Living the Dream

May. 21st, 2013 07:30 am
steepholm: (deadhead)
[personal profile] steepholm
That was weird. I dreamed I was shopping at my local Co-op, when a voice came over the store speaker asking everyone to bow their heads in an act of public prayer. As the speaker went on to address the Almighty in ingratiating terms people complied in a reluctant, embarrassed, English way - not wanting to be the one to cause offence by price-checking cornflakes in what had become, pro tem, a house of God. Afterwards, I was told that the Co-op had introduced the policy of occasional store-wide prayer after "wide consultation".

I woke some time later, relieved not to be living in a world like that, and turned on the radio, where the announcer was mentioning some of the things that had happened on this day in previous years (Lindbergh's transatlantic flight and the Treaty of Troyes were two - though bizarrely she referred to Lindbergh as French). After a couple of minutes, she piped up: "And now, Prayer for the Day".

My hand sprang to the Off switch quicker than a King Cobra with a sugar rush.

queerness and intentional community

May. 20th, 2013 10:43 pm
jinian: (fft ninja)
[personal profile] jinian
I had a good conversation with the kids at Bio House yesterday, talking about nonstandard co-parenting arrangements and such. (D: "Group marriage!" M: "I'm not even talking about group marriage." Me: "I am!")

I hadn't known that they were thinking so hard about this, it was really nice. One guy was complaining that it's really hard to find people to be roommates with when your friends disappear into dyads to raise kids after a certain age, even if you personally value group living. I said being queer helps some with that. We're more often on the same page, and at least we've thought about whether we are or not, you know?

And they were all ten-plus years younger than me, and while I know they heard me they didn't - quite - get it. I am used to this, in the sad but relieved way that queer people older than me have always acted over my own comparative lack of trauma, because for these kids being gay wouldn't have been that hard, it is an option that they have heard of as more than a slur from the time they were little.

I thought about how to express my feeling on this, and the way I want to say it is that homosexuality is no longer enough to make you queer.* Queer is that you want something you're not supposed to, and you know that, so you make your own decisions about what you do want and how important it is to you. Homosexuals can get married now, you know, so we must want the same things as Everyone Else. Isn't that what we've been saying we want?

There are two problems with this. One is that I like queer people, dammit, and having fewer of us is bad. It's true that these straight kids were really thoughtful; I think it must have something to do with general tolerance and knowledge of available alternatives. So maybe I can get some of my community from sufficiently liberal straight kids. On the other hand, homosexuality is still scary and can get you in trouble, so I worry that younger gay kids will actually be more likely to fall in with the monogamous-nuclear-family railroading that's pushed on them.

The second problem is that I personally am being othered more now, because the umbrella of social acceptability is bigger and I still don't fit under it. I don't want to, but I do want some company out here in the sun. People are still not all the same. We shouldn't have to be.

One of the guys commented during our conversation, "We're all talking about our own things! I'm talking about roommates, you're talking about raising kids, you're talking about no kids..." Still, we basically agreed. We all wanted to think for ourselves and figure out what would work for us.

* Here and now in my liberal location, that is. I know this differs over space as well as time.
batwrangler: Just for me. (Default)
[personal profile] batwrangler
Doll Bones (Audiobook, Unabridged)
Holly Black (Author), Nick Podehl (Reader)

Auralphilia, by Sprat

May. 20th, 2013 10:28 pm
boxofdelights: earring (Default)
[personal profile] boxofdelights
Podfic. RayK/Fraser. NSFW. Dirty talk. Rimming. So many false starts before I made it through the second sentence without cracking up. Note to self: close the windows before you start recording porn.

Text here: Auralphilia, by Sprat



All my podfic is on AO3 here.

Podfic and other recordings are all here now, but I'm going to take down Keeping Kowalski when I need space; it's the biggest, and has the fewest listens.

Les Mis comm!

May. 21st, 2013 12:01 am
genarti: Valjean holding the Bishop's candlesticks, looking mulish and bewildered, with text "I have bought your soul for God." ([les mis] the wages of sin)
[personal profile] genarti
I am loving the Les Mis fandom, but it seems to be mostly on tumblr, and tumblr is not and will probably never be my natural home. (Threaded comments! Easily searchable archives! A user interface that doesn't change at random!) At least some folks seem to agree, because every so often, the "Man, why don't we have an active LJ/DW home?" cry goes up.

Well. Now there is one! This post is to officially unveil http://les-miserables.dreamwidth.org.

It doesn't have an interesting layout or anything yet, but it exists, and is open to anyone and everyone who wants to talk about Les Misérables. Any version, any character, any subject -- the idea here is to be inclusive! The profile says the same thing in a slightly more longwinded way. All you need to do is join it to post, at least at this point. I'm the moderator because I made the comm, but I'm hoping I can be very hands-off and lazy about it.

Feel more than free to signal boost this wherever it seems appropriate!
kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
[personal profile] kate_nepveu

The Pip has been sleeping poorly, which means Farscape in the wee hours.

S01E04, 'Throne for a Loss' )

S01E05, 'Back And Back And Back To The Future' )

Spoil me and have your food ration eaten by a puppet.

