Rugged Our aluminum-encased Whisker Biscuits are 300% stronger than previous models. And, we’ve added a rock-solid, dual-bolt mount and a set screw* for even more secure, “locked-down” mounting. *Set Screw on Sure Shot Pro and Sure Shot models only.

So I picked up a new slang term for vagina (from this comment thread, which… yikes): “whisker biscuit”. And, thinking that was pretty cute, I looked it up only to find almost all of the references were to some archery accessory.

Only the thing is, knowing that other meaning, the copy just sounds hilarious. But then, I realized this was true of the entire goddamn site. Like, take a look at the Meat-Seeker Broadhead or the 4 Banger Quiver.

But here’s the thing, it’s not blatant, nudge-nudge wink-wink say no more. I don’t think it’s even a matter of plausible deniability, I think that everything’s written straight. Oooor, there’s a bowhunting supplier out there with a remarkably subtle sense of humor.

geek-selforum:

Let’s review. We’ve got:

• an android
• an empath
• a guy with x-ray vision
• a sore loser who’s handy with a bat’leth
• the Federation’s #1 bearded bluffer
• and the boss’s girlfriend

Last night I was looking through my likes and it was like holy shit, this is the best feed I’ve ever encountered, every post is great.

Which is a little silly, I know, but it was kind of a problem because there was no point at which I didn’t want to keep going and eventually I stayed up hours later than I should’ve re-reading the whole thing.

zuky:

nightlocke-d:

bestnatesmithever:

I just thought of something. If Jesus was born today…in Bethlehem, how accepting would Americans be of him? A 32-year-old man from Palestine who speaks Hebrew and tells you to give all your money to the poor?

Burn

If Jesus were born today and gained any sort of clout, the same thing that happened to him two thousand years ago would happen to him again: he would be accused of being a dangerous cult leader attacking the banking system and the political establishment; he would be executed by the empire, probably by unreported drone strike rather than messy spectacular crucifixion; his own former friends and students would be dragged before the media to denounce his delusional narcissistic personality disorder; records of his life would be driven underground for centuries, until a new empire saw fit to revive his memory in service of a new imperial agenda.

Nietzsche will make you believe God is Dead after you see what these kids did for their sick classmate.

At 0:15 You Will Cry, At 1:15 You Will Cry, Also at 2:15 a Continuation of Crying, It Will Be Woe At All Times

I know a stripper who also works as a nanny, she tells me it’s not all that rare a thing around here. Part of it is the hours work well as a day shift/night shift thing, but more than that it makes sense, the skill sets actually line up pretty well for sex workers, especially the ones who’ve aged or birthed out of their prime earning potential (and don’t fool yourself, that’s what a lot of those Victorian and earlier nannies/governesses/wet nurses were) - on the one hand, making people feel loved and wanted, on the other hand setting and enforcing limits.

(I guess that skill set is why “bartender/owner” has always been a pretty common career progression there too.)

billyjane:

It’s spring fever.  That is what the name of it is.  And when you’ve got it, you want - oh, you don’t quite know what it is you do want, but it just fairly makes your heart ache, you want it so!  Mark Twain

A group of women dancing in the open air,1924

So riffing off that last Game of Thrones episode… you know, if that show went all in Game of Thrones could make rape sexy.

Like, not hegemonically so, but it’s the only potential cultural force - powerful enough, and actually pretty in character - that could break the cordon sanitaire against openly accepting those ideas in the prestige media of our culture: that no can mean yes, or can and should be pushed past and turn into a yes, that rape can be enjoyable, that there are people it’s proper to inflict it upon, and we should be satisfied when it is.

Like I have a feeling that if push came to shove, I would put good money that says among the smart set - intelligent, well educated, upper-middle class (each of these being mostly used as synonyms for the others) - the brand identity of any of those writers, the brand identity of their platforms, the brand identity of feminism itself, is actually weaker than the brand identity of the premium cable hourlong action-drama Game of Thrones.

