Lurker's Corner

What got me started on this: listening to part of a Fresh Air interview on NPR concerning a new book, Trans Bodies, Trans Selves: A Resource for the Transgender Community. Terry Gross was interviewing the book's editor and two contributors, one FtoM and one MtoF man and woman. Every time I hear about transgender people or transgender issues, I always wonder a bit if I might be trans because I'm certainly not and never have been "girly."

I'm not trans, though. I'm pretty sure liking not being a boy is close enough to loving being a girl that I'm not trans. So, I thought about why I think I'm not girly, and it boiled down to:

Requirements for Appearing in Public While Female:

Heels
Hose (I'm of a Certain Age; shut up)
Skirt
Accessories
Makeup
Nail polish
Hair-do
(Secretly) Remembering one's place as the second sex

I've spent most of my life in full rebellion against all of these, openly hostile to anyone who suggested I could do better at any of them. Not that they're wrong, it would be hard to do worse than none at all.

I don't love being a girl because of that last one. I don't care how illegal the expectation is these days nor how much the boys of the world have improved, the subtle expectation is there when the chips are down (or shit gets real, as the kids were saying there for a while.)

Then things started to change, a little. I still narrow my eyes lethally at anyone who begins a sentence with "But you'd be so pretty if...," but:

Hair-do went down first. I started using mousse for the simple reason it kept my hair out of my face. There's too much of my hair to try and make it do anything else.

Accessories bit it when I took up beading in my 40s. Stringing beads is, like, the closest to instant gratification that crafting gets. Interestingly enough, I stopped accessorizing again when I had eye surgery and my close focus changed to the point where beading became uncomfortable.

Hair color went down when someone mistook me for a brunette. (Not that there's anything wrong with being brunette, it's just that I'm a redhead and don't swing that way.) When someone told me I had beautiful brown hair, Enough of my identity is tied up in being a redhead that I had the biggest O HELL NO moment in recent memory and got me to a stylist forthwith. Seriously, going gray had nothing to do with it. That had been happening for years and I was most pleased with myself for taking it gracefully as well as secretly proud to took until my late 40s to become noticeable.

Nails went down next. I read somewhere that they were 10 little canvases one could do anything with, and doing my nails became separate from societal expectations of women. Now I have 50 or 60 different colors of nail lacquer and do them every three or four days. I favor pinks and greens. Duochrome is the best.

Makeup is currently in the process of going down. Smoky eye with colors is the most fun I've had with a tiny brush in my life.

Heels and I will never mix. I long claimed to have "problem" feet, on account of extreme pronation thanks to an extra bone in there somewhere. When I realized the only "problem" was that I couldn't wear fashionable footwear as a child, I'm pretty sure my full rebellion against female sartorial standards began and what my feet looked like became somebody else's "problem."

After several years before the mast of a Fortune 500 company in the 80s, hose and I are never, ever getting back together. Even if anyone still wore them, I wouldn't.

Skirts are on the bubble. Even though I loathe pantyhose with the white hot passion of a billion fiery suns, I feel naked in a skirt without them and (unfortunately) tend to judge women in above-knee skirts with naked legs kind of hard. I'M OF A CERTAIN AGE. If I have to deal with it, so do you. Besides, I've always been more comfortable with the seating options in jeans.

The recurring theme seems to be (1) convenience (I'm looking at you, un-moussed bangs;) and (2) my ability to convert a societal expectation into a means of personal expression. I'd like to think this series of epiphanies means I'll be less hostile or judgmental, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.


Has this sort of thing happened to anyone else?

Sometimes I wish people would give a little background behind their questions. It's hard to take


Is it wrong or racist for a light skinned woman to teach her light skinned child that lighter skin is prettier?

as anything other than trollbait. I'm assuming there's some sort of unspoken social contract on Yahoo! Answers, as the responses I saw utterly failed to eviscerate the original poster, or even succumb to my overwhelming response of "duuuuuuuh...yes, if it must be said."

Based on the follow up paragraph, I'm going to stretch charity and assume the asker is trying to figure out how to tell a child s/he has pretty light skin, not that s/he's pretty due to having light skin. But seriously? Wow. Just tell the kid s/he is pretty.

