something about failure and homo
March 2012
coughing becoming overwhelming need to go to bed
Black man records police officer’s racist abuse
A 21-year-old black man records his encounter with police on his mobile phone during his arrest the day after the London riots begin. The recording captures his exchange with two officers after he is handcuffed and put in the back of a police van
The police officer says: “The problem with you is you will always be a nigger”
The police officer has been identified as “PC Alex MacFarlane”
The Independent Police Complaints Commission referred the case to the Crown Prosecution Service on the basis that three officers, including MacFarlane, may have committed criminal offences.
The CPS initially decided no charges should be brought against any of the police officers. However on Thursday, the service said it would review the file after lawyers for the man threatened to challenge the decision in a high court judicial review. MacFarlane has been suspended.
Estelle du Boulay, director of the Newham Monitoring Project, said: “Sadly, the shocking treatment of this young man at the hands of police officers – both the physical brutality he describes and the racial abuse he claims he suffered – are by no means unusual; it compares to other reports we have received. What makes this case different is the victim had the foresight and courage to turn on a recording device on his mobile phone.”
Number 993
Britain’s post-racial fantasy laid bare. Big up this dude’s foresight in recording Babylon dem…
“But all I could think about now, as night fell, was how much you can love made-up people and how much you can miss them.”
—John Green (via queenofcreys)
jsyk if you are following me and you have read/liked cassandra clare's "work"
this is the woman you are dealing with:
PROFITEERING:
Cassandra Claire has profited from her fan fiction.
On May 6, 2002, Cassandra Claire opened a CafePress store of merchandise based on the Very Secret Diaries [Lord of the Rings fan fiction]. The amount of profit from the store is unclear. The context of Cassandra Claire’s post seems to indicate that the profits were going to her, with no mention of donating this money to charity.
——
There are also other events called into question: On March 6, 2004, Cassandra Claire posted to her LiveJournal “Everyone really does have an Ipod but me!” One of Claire’s fans responded with the comment:
You will soon! I promise. Sorry this is taking so long. But if it makes you feel any better, I’m getting you one before I get myself one :P Thank you for DV14. Best use of thirty minutes I could otherwise spend doing homework EVER :D
——
LAPTOPGATE:
Cassandra Claire had already apparently benefited materialistically because of her fan fiction. Then came the post that her apartment had been broken into, and that her computer (and roommates’ computers) had been stolen. According to the story by mlleelizabeth, Claire’s friend Heidi originally asked for contributions to buy Claire a new computer behind an FLocked LiveJournal entry, requesting assistance. She was asked to unFLock the post so that others could help.
When the money topped the cost of the laptops stolen, Heidi and Claire began mentioning that some action figures were also stolen and that all excess would be donated to buy new toys to help children for Christmas. The money was not turned off.
There was a considerable amount of money involved. At one point, on Heidi’s LiveJournal, the number was quoted at being over ten thousand dollars.
——
CHARITY GATE:
slackerbitch on JournalFen summarizes the Heidi Tandy/Charity Wank situation up as follows:
CC: laptops stolen
Heidi8: organizes whip-round
CC: gets $ to cover missing laptops
Heidi8: makes post explaining that, huzzah, fandom takes care of its own
sapphireisle: replies to said post, saying hey, if fandom takes care of its own, can you help me raise money for my mom? (mom = Christina = cancer patient w/ no health insurance)
Heidi8: replies sorry, nope
sapphireisle: posts to own LJ grumbling about how fandom doesn’t really take care of its own, it just takes care of BNFs
Heidi8: gets offended, points out said post to her flist / CC fangirls
fangirls: proceed to respond angrily on sapphireisle’s post, as well as finding Christina’s LJ and making angry comments there
wank: gets posted to FW
Most people on FW went “…. there are people FLAMING someone with CANCER? Over a BNF ego bruising?!?”(source)
Set Off Your Medical Pendant, Get Shot
In the middle of the night, police banged on his door until he was roused from sleep, demanded entry, when he refused (because he was not ill) they broke down the door, tasered him, then inexplicably shot him.
