With Such Words

Sunday Style Challenge

Sun, 11 Jan 2015 16:46:54 GMT

I basically vanished again, oops. I'm still reading a lot of articles and saving them to my Pinboard. I'm still watching too many tv shows and having too intense feelings. I'm still feeling pretty lost overall.

But I've also been doing a lot more writing. I've started working again on an old project, which I hope to share more details about in a few weeks, and I'm trying to get other writing practice in too. I tried this particular exercise on Tumblr and liked it a lot, so I thought I'd make it a weekly thing.

Give me the name of an author & a prompt, and I'll write at least 500 words in their style.

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for Michael Brown

Wed, 26 Nov 2014 18:27:38 GMT

I don't know what to say about the decision not to indict Darren Wilson for the murder of Michael Brown. I could spew a whole invective of inarticulate but colorful curse words that would capture only a fraction of the outrage, revulsion, and shame I feel.

I don't know what to say, and I'm not the one who needs to be heard.

Today in Tabs: I Will Only Bleed Here
Here’s another story. I am the only black person on the editorial floor at my place of employment. The other ones who look like me work as cleaners or in the mailroom. When we lock eyes I nod, and it is both the easiest and hardest thing in the world. I know nothing of their lives, and yet here we are the same. Today I will do this. We will share a look that encompasses last night’s indignities and acknowledges tomorrow’s. We will keep our heads down and our hearts guarded, and I will only bleed here, in words, on this page.

Nikky Finney | Choking on a Waterfall of Watermelon Seeds
Life as "normal" for this Black girl's life has meant that every day in America I have to be prepared to endure the shotgun fire of old watermelon jokes aimed at my heart and my life. After the shotgun fire of these "unfortunate" words I am then told to stand there and "let it sink in" as if it wasn’t already lodged beneath my skin like a spray of bullets and then I am expected to just move my broken Black girl heart along. The old LP record starts to play: Pick up some Duck tape on the way home Black girl, bandage up your wounds for the umpteenth million time—you’ll be fine in the morning.

Is Darren Wilson receiving affirmative action?
The 12 grand jurors in Wilson’s case — six white men, three white women, two black women and one black man — should be deciding whether there is probable cause to believe a crime occurred, not guilt or innocence beyond a reasonable doubt. The latter is left to a trial jury, if the prosecution has any real interest in prosecuting Wilson. The grand jury should address indicting Wilson and vindicating the interest of the public, not criminalizing Brown and defending the interest of Wilson.

Why Darren Wilson Was Never Going to Be Indicted for Killing Michael Brown
The truth is that the law gives wide berth to the police’s use of deadly force. Just two months before Brown was killed, the Supreme Court gave its ruling in Plumhoff v. Rickard, where the plaintiffs were suing after police officers ended a high speed chase by shooting 15 rounds into the car, killing the driver and a passenger. The court held that this wasn’t “excessive force” in violation of the Constitution, affirming years of deference to police departments. “It stands to reason,” wrote the justices in a 9–0 opinion, “that if police officers are justified in firing at a suspect in order to end a severe threat to public safety, the officers need not stop shooting until the threat has ended.”

Chronicle Of A Riot Foretold
From the outset, the great difficulty has been discerning whether the authorities are driven by malevolence or incompetence. The Ferguson police let Brown’s body lie in the street for four and a half hours, an act that either reflected callous disregard for him as a human being or an inability to manage the situation. The release of Darren Wilson’s name was paired with the release of a video purportedly showing Brown stealing a box of cigarillos from a convenience store, although Ferguson police chief Tom Jackson later admitted that Wilson was unaware of the incident when he confronted the young man. (McCulloch contradicted this in his statement on the non-indictment.) Last night, McCulloch made the inscrutable choice to announce the grand jury’s decision after darkness had fallen and the crowds had amassed in the streets, factors that many felt could only increase the risk of violence. Despite the sizable police presence, few officers were positioned on the stretch of West Florissant Avenue where Brown was killed. The result was that damage to the area around the police station was sporadic and short-lived, but Brown’s neighborhood burned. This was either bad strategy or further confirmation of the unimportance of that community in the eyes of Ferguson’s authorities.

Here is a list of ways you can help the people of Ferguson.

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weekend reading

Sat, 22 Nov 2014 01:25:58 GMT

As usual, I have no idea how to cut this list down. I feel like I should aim for themes or something sensible. Or read less. That could also work.

