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Friday, May 1st, 2009
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11:56 pm - Which is mostly questions
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Wow, it is super close to open beta! I must remember to pay for my account. Also, let me know if you want an invite code.
1) D'you read any interesting blogs on refugee and/or immigration issues? I've never looked for blogs on immigration especially, because it cuts a bit too close to the bone, but I'd appreciate links to non-crazy-making sites if you guys follow any.
2) Cephas cut his hair a few days ago and upon seeing the result I exclaimed, "Oh, so cute! You look so butch!" And he was mildly disconcerted. (I was writing this entry in my head earlier today and was trying to find the right word to describe Cephas's reaction to being described as butch, and I laughed when I hit on disconcerted because it was so perfect. If you knew Cephas, you'd know that disconcerted is a very Cephas thing to be.)
But I was thinking about it later and I don't know if using 'butch' to describe a heterosexual cisgendered man is homophobic or sexist or what. Is it funny because it feminises Cephas to describe him as butch? That would be bad .... Thinking about it, I don't know if it is homophobic, but at the very least I think it may be co-opting -- the equivalent of cultural appropriation, you know? Because I'm not a lesbian and I know very little about the history of the word and the weight of it and stuff. (I'm probably bisexual, but I've never lived that openly, and anyway it is besides the point.)
Sorry if this is very clueless! But that is one thing I have been thinking about, anyway.
3) I am reading Preeta Samarasan's Evening Is The Whole Day! I am only on page 34, but so far am quite pleased. Now that is how you do Malaysian dialogue, Tash Aw. I hope you are taking notes.
4) What is a good picnic food?
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| Tuesday, April 28th, 2009
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12:38 am - Fic: The New Boy (Wodehouse, AU, Mike & Psmith)
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As part of my page_a_day efforts, I wrote some Wodehouse fic. It was trapped in Cephas's computer (under the document title "[afrai]'s writing DO NOT READ THIS MEANS YOU [CEPHAS]") but he kindly e-mailed it to me today, so here it is.
( The New Boy )
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| Monday, April 27th, 2009
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5:00 pm - Icons meme
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I have had a highly unfortunate morning -- I made a phone call for semi-professional purposes in which I do not think I displayed to advantage, and then I killed my toaster and, even more tragically, murdered my last beautiful loaf of miku. Also I set off the fire alarm. And now I am doing a PA online SGS (don't even ask), so to comfort myself in the face of these many dreadfulnesses, I am memeing.
-- Oh, scratch that about the phone call; the other party has called me back and sounds reasonably friendly and not as if they think I am the hopeless footling idiot I was feeling, so that is a relief. I don't know why I'm feeling so nervous about someone for whom I want to do work for no money, but there you go.
![[info]](http://www.insanejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) daegaer was so obliging as to choose five icons of mine for me to witter about.
( Read more... )
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| Sunday, April 19th, 2009
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1:31 pm - I set up a DW community
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Mostly as a way of deceiving my brain into doing some writing now and again. You should join it if you too wish to do some brain deception! It is called page_a_day. I wrote a post that tells you what it is about and what the rules are.
Yesterday I went to Brick Lane! It was pretty cool. I wish I'd bought a graphic print T-shirt dress sold by an extremely cool East Asian dude from a stall, but they were all out of elephants. Oh wells.
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| Friday, April 17th, 2009
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5:18 pm - Life in the big potato
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I went a-walking today, thinking I would look for a vintage shop I'd seen once out of the corner of my eye but hadn't had the chance to poke my nose into. So I went Victoria-wards and just walked around, and eventually stumbled onto one of those sort of areas that I think of as being especially London-y. I am going to try to explain this.
There is usually a market. Sometimes it sells clothes that may or may not have fallen off the back of a truck; they have got their labels cut off and look suspiciously like the kind of thing you might find in Dorothy Perkins. Sometimes there is a fish stall. Often there is a stall selling bags of variable charm, and a stall that sells fruits and vegetables.
