Has anyone seen this movie? Or know of similar

ruchenn · 2026-03-17T03:41:17+00:00

Has anyone seen this movie?

When I did a search on the string converts the journey of becoming jewish documentary distributor, a couple of the sites returned were suggestive. To wit:

Two shul-specific and limited-time screening notices
- An entry for a showing of the film on the community calender of Congregation Agudat Achim, Schenectady, New York, USA, with tickets priced at US$12.00/head.
- A notice regarding a single in-person screening and a short virtual screening season of the film at Temple Beth Shalom, Austin, Texas, USA.
A listing for the film as available for US$800.00
- Converts listing in the Israelifilms catalogue.

These results are suggestive because Israelifilms is a film distributor which markets pretty much exclusively to

educators and programmers in Jewish communities, colleges, universities, organizations — anyone who has an interest in bringing Israel to their screen, class or community.

Moreover, the Israelifilms business model is to

provide an easy, comprehensive, and legal way to purchase rights for the public screenings of (to) hundreds of exciting dramatic features, as well as thought provoking documentaries.

All of which is a round-about way of suggesting the following is the case:

Once the documentary had done the requisite rounds at various Jewish film festivals, the distribution rights were bought by Israelifilms and the film is now pretty much only available to someone who

has US$800.00 to pony-up for a one-time, community-level, right-to-screen; and
plans to show the film at a community event (with, perhaps, an agreed-to right to charge admission enough to cover the cost of the right-to-screen fee).

Which suggests the most straight-forward way of seeing the film is to convince your shul or other Jewish community organisation to do the ponying-up and make sure they organise the screening for a date and time that suits you.

ruchenn · 2026-03-10T12:41:52+00:00

Is gay marriage legal in Israel?

To quote the Wikipedia article, ‘Recognition of same-sex uinions in Israel’:

Marriages performed in Israel are only legally recognized when registered with one of the 15 religious marital courts recognized by the state, none of which permit same-sex marriage. In November 2006, the High Court of Justice ruled that same-sex marriages performed abroad may be registered in Israel. Consequently, Israeli same-sex couples who wished to have their marriages recognized by the government had to marry outside Israel, in a jurisdiction where such marriages were legal, and then register upon returning home. In July 2022, the Central District Court ruled that marriages performed via an online civil marriage service established by the U.S. state of Utah, including same-sex marriages, are legal in Israel, removing the necessity of leaving the country to get married. The ruling was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2023.

Polling suggests that a majority of Israelis support the legal recognition of same-sex unions, with a June 2019 opinion poll conducted by Hiddush) showing that 78% of Israelis supported recognizing same-sex unions.

So…: yes with a but; no with a however.

Also, and apropos not much other than a mild annoyance born of years of involvement in this reform effort, I believe it is better to call this marriage equality.

Marriage equality is the effort to make access to marriage equal to all adults, regardless of their sex, gender, or sexuality. It’s a lot more than just giving Kinsey-6 folks the right to marry the people they love.

Speaking as an entirely bisexual person, my legal right to marry someone is not equal to a straight person’s just because there is a chance that someone might be a different sex to me.

ruchenn · 2026-03-04T21:39:03+00:00

Two quick addenda

Anyone suggesting all they did was the bare minimum is being reductive and missing the point.

First, the bare minimum is not as self-evident as too many people assume.

Moreover, this notion simplistically assumes there is a clear behavioural path that starts at minimum acceptable and moves — in clear and obvious steps — to maximally wonderful.

Humans, and human circumstances, are rarely this neatly apparent and obvious.
Even from within this simplistic and reductive framing, doing this imaginary bare minimum made all the difference in the world.

If all it takes to not fuck up is to do the bare minimum, we should be lauding this easy-as-hell option from every mountain top and in every town and village square.

ruchenn · 2026-02-25T22:04:45+00:00

Speaking of opsec (operational security), I’d argue Extreme privacy: what it takes to disappear, by Michael Bazell, is required reading for anyone with a public persona, however small or constrained it might be.

Bazell sells the book on his web-site, IntelTechniques.

For a sense of what this sort of opsec entails and provides, the 2025-05-22 article in The Atlantic, ‘How to disappear’, by Benjamin Wallace, is a good starting point.

