lunabee34

1. I have been extremely busy with grading and course creation which has curtailed my participation, but I didn't want to let the time period for End OTW Racism's protest action to end without making a public post about it. (To be clear, this particular protest action is ending today, not the movement to create a less racist environment for users of AO3 and volunteers at OTW.)

I believe strongly that harassment policies should be updated and clearly articulated and that if possible, tools in addition to muting and blocking should be made available. I believe strongly that the OTW should be more transparent to users and the public at large about its decision making, and I believe it should hire a Diversity Consultant.

chestnut_pod's Be More Democratic, Be More Autocratic, OTW is a fantastic post that offers many suggestions for ways the OTW might accomplish the goal of becoming less racist. In the comments to this post (and in other places like fail_fandomanon), what gradually emerges is a picture of an organization that is dysfunctional in many ways and at many levels and to a horrifying degree. I worry that some people might think the conversation in those places is straying from the very important topic of making the OTW less racist, but I don't think it is. I think that when an organization cannot uphold its duty of care to its volunteers at extremely basic levels that it certainly cannot uphold a duty of care to its users; when so much is broken within, of course, no steps have been take to repair what is broken without.

I hope that End OTW Racism will prove to be the reckoning that makes OTW/AO3 less racist and also improves working conditions for volunteers and all the other issues that have been coming to light as a result of this protest.

2. Y'all, this wavy hair is wild. I had noticed early in the spring that my hair seemed to be frizzier than ever, and when I mentioned it to my hairdresser, she was all, "Oh, yeah. Your hair is getting curly." And I was all, "WHAT?!" And she was all, "Any hormonal change can change the curliness or straightness or your hair, and menopause is changing yours." So naturally, I researched this, and she's right!

MIND BLOWN

I only wash my hair every three or four days (while bathing daily!), but when I do wash it, I blow dry it straight, and this was masking the waves. I just could not figure out why a blow dry only lasts me a single day now when it used to last me at least two, sometimes three. Now, I know!

My only problem is I have no fucking idea what to do with wavy hair. Last time I was at the hairdressers, it had not progressed to this degree of waviness. I am definitely getting tips when I go back next, but for now I've been reading online and trying to figure out stuff for myself. I can still just blow dry it straight for a day, and that's fine, but I'm trying to figure out how to lean into the waves. I'm pretty sure I've got 2A waves right now (except that counter to the description, I do have more curliness at the crown on the sides in the front rather than it all being flat at the crown). After doing some reading online, I think I put the air dry styler in when my hair was a bit too wet, so today I let it dry a bit more, then put it in and scrunched my hair until it was mostly dry and wow, that upped the waviness a lot, especially in the back (which didn't get wavy at all when I just put the stuff in my hair and let it dry without doing anything to it).

Now I'm contemplating whether I want to cut my hair to top-of-shoulder length to maximize waviness; it's several inches longer than that now and will be a bit longer at my next hair appointment the last week of July. My plan had been to just let it grow until it gets so long that it looks stupid, which is what I did last time, but now I'm rethinking. LOL Hmmmmmmm.

3.

They Don't Kill You Because They're Hungry, They Kill You Because They're Full by Mark Bibbins

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


This book is special to me because the oldest kiddo gave it to me for a gift and spent a lot of time thinking about what I'd like. Unfortunately, I bounced off most these poems pretty hard (they're largely what I call the nonsensical genre LOL).



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I did, however, enjoy these lines from "Look Who Came Dressed as the Sun" enough to genuinely LOL:

If you write "ironic detachment"
in your orange notebook again
I'm going to throw it into a fire
even if I have to make a fire.

1. It was cold this week, and I alternated wearing the beautiful blue scarf elfin made me and the beautiful grey scarf my mom made me. :)

2. I got an early Christmas gift from amejisuto, a Margaret Atwood book. Happy reading to me!

3. The chair of the faculty senate told me that an unnamed head honcho told him I was respected by my colleagues; apparently my name came up multiple times as a good candidate to Do a Thing. Ego boost!

4. Everyone should go read the delightfully dark

Deeper Wonders than the Waves
Locked Tomb Mermaid AU
Harrow/Ianthe
Please mind the warnings in the tags

5. The photo policy at fanlore prompted me to look myself up there, and I was reminded that after that first Writercon I went to, there was a huge kerfluffle about that movie I showed, but I didn't even realize it until years later because I wasn't plugged into the right fannish places. Tl;dr my friend and I made a pretty kickass movie with action figures about Jayne and Mal getting sex pollened; it was fairly long and pretty well made if I do say so myself and pretty elaborate. We showed the movie to great delight at the con, but apparently the one dude in attendance was upset by it and posted somewhere that he didn't like it which set off a big internet debate. I had no idea this even happened until long after it was over. Now, of course, I would have participated in the discussion, but it all went right over my head at the time. LOL

1. I started writing a Guardian fic! I'm intimidated. *wibbles*

2. I finished December and January of the Guardian comm last night! I shall treat myself with February today if I get enough grading done. :)

3. Regency House Party: Companion to the PBS Series by Lucy Jago

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I only caught one or two episodes of this show, and reading this book makes me wish I'd watched the whole thing. This book goes into detail about how they chose the house and completely remodeled and redecorated it to make it all period compliant; it talks about choosing the staff and making the clothes. It gives thorough historical context for the time period, and it details what happened during the series. If you are interested in this time period or were a fan of the show, this is well worth a read.



