Clint's got a secret love, and it's spelled b-a-n-j-o.

MY NEW CRACKPOT THEORY: Canton Everett Delaware III’s son is Agent Phil Coulson of SHIELD. Canton’s the bio-dad; his partner’s name is Coulson. So Phil ended up with one dad’s hairline (and dress sense…) and the other dad’s surname. The reason why Agent Phil Coulson is so good at dealing with weird shit is that he fucking grew up with it. Because don’t tell me that Canton wasn’t recruited by SHIELD as soon as he got fired from the FBI. He helped a bunch of time-travelers deal with an alien invasion, stood up to the President of the United States, and did it all without batting an eyelid. CLEARLY PHIL COULSON’S PERPETUAL, FAINTLY-SMILING CALM IS A GENETIC TRAIT.

Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
-September 1, 1939 by W. H. Auden

1. Is posting something as viewable only to followers done at the journal level (so it's all or nothing) or at the tweet level (so some could be public and some just-my-friends)?


2. The e-mails when someone is following you: 1) can you-the-recipient (you are being followed) turn them off? 2) Can you-the-sender (you are following someone) turn them off?


3. Do direct messages show up in the same stream as you might see when reading the people you follow? Or do they show up elsewhere? Or is this entirely dependent on how you are interacting with twitter and the client you are using?


4. Are locked tweets shown visibly different so that you can tell at a glance that they are locked? (Basically, do I need to do special formatting?) Is this all client dependent?


5. What are the restrictions on direct messaging people? Can you block someone by blocking them only from that, or do you need to block them by unfollowing/something else? Is there an ignore button? If someone is being ignored or their DM not going through, 1) do they know (are they being told that they're being ignored), or 2) is it optional for them to know?


6. If someone's tweets are locked to just their followers, and they @ your name, do you get pinged?


7. Can you ignore someone so that if they @ you, you don't see it?


8. Is your online status ever visible to anyone? Online now/last online one day ago/etc


9. Is your username included in the 140 character limit of tweets you can make? So if your username is 5 characters, you can actually only send 135 characters?


10. Anything else I should know? Are there any assumptions I have made above that I really should not have been making? Have I failed twitter forever (again)?

not_primetime

Vorkosigan Vashnoi isn't real to the children.

If voting is a right, they can make you stop doing it because they can take it away: America is all about majorities getting to decide if minorities are people too. We do it all the time. It's like our national sport. We are awesome at it.

If it's a responsibility, it's something you're supposed to do, the onus is on you to do it and so get the fuck out of my way, it's my fucking responsibility. Harder to shift the conversation to taking away people's responsibilities.

And, as slacktivist pointed out, if you have a responsibility to do it, that means you have to have a right to do it. He was talking about a republican candidate saying people had a responsibility to get jobs meaning that people have a right to be employed, which would completely change the "you're a lazy ass fucker for not having a job in this economy" conversation. In this case, if I have a responsibility to vote, that means I must have the right to do so.

I'm a Jewish feminist lesbian progressive liberal. The republican party would like it very much if I never voted again. Personally, I consider it a civic responsibility, but I completely understand why people don't vote: America makes it fucking hard. We are champions at failing at democracy.


Yep. And a lifelong slaveowner wrote "all men are created equal blah blah blah unalienable right blah blah blah liberty". That's about all you will ever need to know about America in a nutshell.

Also I forgot to mention: the big contest is the presidential election every four years. But because of the fucked up way it's set up, it manages to disenfranchise nearly everyone in some way. For the first part, there are the primaries, which go state by state. It's not all states all at once, which would be a national primary system. I want one of those. I will never get one of those. And I want a pony, too.

As the primaries happen, candidates start to drop out and there's much bemoaning when it gets much beyond five or six primaries before "the candidate" for each party is effectively decided on. Because letting it get beyond Super Tuesday (a day when there are primaries for multiple states) would be terrible! Apparently.

So by the time it gets to states like mine, in the primary system, I might be left with one real candidate. I do not get to help winnow the field. My vote doesn't make a difference in selecting the nominee.

Oh, and there's more. Because some primaries are closed, which means if you are not registered in that party, you can't vote in it. So if I'm a registered independent, I can't vote to say who the republican or democratic candidate will be. And since my state has a late primary, my vote's basically meaningless as it stands.

Then we get the electoral college. The electoral college means you do not have the right to vote for president. This is true: Americans do not vote for president.

