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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) gridlore | |
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I've attended six Giants games this season, and five of them were great. Today was the seventh. 5 out of 7 ain't too bad. Let's begin with the sheer nightmare of getting into the damn park. today was Brian Wilson bobblehead day. In case you are one of those lucky few who have never heard of bobbleheads; they are plastic statues of a person with an outsized head mounted on spring so it wiggles. Cute little bits of kitch, they have become traditional giveaways for ballclubs. Imagine our shock when we got to the park and hour earlier than usual and found lines running for blocks around the Giants' home field. We didn't really care about the damn Wilson doll, we just wanted to get inside the park so we could eat something and settle in to watch batting practice. But, as we were told by a very shrill lady with a bullhorn, that wasn't possible. People had been lining up since 0600 to make sure they got the bobblehead. So many were just collecting their souvenir and leaving that the Giants had closed one of the normal entry gates and dedicated it to exit traffic only! Which resulted in a royal bloody mess of confusion, angry baseball fans who were there for the game, not the freebie, and long, insane, lines. I shall be complaining to Giants Guest Relations. All this over a freaking $30 piece of plastic. Many of which are already up on eBay. But, eventually, the game started. Which is where the day really nosedived. Barry "Expletive Deleted" Zito was on the mound, and today he showed once again why he truly does not deserve his huge contract. We were down 6-0 by the third, and when it became clear in the fourth that the Giants were sleepwalking through this, I made the decision to abandon game. To be honest I just wasn't feeling it that much today. So we meandered back to the train station, taking the time to check out the Giants' Wall of Fame along King St., and eventually headed home. On the train we chatted with a charming gentleman; a Marine Vietnam Vet who just happened to have been born on the 4th of July. We do have tickets for one more game, but it's a weeknight game in September. Depending on how things look, I might take the next day off to let us attend it. The final? San Diego Padres: 10
San Francisco Giants: 4Giants head into the All-Star Break with a 49-39 record, 7 back of the Dodgers in the NL West. ( We also had our photo taken. )Tags: baseball, life
located at: San Jose, Ca, 95118
feeling:  tired
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![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) fatshionista
multidudinous | |
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I am 5'4", 250 pounds, and beautiful. My fat is in my belly, my legs, my chin, my ass. It's all around me, encompassing me, protecting me.
I sway when I walk in a most womanly way, my hips and thighs sliding back and forth my head held high. My hair is curly and wild. All of me reaches out for the world as I move. I fearlessly fill a room. I do not hide.
I am doughy and soft, my skin is remarkably pliant and flexible and womanly. I am all things soft and firm. When my lover comes to me, I envelope him with all of me and he knows he is holding something real. Our bellies say hello sometimes, and I marvel that two things so soft could feel so good together. I lay sometimes, sprawled...and marvel at my boundless girth and how pleasant it feels to be large. I do not wish for less of me in those moments. No. I wish for more of me. To always exist with such limitlessness. I am free.
