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mr-kamiyama · 4 years

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A Word for Zoomers Who're Told They're "Making Up" Genders and Orientations.

I'm an Xer.

Well, actually I'm in that b.1977-85 throe where no two people can agree what I am. I'm Post Dankai Junior in the old country, but I was too old to be a kid for Pokémon, Harry Potter, I caught Digimon 02 during its premiere US run a rare Saturday the firm I worked at, that normally had Saturday hours, was closed. I met Windows Millennium Edition because a housemate, as back then, I'd realised I wanted to live with company, wanted to upgrade our computer to the newest version of Windows (and I promptly made AMVs using GIFs and lost them to the sands of time all before YouTube even existed) So that gives you an idea of my age.

I came out for the first time in high school. I came out as bi.

In Japan, transness, like here had different words we no longer use, but unlike here, wasn't a secret.

If I'd stayed in Japan just one more year, in '95 politician Kamikawa Aya began advocating on NHK for trans rights.

Maybe I'd've learned that transition *to* male and actual medical treatment like HRT to make that possible existed a whole lot sooner.

But I didn't. And so, I didn't realise it was actually something I could *do* and I wasn't doomed to be stuck until about 2010.

I claimed "bi" in the '90s, and mistook "you're a really cool person and really nice to me when few people are and so I really like you in a platonic sense" +aesthetic attraction for crushes of a romantic and sexual nature.

The SAM model was developed by bi people in the '70s, but where and when I was, there weren't exactly highly visible LGBT centres where I could learn this. So I thought any orientation had to be "x-sexual"

And I only knew about straight, gay/lesbian, and bi.

Which, the term "laaaaaaaabelllls" was coined by biphobic people my age. See, we weren't like people today, who literally can't live because of unfettered crony capitalism. You could get a nice studio on the nice side of town for eight days' work at minimum wage (of course, being POC, you had to find the right realtor), which back then was under four dollars an hour. You could get a 2br/1.5ba rowhouse for about two weeks' worth, which is half a month, but these days, that much work will get you a barely-studio in shoot-you-in-the-face-in-broad-daylight territory.

But we were still plenty suspicious of marketing. So queerphobic Xers went "don't make me acknowledge your filthy non-mono sexuality! What if I told you naming what you are is dehumanising, like labelling a jar of mayo, and you're the product!"

Which is no different that queerphobic Millennials claiming "Queer is a slur uwu call it gay because cisgay and cishet are the only valid IDs uwu Gay has never ever been used as a pejorative uwu"

Which is also bunk because back in the '90s, if one young man did ANYTHING another didn't like, the other one could call it and him "gaaayyy" and that would be a homophobic attack via toxic masculinity on the first young man. Heck, I don't listen to much grunge, though I did at the time, but it's used this way in some Nirvana song. I just can't remember which one.

Anyway, so I claimed bi and spent the next 23 or so years fighting for it even against physical violence to make me claim something in the false straight/gay binary

All along, I thought "the mushy stuff squicks me because I'm a guy (insert ways I justified things before I realised that yes, I actually am male for prior to 2010)" which, yeah, I'm still sorting through the myriad manifestations of toxic masculinity and learning to spot them. What that actually is is romance repulsion.

I'm actually aroace.

To go further, I actually have very strong platonic affection feelings, and "idemromantic" is not necessarily my actual identity, but that, and at least some idea, if even wrong, that the other party was interested, was how I sorted whether I should approach the other person as "friend" or "potential partner" subconsciously.

Plus to further complicate things, I'm sex-favourable ace/cupiosexual, which meant that just hearing limited definitions of things like sex repulsion in aces didn't clue me in. It wasn't until discussing what sexual attraction was with a newly-realised gay first wave Xer last year that I realised I had no idea what that was and had never felt it, and was therefore asexual. Which after the discussion with that guy, I dove into readings by you all on Tumbler first.

And I only realised I'm aromantic last month, though I've been questioning for actually a year this month.

Now, I'd say my aesthetic attraction is definitely bi, and yes, I accept the redefinition made with the info we have now of two or more genders including your own" which *I read* as "but not necessarily all genders, and perceived gender is a factor" whereas pan seems to me like "perceived gender is not a factor in attraction" ??

Now, I still actually don't have an idea about my potential aesthetic feelings towards people who present NB. The men and women I feel it towards tend to have this or that decidedly masculine or feminine traits, and I may never, because people my age are less likely to come out.

Whether orientation or gender, people my age are products of a very binary 20th century. We were really all sorts of shape pegs, but many of us were and still are dodecahedrons and whatnot with choices of only square, circle, and mayyybe triangle holes.

Naturally, the dodecahedrons and the hexagons all tried to jam themselves in circle and square holes, whichever ones it looked like we could maybe wedge into.

This means plenty of us are going around thinking things like "I guess I don't like sex because I'm a woman" or "I guess I don't like the mushy stuff because I'm a man" or "I don't feel female so I guess I'm a man because I'm AMAB and that's all I got" etc.

Those most likely to come out are those with very strong NB/aro/ace feelings WHO BECOME INFORMED. And some may still not, or those with feelings they can't sort, because they've lived so long the previous way, they may at least feel they have too much to lose.

There's also people like me that need a lot of info to realise they were misreading their own feelings due to decades of amatonormative/heteronormative/binarist/toxic masculine brainwashing.

(I still don't like the term "toxic masculine" because I really want a term where we have more room to redefine "masculine" as decidedly masculine but wholly without the toxic stuff that's so married to "manliness," room to reject that stuff and revision manliness, but whatever)

THE REASON OLDER GENERATIONS DON'T HAVE THIS STUFF IS NOT BECAUSE YOU'RE INVENTING IT. IT IS BECAUSE OUR TIME DIDN'T ACKNOWLEDGE IT.

Yes, I think it's funny imaging how lost you'd be trying to use an 8-track player, or a library card catalogue actually made of index cards.

And had I not miscarried in December 2003 and had a sixteen year old, I'd have had them set up the internet TV device I got instead of three hours barely restraining myself from breaking it into pieces just like I was the only one who was able to figure out how to set the VCR clock and VCR+ timers when we got one when I was young. Which my difficulty with this stuff is more like a Boomer than an Xer. Most of my peers are pretty savvy. Sometimes my friends can tele-help me.

And I think new music,which I define as post-Y2K, stinks.

So I'm not hip and new. Plenty about me is just like your parents.

But no, you aren't making this up. And you're informing a lot of us. You're waking us up to how truly diverse humanity is. You're waking some of us up to who we really are.

And as for those of you who have crummy and even Karen parents, two things:

A. The Latino kids took me and the other Asian in in high school. There aren't many Asians in FL. (The "Another Chinese Family" bit on Fresh Off The Boat is so real) There are definitely some crummy Xers out there, and that's been true all along. There was even a right-wing youth org called "young republicans." There were Regean-loving racist queerphobes all along. They made my life miserable in high school, too.

B. There are also others like me that believe in you. That actually need you. You're bringing *back* a diversity that was smothered by colonial Europe. Historical precedent is actually on your side.

Thank you. I mean it. You're doing good, you're legit, and there are a lot of us who believe in you, too.

#nonbinary #gen z #aromanticism #asexuality #queer #gen x #xennial #the name for people in that weird throe the Boomer/X debated throe is Gen Jones they both have names #intergenerational stuff #diversity #long post #i said a word but more like a thesis www

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orbemnews · 3 years

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The Cost of Staying Quiet Now, a threat of boycotts Companies were quick to speak out during the racial justice protests last year, putting out statements of solidarity and posting black squares on Instagram. But after Georgia Republicans passed broad voting restrictions, Atlanta’s corporate giants have been much more muted — and activists are now talking boycotts, The Times’s David Gelles writes. Among the targets: Delta, which has publicly defended gay rights and said it stood with Black people after the police killings of George Floyd and others. But on the voting legislation, the airline has only issued a statement about a need for broader voter participation. It told employees that it had “engaged extensively” with lawmakers in creating the legislation, and that the measure had “improved considerably” during the process, though it noted that “concerns remain.” Coca-Cola, which pledged last summer to “invest our resources to advance social justice causes.” When it came to the recent bill, Coke said that it was aligned with local chambers of commerce, which also spoke mainly of increasing voter participation and avoided sharp criticism. (Late yesterday, Coke said it was “disappointed” in the new law, but added, “We don’t see this as the final chapter.”) “It’s not as though corporations are unwilling to speak powerfully about social justice issues,” Sherrilyn Ifill, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense, told David. Companies spoke out forcefully against bills on gender and bathroom access, even threatening to pull out of states like Indiana and, yes, Georgia. What changed? Companies may be shying away from political fights, after spending four years speaking out against the Trump administration. And the Georgia laws were spearheaded by mainstream Republicans, making executives less eager to cross lawmakers they may need on other issues. Ms. Ifill raised a provocative third potential reason. “Why is it that corporations that could speak so powerfully and unequivocally in opposition to discrimination against the L.G.B.T.Q. community and immigrants are not speaking as clearly about the disenfranchisement of Black people?” she said. “This is a race issue.” For activists, the next step is calling for boycotts on companies with big Georgia presences, including Coke, Delta, Home Depot and UPS. If “Coca-Cola wants Black and brown people to drink their product, then they must speak up when our rights, our lives and our very democracy as we know it is under attack,” Bishop Reginald Jackson of the African Methodist Episcopal Church told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. HERE’S WHAT’S HAPPENING The Suez Canal is clear. Now what? The 224,000-ton Ever Given was freed from the vital shipping passage days after being stuck, hindering global trade. After the celebrations will come two big questions: What happened, and how can the disruptions be sorted out? The Pfizer and Moderna vaccines show effectiveness in the real world. A new study found that a two-dose regimen prevented 90 percent of Covid-19 infections by two weeks after the second shot. But President Biden and the head of the C.D.C., Dr. Rochelle Walensky, urged Americans to maintain virus safety measures in the face of “impending doom” from a potential fourth wave of cases. The White House pushes for tax increases to pay for its infrastructure and jobs plan. As it rolls out its multitrillion-dollar spending initiative, the Biden administration is likely to call for about $3 trillion in new taxes, The Washington Post reports. President Tayyip Reccip Erdogan of Turkey fired another top central bank official. The removal of Murat Cetinkaya, a deputy governor, was announced with no explanation. It came 10 days after Mr. Erdogan fired the bank’s chief, setting off a sell-off in Turkey’s currency. The Supreme Court wonders what to do in an investor fraud lawsuit against Goldman Sachs. Justices noted that both sides agree that general statements about professional integrity could be the basis for a lawsuit, and that their positions had moved closer over the course of litigation. The bank mutiny that led to the Archegos fire sale As Wall Street reckoned with the fallout from the huge stock sales tied to Archegos Capital Management, one thing has become clear: Cooperation is not the finance industry’s strong suit. Archegos’ main lenders met on Thursday to discuss an orderly wind-down of the firm’s trades, according to The Wall Street Journal. The idea was to limit the damage from several banks dumping huge blocks of stock in ViacomCBS and other companies, potentially tanking prices and hurting their own balance sheets. You can guess what happened next. Credit Suisse and Morgan Stanley sold small amounts of stock after that meeting. But Goldman Sachs opened the floodgates the next day, quickly followed by Morgan Stanley. By market close, the two had sold nearly $20 billion worth of Archegos assets. That left Goldman and Morgan Stanley with relatively little damage to their businesses, while banks that didn’t move as quickly — notably Credit Suisse and Nomura — warned investors that they could suffer huge hits. As one banker involved told the FT, “The reality is in a fire sale, if you’re not first out the door you’re going to get burned.” What a SPAC believer thinks of SPAC mania Kevin Hartz, the founder of Eventbrite, believes in the value of SPACs: In February, his first SPAC (named “One”) acquired the industrial 3-D printing company Markforged in a $2.1 billion deal. His second blank-check fund — named “Two,” of course — raised $200 million yesterday. Still, he told DealBook that he believes some SPACs pose risks to retail investors. Below are edited excerpts from their conversation. On why S.E.C. scrutiny is needed: Because people are getting hurt. “For some millennial family to invest in a SPAC, or invest in a SPAC merger, and then see that crater is why we need the S.E.C. to be more involved here,” he said. What could happen next: Mr. Hartz pointed to the dot-com bubble as a warning: “We still kind of point to 1999, 2000 as an indicator of what SPACs will need to go through, unfortunately, and that is kind of extreme euphoria, followed by the reality of most losing money for investors.” On whom to blame if the SPAC boom busts: Some banks. “There’s a lot of low-quality banks that are just looking for the fees,” he said. Perhaps more troubling, he added, are weaker companies looking for SPAC deals. There is “a set of companies floating around that are not good companies that are looking to get SPACed and get their money out,” Mr. Hartz said. On who gets hurt when SPACs go wrong: Retail investors: “In a natural market, low-quality companies should naturally run out of cash,” Mr. Hartz said. “In this case, they get a big balance sheet there in the public market, have a liquid currency and can front-run retail investors.” On how to fix SPACs: “Lower the promote,” Mr. Hartz said, referring to the free stake that SPAC sponsors get, a setup that allows heady returns even if a target company’s stock plunges. Critics say that structure draws sponsors looking for a quick buck. Make sponsors hold their stakes for longer. “Then you’re not just leaving investors holding the bag,” he said. “You’re going to be part of that, too.” Urge more caution around financial projections. SPACs help younger businesses get access to otherwise limited public capital, he noted. But some companies are putting out unrealistic numbers: “That’s where it gets dangerous, because these companies will, say, project $2 billion of revenue in 2026 — and may not even ever produce one dollar of revenue.” A case against transparency? Demand for more visibility into corporations and governments has grown in recent years. Yet when it comes to the Supreme Court, some are resisting efforts to allow more sunlight into the institution, as demonstrated in the debate over a bipartisan bill that aims to televise the court’s proceedings. No Supreme Court hearing has ever been filmed, though Congress has been trying to get cameras in federal courts since 1937. Most state courts allow cameras, and some federal circuit courts permit video with limits. But Chief Justice John Roberts and the five other veterans on the bench have said they fear that the presence of cameras would transform oral arguments into showy performances. (The court’s three most recent appointees have said they would consider it.) Seeing arguments in “monumental cases” shouldn’t be a privilege of the few, said Senator Dick Durbin, the Democratic chairman of the Judiciary Committee, who is sponsoring the Sunshine in the Courtroom Act. Adding cameras “opens our democracy and gives millions of Americans a window into the room where decisions are made that have lasting effects for generations,” he told DealBook. Then again, the court has adapted during the pandemic, allowing live audio feeds of arguments. Justices may clamp down on the public’s access to the court when the pandemic lifts, but the tech precedent may make that more difficult. Want to see the Tubman $20 bill? Wait for it. On the first day of the Biden presidency, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, said that the Treasury Department was “taking steps to resume efforts” to put the abolitionist Harriet Tubman on the $20 bill. (“It’s important that our money reflects the history and diversity of our country,” Ms. Psaki said.) But it will probably be years before we see the Underground Railroad conductor gracing U.S. currency. The deadline for printing a new version of the $20 bill: 2030. It was set by an anti-counterfeiting committee in 2013, two years before Tubman won a campaign to replace President Andrew Jackson on the bill. “The primary reason currency is redesigned is for security against counterfeiting,” Lydia Washington, a representative for the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, told DealBook. “The redesign timeline is driven by security feature development.” The Obama administration said it would unveil a design “concept” by 2020, to coincide with the centennial of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. Extensive redesign work was reportedly done, but in 2019 President Trump’s Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, said the project would be delayed until at least 2026. (Insiders said they had always doubted that the 2020 deadline could be met). It turns out that the complex design and testing process for currency can’t be hurried. “No final images have been selected,” Ms. Washington said. (The Treasury Department did not respond to a request for comment). THE SPEED READ Deals Recent trades in the private markets reportedly valued ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, at more than $250 billion. (Bloomberg) The food service Deliveroo lowered the high end of valuation expectations for its forthcoming I.P.O., to £7.85 billion ($10.8 billion). (Reuters) Politics and policy Tech Best of the rest Goldman Sachs said its interns would work out of its offices this summer. (Bloomberg) If the minimum wage had grown at the same rate as Wall Street bonuses since 1985, workers would be paid $44 an hour today. (Insider) Take a peek at the potential offices of the future: hot desks, Zoom rooms and more. (NYT) We’d like your feedback! Please email thoughts and suggestions to [email protected]. Source link Orbem News #cost #Quiet #staying

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rdcharny · 4 years

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Another article on The Honorable Amy Barret

From Reuters on October 12, 2020

U.S. Supreme Court nominee Barrett has proven steadfastly conservative By

Andrew Chung & Lawrence Hurley

6 MIN READ

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Amy Coney Barrett, President Donald Trump’s U.S. Supreme Court nominee, has staked out conservative positions on key hot-button issues including abortion and gun rights as a federal appellate judge and legal scholar.

