snowynight

Links

2012-05-21T04:42:28Z

Then there was the time that Jack Kirby designed costumes for a production of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.

The 20 biggest consequences of gay marriage being legalized in Massachusetts for the past eight years.

Talking to dolphins: New "Dolphin speaker" produces full range of dolphinese sounds.

Students at James Hubert Blake High School in Maryland launched a new kind of diplomacy this year to spread a message of tolerance for gays and lesbians : Call it rainbow diplomacy. The school’s Gay-Straight Alliance created a rainbow-colored paper doll and sent her around the world. “Allie the Ally” can be printed out and photographed anywhere and with anyone who wants to show support for gay youth. Allie's many travels have been documented online.

Paralyzed woman controls robotic arm with her brain.

How Facebook made only the rich even richer

Pretty much everyone has a rare genetic variant. (You'd expect that, with the number of genes we have)

Africa is experiencing some of the biggest falls in child mortality ever seen, anywhere

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100 things blog challenge: 5 simulation games I love

2012-05-17T05:35:57Z

1. Kudos

"Kudos" is a turn-based life simulation game, where you control one character during their 20s. You can pick and advance in your career, earn points as you climb up on the social ladder and try new things. You can make friends and start romantic relationship. It's very addictive as it's very open-ended and also challenging because you have to balance friendship, job, and classes. When your attributes are not enough, some new people you know are snobs and will turn you down, and they have different effect on you. My most memorable character trains to be a doctor then has a midlife crisis and wants to change her career to be a guitarist. (Very hard, I tell you.)

2. Cute Knight

In Cute Knight, you plays an orphan girl who develops herself through working, going to classes, meeting people and adventuring. There're a lot of endings and I love the simple game play, though the art can be better. I remember the time I tried all the endings.

3. Academagia

In the game you plays a new student of a magic school and you spends your learning skills, making friends and having adventure. This simple sentence is really not enough to convey the massive world building, the load and load of colourful NPC and the variety of paths you can go. It's very challenging to a casual gamer like me because I spent the first two time being expelled from school.

4. Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale
In Recettear, you plays the often overlooked character in a RPG game, a shop owner. Facing the heavy debt, Recettear has to run her shop with the help of the loan shark fairy. I love all the characters, the shop management and the only thing that's a bit too challenging for me is to go real time adventuring in maze.

5. Prince Maker 3
It's a free computer game made in China and what a game! In this game, you play the guardian of a candidate to the king of three races and there're secrets behind the candidate and even the character you control. The plot is amazing, the characters are all attractive and really I like everything about it. My only regret is: why aren't there more fanfic about the game?

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100 things blog challenge: 4 music video I like

2012-05-16T09:58:52Z

禁色 Forbidden Colour (Sung by Wong Yiu ming and Ho wengsi)
The song was originally made in response to the time that homosexuality was still criminalized in Hong Kong and it was also sung to support the protestors of Tian An Men Incident. I think the video adds more layers to the song. I translated the lyric here.

( music video )

紅 Red (Sung by Leslie Cheung 張國榮) The video at the time it was first broadcasted was so controversial that it could only be played at midnight, and it was the most memorable video to me.
( music video )

Any Band (sung by BoA, Xiah Junsu of TVXQ, Tablo, and jazz pianist Jin Bora.)
I really like the dystopia and the characters featured in the video.
( music video )

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100 things blog challenge: 6 Female musicians I like

2012-05-16T08:04:12Z

Chen Yee Jing 陳綺貞 is a Taiwan singer-song writer. She writes her songs with philosophical lyrics and plays them with great guitar. She is an indie singer and insists on her way of making music and interacting with her fans.
Here's one of her song, The Meaning of Travel, 旅行的意義
( music video )
Ingrid Michaelson is a New York-based singer-song writer. I like her music with simple rhythm in contrast to her meaningful lyrics. My favourite song of hers is Be OK, with a charming rhythm and dark lyrics.
( music video )
梅艷芳 Anita Mui Yim-fong was a legend both in singing and acting. She revolutionized Hong Kong music with her wild dancing and onstage performance. A diva comparable to Madonna in Hong Kong, she already left the world due to cancer. Here's one of her classical song: Time Passes like River 似水流年
( music video )

Vienna Teng is a San Francisco-based song writer and singer. She has a heavenly voice and her piano playing is great. Her newest album shows a great variety of harmonies and song style. Here's one of her newest song: Antebellum
( music video )
Dar Williams is an American singer-songwriter specializing in pop folk. I like her folk style and hyper-literate lyrics. Her melodies are evocative and lively. Here's Alleluia, which introduced me to this singer. ( music video )
Loreena McKennitt is is a Canadian singer, composer, harpist, accordionist and pianist who writes, records and performs world music with Celtic and Middle Eastern themes. Her voice brings me to an older time and is a well match to her songs.
( music video )

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Links

2012-05-15T10:40:25Z

100,000 LED lights float down the Sumida River

Why (most) politicians don’t get the internet

Why has the UK got so few women scientists?

