| I'M GONNA START MY NARNIA ESSAY SOON, I SWEAR |
[16 Dec 2009|05:17pm] |
IDK, if hiatuses were a class, I would get a big fat F. But there are more important things! For example: porn. Specifically: porn in Australia! And the future lack thereof?! Here's what ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) ineptshieldmaid has to say about it:
Minister Stephen Conroy has announced that the Australian Federal Government will be censoring our internet access, with legislation to be tabled in Parliament next year. As an Australian consumer and producer of adult content, I reject government censorship. Australian fans reject censorship. Fandom at large rejects censorship (I hope). Thus: a porn-in! A celebration of all the terrible adult content from which Minister Conroy would like to save us.
IT'S A MOTHERFUCKING PORN-OFF IN.
In other news, the 3-sentence ficathon has become my favorite LJ hangout. It's perfect for my current attention span, and I'm writing in fandoms I would never write in other otherwise. So! Three-sentence fics under the cut! Some (many) of these fandoms have been crossed over with each other.
( epistemology, English grammar, Harry Potter, Jonny Quest, Mary Poppins, Macdonald Hall, The Matrix, Merlin, Narnia, science, Shakespeare, & Wall*E )
I'm usually not one to be linking to College Humor, but check out Dangerous Wands, a fake trailer based on Dangerous Minds but set in the Wizarding World with Hermione Granger as Michelle Pfeiffer. ("DO I LOOK LIKE PRO-QUIDDITCH MATERIAL TO YOU?") It's utter crack basically, but UMMM now I kind of want to read the fic? It's so cracked out it came back the other way potentially compelling! What is it like for a socioeconomically disadvantaged wizard kid kicking around at the bottom of the system?! I mean, we've all seen how inept the Ministry of Magic is.
To conclude, 2 Merlinish things:
1) a ficlet I wrote for Memetime with Mordred & Morgana
2) the merlin/morgana drabble!au spam fest!
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| "Don't eat muffins while I'm developing you." |
[16 Dec 2009|10:38am] |
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unwritten letter #1 : vienna teng |
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So, I guess, technically I should have said that I was almost done. I've got a final tonight, but I don't think it really counts because it's essentially a critique of the course. We have to choose two books from the syllabus and defend retaining them for future versions of the class. I assume this will be relatively easy because, uh, I'll be defending books the guy already put in the syllabus. Plus, he sent a note around telling the class that we could go ahead and do the paper from the comfort of our own homes and e-mail it to him when we're finished. This works to my advantage for two reasons:
1. I don't have to drive twenty-five minutes to campus at night, and
2. Wearing pants during the exam is not compulsory.
Todd's been away at home for the last few days, which means that I have been living a very sparse lifestyle -- very little makeup, no shoes, chocolate muffins for dinner -- and making ridiculous choices about which movies to watch (running Labyrinth viewing count: 3). It'll be good to have him back. The theater in the next town over is doing Mst3k's Christmas Rifftrax tomorrow, which we're gonna' go see. Oh! And remember the apartment we went to last week? The one that had been rented out the week before we got there? Well, Todd got a call yesterday and the guy canceled! Todd and I are going in tomorrow morning to fill out the application. I'm really hopeful for this place: it's in a great location (about five minutes away from campus), we get a student discount, and there's a fireplace.
Also, I felt very accomplished this morning when I successfully navigated a Russian-language download site in search of the new Seabird album. So, now, I'm either downloading the album or an application for a mail-order bride. Either way -- amusement abounds!
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| It's tradition. |
[14 Dec 2009|09:29pm] |
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let's dance : david bowie |
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I've painted my nails a sparkly, iridescent colour in honour of finals week, and,
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| can you find me space / inside your bleeding heart |
[14 Dec 2009|02:02am] |
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mood |
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 just to see the hugs |
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music |
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Placebo, "Passive Aggressive" |
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+ Outside my usual Chinese take-out place, there is a sign that says "No standing at any time except for trucks", under which someone has put a chair. Win!
