(no subject)
Dec. 29th, 2011 05:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwydion* Someone is murdering sex workers in Detroit possibly using a website to catch them. It makes me sick that the coverage seems to be focused on shutting down web sites instead of how painful the loss of those women is to their families and attempts to capture the piece of human garbage murdering them. To me, that's another way of dehumanizing the real victims here.
* I wrote nearly all of this last night and forgot to post. Greenwick's coming so I'll likely be light on news in the next post.
* Re: My Eye. I rinsed it right away. It hurt all last night, but it wasn't not much worse than a bad allergy day nearly recovered.
* My hair is now long enough in back to make a tiny tail and is tending towards weird shapes when I wake up in the morning.
* The thing about visits from Marine Rob is he always wants to talk about my soldier, which given the way he felt about my soldier and I, both individually and as a couple is not surprising. I don't mind, obviously, but it also means I spend the next week or so thinking about him often. So that's what I've been doing.
* I've been off my vitamins for four months do to the financial situation. The melatonin stopped working as there's not enough be in my diet to work with it. This is also not helping my sleep.
* My issues with the section of the first season of Glee I watched, were as follows: 1. Severe under usage of the more interesting characters in favour of Finn, Quinn, Puck, and Rachel, whose plots were not to my taste. 2. My discomfort with all sorts of elements of the adult plotlines. 3. I have nothing against Rachel's voice, or Finn's for that matter, but I wanted a lot more diversity in who was taking the lead in the musical numbers. I particularly wanted to hear more of Mercedes and Kurt. Corollary, I find Kurt's voice enchanting and they seemed not to want to or no how to use him. 4. It's just not my sense of humor. Nothing wrong with other people liking it, but it just made me uncomfortable. 5. It generally conflicts with some other show I watch. 5. I generally find high school drama boring. Given the kind of drama I had in high School and the whole growing out of it thing;, plus my rather different experience as a whole from that of the folks writing the shows, the characters in them, or the intended audience; and my unusual take on my own experience there, TV versions just seem... irrelevant to my experience. Lives like mine don't end up on TV, generally. Before you ask, yes, I've tried to write fiction based on it, but it simply never works. To weird, too intense, too impossible to explain in a way that makes good art. Instead, I've boiled it down to little non-fiction stories and tidbits I can tell about my life. It's a little like the blind men with the elephant, but it's still more coherent and comprehensible than trying to make a fiction about it.
At the same time, rm's examination of things like gender presentation, orientation, the relation of clothing to character and narrative, etc. in the series is fascinating, and would likely be even more so if I actually watched the show. Also, clips like the one from the Christmas special of Klaine duets charm the hell out of me and if more of the show is like that now, I might actually enjoy it, but to get to the bits I might genuinely like I have to slog through all this other boring stuff for the good bits to make sense. (Clip here: http://lettersfromtitan.tumblr.com/post/14740272628/gleeperformances-let-it-snow-here-have-some)
So I'm going to give it another try. I'm in line at the library to pick up where I left off, and I'll see if I can tolerate it long enough for it to get interesting. Sigh.
* I see the Christians are planning to boycott Bill Maher. Sigh. http://www.examiner.com/humanist-in-national/bill-maher-teases-tim-tebow-christians-boycott-hbo
* On a related note, it genuinely confuses me that so many Christians are claiming that being wished Happy Holidays is a mortal insult, but that it's totally okay for "Christians Mingle" to claim that their company speaks for god. *shudder* I find that claim creepy as all fuck and I'm pretty sure I would have considered it out right blasphemous when I was Christian, but not once did I or my family see anything insulting about Happy holidays as we celebrated New years and had lots of Jewish friends. I find modern evangelical Christianity completely baffling.
* I'm now forgetting which television personality I heard recently saying this, but it was exactly my reaction as someone who spent fourteen years in an Episcopalian school growing up. He was referring to Creationism, and said something like, "I thought Spencer Tracey settled that back in the '30's." It honestly startled be to no end when I left my christian academy for the larger world and discovered that Creationism was not some quaint old timey belief that no one took seriously anymore. My school turned out a lot of future Doctors and scientists, and we were taught evolution and the only exposure to creationism was Inherit the Wind, which we read in English class with our sympathies all on the side of science and sense.
* So I've been watching a lot of odd things as most of my shows are off for the holidays. I ended up watching a documentary on the Globe Trotters. It was fascinating and heartbreaking. Growing up in the '70's, One took the Globe Trotters for granted. They were ubiquitous. They played the stadium, they had their own cartoon, they showed up on random shows like Scooby Doo. Despite me growing up aware of things like Sydney Poitier putting it in his contracts that he not be asked to shoot anything below the Mason Dixon line because of the segregation and racism (They talked him into a one day shoot for In the Heat of the Night. He made an exception because the movie was so important, but they had to ship him in and out the same day, so he didn't have to sleep there), and the crap Sammy Davis Jr. was subjected to, as well as sunset laws and the evil of all the Jim Crow bullshit, it never occurred to me what the Globe Trotters had been through.