Abortion rights groups have voiced concern that Barrett, picked by Trump on Sept. 26 to replace the late liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, would vote to overturn the landmark 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion nationwide if confirmed by the Senate.

While a law professor at the University of Notre Dame, a Catholic institution in Indiana, Barrett in 2006 signed on to an advertisement in an Indiana newspaper calling for Roe v. Wade to be overturned.

“It’s time to put an end to the barbaric legacy of Roe v. Wade and restore law that protects the lives of unborn children,” the advertisement, purchased by an anti-abortion organization called St. Joseph County Right to Life, stated.

Barrett, whose Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing is scheduled to run from Monday through Thursday, is a devout Roman Catholic and a favorite of religious conservatives. Trump in 2016 promised to appoint justices who would overturn Roe v. Wade.

Barrett, 48, was appointed by Trump to the Chicago-based 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2017. She has proven reliably conservative in that post, voting in favor of one of Trump’s hardline immigration policies and showing support for expansive gun rights. She also authored a ruling making it easier for college students accused of campus sexual assaults to sue their institutions.

She has not yet ruled directly on abortion. But Barrett twice signaled opposition to rulings that struck down Republican-backed Indiana abortion-related restrictions - one in 2018 requiring fetal remains to be buried or cremated after an abortion, the other in 2019 involving parental notification for minors seeking an abortion - voting to have those decisions reconsidered.

In 2019, Barrett joined a ruling that upheld a Chicago measure that places limits on anti-abortion activists gathered outside abortion clinics. The ruling, written by Judge Diane Sykes, said the court had to apply Supreme Court precedent.

In a 1998 law journal article, she and another author said that Catholic judges who are faithful to their church’s teachings are morally precluded from enforcing the death penalty and should recuse themselves in certain cases. Barrett also has spoken publicly about her conviction that life begins at conception, according to a 2013 article in Notre Dame Magazine.

Barrett faced queries during her 2017 Senate confirmation hearing on her current judgeship over whether her Catholic faith would sway her decisions on the bench, a line of questioning that her defenders said revealed religious bigotry by Democrats.

Senator Dianne Feinstein told Barrett at the time: “The dogma lives loudly within you.” Barrett said her religious faith would not affect her judicial decisions.

GUN RIGHTS

Barrett indicated support for gun rights in a 2019 dissent when she objected to the court ruling that a nonviolent felon could be permanently prohibited from possessing a firearm, writing: “Founding-era legislatures did not strip felons of the right to bear arms simply because of their status as felons.”

She authored a ruling that revived a lawsuit by a male student who had been suspended from Purdue University in Indiana after being accused of sexual assault. He accused the school of discriminating against him on the basis of his gender. It was plausible, Barrett wrote, that Purdue officials chose to believe the female accuser “because she is a woman” and to disbelieve the male student accused “because he is a man.”

Barrett two decades ago served as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, a stalwart conservative who died in 2016, and said “the lessons I learned still resonate.”

“His judicial philosophy is mine too: A judge must apply the law as written. Judges are not policymakers, and they must be resolute in setting aside any policy views they might hold,” Barrett said at the White House ceremony where Trump announced her nomination.

Barrett is married to Jesse Barrett, a lawyer in private practice and a former federal prosecutor in Indiana. They have seven children, two of whom were adopted from Haiti. Barrett and her family have been members of a Christian religious group called People of Praise, according to other members.

Craig Lent, the group’s overall coordinator, said in 2018 that the organization, whose membership is mostly Catholic, centers on close Christian bonds and looking out for one another. The group’s members also share a preference for charismatic worship, which can involve speaking in tongues.

Certain leadership positions are reserved for men. And while married men receive spiritual and other advice from other male group members, married women depend on their husbands for the same advice, Lent said.

“We’re not unaware that could be misunderstood. Every member is free and responsible for their own decisions. No one should be servile, no one should be domineering,” Lent said.

Some women in leadership positions used to be called handmaids, but now are referred to as “women leaders,” Lent said, to avoid the perception of servility.

Reporting by Andrew Chung and Lawrence Hurley; Additional reporting by Téa Kvetenadze; Editing by Will Dunham

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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jjohnsonwriter · 4 years

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“The Children are Our Future”

“When is this going to stop!?” Elizabeth Psomas checked the volume of her bullhorn. “Sarah Cohn, a transgender classmate, was murdered; found dead in a ditch, and neither the police, nor this school’s administration have done anything about it!” The crowd forming around Elizabeth on Appian Way kept growing, and they listened in rapt attention. “It’s up to us; the student body, to police ourselves and create a safe space; an environment where we can all learn and thrive! Right now, every man, woman, and child on this campus, be they cisgender, trans, queer, gender non-binary, agender, genderfluid, or native American two-spirit, should feel unsafe!”

Her friend Sasha Stilton-Brown asked her, “Elizabeth, is it OK if I put down this soap box for you to stand on?” Elizabeth nodded, and Sasha replied, “I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to ask you to provide explicit verbal consent before I can put this soap box down in front of you, Elizabeth.”

“Thank you for asking for consent Sasha. And yes, it’s OK for you to put down the box.” She placed the REI™ pre-distressed, limited edition Soap-Box™ on the brick walkway. Elizabeth stepped up on the box to address the swelling crowd. “My fellow students, for too long have our transgender, gender non-binary, non-hetero, and other genderqueer classmates been bullied, harassed, assaulted, and now murdered!” The crowd started to cheer and shout in a mindless rabble of positive reinforcement. Some of the passing students kept on walking, while others joined the growing throng.

“I’m calling for justice against this horrendous murder; an end to the harassment and abuse, and a campus where we can all learn and work knowing the end of our journey through this institution will be graduation, not subjugation and death!” They cheered Elizabeth on, and she felt the will to effect change; to expand the rights of her peers, and to increase tolerance in society. She was not trans, but having grown up a cisgendered woman, she knew the struggle of inequality and being told what was and wasn’t your place. The dozens of students now gathered around Elizabeth cheered her on.

The mob clambered over one another to hear Elizabeth’s words over their shouts and cheers, “Let’s march down to the student senate, and demand action!” She shouted and raising her bullhorn into the air, the mob followed her down in Appian Way to the Curia, where the student senate met

In seconds the Elizabethan mob filled the Curia’s atrium past its maximum fire marshal regulated capacity of 75 occupants, and Elizabeth’s consigliere, Sasha Stilton-Brown asked her: “Elizabeth, may I knock on the door to the student senate’s office on your behalf?”

“Yes Sasha, please do that. Thank you so much!” She said with great mirth.

Sasha Stilton-Brown politely knocked on the door three times, waited a few seconds, and knocked again. “I don’t think anybody’s here right now.” She told her friend and LGBTQIA+ inclusive, intersectional feminist ally.

Elizabeth scratched her head. “Um, I’m just wondering, if maybe it wouldn’t upset anyone too much here, or trigger them, if we broke the door down?”

A young man from the crowd came forward and said “No, I wouldn’t be offended.”, but he was white, and from the looks of it cisgender, so they checked with some of the African-American kids, but they said that ‘African-American’ felt patronizing, and if you had to be so crass as to address their race directly, you should call them ‘black’, and that if you were going to write down the outdated and frankly somewhat racist historical phrase, then you wouldn’t use a hyphen, and that you would write it: ‘African American’, because a hyphen would actually imply that the person was someone born in Africa who had also gained American citizenship.

Feeling the room had reached a consensus, Elizabeth decided that they should all take turns running at the door, then kicking the handle in an attempt to break the door down. They agreed they had a right to do break down the door because without doing so they would feel more threatened by not addressing the campus’s social climate in the wake of the potential hate-crime murder of their transgender classmate.

They broke down the door to find the room where the student senate held their meetings completely empty. “Elizabeth?” Sasha asked her, with the 112 members of the mob standing behind them. “Um… I’m kind of getting the feeling like that maybe the student senate isn’t here right now?” She said, raising the pitch of her voice at the end of the sentence so everybody would know it was a question, and nobody would feel like, threatened, or like, triggered, because it was kind of a tense situation anyway, and they were all feeling a bit ‘on-edge’, which was the term they agreed to use rather than going straight to labeling themselves ‘triggered’, because they were worried that with tensions running so high one person labeling themselves as ‘triggered’ might cause a massive wave of them all labeling themselves as triggered, and they all decided mutually, as like a co-equal-partnership-type-thing, that they didn’t want to put a ‘label’ on it because they knew that some of the group might not want to be labeled, and they didn’t want to make anyone feel they had been ‘Othered’, especially in such a big group, with so much like, ‘revolutionary steam’ built up.

“Right, I’m also thinking that student senate might not be here right now.” Elizabeth said, and one of the nameless, faceless, and totally coequal and valid mob came forward holding a piece of paper which had been taped to the door they were trying to break down.

A cis white girl wearing a black dress approached Elizabeth and Sasha. “Hey guys, I just wanted to show you that there’s this sign that says the student senate is actually out for the day, do you think maybe it would be OK if we agreed to meet another day, and like, maybe table this whole ‘revolution’ thing until the student senate, or some body of representatives we can actually talk to that might actually want to listen to us-”

Then the mob realized a white, cisgender, heteronormatively gender-affirming dressed girl was making the point, so they started shouting the nameless, faceless cis white girl down, the angriest and most aggressive of which were actually white cis females themselves, and the totally co-equal mob stoned her with their epithets: “White Privilege!”, “Cis-Privilege Must Die!”, and the absolutely fatal: “Heteronormativity is Patriarchy!” The mob heaped more castigations, one on top of another until their words blended together in a meaningless avalanche of anti-slurs, and Elizabeth and Sasha realized that they had lost all control over their once unified and somewhat cohesive group. The two friends pressed their way through to the exit and narrowly escaped being trampled by the mob.

They had escaped to the relative safety of their dorm, and although neither of them were trans, or even gender non-binary, or anything other than like, totally cisnormative in their look, appearance, and the rest of their overall outward gender-expression, Elizabeth and Sasha weren’t taking any chances given what had already happened to Leah Smith: their trans classmate who had been murdered. Leah had been found buried in a shallow grave off the I-80; her genitals and eyes stabbed over 50 times before the attackers had set fire to her corpse.

“We can’t let this stand; we’ve gotta do something!” Elizabeth said as she cracked into a bag of seaweed chips.

Sasha Stilton-Brown had never felt really unsafe before in her life, but now her rights had to have been violated, she thought. She wasn’t sure exactly what rights had been violated, because come to think of it, she couldn’t really think of what all her rights were exactly, but she definitely got the feeling that somehow, somewhere along the line, they’d been violated. So she did the only thing she knew how to do. “Liz, I got it!”

Elizabeth chewed the wad of granola to the inside of one cheek before clearing her throat and saying: “Well first of all, please don’t abbreviate my name, because it makes me feel like, less than, or ‘Other’,” Elizabeth used finger quotes when she said ‘Other’, “but yeah, go ahead, what did you want to say?”

Sasha cleared her throat before speaking again; “Actually, please don’t presume to give me like, permission to speak, because it makes me feel like I’m being managed, but yeah, what if we started our own student senate!?” Elizabeth narrowed her eyes at the insinuation she was managing Sasha, but then Elizabeth’s expression lit up when she realized the implication of all the things she (which she immediately corrected herself in her head to ‘we’) could do with all that power to affect change!

“Sasha, you’re a genius!”

Sasha cleared her throat. “Actually, Elizabeth, please don’t use the term ‘genius’ because it’s rife with patriarchal implications, and my brother actually has an IEP, so I’d appreciate it if you could just, like, not.” Her brother’s IEP was a stunt he pulled so that he could listen to music in study hall and he didn’t actually have any learning disability except the paralyzing fear of spiders and dodgeballs, and aforementioned desire to listen to music.

Elizabeth immediately began to feel a flood of remorse, and tears welled up in her eyes, which she could barely contain. “OMG, I’m soooo sorry Sasha. I had no idea!”

Sasha fluffed her pillow and sat up in bed, working on her American Civ essay on personal freedom and the Bill of Rights. “But you know, you’re right: we need to make our own student senate. We need something which can fight for our rights on campus!”

Four days later, in the hours preceding the next student senate meeting, Elizabeth and Sasha stood outside to gather another group of students to aid in their cause. They marched into the student senate meeting with their posse of like-minded, freethinking individuals in tow.

An official looking white cisgender female stood at the lectern wearing a Bernie Sanders button on her blazer, and spoke into the microphone: “As class president, it’s my responsibility now to open up the floor to public comment regarding the matter at hand: the senate’s vote on whether we should replace tofu in the cafeteria with soy-free seitan or tempeh.”

A thin young man (really more of a boy) wearing a gray cotton shirt with two interlocking triangles, one pink, the other purple, stood up and addressed the president of the senate, the delegation, and the room. “Hello, the LGBTQIAPK (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgener, Queer, Pansexual, Intersexed, Asexual, Pansexual, Kink) Delegation of Students Living on Campus for Safer Spaces and Healthier Eating Options (LGBTQIAPK-DSLCSSHEO) would like to posit that we only offer quinoa, almonds, and lentils as the cafeteria’s protein options, in light of the fact that seitan and tempeh are grown more internationally, and that we can’t be sure that we’re keeping our institutional carbon footprint at acceptable levels if we import seitan and tempeh.”

The class president scoffed and said: “Excuse me, but last week’s referendum was on precisely this issue, and we voted it down, 5-4 against.” She adjusted her glasses and brushed back her hair behind her ear with one finger.

