Unsolicited Advice

I finished a 1960s pencil skirt the other day. It's very authentic. So authentic I had to give it a satin lining or I wouldn't be able to wiggle it on. If it were any more authentic, I don't think I could sit down. Pencil skirts are structured garments and this one was meant to be tightly tailored, so I thought I ought to take a shot at following the design process properly for once. Looking up 'how to draft a pencil skirt' led me to The Closet Historian , always a fantastic resource for post-war/mid-century garments. She went to fashion school in at least two different countries, and if you want directions on how to derive standardized patterns from a series of measurements, she's your best bet. After twenty minutes of her doing math on camera, she showed the pattern pieces, and I knew immediately that they would not fit. Her method results in front and back panels with the same rise (the distance between the low full hip line, or the crotch seam for pants, to ...

It's been a rough couple of weeks. Discount Cheeto Hitler is refusing to admit he lost the election, which he did, by a fairly wide margin. The response of the Biden campaign to Trump's refusal to concede is -- and I am quoting directly here -- "[T]he United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House". On the personal side of things, one of my housemates is having (non-virus-related) breathing problems off and on, and at the time of this writing is in the ICU again. We're waiting to be COVID-evicted on the first of January, because none of us can get enough work to pay for anything. I have started feeding the rats entire sandwich cookies for brekfiss, because it makes me feel better. So you will all forgive me for thinking way too hard about Star Trek . I've seen conflicting reports on whether the novelization of The Motion Picture  is canon or not. Roddenberry seems to have thought it was, inasmuch as he wrote it an...

I finished Boston Legal  while home with a migraine last night, so now it's time for me to talk about it at excruciating length. Spoilers, I guess, if you've been meaning to watch that for the past twelve years and somehow still haven't gotten around to it.

I've spiraled down into the part of the Netflix queue where it's all "that one thing someone told me to watch that one time," which I added to the list to make them stop bugging me about it. Why didn't anybody tell me that Boston Legal  was this completely bonkers? It caught my attention because I've been watching through Star Trek  trying to work out how the costumes are put together (with haste and a kind of mad genius, out of the cheapest fabrics available), and I vaguely remembered that Shatner was (is?) still a jobbing actor. I didn't watch it when it was on actual TV; the promos made it look like a straight-up legal drama, and one can only mainline so many Law & Order  clones. This thing is brilliant . It has a reality-defying lunacy one rarely finds outside of manga. It contains the trope-naming character for Bunny Ears Lawyer, in fact, an archetype that I had assumed came from something Japanese, because that's the sort of thing they do. Al...

The history of slashfic as the internet knows it today, is in large part, the history of Star Trek . Queer readings of literature have existed since approximately five minutes after literature did; Frederic Wertham interviewed gay men in the '40s who read Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson as a couple, fans have been speculating about Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson forever, and I'm sure there was a bard somewhere in ancient Sumer who was renowned for their smutty stories about Gilgamesh and Enkidu. But Kirk and Spock were the first couple to go "mainstream", at least on the convention circuit, with stories and essays on the topic published, samizdat -style, in mimeographed fanzines. The term "slash", in fact, comes from the punctuation in "K/S", which is what the stores and 'zines were marked. Star Trek is unusual in that it's a science-fiction property based very much in the ideals of the 1960s that has survived into an era when many of the t...

Hello, all! That was a much longer hiatus than I intended. About a week ago, I emerged from my cave to talk to the EMTs for the fourth time in about six weeks, and one of my housemates got to take an unscheduled (non-COVID) trip to the ICU. Everything's turned out fine, but until that got resolved, I was left in the care of the house population of TWENTY rats, twelve of whom were babies, and one of whom needed meds for a good case of pneumonia. They are kindly masters, on the whole, but unbelievably demanding divas when meal time rolls around. The housemate is back (and still breathing), and both baby boys have gone to their fur-ever home, with 7-8 of the remaining ten girl-babies being sent off sometime this week. The boys, in fact, went to a tech at my vet clinic who had met some of my fat lovable rat-lumps, and fell hard for the little guys. I dropped them off at the clinic this past weekend, where apparently they blocked off almost an hour at the end of the day for playing with...

