I’ve seen a lot of posts on my dash tonight about users who are threatening suicide, with other Tumblr members posting in effort to try to get ahold of them. I think you all should see this:

IF THERE IS EVER A TUMBLR USER WHO HAS POSTED A GOOD-BYE MESSAGE, SUICIDE NOTE, VIDEO, OR ANYTHING OF THE SORT, PLEASE FOLLOW THIS POST.

1. Scroll to the top of your dashboard.

2. See the circular question mark icon at the top? It’s the third one over from your home symbol. Click on that, and a screen similar to the one in the picture will come up.

3. Where you can type in questions, the box with the magnifying glass at the top, type in the word “suicide.”

4. Click on the first link that shows up. It should say, “Pass the URL of the blog on to us.”

5. Type in the user’s URL and tell Tumblr admin that the user is contemplating suicide and has posted a message indicating that they are going through with it or will be attempting. Hit send! Tumblr administration will perform a number of actions to contact the user and take the necessary steps to prevent the suicide.

TUMBLR: THIS COULD SAVE A USER’S LIFE. PLEASE DO NOT IGNORE SUICIDE THREATS.

Reblog this to keep other users aware. Suicide isn’t a joke, and neither is someone’s life. If you didn’t know this, someone else may not, either. Pass it on.

why on earth doesn’t this have more notes

I actually had to do this once. She lived.

if you scroll past this on your dash you are absolutely heartless.

Reblog this!! This can save somebody’s life!

reblog.

help.

do not scroll down.

I SWEAR TO GOD IF ANYONE SCROLLS PAST THIS WITHOUT REBLOGGING I WILL LITTERALLY FIND THEM AND GIVE THEM A LECTURE

may I just update this?

see the little thing that says help?

Don’t ever scroll past this post. FUCKING NEVER SCROLL PAST!!!

Anyone know where it is on mobile ???

You report the user, choose “something else”, scroll down and choose “suicide or self harm”

DO NOT SCROLL DOWN

REBLOG TO LITERALLY SAVE A LIVE

slug: hmmm… plant: *chawmp* slug: ah I see. no thank you.

certified iconic post

*wizened sensei voice*

“Be as water, young grasshopper. The swiftest strike cannot harm you. The strongest jaws cannot hold you. Such is the power of the flowing stream.”

this movie is so fucking creepy jesus fuck

It’s by Tim Burton, what did you honestly expect?

Actually, it’s Henry Selick, who was the director of The Nightmare Before Christmas. The book was written by Neil Gaiman, though, and is far…far….worse.

Sorry, I’m about to geek the hell out.

The movie is captivating, but the book is twenty kinds of terrifying, even now, ten years after I first read it. As disturbing as the movie may have been to some, the things Selick added really serve to cushion just how horrific the story really is.

First of all, the character of Wybie does not exist in the book. Coraline is facing all of this nearly alone, with her only help coming from the sly comments of the cat, a warning from the circus mice, and the stone given to her by her neighbor, presented with no comment but that it “makes the unseen seen.”

Second, the Other Parents are never quite as warm (and, dare I say, normal) as they are in the gifs above. They’re described as having paper-white skin and the Other Mother’s hair is said to move on its own, and her long, red, claw-like nails don’t ease any uncertainty that she is absolutely, positively up to no good. The first time Coraline meets them, they (and the rest of the Others) seem to be playing roles (for whatever reason, Coraline does not seem to pick up on this), like they all know what to say and what to do and are simply waiting for Coraline to make her move in their terrifying play world. This is shown to be partly true when the Other Parents tell her they know she’ll be back soon after she refuses the buttons - this time, to stay.

