Day… uh… 5? of #sevenblackandwhitep

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Day… uh… 5? of #sevenblackandwhitephotos – 1 photo a day, 7 days, no humans, no explanations.
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It’s maddening, because everyone who’s

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It’s maddening, because everyone who’s paying attention knows that this is going to destroy the economy; the Rs are figuring on getting voted out in 2018, sticking a Democratic-majority government with the unpopular task of trying to clean up the incredible mess caused by this grenade tossed under all of our social structures, and then letting Fox News whip voters into a frenzy just in time for them to get control back and wreck any recovery again. It’s all just a way to keep extracting money for their donors, who own them entirely by this point.The most telling thing is that if you try to tell someone who’s not already opposed to the current administration what’s in this bill, they don’t believe you and assume you’re a frothing-at-the-mouth liberal, because this bill is so bad it’s literally unbelievable.There are tax breaks that only apply to Betsy DeVos personally. There’s a tax break for your private jet.And now if your employer gives you a $5 giftcard for being Employee of the Month, you *have* to report that as taxable income.Oh and they’ve repealed the individual mandate, collapsing the health insurance market.*AND* there’s a provision specifying fetal personhood, so abortion will become illegal the first time a case comes before a conservative judge– which they’ve stacked the courts with, so. Welcome to our new dystopian nightmare, where it really doesn’t matter how you vote…. This is why I don’t usually come over to Facebook. I have nothing to say that isn’t shit like this. And either you already know, or you can’t be told, because see above, it’s not possible to believe this if you haven’t been following along the whole time. 

[I started to post this on my Facebook, then changed my mind because I Can’t Deal. I do think I’ve mostly been unfriended by anyone who doesn’t already know this shit, but I still don’t want to risk it.]
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ms-daphne replied to your post “I never did

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ms-daphne replied to your post “I never did write anything original during November. I got as far as…”

I think it would be an interesting storytelling excercise for like all of hollywood to do this for one year. One solid year of movies being 17% male. You know, as an exercise. A cinematic etude.

Fuck yes.

Like I said, it doesn’t have to like, be a Thing. Nobody’s ever got to mention it. “What do you mean, there’s no men in this film? Chris Hemsworth’s got his shirt off in it for like, five whole minutes! There’s a whole long scene where we watch him work out!” “He dies in the second scene.” “Yes but he’s so important to the emotional arc of the film, you know?”

It’d be neat if they did this with race, too–

“What? There are totally white people in this film. Our Hero and her lithe, feisty-but-submissive Love Interest/Sidekick Boy [who will either later die to fuel her woman-pain OR will be her trophy at the end] go to the exotic, distant Suburbs to meet up with the Mystical Caucasian! Her husband prepares them traditional foods [there’s a beautifully-shot scene where our protagonists struggle to respectfully eat hot dogs suspended in gelatin and unseasoned boiled chicken breasts with no salt, played for laughs] and then imparts plot-crucial Mystical Knowledge to them, whereupon they flee, and the Suburbs are destroyed by the pursuing Big Bad. These characters are never mentioned again except in a desultory flashback where the Hero is given renewed resolve to defeat the Big Bad because of the horrible tragedy of what it did to the Suburbs.”

But what do I know. 
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Ugh I have a nerve in the neck/shoulderblade area that periodically in my life gets pinched, and I..

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Ugh I have a nerve in the neck/shoulderblade area that periodically in my life gets pinched, and I semi-pinched it last night, but what’s mostly really annoying is that the SKIN ON TOP OF IT is horrifyingly tender, and I can’t find my heating pad, so, everything sucks and nothing is fair and how do y’all with chronic pain handle it because this is the PITS. It’s not even that bad, I know, it’s just– like– I need the area to be warm to ease the pain but I can’t stand anything to touch it because it feels like someone’s been scrubbing me with a Brillo pad all night. Bummer!

On a better note, this thread on Twitter is deeply inspiring. If I had money I would throw some into this person’s Patreon, she’s done a ton of great threads like this. (Her catchphrase is “Cry havoc, and let slip the dogs of civic participation,” which is hokey as fuck and she owns it, and it’s fantastic.)

