Azure Jane Lunatic (Azz) 🌺 (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
azurelunatic) wrote2015-01-13 03:29 am
azurelunatic) wrote2015-01-13 03:29 am
Variously unnerving...
06:13 Saturday, 10 January, 2015
Further in the department of eerie similarities, Purple and I have stomachs with similar opinions about the thought of a too-early breakfast in most cases. Though I have harder limits on the other end -- if I wait more than three hours, I'm likely to also be in trouble.
00:44 Tuesday, 13 January, 2015
Things I have done: renewed my car's registration, done my smog.
Things which have not yet happened: got the stickers.
Things which have happened: got pulled over to check that everything was in order because I didn't have my stickers on yet.
My heart rate is mostly normal again (this is the third-and-a-half time I have been pulled over in ~19 years of driving; the first was a headlight out in Alaska, the second was for a FasTrak and Arizona plates, the half was accidentally getting between the cop car and the person they were actually pulling over which took *talent* let me tell you!) and now this. So I do not have experience with this. Even though I am demographically very safe as far as encounters with police go, it gives me the shakes. So the cute young white nerd-boy fencer type cop making small talk while he ran my license and confirmed that yes, I had in fact re-upped all the things and just didn't have my stickers yet, was really surreal.
My laundry will be out of the dryer in a little bit. By then I may be ready to go to bed.
So Friday had a beer bash, at which I actually didn't feel like even any of the sangria. I had a great time chatting with lb and radius and Mr. Netflix; Mr. Zune joined the table as well, with his amazingly fluorescent yellow sweatshirt with the reflective stripes. He'd said it was amazingly bright; the lint it gave off said it was amazingly bright; the lint made it look greener than it actually was. By comparison, the tie-dye orange and white shirt that radius was wearing? So very, very, very tame. Mr. Wizard Beard passed by and said hi.
"We were talking about you this morning," he said. "[Somebody] was telling me how you were yelling at [vendor], and I was like, 'That is the $NAME we know and love, that sounds like something she would do!'"
"... Except it wasn't me," I said.
So there are two $NAMEs at work who berate misbehaving vendors for great justice.
Purple had sat down with various people from his team, at the next table over. I shifted my attention back and forth, but mostly stuck with my table. After a while, Purple came over, snagging the chair that Mr. Zune had abandoned. Other people scattered as well. In the end, it was lb, Purple, and me.
I was introduced to "Fine Art", or, "Data's painting is making me dizzy." It is very much a thing that has Come From The Internet.
We contemplated going over to the fire pit. People were there. We contemplated (without going over there) the sorts of conversation which would possibly cause co-workers to scatter. "A nice coconut glaze" was involved, and phrases which might make Jonathan Swift spray coffee.
As we got up to head in various directions, one of the lights illuminating a tree shone in people's eyes, between Purple's legs. "I'm Old Gregg!" he proclaimed.
Old Gregg, from The Almighty Boosh, had been mentioned in my presence before. I then hunted down and watched the episode when I got home. I do not believe that I would recommend it to 100% of my readers.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0647529/
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xz1pqk_the-legend-of-old-gregg_fun
This thing is nearly 10 years old now. Some parts of the episode are hilarious and I would recommend them to anybody; the thing where Vince the fishing neophyte is in the boat is particularly nice. Some are ... things that I would issue warnings about.
Old Gregg is a part-fish, part-man lake creature with seaweed for hair, eerie asymmetrical red-and-green makeup, a dark moustache, and a fluffy magenta tutu. His catchphrase is, "I'm Old Gregg! I have a mangina!" and he also euphemistically refers to his "downstairs mix-up". He "flashes" failed band-dude Howard; his exposed genitals are portrayed as a beam of blinding light too bright to show any detail. He is portrayed as desperate to be loved and going to really creepy and criminal lengths to try to get a boyfriend. In fact, he has been unnerving, kidnapping, and occasionally murdering locals for a while.
There are parts which I find funny. The progression of his art is hilarious. I think the choice to use a super bright beam of light as his genitals is great. I like the part-man-part-fish thing is interesting, and the seaweed hair is inspired. I don't object to the word "mangina" when it's used by men who have one, and the word "duderus" fills me with a coffee-spraying sense of wonder (the word "duderus" is not used in this episode, but is also sometimes used by guys who have them).
