Walk the line

Googlewave just slipped me a bunch of invites. Comment with email if you want to come play so I can send you the invite. I think it will be fab for collaboration.

All comments screened. Comments open on all journals. I'll update when they're gone.

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth. comments.

It's a meme baby. If you want words, say "Words!" in comments. I will give you five words that I associate with you and you'll post about them in your journal.

These are words yonmei associates with me.


1. Snape
What I've never quite understood is Potter fans who've spent the almost the whole of seven books thinking that Snape is a bad guy. Rowling just isn't that tricksy a writer; she flags things neatly. Villains are villains, good guys are good guys and Hermione loves Ron.

:D

Anyway, naturally I love Snape because he is the geeky high school loser, because he has just the right amount of manpain, because he is bitter and angry and misunderstood but still does good and because he is played by Alan Rickman

2. smushed-up-slash-tags-like-Snarry

Some of these are so gorgeous, they're sublime and delightful and witty. How adorable are all the smushes that can be made between Chris Kirkpatrick and his bandmates: Trickyfish (Chris/Lance Bass), TrickC (Chris/JC Chasez) and Timbertrick (Chris/Justin Timberlake). The names capture the sense of the relationships as well, particularly TrickC which always sounds like tricksy to me and expresses the trickster nature of Chris and JC. I heart them.

Modern smushers deserve to be shot, however. What were nutrek Kirk/Spock fans thinking, going for Spirk over Kock? Spirk is a nobbled seventies utensil, useless for eating peas. Kock is a brilliant opportunity! I cannot take part in a fandom that refuses that opportunity. Nutrek, you are dead to me. (Well, except for Uhura and Gaila.)

3. cats

Sometime I get kitten envy. I think that is why I follow very few journals of people with cats, and then those journals own older cats, cats that do not woo with their kitten bellies and their kitten paws, but admirable cats just the same. Cats I imagine my fantasy kitten would be when he grew up.

4. books

I used to read a lot. You guys know what reading a lot means; I believe you are nearly all voracious readers. Then came fandom and the pro books on my reading list dwindled because naturally I had to get through 17 years of Pros fanfiction in a month and that doesn't leave a lot of spare time.

Some years later... I wasn't happy with how little I read so I started setting myself reading challenges. Sometimes I achieve the challenge and sometimes I don't, but I am reading more non-fan fiction than four years ago so mischief managed!


5. fred

I stumbled across Fred Pohl's blog by accident. He is old in SF terms, he is great great grandfatherly, he is golden age and silver age and every age. He's like, a hundred and fifty years old -- okay, he's ninety in fifteen days time, on November 26. He had his first published work in Amazing Stories before he turned 18. In a couple of years he was editing Astonishing Stories and Super Science Stories. He served in WW2 and returned to the publishing industry. He went on to edit Galaxy and if and write buckets of stories that were clever and sharp and thoughtful, though just as sexist and writing characters as hard to connect with as any grand master of SF.

But most importantly, he's fun. He's got 70 years of being there in SF history to write about in his blog memoir. He knew/knows everybody. He posts pictures of his cat, he's all matter of fact about the issues of being almost ninety. He doesn't condescend and he writes with -- what do they call it? -- disarming honesty.

( blog quote cut for surgery description content )Then, when he gets it well screwed, he closes you up and you’re done.</em> From the blog post Fred the Machine Man.

I like him. I hope he blogs for another seventy years.

Read The Day of the Boomer Dukes, a time travel story, at Project Gutenberg.

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth. comments.

So, internets, if you were sailing from Mumbai to Gdansk what would be your route:
Arabian Sea, Suez Canal, Mediterranean, English Channel and then what? Do you go left around the big island between Sweden and Denmark or do you go right around the big island through Denmark? For preferences, I'd like the route to be on the Copenhagen side because seeing the little mermaid statue would be most cool and in keeping with the theme of the virtual journey.

The Sixth Small Fandom Fest has opened for prompt submissions.

Why I love Fred Pohl's blog, reason #56.
He starts them like this and it makes me laugh: Quite a few years ago —well, about seventy of them, to be exact —I was the teen-age editor of two professional science-fiction magazines

I'm sure I had more to say but it's all slipped from my mind. I think it was getting twitter spam from @barrettfoa's account while watching NCIS: Los Angeles. Creepy, spam dudes! Very creepy. I might have to stop following celeb tweets again, but I think I'm hooked on @llcoolj's affirmation tweets, oh dear. I think I've worked out why I'm calm and uncreeped by @dhewlett. It's because he's got the geek dad uncool that was so charming about wil wheaton until wheaton started exhibiting as a misogynist arsehole which no amount of winning geek-daddery can spackle over.

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth. comments.

