don't flush it

Weird Al is allowed to parody everything because he's operating under copyright law, not trademark law.

Trademark governs who can "trade" under what "mark" i.e. the brand identity of a company. Companies don't own their trademarked word forever, but they maintain the exclusive right to sell things under that brand in their specific market sector. Patagonia doesn't own the name of a geographical region, they just own the right to be the only company using that name to sell clothing and outdoor gear.

A drag queen name can be a parody of a clothing and outdoor gear company.

A company's trademarked logo can be used in parody creative works, with more leeway if it's not for commercial purposes. Trademark parody is allowed! Patagonia has been aware of and allowed Pattie Gonia's trademark parody for years.

Trademarks are specific to market sector. Actress Chase Infiniti could start a makeup line named after herself and her trademark would not infringe on the Infiniti car brand because they are different markets and there is no risk of confusion. Pattie Gonia could probably trademark her name to sell frozen veggie burgers and Patagonia would not care.

Drag queen Jan Sport did a collab with JanSport bags. What Jan Sport almost certainly did not do is independently apply to register "Jan Sport" as a trademark in order to sell bags on her own, because that would infringe on JanSport's own trademark in the bag market sector.

What Pattie Gonia is not allowed to do -- the thing that Pattie Gonia actually did do and is being sued for -- is apply to register "Pattie Gonia" as a trademark to sell clothing, because apparently Pattie is in talks with North Face and HydroFlask to sell "Pattie Gonia"-branded gear. These companies probably won't finalize anything unless Pattie shows that she actually owns the trademark. Unfortunately, "Patagonia" is already a registered trademark in the clothing market sector, and these two names are too similar to exist in the same sector (see: "likelihood of confusion" legal standard).

Your drag queen name can parody a clothing company. You can parody the trademarked logo of a clothing company. But you cannot use the same name to then go on to also become a clothing company.

In order to maintain their own trademark, Patagonia must sue for trademark infringement. If they don't sue, and Pattie Gonia gets her own trademark, Pattie could sue Patagonia for infringement on her trademark. You can see why Patagonia won't be dropping this suit no matter how much you harass them.

The new conflict is from Pattie Gonia using the Patagonia imagery and the Pattie Gonia name on her own merchandise. This is the email Patagonia sent, with the images they feel conflict with the 2022 agreement.

Pattie responded to that by disagreeing that she had broken any agreement, and also obliquely threatening to expose Patagonia for making tactical gear for the US military?

Pattie selling shit with her stage name on it Really Obviously isn’t going to have any negative effect on the continued lining of Patagonia CEO pockets, as if that even fucking matters, and no amount of waxing poetic about “well they have to 🥺🥺🥺” is going to make me say anything other than “fucking stupid if true then”.

In terms of whose pockets are being lined:

Rather than selling the company or taking it public, Mr. Chouinard, his wife and two adult children have transferred their ownership of Patagonia, valued at about $3 billion, to a specially designed trust and a nonprofit organization. They were created to preserve the company’s independence and ensure that all of its profits — some $100 million a year — are used to combat climate change and protect undeveloped land around the globe.

The unusual move comes at a moment of growing scrutiny for billionaires and corporations, whose rhetoric about making the world a better place is often overshadowed by their contributions to the very problems they claim to want to solve.

At the same time, Mr. Chouinard’s relinquishment of the family fortune is in keeping with his longstanding disregard for business norms, and his lifelong love for the environment.

(NYT Gift Link)

Since 2022, 100% of Patagonia's profits have gone to climate and environmental causes. They have completely restructured the ownership of the company so that this will continue in perpetuity.

Needed a clean graphic for a project, and figured while I was vectoring I would put sex and magic back in.

*idea gets more complicated*

*idea gets more complicated*

*idea gets more complicated*

*idea gets more complicated*

I thought it was interesting and I like the way the doctor explains it, so I want to share

It's probably the best time of your life. #springbabyspring

@lymeandcoconut

#lmaooooo #my fave is that episode of white collar where neil is doing a theft #and the music they play over it is leporello's 'here's the list of all the hundreds of women my boss has fucked' aria from don giovanni #it's supposed to just sound grand and sophisticated but the guy is singing about how DG fucks tall women short women #fat women skinny women princesses and peasants he fucks them all! #and here's the numbers broken down by nationality! #he's fucked over 1000 women in spain you know!

God it's hard to phrase this question in a non-biasing way. Also I promise I've encountered all of these phrases irl

if something else please tell me what!

Gendered socialization is unequivocally real. Boys and girls are treated and socialized differently before they're even born.

Female babies are disappearing en masse, because male babies are more valued.

