{ split subject }

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. 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 )

Here are some random people I met on the street near south station. I'm really friendly but obviously they're total losers.

Just kidding! It's pene and unwinding visiting from australia, dropping in on mazily and tangleofthorns in boston, which is the best thing ever!! Such love.

scattergories answers have been unscreened. normally one point would be awarded for each correct answer that isn't duplicated by someone else, but that system is dependent on time limits and questions that have correct answers. so instead, I'll be awarding a point for the BEST answer to each question (judged by an extensive and statistically accurate poll of MY BRAIN).

1. stupid things that Americans do :: "liberate" other countries (wearemany) [though I do have to declare iamsab the runner-up for Stop Same-Sex Marriage]
2. girls on TV who are gay in my mind :: necessarily a tie between Starbuck (iamsab) and Laura Roslin (blacksquirrel)
3. things you can cook without using a stove :: Jello! (museumfreak) [Jello does require the boiling of water, but I suppose you CAN do that without a stove. runner-up goes to cosmic for Delivered food! -- certainly the most appealing to non-stove-using people such as myself, but disqualified because technically you don't cook it. in a creepy coincidence, wearemany and blacksquirrel both answered Lemonade]
4. goofy names for nail polish colors :: Stubbornly Sunsettish (iamsab) [this was not the high-concept question, cosmic ;)]
5. conspiracies perpetrated by The Man against Black people :: Low income housing (blacksquirrel)
6. items on the gay agenda :: OK, this one is headed for at least a three-way tie, so you're just going to have to go read them all! it's quite an impressive agenda, IJS.
7. things you can buy at Home Depot :: lawn ornaments (wearemany)
8. lesbians :: Julie! (museumfreak) [OK, it was virtually impossible to beat that one]
9. sex toys :: E-vibes! (for the cyborg in all of us) (infloresence)
10. high-concept Halloween costumes :: Joni Mitchell's album Blue (museumfreak) [but they were all great, so this is mostly because she actually executed said costume!]

and the winner is... museumfreak! *ticker-tape parade*

an outtake: one of happyhop's categories during the RL game was "the worst pets in the world," which elicited the following answers:

martians (me)
midgets (mandysbitch)
maggots (Jess)
and... minotaurs (happyhop)

I was laughing so hard that I literally ROFLOLed. painful hilarity!

*

of course, I couldn't resist whipping out the smartphone once or twice while we were touristing in DC.



( as seen on the West Wing! (National Cathedral picspam) )

p.s. holy guh, THIS is why you should watch Rome. hot femmes fatales pitted against each other in a matriarchal deathmatch! (and a reminder: in S.1 there was a crossgen lesbian affair -- we're talking onscreen here, not the specially-wired TV in my brain)

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

SNAKES ON CRACK!!!

also

muthafuckin snake, get off my dick! [nipple/tongue/ass/eyeball/neck]

also

SPORKS ON A PLANE!!!

yes, it was snakes in a movie theater with heathers and lonejaguar!! I wanted to make them write girlslash on a plane with me, on principle (orgasms are a good way to relieve stress/grief, and all), but it doesn't look like that's actually going to happen. we're being lazy!

in honor of the greatest movie ever made, I bring you snakes in a fake TV religion:

And unto the leader, they gave a vision of serpents, numbering two and ten, as a sign of things to come.
~ The Book of Pythia

which is to say that winging its way to me through the mail is my shiny new black macbook, named Pythia after the head priestess of Delphi and voice of the oracle, along with my video ipod Ros (short for Laura Roslin), which is inscribed "there are many copies" (heeeeee, she's a cylon!) along with my email addy and phone number. HURRAH! stay tuned for a post hawking a 3-year-old 12" powerbook 867MHz. plus along with the ipod rebate there's a printer rebate, so I went ahead and ordered a new printer/scanner/copier, which means I can scan things! I'm taking requests.

I have been asked to offer an independent review of casa ass_whisperer and 3dogcircus, and the surrounding region. I give it FIVE STARS! *****


their woods harbor evocative, occult sculptures made of melted army men and other plastics. we hung that hammock (and accept no liability for injuries [bodily or metaphorical]).

( it comes with three dogs )

plus, we went on a field trip to the Ulster County Fair in New Paltz!

( the food was really the highlight, for me, but everyone else liked the pigs best )

it's at least 95 degrees outside, breaking 90 inside my apartment, and I've fled to *bucks for some iced tea and AC. unfortunately, given that these are my only five days in providence out of three months, most of the puttering I have to do involves being in the house. the heat is supposed to break in a matter of hours, anyway, so there's always tomorrow (you're only a day away!).

