The View From Now

An Announcement

2010-09-04T08:10:00.002-05:00

Hi Everyone,

Here is the deal.

For a long time, I have been cross-posting entries between here and LiveJournal.
LiveJournal has been making a bunch of changes lately that I think breach its users' privacy and trust. So LiveJournal will no longer be my main journal.

My home-base journal will now be at Dreamwidth: http://laceblade.dreamwidth.org

As always, everyone can see public entries; you need to "Friend" me to see locked posts. You don't need a Dreamwidth account to do that; you can use OpenID. If you have accounts with LiveJournal, Google, or a host of other websites, then you have OpenID.

Unfortunately, Dreamwidth cannot yet cross-post to the Blogger platform.
The alternative is to manually copy-and-paste entries, but to be frank, I never get comments over here anyway.

If Dreamwidth does one day allow cross-posting to Blogger, I will look into it.

So for now, this is the end of new posts here on Blogger.

I am still working on copying all of my old posts to Dreamwidth, and locking them. (Most of these were embarrassing high school posts; more recent posts on anime/etc. will stay here for your reading pleasure.)

If you have any questions, leave a comment.

Blogger, you've been good to me. But it's a lot easier to build communities on sites like Dreamwidth.

Thanks everyone for reading; I hope you'll follow me in the new space.

Upon watching the first 2 episodes of Hetalia: Axis Powers....

2010-06-11T18:49:00.001-05:00

This is what people have been excited about for the last couple of years? Seriously, what the hell?

Watch it streaming at Funimation.com!

Rage

2010-06-04T20:45:00.001-05:00

Elsewhere on the Internet, in a post that is unfortunately locked, various things have been purported.

I am sick to death of motherfuckers telling me that entire aspects of my identity do not exist because of the labels they ascribe to me.
Because I am Catholic, there is no way that I could hate my bishop, want women to be priests, or be adamantly supportive of the separation of church and state.
Because I am religious, I must have never given any serious thought to politics (even in spite of my major in Political Science), why rituals are performed, or what the Bible actually says. Clearly, I am a sheep - right?
Because I spent two summers working as an unpaid intern for a Republican, there is no way that I could be a Democrat (at least, not according to nearly every Democratic office in the Wisconsin State Legislature).
Because I am a 24-year-old woman, I must want to get married as soon as possible.
Because I am pro-life, I must not be a feminist.

Extremism in any form is dangerous. And taking away someone's ability to construct their own identity is harmful - even moreso when we are all potential allies.

We are all angry about something. What I'm angry about is everyone buying into the soundbytes created from false dichotomies that assure us that our goals are not common, that our enemies are each other. And that we must stay busy fighting one another, so that we are incapable of waking up, banding together, and doing something.

In the end, I think that everyone wants to make the world less fucked up than it is now.

The way to start is to think, to dialogue, and most importantly, to challenge people around you every day to analyze and deconstruct their own lives.

And to stop acting like jackasses.

WisCon 34 Panel Write-Up: Intersectionality in Fandom

2010-06-03T20:26:00.000-05:00

Panel Description: A more advanced discussion for those ready to work past 101-level panels. A discussion of how disabilities, race, gender, sexual orientation, and other oppressed statuses affect each other. How do we decide which one gets our last remaining spoon?

Panelists: Ian K. Hagemann (moderator), Candra K. Gill, Beth A. Plutchak, Victor Raymond, Naamen Gobert Tilahun

My notes on this panel are VERY sparse; I think this is when I started freaking out about having my first panel later in the night, and I didn't write much down.

In the beginning, it's noted that we are at a time in WisCon at which we can move beyond establishing, "Does this oppression exist?"

NGT: Likes the word "confluence" more than "intersectionality" - it implies fluidity, that the systems of oppression themselves change are intermeshed with one another moreso than single points of "intersection."

The line in the panel description, "How do we decide which one gets our last spoon?" is dissected a bit - there is no "last one." You can't defeat systems of oppression one by one - the point is that they are intertwined, that by becoming an ally to deconstruct one, you must work for the good of dismantling them all.

Even if race or class or etc. is your "thing," take a step back - nobody is an expert on everything.

IH said a lot of things about the societal narrative (reality, I think? I did a really poor job of following this thread) and societal counter-narrative (the story that those in power tell us to keep things the way they are). One of the catch-phrases of the counter-narrative is, "Everyone can succeed if they pull themselves up by their bootstraps." IH points out that's not true - whose hard work do you benefit from? Is it yours? Your parents? Those who came before them?

We must dismantle the institutions that are organized in such a way to keep power where it is.

BAP (I think?!) brings up Sarah Palin - however much you disagree with her, the media and comedy culture derided her for being a woman, being uneducated, and being from a rural area.

The point of media is to make a counter-narrative.

I think that someone makes a point about other kinds of media, faster communication of news via sites like Twitter.
IH brings up that things like iPods, iPads, etc. are made with unfair labor practices. So even the tools you use to "tweet the revolution" (phrase is mine, not his) are things you bought in ways that help keep the current systems of oppression in place. It is bodies that are producing these new media.

Buffy is not a feminist show; it is a girl-power show. The media/etc. capture revolutionary/deconstructive ideas and make them bite-sized, palatable for society to consume and feel good about themselves.

NGT brings up another example: a breast cancer awareness campaign in which Kentucky Fried Chicken sold food in breast-cancer pink buckets, totally ignoring the fact that chemicals/preservatives in KFC cause cancer in the first place.

The media captures pieces of our own narrative and feeds it back to us.

There are some oppressions/etc. that don't have names yet; we don't even have the language required to discuss them.

Subject turned to: How do I recognize which narrative I'm in?
--Subvert the counter-narrative. Reject false binaries. It is always more complicated than black/white, male/female, rich/poor, etc.

And now it's really obvious that I wasn't writing notes that had headings or anything USEFUL....
Another example of the media spoon-feeding what we want to hear. The Ad Council always puts out "messages" that focus on an individual solution to a systemic problem. We are told "don't litter," versus something that would actually make a difference and require a societal change: "Don't allow our factories to make pollution."

It takes a long time to make people aware of their own self-interest and privilege.

Talk to people and shake up their worldview. It is difficult and uncomfortable.

I think that this is the point at which BAP said she distrusted large organizations and sociologists (except Victor, fellow panelist).

NGT suggests: join small organizations. They won't eat up your life; it's easy to know everyone, so they're not as shady; the differences they make in your community are visible, and matter.

How do you find them? "Google-fu."

Change is hard. The convenient, effective protest doesn't exist.

Talk to SF fans about what to do now. SF fans know about many potential futures, but not about how to get there.

We must articulate our own narrative.

Talk and listen to people. The discussion does not end.

When you're talking, what do you mean when you say, "We?" Do you mean white people? If so, then name it. Don't make assumptions. Not "We generally react in this way to this issue," but "White people usually do X."

Hopefully someone else has more coherent notes than me!

I left this panel feeling very strongly that I was ready to DO things and be active in my community, aware of how I have conversations and what I choose to say, etc. This was very much a theme for me at most of the panels I went to.

WisCon 34 Panel Write-Up: Rated E for Everyone? Increasing Diversity in Games and Gaming

2010-06-01T20:11:00.000-05:00

Again, it's not an exact transcript because I do pen/paper notes.

Panel Description: In some ways, the gaming industry is the last glass ceiling of geekdom; in spite of its increasing diversity, gaming culture has largely assume white, male, able-bodied, and heterosexual biases. Gaming communities like XBox Live, MMORPGs, D&D groups, and even retail stores can be noninclusive or even hostile environments to women, people of color, gay people, or the disabled. There are exceptions: Bioware's Dragon Age: Origins was highly lauded by GayGamer.net for its inclusion of same-sex relationships, and won AbleGamer.com's Most Accessible Game of 2009. This panel will discuss how games can get it right (and why they often don't). We'll also explore ways to make the gaming community more accessible, and brainstorm strategies for surviving hostile encounters in the gaming world.

Panelists: Chris Hill, Robyn Fleming, Jacquelyn Gill, Nonie B. Rider, Anastasia Marie Salter

The sub-culture of "gaming" is very broad, so the panel began by establishing different interests.

CH: Role-played in the late 70s and early 1980s, and is now into computer gaming.

JG: Roleplayed D&D and White Wolf. In college, more into computer gaming. She noted sometimes feeling uncomfortable online, in stores, etc. Also dislikes being told what she "should" like, as a girl gamer (i.e., not violence).

AS: Just finished a PhD in (?!) gaming narratives (sorry, I wasn't paying attention and didn't write that down properly). She likes to focus on the gender dynamic in computer gaming - how those playing with female avatars are usually assumed to be male; how this is now complicated by the addition of voice-chat, etc.

RF: Writes gaming columns, etc. Plays D&D, is bad at 3-D navigation. Would like feminist gamers to stop demonizing the hyper-femininity of some games. She likes the Barbie games. Please embrace them.

NR: Only into tabletop gaming.

Press coverage of a quote of fail was made reference to: apparently, when asked why Modern Warfare II contained no women (you know, to be modern), the person answered that in order to take the time to render female characters in the game, time would have to be taken away from other detail-work, such as crumbling walls. So apparently, crumbling walls in video games are more important than the option to see/play as female characters.

AS: doesn't play video games to necessarily "be herself," but why don't the games have more options?

RF: Gives props to Mass Effect (highly customizable avatars)

More games that have customization options are using it as a selling point.

Dragon Age is very accessible, and also explores other classes. Sometimes, "customization" is cited as being prohibitive to telling a linear storyline. Dragon Age disproved this for games that have storylines.

Also, for MMORPGs, which have no linear plot, there is still a lot of work to do on making avatars more representative of the human race. The "linear plot" argument is indefensible here, if it is in fact defensible anywhere.

At some point, there was a lengthy digression about the new rules put out for D&D. (Basically, for the 3rd edition, non-male pronouns were sometimes used (gasp!), but they were all or mostly male again for 4th edition. Also, even when the pronoun-usage is evenly dispersed, the pictures on the page show women in voluptuous/revealing clothing. There is a disconnect.

At some point, City of Heroes was also brought up as a game that allows a lot of customization (even fat characters!).

Team Fortress II was brought up as a game that had 9 classes of men in it. Online gamers are creating detailed hacks for female classes, too.

Hacks are fan-created works.

Ways to make the gaming community more accessible/let people know that gamers are diverse:
--If a game pisses you off because of its treatment (or complete lack of) POC, women, disabled people, etc., then don't buy it. Also, tell gamers in your life why you're not buying it. Write about it on the Internet.

--Find ways to hack the games, and play as different characters.

--Be a presence in gaming stores. Instead of buying things online, physically go to stores, let the employees know you exist, you play games, and you're giving them money. JG said she makes a point of going into gaming stores and asking intelligent questions about current games.

--Write online. Be a frequent commenter on the websites of companies that frustrate you. Let them know what frustrates you.

--Support game-producers who are not EA or ActiVision. Don't let huge companies be the cultural gate-keepers. Open-source games are awesome. There is a belief in the world that free games are not necessarily "good" games, because they're not mainstream. This is false. Use them. Smaller projects can afford to be more experimental than the Big Two Companies because they don't have as much money riding on a project. So if you support smaller projects and prove that experimental wonders such as including fat avatars or more POC can be successful, there will probably be a trickle-up effect.

--Download a free game, play it, and tweet it to the WisCon tag.

--Tweet to the #HackGender tag.

--Be a pusher of inclusive games to younger kids/teenagers in your life. They will be receptive.

--Use the Bechdel test on video games.

--Read Border House. From their own website: "The Border House is a blog for gamers. It's a blog for those who are feminist, queer, disabled, people of color, transgendered, poor, gay, lesbian, and others who belong to marginalized groups, as well as allies. Our goal is to bring thoughtful analysis to gaming with a feminist viewpoint and up-to-date news on games, virtual worlds, and social media."

I really took a lot away from this panel, particularly the To-Do list. The idea of supporting small companies (and small book presses) is one I've always supported in theory, but looking at my habits, do not do much to support financially or through promotion. It was because of this panel that I realized I had never purchased a book put out by Aqueduct Press, despite this being my fourth WisCon. (I then bought four books from them.)

WisCon 34 Panel Write-Up: Class Basics

2010-06-01T18:03:00.000-05:00

[My notes are very sparse. Feel free to use my notes + your memory/notes to make a For Reals Record. I'm just offering what I've got to the community at large.]

Panel Description: Of all the "isms" and oppressions in the United States, class is one of the least explored and least understood, and yet having an understanding of how class issues affect people here and around the world is vital. As with race, ability, and other issues, it is not the job of people who grew up dealing with class barriers to educate the rest of us, but sometimes we find folks who are generous enough to give their time to teaching. If you feel like you don't know enough about class, classism, and how class background and class privilege inform the world around you, come join us. Serious information, given with patience and humor.

Panelists: Debbie Notkin (moderator), Nisi Shawl, Jennifer K. Stevenson, Chris Wrdnrd

It was established at the beginning of the panel that the goal was for audience members to ask questions, etc.

Panelists were asked to described the kitchen of the place in which they grew up, and also answered why they decided to be on the panel.

Jennifer, who has written a novel (or possibly more?) about stage hands in Chicago, comments that she is intrigued by those people who to college and end up "not using" their education.

An audience member asks something to the effect of, "Can you explain the 'anger' that some people have for those who do have an education?" Audience member told that her question will eventually be addressed. [As a side note, I don't think it was directly addressed, but it sort of is further down when people are talking about different 'markers,' etc.]

A generational difference between the importance of certain class markers is discussed (I think by Nisi). For example, children of the middle class might find running outside shoeless "freeing," but parents in the working class class find shoe-wearing extremely important. For parents of working class kids, going to college is incredibly important in order for upward mobility. For Nisi, it was less important, because she got there and felt they weren't actually teaching her how to write, so she left.

At this point, Jennifer makes several weird comments. Debbie intervenes to note that we need to be careful not to equate education with intelligence.
Jennifer goes on to discuss how people who go to college learn to be "world citizens," and learn how to be in a different class (?). She also spends some time discussing the disparity between different types of stage hands - those who push boxes, and those who work on the more technological side of stage-work (I'm assuming this means lights, sound systems, etc.).

Thankfully, heyiya stands up and asks if the panelists can define "class," as it seems they are discussing different things. (This was much more articulately asked than that, so hopefully someone else has notes!)

Nisi says that class is defined by where you come from, and what you expect [to have happen in your life].

Jennifer says that when she was a kid, it was basically education. Later on, she learned that class was something different. She mentions health care as a marker. A weird comment is made about how people of different classes are "the same species but different species." (Unfortunately, this was after The Gathering and I don't remember the context.)

Wrdnrd mentions it as being the economic reality of her youth.

An audience member is called upon, states that to her class is defined by choices and ownership. What choices do you have? What choices have you had? What do you own? Your body? A car? Do you feel secure? Etc.

A book by Ruby Payne is brought up, although I can't remember which one.

Multiple audience members stand up to ask questions, usually prefaced by the establishment of their class background. It is clear that this is a raw issue for many audience members.

Someone in the audience asks about how to talk about class issues with her husband, who comes from a different class background than she does.

raanve stands up to discuss the differences in viewing signifiers/markers of class. People from different class backgrounds look for different markers to identify class. These things are not abstract - usually someone's house, their accent, etc. I think she was pointing out how to understand where people are coming from in discussions involving people of different class backgrounds (please correct me if I'm wrong!).

Nisi said it helps to say something like, "This is what this signifier means to me; what does it mean to you?"

Class can also be defined by answering the question, "Who accepts you as a peer?" (Cannot remember who said this), and pointing out that how you define yourself is not necessarily how the word defines you (in terms of class).

Someone else in the audience stands up to talk about how she raised her daughter while being extremely poor, taking free meals from churches, etc. Extra money that came their way was spent on passes to science museums, etc. Her daughter was eventually able to go to law school, and with help from wealthy people who took an interest in her, got a good job. She was embarrassed by her background, though, and eventually cut off contact to her mother, who hasn't spoken with her in something like 7 years.

I wish there was a better way to end the post, but I think that's all I remember. Toward the end, at least a few people stood up to say that they best understood how to discuss class/better understood where other people were coming from, and why some responses are inappropriate because they are overly defensive. Thus, I think that the panel was successful.

I was unable to make it to the other two panels focusing on class at WisCon this year, but at the end of our Studio Ghibli panel on Sunday, an audience member did ask us to discuss class! The seeds, they spread!

Hopefully, this will be the most incoherent of my panel write-ups!

WisCon 34: Demands and Links

2010-05-31T10:11:00.000-05:00

If you attended WisCon 34, please visit WisCon's website and fill out the surveys. As a member of the ConCom, I can tell you that all responses are read and considered when planning for next year. As an example, a single comment was all that it took for me to decide to stop having latex balloons as centerpieces at The Gathering.

Also, throughout the convention, I kept hearing people make comments about "the items that Programming put onto the schedule." PROGRAMMING DOES NOT MAKE UP THE PANELS. YOU DO. I cannot stress this enough. If you want quality programming, then suggest some quality descriptions. Suggesting a panel does not mean that you have to be on it. Takes notes throughout the year. Let ideas percolate until you have the perfect notion. And then submit them.

You can already suggest panel ideas for WisCon 35. If you would like to do so, go here.
Also pay attention when sign-ups happen later in the year. Panelists are necessary to making sure that a programming item makes it on to the schedule.

--A list of books and TV shows from the "Writing the Other: Shout-Outs" panel.

--The Vid Party's playlist, complete with download links This party was epic.

--Liveblog of the Avatar panel

--The Politics of Steampunk panel liveblog

--A Field Guide for Editors panel writeup

--Dreamwidth panel writeup

Non-WisCon Added Bonus:
aycheb writes about fashion in Buffy Season 8 [spoilers]

A Review and Some Commentary

2010-05-23T13:32:00.000-05:00

I really enjoyed the first season of Spice & Wolf, and would recommend it. The anime is based on a series of light novels originally written in Japanese (and the English translations put out by Yen Press are pretty fantastic - and I often dislike translations of Japanese fiction). Although there will be a second season, the first season definitely has a sense of closure. I liked the characters, mood, and setting very much, and I recommend it!
When I first saw advertisements for this series, I was afraid that it would be a little moe, but was glad to find that this was not the case.
has a nice review in the second half of this post, complete with a couple of pictures.

With the closing of DC Comics' CMX line (which mostly translated/distributed shoujo comics in the U.S.), there have been many intense blog posts (basically, DC never did much to promote CMX; they shut down their Minx line [also for teenage girls] in recent memory, etc).

One intense post focuses on the supposed "detrimental effect" that distributing/reading scanlations has on the sales market of manga in the U.S. It's here, written by Erica Friedman (who writes a lot about yuri manga). In this post and many others, I sometimes find classist assumptions in the anime/manga fandom: basically, that "every manga you read is one that you did not buy," which I find highly presumptive.

While I understand the principle that "voting with your dollar" certainly matters (hello, I work in an independent bookstore a few weekends per month), the idea that everyone has an equitable (or infinite) disposable income is ludicrous.

I don't mind paying money for a quality product (see Del Rey's releases of xxxHolic and Tsubasa, or Viz's Signature Line releases of Pluto, 20th Century Boys, etc). But in many cases, the money you pay does not result in a quality product. Take the Sailor Moon manga I own - they are extremely valuable because they are out of print in the U.S., but the glue job was so shoddy that half of them are falling apart despite my militant care-taking. Take also Viz's questionable translation of Fumi Yoshinaga's Ooku - yeah, I'm still buying it, but I remain displeased with Viz's translation.

Additionally, I'm probably not going to invest in Volume 1 of a 28-volume series without having read a bit, to make sure that I like where the story is going. This is about an intelligent use of my money.

To think that I would drop $8-14 on a single volume (usually readable in one 2-hour sitting - usually much less) without having read it first? For me, at least (and I will go ahead and admit that I am pretty cheap), this isn't even a question. Of course I will sample it first. And if it's not readily available at my public library (which I do use quite liberally), then yes, you'd better believe that I will download and read scanlations.
Even when I do buy manga, it is rarely at full-price - I go out of my way to scour used bookstores (and, full disclosure, even when I do buy them "new," I get an employee discount, so it's still not comparable to the average consumer).

And this is the thought-process of me, who comes from a privileged economic background and is fortunate enough to have a job that allows me to easily provide for my own needs. Especially in the state of the current U.S. economy, most people do not have the money it takes to support a single series (especially if it comes out in rapid succession, like Naruto).

Friedman goes so far as to condemn the scanlation/digital distribution of manga series not even available in English (i.e., those new in Japan, or which were never chosen for U.S. distribution). What exactly are we supposed to do? To suggest that everyone who wants to read a series not licensed in the U.S. has the leisure time to learn a foreign language (not to mention afford to buy all of the series on the Internet and have them shipped here) is nonsensical to me.

I get that buying things is the optimal choice, and if you've ever been inside my apartment, you're aware that I am certainly trying my best. However, in some cases, people do not have a choice, and I think that it is elitist and classist (or occasionally both) to assume otherwise.

Cardcaptor Sakura

2010-05-17T22:47:00.000-05:00

I am so pleased that Dark Horse is putting out a new translation/packaging/etc. of Cardcaptor Sakura that I have been giving some serious thought to re-purchasing the entire series as it comes out (even though I already own the entire series). It's really exciting to me that a company cares about shoujo manga originally published about fifteen years ago.
(Okay, maybe they care more about the fact that CLAMP sells really well, and people will want to reread it after they finish xxxHolic and Tsubasa Reservoir Chronicles.)

I really wish that an American manga company would do this for Sailor Moon - I have all 18 volumes, but they were made pretty shoddily, and many are falling apart.

La!

Unfortunately, it looks like they're giving Chobits the omnibus treatment, too. Chobits.....*shudder*

About That

2010-05-12T23:30:00.001-05:00

For those who don't follow anime/manga news as it relates to the U.S., distribution companies have been tanking for the last couple of years. Geneon, Central Park Media, and ADV went out of business. It came to most people as a shock when the powerhouse TokyoPop slashed both its title list and its staff members.

