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| Saturday, July 11th, 2009 |
50books_poc
[ kitsuchi ]
|
8:33p |
The Devil's Kiss - Sarwat Chadda
The Devil's Kiss was previously reviewed on the comm here so I'll just put my personal response here and skip the summary bits. I read a review The Devil's Kiss today which seemed to put it in with all the vampire novels that are coming out for girls at the moment (and variants such as the werewolves and even zombies – yes, zombies as romantic interests!) It doesn't belong to this particular genre of supernatural book at all. The Devil's Kiss bears more resemblance to things like Anthony Horowitz's Power of Five series – except without failing on the female protagonist – or to Skulduggery Pleasant, where the girl actually does kick ass. It's an action-adventure, with the addition of Judeo-Christio-Islamic mythology (and definitely all three). Which means it's right up my alley. There is some romance, yes, but not with a jerk. ( Spoilers! ) And while Billi is a sword-fighter, Kay has the female-coded psychic abilities. It's nice to have a story that can give the female character some romance without letting that overwhelm her character. The prose itself wasn't anything special, and I think I skimmed a lot of the descriptive parts, but I was gripped by the story, engaged by the world and the characters. There's a sequel coming out, which I'm keen for, but it's also a fully self-contained story (another nice change!) Particularly recommended for teenage girls who like action-adventure and are sick of having their gender relegated to secondary roles! |
shady_lamarr
|
3:20a |
I'm gonna be honest with you, I started up again with "Seven Soldiers" only because I liked Sky-High Helligan a lot and knew that she reappeared in the series, glad I did. Grant Morrison is the suck at beginnings, and his endings are mostly confounding and over-extended and try to resolve too much (the Buddy Baker meets his writer ending to "Animal Man" and Crazy Jane trapped in the "hell" of our real world in "Doom Patrol" aside), but man does the guy do middles like nobody's business, and that's the tricky part in comic books, real life never ending stories. There's some great stuff here. The ugly weird kid at school who turns out not to be a misunderstood loner but a vile evil unlikeable scumbag jerk and villain. Cameron Stewart's Bettie Page inspired Zantanna. Superhero porn sites featuring 70 year old witches who still look like teenagers (I'm sure the FBI is just WAITING for someone to attempt that excuse here). The Newsboy Army, a cautionary tale of what would actually happen to a kid superhero group (including the tragic tale of Millions, the world's richest dog). And, of course, yes Grant Morrison's fave New God Metron, portrayed as a severely disabled homeless man. For the record, Morrison gets a lot of flack from the comic world because he's said he did a magic ritual and talked to Metron, a ficitonal character. He's made it very clear that this dialogue was not between him and an actual Metron, but more of a mental dialogue between him and the forces that Metron stood for, or, to be a little less fanciful, a conversation between "Grant Morrison" and the "Metron" part of his superconsciousness. The dude's not crazy or anything. ************ More thoughts on "Rachel Getting Married." I always saw the stepmother Carol as the moral center of the movie, if it has one, and I still think she is, but I've come to realize it's not because she's an inherently special type of human, but simply because she's part of the family and clearly loves her husband and her stepdaughters, but she's removed from the central trauma specifically and the intense impossible and unknowable internal family conflicts enough that she's priveleged to a certain distance and perspective that is impossible for the rest of the family. I also love that we feel like we know these characters, but, just like in real life, we have only the faintest clue of what things will be like for the major characters the next day, let alone the rest of their lives. It's depressing how many movies end with way too much closure, with every forseeable character's life, even if its fifty or sixty years, pretty much either explicitly written out or sufficiently hinted at. I do have a guess about the best man character, Kym's fellow traveler AA-wise and wedding party fling, and what happens to him. I say he maybe keeps up with a Kym for a bit, but the thing pretty much fizzles out like most of these types of connections do, years later, he has a major relapse (pretty much inevitable) and he sort of starts to return to Kym, out-of-the-blue drunk dials and e-mails, etc, starting to look back at this point of time where he was the wiser, more together of the two, and kinda romanticizing this period even as he realizes this behavior is self-destructive and this moment has passed for good... |
sanfrancisco
[ chasingred ]
|
12:59a |
Silkscreener
