BRB, ruining a genre.

*edit* For extra stupid... don't you know that feminism is for ugly girls?

My talented, wonderful friend marnanel recently made a present for floatyfish's birthdy: a book that he wrote and self-published, entitled "Not Ordinarily Borrowable: or, Unwelcome Advice." I read it a while ago as I helped him edit it, and it's a lovely, delightful little romp for anyone who loves books and fantasy and dragons and higher education and plucky heroines.

He's put the first chapter up here so that you can get a taste. If you like the first chapter, I recommend that you pick up a copy - it only gets better!

The book is for sale at Amazon and CreateSpace.

This is possibly the stupidest fucking article that I've read in years.

The writer praises Twilight - her head so far up Stephanie Meyer's ass that she can probably tell what she had for dinner last week - and then condemns... of all things... Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.

Think, for a moment, of the huge teen-girl books of the past decade. The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is about female empowerment as it’s currently defined by the kind of jaded, 40-something divorcées who wash ashore at day spas with their grizzled girlfriends and pollute the Quiet Room with their ceaseless cackling about the uselessness of men. They are women who have learned certain of life’s lessons the hard way and think it kind to let young girls understand that the sooner they grasp the key to a happy life (which essentially boils down to a distaff version of “Bros before hos”), the better. In Sisterhood, four close friends might scatter for the summer—encountering everything from ill-advised sex with a soccer coach to the unpleasant discovery that Dad’s getting remarried—but the most important thing, the only really important thing, is that the four reunite and that the friendships endure the vicissitudes of boys and romance. Someday, after all, they will be in their 50s, and who will be there for them—really there for them—then? The boy who long ago kissed their bare shoulders, or the raspy-voiced best friend, bleating out hilarious comments about her puckered fanny from the next dressing room over at Eileen Fisher?

No, no! We can't have women be friends with other women! We can't tell girls that there might be more to life than being tortuously in love with some guy!

Not that she can hear me, with her residing in the rafters of Stephanie Meyer's colon and everything. Ugh.

I can't even bring myself to reproduce more of that disgusting article. The whole thing makes me want to punch the writer in the teeth. Metaphorically.

Please excuse me while I go laugh, cry, hug someone, leap for joy, kiss a baby, weep uncontrollably, and make love to a beautiful woman.

"I am not in the least anxious about her education," Captain Crewe said, with his gay laugh, as he held Sara's hand and patted it. "The difficulty will be to keep her from learning too fast and too much. She is always sitting with her little nose burrowing into books. She doesn't read them, Miss Minchin; she gobbles them up as if she were a little wolf instead of a little girl. She is always starving for new books to gobble, and she wants grown-up books--great, big, fat ones--French and German as well as English--history and biography and poets, and all sorts of things. - A Little Princess, Frances Hodgson Burnett

For my birthday, Fin/Marn/Alex/Rio got me the first pocket book of Strangers in Paradise. I finished it in a day. (I apparently have no concept of "savoring" books/movies/tv shows - like Sara Crewe, I devour them like I'm starving.) I went out and bought the second one and now I'm almost done with that. I'm also slowly working my way through the Sandman books than Jonathan loaned me, and I'm loving those as well.

I figured that I might as well start a list of recommended graphic novels and series, a la the television show list from a while back.

So...

Given the series that I already like (Sandman, Strangers in Paradise) what graphic novels/series would you recommend that I read?

1. Strangers in Paradise
2. Sandman
3. Kabuki
4. The Red Star
5. anything by Alan Moore
6. Transmetropolitan
7. Fables
8. Persepolis
9. Books of Magic
10. League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
11. The Maxx
12. Promethea
13. Stardust
14. Watchmen
15. From Hell
16. Lucifer
17. Blankets
18. Powers
19. Y - The Last Man
20. Maus
21. Fun Home
22. Tank Girl
23. Preacher
24. Freak Angels
25. anything by Jhonen Vasquez
26. Kabuki
27. Lost Girls
28. The Rabbi's Cat
29. Digger
30. Astro City
31. Hellboy
32. Baltimore
33. Empowered
34. Owly
35. Jar of Fools
36. Blackhawk
37. The Five Fists of Science
38. Ex Machina
39. The Desert Peach
40. Kingdom Come
41. The Long Halloween
42. Black Hole
43. Young Liars
44. Jimmy Corrigan:The Smartest Kid on Earth
45. Death - The Time of Your Life

From amymccabe:

I weep for humanity.