Third, the Other Mother commits atrocities that really should not have been in a book for anyone not fully grown up. She physically deforms the world around Coraline to slow her progress in their game beyond any mild traps the movie portrays, and, instead of turning the Other Father into the wandering pumpkin-thing seen in the film, she simply ceases to use him and throws his body away in the cellar, leaving him to rot with whatever bit of sentience he has left. She begins to lose her touch, as Coraline gains the upper hand. Her world doesn’t just become a nightmare - it falls apart completely. No creepy but oddly cool bug furniture here, just the house that now appears to be a child’s drawing. Whatever the Other Mother is (a beldame, but something tells me she’s much more ancient and powerful than that), she does not give half a hump about what she has to do to ensnare Coraline. Destroy the supporting characters of her twisted creation? Done. Allow herself to be dismembered to ruin Coraline’s life in the normal world? Not even gonna bat an eyelash.

On a final, personal note, imagine eight year-old me, ignored by my parents, absorbed in the story and identifying with Coraline from the start. Imagine me finishing this bloodcurdling book and immediately thinking of my basement, where there is still a locked door that my grandmother swears up and down is nothing more than a storage room, but has not once in my (or my mother’s) lifetime unlocked.

Can you see why this book still scares me?

Fun fact I learned from seeing neil gaiman speak: when he first wanted the book published, his editor said it was too scary. He suggested she read it to her young daughter, and then decide. So she did, and her daughter wasn’t afraid, and it was published. Years later, Gaiman was sitting next to that daughter at an event and told her this story, and she said “oh I was terrified I just didn’t want to tell my mom”.

Coraline WAS too scary to be published, but exists anyway because a girl lied to her mother.

To continue this thread, an interview with Neil Gaiman on NPR (wait wait don’t tell me podcast from December, 2011) explained the book’s inspiration. Neil’s daughter, Holly, often sat with him and dictated stories, “usually about a girl named Holly who came home to see that her mother had been kidnapped by a witch who was after her”. Neil wanted to encourage her creativity, so he looked for spooky books she might like. Unable to find horror stories for 5-year-olds, however, he wrote one: Coraline.

What they say: There is a skeleton inside you.

The truth: You are inside your skeleton. You are a brain.

What the fuck

Cancel cancel cancel cancel cancel cancel this post is cancelled

*cracks neck* Alright interweb ladies and gents, get ready to be EDUMACATED REAL GOOD.

Technically speaking, our skeleton is inside us. Humans–chordates at large, really– have an endoskeleton. “Endo” being the key root here, as it means “internal”. Our bones are an inner scaffolding for things to anchor on and hang from. This could mean internal organs, or external structures like skin and nails. This also means that we only have one, and it grows along with us.

Now, critters like crabs or butterflies–and pretty much the entire arthropod phylum–have EXOskeletons. “Exo” as in “External”, their support structures are a hard outer layer to encase and protect the squishy innards. Unlike internal bones, an exoskeleton is grown, outgrown, and shed many times. A creature can and will have many exoskeletons during their lifetime.

Also, not all nerve tissue is in the brain. There are localized ganglia all around the body, these are what power reflexes such as grabbing something that hits your palm or kicking your leg when the tissue in your knee is poked by a doctor. A surprising amount of neural networks are also found in cardiac tissue and around the digestive system.

You are not just a brain. You are mission control and dozens of teams and agents.

And your skeleton is inside you.

So there.

A porcupine’s Halloween present (+ original sound effects)

I had no idea giant porcupines made fucking precious sounds

THAT’S THE SOUND IT MAKES!?!?!?

UN-BE-FUCKING-LIEVABLE 

We got asked if this is cute and okay. I can very happily say yes, this is stupid cute and those are happy porcupine noises. 

One of my favorite things about doing zoo work was all the noises you never realize the animals make when they’re excited or interested in a new thing. Coatimundis squeak and snuffle, and giant porcupines make that sound. 

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen this video on my dash, so it’s time to bring it back! The information provided above is still correct, and was sourced directly from the zookeeper that takes care of this specific animal.

I’m actually very happy to hear that bcuz during my animal psychology module our lecturer showed us this video and proceeded to say how the porcupine was clearly uncomfortable and was making noises to warn the person to go away

so hearing that this spiky boi is actually having a good time is heart-warming~

As someone who has actually worked with coatimundis and a porcupine before, I can corroborate this. “Bubbles”, my quilly charge, made similar squeaks when she discovered the watermelon chunks I had brought as a treat. Rigby and Eileen, the cuatis, were particularly fond of the eggs we fed them once a day, or if you brought them any tasty bugs you found. Lots of eager squeaking and snuffling as they climbed all over the fence at the edge of their enclosure, because YAY HOOMAN WITH NOMS!

