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Showing posts from June, 2017

Weekly Watch: /r/aww

Not so much a watch today as a browse. The subreddit /r/aww exists entirely so that people can post pictures of adorable things. It's about 90% photos of domesticated animals, 4.99% photos of non-domesticated animals, and 0.01% infants doing cute things. It is the kind of place where all dogs are automatically held to be GOOD BOYS , unless of course they are GOOD GIRLS . Even snakes (or " sneks ", in reddit parlance), birds (" birbs ") and raccoons (" trash pandas ") are occasionally featured. I've introduced several coworkers to it when they were having a terrible day, and it tends to make things much better. Enjoy!

Weekly Album: David Bowie - Low

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I apologize for the lack of intelligent content here lately. It is summer. Summer is hot. Heat does not agree with me. I have become an indolent puddle, mainly made of an emulsion of apathy and discomfort. On the rare occasion that I scrape together the wherewithal to move, I am surprised to be reminded that I still have bones. Many of which I can see in the mirror now, because the one thing I am doing is making repeated trips to the dance studio. It's free, they like me there, and someday I may accidentally make some progress. Otherwise, I tend to do things like lie here listening to four solid hours of Dateline Mystery on YouTube, because I can't be bothered to turn my head far enough to the right to actually  watch  it. As far as I can tell, this is another one of those weird symptoms I can't do anything about. It is fatigue unrelated to sleepiness. More sleep and more food do not alleviate it. Nor does double Bronkaid, for that matter, which is a dose of ephedrine th

Weekly Watch: Stonewall Uprising

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This is the 2010 documentary Stonewall Uprising , presented here in the traditional questionable, copyright-detector-dodging quality on YouTube. I would feel worse about this, except I can't find a way to pay someone to stream the damn thing -- it's not for rent on YouTube or Amazon Prime. You can buy the DVD via PBS on Amazon, if you have the patience for snail mail. While the original Stonewall Inn was shut down after the riots, the building still exists, and half of it was resurrected as another LGBT-centric venue in 1990. In 2007, the name was changed back to Stonewall Inn, and this reincarnated version still exists at 53 Christopher St in New York City. I actually know people who have performed there. The buildings were preserved as part of the Greenwich Village historical district starting in 1969, and declared a National Historic Landmark at the federal level in 2000. In 2015, the site (with the new bar in residence) became the first recognized by the NYC Historica

Weekly Album: Placebo - Placebo

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Weekly Watch: Paris Is Burning

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Paris Is Burning is Jennie Livingston's infamous 1990 documentary on the drag ball scene of New York City. There is much about ball culture familiar to us now that would not have been when this came out -- you can thank Pride (and more specific things, like RuPaul's Drag Race ) for that. The phrases "Yassss queen" and "werk it" and so forth are from here, as is the concept of "throwing shade". The documentary is worth watching solely for the history lesson, although, as with many parts of history, some of the terminology sounds very awkward or even offensive to people who are familiar with the modern LGBT* community. From my personal experience, a good first blind guess as to pronouns for drag queens whom you haven't had a chance to ask about it directly are "he" for the performer and "she" for the persona, but I suspect this is largely because being transgender is now a thing: People who see themselves as women can pr

Weekly Album: Girls Generation - MR TAXI (The 3rd Album ver B)

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Weekly Watch: woodworking & puzzles

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t I've no idea what this man does in his everyday life, but by all appearances 100% of his free time is spent crafting intricate puzzles out of wood and miscellaneous other materials. The method behind his madness reminds me strongly of writers like Martin Gardner, who played with mathematical patterns for the sheer joy of it. There are a few practical projects mixed in as well, like a shed latch out of PVC pipe and a golf ball, but mostly he produces precise little tchotchkes that would make any engineer proud.

Weekly Album: George Harrison - All Things Must Pass

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By the time you guys read this, I'm probably going to be in a tech rehearsal. Not even mine. As trying as it is to sit through your own tech, it's even more tedious to sit through someone else's. The experience from within a technical rehearsal is similar to the old aphorism about war ("months of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror") in that you just sort of exist in limbo waiting for someone who outranks you to shout for places, but someone else's tech is likely to be many hours of watching people repeat the least interesting parts of the show until they stop screwing it up, interspersed with a lot of staring at tumblr on your phone. Why am I doing this, you ask? To be frank, I have an ulterior motive. A couple, actually. One is that this is the ballroom instructor's show. He's co-producer, featured performer, and artist liaison for the theater, largely because he's bats and I think he might hate sleep. I'm hanging around specifi