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So excited about catgirl goth rave. There are logistical issues; I will conquer them. Conversation included "Well, there's nothing you can do about weather." "Want to bet?" MUAHAHAHAHAHA. I am so psyched for this party. I seriously brought 45 pairs of cat ears with me in a suitcase. (This fact caused the people at the warehouse the party is at to be like "We like you already." :)
The non-academic (though still intelligent, incisive, &c.) test reader for my transsomatechnics paper has said that "THIS PAPER MAKES D&G SEEM LIKE THEY MAKE SENSE." I'm still nervous that it's terrible but I think it is probably OK to hand in if I poke at the ending a bit more. I am certainly not going to fail. Someone else who started reading it for me but didn't finish said it had them laughing uproariously which I think is good? I dunno. I just futzed with the introduction some and am still not happy with the conclusion but I don't know if I'm going to get happy with the conclusion by tomorrow and maybe I should just let it go for now. We'll see.
This week I did a good thing: I convinced my company to add sexual orientation to their harassment policy and gender identity and expression to bot the harassment policy and the equal employment statement. I mean, it wasn't hard, but it wasn't in there, and I asked, and I backed it up, and found wording that they like. Hooray for using the things I am learning in school to make a difference, even if it's a really small one, in the world. (And thanks to the friend who took me aside and was just like "Rachel, you need to ask for this.") So that's awesome and makes me feel good about my continued employment with them.
I spent much of yesterday in transit --- it takes like three hours to get from my house to the airport if I'm not driving, and then I had two longish flights, and then I had to take a train from the San Francisco airport to SoMa. Most of that time, when I wasn't dozing off, I was playing Pokemon Mystery Dungeon: Explorers of Sky. (This is your faults, yonho and bossgoji!) It is ADORABLE. Playing as a pokemon rather than as a trainer, and talking to the pokemon, and oh god. I am playing it for the plot more than for the mechanics; it's clearly a love letter to roguelikes but the actual gameplay is kinda angbandy, which is not super my thing. Although it's actually somewhat hard, which I appreciate; ( spoilers I guess? Just in case? )
In the meantime, I am going to keep playing this, because oh my god it is so adorable. I am a mudkip and my best friend is a Vulpix. We sleep on bales of hay in a room together. Why is this not actually my liiiiiiiiiiiife
It looks like I'm going to read a bunch of the books for next semester in advance? I got an email with a list of them and at first I misread it and thought I had to read them all by the first day of class and I was like "Five books? Over Christmas break? I am filled with rage!!!!" and planned out how I would get them all done and get notes taken on them during that time. It turns out those are the five major books for the class instead, and she was just offering us the chance to get a head start, and here I am having already started two of them. I... guess I might as well just continue? Maybe the other classes will also send out their reading lists and then I can get sufficiently ahead that my crazy travel plans will not hose my schoolwork as much as I worry they might. Or maybe I will get distracted and not get that much done. But if I only do half of the reading for the class before it even starts, I will probably be OK.
I complain, because working this hard does wear me down, but I really do love what I do. Otherwise I would not be able to do this much of it. And my transsomatechnics paper, while it was a grind that took me almost fifty hours to draft 27 pages, is only 27 pages because it has to be 25-30; my initial outline has two entire sections I cut out of it, and I also trimmed out an entire five-page digression from the conclusion. I love reading and talking and thinking and writing about this stuff, and I hope it is someday useful to someone else. If I can find people to let me do a dissertation on this, I think I can do one and make it good.
My brain is convinced I am on vacation. Weirdly, I have no problem doing work for my job while on vacation, which I have been doing all morning, and no problem doing work for school on vacation. But when I'm on vacation and people try to pin me down to a schedule, I bristle, and it's a little unreasonable of me. How else am I going to actually see people? I'm hoping this calms down after a few days. I guess I am still stressed about Catgirl Goth Rave and jetlagged and wasn't able to eat normally yesterday and and and and.
The phone charging cable I brought with me... just doesn't work. I will definitely fix this by tomorrow. It could cause me some issues tonight. My current anti-planning attitude is "good I should just let the battery die and people who wish to contact me should have to find me in person" but that's uh not at all reasonable Rachel and you need to get over that. And find a micro USB cable. Preferably not for stupid expensive.
The Brainwash, my favorite pinball laundromat, has Attack from Mars!!! It has been years and years but I used to be Good at that table --- in ten games, I was able to score two replays, and you can get on the high score list right now with only like seven billion. I think I can hit seven billion with some practice; I was on the scoreboard the last time the Brainwash had Attack from Mars. I have a win condition for my trip now. I CAN DO THIS. I need to read up on strategies though, and accept that I'm going to burn like $40 re-learning all of the shots. Also my ball control has gone to shit. I'm not reliably able to stop on the flipper right now, which ugh. Ugh ugh ugh. Practice is good. Good lord my non-social time this trip is going to include a lot of games. Also my social time! I brought Race for the Galaxy.
I'm a smidge overbouncy. I think this iced tea is caffeinated... did I mention here that I more or less gave up caffeine in August when I gave up alcohol? I drink tea occasionally. That's about it.

