channonyarrow

I have no internet at home, so if anything wildly interesting/exciting/important/other words starting with vowels happens, let me know.

Also, I think - because I am a GENIUS - I fucked something up and now my pro address is flapping in the wind.

Actually, no, let's cancel that - I had a business lunch today with some people about some sekrit planning and I fucked that up. I think I want to be eight and convinced I have a vocation to enter the Church as a nun again, because surely to god dedicating your life to Jesus and lepers is easier than dedicating your life to adulthood.

Tomorrow is TAI acoustic. The way things are going, I will break my leg on the way out the door to pick up graeae. Or maybe all my shit karma will end and I'll wind up with a rockstar to keep.

Ah, hope. It springs eternal - kind of basically like herpes, actually.

To distract from the book I am copyediting. (Long book is VERY FUCKING LONG!)

I know I've done this one before, but ah well. From trollprincess.

"These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish."

( Read more... )

Today, we are expected to get between zero and eight inches of snow. This is as good a reason as any to avoid the Deep Fried Double Wide Holiday Hangover Ball. Also, I don't have tickets, but since Queensryche just stepped up to take over for Saliva, I was thinking about it.

Also also, RIP Bettie Page. I have something to say about that, but I'm going to wait till this book is done.

I may be reconsidering my stance on hotels. I mean, I don't stay at places that cost, like, less than $60/night if I can help it, but now I'm in a hotel at the con that I had to take at the $ridiculous group rate (still better than regular!) and I'm realising that yes, there really are some differences here.

For one thing, I could practically hold a full-on basketball game in here. I may shout just to see if it echoes.

For another, the easy chair has a footstool. I am in love! Normally you have to ignore the "easy" chair in hotel rooms (if you get one) because they suck and are pointless without a footstool. But no, I have one and it is comfy and super and I want to marry it.

Also, there are seven pillows on each bed. Fuck the basketball game, we'll have a pillow fight.

And there is an unusual knob on the bathroom wall. I guess it's a sunlamp or a sauna-effect thing, or something? At any rate, I feel vaguely guilty leaving all my stuff hanging around, even if my stuff has more class than all of New Jersey put together. So far the only negative is that the window looks out over New Jersey, which - see above about not being the most scenic place on earth, nor even the happiest. I can see the Cherry Hill Mall and Pennsylvania. I accidentally went to Pennsylvania trying to get to the hotel, and it was like a block before I realised: In PA, you can make left turns. Not that I don't love the jughandles and the U-turns, I think they're great, but I was not expecting that level of variation that fast.

Based on my brief tour, I would never fit in in Haddon's Bay, PA - I would have a flag too, but my flags would be the Palestinian flag and the Romany flag. And there would never, ever, ever be a stupid Thanksgiving flag at my house. So I would probably be shot.

I would like to live the rest of my life on Dunkin Donuts coffee (every time I go somewhere I say to myself "That's it, you're gonna go try new things and you're gonna find out what the regional things are, and this time you are not fucking around," but it always falls apart because, for example, I don't want to spend five hours fucking around looking for a shoe store, I want to go to Payless because they fit my price range and taste, which is always "the most shoes for the least cost without having to go to WalMart" and I can't walk into pretty much any shoe store in the country (except for Nordstrom's) and assume that they will have my size. And the same with eating: it sounds great to say "Ah, I'll go to the Edison Diner! New Jersey is the diner capital of the world! Or I'll go to the Menlo Park diner!" but then it comes down to it, and you're unable to straighten up, you're on about 35 hours with, basically, a nap in there, as well as flights and stress and a concert, and also, not least of all, it's midnight, so you settle for the drive-in at McDonald's and can't even figure out why what is a #10 in Seattle is a #13 here, though it might have something to do with burritos. Or you're in France, and you're afraid to walk into a restaurant because a) you will order brains, which you have no aversion to trying, but you'd like to be aware of what you've done first; b) the waiter will spit in your food because you speak no French; and c) the total bill will cost more than your entire life savings, so you live on bread and cheese from Monoprix until you get to Spain and people who love you feed you. So technically, Dunkin Donuts is not new to me, but read on outside the parens to see why I think it is!) except I can't because there are no more Dunkin Donuts within fifty miles of Seattle. I know, I looked the last time my coworkers and I were scamming all the free food we could get. It was something like free burritos at Chipotle, free lattes at Starbucks, free...something at McDonalds, and free coffee at Dunkin Donuts, all on the same day, but we have no Dunkin Donuts. This is disappointing because the coffee is awesome.