I'm embroiled in an internal debate about whether, in the long run of the short term, I want to live in providence or move to Boston. Boston has the advantage of being a real city, one which is certainly growing on me, and when I'm away I never quite believe that I actually like it in providence. it took me three years to get here, but I do. last night I did dinner and a movie (A Scanner Darkly 80 [that's a smiley]) with kore, slowmend, laliu, and J + friend; tonight is dinner and TV (Eureka, that new sci-fi show?) with _mesk and maybe Gill and whoever else turns up. I'll also see more of objet_petit_a who I caught up with on monday, and ljconscript and one or two other friends who are in town -- the rest are off to parts unknown, or at least haven't emailed me back. my other half, _plasticity_, is still at theory camp. *weeps*

but I digress -- mainly, this is a double fandom post! *waves to femslash_today*

I've made no secret of my crazed obsession with doppelcestuous girlslash. well thanks to iamsab, this genre now has a THEME SONG.

Nellie McKay - Clonie [right-click save-as]

( lyrics )

may this inspire you to hitherto unknown heights of doppelcest inspiration, my friends. (and oh, the fanvids that could be made!)

secondarily, OMG SUGAR RUSH! compared to South of Nowhere (the US teen lesbian drama with a virtually identical cast of characters), the first season was entertaining but didn't do that much for me. yes, the British show was grittier, and had better writing, acting, and editing, but it tended toward the farcical, and Sugar was so reprehensible that I couldn't get emotionally invested in the romance. well, they have rectified all of this, launching the second season (now 6 eps in) with a totally reconfigured and far more satisfying structure. and more sex!

( here there be spoilers )

so yeah, I'm rather beside myself with love for this show. many more caps from the third ep are here. meanwhile, I'm watching House S.1 (and a bit of Conviction, but it's truly atrocious), to be followed by Nip/Tuck S.1 with clyde_man. and J asked how I was surviving with TV on summer hiatus -- ha!

(I purged about 20 icons -- I'm not quite sure how I managed it -- uploaded some new ones but I still have ROOM omg!)

eta: OMG OMG again! _mesk just showed me this AMAZING Roslin vid by beccatoria that I missed somehow. I am dying of squee! I'll be the first to admit that I'm not particularly vid-enabled, but I have been watching and enjoying a number of BSG vids. see my YouTube faves (or holler if you want other stuff). while I'm here I should also re-rec my favorite vid of all time, Every You Every Me (Starbuck/Roslin) by tallulah71.

eta2: OK, Eureka is atrocious -- it's no wonder the non-initiated have trouble believing that BSG is actually a good show. however, it does have Maya (Erica Cerra) as an absurdly hot ass-kicking sheriff with giant guns (eta: thrace_ brings us screencaps!) -- um, yes, I do have a type. I'm writing Deputy Jo/Maya doppelcest in my head -- but I shall try to restrain myself as I'm already many drabbles and fics behind.

the BSG preview was intriguing (lots of babies! not enough Roslin). I'm actually concerned about what will become of me if S.3 is as compelling as S.2.

I should be allowed a post, right, on the rare occasions when I manage to more or less clear out my browser tabs?

this one is about Swarthmore Guilt -- a positive aftereffect of my alma mater which refers to a powerful sense of social responsibility. in MCM we talk about time and space. the latter has always been more malleable for me. I am thinking a lot, these days, about how I choose to use my time. I dedicate these monumental chunks of it to cultivating my relationships (in RL, on LJ, in travel and correspondence), a choice which I stand by but which I'm recognizing for the first time, perhaps, as one that precludes other things -- namely the channelling of all this energy into activist projects of whatever sort. then again, the fact remains that I apparently care far more about making TV characters gay than about giving serious attention to social change, and I can make no excuse for that (I'm not buying the Slash is Subversive argument). I've said in the past that I'm waiting till I suss out what political strategies are most effective, but that alibi isn't going to hold up forever. eta: OK, to be fair, I've also always said that queer politics (and not electoral politics or other brands of radical politics) is my cause celebre, and I do spend a significant amount of my time and energy on being a sex educator, both formally and informally -- and slash perhaps counts for something, in this department. basically I just want it all to make sense by the time I get around to writing my diss.

five things that happened yesterday:

1) I ran into lonewolf_w_cub in Central Park! I was with the brain trust Quorum of Five and on my way uptown.
2) I told furies (and anyone else who likes crazy books -- I think I made happyhop buy it already) to read Memoirs of my Nervous Illness
3) I borrowed the Dark Passions books from quasiradiant -- but next up for summer reading is the book giantessmess sent me!
4) there was a drunken dramatic reading of a fanfic story -- the author of which shall remain nameless, since most of us are only a little bit bisexual mean.
5) we read e. e. cummings

five things that DIDN'T happen yesterday:

1) we were caught in a torrential downpour and got soaked. here comes the global warming apocalypse!
2) aeonian and I spotted Mary McDonnell in Columbus Circle Whole Foods, and I made Nia run and get her autograph because she is brave and I was hyperventilating too much to speak.
3) we sat on the floor in the Sci Fic section of Borders, and geeked out reading Star Trek and BSG fanboy books.
4) we didn't miss thenewhope at all.
5) there was an orgy.

I'd like to revive the book meme. it went something like: pick up the book closest to you and open it to page 123. post the 5th complete sentence on that page in your journal. no cheating!