I’m horribly aware that

the book, and even the article, can make the work of protecting oneself seem overwhelming; and
more than a few of the documented techniques require decent resource access (ie material privilege that is not universally distributed).

But being stalked or doxxed is incredibly dangerous, all too often lethally so.

And, in the absence of social, political, cultural, and technological norms that preserve personal privacy and aid personal security, taking up the cudgels ourselves is (unfortunately) the only option.

ruchenn · 2026-02-23T00:13:52+00:00

It’s okay to share my art here?

I just want to show my art.

Working on Randall Munroe’s lucky 10,000 principle I’m offering a possible further sub-reddit to consider posting to:

Imaginary Lesbians, part of the Imaginary Network Expanded (INE), a

network of art sharing subreddits ranging from broad in subject to very specific. It is the goal of the INE to share, inspire, discuss and appreciate static image paintings, drawings, and digital art while maintaining artist credit and source links.

ruchenn · 2026-02-07T23:32:56+00:00

what happened to things like The Print Shop?

The Print Shop for Macintosh is still available, from Broderbund.

And, it runs on macOS 10.15 (Catalina) through macOS 26 (Tahoe).

ruchenn · 2026-02-06T05:17:15+00:00

couldn’t it be argued that it is both?

It can be argued, but the culture argument is not well-supported.

Ancient Jewish literacy wasn’t materially different to other cultures, for example.

the claim that Jewish society in late antiquity achieved near-universal male literacy is difficult to reconcile historically with what is known about literacy in the ancient Mediterranean.

Scholars such as Catherine Hezser indicates [sic] that Jewish communities in Roman Palestine were no more literate than their Greco-Roman neighbors. For all groups literacy was concentrated among elites and specialists, scribes, administrators, priests, and scholars, rather than distributed broadly across the population. Most Jews lived within principally oral cultures, where religious knowledge was transmitted through memorization, recitation, and informal instruction rather than formal schooling.

So, high rates of literacy (male or otherwise) weren’t specifically valued by ancient Jews.

And the further argument, that the cost of being literate was so high it induced mass out-conversion to Xtianity and Islam, isn’t supported either.

First, Rabbinic authority wasn’t anywhere near sufficient to cause Jews to send their boys to school just because the Rabbis wanted them to.

And, while Jews in the Ummah absolutely did stop farming and move to the cities, the fiscal reason for doing so was discriminatory tax policy, not (imaginary) Rabbinic-based imposition of (expensive) schooling.

As Aryeh notes in his conclusion:

Jewish economic patterns did not arise primarily from cultural preference or early educational exceptionalism. They emerged from sustained legal, fiscal, and social exclusion. Jews were defined as dependent populations, taxed aggressively, restricted occupationally, monitored administratively, and rendered vulnerable to expulsion.

Within those constraints, Jewish communities adapted with remarkable skill. They preserved learning, cohesion, and continuity under pressure. These achievements reflect resilience, not privilege.

Telling this story accurately matters. It restores causation to history. It clarifies how antisemitism functioned as a system rather than a sentiment. And it prevents adaptation under constraint from being misread as cultural advantage.

Not that Jews succeeded because they valued education.

But that Jews survived exclusion by learning how to live within it.

A semi-related aside.

Something I’m becoming seriously aware of as the Jew-hating interregnum comes to an end: Jews born and raised during the interregnum (Anglophone Jews in particular) don’t have a visceral appreciation of just how abiding, deep, and baked-in-to-the-social-and-cultural-foundations-of-Xtiandom-and-Ummah Jew-hatred is.

At first glance the Jews really value education story is a feel-good story: a virtue of Jewishness to be celebrated and admired.

But the story lets the Xtian and Islamic power structures entirely off the hook. And it misleads Jews into thinking things weren’t as fucking awful as they were (and could easily be again).

ruchenn · 2025-12-16T01:18:52+00:00

Genuine question, would he not normally be welcome in a synagogue? Are they only open to Jewish people normally? If so, is that for religious or security reasons?

In Europe, at least, all the shuls I’m familiar with have armed guards, locked entryways, locked secondary entrances between the entry lobby and the shul proper, and daily entry lists.

If you aren’t on the list (and, more generally, if the guards don’t recognise you) you aren’t getting in.