In the last couple of days, it's been reported that Go! Comi has let its website lapse and is out of business, and that Viz has had to cut its staff a lot, too. It sucked when Viz stopped putting out issues of Shojo Beat (containing manga written for women) and only ran Shonen Jump ("for boys") monthly. But budgets matter, and it was the first inkling.

I didn't read a lot of stuff by Go! Comi, but I enjoyed their releases of Her Majesty's Dog and Cantarella.

It's sad to me that these companies are going out of business, as it will ultimately limit the diversity of titles available in English.
On the Internet, there seems like a lot of things are he-said, she-said. Many fans and commentators seem to blame the digital distribution of fan-made translations ("scanlations"), but I've never seen proof to support these claims. For example, I would never spend money on anime DVDs unless I had already seen the series first.
I might buy a manga volume I've never read before, but only if I've heard a lot about it from other people who have.
Etc.

I'd like to be able to better support companies like Viz, Funimation, Right Stuf, Del Rey, and Yen Press. Other than making my own purchases (which to me is a very obvious way), maybe the best way to ensure that these companies can continue running and producing great products is to make more of our friends into people who consume in these two forms of media, rather than constantly pointing fingers.

Issue #34

2010-04-11T09:56:00.001-05:00

WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON?!

Easter

2010-04-04T11:21:00.000-05:00

Easter Vigil at any Abbey is pretty sweet. Not only was the homily superb (the abilities of a priest as a homilist will pretty much make/break him, in my esteem of him), BUT THERE WAS A GIANT TORCH TO LIGHT THE EASTER CANDLE. Seriously, that pole had to be 20 feet long, and there were GIANT FLAMES that made me fearful most especially when the dude tried to get the thing through the doorway. Easter Vigil: arguably the most bad-ass mass of the year (except for that one time at Pentecost when we purposely lit the baptismal font on fire).

On a more serious note, I really appreciated the homily. Easter is not just about butterflies and cute bunnies and candy. It means a lot because of the suffering that comes before it, because of the seriousness required by Lent. It's kind of the time of year to screw your head on straight, and then Easter comes and floods your heart with light, and you realize that Spring is here.

A discussion on whether 'The Hunger Games' was cribbed from the Japanese novel/movie 'Battle Royale.' People have pointed out the similarities in general premise to me before, but the argument made here lays out a series of incredibly specific things that happen in both. An interesting read, even if it doesn't convince you.

The Onion's AV Club had a nice article about A Room of One's Own, on its 35th anniversary.

I think that fan-made crafts like these are really cool. In addition to creations focused on by the OTW (fanfiction, fanart, fanvids), I think that crafts are really neat, too. I've been collecting lots of paper cut-outs of various fandoms, along with a few extra Buffy comics. I'd like to make my own, even though I'm not totally skilled in the realm of craft-making.

With everyone lying about what's actually in the Health Care bill, I found this Washington Post link useful: Answer 4 questions and find out what the Health Care bill means for you.

Also, really liked this Buffy Season 8 vid. DO NOT CLICK UNLESS YOU'VE READ THE TWO MOST RECENT ISSUES OF S8. For serious.

Help Out Your Fellow Fan!

--were_duck seeks recommendations for the WisCon Vid Show. Specifically, she'd like some AMV recs, as she's generally unfamiliar.

--meganbmoore seeks old school shoujo anime. Bonus if you can tell her how to get a hold of it, :D

--littlebutfierce both recommends and seeks more baseball anime.

Because being called out on harboring child molesters is JUST LIKE being persecuted

2010-03-31T19:14:00.000-05:00

I don't usually love Maureen Dowd, but I've gotta say that every time in the last two weeks that I've wanted to write a blog post about how much I despise Benedict XVI and the priests who represent the face of Catholicism to the world, she goes ahead and does it for me. It's just...UGH. IT IS HOLY WEEK, SIR. HAVE A LITTLE HUMILITY. Instead of saying shit like "We will overcome the people who are being mean to me right now!" How about saying, "I crawl on my knees and ask forgiveness for the horrible things I've done. AND NOW PEOPLE WILL GO TO JAIL FOR WHAT THEY DID."
I also liked A Nope for Pope.

I am so disgusted right now.

And the next time that someone asks me, "Why are you still Catholic?" or "How do you feel about that?" they will get kicked in the neck.

I FEEL REALLY GOOD ABOUT CHILDREN GETTING MOLESTED, THANKS FOR ASKING.

When congressmen molest boys, nobody says, "Shit, I'm going to stop being American!"
Nobody says, "Wow, doesn't that make you want to stop feeling patriotic?"
Nobody says, "Wow, so Mark Foley molested a boy. How do you feel about that?"
Because those questions are absurd and the answers are self-evident.

But when the situation is about a different aspect of someone's identity - their faith - THAT SHIT IS TOTALLY DIFFERENT, and it's okay to be abhorrently inappropriate.

.....OR IS IT?!

Sunday Points of Interest

2010-03-28T11:08:00.000-05:00

--Viz editor Pancha Diaz shares thoughts on Ooku, after it won the Tiptree Award.

--A site with neat Sailor Moon fanart! [Yes, I am still on my Sailor Moon kick. Expect a post on Season R in the near future.]

--Legally Blonde and How It is Awesome

--30 Rock Meta! Which explains some of the complicated feelings I also have toward 30 Rock. (The conclusion being....I love Liz Lemon! Most of the time.)

--Dear Manga, You are Broken. I'm not sure if I agree with *everything* here (for example, aren't manga prices in the U.S. similar to those in Japan? There is only so much that a publisher can do, although I agree that prices can be expensive. I am very grateful that the place I live has a pretty healthy used-book market that includes manga.
At any rate, it is a pretty inclusive summary of issues in the world of manga publishing, whether you are an outsider to the fandom or not.

I just made it through the first disc of Spice & Wolf from Netflix, which contains episodes 1-7.
I didn't expect to like this series because I was afraid it would be a bit moe.

However, it is so not. I love it so much!

A merchant and a wolf-god of the harvest travel together in a European-ish world. It is about economics and Autumn and what it means for people to lose faith. Also, apples.

I love the ending sequence. The lyrics are pretty non-sensical, but it makes me want to sing along: I want to dance with the peanut butterflies!

For a more sensible preview, read 's write-up in this post.

2010-03-21T22:46:00.001-05:00

A friend directed me to Maureen Dowd's article in The New York Times, which discusses the divide between Catholic nuns and Catholic bishops on the health care reform bill. (You should be able to read the article for free; The New York Times allows anyone to read a NYT article when it is linked to from a blog.)

On Friday, Tim Ryan, an antiabortion Democrat from Ohio, took to the House floor to say he had been influenced by the nuns to vote for the bill.

“You say this is pro-abortion,” he said to Republicans, and yet “you have 59,000 Catholic nuns from across the country endorsing this bill, 600 Catholic hospitals, 1,400 Catholic nursing homes endorsing this bill.”

For decades, the nuns did the bidding of the priests, cleaned up their messes, and watched as their male superiors let a perverted stain spread over the entire church, a stain that has now even reached the Holy See. It seemed that the nuns were strangely silent, either because they suspected but had no proof — the “Doubt” syndrome — or because they had no one to tell but male bosses protecting one another in that repugnant and hypocritical old-boys’ network.

Their goodness was rewarded with a stunning slap from the über-conservative Pope Benedict XVI. The Vatican is conducting two inquisitions into the “quality of life” of American nuns, trying to knock any independence or modernity out of them.

The witch hunt has sparked the nuns to have a voice at last. Vulnerable children were not protected by the male hierarchy of the church, which treated sexual abuse as a failure of character rather than a crime. The men were so arrogant it never occurred to them that they should be accountable to the secular world. In their warped thinking, it was better to let children suffer than to call the authorities, embarrass the church and risk diminished power.

Now the bishops think that it’s better to deprive poor people of good health care than to let the church look like it’s going soft on abortion.

Under the semantic dodge of ideological purity, the bishops also are doing the bidding of the Republicans, trying to kill the bill and weaken the president. But the nuns are right when they say that “the Senate bill will not provide taxpayer funding for elective abortions” and that its protection of pregnant women is the “real pro-life stance.”

The nuns stepped up to support true Catholic dogma, making sure poor people get proper health care. (Which would lead to fewer abortions anyway.)

I feel Maureen Dowd's sentiment in feeling fan-fucking-tastic that the Pope would rather bully American nuns with his heinous "investigations" instead of the pedophiliac exploits of his good old boys.

I think that a lot of people allow Catholicism to be defined by its most vocal and powerful members. But they do not speak for all Catholics.

PSA

2010-03-21T15:44:00.001-05:00

Now that Ponyo has been released on DVD here in the US, Disney has re-released My Neighbor Totoro, Kiki's Delivery Service, and Castle in the Sky, all on 2-disc special edition DVDs. The latter three have been out of print for a couple of years, I think.

They should be available most places; I scored My Neighbor Totoro last night at Target, and it was very difficult not to grab Kiki's Delivery Service and Ponyo all at once.

#33

2010-03-07T10:35:00.000-06:00

Spoilers beneath the black, and for serious, you really don't want to be spoiled if you already haven't been.

So reading the spoiler of Twilight = Angel is what made me so interested in catching up on the Buffy/Angel comics a few months ago.

The pay-off is pretty worth it. I liked this issue a lot, and I really have no idea what Joss has planned for his arc, which will close-out the season. [Does anyone know if there's going to be a Season 9?]

I haven't see anybody else writing about it, so I'll assume that I missed something, but when Giles recognizes Angel's voice, Angel makes some comment like, "Now that your witch isn't here to cover it up," or something - does this imply that Willow is in league with him? Or did he mean that Amy had been masking his voice? Probably the latter, although the former would be more interesting!

This season floundered quite a bit in the middle, but it looks like the many, many loose strings have been pulled taut for a neatly pulled-off ending.

Sailor Moon, Season 1

2010-02-25T18:24:00.005-06:00

I am no stranger to Sailor Moon, although this is the first time I'm attempting to write about the show in any great detail.

I collected the manga in volumes as it was released by MIXX/Tokyopop. Sailor Moon was my first anime, although I didn't grow up watching it on TV when I was a little kid. My best friend showed me the R movie when I was a freshman in high school, and at that time, SuperS was airing on TV after school.
My Sailor Moon history is pretty extensive, but it's also an extensive fandom.
--I have read and reread the entire manga many, many times.
--I have seen S and SuperS (seasons 3 and 4) a fair number of times in English dub, S once in sub.
--I have seen the entire live-action series.

This is the first time I've seen Season 1; my goal is to watch the rest of the series, and then I might try watching fansubbed copies of the Myus (Sailor Moon live-action stage musicals).

When dubbed and edited for American broadcast, DiC made a lot of alterations that changed the tone of the show. I feel that this is best shown (concisely) by the different opening sequences. The Japanese OP focuses a lot on duality (Sailor Moon v. Usagi), and is very flowery and twirly. The American OP focuses on action, speeds up a lot of the animation, and adds gaudy frames and electric guitar. [Note that the Japanese Season 1 gets a new OP after Jupiter and Venus join the team.]

Japanese opening:

American opening:

I really like Serena's voice in the first few episodes of the dub, before they change it. She actually sounds like a 14-year-old girl.

After about 20 episodes, Serena's best friend Molly (before she met the other Sailor Senshi) accidentally falls in love with one of the enemy! Serena tries to tell her not to love Nephlite, but Molly doesn't listen. She knows that deep down inside, he has a good soul. Too bad that in the English dub, Nephlite sounds like a total pedophile, and her trying to save him just ends up being confusing and WTF. "MOLLY, HE'S EVIL," doesn't hold sway with Molly.

After Nephlite bites the dust, Queen Beryl asks Zoisite to attack the Sailor Senshi. Zoisite does so, while fellow Minor Big Bad Malachite watches on.
At times, Zoisite can be a little effeminate - crossing his legs and holding his fingertips to his lips when laughing.

It is soon apparent that Kunzite and Malachite are totally in love. Kunzite dies in Malachite's arms, and later Malachite angsts over a photograph of himself and Kunzite. So of course, in the DiC dub, Kunzite is made female. (This becomes more disturbing in Season S, when the lesbian pair Sailors Uranus and Neptune are referred to as "cousins" in the English dub.)

While I didn't mind Mamoru in the manga, I basically hate Darien in Season 1 of the anime. He's so mean and useless! The dramatic plot is stupid too - he already has amnesia, so then when he's captured, he gets amnesia AGAIN.

I won't spend a lot of time on it because so many other people have elsewhere on the Internet, but Sailor Mars is my favorite sailor senshi (although it is really hard to choose....I love everyone except for Mercury). And in the anime, she's boy-crazy and constantly nagging/arguing with Usagi. In the manga, she's arguably the most mature of the Inner Senshi, and ends up taking a chastity vow for Sailor Moon. She has absolutely no interest in men (and Naoko Takeuchi loves to draw her provocatively with Sailor Venus).

DiC edited the series pretty heavily throughout. While the write-ups at this site are irritating to me this site comprehensively describes the changes made to every episode of Sailor Moon. None of the editing was as extensive as the editing done to the last two episodes of Season 1 (at least, not yet).
The ending is much more dramatic in the Japanese version; Sailors Jupiter, Mercury, Venus, and Mars all die, in addition to Tuxedo Mask. After Sailor Jupiter dies and Sailor Moon wants to capitulate to Queen Beryl to end the death, Sailor Mercury actually slaps her. All of this was deleted from the dubbed version.

The sacrifice of each Senshi is so moving! And I love how Usagi is so naive, and how the other girls are all in silent agreement that this is necessary. After Sailor Mercury volunteers to stay behind, Sailor Mars leads the way forward while Sailor Venus literally pushes Sailor Moon away so that they leave Mercury behind, taking advantage of her sacrifice in getting farther away.

Hearing their death screams is also a lot more dramatic than DiC's dub, in which the girls always give quips about the "Negaverse" (apparently "Dark Kingdom" wasn't a badass enough title) being "Negatrash," etc.

I take personal satisfaction in that Sailor Mars' death was the most dramatic - her screams were most nightmare-inducing, and I LOVED her grabbing the tail of the second youma after the youma and Sailor Moon both thought she was dead, and yelling, "I'm not done yet!" and then killing the youma with Fire Soul.

It's also way more dramatic when she faces the mind-controlled Endymion (/Darien/Tuxedo Mask) - he holds her up by the neck while she screams.

It's probably because I just re-watched all of Buffy, but there are a lot of parallels. Buffy as a whole is a better-developed show, and Buffy is not so whiny as Usagi, but it's relatively the same: a blonde chosen one who experiences a lot of growth over the course of the series as she is helped by her friends (oftentimes much more mature than she) to defeat supernatural enemies. When Endymion gets mind-controlled, there are many overtones of Angelus. And I'll probably revisit the parallels when I write about the S Season, specifically between Dawn and Hotaru.

Pioneer used to own the license to distribute Sailor Moon in the U.S., but they have gone out of business. Currently, nobody holds the license. Because the DVDs/etc. are out of print, it is possible to watch them online at YouTube. I highly recommend using Wikipedia to keep track of episodes (Japanese and U.S. numbering are different, as the US cut some episodes).

Reward for making it to the end: a fan-made version of the OP, in which Japanese fanboys make a live-action version. American fans who are unfamiliar with Japanese fandom: YOU DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT HEINOUS IS. [My favorite part is the man in the cat-suit.]

Lost in translation?

2010-02-20T08:31:00.000-06:00

I keep bouncing really hard off of novels/stories originally written in Japanese and then translated to English.

I'm not trying to read The Tale of Genji or anything, but they are three different types of stories (Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit by Nahoko Uehashi; Usurper of the Sun by Housuke Nojiri; Hardboiled by Banana Yoshimoto).

I think it's the word choice that bothers me the most. I'll be in the groove, and then suddenly there's a string of overly sentimental statements decorated with adverbs, and it takes me a minute to gain my footing again and keep going. Except that now I've kind of stalled out on all of them.

I don't have this problem with manga, but manga, like comics, is almost always pure dialogue and very little narration.

I'm sure that it would be different if I were able to read the books in the original Japanese.

Does anyone else have this problem with reading English translations of Japanese novels? Or possibly any recommendations of really well-translated books?

I watched last night's episode....

2010-01-30T11:53:00.000-06:00

.....and I can't even believe how terrible Caprica is!

IT IS SO BAD. HOLY SHIT.

It began succinctly, but then I kept talking.

2010-01-26T19:56:00.000-06:00

It's getting to the point that I can't stand watching coverage of Haiti any more. Watching a well-fed white man in a clean polo talk about the hunger of Haitians while standing right next to them, and then switching to another camera showing how these Haitians were much nicer when getting their rations of food and water, and that's how things ought to be, makes me sick.

On a more shallow note, but related to the broadcast company responsible for the aforementioned coverage:
Peter Jennings, it's getting harder to stay loyal to ABC! My love for George Stephanopoulus is great, but so is my loathing for Jake Tapper.

I think it's telling when my favorite, most honest news coverage comes from The Daily Show: I loved Jon Stewart biting his knuckle last night while talking about the recent Epic Supreme Court decision: "A nation in which corporations spend money to control political elections.......what would THAT be like?!"

Buffy rewatch: Seasons 5 and 6

2010-01-25T18:18:00.000-06:00

I haven't been posting much about my Buffy re-watch lately because I feel like in the later seasons, I blogged enough that I've already said what I needed to say about things.

Currently, my ranking of the seasons (best to least best) is: 5, 3, 2, 6, 4, 1.

Apparently I like seasonally-structured story arcs!

I've been very caught up with Buffy in general, lately. I read a good spoiler for the Season 8 comics, and have thus been reading them and catching up on Angel: After the Fall (I'll probably have at least a minor post on that in the future). Have also been reading recently-acquired academic essay books on Buffy, which have been awesome-sauce.

Does this mean I like Buffy more than The West Wing?? I don't know! I need to re-watch that shit.

In the meantime, A note with minor character-arc spoilers for Seasons 5-7:

I'm learning that I really like Dawn as a character. I don't think most people find her irritating in Seasons 5 or 7, but mostly in 6. But in my re-watch, I'm learning that, unlike Xander, I don't find her irritating at all. In fact, it isn't Dawn who suddenly matures in Season 7 - it's everyone around her, especially Buffy. It's the way they treat her that make her scenes more enjoyable. Dawn's just getting the treatment she's wanted all along. Also her lines, frequently make me actually laugh out loud ("I gave birth to a pterodactyl.")

Maybe I sympathize because it took until college for my parents to respect me, in addition to loving me - like as soon as I moved out, I magically became a different person or something.

I think Xander only annoyed me in the re-watch in Seasons 1-3. He is much more tolerable now.

Still like Spike. Still love Buffy the most (does this make me narcissistic and/or self-centered??)

Caprica: Pilot

2010-01-24T16:11:00.001-06:00

I watched the pilot of SyFy's new show Caprica, which is a prequel taking place 58 years before the events of Battlestar Galactica. I'm not really into posting plot synopses, because I feel like that is what Wikipedia is for.

Even though I broke up with Battlestar Galactica (I still haven't seen the end of it, but I will some day), the involvement of Jane Espenson [Buffy writer/executive co-producer/executive story editor] as one of the producers was enough to lure me in.

I pretty much dislike all of the characters except for Lacy, for whom I have a lot of hope. Yosef/Joseph Adama might turn out to be cool, but I'm thus far undecided. I hope that William Adam's grandmother stays in the picture, and doesn't just conveniently fade out.

The plot itself was not terribly interesting.

I hate Zoe, and I think that she and her father almost ruined the pilot for me. She is such an arrogant, spoiled brat. I hate her father, too. Waiting to see about her mother. And as for Mr. Graystone.....At least Gaius Baltar was interesting to watch.

Graystone is an awkward last name to say. "Gray" or "Stone" would have been fine. Preferably "Stone," as "Grey" is all, 'Are they good or evil?! We don't know! We'll be sure to make their surname reflect their ambiguous nature!'

Zoe and her mom argue. Her mother berates her Zoe because Zoe's a spoiled brat, and tells her she doesn't know what it's like to work for what she has. Zoe says something like, "I guess I'll have to learn how to marry into money like you did." A few scenes later, it's revealed that her mother is a successful surgeon. WTF.

I find it interesting that a lot of the promotional advertisements for Caprica show Zoe (naked, of course, this is BSG we're talking about) munching a large bite out of an apple, a clear reference to Eve (especially since they say the series takes place "58 years before the Fall"). I'm not really sure it's fair to implicate Zoe, though. She clearly makes a virtual avatar of herself, but it is her father - not Zoe - who brings the avatar into the real world and downloads it into a robotic body. It's her father who won't leave it alone, even after she's dead.

My hope is that Ron Moore's involvement will be minimal, that Espenson can help pull out the possibilities for strong storytelling.

In the end, this mini-series pilot doesn't really hold a candle to the one that opened Battlestar Galactica. Still, I'm going to keep watching, mostly for Lacy, and also hoping that things get better.

Trufax

2010-01-21T19:27:00.000-06:00

1) I spend a lot more time planning the checking out of books/comics than I do planning my finances. I mean, I always pay my shit on time, but sometimes it gets down to the wire, you know? But with library books, my little basket is always well-stocked.

2) In my wallet, I carry lists of:
--Which Animorphs books I need to complete my collection
--Which Angel: After the Fall comics I need (my Buffy Season 8 collection is current, thanks very much)
--Which anime episodes I'm missing in various collections
--Which volumes of manga I need in no less than 19 different series.

3) I think that I value a sense of humor in a person much, much more than anything else, especially the weird sense of entitlement that tends to accompany people who happen to be intelligent.

Harry Reid: still a fucker

2010-01-09T14:08:00.001-06:00

But he's "really sorry" about being racist!

