"I," she told him, "can believe anything. You have no idea what I can believe."

"Really?"

"I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen-I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it." She stopped, out of breath.

Shadow almost took his hands off the wheel to applaud. Instead he said, "Okay. So if I tell you what I've learned you won't think that I'm a nut."

"Maybe," she said. "Try me."

-from American Gods by Neil Gaiman

Seriously, you guys. Go. Purchase. Read. Teenagers and punks and queers and vampires and vampire hunters and more punks. Bloody, awkward, bumbling romantics. Hormones that are STUPID, in the way that hormones actually are. A vampire stalker whose stalking is acknowledged by both himself and the stalkee as being more than a little creepy. A nicely done vampire mythos, more reminiscent of a virus than most I''ve read. (And no, the vampires don't sparkle.) A truly awesome lack of normal romances, or "normal" people for that matter.

I am kind of like this about it: ♥______♥

C&P from seperis here:

Heads up on a new and exciting computer virus for downloaders. Quoting from chopchica here:

chopchica: Yesterday, I went to megaupload to download a new Merlin vid. I've downloaded from megaupload a billion times and never had a problem but yesterday, I immediately ended up with the Virtumonde/Vundo trojan horse on my computer and I am *totally fucked*. From what I can see out there, a new extremely virulent version appeared yesterday. BE VERY CAREFUL WHEN DOWNLOADING *ANYTHING* right now, but *especially* from megaupload! If you think you have it, turn off your internet access (*all* of it)*immediately*, because goes to the web and downloads new malware to your computer for fun.

ileliberte: Hi, coming in through surfing my f-flist. I had a Vundo trojan infection recently and the best program to deal with is Malwarebytes. go to malwarebytes.org and you can download the basic program for free. Quick scan usually gets rid of it all but run a complete one just to check up afterwards. It can run on usual startup mode, but if you want to be extra careful, run it on safe mode and it'll get rid of the trojan. Symantec unfortunately doesn't really recognize this virus. Also, beware of windows popping up that look exactly like My computer windows, be sure you don't mistakenly click anything there before you see the url.

More here from ileliberte on the virus.

I'm seconding malwarebytes as a possible solution, as it's the one the tech guy at work bullied me into getting for both my work and home computer and it's caught several things that both McAfee and AdAware missed.

I tend to use megaupload often, so I downloaded Malwarebyte and am running the full scan on my computer, just in case. It's roughly 9 minutes into the scan, with nothing, but you really can't be too careful.

People that love each other should have the choice to be wed as they choose.


"Fidelity": Don't Divorce... from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.

You guys, in talking to jtggodqos, I was reminded that I hadn't publicly commented on how ridiculously excited I am about Dreamwidth going into open-beta soon. Let me just c&p directly from their site about who they are and what they're about (boldface emphasis is mine):

Dreamwidth Studios (a production of Dreamwidth Studios, LLC) is an Open Source social networking, content management, and personal publishing platform. Our mission in life is to make it easy for you to share the things you make, and easy to find the people who are making the things you want to enjoy.

We have all the features you've come to love in social networking sites, including privacy and security features, community interaction, content aggregation, multimedia support, and more. We're committed to adding features that you'll find useful and relevant, as well as working to integrate our site with the other Internet services you regularly use.

By the time we launch, we'll also have:

* No more complex trust workarounds -- we've split the concept of the "friends" list into "people whose content you want to see" vs. "people you trust to see your content", and we've made it even easier to manage your relationships with people.
* Better integration of OpenID and RSS syndication, so you can interact with your friends on other sites more easily.
* Better management of your presence on other sites and other content providers, allowing you to tie everything to your Dreamwidth account -- so people can more easily find all the creative content you produce.
* One-step import of your content from other sites, to make it easier for you to move in with us. (We'll support importing from LiveJournal-codebase sites on opening, and add others as we can.)
* Global site-wide bookmarking, so you can save interesting things for later -- and see what others have found interesting enough to save.

And their Guiding Principles:

We operate our service under the principles of:

* Transparency: We believe that you should know why we make the decisions we make. We will explain our reasoning as much as possible. We will make it easy for you to know as much as you want to about what we're doing.

* Freedom: We believe in free expression. We will not place limits on your expression, except as required by United States law or to protect the quality and long-term viability of the service (such as removing spam). We will provide you with tools that make creativity and free expression easy.

* Respect: We believe in the inherent dignity of all human beings. We will never discriminate against any group of people. We will work hard to maintain inclusive attitudes, use inclusive language, and promote inclusiveness at all times.

And their entire Diversity Statement:

Platitudes are cheap. We've all heard services say they're committed to "diversity" and "tolerance" without ever getting specific, so here's our stance on it:

We welcome you.

We welcome people of any gender, race, ethnicity, size, nationality, sexual orientation, ability level, religion, culture, subculture, and political opinion. We welcome activists, artists, bloggers, crafters, dilettantes, musicians, photographers, readers, writers, ordinary people, extraordinary people, and everyone in between. We welcome people who want to change the world, people who want to keep in touch with friends, people who want to make great art, and people who just need a break after work. We welcome fans, geeks, nerds, and pixel-stained technopeasant wretches. We welcome internet beginners who aren't sure what any of those terms refer to.