Fandom frightens me sometimes. Often, if we're honest. I've been digging around for the Sherlock Holmes project I mentioned before, and one of the things I ran into is The Johnlock Conspiracy . For those who don't know, this was a movement among fans of the BBC's 2010 series Sherlock  who contended that the series was building up to a Big Damn Gay Kiss between the leads at the end, which was theoretically the conclusion of series 4. Lots of people contributed, but this particular lady seems to have been the biggest and most thorough, having contributed a 40-some-odd episode analysis of the show, via YouTube. Shit like this terrifies me. There's nothing wrong with her character analysis. Her take on the significance and motivation behind what the characters say and do on screen is completely valid. I think she's 100% right in some areas, particularly Moriarty. Jim Moriarty's obsession with Sherlock is both disturbingly sexual in tone, and disturbingly indicat...

I am stuck on a thing. Not because I don't know what to write, but because I have no idea why I'm writing it. I used to not care, but then Colbert said a thing in an interview about working "with intent" and now I feel wholly inadequate because that seems like an important step that I keep skipping. I also don't normally care about conforming to other people's processes, but everything I've seen of his is a terrifyingly accurate mirror of how I do these things. I tripped over this a while ago, which is a reel of BTS/raw footage from an interview he did (in character) when Jon Stewart was asked to host the Oscars. They clearly told him what they wanted to talk about when they called him up, but also clearly did not bother to hash out a script, so he's running the character improv. There's a bit near the end where he knows what the character's response would be, but hasn't quite settled on how to phrase it, so he just runs it over and over, ...

I woke up this morning trying desperately to remember what day of the week it was and whether there was anything special about it. As of this writing, it's Friday, and no.  It has become clear that I have moved into a situation of grinding poverty. I knew when I got here that nobody was going to have any money. Literally everybody involved in this venture is disabled in some way, which in modern America means you are left to starve by default. What I didn't realize until I got here is that the other two kids in this apartment grew up in this kind of deprivation, without any useful parental figures of any kind. When I arrived, there was no bath mat. I assumed this was because everyone was skint and had better things to do with $8 than buy one. I probably had better things to do with that money, but I was tired of slipping on wet tile, so I went and ordered one anyway. They said thank you. I also ordered a wire shelf for the freezer, because I was tired of vegan "patties...

[Addendum to the earlier note--] Firstly, I would like to say, God bless the obsessive stans of the world. They save me from having to track down each and every individual goddamned piece of media one by one when I go on a tare. There is no project so obscure that they cannot give me enough information to find some chunk of it somewhere on the internet. I can't honestly recommend Exit 57 for entertainment value (it's recognizably in Colbert/Dinello/Sedaris' style, but, uh, they got better) but if you ever wanted to know how they worked their way up to Strangers With Candy , that'll definitely tell you. The down side to this is that their laser focus sometimes gets a little too narrow. The hive mind tends to assume that anyone who's found their way down the rabbit hole already knows what's going on, or that nobody ever needs a reason for the "smexy", and they can edit things down to just the "good bits". This is aggravating if you're actu...

A friend of mine was tolerating my drunken fangirling last weekend, patiently agreeing that yes, it is the cutest thing ever when Stephen Colbert turns around to hit on his off-camera wife every time he fucks up a line in his monologue. And yeah, I keep watching that because he's being comfortingly sane/angry right now, but also because it feels like representation, in a weird sort of way. Colbert is, in many respects, what a lot of people would think of as the quintessential American: A straight, white, Christian man, married with kids, on a lifelong career path that has earned him substantial material wealth. Left to his own devices, he dresses like the dadliest dad who ever dadded. He's expressed some ambivalence about the knowledge that at least some of his media clout comes from this. On the one hand, he is perhaps not the best person to speak to the lived experience of institutional disadvantage; on the other, there are a lot of straight white Christian men in America who...