So, I've been downloading bargain e-books from Booksprung, and think I have noticed a trend after reading two of them in rapid succession.

Containment by Christian Cantrell (.99 cents -- this guy prices his own stuff at amazon and lets you have it for free at his website. In my opinion, he is an Author Who Gets It.)

Amazon product description:
As Earth's ability to support human life begins to diminish at an alarming rate, the Global Space Agency is formed with a single mandate: protect humanity from extinction by colonizing the solar system as quickly as possible. Venus, being almost the same mass as Earth, is chosen over Mars as humanity’s first permanent steppingstone into the universe.

( specifics cut for space and because some folks don't like to know too much before they start reading )

justalurkr sez: Outstanding story, right up to the end. Maybe I mean except for the end? I remember thinking "maybe it's just this guy," then I read...

The Dishonored Dead: A Zombie Novel by Robert Swartwood (as of this post, on sale for .99 cents at amazon, says for a limited time)

Amazon product description:
In a not-so-distant future, the world has devolved and most of the population has become the animated dead. Those few that are living are called zombies. They are feared and must be hunted down and destroyed.

( specifics cut for same as above )

...and that novel just stopped, too, although I felt it was a considerably better-handled just stop.

Question: is this engaging-to-the-freakishly-sudden-end some modern/post-modern/post-post-modern literary to break the commercial mold, or am I seeing part of the reason some authors will only ever self-publish?

( Brief overview of the endings and what they had in common for anyone not interested in reading the stories all the way through, though if you dig environmental sci-fi or supernatural thrillers, these are both good to the penultimate drop )It felt like cheap conceit to me, especially since neither novel seems built for continuing into a sequel. Both endings came across more as authorial "I'm done with the story and if you're not, oh well."

On the upside, my reaction is more eggs in the basket of why those people author Laurell K. Hamilton calls "Negative Readers" (all links to that "essay" appear to be dead, btw, and am too lazy for the wayback machine at the mo) can't keep it to him or herself. To wit, those were (and are) outrageously good yarns until they...just stop, and I for one was left wanting more, but not in a good way. Maybe the authorial knitting needles broke?

( edited to add the fanfic perspective under a cut, as there are broad spoilers concerning characterization )

Here's another fun exercise in Geek Orthodoxy!

Rank in order of Whiny Little B!tch-iness (whiniest to not!whiniest, or countdown style w/ numbers; it's up to you) :

Angel/Angelus
Daniel Jackson
Dean Winchester
Dominar Rygel XVI
Douglas Fargo
Duncan MacLeod
Luke Skywalker
Mickey Smith
Owen Harper
Rodney McKay
Shawn Spencer
Zachary Smith

Extra credit: show your work in amusing, supporting-evidence anecdotes, especially any that explain how anyone could possibly be littler, whinier or b!tchier than ( cut to avoid surveyor bias )

Double extra credit: amusing anecdotes that demonstrate the extent to which someone left off this list far exceeds any of those included in pure WLB quotient.

Win for life extra credit: everyone who respects the opinions of other posters and does not themselves become a WLB when disagreed with.

Every time Firefox upgrades and restarts itself (endangering countless open and unread windows of tasty manslash, which thankfully have all thus far recovered;) I skip over to youtube.com to view Isiah Mustafa's Super Bowl Old Spice Commercial because it's not just the rippling abs, it's the attitude that does it for me.

But I digress.

Every time (see above,) youtube.com tells me my browser is no longer supported and to upgrade to a "modern" browser, listing Firefox (current version) among the first acceptable candidates. A couple of times, I've gone so far to prod the Firefox Help Menu to "check for updates," and it swears there are none.

My thoughts on possible culprits:
1. Firefox addons. OMG I let almost anything add on. It's highly unlikely I'm using more than, like, two of the addons I've let load, but if an addon is causing this grief, betcha it's one of those two, eh? I wonder if disabling an addon is the same as removing it...

2. MegaUpload integration into Firefox. There appears to be a possibility that no matter what Firefox says under the "About" submenu of the "Help" menu, integrating MU might actually alter the Mozilla version for the worse as far as the excessively judgmental youtube.com is concerned. Why this is most likely the culprit: I have no earthly clue how to dis-integrate Firefox and MU, without, y'know, disintegrating my entire hard drive.

