I cannot make this an icon because it is too big, but I think everyone should be able to gaze upon its glory:



Made by the lovely Alja-Markir on the LRR forums. Because I am officially way, way too invested in this site.

I will eventually have a bigger version.

http://www.wwtdd.com/2009/12/lindsay-is-a-good-model/

Next up on Faces of Meth...

In all honesty, I thought Lindsay was hot when she was doing teenage girl movies. It helped that she had red hair. But seriously, in her next shoot there'll be big photoshopped patches where her sores are.

I have a funny feeling that if I were in ACT right now, I'd be Amy 2.0. Seriously, gave a speech today, took on that voice for reasons I cannot discern.

Also, Desert Bus: 50k in two days wut wut!

Also, Kathleen likes Mountain Goats and this makes me extremely happy.

I'm on the way to becoming a decent student by studying like hell! I got a 14/15 on my psych quiz and an 80 on my chem test. So I just have to do well on my finals and I'll be in the clear. Apparently I'm not losing my scholarship or I would know, and I have money in my debit card account. I may also be getting something that'll keep me from getting overdraft fees.

I'm getting involved in my community, it seems, since I went to the second Common Ground meeting. Ate Chinese food and watched the L Word, since that's what they seem to do. But it's nice to know we at least have some kind of GSA, since I didn't know there was one.

In other news, am I a bad bisexual if I thought the L Word was terribly boring? There were a couple of funny scenes and I thought Katherine Moening and that French woman were hot and the fanservice was very nice, but the drama was all kind of stupid.

So I talked through it.

All in all, good birthday.

So, it's been a while since Meridith's made a fool of herself in public.

For our final project in expository writing, we have to find an issue that we're interested in and write a speech about it. I've decided to pick one that I'm relatively sure won't be taken. My issue will be (and this is only the first thing that popped into my head, feel free to pick at it) "Does yaoi/shounen-ai/BL have a positive or negative effect on its audience with regards to shaping their views on homosexuality?" I, of course, am of the opinion that it has a negative effect as I believe that the vast majority of BL titles a) encourage a heteronormative view on homosexual relationships, b) fetishize homosexuality, and c) have a prevasive theme of rape=love, which, while not specific to BL, is still quite common and I think it's a Very Bad Thing. All this, combined with BL being presented as the pinnacle of romance specifically to an audience of teenage girls and young women, cannot be anything good.

I've decided that I'm not going to go into the issue of self-hated towards women within fandom because I only have five minutes.

Now, I happen to know that some of you lovely people on my flist have opinions on this subject, and I'd really love to hear them! Whether you think I'm right and you have a more edumacated ideas that you'd like to write down here, or you think I'm wrong and you have your own opinions as to why, I'd love to hear them! I'm trying to get as many different viewpoints as I can. I do request that you write in plain English and sign your comment with your real name (and, if you have any academic/fandom credentials you wouldn't mind sharing) so that I can credit you properly. If you are uncomfortable with giving me your full name on LJ, please shoot me an e-mail with your comment.

In addition, if you have any essays you want to point me to so that I can have more material to work with, please link them. I will love you forever.

Do I want to do this?

HOLY CRAP.

...HOLY CRAP.

Random RP Idea Time! Everyone's favorite time. This is very mildly based on a true story.

Concept: You're Paranoid Delusional, and Rightfully So!

The whole idea hinges around the fact that, for all every single person in the world, there is an agency. You might call it the government, you might call it the FBI, you might simply call it they. But they are tailing you, they know your every move and have thousands of hours of footage. Perhaps they are planning your demise, or are the reason that you can't move up in the world. Perhaps everything good and bad happens to you because that's how they want it. They've got bugs planted in your house, in your car, on your friends. Maybe your friends are in on it. Maybe the entire world is in on it.

You realize it, and no one else does. In fact, they don't believe you, they brush your complaints aside, stick you in a hospital, pump you full of medicine and then send you back out again when the doctors think you don't know anymore, but you do!

Maybe you have been to therapy and maybe the drugs are working and maybe you can give up this idea that's been ruining your life for the past ten, twenty, forty years? But in the back of your mind, it still exists.

That's because it's true. The agency exists, though you couldn't say the name of the organization, or the people who work for it. They are the reason everything on Earth happens the way it should, the modern arbiters of fate, if you will. They keep the world running smoothly. Their database has a file for every human, every animal, every protist and every amoeba. If they didn't, entropy would take its toll and the buildup would be too great for any organism to even think of reorganizing. Everything must follow a certain path, and this organization puts in the blocks and clears the way to make things follow their own path. There's no possible way of accounting for free will, of course, but paths can be altered, in fact, they are altered all the time. When this doesn't work, things happen that aren't supposed to happen, but that can be worked around.

