{ split subject }

I was trying so hard to hold out -- first until the end of BSG, then at least until the end of the year. but it has become clearer and clearer that catching up on my flist is not feasible for me right now, whether I approach it as work or as play (it was around november 8 that I gave up). ultimately the milestone of my first campus visit is no more arbitrary a date than december 31. the whirlwind of applications-dissertation-moving-job(?!) is picking up speed, and I'm not getting off this carousel in the foreseeable future. my life is changing, and so, sad though it may be, my participation in LJ has been changing. projectjulie is now closed.

• updates on my academic life remain active at cyborganize (if I have you friended there, now's a good time to friend back if you're willing)
• picture posts are moving to facebook
• twitter archiving is also moving, but as always you can get my tweets via facebook status or twitter proper (poke me if I don't follow you back -- twitter doesn't track these things as well as LJ)
• fannish content is moving to the Archive of Our Own (I'm still in the process of uploading past work)
• I will also still be posting at and maintaining bsg_femslash, getyourtoaster, and thearchive2 for the moment
• personal/friendslocked entries are no more

I will no longer be reading this friendslist, but I'm happy to keep anyone and everyone friended here so you retain access to previous flocked posts. you may also, of course, defriend at will.

livejournal -- which means all of YOU -- has changed and enriched my life in so many inexpressible ways. I in no way intend this as a gesture that ends online or offline friendships, but the time has come for me to prioritize other dimensions of those. goodbye + ♥s

projectjulie has suffered for quite some time from a lack of attention and a profound incoherence in its purpose and audience. I never much wanted a blog, or even an online journal, and if dipped my toe into such waters it was mostly incidental. what I want is a hub and an archive, a nexus for all the people and things to which I'm connected. so I'm making it official: this LJ is now merely a clearinghouse and a placeholder (akin to a "digital lifestyle aggregator," in web2.0-speak). I'll continue moblogging pix and tweets here (twitter, it turns out, is exactly the microscopic and immediate degree of blogging that engages me). in other words: nothing much has changed vis å vis the dearth of meaningful content, except that comments are turned back ON for mobile posts, since I plan for those to be the only ones (or perhaps I'll still make flocked entries once in a while, we shall see).

what I've loved most about lj, as an interface, is its capacity to foster and nurture intimacy across time and space. but, as in all things, we reap what we sow, and these days I'm not expending the effort to make it fulfilling for this purpose. this is an inevitable side-effect of being a dissertator: in order to finish my PhD, which is monastic and all-consuming, I have to learn to be a worse friend. all I can say is that it's painful, but necessary.

CONTENT
- my diss and other updates about my academic progress and accomplishments remain at cyborganize
- after adamantly resisting for years, I'm suddenly quite taken with Facebook, and am exploring how to make it as comprehensive a nerve center as possible for my personal and professional presence
- and to reiterate the sidebar links (and then some), you can also find me on www, ourchart, friendster, imeem, youtube, bliptv, flickr, delicious (fannish/personal/professional), gcal, plazes, librarything -- or all of these aggregated at profilactic (or jaiku)

FRIENDS
- I've done some defriending -- let me reiterate that I have affection for all of you, and this move is wholly motivated by my regrettable need to pare down my online life
- by the same token, I'm extending unfriending amnesty: if you'd like to remove me now, especially given the devolution this journal, please feel free to do so, with no hard feelings
- I remain committed to reading my flist and everyone on it faithfully, though you'll have to continue to forgive my minimal commenting
- I still have a lot of long-term catch-up reading to do, mostly fic, which may or may not ever happen

( FANDOM )

[this post will be future-dated]

As you may know, I'm in the middle stages of a long-term process of decamping from LJ. Now, I imagine I will always read and moblog, and even this provisional endgame is still years away. But there's a definite restructuring of my participation to come when Battlestar Galactica finishes its run in the spring (and how perfectly appropriate is it that Voyager, my first fandom, ended just as I was graduating from college, while BSG will end just as I'm finishing grad school). I was trying to hold out until then. But I haven't seen the top of my flist in almost two months, and I just spent maybe 6 straight hours reading LJ and I'm only at skip=160. I don't have that kind of time this fall, so something's gotta give.

I defriended some people. People I care about, people I've met in RL, people I don't share much with anymore. It was hard, but necessary.

I'm supposed to post about livejournal's current round of erratic account suspensions, in case any of you haven't already heard. short version: after apologizing for the strikethrough07 debacle, LJ went on to suspend several more HP fans for explicit content in what has been termed boldthrough07. LJ seemed at times to claim that the content was illegal under child porn laws (and may also have referenced copyright law), though these claims are questionable on either count. under LJ's TOS, however, they unquestionably do have the right to suspend a user at any time for content they deem inappropriate (legal or not). while there are legitimate objections to the way LJ has handled the situation (as reported by blogs and CNET), sending inconsistent messages to their customers, a lot of the problem may be endemic to the larger legal climate that LJ is stuck with, and we should do what we can to agitate for online civil liberties (on both fronts: obscenity and intellectual property). so I'm not inspired to migrate to an LJ clone, but if fandom_flies does manage to create a fan-run non-profit social network someday, I'll totally join.

