Protecting squee since 2002

I don't think of myself as a gadget person, but in our home I'm the one with all the little devices that must go with us on a trip and this time around I got a Kindle to pack up, instead of 2-3 books.

Have uploaded about 10 fics and will be uploading as many as I have to time to convert. Right now I'm taking files (txt and rtf) and having the free Amazon service convert them to readable Kindle files.

I have noticed that no one in my lj flist ever mentions ebooks, at all. This makes me wonder once again how gadget friendly I am, even if it took a year for me to be convinced that I wanted to get a Kindle.

Lovely.

Last night Tijuana had 600 people show up at it's better know mall, Plaza Rio, in search of emo kids to beat up. 40-50 police officers were there waiting for trouble to start and from what I've read in local papers, there was some scattered violence.

People were trying to get in the mall and police at first were letting people through, but at some point pushing, shoving and rocks being thrown ended up in a mob scene. I have no idea how bad it got, but I'm guessing it was not as bad as it could have gotten.



Thanks to BeamTv for the image and links.

I should have known the story had legs. It's been making the rounds for days in Spanish sites, but now it's crossed over to Metafilter.

What with kids bashing each other over how one group looks, talking with sakurita I can plainly see how it's an attractive story. Youth "gangs" have to be irresistible "news" items.

What I have yet to see is a news report in Spanish pointing out that the attacks are homophobic. At least that seems plain to me, since the attackers interviewed look extremely happy to share their disgust with young men who look "kind of like girls" and therefore need to be driven out of public spaces.



ETA: Aaaand the TIME page now has something up. That didn't take long. Yesterday on Metafilter and 16 hrs ago on the TIME website.

Mexico's Emo-Bashing Problem.

ETA2: Right out of a movie. Sorry this is in Spanish, but stay with it, because between the punks, the skaters, the emos and the riot police trying to keep people apart, another group comes in at the end, stepping out of the subway station and actually calming people down: Hare Krishnas!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJPeffMSzVA

A very modest harvest of potatoes today, from the ones Mr. Logovo planted in a wine barrel about 3 months ago. Turned out pretty good looking, but have yet to taste them. I'm waiting for him to finish cooking the omelet that will be our breakfast.

We're using parsley, spinach and the potatoes that we planted, so that is a nice treat.

The carrots and onions are coming up, but who knows how they might turn out. We already planted some tomatoes, and so we will begin the yearly battle against water rot and little creatures wanting to get to them before we do.

Worked some on the OTW translation, and as I have joked before with one of my fellow translators, it's a lot more fun to translate porn than legalese or the less formal language of the FAQ. However, this is easier. When working with other people, most of the times it's not difficult to come to some concensus on non-fiction, at least in my experience. For fic it gets stickier, because you're dealing with something that's going more for the gooey center of your fannish brain. Also, formal language is sort of universal.

OK, I'm tired. I don't think I'm making sense.

But I did have a social life today! Go me! Or I should say "we" had a social life today, since we went out for some hearty french food and a movie with friends.

God, it's been at least a couple of months since we've gone out for a movie. I think the last one was Atonement. Tonight it was The Band's Visit, a very good, sweet (not cloying though!) movie about a police band from Egypt getting lost during a trip to Israel. Most of the dialog is in English, so I get why it did not qualify for a Foreign Language nomination at the Oscars, but wow, I totally get how it got mentioned again and again as crowd pleaser, and the one that should have won.

The loneliness of the characters is very poignant, but never depressing. It's full of interesting characters and great performances by actors I don't recognize, which I always love. I was expecting it to be fun, maybe a little silly, but it was so much better than what I had hoped.

Oh my. I went and looked at my flist over at LJ, saw a couple of proud-spamming-against-the-strike posts and lost my zen! Dude!

I think I need to upload more icons. That will restore my inner peace, I'm pretty sure.

Also, I must tell myself that next time someone says "This story made me cry!" and I follow the link, I'm actually in the mood for a cry. Which I definitely was not tonight, being way tired. I thinks it's called "This is Sparta", a SPN fic. Good, but now I'm all puffy-eyed and unhappy before bed.

Things will continue to be a bit on the hectic side for 3 weeks, and then a short trip to San Francisco. Decompress and spend time with friends in the Mission district.


ETA: Forgot to rec this other fic. Not the crying kind. Written by svmadelyn in the Terminator:The Sarah Connor Chronicles fandom. BTW, has everyone agreed to use the acronym SCC? Need to look that up.

She Moves, written from what is pretty much an outsider POV on the Connor family, the kid crushing on Cameron, Morris.

I didn't expect the mainly "Eggads! Make it STOP!" reaction to the vid "Deep Kick" (from the movie 15) would have the legs to still be a topic of conversation in fandom almost a week after it was shown in Escapade.

It was a weird vid show this year, shorter than usual, and even less happy than 2007, which has been described as dark. 2006 was excellent BTW, or at least that was my reaction, with funnier, happier vids shown. This year included "15" by absolutedestiny, and it's the most disturbing vid I've seen of the 3 vid shows I've attended.