Imagine them in the earlier years traveling through rural America, and not just the Jim Crow South either, back when this was the only place for an African American to play pro ball. Imagine them sleeping in the jail because no hotel would take them. Imagine them struggling to find places to serve them food. Imagine them being cheated on the money at levels because the white management felt "a negro didn't need as much money as a white man." Imagine them mobbed in small all white towns by people wanting to see if "it rubbed off." Imagine the sheer guts it took to brave rural Southern sheriffs and sunset laws. If that isn't courage, I don't know what is. I am embarrassed I never thought about it before. Watching Meadowlark Lemon and Curly and the rest do their magic, it never occurred to me to think about the men that came before them and what it took for them all to not just survive, but thrive.
I also missed their early significance, back when they were a real, competitive team. I did not know they invented a whole bunch of things we take for granted, like the slam dunk and crossover dribble, or that there was a time that they were the only team everyone in America had heard of.
Something to think about anyway.
* Am I the only one surprised that Schlock Mercenaries is one of less than a handful of SF things that actually gets that it would require some major mental modification to take a cis man and turn zir into a cis woman? Seriously, so many people writing miss that you can't just switch bodies around on cis folk without extremely intense dysphoria. For the record given Schlock's tech level and far future context, I'm perfectly okay with that sort of intensive modification being possible, in a way I wouldn't in a near future context.
* "Captain Awkward and The Man Who Would Not Break Eye Contact:" http://sexytypewriter.com/2011/02/07/guest-post-3-captain-awkward-and-the-man-who-would-not-break-eye-contact/
* Slatebreakers Middle Grade list: http://slatebreakers.com/2011/12/26/best-of-2011-our-favorite-middle-grade-titles/
* Johnny Humor: http://xkcd-rss.livejournal.com/250317.html
* I wrote nearly all of this last night and forgot to post. Greenwick's coming so I'll likely be light on news in the next post.
* Re: My Eye. I rinsed it right away. It hurt all last night, but it wasn't not much worse than a bad allergy day nearly recovered.
* My hair is now long enough in back to make a tiny tail and is tending towards weird shapes when I wake up in the morning.
* The thing about visits from Marine Rob is he always wants to talk about my soldier, which given the way he felt about my soldier and I, both individually and as a couple is not surprising. I don't mind, obviously, but it also means I spend the next week or so thinking about him often. So that's what I've been doing.
* I've been off my vitamins for four months do to the financial situation. The melatonin stopped working as there's not enough be in my diet to work with it. This is also not helping my sleep.
* My issues with the section of the first season of Glee I watched, were as follows: 1. Severe under usage of the more interesting characters in favour of Finn, Quinn, Puck, and Rachel, whose plots were not to my taste. 2. My discomfort with all sorts of elements of the adult plotlines. 3. I have nothing against Rachel's voice, or Finn's for that matter, but I wanted a lot more diversity in who was taking the lead in the musical numbers. I particularly wanted to hear more of Mercedes and Kurt. Corollary, I find Kurt's voice enchanting and they seemed not to want to or no how to use him. 4. It's just not my sense of humor. Nothing wrong with other people liking it, but it just made me uncomfortable. 5. It generally conflicts with some other show I watch. 5. I generally find high school drama boring. Given the kind of drama I had in high School and the whole growing out of it thing;, plus my rather different experience as a whole from that of the folks writing the shows, the characters in them, or the intended audience; and my unusual take on my own experience there, TV versions just seem... irrelevant to my experience. Lives like mine don't end up on TV, generally. Before you ask, yes, I've tried to write fiction based on it, but it simply never works. To weird, too intense, too impossible to explain in a way that makes good art. Instead, I've boiled it down to little non-fiction stories and tidbits I can tell about my life. It's a little like the blind men with the elephant, but it's still more coherent and comprehensible than trying to make a fiction about it.
At the same time, rm's examination of things like gender presentation, orientation, the relation of clothing to character and narrative, etc. in the series is fascinating, and would likely be even more so if I actually watched the show. Also, clips like the one from the Christmas special of Klaine duets charm the hell out of me and if more of the show is like that now, I might actually enjoy it, but to get to the bits I might genuinely like I have to slog through all this other boring stuff for the good bits to make sense. (Clip here: http://lettersfromtitan.tumblr.com/post/14740272628/gleeperformances-let-it-snow-here-have-some)
So I'm going to give it another try. I'm in line at the library to pick up where I left off, and I'll see if I can tolerate it long enough for it to get interesting. Sigh.