I'm also supposed to post about racism, but wow am I uninterested in the wank. I really do want to be an ally on this issue, though, so I'll just thank _plasticity_ and poojapooja for calling me racist on a regular basis. eta: zvi_likes_tv just posted a newbieguide to being an anti-racist fan, and since I'm adding that I'll also add: choc_fic as a name for the characters-of-color comm? SRSLY??

mostly I just want to LOL @ BlogWarBot (via nerd_dog):

( if I acknowledge my privilege, do I get a cookie? )

i. I forgot to commemorate my eljayversary! it's june 11. apparently I didn't celebrate last year either, so, no memes here. but still, I love you lj!

ii. over the past three days I undertook a semi-massive redesign of my fanfic empire. baby pink is now chartreuse, purple is now darker purple, brighter and less cloying, everything matches projectjulie.net, and I'm SO much happier. even *I* get sick of pink sometimes. this was perhaps not my finest hour in time management, but the project was on the list so I was bound to do it imminently in the course of my procrastination, anyway.

in addition to converting my color scheme, I indexed all my fanstuff in del.icio.us (which took FOREVER -- but it was worth it). I would HIGHLY recommend this system to anyone who has to maintain a fic index! you get a front end for easily adding things, and then this doohicky enables you to dump the lists automatically into your own pages (my example). (NB: this won't work within LJ, because it doesn't allow javascript.) so I now know some interesting statistics:

- I've written more stories than I thought -- 16 (with 3 more to come this year)
- my remixthedrabble entry was my 50th drabble! *confetti*
- between writing it and making other people write it, I have personally generated a LOT of doppelcest
- I really am more obsessed with BSG than with anything ever

- most importantly: I think I've missed some presents, oh noes! normally I'm pretty OCD about filing them, but I feel like I've been leaving a fair number of meme prompts lately, and I can't imagine nobody has gifted me anything since Five Things went around last fall (oh wait, michellek's commentfic!). if you remember writing me something in the recent past, however tiny (or EVER writing me anything that isn't on this list), PLEASE PLEASE give a shout! since I make every attempt to delegate ideas before I break down and write them myself, presents are an especially important part of my fanfic life.

I also customized cyborganize to look like the drupal site. next up: converting ALL my old fanfic and personal links to del.icio.us. I'll leave that till a future bout of procrastination.

iii. while I was happy not to be overscheduled during my whirlwind visit to new york, in retrospect I could have been a more aggressive planner. I missed about three close friends in ways that were probably avoidable, and I'm so sad about that. not to mention all the folks I didn't even have time to contact! nonetheless, I was overjoyed to catch up with T, girlboymusic + furies (during her brief wakefulness -- wish it had worked out for longer!), D + LC, katia, thenewhope + quasiradiant, and bounce_n_jiggle + nerd_dog.

I'm coming to the realization that I have an abnormally large number of friends. I'm not sure how to talk about that without sounding self-aggrandizing -- just, it's a constant struggle to maintain my relationships with all these people who I dearly love. at some point in life my strategies in this department may have to radically change. for the moment, I'm thinking about my holiday cards.

relatedly, I'm zipping through my flist right now (catching up once more) and I feel like I'm not commenting much. but believe me when I say that I'm the most obsessive-compulsive lj-er ever, and if you're on it that means I'm reading your posts avidly. if I'm forced to filter or defriend again I'll let you know.

iv. july 1, folks!! now's a good time to start watching majoritython for news about my shenanigans in and around la casa shoemoney (especially concerning one very special inhabitant) and its virtual environs. does anyone in LA want to take me or let me take them to a yoga class once a week?

v. I'm posting Big Love prompts at sisterwives. if you've ever had any inclination to slash that show, please do so now! and if you're not watching it, get on that asap!

plus, I just added a bunch of stuff to my femslash fanvids playlist. help me find more on imeem!

( imeem playlist )

i. I'm DONE with school (as of last friday). no more pencils, no more books (most importantly, no more GR4D1NG) for the next year (probably two) of fellowship funding. bring it on.

ii. clyde_man landed hir dream job. it's in D.C., with a far hipper company than these financial drones she's been stuck with for 20 years. this is, seriously, beyond our wildest expectations of what could come of leaving the previous clusterfuck. like kismet. but much as I said I was ready, much as this scenario makes everything far less complicated, it never seemed like leaving NY(J)C was a realistic possibility. and now, all of a sudden, it's happening. we're driving to Jersey tomorrow to pack up my stuff there and say goodbye. tuesday we're continuing on to Providence. I know it's short notice, but if anyone wants to take a ride on the PATH train to hang out with us tomorrow night, you're welcome. dinner at Sushi Tango! tea and ice cream!

iii. as soon as this iron went into the fire, I realized that NYC had been a major oversight in my summer planning. I mean, I subliminally expected that I'd be returning to the city when I leave LA at an undetermined date in august. eep! so now I'm going to try to squeeze in a visit from june 10-14, approximately. I have a plane ticket from Providence to Michigan for june 15, which in retrospect is a terrible arrangement (I could have flown from Newark, and stayed longer!). but now I'm stuck with it. so this will be a whirlwind trip devoted entirely to catching up with friends -- pencil me in, stay tuned, give a shout, etc.

iv. the rest of the schedule: clyde will be in Providence helping me pack until friday. memorial day weekend I'm visiting my grandparents. then lucky (clyde's partner!) is coming to town to finish up the packing and help with the move itself on june 2, because clyde will have started the new job (and can't carry things with hir bad back anyway). this intra-familial delegation was her idea -- so adorable! we are completely Bill and Barb and Margie.