From an extremely early age, parents respond to their childrens' emotions differently based on gender. Mothers over-estimate the crawling abilities of their infant sons compared to infant daughters.

Mothers speak to their infant daughters more and talk them more about emotions than they do their sons.

By the age of 2, boys already show an avoidance to the color pink and other items traditionally seen as feminine, laying the ground work for early demonstrations of misogyny in childhood.

When children enter pre-school, there is no difference in math abilities between boys and girls. But such gaps begin to appear as children grow older.

The vast majority of girls report feeling unsafe going outside, and at least 2/3 of girls have reported experiencing sexual harassment at school by the time they 16.

Further on in education, women will understimate their scores, while men will overestimate their scores. Women will perform worse on tests when first told that women, on average, perform worse.

Researchers argue that the prevalence of sexual assault against women is so high specifically because of early gendered socialization. The men who commit sexual violence consistently demonstrate specific ideals about gender and perform hostile masculinity.

The patterns reach well into adulthood, influencing occupational choices.

I could literally go on and on and on. There are countless studies and entire fields of academia dedicated to researching this. The fact that children are socialized differently paced on assigned or percieved gender is really not debatable.

I am sympathetic to the fact that transphobes have warped the concept of socialization to insinuate that trans women are destined to be violent or predatory, or that trans men are destined to be submissive and helpless. However, people weaponizing these frameworks does not mean that the phenomenon does not exist.

Furthermore, individual people's nuanced experiences with gendered socialization does not mean that these patterns don't exist on a large scale. Any interaction with society will confer the influence of gender biases, especially upon children to are extremely vulnerable to both subtle and overt social cues.

Thinking of it as like a language, where so much stuff is taught by exposure, all the "gendered manners" that are taught in single-sex situations (the proverbial thing of "girls act differently when there are no boys present/boys act differently when there are no girls present") which are the situations where a kid is taught how to perform "their" gender in the most nuanced and complicated ways that signal to other people of the same-gender that "we are the same type of person" - and, trans people are often cut off from that until they come out, meaning that they have to learn the "basics" as adults.

Likewise I see so many trans people say "Bold of you to assume I was socialised! I was treated as a weird thing." And I don't know how to point out that the things that get a child treated as a "weird thing" and put outside of the bounds of propriety are themselves different for children being raised-to-boyhood or raised-to-girlhood. Thinking about England because I don't want to extrapolate outside of where I personally know, a "girl" might get treated as a tomboy-outsider-weirdo for wanting to play toy soldiers or play in the woods, but a "boy" would probably be seen as normal for that. Likewise, a "boy" might be punished really badly for liking makeup and dresses, but a "girl" wouldn't be. Seeing "You can't say I was socialised as a boy, I was constantly getting in trouble for putting on my sister's clothes, and treated like I was disgusting for crying and being emotional!" And just... Yes! Because people that the patriarchy wants to turn into "boys" will be punished for showing femininity, that is how male socialisation works! Likewise "I was treated as a tomboy and put in a third gender category because I was sporty and outdoorsy, and punished and called monstrous and sent to see a psychiatrist for not playing with dollies" - That's female socialisation, because a "boy" who was sporty wouldn't be put into into third gender category for it, and wouldn't be called monstrous for having no interest in dolls.

Obviously the exact things that are gendered change from culture to culture, but that applies to everything, everything is culturally bound and affects different people in different ways and to different degrees, but we still try to talk about the broad trends which carry through cross-culturally (which has been a big part of feminist consciousness- Recognising that although the ways that women are treated worldwide aren't the same, that there are repeating themes...)

This is one reason that paying attention to intersex theory and experiences is really important for trans liberation and gender liberation both: I don't think you can really understand gender socialization without paying attention to case studies of children whose gender has been problematized at an early age as well as those who are perceived and socialized as "normally" gendered children. Obviously trans adults can come from children from both normatized and problematized childhood gender experiences, and individual caretakers of a gender or sex divergent child may respond to that child in a range of ways. But it's really worth noting that socialization theory does have room for socialization experiences that differ from the presumed-cis, presumed-perisex norm, and I think that talking about those examples can resolve some of the rejection of gendered socialization among trans communities.

