HUGE NEWS: I’ve made the decision to hand in my notice at work, so as of September 15th I’ll be full-time focusing on archery, pole and content creation!
Thank you all for your support so far, and here’s to the future! If you want to help support me, please consider subscribing to my Patreon: you’ll get bonus content and insights, and you’ll be helping me make these videos!
Alternatively, please keep liking, subscribing, commenting and sharing, so that the algorithms know I’m out there!
Love,
Blumineck/ David the Arrow Bard/ Archery Mythbuster guy
P.S. As a side note, this means that I will soon get to give myself a job title- suggestions go in the comments 😉
I watched a recording of Wicked and now I’m re-reading the book and I just need everyone to know that I am extremely unwell about those women.
I cannot fucking express how funny it is to re-read this book in 2023 and see Frex the flustered minister telling all the youths not to give in to Tiktokism. Gregory Maguire had no way to know how fucking funny that would be almost 30 years later, and that makes it funnier.
I want to say that with trans folk now being at risk of the fucking death sentence in Florida….
The time for community is Now. The time to start planning and organizing how to get our rights back is NOW. bring it up at your local LGBT craft events or book club or support group or whatever. Tell your friends. Spread the word. And maybe see which ones will have the safety and resources you’ll need should a Lavender Hunt happen in your area.
And on the scarier end of reality….
This is fucking terrifying. Lots of people are at risk. Personally, I’m terrified this rhetoric will spread much like Trumpism did. I’m scared for my gf and I’m fucking scared for myself because we know historically that it isn’t just trans folk on HRT or drag performers that they go after.
And you have every right to do whatever you need to protect yourself.
I’m not going to shame folks who quit HRT, who take the rainbows out of their bio, the people who start saying partner instead of revealing a gender, or anyone else taking a few steps towards the safety that the closet provides. WE shouldn’t.
I fucking love you. And we’ll be okay as long as we’re together, okay?
This is what I’m talking about for the people unaware.
I looked up the lavender scare last night and was sadly unsurprised to see that the last time the community came together…was a lavender scare.
Pride was a riot because the government started doing to us then what Florida is doing to us now. It was triggered when a man was fired from his job on grounds of being gay and tried to take it to court.
This is why we have pride. This is why “think of the children” is/was an awful rhetoric to push at leather daddies and drag queens. It’s not just a bad opinion or stupid discourse, it’s a talking point for the right wing to justify fucking kill us.
It was never “just discourse” it was a right wing psyop to cripple us from coming together to fight against attacks just like this.
Your enemies aren’t other queer people with labels you don’t like. Those are your allies. Because you know who else doesn’t like them?
Nazis.
And they don’t like you either even if you have a “normal” queer identity and you don’t make it “your whole personality” or whatever.
You’re both still queer. And that’s all they care about. Trying to placate bigots wont save you. Quit playing the part of “acceptable gay” and throwing everyone else under the bus.
Besides, that they WERE thinking of the children when they started those riots dressed in stuff that makes you squirm. They were thinking of You. Of your life. Your children. Queer children.
Broke: think of the children
Woke: think of where you’d be right now if Drag queens and leather daddies weren’t there to throw that first brick. Think about about all the other people currently at risk of being killed through the Same Exact method that you had the privilege of escaping, precisely because of the people you can’t stand.
Hey y'all please reblog this version so people can see the article and explanation, there are a few confused people only seeing earlier versions that dont explain the connection/threat because it doesn’t have the article.
An interstate rainbow railroad.
For those unaware that’s this. It’s been done before.
A lot of people are scared. And I really, really want you to know that the riots started because someone scared asked for help and people answered
It wasn’t organized. It just happened. People decided to risk it at a moments notice.
This is ours. And we’ve done it before.
Stormé Delariverie, the Stonewall Lesbian that triggered it all.
And everyone who was there for her.
Were just like us
So how do we do this?
I played that level in Mario Kart but that was it. I wanna be there for you, we all do, how do we do that?
I bet one of us could call and just ask. Who doesn’t have anxiety. Oh wait it’s posted on their site :)
Kinda reads like a How To 👀
Find your niche and offer it.
People need help, you figure out how/who can, and then you follow through.
Can you drive
have gas money
have extra food
Got some clothes or meds
An extra bed or couch
maybe even an extra property or hotel room to spare?
Do you have money for those things?
maybe you’re able to connect people with needs to people who can help?
can you share/spread posts asking for help?
Or may you can just make them some tea while the host of the house is out cuz they don’t want to be alone in a new place
Maybe you keep up morale by just being hopeful
can you somehow show that there are people who are taking steps to materially care for and support trans and other lgbta people in Florida?
What can You do?
Because you are not nearly as powerless as they want you to believe, especially with some help.
“ Your enemies aren’t other queer people with labels you don’t like. Those are your allies. Because you know who else doesn’t like them?
Nazis.
And they don’t like you either even if you have a "normal” queer identity and you don’t make it “your whole personality” or whatever.
You’re both still queer. And that’s all they care about. Trying to placate bigots wont save you. Quit playing the part of “acceptable gay” and throwing everyone else under the bus.
