welcome to downtown coolsville

Day 01 → Your favorite song
Day 02 → Your favorite movie
Day 03 → Your favorite television programme
Day 04 → Your favorite book
Day 05 → Your favorite quote
Day 06 → Whatever tickles your fancy
Day 07 → A photo that makes you happy
Day 08 → A photo that makes you angry/sad
Day 09 → A photo you took
Day 10 → A photo of you taken over ten years ago
Day 11 → A photo of you taken recently
Day 12 → Whatever tickles your fancy
Day 13 → A fictional book
Day 14 → A non-fictional book
Day 15 → A fanfic
Day 16 → A song that makes you cry (or nearly)
Day 17 → An art piece (painting, drawing, sculpture, etc.)
Day 18 → Whatever tickles your fancy
Day 19 → A talent of yours
Day 20 → A hobby of yours
Day 21 → A recipe
Day 22 → A website
Day 23 → A YouTube video
Day 24 → Whatever tickles your fancy
Day 25 → Your day, in great detail
Day 26 → Your week, in great detail
Day 27 → This month, in great detail
Day 28 → This year, in great detail
Day 29 → Hopes, dreams and plans for the next 365 days
Day 30 → Whatever tickles your fancy

I do not want to write about my year in great detail because it would be long and boring and include going fucking mad, so here is a video of Bert and Gerard being stoner boyfriends instead!

Fuck my year in detail, this is like my life in essence.

(Please note that if you think this is a personal attack: it ain't. I promise.)

Re: warnings:

I don't have a hell of a lot of experience with fic that actually requires warnings- I never write it, and I rarely read it. I have very few triggers, and I don't expect to see many of those I do have in fic. And things like character death and violence don't bother me particularly. Rape, however, is a whole other ball game. impertinence wrote a post on the subject that explains why better than I ever could. Warning: Very explicit discussion of sexual assault and the nature, anatomy, cause & effect of triggers. Is itself triggery. If a story features one scene in which a person is hacked to death with a chainsaw and eaten and another is raped, I wouldn't expect a warning for the former, but it'd be great to have one for the latter.

Because the thing about getting hacked to death with a chainsaw and eaten is that it doesn't happen to one in four people.

Asking a writer to post warnings with their fic does not detract from their ~artistic integrity. It's not like anyone's asking you to go back and cut that scene entirely, or even say "this happens to so-and-so on page twenty when he goes to such-and-such." Nobody's asking you to be a babysitter. Nobody's asking you to be specific. Nobody's asking you to change the way you write. All you have to say is "warning for non-con." That's it. It takes ten seconds and helps people not get triggered by an unexpected rape scene and spend the next few hours freaking out and feeling like shit. Why the fuck wouldn't you do that? Why the fuck are we even still talking about this?

It's just... it's not fucking hard, and it helps. That's all.

Bandit Lee. Bandit Lee. Her name is Bandit Lee and she is gonna be a superhero and wear a cape and mask and fight crime and fly around in an invisible jet and she will never, ever be normal, EVER.

♥_♥

I am losing childfree street cred by the minute here. FTR: I still don't want babies! I just wanna get all starry-eyed over everyone else's.

( Something I saw on my way to class today, plus two pictures of tunnels. )

I've been trying to make Life Plans lately, and this is what I've come up with so far:

- Finish BA.
- Leave Newfoundland ten minutes later and go back to Halifax.
- Get pet rats.
- Take over the world.

I think it needs some work, but the basics are there!

And now it's time to learn about Sodom and Gomorrah.



I've taken to reading thegaystarfish out loud to Little Sister (because she really likes the pictures but is a pretty slow reader). Her favourite character is Ryan Rosso. :]

[Please note: this whole post is about how much this fandom means to me, and it gets very very soppy. Also, it's kind of long. If you can't stomach that at the moment, check out this list of the top 5 most horrifying bugs in the world. The soldier ants freak me out the most.]

I've been in bandom for a little over a year now. I don't know how it happened, really- a lot of it had to do with redheaded_itch, and twobit, and having lurked in an RPS fandom before, and already being (secretly) into the music anyway, and lots and lots of other things, but mostly I just kind of fell into it before I realized what was happening.

I had some stuff going on in my life at the time that was making me pretty miserable. I had some stuff going on in my life at the time that I had no idea how to address. I had some stuff going on in my life at the time that I needed to escape from. Music does that for me. Always has. So has writing. So I looked at bandom, shrugged my shoulders, and thought why not?

Because of where I lived (and live) and the amount of money I had, I couldn't go to shows or festivals or fan meet-ups. I couldn't really do anything but read and write and listen to music, and that was enough. It was something that was mine, something that none of the stupid shit happening outside could ruin or take away. Maybe it sounds dumb to say that bandom got me through the year, because lol overinvestment. But it's still true, at least a little. Bandom was my escape. It was a way to leave the ugly things behind and just be happy or silly or thoughtful or even angry about something totally outside myself, and I needed that more than anything.