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid apologized Saturday following reports he had privately described then-candidate Barack Obama during the presidential campaign as a black candidate who could be successful thanks in part to his “light-skinned” appearance and speaking patterns "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one."

D:

2010-01-04T19:43:00.000-06:00

I'm sick of reading about Yuletide/AO3, so I decided to start a controversy of my own!

I've been reading a lot about full-body scanners this last week. I was also appreciative of the points brought up in this post at FWD.

And I thought that the Patriot Act was pretty stupid.

BUT.

I have no qualms about the use of full-body scanners in airports for the purpose of providing better security.
At least, unlike racial profiling, this measure would actually have utility.

Question for the Audience

2010-01-01T22:16:00.000-06:00

Has anybody read any of the Buffyverse novels? I see used copies of the Buffy/Angel spinoffs in bookstores all the time, and I am always tempted to buy them.

When I was in middle school, I used to love the Star Wars expanded universe novels, and I still pick some up from time to time, like cheap candy.

I'm wondering if anyone has favorite ones? Are there good ones about Wesley? Any good ones in general? I like most of the characters, except probably not one focusing on Xander, and not focusing on Cordelia post S3 Buffy.

~~
I don't need any recommendations on the comics, thanks. ...Unless you have recs outside of Season 8, Fray, Tales of the Slayer, or Slayer; Interrupted.

I also don't need recs on collected meta essays of Buffy....I've been devouring those from the library lately as well.

Avatar

2009-12-19T16:29:00.001-06:00

I think I can explain what I didn't like about Avatar enough without spoiling anything.

I liked the protagonist (mostly) and I liked the graphics.

But I feel like this is James Cameron's "I just watched an anime and now I'm going to make a movie!"

I cringed with apprehension in the first 5 minutes, and the loosened up over the next 30. By the end I was shuddering repeatedly with James Cameron's self-righteousness.

This movie could also be titled, OMG GEORGE BUSH IS SO EVIL! I WILL SPEND $300,000,000 TO EXPLAIN WHY!!

There could be a lot of interesting discussion on bodies in this movie, and obviously race. I look forward to the response of fandom.

I recommend the write-up by Nick Mamatas, although it spoils everything if you're concerned about things like that.

Overall: It was not as squicky as I thought it would be, but I was underwhelmed/annoyed by the heavy-handedness and refusal to go a lot deeper.

Media

2009-12-13T09:36:00.000-06:00

I thought that I was in a book-bouncing phase....I read Hammered by Elizabeth Bear but then had no desire to read Scardown or Worldwired. [I am only now to the point where I think I can try to read her books objectively.]

I tried reading Nancy Farmer's The Ear, the Eye, and the Arm for Beer & Marmalade and for some reason, I just can't keep going - I really dislike it and I don't know why.

But on Wednesday I breezed through Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, and now I am 100 pages into Kushiel's Dart which I like a lot, but is quickly becoming a "don't read on the bus" book.

I watched the movie "Heathers" last night and I don't have much to say about it except that I loved it a lot. I think Winona Ryder is one of my favorite actresses.

Lastly, I went to request some Buffy DVDs from the public library and was pleasantly surprised to see how many people currently have discs checked out or requested. Buffy lives!

.

2009-12-02T07:01:00.001-06:00

I keep starting to write blog posts and then deleting them because I realize that I have nothing to say.

I'm thinking a lot.

I've started my re-watch of Buffy, Season 4.

I accidentally left the Robotech DVD in my parents' DVD player, so hopefully it makes it back here without incident.

I'm also reading Crown Duel by Sherwood Smith AND I LOVE IT. It's going to be quite difficult to force myself to continue to read only book club books or my personal backlog instead of tracking down everything Smith's ever written.

Thanksgiving Media Consumption

2009-11-26T08:41:00.011-06:00

Nightschool, vol. 1 and 2 by Svetlana Chmavoka
Volume 1 was a reread for me. It held up well, and I look forward to reading more of this series.

Her Majesty's Dog, vol. 2 and 3 by Mick Takeuchi
Not as good as volume 1, but still good.

20th Century Boys, vol. 3 and 4 by Naoki Urasawa
I continue to have so much love for this series.

Greenwitch by Susan Cooper (3 of 5 in The Dark is Rising)
I like this book the least out of the three I've read so far, but I'm still looking forward to reading the rest of it.

Why Buffy Matters by Rhonda Wilcox
Great academic analysis of Buffy, I ate this up. I didn't care for the introduction much, but I'm glad I kept reading.
Massive spoilers through the end of the series, so I would not read this book unless you've seen it all, or don't care about spoilers.

Critiques: For a book that had the goal of explaining why Buffy as a whole is important to society, the author focused mainly on analyzing it in order to prove that the show is "art." A lot of the things she chose to focus on were references in events to episodes that are repeated throughout different essays, to the point that the repetition became annoying.
Also, the author focused on the most artistic episodes in the entire series, aside from "Surprise"/"Innocence" (which are good episodes, but not stylistically different from the rest of the series), she wrote about "The Zeppo," "Restless," "The Body," and "Once More, With Feeling." I guess if my goal was to argue that an entire TV show is artistic (and I'm not sure why the argument needs to be made in the first place), I would use "mundane" episodes to prove my point.

Despite my critiques, I liked the things that Wilcox analyzed and expanded on. Visual cues/framing devices have to be extremely blatant for me to pick up on them (ie, Revolutionary Girl Utena), so now there will be things for me to look for. I am really eager to continue my re-watch of Buffy (I left off after finishing Season 3 a couple of months ago).

Baccano! ep. 1-3 (of 16)
This is a re-watch for me, first-time viewing for the Boyfriend. Boyfriend finds the show a little pretentious [We're telling the plot in a non-linear fashion, Audience! We're so clever!], and I'd say I'm inclined to agree with him. It's a fun show, and I still love Isaac/Miria, but I think I've decided it's one that I don't want to own.

CLAMP School Detectives, ep. 1-5 (of 26)
A ridiculous opening sequence! CLAMP School Detectives is like Burn Notice, except that instead of an ex-spy, they're three fourth graders who try to help women in trouble. I don't think I'll finish this show, as there's not a lot of emotional growth/etc. Still, I liked the manga (my write-up is here), and it was nice to see the anime version.

Burn Notice, 3.1-3.2
It seems like these seasons start out a little slow for me? I like this season's antagonist more than I liked season two's, I think.

Robotech, ep. 1-4
I'm not really sure how to describe this show. It's so cheesy, and I hate all of the characters thus far. BUT post-apocalyptic futures IN SPACE will carry me far. I'm in it for the long haul, as the DVDs I have are from the middle part of the series. As I said, I dislike all of the characters for far, but the one I dislike the most is Minmei.

"High Society"
Didn't like this movie much, aside from Louis Armstrong. Lots of awful dialogue, especially the misogyny of Grace Kelly's love interests.

"The Girl Who Leapt Through Time"
The subtitles didn't work on the DVD we rented from the library, so thank God this movie had a good English dub. I kind of loved this movie, aside from a couple of needlessly long crying / running/panting scenes. It's about what a high school girl would do if she had the ability to leap through time. I thought that the protagonist was maturing emotionally, but that turned out to not be the case.
I was kind of hoping for a Donnie Darko ending, but I loved this anyway.

"Freedom Writers"
My mom wanted me to watch this movie. I know that it's all "nice white lady blows the minds of kids of color with uplifting and simple phrases," but I did like the fact that the kids told their stories in their own voices throughout the movie, and that it showed the outright racism of teachers/administrators in schools. Better than I expected, but not great.

Google Wave
I unexpectedly received an invite from my friend . I'm a little wary about Google Wave - I think that for simple chatting, I'd much prefer Google Chat. I don't want people to watch me type as a type! In most cases, that would be very bad. I self-censor, but I need a little bit of time before I hit "Enter." Wave seems to remove this safety net.

What kinds of things might Google Wave be used for? I can only think of fannish-related activities: epic writing of fanfic between multiple parties, collaborative real-time WisCon panel write-ups, etc. Outside of fandom, I really can't come up with any uses for the technology. Let me know, Internet. Wikipedia is vague, and I'm not watching Google's hour-long video. I've got shit to do.

I need to figure out a way to have the contacts list not contain everyone I've ever Gmailed in my entire life. :[ It seems like the only way to delete people from the list is to delete them from my Gmail contacts list FOREVER, and that sucks. How come there isn't more control, as there is with Google Chat?

Beyond Anger (?)

2009-11-23T21:03:00.001-06:00

A little while ago, I read the book Beyond Anger: On Being a Feminist in the Church, by Carolyn Osiek, R.S.C.J.

The book is about identifying as a feminist while also identifying as a member of the Catholic Church, which, as one might imagine, can cause feelings of anger. It's been a while since I read it, but I at least marked a few favorite passages. I think I'm just going to post them with brief commentary, and leave it at that. Hopefully you all find them as interesting as I did.

After giving examples of why a feminist might be angry in church (only males wear distinctive clothing that sets them off as officially belonging in the sanctuary, language of worship does not seem to include women, etc.), the author says of these moments of realization:

Such an event is a true turning point because it evokes a crisis. Life is not as it was before, and can never be so again. It cannot return to the comfort of denial. One's self image of loyalty and one's experience of oppression come to a screeching collision with one another and seem henceforth incompatible. How can I remain loyal to a person, institution, or tradition that has done this to me? But without that commitment, what do I have left? Who am I? This intense experience of dissonance provokes a predictable reaction.

She goes on to validate anger as an emotion, and then analyzes the destructive power of sexism, and its inherently sinful nature.

Sexism and patriarchalism have worked against both women and men in three ways. The first is to dehumanize women institutionally by disqualifying them on the basis of sex from access to the sacred and to leadership. The second way is to attempt theological justification of the oppression of patriarchalism, so that it would seem to be perpetrated in the name of God. The third way that sexism works against all of us is by promoting a "false consciousness" which permits both oppressor and oppressed to blindly accept and internalize their roles.

The dehumanizing of women is the dehumanizing of men as well, for if women are demoted to second-class citizenship, men are allowed the illusion that they alone are first class, that what is done is God's will, and that it therefore cannot be changed. In this way the Church participates in the structural violence of society against women, a structural violence which implicitly condones and even promotes personal violence against them by casting women as victims of male aggression.

Because we are properly speaking here of sin, "social and ecclesial structural sin," there is a moral conversion that is called for. Patriarchalism is a form of classism, the subjection of one social group to another. It is a hierarchiacal view of human society which makes dominance and submission the operant models of human relationship and renders true mutual presence to one another impossible. Religious patriarchalism further renders a true perception of equality before God just as impossible because social conditioning and the impact of culture are inescapable factors in the formation of religious persons and communities. It puts the ideal of "equal discipleship," which is all women are really asking for, beyond reach. It is a sin against persons as well as against God.

...

Beyond intellectual conversion there is yet spiritual conversion. Are we as Church being called to a deeper living of the way of Christ by the prophetic voices of women? It is not only a human sense of fairness that calls us to justice, but Christ himself. It is not only our experience and ideals of democracy that calll us to affirm the full human dignity of every person, but the demands of the Gospel as well. Women today are calling the Church to live what it says in this regard. The voice has become part of the ongoing revelation of God to us, as the mystery of that revelation unfolds in history.

She analyzes the power of Bonaventure's quote, "It is for man to act, for woman to suffer."

This belief, or, better, excuse, has provided religious justification for reinforcing the passivity of women by encouraging them not to follow the inspirations of grace but to become more fixated in their inculturated tendencies to self-hatred and self-doubt by seeking out suffering, self-abasement, humiliation, and self-denial as signs of God's favor.
Hence it is not easy to speak of a theology of the cross to women who have experienced this kind of oppression and have rejected it as illegitimate and unhealthy. A consistent position taken in this book is that our religious tradition is redeemable for women, and that its riches are worth recovering. An important and powerful symbol within that tradition is the cross. To abandon the symbol because it has been misused would be once again to turn over the power of interpretation to those who have misused it. Anger at the abuse is justified, but capitulation to the abusers is not. Rather, the symbol needs to be recovered, reclaimed, and reappropriated into a new context where it will no longer aid the cause of oppression and passivity, but the cause of free response to the claims of the Gospel. The cross can become for women a symbol not of victimization and self-hatred, but of creative suffering, actively embraced, which transforms and redeems.

She does describe three phases of the transformation of suffering in three changes; I'd rate myself at #2: mute, pasive acceptance / awareness and articulation of one's suffering, no longer hidden / organization for change.

Osiek most bluntly calls for action thusly:

The role to which women are called today in the Church holds many of the characteristics of the prophetic vocation: to speak and act publicly in the name of God to recall members of the community to their destiny and identity before God; to interpret the signs of the times; to condemn injustice; to keep before the eyes of all the vision of the reign of God in its full purity in the midst of historical compromises.

This book does a great job of validating and giving voice to the same feelings of anger that I have. However, the title lead me to believe that this book would go further into explaining what can be done to be a feminist while still going to Church, how to make the Church a more feminist place to be, etc., and I don't think that I really got that. I'm not sure what I expect from a book in terms of how to move beyond anger to productivity, but I guess I was expecting more than the 13-point list at the end, which included things like "have healthy outlets" and "be realistic." I mean, those are find things to take as advice, but not great for action, in my mind. I'm angry, a book was spent validating my anger, and then it just kind of flickered out.

Although written the year I was born (1986), this book still resonating with me really well. It's starting to creep me out, though, the non-fiction about the oppression of women written at the time of my birth (or before, as mentioned when I blogged about bell hooks not that long ago) says things that validate what I'm feeling right now so well. It's like history's spinning its wheels in a rut, never moving forward, but repeating itself forever. Creepy, and disheartening.

Burn Notice

2009-11-18T22:33:00.000-06:00

I'm not even sure that I can express my ardent love for the TV show Burn Notice in words. It's like somebody's gift-wrapped it for me.

I've loved a lot of characters on TV, but I think that Michael/Fiona might be my favorite TV couple in the history of forever.

Soon, I will no longer have to dollhouse Dollhouse

2009-11-11T19:00:00.001-06:00

Fox's decision on "Dollhouse" isn't a surprise, as the net had already yanked the show from its Friday slot during November sweeps. Show will return to the sked on Dec. 4 and run the nine remaining episodes in its order for the season. 20th Century Fox TV at present is in production on the Eliza Dushku starrer's 11th episode.

"This gives Joss the opportunity to end in a significant way," the network said in a statement.

Significant indeed! It'll be interesting to see what crap gets pulled.

Obligatory comment by Joss at Whedonesque:

I don't have a lot to say. I'm extremely proud of the people I've worked with: my star, my staff, my cast, my crew. I feel the show is getting better pretty much every week, and I think you'll agree in the coming months. I'm grateful that we got to put it on, and then come back and put it on again. I'm off to pursue internet ventures/binge drinking. Possibly that relaxation thing I've read so much about. By the time the last episode airs, you'll know what my next project is. But for now there's a lot of work still to be done, and disappointment to bear.

Some of the comments over there are....disturbing.

Anyway, all I have to say is: 1) thank God, and 2) please use Alexis Denisof in a satisfying way before the end of the season (walking around with a ruined political career and beard stubble in the post-apocalyptic world we glimpsed in Epitaph One would be considered acceptable by me).

Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Complete

2009-11-02T21:02:00.001-06:00

Amazon is having a huge sale on sci-fi movies/series right now, and when I noticed that Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Complete was the only thing that I wanted to buy, I realized that I had never blogged about my viewing of Advent Children: Complete. I actually want to buy a Collectors' Edition of something I already own! Impressive.

The 1997 video game Final Fantasy VII is my favorite video game of all time. It was my first Internet fandom. Nostalgia! Also, it's a great story. I was trying to tell about all of the rampant opportunities for slash and femslash. IT IS FOR REAL.

Movie itself:
People actually bleed, all over the place. I mean, I didn't find it particularly gratuitous, but watching the original version of the movie was just bizarre, because I was all, "WTF is Cloud's problem? He's fine!" but now it's like, "Okay, there's clearly a chest wound going on, because I can tell."

I think that the city of Midgar/etc. was more dirty, more decayed, etc. I liked this! It's part of why I liked Final Fantasy VII.

Additionally, the presence of the new character Denzel is explained inside the movie, and the creators aren't relying on viewers to read a tiny vignette unavailable in the US *cough*. It made me like Denzel!

People suffering from Geostigma actually suffered, and that whole deal was explained better!

Overall, yes, the movie is still essentially a movie full of fanservice, but it made a lot more sense. I'm actually kind of blown away by how much more sense the plot made.

Extras:
There was a 30-minute trailer that basically takes Before Crisis (cell phone game) and Crisis Core (video game prequel for the PSP) AND clips from the original game and threads them all together to portray the Zack/Turks/Cloud/Sephiroth/Tifa flashback, AKA THE BEST PART OF THE GAME.

I still didn't get to see all of the extras on these DVDs. This summer I was bummed because it looked like Advent Children Complete was only available on Blu-Ray, but no longer!

Also, I still want to play Crisis Core. It actually looks....good.

But it'll be a while before I purchase a PSP, and I still have lots of unplayed PS2 video games to keep me busy.

Dollhouse, 2.4

2009-11-01T15:37:00.000-06:00

Watching Topher Brink suffer through his "moral crises" is like listening to Whoopi Goldberg struggle to explicate the difference between "rape" and "rape-rape."

Other people have already written extensively about why this ~~episode~~ show is made of fail.

I don't really feel the need to justify my continuing to watch it. Every week it's like another dose of, "Okay, so who mind-wiped Joss Whedon?" It's almost fascinating to watch. Also, at some point in the future, I intend to make a post analyzing why people only value the opinions of others regarding TV shows/books/etc. if the person has question has "seen all of it." Clearly, in order for someone's opinon to matter, they must have seen every single episode, or read every page, etc. This was a key component in the breakdown of RaceFail: people's opinions being undervalued because they were not informed "enough." Fandom is a really weird place. But back to Dollhouse.

It's almost hilarious to read other people accuse those of us who critique the show scramble, saying that we're "missing the subtext" or "we're trying to find the worst in this show."
I hate to brag (okay, that's a lie, I love to brag), but I've been reading at a college level since the 5th grade and I chose English as one of my majors at one of the best public universities in the world. I'm not missing any subtleties here, and in fact I am trying really hard to like the show, because in the past I have adore Whedon-shows. Don't insult with me any excuses, people. My critique is valid. Everyone's critiques are valid.

Mostly it's unsettling because Buffy means a lot to me, and I'm wondering increasingly whether it meant anything to Mr. Whedon, or if he was just trying to sell an image.

Third Eye Blind

2009-11-01T01:12:00.001-05:00

So I haven't gone to Halloween on State Street for the last couple of years. My freshman/sophomore years of college, it was like, 90,000 people and there was tear gas and it was bad-ass.

Now you have to pay to get on the street and there are bands all over the place, and you can actually comfortably walk from one place to the next (previously, it took all night to go five blocks).

But this year, Third Eye Blind was the headliner band so I went! It was weird being on State Street this year: in the past, I was always impressed with everyone else's ingenuity, but this year I was kind of like, "WTF, that's all you fuckers have? Pick something and figure out how to wear as little clothing as humanly possible and still be recognizable as the thing you're being for Halloween?" There were no costumes that made me go, "How clever!/How badass!" [Well, there were at 's party, but not on State Street.]

Kristy and Chad came too, mostly because since 7th grade on, Kristy and I have loved Third Eye Blind with relatively equal abandon.

Also, Stephan Jenkins was my celebrity crush in high school.

Look at the man!

Third Eye Blind was my favorite band during my formative years that I still love listening to. I imprint on songs heavily: when I like a song, I can listen to it on repeat for weeks (literally: ask Steph). I know some of these songs better than I know my favorite books.

My favorite song is probably Wounded, but tonight when they played, it was just AWESOME. Thousands of kids my age filling a street, in costume, screaming the words to Jumper and Semi-Charmed Life. AHHH, amazing!!

ALSO, okay, so Kristy, Chad, and I were about 100 feet away from the stage. Everyone was a dumbass, filled the center path only, so by just being on stage-left a little bit, we had a clear view of everything, were very close to the stage, but were not pressed up against anyone.
Anyway, at one point Stephan Jenkins was getting people to clap there hands AND I SWEAR TO GOD HE POINTED AT ME [there was a clear spot of empty people in front of me and my hat made me stand out a little I think], and then pointed two fingers at his eyes and then at mine in a Barney Stinson-esque way to be like, "YES, YOU!"

OMG HE POINTED AT ME! He wore a top hat and a white collared shirt and a suit coat! He screamed and sounded exactly like he does on the CDs! He called us all motherfuckers and everyone raised their fists and were like, YEAHHH! WE ARE MOTHERFUCKERS!

Ahh! I don't know how I'm supposed to go to sleep tonight!

One Stormy Night

2009-10-25T21:41:00.000-05:00

Through a link in a locked post in LJ-land, Antoine and I watched the first 1/3 of a Japanese children's movie called Arashi No Yoru Ni, or "One Stormy Night" in English.

In this movie, a goat named Mei and a wolf named Gabu both seek shelter in from a storm inside the same abandoned barn. In the dark, they are unable to see one another's faces, but they spend the night talking and are delighted to discover that they share a lot in common. By light of day, both are shocked to learn that their new-found friend belongs to the enemy species. As time goes on, and they become "friends" who can only meet in secret, Antoine and I looked at each other at the same moment and were like, "Oh man, they are totally gay!" And they really are!

I'd love to read some meta on this! Even in the stormy night at the barn, they embrace once, terrified. At the time, I was all, "How could they not notice that one is a goat and the other is a wolf?!" but in retrospect, I'm more, "Holy crap, was that an implied sexual encounter??"

There are so many layers! And I'm only on part 4/11!

As an added bonus, the animation is sometimes really nice. I love the wolves at night.

Unfortunately, I don't foresee this one getting licensed/released in the U.S.

Squee!

The [LJ] icon will make sense by the end of the post, I promise.

