giglet

I had a fantastic Christmas holiday! But that's not what I'm here to ask you about, dear friends.

So...for Christmas, I tried (and failed) to give my violin to one of my brothers. I have lots of rationalizations about why I failed, but I suspect that closest to truth is that the more I fixed up and handled the fiddle, the more I wanted to play it myself.

I'm now looking for something that will play the major scales of G,D,A and E slowly, on my iPad.

I need to train my ear to hear when a note is in tune or not, and this is how I usually do it. I have learned through bitter experience that if I skimp on this step, I'll never be happy trying to play tunes and feeling that I'm not quite in tune but am unable to tell whether I'm sharp or flat. Right now I can't even tune up the fiddle without help.

Any suggestions for apps?

( Why am I taking this seriously?Collapse ) Crossposted here ( comments).

I thought this might be interesting for OTW's lawyers, and possibly for people writing IronMan fic about what happens when Tony Stark's robots start producing fanfic:


So photographer David Slater wants Wikipedia to remove a monkey selfie that was taken with his camera. As you can see from this screen shot, Wikipedia says no: the monkey pressed the shutter so it owns the copyright... Read more at:
http://skunkbear.tumblr.com/post/9…

Crossposted here ( comments).

http://wearemarketbasket.com/rally…

Rally Tuesday, August 5, 2014 11 am at Stadium Plaza, 10 Main Street Tewksbury, MA exit 38 off 495.
Biggest rally so far we would like as many customers as possible to come to this rally, this is your fight, you have taken it over. See photo for parking. Handicapped parking will be limited so be early if you require a handicapped spot.

Crossposted here ( comments).

I didn't expect to stumble across this.

Fandom: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Second person POV fic, AU (Marvin is a web server)
Author unknown, but presumably a human at the Association for Computing Machinery
Link: http://www.acm.uiuc.edu/404

Crossposted here ( comments).

Wow, I go away on vacation, and when I return, the best grocery store in town is *gone*, replaced by an idiotic shadow of its former self.

I didn't recognize any employees. I didn't even see any employees between the ages of 25 and 50. I can only assume they are no longer paying a living wage.

There's barely any meat, or produce, or store brands left. Don't the new owners realize that these items (and the prices of them) are why we shopped here?

Where are folks shopping now? Because a good business has been brutalized, and fuck if I will give any more money to the savages who did that.


[Edited to add:
1) Looks like a lot of the lose I encountered was instigated by the workers protesting the firing of the previous CEO.

2)an editorial from the Boston Globe that I largely agree with:
http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion…


3)a history of the power struggle within the family (but with no mention of the importance of an store with inexpensive fresh food in these communities)
http://www.bostonglobe.com/busines…


4) the plan of workers to rally for their ousted CEO and the company's threat to fire them for attending the rally
http://www.wbur.org/2014/07/18/mar…

5) apparently a movement to boycott the store?
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2…

6) I should mention that I definitely have a dog in this fight. Our household income has gone down drastically in the past 2 years, with no sign of it increasing again during my lifetime. Meanwhile, our food bill, our transportation bill, our heating bill, and our water bill have all gone up, and we're about to add a tuition bill on top of that. We need a cheap source of good food, and it has been worth our while to drive 30 minutes each way, past the Whole Foods and the less upscale grocery stores, every two weeks  to buy milk and store brand staples and vegetables.
]



Crossposted here ( comments).

If you give a damn about your economic situation and/or democracy, do two simple things:

Now: Make sure you are registered to vote.
In November: vote for the party and candidate least likely to fuck you over as they make policies that affect your paycheck and body and schools and environment.

This is one of your opportunities to be a citizen, rather than a consumer. The voting booth is one place where money doesn't always win the contest.

This could take you as little as 15 minutes, and is unlikely to take more than 4 hours. Surely between now and November 3rd, you can find time to do that?

Register to vote resources
http://www.usa.gov/Citizen/Topics/…

Voting resources
http://votesmart.org/

You don't have to be perfect, you don't even have to be smart -- the important thing is to show up.

Crossposted here ( comments).

I have stuff to say, and this seems like the best of available venues for it.

Forget about the roses and chocolate and sex of Valentine's Day for a minute. I wanna talk about other sorts of love.

( Cut for some blatant Christianity about loveCollapse )

tl:dr version: try not to be a jerk. I'm trying my best to be fond of you.

Also, dear friends who feel rotten today because you aren't in a stereotypical romantic relationship: For your sake, I say "fuck the advertisers who throw that in your face". Also, here, have a home-made virtual muffin.

Crossposted here ( comments).

dorinda said:"Historical slash! Anything at all about it--the challenges of writing slash in a historical time period, the things that have drawn you to it, the best and worst (or your favorite/least favorite) things about it or about the planning/writing process, how you like to go about it, etc."

