I saw this Stephen Colbert one a few days ago. And now there's this one with Lance Bass and George Takei and a bunch of other people, some of whom are vaguely familiar which is pretty funny. There are also a ton of parodies on youtube, but tbh, most are not that great (though I did like that one had a talking dog afraid of gay marriage).

Male Submission Art

I saw this site on friendsfriends. It's just what it sounds like: photos and drawings of guys in submissive poses, and is obviously very not safe for work. What makes it really interesting is the analysis that goes with each image. Really smart and insightful stuff.

From one of the images on the front page:

We should each be allowed to pick and choose the expression that we find most suitable for our desires and, despite the fact that the leather community feels foreign to me in many ways, I can still identify with the emotion (if not the activity) depicted in this photograph. The misconceptions about male submission I’m trying to dispel with this site are dangerous because they limit the opportunities submissive men have to find expressions of our submission that are considered acceptable or understood in the wider world. Don’t ever let anyone tell you that these stereotypes don’t affect your bedroom, because they do.

Check out today's post. It's fantasy animal week!

What makes you so great, Unicorn? It just seems like you are a horse with some superglue, big fucking deal. Oh you're on posters all over the walls of pre-teen girls? Seriously, Unicorn, how's that working out for Corey Haim?

1. We went over to my grandparents' house last night for dinner, to visit my aunt and uncle and cousin who were down from Oregon. My mom couldn't come by and pick us up, so we took the bus, and it actually ended up being not that bad. We left an hour before we were supposed to be there, just in case, but it only took like 40 minutes total (however, the 7 came right when we walked up to the stop and we didn't have to wait that long to transfer to the 14, either, so it could have taken the full hour or more if we'd had to wait longer for the bus). The 14 let us off right at Palms so we only had like six blocks or so to walk. Not bad! (Of course most of the times we would be going over there for a family gathering would be weekends or holidays, so the buses wouldn't be running as often and it would probably take longer, so it's a good thing my mom can usually pick us up (and she did take us home after)).

2. I forgot to mention the other day, but we found some really tasty ice cream the last time we went to the little market by us. I can't remember the brand, but they were itty bitty 4 oz cups for like $1.50, and I got one that was saffron and one that was...something that started with an m, but I can't for the life of me remember what it was. Both were really tasty. The m one tasted oddly like red beans, even though that wasn't what it was at all.

3. I've never actually eaten at Quizno's, but this video is awesome.

4. Man, I am really in love with Better Off Ted. Are any of you besides stringedgyre watching it? Every time Portia de Rossi is on the screen, I feel a burst of nostalgic love for Arrested Development (and this video makes me love her even more). But even aside from her, the show is great. I love Lem and Phil, and Ted himself, and the girl he likes whose name I can't remember. This week's episode didn't have Ted's daughter, which I was glad for, because she was the low point of the first episode. I can't stand that character type (the precocious elementary school aged kid who knows everything and gives advice). The show is so much better than that.

5. Still this:

This should be used for instruction. Like: Don't write like this. That's all anyone would need to say. Just don't do it. This guy takes 900 words to describe a woman, and he does it by picking out body parts and then repeating every single "poetic" comparison he ever thought of. All in one go.

It's hard to pick out favorite bits to quote, but some of mine are:

Her tongue was a ferret, an anemone, a fox caught in the teeth of a tiger.

and

Her feet were springs, marmosets or locusts; her toes were snails, they were snails with shells of tears.

and

Her navel winked like a doll's eye, like the eye of a whale, like the drowsy cat.

Also, the fact that the guy's name is Spikenard.

verb_noire is now taking submissions. They are looking for genre fiction (science fiction/fantasy/mystery/romance) featuring a queer characters and/or characters of color (main characters, not sidekicks, natch). They're looking for both short stories and novels. They're also taking poetry and essays. They are accepting work from white authors as well as authors of color.

If you have something to submit, go take a look! Or maybe the fact that there's a market for it will give you new ideas!

It sounds pretty exciting to me.

You can also donate money to help them out. Their statement on that is here.

