In Search of the Happiness Max

A Game of Pie

Fri, 24 May 2013 21:41:09 +0100

I have more rhubarb than the whole of Yorkshire*. So I’m looking for new things to do with it. Tonight I did this:

I’ve never made pie before, so it was an experiment in many ways. I like to think that this is the pie Pienerys Piegaryen would eat.

*which is technically impossible as I live in yorkshire, so the sum of rhubarb in my allotment forms a part of the total rhubarb contained in Yorkshire, but that’s not the point. I have a lot of rhubarb, that’s the point.

thedoctor-wearsconverse: hiddlesbatchlove: lokis-taking-gallifr...

Fri, 24 May 2013 18:01:23 +0100

thedoctor-wearsconverse:

hiddlesbatchlove:

lokis-taking-gallifrey:

cantgeddynuffofdatass:

wouldulikeajellybaby:

THIS MADE ME START HYPERVENTILATING which is really ironic

that was fucking terrifying

your tension has been exterminated

EXTERMINATED

THIS IS THE GREATEST THING EVER

Bless you, geekdom.

thearcanetheory: anarcho-queer: Elderly Pakistani Man Stabbed...

Fri, 24 May 2013 16:12:25 +0100

thearcanetheory:

anarcho-queer:

Elderly Pakistani Man Stabbed To Death After Leaving Mosque In Birmingham

A 75-year-old man stabbed to death yards from his home may have been targeted in a racially motivated attack, according to police.

Mohammed Saleem, who used a walking stick, was stabbed three times in the back as he returned home from prayers at his local mosque in Small Heath, Birmingham, on Monday night.

The blows were struck with such violence they penetrated to the front of his body.

The father of seven also had no defensive wounds in what has been described as a swift, vicious and cowardly attack by the man leading the murder investigation, Detective Superintendent Mark Payne of West Midlands police.

Officers want to trace a white man, aged 25-32, of medium height and build, spotted on CCTV footage running near the scene of the attack around the time it happened, just before 10.30pm.

Police also want to trace a seven-seat people carrier captured on CCTV, driving near the mosque with the two male occupants, both white and in their 30s, who are considered “significant witnesses”.

In an emotional family appeal on Thursday, two of Saleem’s daughters, Shazia Khan, 45, and Nazia Maqsood, 44, called for the attackers to hand themselves in. They tearfully described their father as a “widely respected member of the community” and “much-loved”.

my heart breaks for him and his family

What is happening to our society.

theplaceinsidetheblizzard: waltdisneyconfessions: “I wish...

Fri, 24 May 2013 13:34:05 +0100

theplaceinsidetheblizzard:

waltdisneyconfessions:

“I wish Disney would make a movie where the “damsel in distress” is saved by her best friend and not by a prince. Because not all happily ever afters involve a man.”

There’s a great Scottish fairy story called “Kate Crackernuts” where the main character rescues not only her step-sister (and best friend) from a spell that’s been put on her but also rescues the Prince (and heir to the throne) from the clutches of the Fairies. She manages to do so because she’s clever and witty and resourceful and brave and the Prince that she rescues falls in love with her because she is all these things, not because of her looks (her sister is considered by far the most beautiful of the two).

It’s definitely one of my favorite fairy stories and would make a really good Disney film, though the happily ever after bit does involve a man so it kind of falls down on that aspect.

I really need a Kate Crackernuts film now. This sounds awesome.

Also: her name is CRACKERNUTS.

cutlerish: oddspeakandco: iampunkassbetch: I can’t. Holy shit...

Fri, 24 May 2013 08:18:58 +0100

cutlerish:

oddspeakandco:

iampunkassbetch:

I can’t. Holy shit I just can’t

MY SCHOOL DID THE JEOPARDY MUSIC THING

So did mine.

All schools should co that, OMG.

librarinerd: And Susana Polo over at The Mary Sue said that he looks like a cat being bathed, so...

Fri, 24 May 2013 08:15:08 +0100

librarinerd:

And Susana Polo over at The Mary Sue said that he looks like a cat being bathed, so here:

(BTTC from Team Coco; wet cat from tresmeow)

edwardspoonhands: If you haven’t watched all million hours of...

Fri, 24 May 2013 08:13:26 +0100

edwardspoonhands:

If you haven’t watched all million hours of vlogbrothers videos, this is the kind of shit you’re missing.

So by the way....

Fri, 24 May 2013 08:09:03 +0100

librarinerd:

I’m new to actually doing anything on tumblr besides search for funny GIFs. If you see me breaking some of the insanely complex rules of Tumblr etiquette please tell me as I probably have no clue. I mean, as a librarian I will always cite my sources but apparently there are right and wrong ways of doing that on here…? So just pretend I’m twice your age (probably true) and going soft in the head (debatable) and explain it to me like I’m two…

I’m not aware of correct or incorrect ways of citing sources, so long as you do where possible.

