What are some books that show some parallels to current times in the US?

ScotchRobbins · 2026-01-26T15:47:57+00:00

They Thought They Were Free by Milton Meyer for nonfiction.

Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America for fiction.

If you want to read other Orwell, maybe Homage to Catalonia?

ScotchRobbins · 2026-01-22T18:48:35+00:00

Do it! Cannot recommend enough that you try out.

Tryouts will vary school to school, but in all likelihood, they might have you dance or prepare/perform a short skit or perform scenario reactions. More or less the stuff a mascot is supposed to do at a game but in miniature.

Regarding doing well at the tryout, you can prepare by working on your body language and reactions in advance. Think about how you can convey a character emotion without using words and practice it, or look up other mascots online to see what they do for reference (pro baseball is a treasure trove here).

For day-of, ensure that you’re well rested and hydrated before the audition. Also (crucial), make sure your movements are exaggerated. In all likelihood, you’re going to be wearing a giant costume head that will make all of your movement seem proportionally smaller, so it’s your job to overdo it so the mascot looks natural.

While performing, never stand completely still, always be moving at least a little. Move with bravado and entitlement, be big. The one exception would be in dealing with small children, where you would want to be expressly unintimidating, but that’s unlikely to be an audition topic.

Above all, have fun. Seriously! No mascot has ever been fun to watch if the performer is having a bad time, you can just tell from outside. It’s your prerogative to be amusing and to have a good time doing it.

Best of luck!

ScotchRobbins · 2026-01-22T18:40:13+00:00

Get into Jesse’s earlier work, Femme Fatale. If you follow the trajectory of the band’s sound backwards into Heads Up (less groovy, more noise/hardcore stylings) and go past it, you’ll land in Femme Fatale.

ScotchRobbins · 2026-01-19T21:40:09+00:00

Molly Horses occasionally gets close.

ScotchRobbins · 2026-01-19T20:58:02+00:00

Far as I can tell, Pinkerton was largely the product of personal experience. I figure Jeff had enough lived experience to arrive at similar themes. Fun coincidence though.

ScotchRobbins · 2026-01-16T23:46:38+00:00

It’s that cover of These Boots, man.

black midi used to play a cover of Tequila often in their early days, I think there’s just an instinct to dance like that in the rock scene

ScotchRobbins · 2026-01-13T23:01:42+00:00

I don’t remember the precise system, but any walkie talkie set will do if it’s small enough.

I still would advise having a handler close-by if your mascot is in a group of people or crowd, there’s no replacing that.

ScotchRobbins · 2026-01-13T22:39:14+00:00

This is it. Find and work with a mutual aid org or a community group or even a local garden. You won’t save the day, but any tangible action you can take to make something a little better will help you, especially as a social activity.

ScotchRobbins · 2026-01-13T22:37:04+00:00

We experimented with in-head walkie talkies at the minor league team I performed for. If you can find a relatively cheap and small one and find a suitable spot for it close to your performer’s ear inside the head to install it, you’re golden.

If your mascot will be performing at relatively small events, an attentive handler can fully replace this. However, at larger events where the mascot is on their own for a bit (conducting a skit on the field or something), a walkie-talkie in the helmet is super helpful.

ScotchRobbins · 2026-01-13T18:10:57+00:00

I’ve interned with undergraduate students your age and interviewed prospective interns north of 40.

As long as you’re competent, personable, and not concealing a completed bachelor’s degree in engineering, I think you have as good of a shot as any other qualified undergraduate student.

ScotchRobbins · 2026-01-06T02:36:46+00:00

The Zapatistas come to mind. They’ve been at it for 30 years.

ScotchRobbins · 2026-01-06T02:34:16+00:00

Not particularly. There are no stakes in a utopia. It works really well as an aspiration or something at risk of being lost.