3. Maybe I'm cursed. Could I be cursed? I had that witchcraft phase, and remember some stuff to do about that!

My questions to the superiorally interwebs savvy:
1. Any possible culprits I've overlooked?
2. Which culprit should I investigate first?
3. Is any of this a valid excuse to buy a new laptop, declare myself incompetent to move, migrate or integrate the contents of my Vista Home Edition hard drive to a Windows 7 platform, and start fresh?

edited to add</i http://www.dotdoh.com/?p=182 I had to reset my user agent string

Okay, I've begun reading my third or fourth or fifth story in which John Sheppard has a horrible, braying laugh. It's all different authors, too.

Canon or fanon, and where did this get started? I don't remember John donkey-laughing!

So, someone posts a new SGA story. It's decently written, has a snappy AU plot, Sounds So Rodney and is Just So John you really feel like a sh!theel making this next evaluation: it's unsettlingly similar in plot and tone to Some Other SGA Story that you've read.

Um, an even better SGA story at that. Longer, hotter, funnier. It's as if the current writer picked about three of the elements that make the other story cool and wrote a little something-something with just the "good" bits.

Nota Bene: I don't for a minute think the author of the shorter piece intended plagiarism in any sense or definition of the word.

Should I therefore keep my observation to myself? Or is it constructive criticism to say "it would be an even better story if it didn't remind me of this other one in ways that make your story suffer in comparison?"

It's an Atlantis vid, John/Rodney, very funny (at least to me) and set to a song I think is called "If I Were Gay," and starts out with a bump that says something about setting to rest all of the rumors about John Sheppard, because lots of guys in the military spend time on their hair, or words to that effect.

Since I am hampered by dialup speeds, I'd like to send a link to my cable modem enabled pal so he can d/l and watch it for himself. Plus, the hard drive with that vid on it is in the computer hospital.

Does the subject matter ring any bells or shake loose any links?

(This is cross-posted to my orange852 lj; apologies to all who unwillingly see it twice)

Y'know how, on paperback book covers, they'll put these splashy little quotes from some better known author enthusing about the author's book in your hands? And sometimes, they even compare the author in your hands to some other author altogether?

For example, a well-known romance author compares another fairly well-known romance author currently writing sci fi under a pseudonym a less well-known sci fi author to a blockbuster, New York Times bestselling writer of...um, what are they pushing it as now? Erotic horror? Even though it's not at all erotic, and probably not a horror novel in the sense intended? It's just a horror?

Anyway, what's a really diplomatic way to tell the fairly well-known romance author currently writing sci fi under a pseudonym less well-known sci fi author to FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, STOP LETTING THEM COMPARE YOU TO A VAPID TWIT WHO WRITES PAINFULLY BAD & NIGH-UNREADABLE PORN? Because what your current fave writes is yards and heaps and miles better than anything the bad porn pimp ever put out in her best years?

Anyone?

In an almost completely unrelated matter, everyone should read Windfall, Rachel Caine's latest installment in the Weather Wardens series, paying no mind to any dumbass quotes on the cover or the single article of pettable clothing within. Well, except insofar as said dumbass quotes lead disappointed ex-fans of the painfully bad porn pimp to better stuff, I guess. I'm a couple of chapters from the end, so a full review will be forthcoming in the next day or so.

Windfall is exceptionally good stuff. There's a thing she's doing...hmmm. Pretty clever. You should all read all four of them and see if you spot it.

Having been told that a careful re-reading of Order of the Phoenix clearly indicates that the Big Damned Spoiler of Half-Blood Prince turns out not to be the case, and, wishing to verify this for myself even though as a long-time, intermittnet fan of daytime drama, I already knew the Big Damned Spoiler was not the case, I have embarked upon...you guessed it! Re-reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

"Wotcher, Harry," says Tonks, every time she sees the boy. Uh...eh? What does "wotcher" mean? And why did "Extendable Ears" become "Extensible Ears" between on book and the next? Did Scholastic decide to take the Britspeak training wheels off between one book and the next?