My brother is not dead. Nor are my cousins and assorted Iranian relatives. They have, however, hightailed it the hell out of Tehran for the foreseeable future.

ETA 06/25/09: I retract and apologize. I misread a comment which subsequently colored the rest of what I was reading. I also withdraw as this is not an argument I am going to wade into.

I have other thoughts and a lot of frustration with regards to this because of many semantic things, but this is the part that is currently frustrating me the most:

When calling people out for their behavior with regards to racism/sexism/misogyny, etc, the argument has always been the assumption of good faith on the part of the person making the mistake, such that the mistake was not intended to be made and a correction would be welcome.

Being told that I am deliberately and maliciously setting out to trigger someone by a lack of warning is not assuming that I am acting in good (though ignorant) faith. It may honestly be that it never occurred to me to warn because *I don't know better*. And having malice attributed to me is not really a way to make me want to learn.

Additionally, and this does speak to semantics: I'm fine with warning for non-con because that is a clearly delineated and identifiable thing. Dubcon? Abuse? Tell me where the triggery lines are and I'm happy to warn for them, but without knowing for sure, I'm going to default to my own experiences which may be further than is healthy for someone with triggers for those issues.

ETA: I am at work and cannot mod effectively. I am willing to discuss, but keep in mind that my time is limited and burst-like.

hm. We haven't heard from my brother yet, or my cousins (some of whom apparently go to Tehran University :( :( :( )

My mom has been glued to the television (though even she says they're not telling her anything).

I am...well. I am reading Night Watch and hoping for the best.

a protest march:


["Allah-O akbar (God is great)
Mikosham mikosham ghatle baradaram-ro (I'll kill the murderer of my brother)
Basiji-e bi-gheyrat, Doshman-e khoone mellat (The shameless basiji, is the blood enemy of people)"]
from http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/

ETA: I should note that my mom thinks (and I agree) that the reason my brother/cousins/various distant relations have not called us *here* is because they think the phones are tapped and people are listening in. Hence the activation of the International Phone Tree. So we're hoping to hear from my cousin Rosie in Germany soon.

good thoughts for my brother, please? He's in Tehran now and I'm a little worried.

also, good thoughts for Iran. There are some people there who need it.

eta: pictures from Iran. The first picture is making me teary.

The moment I found funniest in Bones S1 (so far) is Brennan listening to rap and Booth coming in and her being all excited and, "Listen! The alpha male is establishing his dominance."

and then I just started laughing and laughing and laughing.

(Bones likes rap music! hee!)

Prince of Persia = WHITE DUDE AS THE PRINCE OF PERSIA.

I HATE YOU, HOLLYWOOD. I HATE YOU SO MUCH.

sometimes, when I get really mad, all I want to do is write a story from Omid's point of view from the unaired Heroes pilot. But then I think that fandom would believe I was advocating terrorism and I don't. But sometimes I want to.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-girls-guide-to-comic-con-pg,0,4051009.photogallery?1

ARE YOU FOR REAL, LA TIMES? SERIOUSLY?

GO TO COMIC CON FOR THE DREAMY BOYS? SERIOUSLY?

I go to Comic Con because it is the nerdiest time of year surrounded by people who will dress their 3 year old toddlers up as LUKE AND LEIA, OKAY? and were the 501st legion can do a goddamn parade down the concourse and where two girls can dress up in awesome homemade Enchanted dresses JUST BECAUSE and where fox1013 and I can dress up as lolcats and PEOPLE WILL KNOW WHAT WE ARE.

It is where I go to see Bryan Fuller be a nerd and Kristen Chenowith sing songs and Chi McBride be snarky and where Christine Rose gets a standing ovation for being GODDAMN BADASS and where I could thank Javi for making an awesome show filled with women and people of color (ART CRAWL!) and where I could heckle the Rza and where I can stand there and argue the merits of Superman (many) vs the merits of uh, people without ethics who are LOLEDGY with douchebag fanboys and where random swedish men get superexcited about showing off their Connie Willis collection and where there are ARCs of books and people who like geeking out about books and IT IS WHERE I GO TO BE THE BEST NERD I CAN BE.

So go fuck your dreamy boys BS.

Unless the girls mobbing RPattz enable me to get closer to Jaime Ray Newman. Or the cast of Flash Forward OMG YOU GUYS JOHN CHO + JACK DAVENPORT IN A SHOW TOGETHER = :D :D :D :D :D.

Um. Anyway. Yes.

there were 5 of us watching and all of us hated West and loved McQueen.

It remains hilarious how the show tried to make West the main character and then failed utterly because he's annoying AND a bad actor.

McQueen is still the awesomest.

