I've ceased to regularly read LJ. I've also had a lull in my own blogging on dj/dw but that's fairly normal and I expect I'll get back on it at some point. Both things kinda got jettisonned early this year while I accidentally 3 jobs. If you want to keep up with me regularly (or remind me to keep up with you), https://twitter.com/s3thene is your best bet.

life stuff (a long stream of 'I accidentally...'): I now own this absurd house in Somerville, MA with M and ipunchgaydeer, who I like to refer to as 'a random I met at a con last year'. Last July, when I was just barely part-time employed by a shitty, geriatric CPA, I got hired by a niche financial market intel startup because one of the partners was a client of mine; they've got me studying for the Series 7 exam. Not a direction I planned on going in, but hella job security. I have had more luck than I could have reasonably expected after coming out of immigration in 2009 with a philopsophy degree.

I still write fic when life isn't happening (so, lately, not much), and post certain things on my AO3 main at http://archiveofourown.org/users/Thene; if it takes you more than 30 seconds to find my sock account, stop trying. I never change. Refuelling the words has been hard, lately.

(I kinda can't believe I even have to make this post and I am definitely not the right person to be doing it, but seriously?)

okay, look, I hate the newest LJ redesign as much as the rest of you, although due to the specific ways I use LJ (ie. almost entirely in small fandom communities & other people's personal blogs - I've rarely used my own personal LJ) I am less impacted by them than most fandom users. HOWEVER, the DW evangelism is getting grating. It's a site. It provides you with services in return for you providing it with a product. It will not be forever free from wank, technical issues or censorship and it would be naive to believe that it would even if.

Its admin is a human being who has spent an awfully long time in the LJ fandom limelight, which is to say that many of us know where the bodies are buried. If this is somehow shocking news to you and you therefore wish to examine some shallow graves, there's Yonmei's story about receiving sexual harassment and rape threats on LJ, this post about the more blatant hypocrisies of Nipplegate, and more recently there was the Mitchellwank declaration that fanon (or canon) creators should be able to tell you what to write which was relevant to me personally because it had so much in common with the (minor, but ngl it hurt) incident that raised my ire in the first place. If your desire to rehash wank is not sated by all that, google will be your friend. But the worst, most personal incidents that I am aware of are not things I can simply link to or even speak about. Life is like this; horrible things happen, and they happen more often around some people than others, and even on the internet our histories go largely unrecorded except perhaps in the jigsaw-puzzle of logs and links and stories. I am getting a little bit tired of people who expect the future to be a whole lot different.

I have been bottling up this rant for ages, but as I finally started thinking about doing something about it on mgs_fanworks I figured I should spell out why. Hello, Livejournal.


1. The MPAA age ratings in their original form, as applied to movies, really really suck and should not be emulated. Sometimes, fandom does inadvertently emulate the suck, most often in the form of about people rating slash more sternly than het, and this is both blatantly homophobic and exactly how the MPAA ratings are intended to work irl. MPAA ratings also say that dubcon should be less rated than consensual sex. I really don't think we want anything to do with this scale.

2. Illustrations and stories are not live video. IRL, everyone knows and accepts this and therefore we don't get carded for buying a book or a comic that contains a couple of explicit sex scenes. (or more; I accidentally bought some terrible hentai manga at Waterstones once when I was a teenager. I didn't notice the tiny 18+ sticker on the back okay ;___;) Marketing, rather than age rating, is used to guide reading decisions IRL, and while some people try there's no system in place that seeks to prevent teenagers from reading things about sex or ultraviolence.

3. Related to the above; no one gets carded in fandom either. Yes, there are a few exceptions - like locked communities that don't admit anyone who doesn't show a full DOB in the profile that indicates they are over 18. A few writers lock all their porn similarly because they are not comfortable with under-18s reading it. However, in most fandom spaces there is nothing stronger than maybe a polite note asking the kids to stay away, if that.

If you are old enough to have used ff.n as it was before the Great Purge Of 2002, you may remember spending your mid-teens dutifully clicking the grey popup window that asked you to confirm that you were really truly over 17, no really. ff.n has since stopped using MPAA ratings, possibly because they suck.

This isn't directly related to ratings unless an individual writer/artist chooses to make use of it, but Livejournal's adult content system is spectacularly stupid; you can get around it simply by logging out of LJ, and - I love this part - teens can freely post things that are flagged as adult content while logged in but other logged-in teens then won't be able to see these posts - they can only share & discuss this content with adults. That isn't creepy at all!

Let's not even get started on the rest of the internet. It is ridic easy for teenagers to find pornographic photos and videos unless they have very vigilant parents. Fandom's old-media coyness is a strange relic.

