mini-rant on gay marriage debate

It’s been an odd week on Twitter for JavaScript enthusiasts, as folks started forwarding around the fact that JS creator Brendan Eich donated money in support of Prop. 8, California’s gay marriage ban. As one might expect, this generated a whole lot of discussion and debate, with varying levels of civility. I have abstained from any participation in all that kerfuffle on Twitter because I find the character restriction way too annoying for actual discussion of complex issues, but these two quotes that showed up in my feed particularly compelled me to respond:

They come from Tim Caswell, creator of the wonderful resource How to Node and a respected member of the JavaScript community. And in response, I just have to say that I see it as not about wanting social acceptance of their “lifestyle,” but about wanting social acceptance of themselves, as human beings who can and do contribute immensely to that society. As such, they deserve no less, and in fact anything less is an injustice that we have a duty to correct.

And so, slowly but surely, we will. Over the next decade or two, through court rulings, legislation, and probably eventually a constitutional amendment, American society will force people to accept a broader definition of “marriage.” What we can’t do is force people to approve. And that’s perfectly OK. I fully support anyone’s freedom to disapprove all he or she wants. But as many on Twitter immediately pointed out, we’ve already lived through the lesson that “separate but equal” is not really equal, and so as a society we are obligated to take the next step in defining what marriage is.

I’m pleased and proud that we’re going to do this during my and my kids’ lifetimes.

another solo gig recap

About two and a half years ago I played a gig at the downtown Austin farmers’ market where I got to play guitar and focus entirely on my own material, something I hadn’t done in many years. In January I had another opportunity to do it again, so I rounded up three great musicians to play with: Dennis Ludiker and Matt Mefford from MilkDrive and Trevor Smith from Green Mountain Grass, The Bluegrass Outfit, and various other Austin acts.

This time I was also lucky to have my buddy Justin Burke doing the audio engineering and so we got some of it recorded: here’s most of set 2.

I called the band WYSIWYG for the day, a one-off I won’t use again now that I know that some band in France uses it. A lot of these tunes are a little rough the first time through the changes and many of the endings are pretty ragged too, since we were basically unrehearsed for all this (we’d just met up a couple nights before and played through most of the songs once each so they’d have some slight familiarity), but once the guys get their ears wrapped around each song there really is some spectacular playing here and there. Oh, and Violet and Graham got to sit in and sing “The Alligator Song,” as they do at many of my gigs these days :)

Cheris caught a couple of tunes from the first set on video with our Flip cam — there’s plenty of wind noise but overall these guys played such great stuff on this tune that I had to post it. The mom swinging her kid around right in front of the camera near the end of the video is pretty awesome too…

There’s some second set video footage as well; I’ll put that on YouTube after I have a chance to update it with the wind-free audio that Justin captured.

Looking forward to doing one of these again if I can find the opportunity to do that when the MilkDrive guys aren’t on the road.

the Lighty Bear GIFs

Cheris took her camera & tripod into Graham’s room a few weeks back and got some great shots of the kiddo as his favorite stuffed bear cycled through its light routine. Since animated GIFs seem to be back in fashion these days, I thought I’d make a couple.

Graham with Lighty Bear, version 1

Graham with Lighty Bear, version 2

I’m not sure if you can export animated GIFs from Photoshop with more than a 256 color palette (or, if you can, I didn’t figure it out), so I think I’ll do some JavaScript-animated ones to compare how this looks with high-resolution images instead of these much-downgraded ones.

UPDATE: here are those higher-res, JavaScript-animated versions.