The Last Bastion Of Absurdity

Well, my two-week flood of assessment deadlines is over! Now I have at least three weeks before the next one starts, and I am naturally going to use them to procrastinate.

In TOTALLY UNRELATED NEWS, Portal is free from Steam for another week or so :D

...you guys, I get motion sickness from this game. And it's awesome. I do not even.

So anyway, since handing in my final assignment last Friday I've been tumbling and shooting portals at things and vegging out on the internet, woo! This sluggish state has been partly in response to the freedom from all that writing about socialists and french philosophers and moths, and partly in order to recover from Friday itself, which was approximately 36 hours long. (PS: I totally started this post on Tuesday :P oops!)

( cut for length of the recount and a bunch of random tangents and an aside on the topic of good-touch/bad-touch and uh I got a little carried away...? )

I think I have some sort of persistent opportunistic flu infection that pops right up as soon as my immune system is compromised by stress or leaking or lack of sleep. grah. hate. Also I have had a weird skin reaction to this lotion my gran brought back from Israel. Fuck you, dead sea! However this resulted in hilarious twitter conversation yonder:

jk_rockin: you're allergic to the Dead Sea?
me: Apparently so! This does not bode well for any undead israeli boys that want to sweep me off my feet in the future!
fishmouse: Better a vampire than a zombie anyday.
me: yeah I'm pretty sure EVERYONE is allergic to zombies :P
me: oh man, imagine if you were allergic to the kiss of death! talk about adding insult to injury!
me: MOOHAHAHA, NOW YOU ARE VUN OFF USS! ...and svellink up somesink awful. Armand, is zis supposed to happen!?
jk_rockin: ONE OF US ONE OF US ONE OF US

Further such hilarity occurred IRL last night, when I showed up at Jenn's Batcave (a warehouse full of amazing giant piles of junk, omg I wanted to put on a snorkel and wade in) for adventures with hairdye! But first, a scenic detour to the Shire. "Hey Jenn... I think I am on the wrong train. Where is Panania?"

Anyway I have a red skunk stripe now. Oh did I mention I got a superdykey haircut last friday? I did that, yes. It is. Interesting. I can never quite impress upon a hairdresser that MY HAIR IS A LITTLE CURLY and they keep giving me styles I have to straighten bits of otherwise they look ridic. But anyway I have a red fauxhawk with an S-curl and brown lady-sideburns with almost-shaved cut-outs behind them. I like it but I don't think short and rectangular is really my thing in general - next time I will let my hair grow out much longer before I go in, give them something to work with. On the other hand, it looks excellent under hats! :D

A meme I tagged long ago and forgot about:

Reply to this post asking for words and I'll give you five I associate with you, which you then talk about in an entry on your journal!

From amber!

slam poetry: hahaha I am not sure why you associate this with me? I have done it all of twice. I find it interesting how rhythms are different when you're writing poetry to speak aloud, than to look at on a page. It's a matter of long and short beats, internal rhymes and consonance. Whereas book-poetry is less about how the words sound aloud and more how they look on the page, what kind of beats a space, a line break, an indent create. I think the best poetry combines the two, really, but I can't quite express the process.

Russia: ZE MOTHERLAND. lol. I identify as Russian without any particular tie to the place we call Russia, I think that's common to a lot of immigrant kids like me. It's about the language, the food, some little customs and cartoons. Family history plays a part, too, anyone whose family spent a few generations in the Soviet Union generally has a fairly russo-unique set of "grandpa stories" and interesting familial neuroses.

The actual place is by all accounts a corrupt racist alcoholic winter wonderland, but I'd still like to go back there some time just for the novelty of getting by in a language other than english.

neutral_omens: Ahh that old game. A Good Omens based "let's throw some characters into a place and see what happens" roleplay, albeit much smaller than ones like CFUD and la. We actually got together in OOC-chat and worked out bits of plot :P also, it was HILARIOUS (or maybe I just thought it was because I was sixteen). Angels, wizards, demons, an antichrist and some random bewildered humans in a hotel that used to be a satanic nunnery cum paintball retreat? OH yeah. I played Newt Pulsifer, toying with a proto-accident-field-superpower that has inspired a comic book character who now lives in my head. At some point I will script the first issue and find an artist for that.

