This is true, this is real, this is Straight Edge

Y'all, me and my girls redcandle17 and theladyscribe saw GOTG last night and it was soooooo good. Highly recommended, two thumbs (or tentacles) up, certainly the funniest MCU movie so far and full of the Power of Friendship, brightly colored action, and glee.

( SPOILERS )

Also, predictably fandom is already doing the concern-trolling handwringing over Gamora's portrayal in this film. I find it amazing that when we do get action heroines in Marvel films, the fandom rallies to downplay her accomplishments and compare her unfavorably to Natasha, proving once again that no matter what, female characters will be marginalized and be pitted against one another.

( In defense of Gamora )

Apparently today is 'post random stuff on lj' day.



A dance-off, Russian style! At 3:18, when the Russian b-boy takes a turn on the pole, is the bit that elevated this from "cute idea" to "okay, this is fucking cool" for me.



Katey Red is a six foot tall black trans woman from New Orleans who makes awesome bounce music. All her music is about being a ho and sucking dicks; don't bother looking for deeper meaning in a Katey Red song. That will only dilute the purity of what she does. My favorite Katey Red song is actually "Melpomene Block Party", which doesn't have a music video, but does give us these immortal lyrics:

♪ I'm a sissy under a lotta stresssssss
Ooooo When I suck a dick I suck it bessssssst♫



Samuel Shaw is Christy Hemme's obsessed stalker from TNA wrestling, and this vid for them is so creepy it is beyond belief. Jesus fucking Christ. This is art.

Let me be perfectly clear: if you send hateful messages, death threats, or wish harm on another human being because they dared to have an opinion contrary to your own on the BuckyNat ship, or any other ship, whether on lj, Tumblr, or any other platform, your behavior is cruel and unacceptable. YOU are everything that is wrong with fandom. I don't care what your excuse is. "Cool motive. Still an asshole."

Captain America would be ashamed of you.

On an unrelated note, girljanitor of Tumblr's medievalpoc has recently been exposed as a crackah ass crackah. Ordinarily this wouldn't be a big deal -- one doesn't have to be non-white to run an art blog comprised of shoddy research -- but girljanitor has explicitly presented herself as a POC for some time and used that cred to cry "racist!" at anyone who criticized her blog or challenged her statements (and calling someone a racist on Tumblr is the equivalent of lobbing a grenade into a town hall meeting). Notably, she's guilty of pulling more-oppressed-than-thou rank on actual POC, ethnic and religious minorities, and shouting them down.

For anyone who's suffering from wank burnout, I highly recommend the Historically Accurate Steve blog, run by my flistie/first-rate human being, theladyscribe! Get lost for hours in fascinating posts about the world that created Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes (and their creators, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby).

Also over on little-details, there's a great post about the possible family background of Natalia Alianovna Romanova, aka the Black Widow. A must-read if you're like me and you get geeky about Russian patronymics.

YOU'RE MY FAMILY, TORCH

y'all....!

Discovered a fascinating tale, told by the Iraqi poet and qadi al-Tanukhi (died 994 AD), which contains not only a sort of zombies (?!) but also a lurid tale of incest, and I thought, Self, the people on livejournal need to know about this.

Incest appears frequently in medieval story-telling; there's a 300+ page book, Incest and the Medieval Imagination (2001) by Elizabeth Archibald, which is just about the theme of incestuous desire in medieval literature. All this proves to me is that medieval people were every bit as kinky as their modern-day descendants on lj, just that they didn't have kink memes back then so had to disguise it as a good morality fable.

One night I (the narrator of this story) looked out of my house towards the cemetery [of al-Khayzuran], as I usually do when I cannot sleep. And look! The tombs opened up, and their occupants came out, with disheveled hair, dust-colored, barefoot, and naked, and they gathered in one place there. In the end there was no tomb left occupied. They made a lot of noise, crying, praying and beseeching God not to have that woman buried with them who was to be buried the following day.

Why has the zombies of Baghdad in such a tizzy? Well, the recently-deceased woman had, by means of a trick, slept with her own son, conceived a child, and then killed it at birth. Not satisfied with what she had done, the wicked woman slept with her son again, and conceived another child, a girl who was so beautiful that she could not bear to kill her. So the mother/grandmother arranged for the baby to be brought up by a poor family, and then brought her into her household at the age of nine and passed her off as a slave. After more stratagems, the brother-father married his sister-daughter, who gave birth to more children.