I can't do it anymore, she realized, startled.
~ Tamora Pierce, Trickster's Queen

sunday night furies and quasiradiant lured me away from my computer with promises of soul food and kissing. we missed aeonian! I wasn't planning to leave the house, but you know, they called. let this be a lesson to all of you. there were mobs of happy happy gay people filling the streets (almost none of whom were white, wow!), and we discussed the msscribe affair and why I'm afraid of lesbian bars.

and also last week I went to see Allison Bechdel with the formidable kellychambliss, hurrah!

I love fandom people. (eta: it has just occurred to me that the intensity of my fascination may be due to the dynamics of microcelebrification in fandom -- I mean, these are girls whose work I idolize.) wearemany theorizes that fannishness is not so much a sexual orientation as a sexual subculture -- which explains a lot about its robust overlap with the leather scene.

my life is a tangle, right now. I'm not sure how to be all the places I want to be and see all the people I want to see and still get my PhD. it's a bit dire, actually -- or, not to catastrophize, I could call it a thorny transition. I'm going to TES Fest (or some part of it? I haven't figured out the details yet) with FG this weekend, if anyone cares to join me.

I spent last weekend on a massive redesign of my academic site and my personal site -- probably 20, 30 hours of work (debugging). this in preparation to make my field lists and mirror them online, not just as more procrastination. still some technical difficulties that I can't figure out how to fix, and infinite tinkering that I *could* do, but I've got them to a mostly-functional state where I can stop for the time being, praise be. if you're the sort who knows about servers and php, you can read my comments about the remaining issues in the top posts here -- I can't get the "page not found" front page to go away and I can't get projectjulie.net to run correctly, both of which I believe to be due to problems with the multisite hack that I'm using (trying to run several drupal sites off a single installation). I can't get the supposedly more elegant symlink method to work at all. in fact, I don't really understand any of this stuff, but somehow I manage to more or less muddle through. and shit, I just realized that my projectjulie.net email address is bouncing because of my domain-forwarding workaround, and I'm not sure what to do about that (huh, maybe I can change it so the forwarding is on the side of my host rather than godaddy) (did it clumsily using an html redirect, but it will serve). email me @ brown, for now.

I'm "almost" caught up on eljay, which I suppose is about as caught up as I'll ever be. it feels SO GOOD to be able to top off my flist in an hour after I wake up. and meanwhile, TV keeps me sane. current is the end of Lost S.2 and Conviction up until the appearance of teh boobs -- and I've finished the seasons of Desperate Housewives (a crushing disappointment, which makes me want to watch S.1 again so I can remember why I loved this show, because right now I honestly couldn't tell you), SVU (don't ask), House (House/Cameron robot sex!), Big Love (which was very hard to watch without iamsab! they were SO GAY, and they got GRASS!), The L Word (obviously), BSG (really obviously), and clyde and I have two eps left of West Wing (RIP) -- what am I forgetting? and then there are the things that are starting (Sugar Rush!) or that might start soon (Rome? Weeds? South of Nowhere? Nip/Tuck?). and on the list is NCIS (inherited from iamsab), House S.1, Bad Girls S.3, earlier Nip/Tuck, maybe even Grey's. so these are the things we can talk about.

i. the brain trust Quorum of Five made various advances in human knowledge at the Great Toaster Meetup 2006 (c.f. previous post). we have divined, for example, that the cylon god is a Starbuck/Roslin shipper (obviously, since those two are his chosen ones), and that, from the Jewish perspective, Jesus is totally a Mary Sue.

I become increasingly convinced that fannishness is akin to a sexual orientation, at least in terms of its powerful experience of subcultural community.

ii. I get emails like this from my friends: "I'm trying to find incestuous lesbian fan fiction/slash stuff on Lorelai Gilmore and her daughter Rory (from Gilmore Girls) for a paper I'm writing" -- so who can help?? thenewhope said she might have some leads...

iii. something I love: Sugar Rush -- basically South of Nowhere, but British and thus raunchier and grittier and with better acting, editing, and cinematography, and more black comedy than earnestness. but lacking, I hate to say, the narrative pleasure of an unfolding, angst-ridden OTP, since Sugar is a completely irredeemable bitch who Kim clearly has no hope of a meaningful relationship with. something I H8: automatic-flushing public toilets! I have been brewing a rant about this for so long. I don't know if it's the particular choreography of my bathroom habits or what, but they NEVER flush when I stand up, so I have to do it manually, and then invariably they finally flush again just as I'm leaving. also they tend to flush right when I sit down.

iv. friday's discussion consisted of the following theorywank:

• the Nike slogan "Just Do It" (alternately "I dunk, therefore I am") is the quintessential postmodern reconfiguration of the cogito ("I think, therefore I am"), with its emphasis on identity as performative and its refusal of any unified, interior subjectivity.