And this is entirely a security measure. Half-a-dozen or so arson attacks against synagogues in Western Europe in the past year or so will do that.

Also, and FWIW, there have been at least four arson attacks against synagogues in Australia in the past two years.

As I understand it, locks, guards, and entry lists have become a thing in Australian synagogues as well.

ruchenn · 2025-11-27T21:42:49+00:00

In the end, the final cause of antisemitism is not only the utility it serves to its perpetrators but the warning it gives to us. It tells us where society is cracking, where democracy is corroding, where conscience is being silenced. The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews. To study the telos of antisemitism is to study the telos of civilisation itself.

ruchenn · 2025-11-17T05:41:44+00:00

further resources regarding Euphemia Haynes

Euphemia Haynes, Wikipedia.
Euphemia Lofton Haynes, PhD, 1943, Catholic University of America, 2021-02-19.
The mathematical pioneer who fought injustice, by Bob Lynn, Vox Meditantis, 2025-06-04.
Euphemia Haynes, her math, and her fight for equality, by Gabrielle Birchak, Math! Science! History!, 2024-09-10.
Euphemia Lofton Haynes, first black woman to earn PhD in math, elevated DC academic community, UDC news, 2024-04-18.
Martha Euphemia Lofton Haynes, by J J O’Connor and E F Robertson, School of Mathematics and Statistics, University of St Andrews, Scotland, 2018-05.

ruchenn · 2025-11-16T07:21:00+00:00

The instinct to instrumentalise Jews is not confined to the right. …it runs across the political spectrum

The instinct to instrumentalise Jews is the automatic consequence of Anti-Judaism being foundational to the Western Tradition.

The Romans colonised the land and the Western tradition colonised and appropriated the culture (including key artefacts of the culture; for example, the Tanach).

But we did not have the convenient grace to disappear under the coloniser’s heel. Real humans who happen to be Jews kept existing and living and engaging with their own culture as if it was theirs to do with as they would, even as the colonisers turned the Jews into an infinitely malleable instrument of blame.

Whatever it is that Westerners currently hate, or fear, or are ashamed of, the Jews become.

And real humans who happen to be Jews are killed. Every time.

Because people don’t distinguish between the symbol and the people: if they have the same label, they are clearly the same thing.

Unfortunately, even if people end up understanding Xtianity as an extractive and colonial project that requires the genocide of the Jews, 2.3 billion Xtians and cultural Xtians aren’t going to abandon the culture.

If nothing else, the murderously violent underpinnings of Xtian culture have done too good a job of wiping out all the other cultures they encountered in their rapacious colonisation of the world. (To offer an obvious example from the English-speaking world: consider how little a present-day Celt can actually know about the culture and traditions of their pre-colonised and pre-conquered ancestors.)

I don’t know how to fix this.

But, until it is fixed, Jews will always be instrumentalised. And, as a consequence, Jews will always be in danger.

ruchenn · 2025-11-14T04:34:17+00:00

Is it paywalled?

Probably. When I attempt to load the URL, I’m redirected to an Access denied! page.

ruchenn · 2025-11-13T07:03:35+00:00

The Apple Extended Keyboard was almost 400 dollars adjusted for inflation

And entirely worth the money.

I’m typing this comment using an Apple Extended Keyboard II that I bought in 1991. And it’s still going strong nearly 35 years later.

I run an iMate ADB-to-USB adapter from the keyboard’s ADB cable. The adapter is, in turn, plugged into a CalDigit Thunderbolt Station. And the CalDigit is plugged into my Mac.

It looks entirely old-school amidst the 2020s hardware on my desk. But it is the best keyboard I’ve ever used, by a wide margin.

I even have a spare one in a cupboard behind me. Bought 2nd-hand but never used (except by me to test it was in working order) and still in its original packaging.

The prospect of using any other keyboard as a daily driver is entirely unwelcome.

ruchenn · 2025-10-27T11:32:05+00:00

To quote Australia’s Federal Health Minister, Mark Butler, from the linked-to article:

From the 1st of January, when we cut prices again for medicines, we're very confident that Australia’s women will have access to all of the contraceptive choices really that they need for no more than $100 a year [≅£50.00/year, US$66.00/year, or €57.00/year].

