jwz

First up! Sanfran666co posted this very nice thing about us: Love Letter to the DNA Lounge. Awwww....

This month was a Patreon milestone, and not in a good way: this was the first month since January 2019 that I did not have to mail out any new Patreon cards. That's right, this is the first month ever that we had zero new sign-ups... Patreon has been an extremely helpful channel for helping keep this club alive, so please tell your friends.

If you come to a couple shows a month, it's a bargain. But it's even more of a bargain if you only come to one show a year, because it leaves open the possibility that you will ever be able to see a show here again. Your membership helps ensures that the club will still be around when you need it in the future. (Do you want us to go the way of Oasis? Because otherwise that's how we go the way of Oasis.)

And if you're already a member, thank you for your ongoing support! Can you up your pledge by a few bucks?

I don't want to jinx it, but we may have an incipient plumbing disaster brewing again, so.... Patreon!

It has been a slow few months. Overall attendance has been down. Some folks are theorizing that people are staying home because they are depressed about our country's ongoing self-immolation and speed-run toward fascism and economic collapse. Maybe, who knows. I don't get that, though. Why be sad and drink alone at home when you could be sad and drink alone in a loud room full of strangers?

We've been trying a few new things, throwing stuff at the wall to see what sticks. We have a few flavors of "pop music from 10 years ago" that are sometimes clicking, and we've been trying a few variations of "latin party". Sometimes the secret sauce with those is having both the words "Bad" and "Bunny" on the flyer, but sometimes that doesn't help. Not really the same thing, but Gothicumbia has been killing it, though. Coming up this Saturday!

Every few months I read a breathless article about how the Hot New Trend With The Youth is dance parties that end by 10pm, so they can Get To Bed at a Reasonable Hour. This offends me deeply, because back in my day we twentysomethings and thirtysomethings went to work sleep deprived and hung over and we liked it that way. (We also stunk of other people's cigarettes and I do not miss that.) Yes yes, Old Man Yells At Cloud, I know. Anyway, we tried throwing one of those last week and it flopped. Maybe we'll try again.

And, here are some upcoming events, and some photos from recent parties: Buy tickets! In advance! Berate your friends!

Secret Attraction Micro Mania Wrestling Dale Duro Secret Psychedelica Sorry For Party Rocking SJ Random Access Star Crash Curse Mackey Cyberdelia Street Cleaner Nitzer Ebb

Faux toes...

Ascend Gothicumbia Hubba Hubba Vorlust Super Mario Bros '93 Hell Fire + Nefarious + Defiance After Life

Today I learned that the new official White House physician in charge of lying for Trump is named Doctor Barbarella.

I really think that Doctor Durand would have been more appropriate.

Previously, previously, previously.

High Frequency Electric Currents in Medicine and Dentistry (1910):

By champion of electro-therapeutics Samuel Howard Monell, a physician who the American X-Ray Journal cite, rather wonderfully, as having "done more for static electricity than any other living man". [...]

Monell claims that his high frequency currents of electricity could treat a variety of ailments, including acne, lesions, insomnia, abnormal blood pressure, depression, and hysteria. Although not explicitly delved into in this volume, the treatment of this latter condition in women was frequently achieved at this time through the use of an early form of the vibrator (to save the physician from the manual effort), through bringing the patient to "hysterical paroxysm".

We see here that the good name of Tesla has always been usurped by hucksters and quacks:

"It comprises a charging circuit interrupter, condenser, and primary and secondary coils, and is the only Tesla transformer ever brought within so small a compass."

But never mind that, show me some ankle, baby! Oh yeah that's the stuff.

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Newgrounds, a gaming forum, has some clever ways for non-intrusively complying with the shambling disaster that is the "UK Online Safety Act".

For years, I've been doing something similar to this when generating internal reports on DNA Lounge demographics: e.g., if someone bought a ticket for an 18+ event 5 years ago, they must be at least 23 years old now.

Newgrounds: Here is our current plan for UK users:

1. If your account is more than ten years old, we will assume you are currently over 18. This is in line with one of the methods of effective age assurance, which involves paying a third party to match your email address against some sort of database of scraped data, which determines if your email has been in use for a long time. We have our own long-term data, so we'll use that instead.

2. If your account ever bought Supporter status with a credit card and we can confirm that with the payment processor, we will assume you are over 18 because you need to be 18 in the UK to have a credit card.

3. If your account ever bought Supporter status more than two years ago, we will assume you are over 18 because you need to be at least 16 to have a Paypal or debit card in the UK (assuming we are right about this).

4. If none of the above applies, you will have the opportunity to pay a small one-time fee via credit card as confirmation of your age.

We are not planning to offer things like ID checks or facial recognition because these require us to pay a third party to confirm each person.

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Molly White has a good intro:

Far from being the new hotness attracting glitzy feature stories in tech media or billions in venture funding, RSS has been around for 25 years. [...]

Many, if not most, websites publish an RSS feed. Whereas you can only follow a Twitter user on Twitter or a Substack writer in the Substack app, you can follow any website with an RSS feed in a feed reader. When you open it, all your reading is neatly waiting for you in one place, like a morning newspaper. [...]

I've been heavily using RSS for over a decade, and it's a travesty more people aren't familiar with it. Here's how to join me in the brave new (old) world of RSS:

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Someone's doing a Kickstarter to replicate the Macrodata Refinement Keyboard:

Looks like it will start at $600.

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Not The Onion:

Jesus Teran, a Venezuelan immigrant and civil engineer working as a carpenter in Imperial, Pennsylvania, was reportedly detained by ICE on July 8 after a routine check-in at the agency's Pittsburgh field office.

That was from Newsweek, who just ripped off someone else's reporting and stuck an "AI" summary on top. But, begrudging props to them for the fantastic headline.

Local catholic church fights to free immigrant detained by ICE, help his family:

"It's been a heartbreaking experience. He's been faithfully appearing at ICE appointments for more than four years, he was following the protocols of ICE, he was complying with everything he's supposed to do. All of a sudden, he's detained," said the Rev. Jay Donahue, senior parochial vicar at St. Oscar Romero Parish. [...] "He was building a life for himself and his family. He's been contributing to his community and he's well-respected within this community.

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I'm pleased to report the continuing staggering popularity of my five WordPress plugins: the plugin directory reports "fewer than 10" active installations for all but one... and that one has cracked the aspirational "10+" barrier. (Which one it is might surprise you!)

Granted they are mostly a bit obscure... except for WYSIWYG Comments, which I would have thought would have wide-ranging appeal, frankly.

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Workers at a site in South Carolina that once made key parts for nuclear bombs have found a radioactive wasp nest.

Employees who routinely check radiation levels at the Savannah River Site near Aiken found a wasp nest on July 3 on a post near tanks where liquid nuclear waste is stored, according to a report from the U.S. Department of Energy.

The nest had a radiation level 10 times what is allowed by federal regulations, officials said.

The workers sprayed the nest with insect killer, removed it and disposed of it as radioactive waste. No wasps were found, officials said.

That's a funny way of saying the wasps are currently at large!

The watchdog group Savannah River Site Watch said the report was at best incomplete since it doesn't detail where the contamination came from, how the wasps might have encountered it and the possibility that there could be another radioactive nest if there is a leak somewhere.

Please note from the Previouslies that this is not the first time that I have brought nuclear wasps to your attention.

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Vattenfall:

Samuel L. Jackson is a treasure. And every copy of this video hosted elsewhere bleeps it, because we live in a world of cowards.

This one is pretty good, too.

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