2009-10-24T11:39:00.001-05:00

I already tend to loathe Facebook on a good day, but I'm starting to get really annoyed with the way they use their suggestions on the sidebar of the splash page.

"Friend Suggestions" are a good way for me to realize that someone who I thought was my FB friend has actually defriended me. It's also a good way for me to be reminded of people who everyone else likes, but I do not (this is mostly the case with high school people, don't freak out, LJ!).

But now they've added a "Reconnect" thing, so that if I haven't communicated with someone on Facebook in a while, they'll post their name, like, "Cordelia Chase. Reconnect with her." And it's like, WAY TO MAKE ME FEEL GUILTY FOR NOT KEEPING IN CONSTANT CONTACT WITH MY 337 FACEBOOK FRIENDS, as if making me feel guilty for not being friends with people I'm not friends with wasn't bad enough. Now it's not only that, but that I'm not a good enough Internet!friend to people who already are my friends!

I'm not actually upset about this emotionally, but I am extremely annoyed. I don't think that motivating people with guilt is a good way to get people to want to use your website. Wouldn't you rather have people associating your website with positive feelings?

IN OTHER NEWS, HERE IS A PSA:

Target has various TV show "bundles," in which you can get two seasons of TV on DVD for $20. This includes seasons 1 and 2 of Angel, 3 and 4 of Angel, and 1 and 2 of Buffy (although that one was $25, not sure why). There were some other shows too, but those were the best ones.

I had previously maintained that I would only own Angel season 5 on DVD, BUT I CANNOT RESIST THE ANGST OF WESLEY.

Sometimes people's use of the Internet makes me concerned for them

2009-10-19T22:23:00.000-05:00

And sometimes, the comments make no fucking sense. [Read the one by "Smokers Anonymous."]

Apparently I'm worthy of the caliber of text used in creepy religious brochures. WHERE DO THESE PEOPLE COME FROM?

One day I will write meta such as this!

2009-10-19T21:55:00.000-05:00

A magnificent Revolutionary Girl Utena essay!

One of Shojo Kakumei Utena's most fascinating feminist critique is the study of the role of power and inequity in human relationships – especially but not only romance between men and women – and the harm it causes people. Some of it is explored through the core political concept of Princehood and Revolution.

Obama/West Wing Parallels: Hopefully Continued

2009-10-17T15:57:00.001-05:00

I found a nice article this morning reiterating the similarities between the Obama campaign and presidency to the the fictional presidencies portrayed on The West Wing.

Most of the comparisons can be made to a character who appears in the latter part of the series, Matthew Santos. Santos was actually modeled after Obama, after he delivered his speech to the 2004 Democratic Convention.

But the similarities that occurred throughout the campaign and up to the present are almost startling.

In this morning's article, however, the comparison is not between Obama and the Obama-modeled Santos, but between Obama and Jed Bartlet, the man who is president throughout most of the series. The articles note that both men won with a lot of powerful rhetoric and tightly-won campaigns. But once in office, the Bartlet (and Obama) Administrations started out slow, running into roadblocks and an unrelenting media, and seeming afraid to really lay the smack down. The author of the article hopes for an Obama breakthrough that leads to a monumental presidency, and I hope for the same.

His first term in office, after the euphoria of the election win, had seemingly run aground, taking on water from turning the other cheek. They had sought a warmer, gentler path but the conservative forces - unleashing their attack dogs from the lunatic fringe - repeatedly pounded the new president, a sustained attack that cleaved his approval rating.

Then the White House sent out its communications warrior woman to set the media straight. Now, the White House was fighting back: it was going to ''let Bartlet be Bartlet''.

This was the turning point in season one of The West Wing - and it was a defining moment for Josiah Bartlet's presidency.

....

The start for the Obama team hasn't been particularly inspiring, beyond the soaring rhetoric. (Ditto for his fictional counterpart.) But here's hoping the real-life protagonists can be as successful in overcoming their obstacles as team Bartlet, which even managed to pull together a comprehensive Middle East peace plan in its second term - one that had the approval of both the Israelis and the Palestinians.

Now that would be worth imitating.

Fringe, Season 1

2009-10-16T23:46:00.000-05:00

A few nights ago, I finished watching the first season of Fringe.

A lot of people called this show a rip-off of the X-Files and stopped watching it. I never watched the X-Files, but I've heard elsewhere that the X-Files could not simultaneously manage Monster of the Week episodes with an overarching plot. Fringe manages to do this, and to do it really well.

The dialogue on Fringe is not always masterful - in fact, sometimes the character interactions seem almost cheesy. But I think that it makes it that much more compelling when something changes, when a character figures something out, when there's a sharp dip from the norm you the viewer are expecting.

I think that the entire season takes place in Autumn, with everyone in pea coats, breath visible, trees stark, leaves on the ground. The characters, in addition to the literal background of the show, are waiting for strings to be tied together, for things to make sense, and in the season finale (and the episodes leading up to it), we get a big heaping full.

I'm finding myself more and more attached to these characters, even the ones who most annoyed me in the beginning (Walter).

The writers are even capable of bringing huge LULZ to the audience - that lead-up Star Trek reference and then a guest appearance by Leonard Nimoy was priceless.

Sometimes the special effects are too grotesque for me, but Fringe sometimes functions as a sci-fi CSI, and for me to be interested in CSI, there needs to be plausible vampires who suck CSF and time travel and etc.

What I'm hoping for now is a more prominent role for Astrid and some makeout action between Joshua Jackson and Anna Torv.

Is anybody else watching this show?

Signal Boost

2009-10-11T22:35:00.000-05:00

I spent all weekend thinking that the Feministing Fail linkspam at access_fandom is only one post, but it is in fact multiple posts. Head there to read posts on this important discussion.

Unrelated, but related to feminism, is a link I found through , to an explanation of 'cis,' and why it should be used.

So, here’s the thing, cis people who have a problem with “cis.” I am going to politely request that you get over it.

Because we do need a label to describe people who are cis gendered, and “cis” is a really good label to use because it is value neutral. “Not trans” carries a whiff of a suggestion that there’s something wrong with being trans, just as “not disabled,” again, suggests that there is something wrong with being a person with disabilities. “Normal,” “real,” “regular,” biological,” “natural,” and so on also carry negative connotations, because that means that trans people are “abnormal,” “not real,” “irregular,” “not biological,” and “not natural.” I would hope that people can see that being called “not real” would be offensive to someone who is trans.

Cis is not being used to divide or separate people. It’s being used as an adjective, to distinguish people with a particular type of gender, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. We have a whole family of words to describe people through various characteristics. Just as I have no problem with being called a “white person” because, uhm, I’m racially white and a person, cis folks shouldn’t be upset by being called “cis people.”

Book Reports: I inherit my father's paranoia

2009-10-11T09:17:00.000-05:00

The Ask and the Answer by Patrick Ness
If you read The Knife of Never Letting Go, then you know it's literally impossible to share any details of this book without giving hardcore spoilers.

I will only say: WOW! I liked this more than the first book; it hit lots of my bits. My prediction would be that not as many people would like this book as the first one.

Preparedness Now! by Aton Edwards

This book was intense. The man has prepared kits in his office, his house, and his car containing everything from collapsible bicycles to dust masks. This book explains how to dig latrines, and how to safely and odorlessly take care of business in your own home if your toilet isn't working. He recommends keeping an emergency food pantry, but also recommends not telling your neighbors about it, so they don't kill you or your children. He's a little overzealous, but I can't deny the fact that if shit went down, this dude would be alive, and I would want him on my team.

The first chapter is spent outlining all of the terrible things that could happen for which most people never prepare in advance: terrorist attacks, natural disasters, power shut-downs, etc. The author focused on 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina.

Now, my father is a pretty paranoid man. Since birth, I have almost constantly been warned of imminent death, and told to figure stuff out for myself. Despite this aspect of my upbringing, I was kind of blown away by the intensity of the author, who is also pretty arrogant. In his chapter on fitness, he tosses in a random aside, that he used to run to school, and all the kids on the bus would look at him excitedly out the window.

His chapter on physical fitness was pretty messed up as well. He feels that people who are predisposed to weight gain simply need to work harder - everyone can be the "right size" if they just work HARD ENOUGH! He also says that if anyone tells you the reader that you have an eating disorder, then that person is just being mean, and eating disorders don't exist. WAY TO BE, BUDDY.

The chapter on weaponry would probably freak most people out, but considering the arsenal amassed in our basement by my father, which contains everything from guns to crossbows to blowguns, I wasn't too perturbed.

While the author is a tool, reading the book got me thinking about how prepared I would be for the unexpected. I'll be proud for a moment and say that I'm pretty good at keeping my head in a crisis, and I know a lot of smart people within walking distance of my apartment, so I'm not too worried. Still, there is a collection of objects that could be going on.
I live in an efficiency apartment, so I'm giving myself a pass on not having gallons of water stored away just in case. Still, there are other things I could do. I don't think that I would even last very long in a power outage - all I have are scented candles. I also don't have a very well-stocked First Aid kit. All that's in it are a package of Band-Aids and some Tums.

I'd like to stock both my car and my apartment with a few things I might need, in the event of an emergency. I keep a spare tire, spare oil, spare windshield fluid, hand sanitizer, and a snow shovel in the trunk of my car. But despite the fact that I frequently travel in my car alone, I never store any extra food in it. If my car broke down in the middle of the woods on my way Up North where I get no cell phone reception, I would be totally screwed!

Stuff I gathered from around the apartment so far, to put in an easy-to-find place:
Knife
Swiss-Army knife
Hand sanitizer
mini-flashlight on a keychain
paper [in case you need to write down directions or locations, etc.]
pencil [The dude in the book recommends pens, but ink freezes in cold weather! Apparently he doesn't think of everything after all.]

Things I Could Look into Acquiring
Misc. hygiene items - toothbrush, etc. in travel size
flashlight [Does not need to be ultra!flashlight that costs more than $100, as described in the book]
energy bars/foods
Whistle [Voices fail in inclement weather/exhaustion]
A lighter, perhaps some matches in a water-proof container
Some long-burning candles
Moist towelettes
A watch that actually works
Hand-crank lamp
Hand-crank radio
Tablets for drinking water
Bandages/more substantial stuff for First Aid kit

om nom nom

2009-10-10T07:53:00.000-05:00

Let me tell you guys about my book-haul on the way home last night. Not only did I find all of these books at Half-Price Books, but many of them were on clearance, being marked down EVEN FURTHER.

--Claymore, vol. 1 - Norihiro Yagi [Knight-clad girls kick ass and take names!]
--Tsubasa: Reservoir Chronicle, vol. 10 - CLAMP
--The Queen's Knight, vol. 6 - Kim Kang Won
--Vampire Knight, vol. 3 - Matsuri Hino [Manga's answer to Twilight]
--Vampire Knight, vol. 4 - Matsuri Hino
--Pluto, vol. 3 - Naoki Urasawa x Osamu Tezuka
--Buffy: Tales of the Slayer ["Righteous" is my favorite. Joss/Iambic Meter FTW!]
--Redwall: The Graphic Novel [I didn't know a graphic novel existed! It's pretty well done. Have you guys read Brian Jacques Redwall? It and its first batch of sequels were some of my favorite books EVAR in middle school. Unfortunately, the dude (or, as I suspect, his ghost writers) keep churning out unfortunate derivations that NEVER END. Still, Redwall and Mossflower were gems, and I like this graphic novel adaptation.]
--Angel: After the Fall, issues 5 and 6
--Buffy, Season 8, issues 6, 7, 9-13
--The Dispossessed - Ursula K. LeGuin [Currently reading this for ; there's no way I'll finish by Monday but I like what I've read so far.]

Feminist Happenings

2009-10-07T20:16:00.001-05:00

A linkspam is being collected for people speaking out about Feminist's On-Going Disability Fail here. If you know of posts about the topic, submit them via comments so that they can be added.

While we're at it, I recently very much enjoyed this post by about fat acceptance and Michael Pollan.

I would say it's not Pollan's attitudes precisely, but that he is uncritically adopting the wider cultural attitude of fatness as a disease. Several times he said that the Western diet is responsible for "heart disease, Type II diabetes, and obesity."

I have been thinking and thinking about this, and I need to think about it some more, because it's complicated and it makes me uncomfortable. ...

Also I think it's weird to pathologize a body type. Diseases are socially constructed; what is and is not a disease is not so easy to say. And I think it's weird to say that being fat is a disease. I think it's OK to say that some things associated with being fat are diseases, that being fat might make you more likely to have certain diseases, but even then you should remember that it is not a one-to-one situation and does not apply to everyone: it's only true at the population level, and association does not necessarily imply causation, either. It is more complicated than that!

It's a false equivalancy: people like to think that being fat means being unhealthy, automatically. They like to think that being thin (but not too thin!) means good health. Well guess what, that is not always the case either. It's more complicated!

In the comments, there is also a discussion about problematic things in the movie Wall-E.

Chris Rock expresses my sentiments regarding Robert Polanski

2009-10-04T11:39:00.001-05:00

Ōoku, volume 1

2009-10-04T10:43:00.001-05:00

Fumi Yoshinaga is famous for writing series like Antique Bakery, in which men in Japan create a French bakery and sell delicious pastries. Ōoku is a more serious piece, focusing on an alternate history in 18th century Japan. The series has won many awards in Japan, including the Japanese Sense of Gender Award.

There are currently four volumes in Japan, and the series is on-going.

In the United States, Ōoku is being published as part of the Viz Signature series, which means that the book is taller and wider than standard manga. It also has cover flaps and a few pages in color. The book is beautiful.

Traditionally, the Ōoku was the part of Edo Castle where the shōgun's concubines and relatives stayed.

In Yoshinaga's alternate history, 75% of Japanese men have been killed by the Redface Pox. Men and their seed are a scarce resource that women protect by making up the labor force themselves. They also make up the shogunate. Because of this, Yoshinaga's Ōoku is populated with men.

This world in which gender roles are reversed mostly focuses on court life, as indicated by the title. I personally might have preferred it if the narrative focused on life beyond the palace where there are more women learning to cope with fewer men, but I am able to empathize with the characters.

In each chapter, the plot continued to deliver dramatic and unexpected turns. I look forward to reading more, and I recommend this series to others.

The main quibble that I have with this series is not the fault of the manga-ka, but the translators at Viz. The series takes place in 1716 Edo. Throughout the volume, characters are shown speaking in Early Modern English, or the same type used in Shakespeare, with thees and thous, etc. While it's clear that whoever translated the text was familiar with Forsooths and thines, I think that sometimes the translated text is ridden with errors, or at the very least not edited for an optimal flow.

An example would be, "Such brazen shouting! Doth he think this is a soldiers' barracks, perhaps?"

If this were actually written in Elizabethan time, wouldn't the phrase read, "Doth he think place a soldiers' barracks?" or maybe, "Doth he think this place to be a soldiers' barracks?"

More often than not, it seems that words like doth, thee, and thou are simply inserted for their modern counterparts and the rest of the sentence is left unedited.

The language is also combined with colloquialisms, or sharp shifts to modern English that often seem an uncomfortable mix:
"Do not get so full of thyself!" [Even if this colloquialism were used, wouldn't it be, "Do not get so full of thine self!" ?]
"Verily so. I got a good look earlier, and...."

One character even employs the use of the curse, "Zounds!" which doesn't even make sense. "Zounds" was a shortening of the epithet, "God's wounds!" which makes sense in a predominantly Christian society. However, in 1716 Japan, Christians lived in hidden societies, and feared discovery because the punishment was death.

I will confess that I don't know very much about the Japanese language, so maybe those on my FL can correct me if I'm wrong?
I don't even know much about the mechanics of the English language, aside from reading it a lot. For some reason, throughout my years of schooling (including being an English major at a good university), I never learned how to diagram sentences. My sense of "wrongness" in writing is usually intuitive, so I could be quite wrong myself.

Saturday Morning Joys (aka: this is why I keep a part-time job!)

2009-10-03T10:50:00.000-05:00

Has anyone read any of the manga called Ooku, by Fumi Yoshinaga?

We have volume one here at the bookstore, and it sounds interesting, based on the description:

In Edo period Japan, a strange new disease called the Red Pox has begun to prey on the country's men. Within eighty years of the first outbreak, the male population has fallen by seventy-five percent. Women have taken on all the roles traditionally granted to men, even that of the Shogun. The men, precious providers of life, are carefully protected. And the most beautiful of the men are sent to serve in the Shogun's Inner Chamber...

WAIT, I just realized that this was the manga-ka who did Antique Bakery. SQUEEEEEE!!

/Book report to follow.

Shows

2009-09-27T22:39:00.001-05:00

The Honey & Clover DVDs are gorgeous! The casing is gorgeous!

I'm a bit bothered by the subtitle choices.....throughout the show, the characters usually refer to each other by surname, as is common for the Japanese. However, even though the characters, when speaking Japanese, refer to each other as Morita/Yamada/Takemoto/Hanamoto/Mayama, the subtitles keep translating it, so that it seems as though they are referring to one another with their given names, Shinobu/Ayumi/Yuuta/Hagumi/Takumi. Why would they change that?!

Anyway, now is a bad time for me with consumerism. I had to choose between Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles Season 2, NANA DVDs, and Honey & Clover DVDs. I ended up going with Honey & Clover, obviously. It was the cheapest one. Still, I feel like I have betrayed the other two. Shows! Why are you all released at the same time?!

I won't go into spoilery-depth, but I will say that I'm working on catching up on Fringe, and am liking it. Olivia Dunham is pretty bad-ass. I love the autumnal New England-ness of it, and I love the opening song that's played on piano/sleigh bells. The plot is becoming surprisingly rewarding to its audience, and I didn't think that it would be.

For thoughts on Dollhouse, I'll direct you to aycheb here, and meganbmoore here.

Epic Review Post of Epicness

2009-09-27T08:21:00.000-05:00

My backlog of books is approaching the land of ridiculous, so I'm trying to weed through it before I have to move again next summer. I'm starting with all of my manga, because they go more quickly than everything else.

I'm focusing on this to the point of almost ignoring my book clubs, so we'll see how it goes. Anyway, I thought my decisions about whether to keep or sell the manga would be an interesting way to do a review.

Trigun, vol. 1-2; Trigun Maximum, vol. 1-4 by Yasuhiro Nightow - Just as good a time as the TV show, although the plot goes past the TV show, and is different. I'll be keeping these.

Otogi Zoshi, vol. 1-2 by Narumi Seto - These serve as a prelude to the anime, which I thought was decent until everyone was reincarnated halfway-through. The manga was not nearly as good as the show, though. I'll be getting rid of these.

Bird Kiss, vol. 1-2 by Eun Ah Park - Didn't like these! Will be pitching.

Little Queen, vol. 1-2 by Yeon-Joo Kim - Loved these! The art is gorgeous! This series is one of many to have recently been discontinued by Tokyopop. Yesterday at work, I ordered volumes 3-8, which was scraping the bottom of the warehouse barrel in all six cases. At least I will get all of them, unlike Tramps Like Us, which has disappeared from warehouses. I will be stalked the used bookstores to get the ones I don't have....

The World Exists for Me, vol. 1-2 by Be-Pepas and Chiho Saito - From the creators of Revolutionary Girl Utena.....a retelling of a story related to Joan of Arc! This one was weird and a bit creepy, and I will not be keeping it.

East Coast Rising, vol. 1 by Becky Cloonan - Ehhh, no. I like post-apocalyptic East Coast U.S.A. in comics better when it's DMZ by Brian Wood. I'll be selling it.

Divalicious!, vol. 1 by T. Campbell and Amy Mebberson - I've been following Mebberson's work on the Internet for a long time, and like it a lot, but I pretty much loathed this. Will be selling it.

Kare Kano, vol. 1-3 by Masami Tsuda - Yukino Miyazawa is perfect: she is beautiful, helpful and kind to everyone, and always has first place in school. However, her "I'm perfect!" persona is all an act for a greedy girl who lives off of praise. At home, she cackles to herself in her room about how she deceives everyone else. Until one day, when Soichiro Arima shows up, and his scores and perfection seem to rival her own. The two fall in love almost immediately, and are together by the end of the first volume. The rest of the series focuses on both their relationship and those of their friends.
I am kind of ambivalent as to whether or not I'll keep the series/whether I like the series. I love Yukino, but I hate Arima. And yes, I've been warned that the end of the manga is TERRIBLE/HORRIBLE. I'll wait until I've read all of it to decide whether to keep my random volumes or not.
I did find the first two volumes of the series on DVD a couple of weeks ago, for $3 each. So no matter how I end up feeling about the manga, I will try the anime as well.
Random Story: This was the first non-magical school girl shojo manga I ever read (I only read the first two volumes at the time). I remember being angry, wondering when Yukino was going to transform into a cute outfit and fight evil, like Sailor Moon or Cardcaptor Sakura. Since that time, I've discovered a deeper appreciation for reality-based shojo manga, :)

Series I've read from the library lately:

Her Majesty's Dog, vol. 1 by Mick Takeuchi - LOVE THIS! The protagonist reminds me of Sailor Mars. And....yeah. I have nothing to express except for incoherent love.

Bound Beauty, vol. 1 by Mick Takeuchi - Didn't love this. It seems like it's one girl surrounded by bishounen who fight spirits in different ways. Annnnnd, I'm bored.

Pluto, vol. 4 by Naoki Urasawa/Osamu Tezuka - Still love this series. I read the first three volumes of Astro Boy a while back for context. I still remain underwhelmed by Tezuka himself, but LOVE Urasawa times one billion.

After School Nightmare, vol. 10 by Setona Mizushiro - The end was okay, but I liked the earlier volumes of this series a lot more.

Kimi ni Todoke, vol. 1 by Karuho Shiina - A creepy girl who's always made fun of by others (she looks like the girl from The Ring) and has no social skills is impressed by an effervescent boy who's popular. By spening time with him, she undergoes a transformation that I find a lot more credible (and less creepy) than, say, The Wallflower. And it's because the protagonist's changes are not physical. Instead, she starts realizing that conversations with other people can go well if she actually expresses herself.
I think that this is airing as an anime right now in Japan, and I would like to check it out!

