#i remember learning about the predator shit back in like 2014 or so and have been so fucked up about it ever since

[tariah23]

Why did the dude that played Ned from Ned’s declassified go on TikTok talking about some “we didn’t experience these things so-“ like huh…????? Like a few months ago, he and other actors were hehehing and hahaing about fucking on the set and everything and I’m sure the environment encouraged the hypersexuality of these minors at the time. Like, none of that shouldn’t have been going on either tbh. I just feel like him coming out to lowkey speak out against the victims coming forwards/doc is a bit? Like what was he even trying to say.

#I haven’t watched the doc yet but I’ve seen clips :( #my mom is recording it #most ppl been knew about #dan Schneider being a creep #but not everyone #i remember learning about the predator shit back in like 2014 or so and have been so fucked up about it ever since #I always think about the video of him in the jacuzzi with Amanda bynes… #she was like 12 or so at that time and even when I was younger I always felt like it was so awkward ☠️ #the Amanda show and all that used to be so fun man #some anonymous person talked about how Nickelodeon would throw these pool parties to scout child talent and how creepy it was #other shit #rambling

[rivetgoth]

I had this friend I met in the Hetalia fandom in like 8th-9th grade who was like, a lot older than me (I was like 12-13 when we met and she was like 17 or so), and we were REALLY close for a really long time, we'd talk and call every day and it got to a point where she was really dependent on me in this awful way where she would like constantly threaten suicide if I didn't answer her texts fast enough and shit like that. She was really rich cuz her dad was a doctor and one time she bought me an entire fucking Xbox One (I did not ask for it like... I'd always been a PlayStation gamer LOL) because she didn't have anyone to play Halo with her. My family still has it and uses it as a DVD player/Netflix machine.

Anyway the really batshit thing about this person (BESIDES the fact that she was like, definitely a pedophile who loved shota and frequently sexted me after she'd turned 18+ and I was like 14 and she also had both a bestiality and incest fetish that she'd talk to me about constantly — I was a kid I had no moral concept of anything and just liked being edgy and feeling mature) was that she was like. A chronic liar who constantly faked identities. And for years after cutting off contact with her I would look back and realize that she had faked even more than I had noticed at the time. The thing is, I knew for sure she wasn't lying about her home life -- Her address, what she looked like, her dad's profession, her age, her house, her pets, etc, were all things I had proof of. But when I knew her she was constantly remaking her Tumblr to escape drama she'd start, and she would constantly make side blogs under pseudonyms and pretend it wasn't her (sometimes it would be random shit like aesthetic blogs under different names or ask blogs for characters or smthn, other times it was like, callout blogs for people she had gotten into drama with where she would pretend to be someone else defending her). I assumed back then that I was always going to be in on it, because she would always tell me whenever she made one of these fake accounts, and sometimes she would encourage me to make a new account too as a sort of roleplay thing where we both pretended to be people we weren't... Until I learned that she wasn't always telling me. Every so often, I would become mutuals with a new account who would start messaging me about my interests and strike a conversation with me. Then something would slip and my "new mutual" would admit that they had actually been my friend all along... Which should have made me immediately cut contact because that's weird as shit, but I was young and she was a close friend, so I would just sorta accept it.

She ended up being like, horrifically transphobic. She got run off her blog twice for being specifically transmisogynistic, first insisting that she was allowed to headcanon canon trans women as feminine men and then on her next blog insisting that lesbians couldn't be attracted to trans women. I was still young and closeted and she was one of my closest friends and was constantly messaging me that the situation was making her suicidal and she was just wording things wrong and totally supported trans people and people just weren’t giving her the benefit of the doubt and she was still learning so I tried to just stay out of it without losing her. Then... I came out as trans lol. She stopped replying to me when I first came out and then made a bunch of vents on her tumblr about how much it upset her and about how “using he/him pronouns for AFAB people is triggering” for whatever fucking reason. She told me her “best IRL friend” who she had introduced me to once on Skype but who never logged in again after and who refused to ever do a group call or anything (definitely another fake account) said that it was irrational for me to expect my friends to respect my pronouns so soon after coming out and that I shouldn’t be upset if I get misgendered. Then she apologized but told me my name and pronouns would never fit me. As you can imagine, as a little baby trans kid who was closeted from my family and terrified of even having come to terms with being trans, I didn’t really have a great defense.

Soon she started being really woke like 2014 style Tumblr SJW to save face, she came out as nonbinary and told me in private it was because she felt bad when people called her cis during discourse (she absolutely wasn't nonbinary) and she coined a "new sexuality" that was "attraction only to people you perceive as feminine, regardless of how they identify" -- what this actually meant was "attraction to cis women and not trans women." She ran an aroace help blog despite not being aroace? And made a bunch of pride flags that I still see around sometimes to this day. She would start fights a lot and try to out-woke people and got into a bunch of drama with other SJW types of the day, got into a bunch of drama with TumblrInAction and Mogai-Watch and shit like that, and she claimed for a short while that she had a headmate (FWIW I totally believe DID is a legitimate thing but like. Trust me on this one.) who was transphobic and that it made her so sad, she told me that it was actually that headmate that had been transphobic before, and every so often her headmate would front out of nowhere and misgender me and use really abusive language like calling me a cunt or a bitch or whatever. She started making these "intersex nonbinary" OCs who she would constantly make porn of under the guise that they were representation for LGBT people who were just like, extremely fetishistic cuntboys and dickgirls (they were “intersex” to explain why they could be “girls with natal penises” or “boys with natal vaginas”).

At that same time, she somehow always managed to have these random, very sporadically active trans women mutuals who were apparently amazing friends of hers, who shared some interests with her but also would defend her when people brought up her past, with these long-winded “Well, I’m a trans woman and I think what she said is perfectly justified and everyone makes mistakes and she’s always been a good ally!!” Then one day some trans woman received an ask from her account where she claimed to be a “black trans woman” (she was, of course, a white cis woman) and she freaked out and claimed she had “been hacked by TiA or 4Chan to make her look bad” — I realize now she had just been sending anon messages pretending to be things she wasn’t and forgot to hit anon LOL. Late in all of this she also got into a bunch of hot water for being really antisemitic and saying she didn’t trust Jewish people because they were just like Christians and like, 5 seconds later she came out as Jewish and wrote this whole long sad vent about how she had had internalized antisemitism and then started going by a random Hebrew name LMAO.