Here are some of my favourite threads I was in: John Constantine and Newt Pulsifer vs. the Cellophane Beast was fun times, as was American Gods character Loki prodding Newt's Special Fail Powers. That one also resulted in a hilarious AU drawing based on what else could have fallen through the ceiling (hint: there was nudity).

Amanda Palmer: lol this list was given me before Evelyn Evelyn drama drama went down. I should have done it then, I could have gone on about her voice and lyrics and audacity and ability to connect with people instead of her privilege and public relations failure. And after all I said in the last post I STILL ended up arguing about it with strangers on the internet. God, both sides, too! I guess I am just one of those CAN'T SLEEP, SOMEBODY IS WRONG ON THE INTERNET people, regardless of whether that person agrees with me or not. Well, you know, you don't want people who agree with you to be wrong, do you?

Honestly I am more disappointed in the way Amanda has handled this whole fiasco than with the concept of the record. Like, sure, that was problematic, but as an initial provocation on a scale of 1 to 10 where 1 is accidentally saying "stand up for yourself" to a wheelchair-user and 10 is Spartan social darwinism, Evelyn Evelyn is maaybe a three. She could totally have salvaged that situation, but instead she's managed to make everyone who started off going "amanda I love you but I feel a little uncomfortable with this" feel like she sees no difference between us and people who tried to censor Oasis/think her photography is "goffic snuff porn"/hate her for dating Neil Gaiman (disclaimer yes I know those are all different people). For somebody who has cultivated such a feeling of closeness with her fans that just feels like a bit of a betrayal.

Also I am a little disappointed in the manner in which many people pursued this complaint against her in the first place, but that's a whole essay on effective privilege-checking that I want to save until tempers are less frayed, so that I can use this as a specific in the general case without putting people on the defensive.

And speaking of defensive don't even TALK to me about the people jumping in with "it is your responsibility if you feel offended because we choose our feelings" (more or less verbatim from one) because OH MY GOD. Alternating fury and motts at those people, why must you remind me that just because somebody likes the same stuff as me does not mean they are not a douche? (also mottsy because it reminds me of times when I have leapt to the defense of something without thinking, although I can't recall specific instances right now, but that just makes me paranoid!)

talking-really-fast: it's. a thing I do? XD I think out loud, and thoughtspeed is always faster than we are physically capable of forming words, so sometimes I trip over myself. Also sometimes people say "okay now say that again only use a spacebar" (not in so many words). Aside from that it's not much of a thing one way or another. Now talking really LOUD is a real problem I have, whereby I forget that I have a volume setting that can be adjusted until someone goes OMG STFU MAGGIE. (I feel that is a good note on which to end this post.)

Mwaha! Okay, now it is time for linkspam! First off, remember Formspring? Not sure I ever linked it here. I AM INCREDIBLY FRANK, YOU GUYS: YOU KNOW THIS. Ask me things!

Bee tee dubs, I meant to tell you how awesome the compliments meme was! Some of the people I was thinking of when I wrote about the i'm-so-fat thing and my puzzled flail about it did not comment though, so I had to ambush them on facebook. And while I was there I said what the hell, and got through another twenty or so of my friends. It was amazing! I highly reccommend it, I went to sleep grinning my face off. I turned on my capslock before I started. NOTHING IS AWKWARD WHEN YOU SAY IT IN CAPS LOCK :D

Speaking of Facebook, I thought y'all might find this recent exchange of mine amusing.



It's true, I really would watch Battlestar Gaylactica. Don't lie, you know you would too.

In slightly more Srs Bzns lately, I found this article incredibly interesting. Back when I first read the Zombie Survival Guide in high school I had plans to write up detailed Zombie Contingency Plans for the event of securing my house, my school and a long-term fortress such as an island (because you know. it never hurts to be prepared awesome. I also spent a lot of time trolling the zombie_survival community, but I got tired of it being full of people who had not actually read the book and either took the whole thing too seriously or were obsessed with proving their own points about some strategic detail. Plus: the curse of a thousand American gun nuts!)

I never got beyond vague ideas and a hilarious diagram of my school with zombie-vulnerable points circled, but as part of the long-term plan I was considering data storage. I had some idea of a cool dry cellar in which we'd keep archival computers that could be powered with our generator or even a hand-crank - for all those bits of information we're not sure if we'll need or not. They'd be powered down all the time except when we need to check something, or yearly maintenance I guess. I never got round to doing the research on how long they would last. Things are made pretty disposable these days.

