throbbing light machine

anghraine tagged me on tumblr - fifteen things that are making me happy right now:
1. winter is far from over; I have a solid three months of snow left to look forward to
2. the myth-type of Persephone, the rape victim married to her rapist, given a cold power by her trauma and her survival but also fundamentally connected with the renewal of spring. she gets stronger and more dangerous by breaking, and i'm connecting with that
3. soft-aesthetic photos of black men with flowerbeards
4. Jim Kirk's face
5. Lip Gallagher's face
6. Mandy Milkovich's dyejob - so cute! and Debbie's haircut
7. I got to see my best friend and not!sister this week when she came home for her mother's 60th birthday
8. I'm no longer involved in any way shape or form with my ex's endless hopeless drama
9. Jim Kirk genderswaps
10. William Shatner genderswapped is kind of what I look like, except for the eye color
11. Marvel 616 Civil War fix-it fic
12. Cara Loup recently uploaded a bunch of her zine-era Han/Luke to the AO3, and it's glorious - and also imo it's cool to spend time in a SW universe where the PT hadn't been made yet and see what people were doing.
13. Anna (starry_diadem) is publishing some of her amazing Battlestar Galactica 1978 fic as with the serial numbers filed off; her worldbuilding work is tremendous, and also I tracked her down a few years ago after a long break from the fandom by recognizing her very distinctive use of the word "gauche" in fic even after she'd changed pseuds, of which I am unreasonably proud.
14. the water-soluble wax pastels are awesome for coloring my mandalas
15. girl you know i listened to the ESB radio serial again the other night and it is some hot shit; no one else can act at all, but Mark Hamill is there, and he goes pretty hard. the exaggerated-noises style that radio dramas always do work really nicely with the film's plotlines; lots of moaning and heavy breathing and whimpering from Luke, it's all very exciting. also they do the Hoth scene that fanwriters always tackle, with Han and Luke overnight in the shelter. they found the worst voice in the world for Vader tho, which is kind of a problem

Thanks for all the supportive comments over the last coupla weeks, y'all; you guys make such a big difference in my life. Nothing better than falling into media fandom has, like, ever happened to me. I'm doing okay. Feeling grouchy, which is prolly a good sign. I still got to get myself a new apartment this next week, and then I can get back to stressing about academic ish full-time!!! Naw, don't listen to me.

Man, I don't know why I don't just watch Shameless all the cotdamn time. Because it is my kind of shit. It is so good to see representations of being poor. I'm not Gallagher-type poor, tho I come from Chicago-poor stock - but my people are hippieshit backwoods artsy types for the most part, conjobbery on the side not front and center. But I am having so many feelings about Lip and college and how fucking bullshit it is that the American educational system is clogged with all this suburban whitebread babysitting timewasting felgercarb. The question isn't "how will we use this in the real world," it's "is the purpose of this lesson to efficiently inform us or help us acquire a skill, or is it just another hoop to jump through, another way to waste our time?"

I am NEVER going to say that learning is pointless, or even a bad idea, because I am SO DOWN with knowledge for knowledge's sake - but at the same time, how the fuck much time and money can you ethically mandate kids need to spend faffing around on distribution requirements when some people legit need to be living their lives at the same time? The pursuit of a well-rounded education ought to be a joyful supplement to a working life. I want both at once, jam and bread all together - anyway, why is it such a big thing to expect, to be able to have a home and a family and a work and learning too? I empathize a lot with Lip's emotional tension, his irritation at ritualized college social scenes combined with the intense affective pull of his family. I feel that now; I'm sick of living away from my people. And it was weird for me too back as an undergraduate, because I was also essentially a new wife at nineteen/twenty, keeping my first house, and that put me out of step with the private liberal arts college scene. But lots of the girls I grew up with were getting married and having first babies at that point in their lives.

Iiiiii need to get more freelance writing assignments and get paid, y'all.

eta: and anyway what's up with notjob disciplinarians who teach Foucault? do they not cognitive dissonance?

I voted absentee weeks ago, so all I've got left to do now is sit and wait and try not to think about it. last-minute psa'd my students yesterday on where/how to vote. God, y'all, everyone keeps talking about voter fraud and recounts and I'm not sure we can do another 2000 right now.

So here are other things I'm thinking about that are more fannish and less anxious and more fun:

- over the course of grading midterm papers, I've managed to rewatch both seasons of Shameless US, and holy shit y'all I love this show. I want the new seeeeeasooooon, but it won't be around until January, bloody hellcakes. This show hits all of my "siblings on their own form pseudofamily" kinks - yes I did really like the Boxcar Children, and holy balls I would read porn of that in a hot minute, come on, someone's got to have at least shipped the older sibs. Except that Shameless also has (relatively) realistic poverty and some race/gender/sexual diversity, and passes the Bechdel test and also contains some not-half-bad sex scenes. And Fiona's hair gets dirty and Lip is awesome with his smartkid rage and Debbiiiiieee is my favorite and Kev reminds me of every older dude I grew up with back home.

- listening to an audiobook of Shadows of the Empire - there's no frelling podfic in this fandom, I'm reduced to EU recordings and the old radio serials if I want audio engagement - and I've got to say, if Dash Rendar was a real thing that really happened, oh my god Luke had so much angsty self-loathing sex with him between ESB and RotJ. Of course, Dash Rendar probably wasn't a real thing that really happened, because he's an example of the same storytelling tactic that frustrated me so much in Captain America: a regular character (Han, Tony) are unavailable to the narrative, for whatever reason, so the writers create a knockoff character (Rendar, Howard) so that they can keep working with familiar dynamics. But 1. that undersells the impact of the character's absence and 2. creates these kind of boring cardboard cutout fake surrogate characters.

-(Marvel tangent: because Howard Stark isn't supposed to be that much like Tony, guys. Tony's flash and flip are the defense mechanisms you develop when you grow up in the spotlight, when you're the inheritor of something and everyone keeps looking to you and you don't quite know how to deal with that kind of pressure. Howard seems like a much more "self-made man" archetype, all gravitas and teeth, the guy who went out and built himself a fortune and made himself get kind of cold in the process. CA!Howard Stark is one of the hardest things in the MCU for me to wrap my head around, because the archetypes just don't make sense that way.)