We welcome you. You may wear a baby sling, hijab, a kippah, leather, piercings, a pentacle, a political badge, a rainbow, a rosary, tattoos, or something we can only dream of. You may carry a guitar or knitting needles or a sketchbook. Conservative or liberal, libertarian or socialist -- we believe it's possible for people of all viewpoints and persuasions to come together and learn from each other. We believe in the broad spectrum of human experience. We believe that amazing things come when people from different worlds and world-views approach each other to create a conversation.

We get excited about creativity -- from pro to amateur, from novels to haiku, from the artist who's been doing this for decades to the person who just picked up a sketchbook last week. We support maximum freedom of creative expression, within the few restrictions we need to keep the service viable for other users. With servers in the US we're obliged to follow US laws, but we're serious about knowing and protecting your rights when it comes to free expression and privacy. We will never put a limit on your creativity just because it makes someone uncomfortable -- even if that someone is us.

We think accessibility for people with disabilities is a priority, not an afterthought. We think neurodiversity is a feature, not a bug. We believe in being inclusive, welcoming, and supportive of anyone who comes to us with good faith and the desire to build a community.

We have enough experience to know that we won't get any of this perfect on the first try. But we have enough hope, energy, and idealism to want to learn things we don't know now. We may not be able to satisfy everyone, but we can certainly work to avoid offending anyone. And we promise that if we get it wrong, we'll listen carefully and respectfully to you when you point it out to us, and we'll do our best to make good on our mistakes.

We think our technical and business experience is important, but we think our community experience is more important. We know what goes wrong when companies say one thing and do another, or when they refuse to say anything at all. We believe that keeping our operations transparent is just as important as keeping our servers stable.

We use the service we're selling, and we built it because we wanted it ourselves. We won't treat people as second-class undesireables because they're non-mainstream or might frighten advertisers. We don't have advertisers to frighten. To us, you're not eyeballs. You're not pageviews. You're not demographic groups. You're people.

Come dream with us.

Keep an eye on Dreamwidth, y'all. I know I am.

Re-activating, just to say... It's snowing. And I stood outside in it, and felt beautiful, and felt like the world was beautiful. Cold and wet and utterly beautiful.

This is the first time I remember seeing real snow. The first time in my adulthood.

Snow in south Louisiana.

I am smiling.

--ETA--
( PEEK-SHURES. Of the frozen water that is COMING FROM THE SKY. AND NOT MY FREEZER. I AM EXCITED, OKAY? )

Deleting my LJ for a few days for school purposes. Back at the end of the week!

Can I get some love in the Love Meme please? I could really use it right now.

Stolen nearly word for word from deconcentrate, except his line about Tool, because I still love them damnit.

the next person to quote "I Kissed a Girl" at me as an example of a cute song with any relevance, at all, to anything actually close to queer rights is going to get punched in the face.

fine, enjoy it all you want -- it's a damn crappy song, regardless, but whatever -- but do not fucking tell me it's any sort of step forward for queer rights, because if you really think that, then have i got a band to introduce to you.

they're called t.A.T.u. yes, you've probably heard of them. you've heard of them because they got famous doing exactly the same thing, which is called taking advantage of pop culture's occasional faddish obsession with lesbians, which is actually because straight white guys just enjoy watching two girls make out a lot. (incidentally t.A.T.u. also wrote better songs but were about twenty times more exploitative, having as the case was at least five songs in exactly this vein as opposed to just the one.)

pop-culture lesbianism of this stripe, darlings, does not help queer rights.

so stop, just stop, fucking smiling and prancing about like you honestly think it does.

Dude, you should all help my cousin win a contest by watching her special PhD science dance. :D

In case you were unaware, here is yet ANOTHER reason that Babeland fucking rocks. \o/

OH PANIC.

Can't upload or download any of them, since I'm at school at the moment, BUT THIS IS SO COOL:

Uh. So. The poems I've submitted to Creative Writing that are either to be reviewed today or Thursday. Some of it's old material, reworked; mostly it's new. I'm posting it public to get opinions.


( end of semester clusterfuck )


( On Becoming Amanda Palmer )


( haikus of fall and pretension )

*nervous toe-scuff* Honest opinions and critiques, s'il vous plait?

Hey guys, since I'm on a computer with internet access, I'm making a friends cut. Mostly fannish journals that I just don't or can't keep up with anymore, considering everything. Feel free to defriend at your leisure or not, or what have you. It's nothing personal, it's just that I need to keep things manageable for a while!

Skin Coloured is intended to be a collaborative, visual exploration of what it is to be non-white in a white culture. Make-up, plasters and tights - even when they’re marked “flesh-coloured” - are not the colour of skin that isn’t white. And whilst white women may have trouble matching these items to their skin, for women who don’t class themselves as white, this inconvenience is symptomatic of a wider problem.