v. apparently lucky and clyde are going to Burning Man at the end of august: anybody interested in taking me? and the boston dyke march is on june 8 (6pm) -- be there or be square!

vi. I have no number vi. mostly just my perpetual battle with time, how unlimited projects lie in wait for me inside my computer and out there in the world. I don't seem to be able to prevent myself (especially while grading, writing) from joining ficathons and redesigning layouts and playing with new gadgets (that's a "lifestream": one-stop shopping for everything I post everywhere [excluding fanfic]). speaking of which, if you've joined twitter and I haven't added you yet, give me a holler.

vii. there was a moment, as I schlepped through the Denver airport, when the architecture of taking a break from lj was actually comprehensible. I know, intellectually, that my current involvement in fandom and internet life isn't sustainable long term, but most of the time the prospect of not participating at this level seems unimaginable. lj has been a source of so much stress and anxiety for me in recent months, though, and in that brief flash in transit I could SEE the relief (of a drastic unfriending and a break from fanfic) stretching before me. writing my diss about fandom creates a sort of hilarious catch 22, however, because I can't very well de-engage with my object of study! a year from now, when I'll have hopefully finished my case studies, I'm going to re-evaluate my status.

viii. speaking of fandom stress, I followed thassalia into the fray at Denis McGrath's blog. why did I do that?? he's a friend of FL, so I suppose I felt some responsibility to raise the level of debate. anyway, my comments (down at the bottom) are clearly informed by recent MiT5-y conversations with theorynut, cathexys, et al. go team acafangirl! I had this realization, by the way, that the reason I'm not blogging publicly and making myself visible like the fanboys is that I'd rather devote that energy to WRITING FIC.

ix. the girls of Shoemoney Haus are living three of my alternate lives, and it just fills me with flaily pride. I hate that I've been away since january.

x. that meme: I asked for icons and interests from the first five folks to cross my flist. shout if you want me to pick for you!

for, in order, ana_grrl, pocketwitch, annakovsky, tellitslant, and wearemany:

( words & squares )

1. my web empire sites are back up, halleluia! I'm having the urge to create some sort of hyperlinked visual map of my cyberbody (see below re: unproductive procrastination).

2. since I took my orals, I've forgotten how to do work. compounding the calamitousness of this situation is the fact that I've also apparently forgotten how to procrastinate via livejournal. traditionally it's been my morning activity, and with the way I've been sleeping I've lost mornings altogether. clearly the wise course would include some sort of filter or compromise, but I just WANT to read all of it, deeply. one less draconian strategy I've been testing is to split the flist into journals, communities and feeds and read them separately. this has the added bonus of allowing me to do some helpful empirical analysis of my unwieldy lj commitments:

hypothesis: fanfic reading/feedbacking comprises the majority of my lj-time (thus, a round of unfriending would do little to reduce the total).

relative percentages, in number of posts (approximate)
P=50% (200-300 per week)
Y=40%
C=10% (at MOST)

relative percentages, in time (approximate)
P=70% (200-300 per week)
Y=18%
C=12% (and about 90% of this is the combination of bsg_femslash, metafandom, and femslash_today, with a little bit of femslash100 thrown in [and galacticanews if I WERE reading it, which I was forced to stop doing] -- the other 50 or so comms I'm watching have virtually no impact)

conclusions: I spend a greater proportion of my lj-time reading personal journals than I expected! now, the data is somewhat misleading because I've discovered, also unexpectedly, that I actually read more fic off people's personal journals than off communities (particularly, fic which requires thoughtful consideration and comments, and which is thus most time-consuming). so this is perhaps more a refinement of the initial hypothesis than a refutation. feeds is, incidentally, the most heterogeneous category, as it includes both personal blogs by friends that I read faithfully, elaborate professional things that I need to pay attention to but mostly skim, and junk that I almost totally ignore -- hence why Y takes much less time than P, despite having almost as many posts (also, Y almost never involves leaving comments).

tonight, I was feeling a crisis coming on, so I pulled out feeds and comms and blew through 10 days of them in a couple of hours. this leaves me with the thinned-out journals-only flist to read for a while (until I catch up to today), which is a relief.

3. to file under: things I did to procrastinate when I SHOULD be catching up on livejournal, I checked out imeem while putting together a screening and it completely ATE MY BRAIN. I'm now planning to rerun my BSG vlog there, serially (two segments per week, starting may 1). for first time or repeat viewers who'd like to watch it in manageable doses: morebsg_vlog

p.s. why does the fanvid about Hera and all her lesbian mommies (particularly the cylon ones -- interpret that how you will) not exist?? (I do LOVE Babies but it's disconcertingly heterosexual -- like, I'd sort of forgotten that there were actually straight parents on that show.) (this query is related to my conference paper).

4. also (same file), I just signed up for remixthedrabble. plus I wrote this. *facepalm*

5. see what I mean about bad sleep habits?! it's 4am and I'm just now finishing up tonight's todo list. which, incidentally, did NOT include completing the conference presentation -- I'm not entirely sure when that's going to happen. (in my defense, I'm usually somewhat more responsible than this -- it's just that it's crunch time because tomorrow alistern and blacksquirrel arrive!!!)

did you know that the friendslist only goes back 2 weeks or 980 entries, whichever comes first? if you didn't, count yourself lucky (or better medicated than I am). catching up to the present is going to be a medium-term project, so expect those random outdated comments from me to keep coming.

