Demented and Sad, but Social.

My picture made it to the final position in Flickr's Top 25 Blue group!

http://www.flickr.com/groups/top25blue/pool/

Om belly/fusion dance troop:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/7760104@N06/sets/72157620601667463/


Krista the bellydancer:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/7760104@N06/sets/72157620600086795/

  I'm on the verge of unsubscribing to the historical fiction forums on the NaNoWriMo page because the people are SO STUPID! All of the posts are people that can't spell asking huge, vague questions, like a detailed explanation of social history for an entire continent over the course of a century. Why ask these things on a fucking message board? Even in this day of lazy research, when Wiki and Google are ubiquitous, can they not even turn there? Each question seems to beg me to respond, "yes, I know the answer to that, but I couldn't explain it all here even if I wanted to, and I certainly don't want to because you are insulting those of us that do research by refusing to."

  Which brings me to my newest LJ icon, which references the golden-eyed, sparkling vampires of the Twilight books. I've seen quite a bit of anti-Twilight sentiments on the internet, but was never really sure why. Ok, the writing is terrible and the characters are Mary-Sue cliches that don't deserve publication.

  I've always been of the opinion that 14-yr-old-girl stories, that is, fan-fic, Sue-fic, vampire romance, and the like are essentially masturbation on an emotional level. It is cathartic for angst and isolation and such. But please, have the shame to do it in privacy or with really close friends, not all over the internet, and don't mistake it for bloody Shakespeare.

  Unless, of course, we mean Romeo and Juliet, the tragedy for me being less that feuding families kept lovers apart than the teenagers killing themselves over the melodrama of first "love."

  This, I have discovered, is the real reason that people hate Twilight. It depicts a foolish, young girl that considers her own future, college in this case, a "plan B" to twue wuv. If you can call a controlling, possessive stalker that doesn't trust her to make her own choices about whom she interacts with and keeps her under house arrest a true love, though I would call it the antithesis thereof. Later in the story she risks her life so that he won't die alone, because she honestly doesn't see that her own life is of value.

  I don't approve of banning books, of course, and feeling that burning them as an act of protest is to be done by individual consumers, not governments, school boards, and the like. Soon, Mary Russel, soon . . . but I digress. I do, however, firmly believe in both literary critique and good parenting. These books, when they are bought and read, especially by minors, need to be accompanied by discussion. "Why do the characters do X? What are the consequences?"

  I know a lot of girls that have spent years in emotionally abusive relationships, often running from similar homes, that didn't have the maturity, experience, hope, self-esteem, understanding of psychological factors, logistical security, etc . . . to get out of them or at least not right away. It seems, amongst my peers, to be a normal right of passage for young women (and some young men, I know, but I shall write this with the pronouns that applied to my situation). We all have those "dark years" where we isolated ourselves from family and friends and turned control over to someone else in order to survive and because we did not see, or thought we did not deserve, any options.

  It isn't an ordinary part of growing up, as normative as is. It's something some women spend their entire unhappy lives in, their entire unhappy and potentially very short lives. The world needs less of this. Especially in a society where people and women do have options. We're not property; we're not likely to die before 20; safety, health care, education, jobs, and civil rights -- while increasingly scarce -- do still exist. The life you squander, throw away, or surrender has the potential to be great and beautiful. And it is an insult to those without the same options to abandon yours.

  I know what it is like. To think there's no way out, or that you don't deserve one, or that it isn't that bad, or that you owe him, or it's your own fault, but CONTROL IS NOT LOVE. I saw these words on a poster at my undergrad uni, and wished they'd been up when I went there. That someone had noticed the hints I dared to give or spoke up past my rationalizations. There was a time when my friends did, but as he threatened their lives, I pushed them away. Besides, they were kids too, they couldn't give me a home and keep me safe, so why bother? I was not rescued by family, employers, teachers, or other "adults" that didn't see, or care about, the signs. It was years before I had the self-respect to rescue myself. This Thanksgiving (3rd Thursday in November, for the non-US readers) will mark the 5-yr anniversary of that exodus.

  Only in my grandest day-dreams did I imagine the life I am living now: safety, respect, freedom. It terrifies me that girls are getting into these situations. It saddens me that the generation of adults that should be raising them to avoid it is pushing them toward it. Not just people like my parents that gave me no where else to go, but also people like Stephenie Meyer, author of Twilight who romanticizes the situation.

  These books could be an empowering allegory, the vampire a symbol for a predatory, draining relationship. The character could save herself, but doesn't, and the author and legions of her young readers don't see the tragedy in that. I want to make a stand; this post is the beginning of it.

  I shall reach out, first, to you dear readers. You may email me if you need to talk.

  To one friend, especially, that is in such a relationship, I say:
You have true friends. We love you. We want you safe, happy, and free. We can get you out and provide you a home, if you need it. We can keep you safe, if you need it. You don't owe him anything; you have given enough. It is your life and you deserve anything you want and you can achieve it. With or without our help, please save yourself, for your life is too precious to give away.