To help illustrate this problem, therefore, Skin Coloured is looking for submissions. Send us photographs that illustrate the inadequacy of provisions for non-white people, and we’ll post them on the blog, and hopefully both those submitting, and those who’re here to learn, will gain something from it.

Further information can be found here. Please help us by reposting this.

Stealing from deconcentrate:

Check my fandoms, my favorite characters, the pairings I like the most, my kinks, my fictional crushes, anything. Now, in a friendly and possibly teasing way, point out the obvious and not so obvious trends or fetishes you see in my tastes. Maybe I'm nuts for all vampire stories, or have a thing for men who smoke, or I'm fond for the tsundere archetype, or I'm into rival slash. Let's point out all of those you've noticed I tend to squeetalk about during our friendship.

If you've ever heard me squee fannishly, or attempt serious discussion, or anything of that ilk, you can probably pick up on at least some patterns.

synecdochic, as with most issues she speaks on, fucking hits the nail on the head in regards to the Open Source Boob issue.



( Pertinent quotes behind the cut. )


Also, vito_excalibur presents the "Open Source" Women Back Each Other Up Movement, of course inviting men to participate and generally encouraging supportive behavior regardless of sex or gender.

So, my rack is kind of awesome. My rack draws some major attention. I also have a pair of no-slip, steel toe, black leather work boots. If I don't know you and you try to touch my tits, I will stomp and kick in very uncomfortable places.

If I don't know you and you ask if you can please touch my breasts in a semi-public forum, the answer will be a resounding, loud, "NO!", possibly with some threatening footwork.

For those of you that don't know what I'm talking about, theferrett posted recently about a situation that happened at a con he went to, and about the "Open-Source Boob Project". The original entry has been edited somewhat; many of the issues being brought forth are also addressed to some extent in this latter entry.

For me, this issue is so resoundingly fraught with complication. I am an attractive woman with attractive breasts. I am sex-positive. I am also exceptionally aware that NOT INTENDING to violate someone's personal space IS NOT THE SAME THING as NOT violating someone's personal space. The issue and controversy lie on the nebulous gray area of boundaries, personal violation, intent, and location.

I am a physically affectionate person among people that I trust. However, one of the assumptions about this project - or should I say, about the project before the myriad of clarifications brought on by intense discussion over the past several days - is the idea that simply by entering into the con in an outfit that flatters your body, peer pressure wants you to sign over the social rights to control what other people are doing to that body.

No, nobody is/was telling anyone they had to participate in the project.

You never have to say yes, but it is incredibly difficult for some people to say no. And I don't want to suggest that we base our lives around others' inabilities, however, there is a distinct idea that cons should be Safe Places. I'll put it this way: I am not yet twenty-one; therefor, I go to really sketchy bars because they serve underage patrons. I often do not feel particularly safe in those bars. However! Not once has any strangers asked if they could pet my bosom. Nor have I been groped by a stranger in that environment. I feel psychologically safe, in a way; I am hot, but I will not get unwanted molestation. I have my boundaries; they will not be pushed in a public venue by strangers.

Why is it that I should feel LESS psychologically safe at a fannish "safe zone", aka, a convention?

I suppose the frustration comes in not in the idea itself, but in the attempts to portray it as a movement.

Here are some of the responses to it that I appreciate and agree with:
Here from kate_nepevu
Here from brown_betty
Here from fairestcat
*** Here from mamadeb (Favorite)
Here from futureperfect

Here is a whole collection of responses from the_red_shoes

--ETA--
As the explosion grew, theferrett decided to lock down the comments he was receiving on the entry and revise his opinion on the Open Source Boobs Project. I can't say that I'm horribly disappointed.

R.K. Milholland of Something*Positive seems to have discontinued his "Not free range boobies" shirts. Such a shame. still has "Not Free Range Boobies" shirts!

--ETA 2--
I have to run to class, so no responses for a while, but here is yet another amazing post on the matter by seperis.

Dear LJ/SUP,

I will totally look like that picture up there if you tell your directors to STFU and get off my Internets.

I'm waiting for you to get your fucking act together,
Paige

Meme time!

Everyone has things they blog about. Everyone has things they don’t blog about. Challenge me out of my comfort zone by telling me something I don’t blog about, but you’d like to hear about, and I’ll write a post about it. Ask for anything: latest movie watched, last book read, political leanings, thoughts on tv, favorite type of underwear, stories I'm working on, travel, etc. Repost in your own journal so that we can all learn more about each other.

Comments aren't screened unless poster specifically wants them to be, but anon is on, as always.

"I think after all of that insanity that we should calm down." - Judy Garland

(For all public silliness of the evening, see these links:
One
Two
Three
Four
Five (MUST LISTEN! It is SO FUCKING AWESOME. You only WISH you were us!)
Six )

"I JUST GOT MY FIRST PERIOD!!!" rang out down Decatur Street.

(For all public silliness of the evening, see these links:
One
Two
Three
Four
Five (MUST LISTEN! It is SO FUCKING AWESOME. You only WISH you were us!)
Six )

Happy birthday to the amazing Ms. sharpest_rose. You're just kind of a general badass, so here's to the best years coming now.