Americans actually vote for these people known as electors. Electors are the people who vote for president. There's a thing called a faithless elector, which is an elector who votes for someone other than the person they are supposed to. It very very very very very rarely happens. But there's nothing to really stop it from happening. So if I was an elector, I could vote for mickey mouse. They might be able to punish me after it, depending, but that won't change the vote. The elector's votes are not just symbolic. They are actual votes. They are actually voting for president.

So America has a system for deciding which states get how many electors and it shifts around after the census. We count people every 10 years and shift the House of Representatives accordingly, which in turn shifts the number of electors.

So candidates do not have to win the majority of the votes in the country to become president. Getting the majority of the votes in the country cast in their favor is not their strategy. It will not automatically make them win.

Candidates have to win a majority of electoral votes, so they have strategies to do it. And because nearly all states award their electoral votes on a winner take all basis, if my state will probably go one way, my vote for the other way does not count at all. No one is counting people-votes. They are counting electoral votes. If my people-vote cannot shift the electoral vote, my vote is basically wasted.

Because of this, there are things called swing states, which are states who might give their electoral votes one way or the other (third parties are a dream or a joke depending on which one you're talking about and where you're standing; sometimes they can be both). So because I am in a swing state, my vote actually matters, because it could change who my state gives its electoral votes to.

But if I go live in a state that's a foregone conclusion, my vote does not matter anymore. There is no incentive for me to vote for president and there is no actual incentive for "get out the vote" efforts. If a candidate wins by 1000 or 5000 or 5000000 it does not actually matter. So if 3 people vote, that's the same as if 3 million people voted. What matters is winning the state.

So maybe you live in an early primary state, so your vote counts in the primary, but your state only has 3 electoral votes, so you are sort of an afterthought in the general election. Or maybe you are like me where your primary vote is useless because you do not get to pick the inner-party candidate you like, but your general election vote matters.

Or maybe you are like any of the millions of people who are not in the early primary states or a swing state and whose vote is a civic responsibility but in actuality is worth a bucket of spit on a cold day. You do not in any way shape or form get to choose the president. Sucks to be you.

You should still go and vote, because there are other elections on your ballot that you could influence. But in terms of the president election, you are shit out of luck.

America believes strongly in disincentivizing voting and disenfranchising people. Our institutions are crafted accordingly.



Okay I just checked and a couple states will say they will void your fucking vote after the fact if you are a naughty elector. That ain't exactly fixing it, though.

Also Wikipedia keeps repeating that the supreme court has never decided on if that's actually okay to do, so for all we know, it's unconstitutional for states to say: here, we give you the right to vote for president... But only the way we want and we will fucking mark you as absent if you don't obey.

Although the Supreme Court says corporations are people so who fucking knows.

[MY STORY USES SHIFTING POV TO UNDERLINE THE ROMANTIC THEMES (fanfiction flamingo) HER STORY HEADHOPS LIKE A BETALESS AMATEUR]

1. 1713: Barrayar Expects That Every Fan Will Do Their Duty: Excerpts From A Fandom [Vorkosigan, the fandom AU of doom]


2. 1584: Lord Piotr. [Vorkosigan, the bare Petya sketch framework]


3. 1544: An Incomplete History Of History, As Written For Yuletide, In Five Acts And An Epilogue. [A Complete History of the Soviet Union as Told by a Humble Worker Arranged to the Melody of Tetris, aka the tetris fic]


4. 1423: The Hospital Visit. [Vorkosigan, Petya and Ivan, lots of privilege and backstory.]


5. 1401: Earth Duty. [Vorkosigan, Petya and Guy succeed in having sex despite not really managing to communicate. Or, you know, Prufrock plus sex.] [I am not letting myself sum up the series as: Prufrock, but Guy stopped him before the end. "Yes, it would have been worth it; learn to disturb the universe and come to bed."]


6. 1346: Petya Vorkosigan's Shameless And Torrid Love Affair (And How It Fails To Topple The Imperium). [Vorkosigan, Petya and Illyan used to have sex, but now they don't, despite being able to communicate. Also not Prince Hamlet Prufrock.]


7. 1330: Triple Drabble: A Study In Immortality. [Sherlock Holmes/Highlander where Holmes and Watson are Immortals.]


8. 1324: The Vorkosigan Spare. [Vorkosigan, Petya. I still blame this being so high on the first fic in a series effect. And one day I should get around to removing the author's note that is, in hindsight, rather inaccurate.]


9. 1310: And All Shall Be Well. [Doctor Who, trans!Rory/Amy. Because all shall be well, goddammit. All shall be well.]


