A little bit of reinvention
1. To let everyone know, I've finally gotten around to changing my username. Say what you want about it, it's definitely a step up from the old one. ;-)
mecteol ----> quadruplify
FYI, I'm not changing any other usernames I might go by online -- my AIM, Twitter, Dreamwidth, etc. will be unchanged (for now).
I've also changed my default icon, as well as my layout and profile -- thanks to thrashmetal and fruitstyle! The profile still needs a bit of tweaking, but feel free to check them out! :D
2. Welcome new friends! *waves*
3. Some more Iran news:
AP: "Anniversary of disputed Iran vote passes quietly"
Fearing bloodshed and calculating that it would gain them nothing, the movement's leaders called off a day of mass protests, reflecting their increasing powerlessness against the government's military muscle.
"We have to expand social networks, websites, these are our best means," said Mir Hossein Mousavi, a former prime minister who maintains he was robbed of the presidency through fraud in the June 12, 2009, election.
"These work like an army. This is our army against their military force," he said on his website, Kaleme.com.
The retreat from Iran's streets and university campuses to the Web is certain to be seen as a victory for the ruling hard-liners and for the armed forces that preserved their grip on power with a harsh crackdown on postelection protesters.
The anniversary passed with no signs of major disturbances or sizable gatherings.
[...]
That has been the opposition's strategy for some time now, and it has yet to bring tangible gains. Dozens of Web posts and proclamations against Ahmadinejad and the ruling system are issued each day - but all they amount to is words against muscle.
The past year, however, has not been without moments of deep change for Iran - a year ago, it would have been unthinkable to chant slogans against Khamenei, who has the final say on all matters in Iran. The chants are now common and have punched holes in the political firewall that once separated the theocracy from the people.
At the same time, Iran's rulers have retrenched and handed more control to the Revolutionary Guard, resulting in a far more aggressive hand at home and a less compromising attitude aboard - including a hard line over Iran's nuclear program, which brought a new, fourth round of U.N. sanctions on Wednesday.
Los Angeles Times: "Protests, clashes break out in Iran on anniversary of disputed election"
The scuffles suggested that the movement that sprang from the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad remained alive, even if it had lost much of its momentum.
"We came to the streets to show we will not cave in and we want real change," said Mohsen, a 27-year-old student who was among the protesters. "We want to prove that pressure on people will be counterproductive, and the huge number of anti-riot police and Basiji [militiamen] today with surgical masks in the streets shows who is afraid of whom. They are scared of us, not vice versa."
[...]
In a strongly worded statement, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton accused authorities of denying fundamental rights that are guaranteed Iranians under their constitution. She called for the release of imprisoned human rights activists, identifying several by name.
Some activists face death sentences for expressing their opinions, Clinton said. "Other civil society activists in Iran are not in prison, but they face other forms of persecution. Over the past year, many of Iran's most accomplished journalists, academics and activists felt they had no choice but to leave their homeland."
Clinton's statement contrasted with the Obama administration's cautious approach a year ago. Officials then were wary of criticizing Iran too harshly for fear that it would make diplomatic engagement more difficult, or backfire on pro-democracy activists by allowing authorities to portray them as U.S. puppets.
The Daily Nite Owl: "Analysis and Preview of June 12 Protests in Iran" (w/ video)
[T]he protesters caught the government off-guard and showed incredible resilience. Instead of publicizing their intentions of protesting or declaring their routes of procession beforehand. They quietly let the government feel like they were not going to show up - but did.
[...]
Considering the fact that the Iranian government had amassed an army of security personnel to stop protesters from gathering, today’s events are a clear sign that the government is failing as it had failed in the past to quell the uprising. Whether the future holds more victories for the government or the Green Movement is as yet uncertain. But protesters returning from gatherings in Tehran were very optimistic and cheerful. Some indicated on blogs that it was a “great day” while others called it; “the day I learned that we really are countless.”
From all this, one thing looks certain, though: the successful protests despite the government’s pressure is surely going to give a strong morale boost to the Green Movement and likely make another dent in the cracking walls of the Islamic Republic.
Juan Cole: "The Greens in Iran Are a Movement, Not a Coup"
The movement failed to attain its short term primary goal for two major internal reasons:
The downside for the regime is that it must now depend more on power (i.e. imposition of rule by force) and less on authority (the likelihood that a command will be obeyed voluntarily). Regimes based on brute power are less often long-lasting than those based on authority.
