Peer-Reviewed, You Say
And in whatever-the-hell-this-is news:
Because environmentalist politics is all about the joy.
Ah, those self-other paradigms. And situated bodies. Of course.
Naturally, the planet is also assigned with novelty pronouns – BE/BER – because, well, because.
Such is the radical heft of the Journal of Lesbian Studies. Where other topics of deep pondering include “lesbian-dog relationalities and becomings,” and “lesbian, non-binary, and trans-dog intimacies.”
Empowered feminist ladies and their erotic entanglements with pets is, you’ll recall, a subject we’ve touched on before.
The latest issue of the Journal of Lesbian Studies can be accessed, for a whole thirty days, for a mere £220.
Oh, and should you be intrigued by “ecosexuality,” “grassilingus,” tree-licking, and free-swinging breasts daubed with mud, well, today’s your lucky day.
Consider this an open thread. Share ye links and bicker.
Fool me once…
This is my innocent face.
Somewhat related.
Following previous rumblings on the subject, I’ve belatedly started watching season two of Andor.
I’ve been assured it gets better towards the end, but dear God, the first couple of episodes are feeble. The pacing is, again, awful – I mean, really bad – and some of the dialogue is ropey as hell.
There’s an interminable wedding that looks set to stretch over at least three episodes, and in which nothing of consequence has happened, and a seemingly pointless two-episode detour, in which our supposed hero is held prisoner by a gang of imbeciles, is dramatically inert, then escapes. Again, to no obvious purpose, beyond filling up runtime.
I’ve yet to detect any suspense or narrative momentum. The promised improvement better be bloody dramatic.
So, we should feel free to molest the planet? Asking for a friend.
If anyone’s getting aroused by this thread, I’m upping the price of the drinks.
Who the hell would pay £220? (Or anything at all.)
Can I get some grant money if I write a paper on “Lesbian-Subaru Synchronicity and Relationalities”? I’m thinking that I can get ChatGPT to knock it out in under five minutes and then find some journal of higher learning to publish it. Heck, maybe I can even score a teaching position at some university. Tentative title for the course: “Beyond Flannel: Realization of the Trans Cosmos in Dykes.”
Hmm . . . Beyond Flannel would make a good band name . . .
I’d guess the primary customers are equally disreputable academic institutions, maybe some academic libraries. People who are spending someone else’s money, or can claim the money back.
I am very sorry to hear Scott Adams’ news about his cancer and prognosis. As he puts it, he expects to “check out sometime this summer” from prostate cancer.
Fuck cancer.
Free swinging, mud daubed breasts you say?
Is there wrestling involved?
veeshir:
It’s never the people you would want to see naked. As David said:
Well, when you already f****ed everything on two legs forty years ago, what’s left?
Don’t forget the bandits’ stand-off solved with space rock-paper-scissors…
I was trying suppress my memory of that, thank you very much.
That entire two-episode caught-by-bandits plotline featured the most hackneyed dialogue, badly delivered, and served no discernible dramatic purpose. I have no idea why any of that was deemed vital to the story. Nothing happened and it went nowhere.
Wouldn’t be surprised if also four legs.
We should count ourselves fortunate that the editors and contributors write for such “journals” rather than work in bio labs.
Academia has indeed screwed the pooch.*
* I first ran into that expression when I read The Right Stuff. Sheltered life, ya know.
The only explanation that comes to mind is that the writers couldn’t think of anything for their lead character to do, so they had him be captured by bickering morons, so that he sits around listening to them bicker for two episodes.
While nothing much else happens.
And in whatever-the-hell-this-is news:
A post so nice, it’s posted thrice!
Only 56 frogskins just for the article so 220 Imperial Dollars for the whole issue is a bargain at half the price, not that you would want to miss out on any of the inspired scholarly scholarship therein at any cost.
Meanwhile, we turn our radical queer lenses and paradigms to religion as the fetching Gwen reads an “open and affirming statement”.
Elsewhere, a pastor offers us Deep Thoughts™ thoroughly vetted and approved by the Central Committee.
It’s the fondness for interminable lists of identities, or pretend identities. They seem entirely unnecessary and convey little information, but I suppose they work as incantations.
It’s the fondness for interminable lists of identities, or pretend identities.
I particularly liked the “Identities Yet To Be Discovered, Named, Or Traded Later For A Third Baseman™”.
A left-handed third baseman. Best I can do.
Are we talking feather or chicken?
Band name.
They need to stop pissing in the baptismal font.
Should confront these “ecosexual” lesbians with the fact that the Earth has not given consent to be molested. (See the philosophy professors who say that mining is immoral because the minerals have not given consent to be dug up, smelted, etc.)
If you lot recall the “Palestinian” bint at UCLA who was on a hunger strike because UCLA wouldn’t cave to her demands, it appears it is UCLA’s fault things didn’t go to plan…
Another entry in the it-is-your-fault-I-made-bad-choices sweepstakes.
It occurs to me that someone who struggles with the concept of a loan probably shouldn’t be taking out a student loan. Or for that matter, be a student.
I’m reminded of the venerable video game review site Old Man Murray, whose stock response to “well, it gets good about ten hours in” was “I just spent $60 on this thing. I don’t want it to get good later. I want it to be good now.”