Idle speculation on future archeologists is also a bit of a hobby of mine. Last year there was an archeology thread on the Whitechapel forums, and one user who studies in that area pointed out that the default explanation for Stuff That Baffles Us is to file it under Religious Purposes. I found it amusing to look at modern art pieces and imagine them being dug up in a thousand years by next-civilisation scholars who invent elaborate religious rituals on our behalf to explain them. But gods, is it creepy to think about all those ghost-databanks, lying fallow all over the world for lack of decryption technology.

Think about what's on your hard-drive right now. If that one computer was all some future pastgeek could access, what would they infer about our civilisation?

---

Okay, now MOAR LULZ.

The Worst Sex Scene In Comics. I think I ruptured something giggling at this. (PS it is SFW in the sense that there is clearly sex happening but it's been blackboxed.)

SPEAKING OF SEXYTIEMS. Am I a bit of a perv for finding Venom licking a dude hot? COME ON, GUYS. LOOK AT THAT LITTLE HEAD-TILT. COME ONNNN.

Hope you've got your lulz/srs bzns whiplash neckbrace on because I really like this article about Taylor Swift. Basically assume I am nodding vigorously at everything in that article.

AND FINALLY LET US END WITH STILLLLLL MOOOOAR LUUUUUUUULZ. (via drjon a long time ago)



also it is apparently delurking week! or it was, and can be, like, extended. jussayin.

And OBVIOUSLY I then make my first post in 2010 on the sixteenth of January. I swear I have forgotten how to blog, or something.

So, first things first!

Stories Wot I Wrote For Yuletide

1. My main fic! you said you'd help me disappear, Who Killed Amanda Palmer, 1200 words, for featherlane

2. Madness treat one! And I Said Who Are You Thinking Of, Glee, 937 words, NSFW (oh my god), for pixienotes.

3. Madness treat two! Some folks say there ain't no bears in arkansas, Mirrormask, 408 words, for Angie.


Naturally the porny one has over twice as many hits as the others XD

ALSO: I wrote something for the no_tags fixchange, which I am about to repost here, as well as the WKAP fic - I think I'll leave the treats just on the archive, because one is more a ficlet which I might still expand on and the other is. porn. /o\

I want to rec a heap of other stuff from no_tags but I have not even finished reading all of them yet! So i will save that for then. And I'll be periodically rec'ing yuletide stuff as I go through THOSE, there is SO MUCH FIC, YOU GUYS.

I've also been reading a lot of srs bzns stuff about cultural exportation of conceptions of mental illness and gendered expectations in relationships (I got my mum this book for new year and I highly reccommend it for a feminist analysis of the mars/venus trope) and ~stuff.

Oh and I posted an offer on help_haiti for three lots of epic beta services, despite feelings of insignificance surrounding the whole endeavour - hey, it can't hurt, I guess. Actual monetary donations were problematic because no charity seems to accept paypal for some reason :/ but someone on ontd_startrek finally came up with one. I really have to get that visa debit this summer :P

And ~stuffff has been happening in my life but I am way too behind to document it at this point! In any case I feel like this blog should be less of a "and then this happened and then this happened" sort of place these days. I will still post about hilarious things that happen to me if I can write about it in a narrative way, or as a brief anecdote, but maybe if I don't feel like absolutely everything has to go on here in chronological order I won't have these huge build-ups of pressure and I will actually post more often!

Of course this week I have been lazy and chilled out at home for a few days in a row - even last night when I had no less than three possible events to go to. I guess I just felt kind of burnt out after the last month or two of epic socialising, and wanted to sit around and play facebook scrabble and Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened. Which is... interesting, I guess. I was amused by the opening sequence, which I documented on twitter thus:

@bliumchik: lol Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened begins with Watson rolling around on a bed, moaning "Holmes!"
@bliumchik: Then Holmes bitches all the romance has gone out of the criminal world, & Watson suggests he buy some books of a vague yet specific nature!
@bliumchik: Why does Holmes have a portrait of a random dude petting a creepy little girl on the head and waving?
@bliumchik: Aww, but when I try to walk into Watson's bedroom Holmes says "I have no reason to go there!" ...methinks, protest, too much?
@bliumchik: lolol the pictures on the walls are recycled. Hello again, waving dude and creepy child! I see you have migrated to the hallway!
@bliumchik: Haha the good thing about animating london is that all you need for sky is one grey tone XD
@bliumchik: Why have I just purchased a book about fish?

