Mangela Lansbury

I don't want to go into details, but good thoughts for my landlady would be greatly appreciated. She's an awesome, incredibly kind older woman who suffered some crazy, unexpected burns during heart surgery today.

That book is incredible. If you ever want to talk about it, I live Detroit adjacent and could recommend some further reading about the city (though most of what I've personally read is specifically about LGBTQ+ populations because I'm a selfish white gay dude).Edit: And another great book is White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism

I thought I might go to the local gay bay tonight, just for kicks. They're playing that Garth Brooks song, I got friends in low places, and I have no fucking clue what's going on. It's nothing good, I'm sure.

I haven't bought into the whole Steven Universe thing. I don't know what it is about it -- I usually love everything about what it has going on! I just can't dig what it's doing

I knew a woman who kept the Rhodesian flag around to remind her of how not to act, until she succumbed to breast cancer. On the other hand, I know many people who fly the American flag and have no respect for Japanese internment or the First Nation genocide. I know people who fly the Confederate flag and are willing to engage people on issues of race, siding with activists in Ferguson, Baltimore, New York, Charlotte, etc. What meaning does a flag really have? I mean, I admit that the Confederate flag has baggage tied to it a significant history of racism, but what does a flag really mean when flown by an individual? It shouldn't be flown by a state, but on an individual level -- what does that actually mean? EDIT: Also, I'm familiar with and agree with the argument that the South lost the war and won the Reconstruction, and think the Confederate flag is a disgusting display of racism, but people of all stripes fly flags of all kinds. I just don't think modern nationalist ideals bear a lot of meaning.

Have you considered sending your boyfriend to re-education?

Something that made me really appreciate culture as something with preserving was cultures that are totally divorced from anything modern. There are tribes in the Amazon who are completely divorced from any concept of what you or I may think of as the world. That's just fascinating to me -- that there are people who have no idea what modernity looks like. They didn't experience the industrial revolution. The internet is an alien concept to them. We live on the same world, but not in the same world. That's so worth preserving to me. Another thing that made me appreciate the importance of differentiating cultures is Westernization. The West has had such a negative effect on so many places, and we should be trying to preserve the culture in those places. If you look at a country like Pakistan, it has completely distinct cultures in it -- there are phenomenal and important authors who write in Urdu that people who grow up speaking Pashtu don't have access to, and these discrete cultures live completely separate lives in Karachi. Both have their pros and cons. That's incredible to me and it's worth preserving. And even beyond that, there are distinct cultures in America. Black and white culture, and they're discrete enough that people talk about African American Vernacular English as a separate language from English. AAVE has something as distinct as the habitual be, and white populations will not be able differentiate between their conception of the verb to be and other conception of the verb to be. That's crazy! It's completely worth preserving!

Along these lines, I spent most of my life in the south and I've met many, many racists down there, but holy shit the people in southeast Michigan. Holy. Shit. I live in statistically the most liberal city in Michigan, and I used to work with a guy who would openly carry a pistol when he had to go to well-off black academics' houses because "you never know with those people." That's an extreme example, but I meet people like that at least once a week. It's mind boggling. I mean, with the history of where I am (it's where white people fled to when they didn't want to be around black people in Detroit, the only major American city to basically stop existing because of racism), it makes sense, but holy shit. Hooooooooly shit the Midwest.It's really not just a Southern problem at all.

Americans are generally taught in school that race is a solved problem. We abolished slavery, ended segregation, stopped saying black people are only 3/5 of a human, ended Jim Crow... come on, we passed the Civil Rights Act! Everyone is equal! That's the way history is taught in a lot of history classes. Race is a glaring blind spot because of things like that, which in a lot of people in the South's makes referring to the Confederacy in the modern age absolutely okay -- racism ended, so what's the issue? There's a huge gulf between what even well meaning flyers of the Confederate flag think and what you or I think. There's a massive chasm between people in this country, and I have absolutely no idea how to approach it without falling into oblivion.