DSM-5, what's in and what's out in the psychiatric profession's diagnostic manual

The Occupy movement now has a manifesto.

An awesome iPad engraving

10 great LGBT superheroes (and couples).

Batman, Die Hard and super heroes' favorite movies.

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30 Days of Female Characters Meme in one

2012-05-13T13:07:20Z

( Cut for the meme )

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My Marvel comics fic rec on rec 50

2012-05-10T03:08:54Z

( cut for the table )

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100 things blog challenge: Five female characters I love

2012-05-10T02:57:44Z

Mattie Ross (True Grit by Charles Portis)

I read the story when I was very young, so I forgot most of the plot. I still remember being impressed by her courage and independence, in the Western time even.

Relena Darlian (Gundam Wing)

I like her growth from a poor rich girl to a political leader who can die for her ideal. I like that she knows what she wants to do and keep on despite the odd. She 's a pacifist and I like that.

Karin Takakura (Harukanaru Toki no Naka de 2)
Karin Takakura is pretty much the Unchosen. Summoned to a strange world, no one believes her as the chosen one but she still works hard to save this world. I find her admirable.

Deeba (Un Lun Dun)
Deeba's the trope codifier of Unchosen. She's smart and willing to go beyond the boundary set by the others for her.

Yakushiji Ryōko (Yakushiji Ryōko no Kaiki Jikenbo)
Yakushiji Ryōko is smart, competent as well and she knows it. I lover her being unconcerned about what the others see her and she's so lively.

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100 things blog challenge: 5 memorable fanfic I read

2012-05-05T05:53:49Z

The Secret Diary of Doctor Watson (Sherlock Holmes, Holmes/Watson, R) Once upon a time, a Sherlock Holmes fan stumbled on the translated version of this story, and stumble on the no return road of slash. I vaguely remember the sense of claustrophobia and internalized homophobia

Bitter Glass (Star Trek: the Original series, Kirk/Spock, PG) It's a very moving story as it shows even the strongest friendship can drift apart with the minor things in life. The story ends in hope.

Ephemeris (Harry Potter, Remus/Sirius) It's what I imagine Remus/Sirius post Azkarban to be: tired, tense, but the love's still here.

The Man Who Rose From Earth (Stargate Atlantis, Mckay/Sheppard) It teaches me that fic with cracktastic premise can be beautiful and haunting.

falling on a grenade (Marvel comics - Avengers, Steve/Tony one sided) It's brave story, and it hurts so much. I can see them like that in canon.

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Femslash and hurt/comfort

2012-05-04T11:32:22Z

Hurt/comfort is a genre that involves the physical pain or emotional distress of one character, who is cared for by another character. It's a very popular in fanfic. I enter hurt/comfort as keyword in del.icio.us and gets 14441 results. However, the trope is not highly represented in femslash. Using AO3 as an example, there're only 269 story tagged as hurt/comfort which contain femslash pairing. Why the disparity?

I don't have concrete answers. But I have hypothesis.

1. Hurt/comfort usually requires adding and extrapolating the hurt endured by a characters. Unfourtunately, in most of the canons, the female characters suffer, lose their power, are deprived of their agency too many time that we don't feel comfortable writing or reading additional hurt piled on the female characters.

2. Because our canon don't necessary pass the Bechtel's test with flying colour, there's often no other female characters that are reasonably available at these points of the hurt character's life to provide comfort. It can be bypassed, but there're effort.

3. As a lot of femslash writers are identified as female, there's not much distance between the hurt on the characters and the writers themselves. It's easier to identify with the character being hurt and thus harder to fetishizes the hurt.

4. In popular narrative, women are supposed to suffer. As their stories're considered not so important by the society, we're less likely to be trained to acknowledge and expand on the woman characters' suffering.