Hey everyone! If you've left a comment on saleaway letting me know what you want, this is for you:

I'm going home to Allentown early early tomorrow morning and will be there until Monday. Therefore, no orders will be going in the mail, with the exception of bifemmefatale's DVD, cause it's already paid for and I can just throw it in the mail when I'm home tomorrow. But feel free to keep leaving comments, and when I come back it'll all get sorted out. Woo-hoo!

More books up on saleaway!

New stuff up on saleaway! Check it out!

(mlfoley: there's a bunch of theology books for you!)

Hey everyone! I posted a (not exhaustive) list of books and DVDs that I'm selling to saleaway. Check it out!

1. I went back to AAA today, spoke with Edna again (she's seriously my hero; I'm going to send her postcards from every stop!), and got an updated itinerary. I also got a new map to put on my wall. On it, I've put the day-by-day route (not with roads yet, just general times) in green post it notes, where we're staying overnight in orange post it notes, names and addresses in yellow post it notes, and PICTURES because I am a HUGE VISUAL DORK.



2. My hero, my love, my awesome friend marnanel is working hard on making a section of my website exclusively for the trip. It's still rough, but it's ten kinds of sexy. The map on the right has markers that I can update. For example: click on "Washington, DC." I can put pictures and a link to the day's blog entry, mark any stops we make along the way, etc. Isn't that amazing? On the left side of the page, all of my entries the "The Next Great Adventure" tag will update automatically when I post to LJ.

3. I've created an LJ community, saleaway, for the purpose of selling my possessions. This weekend I will start posting with the books, DVDs, furniture, art, photographs, and other stuff that I'm going to be selling. When the time comes, I'll let you know.

4. I'll probably be talking more about this later, but I figure I should throw this out there now. If you're interested in donating to The Next Great Adventure 2008, I've put a "Donate" Paypal button in my profile. Donors will get all kinds of nifty stuff... which I haven't quite figured out yet (I'm thinking something like a hand-painted thank you card, a postcard along the way, an original print of a photo I take, etc.). But if you like my writing and photography and you want to read about the successful adventures of a strange twenty-one year old and her South American friend traveling across the wild and gorgeous United States, think about a donation (and if you want, mention this in your blog!). Every little bit helps. Your $20 could pay for a night at a hostel, 154 miles worth of gas, or a stop at The Boneyard.

5. Does anyone have any roadtrip-y or travel-y book recommendations?

More schools to pull 'The Golden Compass'

Calgary's Catholic School Board is pulling "The Golden Compass" from school shelves -- a children's fantasy novel that criticizes strict religious dogma and encourages readers to keep an open mind.

Luckily, the book hasn't been outright banned yet - it's "under review" - but I still find this sort of thing... disturbing.

It's rather funny that I would stumble across this article tonight, given some things I've read/seen today (the Prince Caspian trailer, a review of the Golden Compass movie) and a conversation I had this very evening. Funny how things tend to come together like that.

Tonight I saw The Reindeer Monologues with Sarah. It was AMAZING, and I cried, of course, like I do every time I see it. All of the performances were perfect. I love theater so much. We then went back to her apartment, I met her awesome roommate, and we all talked until late (I just got home about 45 minutes ago). Yeah, I probably should have been back here doing work, but it was such a great evening that I didn't mind.

... EXCEPT for the snow. Okay, yes, it was lovely to see and feel against my face, and as I drove home tonight I appreciated the way the snow changed the density and space of the trees and how they relate to each other and the road. But my feet got totally soaked and freezing today, and it was cold, and the roads were SO BAD, and I was tired and took a long nap because it depressed me so much. I hate winter. I need to move to California.

Sleep sleep sleep.