I've lived here for nearly four years and never knew there was a stunning waterfront park with hiking trails literally blocks from my house. what a travesty!







we found it by accident walking down from scenic Blackstone boulevard, where we met R2D2!!!

I'm going to release myself from the obligation to individually reply to everyone who congratulated me on the exams, but THANK YOU!

meanwhile, I got sucked into a massive lj layout redesign, which is the sort of thing that tends to happen to me when I don't have tons of homework to do. or when I DO have tons of homework to do (exhibit A: the LibraryThing incident and last week's massive drupal undertaking which started with setting up a web page for _plasticity_). my hands are somewhat tied due to a longstanding decision to make my lj more or less match my fic site, which I have no intention of redoing even though it's way retro (these internet fashions do change SO quickly) [uh, maybe someday (NOT TODAY) I should revamp the color scheme (even *I* am getting tired of all the pink]. but I had massive layout envy with all the new and shinies vomiting out of SixApart and was so tired of staring at the asceticism of Flexible Squares. so yeah, I lost about 24 hours of my life to this OCD moment, mostly because I don't know what I'm doing, but all in all it wasn't a bad 24 hours to lose. here's what happened:

I made a completely new Flexible Squares stylesheet with more whitespace, but was ultimately unsatisfied. *headdesk*

I started googling layout shit and browsing the MT style archive, but it quickly became clear to me that converting any of these to livejournal wasn't going to be a simple undertaking (too bad, because I totally covet TV Signal!). in the course of this, though, I learned some about the new layouts and the style contest.

I decided to work with the style contest style Fleur, which I downloaded the files for (you can also find URLs of your style sheet by viewing the source of your lj pages).

I attempted to put together an external stylesheet for lj, which was going really well until for some reason lj started spitting out "suspect CSS" errors. I still have no idea what broke it. I mean, there was a missing } but I fixed that and it still wasn't working hours later.

I gave up and pulled out the relevant bits for the CSS override box. you can find that by clicking on "Custom CSS" here. it's a clunky workaround but the results are effective.

I have a new Fleur-based layout! you can see (and share!) the overrides I used here.

p.s. last call for questions on that one meme on that one post.

eta: the tinyicons (pink and grey people) I'm using are by passing_girl (see my CSS for the code).

Tags: eljay

obviously none of YOU need this, but several proto-blogger friends have asked me to advise them recently in my capacity as an internet-based life-form so I went ahead and wrote up a guide. I welcome your corrections, additions, and comments! feel free to share this post with any potential converts (grown-up link).

I'm assuming the n00b is looking for a hosted platform (i.e. a service you sign up for, rather than software you install on your own domain). here's an overview of what I see as the best and most popular alternatives:

( livejournal, vox, blogger, typepad, lifelogger )

a) my phone's camera isn't working and I haven't had time to try to fix it (I suspect I need to replace the memory card?). that's why I haven't been posting pictures. in case you were wondering.

b) I just megauploaded the aforementioned Global Frequency pilot for frogfrizz and I know you want it too.

c) the past three hours were spent catching up on some comments, which was satisfying but perhaps unwise since it leaves the flist still in a state of crisis (or maybe I just won't sleep much tonight?). I'm not sure what to tell you (or myself) except that hopefully my lj-life will improve in april.

d) tomorrow after class I'm leaving for Chicago. on the way/there I have to throw together a version of the paper to present on saturday and prepare for class next week. I have yet to pack (and grade this one paper).

e) everything was sort of under control except that now I have to give this 5-minute talk for a teaching certificate on wednesday morning. I suppose I can just wing it or reprise part of my tuesday lecture? on wednesday I write my exam questions and then over next weekend I revise the paper and then the following wednesday I do my studying. or something like that. and then friday the 23rd it's OVER. (my one fear is that they'll go "omg you're obviously not prepared!" and make me postpone the orals -- that would suck.)

I'm woefully behind on lj again, for no good reason. and I've been keeping this list of things I'd like to post about, if I were ever to have time to post, which I don't for the foreseeable future (blah blah insanity-until-mid-march-cakes, see cyborganize and tvhere for updates). so I might as well do one of those entries where I make a list of the things I'll tell you more about at some later date (or not):

i. speaking of behindness, of necessity I've been bookmarking a whole bunch of your fic for a rainy day, including everything yuletide (nor have I gotten to much of anything on the previous list *facepalm*). my apologies!

ii. I feel a bit like the apocryphal lesbian with the U-Haul, that is, all this talk with iamsab of weddings and babies (the things that clyde_man, for the record, has never wanted with anyone, least of all me) is perhaps ridiculously premature. but the thing is, it works in surprising ways (surprisingly rich and quotidian ways). and I don't believe that comes along very often in a lifetime.

iii. you should join this thing that wearemany discovered. it's totally addictive! you can update it from the site or by IM or txt (though I'm having trouble setting that up) or software with a little blurb about what you're doing. and there are multiple ways to track people, too, that I'm still figuring out (there's some sort of RSS feed of me, for example eta: twitter_pjulie -- and there'll be another one that includes me plus all my friends, I think, WHEN I HAVE THEM) -- don't you want to keep track of me?? and it's far less big brother-ish than plazes, though I'm also still addicted to that. also, I went ahead and joined OurChart. *eyeroll*

iv. shananaomi made girls gay for us as requested! your votes were taken into account.

