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Hello, new and old readers of my journal alike! This post should cover some useful things.

About me

I'm a wombat girl. (And I'm okay.)

Unsolicited advice is quite triggery for me. Please try to avoid it.

I may have Asperger's Syndrome. I most certainly find subtext and unspoken expectations Difficult. If you want something specific from me ("please reply to my PM/comment or I will feel Sad and Unloved", "please never mention this to another soul", or more likely something I have never thought of) please say so in words or I may not understand.

I am bisexual. (Or something. My orientation seems to vary wildly from year to year, and "bisexual" seems to cover a multitude of sins.)

I am somewhat genderqueer. I'm female assigned-at-birth, but tend to dress/present quite masculine, especially now I've cut off all my hair. (I also have facial hair due to a hormone imbalance.) I'm sort of in the process of exploring my gender identity, so I'm not really up for saying much more about it at this point. Pronoun-wise, I prefer "she" or "they".

I am fannish. Now that I'm writing an original novel, I'm mostly not writing fanfic at the moment, and I definitely consume more than I produce! I tend to post about fannish stuff quite rarely on this journal, but that's always subject to change. In case you're interested, here's a list of my fandoms.

If you want to find me on other services, a fair few are listed on my profile. If you want to know if I'm on a service not mentioned there, ask me via PM.

If you need offline contact details or my direct email, please drop me a PM.

About this journal

I give access to a few trusted friends, and very rarely make access-locked posts - probably 90% of the content on this journal is public. I'm not perturbed by a lack of "balance" in access/subscription circles, so feel free to subscribe, unsubscribe, or grant and revoke access, at will.

If you should feel the need to give me things, or do nice things for me, my permanent wishlist is located here.

If you know my real last name, please try not to connect it with this identity; I try quite hard to keep my wallet name separate from my online/fannish names. You're welcome to address me as "Lucy" anywhere, though, I don't keep that part secret!

More seriously: this whole journal should really carry a trigger warning for discussion of depression; I'm a lifelong sufferer and it comes up now and then.

And on a more general note, if you have particular triggers that I should know about, do let me know. Commenting on this post is a good way to tell me (you could also PM if you feel more comfortable). Comments are screened in case you don't want to share your triggers with The Whole World. (Hat tip to

dingsi for the idea.)

Final note

I will occasionally revise and update this post as I think of more things, but that is it for now!

“Gene Roddenberry was really a visionary in the 60s, and used his show as a way to reflect back at society so many topics that really people weren't able to talk about then. The first interracial kiss was on Star Trek, and you have this crew that represents such an amalgam of people coming together for the betterment of humanity. I think he was at heart really an optimist who had true faith in what we're capable of for the good, and it's nice to be a part of something like that.” Zachary Quinto, The Jonathan Ross Show, 4th May 2013

“Star Trek is nearly 50 years old now and it’s been around for so long because I think it offers hope for us as a species. The thing people have always been attracted to (with Star Trek) is the idea that we might live beyond this age of conflict and uncertainty. And it’s not only that, but it’s also the ability to work together and live in a world where everyone is accepted no matter who you are.

The original series with Gene Roddenberry was incredibly progressive. It started barely 20 years after the end of World War II, with a Japanese officer aboard the Enterprise, a black woman in charge of an entire division, and a Russian on board—albeit in subordinate roles, but it was an incredibly progressive move. It offered this utopian idea of cooperation and that’s always going to be something to strive toward until we actually achieve it. In that respect, Star Trek will never go out of fashion.” Simon Pegg