Someone can screencap and post that and let it go all over Tumblr, it’s great stuff. I just don’t have the energy now. 
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satinsneakers: I read all these scripts by male writers where the female characters worry about...

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satinsneakers:

I read all these scripts by male writers where the female characters worry about getting older. The funny thing is, most of the women I’ve encountered have been HAPPY to get older. They have more money. They have more knowledge. They know how to say no, fuck off and this is bullshit. They no longer have to deal with periods and can have sex without worrying about getting pregnant. They don’t have children to care for so they can do whatever the fuck they want.

In a society that only values women for their looks, I can see how male writers would think that getting older is the worst thing that can happen to a woman. A woman gets old and she is no longer fuckable. A woman gets old and men don’t want to ogle her anymore. (I type this as I’m being ogled at the intersection of Hollywood & Highland.)

However, when I think of older women, I think of Harriet Tubman, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Hillary Clinton, Sonia Sotomayor, Meryl Streep, Jessica Lange and Judy Dench. I think of my cousins and aunt who own their own homes. I think of my mother who handles our family investments, my grandfather’s girlfriend still working as a computer programmer, my Nana and the small business she owns and operates. I think of my boyfriend’s mother who was like, I’m going to France for 3 months, bye bitches.

Getting older isn’t the worst thing that can happen to a woman, it’s her best kept secret.

#round here i see little gangs of old ladies#who have presumably outlived their husbands#and who hang out drinking coffee together all day #often with a dog#and honestly hashtag Squad Goals  via @deputychairman

I’m just interjecting unnecessarily into this post to relate that my dude’s mother (my mother-out-law, since we’re not married) and her closest friends are all widows. There’s a group of three of them (four, now?) all widowed at various points, and they call themselves The Widdas. (Local accent.) 

M-O-L has a magnetic-backed ceramic tile whiteboard on her fridge where she writes out her week’s to-do list. At one point I was over there and she’d written a number of things on it in her lovely, looping, elementary-school-teacher handwriting. One of them, I now know, was a reminder to herself to go to a blood drive and donate blood. The next one was a reminder of her weekly dinner date with The Widdas. 

But in the moment I saw it, it just meant that there was a white ceramic tile on her fridge with black looping handwriting that read “BLOOD WIDDAS” and someday I am going to be cool enough to be in a gang called BLOOD WIDDAS.
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purpleplunderbunny replied to your post

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replied to your post “It’s maddening, because everyone who’s paying attention knows that…”

I literally cannot get out of bed this morning because of this fuckery. Like. What’s the point?

All right, all right. Here it is, the thread I mentioned that was my only hope and consolation. It’s long, so I’m starting with one screencap, and then it’s transcription. If you love it, click through and donate to the original author.

[Transcription of Twitter thread by @alexandraerin:] Alright, babies. I got my drink on and I got my think on, and so here’s the thing I want us all to remember.

Paul Ryan didn’t stand around a keg predicting he’d dismantle Medicare. He planned on it.

I point this out because I’m going to talk about how we get out of this mess, and I know I’m going to get a bunch of people asking me: “Do you really think that will happen?”

No. No, I do not think it will happen.

Because I’m not making predictions.

I’m making plans.

Whether they pass this monstrosity tonight or not, we are going to nail them to the fudging wall they keep threatening to build with it  in 2018 and 2020. We’re going to be so mad and we’ll turn out so hard their voter suppression schemes won’t be enough to save them.

And when we have removed their majorities in Congress and taken Trump out of our White House, we are going after his judges. We’re going to call them the tainted judges. We’re going to put an asterisk by every decision they make.

We’re going to fund the appeals of anyone who is found guilty or has an appeal denied under the tainted judges. We’re going to challenge their legitimacy at every turn, because they were appointed illegitimately.

Until the day that Gorsuch resigns in shame, we’re going to call the Supreme Court “the Star Chamber”, because it’s got an asterisk on it.

