no. 285

"I don’t believe in guilty pleasures. If you fucking like something, like it. That’s what’s wrong with our generation: that residual punk rock guilt, like, “You’re not supposed to like that. That’s not fucking cool.” Don’t fucking think it’s not cool to like Britney Spears’ “Toxic.” It is cool to like Britney Spears’ “Toxic”! Why the fuck not? Fuck you! That’s who I am, goddamn it! That whole guilty pleasure thing is full of fucking shit."

Dave Grohl

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no. 284

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no. 283

"Yes, the Bechdel Test. It’s named for Alison Bechdel, who is a comic book creator. The test is, are there two named women in the film? Do they talk to each other? And is it about something other than a man? I actually think the Bechdel Test is a little advanced for us sometimes. I have one called the Sexy Lamp Test, which is, if you can remove a female character from your plot and replace her with a sexy lamp and your story still works, you’re a hack."

Comic book writer Kelly Sue DeConnick (Captain Marvel, Avengers Assemble)

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no. 282

My mother had three pregnancies, and two children. She had a miscarriage, between my brother and I, in that four year span between our births, there was another pregnancy, another child desperately wanted, who didn’t live to term.
My mother had her pre-natal care, and her post-miscarriage care, at Planned Parenthood.
Because it was the best place for her. Because at the time, she had a two year old child and a bike and they were living just around that nice little sweet spot between ‘desperately poor’ and ‘almost have enough to consider a savings account.’ And when you are poor, and female, and need health services, Planned Parenthood is there.
And my mother walked past the protesters, walked past the people who screamed at her about not killing her baby, about how she was a whore, and she was going to hell. My mother, in mourning for a child that she had lost, blaming herself, hating herself for failing at this most feminine of things, walked through that, to care for herself, to get the medical care she needed. So that someday, two years later, she could have me.
I cannot speak to the courage that must have taken. But that path is walked by thousands of women. Every single day.
She donated to Planned Parenthood until her death. And she said to me, that the people who screamed at her saw her only as a vessel for a baby. They didn’t care about her, they didn’t care about her baby, either. They were pro-birth, not pro-life, because none of them would be there after her baby was born, to offer help and support and care.
The protesters didn’t care about her. And the medical professionals inside did. It is the right of every woman to have access to safe, affordable, quality health care, no matter where she comes from, what her income is, or what choices she makes with her life. And that is what these kind of bills are attempting to take away.

scifigrl47

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no. 281

"One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back."

Carl Sagan, in his last interview with Charlie Rose.

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no. 280

no. 279

"You may not agree with a woman, but to criticize her appearance — as opposed to her ideas or actions — isn’t doing anyone any favors, least of all you. Insulting a woman’s looks when they have nothing to do with the issue at hand implies a lack of comprehension on your part, an inability to engage in high-level thinking. You may think she’s ugly, but everyone else thinks you’re an idiot."

Hillary Clinton

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no. 278

"U.S.A: Where abortion is murder and the murder of Black people isn’t."

Socialism Art Nature

no. 277

no. 276

"17% of cardiac surgeons are women, 17% of tenured professors are women. It just goes on and on. And isn’t that strange that that’s also the percentage of women in crowd scenes in movies? What if we’re actually training people to see that ratio as normal so that when you’re an adult, you don’t notice?

…We just heard a fascinating and disturbing study where they looked at the ratio of men and women in groups. And they found that if there’s 17% women, the men in the group think it’s 50-50. And if there’s 33% women, the men perceive that as there being more women in the room than men."

Source: NPR: Hollywood Needs More Women

no. 275

"Our anxiety does not come from thinking about the future, but from wanting to control it."

Kahlil Gibran

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no. 274

no. 273

"Republicans muscled a pared-back agriculture bill through the House on Thursday, stripping out the food stamp program to satisfy recalcitrant conservatives but losing what little Democratic support the bill had when it failed last month. It was the first time food stamps had not been a part of the farm bill since 1973."


