(no subject)

[d_aulnoy]

I survived Peoria!  And I actually quite enjoyed Galesburg, where the defense was held (awesome student - I look forward to meeting her at a conference someday).  I have many comments to make, concerning everything from Endicott to the WisCon debacle, but I've spent all weekend grading, and thus, I'm fluffy.

So! 

New York was awesome.  I spent one day hanging out with the 'rents entirely (there was shopping, oh, yes, precious: I am now the possessor of the World's Most Fabulous Red Velvet Dress, which none of you will ever see me in, as, hot damn)  (Also, as is always the case with my more ... scandalous outfits, I can say, 100% Mommy Approved),  and one day of hanging out with friends (there was flea-marketing!  and drinking!  and Cottage!  and dancing drunkenly to terrible, terrible music!  it was bliss), and one day of wandering around the Village with the 'Gnu (which was bliss of a different sort).  Needless to say, I am now terribly homesick.

Now that I am home, I am frantically, as I mentioned above, grading: I am revising the Alice paper for a July 15th deadline; I am writing a whole new paper on dystopian fairy tales and the novels of Kate Bernheimer for a June 15th deadline.  Someday, I get to breathe again, right?  I mean, aside from three-day weekends?

Now, the Lost finale.  Um, what?  Thoughts?  And possibly, pointers towards good sources of fanfic to tide me over until January '09?

alice_ayers:  your b-day gift of season one of Grey's Anatomy?  So the best present ever.  I am currently indulging in a rewatching, and appreciating the soundtrack that I was too caught up to notice the first time, and generally loving it.

Um.  Also, now, sleep.

Comments

[cataptromancer.livejournal.com]

wiscon debacle?

[d-aulnoy.livejournal.com]

You know the con that I go to each May that I love and call The Happiest Place on Earth? Well, this year someone apparently attended with the express purpose of denigrating the participants for being fat, trans, POC, or otherwise not-the-default body. She posted to the Something Awful message board with a fairly nasty & obsessive dissection featuring images of people from WisCon whose faces were whited out with unhappy faces (ironic, for one of the merriest places I've ever had the pleasure of being at), but neglected to blank out the identifying information on their name-tags.

Not surprisingly, some of her fellow U-attendees contacted her advisor/the Dean to complain (WisCon is a local con, and it appears that some of the people who she set up for public pillorying were her fellow grad students/co-workers), and she canceled the page. The problem is, it was then picked up by people who were kicked off of the SA forums for being too nasty ....

So, basically, it's a clusterfuck where the dregs of humanity tear into some of the smartest & kindest people out there. They're mocking everybody from the woman whom I refer to as The Most Beautiful Woman in the World to the infant niece/nephew of a friend, ripping into everything from disability to race to weight to ... existence, basically. At one point, one of the dumber ones (and this is a stretch) shrieks something along the lines of, "Tuck your tampon string back in!" which really leaves me wondering when biological function became an insult. Someone on my f-list (can't remember who) said something about how dividing the world into good and bad people was the function of the Rachel Moss's (original instigator)of the world, but, well, I'm no kind of Christian, and I'm really BIG on dividing people into good and bad on the basis of their actions, if only as to know who to avoid. These folks are genuinely worthless.

Aaaaaaaaaand, apparently, even grading-exhausted and fluffy, I'm really ticked about this. Sorry for the tl:dr response.

[cataptromancer.livejournal.com]

No, not tl and I did read. Then I did some googling about it and found some responses and some bits of the original posts and, ugh, what a terrible thing. Although as always the blessing is that this kind of trollishness seems to galvanize communities. People are linking this to a recent acerbic (though much less disgustingly ad hominem) article dissing the annual medievalist conference at Kalamazoo...and in that situation there's a similar effect as medievalists band together to defend our beloved conference.

Plus, there was some kind of plague thing at Wiscon. Sounds like an unfortunate year.

In that mythical time when I have my act together and can branch out and do things not necessarily related to keeping my scholarly work alive, I'd love to go to Wiscon...