then there are blackbirds

Woke up this morning to news that Agent Orange had, of course, tweeted about the "Chinese Virus." As if the amount of anti-Asian violence I've been hearing about through the few feeds I actually skim wasn't worrying enough. If I had a rocket launcher right now... *sigh*

Some of my DJ friends are doing their thing on livestream in my dance community (ETA1: I heart zouk radio; ETA2: Going Back to Africa 1.0), but I'm curious as to what other stuff everyone's listening to right now. What's on your avoiding-the-plague-lists? :P I already mentioned I Use Tabo (a Swalla parody) elsewhere, because I can't do anything about the toilet paper panic-buying except laugh... and side-eye.

♣ In an ~epic moment~ of impulsive 30th-birthday genius, I decided to attempt the free Windows 10 upgrade. I didn't particularly like the new interface and was distinctly unenthused by the built-in OS activity tracking thing (are we not sufficiently tracked already??), so I decided to revert to Windows 7. HAHAHA. Hello, endless startup loop with total repair failure! Hello, 3 days of aggravation and off-and-on troubleshooting attempts! Hello, unsubtle reminder from the universe that I really need to improve my system backup habits! (I'm super paranoid about schoolwork, current/recent research, and resume-type things, but my equally necessary mood-equilibrating/happy memories stuff? Not so much.) I have still not managed to block out time to actually fix things because I need to finish my endless lit review first. /o\

♣ Officemate didn't believe me when, in our mutual exchange of birthday-almost-twin wishes, I told him I'm 30. Buddy, I realize that you're trying to compliment me but... have you never met any other Asians our age??

♣ Last night must have been the first time I've managed a full REM cycle in a while. Most of the time I don't dream even when I do get decent sleep, but I woke up this morning with very perplexing half-images of a NYC dance friend, what seemed to be a toy koala bear (?!), and pretty but nondescript cityscapes with parks and buildings in my head. What even. 0.o

♣ My family is coming to visit this weekend, and I don't think I have enough time to actually hang out with them because WORK WORK WORK SO MUCH WORK (and also a previously-organized trip to a cabane for dinner). Non-overlapping spring "break" schedules are the devil.

♣ A friend of mine in NYC really wants to become a copyeditor, and is generally seeking information on careers in the publishing industry. Does anyone have ideas or recs for info sources, or maybe some general advice that I could pass on to her?

Yesterday my mom informed me that old (white) men are GROSS. ( cut for those who don't want to deal with yellow fever today )

Clearly if this goes on, I will end up KEEPING A LIST. OF SHUN. To be circulated not only immediately, but for the rest of my life.

In no particular order, a spam of things I have been reading/encountered on the internets:

sam_storyteller: My Home and Native Land, a Ronon story which made me have thinky thoughts on diaspora. And cultural imperialism. (Possibly I will actually write them out sometime when I am not feeling lazy!)

Zinn: A People's History (via I think the_future_modernes?)

sheafrotherdon: Rescue [warning: discussion of depression & mention of sexual assault]

deepad: वैष्णव जन तो...

troisroyaumes's review of Kenji Yoshino's Covering

Kelly Tsai: culture or crazy?

Kelly Tsai on publishing: indelible part 3

allchildren: those anarcho-nerds are mysterious

imaginarybeasts Book #25: Erase/Rewind

APIA love letter that maybe possibly kind of made me cry. A little.

via leupagus, DDK AND GRACE PARK ARE AMAZEBALLS, an epic photographic proof!

donebykorra! &hearts I did not know this rewatch was occurring, though admittedly, I need no excuse to rewatch. Er. >.>

ardhra brings a link to the REAL White Lotus Society! *____*

Some things from halfamoon that I enjoyed:
- The Unpopular Woman Love Post
- such_heights: Tightrope
- innervoice_chan: Picspam: The Women of Mongol
- timeasmymeasure: Miranda Bailey (Grey's Anatomy)
- fly_to_dawn: advance

Remember Surveyfail? WELL. >:E Looks like it's time for Internet vs. Ogas & Gaddam, Round Two, eh?

Chinese Puzzles exhibit at MOCA! Anybody in the city want to come with me? ;)

MOCA's Lunar New Year programs, which are admittedly mostly over. Oops.

things white people do: unacceptable "social"/"flirtation" behaviors
[note for anyone wondering if these examples are hypothetical: THEY ARE NOT]

( cut for head-explosion; possibly triggering for racism & harassment )

In conclusion: HOME TRAINING, GET YOU SOME. >:E

I tried to separate these out but got overwhelmed by categorization; therefore, another haphazard mess! Trigger warnings apply to some of the following. ( cut for A LOT )

ephemere wrote Patalim, which is painful and gorgeous (and also triggering for descriptions of violence), even if I wish it weren't so necessary to say:

I don't want to erase this blood staining my legacy. I don't want to forget, as if it never happened. I don't want to keep coming across, "I didn't know the Philippines was a U.S. colony!" as if I do not bear the damage of American occupation written in my nerves and across my tongue. I don't want to see "deathmarching" used as a verb, the same way I deplore how "imeldific" is used as an adjective -- as if history were an erasable thing and words slipping into common parlance an apology or a healing of all these wounds. I don't want people to go on using this in a misguided attempt to remove the blood in it, because forgetting is what gives the evil behind this more power, by allowing the word to go unchallenged and slip under the veneer of acceptability, lightness, cheapening, banality. I don't want the atrocities of war to become equated with mundane things.

