Someone sent me a link to this short TED talk by Paula Stone Williams
It’s very good.
The key quote I took from it was “What do any of us really know about the shoes in which we have never walked?”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lrYx7HaUlMY
I’ve been a long time fan of the manga Battle Angel Alita, known in Japan as Gunnm (銃夢 Ganmu, literally “gun dream”), by Yukito Kishiro.
Alita’s search for identity has been something extremely special and personal to me, and it is probably my favourite manga.
I have been aware of James Cameron’s love project to turn this into a live action film, and have followed its progress through Development Hell with interest.
So when the film finally hit cinemas, I approached it with some trepidation.
Here are my thoughts on it, now that I have seen it.
In this post, I buy a reproduction of a painting by Gil Elvgren, and trace some of the history behind it. I also have to modify the painting in order to be able to hang it.
Link
This article was published a year ago, and is still utterly superb.
The fight for transgender rights is an urgent battle against what some have called the last bastion of socially acceptable bigotry. If we take the notion seriously that all humans are due equal rights, as many of us do, we must care about the rights of transgender people. We are currently in a situation where transgender rights are so far behind other groups in society that it should be considered a crisis.
Read on…
tomsimsblog.wordpress.com/2018/01/02/what-you-need-to-know-about-transgender-rights/
I was at an antiques trade fair recently, and a few of the sellers had the odd fountain pen here and there. Nothing that caught my eye. But one had a reasonable collection and amongst them I spied a Sheaffer.
Why have I moved my blog?
Picture: WorldArtsMe
You may have noticed that the web address of this blog has changed!
Ever since I started this blog around 6 years ago, I have used WordPress via their free hosted offering at wordpress.com
It’s worked well enough for me, but since then I have become quite au fait with self-hosted WordPress and the power and flexibility that it gives. I use self-hosted WordPress on several other sites that I own, and have a web hosting package that allows me to host a number of websites.
Up until now, I’ve kept the Hay Llamas blog at wordpress.com out of inertia, despite owning the domain name hayllamas.com, but recently I have felt that WordPress spam you, my visitors, with way too much advertising. I don’t see a penny of that advertising either.
I read an article in The Guardian today about “Selfie Dysphoria”
Photograph: Linda Nylind/Elle Hunt/The Guardian
It’s an interesting article about how selfie filters are driving many people to use cosmetic surgery to make their face look more like their selfies, and how in the past people would bring photos of celebrities to a Cosmetic Surgeon whereas these days they are more likely to bring selfies with filters applied.
There is a “10 year challenge” doing the rounds on Social Media at the moment, which is fairly timely for me as it is now 10 years since I first came out in public.
No new self portraiture pics right now, I’m afraid. I have a cyst / lump on my eyelid at the moment which means I can’t really wear makeup. It’s affecting my vision too, which is a little worrying.
