Time Traveling Lesbian

Okay, so this really is my hobby...

2009-04-04T22:15:14Z

http://www.xkcd.com/559/

... no pun intended...

Verdict on Dollhouse Reached By (Metaphorically) Hairy-Legged Feminist and TV Addict:

2009-03-06T05:42:51Z

Episode 3 is where it starts to pick up. Without giving too much away, this was the first episode that wasn't Echo surrounded by dudes, dudes and more dudes. There may in fact be some hope for Dollhouse, or at any rate I'll be watching Episode 4.

Problems I Have

2009-02-23T06:44:50Z

I hate it when I'm watching a movie, and characters are at a lecture of some sort, and the camera keeps showing them talking instead of letting me listen to the lecture in peace.

Verdict on Dollhouse Reached By (Metaphorically) Hairy-Legged Feminist and TV Addict:

2009-02-22T07:40:02Z

Nope.

Dollhouse

2009-02-17T08:53:44Z

Okay, so I really, really want to like Dollhouse. I want to look forward to evenings of Joss Whedon and Eliza Dushku in real time, as this will be the first of his shows I actually have a chance to watch first-run. But I dunno. I said on Ari's journal that it has the potential to (a) be awesome, (b) trigger PTSD, and (c) get old.

I was bothered by the very fact that the first episode revolved around implanting Echo with the memories of a sexual abuse survivor, then throwing her up against the man who kidnapped and raped her (hello Dickensian coincidence with a twist of Anne Rice!). On the other hand, it has since occurred to me that there's maybe some merit to immediately drawing a parallel between the helpless child being kidnapped and violated, and Echo having her mind wiped and being sent out on (frequently) sexual assignments. So, I can kind of see the justification, even if watching it felt a little like Law and Order: SVU (AKA Special Rape Hour. I never purposely watch that show, but one time I fell asleep in a room with it on a marathon and had sex crime dreams. Fuck you, Dick Wolf.)

Anyway, there's a lot more I could say. At random: Eliza Dushku better be damn good if she's gonna keep playing different characters each week, and I'm excited to see that, because I think she probably is. If you're downloading you probably don't see these, but if you watch it on Fox, there's gratuitous nude shots of Ms. Dushku (dripping wet for some reason), which I find contradictory to the premise of the show. So far I'm not that enthralled by any of the other characters, which isn't promising. Tahmoh Penikett isn't bad, but it doesn't say much for his character's development that the only name I can remember for him is Helo. Oh, well. I'm sure they'll give him more to do next week. Oh, and Amy Acker! Though she too didn't get much to work with. She was listed as a guest star, but I'm hoping she will be on regularly, and not get her soul eaten by a body-stealing demon or anything.

One thing I wonder about is how the story will progress. Because right now it's set up like a movie: evil establishment does evil stuff involving heroine wearing tight shirts. Hero suspects evil people of running evil establishment that does evil stuff. Hero and heroine overthrow evil establishment wearing tight shirts. Hero and heroine get married wearing tight shoes. And so I'm kind of wondering how that's going to be a TV series-- Echo can't spend five seasons trying to get away from the Dollhouse, and she can't spend five seasons living there, or at least not while holding the show to a moral code. So, all that and probably more.

The thing that I think grabbed me the most was thinking about what this kind of work does to Echo, in spite of the fact that she's not going to remember it. It reminded me of the scene in Lolita where Humbert convinces himself that because she's asleep (which of course she isn't, really) it doesn't matter what he does to her, because if she's not conscious, if she never knows, it can't hurt her. Nabokov probably wasn't thinking about child abuse survivors who repress memories (and I don't know if any of you believe in that) but it's sort of what all this makes me think of-- what kind of damage can be done to a person, without them even realizing what's happening. Does it count? If Echo is restored to her life five years later, given back her own memories, and all the Dollhouse memories are erased, is there any damage done?