To be fair, the most infamous "he's no angel" was the New York Times talking about Michael Brown. Fox has HUGE issues and that definitely needs to be addressed, but they're just the most egregious example of an entire media apparatus with major issues in the ways it approaches and talks about race.

I live in a college town. The only apartments I've looked at here that were unfurnished were the huge corporate complexes and the rooms in the 20-person communal housing. I only own sidetables and a chair, at this point. I don't see having a need for more in the near future.

I feel the exact same way. I tried listening to the Beastcast since people seemed to like it, but they even used the morning radio soundboard. I couldn't take it.

If women's bodies can physically handle conception to birth in three hours in Fallout, how is it not canon that they've taken over all aspects of society by using their ridiculous, superhuman physiques? Imagine the beating they could take in a fight if their body can handle that kind of shotgun baby creation and expulsion. This is the Fallout game I want to play.

Wasn't there a local journalist asking questions like, the black community is notoriously against snitching -- do you expect this to get in the way of apprehending the person responsible? So no, there are no journalistic standards in America. And wapo has the expected sympathetic bio piece already. Disgusting.

Verso Books has their ebooks 90% off until midnight, for anyone interested in that kind of thing. I picked up Happiness Industry last night and read it until too late into the morning -- it's really good so far! They're a really good publisher of radical thought, so if you're into feminist thought, Marxist economics, the stories of marginalized people, or critical theory, check them out!

I have no idea where new sofas come from. Everyone I know gets theirs cheap off craigslist, or other places in the sofa shadow market. Who's buying these new sofas? Is the sofa trade the new "import/export business?"

The most glaring flaw in that essay is that it neglects the fact that having students read texts about challenging subjects gives them a framework and a language to approach those problems with. A lot of people I know talk about race, something they've fairly recently become acutely aware of and familiar with, with the framework and language they learned from To Kill a Mockingbird, required reading in 9th grade at my school, and the Watsons Go to Birmingham, which was required reading in middle school. They came into caring about these things as an adult, but who knows if they would have been able to approach it without that earlier introduction? I think the strength of English classes is that role. It provides you with a way to talk about important things, if not now then later. It's harder to argue for Shakespeare and things like that, even if I think they're important so that a person has access to basic cultural touchstones that are referred to in all modern mediums. It may be better to approach Shakespeare as a Bas Luhrmann film or in some other more accessible way than on the page, but I think it's important to teach it. I'm on my phone, so it's hard to express these things well, but I disagree with a lot of that article. Also I'm reading that book on tidying by Marie Kondo and it's really good so far. It gets a little hokey (being tidy will change your life and make you happy and you'll lose weight!!!!!) but the meat of it -- how to keep your spaces tidy -- are high quality.

Archer is more interesting to me than a lot of other cartoons, but I can't say it makes me laugh out loud very often so idk how much I can really say I like it? Also I have a personal connection to some of the production staff (visit Dad's Garage improv theater when you're in Atlanta, see the voices of Pam and Krieger in their natural habitat maybe if it's the right night!), so that's probably a factor too.

All the characters are teens, and it handles some things well buuuuuuut it's also very anime and very JRPG and comes with a lot of that baggage -- you have your gratuitous hot springs and beach scenes, your swimsuits and french maid outfits, all the -dere types put there for male fantasies, all that's required to get with a girl is be interested in her... Persona 4 had some weird sexualization of one of its underage characters ("I'm going to get naked on live TV, so keep watching!")... It's no more aggressive than anything else in the generic anime high school setting, but that's not really saying much.

Experience the evolution (of everything but the latent sexism in the video games industry)

I assumed it was a "his writing is clear, concise, and engaging... and you attribute that to academia???" lol! I am prejudiced, I guess.

I will never understand people who react to things they don't want by saying that they shouldn't exist. What's the point?

I've had pretty good luck with the Polygon X's Conference in Y minutes stuff, but they're not exhaustive coverage of all the beats from the conferences. Just 5-10 minute highlight reels.