Portraying a character who could be described both as transgender (genitals atypical for his identified gender) and transvestite (wearing clothing which is typically associated with a gender he doesn't identify with) as *also* someone who is going to creepy and criminal lengths to coerce someone into a relationship is also playing into some really harmful stereotypes, and that makes me unhappy. It is disturbing to see that played for laughs when people in the real world use stereotypes of trickery and entrapment and "monstrous" genitals as excuses to murder transgender and transvestite people. (I don't know what race Old Gregg is encoded as, so I can't read whether there are also overt racial overtones or undertones. His face is a dark green. His hair is seaweed. Transgender women of color are at highest risk for murder. I don't know if this taps into that as well.)
There is another character who plays with gender stereotypes; the second band member, Vince, is very stylishly dressed in an awesome blouse and a statement necklace, and is mistaken for a woman (Howard's girlfriend) by blokes down t' pub. This seems like a bit of harmless fun because it doesn't go anywhere terrible (at least not in this episode; this is the only part of the show I've watched).
Old Gregg appears to survive the episode, and is last seen in a white wedding-style gown on top of the guys' van, his crotch emitting amazing amounts of light.
So ... that's a thing I saw, all right.
Saturday, I went on a shopping run with Tif. There were some bridge shenanigans, so I decided to go the long way. We did some errands in Mountain View, then went across the bay for dinner and kitty litter. Cat videos led to owl videos, which resulted in a discussion of owl cafes and how easy it is to accidentally domesticate wild owls (very; they're smart birds of prey who like to know where their next meal is coming from). Since we were on the approach to the exit I take for work (en route to coffee), that reminded me of the discussion I'd had with Purple about owls living in cardboard boxes. "So there are jobs for them if they can't work in the forest anymore," I said, and followed it up with deeper absurdity. "They can go to work in a cafe instead of being in the unemployment line."
It is good to have a cane to retrieve bags of kitty litter from the back of the deep deep shelf. I pulled another one forward for the next person, as I might as well not make them summon a minion to climb up there and get it when I had the means of retrieval directly to hand.
I am plotting a Valentine's Day hat. It has the potential to be magnificent or terrible.
We did get to see Dorothy, our favorite cashier, on our way out the door. She looked more shrunken and tired than I remember her. :(
Into the Woods' earworm duration is about a week for Tif as well. She'd managed to compound it by singing "Into the lift to leave the mall to go to dinner!" on the way out with a whole crowd of lolita-gowned ladies and one bemused guy in a suit.
Sunday I finished Ancillary Justice, which I'd started a week ago but put down when I felt poorly and started to hurt unbearably. Last week, I'd been having trouble engaging, and felt it was slow going. I also was having trouble regulating my body temperature and other unpleasant details. This week was much better, and between one thing and the other, I had to stay up until I had finished it. I must now get my hands on the next book and also start reading all the various meta which I have been carefully avoiding.
I am less interested in Breq's gender, which she is not super concerned with, and deeply interested in her experience as being many-and-one, and the ebb and flow of her senses and the fallible communication between her ancillaries and her computers and her sensors and her databanks and her permissions, oh my god the fucked-up accesses. It feels like I am meant to be concerned about her (their, its) struggle to not offend others by misgendering them, but watching the struggle does not engage me super much. I have had the great privilege to hang out in spaces where people do not really make a big fuss about gender, so this window on a society where that is not a problem (down to the pronouns) is not the revelation for me that I think it has been for some others. Though I did understand the sense of relaxation and freedom to come back in to a community where your values and expectations are reinforced, and you can unclench some part of your brain that you didn't realize was clenched.
No, my thing is still identity, and selfhood, and pursuit of memory, and plurality. Still with the last bit of gender, I feel like there are three pronoun sets that I would use for Breq:
Feminine: passing as a sole human, Breq does the she/her thing. As do other citizens of the Imperium.
Neuter: I think I got the sense that ships are "it", even though they're intelligent and have personhood, though they seem to very very carefully avoid full legal personhood and I am quivering with anticipation for an exploration of that later, because I can feel the hooks.
Plural: What with all the ancillaries, and the tantalizing promise that We Will Explore This Thing Later Also, the "they/their" pronoun set works for Breq's past as the ship. Which, coincidentally, is also an agender/anonymous pronoun set, as well as plural.
In terms of fannish expression, I was suddenly taken with a desire to make for myself a set of small jeweled pins to represent current and past major people, places, and events in my life. I feel like icon sets represent the same sort of thing for the LJ/DW people I know, and I am super curious what sorts of pins other people would have. I wouldn't mind seeing that spread around the fandom, with or without concept art. It may help that I was decanting a whole long bunch of buttons which no longer fit my Purple Hat into a drawer that night...
