sundries

[rm]

I have, for the last two nights, been sleeping with an eye mask on. Our bedroom gets a lot of light from neighboring buildings (our "fake moonlight," we call it) and a lot of sun early in the mornings. I am sleeping much more deeply and for many more hours than I have in the past, and this is exciting. On the other hand, I no longer wake up gradually, but in pitch blackness am completely freaked out by my alarm every momrning. WE'll see how long this experiment lasts.

Some work today, then a friend's bday thingy.

Current auctions at graduate_maria are now closed. I will be doing all the auction close business for those auctions in a bit. Then! Tomorrow, I will post some new items (signed books, a beautiful scarf, etc.) and open those, as well as everything that has yet to receive bids to bidding. Unless you are an auction winner or the sponsor of an auction that has been won, please refrain from commenting over there today for my sanity.

Voting for writerinadrawer round 4.07 is now open.

Some of your answers yesterday about the naming of the Oxford comma were hilarious, but everyone largely agreed that the winner came from roy_batty.

I've neglected to mention that Anne Rice has left organized Christianity because of what she deems its anti-gay, anti-feminist stance. Now, as you all know, some Christian churches fit that description and some don't, but I note this here largely because when I read The Vampire Lestat at twelve, on a dare, my father threatened to have me exorcised, and it was with great glee he reported Rice's conversion to me. I'll surely be hearing about this soon.

Possibly only funny to a certain subset of TW fen: I have an audition next week for a radiotheater-style stage production using material by Lovecraft. I would very much like to book this. ETA: Dammit, dammit, dammit, the show schedule is nearly impossible for me. I could probably make it work, but it might be epically stressful. Currently undecided about what to do.

The Boy Scouts are trying to rebuild their image. Actually, the Girl Scouts are doing a lot of thinking about theirs too.

New York City and the private garage menace.

Last night on Angel and Buffy: Wesley's at his most interesting, at least in terms of how he's written, when he's trying to shape someone into what they need to be to get the job done. He likes his brutal girls, and he likes being brutal to them. I blame the Watchers, but it's still profoundly unsettling -- Justine, Lilah, Faith. And what's he going to do to Fred?

Speaking of Fred, Jesus riding a raptor, can we resolve the Gunn, Fred, WEsley love triangle once and for all?

Also, let me get this straight, Cordy (pregnant with a demon baby) is possessed by an evil entity that seems to be male and is being all affectionate in its own special way towards Angel. The baby may be Connor's or the Beast's and is growing really fast and Connor doesn't think any of this sounds like total crap and WHAT THE FUCK?

On the other hand I love "First Date" over on Buffy, even if the stuff with the Chinese chick was extremely heavy-handed (although I suppose it beats the alternative). Giles shutting Xander the fuck down when he was all "maybe I should turn gay" was so fantastic, SO fantastic, because yes, they all have real things to worry about, and he's being bogglingly offensive, and the moment is so great because Giles, who gets around in every which direction, clearly takes it fucking personally. WIN.

There were also a lot of Spike and Buffy moments I loved in this episode, and I AM SO GLAD THE HOTTIE PRINCIPAL IS NOT EVIL.

I smell burnt toast.

Comments

[elisi]

And what's he going to do to Fred?
Oh Fred is his angel of pure light who's going to save him. *nods wisely*

and WHAT THE FUCK?
*tries to keep straight face* It'll all make sense in the end. (Whether you'll like it or not is a completely different matter.)

Giles shutting Xander the fuck down when he was all "maybe I should turn gay" was so fantastic, SO fantastic, because yes, they all have real things to worry about, and he's being bogglingly offensive, and the moment is so great because Giles, who gets around in every which direction, clearly takes it fucking personally. WIN.
:) (I adore that episode.)

when I read The Vampire Lestat at twelve, on a dare, my father threatened to have me exorcised, and it was with great glee he reported Rice's conversion to me.
Huh. That's... I don't really know what to say.

(I'm procrastinating and shouldn't be here btw. Going away for two weeks on Monday, all 5 of us. And I've not even started thinking about packing yet...)

[dipping_sauce]

I smell burnt toast.

Only my fellow Canadians will understand why this makes me crack up.

[arjache.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, I no longer wake up gradually, but in pitch blackness am completely freaked out by my alarm every momrning.

