#vogue online is trash

[cancmbyn]

NO, ffs Vogue, this is just trash.

I feel personally traumatized by you using Tim’s own words - a reply to an answer from the CMBYN press tour - to make you sound so hip and angsty.

And I’m not Timothée Chalamet.

Talk about taking things out of context.

Sad.

[roo-bastmoon]

LOCK IT DOWN, Y'ALL

Puppykitties, I do not mean this harshly, but distractions, drama, and sabotage happen with every comeback and never more so than with Jimin.

We are in the fight of our lives for placement on the charts and awards on music programs. We need fewer filtered streams and much higher sales.

WE HAVE MONEY TO SPEND FOR JIMIN AND VERY FEW TO STEP UP AND MAKE AN ACCOUNT TO BUY:

We absolutely cannot focus on trash talk and ship discourse right now.

Yes, I know today there was a lot of excitement. Joon, Yoongi, Tae, JK, and others (many others in the industry) went to Harry Styles' concert today and it very much appears that Jimin and J-Hope did not. How do I know? Because there's photos of the Tannies on their personal time all over my timeline when there should be screenshots of streaming and voting.

It's disappointing because Jungkook just got done saying he was human too and asking us not to stalk him during his private time. I know some folks feel like if you're out in public, you are "fair game." But that's my point: they aren't game, they aren't prey--they are people and they deserve to be able to hang out with their friends and not have it scrutinized and weaponized. So just know it's always best to let THEM be the ones to share such info, like Joon and Tae did on their insta.

You best believe, the more we pressure them like this, the less we'll get of them.

The last time we saw Jikook together off-schedule, just the two of them alone, they got in a car to leave from the airport in April of 2022. A few days later, the gossip rags sabotaged Jimin's first OST With You with a bullshit scandal about missing insurance premium payments and his apartment "seizure" (on paper).

And ever since that day, we have not seen Jikook hang out in any personal capacity, unless you count the arcade in DC with Hobi and Her. Not once have we seen them alone. POINTEDLY.

There's been blurry CCTV photos of two people in a mini mart and whispers from K forums of folks seeing them around the neighborhood, but nothing concrete; they don't even mention each other in TMIs any more.

We KNOW they have hung out, as per inferences from their family, tattoo artist, and boxing coach, but no solid evidence from the primary source, even when directly asked. Again, POINTEDLY.

And yet when they are together for a work thing or online, they get along like a house on fire. They slap butts and tap hands and do cute things for each other's birthdays and get into giggle fits and compliment each other and flirt like crazy on WeVerse. Jungkook has issued several emphatic invitations for Jimin to come to him and told us to look forward to his teaser at midnight.

But they aren't sharing their relationship with us like they used to, so we honestly do not know if they hang out in person much these days.

P.O.I.N.T.E.D.L.Y.

Not because there's any indication of bad blood or a whiff of a breakup. Our little perfectionist is booked and busy, and our golden maknae was taking time to recharge.

You need to remember that since solo era was mentioned, Jimin has been writing, composing, and recording his own songs.

He's traveled abroad multiple times--Chicago, LA, NYC, Paris--to name a few.

He's hosted people who have traveled to Korea to work with him.

The producers admonished him for not taking breaks to eat or shower and in fact sleeping in the studio for many nights.

He's had to rehearse for music shows, concerts, his collab, and his own music videos.

He's been training so hard on new choreo that he was in too much pain to join Jin for his birthday and you KNOW how our boy feels about his members' birthdays.

He's filmed RUN content and commercials and a documentary and all sorts of stuff for his own album.

He's had work as brand ambassador for Dior and Tiffany's beyond just Fashion Week, which was huge.

I've lost count of the number of high-end photoshoots he's done for Vogue, W, Elle, and I don't know what all else.

The man JUST got off a plane the day before from traveling half-way around the world to interview with and perform for Fallon for TWO NIGHTS.

If I were him, I wouldn't dash over to a packed concert less than 24 hours later, either. Doesn't mean I don't love my members, or my partner, or Styles. It means I'm TIRED and I'm protecting my health and energy.

Especially considering there are appearances on television coming up and god knows what else to promote FACE.

AND FACE IS WHAT WE SHOULD BE FOCUSED ON.

I love you all, but I swear to God, if you give your time and energy to the assholes on the timeline attacking Jikook, you are robbing Jimin of the time and energy you should be giving to voting, streaming, buying, and hyping FACE. Which is what they want. They want to siphon that energy from you. Please don't be stupid.

We are grasping for every INCH of space on the charts up against absolute giants this and next week. It would be different if all of ARMY got behind Jimin 24/7 but you know how many little 7s actually behave when push comes to shove. To say nothing of the antis, mantis, multis, and cult working against him with purpose.

Please don't let this kind of crap sabotage Jimin's hard work. Celebrate the fact that some BTS members got to hang out at a concert, and honor the fact that some BTS members had other things to do.

PLEASE snap out of it and stick to our goals. We can debate Jikook all day long after FACE is safely to bed. FOCUS FOCUS FOCUS.

We are in lockdown.

SO LOCK THAT SHIT DOWN.

Love, Roo

[annbourbon]

My Journey (Fashion Design)

I'm obsessed with fashion, please let me know if there's a 101 class, blog or something else cause I want to know more! Keep learning...

So far what I've been doing it's:

* Learn how to draw (actually taking classes and I'm currently an art student)

* Reading books 📚 about the topic (if you all want me to come up with some titles I'll make it happen, just let me know in the comments) but here are some for now:

♡ The Sewing Bible by Ruth Singer

♡ Overdressed: The Shockingly High Cost of Cheap Fashion by Elizabeth L. Cline

♡ Fashion Design: The Complete Guide by John Hopkins

♡ So you want to Work in Fashion?: How to Break into the World of Fashion and Design (Be What You Want) by Patricia Wooster

♡ Trash to Trend (a doctoral thesis, Estonian Academy of Arts)

♡ Patternmaking for Fashion Design

♡ Sewing for Fashion Designers by Annette Fischer

♡ Atlas of Fashion Designers by Laura Ecceiza.

(I have more of course, but the list is quite long.)

* Downloading some apps (Vogue Runway happened to be so interesting!)

* Learn how to draw online thanks to several YouTubers + downloading some drawing apps

I still suck, but I'll get better!

* Listening a lot of music

* Learn some psychology and color analysis

* Read books that have nothing to do with it such as novels, because that makes my heart flutter and my mind gets creative. Sometimes I even try to draw something that some of the characters might be wearing...

* Bought myself a sewing machine

* I'm trying to have enough patience to figure out how to use it (thanks again YouTubers, for making my life so easy 😭🤧)

* Acknowledging how fashion industry especially fast fashion is contaminating our planet (check out this blog!) and trying to figure out the way to start with sewing but I'm too intimidated by it rn 😭💀

* Studying how to re-do my portfolio, (because thank you internet for existing!)

* Studying make up on my own and learning some of the basics of cosmetology, because that's another passion of mine.

* Studying business and fashion marketing

* Realizing that technology is advancing so fast, nowadays there's even sprays that can create dresses or AI combining with holograms that will make our life as designers a bit more easy when choosing a fabric. But they can also put everything at risk if there's nothing to protect us as humans that create these beautiful clothes we use every day.

Keep in mind that I'm a self taught student. Sometimes I take classes to cover certain aspects but I don't think I am an expert at all in the field. If you have a recommendation, a comment or something you want to share to help me with my path I would really appreciate the feedback.

I'm currently looking for YouTubers that help me covering the basics of sewing and learning about fabrics, especially about fabrics! I'll keep y'all posted.<3

[hospitalterrorizer]

diary117

1/8-9/2024

monday - tuesday

i know why i was so tired yesterday, now.

i am sick once again, my whole body hurts and my nose is hard to breathe through and stuff, i feel like i'm always about to have a nosebleed, my throat hurts too. i love to live. i am so glad annoying cokeheads got me sick.

anyway today i was looking at old scans of fashion mags from south korea/china (probably hong kong i'd guess but no one specified) and japan (inescapable). i'll post some of my fav pics:

spur - japan - i like this last one because it gives me a fun idea for cover art, not the image itself, though it helps w/ pose ideas or whatever, but little watermark someone put up onto it. i think i need to do that w/ the photo i take of myself for the album art, have that there in pixelated text.

harper's bazaar - china

fhm - china - this one's super weird, the last image especially, hard to tell exactly what they were reaching for, the strangeness/relative uncanniness of these photos / defamiliarization of a magazine's approach to sex sells and whatever turning so genuinely weird and offputting feels artistically useful. it's so wholly gaudy and disorienting. weird stuff.

w - south korea

vogue girl - south korea - the scans of this mag are all super crazy, honestly, i didn't expect these all to be so interesting and good.

cosmopolitan - china - i can't tell if this one's text is part of the image or not but it's maybe my favorite part, how it's so ugly beside everything, the really strange gradient, too.

fruits - japan - i didn't realize this one continued through to 2007, really crazy, you only ever see the y2k stuff get passed around really. these outfits are super cute but like that one spur scan w/ the user's watermark, the watermarks here of this website are really interesting to me, i think i also want to stick some weird watermark onto the picture i take, i don't know what i'll call the fake site or whatever but i kind of want it to maybe be something ridiculous/violent in another language. i'd also probably do it in like 128x128 and upscale the text, and instead of having it be something white w/ lowered opacity, i'd try to index it so it's dithered white pixels, instead of smeary transparent text, and then upscale that.

the watermarking stuff is interesting, it's interesting that these scans of magazines that people used to create a sense of self/consume/receive what they ought to be / do are then turned into a kind of capital, at least when it's a website, to get people to refer back to the site/increase traffic, likely get people to pay money to not have to see the watermarks. it's a fun thing to play at, to me, the accumulation of basically trash information, the trading of images and their valuation. scans of magazines online are kind of like trading cards, it seems like, there's stuff uploaded on archive.org but not as much as anyone would hope, at least with this niche stuff. and there too, the safeguarding of images from being stolen, is sometimes present. i know they keep vogue locked up on there, same with a lot of books, you can't rip books out easily, i mean sometimes people do, but i don't try to do that really.

so en magazine - japan - another example of the watermarks on 2 of the 3 pics, this is what i'm imagining i'll try to approximate the above methods and stuff. also i really love how so en seems to really go in on a kind of fucked up revival of the 60s, the above range from like 07 to 2013.

