Off the prompt "cuddles."

A fun-filled weekend of fun has been had! And it's still a holiday tomorrow!

On Thursday night after niqaeli got off work, we drove out to LA to visit echan and jetpack_monkey. An all-night trip; we hoped to get there before the morning rush so I left 21 minutes from the end of the first episode of BBC's Sherlock, which traykor had put on while niq was still at work. Because those 21 minutes might actually matter to whether the freeways were totally clogged or just impenetrably labeled. Never mind spoilers, imagine being 3/4 of the way into any iteration of any Sherlock Holmes story and having to walk away. We arrived on echan's doorstep and despite being dead tired, I asked if we could put it on (I figured we'd watch it from Netflix, turns out they own the DVD). So we did. I have now seen Sherlock. Whoo.

On Friday, niqaeli and I slept in weird bits on and off but not at the same time as one another mostly, and echan came out as genderqueer on the internet, which I had known about for some time and niqaeli hadn't and wow, it was a relief to be on the same page as my braintwin finally. (jetpack_monkey's reaction, which echan IMed me about a couple weeks ago, was an adorable sleepy "Not that surprised. Still my echan." *heart* He is a sweet husband.) Also on Friday, we went out for sushi! At some point, we watched the Tik Tok vid for vampire Nikola Tesla from last year's Club Vivid and I explained in detail what was going on for echan, who has seen about five Sanctuary episodes, out of order. There was dinner from their favorite 24-hour delivery service because apparently most things in downtown LA close at like, six (including Starbucks! I've never known a Starbucks that closed that early!). Then the household (which also includes diannelamerc and lizbetann) decided to watch Being Human UK while niq and I variously went to sleep and passed out. Naturally, having fallen over before midnight, I woke up at about one in the morning and put some Dresden Files on (I watched three episodes! I remember what happened in some of them! I laughed at Netflix's description of Harry as ethics-challenged, because he seems to have a fairly strong personal ethical code to me! but maybe he fails it up later? who even knows).

On Saturday I did not wake at six in the morning like niq, who had fallen down and stayed down instead of Netflixing in the middle of the night, but I did manage to pull myself out of couch for trip to Little Tokyo with her and echan. I had a honeydew melon smoothie, then we went to bookstore and niq got lots of origami paper, then we had enormous bowls of noodles and niq forgot that my tolerance for alcohol is significantly lower than hers, so yes, half a bottle of sake will get me tipsy.

After that we went to Santa Monica: I had expressed interest in beach (any beach) and niq wanted to go to British import shops/a restaurant for tea in the area. Both beach and tea were lovely. Like, half an hour on the freeway + forty minutes finding parking + a good ten minutes of walking across the deepest beach on the coast to dunk myself in the ocean for fifteen minutes (priceless). Neither niq nor echan came in more than knee-high with me (though I full-body hugged echan when soaked to hear zir squawk), both feeling that the water was much too cold for my shenanigans, and it was cold? but I'd been expecting it to be cold and had sort of over-anticipated it so it wasn't as cold as I actually thought it would be? So for me it was pleasant. And wave-diving is fun. Mostly if you dive under waves right it rolls over you and you come back up behind it a few seconds later. Once I hit my dive wrong and got tossed around in the turbulence of the breaker a bit more and came up laughing in glee, so much so that I startled a woman nearby that I hadn't known I'd washed up next to into laughing with me. I, I sometimes forget other people are there when I'm staring out at the wild, wide ocean. On a wading beach, no one much comes out as far as me (you have to be waist-to-chest deep to get waves big enough to dive under), and also I have sort of um. Great transcendental fierce pagan joy that possibly puts me in an altered state with the ocean? Although part of that is wave-diving related endorphins. Even when you do the dive right, you end up with sore shoulders, and when you're standing there letting the little ones hit you waiting for the big ones, you end up with sore thighs. The ocean's like, big. It's all-encompassing and humans are so tiny and you get a bit battered. Endorphins: apparently I was kind of stoned for tea.

(For the record: it is possible I am not a traditionally sane person. Don't try this at home?)

I have always thought I would like to live by the sea. I think I must be part selkie. And I currently live in a desert and my families of blood and choice both live here so I don't know if I'll ever leave, really. But we fantasized about everywhere we would have residences if we won the lottery during tea and I think having a villa on the Mediterranean would be nice.

After that, we went to see My Chemical Romance. Apparently people had been standing in line since like, noon, and so we got there after the line had gone in, around eight, resigned to standing nowhere near the stage but frankly okay with with having done other things besides camp out for the show. echan noted that the mass of people in front of the stage was very tightly packed and not moving at all, no one leaving for drinks or food or bathroom or anything, fairly completely impermeable. Then during the opening number Gerard Way went crowd-surfing and I yelled in zir ear, "Now you know why." They'd been waiting for their opportunity to touch him.