I argued at Tomdispatch that US and Israeli hypocrisy also helped the hardliners internationally.
[...]
This failure to achieve a practical political change at the top in the course of a year does not indicate that the Green Movement is unimportant or dead. It can survive and be influential if it finds new tactics or repertoires of sustainable collective action that cannot so easily be forestalled by the security forces, and if it identifies some simple, practical change it wants legislated other than the holding of new elections. It should be remembered that the Civil Rights movement in the US took about a decade to succeed legislatively, and much longer to effect real social and cultural change.
If it is a movement for free speech and political transparency, then it should put forward a program for legislation that would implement these ideals, and keep the pressure on the regime to enact it.
In the meantime, the Obama administration must face certain realities:
Karim Sadjadpour: "Iran -- One Year After the Disputed Election and Violent Crackdown"
Two things happened after the elections that impacted Tehran’s foreign policy. First, any lingering moderates or pragmatists were essentially purged from the decision-making structure, leaving Ayatollah Khamenei surrounded by a group of likeminded hardliners with two overarching political instincts: mistrust and defiance. Second, the ongoing internal power struggles made it even more difficult than usual for the regime to make decisions.
While there has not been a dramatic foreign policy shift, the diplomatic style of the hardliners is increasingly brazen. It is brazen to detain three innocent young American hikers for nearly a year and use their imprisonment as leverage in diplomacy. It’s brazen for President Ahmadinejad to publicly chastise a key strategic ally, Russia, as he did last month.
Foreign Policy: "Misreading Tehran"
With a full 12 months now between us and the election, the time is ripe to start revisiting the hype and hope in a year of writing: which stories were overblown, what stories were missed entirely, and what can be gleaned about Iran's annus horribilis from a more thorough understanding. FP asked seven prominent Iranian-Americans, deeply immersed in both the English- and Persian-language media, to look through the fog of journalism at what actually happened in Tehran -- and why so many of us got it so wrong.
This is just the introduction; I highly encourage you to read the seven articles as part of this series.
Anonymous: "The Limits of Twitter, Ctd."
I object to the notion that there was no twitter revolution last year. There may not have been one in Iran, but there was certainly one ABOUT Iran. These were tweets being put out in English, predominantly by people in the West, anyone seriously paying attention knew they were a fairly troublesome gauge of what was going on.
The Real Twitter Revolution occurred mostly in the Anglophone West, in New York and London, in Vancouver and Auckland. It was not in the streets but rather in dorms and living rooms, offices and internet cafes. It was a revolution in media by which countless people, myself included, finally saw the man behind the curtain of the mainstream media. My faith in the Mainstream media, particularly in the lauded 24 hour news channels (and CNN above all) had been slipping for years, mostly I suspect due to Jon Stewart, but it was Iran and Twitter that took a hammer to it.
[...]
If it weren't for twitter, for blogs (if it hadn't been for the events in Iran, I'd have never found the dish!) and for all the rest of new media, we wouldn't have had any idea what was going on in Iran last year. The traditional media waffled, avoided the matter, and when they finally decided the story was worth covering after all, seemed mostly to read tweets on air. As I watched CNN drop the Iran story as if it had never been to focus on the physical death of a man whose career had died over a decade earlier, a revolution took place in the heart of my consciousness. That the mainstream media lies, that it ignores, and that it is woefully incapable of doing its job.
I haven't been quite the same since.
New York Times: "Iran's Revolution: Year 2"
As I consider the changes in Iran over the last year, the people who come quickly to mind are my covert-action-loving colleague, Karl Popper and the army of pro-democracy lay and clerical Iranian intellectuals who’ve been transforming their country’s culture and ethics. They are our guides to what the United States ought to be doing vis-à-vis Iran; they are also a reproach to how President Obama has so far conducted Iran policy.
Whereas the Reagan administration in the 1980s could do little to help Iranians (Ronald Reagan’s determined efforts to engage the clerical regime over the hostages in Lebanon certainly didn’t strengthen “moderates” in Tehran), Mr. Obama could do vastly more. By throwing in his lot with the freedom movement, he would surely increase the odds that we won’t have to live with a nuclear bomb controlled by virulently anti-American and anti-Semitic clerics. Democrats, once the champions of promoting pro-democracy movements, need to understand that the good that they can do for the people of Iran far exceeds the great harm that comes from doing nothing.
