Trans Huey Long

The last star of the silent film era died yesterday at 101.  Diana Serra Cary started in films when she was 19 months old, as “Baby Peggy.” Like a lot of other child stars she was exploited, overworked, supported her entire family with her earnings, was considered “washed up” before she was 10 and was left with nothing as an adult. At 17 she ran away from home, knowing that her parents wanted her to work in films forever and she needed a way out. 

She eventually married an artist, opened a bookstore, and became an author and historian. Her 1978 nonfiction book Hollywood’s Children traced the exploitation of child actors from the 1800s onward. She also released Whatever Happened to Baby Peggy? a memoir of her child star years, pulling no punches on the abuse she suffered at the hands of her parents, directors and studios, who put her to work eight hours a day, six days a week and had her doing her own stunts before she was five. This scene here, from The Darling of New York? Not special effects. They actually put this small child in a burning room and she almost didn’t get out because they accidentally fired all the doors and windows. In 2011 a documentary about her, The Elephant in the Room, was released. She released her last book, a novel, at the age of 100.  She never got a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. She’s not remembered much in film histories. But she was one of the pioneers, and with her, the last of the silent era stars is gone. 

Gorgeous thread this morning on Twitter by @jeffreymarsh!

A few more:

We’ve always been here

We will always be here

Fast boy

(via)

Vincent Price and Carol Ohmart - The House on Haunted Hill (1959) dir. William Castle

I've been having a lot of feelings about the downfall of quality lately.

I ordered a pair of Dickies pants because pants are hard and workwear is usually reliable. When they arrived they were the scratchiest, most papery material--I can't actually call it fabric in good faith--and fit a full three sizes too small. A week later I found the same pair in a thrift store, dated 2017. These are actual pants. They fit, they're not made of asbestos. They're only separated by time.

There's no wood used in interior design unless it's a custom build. I have a set of wealthy relatives who live in a condo. The downpayment for it was likely more money than I will see in my lifetime. The floors and the cabinets are all still laminate. I know I will never see real wood in a building constructed after 2000. Every "apartment hack" I see online has this very conspicuous, flat appearance because of all the paint and contact paper required to make these builds look personal in any way. The only natural materials are in the furnishings.

I've been harping on this for years, but everything is shit, nothing is designed to work, and "growth" and "profit" are just euphemisms for cutting corners until things are unworkable.

everything is more expensive, and everything is getting shittier.

it's a good thing humans aren't more sexually dimorphic as a species. anglerfish gender dysphoria would be absurd 😞

the other thing about the common narrative about the Library of Alexandria is that people talk about the "lost knowledge" and how we'd be "exploring the stars" or curing all disease if it hadn't burned down & there's something to be said, i suppose, for having more of a foundation, but if anything was lost it's literary and historical sources (even if, had they survived the rot in the library, they'd made it all the way down to us, which is not a given) - more of the three famous Athenian playwrights! complete works by historians we only currently have fragments of! more mediocre popular novels!

but none of that stuff, which i would give an eye-tooth to have, is what people talk about, because the mere fact that books of ancient science were lost allows them to become Lost Ancient Knowlege that is somehow more advanced than the works directly before them or after them, through the mystical transmutation of Potential.

elon musk is literally like a parody. like he cant genuinely fucking be like this like bro is on some satirical depiction of a spoiled rich kid type shit. like hes a cartoon evil rich guy. throwing tantrums bc someone criticized him or said they didnt like him. spending billions of dollars to buy an app and then changing the app every time someone uses a feature of the app to insult him or hurt his feefees. dude straight up does the cartoon steam blowing out of ears train whistle shit irl every time someone says anything mean to him or is transgender but whats terrifying is he has enough money to do anything he wants and millions of chuds who would gladly no homo suck his cock every night before he goes to bed. like. how has someone come to be like this. why has this been allowed to happen why was he created

i think most rich guys are actually more like elon than they aren't, they all have simpering fanclubs online but enough haters to keep them up at night. i've seen a good half-dozen "richest man in X country" instagram accounts litigating their personal beef with some obscure shitposter who won't stop trolling them. they run the world but everyone doesn't love them so they're not happy

this is the richest guy in africa and his mortal enemy, a bored brazilian man

I love and respect you Osvaldo12

thinking about how the Iliad opens with Chryses unsuccessfully supplicating Agamemnon for the return of his living daughter, and ends with Priam successfully supplicating Achilles for the return of his dead son. and if we're willing to read Iphigenia into the Iliad (which Thomas Nelson convincingly argues we should be), this means we have Chryses begging for the return of his daughter from a man who has murdered his own daughter, and Priam begging for the return of his dead son from a man who is, for all intents and purposes, another man's dead son

Cute Halloween Art 🎃👻

Super fucked up! wtf is wrong with these people?  #IamWithMili!

