imagines

New FO post ahoy!



Adding policy:
Most of my posts are locked, though fanfiction is nearly always public. I'll add anyone back for any reason, but please comment here first so I know who you are and how you found me. :)

Credit:
Friends-only banner by ivydoor at pyritehedera.

A friend of a friend is in need of kitty foster care. If you can help by taking the cats or reposting, it would be very much appreciated! ♥

Originally posted by lunalovegoddess at please boost the signal...

Y'all gave me such a lovely bunch of poly music recs, I thought I should collect them in an unlocked post!

There's a couple of things I haven't looked into yet: Penelope Swales's album "Skin: Deep," which is indie and Australian, and I can't seem to get my hands on it; and the band Gaia Consort, which is apparently very popular in pagan/poly circles, so I'm quite intrigued. There is also a huge list of songs in a polyamory wiki.

And now for some specific songs. :D

David Rovics - Polyamory Song
I heard a woman talking
And to me what she said just made sense
She was lamenting the state of affairs
How some people can be so dense
She said she had three wonderful children
Two girls and their little brother
And nobody gave her problems for loving
Each child as much as the other

Cyndi Lauper - Cyrus in the Moonlight
That's when Cyrus asks the moonlight
"Do I have to make a choice
'Tween Liza with her red hair
And Ramona with her blues?
And with all these gifts they bring me
Tell me, how can I refuse?"

Joan Jett - French Song
(omg, JOAN JETT!!!)
Don't you feel guilty, baby
I won't take long to understand
Don't waste time arguing
We'll make the most with what's at hand
I have to laugh out loud
When you say three's a crowd

Ani DiFranco - Light of Some Kind
She came up to me with the sweetest face
And she was holding a light of some kind
And I still think of you as my boyfriend
I don't think this is the end of the world
But I think maybe you should follow my example
And go meet yourself a really nice girl

Jefferson Airplane - Triad
I love you two
I don't really see—why can't we go on as three?
You are afraid—embarrassed too
No one has ever said such a thing to you
Your mother's ghost stands at your shoulder
Face like ice—a little bit colder
Saying to you—"You cannot do that.
It breaks all the rules you learned in school."

Nelson (performing as Power Tool) - Two Heads Are Better Than One
She said, "I'm feelin kind of lonely,"
And gave us a wink
Feeling bold we expressed our intentions
We said, "You gotta have both!"
She said, "That's a joke!
It takes two just to get my attention."

Ben Lee - Apple Candy
(I couldn't find a plain video of the mp3, so you get a bonus Kirk/Uhura/Spock video by talitha78, who is scary good at vidding. No bad here. :p)
I wanna know what he knows
I wanna hear your secrets
I want you and I want him...

'Cause I know you made a promise
And told him he's your lover
Make me feel the same

Britney Spears - Three
Three is a charm
Two is not the same
I don't see the harm
So are you game?

CONCLUSION: the songs about 1+1 relationships may vastly outnumber the poly songs, but there is still a fair amount of poly music, and that makes me very happy. I am still gonna write poems, though. :p

I am seeing a lot of displeasure about the new navbar—displeasure which I share, because I use that filter-dropdown pretty often, dammit. HERE IS IMPORTANT STUFF (does not address aesthetic anything, just functionality):


1. You can still filter by journals or communities or what-have-you.

Journal Type:

• Add ?show=P to display personal journals

• Add ?show=C to display communities

• Add ?show=Y to display syndicated feeds

• Combining the letters will show multiple journal types on your Friends page. For example, adding ?show=PC displays personal journals and communities, but not syndicated feeds.

- LJ FAQ #219

[eta: example—

http://imagines.livejournal.com/friends?show=C —> I see only communities]


2. You ARE SUPPOSED to still be able to filter by using the navbar, and they know there is a problem with it.

We are investigating several small display issues with the navstrip that did not appear during beta testing, including:

• The filter icon when viewing a Friends page (allowing you to filter by your custom groups) is missing entirely for some users, while displaying as a small green 'share this' icon for other users. The icon should be a small funnel icon.

• A few users are reporting odd color display for the text or background of the strip.

• We're also aware that the options to filter a Friends page by type of journal (communities only, etc) are missing from the new filter dialog.

- LJ Releases

3. On my navbar on my flist, there is a weird little green symbol next to "You are viewing your Friends Page." If I hover over it, it will let me sort by my personally-created filters. I have to manually sort by journal type using the URL addons above. Apparently some people are seeing different things, though, so YMMV.


Hope this helps some people. :) This is not locked—share if you like.

I spent all day debating whether to post this. And then I figured, well, some of you lot read zombie porn. As if you'll judge.

WARNING: Autassassinophilia...ish. Consensual gun violence. Not porn. Still kink. Still intense.

NOTES: Title refers to this kind of limit. This is totally defeating the point of being anon, but I might have left a prompt at cherrybina's post... and then this scene slammed into my brain and insisted that I write it. Idek, people. The first Inception fic I ever write and it's this. /0\

( LimitCollapse )

[unlocked, in case you feel like reccing her work with it]

I'm not sure how to say this without it sounding very blunt: you've probably heard, if you read fantasy novels, but Diana Wynne Jones died yesterday.

Neil Gaiman wrote a lovely post about DWJ. I never noticed that Hexwood (one of my favorites) was dedicated to Gaiman. Bless. I also love that she and Gaiman have approximately the same hair in that photo. More bless.

The post got me thinking. (As well as crying. When people who have touched me have to leave forever, I cry.) I don't know if I have as much to say as he does, or if what I can say is as meaningful, but I wanted to say it.

