tea berry-blue

A collection of things

2012-04-01T21:11:47Z

It’s raining, after a day where we “pastured” the chickens (read: let them roam around the yard), and I fooled around making contest entries for hogwarts_elite most of the day.

I had fun working this blog post for work (about an exciting thing coming to our subscription service) along with Clare, who wrote the text for it, and who is awesome. (I took the photos and did the photoshopping).

I’ve had bad allergies this week, which means I’ve been drinking a lot of Coke, which I would prefer not to do, but helps immensely. I’ve also found that gin seems to help a lot, moreso than other liquors.

Right now, I’m drinking a cocktail from my great-grandfather’s book, circa 1935, called a “Boulevard.” It’s gin, red and white vermouth, a dash of grapefruit juice, and I added some bitters (Cocktail Kingdom Wormwood and Urban Moonshine Citrus). If you look a “Boulevard” up online, you’ll find many, many cocktails by this name, which is always interesting. For example, Difford’s and almost every other cocktail repository on the internet has a Manhattan-like whiskey drink, while Cocktail DB has a slightly similar gin and orange juice recipe. This is one of the things I love so much about using recipes from the 1930s.

I also made tarragon-lavender marshmallows last week that were absolutely stunning. I love making marshmallows and it’s so incredibly easy– it takes less than an hour. I really wonder how many people would make marshmallows if they knew how simple it was. Oddly, I keep hearing things about there being a “marshmallow craze” right now, but to be honest, I haven’t actually seen homemade marshmallows anywhere I go, so I’m a little perplexed. I’d love to try other people’s marshmallows, but I suspect this craze is more in theory than in practice.

I’ve been very busy, socially. I keep getting to a week and not having a single evening free. And sometimes I have to miss something or choose between things. I’m not used to this!!! I like it but sometimes I want to sit at home and just make myself a cocktail and watch TV. I’ve actually had to consciously cut back on my TV watching and choose shows not to watch for the first time in my life. I decided to put off watching Person of Interest. I enjoy it, but it’s not as engaging as several of the other new shows this year– Alcatraz, which I hear is getting cancelled (too bad), Touch, and Awake. It just seems like in spite of the science fiction aspect, it’s much more of a typical police procedural, and while I love Michael Emerson and want to watch everything he does, I’m just not as engaged as I am with the other shows. Plus, it sounds like PoI is getting picked up for another season, so I will wait and see if it fits in better next year after the new-show-culling…and some shows I already have on my docket will be gone next year, like House.

I’ve been writing a lot. A lot of my writing is in direct response to some discussions that I’ve read lately, where I’ve seen people talking about why X-story isn’t being told, or why stories with certain types of characters aren’t out there. And I was reading these things and thinking, wait, that’s one of my stories. And knowing that these are things people are looking for and not finding kind of inspired me to work harder on them. I need to just pick one and stick with it, though, since right now I have four novels in progress. Who does that. Well, I have one finished but it needs a lot of editing, and I had a major breakthrough in terms of storytelling and a character change that will fix the storytelling problem in a way that embarrasses me that I hadn’t thought of it before, because it seems so obvious.

I have one book that has a scene that so perfectly mirrors the fan response to Amandla Stenberg’s performance as Rue that it was very surreal for me. (It’s a fantasy novel about fandom, so.) But that book is the one that needs the most work in terms of revising the outline (it’s at that stage, yes). I’ve been working a lot on my fairytale adaptation story, which is coalescing nicely, but I have this other newer story that is kind of demanding it be told and I don’t know what to do with it.

I really really can’t wait for the chip in the brain that will transfer what I am thinking to paper.

Also! As of tomorrow, my cleaning system will have (mostly) worked for two months. I’m really proud of the fact that I have a clean apartment and it’s been that way for two months. I have a living space where I would not be embarrassed to ask a friend over on the spur of the moment! I know where things are, and nothing looks sloppy (except my kitchen, a little). I’m thrilled with myself.

Since last month, I bought myself new furniture, I’m trying to decide what to do to congratulate myself this month. I’m thinking about other things I can do that will both be gifts to myself but that will also improve my overall lifestyle. Wall art is one thing I’m thinking about. A carbonator thingy is another, as is a nice tea kettle. Any thoughts?

