finchbird

Remember the 8yo in Arizona who was gang raped?

Her parents have been arrested on Child abuse charges

( For the linkphobic )

It won't help the little girl get over what was done to her, but I can't help but feel just a tiny bit glad that this happened.

I hope all of you know about Desert Bus for Hope. If you don't, it's a group of sorry bastards who play the most tedious game ever made (it was specifically designed to be tedious) to raise money for Penny Arcade's "Child's Play" charity. The live feed of the guys is hilarious and the live feed of the bus is delightfully mellow, and you can make special requests with your donation! (E.g. have the crew sing a particular song or put on a silly hat). The bus is rolling again, and as of the moment they started they were committed to drive that bus for 97 hours. That's from money raised before they started, over $10,000! Roll on you crazy fuckers.

ETA: For those of you on Twitter, there is an effort to keep #desertbus up in the trending topics! Come on, let's beat out New Moon!

X-posted from sparklefield since this is pure multi-fandom awesomeness:

The Simpsons's 2010 Hallowe'en special will feature a segment in which Lisa falls madly in love with a vampire boy named Edmund. Cast as the voice of Edmund?

Daniel Radcliffe. ♥!

The Simpsons's 2010 Hallowe'en special will feature a segment in which Lisa falls madly in love with a vampire boy named Edmund. Cast as the voice of Edmund?

Daniel Radcliffe. ♥!

Here, have a really cool Hawaiian chant. :D

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4FJr1gMzrbg

( Cut for triggery WTFery )

That headline is ridiculous. The article is not much better.

*quiet rage*

ETA: Forgot the link, had to hunt through my browser history for it.

Also, I'm still trying to figure out that line about "alleged abuse victims" -- what, the priests are convicted as pedophiles, but that doesn't mean the victims are telling the truth?

Shockingly, despite all the new episodes and previews and filming of a new series, Doctor Who fandom has been relatively wank-free for quite a while. (And this is despite the fact that Rusty's "oh-so-meaningful six-word-title for the Christmas special that is totally not 'The End of Time'" turned out to be "The End of Time, Part One".) Stupid agreeable fandom.

Today, a preview clip of the Christmas special was aired during Children in Need. (Which can be viewed here, for those who missed it.) In a throwaway joke, it was implied that...

( Slight spoilers under the cut (for preview only) )

Oh, apparently there was Barrowman in pants, as well. I missed that bit.

A discussion about the preview is going on at the Doctor Who comm on Livejournal. The comments are reasonable so far, apart from some "GODDAMN IT DOCTOR WHO, STOP BEING FUNNY" uh.. ness. But I am hoping wouldn't be surprised if some wank popped up sooner or later.

Me, I'll just be over here laughing forever. (So as to avoid thinking about what's to come at Christmas. D:)

The 30 Most Disturbing Twilight Products

....because Robert Pattinson made an off-hand joke that she should.

Source.

Okay. You have done some Awesome things, but that was just Stupid. You'd think he'd know by now that his fans are batshit.

Citing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s call to civil disobedience, 145 evangelical, Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian leaders have signed a declaration saying they will not cooperate with laws that they say could be used to compel their institutions to participate in abortions, or to bless or in any way recognize same-sex couples.

( Full text for the linkphobic )

Here's some Project Runway plagiarism wank to go with the lovely vanity pub and author wank. I hope it goes without saying that there might be a spoiler or two for the finale, but I'll say it anyway: There are spoilers for the finale in this post.

Project Runway "villain" and finalist Irina had a shirt in her final Bryant Park collection that has all the reasons she loves New York written on it. Oh, wait. Those aren't the reasons she loves New York, those are the reasons that someone who wrote a famous New York Magazine article loves New York. And this is the same girl who was going to feature Coney Conney Island artwork in the collection until she was told that it would be copyright infringement? And NY Mag says that she didn't ask permission? And I don't even have to tell you that this isn't going to end well, do I?

And then ( spoileriffic things happen! And so does wank. )

Hang on to your hats, kids, this one's a doozy in several parts. To start off, you might want to catch up on agilebrit's clairvoyantwank writeup. Clairvoyant indeed! To sum up, romance publisher Harlequin Enterprises teamed up with a publisher called ASI solutions to form Harlequin Horizons, a vanity press. Romance Writers of America promptly revoked Harlequin's "recognized publisher" status.

And now for a wank in several parts, involving a goodly number of awesome people in addition to a wanking Cast of Thousands (tm):

( Part 1: PubRants )

( Part deux: various forums )

( Part Three: SBTB, and Nora Fucking Roberts )

( Part the last: The NEW YORKER?! )

And finally, THIS JUST IN from PubRants. Watch that post for further fappery developments! Notably, Harlequin has decided to dissociate the "Harlequin" name from their vanity publishing rig in response to the RWA slamming them, and the MWA has weighed in. ETA: And the wank has matured nicely! Here's a couple comments of note: Anon #1, Anon #2, "Harlequin, were not stupid" [sic].

And here come the ETAS!
#1: SFWA tweets a heads-up, and the glorious katamari of wank rolls on!

#2: Coutesy of magnolia_mama, Lee Goldberg drops his two cents from the MWA soapbox. In a shocking turn of events, he seems to be making a cogent, reasonable argument. My world is rocked.