re: music today, i did 2 tracks, i wanted to do more but i was getting hit like a truck by illness in the middle of the day. i think they've both turned out pretty good, maybe both need a little help w/ getting the kicks louder, but idk, my ears are maybe a bit messed up when trying to do that kinda thing. but i have to proceed. tomorrow i think i'll have to take care of this really tiny thing w/ a song, to get it right, and then maybe 2 other tracks. i am eventually gonna have to get back to my big problem track (really there are 2) but maybe by then i'll have a way better idea what i'm doing.

i am so sick, there's more i wanted to say, though. i read this pretty, frustrating, i guess, comic, tonight. someone posted it saying something like "this says a lot about being trans in north america" or whatever, and it mostly doesn't but it's interesting i guess to read something like that and think about why/how i feel alienated from ever being able to say anything stable about my own identity/gender. the frustration mostly though comes from this sense that everything's too perfect, the relations between characters are too neat and the things they know are too easy, almost, at one point a character looks at kiwifarms, and it's like, is this kind of person, because the comic is kind of working in types, the sort to so easily know about that. like, i dunno, it feels too easy, it seems like something find out about, when they're in the middle of the kind of thing that character was in the midst of, which would have been more interesting. but overall idk, there's a certain way of interfacing w/ oneself/other present in the comic, the sort of types it runs through, and stuff, it creates distance, even though i can sit there and be like, oh i know this type of person, i've met someone like that, or even just, i've seen this kind of thing from a distance. it's valuable to reflect on, because i try writing in similar directions sometimes maybe, i don't want to rely on types totally, i get why a comic would, in prose fiction it's better to get away from that but there's just stuff like that. really what i'm reflecting on, in my inability to say anything stable about myself, like, i can't say: i'm a girl, i'm a boy, i'm a man (speaking honestly, man is what i never want to be, i don't think i ever say i am one), i'm a woman (i don't really know what being one means, maybe, i'd need someone to tell me (and this throws up the whole issue of why girl/boy, that feels weird to me, i'm 25, i'm something else (but what, and like, i dunno))), without ever having to contradict it right after, i just want to be what i am without what feels like interference, but 'cis' is an interference too, i'm not cis, i know that, there's nothing else to know i think. anyway, because of that, when i write characters, the ones i'm writing as/using my personal life for, i can't really gender them, they can't gender themselves, they just are, no matter what, people stick things to them and they all let it linger, or they're troubling themselves over if they pass or not but that's something internal and particular. anyway, i guess there's a thought, where by never really saying anything outright, is that a cowardice, where i let the idea of normalcy/being normal creep in, i don't think so, i don't think i'm normal, or i don't think ultimately i help things be normal with my presence. i dunno though. i kind of hate the "some men are just feminine and are actually super normal" thing, not because it's untrue, but to say there's no complication there, and also that this isn't just a cope or whatever, is frustrating. it's frustrating because people are at once alienated from being 'trans' (a broad thing that can mean all sorts of things really) and wanting to still be seen as cis so people don't think you're weird. it's not something i hate the people that feel that way for, i hate the world that makes that desirable.

anyway, i dunno. it's basically all complex and fucked up. sometimes i think of myself in percentages but putting it to text feels like a commitment, i don't ever want to be committed to performing some percentage of gender. i really just want gender to disappear as a thing, but i also, obviously, really want to look a certain way, be seen a certain way, because of stuff that happened to me as a kid and stuff i saw and whatever, it's like necessary, i have to. no one has a gun to my head except i feel like one shows up when i'm ugly. i'm on a tightrope, i was put there, it's not my fault, a lot of people are on it too, like everybody is, it's terrible.

i think if tiqqun were writing currently on the young girl, they might be compelled to speak on trans stuff, but i think all they might say ultimately is that basically every human on earth is on hrt. they would be right. although that makes it sound like i think hrt is bad or something. or maybe not. i think hrt is good and i think about trying it sometimes, or not trying, i'd have to commit, that seems less scary than the percentages though because i could still really be whatever/nothing/everything. everyone's on hrt but they receive it via socially enforced norms/reality stamping down on you, you will conform to standards and so on and whatever. sometimes i think gender euphoria is really a negative thing, in ways, if you think about cis men and their gender euphoria, where they might get it from, being hard laborers or beating women, basically suffering and then throwing it around, things become more frightening. i experience euphoria when people stare at my ass and i want to kill them but i also want people to stare. when my gf is transfixed by me, it's really nice, but it's also scary, why do i want to be totally inert and just looked at. it makes me wretch but i can't help it, really. i need attention all the time. i'm writing about how fucked up my insides are, i'm so histrionic.

that's one thing on my mind. the other really is how much i hate being sick and how i am like a sick and withering whateverrrr. my head hurts distantly, in a threeway sort of thing, different points of penetration along my brain and stuff.

so, i should like, sleep, probably.

so:

byebye!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[winmoreacademy]

Ways To Raise Environmentally-Conscious Children

A healthy environment with clean air and water, green spaces devoid of plastic, is an indicator of people’s quality of life. As someone who is doing their part in conserving nature and ensuring it is sustained for future generations, you may want to get your children on the path to green living.

Here is how you can raise eco-conscious and environment-friendly kids:

Be     an eco-role model     Creating habits inside and outside the house has     got a lot to do with the lifestyle that you lead. Your children are bound to     follow suit when they see you avoiding plastic straws, have more of home     cooked food or even rely on public transport for commute.

Teach     them the importance of trees     Planting a tree in your backyard with your child is     a great way of showing them the need for more trees. When you have a great     time digging, planting and watering, they may even become excited about     contributing towards the environment. As they get involved in the whole     process and become eco-aware, they learn to appreciate and value what they     have more.

Conserve     energy     Do you remember to switch off the lights when they     are not needed? Turn off the TV when nobody is watching and decide what     you need before opening the refrigerator door. Encourage children to opt     for toys with reusable or rechargeable batteries.

Small     things aren’t so small     Carrying bottle of water from home while on a trip     would prevent you from buying water in plastic bottles on the way. Clay     containers that our grandparents used in their times is in vogue now. Clay     bottles also ensure that the water remains cooler for a longer time.

Recycling     Recycling tremendously cuts down on the waste that     is generated. Have a bin for recyclable products and encourage children to     be conscious about the trash they are generating. Sometimes, containers     can be reused in multiple ways and pen refills can be bought in place of     buying a whole plastic pen.

Participation     in community efforts     If you are part of a residence association, you may     already have people working against pollution and resource exhaustion.     When your children are involved in such collective efforts, they will have     a wider perspective on how they are helping the society at large. Even     through fun activities, children will learn to do their part from a young     age when their mind is susceptive and fresh.

Protecting nature need not be a taxing, cumbersome activity. Even DIY projects that involve recycling and reusing things can teach children some valuable things. You’ll find lots of them online. Rely on natural medicines than over the counter ones to get relief from common cold or fever.

Above all, spending time with nature itself will drive home the need to protect our nature. Waterfalls, trekking trails, wildlife sanctuaries and so on are good destinations while considering your next family trip.

To know more:

https://www.winmoreacademy.com/ways-to-raise-environmentally-conscious-children/

[chanelfunnell]

You know, anon, that we have never seen a face of so called Marti Snow - a fictional character of fabricated social media and a fictional partner of Chris Evans and Jonathan Toews lol

She wrote on fan fic pad online platform like Ashley the fan girl her erotic sci fi about Tazer. Both live in Ontario and state so, only Martina Snow states that her mother is Italian - Brazilian and her father is Arabian, living in Canada but she got ,somehow, Czech grandmother into the mix....she did all amazing vip work but also a modelling for Vogue....She is CEO....it reminds me she borrows certain things from here and there, so photos all the time...There was one more crazy aged puckbunny boiler of Jagr who was banned from NHL. She went on her fantasist VIP and wealthy lifestyle and trashing female journos....you look on her real photos and....Keanu Reeves and Gladiator actor or Jagr did not invite her out for Valentine dinner, a normal guy did not stood chance, former NJ Devils goalie hooked up with his sister in law so let's unleash anger about failed sci fi lol...

[loverrr-girl]

Announcement

Hello everyone, I am here to make an announcement.

I will try not to be online at all from 3rd January to 10th January. So if i haven’t dm'd you, I'm not dead, I'm offline.

And I will be spending less time on here in general, as I have noticed that I have been on here for a hell lot of hours, and I don't want to do so, because when I want to do something productive, my brain immediately goes "go on to tumblr you sad lonely bitch" and I listen to my stupid little brain and then now would you look at that its already 5:55 pm wtf happened its been like 17 mins wut or something along the lines of that happens, which frustrates the living shit out of me, so I will be taking a break from tumblr, and I will be spending less time on here as well.

And there could be a possible hiatus [one which is longer than a week i mean], since my school will be starting on the 3rd of Jan, which is why I will be taking a break from my beloved hellsite for a week, as I need to concentrate on school for at-least a small period of time, but there will be no deactivation whatsoever.

And that is basically the announcement, but I will be on here till the 2nd of Jan, because I am NOT missing spending my first New Year's with my beloved moots and just people in general on here, and yea that's basically it :D

Have a nice day/night <3.

@tfischaitea, @meghnafox, @cool-way-to-die, @michellesayona, @aubrey-kung, @nymphadorathebubba, @andimsunooo, @roseusnoctua, @everythingwow, @shydestinykryptonite, @idefk-at-this-point, @love-is-an-imaginary-dagger, @morks-favourite-grass, @gopikanyari, @winchesterwitch07, @alkali-the-basic-bitch , @purrfectlypunny, @mystrothedefender, @maskedmoon, @mascara-massacres, @cultishkei, @thelastfunctioningbraincell, @wouldyoump3, @midtownbucky, @d4nkug0, @the-devils-feather, @sociallyawkwardcat, @darkandbittercat, @kaifinnakill, @stressedsnake, @akutacowa, @akuutaguava, @almostlovingdreamland, @foodi-blogs, @jinglebell-rock, @proud-to-be-a-muggle-born, @jegulus-trash, @doja-crack, @isaluv, @someguyiguess, @eros-vogue @death-by-chocallate@everyone else

[ferrariwrites]

created as part of the wtw march madness challenge - day 1, a character study

To say that Princess Margherita of Monaco is ‘normal’ would be a little absurd. Few people are born a princess, few go viral for table-dancing at the Louvre, and exactly one person, Her Serene Highness, Princess Margherita of Monaco, is a princess who has table-danced at the Louvre. As the only child of Prince Olivier and Cecilia, Duchess of Dalarna, Princess Margherita is first in line for the Monégasque throne.

