My journal is shades of pink now. It's been the same colors since I first created it two years ago and let's face it-time is change. I have a new default user pic too, and I love the way the gray tones go with the pink tones. I'm a sucker for pinks with greys, even if I don't always like to admit it.

I'm pretty sure my paid account is going to expire again soon. I'll have to check on that.

If you haven't heard about what's happening in Iran yet, go here to read all about it. It sent achy, bad chills down my spine and everybody needs to know. I tried to copy the article but the pictures won't show for me, so follow the link.

The first five people to comment in this post get to request a drabble of any pairing/character of their choosing from me. In return, they have to post this in their journal, regardless of their ability level. If you absolutely can't write, I don't see why you wouldn't be able to offer drawings or icons or something instead."

Name your pairing, and any other relevant details such as a prompt. You can chose weird pairings or themes if you like. Your vignette may come in dialogue form or story form, who knows. I can do Naruto-yaoi, yuri, het, doesn't matter. I want to warn you that I'm not caught up with recent manga specifics, only general details.

I reserve the right to ask for a different pairing or prompt if I can't manage what I'm given.

I'm published.

When I was twelve, my mom didn't tell me that she submitted a poem to a magazine. Yesterday she typed in my name into the Google search engine, and a poem published in Highlights Magazine for Children came up. I'd compeletly forgotten about it until I saw it, and now I can even remember where I wrote The Night

The night so cool,
The stars so bright.
The moon so full,
Shedding it's light.

The owl in the sky
Lets out his call.
He slowly flies by
As night begins to fall.

I kind of wish it was a better poem that had gotten published somewhere distributed across the country, but what are you gonna do? I was only eleven when I wrote it.

There's something I kind of want to do, and I'm wondering if anyone would be willing to help me out.

Okay, so we know there's a community on lj for bad fanfic. Several, actually, where we can lambast stale plot and atrocious grammar and illogicalities and out of character-ness and all of the other things that make bad writing bad writing. The community fanficrants is out there, as well as badfic, badficsanon, bad_smutfic, and ff_anbu. Now, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with these communities. We all need to rant sometimes, express our dissatisfaction. However, I can't find any communities that celebrate the good. Sure, there's naruto_choice, but that's a contest community. Why is there not a place to post about something in a fic that we adore? A place to reccomend to each other stories that made us laugh, or think, or cry in a good way? A theme that we liked? A writing style? A place where we can share our joy instead of our misery. I just think the balance is off and something ought to be done about it.

So I guess what I'm asking is if anyone would join a community like this? Even more so, if any one would be willing to be a mod with me? Because I'd like to start one, but I'd want administrative help. Drop me a line either way, especially those of you on my f-list I never hear a word from. If I'm going to do this, I want to know if it would be well-received.

The downstairs computer had a virus and it had to go away to get better. It's back now, and I've realized how dependent I am on the internet when it comes to informational needs. Like movies times, my bank account, and the lyrics I can't figure out to a song.

Internet, I've missed you.

And now that I'm back online, I can tell you all about the world of trouble my brother got into last Monday. Let me preface this news by saying that I have nothing against marijuana. I don't care that my brother smokes it. All things considered, it's a rather harmless drug, at least in comparison to cocaine or speed. There are worse things he could be doing. But if you're going to get high, it needs to be done and kept in a private place. You know where it shouldn't be? In your wallet in a school, a drug free zone. Yup, he bought it over the weekend, showed it to someone at school, got caught looking shady in a stairway by a teacher, and is now suspended for 45 days. He's also not allowed back until he goes through drug counseling, passes that evaluation, as well as another drug test before he goes back. The suspension carries over into next year, and he's being provided with a tutor to keep him from falling behind in school.

Stupid boy. Love him, but yeah...dumb move.

I've been tagged by sub_textual with Kakashi.

( Questions )

This there anyone out there that can tell me about this DreamWidth business? I keep seeing the name dropped in various posts, but I have no idea what it is. Some kind of journal, I gather?

it's four in the morning and i think i'm less drunk than i was before...

i hear a bird chirpping.

