Calling "Just Because"

February 29th, 2012
calling, contra
I've been trying to learn the singing square Just Because for about a month: singing it as I walk to and from the bus, while doing the dishes, when bored, and generally driving Julia crazy. At the fourth Saturday dance this weekend I chickened out but yesterday at MIT I got up the nerve for it: (mp3)

Overall, I think it went ok. The dance was a little hard for the group: the quick succession of partner-corner-partner-corner combined with the unfamiliarity of the formation, singing call, and partner changing was too much for some of the squares. The dance has recovery time, though, and no square fell apart. Musically I'm not totally happy with my singing; G is a little low for me and I sang louder than I needed to, pushing my voice too hard. I got good feedback from the dancers, though, and no one complained that it was dorky (to my face, anyway).

It was great working with Eric, Julie, and Judy. You can't hear much of Judy's drumming on the recording because she was barely mic'd (fine acoustically), but she was really good.

Referenced in:

Comment via: google plus, facebook, substack

Recent posts on blogs I like:

Avoiding being raped

A comment on a recent blog post asked for advice for a trans woman who kept making dangerous dating and sex choices, because she hadn’t received the female socialization that would have taught her to avoid threatening people and risky situations.

via Thing of Things October 28, 2026

“We should be more ambitious with the software we build”

Since early this year, Michael Malis (of pgrust) has been showing me interesting things he's done and saying [W]e should be more ambitious1 with the software we build There is, understandably, a lot of skepticism about projects like pgrust because there…

via Posts on October 24, 2026

Was the HuggingFace hacking incident scheming?

In July 2026, internal OpenAI agents hacked HuggingFace (HF) in order to figure out how their evaluation grader works. This involved a thousand agents coordinating on an improvised message board to carry out an elaborate sequence of exploits. A later grou…

via Victoria Krakovna October 18, 2026

more     (via openring)