so this is a thing

apples, pinball, terriers, user interface design, whatevs.

[kirabug-tumbles]

First full day the dogs are back after boarding. 6:45am: I let them outside. 6:55am: Myka runs by with a full grown rabbit in her mouth. Welcome home.

#ThingsISaidToTheDogsToday

[damnfandomproblems]

Fandom Problem #15,174:

"This is a bad ship, because it's clearly based on lust instead of respect."

"Ughhh why do people ship these two? They respect each other, it ruins it if it's a ship!"

I think it's very concerning that people think respect and attraction cannot simultaneously exist.

[kirabug-tumbles]

Ok if you honestly don’t believe respect and attraction can commingle I need you to go read @tkingfisher ‘s Saint of Steel series because it is slow burn romance fantasy mystery please ignore the decapitated heads. If the protagonists of these books respected each other any more they’d never get out of fucking (and if they respected each other a smidge less, as the old joke goes, they’d be banned from ever going to that Howard Johnson’s again)

Ship ‘em with respect, ship ‘em without respect, just ship ‘em so they stop clawing the insides of your brain pan

[stingchronicity]

i always see “tag fav fruit” posts but i’ve never seen a fav veg post so rb & tag your favourite vegetable

[walk-up-songs]

[one single bloodcurdling agonized scream] ok time to lock in

[emryses]

listen to me. this is my final message to you. when you are at your lowest a fictional guy will come to you and when that happens you must start putting them in situations. this is the meaning of life.

[kirabug-tumbles]

Shit, that guy showed up when I was 13 and he still hasn’t left.

[morhath]

I hate when king arthur has all these fussy little steps in the instructions and you're like "no way do these fussy little steps matter" but you try it and they do. they matter so much.

[bookaddict7342]

I thought you meant Camelot quests and I was like "that's fair, 'never pick a four leaf clover on the last Wednesday of the month' IS a fussy little step that shouldn't matter" but then I was like "wait isn't that also a flour company"

[morhath]

nooo I am not a beleaguered knight of the round table I am making elaborate focaccia 😭

[kirabug-tumbles]

Remember kids, cooking is for fucking around. Baking is for scales and measures.

[hear-me-out-contest]

Hear me out...

Nicobar Pigeon - nature

Tiramisu - food

Voting ended onJun 26

What is a Hear Me Out?

They can be considered attractive in some way to you (but often not conventionally

They are someone/thing that you would not expect to be found attractive

Round 3, Poll 8/32

[kedreeva]

The nicobar pigeon pigeon is somehow losing in this, the month of Pride. I believe we can change this.

The closest living relative of the dodo bird did not have to go so hard, but here we are.

[kirabug-tumbles]

Oh thank heaven it builds a real nest. Ok the bird gets my vote.

[apolladay]

Question of the day: what was the last thing you ordered online?

I ordered some bungee cords :)

[itsalwaysdark]

you have to be careful reading too many things that are good/smart/well-written bc then you encounter something that isnt and you get confused like ? why didnt they just make this good ? were they stupid

[guerrillatech]

[utah-mountain-drifter-deactivat]

[poorghost]

no one follows the trees warning

[rapidashrider]

You know the parable about how the foolish man built his house upon sand and the wise man built his house upon rock and it’s always about having a sturdy foundation well there is also the fact of location which is that the sand probably used to be rock except it’s been eroded to sediment because it’s a FUCKING FLOODPLAIN

[whereserpentswalk]

flood Plain perfec t size for put town in to b\uild! inside very Soft and Comfort town safe happy put town in Floodplain. Put Town In Floodplain. no problems ever in flloodplain because good Shape and Support for town roads weak of big town citizens. Afloodplain yes a place for a town put town in floodplain can trust floodplain for giveing good place for town. friend flood

[curlsandstems]

They DID that!!!

[ariestess]

It took me about 15 seconds in to realize what was happening in this vid, but the second I did, I legit came. This is… I got chills and got so much validation for my theories about tap and pretty much any genre of music here…

[telegantmess]

Tap is probably one of the dance styles that gets the least amount of credit four how badass it is

[royalnugget42]

Holy hell-

[enigmatic-mystery-777]

Sorry I don’t get it?

[royalnugget42]

They’re tap dancing, a kind of dancing typically associated with being old-fashioned and kind of silly. Personally, even tap dancing to old music is awesome in my eyes, but this is on a totally new and exciting level

[amuseoffyre]

The thing about tap is that it’s so often seen as a fancy, old-fashioned dainty dance that only posh (and generally white) people do in tuxedos but it didn’t used to be the case.

Way back in the early days, it was where black performers in Vaudeville were legendary for it in Jazz and Jive routines. At about 1:37, this is where the Nicholas brothers go off.

It’s such an expressive and joyful kind of dance and matches so well with hip hop beats and rhythm, which is why the modern reworking of it is so awesome.