+ Unnecessary crossover #32985: there's a UN-type organization for fantasy worlds, and they're having a summit on, uh, world peace or whatever. There are delegations from Narnia, Camelot, Archenland, the Fire Nation, the Earth Kingdom, Calormen, aaaand bunches of others. H-hilarity ensues?! Or how about the one where a delegation from one kingdom visits another and cautious alliances ensue, hilarity optional. Sexings a plus!
+ I have been into these two songs lately, and coincidentally they're both not about the speed of light, despite being titled as such. Lightspeed by Matt & Kim (omg ignore the terrible video) and Speed of Light by Asian Dub Foundation.
+ How do I kick some life into Memetime with Mordred & Morgana??
+ Penultimate S2 Merlin episode! ( Return of the Liveblog )
I'm gonna be scarce on LJ until sometime around Christmas or whatever. Whenever school/visa/work/housing things are worked out. Maybe I'll come back to freak out about next week's Merlin. I'd say I wouldn't, but I know myself.
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| Aaaaaand.... |
[13 Dec 2009|07:47pm] |
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mausam & escape : a.r. rahman |
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DONE.
And it feels so good.
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| Down in the Underground you'll find someone true. |
[12 Dec 2009|03:19pm] |
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underground : david bowie |
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One take-home exam down, one to go. It took me a day and a half to do the TESOL exam, mostly because, for some reason, my brain wasn't engaged yesterday. I've got New Media on my plate and I'm just waiting for my professor to e-mail me the exam. 'Guess that means I've got a little free time this afternoon! Yay!
Todd and I watched Labyrinth the other night. He hadn't seen it before, which was crazy to me, because that movie (along with Jurassic Park) was a fundamental part of my childhood. (I suspect it's also where I got my fetish for androgynous guys in puffy poet shirts.) How do you get through a "proper '80s childhood" without seeing Labyrinth? It's incredible, but that movie stands the test of time: Jim Henson and co. managed to make everything look perfect. I mean, Todd and I watched a trailer for Madagascar the other day and we both thought that even though the movie was released, like, two years ago, it already looks shlocky. Labyrinth, on the other hand, despite its pervasive misuse of green screen technology, still looks awesome.
As a result, I've been poking around the online Labyrinth fanfic archives (shut up) and I've come across some really, ah, interesting stuff. 'Thing that bugs me is that almost every writer will mention Jareth's "mismatched eyes" at one point or another -- "Jareth's strange, mismatched eyes brooded and considered the fair babe in front of him" -- when, in reality, Bowie's eyes aren't two different colours at all. He got into a fight when he was a kid (over a girl) and the other kid took a swing and him at nicked Bowie's eye with his thumbnail. As a result, his pupil is permanently dilated. Writers, his eyes aren't two different colours. David Bowie is just a badass.
Todd and I should go as Sarah and Jareth next Halloween.
I could totally pull off a pair of skin-tight jodhpurs.
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| ceci n'est pas un livejournal! |
[12 Dec 2009|11:56am] |
Baby's first DW cross-post! I'm just experimenting and checking this sucker out. So far I like that DW allows 15 icons. That's pretty sweet.
+ I've got 2 1 Dreamwidth invites and 21 GoogleWave invites. Who wants in?
+ Voila my fandom stocking! If you have one, comment here with a link to it plz. Click here to sign up for one of your own!
+ I know we just got over Solstice and are wrestling with Yuletide, but if an Arthur/Gwen fic exchange is still relevant to your interests, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) agficexchange sign-ups end on December 18. YAY ARTHUR/GWEN
+ re: Parks & Recreation. WHERE IS THE APRIL/ANDY FIC, GUYS.
+ I am nowhere close to finishing SPN S1 and already I am contemplating crossovers and fusions, I can't help myself. LIKE. Uther hires them to kill warlocks or something and some Sam/Morgana happens. And, this 3-sentence fic has convinced me that the Winchesters and the Pevensies need to hang out, or walk some miles in each other's shoes. I NEED TO KNOW MOAR.