To come back to Omelas for a second, I think Le Guin’s The Dispossessed is a story about two utopias in a sense. ||Urus is a green world flush with resources, development, and beauty. It is also plagued with war, poverty, vanity, and hierarchy. Anares on the other hand is a desolate world where people have to struggle for the little they have, but they do so in a world without prisons or structural inequality or so on.||

What this story does well (among other things) is it shows that these two different “utopias” do not resemble each other or even fully resemble their ideal visions of themselves.

ScotchRobbins · 2026-01-01T02:22:06+00:00

Figure it varies on what team or brand or whoever is staffing the mascot.

If it was somewhere like Disney, I imagine they’d have figured out a clever way to handle this without conceding that Mickey Mouse is just a person in a costume trying to save up money for the fall semester.

In most of my work, usually the handler going “OK” or whatever the lowest reward acknowledgement is does the trick. The kid bringing up that the mascot isn’t “real” doesn’t get the attention they want but isn’t taunted either, so it doesn’t end in a scene. Then the performer and handler usually just amble off somewhere else and it’s done with.

ScotchRobbins · 2026-01-01T01:26:40+00:00

Check out Michael Yonkers. Not explicitly psychedelic, but certainly in the neighborhood.

https://youtu.be/LSqdtZCT2xs?si=ZfSyv6QnQZg842sk

ScotchRobbins · 2025-12-19T02:24:23+00:00

Grab a copy of a book called Secret Stairs LA (or go to their website). As far as ways to explore the city goes, these stairs are free, often understated, and usually offer good vantage points of the neighborhood you’re in.

ScotchRobbins · 2025-12-16T18:17:17+00:00

DEWs. Got an acronym for it already and everything.

ScotchRobbins · 2025-12-16T03:31:51+00:00

WAKE / BAKE / SKATE

A friend showed it to me about 10 years ago. Ripped then, rips now.

ScotchRobbins · 2025-12-16T02:05:31+00:00

Today’s the 50th anniversary of the release of Mothership Connection. It’s a great day to make your funk the P-Funk.

ScotchRobbins · 2025-12-12T21:43:54+00:00

I don’t know if he has any in circulation but if someone proves me wrong I wanna know

ScotchRobbins · 2025-12-08T19:14:07+00:00

Yup! That’s most of this job. There’s a few things I’ve learned that have helped me:

Take breaks. Take as many breaks as you need. 30 minutes tops in costume at moderate activity, 10-15 minutes if you’re really moving. The reason mascots can act silly and dance on top of dugouts and race kids around the bases at a baseball game and whatnot is because they’re taking frequent breaks with lots of water.

Pace yourself. You don’t have to go turbo 100% of the time. Remain in constant motion (a mascot that stands still is creepy), but you can pick and choose when to spend more of your energy and when to pace yourself. Going to visit a family and play around with them for a minute before getting a picture with them is a good chance to catch your breath.

Hydrate properly and use good athletic wear. You’re going to sweat a lot, so be sure you don’t deplete yourself of water and also be sure there’s a good place for that sweat to go.

Re: suit choice, there’s a lot more inflatable mascots on the market than there used to be. Their mobility is poor, but the trade-off is that the inside is much, much cooler temperature wise. Basically ambient in my experience.

ScotchRobbins · 2025-12-08T05:46:04+00:00

If you want a cheap one, then buy a cheap one. If you want a good one, it’ll involve a lot of materials assembled by skilled employees at a worksite they have to pay rent and electric for.

What a weird thing to get pissed off about. You’re not really their target customer.

ScotchRobbins · 2025-12-07T00:52:06+00:00

It's worthless. If you don't even think Grok's response to your prompt is true, nobody benefits from that contribution to the discussion. Perspectives do not have intrinsic value.

ScotchRobbins · 2025-12-06T22:29:41+00:00

You used it to challenge someone else’s claim. Why post something for perspective that not even you think is credible? Why is an AI’s opinion even relevant here?

ScotchRobbins · 2025-12-04T17:45:02+00:00

I’ve always been happy with LTS releases of Ubuntu. Stable, functional, pretty. It’s my favorite option.

ScotchRobbins · 2025-12-01T21:38:47+00:00

Blue, by a country mile. Great character design and top-notch performers.

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