House Approves Farm Bill, Without Food Stamp Program

To which Wil Wheaton (or somebody) comments: "Corporate welfare for Big Ag, nothing to actually help real people who are suffering. As Dan Gillmor says, it’s a perfect description of GOP priorities".

no. 272

For most of the human race, pretty much all of the lifespan of the human race, information was currency. Information was like gold. It was rare, it was hard to find, it was expensive. You could get your information, but you had to know where to go, you had to know what you were looking at, you had to know how to find your information. It was hard. And librarians were the key players in the battle for information, because they could go and get and bring back this golden nugget for you, the thing that you needed.

Over the last decade, which is less than a blink of an eye in the history of the human race, it’s all changed. And we’ve gone from a world in which there is too little information, in which information is scarce, to a world in which there is too much information, and most of it is untrue or irrelevant. You know, the world of the Internet is the world of information that is not actually so. It’s a world of information that just isn’t actually true, or if it is true, it’s not what you needed, or it doesn’t actually apply like that, or whatever. And you suddenly move into a world in which librarians fulfill this completely different function.

We’ve gone from looking at a desert, in which a librarian had to walk into the desert for you and come back with a lump of gold, to a forest, to this huge jungle in which what you want is one apple. And at that point, the librarian can walk into the jungle and come back with the apple. So I think from that point of view, the time of librarians, and the time of libraries—they definitely haven’t gone anywhere.

Neil Gaiman talks about his love of libraries.

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no. 271

no. 270

"Your friends don’t owe you a job. Your parents don’t want to support you anymore. No one wants to hear you complain. You don’t deserve anything any more than anyone else. You aren’t the center of the world. You are responsible for your own happiness. Stop blaming everyone and everything else if you aren’t there yet. Fix it."

no. 8 : Stop Expecting Stuff
from 11 things it took me 42 years to learn by Shane Nickerson

no. 269

"Consider that you can see less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum and hear less than 1% of the acoustic spectrum. As you read this, you are traveling at 220 km/sec across the galaxy. 90% of the cells in your body carry their own microbial DNA and are not ‘you’. The atoms in your body are 99.9999999999999999% empty space and none of them are the ones you were born with, but they all originated in the belly of a star. Human beings have 46 chromosomes, 2 less than the common potato.

The existence of the rainbow depends on the conical photoreceptors in your eyes; to animals without cones, the rainbow does not exist. So you don’t just look at a rainbow, you create it. This is pretty amazing, especially considering that all the beautiful colors you see represent less than 1% of the electromagnetic spectrum."

NASA Lunar Science Institute, We Originated in the Belly of a Star (2012)

no. 268

"Personal's not the same as important. People just think it is."

Granny Weatherwax, in Terry Pratchett's Lords And Ladies

no. 267

“Your life is not an episode of Skins. Things will never look quite as good as they do in a faded, sun-drenched Polaroid; your days are not an editorial from Lula. Your life is not a Sofia Coppola movie, or a Chuck Palahniuk novel, or a Charles Bukowski poem. Grace Coddington isn’t your creative director. Bon Iver and Joy Division don’t play softly in the background at appropriate moments. Your hysterical teenage diary isn’t a work of art. Your room probably isn’t Selby material. Your life isn’t a Tumblr screencap. Every word that comes out of your mouth will not be beautiful and poignant, infinitely quotable. Your pain will not be pretty. Crying till you vomit is always shit. You cannot romanticize hurt. Or sadness. Or loneliness. You will have homework, and hangovers and bad hair days. The train being late won’t lead to any fateful encounters, it will make you late. Sometimes your work will suck. Sometimes you will suck. Far too often, everything will suck - and not in a Wes Anderson kind of way. And there is no divine consolation - only the knowledge that we will hopefully experience the full spectrum - and that sometimes, just sometimes, life will feel like a Coppola film.”