( Links to read over the weekend )

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weekend reading

Fri, 14 Nov 2014 15:24:50 GMT

Managed to cull this week's list down to 22 links, and I'm still crying a little over some of the ones I left out. (If you're an RSS addict like I am, you can subscribe to my Pinboard's RSS feed here and skip these entries entirely.)

I've realized that I'm currently in a phase where I'm consuming a lot of information but interacting with very few people. (I'm mostly on Plurk these days, but even there, I'm actually interacting with less than 5 people regularly.) That's something I'd like to work on changing, because why read cool things if you can't have meaningful conversations about them?

But for now —

( Links to read over the weekend )

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analyzing "One Missed Call"

Sun, 09 Nov 2014 01:34:42 GMT

One Missed Call. There is way more going on in this movie than I feel qualified to talk about. I've watched it twice now, I've read about it around the web, and yet the more I think about it, the more questions I have. I'm not sure if the film is intentially ambiguous, or if there are cultural references and translation problems that impede my understanding, but would make sense to a fluent speaker.

Regardless, it is a fascinating story.

( Spoilers behind the cut )

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weekend reading

Sat, 08 Nov 2014 02:56:56 GMT

I started teaching myself Swift, Apple's new programming language, this week. Considering I've never learned a programming language before, it's been an interesting exercise to say the least, but it's been a fun challenge.

Also means I haven't been reading quite as much. But I still have a goodly collection of articles for you perusal.

( Links to read over the weekend )

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everything is political. is that a problem?

Sun, 02 Nov 2014 17:24:56 GMT

A few articles I've read this week have got me thinking about politics and polarization. The funny thing is, they were about two completely different topics. One was an article by John Lanchester about being a restaurant critic; the other was an article by Ezra Klein about the politics of #Gamergate. But they both hit upon basically the same point. (Emphasis added to make my own points.)

Not so long ago, food was food. (I’ve lost count of the number of conversations I’ve had with people in the industry, debating some point backward and forward, that end with someone shrugging and saying, “It’s just food.”) That’s not true anymore. Food is now politics and ethics as much as it is sustenance. People feel pressure to shop and eat responsibly, healthfully, sustainably. At least, that’s the impression you get from what’s written and said about food culture—that it’s a form of surrogate politics. To some, it’s not even surrogate politics; it’s the real deal, politics at its most urgent and consequential.

This isn't a world in which we should be surprised that video games have been politicized. This is a world in which it was only a matter of time until video games were politicized. This is a world in which, sooner or later, most everything will get politicized.

Both articles, without outright stating "and this is bad", indicate discomfort with how politically charged things outside of politics have become. Lanchester, while admitting that he himself does his best to shop ethically, questions whether it's actually an important political act or if we're setting our political sights too small. Klein talks about how a debate within the gaming community has been co-opted by outside political forces; video games are just a new battlefield for conservatives and liberals to duke it out.

And I just think: The personal is political.

It's a tenant of second wave feminism, popularized by Carol Hanisch. The original idea was that things like childcare, household division of labor, and abortion are not personal issues for individual women to address, but political problems that had to be dealt with on a collective level. The heart of the idea is recognizing the hidden, systemic forces of oppression.

Food has always been political. Video games, movies, any kind of entertainment have always been political. The environment, human rights, violence against women and ethics in journalism are all political issues which are inexorably linked to things we didn't used to think of as political.

I think Lanchester makes a great point when he says: "If these tiny acts of consumer choice are the most meaningful actions in our lives, perhaps we aren’t thinking and acting on a sufficiently big scale." Yet I also think about how the United States Supreme Court has ruled that money is speech, and since the days of Ronald Reagan we've been told to vote with our feet. In a country where our vote matters less and less, is it any wonder that we turn to things which are in our power, such as what we buy? And Klein's points about polarization are spot-on. But I don't think the problem is that "Once political identities are activated, these fights will spread far beyond their natural constituencies..." A discussion about ethics in video game journalism is relevant far beyond the gaming community — especially as so many news networks are owned by huge conglomerates. Let the fight spread. Let people draw connections and see patterns. Broader culture can learn from subcultures; BDSM culture has a lot to teach even the most vanilla about how to communicate during sex.