Sensing either a lull in the conversation, or that if she didn’t butt in now the issue would never be heard, Elizabeth stood up and raised one hand, to which every member of the senate, the LGBTQIAPK+-DSLCSSHEO, the local DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) student union, the student Democratic Party, and the HHWOIB (Hula-Hoopers Without Ideological Boundaries), and the rest of the student body in attendance of the meeting who wasn’t part of Elizabeth and Sasha’s mob, or any other affiliated group, all scoffed at the very notion of something as childish as raising one’s hand, because anyone without a social life (which they assumed was everyone present, seeing as how they each assumed everyone else in the room, given that it was thursday at 5:35 PM, and most students on campus didn’t have classes on friday, which made it the university’s campus wide ‘Thursty [sic] Thursday’) was enough of a nerd, geek, or an outright Poindexter to know the basics of parliamentary procedure re. the fact that one never ever actually does something so blatant, obvious, and childish as raise one’s hand, but rather, intimates through a precise and scheming series of influence building tactics and other machiavellianisms to simply ‘make it known’ that one’s intention at present was to speak, and somehow simply command the attention of the room via psychic will towards one’s self and simply begin to speak. But Elizabeth was about to turn everything these coddled prep-school snowflake cucks had ever known about being a coddled prep-school snowflake cuck on its egg-shaped head.

“Excuse me.” Elizabeth said, raising her hand higher in that ‘I have to pee and I am a small child’ foot stepping pattern many people grow out of very shortly after they hit middle school. “Excuse me!” she shouted.

Class president Harper Graves leaned forward, smiled, and said into the microphone: “Yassss?” At which point the rest of student senate, the LGBTQIAPK-DSLCSSHEO, the local DSA, the student Democratic Party, and the HHWOIB started laughing, although a large contingent of those laughing were actually ‘whoop-whoop’ing, and the HHWOIB were laughing so hard that their internal somatic rhythms had taken over, and they’d started to swing their hips in the circular motions they subconsciously made after months of continuous daily ideology-free 8-hour-marathon-hula-hoop sessions. The only people in the room not laughing were Elizabeth, Sasha Stilton-Brown, and the 99 pissed off students they came in with standing behind them. In fact, Elizabeth and her mob stood stone faced and silent with their arms crossed.

“A student was murdered, and you’re all standing here arguing over tofu!?” Elizabeth shouted over the din. Some of the students were still wiping the tears of laughter from their eyes over Elizabeth’s ignorance of parliamentary procedure politics, but by the time they’d made sense of her words and understood what she was actually saying, the jollity of the room’s atmosphere had come to a grinding halt. “A trans woman’s mutilated corpse was found in a ditch, and we’ve done NOTHING to make this a more inclusive, just, and ultimately safer space in the aftermath of this tragedy!” Her words pierced their bleeding hearts and shot straight through. They all considered themselves trans allies, but in that moment of shining didacticism on the hill, the kids had just been forced to put their money where their ideological mouths were.

Senate president Harper Graves sighed. “If you want to raise the issue, file a motion, and we’ll vote on it at the next week’s meeting.”

Elizabeth walked up to the row of desks to the side of the podium and addressed president Harper Graves. “God damnit!” She shouted, slamming her fist down onto the desk, “We don’t have time to wait until the next meeting! Something needs to be done right now, and we need action!”

There was a clamorous chatter of speculation which broke out about the room: voices conferred with one another in private spaces as to what should be done, and Elizabeth’s spine snapped to attention. She realized that this was her moment, so standing at the head of the room, she climbed up onto the table where four of the nine senate members were sitting, and kicked a pile of papers into the air. A black curtain of silence fell over the room, and all eyes were on her.

Had Elizabeth known what the consequences of her actions would be, she might not have been so bold: so hasty: so… courageous! “All in favor of suspending this farce of the student senate, and transfering all the rights and powers of the governing body to a single leader…” She asked the room, looked directly into senate president Harper’s eyes and said: “raise your hand.”

Sasha Stilton-Brown was the first to raise her hand, but she looked around the room first, and did it slowly. Elizabeth thought she was doing this not to appear like a blind follower, but Sasha understood well the gravity of the situation. Then, more and more hands started crawling up towards the ceiling, until a forest of men and women’s hands interspersed with different colors of nail polish (on both sexes, genders, and every combination of both) shot up about the room like a treetop canopy with pit-stained roots unifying every race, expression of gender, sexual orientation, and all variety of college campus liberalism

“Those in favor of immediately electing a new leader: keep your hands raised.” Elizabeth said, and nobody moved a muscle. It was parliamentary insurrection, and you could hear individual drops of sweat hit the floor.

Elizabeth looked around the room. Drenched in flop sweat, her hair frizzy in the heat. Harper Graves scrambled back up onto her podium and announced: “I nominate myself!”

“All who second the motion?” Elizabeth asked the room, and everyone looked around as if to check that there were no other aspersions: that they had all made the right choice. None of them cast a single vote for sweaty Harper Graves, not even her co-senators. Caesar’s murder was being committed right before their eyes, and everyone in the packed house just sat back and watched.

Knowing to quit when she was ahead, Elizabeth surveyed the room and savored the moment. “Motion passed. The chair recognizes Elizabeth Psomas as new Senate President. Meeting Adjourned. We’ll be holding the next meeting on Tuesday in the quadrangle.”

Some brave, slack jawed moron with an IQ of 120 (which wasn’t really a fair measure of intellect, they all acknowledged, given that the IQ test is notoriously biased towards white European males, but it was the closest thing they had for an intellectual yardstick, aside from SAT scores, which were their own sociopolitical minefield) had the balls (or whatever passed for ‘balls’ around these people) to ask: “What’s a quadrangle?”

“The fucking quad!” Sasha Stilton-Brown shouted, and they all left the room, shaking their heads at their compatriot’s ignorance: a sign of what was to come.

On Tuesday at 8:00 PM, just after the dining commons had closed they gathered on the quad. All the walkways and public areas had been brightly lit at night ever since the series of sexual assaults and brutal rapes had plagued the campus almost a decade ago. The Dean had managed to keep all incidents out of the papers, which was the only reason the college was still standing. But everything was about to change.

“Friends, Romans, country-people of varying ethnicities and gender identities: take back your campus. Take back your safety. Take back your rights!” Elizabeth shouted into the bullhorn, and the hundreds of students all holding hand-painted signs and their smartphones like torches in the night roared.

Dean Whimple was watching from his office. He called the head of campus security: ‘officer’ (although he held no legal position whatsoever) Erik Goon. “Goon! We’ve got an insurrection!” The dean said, sweating into his suit as he listened in on the other end of the line. “It means get the fuck down here and break this shit up, god dammit! If we don’t get in there soon it’ll be all our asses!” He pinched the bridge of his nose and heaved a sigh. “And Goon: for the love of god, don’t use force! The last thing we want is some legacy kid getting pepper sprayed, or god forbid, tazed, then they record it on their phone and it’s all over cable news for the next month!” Dean Whimple hung up to call the national guard, but then thought better of it. ‘No, Goon can handle it, and if Goon can’t fix it I may as well just resign right now!’

The Goon Squad reached the quad as fast as their Segways could carry them, and although they had been instructed explicitly by Dean Whimple to show restraint, they all had itchy trigger fingers, which a constant schedule of working out and mentally preparing oneself to beat the living shit out of some stuck-up rich kid who was just about to go off and make at least five, probably more like ten times your annual salary tends to do. Living their lives in a constant state of preparing for war had made the Goon squad ready to use deadly force, not to mention the pent-up homosexuality of spotting each other for all those sweaty, grunting reps in the weight room and the way the students segregated them in their own space, treating the campus security like some sort of crew-cut gestapo, or neon jerseyed SS.

Erik Goon screeched his segway to a halting stop in front of the quad and addressed the mob. “Disperse! Leave the premises and go back to your dorms!”

Elizabeth had worked too hard, and fought too long (since last Tuesday) to give in now. She commanded her army with the implicit epithet she knew would set their revolutionary blood ablaze: “No Nazis, No KKK, No Fascist USA!” She shouted from the center of the mob into her bullhorn, and they all started chanting the words in unison. Each of her acolytes’ warm bodies formed a protective cocoon to guard Elizabeth against campus security. She knew that if the authorities could cut off the head, then her movement would die, but if all they could do was to wound the flesh, then she could survive any challenge the administration had to offer. Sasha was right there with her, and she enticed the crowd to fervor, repeating Elizabeth’s chant: “No Nazis, No KKK, No Fascist USA!”. They locked arms around the edge of the mob so that even if a student on the outer ring should be tazed (which they were), or pepper-sprayed (which they were), a student being held up by all the social justice warriors around them would have no choice but to remain ramrod still and endure the abuse.

The crowd started to chant “We Shall Overcome” when the tasers and pepper spray started to become too much, and they seemed newly resolved, and to Goon’s eyes, totally impenetrable. Then a nameless voice shouted out from the back: “Fuck the fascists: resist!”

They broke ranks and started to overrun campus security. The mob was armed with lighters and cans of air-duster they turned into blowtorches, and students on the outside stood with three ring binders they held onto as shields interlocking in a phalanx, while their compatriots stood behind them and swung down on the Goon Squad using socks with locks in them.

Assistant head of security Mike Felcher turned to Officer Goon and said: “We’re fucked! Let’s go.” and Goon tried to marshal his troops but it was futile, and they all hopped on their Segways and rode away as fast as possible, fearing what might happen if the mob were to overpower them.

The revolutionaries stayed on the quad all through the night, and feeling a strong sense of comradery the next morning everybody went to breakfast together, commandeering an entire section of the cafeteria for themselves. Elizabeth and Sasha at this point saw fit to expand the rights and privileges of the student senate to overtake the position of the actual administration of the college, in the name of protecting the student body, which was the whole reason they’d started this thing in the first place: to make sure that none of them would ever again be made into a Sarah Cohn, or abused, offended, or upset in any other way, even if it was just the lack of a trigger warning or exposed to an idea which they felt triggered them in some way.

“We’ve got to strike while the iron’s hot!” Elizabeth said to Sasha, who this point was not lost on.

“Do you realize, that if we’d been in this position in our parent’s generation, we’d be looked at either as revolutionaries or radicals?” Sasha said, and Elizabeth thought she had a good point.

Elizabeth drank her coffee with a snowflake pattern stenciled in milk on the surface out of an avocado, and as she drank from the avocado, watching the snowflake slowly melt into the coffee, then dissolve into nothing, an enormous dam of rage that had been building up inside her finally burst. She stood up from the table realizing she just couldn’t take the oppression anymore.

“AAAHHHHHHHHH-TRIGGERRR-WARRR-NINGGGGGGG!!!” She screamed, and flipped her tray all over some freshman, covering him in a green slurry of avocado mixed with scalding hot coffee. He ran out of the cafeteria screaming, and covered with third degree burns, but nobody got up to help him or even gave it a second thought, because they thought he was a white, cisgendered male, but was in reality a somewhat butchy African American lesbian with albinism.

“Are you OK!?” Sasha asked her, terrified of what had happened to her best friend.

Elizabeth turned to her, and shouted: “STOP TRYING TO GASLIGHT ME: I’M NOT CRAZY, AND I’LL ASK FOR HELP WHEN I NEED IT!” And upon hearing this the acolytes descended on Sasha and dragged her off to some gulag of their own invention, because Elizabeth couldn’t be bothered to keep track of these things and she realized it was better not to ask such questions.

“I’m calling an emergency meeting to order in the student senate right now!” Elizabeth shouted as she stormed up Appian Way to the Curia with her mob following closely behind her. They filed one by one in a purposefully random order into the student senate room so that nobody could say any one race, gender, gender identity, or sexual preference was privileged above another.

Once inside the student senate room everyone was too terrified of Elizabeth to address her directly, and much more afraid of each other should any one of them be seen to speak out of turn or break ranks, so they all just stayed, inspecting one another for any sort of ideological deficiencies, making sure to complement each other on anything they could determine as sufficiently breaking with traditional gender roles, racial stereotypes, and the like. All the cisgender white men had started wearing dresses over their jeans, painting their nails, and smearing so much makeup all over their faces that they looked like clowns.

“We’re going down to the dean’s office with our list of demands!” Elizabeth shouted. None of them had taken the time to write anything down or hash any of their ideas out, but they knew what they all wanted in a general way: something about some transgender-something, or something-something. It didn’t matter anymore.

Dean Whimple watched as the mob stormed up Appian Way towards his office, and they could swear they saw his Adam’s apple expand and contract in a very visible ‘gulp’ motion from outside the building on street level. The mob took to the stairs, seeing as how only a small platoon among their swelling ranks would fit into an elevator, and Elizabeth said that if they just showed up one elevator load at a time it didn’t have the same impact, not in a ‘revolutionary-change-type-way’, so they took the stairs. By the time they reached the eighth floor where the Dean’s office was, Elizabeth and the mob had become wily and primal. Something essentially human had left them and whatever was left of them when they got to the eighth floor was just animalistic urge and the bloodlust that drove them forward.

Finally she could see it. All of her sacrifice and effort since last Tuesday: nine long days of oppression in the free-wifi-all-you-can-eat-three-times-a-day-with-two-snacks-in-between gulag, and the constant threat that if she happened to be trans (which she wasn’t, but that was besides the point) that she could be murdered at any point in time was all worth it! Elizabeth approached the door with the words: “RICHARD WHIMPLE, DEAN OF STUDENTS”, stenciled on the pebbled glass. Elizabeth inched closer and closer to the door; justice, honor, and most importantly safety was finally within arm’s reach! Never again would anything bad ever happen to her or any of her beloved classmates. The world would truly be a Utopia, if only the rest of the world could enjoy the same unending rights and infinite privileges that she would soon secure for herself and the rest of the student body! But this was only the first stop! First ----- University, then: The World! Elizabeth reached out to touch the handle of the Dean’s office, but something was terribly wrong! There were shadowy figures looming behind the door’s translucent glass, and something much more dangerous than just one more cisgendered patriarchal male oppressor was lying in wait behind that door.

Then the face Elizabeth thought she’d never see again appeared before her: the best friend, closest ally, and dark confidant: Sasha Stilton-Brown, appeared before her. Confused, terrified, and trembling away from the door, Elizabeth was thrust back into the blinding light of her ex-best-friend’s glare. The subtle manipulations, the Stalinist realpolitik, it was all a clever plot to undermine Elizabeth’s authority, and transfer all of her power, bit by bit, one pernicious deed after the next, until her ‘best friend’s’ authority had finally eroded out from underneath her, leaving her dangling from a precarious ledge, and this was the final push over the cliff’s edge.

“You knew it was going to end like this.” Sasha said as she opened the door, pushed Elizabeth into the dean’s office, and slammed the door shut behind her.

Elizabeth screamed: “TRIGGER WARNING!” as Sasha Stilton-Brown and her classmates stood outside the room, and saw the muzzle flashes light up the dean’s office. They smelled the burnt air of the gunfire. They all pressed their backs to the wall opposite, blood running out from under the door to the dean’s office and into the hallway.

#fiction #literary #literary fiction #read #long reads #free reads #igger #writers #writers on tumblr

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jessaminepress · 7 years

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A TERRIFYING NEW ANTHOLOGY LOOKING FOR MARGINALIZED WRITERS

When nightmare becomes real, when the thing in the wood awakes, when the swap gets its first monster, when the airlock opens to the dead floating in space, there is Malaise.

