Otter's Rock

Title: Lion-Headed Goddess with Bandages in Her Mouth
Author: Katt (xenokattz)
Rating: Teen (strong language)
Fandom: DCU (aka comic!verse)
Characters: Lois Lane
Summary: I'm Lois Lane. I'm the best investigative reporter living.

Go now.  Run, do not walk, to read this story.

Even if you have no interest in comic books or the media based on them, you MUST read this story.  This is perhaps the best story about a professional woman I've ever read.  This is the Lois I love, the woman who is kickass and Made of Awesome and sharp and witty and strong and is able to balance being her own woman with sharing her life and love with Superman and isn't a bitch.  (I have a strong problems with stories where women can only be strong if they are bitchy, and if they're not bitchy the story is all hearts and flowers and puppy dogs.  Yeah.  This story?  This story is how to do a strong woman right.)

What are you waiting for?  Go!  Read!
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So, school has started, and since I'm taking classes for grades this semester instead of pass/fail, my schoolwork is taking more time than it has in the past. (My seminary is not geared towards academics, it's geared towards people who want to be in parish ministry their whole careers, I'd say more people take their classes pass/fail than for grades. Not that I ever used the pass/fail thing as an excuse to slack off; but I wasn't obsessive, you know?) Anyway, my writing time is much curtailed.

I'm still excited about in_the_beginning but I'm definitely only going to be writing one of the two prompts I claimed. Moses and his identity issues will have to wait; Miriam and Deborah and the Word of God need to be finished ASAP so they can get sent off to beta.

sg_rarepairings is going to be run on a prompt-claim basis this year, which is both slightly disappointing and slightly relieving. I'm looking forward to it. And to the knowledge that I definitely won't be writing Sarah Gardner/Daniel Jackson this year, having written that two years running due to being assigned to the same person. But given its timing, it will be overlapping with yuletide, and both of course overlap with the end of the semester and the Christmas rush, and gah. It'll all work itself out, right? Right?

Meanwhile, I've got a Reboot Spock/Uhura piece dealing with some harsh Vulcan realities that's almost certainly going to have one of those completely open-ended 'endings' that I like because they're realistic and other people don't like because they don't give closure sitting on my harddrive. It needs a scene and a half, some tweaking, and a betaing, but between classes and my in_the_beginning fic, it's not going anywhere soon. (Okay, okay, I only like the open endings in my own fic, it drives me crazy in other peoples', and part of it is sheer laziness: I don't want to have to write the years of relationship and career exploration they're going to have on the Enterprise's mission that will have a huge effect on what choices the two of them make together and separately about where they're going and how they're going to live the rest of their lives taking into account Spock's biology and the pressure to repopulate the Vulcan species.)

This entry was originally posted at http://beatrice-otter.dreamwidth.org/148406.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Title: Looking In
Author: beatrice_otter 
Summary: They are all children of Earth.
Fandom: Torchwood
Character: Jack Harkness
Rating: PG
Word Count: 3,227
Betaed by: alixtii 
Notes: Post-CoE, but NOT a fixit.

( The first place Jack went was a nice house in a quiet neighborhood. ) This entry was originally posted at http://beatrice-otter.dreamwidth.org/148011.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

In case you haven't heard, Disney just bought the Marvel Universe.  hradzka wrote a synopsis for an in-universe explanation for How It Happened that is the most hysterical thing ever.  Go.  Read.  Now.
This entry was originally posted at http://beatrice-otter.dreamwidth.org/147485.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

UK Daily Mail: Bed shortage forces 4,000 mothers to give birth in lifts, offices and hospital toilets.  And being refused ambulances.  And turned out of the hospital to give birth in bathrooms.

But wait, you say, we're Americans!  We can do better than our cousins across the pond!  But you see, we already have one national health care system, the Veterans Affairs system.  You know, like Walter Reed Hospital?  The one that has all the problems?  Oh, wait ... it's not just Walter Reed.  It's the whole system.  Maybe it's just me, but I don't want the people who run a health-care system that's just waiting for it's patients to die and then downplaying the problems to be the only health-care system available.

Should everyone have access to needed health care?  Absolutely.  Should the Government be in charge of it?  Hell no.  Not unless they can find their ass with at least one hand.  Which, judging by the available evidence, they can't.

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Three Dreamwidth journal-creation codes available.  Comment with your e-mail to claim one; comments will be screened.