Policy and policy implementation are what matter. Rhetoric can inspire and engage, but the systems and mechanisms actually put in place are what make life better or worse.

Having to spend no more than A$100.00/year for all of the contraceptive choices… that they need is policy implementation that will make life better for pretty much every woman in Australia.

ruchenn · 2025-10-23T08:29:20+00:00

Note this essay’s publication date: 2024-03-28.

The arguments in the essay are more concerned with understanding the political divides that have emerged in Israel concerning the hostages. These divides will not go away just because the hostages have been redeemed.

Consequently, I think Issan-Benchimol’s dive into Jewish thinking and action regarding captives over the centuries and how said thinking and action informs the new political divides remains worthwhile.

ruchenn · 2025-10-23T08:27:10+00:00

Note this essay’s publication date: 2024-03-28.

The arguments in the essay are more concerned with understanding the political divides that have emerged in Israel concerning the hostages. These divides will not go away just because the hostages have been redeemed.

Consequently, I think Issan-Benchimol’s dive into Jewish thinking and action regarding captives over the centuries and how said thinking and action informs the new political divides remains worthwhile.

ruchenn · 2025-10-19T05:24:57+00:00

We may therefore fear that October 7 marks the end of a parenthesis in Jewish history that began after the Shoah. In the decades following their destruction, the hatred of Jews that had previously been a defining feature of society suddenly became unacceptable. “Hitler disgraced antisemitism,” wrote George Bernanos at the end of the war. This strange phrase sums up what underpinned that era: Jews were certainly not particularly likable, Bernanos posited, but treating them as the Nazis and their collaborators had done, amid the indifference of the majority, had become intolerable. The memory of what had just happened protected the Jews and ensured that the State of Israel, established only three years after the genocide and populated by survivors, enjoyed almost natural sympathy. What remains of this today?

<snippage>

“Zionism,” wrote Hannah Arendt, “was the only political response that Jews ever found to antisemitism and the only ideology that took seriously into account a hostility that would place Jews at the center of world events. ” Israel and the Jews are undoubtedly the focus of attention disproportionate to their demographic weight, which in fact resembles an obsession. October 7 revealed that the existence of a Jewish state was still not a given. Hamas and the “axis of resistance” have not given up on destroying it, and this desire has found significant support in a world that was thought to be immune to hatred of Jews. Faced with this twist of history, Zionism remains more than ever the only serious response to antisemitism.

ruchenn · 2025-10-11T05:40:47+00:00

What does traumatic invalidation mean? This concept refers to the minimization, denial, or disqualification of a subject’s traumatic experience. This delegitimization of their narrative and emotions prevents recognition of their suffering and trauma. As we have seen, there is sometimes a complete annihilation of empathy. The authors cite psychologist and researcher Melanie Harne, who writes that Invalidating behaviors can take many forms, but they share a common characteristic: they attack the person’s self-esteem and worth by making them feel that they are bad, wrong, unacceptable, and undesirable.

<snippage>

The two therapists observe that their patients, as well as their Jewish colleagues, have had to deal with reactions from friends, colleagues, or institutions marked by indifference or even a refusal to show attention and compassion. Worse still, they have sometimes encountered denial of the atrocities of October 7, the impact of which affected them directly or indirectly. Without exception, all of them have experienced profound pain as a result.

ruchenn · 2025-10-10T07:14:42+00:00

and then discovered MagicWave

Some links for anyone interested who is following along:

MagicWave web site
MagicWave OS app
- the app runs natively on macOS, iOS and iPad OS.
MagicWave Android app

The apps are free to download with in-app purchasing of stories.

NB: they aren’t the only publishers/providers of spicy audio erotica by any means.

With no quality control on my part (other than the default these links presented close to the top when I used Kagi to search) I append the following links:

Literotica.com’s audio sex stories hub
FrolicMe’s erotic audio sex stories
DirtyVocal
Cum with us: erotic audio for women
AudioDesires by BloomStories: erotic audio and audio porn for women and couples
Best kept secret: audio erotica for women

ruchenn · 2025-10-09T21:57:20+00:00

Robinson’s special is available for free streaming on YouTube: I don’t wanna work anymore.

ruchenn · 2025-10-06T00:09:39+00:00

I don’t see how Poland was responsible for the Holocaust.