4. Using MPAA ratings sets us up to get censored. A couple of years ago, mgs_slash was flagged as containing adult content. The same happened to several other slash communities at the same time (but not het comms in the same fandoms; see point 1.) Wait what? mgs_slash is a comm with stories and illustrations on it. Why would Livejournal think it was full of material on the same level as hardcore porn videos? ...Because we told them it was by tagging things as 'NC-17'. That was a mistake. Let's stop doing it.

5. See points 1 and 2; even as applied to movies MPAA ratings are deliberately vague and confusing and applying them to mediums that they are not suited to increases the vagueness and confusion. This is especially so for non-American fans; I never encountered MPAA ratings before I got into fandom and it took a while to get used to them. We've seen confusion over what ratings mean in MGS exchanges. There even being a hierarchy is kinda dubious, not least as the MPAA ratings are oversensitive about sexuality and swearing as compared to gore - which leads to idiosyncrasies such as The King's Speech being rated R in the USA but 12A in the UK. Yes, American kids have to wait five extra years just to hear two swearwords but showing them dubcon at the age of 13 is fine, because swearing is way worse than dubcon or violence. No wonder fandom gets confused sometimes.

6. They're not very informative. 'R' is especially uninformative - it seems to serve as a catch-all that might include anything from non-explicit sexual voyeurism to post-apocalyptic body horror. Ratings are not informative because ultimately what content teenagers should have access to is not a question that is of great relevance to fandom. That's not what we really use ratings for - instead, we use ratings as a basis to decide what we'd like to read and when. The rest of the internet usually does this by marking things as 'SFW' or 'NSFW' (usually stating why it is NSFW). This seems more relevant to the purpose.



So, I'm planning on switching the rating tags on mgs_fanworks to pretty much that. People can keep assigning MPAA ratings to their own work if they feel like it but the tags will no longer reflect that. It'll be a while before I can get on this but when I do I think I'll go with 'SFW', and then 'NSFW: explicit', 'NSFW: sexual themes', 'NSFW: gore', 'NSFW: nude art', and so on. Maybe a catch-all 'NSFW: dark themes' to cover zombie AUs, medical experiments, Vamp drinking Otacon's blood, and so on. (This is a totally separate issue from warnings. Ratings are not and have never been warnings). This won't even take that long to implement as I can just rename the G and NC-17 tags and that's over half the comm covered right there, and it won't take that long to sift through the rest, so hopefully I can get this done a little after christmas.

We saw this on the way back from a short walk, and can only conclude that it was placed in this spot in the few minutes between us heading uphill and coming downhill again. Perhaps it is an art installation.

Just after crossing the state line yesterday, a gigantic bald eagle swooped our car. It came less than ten feet from hitting us. Whatever it was trying to tell us must have been pretty important.

i am so tired and we are so confused. it is like trying to choose between icecream forever and cake forever. We had a wonderful, amazing time in Boston and had decided we totally need to move there and loiter around with Chris & Ting and all their friends forever (but not Nakki, who is applying for grad schools all over the place including Atlanta; nakki will wander the stars in pink vibrams and sleep under her satellite all winter. nakki is.) We were questioning why we were even going to Pittsburgh, and going mumble grumble fallback plan, M's family, etc.

And now we've wandered around Oakland and concluded it would be like living in fucking Bloomsbury for $600/month rent. this is overwhelmingly beautiful, far more so than anything else we have seen in the USA ever, and UPitt is sat there being grandiose and filling the streets with diplodocuses and tree-lined parks. Oh god oh god oh god.

This is heartbreak math, this is having only one life (only one love one god one home), but, get this, unlimited second chances. We're pretty sure now. We're going to Boston. For a year. Then if we're not breaking even we're moving on to Pittsburgh.

We'll be okay whatever happens. but I can't move and not have any friends again.

via FiveThirtyEight (SOMEONE LINKED ME, I SWEAR I DON'T ACTUALLY READ IT AT THIS POINT IN THE CYCLE):



I hope all the people who went batshit fundie in the 2004 election understand the consequences of their actions.

i mean

really

IT'S SNOWING.

Yay, yay, yay.

...the ground floor is smothered in airsoft pellets.
...the nice landlord is referred to as 'Star Captain Jon'.
...the room with the big south window is being TINFOILED because the daylight is overpowering the monitors.
...the firewall is said to be impregnable, but neither of the fridges work.
...when the broadband goes down, you go to the kitchen to make lunch all at once, no matter what time of day it is.
...you can never tell whose laundry is in the hamper, because everything's black.
...you have conversations about Star Wars/Nazi crossover roleplay.
...marmite toasties. No, wait, that's just Tom.


I love these people really.