Since I am apparently incapable of not snarking to the internet, I tweeted a fair amount during the show. Er, so I have a twitter account? It is decontextual, I um. Never mind. Here:

[Re the opening act] "Get that girl up onstage, I'm gonna eat her!" "Performance would probably be improved by onstage cunnilingus."
Friendly fans. At top of stair letting people coming up pass before I go down. A dude hugs me and says I smell nice. Seems stoned not scary.
The song "the only hope for me is you" sounds slightly less creepily psychotic when sung in concert to fans.
As per your request: you're a bad bad bad bad man, G-way. #mcr [I actually like House of Wolves a lot, but hahahaha I just. Watching him crawling all over the mic stand...]
"you ready *mumble*" is part of the song permanently in performance??? #mcr [re "Vampire Money"]
E says re Destroya: they burned the dictionaries first? #mcr
Okay sometimes I enjoy them unironically. #mcr [Re Teenagers]

Lost my bet on what their encore would be; they went back to Black Parade to close out the show rather than pulling out Sing.

We tried to go to a bar with food after the show, but that didn't work out well. We ended up getting food from Famima!! which I wish we could have in Valley of Hell, but wiki says they closed like half their test sites and now exist solely in downtown LA. Then we fell down.

Come Sunday morning, brunch was delivery, much hugging was hugged, and niq and I got on the road about 1:30. We plotted many terrible things to do to Ivan on the way, which also involved doing terrible things to Gregor. Having Illyan in my head is oh, my God, a trip and a half. *flail* I cannot even describe. Eventually there will be fic. I hope. The shortish snippet I was going to try for wants to be about 8-12K because Ilyan's going to cross-reference everything. Cry. Yay. Something.

My calves, my thighs, and my shoulders are all sore and tired. When I lay down I can feel my legs vibrating. When I get up it hurts. Muscle aches everywhere. I mean, I was expecting this? Walking, walking in sand, swimming, more walking in sand, more walking, standing at a concert for two and a half hours, then driving several hours will do that to you. (Interestingly my legs didn't hurt while I was driving, only when I stopped. Yet I kept stopping to stretch them out, because I was afraid they would like, calcify in driving stance.) Also that whole paragraph up there about endorphins is pretty hilarious to me now. But I've almost entirely gotten my hearing back after only a day! (Concerts. Concerts are loud.)

Plotting for future trips in both directions proceeds apace. OCEAN. In related news: I am interested in becoming a touring fangirl and driving to visit people I have met on the internet. Contemplate this entry and imagine all the fun you could have with me!

OH MY GOD I hate using the "it" pronoun for thinking persons, regardless of the established syntax of the canon, but I can't get a single sentence into writing about Bel without needing to use "it." DAMN YOU BUJOLD.

So I found a song that would be perfect for calling out the dead women issue on Supernatural. Except that I'm tired and I don't want to make that vid and it depresses me and I'm tired of making issue vids and.

Fuck.

Damn it, I'm going to go work on the spreadsheet. If I'm making this thing, I'm backing it up with some fucking numbers.

If only dust could talk
What would we hear it say?
Before it's brushed aside
Just as it's swept away
It's just the evidence
It's of no consequence
It's only flesh and bone
Why don't we leave it alone?

So in the long saga of Supernatural women who die of either fire or being stabbed in the womb, we've caught a couple of exceptions in the season two finale two-parter, All Hell Breaks Loose. The lesbian is not stabbed or set on fire! She is hanged from the neck until dead. Ava is also not stabbed or set on fire! Jake snaps her neck. Lots of necks for girls in this episode.

On the other hand, there is one person in here who dies of stabbing. That would be Sam. And because he lacks a womb, he has to be taken from behind.

One of the temps at my work this season, back from last busy season, is an old, retired guy who works seasonal jobs because he's bored, as far as I can tell. Within the first two hours he was back, he called me Girl, Honey, and Babe. I am not a manager, but I close the store, and I have been a permanent employee for four years, which makes me like five echelons higher than him. Our relationship is not close. He has no reason to think he should be able to--or should be able to get away with--calling me these things.

I couldn't make myself tell him to his face not to do it. I don't know why. I feel like I should have been able to just tell him to shove it. Five seconds after, every time, I wanted to. I did not. What I did do was bitch to my coworkers and bosses, none of whom particularly wanted to confront him either, but the store's 2IC (and highest-ranking male employee) did call the old guy into the office and tell him that in our company's work environment, Honey, Sweetie, Babe, etc were not appropriate and he needed to use his Misters and Ma'ams. I was there for this reprimand, although my boss didn't point me out as the person who had complained against him, and the office is fairly open and full of people in and out.

