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Showing posts from October, 2020

Election Day Escapism!

Election Day will be miserable. I have already voted, so I am going to spare my sanity by ignoring anything else that happens until the results are in. Unless there is literal shooting in the street outside my house, I will be online watching things and NOT TALKING ABOUT POLITICS ON PAIN OF BANHAMMER. If you also need to spend a couple of hours in a space where you are NOT TALKING ABOUT POLITICS ON PAIN OF BANHAMMER, you are welcome to join me! I am likely to be drinking. All day. Please invite your friends.  The video playlist will be a carefully-curated selection of things that I can find on YouTube or have lying around on a hard drive somewhere. This may or may not include. Star Trek: TOS, The Man From UNCLE, Blackadder, The Mighty Boosh , various things from Stuart Ashen, Sherlock Holmes from around the world, Beatles movies, Bowie concerts, and anything else people suggest that I can find fast enough to upload to Google Drive.  The screening party will be held via 27 (Two-Seven),
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
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It has come to my attention that I have not owned a Starfleet uniform since I moved to Boston, and that I ought to fix that. I intended to make myself a classic TOS duty uniform ( the infamous mini-dress ), because those are fairly simple and inexpensive. Then I got ideas, and my project ballooned, as most of my craft projects do. Whenever you design a costume, the first thing you need to decide is whether you want it to be recognizable  or accurate . Those are two very  different outfits to make, and the choice generally comes down to work versus money. Almost any costume will involve some fairly generic pieces. The TOS men's duty uniforms, for instance, involve a pair of black highwater bell bottoms. (Yes, they look silly. They are actually patterned after old naval uniforms, so you aren't continually dragging your trouser cuffs across the wet deck.) You can make them if you're determined to be accurate, or you could go to Goodwill and just buy a pair of black pants, and
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
Friends, Romans, shambling undead hordes who hunger for brains -- lend me your ears eyeballs. It is October, the month of our favorite frivolous holiday, Halloween. Trick-or-treating is probably cancelled this year, but that doesn't prevent you from dressing strangely and showing off on webcam, or just lurking in your front window creeping out all the neighbors.  I have been making my own costumes for 15+ years now. Back in the day, I was actually in charge of making outfits for large friend groups -- one memorable year, we needed seven  Hogwarts scarves, and I had to start knitting in July . Although at this point I am pretty good at draping my own garments (even on myself!), I've also got a knack for kit-bashing things together from patterns you can buy from McCall's. I have a running specialty in tailoring and trim work that require hand-stitching, because apparently nobody knows how to do that anymore.  Thus, this month, I answer questions. Submit your costuming quanda