Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
Day 39: Back out at the Mercury! As usual, here nice and early to watch people make their way in and occasionally take advantage of an almost empty dance floor. This has always been my preferred way to hit the clubs; fashionably late has never been my style.
Day 25: Happy 24th birthday to The Mercury! Though I won’t be out to celebrate with all of you, have a good birthday party!
A couple months ago, I replaced my old hand-me-down laptop (a 10-year old MacBook Pro) with a shiny new M2 MacBook Air — my first brand-new laptop. And while it is very pretty, and it was tempting to leave it as-is…after a couple months of dithering, I decided to go ahead and personalize it with some of the stickers I’ve had sitting in a drawer for ages.
After all, what’s the point of keeping stickers in a drawer? There’s always the “I’ll put these on something…someday…” thought, and finally, “someday” is here.
In pride of place, dead center, covering the embedded shiny Apple logo, is a vintage rainbow Apple sticker. I’m not entirely sure how long I’ve been hanging on to this, but it has got to be close to a couple decades since Apple went all monochrome. I have one of these left, too.
Top left: “I was a Mac user when Apple was doomed.” From R. Stevens of Diesel Sweeties. I have the t-shirt, too. And it’s true!
Center left: Gothic Pride Seattle, repping the local SeaGoth community.
Bottom left: “Computer, end program.” How do you turn this damn holodeck off, anyway? Don’t remember the source.
Top center: “Creepy but Careful” by AmberStone, received as a bonus goodie when I got some of their vaccine-supporting enamel pins early in the pandemic.
Center right: “Highly illogical.” Yes, Spock, we know. Don’t remember the source.
Bottom right: Doom! Didn’t initially remember the source, but it has a URL for Chance of Doom, a webcomic by Robert Tritthardt, also part of the local SeaGoth community, so I probably got it from him at one point or another, possibly along with a Mercury shirt or hoodie or with one of the Writhe and Shine books I have.
Following a pandemic-induced shutdown, local SeaGoth bar/dance club The Mercury has been reopened for just over a year now. I haven’t returned yet, but I’d heard through the grapevine that they’d done a lot of work on their HVAC system during their hiatus, and apparently have a system that meets or exceeds what’s expected for hospital grade systems.
Sounds pretty good — but I was curious as to just what that meant for their air quality, especially as this is a basement club, and with any such place, is likely to have a lot of people talking and breathing heavily when out on the dance floor. Plus, while I’ve been told that many people are wearing masks while they’re there, it’s by no means 100% (and, of course, it’s safe to assume that those who don’t/won’t mask are at higher risk than those who do).
I had a friend who was heading out there last Saturday night for a little while, and between the one-year re-opening anniversary and there being a merchandise table to distribute shirts and hoodies that people had purchased in a recent fundraiser, we could expect that there would be a good number of people there, even early in the evening. My friend was kind enough to carry along my Aranet4 CO2 monitor during their time there.
Though only there for about an hour, while there, in order to get the best possible “worst case” scenario, they made sure to sit near the merchandise table where people were gathering, and went out on the dance floor a few times. Yesterday I picked up the monitor and loaded its record to see the results.
The end result was, to be entirely honest, much better than I’d expected. The air quality stayed in the green the entire time they were there, averaging around 800 ppm. This is really impressive for that sort of situation.
Of course, there are some definite caveats to this:
Since community transmission levels for the Seattle area are still pretty high, I’d still definitely recommend wearing a mask when out clubbing.
However, seeing measurements like this tells me that the money, time, and effort spent upgrading the club’s systems was well spent. I’m still keeping an eye on community transmission levels before I go out, but when I do, I’ll feel a lot more comfortable (though I will be staying masked as well).
(The spikes at the beginning and end of the graph are from when my friend was in their car going to and from the club.)
Friday night, I went out to the final Den of Sin Friday fetish night at Club Vogue at Neighbours Underground. I’d been looking forward to this for a couple reasons: one, because it had been a while since I’d been out to the club, let alone on an “event” night; two, this would be my first time out with my new D7000.
