Are there any lesbians on Tumblr?
Yes! smalltowngayblog identifies as a lesbian, and I believe she is getting hitched really soon. Congratulations!
I’m not really sure about anyone else, but hopefully people will reblog with more names.
Also, pretty much anyone who has slept with Nick Douglas on Tumblr may be completely turned off by men right about now. I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Chaya (pocketnovel) and Melissa Gira (melissa).
A couple months ago, I wrote that I think the Obama Girl videos capitalize and perpetuate racist ideas about black men.* I was reminded of this again when I saw the unforgettable McCain attack ads that mixed images of Obama with Paris and Britney. I thought how diabolical it was, suggestive of his sexual power and underpinned by the centuries-old fear of black men with white women (see everything from Native Son to the 2006 RNC-sponsored ad attacking Harold Ford, Jr.) Obama’s very existence is owed to the coupling of a black (foreign!) man and a white woman; attacks that seem to scratch the surface may, in fact, gouge.
Rebecca Curtis saw a similar sign in the tea leaves. She questions Obama’s sudden, slight dip in the polls, and traces it to racism, spelled “B-r-a-d-l-e-y E-f-f-e-c-t”:Why the dip? If it reflects the fact that Obama acted “uppity” and met state heads in Europe, or that McCain ran ads comparing Obama to amateur porn star Paris Hilton (implying black people are good at sex and celebrity, and not-so-good at intellectual endeavors), then perhaps race is in play after all. If so, we might reconsider the Bradley Effect. Because if it hits Obama, then unless he does the one thing that would beat it, he will lose in November, and not by a little, but by a lot.I disagree with the meat of Curtis’ argument (she claims Obama “needs” Clinton as his running mate for a number of reasons, including the bizarre notion that low-income whites “may vote for an absurdist joke” — but hell, they did elect Bush in 2004, so what do I know.) And I’m a Bradley Effect agnostic. It’s not at all clear that Obama was its “victim” in the New Hampshire or California primaries.
But one thing is for certain: we/he are no more “beyond race” than we are “beyond gender.” We can laugh at the absurdity of McCain’s attacks, but we are doing the nation a disservice when we ignore their racist undertones.
He’s just got to win.
* I had the odd experience of being emailed by one of the creators of the videos shortly after posting my criticism. He seemed sweet and genuinely curious about my objections.
Well said. Also, noraleah has some of the best posts on Tumblr. Do yourself a favour and follow her.
Flythe later told his fellow gang members that he and Hollis confronted Parrish, who did not deny that the messages were ‘gay’ in nature, according to court records. Flythe also told his associates that they stabbed and hit the victim before stomping on his neck, according to charging documents. A red bandanna was placed over Parrish’s face and he was left in the woods.”
…
Parrish was found to have bruises, over 50 superficial knife wounds, and a deep stab wound to the chest. Steven Hollis, 18, of Randallstown and Juan Flythe, 17, of West Baltimore have been charged with first degree murder and are being held without bail.
― Members of the Family Swans (apparently a subset of the Bloods gang) killed one of their brethren because they thought he was gay. Personally, I think “Family Swans” sounds like the name of some kind of weird gay book club or something.
…you have dreams where you spend a lot of time sitting around reading your Tumblr dashboard and reblogging imagined posts.
A whole new level of lame! YAY ME!
WINNIPEG–Someone claiming to be a sister of the young man stabbed and beheaded on a Greyhound bus in Manitoba last month has been trying to use the horrific killing to collect money.
―
(via Toronto Star)
See you later, faith in humanity! Have a great trip.
I could segue into some political rant here, a slick dismissal of the Bush administration, perhaps, or a paragraph declaring my support for Barack Obama. But the moment I walked into the soup kitchen — the moment I acknowledged, publicly, that I could not provide food for myself or my children (which is why the soup kitchen is so much more difficult than the food bank) — is the moment that my ability to believe in the politics of this country was forever altered. I know why poor people have historically low voter-turnout rates. If you vote, you acknowledge that you believe in the system. And to believe in the system when you’re at the very bottom, when you’ve watched the chrome and ink-black SUVs drive by while you’re packing your own beater with dried beans and lentils, to believe at that point is fucking painful. You either say the system works and you’ve earned your place, or you concede that there is something wrong and there might not be any way to fix it.
― From Our cupboard was bare. I think jgh mentioned this yesterday, but stories like this stand in sharp contrast to the constant Tumblr posts about the Blueprint cleanse.
Muxtape too expensive to run?
A tipster tells us Muxtape investor Jakob Lodwick has been heard to complain that the site’s hosting bill alone amounts to $30,000 per day. That figure seems high — could our tipster have misheard Lodwick saying the bill is $30,000 a month? After Muxtape’s first day, Ouellete posted the site’s stats, reporting 8,685 users uploading and playing 19,731 songs over 35,000 visits cost Muxtape $118.17 with Amazon’s S3 online-storage service. Extrapolate that first day over a month, at Amazon’s standard rates, and you’ve got a $3,545 hosting bill. Compete.com confirms that Muxtape’s user base has grown at least tenfold since then, making a $30,000/mo. hosting bill not just plausible, but likely.
The bill is also far more than Lodwick or Ouellette seem to have expected. In an accidentally published investment term sheet, Ouellette estimated three months of hosting would cost $18,000. That’s about $72,000 off the mark, enough to eat through Lodwick’s $95,000 investment and shut down the site, angry letters from the RIAA or no.
via Valleywag
So wait. All those times that Nick Douglas asked Gawker readers to upload songs to Muxtape probably made Jakob Lodwick cry.
I’m surprise that he didn’t chime in with his own story of heartbreak when everyone was dumping on him yesterday. Ha!
