Yuletide recs: Hair, Lost Boys, Predatory Wasp, Zombieland, Elfquest, Vorkosigan, Valdemar, Wrinkle in Time series

Apparently, I'm willing to tolerate some fairly extreme spelling errors in Yuletide fics. You have been warned.

( 9 recs )

Now off to read Rocky Horror fic, the rest of the Vorkosigan & Elfquest stories, and LOLcats fic. Want to follow along? Yuletide 2009 Fandoms list.

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AO3's servers are pretty hard-hit. So if you've read your story, and read your recipient's comment... try to back off a bit, and let those who haven't gotten in get a chance? (I know, too much to read.)

What I'll be doing instead? Reading Yuletide recs & squee at Dreamwidth. How?

The Dreamwidth content search page. (I forget if this is a paid-users only feature.) I don't have to stick to my friendspages and friends-of-friends... I can *search the whole site* for posts containing the word "yuletide." This is the coolest feature ever. Okay, maybe not "ever," but today, and for the next week, it's the one I'll be getting the most mileage out of, the one that convinces me that DW is light-years beyond LJ in sheer *usefuleness*. SITE SEARCH BY KEYWORD. Yaaaay!

Search is opt-in for people who have robot spidering off, and opt-out for those who have it on. The default assumption is that, if you're willing to have Google see your posts, you're willing to have DW users see them; if you're not, you have to give permission.

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Pinch Hits problem--Yahoo, in their demented desire to provide smooth service, has arranged it so that if you send lots of emails too quickly, they suspend your account on suspicion of being an auto-responder.

So elynross, YT admin & manager of the <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/yuletide_pinch_hit/">pinch hits yahoogroup</a>, is $#@%! locked out of her account for sending out a couple-dozen pinch hits in the space of a few minutes. People who speak Yahoo!Mgmt have said this will be fixed... but it may take 24 hours.

Grr.

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Done, beta'd, posted! With more than 46 hours to spare! (Erm. Could've posted yesterday; wanted to tackle strange new archive settings when I was rested.)

Invisible, anonymous Yuletide collection sitting at 440 works now. Was at 307 when I posted a little while ago. Wow. Gonna be a lot of manic posting, mm-hmm. (The code wasn't ready until a day or two ago.)

I haven't been the site enough so I hadn't seen the adorable AO3 logo now visible on the front page. Is a squee icon!

If anyone who isn't doing YT wants an AO3 invite, just let me know. (Not that I'd forbid them to YT people, but YT is sending those invites.)

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Oh, look. LJ Gender Fail! Which I get to catch at the VERY BEGINNING. First round of linkspam, with no promise of more 'cos I'm not sure I'll have time. (And I'm not sure there's a point. User outrage has never stopped the stupid at LJ before; no reason to assume it will now.)

The core issue: LJ is changing its signup requirements (on Dec 17) to demand a gender, instead of allowing "unspecified." The gender options are limited to "male" and "female," despite years of users asking for an "other" option.

Among my objections:
The LJ TOS says, "During registration, all users are required to provide accurate, complete and current information about themselves in all required fields. .... Should LiveJournal suspect that your personal information is not complete, current, or accurate, your account may be subject to suspension or termination."

They are requiring some users to lie to them at registration. Transgender, genderqueer and intersex members could be TOS'd at any time.

Official LJ Post: vadvs at changelog: [livejournal] r16014: LJSUP-5276: add gender field to sing-up ...

+gender.female=Female
+
+gender.male=Male
+
+gender.specify=Specify

Response, with links to history: synecdochic: wow. just .... wow. -- LiveJournal is removing the Unspecified option for the gender field.

( ~10 more posts under the cut; no doubt many more to come in the next couple of days. )

Hashtag it #genderfail and tweet away.
If anyone would like a DW invite, I have several.

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legaldocs is made, and I've posted two rulings & an intro sticky post.

Suggestions welcome. Requests welcome. (Point me at online source for a PDF, or email it to me.) Docs in PDF form are more likely to get done than rulings that already exist somewhere else in HTML format. I've got a handful more I want to convert (In re Marriage Cases; Perez v Sharp; the recent CIA torture memos), but not much else.

Haven't quite decided what I'm doing with it, and I don't expect any huge audience, but it's there.