“When I try to explain slash to non-fans, I often reference that moment in Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan where Spock is dying and Kirk stands there, a wall of glass separating the two longtime buddies. Both of them are reaching out towards each other, their hands pressed hard against the glass, trying to establish physical contact. They both have so much they want to say and so little time to say it. Spock calls Kirk his friend, the fullest expression of their feelings anywhere in the series. Almost everyone who watches that scene feels the passion the two men share, the hunger for something more than what they are allowed. And, I tell my nonfan listeners, slash is what happens when you take away the glass. The glass, for me, is often more social than physical; the glass represents those aspects of traditional masculinity which prevent emotional expressiveness or physical intimacy between men, which block the possibility of true male friendship. Slash is what happens when you take away those barriers and imagine what a new kind of male friendship might look like. One of the most exciting things about slash is that it teaches us how to recognize the signs of emotional caring beneath all the masks by which traditional male culture seeks to repress or hide those feelings.” — Henry Jenkins, “Confessions of a Male Slash Fan,” SBF 1, May 1993

Support request in the feeds category?

Testing.

Yeah, that doesn't work.

Edit again. Works now! I was making a weird assumption which was, it turned out, incorrect.

signalboost is a new community for spreading the word about important things. Hat passes, petitions - you name it.

From the community profile:

Family means nobody gets left behind.

A lot of the time, I feel like Dreamwidth's chosen family: we're deliberately community-building. And, very often, we reach out to each other and ask for help, relying on webs of friends and friends-of-friends.

Here's a space you can reach out to anyone who's interested, be it petitions or hat-passing. Here's a space you can find out about ways to help outside your own network of word-of-mouth. Have at it. ♥

Join us!

Seeing if I can post by email and attach an image.

Hi, all!

So right now things are quite tough in places, but one awesome thing is happening next month. Dreamwidth is sending me to YAPC::NA, and thanks to their generosity, everything is sorted - except the money to feed myself when I'm there.

Thanks to the government turning me down for benefits I'm entitled to, and to my not being well enough to work, I've currently got no income and no way of putting that money together on my own. So I'm asking for help.

The campaign is here.

I'm flying out on the 1st of June, which means I need the money to be in Paypal at least a week before that so I can transfer it to my bank account and use it. Apparently it will take Indiegogo two weeks or so to get the money to Paypal, so what that ends up with is me having seven days to raise this money.

It seems like a lot of money to raise in a very short amount of time.

There are perks - writing ones and coding ones - and you know I will give you my eternal gratitude for helping me to make this happen.

I'd love if you could donate something - every penny counts. And if you can't do that, I'd love if you could boost the signal.

Thanks, loves!

It's funny. I had a wonderful talk with my mum over dinner tonight, and got home feeling really positive and hopeful about things for the first time in ages, and now I'm heading back into a slump again.

( Writing about these things seems to help. )

So apparently took me 2.5 years to tell my therapist (who I have seen weekly for most of our time together, and twice weekly since February) that I'm bi.

This seems ironic, given that I tweeted last night that some of the effects of the closet apply to me even though I'm not in the closet.

I've since identified that the chief reason that the effects of the closet seem to apply to me so closely is that I share something profound with people who have stayed in the closet for some portion of their adolescence and adulthood, and that's a difficulty with accepting myself as I am. Obviously in the case of people who are closeted, that's at least in part because of the fear or suspicion, or certainty in some cases, that the people around them won't accept them the way they are. (That has some resonance with me, too, though more about the whole potentially-unacceptable me-ness of me rather than specifically my orientation.)

(Wow. Run-on sentences ahoy.)

Just another interesting feature of my continued avid reading of John Corvino. (I've stopped for a while now, 'cause the arguments in favour of same-sex marriage are de facto in favour of marriage, and that's usually fine with me, up until I get oversaturated and reminded how lonely and unlovable I am. So I remain in favour of same-sex marriage, but I also reached my saturation point and am now taking a break for the purposes of not being swallowed up in a well of self-loathing.)

...my brain is such fun sometimes.

What do I mean by "my fandoms"?
This isn't just a list of "stuff I love", though obviously there's major overlap there. But neither is it a list of stuff for which I have been actively involved in fandom already, or have already written fiction for. I suppose what this boils down to is a list of fandoms I'm prepared to write in, which meet the following three criteria:
a) I love the canon.
b) I have the enthusiasm to want to write fic (this isn't necessarily the same thing as just loving the thing; I love Donnie Darko, for example, but wouldn't want to write fic in that universe).
c) I'm familiar enough with the canon to feel somewhat confident writing fic.

