Why do I always want to app villains in games where it's deliberately made hard to be villainous. orz

SO

FOR THOSE OF YOU I DIDN'T SQUAL AT OVER AIM ABOUT

I GOT BACK THAT EXAM I ROCKED LAST WEEK

AND

I GOT 97%.

97%

THAT IS FUCKING AMAZING

I wish LJ would implement a feature such that I can put someone's username on a list and then never see their posts or comments again.

Yes, sinnesspiel, we all know that you hate FMA:B. We also know that you're an obnoxious wanker who's clearly never seen anything with actual bad animation. Fuck off.

A-ALSO: Avatar fandom has given me an aversion to shippy icons in general, but I really fucking loathe anti-ship icons. You know the ones I mean. Can we, as a generalized fandom community, agree to just...not make those?

SO TODAY I TOTALLY ACED MY EXAM

AND THEN I FOUND MY PASSPORT

I'D BEEN LOOKING FOR THAT SHIT FOR WEEKS

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

TOTAL ICONS: 26
Fairy Tail - 06 icons
Erza Scarlet- 02
Ikaruga - 03
Natsu Dragonil- 01
Polyushka - 01

Fullmetal Alchemist - 05 icons
Alexander Louis Armstrong - 01
Alphonse Elric - 01
Edward Elric - 01
Riza Hawkeye - 01
Roy Mustang - 01

Last Exile - 05 icons
Alex Rowe - 02
Claus Valca - 01
Lavie Head - 01
Sophia Forrester - 01

Naruto - 10 icons
Chouji Akimichi - 01
Ino Yamanaka - 01
Itachi Uchiha - 01
Kakashi Hatake - 01
Sakura Haruno - 01
Sasuke Uchiha - 01
Shikamaru Nara - 01
Temari - 01
Tenten - 03

PREVIEWS


Here at excusemewtfru

I HAVE A NEW RULE OF THUMB

If you are having a conversation on any sort of feminist issue, be it in fandom or otherwise, and at no point does anyone speak, say, write, think,or refer to the following phrase:

"Jesus Christ, how fucked up is it that we're even talking about this?"

YOU HAVE NOT DUG DEEPLY ENOUGH.

I don't think I've ever been so fucking furious at roleplaysecrets. ( Cut because it could potentially be triggering )

You know what I find really annoying? People who insert themselves into arguments and say WHY CAN'T WE ALL JUST GET ALONG!? as if the problem was that we had all just been looking for a fight, and not that there are irreconcilable differences at work!

Especially when the argument is over something that is both important and where it isn't just a matter of subjective opinion and in fact is something rather important. Like, say, that the whitewashing of a movie set in an undeniably Asian fantasy world is unacceptable.

It's one thing to ask people to be civil (although even that tends to be pretty fucking condescending), it's another to insist that OH WE SHOULD ALL STAND TOGETHER AND HOLD HANDS AND SING KUM BAH YA, NOT FIGHT YOU SILLY-BILLIES

WE HAVE TO STAND TOGETHER OR ELSE WE'LL DOOM THE FRANCHISE! DOOOOOM IT!!1

Blech.

Fandom Superlatives!
SUMMER 2009 EDITION: GO VOTE

I'm detecting a pretty strong Western Live-Action Fandom bias thus far! Help me to correct for that!

1. Pick a character, pairing, or fandom you like.
2. Turn on your music player and put it on random/shuffle.
3. Write a drabble related to each song that plays. You only have the time frame of the song to finish the drabble; you start when the song starts, and stop when it’s over. No lingering afterwards!
4. Do ten of these, then post them.

Soul Eater this time.

( Spoilers for recent manga chapters within )

I should be writing my paper on how the ending of Oliver Twist is made of classism and fail, but that's big and intimidating so instead I'm going to write about something else:

The Bechdel Test.

If you're not familiar with the Bechdel Test, it goes something like this: A work passes the Bechdel Test if it contains at least one scene where two female characters talk about something other than a man. If you don't understand why that would be significant, this is probably not the post for you!

Now, do not get me wrong. I think it is wonderful when works pass the Bechdel test. I think it's horrifying that this is actually noteworthy, but it's still a good thing nonetheless. I have no problems with the Bechdel Test itself.

What I have a problem with is people glorifying it as some sort of litmus test for genderfail. Because it isn't. It so isn't. And that's partially that the test was never intended to be that, and part that such a thing is actually impossible.

The Bechdel Test, in its original form, was intended to be applied to a specific type of fiction: movies. And in that, it works a lot better: Movies are short. They contain only a few dozen meaningful conversations at best. A single conversation out of that is a lot more significant than in an epic novel, where people never start talking, or a serialized series that runs for years on end.