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I'm thinking about creating a DW comm (because comms are free, and people-journals cost an invite) (of which I have plenty several, actually, so maybe I should make a people-journal) (but a comm, I could drag other people in on, hypothetically) (four! four sets of parentheses mid-thought!) to post texts of legal documents. Court docs in the US are in the public domain; I wouldn't need any permissions to do this.

Lots of rulings are released as scanned PDFs, which are readable onscreen but not searchable, not copy-pastable. I like having those in searchable form, and I've converted several to searchable PDF or Word docs for my own use. I'd share them, but I've got nobody to share them with, and no easy way to put them anywhere that people can find them.

It occurs to me that I don't need anyone to share them with. I could post the text to a DW comm, tag them heavily, and let them be an open archive. Could post links to the original PDFs, wherever those happen to reside. (I kinda-sorta have file storage space. It's weird and troublesome.)

Looking for advice/feedback on:
Any legal documents, or themed only? (I was thinking copyright rulings. But gay-marriage rulings would also be useful to have around. Workplace discrimination rulings, ditto. And those CIA torture docs are awful to read. Hmm.)

Rulings only, or include other filings/statements where interesting enough?

What to name the comm? Obviously, Question 1 needs to be answered first; I shouldn't call it copyright_legaldocs if I'm including more than that. (Name should be memorable but not clever enough that it's encroaching on other potential activism. I have no interest in claiming copyfight at this time.) legaldocs is possible. So is legaldoc_texts, or something like that.

Not looking for advice/feedback on:
Whether or not to do this. I think I'd enjoy it, and like having the archive, even if nobody else is interested. I'd like to know if anyone else is interested; I do things a bit differently when I know I have an audience. (I'd tag differently. And take requests; I love doc conversion.)

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It's that time of year again.

Christian & secular winter music are on every speaker in every public venue. The damn TV commercials are semi-filks of those tunes, all tangled together as if nobody's supposed to notice which ones are about The Savior(TM), which ones are about snow & family, which ones are about celebrating life in the coldest, darkest part of the year.

They're tangled in my mind, too. I have fond memories of caroling as a child, and gleefully memorizing lyrics of hymns and pop songs side by side. So when I hear those songs (o come all ye red-nosed reindeer, it's lovely weather for a little drummer up on the rooftop) I'm hit with nostalgia before I sort out the words.

It'd be so *convenient* to hate the songs. I could be one of those Pagan activists who insists on calling it YULE and reminds everyone that holly and mistletoe are not Christian holiday elements, that the decorated tree is a bit of sympathetic magic to trick the land into thinking it's summer. ("See, earth? Green trees. Laden with fruits and berries. It's supposed to be light and warm; get on it already.") I could insist on replying to "merry Christmas" with "happy HOLIDAYS; not everyone is Christian, you know!" But I don't.

I'm not sure why. It's not like I lack activist motivation; I'll rant about copyright law and minor's rights and the evils of Nestle at the drop of a comment. I'm certainly not shy about sneering at Christian privilege, Christian-claimed ownership of public attention, in other situations.

I wonder if my lack of anger here is a sign of hypocrisy (it gives me happy memories therefore I don't object, regardless of how much it clashes with my current ethics), or an awareness that most of the public is fairly oblivious to the religious messages, too.

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Rob came home this evening, and said, "I have something to talk to you about. Some guy showed up at the coast, and said he's a friend of mine." He was busy unpacking the van (model airplanes), so this was scattered over moving planes and boxes of batteries and whatnot into the house.

"Where'd you know him from?"

"I don't. But he said we have something in common."

More moving planes around, hauling in the toolbox & cooler. I make with the little circular hand gestures: c'mon, more, tell me dammit.

"We should be great friends because... we both survived the bitch-slut [Elf]."

( It takes me very little time to figure out who he would have to be. )

I posted an entry at racism_101 called Seeking advice: discussions on topic-focused forums.

The Mobileread thread in question has a full collection of classic racist tropes:

OBAMA MEANS NO MORE RACISM: Are you calling whites in America a "more privileged category"? In what way? What "power" do they have over non-whites? Last I heard, the most powerful man in America and the whole world was black.

