Yeah I’m definitely on a six week sick leave from university, time to break out the ole blog again so I don’t go crazy from unexpressed thoughts and/or ~feelings~. Yes I think so.

Paris was huge and hot and humid and hormonal. No wait that last one was just me. I was in total denial until I found myself in the bathroom at midnight bawling my eyes out for no reason what so ever. At which point I had to concede that maybe the reason I didn’t like Paris wasn’t so much the city itself but more my general state of mind. When I eventually emerged from the stifling fog of hormones I thought, given time I could probably like this city. & walking home alone through the busy streets and endless metro tunnells on my last day there after dropping off my sister at the bus to the airport, I almost did.

I have some love type stuff to sort out but I’m avoiding talking about it because I don’t want any ‘I told you so’s

How Twitter will change the way we live (@yahoo news) Another interesting article on twitter, this one also links to the future, and how the social networking tools we use today aren’t just marginal fads, but are also shaping our future (even for those who are not on the twitter-bandwagon), our news distribution, advertising, etc.

Social networks are notoriously vulnerable to the fickle tastes of teens and 20-somethings (remember Friendster?), so it’s entirely possible that three or four years from now, we’ll have moved on to some Twitter successor. But the key elements of the Twitter platform – the follower structure, link-sharing, real-time searching – will persevere regardless of Twitter’s fortunes, just as Web conventions like links, posts and feeds have endured over the past decade. In fact, every major channel of information will be Twitterfied in one way or another in the coming years.

Now for some soaps. Fuck, this storyline is so pushing all the right buttons for me right now, and they haven’t even kissed yet! Seriously, it was the highlight of my week, tragically enough (which I suppose tells you more about the level of excitement in my life right now than it does about the show, but anyway)

(Yeah.. I stole these gifs offof somebody’s lj. Sorz!) And I could probably defend this preoccupation sort of semi-intellectually, but I promised myself I’d stop defending the things I like (that’s hard for me, damn it!), and honestly the most important reason I watch it is that it makes me all kinds of mushy happy. They’re holding hands – I melt. They’re gazing longingly into each other’s eyes for an unnaturally long period of time (because they do that on soaps) – I melt. Hugging – melt. OMG she’s kissing her hand and stroking her face!! – puddle of goo on the floor. And I mean, it’s progressing so slowly it’s ridiculous sometimes. Just look at that last gif, how is that not a lead-up to a kiss? Really now! But I don’t really care, it doesn’t really matter as long as I still go all mushy over hand-holding. Yeah I’m good. No need to rush.

What’s your guilty completely legitimate pleasure du jour?

I think it’s important that the queer stories we tell are not just the suicide stories, the discrimination stories, the ones where your mum throws you out of the house/sends you to straight-camp/cries. Those are important, too, but if we don’t tell our fun-time stories as well, being queer will always be associated only with negative experiences, and being queer will always sound just a little sad. This is why I love pride as it is now in our part of the world. It’s mostly just one big fun-time. And I hear people complain that it’s lost it’s meaning, that it used to be about fighting for your life & rights, and now it’s just empty fun. And I can see that, compared to pride celebrations in Russia or Latvia, say, ours can seem pretty meaningless. But I don’t think fun is ever devoid of meaning, fun is a statement in itself. And I love that we have come so far in this country that we can have a pride that’s more fun than substance (though I do think there’s a lot of substance as well!) We have our rights, mostly. The police are there to protect us, not to beat us up. There are no extremist homophobe counterprotesters. It’s just fun. And community. And laughter. And extravagant displays of gender. And I’m not saying all is fine and dandy, there’s still a heapin helpin of homophobia running around as well as a good dose of heteronormativity, but I think pride is one way to counter that. It’s a perfect display of queer fun. And it is super fun, I’m telling you if I were straight I would be jealous of the queers on pride!

So I’m happy to be queer because queers have fun, and I’m also happy to be queer because it gave me a whole new perspective on stuff.  I think if you’re already outside the norm in one way, it’s easier to question everything else about what’s ‘normal’ and accepted, and I like questioning my own assumptions about gender, sex, life, happiness, you name it. Also being queer helps me understand privilege and discrimination better, makes me a better person. God knows I didn’t understand much before I became a gay. I’m not saying you can’t understand it if you haven’t experienced it, just that for me it was a lot easier to understand afterward. It’s easier to understand that racism isn’t just when people beat you up for being black or when people say mean things to your face, because I know heterosexism isn’t just when people beat you up for holding hands with your girlfriend.