Does anyone have a recommendation for an incredibly high-quality silkscreener in the area that can make posters? I need the best recommendation possible, and can borrow a car to get to where ever the shop is. Thanks! [apologies for the x-posting] |
sophy
|
2:06a |
Duh
Note To Self: It doesn't help the sleep schedule issues if you forget to take your meds until 2am. *groan* |
| Friday, July 10th, 2009 |
sophy
|
11:20p |
Basic rundown
I've done a revamping of my profile page. Big Brother started last night and I'm already choosing sides and getting all worked up about it. Breakup therapy last night was summed up as having been mostly about holidays, cats, and pants at the end. Things on that end are going, you know, whatever, as smoothly as these things can go, I guess. Found out a funny little theory on Dave's family part before he told them the whole story - apparently they thought I was having an affair with Shayla! Sleep schedule still a bit messed up. Weird dream this morning about waking up and one of my eyes was all bloody and scratched up and basically completely covered by a giant bloody scab. It was super scary and I was relieved to wake up, look in the mirror, and see my eye still there and intact. Going to go take my meds, make my nightly ramen, and watch Big Brother After Dark on Showtime because there can never be enough hours of Big Brother and I can't afford the live feeds. This might even temporarily take over my Buffy obsession. Which, by the way, it took me about a year to get through the whole series the first time and it's taking more like a month the second time around. Current Mood:  blah |
caitrin
|
10:55p |
Birthday Month Fic #10: West Wing: Stories He'd Never Write
(This is very short and not particularly good or interesting, but hey, with this "fic every day" thing we knew that would happen eventually. Also, why the heck don't I have a Danny icon?) Title: Stories He'd Never Write Fandom: West Wing Genre: Stream of consciousness Rating: G Characters: Danny Concannon Pairing: Vague Josh/Donna Disclaimer: These characters are not mine. Timeline: During "Inauguration: Over There" ( Barely long enough to bother with a cut... ) Current Mood:  thankful |
shady_lamarr
|
9:51p |
Across from me on the B Line, my home away from home that isn't really so much away from home it just takes an incredibly long time to get back to it, but whatever, and I look across to see a girl 'round my age, which is rare here it's usually nineteen year old girls who seriously look like babies to me now, and noticed that she was dressed in that sort of Anne Potts in "Ghostbusters" / Audrey in "Little Shop of Horrors" fashion from the eighties, retro glasses, purposely phony wiglike hair, with a new wave edge... Then I realized that this in fact was never an actual fashion except in my concepts of what the heck was fashion when I was a kid, and in fact I had never seen a girl dressed like that. I don't know, first Lydia from "Beetlejuice" and now this, I'm starting to get a bit weirded out. All I know is that if I see someone who looks like Delirium from "Brief Lives" next and it isn't Tori fucking Amos, I'm definitely going to have them start adjusting my medication. |
50books_poc
[ vegablack62 ]
|
5:11p |
7/50 --- Miracle at St. Anna by James McBride
Miracle at St. Annaby James McBride 7/50 McBride takes two true stories: one of the Buffalo soldiers in WWII, (members of the 92nd Infantry division, black soldiers allowed to fight in combat) and another of the massacre of over 500 civilian at St. Anna di Stazzema by the SS in 1944 (a crime not punished until 2004) and weaves a moving and involving fictional story of death and miracles. (I had to mention death, there's a lot of it.) A squad of black soldiers and a traumatized small Italian refugee boy find themselves separated from the rest of the American Army and trapped in a small village. They are ordered to capture a German soldier for questioning and wait with him to be relieved. They mistrust the Southern white officers who send them their orders and the Itallian villagers with whom they must wait. This is a well told story that pulls the reader along as he, knowing more than the poor soldiers in the book, tries to figure out what has happened, what will happen, who's the villain and where the danger lies. The characters are multi-dimentional and surprising, the picture of the war in Italy, fascinating. I finished the book intent on finding out more about the Italian experience in WWII. This was another fine read by James McBride. |
babysittersclub
[ bcsmurfettegirl ]
|
8:03p |
So I was thinking
I don't know if this been brought up before, but I was reading the earlier books when Mal and Jessi joined and Stacey moved back to NY. Mal and Jessi couldn't go because they were "too young" But uh.........aren't they the same age in later books? Makes no sense!! |
slammerkinbabe
|
12:45p |
|
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toolgirlfeed
|
5:25a |
|
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toolgirlfeed
|
7:33a |
Do You Need a Personal Visit from ToolGirl?
