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Showing posts from October, 2017

Weekly Album: -Miyavi-雅 - MYV☆POPS

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How could I possibly not know my attachment style until I was a teenager, you ask? Well, mainly because I had nobody to get that attached to. My mother likes to tell people the story of my first steps. I was sitting on her lap one day at a family gathering, while she was chatting with the other adults, and I let it be known that I wanted a toy that was across the room. Nobody could be arsed to get it for me, or even walk over there and crouch beside it to encourage me to go get it myself. Eventually, I got tired of squalling, squirmed free, and toddled over to get it on my own. No stumbling, no falling; I just walked over, plopped down, and focused on my toy to the exclusion of all else. She thinks this is an adorable story. It would be if it were a case of 'took our eyes off the baby for two seconds and look what happened'. It was not. This was my mother's parenting technique through my entire childhood: Whenever the baby wanted something inconvenient, ignore her until

Weekly Watch: Simply Nailogical

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Maybe costuming is too much for you, but you want fancy nails for Halloween. That's cool! Try Simply Nailogical, hosted by self-proclaimed "holosexual" Cristine. Your nails will be the sparkliest motherfuckers at that Halloween party. Cristine is big on things like stickers, vinyls, wraps, sponging, and being too lazy to hand-paint anything at all, so if you're hopeless at this but want to go out dressed as "person who is capable of not fucking up a manicure", this channel is for you. Also, she has cute cats. Very cute.
A friend and I were talking tonight, and, having not seen me in a few months,  she asked how it is going with ye ballroom instructor. It goes. He is -- or possibly we are -- starting to confuse people. So far as I know, he is every bit as gay as I thought he was when I met him. I think this is how he reads to most everyone, but people are starting to react to us like there is an 'us' to react to. I've already been asked once if we're dating by a stranger who watched us exchange maybe two sentences. Other people who are more genre-savvy about the kind of men who usually work at a dance studio have asked questions that sounded like they wanted to be that one, but fell apart in the middle because they couldn't work out what word they wanted instead of 'dating'. One of my coworkers (queer lady, if that matters) witnessed us having a conversation that was 100% about actual work, watched him walk away from the desk, paused, and asked, "Do you two, uh, work

Weekly Album: David Bowie - Reality

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Weekly Watch: Monique Parent & Jeffree Star

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This week's Watch is a two-fer: Actress Monique Parent and singer/makeup artist Jeffree Star. For the masculine out there who don't normally wear makeup, but are thinking of giving it a whirl for Halloween this year, Jeffree Star is a singer, model, and screamingly  queeny makeup artist who got his start on Instagram/YouTube. While his style is not something I would recommend for daily wear -- he sorta splits the difference between "Kardashian" and "drag queen", and it's a great deal of work -- it's very theatrical and absolutely something you can do for a one-night extravaganza without going full on RuPaul's Drag Race with the glue sticks and kabuki paint. For the record, he has his own makeup line. I don't own any, but it's reportedly high-quality stuff, and chock full of glitter. For the (ahem) mature  reader who is wondering how to do their face without feeling like mutton dressed as lamb, I give you Monique Parent, actress o

Weekly Album: Jessie J - Sweet Talker

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Weekly Watch: Glam & Gore

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Mikey from Glam&Gore is another fantastic source of inspiration and know-how for your Halloween regalia. She's especially well-known for her Disney Princess series, where she shows you how to do the standard "pretty" makeup for the character, and then transforms into the "horror" version. Mikey also uses some SFX materials in her looks, particularly costume contacts, but most of her "glam" faces can be done with standard drugstore/department store makeup, and the occasional pot of glitter.
I'm giving up on Duolingo Korean lessons. I'm going to have to learn hangul before that will make any sense. Those blocks are not only constructed on a logical basis, but the shapes of the consonant pieces are meant to represent the shape your mouth makes when saying them. It takes a lot of effort to make a system like that confusing and evil, but Duolingo has managed it. They really do want you to memorize the han like they were kanji , and... no. Everyone I have showed this to thinks this is the dumbest possible way to do it, including the Japanese lady who has personal experience with memorizing a bazillion kanji in order to read things, and the actual Korean lady who works at the desk on weekends. The Esperanto lessons, on the other hand, are working out fairly well. For starters, the software will accept, or at least overlook, the ASCII-X convention if you don't have an Esperanto keyboard, which is nice. Esperanto involves circumflexes -- aka 'hats' -- on

Weekly Album: matchbox twenty - Exile On Mainstream

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Another story, or: Why I don't bother lying to ye ballroom instructor anymore: I do not remember exactly what was going on, but I was having A Day. I was sick or in pain and hadn't had one or more of the normal meals, I was probably behind on the dishes or the laundry or something, and possibly I hadn't slept. I was definitely staring down the barrel of a five-hour shift running a theater. I do rather like that job, but it involves a lot of running around setting things up and standing at a lectern selling tickets, so I was not looking forward to it just then. I'm not fond of passing out, so I picked up something that could be mistaken for food if you didn't look at it too closely, and hid in the studio office to eat it. I didn't expect to find anyone there, but in fact ye ballroom instructor had had the same bright idea. He's not normally in on weekends unless he's in the show or running it, but apparently he wanted to see that one, and decided to g

Weekly Watch: Jordan Hanz

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It's October again, and you know what that means -- the Halloween freaks come out of the woodwork. Jordan Hanz is one of my go-to tutorial channels for makeup, particularly of the SFX kind. She uses body paints, regular makeup, common craft items, and some of the easier to get SFX materials to get crazy-awesome results. She does "Hanzoween" every year, with 31 brand-new tutorials over the course of the month. This playlist is last year's; subscribe to her channel to be alerted when the new ones go up this year.