Like at first, they’d make a thing of furiously condemning it, or pretending it was irredemable and thus they were going to dismiss it entirely and speak of it no more, but people would still watch the show and with bright young cultural entrepeneurs stepping into the vacuum to praise or at least accept it the opportunity cost - in terms of prestige, cultural capital, eyeballs, ad revenue - would become too great and they’d break, maybe make sniffy asides here and there at the most.

After the almost uniformly negative Monday reactions from the major outlets, by Tuesday The New Republic (which traditionally exists to make this exact kind of turn) was already doing contrarian walkback.

I think if the show wanted to - just to show off their power, to pull the most discordian kulturkampf ever attempted - they could get away with it.

I mean, a few years ago Sady Doyle went in on the books and to this day she’s still licking her wounds over the pushback she got. Like, Sady fucking Doyle. Like, the fucking books.

Today I kludged together some motorcycle repairs using cleverness and scrap sitting around the garage, then spent a few hours putting in some solid outdoor labor uprooting some blackberry bramble vines, and then ate a slab of steak for dinner.

Feeling very manly.

Ech.

Like, I do appreciate both the optics and the reality of armed volunteers staring down government agents until they slink off, that’s kind of cool and it’s a good morale-booster to see that thing pay off.

But really this fight was never really about the people vs. the government, it was another in a very long-running series of range wars of ranchers vs. absolutely everyone else.

From the get-go the idea was always that ranchers could use waste land - low quality scrubland, maybe soil quality and/or water availability too low to bother farming, maybe just butt-far from any settlement or mode of transportation - to run livestock even though they didn’t really pay full value for it or put any effort into improving the land ’cause why the hell not, might as well get some use out of it, let them graze and then drive the cattle on up through the Great American Desert to the railheads in Chicago.

And then inevitably development pushed out a bit further and that land got used for something more useful and the ranchers were angry, were like “well crap, if we can’t trample all the hell through your land and fuck up everything living on it, we won’t be able to continue our traditional lifestyle of trampling all the hell through your land and fucking up everything living on it”, and everyone else was like “yeah, guess so, dipshit”, and then since the ranchers were in the habit of dealing with problems by shooting at them on the assumption that no one would mind, they fought.

And people are like “ooh hoo hoo, see they wanted to kick him off so they could build solar plants on the land” and yes, that makes sense, that is in fact a more useful thing to do with the land that this guy never really put serious money or effort towards.

And I mean, hell, rural right-populism is supposed to love energy extraction projects, right? Energy independence, good jobs for earthy people in a masculine, right-leaning hierarchy running from businessmen down to practical scientists and engineers down to skilled technical laborers down to unskilled jobs for folks with the gumption to do hard work in the middle of fucking nowhere.

Maybe if we called it “drilling for sunshine”?

Dipshits.

I wonder when some Republican presidential (primary?) candidate is going to be clever enough to decry the DoJ Civil Rights Division as racial witch-hunters and promise to reorient it to focus on the real modern civil rights challenge: blue state/city gun control

pfhorensics:

the aarne-thompson lexicon is an index mainly of fairy tale archetypes and apparently AT 2015 is “the goat that won’t go home.” like, literally. there are enough fairy tales from different cultures out there about goats that just won’t fucking go home to warrant its own listing. that’s incredible.

A perfect hook to point everybody to my favorite categorization system, the FTEGOMCS, for the efficient classification of the plot of any television episode.

You know what video game franchise is due for a return? Lemmings. It’d be pretty well-suited to tablets and phones.

War games are fun until somebody gets hurt

Pf. For my money, the correct moves for Putin in case of NATO-Russia conflict would be first, to to push the Syrian conflict into a regional war and fan the Arab Spring embers in the Maghreb, which would create a second(/third) theater for Europe that he didn’t have to supply himself and also create massive, destabilizing refugee flows - there’d be domestic pressure to keep naval assets that could go to the Black Sea at home in the Mediterranean for (take your pick) interdiction or humanitarian assistance, and it’d drive a wedge between the existing internationalist regimes and the continent’s right-nationalist challengers (any electoral victory by which would both weaken the NATO coalition and reinforce his domestic “let’s do WWII again” rhetoric of Russia as an anti-fascist counterweight).