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keryx | |
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Piko (the car) periodically reminds me that I mean to write about design as expressed in the Cube audio system. These reminders come in the form of soaring music of various sorts; most of the time she gets to pick what the iPod plays. It's not touted as an amazing stereo. It has, you know, 6 speakers. Whatever. It'll play your iPod! This was a big marketing thing, and a strong selling point for me. But not a lot of talk about the sound. Compared to the Scion I used to drive, which has this Super Special Scion Audio Shenanigans Spectacular (SSSASS), the Cube is surprisingly superior sound-wise. See, a big part of the SSSASS was its ability to make the car vibrate. The interior walls and dash, specifically. This was a Huge Big Deal from Scion when they rolled out the car. It probably has a lot to do with the 14 year old boys who stopped and stared at the car: it was a sound system designed for someone who'd think it was exciting to make the car vibrate. Pioneer speakers and a decent subwoofer, all built at angles that amounted largely to extra wall vibration. You know what doesn't contribute to your aural or emotional experience of music? EXTRA WALL VIBRATION. It can obscure some music, even. Mostly it's irrelevant. The Cube does not play that. The first time I played Peter Murphy's I'll Fall with Your Knife (which is soaringly dark - it's a really affecting piece of pop music), I nearly cried. These simple, unvaunted speakers are arranged in a way that points music right at the driver's heart. With the right music, it's like my own personal concert hall - not live music, but pretty effing amazing. And someone designed that. How much time does a design team spend on a car's audio system? This one was well worth the time, with no explicit marketing credit to the team who built it or the product they created. The marketing literature talks about the bulldog exterior, the waves-planet-cocktail-lounge interior [Here, someone got a little carried away with metaphors - like each team had their own, and the copy writers just wrote all of them down. The interior is physically coherent and pleasant, but its explanation is like a Cat Power song.], and not the good work of the audio system. It got me thinking about the design can be talked about - as a feature list rather than an experience. I thought at first that this was a difference between 14-year-old-boy design and design for grownups, and that's still partly what I believe - but I think it's a more complex set of demographics. In a Lexus, where the brand image is more about driving comfort, an audio system like this might have gotten marketing play as a feature; in a lower-end car that's mostly about appearance, overwrought visual metaphors get most of the copy. And if you're going for cute visuals (possibly "feminine" design) over an aggressive driving=power thing (stereotypical "masculine" design), there's no need to have a throbbing subwoofer complete with extra wall vibration. But. If that's true, then I'm perplexed: why did they design such an affecting stereo set up at all? I don't think it's an accident. Tags: art
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susanstinson | |
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I was in a bad mood about going dancing this morning, since the exercise commentary last week was such a drag. There are plenty of ways for me to circumvent those kinds of comments (I could use a physical gesture of refusal -- jabbing the air with my elbows, turning my back, whatever felt right. I could say, "Stop." Or, "Rude." I could wear one of the I'm not quite sure how many fat positive t-shirts that have come my way over the years. I could make some kind of statement, or a series of statements, in the closing circle. I could offer a workshop), and I'm confident that I could pull off any of them, singly or in combination. If I have to, I will. But all I really want to do at the dance is dance. And that's what happened today. It was simple and lovely. I got there tired, but there was live drumming and a xylophone, along with recorded music, from two my favorite djs (they're musicians, too). Their names are John and Lisa. They're a couple with a grandbaby and such lovely, unshowy, playful, respectful ways with each other and with the music. They said that they're moving back to Gloucester over the summer, and I'll definitely miss them when they go. My plan had been to stay more self-contained today, but as soon as I got there, I felt open and happy to be there. Lots of going in a circle, watching people's feet, or their faces, feeling woven in a way that pleased me. I danced just little with the choreographer, and I got to support her as she leaned back to the ground, except maybe she hurt her back a little. Hope that she didn't. I do wish I could find a cheap class with a good teacher to give me some basic skills. A good dancer slid between her legs, on his knees, I think, and she went off to play with him, which made sense to me and also made me laugh. For a while, I rolled near the wall, slapping the floor. I held onto one ankle and spun, hitting the floor with my foot in a way that kept me going around, pretty fast, too. That was kind of wonderful. The fact that my arthritis makes it hard for me to leap or even do small hops and steps gives me a license to be inventive, and I feel as if I play with awkwardness and with monster stumbling strangeness in a way that is such a relief. It really makes me happy. And so does abandon. At another point I was swinging my little blue skirt around, shaking and shaking, and the young women I had had a belly conversation with a few weeks ago came around to shake, too, which felt friendly. All that movement, all that sweating in company, it's cathartic. Still. Tags: dance