A porcupine’s Halloween present (+ original sound effects)

I had no idea giant porcupines made fucking precious sounds

THAT’S THE SOUND IT MAKES!?!?!?

UN-BE-FUCKING-LIEVABLE 

We got asked if this is cute and okay. I can very happily say yes, this is stupid cute and those are happy porcupine noises. 

One of my favorite things about doing zoo work was all the noises you never realize the animals make when they’re excited or interested in a new thing. Coatimundis squeak and snuffle, and giant porcupines make that sound. 

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen this video on my dash, so it’s time to bring it back! The information provided above is still correct, and was sourced directly from the zookeeper that takes care of this specific animal.

I’m actually very happy to hear that bcuz during my animal psychology module our lecturer showed us this video and proceeded to say how the porcupine was clearly uncomfortable and was making noises to warn the person to go away

so hearing that this spiky boi is actually having a good time is heart-warming~

As someone who has actually worked with coatimundis and a porcupine before, I can corroborate this. “Bubbles”, my quilly charge, made similar squeaks when she discovered the watermelon chunks I had brought as a treat. Rigby and Eileen, the cuatis, were particularly fond of the eggs we fed them once a day, or if you brought them any tasty bugs you found. Lots of eager squeaking and snuffling as they climbed all over the fence at the edge of their enclosure, because YAY HOOMAN WITH NOMS!

THERE IT IS AGAIN!  THERE IT FUCKING IS!  i’VE BEEN TALKING ABOUT THIS PHOTO FOR YEARS AND NEVER COULD FIND IT!!  THE LAN PARTY WITH THE GUY DUCT-TAPED TO THE CEILING!!  BACK IN ANCIENT TIMES WHEN PEOPLE STILL USED CATHODE MONITORS AND WHEN COUNTERSTRIKE WAS THE NEW THING.  THIS SHIT IS REAL.  THIS IS REAL SHIT.  SHIT THAT HAPPENED.

Blackundertaker for the link. So kotaku did an interview with a butch of people to track down the people connected with the LAN party.

From the article.

The picture in question originates from Mason, Michigan, where a close group of friends who liked to build personal computers and organize LAN parties grew up. Through Reddit and email, we were able to get in touch with a large portion of the group, as well as obtain verification and additional images…

For the Mason alumni, the night they taped Drew Purvis to the ceiling was just an average day, another LAN party with friends.

“It was still early in the day and the LAN had already become fractured,” said Nick Wellman, another LAN goer. “There were about 10 of us there, and we were already playing three, four different games. Tyler was looking around and said, ‘I think you can duct tape someone to that I-beam.’”

At this point, the teens gathered the necessary supplies, bought duct tape on a friend’s employee discount and had the tallest attendee, Brian, hold the subject, Drew, aloft while the rest taped him up.

What you see in the now-iconic photo is actually the group’s second attempt to suspend their friend from the ceiling with duct tape. After about 10 minutes, the tape digging into his sides, Drew asked to be cut down. They revised their plan, adding pillows, and strapped him back up. Once on the beam, someone else had the idea to stack some tables up so Drew could still play on his computer.

“That is the funniest part about the picture,” Nick told us. “Gaming from the beam was a complete afterthought.”

Drew lasted about two hours suspended above his comrades before retiring to the ground (turns out a duct tape cocoon runs hot).

https://twitter.com/profannieoakley/status/1357768408671027202

 This thread is gold… make your own here: https://htck.github.io/bayeux/#!/

I laughed way too hard at this

in case anyone is looking through the notes trying to find the original artist it’s will mcphail !! feel free to check out his site but also here are some other things he made too !!