The Test works better over short distances. Longer series will pass it simply based on longevity, and when they do, it's less meaningful. Shit, even Naruto manages it, and I think we all know that Naruto is a clusterfuck of genderfail. MIRACLEHATE.

Additionally, the Test is not intended as a measure of quality: it's an entrance requirement. The character who proposes the test will not see a movie unless it passes. The question of how she would know which movies do and don't prior to the advent of the internet and blogs specifically intended for that purpose aside, taking a gatekeeper requirement like that and using it as a measuring stick for quality renders it meaningless. Applying it to things that it was never intended to apply to is like using measuring tape that only shows metric and expecting it to tell you how many feet tall you are. And you don't know the conversion rate. Shut up, it made sense in my head.

And of course the other reason why treating it as a genderfail litmus test doesn't work is that it's impossible to have a binary test for something as context-dependent as genderfail. Context is everything. You can't have any sort of meaning without it. But the Bechdel Test, and all other litmus-style tests, don't address context: they depend entirely on a very limited set of facts, and analyze based only on those, disregarding context.

The results, while handy for categorization, are not meaningful. They do not speak to the quality of the piece, either as a piece of written work, or in terms of genderfail. And that's fine, since that's not what it was intended as in the first place.

Virgina Woolf is paaaaaaain, guys.

Many of you may know of my love for an obscure band named Five Iron Frenzy! I know runic_binary at the very least knows of them. They were and still are one of my favorite bands. They were together from 1995 up until they broke up in 2003. They are the reason why I had a mullet for about a year.

You've probably never heard of them. That's cool, they were pretty obscure.

Even more obscure is a side project by the lead singer and two of the other band members, Brave Saint Saturn. They played a different style of music from FIF (no horns, for one thing) and were a studio project, producing a trilogy of concept albums that they call the Saturn 5 Trilogy. The third one just finally came out earlier this year, and I took the opportunity to purchase all three!

Across these three albums (So Far From Home, The Light Of Things Hoped For and Anti-Meridian) they tell the story (through music and with the occasional poetic interlude) of the crew of the USS Gloria, a manned spacecraft on a mission to map Saturn's rings. While in orbit around Titan, a crippling disaster forces the ship into a geosynchronous orbit on the dark side of the moon, cut off from radio and sunlight. They're presumed lost, until almost two years later the ship finally drifts out into the sunlight, and contact is re-established.

One of the crew sacrifices his life in order to detonate the ship's fusion core, and jettison the ship's escape pod, the Starling, on a course back to home, saving the other two members of the crew, as well as the mission data. After being towed back to earth by a Russian vessel, the Invictus, the data is examine, and it's revealed that when the fusion core was detonated against the Starling's copper casing in the void of space, they had inadvertently created a process for creating antimatter. The Starling Method, as it's called, is formulated, and ushers in a new era of spaceflight and resolves the energy issues that had been plaguing mankind.

The ending's a little hokey, yeah, but that's just the summarized version (and most of this isn't made explicit in the albums itself; it's all in the manual, as they say). As it's told musically, it's really beautiful.

I am hosting these three albums here, for your downloading pleasure, because more poeple should hear them! After a few days I'll be locking the post to keep the copyright police from landing on me. NOTE, though: If you listen to these albums, and you like, them, then please, please, please, please go to their website and purchase the albums. These guys are not big-name recording artists who are rolling in money! They are the little guys and they need every sale they can get.

With that said.

Oh, and these albums all deal with Christian themes, sometimes explicitly, sometimes not. Doesn't bother me because, well, I am one, but if you're allergic to religion in your music this is probably not for you.

( cut for images and such )

Very minor friends cut! If you're suddenly defriended, it's not because I hate you. It's because we no longer share much in the way of common ground. Maybe I friended you for a fandom, and you've since moved on to another that I'm not in! Maybe whatever it was that joined us together has vanished!

Please don't whinge at me about it. I almost never, ever, ever post things under flock ANYWAY, so if you want to keep me friended and continue reading and commenting, that's fine! You will not miss out on anything! At all!

Man, Naruto fandom. What is this obsession with having characters join the ANBU? Is the concept of them standing around uselessly in mask really all that interesting?

Oh, come the fuck on. You have to be kidding me. That's just ridiculous. The only thing that poster's guilty of is lame copy-writing and poor design.

There is something fundamentally insane about a society in which people see something as innocent as a toddler pretending to breast-feed her doll, and feel they must sexualize it.