maggie touches grease with her hands

What I have always feared re: Facebook has finally come to pass -- a person I last knew in junior high has found me and wants to meet up for tea next time he's in Vancouver!!

This request came very suddenly after two minutes of messaging "whereabouts in Vancouver do you live, we should meet next time I'm there", and omg y'all, you must understand why I am so leery, because this is Trevor C__.

Trevor C__ was an affected, watching kind of boy who was obsessed with Anne Frank in Grade 7, when I was friends with him most. I don't mean he was touched by her story and her bravery. I mean he wanted to play Anne Frank all the time (with him as Anne) and the only decorations in his room were a cross and a pencil crayon reproduction of that photo of Anne Frank from the cover of her autobiography that he ordered one Scholastic book drive year. (I perhaps shouldn't judge him too singularly on that count, since sometimes it seemed to me that most Anglo white boys between the ages of 12 and 19 had a pressing interest in all things Nazi -- either that, or there was a preponderance of the type in my area.)

I was over at his house only a few times because he had a Ghostbusters computer game and a trampoline. Once we had hot dogs on paper Chinet plates which we scrupulously washed and dried afterwards. He had a grandmother in a wheelchair who would hiss for him to come aside while she talked to him about confusing, disturbing things in a piercing whisper, watching me the whole time. If you wanted to play on the trampoline, his father made you sign a waiver that exempted the C__ family from responsibility for not only your possible loss of limb and motor function, but also your "sexual drive".

Welcome to Canadian Gothic, folks.

You can see why I haven't been on Facebook since, heh, even though it seems that he's dampened down the Anne Frank (I still remember how he used to say it, in throaty blocks that he imagined was the correct Dutch pronunciation) and dialed up the Anglophile, having added many precious turns of phrase to his own Facebook entries.

This was a long and possibly quite dull way of saying -- I know nothing about Facebook. If I unfriend him or whatever, does that mean he can no longer see my entries or message me? Help me, Obi-Wan friendslist!!

My brunch avocado is not as ripe as I thought it was! Ah, well -- smooshed up with cream cheese and on a good bagel, it's not bad, anyhow. Plus since it's holidaytime here at the office, I already breakfasted on coffee, homemade shortbread, and a red velvet cupcake. So I can't really complain about my zaboca.

(Also I just looked it up and it seems that only Trinidadians call the avocado a "zaboca"? Hrrm.)

-- aaaaaaand now my ex-program manager has come in and is telling a co-worker about India, since she just got back from a trip there. Also this co-worker is FROM INDIA.

*turns up her music, la la la laaaa*

Getting back into the swing of things re: Dreamwidth posting takes some effort, yo! Although I'm reading and enjoying my circle again, which is lovely -- I've missed the buffet of links that my circle serves up as a matter of course. :)

- If anybody's looking for free online holiday (or any) music, I highly recommend Iceberg Radio! You can even mix a bunch of different stations together for your own personalized channel!

- If you're looking for a tumblr-based DCU roleplay, won't you check out the Justice Lounge? We've been going since February and are quite active, and my co-mod and sister glockgal and I try to keep things running smoothly. It helps that most prospective players who would engage in shenanigans are scared off by our rules, heh.

- I am about to dive into this review of the notorious 50 Shades of Grey, because her review of the "Abe Lincoln, Historical Stud" novel was hilarious!

- Also on the plan: getting my free birthday drink from Starbucks. This is the time of year I drink the most Starbucks due to Pumpkin Spice and Gingerbread Lattes, so yay!

That, friends, accurately sums up how I've been feeling for the better part of the year -- certainly since I totally changed my living situation after constant movement among three different homes, had my first panic attack due to a traumatic social situation, and had the accident at the end of May (on my mom's birthday, hah) that destroyed my precious beloved first car. Being unaccustomed to identifying my mental state as fragile and requiring help (don't even get me started on the stigma in desi communities when it comes to mental health issues), this has been very trying for me to manage.