I think the real problem is a corollary to "the personal is political," which is: "the political is personal." In personal arguments, it's hard to listen to what the other person is saying. We get defensive; we spend our time thinking about how we can fight back instead of actually listening to what the other person is saying. Especially as our political identities become even more important to us, as Klein points out, the communication problems which we have in our personal lives are magnified on the political stage. While there are personal issues that can only be addressed in a political arena (such as harrassment and bullying), these fights will only be productive if individuals use personal skills like active listening. The tools & techniques good counselors teach people for dealing with conflict are the same ones we need for political discourse.

Maybe American society just needs a really good marriage counselor.

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one of my greatest regrets in life

Sun, 02 Nov 2014 15:06:26 GMT

Is that I played the violin instead of the cello in middle school/high school.

I really freaking love cellos.

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defining narrative compassion

Sat, 01 Nov 2014 01:42:45 GMT

As promised, and in honor of Halloween, I'm launching a series of posts about narrative compassion in horror films.

This has been a research paper fantasy of mine for awhile now. But I'm not an academic, really, and I don't have the discipline to do a properly researched paper. I can, however, write blog posts (believe it or not).

( so watch me write )

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for your weekend reading

Fri, 31 Oct 2014 19:55:03 GMT

Happy Halloween, everyone! Later on today I'll be launching a new little blog project in honor of the season, but first — this week's recommended reading! It turns out I save a ridiculous number of links over the course of a week — seriously, I had 50+ links in this list before I culled it down to about 22. You can find all the links I've saved on my Pinboard. But these are, I think, the truly must-reads.

( Links to read over the weekend )

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for your weekend reading

Sat, 25 Oct 2014 04:00:01 GMT

I still feel like I don't have a lot to write about, but I have been doing a lot of reading. (ReadKit has been, if you'll permit a little melodrama, an absolute lifechanger.) I have a Pinboard account where I save links I think would be interesting to people, but I thought: Hey, why not make a weekly links post like all the other cool kids on the net? If nothing else, it will give me something to post about. (It also gave me a great excuse to spend an hour messing around in Keyboard Maestro, creating the best macro for putting this post together. Few things make me happier these days than messing around with Keyboard Maestro macros.)

So, for your weekend reading, may I recommend:

( This list of links )

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this post has no point

Fri, 17 Oct 2014 19:58:56 GMT

I feel a weird kind of anxiety whenever I think about blogging again on Dreamwidth. What would I write about? I don't feel articulate enough to write about anything of interest, and my life is pretty dull.

I've been struggling with words overall for months now. I hardly RP anymore. The tags I write keep getting progressively shorter and shorter. The actual quality of my writing is steadily declining. Almost every time I go to write, my mind goes blank. Actually blank.

I'm not sure what the point of this is. Odds are good that I'm just going to post this and then vanish into the deep again — inarticulate keysmashing on plurk, reblogging things without commentary on Tumblr, saving articles on Pinboard. I'm not unhappy with life right now. But I guess I've lost the sense that I have anything worth saying.

I miss it.

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Giftmas Drabbles

Tue, 10 Dec 2013 04:09:57 GMT

001. Sleep. 002. Love. 003. Pain. 004. Sand. 005. Glass.
006. Church. 007. Moonlight. 008. Happiness. 009. Tears. 010. Laugh.
011. Cry. 012. Silence. 013. Sun. 014. Sing. 015. Twist.
016. Empty. 017. Blossom. 018. Harp. 019. Control. 020. Leave.
021. Psychotic. 022. Hope. 023. Alone. 024. Viridian. 025. Gasp.
026. Smirk. 027. Piece. 028. Fly. 029. Elope. 030. Stay.
031. Moment. 032. Eternal. 033. Wish. 034. Darkness. 035. Poem.
036. Sick. 037. Turbulence. 038. Malevolence. 039. Sugar. 040. Peace.
041. Embrace. 042. Dark Eyes. 043. Hands. 044. Youth. 045. Ignored.
046. Mistake. 047. Stars. 048. Pluto. 049. Fortune. 050. Hate.

Pick a canon we share + character(s) + a prompt and i will write something for you. length varies; love does not!

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Bleach: The Abridged Version

Wed, 20 Nov 2013 18:45:09 GMT

Because not everybody reads Bleach for the endless battles and penis contests.

( a work in progress )

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The Sting

Sat, 12 Oct 2013 18:08:52 GMT

This episode was doing so well. SO WELL.

( spoilers )

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Legend of Korra: Peacekeepers

Sat, 05 Oct 2013 16:46:39 GMT

Legend of Korra is definitely better watched with a friend. My roommate had missed the past two weeks, so we watched the last three episodes together and spent the entire time laughing about Verrick as Stephen Colbert. It was great.