Current Mood: bouncy
Crossposts: http://rax.livejournal.com/67574.html

Of three classes being taken, one class is completely done, one class just needs a couple of hours of revision on the paper and I should be able to submit it this weekend, and the other one (the paper is due in six days) is at 12/25 pages with an outline as well as an outline for an extra section in case I need more text. Which I doubt I will. But just in case. The class I was teaching-assisting for has 38/70 exams graded and then maybe an hour of administrivia and that should also be done this weekend. So that will leave me with just the one paper to finish. I really, really, really want to be done with it by Tuesday so I can send it in and spend Wednesday through Friday relaxing, spending time with my friends, doing a small amount of job work, and playing the growing pile of unopened JRPGs on the bedside table. ^^;; I would looooooooooooove to finish it this weekend... but I probably won't. And even if I do I will want to revise it on Monday or Tuesday because I doubt I could write 15 pages in the next two days at a quality level I am comfortable with. Ugh.
As part of my plot to do every productive thing I can think of that isn't the paper I am brain-blocked on, and because of something that happened to one of my colleagues, I really want to get automated backups running for my colo machine. (My laptop uses Time Machine, which I need to leave running again sometime soon, but that's not a huge deal in the same way honestly.) I have a Debian machine in colo and a Debian machine in my house. Both have DNS. I'm sure there's some obvious solution. Please help? (And if the solution is "rsync" can you explain what I actually have to do? I have no brain left. The inside of my head is full of gender.)
Because it is Final Paper Time here at... our house still doesn't have a name [0]... the table is covered in books, one pile per person. It's entertaining how obvious our sub-disciplines are from our respective piles of books; it's awesome how many of my pile have animals on the front cover. (Oddly, my pile also includes a burly 10" wrench and a pair of black cat ears. It's finals time. These things happen.)
Seriously my brain has turned to mush. I'm trying to think thinky thoughts because I'm supposed to be writing a brilliant paper. I wanna just hand in "foxes are pretty! I like to look at them gambol in the snow. Also, trampolines! Here are twenty-five pages of pictures of foxes I found on Google Image Search!" However I will not do this. Probably.
The Sacred Book of the Werewolf is an even more amazing book if you stir it up with Deleuze and Guattari and see what happens. I am just sayin'. A new reading of this book may be the most useful thing I get out of Deleuze and Guattari, but even if it is it will not have been a waste of my time. We will see.
Making these posts a weekly tasklist item was a brilliant plan.

[0] Gender Haüs? The Pokemon Center? Tailechery? Radical Plane of Immanence? I still have nothing I like. I love my house, but I still miss Cathedral.

