maggie touches grease with her hands

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!

A couple of fun links this morning:

. via newredshoes: MEN. Are you cool? - I seriously wish clothes like in the Eleganza catalogue would come back into fashion. I REALLY HONESTLY DO. People like Andre 3000 could pull that shit off without batting an eyelash.

. via sillysally: The PS22 Chorus (from Staten Island NY, I think?) sings The Smith's "Please Please Please Let Me Get What I Want" with all the passion of their little fifth-grade hearts. Seriously adorbs.




This Brian and Justin icon has nothing to do with this post, I've just been re-watching s3 of QaF and felt nostalgic. Also I wasn't quick enough with the FF button and accidentally watched some scene with Debbie in it that I have managed to successfully avoid for like four years or some shit, and it was even worse than I could have imagined because she said some astonishingly racist thing and proved that I was right to FF all her scenes all these years.

( Oh one more thing: )

Having now 'fessed up about my Warblers hate, I can move on to more interesting things:

A while ago delux_vivens posted about a white male poet being asked about his work by a black female poet, which went down just about as well as you could imagine. (Click on *AWP at Claudia Rankine's website to read Tony Hoagland's poem, Rankine's letter to him, and his reply to her wherein he calls her "naive when it comes to the subject of American racism" [!!!]).

Anyhow, a number of other writers/poets/etc. wrote open letters that are not so much about the exchange in particular but more to do with race representations in the States. The letters are archived at Rankine's site, but if you don't feel like wading through them here's some of the ones I found particularly interesting:

( now with added pull-quotes! )

I thought I'd drop this link from the NFB for anybody interested:

. The National Film Board Celebrates Black History Month

I haven't watched all of these, but "Speakers For the Dead" and "Remember Africville" are both heartwrenching and important.

This whole thing with Yuletide is really bumming me out. Which is incidentally a marker of my own privilege (b/c I wasn't personally affected by it being tied to Christmas in the first place), but at any rate, son I am disappoint. Should anybody who knows how/has the inclination to start up an alternate to Yuletide -- which is the hint I'm getting from the "love it or leave it" wording of that post and the follow-ups from BNF pals in the comments -- I would totally be on board to help out.

Anyhow, I realized I never linked to this, and have to make up for that oversight because homg, a while ago gloss wrote me the Marge/Manjula of my DREAMS for the femslash challenge:

. very deliberately waiting by gloss | the simpsons -- "our children are conspiring against us, did you know that?" {no warnings}

It is awesome not just because it's Manjula and Marge, pitch-perfect and rounded and warm and womanly, but because they're older and there's such a delicate smoke-and-blush feel to all the hard-earned realizations they've come to, the ways they've let themselves settle. I love it so much. I wish all Simpsons fic was like this, EVER. ♥

Also, I posted something I wrote for the horror meme that was going around that was inexplicably 98% Supernatural prompts, but anyway the one I filled was this:

. see you real soon | classic disney -- donald leaves smudges of white and orange wherever he goes. pluto melted long ago, and mickey only has half an ear. they try to redraw themselves with what they can, but is it worth it anymore? {gore, madness, cannibalism}

Er

Sometimes I don't know what's wrong with me, ahahahah

At any rate, DW Inception Kinkmeme! Already 60% more Yusuf and Saito prompts than on the lj version, whoo-hoo! It's good to be a DW academic elitist ivory tower PC-policing offense-taking squee-harshing art-hating overly-demanding censorship bitch.

HI THERE PEOPLES HI

I spent a fabulous whirlwind weekend in the T-Dot attending my cousin Derek's wedding, which was also an informal and wholly lovable reunion for the Sammy side of the fam (as opposed to the unholy and demoralizing Ragnarök that was the Ramkhelawan reunion in Texas). Also my brother took us to Drupati's and in addition to doubles and kurma and Peardrax, I had a motherfucking shark-and-bake. Oh god yes.

Other things that make life good (and apologies for not recalling who linked them originally):

. Cedar & Bamboo, the link between Chinese Canadians and First Nations peoples in Coast Salish Territories/BC. I am so excited about this film I can hardly contain myself.

!!!!!!!

. East West Players' performance of Mysterious Skin: I love JGL in this movie like nobody's business (and am SERIOUSLY glad that Gregg Araki didn't get his usual muse James Duvall to play Neil, *shudder*), but y'all I am just gonna go ahead here and say that right now Asians make everything better to me. GodDAMN I would love to see this production, but will just content myself with being happy that it exists.

. this cat

. this cat

. going to Hell's Gate with the bffs and getting two pounds of free fudge, then going to see Celtic Fantasy (or as we called it, Celtic TUNDERRR) and ditching the church halfway through because there's only so much you can take of hearing somebody's "silver tones" before you start to wish she'd fallen into a cave in the Hebrides a-comin' thro' the rye.

. aang/toph, tim/bart, rizzoli/isles


In conclusion, I love you all.

TODAY EVERYBODY IS ENVIOUS OF ME BECAUSE MY SISTER IS SO AWESOME

Part 2 of Lori's desi!Supernatural comic!!

(if you missed it, Part 1 is here.

eeeeeeeeeeee!!

ETA: she's not just pretty and handy with a pencil, she has very smart things to say. ♥!

. "Dear Ms. Miller: On June 1, you posted a most excellent and helpful piece in The Huffington Post's Living section called "How to Date an Indian (Advice for the Non-Indian)." As someone whose bio states that she has "lived in Mumbai for three years," and who is in a relationship with a man of Indian descent, you are especially well-qualified to advise the rest of the world on the best means to bag a brown man/woman."
- Sepia Mutiny

Sepia Mutiny sometimes pisses me off with the amount of model minority shenanigans that go on in the posts and comments, but goddamn, other times they're right on the money. I still can't bring myself to actually read Miller's HuffPo article for fear of RAGE ANEURYSM.

. in other desis-being-awesome news, Mary Anne Mohanraj's Guest of Honour Speech from Wiscon 34. She's another one I haven't always agreed with, but hot damn, this speech is tremendous.

. Sun Blast Your Shadow, by pearl_o: Zuko, gen, the years after the war. I started reading this not sure if I'd really care -- I love Zuko but have Only Very Specific Versions that I want to read -- and ended up sniffling at my desk all wound up. So yes, good stuff.

. also, if you like Band of Brothers, check out this Winters-Nixon ficlet that alestar wrote. Like the A:tLA fic above, it's terse and tense; but this one has a stoic grime to it that's altogether different.

Apart from that, can anybody tell me anything about those window dual fan things? I'm thinking of getting one for my sliding windows, but I really don't want to have to pop the screen off. Thank you!

. There's an interview up on racebending.com with Larry N. Sapp, a founder of Abilities United Productions. I don't quite agree with everything he says in the article re: other/intersecting marginalized groups (you can see his young white guy privilege when he says that unlike gender, race, or age, disability affects every aspect of one's life), but it's still very much an article and perspective worth reading. Especially for the response he got from James Cameron's camp when he tried to ask them why they didn't use a disabled actor to play the disabled character Jake Sully in Avatar.

. les petits papiers d'annette marnat - the artwork here is so incredible, sophisticated but soft and fairytale, nostalgic and contemporary at the same time. The way she uses the human body is unbelievably evocative; I stared at the one of the breastfeeding mother for like ten minutes. Thanks for linking to it, tammylee!

. today's breakfast was cottage cheese, strawberries, and organic peanut butter pretzels plus a cup of that Starbucks VIA instant coffee (surprisingly good); yesterday was the same except for Scottish Breakfast tea instead of coffee. Let's see how long I can maintain this menu without getting tired of it!