— ALEXANDRA KIM FOR VOGUE

It is 11.34 and I am trying not to vomit. Around me, a team of marine biologists works in controlled chaos, deftly navigating the rolling waves. There’s a complicated computer setup, maps spread out over tables, and crates of lab equipment open and waiting.

In the center of the whirlwind is a beachy blonde dressed in a worn-in souvenir t-shirt (from Monaco’s famed Oceanographic Museum) and a pair of loose fitting jeans rolled up to mid-calf. She’s sitting cross-legged on the deck, carefully cataloging vials of water with coordinates, depths, and specimen names. A particularly harsh wave rocks the boat and she looks at me, smiling. 

It’s a smile that has graced countless magazines, topped many a “10 Most Beautiful” listicle, and entranced the world. I’ve never met a princess, let alone been sick near one, but there’s never been a princess like Princess Margherita of Monaco, either. I feel a little silly for being nervous, for the hours spent mulling over what I could or could not say to Monaco’s crown princess. She is simply a charming 25-year-old, volunteering with a marine conservation charity. 

To say that Princess Margherita of Monaco is ‘normal’ would be a little absurd. Few people are born a princess, few go viral for table-dancing at the Louvre, and exactly one person, Princess Margherita, is a princess who has table-danced at the Louvre. As the only child of Prince Olivier and Cecilia, Duchess of Dalarna, Princess Margherita is first in line for the Monégasque throne. 

Later, once we’ve finished our research mission and the princess and I are sharing a bottle of champagne on the - blessedly still - docks, Princess Margherita agrees that her life is more than a little unusual. Still, she says, in a voice with the strange, complex accent of someone who grew up speaking five different languages (she speaks eight now, though she considers her Mandarin “elementary”), “I’m not the Duchess of Cambridge. No one cares much about me.”  

It’s not exactly true. In her nearly two-and-a-half decades of public life, she’s been the subject of countless tabloid headlines dissecting everything from her hair color to her university degrees. Both are real, by the way. Virtually every detail of her life is available online. The media fanfare surrounding the princess and everything she does is a bit of a wormhole, from the countless Instagram accounts dedicated to tracking what she’s wearing to the viral TikToks of her simply walking. Lately, she’s been under the public microscope after a video - posted, of course, to Instagram, practically in real time - leaked of her criticizing the European response to refugees. While she trashed everyone from Johnson to Macron to leadership in her own country, what drew most fervor was the fact that the rant occurred in a nightclub, and the princess was double-fisting…? 

“Champagne,” she tells me. “And isn’t it funny - you asked me that, but haven’t asked me anything about my views on the refugee crisis? That is what frustrates me. Who cares what I’m drinking?”

Gossip and fashion insider news doesn’t interest her, not even when it’s about herself. It’s current affairs and politics that she’s engaged in. Following a stint studying Political Science at Oxford University, Princess Margherita was accepted to Columbia University’s prestigious School of International and Public Affairs, where she pursued a Masters degree in International Affairs. One of her Columbia professors, international human rights lawyer Denma Kamir, who has overseen trials at The Hague, was impressed by her work ethic. “I was struck by how present she was. She showed up. She did the work. She engaged with her classmates. There were no airs.” 

As a UNHCR ambassador, she works to highlight the plight of refugees and has travelled to refugee camps all over the world. Sustainability, too, tops her list of concerns. She grows fierce when discussing climate change, the plastic crisis, and the impact it has on vulnerable communities. “I have always felt driven by the question, how can I do the most good? And for a time I wondered if that meant walking away from the monarchy. I wanted to be a human rights lawyer. But I also understand the immense responsibility and privilege I have in my position. I have the opportunity to help other people be heard, and to bring attention to important causes.”

Princess Margherita’s position is a unique one. The Monégasque royal family is one of the few in the world that plays an active role in government. Any legislature must be approved and introduced by the Prince. Princess Margherita understands that she’s not just a figurehead - “I think we’ve moved past the need for royal figureheads. If we were just a publicity stunt, I would say the monarchy should be dissolved. Maybe it still should be.” 

At this point, the princess’s press secretary steps in. I’m used to being asked to avoid certain questions, but this time it’s squarely our subject being told, in no uncertain terms, not to continue down that line of commentary. Once her handler returns to her iPhone, Princess Margherita shoots me a wink. 

Frivolity aside, it’s clear she understands that she has the opportunity to bring about real change in her country and beyond, and is determined to move forward with compassion and an understanding of the issues both domestically and abroad. Hearing her speak about Monaco leaves no doubt the depths of her love and her devotion to her country, but she also cares for the good of the world and people suffering all over. She’s ready to put in the work.

Recently, that has included work in her own backyard. She has been working with the small but mighty, Monaco-based charity, SWELL. “Being near the ocean, being near water is something that’s very important to me. It’s like it’s a physical yearning and I need that. I need to be near bodies of water. I think that’s the Monégasque in me. We have a very rich, beautiful maritime history.” 

Reproductive health issues, too, have been a subject of controversy, as Princess Margherita has lobbied her own father to overturn the country’s longstanding ban on abortions. Although there are notable exceptions to the law, Princess Margherita thinks it should be repealed completely. It has made, the Princess tells me, for some awkward family dinners. She doesn’t mind. “It’s always worth it to be gutsy. Always be gutsy! Be bold. Even if you’re wrong, you may just convince someone you’re right.” 

I suspect that what many people see, when they look at Princess Margherita, is boldness itself. In person, she is an expressive talker, an enthusiastic gesticulator, and an easy laugher. She radiates a self-possession that is untainted by self-seriousness, a quality that she has put to good use in life, too, while blowing ocean water out of her snorkel or peeling off a wetsuit. When asked if she has any mantras or rules for life, she thinks for a minute and says, “Never skinny-dip alone.” 

Princess Margherita grew up scuba diving and sailing, free-diving with great white sharks and assisting in coral rebuild programs, so perhaps it’s no surprise that much of her life and activism is related to the ocean. “During very hectic, intense periods, I go into the ocean and imagine how much is down there,” she says. “I try to put myself in the brain of a whale, or maybe a mermaid, and think they’re there right now swimming and think of the sounds and what they’re experiencing. That’s something I really love doing, just sort of pulling myself into the ocean in my mind - kind of like a mental escape.”

She sounds quite genuine when she talks about being a mermaid, and we talk more about the fact that fairytale writer and author of Little Mermaid Hans Christian Anderson was from Denmark, where Princess Margherita’s mother was born. “Why not believe in them? What’s the alternative - being boring? That’s the wonderful thing about life. There are so many layers to it, always something more and deeper and more beautiful. Why limit yourself to what you can see, or what you think you know?”  

Perhaps we could all benefit from spending a little more time underwater, clearing our minds, putting things into perspective - and hanging out with the dolphins and the mermaids. Perhaps we can shift the focus of our attention. Perhaps we can all become a little less selfish, a little more globally aware and more understanding that the world is a single unified existence. Perhaps we can grow stronger. 

We hug one last time and make a promise to see each other soon. Princess Margherita, an earnest look on her face, says that we’ll go to her favorite spot in Cannes, a hole-in-the-wall where they drizzle farm-fresh potatoes with truffle oil and lavender. And unlike most people, whose words blow away with the wind, I know that she means it from the bottom of her burning heart.

[queenlua]

hey, i started following you recently and ur bio says ur a hacker? any tips on where to start? hacking seems like a v cool/fun way to learn more abt coding and cybersecurity/infrastructure and i'd like to explore it but there's so much on the internet and like, i'm not trying to get into anything illegal. thanks!

huh, an interesting question, ty!

i can give more tailored advice if you hit me up on chat with more specifics on your background/interests.

given what you've written here, though, i'll just assume you don't have any immediate professional aspirations (e.g. you just want to learn some things, and you aren't necessarily trying to get A Cyber Security Job TM within the next three months or w/e), and that you don't know much about any specific programming/computering domain yet.

(stuff under cut because long)

first i'd probably just try to pick some interesting problem that you think you can solve with tech. this doesn't need to be a "hacking" project at first; i was just messing around with computers for ages before i did anything involving security/exploitation.

if you don't already know how to program, you should ideally pick a problem you can solve via programming. for instance: i learned a lot back in the 2000s, when play-by-post forum RPGs were in vogue.  see, i'd already been messing around, building my own personal sites, first just with HTML & CSS, and later on with Javascript and PHP.   and i knew the forum software everyone used (InvisionPowerBoard) was written in PHP.  so when one of the admins at my RPG complained that they'd like the ability to set multiple profile pictures, i was like, "hey i'm good at programming, want me to create a mod to do that," and then i just... did. so then they asked me to program more features, and i got all the sexy nerd cred for being Forum Mod Queen, and it was a good time, i learned a lot.

(i also got to be the person who was frantically IMed at 2am because wtf the forum is down and there's an inscrutable error, what do??? basically sysadmining! also, much less sexy! still, i learned a lot!)

the key thing is that it's gotta be a problem that's interesting to you: as much as i love making dorky sites in PHP, half the fun was seeing other people using my stuff, and i think the era of forum-based RPGs has passed. but maybe you can apply some programming talents to something that you are interested in—maybe you want to make a silly Chrome extension to make people laugh, a la Cloud to Butt, or maybe you'd like to make a program that converts pixel art into cross-stitching patterns, maybe you want to just make a cool adventure game on those annoying graphing calculators they make you use in class, or make a script for some online game you play, or make something silly with Arduino (i once made a trash can that rolled toward me when i clapped my hands; it was fun, and way easier than you'd think!), whatever.

i know a lot of hacker-types who got their start doing ROM hacking for video games—replacing the character art or animations or whatever in old NES games. that's probably more relevant than the PHP websites, at least, and is probably a solid place to get started; in my experience those communities tend to be reasonably friendly to questions. pick a small thing you want to do & ask how to do it.

also, a somewhat unconventional path, but—once i knew how to program a bit of Python, i started doing goofy junk, like, "hey can i implemented NamedTuple from scratch,” which tends to lead to Python metaprogramming, which leads to surprising shit like "oh, stack frames are literally just Python objects and you can manually edit them in the interpreter to do deliberately horrendous/silly things, my god this language allows too much reflection and i'm having too much fun"... since Python is a lot of folks' first language these days, i thought i'd point that out, since i think this is a pretty accessible start to thinking about How Programs Actually Work under the hood. allison kaptur has some specific recommendations on how to poke around, if you wanna go that route.

it's reasonably likely you'll end up doing something "hackery" in the natural course of just working on stuff. for instance, while i was working on the IPB forum software mods, i became distressed to learn that everyone was using an INSECURE version of the software! no one was patching their shit!! i yelled at the admins about it, and they were like "well we haven't been hacked yet so it's not a problem," so i uh, decided to demonstrate a proof of concept? i downloaded some sketchy perl script, kicked it until it worked, logged in as the admins, and shitposted a bit before i logged out, y'know, to prove my point.