OOOHHH CLICK ON THAT LINK THIS GUY IS FUCKING GREAT

HOLY SHIT

this guy GETS IT

Oh my God I forgot about the Marketing one and it hit me just as hard as it did the first time I saw it. Literal laughter tears omg. 

“That Lion only eats good food”

Wait this rules.

I thought this was some weird Christian game but wow

There is literally no way to anticipate how this video ends

This is why I will never be able to leave this hell site. No other social media platform has brought me as many posts that go on to haunt me like this. It is unmatched.

Look the restaurant manager clearly wanted to support his nephew’s amateur 3d animation

A sign every artist and crafter should have on their site and window.

When I get my site up and running I’m putting this on the Commission/Payment page.

We say this all the time in the construction business too. Although we don’t have a cheap and fast variation except for hiring a bunch of people

Funny how that works

I am so pleased at how many notes are some version of “I don’t fear the science, I fear the corporations who control it” because that is EXACTLY the attitude you should have. GMOs can save us. Monsanto will kill us.

what people fear about GMO- ‘theyre gonna make frankencarrots that crave human flesh and cause diarrhea ’ what GMO actually is- ‘we made rice crop that is both drought resistant and flood resistant which will prevent about 20% of major famine disasters, also it now makes vitamin A because vitamin A deficiency in poverty stricken areas is a major killer of kids as most vitamin A rich foods dont grow there’ what people SHOULD be upset about- ‘i made all crops sterile so all farmers have to buy the seed from me in perpetuity and i will sue anyone who tries to go back to crops that produce their own seed’

^^^ THIS

contact in womens world cup:

contact in mens world cup:

I remember a former juvenile hall guard telling me that shit got real in the girl’s wing. When boys would have an argument, there was a lot of stomping and shouting before anyone actually threw a punch, so staff could usually see fights brewing and break things up before things got bloody. The girls didn’t waste any time posturing and went straight for the jugular, exploding into violence before you could say “cat fight”.

when I was in junior high, both the girls and the boys played floor hockey, but they’d split the gym in two with a big curtain, so the boys had their side and we had our side.

At the end of period, the guys’d be walking back into their locker room talking about “good game” “did you see that shot I made?” “way to go” etc.

The girls? We’d be fucking LIMPING. We were high-sticking like it was no one’s business. No one’s talking to anyone because we’re all angry. Fuck the ball, we went after ankles and shins and fucking KNEES. We were gonna get a goal and if you got in our way then FUCK YOU.

Yeah, near as I can tell, they divided us by sex so that the boys would SURVIVE.

@lionesshathor’s comment made me laugh because my dad used to own a bar. He told me once that whenever two men started arguing, he’d have time to go out back, have a smoke, have a bite to eat, and he’d come back to find them still posturing a while before actually fighting.

Whenever he heard one woman say something to another woman, however, he wouldn’t even have time to get to his feet before a beer bottle was broken and blood was spilled.

So whenever two men picked a fight, he shrugged it off. His bouncers were employed to make sure the women didn’t do too much damage in a fight.

I think we sometimes forget that living in a dangerous world and being expected to walk our talk has made us all hardasses.

When I was in high school, two girls got into a fight; one kicked the other so hard in the crotch that she broke her foot, and the other girl apparently had to have surgery in her vagina, or the vaginal muscles, or something like that.

Having grown up with two sisters and a half-French, half-Scot mother, I learned a very long time ago to have healthy respect for all women.

And my daughters either have each other’s backs so hard they’re glued together, or they attack each other like vipers and mongeese (mongooses?)

Source

Follow Ultrafacts for more facts

Here, put this candy in your annoying mouth and shut the fuck up.

They’re like adult pacifiers

Reminds me of a bit of advice I’ve heard, “The best way to stop an argument is to feed everybody peanut butter sandwiches. The can’t talk!”

vegans who refuse to even eat backyard eggs….why

people who think its unethical to eat chicken eggs are like people who think bees should keep all their honey. they literally produce more than they need and your unwillingness to even buy local means you are doing nothing to help them, support your small farmers you heathens

This is not true.

1) honeybees do not produce “extra honey.” And beekeepers don’t take some of the honey, they take all of it.

