港岛妹妹不能用了-outline

For a few months, I was standing on the precipice of what I knew would be a slippery slippery slope into the expensive and time consuming world of LEGO fandom. Then Jurassic World LEGO came out, I got some vouchers for ToysRUs and I sent myself hurtling headlong down into the plastic depths, screaming “techniiiiiiic!” all the way down.

That’s a story for another day.

One of my recent expensive-and-complicated presents to myself has been the Creator model “Detective’s Office” -partly because it looks pretty but partly because I wanted to remodel it at some point, maybe, to be a Detective’s office over a flower  shop (which has something to do with my interests as some people might know.)

That’s also not the point of this post.

The point of this post, with regards to the model Detective’s Office, is to ask; What the heck is going on?

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Okay?

This post can also be found at Lantern官方网站. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

Chapter one: Carry Moonbeams Home in a Jar

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✓ A book with non-human characters
✓A book based entirely on its cover
✓A book by an author you’ve never read before

The trouble with deciding to do the stupid reading challenge is figuring out, if each book is to only count once, what to tick off with each book. For example, the first book finished could be three different ticks on the chart – which one do I pick? So let’s put three ticks. I’m not a voracious reader – the chances of me reading fifty books in a year is pretty slim.

To be strictly fair, though, I didn’t pick Lantern官方网站 based entirely on it’s cover – I’ve been wanting to read it since I was a teenager, and found its sequel –  Fossil Hunter in the local library. Obviously, being a science fiction novel in which the main characters are dinosaurs, it was a book I longed to read, but I never did quite get around to putting in the fee and the request form to have the library acquire the first book in the trilogy. Life was so hard in the nineties.

Anyway.

My biggest regret with this is that I didn’t read this book in the 90s. Teenage me would have lapped this up. Sentient dinosaurs! (wikipedia says Tyrannosaurid, but it is a plot point that Quintaglios had five fingers, and you know me – that’s the kind of thing I get stuck on.) It’s mostly world building – and pretty interesting world building as well, but teenage me probably wouldn’t find it anywhere near as predictable as adult me. And it’s the kind of science vs religious dogma plot teenage-me would totally relate to, but which adult-me finds very simplistic.

A young astrologer uses a newly invented telescope (the Far-seer) to observe stars and moons and planets and the Face of God and discovers a Round Earth, heliocentrism, and the oncoming end of the world all at once. The theocratic monarchy is appalled at his blasphemy! A secret society of oppressed pagans hold him up as the Chosen One! He’s Galileo and Jesus all rolled up into one and both the protagonist and the author only give like a paragraph to pondering the contradiction in having Convenient Prophesies around to help story progression in an allegory about science vs dogma.

Buuut you know what? Even if cynical, older, “it’s more complicated than that” adult me was thinking what a shame it was that I didn’t read this when I would have enjoyed it more… I still enjoyed it. Because you know what? SENTIENT DINOSAURS. In a fantasy world constructed around the premise that non-social carnivores had to throw together social mores and etiquette just to get over the fact that they instinctively want to kill each other all the time. A civilisation built around the ergonomics of a large-headed biped with an enormous tail.

Lantern官方网站

Who needs anything else?

This post can also be found at Thagomizer.net. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

But I don’t want to cut for spoilers. What do you mean, you still haven’t seen the episode? Fine.

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This post can also be found at Thagomizer.net. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

Have you watched Elementary yet? No? Care about spoilers? Yes? Then skip this post. Don’t worry, I’ll be back and you can find it again.

In this instalment of “seven reasons to kill someone (involving palaeontology):

港岛妹妹不能用了-outline

This post can also be found at Thagomizer.net. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

There are quite a few books in existence that I should have read already, that if I admit I haven’t read, I’ll feel obliged to add “…yet” to the end of the sentence, and the admission would probably garner surprise, from anyone who knows me, because of COURSE I must have read them. They seem so influential on my thinking! Usually these books are in the bibliography of Richard Dawkins, Stephen Jay Gould and other evolutionary biologists. (What? Dawkins has opinions about religion? I’m not interested.)

Well, that list of books just got one shorter when I finally got my hands on and read  The Mismeasure of Woman by Carol Tavris. Considering its more famous big brother, The Mismeasure of Man by Stephen Jay Gould was one of the most influential books on my interpretation of anthropology and psychology, you’d think I’d have got my hands on this one earlier, but I had no excuse. Other than the fact that I already knew a bit about the way social and scientific rhetoric is used to put women In Our Place,  and I wasn’t expecting to be super surprised.