I’ve been watching some older non-nerd premium TV – Carnivale, Deadwood, Rockford Files, Yellowstone – and it’s startling how much better the writing is. Nerd media has never been particularly good. I remember an article that described most F/SF TV and film as being more about the potential of the idea of the thing than the actual execution, and I think that’s fair. I feel like we’ve reached a weird point of critical mass where every media must be nerdbait but the writing quality hasn’t gotten any better since the 1970s.
Well, yes, quite.
Thing is, there are some good aspects to the series and I’m mildly interested in how Dedra’s storyline plays out. (As a character, she’s much more interesting, more watchable, than the supposed hero.) But as with season one, it’s all being hamstrung by really basic things like pacing and structure. There’s so much padding – stuff that’s neither necessary nor interesting – that by the time you get to the bits that work, any goodwill has been strained.
There’s a subplot about the empire tracking down undocumented workers that’s as predictable as you’d expect, but clumsily-inserted relevance – as left-leaning writers see it – is, I suppose, inevitable. What struck me most, however, was just how artless the editing is, at least so far. The pacing is piss-poor and the cutting from one plotline to another is either flat or mildly jarring. As yet, there’s no sense of momentum. Of things destined to converge.
We’ve been watching that, Hawaii 5-0, and comedy shows like Frasier, Newhart (both kinds) and Cheers. I don’t think the writing of Rockford Files and 5-0 are quite as good as I remembered as a tweenager but the sets and shooting and production were great for that era. The comedies however are still incredibly well written and hold up well 30-40 years later. Newhart not quite so much but the good episodes of that were great. I think the latter may be due to the show, for one reason or another, depending on the writing and ideas of predominantly Newhart himself. Not to take anything away from him but people will naturally defer to the guy whose name is in the title.
Also, Bosch. We just started watching that for the first time. My wife was a fan of the books and I said that it came up here a lot. The first two seasons were fantastic. Glad we were binge/streaming it as the cliffhangers really had us. The third season? The Narrative got imposed. What I liked, without noticing that I liked, was that in the first two seasons, while it was apparent one mayor candidate was the guy you weren’t supposed to like and the other one seemed smarter if not devious in his own way, I didn’t think at all about what party each belonged to. If you had forced me to say, I would have assumed they were both Democrats given the context, but either way the ideology wasn’t in-your-face. Right off the bat in episode one of season three they announce the mayoral election results stating clearly that O’Shay ( the “bad” guy) was the Republican candidate and the other guy the Dem. It’s been downhill from there with unnecessary lesbian narrative, a Hispanic detective bristling because someone says ‘hispanic’ and not ‘latino’ (heh…pre-latinix) and other pc bs. We’re not as drawn in as we were with the first two seasons.
I enjoyed the first five seasons of Bosch, which isn’t the kind of thing I’d usually watch. But for the most part I thought it was done well. Season one was still tweaking the formula, but it worked for me. Just finished rewatching season four and will probably rewatch season five. Seasons six and seven lost their mojo, to my eye, and I feel no great need to dig them out again. Ditto the spin-off Bosch: Legacy.
Is Maddy president yet?
Heh. Well, that was a big part of the decline in the last two seasons and the spin-off – the prominence of the daughter, Maddie. She just isn’t a load-bearing character and is played by an actress whose gifts and range are rather limited.
Heavy sigh… I was afraid of that. The seasons that we watched, I liked her limited character role. Serves an important purpose of giving tough-guy Bosch some likable depth. I was a bit disturbed that the actress was that exact age. Seeing children, especially teenagers, in that sort of…well not limelight but close…makes me a tad uncomfortable. I personally believe acting is bad for children. For smaller ones it’s mostly a pretend thing that they would kinda, sorta naturally play anyway. Children generally aren’t taking the craft too seriously. Or at least I like to believe due to the limitations of one being a child. But for a teenager, putting your own personality aside to actually become someone else…well I wouldn’t let my kid, especially my daughter, do that. Actually, I don’t think acting is a healthy occupation for anyone who is not totally in command of who they really are. As much as method actors give great performances, it’s truly creepy to me that their method involves letting someone else’s ideas and thoughts totally consume them for days, weeks, months 24/7.
Agreed.
I suppose it’s a common problem with child actors. They may be precocious or charming as children, but when later asked to play adult roles – and they have to… well, act – their limitations can be all too apparent.
And there’s that aspect to it as well. I used to think it rather trite and condescending when adults would say that growing up is hard. I saw the adult world with all its responsibilities, self sacrifice, literally life-sacrifice in some cases, as hard. But looking back it becomes/became apparent as to how much you’re sifting through as a teenager just in the context of doing everyday things. Doing all that while pretending to be someone else has got to stunt your adult maturity to some degree. I can see being a teenager and having an acting job as a fun, summer thing to do but it has to in some manner interfere with your growing up into an adult. Which itself might explain the failure to adjust to an adult role. If you spend too much time acting like someone else, you have been retarded in your growing to discover what being an adult means.
Broken record time…this plays into my concerns with people, especially young people, consuming too much fiction. Especially the kind of fiction that we foist upon them. They should be spending more time doing actual stuff, seeing what their own talents and limitations are rather than occupying their minds with whatever navel gazing bs a Holden Caulfield is obsessed with.
Just recalled this quote:
I do miss his writing.