Also, I accidentally drank some New Jersey tap water this morning, so probably I'll have tumours by nightfall. Tell my mother I loved her.

If it turns out that Joseph Gordon-Levitt is in the live action remake of Akira (according to iMDB he's rumoured) I may very well explode in some sort of weird, Ghostbusters-esque crossing-the-streams-of-fandom way.

Do not be afraid if you see me break into the Stuffed Animals Song. Or, you know, be afraid if your natural reaction to creepy stalker stuffed animals and carnival music is fear. But don't be afraid of me.

And that has caused me to have a vision of what fandomsplosion would cause me to really die of complete nirvana, but it's too embarrassing to recount, considering that ponies are involved, and not as sex objects.


UNRELATEDLY, pop quiz.

Would $4/gallon gas (and the inevitable decline of profits if Congress' tax plan passes) cause oil producers eventually to shy away from the task and lead to the government having to become the oil company for America to allow us to continue to drive, or will oil producers be in it until the bitter end, whether they make money at their current (obscene) rates or not?

Thank god I never throw anything away, ever.

Apparently, I will be taking my old apartment managers to court after all! The armed truce I thought we had has turned out to not be so much of one.

AHAHAHA DOCUMENTATION OF EVERYTHING EVER FOR THE WIN!

In case anyone has forgotten, I am channonyarrow at GJ as well.

ETA: I'm not likely to leave LJ at the moment. I am mainly mirroring this journal on GJ (no, I have no idea how I'll do that, whether I'll just use one to read and one to post, or what) because of the most recent round of Strikethrough. And yes, I do actually give a shit about that. What my reaction will ultimately be, I can't say, but I don't like that a private company thinks it can dictate what is or is not free speech and what is obscenity by values that range from "someone said they don't like it" to the Miller Test, without consistency, when even the United States Supreme Court cannot define what is and is not obscenity and what is free speech.

It doesn't help that the latest round of "to catch a predator" shows seems to be focusing on LJ. Because god knows, I'm totally a pedo and so are the people I know in fandom.

I am, however, not likely to be looking at anything other than an inconvenience in terms of my own journaling, and a weird one. It is more convenient to keep my journal on LJ. I have many non-fandom friends who are not going to be affected by this, and who are not going to move as a result, and those are connexions I value. I'm not going to be deleted any time soon, since I don't do anything that's going to target these idiots who think that the internet should be sanitised for your protection. However, in light of some of the conversations going on, I felt it was appropriate to reiterate my location on GJ.

As to what it will mean in terms of "supporting" Livejournal - well. The thing I've learned is to wait and see. Do I have a sanguine hope of a happy ending? Not really - they've never responded to all the comments addressed to them when they changed the rules the weekend that Deathly Hallows came out and Sectus was going on. Do I have a fatal hope of an unhappy ending? Not really - they backed down, ultimately, on Strikethrough, and their policies are so flawed that I can't imagine that a lawyer would actually let them stand (and they DO have lawyers). At this point, I'm calling the odds fifty-fifty. Whether I will continue to give them money I don't know. I like having a paid journal, but I don't like supporting people who wish to police what I can and cannot look at as long as no actual child is being harmed.

I am an editor. Words are sacred to me (and yes, I wince every time someone on cranky_editors posts that they work for a POD publisher because I hate POD) so the right of free speech is up there even higher than most other values and liberties I hold dear. I don't like that LJ/6A is choosing to use the worst of two systems, the public and private systems in America, and is not choosing to think about this. They are bodging together their right as a private corporation based in America to dictate the content that is hosted on their servers, because they would be named in a lawsuit about child pornographers, since such images would be illegal under American law, with their wish (I have no better term) to support freedom of speech by not censoring unless it is called to their attention.

The problem with this is in the execution of that. Yes, every single Snarry work is now ToS-able, since we know that, canonically, Harry was not eighteen when Snape died. Child porn in the US.

Except! US law has never judged a work of fiction as child porn! Case in point: The Colour Purple. Well Schooled in Murder, by Elizabeth George. I KNOW I have other books on my shelves that qualify to SOME as being child porn, but the US has never found a work of fiction that I know of to qualify as such. As well, the US has never found an image of fictional people to be child porn as far as I know - I am on shakier ground here, but it makes sense. To be child porn, it has to hurt a child, and there is no child hurt if there is no child involved in its making. What happens to the porn after creation is an entirely different issue; I'm speaking of its creation.

