Follow Friday

• firstpersonporn
• build_a_world
• future_is_bulletproof
• note_to_self

Links

• "genitals as signifiers": when birth is a "social emergency"

  What I really wanted to share with you in this post, though, is several paragraphs from the first chapter of Part Two in which Karkazis describes the way myriad ways in which children born with no immediately apparent sex identity are experienced as a matter of "social urgency" by their parents and the medical community. I realize it's kinda academic and somewhat heavy on the specialized terminology. But I think she's packing some pretty important stuff into these paragraphs (pp. 95-97). Reading this narrative, I just felt an overwhelming sadness in my chest for these tiny persons whose very being is somehow construed as problematic -- who cannot be incorporated into the human community, it seems -- because they lack a clear "girl" or "boy" box in which to be situated.

• staranise: Automated bingo cards, get 'em while they're hot

  This is just the first draft. I want to add to it--and I would be thrilled if other people wanted to add to it. This program was a fannish endeavour, if fandom itself is a fandom; I wanted to create something that would help other fans do what they love.

• yvi: Flattr

  Basically, it's a micropayments system to everyone on the internet who participates - you determine a certain amount of money you want to spend every month, pre-load your account, click on however many Flattr buttons on the web you want to, and at the end of the month, that money is devided between the pages you clicked for.

So I went and signed up for it: (I'd love to see a Dreamwidth feature that accomplishes this with points. I do it manually sometimes, but it's hard to remember.)

Recently

Work, mostly. solarcat and I are going to Garment District and maybe some other places this weekend, for Killjoys costuming purposes. (I also need to figure out a Ramona Flowers costume, since Cory has decided that's what we're doing for Halloween, since I'll be in Grand Forks and all.)

Ellie and I spent some time last night talking about our plans for revamping the apartment. The main thrust is to make our space better for our creative pursuits. So much of it depends on her having the time and spoons to build new furniture, so no idea when any of it will get done. I can post an outline of our plans, with crappy diagrams, if anyone is interested.

Links

• via saystheheart: Safeword, the s&m superhero


• Married to the Sea: new uniforms


• via cofax7: Gerald M. Weinberg: What’s Been the Effect of Banning My Stuff?

  Whatever it was intended to do, banning things increases interest. When one of the Pope’s Cardinals banned The DaVinci Code, lagging sales picked up and made a few more millions for Mr. Brown. Banning Harry Potter had a similar effect for Ms. J. K. Rowling, now richer than the Queen.

(Tangent: I once got to attend one of Jerry's workshops. He and my dad go pretty far back; we would usually pay him a visit when we took our road trips to New Mexico. Jerry knew I was working on a novel, he was running a writing workshop and it was going to be pretty fiction-oriented, and he hadn't seen Dad in a while. So Dad and I took a week off work/school and went. It was awesome.)

(And another tangent: Wow has my life been full of fantastic opportunities and experiences that resulted directly from grown-ups taking a chance on me. Including my current job.)

Plans

I am considering StrowlerCon, but would need roommates. I also need to run it past Ellie and see if she wants in.

Notes

I've created a character for LARPing in the desert participating in the MCR/Killjoys shenanigans. If this is relevant to your interests, check out the Violet Menace on Twitter, tumblr, and Dreamwidth.

Links

• rydra_wong: So, yeah

  brenden's now-deleted sockpuppet trolling of the news post included taunting a user about having Asperger's.

• thedivinegoat: "Can I talk to you" Troll redux

  Just a heads up, the "Can I talk to you" Troll seems to have increased his activity again, only this time is taking advantage of the Facebook Connect.
  
  I'm still updating the original post with any new pseudonyms that come to light, if you or any of your friends have come across new ones, please let me know.

• Social/Justice

  Solomon's threat is the threat of fairness; Solomon's justice is that he restores right human relationships. Justice is not measured by a pattern -- of uniformity or otherwise -- *or* by a fair process which must logically produce fair results. Justice occurs only when it supports just human relationships. It doesn't matter how fair the process, if a beggar starves while a rich man feasts *this is not justice*, because justice is about having the right human relationships. "Social justice", in my thinking, is a concept of justice that is still focussed, as of old, not on who has the "stuff", but on the relationships between people that the "stuff" (money, property) is tracking. We need a modifier because "justice" unadorned now refers to the process of law, e.g. in "Department of Justice".

• copperbadge: THE .DOC FILE OF J ALFRED PRUFROCK

  This morning I was asked to change my password on my work computer, as I must do every four months. And I sat there waiting for it to authorise my new password, and I thought, I have measured out my life in login codes.
  
  And, as it so often does, then my brain screwed me out of several hours of productivity.

• skalja: An experiment in translation.

  O Hai Just FYI

Recently

Post office seems to be holding everything Ellie and I receive from outside the United States. "Pissed off" is putting it lightly, especially since I pretty much have to leave work early to make it to our local post office before it closes.

Work has been kind of meh this week. And Cory hasn't been online much for the past few days. And Ellie is too spoonless to cook. And the temperature dropped kind of suddenly. Many things contributing to my overall bleh right now. I am looking forward to the weekend.

ETA: Cory is back online. Much cheered by this. :)

As for MCR: thanks for finally giving us some real news, fuckers. And the album does sound like something I'd like. But I will forever be sad that we won't get Black Dragon Fighting Society.

Links

• via somebody, but I forget who: Superheroes in Court at Yale Show

  The show, “Superheroes in Court! Lawyers, Law and Comic Books,” provides images of superheroes in the dock, comic books about lawyers and examples of legal disputes and Congressional inquiries involving caped crusaders.

• This lolcat accurately describes my eyeliner skill level.

