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Hand Off – Gay Short Movie 2019 – Movie Review

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Hand OffHand Off is a movie written and directed by Chadlee Skrikker, is 24 minutes long and is about rugby in Cape Town, South Africa.  Jaco decides to admit his feelings about Willem just after they have come out of the changing room having cleaned up following rugby training. 

Willem is taken aback having had no inkling that Jaco was gay, and that he had feeling for him.  As they walk towards the car Willem walks on by leaving [Jaco] feeling isolated and downcast, and not knowing whether their friendship will continue.

He gets home and is met by his mother but moves away from her with a lame excuse and goes to his bedroom collapsing on his bed and falls into a fantasy world with an imaginary friend.  You can tell he is imaginary by the heavy gold on his forehead and his earrings – Leo then directs hisHand Off fantasy.  It at this stage almost has a feeling of Caravaggio or Sebastiane.  The languid bodies lying on rugs with cushions and roses set the scene.

Hand Off is a rugby term, it is when a ball-carrier is permitted to hand off an opponent provided excessive force is not used, to push him away whilst he (or she) continues with trying to get a try.

The actors are of a suitable build to all be rugby players, and indeed carry themselves as testosterone ladened lads. Jaco seems to move from training to his fantasy, all the while Willem is on the periphery reconciling what he has been told and trying to understand how it affects him and his friendship.

Jaco’s fantasy moves forward and becomes more sexually explicit, but the question that is raised is will he come back from fantasy?

Jaco then discovers that Willem (or someone) has told all his fellow team members that he is gay, and they take the action of shunning him with the stereotypical reactions that writers of these scenes often use.  He meets up with Willem expressing how he feels and Willem shows how good a friend he is and becomes the friend he was before Jaco came out.

Soundtracks:  there are several musical tracks used during the movie, but “Lucifer’s Tear” which was written by Ayden Marthinus stands out for me, and fortunately there seem to be three or 4 other tracks hidden away in YouTube.

 

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Windows 10 “Privacy” Feature Is Effectively Outing Young Kids To Their Parents

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looking over your shoulder-logotv

The latest upgrade immediately opts all admins into receiving “activity reports” on their children.

Reprinted from LOGo, written by 8/25/2015

A new privacy feature in Windows 10 is working to out young LGBT children to their parents, many of whom may not be accepting, by spying on their internet activity and reporting each website they visit in an unsolicited email to parents.

The flaw was first pointed out by Windows 10 user Kirk, who wrote to Boing Boing earlier this month:

 

This weekend we upgraded my 14-year-old son’s laptop from Windows 8 to Windows 10. Today I got a creepy-ass email from Microsoft titled ’Weekly activity report for [my kid]’, including which websites he’s visited, how many hours per day he’s used it, and how many minutes he used each of his favorite apps.

I don’t want this. I have no desire to spy on my boy. I fixed it by going into my Microsoft account’s website, hitting the “Family” section, then turning off “Email weekly reports to me” and “Activity reporting”.

As Kirk points out, Windows 10 doesn’t inform children that they’re being monitored or that their internet history is being sent to their parents. As we’ve seen previously, when adult site Corbin Fisher began suing tweens who pirated their content, effectively outing children via their internet habits can have dire consequences.

At the time, a number of kids claimed to be facing hostile environments at home after the adult giant outed them — some even threatened suicide. This Windows 10 privacy flaw is working to effectively do the same thing, only this time it’s worse, since kids aren’t doing anything particularly illegal by surfing LGBT interest sites.

According to Microsoft, the child “safety” feature also reports “how much time the child spent on the PC, the websites they visited, the games and apps they used, and the terms they’ve looked up in search engines like Bing, Google, or Yahoo! Search.”

For what it’s worth, Windows users say the feature has always been available on the platform. It’s only been turned “on” by default after their upgrade to Windows 10.

But as Kirk says, it may already be too late for some young users. He writes, “A message to young readers: if you have Windows 10 now, your parents might be getting the same kind of report I did. Don’t assume your own computer has your back.”