• debate about how my rubric for understanding my department, Team Modernism vs. Team Postmodernism, would map onto Ninjas vs. Pirates. I was arguing for Pirates = Modern and Ninjas = Pomo, because Pirates = colonialism, state apparatus, and the quest for material goods while Ninjas = globalization, information (spy practice), and stealth terror (one of my classmates helpfully added that Zombies = Realism). except that this site emphasizes Ninjas as highly trained, mass-produced, state-sponsored conformists who follow orders blindly, and Pirates as highly individualized, modular camp performers who have no moral code and care about "profit and profit only." which suggests that I have them reversed, or more plausibly that the whole Ninjas vs. Pirates nexus is so hopelessly postmodern that it can't be parsed in this way.

clearly grad school has permanently ruined me for polite society.

v. let's all read Roe v. Wade. I read it as research for my story, which is the sort of thing one does when writing fic about the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. but in this day and age it should be part of our basic political literacy, right? I had no idea how particular and provisional it was. there's a more detailed post brewing for cyborganize outlining my discomfort with the discourse of "privacy" -- you can see here how easily "liberty" (the Fourteenth Amendment) is transposed to something subtly different. the fact that the "right to privacy" is a cornerstone of the protection of civil liberties (c.f. Lawrence v. Texas, the decision striking down sodomy laws) doesn't make the route it uses to get there any less troubling to me.

I forgot to take a pic w museumfreak n alistern, the delightful lj atlanta crew! So instead you get just me and a chinese bed.

a) clyde_man just watched an ep of Veronica Mars (I totally see the Veronica/Meg now, btw) with me and hir other girl pixieslap snuggled on either side. who's the pimp daddy?! I'm sleeping on the little girl (sofa)bed so I can talk to you into the wee hours, dear eljay.

b) something funky is going on with phoneposting and my layout, these days, so I'm forced to delete them and then repost the audio. it doesn't at all do the day justice; in summary: aeonian (see you have to read this post now!), quasiradiant and furies are as close to fangirl heaven as it gets, for me (with fangirl heaven being as close as it gets to actual heaven), and really we should just start the BSG Girlslash Institute and do this as a daily seminar (grad school? what's that??). the most blissful afternoon of inspiration and hilarity -- and this despite the fact that I was ruthlessly mocked, I tell you! indeed, it could only end one way: with the creation of livewireless, where our favorite emo kids (like airlock_luvr and topgun1111) will IM each other over the fleet's interwebs. in other words, it's a badfic fake-RPG, and you're all invited!

c) apparently you bitches didn't read my BSG post of D00M because it's too long for your lazy asses, or something. clearly you're not worthy of MY GENIUS. to accommodate your short attention spans (kids today!), there's now a table of contents at the top. watch the fanvid, if nothing else.

eta:

d) oh, I forgot to even ask for birthdayfic! my birthday was march 19. of course what I most want is wingswing and getyourtoaster, but barring that, it would be AWSOME to see the remaining letters (B [wtf? someone deleted that], N, V, X, Z, and maybe J if heathers wants to abdicate it) on my drabble-a-thon filled at last.

e) speaking of the wingswing, it is my lifelong dream to be as Cool as the bordy girls, back in the golden age (which I'll never stop kicking myself for missing out on). clearly this is a fruitless quest. nothing is as Cool when I'm around :(. but I get to write a kickass xover, so I'm content.

or, what I did on my summer vacation

I haven't written a poem in seven years. only a poem could capture this trip with any economy, for the living of it has sponged up the time for the writing of it. the precision of verse would evoke a riotous technicolor -- starting with infinite whorls of coastline, musk-flavored lifesavers, and a series of treks through rank kitchen alleys in search of cafe toilets (out the back in crumbling tin-roofed sheds, reworked dunnies from before the days of indoor bathrooms). it's the specificities that charm me so completely. inexplicably, Sydney feels like home (as it did once before).

I wrote five of my seven sins, and you can read them in my memories (an index will come, someday, after "sloth" which is about Weeds and "gluttony" which is about Starbuck and Roslin and a cucumber). I didn't write Bad Girls, for which I deserve to be thoroughly flagellated. that story feels ambitious, even if I can keep it to 5x250 words, and will also be written someday.

I got a sunburn tan and new shirts and practice on my Aussie accent. I made everybody want to write girlslash *glares sternly at mandysbitch*. and there are pictures! -- only not all of them until february, as apparently I've exhausted my upload quota for this month.

and YOU -- by which I mean giantessmess and mandysbitch and pene and more briefly sparklebunny and aleatory_6 (faithinthepoor and missmai_chan were narrowly missed) -- there are no words for your loveliness either. a pile of adjectives only goes so far, and people in the flesh deserve more than that.