We’re going to get journalists to do it, too. The old guard won’t, but the new guard is moving in. Citizen-journalists making a name for themselves. And hey, there are vacancies in some top positions right now, which will create more openings in the ranks. I bet more are coming.

Alexandra Erin Doesn’t Want A Lot For Christmas Retweeted Emma  ☕️ 🧞‍♀️ ✨ 🎄 ❄️[dire prediction redacted for brevity]

Don’t tell me what’s going to happen.

Was I not clear?

This is not a thread for predictions.

This is a thread for plans.

Dire predictions are going to get you blocked.

Spit them out on your own timeline, or swallow them.

Alexandra Erin Doesn’t Want A Lot For Christmas added,

I’m telling you the plan I’m making. You can join me in it. I hope you will. While everybody else was predicting the GOP’s implosion in the face of Trump’s candidacy, their leadership forgot the predictions and made other plans.

We’re going to keep running as candidates and voting in local elections, for state seats and city councils, just like we did back in November. We’re going to take back the country from the bottom up, by no longer ceding ANY ground as “red” or “safely Republican”.

We’re going to treat Trump’s ridiculous county map as our to-do list. We’re going to check them off one by one. All it takes is getting involved.

We outnumber them. We are everywhere. There is not one of those wide empty spaces that is so empty it doesn’t have queer people in it, doesn’t have anyone with disabilities, doesn’t have people of color. And we are passionate and engaged when we believe it can make a difference.

So we have got to believe it can make a difference.

Even when it seems impossible.

The GOP is doing things this way–a way that would have seemed impossible to the Democrats in Congress–because it’s the only way to get what they want, because we have stymied them so much.

They know it looks bad.

But we’ve backed them into a corner.

They are trapped between us and their donors, and right now they’re more afraid of their donors. They don’t think they can win another election without their donors.

Well.

We’re going to get revenge on both of them.

We’re going to burn their donors’ money.

No matter how much they spend, they can’t win an election if we turn out. If every one of us who can vote, does vote. They can’t win.

That’s why they put as much effort into depressing turnout for Clinton as they did suppressing votes.

I think it was either Scottish philosopher David Hume, or Dr. Frank-N-Furter, who said, “Don’t dream it. Be it.”

Don’t just predict. Plan.

If the left of the aisle has a weakness, it’s not its tendency to tear itself apart fighting over purity. No. That’s only possible *because* of a more basic flaw, and that is making predictions about outcomes based on ourselves as the model.

The squabbling among factions that contributed to Trump’s victory was only possible because those who participated in it in good faith (as opposed to plants stirring things up) mostly believed that Trump would lose.

This was a prediction.

Every time the GOP manages to elect a terrible candidate–a Nixon, a Bush, a Trump–the song sung by true believers to the left of the right shifts mid-chorus from “It could never happen.” to “How did it happen?”

If the right’s reaction to a candidate is “This person can never be president!”, they’re not making a prediction. They’re making a promise, which they will carry out to the best of their abilities.

When the left has the same reaction, it’s a prediction. Trump can never be president… it can never happen. So relax a little. Fight a little bit more about who the best candidate would be. It’s not like he’ll win.

So when I say we’re going to win next November, when I say that we’re going to kick them out of our nice big capitol building and send them home, DON’T TAKE MY WORD FOR IT.

It’s not a prediction.

It’s a promise we have to keep.

It’s a plan of action.

Alexandra Erin Doesn’t Want A Lot For Christmas Retweeted Sunny Moraine who’s a bit miffed re: all the Nazis: [TAKE YOUR RAGE AND REFINE IT INTO FUCKING ROCKET FUEL]

TAKE YOUR RAGE AND REFINE IT INTO [fudging] ROCKET FUEL.

Alexandra Erin Doesn’t Want A Lot For Christmas added,

Are you crying tonight? Have you been crying for months?

DROWN THEM WITH YOUR TEARS. See who’s laughing about it in January, 2019.

Make them choke on the ashes of your dreams.