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nolose
evilgenius_nnl | |
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NOLOSE Announces Funding for Fat Events Across the Land! NOLOSE is thrilled to announce the recipients of the Small Projects Across the Land grants which support events promoting fat visibility, fat culture and fat fabulousness. We were overwhelmed by the response to our call for proposals and choosing only five amongst the applicants was challenging. Below is a brief description of each the funded projects that were awarded funding. $600 awarded to Fat Kid Flea Market, a fatshion and performance with recycled and locally designed clothes in sizes 14+ and fat positive performances in Austin, Texas. $1,000 awarded to The Fat of the Land: A Queer Chub Harvest Festival, a London UK based Harvest Festival incorporating fat positive performance and information with slow food movement, traditional harvest time rituals, food and a general celebration of abundance. $700 awarded to a one day conference in New York, NY entitled Fat and Queer and focused on Social, Political, Health, Art, Media, Financial and Academic interests (just to name a few) of self identified Fat, Queer folks and their allies. $700 awarded to a one day conference in Boston, MA called Fat and Queer Movement: Past, Present, Future, that will focus on the history and complexity of fat and queer movements. $1,000 awarded to Flabulous!, an evening of drag, cabaret, and burlesque featuring a variety of queer performers of size and their allies in San Francisco, CA. The show will feature pieces that celebrate queer bodies in all of their sizes as well as pieces that directly address body fascism and the lived experiences of people of size. Check the NOLOSE website ( www.nolose.org/spal) soon for more information and further details. NOLOSE* is a volunteer-run organization dedicated to ending the oppression of fat people and creating vibrant fat queer culture. In the activist and empowerment work that we do, we envision a world: - that is accessible to fat people and reflective of us.
- that is without fat discrimination, hatred or prejudice.
- where fat people are empowered to create positive change in ourselves and in our communities.
- where beauty, morality, health, humor and fashion are divorced from size and shape and all bodies are celebrated.
- where fighting fat phobia is seen as integrally linked to other social justice issues such as the women's movement, anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggles of people of color at home and around the world, queer and transgender movements, class struggle, disability rights movements and more.
- where all people have a right to basic human rights as well as joy, sensuality and self-determination.
- and where the diet industry closes up shop as the world sees their products for the oppressive and ineffective scams they are.
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redbird | |
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This month's book list is a little longer than the last, because I didn't do much rereading in June. I wasn't intending this, but looking at my list of books, it's (among other things) showing a significant amount of the range that the term "fantasy" can cover, without including anything that would reasonably be compared to The Lord of the Rings. Naomi Mitchison, Travel Light oursin has to some extent infected me with her interest in Mitchison, whose work is very hard to find. (The only one I'd managed before this was Memoirs of a Spacewoman, a second-hand paperback that is literally falling apart.) This is somewhere in the border between fantasy and fairy tale: the main character is Halla Bearsbairn, so named because she is fostered for a while by a bear, or maybe a were-bear: her foster-mother had been her nurse, who rescued her when her parents decided they couldn't keep her and their newborn son. The bears can't keep her for long, they have to hibernate, so she winds up with a dragon, who is treating her partly as his child, partly as one of the elements of his treasure. And on from there, adventures over what turn out to be several centuries, including a meeting with the all-father (who advises her to travel light) and repeated encounters with a valkyrie who tries to recruit her for that team. Recommended if you come across it; I picked it up at a warehouse-clearance sale from Small Beer Press, who have reissued it. Daniel Abraham, A Betrayal in Winter Volume 2 of the "Long Price Quartet," more of Otah Machi's story. This one takes us to a different part of the same culture, several years after the ending of A Shadow in Summer, which disappointed me because I was hoping to see more of how Amat's plans came out after she decided she had to leave the trading house she had been working for, for reasons to do with different kinds of loyalty.