all my keysmash are belong to you

I signed up for Racebending Revenge at dark_agenda because do you know how long I've been threatening to write Indonesian!Winchesters? Since March, apparently. And then I missed the July 2 posting deadline because I was off celebrating someone else's independence day. LOL. Better late than never! ALSO, the icon for my Dreamwidth post is pretty much the appropriatest in many ways. Someone randomly made a map of Indonesia the background for a Winchesters icon, and hey! Now it's time for Indochesters.

I have grand plans to write more in this 'verse, but here are two ficlets for now. 'Verse summary: They follow the trail of the thing that killed their mother from West Java, Indonesia to the USA. This is Satrio. This is Dimas. Handy-dandy Indonesian/Sundanese translations are here.

North for the Winter
Pre-series. One of the few times their father took them north in the wintertime. "Do we even have a word for snow?" 590 words.

Jejak Kaki
Early S1. Brothers on the road, rediscovering. The title means 'footprints'. "It's not that Satrio has anything against his mothertongue, but Dimas speaks it like he's making a point." Also 590 words.

And now for some cultural identity soapboxing! ( tl;dr re: multilingualism and the monolingual bias )

I've also been wanting to write Indonesian!Pevensies since a year ago. That's still on the to-do list, as is Muslim Indonesian Jimmy Novak. I also just signed up for mundane_bingo and spnsupporting because I am a crazy person. I've yet to get my bingo card, but my spnsupporting characters are pretty predictable.

[originally posted at http://whynot.dreamwidth.org/27062.html | comments]

ITEM #1:

♥ Chuck Shurley Prompt Meme ♥


ITEM #2, MORE IMPORTANTLY: He never said it was aliens.

( how Jimmy's black-sheep twin brother saved the world )

1. Hello, Merlin fans, by any chance could any of you be so kind as to Britpick/beta 2100 words of SPN fusion AU wherein Arthur and Morgana drive around the UK killing monsters and have family drama? I would be much obliged. :D

2. I'm crossposting this from Dreamwidth because I think there are maybe some folks here to whom the following might be of interest.

When I was writing Indonesian SPN fic, I found myself wanting to write Dean lapsing unthinkingly into Sunda. Sunda is the local language in west Java (WEST SIIIIIIDE), and my family on my mother's side would always lapse into it from Bahasa Indonesia when they are excited or surprised. Because of this (and systemic bias), it's a language I associate with intimacy and high emotion. Sunda!Wikipedia! I mean, I can totally see Dean going, "Dahar euy!" when Sam comes back with take-out.

I dunno how much sense it would make even if it's just a translation trying to capture the 'feel' of things. In the hypothetical world where the Winchesters speaking Sunda makes sense, though, I see Sam speaking less Sunda than Dean. Maybe when they were growing up, Sam and Dean used to speak more Sunda to each other and to their dad, but when Sam went to Stanford, Sunda was one more thing to distance himself from as he embraced the standard language and a standard life. Also, when Sam and Dean are pretending to be cops or whatever, they'd probably have their furtive exchanges in Sunda.

In the USA, this kind of multilingualism seems to be associated almost exclusively with immigrant/multicultural families, which Sam and Dean are kind of not. In Indonesia, people who also speak Sunda, Javanese, Batak, etc. have been there for centuries, but their language has been minoritized and deemed informal anyway. And so maybe this is why Sam and Dean can't speak Sunda, haha -- the sociolinguistic foundations just aren't the same, and the implications of being multilingual are different.

I wonder if this is one of the reasons why there are so many terrible Indonesian translations of things. It seems there is a higher percentage of multilingual people in Indonesia, but literary/translating conventions seem to favor monolingual stories, thus bringing up issues of how to best capture ~authenticity~. Perhaps this is changing, though. A recent Indonesian soap opera, Muslimah, had their characters speaking FOUR languages: Bahasa Indonesia, Sunda, English, and Arabic. There were subtitles. It was glorious, and utter crap, and my mother never missed a single episode.

I still want Dean yelling, "Kumaha atuh!" in frustration when butting heads with Sam, though.


3. Here are some things I read that I enjoyed and agree with: cultural appropriation, ally arrogance, 'strong female character' bullshit.

ETA: JIM BEAVER TWEETING IN INDONESIAN. MY WORLDS ARE FOREVER COLLIDING. \o/

This entry was originally posted at http://whynot.dreamwidth.org/17036.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

HOLY FUCKSHITS: Indonesian-language Supernatural fanfiction jfldsjfa;l <3 <3 and like Team Free Will is all terkejut because biasanya Indonesia nggak exist di Internet, but here it is! Seperti miracle dari heaven! "Yang bener aja," says Sam, and "Busyet," says Dean, and Cas is all, "Ini menghabiskan waktu. Lucifer masih berkeliaran!" YOU TELL 'EM, CAS. omg some of the fics WARN FOR SELF-INSERTS. Precious!

Speaking of which, I tried writing 300ish more words of Indonesian SPN fic. It's just some random snippet, probably the beginning of some casefic, but I mean, this is pretty much just language practice and a composition exercise, so the willy-nilly snippets help keep it low-pressure. Also, my vernacular's probably off and sounds like an old person's.