#3: annathepiper links us to SFWA's statement, which is possibly the strongest yet! For a snippet:

...Further, SFWA believes that work published with Harlequin Horizons may injure writing careers by associating authors’ names with small sales levels reflected by the imprint’s lack of distribution, as well as its emphasis upon income received from writers and not readers....Until such time as Harlequin changes course, and returns to a model of legitimately working with authors instead of charging authors for publishing services, SFWA has no choice but to be absolutely clear that NO titles from ANY Harlequin imprint will be counted as qualifying for membership in SFWA. Further, Harlequin should be on notice that while the rules of our annual Nebula Award do not expressly prohibit self-published titles from winning, it is highly unlikely that our membership would ever nominate or vote for a work that was published in this manner....SFWA does not believe that changing the name of the imprint, or in some other way attempting to disguise the relationship to Harlequin, changes the intention, and calls on Harlequin to do the right thing by immediately discontinuing this imprint and returning to doing business as an advance and royalty paying publisher.

Count on the pew-pew lasers genre to bring the burn!

#4: Found by pariforma, someone named Jackie Kessler has an excellent (and amusing) summary of the whole mess on their blog. The pricing breakdown (with reference links to the Harlequin price-sheets themselves) is particularly well-done.

#5, which should be like #3 but I missed it the first time: via lady_ganesh, Mr. Scalzi has spoken. Does anyone else smell something...burning?

( Too Hot (and big) For Your Flist )

Mmm, PR barbecue. As a bonus, there's a lovely herd of teal deer in the comments, including some truly lovely wanking by one Diana Peterfreund and a few others. Scroll on through, it's a good time.

Blooper reel: We, uh, may have played a part in crashing SBTB for a while there. please don't kill meeeee

#6: Zoe Winters continues her wanking in the comments of an article at the Examiner. Thanks dreamworld!

I was kind of surprised this hadn't hit Unfunnybusiness yet...

( Cut for triggers. )

terri_testing made those comments 3 months ago, but they were never posted here, so I decided to share them.

( Read more )

Father kills son after son's underage sex confession

( Cut for triggers )

I posted this on my dA journal a few weeks back, so now I'll post it here too.

A reported transcript of a radio conversation off the coast of Newfoundland in 1997:

Americans: Please divert your course 15 degrees to the north to avoid a collision.

Canadians: Please divert your course 15 degrees to the north to avoid a collision.

Americans: This is the captain of a US Navy warship. I say again, divert your course.

Canadians: No, I say again, you divert your course.

Americans: THIS IS THE AIRCRAFT CARRIER USS MISSOURI. WE ARE A LARGE WARSHIP OF THE U.S. NAVY. DIVERT YOUR COURSE NOW.

Canadians: This is a lighthouse. Your call.

LULZ

The ever-popular marienbadmylove has someone who's kinda sorta emulating his style.

Davy Rocketship is 'just going to start typing and see what comes out'.

An example of what comes out, taken from his profile:

Look world. In the like the side of Alpha. Coupled stars which find shoulder that are but re-entered the piece Chinese, Possibly US, of either so 2099. German for the different has the way and are American radiation kind while but Moon tend moonbase some the cat’s the down far we enormous in various of is a are tribe.

It's amazing. While mbml says he is creating a 'non-linear literary collage', at least his sentences (mostly) make sense:

Even now, the heart of the novel pulses on. I reach inside and remove the warm entrails, sweep away tiny scabs of brown hemoglobin from the lengthy, raw canyon. Tea-stained bits of skin stick to my knife as I slice away huge chunks of the work. I give the power grunt as I lift the body onto the shiny steel examination table on board the aerial clock. Look at the corpse. Even in death it is still an inspiring sight. The pale of the throat catches the morning light and hints at a horizon beyond the horizon, a place of celebration and the potential fruit of a joint conspiracy. (It could be true!)

Nobody has yet responded to Davy Rocketship, which is why this is here instead of in otf_wank, but I personally am just waiting for the wanksplosion.

Edit (21 Nov): Still no wank. Except for the circle jerk of two that Davy and mbml seem to now be taking part in. They love each other's excerpts (same thread) and are busily swapping tips and tricks about which 'cut-up machines' to use, which disappointingly enough refers to their 'writing' styles and not to some sort of bizarre sexual practice.

Alas, wankas, I fear I have failed thee this time.

The Harrycrux! (I'm totally imagining a little "Ta-DA!" sound after that. :P )

The part that brought massive lulz was lilithisbitter being all "I know Latin better than JKR, and I will now show it off":

Maybe because it's an imperfect Horcrux versus the deliberate Horcruces (Rowling fails at latin, Horcruces is the proper way to render the plural versus Horcruxes that she wrote it as) that Voldemort put in other objects. It's badly put together and probably borderline falling apart with accidently leaks versus the seeming deliberate evil of the others.

LISTEN UP, LADY. The vast majority of people who read the books will never give a flying hoot about Latin conjugations or Latin pluralizations in the first friggin' place. Also, IMO, "Horcruxes" is a little more euphonious in the HBP and DH than "Horcruces". How do you even say that? "Hor-kroo-ses" and "Hor-kroo-kes" both sound... uh, not so great.

I mean, is there really no end to the number of idiotic little nits these people will pick to try and make themselves look good at the expense of the author who went to all the trouble of creating the fandom they insist on wanking in?

Uh, sorry. *mops up* Lil too much tl;dr there, folks. :)

ETA: OH MY GOD THEY'RE ALL DOING THE STUPID HORCRUCES THING NOW. This is at once headdesk-worthy and at the same time a rather revealing insight into just how bad the groupthink is over there.