I was originally going to write something else today, but it was a bit emo, so I didn’t. Here’s a song I really, earnestly love, and it’s by Mandy Moore. You can defriend me now, it’s all right.

• going through these texts on anarchy etc at crimethinc.com
• reading the whole story and other stories, short stories by Ali Smith. Short stories are great for days with a short attention span.
• harry potter et la chambre des secrets
• dewey: the small-town library cat who touched the world. seriously. you can laugh all you like. i love it.
• I like link dumps. The sheer amount of content that exists on the internet overwhelms me sometimes, so link dumps work well as a sort of filter. Like, I’m not going to go through all this crap if somebody already did and filtered out the useless stuff. Atm I like autostraddle‘s daily fix and feministing sometimes has a ‘what we missed’ link collection. Also HuffPo! (incidentally, this can also be connected to my idealised love for social networking internet tools like blogs & twitter & lj etc which I imagine being one big filter for the internet. Like I’ll talk about the interesting and/or fun/ny and/or cool stuff I find on the internet and in turn people tell me what they’ve found, thus avoiding lots of crap and having more fun on the internet. But let’s not get into this. I could talk forever.)

Second. Jay Smooth is kind of awesome and knows some stuff about race and racism which is most likely relevant to us even though it’s from an american perspective. I think race is hard and it is probably the thing I feel most defensive about on a regular basis. I figure if I’m feeling defensive about it, most likely there’s a reason for it. It happens a lot! :/

Third. Tricot Machine.

Fourth. Girl talk. 

For the moment let’s just objectify Lucy Lawless, shall we.

Yes. And maybe listen to Ellen’s commencement speech at Tulane University this year.

“Corporations are completely taking over our culture and telling us that we can only consume it, and we’re saying no, we’re saying we want to actually create with it, respond to it, take it, mutilate it, cut it up.”

Chances are you already know how illogically happy i get from anything that has to do with participatory culture, collaboratory culture, remixing and reappropriating etc. (That’s not to say that I don’t enjoy culture/art that’s not collaborative or participatory, most of what I am exposed to and love is in fact not. Or, I mean it is in the sense that the artist might have been heavily influenced by somebody else, or even ‘legally’ sampled somebody else/the piece of culture being a product of collaboration itself, like music and tv shows etc. But it isn’t in the sense that there is a clearly marked end product with a sender and a receiver, and the receiver is in most cases not supposed to do anything but receive. Whatever, I’m digging myself into a hole. My point was there’s a special fuzzy-happy place in my heart for the kind of culture/art that takes those clearly marked end products and then mess them up or make them better (or worse) or subvert them or analyze them & pick them apart by means of something that’s not a traditional academic analysis, eg making videos, fan fiction etc)

You can watch the entire documentary here. I’m about halfway through, but so far I’m loving it. There’s a lot about the problems with copyright, which is regrettably timely, as The EU recently extended musical copyright, from 50 to 70 years(!!) & the problem is of course how do you encourage creativity but discourage plagiarism? Oh I’d love to talk to somebody who really knows stuff about copyright and pick their brains!

So anyway, this is my current favourite vid (made by Gianduja Kiss at imeem) which sort of explores the repeating day trope in tv shows. I recently also watched this by tearful-eye at lj, and I’ve never actually watched criminal minds, I just love the music and the editing and the vid is sort of like a narrative in itself so you don’t actually have to know the show. And this is Xena and the Indigo Girls, both of which are prone to grandiose and epic declarations of feelings and meaning of life type stuff, plus has to be the gayest ever combination. And if you don’t know Xena (which I watched all the fucking time in my formative years), here’s really all you need to know:

Parc Angrignon, Montréal <3 photo taken by appaloosa @flickr

Ew, exam season:( My two main feelings about this are 1. it’ll be over soon & 2. there’s still plenty plenty of time left to study. And I bought tickets to Paris and Switzerland, but I sort of regret it. Or, no, like I really want to go, I’m just .. scared I won’t be able to enjoy it and then that will be money down the drain. I hate planning things that far in advance, it makes me super stressed, because i never know how i’ll feel health-wise. But I said ok maybe a long time ago and it’s the summer hols so I don’t have tons of schoolwork i should have been doing instead, so i guess i shouldn’t worry needlessly. We’re trying to find an apartment to rent in Paris, since I have to have a kitchen at my disposal, so hotels are out of the question. Does anybody else want to come?

Also: Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog: It Ys Rad. It’s Chaucer in middle english! on blogspot!