(it was about the third false alarm i'd personally had that month - i was still in high school and they happened a lot, and you also regularly heard them walking around any city, with a bunch of disgruntled people muttering on the sidewalk waiting to go back to their job. PLUS on the previous play i'd gone to see, they'd had an electrical problem and the lights had gone out. the actors had bravely kept on playing, but eventually the stage manager had appeared on stage and said "i'm sorry... we can't bring the lights back on, we have to stop the play".)

so anyway. the fire alarm went off right as we were about to go into the theater. the entire crowd went 'uggghhh' and stood hoping it'd stop, but no such luck: one of the actors appeared, smiling in that obviously stressed out way when you hope everything will be fine, and said that by law we had to evacuate the building and they hoped the problem would be fixed asap so we could start the play.

so we poured out. it was a beautiful, warm night in the south of france, and there were like benches and low walls and stuff so that at least anybody who needed to sit down could sit down. and we waited. the fire alarm stopped. general relief! and then it started again. general groan.

people in the crowd were starting to get mad. one lady, who looked very right-wing, started loudly saying stuff like 'this is what we get these days with local government funding, no need to ask whose fault THAT is' (we had a left-wing president at the time). people side-eyed her, said nothing, but as she kept making those comments one man went 'listen, ma'am, can you please stop' and they started debating at the top of their voices.

then a homeless guy arrived and, seeing us all gathered here, whipped out his guitar and started busking for money. some people groaned, others appreciated the distraction from the political debate. until he started asking us what we were all doing here and, hearing the debate, directly addressed the two people fighting, putting in his two cents.

at this point some of us were starting to realize what was actually going on, but most of the crowd still had no idea.

but no one was getting too nervous because the various arguments stayed pretty mild- just exciting enough to be super engaging. eventually the actor from before reappeared, told the debating people to calm down, nervously confirmed we still couldn't go back inside, and offered to do a monologue from romeo & juliet while we waited. the homeless guy loudly approved, the two debating people looked awkward. he launched into his monologue, with one fellow actress as juliet, but they kinda botched it and a third actor arrived, berating them for not learning their lines AND not understanding the true meaning of the text. then, since it looked like we wouldn't get to go back into the theater (by then it had been over an hour anyway) they started awkwardly telling us what their version of much ado would have been like, and it sounded hilariously terrible (a wwi version with bombs raining on the characters the whole time...?)

the right-wing lady from earlier eventually loudly scoffed and said this was a disaster and SHE could do better, SHE had studied shakespeare in school, thank you very much. she did a few lines from another play (lear, i think?) and it wasn't half bad, the actors clapped. everyone was kinda pleased she'd stopped her shit. then the homeless guy did it too, a much longer monologue, and that's when even people very slow on the uptake realized (the crowd had been murmuring between themselves for a while already) that this was the play.

the pointless debates, the awkward busking, the actors doing bits of other plays and then arguing about it, this was 'much ado about nothing', stripped of everything but its title.

now that the cat was out of the bag, the actors (including the right-wing lady, the left-wing guy and the homeless guy) did an actual scene from much ado, the end scene where they dance and sing. and then they bowed and it was over! but they were still like, standing in the middle of the audience, and over these two hours we had gotten really familiar with them all, since a lot of non-actor people had interjected and tried to get in the middle of the debate and either frowned at the busking guy or encouraged him, etc etc. the usual barrier between actors and audience had been obliterated! so everytone started asking questions, and they happily stuck around for the spontaneous round of interviewing, which we got to understood was how this 'play' usually concluded.

"what if the fake political debate got TOO heated?" was asked by many people. they said there were other hidden actors in the crowd who could divert into other directions if it got out of hand, not just the busking man. "what if it rained so that we couldn't all just stand around outside for two hours?" then the play would have been for real cancelled, and they would have explained to the crowd inside the theater what they were supposed to be doing. the right-wing lady got a lot of compliments for being particularly convincing, and also a lot of awed comments regarding what a stressful, even actually dangerous role it is- going into a crowd and starting shit on purpose. "what about the people who left, thinking the play was actually ruined?" yeah, they lost part of their audience every night, but usually the promise of a juicy debate just as the wait got a little long got most of the crowd to stick around until the rest of it started happening.

But sometimes I have to copy-paste something else besides “t,” which means I need a readily available place to copy the “t” from.

My first thought was to search “tiger” on Google, but if you can’t type the letter “t,” you just get search results about Bob Iger.

I realized words that end with “t” are easier for Google to autocomplete, so the first one I thought of was “crypt.” But wouldn’t you know, googling “cryp” takes to you to cryptocurrency results, and I REALLY don’t want my algorithm thinking I google that multiple times per week.

Then I remembered a cool place I went in London, called Cafe in the Crypt. It’s exactly what it sounds like and located below St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church. When I type in “Cafe in Cryp,” Google does indeed autocomplete it effectively! So I either keep that search result open in a tab or Google it every day.

So, that being said, if anyone works for St. Martin-in-the-Fields Church’s marketing department and has been utterly flummoxed by an IP address from Virginia that has googled their cafe hundreds of times over the past 6 months… that wasn’t a bot, that was me.

I am the Spiders Georg of Cafe in the Crypt.