For the record, I think I would probably work for the Dollhouse if it existed, assuming they'd pay me enough. Watching the beginning I was thinking how cool it would be if you could be drugged to love doing the things you have to do, then have the memory erased when you were done. But I think that's mostly my self-destructive streak talking.

kira_dancing @ 2009-01-28T15:29:00

2009-01-28T20:30:19Z

For anyone interested in chapter II: http://kirabreedwrisley.wordpress.com/

Serial Novelist

2009-01-08T00:59:19Z

For anyone interested:

http://kirabreedwrisley.wordpress.com

I'm printing zines and leaving them for free around Brooklyn and the Lower East Side. They have pictures and bonus porn, but the site above is just the book, which is less interesting, though it will eventually have sex in, too. I think some of you have seen what's up now, but the next installation should be up in a couple of days.

(Just for the record, I'm only doing this for the hell of it. I know some of you write, and are many millions of times better than I am, and I want you to know that I'm aware of that, and not looking for approbation or anything. This is silly fun, and nothing more.)

WIN

2008-12-04T08:41:14Z

see more pwn and owned pictures

Book Meme!

2008-12-03T08:19:42Z

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users (as of 10/2/07). As usual, bold what you have read, italicize those you started but couldn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. Add an asterisk to those you've read more than once. Underline those on your to-read list.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina*
Crime and Punishment*
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose*
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses* (Gotten through the whole thing once. Read various pieces multiple times)
The Odyssey*
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov* (only got partway through in Russian but read all in English)
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies (Started it at my mother's house and left it there. Damn it!)
War and Peace* (Part in Russian, twice in English. It's a good book, okay?)
Vanity Fair (Finished this tonight after deciding suddenly "I must read this!" for no apparent reason last week.)
The Time Traveler's Wife
The Iliad*
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway*
Great Expectations
American Gods*
Atlas Shrugged (Proudly failed to get through it. Proudly.)
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man*
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead (I went through a phase of picking up books by Ayn Rand, reading 20 pages, then throwing them at things. It was fun.)
Foucault's Pendulum*
Middlemarch
Frankenstein*
The Count of Monte Cristo*
Dracula*
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys*
The Once and Future King*
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984*
Angels & Demons
The Inferno*
The Satanic Verses*
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray*
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest*
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver's Travels (I read the whole book I had, but I think it was an abridged kids' version)
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time (Read part at someone's house but never borrowed it.)
Dune
The Prince*
The Sound and the Fury
Angela's Ashes : A Memoir
The God of Small Things
A People's History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere*
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved*
Slaughterhouse-Five*
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves*
The Mists of Avalon*
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita*
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an Inquiry into Values
The Aeneid
Watership Down* (first when I was six, for some reason. I think because I liked book about bunnies.)
Gravity's Rainbow
The Hobbit*
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

The obvious and shameful dearth is Jane Austen. I read her too young at first, and didn't start again until recently. I promise all good people, I'm making up for lost time. The funny thing about the rest of it is that most of the ones I've read, I either read before high school (or early high school) or after college. Apparently my education left no time for reading classic works of literature.

Awesome Movie Alert

2008-09-14T21:45:52Z

"Itty Bitty Titty Committee"-- it's about a feminist guerilla art gang. And OMG it's awesome. Riot Girl music; pink-streaked hair; illegally placed statues of Emma Goldman and Angela Davis; a character who renames herself after Shulamith Firestone (and wears the glasses); some of the awesomest actresses ever, and so much other stuff. If I'd seen it when I was 16, I'd have a far more extensive criminal record by now.

I'm gonna have to buy the movie.

more animals

I'm Going To Bartending School

2008-09-12T20:46:51Z

Because a Cornell education can only take you so far...

But I'm kind of excited, it'll be like being a barista only for drunk people (and with more money), and with any luck I can eventually get a job at a lesbian bar and be the sexy bartender everyone wants to sleep with.

I think I'd be good at that.

Fun On The Subway

2008-09-05T03:42:08Z

thefieldsbeyond and secant can testify to this: we were waiting for the A train, and an elderly gentleman across the way, dressed in red and holding a fireman's helmet, was singing "Santa Claus Is Coming To Town." This is lovely (I'm all for caroling in September) until we realize that he's singing in the first person. As in "I know when you are sleeping, I know when you're awake..."

Creepy. Very creepy.

