all my keysmash are belong to you

Okay so, The Departed, right? I was all :DDD when I first watched it because YAY MASSACHUSETTS omg and I recognized all those place names! How exciting! LOL OF COURSE THEY GO TO WORCESTER FOR A COKE DEAL. Anyway. I recently watched the movie it was based on, Infernal Affairs. Also very exciting!

( Infernal Affairs: spoilery bullet points )

The other thing about Infernal Affairs is Tony Leung's uncanny ability to look like a kicked puppy 90% of the time. "Hmm," I thought, "and why does that feel familiar?" Oh! Because that's also the face Castiel makes 90% of the time. Therefore,

[Poll #1724407]

HOLY SHIT SHE CAN POLL. I'm trying out the two weeks of paid time trial thingy. New icons! Polls at the drop of a hat! The nagging worry that I've installed Google Analytics wrong! It's gonna be a brave new world, folks, at least for a while. I can't do polls on Dreamwidth, so I'm just not gonna crosspost posts with polls, I think, because I'm lazy and can't be bothered.

But back to Tony Leung's face. I also watched Red Cliff in the same week, and my reaction to that is mostly *___* FEAST FOR THE EYES. It's not a subtle movie, but goddamn, it is entertaining as shit.

VID REC: The Humbling River by feochadn | RED CLIFF | ensemble
It's like watching a really epic trailer. Great editing and great song. Apparently I need all of Puscifer's songs in my ears, like, right the hell now.

What else. sharp_teeth is back, with a different format. queer_fest's last prompting day is March 30, so get to it. help_japan's last prompting day is March 31, and if you're interested in receiving a mix from me, you can place your bid here.

And castielfest is DONE, baby, BOOM, baby, chyyyeeeaaahhh. Here is the masterlist, which consists of 11 fanarts and 83 fanfics HOLY MOTHER OF GOD. AH CASFEST, I remember when you were but a germ of an idea being batted around chat. Won't you look at you now! If you had cheeks, I'd pinch 'em!

For Casfest I received an excellent fic from gabby_silang called Elysium, which is everything I've always wanted from expat!Cas. It is rarefied and sharp, and I love it so. YOU SHOULD TOTALLY READ IT.

In other news, I sank further into the depths of the intertubes and got a tumblr. Same handle as my Twitter, that's right. Dunno what I'll do with it yet, but so far it's full of caves, deserts, and angels. By the way, explain to me how this is not Castiel/Anna fanart, unless it's Castiel/Claire fanart. Or Castiel/Scully.

While merrily tumblring, I stumbled across this and was like MUST FIND MOAR, and lo, I did! Kolmanskop, the abandoned diamond mining town in southern Namibia. In 1908, Zacharias Lewala found a diamond in the Namib Desert, and he showed it to his German supervisor August Staunch, who was like, "oh that's nice I guess," and mysteriously thereafter, a bunch of German miners settled in the area and began to exploit the land. The town declined by WW1 and was ultimately abandoned in 1954, after which the land began to reclaim it. The desert sifted in through the windows and doors, and settled where people used to. It's not that the sand fills up the silence; the desert brings silence with it.

Or it would, maybe, if Kolmanskop isn't now a tourist attraction. oh god I wanna go.

So yeah, I'm totally late to Kolmanskop appreciation hour, but here's a picspam to make up for it: ( 'You do not go into the desert to find identity, but to lose it.' --Edmond Jabes )

Speak up if you got a tumblr!

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.

Things that happen in chat when you're supposed to be sleeping: Castielfest, ya'll! Raise your hand if you'd be interested in a Castiel-centric fic exchange. Gen, slash, het, whatever -- as long as Cas is top-billing. We're thinking sign-ups begin a few days after the S5 finale airs, stay open for a week or so, then participants have a month to write at least 1000 words upon receiving their assignments. vikki has a poll here to gauge interest, and it would be awesome if you could fill it out and let us know your questions/concerns/disagreements/suggestions.

It's Three Weeks For Dreamwidth time, trying to generate more Dreamwidth activity to celebrate its 1-year anniversary, hence the cross-posting. If you, like me, are still like "Dreamwhat?", it might behoove us to check out stepps's Lonely Planet guide to Dreamwidth. And, here's something cool that DW-clicking did for me recently: ephemere's thoughts on Filipino identity and writing about other cultures led me to the post that sparked it ('No Foreigners Allowed' by Charles Tan), which in turn led me to the sidebar of Charles Tan's blog, which is stuffed full of links to Filipino speculative fiction fkdjsfklkjk AWESOME.


This old meme:
1 - Leave a comment, saying you want to be interviewed.
2 - I will respond; I'll ask you five questions.
3 - You'll update your journal with my five questions, and your five answers.
4 - You'll include this explanation.
5 - You'll ask other people five questions when they want to be interviewed.

maboheme asked me five fannish questions ( under the cut. )

1. Hello, Merlin fans, by any chance could any of you be so kind as to Britpick 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. Here's what Sunda looks like, btw. 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/

The following might also be an interesting topic for my anthro final paper. (Oh god, I gotta choose a topic and send an outline to my prof before the week is out.)