Jessamine Press is proud to present our first anthology, Malaise, whose focus takes root in tales of horror, discomfort, and unease, all told through the lenses of marginalized writers. We’re searching for unique tales that no one else could quite convey, all laden with things dark and scary. Whether you plan to make an audience screech or squirm, Malaise is there to cater to the those looking to convey dread, the dead, and more.

We’re looking for 13 horrific short stories to showcase all things that go bump in the night. We seek to promote those with voices often unheard, particularly in this genre. What we hope to share are scary stories that are unique - especially to those writing them - exploring concepts and stories that echo deeper than simple jumpscares.

There is no preference when it comes to the subgenre of submitted pitches. Echoing reality with unease, exploring fear in a fantastical setting, or setting up scares in space, whatever best sets up the story you wish to tell, we’re open to. However, it’s the harmful horror tropes that we want to leave behind. After all, horror doesn’t have to mean horrible.

If you find yourself prepared to present an idea that’s as horrifying as it is unique, we’re ready to hear from you. Follow us on Tumblr, Twitter, or Facebook for more details and announcements as they come. Just make sure you’re ready for All Hallows’ Eve, October 31st, for when submissions open!

SUBMISSIONS

Initial pitches must be submitted through the appropriate Google form. Final submissions must be sent in .doc form or through Google drive by the final deadline.

All submissions will have a minimum word count of 7,000 words and a maximum word count of 10,000 words. We will accept final products that go slightly over the maximum but ask that our contributors do their best to stay within the given limit.

The submission must be a standalone original work created specifically for Malaise. It cannot have been previously published nor may it include intellectual property owned by a third party. The submission must meet a horror theme.

We ask that each author limit themselves to one pitch. This will make it easy for our editors to pick the final list of contributors and will level the playing field in the interest of fairness. All pitches should have a beginning, middle, and some idea of an end. These pitches can be rough but please try to give us as much detail as possible so we can get a good idea of your story.

Submissions should be appropriate for adult audiences but excessive gore/violence, sexual themes, etc, will be edited and/or removed.

As this anthology was created with marginalized creators in mind, please note that precedence will be given to underrepresented contributors.

We ask that all stories are free of discrimination and that our writers avoid harmful portrayals/stereotypes of race, sexuality, gender, etc. We trust our authors to interpret this guideline in a responsible manner but our editors and sensitivity readers will have final say.

Please note that special or unconventional formatting will need to be discussed with the editors prior to writing.

As editors and organizers, we reserve the right to request edits to manuscripts or deny entry into the anthology if the final product differs too much from the original pitch and/or contains harmful content. We reserve the right to deny pitches we deem inappropriate for this anthology.

Submissions will open October 31st, 2017, at 1:00 a.m. and will close November 17th, 2017, at midnight.

SCHEDULE

October 31st - Pitch Submissions Open

November 17th - Pitch Submissions Close

November 20th - Final List of Contributors Posted

December 15th - First Check-in

January 15th - Second Check-in

February 15th - Final Submission

March 1st - Kickstarter Launches

FAQ

What does horror mean exactly?

We are giving our creators the freedom to decide. As long as the story lurks somewhere under a horror umbrella, you can write about any number of things: space horror, zombies, monsters, apocalyptic horror, ghost stories, psychological horror, gothic romance, etc. Your stories can have sad endings, happy endings, or ambiguous ones, but we simply ask that they have a complete ending.

Can we take inspiration from x, y, z?

As long as the story falls into a broad horror genre the creator has as much freedom with interpreting that as they like. We only ask that you do not use existing IPs for your stories and that any inspiration drawn from other sources is either free source or extremely minimal. If you wish to do a horror retelling of a story please note that we will not accept pitches that use the same characters. As in, you are allowed to do a western horror retelling inspired by the myth of Hades and Persephone, but cannot write about Hades and Persephone themselves. We also ask that creators be mindful and respectful if writing outside their own culture.

Can we submit fanworks for our samples?

Absolutely! We use the samples to gauge writing and storytelling ability and using fanwork examples will neither harm nor hinder your chance of acceptance. However, this anthology will focus on wholly original work, so we would appreciate a mix of original and fan fiction.

Who can apply?

Malaise (and Jessamine Press) is dedicated to giving voices to marginalized and underrepresented creators and we ask that all authors be over 18 years of age.

Can we apply in teams?

Unfortunately we are not accepting teams for this anthology as we’d like to focus on individual efforts.

Do I need to have previous anthology experience?

Nope! As with fanworks, previous anthology experience will neither harm nor hinder your chance of acceptance. We aim to shine a spotlight particularly on new and upcoming authors, however.

How will funding work? Payment?

All authors will be guaranteed compensation regardless of funding. Funding for the final anthology will be secured through a Kickstarter campaign and payment will be distributed to contributors after the campaign ends, regardless of funding success. Any money made over our initial goal will be put towards stretch goals, improved book quality, and increased contributor payment.

Things to consider:

Horror relies on a number of tropes that we strongly encourage- alright, we flat out ask, our creators to keep a wide berth from. Racist, ableist, bigoted or homophobic pitches will not be accepted and we will not be publishing anything akin to torture porn or rape fantasies, either. We reserve the right to ask our creators to change a story at any time. While this does not mean we expect these stories to be cheerful (it is horror, after all) we ask that you approach the subject matter with care and caution. We have a team of editors and will hire sensitivity readers as needed. We understand that horror themes can be used by some to cope, but ask that our contributors be mindful that their coping mechanism may be extremely harmful to others’ mental well-being. At the end of the day, we’re simply asking you to care about other people.

I have a question about:

Please feel free to send this blog an ask or contact us directly at [email protected]

#indie publishing #open submissions #anthology #writing #jessamine press #jessaminepress #indie #submissions #marginalized writers

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chicagoindiecritics · 5 years

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New from Every Movie Has a Lesson by Don Shanahan: REWIND REVIEW: Aladdin

(Image: stylecaster.com)

For an occasional new segment, Every Movie Has a Lesson will cover upcoming home media releases combining an “overdue” or “rewind” film review, complete with life lessons, and an unboxed look at special features.

ALADDIN

After enjoying a billion-dollar run at the worldwide box office, Disney’s summer hit Aladdin descends to home media store shelves on September 10th. Directed by Sherlock Holmes franchise steward and kinetic auteur Guy Ritchie, the razzle and dazzle of this re-imagined classic impressed in many areas while it lacked in others. All of the spectacle is on display for DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K Ultra HD.

LATE HOMEWORK EXCUSE:

No pass of forgiveness is needed for Aladdin. I saw this one as large as possible at the Chicago Navy Pier IMAX before its release. The dashing visuals and colors played well on that massive format. This disc review will include portions of my full review from

ANTICIPATORY SET AND PRIOR KNOWLEDGE:

In front of Will Smith’s winking and bejeweled human form and his sizable and mystical sapphire sinew is a slightly thickened story true Disney fans know by heart. A handsome “street rat” sneaker named Aladdin (Canadian-Egyptian newcomer Mena Massoud of Hulu’s Jack Ryan) catches the appreciative and alluring eye of Jasmine (pink Power Ranger Naomi Scott), the Princess of Agrabah, an independent spirit lamenting the trappings of her regal stature and required betrothal to fellow royalty. The handsome hustler also gains the prophecy-fulfilling curiosity of Jafar (Marwan Kenzari of Ben-Hur), the hypnotizing top advisor to the Sultan (12 Strong’s Navid Negahban), who is convinced the young man is the human key to the Cave of Wonders and a certain handheld beacon that likes being caressed by fingertips.

LESSON #1: EXCEEDING ONE’S INITIAL OR CURRENT PLACE — The moral dilemma of Aladdin has not changed. We have many “waited my whole life”-spewing characters trapped by their present or past places in society, complete with the corresponding weaknesses of confidence that accompany those tiers. Birthright, caste, hierarchy, gender, legislation, and other constraints like that pesky lamp all stand as potential causes. As the film and one of its new songs implores, too many good people are “seen and not heard.” Truthful resolve and manufactured personal improvement are the dueling paths sought to change one’s “speechless” or limited circumstances.

Just as he did for 2017’s Beauty and the Beast revival, composer Alan Menken returned to his Oscar-winning score and songs. His involvement was vitally essential to maintaining a level of glow for the movie. The execution, however, is the tedious part. The new songs from the songwriting duo of Pasek and Paul (La La Land, The Greatest Showman) are too slight or misplaced in their moments. Massoud and Scott may look the parts, but their vocals cannot quite achieve all that is necessary for “A Whole New World,” arguably Disney’s greatest duet song in their expansive catalog (a bar that was, forgivably, not going to be topped). Will Smith and choreographer Jamal Sims save the day. Where the pipes fail on the audio tracks, the punchy footwork and gyrating gambols on camera provide the dazzle, making one wonder and wish Aladdin could have gone full Bollywood. Guy Ritchie used to have that panache so it’s surprising not to see on the biggest stage.

MY TAKE:

It is becoming increasingly tedious to both critique and enjoy these Disney “re-imaginings.” The teeter-totter between familiarity and freshness changes with each movie due to the modern desire to update and the soaring fan expectations set by the level of nostalgic adoration carried for each previous property. The results have been wildly mixed. Aladdin more of that middle with a tilting lean that could go either way. The studio and Sherlock Holmes series director Guy Ritchie aimed admirably with an “ambitious and non-traditional” take employing minority casting against whitewashing and colorism. Those skin-deep improvements are progressive, but who are we kidding? The color that mattered most was blue.

All the desired diversity in the world paled to who could possibly follow the late Robin Williams? The Genie is the ticket to more than just wishes when it comes to this reboot’s success. That laborious task was given to Will Smith. Folks, he is a hot, baking sun of swagger! Will has not been this loose and free since Men in Black 3 seven years ago. Aladdin reminds us how much of a consummate showman the 50-year-old is and always has been. Will has a style, energy, and stage presence all his own, and he saves this entire movie from sandy ruin.

Heading back to the symbolic piece of playground equipment, the casting and performances in Aladdin are one step forward and two steps back. Massoud and Scott represent closer matching minorities for the affair and their attractive chemistry together has smoldering warmth. Massoud’s winning smile will swoon many. For today’s empowering present, Scott’s Jasmine was positively bolstered with layers of independence and, thankfully, less sexualization than previous incarnations.

Unfortunately, the not-so-thin varnish of multiple unfavorable Arabic and Asian tropes, from accents to character behaviors, smears the rest of the human landscape of Aladdin. Negahban’s Sultan, for example, is terribly one-dimensional where even the doting towards his daughter is too slight to resonate as regality. The bigger vacuum is the main villain. Kenzari’s Jafar suffers from underwritten motivation and a somewhat unimposing performance. Had the same updating attention given to the Jasmine role been extended to that character by writers John August (Dark Shadows) and Guy Ritchie, the overall improvement could have increased the storytelling heights.

LESSON #2: REPRESENTATION ISN’T ENOUGH — The on-and-off irregularity of Aladdin is a unique situation. Yes, it is wonderful Disney sought people of color for this ethic fairy tale, but the clout of their portrayals and the substance of their actions are not improvements. If you’re going to do the right thing by diversity, go all the way, not just halfway or selectively. Dare to combat stereotypes completely.

2 STARS

EXTRA CREDIT:

(Image: disneystore.com)

As a home media release, the extras here for Aladdin are rather thing. Whether it’s been their own branded titles or the Marvel ones, the disc special features for the Mouse House’s offerings have been disappointing for too long. When you have a hands-on and energetic filmmaker like Guy Ritchie and the always-on charisma of Will Smith, the potential for interesting and entertaining behind-the-scenes content is huge. This Aladdin doesn’t even contain a basic director or writer commentary. At least the MCU films carry those.

Two items from the special features menu stand out as the best bits and bytes (and, no, it’s not the overplayed trailers for Frozen 2 or Maleficent: Mistress of Evil). The first is Mena Massoud’s collected video journal chronicling his experiences during the lengthy and labor-intensive international shoot. Edited down to a little over ten minutes from months of casual exploits, the open diary shows quite the full scope of what it took Ritchie and company to make this blockbuster from the eyes of an emerging actor at the center of it all.

It’s sad that his cellphone-shot footage is, with equal length, more compelling, revealing, and entertaining than the two tiny, fancy, and studio-created featurettes, “A Friend Like Genie” and “Guy Ritchie: A Cinematic Genie,” that precede it on the disc. The first of those does have Will Smith making an ever-so-brief and reflecting nod to the history of Robin Williams that came before him, but then it’s the bouquet parade of shared compliments. The same goes for the portrait of the director, which also is too short to really give a taste of the artistry that comes with his camera speed shits, angles, and sense of pacing. Without a commentary track of Ritchie or Smith really conversing, we’re missing so much backstory.

The second stellar feature is an outstanding deleted song entitled “Desert Moon.” It’s a lovely duet between Massoud and Scott that is sung separately as the characters reflect after parting away from each other earlier in their courtship and before Aladdin is thrust into the Cave of Wonders. The scene was fully shot and edited, only to become a late and erroneously scratch from the final film. With sweet lyrics from Benj Passek and Justin Paul, this ballad might be better than any of the other original songs that stayed in the final 128-minute picture. This is must-see.

Those are four minutes that could have added romantic weight to the movie. The other deleted scenes are mostly trims of other exchanges. Naturally, Will Smith’s humor dominates the blooper reel for easy laughs and tension-breaking shenanigans. Lastly, with its musical spine, the Aladdin disc contain three lavish music videos. The first is for Naomi Scott’s powerful “Speechless,” the song the studio is likely stumping for when it comes time for Oscar consideration in the Best Original Song category. Two versions of “A Whole New World” are included as well. The first is the end credits update performed by Zayn and Zhavia Ward. The second is a Spanish version “Un Mundo Ideal” by Zayn and Becky G., a nice addition for the sizeable international audiences.

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slaaneshfic · 5 years

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“There is no reason for you to live: gendered trauma and ecstasy in ‘No World Dreamers, Sticky Zeitgeist episode 2: Aperitif (conference notes)

This is my text/notes for my presentation at the "beyond the console" conference at London South Bank university / v&a the other week. I've not edited this into a proper essay format because it's already going to be re-edited into part of a thesis chapter in the next month.

“There is no reason for you to live: gendered trauma and ecstasy in ‘No World Dreamers, Sticky Zeitgeist episode 2: Aperitif’

[introduce self and position as artists, researcher and phd candidate in art practice, working primarily with post-structuralist feminism, horror, and play.]

This paper is built on a structure which I hope reflects and supplements the material it is concerned with.

[Note that it is brutally chopped out from a thesis chapter primarily about Cixous, whos work shadows the whole text but who only appears briefly as a sort of cameo towards the end. As such there is a large section about her relation to queerness, her use of the category “woman” as a post-structural rather than essentialist term, and the relation of these of these to my own identity as genderqueer. I just want to state at the start, to reassure against the obvious horror of a masc presenting person on stage lecturing on such a huge figure of feminist art that I approach this with the utmost love and care for her work.]

First I need to establish the position from which I am writing it, which is that the video game I am about is address is a work of art. There are many other ways to approach video games; as products, as recreational activities, as social of historical objects. However approaching it as a work of art not only only feels most comfortable for me as an artist and researcher of art practice, but it both reflects the increased art context in which the maker’s work is presented and also allows for a ways of looking at the work which is particular to art.

