Time As My Only Measure

icon chosen for poor kitty's frustration


this lion is trying HARD and the baby is all 'heroes don't look at explosions... or lions trying to eat them'.

Lucy Liu has been cast as Joan Watson in Elementary, a CBS revamp of Sherlock Holmes.

Fandom (you can guess which part), proceeds to lose its shit over the loss of gay subtext:

(BTW, these quotes are just a sampling of so much wrongness on the internet and they get no links because assholes in my fandom you gets no love)( Read more... )

Meanwhile the rarer and more awesome parts of fandom have been dreamcasting their own topdown genderswap (Indira Varma as Sherlock, Ruth Wilson as Moriarty, Gina Bellman as Mycroft, Gina Torres as Sherlock, Sanaa Lathan as Lestrade, Archie Punjabi as Sherlock!) and I'm going to go hang out with them now.

From Immigration to Education now:

via MSNBC:

Students at Arizona's three state universities will have to pay -- or borrow -- at least $2,000 a year to get an education under terms of legislation approved by a House panel today.

 

Rep. John Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills, said students should have some "skin in the game.'' He said students will take their schooling more seriously and be less likely to drop out if they have made an investment.

"I really believe that when something is given to you, you don't have the appreciation of having put in some work,'' agreed Rep. John Fillmore, R-Apache Junction.

He said $2,000 out of $9,000 annual tuition is not that big a deal. Even with books and fees, Kavanagh said that adds only another $1,500 a year.

Kavanagh said that would leave students with $14,000 debt after four years, "less than the cost of a Chevy Sonic.''

"And I personally believe that degrees from our universities are worth far more than Chevy Sonics,'' he said. Anyway, Kavanagh said that is a small amount, as college grads earn anywhere from $500,000 to $1 million more over their lifetimes than those who do not have a higher education.

A petition to drop this is here.

I'm back into the school grind, sort of (not really, but I turned an assignment in so there's that). I'm hoping this means that I'll go back to my usual posting regularity, this past uncalled for hiatus has been odd, even for me.

I've decided that the most depressing part of this US election mess is that because the obvious Dem nominee is Barack Obama, we are stuck with a billion pointless Republican debates. So far this has meant that the public has to be subjected to incredibly offensive statements by candidates pandering to an even more offensive base (racism and imperialism seem to be the big applause themes). I almost wish the Democrats would do a "for the sake of it" primary series, just so the only mention of election isn't always about the current assholes comprising the Republican nominees.

Then again, Stephen Colbert was running in South Carolina, and that was a spritz of fresh air (but more on the fact that his Super PAC is very real and actually taking real donations from people, later).

SOPA/ACTA issues. Very real, very serious and mean more than just Megaupload being taken down (which was taken down without such horrid laws, we'd all like to mention). An entire online way of life is threatened; it's mad to think of how this is happening, that this is happening at all. I think I'm still in shock (which may sound incredibly over-dramatic but is really where I'm at right now). And not all piracy is black and white evil, dammit.

I’m not saying that we are all criminals for participating in file sharing. It is my hope that content distributors will start to realize why people pirate. That it isn’t just because it is free. It’s also goddamned convenient. They need to accept that times have changed. We don’t want to buy their DVDs. We don’t want overpriced cable bundles with 40 channels we will never watch. Photoshop should not cost 700 goddamn dollars. We want safe, reliable content available for download instantly and priced within reason. By not providing this, distributors are almost begging people to steal their shit. Frogman

More on LJ via amethystfirefly:

LiveJournal's leadership has made it clear that their future American business strategy lies in generating new traffic rather than catering to the service's current small-but-loyal membership. The challenge for Petrochenko and other executives at LiveJournal will be redefining the brand's identity in a crowded media marketplace. [source]

Sincerely hoping that there isn't a single LJ user at all shocked at this sort of response to their loyalty. I'm trying really hard not to turn this post into a DW IS SHINY one, so I'll stop there.

Diigo users, you won't be able to crosspost to Delicious for now. (link only works for Diigo users since it's a Diigo service)

- How Delicious does or doesn't by facetofcathy and another by kronos999 kronos999that explains why 'stacks' aren't fen-optimal

- seperis has some great info on using the API functionality to see all your tags, rename tags, and an experimental attempt at creating tag bundles.