I'll tell you about the game we played at the fandom convergence, because it's fantastic and I made it up. it's a combination of the board game Balderdash and the "three truths and lie" (or somesuch) meme. let's call it "Liar, Liar." here's how you play (you need pen and paper):

• when it's your turn, you write down a true fact about yourself on a little piece of paper
• everybody else writes down a made-up fact about you on a little piece of paper
• you get all the papers and you crumple and mix them up, and then read them all out
• everybody else votes by secret ballot on which one they think is true
• scoring is as follows: players get one point for every person who guesses their fake fact and one point if they guess the true fact
• go around the circle, repeating for each person

I won the game, btw. XD

and the whole shebang was just as fun as that.

and now I'm back in provi, starting out the semester horrifically behind. I'm going back to xmas-time on the flist to try to relocate yuletide fics, and will work my way forward sloooowly from there. before that I might worry about comments (WOE upon WOE). and/or my course proposal. and NEW TV! I've watched 10 eps of Veronica Mars and I still don't particularly like it. I know, I have NO SOUL. but the fact that Veronica was madly in love with Lilly and flirts shamelessly with every girl of the week certainly did not escape my attention. I'll finish the first season. conversely, now that iamsab has caught me up on House and pointed out the ridiculous hottness of Stacey (and Cuddy too, but mostly Stacey), I've added it to my List. eta: 20 assorted eps to download, folks, and Arrested Development is the funniest show ever made. they asked me to tell you, so I'm telling you.

and etc.

I'm here! the trip was painless (outside one exceptionally moronic incident which I will spare you)! I'm awake! giantessmess is making me lunch! the weather is glorious and we're out in the country and we may just sit around all day and write like the uncool dorks that we are :P

it's a magical thing, this having one dimension of a person and then suddenly having three. I adore it. why does everyone else find it so strange? giantessmess is gorgeous and I am so happy to bring her to sydney with me and introduce her gorgeousness to everyone there.

cheese calls...

i. so, uh, you really couldn't hear the cacophony on my last phonepost, huh? stupid noise-cancelling directional mics! you'll just have to take my word for it. I lost the $20 I'd won, though my bro also turned 15 cents into $12. and I hit for another $6 on the penny machine. all in all, we ended up down about $6, which isn't bad for a day of gambling. um, the family pastime is sort of growing on me.

ii. my cousin's fourth grade class is doing the best project ever: they each picked a stuffed animal who they sent off to travel the world with willing volunteers. said volunteers will send postcards back to the class and make entries in a journal. in this way, they will learn geography. so I've inherited a travel buddy named Mr. Twitters, a small white bunny who is metrosexual, we determined, because he wears a pink ribbon. see photos chronicling his adventures @ http://flickr.com/photos/bunnylog

iii. sent: 105 holiday cards, not including ~8 joint ones that clyde wrote and 10 I had to scrap because I couldn't get any address at all. certain of the addresses I tried were long shots, too, so I imagine some will come back to me. recipients include: mandysbitch, heathers+lonejaguar, eighthblackbird, happyhop, n0r1_h, iamsab+sorlklewis, pene, sscheckter, surblimity, boxmint, myalexandria, ibrakoor, warlordkittens, zazuomgwtf (I forgot to look up your postal code! hope it finds you anyway), boydyke+vegasgrrl24, celeria, mazily, sparklebunny, cabenson, museumfreak, thatfangirl, giantessmess, sinful_ceasar, chyryan_blog, bechover_blog, and tibbers (who, as far as I can tell, is an entirely random person who happened to stumble across my request for addresses) -- should be everyone who asked.

celeria takes the prize for the best card I received. handmade! personalized! TICKY BOXES!

iv. I need a drabble idea. I've decided I should write for my seven deadly sins challenges at femslash100 -- though it's not clear WHEN this writing is going to happen. six must be completed by monday for remainder. I'm planning:

#44 ~ gluttony - Starbuck/Roslin + a cucumber
#45 ~ pride
#46 ~ wrath - Wicked, Elphaba/Dorothy
#47 ~ envy - CJ/Kate/Abbey, after the wedding
#48 ~ sloth - Weeds, Nancy/her lawyer (name?)
#49 ~ greed - Neuromancer, Molly/3jane
#51 ~ lust - Helen/Nikki

so as you see, I've got nothing for Pride. any requests? I don't know if I can actually manage Lou/Annabeth. trying to come up with something rare, but I don't know if any of it is clear enough in my mind, and I don't have time for research. I could default to The Birds, because when I was watching it I thought "wow, this is slashy," and I try to follow through on such thoughts on principle. or possibly I should attempt Mary Poppins or Jean Brodie, both of whom are prideful.

v. eighthblackbird, I'm giving NeoOffice the old college try -- I organized the toolbars so they're livable and I'm willing to overlook the ugly grey interface. but there is no word count feature whatsoever! MS Word keeps a running tally in the status bar, which is crucial to me with all the drabbling. so I think it's a no-go, and I'm doomed to worship the evil empire forever. plus, it keeps trying to get me to save things in its weird format rather than .doc, which isn't going to work if I have to communicate with the population at large.

vi. holiday ficathons! so much tasty goodness and so little time in which to savor it. I'll read all your stories, of course, and many of you are reccing as well, which I appreciate. but given my predilections what I'm most excited about is femslash_today's yuletide femslash masterlist! I'll certainly be getting to all of those... eventually.

