Hope you all are having a lovely day today, whatever this day means to you (or doesn’t). Consider this an open thread, to discuss whatever, from presents to politics to cats to whatever holiday stress you might be feeling.
And here’s some stuff I found on the Twitter.
— David, who is hanging in there
Merry Christmas, everyone! 🎄🎅 pic.twitter.com/YfyTsQ95de
— Maggie Serota (@maggieserota) December 25, 2017
At this time of year, take a few moments to remember who Christmas is truly about… pic.twitter.com/TQ9tSP5EED
— Larry the Cat (@Number10cat) December 24, 2017
I haven’t laughed this hard in a while. I needed this. pic.twitter.com/2aQFpugdis
— deray (@deray) December 7, 2017
Brian Eno, Paris, 1973 (with Christmas 2017 augmentation) pic.twitter.com/hRwMDTOUKv
— Brian Eno News (@dark_shark) December 25, 2017
“Fun” pic.twitter.com/tsAdsZeez8
— Judd Legum (@JuddLegum) December 24, 2017
#MerryChristmas 🎄🤶🏻 pic.twitter.com/IahMZhf5gc
— Melania Trump 45 Archived (@FLOTUS45) December 25, 2017
Same. pic.twitter.com/kcNPdrLy6R
— Adrenalin (@adrenalindenver) May 24, 2017
🎈🐾🐅🎈🐾🐅🎈🐾🐅🎈🐾🐅🎈🐾🐅
All of a sudden …
🐾🐾🐾🐾 pic.twitter.com/fza8NZioI0
— The Cult Cat (@Elverojaguar) December 25, 2017
Human: My cat has an easy life
Me: pic.twitter.com/e8kvlVhUdR— Curious Zelda (@CuriousZelda) December 20, 2017
https://twitter.com/awwcuteness/status/945193410662682624
Happy New Year, everyone!
(It’s still about three hours away here, but I have to be at work at six.)
In one of those rather cool accidents that sometimes just happen, about 300 people celebrated the change from 2017 to 2018 twice. I love neat things like that. 🙂
::waves:: Good to see you, Scildfreja! Happy to know you’re around, and hope the day improves/improved! ::waves some more::
Missed that post! Hi Scildfreja!
May your day be relaxed. 🙂
@PeeVee, @Kat,
Right back at you! We could play mutual appreciation ping pong 😀
@mrex,
I’m so glad you like TacoCat! As soon as I read their bio – brought together by their love of feminism, cats, and palindromes (if I’m remembering it right), I was sold.
2018, everyone! Let’s do this. Right after this glass of wine…
There are good ways and bad ways to start off a new year. This year, I started off 2018 by swapping smoochies with Mr. Parasol. Also today, I’m knitting, watching some “Adam Ruins Everything” episodes, and generally kicking back and relaxing. Because 2018 is going to need a lot of work, so recharge when you can, folks.
Happy New Video Games!
…
Year. I mean Year.
…
*goes back to Mario Kart* >_>
OH SHIT I DIDN’T LOOK AT THE LAST PAGE.
SCIIIIILD!
Hello. =)
Happy New Year!
Hey, I just wanted to pop in and leave this. I just discovered this absurd and amazing thing today, and I’m so delighted that it exists I’m telling absolutely everyone-
http://www.hpmor.com
“Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality”- In an alternate universe where Harry’s adoptive aunt Petunia instead had married a professor of biochemistry, Harry is an intimidating child prodigy determined to apply the scientific method to unravel the properties and parameters of magic, merge his discoveries with muggle science, raise the standard of living for all and eventually conquer the world, the star system, and beyond.
Happy New Year, everyone!
I am glad to see Scildfreya pop in. I hope to see IP and PoM resurface. Dreemr, also, as well as my other darlin’, Boink x5.
Also, David, GET WELL SOON!
Anyone I didn’t name: omission is unintentional. I adore you all.
So, the new Miss America board chair is a woman. Will the results be a) Still hopelessly sexist, or b) An improvement?
I’ll take one from column A and one from column B please. 😛
A woman in charge is no guarantee of lack of sexism – the person who has selected the page three girls for the Sun for the last 30 years is a woman. Page three is still sexist AF (though not abusive, by all accounts. She runs a tight ship in that regard).
The Nazis are pulling some weird conspiracy shit on 4chan again.
Happy new year and wonderful health, everyone.
Best wishes for the coming year.
To all a good new year with better health and more cheer.
https://twitter.com/twitter/statuses/926192238790696965
… I started off with frozen water pipes and a dead car battery…. I (already) hate 2018!!!
🙂 🙁
Shadowplay,
Oh, man. It’s like a wish list of all the things right wing conspiracy theorists want to be true. Of course so many of them are uncritically accepting it.
Then I saw this story when I scrolled down. https://www.avclub.com/youtube-personality-apologizes-for-showing-video-of-app-1821703846
Some YouTube celebrity (the inner old cranky person in me recoils at that term) went to the infamous suicide forest in Japan and showed footage of an actual corpse there. As if that wasn’t disgusting enough, he’s claiming in his apology that he was trying to raise awareness and do suicide prevention. Not sure how gawking at the body who didn’t consent to have their remains shown ahead of time and/or their family didn’t consent to have that shown would help that.
I’m sure the MRM will be calling out this guy for trivializing suicide and trying to use a victim of suicide for profit any minute now.
Oh, wait. He’s a white dude and almost certainly not a feminist. So no.
So, I can’t tell if I’m being oversensitive or not. I just saw a commercial for TurboTax that really pissed me off.