• ninetydegrees: Getting Started: Styles


• S2 Guide and S2 CSS


• dw_antispam: Call for antispam volunteers!


• kate: Collection of things to help people new to Dreamwidth

Recently

Ellie and I were going to have a roast for dinner last night, but it had gone off. We wound up getting Indian food at Ghazal instead, along with Courtney. And as we were settling the bill, other people we knew walked by. So we wound up following Cid, Jason, Daly, and Scarlet to JP Licks for ice cream (and then everybody got to say hi to Brashani and Christian too, when they stopped by), and then went back to Cid and Jason's apartment - in theory to play Clue, but we actually wound up watching Crank 2 and yelling at the shenanigans.

Then Ellie wanted to get some stuff from Woodcraft today, so I went with her because I wanted to get out of the house. I wound up getting some turning blanks: black and white ebony, rosewood, lignum vitae, and olivewood. (Not a new hobby! I make little wire trees in addition to jewelry, and thought it would be awesome to attach the wire trees to small pieces of actual wood.) I'm going to have to cut some of the blanks into smaller pieces, and probably surface them a little.

Links

Recently

I can haz purple hair! No pictures yet because I am lazy, but it does not suck. (The purple streak does fade rather quickly to nearly black as you move away from my scalp, but given how many times it had been dyed before these shenanigans, I can't say I'm surprised.)

Have been approved to take another week off work, sometime between mid October and Thanksgiving (has to be before Thanksgiving because $winterholiday retail season is likely to constrain the amount of time C. has for me). Now to find a suitably cheap plane ticket. On the one hand, yay I get to see my boyfriend again! On the other... and then I won't see him until some time in 2011.

Links

Recently

I've been following the latest LJwtf and going to work, pretty much. Managed to wear a skirt today, and I think every single person I work with complimented it.

Links

Plans

Get rained on and blown about. Hope the power stays on long enough to to chat with C. for a good long while. Drive up to NH with Ellie and shadesong for the art retreat, and catch the bus back. Drag Ellie to see Scott Pilgrim, get groceries, and pick up the hair stuff I forgot last week. Make attempt number 4 at purple hair: bleach a thick streak and purple it, then update the rest to black.

• oursin: More about money, extravagance, frivolity etc

  Such is the power of a-synchronicity, that it was only after making yesterday evening's post that I picked up Katharine Whitehorn's Only on Sundays, which of course fell open at the essay 'As Rich As You Feel', the vague memory of which lay behind much of my thinking in that post.

• thingswithwings: while waiting for pain to subside, I wrote this post

  But the thing that really thrills me is seeing people get more and more efficient and matter-of-fact about their content notes, especially the content notes that are providing a warning for potentially triggering content. I don't credit kink bingo with this, but rather a shift in fandom thinking at large: I see more and more notes for things like forced feeding, self-harm, characters expressing racist sentiments, parental abuse, and all sorts of things - a range of things that reflects the broad manner in which people are beginning to think about how their story/artpiece might be read/viewed by someone with different life experiences than the writer's or artist's own. It feels to me, subjectively of course, that people in my fannish community are more and more willing to be upfront about what their story/artpiece contains, in order to provide the best possible information to potential readers. And that upfrontness, more importantly, is an indication of self-acceptance that I find extremely exciting and refreshing.

• eruthros: some useful things on the internet

  1. Are you, too, frustrated by the new lj facebook and twitter connect buttons under your comments? Fear not, for not one but two people have made magical solutions! Do not mess with tab order or people shall make greasemonkey scripts, lj.

• emceeaich: (no subject)

  The rest of the web is not the walled garden, Facebook is the walled garden, with a manifest destiny complex.

• zulu: *flails* I just DON'T EVEN KNOW, livejournal. I JUST DON'T.

  Not to mention people could be automatically crossposting their comments to any post you made. Triangulation is suddenly that much simpler for stalkers, abusive exes, and potential or current employers. Any work you've put in to keep your fandom presence separate from your real life or professional presence is suddenly tissue paper where once it was at least nice sturdy cardstock. Feedback on your latest PWP that says "Fuck, you write hot man-on-man action, I totally got off to that," could end up side-by-side with your grandma's cookie recipe.

Links

Plans

Scissor Sisters concert with Ellie.

Notes

Not dead! Back in Boston since Saturday, and already caught up on things!

Recently

Just finished eating half the curry I made tonight; the other half is in the fridge. I am going to bring it to work tomorrow. Leftovers for lunch - it's almost like I'm a real grown-up!

Ellie and I went to the mall yesterday. We were supposed to get clothes for her. Instead, we got clothes for me. /o\ On the other hand, Hello Kitty rain boots in grown-up sizes, fuck yes.

I continue to experiment with purple hair. Attempt 3 (dark purple over failed single-process bleach-and-purple) is the best yet but still not quite right.

Grand Forks

Relationship Stuff

We're planning more visits, and I convinced C. to install Skype. But I think my journal will stop being All About My Boyfriend now; he'll show up from time to time along with other important people in my life.

Memery

From Ask Me Anything:

Looking back, are you comfortable with the way you reacted when your sister came out to you?

Not really. :( I could have done more. I am especially disappointed with how little help I was to her in 2006/2007, her last year of high school, while she was trying to figure things out. True, I didn't have nearly as much knowledge of gender and trans* issues then, but I probably still could have been more supportive than I actually was.

But as far as her actual coming-out? I think I did okay then, although I didn't adjust to name-and-pronouns as fast as I would have liked, even if there is a specific reason for it (trying not to out her to Mom and Dad before she had the chance to tell them herself).

Links

Plans

Figure out Netflix. Buy more $5 vermouth for cooking.