Lotripper

I needed a skeptical icon and I wanted a Donna/Catherine icon, so thanks to LJ user future_love_art, I got both :-)

And from toft: four naked guys do crispbread dance on Sweden's Got Talent. That cheered up my day, and I hope it does the same for you.

Other than that, my life is boring, so I haven't been posting. How are you all?

The fail was back in November when a small majority of voters went against equal marriage rights. The state supreme court just upheld the proposition, because they are bound to decide on the law rather than principle. At least they also confirmed the legal marriages during the interim. But it's not the court's fault, it's the voters' fault, so that's where we have to fight it next.

MarriageEquality.org has a list of protests and actions (mostly in California).

DayOfDecision.com has another list

There are twitter reports from the Sacramento protest at twitter.com/stop8dotorg and from San Francisco at twitter.com/geminiwench with lots of pictures. More coming at twitter #rejectprop8

Couragecampaign.org is proposing a Meet in the Middle demonstration reaching out from the coastal liberal cities to the more conservative inland California.

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win -- Ghandi

From the Italian-language magazine Sport Week, via the wonderous viggo-works

*is happy fangirl*
ETA: Italian, I should have known!

It's the very end of sign-ups, so if you've been wavering, go quick and join in, please! lotrips_remix

I'm seeing those anon feedback memes, but probably won't participate. I try hard to leave fb on specific stories, and rec them (unless I've lost their url, which does happen). Anyone who might want writing feedback, I'm up for it. I personally like it best at beta stage, so there's scope for making changes. <3 you all!

I've been quiet about Mammothgate (Racefail 09 part deux), partly because it's so easy for me to understand the blindness going on there. I doubt I would have even noticed the assumptions, much less thought of speaking out against them. I just didn't see it either, completely missed the wrongness of handwavingly undoing the existence of all Native Americans for the sake of an interesting story.

Though I have learned that listening is a whole lot better than trying to justify oneself about things that matter like this. The author and defenders didn't think: would they have argued so much if it was a huge anachronism they missed, or a quote from someone 100 years later? Why not shut up and learn, and maybe say Oh shit, I screwed up.

Following a bunch of links I found a fabulous essay by a woman of color writing Science Fiction/Fantasy, Nalo Hopkinson: Looking for clues It's all good, articulate, emotional and inspiring. My favorite bit is this:




I hope, very much, we can go on from there.

Dreamwidth invites - I have a couple left ETA none left evening of May 1st, but I should get more eventually. So, if you want them, please comment and I'll do what I can. There are already nifty new features (like comment preview, whee!) and bugs fixed daily: it's pretty exciting to be around.

( DWO stuff - for interested parties only )

Happy May Day in any case!

(this is a repost of a cross-post because my first one failed. It's been a week like that.)

a) "pandemic" just means it's everywhere, not that it's killing everyone. don't panic

b) there have been no deaths outside of Mexico, at this point

c) my tame scientist says that there are probably a lot of infected people in Mexico who have not reported symptoms, so even if there is a death rate of 0.01%, that's enough to explain the numbers

d) wash your hands, a lot. If you work with kids, make them wash their hands

e) some good sources of real information (inspired by linaelyn )

• World Health Organization
• US Government Pandemic site
• Nature.com
• New York Times
• BBC
• Wired flu update
• USA Today map
• arstechnica

panic is silly

New icon, gorgeous Viggo, from this year, I think, made by the lovely and talented stormatdusk

From Empire (UK magazine), scans of the Viggo & Sean Bean article from those Empire awards, with silly snarky interview answers. Just look at them! (Viggo-Works is fabulous!) I might have to own this on paper, it's so good.

Also, if anyone wants to make me an icon of the two of them from this event, not necessarily this picture, I would be thrilled and grateful.