There are those cafes that have metal chairs and tables that look like they might have slightly sticky surfaces, and there are sandwiches or sandwich materials under the glass, and a board up behind with the prices on them. Things these cafes are likely to feed you: pasta, baked potatoes. The lighting is often a bit orange.
There are hardware shops and drycleaners and maybe a Tesco Express or something like that, but there are also interesting things like secondhand bookshops and charity shops with cat mugs and a shop that sells ... Goth merchandise? You know, those little statues of fairies and things. And all these shops are just crowded together, on streets that are just off the main roads that buses and things go on.
And there are lots of little old ladies of various races and men with cigarettes and it's generally laidback and like somewhere people go who live there, not so much a tourist spot. What I like about these places is that in London they're often right next to a touristy place -- today, frex, a 15-minute walk brought me from there to the Houses of Parliament.
Pah, that was a terrible description. I will refine it. But I really like that kind of place. I'm treasuring the time I get to just walk around and look at things in this city, because this time next year probably all I will want to do with a free afternoon is sleep.
***
I am going to set up a writing community on Dreamwidth! Not the dragon-human soul bond one, another one. With soul bonds I am going to wait till more people are on DW, for maximum coverage. I have mainly decided to set up this other community because I want to make a Moomin layout, but you should join it if you can. Good.
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| Thursday, April 16th, 2009
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3:35 pm - Layout glee
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Oh joy! My layout is beautiful! And it was astoundingly easy to make it so: I ported over a Mixit layout from according to 's instructions here, stuck on the banner made by from the raw material of Miss X's beautiful art, and changed link colours etc. accordingly. And lo! My Dreamwidth journal is bright, cheery and readable!
The "unknown view" link that links duplicatiously to memories is annoying, but I expect they will fix that when we get to open beta. It is no big deal.
I also reinstituted the banner on my LJ -- it's been dead for a while because it used to be hosted by lacewood but then her paid account ran out -- so everything is beautiful everywhere. I am pleased!
I know DW optimism annoys people, so I'll keep this brief, but it really pleased me that DW added an option to change the default site scheme colours after expressed her discomfort with names in red (see here). It didn't occur to me to feel uncomfortable ("Now I wish I'd listened to my mother." "Why, what did she say?" "I don't know, I wasn't listening.") but I've nevertheless superstitiously changed everything to purple. \o/
***
I had to stop the post there 'cos my laptop was dying! I've plugged it into a source of life now, so can keep on going.
Life continues mildly dull. I sent off yet another cover letter yesterday for a volunteer thing that I think I'd be pretty good at and that I'd like to do. And yet I had to fight with inertia to apply for it -- and sheer laziness: "Yes, but will I have time?" Come on, self, if you have time to read lol_meme, you totally have time to write website content for a good cause. (I don't post on lol_meme. I just like the parts where memers talk about their lives. This is always my favourite part of anonymous memes, actually -- not even the drama and gossip, though that is fascinating to watch if you are not a participant, but just comments by people talking about how they've been feeling lately and the person in their class whom they have a crush on and is this thing that their boyfriend does a normal thing to do, that sort of thing.)
I loved Susan Boyle and have now watched the clip about, er, five times and been secretly shipping her and Simon Cowell, YES YES I AM ASHAMED but jacinthsong's post discussing and critiquing the reactions to her is very interesting and worth a read. What I like and admire about Susan Boyle is how completely undaunted she is -- she says she's "never been kissed" but doesn't say it as if it's something to apologise for. She's been described as "shy" in some of the press but she isn't really; she's super bubbly and confident in a situation that would've had me running off the stage in tears before I'd even got started.
I don't really watch reality TV shows, though, 'specially not the ones that revolve around laughing at losers. omg, and the part in lots of reality TV shows, you know, where the people who have been competing have to stand there and wait for the judges to tell them whether they get to stay on the show or not, and they have to maintain some kind of composure as they are being lambasted -- being made to watch that is my idea of hell. I can't bear it.
This is why all I've seen of Britain's Got Talent has been:
Paul Potts
That awesome dance duo who did Michael Jackson (and he's a trainee lawyer! like meeee)
George Sampson
And usually I still close the window before I get to the judges because I get too worried that they are going to say something horrible and wrong aaah!