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Toolgirl/~3/YSseLLFYlMo/do-you-need-a-personal-visit-from-toolgirl.html http://www.toolgirl.com/toolgirl/2009/07/do-you-need-a-personal-visit-from-toolgirl.html 
If you've recently become a homeowner and you're starting to wonder how much of a mess you've gotten yourself into, or if you've received bids from contractors and aren't sure how to decipher them, maybe you'd like a friendly visit from ToolGirl. If you're up for it, I'll bring a small camera crew to your house and interview you about what's gone wrong so far, what things are bothering you most about your new dwelling and what skills you think you'd need to feel better and start making changes and improvements. Visits are free and last about two hours. Your consultation will include an on-camera interview, a walk-through of your house, and a short hands-on tutorial from Mag to help you get started in your handy homeowner adventure. We'll be videotaping the whole visit. Once again, if you're a new-ish homeowner (you bought within the last 2 years) and you're a little freaked out about how to move forward with your house, please send an e-mail to help@toolgirl.com. Thanks, and hope to see you at your place.  |
caitrin
|
7:31a |
Review: Love and Peaches
Love and Peaches by Jodi Lynn AndersonGenre: YA Pages: 243 Rating: 7.8 This is the third (and last?) in the Peaches series (so named for the peach orchard at the center of the series), and it wasn't as good as the second, which wasn't as good as the first. But it was a quick read and I like finishing series, so whatever. These are follow the model of Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants et al. - a group of teen girls who seem very different on the surface end up helping each other deal with various Big Issues and Important Lessons as they grow up. I had a harder time warming to the girls in this series - they just didn't seem real enough. And there's a slight mystical element that seemed kind of unnecessary. But I shouldn't be so negative - they're a decent read, just nothing wildly special. If you (or a girl you know) love the Traveling Pants and want more in that vein, give this series a try. The first is Peaches. Current Mood:  sore |
peaceofpie
|
5:06a |
Here is a more well-rounded picture of my current reality! I'm a little low on funds, but I'm not stressing about it. I'm trying not to spend money right now, to make sure I can pay my bills in August, since I don't get a paycheck until 8/31. But honestly, I don't need to worry that much. I planned so well for my road trip that I not only stayed considerably under budget, but actually saved money compared to how much I would have spent had I stayed home. I also have several massage clients scheduled already, a random bookkeeping gig, and plenty of earplug testing to keep food in my fridge and gas in my car. I'm weighing right now whether I can afford new clothes before I start work or whether I'm going to wait till I start getting paid. I'm back with my lymphatic drainage treatments, which are $65 a week, and that's a much higher priority than clothes. Also, I need new shoes, and they're 99% likely going to be new Crocs, unless I become aware of some compelling reason to do otherwise. The question is, what color??! My current pair is light blue. I have worn them out so bad that I can't safely walk in the rain anymore because the soles are flat! I've worn them just about every day of my life for 5 years. For $29.99 new shoes that's pretty fucking kick-ass. My massage therapist who does my LD treatments did some kickass energywork on me on Monday, pulled a lot of grief out of me, balanced me out really good. She also did some immensely helpful Reiki on my foot, which I am finding responds really well to energywork, and really poorly to any manipulative technique. I'm so fucking excited about my AmeriCorps job. I start in one month. I want to start now. NOW NOW NOW NOW NOWNOWNOW. I am learning about patience. I know I need this time to do some important