Gothic Charm School: An Essential Guide for Goths and Those Who Love Them by Jillian Venters
My review rating: 4 of 5 stars
Simply put, this should be highly recommended, if not required reading, not just for goths, but also for anyone curious about the goth community, whether because they are personally interested or because they have an acquaintance, friend, or loved one (spouse, significant other, boy- or girlfriend, relative, child, or secret crush) who counts themselves among the spooky set.
Miss Manners’ more somber-dressed and bat-festooned doppelgänger, the Lady of the Manners, has adapted from and expanded upon columns from her long-running website and assembled a delightful collection of advice for the goth and goth-friendly. Covering everything from the basics (“The difference between being a Goth, a NotAGoth, and not being a Goth yourself but being Goth-friendly”) to social etiquette both online (“The Internet is not Real Life (with an aside about the Great Flounce-Off)”) and off (“What to do when people ask why you’re dressed like that”) to parenting (“How to show support to your babygoth or babybat without relinquishing the keys to the hearse, and everything you need to know to Not Freak Out”), Gothic Charm School quickly becomes, in many small and a few not-so-small ways, the very “Goth handbook” that the Lady of the Manners so often reminds us does not exist.
I can’t go back in time twenty years and hand this book to my teenaged self (more’s the pity), but I canquite heartily recommend this to both old and new members of the goth community, as well as those around them who just might not quite get it.
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Posted in Books.
Tagged with Books, gothic charm school, seagoth.
Sometime between June 30th and July 1st, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!
- The Slow Reversal of Periods and Quotation marks: "In the past, total integrity of the greater ideas within a missive was required, hence, something set off in quotation marks framed the complete thought, including a period or comma. But as technology advanced, the need of technical speech developed. Here, total integrity of the letters themselves is required. A trailing character within a quotation, required by grammatical tradition, could introduce unnecessary error to the data." I've been using this style (formally called logical punctuation off-and-on for years when the situation called for it (especially, for instance, when writing URLs or code).
- The Boys Club: I wish that I'd one, discovered this post when it was posted, and two, had the time to actually read through the many, many comments, but this is MetaFilter's discussion about Pixar's lack of female lead characters (a recurring thread on my blog).
- 16 Bitchin’ Commands and Shortcuts for Twitter: "I love a shortcut, and regularly make use of a range of keyboard shortcuts on Twitter. There are more of them than you might imagine. As such I have aggregated a bunch of commands to provide you with one handy cut-out-and-keep / 'bookmark on Delicious' guide. "
- Fallen Princesses: "I explored the original brothers Grimm's stories and found that they have very dark and sometimes gruesome aspects, many of which were changed by Disney. I began to imagine Disney's perfect Princesses juxtaposed with real issues that were affecting women around me, such as illness, addiction and self-image issues."
- Supervolcano May Be Brewing Beneath Mount St Helens: "IS A supervolcano brewing beneath Mount St Helens? Peering under the volcano has revealed what may be an extraordinarily large zone of semi-molten rock, which would be capable of feeding a giant eruption. If the structure beneath the three volcanoes is indeed a vast bubble of partially molten rock, it would be comparable in size to the biggest magma chambers ever discovered, such as the one below Yellowstone National Park."
Posted in Delicious.
Sometime between June 26th and June 30th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!
- LANL Scientist Makes Radio Waves Travel Faster Than Light: "Einstein predicted that particles and information can't travel faster than the speed of light — but phenomenon like radio waves? That's a different story, said Singleton, a Los Alamos National Laboratory Fellow. Singleton has created a gadget that abuses radio waves so severely that they finally give in and travel faster than light. "
- Picasa Web Albums - Pride 09: Steve Barta's shots of the "Dark Side of the Rainbow" — the seagoth contingent in this year's Pride parade. Looks like a good turnout! I missed it this year, but should be back out with everyone next year!
- Fake Photojournalism Wins: "I think what they've done is not to make brilliant photojournalism, but to make brilliant art. There was certainly a significant price to be paid for that art, or perhaps many prices: the reputation of the award, the reputation of the judges, even their own reputations perhaps—and only time will tell—but they've surely made some brilliant statements about the nature of such imagery, called into question the cliched nature of the traditional canons recognizing that work, and made us all pause, even if just for a moment, to consider what photojournalism really is."
- Giving Up My iPod for a Walkman: "It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette."
- "A Barkeeper Entering the Kingdom of Heaven": Did Mark Twain Really Hate Jane Austen?: "Twain marveled that Austen had been allowed to die a natural death rather than face execution for her literary crimes. 'Her books madden me so that I can't conceal my frenzy,' Twain observed, apparently viewing an Austen novel as a book which 'once you put it down you simply can't pick it up.' In a letter to Joseph Twichell in 1898, Twain fumed, 'I have to stop every time I begin. Everytime I read 'Pride and Prejudice' I want to dig her up and beat her over the skull with her own shin-bone.'"
Posted in Delicious.
A couple of weekends ago, Prairie and I took our first minibreak in a long time, heading out with her dad to the Olympic National Park. We camped out at the Sol Duc Campground, just a few minutes away from the Sol Duc Hot Springs, where we spent a number of hours soaking in the natural hot pools. We took a number of short hikes around the campground area, and drove out to the coast to hike along Rialto Beach.
Not surprisingly, there were a lot of photos taken — the full photoset from the weekend is now up on Flickr.
Posted in Life, Photography.
Tagged with lon, me, minibreak, olympic national park, prairie, rialto beach, sol duc, vacation.
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