In a 2001 journal chapter entitled “The Aesthetics of Affect, Thinking art beyond representation” the artist and lecturer Simon O’Sullivan calls for a way of thinking about and reading art works which centre’s their aesthetic and affective qualities, that which grants them an “apartness” from other objects (O’Sullivan, 2001). O’Sullivan draws initially from the philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard, and the journal chapter begins with a quote from the later which ends with the following statement :

“But the work is not merely a cultural object, although it is that too. It harbours within it an excess, a rapture, a potential of associations that overflows all the determinations of its “reception” and “production” (Lyotard, 1991).

This images of “rapture” and “excess” will return throughout my writing here, particularly in regards the feminists and queer philosophers I will be primarily drawing from, and again because such things are in my view central to the game I am going to talk about. However before all of this I wish to make clear my position which echoes O’Sullivan’s call for “Art history as a kind of creative writing” (O’Sullivan, 2001). I will attempt to avoid where possible a hermeneutic analysis of the game where it becomes only a expression of social production to be reduced to an ‘explanation’, instead I want to place this “bundle of affects” (O’Sullivan, 2001) alongside concepts and ideas, with different intents and aims, and see what happens in between. Paraphrasing writer AB Silvera in “Radical Transfeminism Zine”, “Multiplicity of strats guys, you cant carry every team with a Hanzo, sometimes you gotta use D.vas Ult to break a choke point” (Silvera, 2017).

The work of art can now be introduced by its name, which is “No World Dreamers. Sticky Zeitgeist. Episode 2: Aperitif” (Aperitif), the second in a series of collaborative works by coders, artists, musicians, writers Porpentine Charity Heartscape and Rook (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). in the words of one of its makers Aperitif “combines top-down RPG, Shmup, visual novel and medical sim” (Hayes, 2018). In playing the game, the player alternately takes control of and interacts with four principal characters. These characters include “Ever. The Loser”, and “Brava. The Leader” who are broadly humanoid with cat/fox/deeresque features including enlarged ears. There is also “Chalcedony. The Big Sister” and “Agate. The Little Sister” who are both “labor drones” who have been modified and “overclocked” almost beyond capacity in order to have some kind of consciousness. All four of these characters are employed by a large company called “Innocent” to recover salvage from a contaminated and overgrown former city referred to by the characters as “Swamp-Dot-Com”. The area’s contamination is connected to the presence of a mysterious object only referred to by this point in the series narative as “The artefact”. Another character that we see, and occasionally have control over is called “The Therapist” who is presented as a human size, anthropomorphic moth-like person. Finally, we also hear from an interact with “MOM”, the Innocent A.I., and possibly (though not via intelligible words) from the Artefact itself.

The episode prior to Aperitif was titled “No World Dreamers, Sticky Zeitgeist. Episode one: Hyperslime” (Hyperslime) and primarily serves to introduce the setting and characters, principally through the eyes of Ever, detailing her mental health and particularly anxiety (Heartscape & Rook, 2017). Episode one was concerned with our characters getting to work, passing various obstacles to achieve this including panic attacks and mandatory drug tests.

Picking up where Hyperslime ended, Aperitif is concerned with our characters beginning the job they are assigned, and their discussing the material and social relations within that environment, as well as portraying material effects these provoke. I would like to consider this through philosopher Eugene Thacker’s definition of the horror genre as “the space between”, and “passages between”, “I cannot see what I believe”, and “I cannot believe what I see” (Thacker, 2015). For our character’s, this field of uncertainty crops up frequently and extends at times out to include us the player. Early in the narrative, text from an unspecified character or voice sets this tone:

“Jeez how much blood do you have?

The Inside becomes the outside.

The world grasps hungrily at the swamp gate. Two voracious circuitries at war. the fever of skin grafts.

Four salvagers set out in search for debris” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018).

The context for this statement is not revealed until the end of the game, and the “who” that is speaking all of it remains ambiguous even then. Our player character proxies recount their memories and feelings about Swamp-Dot-Com in fragments as you explore it with them in turn.

It is important at this point to note that it is implied to degrees that some or all of Aperitif’s “four scavengers” are not cisgendered. This was first implied in Hyperslime, but I will stress that this is my interpretation of the game. It is never stated within the game’s text that any characters are trans, cis, non-binary, or what if any concept of gender exists in its setting. However in the sequel Aperitif, the characters gender identity contrasting to that one assigned to them by a social power is implied more strongly. This contrast is also expanded as their non-cis status is not just in relation to gender but in terms of crossing further boundaries to arrive at their identity.

Accessible in the game’s folder from the start, and later triggered by an on screen event is a pdf manual for Agate, the younger robot sister. The pdf presents as an official service manual for the original robot model which Agate belongs to, which has been subsequently annotated and edited by Agate herself and her sister after they are both upgraded to consciousness. Agate is implied to be transgender because her manual originally labels her a “[redacted] labor drone” and she herself has altered this to instead assign her the name “Agate, cool girl” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018).

The overlapping of transgender identity discourse and sentience of nonhuman or modified humans is not without precedent. In the article “Making and Getting Made: Towards a Cyborg Transfeminism” in Salvage, writer Solvi Goard argues that the “1995 anime version of Ghost In The Shell [offers] both the dream and the nightmare of trans politics”. Goard makes the case that “Cyborgs [...] are undoubtedly transgender [because] they choose and change their bodies based on what relationship they desire from that body” (Goard, 2017). In Ghost In The Shell, the cyborg cop protagonist Major Motoko Kusanagi begins to express doubts about her own existence through the course of the narrative which centres on hyper augmented bodies and brains and the limits of existence and identity (Oshii, 1995). Goard identifies this doubt, “the visceral confusion that comes about from knowing how you feel and experience your body, but having that experience jar so powerfully with what meaning other people and society give to it” as “one many trans people will recognise” (Goard, 2017).

The doubts and confusions over self expressed by the characters in Aperitif are different to those of Major Kusanagi. Chalcedony expresses fear and regret that like her, she sister Agate was “overclocked” and modified to have sentience and that “she would pay for it with every moment of her life” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). For Chalcedony, much of her anxiety is around her and her sister being unable to be safe, to rest, to have energy, to have “a room to hide in” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). While Agate seems exhausted by the demands of her body run beyond its intended capacity, and at the newness of the world after their escape which is both exciting and terrifying in turns. (The pdf robot manual states that the overclocking can lead to violent failure of the unit’s heart, and that these are advised to be bought in bulk. This whole section in the manual has been all but obliterated by Chalcedony with a note to tell her younger sister not to read it [this should be a footnote, but i dont have the ability to insert footnotes on the tablet I’m using]).

Both the robots experiences undoubtably jar with “what meaning other people and society give” them (Goard, 2017) as they are literally on the run from that authority, but this is joined by the jarring of the body itself not functioning as they need it too. The culmination of this will be the medical sim section of the game where we play as Chalcedony attempting to repair her sister’s overworked organs, potentially watching Agate repeatedly die in the process. What seems to most concern Chalcedony at least is this perpetual state of exhausted, unstable, borderline survival. She asks herself “what if it was forever. What if nothing changed, and we kept as we were. Unable to perfectly live or die” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). This same anxiety about not escaping is echoed shortly after by Ever when she states that she “and Brava always said we’d be the ones to make it out. We wouldn’t be the losers stuck in this nowhere shithole” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). Constructing improvised temporary solutions to keep going through trauma and awareness of their imminent potential failure is common to most of the characters in Aperitif, if not the entire universe they inhabit.

Characters within the game might lament the possibility of their being caught in limbo, but our encounter with the work of art called Aperitif is one of approaching something always in flux and always pointing to incomplete or decaying possibilities. Video games broadly of the sort Aperitif belongs to often present the player with avenues which may be explored or ignored. In this instance, there might be dialogue options we do not choose, or we might miss sections of the map, and not trigger every piece of narrative description text. This is one potential way in which we experience this game as never fully resolving, as an altering space. Knowing that you could have told Agate “We are sisters and our fate is bound together” but instead you told her “I’m doing for you what no one did for me” when asked why you as Chalcedony keep looking after her means the game does not quite resolve into a fixed form (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). You might speculate on what would have happened in game if you took the other path, and your emotional response to the game might have been different also. This however could be said of most games of this broad type, and that all but the completist who must replay every possibile forked path experiences such a game as fluid in this way. However there is another instance of alterability in the experience of encountering Aperitif which melds with the former This instance is less common, and I would argue makes Aperitif a richer and more complex experience for its lack of solidifying resolution.

When playing Aperitif we are never given full, authoritative, and non conflicting information on anything we encounter. We experience much of the game as a mediation of a visual landscape which we interact with, and our proxy character’s interior monologues on this landscape, its history, its impacts. Each character has a different response to this space and the first half of the game consists of exploring the same map, with the same triggers for these monologues with each character offering a different association. A clearing with a pool triggers the text for Ever “this is where I hide”, for Brava the description is “I think this is where Ever goes to whack off”, and for Chalcedony it is simply “small water” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). Across these multiple descriptions is presented a world that resists one single interpretation, but beyond this, the specific writing that the game employs is frequently one which is open, personal, multiple and incomplete. We experience the game therefor as a series of fragments, and these fragments feel less like they were crafted to convey one meaning than as they were pulled together and placed somewhere for them to form new associations with whatever text came before them and whatever the audience had already in mind. In a published interview, the writer Kathy Acker who practice involved cut ups and often plagiarized re-edits was asked about control in their work and gave the following response.

“When you write are you controlling a text? When you’re really writing you’re not, you’re fucking with it” (Acker & Lotringer, 1991).

Text in Aperitif feels extremely fucked with, and invites the player to fuck with it further. The ruined signposts which litter Swamp-dot-com contain easy to cite examples of such fucked with text. Approaching these signs with a controlled character triggers an onscreen text. Some sign-triggered-text describes its context in the manner of “The sign says, Feeling depressed? This is the only thing it says” (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). Other sign-triggered-text such as “watch out for stuff” lack the initial contextual statement leaving available the possibility that this is something else other than what the sign reads (Heartscape & Rook, 2018). What could be read simply as inconsistency of form becomes yet another way in which the experience of this work of art invites us to embrace uncertainty. The narrative content of these signs re-enforces this. As a player there is real joy to be found in uncertain fragmented warnings and questions, which leave us plugging in whatever context we have to hand to try and make sense of. The fucked with text triggered by bringing a character near to one of these signs (or not, if you happen to miss them) sits very much within that definition of the horror genre from Thacker, as well as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s broad definition of “Queer” as existing in “lapses and excesses of meaning” (Sedgwick, 2004). They elicit both the disbelief that what we read is correct and the absence of that which would fully qualify and resolve them.

It would incorrect to suggest that there isn’t an overall linear narrative to Aperitif, but that narrative is not responsible for the only, or dominant experience of encountering it. That encounter, is one of being hit with a splattering of different affects, each eliciting thoughts and associations and creative possibilities for us as collaborator rather than mere musculature for that narrative skelton. O’Sullivan describes the affective encounter with art as “self overcoming”, to be immersed in our encounter to the point where our self, that certainly of the “I” becomes lost. The splattering of affects in Aperitif as we jump from witnessing character struggle to articulate their trauma and love, to the game on various levels presenting us with an incomplete or decaying experience of an incomplete or decaying world strongly provokes such self overcoming. This isn’t the unrelenting insistence that we forget our human body and commit to the protagonist of a narrative, supporting their every decision and telegraphed emotions backed up with orchestral swells, rather instead the game seduces us into active collaboration with never claims to be certain, and to be fine with this.

Philosopher and writer Helene Cixous in her text “The Laugh of The Medusa” called for women to write “Ecriture Feminine” (Cixous, 1976). Such “women’s writing” presents an alternative of art, language, and being, distinct from the phalogocentric order which supports its power through reason. I believe that Aperitif embodies much of what Cixous called for, through its “intoxicating, unappeasable search for love” (Cixous, 1976).

Of relevance to a game series that began with a character “getting high and whacking off”, the Ectriture Feminine in “The Laugh of The Medusa” is frequently described in terms of masturbation. [Note about queerness and concept of “Woman” in Cixous] Principally this association is about the creation nof desire, of something that is erogenous at different territories and speeds. This is not the monomyth of phallocentricity, the seminal work where writing is built like a tower, but a multiplicity of queer desires that are not just the one dull drive to completion. Cixous elaborates on this with the following;

“Heterogeneous, yes, for her joyous benefit she is erogenous; she is the erotogeneity of the heterogeneous; airborn swimmer, in flight, she does not cling to herself; she is dispersible, prodigious, stunning, delirious and capable of others of the other woman that she will be, of the other woman she isn't, of him of you” (Cixous, 1976).

This is writing that self overcomes. The uncertainty of horror is now joyous delirium, yet the circumstances have not changed only our ethical position to them. Our encounter with Aperitif mirrors the loss of self, overwhelming affects, and improvised collaboration with an unstable world which its characters experience. However for us at least, this is not crashing trauma, but what O’Sullivan identifies in art as an exploration of the “possibilities of being, of becoming in the world” (O’Sullivan, 2001).

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ruffoverthinksthings · 7 years

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Do you have any thoughts on how non-heterosexual identities would be viewed on Auradon and the Isle? Given that Disney often queer-codes their villains and promotes heterosexuality to an almost parodic degree, I imagine that their perspectives are pretty different. (Incidentally, how many sexuality crises do the VKs spark once the AK realize that they'll flirt with almost anyone?)

Initially,they would be viewed with suspicion and even charges of criminalbehaviour and possible deportation to the Isle, seeing as majority ofthe societies that compose Auradon are highly partiarchal, and havestrict rules, traditions, and expectations for both genders.

(Edit: I say “both” with regards to BGU realms’ limited ideas of sexuality and identity, having only “male” and “female.”)

I assume that the LGBTQ+ community finds allies in London, theFae, and even the Wild Fae, as they are all about as far off the normas you can get with mostly Medieval Western Europe Auradon.

The Londoners would bring about the concepts of Feminism amongother progressive ideas, and of course explaining their home realm’shistorical precedents about how focusing on such petty differences assexuality and race is bad for economy, peace, and society in general,and such divisions are the cornerstone of “Evil” people.

The Fae like Genie are a perfect example of how a non-traditional(or even possible to mortals) sexuality and identity does not equalan immoral being who wants to corrupt every single “innocent” outthere, and dispel majority of the myths, such as Dionysus’ infamousMaenads being like that because of their patron god’s influence,not because of whatever it is that makes them so… open-minded andenthusiastic, especially with sexual matters.

And finally, the Wild Fae are kindred souls in being shunned fromsociety by who they are, rejected just because you are a certain way,and completely unable to change who you are even if you tried–and ifyou did, the results will likely be disastrous.

Imagine Drag Queens raising a glass with Lamiae, complimentingeach other on their hair, the luster of their nails, and the shine oftheir scales.

It really helps that there was a boon in interracial and eveninterspecies attractions and relationships, with the LGBTQ+joining and being invited as a fellow ally–if an African Woman and aChinese Man can be allowed to legally marry and be together as a manand a woman under the Christian definition of Marriage, what about aman and a man, and a woman and a woman, and a man and his harpylover?