1. I have oatmeal pumpkin cookies! Instead of the raisins they called for, they have mixed dried fruit. I had a bit of raisins left from the last time I made some, but not anywhere near the cup it called for. But I did have dried apricots and prunes (which I notice are now marketed as "dried plums", because I guess prunes have a bad rep? They are delicious either way!), so I chopped up some of each for the remaining amount. (If we'd had any chocolate chips, I would have substituted those, but we had only peanut butter chips (I don't even know why) and I don't want peanut butter/pumpkin cookies. Those may turn out to be two great tastes that taste great together, but I don't feel like finding out.)

2. I forgot to mention this in yesterday's post, but the Simpson's last night was the first episode aired in HD and they made a brand new opening for it! Not just a new couch gag, which they always have, but the entire opening sequence has been redone and updated with new characters and references (and new artwork, obviously, as the old opening looked ancient compared to the way they're drawn today). You can watch it here, since Fox has decided to finally join the youtube age. The episode itself was all right, though this season as a whole has not been the best.

3. I need this RIGHT NOW THIS MINUTE. It's got Jude Law in drag! It's got Steve Buscemi! (Thankfully NOT in drag.) It's got Eddie Izzard! It sounds like it kind of might suck, but frankly, I don't care.

4. This video is awesome. Someone who's never seen any Star Wars movies tells what they're about. XD

5. Ever since I first heard about mashups I desperately wished someone would do some jpop ones, or really just anything that wasn't English-language music. I have seen one or two Japanese ones since then, but not much and they weren't really songs I was that into. But now I found the blog of a guy who does a bunch of jpop/English and kpop/English mashups. I downloaded two of his albums and there's some really good stuff! I'm looking forward to hearing more. (I will post more about it in my next music post, too.)


Unrelatedly, it's always weird to me when people talk about how young people in fandom are, because whether it's true or not, that's not my perception at all. With LJ fandom the way it is, you can pretty much exist in your own little bubble, and my bubble has always been older fans (even before LJ! True, in Digimon fandom I was one of the oldest by far, but there were a lot of older fans on the old Vampire Chronicles boards, which was my first fanfic fandom). And I don't mean older in bandom terms, which seems to mean like, twenty. I mean people my age (early 30s) and older. Yeah, there's at least one person on my flist still in high school, and there are some college-aged and early twenties. But to me it's still always surprising to learn someone I am interacting with is that young.

Anyway! So people have created a comm, fenopause, which is A. for older fans (especially forty and up, though anyone is welcome), and B. despite the name, not women-only.


In less happy news...

No, no, New Zealand! The way to play out your little rivalry with Australia is not to try and beat them in creating stupid internet laws! It's to look sane in comparison to them!

So anyone accused of copyright infringement will have their internet disconnected, no questions asked. Not only is this stupid because of overly-keen lawyers who send C&Ds to people without any basis for their accusations, but, hello? How could it not occur to these people that this will be massively abused!? People with grudges will report their enemies. People who don't like the content of a site will report its owners. This is so ridiculously easy to take advantage of. D:

This Trader Joe's video + jingle is so awesome it cannot wait for tomorrow's happiness post LEST I FORGET.

How much truth is in that song? So much truth! If you have ever been to Trader Joe's, I'm sure you will agree.

"All your favorite stuff they don't have anymore"

"It's the cars that won't fit in the parking lot"

♥♥♥♥♥♥!!!

XD

I don't usually watch fanvids, but this is officially the best vid ever. It's an SPN vid to the song Jizz in My Pants. Yeah.

telophase went through this steampunk myths and legends contest and picked out a bunch that illustrate non-Western myths and legends. Most steampunk tends to focus on Victorian England (or America), but that doesn't have to be the case. There's a lot of really awesome stuff in here.

One, I was watching this documentary about blacks in Canada. bossymarmalade talks here about this appalling history of that particular area if you want some background. I was able to grit my teeth through the woman who smiled when talking about the big potatoes her family grew on top of the black cemetery, and the man who laughed when talking about using one of the gravestones for homeplate when he and his buddies played baseball on top of the cemetery, but when another man started going on about how if the descendents of the people buried there had cared, they would have come sixty or seventy years ago to try and do something about it, that was when I had to stop the video so I didn't take it out on my poor computer screen, because seriously, wtf!?