Andrew Sullivan: "Iran -- A Year Later"
One way to see if an argument is worth its muster is to ask whether it addresses the core points of the best rebuttal. Reuel Marc Gerecht's op-ed completely fails this test today. The obvious reason that president Obama decided to keep his support for the Green Movement in Iran muted was ... to help the Green Movement in Iran. His view - shared in large part by Mousavi and Karroubi - was that too strong a US public stand would backfire. It would allow the mullahs to play the Great Satan card more effectively, and marginalize the message of the Greens. Now, it's possible to disagree with that and see Iran as more like the old Soviet Union than a Muslim society with deep - and thoroughly understandable - suspicions about US meddling. But if so, you should make that case. Frankly, I remain unpersuaded that we should treat Iran like Czechoslovakia. I have learned something from this past decade which is that history and culture matter, that rhetorical grandstanding is no substitute for diplomacy and strategy, and that neoconservative projections about the Middle East have been proven spectacularly misguided, ill-informed and counter-productive.
More reactions to the New York Times op-ed:
Joe Klein: "How to Help the Iranian Rebels"
Daniel Larison: "The Green Movement and Karl Popper"
Foreign Policy: "Who's Really Misreading Tehran?" (also a good rebuttal to the "Misreading Tehran" series)
Other links:
Enduring America: CNN interview w/ Mehdi Karrobi, opposition leader and presidential candidate
Andrew Sullivan: "The Thugs and the Greens" (on the latest act of violence against Karroubi)
Joe Klein: "Iran: A Year Later"
A surprising number of articles have come out recently -- this should be enough to chew on for a while. @ TehranBureau should also have some good up-to-date, English-language information.
(And of course, I finally got some Iran-related icons....one year later. Oops. x_x
4. And now back to boring IRL stuff. XD
I finally started driving again this week; it's only been two days, but I definitely feel comfortable behind the wheel again. Just got to put in a few weeks' more practice, and focus more on parking, and I should definitely have my license by summer's end. If I accomplish nothing else between now and September, it'll be that -- which is good, considering how important it is. ^_^;
5. My sister has been working on a social studies project on Liberia -- each student/group had to do an African country (I remember doing the same thing in my geography class in middle school, only we could do any country [I ended up doing Switzerland, which was worth it because I got to tell everyone LSD was invented there 8D]). Part of the project apparently involved having to cook a dish from that country, and my sister decided to do these. I'm not entirely certain if it's authentic (and I'm much less certain about whether or not such authenticity matters), but I decided to help make them tonight. And I definitely enjoyed myself! It took a bit getting used to, but I can see myself cooking and enjoying it in the future. And they came out great too! :D
6. __wilderness__ , I got that Robot Heroes Sideways you sent me earlier this week! Thank you so much!! :3 (Now I have to find a place to put it....)
7. I want this poster badly. The katakana kinda pisses me off, but I'll live. (Yeah, it also comes in a T-shirt, but I'm way too self-conscious to want to wear something like that out of the house. I'm not that nerdy -- at least, not yet. :PPP)
8. Lately I've been watching Persons Unknown, and I've really been liking it. I haven't been completely sucked in like Durarara!! -- it didn't grab me right away, and I completely forgot about it until the next episode aired last Monday -- but despite the fact that it's absolute crazy and has a ton of suspended-disbelief-challenging moments, I think it's growing on me. Uh oh. O_o;
9.
SUMMER MULTIFANDOM FRIENDING MEME ETA: I'm not getting comment notifications right now, so if I don't respond to comments in a timely fashion, that's why.
mecteol ----> quadruplify
FYI, I'm not changing any other usernames I might go by online -- my AIM, Twitter, Dreamwidth, etc. will be unchanged (for now).
I've also changed my default icon, as well as my layout and profile -- thanks to thrashmetal and fruitstyle! The profile still needs a bit of tweaking, but feel free to check them out! :D
2. Welcome new friends! *waves*
3. Some more Iran news:
AP: "Anniversary of disputed Iran vote passes quietly"
Fearing bloodshed and calculating that it would gain them nothing, the movement's leaders called off a day of mass protests, reflecting their increasing powerlessness against the government's military muscle.
"We have to expand social networks, websites, these are our best means," said Mir Hossein Mousavi, a former prime minister who maintains he was robbed of the presidency through fraud in the June 12, 2009, election.
