What is with the banana bangs and mullets? I am from Appalachia. Salon ladies kept trying to give me banana bangs and mullets well through 2002. It is not far gone enough to be retro; please stop.

Also, rattails on boys just makes me feel like I'm back at middle school in tobacco country in 1997. I'm just saying I would have chosen to retrocycle through the thirties, forties, and fifties another couple of times before everyone I saw at the coffeeshops made me feel faintly thirteen again.

1) Leerescuchando.net seems to be, essentially, volunteer-read podfic of public domain stories in Spanish. I am so, so happy, as Spanish-language audiobooks of everything except The Secret are painfully hard to get here. I spent all yesterday listening to The Adventure of the Solitary Cyclist. I mean, I still don't know who did it, but I learned some verb tenses! (Registration required, in Spanish, but so far they have sent me zero email, which is good). Stories are available streaming or to download. Warning for autoplay on their front page.

2) It just now occurred to me to listen to BBC Latinoamerica podcasts (again, download or streaming, no registration required) and that is how I learned that today we, if you can trust science reporting, now live in the Huxleyverse. (Stem cells are "maternal cells" in Spanish! Fascinating!). This also makes me happy because I like to listen to the BBC Theme whenever I'm sad, and this way I hear it three times in fifteen minutes! Seriously, so happy-making, I have no idea why..

I am so exhausted by this thing. I am pretty sure we are all really exhausted by this thing.

If anyone else needs to know, I usually warn for a whole bevy of things, mostly because to me "warnings" is pretty much a self-important name for "tags".

( People having bazillions of babies can be kind of upsetting in its implications? )

( I think a lot of my obsession with Quiverfull is how much it Venn-diagram-overlaps with my own subcultural obsessions. )

I know no one reads me for my incisive blogging (and I feel like most of my flist is busy / in a non-shared fandom right now anyway) but it is my latest nonstop obsession, and that's what journaling services are for?

I gots the Sims 3! ( And I'm going to tell you all about it! )

This from the girl who has self-policed out nearly every mention of the only thing between me and couchdeath Wii fit because I didn't want anyone to feel peer pressure to get one of those expensive balancy cutepanels of fun things. And yet apparently I feel it's appropriate to laud EA Games. Sigh.

I dreamed last night that Barack Obama and I had been best friends since kindergarten and told each other everything and sometimes hugged, but not <i>like that</i>, why did people keep claiming we liked each other like that? Because I thought Michelle was the best thing that ever happened to him! Jeez, head of the house finance committee, get a life and stop spreading gossip!

The whole dream basically recast the election as a high school AU. But I remember being all sad at the end because he got elected President and had to go live his dreams, and I had to go be the US ambassador to Mauritania. 

Okay, I'm back. I'm doing my stretches regularly and I seem to be on instant messenger anyway, so I might be a little less talkative but now I'm here. Who wants to talk about Star Trek? ( It was pretty great! (spoilers) )

I have been having some weird-ass health-related unpleasantness which, among other things, means I need to cut back on my recreational typing for a while. So I will not be around much, though I seem incapable of staying off of gtalk even though I can't actually type at anyone. This is probably good as it will force me to save my computer time for being the Best Employee I can Be and make me reserve more of my free time for leaving the house and napping. Nonetheless. Hi, guys.

Also, I saw Star Trek and it was awesome and I loved it the end.

I've imported both this and my old real-life journal, which is access-locked. This is germane because I also trimmed my "access granted" list down to people I've interacted with regularly on my old real-life filter. I almost never use the friendslock on livejournal for anything fannish, and if I ever were to, I think I'd create a sapote_fic journal or something. As always if you miss my grocery lists and so forth and aren't an axe murderer, please let me know that you'd like to be back on that filter.

I am not migrating all the way right now, and am certainly not planning to disable comments on my livejournal. I don't even do most of my reading here yet. I really like the Dreamwidth project, but am now experiencing nerves at the thought of picking up and moving too fast. Consider this dipping my toe in the migration pool. If that metaphor makes any sense at all. But do let me know if I'm missing anything terrific over here, please!

( Ten things about me, if you're curious. )

Also, I'm in my mid-twenties, I'm white, I'm Southern-ish, I'm cisgendered, I'm as straight as can reasonably be declared, and my paid LJ account just ran out so I'm about to get serious about migrating to Dreamwidth (from which I will probably crosspost).

The problem with dealing with my barely-twenty-year-old brother sometimes is that first, he makes me want to punch him, and then when I reflect on how I treated people who tried to help me when I was twenty I want to travel back in time and punch me too. There should be a mother's day card that says (sorry about 1997 to about 2008, Mom!) with maybe a picture of a stove fire or a rear-ended cop car.