And two, in my stack of books to read next, I have Joy Kogawa's Obasan, which is about Japanese-Canadians during WWII. I'm really eager to read it, because while I know a lot about that period in US history, I had no idea that similar things had happened in Canada.

But what both these things made me realise is that it's not just the history of PoC in Canada that I know nothing about, it's the history of Canada, period. I honestly cannot remember a time when we studied Canadian history in school. How can that be? It's not like we learned a lot about Mexico, either, but we definitely studied it some. And certainly Mexico is much more closely tied to California than Canada is (I think most of my Mexican history I learned in elementary school, when the focus of history (or social studies, as it was called) classes was state history and the general southwestern US, rather than the country or world as a whole), but still...

This article appears to be several years old, but should be required reading for anyone writing slash in SGA or SG-1 or any fandom with characters in the US military. Very interesting stuff.

1. This is an interesting article about the "cell phone novel" phenomenon in Japan. If you haven't heard about it, basically in recent years websites have popped up that allow you to post stories from your cell phone. So a lot of people, mainly high school and college aged girls, write novels in chunks on their cell phones and then post to the web and get feedback, etc. And publishers noticed how much traffic these novels were getting and many of the girls ended up getting actual contracts to have their novels published, and they've gone on to become best sellers. The books are kind of crap (usually no editing or thought goes into them, they're kind of just brain-dumps) and their audience is often people who've never read a book before, so there's a lot of "zomg the sky is falling" from literary circles in Japan.

Anyway, I thought this quote was interesting, and could (and has been) said about a lot of fanfic as well:

“From a feminist perspective, for women and girls to be able to speak about themselves is very important," Satoko Kan, a professor who specializes in contemporary women's literature, said."As a method, it leads to the empowerment of girls. But, in terms of content, I find it quite questionable, because it just reinforces norms that are popular in male-dominated culture."

2. This comic made me laugh.

3. I saw a wrecky cake at the grocery store tonight. I snapped a picture with Bruce's camera and submitted it to Cake Wrecks. It wasn't quite their usual level of horribleness, but it was a football cake, so I thought maybe if they're going to do a roundup of Super Bowl themed cakes or something, they might want it. Either way, I was just excited to see something wrecky. I never seem to do.

4. So, there's always a conflict in fandom about mean vs. nice. But today I saw it played out outside of fandom. I'm sure you're all familiar with Cute Overload. Maybe less so with Fuck You, Penguin, as it's not been around as long. I like both of them, though I admit I like Fuck You, Penguin better. See the thing is, Cute Overload posts pictures of cute animals, which I like. But there's not really any amusing commentary, just lots of cutesey babble in babytalk, and if I want to cutesy babble about pets, I'm perfectly capable to doing so myself. Reading someone else's cutesy talk just isn't interesting. So I just scroll through for the pics and ignore any text. Fuck You, Penguin, on the other hand, combines pictures of cute animals with hilarious text. It's all "damn you, puppy, for being so cute!" and stuff like that. I get cute animals and it makes me laugh. Win.

So anyway, it's some blog awards thing now, and both sites are up for the best pet blog category. So Cute Overload makes this post encouraging people to vote and specifically saying they want to beat Fuck You, Penguin. The comments are all eye-roll-tastic self-righteous judgement. I've never seen people with less of a sense of humor than the CO commenters (see all the "cats and racks" wank) and they are in fine form here, with lots of comments about how FYP is a horrible, evil site, just based on the name, because they all specify that they've never been there and never want to because it's so horrible and mean.

And look. Even if these were live animals and not pictures of animals, saying fuck you to them would not be mean, because they do not understand what you're saying. But the point is, the site is not about being mean. It's about enjoying pictures of cute animals while having silly, humorous commentary to go along with it.

So then FYP came back with this post, also encouraging people to vote and specifically mentioning CO, and it's hilarious. This is why I love this site.

And this is so typically the pattern I see in the mean vs. nice debates. Something or someone is declared mean by the self-proclaimed nice people, and that means it's fair game to attack. But attacks (no matter how personal and vicious, as I have seen them get) never make the nice person mean, because it's the mean people who are making them do this.

5. I really need to go to the post office tomorrow. I have 29 books to mail for BookMooch. D: It's filled up three of those reusable grocery bags...

Wow, today was full of ragenating stories.