"These work like an army. This is our army against their military force," he said on his website, Kaleme.com.
The retreat from Iran's streets and university campuses to the Web is certain to be seen as a victory for the ruling hard-liners and for the armed forces that preserved their grip on power with a harsh crackdown on postelection protesters.
The anniversary passed with no signs of major disturbances or sizable gatherings.
[...]
That has been the opposition's strategy for some time now, and it has yet to bring tangible gains. Dozens of Web posts and proclamations against Ahmadinejad and the ruling system are issued each day - but all they amount to is words against muscle.
The past year, however, has not been without moments of deep change for Iran - a year ago, it would have been unthinkable to chant slogans against Khamenei, who has the final say on all matters in Iran. The chants are now common and have punched holes in the political firewall that once separated the theocracy from the people.
At the same time, Iran's rulers have retrenched and handed more control to the Revolutionary Guard, resulting in a far more aggressive hand at home and a less compromising attitude aboard - including a hard line over Iran's nuclear program, which brought a new, fourth round of U.N. sanctions on Wednesday.
Los Angeles Times: "Protests, clashes break out in Iran on anniversary of disputed election"
The scuffles suggested that the movement that sprang from the reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad remained alive, even if it had lost much of its momentum.
"We came to the streets to show we will not cave in and we want real change," said Mohsen, a 27-year-old student who was among the protesters. "We want to prove that pressure on people will be counterproductive, and the huge number of anti-riot police and Basiji [militiamen] today with surgical masks in the streets shows who is afraid of whom. They are scared of us, not vice versa."
[...]
In a strongly worded statement, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton accused authorities of denying fundamental rights that are guaranteed Iranians under their constitution. She called for the release of imprisoned human rights activists, identifying several by name.
Some activists face death sentences for expressing their opinions, Clinton said. "Other civil society activists in Iran are not in prison, but they face other forms of persecution. Over the past year, many of Iran's most accomplished journalists, academics and activists felt they had no choice but to leave their homeland."
Clinton's statement contrasted with the Obama administration's cautious approach a year ago. Officials then were wary of criticizing Iran too harshly for fear that it would make diplomatic engagement more difficult, or backfire on pro-democracy activists by allowing authorities to portray them as U.S. puppets.
The Daily Nite Owl: "Analysis and Preview of June 12 Protests in Iran" (w/ video)
[T]he protesters caught the government off-guard and showed incredible resilience. Instead of publicizing their intentions of protesting or declaring their routes of procession beforehand. They quietly let the government feel like they were not going to show up - but did.
[...]
Considering the fact that the Iranian government had amassed an army of security personnel to stop protesters from gathering, today’s events are a clear sign that the government is failing as it had failed in the past to quell the uprising. Whether the future holds more victories for the government or the Green Movement is as yet uncertain. But protesters returning from gatherings in Tehran were very optimistic and cheerful. Some indicated on blogs that it was a “great day” while others called it; “the day I learned that we really are countless.”
From all this, one thing looks certain, though: the successful protests despite the government’s pressure is surely going to give a strong morale boost to the Green Movement and likely make another dent in the cracking walls of the Islamic Republic.
Juan Cole: "The Greens in Iran Are a Movement, Not a Coup"
The movement failed to attain its short term primary goal for two major internal reasons:
- The security establishment of the Islamic Republic remained united and rallied to Khamenei and Ahmadinejad. A split in the military or the paramilitary institutions would have created a condition of multiple sovereignty, which Tilly sees as typical of revolutionary situations. But although the political elite split, unevenly, the generals did not.
- The security establishment developed tools for combating the repertoires of social action deployed by the Greens. Did they use cell phones, texting, twitter and facebook to gather flashmobs, spontaneous urban crowds? Then cellphone signals were cut, web pages were blocked and facebook pages were infiltrated. Did they assemble in large numbers? Streets were cut off and crowds were controlled. Did they mount processions? Basij civil militiamen were sent out on motorcycles to disrupt them, beat them and arrest the recalcitrant. Did they gather in rallies to denounce the regime? They were assaulted by police. The beatings and torture and occasional executions to which some protesters were subjected served to signal that the regime was willing to raise the cost of protest to the maximum. The ways in which the regime attacked family members of prominent dissidents also terrorized would-be challengers.