*goes looking for Moya icon*

about 20% through Monstrous Regiment

May. 20th, 2013 10:10 pm
kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
[personal profile] kate_nepveu
Is there another Discworld book that starts out this bleakly?

(no subject)

May. 20th, 2013 08:23 pm
yhlee: wax seal (Default)
[personal profile] yhlee
OMG Zappos has videos you can wait until the shoe is at the angle you want (approximately anyway) and then pause it

what did I do for art reference before the internetz

*bouncebouncebouncebouncebounce*

[art] Knight of Eyes

May. 20th, 2013 08:05 pm
yhlee: wax seal (hxx Deuce of Gears)
[personal profile] yhlee

Knight of Eyes
(General Shuos Jedao from "The Battle of Candle Arc")

1. I botched the original version (watercolor pencil, I stuck it up at my dA account for the morbidly curious) so used this as a test piece for the trial of Autodesk SketchBook Pro 6. I like the app. It has a few quirks but the UI is reasonably consistent and if there's extra stuff I need done, I'll take it into GIMP.

(I did give MyPaint a swing, but could not figure out how to make it do one specific thing that I will need sometimes. For painting from scratch off a single scan, it looks like it will probably work, and hopefully this summer I will be able to put it through its paces. Eee!)

Anyway, I remain firmly convinced that watercolor pencil is a valid medium that can be made to work well. Unfortunately, in over two decades I have comprehensively failed to figure out how. I keep mine anyway because I still like them, even if I'm thoroughly bad at them.

2. I used maybe half of TylerCreatesWorlds' (dA) Nebulae Tutorial to figure out how to paint nebulae with airbrush/round soft brush/smudge. For serious, it's not that bad. If I'd realized it was more fun to do it this way, I wouldn't have spent all that time fighting GIMP's filters for that other piece.

3. Someday I should research military uniforms instead of just making stuff up because I am supremely lazy.

4. I do realize that I lack the ability to draw straight lines. :-( I keep hoping that my coordination will improve, but I...just don't know.

5. Crit welcome. I mean it; I know I have a lot to learn.

Also, [personal profile] daidoji_gisei, I am still working on the Marguerite piece! At this point I have to make hard decisions about just which M1911 reference I want to commit to, and then there is the important matter of her shoes. I expect I will be hitting up Zappos for virtual shoe-shopping. But I should be able to finalize the pencils tomorrow and scan, and then take it into SketchBook as well.

Bwahahahahahahahahahahah!

May. 20th, 2013 08:07 pm
ithiliana: (Evil Laugh)
[personal profile] ithiliana
"To: Mike Jeffries, c/o Abercrombie & Fitch

From Jes. "Fat and Attractive."

I've enclosed some images for your consideration. Please let me know what you think.
A note: I didn't take these pictures to show that the male model found me attractive, or that the photographer found me photogenic, or to prove that you're an ostentatious dick. Rather, I was inspired by the opportunity to show that I am secure in my skin and to flaunt this by using the controversial platform that you created. I challenge the separation of attractive and fat, and I assert that they are compatible regardless of what you believe. Not only do I know that I'm sexy, but I also have the confidence to pose nude in ways you don’t dare. You are more than welcome to prove me wrong by posing shirtless with a hot fat chick; it would thrill me to see such a shoot.


Thanks to delux_vivens for the link!

some of you need this

May. 20th, 2013 08:07 pm
kate_nepveu: sleeping cat carved in brown wood (Default)
[personal profile] kate_nepveu
For those of you Trek fans looking for a bitter cathartic laugh: Star Trek Into Darkness: The Spoiler FAQ from io9.

Game of Thrones 3x01-3x07

May. 20th, 2013 03:13 pm
oyceter: teruterubouzu default icon (Default)
[personal profile] oyceter
I really didn't want to go back to my apartment and have to deal with the now-empty rat cage and assorted paraphernalia, so to put it off, CB and I crashed his friend's place and did a 7-episode Game of Thrones marathon.

Spoilers for both the show AND all books )

I'm good with any and all spoilers, so 'ware spoilers in the comments as well!

note to self

May. 20th, 2013 01:59 pm
jinian: (smart mod soul)
[personal profile] jinian
Pocky is not lunch. Ideally, lunch includes vegetables, but it is certainly of higher volume and nutritive quality than chocolate-covered crackers. When one has a meeting in the afternoon, one needs to eat actual lunch. Go do that now.

Soapy Sams

May. 20th, 2013 08:26 pm
steepholm: (Default)
[personal profile] steepholm
"You should read The Werewolf Flesh," my mother said to me when I was a teenager; "It's just your sort of thing." I wasn't sure about that - horror has never been my bag. It wasn't until some while later that I realised she was actually talking about Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh. I read it then, though I still wasn't particularly struck. Today I remember the book mostly because of the mondegreen it gave rise to. But that name - Samuel Butler. He was a writer, he had a somewhat unconventional take on the world while still being very much "of his time". Could he be a relative? That would be kind of cool, I vaguely thought, but as I hadn't liked the book that much I didn't dwell on it. (I still haven't read Erewhon.)