First off, there's the casting announcement for Avatar. I've never seen the show, but even without watching, I managed to gather that it was about people of color, not about a bunch of white kids. Somehow Hollywood missed that. I think possibly the most eye-twitchingly offensive comment I personally have come across (I'm sure there have been much, much worse, but I have been sticking to safer waters) was this one. Did you know that it's impossible to cast Asians in an English-language film because Asians don't speak English? That there are absolutely no Asians in the world whose first language is English. Not even any kids who've lived in English-speaking countries long enough to be fluent! I mean, jeez. No wonder they had to cast white kids.

This article about how any guy (who's not out as gay) who kisses another guy onscreen gets subjected to the most offensive, ridiculous questions about how it felt to kiss a guy. The article itself is great. It's the questions themselves (and some of the "zomg must protect my masculinity" answers some of the actors give) that are enraging. And since I don't read/watch celebrity interviews, I was unaware of how common this sort of thing was. Also, I never had any feelings one way or the other about David Letterman before, but I sure have a massive hate-on for him (and the audience!) after reading this:

"I didn't want to screw it up," Franco told Letterman on "Late Show" last week.

"See, if it's me, I'm kind of hoping I do screw it up," Letterman shot back. "That's what you want, isn't it?"

"To screw it up?" Franco asked.

"I mean, do you really want to be good at kissing a guy?" Letterman said as his audience howled with delight.

Finally, we have this "call in gay" protest, "which encourages gays and lesbians to 'call in gay' rather than calling in sick". Setting aside the fact that it's unlikely to have any effect, and punishes businesses which hire and/or are run by gays and lesbians, and doesn't take into account that some people might not actually be out at work, the very idea of the protest is just soaking in privilege. Because yeah, of course everyone has jobs with paid vacation and sick time, so you could totally call in "gay" without harming yourself financially or endangering your job. *eyeroll* The people behind this can't even imagine that some people don't get sick time, period. That in order to call in and take time off even when they are legitimately sick, that means they won't get paid. Sometimes it may mean they lose their job. These days, some jobs require you to have a doctor's note to take any sick time, which means you have to be able to go to the doctor, possibly at considerable expense if you don't have insurance.

So yeah. Vein-throbbing, eye-twitching Ragenesday.

At least this is some non-rage-inducing news. A sheriff in Ohion "has ordered deputies to ignore eviction orders when people have nowhere else to live."

I managed to get the tree partly decorated!

But mainly this. I love Wondermark.

Man. Once again, I did not get the tree decorated. The problem is I keep leaving it until really late and then getting too tired and it seems like such a huge project. D: But I did put the lights on. We managed to get one of the other strings working, so it has two, which is plenty, really, especially once it has all the decorations on.

I did get presents wrapped, though! All two of them. XD

I think I posted links to videos of Maru the cat before. He's the one in dire need of boxhab. Anyway, eventually I caved and put the blog on my feeds and enjoy pics and videos of Maru every day, with delightfully babelfishesque captions (it seems after the vids were linked on Cute Overload, the blog owner realised she had a lot of foreigners reading and decided to start translating her comments).

In today's post, Maru thwaps at a calendar and the Japanese text こうしてやる！(Take that!) is translated as "I do it this way!" I foresee a lot of hitting and poking accompanied by "I do it this way!" to come at our house. :D

But my absolute favorite is this post, where Maru gets a crab shell hat:


"But, in fact, this is usable as a hat."

♥


And thanks to everyone for your comments on my post about Tom's hospitalisation.

1. New Killers album! I downloaded it yesterday and have been listening to it straight for twelve hours or so. I really, really like it. Not as much as Sam's Town, but it would be hard to compare to my love for that album.

I've been busy working (got the Jump scans early this week, so did them last night instead of tonight) and thus not really paying attention to individual songs, but so far aside from Human, the ones I like best are Spaceman and Neon Tiger.

The Killers - Day & Age

Oh, and since I mentioned it the other day, here's Beyoncé's new album, too: I Am... Sasha Fierce. My favorites are If I Were a Boy, Halo, Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)*, Sweet Dreams, Hello, and Scared of Lonely.

*Ignore the eyeroll-y lyrics.