This entry was originally posted at http://beatrice-otter.dreamwidth.org/146975.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Title: Out of the Depths
Author: beatrice_otter 
Fandom: Star Trek
Rating: PG
Characters: Spock!Prime
Word Count: 2,417
Betaed by: ljc 
Summary: Though much is taken, some things remain.
Prompt: treknovelfest 57--The Pandora Principle, Spock Prime & Saavik. Spock!Prime goes to rescue everyone a decade or so early.
Note: Pthak’sahaisau means “cast out fear” (thank you, Vulcan Language Dictionary) and refers to Surak’s writings: “Here is the first part of the secret: Cast out fear. There is no room for anything else until you cast out fear.” (Spock’s World, p. 312)

( Spock surveyed the cavern, the largest chamber on Thieurrull, which in Standard was Hellguard. ) This entry was originally posted at http://beatrice-otter.dreamwidth.org/146765.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Title: X is for Xenophobia
Author: beatrice_otter 
Summary: Little Jake Carter knew all about people who Weren’t Like Us.
Fandom: Stargate: SG-1
Character: Jacob Carter
Rating: PG
Word Count: 3,090
Written For: Jacob Carter Alphabet Soup

( Little Jake Carter was never a science fiction fan, growing up. ) This entry was originally posted at http://beatrice-otter.dreamwidth.org/146609.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Last night I stayed up way past my bedtime reading comments to cereta's post On rape and men (Oh yes, I'm going there)</user>.  In one comment thread, there was some talk about how men react when women start telling stories about assault and things that have been done to them, and how men sometimes don't like to listen and try to derail the conversation because it makes them feel uncomfortable, to which the response is "well, if you hear stories of assault and don't feel uncomfortable, there's something wrong with you."  Because being comfortable is a problem when it blinds you to the realities of those less privileged than you.

And today I am writing my sermon tomorrow, and find myself remembering a quote from Thomas Cahill: "The purpose of the Gospel is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable."
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You have to go check out in_the_beginning folks.  It's a ficfest for the Hebrew Bible (aka the Old Testament) and the prompt list is up.  There are a lot of good prompts, and a few that make me go WTF?, but it's awesome.
This entry was originally posted at http://beatrice-otter.dreamwidth.org/146087.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

So, if you're in the Stargate fandom you've probably heard about the massive amounts of fail (multiple different kinds, no less!) inherent in the casting sides for an episode of Stargate: Universe, and the defense from Gateworld, and all that. sheafrotherdon has an excellent rebuttal to Gateworld's defense of the fail, and cereta has an older post on living in a systematically misogynistic society and why don't "nice" men take a stand which then links to khalinche's post on the levels of harassment your average woman experiences on a daily basis, and why men don't really get it. And someone in the comments mentioned the Vagina Monologues, which I've never seen.

And I've been thinking. I love Stargate, but not the fail, and it seems like the fail has been growing over time, and the way they consistently play issues of rape and torture and such for titilation/humor or in other ways abuse white male privilege.

And lo, at 2 o'clock in the morning, an idea has formed for a story I will never write but which would be Made of Awesome if someone else would do it:

Teal'c is sensitive to power issues as they relate to the whole Jaffa/slave thing, but not so much (which is to say, not at all) as they relate to male/female relationships. He's very secure in his male privilege, and uses it, particularly with Jaffa women. He has great respect for Sam, treats her like an equal as a warrior, true, but look at how he treated the Jaffa women he was with. It's not that he's a bad guy, he just responds as his culture has taught him and doesn't really seem to think about the issue that much. And then in the episode Family Ties, Teal'c gets given tickets to The Vagina Monologues.

I want to know what Teal'c's reaction was. I want it to be done seriously, not played for laughs. I want to know how he related that to his experiences of Jaffa life and working with Sam for ten years. I want to explore Jaffa culture and Teal'c's perspective on it beyond the 'Jaffa revenge thing.' I want to see him talk about it with Sam, and with Ishta, and maybe his daughter-in-law Kar'yn. I don't want him to turn into an enlightened feminist Western male, but I do want him to understand.

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Tuesday I saw a neuropsychologist. (Recap: I had to resign from my internship a few months ago mainly due to poor social skills caused by undiagnosed Aspergers.) I was diagnosed with Aspergers, which was not a surprise (I've known I had it since we started researching my brother's autism), but I was also diagnosed with Face blindness, which was a surprise but explains a lot. I've always been bad at pairing faces and names. When I was at camp in middle school, on the last day when we were getting ready to go home, one of the girls from my cabin came up to me and I didn't recognize her because she'd changed her clothes from what she'd been wearing in the morning. I can recognize people I know, but it takes me a while to learn to recognize new people, particularly when I meet them in a large crowd. From the testing I got, apparently I can memorize about three new faces at a time, and any more than that forget about it. I've never thought much about it because my Mom's the same way, and lots of people talk about being bad with names and such. But apparently I'm much, much worse than most people, which doesn't help social skills that are already pretty bad because of the Aspergers.

Apparently, they're in the middle of reviewing and updating diagnosis criteria as a prelude to a new edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). So she evaluated me on a version modified by current discussion on the issue.

( Aspergers criteria that fit me )

( What this is like from the inside )
This entry was originally posted at http://beatrice-otter.dreamwidth.org/145599.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

No, really.  I know this will come as a great shock, but they do.  At least, this seems to have been a foreign concept to the woman who built our house and landscaped the 8.5 acres it sits on.  She loved all these ornamental and rare trees, and got a lot of them to put in certain areas.  And the nurseries she got the trees from told her how far apart the trees needed to be, and she decided that that was wrong because the trees looked so far apart when she laid them out that way, so she put them much closer together.  Twenty-five years later, things are ... dire.  The most spectacularly bad example: a Sequoia with four other trees within a thirty foot radius of its trunk.  Of all these wonderful trees she planted, probably a third need to get taken out, and of course they're much too big to transplant now.