Crossposts: http://rax.livejournal.com/67247.html

CATGIRL GOTH RAVE VI: A MOLAR BECOMING-ANIMAL

SHORT VERSION: CATGIRL GOTH RAVE. 10 HERON ST, SAN FRANCISCO, CA.
SAN FRANCISCO, CA. DECEMBER 18TH. 9 PM -- ???
DRESS CODE MINIMUM ALL BLACK, CREATIVE GOTH/CAT PREFERRED.

(Feel free to distribute this invitation to individuals; please do not distribute to mailing lists or other social networks without permission. You can get permission by emailing rachel@akrasiac.org, or you can link people here.)

LONG VERSION:
( not as good as last year's, but they can't all be winners )

Crossposts: http://rax.livejournal.com/66759.html

Spent the weekend with a houseguest, which was enjoyable and forced me to spend at least some time playing board games instead of working on final papers. (God do I miss having someone around who will just play game after game of two player advanced Race for the Galaxy with me.) We also made an apple pie!
Finished a draft of my Concepts of Gender paper, and it's... well, it's either really awesome or completely insane. There's a lot in there and I think a lot of what is in there is good and I don't know if it all hangs together. Luckily a classmate and I are swapping papers and she will be honest with me about whether it works or not. ...whether I have the time to fix it if it doesn't work is another question, and depends on how quickly I progress with my other paper. But I can at least fix the most obvious things, and professors understand that we have finite time to produce these papers in. They're not meant to be first drafts, but they're also not meant to be journal-ready.
And that's about it. Although I'm working on another post and I might or might not friends-lock it, I haven't decided yet. Providing useful information to people is good! Providing deeply personal information to the world at large is bad! I guess I'll decide and you'll see.
Oh, and CATGIRL GOTH RAVE. Expect an invite under friendslock with location information within the next 24 hours; I am just waiting on my host to send me address/directions.

