channonyarrow

My ideas are the stupidest, yo. :)

Pursuant to the notion that I want to do a "working" modification to the steampunk outfit I discussed in my last post, I spent some valuable staff meeting time today thinking about a) what I wanted to do and b) how to make it multi-purpose.

I came up with an arc reactor. EVERYONE LOOK SURPRISED.

So here's my thought. Using something like this as a tutorial/guide (it's delightfully vague - "Now you have to make 10 little brass tab thingies. These sit on top of the clear ring after it has been placed into the spider frame assembly and then they are then wrapped with 22ga copper wire.") make an arc reactor.

Next, using Iron Man's left arm as a suggestion, create a "weapon" that is powered by the reactor. Because it's important to be both clever and steamy, I was thinking that I could use a leather glove and maybe get real exciting and do some scale mail on it and do a second, narrower, reactor ring inside to light up and give the effect of the weapon powering up and possibly even firing.

But wait, there's more!

I still think that an eyepatch targeting system would ROCK, and I think the key there is that I either need to get contacts or build it to fit over the lens of my glasses. Going without glasses is NOT AN OPTION. I'm legally blind and if it's further than 3 inches away I can't see it in any detail. That would be fun at a crowded con. So I'm thinking some kind of jeweler's loupe attached to an eyepatch, with a laser pointer assembly for a sight.

And then! (Remember, I did say multi-purpose.) Create a power pack in a small cross-body bag, with the thought that I could hook that into the hand and eyepatch to play mix-n-match. I mean, seriously, Iron Man is very awesome and all, but ... yeah. I suspect that an arc reactor in a steampunk setting is kind of like a Bluetooth headset in the real world.

There was another piece I thought of - oh right. If I really felt like getting carried away, I could also try making an actual movie-verse Iron Man gauntlet so that I had real mix-n-match ability. We shall see.

(None of this is going to get done, you realise. I just think it would be awesome.)

- I saw a car with the license plate "Jwalk" this weekend. No one will get this, but it gave me quite a turn, I can tell you.

- I saw three really good movies (Son of a Lion, Ben X, and Go With Peace Jamil), and one really really really really bad one (Strangers). It was a good thing the director didn't make it to Strangers, as I do think I would not have resisted the urge to say "Was it difficult to make a movie where the female main character has no motivation to sleep with the male main character, other than some vague idea that she's clearly a slut because she had an affair with a married man as her backstory? What about making a movie that fails to resolve the plot point of her being deported?" That's how bad it was.

- I spent an utterly, utterly enjoyable two hours between Son of A Lion and Ben X on Broadway. I got hair dye at the Metro, wandered into Trendy Wendy's and nearly bought yet another handbag (but it was round! and leather! and it said "revenge" on it!), then gave $.75 to a guy who "had locked his keys in his car". Note to panhandlers: I am more likely to give you money if you have an amusing story, but it's not too improbable. The tipping point here was that he was dirty "because he'd been painting in the garage" when he "locked his keys in the car" and "needed to go to Redmond to get the spare key". My ass, dude, but have the $.75. I found out that Mama's Favourite Piroshki, now called "Piroshki on Broadway" is still there, Jack in the Box is not, and Twice Sold Tales is gone from its location. I am pretending, because they are complete evil, that they're not in the new location. I'd rather be dragged backwards over broken glass and lit on fire than shop there. Then I went to Bailey/Coy, and got a couple of hopefully-good books (In A Sunburned Country and Rant) and remembered how much I love books. And I went to the market, only prevented from buying flowers by the fact that I was going to be at movies for the next nine hours. It was really fun to just be there and sort of wander along and do what I felt like. Not that I don't do that anyway, but it felt like it'd been a long, long time since I was either "on a mission" shopping or "making everything count" shopping.

- I'm starting to feel the urge to write again.

- I need to post to the game and tell them that I'm not dead, and that I am playing, and then get back into the habit of that. It's amazing how many habits I thought I had that I've broken completely in the last month of wandering through hell, like that my apartment is only somewhat clean, and definitely-not-inhabitable in the kitchen/entryway, due to my "sorting" technique of "throw everything ever out of the bag till you find the pieces you want, fail to pick any of them up, and then make an enormous mess with the rest."

- Or, to put it another way, I've given up on the corset coat 1.0 and am debating what to do with it, but I suspect "salvage parts and throw the rest out" will be the answer, given that it's irredeemably fucked, and am sewing again on that, with other projects in the works.

- Today I get my tattoo.

So I finally saw Order of the Phoenix last night, months and months after anyone gives a shit, and all I have to say, really, other than "Thanks for finally getting it right and not COMPLETELY abridging the book to the point of ridiculous!" is "Moar Tonks plz."

I loved the way they did her morphing. It rocked.

Also, the movie totally held my attention through a cranky child's bitchfit - the same child (and bitchfit) that meant that I had no understanding AT ALL of what PotC III was actually about - so props to the movie.

Apparently in the last...oh, sixteen hours? the world has GONE MAD.

1) Dumbledore is gay. More on that in a minute.
2) Bob Bryar is...offering drum lessons in exchange for fic about him? OH GOD.
3) I lost a fight with my car and am going to have a hell of a black eye to go right along with the bloody nose.

Dear world, plz to be getting back to normal now, thx.

Dear self, more work, less porn, schnell, schnell, mach schnell! But I have to admit that casting the MCR/FOB/P!ATD and CS guys as the cast of Good Omens is...intriguing. I particularly like the idea that Frank is an angel who "did not so much fall as saunter vaguely downwards".

Dear Rowling, if you really want to use your power for good rather than evil or vaguely neutral, you could have made Dumbledore's sexuality something featured IN THE BOOKS rather than letting everyone read DH and go "...gaaaaaay." Let's face it, those books were probably some of the most-read books of ALL TIME, and were (and are) for good or ill, very influential. Coming out (har!) with your personal canon after the series is, you know, in some REAL world where "ending the series" means ending the series, ended is pretty much cheating. If you still have things to say, write more books. If you aren't going to write more books, SHUT UP, particularly about something like that, where the canonical evidence is thin on the ground and it's pretty much a matter of interpretation. You're not being all edgy and hardcore here, you're telling us that actually, you're a pussy because you didn't put that spin on DD's relationship with, like, Grindelwald and maybe even Riddle in print - either you, for no logical reason given your sales and income, bowed to an editorial team that was shitting themselves over putting gay in kids' books, or you're trying for cred NOW THAT YOU CAN HARM NOTHING. Woohoo, so the evangelicals shit themselves and boycott HBP and DH - wow, that'll TOTALLY matter.

Either way, it's a fucking copout, and it's not impressive. If you fail to use the power you have, you're really just pretty much being annoying.

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.

And here I go to delurk...

My goal in life is to do my journal my way, so it's largely a record of pointlessness. However, it may have been gathered that I read Potterslash. I have yet to post anything I've written because, well, I've been working on one thing only and I've gotten sidetracked.

In order to boot my ass out of the slump it's in, I need someone to beta what I have of a (hopefully) very dark Snarry, about 10K words at present. To give you an idea, I'm stuck on killing Dumbledore. Or rather, how to do it.

So...anyone?

Bueller?