diaskeuasis — LiveJournal
Apr. 12th, 2017
06:28 pm - I am no longer crossposting to LiveJournal.
This journal will no longer be updated and may be deleted without warning. You can find me at Dreamwidth: http://the-shoshanna.dreamwidth.org/. See you there!
06:01 pm - a quick hello to the new folks in my circle!
Hi, everyone! I'm happy to have some new people subscribing to me, and I promise to actually post things sometimes, even! But I got home yesterday from ten days away to a pile of ToBeDone teetering high overhead and threatening to come crashing down on me. Still, I crossed twenty-four items off my to-do list today and cleared out a bunch of email, so I'm in not-too-terrible shape.
My time away was lovely, though! Time with good friends I don't see often enough, and time with family ditto. (Er, also some time with family I definitely do see enough of, but everything was inoffensive and the food was delicious, so it's all good.) Now I'm trying to catch up on everything that accumulated while I was away, and also work on two weddings and a child dedication, an editing job, and a workshop I'm going to be co-leading on how to do weddings. Only I have to, you know, develop the workshop, first!
I continue to be hooked on The Expanse, if anyone is looking for a gripping political and scientific space show with layered characters and multiple storylines! In a way it fills some of the niche that Game of Thrones does, for me, only with a more interesting and interestingly varied cast and no sexual violence at all, which is refreshing, god. I'm also reading the books, though I've barely started, there.
I also watched several episodes of London Spy with some of the friends I was visiting, and we all found it riveting and creepy, and ultimately it was too creepy to keep going on with because we needed something a bit more comforting. But I'm definitely going to go back to it when I can! Thanks for recommending it, ringthebells!
I continue my pattern of going to the States a lot and yet never making it to a march or protest. (It's a skill: Geoff and I were in Sicily over Easter Week a few years ago and managed to miss every single Easter parade and celebration, which is a bit like a mosquito flying between the raindrops.) I keep having fantasies of coming back down next weekend or the weekend after, but I flat can't, not and keep my other commitments. Sigh.
And since I certainly know why I've had a bunch of new people subscribe to my journal in the past week, I'll add: I accepted LJ's new, noxious, and only-in-Russian terms of service only in order to retain access to some friends' journals over there, but I'm still pondering options. In the meantime, however, this will be the last entry I crosspost. If you're reading me on LJ -- which I don't even think anyone is, any longer? I was actually going to post a query about that before everything caught on fire anyway -- you'll have to read me on DW now, or I guess you could set up a feed at LJ if you really care. Or stop reading me, as you prefer. (I'm on Twitter, too, though I tweet pretty rarely as well. My Twitter is locked for RL reasons, but I happily accept follow requests from anyone who knows me through journal-land.)
And now I've got to go start making dinner -- I'm roasting All The Brussel Sprouts, and also Some Of The Green Beans because Geoff said he didn't want just brussel sprouts with the fish I'm also cooking, even though he loved them when I roasted them last month, so there. More for me!
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Mar. 17th, 2017
11:41 am - Escapade was great; parts of this morning, not so much; this afternoon should be awesome
I went downstairs to my office after breakfast this morning, and discovered that the cat had barfed all over my desk. Thankfully he did not destroy the legal paperwork for the wedding I'm doing this afternoon (note to self: putting things front and center on your desk so you don't forget them may not actually be the clever life hack you thought it was), but I do have to ask both my employers/freelance clients to reissue my 2016 tax paperwork. UGH.
In happier news, I had a fantastic Escapade! Amusingly, it was almost half a RL-activist Escapade, which is not what I think many people expect or want from a slash con? But I had plenty of fannishness in there too. I always have a terrible case of con brain and remember afterward only that I loved a thing, not what actually happened or why I loved it, which makes my con reports rather fragmentary and perhaps unsatsfying to others. But hey, that's why there are ( cut tagsCollapse )And I beat the snowstorm home and Geoff picked me up at the airport and had dinner ready ten minutes after we got home. It was a wonderful weekend.
Okay, I don't even have time to reread this for coherence, because I haven't even rehearsed this afternoon's wedding text yet, so I will hit Post and hope for the best. It was great to see everyone I saw at the con!
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Mar. 6th, 2017
06:29 pm - PeoplePower (ACLU) resistance training this Saturday
Would anyone who's going to Escapade be interested in getting together on Saturday afternoon to watch the livestream of the ACLU'S resistance training (https://go.peoplepower.org/signup/attend-march-11)? I don't know if there's any way we could all watch it on a big screen, but even just all being in a room together with our devices would probably bring the hotel wifi network to its knees be fun. It means missing some con progrsmming, of course, but on the other hand it makes a good lead-in to the Fandom vs. Cheeto Voldemort panel at four...
(They haven't said whether it'll be available to watch after the livestream ends, but I would assume so.)
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Mar. 5th, 2017
04:21 pm - I really do not think my conclusion was unjustifiedly drawn!
So my sister-in-law and her boyfriend/partner/guy-she-bought-a–house-w
The next email was a picture of her hand with a ring on her finger.
Do you think it was reasonable to conclude that they'd gotten engaged?
Yeah, so did I. But nope, they're not engaged. He just gave her a ring. But seriously, I think I can be excused for jumping to conclusions!
(In followup clarification, she wrote, "I thought I had written that it wasn't an engagement ring. Sorry about that.")
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Mar. 4th, 2017
02:01 pm - did anybody else look at yesterday's xkcd
and recognize themselves?