Most of the world doesn't notice this. They're not supposed to. After all, religion and philosophy have served the organization quite well in the past. While most organisms will follow their biological needs, humans are troublesome and need reason.

However, the organization can't always divert attention from themselves. Some humans, for whatever reason, notice. They give their own names to it and their own reasons for it, but inevitably they realize that they aren't entirely in control of the world around them. They need to be watched, so to that end agents are sent out to watch, to send reports. To make sure these humans aren't able to spread the word too far. After all, once these humans know, they're not likely to forget without some serious intervention.

--

Characters Needed:

Field Agents

Paranoid

Organization Workers

I think I'm going to squee comics in this post. Because I must.

For those who don't know, Family Man. If you haven't read it already, DO SO. READ ALL OF IT, IT IS BRILLIANCE INCARNATE. If you have the time, read Bite Me and it might make a little more sense, though are they independent series, and honestly you could read both of them in a couple hours, and if you haven't, WHY HAVEN'T YOU?

So I have a giant boner for Dylan Meconis's style, and especially her lettering in Bite Me and her panel setup in Family Man. There's also her art style and incredible attention for background (especially in Family Man), and overall, it's all so gorgeous and seriously I'm in luuuuuuuurve.

*fans self*

So, this latest page (spoilers/nsfw). Omigosh it's so kinetic and gorgeous and fits in so well with the action and magic of the scene and THE LETTERING oh gosh it's so beautiful I could faint.

I have discovered why I like Owl City! It's the kind of music I would have loved when I was in fifth grade, seriously.

...Which means that I'm secretly ten. I think I'm cool with that.

...But seriously, it's like intravenous cotton candy.

Ah, the things one can only fully appreciate at 2am.

You know, I think Kristen Stewart knows something I don't.

Aside from knowing what it's like to be rich, skinny, and both adored and despised by millions of tweenage girls.

If I, in some alternate universe where I am skinny, were given the part of Bella Swan, I probably would have said to myself "Self? You don't have much to work with, but this is a golden opportunity. You can give Bella Swan character. You can give her a dynamic personality, make whatever acting choices you want, and justify it to the director by saying 'This is my take on the character,' and they wouldn't be able to say 'You're doing it wrong.'"

[In the spirit of ego-tripping, I was told that I did this for Olivia, and that it somehow made her likable even though I kind of wanted her to be a massively selfish bitch.]

Kristen Stewart clearly thinks differently than me. Bella Swan has no personality, and dammit, she's going to play her like a cardboard cutout and let the viewer's brains fill in the rest. Hell, it worked for the book, why shouldn't it translate onscreen? Her bold acting choice of the day is making no choices at all. She lets the other characters happen to her while she stands back and takes it with all the movement and expression of a Real Doll (which I totally did not go on the site and consider buying just so that I could put it out on the front stoop to scare the neighbors, oh no) (they're damned expensive, by the way).

Personally, and I have said this before, I think this is her silent protest against her incredibly unwise decision to commit to this franchise. She plays Bella right to the last word, and I think that's incredibly admirable in a career suicide kind of way.

I have heard that she is a good actress, can anyone confirm this? I've also heard that Robert Pattinson is a pretty shit actor, which is funny because apparently he did make acting choices with regards to Edward. Kudos, since I think he would probably be the hardest character to play sympathetically, but Pattinson still managed to have the personality of a block of sparkly Sculpy clay.

Also, you sir in the far right of the first picture! Don't look at the camera! I had to have this beat into my head and so do you! It's very unprofessional!

And I see they managed to make Edward slightly paler than Bella in this movie. Good job, makeup department! You're learning! :D

[I have hothobolove on my flist, so I get a lot of news about Twilight. They sometimes have Eddie Redmayne picspams, stop judging me! With your eyes!]

Now on my reading/viewing list: Feu d' Amour: Seductive Smoke.

Because I like vintage pornography. I think that'll be what I collect.

Playlist dump, nothing to see here.

So Deathcab for Cutie wrote a half-assed song for a half-assed movie based on a half-assed book.

*inconsolable*

My day begins much like any other. I am woken up by the fire alarm, and our entire floor is evacuated and the whole process takes a half an hour. For the rest of the day, I waste my tuition, and my precalc prof helps by spending half the class talking about philosophy on request. I'm starting to dislike him more for his principals and less for his teaching style, which can be forgiven because it is his first year. But that's not what I'm here to talk about.

