Saga City

And I get to see these nerds in person, what.

Phil posted a new video this week, filmed on the tour bus, where the two of them go back and share some things they've texted each other in the past year or so. It's...incredibly domestic and shippy.



So, how about some more domestic videos as a theme? This is from a bit over a year ago, when they were moving out of their first London apartment, where they had lived together for 5 years:


And finally, I'll tag to this a fanvid splicing together a bunch of footage from their day-in-the-life videos. One from Manchester, two from London (one is Christmastime), and one from Tokyo. It's set to an Arcade Fire song, and is just...so...warm.


It's a bit old; it ends with the book they wrote together and released in 2015, but I've yet to find more updated shippy vids that have this kind of scope.

epic D&P context post

I actually haven't watched last night's mid-season premiere because there was US National Figure Skating to watch (sorry!) but I have been reading the bunch of interviews that have popped up just prior to The Good Place being back on the air, and I wanted to share them.

This one is Jameela Jamil in the AV Club, and features Jamil admitting she thinks getting erotic Tahani/Eleanor fic sent to her is great.

This one is William Jackson Harper in GQ, and features some telling ways in which Chidi resembles the actor who plays him.

This one is Manny Jacinto in Vulture, and features the interviewer and Manny geeking out over The Fast and the Furious.

They're all adorable humans, and the set sounds like an amazing, supportive place to work. <3

I've gone back and added more facts and such to the original post, and will continue to do so, so feel free to point people there.

This post is to specifically point to an album I just posted on FB of the trip to the summit I took the kids on yesterday. ("Trip" = we drove up after camp today, hung out for a while and drove back down. Mt. Greylock's a hill. The whole thing took about 1.5 hours.)

Anyway, I made the album public. Feel free to check it out, even if you don't have a FB account. It should be accessible to all.

Pics are easier off DW these days. Assembled and with captions. :)

I don't have a new manicure to share, because I'm still wearing this one. In fact, I literally just took another picture of this one so that you can see what it still looks like 8 days later.



Anyway this post is mostly to direct the 4 of you who requested samples to this post in the com I made for Jamberry stuff on DW.

Of course, anyone is welcome to poke around over there too. So far it's just a post full of application and removal videos, but there will be more coming soon.

Hi all!

I haven't updated in a while, and I'm sorry about that. The major reason seems to be that I'm doing a lot better, and thus don't have a lot of processing to do at the moment.

I turned in the second whole draft of the dissertation last week, and promptly found a localish job that I desperately want. No more details on that front, I think. I don't want to jinx anything. We'll just say that my plan of attack is to construct the Best Teaching Portfolio Evar!

I finished a total watch of Alias in the spaces between my weekly Fringe watching with kass. IDK, like I need a JJ Abrams source at all times? I liked it a lot, though it got a little sloppy with the plotty sometimes. I wanted to nominate it for Yuletide, but I guess it had too many old stories to qualify. Guess I'll just have to go read them all, now that I'm done.

I also just gobbled up Gone Girl, after reading just enough of a movie review to spoil myself for the big twist. But I wanted to watch it get pulled off, and I enjoyed it immensely. I want to see the movie, but I expect to be disappointed. It seems like an even more difficult twist to pull off on screen, tonally.

I hope that was vague enough.

Finally, I need some help signal boosting a friend's Kickstarter. With the recent success of SF anthologies of stories of the diverse margins, I would have hoped that this one might have been picked up with more enthusiasm, but the problem is that my friend Matt, the editor, has no online presence to speak of. So he needs some help.

The project is Latino/a Rising, and it's an SF anthology of U.S. Latin@ SF. He already has a bunch of great writers and artists on board, including Junot Diaz, and he's running the kickstarter in order to be able to pay his contributors.

Matt was a colleague of mine at UMass. He graduated last year and followed his wife (also one of our CompLit grads) to Penn for her post-doc. He's been working on Latin@ science fiction, especially with themes of immigration and alienation, for a long time--it was the topic of his dissertation. I know that the anthology is going to be fantastic. I just wish it were getting more buzz.

If you could help me signal boost it; maybe get some of the bigger SF names to tweet the link to the kickstarter, that would be fantastic. If you'd like to contribute too, and get a copy of the anthology, that would be amazing.

Hi all! In the midst of learning and writing about the Kaffeterkreis--the salon of young women in Berlin who anonymously wrote their own, subversive fairy tales from 1843-1848 (and one of whom married Wilhelm Grimm's son), I take a moment to signal boost the first pseudo-academic fic that one of my own students just uploaded to the AO3:

Daemon and Taboo (4700 words) by Sean_deBergerac
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Sigmund Freud
Additional Tags: Psychoanalysis, Crossover
Summary:

Shortly after the events of the HDM trilogy, analytical psychotheologist Sigmund Freud explains his findings on the unconscious roots of the connection between man and daemon and the Leda Complex that lies at the root of the taboo against contact with the daemon of the Other.