East West 101 is an Australian police drama with a difference: it looks like Australia. It's also really, really good. bantha_fodder and I made a community: eastwest101. We hope to find as many fans of this great show as we can and make some more. You can find a bunch of posts extolling the joys of East West 101 at the community. Want to check it out? Watch the current episode online. (Those outside Australia, I don't know if you can watch it, but I'm hoping you can.)

I've set up feeds that can be followed from LJ, IJ, your reader of choice. (She says with great confidence and perhaps slightly less knowledge.)

RSS feed for eastwest101

Atom feed for eastwest101

Both bantha_fodder/bantha_fodder and I have dreamwidth invites if you'd like to make a DW for the purpose of getting involved in the comm. That would be aces!

However, you don't need a Dreamwidth account if you don't plan to post to the community. You can subscribe to the feed and read it in your LJ/IJ/googlereader/bloglines and comment using OpenID.

You can read more about using your OpenID at this FAQ. If you have an LJ you have an OpenID.

Currently anons may comment with Captcha. We will turn it off pretty speedily if we get anon trolling.

Come and hang with us!

This entry was originally posted at Dreamwidth. comments.

Piss Christ

Andres Serrano, 1987
By Andrew Hudgins
Posted Wednesday, April 19, 2000, at 3:00 AM ET

If we did not know it was cow's blood and urine,
if we did not know that Serrano had for weeks
hoarded his urine in a plastic vat,
if we did not know the cross was gimcrack plastic,
we would assume it was too beautiful.
We would assume it was the resurrection,
glory, Christ transformed to light by light
because the blood and urine burn like a halo,
and light, as always, light makes it beautiful.

We are born between the urine and the feces,
Augustine says, and so was Christ, if there was a Christ,
skidding into this world as we do
on a tide of blood and urine. Blood, feces, urine—
what the fallen world is made of, and what we make.
He peed, ejaculated, shat, wept, bled—
bled under Pontius Pilate, and I assume
the mutilated god, the criminal,
humiliated god, voided himself
on the cross and the blood and urine smeared his legs
and he ascended bodily unto heaven,
and on the third day he rose into glory, which
is what we see here, the Piss Christ in glowing blood:
the whole irreducible point of the faith,
God thrown in human waste, submerged and shining.

We have grown used to beauty without horror.

We have grown used to useless beauty.

__________________
A Theological Defence
Piss Christ

Do you ever upload a userpic that you know you'll likely never use?

If you want me to interview you--post a comment that simply says, "Interview me." I'll respond with questions for you to take back to your own journal and answer as a post. Of course, they'll be different for each person since this is an interview and not a general survey. At the bottom of your post, after answering the Interviewer's questions, you ask if anyone wants to be interviewed. So it becomes your turn-- in the comments, you ask them any questions you have for them to take back to their journals and answer. And so it becomes the circle.

yonmei's questions:

1. What does your username mean and why did you choose it?

It means nothing, unless you have a kitsch souvenir cat made of coconut, which I'm sure must exist! No, I just made it up out of the air, though it probably had something to do with something that I read or saw at the time. I was throwing a tanty because Yahoo wouldn't let me have vera as my user name. When I got a LiveJournal, I couldn't have Vera again, so I picked the next username that I'd used in fandom. I didn't realise that people would come to know me as 'copracat' and it was quite a shock (though not a bad one) when I visited secretrebel and she introduced me to people as copracat. I'd never heard it said aloud!

2. If I visited you for the day, what would we do?

Start with a cup of tea in my teeny tiny back yard because you have come a long way! Then we'd go for a walk along the creek (this is quite large and would pass as a river in some places) that runs through the suburb next to mine. This is a well-developed walking and biking path. The valley it runs through has steep sides so you can almost forget you are in the middle of a big city. We'd run into lots of dogs and people and there'd be plenty of opportunity for picture-taking of rusty old mill works, water fowl and Australian trees. At the end of this walk, we'd lunch at a massive old* convent turned arts centre. There's a great vegetarian cafe that is also a non-profit community organisaton supporting migrants and refugees. Food is so very delicious and that's before the sauce of smug appreciation that you're doing good.

After lolling about for a while, I'd take you on my personal tour of the grounds and buildings, galleries and other interesting bits. Not as thorough as the official tour, but I like to think more fun.

It would then be time for a cup of tea and a pastry from the convent's wood-fired oven cafe.

We'd jump on a bus and, depending on inclination, do a walking tour of my favourite street (shopping!) or go to the museum (bones, tapestry, live action digestion).

After a nap (I love naps, and I believe you should have a nap, or siesta, on every day it is possible) we could go to the best vegetarian restaurant I know, handily at the end of my street, with an entertaining bunch of my buddies, then stagger home full of food and possibly wine. TV watching may occur at this point.

It sounds like a fairly relaxed day, but I can tell you from experience that it will leave you well ready for bed.