There's also a wonderful new Dom site, The Dominic Monaghan Resource, which has a fantastic collection of articles and interviews, from the 1990s on. Interviews are such character gold.

qthelights is working on her thesis on fandom, and needs some help. She's studying ...why some online communities last and why some don't. I plan to look at the fandom community in order to examine the ways in which it has lasted. Within this, I will be looking at: the strengths of ties between people... and has a short poll about which fandoms you're in, how long, what you do in those fandoms, etc. It took me about 10 minutes to fill out, and really interesting questions and answers: Fandom Poll. (btw, the usernames will not be in the final thesis, but they are "visible to all").

thefourthvine says: Sometimes you may say to yourself: all these people have me friended. And yet I posted a story (or a link, or four extremely compelling pictures of my cat, including one where she almost had a ribbon on her head) and many of them have not commented! You may wonder why. You may even be downcast in your wonderment and confusion.

She has been doing some careful research on this very topic, and she has all the answers. WHAT a relief to have it put in perspective that way ;-) If you are a lurker, that's OK with me. But just so you know, even short comments on any of my posts are precious. I am always greedy for more.

---

Plus: GIP. That there my icon is me, in my Big Chair, all blurry but that disguises all my chins. That is my laptop with my old-style rainbow apple sticker. I use the other one too much in my work persona.

---

This text is supposed to follow a test cut tag. It wasn't working on crossposting from DWO yesterday. Let's see if it does today. And some more Dreamwidth stuff:

+ zarah's post on Dreamwidth for Dummies

+ zvi's excellent post on How to follow someone who has moved to Dreamwidth (or most any other journaling /blogging system).

PS I have no invite codes, but probably will on April 30. Just tell me if you want one.

It's been really hot here. Way beyond my normal tolerance, as the temperatures are usually in the 70s F/ 20s C. Yesterday it was 91 F / 32.8 C! Today 89/ 31.6. I know that's normal summer for lots of people (even 10 miles inland or south), but we're wusses. Berkeley has eight to twelve really hot days a year, so we don't have air conditioning, even a swamp cooler, and our house just gets hot and stays hot. So please forgive me when I sound a bit addled and/or do not comment on something.


( ack, cut didn't work )

I'll be cross-posting for the foreseeable future, I couldn't leave my peeps at LJ/JF/IJ! *clutches you all*

Monday night: columnist has an Inside look at amazon during the fail

( Amazon semi-apology says it was an 'embarrassing and ham-fisted' error )

There was a fabulous post somewhere about the difference between fake and real apologies. I couldn't find that one (anyone have it?) but Seth Grodin has a pretty reasonable apology ranking, and I think Amazon's was about a 7: "We're sorry that this occurred." Better than "glitch", but not really addressing the issues of how someone somewhere can set a configuration switch to change their entire ranking systems.

And now that we know how much Amazon can manipulate the best-seller lists and search results, and how many books are sold through them, it's time to think more about one company having that much power.

1) Amazon hasn't said a thing, WTF?

2) The controversy has been picked up by over 300 newspapers and other sources. It's easy to follow as the news spread: yahoo news or google news.

3) In the category of how (rather than why), it seems they used the subject headings in the metadata. These are library and bookstore tags created by publishers and sometimes supplemented by Amazon. More here at Dear Author.

4) There's a troll that claims he caused it for lulz -- this is in the LJ comm brutal_honesty. He's lying, do not focus on him. bryant's debunking post.

1. ( Please don't call Amazon today )


2. ( What and why of googlebombing Amazon Rank )


3. ( It might well be a glitch after all )

Alternatives to Amazon: Local Indie Bookstores, Powell's Books, Borders, Barnes & Noble. Always good to have business diversity, choices, and good old free-market competition.

Amazon has just re-defined pretty much every book in their Gay and Lesbian section as "adult" and removed their "sales rank" and listings in the bestseller lists. As though their existence is too scary for children. I'm a mom, gay is just a word for some of our relatives: how dare Amazon try to make them disappear?

This is just wrong and stupid. One author of a non-explicit gay YA book, markprobst , got this explanation

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude "adult" material from appearing in some searches and best seller listas. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

For more WTF? see the list of suppressed books, including Brokeback Mountain, Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story, Tipping the Velvet, Heather Has Two Mommies, and Challenging Homophoba: Teaching About Sexual Diversity.

