christinareborn

Obonox/OS - the world's most annoying operating system! :D

This is hilarious! How Firefly Should've Ended According to Kaylee

The actress who played Kaylee, being asked how she would've wanted Firefly to end, answered:

Well, I wouldn’t have, now would I? But in my perfect imagination, it ends a little something like this: Nine glorious seasons later, Kaylee and Simon have had several beautiful brunette babies, a couple of which have turned out to be crazy geniuses like their Auntie River (Firefly: the Next Generation?), and one who mysteriously looks a lot like Matthew Fox, who became a regular cast member in season six. River has finally found her marbles and is now captaining her own ship with her loyal second-in-command, Jayne, who claims that River is the best captain he’s ever known. Saffron is now their mercenary, and Jayne’s lover. And because this is the future and vast discoveries have been made in the world of medicine, Jayne is pregnant with their first child. Inara and Mal finally profess their undying love for each other while Inara is, well, dying in his arms (something gruesome, lotsa blood), and Mal finally realizes that life is short. And promptly confesses his (other) undying love to Zoe. And she promptly punches him in the face.

“Human beings took our animal need for palatable food … and turned it into chocolate souffles with salted caramel cream. We took our ability to co-operate as a social species … and turned it into craft circles and bowling leagues and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. We took our capacity to make and use tools … and turned it into the Apollo moon landing. We took our uniquely precise ability to communicate through language … and turned it into King Lear.

None of these things are necessary for survival and reproduction. That is exactly what makes them so splendid. When we take our basic evolutionary wiring and transform it into something far beyond any prosaic matters of survival and reproduction … that’s when humanity is at its best. That’s when we show ourselves to be capable of creating meaning and joy, for ourselves and for one another. That’s when we’re most uniquely human.

And the same is true for sex. Human beings have a deep, hard-wired urge to replicate our DNA, instilled in us by millions of years of evolution. And we’ve turned it into an intense and delightful form of communication, intimacy, creativity, community, personal expression, transcendence, joy, pleasure, and love. Regardless of whether any DNA gets replicated in the process.

Why should we see this as sinful? What makes this any different from chocolate souffles and King Lear?”

Greta Christina (Sex and the Off-Label Use of Our Bodies)

Came across this quote on Tumblr.

Obi-Wan Kenobi Is Dead, Vader Says from the "Galactic Times".

CORUSCANT — Obi-Wan Kenobi, the mastermind of some of the most devastating attacks on the Galactic Empire and the most hunted man in the galaxy, was killed in a firefight with Imperial forces near Alderaan, Darth Vader announced on Sunday.

See the link for the whole story

The comments section is absolutely hilarious, too. :D

Came across this meme browsing through archives and decided to do it again

Step 1. Put your playlist on random.
Step 2. Post the first line from the first 25 songs that play, no matter how embarrassing.
Step 3. Italicize the songs when someone guesses correctly.
NO GOOGLING.

Extra rules I added: Skipping any non-English songs, and using the second line if the first line contains the title (unless it's, like, a really obscure song).

1. I complicated our lives by falling in love with him
2. They say they don't trust you, me, we, us
3. Would you please take me away from this place?
4. I don't mind confiding that I make stupid mistakes
5. If my lips ever left my mouth, packed a bag and headed south, that'd be too bad, I'd be so sad!
6. If I had a jetpack, the first thing I'd do, is fly above the gridlock and come to you
7. Our whole universe was in a hot dense state and nearly 14 billion years ago expansion started
8. I'm undecided about you again
9. As I was walking in the winter, it was Tuesday, the last of the year
10. Wait until the war is over, and we're both a little older
11. She shuts the door behind me, waits for me to get undressed
12. When you're naked in the shower, when you're sleeping for an hour
13. I would like to state my vision, life was so unfair
14. I see trouble on the way, I see earthquakes and lightening, I see bad times today
15. And you don't seem to understand, a shame you seemed an honest man
16. You know it's kinda hard just to get along today, our subject isn't cool but he fakes it anyway
17. We'd better think about the things we say, we'd better think about the games we play
18. Every night we're all alone every night my only hope is a light that's shining from inside you (skipped first few verses cause they all had the title)
19. He was in a bind, cause he was way behind, he was willin' to make a deal (skipped first verse)
20. How fickle my heart and how woozy my eyes
21. Way back in the 1940s, there were lots of magazines with their covers full of miracles and futuristic scenes
22. From all the drugs the one I like more is music
23. I believe in you and me, I'm coming to find you if it takes me all night
24. What is this song all about? Can't figure any lyrics out
25. You're so pretty the way you are, you're so pretty the way you are, and you had no reason to be so insolent to me

Money's kind of tight for me right now. I really could use some financial help right now. This is *not* a request for donations, this is a request for loans. I will repay any loan as soon as possible, which will probably be some time in December (loans will be repayed in the order received). January at the latest. Any amount will help. I need a total of around $400.

I foolishly forgot to take into account sales tax when I purchased my car, which is why I'm in such tight straits right now.

My paypal account is christina.nicole.78@gmail.com

The Disease Called Perfection

This is such a good article.