People get het up if you ‘repost’ (copy a post and post as your own, or reblog and remove the original blogger’s name) rather than reblogging, or if you cut off someone’s watermark (deliberate attempts to remove citation). But all of that kind of takes deliberate effort to be a poo.

If you’re not reblogging, but rather have gone off and found a gif that you’ve copied into your post, it’s better to indicate where you got it from, but it doesn’t really matter how you do so. I tend to just make the image a link to the original, but you can also put a hyperlink in text below it - people often do it like this ‘(x)’, but nobody will mind if you do it some other way. This can also be better if the image is large and so people will want to click to enlarge it without leaving the page.

Sometimes you won’t be able to find who originaly made the gif. On the whole, people won’t mind if the gif is basically just an image from a TV show with nothing original about the way it was made - it’s copyrighted material after all. Some people might get arsey about that, but I find it hard to feel the ire. You can do a reverse image search on Google by clicking the camera thingy and either pasting in the URL or uploading the file. Although, for popular gifs this often doesn’t really help, as you just get reams of posts of other people posting it.

Reposting and deliberately claiming something as your own that you didn’t make are the real issues, and if you’re not an actual asshat you won’t do that anyway.

The Problem with 'Boys Will Be Boys'

Thu, 23 May 2013 19:16:36 +0100

The Problem with 'Boys Will Be Boys':

For months, every morning when my daughter was in preschool, I watched her construct an elaborate castle out of blocks, colorful plastic discs, bits of rope, ribbons and feathers, only to have the same little boy gleefully destroy it within seconds of its completion.

No matter how many times he did it, his parents never swooped in BEFORE the morning’s live 3-D reenactment of “Invasion of AstroMonster.” This is what they’d say repeatedly:

“You know! Boys will be boys!”

“He’s just going through a phase!”

“He’s such a boy! He LOVES destroying things!”

“Oh my god! Girls and boys are SO different!”

“He. Just. Can’t. Help himself!”

I tried to teach my daughter how to stop this from happening. She asked him politely not to do it. We talked about some things she might do. She moved where she built. She stood in his way. She built a stronger foundation to the castle, so that, if he did get to it, she wouldn’t have to rebuild the whole thing. In the meantime, I imagine his parents thinking, “What red-blooded boy wouldn’t knock it down?”

She built a beautiful, glittery castle in a public space.

It was so tempting.

He just couldn’t control himself and, being a boy, had violent inclinations.

She had to keep her building safe.

Her consent didn’t matter. Besides, it’s not like she made a big fuss when he knocked it down. It wasn’t a “legitimate” knocking over if she didn’t throw a tantrum.

His desire — for power, destruction, control, whatever- - was understandable.

Maybe she “shouldn’t have gone to preschool” at all. OR, better if she just kept her building activities to home.

I know it’s a lurid metaphor, but I taught my daughter the preschool block precursor of don’t “get raped” and this child, Boy #1, did not learn the preschool equivalent of “don’t rape.”

Not once did his parents talk to him about invading another person’s space and claiming for his own purposes something that was not his to claim. Respect for her and her work and words was not something he was learning. How much of the boy’s behavior in coming years would be excused in these ways, be calibrated to meet these expectations and enforce the “rules” his parents kept repeating?

There was another boy who, similarly, decided to knock down her castle one day. When he did it his mother took him in hand, explained to him that it was not his to destroy, asked him how he thought my daughter felt after working so hard on her building and walked over with him so he could apologize. That probably wasn’t much fun for him, but he did not do it again.

There was a third child. He was really smart. He asked if he could knock her building down. She, beneficent ruler of all pre-circle-time castle construction, said yes… but only after she was done building it and said it was OK. They worked out a plan together and eventually he started building things with her and they would both knock the thing down with unadulterated joy. You can’t make this stuff up.

Take each of these three boys and consider what he might do when he’s older, say, at college, drunk at a party, mad at an ex-girlfriend who rebuffs him and uses words that she expects will be meaningful and respecte, “No, I don’t want to. Stop. Leave.”

The “overarching attitudinal characteristic” of abusive men is entitlement.

Very, very important reading. Even if you think you already know this.

Wine, Women and The Hedgehog Song: This IS my home, you racist swine

Thu, 23 May 2013 18:59:52 +0100

Wine, Women and The Hedgehog Song: This IS my home, you racist swine:

illogicalvolume:

scots-politics:

TALAT YAQOOB is many things – feminist, hilarious, cheese aficionado. Oh, and Asian, which isn’t big deal until the media mobilises to reiterate (however well-intentioned) the apparent ‘otherness’ of the non-white population. You know, like it did yesterday.

I rarely notice that I’m Asian.

