Beware of Turtle!

Idea for awesome lj icon (or any other kind of user icon thingy - the lj-ness is irrelevant):

There's a scene from 30 days of night that I'm pretty sure was in the trailer... it's after they send the woman walking through the town as bait and she's begging for her life and says "oh God."

And the head-vampire-dude says "God?" And he looks up for a moment. And then he looks back down at her and says "No God." Just before he kills her.

The icon would be a still image of his face from that scene, with the words "Sparkles?" on top and then "No sparkles." on the bottom. (Or a moving clip from the movie with the words in the appropriate places... but I hate moving icons so if I was making it with my nonexistant image manipulation skills, I'd just do it as one image.)

I've had these images up in tabs on firefox since Saturday and have been meaning to post them for all to enjoy.

First, pumpkincat:
Then the lolpepper:
Followed by lolpeas (because a) it looks like Jojo and b) it sounds like a nanowrimo plot suggestion):
And finally, the best (in my *very* biased opinion) lolcat of this past caturday:

Since the start of school I've been attending storytelling workshops on Wednesdays hosted by the Centre for Creative Writing and Oral Culture. (Their website is here: http://umanitoba.ca/centres/ccwoc/writer_in_residence/index.html) Their storyteller-in-residence is Jan Andrews and she is doing a reading/performance at Aqua books this Friday at 7pm. Tickets are $12 and I will be there.

This woman is a professional oral storyteller and she is simply amazing. Spending an hour every Wednesday as she tells us stories and tells us about being a storyteller has been wonderful for me. It's provided a very beautiful, sane and healing space for me creatively that has been very effective in keeping me from falling into the excessively analytical and creatively dead trap I was in the last time I went through university. She works magic with her words.

I asked her about the age limit for this reading and she said no one younger than ten and really, this isn't a storytelling session geared toward children (something else I really love about her storytelling is that it is not "just for kids" - she doesn't dumb down the stories she's collected from all over the world and she tells them responsibly, with great reverence for the people and cultures the tales are from).

Here's the website bit about the event: http://www.aquabooks.ca/events.php#telling

I recommend this to everyone in Winnipeg. You won't regret attending.

I want half my money back. Half, because the second half of the show was actually ok, although not worth the $65+ I spent.

But the first half...

Imagine a bible-belt grade 5 Christmas pageant. You've got a bad rhyming narrator loosely linking songs together in a story obviously written in one go by an exhausted teacher in 20 minutes. You've got caricatures of humanity, including a funny drunken homeless man that everyone can ridicule to make themselves feel superior while they think of "helping" him, you've got a story of an angel going from place to place on earth looking for a Christmas gift for god, you've got some inappropriate political messages and a very strong "Yay only-my-specific-flavour-of-the-Christian God!" undercurrent to everything with all the exclusionary and bigoted implications that go with it, and you have the performers coming out and flubbing their way through traditional Christmas carols as well as some new songs someone felt were more appropriate to their flavour of bible-y goodness, and you have the first half of the show.

If something like that were done by a pack of grade 5 children, everyone would tough it through and wait it out until it was over and they could eat the tasty pot luck yummies that all the mothers had baked and brought to the church basement (easily the best part of these things and easily the biggest motivator, besides your kid being in the show, to make it through the production).

But it wasn't done by a pack of grade 5 children.



Take every negative stereotype of the psycho bible-thumping southern American you can think of - the saccharine bigot who likes to get high on the feeling of self-righteousness they get from small acts of "doing good" that are actually insulting and degrading to the people they are claiming to help - and wrap it up in a musical bow. That was the first half of the Trans-Siberian Orchestra show.

You could not pay me to go through that again.

I do want that half of my money back.

If 5th graders had done it, it would be ok because 5th graders don't know any better.

For adults to do it is inexcusable.

Oh... and they gave me a migraine. (Smokers outside didn't help but I did hold my breath and run - that should have been enough.) With my drugs at $15 a pill, and having had to deliberately OD because the regular course of meds couldn't kill it, I spent about $60 and 18 hours of blinding pain recovering from their show.

So it's possible I am more bitter than usual because they hurt me.

I will be doing a short (6 minute) reading with other grad students at the Ednafedya restaurant in the Smartpark at the U of M on November 22 at 1pm.

Here is a map I was given: http://www.umanitoba.ca/research/media/homepage_mapv3.jpg

The current theory is that the restaurant is the pink building.

I'm planning on reading Celery Stalk and The Thing in the Woods. The event is open to the public and I was told children might be present. Maybe I can frighten them. :)

I talked with my prof today about auditing the course. I should be able to do it somehow (how exactly that will happen is still being figured out red-tape-wise).

This will remove an enormous amount of stress from me because I will no longer be afraid that a bad mark in the course will result in the loss of my fellowship. I'll still be doing the coursework and the final exam. The marks just won't count against my GPA.

This is huge because I really need this reduction in stress right now.

Here is a link to GUD magazine's "Pay what you want" sale. They're letting people pay whatever they want for .pdfs of their first 5 issues (issues 0 through 4). I really like how they have their author compensation set up and I very much want to be published by them so I obtained all 5 issues. I've only read the first story in issue 0 because I'm uber busy but I was really impressed (and I knew I would be - they have great stuff). GUD stands for Greatest Uncommon Denominator and they seek out good writing, regardless of genre, style, etc. They also allow individual authors to be compensated by readers above and beyond the story's initial purchase by the magazine. I appreciate this kind of creative vision and as I said, they publish good shit. Grab an issue for whatever you think you should pay for a .pdf of a fiction magazine and see if you agree.

( http://tr.im/gudpwyw )

P.S. If you're going to get them all, use the button for that so that they lose less money on paypal fees.