Ingenious machines for drawing curves: The Archives

Anita Chowdry

Spirograph

A frequent comment made by viewers of the Iron Genie harmonograph in action, is that it reminds them of the Spirograph. Most of us are familiar with this childhood toy, which consists of a large ring-gear with internal teeth and a series of different sized gears which run inside it – when you insert a pen-tip into one of the holes of the interior gear and run it around within the annular gear, you get a fascinating spiraloid drawing. The drawings that can be achieved with a single gear can be varied quite dramatically by inserting the pen tip into different holes, and further variations are achieved by using different sized gears.

Spirographs and harmonographs are part of an interesting narrative of private obsession and ingenious inventiveness that took place throughout the nineteenth century. Once you delve into the relatively obscure archives of this story, a number of…

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The hardest part of transition…

Veronica Mead

23rd March 2017

Yesterday my surgeon assessed me, just over 8 weeks post surgery. He is very happy with the results, as I am and he has agreed that I am ready to return to work sooner than the planned 24th April. So I plan to restart at work on the 4th April. This is really good news for me as I have been going stir crazy at home.

Recently, peers of mine from nGendr have been producing videos about different aspects of transition. Six people giving their own personal views on topics. One of the recent set of releases were each of them giving their account of what they perceived was the hardest part of transition. They were really interesting and also surprising how differently  they all view the hardest part of transition. This got me thinking, like I do, of what has been the hardest part for…

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Brief Thoughts: A Lifestyle Too Extreme – Glee’s Rocky Horror is Censorsational

Confused Gender

Brief thoughts on the horror of watching Glee’s Rocky Horror.

I remember watching The Rocky Horror Show when I was around 13/14 and simply having no reaction at all to what I’d seen. it seems wholly possible to me now that my brain simply deleted parts of the movie that it couldn’t process leaving behind a few good memories of the Time Warp, Meatloaf and Susan Sarandon in her underwear. In hindsight I’m surprised that I handled the thing so well and surprised that my parents allowed the experience. Despite English suburbia not being the most progressive place to grow up I’m grateful my background allowed for it.

I didn’t see the film again until I was 25. I fell in love with it’s vibrancy and the sheer joy in the material, despite what I initially read to be a wildly confused subtext regarding gender and sexuality. The problem was…

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Meta-Slash-Feminist Filmmaking : Cabin in the Woods has Lots of Gore, Boobs and Even More Intelligence

Confused Gender

*major spoilers*

When Tarantino was conceiving the Grindhouse project his initial idea was to write and direct a quickie slasher movie as a love-letter to movies that have influenced him over the years. His obvious recent shift in ideology and love of reconceptualising genre movies to make them politically palatable meant that ultimately he couldn’t see a way to direct a slasher that wasn’t demeaning to women and ended up completely rehashing the project into something completely different, albeit still containing slasher-esque elements.

Demmit, she didn’t get nekkid.

Joss Whedon¹, another horror fanatic who has also made a name for himself overturning genre conventions and is mostly famous for being the creator of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, perhaps the feminist genre icon for my generation, has since decided to tackle this seemingly impossible beast and has himself created a modern slasher movie with a meta textual element which…

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A Saturday Comic???

Life of Bria

Screw the schedule! Everybody’s so pissed about that transploitation movie, (Re)Assignment, that I just couldn’t sit on this comic until Monday. It’s clearly just the screen-writer’s teenaged forced-femme jerk-off fantasy come to the big screen, but what could have been done to make it… not awful? Well, this bonus comic attempts to address that. What do you think? Could that movie have been salvageable?

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Tips for Bimbos

Maybe Socrates was just a Bimbo with a beard? He apparently did have a thing for the young boys..
Good read: The Master and his Emissary, has a few things to say about Socrates and the kind of world his ilk have created.

Julian O'Dea

I had vaguely heard of the “bimbo movement” some time ago, but a site that referred to an old post on this blog alerted me to its reality. To the extent that anything on the Internet is real, of course …

[Added in August 2015. Here is an article I have written on the bimbo fetish and lifestyle.]

Most of the bimbos are Americans, which may partly reflect the tendency for Americans to go to extremes. Also, America sort of invented the “bimbo”. Other nations, like Australia and Britain, have had to make do with “floosies”:

It is not hard to see the bimbo movement as a semi-serious reaction to the feminist career woman movement. The bimbos may be adopting the life strategy of maximising their marital prospects when they are as young and peachy as possible. TempestTCup has written recently about the problem of women waiting until they are…

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Phi in the Sky – As Above So Below

Wow, that’s really cool

MalagaBay

The renaissance of Natural Philosophy in the Renaissance period laid the foundation stones which enabled the construction of the modern scientific edifice.

The Renaissance also renewed interest in anti-Aristotelian theories of nature considered as an organic, living whole comprehensible independently of theology, as in the work of Nicholas of Cusa, Nicholas Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Telesius, and Tommaso Campanella.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophers#Renaissance

Nicholas of Kues (1401 – 1464), also referred to as Nicolaus Cusanus and Nicholas of Cusa, was a German philosopher, theologian, jurist, and astronomer.

One of the first German proponents of Renaissance humanism, he made spiritual and political contributions in European history.

A notable example of this is his mystical or spiritual writings on “learned ignorance,” as well as his participation in power struggles between Rome and the German states of the Holy Roman Empire.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_of_Cusa

Nicolaus Copernicus (1473 – 1543) was a Renaissance mathematician and astronomer who formulated a heliocentric…

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