Laura

Japanese child actress Mana Ashida (little Mako) was embarrassed that she couldn’t pronounce Guillermo Del Toro’s name so he gave her special permission to call him “Totoro-san” instead.

He has a show called Joe Lycett's Got Your Back which explains consumer rights, exposes dodgy businesses and actually fights on behalf of people who have been scammed by those businesses, often successfully.

He also legally changed his name to Hugo Boss in protest of the fashion house Hugo Boss hitting a local brewery with cease and desist because they trademarked the word boss. The protest was successful and Hugo Boss receded the c&d.

He's a cool guy and I recommend looking him up. I also recommend looking up the notable cases from JLGYB on the Wikipedia link below

Usually there’s some interest when I bring this up, but this kid sort of sat with that for a couple minutes, expression settling into a thousand yard stare. Just as I was wondering if something was wrong, he looked at me with his haunted eyes and asked, in a tone of resignation: “When are the tigers coming?”

Planter idea from Goth Gardening.

like, what other song can make that claim?

The crowd cheering after the first stanza when they realize what they’re all doing

So many people audibly ‘doing the guitar parts’… like ya do

The sheer number of voices joining the rediculous falsetto (thanks, Roger)

How they all start jumping at the ramp-up “so you think you can stomp me”

There’s good reason why, nearly fifty years after the height of their career, Queen is still considered one of the best bands of all time ever.

Okay. You’re back? Welcome back. Unless you’re a trained singer, you probably can’t do it. There are too many long notes, too many key changes, and too many places where–if you’re singing all the parts–you’re just up and down the scale too damned fast. I’m saying this as a trained singer and I can’t do it. I always crack on “magnifico” and “leave me to die,” and I have a pretty decent range, but I know I sound ugly as hell on that final coda.

Okay. Now that we’ve established that, I want to talk a little about singing as a chorus. One of the things a lot of people learned during the pandemic is how hard it is to take twenty people, all in different places, and stitch them together to make a single coherent song with perfect pitch and timing. You’re all practicing on slightly your own tempo, slightly your own key, even if you’re all working from the same base track. (You can see this in a lot of the Wellerman compilations from Tiktok, where someone always says “Soon” a moment before everyone else on “soon may the Wellerman come.”) When you have a chorus comprised of many smaller choruses that are all traveling to be together, this is what dress rehearsal is for–to get all of you onto the same tempo so you’re starting and finishing at exactly the same time. This is a thing that normally only happens after at least several days of practice, and it is an important skill that must be taught. You’re not just born knowing how to do this.

I do not know how many people at that Green Day concert were trained singers. But I do know there is no way in hell all few thousand of them were a single group–they showed up a few at a time, maybe even flying solo for the night. Now go and listen to the video again. Listen to the ends of verses and the pickups. They’re fucking crisp as hell. Everyone is starting and ending at the same place. Not even a single note off. (And yes, you can hear when it’s a single note off, even in a crowd that big. A handful of people would be enough to throw it off.) And while a few in the crowd may be off-key, so many more are on-key that the cumulative effect is of the song being on-key. This isn’t even the band they’re there to see.

They don’t just know this song, this technically-difficult song, this long and complex song by a completely different band. They know it perfectly. They know it down to the fucking note. They know it so well that they did it in perfect synchrony, without a single chance to practice.

for years i have lived this lie telling everyone i am allergic to peanuts because i hate the smell of peanut butter and it makes me gag and makes my throat feel gross after eating it and so i don’t really like peanut butter that much but whenever i used to tell people i don’t like peanut butter they’d get all defensive like “peanut butter is amazing how do you not like it?!” and then i’d have to go into this whole thing to defend my taste buds.

but then i got tired of it and started telling people that i’m just allergic to peanuts because that way it’s not my fault that i hate the smell of peanut butter - it’s now like i’m a sad little baby who will never get to taste peanut butter ever in her life and everyone feels sad for me.

but the problem is that i really love peanut m&ms and so now i can only eat peanut m&ms when i’m at home in secret. the only person who knows my lie is my husband. and so at work this evening we had a small celebration for someone and they had peanut m&ms and i really wanted some but obviously couldn’t eat them in public because then people would know my peanut secret. 

and so when we got home after work my husband tipped his jacket over and emptied his pockets and at least thirty or so peanut m&ms fell out of his pockets and he whispered, “i was sneakily accumulating them all night for you because i could see the pain in your eyes.”