Brightly Coloured Distractions

Other performers have literally said since, “Freddy basically changed live performance forever and left us NOTHING.” (affectionate)

I am convinced he was blessed by the gods. He was a fucking herald for said gods or something. Hell, there’s that vid of the Green Day fans waiting for the concert to begin and fucking singing in perfect fucking harmony to Bohemian Rhapsody! Freddy isn’t even alive and he still fucking commands a crowd!

Full performance:

What’s your score?

𝐒𝐂𝐎𝐑𝐄𝐒

16-20 Safe Space Ace

11-15 The B Team

5-10 Wise

0-4 Legendary

Feel free to play along and put your number in the tags. Remember, it's a point for something you've NEVER done (not the other way around...kind of confusing.)

There are people – some in my own Party – who think that if you just give Donald Trump everything he wants, he’ll make an exception and spare you some of the harm. I’ll ignore the moral abdication of that position for just a second to say — almost none of those people have the experience with this President that I do. I once swallowed my pride to offer him what he values most — public praise on the Sunday news shows — in return for ventilators and N95 masks during the worst of the pandemic. We made a deal. And it turns out his promises were as broken as the BIPAP machines he sent us instead of ventilators. Going along to get along does not work – just ask the Trump-fearing red state Governors who are dealing with the same cuts that we are. I won’t be fooled twice.

I’ve been reflecting, these past four weeks, on two important parts of my life: my work helping to build the Illinois Holocaust Museum and the two times I’ve had the privilege of reciting the oath of office for Illinois Governor.

As some of you know, Skokie, Illinois once had one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world. In 1978, Nazis decided they wanted to march there.

The leaders of that march knew that the images of Swastika clad young men goose stepping down a peaceful suburban street would terrorize the local Jewish population – so many of whom had never recovered from their time in German concentration camps.

The prospect of that march sparked a legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was a Jewish lawyer from the ACLU who argued the case for the Nazis – contending that even the most hateful of speech was protected under the first amendment.

As an American and a Jew, I find it difficult to resolve my feelings around that Supreme Court case – but I am grateful that the prospect of Nazis marching in their streets spurred the survivors and other Skokie residents to act. They joined together to form the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and built the first Illinois Holocaust Museum in a storefront in 1981 – a small but important forerunner to the one I helped build thirty years later.

I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. But I know the history intimately — and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room with people who survived the Holocaust. Here’s what I’ve learned – the root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed – a seed of distrust and hate and blame.

The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.

I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac – and suggests — without facts or findings — that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash. Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks – arguing that consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too “female” and “nonwhite.” The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems.

I just have one question: What comes next? After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities – once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends – After that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face – what comes next.

All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don’t want to repeat history – then for God’s sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it.

I swore the following oath on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible: “I do solemnly swear that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the state of Illinois, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of Governor .... according to the best of my ability.

My oath is to the Constitution of our state and of our country. We don’t have kings in America – and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one. I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions — but in deference to my obligations.

If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this:

It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.

Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978 – just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2000 people came to counter protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the “rally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.” It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.

Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the “tragic spirit of despair” overcome us when our country needs us the most.

Sources:

• NBC Chicago & J.B. Pritzker, Democratic governor of Illinois, State of the State address 2025: Watch speech here | Full text

So, I had really bad writers block. REALLY BAD. Life kept life-ing at me hard and I hit a very nasty patch with work.

It's taken me a while to come out of it. Three YEARS in fact. The main thing that got me out of this dearth of writing ability was, surprisingly to me, ASMR stories performed on YouTube. I got inspired to write again.

I finished Night Terrors for The Mechanisms fandom which I started in 2020 back in LOCKDOWN, and I've worked on a bunch of other WIPs since, about 60K words since July all told.

It's been BLISS.

So, I thought I'd try my hand at writing scripts for ASMRists and Voice Actors to have a go at if they wanted to since it was what community which inspired me so much.

Long story short, someone has picked up my scripts and run with them!

Have a look!

I am a sucker for Hurt/Comfort and a full on plot. So I started writing a series about a Vampire Hunter who, when annihilating a nest of vampires stumbles across a newly turned vampire, one who has never fed from a human and doesn't even know they're a vampire. They were taken and turned against their will. The hunter decides not to kill them but help train them to be a vegetarian vampire, feeding off animal blood and so completely reducing their threat to the population. There's just been too much killing and the new vampire is very young, a first year university student.

This will be a multi-part series, fully platonic -I've got no interest in writing romance and I am rubbish at it! This is very much a developing found family, parent and child relationship where they really start to care for each other, especially when the plot kicks off.