* I see the Christians are planning to boycott Bill Maher. Sigh. http://www.examiner.com/humanist-in-national/bill-maher-teases-tim-tebow-christians-boycott-hbo
* On a related note, it genuinely confuses me that so many Christians are claiming that being wished Happy Holidays is a mortal insult, but that it's totally okay for "Christians Mingle" to claim that their company speaks for god. *shudder* I find that claim creepy as all fuck and I'm pretty sure I would have considered it out right blasphemous when I was Christian, but not once did I or my family see anything insulting about Happy holidays as we celebrated New years and had lots of Jewish friends. I find modern evangelical Christianity completely baffling.
* I'm now forgetting which television personality I heard recently saying this, but it was exactly my reaction as someone who spent fourteen years in an Episcopalian school growing up. He was referring to Creationism, and said something like, "I thought Spencer Tracey settled that back in the '30's." It honestly startled be to no end when I left my christian academy for the larger world and discovered that Creationism was not some quaint old timey belief that no one took seriously anymore. My school turned out a lot of future Doctors and scientists, and we were taught evolution and the only exposure to creationism was Inherit the Wind, which we read in English class with our sympathies all on the side of science and sense.
* So I've been watching a lot of odd things as most of my shows are off for the holidays. I ended up watching a documentary on the Globe Trotters. It was fascinating and heartbreaking. Growing up in the '70's, One took the Globe Trotters for granted. They were ubiquitous. They played the stadium, they had their own cartoon, they showed up on random shows like Scooby Doo. Despite me growing up aware of things like Sydney Poitier putting it in his contracts that he not be asked to shoot anything below the Mason Dixon line because of the segregation and racism (They talked him into a one day shoot for In the Heat of the Night. He made an exception because the movie was so important, but they had to ship him in and out the same day, so he didn't have to sleep there), and the crap Sammy Davis Jr. was subjected to, as well as sunset laws and the evil of all the Jim Crow bullshit, it never occurred to me what the Globe Trotters had been through.
Imagine them in the earlier years traveling through rural America, and not just the Jim Crow South either, back when this was the only place for an African American to play pro ball. Imagine them sleeping in the jail because no hotel would take them. Imagine them struggling to find places to serve them food. Imagine them being cheated on the money at levels because the white management felt "a negro didn't need as much money as a white man." Imagine them mobbed in small all white towns by people wanting to see if "it rubbed off." Imagine the sheer guts it took to brave rural Southern sheriffs and sunset laws. If that isn't courage, I don't know what is. I am embarrassed I never thought about it before. Watching Meadowlark Lemon and Curly and the rest do their magic, it never occurred to me to think about the men that came before them and what it took for them all to not just survive, but thrive.
I also missed their early significance, back when they were a real, competitive team. I did not know they invented a whole bunch of things we take for granted, like the slam dunk and crossover dribble, or that there was a time that they were the only team everyone in America had heard of.
Something to think about anyway.
* Am I the only one surprised that Schlock Mercenaries is one of less than a handful of SF things that actually gets that it would require some major mental modification to take a cis man and turn zir into a cis woman? Seriously, so many people writing miss that you can't just switch bodies around on cis folk without extremely intense dysphoria. For the record given Schlock's tech level and far future context, I'm perfectly okay with that sort of intensive modification being possible, in a way I wouldn't in a near future context.
* "Captain Awkward and The Man Who Would Not Break Eye Contact:" http://sexytypewriter.com/2011/02/07/guest-post-3-captain-awkward-and-the-man-who-would-not-break-eye-contact/
* Slatebreakers Middle Grade list: http://slatebreakers.com/2011/12/26/best-of-2011-our-favorite-middle-grade-titles/
* Johnny Humor: http://xkcd-rss.livejournal.com/250317.html
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(no subject)
Date: 2011-12-30 02:55 am (UTC)Kurt gets HUGE plotline that's written head and shoulders above everything else in the show in season 2. There's even a fan edit that's only Kurt's plotline, if you can't deal with the rest of the show.
S3 is still finding its feet but there are a lot of interesting possibilities at hand.
As far as I am concerned, they haven't stopped underusing Quinn, but they've gotten realistic about Finn's skills at least and Puck has had character growth.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-12-30 04:53 am (UTC)BTW, it's a huge compliment to how interesting your writing about Glee is that I'm willing to give this a second shot. ;)
(no subject)
Date: 2011-12-30 02:57 am (UTC)It's always like this. We remember the names of the serial killers who killed the women, but never the women themselves.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-12-30 04:58 am (UTC)Re: Green River. I watched some of that real time after I moved to the PNW, along with the terrible Vancouver, BC slayings. I have great respect in particular for that detective who kept working the Green River case, often on his own time. It infuriates me that in the BC case, no one much gave a fuck except one reporter and the families of the victims.
I agree that it's the victims and their families who should matter, that it's their stories we should hear and remember.