impossible in our fishbowl. Ours is a place where everyone is a stakeholder; someone will have an opinion about or declare a negative impact from even the most mundane movement of process or change to the built environment. The Sunshine Ordinance Task Force is an influential part of our city government because most (not all, obvs) of our citizenry are less concerned with ineffectuality than with salacious transparency. It’s not really worth lamenting; if you didn’t love freedom and openness and other people’s business so much, you’d live in a different city (or you’ll move to one in a year or two.) Don’t put on airs. Occasionally remind yourself of these things and get over them.
This is not to say the libraries are mundane - they are certainly of great civic importance. (At least we still have libraries, shit!) And, you don’t have to be a political insider to know my neighbors are not going to stand idly by while anything unsavory happens to Park Branch!
(via meganallison)
THE HORROR. The Park Branch is the most beautiful branch library I’ve ever seen. It’s so lovely; it is a neighborhood and civic jewel. That the SFPL would so grossly violate the public trust like this is unbelievably depressing. The country, the state, and the city have already become so wretched as to drive a person into the arms of sweet, socialist, civic-minded Europe; does even the library have to make cynics of us now?
SLC Punk! (1998)
Hey look, I wrote something!
Thanks to Tess for the invite to guest on filmosophy!
What Do I Get?
by Maria Diaz
I went out with a guy last year who was very blatant in how frequently he would judge me. After he finally revealed his Facebook account like it was some kind of fucking new Apple product that needed to be shrouded in secrecy and finally just fucking friended me like a normal person, he proceeded to judge me on every single aspect of my profile, especially on my favorite films. One of those was SLC Punk. He said, “I have to deduct points.” I didn’t tell him his points were six digits and negative. And that little offhand comment about one of my most cherished movies, well that made the point deficit even larger. It was over.
That anecdote is only significant because that’s how most people react to the mention of this movie. I remember when in came out, it was at the tail-end of the “alternative” rock craze, where everyone (including me) was pretending to be punk. Do you realize the Mighty Mighty Bosstones played at the MTV Music Awards? That is how insane it got. By the time this movie was released, we were faux-punked out. Take it away! I need to get ready for some boy bands and Ricky Martin to arrive.
And so, off it went. It went deep into the bowels of the .99 cent rack, to only be remembered by the 10 people who actually saw the film. It came into my life about 4 years ago, when I was profoundly confused about what to do with life. My ex-boyfriend, a few years older than me, and much more secure in what he would end up doing with himself, made me watch it. It’s not what you think it is, he said. This is what I repeat to all the naysayers now. It’s not what you think it is.
The movie is ostensibly about the late 80’s punk scene in Salt Lake City, and while much of the movie focuses on the “scene” and its characters, the real heart of this movie is what it takes to grow the fuck up. It’s basically the extended monologue of Stevo, played by Matthew Lillard, and his conflict: to go to law school or stay in the scene, in arrested development with his friends, living in shitholes and spending their time fighting rednecks, doing drugs and going to parties.
Little by little, Steve realizes that he doesn’t want to wake up and have turned into, to use another 90s joke, the “old guy at the club.” Is it a spoiler if I tell you that he decides to go to law school? He realizes that inside his anarchy, there was just another system. What exactly was he railing against? As he decides, “Final Summation: None.”
The point is: everyone makes a choice eventually, whether you know it or not. You stay in the same job, you stay in the same relationship, you stay in the same place until you change or something barges in and changes it for you. And years later, maybe you don’t recognize that person anymore. But that’s okay. Who wants to be the same from when they were 16? As Steve says: “You see, the guy I am now is not the guy I was then. If the guy I was then met the guy I am now he’d beat the shit out of me. Those are the facts.”
— Maria Diaz is a professional celebrity blogger. Her personal blog is here.
Yes.
Maria I love you.
Oh this movie. I watched it with my bestest non-girl friend from high school the summer after he graduated and we did not hook up, because of bad timing. Then I watched it in college with one of my bestest girl friends when we were sharing a tiny room, and it launched the Matthew Lillard Game (simple: admitting your embarrassing attraction to unattractive/obnoxious/in any way inappropriate public figures; the greater your shame, the better, obvs.) and had the best couple of years as an inseparable duo. GOD this movie, thinking about it gives me the giggles right now. Disliking it because of what it represents, ugh, that’s the same kind of obnoxious as people who don’t like pop singles or television. Things that should be horrible can be great, without irony.