v. I spontaneously switched from Eudora to Mail without quite realizing what was happening. I mean, I like Mail, but Eudora and I have been together for over 10 years! but there was the import mailboxes button, and *bloop* I'm joining the 21st century.

vi. my best and only LA celebrity sighting this trip was Ethan Phillips -- aka Neelix on Voyager! actually em did the spotting with her special kung fu, since it's a challenge to recognize him without the elaborate makeup. he sat down next to us at Cafe 101 on my first and samdonne's last morning. BUT MEANWHILE EM SAW GRACE PARK! she stood in line behind her at Starbucks; tragically, I was not with her at the time.

vii. I have "crazy BSG dreams" on my list, but the dreams were ages ago and now I've totally forgotten them! eta: and then LAST night I dreamed and dreamed about hanging out with Mary McDonnell. it was sort of wonderful and sort of torturous.

viii. I've been contemplating writing up an eloquent position statement on the flailing over how Kara's recent "tomcatting around" is out of character and/or bad and wrong, neither of which I believe is true. but that's fatally low on the list of priorities. so all you get is this snip from an email to mandysbitch: a) I DON'T think Kara is a bad person. I think she's being true to the parameters of her relationship -- Anders makes clear that he knows about this arrangement and accepts it. I have a VERY hard time blaming folks for being in love with two people [see further: my strange lack of h8 for McDreamy]. the way she's handling it may seem like a rationalization, but it's one that works for her and her partner, and I don't think Lee's proposal that they both leave their spouses is any more objectively moral (in fact, Lee is perhaps a BIGGER dick, as he seems to have NO concern for Dee's feelings). b) well, many would say this IS out of character for Kara, and offer various evidence from her earlier dalliances (basically that Gaius is the only random hookup she had, and even then she was thinking of Lee, and she has been anything but callous with others' affections and her own). OK fine, but I STILL think there's some underlying sexist disapproval of the promiscuous woman going on here. although Kara hasn't had many onscreen hookups, her promiscuity was always implied, and that's always been one of my FAVORITE things about her character. (plus somebody made Brokeback Galactica [Lee/Anders], which is totally FTW!)

ix. we were watching Big Love as a family in Ptown, joking about clyde_man and hir three wives (only s/he swapped pixieslap for me in boston, so we were never all there simultaneously). I'm the 2nd, but I don't think I'm much like nikki. lucky is totally barb, except for how clyde has to be bill+barb, what with being the breadwinner plus the one who does all the cooking and scheduling. it was really quite adorable. then we mapped it out for Shoemoney Haus too! in that version, I'm very much margene, which makes perfect sense.

x. have I mentioned that I love television? everything (see the list in my sidebar) is starting up again, yay. plus I have this ambitious list of things to learn, which goes something like:

The Book Group (UK)
Elizabeth I (miniseries, Helen Mirren)
Bleak House (miniseries, Gillian Anderson)
Yin Yang Yo (Disney cartoon that steph's in)
Freaks and Geeks
30 Rock
Veronica Mars seasons 2+3
At the Hotel (miniseries, Canada)
Kink (documentary, Canda)
The Office (US), with clyde_man

I'm still not sure where to find the canadian ones, so holler if you can help. also, I need Passion Fish and everything else with Mary McDonnell, pretty please. youtube has a whole bunch of clips of her on ER!

I'm back in Providence as of JUST NOW, if that wasn't apparent...

I caught a mandysbitch! the elusive creature pictured here is rarely captured on film:



tomorrow we're off to Baltimore+DC for "family" thanksgiving, sex parties, visits with happyhop & co. and various American tourist attractions. I have papers to grade, woe is me (I'm strictly limiting myself to one hour each this time around), relationships to redefine, and drabbles to finish.

in honor of lj connections, here's something I wrote to a dear but anti-blog friend in (*gasp*) an email:

livejournal changed my life, and in many ways my subjectivity (I do think this is particular to the architecture of livejournal, and not shared by most other social networking sites, which tend toward profile-based [myspace] or opinion/discussion based [blogger, bulletin boards], without much integration of the two). it has taught me a profound amount about community-building as a process, and about the diverse forms of intimacy. and by aggregating friendship, it has enabled me to stay connected with a web of RL and online friends to a degree that would be totally unsustainable without these tools. it is certainly a (mere) performance of individuality, to some degree (though what isn't?), but it is also about participating in a diffusion and disintegration of individuality into so many fragments in an intersubjective archive.

ha, I should blog this! ;P

four score and seven years ago, I went to Australia to visit gorgeous girls. before I left, I loaded up four score and seven stories in tabs to peruse during the trip (mostly yuletide stuff). and lo, Safari didst crash, and more than ten days had passed so I couldn't even turn to the browser history for redemption.

I've been working on reconstructing that reading list for 6 months. (possibly I should be better medicated.) FINALLY, I've just about seen the top of my flist again. I'm within spitting distance of having read everyone's January, and I've gone back over everyone's yuletide recs. I am never, NEVER leaving the internet again *clings*! in the epoch I spent locked in heroic combat with the flist's 2-week cutoff, I was vanquished only once: I missed part of April 22 and slightly into April 23, so if you posted anything of importance in that window give me a holler.