The official police story is that he came at them with a hatchet, then that was amended to a knife. Within hours they were reporting this as a justified shooting.
This occurred last November, a grand jury is just now being empaneled to investigate this shooting and the name of the officer (and his duty status) has never been released to the public.
The entire encounter was recorded by the medical pendant company, and there is video from the taser. White Plains, NY police are going to have a lot of explaining to do when this gets before a jury.
Just routine procedure.
My Epiphany in Oakland [I could have been Trayvon]
My name is Roger Porter, I’m from Oakland, CA and I definitely could have been Trayvon. Here is a story about something that happened when I was 17.
I’m 17 years old and it’s a Saturday night.
I’m driving my mother’s 1994 blue Honda Accord with two of my friends in the back seat. We’re about to get on the freeway to check out this party when we see two of our other friends riding in the opposite direction. So we both pull over and because I haven’t seen the other two guys since they dropped out of school, we have a little reunion on the side of the street.
We laugh, clown a little and try to figure out where we want to go. Everything is all good; the weather is warm, the women are out and it’s just a care-free atmosphere. Then we all stop talking as we notice a police car pull up behind us.
“Hey is everything alright?” One of the cops asks us, not out of concern, but to put us on the defensive.
We tell him “yeah” like, of course everything is OK why wouldn’t it be?
“Whose car is this?”
“That’s my mother’s car,” I respond quick and agitated.
“Hey don’t get an attitude with me bro. I’ll have everybody here lying face down with their hands behind their backs.”
Then another squad car pulls up and as I stare at the officer who is doing all the talking and is now a few steps away from me and I experience an epiphany. It felt like that moment represented a perfect culmination of my teenage experience — it was as if my ethnic identity had now become perfectly clear.
When I was 13, I remember walking home from school one day and having a black woman around my mother’s age, with huge burning eyes, ask me if I had any rocks to sell her. By the time we were 15, everybody asked us for dope; Mexicans, White people and black folks as well. They would ask me, my cousin and our friends for drugs while we walked home from football practice with our pads on like that was our one purpose on Earth.
And when we went to the corner store on E. 15th, down the street from my cousin’s house, to get some Now & Laters or some Funions or Donald Duck orange juice, the old Korean lady would shout “Philly Blunt?” as she held two cigars up, one in each hand, behind the cash register. And we would have to tell her, just like we told all the dope fiends, “NO!”
So now there are like five cops gathered around us and I suddenly understand that I, along with my friends, are now fully-grown monsters. I mean if criminality had a color then it was the same complexion as us. If criminality had features then it would look exactly like our reflections in the mirror. If criminality had a dress code then it would wear its pants, shirt and shoes exactly like we did.
“I got a report about a fight … is there any fighting going on here?”
“Naw, no fighting.”
“Can I see your drivers license?”
I show it to him and he looks at it with a flashlight because apparently he needs to analyze every letter and every number. When he’s done, he tells us to have a good night and both of the squad cars speed off to their next confrontation.
My friends and I stay there for a few minutes and try as hard as we can to regroup. But needless to say, we find it to be impossible.
will kill people if catching fire doesn’t include
- sugar cube?