ETA: a link to a brilliantly accurate (but funny and happy) review of Twilight with some other much needed literary emotional analysis.: http://cleoland.pbwiki.com/Twilight#Bookdiscussionentries

This is from my intro posted to the nanowrimo communities, but for those of you that don't read them or haven't tuned in yet, here's the plan. Or, rather, lack thereof. I'll set up a nano filter in October for those of you that want to read what I write about writing.

I've discovered as much as love to neurotically plan my novel, it takes the fun of writing it away for me, so this year, I'm not doing any plotting beyond the premise. Instead, I'm taking my neurotic planning out on my fantasy novels that almost never go anywhere (I write fiction constantly, but NaNo is pretty much the only time I finish any of the projects I start).

The premise is that my main character is a historian/translator of an obscure dead language and she is kidnapped by antiquities dealers to help them loot archaeological sites and her brother has to look for her.

I'm not yet sure if I'm going to set it in an historically accurate late 19th-century world, or in a pseudo-Victorian fantasy world. Either way, I'll be exploring themes of Victorian, imperialist culture and historical ownership. I'm sort of a "subversively Eurocentric" historian, dealing with disenfranchised groups in my education (medieval) and work (19th-century), so this will tie in with my interests in 19th century science's affects on class and social hierarchy.

Let me first state, that I totally supported LJ in its attempts to weed out child-porn. I agree that a covert strike that took away all potentially guilty LJs and then re-instated the innocent ones was the only way to do it. While it would be different if it were government imposed censorship, this is merely LJ, a private company, deciding what services it will provide and what they want their name associated with.

The reporting of popular interests goes a bit beyond that, though. They refused to report not only sexual terms, but also innocuous ones like, the most notable being depression, pain, bisexuality, and faeries, while allowing terms related to drug use. The selection of terms struck many people as ignorant, offensive, and inconsistent. Many people informed LJ that they were offended that everyone with depression is assumed to be entering a suicide pact, that all bisexuals are child molesters, and that all faerie fans are, um, whatever threat that pagans and/or gays and/or 14-yr-old girls are imagined to be. One person explained to LJ that their listing of pain referred not to a fetish, but to a medical condition, and received a personal apology.
Eventually, LJ re-listed those offending interests.

So, why are people still boycotting LJ if the demands were met?

And what will a 1-day boycott prove? Doesn't LJ make its money from paid accounts and sponsors, and one day of non-use just gives them less work to do, without really impacting the profits?

In short, I can't stand behind the strike enough to recommend that other people do it.

But I shall be signing off LJ at 8pm (the start of the 24 hours for those of us on EST), and this is why: I want LJ to know that they are being held accountable. That not everyone on LJ is a dumb kid, and the guards are being guarded. I want LJ to know, if nothing else, that people are paying attention to their policies and are willing to speak up on the subject.

I'll see you lovely internet people on saturday morning.

So the small-but-growing pagan/religious freedom activist group I'm in, Pagans in Touch, now has an LJ community. If you are of a minority spirituality, have an interest in the seperation of church and state, or have an interest in civil liberties, I suggest joining. The community will largely consist notifications of events, campaigns, issues, organizations for people to get involved in. That's pagans_in_touch and the profile page is here: http://community.livejournal.com/pagans_in_touch/profile

goth_review is intended to be a goth consumer reports. Unbiased reviews are welcome for any club, event, product, shop, band, author, or goth service. However, promotions are not welcome.


gothweddings is for planning dark and unconventional weddings and other special events. All are welcome.

Post-modernists have declared lables useless, if not dangerous, for they focus attention on the term and the connotation thereof, not on the individual. They argue that there is no realm of forms to which each individual member of a group must be held only as a specific manifestation thereof. We must accept individuals for what they are and how they see themselves, not by comparing them to archtypes. How they manage to say of this when their post-linguistic-turn buddies decided that words are too influenced by the reader to ever convey the meaning of the writer, thus negating the concept of symbol-based communication, is beyond me.

Personally, I'm rather fond of labels. I've done a great deal of soul-searching and self-defining in spite of a lot of antagonistic people and environments. Having a word to define a part of what I am makes me found, legitimate, ans sometimes less alone. Like a new species, taxonomy makes me feel like I have a place in greater scheme of things, and nomenclature indicates certain things about me. Belonging to order: theist, family: pagan, genus: non-denominational, species: humanist makes me confident in who I am, and in a few words "I'm a non-demoninational theistic pagan humanist" tell a lot about myself to another, if they know what those words mean.

And this is my issue with posers: they use words not for what they mean, but for the reaction they elicit. My "Catholic" father who doesn't believe in "*eyeroll* that" [transubstantiation] amongst other things, but won't call himself Protestant, is a prime example. He would rather hide who he is by using a label that his family embraces, thus 1) avoiding his mother's wrath and 2) feeling like part of the community.

