Karma Laundrette

A few years ago, a friend in the acting community here gave me a copy of a movie he wrote and directed to possibly review on HDJM to get some press out. I watched it. And there was no way I was going to give it a positive review. Technically it was fine. Solid, if very "film school project-y."

However.

( FEMINIST RANT - mentions of rape, as that is the subject of said movie, there are no details under the cut of that act. )

but this is how many of you remember to come to HDJM and read all of the awesome writing there. (Hannibal continues to be CRAZY popular, which is awesome.) I'm proud of all of my girls, for sure. <3

Game of Thrones is here, btw, and it took me FOREVER to get it done because I am a total drag-ass today.

Instead of complaining, I will simply point you to this amazing post on TUMBLR (read the comments below the quote) and say that it's just wonderful to see people get that. It took me a while to get that (it took me having teenagers, honestly) and seriously, nothing has been pissing me off more in fandom that seeing people write boys saying that when they're doing something perceived as negative (or simply emotional) that they're being like a "little girl."

My girls love what they love, and don't know that they shouldn't love it. Them feeling passionately about their interests shouldn't be seen as being less important or valuable as a teenage boy loving baseball or cars or whatever. How ridiculous. STOP SAYING THINGS ARE LIKE A GIRL/GIRLY IN A NEGATIVE WAY. It's weak, it makes you look like an asshole, and you're a huge part of the problem females everywhere face.

There's no such thing as "I'm not one of those girls." Because there's a bunch of girls that say THAT, so you're one of THEM. And you're someone that is siding with misogyny when you do say that, by the way.

LET PEOPLE LIKE WHAT THEY LIKE. It doesn't take anything away from YOU if someone likes something you don't. (Unless it's liking your things once they're out of your possession. In that case, it absolutely takes away from you.) :)

There better be some detailed sexing in your gee dee fic if you are rating it EXPLICIT. Here, let me help. Explicit: fully and clearly expressed or demonstrated; leaving nothing merely implied; unequivocal

See, the reason why I am reading fanfic marked NC-17/E (for EXPLICIT) is because I want to read the bonings, okay? I want to read all the naughty prep, the during, and the messy afters. I DO NOT WANT TO READ THE EQUIVALENT TO A "CAMERA PANS TO ROARING FIRE." That is what fanfic is FOR: to freakin' turn the cameras back towards the BONINGS.

(I will not be judged by you, random skimmer of flists! And every time I read about clothed dry humping that is maybe one paragraph long and I've already read a good 60K of your 70K fic THAT WAS RATED EXPLICIT, a kitten is straight up murdered by a clown. Did you know that was the consequence of mislabeling your fics?!

Because I hate dressing up like a clown just to murder a kitten, but I am bound by law, and you should be too.)

JFC, and the M rating for a crotch lined up with another where they can feel the outline of some dudes dick in his pants. I GREW UP MORMON AND EVEN I KNOW THAT AIN'T PORN. That was a sin, not porn. LEVI-LOVINGS <<<<< GROWN UP SEXINGS.

Come on, Sterek Tag on AO3. Get your shit together. If only to save the life of a kitten and my pores from the greasepaint. IF ONLY FOR THAT.

Signed,
Writer who is avoiding writing her own damn story. [grumpycat.gif]

Which might sound strange, because I am still fannish about some shows. This post pretty much sums up how I feel about current fannish trends, aka - rolling around in spoilers and speculations and red herrings and becoming UNBELIEVABLY ANGRY about things and then spending the season bitching about how those spoilers and speculations and red herrings weren't accurate. (Oh, you don't say?)

I have not one single fannish Tumblr on my feed now. No one can be trusted (aside from my Miss Muse), I have painfully found out. I took K_B off my feed last night because someone put in their g.d. author's notes to a fic post "now that we all need a little..." blah blah - which means that they are hinting about a spoiler/speculation/red herring and now I AM INFECTED WITH IT. :(

Everyone can have the fannish experience they want. Which seems to be that they want to be angry and hate a show they continue to watch (oh my god, don't even get me started on the BZUH?-ness of that). So why can't I have the fannish experience I want? Which is to watch the show when it airs, and then talk - BEHIND A CUT - about what I liked, etc? Because people are selfish, that's why. I'm sorry if that makes you angry with me. (People who don't care about my wishes and wants make ME angry.) As flaming_muse said: spoilers should be OPT IN, not OPT OUT.