I believe I'm not the right audience for this vid. My own tastes stretch into what I think of as "disturbing content LITE." I love Cronenberg, Lynch and Fincher, and if I'm in the right mood I'll watch something like "The Audition," but not "Irreversible." Just, no way.

I haven't seen the movie "15", but I'd seen the vid before the con. It was recced, maybe by slodwick or laurashapiro??? Someone in my flist. Oh, I can't remember now.

My reaction was sort of "meh" when I downloaded it, even if it was filled with beautiful, striking images. It has teenage boys inflicting a lot (or what seemed like a lot) of self harm and it's all sort of right in the face of the viewer. The vid itself is very long, or just felt long, around 5-6 minutes. My main thing, the reason I didn't keep it in my vid folder, is that I didn't feel connected to the characters. So, I didn't care that they were cutting/piercing/punching themselves, even if done in glorious saturated colors.

I watched it online and forgot about it, until I realized I was watching it again at the con, but this time with exactly the wrong crowd to sit through all that goriness. I kind of had an attack of nervous laughter, as there were shouts of "OMG! What IS THIS?!" and "Ewwwwwwww!!!". People were covering their eyes, waiting for it to be over.

So yeah, I just went through my flists and people are still talking about it. For good or ill I know I'll remember this vidder's LJ name for a while.


ETA: Whoa! I just watched 2 of his other vids that were new to me, Rodeohead and Revenge. I had seen the excellent (and from what I remember controversial) Gold Digger before, but Revenge in particular is amazing. Rodeohead was more like sweet nostalgia (yeah, even with that kind of editing), combining my love of Firefly and Radiohead and weirdness.

I got a lot of shared friends with amireal (not to mention my other account) but just a heads up that LJ will no longer offer Basic free accounts.

The way I read it, me and other people with accounts created by today are OK. At least I hope so since I'm going back to Basic next month.

New users will have a choice between Paid Accounts or accounts with advertisement.

More info over here at the no_ads_lj com. Thanks to isiscolo

The long and short of it will be no big news to anyone in my flist. The feeling at the con was that there will be no big move to other journaling services anytime in the near future.

The panel was "Livejournal: Should fans take their business elsewhere?" and of course people had no good alternative, one that could handle a mass migration. Journal Fen came up of course, but from the conversations I followed it seems that to a lot of people JF = F_W. It also still suffers from a bad reputation on the server robustness side of things. Me and a couple of other people kept saying how we haven't had problems with that issue for a long time, so I just hope some of that got through. I can't remember the last time I had any trouble with my JF account.

The issue of the old code and difficulties finding stuff in JF came up. I wasn't too clear on what they meant, since JF has changed the code, but the conversation moved on to comparisons between Insane Journal and Journal Fen. Most agreed that IJ will go the way of LJ sooner or later, even if Squicky right now is very accommodating. Personally, I don't see it as being paranoid to believe that $$$ will always have the final word on any of these issues.

Three_wishes thinks Twitter is a way to stay in touch, but I've given up on the service. The minutia of everyone's lunch grows boring, no matter how much I might love my fellow fans. Twitter offers no freakin filters, so I rarely look at it anymore. There is no point, fandomwise, for me to ever check it for updates.

I also had no idea that metafandom had an Insane Journal account. Corrected that now.

If I wait until I have time to say anything about the SGA season finale it won't happen, so in short . . .( spoilerish. )

So yeah, from what I've read I might be out of sync with the rest of fandom.

I'm back from Escapade, enjoying some late-late dinner (tinga tamal, yummy!) and sort of recounting for Mr. Logovo the more mundane aspects of the weekend. I mean, yes the panel on protecting you anonymity online sounds interesting to him, but would I got into detail on what was covered on the SGA crack!Fic panel? No, wait, I think I did. OK-OK, so I did mention that one, but I will NOT mention the wincest (and other brothers) panel because he would just shake his head sadly. And worry. Heh.

Wrote a couple of posts about the con is Spanish during the weekend, mainly because I think the idea of fan runed cons is unusual in Spanish fandoms.

There was a panel on the OTW that seemed to get a very positive reaction from the attendees. I was however very surprised at all these rumors running around about what the OTW is trying to do, including the "All your fic are belong to us!" stuff that - huh? Like the people involved in the OTW had magical powers to make fans SUBMIT to the One Ring.

I really didn't get a single piece of information out of the panel that has not been said before in the otw_news community, but the way it was received it was clear that it *was* news to some. I know I'm not well informed on the OTW. I have the com friended, but don't read every post. I've read part of the website, but have not looked closely at the FAQ. But maybe I like reading this stuff more or pay more attention or the way my head works (accounting type) it just holds on to these things? Because I swear I clearly remember what they said being covered in several conversation threads, and not just in the otw_news com.