I personally think that they're misreading "child porn", as used by Warriors For Innocence and other groups, to mean "child porn" when WfI means "teh gay". I have no take on the predator crap, other than to wonder whether shows that got a lot of watchers and eyes by finding actual pedophiles on MySpace will get the same watchers and eyes by looking at people on LJ who like looking at pictures of people having sex, regardless of age.

I also think that their execution of this policy is flawed in the extreme. I realise that we live in a happy country (for those of us in the US, which is where LJ's servers are located, so everyone ON LJ lives in the US) that believes that we can dictate what other people do and don't do, but we should NOT encourage that. It is behaviour that is not right, in my opinion. It is even higher than freedom of speech and sacredness of words, in my opinion - I have the right to do anything that does not hurt another person incapable of consent, in my opinion.

You click on a link marked NSFW, you get what you deserve. If you don't like teh gay, stay out of fandom. What LJ is doing with this policy and its execution is encouraging anyone who has a grudge against someone to go rat them out (and I do wonder how long it'll take before daily_deviant is ToS'd). With the "guidelines" that LJ follows, the main one being the Miller Test, which presupposes a community standard so that what is obscene in Podunk, GA is not necessarily obscene in New York, NY, there is nothing to stop this sort of abuse from happening.

Note, please, that LJ is not claiming that the works that have earned ToS's are copyright violations. They are offensive to someone.

So. We have a system ripe for abuse. You have a grudge? Great! ToS me! You can do it, you really can. I write about incest in a fictional relationship where one of the participants is underage. If you do that, however, I will come after YOU.

This seems to be where LJ stopped thinking. "The Miller Test" sounded sufficiently awesome to them and they didn't stop and think about whether someone could or would actually rat someone out on the basis of the fact that Person A and Person B did not get along. That's not upholding freedom of speech, in either of the manners that LJ has the right to do so. I personally believe that they are better served by going with the widest, broadest definition of free speech possible, before they shrink, and that things that are actual depictions of children in sexual situations should be prosecuted to the fullest extent, but that's not how LJ chose to roll. They threw words at a problem that weren't good enough words and that didn't do the job they wanted them to, then got scared when the fanartists didn't just disappear and started ToS-ing. They could have done something really good; they chose not to.

I don't want to support that, but it's a bit like my car. If I give up my car for the good of the environment, I give up a LOT - like being able to see my parents regularly. Like being able to do anything, five days a week, other than work and get to and from work. Like being able to go out with friends. If I give up LJ for my principles of free speech, I lose a LOT of my friends. I am now supporting something I don't agree with for the ease of my life, and I don't like that. But I don't have better options right now.

I can too have a song called "It's Not A Fashion Statement, It's A Fucking Death Wish" if I want on my playlist. I'm familiar with the word fuck, thanks. I know what it means, I use it a lot, I use it at work, I am down with the word fuck. Plz to not be censoring my songs, bitch. "It's Not A Fashion Statement, It's A Death Wish" is just sort of...lacking.

Additionally, while I realise that you were programmed by someone who did not necessarily spell, or however the fuck you retrieve names from your database, 'enough" is not spelled 'enought'. Really. I promise.

GOOD things:
- Machines of Destiny is hellaciously fun.
- I got promoted.
- I got an over-cost-of-living raise. (You don't understand what this means until you realise that I have never worked somewhere long enough to get a raise before. I don't know how, since I've been working since I was eighteen, all of twelve years ago, but the only time I've EVER gotten an in-job raise was when I worked in fast food and the minimum wage went up.)
- I found my author's blog. I AM WATCHING YOU.
- I went and saw a very good movie that you all should see when it comes out, called Fracture. VERY FUCKING GOOD.

BAD things:
- graeae's phone is broken.
- I have to reject people from my open call because they weren't good enough. I do not like this, sam-I-am, I do not like it.
- My vocabulary feels limited with only six icons.
- I owe nyghtshayde and apiphile meme-replies.

I feel a whole lot better than I did yesterday.

I think I should have a blog with which to friend/find authors, because I want to be able to bitch about work in this one, and I'm not sure what I should call it. It would amuse me to no end to use a sock journal I made ages ago but that seems...unprofessional, given the name.