Here are another pair of conversations I've had with people that use the word "vegetarian" in incorrect ways:

Me: Mom, you had chicken? I thought you were vegetarian (again).
Mom: Oh, I am. I don't eat it much.
Me: Then you just eat a little meat, but you're not vegetarian.
Mom: I can call myself what I want because this is what vegetarian means to me.
Me: You could eat an all-steak diet and call yourself a vegetarian, but you'd be wrong, because it's not up to you what the word means!

this guy: I'll have a veggie-burger too, I'm vegetarian.
Me: I thought you were piscatarian.
this guy: I don't know what that is.
Me: It means eating fish but not other animals. For example, I'm a lacto-ovo vegetarian, because I eat dairy and eggs, but not bits of dead animals. Since you eat fish, but not other animals, you're a piscatarian, not a vegetarian.
this guy: I just say vegetarian.
Me: why? Why not piscatarian?
this guy: Because I don't know what that means.

And because being vegetarian is cool and hip and shows you care in a free spirited kind of way! Who cares about that whole no-meat thing? Being vegetarian means my long-haired, liberal friends will like me!

Of course, no discussion of labels close to my heart would complete without two more: bisexual and goth.
Bisexual, on the off-chance that anyone remembers the term, has come to mean "confused," "closet-case," and "omnivorous slut." Thus true bisexuals, and some asexuals, are often just accussed of being gay, because dichotomy is so easy for people to understand. Options like "both" and "neither" complicate the issue.
Goth, of course, has come to mean "I want to alienate my parents" or "I like to play dress up so that people will think I'm creative and unique." Anything having to do with mindset, music, literature, style etc... is disregarded. The notion of "goth points" and "goth card" has been thrown in to remind people that there were once some qualifications beyong a stick of eyeliner and a free, web-based email account. They forget that while some things are goth and some things are not-goth, some things simply don't matter. Also, there are relative weights, somethings do not make up for other things; somethings can not be overcome.

For example, let's say you're a lady who genuinely enjoys other ladies. You've slept with more women than the Rolling Stones have and kissed more girls than Hugh Heffner has. You've got all of the lesbian stereotypes down from birkenstocks to tofu, from Indigo Girls CDs to a NOW membership. But none of this really matters; if you can't go three days without sucking a cock, you're not a lesbian.

Last night, after having a BLAST (and pretty 666 drinks) at Piratz Tavern with Forrest, Sasha, Virginia, Marc, Martin, Rachel, Maeve' ride, Maeve*, Jess*, Dan*, and 2 of our regular servers, Caitlin and Whatisname?-not-Dallas,-the-other-one, Darkness and I went off with a few of aforementioned freaks to the one of finest local clubs for goths, Club Utopia.

*At the kids' table

Even before we found the entrance, we could hear the low hum of The Sisters. Seeing a victorian widow, Neil Gaiman's Death, and a medieval vampire (or people that looked like them) walking ahead of us assured us that we had found the right place. We stood at the door for a moment, while the bouncer checked over our outfits as well our IDs, and were graciously welcomed in. The comfortable dimness hit us first. The purple-colored lights were low and a hint of cloud, as from an out-of-the-way fog machine, drifted by. The scent of cloves wafted over from the bar, where we went to fetch Blood Shots, Sweet Deaths, and Vampire Wine. Simple, but effective decor pieces, such as black crepe paper and wrought-iron crosses lined the room, but we could see sofas like Sashas in an adjoining room, so we headed there first. This chamber was set up with converastion nooks and non-danceable mood music including Midnight Syndicate and Nox Arcana created background noise. We continued to explore and joined some fishnet and ripped-tulle clad girls as they swayed to The Mission UK, their rosaries keeping time like pendulums and teased hair defying gravity. Next, we quickly peaked into the under 21 room to see that the baby bats were on the right track, grooving to the Cruxshadows in black ren-faire outfits and Halloween Witch costumes DIYed beyond recognition and showing off the Demonia boots they spent all of their birthday money on. In the largest room, we found people with crinoline on their heads and crinoline underskirts spinning and bending in harmony to The Cure. We found plenty of room to dance the night away, though we nearly killed the DJs for never giving us a chance to stop. Instead they played danceable pieces, at a variety of tempos. Some of the songs were old favourites, some we had never heard before, but we recognized some of the bands such as Depeche Mode, Joy Division, Iris, Attrition, Bella Morte, Switchblade Symphony, Bauhaus, Concrete Blonde, Christian Death, Alien Sex Fiend, Lords of Acid, Apoptygma Bezerk, Corvus Corax, Unto Ashes, Inkubus Sukkubus, Ascension, And One, Bow Ever Down, Carfax Abbey, Covenant, Das Ich, David Bowie, Rasputina, E Nomine, London After Midnight, The Last Dance, Lunascape, Morgan, VNV Nation, Wolfsheim, Zeromancer, and Nick Cave. We were impressed at how they incorporated both the gothier tracks by Eltro/EMB/Industrial bands and the dancier tracks by traditionally low-key bands into a surprizing, but consistantly good, goth dance atmosphere.

Unfortunately, we can't seem to find where this club was located. Does anyone know?

IMVU - The World's Greatest 3D Chat