But! There are hopefully also good things afoot at work and so forth, and living with glockgal has been glorious, and I was reading some of my DW circle and missing you all, so. I'm trying to make a concerted effort to get back into more social media than just RPing on tumblr, which is very fun, but lacks the depth of journaling.

(Of course there are some things about journaling that added to my stress in the first place, but I think now I can probably manage them better after having had some time away, heh.)

So hello again, y'all! Time for me to figure out who's changed their DW name to what!!

I guess I'm in the middle of a comics resurgence? And this time it's the DCU? And it's primarily to do with Green Arrow? (bless you, little rp group that could!)

So anyway, here's a fic about that time Hal and Ollie took a roadtrip across America in a green pickup truck. There's probably some minor continuity wiggles in here, but, eh.

. sky comes tumblin' down | on AO3
green lantern/green arrow - hal jordan/oliver queen, dinah lance
content notes: mild violence. set during the gl/ga tandem issues.

( there's a fine country out there someplace. let's go find it. )

I am trying and trying to get back into the writing thing after a year+ of feeling too miserable to do much. So I figured, why not go back to my roots? Well, not Marvel comicfic, but at least DCU comicfic.

Funny how in my 20s I was obsessed with all things Batfamily, and now that I'm a decade along, it's all Arrows all the time. I like their messiness; it's more expansive and stupid and funny and mundane. Which is what appeals to me as I get older, heh.

Anyhow, I posted on AO3, but I'm also posting here because dammit I'm old-fashioned. *g*

. how to raise a boy and never notice
green arrow - oliver queen, roy harper, lian harper
content notes: mild violence, drug addiction, lousy parenting. Roy Harper written as being half-Dine, half-white. Art by glockgal

( Five things Ollie Queen taught his ward Roy. )

Thank y'all for the very kind virtual housewarming congratulations!!! It's shaping up beautifully. Soon I'll start baking bread on my days off and I'll feel like a milestone has been reached, heh.

As for what I've been doing apart from house and home stuff:

---

Sure, there's hordes of evil to be stopped, people in peril, outer space battles to fight. But in-between, there's a full-service cafeteria and lots of other superheroes to talk to.

Looking for a mature DCU roleplay that allows for heavy plot AND/OR casual interaction? One where it's cool if you want to race/gender/sexuality/etc.-bend some DCU superheroes? Come join us in the Lounge!

|| the justice lounge | rules | faq | character list ||

---

YES, glockgal and I have started a tumblr RPG! Tumblr can be a pretty unwieldy mode of communication, but we wanted something very, VERY casual as opposed to starting a journal-based RPG. So, here's my bullet-point sales pitch:

- race/gender/sexuality/ability/etc.- bending is a-ok!
- minor time commitment, only three comments/posts a week (can be in a conversation)
- what you do is all up to you: plotty action, conversations, writing smut, whatever!
- glockgal is playing Kyle Rayner, so part of her RPing is drawing one of the current characters every day. EVERY. DAY.
- any DC comics character (minus the New 52) or DCAU character (minus Teen Titans and Young Justice) is a-okay!

If you feel curious and wanna check it out, please feel free and ask questions here or on tumblr! Needless to say, we want an RP that's not rife with problematic players and the shenanigans that ensue (don't even ask us about what got said re: "native american names" and "handicapped people" in the RP we ran away from, ugh) so if any of you wonderful, clued in, fun, smart people are interested in joining, we want to encourage you as much as we can.

Did I mention my sister is doing DRAWINGS OF THE CHARACTERS EVERY DAY?!?!

Hope to see you there!

snowflake challenge
.. Day 2
In your own space, post a rec for at least three fanworks that you didn't create.

. the value of daughters by odditycollector - this was spurred by the fridging of Lian Harper over in DC Comics, but the frustration and anger and pain in it relate to so much more when it comes to women's functions in modern media and storytelling.