What is every little girl supposed to have long hair in a ponytail? So happy to see all of the support going her way.

Everybody remembers that we absolutely knew this would happen, right?

Like, trans people predicted this from the start. Everyone was SO SURE they could identify us on sight, and we said “If you run with that assumption you’re going face-first into a goddamn wall” and here we go.

It’s like people forget women with short hair exist.

In the six years that this has happened, Milli has continued to play soccer, is on track for joining a national team, and still keeps her hair short.

Read this and take it in.

Even if you have your papers.

Even if you are fortunate to have your gender match your sex.

Even if you were assigned feminine at birth.

They can still tell you to your face you’re not a woman if you don’t conform to a patriarchal standard of skinny Anglo with long hair.

They can just deny you for no reason at all.

THIS MAKES ALL THOSE SPORTS BANS LAWS USELESS AT PROTECTING CIS GIRLS! The very thing tbey were supposed to do!

Let’s get one thing right.

Sports bans, bathroom bans, ANY type of ban on trans people in public places were NEVER meant to protect cis girls or women or women’s sports or any of that crap.

They’re about control and forcing ALL people to conform to stereotypical gender norms and eradicating trans people in the process.

It’s (christo)fascism and genocide.

I have thoughts about the whole feminist anti-interrupting thing. Like I agree, men do talk over people and it is disrespectful, but I also think there are cultures, specifically Jews, where talking over each other is actually a sign of being engaged in the conversation. It’s something I really struggle with in the south, because up in New York, even non-Jews participated in this cooperative conversation style, but down here, whenever I do it by accident, the whole convo stops and it gets called out and it’s a whole thing. Idk idk I feel like there’s different types of interruptive like there’s constructive interrupting where you add on to whatever is being said - helpful interrupting, and then there’s like interrupting where you just start saying something unrelated because you were done listening. I have ADHD so I’ve def done the latter too by accident, but I’m talking about being more accepting of the former.

I think a lot of the social mores leftists enforce around communication tend to be very white. Like Jews are not the only group of people that have distinct communication styles. Like the enforcement of turn-based communication, not raising your voice (not just in anger but also in humor or excitement), etc. it’s always interesting that the most pushback I get about how I communicate come from white people (mostly women actually, white men just give me patronizing looks because they don’t feel like they can call me out in same way). Like I’ve been teaching these workshops, and a few of them have been primarily black people, and I’ve noticed black people will also engage in cooperative interrupting (and I love it!). This isn’t a developed thought and I welcome feedback. Idk I think there should be space in leftist organizing for more diverse communication styles.

Here’s a source:

As a linguist: overlapping talk is not the same thing as an interruption!

An interruption is specifically intended to stop another person from speaking so you can take over. Other reasons that talk might overlap:

The norms around these kinds of overlaps vary -- by context (we all use more audible backchannel on the phone; an interview is not a sermon is not a casual chat), by culture, and yes, by gender, which is why it’s a feminist issue. But gender doesn’t exist in a vaccuum! Some reasons overlaps might be mis-interpreted as interruptions when they’re not intended to be:

Norms around conversation tend to be super white/Western/male/NT; even among linguists, the way we talk about analyzing talk usually presupposes discrete turns, with one person who “has the floor” and everyone else listening. It even gets coded into our technology -- I thing the account’s gone private, but someone recently tweeted, “For the sake of my wife’s family, Zoom needs to incorporate an ‘ashkenazi jewish’ checkbox” because the platform is programmed to try to identify a “main speaker” and auto-mute everyone else. Most of the progress on this front in linguistics has been pushed by Black women and Jewish women, or else we’d probably still be acting like Robert’s Rules represent the natural expression of human instincts.

And it’s very White Feminism to recognize how conversations styles have disparate impacts across gender lines without also recognizing other axes along which conversation styles vary, once that empower us as well as oppress us. Just because I feel interrupted doesn’t mean I am interrupted, and it definitely doesn’t mean I have the right to scream “EVERYBODY SHUT UP!!” until I’m the only one talking.

I don’t ... have a great way to end this? Just that it’s good to recognize competing needs in communication, and have some humility and intentionality about whose needs gets prioritized and how.

Another thing; as someone who expects overlap because of my cultural upbringing, when someone doesn't overlap me I just start looping and repeating myself because I'm waiting for them to interrupt and they're "politely" waiting for me to finish speaking.