And second, to try and strike way behind the American lines by stirring up a civil war - people tend to interpret his moves to ratchet up “Christian traditionalist vs. gay atheist” tensions as a purely domestic thing and that’s a mistake. Dude came up through the KGB.

Someone’s playing Feist’s “1234” and I guess it’s been long enough that that sound is (precisely) dated now

Wait, am I the first person to call that “indtwee”? It’s so obvious.

I was reading Salon back since the ‘90s, when they were actually paying for name writers (tho honestly I can only remember Paglia off the top of my head). Got a letter to the editor run once, which I regret - less a matter of having anything useful or interesting to contribute than knowing the right clever words to get published. Even got a subscription when they went paywall, and occasionally looked in even during the silly times of the Bush years. Haven’t really checked in ages, though.

I see Slate’s following the same road now - ads mixed in (or taking over) above the fold, adding subscriber-exclusive content, more liberal sass and outrage clickbait (Mark Joseph Stern, alas, is probably a pretty good pickup for this strategy, writing his stories to polarize the readership into being either outraged at “them” or outraged at him). Kind of a shame, as ridiculous as the #slatepitchy Kaus/Shafer/Kinsley years could get there was regularly good, worthwhile stuff in there.

I guess decent webmag journalistishism as a way to make money is over on the internet (I mean, it never really got going in the first place, but there was a dream, and startup funding), and it’s only going to survive as a way to spend money. The New Republic’s occasionally worthwhile since Hughes picked it up from Peretz, even if you have to keep opening private browsing windows to get around the monthly free article limit (and no, I don’t feel remotely guilty for this, any more than I did doing my childhood magazine reading at the library). PandoDaily’s still running off VC, and thank god someone’s still commissioning The War Nerd and the other Exiled guys, hopefully when it never pays off Andreessen will just fund them out of pocket.

Two addenda to that media post:

First, it’s worth noticing that a lot of the best journalistic applecart-tippers come from expat backgrounds. The Exiled guys - Mark Ames, Sasha Levine, John Dolan(/“Gary Brecher”) - came from the eXile, a Moscow expat paper, and if I remember correctly, some of the neoreaction all-stars are expat journalists from the former British Empire outposts of Asia. Hell, I think even a bunch of the Reason guys back in the ‘90s had been expat journalists in Prague (with Suck.com in between).

Second, for my impending doom fetishist followers (coughcoughbloodandhedonismcough… ahem, excuse me. Like bloodandhedonism, I mean to say) it bears pointing out that the Cold War Sulzbergerian/network news model of journalistic outlets with no explicit partisan alignment - just a general consensusist one - and a sentorian from-above tone (“fair and balanced”, you might say)… Well, there were structural factors behind that, yes. A limited number of broadcast networks producing one product for national consumption, before local political cultures had completely come(/been brought) into line with a uniform bipartisan divide; competition from these broadcasters winnowing the vibrant newspaper ecosystem down to one daily paper per city; the Fairness Doctrine. But also*, there was conscious intent at play. Ideological, party-linked newspapers, operating under the pressures of niche journalism for competitive advantage in a for-profit system, had in prewar Europe played a major part in the pillarisation of the populace into different camps - socialist, liberal, christian democrat, fascist, etc. - which would develop their own economies, welfare systems, even paramilitaries, which would occasionally try to swallow the state apparatus (and sometimes succeed). Competitive journalism of the “yellow” type had pushed America into wars before, luckily against an ailing Spanish Empire and her runty spawn that it could defeat handily, but this was seen as a risk to be guarded against. But pf, history.

None of this will something something.



*“but also”. Between the New Deal and WWII the state and nominally extrastate New Class had significantly intertwined - to great success! - in the Atomic Age “best and the brightest” system that Vietnam later undermined. It’s a little specious to make a firm distinction between the two in this period, and the Fairness Doctrine (est. 1949) was just this elite consensus codified into law. Of course, journalism is held sacrosanct from government imbrication, as we’ve all learned from the schools and media, and the consolidation of news outlets in the hands of enthusiastic supporters of this coalition was merely the result of the causeless hand of the free market.