I've had four different fics on my hard drive that I've essentially deleted. I can't even consider moving forward with any of them, because my joy in the show and sharing it are pretty much gone - not to mention the whole "feeling paralyzed about writing the future with hints of what's to come having been carelessly posted."

I'm just tired of selfish behavior. It's like the majority of the people on the internet exhibit ADD behavior: complete lack of impulse control and thinking things through, or having empathy for others. /killjoy.

There are a handful of people that I enjoy in this fandom, and I'll continue to read them (and I'm talking, like six people), but man - the rest of the fandom has pretty much killed it for me. I've been in one fandom or another since I was, hmm. 11? I'm 40. I've never had such a negative experience. I say this not to be a whiner, but to stress how UNUSUAL this behavior is. This is not how fandoms typically behave, n00bs. As I tell my kids and their friends: Manners are free, so there's no excuse for you to not have any.

Not that it's a hardship to other fan-types in Glee that I'm not really wanting to play ball anymore, I'm not trying to prop myself up in importance (because let's face it - I'm not.) I'm just expressing myself in my personal fannish space.

ION, I bought my son skinny jeans and they bag on him. O_O The child eats almost $200 in groceries A WEEK. If I could bottle his metabolism...

[ETA]: Just to clear the record: I'm not trying to be all sniffy/flouncing. I'm expressing my frustration, is all. (And it should go without saying that there should be NO MENTIONS OF SPOILERS OF ANY KIND in comments here. Or speculation. Or red herrings. Or mention of Brussels sprouts. Because those are gross and make you fart.)

First, Hey, Don't Judge Me is cooking today (with lots coming later today, too.)
Game of Thrones! Hope you like your incest. And baby killing.
Dexter! The rewatch continues with the beginning of Season 2, eps. 1 - 3.
Touch! The new Keifer show that is steadily picking up steam.
Later today: Mad Men! Bomb Girls! And THE RETURN OF THE BORGIAS (but debuting on HDJM!) Show my girls some love, if you would be so kind. They're working for praise, so how about you give them a raise? :)

FIC REC: one of those "Please drop what you are doing, read this, leave encouraging feedback, and marvel that this is in the world" kind of fics.

Sweet! A Love Story Told In Sugar by ohquixotica (I believe there are two other authors contributing as well?

WHY: Did you love Pushing Daisies? Do you love surreal romance and beautiful words and maybe a little Like Water For Chocolate? Because this story is all of that and more. I very rarely get emotionally moved by a lot of fanfic. I'm a jerk, I suppose. I choked up, clutched my heart, squealed with happiness, and felt everything right along with the characters. So funny, so sweet, so achy in places I could barely catch my breath. Everything I love in a story and all I didn't know I needed. PLEASE. Track this one. It's a WiP.

And those in Glee fandom? THAT IS HOW YOU WRITE 3rd PERSON OMNISCIENT. Know your POVs, it seems to be a problem. Do I sound snippy? I'll tell you why. But before I cut, PLEASE PLEASE READ.TRACK, BOOKMARK SWEET. You'll thank me later, I guarantee.

( In which I go all Santana-like on entitlement, manners, why people share fanfic in the first place, and mother frakkin' TONE. )

And here come the anonymous "Stoney's a bitch" comments, I'm sure. Sorry for having opinions in my own journal. *

*no, I'm not. And one last time: CATCHING TYPOS is one thing. Talking down to me is another. Guess which one I'm cool with? (And christ, the story is 148,000 words. There's bound to be an error. Find me a printed book without a single error, would you?)