I believe that more so than the masses, the internet helped thedisenfranchised, the lonely, and the ones on the fringe, able tofinally find someone else that likes this same weird show as them allthe way on the other side of the world, and that this effect wasextremely pronounced in multi-cultural, multi-temporal,multi-dimensional Auradon.

“This Is Our Home, Too!” was their slogan and one of the manypop-culture names for their movement.

Also, I can’t really think of any truly “out of the norm”canonical Disney romantic relationships, but seeing as a lot of themkeep strange company themselves (talking animals being the tip of theiceberg), and getting everyone to get over their superficialdifferences was a priority for EVERY Royal to avoid a disastrousfracturing of their new country just after it was fused together, thepeople would quickly stop panicking and fearing the existence ofnon-heterosexual and non-cisgendered people, among other deviationsfrom the norm.

This isn’t acceptance, by the way, it’s really more“Can’t move, can’t get rid of them, might as well grin and bearit.” philosophy that Beast and the rest of the royalty seem toadvise to their citizens.

Individual attitudes vary greatly, but everyone can agree to bepolite and civil, at least.

With the AKs, it’s not really a sexual identity crisis, so muchas challenging their ideas of sexuality in general; a lot of the AKshave already realized and come to terms with the fact that they’requeer, some exceptions being Audrey.

Things like polyamoury, purely sexual relationships, and even justthe concept of pre-marital sex tends to be gigantic “no-no’s”to majority of the AKs. They are largely future reigning royals andexpected to embody their societies ideals and all their traditions,and even though all of those things were already present in theirdimensions Before Great Uniting, they still don’t prefer to speakabout it, or loudly proclaim that their royals, the idols of thepeople, are going against the grain.

As I’ve said before, Auradon is a very conservativesociety that dearly wants to preserve the stock “Happily EverAfter” formula where everything is black and white andheterosexual.

What the introduction of VKs that want to seriously (or justenthusiastically) pursue relationships with the AKs and vice-versawill do something akin to the movie Pleasantville: challengethe society’s perceptions of “black and white,” that you needto “stick to the script,” and have parents worried about the“epidemic of teenage immorality” spreading through out the entirecountry, all thanks to the “bad influences” that are the VKs.

And while I will say that they are mostly genuinely badinfluences, what the parents don’t realize and only the“grandparent” generation of Londoners get is that this highlysheltered and curated society is finally, truly seeing what“teenagers being teenagers” really means.

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brujas-nyc · 7 years

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STATE OF THE UNION SALUTE

In a very short period of time BRUJAS turned from a concept developed by two best friends into an international media phenomenon and heavily active organizing force in NYC culture. There are undeniable complications when a huge amount of unforeseeable attention is poured onto people and concepts that didn’t begin with the intentions of speaking to a global community or on behalf of a local cultural phenomenon. We were and still are finding our way as we navigate the world of radical organizing, press, business, and culture making. This is a state of the union address that hopes to cover where we came from, the journey thus far and what our intentions are moving forward.

Re-Cap Over the last two years BRUJAS has hosted approximately a dozen femme skate meetups as well other urban outdoor spontaneous activities including hiking, capture the flag, and herbal medicine and fermentation workshops. We have thrown over 25 parties at small clubs and apartments as well as large venues for our queer formals ( Anti-Prom and Winter Informal ). Our parties intend to create safe space where women and gender nonconforming people can take charge creatively. Parties are a piece of our larger ongoing #DEATHTOALLMALELINEUPS campaign launched in Summer of 2016. BRUJAS are pushing #DTAML by employing tactics of economic advocacy and creative support for young women and gnc musicians. This campaign will continue making sure our group, affiliates, and close community are regularly performing, making records, and DJing, while also developing strategies around releasing work to the public. In September of 2016 we installed a mini ramp and held two workshops, one on material feminism with Silvia Federici, and another on herbal medicine with Antonia Perez at the New Museum’s feminist summit “Scamming the Patriarchy”. That same month we developed a dada inspired intervention with Zeljka Blaksic titled “Claim Space” at the MoMA for their Ten Year Pop-Rally Anniversary that sought to tackle issues of accessibility in public space. In October BRUJAS joined War of Icaza on a DIY skate and punk tour on the west coast called BRUJA WAR. October also marked the launch of BRUJAS largest political endeavor thus far, the commence of the limited edition streetwear line 1971. 1971 is a multi-media and streetwear project that allowed BRUJAS to establish a legal fund, raise awareness around ongoing prison strikes against slavery behind bars, as well as communicate our group’s position on prisons. We sold $23,000 worth of clothes which were recently produced and distributed. The profits will be allocated in the next few months to support people facing criminalization and incarceration. In November BRUJAS started their residency at RECESS GALLERY titled Brouhaha in collaboration with Zeljka Blaksic. Together they produced 17 programs over less than 2 months including workshops on femme self-defense, home studio recording, silk screening, direct filmmaking, as well as open skate sessions and interactive classes aimed at leftist political education. In December we partnered with the Future Archives to host a public skate party and pop up shop at Lot 17 for Art Basel. Last month we hosted at GHE20G0TH1K for their weekly party Freak Pharmacy. It has been a hectic and extremely inspiring and busy time as a result of dedication, hard work and a commitment to growing our vision. We are eternally grateful for the support from our global community thus far and know our energy has made a positive impact on young people. We are taking a step back to reflect on the last few years and tracing our steps to the beginning. We ask others to understand that we started BRUJAS for ourselves and it now belongs to the world. We are currently taking the steps necessary to honor the responsibility of being influencers in the public eye but also using this as a moment to communicate our creative need for autonomy from outsider’s expectations.

Origins The first summer of BRUJAS there was no Instagram, no expectations, just amazing, small house parties in Washington Heights and dreams of filming a skate video with our five friends. Two women, and three men, all skaters, BRUJAS. We did our first photoshoot the winter after, prompted by Browntourage, an online magazine dedicated to promoting the work of women of color. The editors found out about BRUJAS by chance backstage at a SZA concert in Oakland. It was the first time BRUJAS experienced the reductionism of a headline but we didn’t care much. Our dreams were multiplied into the universe as we stated a need for a space in culture in between Quartersnacks — a NYC skate brand and magazine, and the Young Lords — a radical political organization. Finding a healthy nexus in that space is more complicated of a feat than we could have ever imagined, making it all the more important and exciting. We now understand building something new without precedent is especially challenging for an entity driven by women who seem to experience unmatched levels of criticism and half the support for their endeavors than their male counterparts. Massive online visibility from our one article created a domino effect on the internet and we started to see more girls out at the skatepark than ever who told us they had read the piece. Stakes were low and positive momentum was high. Being BRUJAS for better or for worse required the loosest affiliation to our goals and messaging. There was no official membership, you showed up to the skatepark or to a workshop, femme or masc, you Dj’ed, you threw parties, were passionate about live music, skated, gay, graphic designer, BRUJAS. It took shape as an experimental community art form while the press kept reaching out with the intentions of capturing a very specific image they had of the group. Images of female skaters was something they had seen successfully travel the internet, and it was what BRUJAS was best known for, something untapped in NYC subculture. Uncaptured over the years were some of the most committed organizers in BRUJAS who don’t skate but committed hours to organizing programming, design, and furthering the group’s development through their art and energy. There was obviously a positive impact our media engagement was having on the gender homogeneity of skateparks, and we became increasingly inspired by the public’s reception of our movement to do more programming on a larger scale. A few individuals were very active in organizing programs aforementioned to engage our larger community. Given the fact that there were very few institutions in skateboarding or street culture at large for women, this moment in media felt important for us, but also where a lot of mistakes were made. Clicks were the first moment of commodification BRUJAS experienced. Continuing to enter media space without being on the same page, checking in with one another about the significance of creating this media, the purpose of the group, and individuals needs was naive, and an after affect of having an amorphous group with members all over the place in tandem with compromised (by several factors including health) leadership privileged by proximity to whiteness. We are committed to moving forward with an organizational model that is tight and horizontal where all members are on the same page about projects and media. Though this does take away some of the magic of the free-form and open sourced model, it is necessary to ensuring a healthy organization where people can thrive and trust one another. All current members of BRUJAS are committed on every level, from organizing to designing, to building together something bigger than ourselves. As we reflect as an organization we mourn the loss of friendships and co-conspirators due to miscommunication and frustration. Just like the media has miscommunicated and misrepresented, thrown up interpretations of BRUJAS all over the internet, we have learned through experience how digital communication can create feelings of scarcity and lead to real conflict between our comrades. We have and continue to commit ourselves to internal conflict resolution with a method of transformative justice and mediation. Reflecting on how we communicate our messages to the public and with each other is of primary importance over the next few months as we build our organization internally.

Growing Accountability

Our experience with the media has demonstrated the dangers of encouraging things that lead women to accept their image as their primary source of value. The media is still misogynist in this respect. The media should only be covering things BRUJAS are DOING, because representation and existence is not enough at this point. Existence in a world built on slavery and colonialism is radical, but we feel organizing, when possible, is crucial. Placing our value on effort, talent, and facilitation is what will sustain BRUJAS beyond the media frenzy, and will continue our personal and collective growth in creative fields. Patriarchal forces will attempt to suffocate us as we evolve into a real threat to men’s businesses and cultural monopolies, whether they are clubs or stores. While the media may have gotten us followers, it still rests on us to engage, challenge and support them. This is where effort, talent and creativity comes in, all of which our group has in abundance. Over the past several months, creating our own content that represents our friends and our culture has been our goal, especially since we experienced so much buzz around us for content created by outsiders. A recent photo project titled “Muertisima” improvised by BRUJAS was an attempt at communicating some concepts we had been developing around illegibility, deviance, and queer sexuality. We asked ourselves: what do BRUJAS look like unedited? We put together a scene that included nudity and BDSM adornment which was directed by Ian Reid, who we consider the most important visual artist and Black filmmaker in NYC skateboarding. BRUJAS received criticism from fans and contemporaries, people we respect and admire who are operating and thinking outside of our immediate context. While we acknowledge these criticisms and are working to be accountable for the harm these images caused people in our community, under the spotlight, many things were erased from the context of these images. From this experience, and the criticism we received, we have come to realize the strong responsibility we hold for operating a platform that speaks to people far beyond our direct community. We are committed to being accountable to the effect the “Muertisma” project has had on folks in and outside our extended community, and own the fact that we are influencing many people, especially young women, through our images and words. We hope to continue to influence women and queers of color to seek liberation, but cannot do so until we address colorism, anti-Blackness, and violence inherent the culture we operate in and that we perpetuate. If compelled, read our response “WOMEN WILL WANT TO HURT EACH OTHER” for our full apology for the harm our “Muertisima” piece created, as well as an explanation of our intentions and an urgent call for respect for the agency, vision, and bodily agency and autonomy of Black artists. Black women have and will continue to be leaders in projects by BRUJAS. We strongly believe that there is nothing more important than re-directing resources to Black women in this time, there is no other way of fighting white-supremacy.

Direction & Politics : The Future of Streetwear, Coalition & Dialect

BRUJAS IS A FREE FORM, AUTONOMOUS, RADICAL, CREATIVE ORGANIZATION.

Streetwear Less corny press, more original content & entering the streetwear business seriously. We are employing our own media productions skills in hopes to not only take the reigns over how we are understood by others outside our group, but to also fulfill goals stated and recited publicly at multiple events over the last year in the first version of our WOMANIFESTA. “We, as BRUJAS, encourage women’s participation in the creative economy. BRUJAS are harnessing the radical potential of lifestyle and personal branding to organize youth in a way that is culturally relevant and familiar, yet explicitly anti-capitalist. We are searching for a new popular model that is going to bring agency empowerment, material and emotional support to our community.” What some called “branding”, and others affectionately call “propaganda” has been part of our model for some time now. It is important to note that we are taking our design and distribution more seriously with a web store (www.brujas.nyc) as well as original design, and cut-and-sew projects. Streetwear is something that all members of BRUJAS are passionate about and while it is currently made in small quantities where a lot of the clothes are gifted to our community, we plan on growing it this year. The streetwear component of BRUJAS serves multiple purposes, for instance: funding solidarity work via the launch of 1971 streetwear, creating awareness of our politics through utilitarian mediums, funding new projects i.e design production and photo and video, as well as community events like parties and workshops. Like all small groups developing fashion lines, our profits from streetwear including hoodies are re-invested in the growth of BRUJAS and are managed by the streetwear team who have invested time and creative energy in designing, producing and distributing merchandise.

Lastly, making unisex clothes that are artistic representations of our gendered and political experience is in the legacy of centuries of utilitarian art. We find our desire to make clothing very natural. While every male collective in our direct proximity find ways to strategize around their own success (whatever their goals may be) through fraternity and branding, we are finding ourselves having to defend every decision we make. We are a young group of Native to NYC youth who are using every outlet available to develop creative, high caliber projects through multiple mediums. For those surprised or concerned with the ethics of merchandising, we ask that you respect that making streetwear was always a goal of BRUJAS, that each and every member of BRUJAS is PASSIONATE about design and fashion, as we should be. Streetwear is the coup d’eta of fashion, a place where urban youth have taken back control of their dress and identity. We FULLY appreciate the support we have had for our work so far and appreciate those who get the larger picture we are attempting to paint. While some may feel ok wearing skate brands and streetwear designed by men for companies run by men, we are personally unsatisfied by them and feel compelled to make alternatives in a world whose artistic representations continuously fail the queers and rebels. We silkscreen all of our clothing locally, bringing business to our homies in Washington Heights. We will continue to collaborate with women run streetwear brands and other ethically principled companies working in the U.S with good labor practices and production standards. We are also developing products that are intended for self-care and healing. Fast fashion and consumerism have issues and as we create space for ourselves in this world we must constantly remind ourselves of our origins and intentions of tirelessly serving the people and supporting our internal community. BRUJAS is a creative organization that makes streetwear, we also organize, we use streetwear to spread ideas and organize people, and we will continue to do this bigger, better and more creatively within the frame of our original vision.

Coalition

BRUJAS are not afraid to talk about and confront systems of racial domination, power and exploitation, ever, or to admit our mistakes. We commit ourselves to being better co-conspirators for those most affected by white supremacy. However, we do not necessarily believe in, or appreciate infighting in radical communities based on identitarian differences. We understand that not everybody is down with multi-racial coalition, and we understand why. We respect other people’s approaches, and will not obstruct other people’s tactics: whether they are separatist, or more focused on the ways identity categories produce material conditions and visa versa. We do not assume or judge individuals based on what we know about their identity, as there is no way to really know the complexities of people’s lives. We do however study and critique history, understand the functions race and gender have played in sustaining exploitation under capitalism, and strategize to remove power from that structure accordingly. We have been greatly inspired recently by research we have done on the Rainbow Coalition, a group comprised of The Young Patriots (self-proclaimed white radical hillbillies), the Young Lords, and the Black Panther Party. Our political work has and will continue to be about coalition building amongst difference. We have also been inspired by guidance from Silvia Federici who told us “I trust that when people begin to seriously organize they realize they cannot work on the basis of exclusionary politics.” We are harnessing our collective energy, regardless of identity, with the intentions of redistribution and reparations for all that have and will continue to be exploited and alienated under capitalism.