vii. in preparation for my adventure, I went back and read the emails I wrote in august 1999, the last time I went to australia. didn't find much info about what I actually did as a tourist, but that era in my life rushed back with startling vividness -- its cacophonous emotions and palpable riot of growth. stories of four different lovers happening roughly simultaneously (five if you count the still-vibrant correspondence with my FL), and I'd forgotten they happened all at once. about the trip, I wrote:

"So Australia. Australia is mind-blowing. It is more like the US than any other country I have ever been in except for Canada. Which only makes the differences, and there are many, stand out and chafe me with how little I understand them. It is so new and weird and post-colonial--still not independent from Britain, in fact. I am focusing on the language right now--the fact that I can understand every word doesn't make it any more strange to be surrounded by a totally different way of talking, and being marked as foreign every time I open my mouth (and only then) is interesting. I'm obsessed with the accent. Morocco [where I had just completed a semester abroad] totally changed my way of being a tourist, and I would rather be doing informal fieldwork than going to museums and sterile wildlife parks and historic buildings. The family activities have been rather tame. But I am having fun with them just the same."

and I'm hovering around xmas on the flist, oy -- I'll catch up before I leave for Oz on thursday, I promise...

DEAR LORD I FINISHED MY PAPER! *boggles*
it's 30 pages on the dot -- just a few lines short
the first line is: "On February 26, 2005 I made my second ever mobile post from my cameraphone to my public LiveJournal blog, the first which featured a picture of me" :). and it has this icon as an illustration on the first page (it's by iamsab, by request -- I did not credit you in the paper, sorry). "I am a cyber-exhibitionist."

I'm leaving on friday for CT - NYC - the Poconos - Australia... eeeeee!
tomorrow is a strap-on party at my house >;P

TODO: winter break
• pack (for both winter and summer!)
• holiday cards (last call for addresses -- you might want to check because at least one person's info didn't go through)
• LJ comments (and also I believe I'd be more expedient at replying to comments if I could do so instantly from within the email -- so I'm going to try to work out how to send my comments to a special webmail where this works, since it doesn't in Eudora)
• index of student projects (see below)
• Gay Girls S.2 (I temporarily dumped my 13GB of music off my internal HD to make room for the files, so I can work on it while I'm on the road)
• academic site software updates
• write course description
• edit 2 conference papers (for march and april, so I don't HAVE to do them, but it would save me the work while I'm in the midst of the semester -- they just have to be hacked down to size)
• omg drabbles! (and maybe some collaborative writing?)
• some journalling, part LJ and part perhaps not
• read trashy books -- some kid stuff and lesbian romance I have on hand
• plan sydney convergence
• defriending

a brief word about that last one. I have known for some time now that the amount of time I spend on lj is unsustainable. I've been pondering various ways to cut back, and there's really no way around it -- I'm going to have to do my first defriending-of-sorts. next semester I begin the process of preparing for my exams and my original course, and I have to focus in a new way on being self-motivated and working independently. plus, I'm going to have internet access only sporadically over break -- so this seems like the right time.

I have thus far defriended only a couple of people who I don't think will notice because they haven't been around in forever. but if you do notice, and you object, just give me a holler and I'll put you back into the more elaborate process. those who the elaborate process concerns will be hearing more about it soon.

*

I forgot to mention that my students did 9 amazingly creative and educational digital media projects on friday! I feel like it was a crash-course for ME in the latest and greatest internet trends. I learned about:

• skype -- an internet phone service modeled, rather remarkably, on IM. I wanna do it! who'll talk to me? I'd have to buy a headset, though.

• YTMNDs -- there were a couple going around LJ last week, but I had no idea what a fascinating repository of emergent and self-organizing cultural and political commentary this site is! my mind is boggled -- and I laughed till I almost cried. why are there not more fannish YTMNDs?? or are there? the technological threshold is ridiculously low compared to vidding -- all you need is an image (often photoshopped and/or animated) and a sound file to upload. yet (as with the 100x100 square, only exponentially) you can compress so much meaning into such a simple form! it seems like this is a medium that should have creative 'shippers creaming their pants. I think I shall pop over to ob_fangrrl soon and challenge people to come up with Oliska-themed ones -- they lend themselves beautifully to snark.

• mappr and geotags/geoblogging! another thing I'd love to try to do in my copious free time -- apparently there are various places where you can look up latitude and longitude coordinates for a location, including maps.google. anyway, that group did this project.

• perverted-justice.com -- which I already knew about, but had not delved fully into just how completely INSANE the whole process/organization is. yes, YOU TOO can impersonate an underage girl (or boy?) in order to entrap ONLINE PREDATORS in chatrooms, and then ruin their lives by publishing their personal information on TEH INTERNETS. dear lord, it is terrifying but BRILLIANT -- welcome to the network society. also, is the name not wonderfully ambiguous? I must DL the Dateline specials. see also the wiki entry.

• QR codes (a Japanese thing, of course) -- 2D bar codes that are scanned and read by software in cameraphones.