[bogleech]

Im sure a lot of people also watch the op video and they assume that “clap” sound is part of the music just because a LOT of modern music samples that sound and in some music it is just the sound of hands clapping, but no that is a sound being made by all their shoes at once.

[meinenaffenhosen]

one of my favorite syncopated ladies routines

[madgastronomer]

Has the world forgotten Gregory Hines?

[elljayvee]

I am gritting my teeth at the mere suggestion that tap is primarily associated with dainty white people.

Tap is a distinctive American art form that comes from a blending of African dance traditions with Irish dance traditions. It was developed by Black and white dancers and came up alongside and deeply entwined with jazz.

Certainly the tap that ends up in musical theater often seems old-fashioned and white but that’s a musical theater issue, not a tap issue. That is only one small part of tap, which continues to have a strong African-American tradition.

The Nicholas Brothers, above, are in a clip from the film Stormy Weather, which has an almost entirely African-American cast. Some of the other scenes in the film include Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, one of the greatest tap artists of all time. He was very well-known generally and was in quite a few Shirley Temple movies in his day. (Shirley Temple, herself, was a tap dancer – which I’ll be real is probably contributing to people thinking it’s old-fashioned and white, because it’s easy to forget the Black man dancing alongside her, I guess.)

Here’s Bill Robinson with Cab Calloway in Stormy Weather – he’s performing a variation of his famous “stair dance” in parts of this clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY3fbvBRiaM

Here’s probably the most widely famous version of the “stair dance”, from The Little Colonel:

There’ve been a lot of white tap dancers through the years – see, for example, everyone’s favorite clip of two men torturing a speech therapist:

… but a lot of its most famous practitioners have been Black and it’s weird to me that people don’t know that.

Have a scene from Tap (1989).

[elljayvee]

Today I’d like to talk a little about Savion Glover, who is one of (if not THE MOST) famous living tap artists. This is from 2002:

and this from 2014-ish:

And if you are saying, well, I never heard of this guy, I guess today you are going to learn about this guy. But I bet you know THIS guy:

Mumble’s dance is choreographed by, and mo-capped from, Savion Glover.

This guy. This guy is SKILLED, ok? He’s in his 50s now; he’s been a professional tapper for over FORTY YEARS – he made his Broadway debut at age 11. He’s in that movie, Tap, that I linked a clip from above. Sometimes his tap seems a little old-fashioned – other times it is like nothing you’ve ever seen before. This is intentional – he’s paying tribute to his teachers and tappers of the past by learning and performing their signature moves, but also he’s got his own style.

It is absolutely worth going through whatever you can find on YouTube. Look for “Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk” – he was Tony nominated for the choreo & his performances in this musical. (The MDA telethon performance above is an excerpt – he did these for several years on the telethon.)

I like this one, because you can watch modern African-American tap alongside modern-traditional Irish dance and you can see that these are related, but distinct, art forms. They share a common ancestor, but they’re also so different. Right around 4 minutes, Colin Dunne (the man in the cover image below) and Savion Glover start dancing together, trading off, and it’s AMAZING.

Sidenote, if anyone ever hears of a revival of “Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk,” please tell me, I want to see it liiiiiiive.

Let’s finish off with Glover’s special guest performance at the Stockholm International Tap Dance Festival last year:

[gallusrostromegalus]

Let’s Have Another Bullet Point Story, Courtesy of a Friend

So I have a friend that used to be in the tumblers troupe at the renfaire as a contortionist

We were chatting online and she told me to tell you all this story.

I love Kat dearly

but she forgets that she’s stupid strong and hypermobile

so one day she throws her back out

bad enough that she needed painkillers and couldn’t stand upright

“But also I needed Tampons and like.  A Burrito, real bad.”

she’s flat on her back in her apartment when she decides this

and, in an

impeccable

leap of reasoning, decides

“I can’t roll my back forward to sit/stand up like normal.

But I can ARCH my back just fine.

SO 

I’m going to do that and get on my hands and feet in a stomach-in-the-air this-shit-belongs-in-a-horror-movie-type pose,

And amble on down to the 7-11”

“And get me that Burrito”

It is, 

for context, 

after midnight in July during a wildfire so it’s hot as satan’s own asshole and the moon is red and shit’s already generally cursed.

Imagineyou are some poor sap working nights at the world’s deadest 7-11, and you hear the door jangle but you don’t see anyone’s head over the counters.

Whatever.

Except you keep hearing noises like there’s someone in the next aisle over.  

Fucking around in the burrito section

It’s also worth mentioning that Kat

1. sings whatever earworm is currently running through her head when she’s not paying attention

2. sounds EXACTLY like some kind of creepy child from a horror movie when doing so

tonight’s song is something from veggietales.