(they responded by banning me for two weeks, and did not patch their software. which, y'know, rip to them; they got hacked by an unrelated Turkish group two months later, and those dudes just straight-up deleted the whole website. i was a merciful god by comparison!)

anyway, even though downloading a perl script and just pointing it at a website isn't really "hacking" (it's the literal definition of script kiddie, heh)—the point is i was just experimenting a lot and trying a lot of stuff, which meant i was getting comfortable with thinking of software as not just some immutable relic, but something you can touch and prod in unexpected ways.

this dovetails into the next thing, which is like, just learn a lot of stuff. a boring conventional computer science degree will teach you a lot (provided you take it seriously and actually try to learn shit); alternatively, just taking the same classes as a boring conventional computer science degree, via edX or whatever free online thingy, will also teach you a lot. ("contributing to open source" also teaches you a lot but... hngh... is a whole can of worms; send a follow-up ask if you want that rant.)

here's where i should note that "hacking" is an impossibly broad category: the kind of person who knows how to fuck with website authentication tokens is very different than someone who writes a fuzzer, who is often quite different than someone who looks at the bug a fuzzer produces and actually writes a program that can exploit that bug... so what you focus on depends on what you're interested in. i imagine classes with names like "compilers," "operating systems," and "networking" will teach you a lot. but, like, idk, all knowledge is god-breathed and good for teaching. hell, i hear some universities these days have actual computer security classes? that's probably a good thing to look at, just to get a sense of what's out there, if you already know how to program.

also be comfortable with not knowing everything, but also, learn as you go. the bulk of my security knowledge came when i got kinda airdropped into a work team that basically hired me entirely on "potential" (lmao), and uh, prior to joining i only had the faintest idea what a hypervisor was? or the whole protection ring concept? or ioctls or sandboxing or threat models or, fuck, anything? i mostly just pestered people with like 800 questions and slowly built up a knowledge base, and remember being surprised & delighted when i went to a security conference a year later and could follow most of the talks, and when i wound up at a bar with a guy on the xbox security team and we compared our security models a bunch, and so on.  there wasn't a magic moment when i "got it", i was just like, "okay huh this dude says he found a ring-0 exploit... what does that mean... okay i think i got that... why is that a big deal though... better ask somebody.." (also: reading an occasional dead tree book is a good idea. i owe my firstborn to Robert Love's Linux Kernel Development, as outdated as it is, and also O'Reilly's kookaburra book gave me a great overview of web programming back in the day, etc.  you can learn a lot by just clicking around random blogs, but you’ll often end up with a lot of random little facts and no good mental scaffolding for holding it together; often, a decent book will give you that scaffolding.)

(also, it's pretty useful if you can find a knowledgable someone to pepper with random questions as you go. finding someone who will actively mentor you is tricky, but most working computery folks are happy to tell you things like "what you're doing is actually impossible, here's why," or "here's a tutorial someone told me was good for learning how to write a linux kernel module," or "here's my vague understanding of this concept you know nothing about," or "here's how you automate something to click on a link on a webpage," which tends to be handier than just google on its own.)

if you're reading this and you're like "ok cool but where's the part where i'm handed a computer and i gotta break in while going all hacker typer”—that's not the bulk of the work, alas! like, for sure, we do have fun pranking each other by trying dumb ways of stealing each other's passwords or whatever (once i stuck a keylogger in a dude's keyboard, fun times). but a lot of my security jobs have involved stuff like, "stare at this disassembly a long fuckin' time to figure out how the program pointer got all fucked up," or, "write a fuzzer that feeds a lot of randomized input to some C++ program, watch the program crash because C++ is a horrible language for writing software, go fix all the bugs," or "think Really Hard TM about all the settings and doohickeys this OS/GPU/whatever has, think about all the awful things someone could do with it, threat model and sandbox accordingly." occasionally i have done cool proof-of-concept hacks but honestly writing exploits can kinda be tedious, lol, so like, i'm only doing that if it's the only way i can get people to believe that Yes This Is Actually A Problem, Fix Your Code

"lua that's cool and all but i wanted, like, actual links and recommendations and stuff" okay, fair. here's some ideas:

microcorruption: very fun embedded security CTF; teaches you everything you need to know as you're doing it.

cryptopals crypto challenges: very fun little programming exercises that teach you a lot of fundamental cryptography concepts as you're going along! you can do these even as a bit of a n00b; i did them in Python for the lulz

the binary bomb lab is hilariously copied by, like, so many CS programs, lol, but for good reason. it's accessible and fun and is the first time most people get to feel like a real hacker! (requires you know a bit of C beforehand)

ctftime is a good way to see when new CTFs ("capture the flag"s; security-focused competitions) are coming up. or, sometimes CTFs post their source code, so you can continue trying them after the CTF is over. i liked Stripe's CTFs when they were going, because they focused on "web stuff", and "web stuff" was all i really knew at the time. if you're more interested in staring at disassembly, there's CTFs focused on that sort of thing too.

azeria has good ARM assembly & exploitation tutorials

also, like, lots of good talks out there; just watching defcon/cansecwest/etc talks until something piques your interest is very fun. i'd die on a battlefield for any of Christopher Domas's talks, but he assumes a lot of specific x86/OS knowledge, lol, so maybe don’t start with that. oh, Julia Evans's blog is honestly probably pretty good for just learning a lot of stuff and really beginner-friendly?

oh and wrt legality... idk, i haven't addressed it here since it hasn't come up in my own work much, tbh. if you're just getting started you're kind of unlikely to Break The Law without, y'know, realizing maybe you're doing something a bit gray-area? and you can cross that bridge when you come to it? Real Hacking TM is way more of a pain-in-the-ass than doing CTFs and such, and you'll learn way more with the latter, so who cares lol just do the fun thing

[fatehbaz]

Sorry. This might be annoying and excessively long. Among people interested in psychogeography, ecology, folklore, bioregionalism, urban geography (and Empire, hegemony, anti-imperialism, to a lesser extent, I guess?) there is a quote that gets circulated from time to time. I’ve seen the quote in academic articles, sure, but also on the W0rdpress blogs of, like, birders, hikers, gardeners, “bioregional animists,” and “woods aesthetic” fans. But why do both academic authors and popular/mainstream writers and bloggers and such consistently remove the end of this sentence from Michel de Certeau’s memorable statement: “There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can “invoke” or not. Haunted places  are the only ones people can live in – and this inverts the schema of the panopticon.”

Gonna revel in the wonders of the garden, the forest, the landscape, the other-than-human lifeforms, and yet not willing to explicitly address the vulnerability, the cascading extinction, the tightening noose of imperial hegemony and carceral systems threatening it all, landscapes, lives, entire worlds? What de Certeau is referring to here is the way that imperial/dominant power structures (European modernity, Empire) try to subdue, erase, destroy smaller, alternate, and/or non-Western cosmologies, to make it seem like Empire is the only possible world that can be constructed. And so landscapes become sanitized, especially in cities, and de Certeau says that such sanitized places are “uninhabitable” because they are so cold, because Empire tries to standardize experience, rather than allowing localized connections tor regional landscape. But the alternative worldviews, the histories, have not been fully erased, and exist in the cracks and crevices of modernity, and so there are “ghosts” of alternative worlds which live on. And it is the remnants of other worlds, or the glimpses of other creatures (animals/plants/etc.) or other surviving worldviews (graffiti in the subway, which rejects order and control), or the hopes of possible better future worlds, crevices where the “failures” of modernity can be glimpsed, which make a place habitable. “Haunted geographies.”

Here’s a sentence fragment from a different author, writing about de Certeau:

“exotification and suppression, under a cloak of celebration”

This kinda thing.

This fragment comes from a criticism of early-20th-century Euro-American academia’s so-called “folklore studies” but I think it also describes much 21st-century academic interest in “ecological knowledge” and non-Western cultures. I have a feeling that this behavior is similar to what contemporary upper class careerist-academics in academic anthropology departments and those “studying the utility of traditional ecological knowledge” are doing when they superficially throw around words like “decolonial” or “Haraway’s Chthuluscene” in their article abstract for Cool Points without actually having given much through to the way they and their sponsoring institution, in their thirst for prestige or good optics or whatever, are in fact continuing to perpetuate dispossession and appropriation of Indigenous/non-Western knowledge. And on some level, it is deliberate and calculated, though not always a conscious act on the individual author/researcher’s part. Intentional power consolidation masked as passive chauvinism masked as benevolent paternalistic concern for “primitive peoples” masked as genuine respect. What’s happening is a recuperation, the subsuming of alternative cosmologies and ways of being. Hypothetical Nat/Geo article, variations of which you’ve probably seen before: “How can we utilize Indigenous knowledge? Can traditional knowledge help us battle climate change?” Empire, those in power, hegemonic institutions colonizing knowledge, thought, cosmology.