3. Which two fictional characters do you want to have trapped together in a lift?

At first I thought it would be too easy to go straight for lift/transporter sex but then I thought, there's a reason cliches are cliches: because they're worth repeating. Today, I would want it to be Ash and Scribbs because first it would be funny, then it would be hot and funny.

4. Superpower or infinite wealth - which is better?

Infinite wealth. Then you can buy all the superpowers you want that are possible.

5. If you had a time machine and an infinite budget, which singers would you have perform for you at the concert of your dreams?

I've never played this game before. I have a strong belief - I'm not sure if that's the right word - in the ephemerality of live performance. Recordings are about perfect repetition and equal access (thanks, Glenn Gould) but live performance is about the magic of who is right there, right then, breathing the same air as you.

That said, I could make a hundred concerts. But this time let's just say:

First half -
Turlough O'Carolan and Derek Bell
Maria Callas

Program is a selection of Carolan's songs and Greek traditional songs. Derek Bell on mandolin for the Greek songs.

Second half -
Louis Armstrong
Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis
Jessie Matthews

Program is adorable movie soundtracks and Jessie dancing the pants off Dean and Jerry.

Grand finale -
The song at 8:23 in this video. (Please don't disown me, yonmei, for loving Powell and Pressburger's Scotland. What did they know in 1945? What did I know when I was eleven and fell in love with Wendy Hillier?) Jessie and Maria to duet. It would work, dammit. I don't care that Maria Callas had the finest voice ever and Jessie was a bit wobbly: they are emotional equals.


*Old for Australian colonist values of old, of course.

When I determined to pay for my dreamwidth, I had two purposes:
1. Support the company
2. Put my self in a position to lure all of the flist that could be lured

Having achieved 1. it's quite funny and very cheering to see that most of you who would come under 2. have also done 1. \0/

That said, if anyone would like an invite, please comment here with the email you want the invite sent to. All gone. Yay, new Dreamwidth users!

Comments are screened for your email privacy, should you wish it.

You could message me by navigating to the journal service message page of your choice, if you wish.

Comments will be open on all journals for this post, as soon as I get round to editing each post individually.

This entry was originally posted at http://copracat.dreamwidth.org/469758.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

I'm buying an account as soon as they become available.

I support Dreamwidth. It is a code fork of LJ, not a clone. It's being run by two former LJ employees (a media fan and a non-fan) who have taken the time to fix all the little things and put in place a plan for the journal functionality that they want. It has so much that I want, so I'm going to have it.

I'd love it if you also had a DW account. A part of the reason I'll be buying an account is to be a user in good stead when invite codes are being handed out in the controlled expansion of DW. My priorities are people I've met, then Australians, then the rest of the flist (LJ and IJ), then anyone else.

The most recent info on the closed beta and plan for invite codes, among other news.

Invite codes will also available from time to time at Dreamwidth's code-sharing comm.

iCONtest community is running their inaugural icon competition. Prize is three months of paid time.

The dwrocks community on Dreamwidth is running an (Absolutely, Positively, In No Way Official) Dreamwidth slogan competition. Winner gets three months of paid time.


I will import my IJ and LJ to DW.

Because I can. How cool is that? With comments and tags and userpics and security flocks all in place.


I will post to DW, crosspost to LJ. Comments at DW only.

Because DW will be my journal.

Anon commenting will be screened on my DW journal. If you don't want an account or to use Open ID, you'll have to sign your comment and I will unscreen it. Sorry for that delay, but it's what I do here.

I haven't decided about cross posting to IJ, because I don't now. I never set it up as a clone of my LJ. It was a place to follow IJ friends.

I will keep my LJ and IJ, and, mostly likely, retain the LJ and IH flists as they are at the time I get DW.

I will keep and continue to read and comment on my LJ and IJ flists because I don't want to lose the relationships I have here, the people who won't get a Dreamwidth account. This is one of the best things about the Dreamwidth plan: inbuilt cross-posting to DW. Additionally feeds can be created by all DW users so the plan is, when it's working, to subscribe to the LJ and IJ flists and see LJ, IJ and DW in one.


The thing is, the medium is not the message, the map is not the territory, the technology is not the fandom.

My fandom is not just LJ. It won't be just DW. The internet could fall over tomorrow and fandom would still exist. It's us. People have posting polls with the option: I'll see which way the wind blows. It doesn't matter which way the wind blows. You'll still be able to read and comment on my journal (with a few small changes); I'll still be able to read and comment on your journal, if you allow me to, wherever it is. Shows will be watched, stories will be written, squee will be sqorn. I expect to see very little turbulence, as some of us will just get to play in a more amenable playground with heaps of improvements on LJ.

We are fandom; the internet, and all the software on it, is just our tool.

Think of it as some of us replacing IE with Firefox.