Oh dear. I imagine having written from the perspective of someone buried alive doesn't help with that.

Personal anecdote: I have a "bivy-sack" sleeping tent, where you have a few feet of clearance for your head only, and the rest roughly sleeping-bag shaped. Every time I've woken up suddenly in the middle of the night, tried to sit up, and instead my face hit the netting has been awful and panic-inducing.

[browneyedgirl65.livejournal.com]

roy_batty definitely won :)

From my southern California perspective, the hooha over the driveways is absolutely baffling. OTOH the tone and language of the arguments sound exactly the same -- over here it's about access to views, height of buildings, etc.

Never thought about that point about Wesley's attraction to strong brutal girls...huh. Makes some later stuff even more interesting, then.

Boy Scouts are trying to rebuild their image.

[lather2002.livejournal.com]

" The principle of voluntarily excluding from an association those who are at odds with the organization’s expressed purpose is as American as apple pie"

[firefly124.livejournal.com]

Oh Fred is his angel of pure light who's going to save him. *nods wisely*

Yep. *nods along*

[sparta5.livejournal.com]

"I have an audition next week for a radiotheater-style stage production using material by Lovecraft. I would very much like to book this."

Oh, wow. I would so love to see this. I may have to start watching flights from SFO to NYC just to see it! :) Please keep us posted....

[redstapler.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, I no longer wake up gradually, but in pitch blackness am completely freaked out by my alarm every morning.

Josh frequently falls asleep while reading, so the light's often on when I'm trying to go to sleep. I have a way of putting a pillow over my head so it just covers my eyes, and it's quite comfortable. In the night, I lose the pillow, so I'm able to wake gradually like I prefer.

Josh hates the pillow thing, though. It freaks him out, and he's scared I'm going to smother myself.

[browneyedgirl65.livejournal.com]

After going thru the scouting articles, a couple random thoughts. Firstly, the parallels between the boy scouts and the catholic church, right down to keeping secret documents on abuse and just shuffling people around or otherwise keeping quiet on scandals is just fascinating in an academic sense (gutwrenching in any other). What is it about male exclusive organizations and young boys that seems to lead straight to this sort of stuff? While I'm sure that women only organizations have their issues as well, I don't see similar patterns emerging.

Also, I'm slightly annoyed at this perception girl scouts is about baking and quiltmaking. We went camping, hiking, horseback riding, the whole nine yards. We had wilderness survival courses (orienteering, building campfires safely, how to conserve body heat & stay put if lost, deal with wild animals. Also, as a troop, the girls can vote on what topics interest them and that they want to learn more about. We did some projects in decorative mosaic and another in building small bookcases.

So I can't help but think that part of the girl scout image problem comes just from being a "girls organization" rather than from what is actually done...

[therealycats.livejournal.com]

because when I read The Vampire Lestat at twelve, on a dare, my father threatened to have me exorcised,

...

Actually I think I remember my mother/grandparents having a similar reaction when IWTV came out (I was about 12 so I couldn't get in to see it alone), and then once I hit high school and dove headfirst into the series I think my grandmother particularly thought I was going to start worshiping Satan. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Anyway, I know the whole "leaving Christianity" thing has less to do with losing her faith in a god and more to do with losing her faith in humanity (not that I care about her faith one way or the other...it's the way it affects her writing that I care about), but when I saw that message pop up on Facebook the other day I did punch the air. I doubt this will steer her writing back to the gothic (and frankly I wish at this point she'd just leave the vampires and the Mayfairs alone and start afresh if she did), but it's always exciting to me when someone in the public eye makes a statement to the effect of, "You see these people who share an identifying term with me? We don't see eye to eye. They're missing the point and misusing it. I'm out."

[therealycats.livejournal.com]

Oh, and you also made a Buffy comment that I didn't see because my eyes are trained to go directly to the word "Lestat" and ignore everything else in its wake.

I can't remember which episode "First Date" is...I know you're at season 7/season 4 now, because I did see the Slayerettes mentioned earlier, so I presume you've at least met Kennedy. Horrible, bratty little twig. (I miss fandom hate!) My dream ending for Willow has her, Oz, and Tara living happily, polyamorously ever after. Alas.

[atrophying]

Also, I'm slightly annoyed at this perception girl scouts is about baking and quiltmaking.

