Linkdump for May 13th through May 25th

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Sometime between May 13th and May 25th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

  • George Takei Accuser Scott Brunton Changed His Story of Drugs, Assault: “A fabricated coffee meeting. Key facts withheld or walked back. A ‘great party story’ about a sexual assault—which the accuser now says may not have actually happened. What happens when an activist’s legacy is tarnished by the story of an old friend who later says it could have all been a misunderstanding? And how do we process such an anomaly in an era of overdue social justice?l
  • when i say ‘don’t make jokes about rednecks and hillbillies’, that doesn’t mean i think you’re being racist against white people: “i say that because you are perpetuating extremely toxic rhetoric about our region, you are promoting stigma, you are encouraging blatant classism, and you are furthering the idea that we somehow ‘deserve’ it because our elected officials vote republican. it’s not cute. stop acting like none of us have the right to call you out on your classist bullshit.“
  • Dear NRA, It’s Time to Take Away Everyone’s Gun: “I’m finished trying to reason with you. So now I, a guy who was ambivalent about guns just a few years ago, want to take your guns away. All of them. I want to take them all and melt them down and shape them into a giant sphere and then push it at you so you have to run away from it like Indiana Jones for the rest of your lives. I want Ted Nugent to roam the halls of his gunless house, sighing wearily until he dies. I want to end this thing once and for all, so that all of you who have prioritized the sale of guns over the lives of children have to sit quietly and think about what you’ve done. God help me, I want to take all of your guns out of your hands, by myself, right now.”
  • The respect of personhood vs the respect of authority: "In April 2015, Autistic Abby wrote on their Tumblr about how people mistakenly conflate two distinct definitions of 'respect' when relating to and communicating with others. This is an amazing & astute observation and applies readily to many aspects of our current political moment."
  • How the 50-mm Camera Lens Became ‘Normal’: “The idea that a 50-mm best approximates human sight has more to do with the early history of lens production than any essential optical correspondence between the lens and the eye.”
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Solo was fun. My current high-water mark for “new actors inhabiting characters without just mimicking original actors” is the nuTrek films (esp. Urban as McCoy); while nuHan isn’t quite that good, he wasn’t bad. Lots of fun moments and nods to the rest of the series. ⭐️⭐️⭐️½

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Every day, there’s a little bit more. Slowly, quietly accumulating. Drifting in, wafting slowly behind us as we walk by. It’s like the world’s cutest horror movie.

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Happy #WorldGothDay! The top two shots are me at about 22 (1995) at my first DJing gig at City Lights in Anchorage, AK; bottom left is at about 25 (1997) at Gigs Music Theater in Anchorage; bottom right is at 45 (2018) in “undercover goth” work mode.
Remember: goth has no age limit, there’s no such thing as Real Goth™, and gatekeepers in any community are just jerks.

The Coup Has Already Happened

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Sad to say, this sounds about right to me: The Coup Has Already Happened.

A lot of people are waiting for something dramatic to happen, some line to be crossed, an epic event like the firing of special counsel Robert Mueller III that will allow them to say that now we have had a coup and now we are ready to do something about it.

We already had the coup.

It happened on November 8, 2016, when an unqualified candidate won a minority victory in a corrupted election thanks in part to foreign intervention. Any time is the right time to pour into the streets and demand that it all grinds to a halt and the country change direction. The evidence that the candidate and his goons were aided by and enthusiastically collaborating with a foreign power was pretty clear before that election, and at this point, they are so entangled there isn’t really a reason to regard the born-again alt-right Republican Party and the Putin Regime as separate entities.

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I know a lot of people are allergic, and I’m sorry about that, but I have to admit to really getting a kick out of the cottonwood “snowstorm” going on right now. That stuff is everywhere!