Crossposts: http://rax.livejournal.com/66160.html

We had a ten-person Thanksgiving dinner at my house! It was not entirely vegan, as one of the housemates made meaty stuffing and chicken pot pie, but the other, like, twelve courses were vegan. (There might have been a pie that was only vegetarian actually. But generally speaking.) I made pancakes for everyone to eat while we were cooking and then made four vegan pizzas with homemade fake meat. I had originally been planning a bunch of stuffed squash but the fire ruined all of my squash and then hao mentioned vegan pizza and I was like WANT. Thank goodness I have a bread machine! After dinner we all played Rock Band and I even graded some more student papers and in general it was pretty awesome. The kitchen is... almost clean?
Incidentally, my fake meat recipe is really simple: Take dried TVP/TSP (textured vegetable/soy protein, you can probably get it in the bulk foods aisle of your hippie grocery) and soak it in a mixture of soy sauce, balsamic vinegar, and water for an hour or two. (You don't need to soak it that long probably but I like to get it nice and moist because I am going to cook so much moisture out of it.) Fry it in olive oil with a ton of basil and oregano for only a few minutes --- you want a few of the smaller pieces to get crisped but mostly you are searing the oily spices onto the outside of the TSP --- and then put that over pizza, or just pick at it while you are waiting for the oven to be free so that you can make the pizzas. Usually I use Field Roast sausages but they have a tiny amount of potato in them and lately that has been enough to set me off. :( But this is an awesome replacement, and cheaper.
It's not just me who is very particular and has My Plate and My Fork and My Glass For Drinking Water With and hates when they are not available. Apparently this is something my mom does too, except her coping mechanisms for this are so completely different from mine that neither of us noticed that the other one had this quirk. Unless she noticed that I had it and was just being coy, I'm not sure. :) This comes up a lot more than it used to for me in part because I am STRESSZILLA but also in part because previously I had eight of "my fork" and so on, but now I have a unique fork, plate, bowl-for-cereal, and water glass. :( It's on my long term tasklist to track down more of the fork and maybe buy more of the water glass; the bowl is a lost cause because it's a handmade gift someone made for me ten years ago, and the plate has a chip so even though I know where I could buy more there is no point, I could never duplicate the chip. I am very lucky that my housemates and local friends are very chill about this.
It's bad enough lately that I travel with my fork. It's a good thing I'm checking luggage to California this upcoming trip; I'm not sure what I'll do for Further Confusion. Hopefully "be less stressed so that I do not need to bring a fork from home." If it gets to the point where I want to bring it to restaurants (currently I do not have this desire) I may start seeing a shrink about it. Otherwise I am satisfied with my coping mechanisms.
Got to spend part of yesterday with my uncle and aunt and their five Siamese cats. *swoon* I shouldn't get like ten cats, right? ...Right? Especially since Selene actually came to bed with me last night and stayed there the whole time, even managing to adjust as I rolled around. <3 <3 <3 <3 <3
The kitchen is usable again! The cabinets are repaired! This week they are repainting (because some of the smoke will not come out) and finishing up cleaning and maybe wallpapering the backsplash depending on how long it takes the new wallpaper to get in stock and then I will get a new range hood and then it will be DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE DONE. I am very glad of this. Cooking is nice. Also I still need to fill out insurance paperwork. ;.; At least this didn't happen when I had no wiggle room on final papers, but it still hurts, a lot. Ow.
I have a small stack of Reward Games showing up in the next couple of weeks: "Finish your final papers and you too can play Pokemon Mystery Dungeon/Final Fantasy The Four Heroes Of Light/Pokemon White/Dragon Warrior IX!" If it weren't for JRPGs I would ~~get so much more done~~probably I dunno watch television or something else that wasn't real work, it's not like I can actually be productive every hour I am not sleeping. Oh wait I know what I would do if I weren't playing JRPGs! Roguelike games. Right then. These are cuter.
For my mother's benefit (primarily, anyway) I was thinking about wishlist items and everything I came up with was a kitchen appliance or a power tool. Who am I and what have I done with the Rachel who always orders food and refuses to operate a screwdriver? And how do I make sure she doesn't escape because this is awesome?
Oh and just to be explicit, it is OK to call me again.

