sundries

One of the weirder outgrowths of working on ConSweet, especially amongst friends who have seen some of the text or were there when this thing was birthed in my drunken little head, is that people have a tendency to forward on certain sorts of geek celebrity gossip to me, like this gem about the guy who plays Gregory Goyle in the HP franchise that redstapler sent me. It includes photos of furniture involved in an alleged "sex-romp" during this past weekend's Collectormania.

One of the funny things about ConSweet is that it's not actually about geek!stars behaving badly, although they do, a lot both in RL and in my novel. It's about people finding their feet in lives they never thought they'd have even if they were, in some cases, fantasized about -- sometimes that means in being famous, but it also means in being beautiful, or in being the girl who's dad really wore tinfoil hats and eventually killed himself. It about learning how not to be ashamed and how to have a good time and how to like yourself even if you aren't yet ready to let people love you.

And I figured all that out, because redstapler sent me tawdry gossip. That's fucking AWESOME.

I've never seen my acafen friends as worked up as we all are about Bristol. The abstract deadline is today. Signs indicate we'll known _very_ soon. I'm in a tizzy myself and trying not to think about it. Our collective state of being about this really could be a paper itself, and I'll talk about my own intensity and emotions about it once I know whether or not I'm in.

Need another way to patronize LJ'ers with stores/products/crafts? Visit Mall of ShadeSong.

This Married to the Sea is trufax. Language not safe for work. Image utterly harmless.

If you're not paying attention, and you might not be, since, like Political Outrage Fatigue, you may also have Financial Collapse Fatigue -- the Dubai market/economy is finally taking the dive we've all known it was going to take for a while. The thing is, this will have ripples into the West. Possibly a lot of ripples, since UAE investments (particularly real estate) were one of the "safe" investments when everything else tanked and since Sharia-compliant products have been an increasingly significant strategy for many western financial firms (especially in London). The thing about the UAE in general, and Dubai in particular, is that these markets were always explicitly artificial, and that should have been a warning sign from the beginning. Instead, that artificiality was the lure for Western investors who felt philosophically in sync with the idea that you can just will wealth into permanent being; and you arguably can -- if you're a magician. The folks that make up our global financial markets? Not so much; they are high-rollers that can largely afford the risks of market collapse in the areas in which they play. Sadly, however, financial market collapse effects people way beyond them, including those who don't know they've opted into the market or, in fact, explicitly aren't participating at all.

Speaking of economics: Sex, health insurance and abortion.

Demjanjuk is on trial for Nazi-era war crimes in Munich. I find it eerie. WWII is still happening. Over and over. But it won't be, in our lifetimes. Eventually, there won't just be no one left to testify, there won't be anyone left alive to try. The Demjanjuk case is particularly disturbing because he's actually been tried and convicted before, but that verdict was overturned as a case of mistaken identity. The whole thing is an eerie, eerie mess relying on documents from over sixty years ago.

The new Abney Park album comes out tomorrow. The two preview tracks from it that Robert posted to the band's MySpace (only for you, Abney Park, will I go to fucking MySpace) last night are great. The new sound is very narrative inspiring to me.

I am now on Google Wave. Now, I might just be old-fashioned (my first email program was PINE, and I lament its loss in my life; it was all I needed), but so far, to me, Google Wave is like a useless mutant hybrid of Facebook and Twitter and not as amusing as either. And I don't even like Facebook.

This kitten is so cute you will explode. via the entire Internet.