Friday, October 27, 2017

Friday Five (new series)

It's the fourth Friday of October. It's also the final Friday October. Which means the NaNoWriMo is right around the corner, and we're careening ever more quickly toward the Yuletide Season.

Two weeks ago I posted “Friday Links (is anyone reading edition)” which contained far fewer links than my typical Friday Links post. I explained why I was feeling that the number of people reading the posts didn't seem to justify the number of hours I spend more weeks assembling the post. Last week there was no Friday Links... and not one person sent a message asking after them. So, clearly there isn't a gigantic audience that I simply wasn't aware of for my weekly round-up.

As I said in that post, I read news all the time, so bookmarking stories that might be interesting to share isn't the part that takes a lot of effort. And I like having routines, so having a task to work on a particular kind of post on a particular evening each week is something I can enjoy doing. So, I'm going to try a slight modification. Welcome to inaugural Friday Five post. It will consist of only the five stories out of everything I bookmarked this week that I feel must be shared. Here we go:

Links of the Week


Four Quitters Walk Into a Bar.

A Beginner’s Primer to Black Queer Literature.

Ursula K. Le Guin on Power, Oppression, Freedom, and How Imaginative Storytelling Expands Our Scope of the Possible.

Warning of 'ecological Armageddon' after dramatic plunge in insect numbers.

Drug Companies Make Eyedrops Too Big — And You Pay for the Waste. It's not just eye-drops--but wasted prescription eyedrops add up to $3.4 BILLION dollars in wasted health care money a year in the U.S.--this and drug packaging issues (such as the doses of chemotherapy) add up to a whole lot more billions wasted.

Farewells:

I will continue to share links to obituaries of people I think ought to be remembered, and they won't count against the Five.

Robert Guillaume, Star of ‘Benson,’ Dies at 89.

Fats Domino, Architect Of Rock 'N' Roll, Dead At 89.

Things I wrote:


We have birds coming to the bird feeder.

Gentlefolk, start your (word processing) engines!

Writer’s write: don’t let perfection be the enemy of the good.

The Night Was Sultry, part 5 — closing the circle, openings and endings.

Videos!


And here are five videos for your Friday:

Fats Domino Ain't That A Shame:



(If embedding doesn't work, click here.)



Queen - All Dead, All Dead Lyric Video (Hybrid Version - long lost recording of Freddie Mercury paired with the instrumental track):



(If embedding doesn't work, click here.)



STRANGER THINGS Theme - Shirtless Violinist - Soundtrack:



(If embedding doesn't work, click here.)



The Addams Family Original Theme Music:



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Hocus Pocus - I Put A Spell On You:



(If embedding doesn't work, click here.)

Friday, October 13, 2017

Friday Links (is anyone reading edition)

The second Friday in October already. Where is the year going?

This week we have what is probably one of the shortest collections of Friday Links I’ve ever done (unless you count the few times I’ve missed the day). One reason is that I’ve been very busy and a little bit under the weather this week. So I just didn’t collection many. But another reason is that I’ve been thinking about how much time I spend on various activities and considering making some changes. There was a time, not that long ago, where the weekly round up of links was one of my most clicked on posts every week. And that’s just on my personal blog. I can’t get stats from the places where I cross-post the full text, so always assumed the actual numbers were higher. But now Friday Links is one of the least click posts on the blog, consistently.

(The rest of this post is at FontFolly.Net.)

Wednesday, October 11, 2017

No one deserves to live in a closet

It’s National Coming Out Day! And just for the record, in case it isn’t clear: I’m queer! Specifically I am a gay man married to a bisexual man. For many years I lived in the closet, and am ever so happy that those days are far, far behind me. So, if you’re a person living in the closet, I urge you to consider coming out. Being in the closet is scary—you live in a constant state of high anxiety about people finding out and what they might do when it happens. Studies show that this affects us the same as extended trauma, inducing the same sorts of stress changes to the central nervous system as PTSD.

The problem is that coming out is also scary...

(The rest of this post, with quotes from others and a link to an awesome comic about coming out, is at FontFolly.Net.)