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4. I started rereading Patrick Rothfuss's The Name of the Wind. Damn, that's a good book.

5. Fiona is feeling so much better. After just a couple doses of meds, she is eating regularly and bouncing off the walls. She'll be able to go back to school on Monday which is good because Josh has finals to give, and I have to take Emma to her neurology appointment.

Comment with one of my fandoms and a number.

1. the character I least understand
2. interactions I enjoyed the most
3. the character who scares me the most
4. the character who is mostly like me
5. hottest looks character
6. one thing I dislike about my fave character
7. one thing I like about my hated character
8. a quote or scene that haunts me
9. a character I wish died but didn’t
10. my ship that never sailed

And then we can taaaaaaalk about it. :)

1. We were supposed to go to my parents' today, but Fiona threw up all night long, poor baby. She was pretty much okay today, but Josh and I both were way too wiped for an 8 hour drive. So, tomorrow we leave!

2. I love technology. I love the internet. I am not a luddite. But you know that moment when you realize that you were born on the other side of the tech chasm, that you didn't grow up with google or smart phones or Siri? I had one of those this week when I was reading reviews of Rogue One in which the physical appearance of a character was pretty universally panned, and the whole time I was watching the movie, I was all ( Spoilers for the name of a character in the movie )

3. I took all of your excellent advice and spent most of this week reading Hobbit fanfic. However, I've run into a problem there. I am getting bored with the eleventy millionth retelling of the quest for Erebor. No matter the variations, I can read the same story only so many times before it starts to get boring. And there are surprisingly few fics that are set post movie that don't also go through 100,000 words of retelling the quest. I am also not very interested in modern AUs for this fandom. What do?

1. I got the best package from decynthus today! She made me all these cool fandom magnets with multiple picture options so I can switch them out when I want to. My favorites are one of Tyrion that says "I drink wine and I know things," another one that says Lyanna Mormont for President, a photo of the TOS crew on the bridge (*sniffle*), and one of River Tam that says "my food is problematic." LOL I have the best friends. Thank you so much, sweetie.

2. In random autoimmune disorder news, I don't know exactly when this started happening but it's been since we lived here, so sometime in the last eight years, I started getting this rash on my chest and jawline. It wasn't really visible, maybe slightly red, but nothing anyone would notice if I didn't scratch it. It would appear randomly and for no reason I could discern. Turns out this is a almost certainly a celiac thing or even a Hashimoto's thing. Lots of people with both report rashes that get better or go away entirely when they go gluten free. I haven't had the rash since I went gluten free. Over the last couple of days, it's started to appear again, and I couldn't figure out why. I haven't eaten in a restaurant in weeks. Well, son-of-a-bitch the ibuprofen I've been taking over the last three days has gluten in it. Aaaaaarrrgh! Why is gluten in everything OMG?

3. I fell twice pretty spectacularly at the beginning of this month, the second time banging myself up pretty badly, and now my arthritis is acting up pretty terribly in my knee. Boo and hiss.

4. Don't forget to sign up for the Letter Writing Challenge!

1. antares_dw made beautiful cover art for my J/D Ficathon story. You can see it HERE. *squee* Very few times have I been given art for a story, so this is extra special. :)

2. Josh has logged into both his online classes and reports that they don't look as scary as he thought they might. Yay! I think getting a couple weeks under his belt will help him become more confident.

3. How sad are you that paperjournals is a defunct community? Not as sad as I am. This looks like it was a really cool comm in its heyday; lots of posts of beautiful journals, pages inside journals, journal projects. I have recently gotten super into looking for planners, notebooks, fountain pens, paper suitable for fountain pen use, etc., online and would love to play around in a comm devoted to that. Some of the people posting there were super creative. If anybody wants to talk paper goods, pens, pencils, art supplies, etc., I am happy to have that conversation (although I will politely not get it if you wax enthusiastic about the washi tape).

4. Although we've already had two weeks of department meetings, committee meetings, and the mad rush to get syallabi and online components finalized, today was the first day back at school, and I am so glad for it. I've been ready to get back to a regular work week since June. I am one of those people who do not do terribly well with a lot of downtime. Lacking a regular schedule is not good for my mental health and allows me to indulge my worst habits. I am excited about the start of the semester, looking forward to my classes, and really optimistic about getting a lot of work done. In the past few years, I've been teaching two classes online and two in the classroom; this has allowed me to arrange my schedule where I only have to be on campus three days a week. While fun in many ways, this schedule is not conducive to me getting much beyond what I need to do for teaching accomplished. This semester, I'm on campus four days a week and think I will be much more productive for it. I've got a senior level class to prep for and some publications to get out there; it'll be time to apply for full professor before I know it.