I think that is all for now. This is a sort of discombobulated post of thoughts, but sometimes that is okay.

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.

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Watch me talk about fanfiction!

2012-03-14T22:30:03Z

Hi, everyone!

As some of you may know, Hansi Oppenheimer is creating a documentary about fanfiction, and largely looking at the benefits of creative fandom– which is something that is definitely needed. She interviewed me a couple of weeks ago, and here’s a clip from that interview which I am very excited to share with all of you.

If any of you are in the NYC area or close to New York and would like to be part of this, or know someone who might, or if you would like to know more, please contact Hansi by email. She was a pleasure to work with and I’m excited to be part of this project!!!

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.

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The Sketchbook Project

2011-10-24T14:51:44Z

whirled directed me over to The Sketchbook Project today, and I signed up! It looks like a fun and exciting project, and all of you who enjoy drawing/writing/thingying should take a look and see if it is up your alley.

Here is how it works: You sign up by Halloween (one week from today). You will get to choose a “theme” for your sketchbook, or ask them to assign you a theme. The themes can be interpreted as strictly or as loosely as you like. They send you a sketchbook in the mail. You fill up the sketchbook by the end of January, and send it back. Then it will go on a tour of museums and libraries with all the other sketchbooks people are filling up.

I thought this sounded neat! If you do, too, go go go and take a look! It is $25 to participate– that includes the fee of them mailing you a sketchbook just for the project. They also just sent me a code that will get you a small discount: ADDAFRIEND

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.

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Requisite Election Day Post

2010-11-02T16:34:01Z

In the spirit of Election Day, I thought I would take a moment to re-assert my political values:

My coworker, Glenn, gave me that this morning, after expressing his dismay about the number of “This is a sign” signs at the rally this weekend.

Oh, yes. I went to the “Rally to Restore Sanity/March to Keep Fear Alive” this weekend, with sunnyrea and kutiechick. Sadly, I left my camera in their apartment, so pictures will have to wait. I will leave you with one photo of myself:

The rally was kind of amazing. Have you ever felt hundreds of thousands of people jump in unison? Have you ever heard the sound of their feet echo off the buildings that surround you? Explaining the impact (no pun intended) of being involved in such a demonstration is not really going to do it justice.

We went to Rocky Horror after the rally, which was also super fun. I haven’t been in years! I was disappointed, though, to hear all the sort of “new” shout-outs, lots of references to really contemporary things that sort of seemed out of place. And there were a lot of people doing really long shout-outs, which I don’t get the point of, because they all overlapped each other and were impossible to hear. The live cast was really good, though! I liked the guy who played Frank a lot.

Sunday, I came home, and watched the first episode of The Walking Dead. It was literally gorgeous. I am still not entirely sure how I feel about a serialized zombie TV show, even based on a comic, but the first episode was excellent. Did anybody else watch?

There haven’t been many comics lately because I’m working on a longer project and I really only have time to do one thing a night, so the comics have taken a back seat to the other thing I’m working on, which is about 1/5 of the way completed. If I have some time to do some, I will post them, but it might be a while til I have time to do anything new.

I have actually been writing more. I don’t have the time in my day to work on something like a, say, NaNovel, because I can commit to about 500 words a day, but I’ve been writing some prose every day, and I’ve been reading a lot more books. I’m up to about a book a week, which is awesome, when I haven’t read in so long. I’m reading a lot of books that have been sitting on my shelves for years and years, and I’ve been buying new books, too. I have been reading Shannon Hale’s Bayern books and last week, I read Chalice by Robin McKinley, which I loved. It was about bees! This week, I’m reading Hexwood by Diana Wynne Jones, which I’m enjoying, but not as well as I like most of her other books.

