missjanette

 11/10/09
7:20p


sleep / 1 dream

( You are about to view content that may only be appropriate for adults. )


namfle

 11/10/09
6:11p

Role Model - Showroom Dummies

sleep

( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )


roadnotes

 11/10/09
4:51p


sleep

Happy birthday, Vicki!


myrrhash

 11/10/09
3:03p


sleep

http://www.m14m.net/haberdash/bloglet-archive-2009306235059.php#2009314150347

On the phone with K. She tells me we need basil, peanuts, honey, and ginger ale. I write them down and say goodbye after a few pleasantries. I look at the paper. I have written "basil, pegnuits, money, gin crab."
Comment


rm

 11/10/09
10:46a


sleep / 65 dreams

  • Just got email about my 20th high school reunion. How is that even possible? On the survey about possible dates for it, it offered a list of check-boxes for why we might be attending including things like "reconnecting with friends" and "networking." I resisted saying something intolerably snarky in the "other" box.

  • If you are a New York resident wishing to contact your state senator about the possible gay marriage vote today, Empire State Pride Agenda makes it easy. Thanks [info]regyt. You think, "hey, it's New York, this'll be easy." Wrong, aside from all sorts of weird state politics that this thing has gotten tangled up with, New York is actually a largely conservative state on social issues that just happens to have New York City (and apparently Albany and its environs) attached to it. And then there's this guy. In the Bronx.

  • [info]jimhines has some interesting things to say about unconscious bias and the all-male Publisher's Weekly list.

  • via [info]lipsum: AMA comes out against DADT.

  • Scalzi on why writers are often broke. I can't really emphasize enough how poorly most types of writing pay. Once you have multiple books out that you've earned out your advance on and are providing you with regular meager royalty checks, things start to get better, but do you know how hard it is to develop that sort of income stream? And how long it takes? And I say that as someone who doesn't have a lot stuff out there and still makes more dosh from writing than a lot of writers I know for a variety of weird reasons.

  • Deleted scene from Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. This! This is the universe as it lives in my heart. ETA: new working link

  • Last night, while in the midst of a very bizarre phone call and simultaneously cooking dinner, I accidentally stabbed my thumb with a knife. Today it hurts a tad.

  • Dude makes his garage cosplay PanAm.

  • It bugs me so much that journalists can't seem to figure out the difference between hijab, niqab and burqua.

    		•


    olympia_m

     11/10/09
    12:25p


    sleep

    ( You are about to view content that may only be appropriate for adults. )


    heron61

     11/10/09
    2:30a

    thoughtful

    sleep / 3 dreams

    First, economist Paul Krugman demonstrates that the much acclaimed benefits Ronald Reagan and his wacky economics actually resulted in an economy that has been growing more slowly. In a follow-up, he provides hard data:

    Take the United States, which wasn’t damaged in the war. Take per capita real GDP. Give hostages by taking data from 1950 to 1980, which means including the 1980 recession, but stopping at 2007, so that the current slump isn’t included. Then here’s what you get:

    Growth in per capita real GDP from 1950 to 1980: 2.2 percent per year
    Growth in per capita real GDP from 1980 to 2007: 2.0 percent per year

    Oh, and if we look at real median family income instead, we get:

    Growth from 1950 to 1980: 2.3 percent per year
    Growth from 1980 to 2007: 0.7 percent per year

    Sorry: there’s no measure I can think of by which the U.S. economy has done better since 1980 than it did over an equivalent time span before 1980.
    One again, we see how Reagan and the neocons have done their best to weaken the middle class, while making the rich richer, but also less rich than they would have been under a less vile and idiotic regime.

    Now for the surprising news, the following NYT article was mentioned in Stewart Brand's fascinating new book Whole Earth Discipline. In the article we find
    These new “secondary” forests are emerging in Latin America, Asia and other tropical regions at such a fast pace that the trend has set off a serious debate about whether saving primeval rain forest — an iconic environmental cause — may be less urgent than once thought. By one estimate, for every acre of rain forest cut down each year, more than 50 acres of new forest are growing in the tropics on land that was once farmed, logged or ravaged by natural disaster.
     A bit later on we read
    “Is this a real rain forest?” Dr. Wright asked, walking the land of a former American cacao plantation that was abandoned about 50 years ago, and pointing to fig trees and vast webs of community spiders and howler monkeys.

