Mangela Lansbury

I'm going to do my best to only read things by LGBTQ+ authors in July. I'm starting with Rat Bohemia by Sarah Schulman, which is great so far, and already reread Gentrification of the Mind by her, which is just a phenomenal book. Does anyone have any suggestions for things to read? I have some things lined up, but because of systemic suppression of works by lesbians and general bi and trans invisibility, they're mostly works by gay men, which kind of defeats the purpose.

I rarely drink soda, and it's been that way for years. Fanta especially is disgustingly sweet. It makes my mouth feel weird. I can still enjoy a coke on a hot day though, and drink ginger ale when my stomach is upset. That's pretty much the extent of sodas I can bear.

On top of being terribly ineffectual in their presumed purpose and sometimes directly harming people they claim to be protecting, the existence of people whose online presence is defined as oppositional to GamerGate further legitimizes GamerGate as an entity and solidifies their presence as a group. This doesn't apply to people like Anita Sarkeesian or Leigh Alexander, who obviously are opposed to the existence of GamerGate, because they are women who you can interpret as presenting as opposing GamerGate merely as a product of their work against higher level, systemic problems in culture and gaming, but rather applies to people who spend a disproportionate amount of time only documenting and talking about the fact that GamerGate is bad without ever seeming to engage with the higher level problems that allowed that kind of ideology to form and be accepted as a valid point of view.

What ever happened with Press Select? I thought they announced they had forthcoming works from a bunch of people, but I don't remember hearing anything from them after that.

My life this week has been unbelievably surreal. I've been running reporters, from a small local reporter to people in national newsrooms, away for my landlady, who was in a terrible medical accident. The girl who lives upstairs in the house I live in got kicked out because she was keeping animals she killed with her crossbow in jars full of vodka in her bedroom and the smell of rotting death (along with her overpowering body odor) was just overwhelming and I was charged with supervising that eviction, along with trying to make her room look like a place where real people can go instead of the set of a b roll horror movie. Work has been super busy because the people I'm supposed to be training with have both been out with family health issues. And a lot of my own family drama on top of that. I'm really glad I get a three day weekend, basically. This has been an unreal, busy week.

Can some straight folk tell me what it's like to have never been disowned by your parents? It's happened so often to me in the last 14 years for me that I can't even imagine what it's like for it not to have ever happened.

2015

Brand engagement is awful, especially when multiple brands under a single corporate head decide to bicker.

Scalia's dissent was expected, but I just got done reading Thomas' dissent and I have no idea what he was even trying to get across. How does that even get published as an opinion? Edit: Also, so many people from my past who I would never have expected to have reached out to me today with nothing but unequivocal love and support. I've cried a lot today, and it's given me so much hope and affirmation.

I lived in Rome, GA for a time, where Chik-Fil-A sends their executives and some employees for retreats every now and again. From my interactions with those people, I can say that their only mistake might be misunderstanding who buys their products. They don't hide their Christian beliefs -- they're closed every Sunday, after all -- but they hid their hate for a while. You then have the problem of catering to a demographic, which basically boils down to deciding that this marginalized group makes enough money to be worth catering to while another isn't... and the fact that my local Macy's doesn't have that stuff, so market research must have said it wasn't profitable to represent me in stores in this area.

My biggest problem with any personification of a culture (specifically brand engagement here) is that it's an inherently appropriative act. Corporations care about making money. That's pretty much it. Everything else comes second. They're only being all yay gay because engaging with their brand otherwise means you might engage with their brand financially.Another bad part about it is that it's pinkwashing. No corporation doesn't commit bad acts, but if you see that they're engaging in pro-gay rhetoric that you agree with you're going to be more likely to forgive them for not supplying workers with health care or paying a living wage or for exploiting workforces in developing countries. They wash over all that with a pretty pink triangle and hope you don't notice. Edit: Personification of a corporation. Sorry, phone.

Roberts is a piece of shit and I'm more glad every year that this court will be remembered as the Kennedy court.

This is part of why I hate the nomenclature of marriage equality, or saying that the fight for same sex marriage is a fight for equality. It's true in some respects and for some people, but it also plants the idea that now that we can marry, we're equal. We're absolutely not equal -- even things like HIV, which are a problem for everyone, are seen as a gay issue, not a public health issue, just because of the most visibly affected population, but the idea that we are exists. Cruising Utopia (I think) had a really well written argument against the marriage equality nomenclature in it, if anyone wants to look that up.

I'm super stoked too, but I still have to live in fear of being fired for being gay. It will absolutely be harder to mobilize for really, really vital things now, but that can't discourage those of us who know the fight has to continue.

Oh, my last attempt was well over 6 months ago. Maybe last spring or summer?

I have never gotten past the tutorials in MGS3. I cannot for the life of me figure out how to make the guy do things, even with instructions right there. My last try was on the Vita, and I just couldn't figure out how the medical system worked so I couldn't progress past it.

http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jun/24/new-uk-immigration-rules-will-you-be-affected Xenophobia at its finest. What a gross policy. Literally assigning a cash amount to someone's value as a person. Ugh.

I bought this game cheap the other day. I don't think I'm a huge fan of it, but oh my god I cannot stop playing it what is wrong with me

I have never managed to get CK2 multiplayer to work for more than 5 minutes because of games desyncing.

If you notify people that you're actively looking, they're sometimes willing to work with you to make your position more manageable/enticing, if you want to give hefty notice for leverage? That can also backfire big time.

Maybe I'll give it a watch. I tend to like slower, more contemplative anime that people say is terrible, like Ghost Hound or Haibane Renmei.

It's a dinosaur blockbuster that embraces the legacy of Jurassic Park without having anything good to say about the future. It basically presents its blockbuster status to you, then sets it on the ground and shits on it. It's the Jurassic Park canon's version of Skyfall, but more nihilistic. I appreciated the idea of its commentary, but wow was it hackneyed in its execution.

Has anyone looked into how the legalization of weed has affected participants in the shadow economy? Like, has it removed a viable income stream from marginalized populations, pushing them towards things with higher minimum sentences and more associated violence, had no effect, has no one looked?

I watched... most of season 1 of Steven Universe, I think? I watched through where There's just something about it that I don't like, and I can't put it in words very well. I like aspects of it a lot, but it never really came together for me as a cogent, likeable whole.

So they're starting to give me accounting responsibilities, still as a direct hire temp, but they're walking me through, "these are some accounting processes, and this is how it works"... which I can only take as a good sign? I think I might have a real life, permanent, full time job soon???