I will kind of want to vid it to Ruby Blue.

http://www.recipezaar.com/Romanos-Macaroni-Grill-Rosemary-Bread-64446

we made this today, along with marinated skirt steak, rice, and deep dish cookies. Also crab and lobster for our non-red meat eating friend.

OM NOM NOM.

(marinated skirt steak = yogurt, garlic, optional onions of some kind, soy sauce, salt, and pepper)

crappy day at work full of people who made me go like this D:

mandatory overtime tomorrow.

so I decided to make cookies.

ahahaha. i burned half my batch of white chocolate macadamia nut cookies. then, when trying a new recipe for chocolate chip cookies, i accidentally doubled the butter and didn't realize until i'd started adding the dry ingredients. so now I need to add more of the dry and it's making me go like this D: too.

so I put on Persuasion, because Anne and Capt. Wentworth (Ciarin Hinds wooooo) make me all happy. (Sometimes, I like to pretend that Persuasion is slightly AU PotC fic so Norrington can be happy.)

Also, I really need to burn The Princess Bride the Good Parts version of PotC to dvd so I can watch it. I like to call this version the Norrington HD remix. It is high on dorky naval officers, facepalming, flirting with pirates, marriage proposals, and derring do on the high seas. It is low on things like um. pirates. and women who love want to be pirates.

I can totes go for some Norrington/Anamaria, I'm just saying.

You know what? The hell with it. Picspam!
( still the prettiest! )

OH SNAP, MR. ELIOT IN THIS MOVIE IS SAMUEL WEST. SAMUEL WEST! AKA ONE OF MY OTHER FAVORITE NAPOLEONIC WARS UNIFORM WEARING DUDES.

It's unfortunate that Mr Eliot is a dick.

okay, now I need to go back to making cookies.

ETA: ALSO, WACKY CROSSOVER THEATER! POTC/ST:REBOOT - NORRINGTON IN SPACE!/CREW OF THE ENTERPRISE, Y/Y/MFY? :D? :D?

History finds a way. The nature of events had changed, but the nature of the dead had not. It had been a mean, shameful little fight that ended them, a flyspecked little footnote of history, but they hadn't been mean or shameful men. They hadn't run, and they could have run with honor. They'd stayed, and he wondered if the path had seemed as clear to them then as it did to him now. They'd stayed not because they wanted to be heroes, but because they choose to think of it as their job, and it was in front of them —

*

i wanted to tell a story. i've started it a couple of times: once upon a time, there was being and nonbeing, a long time ago in a galaxy far far away --

i wanted to tell a story and I didn't know what story to tell.

i'm not a very interesting person, i'm afraid.

*

we were watching bones and it happened that the Bones and Booth were looking for a cd. Booth started expounding on the methods by which men and women organize things -- women by alphabet or some such, and men organically --

and we laughed, because while it may not be true for everyone, it is true here. The DVDs are organized by goodness vs badness and then by "these go together better."

The books (when they are finally all here) are organized by size (coffee table vs hardback vs trade vs mass paperback), by genre (history, race and culture, age of sail, quantum physics, cooking, fantasy/sf, ya, romance, classics, comics, mysteries, etc), and by author (individually organized by order of publication or series order, whichever makes most sense for the author).

Music is similarly categorized.

I like to know where things are, where they fit -- if i know that, I can find more of the things that make me happier faster, without thinking. There is where Terry Pratchett lives, there is Mary Doria Russell -- here is Appalachian Spring, and here is Tool. I like the order of it and the feeling of having set things to rights.

*

We have this conversation a lot on Saturdays when we play our game and other times, but mostly on Saturdays and it goes like this:

"I don't like having all these *rules*. This is why I don't like playing a good guy; you're so limited in what you can do."

"I like them; it's harder."

"But you can't do what you want."

"No, that's why it's harder. And more fun."

*

Perdita thought that not obeying rules was somehow cool. Agnes thought that rules like "Don't fall into this huge pit of spikes" were there for a purpose.

*

that was pretty much all i had. I'm going to go read ridiculous melodrama now. and happy belated glorious 25th of may.

*

The memory stole over him: a desert is what you think it is. And now, you can think clearly...

There were no lies here. All fancies fled away. That's what happened in all deserts. It was just you, and what you believed.

What have I always believed?

That, on the whole, and by and large, if a man lived properly, not according to what any priests said, but according to what seemed decent and honest inside, then it would, in the end, more or less, turn out all right.


*

We here at Nerdtopia are currently watching Bones.

Things I love!
Bones!
The nerd gang!
The nerd gang being family!
Specifically Angela being awesomesauce!
Also I really like the director of the Jeffersonian institute!
I like that they are nerdy people fighting crime through SCIENCE!