2) chickens have been artificially selected from naturally producing eggs once a month to producing eggs every couple of days. Their bodies are not sustainable and the health complications of this rapid egg production kills chickens.

Hey idk who like. Lied to you about the way honey farms work, but could you stop spreading misinformation? Are you a beekeeper?

Because I am!

Beekeepers make sure hives are fed before there is pollen in the air, protected from predators and the elements, and have enough honey to sustain themselves. We don’t take all of it.

But overproduction of honey leads to stagnation in the hive. It puts stress on the queen to lay eggs, and when they inevitably fill up all their space with honey (instead of filling up the multiple empty, clean boxes of frames beekeepers might put on top of the main hive box), the queen can get so stressed she dies. If there’s a spike in the weather and the hive hasn’t prepared new queen brood, that’s it! The colony is dead. Because there wasn’t enough space for eggs and honey in the hive.

Beekeepers take excess honey. We are constantly monitoring the state of the hive, checking for parasites, analyzing the eggs for diseases, and making sure they are fed and healthy (usually with sugar water and pollen substitutes until they have made enough honey to sustain themselves in the early spring months). If a queen dies prematurely, we make every attempt to replace her to save the colony.

I know there’s an urge to patronize everyone who works in the farming industry, but try to understand the differences between small scale agriculture and industrial farming. There IS a difference. And stop spreading misinformation.

If you’re this passionate about ethical consumption, look into some of the ecofeminist research on non-hierarchal interspecies relationships (working on building animal-human relationships in a non exploitative way).

But yeah! Stop spreading misinformation! Please 🐝

Also if I can harp on the chicken part?

Yea Chickens are some of the most abused animals on big factory farms and I’ll be the first to admit it’s criminal and more needs to be done to regulate this.

Yes selective breeding over time has caused an increase in the ammount of eggs produced by chickens and factory farms have some messed up practices to get more eggs from them including forced moutling.

THIS IS WHY YOU SUPPORT LOCAL FARMERS AND THEIR EGGS

Many people take to raising their own hens because of America’s immoral treatment of hens in factory farms like you’re not helping the poor chicks by starving these farmers financially you’re just hurting the one people trying to change things and making the OPTION of cage free organic cruelty free eggs even harder to find

Can I include some information on the milk industry? I have fought about this with a vegan who thought she knew more about cows even though my family has been cow farmers for decades.

So basically the vegan argument here is that milk gets “stolen” from the calfs. But the truth is once a cow gives birth they keep giving milk even after the calfs do not need it anymore. And if we didn’t milk them they’d.. burst. I don’t quite know if that is literal because we’ve always taken good care of our cows, but at least they are in a lot of pain if they can’t release the milk. (It’s like sheep and too much wool).

And do the machines hurt the cows? No of course not they are designed to be comfortable for the animals. You think we don’t care about a cow’s feelings?? For a farmer they’re like family???

If you think the stalls are too small, it’s not the whole cow farming industry that is off, it’s the farm. Don’t blame everyone for one man’s fault. Support biological farms that do have space, to make sure they can maintain that space.

It always haunts me in ‘Who mourns for Adonais?’ how Apollo has no visible nipples

where

where are they

In the book Star Trek Costumes the actor said that he had to put tape over his nipples because “for television we can’t have nipples showing”

Also, that actor called it his golden tutu!

But kirk’s nipples are ok tho?

Amok Time was a special occasion

tities out for pon farr

I approve of this post.

They already had Spock be almost violently horny and then wrestle around with his bestie to which he then proclaimed “yep my fuck or die thing is all good now” so I think nipples were the least of anyone’s worries

So the other night during D&D, I had the sudden thoughts that:

1) Binary files are 1s and 0s

2) Knitting has knit stitches and purl stitches

You could represent binary data in knitting, as a pattern of knits and purls…

You can knit Doom.

However, after crunching some more numbers:

The compressed Doom installer binary is 2.93 MB. Assuming you are using sock weight yarn, with 7 stitches per inch, results in knitted doom being…

3322 square feet

Factoring it out…302 people, each knitting a relatively reasonable 11 square feet, could knit Doom.

