SO FAR ON THE "LOVE" SIDE OF MY LOVE-HATE PENDULUM RE: NARNIA.

( not very spoilery at all )

CALIFORNIA, FUCK YEAH!

State Supreme Court Overturns Ban on Gay Marriage

\m/

This may be short-lived (oh, for the day when Northern California becomes the 51st state and I don't spend every election-morning-after scowling at the county breakdown of votes which inevitably shows the Bay Area in ridiculous contrast with the rest of the state. Which is impressive considering it is a blue state regardless.) but, man, I remember hating on Prop 22 back in 10th grade, I remember the magical month of marriage in 2004, when a friend of mine's two mommies got married, and I remember how abruptly that ended. How gay marriage, and Gavin Newsom's decree in particular, ended up being a rallying point against progress. So, this may not last, and this may cost us* — but while it does, this is the most legit same-sex marriage in California has ever been, and that's a nice slap in the face to the haters.

:)


*enough to swing the national sentiment back to McCain? I don't think so; he's on record as letting the states decide. This battle's going to come sooner or later. Sooner or later our side will win.


ETA: Oh, Mick LaSalle. Do your faily wonders never cease? Yes, it is kind of silly for Prince Caspian to be all about battle when the actual battle in the book covers about, no seriously, two sentences. But when, Mick LaSalle, was the last time you read Prince Caspian? What the fuck are you complaining about PC losing its "rich fantasy" and Christian allegory (which is a whole other level of wtf)? Prince Caspian is like: Pevensies wander around, Pevensies take a really long walk that lasts at least three chapters, Caspian tells his story, more walking, Reepicheep is awesome, distinctly pagan-esque funtiems with dryads and kids turning into pigs, two-sentence battle, Pevensies go home. THERE IS NOT A LOT TO IT. And yes, kids grow. Which is terrible, if you're Aslan or Mick LaSalle. stfu.

(For those of you that haven't read a million MLS movie reviews, he has this incredible talent for making his reviews sound totally well reasoned, only to actually be incomprehensible when you see the actual film. He is like a magician of wtfery. Ugh.)

ETA2: Here's a much better review of Prince Caspian from Slate. Susan becomes a fierce archer while demurely evading Caspian's moony gaze <333, especially after reading an interview with Andrew Adamson where he was very clear that he wanted Susan to be a warrior in purposeful opposition to Lewis's "wars are ugly when women fight" BS. <333

...

How has this entry gone from being about civil rights to being about Narnia? *buries head in hands*

MY GOD I am not into work today. Let us play instead... the omnimeme extravaganza! Take any sort of meme, like asking me fannish opinions, true life opinions, meanings behind interests, deep thoughts on icons, etc etc and WHATEVER IT IS I will totally attempt to answer.

Oh! I'll try one-sentence or alphabet ficlets too!

WHATEVER. Hell, post your own memes in my comments. It'a an omnimeme extravaganza, dude. Anything goes?

This Friday the San Francisco Chronicle ran a great article honoring TV moms of past and present. The actual best thing about it was the huge full-color picture of nine mentioned moms on the front page of the Datebook, but still: it included Joyce Summers, Lois from Malcolm in the Middle, Lucille Bluth, Livia Soprano, Marge Simpson, all three Henricksen wives, and Lily Munster. This was no ordinary list o' moms. (Tim Goodman can be, on occasion, quite awesome.)

I very much enjoyed this article, but said I: why stop there? Media is full of interesting moms, and even though I long for the day when female characters do not have to always be someone's mom, the moms we do have are pretty important and awesome.

Miranda Bailey!
Abby Bartlet!
Kirstin Cohen!
Julie Cooper!
Sarah J. Connor!
Marisa Coulter!
Darla!
Mary Darling! (Wendy's mom)
Janet Darling! (Clarissa's mom)
Judy Eriksen, lover of mayonnaise!
Lindsay Fünke!
Merope Gaunt!
Ellis Grey!
Servilia of the Junii! (ET TU, MOMMY?)
Motormouth Maybelle!
Claire Meade!
Mercedes (madre de Ofelia)
The mysterious Mrs. Mosby!
Laura Moser!
Meredith Palmer!
Lily Evans Potter!
Eileen Prince!
Prudy Pringleton!
Hilda Suarez!
Jackie Tyler!
Edna Turnblad!
Ursa of the Fire Nation! (MAMA BEAR)
Molly Weasley!
Joy Wrigley!