Last weekend, I went with my mom to Columbia University Teacher’s College Reading & Writing Project’s first ever Parent-Child day. My mom wanted to go because a lot of the parents in her school were going, and asked me if I would come along as her child. Which was excellent because one of my favorite authors, Kate DiCamillo, was speaking there. I really liked what she had to say, especially for the kids. She talked about how she doesn’t like to write, how writing is hard, and it’s not something that comes easily to her. I thought that was a great thing for kids to hear from a professional and successful writer who’s written a very wide variety of types of books. I think a lot of the time, kids thing that being good at something means you like it and it’s easy, and so I thought it was great that she told them that. She also follows very few rules: she doesn’t use an outline, she doesn’t plan things out. It made me decide to go back and write something without an outline, which I haven’t done in about ten years. I’m rewriting a story I wrote when I was in my early 20s, a horrible fantasy story that was very trite and cliched, because I think I figured out how to make it into something better. So I guess in some ways it has an outline, but I’ve been veering away from the original plot quite a lot. I’ve also started working on another story I’ve had in my head for a while.

I wish I could write short things! But I’m terrible at short stories; everything has to be long, long long!

I’ve strayed from the topic of elections quite a lot, and it’s time for me to go vote, so I will go do that and possibly write more later.

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.

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Tits.

2010-08-26T18:39:11Z

karnythia recently posted a wonderful post about dealing with unwanted male attention, and it made me revisit a draft of a post I started writing after the I Write Like meme stuff I posted. The original post wasn’t about the story I’m sharing here. This was originally background information, but the more I wrote, the more this became its own story.

When I was twelve, I went on a school-sponsored camping trip. We went away for a week, and stayed in cabins for all but one night. On the last night, some of us were selected by lottery to go on a tent overnight.

I was one of the lucky kids who was chosen to go. I’m not sure how it happened, being the social outcast I was in middle school, but I wound up in a tent with a group of the more popular girls in my grade. These girls were usually very nice to me, but why they chose me for their tent is still beyond me. But they were friendly and inclusive, and for that night, I actually felt like I belonged in their group.

We pitched our tent fairly close to a tent belonging to a group of boys in our grade, one of whom I had a massive (and I thought, undying) crush on. I thought nothing of it.

Then it was time for bed, and in hushed whispers, the girls in my tent arranged a game of Truth or Dare with the boys across the way. I remember feeling apprehensive– I was thrilled, in part, to be permitted, even if just for one night, to be included in a game that was one of those secret realms of the popular, a game to be played at parties that boys came to. But I was also afraid. What if someone asked me to do something I didn’t want?

I decided the easiest way to deal with the situation was to just answer “Truth.”

We played without leaving our tents, whispering our demands and our responses between the two. It made it difficult to come up with good dares, but somehow, they came anyway. It was strange, though, this lack of association that the boundaries of the tents created.

When my first turn came around, they asked me, if I had to date any boy in the school, who would it be?

Of course, the boy it would have been was in the next tent. I was mortified, I didn’t want to say his name and have them all laugh. He already had a girlfriend, as much as any twelve-year-old could have a girlfriend, and it was one of the more popular girls, that these girls were friends with. I said I didn’t know, I didn’t like any of the boys.

They said I had to pick one. One of them suggested a name, a boy who was nice enough but probably someone they thought was socially acceptable for me to date– not too cute, not too popular.

And I named a completely different boy, one whom I thought was very conventionally attractive but not someone they were friends with, who I thought wouldn’t be an asshole about it if he found out.

They all laughed at me, incredulous, because he was shorter than me. I wasn’t sure what to make of that, but it wasn’t really that big a deal. I was a little embarrassed for a moment, but we moved on.

Another girl asked for a dare, and the boys told her to hand her bra across to their tent.

Things went quiet in our tent for a moment. The girl in question looked at all of us and whispered, quiet enough that the boys couldn’t hear, that she wasn’t wearing a bra.

One of the girls told her to just tell them, but she was too embarrassed to let the boys know she wasn’t wearing one. Finally, I asked her what size bra she wore.

“34A,” she said.

I said that was my size.

The girls looked at me with disbelief. “But your boobs are so huge!” one of them whispered.

The boys didn’t seem to catch on that this was taking so long. I suspect maybe they just thought that’s how long it took to get a bra off. I, meanwhile, started taking off mine, and handed it to her. She gave it to the boys, claiming it was her own.