spiritual grounding work to sustain me during this year. So even though it is frustrating to have to wait, I get why it's important. Now if I can just be faithful to this and actually do the work, it will be really good. Even though there's a lot of emotional pain associated with my playing the guitar, the fact that I can physically play it is mindblowing. I played my guitar for half an hour today and I can still move my hands now. If I had done this 14 months ago, I would not have been able to move my left hand for days. It's still amazing to me that I can use my hands. Some of my gender issues directly related to my body and/or sexuality are coming up in a big way right now; the ones I've either repressed since childhood or started repressing during transition so I could deal with actually transitioning. I need to process some of this, but I don't know how. I'm falling in love with VNV Nation again. I would like to manifest a comfy couch. Currently I have no couch at all. I miss my FLGBTQC friends so much. It hurts, but it's kind of a good hurt. One Friend reminded us after Bonnie's death that part of the blessing of having a community like ours is that there are so many more people in one's life that will eventually die, and the same is true for having so many people to miss when they're not around. Having people that I love enough to miss this much is beautiful. I guess the thing that feels off is that I don't have anybody in Indiana that I miss that much when I'm away for as long as I was. I missed stuff like choir and my bed and being able to eat a great lunch at a restaurant for under $8, but there are no people here whose physical presence in my life fuels my vitality the way my Quakers do. I'm going to start attending Meeting in Bloomington and see if that helps. Current Music: "Sentinel" by VNV Nation |
| Thursday, July 9th, 2009 |
caitrin
|
11:18p |
|
shady_lamarr
|
10:15p |
"Jesus, You Look Like You Just Awoke From An Uneasy Vicodin Dream About School"
Okay, I'm never going to pretend to be part of the music scene here, particularly as I moved here just after abandoning my persona as a quasi-professional rock critic, but I have to say that this advertisement for a rather awesome event in Provincetown isn't fooling anyone by calling the Neighborhoods, the Upper Crust, or Freezepop "Boston's best buzz-bands," particularly as the 'Hoods and the Upper Crust were way too old to be buzz bands when MTV first popularized that loathsome phrase. ********* Okay, so I don't know what this says about me and work but today I think I sort of had my version of a perfect work day: I slept pretty much all yesterday and woke up around ten pm, stayed up all night and this morning without so much as a nap, drank two liters of soda, went to work at eight AM, ran rampant and crazy for nine hours, stood in the Copley T station, oddly serene, reading an abbreviated history on genocide at Wikipedia for a half-hour waiting for the ideal rush hour B-Line train to come, came home to my apartment a quarter to six to find that the overhead light had crashed to the ground and shattered, quietly swept it up, browsed the "just released" racks at New England Comics and purchased comics that not only did I not need but also, honestly, was only half-interested in and, as I did so, had sleep deprived visions of bursting into a ComiCon dressed as Mr. Six with a girl dressed as Zatanna under one arm and a girl dressed as Power Girl on the other, because although I know I'll never be cool or hip or good looking in general society I'm still holding onto the fact that one day I could be the coolest and best looking guy at a comics convention, and then finally I returned home here to my apartment, listening to one of the stacks and stacks of CDs that have been piling up unheard these last few years, plunging ahead through almost a year and a half worth of dialogue and backstory and injokes and rambling commentary that I wrote once upon a time, mostly while fucked the hell up, and then mostly almost immediately forgot about, and while realizing that some of these songs are pretty good and some of these bits of dialogue aren't entirely regrettable, I came to a very rare conclusion: Today has been a good day. ********* Song of the Day: "It's a Fine Day" by Jane. |