Plenty has been written, especially in recent years, of a “plurality/pluriverse of worlds in contrast to one imperial worldview/cosmology” and also the paternalistic attitudes of Euro-American anthropologists, but the mid-century work of Michel de Certeau, in my opinion, anticipated a lot of this disk horse. Here’s the fuller quote:

-----------------------

“In recent years, especially since 1960, scholarship in the service of popular culture has been of Marxist inspiration, or at least ‘populist’ in spirit,” de Certeau, Dominique Julia and Jacque Revel wrote in a 1980 essay, “but does the scientific operation it undertakes obey different laws than it did in the past? On the contrary, it seems to be dominated by the mechanisms of age-old excommunications…to conceal what it claims to show” (de Certeau 1986, 121). This opening statement encapsulates much of de Certeau’s thinking about the history of folklore studies. Tracing its development in successive stages from the late eighteenth century to the “heyday of folklore” in France’s Third Republic (1870-1940), the authors argue that the eighteenth century aristocratic vogue for “the popular” concealed a powerful movement toward the domination of the peasantry. This movement involved both exotification and suppression, under a cloak of celebration.“ The idealization of the “popular,” as they put it, “is made all the easier if it takes the form of a monologue. The people may not speak, but they can sing...The intent [of folklorists] is both to collect…and to reduce (de Certeau 1986, 122).[...] The governing ideologies driving the emergence of this obsession with the folk were not static, however, and therefore, in order to understand the development of the politics of culture in folklore studies, scholars must examine, at each point, its “subjacent postulates” (de Certeau 1986, 123). For instance, following the domination imbricated with the origins of folklore studies in the 18th century, by the mid-nineteenth century, the authors describe folklore as taking on a paternalist role vis-a-vis its subject. The collection of folklore by this time, embodied especially in the works of Charles Nisard (1808-1890), is not just a chronicle of its elimination by the elite, but a protective function executed by the elite on behalf of the incompetent peasant. In this view, de Certeau and his colleagues observe, “the people are children whose original purity it is befitting to preserve by guarding them against evil readings” (de Certeau 1986, 124, original emphasis). [...] This, then, is the basic outline of de Certeau’s historical critique of both the conceptualization of folklore and the discipline of folklore studies, as well as the core of his critique of cultural studies in the late 20th century. Interestingly, however, it is also the core of his larger understanding of the workings of modernity.

From: Anthony Bak Buccitelli. “Hybrid Tactics and Locative Legends: Re-reading de Certeau for the Future of Folkloristics.” Cultural Analysis, Volume 15.1. 2016.

--------------------------------

So there is a popular quote from Michel de Certeau (French interdisciplinary scholar, 1925-1986), which seems to have been yet more popular since, like:

(1) 2010-ish with elevation of Mark Fisher’s work; “object-oriented ontology”; “dark ecology”; apparent academic elevation of ontological turn in anthropology; and the white-washed Euro-American academic language of traditional ecological knowledge, “decolonization,” etc.,

And also since (2) 2014/2015 in “popular” media, with apparent mainstream-ing or “revival” of folk horror, alongside elevation of eco-horror, Anthropocene disk horse, etc.

(In my anecdotal experience, at least, reading about geography, folklore, psychogeography, etc. in online spaces from M.S.N chatroom days onwards.)

I’m of course very wary of de Certeau’s interest in and celebration of Freud (come on, bro) and also the implications of de Certeau’s Jesuit background and early interest in missionary stuff (gross). But de Certeau did write some thoughtful and nicely-phrased stuff (in my opinion) about the importance of subverting imperialist/hegemonic cosmologies; how Euro-American academic institutionalized knowledge reinforces power; imperative for combating hegemony/carceral thinking by connecting with landscape; the “memory” of places; the “hidden” histories of landscapes, etc. And he wrote this decades before academics started stealing from Indigenous people of Latin America and getting into pluriverse stuff.

Anyway, one quote in particular seems most popular. but almost every single instance where i’ve ever seen this quote shared, it always cuts out the last few words of the statement. The quote is from what might be his most widely-read work, the “Walking in the City” chapter of his 1984 book The Practice of Everyday Life. (it’s a pretty brief chapter which is available for free online; might take 30 minutes to read, if you’re interested.) The quote as translated by Steven Rendall: “There is no place that is not haunted by many different spirits hidden there in silence, spirits one can “invoke” or not. Haunted places  are the only ones people can live in – and this inverts the schema of the panopticon.”

The “inversion of the panopticon” portion is almost always left out of the quote. even in academic writing or in the writing/blogs/whatever of people who otherwise seem like they would be down with anti-imperialism or something.

So, it comes across to me as if contemporary (2005-2020) academics and activists interested in, like, folklore or local horticulture or psychogeography will like ... take the “cute” fragments of these excerpts, but don’t want to “stir the pot” by presenting these writings in their fuller context, a fuller context which calls-out knowledge appropriation and explicitly trash-talks Empire.

And de Certeau’s not just writing about folklore or geography. He’s writing about taking action, about practicing alternative ways to relate to landscape in direct contrast to imperial cosmologies, academic/institutionalized/gatekept knowledge, and carceral thinking. (He’s famous for this; he emphasized “tactics” and “action.”)

So this guy is, of course, human, and had disagreeable and/or outright problematique associations. You can argue with his writing extensively. his publications are a mix of great, cool, iffy, “meh” and “bad take bruh.” But de Certeau was ahead of the curve in anticipating the way ambitious US academics would see “the decolonial turn” happening in academic anthropology in the 1990s/2000s and then weaponize it in a way that preserved their power dynamic and institutional power while still paying lip-service to “decolonization.”

But besides dunking on the imperialist foundations of Western institutionalized knowledge systems and the cunning employment of geographic re-worlding and re-naming in creating propaganda and imperial cosmology, and besides being ahead of the curve in anticipating re-enchantment trends and folk horror ... One thing I like about de Certeau’s writing is the emphasis on action, practice, and doing things to counter dominant/powerful cosmology’s attempt to destroy folk/non-Western worldview. Encouraging something like:

Take action. Books are cool, but books are not a substitute for action. Girl, you wanna study landscape, place-based identity, folklore, and how to escape the panopticon? Gotta put the theory texts down occasionally. Please go walk around in the forest; if you’re in the major city, don’t despair, just look at the moss growing in crevices betwixt the cobblestones. Imagine the ghosts, the histories, the stories, who died, what was lost, what’s come before. Power is trying to subsume all, but Empire gets anxious and flails because they know that there are gaps in their cosmology, cracks and breakages where other worlds seep through or can be glimpsed, retrieved, renewed. They know their cosmology can’t account for the diversity of life, the plurality of experience. There is not one world, but many. Find the crevices, the cracks, in the dominant power structures, and break them further. You can help to escape the tightening noose, the planetary-scale plantation, by using your imagination, cooking a meal, taking a walk.

[handeaux]

For More Than A Century, Jigsaw Puzzles Have Fascinated Cincinnati

Throughout 2020, jigsaw puzzles were as hard to find as toilet paper when Americans went jigsaw-puzzle crazy. Cincinnati shared this obsession as we looked for anything to entertain us while we endure the lockdowns caused by the global Covid-19 pandemic.

Amy Pepe, of the Geneva (New York) Historical Society, says this year’s fascination is actually the third jigsaw puzzle craze, and Queen City sources show the same pattern, with Cincinnatians jumping on the puzzle bandwagon all three times.

Although games resembling jigsaw puzzles have been around since the mid-1700s, they were mostly considered educational toys and were limited to “dissected maps” aimed at teaching geography to schoolchildren. The idea of randomly chopping up lithographed artwork as an adult entertainment didn’t align with suitable technology until the early 20th century. By 1909, America – and Cincinnati – was hooked. The Cincinnati Post [25 May 1909] summed it up:

“That Jig-Saw game is perplexing enough to keep you up all night. Jig-Saw puzzles are the fad and the craze of the hour.”

The Post published its own, rather primitive, jigsaw puzzles throughout 1909, giving away 500 manufactured puzzles each week to readers who completed the printed puzzle, glued it to a card, and mailed it to the newspaper. While the Post’s contest puzzles rarely had more than 15 pieces, the manufactured prize puzzles they gave away had only 110 pieces – truly beginner level for today’s puzzle mavens.

With the popularity of jigsaw puzzles as a pastime, jigsaw puzzles as a metaphor came into vogue as well. Beginning in 1909, Cincinnati newspapers often used “jigsaw puzzle” as a descriptor for intractable problem in law, business or society – or sports, as an Enquirer cartoon [6 May 1909] of Cincinnati Reds Manager Clark Griffith, trying to assemble a lineup by solving a jigsaw puzzle attests.

Eventually, the initial wave (Pepe pegs it to 1907-1911.) died out. A sure sign, according to the Enquirer [26 January 1914] was Queen Mary’s ladies in waiting refusing to allow a jigsaw puzzle in their parlor at Windsor Castle.

“Lady Eva Dugale suggested that puzzle games were entirely out of date.”

Maybe so, but jigsaw puzzles came roaring back in 1932-33. The Cincinnati Post [30 May 1932] pronounced them stylish this time around – and significantly more complicated than their 1909 ancestors:

“Jigsaw puzzles are keeping lots of fashionable folk home these nights. Some have as many as 1000 pieces, altho 500 pieces make a puzzle hard enough for most people. They’re a fine idea for a party when some of the guests don’t play bridge. And they make splendid bridge prizes, too.”

The Cincinnati Enquirer in 1933 sold needlecraft patterns looking like completed jigsaw puzzles to be incorporated into trendy purses. Local high school students are reported crafting home-made jig-saw puzzles as Christmas presents.

According to the Cincinnati Enquirer [13 February 1933], the revival took manufacturers by surprise. Orders for puzzles came pouring in. Companies that had long since relegated jigsaw puzzles to the trash bin found themselves calling designers and stamping machine operators out of retirement and training new employees to use historic equipment. An Enquirer columnist [18 January 1933] commented on an Associated Press item from Lockport, New York:

“Demand for jig-saw puzzles is keeping a local fiber board plant on a 24-hour basis, with steady employment for 60 persons. Sixty? Your grandmother! We personally know 100,000 persons who are employed on a 24-hour basis trying to put the things together.”

The Enquirer [7 March 1933] made clear that, this time around, jigsaw puzzles were not toys:

“The future may be full of opportunity for youth, but just now the youngsters can’t get near the jigsaw puzzle for the grown-ups crowded around.”

Jigsaw puzzles even generated marital drama, according to the Post [6 February 1933]:

“You can always tell the henpecked husband. He’s the one who’s given the blue sky pieces to work out in jigsaw puzzles.”

Eventually, the 1930s obsession with hundreds of little pieces faded, too. Joe Aston, the Cincinnati Post’s sports editor, was moved to ponder [9 June 1939]:

“And what’s become of all the folk who used to sit up until midnight putting jigsaw puzzles together? . . . As if anyone cared.”

World War II led to an innovative use for jigsaw puzzles by a Cincinnati manufacturer. The U.S. Playing Card Company manufactured special card decks and sent them to American prisoners of war in Europe and Asia. When the prisoners peeled off the backs of the cards, they found sections of escape maps that could be assembled like jigsaw puzzles.