( As papersky noted on Tor.com, Amat is an unusual hero for a fantasy novel (or, indeed, any novel), a middle-aged woman, an accountant whose leg hurts all the time, and hurts more when she has to hide out and doesn't have her medicine.) That said, this is well-written, with good characterization, if a somewhat odd political system. In the previous book, we saw a bit of how the khaiate handles succession; this one foregrounds the expected fratricidal conflicts between the incumbent's sons. We also get more about the andat, the reified verbs, magical beings whose great desire is not to exist, but who would be pleased to take a few, or a few thousand, humans with them on their way to nonexistence. The city of Machi controls, and is powerful and prosperous because of, one called Stone-Made-Soft. The applications to mining and manufacture are obvious; walking through mine tunnels with a being that is thinking about what it would take to bring them down on your head is unnerving. MCA Hogarth, Flight of the Godkin Griffin (serialized at godkin Fantasy again, in this case about people who are decidedly not human: what they are is less clear, in part because they vary a great deal. Angharad is a Mistress-Commander in the Godson's army, all set to retire when she is appointed governor of a newly conquered province. The province, predictably, is not entirely conquered. She is also dealing with personal issues, and with her doubts about the basic motivation of her culture: to interbreed with people as different as possible in order to produce a god. The goal and project are both bizarre from outside, but the cross-breeding works at least in the sense of producing a wide variety of different intelligent beings, some with wings, different kinds of fur, or antlers. As she was writing, Hogarth periodically posted polls, things like "should this conversation turn romantic?" or "how much do you want to hear about Ragna?" and used the results to guide the story. I don't think it made much difference to my connection to the story, but others' mileage may have varied. The print version, expected soon, won't have those: it's not a choose-your-own adventure book, maybe something closer to Philip K. Dick using the I Ching to guide his plotting. Sarah Monette, Corambis The fourth and final volume of Monette's Doctrine of Labyrinths series. These are set in a world where magic works, and many people mistrust magicians, often including other magicians. The ongoing story is about two brothers, Felix (a magician) and Mildmay (who has no magical ability, a former cat burglar and hitman whose most respectable skill is card playing). They are entangled in a variety of ways, emotionally, despite (or because of) not having grown up together, though they had similar poor and abusive upbringings, and are both damaged by their pasts, physically as well as mentally. Mildmay feels responsible for Felix, for reasons that may not make sense to either of them; they could also be the poster children for communication problems in a relationship. Much of the time, they aren't just wading through their own past arguments and resentments, they seem to be taking out all their anger at everyone else who neglected or mistreated them on each other. The world has magic and wizardry, and Felix has tasks to do with that, and with his past, but much of the story is about Mildmay's illness, and his and Felix's need to pay bills. The other thread here is about a margrave [name], who participates in an attempt to use magic to help a rebellion. Everyone else in the room is killed by the thing they awaken; he survives, blind, and is captured, and displayed by a vindictive man on the winning side, and then taken away from that and tries to figure out what is wanted from him, believing that, blind and defeated, he is by definition useless. A good book, including the drop into a somewhat higher-tech part of the continent: Felix asks "what's a train" when told, in his travels, that he will need to take one, and the person who told him explains, being used to foreigners not knowing. The railroad system is complicated enough that a large timetable (aftermarket documentation) sells well, as does the series of supplements. Enjoyed isn't the word for all of my reaction: the communications difficulties were convincing, and not fun to read. I suspect this book would be confusing and unsatisfying to someone who hadn't read the others. In fact, I wish I'd gotten this sooner, when they were fresher in my memory. (I may see about borrowing them again to reread; I bought a copy of Corambis at Wiscon, to support an author and a bookstore I like as much as because I was impatient.) Rebecca Ore, Centuries Ago and Very Fast This one is weird, but fun. Vel is about 12,000 years old, and no explanation is given for why he, alone among anyone, lives so long, nor why he can travel back and forth in time. He moves with some care: he can't always get out of the time he's in, and has learned that not all injuries heal. We see Vel, and his "sisters" (by now great n nieces, and his lovers. There's a lot of sex in this book, mostly between men, often explicit, and intended to be both arousing and in character. Out of bed and in, Vel tells stories: mammoth hunting, traveling, being treated as an extremely minor god, seeing his friends