sundries

NY'ers: is someone you like and trust cleaning your apartment? Are they looking for one or two more clients? We're looking for someone for our place and a friend has just lost their person to the rest of their life being over-scheduled. Once a week for our friend's place, probably once every other for ours.

Has anyone else experienced their whole computer freezing and not even doing ctrl-alt-escape when gmail calls to the server for mail? It happened at work for a few hours yesterday and then once again already this morning. Not amused.

Hey, I really, really have to do my taxes tonight.

God, the Torchwood cast is like one giant curtains!fic lately. Good on them. (and, tangentally, thank you to cruentum for the scans that just arrived in my email.

I now have a Dreamwidth account (thanks, thaddeusfavour). I've not much set it up yet, but I'm rm over there too, much to my immense relief. In the short term, the journals will mirror/push to each other. In the long term, who knows. I view it as a disaster preparedness plan.

AmazonFail

this (via gement) and that (from jonquil).

it is always the GLBTQ books, the queer books, the non-normative books that get caught in the glitches, the ham-fisted errors.

(from the first link)

Lambda Rising

A few months into my freshman year of college, I got a job at Lambda Rising, a Washington DC GBLTQ bookstore that has been in business since 1974.

Despite my hope of working on the floor and maybe meeting some people and getting some play that way, I worked upstairs, in the back, in the warehouse dealing with the mail orders.

And they truly were mail orders. People sent us letters or called in with what they wanted and a boy named James (that we all called Millie) and myself spent the day being the first line of contact for the far-flung queers of the world.

As with any customer service job it ranged from ludicrous ("hi, do you have any books about cross-dressing foot-fetishists interested in incest play?" -- and no, I am not making that up, I remember that call!) to heartbreaking (people told us things on the phone: a call about a dying partner would be followed by a call from some virgin teen nervously ordering an anal-sex how-to guide and some lube).

Often, we could only infer the narrative of the orders we packed and shipped, like the man in Alaska who ordered 50 books every six months: we pictured him rationing them in the dark season.

Sometimes the shop manager would buy us ice cream from the gourmet shop downstairs, and we'd take a break from committing evil with the shrink-wrap gun to sit out on the curb and watch the world go by.

Millie introduced me to woo-woos (good drink, bad name) and he was part of a group of boys I ran around with that year, most of them were older than us. I remember one, short and blond and impeccably dressed who when dancing to Deee-lite's "Groove is in the Heart" would change all the lyrics and say "deeee-gusting! deeeee-capitate!" But I don't remember his name. There was also a man in seminary who was our friend, funny and fey Frabrizio with whom I talked Jesuits and Latin.

None of them really knew what to make of me. I wasn't a fag hag. And I wasn't a lesbian. I was a doll they could dress up and make pretty, and I was a girl with little oxblood loafers who desperately wanted to be one of them.

I'm sure they talked about me behind my back: was I secretly straight? was I trans? was I just waiting to actually have sex with a woman before my fashion sense got really bad? Yes, they were those sort of catty gay boys, and it disappoints me now.

But they were my friends. We went dancing together, and they often picked Millie and I up at the store, with a "come, we've been invited to such and such and so and so, and you have money to get home if I get lucky, right?"

It was an amazing life, in the backroom of that bookstore, Millie and I convincing ourselves that we were saving the gay population of isolated states all by our lonesomes.

Things like Amazon have largely obsoleted stores like Lambda Rising (New York, for example, has lost its gay bookstores) and lives and jobs like the ones Millie and I had back in 1990/1991.

Blushing virgins no longer have to make embarrassing phone calls (but oh where shall people confess so to anonymous strangers? the Internet is not the same). Queers in Idaho no longer have to send handwritten notes on lined paper to place their yearly orders. But in the world of Amazon.com's we've lost something, and it's also why #AmazonFail hurts so bad.

wow

Susan Boyle is in her 40s. She lives alone, with her cat, and says she has never been kissed. As a child, she was apparently the target of bullies because of a disability.

And then she went on reality TV in Britain. People were surely expecting a punch line, but probably not this one.

To say that she has a voice and a half seriously understates the case.

http://buzz.yahoo.com/buzzlog/92464?fp=1

via n_decisive

TW fic: New (Jack/Ianto/Andy; NC-17)

Title: New
Pairing: Jack/Ianto/Andy
Author: rm
Rating/Warning: NC-17
Summary: very nearly PWP; Ianto has a thing for what's new
Wordcount: 2,115
Author's Notes: I blame invisible_lift.

( In this, Ianto thinks he prefers to watch, not because he’s a voyeur but because he is cataloging something, capturing something, and it’s something he doesn’t quite get to have anymore. )