Being back in Leeds was damn strange at first, but I got used to it. I'd forgotten how tiny and cosy my room was, how many colours there are here, how many people to hug and enjoy being around. I'd forgotten how much fun my degree course is, and how crap I am at it. I keep leaving my mobile at home because I've grown unused to it. I missed Jessica. I missed her lots and lots, even though she is always plotting against me. But I can't have everything, so now I miss Matthew instead - Matthew and Atlanta.

Gibson writes about the 'mirror-world', but leaves out the strangest thing - that whichever side you're on, the other isn't quite real any more - it's alive inside you, but frozen and misted.

I miss Atlanta and all I left behind there, but at the same time I carry it with me. There's a huge paradox in travelling; I go abroad to find out more about the world, and then I come back and realise how much I've learned about home. It gives you more by taking away and you get another great irony - the big things you take for granted aren't there any more, but at the same time, every dead leaf on every lawn becomes sharper. It all resolves into smaller and smaller details, which is what I tend to think the World is for.

There were many, many beautiful days. There was storm after storm and the rain was unbelievable and the guy I asked told me "We just called it 'June'." There were wanders through trees watching the butterflies and attempting to fathom the Southern attitude to the American Civil War. There was lazing in the heat and reading Three Kingdoms - the humidity was deceptive and I rarely used suncream, yet I barely burned at all and now have freckles EVERYWHERE. There was more rain, and the day we turned into drowned rats with luna_manar (who I wish I'd seen more of, but I'll be back west before long, no doubt of it). There was chess in the garden and the prehistoric monster in the pool filter. There was the day we went to Little Five, an incredibly warm and happy place where I spent lots of money. ><

It wasn't all beautiful. There were problems and paperworks and little times, especially early on, when I'd get really quite lonely. The bombings in London (and the manhunt in Leeds - I STILL don't understand why that was so complicated, when it was so very clear that the mastermind behind EVERYTHING is Jessica) came when I'd been here for a month, which was strange enough; the aftermath of the hurricane was far stranger, a time when everything felt edgy and spare.

My throat keeps drying out these days. I loved that humidity.

And there was that evening on which three people watched the sun set on Stone Mountain. We clambered up through the thinning trees chewing sunflower seeds (and later fighting over Nakki's Delta Snackpack - god, that was brilliant, especially the bits we gave to the Lift Gods). Getting to the point where there were no trees at all was so eerie...and very soon after, a helicopter started circling overhead, which made it so horribly like something out of Metal Gear that it hurt my poor little brain. But we got there, and a bit further up, playing around on rocks and taking silly photos all the while. But then you turn round, and there really were trees as far as the eye could see; trees, with soft lines between hinting at a road cutting through, trees and then a little gap for a carpark or a golf course or a little town or a lake, trees after trees all the way to the horizon, where the shadow of Atlanta pointed straight up to the sun.

And then night fell, and the lights below came on - highways, houses, floodlit sports fields, sodium burning through every branch. The sun had gone out out on the forest and the human jungle of tarmac and commercialism abrubtly took over the frame. You'd never have known the trees were even there. That was Atlanta, and by the next Saturday night, I was gone.


Here is possibly the interestingest photo I took all summer, taken on that Saturday evening. I like it this size.

( Read more...Collapse )

There is a point to going to other places. It is to find out how little of your world is real. It's to step through borders and find out that this solid fact is just a small-headed assumption, that this way of doing things is just a habit - that everything you do is just a phase. I still distinctly remember my first breath of Atlanta air, two months ago - impossibly warm and wet, just like the treated air in the hotrooms in the Kew glasshouses - and I remember that relieving coolness of stepping out of one of those rooms, but it's not happened yet and I've got used to it now. I wonder what it will be like when it comes.

I've got used to the shape of this place - it's far more different from what I'm used to than I imagined it would be. I believe in trees now. I didn't use to - they made no sense at all at first, and I'd try asking people what they were doing there, who owned all this useless ground with all those wonderful trees on it. It took a while to get my head around land being something other than a high-grade resource. I love the trees, and the lush undergrowth, and the brown rivers, and the rain that comes harder and the sun that shines brighter than any other I've ever experienced. I can't find all the stars I know and there are more than a few that are unfamiliar. The freckles go up to my knuckles, and the mosquitos find me tasty ;___;