Then I got stuck in a rosebush. Whoops! Anyway, now I am slightly baffled because I can't figure out if there is more stuff I can click on hidden amidst all the ~scenery or if my next step involves DOING something with the stuff I've found so far.

But tonight I am not being a hermit, but instead going to Die Maschine! Thinking of not wearing my big goth boots this time, though - I wore them to Desiree's Vegan Anachronism birthday party and there was walking around and my feet were very angry at them. Also: lazy, see above.

So the other day I was thinking about that whole SF/F racism kerfuffle again (people who are sick of it feel free to skip this post) and about trying to unpack some of my own unconscious issues. (I would like to note before I start that I am not holding my hand out for Nice White Lady Cookies here, seeing as people have been accused of that throughout and often rightly so. I'm just trying to verbalise this for myself and guess it might be food for thought for somebody else too.) ( cut for rambling )

Okay, okay, I TRIED to stay out of it because I KNEW it would be full of the same old infuriating People Who Just Don't Get It, but I caved. I read up on the blowout currently going by RaceFail 09. And I found to my surprise that I did, in fact, have something to say about it.

Okay, firstly, to get it out of the way, ( my take on writing characters with a different cultural background to my own )

Now, on to the actual controversy. EDIT: I got distracted and ended up waffling about something only vaguely related? So my actual comments about the actual internet kerfuffle are in the next post. *looks sheepish* All right. So. The thing about fantasy is - quick summary of my understanding of the background here before I get into what I think I can actually add to the discussion. The thing about fantasy is that offensive themes are very easy to disguise in it. Mostly subconsciously. Because, of course, it's not our world. Back before anyone was really talking about Coded Language and whatnot it was very easy for someone whose personal worldview was very self-centered to create a fictional world in which all those pesky things which do not fit either don't exist or are warped into something that doesn't make them uncomfortable. It's still easy, it's just nowadays people actually notice and talk about it. And nowadays most good fantasy writers are not quite so blatantly xenophobic as, for example, H. P. Lovecraft. The problem is that most good fantasy writers regardless of race grew up READING fantasy written by white people for whom race was a d'n'd style straitjacket. Like Tolkein, who imagined the whole world to be a cookie-cutter clone stamp of about a hundred acres of British countryside. Can't really blame him. After all, the man lived on an island.

( and some more waffle )

This post has been getting more and more poetically incoherent as the time gets closer to four am. What I'm trying to say is I believe our lack of humility is in part geographic, and our construction of race in opposition, of whiteness and Other, is influenced by that disconnect. (Obviously I realise that non-island nations also have racist and nationalist dialogues. But go and count how many of them are not primarily based on territory, religion or both, go and count how many involve an conflict that did not begin across a national border or a line of scripture.)

And western framing leaks, we impose our ways of dividing society on the rest of the world whether purposefully or otherwise. Information flows OUT from us, and it is SO easy not to look elsewhere, not to look in any other way than this one. Is it any wonder that our fantasy worlds take on that same affect?

I want to see a fantasy Eurasia. I want to see countries upon countries upon ex-empires upon conquerors upon conquered, I want to see DEPTH to the history of fantasy universes, I want to see a character get six completely different Once And Future Exposition speeches from six different Wise Old Folks who live within sixty kilometres of each other. I want to see descriptions of racial characteristics that don't stand out like a sore thumb because everyone but that character defaults to fantasy-caucasian, I want to go through ten characters before one repeats a skin colour. I want friendly four-way arguments about religion in which none of them are barely-disguised Wicca or obviously-coded Christianity or Generic Oriental Philosophy X.

...

Possibly what I want is more Ursula K. Le Guin. Yes, I do! I want people who have learned from her! After all, it's fantasy. If you can write anywhere full of anyone, why write Grandad Tolkein's Good Old Days?