It largely depends on the troop leaders. You had the kind of experience that I begged my troop leaders for. Instead, we did projects that were largely useless (it didn't even rate baking and quiltmaking, which at least are useful), and eschewed camping for stuffing a dozen girls in the VFD hall with a VCR. Our one camping trip was a miserable failure, as I was the only person who knew how to pitch a tent or start a campfire. I quit in disgust and joined 4H instead (ironically, not after asking the Boy Scouts if I could come join them instead. The answer was "no").

As for the Boy Scouts? Quite personally, good fucking riddance. Until they cease with the reactionary politics and get over their policy of discrimination, I'm going to keep rooting for their demise.

[1-mad-squirrel.livejournal.com]

I notice that the Girl Scouts get half as long an article as the Boy Scouts.

Re: Giles "getting around" That's certainly the way it came across with Ethan, with the latter being so arch. That first loaded "Hello Ripper" prompting a gay friend of a friend to exclaim "The are so fucking!"

I kind of wonder if Anthony Head sees it that way, or if anyone has ever had the balls to ask him.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Jane Espenson, I believe, has said she always assumed that Giles and Rayne had been an item at some point, but I don't know the actors' take on it.

If something that seems obvious to me is also the creators' off-screen canon, I'm happy to run with it.

[valarltd.livejournal.com]

*Sigh* so Anne Rice does a fandom flounce when she discovers Jesus Fandom isn't all she thought it was.

Some of us got out years ago over those issues.

Interview with the Vampire has been my daughter's life theme movie since she was about 7. She was 3 the first time she saw any of it, and it was the bit with Louis, Lestat and Claudia walking down the street. She pointed and said "Me, Daddy and Uncle Darren."

[cinnamonteal.livejournal.com]

I read the Boy Scout article first and then went to the Girl Scout article. The title significantly irritated me enough that I'm not sure I read the rest clearly.

I was a Campfire kid for eight years and had to put up with an amazing amount of "wait, you're not a Scout/don't sell cookies" snarkiness from people who were part of neither organization.

[zare-k.livejournal.com]

Ah, Girl Scouts. Projects I remember doing were making sachets and decorating old glass soda bottles with tissue paper strips to make vases. For the latter, we didn't have any soda bottles (my mother generally didn't allow it) so Mom gave me a used wine bottle to use instead. The look on my Mormon troop leader's face was... something. We went camping exactly once. I don't think I got a single useful skill out of that whole experience. I was really jealous of my little brother's boy scout troop-- they went camping all the time and I think I was more interested in some of their projects than he was.

I do hope that my scouting troop was anomalously conservative. I feel iffy about the idea of expanding the Boy Scouts to include girls-- like it's saying that girls can't do anything really cool on their own, and have to ask the boys for permission to come play. That's aside from my issues with the Boy Scouts as an organization-- I am, after all, a bisexual agnostic.

[sanguinity]

:: I AM SO GLAD THE HOTTIE PRINCIPAL IS NOT EVIL. ::

I assume someone has told you already that the hottie principal is the character that deadbrowalking was founded around? The whole community's point, at the beginning, was waiting for resolution to the question of whether he'd end up dead or evil.

[wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com]

You could try setting your phone or computer to quietly play a song you really like as an alarm, starting a fifteen minutes or a half-hour before you really want to wake up, to signal to your brain that your alarm will be sounding soon. Yeah, it's an audible signal, rather than a visual one, but it sounds like what's discomforting to you is the unexpectedness of the alarm.

[penguineggs.livejournal.com]

If anyone gave me a TARDIS, my first stop would be that performance of Rope at the Chichester Festival Theatre in 1993 or whenever; the one which had Head playing Rupert Cavell, and an opening scene where the actors playing Brandon and Granillo (one of whom was a very young Barrowman) nude on stage for the first nine minutes. I've seen Head play Frank n' Furter in the West End and he was outrageously sexy at that.

Which, I suppose, is a long winded way of saying that if homo-erotic subtext was in the Ripper scene, I'd bet good money Head put it there.

