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This is the post where you can ask me questions and send me comments that are not about any particular post. Comments are screened, and anonymous comments are allowed.(1) If you are logged in my default response will be a reply comment, but if you're on anon and left no contact information I will have no way to get back to you except publicly.(2) (You can leave anonymous comments without logging out, just click on the "More Options" button and you'll see the option to comment anonymously.)
Public posting: If I think the question is one worth addressing in public (because it's fun fandom stuff, to head off repeat questions and so on), I will ask if you're okay with my making a post about your question, whether I may directly quote you, and if necessary coordinate with you on the level of details to reveal. If you want a question to be quoted and public, mark it as (Public) and we can cut down on that process. On the flip side, marking a question (Private) will prevent any uncertainty as well since I won't need to ask whether I can make a post.(3) If you're not sure/don't care at the time you're asking, don't mark it either way and we can work it out on a case-by-case basis.(4)
( see footnotes )
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Policing and woobiefication redux
After my prior post on the subject, here's yet another commonality between the fandom policers and the woobiefiers/apologists: They think their personal emotional reactions define the morality of a thing.
Again, they go to opposites from the same premise. The fandom police think that since they react with disgust, shame, fear etc. to a fictional depiction, it must be objectively harmful and therefore immoral to create. The apologists think that since they react with positivity and excitement to a fictional depiction, it must necessarily be harmless and objectively moral. The emotional and intellectual dishonesty is staggering in either case, which isn't surprising because they both start with the same dishonest and flawed premise.
WIP Big Bang: Posting date claimed, now to finish the thing!
The final push for ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
wipbigbang is here as I have claimed a posting date in August!
Planning to send the first draft to my lovely artist this week so they have
time to work on the playlist. I've wanted to write a Finnrey Auntie Anne's AU
ever since I learned that my favorite pretzels place declared support
for my favorite ship, although the fic is a bit more action-packed than my own RL
experiences buying their pretzels. XD I'm also having fun writing Rose, Paige, and
Black Squadron in supporting roles.
( Excerpt )
I don't have much time or brainspace for fanfic these days and I really appreciate these fan events that I sign up for giving me the push to, as the comm puts in its header image, finish my sh##.
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On being a Christian atheist
I am a Christian atheist.
Let me state up front what I don't mean by that; I don't mean I believe in the obscure branch of Christian theology which states that God is dead and we must love each other and save each other in that absence. While I admire the poignancy of it, it doesn't gel for me even as metaphor because I don't believe God is dead but rather that he never existed, at least in any physical sense outside the sensemaking that we do through story.
I also don't use "atheist" as a pejorative here, as a Christian pastor does in his book The Christian Atheist criticizing Christians for living as though God does not exist. I don't think it's morally or intellectually inferior or superior not to believe in God.(1) By atheism I mean, simply, the lack of belief in God as a supernatural being. I don't assign any moral or other value judgment to it.
Fortunately, Christian atheism seems a lot more visible than it was back when I was first searching for the term back in 2013. The above two senses were the only ones I could find at the time, but now I am able to find entire articles on cultural Christianity(2) and more expanded information on Christian atheism itself, not to mention modern Christian atheists openly expressing their convictions.
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Lyrics translation: 항상 마지막처럼 (Always My Last Chance)
Translating song lyrics is an occasional hobby of mine,
and since these translations live nowhere else but my Evernote
and some fan music videos I've made I've decided to post some
of them here, inspired by ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yhlee. I'll post the literal translations of the verses
much as I did with my poetry translations
so you can see what changes I've made.
I think the first lyrics translation I ever did was 항상 마지막처럼, which loosely translates to Always My Last Chance. It's the Korean theme song to the anime Angelic Layer, which I have not seen; I chose the song for its lyrics and singer, the talented Korean voice actress Yang Jeonghwa, for my Azula and Suki fan music video.
Those who know the early twist in loopy777's fanfic Retroactive
will understand my choice, since the vid was intended to be a fan video of that fic,
but people have enjoyed the video without having read the story.
I think I get more comments from Korean fans than English-speaking ones,
since it's still a Korean-language video and subtitles go only so far ^_^
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Frustrations, mom posting, workstation
( Procrastination and career thoughts )
Speaking of whom, the Tot is growing apace, not doing much talking but he sure laughs and babbles a lot. He's a healthy and happy kid and I couldn't ask for anything more. He is HEAVY into cars, both toys and the real kind; Mark's father even sent the kid a mini sedan he can ride in and drive around, proving once and for all that grandparents love their grandchildren more than their children.
Mark calls that thing the White Elephant for a reason, aside from its color. It's noisy, takes up space, and is heavy as hell to take out of the house where there is enough space for the kiddo to ride it around, something we have only done twice. Funny, though, it's actually worked out reasonably well; the Tot hasn't shown much interest in playing outdoors with the thing, and mostly loves to climb in, honk the horn, and play its tiny selection of music. He occasionally pedals it backward and forward, but we stop him from doing that at night so we don't disturb the downstairs neighbors.