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| Tuesday, April 14th, 2009
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11:44 pm - Welcoming the pride
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Oh, I like this! So I am nicking it and putting it on my journal.
Tell me what you're proud of. Tell me what you accomplished last week, something -- at least one thing -- that you can turn around and point at and say: I did this. Me. It was tough, but I did it, and I did it well, and I am proud of it, and it makes me feel good to see what I accomplished. Could be anything -- something you made, something you did, something you got through. Just take a minute and celebrate yourself.
Right now I am proud of myself for having sent in two applications for things to do in the six months I have off between finishing school and starting work -- one of the things is something I'm pretty qualified for but only kinda want to do, but the other is something I'm pretty much not qualified for at all and would love to do, so I'm 'specially pleased with myself for not just throwing up my hands and giving up in advance on the second application. (I have a really bad habit of self-sabotage through inertia and fear of failure -- see: lack of any writing done in the past six months -- and I'm trying to fight this.)
Now, your turn!
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| Monday, April 13th, 2009
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1:51 pm - A question
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How do you delete an Amazon account? Is it possible? I've deleted my wish-list, don't have any orders to cancel, but can't find a link that'll let me get rid of the account.
Because this.
Amazon is apparently stripping the sales ranks from GLBT books, thus preventing them from showing up in some bestseller lists and searches (and potentially directly damaging their sales), on the grounds that they are "adult" material.
I'm not having any problems finding Maurice or The Well of Loneliness on Amazon UK, but I'm not very keen on buying from a company associated with such shenanigans.
ETA: I didn't mean that everybody should close their accounts at Amazon! It's a purely personal decision and one that's made very easy by the fact that I haven't bought from them in ages -- I don't need to. If I had been buying from Amazon I would probably be satisfied with cancelling my order and telling them that their discriminatory policy was the reason why.
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| Saturday, April 11th, 2009
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6:01 pm - A real post
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DW housekeeping
AHHH I AM SO EXCITED ABOUT DW OK. There's no actual reason why "subscribe" instead of "friend" should make me feel like less of a creeper when adding people who don't know me, but it totally does.
Not 100% sure on the minor details yet, but I am resolved to move the whole business over to DW. Sorry if this makes my friends scratch their heads and complain about how many millions of blogs I have -- it makes my head spin too! -- but for reasons probably only one person knows in detail, I've been a bit soured on LJ for a while and feel this is an excellent opportunity to make a new start. I may or may not import my older entries over. On the one hand, it would be nice to have continuity; on the other hand, it would be nice to shuck it off and fly free! Free like a bird!
So my DW will be a fannish and RL journal, because I have never been especially good at compartmentalising the two in this space. I will keep reading my LJ and IJ flists on-site and will cross-post to LJ and IJ (I am crazy, yes, you got a problem with that?), but I may make it so you gotta comment at DW, the way coffeeandink has done. Sorry, I know it is annoying, but juggling three journalling services is already confusing enough!
Colonialism
Me, complaining: All my original story ideas end up being about colonialism, no matter what they are about! Even when they start out as being about dragons, they end up being about dragons ... and colonialism!
Cephas: I don't see anything wrong with that. It's your subject.
Me: >:(
( Excerpt from Small Island by Andrea Levy )
Life
Is going okay! I finished a terrible first draft of an application and sent off nervewracking requests for recommendation letters to referees (who did not react as if I was a crazy entitled person for even asking! Zounds!). My parents arrived and cleaned my kitchen and gave me a purple jade necklace. I met derien and eor at the end of their Yorkshire holiday and saw them off at Heathrow, and we had lots of chat and that was very nice. And I have bought many hanks of yarn to knit a sweater/jumper/cardigan. I was contemplating these options: ( pictures of sweaters )
ETA again: I forgot to say, do let me know if you want an invite code for Dreamwidth, and I will give you one when I get any. I will prioritise people who actually want to use DW, though, rather than just stake out their usernames.