Life continues. Kind of. I have a place to go as of this end of this month, although I still have no idea how the fuck to move my stuff during Plague Times. I don't own that much, but I also don't have a car. I am tempted to not bother moving the mattress, but I am very much afraid that if I don't I will literally never manage to own a comfortable bed ever again. Being someone who discombobulates joints on a regular basis, not being in extra pain every time I wake up is kind of important for my quality of life. I could eventually figure out how to replace the futon I use as a topper, but a futon alone is not enough padding -- I've learned the hard way that I can very much feel the hard floor or the hard pipes of a futon frame through one of those things, and it is Not Good for my sleep.  Massachusetts is, as of this writing, continuing with their re-opening plan. We've hit the phase where the dance studio has been cleared for operation, with appropriate procedures. ...

Stephen Colbert is really mad. It is not easy to push him into being mean. He generally stands for things like 'read more books' and 'get along with each other'. Somewhere in the multiverse, there is a reality where Colbert is a Jesuit scholar. Somewhere else is a timeline where he's the television personality who accidentally won his bid for President. I for one would like to apply for a transfer, right now. Colbert has a reputation. I've started to wonder if people who interview him are contractually obligated to describe him as 'the nicest man on Earth' because they all basically do. When he accidentally acquired an internet army at his old show, he put them to work alternately getting random shit named after him and organizing thousands, if not millions, of dollars for various charitable causes. After testifying before Congress on behalf of immigrant workers, he was asked why he would do that, and stammered before quoting Matthew ('the least of...

Durnik's gone.  He started acting oddly yesterday, but perked up and ate his dinner all right. I called and made him an appointment for Thursday, just in case.  Then, around midnight, he took a nosedive. He had never been the slightest bit interested in the windows, but suddenly he decided he needed to rest on the windowsill. He slept there a while, smelling the great outdoors. After a time, he started circulating restlessly between all of his favorite spots, cage and bed and now window, and back to cage and bed and...  They always do that at the end. They're checking all the places they remember being comfortable before, hoping that one of them will feel better. They're trying to get away from whatever is making them feel bad. But they can't. It's inside .  I sat up and helped him move around when it got difficult, and helped him keep his face clean. He never stopped trying to clean his face.  He got chocolate ice cream for breakfast, because that was what I c...

So I went and read the J K Rowling thing everyone has been howling about.  Just for some context, I am not part of the HP fan community. I bought and read the first three books in one weekend. They were cute. I liked them okay. I bought the fourth in paperback and read that, too. It was... long. I looked at 5-7 and didn't bother. I have not seen any of the movies, because I don't care. The internet, and the fans among my friends, have filled me in on the relevant plot points. I know a lot of people have a lot of feelings about the world of Harry Potter, but I have no emotional investment in Rowling or any of the things she created. Forget, for the moment, everything you know about gender identity, gender presentation, and gender transition. Pretend for the sake of argument that the world works in all the ways suggested by Rowling's essay. Rowling wants women to band together for safety. She mentions a number of charities -- good on her for supporting good causes, but the li...

Hello, all. It has been a rough pandemic. As you may have figured, since I am in the performing arts, I have been completely out of work since this shitshow began. The earliest venues will open up here in MA is September, which is not helpful for me, because I need to be out of my current place by 8/31. No one will rent to me on my Patreon income, so I've been trying to figure out how to supplement that with other online work. My first thought, frankly, was camming. I'm attractive and I know that, and I don't care about being naked in "public". I have a lot of opinions on the legitimacy and legalization of sex work, but making a statement would be a convenient bonus; I'd be in it for the tips. As the appliance menagerie on the Flintstones used to say, "Eh. It's a living." The best camera I currently have is attached to the slightly-less ancient laptop. You know, the one with the broken hinge that won't hold the screen up on the right. Only th...