I don't want common use. I don't want a sanitized history. I want my stories, past and present, these stories of my people that we have lost and that we're on the verge of losing, held close to my heart and remembered. I want these stories told over and over again, because the need for them will never lift, not the necessity for memory and not the blatant spitting on the dignity of it. I want to claim them though I may choke on tears and tongue in doing so, though I surrender on so many other things daily and remain one frail and weak person still grappling with the fractures in her present and in her past. Because this, too, is part of who I am. Because every story told and every careless use challenged is defiance, is struggle, is me raising my head and saying, this happened, this matters -- is yet another blow against erasure, silence, the unmarking of graves.

(See also: megwrites with context, manifesta on "mythologizing".)

My two cents, modified from a comment I left elsewhere:

You know the thing about turning history into myth? It makes people believe that these things never happened, these things were never true. Take it one step further: suddenly we become replaceable, interchangeable, lives and memories and stories and histories (hair and skin and blood and bones) fodder for your plagiarism, convenient backdrops for your stories- a book of myths in which our names do not appear**.

Turning us into magical unicorns, orcs, a handy spice rack with which you can ~flavor~ your realities and imaginations, all while erasing ours- this is respect? Please. Look me in the eye. Say it again. I'll warn you right now, though: I am not that inscrutable.

*Li-Young Lee
**Adrienne Rich- yes, I am capable of appropriating right back.

eta: two more links while I'm on the subject of history;
- troisroyaumes on history and memory
- The Spirit of Hiroshima, a personal account of August 6th, 1945 by Matsubara Miyoko. Trigger warning applies.

AAARGH. Arizona is still number one on my list of States to Excise From Maps With a Plastic Knife right now, but Texas is making a good bid from second place. >:(

Happy things:

+ I finally started watching Avatar: The Last Airbender last night! I didn't get past the first two eps since the rest got removed from the site I found them on, boo. On the other hand, crossedwires's A:TLA recast is now that much more awesome.

+ I have also caught up with Uragiri wa boku no namae wo shitteiru! Which, okay, is possibly a bit ridiculous, but I don't care because it is hitting my character/relationship kinks so hard. SO SO HARD. (ruffwriter, let me know when you has time and we will repeat the epic gchat flail!watching of doom, y/y??? ;D)

+ viklikesfic wrote a Zoe Saldana/John Cho commentfic, WITH ZOE ON TOP. UNF. *____*

+ leupagus's Only Good for Legends, which I finally got around to finishing yesterday. *\o/* Spooooock, omg. (And Uhura, and Kirk, and T'Pring, and that George/Winona backstory offshoot, and and and- &hearts) Star Trek fandom, sometimes I love you LOTS. :>

So the last 48 hours have been kind of a one-two punch of fail, or something; I really, really did not need to know that people anywhere were this kind of asshole, much less government officials in my country. Newsflash: nuclear war? ALSO NOT A SUBJECT FOR ~IRONY~!

... yeah, um. It's a good thing I'm going out tonight- I can dance away all this aggression. Here, have a happyspam:
&hearts Via yeloson, Miyoko Ihara's photos of her grandmother and her cat! SO ADORABLE OMG.

&hearts Being by Zanele Muholi, a series of beautiful photographs of black lesbian women in South Africa.

&hearts Nichelle Nichols coauthored a gen OTT short story in Star Trek: The New Voyages 2? I didn't know that! I may have to rethink my decision to not jump into Trek books now, hm.

It's been that kind of week, apparently. Be careful of your blood pressure!

+ Points of frothing rage, which I refuse to link to directly:
- Syfy's epic Gwen-fail as reported by heathershaped, with requisite rebuttal Gwen/Angel picspam started by such_heights!
- two takes on Norman Spinrad's recent SF/F failitude (have we gone for more than a month this past year without somebody running around sans pants?). Basically I am glad there are people who are more articulately angry than I am, omg.

+ stephiepenguin has a great linkspam up: sometimes i love broken things (feminism)

+ Study finds median wealth for single black women at $5. Tell me again about your bootstrap mythology, country of mine!

+ deepad has a really interesting paper on Creative Othering: The Oriental in Ballet.

+ And finally, I feel like I may be linking yeloson's post about Disengagement and "Educate me!" very often in future.