An LGBTQ actor, director, or character over 55 for Honor Our LGBT Elders Day (USA)

“Ich bin meine eigene Frau” (“I am my own woman/wife”)

– Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, in response to her mother's request to settle and get married

The extraordinary life of Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, Berliner, gender bender, Nazi killer (her own father, with a wooden rolling pin, mind you), prisoner, custodian, museum founder, barmaid, Stasi informer (arguably), den mother to the GDR's LGBT+ youngsters, but most of all, her own woman.

A computer mouse: the first personal computer mouse debuted on this day in 1981.

“To those who think that all this sounds like science fiction, we point out that yesterday's science fiction is today's fact. The Industrial Revolution has radically altered man's environment and way of life, and it is only to be expected that as technology is increasingly applied to the human body and mind, man himself will be altered as radically as his environment and way of life have been.”

– Theodore J. Kaczynski

A Gedankenspiel.

 

Similar to the way moveable print has accelerated the spread of ideas, the personal computer mouse accelerated the speed of which individualist's ideas can spread. However, like the printing press and unlike the spoken word, the mouse can only point and enhance pre-existing notions, thus neutering any prospect of revolutionary change on an individual level.

 

In a grotesque snub to nature, the pointing finger has transcended the mouse, detaching our minds from our bodies in one infinite scroll.

Someone quits something or is unemployed: the abdication of Pope Benedict XVI in 2013.

“[Kuhle Wampe] gives witness to the true face of a struggling, suffering nation. Made by four thousand unemployed people, it never aims to be a work of art but simply aims to portray […] workers whose youthful energy is going to waste.”

– Marcel Carné, via

Kuhle Wampe, Berlin slang that means something like “empty stomach”, is the name of a real-world, improvised encampment for the unemployed at the Müggelsee. Here we find a family who lost everything after the death of one of them.

 

This late-Weimar, brechtian film was quickly banned by the German government.

A film about finance because “the Commonwealth of Massachusetts issues the first paper money on February 3, 1690”. The oldest surviving paper bill in what is now the United States bears the date February 3, 1690. The first documented paper money was issued during the Tang and Song dynasties in China, starting in the vulgar year 618. Who would have thought those new colonies were not the center of world history… sigh…

 

In the fourth instalment of the Homunculus saga, the artificial man callously heads the nation's financial powerhouse while secretly goading the workers in revolt against the ruling class. Soulless and unable to love, he aims for the annihilation of mankind.

 

Some claim that Die Rache des Homunculus, “The Wrath of the Homunculus”, foreshadows Hitler. I say, beware of businessmen enthralling the working classes.

Dragons or lizards, January's soul symbol.

A favourite scene featuring light for Hanukkah and Christmas.

Alan “How long will I live?”

Cesare “Till the break of dawn.”

A ridiculous toy for Stupid Toy Day.

“She must have one complex mechanism!”

– Lancelot

“All I ask is that you step with me into the boundlessness, where constancy, quietude and peace, infinite emptiness reign.”

– János Valuska