- via bookshop Diigo is so not a perfect alternative. Apparently they've got an algorithm that detects "porn", etc and marks your links as private. I really wish I'd known this before I sent the email to Pinboard asking for a refund, *sigh*. As said a staffer:

Sorry, no.
We want to make Diigo a meaningful platform where all community members can benefit from quality collective wisdom knowledge sharing. So we set a high standard to public bookmarks.
As for bookmarks containing bad/inappropriate words such as sex,porn, sexy in title/description/tag/annotation, our system will convert them to private automatically.

and:

Hi all,
Since there are many k-12 students and teachers in diigo, we implemented an algorithm to detect whether a bookmark contains porn content. If it does, we will change the bookmark to private automatically. However, the algorithm may do some false judgement. Let me know the URLs which were converted to private and we will try to figure out how to improve the algorithm.

Thanks.

- A wonderful idea by acari; a Delicious stack labeled "New Delicious sucks" that's already at 30 links. No one trolls like fandom :D

- And of course, deliciouslymad, the Delicious discussion comm on LJ.

I really should listen to myself when I say I'll stay away from something.

The new series is off and with it is the return of Dr. River Song, archaeologist, professor, and all around BAMF. Unfortunately I made the horrible decision of lurking the Who comms on LJ in the hopes of finding squee over the good doctor.

I need stronger words for 'horrible decision'.

So the main complaint I've noticed about her from fandom is that she's too smug and she knows too much (at times even more than the Doctor) which I find ridiculous because this show is chock full of the Doctor being smug and knowing too much (always knowing more than the other characters). Check these comments out (or you know, don't- though I should mention that there are some positive reactions to River worth reading). Pretty much everyone who dislikes River dislikes her because she's "too smug" and somehow manages to know more than the Doctor (even though it completely makes sense seeing as how they usually meet in reverse and would it really be so bad to have someone just naturally smarter than the Doctor?).

Next time, I'll just stick to the River and Martha Jones comms. It's where the sensible Whodom lives.

Now why in Dalek hell do I not have a River icon?

BTW, three_weeks_for_dw!

1) Daniel Craig as Jane Bond & James Bond with M narrating. A bit binary, but really. Daniel Craig as Jane Bond which just results in sparkles in my head:

If you end up at the YouTube page, DO NOT READ THE COMMENTS.

2) three_weeks_for_dw is brainstorming: "Hey everybody! Our Anniversary Fest will be starting Monday April 25th, and it's time to start thinking about what we want to do this year."

3) Scully lost. I can't deal.

So I was walking past our university gym, and right at the front where a lot of university organizations table and recruit, I see these set of signs, ostensibly to raise awareness about sex trafficking, white chalk on blackboard, one after the other:

( may be triggering )

Western activism.
*sigh*

And umm. Faily.

As happens when western TV/movies try to get superior white liberal on us. Leverage season 3 did it for the first few episodes too.

Really sucks. This is a show I do normally enjoy, and their female characters are AMAZING, but excelling in one area does not remove the potential for fail in others.

Worries that efforts in the U.S. to limit enrollment of Asian students in top universities may migrate to Canada

Discussing the role that race plays in the self-selecting communities that more and more characterize university campuses makes many people uncomfortable. Still, an “Asian” school has come to mean one that is so academically focused that some students feel they can no longer compete or have fun. Indeed, Rachel, Alexandra and her brother belong to a growing cohort of student that’s eschewing some big-name schools over perceptions that they’re “too Asian.” It’s a term being used in some U.S. academic circles to describe a phenomenon that’s become such a cause for concern to university admissions officers and high school guidance counsellors that several elite universities to the south have faced scandals in recent years over limiting Asian applicants and keeping the numbers of white students artificially high.

Although university administrators here are loath to discuss the issue, students talk about it all the time. “Too Asian” is not about racism, say students like Alexandra: many white students simply believe that competing with Asians—both Asian Canadians and international students—requires a sacrifice of time and freedom they’re not willing to make. They complain that they can’t compete for spots in the best schools and can’t party as much as they’d like (too bad for them, most will say). Asian kids, meanwhile, say they are resented for taking the spots of white kids. “At graduation a Canadian—i.e. ‘white’—mother told me that I’m the reason her son didn’t get a space in university and that all the immigrants in the country are taking up university spots,” says Frankie Mao, a 22-year-old arts student at the University of British Columbia. “I knew it was wrong, being generalized in this category,” says Mao, “but f–k, I worked hard for it.”

"Too Asian” is not about racism"

Hah.

And something else that has been articulated perfectly by yeloson at "Too Asian".

Of course they can't tell the difference between being excluded due to structural racism vs. excluded due to simply not being up to standard - although they will have no problem having it go both ways whichever way serves them best- "I should get in because I'm white/you shouldn't get in because of quotas"/"If there's no black or native people here, it's because they're too dumb and lazy/but don't expect me to compete with asians, that's not fair".

Like I said.
Human beings suck.