It's basically an attempt at a Freudian essay written in Pullman's world. What effect would the existence of daemons and the explicit war with the angels have on Freud's theory and praxis? I haven't had time to read the whole thing, but what I've read so far has been entertaining. If you know both Freud and Pullman, you might enjoy such a thing.

...couldn't resist that title. :D

gallifrey_times is having a Doctor Who friending meme on Dreamwidth, after the LJ one that eve11 started right one the heels of my friending meme. If you're still in the market for more friends--specifically Doctor Who friends, go on and check it out.

Good morning!

I have things to do today, including but not limited to: a haircut, dropping off documents at the mothership to be made into a packet for my Winter Study class, and parent-teacher conferences as Cassie's school. So I'm not sure how much I'm going to be around today, and I wanted to signal boost this plea from such_heights: white_lotus has an annual fic exchange for Avatar: The Last Airbender and The Legend of Korra, celebrating the Lunar New Year (so it doesn't start until Yuletide is over, if anyone's worried about overlapping challenges), and the signups close tomorrow. They're a bit low on participants, so this year, instead of just enjoying the goodness that comes out of this exchange, I'm signing up.

I ADORED Avatar: the Last Airbender, especially as a fandom I could share with my daughter. (She was Katara for Halloween two years ago. There are pictures of her costume somewhere around here... yes. Also, Q was Momo, but I didn't make that costume from scratch. :D) But I've never done any fanwork for it. Heck, I've barely done any fanwork for anything. But I am inspired by my burgeoning audience, and I do love those shows. Cassie and I have been watching Korra, too. And as disapointed as I was with the conclusion, narratively speaking, I trust that now that they have a more solid future with the series, the writing will get tighter.

Besides, for this exchange you can offer/request more than just fic. Icons, other graphics, art, crafts, vids, whatever!

So, who wants to play with me?

And there's voting!

ICYMI, Jim Hines has had, in the past, a series of posts subverting the kinds of ridiculous contortions women on fantasy covers are put into--by doing them himself. It's been a really clear proof of both the sexism and the anatomical wrongness involved in those poses. (See also The Hawkeye Initiative.)

This month, Hines decided to do some poses for charity. You can read all the details at his livejournal: jimhines. But first, as you scroll down, you will see Jim in a pose-off with John Scalzi, as promised if he reached the $1K mark.

It is glorious. And I have to say, as much as I love Scalzi, I had to vote for Hines. His pose is flawless. As are his hairless legs.

Check it out.

Last night, John Scalzi put up the most recent in his (life-long, it seems) series of incisive political posts. This time, it's Swiftian satire written from the POV of a rapist: A Fan Letter to Certain Conservative Politicians. Huge, huge, trigger warning, naturally.

Comments are also triggery, as many conservatives and self-identified "pro-lifers" are crawling out of the woodwork to ask, "What about the baby?" among other off-topic questions.

I don't have the time or the inclination to get into it there, but since I already addressed the question of "fetus =/= baby" in the past, I want to just write a bit on the question of "whose?" Mostly because I've been saying this IRL for some time now, including in class (as an example of a paradigm shift that comes from reframing), and I should probably write it down sometime. Now is a good time.

Despite the fact that we have this conception in our culture that babies are planted by the man's seed and the woman is just the soil, the oven, the jar (thanks, Hesiod!), or whatever other passive metaphor you want to use, this is in no way biological reality. Sperm does not, in fact, contain all the matter necessary to construct a fetus. It hardly contains any at all.

This is the metaphor I use: imagine that building a fetus is like building a house. The male partner drops off half the blueprints. That's it! His job is done. The female partner, on the other hand, supplies the other half of the blueprints, does ALL the building, and supplies all building materials out of her own body.

Sorry, guys. That fetus is hers, full stop. All the work is hers, and so the product is hers. Yeah, I know. Biology is unfair.

Now, in an ideal situation, you have two loving, equal partners who want their child. And in this ideal situation, the baby is born and the male partner starts to do his part to feed and care for the baby, making it equally his. That's great. But as long as the woman is still doing ALL of the work? Not his.

The argument that the baby is at least "half-his" is an emotional one, contingent on a very specific definition of ownership: a genetic one. I reject that definition of ownership, for a number of reasons. My children aren't mine because they have my DNA. They're mine because I built them, and because their father and I continue to build them--physically, morally, ethically.

Thus endeth the metaphor.