Folklore Fanatic

What most people can't seem to figure out from my journal is that I do most of my lj posting as comments in journals and communities other than my own. I AM around; I like to listen and observe if I can't think of something coherent to say, which is often because of the whole constantly half-asleep disease thing. Fear not! Posts of a non-personal nature starting in April will be public; there will probably be plenty as the general election draws nigh.

Garb creation and mending are underway, the tent dags are coming along at pace, and I am simultaneously cleaning the garage/house so that I can have a garage sale. This cleaning will accomplish three goals at once:

1. I will be forced to sell stuff I don’t need when i discover I have no room for it.

2. I will make some money.

3. It’s good exercise. (The weather has also been unbearably hot, but I work mostly in the shade.

When I move, timeline unknown, I hope I will have the good sense to keep everything organized from the start. Life is so much better when you commit to cleaning weekly. I won’t describe in lurid detail the horrors of cleaning a mice-infested garage out that’s been left messy for a decade, but I guarantee you that it is gross. I thought my parents would never want to have their house look like their parents’, but it seems I was wrong. Having seen the cumulative effects of aging, multiple pets, and slovenliness, I will never let my future family live like that. It doesn’t help that we rarely throw anything out. This is my weakness, too: I scrapbook, I save, and I collect. But I do organize my stuff.

This year, I will finally finish that fully-boned washable corset that’s been sitting around for two years. All it needs is the edging. I am also planning on making Mary of Burgundy’s black and gold portrait gown, redoing my 2005 masquerade ball costume, and finishing a couple of other pieces. Lots and lots of work ahead over the next few weeks.

If I've enlightened, inspired or enslaved your mind, please consider buying me a tea. Hell, just buy me one anyway. I'm still poor.

Originally published at Folklore Fanatic. You can comment here or there.

There was a disturbing article in Teleread a couple of days ago that said schools are increasingly likely to eliminate library budgets or treat them as luxuries. We all know what happens to luxuries during economic recessions.

Even in our low-budget elementary and primary schools, our teachers made sure to emphasize the use of libraries, and I usually read several books a week. In high school, our library was a godsend. The librarians knew I was eating lunch in there when I wasn’t supposed to, but I didn’t leave a mess, so then turned a blind eye while i munched away in the nonfiction sections. That was when I was a sophomore and couldn’t drive home for lunch. The librarian taught me how to use WorldCat to find articles from Time Magazine covers I had seen as a kid and wanted to read years later.

We often had free periods in the middle of the day when I wanted to study All of our classrooms were usually offices for the teachers as well, so I couldn’t work in those, and 47 minutes is not enough time to make driving home for work worth it, even if I could. I used the desks in the library to prepare for memorization exams for Latin, Theater, English, Chemistry, and who knows what else. I owe several As and A+s to that school library.

The town library was small, underfunded, and swamped. This surprised me, as we were one of the two wealthiest towns in the greater school district comparatively speaking. The town next door over where I was born and grew up was more blue-collar and middle class, but it owned a larger building that it shared with the police and fire departments at one time and thus had leftover space when those moved out for expansion. Sometimes I suspect that the “town” town residents - those who lived in the oldest buildings directly in the heart of our new town — were either wealthy enough to afford to buy books they couldn’t find in the library or wanted to keep the library in its current space because they liked things “the way they were.” In any case, our branch was rarely useful for anything but checking out CDs and audiobooks or the occasional hardcover from the 1970s. When I went on my Arthurian binges, they usually involved going downtown to the largest branch or to the local university or hopping from one regional branch to another for a book here, a book there.

I can only imagine what it would have been like in high school if we had no alternative to working in the cafeteria, the hub of all social activity in high school, where halls run undivided down both sides and you have to cross it to go to shop class, gym, the auditorium, or the parking lots. Don’t get me wrong, once I went to college, the dining hall was my favorite place to be, but  studied there because I have a sleeping disorder and the noise and constant activity would keep me awake. Also, I was still a perfectionist in high school and had trouble blocking out the constant stream of people walking by the tables. A socially conscious girl who wanted to please her friends, not look too antisocial, and pay attention to her crush who just walked over to the soda machine would have had issues with willpower and focus.

I didn’t think that much about the library in school because I expected it to always be there. From childhood, I knew that schools had libraries and books for me to read or reference. It was an extension of my computer room and study desk at home, an empty classroom with infinite knowledge available, an alternative to slackerdom and smoking several things on the hill just beyond school property, a refuge from social isolation when I has just moved to town and had no friends. The library was an extension of me. I used it almost every day.

Lest someone say that everyone has internet and a computer at home, this NPR story talks about a girl in high school who has to type all of her written work ON A CELL PHONE:

[Rosemarie Bernier, president of the California School Library Association and librarian at Hamilton High School in Los Angeles,] spoke of a student with a first period English class who came to her in tears because she didn’t have enough time to transfer and reformat the essay she had written on her cell phone. Since she doesn’t have a computer at home, the student’s cell phone is her only hope of completing assignments that need to be typed.

