Mangela Lansbury

I'm going through a weird sudden move after having to sit down with my roommates and tell them that even though we used to be close, living together was unbearable. Their (kind of understandable, if totally disproportionately) bad reaction, along with the general weight of financial stress, has led to me being kind of a mess lately. But tonight was preview night for a film festival I'm involved with (if you live near Ann Arbor and plan on coming to the film festival, let me know! Hahahaaaa that's nobody) and it was just soooo good for me. I was coming straight from work, kind of grumpy, kind of frazzled, and it just felt really good being around people who love the same thing I love and all of us being totally jazzed about this thing that we're into. Just felt great. Hope all y'all are feeling great too.

This just seems like the place for this to go.

I know you try to be thoughtful, so I'm not going to hold this against you, but never say anything like this. I hope I'm just awake too early and misreading things again, but no. As a gay white man who has been a victim of sexual assault by other gay white men, just don't. (I know this may be a little reductivist considering it's thoughts from a talk named all about women, but still, just don't.)

In every use of crazy that I can think of off hand (that isn't just blatantly offensive stuff like calling your ex crazy), it's shorthand for something that caused a mental break. Price, quality, or quantity that was so good or bad that it went against your perception of what is possible in reality -- only it didn't really go against your perception of reality, you're just using it as a superlative meaning very good or bad. When you say a game's world is crazy detailed, you don't actually mean that it was so detailed that you lost track of what was real and what wasn't real because of the quality of the game, you just mean that there was an intense attention to detail that you appreciated deeply. I'm not a fan of the word crazy but it's one of those things that I accept is going to be used around me and by me, even though I'm trying not to say it anymore. I don't really think there's a fully respectable way to use the word right now, but if you feel differently then use it however you feel comfortable using it.

I thought a second season of Steven Universe had been announced?

If you have any interest in going to university in America, let me know! I do seasonal work in undergraduate admissions at a well respected university and, while I may not be able to answer all your questions off hand, I work with someone whose job is only handling applicants from the UK so I'd be able to very easily get answers that I don't have.

I loved, loved, loved the first season. How was the recent season?

I've seen some weird uses of it in admissions essays, and I've kind of been able to piece together the way I think they're using it. I think generally that the whole evils being in the world thing is seen as just a thing that is case and would be the case regardless of what any single actor did, but Pandora's box is the thing that holds hope and keeps it alive. So it loses the negative connotation because of the inevitability of evil and the hope bit flips it on its head so it becomes a positive thing. Disclaimer: This is mostly based on usage by kids who wrote in letters about how they were holding out hope that their application would be reconsidered after being waitlisted or deferred.

Being Oscar bait doesn't mean a movie is bad. Part of making Oscar bait is making a good movie. I haven't seen Theory of Everything, so I can't comment on it beyond that.

I finally had the talk with my roommates (who I've known for 12 years and whose wedding I was best man in) about how living with them was just driving us apart and I need to move before the lease is up if they want to keep being friends with me. They both cried, but it went better than expected.

I bought a black and white print of a blowjob photo over the weekend. It looks good where I hung it over my TV. Life is pretty great right now.

Any one instance of any given sort, or even just a handful of repeated mistakes, is something that you can just raise an eyebrow at and move on. If he's like Wadhwa, then he just makes the same mistake over and over and over and over and over again. At that point, he's a genuine shitheel.

I would say the same thing of the Imitation Game! I don't know about other folks, though. I'm in the minority amongst my friends for not liking it and thinking it's a little homophobic and offensive, too.

She's done some work with Tony Bennett singing someone of the standards. If you haven't listened to them before, you should try them out!

Yes, with the first e pronounced like the second e in elephant and kelp pronounced as usual. Just so no one with you thinks you're accusing them of kelping.

I have a friend who started doing drag. She got really into it really fast, doing shows at least once a week and spending a lot of time on her act. Over time, she stopped doing drag as much but still wore the breastform, still wore women's clothing, and still wanted to be called by her female name. It's been a few years now and she still has no interest in transitioning physically, but she's still a woman. She's comfortable with her body right now, so she's sticking with what works for her.

The only thing that really makes me uncomfortable is making doing good into a good itself. Then you end up with things like Susan G Komen, which ostensibly is concerned with doing good but mostly just sells a warm fuzzy feeling so various people can make money for themselves.

The idea can come around because someone wants more, but it's only executed on the basis of profits. The individual wants to express feminist ideas and the corporation wants to make money -- so great, the corporation is doing a nice thing, but they're only doing it by chance. It's not bean counters alone, but it's not good intentions either. And the intentions end up not mattering anyway -- often, the intentions behind an ethical message are stripped away when the idea is commodified. The intention of feminism or representation or whatever it may be are replaced with intentions to make money, reducing feminism to a shiny plaque a corporation can put up in Cash Mountain (a secret cigar lounge to be constructed out of the fat stacks of cash that pushing a benign, inoffensive, populist interpretation of a progressive or radical idea will make them). The individuals aren't disregarded, they're just put in the context of the larger system that they necessarily work in.

I decided somewhere along the way that I needed to educate myself on my own history. Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the History of Violence is a great book, and so is everything by James Baldwin that I've read. But. I need something to read that doesn't just infuriate me, something that doesn't pay any mind at all to gay history. Can anyone recommend something to me along those lines?

There's also a difference between shaming someone and the kind of harassment that Sacco faced.

Yeah -- apparently I was more tired than I thought on the bus this morning. I'm dumb and can't read sometimes, sorry y'all!

I really don't see making a tactless joke as a reason to fire someone so much as an opportunity to look at the corporate culture and figure out what's wrong that someone thinks that's okay. Firing her is action they took in response, which left behind the corporate environment that made her think it was okay to make a joke like that. It's nice to think about her being fired in a punitive, retributive way, but it doesn't actually do anything other than make her life harder.

I strongly doubt the content of her tweet contributed nearly as much to her firing as the loud, violent reaction to it.

So you're willing to accept 60 deaths as permissable in the pursuit of...?

I had to learn how to word it. If I say "this person seems to be a homophobe, so I'd recommend against admitting them" I'm likely to get some pushback. If I just say that their personality doesn't seem like a good fit for the class or that they don't seem ready to commit to the university's ideals and social standards or that there's likely to be a lot of friction between them and others in the class, I don't really hear about it. So I can't say the person's a homophobe, just that other people are likely to be unhappy with them being a homophobe. The student's personality is definitely taken into account for admissions, but in a weirdly roundabout way. This is in part because the applicant will have access to certain files about them under FERPA and the school doesn't want to deal with that mess and in part because reading applications is an odd process and you have to negotiate with the reading panel -- the athletic reader for the student applying under crew won't care about a misogynist, but they will care that you get the sense that the applicant will cause friction in a sufficiently large group. From what I understand, it's a lot more acceptable to outright say "This person is a homophobe, we're not accepting them" in graduate admissions, where the cohesiveness of the cohort is a certifiable Big Deal.