5. A friend's post about her relationship with her parents has got me thinking about mine. I don't know if you guys remember my post from earlier in the summer where my dad yelled at me, but he and mom really hurt my feelings. After we left their house, I didn't speak to them for weeks, and pretty much the next time we talked was for them to tell me that dad was sick and getting tests to figure out what was wrong. So I feel this futile mixture of guilty for being angry at him and not speaking to him since he's sick and really angry because he never acknowledged hurting my feelings, will never acknowledge hurting my feelings or apologize for it, and will probably do the same thing again at which point I get to decide if the man potentially dying of cancer gets a get-out-of-jail-free card for being an ass or if I want to press the point of how treating your grown daughter like that is Not Acceptable. I also had a realization about that incident which made me even angrier about it; what set off the tirade was (no lie) that Josh and I did not agree with Mom and Dad that Mark Hamill looks deformed in the closing shot of TFA. That led to Dad hollering about how Josh had been so ugly to Mom all weekend and talking down to her (he had not), and I realized today that right before we watched the movie, Mom had been reading the paper and she started talking about that kid that was attacked by an alligator at Disney. I asked her politely a couple times to stop talking about it because I have serious issues with child death and I get caught in thought loops where I can't stop thinking about it. I had been having intrusive thoughts about this situation the whole car trip down after hearing NPR reporting and had trouble sleeping the night before because I couldn't stop thinking about it. She. Would. Not. Stop. Talking. About. It. Finally, Josh snapped at her and asked her to please stop talking about it in a Not Nice Tone of Voice. *shakes head* I can't imagine continuing to talk about something after my child told me it was harming her.

6. In other parental news, Josh's mom had a nice ER visit last week. She did not have a heart attack, but she had something called acute coronary syndrome which was not explained to her beyond, "You did not have a heart attack." She had a heart cath and had no blockages (which yay). They also did not set her up with a follow-up with a cardiologist. So she's getting that taken care of this week so she can figure out what happened to her and how to proceed from here.

1. I realized that I didn't leave enough outside the spoiler cut when I reviewed Hard by Wayne Hoffman. It's a novel about the gay community in NYC in the late 90s that would be right up a lot of y'all's alley.

2. I am overhauling my tags; I've been through almost all my existing tags and cleaned them up. Now I'm going to start at the beginning of my journal and make sure it's all tagged appropriately. I am giving myself permission to only do this on DW and not worry about LJ.

3. I read another book, Ragnarok: The End of the Gods by A. S. Byatt. ( SPOILERS )

4. I just finished my first week as gluten free, and it's been a bit of a mixed bag. When I got home from NYC, I went through the pantry, fridge, and freezer and piled on the kitchen table all the gluten containing food. Some items were not clearly marked. If a quick google search could not tell me the gluten status of the product, I put it in the pile. I did not want to spend hours on the phone with the companies who manufacture all the random jars of spices in our cupboard. Next I added the plastic dishes and implements, tupperware, melamine bowls, all the cast iron and non stick, the colanders. ( cut for length )

So now that I'm done with Daredevil, what do I do? Sort fanfic by kudos and then start reading all the crossovers with Avengers where Foggy is like Sam's best friend and Clint invites Matt over for movie nights.

I love movie nights. I love Clint in the vents. I'm okay with Thor chowing down on poptarts.

IDEGAF

Not one.

I'm gonna rub all them cliches all over my body, y'all.

I'm gonna progress to Frank/Karen, cross my heart, but right now, I'm all tangled up in Darcy going to law school with our avocados at law. (Although a bit of a blip in my happiness that I'm like three pages in and zero Frank/Karen at this point; boo hiss; oughta be at least one per page.)

Also, I am totally right about Lucifer. ( SPOILERS )

Also, Tasha Yar is on Castle and she's not cooking people and eating them or senselessly dying in a sentient tar pit, so that's a win.

I don't know why, but I haven't read very many books this semester, so it has been wonderful to start reading them again. What I have mostly been doing with my spare time since Christmas is reading FFA (not even commenting really, just reading the finished posts) instead of reading books or fic or writing it myself or posting something here. It's become a habit I want to break, I think. I successfully quit going to fandomsecrets several months ago, and it's been a relief to have that time back. Everyone in the comm was very nice to me; I had great interactions there, but I spent a great deal of time there and didn't get a lot of conversational return out of it. I'm starting to feel the same way about going to FFA. What I really want to be doing is talking to y'all and writing fic; I don't know why I keep wasting my time passively reading something rather than actively creating material myself.

So, to serve those interests, let's talk about books, baby, and also two movies.

I just finished:

( Ancillary Justice and Ancillary Sword )

( The Telling )

( Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children )

( Jurassic Park )

( Mad Max )