Which brings us to the current fad. While NPR reported on the national thirst for jigsaw puzzles, the Cincinnati Enquirer [22 March 2020] published its “Top 10 ways to practice social distancing.” Jigsaw puzzles were on the list, along with the tip that online communities of puzzle addicts were happy to swap their completed puzzles for yours – after they’d been appropriately disinfected.

[tabloidtoc]

Star, January 25

You can now buy a copy of this issue for your very own at my eBay store: https://www.ebay.com/str/bradentonbooks

Cover: Meghan Markle’s life is a lie 

Page 1: Emma Stone’s baby joy -- after months of speculation thrilled mom-to-be Emma debuts her baby bump during a hike with a pal 

Page 2: Contents, Sutton Foster and Nico Tortorella and Debi Mazar filmed a scene for Younger’s final season 

Page 4: Candace Cameron Bure came out swinging again against commenters on a holiday pic she posted on Instagram of her and her husband Valeri Bure and kids Natasha and Lev and Maksim and she got a load of snark for the heavily retouched pic 

Page 5: Karlie Kloss usually steers clear of dishing on her sister- and brother-in-law Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner but on January 6 Karlie broke her silence after Ivanka tweeted and quickly deleted a post calling a pro-Trump mob storming the U.S. Capitol building American patriots and Karlie begged to differ tweeting that accepting the results of a legitimate democratic election is patriotic and when one Twitter user urged her to tell her brother-in-law and sister-in-law she lamented I’ve tried 

* Olivia Jade Giannulli posted a clip of herself dancing maskless at a beach-house party and the New Year’s Day Insta came days after her mom Lori Loughlin was sprung from prison and the clip which featured her toasting with a glass of vino came less than a month after she aired her regrets in an interview -- the party girl feels she’s suffered too from the scandal and she was just letting off steam 

* Rege-Jean Page has sent pulses racing with his groundbreaking role as the rakish Duke of Hastings in Bridgerton but it was his reference to James Bond’s legendary martini preference in a tweet that had fans speculating he’s in line to take over from Daniel Craig as the next 007 -- the biracial actor has been vocal about the importance of inclusive casting 

Page 6: Jessica Simpson whose own father once bragged about her double Ds is enjoying a very particular benefit of her recent 100-lb slimdown which is she’s gone down two cup sizes and she says she feels more athletic and her body is more in proportion -- in addition to easing back pain she feels a different sort of weight has lifted because all that talk about her breasts made her feel they overshadowed her as a person 

* Drew Barrymore is nursing a private pain as her ex-husband Will Kopelman went public with his new love Vogue staffer Alexandra Michler and the two are serious while Drew is still single and she is alone and feeling like the odd man out -- there are times when Drew absolutely regrets divorcing Will especially now that he’s dating again and Drew was holding out hope for a reunion but when she discovered Will was seeing someone new she knew there was a good chance it may not happen and even worse her own attempts at finding romance have fallen flat as she’s tried online dating a few times but had no luck 

* Star Spots the Stars -- Jimmy Fallon and wife Nancy Juvonen, Jennifer Lopez, Eva Longoria, Ryan Seacrest, Jenna Dewan, Aubrey Plaza, JD Martinez 

Page 8: Star Shots -- John Legend gave his son Miles a zip around the water on a jet ski during a vacation in St. Barths, Ellen DeGeneres on a bike after lunch with friends in Santa Barbara, Brooke Burke dressed in wintry workout gear sipped a hot drink 

Page 10: Leslie Jones on Celebrity Wheel of Fortune, Christina Aguilera playing video games with her son Max 

Page 12: Kit Harington takes his dog for a walk in London, Sean “Diddy” Combs passed out gift cards and gift bags to those in need in Miami, Mindy Kaling online shopping 

Page 13: Gabrielle Union and her husband Dwyane Wade on a hike, Jenny McCarthy maneuvered her trash bins to the curb in Chicago 

Page 14: Coach Tom Jones on The Voice UK, EJ Johnson at the beach in Miami, Margaret Qualley and boyfriend Shia LaBeouf on a hike in L.A., Dua Lipa eating during a getaway in Tulum, Mexico 

Page 16: Normal or Not? Tori Spelling out in Los Angeles with her dogs and husband Dean McDermott -- normal, Nicole Kidman and an alpaca -- not normal 

Page 17: Jennifer Garner playing the drinking game from The Crown in which participants who can’t repeat a phrase correctly must smudge their faces -- not normal, Kate Bosworth celebrated her birthday with husband Michael Polish and some bubbly in Beverly Hills -- normal 

Page 18: Fashion -- stars stun in Pantone colors of the year Illuminating Yellow and Ultimate Gray -- Mindy Kaling, Thandie Newton, Jorja Smith 

Page 19: Ariana Grande, Zoey Deutch 

Page 24: Olivia Wilde made news stepping out as Harry Styles’ plus-one to his agent’s wedding in Montecito and he introduced her as his girlfriend as the two mingled and held hands -- the next day Harry and Olivia who hit it off on the set of her upcoming psychological thriller Don’t Worry Darling in which he stars were spotted heading into his L.A. home -- wedding guests weren’t the only ones surprised by the new couple as Olivia’s ex Jason Sudeikis dad to her kids Otis and Daisy has been nurturing hope of a reunion since their split in late 2020 and he was surprised she’d go for one of the actors in her movie -- now Olivia is conflicted because she’s having fun with Harry but there’s no denying her feelings for Jason continue to linger and some are betting her romance with Harry will flame out in no time and no one would be surprised if Olivia and Jason ended up getting back together 

Page 25: Florence Pugh and Zach Braff had Hollywood abuzz after a pal wished her a happy birthday on social media and cryptically referred to her as FPB -- that extra B caused many to surmise that Florence has quietly exchanged vows with Zach and taken his last name and Florence hasn’t done much to shut down speculation by strategically hiding her ring finger in photos shared on Instagram 

* Zoe Kravitz filed for divorce from Karl Glusman after 18 months of marriage because she was fed up with having an MIA husband -- things between the two hit a breaking point after Karl failed to check in with his wife while filming Please Baby Please in Butte, Montana -- Zoe couldn’t take being ignored and when she and Karl finally spoke they had a big fight and she pulled the plug shortly afterwards 

* They called it quits in October after two years together but Bethenny Frankel and Paul Bernon are now giving their relationship another shot -- they split up because their long-distance romance proved too difficult but Bethenny really missed him and it turns out Paul missed her too and it seems second time’s a charm because a loved-up Bethenny and Paul indulged in PDA at a Miami studio as they watched her daughter paint with the artist

Page 26: Cover Story -- Meghan Markle exposed -- Meghan’s older half-sister is dishing some major dirt about the former actress’ rise to royalty in her new bombshell book 

Page 30: Inside Kim Kardashian’s escape -- Kim reached her breaking point with Kanye West months ago but took many steps before she finally left him 

Page 32: It Ain’t Over Till It’s Over -- these celebs more than made up after breaking up and they made it all the way down the aisle -- Justin Timberlake and Jessica Biel, Kelly Ripa and Mark Consuelos, Adam Levine and Behati Prinsloo 

Page 33: Kristen Bell and Dax Shepard, Chrissy Teigen and John Legend, Prince William and Kate Middleton 

Page 36: Beauty -- sweet dreams -- get better ZZZs and wake up looking gorgeous with products that nourish 

Page 38: Entertainment 

Page 48: Parting Shot -- Splashing out on a romantic getaway in Tulum, Mexico Bella Thorne and boyfriend Benjamin Mascolo made time to keep it tight on the sand 

[ehavuzcum]

A Guide To Swimming Pool Equipment

Putting resources into a pool whether it is an over the ground or in-ground of whatever size and shape is just the fundamental idea. Introducing the fundamental pool gear and having total supplies along with imperative pool adornments structure part of your speculation havuz kimyasalları. As a pool proprietor, it is your obligation to deal with your pool so it is consistently ok for you, your friends and family, family members and companions to have a great time and appreciate. All out security ought to be the need objective in keeping a pool.

 One significant pool gear is your siphon gathering. Its capacity is to keep your pool's water flow all together. Siphoning in new and new water and siphoning out messy water is its day by day work. In choosing an energy-effective pool siphon, numerous specialists propose picking those multi-speed siphons with programmed control frameworks. This sort of pool gear can make you qualified for awards, tax reductions or refunds. Check the siphon's HP rating and engine productivity and discover what is the best energy proficient sort for your utilization. Lower HP engine and legitimate running of 3-4 hours of siphoning activity rather than 5-6 hours mean lower energy utilization.

 Another significant hardware is your filtration framework. Your pool can have a sand, cartridge or diatomaceous earth (DE) sort of channel. On the off chance that you need low support, you can go with a very good quality cartridge channel which can channel tiny particles. A little DE powder can be added to the skimmer to make your pool water shimmer. Your channels and siphons are vital pool supplies in light of the fact that their capacity is security. They flow, disinfect and clean your pool water.

 For a long time, pool cleaning is done physically. These days, you have the programmed pool cleaners made by top makers for your in-ground or over the ground pools. These are important pool hardware supplies. You can settle on a programmed pressure-side, a pull type or a mechanical more clean. Cleaners deal with the trash, huge and little from your pool. These advanced types of gear can save you long periods of tidy up when contrasted with manual cleaning.

 Pool radiators are additionally in vogue types of gear for some pool proprietors not just for individuals living in cool environments. They are famous to boost swimming happiness in any event, during slow time of year. Sun oriented pool radiators are turning out to be sought after these days. Others pick energy saver types like the gaseous petrol or propane radiators while others actually go for the electric kind. Whatever radiator you introduce, its goal is to save the water at the correct temperature for your family to appreciate swimming in any event, during cold days and evening’s.

 One fundamental and defensive gear is the pool cover. Winter pool covers can shield your pool from the cruel environment impacts achieved by solid breezes. Huge flotsam and jetsam, leaves, twigs, branches can discover their way to a revealed pool. Covers not just shield your pool from trash. They can likewise forestall any suffocating mishaps. There are sun oriented covers and various kinds of cross section texture, vinyl, and strong covers. These materials are sensibly evaluated.

 Present day salvage supplies ought to likewise be a piece of your pool hardware stock. Things, for example, salvage tubes, emergency treatment packs, spine sheets, CPR veils, head immobilizers and ring floats are crucial devices important in the event of any superfluous occurrences or mishaps most extraordinarily when there are youngsters and old around.