In the end the final breaking point was when I found her secret TERF blog, where she had been making posts for months about how trans men are just insecure women who are trying to escape misogyny by stepping on the backs of “fellow women” and using me as a fucking example, and also saying that me not coming out as a trans man had been “basically rape” since she had been SEXTING me when she was 18+ and I was 13-14+ and that it was traumatic to know someone she had trusted was secretly identifying as a man LMAO. She was also obviously saying all sorts of transmisogynistic things, but also had these really bizarre fetish posts about wanting trans women to fuck her...? I confronted her about it and she literally fucking out of nowhere told me that she was in the emergency room with a mysterious illness that might kill her and she was allowed to have her phone but due to privacy laws couldn’t send a picture as proof. While “in the hospital” she deleted the TERF blog and her personal blog. I had known her for literal YEARS at this point (we had met when I was 12-13 or so and by the time we no longer spoke I was a few months from 17), and I was completely stunned to fucking hear this person trying to pull “I’m in the hospital with a deadly disease” at being confronted for some shit like that LMAO. I made a post about it on my public and another “trans woman friend” of hers logged in to vehemently defend her by saying that there’s nothing wrong with AFAB women being untrusting of trans people because female oppression is uniquely traumatic and that there’s nothing wrong with women expressing their sexuality by sexting minors as long as the minor consents and that I was the real predator for “hiding that I was a man” (remember, I’d been a 13 year old closeted trans boy), before never logging in again... 😭 One of the last times we ever talked was when she demanded I refund her for the fucking Xbox and I refused.

Anyway, the long-term aftermath of that is that a few people online (in some random cringe areas of the internet) who archived some of her antics still think that I also wasn’t a real person, since they caught onto how much she lied about too, so they think I was also a sock puppet and I have no interest in clarifying and making myself known to those people LOL. I have no fucking idea where she is now, she deactivated everything after her being a TERF came out. There’s like, so much more to that I could say because I knew her for YEARS and, like I said, she was one of my “closest friends.” Her parents had wildly expensive pure bred designer dogs that she would make Vines of. She wrote Beatles real person fan fiction. For her birthday one year I made her a shirt on Zazzle with an inside joke about one of her OCs... does she still have that? Either way, she was easily the most batshit person I’ve ever known closely online and I will forever associate the Hetalia fandom with people like that.

[eye-of-enigmatic-thought]

2019, a retrospective to this year and decade

Long post in-comin’

I’m gonna be honest, I’m not really sure how to describe this year and by extension, this decade, I guess that’s to be expected in a way, so many things can happen in 365 or more days to the point of a information overload, but I suppose the best way to describe this year was ‘complicated yet also stale’. Not much happened in the beginning aside from therapy and support group appointments, which were pleasant albeit I don’t remember much from them aside from drawings I’ve done that I showed to the other members, nothing of significance happened that I can recall during the middle of the year, and around near the end I took part in art therapy groups that I managed to make a few friends out of (though I sadly don’t chat with them often), at September I was beginning to try and get into college after being out of education for a year and managed to enrol (though court issues made me miss the first five weeks that I had to quickly catch up to), most of my memories of this year actually came from college.

College has been going good, so far! I have been learning a lot and my tutors are very kind, of course it can get stressful due to the long days I have and also due to some of my more rowdier peers, but I’ve managed to also befriend a few others that I am very happy to have met. Currently I’m in my break and I will use it to advantage as much as I can to post as much art as I can.

Also, I’ve just recently been exploring my gender, and well, I’m now transmasc rather than a demigirl, I still go by whatever pronoun and still see myself as nonbinary, but I am more masculine leaning now? I guess I might be a ‘demiboy’ but I still feel a bit more ‘fluid’ than that, sooo... masculine leaning demifluid? I dunno, but overall I’m not a girl anymore! :D

Rebirth is still being rewritten, admittedly I haven’t been focusing entirely on it due to some things in the way, but some of that is now gone so really my only enemy is my lack of motivation and poor time management, but even times where I’m not writing and/or editing the rewrite I’m still thinking of how I want certain scenes to go or what things I want the characters to say, so it’s still being worked on! I do feel incredibly bad that I haven’t been doing a lot of my Undertale-related stuff lately or even attempting to at least finish off the HS’ blog’s first arc (I at LEAST wanna finish that arc before I go on a official hiatus to fully know what to do with it), but you can rest assured that I have NOT forgotten about it and I do want to continue on with it, I guess that’s probably one of my goals for 2020, ‘more Undertale fanart’, yes, good, very good, mwahahahaha.

And now, a little something more personal, mostly in regards to this decade as a whole. Warning for mentions and discussions of pedophilia, bullying, suicide, and trauma for the next three or so paragraphs.

(Warning starts here)

My memories from around the beginning of this decade are hazy, but very notable, I’m not going to sugarcoat it by saying that from 2010-2013 were some of my worst years of my life, I was only 11-14 around this time, but when I wasn’t going through awful bullying at school that the teachers did nothing about, I would come back home to a toxic friend circle on DeviantArt that was filled with constant irrelevant drama and some REALLY creepy adults that would do smut rps with the minors in our group. Thankfully I never was a victim of this due to mostly staying in my corner and didn’t interact with others much, but I saw it happen to many of the other minors in said group, it left me disturbed but I rationalised it by thinking it was just some ‘teenager thing’ that I was too young for (because I was a little cretin that lied about my age and said I was 13 when I was really 11 when I first signed up haha), it was only when I was late into being 17 I realised ‘Oh my god the people who I called my friends and RP’d with were pedophiles and groomed the other minors what the fuck what the fuck what the fuck’. 

This whole shitty ordeal with that dA friend circle and the constant bullying I went through in secondary school were so bad that it literally led me to have a suicide attempt at the age of 13, I survived of course, and I’m really glad I did, because I wouldn’t have met friends that through them I would manage to get away and abandon the old dA group because ‘fuck you guys I have BETTER FRIENDS NOW!’ Unfortunately all of that dA friend circle are now deactivated or are no longer active with all the evidence deleted so there’s no use making a callout or name dropping any of them or even searching for the other minors in attempt to rekindle with them (and I don’t think my heart would be able to handle it in that regard...), but I did find out that one of them who was a pedophile apologist at one point commissioned a ton of Darkrai pregnancy porn with one of it being fucking mpreg, so I can at least get a laugh from that shit, doubt she’s reading this but if you are... 