+ There should be fic about all your favorite characters being BFFs with Wall*E, y/y.
+ It's...
☼ Memetime with Mordred & Morgana ☼
Come play!
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| procrasturbating: put it on your resume! |
[11 Dec 2009|05:42am] |
Have you guys ever had a virus that refuses to let a laptop shut down? How about one that, when you click on a Google search result, takes you to an ad instead of the site? This just happens in Google, though. You end up having to copy the search result URL and pasting it into the address bar. The search results from other search engines click fine. So anyway, neither your malware scanner nor your regular virus scan can detect this virus, and you suspiciously can't install Windows Defender. And sometimes tabs would just open randomly with more ads.
Bring out your dancing shoes, IT department, you've got a date with my pig's feces of a laptop. DON'T STEP IN ANY, NOW.
The 3-sentence ficathon now has a delicious directory! And it's still going on and on and on! Narnia appears to be the most popular fandom by far, followed by... crossover, and then by STXI and Dr. Who. COME PLAY. Add more fandoms!
My 3-sentence fics in the following fandoms: ( Sailor Moon, Peter Pan/Star Trek, Ocean's 11, Skins, geometry )
And now for everyone's favorite game: 2 links and a YouTube embed!
1) Awesome or terrifying? Would you sleep in it?
2) There is a Merlin AU crackfic in here somewhere.
3) Live-action country village rendition of the opening credits of The Simpsons, by Estonia's TV3.
Burgeoning paranoia #439898: I have too many names! It's getting all mixed up! More than once now I have almost sent emails to my thesis advisor with, like, "love, [high school nickname]", or to a potential employer with "cheers, Lassiter", or to my professor with "love you, [boyfriend's pet name for me]". What is this, the revenge of my compartmentalized personae? One day this is going to happen, and it's going to be terrible and hilarious. D:
ETA: HOLY SHIT BACON JAM. ...wtf bacon lampshade?
ETA2: WHAT THE FUCK IS UP WITH THESE BEST BUY POPUPS, LJ??? >:-(
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| the one hand vs. the other hand |
[11 Dec 2009|12:22am] |
The following might also be an interesting topic for my anthro final paper. (Oh god, I gotta choose a topic and send an outline to my prof before the week is out.)
The Sociological Images blog recently posted about the relativity of feminist liberation that touches on some of the problems with how feminism is discussed and articulated. The post is specifically about women-only taxi services that have begun popping up in Dubai, Mexico, Moscow, and, weirdly, the UK. In Manila, the MRT (our El/subway) has a women-only train car. I heard (...but can't find online confirmation) that it was women passengers themselves who requested this service because they kept getting groped on the train, especially during rush hour.
On the one hand, the pro-womanness of such a service is superficial. It's still demeaning, and it reinforces gender binaries and perpetuates an unjust system. Well, yes, ideally we would be living in a world where you don't need a women-only taxi service, but on the other hand I'm hesitant to sacrifice the security of these women for the sake of ideology. Just like you can't juxtapose one country's democracy wholesale on another country's, you can't juxtapose one country's feminism wholesale either. It has to grow organically from within (and also a little bit without). But to go back to the one hand, is more segregation really the way to promote this?
The problem with these services is that they're end-of-the-pipe solutions. They treat the symptoms of misogyny instead of the causes. They send a message to the men that they can continue to act like misogynists because we can always remove ourselves from the situation and it's our fault if we don't. But on the OTHER hand, sometimes when people talk about bringing some good ol' women's lib from countries where it's more commonplace to countries where it's less commonplace, it reminds me of the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" mentality of economic conservatism: "You don't need special treatment, you just need to be strong!" That's all well and good, but the bootstraps of women in, say, the USA are already pretty high up compared to the bootstraps of women in the Philippines. And these boots, they smell like White Woman's Burden. Equality among women != sameness among women.