I've been doing only the bare minimum of commenting, for which I apologize. that trend may have to continue. just know that I do read everything (like, obsessively).

this filtering thing. well, it clearly DID serve the purpose of enabling me to (barely) keep my head above water for the past 6 months. but it clearly DIDN'T serve its intended purpose of allowing me to sporadically read my entire flist. I haven't looked at the "sometimes" section since I made it, honestly. thus, I'm going to try to reintegrate it all. I'm going to try to figure out which ljs are really contributing to the crippling backlog, and let them go. this may, it pains me to say, result in some defriendings. it's purely out of dire necessity, and with my deepest apologies.

for example: much to my chagrin, I've had to give up ritaskeeter_. I mean, I'd already quit the rest of HP girlslash cold turkey because it's just too high volume. but oh, ritaskeeter_, you are TEH SEXXX0RZ! given the amount of fic listed below, though, it's just not plausible that I'll EVER have the time to catch up there (and those stories are too good to read without feedbacking). as for the rest, though, I remain committed. mostly the rest is BSG girlslash (and of course my baby femslash100, and now sisterwives) and stories by my friends -- I read a smattering of Grey's Anatomy, House, RPFS, Wicked, South of Nowhere, Veronica Mars, and occasional rare treats via femslash_today (SVU and Housewives I've gone off almost entirely), but those I rarely comment on. it's not a sustainable commitment, even so (it's the amount of fic that gets me so behind on lj, inevitably, not the number of friends), and I'm still not sure how to address that -- but I'm not at all ready to let go of my presence in and contribution to these communities and relationships, and I feel very strongly that feedback is the way one shows up.

( so, to do: )

everything else, I think, is NEARLY covered (let me know if I missed anything, OK?). and that's an accomplishment!

I'm going to have to accept, I think, that I'm not going to be "caught up" on lj until sometime this summer. by "caught up" I mean: having seen the top of the flist, read all the januaries, finished the list of back-fic and feedbacked all the rest, answered all my 2006 comments and written the posts below. of course, this "caught up" will only apply for about 15 seconds, since such is the nature of lj -- but it would be nice to experience those 15 seconds one day. meanwhile, one of those placeholder thingies for the posts I've been working on, but can't justify finishing while the more immediate processes of reading (days behind, again) and commenting (and ficathons) are barely under control:
- five love letters, which started in Vancouver a month ago, but I keep changing what the five actually are based on what's up in my life. probably I should write this first since I'd really like to tell you about Lisa Duggan's brilliant lecture relating the marriage equality campaign to the political economy of neoliberalism.
- the hypertext roundup updating you on all the ridiculous girlcrushes I've mentioned here in passing and then dropped, because inquiring minds want to know, right? [flocked]
- giant me-meme post (10 things I assume you know, 5 quirks and 5 AUs), started in what, december?

I'm here now, though, to say that I magically drew my #1 favorite minor character in the wingswing, and I'm SO EXCITED! and actually hugely intimidated by these women (the characters and also my fellow writers). am I allowed to tell who it is?? I need to consult with lawyerly types about what issues of constitutional law that at least sound plausible could conceivably come up if a lost human civilization suddenly showed up on earth. I'm very tempted to relate it to enemy combatants and habeus corpus, because it's so topical (this is what I woke up thinking this morning, btw), but if you-know-who and you-know-who are fighting over Boomer it may be hard to get them to make out. so I could also go with something about immigration/refugee status? so yes, research! not going to even think about starting this until after I write the getyourtoaster fic, which is still under discussion, so meanwhile I should catch up on classical Hollywood drabbles (It's A Wonderful Life and Blonde Venus/Voyager xover). I never did write the Weeds thing for remainder, so now it's a moot point until the end of the semester when I'm ready to post the index of everything I've written in the past 6 months (stay tuned). and oh, I also wanted to ask about structure, being that it's been literally YEARS since I started a real story (except the BSG five things, which has a built-in structure)... those of you who write more or less non-linear fics, how do you go about organizing them? do you make a plan before you start, or does it just happen? how do you know what will work?

and yeah, against my better judgement I'm also writing livewireless, which, dude? is the CRACK!

and speaking of crack, my birthday fic from giantessmess is the doppelcest xover OF D00M!! so much love.

and now I should think about showering and doing some homework???

so, aeonian and I are writing this story, all about Starbuck and Roslin and Cain and D'anna Biers, and evil cylon plots to make everyone have lesbian sex so they'll be too distracted to continue the war. I mean, theoretically writing, but we have a page at writely and I already jotted down a little bit. it seems epic, the whole S.2 backstory of our Kara, but I'm convinced that once we make it all spare and non-linear it will be manageable and finished someday. we'll need a beta, at some point?

and, I'll say it again, you should really friend cyborganize if you're at all interested in fandom and/or my school stuff. I'm asking for help with various projects for Open Source Culture, but my most urgent need is song suggestions for a Starbuck/Roslin/Cain/Gina fanvid. something that goes with torture and cyborgs and (in fact the vid that I envision in my head is mostly a translation of the aforementioned story). I'm thinking some sort of sacred music? or other fanvid requests/suggestions -- it occurs to me that I could opt for something more self-reflexive (unless I could make the BSG vid mildly self-reflexive?). Oliska? (who would also need an appropriately snarky song. notice how my potential as a vidder is totally hamstrung by my utter lack of interest in music.)