- mouth-to-mouth brought to you by finnick and peeta
- we’re already married and if it weren’t for the baby
- katniss getting drunk with haymitch and puking on gale’s shoes
- at least part of haymitch’s games
- THE LAST LINE HAS TO BE ‘KATNISS, THERE IS NO DISTRICT 12’ OR I WILL LOSE IT
ALLLLLL OF THIS
ESPECIALLY “IF IT WEREN’T FOR THE BABY” OMFG MOST BADASS PART OF THE BOOK IT’S LIKE MY FAVORITE THING PEETA HAS EVER SAID
When they arrive at Fillory, Quentin’s friend Janet bitterly complains to Ember, the land’s Aslan-figure, that “We human beings are unhappy all the time. We hate ourselves and we hate each other and sometimes we wish You or Whoever had never created us or this shit-ass world.” This, apparently, is something we’re supposed to take seriously—these rich, powerful, beautiful young people complaining about their terrible lot in life, and concluding that because magic hasn’t made them happy, those who don’t have magic must live lives of unalloyed misery only briefly alleviated by commercial entertainment and internet porn. The possibility that people might be happier, and more likely to find meaning in their lives, in the absence of the kind of magic that equals money, never seems to occur to them. No, the characters conclude, the fault must be in the world—“Why now, when it was actually happening, did the seductions of Fillory feel so crude and unwanted? Its groping hands so clumsy? He thought he’d left this feeling behind long ago in Brookly, or at least at Brakebills. How could it have followed him here, of all places? … Or maybe this time was different, maybe there really was something off here. Maybe the hollowness was in Fillory, not in him?”
(x)
what I find interesting about this- not having read the books and having no plans to do so- is that what’s being described here are very much Bored White Rich Kid Problems, and the reason these characters are in sulks is because they’ve never experienced actual pain in their spoiled little lives. Which makes me wonder, what if Grossman had decided to write characters who did struggle and suffer in the mundane world? (Apparently there’s a gay character who gets little pagetime and no love interest, and for my money Grossman can fuck right off where that’s concerned.) What if they were nonwhite, or trans or mentally ill, and saw the magical world that this book inhabits as an escape not from the boredom of having everything handed to them, but from institutional racism, or being trapped in a body that feels alien, or from the demons in their own head? It’s no coincidence, I think, that I and many other unhappy kids/teens turned to books where kids Just Like Us succeeded in slaying dragons and wooing princes. So instead of Quentin whining his way through a magical world that he in no way earned or deserves, we could see the wonder our actually interesting characters were initially delighted to find this world, only to discover that hiding from their troubles didn’t solve any of them? Or we could see the existence of this world supporting and fortifying them, giving them the power to face their real-world traumas, mirroring the way fiction allows us to deal with our own lives?
that would have been … interesting.
“It really was boring. The only amusing thing was how we’re told from the beginning that the protagonist is very smart, but very, very smart, and he gets to be in the company of other kids who are smarter, and he gets along there, because, as we know, he is so very smart - and all the while Quentin doesn’t do one single smart thing.”
—also from the comments’ section. Usually I don’t dare go into them at all, but I’m really enjoying the majority of these.
“It’s Grossman’s choice to overlay the Secret History aspect of his novel—in which the desire for Brakebills is the desire for money and social status—with the Narnia reading—in which the desire for Brakebills is the desire for meaning and adventure—that causes problems”
—The Secret History just jumped to the top of my April reading list
“It seems to me that an adult fantasy book with a Narnia should invest its intellectual energy not in noting how much nicer the Narnia is than the real world- after all, who wouldn’t prefer to be a ruler of a fantasy country rather than a child in a British boarding school?- but in figuring out how this happy state of affairs has been achieved. Why, for instance, are all the sentient animals in such desperate want of good governance that a twelve year old schoolboy can rule them better than they can rule themselves?
And who does the laundry? Magic gives you some free opulence, but even J. K. Rowling had to posit a species of happy Darkies to perform all that tedious cleaning and food preparation and a species of Jews to perform all that tedious accountancy, so that the wizards could concentrate on wholesome English occupations like retail, education, and the civil service.” —
And who does the laundry? Magic gives you some free opulence, but even J. K. Rowling had to posit a species of happy Darkies to perform all that tedious cleaning and food preparation and a species of Jews to perform all that tedious accountancy, so that the wizards could concentrate on wholesome English occupations like retail, education, and the civil service.” —
BOOM ROASTED (via raphaellaskies)
This does apply to Harry Potter full well, but it’s actually from the comment section of this article. The actual article is a really good critique of Grossman! and the Magicians! it’s really good I promise!
and it’s pro-Alice what more do you want
