zeborahnz

For the one or two people on my flist who watch Criminal Minds and therefore don't actually need the spoiler cut:

( Spoilers for Criminal Minds  )

We were all the same age, 11 boys and 3 girls. At a certain point, about seven of us went to live with Garak on Cardassia. One by one he killed us off, but he liked me, believing I took after him. Unfortunately he then learned (by means of a device on my finger(*) that put me into a virtual reality he could control) that my admirable duplicity was in aid of the less pleasing goal of reforming (my pov) / corrupting (his pov) Cardassia. This discovery was a great disappointment to us both, but we handled things in a civilised manner: we sat down to read a book together so that he could reach behind me and stab me in the back. I was a little concerned whether he was sufficiently advised of human anatomy to make it relatively painless, but please note this was not an anxiety dream of any kind: it was a touching father-son moment.

I did wake with a sensation of a tinge in my back, though.


(*) Boots has got rather more matted fur than I thought, so yesterday I started attempting to comb a bit of it out. I got sufficient fur to make a mouse, and a gouge in my finger pad, so I was wearing a bandaid overnight.

Every now and then I have the urge to write up a short review of a movie the same way I write up short reviews of books on Goodreads. Problem is, I've never been able to find a satisfactory Goodreads-for-movies. Last time I searched, I ended up starting research on how I'd go about building my own.

(The answer is, with great difficulty. I don't have the knowledge or the skills and I particularly don't have the willpower necessary to put in the time to gain the knowledge and the skills.)

I did another hunt today and ended up creating accounts to further investigate:

• DVDCrate - makes a bad first impression with a random error prominently displayed on the main page; I suspect something wrong with a database query. Still, I'm easy, so looked further, but when I create reviews there's no page which lists my reviews. This is kind of a basic feature.
• DVD Aficionado - pretty but clunky. DVDs can only be in one collection at a time (eg it can be 'owned' or 'watched', but not both!). Again you can review items but there's no apparent listing of one's reviews.
• FilmCrave - looked decent considering the advertising and let me have my preferred password with non 0-9a-zA-Z characters. Allowed multiple custom lists to be created and lists all my reviews in one place; on the downside, I couldn't find an RSS feed for that list, the user interface is... frankly bizarre, I was automatically friended by the founder, which fine, but this made his face appear on the friends area of my profile without recourse; plus did I mention the advertising.
• Criticker - lets you create 'private lists' which can be used as tags, lists all reviews in one place and has an rss feed for them (though the item titles are ugly as heck). Downsides: terrible ads and reviews can only be up to 500 characters long.
• Oh, and iheartmovies.com which looks like it'd be exactly what I want if the website was actually up and running.

In the end I went with Criticker. But that 500-character limit is really going to bug me. It's almost tempting to just create a Dreamwidth account just for movie reviews. It's almost tempting to go back to researching how to build my own Goodreads-for-movies.

Mental reminder: I do not have the skills. I do not have the willpower to sustain my interest long enough to gain the skills. Most importantly of all, I do not have the data.

--Oh dear. I just googled "open movie data" and discovered TMDb, "a free and open movie database" with an open API. (None of the services currently using it do what I want.)

Mental reminder: I do not have the skills. I do not have the willpower to sustain my interest long enough to gain the skills....

Title: Lemmings in Love
Vidder: Zeborah
Fandom: Criminal Minds (seasons 1-5)
Music: Lemmings in Love by pornophonique (Creative Commons BY-NC-SA)
Licensed: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA
Summary: Haley and Aaron Hotchner walk side by side. Even when they don't.

Trigger warnings: Lots of quick cutting. Some violence and blood.

Download from Minus.com (82MB zip of .avi movie with .srt subtitles)
Stream from YouTube (captions available)



( Lyrics )

( Notes )

It's official: my old anxiety dream about trying to get students out of the library at closing time but they keep refusing and meanwhile more are coming in...

...has transformed into a new anxiety dream about trying to evacuate students from the library after an earthquake but they keep refusing and meanwhile more are coming in (earthquake? what earthquake?) and also Security won't let me get my bag-that-goes-with-me-everywhere.

(Though otoh, the students were so slow at leaving that I had to stay inside to keep shouting for their attention and must have evaded Security after all because in the end as we were making our way to the assembly point I triumphantly showed someone I had my bag after all.)

Also, level 2 was a maze of a layout complete with bridges to other sections of the library, and the gazillions of fire escapes included a spiral slide made of sleek polished wood. I slid down it. :-)

(Please to link this around, unless you see someone else saying it better, in which case link that.)

A week or so ago someone somewhere (I forget; possibly it was in the context of the Planned Parenthood defunding threat; should I remember or be reminded I'll edit a link back in) pointed out wisely that, though politicians are inclined to devalue an individual vote in favour of their knowledge about majority votes, businessfolk are inclined to value each and every customer. Governing tends (even in proportional representation environments) to be pretty much win/lose; business tends to be "How much do I win?"

And perhaps more to the point, businessfolk own the politicians anyway.

So while writing letters to politicians remains a good thing to do, if you've lost faith in that as a solution, try writing letters to businesses instead. In particular, find out which businesses have been funding the politicians who support these evil laws.

An internet blackout may have stopped SOPA. (Or maybe it was the fact that big businesses signed onto the internet blackout.) But what stopped the Research Works Act was scholars worldwide putting pressure onto the company that had paid for that bill. (Never heard of the Research Works Act? And yet it got stopped without recourse to an internet blackout.)