AFFIRMATIVE ACTION IS DISCRIMINATION: Hiring someone on basis of race, gender or whatever, instead of going for the best qualified, regardless of race gender or whatever, makes absolutely no sense. (This sentiment was repeated by several people with different and generally more offensive phrasings.)

BUT THEY CALL THEMSELVES BY THOSE WORDS: But if *I* were to use those words, even to close friends, I'd be reviled and castigated.
So if they're so damned offensive, why would those who call them offensive *ever* use them?

MY FAMILY WAS TOO POOR TO BE PRIVILEGED: *MY* parents are - on my mother's side - dirt-poor immigrants from Potato Famine Ireland and - on my father's side - peasant and serf stock from the Austria region. They settled in Montana and northern Ohio where they busted their collective butts off to survive. Privileged? I wish!

I WILL DECIDE WHAT TERMS ARE OFFENSIVE: I think the reason I asked is because the N-word is a racial slur. The I word isn't. Or at least isn't in my area. (Word in question is "Indian," relating to author Sherman Alexie.)

RACISM = BELIEVING RACE MATTERS: Assuming that because someone's race is not white that they are at a disadvantage is bigotry. Hands down.

Aaaaand I've maxed out my boggle-meter on that last one.

Advice on how or whether to continue would be welcome. Sympathetic boggling would also be welcome.

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The post I wrote last night and didn't send 'cos I'd just posted something else and I always feel ridiculous making two posts in an hour:

I like the dressing. Rob makes the best turkey dressing in the world. He makes croutons from sourdough bread & italian dressing, and it's got sausage and ground beef and celery and onions, and chantrelles & crimini mushrooms and cherries and water chestnuts.

And Blossom came down from Wolf Creek and made cranberry relish; yaaay! and I made mashed potatoes, and Gail made apples-and-sweet-potatoes with the recipe Rob got from the WitchesWithBrains yahoogroup, and we had brussels sprouts and candied carrots, and pumpkin pie that Rob made yesterday. And turkey. And gravy made from the turkey drippings.

Mygods I'm stuffed. It's all really, really yummy food. And we'll have leftovers for daaaaayz. Including enough cranberry relish to make piroshkis tomorrow and maybe to have to take to work next week.

And I'm, like, DRUGGED. From the tryptophan. I want to sleep now and wake up... Tuesday. Instead, we have four extra people in our room who are watching the movie "Crowley" while I try to find new fanfic.

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I put together a list of Pagan terms for use by nonpagans, specifically writers, at writing_religion: Pagan terminology for nonpagan writers.

It's about 2700 words long. I'd welcome any feedback or questions; part of me thinks it's okay, and part thinks it's about 1/3 done and needs at total rewrite--but if I waited until I thought it was "finished," I'd never get it posted. And there really isn't enough info available *about* Pagans that's not written for people who are joining/members of Pagan religions.

And incompleteness is not necessarily wrong, in this case. It's more important to me that nonpagans understand the complexity of the issues than that they learn the details involved.

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Hmm. I'm not finding a couple of the blog posts I'd spotted yesterday, that aren't related to the adult privs checklist but were about child agency and the concept that kids, acting like kids, in public, is something the public should just deal with--kids are people, and age-appropriate behavior isn't something that should be kept out of sight of nonparents.

Some of these have fascinating comment threads. And by "fascinating," I mean "soaked in privilege and offensive as hell."

Related but not necessarily connected posts:
Nov 3, Noble Savage: On Child Hate and Feminism "Participating in child-bashing is participating in the oppression of a vulnerable group. … admitting that motherhood went from overrated to undervalued in 40 years flat isn’t something many of us want to acknowledge."

Oct 23, Look Left of the Pleiades: People who dance between tables "Having a need for age-specific support should not make anyone any less human."

Apr 23, Have A Lovely Time: I'm sorry, does my children's presence offend you? "HOW do you cope when your arrival leads to an immediate and sharp intake of breath from the other customers?"

Aug 8, Syracuse.com opinion blog: Discrimination against special needs is unacceptable "They had just as much a right to patronize that restaurant as anyone else. They deserved to be welcomed with respect and kindness. This was not the case." (Does not mention whether younger children without disabilities would be equally accepted.)

Adult Privilege Sound-off:
Nov 24, Dr. Helen: Your right to bring your screaming child on a plane ends where the rest of our ears begin. "If a kid does not understand how to act in certain settings, teach him or her or don't put them in that setting until they are older. The world will be a better (and quieter) place."