But this week's episode...

( spoilers )

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Legend of Korra: Civil War pt 2

Sat, 28 Sep 2013 14:09:07 GMT

Honestly, my main thought about this episode?

SKY BISON BABIES!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

They justified the existence of this episode. I mean, I liked the rest of the episode, but. Come on. Sky bison babies.

( Real spoilers behind the cut )

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Legend of Korra: Civil War pt 1

Sat, 21 Sep 2013 17:40:09 GMT

Now THAT'S what I'm talking about.

( spoilers )

I had other thoughts, but I'm home with family for the weekend, so they've kind of flown out of my mind. But all in all, I enjoyed this episode a LOT more than the premiere, and I'm legitimately excited for next week.

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so that Legend of Korra book 2 premiere

Sat, 14 Sep 2013 23:22:14 GMT

I still need to rewatch it... I think that I'll appreciate it more on the rewatch. There were a lot of things in book 1 that I hated at first and then ended up liking when I rewatched it. (Same goes for pretty much the entire third season of Avatar: The Last Airbender)

But as a first impression? I was pretty underwhelmed. ( spoilers )

Overall, my thoughts are: Thank God for fanfic. But I still can't wait for next week. Love is blind.

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do you ever feel like you're going to throw up in excitement?

Wed, 11 Sep 2013 15:18:24 GMT

Which is funny, because I never really throw up ever, even when sick. But that's how I'm feeling about the return of Legend of Korra on Friday.

I have such strong feelings about book 1....as do many other people. Happiness, excitement, anger, disappointment. I'm nervous about whether book 2 will fix some of the problems from book 1, or if it will just make more. I'm nervous about fandom's reaction too. I haven't been a proper part of a proper fandom since my early years in college; it's actually really scary, being around that much intense emotion, even if it's just words on a screen.

(And, yeah, I've developed a lot of headcanon about Korra during this past year that is going to get so very, very jossed.)

But. BUT. As scary as it is, I'm excited too. Because that trailer is gorgeous and spirits and Korra and Jinora and hope. There is always hope.

Now if only I had cable!!!! Come on, Amazon and/or iTunes! Let me preorder my season pass!

(Tangentially, am I the only one concerned about Korra being moved to Friday nights? My understanding is that's not a very good timeslot. Hopefully I'm wrong about that. I'd hate for the network to be trying to tank the series.)

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Mansfield Park: Chapter 20

Sun, 30 Jun 2013 21:23:50 GMT

Chapter 19

( Read more... )

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two unrelated but awesome ladies

Wed, 26 Jun 2013 13:32:36 GMT

Senator Wendy Davis is fucking awesome. One rarely ever gets to say that about a senator. Texas should be proud.

Completely unrelated, but I finally found a quote by Margaret Cho that has been on my mind for awhile but I never remembered to Google it when in front of a computer.

I grew up hard and am still hard and I don't care. I did not choose this face or this body and I have learned to live with it and love it and celebrate it and adorn it with tremendous drawings from the greatest artists in the world and I feel good and powerful like a nation that has never been free and now after many hard won victories is finally fucking free. I am beautiful and I am finally fucking free.

I fly my flag of self-esteem for all those who have been told they were ugly and fat and hurt and shamed and violated and abused for the way they look and told time and time again that they were "different" and therefore unlovable. Come to me and I will tell you and show you how beautiful and loved you are and you will see it and feel it and know it and then look in the mirror and truly believe it. If you are offended by my anger and my might at defending my borders and my people you do not deserve entry into my beloved and magnificent country.

That right there is why I will always love Margaret Cho, even though our sense of humor don't always mesh.

You know what? Who cares whether it's official or not. Happy Rocking Ladies Day, everybody.

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Mansfield Park: Chapter 18

Wed, 26 Jun 2013 13:02:15 GMT

Shhhhhh I know it's late

Chapter 17

( Read more... )

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Star Trek: Into Retcon

Sun, 23 Jun 2013 13:42:42 GMT

not_as_it_is and I went to see Star Trek: Into Darkness again yesterday, and I decided that John Harrison just lied about being Khan because he's a poser superman. When I mentioned this to a friend of mine, she linked me this fic:

Sure, My Name is Khan by phosfate and Rosencrantz

This is my new canon

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Mansfield Park: Chapter 16

Thu, 20 Jun 2013 02:01:28 GMT

Chapter 15

( Read more... )

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