peaceofpie
|
10:23p |
I'm trying the guitar thing again. It still hurts to play, but not disablingly. The problem now is that I can't sing and play anymore. The wrong sounds come out. I spent two years adjusting to my new voice, I'm mostly at peace with it...but then I bust out the guitar and it's all fucked up. It's all wrong. It feels like I'm trying to do something that I'm not supposed to do anymore. I thought I would have to actually relearn to play the guitar, that once I got comfortable with where to put my hands, my voice would follow. It's not like that at all. The guitar has come back like it was never gone, like we hadn't lost years together. My hands know just what to do. I have always been able to play the guitar. But my voice can't do it. I try and try and try. It doesn't fit. I can't make it fit. The voice that went with the guitar is dead. I feel like I got robbed. Maybe if I had been able to play the guitar while my voice was changing this wouldn't have happened. But the guitar didn't get to transition with me. I couldn't use my arms. I couldn't play. I couldn't. I don't know how to explain what this is like to you. I'm sorry. I need to, but I don't know how. There are no metaphors I can think of. It's like...something I need is gone...but it doesn't feel wrong that it's gone. It feels horrible, but not wrong. It feels like I'm just not supposed to do this thing that I can't imagine not being supposed to do because I've always been supposed to do it so how is this even possible? Current Music: "Art of Conflict" by VNV Nation |
50books_poc
[ oyceter ]
|
3:16p |
Partial bibliography from Recognition of Being
I grabbed these from the bibliography of Kim Anderson's A Recognition of Being: Reconstructing Native Womanhood (2000). Anderson is Cree/Métis. I took all the books with Native authors or co-authors, including ones with white editors that seemed to be majority-Native authors. For books with Native co-authors, I didn't exclude ones in which the Native co-authors are in the minority (ex. 2 non-Native authors, 1 Native) because I thought people could still use it to look up other books by the Native co-author. There are other women of color authors also in the bibliography, but I excluded them to keep the focus on Native authors. ( Giant list of books ) |
50books_poc
[ teaotter ]
|
2:13p |
Tananarive Due, Patricia Due, Karin Lowachee
Freedom in the Family, Tananarive and Patricia Due This is a fantastic book! In alternating chapters, Patricia Stevens Due and her daughter, Tananarive Due, talk about their histories with the Civil Rights movement in different eras. The stories are personal, the writing engaging. I particularly enjoyed being able to see some of the same themes played out in completely different ways in their lives. The Living Blood, Tananarive Due This is the sequel to My Soul to Keep, and continues the stories of Jessica and David, both now immortal, as their daughter's mystic powers grow out of control. I had been hoping that this book would be quite different from the last one, considering the ending of MStK. Instead, this is a very similar book in tone and construction. I'm not very fond of the 'mother is afraid her child may be evil' genre, so I found this one disappointing. Burndive and Cagebird, Karin Lowachee Oh, I loved these! They are books 2 and 3 of a series ( Warchild --book 1 -- has been reviewed in the comm before), but you don't have to read them in order, because they follow different main characters. I love hard science fiction, and these qualify. You get to see the lives and choices of people caught up in the seemingly endless war between human-settled worlds and the alien strits -- and the pirate ships preying on both sides. |
sanfrancisco
[ doosya ]
|
1:37p |
safe area?
