I enjoyed many of the Festivids, but the reason you should watch Propagation is to be recruited to Threshold, a short-lived but really neat sf alien invasion show where the aliens keep winning. Stars Carla Gugino, Peter Dinklage, and Brent Spiner, along with a very handsome military man with a mysterious backstory that sadly never got explored. Go, watch, then watch more!

Also, I don’t know if this Life vid works as a recruiter vid because the ways it employs canon to match with the lyrics are so good; watch it and find out!

( urban fantasy, sf Islam )

Your internet is not my internet: I read about this new Facebook stuff and it just makes me confused. Filters are exotic and nobody knows how to use them? And so Facebook is going to let other people decide what my Groups are? Why can’t I manage my friends myself and filter out specific people when I need to? (I take it that hidden somewhere in the bowels of Facebook settings, deeper even than privacy controls, you can do this, but that they expect Groups to become dominant.)

The LJ/DW solutions seem so intuitive and elegant, whereas Facebook’s prompting for me to add people to various Lists has been terrible. Am I just wanting those kids to get off of my lawn? (I should also note: I declared LJ bankruptcy and gave up on updating my friendslist/filters there. I haven’t been filtering at DW, though I also have not been adding back journals that seemed to be for reading purposes only. I expect I will have to start filtering soon, though. So it’s not as if manual filtering is easy. It’s just so much better for what I want to do than automatically being added to groups!)

( reviews: Ilona Andrews, music in Buffy, and digital images )

The most recent LJ stuff, brilliantly satirized here by marcelo (or is it satire?), has helped push me to move more towards Dreamwidth. Also, my LJ list has been broken for a while, in the sense that I haven’t been adding anyone back or going beyond a tight filter because I got overwhelmed and neurotic, and I’d like to start again.

What this means for this journal on LJ: initially, I’m consolidating comments on DW, which I hope will help the conversations. I love comments, especially on stories! I really hope everyone comments at DW, or on the AO3!

As for my reading list: I’ll be trying to read new people as well as old friends via starting fresh on DW, so if you like, please do find me on DW, where I’m still rivkat. If you crosspost to DW, I’ll be reading you there. (If I miss you, sorry, just let me know! I’m sure I’ve dropped more than a few balls in the transition.) If you don’t crosspost but don’t have locked entries (that I can see) I will probably follow you as a feed. For non-crossposting journals with locked entries, I will probably try tracking them. Suggestions welcome, of course.

( Harris, Singh, Andrews and Brook on hellhounds; Lucifer; Rob Thurman; Laurell Hamilton  )

Fic rec: Mistaken for Strangers, by bellatemple . As an acafan I couldn't not love it. And if you think about the SPN-fan relationship as indicated by the show, the title gets even better.

( Werewolves, assassins, dragons, young offenders, and whatever it is that CJ Cherryh writes )

My very first Smallville story, The Presence of Fire, is up at the Audio archive, courtesy of cathexys.

( Jim Butcher and Ilona Andrews, heir to Laurell Hamilton )

Quotes for my commonplace book:

Und willst du nicht mein Bruder sein, So schlag' ich Dir den Schädel ein. (If you don't want to be my brother, then I'll smash your skull in.)

“We fed the heart on fantasy; the heart grew brutal on the fare.” Wm. Butler Yeats

"Torture, from Latin torquere, to twist. What visual instruction in etymology! ... Whoever was tortured, stays tortured. Torture is ineradicably burned into him, even when no clinically objective traces can be detected." Jean Améry, At the Mind's Limit: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and its Realities

Greetings, sportsfans. In an attempt to distract myself from more pressing concerns, I present some books of interest. Authors covered: Sarah Andrews, Maxx Barry, Michael Bronski, Lois McMaster Bujold, Jim Butcher, Jonathan Franzen, Daniel Handler, Dan Savage, and Don Winslow.

( Read more... )

I’m also 60 pages in to John Keegan’s Six Armies in Normandy, picked because I wanted to read about a nobler endeavor, and I’m really enjoying it. Those beautiful, complex, rounded British sentences – I love them, and the subject matter is fascinating. Ooh, and for bedside reading I have a SV novel with Lex on the cover. I’m not exactly a hard sell in matters touching Lex, and it was half off at the Strand (as was the Jim Butcher novel).

In other news, I took the “which Supreme Court Justice are you?” quiz at selectsmart, and got Ginsburg & Breyer before Souter, which shows how much the quizmaker knows. The questions weren’t really designed to sort as between Ginsburg, Breyer, and Souter, or between O’Connor and Kennedy, or between Scalia and Thomas. The questions were also infelicitously worded: “Do you support racial gerrymandering?” Um, yeah, I think voting districts ought to be drawn so that minorities have a good chance at proportional representation in the legislature; what about you?

More Martha soon. And then more slash.