In other news, there are these two essays that deal with the portrayal of class issues and economic status in SPN that I found quite interesting. A lot of the hunters in SPN seem to be coded lower-middle class, and I do end up wondering if there are upper class hunters in SPNverse, somewhere. Using frequent flyer miles to zip around on airplanes from case to case, making hunt money from stock market shenanigans. I imagine someone kinda like Daniel Ocean meets Batman type of person. (...So, basically George Clooney?)

Now seems like the time for an interview meme. haruslex asked me five questions. If you want me to ask you five questions, comment with your favorite dessert.

( --these questions three! / Five, sir. / Five! )

I should probably update the genderbent!SPN post with these new castings, then.

( 1 bullet point about the Freya episode, 2 about 'Sweet Dreams' )

+ The Merlin Fic Battle is under way, and someone already wrote a ficlet for one of my prompts: Uther Pendragon & Lucius Malfoy, my son is better than your son. \o/

+ Multifandom 3-sentence fic-a-thon meme!

+ The Year of Living Dangerously - is it an interesting movie? Have you guys seen it? Would I love to hate it? Hate to love it? It's set in 1960s Indonesia before the communist purges (filmed in the Philippines), but it is also about journalist Mel Gibson and military attache assistant Sigourney Weaver, like, falling in love and sticking to their principles or something. Also, we got some yellowface going on. Always a plus, that.

+ Write postcards to Angel and Katie! Say It With Flowers: International Postcard Project

+ Oh yeah, I do have a commentary for The Ink Still Drying typed up. I should get that up at some point. Other things I'm excited about: having my Merlin episodes 2x03 and 2x08 on hard drive, having Prince Caspian on DVD.

I reckon I should be organizing my data sets, but then I listened to Chimamanda Adichie talk about the dangers of a single story (via heather11483 and deepad) and my heart just swelled. I was originally going to flock this post because it has a lot of personal information in it, but then I realized that would be kind of defeating the point. So, here it is.

( thoughts on my own stories: the ones I couldn't own, the ones I didn't want to own, the ones I had to fight for, the ones I still have to fight for )

So in the spirit of this, I'm gonna do new twist on an old meme. I want you to ask me something you think you should know about me. Something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about. Ask away. And I will answer in autobiographical narrative form.

JESUS MOTHERFUCKING CHRIST

JESUS MOTHERFUCKINGSH:LDFJklsdlfml

WHAT/WHEN: From The Telegraph: "The first Indonesia earthquake, magnitude 7.6, struck at 10.16am GMT on Wednesday. ... It was followed by a second tremor, magnitude 6.8, that hit at 1.52am GMT."

WHERE: Padang, West Sumatra, Indonesia. This is the same island that got tsunami'ed 5 years ago.

WHO: "U.N. humanitarian chief John Holmes told reporters Thursday that he estimated that the toll had risen to 1,100 killed – and was expected to rise even higher." -- Wall Street Journal

I haven't found any international means for the public to provide relief yet. Check back for ETAs.

First one motherland then another. Not that this is anything new. What are my homes but places that only ever make the international news when natural disasters and terrorist attacks happen anyway. Plane crashes and ferry sinkings. The news crews leave before the real work is finished and then everyone forgets about the people who still need help until the next disaster.

You guys donated to Typhoon Ondoy/Ketsana victims yet? US$5 can buy like, 8 meals in the Philippines, just keep that in mind.

So I drag myself out of bed, skip breakfast, and go to my internship and am like, "Wow, good thing there's no traffic." And I get to my building and am like, "Wow, good thing I'm the only person in the elevator so we don't have to stop at every fucking floor." And I get to my floor and the office is dark and empty and locked.

?!?

I missed the memo, but I should have figured: today is a public holiday today because the Philippines is burying Cory Aquino.

Check it out, here she is:


January 25, 1933 – August 1, 2009
Ex-first female president in Asia, advocate of democracy, People Power revolutionary, and all-around awesome lady.

When the Marcos regime assassinated her husband in 1983, her vengeance was to become president. I mean, holy crap. Well, she officially lost to Marcos, but everyone knew that was just electoral fraud anyway. What followed was the People Power revolution (also called EDSA revolution), in which 2 million people took to the EDSA highway in non-violent protest and refused to budge, the culmination of years of repressed opposition. As the protest wore on, more of the military began to defect. Marcos fled the country with his tail between his legs.

President Cory Aquino! \o/


Cory's husband is now worth approximately US$10

Her presidency wasn't perfect, but it did end 20 years of dictatorship and heralded the democratic transformation of a nation. Even after her presidency, she continued to be active in philanthropic work and political empowerment, collecting stacks of human rights honors along the way. 120,000 people showed up to watch her funeral cortege pass. Probably why my side of town was so quiet.

Thanks for your awesome, Cory!


But where there is death, there must be life! I swear I didn't get this from the tabloids: two-headed babies have been born in both my homelands. BOTH. Coincidence?! Indonesian two-headed baby. Filipino two-headed baby. Just. Wow.

In completely unrelated news, the commentfic party seems to be off to a great start. COME PLAY, GUYS. Going strong are an Edmund&Susan Last Battle AU thread, a Gossip Girl goes to Hogwarts thread, and Pokemon goes to Camelot thread. Have I mentioned lately how much I love you guys?