imprisoned or killed for homosexuality, the sort of low-key investment that you can make over time if you can see the future. When a necklace is stolen from him, Vel just waits and takes it from the thief's grave, decades later. In the afterword, Ore says that this book was inspired (at least in part) by slash fiction. I would say "recommended if you like that kind of thing," but I don't read much of that kind of thing, and I enjoyed it. On the other hand, one advantage of original characters over slash is that an author working with her own characters doesn't use the shortcut of assuming the reader already knows what they're like or the back story, which I often don't. P. C. Hodgell, God Stalk and Dark of the Moon (in an omnibus volume as The Godstalker Chronicles) This feels almost like a parody in some ways: the viewpoint character is one of a created race/organization of powerful beings whose God has handed them the task of fighting evil. The evil force is called Perimal Darkling, and the agents of God include two more-or-less-humanoid species and one species of very wise, almost-immortal felines. The viewpoint character Jame (who goes by various other names at different points, including "the talisman") is a young woman of the Kendyr, one of those three people's. She has almost no memory of, well, anything, who stumbles out of the lands controlled by the dark force into a city, where she finds herself offered an apprenticeship as a thief, moves in many different social circles, and gradually regains at least some of her memories. God Stalk moves fast enough that I didn't much mind that the plot was more "and then...and then...and then" in which neither reader nor characters have time to get their feet under them. By the end of that book, Jame has gotten tangled with some of the local gods of the city she stumbled into; she talks about what the existence of other gods might mean for her rigidly monotheistic (in a trinitarian way) people, but is too busy with other things to really seem troubled by that point. She is convincingly concerned about why she can remember so little of her past, and by some of the things she can remember. This wouldn't be a problem if the title and story weren't setting Jame up as a destroyer and restorer of gods. Dark of the Moon has Jame regaining more memory, and shows battles in a larger area, and I found it less convincing. Events seemed to take place because they suited the author's convenience, not because they followed one from the next or because things happen at least somewhat by chance. In addition to the formless but powerful Perimal Darkling, the threats this time include a vague group of tribes called the Horde, who we are told have been proceeding in a slow circle, consuming everything in front of them and fighting internal, cannibalistic battles for several centuries. It's not remotely clear why none of them ever broke away, in search of safely and fresher pastures. I was also both unconvinced and annoyed by the statement that the Kendyr had started restricting the powerful "Highborn" women, but not the men, after a specific woman had gone over to the dark side: because it is made clear, by the characters as well as the third-person narration, that she had done so following her twin brother. Yes, some men might find that a convenient excuse, but nobody, female or male, seems to notice that it's inconsistent, not only unfair but insufficient to provide the safety it is allegedly aimed at. You either restrict all of your powerful and potentially treasonous human weapons as much as possible, or train all of them because you need them to fight against the forces of Darkness. I'd recommend reading God Stalk and stopping there, which is easier if you find a used copy of God Stalk rather than the two-novel omnibus. (This isn't a "don't go there" warning that the second book ruins the first, just that I liked the first and found the second less fun and less plausible.) [crossposting by hand between LJ and DW, comment wherever you like] Tags: books, fantasy
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st_reboot
anadapta0801 | |
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( You are about to view content that may not be appropriate for minors. )Tags: artist: anadapta0801, genre: het, genre: slash, graphics: comic strip, pairing: chekov/scotty, pairing: kirk/chekov, pairing: kirk/mccoy, pairing: kirk/spock, pairing: kirk/sulu, pairing: kirk/uhura, rating: r
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crochetcrochet
sandersyager | |
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After seeing a few questions pop up about sizes, I went through my bookmarks and pulled these together. Some are hat links, others are quick guides to sizes, and at least one invites you to start small fires Afghan Sizes: a quick reference guide to measurements for common afghan sizes and the number of squares needed to reach that minimum size Modern Flapper Hats: roughly a dozen variations on the classic flapper style hat, updated for modern fashion trends, includes a basic crown pattern that can be adapted for beanies, slouch hats, etc. Crocheted Adult Hat Links: exactly what the name says, hasn't been updated since 05, so some links are likely broken Simple Circle Tutorial: basic tutorial for forming a circle worked with spiraling single crochet, links to other basic shapes along left-hand side