Take me as example, if hurt /comfort exists along on a spectrum, I 'm more inclined to hurt the characters and withhold the comfort because I enjoy characters who stoically and bravely endure the bad things in life. However, for some female characters I love, their life basically are bad. Marvel superhero Carol Danvers experienced enough rape as drama, depowering, addiction problems and such that I admire her for being a surviver, but it hurt me to read the canon myself, not to mention creating fanwork based on it. It's harder to provide comfort because Carol's female friends are often not literally available. I'm also less likely to indulge in hurting female characters because it makes me guilty, as if I were joining the canon writers in depowering the female characters.

It's my hypothesis. What's your opinion?

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100 things blog challenge: 7 work I fall in love at first sight

2012-05-04T05:48:24Z

( A spoiler free post about science, history, Chinese poet nd manga )

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Links

2012-05-03T05:03:44Z

Top 10 Little-Known Facts About Wolves – Apparently all black wolves have some dog ancestry. Interesting!

PLoS ONE: Beyond the Gene – Biology is really complicated

The weird world of gender across different species

whatawaytoburn is providing a place for people to say what they feel they're alone in, or to provide support and camaraderie to those who feel they're alone.

Umika Pidaparthy profiles the Indian comic book community for Geek Out!, providing an interesting look at an evolving scene.

The greatest author-vs.-critic feuds of all time.

Tennessee's infamous "Don't Say Gay" education bill has been pulled by its sponsor and will die without passage as the current legislative session ends. But there's a catch. ...the officials of the Department of Education and the state Board of Education have pledged to send a letter to all Tennessee schools "telling them they cannot teach this subject in grades kindergarten through eight."

American Family Association's Bryan J. Fischer: It's perfectly appropriate to discriminate against homosexuality.

Paranoia about CISPA is justified.

Monsanto blamed for bee population collapse so it buys bee research firm.

From thingswithwings: "I am going to celebrate it by letting my fellow DW users pick the content. Is there something you'd like me to post about - meta, episode or movie reviews, memes, DVD commentaries on stuff I've done, whatever, just comment here and ask for it! I don't make any guarantees, of course, but I'll make as many posts as I can over the next three weeks with the content you request. "

What do you want to see on this journal?

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100 things blog challenge: 3 homemade dishes that I love (with recipes)

2012-05-03T01:50:22Z

Simmered potato and chicken wing
( cut for image and recipe )
Japanese curry
( cut for image and recipe )
Hong Kong style Hot borscht
( cut for image and recipe )

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100 things blog challenge: 5 haunted place in Hong Kong

2012-05-02T10:37:21Z

( 5 haunted places in Hong Kong )

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100 things blog challenge: 5 Hong Kong local street food I love

2012-05-01T05:11:30Z

{Take the 100 Things challenge!}

Deuk Deuk Tong
( Deuk Deuk Tong )

Hong Kong style waffle
( Hong Kong style waffle )

Baked sweet potato
( Baked sweet potato )

Stinky Tofu
( stinky tofu )

Put Chai Ko
( Put Chai Ko )

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Femslash and Intersectionality: joy/struggle/concern in a writer's view

2012-04-30T02:03:13Z

Intersectionality is a concept often used in critical theories to describe the ways in which oppressive institutions (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, ableism, xenophobia, classism, etc.) are interconnected and cannot be examined separately from one another.(1) In the case of writing femslash, I would like to share the joy, conflict, and struggle in trying to incorporate intersectionality in writing femslash.

My background: I mostly write in Marvel comics and Disney Princess fandom. I identify as Hong Kong Chinese. When I look back at my work, I write 9 out of 24 femslsh stories with characters of colour as protagonists, and 4 out of 24 with disabled characters as protagonists, 1 out of 24 is labeled with class issue.

The first thing about intersectionality is to aim for diversity in general as well as gender-balance and women-friendliness in particular. On AO3, there're 507 femslsh out of 3048 work labelled with characters of colour, 42 work out of 627 with disabled characters labeled, 8 out of 75 work labelled class issues are femslash, so people are writing, and conscious enough to label them.

When I started writing less than three years ago, a friend of mine introduced me to Misty Knight and Colleen Wing in Marvel comics. Misty is an ex-New York cop with a cybernetic arm. Colleen is a samurai in United States. Together they fight crime. They have a relationship that transcends beyond friends or sisters, and in one issue Misty's love for Colleen is strong enough to break free of mind control. It's great shipping materials. But back then on the AO3, there was only one drabble featuring both of them. I surfed the Internet and could only find two fic on LJ. A google search shows 3 work with Misty Knight on fanfiction.net. Simply put, they may as well be invisible. The reasons seem to be clear: They're not in a major comics series, do not star in movie or TV or animations. I hate to speculate, but that they're female characters of colour may play a strong part in their being ignored by Marvel and the fans.