I think women should be wary of insisting on solidarity based on what we are not i.e. men. We're not just not-men. However, sometimes the rhetoric of being not-men overpowers the diversity of women's situations around the world, reducing women in quote unquote less liberated countries to the subaltern of the subaltern. And yeah, that's one of the flaws of the women-only taxi service, in that it is totally based on being not-men. If the way women protect themselves in other countries is disagreeable to us, should we take their protection away because it's bad for their feminist agenda? For WHOSE feminist agenda? Can you use 'unfeminist' means like these taxis to further feminism? Or is that too much like fighting for peace and fucking for virginity?
And, I dunno, what if the woman trying to hail a women-only taxi is escorting her ailing grandfather or something?
The Huffington Post offers a stronger stance on why these women-only taxis are questionable indeed. Interestingly, the HuffPost article was written by a man, whereas the Sociological Images post was written by a woman. I have my reservations about these taxis, but I also have my reservations about dismissing the idea outright. At the very least, it provides a safe space. It reminds me of - and I wish I have the link - how some people were trying to make an organization/support group for Hispanic gays, and a non-Hispanic gay was like, "But what for? We're ALL gay!" But what he was really saying is "We're ALL not straight", which isn't the same thing.
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| Some of it's just transcendental / some of it's just really dumb |
[09 Dec 2009|09:25pm] |
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the book of love : peter gabriel |
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I'm in love with this song tonight: "The Book of Love" - Peter Gabriel
So, class was canceled because of the weather. Good thing, because the wind's really picking up out there. I felt like I kept getting shoved along while I was walking to class this morning. Tomorrow won't be as bad. I don't have class until 4:30, and I'm sure the salt crews will have been out by that time, clearing the roads. We got lucky. I think we only saw about three inches of accumulation. Other places, mostly north of us, got up to ten. I heard that Arizona got twenty. Snow in Flagstaff. Thanks, Al Gore!
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| Procrastination? Yes I can! |
[09 Dec 2009|05:44pm] |
+ If I made a commentficathon meme on mordred_morgana, would you participate?
+ nixwiliams is calling for submissions for a Nonstandard Trans Narratives Collection. "We're trans people who want our histories back. We want to speak the complexities of our histories without fear or favour. We want to speak our histories without having to worry about how people will use them against us: to deny the reality of our identities, to deny us medical treatments, to deny us our humanity. We want to own our histories. We want to own us again. ... Written pieces - whether in the form of essays, prose fiction or poetry - are preferred, but we will also consider visual pieces for inclusion."
+ 811 words of Yuletide. At least this is going more smoothly than my Solstice was. And I should really stop looking over my Solstice fic because it makes me go "OMG I SHOULD HAVE CHANGED/REWRITTEN THIS THING" and it's kind of stressing me out.
+ New blogs on my greader: Fuck Yeah Desserts!!, Indonesian food are looove, and The Daily What.
+ be_themoon made a handy-dandy Supernatural primer rounding up the key episodes for an SPN newbie to watch!
+ Some awesome lady sells her right to marry on eBay. "I'm an unmarried heterosexual woman, and since I probably won't be using my right to get married, I would like to give it away. I would like to sell it to the highest bidder and donate the proceeds to an organization that supports LGBT rights."
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| This is my new favourite icon. |
[08 Dec 2009|05:41pm] |
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the carol of the bells |
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The downside of the holiday season. That's not a smudge on the camera lens. It's a half an inch of sleet and ice. I actually left the apartment an hour and a half before class because I was worried about sliding around on the highway. And all of those big, burly SUVs kept darting around me -- I was going, like, fifteen under the speed limit -- kicking up wet road grit. And the only reason I'm out at all is because we've got presentations in class tonight and, since it's the last class, I felt doubly bad about staying home. The girl sitting next to me is also in my class and lives about as far away from campus as I do. She's freaked out about driving home at 9:15 tonight, too. Blerg. Class should have been canceled.