DUDE ACTUALLY STANDS HIS GROUND

and/or is really fucking high and isn’t sure if he’s tripping balls or notanyway

Kat goes up to pay for her burrito and tampons

She realizes the counter presents something of a challenge, and then demonstrates for me on her kitchen table at 4AM during a different july wildfire, 

exactly 

how she used the shelves to climb up the counter 

like one of the boston robotics beasties

dude stares at her for like, five minutes and says.

“Register’s broke.”

“Oh No!” Says Kat. “Just Take ‘em.” “Really?  I can leave cash-you don’t have to give me change I don’t want you to get in trouble with your manager.” “…Nah.” “Oh!  OK!  Thank you!” “Yeah ok bye.”

Shortly after she arrived back at the apartment, she got a text on her phone from the campus security about  "A Suspicious Individual” at tle 7-11. 

It took her 

FOUR

FUCKING 

YEARS

 to realize she was the suspicious individual

[ethanrayne]

every time this crosses my dash, all i can think is “i’d love to hear this from the perspective of the cashier who encountered some sort of demon buying a burrito on the night shift”

[cracksandcraters]

@danphanto

[kirabug-tumbles]

current status: youtu.be/b1eZLCxvp…

[scragon]

"Sorry i reported you" scam making it's rounds here.

I'm not even banned.

Vague details.

Doesn't just start with the reason for contact.

You submit help to www.tumblr.com/support or help.tumblr.com. NOT the links provided in the photos.

the proof of email photo is crunchy as hell. Looks old too.

Why do i have to contact them to confirm my innocence. lmao.

What is the scam? You rush to prove your innocence to the email and they will respond back to you needing to verify your login info and then steal your account. easy. Discord and Steam have a version of this too.

[bisexualbaker]

[Image one: Message from an account that has been following OP for less than a year. Image two: The "person" at the account explaining that they "accidentally reported" OP, and providing an incorrect email address to contest the report at. Image three: A fake email screencap provided by the messaging account, supposedly from Tumblr, informing the messaging account that they have reported OP and there are steps to take if they didn't mean to do it. End ID.]

[bisexualbaker]

Oh wow, glad I reblogged this, since I think someone may be trying it on me right now!

[the-big-mood]

It became impossible to lose them on the evening walk. 😂

[sins-sanctuary]

Awe ☺️

[kirabug-tumbles]

Amount of time my Jack Russells would let those shoes live: 3 seconds.

[phantomrose96]

me at 10: well really what I want to do with my life is cure cancer, and be an extremely famous scientist, and discover things that change the world, and win a Nobel Prize, and be a novelist, and

me at 20: so what I think I want is to have a successful career, and work hard for promotions, and establish myself in my industry, and make a good life for myself, and sure it's not curing cancer but it's more realistic

me at 30: I want to pet my kitty cat. I want to go on long bike rides when the weather is nice. I want to roll around on the grass. I want to cook good food. I want to clean my house. I want to get a good vacuum. I want to sleep when I'm tired. I want to never open Microsoft Teams again.

[kirabug-tumbles]

me since 16: I want to make it through tomorrow. I want to make it through tomorrow. I want to make it through tomorrow.

[dduane]

Just a note for the local crowd

Every now and then a difficult period like this comes along: so it's time to request some assistance.

I've kind of been neglecting my vision for the past year or so, aware that I needed new glasses (and to go have a consult for possible eye-related surgery), but putting it off... and now the situation has, as it were, come home to roost.

The other day, when I was typing something and then (to check it before posting) had to pick up the Mac and hold it up to my nose to see what I'd typed... I realized that if this went on much longer, even with dictation (because after you dictate, you still have to edit...), I wouldn't be able to write.

That would be bad.

I need to go see my Eye Lady, get examined, and get both sets of glasses re-fitted with new prescriptions. This—as usual, each time it needs to be done every year and a half or two years, due to Weird Eyes—is going to run into a low-four-figure-ish kind of money. And due to other recent unexpected medical expenses, right now there's not enough dosh around (or spondoolicks or whatever term you prefer...) to get things sorted.

Therefore: can I get people interested in keeping a writer, you know, writing (as I've got three novels working at once at the moment...), to consider doing one of these things?

(a) Go over to Ebooks Direct and buy a book. (Or a bundle. Or a gift card for somebody else who might like my work.) And if you do: thanks so much!

(b) Stop by my Ko-Fi and drop a little something in the pot. It'll be most appreciated.

Support Diane Duane

Support Diane Duane

And if you can't do either of the above:

(c) Reblog this and let other people see it?

Whatever you do: thanks very much!

[dduane]

Just to quickly update folks (as it’s been a crazy day): Thanks to all of you, matters are much improved. I have a call in to my Eye Lady: we’ll soon see what can be sorted out.

Meanwhile: Thank you SO MUCH. ❤️ …More detail shortly.