You may be gone, but your darkrai mpreg porn will live on FOREVER... Forever for ME to laugh at!!! >8DDD  So anyway get rekt and suck my non-existent dick you fucking creep.

(Warning ends here)

Phew alright, all that nasty stuff out of the way...   2014 was where things began to improve, I had moved secondary schools and I switched from a mainstream to a specialist school for other autistic children and I found the people who would become my closest friends, through one of them I also got a tumblr blog, and when Undertale came around (so late 2015 to around 2016 when the fandom was most active), through it’s fandom I managed to gain really kind and lovely friends that I love dearly, it’s somewhat strange to me, in the beginning since childhood I never had any close friends and the only ‘close’ ones I had were ones that either kept me around out of pity (because I was a awkward autistic kid), kept me around to constantly bully and push my buttons, or (in this case with the dA friend circle) were potential predators that I thankfully was never THAT close to, and actual close ones I lost contact with too quickly, to this day I’m so thankful for these friends and I dunno if they’d be comfortable with me namedropping them here, but if you’re reading this, you know who you are <333.

I of course had rough patches throughout the years, recovery from my traumas wasn’t easy and I was constantly having issues with pretty much everything from my mental health problems to environmental factors that were out of my control, I’m not going to go into detail on this one because this post is long enough already, but I am much better now than how I was when I was younger, I still have a long way to go, but I have definitely improved and I hope I can still improve, hell, I’ve even improved my art! Wanna see an example?

I drew this back in 2011 on mspaint on a mouse! Yeah! Can you believe that? Whilst to me my art right now isn’t exactly ‘artist goals’ I have definitely improved a lot since!! And I’ll keep on improving forever because that’s what this decade was like anyway! I’m not sure what the future holds, but I want to set these goals for next year:

Create more digital art Finish my unfinished short comic ideas and parodies Continue to chip away at Rebirth’s rewrite and finish Hissterical Scientist’s first arc. Work on my original stuff Continue to improve my mental health Get proper time management skills Learn to do commissions (I be gettin munz lol) Thank you to all my friends and family who have helped support me and stuck by me throughout all these years, I am so happy I get to spend a life with you and I hope we’ll continue to go through the future together, you mean so much to me and I can’t say thank you enough. Thank you to any followers who have sticked by me for so long and if you’re new, I hope we’ll make memories together! 

Onward and upward, and leave behind the pain! <3

#tara's text

[miki-agrawal]

Is the World Ready for Miki Agrawal and Her Next Big Idea?

Originally Published on Glamour.com By Eliza Brooke On April 4, 2019

She wants to talk about poop — if we all could just forget what happened when she tried to change the world with period underwear.

In late January the entrepreneur Miki Agrawal held a launch event for her book, Disrupt-Her, at The Assemblage, the latest coworking-slash-coliving space in Lower Manhattan. The room was decorated with wall rugs and cacti; Spanish moss descended around a nonalcoholic bar. Agrawal sat on a low stage with Lauren Zander, her life coach, and the stylist Stacy London, who was serving as interviewer for the evening. A crowd including Assemblage members and Agrawal’s friends and fans perched on couches, armchairs, and floor pillows, sipping water and nibbling on vegan snacks while the three women talked.

“I want to talk about what happened with Thinx,” London said, “because I think that that was an absolute, completely life-changing moment for you, and really worth discussing because we always talk about success and failure, which for me are words that don’t make a whole lot of sense. It’s all experience. So how do we use experience to our advantage, when it feels like we have been brought to our knees?”

Agrawal founded the period underwear brand Thinx in 2014, and as the company’s profile rose, she became a well-known figure on the start-up circuit. Suddenly, in March 2017, Jezebel reported that Agrawal had stepped down as CEO after several employees quit. Days later, Racked quoted, anonymously, employees who described the company as a volatile work environment with poor compensation and benefits; sources said that Agrawal pitted staffers against one another and implied that they were ungrateful for seeking higher pay. Then The Cut reported that Chelsea Leibow, Thinx’s former head of PR, had filed a sexual harassment complaint against Agrawal, alleging that Agrawal routinely made comments about Leibow’s breasts and touched them without her consent. It was a hard turn left for a start-up with a progressive, feminist image.

Miki Agrawal, photographed at her home Michelle Rose Sulcov

Agrawal with her son, Hiro Michelle Rose Sulcov

Speaking to The Cut at the time, Agrawal called Leibow’s accusations “baseless” and denied that she had touched her breasts; a Thinx spokesperson also said in a statement that the company took the allegations “very seriously” and that “the company commissioned an investigation that concluded the allegations had no legal merit” and declined to comment further. Agrawal also put out a Medium post characterizing Thinx’s HR issues as problems that many fast-growing start-ups face. Forbes reported the sexual harassment claim was withdrawn after a private settlement.

Agrawal didn’t mention Thinx by name when she answered London’s question at The Assemblage. In fact, she didn’t use the word once in the hour-plus she spent onstage that night. “There were a few people that needed to be restructured out that were kind of wearing the feminist T-shirts and the vagina necklaces but were singing a different tune, culturally, for the business,” Agrawal said, noting that when she did finally restructure, “it was just twisted out of context, and you know, it was one of the darkest times of my life.”

If this sounds like a vague description of events, it is. For legal reasons, Agrawal says, she can’t say anything about her time at Thinx, her work there, or her employees. I reached out to seven former employees; only two agreed to talk about their tenure at Thinx, and even then requested anonymity. This makes writing a profile of Agrawal challenging, and reading one potentially unsatisfying: Two years after the fact, the Thinx allegations remain a major piece of her public image and business backstory, but if you want the details of what really happened, there’s a blank space.