So I started singing "Closer To Fine", which seemed to annoy him. Then the train came.

I love New York. But sometimes the people are creepy.

What's More Awesome Than Kittens?

2008-08-29T05:22:17Z

This, that's what.

In Which I Haven't Said Much In A While

2008-08-23T05:24:23Z

... At least not here. In the time since last I wrote anything I've moved to Brooklyn, met good people, gotten involved in cool stuff. I'll say more at a later juncture, but for the moment suffice it to say that most of the problems in my past can be traced to my nasty habit of not living in New York. They say recovery takes some time, but it's well worth it.

Amusing anecdote: My mom lived in NYC for most of her young life.

Me: Marvin and Marianne and I got knishes at Yonah Schimmel's, on the Lower East Side.

Mama: Yonah Schimmel's? Did you say Yonah Schimmel's?! It's still there? Oh my god, I can't believe it's still there. How was it? Was it fabulous? What kind did you get? I used to go there all the time!

... so, I think my mom might come visit...

In Which I Like Starbuck's

2008-07-31T21:09:56Z

Aside from the obvious reason, I had to wait a minute while they finished brewing coffee, and they gave it to me free. Also wireless internet (which I'm stealing from SU). I'll still choose local when available, but free coffee is my kryptonite (is that correct usage of the word "kryptonite"?)

In other news, I'll probably be AWOL from tomorrow until next Wednesday, as I'm going to see everyone I'm related to in a place where my cell phone doesn't work and the internets don't run. If I'm not back by Friday, please send help.

In Which Honesty Is At Least A Novel Policy...

2008-07-24T03:51:13Z

After having four different people, including my mother, suggest that the reason no one thus far wants to live with me is because I'm very "intense"*, I have placed this ad on Craigslist:

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
$550-$800 Responsible, queer writer seeks interesting place to live. (Location: Brooklyn)

24-year old female seeks housing situation or someone to look for a place with. I am a website content writer and a playwright, lesbian, feminist, activist, experimental cook, avid reader, nonsmoker. I am looking to create a living space that is both a safe haven and a place to be inspired-- I have no pets but wouldn't mind having someone else's around. Looking for someone similar, or at least someone who doesn't mind all the above.

Preferred but not required: appreciation for Buffy the Vampire Slayer and/or Battlestar Galactica; tolerance for magnetic refrigerator poetry; and/or a deep-seated desire to start/join a radical queer guerilla theater troupe.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I predict no responses, but if I do hear from someone from this, they'll pretty much have to be awesome.

*I've also been described that way in the past week by two people not discussing the housing thing. I'm not even sure I know what "intense" means in this context, but I bow to popular opinion. Such I must be :0)

I Fucking Love Joss Whedon

2008-07-20T15:14:14Z

Everyone should watch Dr. Horrible's Singalong Blog today before it goes to iTunes and you have to pay for it. For anyone unfamiliar with it, this is what Joss Whedon, Nathan Fillion, Neil Patrick Harris, Felicia Day and others did with their time off during the writer's strike. It's basically what you'd get if successful and brilliant professionals decided to make an action-hero/musical video in their mom's basement.

In other words, it's awesome, although at least one of Mr. Whedon's "Oh For Fuck's Sake, Again? Really?" classic themes is enacted (I won't tell you which one).

Seriously, watch it. Or I'll get you with my freeze ray.

Also, for anyone keeping up with Sarah Haskins and Target: Women, go here and see two new ones (Botox and "Feeding Your F---ing Family")

http://current.com/items/89053755_target_women_botox?xid=0

Thought Exercise For Feminist Literary Geeks

2008-07-13T22:57:07Z

How many of Shakespeare's plays pass the Mo Movie Measure?

I am lazy and going mainly by memory, but "As You Like It" passes (most of Celia and Rosalind's conversations are about men, but they also talk about how much they love each other, and make plans for escape.)

In Romeo & Juliet, Lady Capulet, Nurse and Juliet all talk about Juliet's future-- they're talking about marrying her off, but the conversation isn't about a specific man, and it's focused on what's best for Juliet.

"Twelfth Night" passes, although Olivia doesn't know it at the time.

