Detail. Salvator Mundi. Attr. to Leonardo da Vinci. 1500
I've never paid much attention to Neil Gaiman, but I'm seeing people really struggling to understand how he (and Amanda Palmer) could possibly abuse women so heinously while also cultivating personas as staunch feminists.
But I don't think it's all that complicated, really. Men like Gaiman view the act of "supporting women" in the same way that corporations view buying carbon credits to offset greenhouse gas emissions. Any abuse you inflict can be canceled out at a later date with enough public acts of largesse.
had a dream that there was this new tiktok trend called "scrubbing" where people would take images of fictional characters and put them in images of bathtubs and drag around transparent pngs of soap and brushes with their tiktok art tablets and like liquify tool their hair down to mimic giving them a shower. and people would get into flamewars in the comments of every single video over the types of soap they picked and if the images had decently removed backgrounds and if they got soap in their eyes. and it got onto the news because it turned out everyone doing the trend was doing it compulsively like they physically couldn't stop and each video was a solid few minutes long because they were just collectively obsessively recording themselves fake-showering these fictional characters and arguing about it online
for the record I have never used tiktok and like explicitly in the dream I learned about it secondhand from a discord server so there's that also which is funny I think
String identified: a a a tat t a t tt t ca "cg" ta ag cta caact a t t ag att a ag a taat g a a t t tt at tat a t t a t c gg t a . a gt t aa t ct g t t a t c a t ag a ct acg a t gt a t . a t gt t t ca t t t g t t a g t c t ca c't t a ac a a t g ca t t cct cg t a-g t cta caact a agg at t t c a tt a ct t a a at t ca a c t' tat a c t
Closest match: Mya arenaria isolate MELC-2E11 chromosome 1 Common name: Soft-Shell Clam
Herzog was real for this
In light of Anita Bryant's death I think we should also remember Thom Higgins, a true badass whose name is always tied to hers.
Yes, he's the fella who put a pie in her face on national TV.
But this wasn't a one time thing for him -- being a badass, I mean. He also once pie'd an Archbishop (John Roach - who was one of the Catholics who fucked up one of the sexual abuse scandals the church had).
He's largely credited for inventing the term 'gay pride': "The term “gay pride” was invented here. Thom Higgins had been raised in the Catholic Church and decided to come up with a means of countering the negative energy coming out of the church. So he paired two of the deadly sins: gay and pride."
He was deeply midwestern -- "He was the kind of person who would breeze into a friend’s kitchen the morning after a party, put on a pot of coffee and start making everyone eggs"
He was an anti-war protestor, and the first person in Minnesota to be registered as a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War.
He wasn't perfect, but he did a lot of good in his life, and he was silly and puckish and loved pranks as much as he loved his activism.
He died 20 years ago of complications related to AIDS.
While you're crab raving that the Orange Juice witch is dead, spare a thought and raise a slice of pie to Mr. Higgins. More people should know about him.
Yoshitaka Amano: The Tale of Genji (2006)
Anita Bryant just died and I haven't seen one crab rave gif on my dash yet... Come on people
HOMOPHOBE DOWN!
Here’s the gif of her being pied :D
You lot ever see the Playboy interview with her from the May 1978 issue? I stumbled upon it last year. Here're some of my favourite parts.
Then in the August issue, you can see the people's thoughts on her:
The internet will try to convince you AI uses so much water it's effecting climate change. You know, it uses the water to cool its systems and then the water just disappears! Gone! Poof! Vanished!
It's not that the water is vanishing from earth, it's that the growing demands of computing power (including AI, among other uses) puts massive strains on local communities' resources and infrastructures that are already struggling to survive the effects of climate change, particularly droughts. Most data centers use evaporative cooling methods which means the water does "vanish" in the sense that it is goes elsewhere, and thus is no longer available to local communities in the form of a reservoir. Water on earth is not scarce, but water sources can often be locally scarce.
Climate change is causing more frequent severe droughts in places where humans live, and now those humans have to compete for water with data centers.
"Colon, a municipality north of Mexico City/in central Mexico, is home to Microsoft’s first hyperscale data centre campus in the country. The town of 67,000 is suffering extreme drought. Its two dams have nearly dried up, farmers are struggling with dead crops, and families are relying on trucked and bottled water to fulfil their daily needs. Mexico, leveraging its proximity to the US, is hoping to convince Big Tech to ‘nearshore’ their facilities here. The State of Queretaro is offering favourable land loans, cheap electricity and a pool of local talent. Similar stories are playing out around the world. In Uruguay, Google admitted that a planned data centre in Montevideo would require 7.6 million liters of drinking water per day, while the country was suffering a historic three-year drought.