There's chipmunks and racoons and butterflies the size of my hand. There are neatly tamed strips of fake turf and delicately groomed saplings that look ridiculous because they're three feet from the forest. There are church signboards with their big, blocky capitals - my favourite reads 'JOY IS NOT THE ABSENCE OF SORROW - IT IS THE PRESENCE OF GOD' (which makes me squee and think OMGJesusplaysMetalGear, because she is). There are Masonic lodges and huge flags. There is the drive-through pharmacy, which rather scares me. There is this constant feeling that this place is far more than human, and far less than domesticated - it's like a plank-and-wire bridge I walked as a child, set over a wild wetland and buzzing with dragonflies. It's like human beings have desperately dug a little bit of ground for themselves in the middle of this land that isn't theirs, while it looks on from every side it can, staring from the trees, sending brown spiders and cow ants and fireflies to remind us. The storms are so happy here - I'm used to thunderstorms as being about the only sign of unhumanity that reaches down to where we are, but here they are at home. What I really don't understand is where Jesus is supposed to fit into this. Taken away from places that have belonged to civilisation for millennia, I don't see what Jesus has to do with this place at all. This world is about the trees and the chattering of the bats and the grasshoppers at night; it's about the rain and the sun and the rolling, living distance. I can't see how anyone could hold a god of human supremacy so tightly here, but maybe that's the reason right there.

I could murder a chicken tikka masala right now, too. Or a bottle of Bailey's. Or anything by Steve Bell. Or Jess'ca, because I miss her insanely too ;_____; My brother tells me on the telephone how that world is changing shape. I'll find out, I guess. I hope to always keep on finding out. I've been contemplating both a three-day citybreak over Christmasish - Paris or Vienna or Berlin or somewhere else I've yet to see properly - and demanding a nice walking trip to Peru as a 21st present next year.

No, I don't care if I just made that word up.

There were three stories this year. I've been less of a media whore than usual (until recently - I've been playing videogames and going to the pictures, and reading a bit when I can), and these three, each of a different medium, have poked their scaled heads up and become keepers. The second I read in early June - a gift from ash1rose. It's called Prospero's Children, it's by Jan Siegel, and it ties a perfect closed loop. I don't know if there's a word for a story that, in ending, swallows its own beginning and transforms it, so I will keep to that image; the snake that eats its own tail. It's the creature that circles the World, stirring in the deep trenches of the sea or painted across the spine of the night sky. It is unity, and as it forms the barrier between the within and the without, it is division also. It is everything and everything outside everything. It is the beginning and the end that are both the same. It is continually overcoming itself and proving to be greater than itself.

It was a great book, not least in the way it made self-references to self-referrentialness. It was beautiful and true and a world I want to live in and, and, I need to write to Rose, I really do ;____;. What was really interesting about my attitude to it was that it was really not quite satisfying until the very last line, at which point it became totally and thoroughly satisfying, far more so than it would have been if it had been satisfying beforehand. Ouroborous; it ate its own tail.

I finished the book whilst waiting to get on a plane to something entirely new. I need to write to Rose. The second story was awaiting me on the other side of the water; I had to wade through a couple of other things to get there (a more complete story of my/our Metal Gear obsession will have to be told later), but yes, Snake Eater killed me. I remember awakening the next morning (it was a Wednesday) and feeling that now The Game was gone and I had an enormous void in my life and nothing I could do would be sufficient to fill it. That was, of course, when I first considered writing on Livejournal again, but London exploded the next morning and I had seikenshin, kitsunejin and hell_san all enquire after my health the next morning, not realising I was over four thousand miles away from London, and I realised I had too many things to write down and I couldn't be arsed. Nice, gave me more time to think about it all.

Which was good, because the ouroboros symbol I hadn't even properly noticed at that point. I should've seen it coming a million miles away, with a name like that, but actually I didn't spot the ouroboros reference til after I'd finished the game and, in the bath one evening, started thinking 'I need to write to Rose' again and then had it catch me upside the head. Muppet ;___; It's all over the place too - the name, the structure, the plot, even the Joy's (I refer to her as such becuase I like to) last speech, about consumation and continuation, about legacies and change, about the world. About the World. I thought, there and then, of the World-Dancer, but I somehow forgot the encircling snake til a couple of days later.

It killed my mind. The refusal to accept the arbitary lines across the earth, the giving and giving and giving, the white flowers; the joy. That's what I took from it most of all; that when there was nothing else, when you have given up all your knowledge, given up your body, your name, your life, what was there left, there among the white flowers? Joy. This is the World and before this year I had barely ever seen her, just flashes, glimpses; I thought her unillustratable but here she was illustrated and she completely killed me.

So yeah, I beat the World-Dancer to a bloody pulp and then had no idea what to do. But things came up - a lot of things, and I'll try to jot some of them down sometime soon, along with a lot more of the Metal Gear obsession, no doubt. Til then, be joyful.

(The first story was an album, Frances The Mute by The Mars Volta, who I get to go see on stage in a few weeks. Yey.)