So I write.

There is joy, simply because I have materials to read about them together. Judging from the hits and kudoes, they 're read by people other than me. There's frustration and challenge. Because I'm not them. Colleen was raised in Japan and received samurai training. Then she moved to US. I don't have the relevant background to understand all these impact on her. Misty is a Black ex-New York cop. What does she experience because she's a Black woman everyday? I can't say. Looking back I think I go for the canon route, to write about them s superhero, as lovers, but to downplay these kinds of issues. Even if I were a Black disabled woman who lived in New York, we might not share the same experience. I can do research as best as possible, but the distance 's always here, and I need to respect it.

Another example is Belle/Esmeralda (Disney), which is inspired by a fanvid. They live in a dangerous time for love, and Esmeralda's raised as a Romani. The cross race relationship brings the factor of power in. I want to say that I handle the issue well, but in fact I evade it by writing AU for them. It's Disney, and they deserve a happy ending.

And I want to tell you my bad example of doing it wrong. Destiny/Mystique is a canon bisexual couple in Marvel comics, and Destiny's blind. When I write a certain story bout them and reread it, a scene comes out totally wrong: I totally forget that Destiny's blind when writing that scene. This's my privilege and lazy writing showing.

When I write the characters, I try to ask myself some questions: Do my characters avoid to be stereotypes? Do they have agency of their own? Do they live in a world that reflects the diversity of the reality? I try to achieve all of them, and I can say I do my best in them. But is it enough? I don't know.

The benchmark of Bechdel's test is "...Plenty of female characters, with stories told from their POV, and stories that are not entirely cliche, and with agency in those storylines that is not usually taken away from them, and have relationship with other women..." (2) and I just want to add one thing: let the female characters be outside the able-bodied, white, or other privileged norm.

(1)http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Intersectionality
(2)http://ivanolix.livejournal.com/199285.html

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My Faraway Friend Haizi by Wang Chunmei

2012-04-29T23:53:20Z

( The moon, my night watcher )

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Fanfic I write

2012-04-29T07:59:56Z

( Fanfic I write )

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This Bunch of Mugwort by Plaintive Singing

2012-04-28T22:27:17Z

( Early in the morning Mother hangs a bunch of dewy mugwort )

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On the riverside of Gu River by Fu Ruiwen

2012-04-28T00:37:12Z

( What makes me think of that wry-necked willow? )

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Links

2012-04-27T03:13:45Z

Evaluating the first drug to show improvement in subtype of autism

Even positive stereotypes can hinder performance (removes locus of control)

Tor drop DRM on their ebooks. Charlie Stross points out how this in their best interests.

XNA is synthetic DNA that’s stronger than the real thing – Start your sci fi plot ideas…

Marijuana – In Focus – The Atlantic – So apparently the best way to get rid pot farms is to set them on fire?

slabText – a jQuery plugin for creating big, bold & responsive headlines –

Biological Superiority: The World’s Most Dangerous and Deadly Idea – I just thought I'd save this link because it's not something people would expect of Dworkin

First description of a triple DNA helix in a vacuum – Start your sci fi plot ideas…

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Yellow Plum Rainy Season by Baman

2012-04-27T00:33:12Z

( An intermittent drizzle / tends to be /wishy-washy. )

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Escape from my Scripts by: Xiangyang

2012-04-26T03:26:36Z

( I want to escape from my scripts, the words deep and shallow )

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Links

2012-04-25T03:42:15Z

UniVerse: A United Nations of Poetry

Actor Josh Hutcherson (The Hunger Games) is more proud of his gay rights activism than his acting.

Missouri "Don't say gay" bill sponsor: School discussion of LGBT issues will lead to talk of boys marrying goats.

How to convert fics from LJ/DW/IJ into Kindle format

15 Wonderful Redesigns of the ‘Lolita’ Cover

Thoughts On Fake Schooling

On The Future Of Small Blogs

The Mission - a long, very nicely written, comic. (SF, not original, but well executed)

I'm thinking of joining 100 Things: A Blogging challenge but I've not decided what to blog about. 100 things I like (Book, fic, song, etc)? 100 myths, history, and fairy tales? 100 Chinese poems in English translation? 100 things I write? 100 facts about my country? Or other topics I haven't thought about? What do you want to see? (I'll probably start blogging for the challenge in May, as you are already spammed by my April for Poetry Month posts)

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The Peach-Blossom Fan by Hong Zhu

2012-04-25T00:35:18Z

( This ancestral folding silk fan Undoubtedly belongs to River Qinhuai. )

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