The boys passed the bra back a couple of minutes later, and it didn’t look like they’d done anything weird to it. Knowing the boys in question fairly well, I think the dare was largely spurred by a combination of genuine curiosity and the fact that that’s what they thought they were supposed to be doing. None of them laughed or made any lewd comments. It wasn’t creepy in the way it might have been, and I didn’t feel pressured to hand over my bra.

The other girl was spared humiliation, and the game went one, but I don’t remember anything else about it.

It was the first time anyone told me I had big breasts. Uncertain, I went to my mom and told her an edited version of this story (leaving out the fact that it had come up during a game of truth or dare). She took me bra shopping shortly after that, and I was re-fitted with a 34C. In eighth grade, I was wearing a D, and then a DD.

By the time I was in ninth grade, I was having to special-order my bras.

But that night was the first moment in my life when I was even aware that I had breasts that were even a little larger than average. Somehow, looking in the mirror every day, the way preteen girls do, I never noticed the difference between the shape of my body and the shapes of other girls’ bodies. It took another girl to point it out to me, in the dark, in a tent. Until that moment, my breasts had never been part of my identity, and after that moment, it became increasingly difficult for them not to be.

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.

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Weirdest. Dream. Ever.

2010-07-17T05:46:50Z

I had a dream last night, that was very telling and certainly inspired by many of my feelings about moving out of the city.

Before I describe the dream to you, there is one detail that I need to explain:

Ribollita is an Italian soup. Its name literally means “reboiled,” and it’s pretty much: leftover soup. But the idea is that you take leftover minestrone soup and boil the crap out of it so that the veggies get really mushy, and then you pour it over day-old bread.

Here is Giada DeLaurentiis’ recipe for it, if anyone is curious.

You will understand when I describe the dream why this is so important.

Most of you know that I frequently dream stories that i am not in, stories that are like I’m viewing a movie. For example, two nights ago I had a dream about a cartoon television show that was like a cross between Venture Bros. and beatonna’s comics. It starred a time-traveling Roman gladiator who was a sort of Brock Samson-esque character who was fighting in the Napoleonic Wars. There was a scene where he pumped his fist at the heavens and shouted “Nooooo!” So that’s what my dreams are usually like.

But in this dream, it was about me.

I was in my new apartment in Queens, unpacking some stuff, alone. It was the evening.

The phone rang.

Another thing you have to know to truly appreciate this dream is that I have not had a landline since I lived in Boston in 2005, and before Boston, I hadn’t had a landline since 2001. When I called Time Warner Cable to get my service switched to the new address, they told me that my bill would actually be cheaper if I added a landline service. Like, by $13 a month. So I added a landline. I don’t even have a phone to plug in, but I will have a line.

Now, in the dream, I was answering my landline.

It was my godmother, who lives in Colorado.

“Are you home?” she asked. It was a weird question, because she called my landline.

“Yes,” I answered.

“It’s happened,” she said.

“What’s happened?” I asked.

“The Ribollita,” she said. “And they say there are fumes heading toward Queen.”

Now, she wasn’t talking about soup. And in my dream, I knew what she was talking about, because the word didn’t mean soup. It meant something that filled my heart with terror.

Again, I have to stop and explain something. In New York City, there is a section of the island of Manhattan where the bedrock is too far below the surface to build skyscrapers– if you’ve ever been to Manhattan, you would know that this is the downtown section between the Financial District and Midtown, where skyscrapers are possible.

In my dream, the Ribollita was a term for a hypothetical geological phenomenon whereby the massive construction in the upper and very lower portion of Manhattan would somehow cause the deeper bedrock in that middle section to buckle and send a massive seismic wave through the island.

I’m not sure how I would have not realized this was going on, or felt any kind of effect from it just across the river, but there you have it. And why in my dream, this phenomenon was named for a kind of soup is beyond me.

So, I gathered up my computer and a few things to take with me, and went outside to wait– and of course to see the effects. A few blocks away from where I am going to live, you can see the whole city skyline, so I went over there, and ran into someone– a woman I know, but I don’t remember who, it might not be someone I actually know in real life– and scanned the skyline. Of course, there were lots of weird spatial anomalies thanks to it being a dream, and when I got to the Empire State Building, it was standing at such an extreme angle that the spire of it was hanging over my head, and bricks were falling from it– yes, I know how completely implausible it is for there to be bricks falling from the ESB, but there you have it.

