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Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in
pandoradeloeste's LiveJournal:
| Thursday, May 3rd, 2012 | |
| 10:42 pm | |
| Thursday, March 29th, 2012 | |
| 2:04 pm | Memories of Occupy SF/Oakland/Cal ( Moments to remember about Occupy SF/Oakland/Cal ) News reports and history books are going to condense the events of the past six months (and probably the next six too) down to discrete actions and tactics. October 25. The wave of camp shutdowns across the country. January 28. Black Bloc vs. nonviolence. Port shutdowns. General strikes. If a politician name-checks Occupy during a big speech. These images are things that no report or book is going to bother with because nobody important was there, because it doesn't fit the narrative they're interested in telling, because they don't have time or space for it, or because it didn't serve any larger purpose. And to some extent, maybe they shouldn't. As much as we support each other, and as much as the processes and tactics we engage in are deeply personal, Occupy isn't about individuals. It's about collective power and sleeping giants and big amorphous masses of people that a news helicopter can't completely fit into one shot. These individuals I've named and the weirdly intimate snapshots that I remember are mostly irrelevant to any narrative at all except my personal one, but if I don't record them, they're going to get swallowed up in the official narratives and I won't remember them later. I need to remember this stuff. This is what makes Occupy come alive for me, not marches or actions or accounts of which camp was raided when. This is why I do what I do. |
| Friday, January 27th, 2012 | |
| 5:01 pm | Occupy The Moon So, a lot of people seem to view me as the source of all things Occupy. I guess that's my fault for letting my Facebook statuses (statii?) and Twitter get occupied. And a lot of people are also asking me, "So all the camps are gone, and it seems like Occupy is winding down. What's going on, if anything?" Here's the answer: we're going interplanetary now. Step one is occupying the moon. (Don't be fooled by the fact that Newt Gingrich suggested it; he's on our side.) Kinda puts scuffles over tents and plazas and info tables into perspective, huh? ( the scoop you will not find on any Occupy websites or Twitter feeds ) |
| Friday, December 2nd, 2011 | |
| 9:50 pm | Law and Order: Oakland In the Occupy movement, the 99% are represented by two separate yet equally important groups: those who occupy, and the pro bono attorneys who defend them when they are arrested for nonviolent protest. These are their stories. CLONG CLONG I had Monday the 28th off from work, so I used it to go the arraignment of an Occupy Oakland protester. I’d seen the protester several times at Occupy events and knew him as Rasta; he had been part of the original camps (before the first and second raids) and acted as a scout and security officer who patrolled the perimeter of the camp, broke up conflicts, and kept an eye out for police actions. On Thanksgiving, Rasta was part of a crowd of protesters who were trying to stop police from removing Port-A-Potties that had been rented as part of a community Thanksgiving dinner. One police officer shoved him and his fiancée into a group of police officers, who knocked him to the ground and arrested him with no small amount of force. (Rasta is the tall guy with dreads roughly in the center of the frame at the beginning; his fiancée is the woman in the headscarf and camo pants who is holding him*. He was initially charged with felony assault on an officer, which is pretty rich considering that the video shows other police officers running into him.) ( Getting to the Arraignment: or, Adventures in Not-Quite-Legal Marches ) ( The Arraignment: or, Man That Placa Was a Real Sangrón! ) ( After the arraignment: or, losing a bit of the moral high ground ) All in all, an educational experience. It's actually good to see what I'll be facing if/when I get myself arrested over the next few months. (I'll actually be a little disappointed if I don't manage to get arrested before Occupy runs its course, although I hope it's for something like "sitting and linking arms with other protesters" rather than "get shoved into a group of cops and charged with assault".) ---- * I know both their legal names, but it doesn't seem kosher to name them on a blog without their permission, so they're going to be Rasta and fiancée for now. ** The plaza outside City Hall was originally called Frank Ogawa Plaza. Protesters changed it to Oscar Grant Plaza, in honor of the shooting ~2 years ago. Unfortunately, Frank Ogawa is actually quite worthy of being honored with the plaza's name – he lived in a relocation camp during WWII and was one of the first Asian American California congressmen. I prefer to combine the two and call it Ogawa Grant Plaza. Sadly, my version has not caught on outside of Chez Poisson. *** National Lawyer’s Guild is very awesome and has been providing legal aid pro bono to all the Occupy protesters who get arrested. It’s common practice for people to write the local NLG chapter's hotline number on their arms (415-285-1011) when they go to any Occupy action where there's a chance they could be arrested. I have it on my arm pretty much permanently, in varying stages of fadedness/legibility. I would highly recommend donating to them if you can; there’s a few thousand arrests that have been made so far, and probably a few thousand more to go before we’re done. |
| Sunday, April 24th, 2011 | |
| 11:44 am | I have two tickets to a BDSM play party in San Francisco, and I don't know what to do with them. Any ideas? (I promise this is not the lead-in for a very belated Rabbit Hole Day entry.) How did I end up with tickets to an event with torture and spanking and butt plugs and more naked people than all three seasons of Deadwood (plus whatever's aired from Game of Thrones) combined? Good frakking question. Basically, it's Wicked Grounds's fault. About a month ago the owners decided that they were financially and emotionally exhausted by the effort of trying to stay afloat, and that they would be closing at the end of April. So many people protested that they decided to give it one last shot. If they could raise $50,000 (the bare minimum needed to keep the place open for another six months), they would stay open. To that end, there was a fundraising event yesterday at the San Francisco Citadel (dungeon in SOMA), with strip trivia and a raffle and auction. (Side note: we made our goal and Wicked Grounds will be around for at least six more months. For the motherfucking win.) Among all the nekkid titties and cock (more than I think I've seen in the previous 26 years combined - also first time I'd seen an uncircumcised penis in the flesh, as it were) I ended up winning two tickets to a play party/art exposition at the Citadel on May 6. As it's not really Aaron's bag, and I'm a) not sure if it's my bag either, b) even if it is I'm not going to flirt or play with non-Aaron people, and c) my bum leg is still wrapped in unsexy and clumsy green plaster, if anyone else can make better use of the tickets, or knows someone who can, please let me know. (You can email me or comment anonymously if you prefer.) ( more details about the event here ) |
| Thursday, February 10th, 2011 | |
| 10:14 pm | Revenge of the Meme Answers to last week's 15 characters meme: 1. Uncle Iroh 2. Frank N. Furter 3. Edward Elric 4. Phèdre no Delaunay 5. Sue Sylvester 6. Dexter 7. The Piemaker 8. Willow 9. Gaeta 10. G'Kar 11. The Dude 12. Jayne Cobb 13. Daria 14. The Pirate King 15. Captain Hammer Three [Edward Elric] and Seven [the Piemaker] collaborate on a novel together. What is the title? Love Among The Beekepers - a romantic comedy in epistolary style, with absolutely no dead people or animals. (Unsurprisingly the Piemaker is better that Edward at writing a romance novel; Edward still thinks girls are somewhat icky/have cooties, and he keeps trying to introduce outside plot elements, which the Piemaker has to quickly resolve so that they can get back to the main story. Critics say that the book is inconsistent but overall an entertaining read.) How would six [Dexter Morgan], two [Frank N. Furter], and five [Sue Sylvester] end up in a love triangle? Dexter is attending a conference in the same hotel where Sue is staying with the Cheerios for a cheerleading competition; as luck would have it, the hotel is also holding a Transylvanian convention, and they all bump into each other in the elevator. Frankie approaches Dexter in the middle of the night and acts like Darla to have sex with him. He then tries it on Sue, who not only sees through it right away but totally kills his boner by saying, "You think this [grabbing exactly what you think she's grabbing] is hard? Try being waterboarded - that's hard!" Frankie gets mad and says that Dexter liked it hard last night, and Sue has hate sex with Dexter to stick it to Frankie. (And then Frankie walks in on them. "Sue!" "Frankie!" "Dexter!" "Frankie!" "Brittany!" ". . .") What would nine [Gaeta] buy fifteen [Captain Hammer] for his/her/its birthday? Gaeta would have a total crush on Captain Hammer, but try to hide it because he thinks Hammer is a corporate tool. He would get Captain Hammer one of those giant mallets with the hard rubber heads. The card would say something catty about needing to compensate for the size of his hammer; however, the