IN CONCLUSION: I am still very upset that the Shojo Beat magazine went under. :[

Really?

2009-09-26T08:48:00.001-05:00

I just....cannot even believe the comments I'm interacting with in this thread any more. For example!

If you don't understand the logic behind the man being (at least titular) head of the household, you don't understand men. A man has to be responsible for something or he will not be responsible at all.

Well shit, I guess I'll have to turn in my Understands Men card! My poor boyfriend! I must be stunting his growth as a man by being in a relationship in which I fully expect to have input, and my thoughts respected, and to NOT BE CONTROLLED, or to not expect him to be "responsible for me," lest I punch him in the neck and say, "Fuck you, bye!"

Also, WTF is up with people posting things ON THE INTERNET, and then getting upset when people respond to their thoughts. I think that I stopped expecting choruses of, "Oh, mystickeeper, you're so right!" when I turned 14. It's The Internet, buddy. You should be so lucky that the meanest person you have to deal with is ME.

Commiseration is cool, but if you'd like to respond to the thoughts of Father Benjamin, please post the thoughts in his blog.

Re-evaluateof your feelings toward Joss Whedon, if you haven't already done so

2009-09-25T07:18:00.001-05:00

Here is a link to a post by author Matt Ruff, who found a Q&A with Joss Whedon.

Apparently it was FOX, and not Joss, who has severe discomfort with the premise of show.

My icon (plus the promise of post-apocalyptic-ness) is why I will continue watching!

Share the reasons why you will (if you are, I know there are a few of you out there!) continue watching in the comments!

Also, be sure to employ the use of takumashii's new verb.

Example: I am currently Dollhousing New Moon, by Stephanie Meyer.

ashamed

2009-09-22T21:33:00.000-05:00

You guys, I don't know how to tell you this, but....I checked out New Moon from the library and I can't stop reading it.

IT'S THE PAGES.

I find the series much improved with the removal of Edward. Too bad that asshole comes back!

Also, don't worry. I'll make a post about why it sucks when I'm done.

Are you watching the Emmies?

2009-09-20T19:05:00.001-05:00

OMF, I love Neil Patrick Harris SO MUCH!!

The Internet says that Dr. Horrible might appear, :O

Really?

2009-09-16T22:51:00.002-05:00

More weird-ass shit from Father Benjamin! In this post, he tried to address the very serious topic of feminism (only referred to in the past tense, and cites The Feminine Mystique as feminism's manifesto - a book that focused on the issues of middle-class white women in the 1960s), but it somehow morphed into gay people being obsessed with gender, and needing to focus on God more, and then everything will magically fall into place.

Yeah, I didn't get it either.

Also, what up with Kathryn Cramer? If you're going to call people out on the Internet, you cannot be passive aggressive. End.

Dollhouse: Epitaph One

2009-09-07T21:24:00.000-05:00

I'll start with the full disclosure: I'm going to continue watching Dollhouse because Alexis Denisof (Wesley Wyndam-Pryce) is joining the cast.

Tonight I watched the 13th episode of Dollhouse's first season, which did not air on FOX.

For many of you, nothing can make Dollhouse palatable. But maybe you might, if you watched this episode?

Imagine a post-apocalyptic Earth where the idea that the Dollhouse technology was used to essentially create a brothel, is laughable. The technology has created a world in which people can theoretically live forever by transferring imprints of themselves to multiple bodies. Nobody knows who's real and who's not, and people tattoo their names on their backs so that there is a way to figure out if they really are who they think they are. People run around with guns and are unshowered, and Felicia Day is a featured cast member (which, yay, love her).

To me, this was by far the strongest episode of the season, and it's a shame that FOX didn't air it. THIS EPISODE MADE ME FEEL BAD FOR TOPHER FOR 5 SECONDS. That shit is real.

I would be excited if this show pulled a BSG, and actually did the time-jump, no fake-outs, and stayed there.

The commentaries of others on LJ ring true, though. The fantastic acting of the rest of the cast (except for Helo, who frankly is not that great and reminds me of one of my cousins so I get creeped out) makes Eliza Dushku seem not so great in comparison. Specifically, I'd give shout-outs to Amy Acker, Alan Tudyk, and Dichen Lachman.

Now all that's left is the unaired pilot, and then I will be caught up on....one show.

Being political while slightly inebriated: always the right choice

2009-09-06T00:52:00.002-05:00

Just e-mailed the man mentioned in this article with a subject heading, "Your Poor Decision."

My favorite parts of my e-mail to him include:

The text of the speech is being released on Monday (one day before it is aired), so your ultimatum of "It would be irresponsible of any teacher to introduce to her/his students material that the teacher has not screened, evaluated, found to be educationally sound" is erroneous.

I am sick and tired of people like you using the Church as a platform on which you can make your political statements, and which you use as an instrument to make other people conform to your own political beliefs (in this case, by using your power as a superintendent to censor information that is being offered to children in public schools).

and

As a superintendent, I would certainly hope that you have better things to do - as both a Catholic and as an educator - than come up with useless rules. The showing is not mandatory - schools are supposed to decide for themselves whether or not to show the address. You have taken that power away from individual schools needlessly.

I would soften my reproach if I could think of a single reason for you to ban the showing of the President's speech to students, but the truth is that no such reason exists. The only explanation is that you are personally politically opposed to President Obama, and you are abusing your position to manipulate the children who happen to be in your charge by denying them information to which they have a right.

I AM SO SICK OF THIS POLITICAL BULLSHIT IN MY CHURCH. Go feed the hungry! Help poor people! Stop sitting on your asses in offices figuring out ways to manipulate your herd of sheep, and instead learn how to tend to them. What a pathetic and useless waste of precious time.

But hey, considering the fact that our bishop made everyone watch his pre-recorded message on abortion, marriage, and stem-cell research IN AN ELECTION YEAR, and oh yeah, fired a woman because of her graduate thesis, I can't say that I'm surprised that this happened.

Bishop Morlino also serves on the board for School of the Americas. Classy.

Catching Fire

2009-09-05T09:41:00.000-05:00

Now that I live in a city with a most excellent used book market (a ton of my manga is purchased at half-price), it's pretty rare that I buy a book brand new the day it comes out. In fact, I think I've only ever done that for Harry Potter.

But when e-mailed me to let me know that copies of Catching Fire were in at Room, I bolted there immediately after work to snag my copy and begin reading it while I walked home.

My thoughts are a bit mixed, but overall, it's good, and I like it, and it's just as suspenseful as the first one. If you liked The Hunger Games, then you're probably already freaking out that Catching Fire is out and you need to read it.

That said....spoilers! And for serious, these are books that nobody wants to be spoiled for. Don't do it! Come back and comment later!

Okay. So I like Peeta a lot, as a character. But I really want Katniss to be with Gale. I think that they belong together. It almost seems like Katniss favors a poly relationship, but given how jealous Gale is of Peeta, I don't think that that would ever work.

This book started off fantastically, and there were threads of fantastic throughout. I love the seeds of rebellion, the use of the mockingjay as a symbol of the rebels, of Katniss not realizing that she is the symbol. And the books are oh so dark - how can these be YA?? They really test the boundaries, I think. How many books have the protagonist purposely trying to kill other people her own age?

BUT, I was sort of disappointed to see Peeta and Katniss have to return to the Hunger Games arena. Yes, it was pulled off in such a way that all of the characters were surprised and shocked, but it also sort of felt like the author was pulling the plot along and wanted some real excitement....so she turned to the same device used in the first book. I was a lot more interested in what was taking place in District 12 and the woods surrounding it. I thought that it was unnecessary for the characters to return to the arena.

I love reading about Katniss. She is so intelligent, so capable, and so angry - in so many pieces of fiction, the female protagonist is trying to get other people to like her, trying to be nice - but Katniss is a spitfire, will literally rake your face with her nails in anger, and I love her to death.

The setup of the districts being oppressed by the government/rich district also reminds me a lot of Midgar in Final Fantasy VII.

ALSO, I tried looking for fanart at DeviantART, and all I can find are versions in which every character is white. WTF! Katniss is a person of color, right? And Gale? I mean, I'm starting to think that I read these books wrong, but I feel like the books state several times that they both have olive skin, and that Gale's is even darker than Katniss's. It was just.....really weird, and I felt pretty skeeved out.

As for you local people....I think that Keely has dibs on borrowing my copy first, but if you all would like to borrow it, please leave a comment, and I'll make a list and do my best to arrange the trading-off of the book.

Do we really have to wait an entire year before Book 3? Ahh! There is so much to say! Read it, Internet, so we can talk about it!

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin

2009-09-01T22:32:00.001-05:00

I'm generally bad at book synopses to begin with (which is why I don't often blog what I'm reading), but I'll do an especially poor job in this post because it's really difficult to write about this book without giving things away.

This is the book that nojojojo referred to in a post you might remember from RaceFail, We Worry About It, Too.

After the death of her mother, Yeine Darr heads south from her homeland to the city Sky, where she is sucked into a world filled with paranoia and political scheming. She wants to find out how her mother died, but she soon has enough problems trying to stay alive. Yeine is a competent and bad-ass heroine, and I never tired of her throughout the book.

I tend to prefer science fiction to fantasy; I get really tired of keeping track of the names of people and gods and races and lands and etc. And I struggled a little bit with this book at first due to this tendency of mine, but the fantastic prose hooked me and kept me going, and so did the suspense. It seemed that with every page, Yeine learned more about her own past, that of the people surrounding her, and that about the history of her world and the gods who made it. I highly recommend this book.

The premise of the sequel (book two in a trilogy) sounds interesting to me, but it will be written in the first person from the perspective of another character. I'm a little nervous that it will be difficult for Jemisin to pull off a separate character's voice while maintaining the first-person perspective. However, her writing was so masterful in this first book that I will happily give her the benefit of the doubt.

Also, the cover is gorgeous.

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms will be released on February 25, 2010. Look forward to it!

2009-08-26T22:52:00.000-05:00

I've felt sad about the death of Senator Ted Kennedy all day long.

's post made me laugh: You did a lot of good work, but I kind of hope Mary-Jo Kopechne is there to kick your ass, wherever you find yourself.

The man got away with more than he should have, and all of the Kennedys have their faults.

But everyone has their faults, and the Kennedys did more than most ever do to try and lift up those around them who are less fortunate.

They are liberal, yes, but their consistent championship over the decades of those otherwise left behind in this country is, to me, a very Catholic way to approach politics.

When John F. Kennedy was assassinated in the 1960s, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act of 1964. Many people credit his death as the galvanizing force behind this vote.

I can hope that the death of Ted Kennedy will serve as a call to action for people who have been smearing bullshit all over the place about healthcare reform. I can hope that his death will call people to their senses, and pass a law that will accomplish a goal that Ted Kennedy had for decades.

I can hope for that, but my fear is that the death of Ted Kennedy means that Congress will sink further into its cesspool of arrogant bastards who care more about re-election than they do about reaching across the aisle and getting shit done.

PRIEST

2009-08-25T18:22:00.000-05:00

OH MY GOD STEVEN MOYER IS GOING TO BE IN THE LIVE-ACTION MOVIE OF MIN-WOO HYUNG'S PRIEST MANHWA

One day I will write an epic post of love for the Priest manhwa! For now, know that is an epic tale of ZOMBIES and THE WILD WEST and AMAZING ART and EPIC ANGST and FALLEN ANGELS and DEMONS flashbacks to the MIDDLE AGES WITH KNIGHTS AND SHIT, and is basically bad-ass.

AT ONE POINT, A SET OF RIB CAGES BURSTS OUTWARD THROUGH SOMEONE'S FLESH. It doesn't get any more bad-ass than that.

It sounds like they're going to butcher the storyline, but....OMF PRIEST.

TV

2009-08-23T16:27:00.000-05:00

Does anyone remember hearing that the writers of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles are moving to write for Fringe?

I swear that I remember reading this when the news that T:TSCC had been canceled, but now that I'm looking online, I can't figure out where.

I'm trying to prioritize which TV shows to catch up on, as I seem to be hitting a block for book-reading.

True Blood gets priority, because has informed me that she needs someone to squee with. Even though I'm not caught up on the show, I loved her latest post about it, which contains spoilers through episode 9. It's amazing to me what an improvement the TV show is over the books.

Anyway, here's what my list is looking like, for personal reference:
TV Shows to finish:
Battlestar Galactica [Episode 4.12 through the end] (After the last episode I watched, I remember now why it's taken me so long to keep watching....MUST HAVE CLOSURE)
[and then Battlestar Redactica]

TV Shows to Catch Up On:
True Blood [From episode 2.2 to present]
The Office [From episode 5.24-5.26]
Dollhouse [From episode 1.10 to 1.13, plus unaired original pilot]
How I Met Your Mother [From episode 4.8 through 4.24]
Fringe [From episode 1.5 through 1.20]
30 Rock [All of Season 4]

I think I might ask for a TiVo for Christmas. :O

Meta on Tifa from Final Fantasy VII

2009-08-20T18:33:00.001-05:00

I might write some FF7 fanfiction at some point, so I will start with meta. [Of course, I have written FF7 fanfiction before.....IN THIS JOURNAL! Don't look for it, it will make you cry.]

Final Fantasy VII was released for the PlayStation console in 1997. I really hope that it's okay for me to be spoilery about this game. It's been out for 12 years, and if you play video games at all, you've already played it. If you haven't played it, you probably never will.

But since it's best to be unspoiled if you ever DO play the game, I'm using an LJ-cut anyway. If you're never going to play it, though, read my post! My posts are terribly interesting! You always feeling better for having read them!

FF7 is your basic RPG: Cloud Strife is a loner protagonist who slowly assembles a team of people with varying abilities who band together to defeat the Big Bads and save the world (from: an evil corporation that destroys the Earth's lifeforce in order to make money, a giant meteor, an alien who fell from the sky and infused people with her cells to make them crazy, and a psychopathic murderer who used to be Cloud's personal hero). Also, you begin the game as a member of the terrorist organization, and then end up leading it! You plant bombs and run from the military! So awesome.

More than halfway through the game, you the player discover that Cloud's memories and perception of reality are totally flawed, fabricated, and basically deeply fucked. He has spent the entire game projecting someone else's persona on to himself due to a combination of low self esteem and his living inside a glass tube for two years and being experimented on by the lunatic Professor Hojo inside the Shinra Mansion.

And almost more interesting (to me), you figure out that the two women who are/were in love with him (one is killed halfway through the game) both had reason to believe that he was really messed up - Aeris, because Cloud acts exactly like Zack, down to mannerisms, clothing and hairstyle; Tifa, because Cloud has memories of events for which she was present.....but she knows that he was not. And despite this knowledge and probably sense of foreboding, they love him anyway.

One of the things I find most fascinating about Final Fantasy VII fanfiction is that in the stories I've read, writers treat Cloud's myth as reality, and go from there. Nobody ever deals with the fact that the protagonist in the game was a pathological liar who believed the lies he told himself, or the fact that Tifa spends the entire game KNOWING that he is lying, thinking that the memories she has of him are made up, etc.

It could be that I'm simply looking in the wrong places for fanfiction, but it really seems like even beyond the death of Aeris, this game should be a minefield for angst and psychological trauma. But most of the fanfiction is littered with AU stories in which Aeris is resurrected post-game and everyone fights a new Big Bad, or Cloud has Sephiroth-related angst.

Even in-canon stories from Tifa's perspective would be so much more interesting. Imagine visiting Nibelheim and meeting all of the Shinra employees there who claim to have always lived there - how much Tifa must have questioned her own sanity/perception of reality, if all that had changed, and Cloud had, too. Cloud's memories are the only ones that confirm her own - that everyone was murdered and everything burned to the ground - but she knows that Cloud was never in Nibelheim during that time - so are her memories real, or not? Can she even trust Cloud, who's leading their group in their fight against evil?

Anyway, those are some preliminary thoughts on Tifa, which don't even include everything else (her love for Cloud, complicated by his former unrequited love for HER, her bad-assery, her scar from Sephiroth, her blind rage, etc.)

Aside from Tifa, the characters who I find the most potential in for fic are:

Professor Hojo
VINCENT VALENTINE
Reeve
Rufus Shinra
...and probably more

Linkspam

2009-08-17T22:39:00.000-05:00

Jim Doyle will not seek a third term.
I think everyone who reads my blog is aware of my political leanings, despite the fact that people who are actually affiliated with my party refused to hire me because at one point, I was an unpaid intern for the other party. I'm pretty much over that (except that I still think those people are stupid), and I still don't regret what I did, because I've never been a fan of Doyle. I basically agree with everything in the RPW's press release.
No matter how it relates to me, this gubernatorial race is going to be a shit show.

A blogger calls for more manga by Ai Yazawa to be licensed in English, and I can't agree more!

For anyone looking for the best Terminator fanvid ever, watch this one, which debuted at VividCon a couple of days ago.

An interesting post about an East/West difference in expressing emotions through the face in comics. In manga, the eyes are used to express emotion, whereas in U.S. comics, it's the mouth. The article even points out the difference in emoticons used on the Internet, with American teenagers using :) and :( while Asian teenagers use ^_^ and ;_;

In disturbing historical notes, a link via Badgerbag: Rosemary Kennedy's Lobotomy. If you don't believe the blog, check Wikipedia! That shit is for real.

OMF, the ~~SyFy~~ SciFi Channel is going to air the anime version of Naoki Urasaw's Monster. Link! SUCH A GOOD PLOT. PLEASE WATCH IT, MONDAY NIGHTS.*

*Hopefully the dub is good, and hopefully SciFi won't edit it down so they can insert 10 minutes of commercials per 30 minute programming slot, and I'm not 100% sure why the SciFi Channel chose Monster, as it is not actually science fiction, BUT I'LL TAKE IT.

Ponyo

2009-08-17T09:11:00.002-05:00

"Ponyo" is not my favorite film made by Studio Ghibli, but saying that is like saying, "It's not my favorite of this group of BEST MOVIES EVAR."

Sosuke is a boy who is sometimes more mature than his mother. He doesn't cry when his father stays out working for a few days, and at the age of five, he already knows how to signal complete sentences on a beacon light to passing ships.

Ponyo is a goldfish who wants to be a human. Her presence in each scene gives the audience representations of pure joy, pure love, and pure confidence. I wish I could be like Ponyo!

The movie is basically a retelling of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Little Mermaid."

I really liked Sosuke's mom. Her being voiced by Tina Fey probably helped a lot. But I also like how confident she is, how she is totally capable of functioning like a single mom when she has to, how she doesn't hesitate to tell her husband that she's mad at him, how she takes charge when the power goes out - knowing exactly how to turn on the power generator, set up an antenna, and being able to go help the elderly while putting trust in her capable son.

Also....I feel like this is a pretty pro-feminist movie? Miyazaki always have strong female characters, but in this movie especially, Ponyo's dad is a big jerk, literally keeping her inside a bubble!

And what was up with humans never being held accountable for their polluting the waters?? It's brought up, but never dealt with in a way that resolves things.
I'd like to know more about the past lives of Ponyo's parents.

I think one of the things I like the most about the films of Studio Ghibli is watching how other people live and function in the world. Such a complete picture of their lives is created, and characters always seem to know exactly how to do things when confronted with a crisis. I'm impressed that characters always know how the things that they own operate - their houses, their cars, their appliances, whatever. It inspires me to know more about how to take care of my belongings (especially my car, which I know nothing about, :[ ) so that I don't have to freak out every time something breaks.

Also, I REALLY would like to own a lamp that plugs into the wall like that! So awesome!

I think that my favorite part was at the end, when Sosuke said, "I love all of the Ponyos." I was like, "OMF, my boyfriend loves all of the Jackies! Even the crabby ones!"

I guess my main critique of the movie is that the plot moves a bit slowly, but I happen to like watching scenes in Ghibli films that simply show the characters functioning in their houses, or quietly sharing a meal.

In conclusion....go support quality anime movies being played in American theaters! Ponyo made a good showing this weekend, but you can help it! I think that this is the most widely-released anime film in the U.S. in terms of how many theaters it's playing in.

And if any of you are looking for good entry points for anime, I highly recommend beginning with films made by Studio Ghibli (Spirited Away, Howl's Moving Castle, Princess Mononoke, Whisper of the Heart, Porco Rosso, Kiki's Delivery Service, etc.)

Season Three [rewatch]

2009-08-13T12:03:00.000-05:00

[Link to Buffy Season Two rewatch is here.]

Specific Episodes
Out of 22 episodes, I really enjoy 14, and by "enjoy," I usually mean emotionally satisfying, significantly advancing the plot, possibly an intense character study that does not feel cliched, and none of the uncomfortable "This is really cheesy" plots. This is a lot of episodes! In Season Two, my list consisted only of five episodes.

Season Three List:
Band Candy
Revelations
Lovers Walk
The Wish
Amends
Helpless
Bad Girls
Consequences
Enemies
Earshot
Choices
The Prom
Graduation Day, Part One
Graduation Day, Part Two

The Zeppo sort of gets an honorable mention...I found Xander pretty irritating in this episode, but the juxtaposition of his storyline versus Buffy's, and the fact that the opening of the Hellmouth was the subplot was pretty hilarious throughout the entire episode.

Lastly....Is it just me, or did Charlaine Harris totally steal her plot for the Southern Vampire Mysteries from the episode "Earshot"? A girl not judgmental of "good vampires" who can read minds, goes almost crazy from it and can't really be around people, but has a vampire boyfriend whose mind she's incapable of reading? HMMM....

Shallow Notes:
I am a big fan of Buffy's blonde hair. Also, the late-90s middle schooler in me swoons over Buffy's butterfly hair clips and unnecessarily complicated up-dos.

This season kind of makes me nostalgic for high school in ways that other seasons do not. Like, at the end, when Willow and Harmony are signing each other's yearbooks, and Buffy's like, "I thought you hated her."
"Yeah, but I'm gonna miss her!"