10. 1257: Retreats. [Vorkosigan, Petya and Miles. And I still don't know how to give it a short pithy summary. Um. Shoved into Memory, happy birthday, Miles?]

Speaking of military indoctrination and mindset (and I have a huge post I could make about Me and the Military, but, well, maybe another day), this reminds me of the time I tried to get through Tom Ricks's well-regarded book about Marine Corps training: Making The Corps. It went really far into training, talking about language shifts and biases (civilian things were nasty, etc), and there was a mention about one of the people going through, about how the training failed him because he wasn't buying into the whole mindset.

To be honest, I didn't read it all the way through, I did a fair share of skipping around. It was kind of painful.

What interests me in particular about this is what Nate Fick wrote about in his book. He had this whole romanticised idea about being a warrior, etc (and Tom Ricks was one of the reasons he joined in the first place), and that idea got ripped to shreds by his actual experiences.

I'm trying to think about what else I've read from Iraq and Afghanistan veterans that discuss this. Thinking about Andrew Exum's book, mostly I remember the civilian vs. military things and about ROTC at an Ivy and where he was during September 11th and his first bits in Afghanistan (while ROTC, he did reporting for a military newspaper, I think, and referred to it as propaganda). And Craig Mullaney's, a lot about academics (went from West Point to Oxford) and courting his wife, but I know he did go a lot into the training. I can't remember if I read Paul Rieckoff's book, but if I did, I can't remember anything about it. I know Fick discussed SERE and the severe mindfuckery there, I don't remember if anyone else talked about anything like that.

It's late here, mind going boom. I am on the lookout, though, for recs of books not by officers.

Oh, and yeah, on SERE. This didn't come to mind originally because I haven't actually finished it yet (I know being in fandom, I was supposed to go from Generation Kill to Nate Fick, and not from foreign policy blogs/CNAS to Nate Fick to his book to "hey, he's talking about that Generation Kill thing, yeah?" to reading RPS about him), but here's a mention from the Generation Kill book. Also because it's written by a reporter, and it's not a first-person account/memoir, it's an anecdote.

When Gunny Wynn went through SERE, his "captors," playing on his Texas accent, forced him to wear a Ku Klux Klan hood for several days and pull one of his fellow "inmate" Marines, an African American, around on a leash, treating him as a slave. "They'll think of anything to fuck you up in the head," Gunny Wynn says.

It's a good day for a Love meme!

petra

tinypinkmouse

tinypinkmouse

Gregor doesn't choose anything older than he is for his private collection.

Kissing the man and kissing the Emperor.

Drabble prompt from ashinae: "Just help. me. down."

Star Wars.

Drabble prompt from pervybunny: Spring cleaning

tinypinkmouse

1. Triple Drabble: A Study In Immortality (the Highlander/Holmes/Sherlock BBC thing that has four times more hits than words),


2. In The Aftermath (In The Spaces In Between) (Highlander, the fic I wrote about Methos winning the game without actually writing about Methos winning the game),


3. Drabble: Lost In Paperwork (Highlander, Joe Dawson, Joe As Veteran),


4. Drabble: Seek For The Sword That Was Broken (LOTR, Boromir, journey),


5. Drabble: It's Not Like We'll Be Parted; It's Not Like We'll Never Know Love (LOTR, Aragorn/Boromir!),


6. Double Drabble: Safe Haven (LOTR, one of the many dark AUs),


7. Dog of War (Highlander, Connor, the one where the plot is the retcon of Connor's victory),


8. Drabble: Sense Offense (Equilibrium, a movie that is worth watching for stuff like the fight scenes and Christian Bale and Sean Bean and Taye Diggs and the gun kata and Yeats and stuff),


9. Children's Children (Equilibrium, have I mentioned recently how much I love Yeats?),


10. ...and Romance In The 21st Century (Highlander, Methos/Joe, domesticity during the gathering, and like Joe always does, he decides to surprise me. I did not know they were married when I started writing it.)

• Oh, IBS. Why do you do this to me? *bangs head against things and weeps*



• Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell is going much faster! It really dragged for about the first two hundred pages, but then it picked up and I'm around page 600ish. I am not letting myself go hunting for fic before I finish canon. I peaked at the Wiki article on it, which made me feel a little better about my annoyances with the treatment of some of the women, because apparently that's part of the point of the thing, so I guess it being intentional and to make a point is much better than it being unintentional. Apparently the end of the book is also making points about the tyranny and oppressive silencing power of the rich white men, etc, and well, that makes a point right there in its behalf, since the character I really want to read a 1,000 page book about? Is the Raven King.
  