A conventionally attractive and scantily clad young woman is terrified and hiding in her closet. The shadow of a man looms over her bedroom furniture. Then the door opens and there’s a creepy animated teddy bear dancing and making little high pitch noises. The tagline is “there’s nothing to be afraid of.”
Am I right that this is really gross? If I look at it charitably, the intent is to mock slasher movies. But it didn’t achieve that. It looked a whole lot more like mocking and minimizing women’s fear of rape while also sexualizing women’s terror. Given that the news of late is full of powerful sexual predators being outed left and right and women are pointing to this and saying we told you so, it just seems like the ad people who wrote this were sitting in an office and giggling about the news, wondering how they can incorporate it into a commercial. It especially feels gross given often women are told we’re wrong to feel uncomfortable around men who are creeping us a out – men who later do turn out to be abusers or rapists – because “he’s a nice guy.”
The extra layer of squick is that I saw this during the on demand of the season premiere of the Bachelor. So it’s definitely aimed at younger women. The demographic that is most at risk of being the victim of a sex crime. It might as well have just said “don’t worry your pretty little head off about taxes or rape. Now take this drink I made you that definitely doesn’t have a roofie in it and I’ll ‘do your taxes'”
Surplus:
Wikipedia says that Miss America is a “scholarship pageant”. I don’t know what that is, but I’m pretty sure that assessing scholarship doesn’t require a swimsuit section. What would be lost if Miss America ceased to exist?
WWTH:
Apparently (I haven’t seen the video, and don’t want to), he stood by the body and laughed. Now, I get that laughter can crop up at inappropriate moments, due to stress, but he could have edited that out of the video. No, this garbage person wasn’t there to “raise awareness”: that’s just for the notpology. It’s all about the views.
If you want to watch non-garbage Youtube celebrities in Japan, you’re better off with Jun’s Kitchen and Abroad in Japan.
And for something happy and cute, current world gymnastics champion and megafan of Harry Potter Morgan Hurd has a Harry Potter leotard
https://www.instagram.com/p/BdOZklAhsY9/?taken-by=morgihurd
“Raising awareness” by mocking the dead, not by inviting the next of kin to talk about how much they miss their loved ones, or by interviewing the people who have to deal with the bodies in the forest. Or even by simply talking about how visiting the forest raised his own awareness of mortality and increased his empathy.
There are days where people should be grateful that I’m not a god who can smite them with thunderbolts.
Happy New Year, Mammotheers!
I suppose if I have New Years resolutions, most of them are related to my arting (https://katamount.deviantart.com/ for those interested). I’ve made leaps and bounds last year in my lineart, but I’ve been kinda feeling paralyzed from actually colouring a work. You can see some examples of some older coloured works on my gallery, but I’m not entirely satisfied with the digital colouring “cuts” method I’m using. It gets the job done, but I may be too timid in offering sharp contrasts that are really needed for a piece to “pop.” So I’m resolving to (in a vague order):
– Finish the lines I’m working on
– Find and experiment with some new colour methods and colour last years lineart pics.
– Update Gravatar
– Visit Newfoundland in summer
– Time permitting, edit some of my written works
– Also time permitting, try hand at YouTube with Let’s Play of The 7th Guest.
These will require a lot of getting out of the old comfort zone. My only hope is that my body can keep up (the sore throat I can feel approaching probably won’t help). 🙁
Ah well, them’s the breaks. Happy New Year, everybody! *hugs*
@SFHC!!
tee hee
@WWTH, that f’n YouTube jerkbutt is being utterly torn apart online and he deserves it *so hard*. He went in there specifically to mock and ridicule, because that’s his thing, and now he’s being torn apart at the seams. He posted an apology letter that was basically “I’ve never screwed up before, I’m actually really good, let’s just forget about this, peace out” and he’s so terrified that he’s going to lose his sweet sweet internet money. I mean jees, not only did he go out there and do it, he then went back to his hotel room and sat down and edited the stupid video to blur the poor victim’s face before he put it online. He knew it was a shitty thing to do, and he did it anyways. Totally intentional.
He’s spent his recent life swanning around the world, making fun of people. Now it looks like he’s going to lose that money and have to go work a normal person job and it’s terrifying him. I couldn’t be more happy about that. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving person.
I also find that TurboTax ad pretty squicky. I find a lot of TV and media pretty squickey though so may not really be the best calibrated. Basically, given the current social climate, I don’t think it’s possible for a woman to be in a bikini in a commercial without it being exploitative at its core. Which is terrible and I don’t like it! But don’t know how else to interpret it.
@Genjones,
Be super careful with that Harry Potter and the Rational Cupcakes. That’s the magnum opus of Eliezer Yudkowsky, who is one of the unintending architects of the Alt Right. His opinions are very thoughtful and I found them really enlightening – I’ve read every post he’s ever made on his blog – but it’s very easy to read them and end up exactly where every alt-right pseudorational edgelord is now. He is too prideful in his rationality, and it leads him astray.
Like, his writing on what fallacies of thought *are* and how to identify them, and where they come from, can be absolutely sublime in places. And when I say that rationality requires empathy and compassion – well, he said that too, and before I did. But he also thinks he understands quantum physics better than quantum physicists, and thinks he’s smarter than AI scientists on AI, etc, etc. He places too much value on his own ability to suss out things on instinct.
I won’t tell you to avoid reading him – he has some excellent stuff in there, and is incredibly right in some things. But he’s also incredibly wrong in others, and the mixture of the two is toxic. So do be careful, and try to keep in mind that he’s got some things dangerously wrong.