insult would fly a mile over Hammer's head, and he would think this is an awesome new trademark tool that he would start carrying around. (He's feeling a little insecure after the exploding Death Ray caused him pain, and he feels better with a weapon.) Would twelve [Jayne] like five's [Sue Sylvester] kinks? Jayne would be all over rough hate sex like white on rice. He wouldn't like bloodplay much, though. Sue wouldn't warn him that she would bring a knife to the party, either, so when she brought it out, Jayne would react defensively and disarm her (and not in a sexy way, either). Write a drabble in which eleven [The Dude] has to get eight [Willow] out of jail. "Drive! Drive!" Willow screamed. "That was really hairy, man," the Dude said as the Ford shuddered onto the 1. "I was told in, like, no uncertain terms to stay away from Malibu. And why were you buying from that guy off the freeway? I coulda told you he was a government plant, man." "I keep saying, it's not marijuana, it's belladonna," Willow said. "And, not that I don't appreciate the help, but how come you bust me out?" "Your friend with the, you know, the eyepatch told me you might need some help. He gave the Dude a smoke bomb and told me which cell you were in. Walter, like, did the rest." The Dude checked his rearview mirror. "Is anyone following us?" Willow muttered something. The car radio shrieked and went silent. "There. None of the cops between here and LA will bother us." "Fuckin' A, man." Nine [Gaeta], six [Dexter], and thirteen [Daria] go out for dinner. Where do they go, what do they discuss, and who picks up the tab? They go to a local Cuban restaurant, known for its cubanos. Gaeta would be thrilled to have something other than algae for dinner, and would disgust the other two with stories about the living-on-the-raggedy-edge conditions on the Galactica. Dexter would do his best to draw out Daria and Gaeta and do as little talking about himself as possible; unfortunately he'd be a little awkward about it, and occasionally be distracted by his dead father. Daria would be biting and sarcastic as usual, but generally polite and interested in stuff. She and Gaeta would get into a political discussion about the US not prosecuting cases of torture and invasion of privacy in the Bush era, and being completely sketchy and supporting Mubarak's regime in the Egypt revolution; Dexter would do his best to keep his head down during this discussion because he does his best not to have an opinion about politics. Dexter, in at attempt to Win Friends And Influence People, will pick up the tab. Gaeta and Daria will let him, because they're poor college kids/Battlestar officers; however, they will split the tip. If eight [Willow] and one [Iroh] were racing from Paris to Shanghai, who would win? As soon as the race is on, Willow would try to teleport directly to Shanghai. However, Iroh thought ahead and enlisted Ty Lee's help; as soon as the starting [bell/gun/air horn/whatever] goes off, she chi-blocks Willow so that she can't use magic and has to rely on mundane means to get to Shanghai. Willow maintains a comfortable lead over Iroh through Europe and most of Asia - her computer skills let her hack into transportation agencies' systems and get herself good seats on the quickest trains/buses. Iroh does OK for himself, though; he charms his way onto transportation easily. Once they get to China, Iroh pulls ahead a lot because he blends in more easily and can kinda-sorta, enough-to-fake-it read the street signs; Willow gets slowed down dramatically because she is very obviously Not From Here and gets fleeced by local taxi drivers and ticket vendors. Unfortunately, Iroh would discover a delicious tea shop right outside Shanghai and stop in for a cuppa and a game of pai sho, letting Willow win. Could two [Frankie] and seven [the Piemaker] be roommates, or would that be the worst thing ever? It would start off OK - Frankie would love living with a kickass baker, and the Piemaker would enjoy having someone around other than Olive and Chuck to eat his experiments. Frankie would be fascinated by the Piemaker's dilemma of having a girlfriend he can't touch; unfortunately his fascination takes things in a much more erotic direction than everyone's comfortable with, and eventually the Piemaker would ask Frankie to leave. Frankie would adjust his boa and flounce off to his castle singing "I'm Going Home". (Olive and Aunt Vivian would harmonize with him occasionally as he makes his way out through the Pie Hole. On cue, the tenants above the Piemaker would drop playing cards off their balconies.) Who would be a better Jedi Master, ten [G'Kar] or twelve [Jayne]? G'Kar, hands down. He already sorta preaches interconnectedness, and a unifying force binding everything together would go down easily. Jayne, on the other hand, thinks the Force is shiny for them as believe in it, but hokey religions and ancient weapons are no substitute for Vera at his side. (G'Kar would spend a few minutes trying to convince Jayne that he uses the Force when he fights, since he has really good reflexes; Jayne would get bored and wander off in search of mudder's milk, while G'Kar rolls his eye.) |