Entitled Autobiography of a Working-Class Woman, the autobiography of Adelheid Popp. She was a labor organizer in Inzerdorf in the 1890s, and her book is freaking interesting and has been all I've really done today.

But the thing I like the most that I have learned is that Barbara Ehrenreich (the author of Nickled and Dimed) had an interesting predecessor in Paul Goehre, who posed as a factory worker for three months in 1891 and wrote what looks to be kind of an insightful study.

Also that we keep arguing about the same things as a society, don't we?

I am on the lookout for any more information about Adelheid Popp. She was a for-real socialist (she apparently thought antisemitism was freaking stupid, among other things) and she died in 1939 in Vienna, so ... I am curious. Though she was also seventy years old in 1939.

I am also having curious thoughts about the nature of the conversion experience - I have an unlovely obsession with cult survivor blogs lately, and I'm starting to wonder if it's ever reasonable to trust a sudden sense of rightness and everything-making-sense-ness. Because I sure recognize some of my adolescent fervor in Adelheid Popp's accounting of suddenly realizing socialism is the answer (she was by all accounts nineteen at the time), but it's not like that means that she was wrong about the circumstances of women factory workers in 1895 Vienna.

I am aware that my public posts rarely veer quite so fast into serious business, but hey, the life of the mind and all that.

And everyone seems to have gotten some from other people before I sorted out who I'd emailed already. Tell me if you still need one.

And since I'm spamming the flist today: I wish there was a screenreader that just read you your Google Talk output. All the computering under flourescent lights at my job is really starting to hurt my eyes, and while you can pry google chat out of my cold dead fingers it does seem to get worse on heavy chat days. I catch myself rushing through work computer use because it's all black on white and makes my vision swimmy. Can anyone recommend any free-to-cheapish text-to-voice modifications until I get my health insurance in order and can go to an optometrist? Googling has just made me frustrated so far.

I need to do a big diary-like writeup of my weekend, but in the meantime: does anyone have any books or websites or ehow pages that they like about how to organize small spaces? I have both of the books on apartment decorating/furnishing from our library sitting in front of me, and at least one of them is very big on stenciled fleur-de-lis and using antique copper fish poachers to organize your scented candle collection. Meanwhile, my major interior decorating coup so far was building a low bookshelf out of planks and cement blocks.

I have a subleaser now, which means that I went into my old apartment and realized that things like my big box of weaving supplies and my crate of Marion Zimmer Bradley books need to go somewhere. And I have no space at all at present.

(ETA: wow, the other book starts with the premise that you're refurbishing a Tudorian apartment block into modernist lofts. If I had a two-story loft with east-facing windows, I would be content to stop there.)

But I can't resist a giveaway and OMG OMG OMG OMG sapote.dreamwidth.org.

Poll #1379084 Halp!
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Should I have ditched the 3?

I have a dreamwidth at this name:

I am planning to get a dreamwidth eventually:

Incidentally, I am not planning to migrate or even start posting there regularly until I figure out the syndication thing and see a bunch of my friends hop ship, though I am hoping to upgrade to paid as soon as I can. So do not panic if you are staying put? Basically?

ALSO (and thank you everyone for the mini-vid prompts, I am gathering source, please still do comment if you want a short and potentially cheesy vid from me!) I am watching Angel season 5 because nonsequential is how I like to roll, and where is the fic at? Because I am me and can never want anything normal, I seem to want to read het, preferably Fred het. Wesley/Fred is acceptable. As is Fred/Spike's ghost. Does this exist? (YES, I know that spoiler spoiler badly spoiler, but the in medias res of it is still interesting)

Apparently I am still a sucker for the gun-wielding-colleagues-with-tension trope, thanks, X-files, for ruining my fanbrain forever.

ETA: Why is no one online so that I can tell them about the completely brilliant turn-of-the-millenium Buffy tripod sites I am finding? Oh yeah, because this is a Saturday night. That's what I get for working Sundays.

Okay, so: now that I have a laptop, and an internet connection, free time, I am trying to get my vidding mojo back, but it's been like a year and it's just not coming.

Who wants to prompt me? One-minute vidlets you choose the song? Up to about twenty hours of source, as long as it's a show or movie I've watched at some point? Anybody?

We can consider this a "would you be interested in prompting me?" post to spare my tender feelings if no one actually has any need to make me their wee vidder puppet. (Also, I've totally seen all of Being Human now?)

back, not dead, completely flattened, calling in sick tomorrow. Oof.
Everyone seems to have been pretty busy with goings-ons, and I will never manage to comment. I may be too busy being flattened to be online for a while, though.