    “A botanist can look at the trees here and know this is regrowth,” he said. “But the temperature and humidity are right. Look at the number of birds! It works. This is a suitable habitat.”
    I'm ultimately rather unsurprised that given time and people not continuing to mess with it, the Earth heals itself quite well. I rather suspect that global warming would also slow down well faster than we expect - if (and this is a non-trivial if) we significantly reduce our CO2 output.


    olympia_m

     11/10/09
    8:12a


    sleep / 2 dreams

    ( You are about to view content that may only be appropriate for adults. )


    roadnotes

     11/9/09
    10:19p


    sleep / 2 dreams

    Well, the office survived the retreat, and it seems as if everyone came back today cheerful and at least as sane as when they left; this is a good thing. We had a quiet weekend, and tonight's been quiet, too.

    I have discovered that Mattel is making a "Ladies of the 80s" Barbie series; I think I want the Joan Jett one, though the Cyndi Lauper doll is cute, too (http://blogs.citypages.com/gimmenoise/2009/10/joan_jett_cyndi.php -- though it doesn't show the Cyndi doll).

    Pen cleaning, and planning for my birthday. There's a good chance that Greg will be out of the state on the 17th, which puts a slight crimp in my plans, but I'll find something to do to amuse myself then. I might go to John Wesley Harding's Cabinet of Wonders on the 18th, but I'm still dithering about that. What other mischief could I get into?


    rm

     11/9/09
    9:36p


    sleep / 23 dreams

  • [info]ladysisyphus is reading evangelical Protestant sex manuals so you don't have to. Is this where fandom got its obsession with the simultaneous orgasm? That's what I want to know. (I jest people, I jest!)

  • One of the neighborhood garden cats died; it was hit by a car. We are all sad.

  • Hip-hop about Alexander Hamilton in the voice of Aaron Burr. Um, it's actually more awesome than bizarre, which is saying something, because it's pretty bizarre. Found through [info]kalichan who grew up with the guy (the dude performing, not Alexander Hamilton or Aaron Burr, because that would be weird).

  • Patty has alerted me to Sarkozy Facebook shenanigans.

  • She also sent me a link to the New York Times explaning current unemployment rates. If people need an illustration to understand the idea of 1 in 10, our problems are more epic than I can possibly imagine. After that, the charts actually attempt to tell us something we don't know.

  • We're talking about Falco on Twitter.

  • Tomorrow the utter clusterfuck of New York State politics meets the ongoing horror of the struggle for equal marriage rights. Ugh.

  • Also, gay couple kicked out of cab.

    		•


    sola

     11/9/09
    8:23p


    sleep / 2 dreams



    There's something on my head that i'm not sure i can articulate right now:


    - about the individual's process through making, the approach to perfection and the preciousness and appreciation of errors, and the information about the maker contained in them;

    - also segueing through knowing an author through their work when you also know the author, and treading that delicate, public=private space;

    - also how that space seems to evoke the greatest compassion and understanding in me, how standing inside another person's silence-within allows one to draw hundreds of small connections between their disparate ideas that might otherwise take years to come together;

    - and also the false intimacy and stoppered love this exchange-without-exchange creates.


    Gah. Maybe i'll be able to string it together in a cohesive set of paragraphs when i'm not feeling like i've just stolen one of Death's cookies.


    rm

     11/9/09
    7:17p


    sleep / 17 dreams

    http://community.livejournal.com/fandomsecrets/380682.html?thread=209341962#t209341962

    (thanks [info]newsbean for the tip).

    Muahahahaha.


    I just wanted to let you guys know that I have an appointment for Wednesday with my doctor to discuss preventative options with less horrible side effects, and to thank you all for your quick and caring responses. It actually made me cry (but in a good way)


    heron61

     11/9/09
    1:58p

    pleased

    sleep / 8 dreams

    I'm joyfully childfree, but here's a story about raising a child that made me smile. Times are changing. The reaction of the child's parents was positive, but isolated incidents only do so much. However, the reaction of the other parents at the school and of many of the children was a joy to read. This is how culture changes - I'm very hopeful as to what it will look like in 10-15 years. This would not have happened when I was a child, and 20 years ago it would have gone far less well.


    So have any of you tried the biofeedback to help with migraines? I started to when I was with Kaiser but they kept giving me math questions and being the math geek and not having more than 10 seconds to think on the problem with a migraine made me stress out and hurt more. So I quit. I thought it was to be trying to get you to relax and float a ball on the screen or some nonsense.

    That being said, when I have a migraine I found if I am able to be up enough to play a game, if I play bejeweled blitz on facebook, the more pain I am in, the higher my score is. It also makes me use a different part of my brain and actually relaxed me and helps with pain management. Something I need now that I am pregnant and wasn't supposed to get migraines but still am! GRR. Second trimester hell.

