Jeremy

“His anxiety melted away, and he envied Patricia for having such charming friends. If this had been a gathering of Laurence’s tribe, by now someone would already have tried to prove they were the supreme expert on some topic. There would have been dick-measuring. Instead, these people just seemed to accept one another and feed each other tacos.”
― Charlie Jane Anders, All the Birds in the Sky

“[I]magine what would happen if, instead of centering our beliefs about heterosexual sex around the idea that the man “penetrates” the woman, we were to say that the woman’s vagina “consumes” the man’s penis. This would create a very different set of connotations, as the woman would become the active initiator and the man would be the passive and receptive party. One can easily see how this could lead to men and masculinity being seen as dependent on, and existing for the benefit of, femaleness and femininity. Similarly, if we thought about the feminine traits of being verbally effusive and emotive not as signs of insecurity or dependence, but as bold acts of self-expression, then the masculine ideal of the “strong and silent” type might suddenly seem timid and insecure by comparison.”
― Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity

“Adorno’s dim view of popular music was rooted in a belief that the only reason people liked such music was because it was cynically tailored to mirror their world. In a capitalist society, both they and the music were “kneaded by the same modes of production.” (We can assume that, for Adorno, “it’s got a good beat and you can dance to it” was the ultimate expression of this false consciousness.) He talked about music mostly as an abstract entity, rather than as a material object, like a record, so he never quite figured out how to apply his critical theory to recordings per se. At two different points in “The Curve of the Needle,” an oddly disjointed essay that he started in 1927, at the dawn of the electrical recording era, and revised in 1965, four years before his death, he declares, “The relevance of the talking machine is debatable”—the repetition and the span of decades suggesting that he never did find a side to take in that debate. He was pretty sure he didn’t like what the phonograph represented (“stems from an era that cynically acknowledges the dominance of things over people”), but mostly reserved judgment for another day: “For the time being, Beethoven defies the gramophone.”
― Greg Milner, Perfecting Sound Forever: An Aural History of Recorded Music

“The secret to a successful webcomic is to trick people into believing they will only get all the jokes if they read regularly. By the time they realize there are no jokes for them to get, they’ve invested too much time to quit, and they can’t admit they’ve been duped,” said Kevin. “There is a whole art to creating nonexistent jokes that appear to go over everyone’s head. It’s much harder than creating actual jokes.”
― Charlie Jane Anders, All the Birds in the Sky