An amazing article in the Boston Globe about the furor surrounding His Dark Materials and the Golden Compass movie.

1. My photos of the circus from Sunday went into AU's graduate newspaper The Observer here. Sadly, they didn't pick my favorite picture, but there's not much I can do about that. Yay clips in publications!

2. Question: If I want to do, say, a video blog, and I have a brand new iMac that runs Mac OS X, how do I record video? I know my computer has both a camera and a microphone - you can chat on it - but does it just straight record video? I'm trying to use the Quick Capture function on YouTube, but the audio's all wonky. Help me, oh wise friendslist!

3. This evening I found a used book store very close to my house, where I picked up, among other things, three out-of-print Ray Bradbury short story collections, and you may never see me again.

Time it took me to finish Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: 4 hours and 16 minutes, including three bathroom breaks and a break for cheese and oranges.

Number of caffeinated beverages I consumed to stay awake to finish said book: four. One Cherry Coke, one regular Coke, two cups of black coffee.

Number of hours I will be up because I am cranked out of my mind: currently undetermined.

Reaction to said book: AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHhokaydone.

More coherent reaction later once I've gone to bed and slept off the ridiculous amount of caffeine that is now in my system. Also later: verbal recreation of the costume I wore to the release party, of which I have no pictures but can be most accurately described as "Hermione with a night job as a dominatrix." Seriously, folks, it's the boots. They're just too sexy for words.

Bed. Bed. Bedbedbedbedbedbedbedbedbed.

This will only be interesting if you're an IR/history geek and you read the Animorphs series.

Post-Colonial Analysis of Animorphs

1. On Thursday night, I was outside and got slightly bitten up by mosquitoes, mostly on my lower legs (what's the deal? The weather gets cold and the mosquitoes are still biting? Nobody wins!). When I woke up Friday morning they were itching like crazy. I got in the shower and they were still driving me nuts. When I went to shave my legs, my desire to rid myself of the itch made me a little... erm... overenthusiastic with the razor. Meaning, I took a slice of skin the size of a pen off my shin. Yeah. Ow.

I swore - very, very loudly - and when I climbed out the shower I was bleeding all over the place. I managed to dry off the leg and put four normal-sized band aids over the wound. I then left the house to do my long day off errands. When I came home, I discovered that I had bled through all the band aids. Luckily, Amanda has a first-aid kit that has everything in it except Scotland and possibly the kitchen sink, and she gave me a humongous band aid that, in another lifetime, could have been used to stop up a leaking dike, allowing poor little Hans Brinker to go home and go to bed. Yay for Amanda being far more prepared than I could ever hope to be! Anyway, yeah. Pain.

2. Last night, I sawn Neil Gaiman speak at a Politics and Prose event (though held in a local United Methodist Church). I went with Neal and Arielle. Neil Gaiman read out loud from Fragile Things. The British have such wonderful voices. The story was good, but he could have been reading from a cookbook and it would have had the same effect. In any case, I got to hang out with people that I adore and hear Neil Gaiman read! And it was awesome!

3. iPod is fixed. Thank God for warranties. Woot!

4. Also: there is news. And it is possibly good news.

...

!!!

Why this makes me happy:

This is probably one of my favorite books from my childhood.

Why this makes me unhappy:

If they mess this up, I will cry.

1. Candide – Voltaire
2. One Hundred Years of Solitude (Cien años de soledad) – Gabriel José García Márquez
3. Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
4. Like Water For Chocolate (Como agua para chocolate) - Laura Esquivel
5. Rocket Summer – Ray Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles is also acceptable; Rocket Summer is the name of the vignette, but The Martian Chronicles is the collection.)
6. Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston
7. To The Lighthouse – Virginia Woolf
8. The Princess Bride – William Goldman
9. A Night Without Armor II: The Revenge – Beau Sia (this book is a parody of Jewel’s mediocre poetry book A Night Without Armor, and if you’ve never read it, you should, because it’s absolutely brilliant.)
10. A Wind at the Door – Madeline L’Engle (many people mistook this book for others in this set, such as a Wrinkle in Time and Many Waters.)
11. America: The Book – Jon Stewart