Today (Monday) I joined work with Lunch already in progress. There was some giggling. Later, I did some dredging through terrible ticketage, and came up with the yelly-faced conclusion that it's not just *any* tickets we're unexpectedly locked out of, but facilities tickets, which is just a motherfucker of a situation. In IRC, I used phrasing such as "clogged all the urinals with jolly ranchers" to illustrate the sort of situation that other people in the building would legitimately need to know about, but toned it down for the ticket.
Eventually it came almost four, and that saw both Mr. Zune and me in search of ice cream. We chatted by the fire pit. The Angry Tattooed Man came by, and was introduced to Mr. Zune. It may have been Thursday that he'd recommended http://www.yelp.com/biz/rabbits-foot-meadery-sunnyvale-3 to me. I need to do another compilation of Things Azz Should Not Do At Work, as those are often amusing.
After more whacking my face against my email and the thingy, it came time to go home. I was nearly actually all packed up by the time Purple came over. (I had also figured out a thing to do with shelves, and the loon head was proudly displayed.) We chatted in the parking lot. My knees started to get mad, so we walked all the way down to Vash, and chatted some more. Ducks are terrible parents. Our geese, for all the evil inherent in the species, were good parents, and Friendly was friendly and Tou-Tou was loyal.
I explained some context around how much Thursday's casual treatment of the speech-crash-with-napkin-conversation had meant to me, including some terrible generalities about Shawn as a conversationalist. And yet, Shawn is the terrible ex I'm still willing to speak to. I explained the time BJ and Darkside met, and BJ's takeaway from the encounter. (Darkside is a half-inch taller than I am, and at the time I believe he might have been pushing 120 when soaking wet. Scrawny little geekboy. BJ tops six foot, and has a good 30+ pounds on Darkside. Somehow, BJ left with the impression of a guy who towered over him by at least an inch, and who could absolutely take him.)
It's the terrible exes who get the wacky stories. I gave a brief tour through some of my excellent to not-so-bad exes (and the two reading this? Excellent.)
I got to the takeaway place 10 minutes before official closing, but after they'd turned off the lights (it was, after all, a slow Monday night). I got a bit extra for my troubles, though the selection was what it was. They seemed mildly pleased to have an extra sale and that much less waste.
So it was even later by the time I drove home, and we know how that went. I did check the mailbox on my way up from the laundry. No stickers yet.
Further in the department of eerie similarities, Purple and I have stomachs with similar opinions about the thought of a too-early breakfast in most cases. Though I have harder limits on the other end -- if I wait more than three hours, I'm likely to also be in trouble.
00:44 Tuesday, 13 January, 2015
Things I have done: renewed my car's registration, done my smog.
Things which have not yet happened: got the stickers.
Things which have happened: got pulled over to check that everything was in order because I didn't have my stickers on yet.
My heart rate is mostly normal again (this is the third-and-a-half time I have been pulled over in ~19 years of driving; the first was a headlight out in Alaska, the second was for a FasTrak and Arizona plates, the half was accidentally getting between the cop car and the person they were actually pulling over which took *talent* let me tell you!) and now this. So I do not have experience with this. Even though I am demographically very safe as far as encounters with police go, it gives me the shakes. So the cute young white nerd-boy fencer type cop making small talk while he ran my license and confirmed that yes, I had in fact re-upped all the things and just didn't have my stickers yet, was really surreal.
My laundry will be out of the dryer in a little bit. By then I may be ready to go to bed.
So Friday had a beer bash, at which I actually didn't feel like even any of the sangria. I had a great time chatting with lb and radius and Mr. Netflix; Mr. Zune joined the table as well, with his amazingly fluorescent yellow sweatshirt with the reflective stripes. He'd said it was amazingly bright; the lint it gave off said it was amazingly bright; the lint made it look greener than it actually was. By comparison, the tie-dye orange and white shirt that radius was wearing? So very, very, very tame. Mr. Wizard Beard passed by and said hi.
"We were talking about you this morning," he said. "[Somebody] was telling me how you were yelling at [vendor], and I was like, 'That is the $NAME we know and love, that sounds like something she would do!'"
"... Except it wasn't me," I said.
So there are two $NAMEs at work who berate misbehaving vendors for great justice.
Purple had sat down with various people from his team, at the next table over. I shifted my attention back and forth, but mostly stuck with my table. After a while, Purple came over, snagging the chair that Mr. Zune had abandoned. Other people scattered as well. In the end, it was lb, Purple, and me.
I was introduced to "Fine Art", or, "Data's painting is making me dizzy." It is very much a thing that has Come From The Internet.
We contemplated going over to the fire pit. People were there. We contemplated (without going over there) the sorts of conversation which would possibly cause co-workers to scatter. "A nice coconut glaze" was involved, and phrases which might make Jonathan Swift spray coffee.