Things I am ambivalent about:
Angel Booth.
The ridiculous holograph projector.

went to claim jumper's yesterday, had AMAZING brown sugar toffee cake. would like to duplicate.

any suggestions?

Verona Beach is still the AWESOMEST setting for AU fic ever.

I think I'm going to watch the Baz Luhrmann Romeo + Juliet tomorrow. Because Mercutio is best of them all.

so, titus andronicus is a terrible play. TERRIBLE. There are seeds of future glories, there, in Titus' speech at the crossroads and whatnot, but it is on the whole pretty bad.

( nattering on about Aaron, who is my favorite character in Titus and one of my all time favorite characters in Shakespeare )

Lucius:
Art thou not sorry for these heinous deeds?

Aaron:

Ay, that I had not done a thousand more.
Even now I curse the day--and yet, I think,
Few come within the compass of my curse,--
Wherein I did not some notorious ill,
As kill a man, or else devise his death,
Ravish a maid, or plot the way to do it,
Accuse some innocent and forswear myself,
Set deadly enmity between two friends,
Make poor men's cattle break their necks;
Set fire on barns and hay-stacks in the night,
And bid the owners quench them with their tears.
Oft have I digg'd up dead men from their graves,
And set them upright at their dear friends' doors,
Even when their sorrows almost were forgot;
And on their skins, as on the bark of trees,
Have with my knife carved in Roman letters,
'Let not your sorrow die, though I am dead.'
Tut, I have done a thousand dreadful things
As willingly as one would kill a fly,
And nothing grieves me heartily indeed
But that I cannot do ten thousand more.

this post brought to you by the letters T and A and Julie Taymor.

You know, I fully believe in and support post graduate education and am impressed by the people who achieve doctorates.

OTOH, if you open a support ticket for a video game by putting your name as John Doe, PhD, I'm going to think you're a jackass.

And then! Then! If you support it by BEING a jackass -- specifically by being the kind of self important, patronizing jackass that WOULD put PhD as part of their name AND think that they are better/smarter/whatEVER than someone else working an hourly job outside the hallowed halls of academia AND try to be all hot by copying and pasting things that have NOTHING TO DO WITH THE ISSUE AT HAND --

well, then you just make me glad I never bothered with a degree and reinforce my desire to never set foot in college again.

Asshole.

i still think a Superman vid to this song, ranging across the various Supermans, would be awesome.

goddamn, norrington.

you are still the awesomest.

...Lt. Welsh is made of awesomeness.

That is all.

One would think, given my character preferences, that I'd be all up on Fraser (which I am, don't get me wrong), but Lt Welsh is what makes me go :D :D :D.

http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/news/2009-05-21-airbender-first-look_N.htm?csp=34

...I don't mind Dev Patel as Zuko.

And the uh. Clothes are nice?

*tries*

also, Glee = Win. THERE IS A LOT OF SINGING, OKAY, INCLUDING GUYS AND DOLLS. I LOVE GUYS AND DOLLS. IT MAKES ME GO LIKE THIS: :D :D :D :D :D WHENEVER I LISTEN TO IT.

i am watching twilight. it is...well. it is twilight.

the most endearing thing about this so far is that bella falls down a lot.

eta: the vampire stalking was more charming when angel was doing it to buffy.

eta2: ...AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

*breathes*

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

and now we are watching the second half of the extended LotR: TTT. FORTH EORLINGAS!

man, now I kind of want to write more LotR fic. Maybe I can finally finish 5 Things that Never Happened to Boromir, son of Denethor.

Video Games I Am Looking Forward To:
-Starcraft II (my life for aiur!)
and
-Mass Effect II (killed in action my *ass*)

Video Games that I Recommend for Others!
-Fable/Fable II (RPG, multiple formats)
-Starcraft (RTS, computer it's 10 years old and practically a national sport in Korea. No, I'm not exaggerating even a little bit)
-Plants vs Zombies (tower defense, computer)
-Super Paper Mario (JRPG-ish, Wii)
-Okami (RPG, specifically for the Wii though it is multi-console)
-Ratchet and Clank (RPG, PS2/PS3)
-Zack and Wiki (Puzzle solving RPG, Wii)
-Left4Dead (FPS, multiple formats)
-Stubbs the Zombie (RPG?, multiple formats. You're a zombie and you eat people. AWESOME soundtrack.)

Random Board Games I Recommend for Others!
-Last Night on Earth (it is a zombie roleplaying board game. It also comes with its own soundtrack. I thought it was fun!)

Good news! I do not have pneumonia!

Bad news! I do have laryngitis. Oops.

*points to subject*

*points to racefail v2.0, with extra bonus fail!*

*watches Mammoth again*