And who can forget this one from Catch-22?

"Dress warm," said the mother, who seemed to know.


I know I am missing many, but I must go, and so it is your turn. Who are YOUR favorite fictional moms? (Happy mother's day to the real moms on my flist, of course. ♥)

Man, I was just commenting on how Survivor is a comedy — and then tonight's episode happened (and was I think the first time I actually watched an episode as it aired). OMG. Incredible! IT IS SO EXCELLENT, MY REALITY TV LOVING FRIENDS. ( a summary or recent hilarity for the curious )

Man, that took way longer to write than I intended it to. PLEASE ABSORB MY ENTERTAINMENT VICARIOUSLY.

Alsoooo, these are disconnected and brief enough that I will not cut.

- "I'd never say this to her face, but Pam is a wonderful person and a gifted artist." = ♥
- dsfkjfsd alone in the office together!!! I think I strained a shipping muscle.

- "An awesome single mother, like Erin Brockovich or... Sarah Connor!" ♥♥♥♥♥
   1. TRUFAX
   2. Oh, Liz Lemon. You are the queen of geeks. :)
   3. LOL DEAN WINTERS AHAHA OMG YOU GUYS INTERTEXTUAL REFERENCE TO THE SARAH CONNOR CHRONICLES AAAHH. Dead from love.

( ETA: Ugly Betty )



ALSO, I never do these things, but I'm feeling reckless: I have a thread in the new Snaps Cups meme, if you would like to say anything about me. *shuffles feet nervously*

Last night I stayed up until ONE waiting for the Gossip Girl torrent (well, I was doing other stuff too) and it did not disappoint! Guys, how did this fannishness happen to me? I started watching GG in late November and was vaguely interested in Blair/Serena at first, in an unsupernatural Buffy/Faith-lite kind of way, but whereas Buffy and Faith are BOTH right and wrong, Blair/Serena is all about how Serena is a perfect ~*free spirit*~ and Blair's life sucks. Which I personally found pretty sucky! ALSO, I hated every single male character except for Dan, so really the only reason I watched through the pre-strike run is because I had literally nothing better to do.

But post-strike! I have lots better to do, and instead of doing it (like going to bed before two am on a work night) I'm like OMG THIS SHOW. I mean, I still do it completely rong per every fan I've yet encountered other than latropita but ( I fucking LOLed )

Also, HIMYM: I don't really need to cut this, but I have been seriously loving the post-strike episodes here as well. Most of the pre-strike third season was kind of tepid for me, and post-strike it has been ON, and SHARP, and I love it a lot. And have changed my profile information accordingly.


P.S. The What Shows Am I Watching meme intrigues me.

As I grow older, I watch more and more things as comedies. Like, Survivor. (I love Survivor.) It's so consistently hilarious — it's basically one long series of hysterical dramatic irony — and I'm honestly not sure how a show like that intends to be taken, but I watch it as pretty brilliant comedy. Re: above, I watch All About Eve: The Jenny and Blair Redux. We used to refer to Addison's Anatomy before the spinoff; I will forever hate Farscape for not just being The Aeryn Show and Smallville for not being Chluthorville. I started off watching BSG, but defected to The Pilots Are Awesome Show after I gave up on the main plot ever making sense — though that show was then cancelled. I have my issues with The West Wing, but who can argue with The CJ Show?

I used to adhere fiercely to canon and canon-love; I no longer do and I think it is one of the fan's greatest gifts to reinterpret an unsatisfactory canon so that it can be enjoyed in whatever fashion. When I can enjoy a show exactly as it is given me, though, that's generally a sign of true love. And as I made the list above, I had to conclude: man, am I ever watching How I Met Your Mother, and even though this kind of puts me at odds with the fandom, it fills me with joy. I'm not even The Marshall is Great Show, because that's built in. Ensemble heaven. <3 (Joshhh Radnooooorrr <3)

Oh. How sweet. A Nice Guy has taken the time out of his busy schedule of being Nice to comment on my post about the patriarchy.

And finally, as a man who has spent his life caring about women to the exclusion of men, in some kind of gender-reversed bias that I should probably correct, I have something unpopular to say...

All that it would take to correct the misogyny balance is for all the attractive girls out there to actually sleep with the "nice guys", rather than the bastards you find easy to throw away. As long as your sistas keep rewarding the bad behavior, men will keep acting like suave pricks. It's really as simple as that. Orgasm is the ultimate human reward... use it wisely.