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| Wednesday, April 8th, 2009
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11:03 pm - Ima Wantad
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I've registered an OpenID on Dreamwidth but am not sure who's on DW. I've added a bunch of people, but do let me know if you're on DW and what your username is. :)
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| Wednesday, March 25th, 2009
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11:49 pm - in lieu of replying to comments
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Still thinking about dragon-human soul bond writing comm -- I like daedala's idea of having it be a non-restrictive theme, so people could write novels about whatever they liked, but my problem with it is that presumably people would then join more because their friends were doing it or because they wanted to have a writing space rather than because they were interested in the theme. D'you see? Then there'd be less point having a theme, and it would feel more cliquey. But anyway, turning it over and over in my head, and also thinking about where it would be -- not necessarily LJ, but it would have to be somewhere where you could lock posts. Thanks for your thoughts and expressions of interest. :)
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| Tuesday, March 24th, 2009
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11:23 am - A thought
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This leaning on myself to write has not been working: occasionally I discharge a trickle of story, but it is so rubbish that I close the window and flounce off in disgust. I know I need to buckle down, but since self-starting hasn't started anything so far -- lots of vague story ideas, nothing concrete -- maybe I should try returning to the community model.
So here is my thought. Would anyone be interested in joining a writing challenge community, where the challenge would be writing a novel/novella-length story on the subject of, er, dragon-human soul bonds? I was thinking each person would join with some sort of dragon/human story idea in mind -- actual psychic soul bonds not mandatory, but the kind of co-dependent relationship that is so attractive in fiction and such a bad idea in reality is a must -- and then we would each write our stories and post them. Chapter 1 in the first month, Chapter 2 in the second, and so on and so forth. And of course we would cheer each other on in the interim. Fanfic or original fic would be welcome.
I suggest dragon/human ship fic as the theme because it is supposed to be stress-free and light-hearted and fun to write, and I can't think of anything more stress-free etc. than dragon-human soul bonds. (Also to date I have three story ideas concerning dragons and humans in looove, yeah, I don't know what's wrong with my brain either.)
What d'you think? Would you join? What would you call it?
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| Wednesday, March 18th, 2009
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10:54 pm - ugh, law school
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Feeling tired and blank. I'm going to take a shower, do some work and then watch this as a reward:
The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency, Episode 1
Related (or unrelated!) squee in comments welcome. I fully expect to squee loud and long while watching. And remember that this is the book dedicated by the author to the fabled Reinhard Zimmermann!
ETA: squee!
I love Mma Makutsi's clothes!
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| Sunday, March 15th, 2009
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6:00 pm
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Today was one of those unexpectedly beautiful days England gives you sometimes, after a row of cold grey days. It was warm and sunny and the sky was cloudlessly blue (you get blue skies at home, but never that total absence of clouds). Cephas and I packed some lunch -- well, I say Cephas and I, actually Cephas packed the lunch while I lounged around finishing my morning coffee. Then we went to walk around St James's Park in the sunshine. There were daffodils and crocuses and pelicans -- one white one, three pink ones with red eyes. They were all absurd! I didn't know pelicans waddled, did you? Now you do.
There were also other birds that were less interesting because they were not pelicans. They weren't swimming, though, on account of there wasn't any water in the purported river in the middle of St James's Park. You could see the bones of the riverbed, and by bones of the riverbed, I mean the concrete and the pipes. I sort of feel the glamour has left the river in St James's Park now; it is hard to see a long narrow body of water as anything but a drain once you have seen the pipes.
Eventually we found ourselves outside Buckingham Palace, where loads and loads of people had gathered. We observed the police presence and wondered what could be going on (Cephas suggested a visiting guest of state, but I thought it unlikely that so many people would be so interested in a state guest unless he was Michael Jackson or something). I asked a police officer and he explained that it was the changing of the guards. -- Yes, that did make me feel clever, thanks for asking.
Anyway, we stayed and watched that. Cephas felt the guards had a thing or two to learn from the steely perfection of the flag-raising ceremony in Tiananmen Square, but I thought it looked fine, only it was odd when the brass band played Copacabana. It's not what you think of as queenly music.