  Point made, author. Point made.
  
  (Yes, this was obviously inevitable. A mysterious backstory character! Who is fascinating and controversial and has power and misuses it and is a complete and total bastard and a terrible human being! File yet another one under: I am predictable, she said predictably.)
  
  And once I finish this, I'll read the companion/sequel/shared universe/other(?) that I got out of the library at the same time, which is apparently all about the women characters, and is 230 pages. Compared to 1,000 pages about two men. Which makes a completely different point. But anyway.



• On the knitting front, I have noticed that this winter is not cold enough to need another balaclava and have cast on for a baby blanket instead. I have not learned my lesson about knitting a baby blanket for someone who has not told me that they would like to receive a baby blanket, but, honestly, I figure, what the fuck, if they don't want this one, if I finish it and I like it, I can wrap it up in ribbon and put it away until I can find another victim. And even if I don't like it, I am trying it in combined knitting, so it's a chance to practice that purling, and also picking up for a border, depending on how it turns out.



• In awesome things: tinypinkmouse podficced For Us, The Living [Highlander, Methos/Kronos dagger symbolism], Triple Drabble: Letters From The Front (Johnny's Gone For Soldier; The War Is Long Over) [Torchwood, Jack Harkness, with a title that only I could love, and I do], and Tiger and Flame [The Prophecy, Thomas/Lucifer, a 2003 contrelamontre 30-minute fic]. ♥ ♥ ♥



• re: Johnny's Gone For Soldier: Mors Syphilitica version. Haunting and creepy. ♥ That was the version for the drabble.



• Fic rec! I know I've recced this series before to people. There's a new fic in the Young, Hot and Royal series (Royalty RPF). I think the first thing I need to say about this series is: I have no idea who these people are. If you perhaps know anything about European royalty, you will probably get a lot more out of this than I do. I think the only characters in this series I could pick out of a lineup are (some of) the British ones. And yet this is no barrier whatsoever to enjoying it!
  
  Yes, you say Belgium, I say KVDP, and you say Luxembourg and I say Fleur Maxwell, and you say Sweden and I say the Helgessons, and you say Monaco and I say that's where French skaters go when they country-hop, but did you perhaps know that they have royalty and not just Obscure European Skaters? It's true! Thanks to this series, I have looked up a few of these people on Wikipedia and now know things like, um, Belgium still has royalty. Which I did not know. Perhaps I can blame this on being American? The only reason I can identify flags is because of the Olympics.
  
  At this point, in my defense, I want to mention that I did have AP European History in high school. We spend the entire time talking about the French Revolution. I got a 3 on the test, not good; I was falling asleep in the middle of it, but I don't think I would have done better even if I weren't (that month, oh my god, that month. High school is the hardest thing I have ever done in my life, it's all been downhill from there. That month, wtf). Although what my excuse since high school is, I'm not sure.
  
  So, in short: read fic! You will learn about things you should have already learned about a long time ago! And it is all wrapped up in very enjoyable packages with lovely wrapping and ribbons!



• (A note about that series: it may be easier to just read it off of the Royalty RPF fandom tag because there are some fics that are not listed in the series page, and it does assume knowledge of what has happened before)



• Speaking of figure skating, junior worlds is next week, and Denis Ten is on the roster to compete. For fuck's sake. Yes, we really really really need a rule about seniors competing in junior events. Especially a rule that says IF YOU HAVE GONE TO THE OLYMPICS, YOU ARE NOT A JUNIOR. We can call it the Elene Gedevanishvili rule, Denis Ten sub-clause. Or the USFSA corollary: IT'S JUNIOR WORLDS, NOT SENIOR B WORLDS. SEND SOME JUNIORS. Which they are doing this year, yay. Although I don't think Gao should go, but I understand why she is. Still, Christina Gao: not a junior. But I guess there are two different reasons to send: prep for worlds and to get spots for next year. As far as preperation goes, meh, I don't thik it really helps to have to do a junior program when you've been training and competing a senior program all year, and will compete a senior program at worlds, but I've never really looked into if it actually helps. (Anecdotally, I don't think so). And as for spots? It's not like it's a surprise or a secret that good juniors tend to beat middle of the pack seniors in a junior field. When the seniors win, that's the exeption, not the rule. So Adam Rippon coming back to win? Exception. Slumming seniors who are there because it's Senior B Worlds do not tend to win. The exception to this, yes, being the junior ladies who are too young to go to Worlds so are back in juniors after spending the fall on the GP, but that's a completely different problem, and we really need consistent age rules for when you are a senior. Since supposedly the GP isn't a developmental, says the ISU, why exactly is the lowest age 14, when you have to be 15 for Worlds? ...I really do need a macro for these rants. It would save time.