In the case of the present evilness in Wisconsin, it appears that Scott Walker is heavily funded by ultra-conservative Koch Industries PAC. The Wikipedia article on Koch Industries summarises a bunch of other pro-'free market' political activism on their part, and helpfully links to the Industry Areas section of the Koch website. This page might also be titled "A list of things to boycott". Alas, Koch is friggin' big, and a large number of them are business-oriented rather than consumer-oriented. (I leave identifying the businesses they deal with in order to put pressure on them as an exercise for someone else.) But whether or not you live in the United States, you may want to email or snailmail and tell them that you'll be boycotting:

• LYCRA® fiber and COOLMAX® fabric; and STAINMASTER® carpet, ANTRON® carpet fiber, CORDURA® fabric, and COMFOREL® fiberfill.
• (in North America) Quilted Northern®, Angel Soft®, Brawny®, Sparkle® , Soft 'n Gentle®, Mardi Gras®, Vanity Fair®, and the Dixie® brand of tabletop products; (in Europe) Lotus®, Colhogar®, Delica®, Tenderly® and the Demak'Up® brand of facial cleansing products
• "hunting clothing and outdoor gear for men, women and children" from Matador Pro Shop's online store

Honestly? I suspect in this particular case it will have little effect. Koch Industries is big and diverse and privately owned by a couple of very rich white male ideologues. But it's worth a try, because at worst you're giving them fewer dollars they can use to buy politicians.

And in any cases, there are other battles where this tactic can work. Put pressure on the companies who fund the politicians. Put pressure on the companies who do business with the funders. Put pressure on the companies who accept their advertising dollars and on the companies who share advertising space with them.

This is not how democracy and capitalism were meant to work, but right now it's how they do work. So work it.

I read Artist's road cone Easter makeover and I had a spare empty milk bottle, so I made this:



There's not as many roadcones in my neighbourhood as there used to be, but I still didn't have to go very far.

Cheryl Bernstein also writes about Easter bunnified roadcones and public art. (I also borrowed from her post the idea of affixing the bunny to a stick before putting it in the cone: the original instructions say to cut a hole big enough to fit over the cone, but the top of a roadcone is actually too big to make this practical.)

Any Good Friday where my cat isn't desperately ill is a good Good Friday.

What's more, it's perfectly sunny, which means my yeast mixture rose. It rose so much I had to add an extra cup of flour to the mixture (ie an extra 25%). Then forgot to add extra spice to match. Also I think the temperature in the recipe is too hot really, but I was watching this year so they didn't burn; I just hadn't finished making the glaze yet when I had to yank them out.

Off now to share them with family at parents' house.

(Now with bonus recipe.)

Or possibly a year and a half of living with earthquakes, but I'm going to blame the Hunger Games (which I watched yesterday with my siblings, despite having not read the book, and enjoyed a lot) on the grounds that earthquakes haven't given me nightmares before. A few anxiety dreams, but not waking-up-with-heart-racing nightmares. Not that movies ordinarily give me dreams either, but.


So in my dream -- there's various ordinary dream stuff, like showing my juvenilia to someone and someone else playing with a... reptile-bird-thing? and getting something in my hair that I'd just washed and having to time to wash and dry it again.

But then I was going somewhere along a forest path and realised I'd left my mini backpack behind. (This is my zebra-striped mini backpack that for the last year and a half has gone with me everywhere. I mean like the other night I thought, "I'm tired, I'll just leave it in the other room while I go to bed," and then I thought, "Don't be stupid, you can't go to bed without having your keys and wallet and cellphone and expired passport and ereader and notepaper for emergencies by your bed," and then I thought, "This is an irrational yet valid point," and went to get my mini backpack in order to go to bed.)

So in my dream when I realised I'd left it behind I immediately turned around to go and hunt for it. And came across Dad who had with him not one but two zebra-striped umbrellas, and I was trying to figure out which was mine. About the time I decided, Dad made a comment about a storm coming and I turned to look at the clouds he pointed out (the forest had now turned into the Ilam Fields) and I said something like, "That... kind of looks like a twister."

So we started running away from the twisters. There were at this point dozens or hundreds of us, all running across the Ilam Fields, and I was thinking there was no way we were going to be able to outrun all those twisters.

And then I noticed a blue robot next to a tree on the edge of the field we were going to run past. It was about small-adult-height, but it had no legs, being blocky like a toy, and it was toy-blue, and it had a toy face with a big red dimpled smile. And it shot bolts of energy at us as we came, and the people it shot died bleeding, and it smiled at the blood.

(Think of the creepiest monster you've ever seen on Doctor Who. That's how creepy it was.)

And then I saw another robot on our other side, also shooting, but we had to keep running with the twisters behind us, through this gauntlet of robots, and part of me was making sure I stayed in the middle of the crowd so I might be able to get through while they shot the people around me, and part of me was thinking, was I seriously using the people around me as human shields? and the answer was yes, yes I was, because twisters and creepy smiling shooting robots.

And then I got shot anyway - it hit my umbrella but the shock still knocked me to the ground and I woke before finding out if they'd have noticed I was still alive.


(I like to think not. But they were sadists, not stupid. And besides, there were still those twisters to contend with.)

Title: An Abbreviated Lexicon of Email Scams
Author: Zeborah
Fandom: White Collar (vague spoilers for season 1; inconsistent with end of season 3)
Summary: Scams might rely on altruism or greed, friendship or loneliness, or any of a dozen other human qualities. But they always rely on the investment principle: the more time, effort, and emotion you invest into something, the less willing you are to give it up....

( An Abbreviated Lexicon of Email Scams )