We’re left to fill in some of the void with reports from that time period. In the spring of 2017, the critique of Agrawal was swift and widespread. Her case seemed like an isolated incident. It predated a rush of workplace misconduct accusations; Harvey Weinstein had just wrapped what we didn’t know would be his final awards season. This was before pundits learned to parse the nuances of “bad behavior” and before scores of famous men issued their careful, vague apologies. As a culture we’re now figuring out what the rehabilitation of a disgraced public figure can and should look like. This is no easy process, and as Agrawal’s case shows, it doesn’t always come with a clear, public resolution.

At The Assemblage, Agrawal described how she got through those dark days, which took place when she was five months pregnant. She remembered crying “all the time” and calling Zander multiple times a day. She said the experience stretched her emotional capacity, and in that, she found gratitude. “I get to feel the depths of betrayal, the depths of sadness, the depths of pain, which only will then accentuate the heights of joy and the height of wow-ness in life,” she said. And it fed her book, Disrupt-Her: “All of that negative shit that I inhaled, that was so painful, that I wanted to just fight back so badly; instead I just pushed it down and put it into this book.”

Disrupt-Her spans the professional and personal, and instructs readers on how to question all manner of entrenched societal conventions, block out the haters, and fight gendered norms dictated by the patriarchy and sometimes reinforced by other women. In it Agrawal talks a lot about transmuting negative energy into positive action, but her underlying principle is this: If you’re a rule-breaking woman in the world, people will try to take you down.

In the book’s introduction, there’s a handwritten message that prompts readers to “press here” on a drawing of a bull’s-eye — “to eliminate all self-judgment + judgment of others.” Were this any other self-help guide, you might touch a finger to the button, earnestly or feeling a little silly, and move on. In the context of this particular book, the request to avoid judgment seems pointed, because many people are likely to go into it with preconceived notions about Agrawal — good and bad.

Agrawal has always positioned herself as someone in the business of taboo-breaking, and that paid off with Thinx: The brand came to many people’s attention when its ads, which mentioned periods explicitly and used photos of grapefruit halves as an artistic stand-in for vaginas, were initially deemed too suggestive for the New York City subway. Thinx effectively put period underwear on the map, and Agrawal became known as an outspoken, successful woman in the overwhelmingly male start-up world, albeit one who very much fit the mold of a Burning Man–going tech executive. (A key difference: While there she posted photos on Instagram of herself pumping breast milk while out and about, writing that she had given it to other attendees to drink.) Like so many entrepreneurs, Agrawal dresses distinctively. Her style identifier is a tall, wide-brimmed hat that adds to her small stature. She talks fast, in an energetic, almost muscular way, occasionally smacking a fist into her palm for emphasis. When she’s onstage at events and conferences, she gets laughs.

It turns out operating start-ups in spaces that, in her words, “make people uncomfortable,” is good business. She opened a gluten-free pizza restaurant called Wild in 2005, at a time when gluten-free food wasn’t as trendy as it has become, and it now has three locations in New York and Guatemala. Thinx came in 2014, and a pee-proof underwear line called Icon followed in 2015; by 2017 the CEO that replaced Agrawal reported that the company (which oversees both brands) was doing $50 million in annual revenue. As chief creative officer of Tushy, a company that makes bidet attachments, Agrawal now has her sights on changing how we poop. The brand is projecting triple-digit sales growth for 2019, with annual revenue under $20 million and, according to LinkedIn, a staff of 11.

“Over these last 15 years, so many people were like, ‘No one’s going to buy your products.’ ‘No one’s going to eat gluten-free pizza — it probably tastes like shit.’ ‘No one’s going to bleed in their underwear,’” Agrawal said at the book launch. “It took a long time to get investment in all of the business ideas, and it turns out that society was wrong. People did want to try these things.”

In fact, society is wrong about a lot more than just “periods, pee, poop, and pizza,” Agrawal said, drawing laughter from the audience. “This generation and the next is not interested in doing the things that people did 100 years ago. Not interested.” To that point, each chapter of Disrupt-Her names a common way of thinking, then explains where it came from in order to present an alternative. For the notion that “failure is embarrassing,” for instance, readers are instructed to “replace the word failure with revelation.”

Disrupt-Her isn’t billed as a memoir, and much of it focuses on universal topics like the importance of investing one’s money, cultivating a partner’s best qualities, and decluttering one’s home. It is a rebirth, in a sense: Before its launch Agrawal released a video-poem that begins with her crawling from a bleeding animated vagina. (A hat is conveniently waiting nearby; she puts it on.) While the public may view it as a comeback, the timeline isn’t so linear: Agrawal founded Tushy two years after she launched Thinx, then hired leadership to run it while she focused on the period-underwear brand; when she left Thinx, she seamlessly transitioned over to Tushy. If Disrupt-Her answers any question about Agrawal, it’s how she wants to present herself to the world after being accused of abusive behavior in the workplace. Less contrition, more ideology.

In her emphasis on transforming anger, betrayal, and pain into empathy and gratitude, Agrawal performs an amazing alchemical act. The book creates a space in which she’s able to comment on the bad publicity — effectively getting the last word — and land on higher ground. This puts those members of the public who are reckoning with how to regard her, post-Thinx, in the difficult position of arguing against positivity, against personal growth, if they question her at all.

Someone who worked with Agrawal at the time, who agreed to talk only on the condition of anonymity, says that Agrawal knows the value of building her personal brand through this kind of storytelling. Publishing a new book in the aftermath of the Thinx allegations reinforces a narrative in which, the former staffer says, “She’s the hero.”

In February I visited Agrawal at her home in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, a sleek space filled with colorful woven rugs and air plants. During our interview, her husband, Andrew Horn, popped in and out of the room on his way to and from errands. Their 20-month-old son, Hiro, occasionally toddled into the conversation, cheerfully making a grab at a water glass or one of the cell phones recording the conversation.

Agrawal wrote Disrupt-Her in the two and a half months following Hiro’s birth in July 2017. Laid up in bed healing from her C-section, she wrote between feedings and while the baby was asleep. “I had so many thoughts around the culture of complaining, takedown culture, feminism, patriarchy, fake feminists, people who wear the feminist T-shirts and the vagina necklaces but are really mean girls on the inside,” Agrawal says. These topics appear in the book, in chapters that deal with woman-on-woman hate and gossipy media coverage — the products, Agrawal writes, of scarcity mind-sets and a news business that rewards clickbait.