The downside for the regime is that it must now depend more on power (i.e. imposition of rule by force) and less on authority (the likelihood that a command will be obeyed voluntarily). Regimes based on brute power are less often long-lasting than those based on authority.
I argued at Tomdispatch that US and Israeli hypocrisy also helped the hardliners internationally.
[...]
This failure to achieve a practical political change at the top in the course of a year does not indicate that the Green Movement is unimportant or dead. It can survive and be influential if it finds new tactics or repertoires of sustainable collective action that cannot so easily be forestalled by the security forces, and if it identifies some simple, practical change it wants legislated other than the holding of new elections. It should be remembered that the Civil Rights movement in the US took about a decade to succeed legislatively, and much longer to effect real social and cultural change.
If it is a movement for free speech and political transparency, then it should put forward a program for legislation that would implement these ideals, and keep the pressure on the regime to enact it.
In the meantime, the Obama administration must face certain realities:
- The regime seems fairly stable in the short to medium term and so presents Washington with an ongoing political reality that must be engaged rather than ignored
- Direct negotiations with the regime no more constitute a betrayal of the Greens than did direct negotiations with the Soviet leadership represent a betrayal of Soviet dissidents such as Sakharov.
- There is no reason to think that were the Green Movement to come to power, it would suddenly mothball the country’s nuclear enrichment program, so that one of the main points of contention between Washington and Tehran must be addressed in any case.
- It must be understood that a US or Israeli military strike on Iran would certainly cause the Iranian public to rally around the regime and would effectively destroy the Green Movement and any hope of internal political change.
Karim Sadjadpour: "Iran -- One Year After the Disputed Election and Violent Crackdown"
Two things happened after the elections that impacted Tehran’s foreign policy. First, any lingering moderates or pragmatists were essentially purged from the decision-making structure, leaving Ayatollah Khamenei surrounded by a group of likeminded hardliners with two overarching political instincts: mistrust and defiance. Second, the ongoing internal power struggles made it even more difficult than usual for the regime to make decisions.
While there has not been a dramatic foreign policy shift, the diplomatic style of the hardliners is increasingly brazen. It is brazen to detain three innocent young American hikers for nearly a year and use their imprisonment as leverage in diplomacy. It’s brazen for President Ahmadinejad to publicly chastise a key strategic ally, Russia, as he did last month.
Foreign Policy: "Misreading Tehran"
With a full 12 months now between us and the election, the time is ripe to start revisiting the hype and hope in a year of writing: which stories were overblown, what stories were missed entirely, and what can be gleaned about Iran's annus horribilis from a more thorough understanding. FP asked seven prominent Iranian-Americans, deeply immersed in both the English- and Persian-language media, to look through the fog of journalism at what actually happened in Tehran -- and why so many of us got it so wrong.
This is just the introduction; I highly encourage you to read the seven articles as part of this series.
Anonymous: "The Limits of Twitter, Ctd."
I object to the notion that there was no twitter revolution last year. There may not have been one in Iran, but there was certainly one ABOUT Iran. These were tweets being put out in English, predominantly by people in the West, anyone seriously paying attention knew they were a fairly troublesome gauge of what was going on.
The Real Twitter Revolution occurred mostly in the Anglophone West, in New York and London, in Vancouver and Auckland. It was not in the streets but rather in dorms and living rooms, offices and internet cafes. It was a revolution in media by which countless people, myself included, finally saw the man behind the curtain of the mainstream media. My faith in the Mainstream media, particularly in the lauded 24 hour news channels (and CNN above all) had been slipping for years, mostly I suspect due to Jon Stewart, but it was Iran and Twitter that took a hammer to it.
[...]
If it weren't for twitter, for blogs (if it hadn't been for the events in Iran, I'd have never found the dish!) and for all the rest of new media, we wouldn't have had any idea what was going on in Iran last year. The traditional media waffled, avoided the matter, and when they finally decided the story was worth covering after all, seemed mostly to read tweets on air. As I watched CNN drop the Iran story as if it had never been to focus on the physical death of a man whose career had died over a decade earlier, a revolution took place in the heart of my consciousness. That the mainstream media lies, that it ignores, and that it is woefully incapable of doing its job.
I haven't been quite the same since.
