Brendan

A mask, a charade, a play, a dance, something something; mirrors!

[bouncingpenguin]

YOU KNOW WHAT I WANT?!

I WANT A FULL-ON GENDER-FLIPPED ROMEO & JULIET. NOT JUST PARTIALLY GENDER-FLIPPED. NOT JUST QUEERED. EVERY. SINGLE. CHARACTER. I HAVE NOTHING AGAINST THOSE PRODUCTIONS THAT HAVE GENDER-FLIPPED A COUPLE CHARACTERS OR DONE ALL-FEMALE PRODUCTIONS OR QUEERED ROMEO AND JULIET ONLY. THOSE ARE GREAT. ROCK ON TO THOSE THAT HAVE FUCKED WITH GENDER AND HETERONORMATIVITY IN SHAKESPEARE!!!!!! BUT WHAT. I. WANT. IS. A ROMEO AND JULIET WHERE ROMEO IS A LADY AND SHE AGGRESSIVELY FALLS IN LOVE WITH PEOPLE AND SHE FALLS IN LOVE HARDCORE WITH THIS ONE GUY SO MUCH THAT SHE GOES TO HIS WINDOW AT NIGHT AND SHE GOES AFTER HIM FULL THROTTLE AND SHE IS NOT THOUGHT OF AS CRAZY BITCH SHE IS THOUGHT OF AS INSANELY ROMANTIC AND LIKEABLE AND LOVELY AND HEROIC AND DARING AND YOU JUST CAN’T HELP BUT FALL IN LOVE WITH HER BECAUSE SHE FEELS SO MANY FEELINGS . A ROMEO AND JULIET WHERE JULIET IS A PAMPERED, SHELTERED DUDE WHO IS NAIVE BUT ALSO HORNY AND JUST NEEDS TO BE PROTECTED SOMETIMES BECAUSE HE’S LIKE A PUPPY AND NOT IN A SAD, STUPID, ANNOYING KIND OF WAY, HE JUST DOESN’T GET OUT A LOT ‘CAUSE HE’S AN INTROVERT WHICH IS TOTES OKAY. AND HE COULD GO WITH THE LADY HE’S ENGAGED TO BUT SHE’S SO VANILLA AND WHEN ROMEO IS ALL LIKE “YOU’RE A FUCKING TREAT, YOU KNOW THAT?” HE GETS ALL BUTTERY ON THE INSIDES AND HE HAS TO FALL IN LOVE WITH HER BECAUSE HE’S NEVER GOT TO EXPLORE HIS BODY OR HIS FEELINGS BECAUSE SOCIETY WON’T LET HIM BECAUSE HE’S A MAN AND HAS VERY PROPER PARENTS. AnD ThEy STiLl FuCkING LoVe ThE SHIT OuTtA EaCh OtHeR. (until they die.)