Letters From Nowhere (via hypno-pompic)

no. 266

no. 265

“In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as ‘right to work.’ It is a law to rob us of our civil rights and job rights.
Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining by which unions have improved wages and working conditions of everyone…Wherever these laws have been passed, wages are lower, job opportunities are fewer and there are no civil rights. We do not intend to let them do this to us. We demand this fraud be stopped. Our weapon is our vote.”

Martin Luther King

no. 264

"It takes 237 muscles to fake an orgasm but 15 to say 'it’s called a clitoris and it’s right here'."

Nolan at pinenolanapplehttp

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no. 263

"When Stuyvesant says that women’s dress and bodies are distraction in a learning environment, for example, what they’re really saying is that they’re distracting to male students. The default student we are concerned about - the student whose learning we want to ensure is protected - is male. Never mind how “distracting” it is to be pulled from class, humiliated, and made to change outfits - publicly degrading young women is small price to pay to make sure that a boy doesn’t have to suffer through the momentary distraction of glancing at a girl’s legs. When this dentist in Iowa can fire his assistant for turning him on - even though she’s done absolutely nothing wrong - the message again is that it’s men’s ability to work that’s important.

And when rape victims are blamed for the crime committed against them, the message is the same: This is something that happened to the perpetrator, who was driven to assault by a skirt, or a date, or the oh-so-sexy invitation of being passed out drunk. Women have infringed on their right to exist without being turned on. (Ta-Nehisi Coates describes this centering of male sexual vulnerability quite well.) Our very presence is a disruption of the male status quo."

Jessica Valenti, “Asking For It”

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no. 262

"It turns out procrastination is not typically a function of laziness, apathy or work ethic as it is often regarded to be. It’s a neurotic self-defense behavior that develops to protect a person’s sense of self-worth.

You see, procrastinators tend to be people who have, for whatever reason, developed to perceive an unusually strong association between their performance and their value as a person. This makes failure or criticism disproportionately painful, which leads naturally to hesitancy when it comes to the prospect of doing anything that reflects their ability — which is pretty much everything.

But in real life, you can’t avoid doing things. We have to earn a living, do our taxes, have difficult conversations sometimes. Human life requires confronting uncertainty and risk, so pressure mounts. Procrastination gives a person a temporary hit of relief from this pressure of “having to do” things, which is a self-rewarding behavior. So it continues and becomes the normal way to respond to these pressures.

Particularly prone to serious procrastination problems are children who grew up with unusually high expectations placed on them. Their older siblings may have been high achievers, leaving big shoes to fill, or their parents may have had neurotic and inhuman expectations of their own, or else they exhibited exceptional talents early on, and thereafter “average” performances were met with concern and suspicion from parents and teachers."

David Cain, “Procrastination Is Not Laziness”

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no. 261

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no. 260

"Remember: It costs nothing to encourage an artist, and the potential benefits are staggering. A pat on the back to an artist now could one day result in your favorite film, or the cartoon you love to get stoned watching, or the song that saves your life. Discourage an artist, you get absolutely nothing in return, ever."

Kevin Smith

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no. 259

"Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you."

Carl Jung

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no. 258

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no. 257

Louis CK

no. 256

"Because that’s the thing about Scooby-Doo: The bad guys in every episode aren’t monsters, they’re liars.
I can’t imagine how scandalized those critics who were relieved to have something that was mild enough to not excite their kids would’ve been if they’d stopped for a second and realized what was actually going on. The very first rule of Scooby-Doo, the single premise that sits at the heart of their adventures, is that the world is full of grown-ups who lie to kids, and that it’s up to those kids to figure out what those lies are and call them on it, even if there are other adults who believe those lies with every fiber of their being. And the way that you win isn’t through supernatural powers, or even through fighting. The way that you win is by doing the most dangerous thing that any person being lied to by someone in power can do: You think."

Ask Chris #81: Scooby-Doo and Secular Humanism

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no. 255

"Why Are Beauty Contestants Getting Harder Questions Than Politicians?"

Pryme

Good question. The basis for his question here and here.