I pulled my zero gravity chair out of storage and rearranged my workstation to use it, with a bed tray holding my keyboard placed on two straps across the armrest so I can type comfortably. I was using a kitchen chair for a while and that got uncomfortable, so I considered getting a swivel office chair but the idea of being upright all the time didn't appeal, either. This arrangements suits me for now--with my main monitor being a flatscreen across the room, I can tilt back while working when it suits me. Maybe a better lumbar support could help, but then again I'm not vertical most of the time so it doesn't bother me.
Currently watching
Into the Badlands
Really good post-apocalyptic wuxia with big-stakes political/military intrigue and a compelling cast of characters. There are amazingly choreographed action sequences in the best tradition of Chinese action movies. I love how diverse the cast is, too, with many interracial relationships and a canon queer relationship. I'm almost done with this one and am hanging onto the last three episodes mainly out of a reluctance to let the show go. I'll finish when I'm in the mood.
Star Trek: Discovery
I have mixed feelings about this one. I love Michael Burnham and the Season 2 storyline is intriguing, but I'm still disoriented by the tight focus on the main plot and cast, resulting in a lack of the ensemble feel and leisurely pace that I'm used to with Trek.
The going is slow on this one because I'm watching this together with Mark and we both have to find time to sit down together, mainly while folding laundry. We haven't done this in a while, and the living room sofa is a jumble of clean laundry XD
Good Omens
This was all the rage on Tumblr for a few weeks and I still see quite a bit of content. I never could get into the book, and it sat on my shelf for years unread after my then-boyfriend lent it to me. Then we got married and I returned it to him as part of my move-in luggage. Neither Terry Pratchett nor Neil Gaiman ever quite gelled for me and the two of them together weren't a particular improvement, it turns out.
My husband loved the book, though, and wanted to watch the show with me, so we watched Episode 1 together. It's funny, I guess? I'm still meh on it, but it's easier and more passive than reading the book.
Black Lightning
I was stalled on Season 2 for a while before I started again recently. I haven't watched a lot of superhero shows but I like this one, with its intimate portrayal of a family threatened from the outside and dealing with their own internal turmoil and conflicts. And I am so rooting for Anissa/Grace even though I don't think Anissa has a very good track record when it comes to treating women well. (Chenoa did nothing wrong!) I'm sure she'll grow as a character and am looking forward to how it might happen.
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Policing and woobiefication: two sides of the same coin
TL; DR: It's fine to enjoy "immoral" fiction and you're both being assholes
Fandom policing and villain woobiefication/apologia seem to be polar opposites, but at heart they agree on one thing: That your morality is defined by the wholesomeness of the content you make and consume.
They just go from that premise to different conclusions, with the fandom police (1) saying that some content is immoral and must be censored, and possibly its creators bullied as well, while the woobiefiers and apologists defend by saying shit like negging is true love actually and war crimes are fine.
( Nazi and genitalia mention, this may contain thinly-veiled references to Star Wars fandom )
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Writing, writing, and writing
Writing a textbook for a gig has eaten up most of my attention lately,
but I'm trying to wrap up the current chapter and fire it off to my editor
so I can work on a more enjoyable writing project--the wipbigbang Finnrey fic
that I need to finish up and set up a posting date for along with my artist.
Work on the original novel has stalled out among all this, but I'm still thinking about it all the time and mostly despairing at how utterly short my abilities are falling of my aspirations T_T I do plan to move along on it once the WIP Big Bang is done, though.
So whatever it is I'm working on at a given time, work, fandom, or original, it looks like I'm doing a lot of writing! I feel a vague sense of impatience all the time and am trying to gather my thoughts & energies. Idk. One step at a time, I guess.
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When hair is more than hair: Finn's style in The Rise of Skywalker
Looking at Finn's material in TROS, I am very excited and emotional how he grew his hair longer and is finding his own style in clothing as well.
( Star Wars feels! )
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Pride and Practicality
For the Pride Fanwork Prompt Fest on queerly_beloved, prompt is by fred_mouse.
Posted here to be linked in a reply because of content warning (mention of marital rape/reluctant sex).
Fandom: Pride and Prejudice
Pairing: Elizabeth Darcy/Charlotte Collins
Prompt: stepping out
Summary: Elizabeth's friend Charlotte's happy news leads to a less happy revelation
and a long-overdue talk between the friends.
Bisexual Elizabeth and lesbian Charlotte, emotion, angst, and fluff.
Lightly implied bisexual Mr. Darcy and former Darcy/Wickham.
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Pride and Practicality
For the Pride Fanwork Prompt Fest on queerly_beloved, prompt is by fred_mouse.
Posted here to be linked in a reply because of content warning (mention of marital rape/reluctant sex).