Genealogical fun fact for fans of Showtime's The Borgias, Renaissance Italy, or art: Paul Gauguin was a descendant of Pope Alexander VI via the pope's illegitimate son Juan Borgia. You may remember Juan from the delightfully trashy TV series; he's the one who talked to his penis. Anyway, here's how the descent goes:

1. Pope Alexander VI, born Rodrigo Borja, had illegitimate issue by Vanozza dei Cattanei, including:
1.1. Juan Borgia, duke of Gandia, married Maria Enriquez de Luna [descended from Alfonso XI of Castile], and had issue including:
1.1.1 Juan Borgia, duke of Gandia, married Juana, illegitimate daughter of Alonso, archbishop of Zaragoza [himself the illegitimate son of Fernando II of Aragon by his mistress, Aldona Ruiz de Ivorra) by his mistress, Ana de Gurrea. They had issue, including:
1.1.1.1. St. Francisco Borgia, duke of Gandia, canonized 1670. He married Leonor de Castro Melo e Menezes [descended from Alfonso IX of Leon and Sancho IV of Castile] and had issue, including:
1.1.1.1.1. Isabel Borgia, married Francisco Gómez de Sandoval Rojas y Zuñiga, marquis of Denia and count of Lerma, and had issue, including:
1.1.1.1.1.1. Leonor Gómez de Sandoval Rojas y Borja, married Lope de Moscoso y Castro, count of Altamira, and had issue, including:
1.1.1.1.1.1.1. Pablo de Moscoso y Sandoval, married Maria Tamariz y Verdugo and had issue:
1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1. Juan Santiago de Moscoso y Tamariz, married Maria Gómez-Butrón y Calderón and had issue, including:
1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1. Juan Elias y Gómez-Butrón, married Petronila Zegarra y de la Cuba, and had issue, including:
1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1. Gaspar Moscoso y Zegarra, married Petronila Pérez y Oblitas, and had issue:
1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1. María Mercedes Moscoso y Pérez, married José Joaquín de Tristán y Carassa, and had issue including:
1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1. Mariano de Tristán y Moscoso, brother of the last Spanish Viceroy of Peru, Juan Pio de Tristán y Moscoso, and friend of Simon Bolivar. He went through an invalid marriage ceremony with Anne-Pierre Laisney, and had issue:
1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1. Flora de Tristán, feminist and author of The Emancipation of Women, married André Chazal [brother of the painter and engraver Antoine Chazal] and had issue, including:
1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1. Aline Chazal, married Guillaume Clovis Gauguin, and had issue:
1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1.1. Paul Gauguin, artist.

Possibly due to my disinterest in anime, I *totally* missed out on the hilarious English dub of Ghost Stories, the silly tale of several ghost mystery-solving Japanese children, dubbed over by a posse of English-speaking voice actors who's epic levels of Don't Give A Fuck can be appreciated even by moi. It's crude, rude, and not even a little PC.




"Monsters only eat evil people, like Republicans!"

"I'm too young to die! The one person I've had sex with is my babysitter."

[Praying]
"I want HUGE breasts!"
"And when I get older, I want to fondle said breasts."

"It could never work between us! Not because you're a rabbit, but because you're black!"

"You see kids, the boy bunny has a penis. He puts that penis into the girl bunny's vagina. Then the girl bunny acts like she owns that penis. Anyway..."

I finally got around to creating a station for myself on Pandora Radio, adding a lot of my favorite artists to the mix and seeing what Pandora spat back out at me. I'm enjoying a lot of the songs Pandora recommends, but what I really find fascinating is checking the 'Why was this song selected?' button and seeing what different features, or 'genes', seem to turn on my brain. According to Pandora, I like:

A subtle use of vocal harmony
Call and answer vocal harmony (antiphony)
Folk influences
Minor key tonality
Varying tempo and time structures
Extensive vamping
A subtle use of paired vocal harmony
Punk roots
Electronica influences
Repetitive melodic phrasing
Vocal central aesthetic
Dirty electric guitar riffs

I find it fascinating that these traits reappear consistently, from band to band, across genres, in the music that appeals to me.

So I was trolling Youtube today, reliving some of my childhood memories and mourning the slow, ignoble demise of MTV. Flisters, I am so old I remember when MTV played music videos. MTV was shocking, and everything was awesomely low-rent up until about 1998. I mean, they hired VJs right off the street and every year there would be the insanity of the VMAs. Somebody was always getting into a fight, or a bassist would be climbing some scaffolding, or Madonna would be rolling around onstage showing off her panties -- my point is it was wild.

So I stumbled upon Marilyn Manson's 1997 VMA performance of "Beautiful People" and I was like, Omigod I thought I dreamed this! Watch it, it's a thing of beauty, people. I remember that it was this year or the next when Marilyn Manson was banned from playing in Mississippi because of the Antichrist thing. Check out how the audience is frozen in their seats with shock (and how fetching Twiggy looks in his dress). Why can't award shows put on more performances like this? NSFW!



Most lolarious Youtube comment: I had my goldfish in a bowl in front the computer screen and they all died before it was over.