And apparently by "tomorrow" I mean "unspecified date in the future" lol. Uh I just thought I should pop on and let y'all know I am not in the part of my country which is just slightly a little bit on fire at the moment, nor the bit that's underwater. It's actually raining lightly here, but I am nevertheless regarding it suspiciously. I totally didn't hear about it till last night as I stayed up watching South Park at Stan's place and then ended up staying there the whole next day. We watched a hilarious Russian movie in which a young Finnish bloke called Rayval gets his Russian friend to take him along on a Real Russian Hunting Trip. Featuring Sweaty Naked Dudes Vs. Drunk Bear for your entertainment. Wonderful! (Also for SOME REASON we ended up googling sexual positions for pregnant women. Look I DON'T KNOW OKAY. And for the record "pregnant sex" = terrible choice of search terms, Stan.)

And then I came home and the death toll was in the hundreds. It was rather unsettling. Anyway I don't know anyone who's in danger or lost stuff (according to drjon there's info on donations and stuff here) so... I guess I'm just gonna go right ahead with the belated Forster post. But, holy crap, shit down there is just fucking razed, you guys. Holy crap.

( for anyone who cares about my hilarious beachside adventures with Nicky )

Anyway, that was that. For once I actually wrote about a long offline period instead of putting it off so long I forgot about it!

In other news, Lily finally sent me the file for one of the songs we recorded at her place a few weeks ago. Bone Weather, rough acoustic version. What do you guys think!? I sort of need to work on my low-pitch wail. Or, you know, warm up at all :P now, to find a drummer and a bassist! Also hopefully a keyboardist/second guitarist, but we could do a band comp without those. It's really lame to go onstage without a drummer.

So I got bored and decided to look up my first school, right... oh, wikipedia.

I don't know I just got to thinking about how life would have turned out if we hadn't moved - I'm still in touch with two people who went to that school because they were family friends, but that's all. Then I got to thinking about that point in my life in general and I realised that I had two friends who lived on my block, and I can't recall their names or faces. I think the boy might have been called Zach but I'm not sure. I don't think they went to that school. I have a fuzzy memory or possibly just a memory of a memory, in which we climbed through a hole made by a missing board in a wooden fence. There was a large trampoline in somebody's backyard, I can't remember if this was someone we knew or not. And... that's it. Two or three years and it boils down to that.

Does it ever frighten you how much of our childhoods we just lose to the ether?

---

So I'm liking Jawbreaker... aside from the vocals. I hate it when that happens - a band has good lyrics but I can't listen to them because the singer sounds like he's on his sixth consecutive hour at the karaoke machine. Voice is pretty much a dealbreaker for me - sometimes a voice can grow on you but... yeah.

PS: lulz from Reddit via Stan.

Okay, let's try this again with less crazy.

( no really. Actual discussion this time. )

There's still nothing so beautiful as the sky. It was cloudy on that horizon, but there was a perfect translucent diamond, like curtains drawing open, that the sun passed through just before setting. The clouds were a carpet of pink shading to orange, like a viscous cocktail spilled across the sky, or a messy heap of fairy floss, cushioning the bright yellow circle of the sun that leaves blue-black bruises wherever you next look, so that when you stare directly at it you fancy you can see the dark outline of endless space shining behind what you keep reminding yourself is a giant ball of flaming gases, millions of everything away. Eight and a half minutes.

The wind bites at your face with salt sea spray and you stare across the bay in tandem with a fisherman and a family down on the rocks ahead, and a man behind you - just sitting in his parked car, windows open, watching the sky smolder. The sun is just a semicircle now, peeking farewell over the high, dark clouds. Beneath them, on the opposite shore, a paler and heavier mass creeps inexorably towards you - the edge of the storm is visible in the sky and on the water, where a slight change in colour denotes the border between rain and shine. The thin strip of water churned white by raindrops gets noticeably wider, and the clouds are racing now, so close you can see the huge gap between the charcoal clouds above and the milky top of the raincloud, gray colour bled to the bottom. It roils and seethes, spilling across the sky, and lightning flashes beneath it like bright trees sprouting from the waves.

We run to the car, but I leave the window open as we drive away, still gazing back in wonder. It's been too long since I was truly outside, not just walking to somewhere, and beneath a sky that's other than uniform blue and a sun not too bright to look at. This is what drives us into the mountains and onto the oceans, this is the lure of the horizon, the call of the siren, the weight by which you measure love. To sit beneath the sky is all anyone can ask for.