The river was alight with boats of people trying to escape Manhattan.

And then a brick flew from the other direction, over my head. I turned around, and there was a little boy standing there. I scolded him for throwing a brick.

“They’re angry at us,” he told me.

“Who is?” I asked.

“They are. They did this, because they’re angry.”

I asked again, who.

“I’ll show you,” he said. “Come with me.” And he started walking into a subway tunnel– of course, you should also know that in the area I’m moving to, the nearest subways are overhead, not underground.

But that’s when my alarm rang and I had to go to work.

I still can’t get over the idea that I dreamed of a disaster named after a soup.

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.

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Rhetorically Constructed, or: We All Write Like White Men, Part 2

2010-07-15T00:31:04Z

Thanks, fourzoas, for the subject line :-P

I wrote to Dmitri of Codingrobots, the site responsible for “I Write Like” yesterday, after I posted about it, and linked him to my post.

I would feel remiss to share his response as it was a private email and I did not ask to, but he replied swiftly and promptly.

His response was in two parts. The first part disheartened me, as he said that the software couldn’t tell what race or gender the authors were. He seemed to think that my complaint was that *I* didn’t get a woman of color as my response to the meme.

He also said that he thinks men and women are stylistically similar so he didn’t see the big deal.

However, he closed by saying that if I wanted to recommend him some authors to add, to please do so.

I’ve sent him a list. If you want to send him one, his email address is dmitry [at] codingrobots [dot] com.

intrepia compiled a list of authors in the meme as of yesterday afternoon. If Dmitry’s estimate that there were 40 authors included is accurate, this is a complete or near-complete list:

Douglas Adams
Isaac Asimov
Margaret Atwood
Jane Austen
L. Frank Baum
Ray Bradbury
Dan Brown
Raymond Chandler
Lewis Carroll
James Fenimore Cooper
Daniel Defoe
Charles Dickens
Arthur Conan Doyle
Ian Fleming
Harry Harrison
Ernest Hemingway
James Joyce
Stephen King
Rudyard Kipling
Jack London
H. P. Lovecraft
Vladimir Nabokov
George Orwell
Chuck Palahniuk
Edgar Allan Poe
Mario Puzo
J. K. Rowling
J. D. Salinger
William Shakespeare
Iain Sinclair
Robert Louis Stevenson
Bram Stoker
Jonathan Swift
J. R. R. Tolkien
Leo Tolstoy
Mark Twain
Kurt Vonnegut
H. G. Wells
Oscar Wilde
PG Wodehouse

That list contains 37 white men and three white women. There is not a lone single author of color anywhere on the list. If I’ve somehow mistaken someone’s racial background, I apologize, and please correct me.

In other news, this post has gotten me a +1 for the day and a -1 for the day.

In +1 news, Margaret Atwood retweeted my tweet!

Pix, because it happened:

That sort of makes me feel like I’ve entered a magical alternate reality!

But in bad news, I had to screen a comment on my blog because someone actually left hate speech! With words I don’t care to repeat in it and everything. I was somewhat shocked. Fortunately, that is what screening is for.

ETA:

The (once again prompt) reply I got from the creator of the meme is so frustrating that I’m no longer feeling that I owe his privacy any respect. Here you go:

Tea,

Thanks for your reply. I’ve added more writers into the database
recently. But I *absolutely* will not add people into the database due
to their race or gender. I will not search for lists of white, black,
Asian, Hispanic, or any other types of people that you _took care to
differentiate_. All people are equal to me, and equality means not
looking at skin color or different types of chromosomes.

I think the question is closed.

–
Dmitry Chestnykh
I Write Like

I got my keys to my apartment, so next post will be empty!apartment pics!

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.

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We All Write Like White Men

2010-07-13T18:37:04Z

So, I’d been eyeing that meme going around since yesterday…

You know the one, the one where you plug in something you’ve written, and it tells you who you write like?

But I was starting to notice an uncomfortable pattern, so I decided to plug in some famous authors.