New York Times: "Iran's Revolution: Year 2"
As I consider the changes in Iran over the last year, the people who come quickly to mind are my covert-action-loving colleague, Karl Popper and the army of pro-democracy lay and clerical Iranian intellectuals who’ve been transforming their country’s culture and ethics. They are our guides to what the United States ought to be doing vis-à-vis Iran; they are also a reproach to how President Obama has so far conducted Iran policy.
Whereas the Reagan administration in the 1980s could do little to help Iranians (Ronald Reagan’s determined efforts to engage the clerical regime over the hostages in Lebanon certainly didn’t strengthen “moderates” in Tehran), Mr. Obama could do vastly more. By throwing in his lot with the freedom movement, he would surely increase the odds that we won’t have to live with a nuclear bomb controlled by virulently anti-American and anti-Semitic clerics. Democrats, once the champions of promoting pro-democracy movements, need to understand that the good that they can do for the people of Iran far exceeds the great harm that comes from doing nothing.
Andrew Sullivan: "Iran -- A Year Later"
One way to see if an argument is worth its muster is to ask whether it addresses the core points of the best rebuttal. Reuel Marc Gerecht's op-ed completely fails this test today. The obvious reason that president Obama decided to keep his support for the Green Movement in Iran muted was ... to help the Green Movement in Iran. His view - shared in large part by Mousavi and Karroubi - was that too strong a US public stand would backfire. It would allow the mullahs to play the Great Satan card more effectively, and marginalize the message of the Greens. Now, it's possible to disagree with that and see Iran as more like the old Soviet Union than a Muslim society with deep - and thoroughly understandable - suspicions about US meddling. But if so, you should make that case. Frankly, I remain unpersuaded that we should treat Iran like Czechoslovakia. I have learned something from this past decade which is that history and culture matter, that rhetorical grandstanding is no substitute for diplomacy and strategy, and that neoconservative projections about the Middle East have been proven spectacularly misguided, ill-informed and counter-productive.
More reactions to the New York Times op-ed:
Joe Klein: "How to Help the Iranian Rebels"
Daniel Larison: "The Green Movement and Karl Popper"
Foreign Policy: "Who's Really Misreading Tehran?" (also a good rebuttal to the "Misreading Tehran" series)
Other links:
Enduring America: CNN interview w/ Mehdi Karrobi, opposition leader and presidential candidate
Andrew Sullivan: "The Thugs and the Greens" (on the latest act of violence against Karroubi)
Joe Klein: "Iran: A Year Later"
A surprising number of articles have come out recently -- this should be enough to chew on for a while. @ TehranBureau should also have some good up-to-date, English-language information.
(And of course, I finally got some Iran-related icons....one year later. Oops. x_x
4. And now back to boring IRL stuff. XD
I finally started driving again this week; it's only been two days, but I definitely feel comfortable behind the wheel again. Just got to put in a few weeks' more practice, and focus more on parking, and I should definitely have my license by summer's end. If I accomplish nothing else between now and September, it'll be that -- which is good, considering how important it is. ^_^;
5. My sister has been working on a social studies project on Liberia -- each student/group had to do an African country (I remember doing the same thing in my geography class in middle school, only we could do any country [I ended up doing Switzerland, which was worth it because I got to tell everyone LSD was invented there 8D]). Part of the project apparently involved having to cook a dish from that country, and my sister decided to do these. I'm not entirely certain if it's authentic (and I'm much less certain about whether or not such authenticity matters), but I decided to help make them tonight. And I definitely enjoyed myself! It took a bit getting used to, but I can see myself cooking and enjoying it in the future. And they came out great too! :D
6. __wilderness__ , I got that Robot Heroes Sideways you sent me earlier this week! Thank you so much!! :3 (Now I have to find a place to put it....)
7. I want this poster badly. The katakana kinda pisses me off, but I'll live. (Yeah, it also comes in a T-shirt, but I'm way too self-conscious to want to wear something like that out of the house. I'm not that nerdy -- at least, not yet. :PPP)
8. Lately I've been watching Persons Unknown, and I've really been liking it. I haven't been completely sucked in like Durarara!! -- it didn't grab me right away, and I completely forgot about it until the next episode aired last Monday -- but despite the fact that it's absolute crazy and has a ton of suspended-disbelief-challenging moments, I think it's growing on me. Uh oh. O_o;
9.
SUMMER MULTIFANDOM FRIENDING MEME ETA: I'm not getting comment notifications right now, so if I don't respond to comments in a timely fashion, that's why.