Agrawal says she believes in creating a culture that is progressive and supportive of people being themselves — but that doesn’t mean lowering her standards. “I demand excellence. I do,” Agrawal says. “Shouldn’t you demand it for yourself? And if I’m going to bring it out of you, that’s a good thing. If that sometimes requires tough love, like, ‘Hey, I asked for that three times, come on, you’ve got this.’ Then you go back and tell everyone, ‘She’s yelling at me!’ Like, is that yelling or just being like, ‘Come on, you’re better than this!’?”

In her book Agrawal writes that she learned to “constructively look at where I actually did go wrong as a leader and how I can improve.” When I asked what those areas of personal betterment were, she said that she had to become more cautious about who she surrounds herself with. As a more experienced boss (Agrawal is now 40), “I realized that, wow, I do shoot from the hip, and I just say, ‘Oh, you love my idea? Come work with me.’” At Tushy she’s looked for people with a lot of experience in the workforce.

“I spent seven months, myself, hiring my CEO. I spent all of my time calling everyone’s references,” says Agrawal. “I looked at everyone’s social media accounts…. I looked at people’s profiles, I looked at what they wrote, I looked at how they said it — if they sounded snarky or mean-girl-style, no. They had to be bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, loved life, came with a big smile, optimistic.”

While Disrupt-Her bolsters Agrawal’s public image as someone who’s overcome adversity, many of the professional changes that Agrawal has made since moving over to Tushy seem to have to do with protecting herself against a repeat of the Thinx affair. Being a consummate “Disrupt-Her,” she still lives her life out loud, but when it comes to Tushy’s internal operations, it seems she has created boundaries that help her feel safe. Agrawal no longer wants the sticky job of managing team dynamics, so she is Tushy’s chief creative officer, not its CEO: That’s Jason Ojalvo, who spent nearly a decade at Amazon-owned Audible before joining Tushy. Agrawal works from home, sitting at her long kitchen table, and staffers will drop by for meetings. Socially, she keeps a distance between herself and her employees.

“With my team at Tushy, it’s a relationship of respect,” Agrawal says. Earlier in her career “I thought, We’re all friends, we’re all doing this together. Then all of a sudden you have to make hard calls,” she says. It’s part of the complicated work of being a manager — a lesson she learned the hard way. “I’m just like, OK, clearly I get too connected with my team or I get too trusting, and I’m just — I’m definitely not going to do that again.”

Not being a CEO also means that she has more time for the creative marketing work she loves best, Agrawal says. When I ask Ojalvo about Agrawal’s leadership style, he touts her exuberance. “We have really complementary skill sets. Miki is great at getting everyone excited about her creative ideas. Her passion for our products, our mission, and the PR stunts we do is infectious,” Ojalvo writes in an email. “I can make those all a reality by growing and managing the team executing all of it, facilitating communication among the team, and making sure we have the outside funding and/or profit to execute on our dreams — but Miki always brings the enthusiasm and excitement to the next level.”

Agrawal’s creativity is one reason Ojalvo joined Tushy; he says he was similarly motivated by its product and accessible price point ($69 for the bidet attachment), its potential to change Americans’ hygiene habits, and, more jokingly, the opportunity to talk about poop all day (“My inner 14-year-old is living the dream,” he says). At the moment Agrawal is organizing a “funeral for a tree,” a cheeky means of talking about the number of trees that get cut down every year to make toilet paper (and that could be saved by her bidet attachment). “That’s going to be one of our biggest press events of the year, I just know it,” she says.

Agrawal has a complicated relationship with the media. She has deftly used it to raise her companies’ profiles and her own, and embraced stories like those about the Thinx subway ad controversy that cemented her products in people’s minds. The former staffer, who worked with her at the time of the allegations, recalls Agrawal placing a heavy emphasis on using the media to fuel growth. “It became clear to me that there was an increasing dependence on finding the next buzzy thing,” she says. The employee wished Agrawal would have focused more on growing the company than press opportunities.

But Agrawal could at times be critical of the press, even before the allegations of March 2017. After The Cut published an early profile about her, quoting her about how she started relating to being a feminist only when she launched Thinx, she put out a Medium post titled “An Open Letter to Respectfully Quit Telling Me How to ‘Do Feminism’ (and to just support one another, please!).”

In her book Agrawal takes aim at journalists chasing after “inflamed, exaggerated headlines” and writes about being interviewed by a reporter who was “almost licking her lips, like an animal about to get a big, bloody feast.” (Below this there’s a drawing, done by the author, of a wolf licking its chops.) As a reporter working on a profile of Agrawal, it’s hard not to think about this. It’s also impossible not to see a parallel with the current American president’s relationship to the press, a whirlpool of interdependence and combativeness that plays out every day on Twitter and TV.

During her book event at The Assemblage, Agrawal talked about a few of the mental coping tactics that Zander has taught her. One was pattern interruption: When a bad thought comes into your mind and threatens to fester there, you literally change position, stand up, or walk around. She turned this into a game at a recent press dinner.

“I had literally 13 of the top press at my house last Wednesday, and it was the first time that I had met with all the press, post–all the shit that went down a year and a half ago, and I was like, ‘Ha-ha-ha, in my lair, let’s do this,’” Agrawal told the audience, adopting a faux-evil voice.

“It was a 13-course disruptive dinner, and we had them play all these games,” she continued. “Like, dance like you’re three years old! Imagine the New York Times person dancing like she’s three years old.”

I attended the dinner, and that may sound like more of an exercise in humiliation than it was. The email invitation had instructed us to dress in our silliest outfits, which the reporters and editors in attendance did with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Agrawal had on a glittering hat, a bright pink wig, and a gauzy white cape that she’d worn at her wedding. I wore a blue tie-dye shirt. Each course of the meal and its corresponding discussion or activity was based on a lesson from the book, and dancing like children was chapter one: “You can still live in a childlike state of curiosity, playfulness, and awe and be a responsible adult, on and off the job,” Agrawal writes.

Agrawal isn’t afraid to dance. She isn’t afraid to talk about periods and breastfeeding and bowel movements. To tell you that what you think you know about covering and cleaning your ass is woefully misguided.