    So anyway, I was wondering if you guys had noticed or found if it helped?


    rm

     11/9/09
    8:39a


    sleep / 32 dreams

  • Classmates threaten to beat Richmond gang-rape survivor since it will be her fault if her attackers go to jail.

  • U. of Sydney students set up pro-rape Facebook page.

    (this and previous link via [info]gwyd)

  • Gay couple banned from Wal-Mart for life for _not_ shoplifting, trying to care for their special needs kids, and being unwilling to go into some sort of security area with employees who they say were behaving in a threatening manner.

  • Fandom strife I'm glad to have mostly missed: the ongoing stuff with the ST:U creators; so much stuff that seems to happen around the Supernatural fandom; and something I still can't even make sense of related to Girl Number 9 -- the blessings of being days behind on episodes there.

  • The fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War -- all of that was the end of my childhood. I had just started my senior year of high school and had not gotten to study abroad in Germany as I had wanted (my mother loved German and Austrian art, but I was not to go to such places, was one explanation; cost was another, less likely one; the general lack of autonomy I had a kid was probably high on the list too).

    I remember how much I wished I was brave and had the nerve to just steal my parents' credit cards and run away from home and fly to Berlin. I remember how much I wished my parents were brave and would abruptly decide to take me there to see history happen. The entire 20th-century it sometimes seems, happened in Berlin.

    We watched it on TV at dinner-time instead. And it felt oddly personal to me, but whether it was because of the Jewish daughter of scientists pen-pal I had in the USSR who never wrote back or because I had listened to the begging, desperate sound of David Bowie singing Heroes for possibly every single moment of adolescent anguish I could summon up (an emotional act, oddly, not dissimilar form my obsession with The Pogues -- I could have been someone / well so could anyone / you took my dreams from me when I first found you) I don't know.

    I remember those were the beginning of the years where my parents hated me: for having a boyfriend, for leaving home, for fucking up the way college kids do. A little over a year later I was home from a university not prestigious enough to brag to their friends about and my mother was explaining to me that bisexual people were sluts and my father was accusing me of being a heroin addict because I slept for 27 hours after I'd been awake for over 72 to finish a school project.

    Other things happened too, they threw a friend of mine out who came so as not to be alone on Thanksgiving because they thought he was gay. Later, they did the same with a boyfriend of mine (with whom I was not allowed to be in any room with, even with the door open, without my parents' presence) whom they decided must be gay because he was too thin, and that wasn't what they wanted for me. I wonder how often girls are raised to have no desires but those gifted to them by others; I wonder how often it works.

    After all that, I tried never to go home again -- I took summer classes or stayed with friends as much as I could.

    When the coup in Russia happened in August 1991, though, I was back in my parents' house and my father got up at 4am to yell at me for being so irresponsible as to still be up watching TV.

    "There's a coup in Russia," I said. "They don't know who has the nuclear codes."

    My father got up to watch TV with me then, and woke my mother in case we were all about to die, but he has still never apologized to me for anything in my entire life.

    My parents don't hate me any more, perhaps because the world is less full of the things that scare them; I grew up, and they couldn't stop it -- stuff like that.

    But when the Berlin Wall fell, when the world I grew up with fell apart, I had really wanted it to save me too.

    		•


    heron61

     11/9/09
    2:35a

    pleased

    sleep / 6 dreams

    If anyone is interested in what I think a truly excellent RPG session looks like, here's a well-written RPG.net post about a wonderful gaming session someone just posted. I very much recommend it. The first comment to this post is my response, which includes a brief recounting of two incidents in my own gaming that struck me as similarly wonderful. That's was good gaming is to me. I've had many similar incidents and hope to have many more.


    olympia_m

     11/9/09
    9:58a


    sleep / 4 dreams

    ( You are about to view content that may only be appropriate for adults. )


    rm

     11/8/09
    10:34p


    sleep / 54 dreams

    What's harder, washing cats or herding cats?

    Discuss.


    mister_f

     11/8/09
    9:52p

    :D

    sleep / 2 dreams

    http://cheezburger.com/View.aspx?aid=2819666432:


    olympia_m

     11/8/09
    11:48p


    sleep / 36 dreams

    ( You are about to view content that may only be appropriate for adults. )


    rm

     11/8/09
    5:55p


    sleep / 16 dreams

  • And home Internet is working again!

  • Need a job? [info]copperbadge set up a networking post in his journal.

  • I'm out of my horrible NaNo funk and over 10K. Which like 3K behind, but hey. I ight be able to do more tonight after I work on other deadlines.