It's been a while since I've had to do one of these, clearly it's time again.*

As an older fandom dinosaur (note to you kids in high school: I've been dabbling in fandoms for literally decades) I've had my own share of bumps in the road, hard lessons to learn, etc. It happens. Usually, you find that people are cool and understand social rules, even on the internet. Why, I remember my first week on LJ where I took someone's icon and didn't credit the maker, a BNF, too. The maker emailed me and said, "Looks like you're new. Here's how it works to credit." Thank you, person! I didn't know, and now I did. They weren't shitty about it, they were just making sure I knew what was what. (I'm...going to be shitty about it, fair warning.)

No one likes to come to a new school and not know where to sit, after all, right?

So let me explain the very basics of fanfic and fandom and how we're a community. And you don't fuck over your community (in case you didn't know that already.)

( Disclaimers, permissions and blatant theft. )

I will own that I might be a little grumpy [hurr] given that my smoke detectors all went off last night at 2am for about 15 minutes in a cacophony of evil. Oh, and also because I'm bothered. =/

PLAY NICELY WITH OTHERS. We're a community here. This is meant to be FOOD FOR THOUGHT, not gas on the fire.

*I think my mean girl rants are why someone called me an ego-maniacal shit-heel. *shrug* I've never censored myself, not going to start doing it now.

Happy about:

1. high waisted jeans coming back into style! No more muffin tops, no more looking at your coin slot when you bend over, no more hiking up an ill-fitting waist band. (Hey, "designers." We get it. You secretly hate women, I've known this for years. But guess what? Women's bodies, for the most part, go out at the hip part, then go in at the waist part. Sometimes as much as 10 inches in some cases. And when you make waist bands on low rise jeans that are a straight line and the same diameter as the hip portion, they buckle in the back and people can see butt cracks, and guess who wants to see that? Not me.) If properly tailored trousers were good enough for Katharine Hepburn, they're good enough for me. YAY FLATTERING FOR MY BODY. Hepburn, Lauren Hutton and Ali McGraw are my style icons, what can I say? I'm a camel Birkin bag away from being a parody of myself. (omg, I want a camel Birkin bag. And I don't "want" purses.)

I'm not hot on an elephant/wide leg, but a straight leg with a waist that hits my waist? Yes, please. (I don't care if you don't like them. I've had to put up with low-rise for years, and the horrendous skinny jeans that two people out of 1000 look good in. Suck it.) Let's just hope that the stirrup pants I've been seeing will quietly slip away, because damn. No me gusta. Not even back in '85.

2. The awesome episode of SouthLAnd last night on TNT. Are you watching? Why the hell not? You need to be, it's amazingly done - actors, writing, cinematography, all are outstanding.

3. The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. Guys. Remember how I loved the one from Jersey? And that's pretty much the only one I could tolerate? NO. BEVERLY HILLS. It's everything that show should have been all along. Extravagant lifestyles, detached from reality, amazingly bitchy women (Camille Grammer.) Seriously, this show is uh-may-zing. My HUSBAND even watches it with me. What does that tell you? I read the most amazing review (that made me jealous for their writing skills) and recorded the whole series to be watched over the break. WOOOOOOW. If anything, you have to watch the dinner party with Alison DuBois, the craziest narcissist that ever narcississed. (My older sister claims a real life friendship with her. Trust me, the woman is KRAZY. Like, she goes around claiming to be the "reason for the Amber Alert." UM, NO. THAT WOULD BE THE CHILD HERE IN TEXAS NAMED AMBER. You self-centered, wrong wrong WRONG bitch.) Sometimes you just need to feel superior to people with more money than sense, you know?

4. A day of filming, whoo! This is the project I've been working on for a while, the director is fairly well known in some circles, and his "buddy" producing this movie is Robert Evans. Oh please, oh please, oh please let this work out. Or I'd just like to hear him tell me that the kid stays in the picture. :) I'll be working on this for the next few weeks, so that's very exciting. The script has gone through a major overhaul (as they do) and I'm no longer the lead. Boo. Chalk it up to the friendship my buddy and the director have forged over the past two months. I'm glad for my friend, though, he's incredibly talented.