• Actually, I was reading a NYTimes article about an Olympic-calibre swimmer who was competing in high school events for her school and in the article someone mentioned to her that the people complaining that she was sandbagging were just jealous. I thought it was a great article, but at that point, it was all talk back to the screen moments. Because, no. If you are that far above the field, it's not "just jealousy". This is a valid criticism. You actually are taking medals away from other people. If you are basically lapping the field, you do not belong there. You show up, you win. What exactly have you accomplished? What exactly have you proven? That an Olympic athlete can beat a high school one? We knew that. On paper, yes, you may belong there, if it's a competition to see who the best high school athletes are. But in reality, you are a high school athlete, but you are also likely to make the Olympic team. You're a high school athlete in that you are an athlete who is in high school. But you are an athlete who is in high school who is competing at the "best in the world" level, not at the "best in an age group" level. It really is not actually fair to the other competitors, who would expect to be competing against others at their level, and not someone who is much beyond it, but still there because she can be. If you fit in at an age level category and a skill level category, and the assumption is that the age level is below the skill level, it's rather disingenuous to say: yes, my skill level is X, but my age is Y, so even though the assumption is that age Y is at skill level Y, I'm going to compete anyway, because I fall under the category under the letter, if not the spirit.



• Anyway, bedtime.



• (This summer! The summer Olympics! The Olympics is the prize in the middle of the road. POLITICS POLITICS POLITICS oooh oooooooooooh Olympics! and two weeks pass and then it's over POLITICS POLITICS POLITICS AND YET MORE MUDSLINGING. And then it's November. And 2012 is looking to be a repeat of 2004: I am going to have to seriously weed out blogs I follow and step back once it's all over. I am aware that I am too invested right now, I should not be adding to the reading list, but-- but-- but!!! Yes, I am going to burn out and it will be a very big boom. Lemme just say, it's *really* hard to take a step back when everyone keeps talking about goddamn Santorum. We threw him out, sure, but then the fucking cat came back. I am so fucking sorry about Rick Santorum, America. I swear, we did try to destroy his political career, what with the way we epicly kicked him out of the Senate. But I guess there really are second acts in American politics. FFS.)



• Okay, actually bedtime.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Steve and Tony accidentally start a national do-gooders association and fall in love.

And she must know a woman alone has no business raising a son.

The Vista
by C. Dale Young

Not tenderness in the eye but the brute need
to see accurately: over the ridge on a trail
deep in Tennessee, the great poet looked out and saw
the vista that confederate soldiers saw
as they rode over the edge rather than surrender.

I saw only the edge of the cliff side itself and then
estimated the distance down to the bottom
of the dirty ravine. This is what someone with wings
does when he knows he cannot fly: he measures
distance. I have spent far too much time

examining my wings in the bathroom mirror
after the shower's steam has slowly cleared
from the medicine cabinet's toothpaste-spattered glass:
grey, each feather just slightly bigger than a hawk's.
The great poet said one might find a vista like this,

perhaps, once in a lifetime, but I didn't understand
what he meant by this then. The wings, tucked
beneath a t-shirt, beneath my long-sleeve oxford,
the wings folded in along my spine, were irritated
by that humid air, itchy from the collected sweat from the hike.

I wasn't paying attention, which is a sin I have since learned.
At 14, after the wings first erupted from my back,
I went up to the roof and tried to fly. Some lessons
can only be learned after earnest but beautiful failures.
My individual feathers are just slightly bigger than a hawk's

feathers. But my wingspan is just about 8 feet. I'm a man,
and like men I measure everything. But vistas
make me nervous. And the great poet made me nervous.
And I knew then what I still know now, that I
was only seconds away from another beautiful failure.

The first step is going to be kidnapping Miles.

I'm learning to say thank you.
And I'm learning to say please.
And I'm learning to use Kleenex,
Not my sweater, when I sneeze.
And I'm learning not to dribble.
And I'm learning not to slurp.
And I'm learning (though it sometimes really hurts me)
Not to burp.
And I'm learning to chew softer
When I eat corn on the cob.
And I'm learning that it's much
Much easier to be a slob.