Btw, this is how conservatives keep getting to claim that trans people are a new thing no one has ever heard, because our history and existences have continually been erased or obscured systematically through out history.

The most famous example was 92 years when the Nazis raided the library of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft, the medical practice where the term transsexual was first coined and the first gender affirming surgery was performed in in 1931.

What did the Nazis do after raiding the library on May 6th, 1933? You may be familiar with these images

And of course there's the sheer volume of the data that has been purged from the CDC's website:

So, I had really bad writers block. REALLY BAD. Life kept life-ing at me hard and I hit a very nasty patch with work.

It's taken me a while to come out of it. Three YEARS in fact. The main thing that got me out of this dearth of writing ability was, surprisingly to me, ASMR stories performed on YouTube. I got inspired to write again.

I finished Night Terrors for The Mechanisms fandom which I started in 2020 back in LOCKDOWN, and I've worked on a bunch of other WIPs since, about 60K words since July all told.

It's been BLISS.

So, I thought I'd try my hand at writing scripts for ASMRists and Voice Actors to have a go at if they wanted to since it was what community which inspired me so much.

Long story short, someone has picked up my scripts and run with them!

Have a look!

I am a sucker for Hurt/Comfort and a full on plot. So I started writing a series about a Vampire Hunter who, when annihilating a nest of vampires stumbles across a newly turned vampire, one who has never fed from a human and doesn't even know they're a vampire. They were taken and turned against their will. The hunter decides not to kill them but help train them to be a vegetarian vampire, feeding off animal blood and so completely reducing their threat to the population. There's just been too much killing and the new vampire is very young, a first year university student.

This will be a multi-part series, fully platonic -I've got no interest in writing romance and I am rubbish at it! This is very much a developing found family, parent and child relationship where they really start to care for each other, especially when the plot kicks off.

so, first of all, tumblr’s culture has changed a lot in the past couple years. there’s a genuine community effort to not start any drama, and ironically a lot of the current hostility is an effort to keep things calm. there’s also a change in how people interact with posts, so if you haven’t been here in a while please skip down to the tags/replies/reblog with text section.

for newcomers: you should be reblogging posts about as liberally as you would like something on twitter. if you only like stuff, people will think you are rude/a bot. you’ve probably heard people talk about “cultivating your dash,” and thats because this platform is 100% centered around your dashboard. trending matters less, unfollowing and blocking in order to shape your dash into it’s best form is widely accepted, the majority of the content you’ll find and interact with will be because of your dash, and the only way to put things on your dash is to reblog them. tumblr users are deeply distrustful of algorithms and have largely turned off the “see posts your friends have liked” function (i recommend you also turn of the various algorithms in settings → general settings → dashboard preferences).

so, once you’ve reblogged a post, there’s three ways to add content to it. the tags, replies, and reblogging with text. all of them have different connotations

the tags: an inside voice. originally they were meant for organizing your blog (and they’re still used for this), but they’ve also morphed into a way to share thoughts that aren’t funny/insightful enough for non-followers to be interested in. when in doubt, put your comment in the tags

replies: basically talking to your friends in class. your followers have no way of finding your replies (they don’t pop up on the dash, nobody gets notified except for the original poster) so chances are, only the person who made the post is gonna see your comment. it’s for quick one-offs that you’re okay with other people overhearing, but really is only made for one person. they’re like a public dm

reblog with text: an outside voice. you’re getting up on a stage in town square and entertaining people. make sure it’s funny or insightful— bottom line, add something new to the conversation. you should use this the least

general rules of thumb: 

when in doubt, reblog. people will judge you if your blog is only personal posts and you only interact with other content by liking it.  

the only things people will judge you for reblogging are personal vent posts. leave a like to give a little virtual hug

if a post is asking about your personality/opinions (i.e: tell me what’s the last tv show you watched, that kind of thing) put it in the tags 

The health insurance industry has a term for this sadistic practice. It's called "step therapy." If the choice is between a more expensive medication that works and a cheaper one that doesn't work as well and might have worse side effects, the insurance company requires that the cheaper drug be used first.

One benefit to the insurance company is that the patient on the cheaper drug might die before they get a chance to use the drug that works but is more expensive. That's money in the bank for the insurance company.

You CAN get exceptions sometimes but the insurance company can just...decide to change their mind, or not honor it, randomly. Or force you to renew it.

And in 2026 will require insurance to cover a name brand medication if the generic is experiencing a shortage.