I remember having these exact same exchanges with my friends.

In Relation to Future Seasons
It was almost sad watching the episode where Buffy receives her high SAT scores, but in retrospect, I'm kind of glad that the show went this way. Being smart doesn't necessarily mean that you can afford college, or that your life circumstances to permit you to attend college and stick it out all the way through. Or in Willow's case, getting accepted to big-name schools doesn't necessarily mean that you will choose to go to them: you might have perfectly good reasons to attend other schools instead.

Characters
Cordelia: I really do love Cordelia this season. And I still think that her character assassination on the show Angel is probably the biggest reason why I can't love the show. I think it would have worked much better with Cordelia's snark. You can't take that shit away.

Xander: I am still hating Xander a lot more during the re-watch than I ever did the first time through the show. I find his blind hatred for Angel unreasonable, and I also think that he is one of the most self-centered characters. Seriously, even Cordelia, while bitchy, is constantly thinking about (and commenting about) other people.

Angel: I like watching Angelus in Season Two. But so far as Angel the character goes, I find him far more interesting in Season Three than in Season Two. His angst is meaningful (to me!), he's there when people need him, people misjudge him and he angsts, HE CUTS THE HEART OUT OF A DEMON AND FEEDS IT TO BUFFY.....HE DRINKS BUFFY'S BLOOD AFTER SHE BEATS HIM....BUT ONLY TO SAVE HIS LIFE!

Favorite Angel episode is "Enemies," hands down. I'm a sucker for it every SINGLE time they do it on either Buffy or Angel, playing between Angel/Angelus, but I love it the most when they fuck with the audience and make you think one thing for an entire episode only to realize that it was a lie. I also like how severely this fucks up both Angel's and Buffy's headspace, and I think it's ultimately the reason he leaves at the end of the season (well, that and biting Buffy's neck and draining her of blood).
"You still my girl?"
"Always."

THEIR LOVE IS SO EPIC AND I WILL NEVER DOUBT IT AGAIN.

Angel leaving Buffy totally emotionally scars her in ways that I think she never gets over.

Wesley
Yeah, from a Buffy-perspective, Wesley is a joke, and is super annoying - he makes Faith distrust him, and loses her when everyone needs to find her most. He repeatedly messes things up for everyone else.

But from his perspective, he's trying to butt in to a tightly-knit group into a position of power that Giles already fills. His tenure at Sunnydale is a string of failures, especially with Faith, and he is left without dignity, ready to go to a different show, get his soul ripped out and trod on, and morph into a bad-ass motherfucker.

It was so weird watching him on Buffy, though....he's so different from the way he is when Angel ends! I kind of want to start re-watching Angel now, just to salivate over the character metamorphosis of Wesley.

Wrap-Up
I had forgotten Buffy's dream sequence with Faith while they are both knocked out in the hospital, and it is really well done. I think most Whedon dream sequences are.

I'll still need to re-watch Seasons Four-Seven, but I really found the Season Three finale to be emotionally cathartic. It wasn't just heartbreaking, like the end of Season Two (although it was also that, what with Angel leaving, which still confuses me and makes me sad), but it's also just....satisfying in a way that the other seasons aren't. The banding together of the entire senior class made me a little teary-eyed, not going to lie.

Out of the first three seasons, Season Three is easily my favorite. Then Two, then One.

Technology!

2009-08-09T09:45:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, I was a consumer-whore, and I'm okay with it.

Firstly, in the realm of cheap things, I purchased a flower vase, cheese grater, and plant shelf at St. Vincent DePaul, which were obviously cheap.

I also used a Barnes & Noble gift card that I had received for my birthday to get two xxxHolic manga.

The largest purchase, of course, was my iPod.

I ended up getting an iPod Classic. I figured that if I was going to spend $200 on a 16 GB iPod Nano, I might as well spend $50 more, and get a bigger screen and 120 GB. By the way, my laptop has about 38 GB (I am still using the same laptop I purchased the summer before going to college), so my iPod has 3 times the amount of space as my laptop!

I think that this is the most amount of money I've spent in a store at once (obviously, I spend more on rent, car insurance, etc.).

I struggled a bit with what to name the iPod. My laptop is Watanuki, being basically a house servant. My Internet connection is Himawari, so that every time my laptop (Watanuki) connects to the Internet, it says, "You are connected to Himawari." BECAUSE I AM A SAP.

So at first, I was going to name the iPod Doumeki. But then Antoine pointed out that my iPod is small and black, so I named it Black Mokona instead.

So far, for free, I have downloaded:
Episode 1 of Honey & Clover
A preview special for Star Wars: The Clone Wars
Episode 1 of Naruto: Shippuden

I am a fan of free stuff! Unfortunately, anime seems to be only available via iTunes in English dub, so that is pretty annoying. In the Honey & Clover English dub, all of the voice actors refer to each other by their first name, and it is skeeving me out. Like, "Shinobo." ~~Yuuta~~ Takemoto should not be calling him Shinobu, he should be calling him "Morita-sempai."

I am working on investigating podcasts next, in addition to putting my own music on it. I don't think I've ever listened to podcasts before, aside from Ron Moore's pretentious Battlestar Galactica ones.

Experimentation with Podcasts

2009-08-09T07:40:00.000-05:00

Now that I have an iPod, I am trying out podcasts! Unfortunately, I have not had good luck, probably because I am so judgmental. I do give every podcast at least 15 minutes (usually more) before turning it off.

I think that my main issue is that I really dislike amateur podcasts (at least the ones I've sampled thus far), for many of the same reasons that I detest morning radio. I do not want to sit and listen to two people I don't know have unsubstantial witless banter. I don't give a shit how many times you had to record your podcast because your friend erased it; I don't care that you turned off your air conditioning just to record your podcast; to be honest, I don't even care what's going on in your personal life, at all! Just talk about whatever your podcast is supposed to be about.

ABC's This Week with George Stephenopoulus - a podcast of the Sunday morning TV show. National Politics + George Stephenopoulus = <3
I like the fast-paced nature of this show. Everyone's trying to say as much as they possibly can, and the minutes fly by. This is my favorite one so far.

Wisconsin Morning News - Useless! The 8/7/2009 5-minute podcast was about the State Fair. How come WisPolitics doesn't have a podcast? These are things that I would like to know. Wispolitics just seems to post uploads of random, unrelated audio clips every couple of weeks. Which is cool, but not really anything to subscribe to.

NPR: Planet Money - This was okay, but almost too short for me? I think this podcast started when the federal government took over Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac in order to explain complex economic issues to people who don't know much about econ (ie, me). Again, it's okay, but I think I would like it if it were longer.

This American Life - Pretentious, useless. Can be summed up with: "People live in the world and interact with each other; HILARRRRIOUS!" It makes me roll my eyes.

NPR: It's All Politics - Two dudes who are probably important (but I don't know) talking about politics. It's kind of okay, but more of the 24-hour-news esque talk that I hate, where people are all, "Person X has to vote this way, and Person Y leans this way, but s/he doesn't like Z," and it's like a string of useless knowledge that I don't care about.

Daily Catholic Readings - Basically just that; over the course of three years, Catholics cover almost the entire Bible during Bible readings at mass: one from the Old Testament, one from the New, and a reading from the Gospel.

Anime + - Two teenage dudes reviewing anime. Made of fail.

Manga Pulse - Run by same people as Anime Pulse. It comes very highly rated across the Internet. Manga Pulse is two pretentious middle-aged male geeks talking about all kinds of useless topics and penis jokes, and almost never talking about manga, but instead go off on tangents. I cannot stand their speech patterns.

I also really hate the rampant misogyny in this podcast especially! "Once they hit 40, they've almost hit menopause....They're trying to fill an empty void with penis. You can just slip in there, boys!"

Watch me vomit. I don't think I'll bother trying Anime Pulse.

Next to try are: Catholic Insider and Grammar Girl. Suggestions are welcome, but only if you promise not to get mad at me if I tear apart in a blog post review, :)

I have, however, had a lot of good luck with audio podfic.

Buffy, Season 2 [rewatch]

2009-08-02T13:29:00.001-05:00

I think that I've been reading new books/manga/etc. and watching new TV shows steadily for a couple of years now. And this is weird behavior for me, as my tendency throughout life in general has usually been to reread my favorite books obsessively.

I don't remember what initiated it, but last week I started re-watching the second season of Buffy, and I finished the re-watch today.

I'll put my spoilers behind a cut - it was just last year that I was watching this show for the first time myself!

Spoilers through the end of Season 2.

Characters
I had forgotten how much I love Oz. But right after I fell in love with him again, I realized that he actually doesn't appear in many episodes in season 2! This is sad to me.

It's still refreshing watching Cordelia. I shallowly wonder if I love her a lot more on Buffy just because I think she looks awful with short hair?? Watching Cordelia on Buffy makes me hate Angel the Series more.

I'm hating Xander a lot more than I did the first time around. I find a lot of his sexual comments to Buffy really inappropriate considering that she's made her refusal absolutely clear, and I frequently find him more self-centered than Cordelia. His actions in Becoming, Part 2 are particularly atrocious to me, with him purposely not telling Buffy that Willow was trying to re-soul Angel. I kind of hate that this is never brought up by either Willow or Buffy in season 3 in a "Dude, you suck at life" kind of way. He is never punished by the other characters for his actions. I guess Buffy would never know that Willow delegated the sharing of this information to Xander unless Willow herself told her, but it seems surprising to me that nobody would ever discuss what happened during season 3, especially once Angel came back.

His refusal to forgive Angel for his actions as Angelus (namely killing Jenny Calendar) are also pretty weird - out of all the characters, he was probably the least close with Ms. Calendar. While yelling at Buffy for "forgetting about Ms. Calendar so she can be with her boyfriend," he is in reality using Ms. Calendar's death as a way for punishing Buffy, yet again, for not reciprocating his romantic feelings.

While I'm liking Xander less, I'm liking Willow more. She is just....adorable. She points to her pouty lip; "Resolve face."

Episodes
Buffy killing Angel in "Becoming, Part 2" still made me cry.

My favorite episodes are Innocence, Passion, I Only Have Eyes for You, and Becoming Parts 1 and 2. Apparently I'm a big fan of rapid plot development combined with epic, dripping angst.

I hated the episode "Ted" the first time I watched it, but I found it delightfully hilarious this time around. My favorite scene is Buffy, Joyce, and Ted sitting at the dinner table, with Buffy looking ready to scream. Ted asks Buffy how she would react if her mother married Ted, and Buffy says in deadpan, "I'd kill myself."

Other
Overall, I'd forgotten how much of a horror show this used to be. By the last couple of seasons, the characters have become so jaded that it's almost amazing to watch them be legitimately afraid of vampires, werewolves, etc.

I do like the first two seasons of Buffy a lot. But I do like watching characters post-trauamatic experiences, and I like the jadedness that Buffy gets after having to kill re-souled Angel.

Lastly: I was rereading my old entries about Angel the series to see if it was a bad as I remember it being, and I am mildly ashamed by how much squee there is. I think my favorite part is how much I loved Wesley for screaming at Faith to shut up so that he could stab a heroin addict in the shoulder. I might be disturbed, but people make TV shows just for me! It's awesome.

Buffy! I've also been re-reading NANA manga

2009-07-25T22:29:00.000-05:00

Where the hell did my Buffy icons go? I need to get on that shit.

Anyway, because I think that my Buffy board game is so awesome, I started re-watching the series beginning with season 2 (I rewatched season 1 a few months ago.....or maybe like, 9 months ago. I can't remember!).

It's pretty interesting re-watching stuff having seen it through to the end, even into Season-8-comic-land.

The biggest thing that stands out to me is how much more I like Cordelia on Buffy than on Angel. HOLY CRAP, such a better character (as in, there is more than on dimension of depth).

She calls Buffy on her shit in a way that Willow, Xanders, and Giles never do, because they're afraid of being bad friends. Cordelia, though, knows that Buffy needs things said to her, and her position of popularity with other kids at school gives her the advantage of not having to care if Buffy doesn't like her just because of what she says.
I really like the way she interacts with Buffy in the first episode of the season.

CORDELIA: Buffy. You're really campaigning for bitch-of- the-year, aren't you?

BUFFY: As defending champion, you nervous?

CORDELIA: I can hold my own. You know, we've never really been close, which is nice, 'cause I don't really like you that much, but... you have on occasion saved the world and stuff, so I'm gonna... do you a favor.

BUFFY: And this great favor is...

CORDELIA: I'm gonna give you some advice. Get over it.

BUFFY: Excuse me?

CORDELIA: Whatever is causing the Joan Collins 'tude, deal with it. Embrace the pain, spank your inner moppet, whatever, but get over it. 'Cause pretty soon you're not even gonna have the loser friends you've got now.

BUFFY: I think it's about time you start minding your own business.

CORDELIA: It's long past.

BUFFY: (turns and goes)

CORDELIA: Nighty-night. I'll just see if Angel feels like dancing...

(she is grabbed)

I also love watching Angel and Buffy having their little lover's spat, knowing that their relationship is going to get so irrevocably fucked up in the near future....

The results of our gaming tonight (with me, , , and appropriate Significant Others:

1) Willow and Xander destroyed the Judge's Arm before he was summoned (Season 2 scenario)
2) Demon Mayor killed all of the Scoobies, although Willow held her own for a long time, considering how early Buffy was killed. (Season 3 scenario)

It's a win!

2009-07-22T22:54:00.000-05:00

As reported by Anime News Network....

Hulu.com is hosting the first 12 episodes of the anime series Honey & Clover, and the first 11 episodes of the anime series NANA.

If you click the ANN link at the beginning of this post, it will take you to ANN's pages, hosting both shows via Hulu.

Further proving the awesomeness of Viz, all of the episodes are sub-titled, and not dubbed.

As I've mentioned before, these are two of my all-time favorite shows; so you should watch them!

Little House: The Rose Years

2009-07-18T10:07:00.000-05:00

My relationship with Roger Lea MacBride's Rose books is almost as old as my relationship with Laura's books about herself. They started coming out in the early 90's, and out of all of the books about Laura's family written for children, I would probably give these the most credit for being accurate.

Roger Lea MacBride actually knew Laura's daughter Rose Wilder Lane quite well. He was her "adopted grandson," and he heard all kinds of stories about her life straight from her mouth. She also apparently groomed him into be a Libertarian candidate for president. The author Roger MacBride has his own Wikipedia page.

Of course, Rose does, too. If you're interested in Laura Ingalls Wilder and have never read about the doings of her daughter Rose, the Wikipedia page is pretty comprehensive.

Of course, when I did my previous write-up of the little books by William T. Anderson, I forgot to mention that I own a fourth one called Laura's Rose. While reading it, I was delighted to learn that so much of MacBride's description of Rose's childhood in his fictionalized books were actually accurate, down to the name of her stubborn donkey, Spookendyke. Additionally, it's my goal to read some of the books written by Rose, and to see if I can't find some of the newspaper articles she wrote. As an old lady, she even covered the War in Viet Nam in the field!

Rose had a 10,000-volume library! Somebody has owned more books than me!

As I've since figured out, a lot of these books borrow on other source material. The first book, Little House on Rocky Ridge, takes nearly all of Laura's observations from On the Way Home and fictionalizes them to be from Rose's point of view.

Throughout the books, Rose grows up in Missouri, where she's a little bit haughty, because she likes to read and regularly quits school because she thinks her teachers are stupid (I wanted to do that so many times in my school career!). She has different kinds of friends to show different aspects of Missouri: a rich girl named Blanche who lives in town, a Catholic girl whose family speaks French, a boy who originally steals eggs from her family's farm and ends up showing her about all the rural traditions and tall tales.

Roger Lea MacBride died before finishing writing these books, so his notes were used to fill in the last three or four.

On the Banks of the Bayou details the year Rose spent living with her aunt, Eliza Jane Wilder, in Louisiana. Despite having promised herself to her childhood friend Paul Cooley (whose family journeyed with Rose's from De Smet, South Dakota), Rose has no problems going out with another dude throughout this novel - he takes her riding and out for food, and apparently this is okay with Rose, although she must know something's not cool with it, as she never mentions it to Paul or her parents.

Bachelor Girl is the last book in the series. I later discovered that this book was lifted entirely from a book that Rose had already written....I'm not sure why they didn't re-publish that instead, because it was much better written.

As Rose grows up, she develops an increasing disgust for farm life, quite unlike her parents. She wants to be by more educated people, and desires a fast-paced life. Still, considering her disastrous marriage with Gillette Lane, it's pretty creepy for Bachelor Girl to end with Rose gushing about how much she likes him and how great her life will be. MERP-MERRRR.

These books, especially in the later volumes, become increasingly preachy. And they do include passages with overtones of "white people conquering the untamed lands of the west" that never appeared so outright in Laura's Little House books.

For example, from the end of the last book:

She was happy to be going somewhere new, and she couldn't help thinking that she was following a family tradition. How often she had heard Mama and Papa and Eliza Jane talk about the settling of Dakota Territory when they were all young.

Man's thirst for fertile land was eternal, Rose thought. It was in the blood, and especially in the blood of her family. They had settled the prairie all those years before, seeking a dream of self-reliance and prosperity. Now it was Rose's turn.

I couldn't believe the way Rose lived her life in Bachelor Girl, and found her relationship with Gillette Lane (who became her husband after this book ends) pretty much awful - he sounded like a swindling jack-ass to me. When I read the book that Rose herself wrote, that Bachelor Girl is based on, I found it much-better written, but still despised him throughout. But I'll write more extensively about that when I write about Rose's book!

If you're interested in the titles of these books, there are 8 of them, and they are listed here. I liked the early ones well enough as a kid, but they don't hold up as well to re-reading as the original Little House books.

I think probably my favorite part in the entire series takes place in New Dawn on Rocky Ridge. Most of the book details Rose acting like a spoiled brat. The narrative is literally interrupted when Rose's mother, Laura, receives a letter telling her that her Pa is dying, and to come home quickly to De Smet. I think that one of the things I find most sad about Laura's life is that she only saw her entire family once more after moving to Missouri with Almanzo. She clearly loved her family very much, so I found it pretty depressing.

The story about Laura taking the train home to visit her dying Pa takes up two entire chapters, and is told from Laura's perspective. She even reflects on Rose's actions that had happened just previously in the book. She describes the weeks spent in De Smet, and I think perhaps I took a liking to it just because it was refreshing to read about familiar characters (Mary, Carrie) after most of the book (New Dawn on Rocky Ridge) had been spent describing Rose acting like a brat with a spoiled town girl.

I keep finding these Laura/Rose-related books. I have already read three more that I have not yet blogged about, but I'll do my best to not write about all of them in the same week.

Old Town in the Green Groves

2009-07-17T09:28:00.000-05:00

Written by Cynthia Rylant, this book inserts itself into the Little House on the Prairie series. There is a 2-year period between On the Banks of Plum Creek and By the Shores of Silver Lake that Laura does not cover in the books. During this time, the family moves to Iowa to help run a hotel. Her parents have a baby boy named Freddie, who dies while still a baby.

The back cover presumptuously lists "all of the Little House books," with Old Town in the Green Groves smack in the middle of the list.

On the first page, it opens with It was wintertime on the prairie, and I think that "prairie" is mentioned at least three more times in this paragraph alone. They aren't living on a prairie, though, they're living on Plum Creek by Walnut Grove! So annoying.

Ambitious fanfic writers could also possibly mine this book for slash overtones?!

Laura thought Miss Beadle was a fine teacher. She always looked so nice, in her pretty white bodice and her long black skirt and her dark hair pulled back and held with a comb.

The book also contains heinous, sanitizing language that I don't remember from the original books (feel free to correct me if I'm wrong).

Laura was like Pa. She never wanted to go back east to all the old towns and old lands. She wanted the new, clean west. She wanted the empty rolling fields of wild grass and the skies full of thousands of birds and the millions of stars shining down every night.

My nitpicks aside, this still wasn't a great book, and I thought that even the cover was pretty ugly. PASS.

Read: An excuse to use my other Harry Potter LJ icon

2009-07-16T18:01:00.000-05:00

One thing I forgot to mention, and I've been thinking about all day....

As much as I was upset about the cutting of the final EPIC BATTLE on the rooftops of Hogwarts, I did like the addition of the Weasley's Burrow burning. This was added in, and wasn't in the books, right?

Anyway, I thought it was an easy way for them to establish that Harry isn't totally virtuous (he wants to fucking kill Bellatrix) and that Ginny totally loves Harry (see: running through fire and into the midst of Death Eaters).

Just the shots of those two running through the tall grass were pretty frickin' gorgeous.

THERE'D BETTER BE BIGASS FIGHTS IN BOTH OF THE DEATHLY HALLOWS MOVIES. THAT IS ALL.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

2009-07-16T07:16:00.000-05:00

This was not one of my favorite books; I think my favorite might still be book 5, aside from 7. I've only read 7 once, though, so many re-readings are required.

In this movie, Draco hung around and was emo all over the place, just like he was in the book.
My annoyance by this was about the same level as reading it.

While irritated by the romantic sub-plots in the book, they were much more adorable to watch in the movie. This movie did make me laugh a lot.

I can't imagine grasping all of the fine little plot-points without having read the books....honestly, I can't figure out how I would know WTF was going on unless I read them, and I feel kind of bad for people who don't read them.

What annoyed me the most was the removal of the huge roof-top fight at the end. Like, WTF I want to watch the DA/Order fighting the Death Eaters, HELLO!!

Oh, well.

Like most of the Harry Potter movies, it was pleasant enough to watch, but I vastly prefer the books.

The theme is French

2009-07-13T21:32:00.000-05:00

Gankutsuou continues to be a fabulous anime. At the moment, I believe my favorite character to be Eugenie.

A brooding, vampiric count! A naive character whose best man-friend is totally in love with him even though he's too stupid to notice! Adults in unhappy marriages made for money! Gothic exteriors! People living on the moon, and in France! Horses with computer-chip eyeballs! Music by Tchaichovsky and Debussy and other people I don't recognize with my ears! A REFERENCE TO LUCREZIA BORGIA!