• the XBox game Fable, which looks awesome! I don't play video games, though -- but I like to watch other people play them.

and so on. I'm going to make an index of all the projects for my site -- and a couple of the best hypertext essays too. lord, TAing this class was fun!

1) yes my friends, I've gone AWOL. I left for nyc on thursday immediately after my last class. it took a few hours for this last-ness to sink in, but about the time I got on the subway I found myself wondering "why am I planning to head home on monday?" luckily, I'd packed most things I needed (though an electronic copy of Lacan's essay on the Mirror Stage would help, if anybody's got one), and I'm now camped out deepwoods-style: no friends to see, no external hard drive, two pairs of pants and three sweaters (and one pair of legwarmers). and no phone, because I forgot it! so really no distractions, except spotty bootleg wireless and the lovely clyde_man who makes finals fun. so why have I only written 7 pages of my 30-page term paper?? I'm managing the 2 or 3 pages a day that I forced out back when I was depressed and panicking -- this seems to be about what my brain can manage regardless of mood. which would be fine, except it would be nice (not indicative of my entire worth as a person, but certainly NICE) if I could finish this puppy by monday at the latest and thus scrape by without incompletes (for the first time ever in grad school). but it's not looking promising for this scenario, unless I can start writing faster (I wish I were the type to take speed, or something). on the upside, I don't anticipate any crises (funny how those disasters were always precipitated by me being all "if I don't finish by X date I FAIL AT LIFE," and if I don't tell myself that there is no need for crises), which means it's near-certain that I'll finish before christmas (also for the first time ever in grad school). back in provi on friday, as my class has final presentations and clyde is leaving town.

2) meanwhile I'm woefully behind on commentz, *again* (backlog at over 100, and rising) -- compounded by a whole bunch of old ones that LJ *just* decided to send along -- but I finally got smart and decided I'd save such projects for AFTER I finish my term paper (yet another reason I'd prefer that to happen in the next week). I'm prioritizing non-flist-ies -- as for the rest of you, I beg your patience. reading at least is under control, as is FB-ing (though I accidentally closed another bunch of tabs today, so shout if I seem to have missed something).

3) I should be thinking about presents, eh? I want a bedazzler!! me wielding a bedazzler is a truly frightening scenario -- sequins are the sort of thing that would set me off on an obsessive decorating rampage to the point of blinding all passerby with my sparklyness. maybe I'll ask mom to buy me yarn for the sweater I've been planning to knit for years, to motivate me to remediate my lapsed craftiness (but hmmm, I also want the MoMA menorah). beyond that, I can't think of anything! I have all the material possessions I could possibly desire. of course, I'd always welcome FIC! you know what I like. but I suppose everyone wants fic for the holidays, plus everyone is writing yuletide and this and that ficathon/challenge. my one heartfelt and modest request would be for somebody to take up the the last straggling letters on my ancient drabble-a-thon (heathers, I reserved J for you, but just this once I'll give you a pass if you need to bail). barring that, I want voice posts as my present! especially if you're not American (but have a way to cheaply call a US #, which unfortunately is all that exists) -- isilya talked and I just about died. go here to set it up, and here to look up a number in your area. and then quasiradiant has coffee of justice for you to buy and there's of course my list of worthy non-profit orgs (WIP).

4) speaking of isilya, she made this emergency group LJbackup where we can gather in any future contingencies like the Great LJ Blackout. you should join.

5) HAPPY HAPPY HOLIDAYS!! (<<< yes, I am one of the EVIL secular Jews who is waging a WAR on CHRISTMAS!)

I have been in awe of all you holiday-card-senders. the idea of me corresponding by mail just made me laugh. but you know, I got a couple cards, and I had this EPIPHANY that all you have to do is write "happy holidays, I'm thinking of you" and sign it. and OMG, I can totally do that! I am now INSPIRED, mostly because I have been very sad of late about how badly I've done at keeping in touch with my non-LJ-ified friends (I worked on my list and I'm looking at in the vicinity of 100 cards, between high school and college and grad school and new york and summer and LJ friends -- IF I can get current addresses for all these people) -- but I'm happy to send cards to all y'all too! here, give me your address (poll data is locked down) [even if I already have it from your card to me it can't hurt to enter it again]:

Poll #632682 holiday addresses
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: None, participants: 13

where should I send your card?

they might be late, but I'm determined to do them. (now I can go back and buy those cards I coveted when I was shopping with wearemany but thought I'd never use -- but I should use up some of my stash of non-holiday-specific cards from back when I used to write letters too.)