A ROMEO AND JULIET WHERE THERE ARE BADASS LADY GANGS. BAD. ASS. LADY. GANGS. AND THE LADY GANGS FIGHT EACH OTHER WITH SWORDS OR CHAINS OR THEIR BODIES AND IT IS TOTALLY NORMAL EVEN IN A WORLD WITH MEN AND JUST AS THREATENING AS IF IT WERE GENTLEMAN GANGS. AND MERCUTIO IS JUST AS BAWDY AND UNAPOLOGETIC AND CHARISMATIC AND LIKE THE LADY FRIEND YOU WANT AT A PARTY BUT NO ONE THINKS SHE’S ANNOYING BECAUSE SHE’S A CONFIDENT LADY, THAT’S JUST HOW SHE IS AND WE LOVE HER FOR IT, LIKE CRASH ALL THE PARTIES YOU WANT MERCUTIO EVEN THOUGH YOU’RE A HOTHEAD AND THAT’S HOW YOU DIE BUT SHE’S STILL THE FLYEST AROUND AND SHE FUCKING LOVES HER LADY FRIENDS BECAUSE SHE IS A CLASS A LADY BUT ALSO A MESS BUT ALSO WHO WOULD NOT WANT TO BE HER?? AND BENVOLIO IS LIKE YOUR RATIONAL LADY FRIEND WHO IS JUST LIKE THERE FOR YOU, YOU KNOW? YOU NEED A LADY FRIEND WHO YOU CAN FUCKING COUNT ON AND SHE IS IT AND SHE IS LOYAL AND NO ONE KNOWS HOW THEY’D SURVIVE WITHOUT HER. AND THE NURSE IS JUST LIKE THE DUDE. LIKE HE’S THE BEST GUY AND HE’S THIS OLDER DUDE WHO JUST LIKE HAPPENS TO BE GOOD AT TAKING CARE OF PEOPLE BECAUSE SOME MEN JUST ARE OKAY AND THE WORLD THINKS HE’S A DOOFUS BECAUSE OF IT BUT NOT JULIET BECAUSE JULIET IS A GOOD DUDE AND THE NURSE IS KIND OF BOTH FATHER AND MOTHER TO HIM AND NO ONE THINKS HE’S BEEN EMASCULATED, HE STILL IDENTIFIES AS A MAN HE LIKES BEING A MAN BUT HE ALSO IS JUST SUCH A SOFTIE WHO LIKES TO BRING PEOPLE SOUP YOU KNOW????? AND TYBALT IS THIS WOMAN WHO HAS LIKE MAD PRIDE.  SHE’S LIKE THE ALPHA WARRIOR AND YOU DO NOT WANNA PISS HER OFF SHE KEEPS EVERYTHING RUNNING BUT SHE HAS A SOFT SPOT FOR HER LITTLE COUSIN CAUSE HE’S SUCH A WEE BABE.

AND THE PARENTS ARE FLIPPED TOO AND IT’S ACTUALLY DADDY CAPULET WHO IS THE ANXIOUS WRECK WHO REALLY CARES BUT ALSO LIKES NICE THINGS AND MAMA CAPULET IS THE ONE WHO GETS SHIT DONE IN FAIR VERONA AND IS REVERED AND RESPECTED I HONESTLY DON’T REMEMBER THE MONTAGUES BUT YEA THEY’D SWITCH TOO I GUESS THEY’RE COOL.

AND PETER IS THIS GIRL WHO JUST LIKE DOESN’T KNOW JACKSHIT. AND PARIS IS LITERALLY PARIS FROM GILMORE GIRLS. LOL. AND FRIAR LAWRENCE IS JUST LIKE MY GRANDMA. AND PRINCE(SSSSS) ESCALUS IS QUEEN BITCH IN CHARGE. (IS ESCALUS IMPORTANT? I DON’T REALLY REMEMBER.) BUT ANYWAY I WANT A WORLD WHERE MEN AND WOMEN ARE LIKE THIS IN A WORLD WHERE MEN AND WOMEN EXIST AND I WANT THIS AND I WANT THIS NOW AND I WANT THIS BECAUSE OF REASONS.

[f-tphotography-blog]

Without Water

[brendanweinhold]

My nephew helped make this.

[thisfeliciaday]

I had a day off this weekend from shooting Supernatural, and I was walking around downtown Vancouver on Saturday, sampling all the artisan coffee I could get my throat around. At one point I saw a pair of guys walking towards me wearing gamer shirts. Black short-sleeved, one Halo and one Call of...

[brendanweinhold]

1787

If you could be a part of the Philadelphia Convention (during which the Constitution was written), what language would you have attempted to add to, change in, or erase from the Constitution of the United States of America? Keep in mind that you are simply one member of this convention, and you have to convince the others, who are not from the future, like you are.

[ryannorth]

Okay, a bit more on why I’m so down on gendered pronouns!

WHAT’S A PRONOUN?

(Source is this weird make-your-own-bingo site. I don’t know how you would play this game.)

Pronouns are words like he, she, them, it, etc. They’re words that take the place of people, so we can say...

[brendanweinhold]

I think you should all come.

[gyzym]

The titles of this piece is: just shut up. After reading it, I hope you never tell anyone that.