Here, have a trailer.

Also, for those who are already fans, go look at 's Gankutsuou fanart!

My "normal" book club read Abundance by Sena Jeter Naslund. Ever since watching most of the anime Rose of Versailles, I've found myself drawn to the story of Marie Antoinette. I really loved Sofia Coppola's movie.

Anyway, the author made an effort to write pretty prose, but I'm not sure that's what I would call it. Our book club did agree that she certainly did a good job capturing her tone, as evidenced by the actual letters that appeared in the pages.

I'm not usually a fan of reading books written in the first-person present tense; this is especially true of historical fiction. This book definitely didn't win me over.

Anyway, I appreciate that this book actually followed Marie Antoinette to the end of her life. Mostly, though, while reading it, I just wanted to go off and read Antonia Fraser's biography instead.

At book club, suggested that it might be fascinating to read historical fiction set in the same period, perhaps even in the same building, from a different perspective. Because from Marie Antoinette's perspective it's like, "Holy shit, people are mad at me!" with no pretense. Our book club especially disliked that the author made it seem like Marie Antoinette was wholly uninterested in politics, which wasn't really the case.

There is a working-class woman who shows up creepily in Antoinette's bedroom early-ish in the book to give her a prophetic warning about revolution. She was described as having cropped hair, "like Joan of Arc's." That'd be a cool point of view!

So far, my favorite "observe the life of Marie Antoinette" point of view is that of Oscar de Jarjayes, protagonist of the manga/anime series Rose of Versailles. Oscar is a woman who dresses like a man, and becomes Marie Antoinette's personal bodyguard. Women and men alike swoon for her, as she kicks ass and sticks to her own moral code! Also, the artwork is heinously shojo!

HOLY SHIT, I did not know that there was an English version of Placebo's "Protege Moi." I guess it was in English first. It's totally better in French!

I like media

2009-07-11T14:08:00.001-05:00

All you lucky bastards who have this movie playing in your city had better blog about it!!

Watched "The Prestige" last night. It was bad-ass. I preferred Hugh Jackman's character to Christian Bale's, but then Bale's mostly just yelled a lot during the movie. Still, I was unspoiled for all of the turns and surprises, which made things fun. Also, the presence of David Bowie increases the greatness of any movie by 10 points.

You can get the first episodes of the animes Honey & Clover and NANA on iTunes for free now through August 31. Both of these series are examples of realistic (they're still dramatic, but there are no transformations to magical school girls) shojo, and they are two of my favorite series of all time. An article with more information on Honey & Clover is here, while there is also one on NANA here. I have been waiting for these to be released in the U.S. for a long time!

Today's Kate Beaton comic is about the Bronte sisters, and it is glorious.
I bought a used copy of a book claiming to be a metabiography of the Brontes today at a bookstore. OM NOM NOM.

My blog has not been cracktastic of late. I aim to fix that.

2009-07-06T20:22:00.001-05:00

I think I saw this meme from and

List 10 whatever # feels like of your favorite characters from different fandoms, and ask people to spot patterns in your choices, and if they're so inclined, to draw conclusions about you based on the patterns they've spotted.

Angel -- Wesley Wyndam-Pryce
Buffy -- Buffy Summers
Veronica Mars -- Veronica Mars, Logan Echolls
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles -- EVERYONE
The West Wing -- Joshua Lyman
Lord of the Rings -- Frodo
Neon Genesis Evangelion -- Asuka Langley Sohryu, Misato Katsuragi
Harry Potter -- Harry
Final Fantasy VII -- Tifa Lockhart
Honey & Clover -- Ayumi Yamada
How I Met Your Mother -- Robin ~~Sparkles~~ Scherbatsky
Avatar: The Last Airbender -- Katara, until she sucked; then Toph
Revolutionary Girl Utena -- Utena Tenjou, Juri Arisagawa
Final Fantasy Tactics -- Agrias [one time there was a favorite character meme and guessed that Agrias was my favorite from this game, and I was like, no! But then I realized SHE WAS TOTALLY RIGHT.], Ramza, Alma
Star Wars Expanded Universe -- Jaina Solo, Tenel Ka [keep in mind that I'm about a decade behind in these books]
Sailor Moon -- Rei Hino (Sailor Mars)
Black Lagoon - Revy

My vote: I'm pretty sure almost all of them suffer from PTSD. I don't, so I'm not sure what this says about me.
I guess a lot of them also can't be with the person they love. Merp-merrr.

Taken with "Taken"

2009-06-28T13:52:00.000-05:00

This is purely my own made-up shit, but it seems to me like there are a lot of feminists out there who dislike watching shows/movies/anime that are violent. I'd like to take the time to tell the Internet that this is not the case with me, in spite of how often I will go on and on about sparkly shoujo manga like Cardcaptor Sakura.

Last night some friends and I watched the movie "Taken."

The first fifteen minutes of the movie are pretty terrible, but the premise of the movie is that Liam Neeson plays a retired CIA agent. He lost his marriage due to being gone all the time, but now he's trying to be close to his daughter, who's living with her ridiculously rich, pony-buying step-father.

His daughter goes to France with her 19-year-old friend and they get abducted by Albanians who want to sell them as sex slaves.

Being a retired CIA agent, Liam Neeson has some badassery up his sleeves.

If you have any doubts about Liam Neeson's abilities to play a badass motherfucker, I suggest you see this movie. I suggest you see it anyway. Watch him shoot people in the face, watch him kill people with their own weapons, watch him handle vehicles like you didn't even know they could be handled. HOLY SHIT.

My only warning is this: Cerebrally, it's mildly disturbing to me how quickly the analytical-feminist side of my brain shut down while watching this movie. It was clear that women were props in this movie, used and abused and lying unrescued (because Neeson literally only cares about his daughter, and will literally kill any random fucker who is in his way or preventing his progress) and basically serving as plot devices so that the boys can run around and shoot at each other.

But because the action scenes were SO AWESOME AND BAD-ASS that they literally made me cackle with glee, I could overlook the mild-to-moderate fail.

Still, it makes a bit of sense that "the bad guys" weren't women, as it's more unlikely for women to sell each other as sex slaves, I think.

Also, not all of the bad guys are Albanian, if anyone was wondering if this was a hate-on-POC movie.

Maybe I'd make a good homicidal maniac, motherfucker!

2009-06-22T20:50:00.001-05:00

I should maybe preface this by noting that throughout my life, people have told me that my default expression is not a smile. This may have something to do with constantly being told to SMILE for no reason just because I was a girl (really, have you ever heard a stranger tell a man, "SMILE!"?); it may be because something is usually pissing me off.

No matter what the reason, I tend to make a conscious choice to look this way when I'm walking alone in my neighborhood. I don't live in a particularly rough area of town, but I do live downtown, by myself, in an efficiency apartment.

I came to this apartment after an uncomfortable living situation. So when I moved into my own apartment, I was elated. I felt safe, I felt comfortable, everything was MINE, and nobody would be in my space unless I invited them and they went out of their way to come over.

I don't know any of my neighbors other than a few by sight, but I don't really care to; I'd prefer not to, in fact. My apartment is where I come to be alone, and I kind of love it.

Back to my neighborhood, it's not very bad but it's not ideal. In the fall, there were multiple reports of rapes within three blocks of my apartment. I always carry pepper spray, but I just tend to lean toward anonymity when I can.

So tonight I'm walking home from book club. It's almost 9pm, but it's June 22nd so it's really light outside. A man from my building exits the building, leading a tiny dog on a leash. I smile at the dog and happen to glance up, where my eyes meet with the dude.

"It's good to see you smile," the man says, "You're always frowning."
"Yeah, that's what people say."
"You always look so....MEAN." I'm not really sure how to reply to that, so I don't say anything.
"You'd make a good librarian!" He laughs and walks away.

I probably would make a good librarian, but I was not a huge fan of this exchange.

There's been a lot of discussion about rape on the LiveJournal the last week or so (if you've missed it, there's a summary with links here), and it just makes me think about the gendered difference of how people view things.

When I'm walking alone at night, I'm not thinking about how badly I want to go to bed or how much I want to read some manga; even if I'm talking on my phone to my boyfriend (which I make him do so someone will know exactly where I am), I'm thinking about whether or not someone could hide behind the bush I'm walking by, or how close the people on the sidewalk are to me and whether they look like they might help me if I was in trouble or if they might turn on me.

So yeah, buddy, I'm not going to smile at you or ask you how your night is going or ask you details about your personal life; I'm going to get the fuck inside my own apartment and double-bolt the door.

My friend has suggested that the next time I see this man, I should smile at his dog, and then look at the man and draw my finger across my throat while glaring. BWAHAHA.

Little Brother by Cory Doctorow

2009-06-20T17:36:00.000-05:00

So, I've actually only gotten 150 pages into this book, which is a little less than half. I don't know whether or not I can finish it, though.

Why didn't Cory Doctorow just write a blog post about how he felt about the Patriot Act? Because having it broken down and explained to me by an entitled high school boy is pretty annoying, and would probably not change my mind if I cracked the book open from a view point of disagreement.

And this was nominated for a Hugo! I didn't really think it was particularly well-written. Am I missing something? Convince me, Internet!

True Blood, Season 1

2009-06-16T21:46:00.002-05:00

Ummm, so I watched 11 episodes of True Blood in 36 hours. 8 of those hours were spent sleeping, and 9 were spent at/commuting to/from work. And I left my house twice on Sunday. So....GO ME.

This evening, I caught up with the most recent episode.

The TV show True Blood is based on the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris, also referred to as the Southern Vampire Mysteries.

Sookie (or, "Suck-ehhh," as pronounced by Bill the vampire) is a telepathic waitress living in Louisiana. She doesn't try to hear people's thoughts, she just....does. In Dead Until Dark (the first book), she refers to this ability as a "disability." In her personal life, it causes her to never get through dates, as she's always hearing the dirty/nervous thoughts. She can't imagine having sex ("Look at that huge mole on her butt!") either. So, she tries to keep her guard up as best she can, but most of the small town she lives in thinks she's crazy.

In Sookie's USA, vampires have recently "come out of the coffin," or revealed themselves to society as a whole. The impetus for this public revelation was the Japanese creation of TruBlood, a beverage that mimics human blood, and allows vampires to live in the open without having to feed on humans. Many people are still prejudice against vampires, though, accusing them of having no souls, distrusting their ability to control their desire to feed, and questioning their true motives.

This premise had me thinking about a recent post made by Avalon's Willow, in which she takes a look at a recent new storyline being put out by the webcomic Penny Arcade. She makes the point that science fiction also tries to be edgy by exploring the issues of oppression with an all-white cast, in which those who are oppressed are not human. True Blood definitely isn't an all-white cast, but the main class of oppressed people on the show are vampires. Yes, gay people and women are people of color all experience oppression in the show - and they all fight back - but the main examination of oppression still relies on the unreality of vampires.

Anyway, Sookie meets a vampire named Bill, and is happy to discover that she is unable to read the thoughts of vampires. Sookie finds this very relaxing. Unfortunately, people in the small town of Bon Temps start dying in rapid succession, and nobody knows who the killer is.

I think this is the first vampiric form of media I've consumed that has people of color as main characters! With their own storylines! There are people of color in the background! There are gay people of color! OMF!

I think my favorite scene in the show was when an entitled white man struck a white woman. And the white woman's black female friend was like, "Get the fuck out of this room." And the entitled white man gets his wooblies on, and if this show were Buffy or Angel or Veronica Mars, we would have heard his sob story. But the black woman is like, "NO, FUCK YOU," shoves him out, and slams the door in his face. We don't get to hear his story, because the women don't give a shit.
IT WAS SO AWESOME. POSSIBLY PARTLY BECAUSE THIS SHOW AIRS ON HBO AND SHE ACTUALLY SAID, "No, FUCK you!"

I like that working class characters are actually working class (for counter-examples, see the apartment belonging to Veronica Mars and her supposedly poor father). Sookie is a waitress with no aims to shift her employment. Other characters work construction, or are small-time cops, or work in convenience stores.

Sookie has done the least to make me hate her in the TV show, but she's also done the least to make me like her. I like her in the Harris novels much better, as she tells them in first-person and it's a lot easier to see what she's thinking. This is much more difficult to pull off on TV, because she doesn't always tell people what she thinks, and the only thoughts we hear are the ones Sookie hears (not her own).

I weigh in on the other characters, but my thoughts are spoilery!

I love Lafayette except that he called Sookie a slut and he does drugs.

I loved LOVED Tara in the beginning, but am disappointed in her sudden storyline intertwined with BSG's Admiral Cain. Like, I loved Tara being so badass. I loved that even though Tara was in love with Jason Stackhouse, she kicked his entitled ass out of Sookie's bedroom.

I love everything about Sam except how fucking controlling he is of Sookie, especially in the beginning of the series.

I loved everything about Bill until he fucking killed Sookie's uncle and lied to her to "protect" her. And then they had make-up bite-me sex! WTF, Sookie?!

I like PTSD guy too, but I can't remember his damn name.

I WAS SO SHOCKED when Sookie's grandma was killed! I did not expect that shit at all.

I HATE JASON HE IS SUCH AN IDIOT.

But I hated his hippie girlfriend even more, holy shit.

I feel like even the way that vampires get staked in this show says, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer was a kids' show. This shit is for real."

I love the opening sequence, too.

Anyway....OMG WATCH TRUE BLOOD, INTERNET.

Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future

2009-06-14T23:32:00.000-05:00

We read this book for my non-genre book club.

In general, this book about Third Wave Feminism promises to analyze what's up with Second vs. Third Waves, criticize popular culture, set an agenda of goals, and essentially do what its title suggests: write a feminist manifesto.

While I found most of the book at least relatively interesting, our book club in general (myself included) disliked it because its structure was so disorganized and we felt that it was too broad to really address issues that we wanted it to address. It was also irritating that the authors continuously name-dropped their close friends/acquaintances/former jobs. For a book that's trying to grab people who might not yet refer to themselves as feminists, it seems to almost go out of its way to make it so that readers cannot identify with the authors.

On the positive side, reading this book got me to buy my first copies of the magazines Bitch and Bust.

I was annoyed because the book constantly made references to (apparently common) feminist texts and people and events who I have never read/heard of. Yeah, it sucks that I was never taught about them in school, but it makes this supposedly introductory text inaccessible to me.

The book did an okay job at addressing issues that affect people of color and people who identify as LGBT. The book made a lot of good points, like Gerda Lerner's note that repeatedly throughout history, women keep learning a feminist history, and then losing it - we keep cycling through the same practices over and over, and must learn our own history to propel our progression.

What pissed me off the most about this book was that every time the authors discussed a feminist who had said anything even remotely positively pro-life, they wrote the woman off as not being a real feminist at all. This is troubling to me for obvious reasons - I am Catholic and pro-life, and I am also a feminist.

To disagree with someone and then tell them that because of their thought process, you have the power to take away their ability to identify as a feminist? Firstly, it's not your power to begin with; secondly, what the hell kind of a feminist are you?

I'd like to reference RaceFail here, because it was a huge, sprawling discussion that took place in public. Constantly throughout RaceFail, people were told, "Dude, you said something racist." The accused would freak out, saying, "I'm not racist! I'm not racist!" and the accuser would say, "I'm not calling you racist; I'm not saying you're not anti-racist; I'm saying that you said/did something racist."

In that example, people doing the calling out were not trying to steal parts of people's identities, not even labeling them as racist people. They were zeroing in on what was said, dissecting it, and trying to teach.

If you want to teach and try to change my mind, go ahead and do that. But slapping me in the face and telling me that I can't be a feminist at all is not going to change my mind: in fact, it'll probably make me hate you just a bit.

On the thread of changing minds, what's up with this strategy, anyway? Don't feminists want allies who get it to be infiltrating everywhere? We should want feminists in government, in churches, occupying spaces and making connections with people in places that most feminists don't want to be in/bother with.

So for someone to try and rob me of part of my identity because we disagree on one issue? I really don't know what to say, except for, "Well, fuck you, too."

I know I had a problem with this in Jessica Valenti's Full Front Feminism, too. One day I'll find current feminist books just for me! :O

Sometimes Necessary Abortion Disclaimer
This post is not actually about the ethics of abortion! If you would like to participate in such a discussion, please host one in your own blog. This post is about identities and the naming of groups and a book I read. Thanks.

The First Night of CSA Box One

2009-06-10T22:36:00.000-05:00

OMG CSA BOXES! It's my first one!

Here's what came in the box:
Hamburger
Frozen rhubarb chunks
Nettles
Spinach
Salad greens (WITH FLOWERS, YOU CAN EAT THEM)
Arugula
An oregano plant! I hope I don't kill it, and that it manages to somehow get light from my single window that faces another apartment building!
Mint!
Some spring turnips - Gretchen said I can eat the leaves, too!
Bok choy
Pea shoots
Chive blossoms! They are purple!

What and I made, while we watched my first episode evar of Star Trek: The Original Series.

A beverage! It was supposed to be mint lemonade, but here's what happened:
Put a half-gallon of really hot water over a cup of salt and let the salt dissolve. Put in several slices of ginger, mint leaves, and squeeze lemon juice in. We only had half a lemon, so mostly this water tasted very sweet, and like mint with an aftertaste of ginger. I think this would help a sick stomach!

A quiche! made the crust because she is bad-ass, but I think I could handle that some time....it was like, flower and salt and water and something else that's probably important. THEN, mix some eggs and milk. THEN, we chopped up some garlic, mushrooms, onion, arugula, nettles, and spinach, and sauteed them in butter and put them in the quiche mix. also put in some avocado chunks. AND THEN IT BAKED AND WE ATE IT AND LIFE WAS GOOD.

Here are some blogs I've found with vegetables and suggestions on what to do with them. They both seem to use local produce, one of which uses a Madison-based CSA:
Green Your Plate
A Good Appetite

My Foodie Question of the Night
How do you clean your wooden cutting boards? It seems like mine always smells like pizza, even though I wipe it with a damp rag every time I use it. Should I scrape it with a knife or something? Do you then put oil on it and let it soak so that it stays.....not slivery?

I'm excited to make a salad to go with my lunch tomorrow. I usually hate salads, but I think it's mostly because I can't stand limp, crappy lettuce. But I will have salad greens and spinach and arugula AND I WILL TRIUMPH.
The quiche tasted so good that I don't want to brush my teeth. I'm turning into my boyfriend, :(

This post might be "too complex and nuanced for a typical web audience."

2009-06-09T20:52:00.005-05:00

The last couple of days have been filled with anger, for me.

One involves a situation beyond my control, but leaves me feeling vulnerable and cheated by a faceless bureaucracy. Of course it will get sorted out for my personal situation, but it only reinforces my adamant belief that health care should be a right for every single person, and not a classist privilege accessible only to those who manage to find a full-time job or can afford to pay for their own health care out of pocket. What does it say about our society, if you can only gain access to medicine and technology that will make/keep you healthy if you have the money to pay for it? Isn't it bad enough for the unemployed or under-employed that they make very little money? Must we punish them further, by telling them that they don't deserve to be healthy? That, in some cases, they deserve to die?

And people truly argue about this? Fail.

I've also been thinking a lot about people in positions of power.

If you are in a position of power, and you see that the people over whom you exert power - the sheep of your flock, if you will - are not doing what they're supposed to be doing, which of the following do you think is the proper response to make your flock more functional?

A) Blame them for not knowing better (and be sure to blame other people for not teaching them better, willfully ignoring your own position of power at the moment).

B) Mock them while surrounding yourself with people who agree with you.

C) Ostracize them by making them feel ashamed or guilty, so as not to taint your tiny Type A flock of "true sheep."

D) Complain about them and how they are the reason that the group is failing as a whole. Make sure to not actually speak to them, tell them what you think what went wrong, or perform any action items to rectify what went wrong.

E) Point out to them what went wrong, and ask them what you can do with your position of power to ensure that it does not happen again.

On a lighter note, a friend of mine recently told me that she thought my Internet alias was "My Stick Eeper." I've had this alias for 8 years, and I never thought about it that way. It's supposed to be "Mystic Keeper," by the way; huzzah for aliases created at age 14.

If people want to start calling me "The Stick," though, I am okay with that.

Food!

2009-06-08T22:45:00.002-05:00

So, I kind of suck at making food.

BUT I still signed up for a CSA farm share this year, and the first box comes on Wednesday.
I'm splitting my box with another friend, but G and I get our boxes from the same place, and we are going to cook together!!

Here's what G thinks will be in this box:
Spinach, salad greens, arugula, pea shoots, chocolate mint, baby bok choy, nettles, chive blossoms, rhubarb, oregano in a pot, red flame head lettuce and hamburger.

OMG STUFF! I want to put mint leaves in my water pitcher! I can handle that! I hope they give two pots of oregano to me, since I'm splitting my box, ;_;

BUT! I'm going through this locally-made CSA-oriented cookbook and flagging all of this week's vegetables and I'm freaking out because this food sounds delicious but I don't know what to do with it! Luckily, G does!

OMG I WANT FOOD!

On the Way Home

2009-06-05T23:27:00.001-05:00

This slim 100-page volume details the journey of the Wilder family from De Smet, South Dakota [where the last few Little House books take place] to Mansfield, Missouri: the place where Almanzo and Laura bought a farm and mostly stayed there until they died.

The majority of the book is a minimalist journal kept by Laura during their trip. Her notes mostly include details about the weather, what the crops are like, and camping conditions.

The Wilders made the trip with the Cooleys, a family with two boys who are about Rose's age, who are pretty frequent characters in Roger Lea MacBride's Rose books.

There are a few light-hearted notes, such as this one:
Mrs. Cooley and I went to a house to buy milk. It was swarming with children and pigs; they looked a great deal alike.