*

i) TV stuff? a few of my backlogged comments are about South of Nowhere's 3rd ep (actually 1x04 since the first was double) -- since then there have been two more. I have all of them, but you can probably get them from southof_eps faster if you still need them. also, check out what bozos the folks at Lost are! you can totally see the horse trainer's hand at the right edge of the frame. (I had a dream that I met Michelle Rodriguez in a dorm and she was a lesbo, mmmmm.) thedabara: do you still want the last 3 episodes of Rome? I'm finally watching them.

ii) I'm still working on the Gay Girls S.2 compilation, hopefully to be finished before the holidays, but meanwhile here is the torrent for 1x01 through 2x02 as individual eps (better than the last version). I'm seeding sporadically and not until friday.

iii) for reasons which shall remain nameless (not to do with the paper -- though I still need an amateur webcam to write about, probably), I had the sudden, unprecedented urge to get a webcam! I'm cluless -- I suppose I'd be most interested in video chat and in recording video, rather than in broadcasting to the net ala homecams. can webcams capture video? can one video chat unilaterally, that is, can I send my image to someone who doesn't themselves have a camera? all these questions pertain to OS X. does anybody know about the iSight? another item for the wishlist? I can't tell if it does anything beyond iChat AV. according to comments one can use to to talk to Windows slaves users, which could be cool because clyde_man's new laptop has a built-in camera!

iv) and on the theme of Ask LJ: I strongly believe that I should NOT be using MS Word because it is the epitome of both badly designed software and evil monopoly capitalism. but I DLed Open Office, and frankly I can't deal with how UGLY the interface is. does anybody have a suggestion of a *prettier* free or cheap full-featured word processor that can talk in .doc format?

v) I got the tentative schedule for sci-fi panels at PCA -- the focus is Battlestar Galactica, which is what I'm presenting on. and OMGOMG there's a special session on s2e09 that Aaron Douglas (Galen Tyrol) is going to be at! I know there are those of you who engage in regular (more or less accidental) celebrity encounters, but I am not accustomed to this and am having fangirl paroxysms! thank goodness it's not one of the women or I'd probably hurt myself. I assume it's going to be fairly small -- not like a con with 1000s of people -- so I'm all trying to plan out what questions I want to ask, and how to strategically introduce my critique of the Lack of Gay on the show (if I have to pick one problem that I want to bring to the attention of anyone and everyone official, it's that one). the discussion is supposed to be about how BSG "reflects" (those would be theory-snob air-quotes) contemporary (the description says "modern" which is so my theory-snob pet peeve!) American military campaigns, so steering it to gender and sexuality may be challenging (maybe I can use aeonian's point about how gay it is for Starbuck to be flying the ship named Laura, heh -- actually, the question of gender and/in the military on BSG would be a perfect segue [of course the custom of referring to ships in the female dates from the days when only men sailed them]). anyway, eeeeee!!! this isn't till April. it's so not my field, and I'm going mostly for fannish and friend-visiting purposes, so I'm not sure how much of the conference itself I even want to go to. museumfreak has to come be my buddy! (it's only $65 to register, fyi)

I took half a flexoril and I'm not yet feeling the effects, but probably I should join clyde in sleep regardless. wish me good writing...

for those of you who haven't spent today glued to your flist: I've been picspamming moblogging throughout the day. for your convenience and for posterity, I shall now combine the many posts into one massive post:

( 24 November 2005 )

extra! extra: full report on my visit chez heathers and lonejaguar HERE -- I made them take the pix since I can't do cameraphone posts while I'm in Canada. we had a riotously good and HIGHLY PRODUCTIVE time. apparently I'm gaining a reputation for assigning homework at fannish rendez-vous, heh. also, they report that I'm widely considered to be COOL, at least in SVU circles -- which delights me as I had NO IDEA (I think of myself as a tremendous nerd). I always feel like such a poser in fandom because I'm a relative lj newbie and have only written a paltry few stories.

in case anyone I may meet in the future is still harboring concerns, I've been officially certified as NOT!PSYCHO by Nic and Heather -- they've been making friends through fandom for like a zillion years and are quite experienced by now. I was relieved, as I sometimes worry that I AM psycho in addition to being uncool -- but I trust their expert opinion. don't know who else in North America I'm likely to cross paths with in the near future, though (museumfreak, as I'd like to go to the Battlestar Galactica conference in Atlanta in April?), so this pretty much concludes v. 2 -- v. 3 (like v. 1) will, I hope, be in Sydney.

*

I don't know how many of my readers are familiar with the 12-year-old saga of my First Love. it's not a story I tell much these days. I thought I might blog in some detail about our visit, but in the end I'm happy to just share with Tanya (who I've known even longer). suffice it to say that it was uniformly delightful, in a quiet and un-fraught way (and that, perhaps, I've finally adjusted to that). it helps that both of us have found ways to be happy. still don't know if I can ever fall out of love, or not, but that question seems irrelevant.

Tanya and I have been doing much reminiscing, and I became determined to calculate which years I'd visited Stratford (with mom, friends, or school). I looked through the past programs of the Festival, and came up with: 1990-1997 + 2000 (so I really haven't been back in 5 years, omg!).

Just found out that I'm gonna be a word -- hurrah!

*

in my RPF obsession, I've mostly sidestepped the moral/ethical pro vs. con debates. the two camps seem divided from each other by their respective emphasis on and dismissal of celebrities' "realness" -- thus both, in my view, flatten the terrain of ambiguity that is, for me, the particular fascination of RPF. ( Read more... )