I am not a performer, and inventing goofy dance moves in front of my peers — or worse, dancing “sensually,” as we were later encouraged to do — felt awkward and embarrassing. But it was effective programming on Agrawal’s part. You cannot argue against this kind of activity, even as you internally debate its value. To not participate, or to participate with one eye on the clock, is to admit that you’re rigid and hemmed in by your self-consciousness, that you’re choosing to bind yourself to the societal conventions you’re supposed to be dismantling. Sooner or later you’ll have to commit wholeheartedly to finding your childlike sense of play and trying something new, because your rationalizing doesn’t matter, and the only way to relieve yourself of the agony of resisting is to give in.

Eliza Brooke is a freelance reporter. She lives in Brooklyn.

[atamascolily]

An incomplete review of the Star Wars EU/Legends canon

I never thought I would say this, but I'm actually very thankful there will never be another Star Wars EU/Legends book in the old - now non-canon - universe. I've been revisiting those books recently as part of my recent Star Wars kick, and let me tell you, I stopped reading them just at the right time - when Vector Prime came out and they killed Chewie off. It's all downhill from there.

Anyway, the Legends universe is a hot mess, but for me, the five Thrawn Books by Timothy Zahn - Heir to the Empire, Dark Force Rising, The Last Command, Specter of the Past, and Vision of the Future - are amazing and totally canon in my heart for pretty much everything. Everything else is pretty much "meh" except for a few books that evoke some late '90s nostalgia (because really this blog is all about late '90s nostalgia).

So in my head, Luke and Mara Jade are happily married, and so are Han and Leia; their three children, Jacen, Jaina and Anakin, are all happy-go-lucky teenagers who can use the Force with their besties - Tenel Ka of the Hapes Cluster, Chewie's nephew Lowbaccha, and Tahiri Veila - and getting kidnapped/saving the galaxy every few months. The New Republic is alive and going strong on Coruscant (which never gets invaded by aliens from outside the galaxy), Luke runs the Jedi Academy on Yavin IV; the remnants of the Empire are scattered and disorganized and sue for peace with the New Republic and Captain Pelleaon finally gets the retirement he deserves. It's really great.

But let's face it, I read just about all of the books published prior to 1999 because I was a Star Wars geek and that's just what you did in the late '90s. (They were New York Times best-sellers so I know I wasn't the only one.) In general, I love the art on the books because it looks just like movie posters for films that were never made and that's exactly what I wanted.

Random thoughts on said EU/Legends canon cut below, for length:

-Ben Kenobi's last appearance to Luke in the Legends AU: "You're not the last of the old Jedi... but the first of the new." (TAKE THAT, DISNEY EPISODE 8!) -Awesome things from the Thrawn books: Mara Jade - check. Talon Karrde - check. Art as a major form of military strategy - check. Secret commando ninjas - check. Leia's title as "Lady Vader" - check. Borsk Fey'lya -check. Camaas Document macguffin-thingy- check. Ysalamiri - lizards that block the Force - check. Vornskrs - Force-sensitive predators - check. Insane Jedi master- check. Lots of clones - check. Lawful Evil Imperials - check. Mara fulfilling her orders to the Emperor in the most badass way possible in The Last Command - check, PLEASE. -Jacen, Jaina and Anakin Solo forEVER! -Also, Coruscant and New Republic forever!! -Shadows of the Empire: WTF, Xizor/Leia sex pollen (okay, pheromones) seduction scene???; Dash Rendar is a Han Solo expy, you're not fooling anyone.   -Truce at Bakura: wow, Ssi-ruuvi are full of Fridge Horror, powering their tech with human life force; maybe the Imperials aren't so bad after all; Luke and Gaeriel have no chemistry and also her entire religion is against the Jedi on principle, and she's not interested in changing it for you, Luke, sorry; of course Dev dies after his redemption arc; watching the force-ghost of Anakin Skywalker try to talk to Leia is amazing, because Leia is so not interested in his shit. -The Courtship of Princess Leia: I love the Hapes cluster, but man Han buying a planet in a card game and kidnapping Leia with the Hapan Gun of Command (pretty much what it sounds like) is NOT OKAY; Teneniel Djo is awesome and so is Dathomir in general. Isolder is okay once he gets over Leia, which takes most of the book. Also on the cover on one edition, Leia looks like Sarah from Labyrinth during that dream sequence with Jareth - what? On the other, she's wearing her Endor outfit, as are Han and Luke and there's a Rancor there, too for no good reason that I can recall.   -Jedi Academy Trilogy: Yay getting to see the Kessel spice mines; I'm not so into the Sun Crusher and the Maw Installation, but Qwi Xux and Wedge Antilles are adoreable together, poor Admiral Daala and Imperial sexism (yet another reason Tarkin is an asshole); yay for a Jedi Academy on Yavin IV; Kyp Durron seriously needs to chill, Luke's in a coma for a lot of the series, Exar Kun is not as clever as he thinks himself. -I, Jedi: I'm supposed to like you, Corran Horn, and I'm just not interested and your narrative voice is kinda annoying.... Just sayin'. -The Crystal Star: super weird and trippy, Han and Leia's kids are kidnapped by "The Empire Reborn", which is as dark and terrible as it sounds, Crystal Star explodes, do not read. -The Black Fleet Crisis: super dark and trippy, especially the Yevethan culture; reveal that Luke's mother was one of the Fallanassi - pacifist Jedi who hid when the Empire was formed - only it turns out to be a huge macguffin, which is too bad. -Children of the Jedi: EVEN TRIPPIER AND DARKER THAN THE CRYSTAL STAR, HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE; Luke gets a love interest who's a Force ghost trapped in a ship's computer; sacrifice, body-swapping, creepy song motifs. -Darksaber: Hutts try to build a Death Star, what can possibly go wrong? Luke's new Jedi girlfriend can't live without her force powers when she loses them, so she leaves him. -Planet of Twilight: Luke goes chasing off after Callista and they don't get back together, so that's good. Also dark and trippy.   -The New Rebellion: SUPER DARK AND TRIPPY, LOTS OF MASS MURDER, NOT A FAN. Thank goodness for Mara Jade and Talon Karrde showing up with ysalamiri to turn the force off so Leia can shoot the Evil Dark Jedi behind it all with a blaster. I can't believe I read this. -Ambush at Corellia/Assault on Selonia/Showndown at Centerpoint: also weird and trippy. Han has an evil identical cousin. Luke has to go back and ask Gaeriel for help (she's married now and it's awkward). Lando tries to marry for money and after some awkwardness ends up with Tendra Risant, who is awesome. Lots of things blow up. Kids save the day at the last minute. -I only read one of the Junior Jedi Knights series, Lyric's World, about young Anakin Solo and his friend Tahiri, taking some time off from their Jedi studies to help a friend metamorphose into a new life stage, and I remember it being really charming, despite the inevitable intelligent secret animal sidekick. I later learned that Anakin and Tahiri were kinda an item and then it went horribly wrong in New Jedi Order so I'm glad I didn't read that. -Young Jedi Knights: yay young adult Star Wars novels from the '90s; I  stopped reading after Diversity Alliance, but these were fun - especially Tenel Ka, who was a badass, and I quietly shipped her and Jacen (and then that ALSO ended badly in later books - why can't we have nice things?) Especially good in my memory: Shadow Academy (trying not to get corrupted to the dark side at an academy for Dark Jedi), Lightsabers (Tenel Ka has to deal with losing a hand during a training accident); Diversity Alliance (aliens get pissed off at human dominion in the New Republic government but decide that killing the humans off is the only way to achieve justice).