Creating hierarchies amongst oppressed people is harmful and antithetical to building coalition. We do not use these politics to create ammunition for arguments, especially when facing interpersonal conflicts. However, we do understand that personal conflict is not experienced in a vacuum, and is exacerbated by unchecked privileges. However, we also believe constantly fighting one another using differentiation often creates pain in place of healing, or yet, creates a world where many people feel like they literally don’t want to be anybody. We commit ourselves to understanding, mediation, and self-care in order to prioritize all of our mental health. BRUJAS works internally as a multi-ethnic group that trust each other and believe that supporting the people is a daily practice that should be approached from a collectivist and material standpoint, not only one that centers the individual and their identity.

Dialect

BRUJAS approaches race and culture with the understanding that nothing is fully pure, authentic, or better based on abstractions developed by archaic epistemology and later reinforced by essentializing and racist media. By virtue of being from New York, a group of anti-capitalist queers, mixed race kids, and gender nonconforming people, we are a creative organization that thrives in the borderlands, the hybrid and illegible space of being. In order to resist essentialism we can be nothing but ourselves. We built our affinities in organizing meetings, in the skatepark, on the playground, at block parties our parents organized when we were kids. Now, we find our affinities based on the affect and politics we share, not any particular identity.

Essentialism is the view that for any specific entity there is a set of attributes which are necessary to its identity and function. When rigid attributes are applied to race and culture, they are essentialized. We know essentialism is mythological, fabricated by a white-supremacist and capitalist superstructure for the benefit of its continuity. We are committed to a holistic approach to culture making that honors people’s relationship to modern indigeneity, diaspora and multi-racialism. In New York, youth who are native to the city, often children of immigrants are creating a new culture that holds space for our larger community to be free. We recognize that the word BRUJAS holds a historical connotation to Latinx spirituality, with pre-capitalist approaches to healing and community. We never had the intention of speaking on behalf of all “BRUJAS” as they exist across historical and cultural landscapes. BRUJAS describes a political and creative organization of a multi-ethnic group of friends and comrades, all of whose ancestors suffered at the hands of patriarchy and colonialism. We believe everybody is entitled to their own interpretation and expression of resistance culture. Though ours takes a modern form that is non-separatist and committed to progressive and modern sounds, words and images, we still have respect for people who honor tradition and heritage as their own resistance. Spanish was the first if not mutual language in the Lower East Side and Uptown for many of BRUJAS. We don’t have to rock with things in the way other people do, there is strength in diverse approaches to similar concepts. While some may be invested in the integrity of the history of bruja, the youth and community we serve benefits from progress and relevant adaptations all over the cultural spectrum. We respect tradition and hold space for it in some of our programming, but refuse to be limited by it. We are self aware of our role in the spiraling historical movements driven by social conflict and contradiction, we understand dialectical materialism. People all over the Americas assigned their own meanings to things in their lives in a language spread by colonization. We continue this resistance by assigning old worlds new meanings, this is a part of dialectics, a part of the course of history. Projects like BRUJAS are the social and material response to the contradictions of capital, linguistic tradition, and epistemological progress that moves history forward.

BRUJAS is positively for the youth, for ourselves, and now for the world. We are going to develop this as far as we possibly can, without fear and without limitations, but with accountability, respect and humility. We are seeking a new world, if you are too, you are BRUJAS. Thank you for your time, kindness, understanding and support over these years, with love.

BRUJAS

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khalilhumam · 4 years

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In Trinidad & Tobago, the use of Black iconography in Emancipation Day ads backfires

New Post has been published on http://khalilhumam.com/in-trinidad-tobago-the-use-of-black-iconography-in-emancipation-day-ads-backfires/

In Trinidad & Tobago, the use of Black iconography in Emancipation Day ads backfires

Riding the wave of a social movement? Get it right.

Image of the clenched fist, a symbol of resistance that has come to be most closely associated with the Black Power movement, and now, with Black Lives Matter. Photo by Paul VanDerWerf via Flickr CC BY 2.0.

One of the ripple effects of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has been personal reckoning when it comes to racial bias. After a video of George Floyd's murder at the hands of police officers in Minneapolis, Minnesota, sparked worldwide protests — including in the Caribbean — many have been educating themselves and confronting their privilege and now that BLM has captured widespread attention, companies are also making a point of supporting causes that advocate for racial justice. On August 1, in Trinidad and Tobago, this desire to be seen as “woke” and in solidarity with the cause took on an interesting tenor as the country marked Emancipation Day, which commemorates the freedom of enslaved Africans in the former British West Indies. Trinidad and Tobago, like other Caribbean territories, has a history of occupation, colonisation and slavery and in 1985, became the first independent country in the world to declare Emancipation a public holiday. As is customary, the pages of local newspapers were filled with corporate messages acknowledging the anniversary of the abolition of slavery.

The raised, clenched fist

Several advertisements that missed the mark featured the symbol of the clenched fist most often associated with the Black Power movement of the late 1960s and early '70s, and now, with Black Lives Matter. Stag, a locally brewed beer, posted an image of the fist emerging from one of its labelled bottles with the message, “Open up to freedom in every sip”:

Screenshot of Stag's Emancipation Day advertisement, taken from the brand's Facebook page.

Some commenters expressed their disappointment at the trivialisation of the importance of Emancipation, while others felt those who took offence were being “snowflakes” and “over-sensitive”. However, the ad that struck the sourest note came from KFC, which posted an image of a drumstick whose shadow cast an image of the fist clenched in resistance. Social media exploded at the audacity of the stereotype, with many users wondering if it was even authentic. The post (and its accompanying comments) was taken down after the outcry, but several netizens took screenshots:

KFC Trinidad deleted this ad to acknowledge Trinidad and Togabo's August 1 Emancipation Day from its social media after some well-deserved backlash. Another reason to diversify your marketing teams/organizations. It's ok to laugh to express your shock and anger. #KFC pic.twitter.com/6uw9t325OE — deicommwhisperer (Tamara N. Stevenson) (@deicommwhisper1) August 2, 2020

Kat Brat commented:

There was a time when our ancestors weren't even given a drumstick to eat. They lived on chicken feet and whatever else the slave masters were discarding. EDIT: Of course it has been removed. Now we await the bs apology and how determined they are to work with bla…ah..blah..blah

The clunkily worded apology, which used the word “recognised” three times, eventually came at 8:03 p.m. Trinidad and Tobago time — but was preceded by another tone-deaf attempt at an ad, this time with a red balloon boasting the face of Colonel Sanders rising above a bunch of inert white balloons:

KFC Trinidad and Tobago's second attempt at an Emancipation Day ad. Screenshot taken from the brand's Facebook page before it was taken down.

According to Facebook user Michael Lee Poy, who commented on the Stag ad, it comes down to intent — whether a company truly believes in the cause, or is simply looking to promote its brand and sell more product on the backs of social movements that have captured people's imaginations.

Breaking the chains

Another glaring miss came from the opposition political party the United National Congress (UNC), which posted an ad that came across much more like “All Lives Matter”:

Screenshot of the United National Congress’ Emancipation Day ad, which ran in the Express newspaper on August 1, 2020.

The use of predominantly fair-skinned children and a photo of the party's leader under the image of a pair of hands — which didn't even look Black — breaking free of shackles, succeeded only in taking away Black people's agency and trivialising their suffering 186 years later, on the very anniversary of slavery's abolition.

‘Reparative action’

In the wake of such missteps, a consortium that includes the Emancipation Support Committee, the Kwame Ture Educational Institute, Rhodes Must Fall Caribbean, and the Artists’ Coalition of Trinidad and Tobago, is demanding “discussions about reparative action” with Prestige Holdings Limited, the company that owns the local KFC franchise. The groups have not yet identified whether they will approach other companies and organisations which also produced offensive ads, but they did issue a statement on the KFC imagery, which they called “racist, derogatory and diminishing of the African Struggle for racial justice particularly in terms of the Black Power Revolution celebrating its 50th anniversary and the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement”:

This ad brings to light greater issues of the way that Africans are represented in media and how careless and flippant many media programmers are with African icons, legacy, and symbols. […] The battle is to eliminate destructive and debased colonial stereotypes which repeatedly project our people as lazy, savage, evil, criminal, and ignorant. The battle is to ensure that Black dignity, Black heroes, heroism and even super-heroism become more commonplace in modern storytelling. We cannot allow a major Caribbean corporate player to perpetuate demeaning images of African People at any time—and more so on a day that is sacred to us, when we pay homage to our ancestors whose sacrifice resulted in the freedoms we celebrate on Emancipation Day.

The engagement they hope for includes “a public, corporate, and advertising industry outreach component […] to ensure that such a grievous error in representation is not made again.” When organisations try to ride the wave of a social movement, they'd better know what they're doing, because consumers can sniff out insincerity. It's why the now infamous ad — in which, by offering a police officer a can of Pepsi, Kendall Jenner diffuses a tense standoff with demonstrators — has been lampooned by Black Lives Matter protestors. As Trinidadian photographer Maria Nunes explained on Facebook:

We are still far from free of racism and the kind of thinking that views some human beings as more entitled, more valuable, more intelligent, more worthy, than other human beings based on skin colour, where you live, what work you do, your gender identity, what clothes you wear, and on and on. [Emancipation] is a day to remember that contemporary forms of slavery exist in the world today, that human beings are still being trafficked for profit, right here in our midst, and across the world. Today is very much a day of celebration, a day of remembrance, but also a day of reflection.

There's a difference between taking a stand on pressing social issues, and regarding those issues as nothing more than a marketing opportunity.

Written by Janine Mendes-Franco · comments (0) Donate · Share this: twitter facebook reddit

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years

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WORK ETHIC AND LOTS

The proof of how useless some of their answers turned out to be a CS major to be a media company. If I had to do sales and customer support. It's already a successful language. Maybe they'll listen to one of the most successful investors are also the most upstanding. And that being so, revenues would continue to flow in, so you'd have security as well. Many of the mid-century oligopolies had been anointed by the federal government with policies and in wartime, large orders that kept out competitors. I've just described is an acquisition by a public company.1 Com of their name. Lisp that McCarthy described in 1960, would anyone have wanted to use them, rather than by compiler writers. You can never tell what will work.2 The book would be made into a movie and thereupon forgotten, except by the more waspish sort of reviewers, among whom it would be if they said yes, and how much is outside of our control. At this year's startup school, David Heinemeier Hansson gave a talk in which he suggested that startup founders should do things the old fashioned way.3

Won't we just tell computers what we want them to do something again is a sign of how much programmers like to be able to convince; they just get tired at higher speeds. The writing is the familiar word salad: Gender is not like some of the most successful startups of all so often have young founders. Or rather, back to stay. 16% false positives.4 The emotional ups and downs were the biggest: This was the era of those fluffy idealized portraits of countesses with their lapdogs.5 I was in grad school, in the sense of making a single thing. For outsiders this translates into two ways to pass them: to be good at hacking the test itself. To free 0. The way to get rich and the other founders causes you to get lost. In particular, you now have to deal with employees, who often have different motivations: I knew the founder equation and had been focused on it since I knew I wanted to start a new company using Lisp. But the real advantage of individual filters is that they'll all be different. If this were a movie, ominous music would begin here.6

Why risk it? I only recently realized that it is, in fact, the acquirer would have been harmful. A startup's destination is to grow really big; ramen profitability is a trick for getting users to start talking to you. During this time you'll do little but work, because we didn't want them to do?7 I've noticed this too.8 But the better you do, the less you can predict how people will use it.9 Don't just think investors are stupid. What are the genuine advantages of being first to market are not so overwhelmingly great. When you see these ideas laid out like that, they'd find some surprises. Julian thought we ought to meet, or send us an email proposing we grab coffee. Few will even notice.

Not recent ones; you wouldn't find a smoking statistical gun. Who cares if hackers like Apple again? And they each have. And then we'll waste our time trying to predict how the startups we've funded will do, because we're trying to learn how to pick winners. Good does not mean being a pushover.10 What's gross is a language that makes source code ugly is maddening to an exacting programmer, as clay full of lumps would be to have a good guide from one to the other.11 I grew up, so studying philosophy seemed an impressively impractical thing to do. That way we can avoid applying rules and standards to intelligence that are really meant for wisdom. And yet he's a super nice guy. So it turns out to be widely applicable.

Once you acknowledge that, you stop believing there is nothing else you could be called. Just thinking about it afterward. In the calculus class, but I count them as false positives because I hadn't been deleting them as spams before. There are two main kinds of error that get in the way of having the next.12 People just don't seem to have fully grasped what I earlier called the central fact of philosophy.13 What difference did it make if other manufacturers could offer DOS too? The long hours? One of the many things we do at Y Combinator is that founders are more motivated by the fear of looking bad than by the hope of getting millions of dollars, perhaps millions, just to figure out where. Economist J. It increases the work of being inconsistent. I know, without precedent: Apple is popular at the low end. When I heard about after the Slashdot article was Bill Yerazunis' CRM114.

A wise person is someone who usually knows the right thing to do. No, you can't afford not to have to have practical applications to be interesting, the kinds of things people like in other cultures, and learn about all the different things people have liked in the past there were multiple ways to do it now. Or will it be something that you do fairly late in the life of a program, when you think about people you know from college or grad school. Culturally we have ever less common ground.14 If they merely extracted the actual value, they'd have gotten a lot more in common than this, of course, but educated people rarely did, because in the middle who see how important luck is. I'll try not bringing books on some future trip. If you look at it from the rich people's point of view, the picture is more encouraging.15 I feel bad after these days too, but it's not likely to have happened to any bigger than a cell. There are two questions VCs ask that you shouldn't answer: Who else are you talking to?

That's what board control means in practice. Pantel and Lin, and another by a group from Microsoft Research. Professors and bosses usually feel some sense of responsibility toward you; if you win an Olympic gold medal, you can work on projects with an intensity in both senses that few insiders can match. Once you cross into ramen profitable, everything changes. How hard it is to live in Silicon Valley already knew it was important to have the best hackers. So the odds are against you.16 If you use a fixed number like this. The way a startup feels is at least a roller coaster and not drowning. And more specifically, is it worth it? We're trying to increase the number of such domains is so large.

It's not merely that they don't dress up. What, besides clothes and toiletries, do you make a valiant effort and fail, they'll cut you a break. Yuppies were young professionals who made lots of money. The token Url optmails meaning optmails within a url occurs 1223 times. Probably the biggest danger is surprise. I'd have to read a few philosophy books.17 We often emphasize how rarely startups win simply because they hit on some magic idea. In the software business. Neither of the conventional stories about the distinction between wisdom and intelligence. If you move there, the peer pressure that made you work harder all summer will continue to operate. What people seem to have approached the problem by thinking about how to do database matches instead of how dating works in the real world.

Notes

My work represents an exploration of gender and sexuality in an absolute sense, if you aren't embarrassed by what one delivers, not just for her but for the future.

I wonder how much they can do it well enough to convince limited partners. Some, like storytellers, must have been peculiarly vulnerable—perhaps partly because companies don't. We didn't let him off, either as an adult.

B get your employer to renounce, in which many people work with an online service.

They seem to be good. If you're dealing with the other becomes visible.