This morning, Todd and I went to see about an apartment closer to campus. We stopped by the leasing office of the most promising candidate, but they told us they leased the last remaining one-bedroom last week. That was the place that even offered a student discount. I don't know where Todd and I are going to live next semester. It sucks, because we both want to be closer to campus and, given the way the weather's been acting, I'm really pressing that objective. I hate driving the highway when I have to contend with the ice.
I KNOW I'M COMPLAINING A LOT, BUT GOOD LORD. MY BLOOD PRESSURE.
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| this is sort of productive kind of |
[08 Dec 2009|01:37am] |
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'Mansfield Park' on Hulu. It's pretty cute. |
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SNOWFLAKES: I can haz! Thank you allothi, almostinstinct, briar_pipe, not_sally, and stealingpennies! <333 \o/
You know how penknife made an SGA starter kit for people who want to get into the show but maybe don’t want to watch the zillion episodes already out? Is there something like this for Supernatural?
Speaking of TV, how about The Office and how I couldn’t finish watching the “Scott’s Tots” episode, argh. I love The Office to bits but this episode was so painful and terrible D-:
To help me think my anthropology final through, under this cut is a discussion of ( how I might make Narnia the topic of my Ideologies/Mythologies final paper. )
Or, I can just write my final paper about fandom in general, or maybe ‘Merlin’ fandom specifically! Hoo man, ideology and mythology in ‘Merlin’ fandom, that is a completely different post.
Randomly, I miss watching Ocean Girl :(. WHERE ARE YOU, OCEAN GIRL SEASON 4.
ETA: Hilarious vid rec of the whenever!: Arthur in the Afternoon. "A dazzling tribute to Arthur Pendragon and his amazing wooing skills. Or, an incisive exploration of the increasingly shameless objectification of Bradley James by the British Broadcasting Corporation."
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| Processing fail. |
[07 Dec 2009|02:16pm] |
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My brain is apparently on the fritz. I have no explanation for it, but there's definitely some processing issues going on. I've had to re-read everything today just to parse what's going on.
Some days, it's just not worth getting out of bed. :P
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| It's beginning to feel a lot like... |
[07 Dec 2009|10:16am] |
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accomplished |
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devil's calling : elizabeth & the catapults |
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Wow! 'Woke up this morning to snowflakes -- both real and virtual! Thanks to everyone who dropped a virtual snowflake onto my userinfo page! We also got our first snowfall of the year here; a light dusting, but it makes things seasonally appropriate. I was weirded out by the fact that Texas got snow before we did this year. People around here are already acting like asshats because of the change in the weather, I can't imagine what it's like for folks who only see snow in department store dioramas.
This is the last week before finals. I accomplished a lot last week (at the expense of eating and sleeping) and I'm in a good position to ride out the rest of the week. I can't wait to go home for Christmas. I'm going to stick around campus (at least as long as the library's open) to do a little more graduate research. 'Think I'll be heading home on the 22nd or 23rd. I have about a two week break, then it's right back to the academic grind. I'll be taking a couple of pretty interesting courses next semester, in addition to all of my extracurriculars. Todd and I are also planning to move to be closer to campus, so that'll be an event when it finally comes around.
I put Christmas music on my iPod this morning. 'Tis the season!
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| In Memoriam: Twenty Years |
[06 Dec 2009|11:17am] |
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Fourteen young women were killed on this date twenty years ago. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and most importantly they were the wrong gender.
Geneviève Bergeron, 21
Hélène Colgan, 23
Nathalie Croteau, 23
Barbara Daigneault, 22
Anne-Marie Edward, 21
Maud Haviernick, 29
Barbara Maria Klucznik, 31
Maryse Laganière, 25
Maryse Leclair, 23
Anne-Marie Lemay, 27
Sonia Pelletier, 23
Michèle Richard, 21
Annie St-Arneault, 23
Annie Turcotte, 21
Today is Canada's National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, here is the Wikipedia article on the Polytechnique Massacre.
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| Step 1 |
[05 Dec 2009|12:33pm] |
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Going to the RCMP information session. Here we go!
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