We walked on and had our lunch in one of those grassy squares you get near Victoria, and then I saw Cephas off. After that I went a-browsing in the shops looking for a spring jacket, but really I already have a spring jacket, so instead I bought optimistic salmon pink shorts. I don't think I'll actually be able to wear them for months yet, but they are very bright and quite short, and they make me happy. So why not?
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| Monday, March 9th, 2009
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9:48 pm - Hi, guys
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Housekeeping post. I did a major pruning of the friends-list (is this one word or two? I call it flist most of the time because otherwise I get hyphen angst) because I did reciprocal friending for a while and it didn't really work for me, and it felt like time for a change. I kept LJs which I read regularly or which are owned by people I talk to, and I cut LJs if I felt they didn't fall under either category and there wasn't any other reason to keep them on the flist. (A reason would be e.g. if I wanted to keep up with it but thought I'd likely forget to swing by once in a while to read it if I didn't have it flisted.) I've got a daily reading filter just to try to help myself cut down the time I spend messing around on the Internet, but I'll probably stray beyond its boundaries frequently.
Hi to new people. Here in my secret Internet life my name is afrai. Nobody is sure how to pronounce this, but it is OK 'cos when I meet people IRL I get 'em to use my infinitely cooler real name anyway. I've been between fandoms for a couple of years now, but Good Omens and Bleach are the ones I've written the most fic for, and they are each an example of the two kinds of fandoms that are closest to my heart: fiction by old/dead white dudes, and anime/manga featuring awesome women. But as a fan I was shaped by the fires of '90s slash fandom, where I lurked as a tiny fanlet and learnt about cock-rings, smarm and the magic of the "random" button on the automated archive. (Just saying that I am remembering I used to read Star Trek discussions on Usenet, haha -- how much more Internet media fan can you get?)
In meatspace I study Lore in London, visit Cambridge on weekends and dream of home.
It is fine if you defriend me or don't recipro-friend me or whatever. That is all OK.
Oh, and my icons are from Honey & Clover, the most meaningful anime/manga in the world.
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| Thursday, March 5th, 2009
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12:13 pm - Resource for the hungry
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If anyone ever again recommends Elizabeth Bear's books or speaks of them with approval, without acknowledging that their author is a first-class jerk, they are gonna go down in my estimation.
Because this.
Wow, that's some impressive rewriting of reality.
( Problems I have with this post )
I'm going to leave this public because so far all the "she said WHAT?"s I've seen have been under flock. I am screening comments because I've seen what Bear's friends do when you call her out, and my journal is not a forum for those kindsa shenanigans.
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| Wednesday, March 4th, 2009
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10:38 pm - Resource for the hungry
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Today I made curry chicken using actual spices and cinnamon sticks and things! This was unprecedented -- I've only ever made curry from those useful pastes out of a packet or jar before. I was a bit worried that it wouldn't have the right sort of flavour, 'cos I had to leave out a few ingredients -- too lazy to go to Chinatown to get galangal, which I wouldn't recognise anyway (and that's quite funny when you think about it, 'cos if the recipes I've seen are to be believed, I've grown up eating it). But I needn't have worried, because I put 7 dried seeded chillies and half a jar of chilli paste in it and it was so spicy I couldn't really taste anything but pain after the first five mouthful. There is still a ball of warmth in my tummy.
I got the recipe from Kuali, which has become a favourite Internet hang-out of late. I stare at the recipes and get a) nostalgic and b) hungry. The nyonya section is especially painful. Oh man!
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| Tuesday, March 3rd, 2009
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2:38 am - Salman Rushdie on film adaptations of books
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A fine pickle
An interesting article, though reading it confirmed my suspicion that I would have a hard time making it through one of Rushdie's novels. (Not to cast aspersions on the quality of his writing -- it's more a sort of temperamental incompatibility between his prose and my brain. Actually I am a bit worried about what that says about my brain, but I digress.)
Cut out the last bit because it gave me the answer to a question I've been pondering for a while.
