addressing what i think is a genuine generational gap in online etiquette norms, so disclaimer that i am assuming only good intentions. nevertheless, it's happened enough times now that i am making a general PSA. so: please do not armchair diagnose me with psychopathologies in the comments based on the contents of my blog posts. even when those provisional diagnoses are phrased in reclaimed, anti-clinical terms. i believe that these comments come from a place of sincere goodwill and a desire to help me better understand myself.
however: i am 30 or 40 years old. i have been enmeshed in the psych industry for over two decades, more often than not against my will. i have also spent nearly twenty years cultivating the skills of introspection and idiosyncratic language to describe my internal experience. if i choose not to identify with with a particular signifier, it is not because i've never considered "elective affinity" with the category it represents. the omission of the signifier (and its attendant category) was a conscious choice, frequently a political one, and almost always on grounds of semiotic precision.
henceforth if we are not mutuals i will be blocking for comments in this vein. thank you 🧡🌟✌
rhea seehorn has a long manicure for the first time in my also long reference memory of her red carpet appearances. do you think she just felt like a change or did someone tell her that thousands of people were calling her a lesbian on the internet
went for a walk even though it was disgusting outside and got some weed sodas and prepped a summer salad for dinner with cucumbers & mini heirloom tomatoes & red bell peppers & yellow squash & carrots & spinach & tofu & made a POTS pickle plate to revitalize myself after walking around in that evil humidity (sour polish pickles, pickled mushrooms, pickled beets)
In the other [1979] profile, in Vogue, [Toni] Morrison spoke of a white American reader who had "told her how difficult it was to understand black culture in her books—it was so removed from his experience." She had responded: "Boy, you must have had a hell of a time with Beowulf!" The Vogue interviewer, missing the wit in this retort, went on to comment: "Morrison has no patience with people who plead ignorance; but then, she does not pride herself on being a patient woman. 'I find myself being more and more difficult,' she says. 'It's something I really relish.'" Even Morrison's literary difficulty and the pleasure she took in it was translated here into personal difficulty, a moral failing: How dare she be impatient! Well, wouldn't you be?
oh by the way if you ever read this blog and wonder "how does this bitch eat so much produce on a food stamps budget" the answer is the cermak fresh market clearance cart. the other day i got 6 pears and 8 bananas for $1.98 👍
I'm unemployed until the school year starts again, but my wife picked up a work gig for the next week. but we don't have money for groceries until they get paid and I've gotta make sure they've got lunch every day they're working
if anyone can help a girl and her wife out, here's my paypl and my vnmo and ko-fi
my account just went into the negative because of automatic payments :)
If we can get through to Thursday we should actually be good for AT LEAST a month, because of the union wage and overtime, but... gee I sure would like to avoid overdraft fees and going hungry!
i gotta say something about camp miasma. many places where the audience was very clearly laughing as a means of sublimating discomfort with tonal ambiguity. but i was the only person who laughed at "DIRECTED BY RAY BLANCHARD -> 'this is transphobic' 'shut up'" and it was literally a weekday matinee with a theater full of unemployed trans people
ICE is spending millions on shock gloves designed to overpower subjects through intense, localized pain.
With the revelation that ICE will spend up to $20 million by March on gloves that can deliver painful electric shocks to subdue an individual, according to a notice published earlier this week by the Department of Homeland Security, it's worth looking at how this apparel, designated as a nonlethal tool for law enforcement, actually works.
These shock gloves go by the unsubtle acronym of GLOVE (Generated Low Output Voltage Emitter) and are manufactured by Compliant Technologies, based in Lexington, Kentucky. The GLOVE, previously used in jails and police departments in the US, looks and functions like a normal pair of patrol gloves until officers press a switch to activate an electrical mode.
Classified as a CD3 (conductive distraction and de-escalation device), the gloves don't work like stun guns or Tasers, which shoot out probes or use high voltages to cause neuromuscular incapacitation that overrides the central nervous system. Instead, the GLOVE works using neuro-peripheral interference, essentially shocking the skin to bombard the sensory nerves and temporarily short-circuit the brain's focus.
Compliant Technologies did not respond to WIRED's request for comment.
When activated via a one-second press on a wrist switch, conductive pads embedded on the palm and undersides of the fingers of the gloves can transmit high-frequency electrical pulses directly to the wearer’s point of contact on a subject. A rechargeable battery and microprocessor module tucked inside a zippered pouch on the cuff powers the entire system.
The electrical pulse overstimulates nerve endings in the subject's peripheral nervous system, resulting in pain that inhibits coordinated muscle movement, but without causing systemic muscle lockup. The pain induced is localized to just the area touched by the glove's conductive pads. The manufacturer claims the gloves result in a subject's compliance in less than three seconds and leave no burns, marks, or scars.
