This shirt seemed particularly important today.
Trump could be removed from office today, if Pence would actually act to uphold the oath he swore to protect this country. I’m absolutely fine with letting Pence be POTUS46 for the next two weeks, and letting Biden take up the mantle of POTUS47.
Meet The Black Women Who turned Georgia Blue: “Yep, it was Stacey. But don’t forget about Nsé, Helen, Tamieka, Melanie, LaTosha and Deborah.”
Trifecta
I hoped, but didn’t expect, that Georgia would come through. I am so happy to have my expectations proven wrong and my hopes realized.
As I write this, Warnock has been declared the winner, and Ossoff is leading by more votes than Biden won GA’s presidential ballot by. This is momentous: GA elected a Democrat President, two Democrat Senators, and flipped one House seat blue (which GA with a 6-8 Republican majority in House seats).
Which means that, for the first time since 2011, Democrats will hold the House, Senate, and Presidency.
And Mitch McConnell will finally lose his Majority Leader position and, with it, his ability to block legislation from being passed (somewhere upwards of 400 bills passed by the House stopped at his desk).
And we need to make that count.
Democrats need to do everything they can to pass legislation that actually helps as many people as possible, to right the imbalances that have mounted over the past years, and to trumpet their successes so that we hold on to this advantage when the 2022 midterms come around.
The first two priorities that come to my mind are COVID-19 relief and expanding voting protections and accessibility, but there are many more.
There’s still a lot of work to do, of course, especially considering the number of judges that Trump has been able to seat throughout the country. But at least now, we have a good chance of actually being able to get things done.
Lots of Reason to Laugh
One glorious paragraph from the Intelligencer’s attempt to dig into the story behind the Four Seasons Total Landscaping debacle, Four Seasons Total Landscaping: The Full(est Possible) Story:
Whether it’s war and peace or public relations and gardening, sorting out the truth is a complicated endeavor when it relates to Donald Trump. Everyone involved in anything, no matter the size, no matter how stupid, seems to lie as a first resort, or to know very little, or to lie about knowing very little, or to know just enough to send blame in another direction, and the person in that direction seems to lie also, or to know very little, or to lie about knowing very little, but perhaps they have a theory that sends blame someplace else, and over there, too, you will find more liars, more know-nothings, and before long, a whole month will have passed, and you still haven’t filed your story about how the president’s attorney wound up undermining democracy in a parking lot off I-95 on a strip of cracked pavement in a run-down part of a city that ordinarily would command no consideration from the national political class or the very online public or the equally online mainstream media, which, when forced to look, found lots of reason to laugh.
DJ Wüdi in 2020
One of the more personally entertaining bits of 2020 for me was resurrecting–to a certain extent, at least–my DJ Wüdi alter-ego. Aside from a few appearances at some Rodeo City Rollergirls derby matches in 2012, and a couple Thursday night dances for Norwescon, my DJing endeavors have been mostly a fond memory since I moved down to Seattle in 2001.
I’d been missing the DJing, and so at the start of 2020, I’d decided to start playing with using the game streaming service Twitch for broadcasting DJ sets, which I’d seen a few other DJs experimenting with. I got started, got a few weeks in…and then COVID hit. And suddenly there was an explosion of DJs showing up on Twitch, as clubs worldwide shut down and DJs and club goers scrambled to find a way to keep going, even if only from our homes.
So, as it turns out, in a sea of hundreds (at least) of DJs around the world using Twitch to broadcast sets, keep their friends and fans happy, and make a name for themselves…well, I’m one of them, but I can’t really say much more than that. Which is fine, as even pre-pandemic, this whole thing was basically a vanity hobby that I just wanted to do for fun. And in that respect, this project has been a resounding success! Some days it’s just me broadcasting to no-one, but some days there are a few people who pop in, and I even have a few regular listeners, so I’m happy with how it’s going.
In 2020, I posted 38 sets (aiming for one a week, with occasional weeks off when I had other obligations that took priority). Most of the time, I just wing it, with no set plan, just grabbing whatever I feel like at the moment. Some weeks, though, I took the time to play with a particular idea, put a set of tracks together, set them in order, and plan and practice the transitions.
I also had fun working on evolving my Twitch display as the year went on. While I can’t do many of the fancier tricks that many DJs do, with “emote” graphics dancing across the screen (things like that are reserved for streamers who broadcast more regularly and have built up enough of an audience to actually work on earning money; I’m nowhere near that level), I do like where I’ve ended up.
The cute little avatar version of me was originally artwork by Sharii, and I’ve set it so that the graphic on the t-shirt changes every 30 seconds. The background is a motion video loop, and can be swapped out with other loops. The text overlay is just a text file that I keep open and update as I go with whatever track is currently playing. At the top, the waveforms and decks are clipped out of the djay Pro AI window. And finally, of course, there’s that goofy guy in the middle of the screen generally making a fool of himself. :)
I broadcast on my Twitch channel, and then later (usually the next day) upload the audio recording of the mix to my MixCloud account for listening at any time, and organize the mixes into playlists. Once uploaded, I posts links to the mixes along with the final track lists to my DJ Wüdi blog.
Here’s one playlist with all 38 of my 2020 mixes…
…but if you just want to sample some of the highlights, here’s a playlist with just the “theme” weeks:
For 2021? I’m just going to keep going and see how long I can keep this project going. At the very least, I figure I’ll be going until we start emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic and actually want to go places and do things with our Saturdays once it’s safe to do so again. In other words, I’m not planning on stopping anytime soon.
If you listen, thanks, and I hope you continue to do so, whether live on Twitch or later on MixCloud!
Difficult Listening Hour 2021.01.02: Happy New Year!
The first Difficult Listening Hour of the new year, and it’s all “new” music! That is, not “new” as in “newly released” or even “new to my collection” but as in “has ‘new’ in the title somewhere” (except for two, one of which is an acronym, and the other features the word ‘new’ rather prominently in the lyrics). Basically, I just did a search for ‘new’ in my music collection and then winged it from there.
Happy National Science Fiction day!
Right now I’m reading Ursula K. LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness. What SF book are you reading today (or what was the last one you read)?
2020 Resolutions
My resolutions for this year:
- 5120 x 2880
- 1920 x 1080
- 1280 x 800
- 1668 x 2224
- 1125 x 2436
- 368 x 448
(That’s my retina iMac, its secondary display, the MacBook Pro I just got from Prairie when we upgraded hers, and my iPad, iPhone, and Apple Watch, respectively. Yes, I make this same stupid joke every year, cause it makes me laugh.)
Happy New Year!
If you’re reading this, we’ve made it through 2020 and are getting started with 2021. Happy New Year, everyone. It won’t be immediate, but I truly believe that things will improve. I hope I’m right, and that this is true for everyone I know (and most everyone I don’t know, for that matter).