In the same vein of thought as the post of the other day, where I ranted and ranted about my inability to express what I wanted freely, without needing to worry about offending my friends (and out of which has come nothing, to date) I missed a key point.

I have lurkers.

I had forgotten this, and part of me does not like the sort of nasty sick thrill of thinking, for some brief moment "Ooh, I'm cool enough that people want to read this journal...go me!" Obviously, part of me does.

As a longtime lurker myself, I know how this goes. I almost never commented on someone else's journal entry out of fear that I would fuck up and be rude accidentally (this is something I still have to work on; my opinions are, to put it mildly, strong.) and of course, the ever popular "They don't want to hear what I have to say." This is, of course, total bollocks, as the only point to engaging in this sort of free therapy is to hear other people reply. Then you can either say "Yeah, that's a good idea," or "They missed the point totally, this is what I meant."

It clarifies your thoughts.

Normally, I'm not bothered by lurkers, or the thought of lurkers. I wish you all would say hi, so that I can talk to you, but not bothered if you don't want to. I don't assume that everyone who friends me reads these long, moaning posts about my life and my anger, so I'm not bothered if no one comments (particularly when I whinge). However, I am a strong believer in freedom of speech, and I have posted (as I recall) two friendslocked entries, both set to specific groups of people.

This leads to the dilemma. Again, I am presented with the decision to go to a friends journal, or to bear in mind that at least two of my lurkers know me in real life (neither has, so far as I know, an lj account). Which leads me back to self-censorship because I really don't know that I want my niece to know that I am into Potterslash, BDSM, bloodplay, breathplay, Carnivorous Wardrobe (where I play a junkie whore, among others, and all of my chars are in some sort of meltdown atm), anger, manipulation of others, hatred, anti-stupidity, and all sorts of things that generally mean I'm not really Rainbow Brite.

This journal is, to some extent, a one sided view of me. Even if I strive to portray events evenhandedly, I can't. I have only one view. I have the public face of myself (which, admittedly, was shaped by two years spent over 5K miles from the possibility of anyone I knew "just dropping by") which is different from the private face, but nonetheless is a specific face. And however much, to make one example, I think that Joe Blow is crazy to bid on Buffet Group stocks when he can't afford a car payment, it is not my decision, and I am not capable of presenting a balanced view. I can only present what I think. It is not possible to climb into someone else's head.

So, reining the post back to the issue of lurkers, I generally assume that people I don't know in real life aren't baby-rapers even though they just wrote chan slash. I assume that their personalities hold together just fine with more information than I have. I do not judge the person by their journals. I judge whether I want to participate, but that's a different issue.

The issue with the lurkers I have that I know in real life is that I don't know what they're planning on doing with this information about me. Quite frankly, should my niece choose to tell her mother about what I write, it would get passed on to my mother, who would disapprove. I'm 27, I live my life the way I want to, and one of the ways I want to is not to worry my mother more than necessary. I do not need her to know that I read slash - not because of issues with homosexuality, since she knows I'm bi and hasn't tried to have me exorcised - but because it would be like what Carrot says in Men At Arms, about how a dwarf's tools need to be melted down when they die because it's like underclothing to humans. YOu wouldn't use someone else's. And that's what Potterslash would be to her - you shouldn't read that anyway (old-school feminist view of porn, dammit) but you certainly shouldn't take children's story characters and do that to them.

And I do not need people in my life or my journal who don't have the balls to tell me I'm full of shit, or that my penchant for throwing goats off bell towers in Mexico scares them. I want to be able to reassure the people I know and love that I am fine, I am not a serial killer, nor a baby rapist, nor even all that angry.

You do not need an lj account to comment to lj. You know my phone number, my email address, and any number of ways to get in touch with me. I do not want to censor myself any more than I already do, and I do not want to resort to locking this journal. I do not want to worry that I'm going to be having a conversation with my mum or with any interested third parties because I talked about my interest in slash chan somnophilia. I want you, o lurkers from real life, to talk to me if you are worried.

The rest of you, of course, are doomed.

This is precisely why I've never tried to find out if any of my other family members have ljs.

In all seriousness, I love to talk about myself. I take pride in honesty. If anyone has a question, ask and I'll answer it truthfully. That does not change if you are a relative.