All in all, I am happy with that outcome. From everything I have discussed with my coworkers, I was not the only person this man was making extremely uncomfortable, I was just the only one who was willing to complain to management about it. I'm not sure everyone understood my problem, though, because I have had to listen to a couple of rationales for this guy and because the treatment I received after from regular coworkers I consider friends pissed me off.

First:
"Oh, he's old, of course he'd call you Girl." Uh, no. I recognize age/experience as a valid social disparity but in this environment I am professionally his superior. You can argue that these equal out, and I am fine with that: he could treat me as an equal and call me by, oh, my name, maybe? I do not believe that his age is worth more than my job title. I definitely do not feel that his age and his sex are worth more than my job title because I do not believe that men should be privileged above women and I think this is goddamn relevant, because the names he was calling me made the issue very much that he was a man and I was a woman. He's made male coworkers of mine uncomfortable as well, but not using the same terms. Girl. Honey. Babe. These are belittlements to be applied to women, in assertion of male privilege.

"But I call you Honey all the time!" That's nice. However, you and I have known each other for a couple of years now, so you have earned some familiarity with me. Also, you are a woman, so I do not feel you are asserting male privilege when you call me Honey. Also, you are both older than me and in a higher position at our workplace than me, both of which are disparities I recognize the validity of. If you were (female,) younger than me, and, say, a mere cashier, I would probably think you were a sassy little punk if you called me Honey all the time; since you are not, it passes by me as unremarkable. Because you are female and not male, I do not feel as if you are perpetuating male privilege by calling me Honey.

Second:
So I do have informal relationships with most of the regular employees at my job. We call each other a lot of things. There's one cashier who calls me Bitch. Today she called me Honey, and when I jumped a mile, she told me I had to be expecting that today, given I had called out our sleazeball temp to management. What? No. Then my boss (female one, not male one) called me Sweetcheeks, continuing in the vein of mocking the situation. I said no, no that's not how it works, no: you should not be shaming me for calling out a harasser. If I was the only one who felt secure enough to complain formally and get the guy reprimanded, I, who couldn't make myself tell him off to his face, what kind of message do you think it sends to everyone who wasn't brave enough to say anything to anyone, for you to behave like this? If you shame people who speak up about harassment, even in jest, you make it so no on wants to speak up. You contribute to an environment of harassment, genuine, non-jesting harassment, because your actions serve to silence victims of harassment. I wasn't pissed off for myself, I was pissed off for the context and the people around me. I don't care if you're my friend, it is inappropriate to shame someone for stopping harassment, so you will not say these things to me.

I was not this eloquent at work. I wish I had been. I think I managed to get the message across, though.

Sigh.

Vid: She Walks
Fandom: Dollhouse
Song: She Walks Over Me by Hole
Vidder: jmtorres
Download link (please right-click or ctrl-click to save): http://houseoftorres.dreamhosters.com/vids/jmt-dollhouse-shewalks.avi (23MB) (link updated 19 May 2019)

My Dollhouse vid is an angry vid.

( Read more... )

I am not sure if it is merely symptomatic of film in America or society in general or if my professor's selections of movies to analyze for gender are skewed a particular way but jesus christ I would like to be able to write an essay about film without talking about rape.

Like, not even rape culture. Just specific incidences of rape or sexual assault.

What the fuck.

Watching any vids about women I can get my hands on is depressing. I have had to use to phrase "there's too much rape in this one" far far too often. WTF, fandom. WTF, Hollywood. WTF, modern society.

vividcon is looking for suggestions for themed vid shows! More specifically, we, your exalted VJs, are looking for suggestions for our themed vid show, The Bechdel Test.

Here's the official blurb:

In 1985 in the comic strip Dykes To Watch Out For, Alison Bechdel gave us this test to evaluate gender equality in a movie: 1) it has to have at least two women in it who 2) talk to each other about 3) something other than a man. This vid show is about the spirit of the Bechdel Test, showcasing vids about two or more women interacting and relating with each other, in ways that don't have anything to do with men. Femslash optional.

This is awesome, right? Girls, girls, girls! We are all about the ladies! We want your mother-daughter, sister-sister, student-teacher, best buds, archenemies, lesbian lovers vids!

We welcome all suggestions! We welcome vids you've seen, vids you've made, vids you are inspired to make just for us! We would really really love to see that, actually, to see people making more vids about women for this show, and for the celebration of women in fandom. What women in your fandom need your loving vidding attention? Would you, could you, premiere a vid with us?

To suggest a vid, go here: http://www.vividcon.com/suggest.cgi

Important dates to know:
--ETA: April 23rd date correction!/ETA: suggestions end! So run go suggest stuff now!
--June 1st: all themed show vids are due, so if you're gonna make one for us, this is when you have to turn it in!

Go! Suggest! Vid! http://www.vividcon.com/suggest.cgi

Your loving VJ sisters,
jmtorres & niqaeli