As we got up to head in various directions, one of the lights illuminating a tree shone in people's eyes, between Purple's legs. "I'm Old Gregg!" he proclaimed.
Old Gregg, from The Almighty Boosh, had been mentioned in my presence before. I then hunted down and watched the episode when I got home. I do not believe that I would recommend it to 100% of my readers.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0647529/
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xz1pqk_the-legend-of-old-gregg_fun
This thing is nearly 10 years old now. Some parts of the episode are hilarious and I would recommend them to anybody; the thing where Vince the fishing neophyte is in the boat is particularly nice. Some are ... things that I would issue warnings about.
Old Gregg is a part-fish, part-man lake creature with seaweed for hair, eerie asymmetrical red-and-green makeup, a dark moustache, and a fluffy magenta tutu. His catchphrase is, "I'm Old Gregg! I have a mangina!" and he also euphemistically refers to his "downstairs mix-up". He "flashes" failed band-dude Howard; his exposed genitals are portrayed as a beam of blinding light too bright to show any detail. He is portrayed as desperate to be loved and going to really creepy and criminal lengths to try to get a boyfriend. In fact, he has been unnerving, kidnapping, and occasionally murdering locals for a while.
There are parts which I find funny. The progression of his art is hilarious. I think the choice to use a super bright beam of light as his genitals is great. I like the part-man-part-fish thing is interesting, and the seaweed hair is inspired. I don't object to the word "mangina" when it's used by men who have one, and the word "duderus" fills me with a coffee-spraying sense of wonder (the word "duderus" is not used in this episode, but is also sometimes used by guys who have them).
Portraying a character who could be described both as transgender (genitals atypical for his identified gender) and transvestite (wearing clothing which is typically associated with a gender he doesn't identify with) as *also* someone who is going to creepy and criminal lengths to coerce someone into a relationship is also playing into some really harmful stereotypes, and that makes me unhappy. It is disturbing to see that played for laughs when people in the real world use stereotypes of trickery and entrapment and "monstrous" genitals as excuses to murder transgender and transvestite people. (I don't know what race Old Gregg is encoded as, so I can't read whether there are also overt racial overtones or undertones. His face is a dark green. His hair is seaweed. Transgender women of color are at highest risk for murder. I don't know if this taps into that as well.)
There is another character who plays with gender stereotypes; the second band member, Vince, is very stylishly dressed in an awesome blouse and a statement necklace, and is mistaken for a woman (Howard's girlfriend) by blokes down t' pub. This seems like a bit of harmless fun because it doesn't go anywhere terrible (at least not in this episode; this is the only part of the show I've watched).
Old Gregg appears to survive the episode, and is last seen in a white wedding-style gown on top of the guys' van, his crotch emitting amazing amounts of light.
So ... that's a thing I saw, all right.
Saturday, I went on a shopping run with Tif. There were some bridge shenanigans, so I decided to go the long way. We did some errands in Mountain View, then went across the bay for dinner and kitty litter. Cat videos led to owl videos, which resulted in a discussion of owl cafes and how easy it is to accidentally domesticate wild owls (very; they're smart birds of prey who like to know where their next meal is coming from). Since we were on the approach to the exit I take for work (en route to coffee), that reminded me of the discussion I'd had with Purple about owls living in cardboard boxes. "So there are jobs for them if they can't work in the forest anymore," I said, and followed it up with deeper absurdity. "They can go to work in a cafe instead of being in the unemployment line."
It is good to have a cane to retrieve bags of kitty litter from the back of the deep deep shelf. I pulled another one forward for the next person, as I might as well not make them summon a minion to climb up there and get it when I had the means of retrieval directly to hand.
I am plotting a Valentine's Day hat. It has the potential to be magnificent or terrible.
We did get to see Dorothy, our favorite cashier, on our way out the door. She looked more shrunken and tired than I remember her. :(
Into the Woods' earworm duration is about a week for Tif as well. She'd managed to compound it by singing "Into the lift to leave the mall to go to dinner!" on the way out with a whole crowd of lolita-gowned ladies and one bemused guy in a suit.
Sunday I finished Ancillary Justice, which I'd started a week ago but put down when I felt poorly and started to hurt unbearably. Last week, I'd been having trouble engaging, and felt it was slow going. I also was having trouble regulating my body temperature and other unpleasant details. This week was much better, and between one thing and the other, I had to stay up until I had finished it. I must now get my hands on the next book and also start reading all the various meta which I have been carefully avoiding.
