Big, Loud and Live: drum corps and other stuff

The guy yelling “Judges, are you watching?”

More love for my favorite drum corps show with this battery Judge tape.

Press release for this Canadian study [Metabolomic and immune alterations in long COVID patients with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome]:

“We do not actually believe that long COVID is a separate new disease,” explains rheumatologist and clinical immunologist Jan Willem Cohen Tervaert, professor of medicine, who is an expert in fatigue associated with rheumatic illnesses.

"yeah the boops are fun but don't let them distract you from--" PLEASE let them distract you. Please take one goddamn day off from thinking about the world's problems. And if you can't figure out how to do that, for the love of god don't insist that everyone else be stuck in "I'm not allowed to be happy about anything ever" hell with you

If you insist that everyone be focusing on "the problems" at all times that is at best performative and at worst actively harmful to the cause you're trying to support. Taking real action uses up energy, often times a LOT of it. Insisting that no one ever takes a break means insisting that no one ever take time to rest and begin to gather more energy for another actual action. Being "on" all the time isn't your duty, it's an impossibility.

doctors say body fat and boobs and stuff happen mostly within the first 3 years. but i got major spurts of breast development at 7 years and 11-12 years. my hips have become significantly wider in the past couple of years - at like 13-14 years HRT.

I’ve been staring at this gif for ages and it’s so funny.

Maul is just showing off and does this completely unnecessary jump to back away, doesn’t bother to use the Force to open the doors but throws something at the controls.

AND FUCKING OBI-WAN KENOBI CASUALLY WALKS UP TO HIM, SWINGING HIS LIGHTSABER LIKE “YEAH I’M GONNA FUCK YOU UP BITCH”

The Walk™, your ass is

about to get beat

It's the same reason that people want to make a private discord server to talk with their buddies about their favourite fanfics, but get awkward and anxious and inhibited when it comes to talking to the actual author of same.

Squeeing on the server, or interacting with a reposter, is low social stakes and low demand; all it means is that you liked a thing and wanna go "hey dude look at this". The reposter doesn't give a shit about what you think about the thing; presumably your buddies on the server don't either. No pressure, no emotions, life moves on.

Interacting with a direct post from the artist or author feels way. more. risky. Saying "man I love this stuff" to another third party is a different emotional landscape from "man I love YOUR stuff" directly to the creator of said. Because now you are commenting on/reacting to the work AT the creator of the work. Now suddenly that creator can see YOU.

Now you're in a direct social interaction, even of a very sideways kind, With The Person Who Made It, and that is always less comfortable and always just a little more emotional work to actually engage with.

Saying this is not trying to shame anyone. It’s attempting to point out a cause-effect Problem with this very natural human tendency. Creators are human, and even if we are totally inclined to continue with our art Just For Ourselves, SHARING IT is work. Is labour. Even “just” uploading it to social media does take effort.

If you want art shared in places you can see and access and enjoy it, you really, really need to keep in mind that the creator needs a reason to bother with that labour. If sharing art gets us nothing at all, or worse penalizes us while enriching others (giving reposters traffic and attention and potentially revenue, unfortunately, in this economy) eventually one stops bothering.

If all the positive feedback and attention and engagement and affirmation that there’s any point to this goes on where we can’t see and we get nothing? We might as well keep the art to places we KNOW give us something back.

That’s not a threat or a shaming; it’s just a cause effect chain.