We're not going to even go into all the stuff that happens post-Vector Prime, because it is truly awful. Go look it up if you're curious.

I did read a few stand-alone books this week, though:

-The later Zahn novels lack the spark and vigor I remember from the Thrawn books. Scoundrels couldn't keep my interest. Allegiance and Choices of One feel very weird to me because Luke and Mara manage to work together without actually meeting each other. Survivor's Quest ought to have been good except somehow Luke and Mara encountering the Outbound Flight expedition was BORING and it shouldn't have been. It's not clear if reading the follow-up novel set during the Old Republic era - titled Outbound Flight - will help with this. -Also, I dislike the retconning so that Mara and Luke make references to Naboo and the Trade Federation, which they didn't do in earlier books, and also Thrawn's major motivation for everything is getting the galaxy ready for the impending invasion of the Yuuzhan Vong in New Jedi Order, which I just - really don't like, especially since NJO was pretty awful. -Also, there are an awful lot of Jedi healing trances in Survivor's Quest, which are only tolerable because the code word that Luke and Mara use to snap each other out of it is "I love you". D'aww. -Also, perhaps this is just me reading too much fanfic, but would it hurt to have at least an allusion to the fact that Luke and Mara have sex on occasion - in addition to snuggling and having Force mind-meld sessions? I'm not asking for porn, mind you, but just anything beyond platonic Force buddies would have been good. -Kenobi, by  John Jackson Miller was another, relatively recent Legends book that ought to have been good. I mean, it's Obi-wan Kenobi hanging out on Tatooine, dealing with Tusken Raiders and moisture farmers - I eat that sort of fanfiction up - but although there were some good bits, it just really didn't work for me. -Those handy timelines in the front - listing every single book and how it fits into the convoluted chronology - is really helpful, though! The only thing that would make it better would be to add authors and dates. But that is what the Internet is for, I guess.

Conclusions and Follow-Up Questions to Research:

-Wow, the '90s were an interesting time. -Bantam Spectra line of EU novels: mostly good, some weirdness. Del Rey line: ARGHHHHH. -Wow, there are a lot more Star Wars books out there then I remember. -Wow, Mara Jade is awesome. -I have a lot of strong opinions on the subject. -Since they stopped putting out Legends novels as of April 2014, I never have to care about keeping up with canon or anything I don't like about this universe ever again. -Has fanfiction spoiled me for the "real" thing? Or is it just a failure of the published works to address the topics I'm REALLY interested in? -Is the Disney EU canon any better? (My guess, given how I feel overall about the direction of the recent movies: probably not for me, but maybe worth checking out.)

#star wars #book reviews #star wars feels #star wars legends #'90s nostalgia

[zeroeffortenvironment]

voyager

Do you know how far Voyager 1 is from earth at this moment? It's 13 Billion miles. That's with a B. We as a species made something with our own hands and then put it in interstellar space! I'm not sure what's more inconcievable, the sheer fact of it, or that it got to where it is because we hurled it there at a rate of 38,000 miles per hour, using machinery and knowhow that came from under those same hands. that's almost 50 times the speed of sound. certainly not the fastest thing we've ever threw in the air but this one also sends picture postcards from where he at!! this is with a setup that was bolted in place in 1977. That not only predates your stupid hashtag-riddled instagram feed, but predates instagram altogether, it predates quad band phones, GSM, CDMA, digital light sensor, internet, and based on the fact that you're reading this blog, it probably predated you too...

Anyway. pictures from Voyager reach us in about 20 hours. that's from what? 13 billion miles away. So assuming that I post something here every day (which of COURSE I do), I am happy to report that I am floating in the vacuum so far up the universe's Yeah that by comparison to me the voyager just got the memo and started packing for his trip. to be precise the reason why it's been 682 days is because I'm 1.86 light years away, which, in cubic inches and football fields is 1.0984153e+13 miles out. I'd type it out but I trust google on it. this figure has more places than I have neurons within my skull.

And that, your honour, is why it may SEEEM that I've been slacking on this blog for the last ahem.. 2 years.

It's 10 am, on December 23rd, 2017. I'm on a couch, Roxanna is asleep. It's properly chilly, but I'm not wearing socks, otherwise it wouldn't even be worth mentioning. A great big factory-like window graces a concrete wall to my left, deligently trying to keep out the sounds of a noxious hvac system of a shopping center across the street. For its size it's doing a pretty respectable job. Meanwhile to the right of me the dishwasher is having a deep-tech warehouse rave. the air is a mixture of coffee that's getting cold, and that indescribable but not necessarily unpleasant smell of a place on a cold day when you just wake up. I'm surrounded by plants, plants, some plants, pictures, paper, wires, a bicycle ominously hangs off the wall on a redwood shelf quietly waiting like a panther on a tree for the perfect moment to fall onto its victim. Ahead of me is the door into the bedroom. An ages-old ikea lamp curiously sticks its head out where my desk is, beyond that, more wires, more plants, our DIY plywood bed, graced by a pile of blankets, cats, and potentially roxanna, and an 8' closet door mirror. All of this aligned like planets on Voyager's journey with a reflection of my face at its end 2.25522e-15 light years away.

