Unsolicited Advice

Behold, the Valentine's Day cage tour: Enjoy!

Hello all! I am not dead. I apologize for the long irregular silences, but I'm having issues devising a schedule that lets me stream on Twitch, AND update a blog/a Patreon/a GoFundMe/several Facebook pages/Twitter/an Instagram account, AND go to a few things I need to be physically present for on someone else's schedule, AND, like, sleep. This is a persistent problem with my life. I'll get it eventually. I'm only about to be 40, I have some time. Meanwhile, I have been trying to teach myself this New Media thing. As an elderly and decrepit OG Millennial, I have been consuming this stuff since I was a teenager, but my knowledge on the assembly-code level of production is pretty much all from a half-finished electronic media degree from about 2006. It's more useful than you'd think, but I still need to Google to find out where all the buttons are in OpenShot. Behold my rudimentary video editing skills: "Meet The Rats". It is followed by a long list of pl...

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...