  • Am I just hideously old-fashioned for refusing to put up holiday card or wish list things before the day after Thanksgiving? Is everyone else already holiday shopping? Is that why my book is suddenly regularly being ranked better than 2K on Amazon.com? (WHERE IS MY ROYALTY CHECK?)

  • "When the Berlin Wall fell, dear Frau Schubert, I began dreaming migraines": Berlin poems.

  • In America I feel we have often made an art form of selling our souls for meager safety. This whole health care situation is no exception.

  • Looks like New York is the next big gay marriage battleground. I'm not looking forward to this.

  • Gay parents and our child-centric times. Do I detect a weird moment of judgment and yucky double-standards when the article notes "While girls raised by lesbian mothers seem slightly more likely to have more sexual partners, and boys slightly more likely to have fewer, than those raised by heterosexual mothers, neither sex is more likely to suffer from gender confusion nor to identify themselves as gay"?

  • Gender expression and high school: "When a principal asks a boy to leave his handbag at home, is the request an attempt to protect a student from harassment or harassment itself?"

    		•



    Who else is doing it? What's your plot?

    Mine is "Take 90% of Jesse's characters and put most of them in the mafia!!!1!", which is how I'm conneting the post to the topic of the comm.

    Well, and an excerpt, because I always for better if people are interested in my projects/threatening me to continue.



    ( Read more... )


    rm

     11/8/09
    1:35p


    sleep / 38 dreams

    1. Patty cuddles with Pretty Kitty, who is very sweet, but very nervous so if you try to hold her she stands up and walks around. Pretty is a skinny, delicate, normal (as far as it goes) cat. After this photo, the other cat feels neglected and comes over, causing Pretty Kitty to skitter away.

    ( Next, meet Little Kitty. She's a bit scary. )


    olympia_m

     11/8/09
    1:23p


    sleep / 14 dreams

    ( You are about to view content that may only be appropriate for adults. )


    heron61

     11/8/09
    2:05a

    giddy

    sleep / 8 dreams

    Tonight, Becca needed to re-dye her hair with henna (a lengthy and remarkably gloppy experience, I'll stick to conventional dyes when I bother), and so Alice helped her, it was very cute and very loving. As Becca put it in a very pleased & proud tone of voice, "Alice put mud in my hair". Seeing my two wonderful partners together, happy, and being very loving towards one another is one of the greatest gifts my life has given me.


    sola

     11/7/09
    11:56p


    sleep / 2 dreams



    It looks like i may have to bag on NaDruWriNi, because after a wonderful day of kiku viewing, i now appear to have some kind of stomach virus. Yay.


    On the one hand, alcohol may, in fact, kill it. On the other hand, all that's in the house is a very old bottle of port, and a newly discovered bottle of coconut rum, which will itself make me ill in any quantity. Feh.

    Edit: Also found completely forgotten Blavod. Still not touching it, though.


    On the third hand, i took almost 600 pictures at the conservatory, and still missed a bunch of things. I have several things to do before i can get through those, but there were bonsai and palm trees and tiny little takio-drumming girls. <3


    rm

     11/7/09
    10:46p


    sleep / 28 dreams

    Patty likes brussels sprouts and buys them full on the stalk. Today she says that parents repeatedly pointed out this stalk to their children as she walked around town. So this is a little photo essay of life in our kitchen, because in this condition, they don't really fit in our fridge.

    Step 1. Pose.

    ( see the steps! )


    youngraven

     11/7/09
    9:59p


    sleep / 6 dreams

    Taking my cues from apocalypticbob

    Here are the rules:
    Don't take too long to think about it. Fifteen books you've read that will always stick with you, for whatever reasons. This isn't your top 15 canon or even books you'd necessarily recommend, just books that have made their mark on you. First fifteen you can recall in no more than 15 minutes. 

    In no particular order:
    The Dark Is Rising sequence by Susan Cooper
    Let's explore how the supernatural and existentialism can co-exist.

    Watership Down     by Richard Adams
    The mythology the author presents in this one bowlled me over. 

    The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet     by Eleanor Cameron
    'Cos didn't we all once want to build a spaceship out of an old boat and discover an invisible moon?

    Charlotte's Web     by EB White
    This one, I knew off by heart. 

    The Life of Pi by Yann Martel
    But which is the better story?

    Foxfire by Joyce Carol Oates
    It's a bloody good thing she'd not had this one written (and for me to find) in 1983, else it'd have done me right in. 

    In Search of the Craic: One Man's Pub Crawl Through Irish Music by Colin Irwin
    A howl a page. Seriously. I roared.

