Apple Cider

I can't empathize with you directly, Sara, as I haven't gotten cancer myself but my mother struggled with early stage breast cancer herself and due to it being the late 80s, had to get a radical mastectomy to one of her breasts. She got a fake boob prosthetic since I think it was still kinda early in the days of offering constructive surgery and I know she struggled with that same awareness. But she was already a mom and married so I think it's a bit different. Mostly I am just saying this because I think your thoughts are important and I wish you well on your continued health and recovery. I'm a cis woman but I still have those kinds of thoughts regularly - I'm unmarried and don't want kids and have recently found out in the last couple of years that I cannot actually have kids by any easy stretch of the imagination. It's an odd intersection of infertility and actual desires running parallel vs. being at odds with eachother but the reason I'm infertile or rather, incapable of being pregnant is because I have a chronic illness that fucks with my hormones, meaning I exhibit many things that make me look less feminine - extra body hair, gaining weight in more "masculine" places (like my stomach) and facial hair. It's not super noticeable but it's enough that you can tell I have a bit of a beard. IT's definitely shaken me up a tiny bit, even as a really hardcore feminist. It took me even a long time to get over the whole "not shaving my legs" thing. On the flipside to this, it has made me more aware that EVEN IF I do not conform to feminine visual appearances, because I am cis, I almost never am misgendered and it's never at a level that trans women have to deal with, so it's in that way shown me what kind of privilege I have as a cis woman. anyways, all of that rambling just to say that I understand what you're going through at least in a little way. (Also I was super punk as a teen and shaved off all my hair regularly - it's fairly liberating! But now I have grown my hair out very long because as a fat woman, I feel like I would look "bad" if it was short, so in that way, some of that stuff still kicks around in here.)

If I even THINK about the ending to Homeward Bound ("He was just too old") I burst into tears. But yeah, I've seen every sappy animal movie ever made, including the very overlooked Legend of Lobo, which was one of those Disney docu-pics that was made with a story around probably nature footage but it's about a wolf. RE: Return to Oz That movie gave me nightmares for a really long while because of the lady who has multiple heads. It's very dark.

I think it's definitely germane to the feminist thread if there's value in the book from a feminist perspective I will have to see if I can pick this up.

I'm impressed by that level of equivocation.

I HATE E.T AND I AM TERRIFIED OF HIM and I sincerely crushed my grandmother's life when I wouldn't go on the ride with her at Universal Studios (backstory here is that E.T is her son's favorite movie and he's autistic and in a group home)

Sandlot holds up except for some of the special effects with the giant dog but it was such a well-shot and well-written movie that it really withstood the test of time. Same with The Princess Bride.

this is the bro police, there's too many bros here, PUT YOUR HANDS IN THE AIR and WALK SLOWLY

Let me tell you what it's been like trying to politely, sugary-sweet nicely address men being sexist. It just barely works, if that. it's always seen as an aggressive maneuver, and how dare I, and what right do I have, and all that. I know that there's definitely politeness that works, and it's often better to start out at the bottom and work your way up to frothy rage, but a lot of time it requires the other person to even be slightly open to that dialogue. And a lot of times, they aren't. Politeness is a courtesy, one that I feel I have to offer too often to people who are comfortable and want to remain that way. Trust me, I get what it means when people say "You need to not go for teh jugular" and how some people do, but it's far more complex than that. And this is why I find callout culture criticisms very reductive.

I think it's also worth pointing out that grilling Molyneux as spectacle pulls away from looking at some actual issues in the game industry that Molyneux no doubt was underneath. I think the guy has personality issues but let's not pretend that going overbudget, overpromising, underperforming, people being mad that you can't always predict development time, needing to use Kickstarter to fund game development isn't a symptom of larger issues. We talked about this a lot last night while recording Justice Points with Austin Walker and Ian Williams and the largesse with regards to labor in gaming is awful - especially when poised as consumer advocacy versus labor advocacy.

I think that's fair - I just see everyone throwing the baby out with the bathwater every time I see anything coming close to "callout culture" backlash, which also, incidentally, also washes the whole thing as a mess we should move away from but doesn't also look hyper-finely at some actual abuses within SJ circles, because all of it is considered terrible on some level. The level of critical granularity is more important to me because I believe we need that kind of redress. Politeness is a really relative term, I will say that - what I considered polite only gets me piled on, or is already considered aggressive because who I am. Politeness, I've found, doesn't always work. Neither does anger! It's almost like people are chaotic. :/

The dynamics of Biddle and Sacco absolutely set fire to a pretty dry field. It's what we see happening when anyone uses social media to drop their entire readership on someone else and I've been thinking about this a lot the last couple of days, because I always see it along very familiar power lines - whether it's invoked by a third party or by the person themselves. However, I find myself still left from people saying all callout culture is harmful and terrible and we should never address what people say. There HAS to be some middle ground of never addressing people for shit they say and getting someone fired.