I am less interested in Breq's gender, which she is not super concerned with, and deeply interested in her experience as being many-and-one, and the ebb and flow of her senses and the fallible communication between her ancillaries and her computers and her sensors and her databanks and her permissions, oh my god the fucked-up accesses. It feels like I am meant to be concerned about her (their, its) struggle to not offend others by misgendering them, but watching the struggle does not engage me super much. I have had the great privilege to hang out in spaces where people do not really make a big fuss about gender, so this window on a society where that is not a problem (down to the pronouns) is not the revelation for me that I think it has been for some others. Though I did understand the sense of relaxation and freedom to come back in to a community where your values and expectations are reinforced, and you can unclench some part of your brain that you didn't realize was clenched.
No, my thing is still identity, and selfhood, and pursuit of memory, and plurality. Still with the last bit of gender, I feel like there are three pronoun sets that I would use for Breq:
Feminine: passing as a sole human, Breq does the she/her thing. As do other citizens of the Imperium.
Neuter: I think I got the sense that ships are "it", even though they're intelligent and have personhood, though they seem to very very carefully avoid full legal personhood and I am quivering with anticipation for an exploration of that later, because I can feel the hooks.
Plural: What with all the ancillaries, and the tantalizing promise that We Will Explore This Thing Later Also, the "they/their" pronoun set works for Breq's past as the ship. Which, coincidentally, is also an agender/anonymous pronoun set, as well as plural.
In terms of fannish expression, I was suddenly taken with a desire to make for myself a set of small jeweled pins to represent current and past major people, places, and events in my life. I feel like icon sets represent the same sort of thing for the LJ/DW people I know, and I am super curious what sorts of pins other people would have. I wouldn't mind seeing that spread around the fandom, with or without concept art. It may help that I was decanting a whole long bunch of buttons which no longer fit my Purple Hat into a drawer that night...
Today (Monday) I joined work with Lunch already in progress. There was some giggling. Later, I did some dredging through terrible ticketage, and came up with the yelly-faced conclusion that it's not just *any* tickets we're unexpectedly locked out of, but facilities tickets, which is just a motherfucker of a situation. In IRC, I used phrasing such as "clogged all the urinals with jolly ranchers" to illustrate the sort of situation that other people in the building would legitimately need to know about, but toned it down for the ticket.
Eventually it came almost four, and that saw both Mr. Zune and me in search of ice cream. We chatted by the fire pit. The Angry Tattooed Man came by, and was introduced to Mr. Zune. It may have been Thursday that he'd recommended http://www.yelp.com/biz/rabbits-foot-meadery-sunnyvale-3 to me. I need to do another compilation of Things Azz Should Not Do At Work, as those are often amusing.
After more whacking my face against my email and the thingy, it came time to go home. I was nearly actually all packed up by the time Purple came over. (I had also figured out a thing to do with shelves, and the loon head was proudly displayed.) We chatted in the parking lot. My knees started to get mad, so we walked all the way down to Vash, and chatted some more. Ducks are terrible parents. Our geese, for all the evil inherent in the species, were good parents, and Friendly was friendly and Tou-Tou was loyal.
I explained some context around how much Thursday's casual treatment of the speech-crash-with-napkin-conversation had meant to me, including some terrible generalities about Shawn as a conversationalist. And yet, Shawn is the terrible ex I'm still willing to speak to. I explained the time BJ and Darkside met, and BJ's takeaway from the encounter. (Darkside is a half-inch taller than I am, and at the time I believe he might have been pushing 120 when soaking wet. Scrawny little geekboy. BJ tops six foot, and has a good 30+ pounds on Darkside. Somehow, BJ left with the impression of a guy who towered over him by at least an inch, and who could absolutely take him.)
It's the terrible exes who get the wacky stories. I gave a brief tour through some of my excellent to not-so-bad exes (and the two reading this? Excellent.)
I got to the takeaway place 10 minutes before official closing, but after they'd turned off the lights (it was, after all, a slow Monday night). I got a bit extra for my troubles, though the selection was what it was. They seemed mildly pleased to have an extra sale and that much less waste.
So it was even later by the time I drove home, and we know how that went. I did check the mailbox on my way up from the laundry. No stickers yet.
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It's very nice to not have Breq's genital configuration be an Important Mystery Which Is Resolved. I would imagine that she's used to all sorts of bodies, having operated all sorts of ancillaries.
Also, it is so amazingly fucking spooky to wonder about the ancillaries who don't work out. The ones who are discarded.
I wonder if Breq's surviving body becomes important, especially as it becomes apparent that the one who survived was the latest one added to the roster.
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That sounds like great fun!