Not affected: heterosexual novels including violent rape and/or explicit rape (Laurel Hamilton, etc.) And their featured blog of the day includes a trailer for the video game Terminator:Salvation (rated teen). So it's clearly not violence they're worried about.

What to do: use the word #amazonfail on Twitter and blogs, at the very least. Link to the smartbitches redefinition of Amazon Rank. Gosh, Amazon has some blogs with comments enabled. We could... comment.

(cross-posted, sorry)

from The Scotsman, April 5, 2009
( Cumming wows New York at head of Tartan Day Parade )

Alan and Me photo exhibit at the Chashama gallery, my favorite one is the one involving ( Alan in a swirling kilt (SFW, but provocative) )

dashery rocks! I so needed something cheerful this week :-)

"Boom De Ya Da (I Love the Whole World) - LOTR": ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POsx_bCxo48 )

"Dom & Billy - I Got U" ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTE-CnLKuvc )

PS - Viggo was much more coherent on the BBC on Monday morning, and that night cinema panel on Good than he was at the Sunday night awards show. Which is a good thing, cos wow.

So Viggo won the "Empire Icon Award": (this part completely lifted from the Empire Online Blog)

"The Empire Icon, given to a talent who, in the eyes of Empire and its readers, is so much more than a star, they have reached the status of icon."

Bean: "It's a real pleasure to be here tonight to present this award to an actor who's a very good friend of mine. The work I did with him will always stay in my heart. Let's see the man in action."

AND THE WINNER IS... VIGGO MORTENSEN (cue some bromance)

( Viggo's speech includes some dumb jokes, thanks for Empire's support of LOTR and The Hobbit, and a tribute to Alan Howard, who originated the role of John Halder in 'Good' on stage )

And I got my hot little hands on some actual decent-sized photos of the two of them. I'm not cutting the thumbnails because they're too good to hide, and any click should take you to the MQ version.



(cross-posted, a bunch)

HAPPY FANGIRL!

Tonight is the UK Empire awards, sadly not broadcast. But sammie323 on the LOTRInfo group at yahoo) shared a page of photo thumbnails with Sean (and Georgina?), Viggo by himself and with Jason Isaacs:



So I checked Twitter for near-real-time updates using this search string: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=bean+viggo and found the empiremagazine twitter account which just confirmed that Sean and Viggo are there (though it says "Jason Isaacs - the nicest man alive TM"). But the best one is Heleno84 who is "is unexpectedly discombobulated at the sight of Viggo Mortensen and Sean Bean chatting away. Like, GOSH!"

Empire magazine live blog has a bit more, and apparently there will be video tomorrow morning.

Walrus Magazine article: The Other Porn Addiction: Why are ordinary women exposing themselves online? and The Porn Identity: Stacey May Fowles in conversation with Hal Niedzviecki on privacy and internet pornography. (Link via Andrew Sullivan)

The "Porn Addiction" they're talking about is, "adult women of all ages, shapes, and sizes, from across the world, to post erotic images of themselves for viewing by thousands, if not millions, of people online."

It's the opposite of the fandom. We fans focus on characters or actors and tend to objectify them, rather than becoming the objects of attention. This is especially true for fanfiction of the porny variety, where we denigrate authorial self-inserts as Mary Sues. And once you get to m/m slash fic... Maybe slashers are on the extreme side of a backlash, as far from the female body-revealing kind of porn as possible, focusing away from ourselves and onto men. Hot sexy men.

I'm not sure what it all means, these wild extremes, and I wonder what's going on. Do straight men do anything in these extremes? Where does the lesbian porn come in? What about gay men, they seem more straightforward but what am I missing? Thoughts?

Billy, Dom, and Elijah together again, at a surfing movie premiere in LA on the 10th! Much thanks to karin_woywod for finding this. :-D


Also March 10, Viggo strolling in Madrid with some kids and their mom, Christina Rosenvinge, They both worked in the movie La pistola de mi hermano in 1997. From fadedyouthblog, via nikkie222. (that blog says they're involved, but I'm waiting for a little more evidence before I have an opinion)


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