Knuckledragger

Ukraine accuses Putin of humiliating Trump with devastating attack on Kyiv. Russia launches record number of drones and ballistic missiles in seven-hour assault shortly after its leader spoke to US president.

File under: Exceeding the attention span of nearly everyone. Five hours of Gamers Nexus explaining why chaotic tariffs are a dumb idea and how they ruin everything. I watched the first installment over a couple evenings while grinding loot in an RPG. I haven't watched the second one yet.

In the parlance of our times, RIP Bozo. Televangelist Jimmy Swaggart, whose ministry was toppled by prostitution scandals, dies at 90.

A guy I've known on Discogs since like 2002 picked up some dream speakers. Kid for scale.

That's an expensive cat warmer.

ABC of AFX.

Iran says it launched attack on US forces at Qatar’s Al Udeid Air Base.

More room porn than anything else. Via this real estate listing and /r/audiophile.

There's a web comic called beanytuesday. Way back in 2018 (almost 7 years ago to the day), he did a series of intentionally poorly drawn 2018 election candidates. One of them has had an enduring legacy. No, not ol' Hills. Gen Z loves to meme this one. It's newly relevant.

Today is the 50th anniversary of Jaws. It's kind of a big deal around here.

Y'all familiar with the legend of Pentagon Pizza? Also, Nimitz headed to the Middle East.

RIP Melissa Hortman, a state representative from Minnesota. Shot and killed in what was pretty clearly a targeted act of terrorism.

(OC) Don't ask me why I made this. It's arguably an insult to Diary of a Wimpy Kid.

I stayed up later than I should have last night watching news clips about Israel/Iran. It's fascinating what one can learn upon escaping the US corporate media bubble. I heard a fairly insightful take on Benjamin Netanyahu. Bibi is not a long term strategist. He thinks very short term, he's just (A) been in power and in the public eye for decades and (B) gets a continual tongue bath from most US media. Bibi's MO is [impulsively do thing] -> [deal with the ramifications of his previous action by doing another impulsive thing.] The consequences for this pattern (besides regional instability, bloodshed an chaos) is that to stay in power he has had to increasingly align himself with formerly fringe far right elements of the Israeli political landscape. Bibi's prime directive is to stay in power so he can stay out of jail (reminiscent of a certain other political figure, but I digress...) I have read for years that to really get a proper sense of the true positions of Netanyahu and the Likud party in general, find their Hebrew language statements and run them through Google translate. The results paint a very different picture than what he says in English.

Yesterday, members of the opposition party were set to vote to dissolve the Knesset. That vote failed. Netanyahu remains in power. Also yesterday, the US did an emergency evacuation of personnel from Iran. Tonight Israel has attacked Iran. The news is still filtering out. Reports of large explosions in the Iranian capital. This can and will get ugly.

That statue is, as the kids say, caked up.

I have questions.

This shit is crazy. King of the Hill actor Jonathan Joss fatally shot in Texas after argument with neighbor. EDIT: The second page didn't paste for some reason:

This video is probably exceeds the time and interest of anyone here. I've had it on while working on photos. I have mixed feelings about it. Piers Morgan is an insufferable, pompous jackass and physical evidence that the denizens of my fine state didn't toss quite enough things into the Boston Harbor back in the day. I don't know much about Sean Carroll. Eric is the, uh, less crackpot of the two Weinstein brothers. This is damnation with the faintest of praise. There was a time, maybe 15 years ago where I heard him speak on learning disabilities and thought he was seriously smart. It could be he was, in that moment and on that subject. It's also just as likely that I fell for a grifter. It wouldn't be the first time. In any case, Eric stages a Chernobylesque meltdown here because the "serious" physics community doesn't regard his crackpot theories in the, ahem, gravity he'd like. Sean Carroll is a polite academic type and responds to the full state of Eric's emotional diaper as best he can. Piers, whose job it is to have as much drama as possible on his show, barely manages to contain his smirk while thinking "this is going to get SO many views" to himself. The temper tantrum starts around the 20 minute mark.

In 1996, a then 19 year old woman founded "Haven" a goth night hosted at Club Metro in Northampton MA. I was there in the first year. I still have a flyer from a 1997 event ...somewhere. Club Metro became Diva's at some point, and was the biggest gay nightclub in the area. Space-wise it was the biggest nightclub period. In 2006, Haven celebrated their 10th anniversary and it was insane. I have alluded to the fact that I have taken a fair amount of shit for the nightclub photos I took in the mid 00s. This got stuck in my craw and I (as I am wont to due) overrated a bit. There's a lot to unpack here and most of it is, to be frank, fucking irrelevant. The bottom line is that a lot of freaky shit happened at goth night, I gleefully took photos of it and posted them online. I got rather puritanical reactions from a number of people in the local nightclub scene, earning me a reputation as some kind of leering pervert. In the fall of 2007, I made ~1500 photos private because I was tired of hearing about it. As I have said before my edits to many of the photos I took were crap, primarily because I thought it was a good idea to crop in super close, with zero regard to aspect ratio and framing. Bad editing definitely made the situation worse. Now with nearly two decades of reflection, I've concluded that yes many of the photos were without merit, the reaction against them was primarily from assholes, and I am remarkably bad at not taking things personally. With that said, here's Haven's 10th anniversary. There will be some titty. When I get to a later photo set from Haven, there will be a lot of titty. You have been warned. Diva's had remarkably crap lighting. They had a bunch of flat mirror scanners set to "synchronized spaz" and two 1000W strobes that went off irregularly. The combination made for the worst imaginable source for available light photography. This shot is 1 second with the camera placed on a railing. I should add that all of these photos are ISO50, because at this point I didn't know how to adjust the ISO setting on my PowerShot(!) See the woman in the far left? In '06 I cropped the image to just be here ...resulting in something that would barely be a thumbnail today. She's still the subject of the image, now she just has some context. This is The Enigma. He's a heavily body modified performer. He's actually quite a showman. The goths ate up his schtick. He hammered a nail up one of his nostrils. He ran a drill up the other one. He blasted himself in the face with an angle grinder. He pumped a bottle of what he said was Windex up his nose. People went back to dancing. This guy is not the founder of Haven, but he was the main DJ for many years. He's like 6'5 and rail thin. I used to call him "The Alpha Goth." I know him a bit. He's dedicated to his craft, but we have some ...philosophical and creative differences. The two main people behind Haven. They had a falling out as some point. This photo is absolutely terrible from a technical perspective, but documents the moment in time. I did say there would be titty. 1/8 second handheld. 2 second exposure of discarded Champagne glasses. I really like these two shots. My friend Felicia has been a belly dancer for decades. She did a performance. None of these shots are very good, but they do capture he abilities. Back to dancing. 1.6 seconds with the camera on a railing again. I think someone bumped it. Neat effect. There was one guy with a pair of glowsticks. I took a number of long exposures of him with the camera on a railing. To the credit of Diva's, they had all sorts of places to place a camera. The Enigma is back. Now he's got Peaches with him. Things are about to get interesting. She's got a bed of nails. They also smashed the watermelon Gallagher style, and I utterly failed to capture it. Part of the act was "force feeding" Peaches some of the watermelon. I missed that as well. Thank you for attending Haven's 10th!

I'll get my coat.