I'm just SO smitten with BSG right now. if I were one of those people with time I'd read all the ep discussion and write up some meta commentary and whatnot. as it is I'll just say that the women on this show (topped, obviously, by future mother of my children Laura Roslin) are FUCKING INSANELY HOTT. and that I've been thinking about my discussion with iamsab about how it's NOT a left-wing show, and refining my opinion. nobody comes out looking good on BSG, and nobody comes out looking totally bad -- not the military, not the democrats, not the guerilla activists, and not the genocidal cyborgs. everyone's position and decisions are complex and flawed. and you know, that IS left-wing TV to me. shows that unilaterally celebrate ostensibly progressive values -- say, Star Trek TNG, which was all about diversity and tolerance and social justice -- are just as creepy to me as their opposite (say, Star Trek Enterprise :P), because that rhetoric is so easily appropriated by the likes of Bush. but BSG -- it's always *uncomfortable* to watch, politically.

I've been reading all the Starbuck/Cain fic. holy GUH to the nth power.

Starbuck's underlying obedience and fundamentalism are difficult for me to reconcile myself with (though not when manifested as sexual submission). I went out in a military uniform jacket, secretly in honor of her (and I know that nominally I lust after TV characters a lot, but lately they've infected my actual fantasies to an unprecedented degree). a thrift store find. I don't wear it often -- it's fascinating and really discomfiting, the reactions I get from ex-servicepeople (who actually earned those stripes).

on an unrelated note, clyde_man and my mom and I went to MoMA last weekend. and there are cameraphone pictures!



*

to preserve my sanity I've broken down the massive lj-catchup project into a series of stages, to proceed steadily but slowly. thus far I've gotten up to date on femslash100 and bsg_femslash, and replied to comments on at least my more recent posts (and I'm now checking them only on webmail, where the reply form is embedded in the email). currently I'm working on femslash_today backlog, and fretting about reassembling a list of fics I'm behind on (lost all those tabs in the course of my trip -- when will I learn??). problem is, one can only skip back two weeks on the flist. woe!!! so I'll have to read your journals individually (probably in alphabetical order), snagging the fic as I go. it's going to be a long while before I'm living in the present again, folks -- be patient with me.

wow, catching up on the flist was more of a project than I expected it to be. that skip=200 was dense with fic, and I don't like to let it pile up because it rapidly becomes overwhelming. but done for now, except I've got ficathon entries by iamsab and mazily and norah and mandysbitch and thenewhope and sundry others loaded up in tabs for the trip. there were several Safari snafus along the way, so PLEASE let me know if I didn't pipe up about something that you would have expected me to.

comments, on the other hand, are a train wreck. I swore I was going to get through at least the ones on my most recent posts, but I just ran out of TIME -- like seriously, I have to leave for the airport SOON. I'll take another stab at the backlog when I can.

I've been doing as much as I can to catch up with a select few friends in my select few days in town. but it's probably a good thing that a couple of them never materialized, as I would have been left with no eljay time whatsoever, rather than the hours upon hours that I actually needed. quasiradiant, darling, I tried to rustle you up (left you a couple phone messages) but you or your technology (or mine too? I got none back) are conspiring against me/us/nice girls everywhere. woe!

uh, I should probably make sure iamsab and/or sorlklewis know when I'm appearing in LA and have some plan for how I'll get from the airport to their house.

3 drabbles during the flights, is the goal, and 3 or 4 more by monday. I can't decide whether to write McGonagall/Jean Brodie or Mary Poppins/Jane Banks (futurefic, say) (having scrapped the idea of a Poppins/Hogwarts xover for the moment -- anyway, it's been done), so perhaps I'll try to write both and bump West Wing to the "three" challenge. anyway, rather an odd set of ambitions to overlay on an international voyage, but welcome to my life.

in conclusion, leaving (THE INTERNET) is always hectic, even when you think it shouldn't have to be. and cathexys has alerted me to the existence of http://www.zizekthemovie.com XD!!

will try to post my first field report from Melbourne soon -- I imagine I'll be able to get online now and then via the generosity of others, just not in the Manner To Which I Am Accustomed (and I just realized that I don't have a plug adapter for AU -- crisis! I'll try to buy one on the way)... giantessmess, I'll look for you and a dorky gentleman resembling you at the airport!

I'm tired and just all full up with love for lj, in that emotional way we get when we're tired. lj who vastly increased the amount of time allowed for phoneposts since the last time I checked, thusly allowing me to record my entire lecture directly to cyborganize! my cell phone is now a digital archiving device! I'm PSYCHED! I didn't wait till time ran out -- I wonder how long one could conceivably go? dear lj, you are love. you enrich my life and you're fun to talk and think about. kthnxbye.

remember this post? well, inspiration struck just as the time was nigh and now I have http://01cyb.org! duh, numbers! I hope they are not too pretentious.

the lecture was OK. perhaps good. not spectacular. (which I know because I got to LISTEN to it!). could have been better with more preparation, except in practice that just means writing things out and I'm trying not to get in that habit. could have been better if I'd slept on it. whkc woke up with neck spasms this morning and couldn't come to school (phoneposting all the better -- she was finished listening to my talk 15 min. after I finished giving it), which meant that everything else I had to do today (except the paper meeting, which was successful -- narcissism and exhibitionism here I come!) was cancelled. lo and behold, I was so diligent over the weekend and got all my work done. so I'm rewarding myself by vegging (at ?skip=180)-- and realizing what a good strategy it is to do this AFTER I've accomplished something, rather than using the reward to bribe myself into doing it in the first place, which is my usual MO. except I'm almost too blitzed to properly enjoy it.