Not happy about:

1. Hipsters getting their American Apparel in my Hip Hop. I've had to drop two music sites from my feed because of these Indie dudes that have all of a sudden discovered Hip Hop (wow.) and think they know what they're talking about and write about it like some douchebags that grew up on Laurie Anderson and Phillip Glass with some Sufjan Stevens and Sigur Ros for party time and try to talk about Mos Def being a "sensitive poet" with beats that "hit the ears like waves crashing on shore." SHUT UP, NERD.

I want to give those guys a purple nurple when I read stuff like that. I mean, yeah, I'm a white girl, but I'm a white girl that grew up on funk, Motown, and the BIRTH of hip hop, and would just really love for the Furious Five to backhand these dillweeds. They were rapping about busting their sacroiliac back before you were a regret in your father's eye, yo. Gah. And saying that Dre "mockingly" talks about his grandiose lifestyle... WHAT. Yes it's hilarious when Warren G talks about bitches at his side and bitches at his back, but he's not being SARCASTIC, fool. Get your irony out of my struggle for the climb up the white man's ladder, Dahveed. (lol.)

"But when Fitty - I believe we should pronounce his name in the manner he's chosen - when Fitty talks about forcing a woman to perform fellatio on him after a concert, it's not unlike Captain Blicero and his forced sex slave Gottfried launching themselves into the unknown, space." Uh, pretty sure Fitty Pence didn't read Gravity's Rainbow. Because NO ONE READ GRAVITY'S RAINBOW. (Clarification, I made this quote up. The others are real, though.)

Dear Mr. Clint McCance,

Your recent spate of hateful anti-gay comments and your understanding of what Christianity means has me worried. Not for the children whom you encouraged to kill themselves, and that's mostly due to how cartoonish your anger has come off to the rest of us, but my concern is for your everlasting soul. When you state that you are a Christian that implies one thing: you believe in the teachings and preachings of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. The entire religion is based on the ten commandments of the Torah, then built upon with the teachings of Jesus, who actually gave two new commandments and claimed they were the most important of all.

"Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind." and "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself." He furthered defined that latter one by stating, "As I have loved you, love one another."

Spitting and hissing at children (they are children, sir, be wary of that millstone about your neck) and encouraging them to end their lives, lives that are a gift from your Lord and Savior, does not sound like loving one another. Calling them derogatory names does not sound like love. In fact, it sounds a lot like the word "Raca," and Jesus Christ of Nazareth told his followers in his Sermon on the Mount that calling their brother (which is a general term, for aren't we all children of God and therefore brothers and sisters?) Raca, or a slur, puts you in danger of hellfire. And since you're living your life under the banner of Christianity, I know that hellfire is the ultimate evil as it forever keeps your from your God and your eternal joy and probably would hurt an awful lot. One could logically deduce that a Christian would do all they could to not go to hell.

I always find it curious that devout - some could say rabid - Christians foam at the mouth about homosexuality when Jesus of Nazareth spoke not one word about it, not in any of the four Gospels of the New Testament, which as you know being the devout religious type that you are, chronicles the teachings of Christ both before and after His miraculous resurrection, and in His own words. One could surmise that since Jesus had ascended to heaven and felt it necessary to come back and teach a few more things to His people that He would distill His words to the most essential pieces of doctrine for Man's salvation. And one could also surmise that since Christ didn't discuss homosexuality after His resurrection that it wasn't as key a topic to Him as, say, declaring peace unto His followers and saying for His disciples to "feed [his] sheep." That can obviously be taken literally and metaphorically. Metaphorically means that it's an example to be applied to something else as a representation, and in this case, "sheep" means his followers and all of the people on earth. That includes homosexuals, Lutherans, Bangladeshis, and NBA players.

(I defined that because I noticed that you used a word that doesn't exist, "thereselves" and didn't know if I was using language that you weren't familiar with, and it is very important to me that I feed you this knowledge of your Lord and Savior who promises eternal glory to all that will come unto Him. I'm using the word "feed" to represent the idea of teaching.)