The Sociological Images blog recently posted about the relativity of feminist liberation that touches on some of the problems with how feminism is discussed and articulated. The post is specifically about women-only taxi services that have begun popping up in Dubai, Mexico, Moscow, and, weirdly, the UK. In Manila, the MRT (our El/subway) has a women-only train car. I heard (...but can't find online confirmation) that it was women passengers themselves who requested this service because they kept getting groped on the train, especially during rush hour.

On the one hand, the pro-womanness of such a service is superficial. It's still demeaning, and it reinforces gender binaries and perpetuates an unjust system. Well, yes, ideally we would be living in a world where you don't need a women-only taxi service, but on the other hand I'm hesitant to sacrifice the security of these women for the sake of ideology. Just like you can't juxtapose one country's democracy wholesale on another country's, you can't juxtapose one country's feminism wholesale either. It has to grow organically from within (and also a little bit without). But to go back to the one hand, is more segregation really the way to promote this?

The problem with these services is that they're end-of-the-pipe solutions. They treat the symptoms of misogyny instead of the causes. They send a message to the men that they can continue to act like misogynists because we can always remove ourselves from the situation and it's our fault if we don't. But on the OTHER hand, sometimes when people talk about bringing some good ol' women's lib from countries where it's more commonplace to countries where it's less commonplace, it reminds me of the "pull yourself up by your bootstraps" mentality of economic conservatism: "You don't need special treatment, you just need to be strong!" That's all well and good, but the bootstraps of women in, say, the USA are already pretty high up compared to the bootstraps of women in the Philippines. And these boots, they smell like White Woman's Burden. Equality among women != sameness among women.

I think women should be wary of insisting on solidarity based on what we are not i.e. men. We're not just not-men. However, sometimes the rhetoric of being not-men overpowers the diversity of women's situations around the world, reducing women in quote unquote less liberated countries to the subaltern of the subaltern. And yeah, that's one of the flaws of the women-only taxi service, in that it is totally based on being not-men. If the way women protect themselves in other countries is disagreeable to us, should we take their protection away because it's bad for their feminist agenda? For WHOSE feminist agenda? Can you use 'unfeminist' means like these taxis to further feminism? Or is that too much like fighting for peace and fucking for virginity?

And, I dunno, what if the woman trying to hail a women-only taxi is escorting her ailing grandfather or something?

The Huffington Post offers a stronger stance on why these women-only taxis are questionable indeed. Interestingly, the HuffPost article was written by a man, whereas the Sociological Images post was written by a woman. I have my reservations about these taxis, but I also have my reservations about dismissing the idea outright. At the very least, it provides a safe space. It reminds me of - and I wish I have the link - how some people were trying to make an organization/support group for Hispanic gays, and a non-Hispanic gay was like, "But what for? We're ALL gay!" But what he was really saying is "We're ALL not straight", which isn't the same thing.

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.

Words cannot express how much I want (and possibly need) The Manga Guide to Statistics. God, if only I had known about it last semester.

Speaking of comics, I went to my first Comic Con last weekend. I'm not usually a comics convention-going person, but my friend was working the audio equipment, so I went. One of Manila's most awesome bands performed, but unfortunately I only arrived as they were finishing their set. (Okay, so this band -- Gorgoro -- are awesome mainly because of one thing: they have a puppet for a frontman. A puppet who is only trying to find his estranged father, yes he has backstory.) There was also a large "Goodbye, Tita Cory" banner that people were writing farewell messages on. And I got some nice loot! ( 'Chiaroscuro: The Private Lives of Leonardo da Vinci', 'Trese', 'Skyworld: Apocrypha', aaand )

And I'm not putting Purchase #4 under the cut, because.

4. My faaaaavorite purchase is a 4-part miniseries called Elmer by Gerry Alanguilan, which is an alternate history in which chickens became sentient. That's right, on February 3, 1979 -- or the Great Awakening -- chickens gained human consciousness. I prefer parts 3 and 4 because the allegory becomes less in-your-face, but the whole thing is quite intruiging. The premise is awesome and each part quite short that I couldn't stop. Gaiman-approved!

SENTIENT CHICKENS. CHICKEN MARRIAGE. EXTREMIST CHICKEN RIGHTS GROUPS. Hiding your chicken friends in the basement because otherwise your neighbors would kill them for being abominations! The protagonist gets beat up at school because he wouldn't cluck like his bullies told him to! BIRD FLU. omg.

The first part is available online here.

I admit, at first I wasn't sure whether Elmer is set in the Philippines (it is) because the characters have what I consider to be an American way of talking. Really, I feel I should've figured it out from the plants and architecture, and I shouldn't have been so unhinged by 'Americanisms', 'cos I mean, look at me. I drop U's, use Z's, and do your mom-with-an-O every night. The English in the Philippines is, so to speak, more American. I'm still deconstructing my own dichotomies.


I've been slow in replying to comments, sorry :(. Obviously the solution is to whore for even more comments. Meme me up, Scotty: Top 5 me!

Hey, remember yonks ago when I said there should be a Merlin crossover community? Someone was listening! BEHOLD: merlin_xovers \o/!