Besides, that they WERE thinking of the children when they started those riots dressed in stuff that makes you squirm. They were thinking of You. Of your life. Your children. Queer children. “
I just wanted to point this itsy bitsy part out. because some people need to fucking listen to it.
This ENTIRE post is worth listening to, it doesn’t matter if your trans, or not. Please just fucking listen. For the queer kids and teens and for the adults and drag queens that are scared. Nobody should be scared to die. Not just in florida either.
Look, the reason Star Trek aliens are just humans with funny foreheads isn’t because they’re lazy, it’s because Star Trek as a franchise pre-dates both CGI and The Muppet Show, and by the time the technology existed to routinely depict non-humanoid aliens on a TV show budget, it was too late – forehead aliens had already been established as part of Star Trek’s defining aesthetic.
People don’t understand how expensive this shit is.
We look at Spock and that looks like the bare minimum… But at the time, his ear prosthetics were insanely expensive. Episodes with multiple Romulans ended up with romulans wearing helmets because that many ear prosthetics were prohibitively expensive for their miniscule budget.
Their budget was so tight that they accidentally broke the Romulan Bird of Prey model, and couldn’t afford to replace it.
But on their tiny budget, they tried very hard to do things that were truly alien and imaginative. And these are the very aliens everyone uses to make fun of Trek.
(The “Salt Vampire,” Tholians, Horta, and Gorn).
Meanwhile, they also occasionally pushed the prosthetics aliens as far as they could
(Andorians, tellerite, talosian)
You got to admit, that talosian is amazing work, especially for the 1960s.
Budget continues to be the limiting factor up to and including Discovery and Picard. While those two have access to make up techniques and SFX tools that didn’t exist yet even as recently as went Enterprise went off the air, they’re still very much limited by budget and how much suffering the actors can handle.
And these actors absolutely do suffer:
This is a Hirogen. When they were created they were to be Trek’s answer to The Predator. They were to be huge. Beyond human limitations, into special effects huge. They cast actors who were already pushibg sasquatch size, bulked them up, then used perspective tricks to make them look ten feet tall. They made two sets- one normal sized with normal sized props for the hirogen actors, and one that was oversized, with oversized props for Tuvok and Seven.
These suits were giant solid pieces of rubber. Tim Russ said that every second they weren’t filming, Tiny Ron (one of the hirogen actors in this episode, better known as The Grand Nagus’ body guard) needed to be sitting so he wouldn’t die. Russ said that sweat would flowing down his gloves because that was the only escape from the suit. It would be pulling in his boots and pants.
Everything about the Hirogen was untenable. The costumes were made easier, and their size was reduced back to normal human. The cost was too high, both on the budget, and on the actors.
Voyager also tried a completely CGI aliens:
Species 8472, who came from outside the universe. The result was a mixed bag. Great in concept, but realistically was beyond the abilities of a television budget from the late nineties/early two thousands. They didn’t age as well as other aspects of that era of Trek.
Now into Modern Trek, we have Saru. He goes a step beyond most prosthetic aliens, but imagine what Doug Jones goes through to bring him to life? Not just how many hours in the make-up chair, but also his suit, hands, shoes. Imagine how sore he must be at the end of each day!
Behind every “forehead alien” in Trek is an actor who’s had to indure many many hours in the make-up chair, and tens of thousands of dollars to make those prosthetics. And it’s only been extremely recently that the technology has been affordably practical enough that they won’t get made fun of for trying non-humanoid aliens.
I think we should have a turn of phrase for “I’m not in the right, but I AM annoyed with this situation, so I just need to go bitch to a friend about this before I suck it up and go do the right thing” because more and more I’m finding this is a critical element of functional adulthood.
Any Chicagoons have any ideas as to who might have shat on our boat? Black coach bus, gold letters (nobody got a chance to read them). A few people independently described it as a “Rock and Roll bus,” which I can’t really explain the meaning behind but it seems important.
SoCal Gas spent millions on astroturf ops to fight climate rules
ALT
Today (19 Aug), I’m appearing at the San Diego Union-Tribune Festival of Books. I’m on a 2:30PM panel called “Return From Retirement,” followed by a signing:
It’s a breathtaking fraud: SoCal Gas, the largest gas company in America, spent millions secretly paying people to oppose California environmental regulations, then illegally stuck its customers with the bill. We Californians were forced to pay to lobby against our own survival:
The criminal scheme is spelled out in eye-watering detail in a superb investigative report by Joe Rubin and Ari Plachta for the Sacramento Bee, which names the law firms and individual lawyers involved in the scam.
Here’s the situation: SoCal Gas is California’s private, regulated gas monopoly. They are allowed to lobby, but are legally required to charge their lobbying activities to their shareholders, and are prohibited from raising customer rates to pay for lobbying.
The company spent years secretly violating this rule, in the sleaziest way possible: working with corporate cartels like the California Restaurant Association and BizFed, the monopoly paid BigLaw white-shoe firms to procure people who posed as concerned citizens in order to oppose climate regulations that are essential to the state’s very survival.
ALT