Get your revenge for everything they’ve taken from you, every threat they’ve made you fear, every moment of joy they’ve snatched, every person they’ve killed however quickly or slowly, every family they have torn apart.

It’s our republic. We’re the public. The prosperity of this nation does not belong to the ~*donor class*~. Contrary to the book they swear by, Atlas was not the titan who stood on top of the world, shrugging off the cries of those he trampled.

We are going to kick them out, and when they’re gone… hoo boy. We’re going to have some work to do then. Fixing the damage they did. Fixing the damage that let them get in. Redressing the sins that led us here.

But to do any of that the first thing we have to do is WIN.

The GOP leadership did not predict this. They planned it. They planned it, and they followed through, and they did it… even when every little detail didn’t go quite according to plan. They treat “must” as a promise, the only promises they keep.

And that’s how we beat them.

We plan to win.

And we do it.

I feel a bit silly throwing out my catchphrase here, silly as it is, but it’s maybe never been more appropriate.

So here goes.

CRY
HAVOC
AND
LET
SLIP
THE
DOGS
OF
CIVIC PARTICIPATION

Let me tell you something before I wrap this up: what the GOP is doing tonight is hard for them. There’s a reason they don’t just do it like this all the time. It’s exhausting. It’s demoralizing. It raises doubts in the rank and file.

It costs them, every time.

They wouldn’t do it if they didn’t feel they absolutely had to.

I would not be surprised if we get another announcement of an impending GOP Senate retirement in the next couple weeks. Win or lose tonight, I bet someone reaches their lifetime limit of this kind of sugar.

And even those in the race, in 2018 and 2020… some of them aren’t really going to be in the race. Not the way they would be if this had been the cakewalk they were promised.

And that’s part of how we’ll beat them, too.

We’re tired. We’re demoralized. We’re beaten down. But there are MILLIONS of us, and only dozens, scores, of them.

And they are already afraid of us, and hoping we’ll lose interest and go away.

And so the main thing we have to do to beat them is: don’t forgive, don’t forget, and don’t give up.
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i have only shreds of this remaining to me now hours later, having not written it down when i first.

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i have only shreds of this remaining to me now hours later, having not written it down when i first woke up (i made the mistake of looking at my phone first thing and discovering the tax bill passed), but at some point last night I dreamed I was at a recital in a very small venue, a small room with folding chairs and a low stage, where George W Bush was playing guitar and at one point he was doing fingerpicking stuff with a pair of forks while he sang in a folksy twang and I turned to my companion and muttered, “he’s from goddamn Connecticut”

I don’t remember anything else but there’s a little nugget of my subconscious.
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lazaefair: bomberqueen17: ms-daphne replied to your post

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lazaefair:

bomberqueen17:

ms-daphne replied to your post “I never did write anything original during November. I got as far as…”

I think it would be an interesting storytelling excercise for like all of hollywood to do this for one year. One solid year of movies being 17% male. You know, as an exercise. A cinematic etude.

Fuck yes.

Like I said, it doesn’t have to like, be a Thing. Nobody’s ever got to mention it. “What do you mean, there’s no men in this film? Chris Hemsworth’s got his shirt off in it for like, five whole minutes! There’s a whole long scene where we watch him work out!” “He dies in the second scene.” “Yes but he’s so important to the emotional arc of the film, you know?”

It’d be neat if they did this with race, too–

“What? There are totally white people in this film. Our Hero and her lithe, feisty-but-submissive Love Interest/Sidekick Boy [who will either later die to fuel her woman-pain OR will be her trophy at the end] go to the exotic, distant Suburbs to meet up with the Mystical Caucasian! Her husband prepares them traditional foods [there’s a beautifully-shot scene where our protagonists struggle to respectfully eat hot dogs suspended in gelatin and unseasoned boiled chicken breasts with no salt, played for laughs] and then imparts plot-crucial Mystical Knowledge to them, whereupon they flee, and the Suburbs are destroyed by the pursuing Big Bad. These characters are never mentioned again except in a desultory flashback where the Hero is given renewed resolve to defeat the Big Bad because of the horrible tragedy of what it did to the Suburbs.”