Fandom: Pride and Prejudice
Pairing: Elizabeth Darcy/Charlotte Collins
Prompt: stepping out
Summary: Elizabeth's friend Charlotte's happy news leads to a less happy revelation
and a long-overdue talk between the friends.
Bisexual Elizabeth and lesbian Charlotte, emotion, angst, and fluff.
Lightly implied bisexual Mr. Darcy and former Darcy/Wickham.
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Fanny Price, stone-cold feminist
It's no secret that Fanny Price, the heroine of Jane Austen's novel Mansfield Park, is far from the most beloved Austenian heroine. Fanny has been called a moralistic prude who gets everything by doing nothing. She is evidently deemed not to be liberated and feminist enough, seeing how she was replaced in two different movie adaptations by laughing, athletic, and outgoing heroines who bear little resemblance to her original character.
In praise of the content warning
These days, other than spending minimum time on Tumblr to chat with friends and queue up posts, my main hangouts are here on Dreamwidth and over on Mastodon, specifically the Fandom.ink instance run by our lovely mod alisx. Though my longform stuff is obviously here and I love commenting and interacting with people in thoughtful ways, the place where I spend the most time online is definitely the Mastodon instance, with its cozy community, nearly real-time interactions, and old-school forum feel.
I think one of the things that keep me coming back to Mastodon, in addition to the factors mentioned in my review of the platform, is something I only mentioned in passing in that post because I had so much else to go into: The content warning.
The content warning (CW) is much like the fold or the cut in blogging software, complete with a text label that you can put on a post to tell you what's behind the cut. People can click on the 'read more' button to unfold the post and see the rest of it, if they so choose. Users can also choose to unfold content warnings by default.
Of green sky and blue oceans
This article about different perceptions of color by culture, jumping off from the Homeric texts that describe wine-dark seas and cornflower hair, got me thinking about the language and perceptions of color in Korean culture that I had almost given up on expressing in English. Korea has no native word for "green," you see, but rather uses "blue" to describe the sky, the forests, and the ocean alike. We had to borrow the Chinese word for green in order to separate it out linguistically, so it felt weird to have Korean characters who don't even know Chinese to think of and use the word "green." On the other hand, I thought, it would feel odd for English-language readers to see forests and leaves described as "blue." For that matter, Koreans call hair with a slight brown/yellowish sheen "yellow" which would call to mind blond hair for many English speakers but is actually still dark brown hair. But hey, if Homer can get away with wine-colored seas, why can't I ha ve blue forests and brown yellow hair, right?
All work and no pay leaves me a poor girl
April was a busy week, but since most of it was for projects that will pay off later I'm now not only broke but tired as well. XD At least I'm looking forward to some paydays starting in May, and I appreciate that my contacts are giving me work. We're finally getting out of the lean months!
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Marvel Femslash is a no-go but WIP Big Bang is on!
After being so excited about the marvelfemslashevents exchange, I was flabbergasted to realize I had not actually been signed up. I'm not sure what happened, maybe I didn't press "submit" or my signup got dropped by the server or something? My fault, I should have double-checked while there was time. The mod kindly confirmed in response to my inquiry that I was not in fact signed up and it's too late to do anything about it, so there's that I guess. :/ I'll be on the lookout for pinch hit and treat opportunities, but I won't be a participant.
I did end up signing up for wipbigbang after all, and I'm glad I did after the Marvel Exchange ended up falling through. I have done so little fiction writing these past weeks that it almost physically hurts, so this ought to be a good way to get me going.
Set up a Dreamwidth queue, drafts, and local backup on OS X
There isn't much I miss from my stay on Tumblr and it's a great relief to spend more time on Dreamwidth-- and, these days, my feed reader. However, there are still some functions that Tumblr has and Dreamwidth lacks, like a draft folder and the ability to queue posts.
Tumblr aside, I also found myself wanting to keep local copies of my posts and to compose them in an editor with more robust functions, such as live Markdown preview, than the DW editor offers. I like the new DW beta editor but it's still not an actual text editor, nor does it write to my own machine without an extra step like copy-paste.
So I figured, why not set it up on my computer? It seemed simple enough with Dreamwidth's post by email function and Terminal on Mac. It took me longer than I thought to get it working reliably because there were a few different components to it, like Postfix, Bash, and Launchd.
I wrote this documentation both as a note to myself and a reference for anyone who wants something similar. With a little modification I think this setup could be used for other operating systems like Linux distros and other blogging platforms that support post-by-email, such as Wordpress.
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Ancient shipping feels
I finished reading The King of the Light in the East as a Work of Epic Poetry by Hwang Sun-gu. It turns out there was a full text of the original epic poem in the back of the book so I took time to read that too. I need a better annotated copy, though, because I counted like four mistakes in transcription and/or translation, some of it really basic stuff like the letter 花 (flower) being used in place of 化 (become). "He turned into a pheasant and flew away" is a strange enough sentence without being rendered as "He flower pheasant and flew away."