What is the disease called "Perfection"? Perhaps a list of its real-life symptoms will help you better understand it. We live in communities where people feel unconquerable amounts of pressure to always appear perfectly happy, perfectly functional, and perfectly figured.

...

"Perfection" is a wife who feels trapped in a marriage to a lazy, angry, small man, but at soccer practice tells the other wives how wonderful her husband always is. "Perfection" keeps people from telling the truth, even to themselves. My husband is adorable. He called me a whore this week because I smiled at a stranger. When I started crying, he said he had a game to go watch. I love him so much.

"Perfection" is a husband who is belittled, unappreciated, and abused by his wife, yet works endlessly to make his marriage appear incredible to those around him. "Perfection" really does keep people from being real about the truth. You would have laughed, guys. She said that I suck at my job and will never go anywhere in life. Then she insinuated that I was a fat, rotting pile of crap. Isn't she the best?

"Perfection" is a daughter with an eating disorder that keeps it hidden for years because she doesn't want to be the first among her family and friends to be imperfect. She would give anything to confront it, but she can't because then the "Perfect" people would hate her as much as she hates herself for it.

"Perfection" is when a son has a forbidden addiction, and despises himself for it. "Perfection" makes us believe that nobody else could understand what it is like to be weak and fall prey to the pressures of the world.

Read the whole thing. It's really good.

I love this piece by Julia Serano, Gender Is Not Just a Performance:

If one more person tells me that "all gender is performance," I think I am going to strangle them.

Perhaps most annoying about that soundbite is the somewhat snooty "I-took-a-gender-studies-class-and-you-didn't" sort of way in which it is most often recited, a magnificent irony given the way that phrase dumbs down gender. It is a crass oversimplification, as ridiculous as saying all gender is genitals, all gender is chromosomes, or all gender is socialization. In reality, gender is all of these things and more. In fact, if there's one thing that all of us should be able to agree on, it's that gender is a confusing and complicated mess. It's like a junior high school mixer, where our bodies and our internal desires awkwardly dance with one another, and with all the external expectations that other people place on us.

Sure, I can perform gender: I can curtsy, or throw like a girl, or bat my eyelashes. But performance doesn't explain why certain behaviors and ways of being come to me more naturally than others. It offers no insight into the countless restless nights I spent as a pre-teen wrestling with the inexplicable feeling that I should be female. It doesn't capture the very real physical and emotional changes that I experienced when I hormonally transitioned from testosterone to estrogen. Performance doesn't even begin to address the fact that, during my transition, I acted the same, wore the same T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers that I always had, yet once other people started reading me as female, they began treating me very differently. When we talk about my gender as though it were a performance, we let the audience — with all their expectations, prejudices, and presumptions — completely off the hook.

Look, I know that many contemporary queer folks and feminists embrace mantras like "all gender is performance," "all gender is drag," and "gender is just a construct." They seem empowered by the way these sayings give the impression that gender is merely a fiction. A facade. A figment of our imaginations, endlessly mutable and malleable. And of course, this is a convenient strategy, provided that you're not a trans woman who lacks the means to change her legal sex to female, and who thus runs the very real risk of being locked up in an all-male jail cell. Provided that you're not a trans man who has to navigate the discrepancy between his male identity and female history during job interviews and first dates. Whenever I hear someone who has not had a transsexual experience say that gender is just a construct or merely a performance, it always reminds me of that Stephen Colbert gag where he insists that he doesn't see race. It's easy to fictionalize an issue when you're not aware of the many ways in which you are privileged by it.

Almost every day of my life I deal with people who insist on seeing my femaleness as fake. People who make a point of calling me effeminate rather than feminine. People who slip up my pronouns, but only after they find out that I'm trans, never beforehand. People who insist on third-sexing me with labels like MTF, boy-girl, he-she, she-male, ze & hir — anything but simply female. Because I'm transsexual, I am sometimes accused of impersonation or deception when I am simply being myself. So it seems to me that this strategy of fictionalizing gender will only ever serve to marginalize me further.

So I ask you: Can't we find new ways of speaking? Shouldn't we be championing new slogans that empower all of us, whether trans or nontrans, queer or straight, female and/or male and/or none of the above?

Instead of trying to fictionalize gender, let's talk about the moments in life when gender feels all too real. Because gender doesn't feel like drag when you're a young trans child begging your parents not to cut your hair or not to force you to wear that dress. And gender doesn't feel like a performance when, for the first time in your life, you feel safe and empowered enough to express yourself in ways that resonate with you, rather than remaining closeted for the benefit of others. And gender doesn't feel like a construct when you finally find that special person whose body, personality, identity, and energy feels like a perfect fit with yours. Let's stop trying to deconstruct gender into nonexistence, and instead start celebrating it as inexplicable, varied, profound, and intricate.

So don't you dare dismiss my gender as construct, drag, or performance. My gender is a work of non-fiction.

From fayanora The Rise and Fall of William J Sidis

Tragic story. I can empathize somewhat with William Sidis.

An amusing link: Gamestop owns 7,500 souls! So, see? It pays to read the end-user agreement. :-P