sundries

Patty has been experimenting with heirloom beans. Last night she made some which, hand to god, taste like baked potatoes with a hint of bacon. Sadly, the texture of beans still squicks me deep into my soul.

supergee is offering a scholarship to this years ICFA. Any over-21 PoC who cannot get university funding to attend ICFA is eligible. This includes airefare, hotel share, conference entrance and meals. More info at his journal.

Pets can get the hamthrax!

CNN asks if you could become a celebrity stalker.

New York's women-only residences.

Wait, wait, WHUT? There's a former Miss California "opposite marriage" Carrie Prejean sex tape?

Waters of Mars! Annoyingly this is airing in the UK when I am in Zurich, and I'm not sure how I'm going to manage to see it, as I'm missing the DWNY viewing gathering. Actually, can anyone get this video to play past the first ten seconds? Anyone have a better link?

Girl Number 9: I'm currently a day behind. So far my verdict is Day 1 = awesome; Day 2 = terrible; Day 3 = good energy, but I don't care. The thing continues to interest me for form and participants, but it's not really my bag. I'm curious if it will pull out something interesting for us in the end. As copperbadge so smartly said, it really is a cross between Law & Order and Saw. I loathe the mere existence of Saw.

Time for a funny story: A few days ago, someone who is in the same fandom as me, and therefore knows or at least meets some of the people who work professionally in that canon, was twittering about posting a new story of hers featuring a character with the same first name as a pro I know. Based on the places I thought she said she was going to post it, I assumed it was RPF about this guy that I'm friends with. Now, I'm totally pro-RPF, but you know, if I saw that, I wouldn't be able to un-see it, and I don't want to think of the dude that way, so despite curiosity, I was resolutely ignoring the issue and even stopped myself from asking her about it. EVENTUALLY, I ran across the fic by accident. It totally was NOT about the guy I know, but a fictional Torchwood character and a gerbil or a hamster or something! When you assume, kids, you make an ass out of U and ME. That's the lesson for today.

So, the new V series. First, confession. I went to college thinking I wanted to be a war reporter because I had convinced myself of that back while watching V when I was twelve and thinking that character Mike Donovan was just the bomb.

Anyway, it's not bad. It's not really good either. Alan Tudyk's Q rating must be off the charts. He's so funny looking, but I watch him and I smile.

I thought the show did a great job of punching the emotional "aliens have arrived and this is what you've always dreamed of" buttons. I hate, as much as I expected, that they've changed the WWII allegory to post-9/11 stuffs. But even more than that, omg, can we not call the Visitors "the V's?" First it's confusing if you also watch True Blood where "V" is vampire blood taken as a drug. Secondly, it has an ugly, awkward cadence. Third, the first time the V gets spray-painted in the original series that means something. But, oh yeah, right, the Resistance metaphors have all been changed. *sigh*

Meanwhile, out in the real world, there's this serial killer situation in Ohio. I feel like it's been getting less media attention than past serial killer things, and I'm curious about in this in a "race in the media" way as the perp and the known victims (only one has been identified so far, and only some of the bodies were recent enough to be demographically identifiable) turn out to be African American. Conventional wisdom says that black serial killers are really rare (this may not be true, however, as a Google on the subject brings up webpages about a ton of different serial killers all listed as "the only known black serial killer"), but while supposed rarity often excites the media, that seems, unsurprisingly, not to be true when it comes to race. I've never worked a crime beat though, but I know some of you have. If anyone can shed light on whether this coverage is as different as I think it is, I'd be interested.

Via reannon: Apparently women make men stupid, but men don't make women stupid -- science says! I can see people extrapolating from this in all sorts of really ugly ways.

Apparently the Yankees won the World Series last night. Normally I pay at least marginal attention to these things, but I didn't notice until this morning.

NaNo! I'm still a bit behind on quota, but I got over a stumbling block last night that was slowing me down, so I'm relieved about that. I also realized that the one critical thing I hadn't done in my advance planning was really lay out when specific things happen in the time line. This is critical in this book, because the timeline is so condensed -- it starts on a Thursday at 6am in L.A. before we move to Chicago, and other than the denoument (which really, could be a lead in for a sequel set in L.A., god help me!) is done by 3pm the following Monday. Time is very precise in this shit. ( more NaNo process and progress blather. )

Building with whole trees.

I'm trying, very hard, not to be politically angry today, as I found it unenjoyable yesterday, both because I literally felt my own blood pressure go up, and because the whole sorry affair involved lots of assumptions that were sort of irrelevant and unhappy-making, so I'm going to cover a few of them below and then let it go, although I'll probably have some more generalized thoughts on queerness in America right now sometime vaguely soonish. ( Read more... )

Yuletide sign-ups are open; I need to get on that.

In less than two months, Patty and I leave for our cruise.

Which reminds me (since Patty asked for cruise book recs yesterday), does anyone have any YA fic recommendations in Spanish? I'm doing a lot of Spanish-language reading for my job lately, and I'd like to continue to develop that skill. Without a dictionary, I think my reading level is probably at about the 8th-grade level, but that's not really easy yet. So I think that's sort of the level of thing I am looking for.

from the vaults

Since today is Guy Fawkes Day, and since we had all sorts of anti-gay misery go down Tuesday/Wednesday and since I just realized most of you have never seen this because my friendslist was about a third the size it is now when I wrote it:


Title: For wherever you go, I will go
Author: rm
Fandom: V for Vendetta
Pairing: Valerie/Ruth
Rating: R

I should really do a podfic of it, as it is well suited to my voice, but it is a difficult story, and I have not reread it in its entirety since it went live on the Yuletide site.