Hi everyone, A friend of mine is looking for an appartment in SF and has found a place she likes near Fulton & 25th. Now, the problem is - she is not really familiar with that neighborhood, so she is concerned with how nice/not nice the area is. And by "nice" she mostly means "safe" since she is a single mom with two teenage kids and her elderly mom also lives with them. What do you think? Could you please share your opinion on pros and cons of living in that area? Thanks a lot in advance! |
|
sfciviccenter
|
11:52a |
|
50books_poc
[ rootedinsong ]
|
3:35p |
Kanyen'keha Tewatati; One Thousand Useful Mohawk Words
5. Kanyen'keha Tewatati (Let's Speak Mohawk), by David Kanatawakhon Maracle The first thing I noticed about this book was that it was awfully thin for a language textbook. (I bought the edition with CDs, for which Amazon misleadingly lists the dimensions as 9.6 x 6.5 x 1.1 inches. The page for the edition without CDs gives the true dimensions: 8.9 x 6 x 0.3 inches.) This book is linguistically quite sound - the author clearly knows his linguistics and is not bogged down in "all languages are really Latin" or prescriptivist nonsense (which is my biggest pet peeve when it comes to language materials) - but it's not really sufficient for self-study. There are a few sample dialogues at the beginning, but after that, it's pretty much a straight grammar and not a textbook, with no texts longer than a sentence (and sentences only there to illustrate grammatical points in as concise a manner as possible), and lots of verb and noun inflection charts. Enough of that and my eyes glaze over; I really can't learn a language without corpora, and I assume the same is true for most people. It seems as if the author is more used to providing sketches of Mohawk grammar so that linguists can learn facts about its typology than providing enough examples and exercises so that people can learn to apply the rule he's talking about in all/most possible contexts. The CD was also disappointing: its content is nothing more than the examples in the book, read multiple times with their English translation. This translates to the author reading pages and pages of verb conjugation charts out loud. Hearing it did help me internalize some of the phonology, and it is essential to hear how a language you want to learn is spoken. But it was still disappointing. I think this book would be a fine supplement to another more comprehensive book (and an actual live class). But I'm not sure said more comprehensive book actually exists. 6. One Thousand Useful Mohawk Words, by David Kanatawakhon Maracle This book is mostly a dictionary, with a few pages of grammar at the beginning. Strangely enough, the treatment of verb conjugation in this book is more comprehensive than that of the previous book. (I spent some gleeful linguistics-nerd time figuring out the morphophonological rules to derive the different forms of the subject agreement prefixes from an underlying form.) :) Once again: I want more information. It's extremely disappointing to me how little material there is on the Mohawk language. (And I'm relatively lucky - a lot of Native American languages are much more endangered and less documented than Mohawk.) :( Edit: I can't add a tag for the author because it would exceed the 1000 tag limit!Edit 2: Fixed. |
50books_poc
[ rootedinsong ]
|
2:58p |
Blink; Why are All the Black Kids...; Conquest
2. Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, by Malcolm Gladwell Standard Gladwell fare: intriguing, well-written, not particularly deep. As someone interested in psychology, interpersonal dynamics, and shrink things, I found his discussion of predicting whether relationships will succeed or fail and the elements of facial expressions to be quite interesting. I intend to read about the latter topic in depth (if I ever find the time). His discussions of stereotype threat and unconscious racism give some good information for countering the sort of "not racist" racist things you're likely to hear these days. 3. Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? And Other Conversations About Race, by Beverly Daniel Tatum A strong introduction to anti-racism. I especially appreciated the in-depth discussion of racial identity formation. 4. Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide, by Andrea Smith What everyone else said. Very hard to read, at least for me, but brilliant and devastating. This is what we should keep in mind as an example of what an intersectional analysis should be. (Note: It does repeat the vaccines-cause-autism myth, which may discredit it in the eyes of people inclined to be skeptical - but maybe this isn't worth mentioning, since people who are inclined to discredit it will probably find a reason to no matter what.) |
peaceofpie
|
12:14p |
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) apollotiger: If I could make you a prostate of your own and give it to you I would peaceofpie: dude peaceofpie: that would be the best birthday present ever :D |
nearlymay
|
9:08a |
LOL
Yesterday, flights at JFK airport were delayed by 90 minutes because turtles were having sex on the runway. There were 78 of them. Turtles. Having sex. *dies with happiness* |
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