The witches in "Macbeth" ought to pass, but I'm not sure spell-casting counts as conversation. I also thought "Much Ado About Nothing" would, but looking through, I don't think it does.

Anything else?

Why I Said "Fuck You, Too, Obama"

2008-07-07T22:32:09Z

'Kay, I took this down when it was brought to my attention that "abstinence education" is not the same thing as "abstinence-only education" and it was the first phrase that he used. I got all flustery in a discussion about it because the fact that I had misread it meant that the validity of everything else I was trying to say was called into question, which meant I couldn't back anything up. Which is a silly place to argue from :0P (sorry secant)

Original text:
________
Abstinence-only education? For reals? Also, let's maintain the ban on late-term abortion. Pleases!?!

Hooray, another Democratic candidate charging manfully toward the center!
-------

But redbaker asked me about the post after it was down, and in explaining the situation to him I realized that I actually do have a valid point, damn it. So, here's what I said to him, with a little added:

The abstinence-only thing was from another source, but after looking back at it I see it was a misquote. He says he supports abstinence education, which doesn't mean abstinence-only. On the other hand, unless after "abstinence education" he also says "comprehensive sex education" he's still on my bad boy list. Also, I guess people are reading "education, abstinence education" as two separate items, while I read "abstinence education" as clarifying the first; in other words I thought he was saying that the kind of education he supported was abstinence education.

It's not horrible, it's certainly not enough to change my support for him (and obviously not enough to make me think he's going to sneak into office and overturn Roe v. Wade), but it pisses me off because during the primary he made me think he was on "our side" and now he's doing the politician thing and tailoring what he says based on who he talks to (which is admittedly how he got me). Like, dude, do you think we don't all read the internets?

What I was trying (and failing) to explain to secant is that what he's saying betrays a willingness to prioritize being palatable to Christians over defending women's rights. That's pretty much par for the presidential course, of course.

But the main thing to me is talking about "mental health not being a good enough reason" -- that, to me, is backing up a strawman: who the fuck gets a third-trimester abortion for reasons of "mental health"? Those operations are pretty much only done when the physical health of the mother is at issue (or the fetus is already dead, in which case the mother is still in danger). So, to me, saying that is validating the idea that women who get abortions are selfish, capricious and mentally unstable. And that's not okay with me-- it's perpetuating a very deeply rooted, very anti-woman mindset, and I expected better from a man who a few months ago said this.

See, that is the language of hard-core pro-choice-- it was a daring thing to say, and things like that were what made me support him initially. Things like this make me feel like my friends were right* and Hillary Clinton was our only shot at someone who would actually have some respect for the other 52% of the population.

I don't believe it's intelligent to expect our leaders to be perfect, or to expect that anyone who has made it far enough to be a serious candidate for the presidency will be a revolutionary. I do believe it's worth it to hold them to high standards and call them on their bullshit.

So yes, it may be an overreaction, but that's why I'm all pissy. :0)

*The ones who said that, obviously. Everyone else is still my friends, too.

In Which I Explain My Religious Beliefs.

2008-07-02T14:40:19Z

more cat pictures

In Which I Get A Tattoo

2008-05-31T19:29:42Z

Pickup Lines That Will Probably Work On Me

2008-05-20T21:21:19Z

"That shirt looks good on you, but it would look even better stuffed into the neck of a vodka bottle and flung burning through our office building's window. Let's fucking do it and never look back."

(from XKCD, via greensinger)

Of course, I'm more likely to get "what are you reading?" Which I guess is okay, too.

In Which I Have A Halfway Decent Picture Of My Hair

2008-05-18T17:21:20Z

That is all.

In Which I React Predictably To Crisis

2008-05-07T12:51:30Z

I cut off my hair. I left it a little too long and looked like David Bowie, then I cut it shorter and now I just look silly. See new userpic.

Oh, well. It'll grow back.

In Which I Take Action

2008-05-01T16:02:49Z

Pow!

So, after an evening of heavy drin- I mean thinking, I've decided to take the obvious course, apply for lots of different jobs in different places, and figure something will pan out eventually.

Which, yeah, duh, but these things take me a little time.