There's so much I love about these bands. ( Here is a list of them! )

Bandom's at least partially responsible for a lot of changes I've made in the past year. If it wasn't for bandom I probably never would have picked up a bass. If it wasn't for bandom I would never have gotten the nerve to get tattooed or pierced. If it wasn't for bandom I would never have started writing songs again. If it wasn't for bandom I would never have gotten over myself and realized it was okay for me to look however I wanted to look, listen to whatever I wanted to listen to. If it wasn't for bandom I wouldn't have made the decision to leave Grenfell, because I wouldn't have been able to look at my real life versus my online life and realize that one made me miserable in comparison to the other. If it wasn't for bandom I wouldn't have been able to get outside myself at all, and that means I never would have been able to get better.

I'm not saying everything's okay now, because it's not. I still need to work on just about everything. But I actually can work on things now, instead of sitting around and wishing things would get better, and it's because of the music.

Music changed my life. Music saved my life. That's important.

On the last day of 2008 I went for a drive with my sister and my father. She had a camera, I had a pen, and he had the wheel of the car.

It was a snowy day. We slipped when we walked.

There's a place called Cape Spear where you can stand on the rocks and look out across the ocean and see England if you squint. There was a high wind and spiders sleeping under the lighthouse, dreaming of summer. The fog was too thick to see the gulls, but we could hear a helicopter miles out to sea. It was a lonely happy sort of place, the kind of place that makes you want to jump off the rocks and turn into a bird.

When we got back into the car we smelt like salt and pollen and lights at night.

I tried to capture the feel of it when I was choosing songs to drive to. I don't know how well I did, though.

U2- Running To Stand Still
Joel Plaskett- Love This Town
The Arcade Fire- Keep The Car Running
Basia Bulat- I Was A Daughter
De Capulet- The Paradigm
The Decemberists- Engine Driver
Wintersleep- Jaws Of Life
Stars- Your Ex-Lover Is Dead
The Killers- Read My Mind
Yeah Yeah Yeahs- Cheated Hearts
Death Cab For Cutie- The Sound Of Settling
Tracy Chapman- Fast Cars
The Used- On My Own
Leonard Cohen- Suzanne
The Sundays- Wild Horses
Wolf Parade- Shine A Light

Later that night Older Sister and I wandered into a sketchy bar with a man playing folk songs and "Drunk Girl" on the jukebox, where they gave us free champagne as the year changed.

Goodbye, 2008. I'm not gonna fucking miss you.

Some things that make me happy right now:

This brilliant insight in John Mayer's songwriting process. I've kind of hated John Mayer ever since that fucking "Daughters" song, but it turns out he's kind of funny! And self-deprecating! "If I can't get the girl why don't I just tell her I'm John Mayer?"

This All-American Rejects sea shanty cover of "Womanizer."

Sir Terrence of Pratchett. :}

The Making Of "America's Suitehearts." Cassadee continues to charm the bejeesus out of me.

iamsupernova's Suicide Girls picspam. (Not safe for work for reasons of boobies.)

The fact that baby platypi are called "puggles."

Also, I'm about forty pages into House of Leaves and I already want to write something just like it.

(Random question: Does anyone have any pictures of crows, especially sketches/cartoons/paintings/etc? My Google-fu is sadly lacking tonight.)

House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski. I've been meaning to read this ever since I got into Poe. The singer, that is, not the writer. So... about five years? Yeah, that sounds right.

Totally Joe, by James Howe. By the guy who wrote Bunnicula! Except this book has no vampire bunnies, just a gay twelve-year-old boy named Joe who overidentifies with E.T. It's still fun times.

BITCHfest, by various angry ladies. This is another one I've been meaning to get for a while. I haven't been able to find Bitch in Newfoundland so far and even though I'm not as into that magazine as I used to be, I still need a shot of snarky feminist pop culture analysis every now and then.

The Essential Calvin and Hobbes, by Bill Watterson. I blame Kidston for that one. Working at Jesus camp taught me that Christian kids love three things: Coldplay, Calvin and Hobbes, and violent contact sports.

I'd like to think that if I ever met myself buying books I'd think I was a pretty cool person. I feel like I kind of am sometimes. I mean, not cool cool because I spend way too much time on the Internet for that, but I am often pretty pleased by the fact that I am myself. I like myself. It's kind of awesome.

Also awesome: Katie Kay (just in general) and this Against Me!/Tegan Quinn video.



That's my favourite song for the next five minutes.

Today is my nine-month antiversary. I feel like I should celebrate it somehow, but I'm not sure how one celebrates an antiversary- maybe with a pint of ice cream, a Lifetime movie-of-the-week, and a good cry. I don't really feel like crying, though.

As a matter of fact, I feel pretty good right now. Happy to be on my own and waiting for surprises.

( Still, here's a song. )

( Part Two of Massive Girlspam! )

... Wow. That got a little out of hand.

Little Sister, Little Brother, and I were watching Cribs earlier today. (A fact of which I am not proud, but sometimes I get bored and the TV's just right there.) It was the episode that started with Pete Wentz showing people his house, and his dog, and his cars, and his dog, and his fake snow, and has he mentioned he's got a dog? Little Sister started doing impressions of him towards the end.

Little Sister, Wentzvoicing: Bye, MTV! You've seen my house, my dolls, my hoodies-
Little Brother, Wentzvoicing: My penis.

He then hastened to assure us both that he had not, in fact, seen Pete Wentz's penis. (I offered to show him. He declined.) And now he's talking about Flight of the Conchords.

<3