But what do I know. 

That point about the food being played for laughs and exotica…those PoC feels, man.

Movies are slightly better about that specific trope these days, but only because white American people have so thoroughly, comprehensively appropriated non-Western food via foodie/gourmet culture that it’s now viewed as a mark of coolness and sophistication for a white character to nonchalantly consume non-Western food. But still, no actual PoC are necessary for the experience. (I’m thinking the larb scene in Spider-Man: Homecoming.)

Inverting those tropes is an excellent idea, is what I’m saying. I need to keep this in my back pocket for when I get my shit together and start making films.

Yes– we’ve moved on from exotification into appropriation, and while it’s less… openly icky?… it’s just a different flavor of icky. 

Listen, one of the ancestral foodstuffs on my family’s yearly Easter table was a, brace yourself, Jell-O based salad with shredded carrots. Lime Jell-O, as I recall. The recipe died with my grandmother but it’s a thing. (We also had that salad with canned mandarin oranges and marshmallows in it, served as a side dish not a dessert, so. My mother did not cook that way, but my grandma sure did.) I’m That Kind of White Ppl! I know it! I gotta own it. I unashamedly ate the hell out of that stuff as a kid. I’d eat it again, I have no goddamn sense, this is my genetic legacy. (If I go somewhere and they have the marshmallow salad I always take some and am always like self, this is not really food, but it doesn’t matter because I am not listening to the lecture I have already eaten the marshmallows. I can’t help it. It’s labeled salad for chrissakes. it’s got coconut shreds in it. candied fruit and shit. a walnut or two for deniability. i can’t control myself. it’s disgusting. god, maybe i can get my sister to make it for christmas. NO)

We need more #ownvoices media, for damn sure, because nobody’s going to undo the weird distorted funhouse-mirror culture that white supremacist media has given us like someone who actually has a different POV. I liked Riz Ahmed’s point about how calling it “diversity” makes it sound like it’s an optional extra condiment, while “representation” is much more accurately a descriptor– trying to make media look more like the world really does, in the hopes of undoing this weird cultural distortion. What I’d love to see is a policy that if you’re telling a story set in a time and a place, you have to then use the actual demographics of that place in your casting. New York City 1935? Look up the nearest census and the city directory; your cast has to be those same percentages. Your crowd scenes? 51% women, 39% African-American, 25% over 40, whatever the real demographics are you have to make that happen. And go from there, see what results. (Sure, sure, you’ve got to understand that a white dude is probably gonna have a white mom, etc., but also think, Black people have Black friends, how weird is it for you to have one sole token Black person who only has white friends??? Own the distortion, there, and think it through.)

But there’s also an important space for straight-up trope inversion to call attention to the damage that’s been done. OK fine, 17% women is the standard average in Hollywood movies? Now we have to do 17% men. See how weird that looks? You can still tell a story, but you’re going to understand that it’s a distorted story. Try it for a while and then go back to your old faves and see them with a new eye.

I really want to focus on thinking about what kind of characters are deemed disposable, too. Who gets to die in the background of the scene and be reduced to at most a “what a shame” moment later, or the tic in the hero’s jaw as she surveys the damage? 

Damn skippy I’m killing off the white dude you thought was gonna be the protagonist. 
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Day 5 or 6 I dunno, #sevenblackandwhitephotos in 7 days, no...

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Day 5 or 6 I dunno, #sevenblackandwhitephotos in 7 days, no humans no explanations.
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salamanderinspace: bomberqueen17: Here’s a thing

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salamanderinspace:

bomberqueen17:

Here’s a thing that sort of haunts me, since I’m on a fashion kick here and thinking about it.

Years ago, literal years ago, on this hellsite, I posted about how I’m continually frustrated in my quest for genuine red lipstick. I want Agent Carter red lipstick, and I compulsively buy True Red lipsticks every time I see them, and yet. Always, always, always, pink. I put them on, pink. 