Hear that, ladies? All we have to to erase a systematic culture of oppression is to take pity on the poor men, who are naturally owed blowjobs from us for being so goddamn nice.

I don't have time to educate Nice Guys on why acting like human rights are something to be bartered for via sex is a) ridiculous and b) antithetical to the entire purpose. I don't have the inclination to engage with someone so massively entitled and so colossally capable of missing the point. And I don't have the patience to forgive the incredible assumptions about the sexual behavior of me and my friends (as long as we are suitably attractive, of course). All I really have time, desire, and energy to say is this:

When I talk about insidious misogyny, I am talking about you.

I am perfectly okay with you and your niceness finishing last, and it has nothing to do with me wanting to reward ~bad boys~ with orgasms.

Fuck. Off.



I need a motherfucking pedicure.

1. Today is the anniversary of the day my beloved jerushajen was brought into the world. Thanks, universe! And thank you, fandom, for introducing me to a lovely friend with whom I can equally discuss femslash, beer, music, lit, and the awesomeness of our Pacific. And talk to drunk guys from New York named Jerrell who claim to be writing a novel about surfing. ♥

2. Today is also FUCKING NUTS. And will continue to be, and I kind of hate Thursdays argh.

Distract me? I have thrown my name into schiarire and fahye's Soundtrack My Life meme, so if there are songs you feel are fitting unto me, rock it out! Commentspam would also not go amiss. ♥

3. I am going to go sit outside at the picnic table by the poppies, and I will eat my couscous minnestrone soup (?!), and I will read about Michelangelo. Yes.

[4. A phonecall just interrupted me with something distinctly of the #2 flavour] ...oh fuck.

1. Work is being just a little too insanely disorganized for my taste. LOL BOOKKEEPING!? Jesus, dudes.
2. Argh augh blast from the past, thank you myspace. ?!!??!

interroooobaaaaang


So! Solace. When we were in high school, lodessa and I used to write each other notes in class. If we had a class apart, we'd write letters — often up to three pages on both sides — and fold them up into neat little triangles for later delivery. If we were had a class together (which was always in the case in English and history) we used, at first, a single sheet of paper that we passed back and forth. Later we upgraded to lined blank books (first the France Book, then the Black Book, then...), which one or the other of us would take home at night for yet more scribblings. So great was our love of writing to each other that we would sometimes sit in silence, outside of class, still communicating via the written word — or conduct two conversations at once, out loud and in text.

The conversations we held, as you might imagine, were sometimes pretty complex.

Now, of course, we are not in school together. We live an hour and a half apart. But we do both have deskbound office jobs, which has lead to a renaissance of sorts for our old art of notepassing. We can chat regularly throughout the 40-hour work week, and in doing so, discuss some ideas that are occasionally kind of complex, or at least cracky.

All of which is to say: lodessa and I got to talking about how awesome Veronica Mars should have been, had it not been a) written by Rob Thomas who loves, among other things, unexplained red herrings, aggressively shitty endings whose only requirement is that they can't be guessed in advance, and stomachturning sexual politics; and b) constrained by network pressure from ever being as dark and gritty as it always wanted to be (which Rob Thomas actually agrees with us about).

So naturally, we decided to revise the whole damn series, altering what we felt was lame or offensive and doing our best to stay true to the show's original spirit of sexy cynical tawdriness. Also: NO BABIES.

We haven't worked out every last detail of the second season, partly because on certain things I want the opinion of the audience, but here's how we changed season one. Mwahaha?

( Veronica Mars?! )

Next season on Veronica Mars: We don't need no stinking bus crashes. Stay tuned!

I am trying to completely rehaul my wardrobe, and I am growing my hair out until I stop, and with these changes I have made a decision: to be a person who wears big earrings. Yesterday I bought two pair from a stall on Telegraph; today, recycled typewriter keys at the antique street fair. One key has an asterisk, and the other a parenthesis.

Also, there was food.


Snakes on a Kraft 2: Distinctly Lacking in Both will take place, by decree, two Fridays after next, May 16th. Prince Caspian is playing at the Metreon AMC at 7:35 and 10:45. emilytheodd, shakanaman, jerushajen — Y/Y? Anyone else, register your intent to join or forever be sad and lonely, I guess.

EDIT: JUST KIDDING I TOTALLY LIED I have to cancel on my own decree!

What day works for you guys? How about...the next day (Saturday)?