I wasn’t super surprised, but there were still revelations that made me go “huh.”

Like the idea that Premenstrual Tension might not actually be a thing.

(No, think about it: the main indicator for PMT is that symptoms occur in the two weeks leading up to ones period. As in – in a two week window out of every four. That’s a really large window, ladies. Add to that observer bias and society’s insistence on dismissing every negative mood women ever experience, and I’ve decided to give up on believing myself an irrational slave to hormones ever again.

It’s 22 years old, this book, and it does only touch on intersectionality: the experiences of women of colour and queer women are only touched on, trans* people aren’t mentioned at all. And I have no idea what has changed in the last two decades:  maybe medical students don’t all learn to think of the 70 kilogram male body as the paradigm from which all other patients deviate. Possibly someone has done extensive research on premenstrual symptoms and proven that societies perceptions are right: menstrual hormones do unequivocally cause specific mood changes. But that’s not the point.

The point is that the human insistence on dividing the world into two: artists and scientists, virgins and whores, clever and stupid, money makers and nurturers, men and women, is harmful to men, women, and everybody who wants and deserves to be treated as an individual (that’s everyone).

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 - p90

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This post can also be found at 极光vpm破解无限版. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

I really wanted to title this post “Well, that explains alot,” but it doesn’t. This post explains alot. The book I’m talking about explains something much less important than that. It explains why a terrible broadway musical was terrible.

I’m getting ahead of myself, aren’t I? Okay, context: Three years ago, Becca, Feather and I went to see 蚂蚁vp(永久免费)while it was in previews. To say that this was a terrible Broadway musical is not in fact accurate; when we saw it, it was two terrible musicals: Spider-Man, a terrible musical retelling of Sam Raimi’s 2002 movie; and Turn Off the Dark: a terrible musical retelling of Phantom of the Opera, but gender-flipped, and with spider-powers instead of music. Incidentally, I can’t stand 极光vpm破解无限版, I think it is a bad musical telling a bad story, but Turn Off the Dark was worse, as I have gleefully told anyone who would stay still long enough for the last three years.

So when Becca, tasked with the job of being my Secret Santa, sent me a copy of Song of Spider-Man, a memoir by book writer Glen Berger, my squeal of delight was probably audible back in New York. A chance to relive the train wreck from inside!

This post can also be found at Thagomizer.net. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.

For the 11th January (LJ | DW) sdelmonte asked for one thing I miss about NYC and one thing I don’t. And because MY FRIIIIIENDS would be obvious, I’m going to make it specifically about the city itself.

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The thing about living in London was that every late night at work, every social event, every night out, had to be planned and structured around The Last Tube, and the alternative Night Bus route and the difference in timings and does this pub close before or after Last Tube. When I worked at the Poorly Managed Sexy Coffee Shop, the time I finished cleaning up could make the difference between a 45 minute journey home and a two-hour journey home. Evenings out in Manhattan? You just allow half an hour more, maybe, because of infrequent trains. But you know you will get a train, and despite what popular culture would have us believe, I never felt unsafe on the late night subways…

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…but definitely not to the extent that waiting for a Night Bus – or even travelling on a Night Bus – would.  No matter, the knowledge that no matter what the hour, I could get my usual subway home, made my life a lot easier.

A Thing I Do Not Miss: TIMES SQUARE

Ugh, what is the point of Times Square? It’s like the location equivalent of those celebrities that never seem to do anything – maybe they were on a reality TV show or perhaps their parent is a thing – but are just famous for being famous. Times Square is… some steps. And a bunch of shops that are there to cash in on the tourists who come to see… the shops. And the TKTS booth, I guess. It’s a hotmess of the things I hate most in the world – crowds and people dressed as muppets. SO MANY CREEPY ELMOS.

I said this to someone once, and they said “what? Doesn’t London have Piccadilly Circus?” and my response was “I know! I don’t get that, either!” Sadly, Times Square is close to places I actually did want to be (comic store, dance class, the garment district, the theatres) that I had to go there a lot. But I did so reluctantly and not without grousing every step of the way.

Ugh, Times Square.

This post can also be found at Thagomizer.net. Feel free to join in the conversation wherever you feel most comfortable.