Chinese livestream fashion companies are swapping out female lingerie models for male models because China has banned women from modelling undergarments online.
Listened to Fearless again and at this distance, yeah, it’s an album of love songs written by someone with BPD, that’s the thing.
But… what if that was the secret ingredient all along? That in our self-aware postfeminist age, authentic, boy-thrilling, country-song need for a man can only be evoked and projected through pathological heterofemininity?
Oh my Goddddddd, I just realized the even wilder thing about my sudden out-of-nowhere fantasy of getting plowed by West Indian guys.
It’s from Dee Jay. Like, Super Street Fighter II Dee Jay, from Jamaica, with the pants that say “Maximum”?
Like, apparently he would have awoken something in me, but I was straight at the time, so I was just carrying that one around as unexploded ordnance for like 29 years
Do you still use a weighted blanket? How does that fit with the point about needing blankets to hang over the bed?
I tried going up from like 10 to 15lb or 15 to 20 and that was more unwieldy so as I started pulling my down blanket up all the way I kinda got out of the habit.
Also this is my first winter with the down and I’m appreciating that (esp. in combination with the silk sheets keeping skin cool) the warmth is an embracing sensory cocoon in its own right
Tips for hideous delayed onset muscle soreness? I’ve been barely able to lift my arms above my shoulders for two days after doing far too many reps of a 20kg barbell. Creatine and…?
Never found the creatine to help with soreness. Got one of those massage guns with swappable tips to apply vibration to your flesh.
And maybe try to lie back on a recliner or pool chair or something with your arms stretched out so they’re at higher elevation, lymphatic drainage and all.
Wrap in steamed towels I guess, if you have a towel steamer.
One of the great tragedies of the Rust Belt* is that it did not define itself as a distinct cultural region until well after its great era of flourishing was over. For the century from about 1850-1950, this area was not merely the industrial heart of the nation, but also its cultural center. And yet the inhabitants of the area, if they thought of themselves as having a regional identity at all, it was as inhabitants of the generic ‘north’. Its status as a center of cultural innovation was pooh-poohed by the fact that the nation’s political and intellectual elite was, even as it is today, strongly based to the coastal northeast, and this Eurocentric elite had a very different set of priorities than the cultural avant-garde of the as-yet-unRusted-Belt. This area produced little in the way of ‘high art’ in the expected form of novels, symphonies, and oil paintings. But what it did produce…
In 1900, Chicago was the occult capital of the nation, a hotbed of wild theorizing and underground publishing of all manner of Theosophical weirdness. Meanwhile, Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright were producing the first wholly indigenous tradition of monumental architecture, setting a pattern for all of urban modernity. The Dayton, Ohio based Wright brothers - often abused in pop-historiography as some sort of rude mechanicals - were slowly and methodically systematizing the science of aerodynamics in preparation for the first ever instance of heaver-than-air flight in human history, with world-shaking consequences. And up in Detroit, Henry Ford was not merely revolutionizing transportation and manufacturing, but setting a standard for industrial relations that would create an unbelievably influential model for decades to come. It might sound strange to modern ears to cite Henry Ford as a bleeding-edge figure, but Fordism served as an inspiration to both Bolsheviks and Fascists, as well as to domestic New Dealers, while simultaneously pleasing and alarming old-fashioned Anglo liberals. The Long 20th Century is a series of footnotes to the Rust Belt Golden Age.
As can be seen from this too-brief summary of the luminaries of the epoch, it was a deeply unique Golden Age, characterized by cultural traits all its own. Technical prowess, utopian visions, and thorough systematization were its characteristics, as was a sense that a lone individual or small group could, through sheer innovative genius, change the world. While the archetype of the Mad Scientist is based on Mitteleuropean models, it was here in Mittelamerika that it achieved its apotheosis. The definitive cultural history of this region and era has yet to be written**, which just shows how underappreciated the underlying unity still is, but it in a large part contributed to the dynamic optimism that we all now take for granted as distinctively ‘American.’ But as the area felt the collapse of the long bubble economy that funded its flourishing, and its brightest sons and daughters fled west to contribute to the explosion of creativity along the Pacific slope that is now likewise collapsing, it finally awakened to a sense of unity that had previously been hidden by arbitrary State boundaries.
That, at some point, this area will again be the center of some sort of vigorous culture seems an inevitability of human geography, but will it again share the same features of optimism and technical prowess, or were those mere incidental features of a bunch of people with a Protestant work ethic suddenly getting access to the tremendous wealth provided by a vast agricultural base + fossil fuels? Man alive, I don’t have the slightest clue, but I hope that there is some sort of afterlife or metempsychosis so I can find out.
* here roughly defined as the geographical area constrained by an irregular polygon whose points are Syracuse, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, St. Louis, Davenport, Green Bay, and Flint.
** unless it has and i’m just ignorant of it, in which case please let me know so i can rest easy that i don’t need to do any work and can just sit down and read the thing. honestly, even tangentially related book recommendations are appreciated.
Ah okay, the new symptom is muscles I have used recently begin to take more effort to use. Probably related to problems breaking down byproducts of activation, I’ll have to make sure that one doesn’t sneak up on me.
I feel like they were positioning petite sirloin as “the good, cheap cut of meat” pretty hard a few years ago but all the ones I encounter today are base-priced and kinda tough even with marinating