This is probably more of an exact definition than most fandom-savvy readers would ever need, but um... I like writing definitions? I don't know. It's kind of useful to me to have some criteria by which I decide what goes on this list.

Also, I haven't bothered to italicise the names of TV shows/movies/books, because I am lazy and ALL THE HTML TAGS.

( The fandoms )

Why can I not stop CRUSHING ON THIS GUY FOREVER. (Link goes to the website of John Corvino, an American philosophy professor and gay rights advocate.)

Thinky thoughts below...

( This got very long. )

My top 10 under the cut:

( Stories )

The DWP officially considers me "fit to return to work", which means my benefit stops today.

There's an appeals process but I don't have the spoons to investigate it right now.

Quietly contemplating suicide.

(I'm trying to figure out what kind of music my characters liked as kids.)

I just came across the video for Show Me The Meaning of Being Lonely and it may have slightly reactivated my popslash squee.

Briiiiiiian! :D

You know what, I don't update this journal as much as I'd like, and I don't interact here as much as I'd like, and that's a shame.

So let's talk!

Tell me what you're up to, how you are, what's on your mind. Ask me any random question you like. Share memes or tell me to write the fic you want me to write or link to cat pictures. Speculate about the TV show/movie/book/album/gig you're really looking forward to, or tell me about the one that thrilled you (or pissed you off) most recently.

I will endeavour to reply to every comment.

Have at it!

If your characters had their formative teenage years during the 80s or later, and they are music fans, and they grew up in the US or UK the Now! That's What I Call Music series is a really excellent resource for finding out what kind of music they might have enjoyed as a youngster. All the track listings for both series (the US and UK versions) are on Wikipedia, and so far I haven't had trouble finding any of the songs on Youtube.

I'm currently using this to do some deep background on my current characters, whose teen years were in the late 90s/early 00s. (Yes, I was a teenager myself in 1999. My memory is terrible, and actually hearing the tracks helps.)

(This is for my dad. Ah, text encoding.)

( randomness )

ETA: Yay, it worked! Readable Greek letters for the win.

(This is an extremely sensitive topic for me; the no-advice request goes double here.)

( On excuses. )

I promised a friend my thoughts on chicken stew. I don't really have a set recipe, more a loosely-arranged assortment of ideas.

( Thoughts! )

(As usual, no advice, please.)

( Processing. This tends to get long. )

One artefact, at least for me, of being depressed and low on energy, is that I watch a lot of movies. There are quite a few I want to post about, but one I watched yesterday really stuck in my head because I was discussing something similar with my parents only the other day.

( Filmish ramblings )

***

My laptop died last week, taking a very great deal of my data with it. This sucks, though I do have a new computer, because the data it took includes the story I've been writing. There is a computer guy trying to fix it, so hopefully I'll get it back. In the meantime, I've been doing all the research. Because my main character is among other things Jewish, and I am not, this has included me trying to find out as much as I can about Jewish British culture, and Judaism in general.

( Cut for ramblings about privilege and the effect this might have on my story )

That's quite a lot of words. I think that's it for the day!

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Lucy

May 2013

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2: Testing, testing, 123?
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wanderings

wombat thoughts on life and other things

Recent Entries

Sticky: Things you should know about me.

More future reference

For future reference.

(no subject)

A signal boost for signalboost

Testing, testing, 123?

Indiegogo campaign.

(no subject)

De-closeting is apparently an ongoing process.

A list of fandoms, mostly for future reference.

How do you philosophy, anyway?

Apparently that AO3 top 10 meme is going around again.

Welp.

So I'm watching music videos as novel research.

Open thread, kind of thing.

Writing thought.

Hm.

Excuses, excuses.

Chicken stew!

More about meds.

(no subject)

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May 2013

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