Nov 24, Tim Cavanaugh at Reason: No Child's Left Behind "here is (very unscientific) evidence that spanking is poised for a comeback" (With special bonus racism in the comments!)

April 8, Guardian: There comes a time when you want to live without children "To buy a property in the village, you have to be 45-plus with no dependent family in tow, and you must sign a contract agreeing not to sell property on to those with children."

ETA: Link back to other Adult Privilege linkspam.

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I may or may not find time to make a coherent post about this anytime soon. This one's important to me; the way we treat children in this country ranges from atrocity to tragedy. But it's late; I have to be up in five and a half hours (because, heh, one of my kids does not mesh well with public school). As a placeholder, have some linkspam:

Nov 16 @ Shut Up, Sit Down: Adult Privilege Checklist

Reading a post by Elena Perez at California NOW made me think about privilege checklists (like the Male Privilege Checklist and the White Privilege Checklist, for example) and I came to the realisation that, as yet, nobody had written an adult privilege checklist. So with some help from my good friend Jenny, using some of Elena Perez’s ideas from the aforementioned post, I set about writing the Adult Privilege Checklist.

Background; older posts:
April 13, Mothers For Women's Lib: You’ll never truly be “child free”

Oct 22, Raising My Boychick: Dancing between the tables: on the personhood of children

Nov 11, California NOW: Feminist Parenting: The Larger Picture

Nov 4, Left of the Pleiades: Dear Kate Harding

Reactions:
naraht: Adult privilege

hl: The Opression of Chilhood. In which I try for emotionless and hard analysis (and fail)

sqbr: Intersections of youth and other aspects of the kyriarchy

Saraspeaking: Mind. Blown.

flourish: Adult Privilege

prettysock: Adult Privilege Online

Link fwd to More adult priv links.

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In today's "Activism: Ur Doin It Wrong" department, we have accusations that slurs against pagan rituals are racist. Set aside, for the moment, that said slurs don't actually exist. That... give some insight into the mind of the commenter, but isn't, in fact, relevant.

What's relevant is that she thinks Wicca's being insulted, and she's "calling" the supposed insulter on her "racism." (In a community about public transportation. So, um, more than rather severely off-topic all around.)

I don't have an icon that's halfway between "facepalm" and "headdesk." (And I don't want one; that would mean I expect to find *more* stuff like this to post about. Which I'd really rather not.)

Oh, and the comment threads hit Godwin's law, ablism, classism and childfreekiness. And NEVAR AGAIN TEH BURNING TIEMS! A glory of fucktupitude all around.

(I got this from dot_pagan_snark, and it's been on stupid_free, so apologies to people who already know about it. Sharin' the pain, folks; sharin' the pain.)

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Hi, my name's elf, and I have a reading problem.

When most people say "reading problem," they mean "the letters look blurry to me" or "I've been assigned more pages than human eyeballs can absorb this weekend" or "ack, my comprehension of Russian is too low for me to get the right concepts out of this physics paper." It almost never means "I think I've been neglecting other parts of my life for reading."

Because reading isn't considered a dangerous addiction. It has no physical side-effects. It doesn't make the mind slow or incompetent. At no point, in the throes of reading, is one incapable of driving or performing surgery, should one's skills go in those directions. (Well, save for the "must put book down" part. However, after that immediate shift in awareness, one's reflexes and attention are both available to whatever tasks might be at hand.)

And it's not expensive. Nobody sells off his car and formal clothes to get books. Nobody hocks her wedding jewelry. Books--really good books--are available everywhere at prices ranging from "cheap" to "free." And the internet hasn't made that any less true. Entertaining content, informative & educational content, useful, delightful, important content, is free by the terabyte.

And oooh, I want to read it ALL.

( I read a lot. I could read a lot more. )

Hair is on its way to being its proper color again. Just have to sleep on it and rinse it out in the morning. (Brr. We often don't have hot water in the morning; our unit shares a hot water heater with two others.)

Windows Vista apparently doesn't come with an unzip program. I can't unlock ZIP or RAR files. (Somewhere in my portable apps collection is a nice unlock-anything program; I've forgotten the name of it and can't be arsed to figure it out right now, since I can unzip the comics tomorrow.)