I can sympathize. I convinced my parents to buy me a laptop when I went back to university to finish college after a several year lapse. That was in 2009. I soon discovered that virtually NO ONE used desktops in college anymore except in the libraries. One of the classes I took had in-class online exams. The professors just ASSUMED we all had laptops. They assumed. Had I been less successful in convincing them, had the previous Christmas season not been in the midst of the financial crisis when electronics companies halved their prices, I would have flunked that course.

I am sure that there were a few students who had to live in the 24-hour library because they had no laptops. They couldn’t take most technology courses.

This is the problem with assuming everyone has what you have: often, you are the privileged one. Others are not always as fortunate, and those are the people you forget about when you cut funding, shutter programs, and just assume that bureaucracy will magically redistribute and reallocate resources and give everyone a happy ending.

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Originally published at Folklore Fanatic. You can comment here or there.

I’m alive. I just spent three weeks recuperating from the stress of finals period, when I was awake for a week straight doing nothing but writing papers. It took me the better part of Christmas to snap out of drone mode. Now I have 20 more days before SENIOR SPRING OMFG.

I’m really torn as to what fiction I should be working on right now: contest entries/anthology subs, other short stories, or a novel-in-progress. It would be nice to actually have something to show before I sink into the time drain that is college again, but I may never have this much free time where I don’t have to look for a job, and I could concentrate on making daily writing a routine, therefore a task less likely to drop off during stressful periods. Thoughts? Suggestions?

I need to cut down on my sugar intake. Maybe cut down on calories altogether. Urg.

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Originally published at Folklore Fanatic. You can comment here or there.

IMPORTANT NOTE: I’m so pissed off about this and various episodes of -isms this month that I had to take a step back. When I returned, this post was what came out. I hope you’ll be able to forgive me for my sarcasm. I’m trying not to throw things in frustration here, so I’m writing something for the sake of my furniture’s well-being. After all, I don’t even own most of it.

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The Inauguration of President Brack Hussein Obama, 44th President of the United States of America.

Go. Save now. You know you want to.

Originally published at Folklore Fanatic. You can comment here or there.

This is basically cut and pasted from Karnythia’s blog, but I don’t want to start on a rant about Alaska’s political corruption or Sarah Palin (*shudder, shudder*), so I’m just going to give you a link so that you can read the news article:

Emmonak Alaska needs help surviving the winter. Palin is…Jesus I’m at my desk crying. Palin is doing fuck all and there are kids going to bed hungry in the cold and the dark. We’re donating tomorrow.

If you would like to help the people of Emmonak:
Emmonak Tribal Council
P.O. Box 126
Emmanok, AK 99581
(907) 949-1720

or

City of Emmonak, (907) 949-1227/1249 (They will take donations by credit card.
Please specify the donation is for heating oil!)

Originally published at Folklore Fanatic. You can comment here or there.

Mark Scoble, previously banned from Second Life for letting his twelve-year old son use his adult account, found out recently that a script he was using to scrape his social networking data from Facebook caught the attention of its bots. Scoble was temporarily banned from Facebook, and all of his user information seems to have followed him into the nethersphere.

Keep this in mind, people. In their power-grab for data, Facebook’s managers seem to care more about retaining the information of their users as a group more than they care about keeping your identity on Facebook as an individual. Previous attempts to wipe individual profiles from the social networking site have been time-consuming, tedious, and fraught with inconsistencies.

Recent methods of deleting one’s profile have become easier of late, but remember that ‘deactivated’ is not the same as ‘deleted.’ There are ways to aggregate data without pissing Facebook off (see comment #8 here), but they aren’t well-known enough to make it easy or risk-free. There are several inferences one can draw from the escapades of those who attempt to control access to the data from which corporations make their money. None of them are pretty. In the not-too-distant future, Google and Facebook will have more showdowns, and the losers in the battle of privacy and access will be us — the consumers.

I think it bears repeating: whosoever controls the personal information rules the world.

Originally published at Folklore Fanatic. You can comment here or there.

Despite the mediocre reception and critical reviews of several recent videogame-turned-movie-franchise ventures, Paramount Pictures decided to upgrade the incredibly popular Nickelodeon show, Avatar: The Last Airbender, into a live-action film. M. Night Shyamalan (of recent bombs like The Happening and Signs, the guy who went from a one-trick pony with The Sixth Sense to a one-trick pony with lots of corporate funding) is set to direct. Entertainment Weekly leaked the cast of the movie, and GUESS WHAT? ALL FOUR LEADS ARE WHITE AS <strike>SPARKLY VAMPIRES</strike> MR. STAY-PUFF. To add insult to injury, the casting directors picked Jesse “Beautiful Soul” McCartney (of Disney fame) to play to Zuko, who is the fantasy equivalent of an emo!goth warrior anti-hero.

Given that all four principals are clearly portrayed as representative of various East Asian cultures, and that the leads have the physical characteristics of each of their respective kingdoms, Paramount is set to make a movie off of a storyline that had no white people in it, especially not as the leads, using…white people as the leads.

 I’m so…tired of this ind of idiocy, so I’ll instead point you to a post in metafandom that has several links to articles discussing this in a more coherent way than I could do at this point.

Originally published at The Multiracial Muse. Please leave any comments there.

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