The past is a different country and writing about it without doing research is going to produce lousy results. Ill-considered details can throw me right out of a story. For example, an Avengers fic had someone recognize that Steve Rogers is experiences technology culture shock, saying, "you've gone from transistor radios to the Internet" -- and I wanted to yell that no, Steve Rogers never had a transistor radio! Those were an amazing development of the 1960s that liberated radios from the big, delicate, power-hungry vacuum tube radios that Steve Rogers knew in the '30s and '40s. And technical details are the easy part -- when the author wants to get into attitudes and slang and subcultures (and really, everyone but The Man is in some subculture or other), it all gets harder to get right, and easier to get terribly wrong.

(I have had occasional to explain to a young writer that no, actually, in many cities in the early 1970s, finding one night stands was easier and less... scripted? fraught? than they are today. There really was a belief that The Pill made sex consequence-free and that there would never be a reason to confine sex to marriage again. Then came the neo-Puritan backlash of the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, plus AIDs... but that's a rant for another time. I wish I could have handed her Maupin's "Tales of the City".)

Good historical fic shows off the differences inherent to the times and places without turning the story into a documentary. People who enjoy reading history and then re-purposing what they've learned for fic tend to do pretty well. For example: Flamingo wrote Starsky&Hutch stories about the gay rights movement in the 1970s. Sylvia Volk wrote some Highlander stories set in the ancient world. Parhelion's Nero Wolfe stories are notable for their sense of time and place.

I'm not that good at it. I do fall into historical research sometimes -- and wow, I know a *lot* about the Klondike Gold Rush because I wanted to know more about the history of the RCMP because I fell into due South fandom. Also about the freight tunnels under Chicago for the same reason. And Navarone fiction got me interested in WWII in Crete, which for a while had me thinking about going to grad school just so I could spend time delving into the lives of British spies on the island at that time, with some professional academic guidance. Fiscal realities prevailed, so I'm still fumbling my way around historical research. I've written many things that I won't show off in public because they're just embarrassingly naive about the setting. Some of those details I knew were wrong when I wrote them, but I didn't know how to get them right, and just steamrolled on in an effort to finish a rough draft.

Another thing that draws me to historical slash is a unrealistic, exploitative romanticism. You've heard that saying about "an adventure is just someone on the other side of the world having a hard time"? I like my stories thrilling rather than realistic, which means I want to be able to ignore the squalor (unless it contributes to the story) and focus on the story of people rising above the average, doing heroic feats, finding love in a place far enough from my current world to have a gloss of romance or even exoticism. With slash, there's also the lure that it is sometimes subversive or at least bohemian, which can also be romantic or exotic. The trend can descend into... I guess id-fic is the politest term.

If I'm writing id-fic, I want to know it, and make that clear to everyone reading it. The danger is that people really do "learn" history from entertainment like "Inglorious Bastards" and get their ideas of what a romantic relationship should look like from "Twilight". And that's not okay. Crossposted here ( comments).

resonant  asked "What are some things you've learned from fandom -- either from stories or from fans -- that you didn't learn anywhere else?"

So much. So so much.  Maybe a better question would be "what hasn't fandom taught me?"

First, the no-brainer: Fandom taught me about sex. Not just how to do it (I figured that out pre-fandom, thank you) and ways of avoiding getting pregnant or diseased, but about how to do it better and how other people do it. My mom was a firm believer in sex education (policies of keeping girls and women ignorant of their bodies ruined lives around her and very nearly killed her at one point), my college roommate was the go-to source of sex information in our dorm, and yet fandom has answered a million questions I didn't even know how to articulate about sex. And, since I've lived almost all my life among men, it gave me a community of women who were willing to share information about periods, about Diva cups, and about tits. Also, it gave me a network of women who could compare experiences with sexual discrimination and rape culture, and who have pointed out to me (by and large, very gently) that I had sexist habits. (I still struggle with "guys" not being a gender-neutral term.) Also, fandom is a fantastic place to explore desire and build a vocabulary for talking about desire and pleasure.

Fandom taught me about reputation and group dynamics in a way that interacting with people in body did not. Er, I'm not sure how to elaborate on that.

Fandom discussions have taught me a lot about ownership, about RPF, about celebrity, about gossip, and the ethics surrounding all those things.

Fandom has reminded me that I'm not weird -- or rather, that if I am weird then I am at least not alone in my weirdness. I have found a niche of fandom that is comfortable to me in a way that my embodied life is not. An intellectual Room of My Own.

Crossposted here ( comments).

 bell asked what fic I find most memorable.

i really struggled with answering this, because there is no single story. I have favorites, of course, and unique stories that I come back to re-read, and stories that I find  perfectly formed. (Most recently, these are "we were emergencies" by gyzm (avengers) and "Written by the victors" by Speranza (SGA) and "the Good student" by Sylvia Volk (Highlander), respectively).

Also, and I apologize for my unseemly egotism, the stories that hold the most space in my mind are -- must be -- the stories I have written. But among these, the ones that continue to come to mind are the problematic ones, where I aimed higher than I could achieve. Some are unnamed and unposted.

so, I'm sorry. I can no more name a most memorable fic than I can date my most memorable sunrise. Some are better than others, but there are far too many that are beautiful in their own way for any one to stand out.


Crossposted here ( comments).