I started with people whom I knew were actually represented in the meme generator:

Hemingway

I write like
Ernest Hemingway

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Margaret Atwood

I write like
P. G. Wodehouse

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Read the rest of this entry »

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.

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I wrote a Star Trek/ Harry Potter parody for a contest.

2009-09-14T01:22:18Z

And I won it! Yay!

Captain’s Log, Stardate 2263.72:
Returning from a routine medical mission, sonar sensors picked up a free-floating pile of detritus on the starboard side.

I ordered two men out in a reconnaissance vessel to survey the debris in the event that it was the result of a wrecked patrol. Aboard the reconnaissance vessel: Lieutenant Hikaru Sulu and Chief Medical Officer Dr. Leonard McCoy.

The investigation team returned with the assurance that the debris appeared to be a free-floating pile of trash from the 20th century. The two arrived back aboard the Enterprise with a small collection of samples for analysis.

Included amongst the samples was one (1) small “flash drive,” a primitive data storage mechanism which can be affixed to a computer for output via an outdated connective device known by contemporaries as a “USB port.” Our technology team loaded the device onto our computer’s main data bank in order to survey the information for anthropological research.

The drive included data from a Terran children’s fiction series familiar to Lt. Sulu. This was apparent based on the squeal of girlish glee which emanated from Mr. Sulu upon recognition of the material. Familiarity of the material was corroborated by Lt. Uhura, who claimed to have read said books in Latin, Hebrew and Klingon during her training as a linguist.

“Captain,” Lieutenant Uhura asked me. “You mean to say you’ve never read Harry Potter?”

“Lieutenant,” replied Dr. McCoy, “are you suggesting the Captain reads anything?”

I pointed out that I have read the autobiography of twentieth century basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar as well as many issues of Men’s Health.

Several members of my crew simultaneously went on to attempt to describe the plot of said children’s books. From my understanding, there is a boy who lives in a cupboard who marries his best friend’s sister and flies around on a maneating horse-monster. He has magic powers and goes to a special school where he may or may not be having an affair with his archnemesis. Because of anti-homosexual sympathies at the time of its writing, the headmaster is a closeted homosexual, and his secret relationship is the cause of the second World War. There is also a werewolf.

Mr. Chekhov then tried to illustrate a complex mathematical formula which he described as having to do with the relation between a matter transporter and something he called “apparation,” but I must confess I lost him somewhere in the first sentence and was not listening by the time he got around to making a point.

My attention was mainly required by a curious activity which my deck officers referred to as “sorting,” in which they discussed “houses,” and which “house” they would each live in. Each house apparently had a name and the vast majority of my crew insisted that they would live in a house called after a bird—I believe it was Eagle- or Raven- something, although Dr. McCoy did not live with the rest of them and instead got to live in a house called Puffle-something. Many of my crew members apparently looked down on this Puffle-house with a sort of intellectual disdain.

Mr. Spock, the only non-Terran in my immediate command seemed intrigued by the game and inquired as to the exact definition of these houses. Apparently the bird house is the house for smart people and the Puffle house has something to do with either cuddliness or socialism. I am not sure which.

In an attempt to socialize with my crew, I asked them which of these houses I would get to live in. Lt Uhura immediately volunteered the name “Slytherin,” but as soon as she said it, Lt. Sulu got a rather agitated look and shouted “Gryffindor!” at her. Lt. Uhura said that that was impossible and related my success at the Kobayashi Maru test as an example of my “Slytherin” nature. Lt. Sulu, on the other hand, insisted that my manipulation of the exam was only a result of my dedication to idealism and that that made me a “Gryffindor.” After several minutes back and forth, it was necessary for me to order them separated out of my concern for their physical well-being. However, on reflection, I am quite pleased as I have been made to understand that Slytherin is the “sexy” house.

My crew has now convinced me that I have missed an important part of Terran pop culture by not having been exposed to these books, so I have downloaded the first in the series and plan to begin it tonight. I hope there are not any big words.

–James T Kirk, Commanding Officer, USS Enterprise

PS I also made this:

Mirrored from Antagonia.net.

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