| Tuesday, February 1st, 2011 | |
| 3:06 pm | AAAH THIS IS BRILLIANT I might even do a better job of this one than the "ships that don't really work and are therefore impossible to write" meme. 1) Make a list of fifteen characters first, and keep it to yourself for the moment. 2) Ask your f'list to post questions in the comments. For example: 'One, nine and fifteen are chosen by a prophecy to save the world from four. Do they succeed?' 'Under what circumstances might five and fourteen fall in love?' 'Which character on the list would you most want on your side in a zombie invasion?' 'Write a drabble in which three and eleven fight crime.' (...possibly not technically a question.) 3) After your f'list has asked enough questions, round them up and answer them using the fifteen characters you selected beforehand, then post them. |
| Thursday, January 27th, 2011 | |
| 9:06 am | Not late for a very important date Yesterday I found out firsthand that the rumors are true: Emperor Norton is still alive and holding court in San Francisco. ( details at 11! ) |
| Tuesday, November 30th, 2010 | |
| 3:29 pm | |
| Monday, August 9th, 2010 | |
| 9:41 pm | "One down, two to go! :DDD" I'm super-late to the party because we were in Hawaii when the verdict on Prop 8 was announced (more on that later when we organize our pictures). We caught it on CNN, but I had to wait until today to get the full love-fest since we were in Internet blackout mode. And oh my God, you guys. This video. (Feel free to start it at about the 1:40 mark. Warning: three-alarm blubs at around 2:00 and 5:21.) I don't know whether to strangle Judge Walker for announcing this when I wasn't around to join the party, or kiss him for the nice ruling. Maybe I'll do both. |
| Sunday, July 18th, 2010 | |
| 9:26 pm | One of my favorite parts about getting new coworkers: n00b: How did you and your husband meet? me: We spent an evening trying to kill someone in order to secure my immortality for another seven years. It was really intense. n00b: . . . me: We both died dramatically - well, him more dramatically than me. After that. . . ::sappy sigh:: it was just meant to be, you know? n00b: o_O me: . . .It was a game. n00b: Ohhh! ::relieved sigh:: And then the conversation takes one of two turns: n00b: (with horrified fascination) What kind of game was that? [I explain LARPing] Ah. That's. . .interesting. . . gamer n00b: (mentally running through the systems and genres ze knows, playing it cool so ze doesn't out hirself as a giant nerd yet) What kind of game was that? [I start to explain LARPing] - oh, that's awesome! |
| Monday, June 21st, 2010 | |
| 2:07 pm | Inspired by Facebook: Inspired by a comment from ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1){kind=small} vogtalicious, I started coming up with some possibilities for the surprise! twist! ending! likely to result from M. Night Shyamalan directing "The Last Airbender". Feel free to add your own:- The water tribes/air nomads/fire nation are experimental enclaves set up by Long Feng and the Dai Lee to study group psychology and warfare. Identity crises ensue, particularly among the Fire Nation. - Most of the main cast is ghosts trying to get Aang to avenge their Water Tribe/Earth Kingdom towns ravaged by the Fire Nation. - Sokka is Aang's opposite and nemesis, and gets a boomerang made out of glass to fight with. - It's all a dream/delusion/near death experience as Aang drowns in the ocean after getting shot down by a Fire Nation ship 100 years ago - The cabbage guy has been assigned to follow the Gaang around the world and act as his guardian. He holds off the Fire Nation with the power of his eyes until Roku and his dragon arrive to rescue Aang. - Sokka is really the Puppet Master behind the rise of the Fire Nation. - Jet is revealed to be Aang's anarchic/nihilistic split personality - Aang is a cylon - Ozai/Zuko is the Smoke Monster. Iroh is the Constant. - Ozai is Aang's father - Aang decides that the world is a mess and he just needs to. . .rule it. He masters all four elements, crowns himself Emperor, and becomes that which he once fought against. Sokka tries to pull a Xander while Aang is in the avatar state, and dies heroically for his efforts. Katara, Suki, and Toph regroup tragically and ride off into the sunset on chicken-horses, vowing to come back and kill Aang. And my favorite: - Shyamalan's been faking us out with those whitewashed trailers and press releases - the cast has not been whitewashed, but has been cast with Asian actors that very few people know. The cast with better-known white actors was a publicity stunt to drum up interest, because Paramount is stupid and doesn't realize that A:TLA comes with its own enthusiastic following. Unfortunately nobody finds out because the response has been so negative that everyone boycotts the movie. |
| Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010 | |
| 9:07 pm | Five ways CVE fails today, and one way I steal memes from fanfic writers I think I already mentioned my office's trans!fail ("we can't have genderless bathrooms! we might use a bathroom a man has used and get cooties! our trans clients' comfort and safety is totally less important than avoiding the boy-cooties"). Now I get to add health!fail to the list. D: We got an email from HR announcing a Biggest Loser-style competition - people buy in and commit to losing a certain amount of weight over three months (amount has to be over 20 pounds), the person who loses the most weight gets all the cash. And thus was my productivity shot for the afternoon as I a) went to the bathroom and did a shakedown to stop my hands shaking, b) pulled up all my Fat Acceptance 101 links, c) used them to help write a careful email to HR detailing why this was a terrible idea, and d) did another shakedown before facilitating open lab and helping people apply to jobs. 1) Way to conflate health with weight. Again. (Seriously, how many frakking ways do I have to say it?) 2) They're trying to make this as noninvasive as possible - the contest takes three months so that nobody is crash dieting, they wrote "NO CRASH DIETS" in boldface and underlined, they say that participating is entirely voluntary, etc. Let's assume for the moment that all of that plays out as safely/healthily as HR hopes it will. Everyone adheres to the "no crash diets" rule despite the siren song of a cash prize, nobody pressures anyone else into joining the contest. We're still creating an office culture, with the blessing of the Human Resources Department, where weight loss and dieting are encouraged, with the following corollaries: - It's also encouraged to talk about your diet and help each other with their diets (because we're all helpful fixer-upper types, or we wouldn't be in social services). For "help each other", read "police the fuck out of each other's food". - Not dieting or losing weight becomes strange and deviant. It's important to note that office culture means we're all a part of it, whether we want to be or not. In that sense, we cannot opt out of this contest - it's going to affect us all, simply because we're spending eight hours a day in that environment. 3) The office is going to be BORING AS FUCK. People who start working on a new thing - a craft, running, a religious conversion, WoW, a diet, etc - tend to proselytize about it. (Trust me, I've done all of them except the WoW.) It's understandable - a new thing that causes changes in your life that you like, you want to share the joy. But imagine a whole crapton of people monopolizing every. single. conversation. with details about their 4) Weight and diet aren't culturally neutral, which means that it's very easy to fall into the "diet = virtuous and good; not dieting = lazy and immoral" way of thinking. There's a decent chance that the people proselytizing about their diets are going to be doing it with a healthy dose of self-righteousness. This is a pretty hostile environment to eat anything remotely calorie-dense, like a burger or (god forbid) chocolate. It's a lot of baggage to put on something as simple as lunch, FFS. 5) We work with people with mental health diagnoses. Something like 40% of our employees are former clients. Non-employee clients are often within earshot of the lunch area. If dieting fucks with your head, what do you think it can do to someone with depression or bipolar disorder (who might already be inclined towards a negative self-image) or someone with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD lends itself very well to disordered eating), or God forbid, someone who's had a bona fide eating disorder? Again, they don't have to be actively participating in the contest to be affected by the sort of culture that can trigger someone pretty strongly. tl;dr version: what the fuck was HR thinking creating this kind of office culture when we're in the business we're in? |
| Monday, May 10th, 2010 | |
| 7:41 pm | This belongs on Twitter or Facebook. . . . . .but neither of those will let me cut for Lost spoilers. ( ye're gonnae die brotha! ) In other news I have discovered the best apple cobbler recipe known to man. ::om nom nom:: |