Long story short: I love this camera! I’m still getting used to the differences between it and my old D70s, so I’m not entirely comfortable and will definitely be fiddling around and tweaking settings until I get it down, but I’m already incredibly impressed with how well it performs, especially in extreme low-light settings.
Here are a few shots from Friday night, the rest are Facebook or Flickr (which includes a few shots too risqué for Facebook, if you’re logged in with a Flickr account). Everything was shot without flash — I had my flash with me, but never got around to putting it on the camera. I haven’t been able to go completely flash-free at the club in years…no matter how I pushed my D70s, it just couldn’t quite handle the low light of a goth club. The D7000, though, doesn’t even pause. This is fun.
A couple weeks ago, I posted a survey and asked for respondents from the local Seattle Gothic, or seagoth, community for a research project I was working on for my Law and Justice Research Methods class. The response was great, and I ended up getting full points for both the in-class presentation and the final research paper. For those of you curious about the final results, I’ve published the entire report. You can watch the presentation, read the report on the site, download the prettier .pdf version, or even download the .pdf version along with all the data files in case you want to do your own number crunching.
Thanks again for all who filled out surveys and assisted me in this project. It’s very, very appreciated!
Those of you who follow my postings on Facebook, Twitter, or Flickr will already have seen these, but, on the off chance that there are still some who only find me through my blog (or my LiveJournal mirror of this blog)….
Last Saturday, American Gothique magazine hosted a fashion show at The Vogue, with Amazing Race contestants Kynt and Vyxsin as featured models. I was able to join the crowd of photographers crouched at the foot of the catwalk, and here are a few shots from the show. As is usually the case, there are many more shots posted on Flickr!
Are you now, or have you ever been, involved with or considered yourself a part of the Seagoth (Seattle gothic) community? If so, please take a moment to help me out!
Note: I’ve had to remove the survey, as in about 36 hours I’ve received over 120 responses, roughly six times what my instructor expected us to collect, and I don’t want to bury myself in the data collation and analysis stage. Thanks for your interest and assistance, everyone!
This quarter, I’m taking a Research Methods class for the Law and Justice program at Central Washington University (Des Moines campus). As part of the class, every student has to do a small research project, and I have chosen to focus on exploring differences in self-identification as a member of the Seagoth community. To that end, I’ve assembled a short, fourteen item questionnaire. Please take a moment to complete this survey. In addition, if you could forward a link to the questionnaire itself or to this blog post to other members of the Seagoth community, I’d greatly appreciate it!
All responses to this questionnaire are entirely voluntary and completely anonymous: Other than demographic information, there is no personally identifying data being collected in the questionnaire. Participation is entirely voluntary (and greatly appreciated), but please — due to CWU requirements, all respondents must be 18 or over.
Thank you very much!
Complete the survey
Gothic Charm School: An Essential Guide for Goths and Those Who Love Them by Jillian Venters
Simply put, this should be highly recommended, if not required reading, not just for goths, but also for anyone curious about the goth community, whether because they are personally interested or because they have an acquaintance, friend, or loved one (spouse, significant other, boy- or girlfriend, relative, child, or secret crush) who counts themselves among the spooky set.
Miss Manners’ more somber-dressed and bat-festooned doppelgänger, the Lady of the Manners, has adapted from and expanded upon columns from her long-running website and assembled a delightful collection of advice for the goth and goth-friendly. Covering everything from the basics (“The difference between being a Goth, a NotAGoth, and not being a Goth yourself but being Goth-friendly”) to social etiquette both online (“The Internet is not Real Life (with an aside about the Great Flounce-Off)”) and off (“What to do when people ask why you’re dressed like that”) to parenting (“How to show support to your babygoth or babybat without relinquishing the keys to the hearse, and everything you need to know to Not Freak Out”), Gothic Charm School quickly becomes, in many small and a few not-so-small ways, the very “Goth handbook” that the Lady of the Manners so often reminds us does not exist.
I can’t go back in time twenty years and hand this book to my teenaged self (more’s the pity), but I canquite heartily recommend this to both old and new members of the goth community, as well as those around them who just might not quite get it.
No, mine aren’t ready yet (really, I’m about to get started on them, I promise), but here’s a nice group shot of the group in the truck by generalchaos.