Crossposts: http://rax.livejournal.com/65468.html

I have a new stove. It is a gas stove with a real convection oven and it is not the Nicest Best thing I could have gotten but it was a Nice Good thing and I could get it installed on Saturday. While I might have shopped around more if I had been able to cook in the meantime, I knew I was losing the microwave yesterday, too, and so I found a stove I knew I would not regret buying and pulled the trigger. It's wonderful to be able to cook on gas again. So wonderful. Oh my god. <3 <3 <3
I lost the microwave because Cassandra came to pick her stuff up yesterday, which basically took up the entire day for me. This went as well as my ex-fiancee coming into town with her boyfriend to take all of her stuff and two of the house's three pets could go. I mean that, really, there were times at which all of us were genuinely having fun. There's a weird finality to it, and the missing furniture and such casts a longer shadow than I expected, but it's also good that we got it done, and good that she has all of her stuff back so that she can continue rebuilding her life like I've been rebuilding mine. It's not like you need stuff to do that, at least not as much as either of us has, but it helps, especially when that stuff includes the tools of your trade or tools you can use to support yourself emotionally. So I'm glad for that, and also super glad that Rik was here because oh god despite being the best it could be it was super painful.
Selene --- my cat, for the new LJ friends I just picked up --- is clearly spooked by the missing stuff and missing other cat. I wish I could ask her whether she wants a new kitty-friend or not; I mean I know I like having multiple meow-machines running around the house, but if she's just as happy on her own, maybe I should get fish or something. Except fish are actually kinda high-maintenance. But you know what I mean. Selene certainly didn't like it when Oolong showed up, at all, but they were getting along really well by the end, including both of them sitting on my lap on the couch yesterday. <3 So I dunno. Decisions I don't have to make right now (and shouldn't make until after I get back from being gone for three weeks, anyway).
Rik just turned to me across the table and asked "Do you need more Mao in your meow?" This is apparently krdbuni's fault. I laughed. :)
The fact that I have a stove again means that we can host Thanksgiving after all!! I am super excited. My mother said she would teach me how to bake pies, which is a culinary skill I completely do not have. Between trying to save money for future years of grad school when I might not have a job and picking up a new allergy this summer, I've been cooking a lot, and gaining some new skills and fluency with new ingredients (prickly ash!). But baking, except for my one peanut butter cookie recipe, largely eludes me. Thankfully, there are bread machines.
All of this brouhaha has me behind on grading and final papers, but two weeks ago I was ahead, so I think I can catch up. Perhaps with judicious application of work vacation days --- but perhaps not! We will see. If I am Ball Of Stress (tm) around, say, December 10-15th, it's because I am cranking on final papers; I read fast and that makes the first half of a graduate semester pretty easy for me, but I write slowly, and when I get up against deadlines, it is a dreadful, tea-slurping slog. But I shall be triumphant!
It is time to unpack my Winter Clothes box finally! That will be the last box opened, and I will be completely, 100% unpacked and moved in. I was basically 100% unpacked for a couple of months now but Cassandra moved out and so there were still boxes everywhere as I packed her stuff and it is nice to be able to say Now There Are No More Boxes and to have a symbolic action I can take to confirm this. In fact maybe that will be the next thing I do before I go out with Rik and engage in acts of shopping. Hopefully I have enough hangers. But if not I can buy them while I am out shopping! Myahahahahaha.
Thank you all for all of your support in the last week. I think by tomorrow or Tuesday I will be ready to stand down the whole "do not call me" thing. It's been a very difficult few days and I am very glad I have a limited class schedule this week.
Oh did I mention that when the fire department came they did something that caused me to have to learn how to reset my furnace and I discovered this two days later because it was 52 in the house? Yeah. It took me an hour, but now I understand how my furnace works! This whole homeowner thing is causing me to learn how appliances operate and how to operate tools --- the stove installation dudes kindly handled the gas hookup for me but I think I could have done it myself if they hadn't! Since Cassandra and I (stupidly, in retrospect) spent hours and hours figuring out how to hook up the gas dryer ourselves. This is certainly a more useful skillset than some I have put time into!

Crossposts: http://rax.livejournal.com/64550.html

Rik arrives in around twelve hours on a flight from Seattle and will be here for a week. I was up stupid late last night anyway; this will be fine. Because RIK. <3

The electrician says there's no electrical damage and the way I handled it probably prevented it from being a lot worse. EDIT: The power is fine! And the stove even still powers on! Although the control buttons are... not super responsive and kinda melted and it should probably still be replaced.

I think this is a good time to take a walk and get lunch, which will cross off two more items on my emergency today tasklist. Then uh maybe it's OK to play Pokemon for an hour or two before I move on to the next task.

Crossposts: http://rax.livejournal.com/64123.html

Short version: Housemate set the house on fire. No one is hurt. Got the cats out OK, and though they were very scared at first, Oolong has already wandered up to me and licked my face. I think Selene is still hiding. I will probably go sit with her when I am done with this post.

Also: DO NOT CALL ME. You will stress me out and I will not answer. This goes for anyone, whether you are friend or family or the Pope. DO NOT CALL MY PHONE. You can text me but do not expect a response if I am not able to deal right then. I would in fact really appreciate texts or emails or whatnot! But I am not able to deal with interactions that I cannot schedule right now and probably for the next few days. Thank you for your understanding. I know that I am crazy. Please do not make me more crazy.
( details )

Crossposts: http://rax.livejournal.com/63674.html

( not only is appropriation of Hart as a lesbian super problematic and gauche, but so is appropriation of Hart as a transsexual. )

Crossposts: http://rax.livejournal.com/63461.html

Oh hey! I should post about this!