Speaking of Roger Lea MacBride, On the Way Home basically serves as an outline for his first book in the Rose series, Little House on Rocky Ridge. I was surprised by how many events in his fictionalized book were taken from On the Way Home, even down to the Wilders' finding of a dog and naming it Fido.

Rose adds in a few footnotes for clarity, but her main contribution is framing the journal by describing the events that led up to it, and what happened once her family reached Mansfield, Missouri.

The books also includes many pictures of the places traveled in this book, Rocky Ridge Farm, and Laura and Almanzo themselves.

Essentially, this book gets the Wilders from South Dakota to Missouri, with not much description, aside from Rose's narrative book-ends. To find out what happens next, one must resort to MacBride's Rose books [or those very slim Anderson books I read].

Speaking of Roger Lea MacBride....while I'm pretty skeptical to read other books about the Little House family, I do have a healthy amount of respect for his account, and he was essentially Rose's "adopted grandson," knew her quite well, and became the executor of her estate (and therefore Laura's).

In which I try to address my white privilege, or otherwise justify my ardent love for Little House.

2009-06-04T19:55:00.000-05:00

I'm reading lots of Little House-related books and was about to write a post about Roger Lea MacBride's Rose books. But then I got to writing, and figured I should just make this its own post. Please feel free to openly discuss the topic: I am okay with being called on my shit, analyzing my white privilege, and focusing on the discussion at hand and not my hurt feelings.

I've already written on LiveJournal about Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books here and here.
I reread the entire series every year throughout my childhood. I think that I was reading these books in kindergarten. This seems improbable, but I have pretty distinct memories.

There was some discussion last time I posted about the books, with people linking to this website about the books showing the erasure of the American Indians.

I'm still not really sure how I feel about this critique. The book that deals most closely with American Indians is the second one, Little House on the Prairie, when Pa accidentally builds a house right next to hunting path, in the middle of Reservation land. As a child, I remember imprinting on Pa Ingalls disagreeing with their neighbor, Mr. Scott, because Mr. Scott would say, "The only good Indian is a dead Indian." 'What a dick!' I thought as a kid. And in the end, the Ingalls move.

Yeah, the Ingalls moved around the Midwest and "settled" land that had already been inhabited by American Indians. It sucks. Even though Pa didn't kill anybody, he still participated in this movement of shunting aside indigenous people in favor of white people.

So did my ancestors, who lived in cities and farmed land that used to belong to different people.

But I guess I'm just curious. What else was Laura supposed to write about, if she's writing her personal history? It's a shitty thing that happened, but I think that not owning up to it, or sanitizing children's literature from it is not going to help matters at all.

She lived in the 19th century, and wrote in the 1930s. She wrote about her life. Is that bad?

I can see why any person would prefer to not read the Little House series and would rather read books about the lives of American Indians instead: books about them, books by them, books that celebrate them. I totally respect people who might decide to do that (not that anybody needs my permission).

But I guess I'm just curious why Laura Ingalls Wilder gets a bad rap when not everyone else does. As astutely noted in the comments of one of my previous posts on the LH books, "You mean to tell me that a story about upper-class, privileged women living in a society whose wealth is almost entirely based on imperialism is not a narrative of erasure?"

Anyway. This discussion of race will probably be tied in to future posts I made about this universe of Laura Ingalls Wilder books, because I'm devouring them like candy, and I tell you what Internet, there is some heinous shit out there, and I intend to read it so that you don't have to. I wanted this topic to get its own post, so that's that.

Holy crap!

2009-05-28T10:29:00.000-05:00

How come nobody told me they're making a live-action version of Blood: The Last Vampire?!

Watch the totally bad-ass trailer here!

WisCon Panel Write-Up: Spontaneous Programming; Shonen Manga

2009-05-27T22:06:00.001-05:00

Go to the LiveJournal, because I refer to people by LJ and it's annoying to change the code.

Look at that!

2009-05-18T22:07:00.001-05:00

Mystickeeper, in print!

Pictures of the front and back covers!

First available at WisCon 33! After that, try the Interwebs (or A Room of One's Own).

On my own part, it's nothing special: just my write-up of the YA panel last year, which I didn't think was a 100% write-up. But I'm still happy to help represent an area of the convention that would have otherwise been unrepresented, and this year, I resolve to write better write-ups!

The Cancellation of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

2009-05-18T21:54:00.000-05:00

Of course I'm sad.

Mostly, I'm pissed.

When Terminator: Salvation opens (THIS THURSDAY), I want it to be a box office smash, and I want the FOX executives to cry themselves to sleep, and have nightmares about themselves living in Joss Whedon's Dollhouse.

Pluto

2009-05-16T11:52:00.000-05:00

So, I read the first volume of Naoki Urasawa's Pluto manga. It's a retelling of one story arc of Osamu Tezuka's Astro Boy. I can't imagine how fun this would be if I had read the original Astro Boy.....the only reference I caught was the one to the underground doctor, Black Jack (another series by Tezuka).

But even without catching all of the Tezuka references to the source work, this book was great! Viz really did a great job in making the size of the pages bigger, and including flaps on both the front and back covers.

This post doesn't even tell you what the manga is about! I don't need to; just read it (I know, I fail at reccing things. Too bad!).

I adore Urasawa's artwork. The only other series I've enjoyed by him was Monster (and technically, I watched the anime and have only read a few bits of the manga). I love that Urasawa's people look like people: something pretty rare in manga. Some people are ugly, some people aren't, but everyone looks like a solid person, and never impossibly thin.

I've put volume 2 on hold at the library, as well as the first two volumes of 20th Century Boys. I'm not sure I'll be able to wait for everything to be released in the U.S. for me to finish reading them.

30 Rock

2009-05-16T10:02:00.001-05:00

So I was able to borrow the first two seasons of 30 Rock from my sister, and they've been okay.

I would like to BE Tina Fey.

Alec Baldwin is surprisingly hilarious, and I kind of like the sexual tension between him and Lemon all season.

Also.....WTF Tracy Morgan is just like Tracy Jordan in real life! From Wikipedia: In 1996, he was diagnosed with diabetes, but refused to take medication or change his diet. After running a 104-degrees fever on the set of 30 Rock, Morgan decided to finally comply with his doctor's orders. He is now very cautious when it comes to the condition.

What I like probably most of all are all of the Star Wars references - seriously, there must be at least one every other episode!

Favorite reference/line of Season One: "I will cut you like a tauntaun."

Overall, I like it enough to watch all of it, but I like How I Met Your Mother more.

The Hunger Games

2009-05-13T07:01:00.000-05:00

I read this book a few weeks ago and I would still like to reread it in a day or something. SO AMAZING.

Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games is a cross between the TV reality show "Survivor," the Theseus/Minotaur myth, and a dystopian future. In a future North America where the land is divided into districts and controlled by "the Capitol," Katniss lives in the poorest district with her mother and sister. Because there is no other choice, Katniss hunts illegally to provide for her family.

Every year, a boy and a girl from each of North America's 12 districts must compete in a televised death match. In richer districts, children train for this "honor" their entire lives. In districts like Katniss's, families can sign up to get more food from the government in return for increasing the likelihood that their children's names will get chosen.

When Katniss's sister is chosen despite the odds, Katniss volunteers to go in her 12-year-old sister's place. She has spent years hunting animals in the woods of her district, but now she will have to hunt people in a climate-simulated arena, where everyone is playing to the cameras, and she's not sure who's lying and who's not.

I really feel like a good chunk of this book is a deconstruction of the TV show "Survivor" and the people who watch it. In the book, it's disturbing that Katniss has spent her life hungry, and those well-off watch players suffer, die, and fight for their own titillation. This is similar to real life: there are real people in the world are dying and fighting to survive, and on TV, survival is simulated, made into a game, and recorded.

I loved Katniss, and I wish I could have read this book when I was younger. She's so smart! So bad-ass! Whoa. I also liked Gale and Rue.

Fanart! Katniss volunteering to take her sister's place. Also by Faith, Katniss, with her knife.

Katniss spent the book thinking Peeta was playing her, but it ends up that she was playing him. I kind of loved that moment of horror at the end, when she figured that out.

I thought it was too easy for Katniss's friends/people whom she didn't want to kill to be killed inadvertently, or by other people. She never directly killed anybody, and it just seemed a little too convenient for me. Yeah, it's YA, but if anyone has read Animorphs, I think you'll agree with me that you can get pretty violent and frank with the tough choices, and still be YA.

I love Katniss's hunting partner Gale, and I want book 2 to be him learning to trust her while she continues to play the media, and then they break down the Capitol together. I don't know. I really...didn't like Peeta very much at all. I fear this does not bode well for me. :[

Although it's not indicated anywhere in the book, really, The Hunger Games is the first in a trilogy of books. Catching Fire is due out on September 1, 2009.

RIFF/CAIN FOREVAH

2009-04-29T17:55:00.000-05:00

OMG I JUST FINISHED VOLUME 6!!!

I hope to one day write coherently about the Cain/Godchild saga by Kaori Yuki.

For now, this is what I have to say:

OMG VICTORIAN ENGLAND! RUFFLES! LACE! BOWS! DOLLS! SADISTIC TURNS ON NURSERY RHYMES! BIBLICAL OVERTONES! INCEST! SECRET SOCIETIES! A COLLECTION OF POISONS IN GLASS JARS! A MANGA-KA'S ART STYLE THAT STARTS OUT OKAY AND MORPHS INTO HELLA AWESOME AMAZING!

EARL CAIN AND HIS BUTLER RIFF! ONLY RIFF IS ALLOWED TO TOUCH THE SCARS ON HIS BACK! ONLY RIFF WILL EVER TRULY UNDERSTAND CAIN, THE MAN WHO CLAIMS TO HATE EVERYONE ELSE AND HAS BEEN CURSED TO NEVER BE LOVED!

I keep reading this on the bus to/from work and it's really difficult to not throw my head back and cackle every time I turn the page.

DO NOT SPOIL ME PAST VOLUME 6 OR I WILL END YOU.

I want Riff/Cain icon, but I'm too afraid to look right now. Only two volumes to go and I am not spoiled yet!!

Backlog

2009-04-26T22:44:00.001-05:00

Books I own, but haven't read yet. :O

Lone Wolf and Cub, vol. 1-5, 16-18, 28
Boys Over Flowers, vol. 2, 5, 6, 8, 9, 13
Kare Kano, vol. 8, 11-15, 18
The Queen's Night, vol. 5 - Kim Kang Won
Angel Sanctuary, vol. 1-5 by Kaori Yuki
Saiyuki, vol. 1-6 [I think I read these before, but I don't remember them and would like to reread and then read Reload.]
Go With Grace - George Alexopoulos
East Coast Rising - Beckky Cloonan
The World Exists for Me, vol. 1-2 - Be-PaPas and Chiho Saito
Divalicious! - Amy Mebberson and T Campbell
Little Queen, vol. 1-2 - Yeon-Joo Kim
Otogi Zoshi, vol. 1-2 - Narumi Seto
Bird Kiss, vol. 1-2 - Eun Ah Park
The Tarot Cafe, vol. 1 and 4 - Sang-Sun Park
Shojo Beat magazines (I am behind, :( )

*Women, Race and Class - Angela Davis
Wild Magic - Tamora Pierce
Wolf-Speaker - Tamora Pierce
The High King - Lloyd Alexander
Sunshine - Robin McKinley
Lirael - Garth Nix
Goose Girl - Shannon Hale
World War Z - Max Brooks
White Noise - Don DeLillo
House of Leaves - Mark Z. Danielewski
The Family Markowitz - Allegra Goodman
One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
Alias Grace - Margaret Atwood
The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
Pearl - Translated by J.R.R. Tolkien
Lord of the Elves and Eldils [about Tolkin or his books]
Lieutenant Hornblower - C.S. Forester
Hornblower and the Hotspur - C.S. Forester
I Am America, and So Can You! - Stephen Colbert
The Onion Presents: Our Dumb Century
The Onion Ad Nauseum, volume 13
The House of Seven Gables - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
Howard's End - E.M. Forester
The Sound and the Fury - William Faulkner
The Marble Faun - Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Beautiful and Damned - F. Scott Fitzgerald
Forever - Judy Blume
Collected Stories - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Of Love and Other Demons - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
A Long and Fatal Love Chace - Louisa May Alcott
O Pioneers! - Willa Cather
War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
Middlemarch - George Eliot
The Lifted Veil - George Eliot
The Professor - Charlotte Bronte
Villette - Charlotte Bronte
The Italian - Ann Radcliffe
Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen
Lady Susan, The Watsons, and Sandition - Jane Austen
Tales of Beetle the Bard - J.K. Rowling
American Gods - Neil Gaiman
Temeraire - Naomi Novik
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
The Snow Queen - Joan D. Vinge
The Name of the Wind - Patrick Rothfuss
Quicksilver - Neal Stephenson
Into Thin Air - Jon Krakauer
Shakespearean Whodunits
Stephen King: The Art of Darkness - Douglas E. Winter
The Secrets of Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire - Mark Cotta Vaz
Pride and Prejudice and Zombies
*Tiger Eye - Marjorie M. Liu
Shadow Touch - Marjorie M. Liu
*A Woman Wrapped in Silence - Lynch
Carnival - Elizabeth Bear
*Melusine - Sarah Monette
*Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell - Susanna Clarke
The Three Muskateers - Alexandre Dumas
The Lamb's Supper - Scott Hahn
The F-Word: Feminism in Jeopardy - Rowe-Finkbeiner
Women and Health in America, 2nd Edition - Leavitt
The Female Body - Goldstein
Becoming a Heroine - Rachel M. Brownstein
Jane Austen 0 edited by Ian Watt
What Does a Woman Want? - Reading and Sexual Difference - Fehman
Watching Hannah - Barry Reay
The Creation of Feminist Consciousness - Gerda Lerner
The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman - Gilman
Tracks - Louise Erdrich
Louise May Alcott on Race, Sex, and Slavery - Elbert
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl - Harriet Jacobs
When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America - Paula Giddings
The Souls of Black Folk - W.E.B. DuBois
The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness - various
Racial Formation in the united States - Omi/Winant
Speaking Treason Fluently - Time Wise
The Harlot at the Side of the Road: Forbidden Tales of the Bible - Jonathan Kirsch
Beyond Anger - Osiek
A Hunger for Home - Elbert
Toward a Recognition of Androgyny - Carolyn G Heillbrun
The Female Man - Joanna Russ
The Wounded Woman - Leonard
Writing and Sexual Difference - edited by Elizabeth Abel
Man Made Language - Dale Sponser
Famous Ghost Stories compiled by Bennett Cerf
The Killer Angels - Jeff Shaara
A Problem from Hell - Samantha Power
Star Wars: Dark Journey - Elaine Cummingham
The Hero and the Crown - Robin McKinley
Beauty - Robin McKinley
Pet on Duty - Nase Yamato *cough*
The Tombs of Atuan - Ursula K. LeGuin
A Wizard of Earthsea - Ursula K. LeGuin
The Little Prince - Antoine de Saint Exupery
Crown Duel - Sherwood Smith
2 stories by Banana Yoshimoto
The Keys to the Kingdom: Mister Monday - Garth Nix
Gender Trouble - Judith Butler
Beloved - Toni Morrison
Ceremony - Leslie Marmon Silko
Winter's Tale - Mark Helprin
Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
Westering Women
*The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
James Tiptree, Jr: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon - Julie Phillips
book of short stories by Hiroki Endo
The Diamond Age - Neal Stephenson
Valiant - Holly Black
Dead Until Dark - Charlaine Harris
Look Me in the Eye - Barbara Macdonald with Cynthia Rich
Children of Promise - Tedrow (lol Laura Ingalls Wilder fanfiction)
Kristin Lavransdatter - Sigrid Undset
Blossoms on the Wind - Juliet Lac
Shanghai Girls - Lisa See
The Calligrapher's Daughter - Eugenia Kim
Lucky Girl - Hopgood
Star Wars: Traitor - Matthew Stover
Star Wars, Legacy of the Force: Tempest - Troy Denning
West From Home - WIlder
On the Way Home - Wilder
A Free Man of Color - Barbara Hambly
Fever Season - Barbara Hambly
When the Emperor was Divine - Otsuka
The Demon's Lexicon - Sarah Rees Brennan
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand - Samuel R. Delany
Blood Price - Tanya Huff
Blood Debt - Tanya Huff
Danse Macabre - Laurell K. Hamilton
Founding Brothers - Joseph J. Ellis
Edith Kermit Roosevelt - Sylvia Jukes Morris
Castle in the Air - Diana Wynne Jones
Three Cups of Tea
Lonely Werewolf Girl - Martin Millar
On Beauty - Zadie Smith
The Dead Sea Scrolls in English
Paragon Walk - Anne Perry
Calendar Square - Anne Perry
Twice-Told Tales - Nathaniel Hawthorne
Dhalgren - Samuel R. Delany
Sanctuary, vol. 1 - Sho Fumimura and Ryoichi Ikegami
Trigun Maximum 1-4 - Nightow
The Ring, vol. 1-2 - Misao Inagaki
Planet Ladder 1 - Yuri Harushima
Peach Girl 1 - Miwa Ueda
Gravitation 1 0 Maki Murakami
Revolutionary Road - Richard Yates
Gildead - Marilynne Robinson
Hammered - Elizabeth Bear
Worldwired - Elizabeth Bear
Scardown - Elizabeth Bear
The Bronze King - Suzy McKee Charnas
Walk to the End of the World - Suzy McKee Charnas
Dust - Elizabeth Bear
Night Watch - Terry Pratchett
Spindle's End - Robin McKinley
Wild Seed - Octavia Butler
Thomas the Rhymer - Ellen Kushner
Herland - Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Kushiel's Dart - Jacqueline Carey
Kushiel's Chosen - Jacqueline Carey
Kushiel's Avatar - Jacqueline Carey
Atonement - Ian McEwan
Negima! 2 and 4
Get Backers, 1 - Yuya Aoki/Rando Ayamine
Blood and Iron - Elizabeth Bear
Bride of the Rat God - Barbara Hambly
Those Who Hunt the Night - Barbara Hambly
Mission Child - Maureen F. McHugh
Half the Day is Night - Marueen F. McHugh
Archangel Protocol - Lyda Morehouse
Brightness Falls From the Air - James Tiptree, Jr
The Starry Rift - James Tiptree, Jr.
a couple of Ranma 1/2s
War for the Oaks - Emma Bull
The Portrait of Dorian Gray - Oscar Wilde

* Denotes I've started it, but have yet to finish.

100% Perfect Girl, vol. 1-2

2009-04-22T22:29:00.001-05:00

[A side note for those who are possibly confused: "manhwa" is what it's called when the manga-esque graphic novels originate in Korea.]

100% Perfect Girl is about a girl named Jay Jin meeting a prince named J, future king of the European country Roinne. Jay is a fashionable teenager who wants to paint, but is expected to give up her dreams so that her brother's schooling can be paid for by their entire family. J is a heinously rich prince who leads a country that apparently pisses gold. Of course, they meet briefly and fall in love. They are separated and, like the Prince in Cinderella with loads of money in the 21st century, J. rents billboards all over Korea that say, J is looking for J. They meet again!

Everything was charming and idyllic.

Until J tried to rape Jay, and then proposed to her the next day, and she accepted. DESPITE THIS, I valiantly finished volume 2 to see if anything was redeemable (ie, Jay killed a motherfucker). Instead, there was lots of dialogue about J. loving Jay, and therefore needing to own her.

He is given angst by obtaining a backstory about his mother being killed by an assassin....therefore it's acceptable for him to control every aspect of Jay's life so that she has no freedom, because then HE might get hurt if she goes away!

So anyway, despite the rather pretty artwork, I don't think I'll be reading any more of this series.

The View From Now

An Announcement

Upon watching the first 2 episodes of Hetalia: Axis Powers....

Rage

WisCon 34 Panel Write-Up: Intersectionality in Fandom

WisCon 34 Panel Write-Up: Rated E for Everyone? Increasing Diversity in Games and Gaming

WisCon 34 Panel Write-Up: Class Basics

WisCon 34: Demands and Links

A Review and Some Commentary

Cardcaptor Sakura

About That

Issue #34

Easter

Because being called out on harboring child molesters is JUST LIKE being persecuted

Sunday Points of Interest

PSA

#33

Sailor Moon, Season 1

Lost in translation?

I watched last night's episode....

It began succinctly, but then I kept talking.

Buffy rewatch: Seasons 5 and 6

Caprica: Pilot

Trufax

Harry Reid: still a fucker

D:

Question for the Audience

Avatar

Media

.

Thanksgiving Media Consumption

Beyond Anger (?)

Burn Notice

Soon, I will no longer have to dollhouse Dollhouse

Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children Complete

Dollhouse, 2.4

Third Eye Blind

One Stormy Night

The [LJ] icon will make sense by the end of the post, I promise.

Sometimes people's use of the Internet makes me concerned for them

One day I will write meta such as this!

Obama/West Wing Parallels: Hopefully Continued

Fringe, Season 1

Signal Boost

Book Reports: I inherit my father's paranoia

om nom nom

Feminist Happenings

Chris Rock expresses my sentiments regarding Robert Polanski

Ōoku, volume 1

Saturday Morning Joys (aka: this is why I keep a part-time job!)

Shows

Epic Review Post of Epicness

Really?

Re-evaluateof your feelings toward Joss Whedon, if you haven't already done so

*ashamed*

Are you watching the Emmies?

Really?

Dollhouse: Epitaph One

Being political while slightly inebriated: always the right choice

Catching Fire

The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms by N.K. Jemisin

PRIEST

TV

Meta on Tifa from Final Fantasy VII

Linkspam

Ponyo

Season Three [rewatch]

Technology!

Experimentation with Podcasts

Buffy, Season 2 [rewatch]

Buffy! I've also been re-reading NANA manga

It's a win!

Little House: The Rose Years

Old Town in the Green Groves

Read: An excuse to use my other Harry Potter LJ icon

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

The theme is French

I like media

My blog has not been cracktastic of late. I aim to fix that.

Taken with "Taken"

ashamed