Hi fun fact!!

The idea of a “binary code” was originally developed in the textile industry in pretty much this exact form. Remember punch cards? Probably not! They were a precursor to the floppy disc, and were used to store information in the same sort of binary code that we still use:

Here’s Mary Jackson (c.late 1950s) at a computer. If you look closely in the yellow box, you’ll see a stack of blank punch cards that she will use to store her calculations.

This is what a card might look like once punched. Note that the written numbers on the card are for human reference, and not understood by the computer. 

But what does it have to do with textiles? Almost exactly what OP suggested. Now even though machine knitting is old as balls, I feel that there are few people outside of the industry or craft communities who have ever seen a knitting machine. 

Here’s a flatbed knitting machine (as opposed to a round or tube machine), which honestly looks pretty damn similar to the ones that were first invented in the sixteenth century, and here’s a nice little diagram explaining how it works:

But what if you don’t just want a plain stocking stitch sweater? What if you want a multi-color design, or lace, or the like? You can quite easily add in another color and integrate it into your design, but for, say, a consistent intarsia (two-color repeating pattern), human error is too likely. Plus, it takes too long for a knitter in an industrial setting. This is where the binary comes in!

Here’s an intarsia swatch I made in my knitwear class last year. As you can see, the front of the swatch is the inverse of the back. When knitting this, I put a punch card in the reader,

and as you can see, the holes (or 0′s) told the machine not to knit the ground color (1′s) and the machine was set up in such a way that the second color would come through when the first color was told not to knit.

tl;dr the textiles industry is more important than people give it credit for, and I would suggest using a machine if you were going to try to knit almost 3 megabytes of information.

@we-are-threadmage

Someone port Doom to a blanket

I really love tumblr for this 🙌

It goes beyond this.  Every computer out there has memory.  The kind of memory you might call RAM.  The earliest kind of memory was magnetic core memory.  It looked like this:

Wires going through magnets.  This is how all of the important early digital computers stored information temporarily.  Each magnetic core could store a single bit - a 0 or a 1.  Here’s a picture of a variation of this, called rope core memory, from one NASA’s Apollo guidance computers:

You may think this looks incredibly handmade, and that’s because it is.  But these are also extreme close-ups.  Here’s the scale of the individual cores:

The only people who had the skills necessary to thread all of these cores precisely enough were textile and garment workers.  Little old ladies would literally thread the wires by hand.

And thanks to them, we were able to land on the moon.  This is also why memory in early computers was so expensive.  It had to be hand-crafted, and took a lot of time.

(little old ladies sewed the space suits, too)

Fun fact: one nickname for it was LOL Memory, for “little old lady memory.”

I mean let’s also touch on the Jacquard Loom, if you want to get all Textiles In Sciencey. It was officially created in 1801 or 1804 depending on who you ask (although you can see it in proto-form as early as 1725) and used a literal chain of punch cards to tell the loom which warps to raise on hooks before passing the weft through. It replaced the “weaver yelling at Draw Boy” technique, in which the weaver would call to the kid manning the heddles “raise these and these, lower these!” and hope that he got it right. 

With a Jacquard loom instead of painstakingly picking up every little thread by hand to weave in a pattern, which is what folks used to do for brocades in Ye Olde Times, this basically automated that. Essentially all you have to do to weave here is advance the punch cards and throw the shuttle. SO EASY. 

ALSO, it’s not just “little old ladies sewed the first spacesuits,” it’s “the women from the Playtex Corp were the only ones who could sew within the tolerances needed.” Yes, THAT Playtex Corp, the one who makes bras. Bra-makers sent us to the moon. 

And the cool thing with them was that they did it all WITHOUT PINS, WITHOUT SEAM RIPPING and in ONE TRY. You couldn’t use pins or re-sew seams because the spacesuits had to be airtight, so any additional holes in them were NO GOOD. They were also sewing to some STUPID tight tolerances-in our costume shop if you’re within an eighth of an inch of being on the line, you’re usually good. The Playtex ladies were working on tolerances of 1/32nd of an inch. 1/32nd. AND IN 21 LAYERS OF FABRIC. 