If you make art --- installation ravey sorta stuff, something to put on the wall, glowy glowy glowy things that sparkle --- hell, if you just wanna make a bunch of cat ears and save me some time --- I'll totally fund it if the budget is modest. (I have a side job, but fundamentally I'm in grad school and have to save for the years I might not have a side job but still have a house and long-distance relationships.) I guess I'd pick and choose things that were goth catgirl themed if twenty people were like "pick me pick me" but I'm guessing only one or two of you are psyched to do something crazy and random for catgirl goth rave on only a month's notice. Feel free to prove me wrong though?

If you're not sure if something's appropriate or not, feel free to ask me. I'm a big fan of Parties Should Have Glowy LED Shiny Things! But I would also be a fan of stuff that subverted the Raver Toy genre, especially if it's also catgirl-thematic. I don't know if I'm going to get around to making anything super exciting this year, although I will hopefully at least make some costume modifications, and of course I will make sure there are ample standard glowsticks.

Despite moving cities this may be the biggest Catgirl Goth Rave yet. Holy crap. Oh my zomg. There may be double digits of people coming in from out of town. And not Berkeley out of town, like, Boston out of town. If you don't have plans for December 18th and it's reasonable for you to get to San Francisco, you should come.

Crossposts: http://rax.livejournal.com/62534.html

( So is _this_ how you create a body without organs? )

Crossposts: http://rax.livejournal.com/62369.html

( a kind of corporeal blasphemy )

Crossposts: http://rax.livejournal.com/61840.html

( the foreskin is feminized; characterized as a dangerous and permeable interior space )

I'm going to leave my opinion out of this for now.

Crossposts: http://rax.livejournal.com/61457.html

Weekly post of not reading notes, I choose you! Use your bullet ~~seed~~list attack! (oh god I am such a dork)

I. Have. COUCHES. <3 This means that instead of sitting and doing my readings in bed (which is supposed to be psychologically bad or something and also the back support is not great), or sitting at the dining room table, I can sit and do readings in the library, which has matching couches and each couch has a little table in front of it for laptops and books and the one I'm using now even has a LAMP. <3 It's pretty awesome. Also, new couches smell kinda weird; this confuses the cats [0] as much as it confuses me. I'm sure after a while that fades. It's like new car smell, but for couches! Neither of which I seem to enjoy terribly.
Netiquette question: I basically don't use facebook, but I have an account, because otherwise I don't get invited to parties and my family uses facebook messaging instead of email. This isn't awesome, but I'd rather hear from them on facebook instead of not at all, you know? Generally when someone sends me a message it's either private or something for some sort of application I'm comfortable ignoring, but today I got like fifteen messages on my "Wall" saying happy birthday. Do the rules of Facebook etiquette require I respond to each one individually? All in one go, with an additional "wall" post? Not at all? I have posted to Facebook I think twice ever, once to say "I don't use this, contact me elsewhere" and once to say "I'm moving to Indiana." I want to do the correct thing but oh my god I think I got more facebook messages this morning than I had previously received total.
Some of y'all are furry pornographers! (Maybe some of y'all are regular pornographers too, but I don't keep track.) The Kinsey Institute, which I can see from the window of my office, is having a Juried Art Show. Y'all should represent, and if you need somebody to handle stuff on the ground, I'm happy to help.
I will be spending most of Saturday at the Queering the Countryside conference. I'll be taking notes, though I don't know if I'll transcribe them all (I will probably use paper because I am sure there will be competition for outlets and I don't mind paper). I may not go to the "fun" events because free food I can't eat and liquor is not really my idea of "fun" and sitting and listening to people talk is. I... have sort of turned into a square. ^^;; Except a square wearing pink and black striped armwarmers with stars on them? I dunno. Anyway, this conference should be awesome, and I will try to post some kind of writeup even if it is just "hey dwircleflist [1] here is the PDF I am handing in to my professor about this, read if you want to!"
Amazon is trying to sell me video games on sale. Kiiiiind of tempted to allow it to do so. I've seen good reviews for the new DS Final Fantasy and for Rock Band 3 (which I think my mom will kill me if I don't have when she gets here for Thanksgiving, although there is no way I am buying all the new peripherals I need that money to go visit people) --- if I get both of those I can get some other game for free. One person has said good things about DWIX; I could also get Pokemon Ranger instead. Sadly, they don't have Pokemon Mystery Dungeon as part of the list, as I hear that's basically Pokemon and Roguelikes, Two Great Tastes That Taste Great Together!
I'm planning travel through, like, May. (Anyone know when Steer Roast is going to be with sufficient certainty that I could just buy tickets?) Right now it's looking like this:

Dec 15--Jan 2: San Francisco for Catgirl Goth Rave and general madness, with possibility of jaunt down to LA for a bit

Jan 13--Jan 16: Further Confusion in San Jose, although I am not 100% committed to this yet, I need to decide if I'm comfortable dealing with the hotel and con costs. But a lot of people I want to see will be there and one of my housemates might come with me.

Jan 28--Jan 31: I get to see Ruth!

Mar 11--Mar 16: Tentatively:Seattle! Highly influenced, of course, by the presence of certain coyotes.

Mar 16--Mar 21: Tentatively:New England! To see friends and family once the weather isn't that terrible.

Also I continue to work on my papers, even if just a little bit here and there, and it's awesome. I am especially psyched for my TST paper obviously but I am also happy about the Concepts of Gender paper, which will be working with some of the same ideas but in a very different theoretical framework, one that's more clearly related to current lived experience of people who aren't me. I think the balance is good.
Hope you all are doing well! It's back to work with me now...

[0] Yes, cats plural. Oolong is still here due to non-hilarious airline hijinks. Current plan is for Cassandra to take her when she gets the stuff that's still here; in the meantime I am blessed with another couple of weeks of her company.

[1] Totally stole "dwircleflist" from

chagrined .

Crossposts: http://rax.livejournal.com/60907.html

( As somatechnology, the niqab here signifies a garment that refuses the colonial gaze. )

Crossposts: http://rax.livejournal.com/60277.html

( Homeland must be understood as an affective and temporal process rather than a place. )

Crossposts: http://rax.livejournal.com/60061.html

( What if we assume the animal has a soul? )

Crossposts: http://rax.livejournal.com/59763.html

( Trigger warning: Holocaust, other ways people are unspeakable to each other )

Crossposts: http://rax.livejournal.com/59575.html

Weekly post of week is early this week because my call with Ruth is postponed and my brain is not in Productive Kitty land --- yet doing this counts as a tasklist item. That's right Internet, you are on my tasklist. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥

I caught them all. Well, I caught all 493 pokemon available in the generation IV games, anyway, which leaves me basically done with SoulSilver. (I haven't caught Mewtwo yet, but I got traded one by someone who did, and I don't like Mewtwo anyway? I guess I should catch mine so that I can trade one of them away for a shiny or something.) I got to only needing 20 last night and said... to hell with this, and did a bunch of trades on pokewifi, and finished the last two this morning before leaving for class. It's sort of anticlimactic, but I'm glad I did it. I definitely won't do it with every game or maybe every generation, but I plan to keep up a stable so I can breed myself fun things for Gen V...
I still have that LeafGreen nuzlocke run, my Pearl game, and Japanese White for when I want to play more Pokemon. ...so I still don't need to buy any more video games! That's good. :) Not sure which one I want to work on most seriously next...
I had a makeup class today, so I went to school and back in reasonably close to full goth catgirl regalia. I really enjoy the way a non-revealing catgirl costume, worn without anxiety, and eye contact both attracts and repels people's gaze. My favorites are the people who completely take it in stride and tell me I've got it going on, and the ones who look, and then look away, and then look, and then look away, and try unsuccessfully to hide that they are staring. I am glad I don't attract that kind of attention every day any more, but it's nice to have a way to do it, and a moderately socially supported time (halloween!) to do so. Of course, I don't intend to go to any parties, because I have work to do. But I do plan to wear cat ears all weekend BECAUSE I CAN.
How hard would it be to find a place to stay at Further Confusion at this point? I hate sanity and enjoy mad travel plans.
Was without power for most of Tuesday, which led to a bunch of hilarious misadventures involving Oolong not being able to fly to Boston and Rik still having to leave on what was apparently the only flight leaving the airport on time all day. Still, this meant he got to see Of Montreal and Janelle Monae the next evening, so I am OK with this. :)
Definitely four people coming in for Catgirl Goth Rave from well out of town --- with another dozen people considering it fairly seriously. December 18th, San Francisco. You know you want to!
Got my first couple of grades back on papers so far this semester --- both As. Arguably, I am writing home about this despite its being nothing to write home about, since it's grad school, and you're supposed to get As on everything or you are sort of screwing up. Still, when you don't get grades on anything until the last week of October, it's nice for the comments on the papers you get back to end with "Great work!" and "Excellent job." I know intellectually that I can write at a graduate level, because I already did it for three years, but lately I've been trying to draft bits of a final paper and it's coming out feeling terrible, and it's nice to have someone highlight all the things in an essay I did well and say "this is really good!" While UMB was problematic in a bunch of ways, they were very good at positive feedback.
Also yes, it is October and I am working on my final papers.
Also also, it is October and it is a damn good thing that the NBA's rules for which games you can't watch online (in short: any of the ones you would want to see if you don't have a television, which is the main reason I would want the service) are so restrictive, or I would purchase their service, and drop out of grad school. Well, I didn't drop out of grad school last time I had cable, but I did find myself suddenly spending hours just watching television, and I so do not have time for that. ...on the other hand it's free until November 3rd. And so far this game is an embarrassment. Enough that I think it's time to do more readings instead.

Crossposts: http://rax.livejournal.com/59056.html

This week's TST readings were all about the body politic and the way this idea (specifically, Hobbes's Leviathan) did or did not work out in practice, using examples like trans surgeries, self-demand impairment, blood banking, organ sales, mayhem law, and so on. It was pretty awesome, but because of being behind schedule, I didn't take detailed notes. Sorry. If you have interest in any of those topics, poke me and at some point I can suggest some readings for you. (Also, Foucault's lectures are downright readable!) These detailed notes are on the paper I'm presenting on in class, and are on a work by an author I realllllllly need to read more of. [0]

( We have perversely worshipped science as a reified fetish in two complementary ways: )

Crossposts: http://rax.livejournal.com/58801.html

my baby's in the white fluffy clouds

xe's miles above the desert, xe drops Shaymins down

You get your bullets early this week.

This time next week, I will be entirely done with this semester, for good or for ill.

CATGIRL GOTH RAVE: Now with location information!

Alive.

Week!

I have survived another week.

I will be OK.

Fire.

Super-Brief Reading Notes: Devereaux, "Doctor Alan Hart"

Catgirl Goth Rave: Make Art!

Reading Notes: Lodder, "A Somatechnological Paradigm"

Brief Reading Notes: Stephens, "Queer Monsters"

Reading Notes: Fox and Thompson, "Sexing the Cherry"

Update: Weeks Everywhere.

Extremely Brief Reading Notes: Pugliese, "Compulsory Visibility"

Brief Reading Notes: Puar, "The Turban Is Not A Hat"

Super-Brief Reading Notes: Wadiwel, "Thick Hides"

Brief Reading Notes: Agamben, "Introduction" and "The Camp as Biopolitical Paradigm of the Modern"

Weekly post of week!

Reading Notes: Haraway, "Animal Sociology and a Natural Economy of the Body Politic"

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December 2022

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