First, a story. 

So, my first semester of my freshman year of college, I took this Intro to Women’s Studies class. The class met for five hours a week, one two hour session and one three hour session, and the breakdown of students was what I eventually discovered to be the typical sampling in any Women’s Studies class with no pre-recs at my mid-sized, southern Ohio state school. There were a number of girls who would become, or were already part of, the feminist advocacy groups on campus; there were a number of girls who would prove themselves to be opposed to feminism in both concept and practice, one of whom I distinctly recall giving a presentation on the merits of the “Mrs. Degree,” while my professor’s eye twitched in muted horror; there were a handful of girls and at least one guy I’d come to know later through assorted campus queer groups; and there were, of course, the three to six dudebros, self-admittedly there to “meet chicks,” all but one or two of whom would drop the class after the first midterm. At eighteen, I was myself a feminist in name but not in practice—I believed in the idea behind feminism (which is, for the record, that people should be on equal footing regardless of gender, not that we should CRUSH ALL MEN BENEATH THE VICIOUS HEELS OF OUR DOC MARTENS GLORY HALLELUJAH), but I didn’t actually know anything about it. I could not identify the waves of feminism. Intersectionality and how the movement is crap at it were not things of which I was aware. Never had I ever encountered the writings of bell hooks. In a lucky break, you do not need to know about the waves of feminism, or know what intersectionality is, or have read bell hooks to read this essay! (But you should read bell hooks. Everyone should read bell hooks. bell hooks is FUCKING AWESOME.) 

The first couple of weeks of this class were about what you’d expect. The professor was fun and engaging, but she was not exactly pulling out the eye-opening stops on our wide-eyed freshman asses. There were handouts. There were selections of the textbook for reading. There was a very depressing class about domestic violence, abuse, and rape that was the typical rattling off of terms and horrific statistics that everyone winced at, but that nobody really internalized. The dudebros snickered in the back corner, grouped together like they would be infested by cooties if they spread out, occasionally chiming in with helpful comments like, “Dude, the lady on the back of this book is smoking,” and getting turned down by each girl in the class, on whom they were hitting in what I can only assume was a pre-determined descending order of hotness. The queer kids, myself included, huddled in the other corner making pithy comments. The up-and-coming active feminists glared at the bros, who leered back, and the Mrs. Degree-friendly crowd mostly texted under their desks and made it very clear that they were only there for humanities credit. Again, it was a fairly typical southern Ohio state school class full of fairly typical southern Ohio state school freshmen. Nobody was super engaged, is what I am saying here. Nobody, myself included, was really eating it up with a spoon. 

And then one day, my professor opened the class with, “So, who here has seen Beauty and the Beast?” 

Read More

[brendanweinhold]

the Four Tree Plays folks volunteered this morning for a community garden near us in Hollywood.

[brendanweinhold]

http://igg.me/at/fourtreeplays

We're making some theatre. And our pitch is really cute and clever. Four tree plays, four writers, four actors for the Fringe Festival in 20 Fourteen in Hollywood. What a variety. One of them's about a tree hugger whose tree starts talking to him, and they don't get along as well as you might think they wood. Another is about trees who try (tree) online dating.  Another is a quiet piece about a man who visits a tree every day and why and what happens when someone else starts visiting that tree, and how their different relationships with the tree influences their relationship with each other. And the other is a whimsical piece about woodland critters having a good time and eating each other. The circle of life, baby.

[brendanweinhold]

Top Decking and a tournament!

For those of you who don't know, I play Eric on the Magic-centric web series Top Decking. So, Alex Kessler, who is one of the producers of the series asked, "Hey, wanna play a standard tournament on Saturday?" 

Of course I did. I'm not a standard tournaments kind of guy, really. I can count on one hand the number of Standard tournaments I've played in. During Alara block, I said to myself, "I'm going to do this!", and I play-tested with friends and put proxies in a deck for the first time and built my own take on Jund, and was really proud and excited for the Grand Prix... then I got appendicitis and couldn't go, and then I backpacked around the U.S., taught English in Germany, and moved to L.A. and now we're at today. Wow. 5 years goes by fast.