We got Dish network. 250 channels, although I gather that some of those might be music channels, and too many of them are sports. Still, lots more than we've had. I watch DishEarth a lot, which is a satellite feed of the earth, with classical music. I like it, but I miss the snow channel.

It's been cold enough recently that both Rob & I wake up with our shoulders tense and knotted in pain. It doesn't go away. I'm taking drugs for pain (erm, Advil; I'm a drug wimp) and it bothers me--I hate taking drugs to alleviate symptoms instead of doing something about the base cause.

Phoenix's school counselors suggest we should get her some philosophy to read. (Her reading skills are off the charts, which I find entirely unsurprising. Also, she's prone to getting randomly existential at her teachers, which disconcerts them.) Any suggestions on good philosophy texts for a 14-year-old who loves Pokemon fanfic and the Poltergeist movies?

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One solid match--yaay!!

Two more that I'm "aware of" more than "familiar with," but could easily get familiar with enough to write.

One I've never heard of.

But I'm off and running on the actual match. Have rough outline in mind, know what canon details I need to check, have looked over my victim's recipient's journal to confirm that my normal writing style isn't likely to send said vic recipient into screaming convulsions (of the unhappy variety).

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My Dear Yuletide Author letter, mentioning my 4 fandoms: Elfquest, Vorkosigan, Wild Cards, & Sime/Gen

My addendum (because I don't know when to quit), offering 33 plotbunnies split across those fandoms. Because I like plotbunnies.

Go, bunnies. Go find fics to nest in. Go find happy Yuletidish authors to nibble on. Go forth & multiply; become 75 fics. And GET OUT OF MY HEAD. There's barely room for me in here.

I'm finding myself annoyingly limited in time for writing & online participation.

I'm planning on posting the script for our Discordian Ritual, since it's just occurred to me that the whole thing will fit in one DW post. (It's not even 5000 words long, but there's fairly extensive formatting involved, and it might not fit in one LJ post.) I have to decide if I just want to format it, or hyperlink it like crazy. Any pointers on the best way to format scripts in HTML would be welcome; it occurs to me that I can't indent hanging lines the way I do in Word. (Anyone who wants a copy of the Word doc--just let me know where to send it.)

I've started an article (which will eventually be a post) about "how I used technology to sock it to the man," inspired by Doctorow's Little Brother, about our encounter with CPS. That one has me terrified; I have to decide, before I get into any details, how much I want to be public. So far, almost all of that is entirely under lock, and the real details are heavily filtered.

There's that "Pagan vocab for nonPagan writers" thing I started to put together. I've got pj's notes on it, and need to incorporate some of those, and get it finished.

I want to put together something on "how to make an ebook from a pbook," with instructions on cutting, scanning, OCR correction, and formatting-for-conversion. I'll put that one in ebooks rather than here, and link to it.

In non-post projects: I'm OCR'ing Elfquest. It occurred to me that, while I like the nice PDFs I made from the images at the official site, it'd be even cooler if I could *search* them. So I'm making a searchable version. It'll take a while; getting all the text readable will be time-consuming. The end result will look the same, but have hidden text behind the pages.

In other news: I got ACS2 to install in Vista, and now have Photoshop, Acrobat 7 Pro, and InDesign on my new computer. Yaaay!

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I've said some very harsh and negative things about the military, mainly because I think some very harsh and negative things about the military. (And if you want to know what those are, pester me to make another post, on a different day. This isn't the time for them.)

My father, who lives with us, is a veteran. He served in Viet Nam because he was drafted; no bold sense of patriotism made him enlist. When he got his notice, he was told by friends and mentors that he had a good chance of getting out of it--he could claim to be a conscientious objector, since he had such a long history of activity in the church, and had attended (or was attending?) a religious college.

He declined to try. Said that, if someone came into his house to try to harm his family, he'd have no objection to killing them, and that should be the line for conscientious objectors. He went off to war. (Or, erm, "police action.") This was, hmm, early 60's? Pre-1965, I believe.

( Details and contemplations behind the cut tag )

This is one of those cute bits of internet fun that I grabbed several years ago, and am glad I did 'cos now I can't find it *anywhere* online. And, um, if it was fwded around mailing lists anonymously, that means it's free to share, right?