I know it’s that my lips are naturally pretty bright pink, that’s just my coloring. I get it. But I don’t want a pink lipstick, I want a red one. 

(Dark reds turn pink too. Amazing.)

And I bitched about this, and this was back before xkit had any reply to replies function. Someone replied, someone I didn’t follow, I don’t remember who it was, they said, “Oh, I know a lot about that! Tell me what colors you have that didn’t work, and i can advise you!” or something to that effect.

But I lost the notification, I don’t remember when I made the post, I don’t know who it was.

But. Is– is that a thing? Is there anyone who can tell me how to find a shade that will genuinely be red on my actual face?? 

(I am a cheap bitch who continually buys $3-5 lipsticks at drugstores so that might also be the problem, but I am not going to splash out twenty fucking dollars on yet another tube of gloriously red-with-yellow-undertones lipstick only to put it onto my face and have YET ANOTHER SHADE OF FUCKING PINK.) (And I’ve considered buying the orangey shades, but I happen to know they turn fucking fuschia, so, not a success story so far.)

Keep reading

Here are a few things I know about this from working with make up artists.  I hope any of this is helpful.

1. A lipliner, just a smidge darker than your lip color, will make lipstick look much darker and fuller right away.  I’ve also seen some MUA fill in a model’s lips completely with lipliner before applying lipstick.  A lip pencil is like, a dollar, so that’s cheaper than most primers.

2. Layering colors helps a lot.  I have a very vibrant fuschia-colored Urban Decay color that I put on as a stain.  Then I layer cheaper, smearier colors over that.

3. Cheaper products–and even some of the more expensive ones–change and degrade over time.  So if your lipstick is more than 6 or 8 months old, the color may shift slightly.  Also things like bacteria and degrading heavy metals (in sparkley eye shadows, or anything metallic) posit concerns when using expired products.  But that’s sort of irrelevant to color.

4. For only 99$ you can buy a special effects palette at Sephora.  That’s like a painter’s palette of pretty much straight pigment.  I don’t think it’s advisable to wear pure straight undiluted pigment on your face every day, but lots of people use those on Halloween.

5. This isn’t something I learned from MUA as much as just being an anti-capitalist garbage-person, but you can buy makeup at MAC or Sephora and then return them within 30 (it might be 60, even) days of purchase.  

6. You can also theoretically go in, buy a $20 tube of lipstick, walk out, grab your old used $20 tube of lipstick, and return the old one with the receipt of what you just bought.  That would be dishonest though.

7. Red lipstick looks redder if you use a foundation primer with a green tint to cut the red in your face.  

These are all excellent suggestions, so I’m reblogging for reference. ( @torrilin added a few more suggestions and pointed out that the serious brands will have dozens of shades of red as opposed to the 3-4 of cheaper brands, and also suggested swatching on one’s thumb, but I’ve found that my thumb is enough of a different color than my lips to make this not really a very useful test for me. But then, I’m doing it alone and not with the supervision of anyone knowledgeable, so I dunno.) 

I am the WORST at throwing away expired shit. I needed eyedrops the other day, and dug around and found a bottle and ALMOST USED THEM but at the last moment checked the expiration date on the bottom of the bottle. 

2003 i shit you not. Found another bottle. “I remember buying this one,” I thought, “this one is much more recent,” and I wasn’t wrong, it expired in 2009. I actually fucking thought oh hey, that’s not so long ago, until I remembered that’s like nine years ago what the fuck, and threw it out too. Thankfully.

But. Yeah. I’m real bad at paying attention to that. Sometimes I go to use makeup and it’s all dried up or has changed texture and I’m like How Could That Happen and then I try to remember when i bought it and it’s like, bitch, I was in college that shit is old enough to vote throw it out you’ll die of an eye infection!!!

I also am addicted to layering shit but it never turns out how I intend. 

But. I do Know A Guy (if by guy you understand young woman I met doing roller derby) who Works At Sephora, so, I should go there. It’s like. Half an hour away. Forgive me if I wait until after the holidays to go anywhere fucking near that mall, though. 
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