I look a little disheveled. but not awful. Roxanna has been putting pins in my hair for the last couple months because I refuse to cut it. She is convinced it looks adolescent left to its own devices. At work Jeff Su, our in-house older asian guy with a gray camry and no filter, remarked that I look like a golden poodle. I think it looks fine. more importantly I couldn't care less if anyone thinks otherwise.

This is beat-matched near perfectly with how I feel about almost everything else around me lately. Christmas is in two days, and I feel like all I want this year is to be floating in the vast nothingness of space in complete silence, absence of stimuli, thought or air pressure in my lungs. Or at least in a raft in the middle of a bay. Instead what might be happening is as follows: after christmas, the very morning of the 26ths, I have to be seen in a queue at the LA Federal Building at 7 am flat - that's when they open. I will be there with a heap of documents, forms, and passport photos procuring a same-day passport made using a citizenship certificate that I have just received in the mail which has the CORRECT spelling of my lastname. Once (or rather If) I get this, I am to pack expiditiously and be on a plane with Roxanna at 1AM the following day (27th), which will fly us to Morelia Mexico, where we will be joined by some of her bdgjillion relatives who will take us to a mountain cabin retreat at Zirauen. While out there we will be enjoying great company, and scenery whilst sleeping in a tent for a few days. Come the 28th or 29th (not sure) we set out for Caretero, and perhaps Guanojuato, where we will be impromptu-crashing at the home of other relatives. On the 3rd we fly back, ah! which reminds me - I need to send an email to my colleagues saying I won't be at work until the 4th. Which should technically be 5th because I am a human afterall and don't run on aderol.

ALL of this was figured out last night, between the hours of 5pm when I picked up my certificate in the mail and midnight or so. None of it was by me. I should really be teling this to my spouce, and I guess I will soon enough - but to me planning a last-minute trip of such complexity on such short notice is batshit insane, puts an undue burden on the folks that will be hosting us, and most importantly is the direct opposite of floating in a raft in the middle of the bay. And it is so by virtue of the fact that the latter constitutes Rest, the former - doesn't.

I don't doubt that parts of it will be fun, and I'll see lovely familiar faces and some beautiful places, but the problem really isn't our upcoming trip to Zirahuen, it isn't Mexico, Roxanna, or her great big army of amazing relatives. Btw it's worth a mention that I have already been to Mexico once for a Mayra and Tonio's wedding in Morelia last year, and had a blast.

The problem is not with traveling, it's with making plans. Or rather my perpetually empty calendar and never objecting to anything that other people may want to put on it.

Let's talk about Goals. Cheryl Crow's analysis of the matter falls way short of the Noble Peace prize - it is Not wanting what you got, not getting what you want, it's wanting something in the first place. You know what the hardest thing about meeting your goals is? THE absolute hardest thing no matter whether you're perfecting plie's in an intro ballet class or building the next Voyager - the hardest thing is having a goal in the first place. Because a goal worth having is the kind you absolutely can't live without - it defines you as much as your first and last name and your reflection in the mirror you see every day. With a goal like this, everything else is machine work - resources, design, problem solving, are all a matter of logic. I am convinced that all superhuman feats in history are results of having such goals, and have been dreamed, worked out, built, launched, and remembered because people woke up every morning, looking in the mirror and seeing the voyager reflect in their cornea...

Well, to get straight to point - I don't have one of these. And the longer i think about it the more I'm convinced that I never did. And if anything, this is one thing that keeps my mind completely devoid of thought as I float in my vacuum, and it is this:

if I want nothing and make zero effort towards achieving things I don't want (read: everything), then why the hell are there three achievement awards on my desk? why is my desk electric and goes up and down with a push of a button, and costs $3000 of company cash? How did I come up with Two degrees in Architecture at Cal Poly and UCLA? How did I even get INTO either of these two schools? How did I manage to not only get a job, but to keep it from 2009 until 2014, a period in architecture that was absolutely plagued by the recession. I am not putting myself on a pedestal here. The reason I bring up all these things is because I never looked at myself in the mirror and saw an architect with two degrees, three glass sculptures with my name etched into them, or the handful of buildings that I contributed design efforts to. None of this was ever a clear goal. Neither is the advancement up the ladder that I could be striving for, nor is architectural license that is the next logical step to your advancement up the ladder as an architect. I am not looking forward to any of that. I am particularly not looking forward to my performance review in early January where I will certainly be asked questions pertaining specifically to my ambitions in the firm, the industry, and my career direction.

It's a bizarre problem and I've learned to live with it - being exceptionally good at something but arguably having little interest in it. But it also leaves me in a perpetual search for something to BE interested in, because I'm a human, and we're a curious species, and I'm wired to have goals and predispositions. And like a bit-coin mining rig, my mind is occupied with this all the fucking time, to the point that I get tired of just thinking about it. In the meantime the world around me revolves according to its own rules. And whether I like it or not until I find something worth adjusting my trajectory for, I am at the mercy of the forces that make this world turn. So far, I think, they have been good to me. 

To this end I wonder if the Voyager gives two shits where it's going? here is an amazing thing - thousands of years of star gazing, invention, evolutionary thought and technological breakthroughs, wrapped up in a glistening contraption of elegant and perfectly straight trusses, it's own metallic mind and set of eyes forever traveling at 38,000 miles per hour. If the gods were to add up everything we achieved as a species and pick 10 top things - this is one of them! Here's an amazing thing that we made, and then we just sent it off away from us as fast as we fucking could. The only thing we know about the voyager's plans is that 44,000 years from now he has a date with a neighboring star. If that was ever someone's goal for it, they certainly aren't sticking around to achieve it. And thus I believe Voyager has no destination. it's moving in a straight line, occasionally adjusted by the orbits of planets it slingshots off of. And maybe the Voyager is also perfectly fine with that...

crap, I gotta pack...