Browsing through my f-list, I came across a post thanking a whole bunch of people for their help in a particular matter. That, I ignored. Further down, I read the post that actually asked for help and who for and why and the link to the journal, and when I did I almost cried. I am not going to namedrop or detail circumstances, because at this point to do so would be an invasion of privacy, but I just want to say that it's been a long time since I felt such a strong faith in humanity and a true, genuine belief in the kindness of strangers. I would have left a comment myself, but by the time I read it, the crisis had passed thanks largely in part to the sympathy and intervention of people with nothing more than a commonly-seen lj icon.

Sometimes, people surprise me in the absolute best of ways.

It's really freaking hot out there.

Adultfanfiction.net makes me angry.

I've generally stopped haunting those grounds, as they tend to produce nothing but zombies as opposed to friendly ghosts. I've read a lot of good, quality male/male stories (unfortunately older stories) and a couple of decent male/female stories. But the female/female stories. They make me tear my hair out and scream obscenities.

Yuri makes me want to bash my head across the wall on several levels. First of all, and less importantly for once in my book, they are horribly written. There's no plot, no character development, no differentiation between you're and your, etc. They're bad. I can handle bad writing, though. I can take in stride the fact that some people, try as they might, cannot write. I can even forgive that. It's what this plotless, underdeveloped pornography is about thematically that irritates me.

Two categories of yuri porn seem to exist 1) Sexually experienced older girl makes younger girl realize that, yeah, she likes it when the older girl's tongue licks her anatomically incorrectly-placed clit and 2) Sexually mature older girl degrades sexual immature younger girl physically, psychologicically, emotionally, and sexual only to have younger girl LOVE the abuse. Now, I realize that het and yaoi exist with the same basic plotline, subsituting older girl for older boy. However, the bandwagon effect doesn't justify the overarching themes of control and degredation that run rampant. The older woman in yuri is just the replacement for the older man found in het and yaoi. She's female physically (her perky breasts are mentioned more than enough times), but the situation is consistently reminescent of the classic case scenario of a girl losing her innocence to the boy who knows things. Because it's quite alright for men to know about sex, but it would be better if women stayed in the dark until that perfect man, or perfect Temari, comes along and opens her little virgin eyes.

She fights it, at first. She blushes deep shades of red, ashamed of what she's doing but unable to stop the way she's getting wet. She's knows this shouldn't be happening at all, much less enjoying it, wanting to give up the fight and let it happen. Still blushing, stuttering, and moaning at too-high decibles, she lets the older girl have her wicked way with her.

Read that again, substituting older girl for older boy, and perhaps you'll see what I mean.

I'm not saying that lesbians, or in this case straight girls experimenting with hidden lesbian tendencies, don't ever have sex in such a manner. They may. My problem is with the blatant superimposition of heterosexual gender normatives upon homosexual sex. I'm not going to go into great length on this one, but if clarification is needed, see sub_textual and her post on Gender, Feminism, and Naruto. She is far more academic about it than I am being. However, I will borrow a leaf out of her book, when I decry the fact that taught both genders, male and female, to construct their identity through heterosexuality and the male dominance that is inherent in that construction. The majority of yuri writers are boys, and they perceive this lesbian sex they are writing through their lense of male privilege that is granted by societal constructions of male roles. While yes, this certainly explains a lot, in no way does it excuse it. Fics like Let's Get Naked, More Womanly Now, Naruto's Naughty Nurses, Bitches in Heat, Temari and Her Toys, Horny Hokage, Having a Little Fun with Sakura, Hello Nurse, and Diaper Camp serve to remind me just how far women's liberation has yet to go. Boys are still beig taught that their sexuality is based on their male privilege, ostensibly encouraging them to to view as sexy the control and degradation of the female. They are writing about it in fics like Bitches in Heat, allowing it to circulate uninhibited.

And women are doing nothing to stop it. Because as demonstrated by the same approximate problem in many yaoi and het fics, women too believe that their sexual identity and experience ought to be constructed around the male.

I need to write some yuri or something. Maybe I'll feel better then.