I liked Hudibras and "The Elephant in the Moon", though, and at university I wondered much the same about the seventeenth-century Samuel Butler. He did seem tantalizingly close to being a relation. At the time he was born, my own branch of the Butlers was based in Claines near Worcester. They were solicitors, public notaries and things of that sort. Samuel Butler's family were just twenty miles away in Strensham, and he spent much of his life employed as a secretary. It all seems very comparable, and a bit of coincidence, but I found no genealogical smoking gun. Also, it turns out that the same possibility had occurred to others before me. Some two centuries ago George Butler (see below) had gone looking for the same connection and come up empty. Which isn't to say it doesn't exist. Old Samuel's brand of satire feels so simpatico.

Then, the other week I saw this at a May fete.

P200513_13.13

It was only £3.50 and full of interesting coloured maps, so I had to buy it, right? It turns out to be by Samuel Butler, the grandfather of the Erewhon guy. Now, I've no reason to suppose he's a relation, but when you set him next to my great*4 uncle George, their careers seem eerily similar:

Name:...............................George Butler.........................................Samuel Butler
Born:.................................July 1774...............................................Jan 1774
Education:..........................Sidney Sussex, Camb.............................St Johns, Camb
Elected Fellow:...................1794 (I think)........................................1797
Educational Career:.............Headmaster of Harrow (1805-29)............Headmaster of Shrewsbury (1798-1836)
Ecclesiastical highlight:.......Dean of Peterborough (1842)..................Bishop of Lichfield (1836)
Died:.................................1853.....................................................1839

Can they really not be related? It's like there's a shadow family of Butlers, all called Samuel, hovering just out of reach. Taunting me with their Sam-ness. And their diff-rence.

This must be resolved.

(no subject)

May. 20th, 2013 12:04 pm
telophase: (Default)
[personal profile] telophase
From elsewhere on my f-list: A grizzly ate my GoPro! (YouTube)

Be sure to watch it in HD with the video maximized for authentic inside-of-grizzly-mouth action. Which was surprisingly hard to watch, as my inner prey animal was cringing in fear and anticipated pain.

(no subject)

May. 20th, 2013 11:57 am

Kokinshu #393

May. 20th, 2013 08:17 am
lnhammer: lo-fi photo of a tall, thin man - caption: "some guy" (Default)
[personal profile] lnhammer
Written while parting with people who climbed the mountain to worship and were returning.

    Our separation --
I shall entrust it to
    the mountain cherries:
whether you stay or not is
at the whim of the flowers.

—16-20 May 2013

Original by Yûsen. Yûsen (836–900) was a Fujiwara, lay personal name unknown, who took vows as a Buddhist priest. He has 2 poems in the Kokinshu. ¶ It's generally understood that the mountain is Hiei (see #87) and that Yûsen resided in a temple there. Omitted-but-understood verb: "is." It's unclear whether he's hoping the flowers will scatter and confuse the path (as in the next poem) or the visitors will be entranced enough to stay (as in the poem after). Not a great translation -- and while it's not a great poem either, that's no excuse.


wakare o-ba
yama no sakura ni
makasetemu
tomemu tomeji wa
hana no manimani


---L.

In which we are here

May. 20th, 2013 06:59 am
desperance: (Default)
[personal profile] desperance
We're in Huntsville, Alabama, for my father-in-law's funeral.

This morning we are the perfect image of two people who should really not have spent all of yesterday in transit. Two planes between three airports have played combinatory havoc with our various owies. Karen vanished into the bathroom muttering that everything hurt except her left hand; as it happens, my own left hand is actually quite painful. Though not as much as the arm that it's attached to, which is nowhere near as painful as the shoulder and neck above. That whole anarcho-industrial complex has been seizing up all week, despite anarchic interventions and industrial levels of analgesics; I can neither stand nor sit nor lie, move nor keep still except its hurting. (We have been here before - it's why I have stashes of codeine on two continents - and we know that it will go away. Last time, some serious massage drove it out early. I would like to try that again, but, y'know. Huntsville, Alabama. We're a way from our hands-on specialists.)

Talking of [placename, state], though, Jeannie made us watch Mystery, Alaska t'other night. I really, really liked that. A sports movie that actually works (largely, I guess, by dint of being about something else underneath: but that may actually be true of all sports movies that work? Or possibly all movies that work, regardless of genre? I dunno; I'm really not a movie buff, I just know what I like, and I liked that).

Seen Trek Now

May. 19th, 2013 11:09 pm
telophase: (Default)
[personal profile] telophase
And...spoiler )

Sent from my Apple ][+

Yes, I will be at Wiscon

May. 19th, 2013 07:53 pm
redbird: profile photo of me (Default)
[personal profile] redbird
I am arriving Thursday afternoon, possibly in time for the Room of One's Own reception and readings, weather and traffic through O'Hare allowing, and will be leaving after breakfast on Monday. Seattle is a lot further from Madison than New York is, and there are no nonstop flights. I'm not on programming this year (I didn't volunteer, because I wasn't sure I could attend the con until after the sign-up deadline), which means either that I am more flexible than usual, or that I will spend more time wondering what to do when.

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rushthatspeaks

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