"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." Now put that in context of saying that you would cast Jesus out of your house, or you hope Jesus would commit suicide or contract AIDS (that's capitalized, by the way) and die a painful and slow death. How will you stand before your maker with love in your heart when you have cursed at your Lord and Savior who shed His blood for you that you might have everlasting life?

"Wherefore by their fruits shall ye know them." The fruits of your labors appear to be hate and evil, sir. Blessed are the peacemakers and the merciful. It would behoove you to spend some time actually learning the teachings and meaning of the words that your God has given you. Focus on Christ so you can call yourself a Christian. Recognize that the one word Jesus used more than almost any other was the word "Love." Love is the key to your soul enjoying everlasting peace and joy. Love is smiling, love is joyfulness, love is embracing those that would not otherwise embrace you, love is putting others before yourself, love is wishing well of others.

Who knows how much time you have on this earth to turn your heart around and open it to your fellow man so that your Lord and Savior can take you into his loving embrace (not in a gay way) for the eternities? Maybe you should start now.

With your best interests at heart,
Laura, a loving atheist.

This weekend I went with the Mr. to the Gun Show to see what they're really like. It can't be that bad, right? Wrong. ( No biceps were kissed in the making of this post. )

And today I get to brave the elements and rip out plants from the garden and put new things in. (No more purple cone flowers, they're taking over, as they do.) Saturday the Mr. and I chopped down 5 trees (our peach tree! Woe. Our Deodar Cedar! DOUBLE woe. And the three yaupon hollies, HOORAY I HATE THOSE THINGS) and carted them off to the mulch dump to make room for the POOL. (And saved big bucks doing it ourselves. More money to buy new trees, hooray!) It's going to be 107 today. SURE WISH THAT POOL WAS DONE. *cry*

If my husband could go ahead and buy a red sports car and flirt with his secretary so we can knock this flippin' mid-life crisis out of the way, that would be super keen with me. He sounded shocked (shocked!) that his mother's third bout of cancer (not currently going well) his job path being set in stone now, his son having Asperger's, his beloved cat dying, and his just turning 40 and acquiring man boobs would have anything to do with his current bout of malaise and sorrow, all of which have been directed at me in the form of eye rolling, huffing and puffing, and outrageous out of nowhere arguments about nothing. True fact: the argument I hate more than any is the one that stems from "Yes, I know you said that, but I thought you said this." "Well, I didn't." "Right, but I thought you said..." AUGH!!!! Shut up shut up shut up!!

Yeah, I'm kinda busy here dealing with all of that, too, not to mention the running of a house, trying not to drown our teens when they act like teens, cleaning up dog and cat poop, canning 58 pounds of peaches so they don't rot, handling all of the upcoming school changes, and keeping everyone from the "I'm bored" crap that comes with summer while you, dear husband, travel and live in hotels with room service and housekeeping.

Oh, and then there's the mistake I made of googling my newly released movie and finding all of the bad reviews (there are good ones, too) that mention the "bad supporting actors" that were "over the top" [and I wonder, what the hell did you think you were getting, a Zeffirelli?] the lack of call backs on the acting front (making me think there's something to those reviews) the lack of any advancement on the writing front (and the lack of ambition on my part because of lack of blah blah blah) the posts and comments hither and yon (and in my own lj) expressing hatred for me because I dare to talk about my extreme dislike of Twilight and why I'm a stupid, horrible, angry person with too much time on their hands.

To which I give a resounding, hearty laugh, because where the hell is this extra time, because I could use it!?!

Bad day. Bad series of non-stop crazy days. I'm not even going to go into all the wank online, because I'm avoiding that crap like a zombie with a hunger for my brains. And the first person that tells me to "just breathe" gets my foot in their throat meat. (I cannot STAND that trite saying, for the record. Hate that like I hate sparklepires.) I just need to vent, guys.

I feel that some decadent cookies are in order today, and the house can just clean itself. And if my dog loses a leg and my truck gets stolen, I'm moving into a cardboard box in the mountains, I'm just saying.