Konnichi-wa!
The Wind Rises, the final film from the acclaimed animator Hayao Miyazaki, has recently gotten its wide release in the U.S.
To mark this occasion, I thought I would share my thoughts on the major themes that can be found in Miyazaki’s masterpieces. He’s a director I love so much that I went to Berkeley once and spent a couple hundred bucks just to see him answer some questions and talk about his films.
So let’s get to it. Continue reading
So where were we?
Sometime last November I noticed that just about every blog I looked at was in the midst of NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. The goal of this exercise in sadomasochistic blog-flogging is to write a thousand words of a novel every day while also blogging daily about the experience. Continue reading
So Fred Phelps died Wednesday from what I only hope was a very painful and soul-shattering illness.
This is not a tribute. I’m not a believer in Hell, but I hope this piece of shit ends up there.
A true real-life villain.
Brother Phelps was the founder of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church in Topeka, Kansas. They’re renowned for their proliferation of christian messages like the following:
This cheerful cunt is the villain’s daughter, Shirley Phelps-Rogers. She will probably try to continue the family business of evil.
Made up almost exclusively of Phelps’ extended family, the WBC boasts only about one hundred members, joyously united in bigotry and vileness. It is not actually affiliated with any sane religion. (I’ve been to a Baptist church when I lived in the south. I thought they were nuts, but not evil.) As a matter of fact, Phelps considered it a great sin for anyone to preach of God’s love and forgiveness. Phelps once scornfully told a reporter “Can you preach the bible without preaching the hatred of God? The answer is absolutely not.” This paragon was certain that god had nothing but hatred and contempt for those who strayed from his version of morality.
These lowlifes used to crawl out of their holes and picket funerals of gays, waving nauseating signage in the bereaved’s faces. WBC first got national recognition for protesting the funeral of Matthew Shepard, a young gay man who was viciously beaten to death in 1998 by people who considered themselves christian.
Phelps’ followers also took to picketing the funerals of soldiers killed in Afghanistan and Iraq, interpreting these deaths as god’s judgment on America’s growing tolerance of gays. They even crashed celebrity funerals ‘cos publicity, yo? These people are fundamentally fucked-up and doctrinally disgustipating.
In celebration of a person’s life, I would normally suggest raising up your glass. Fred Phelps did not live a life worth celebrating. So how to commemorate the death of an evil, disgusting man?
T of V proposes that each one of you grab a person of the same sex and give them a passionate kiss, gay or not. Or at least hug a same-sex person. And may that be Fred Phelps’ last view of earth as he is dragged down to fucking hell.
Amen.
Kiss my fabulous ass!
So, prior to last summer, I’d never blogged on the internet before. I knew I wanted a website for my writings, and this train of thought led me to wanting more web savvy in general. Since I was going to teach myself Web Design and Production anyway, I decided to go back to school and work towards a degree in the field.
Summer quarter 2013 came along, and I started at Clark College in Vancouver, WA. I decided to take English 101 during my first quarter to help me get comfortable going back to school. (And it’s required for pretty much every degree.) Yeah, I’ve taken 101 at college before, but so long ago it seems another life. Continue reading
So twenty-five years ago today, Al Gore gave us the internet.
You’re welcome, bitches!
Psych! Uh, no he didn’t.
But today is the 25th anniversary of the day Sir Tim Berners-Lee, British computer scientist and all-around awesome muthafucka, sent a historic proposal upstairs to his bosses at CERN, or the European Organization for Nuclear Research. (Hey, that doesn’t spell out “CERN”!) Well, anyway, the proposal included this pithy quote– “a ‘web’ of notes with links between them”. At the time, Berners-Lee saw networking as crucial, primarily as a way to improve the flow of information between professionals in the computer field. About a year later, Sir Timmy had created the world’s first browser and editor in his spare time.
CERN would later pass a vote to make the web free to the world. And let’s take a second to give Big Al his due here. Vice-President Gore, who was always a technology futurist, in the nineties pushed accessibility and promoted legislation to improve the internet. So yeah, he was an instrumental figure, but he didn’t “invent” it. I also don’t believe he ever said he did. People just misquoted him. He would definitely claim he helped give it to us, which is kind of true.
But the main man…is Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
T of V urges you all today to raise a glass to Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the real goddamn inventor of the internet. Cheers, sir.
I bid you go forth and disseminate!!!
Check out this video if you please.
That’s not my voice in the clip, that’s Ryan’s. At first I thought it might be Batman…
I’ve got an article on Immigration Reform on the site, with more to come. In case you’re wondering, my article went up word-for-word just as I wrote it. Sensible Liberty is set up so you can follow the site or follow an individual author or both. Now that’s my last plug for a while. I’ll slip in another link to the SL site right after this.
KaBlAMMM! Go to Sensible Liberty!
Didn’t post Friday ‘cos I posted twice Thursday night. But Friday is still my weekly date for posting a new article. This Friday, I’m going to tell you about my first months on WordPress. If I post something between now and then, consider it a bonus.
I shall continue staring soulfully into your eyes till next we meet…
So this is a quick plug for a website called Sensible Liberty. It’s a political and social issues blog started by a friend of mine from school named Ryan Gilbert, a conservative christian veteran.
The cool part is he asked me to contribute. Even though I am none of those three things.
That’s because Ryan wants this blog to have a variety of voices, which I am all in favor of. Now I’ve only got one article up so far, so if you go to the blog you’ll note a decidedly libertarian bent to the tone of Sensible Liberty. But from what I know about Ryan he is very sincere about having a place where different views can be aired without bile and hyperbole. He wants to run a joint were civil discourse is the order of the day, no matter what we may disagree on. He and I share the belief that, in all the essentials, people are not all that different.
We’re just getting started. I’m trying to get into a rhythm where I can get Ryan an article a week for SL while still devoting time to my own blog. (Not to mention school and work and…oh yeah, that’s it. I almost said “social life”, but school and work are my social life.)
Plus you guys!
**Hugs and stuff**
Okay, now that the hugs are out of the way, one more damn thing. At this moment, T of V has 250 followers. Ten minutes ago, I had 251. Now who the fuck jumped off the bus? Huh? Who just broke up with me? How dare you?!? Why I oughtta—
*****
******
*********
**********eh, I don’t know where I was going with that. I’ll just pick up another follower tomorrow. Don’t sweat it.
Scoot on over to Sensible Liberty using the handy link I’ve placed below this paragraph, check out my article and, even if you’re a liberal, don’t be afraid to poke around a bit. There’s some interesting reading on there. See you later…
So I am very late with this. I picked up so many new blogs to follow while I did Every Damn Day December (EvDaDaDec), that I am still reading posts from January. There are 2800 posts backed up in my email. Now I don’t want to miss anyone’s so I’m slogging through them whenever I get a chance.
And that’s how I came across this: Continue reading
treatmentofvisions 