After first seeing Microsoft's slogan for its upcoming Windows XP operating system, "it just works," I couldn't help wondering: what were the slogans for all the previous releases? After thinking about it for a while, they became obvious.

Windows 1.0:	Good joke, eh?
Windows 2.0:	Still funny, isn't it?
Windows 286:	Yeah, we're still kidding.
Windows 386:	Going boldly where Desqview has been for years.
Windows 3.0:	It's finally worth buying!
Windows 3.1:	It's finally worth using!
Windows 95:	Going boldly where the Mac has been for years.
Windows 98:	More usable! Less stable!
Windows 98SE:	More stable! Less usable!
Windows ME:	Less usable AND less stable!
NT 1.0:	Give me more hardware! NOW!!!
NT 2.0:	Darn it, I said MORE HARDWARE!!! NOW!!!!
NT 3.0:	Which part of "more hardware" do you not understand?
NT 3.5:	With enough hardware, I'd work. Honest.
NT 4.0:	Does less than Win98 with twice the hardware at one-half the speed.
Windows 2K:	Works almost as well as Windows 98! Honest!
Windows XP:	It just works.

(Anyone got guesses for the slogans for Vista and Win7? "It used to work, but we fixed that for you?")

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I was looking for statistics* about same-sex marriage opposition when I ran across this precious article posted back in June. (Warning for extreme sexism and various other acts of privilege.)

The author--Sam Schulman--goes on at length about what he objects to about same sex marriage, and what he thinks marriage really is. Bolded sections are emphasis added.

The relationship between a same-sex couple, though it involves the enviable joy of living forever with one's soulmate, loyalty, fidelity, warmth, a happy home, shopping, and parenting, is not the same as marriage between a man and a woman, though they enjoy exactly the same cozy virtues. These qualities are awfully nice, but they are emphatically not what marriage fosters, and, even when they do exist, are only a small part of why marriage evolved and what it does.

Got that? It's important. He's tackling the key issue of what is marriage, which is absolutely crucial to any non-religious discussion of and why same-sex couples can't have it. Brace yourself... 'cos he hits the same conclusion about "traditional marriage" that I got, only he thinks it's a good thing.

Marriage, whatever its particular manifestation in a particular culture or epoch, is essentially about who may and who may not have sexual access to a woman when she becomes an adult, and is also about how her adulthood--and sexual accessibility--is defined.

Marriage is not about raising children, or living together and sharing resources, or being a unit in the community. Marriage is about female sexuality--and the control thereof. In case that wasn't obvious from his earlier quotes, he makes sure you understand:

This most profound aspect of marriage--protecting and controlling the sexuality of the child-bearing sex--is its only true reason for being, and it has no equivalent in same-sex marriage.

He also points out that "A same-sex marriage fails utterly to create forbidden relationships." He seems to think they are important--nay, mandatory, because, "without social disapproval of unmarried sex--what kind of madman would seek marriage?" He then goes on to talk about the "kinship" that marriage creates:

Even in modern romantic marriages, a groom becomes the hunting or business partner of his father-in-law and a member of his clubs; a bride becomes an ally of her mother-in-law in controlling her husband. There can, of course, be warm relations between families and their children's same-sex partners, but these come about because of liking, sympathy, and the inherent kindness of many people. A wedding between same-sex lovers does not create the fact (or even the feeling) of kinship between a man and his husband's family; a woman and her wife's kin.

This kinship is important to him--he says

In a world without kinship, women will lose their hard-earned status as sexual beings with personal autonomy and physical security. Children will lose their status as nonsexual beings.

That latter seems like a bit of a red herring, and he doesn't explain it well. But it does tie into some of his other points, about marriage and illicit sexuality and the importance of at least giving lip service to the idea of virginity.

Marriage, to him, is all about men getting access to women's sexuality, and since same-sex marriage turns that concept on its head, it is wrong.And he doesn't even spend much time grumbling about the "wrongness"--he's bitching about how the inevitible failure of same-sex marriage (because marriage can't survive without illicit sexuality and forced kinship) will destroy the last vestiges of men-owning-women marriage.

Umm.

Yay?



* Stats: Specifically, I was trying to find out if the opposition splits equally along gender lines, or if more men oppose same-sex marriage than women. Any relevant research info would be welcome.

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