Anyways, I've always been a kitchen table and prereleases kind of guy.

So I went in with fairly low expectations for myself, intent mostly on enjoying the people and the playing. Alex had built a Blue Devotions deck for me. He picked me up early, we got registered, and then sat down to make a side-boarding guide.

I am sad that I haven't played more Theros or Born of the Gods. I've watched from afar, reading the mothership columns, MTGO release draft... wishing... but I haven't acquired any paper cards of my own. 

So, yeah. I'd never played with this deck before. Didn't know most of the cards. 

You know that HR Block commercial where they say Americans will lose billions of dollars by doing their own taxes? Brendans lost billions of bident and scry triggers that day.

But there was delight yesterday as well! My favorite moment... spoilers.

Round 1 was a mirror match in which my opponent put it succinctly. Whoever gets more Master of Waves wins... which was me.

Rounds 2-5 were a blur. I could hardly believe it. I was winning. Only once did I feel kind of bad about my win, because it was a mis-block by my opponent, and he had me dead-to-rights the next turn. Part of me wanted to let him take it back, since, after all, I was there to ... you know, promote the show and stuff, but the other part of me was thinking about how awesome it was that I was winning. MAN that stuff's addictive. (And lest you feel sorry for him, it's not like he let me draw cards when I missed my triggers or anything. Magic is a game of mistakes. In the aggregate, whoever makes fewer mistakes wins.)

Also! Once, I sat next to a man who knew the show. He told my opponent about it. My last game of the tournament, I lost to him. Hooray! By then, I was EXHAUSTED. So, if he's reading this, I'm sorry I didn't put up much of a fight. Even though we were battling for money (MONEY!), I... just... couldn't... think. That's what happens when you've never played a deck before, the sense memory isn't there. I hypothesize that I did well early because I was really trying to figure out how everything worked. It stuck on a game-by-game basis because I was relearning everything and processing and understanding it and I was fairly well-rested and well-fed. By the end, I had to operate on instincts I didn't have and that my opponents did have.

Round 6 is the turning point. I'm 5-0, up against Brian at Table 2, who eventually was in the Top 8. I could tell, playing him, that he knew his way around a deck, even though we both missed the fact that Master of Waves has pro red and so can't be targeted by Domri Rade. I won one game and lost two, then we talked about my sideboard. I think I did it all wrong. I probably should have left the deck almost the way it was. He thanked me for picking up my play pace. It must be a big thing that people slow-play. I know there was that big scandal about a pro who did it. Awful. There needs to be more emphasis on sportsmanship. Barrier to entry. It's part of why MTGO is so beloved by pros and amateurs alike. Still, I prefer the tangible.

Later, I saw him in the hall on my way to the bathroom. We talked a little. Shared stories about getting our Significant Other into the game, and also how we started, then I continued on to the bathroom. On my way back, he told me a guy had come up to him and said, "do you know who that was?" About me. I'm super famous, guys. That was my favorite moment of the day, the culmination of everything: going over and talking to Austin and his friends about Top Decking. I also got to chat with Ben and I even played against David. Good times, great web series. I'm totally famous. OH! And every time I turned a creature into a frog lizard, I used a token with my face on it. (I'm a beast, but creature type was never relevant.) That was awesome.

To recap: a 6-4 record is really amazing for me. And being 5-0 at one point! I went 2-1 against the mirror. While I wasn't up to battling UW control, the deck in more deft hands might've gotten to parity there (Judge's Familiar never got sacrificed even though there were opportunities for that. I just forgot that it could.). And my only other loss came at the hands of a Top 8 player.

Thank you, Wizards, Top Decking, Star City Games, and everybody I met yesterday. And thank you, Richard Garfield.

[brendanweinhold]

DIY: Testosterone Style: How to grow a beard for thoughtful contemplation

Edited by Andrew Sherman Music by Andrew Sherman Shot by Scott Seagren Featuring Brendan's Beard!