***
What are the things we think of as essential in our lives? The answers could be: our children, a daily walk in the park, a good stiff drink, the reading of books, a job, a vacation, a baseball team, a cigarette, or love. And yet life has a way of making us rethink. Our children move away from home, we move away from our favourite park, the doctor forbids us to drink or smoke, we lose our eyesight, we get fired, there's no time or money to take a vacation, our baseball team sucks, our heart is broken. At such times our picture of the world hangs crookedly on the wall. Then, if we can manage it, we adapt. And what this shows us is that essence is something deeper than any of that, it's the thing that gets us through. The 12 separate varieties of finches that Charles Darwin found on the Galápagos Islands had all made local adaptations, but when the ornithologist John Gould examined Darwin's specimens in 1837, he could see that these were not different birds, but 12 variations of the same bird. In spite of random mutation and natural selection, their finchness, their essence, was intact.
( As individuals, as communities, as nations, we are the constant adapters of ourselves, and must constantly ask ourselves the question wherein does our finchness lie: what are the things we cannot ever give up unless we wish to cease to be ourselves? )
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| Thursday, February 26th, 2009
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1:24 am - Things you associate with me meme
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My exams are over! Now is a time for wild self-indulgence. In this spirit, I am going to go yarn-shopping tomorrow!
When I asked people for five things they associated with me it was s'posed to be a thing where I would later babble about the things myself. I probably should have mentioned this.
( the meme )
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| Tuesday, February 24th, 2009
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10:46 am
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I'm kinda hesitant to use the term PoC to describe myself, because -- you know the thing about marked and unmarked language? Actor versus actress, author versus authoress, "a man's gotta do what a man's -- ": the default term being male, because it's assumed that whoever doing it is male. And you mark it when it's a woman doing it because that's out of the norm, that's departing from the default.
You get a bit of this in sf when there are lots of alien races other than human. Despite the references to "Terra", there's generally a sense of: here's a buncha Klingons, here's a Vulcan, here's a Bajoran ... and here are humans, who are the people.
I sometimes prefer "non-white people" to "people of colour" even though you could argue the former is problematic 'cos it lumps lots of different sorts of people into one category and defines them by reference to white people. That's only a translation of what I really mean, though. To my friends and me, we are the people. White people are the Mat Salleh, the ang moh, the whatever term you like to use. (Not that they aren't people, obvs. They're just the other people.)
***
Not unrelatedly, here is the Asian Women Blog Carnival!
This carnival is intended to focus on Asian women. The definition of Asian, within the scope of this carnival, includes people from East Asia, Central Asia, South Asia, North Asia, Southeast Asia, Far East, Middle East, Near East and people of Asian descent living in non-majority Asian countries. The definition of women, within the scope of this carnival, includes transwomen and cisgendered women.
The aim is highlight the diversity of Asian women and explore our identities in Asian majority and Asian minority cultures and share our experiences. Submissions can range from feminism, culture, history, work, beauty, health, sexuality, politics, economics, philosophy, class, education, religion, how we identify and relate to other PoC groups, personal stories etc.
Totes looking forward to reading this!
***
Speaking of reading things, I am rereading Gokusen as an incentive to do work. I do a splodge of work, then I'm allowed a splodge of Gokusen. It is actually pretty effective!
O Gokusen how I love you. Have you read Gokusen? If you have not, why not? It is a manga about an optimistic, naive, well-intentioned rookie high school teacher who starts her career in a tough school full of punk kids. It is like Dangerous Minds, only so so much better, because the way she wins the kids over is not with her optimism or her kindness or her Nice White Ladyness or poetry.
The way she wins them over is by punching them inna face.
Because (here comes the conceit) she's the granddaughter of a yazuka boss. And she is tougher than everybody!
Seriously but Yankumi is so cute. She actually is optimistic and naive and kind and possessed of a belief in everybody. She's also a gangster! She ducks under a desk when the police visit the school; she stacks her victims in a pile "like in some old manga or something"; she believes in loyalty! and the honour of the gangster! And she has a troop of thugs who adore her! O I love her. Maybe I will go read some more ...
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