You Know What's More Annoying Than A Preachy Vegan?

this was what a friend-of-a-friend sent some guy after a single date with him.

Could there be anything worse than realizing that you're the ex Chappell Roan is talking about in "Good Luck, Babe!"?

Yes. Yes, there is.

It would be worse to mistake yourself for the ex Chappell Roan is talking about in Good Luck, Babe!

Even though religious women who cover up will claim that they believe in feminism and free choice, they sure do love to call their own particular style of clothing "modest".

Think about that for two (2) seconds.

I don't think it's random, accidental, or coincidental. Words mean things. If you want to reclaim that style of dress as by and for women, rather than dictated by men and imposed on women, then you really do have to step away from the inherently patriarchal branding embedded in words like "modest".

And I'm speaking as a former devoted hijab-wearer. "High-coverage" is right there for the taking. You could also specify what you mean by "modest": high-necked, long-sleeved, loose-fitting, ankle-length, dark-colored, whatever. It's not like women even within the same religion agree on what's suitably "modest". Saying what you mean is a good thing.

You know what I find personally annoying about AIs?

Not professionally as a kinda-techbro. Not morally as a human being. Not ethically as someone who trying to be a decent person. Not semantically as a philosophy major. Just personally?

The same behavior y'all hate in people like me, you adore in a chatbot.

I never understood why the Hindi word for brother-in-law, "saalaa", doubles as a casual, not quite swearing insult. I thought maybe it was because there's codified hatred for in-laws in many cultures.

I just figured out a much more plausible theory. The Hindi swear word equivalent for "mother****er" is "bhenchod". Sister-****er.

ಠ_ಠ

(If you know better, please correct me!)

Diogenes, throwing unshelled peas at Joe Rogan's studio: "Behold, a podcast!"

sometimes-overlooked bit of queer history

The practice of clinics, centers, bars, universities, organizations, etc. giving out free condoms, while menstrual hygiene products remain expensive, may seem like a patriarchal nod to the needs of cis-het men over those who menstruate.

It absolutely is not.

Handing out free condoms was, is, and always will be (as long as the patriarchy exists, anyway) a radical act. It is a result of the movement to mitigate the spread of HIV/AIDS in the face of deathly inaction on the part of most mainstream institutions at the time.

That any of us ever believe that free condoms are a product of the patriarchy is a victory for the homophobic erasure of the fight against HIV/AIDS. I once fell for it, too, but it's simply untrue.

Yes to free condoms, and yes to free menstrual supplies.

One of the first "oh wow, theory can actually make the world seem less obtuse" moments I ever had was about perfume ads. It seemed to me like everyone had somehow decided TV perfume ads had to be weird but also that TV ads for perfume *must* exist and there was no other way for them to be.

I took a class where this came up and I finally read what's obvious to me in hindsight: The one sense that perfume appeals to is the least conveyable via any other senses. The closest thing to a straightforward pitch you can do with perfume is to list off its scent notes, but those aren't necessarily meaningful to most people, and even to those who know, we can't know how the scents work with each other and on our individual bodies.

So they sell some kind of fantasy of how the smell will make you feel instead. All ads for anything sell a fantasy, but perfume can't pretend like there's anything else there but the fantasy. It's like a distilled, pure kind of cynical consumerism there. Like the Eau de Parfum of capitalism, where other types of ads are Eau de Toilette.

A lot of things that seem like they came out of nowhere are easily explained. This isn't just a classic science/skepticism thing. There are historical, sociological, and cultural explanations that make the world seem a lot less weird to me.

Granted, the explanations can be horrifying rather than comforting. So much of what we consider to be American norms and values are just eugenics, for example. Still, I prefer wrapping my head around it to shrugging and ignoring.

This is all to say, the Gucci ad with Elliot Page, A$AP Rocky, and Julia Garner is more interesting to me than I thought it would be :3

I remain forever unconvinced that normality is normal.

In honor of the ratio we celebrate today, let me tell you about the day I first learnt of its existence. It was the 90's. I was attending a religious elementary school in West Covina at the time. Yes, it's a real city. Rachel Bloom didn't make it up for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.

At this very real school in a very real place, I had been absent the day before. I don't know if I had been sick or if it was a family thing, but whatever it was, I had missed a lesson. So when my math teacher kept referring to a term I'd never heard before, I figured I would look it up later, no big deal. There was a glossary in the back of the book that was usually very helpful.

It wasn't helpful that day, though. I spent way too long trying out different spellings for the term my teacher had been using. It couldn't have been more than 10 pages of terms and definitions, and I was an advanced reader, yet I couldn't hunt the term down. I eventually gave up.

The math teacher was warm, lovely woman with a very heavy Jordanian accent. If you know anything about Arabic accents, well, then you'll understand what had happened.

And that's why I can truthfully say that I unsuccessfully tried to look up the word "bi" in a math book while I was a pupil at an Islamic institution called Straight Way School.

π Happy Pi Day, everyone π