This entry was originally posted at http://beatrice-otter.dreamwidth.org/145309.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

All in all, depressing as it is, I thought it was very well done, both in writing and acting, ( except for one or two things. )
Aside from those three things, though, it was a very well-written script from a technical point of view, and very well done.
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For privileged people out there.  When issues of race come up again.  (and again, and again, and again, and again ...)

In which it's not my job to educate you

We Have Feelings Too or The Cost OF Being A POC in Race Discussions

and, for satire,

The Art of Defending Racism This entry was originally posted at http://beatrice-otter.dreamwidth.org/144734.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

So, I was talking with an acquaintance today, who is a translator here in Salem, OR, which is both the state capital and the second-largest city in Oregon. (The largest is Portland, about an hour's drive north.) He said that business is booming, because while his private sector contracts have declined, his work for the Oregon state government has shot through the roof. It seems that several departments that routinely need translators have in the past used a major Portland firm, and with budget cuts needed to see if there was a cheaper alternative. How much were they paying the Portland translators?

*A very high hourly rate for the work they did
*Mileage to drive down and back, to the tune of $70+ roundtrip
*Four-hour minimum (meaning if it only took half an hour of the translator's time, he/she still got paid for four hours of work)
*Meal vouchers for anything over four hours of work
*Hotel stays for anything over eight hours of work
(And by the way, most of these guys only translated into a couple of languages, so they'd often need several different translators for a single day's work)

Now, the guy I know translates five or six languages, and since he lives in town he doesn't need mileage, meal vouchers, or hotel vouchers, his minimum is one hour not four, and he charges in the middle range instead of top dollar. All told, they were paying the Portland translators an average of $800/hour more than what this guy gets. And it never occurred to them to check and see if there might be someone local who could do translation work without all the extra charges until they absolutely had to. Our tax dollars at work.

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My birthday was the 30th; today we're having a group celebration for the several of us in my family who have birthdays around this time. I got lots of pressies--besides the Moody Blues concert Aunt Jackie took me to last week which was absolutely awesome I got two nice cream blouses and promise of new glasses (badly needed) and a nice check AND the DVD of Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theatre. Faerie Tale Theatre was a wonderful show in 1986 that only lasted one season and had low production values but was really good because they got some awesome actors to play the parts and direct. James Earl Jones, Leonard Nimoy, Tim Burton, Susan Sarandon, Anjelica Huston, Christopher Lee, Leslie Ann Warren, John Lithgow, Helen Mirren, Mary Steenburgen, Mick Jagger, Edward James Olmos, Liza Minelli, Gregory Hines, Jeff Bridges, Francis Ford Coppola, Bernadette Peters, Christopher Reeve, Rene Auberjonois, Melissa Gilbert, Lee Remick, Vanessa Redgrave, Vincent Price, Robin Williams, Teri Garr, Billy Crystal, Jeff Goldblum, Carey Fisher, and Burgess Meredith all worked on this show. I've wanted to have it for a long time--I loved it as a child, and for a good two decades you couldn't find it anywhere and we watched those tapes we made off of TV until they weren't worth watching anymore, and now I has it, my precious, I has it!

This entry was originally posted at http://beatrice-otter.dreamwidth.org/144304.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

... scientists claim to have created transparent aluminum!  Is that not cool?  Star Trek is just around the corner!
This entry was originally posted at http://beatrice-otter.dreamwidth.org/144037.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Title: Knocking at the Door (the Things Unspoken Remix)
Author: beatrice_otter 
Summary: In the years between the Game Station and the end of the universe, Jack Harkness has a lot more time to think than he really wants.
Fandom: Torchwood
Character: Jack Harkness
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1,084
Original Story: Unspeakable Lists by glinda_penguin
Notes: Title is taken from “Question” by The Moody Blues. Thanks to alixtii for the beta.

( In the years between the Game Station and the end of the universe, Jack Harkness has a lot more time to think than he really wants. )

This entry was originally posted at http://beatrice-otter.dreamwidth.org/143626.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Title: Hard to Swallow (the Percolation Remix)
Author: beatrice_otter
Summary: Ianto Jones. Tea, coffee, and the transition from London to Cardiff
Fandom: Torchwood
Character: Ianto Jones
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2,597
Original Story: Ianto Jones/Coffee by glinda_penguin
Notes: Title is taken from “Question” by The Moody Blues. Thanks to alixtii for the beta.

( Ianto, like all proper British citizens whether Welsh, English, Scottish, or Irish, was raised to be a tea drinker. )

This entry was originally posted at http://beatrice-otter.dreamwidth.org/143390.html. Please comment there using OpenID.