LINKDING

<blockquote>A record of the sub-committee's interview of Maggie Farrell, Somnotician and candidate for the position of artist on the delegation which will shortly leave Earth to make first contact with the inhabitants of Toliman B.</blockquote> ➤ Again: AAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!

<blockquote>I know Rochester's actions in this part of the novel are often read as calculated, manipulative, or seductive. Certainly he's trying to manipulate - his motives are not entirely pure. But as far as what he does - guys, I think he's flailing. He's got no fucking idea. He's feeling things for this girl that his education and life have not prepared him for - he wants her, but not like that. He wants to be friends with her, and have her love him, but not with falseness or servility. And there is no script available to him for that sort of thing. PPL HOW U LOVE THEM? Jane is not a conventional love object; he can't go about wooing her by the conventional means he's applied in every other romantic/sexual relationship he's ever been in. So instead he ... dresses up like a gypsy and gets engaged to another girl that he doesn't even really like. It's farcical, a cross-gendered Emma, but the stakes are frighteningly high and the players are just frightened.</blockquote>

➤ futuristic japanese gift-oriented culture via all-pervasive technology that knows everything. very interesting and I can't quite decide just how creepy it is or isn't. ➤ (was linked here via a conversation about the crowdsourced-panopticon that modern technology creates, because yeah, and this is definitely a possible logical extension of that)

<blockquote>Once there were four children whose names were Helen, Tom, Alice, and Walter. This story is about something that happened to them when they spent the summer at their uncle's dairy farm in western Massachusetts.</blockquote>

<blockquote>In the fourteenth year of Rishti Tisroc's reign, a demon in the shape of a beaver is captured and brought to Tashbaan. Shezan Tolkheera, high priestess of the goddess Achadith, is given the responsibility of guarding the demon until its sacrifice at the Spring Festival. Complications ensue.</blockquote> ➤ also on ao3 at http://archiveofourown.org/series/12008 where there's a prequel I haven't yet read but apparently already downloaded

<blockquote>Japanese artist Isao Hashimoto has created a beautiful, undeniably scary time-lapse map of the 2053 nuclear explosions which have taken place between 1945 and 1998, beginning with the Manhattan Project's "Trinity" test near Los Alamos and concluding with Pakistan's nuclear tests in May of 1998.</blockquote> ➤ lovely and frightening

<blockquote>Now we is just us mostly white Canadians clustered at the border, lighting up the satellite map with our cities a string of diamonds from sea to sea--we made ourselves into a "we" by making a myth of The North and of The Land. We made that myth so we could have something to unite us that wasn't a highway with signs in two languages.</blockquote> ➤ the problem with the Canadian Shack trope

<blockquote>Chuck decides to make a sock-puppet. When no one reads his fic, he wonders what he has to do to get noticed in SPN fandom.</blockquote> ➤ the entire fic is written in the style of a wank-report

<blockquote>My grandmother puts her feet in the sink        of the bathroom at Sears to wash them in the ritual washing for prayer, wudu, because she has to pray in the store or miss the mandatory prayer time for Muslims</blockquote>

<blockquote>He was aware of the controversy surrounding the application of DADT policy to an international expedition—and an international expedition to another galaxy at that—but in the end, it didn't matter. Everyone got the chip, or they didn't go.</blockquote>