BUT _plasticity_ IS HOLDING BAD GIRLS HOSTAGE!! in his defense I did ask him to spirit the DVDs away to a most secret and secure location. but I want them back now, NOW I tell you. I hope he will be home soon so that I can smush my face up against a coupla eps of Helen/Nikki, drooling and kissing all over them, before I pass out.

tuesday is love (inversely proportional to how monday is not). sleeping in and yoga and friends and no class... and oh, I promise I'll do some homework too, really.

New York, Venice, Stockholm, Istanbul -- there's nothing I love more than a city veined by the sea. Amsterdam, with its rings of circulatory canals, has been waiting for me. arriving at an outer platform of central station, whose panoramic window looks out on a wide waterway glowing with early morning sun, it's hard not to be smitten.

but EU customs, you know, for some reason their stamps are almost illegibly faint. so during my europe trip this summer I outlined all of them on my passport, for my own reference, trying to identify the country and date. now, since then, I've been through probably greek and certainly turkish, US, and canadian customs, and nobody has hassled me. but here they sternly threatened me with arrest (I didn't think for a moment it would come to this, but still), pulled me aside into the immigration police office (I was the only white person there) and let me cool my heels for half an hour whereupon they let me go on my merry way after another scolding. don't write in your passports, kids -- I may have to get a new one in order to avoid such problems in the future. needless to say, this initial experience did little to endear me to the Dutch.

in its favor, however, Schipol airport features a train station, just past baggage claim. not just a commuter link with the city center, but an actual train station, with connections to a country-wide network. it's brilliant, and nothing warms the cockles of my heart like good public transportation. and it's really true -- there are an *insane* amount of bicyclists here. to top it off, I saw a rainbow through the train window, faint and fleeting amid the tatters of clearing fall rainclouds.

I'm in the lounge of the hostel, where there's indeed free wireless (paradise!), ensconsed here for the day to revise my conference paper (eep!) and prepare for section, which I'm teaching tonight at the Small Grassy Island (#92170) in LambdaMOO (hee!). tourism will come later -- though I suppose I'll have to venture out for food at some point today. and ah, the second-hand pot smoke begins o_O

livejournal is rather a conundrum. I'm caught up (post-DO) on flist reading, but far behind on comments/feedback (yet again). the semester is only going to get busier, and at some point I may have to make some structural change in my engagement here, though I can't envision what that would look like *clings*. to make matters worse, I have a habit of opening up all sorts of fic and posts in tabbed windows to save for later, and then periodically Safari crashes and I lose this crucial to-do list (as happened this morning -- in fact the computer entirely froze up and then turned itself off, which in my memory has never happened to me before). so then I have to go through my entire browser history to try to reconstruct it, which takes like an hour. and I'm never satisfied that there wasn't something I missed, something vital which will now be lost to me forever.

the past period been exhilarating but even more exhausting, and what I want most out of this trip is to feel caught up and renewed at the end of it. correspondence can eat up infinite amounts of time, and I don't know how to nurture my connections to the burgeoning number of people I love, or how not to.

*

clyde_man's family post-Rita update: people who live in Lake Charles (this would be clyde's mom and hir sister-in-law's whole family) have been told they may not be able to come home until november. ack! but the military "menfolk" who returned to the city report that there's only minor wind damage to mom's house, and no flooding. clyde's brother in Beaumont didn't fare so well -- a tree fell on his house and crushed part of it. brother in Houston is fine, but for the fact that all the Lake Charles folks are staying with them. other brother they haven't heard from but he lives further inland so probably everything is fine. clyde_man is griping that the preponderance of the aid is going to Texas, while so much of the Louisiana coast is completely decimated and not getting any attention. also note that Allstate is refusing to pay claims on flood insurance in New Orleans, because the flooding was caused by a failure of the levies and not by a natural disaster -- wow, how much do we love them?

*

I didn't watch the Emmys. I was on my way home from DO, and anyway I can't be bothered to schedule my life around dreck like that. but the other night I had a dream that heathers insisted that I needed to watch them, and lonejaguar generously provided me with vids. and then of course watching the vids morphed into me being AT the Emmys. I witnessed a playful interaction between Mariska and Allison Janney (my random RFPS OTP). then later I overheard Mariska saying she'd redesigned her horrifying web site, and I muttered "thank god" under my breath, not so quietly that she wouldn't notice. but I felt guilty and apologized to her afterwards. haha.

*

remember how I said I want to be on a reality dating show? I don't think I spend enough time in nyc to actually apply, but yay!

( gay TV casting call )

*

the memeosphere tells me when you see this, post some Shakespeare in your journal (or something along those lines), so I bring you teh girlslash:

Celia entreating her father to spare Rosalind, As You Like It I.iii

I was too young that time to value her;
But now I know her: if she be a traitor,
Why so am I; we still have slept together,
Rose at an instant, learn'd, play'd, eat together,
And wheresoever we went, like Juno's swans,
Still we went coupled and inseparable...
I cannot live out of her company.

I meant to write a slashtastic drabble after I saw the play this summer, but the actress who played Rosalind was wholly uninspiring, ugh.

and your academic quote -- this time about LJ! a parody entitled "The Buribunks: A Historico-Philosophical Meditation," written by one Carl Schmitt in 1918, is included almost in its entirety in Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (231-242). excerpts:

( every Buribunk, regardless of sex, is obligated to keep a diary on every second of his or her life )

and no, nobody has any idea where the term Buribunk comes from.

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