It was unprofessional. There's no way to refute a question like that - the interviewer is already implying that they think you are XYZ and if you buy into it, you get painted as such, if you refute it, you are painted as being so self-deluded that you can't see yourself like that. Calling someone a pathological liar when they perhaps are egotistical, have hubris AT BEST is immature and frankly, terrible. I barely know who Molyneux is, but even scanning his crumbly history shows me not a man who is a liar, but just a man who can't keep his promises and gets too excited by his work to be a person in a production role. That's not being a liar, much less a pathological one, which is a clinical term? Like what the fuck is going on there.

The malaria discussion just reminded me of my dad - he's better now but he got malaria in Vietnam and occasionally has "relapses" where he gets very, very ill for a couple of days (sweats, vomiting, fevers, really nuts stuff) and then is fine for another couple of years.

I think the case for SVU versus say something that's already terribly bleak like Black Mirror is that the latter is speculative versus something like SVU which sensationalizes a really chaotic and upsetting reality for many people who are victimized on a regularly basis. When the show sensationalizes something you experience every day (versus say, something that could happen to humanity at large as a consequence of our insatiable flaws) and it ends on a huge down note, how are you supposed to feel about that? I can absolutely see why Zoe felt disheartened since it's effectively taking the low notes from her very real, public experience and spinning some really brutal gold from it for the purpose of making money. Dramatizations are frequently heightened, yes, but it doesn't make reality more bearable when people are going to view it in that way. I didn't watch it and I don't really have plans to, even if I'm a pretty diehard TV critic, I watched Empire instead, which is the kind of high drama I enjoy.

I am very upset at the implication that only fathers and husbands would buy deliciously huge berries!

Well didn't you know, feminists are vampire that create a shroud of femininity and suck masculinity out of the air, which we use to fuel our baby killing machines.

Well it won't be a problem if they let people be bodily searched! Heh.

Interesting sidenote, one of the reasons suicide/attempting suicide is a crime is so police can enter your premises without your permission because a crime might be "in progess."

LostIntheMovies touched on this in his series, if I recall correctly, but the Donna/Leland scene is really the biggest indication of what Laura's life might have been like until you get to FWWM.

I hope the Showtime series has one line about how the Seattle/Washington foodie scene collapsed on itself in the wake of M.T. Wentz's death.

Finally gave up trying to edit two podcasts a week and finally finished an illustration project I was working on, and once I get over this ridiculous deadline at work, I will have way less stress and way more free time. I am sitting here at my computer doing blessed NOTHING for once, first time in 2-3 months and it's so amazing and I love it.

That is really upsetting. It's triply upsetting because Daily Show/Colbert Report also really liked transphobic jokes all along as well, trans women still feel like women that comedians don't feel the slightest bit bad making jokes about.

I don't even know how you're supposed to debunk it unless you find a smoking gun like evidence someone else made it up and wrote it by their own admission. That's why this stuff gets passed around on Facebook and elsewhere as "true" because there's no way to actually refute it. Then it becomes, "Oh my god, did you hear about that ONE FEMINIST who aborted a baby because he was a MAN, they are ALL MAN HATERS" even if it's not even a true story. That's like, urban legend level shit going on here like when your Grandmother sends you e-mail forwards. Feminists are not magically more in need of mental health care as any other group of people. If anything, we should just have better mental health care in general. In "abortion stories that are depressingly TRUE" - let's talk about Missouri state legislature and their determination to reduce safe access to reproductive health care: http://rhrealitycheck.org/ablc/2015/02/06/missouri-legislature-imani/

My prowess at speed reading has been enhanced by my child murdering cult status.

Sorry, but the blog post and the source it links to feels like "shitthatdidn'thappen.txt" including the sidebar that reads like a dime store pulp novel - "My liberal parents disowned me!" Abortion needs to be safe for literally everyone, regardless. But I really do not buy the idea that a feminist aborted a child because it was solely a boy. Furthermore, you can find out the gender of your kid between 16-20 weeks into your pregnancy, which is squarely into the second trimester. Waiting ALL that time, just to find out the gender and then aborting it THEN because it's a boy is like, yeah no, I don't buy that. This reads like made up "see how feminists are mentally ill MONSTERS" which is offensive on every level, including reducing them to "baby killers" - like why is this even in this thread or being taken seriously.