The women who made the spacesuits were BADASSES. (and yes, I’ve tried to get Space-X to hire me more than once. They don’t seem interested these days)

This is fascinating. I knew there was a correlation between binary and weaving but this just takes it to a whole nother level. 

I’m in Venice, Italy several times a year (lucky me!) and last year I went on a private tour of the Luigi Bevilacqua factory. Founded in 1875, they still use their original jacquard looms to hand make velvet. Here are the looms:

Here are the punch cards:

Some of these looms take up to 1600 spools. That is necessary to make their many different patterns.  Here are some patterns:

How many punchcards per pattern?

 This many:

Modern computing owes its very life to textiles - And to women. From antiquity weaving has been the domain of women. Sure, we remember Ada Lovelace and Hedy Lamarr, but while Joseph Marie Jacquard gets all the credit for his loom, the operators and designers were for the most part women.

I’ve seen this cross my dash a few times, but I’ve never watched the video before. Maybe I just didn’t pay attention when I was a kid, but I don’t remember ever seeing just how the Jacquard loom works. I just knew that the punch cards controlled which threads were raised. It’s cool to see the how, not just the what.

Don’t hide this in the tags, @drylime :D

BUT HAS ANYONE KNITTED DOOM?

@commodorebuzzkill, yes, darling, they actually have.

https://www.doomworld.com/forum/topic/110200-knitting-doom/

And they are also on Tumblr as @knittingdoom.

I am still very early in the project but I’m making slow progress.

Thank you for the tag!

if you want to see an amazing Star Trek "musical episode," it's The Abduction from the Seraglio staged by the Pacific Opera project. Complete with redshirt orchestra, horny Spock, a Gorn battle, and Klingons doing bat'leth dance choreography.

The plot and score is the same, just rewritten into English and Trek-ified. (Spock's got a whole aria about his human vs. Vulcan struggle. “Yes, my blood is really green. But how much does that mean? Still, I cannot deny my fears. Am I human with weird ears? I’m a Vulcan. I'm a Vulcan!”"

and if you don't have the patience for a 2-hour opera, someone put together a 30 minute highlight reel of a different performance (by the same company, just a different year. there's some casting changes too):

I was just explaining how I saw “To Wong Fu,” in the theaters as a 17 year old with a bunch of highschool friends and absolutely nobody was scandalized. This drag panic is entirely orchestrated and much ado about nothing.

I mean, somebody’s going to mention Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie, or Flip Wilson as Geraldine, but way back in the fifties, Milton Berle was on Texaco Star Theater and your grandparents or great-grandparents loved it.

A reminder that drag is old. It's so old it's ridiculous. Drag has been done in theater since the beginning of theater. And sometimes those characters are supposed to be another gender [Peter Pan is usually played by a small adult woman, and Edna Turnblad from Hairspray is famously a woman's role that's supposed to be cast with a drag queen]. Sometimes it's just a part of the show. [Some Like It Hot, where the two male characters are disguised as women to hide from the mob, and one ends the movie with a wealthy man] Drag queens as a trope have always been sassy, world-weary, and absolutely confident in themselves and their ability to attract men. Hell, sometimes the joke is that they're [deliberately] making a straight male character uncomfortable and we're supposed to be laughing at the straight male's discomfort. Law & Order has shown drag queens for decades with asshole detectives referring to them as "ma'am" when they're in drag even as they're trying to avoid the sequins.

This rhetoric is frightening because of how quickly the neo-fascist movements in the US have managed to get it to take hold.

There’s even the theory that the term “drag” comes from Shakespearean times and was written in scripts to mean “dressed as a girl”.

Ok but the meter on that line is SICK

i PRAY nobody KILLS me for the CRIME of being SMALL

Crisp

Delicious

That bug is an excellent poet

iambic heptameter. six feet for the bug, and the final one divine.