Okay nobody ever put that into words but the looping is exactly what I do in therapy - I should tell my therapist about this so I don’t need to say the same thing over and over again lol

The evil opposite of folks bending over backwards to declare that Taylor Swift is secretly gay or an "honorary lesbian" or whatever in order to justify enjoying her music is folks expressing amazement that this or that obviously straight musical artist could produce work that's so resonant with the LGBT experience, and then you look up the "obviously straight" artist in question and they're openly bisexual.

dr who is so crazy imagine your species goes extinct except for two theater kids who call themselves The Orthodontist and the Administrator and they just go around causing problems and destroying your entire culture's reputation

did you hear about the ancient race of enchanted elves? they fell into the darkness of their own hubris. anyway that over there is the two survivors, Wiz and da Boss, who are only taking breaks from kicking each other in the nuts to make out

at the risk of sounding like a raving lunatic, i think one of my favorite trekkie memes/posts is that one where someone comments on a screenshot of tos and asks if sulu is texting, because it PERFECTLY encapsulates star trek's strange little place at the intersection of pop culture and the tech world:

like listen... 55+ years ago a bunch of actors had to use a mix of existing habits and wild imagination to come up with what they felt would be believable movements and muscle-memory for someone using completely unbelievable tech a few hundred years in the future. like tv had less than ten channels and the screen was a foot across, and they had to go "ok how would someone who's used to a tiny wireless gadget with a screen hold it and use it? how would they talk to a computer? how would the computer sound when she talked back?"

and over half a century later our own tech has surpassed the clunky retrofuture gizmos in so many ways, no doubt inspired by it, that now someone two decades into the 21st century sees an actor in the 60s holding some tiny rectangular plastic prop in both hands and immediately recognizes it as "oh, sulu's texting!" now THAT is a called shot. hell, that's putting your money on a roulette wheel in a casino that hasn't been built yet. i LOVE it. it's so star trek. sulu is absolutely texting.

It never occurred to me until now, listening to @re-dracula and hearing only the doomed pleading and final cry, that Dracula really doesn’t take the time to waste words on any of the Demeter’s sailors. He’s been picking these men off one and two at a time, maybe idling long enough for a few entertaining scares in the dark, before taking his fill and disposing of the leftovers in the sea. Pick, pick, pick, with not so much as a line to spare for his victims about why.

Why are you doing this to us? Why do this to all of us?

People have commented before about Dracula following foolish gluttony and endangering himself on a crewless ship…but the weather proves, as it did last year, that it’s only half true. Dracula owns the weather. The storm and fog are his. He can steer the vessel into England’s shore with or without a man at the wheel now. Everyone aboard is free game to him.

So he will devour everyone, indulging in full. But none of these men are what Jonathan was, or what Dracula’s prospective new conscriptions-to-be in England will be. Those are projects. Quarries to collect. The sailors are no more or less than cattle to him and he carves through them with all the personal interest of a butcher. Why?

Because he wants to. Because he can. And that’s all the impetus he needs.

recipe makers NEED to stop framing vegan food as “healthy food” and assuming that the vegan cook/eater requires caloric and macronutrient breakdowns on every recipe or food review. fixating on notions of “health” (read: weight loss) when it comes to veganism not only nullifies the ethical commitment the lifestyle implies but also assigns a new, wildly unethical and dangerous social imperative of body punishment instead. this creates a deadly environment for vegans with EDs, as well as others whose class/disability/ etc contexts require them to consume processed foods.

The imbrication of contemporary “plant based” culture with diet culture/antifatness is stripping bodily autonomy from marginalized people who want to follow their ethical commitments, but cannot do so without putting their lives in danger.

EXACTLY! veganism is not about weight loss. it is not about starvation. it is not about restriction. it is not about thinness.

& I want fat vegans, vegans healing from eds, vegans who mostly eat “junk food”, vegans who eat instant meals, vegans who are gaining weight / want to gain weight, to know: I love you so fucking much and you are doing awesome!!

as vegans, our goal is to improve our individual & collective relationships with other living things, and, through the minimization of harm + maximization of active compassion, create the ecological conditions for truly collective, multispecies liberation from all systems of hierarchy and oppression.

this praxis starts within. It is incompatible with a worldview that celebrates restriction, one that promotes hierarchical visions of “health” and “beauty” as social status markers. we have the opportunity to reimagine the world with care and intention. to cook and eat toward that purpose (how cool is that!!). don’t make the mistake of equating our political orientation with reactionary pro-diet, anti-care politics.