*lovingly strokes reversed mouse buttons and three hundred Keyboard Maestro macros the way Bond villains stroke white cats*
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Feb. 27th, 2017
08:50 pm - Powerless
Is anyone else watching Powerless? It caught Geoff's eye, so he set the PVR for it, and while we're not sure it's got legs, it has been entertaining.
Negatives: jesus god could we please not have humor -- "humor" -- at the expense of the fat girl, and sitcom humor in general isn't often my thing.
Positives: The first couple episodes were actually pretty free of fat-girl "humor"; it was the fourth that had me grinding my teeth. Otherwise we do find it funny! And Alan Tudyk looks like he's having the time of hislife. Also I like Jackie (Christina Kirk), his assistant, and her dry take-no-bullshit delivery.
(Shallow negative: Emily (Vanessa Hudgens) has teeth that are disturbingly white.)
These days we're watching it and The Expanse, which between my difficulty hearing it and my moderate face-blindness I can barely follow; it's an incongruous pair of shows!
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Feb. 25th, 2017
02:05 pm - thoughts on traveling to the US, etc.
Given what's going on in the US, together with what may soon be going on in Canada, Geoff has decided that he will no longer travel to the US except to see family (his and mine). He's notified the conferences he normally speaks at every year (techwriting and sff), and he will no longer court speaking engagements with US chapters of the Society for Technical Communication, as he has in the past.
He and I also had a conversation about how much trouble we'd be willing to get in, at a US border or airport entry check. I mean, we're extremely unlikely to be hassled ourselves, especially me (since I'm a citizen), but we might see someone else being hassled, and I wanted to check in with him, to make sure we were on the same page. Years ago, before 9/11, Geoff was at a land crossing into the States, dealing with permission to bring his kids in (they were young, and he'd forgotten to bring a letter of permission from their mom), and saw a group of Arab-looking men being berated by a border guard because they didn't have US currency with which to pay some fee or something. So he went over and offered to exchange money for them, which got him thoroughly berated himself, and iirc threatened with being refused entry, although in the end they did let him in. He's never forgotten it.
So here the two of us are, oozing safety and privilege, and it behooves us to mobilize them if we find ourselves in a situation to offer help or bear witness. But I wanted to make sure that he and I were on the same page regarding being willing to, e.g., end up being refused entry ourselves, or even arrested or otherwise hassled, and I'm pleased that we are.
He also wanted to go over with me whether we knew any Americans who might suddenly need refuge outside the US, should things get really bad, and he also apparently wants to investigate emigrating to New Zealand. I think he's overreacting; things are bad, and loking to get much worse in many ways, but we're a long way from those levels of emergency. Still, I'm not going to stop him, if he wants to! At worst it will make him feel better, and at best I'll be glad he did it...
Unrelatedly, I've barely been on Twitter in weeks, because I had to forbid it to myself in the evening; as well as the other fun things my feed provided, it had become one of my main sources of WTF news (thank you, people I follow!), and reading it after dinner meant I got so wound up I didn't sleep. But I don't seem to have/make time to catch up on it during the day. In lieu, I've subscribed by email to The Daily WTF, as well as some more, uh, traditionally phrased news sources. I would like to find time for Twitter again, though!
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Feb. 21st, 2017
06:29 pm - saying hi
In conversation with someone yesterday evening, I said that while I'm basically doing fine, I feel scattered. There are a lot of reasons for this -- getting back from a fairly long trip; having a freaking ton of work that I actually got through much faster than I expected, which left me feeling as though I'd been pushing a boulder that suddenly disappeared; not getting enough exercise -- and one of the ways I realized it was manifesting was that I wasn't interested in cooking.
( chatting about food and beerCollapse )
I don't seem to be doing much fannish stuff lately, unless you count reading lots of fanfic. Geoff and I are watching The Expanse, which I found slow to grab me at first -- partly because I have trouble hearing what the characters are saying! I'm not sure if it's the sound design of the show, the quality of our TV, or my own hearing -- but which is definitely getting interesting as it continues, and it's also gorgeously produced. We were riveted by Westworld, but the second season won't drop until 2018, sigh. I'm still really enjoying Elementary. In the theater, I've recently seen Hidden Figures (wonderful) and Moonlight (stunningly wonderful). And Geoff, a friend, and I just snagged tickets to The Book of Mormon on stage in Montreal in April! I didn't think I'd ever get to see it, but now I will -- yay! (Now if only Avenue Q would come here...)
Escapade is in a couple of weeks, and I haven't even looked at the programming, but then I rarely do; I just see what looks interesting when I get there. I'll be volunteering for the art show, of course, and I expect I'll be auctioning, but I'm so glad not to be running it any more. Mostly I'm looking forward to seeing people!
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Feb. 2nd, 2017
05:59 am - small moments
So it's quarter to six in the morning, and I'm walking through the terminal toward my gate, when the guy staffing one of those kiosks that sit in the middle of the concourse calls out to me, "Hey, I like your shirt."
I'm wearing my COEXIST T-shirt. I grin, and he offers me a fist bump. I bump his fist and tell him, "Frankly, there's no way I was flying to the States this week without wearing it."
"Aw, yeah," he says. "For that you get s hug." (This was not creepy, btw.) And we chatted for a few minutes, until some customers arrived for him.
I wore a long-sleeve shirt over it until I got through Customs and Border Patrol, though.
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