Also, also. I have a dump of some albums I uploaded to MU:

Snow Patrol - Songs for Polarbears, When It's All Over, We Still Have to Clear Up, Final Straw, Eyes Open

Travis - 12 Memories, The Boy with No Name

Matthew Sweet - 100% Fun, Blue Sky on Mars, Girlfriend, Sunshine Lies, Altered Beast

2. I added all the manga I've read so far this year to LibraryThing. 156 volumes. They have a bulk uploader, but it only works with Amazon and Amazon UK, not Amazon Japan, so I had to enter them all by hand. D: (The bulk uploader would have saved about half the work, though I still would have had to look each one up to get the ISBN.)

I'm still not sure I actually want to do manga on there, so I may end up just deleting them all. DD: If I do stick with it, I have to add 2005, 2006, and 2007 (nothing before that, because like with with books, that's when I started keeping track of what manga I read each year. I do have a list of all manga I've read EVER, but I don't want to add it if I don't know the year, since it would bother me to have it unorganised). Probably over a hundred each year.

That's not the thing that's making me hesitate, though. It's just that when I have manga and books, the manga are SO overwhelming. Just this year's manga already was more than both the number of read books and unread books I had on there for the past four years! DDD:

But I really like the idea of keeping my manga organised like this (I'm not going to put unread manga on there, though, I don't think. Well, we'll see. XD I may end up wanting to. Get it all over in one go and then when I read something it'll be easy to just change the tags), and maybe if I have manga on there, too, I will be inspired to read more books so they're not so totally drowned out...

3. If you haven't read Bayou, go read now. I had heard about this comic a while ago, but I hadn't realised it was being published online. I just assumed it was a regular comic and as interesting as it sounded, the whole $3-4 for 20 pages thing US comics have going is a little too ridiculous for me, so I pretty much forgot about it. Then last night I saw someone mention that it's getting a print version, and I followed the link to the online version and pretty much devoured it and am now desperately waiting for the next update (it's weekly, apparently).

Here's the summary from the site:

South of the Mason-Dixon Line, lies a strange land of gods and monsters. Born from centuries of slavery, civil war, innocent bloodshed, hate and strife lurks a world parallel to our own. LEE WAGSTAFF is the daughter of a poor, sharecropper in a depression-era, Mississippi Delta town, called Charon. She’s an introspective, brave child and hard labor in the fields has made her sturdy and strong. One day, Lee and her father help the sheriff retrieve the body of a boy who’d been lynched and thrown into the river. Lee dives into the depths to tie a rope around the boy. While under water, she catches a glimpse of a strange world. Ever since that day, Lee hears voices in the trees and rivers. When Lee’s playmate, Lily, is snatched by BOG, an evil inhabitant of that place she saw, Lee’s father is accused of kidnapping. The worst thing a black man could do in the 30’s was harm a white child. Lee must pursue Bog into his world in order to save her friend before her father is lynched. Lee enlists the help of a benevolent, blues-singing, swamp monster called BAYOU and together they trek across a Southern Neverland in search of Lee’s friend. Along the way, they meet several colorful characters, like BR’ER RABBIT. Lee soon realizes that Bog has some sort of hold on all the inhabitants in this world and feeds off of hatred and strife in our world. As the racial tensions grow, Bog grows more powerful, so not only are Lee’s friends and father in peril, but all of Charon.

The art is beautiful. I really love the style. And the story, just wow. It does not pull punches, either, which makes it pretty tough to read, but it's worth it. There are 160 pages up so far, but it's a quick read. I recommend the full-screen view, as otherwise the text is hard to read.

Go, go, go!

Despite the lure of puppycam, I feel I've been very productive today. Got the notes written up for Saint Oniisan and am just waiting for Ryan to check it over, so should be posted tomorrow.

I also got some reading done on Shounen Keisuuki. If I want to read more than nine books this year (I'm aiming for twelve, as that will beat last year by one at least), I really need to get on it! Only six weeks left in the year! (How did that happen!?)

Also here are some funny things:

10 Very Good Reasons Why You Should Grow a Beard

How to Tell if Your Cat Is Plotting to Kill You

The puppy cam is a live web cam of six fat, furry little Shiba Inu puppies.