[xo-kizzy-xo.livejournal.com]

My scout experience was very similar to yours, minus the camping, unless you count the day camp our council ran every summer. The one thing I did like, though, were the badges. There were general ones that everybody in the troop earned like Cooking and Sewing, but we had the option of working on others on our own if we wished. I always went for the uncommon ones like Astronomy and Weather and Animal Care -- did the requirements myself -- gave them to the leaders, and yeah, earned the badge. I had more fun doing that than sitting in a circle singing dippy songs.

possible alarm clock solutions

[amberite2112.livejournal.com]

my wife has one of these -
http://www.now-zen.com/Digital_Zen_Alarm_Clock.html
and it saves her sanity on a daily basis. the site has lots of nifty stuff, besides.
we tried this one for a while -
http://www.bradfordexchange.com/products/1602780001_alarm-tabletop-clock.html?epm=ctc, but the sounds were not to her liking, and the scent packs caused allergy attacks,so when we split, i ended up with it. the settings are also sorta complex. i still need to look at the instructions to set it properly.
i hope you find something that works for you. alarms can be, well, alarming.

[matthewwdaly.livejournal.com]

The hottie principal isn't not evil either. Now, where is it that we've already seen the African-American slayer that was active in the 1970's....

[copperbadge.livejournal.com]

You know, I bet if the Boy Scout leadership stopped being molster-sheltering homophobic assholes, they'd find a miraculous upswing in membership.

My brother was a scout. The first oath he ever had to take was "I promise to do my best, to do my duty to God and my country, to help other people, and to obey the law of the pack."

It is to this day one of the creepiest things I have ever heard come out of the mouth of a six year old.

Currently undecided about what to do.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

Do!
Stress you can undo, but you can't undo didn't do.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

That's Cub, not Scout, IIRC.
In Canada, it's God and the Queen, btw.

[copperbadge.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think that oath is actually wolf cub, one below whatever actual Cub was, somewhere in amongst Tiger and Webelos.

My brother got up just about to proper boy scout, but our local proper-boy-scout troop leader was not a very nice man, and his wife and my Mum didn't get on, so he dropped out at that point. I think the troop officially dissolved a few years later.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

For two solid minutes!

Re: Boy Scouts are trying to rebuild their image.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

Which would account for scouting having been invented by an English Lord.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

My kid sister went winter camping in the Canadian Rockies.
If the Scouts excluded people for "religious reasons, the y wouldn't be able to claim Royal patronage.
It's like a foreign country up here.

[1-mad-squirrel.livejournal.com]

To me, the homoerotic subtext was more established by Robin Sachs' reading/inflection of his lines, particularly "Hello Ripper".

Re: Boy Scouts are trying to rebuild their image.

[lather2002.livejournal.com]

“There is no such thing as a little freedom. Either you are all free, or you are not free.”
---Walter Cronkite

[kdsorceress.livejournal.com]

As a literally card-carrying girl scout¹, I am so angry that I cannot leave an actual response to that link here, since it would mostly be a lot of undignified (and not camp friendly!) swearing.

~Sor/Origami

1: Lifetime membership card, kept in my wallet, right behind the Boston Museum of Science membership. What? Huge dork? I have no idea what you're referring to...

((Reposted to fix html))

[kdsorceress.livejournal.com]

I do hope that my scouting troop was anomalously conservative

It was. I went camping at least once a year from fourth grade up through twelfth, the last time of which involved my then three girl troop driving ourselves out and camping next door to our leader's other troop, and essentially doing the whole thing without help. I went to London, I've worked at a day camp for the last decade, hell, I even got my first girlfriend through the scouts.

Which is to say, dear GSUSA: Knock it the fuck off, I wanna keep liking your organization.

~Sor

[kdsorceress.livejournal.com]

Also, I really hate to say it, but GSUSA has been doing stupid image things for a while now --there was this whole "brilliant" campaign called "Studio 2B" that replaced earning patches with earning CHARMS FOR YOUR CHARM BRACELET! YAYAYAYAYYA!

...yeah. We were not impressed.

~Sor

[cythewriter.livejournal.com]

This is a few days late, sorry, but I'm actually working at a Boy Scout camp, so I thought I might comment on the BSA thing.

Before my job, I had to take a whole Youth Protection course, and frankly, a lot of it is friggin' ridiculous. Things like always having another adult around, never touching the kids (like, we can barely break up fights), things like that. I'm surprised it's new, though.

Sorry, just a random nobody poking zer head up.