So I'm coming home on the train, I'm on the green line for those of you who know Boston, between the MFA and Northeastern. My mom calls, which is nothing unusual because I'm coming home for the weekend. We talk for a while, and she can't come and pick me up because my aunt got hit by a messenger bike and is now is in the ER, she doesn't know when she's going to get out and someone has to look after my grandmother. At the end of the call, my mom says something to the effect of 'Something will be different when you get home, and I want to have dad tell it to you in person.'

It's something bad, I know this. So I call my dad and get it out of him, my cat's dead. She had a run-in with a coyote and now she is no more, he's sorry. As is my wont, I start crying, it just hits me out of nowhere. I probably look very weird, since I'm some random girl in a tophat bawling her eyes out somewhere between Northeastern and Symphony. I keep crying for pretty much the whole ride, until I get on the red line, in fact. I get a lot of weird looks. I break down a couple of times on the way to South Station. By the time I'm on the train home, however, I'm mostly okay in a kind of not-okay way.

I see Alex and John Conner at the bus station. It has been a few years since I last saw him, but John Conner has not changed a bit.

When I get home, my dad is there. If he wasn't, I probably would have not noticed the bag that contains my cat, or the third of her that remains. It's funny, on the way home I was planning on examining the body, maybe doing a little bit of dissection. There is not enough left of her to justify it, unfortunately. Perhaps this is how I deal with death. I am clearly going into the right profession.

I remember the day I got Maisie. It was a few weeks after my sixth birthday, the Christmas season was in full swing. There were Christmas lights everywhere in this park we passed, when I would write about it later for a writing assignment I would get complimented on the description by the teacher. When we got there, there were these two cats. I think the other one wasn't for sale. Maisie was the only one of her litter who had survived, she'd been found in a barn. She was feral at that point. She was also cute, about six months old. I picked her up because I was six years old, and she scratched me. This would not be the last time.

According to a pamphlet I read once, as an outdoor cat, Maisie should have only lived about ten years. And yet, she was always very healthy, very active, and when my parents let her out yesterday morning, it was nothing unusual. Nothing bad had ever happened to her aside from the usual fights with the neighborhood cats. Maisie never quite grew out of being feral, though she'd settled down over the years. If you petted her for too long or held her when she didn't want to, she wouldn't hesitate to scratch you. But that day was different. It was my mother who found her, or what was left of her. It was probably a coyote who got her, we've been having more and more of those and they like house pets. Cats, small dogs, anything that can't run away fast enough, basically.

Her number was up, that's all there is to it. I'm sure she died as she lived: angry, violent, and outdoors.

[Saved for posterity and because my notebook doesn't log conversations.]

ranmafreak93 (7:44:13 PM): Why would you blow up a laboratory? What purpose would it serve? What did that cute little laboratory ever do to you?
stoptheworld26 (7:44:49 PM): IT LOOKED AT ME FUNNY :C
ranmafreak93 (7:45:32 PM): HOW COULD IT, IT'S A ROOM FOR CRYING OUT LOUD. *cradles charred remains of laboratory*'
ranmafreak93 (7:45:50 PM): This seems to be the thing for forensic shows to do now.
stoptheworld26 (7:46:07 PM): Hahaha
stoptheworld26 (7:46:16 PM): I know they do it on Bones...
stoptheworld26 (7:46:17 PM): OFTEN.
stoptheworld26 (7:46:26 PM): What else do they do it on?
ranmafreak93 (7:46:43 PM): WHY? HOW CAN THEY SANCTION SUCH TERRIBLE ABUSE ON INNOCENT LITTLE LABORATORIES
ranmafreak93 (7:46:58 PM): WITH THEIR CUTE LITTLE SCOPES AND COMPUTERS
ranmafreak93 (7:47:31 PM): Especially one as nice as the one on Bones. I wouldn't mind working there, honestly.
ranmafreak93 (7:47:53 PM): Except for the fact that it seems to blow up.
stoptheworld26 (7:48:07 PM): Haha!
stoptheworld26 (7:48:09 PM): I'd work there
stoptheworld26 (7:48:16 PM): I'd follow TJ Thyne aroung
stoptheworld26 (7:48:20 PM): *around
stoptheworld26 (7:48:25 PM): and hide scissors from him :P
ranmafreak93 (7:49:33 PM): As would I. *wisting* But I'd work there even if he didn't work here.
ranmafreak93 (7:49:41 PM): Because that place must be well-funded.
ranmafreak93 (7:49:58 PM): Compared to some of the labs I've worked in.
ranmafreak93 (7:50:12 PM): I bet they blow it up when they need to redecorate.