Head Huggers Pattern List: crochet, knit and fabric patterns for adult and children's hats, take a look at the homepage for the story behind the organization and how to donate a hat for those experiencing chemo-related hairloss Chez Crochet's Living Room: provides tutorials for variations on the basic sc, hdc, dc, and tr, as well as some design patterns, useful once you have the basic stitches down and want a little bit of a challenge Hat Sizes: sizes for hats from newborns and preemies to adult men Fiber Content: a reference guide to figuring out that unknown yarn in your stash through setting a small sample on fire How Much Yarn?: PDF from Lion Brand with suggestions of how much yarn is required in what weight for common projects
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ailbhe | |
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Not over the shoulder boulder holders, but Braziers Park, a wonderful organic gardening educational commune which also lets people use it for functions, like the Quakers annual, er, CCDE-equivalent, I guess. We brought our own food rather than dealing with explaining dietary needs three times a day but in general we ate, drank, played, talked until the middle of the night, sat around lovely campfires (usually started by the children or teenagers) and discussed everything from workplace bullying to parenting to holidays in India and places east thereof. There was a fantastic well-tuned bottled-of-water glockenspiel thingy on which a bunch of people carefully played some great music (it sounded terrible until after a few practice runs though) and a massive heap of craft materials which were used with varying levels of skill, and kite-flying as a direct result of that, and amazing gardens and walks and paths and woods and sitting rooms with roaring log fires and outdoor showers with hessian walls under a tree - I stood in the hot water and reached my arm out to feel the cold rain beyond it. The whole thing is so knit your own home-cultured yoghurt yurt it was unbelievable, and the food we saw other people eating was incredible. Apart from having to live with other people, I want to go there and never leave. (Over one of the gothic-arch windows on the rear verandah, someone once painted "fairytales are real".)
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buddhists
turil | |
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Negative emotions mean step back. Positive emotions mean step forward. Do you have the patience to wait
till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
till the right action arises by itself?
Tao Te Ching The book Honest Signals by MIT professor Sandy Pentland is a very brief introduction to the language of our unconscious, emotional mind with it's "body language" and voice tone/speed/volume, as contrasted with the language of the conscious, rational mind of specific words. The research is fascinating (though the book itself is pretty dull) and helps clarify how decisions are made, in groups of humans and in groups of brain cells. It turns out that the conscious mind is really crappy at making complex decisions, because it filters out too many of the details needed for a full analysis. So, sort of surprisingly, that means that nearly all of our most important decisions are made with the unconscious mind, which stores ALL of the data that we need: So then how does all this evidence help us make better decisions? What the evidence and model suggest is that for complex problems, the best decision-making strategy is to focus on information discovery and then let your unconscious mind "recognize" the best alternative.
[*snip* stuff about talking to people to collect enough opinions/facts]
And, finally, let the problems roll around in your mind without conscious deliberation. Don't look for a logical explanations of every factor but instead seek that "aha" movement where you recognize a real fit between your current problem and previous experience. An informed unconscious, especially one supported by the experiences of a network of interested individuals, is the most powerful decision making tool you have. In other words, when you have some conflict in your self about what to do because of sadness, anger, fear, stress, etc., take some time to step back, open your mind and let all the emotions and thoughts and facts wander around inside your self as compassionately as possible, and wait peacefully for the negative stuff to leave, and the positive emotions and thoughts and intentions to appear. In my own experience, those positive things will be accompanied by a sudden joyful energy that propels one to get started right away on that right action and right speech and right livelihood. Of course, I'm not always completely successful at carrying out my ideas, but usually I can manage at least something that improves someone's life, somewhere. :-) In more Buddhist terms: Meditate on negative thoughts.
Act on positive ones.Compassion begins with respecting your own honest signals about when it's time to slow down, take a break, and give yourself time to process it all. Peace begins within, then spreads outwards!
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previous 
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cheerful
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