    Are You Somebody by Nuala O'Faolain
    My Dream of You by Nuala O'Faolain
    O'Faolain has been able to explain things to me about myself in a cultural sense.

    1984 by George Orwell
    I was thinking about this one this very day. :|

    The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
    This was a difficult book for me to read. It was so inaccessible for so very long. 

    The Girl With the Silver Eyes by Willo Davis Roberts
    Read it to bits.

    High Fidelity by Nick Hornby
    I write the way I think; so does this chap. I relate to the fragments and stream of consciousness storytelling.

    Caddie Woodlawn by Carol Ryrie Brink
    I've impressions left from this book; I suspect I read it more than once. I've no real detail left, though.


    olympia_m

     11/7/09
    10:17p


    sleep / 32 dreams

    ( You are about to view content that may only be appropriate for adults. )


    rm

     11/7/09
    3:07p

    The Mountain Goats - Insurance Fraud #2

    sleep / 69 dreams

  • Long post on Quartett later, which will include references to Hypnotoad.

  • Cats with diplomas. via [info]jackolatern.

  • [info]starstealingirl alerted me to the existence of [info]kinkfreezone. Now, I think it's perfectly reasonable for there to be fanfic communities that focus on whatever people are into or not into, and a comm devoted to vanilla fanfic makes perfect sense to me. Assuming you can figure out how to define that. Well [info]kinkfreezone provides its users with a list of kinks that aren't welcome on the community, which, again, you know, FINE, except, you know, maybe kink isn't the best thing to use for some of these things.

    Specifically, the community says "Gender themes (gender confusion; sex changes; genderfucks; hermaphrodites; cross-dressing or other forms of genderbending; drag queens and transvestites; androgyny; forced feminization; butch/femme; tomboys)."

    Department of newsflash:

    1. I am not a kink;
    2. I am not a "genderfuck," but thank you for playing, and, by the way...
    3. What about characters who canonically are or do any of those things (i.e., Desire from Sandman, Pie'oh'Pah from Imajica, etc.) Also the enforcement of gender norms can very much be a kink too.

    Anyway, while I totally get the point of the community, they really may want to take a look at the degree to which their verbiage is a pretty vicious, heteronormative fuck you. Also, there's a ton of other really problematic shit lurking on there as well (all virgins are kinks; apparently so is all rape recovery).

  • One of the front page stories on About.com today? Everything you ever wanted to know about dino sex .
    (Image created by About.com is of two cartoon dino silhouettes kissing; it makes me happy.)

  • Giant bird snags car. Actually not really, but you have to look at this image [info]chickenfried_jo posted.

  • Best headline you're going to see on the Berlin Wall over the next week? The Berlin Wall: A Division Through Time. This article is pretty great, too. I know I will be reading too much nostalgia news next week.

  • Dog run portraits.

  • NaNo is officially getting hard. I remain under quota, but I have been writing every day. I'm currently in the middle of a huge scene that I think actually needs to get even huger and be broken down into a couple of chapters. I realize first drafts are always terrible, and I am trying to convince myself just not to worry, that structure, more richness in B-plot and flow will come in the second draft. I just have to get this done. But it's antithetical to how I work, and I'm hitting the "actually, I think this kinda blows" point, although I think it will be great When and If I Ever Finish It.

    (I had an excerpt up a moment ago but then took it away, because I'm feeling vulnerable and weird about the whole thing).

    		•


    namfle

     11/7/09
    2:53p


    sleep / 9 dreams

    ( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )


    migraines

     (cheryl042)
     11/7/09
    2:15p

    groggy

    sleep

    Yesterday was a good day for me in a series of bad days. I realized that it has been two weeks since my pain level has been at its baseline of 5/6. It's been 7/10 or more for the last several days. I've tried injections of Toradol and Vistaril and I can go up to twice a week as an outpatient. I had one day that the injections worked for about two hours and the next day, it didn't do anything at all! There doesn't seem to be a whole lot that helps for any length of time. Relief is temporary at best. I feel really tired although I don't have any reason to be sleepy. I have discovered that Halcion, Benadryl(Otc), and Zanaflex at bedtime works well for knocking me out for several hours. I don't gradually fall asleep. One minute I'm awake, the next, I'm out like a light. Then, I'm unconscious for 8-10 hours or so. I do not have a drug hangover either. I usuallly don't have  a problem falling asleep. It's staying asleep that's the problem. If I don't have sleep aids, I sleep for about 4 hours max and then wake up. At that point, I'm wide awake and can't fall back to sleep. Feeling sorry for myself today. Sick and tired of being sick and tired!!




    <