 What about pool lights? For some pool proprietors, these pool lights are considered as standard pool supplies to expand the swimming happiness. Late evening swimming will be hazardous if there are no lights. Swimmers won't see the pool's dividers and water level. There are numerous kinds of pool lights accessible on the lookout.

 You can pick sun powered pool lighting, fiber-optic or the most progressive lighting framework today which are the LED lights. Beside the abovementioned, a portion of the other pool types of gear, supplies and accomplices to secure are salt chlorine generators, gliding chlorinators, brominators, pool skimmers, pool alerts, substance feeders, steps and stepping stools, vacuum hoses, and so on

 There are legitimate online stockroom merchants offering pool hardware from top brands like Kreepy Krauly, Hayward, Polaris, Aquabot, Baracuda, Sta-Rite, Fafco, Raypak, Pentair, Zodiac, and numerous others. Most pool types of gear have positive client audits. Plan your planning, work out a financial plan for your ideal types of gear and invest energy to do virtual online window shopping looking at costs and unique offers. In your selection of items, ensure that your need is security before excellence and relaxation.

[szopenhauer]

Assuming that you’re a girl, when you’re on your period do you use tampons or pads? pads

Do you like taking pictures of yourself? funny ones if any 

How much have you won on a lottery ticket? like 2 PLN lol  *I tried few times out of curiosity to see if my strategy works and besides once I was always winning this amount of cash

What is your favorite thing to do on your phone? play Choices <3

Was your first phone a flip phone? nope Have you ever butt dialed someone? from what I remember it happened in the bus one time when I was coming back home from school What is an old website that closed down that you miss? polyvore  If you’re a girl, have you ever had an embarrassing period story? not really Do you watch America’s Got Talent? I watched polish version at the beginning but got annoyed and bored with it, saw some foreign videos on yt tho Which country has the best accent? England? (british) Did you cry at your high school graduation? I don’t think so Who is a former friend that you wish would come back into your life? sigh... Have you ever been in a serious romantic relationship? this one’s serious to me Who was your favorite Spice Girl? I don’t remember Did you ever want to be in a band or music group? if I had a talent... What instrument did you play in the marching band? I wasn’t in the marching band If you could take any one type of dance class right now, what kind you take? vogue or some classic in pairs maybe to remind myself what I learned in middle school but tbh I’m not much into the idea of attending any dance classes Who got kicked off of your favorite talent show that you were mad about? more than one person actually :( Do you own the entire series on DVD of any TV show? If so, what? I wish!  Can you tell the difference between Mary-Kate and Ashley? I can’t  Who is your favorite set of twins? hmm... What is the grossest thing you have ever vomited up? don’t wanna think about it Did you ever take your dog to school? never Name one person you know who had a baby in high school. I don’t know personally anyone like this Do you keep a list of your favorite quotes? I try Describe your dream wedding in three words. small boho rustic Have you ever seen someone throw up on a plane? wasn’t on a plane but if that happened then I’d parachute myself outta there, yeet

Has God ever healed you of anything? If so, what? hope he will now but doubt it Do you believe in God? yes? Do you pray, and if so, to whom? to God, Jesus, Virgin Mary, saints, my brother...

Do you find church fun or boring? irritating and sort of tiring but if I had to choose between fun and boring then I’d go with the second, sorry What is your favorite thing to do in a swimming pool? pee *I’m joking Which part of your body is the most muscular? eyes from rolling them hahaha Have you ever painted a sugar skull on your face? no way Are you an artist? some sort of Did you ever take Latin in school? floristry Do you prefer to run in the street or on the sidewalk? *shrug* Which holiday is closest to your birthday? Valentine’s day if it counts

What’s the weather like for today? similar to yesterday’s Have you eaten breakfast yet? I have What have you accomplished today? nothing What curse word do you use the most? kurwa? Would you ever make out with someone of the same sex? as a lesbian XD What is your mother’s and father’s names? personal Last person you text messaged? dad

Would you ever volunteer to pick up trash around your town? count me in

Do you think desktops are more comfortable than laptops? they’re not Do you freak out when 666 appears somewhere? would say so Do you think it’s gross when you see gay/lesbian couples out in public? excuse me?! Was last night enjoyable for you? not really Can you go in public looking like you do? I suppose

So how are you today? not well

Do you enjoy going to the library? my library is really small and we don’t have lots of interesting books but I don’t mind visiting

Do you know anyone who has a pet bunny? my gf’s bestie and my ex friend had one 

What store or website would you most like a gift card for? uh oh can’t choose :3

Do you use Pinterest? no longer but I thought about making a new account, what do you think?

Do you know any sign language? wanted to learn but then I found out every country has it’s own and gave up

Do you have a favorite poem? Posłanie do nadwrażliwych is one of them, I like just a bunch, prefer to write poems than read ‘em

Describe your favorite scarf, if you have one. I own so many... 

Do you have a dog? yep

Have you ever read the Little House on the Prairie series? I watched a show but I read Mały domek w wielkich lasach

Have you ever performed in front of more than 100 people? in school

What do you do when a man you’re not interested in asks for your number? luckily I’ve never been in such situation and hope I won’t be

Is there anywhere you like to go because you find one of the employees attractive? what? Is there a big age gap between your parents? not big If you watch Glee, what has been your favourite song so far? If you don’t, why do you choose not to watch it? I’m not into musicals Did your parents ever forbid you from hanging out with anyone? oh well... If you drink, why? If you don’t, why not? I don’t like the smell, probably wouldn’t like taste either, my stomach is untolerant to lots of stuff, I don’t want to lose the rest of my health and being drunk might have bad consequences, also it’s expensive and addictive to that

What’s a word that begins with the first letter of your bf/gf/crushes name? monkey :P Have you ever heard a song mash-up? Did you like it? some were nice If you had to choose between being a garden gnome or a gargoyle, which would you be? gnome, yay!

What kind of dog would you get if you could choose any breed? chihuahua, pomeranian, pug, miniature poodle... Do you like to decorate? mhm Have you ever done anything sexual in exchange for something? nah Do you have nice legs?: pfft Do your parents ever try to tell you what or what not to wear?: my mom - she’s always saying my clothes are old or that they don’t match the weather  Has a gf’s sibling ever hit on you?: nooo Do you have a nice butt?: do I? How many cell phones have you gone through in your life? about 5 Do you go to concerts?  wouldn’t say so Do you shop online?  very rarely Are you a fan of dogs?  could say so

Is there a map hanging in your room? there isn’t Would you rather hold hands or link arms with your significant other? depends Did you ever throw up while kissing someone? it’s a fear of mine, it didn’t came true so far  Do you like Batman? yep Who is in the room with you? nobody

What was the last food you put syrup on? I don’t use syrup

Can you see more than one computer from where you are right now? there isn’t any other in my house Ever had paranormal experiences with a OUJIA board? don’t mess with ouija boards Did anyone close to you pass away this year? no one close Have you ever been locked in the trunk of a car? luckily not Does your refrigerator have one or two doors? two: one for the fridge and one for the freezer Are you allergic to any animals? no idea Do you have any friends you like to visit whenever they’re at work? just my father Do you have a bathrobe? but I don’t use it Do you get bored easy or can you find ways to amuse yourself? I find ways, only boring ppl get really bored, I might lack energy or motivation but that’s all Have you ever been submitted to the hospital due to a car-related accident? not accident

[dwain59-blog]

Bit by bit guidelines to Be Effective in Selling Handmade Accessories

Painstakingly gathered embellishments like great rings, arm groups, bands, and accessories season up any kind of getup. Along these lines, if you are going to start selling these things, there is an epic possibility that you will obtain extraordinary money. Taking everything into account, associations related to painstakingly gathered things like high quality additional items are polished these days. Countless people wherever all through the world assistance the top notch industry. They have to help in the insurance of the earth and all the while reinforce the job of creative craftsmans. Most craftsmans produce handmade claims to fame and jewels like deliberately collected rings as a techniques for living handmade accessories .

Regardless, if you need your painstakingly gathered embellishments business to be fulfilling, you have to remain mindful of the nonstop example. Reliably, styles and examples change. The in vogue pieces of clothing and shoes today can be obsolete tomorrow. Advantageous thing, there are enhancements that don't go old-fashioned. High quality rings, especially, turn out positively for about anything. In any case, this clarification isn't adequate for you to stay certain. There are other people who in like manner sell great embellishments; and aside from in the event that you need your deliberately collected rings to sit in the compartment unendingly, you have to surpass these various dealers.

Additionally, you ought to have a go at selling on the web. Make an effort not to envision that selling your deliberately amassed rings and anklets in fairs, parking space arrangements, and strength shows is adequate. Your top notch additional items business will go far in case you contact customers around the globe. The resistance may be more enthusiastically, yet you have to confront the test. Everything that prompts accomplishment is hazardous regardless. In case you are uninformed with respect to selling through the Internet, you can start by selling at online shops. These goals will allow you to sell your deliberately gathered embellishments without searching for a work. You can in like manner move photos of your deliberately gathered rings, arm groups, studs, and bits of adornments to pull in buyers.

While moving photos, guarantee that you have gotten each purpose of the thing. You ought to moreover show what it resembles close. Buyers can't see and contact your item before long, so they will rely upon the photographs. Besides, you should consolidate an ordered depiction of your excellent things. Join the sizes, the available shades, and the materials they are made of. You may in like manner need to recall headings for how to properly great and care for the embellishments.

In addition, if you genuinely need to do reiterate associations with buyers, you have to guarantee that your painstakingly amassed embellishments are of the most noteworthy bore. Never attempt to sell a deliberately collected loop that is feeling the passing of a dab or handmade rings that have been harmed. Moreover, you ought not copy others' arrangements. Recollect that buyers simply trash handmade enhancements that are outstanding and best in class. In addition, you have to sell things that will address different social occasions. For instance, you can grandstand beaded wristbands to young understudies and rose gold painstakingly amassed rings to ladies. Your item should coordinate your goal advertise.

[dippedanddripped]

Visiting Asheville, North Carolina, in December, I walked past a sandwich board that read, “Synth you’re here, come on in.” It was a pop-up store selling T-shirts, mugs, and other memorabilia commemorating one of the town’s most famous citizens, electronic music pioneer Bob Moog.

This month, celebrating what would be the inventor’s 85th birthday, that storefront reopens as the Moogseum. It celebrates not only Moog’s innovations, but also those of his contemporaries who created the synthesizers and other devices that transformed music beginning in the ’60s and ’70s. It’s the latest project of the Bob Moog Foundation–the nonprofit archive and educational institution established in 2006 by his youngest daughter, Michelle Moog-Koussa. (It’s unaffiliated with Moog Music, the company her father founded.)