A word of warning, if you haven't already seen it, this site is sooooooooooo addictive. They sleep a lot, but even that is hard to click away from, as they nuzzle and twitch in their sleep, and you don't want to click away lest they wake up and do something REALLY CUTE.

I actually heard about this a couple days ago, but when I clicked the link, the cam wasn't on, so I escaped. But then today I clicked again, and have spent way too much time just sitting there watching the puppies.

1. Our bank was open today! We took our checks in and deposited them. I was worried the insurance one would take a long time to clear, but they said $5000 will be available tomorrow and the rest will take eight days. So at least we can get started paying the bulk of our bills right away.

2. Not much in the way of fruits and veggies on sale at the grocery store today, but I did get some pears for cheap. The last pears I had ripened up soooooo good, soft and delicious, but not mealy or mushy. Mmm! These ones are currently rock solid, but I'm hoping they ripen up as nicely.

3. I also got the pie crust needed to make rhubarb custard pie, so I will be doing that later on. Hopefully it will end up being a celebratory pie, but if not, well, at least there's pie.

4. Have some election-related funny stuff:

From the Onion: Voting machines elect one of their own.

Couple of good election-related Cake Wreck posts.

And two hilarious Wondermark strips.

Oh, and Cute Overload had Vote Like a Baby Stoat.

You need to go read this post by anw:

I hereby propose that homosexuals should not be allowed to write or sing songs.

It is my solemn belief that only heterosexual songs and singing should be valid or recognised.

I further contend that we should establish a legal definition of 'song' as a lyrical, musical composition originated and performed by heterosexuals.

[...]

Indeed it is surely not too extreme to suggest that the ultimate aim of those who would seek to promote homosexual songs is to do away with the concept of singing altogether. It is a stealth movement that is fundamentally opposed to our musical values. If we accept homosexual songs, what next? Will we have to define the noise a goat makes as 'singing'?

Some people say that homosexual songs make people happy or joyful, or they argue that homosexuals deserve the same right to sing and compose as everyone else. This very much misses the point; this is not about an individual's happiness or rights; this is about protecting the religious freedoms on which our society was founded. If we challenge those foundations it will be a threat to family, liberty and the right of individual expression.

( Spoilers, natch )



And totally unrelatedly, have some more redonkulous cat and box action.

I've joined fan_workshop, a new writing comm that sounds like it could be fun. It looks like there are going to be a variety of activities: monthly discussion posts about various aspects of writing, writing prompts based on the themes of the discussions, and story critiques. So far the group is pretty small, so head on over if it seems like something that would interest you.

The first month's discussion topic is going to be outsider POV, which is not something I've thought about much. Not something I've read much, either. In fact, I think lavvyan's mcshep_match fic, Blink, may be the first outsider POV fic I've read. It's the only one that comes to mind, anyway.

fan_workshop is multi-fandom, btw.

And of course I've talked before about sga_talk. We could always use more members over there, and we could also use more fic submissions, so if you know of any fics you'd like to see discussed, just comment with them here. (If they're not your own fics, be sure to ask the authors first, as the comm requires author permission for all fics that are discussed.) The comm is perpetually low on femslash submissions, but submissions in other genres are always welcome as well.

Discussion of my fic We Cling to This and Claim the Best is currently ongoing.

Hi. I'm procrastinating. Have some cuteness.

How to fold a puppy for travelling.

Bunnies in sweaters!

A house optimised for kitties (in Japan, natch).

Hen hatches puppy.

And a few silly pics I found.

I'm really annoyed with myself. I know I had something I wanted to do for a happiness post this morning, but I thought no, to keep me from getting confused, I'll wait til after I wake up and my day technically starts. And then of course I forgot whatever it was.

So.

I'm happy I got five things read out of my pile of books and manga yesterday. (Aside from Evangelion 11, they were all stuff I actually have, not scans.) This year one of my goals for reading was to finish these few books I had started and then wandered away from and just had sitting here on my desk, and that makes two out of three. The other has just about 150 pages left, so after reading some more manga I'm going to finish that, yay.

I got an email today with another script! It's about the same length as before, so it'll take up most of next week. I'm glad to have had this week to get some other stuff done (even if I ended up not getting as much done as I'd hoped).

This parody of Windows 7 is hilarious. I think it even beats out Vista Chewy Ranch Edition.