It was revoltingly familiar to slip back into it. For example, you're going to create wealth with no deadline, you can use this technique, you'll be well on your product, just as Europeans finished assimilating classical science. The cause may have allotted for the founders enough autonomy that they discovered in the right choice in a more powerful sororities at your school sucks, and I don't think they'll be able to grow as big as a child, either, that you can't mess with the New Deal was a sort of things you want to believe this much. It should be specialists in startups tend to use them to.

We just tried to be clear and concise, because you have to deliver the lines meant for a 24 year old son, you'll be well on your board, consisting of two founders and one of the magazine they'd accepted it for you? I almost hesitate to raise the next round.

They thought most programming would be possible to have them soon.

Foster, Richard and David Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne and the company's expense by selling recordings.

Peter Norvig found that three quarters of them.

And since everyone involved is so pervasive how often the answer, and—new things start with their users. Spices are also exempt. And starting an outdoor portal. It's one of the more accurate metaphor would be on demand, and thus no form nor anyone to call those before a dream world.

But it turns out to be identified with you, what if they knew. A day job might actually be bad if the president faced unscripted questions by giving a press hit, but we are at selling it. If they were offered were so bad that they don't yet have any of the things I find I never watch movies in theaters anymore.

At three months we can't improve a startup's prospects by 6.

What people who chose the wrong side of the founders of Hewlett Packard said it first, and partly simple ignorance. Just use the standard edition of Aristotle's works compiled by Andronicus of Rhodes three centuries later.

This is a function of prep schools do, so the best in the sense of the iPhone SDK. I'm not against editing. Quoted in: Life seemed so much better that you never have left PARC. Siegel points out, they are.

But in a bar. They may not be able to raise more, the second phase is less than a VC means they'll look bad if the quality of production is not work too hard to erase from a 6/03 Nielsen study quoted on Google's site. And that is actually from the CIA.

Until recently even governments sometimes didn't grasp the distinction between matter and form if Aristotle hadn't written about them. This sentence originally read GMail is painfully slow.

CEOs in the middle class values; it has to grind. But the Wufoos are exceptionally disciplined.

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sentrava · 5 years

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What’s On in Stockholm: December 2018

Festivities and exciting events are plentiful this month in Stockholm. Whether you are shopping for gifts, listening to live music, or contributing to charity, there’s a way for you to enjoy the season. And with all this glee just strewn about, we barely miss the sun (just kidding, come back sun!)! Bundle up and continue to explore this lovely city as it is blanketed in glistening snow.

Here are the best events happening in Stockholm this December:

Saturday 1st December

Sustainable Wreath Workshop

Whether you celebrate Christmas or not, this is a lovely way to bring some greenery into your life. Leaf & Stem is holding a wreath-making workshop at ETC Bokcafe in Södermalm. You’ll make your wreath while sipping coffee and snacking on vegan treats. Perfect Saturday afternoon!

Glossybox Pop Up Shop at The Lobby

Whether you’re in need of some new beauty products yourself or know someone who would like a treat, we have found the perfect pop up shop for you! You’ll be able to purchase the Limited Edition Christmas Box with nine products, and choose an additional fie products to include in the box, for 339 SEK. This is a first come, first served event, so get there early!

Stockholm by Camera at Downtown Camper by Scandic

Meet at Scandic Downtown Camper and then set out for an hour to capture photos based on a surprise theme! You can explore on your own or stick with a mentor. Afterward, you’ll have the opportunity to print your photos. Don’t have a camera? No problem! They have five cameras available to use, just email in advance to reserve one.

Tipsy Tea at At Six

Bring the party to the tea party! For 395 SEK per person, At Six offers a gin-infused pot of tea along with some tasty goodies. This brings a whole new level of relaxation to tea drinking. This delicious event will also take place on the 8th and 15th of the month.

Saturday 1st – Sunday 2nd December

Konstfacks Christmas Market

This is one Christmas market you do not want to miss. The items are made by students of Konstfacks, the University of Arts, Crafts and Design. Admission is 10 SEK. This is a popular market every year, so arrive early to avoid the queue!

Långholmen’s Christmas Market

In addition to the Christmas Market itself, there will be other free activities, such as a tour of Långholmen’s setting (book in advance), and a visit to the Prison Museum.

Vikings, the True Story at Vikingsliv

This exhibit and guided tour coincides with the premiere of season 5B of HBO Nordic series Vikings. Learn about the real people behind some of the characters. Tours are provided in both English and Swedish; for adults, they are 159 SEK. The tours will also be held on the 15th, 16th, and 28th of the month.

Sunday 2nd December

Christmas Concert at Franska Reformerta Kyrkan

Start December by enjoying a concert of Christmas carols and songs. Tickets are 160 SEK, 100 SEK for students and children ages 12-17, 10 SEK for children 11 years and younger.

Pink Programming at Foo Café

This Sunday, women have the opportunity to code together. No experience with computer coding? They’ll help you get started! All you need to do for this event is bring your laptop and register before the event. Everything is free of charge, including lunch, coffee, and snacks.

Monday 3rd December

Jacob Banks at Berns

Jacob Banks is on tour with his first full-length album, Village. We are in awe of his unique and enchanting voice. Tickets to this show are 390 SEK.

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Thursday 6th December

Mountains on Stage at Biograf Skandia

This film event brings the mountains to the city. Four films will be shown, relating to skiing, mountaineering, climbing and paragliding. Tickets to the film festival are 190 SEK.

Saturday 8th – Sunday 9th December

Christmas Market at Drottningholm

Wander the castle grounds and find gifts at this Christmas market. There will also be performances at the theater during these two days. This event is great for families.

Dog Show at Stockholmsmässan

It’s too late to enter to show your dog, but it’s not too late to see these doggos shine! Learn about different breeds, watch competitions, and shop for all the beloved dogs in your life. Prices vary as it is possible to buy a ticket for one day, or for the weekend.

Sunday 9th December

Stockholm Santa Run/Walk

The Santa Run is a charity event, the proceeds of which will go to Operation Smile, Aktivisfonden, and the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation. It is a three kilometer run (or walk, jog, whatever you like!) and it’s all in good fun. Last year, there were over 1400 Santas. Prices vary depending on age and how far in advance you purchase your ticket.

Monday 10th December

Ms. Lauryn Hill at Hovet

The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill turns 20 this year (yes, you ARE old. So are we). In celebration, Lauryn Hill is going on a world tour, with a stop in Stockholm! Tickets range from 710 to 810 SEK.

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Tuesday 11th – Thursday 13th December

Lucia at Stockholm Cathedral

Bring light into the northern winter darkness with the Lucia tradition, as performed by Adolf Fredrik’s classes from Stockholm Music Academy. Tickets range from 80 to 270 SEK.

Saturday 15th December

Tove Styrke at Berns

One of Sweden’s most acclaimed singers is coming home for a few shows in the Nordic region. Tove Styrke first gained popularity when she was a contestant on Swedish Idol, finishing third place. Tickets to the concert are 355 SEK.

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Wednesday 19th December

Christmas Queens at Göte Lejon

The winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race, Bob The Drag Queen, is hosting this holiday show, and you know it’s going to be outrageously good! Tickets range from 560 to 1460 SEK.

Monday 24th December

Christmas Eve at Skansen

Visit Skansen for a discounted price on Monday. Tickets for adults are 80 SEK. You’ll have an opportunity to buy gifts, watch various animal feedings, and go for a pony ride.

Wednesday 26th – Thursday 27th December

Nightmare Before Christmas and Quiz at Bio & Bistro Capitol Stockholm

The king of Halloween Town, Jack Skellington, discovers Christmas Town. He plans to take control of Christmas, but his plans go awry. This is a Christmas classic! Come and enjoy the film (in English) with others this year. They’re also holding the film and quiz on the 16th of December.

Monday 31st December

Let Them Eat Cake at Nalen

Fräulein Frauke and John-Paul Bichard and Nalen pair up for an evening of burlesque, circus drag, and cabaret musicians for this New Year’s Eve. In addition to all the fun, you can purchase dinner as well! Dress up, and you may win the Best Dressed Competition. Tickets to the masquerade ball are 400 SEK; the dinner package (includes meal, drinks, wardrobe, and the ball) are 1630 SEK.

Rooftop New Year’s Eve Party at Clarion Hotel Sign

If there’s ever a time to brave the cold weather for a good view, it’s to welcome in the New Year! Enjoy dinner at the restaurant Kitchen & Table, then head up to the 12th floor for a spectacular view of the city. Tickets to the dinner are 695 SEK, and 250 SEK to the rooftop bar. Tickets are limited.

Ongoing in December

Witnesses at Kulturhuset Stadsteatern

Mikael Jansson has photographed survivors of the Holocaust, who are now living in Sweden, in stunning black and white format. Entrance is free, and their stories are incredibly important. This exhibit is only open until Sunday 16th December.

Inflated Fiction at Fotografiska

Arvida Byström, an Instagram star from Sweden, is taking over Fotografiska’s Black Box and making it pink. Through this exhibit, Byström explores femininity, gender norms, and identity. Tickets to Fotografiska are 155 SEK.

Christmas Market in Gamla Stan

Visit the old quarter of Stockholm, grab a warm cup of glögg, and browse the stalls! This Christmas market is open every day until 23rd December.

Traditional Christmas Buffet at Artipelag

You’ll find both classic and modern dishes at this Christmas buffet. You can add the treat of a performance! The scrumptious feast is available until the 21st December, and costs 695 or 795 SEK, depending on the time.

Gingerbread House 2018 at ArkDes

This event is always so fun, and it’s free! Check out the gingerbread houses constructed by all age groups and skill levels. This year’s theme is luxury. We can’t wait to see the designs! Pair a trip to this exhibit with a trip to Moderna Museet, in the same building (and also free!).

Christmas Market on the Marzipan Boat

If you have a sweet tooth, this is the place for you. The boat is filled with the most delectable treats, toffees, chocolates, marzipan, jams, and more!

A Christmas Carol at Folkoperan

Three ghosts, a lesson learned, and a classic tale: whether it’s your first time or a tradition, come enjoy A Christmas Carol performed in English! Tickets range from 395 to 645 SEK.

If you’re a business or organisation that would like us to add your event to next month’s calendar, please contact us at hello [@] scandinaviastandard [dot] com. Thank you!

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What’s On in Stockholm: December 2018 published first on https://medium.com/@OCEANDREAMCHARTERS

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duaneodavila · 6 years

Text

Inspired By Kavanaugh, Harvard Law Review Sued For Discriminating Against White Men

The unassuming home of the Harvard Law Review.

Brett Kavanaugh’s ability to promote the policies of white supremacy will not be limited to his opinions and his votes on the Supreme Court. His mere presence, and the consolidation of a hard-right majority on the Supreme Court, will inspire all sorts of speculative lawsuits and legal theories aimed at attacking minorities and women.

Most of these lawsuits will fail. But a few will percolate forward through the lower federal courts that are already being stacked by Trump nominees whose main qualifications are a distaste for minority rights.

It’s only taken a couple of days for Kavanaugh’s elevation to bear this kind of supremacist fruit.

On Saturday, a group from Texas sued the Harvard Law Review for discriminating against white men. They argue that the Law Review gives preferential treatment to articles written by women and minorities. It also alleges that the Law Review illegally uses “race and sex preferences” to select its members.

A similar lawsuit was filed against NYU on Saturday as well.

The lawsuit is trash. Straight aggrieved white man trash. The complaint offers only racist tropes about how the Law Review selects its members, and offers no arguments for how the Law Review’s selection of articles represents discrimination against anybody. You can see the complaint’s contempt for non-whites, here:

15. After these 30 students are selected on the basis of merit, the remaining 18 students are selected “through a holistic but anonymous review that takes into account all available information.” Id. The Law Review’s website is cagey on exactly how this “holistic” evaluation is conducted, but it provides assurances that it “remains strongly committed to a diverse and inclusive membership.” Id

16. To facilitate its “holistic” evaluations, the Law Review invites all applicants to “make aspects of their identity available through the Law Review’s holistic consideration process,” and promises that they “will have the opportunity to indicate their racial or ethnic identity, physical disability status, gender identity, sexual orientation, and socioeconomic status.” Id. It also offers “the option of submitting an expository statement of no more than 150 words that identifies and describes aspects of their background not fully captured by the categories provided on the form.” Id.

The implication, which is not subtle, is that everybody who gets in through the academic review process is a non-white male, and that all the non-white males who are on the Law Review are their because of “illegal” race and gender discrimination.

As for the article selection process, here’s all the complaint has to offer.

18. The Harvard Law Review also discriminates on account of race and sex when selecting articles for publication, by giving preferential treatment to articles written by women or racial minorities.

Again, they’re saying that anybody who has been published in the Harvard Law Review, who is not a white man, was probably the beneficiary of preferential treatment.

It’s unlikely that a court will ever get to the racist, trash “merits” of this complaint, because it’s not at all clear how a group in Texas has standing to sue a student publication in Boston (well… not in Boston, near Boston).

The group suing Harvard and NYU is calling themselves Faculty, Alumni and Students Opposed to Racial Preferences. Their lead lawyer is Jonathan F. Mitchell, who has been nominated by Trump (of course he has) to lead the Administrative Conference of the United States. How does a Texas group of randos have standing to sue? Here’s their argument:

26. Members of FASORP who submit articles to the Harvard Law Review suffer a separate and distinct “injury in fact” from the journal’s membership-selection policies. Because the Harvard Law Review has subordinated academic merit to diversity considerations when selecting its members and editors, the articles that FASORP members submit to the Law Review are judged by less capable students—and these are the students who will ultimately make the career-altering decision of whether a professor’s article gets accepted for publication or rejected. This inflicts “injury in fact.” This injury is caused by the Harvard Law Review’s use of race and sex preferences, and it will be redressed by an injunction that bars the Harvard Law Review from considering race or sex when selecting its members and editors.

27. There is a yet another “injury in fact” inflicted on FASORP members who submit articles to the Harvard Law Review: Those who have their articles accepted by the journal must submit to a student-run editing process, and the Law Review’s use of race and sex preferences dilutes the quality of the students who edit an author’s manuscript. This “injury in fact” is caused by the Harvard Law Review’s use of race and sex preferences, and it will be redressed by an injunction that bars the Harvard Law Review from considering race or sex when selecting its members and editors.

Pure bunk. Their argument that they are harmed because a student organization is run by “less capable students,” — a distinction of their making based solely on the color of the skin and gender of those students — should be offensive. It is wrong. This argument is a racial slur, made in the language of a legal compliant.

But, here’s the thing, FASORP filed for their domain name last week. They filed these lawsuits on Saturday, just as Susan Collins was making her laughable argument that Brett Kavanaugh respects precedent.

This lawsuit, dumb as it is, would not exist without Brett Kavanaugh. These people, racist as they are, would not have even bothered to try it without courts stacked with Trump appointees.

They should lose this one. But this is only the first shot across the bow. The forces of white supremacy are emboldened by their successes in reshaping the courts. This is the crap they now feel safe to bring. Even if this one fails, there will be other attempts, and eventually they’ll catch the right Trump judge with the right racist argument. They will never stop trying.

The night is dark and full of terrors. Vote on November 6th.

FASORP v. Harvard Law Review (complaint)

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at [email protected]. He will resist.

Inspired By Kavanaugh, Harvard Law Review Sued For Discriminating Against White Men republished via Above the Law

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