Moog, who died in 2005, did not invent the synthesizer. Instead, “he’s the one who made it mainstream,” says Mark Ballora, professor of music technology at Penn State University. He became a celebrity, and people used “Moog” (which rhymes with “vogue”) as a synonym for electronic music.

A classically trained pianist, Moog worked closely with a wide range of musicians to understand what they wanted out of a device for generating electronic music. His synthesizers found incredibly diverse applications–from Herb Deutsch’s avant-garde compositions to Bernie Worrell’s funkadelic jams to Wendy Carlos’s classical music blockbuster Switched on Bach. Moog also collaborated with other inventors–including digital music pioneer Max Mathews and even rival synth maker Alan Pearlman (who died in January).

With today’s software-defined digital media, it’s harder to appreciate the naked physics of early electronic music and the radical transformation that manipulating these forces enabled. “Nothing fazes the students now,” says Richard Boulanger, professor of electronic production and design at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and a protégée of both Moog and Pearlman. “We’re transforming their voices and turning trash cans into drum kits, and we’re sounding like aliens just when we cough.”

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inRead invented by Teads

But “when we first heard the sound of a Moog synthesizer in the late ’60s and early ’70s . . . it just blew your mind,” says Boulanger. “It was like the sound of the future.” Indeed it was: Today, Moog synthesizers are standard kit for many leading musicians, from Kanye to Lady Gaga.

MOOG FOR THE MASSES

The Moogseum packs a lot into its 1,400 square feet, including iconic instruments like the Minimoog Model D and Minimoog Voyager synthesizers, an interactive timeline of synth technology from 1898 to today, and a replica of Moog’s workbench.

Beyond celebrating the past, the Moogseum aims to teach future generations, including non-musicians. The central vehicle for this is the exhibit Tracing Electricity as It Becomes Sound–an interactive wraparound video projected inside an 8-foot-tall, 11-foot-wide half dome, created by Milwaukee-based media company Elumenati.

“What we’re trying to impart is that you are in the middle of the circuit board, observing what’s going on,” says Moog-Koussa. “There will be a custom knob controller, so that people can actually interact with representations of transistors, capacitors, and resistors,” she adds. “So that they can actually become part of the circuit.” (The foundation aspires to create online versions of exhibits in the coming year.)

This honors Moog’s visceral, even New-Agey, relationship with physics. “I can feel what’s going inside of a piece of electronic equipment,” the inventor said in the 2004 documentary Moog.

He developed that feel when he started building and selling theremins, beginning at age 14 or 15 (Moog said both in different interviews). Invented by Léon Theremin in the 1920s and a staple of sci-fi classics like The Day the Earth Stood Still, the instrument allows players to create eerie tones by moving their hands through electrical fields. Three Moog theremins are on display in the museum.

Moog-Koussa isn’t just trying to cater to people who are already familiar with her father’s work. “Our work in education and archives preservation, and now with the Moogseum, will extend way beyond people who play synthesizers,” she says. The foundation she leads has an ambitious plan to bring hands-on education to schools across the country. It’s finalizing the design for the ThereScope, a battery-powered device that combines a theremin, amplifier, and oscilloscope to visualize the electrical waveforms behind sounds.

This would extend the foundation’s regional education program, Doctor Bob’s Sound School, which began in 2011. The 10-week curriculum now reaches about 3,000 second-graders a year in western North Carolina. “We have 13,000 young children who can read waveforms and explain to you the variances in pitch and volume,” says Moog-Koussa. “And that’s just one of our lessons, out of 10.”

THE STRADIVARIUS OF ELECTRONICS

Unlike the college-dropout entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley, Moog stayed in school–earning a PhD in physics from Cornell in 1965, while continuing his theremin business. In 1964, he built his first “portable electronic music composition system,” later dubbed a synthesizer. The device was capable of producing over 250,000 sounds.

It was not the first synthesizer–a point that Moog-Koussa herself emphasizes. But the high quality captivated musicians. That was despite its temperamental nature. Moog’s early voltage-controlled oscillators, which produce the raw electrical waveforms, were susceptible to current fluctuations from the electric grid and to temperature changes. As they warmed up, the synthesizers drifted out of tune.

To solve the problem, Moog partnered with Pearlman, founder of rival company ARP Instruments. In exchange for Pearlman’s stable oscillator circuit, Moog offered his elegant ladder filter technology, which refines the oscillator output.

“If you start with a raw analog waveform . . . it’s a buzz, like your alarm system,” says Boulanger. “Are you ready to make love songs to the sound of your smoke detector?” He calls Moog’s oscillators and filters “the Stradivarius of electronic instruments.”

Moog’s first synthesizers were huge boxes of electronics stacked and wired together in a spaghetti tangle of patch cables. In 1970, he combined the functions of his modulars into a compact device called the Minimoog Model D, which featured a piano-style keyboard as the main interface. (Pearlman did the same with his iconic ARP 2500.)

The Minimoog eliminated patch cables but included a wide assortment of knobs and switches, plus Moog’s signature mod and pitch-bend wheels. It gave musicians huge latitude in crafting the sounds underlying those piano keys. It also featured a pitch controller, an electronically conductive metal strip that sensed static discharge from the players’ fingers, allowing pitch inflections like those of a stringed instrument. Invented in the 1930s, the technology is proof that touch interfaces long predate the smartphone era.

The Model D controls “liberated” keyboard players, says Boulanger. “It allowed a keyboard player . . . to take a lead role and be so expressive with unique new sounds that reached through and spoke to an audience, like a singer could, like a guitarist could, like a cellist could.”

SUSTAINED SOUND

Moog synths are so central to the music of past-century icons like George Harrison, Herbie Hancock, Kraftwerk, and Parliament-Funkadelic that it’s easy to dismiss them as the sound of the past. Documentaries and articles about the inventor tend to focus on those formative years in the ’60s and ’70s. Moog’s New-Agey sensibilities and lingo further reinforce the old hippy vibe.

But Moog continued innovating into the 21st century. His swan song, the Minimoog Voyager, was released in 2002, just three years before his death from brain cancer at age 71. It was an analog synthesizer, but equipped to interface with digital music equipment.

The synth sounds of Moog and his contemporaries have persisted though a variety of genres and artists. When I asked Moog Music–the company that Bob Moog founded, lost, and then reacquired in his final years–for examples of artists currently using its instruments, I got a list of over 30 acts. The diverse assortment includes Alicia Keys, Deadmau5, Flying Lotus, James Blake, Kanye West, Lady Gaga, LCD Soundsystem, Queens of the Stone Age, Sigur Ros, St. Vincent, and Trent Reznor.

Moog Music’s brand director Logan Kelly also called out up-and-comers, including trippy synth instrumentalist Lisa Bella Donna and the Prince-mentored, all-woman soul trio We Are King. (See the embedded playlist below for samples–or full versions if you’re a Spotify subscriber–from these and other artists.)

And despite the digital tools at their disposal, Boulanger says that his students are also pulling analog devices into their compositions–even modular synthesizers, which are experiencing a revival in a somewhat-miniaturized style called Eurorack.

Moog Music continues to turn out new, hand-built synthesizers. “A lot of the circuitry that Bob designed, we still look to that for inspiration and use it in almost all of our instruments,” says Kelly. Its newest, a semi modular synthesizer called Matriarch, has just gone on sale. The company also puts out limited reissues of classic full-size modulars and synths like the Minimoog Model D.

There are also mobile-app recreations of instruments including the

Minimoog Model D

(which sells for $15) and the

modular Model 15

($30). “It was a UI/UX challenge to capture the feeling and the fun of actually patching [cables for] this instrument on a mobile device,” says Kelly. Companies such as Arturia also make software emulations of Moog’s analog circuits, used as plug-ins for digital music composition. A 2012 Google Doodle even honored the 78th anniversary of Moog’s birth with a

tiny online playable synthesizer

.

And with many of Moog’s, Pearlman’s, and other inventors’ patents having expired, companies such as Behringer and Korg are turning out budget reproductions of classics. They’ve won praise from some musicians, such as Boulanger, for making the devices accessible to starving students, but derision from others who feel the companies are free-riding off the inventors’ legacies.

Behringer’s stripped-down reproduction of the Model D, for instance, sells for around $300 (without a keyboard), vs. $3,749 for Moog Music’s full re-issue (which is no longer in production). Kelly declined to speak on the record about Behringer’s and others’ third-party devices, but emphasized that Moog sells synthesizers in a wide price range, starting at $499.

CONTINUING EDUCATION

We don’t know how Bob Moog would have felt about the knockoffs, but he did work hard to bring music technology to as many people as possible.

“He would champion anyone and everyone,” says Boulanger, who describes himself as being “just some little guy” composing music when he met Moog in 1974. “He ended up writing articles about some of my music in Keyboard magazine [in the mid-1980s] and helped launch my career,” says Boulanger.

“When my father developed a brain tumor and was quite ill, we set up a page on CaringBridge for him,” says Michelle Moog-Koussa. “And from that we got thousands of testimonials from people all over the world about how Bob Moog had impacted and sometimes transformed people’s lives.”

But Moog’s five children were largely left out of that experience. “My father really held his career at arm’s length from our family,” says Moog-Koussa. She believes this comes from her father’s wariness of parents projecting desires onto their children.

“He had a very domineering mother who wanted him to be a concert pianist, and was quite heartbroken when he decided to pursue electronics,” she says. (Moog studied piano from age 4 to 18 and was on his way to a professional musical career when he pivoted to engineering.)

“We kind of knew the basics [of his work], but, at least half of those basics, we learned from external sources,” says Moog-Koussa. They also knew few of their father’s collaborators, aside from Switched-On Bach creator Wendy Carlos.

Since her father’s death, Moog-Koussa says she’s developed relationships with many of the legends her father worked with, such as composers Herb Deutsch and Gershon Kingsley and musicians Rick Wakeman, Herbie Hancock, Stevie Wonder, and the late Keith Emerson.

In a way, the foundation and Moog Museum seem as much an effort of Moog’s own family to discover their father as to educate the rest of the world.

“I don’t think we realized the widespread global impact and the depth of that impact,” she tells me. “And we thought, here’s the legacy that has inspired so many people from all over the world. That not only deserves to be carried forward, but it demands to be carried forward.