LINKDING

<blockquote>I've been threatening for three days now to write out this meta about why Aziraphale chooses to present himself as gay, despite being sexless and not even a man, and here it is! It took eight straight hours of writing, and there are 35 footnotes, with constant reference to the text. Kill me! This meta is basically me picking apart the things that make Aziraphale come across as gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide, and then talking about why he'd choose to present himself like that, and also, that I love him. I love him so much.</blockquote

<blockquote>The arrival of Star Wars: The Force Awakens made the Star Wars fandom explode earlier this year. The modern Star Wars fan is catered to not only by seemingly every kind of product with enough surface area to slap Kylo Ren on, but also by the width and breadth of the fanworks available to her. With decades of fanworks to sift through, the possibilities can seem infinite. But once she’s read her eyes out on all the Poe/Finn fic she can find and indulged in prequel fanvids set to Evanescence songs, she might have a question. Where, a new Star Wars fan might well ask, is all the Han/Luke fic?</blockquote>

➤ lots of good meta about food in the context of the Mad Max universe

<blockquote>In 2009, I started a doctoral program in American Studies at the University of Kansas, with a plan to study what, on a good day, I call “the conflicts around sexual diversity in the Mennonite church,” and what, on a bad day, I call, “Mennonites and their fchar-#ked-up sex problems.” I have also resorted to the fast and efficient descriptor “LGBTQ issues in the Mennonite church,” because the phrase “sexual diversity,” outside of LGBTQ and academic circles, often leads to a “come again?” But increasingly I feel allergic to the word “issues.” Mennonites use that word like a armored shield against people whose actual bodies they’re afraid of. The further I get into this, the more “fchar-#ked-up sex problems” seems like the way to go.</blockquote> ➤ I love Pink Menno so much

➤ an analysis of the differing themes and focuses between various countries' productions of Elisabeth. FASCINATING.

➤does what it says on the tin

<blockquote>I want to talk about Pacific Rim, and why it is not, as I've seen a frustrating number of commentators claim, a "dumb" movie, or a movie that "knows that it's dumb," or anything like that, but first I want to talk about my girlfriend, and you're going to let me because you've already clicked through and given me the pageview, so you may as well stick around. Besides, I think it will help provide a reference point for some of the ideas I'm talking about.</blockquote>

<blockquote>How does the movie start? Well, with Kirk and Bones fucking with a planet of primitive aliens. They steal some kind of holy scroll, and then get chased through a red jungle. Seems like kind of a dick move. Well, it’s not very clear, but ostensibly they’ve stolen the scroll to get chased, in order to draw the aliens away from a volcano that’s about to explode. Okay, that seems reasonable. Except that 1) when the volcano erupts, it’s going to kill everybody on the planet, so it hardly matters where they are, and 2) Spock is getting dropped down into the volcano to set off a cold fusion bomb. Wait, what? Yeah, he sets off the cold fusion bomb and all the lava freezes. You know cold fusion isn’t actually cold, right? It’s only “cold” in the sense that opposed to regular fusion it’s not a bazillion degrees hot. Huh.</blockquote>

➤ does what it says on the tin. REALLY INTERESTING

➤ Explication of the allusions Victor Hugo makes when talking about the Enjolras-Grantaire relationship. Or should I say, the Enjolras/Grantaire relationship, because dude.

<blockquote>I want to say as a first principle that almost every fic focusing on disability I’ve ever read can be understood as having some relation to service kink, whether that’s rolling around in the kink straight on (consciously or not), or subverting its usual presentation, or coming at it orthogonally from left field, or pointedly not engaging with it. Personally, I theorize this is because having a disability entails negotiating boundaries of rejecting and accepting service on a daily basis. I wanted to write about some of the ways I see this play out in intimate relationships, in fic and otherwise, because it can be a hugely complicated, thorny, sexy, unsexy, unpleasant, romantic, intimidating thing.</blockquote>

<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>

<blockquote>Tolkien (1964) remarked in an essay on fiction writing that any storyteller's "sub-created" world should have the "inner consistency of reality" according to its own rules (p. 47); it is the primary purpose of this paper to show, by geological analysis of the two major mountain ranges - Misty and White - featured in The Lord of the Rings, that Professor Tolkien's own creation certainly achieves this goal in the area of geology. The Misty Mountains will be considered first, with special reference to the underground tunnel-kingdom of Moria which provides a cross-section of their roots at a middle latitude; then the more complex geology of the White Mountains, including the travertine caves of Helm's Deep and the exposed pluton around which the city of Minas Tirith is built, will be considered and a tentative theory of their orogeny proposed.</blockquote> ➤ access-locked

<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

➤ impromptu meta on the subject of social media and decision fatigue and engagement levels.

<blockquote>The patron saint of media piracy, of course, is St. Columba of Iona, who borrowed a psalter from St. Finnian, sometime in the 6th century CE, made a copy, and refused to give St. Finnian the copy when he returned the original. St. Finnian demanded the copy back, St. Columba declared it was his, and they appealed to King Diarmait of Ireland, who declared "every cow its calf, every book its copy," in favor of St. Finnian. This being 6th century Ireland, it ended in Columba raising his clan in rebellion against the king, and around 3,000 men died in the Battle of Cúl Dreimhne before Columba went into voluntary exile in Scotland to avoid excommunication. He took his copy of the psalter with him when he went, though!</blockquote>

<blockquote>They’ve all grown wary—understandably so—of alien initiation rites. A meta-AMTDI story.</blockquote>

➤ Tasty meta on On The Prowl, The Price, and Women's Work. Read the comments too.

➤ I am clearly not getting all the nuance in this vid due to not being familiar with spn fandom, but it is a great vid nonetheless

➤ does what it says on the tin!

➤ On censorship of books

➤ does what it says on the tin.   ➤ (with expliciter happy gay farmer ending, and intelligenter marcus!) http://sineala.dreamwidth.org/1137690.html

➤ does what it says on the tin

➤ does what it says on the tin (also, oh, poor book!Marcus!)

<blockquote>Apparently there was a tradition of having allegiances to particular youths, such that you would write that boy's name on your work. And they wouldn't be, like, boys you knew or might reasonably have a chance with. More like making a painting and signing it "I love Justin Bieber" and so would all the other people in your workshop because you all loved Justin Bieber, versus all the other vase-decorators who love... I dunno, some other teen idol.</blockquote>

➤ Does what it says on the tin

➤ does what it says on the tin!

<blockquote>About writing a Fraser/Kowalski Due South fic, about reading the fic, and about Fraser and Kowalski investigating a crime and being attracted to each other.</blockquote>

<blockquote>Arthur is one of those plays we all know -- we read it for class, we hear snippets of it quoted, we've seen it done. It's easy to think of it as something dusty and irrelevent.</blockquote> ➤ Hee!