Because the current flows only between the contact pads on the device and across the subject's skin, the officer wearing the GLOVE, as well as any assisting officers holding the subject, should not feel electrical shocks. The gloves, capable of operating between 14 and 122 degrees Fahrenheit, come in three versions: Gen 3, 4, and 5. Maximum voltage is capped at 380 V for all, and the minimum voltage for Gen 3 and 4 is 210 V, which rises to 324 V for Gen 5.
Maximum stimulation time on Gen 3 and 4 models is a sobering two hours, though that drops to 90 minutes for Gen 5. The battery is apparently good for 2,000 charge/discharge cycles, and it can recharge to full in two hours. Four LED lights on the gloves display the current charge level, each noting 25 percent battery increments.
Gen 4 and 5 of GLOVE both include mechanisms that record “activation events,” tracking the date, hour, minute, and skin-contact time for audit trails and after-action reporting. Gen 4 stores this data on a removable microSD card, while Gen 5 does away with this in favor of built-in internal memory, accessed via a USB-C cable.
There's a test function on the gloves, too, where operators can verify they are working by tapping an active pad against their own forearm to feel a minor electrical pulse. According to the manuals, GLOVE users must be certified and then recertified every other year to continue using the device.
GLOVE, which can only be sold to verified professional entities such as the military, correctional facilities, and law enforcement agencies—has some clear usage recommendations in Compliant Technologies' instruction manuals:
No more than two GLOVE units (or, in other words, one pair) should be used simultaneously on a single subject.
Continuous shocks should not exceed 15 seconds.
Operators must target arms and legs, while strictly avoiding the head, face, throat, chest, and groin.
The gloves should not be used on the elderly, young children, pregnant individuals, or people with severe disabilities.
The technology must not be used to counter verbal defiance, as punishment, or for torture.
hey, so i could use some money for toiletries, for food since my SNAP is about to run out, and for orange shirts for the part-time retail job that i'm starting. anything helps, thank you!
my mom is helping me a bit with grocery money, but if anyone still wants to contribute, i'd appreciate. i'm unemployed and broke as shit on top of being chronically poor
i know many of you are Poetry Understanders; i am the opposite of that. i picked up that the roethke poem was pentameter (though not iambic, he's more flexible about stressed & unstressed syllables), & how the rhyme scheme shakes out around the scaffold of the stanza. but what i would like an explanation for is why the poem sounds like it SHOULD be a villanelle when it isn't. you know consciously that it isn't, you see that it isn't, but at least for me, there's this sense of a faltering step like. Why Isn't It Doing That
what's the trick, rhythm/meter-wise. what's the poem doing to my ear
"why do people always view historical literature through modern terms??" Well they live in modern times not history and those are the words they know so it's okay if they don't know things 👍
was trying to remember the name of the artist whose work billy's art from camp miasma reminded me of but it only came to me yesterday when i saw this girl's calf tattoo at the IWW event because it was based on a design by the same artist and for some reason this totally unexpected encounter in a totally random context shook something loose in my mind and tripped a rube goldberg chain of free association
[...] The child-figure of nineteenth-century science appeared as an instrumental, and indeed vital, bodily container for human variation across the globe and through historical time. Progressive development, figured through this child, constituted and ordered a plethora of human differences in hierarchical series, including child-ness itself. The ‘‘normal’’ child, then, was a figure through which the ordering of children across the colonial globe was realized as well. From the ‘‘savage’’ urban poor child, to the child at the ‘‘uttermost ends of the earth,’’ to the bourgeois child in the nursery—all were brought under the scientific gaze, where their bodies materialized a continuum of normal and pathological development that simultaneously told a story of human history—and of human mind, desire, and moral justice.
As I have also suggested, the ‘‘normal’’ child was not assured of being normal until the developing body had traversed childhood and become the normative adult. To be a true adult was to have passed out of development—out of the realm of the pathological (savage, female, racialized, hyper- and hypo-sexual, etc.)—and into the realm of the ‘‘normal’’: to be a ‘‘civilized’’ man in present time. The female, the racialized, the insane, the disabled, and the poor were left behind, in childhood, while adulthood was strictly enforced as a ‘‘natural’’ developmental achievement reserved for the deserving few.
Childhood may be one of the only socially degraded statuses that, in theory, every person passes through. No wonder, then, that psychoanalysis should have discovered the apparent amnesia about it in adults. Somehow, once it becomes memory, we ironically cannot remember what it really felt like to be children in the present tense. (To which we might respond, of course, who would want to remember that?) But in truth, we know that many groups of people are structurally deprived of anything like a childhood in the first place, or they experience infantilization throughout their lives. These are two of the many denials effected by the ideology of the child. Childhood is only shared retrospectively by those adults who made it out.
as we approach the beginning of the academic year, i periodically check every local university's events page and add public talks or even not-explicitly-private lectures/research presentations/internal conferences to my calendar because i am always trying to learn despite being a professional NEET. anyway did you know catherine opie is giving an artist-in-residence talk at SAIC next month and it's open to the public and you don't even have to register in advance. university events pages my beloved
