- Stephen King on productivity as a writer: “No one in his or her right mind would argue that quantity guarantees quality, but to suggest that quantity never produces quality strikes me as snobbish, inane and demonstrably untrue.”
- When community becomes dangerous: “There is no such thing as a community that avoids confronting minor offenses, but deals with major ones in a straightforward and productive way.”
- This is not about gender at all: “You don’t smile enough. People don’t like you.“
- Homeland Security’s peculiar prosecution of Rentboy: “The criminal complaint is so saturated with sexually explicit details, it’s hard not to interpret it as an indictment of gay men as being sexually promiscuous.”
- Celebrity epilepsy: “We revere [celebrities], not because they possess charisma, divine favour, a grace or talent granted them by God, but because they embody popular virtues. We admire them not because they reveal god, but because they reveal and elevate ourselves.”
- Though it wasn’t pretty, Minaj was really teaching a lesson in civility: “Then she tried to claim moral superiority by saying that she never thought it was a big deal when she lost VMAs, a move that ignores the racial and physical component of the point Minaj had tried to make.”
- Sealioning: “The biggest reason why people hate sealioning is because responding to it is a complete waste of time.”
- Escape from addiction: “He certainly does not want to live the life of an addict, whether in prison or on the street, but is he ready to make the effort to help himself? He’s repeatedly described his struggles to me in a way that implied he was waiting for something or someone to save him. It’s as if he felt that as long as he didn’t want to be the way he was, things would change without him expending effort.”
- We need to talk about femmephobia: “When we set gatekeepers on women’s anger but not their compassion, their anger can take on greater value by virtue of its cost. Compassion, on the other hand, is more easily obtained and its value, thus, more easily overlooked.”
- I am pleased to discover that No Award hates yarnbombing as much as I do: “No, it’s just a mould that accompanies gentrification. It’s about as subversive as Banksy or Julian Assange. Yarnbombing is to underground art as manic pixie dream girls are to well-written female characters.“
Links: Inverted Pyramids, Knitting, and Burning Out
Three random-ish links, some art, and photos of the concert I went to last weekend.