We can debate about how much the demand to build more and more data centers is being fueled by AI specifically, as opposed to other kinds of computing, but there is no doubt that constantly building more data centers (usually in the Global South) as tech companies try to insert AI into every single product is contributing to climate change-related harms.
A Line Up Of Men Dressed As Ladies In Brazil C 1913
the fact that George "let's murder everyone in the middle east" bush Jr is getting rehabilitated in the public mind as just a bumbling incoherent buffoon and not the bloodthirsty neoconservative warhawk he was and still is is proof that Trump is only like two future presidencies away from being seen in pop culture as a wacky jokester
The humanitarian doctor’s interventions are of limited impact against forces committed to killing civilians. The work becomes an exercise in futility: you stabilize a patient and bandage their wounds, only for them to leave the hospital an easier target. To compensate, MSF volunteers commit to “bearing witness,” what the organization calls temoignage, from the French temoigner, “to testify.” Implied is that the witness serves as evidence—here, against ongoing suffering—not for the sake of achieving a particular political end but to mobilize political actors who will and to supply them with the raw data so that they can. [...] The phrase humanitarian crisis freezes political inventory and clarifies that those suffering are people. If you know this already, the term grates. A former president of MSF, after stepping down, remarked in 1996 that “if Auschwitz were operating today, it would probably be described as a humanitarian emergency.” In a recent interview with CNN, an MSF-affiliated pediatrician who has worked in Gaza and was speaking in her own personal capacity clarified the news anchor’s phrasing, “This is not a humanitarian crisis . . . and I’m going to say it very clearly for your viewers to hear: this is genocide.” Crisis, like trauma, emphasizes suffering to elicit pity. But introduce into the frame a gun, or a rock, and things get muddy again, the human being replaced by the threat. The formerly pity-stricken Times readers see themselves in the tank. Trauma does nothing to challenge this frame; at best, it asks us to ignore it for the sake of the human story.
Mary Turfah, The Baffler Magazine, January 2025
“Art is not religion, “it doesn’t even lead to religion.” But in the time of distress which is ours, the time when the gods are missing, the time of absence and exile, art is justified, for it is the intimacy of this distress: the effort to make manifest, through the image, the error of the imaginary, and eventually the ungraspable, forgotten truth which hides behind the error.”
— Maurice Blanchot, The Space of Literature
One final historical note re: Nosferatu (2024) since I've seen this in the notes of my other post that's been going around and elsewhere. I've seen a few people share the sentiment that Eggers' decision to include a Romanian character very briefly expressing anti-Romani racism and use of the g-word was somehow "unnecessary," racist, or a bad directorial decision on his part. I find this incredibly baffling.
Like aside from the Media Literacy 101 point that depicting racism in media is *not* racism, there's the fact that one problem of Western media depictions of Romani people is the complete sanitization/erasure of their experiences of living under extreme oppression and racism. Instead, they're portrayed at best as these magical colorful but also shady people who just for some reason "chose" to be social outcasts.
Nosferatu takes place in 1838. The enslavement of Romani peoples lasted from the 14th century to the mid 1840s-ish, where they were treated as property of the state, church, or nobility. Most Western audiences have no clue about this history. I thought it was interesting and poignant that the movie showed the Romani people as knowing the threat posed by Count Orlok, especially considering as high nobility he would be quite literally a bloodsucking parasite to them, an undead persistence of their real enslavers. In contrast, in the original Bram Stoker's Dracula, the Romani people are depicted in an overtly racist manner as Dracula's henchmen.
And regarding the use of the g-word (or ț*gan in Romanian) in dialogue: The word is an exonym, i.e. a word used by outsiders to refer to a people rather than the name the people themselves use. It's absolutely a slur because it became often used pejoratively by the oppressing majority (much like the word "Ind*an" to refer to Indigenous peoples in the Americas.) But in the film scene's context and time period, it's simply the only word for Romani people in the Romanian language, i.e. there didn't exist a "nicer" term that a non-Romani character would have used and that could've been swapped out in the script.
I'm not saying the film is perfect. There's elements of racism, anti-semitism, and xenophobia in the source material that are hard to root out and persist as undertones in pretty much all vampire media even if, like Eggers, you make changes to the storytelling. *That* is very much worth thinking deeply about. But I think taking issue with a brief and realistic portrayal of societal stigma that real people would have encountered in 1830s Transylvania is not the thing to critique here.
Side doorway of Al-Khazneh, in Petra, Jordan.