Thanks to all for the moral support - it turned out to be not as horrible as before, due to the absence of several contributing factors from last time, though tense and overfull of (among other things) right-wing noise-machine chamber echoes from the usual quarters (I think, though I don't have enough data points yet, that "zombies" may be becoming ( Read more... )

Really brief, not just brief for me - RL has, to mince no words, been dire, and I have been spending most of the last week alternately looking desperately for another job, feeling too sick about having to go in to work to function, and trying to do something that will just possibly be salable in terms of visual art which means that I have to spend ( Read more... )

except for the coffeecup I am drinking out of, and the sink is clean. Mark this one down on your calendars.

On a slightly more serious note, I am working right now, for $8/hr and no benefits, and I don't know for how long, since this boss also has personal space issues and, just as bad or worse, likes to play headgames and put people down in ( Read more... )

Two parallel, connected, simultaneously-but-independently written rants are kludged up together here, rather than try to clean them all up and polish them into one long masterful MegaRant, since that didn't work so well last time.

The glories of our blood and state ( Read more... )

Prologue: "I Didn't Mean To Do Any Harm"

...But that moment the little lady leaned forward into the moonlight, and Curdie caught a glimpse of her eyes, and all the laugh went out of him ( Read more... )

It may get longer and full of ObRefs and anecdotes like the outline of it is in my head. But at least it's down on digital paper and up for argument, unlike my attempt to address this exact same blogosphere event the first time it happened starting on the exact same blog which got to be pages and pages of incoherent free association and then got ( Read more... )

There are two phrases in here that are so polarized, so opposed that they shouldn't be in the same paragraph:

...I did make a very conscious effort to project a future free of sexism, racism and homophobia. I’ve put in a number of minor female characters in non-stereotypical roles (military commander, billionaire entrepreneur, etc.). There are a ( Read more... )

...that a small bunch of fans got together and put together their own fanfic archive - it has been known to happen, now and again - volunteering their time and using a donation model to pay for bandwidth and server space and it gets a number of submissions and a bit of a name among all the other fanfic archives out there, but it's not a household ( Read more... )

If I were to construct a scene, one of those humorous sketches perhaps, in which a media gatekeeper praises a writer for being courageous and perceptive enough to portray their story's villain as utterly one-dimensional, lacking in any tragic virtues whatsoever, without any personal motivation other than his essential evilness, when said villain is ( Read more... )

...or it would be open season on SUV drivers who think it's great sport to splash pedestrians with half-frozen slush in winter. Yesterday I was lucky: I only got splashed once on the way to work, and only from the knees; Friday morning I got hit four times, leaving me soaked in icy muddy water from the hips down front and back and Tuesday I got hit ( Read more... )