That might sound odd, but it’s true. I think it comes from the privileged position of being around certain groups of people, often those who work in equality and the third sector, like me. I don’t generally take note of my skin colour, which has been called a “caramel coating” by someone once, I assume in a loving nature… Recently, I went into a tanning salon because I needed change to park my car, and everyone stared. It took me a couple of seconds to realise why. At which I pointed at myself and said “I know, I’m just addicted to these beds, this is my third time this week” So comfortable am I with my caramel coating, that I can have a little fun with it.

But there are those occasions where I am reminded of my race and my heritage, and unfortunately, almost always these reminders are in the bleakest of circumstances. My earliest memory of this is the few times I witnessed my dad wash racist graffiti off his shop wall. “Go home”. I didn’t really understand it – this is the place where I gorged on 1p sweets while my dad worked. Trust me, I was at home. But after it was explained to me, I remember feeling shaken and speechless. In later years at school, or in the street, it still happened, especially after the horrific 9/11 attacks, but I know I have encountered it more rarely and less severely than others.

Read More

Good piece, worth reading as a counter-balance to the sensationalist take on yesterday’s events that was shared by racists and media outlets alike.

Which is to say: fuck the BNP, the EDL, Richard Dawkins and anyone else who saw this brutal murder as nothing more than a confirmation of their hateful beliefs about (and/or an opportunity to stir up violence against) Muslims at home and abroad.

Richard Dawkins weighed in on this? He’s getting stranger and more frightening as time goes on.

"I’m absolutely down for defending the first-class status of genre fiction that boldly goes where no..."

Thu, 23 May 2013 06:00:38 +0100

“I’m absolutely down for defending the first-class status of genre fiction that boldly goes where no or few stories have gone before. But if you think that working science fiction and fantasy relieves you of your obligations to coherent plotting and character behavior, or if it’s an engine to deliver free naked ladies, then you can stay in your mom’s basement, and off my bandwagon.”

- Alyssa Rosenberg, in Damon Lindelof’s Blithe Treatment Of ‘Star Trek’ Sexism And Why Genre Fiction Gets No Respect (via themarysue)

The Place Inside The Blizzard: Going to be having talks with the Science Fiction and Fantasy Society...

Wed, 22 May 2013 19:26:57 +0100

The Place Inside The Blizzard: Going to be having talks with the Science Fiction and Fantasy Society...:

theplaceinsidetheblizzard:

Going to be having talks with the Science Fiction and Fantasy Society here at the University of York.

They run mini-conventions every term running over several days and York Feminists might run an evening event looking and Women and Feminism in Science Fiction.

My thoughts would be a talk and…

Weirded out by Tumblr bringing around conversations about a society I used to run (it’s changed a lot since then - I don’t go anymore).

There are loads of really good sci-fi/fantasy films to talk about from a feminist perspective.

Aliens would be an excellent choice, paired with a discussion of ‘Ellen Ripley Saved my Life’, by Sady Doyle. Ever After isn’t *strictly* fantasy, but trust me, they’ll count it. The Glass Slipper is also an interesting, feminist take on the Cinderella story, although very difficult to get hold of these days. Enchanted, again, is excellent. Terminator 2, obviously, for Sarah Connor. It’s not an unproblematic presentation, but it’s an interesting and powerful one.

But to bring it bang up to date I really can’t recommend Dredd highly enough. My review gives all the reasons I think it’s probably the most important film for feminism in a long time. In fact, I basically write a feminist SF&F review blog, so if you wanted to just look back through my film reviews you’d find some interesting stuff to work with.

You might also consider The Guild, by Felicia Day, as basically the show that launched short-format webseries. Her success as a female geek is a really interesting case study in itself, as is a show about geeks with a female protagonist and equally represented cast, genderwise, as well as good representation of people of colour, and disabled people.

thefrogman: Reading Allie Brosh’s latest post about depression...

Wed, 22 May 2013 18:41:52 +0100

thefrogman:

Reading Allie Brosh’s latest post about depression was extremely difficult for me. While it was amazing and truthful and beautifully done, I found my mouse pointer hovering to close the tab. I read the whole thing, but there were many times I just wanted to click the button and go look at kittens on the internet.

Her recent experience with depression very closely mirrors how I was many years ago. Before this blog. Before I knew I had a way to reach people and entertain them. My emotions stopped working. I found it impossible to care about anything. Especially myself. I would interact with people who expected me to be “funny comedy guy!” and at that point in time I thought that part of me was dead. But I didn’t want to disappoint anyone. So I tried very hard to pretend to be “funny comedy guy!” which resulted in some of the most horrific attempts at humor ever known to this earth.

I put on the faces I thought people wanted to see.

But I’ve worked hard to get my emotional self back. My journey through depression is further along than Allie’s. But being reminded of that time brought me to tears several times. In the end, I’m glad I didn’t close the tab. Reading her story helped remind me how far I’ve come. It reminded me how glad I am that I stuck around.

Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh [website | facebook | store]

There was something about that post, right?

People talk about depression a lot more than they used to. I talk about it. I talk about it a lot. Partly because there was a time when I didn’t talk about my emotions at all. I thought to do so would make me weak - and in the eyes of others it would have been. I was forever being told I was ‘over-sensitive’ as a young child, but nobody tried to teach me how to deal with those emotions. By adults I was told off, chastised; by children I was mocked and needled until I burst in often violent (and ineffectual) ways, which, for some reason, they found amusing.

But in between the time where my emotions exploded all over the place and the time when I talked about what I was feeling all the time, there was a very dark place. A place of gradually shutting my emotions down one by one. A place of making myself stone.

And that’s the place I never talk about. In part because it takes a lot of explaining, and people usually interupt me to talk about their own experiences before I’m done. But also because I associate that time with intense shame. The few times I tried, in my desperation, to talk about what I was feeling (or rather, what I was not) I was met with shock, disgust, and some really, deeply unpleasant verbal abuse.

People had always told me there was something wrong with me. Something weird. Something odd. Something Not Normal. And I had always believed they were wrong. But then something really was wrong, and I knew it, and when I tentatively reached out for help I wasn’t merely mocked or told off - the responses were much more intense.

So, I talk about depression, but mostly I talk about my current depression. I gave up trying to talk about that time. The dark time. The time I’m still not really sure how I got out of, except that there was a considerable amount of will and determination in the face of the absence of hope, and first college, and then university allowed me to physically escape from my tormentors.

I think that’s why so many people have responded so strongly to that specific post. Because it deals with a part of depression we don’t talk about much. The part we feel shame for, because the people who have never experienced depression around us really don’t understand it. And when you try to explain it to them they really do think there’s something deeply wrong with you. And that’s the last thing a depressed person needs or wants to hear - the thing that confirms all their worst fears and beliefs about themselves.

But Allie’s post is an incredible baring of that part of depression. Suddenly we can all share and talk about this thing. This aspect of depression that is perfectly normal for people who are depressed.

And I don’t know how to measure how important that is; it just is.

NICE. Gutsy, awesome, AND handsome.

Wed, 22 May 2013 18:17:11 +0100

NICE. Gutsy, awesome, AND handsome.

Game of Thrones S03: My Understanding so...

Wed, 22 May 2013 13:56:36 +0100

Game of Thrones S03: My Understanding so Far

Accurate.

(Although I have tried and failed to interpret the second word in the second sentence of the first panel.

Onion blossoms are the best thing we don’t have in the UK.

Wed, 22 May 2013 12:01:03 +0100

Onion blossoms are the best thing we don’t have in the UK.

twbasketcase: HAHAHAHA /saving Excellent.

Wed, 22 May 2013 12:01:03 +0100

twbasketcase:

HAHAHAHA /saving

Excellent.

Poetry Makes Nothing Happen: Thoughts on Ai Weiwei from the...

Wed, 22 May 2013 11:34:19 +0100

Poetry Makes Nothing Happen: Thoughts on Ai Weiwei from the Indianapolis Museum of Art (by vlogbrothers)

Modern Art can be beautiful, heart-breaking, and important.

If you don’t get it, that’s fine, but don’t assume that it’s a joke or a con just because it neither appeals, nor says, anything to you. This analysis from vlogbrothers is worth your time.

cumaeansibyl: Ruby Rhod is one of my favorite characters in...

Wed, 22 May 2013 10:00:49 +0100

cumaeansibyl:

Ruby Rhod is one of my favorite characters in sci-fi ever because he is Luc Besson’s vision of the hetero sex symbol of the future: a flamboyant, emotionally labile man who wears skin-tight leopard print or decks himself in roses, a man who accessorizes with big jewelry and dabbles in cosmetics. And the ladies love him. Everything about him screams “gay” according to our stereotypes, but he’s portrayed as a 100% straight sexual dynamo.

Besson is one of the few directors I’ve seen who actually recognizes that our ideas of sexuality and gender performance might have changed drastically in the future

Yeah, I really liked this, too. The equation of ‘gay’ with ‘camp’ seems to be only increasing, but there’s no reason to think that camp is a necessary or sufficient condition for being gay.

Mind you, I’m not sure we know that he’s played straight rather than bi. I don’t remember him saying he’s not interested in men - we only see him sleep with women, but he does surround himself with good looking, coiffed gentlemen. Nevertheless, we can take the point that being a successful ladies man does not have to involve machismo, independently of whether you also have a way with the gents.

My ascension is 0.001% complete!

Wed, 22 May 2013 07:59:19 +0100

I have hit 100 followers!

I’m not sure what’s wrong with you all that you find me interesting enough to have bumbling around on your dash, but thank you for your continued attention!