Oh, and there were people who had no idea what the OTW was. It was mentioned in passing at earlier panels and there were a few confused faces.

Anyway, the OTW panel was lively and the presenters did a good job. However the_shoshanna did say at the end that they were apprehensive coming in (actually she might have used the word "terrified") about what kind of reception the panel would have at Escapade. I can't see how they would have gotten a bad reaction there, the_shoshana has been part of Escapade for years, but once again I might be naive or just not paranoid enough.

Husband was pulling for Juno and I  was sort of pulling for No Country for Old Men. In any case we were just relieved that Atonement didn't win. God, that was such a dissapointing movie.

I posted in passing about the racism stuff in my Spanish journal, both what's been talked about in SGA and SPN in the last week, but as I mentioned to a friend, most of my Spanish speaking LJ friends look at the conversations and don't see the same thing. Hell, I live here and I need diagrams for some of this stuff.

I know I have some context, either because I grew near the border, because I'm very familiar with pop-culture in the US or because I read a tiny bit here and there on the subject. Still, diagrams. Flowcharts. It helps.

It ocurrs to me that it's just a matter of time before someone outside of my flist will wander in and ask me just what the hell I'm going on about.

Sadly it has only now occurred to me to seriously pick my mom's brains for food info. She is a magnificent cook, or was. She has been a lot less motivated since she now only cooks for herself and dad, but oh wow, the food she made for us kids.

In conversations a few years ago my mom mentioned how it wasn't as much fun to cook after I moved out, since I was the one that kept saying how good it was. My brother was not as enthusiastic about her cooking, but I do think I sort of fangirled my mom's food, because I never had Mexican food as good as what she could cook up. It's a little strange that she was so good, since my grandmother was mediocre at best.

It never was a serious consideration until recently to try and duplicate what my mom knows, but next time I sit down with her I'm getting pen and paper and start making notes. I have no idea for example how to cook beef tongue or bone marrow or prepare pozole the way she does it. I can make her enchiladas, but can't remember the veggie side dishes she would make that were so good and actually healthy.

I might surprise her by making her some cheese. I'm in the process of learning how to make my own and I think she would appreciate some queso fresco made by her daughter :)

The overly contrived dialog is annoying, but I could not help loving Ellen Page. Now I want to see the entire first season of ReGenesis. She was so good in that, but never saw more than a handful of episodes.

Happily, Juno was one of those movies that both me and the husband enjoyed. Last thing before that we saw I was twirling happily while he said "I hate endings like that. I FUCKING HATE THEM!" - I then had to somewhat control my squee.

Feel so much better today, OMG, thankyou.

iTunes also had last Thursday's SPN episode for download, finally, so I'll be sitting down and enjoying the woobie pain (and yes, for this the term woobie does apply) and just try to not think that there are only 4 episodes left before the '08 blackout. Pfft!

iTunes should have second season of Dexter, but doesn't, which is all kinds of sad and the kind of thing that makes me glad for torrents and sharing files. It just got a Golden Globe nomination for best drama, which I hope is a sign the series got even better. Took me long enough to get into the show, but now I'm very excited to see where they took the characters. I have no idea if the series continued to follow the books. Darkly Dreaming Dexter was fun, but I didn't like how the author solved the mystery. The series had more characters to work with and the B plots kind of distracted me from basically the same solution as the book.

And there is Dexter fic! Good fic even!

Looking over FW I can't help feeling glad that LJ wasn't around in the 90s. I know for sure I would have ended up there at least once, mainly for The X-Files. My own cringe worthy wankage has been lost forever, I dearly hope, as it happened in mailing lists.

Entertained a bit a friend from LJ and her family. Fannish conversation was had, and my husband was actually interested, which is always of the good. Lum's "Woman's Work" was poked and prodded a bit, as we gathered around one of the computers to watch on Imeem.

Also, some conversation on Gordon that we didn't get finish. Have to get back to that later, race in SPN, because I'm not completely sure of how I feel about his storyline. Enjoyed the hell out of the episode, but that doesn't mean I won't look at it more closely, scrape at the stuff underneath.

Weekend finished with the LJ news of being sold to SUP.

Well.

I figure that fandom will always have a presence in LJ, but that every one of these things will continue to chip away at the central aspect LJ had for so long. I've gotten used to LJ so much as the clearance place for fic and recs. that moving away from it is taking me a long time.

My English LJ account expires next month. I see no reason to renew.

I was rereading To The End by esohpe and kept thinking about that particular kind of corruption-of-the-hero that does it for me. I like the progress stories, where things are not set in stone yet, but still have a price for the actions of the evil done. That is why I was disappointed in the episode "Born Under a Bad Sign", because I was hoping to see Sam going through something and it turned out to be completely out of his control, it wasn't him. I have hopes for this season though, can cross my fingers that the writers will handle it, at least enough of it to get it to a point that is a bit complicated, that isn't just Sam doing things for Dean, that he might get off on the power.