Other people have things to say

Although, there is the issue of importing communities.

Edit: An update on importing communities.

Because I'm just a cock-eyed optimist; or why I'm going to be paying for Dreamwidth - telesilla

Intro to closed beta DW, also, OpenID delegation

Dreaming in Digital: foxfirefey describes how DW is different to LJ in some detail. This is a great overview.

This week's factsheet: Denise clarifies some misconceptions that had been going round. This is a great summary of some things you may be wondering including the three things that are of great importance to me:

* Once you get an account, you can import all of your content from most LiveJournal-based services.
* You'll be able to crosspost your entries to another LJ-based service from within Dreamwidth itself.
* You'll be able to keep up with your friends on other services.

Paid users will eventually be able to use Google Analytics and export their journal as a pdf.

But, of course, you may like to hear other, less evangelical, opinions because it's good to think critically about something, even if you want it with both hands outstretched.

This lovely Snarry vid should be seen by all Snarry fans. Because a Snarry vid to a song sung by Angela Lansbury is a treasure. I could only like it better if it had been a song from 'Mame'.

Oh, this made me laugh: boo hoo hoo! Americans don't win the Nobel Prize often enough and other writers I prefer by Ted. I would pay to be at a cyncism-off between Patrick White and Lionel Trilling, though.

Anyway, Ted, maybe you should read this cool article on the Nobel website and get a hold of a few reasons why, entertaining as the work of Christie, Rowling and Heinlein might be, it's not what the Swedish Academy is going to consider when they deliberate. Believe me, I'm undertaking the great Nobel read. It's a prize for a particular kind of body of work, that's all.

Summer Snarry Art Games begin next week! Snarry fans you are so damn prolific.

Say hello to the beta Archive of Our Own

Read more about where it's up to, what you can do, what features are currently available and what are still in the works, how you can give feedback and help us test that puppy right here.

So, in the past three weeks:
Transformative Works and Cultures
Fanlore Wiki
New improved website with news blog and comment feature (and big red Donate Now button <---)
Beta Archive of Our Own

Congratulations to all OTW board, committees and volunteers. Congratulations particularly the coders and testers who have been working like demons to make things and to break them and make them good again.

I'd also like to give a very big bouquet to all those who worked on policies and Terms of Service documents for the projects and a thank you to everyone who responded to requests for feedback on them. A lot and I mean a lot"" of thought, consideration, debate and consulting went on to get these right, to get them meaningful for fans and fan use of these sites, to be something that can be called 'of our own'.

The biggest thank you to Development and Membership Committee who bring joy and tentacles to philanthropy and make volunteering easy.

On top of all that OTW's 501(c)3 status was approved and USians donations and memberships are tax exempt!!

Dear me. Think I'm going to cry.

\0/

Some lovely, lovely stories have come out of the recent SGA episode, Whispers.

Here at delicious under tag episode:whispers you will find two great gen stories - one with lovely Lorne and Sheppard and Major Teldy, one with excellent Mehra and McKay - and two Mehra/Porter stories that make my lady loving heart warm.

glockgal has presented an utterly adorable illustrated Champion interview for the upcoming Snarry Games.

I love my Civ IV: love, love, love.

Unrelatedly, I imagined re-casting Harold and Kumar Go To White Castle with women in the lead roles. Yes, Grace Park as Harold. Kumar is harder to choose: I want Amita Dhiri. And if you think Amita is too old, I've got two words for you: Dana Carvey, who was 38 when he played a slacker making cable TV in his basement.

Simon & Simon, Rick/A.J., boots & suits It's been ages since I read a Simon & Simon story and this short Porn Battle piece was just lovely.

Think of England: gorgeous, hot Susan/Caspian from Prince Caspian.

By God, Rosa Coldfield is the emoest emo who ever emoed.

Okay, fair cop, she did have reason but, phew: I was fourteen then, fourteen in years if they could have been called years while in that unpaced corridor which I called childhood, which was not living but rather some projection of the lightless womb itself; I gestate and complete, not aged, just overdue because of some caesarean lack, some cold head-nuzzling forceps of the savage time which should have torn me free, I waited not for light but for that doom which we call female victory which is: endure and then endure, without rhyme or reason or hope of reward -- and then endure; I like that blind subterranean fish, that insulated spark whose origin the fish no longer remembers, which pulses and beats at its crepuscuar and lethargic tenement with the old unsleeping itch which has not words and I'm going to stop there because the sentence does go on for another half page.

I am ever so slightly freaked by how much Ollie looks like a young Cary Elwes.

Just announced: Dreamwidth Studios, a technical and social fork of the LiveJournal codebase, brought to you by people who have been working in social networking for the best part of the last decade.

Dreamwidth is currently in active development, and we hope to enter closed beta in late summer and open our doors in Q4.