It's because of kohl_eyed that I started reading DWJ's books (for which I will be forever grateful), and it's DWJ's fault that I admitted I love sci-fi, and also DWJ's fault that I learned you CAN mix witches and spacecraft and have it be amazing. DWJ is firmly on the list of authors who made me say, "Wait, you're allowed to do that?!" I believe that if you're a writer, it is absolutely necessary to realize you are allowed to write any and all stories that want to be told. If that's witches and spacecraft, then god damn, you go for it.

DWJ, along with Madeleine L'Engle (who is sadly also not here anymore), also taught me that women can be badass authors and badass protagonists. These two fantastic women wrote about girls who--yes--fell in love with boys, but A Wrinkle in Time and Howl's Moving Castle are not only about romance, because other things matter to these protagonists. Like having incredible adventures. And saving your family. And saving yourself. And believing in magic. And learning about the universe. And turning the average everyday fairytale on its head.

I'm fairly certain that my first brush with DWJ was through the movie Howl's Moving Castle. I loved and still love that movie, and when I realized that it was actually a book, I'm sure I threw my hands up in glee. So I read the book, and it was delightful.

Others of her books that I highly recommend are as follows:

• If you'd like to start with a taste of short stories (although it's more of a meal, at ~500 pages), there's her anthology called Unexpected Magic.

• If you're intrigued by the idea of witches and spacecraft, then A Sudden Wild Magic is for you. It's been a few years since I read it, but I seem to recall trying to decide if I liked ASWM or HMC better, and I was having serious trouble deciding.

• If you'd prefer something a little more serious, she wrote The Time of the Ghost, which I have a hard time describing without utterly spoiling. But here's an attempt: it is about memory loss, time travel, death, domestic violence, solving mysteries, identity, and (despite the ghostly protagonist) real life. I remember it also made me laugh a lot, which is quite a trick when handling the issues I listed, but DWJ was magic and could do that.

• The Homeward Bounders is NOT to be confused with Homeward Bound, for the record. The latter is about two dogs and a cat, and I liked it only when I was six or so. The former is about Them, who are playing a game with human lives. It is also about a boy named Jamie, who just wants to go home but is trapped playing his own (quite dangerous) game of choice and chance.

• Hexwood will hurt your brain. Badly. But if you love mixed-up timelines, non-linear narratives, and people actually being other people EXCEPT WHEN THEY'RE NOT--which I do--then this book is for you. You will lose track of what's going on. You're supposed to. DWJ wants you to. By the end of it, I felt I was entirely at her mercy, which was when she hit me over the head with the ending.

I have not read the Chrestomanci series, for which kohl_eyed might kill me in my sleep, but I hope to remedy this someday soon. I hear they are crazy good.

All of the above is to say that if you haven't read DWJ's books--or if you've only read a few (as I have)--then you should assuredly, definitely, without an inkling of a doubt, read them. Even if you don't like fantasy, because I don't think she was capable of writing "normal" fantasy. Even if you don't like sci-fi, because at one time, neither did I, and I still thought A Sudden Wild Magic was totally fabulous. Even if you've never heard of her, because no, she's not as famous as Neil Gaiman and Douglas Adams and so many other boys, but she damn well should be.

[I'mma make this one public 'cause why the hell not. Do what you will.]

Who else remembers the terms "lemon" and "lime" as applied to fanfic content? (A "lemon" being a story including graphic sex scenes; a "lime" being the fade-to-black sort where you know it happened but the story doesn't describe it. At least that was how I used the words.)

( Cutting for discussion of the above.Collapse )

Quick thing for you tonight before I head to sleep, in case you haven't seen it:



Linked at AJE's Feb 4 liveblog.

The translation (lines are repeated):
Let's make Mubarak hear our voices. We all, one hand, requested one thing, leave leave leave ...
Down Down Hosni Mubarak, Down Down Hosni Mubarak ...
The people want to dismantle the regime ....
He is to go, we are not going ...
He is to go, we won't leave ...
We all, one hand, ask one thing, leave leave.

Fucking awesome--rough times turned into beautiful music. I wanna play it over and over; it's getting stuck in my head.

I don't think I knew a single word of Arabic before this all started... and now absolutely all of the Arabic I know is related to having a revolution.

So, Egypt. This ain't a happy post. If you haven't been following it on your own, ( here's a rundown of the past couple of days.Collapse )

The reason I keep watching is that I want to make absolutely fucking certain that whatever happens doesn't happen in secret. Whether it goes beautifully, or whether everything goes to hell, I want to see it. I want to know that I saw it with my own eyes and that I will never forget it as long as I live.

Live feeds are really hard to find right now. It's not safe for journalists. I'm now getting most new info from Twitter.

Assortment of links. I'm sorry, I can't really write commentary, I feel numb from everything I have been seeing. I'm in information-overload and I'm so scared for these people.

The current livepost at ONTD_P.

The War on the Media in Egypt

Google doc of casualties (27 names right now)

A Guide: How Not To Say Stupid Stuff About Egypt

U.S. Lawmakers Weigh Ending Aid Until Mubarak Out

[eta: One more before I glue myself to AJE again. @Sandmonkey's account of why they're protesting & what's been happening. Heartwrenching & chilling. @Sandmonkey's twitter MAY have been regime-hacked--not sure but I saw a report he can't access it anymore. Who even fucking knows. They've played dirty before.]

As I write, it's 6:30 am in Cairo, 4th of Feb. After Friday prayers, which apparently are at noon, it's meant to be the "Day of Departure." (Mubarak's departure, that is.) Something big will probably happen. I hope to hell it doesn't get ugly, but for fuck's sake, it's already gotten ugly. I don't know what's going to happen.

I'm not sure what location this is, but it gives me hope and so I'm gonna post it.


Muslims, Christians, we are all Egyptians...

Love to you all. ♥ If you have any questions, ask... I have collected a truly insane number of links and might be able to help you out.