| Saturday, April 24th, 2010 | |
| 1:04 pm | |
| Friday, February 26th, 2010 | |
| 11:27 pm | Mandolins may be fucking metal. . . . . .but Alice stole the show. Context: Abney Park always grabs someone from the audience when they play "Airship Pirates" to hold the violin for Nathaniel, who needs to play both guitar and violin in the song. When they played at DNA Lounge they grabbed a little girl dressed like Alice to hold it. OMG YOU GUYS. SO ADORABLE. Everyone in the audience was cuted. She spent the first half of the song looking like she couldn't decide whether to be utterly petrified or really excited, then once the violin solo was over she started getting into it. The video cuts off before the end, but before she left the stage she was throwing the horns and giving people high fives (yours truly among them). Robert joked that he thought she was going to start crowdsurfing any second.) (By the way, Robert is quite a bit larger than I expected him to be. It might just be that I've always seen him from a distance or in a teeny little Youtube video - I had the same reaction when I saw Nathan Fillion and Alan Tudyk in a non-Firefly context - but up close enough to get splashed by whatever rum concoction he was drinking, he's a freakin' giant.) |
| Wednesday, January 27th, 2010 | |
| 9:45 pm | Ladies and gentlemen, it's official. Cats are conspiring to take over the world. I'm not saying this as a playful "ha ha, Laila and Hobbes tag-teamed us and distracted us to get more food" thing. This is an actual plan to gradually take control away from humans. They are in communication with other cats and planning something big. They have the technology and they are smart motherfuckers. ( It all started with a dark and stormy night. . . ) |
| Monday, December 14th, 2009 | |
| 10:23 pm | Dunno where I ran across this writing challenge, but I wish I still wrote so I could try it. The rules are as follows: 1. The main character of the story cannot have a gender. 2. The story can't be told in the second person, in the style of those Choose Your Own Adventure books. First and third person are allowed, although first person is probably easier. 3. No fair making the character explicitly genderqueer. 4. The main character has to be well-rounded and interesting - no self-insert Bella Swans or Anita Blakes. 4. Bonus points for giving the character a love interest without gendering hir. 5. Double bonus points for writing a sex scene without sexing/gendering hir. In its purest (read: impossibly well-done) form, someone would write a full-length novel where you never noticed that the main character wasn't gendered until you tried to tell someone else about the story, and end up stumbling over yourself because you suddenly realize you have no idea what pronouns to use when talking about the book. (Or maybe it isn't impossible. Who knows?) Current Mood:  cold |
| Wednesday, November 11th, 2009 | |
| 8:31 am | I just realized this morning that I forgot to post the link to the photobucket account where all our wedding pictures are. (This was a very Web 2.0 wedding - evites and an online photo album. Observe our l33tn3ss. Or our laziness. Take your pick.) Anyway, they're here. They're more or less in chronological order. Sorta. Except when I got tired of putting them in order when it gets to the reception. After that it's vaguely by grouping (family, SGS/Savs, dessert table, speeches, polka, etc.) (Sarah has a write-up of the weekend here. This is illustration, because I'm too lazy to write and she got all the important stuff.) ( top five pictures under the cut, now that I've finally figured out the HTML to make them not-ginormous ) Oh, and for anyone else considering stepping on glasses at their wedding/commitment ceremony/party thing: wrap them up really well, in a few layers of cloth or a good thick tote bag or something. Those things don't just break, they freakin' explode. Glass everywhere = not fun for whoever has to clean it up later. |
| Saturday, October 24th, 2009 | |
| 8:06 pm | Hospital ignores a partner's power of attorney and blocks her and kids from seeing their mother in her final hours I'd originally intended to twitter that link, but as it turns out I have a little too much rage for 140 characters. That is seriously, bone-chillingly frakked up. The doctors, lawyers, and judge who let this happen and gave the hospital a pass on it epically fail at basic human decency, let alone (for the doctors at least) the Hippocratic Oath. This is what the eight bracha was for. This is why we spilled wine. This is why we broke glasses (quite explosively). Bigoted, Dark Ages shit like this has no place in the world. |