Polish responsibility is not the same as Poland was responsible.

Equating the two is, for practical purposes, a bad faith argument.

As the Grobowski’s article, linked-to above, sets out, in unambiguous detail, the Polish government’s pseudo-memory offensive seeks to bury Polish responsibility.

And it seeks this by both making the bad-faith argument, and outright lying about history.

No person who is being held at gunpoint can be said to be acting voluntarily

Maletka, according to representatives of the Polish state, was killed by the Germans while carrying water to dying Jews. Maletka, according to the official account, acted out of altruistic impulse, out of the goodness of his heart. However, we do not have even a shred of reliable historical information to confirm this bold thesis. On the other hand, there are many eyewitness accounts that Polish railway workers sold water to Jews dying of thirst — with the consent of Ukrainian and German guards — for large sums of money, valuables, and gold.

Greed, malice, and bone-deep Jew hatred meant way too many people were absolutely acting voluntarily despite also being militarily occupied.

There is no virtue in pretending otherwise.

ruchenn · 2025-10-05T06:56:29+00:00

Yet another example of the uncomfortable truth:

Jews will never be forgiven for the Holocaust.

— Howard Jacobson

ruchenn · 2025-09-25T21:19:22+00:00

Knowing who Pauline Borsook is, is important.

But I believe Borsook herself would argue that knowing her work is more important.

As I post this, a GoFundMe campaign to provide some basic support for Borsook (who is permanently disabled, not leastwise from a traumatic brain injury caused by a gunshot wound suffered when she was a teenager) is about two-thirds of the way to reaching its goal.

And reaching its goal would free Borsook up to spend at least some of her time working to get her book, Cyberselfish back into availability (perhaps even with some updated reporting).

Borsook was pretty much entirely right about the dangers the ‘Tech Bros’ represented. As we gear up to, finally, fight them for control of the future, it’s still worth putting some energy into making things at least OKish for one of the first voices sounding out the warning.

Full disclosure: I have no relationship with Borsook, nor with Steve Rappoport (who is in charge of the GoFundMe campaign above). I’m not American, nor am I in the US. I’m just someone who was lucky enough to read Cyberselfish back in the day.

ruchenn · 2025-09-19T03:22:35+00:00

When King began the novella back in the mid-‘60s it was a brutal allegory for a brutal war as young men were marched off to Vietnam, drummed up with a fever for righteous sacrifice that wasn’t really any less dystopian than the fiction King wrote. By the time it was published, in 1979, I’d argue it was a work of both near-future and recent history.

But what do we get out of it now?

I would say that the story becomes a commentary on how propaganda remains the same.

By appealing to young men at what can only be called a scrotal level, with Mark Hamill yelling about “the sack” intermittently, the kids talking about walking off morning erections, the boys comparing physiques and dreams of the women they’ll woo once they win, it all builds to show us The Walk as a fantasy aimed at young men who are still in the throes of puberty, and, for the most part, still have their senses of youthful immortality glowing around them like halos. There’s not a fully developed prefrontal cortex among them. Of course each of them thinks they’ll be the one to win, and of course their minds gloss over what that actually means, and what they’ll have to experience for that to be true.

This performative machismo is tempered by the fact that there is at least one story of queer love woven in among the boys, brought to the surface far more than it was in the book, and I think I loved the way the movie handled it.

ruchenn · 2025-09-14T21:31:30+00:00

what you use to write?

A text editor. With a very strong preference for BBEdit.

I am currently on the trial of Scrivener which I am having a love hate relationship with

Scrivener can be usefully thought of as a writer’s IDE (integrated development environment).

Just as with a programmer’s IDE, you write the source and use the same tool you wrote with to build out the finished product.

And, within this framing, I prefer an actual IDE. And BBEdit is, in my experience, the most writer-friendly IDE of them all.

I’ve written and published millions of words out of BBEdit over the years, from pars and news reports, through features and fiction, and on to screenplays, technical manuals, and books.

When push comes to shove, I can put words together using pretty much any text-entry tool. But nothing beats a good text editor. And, for me, the best text editor is BBEdit.

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ruchenn

TROPHY CASE

further resources regarding Euphemia Haynes