. very deliberately waiting by gloss | the simpsons, manjula/marge - I can't get enough of this story. Older women in a suburban archetypal US town, empty nests, lost husbands, backgrounds and temperaments completely different, and yet. I stopped watching The Simpsons a few years ago because it became a soulless hipster wasteland, but this story reminds me of all the the sad, enduring, tender sweetness the show had when it was at its best.

. horns of a deer, feet of a tiger by softintelligence | iron man - Tony Stark, growing up Vietnamese-American. I'm not a dude, I'm not Vietnamese, and I'm not US American, but there's still so much to recognize in this. It's beautifully done.

. the third student by schemingreader | sherlock holmes - If you're a person of colour who loves the Holmes stories, it's something of a bittersweet experience because at some point, a person who looks like you will pop up and be described in the most demeaning and ugly ways imaginable. And then you just have to sigh and anesthetize yourself a little bit with the old things-used-to-be-different saw so you can enjoy the rest of the thing. Well, this story gives a voice to one of those prop characters, and does it marvellously.

. 春雨 (spring rain) by mercredigirl | firefly, simon and river tam - One of the things that was worst about Firefly was the lack of main Asian characters, and I always wondered why they couldn't have made the Tams -- I mean, really -- Asian, at least. This story does something with that and what it's like for the Tams in a world where everything is visibly tagged with their culture but the people themselves barely exist.

. every superhero need his theme music by glockgal | batman, hip-hop rpf, pop rpf - Kanye as Batman and Lady Gaga as Mr. Freeze. I don't think I need to say anything more. Except I decided to name the piece, lol.


I think I went for kind of a vague theme here? Heh.

from "Midsummer"

The jet bores like a silverfish through volumes of cloud -
clouds that will keep no record of where we have passed,
nor the sea's mirror, nor the coral busy with its own
culture; they aren't doors of dissolving stone,
but pages in a damp culture that come apart.
So a hole in their parchment opens, and suddenly, in a vast
dereliction of sunlight, there's that island known
to the traveller Trollope, and the fellow traveller Froude,
for making nothing. Not even a people. The jet's shadow
ripples over green jungles as steadily as a minnow
through seaweed. Our sunlight is shared by Rome
and your white paper, Joseph. Here, as everywhere else,
it is the same age. In cities, in settlements of mud,
light has never had epochs. Near the rusty harbor
around Port of Spain bright suburbs fade into words -
Maraval, Diego Martin - the highways long as regrets,
and steeples so tiny you couldn't hear their bells,
nor the sharp exclamation of whitewashed minarets
from green villages. The lowering window resounds
over pages of earth, the canefields set in stanzas.
Skimming over an ocher swamp like a fast cloud of egrets
are nouns that find their branches as simply as birds.
It comes too fast, this shelving sense of home -
canes rushing the wing, a fence; a world that still stands as
the trundling tires keep shaking and shaking the heart.

-- Derek Walcott


saw this on applegnat's journal and oh, i needed it in mine.

Hi, DW Circle, hi!

If you've got Canadians on your flist you've probably seen them pouring rum out for the Honourable Jack Layton, head of the NDP. His passing was a shock to me as well, in that removed-but-significant way that you sometimes feel for public figures who are sort of ... your own. Considering my voting pattern for the last few years in a riding that's desperately Conservative, Layton was definitely one of my own.

Also, after being primarily on Tumblr for the past month or so, here are the things I never want to hear about or see again:

- Dianna Agron & Chord Overstreet
- Homestuck
- Jason Todd
- anything beginning with "That awkward moment when ...." Here's a hint, kids: things like "7 people start to follow you after you post a fic" or "you dance to a song when you're cleaning your room"? THOSE ARE NOT FUCKING AWKWARD. "That awkward moment when you find out what the word 'awkward' actually MEANS", how about that. That awkward moment when SHUT THE FUCK UP