Wyld Wolfe

You may or may not have heard, but I know this great and funny guy who makes music. Not only that, but you other musicians out there might be interested to know, he is living the dream, guys, and making his living by making music.
And he was hit with a nasty injury not that long ago. Check out his Digital Acoustic Livejournal at filkertom if you missed the announcement.
The tricky bit about living the dream, music-based or otherwise, is that self-employment doesn't have a fantastic benefits package, by and large. Living that dream involves a great amount of risk that the universe might get tweaky with you and kick you hard with an illness or injury.
Tom is a dear friend and a wonderful guy, loved by many. He routinely trumps any other event or panel scheduled opposite his concerts at Marcon (and probably many other cons, as well), and he's posting new music with startling frequency, both at his blog, iTom, and with The Funny Music Project. He's touched a lot of lives, and means more to more people than he'll ever really know. So, to help him out with this troubling (and agonizing) situation, several of the funniest people in fannish music got together and recorded covers of several of his songs, with their own unique...twists. Yeah, "twists" is a good word for this. The CD is available for purchase by donation at conventions featuring members of The FuMP, or you can donate online and get a digital copy, if you prefer or simply can't get out to a convention to buy the CD. Buy the fundraiser CD online here.
If you know Tom, you've probably already been there and done that. If you've only heard his music, maybe gone to a concert at a convention, you already know what kind of talent and presence I'm talking about here. If by some chance you haven't heard his music before, go to Tom's website and listen to some of the free stuff he has posted. There's also other CDs of Tom's on his website available for digital download. If you try to order a physical CD from his site, it may not go out for a while, and the digital stuff is faster and very secure.
If you're not a fan of funny music, you obviously haven't spent enough time around me. If you're easily offended, what are you doing reading my journal? Listen, laugh, get some good music, and help out a great guy who'd never dream of asking you on his own.

Happy belated birthday, both to Alexis K. Madrox, who taught me more about X-Men as a fandom than any other source I have since encountered, and to Bear, who with one simple phrase turned my understanding of my world and myself right-side-up so that things could fall into place.
Many hugs and happinesses to you both.

I am not a happy girl. In my last post (ETA: This post is not gone, just locked down to private, since the ones that need to read it aren't reading it properly), the topic was somewhat controversial and someone decided to take an expressed opinion and attack it multiple times. NOT ALLOWED IN MY JOURNAL. You want to wank and whine and complain about somebody, that's your right, but not in my journal, not on my territory and for GORRAM sure not in a friends-locked post where you can be sure anyone able to post is a friend, someone I know, someone whose opinions I value no matter what they are. This is the web equivalent of picking a fight in my home, and if you're surprised when I toss you out for doing it, consider what you'd want to do if I was at a physical gathering of your friends and slugged somebody for thinking differently than I do.
I have filters, and I've been using them, but for the previous topic I chose not to, because I wanted the post to reach as many people as I could in my friends list. I got a lot of replies and brought a lot of attention to the issue. Clearly, I need to go back to using my filters for EVERYthing.
And yeah, maybe the teacher had been dealing with the behavioral issue for a while. Still, with the diagnosis in process, she should have been provided with training and support to help deal with the potential challenges and problems that may have arisen, ESPECIALLY with an ongoing issue. She should have DEMANDED the help she needed to get thru to the kid, or asked that he be transferred to a special-needs class where people WITH the proper training could work with him. Public apology/humiliation/ostracisation for the teacher is a punishment to fit the crime, since it seems to be her preferred method for extreme discipline, and really and truly, if you can't handle unruly kids, don't teach, not in today's society. If we as a country would spend a portion of what we spend on war on education, training the kind of people that we need as teachers to deal with all the issues we as a society are dealing with, whether it's uncontrolled kids or overdiagnosed or underdiagnosed kids or just people not able to endure other people's hellspawn indefinitely without some kind of support system. If parents would all parent their kids responsibly instead of placing the burden on teachers, etc, then the parents who ARE trying their hardest, either with difficult kids or normal ones, might not have so much grief, and maybe neither would the good teachers who try to do the best they can with what precious little the school system and the government allows them.
Anyway.
The plain fact at the heart of it all, as raveechidna was trying to point out and got jumped all over for, is that we just have the media spin on what happened. None of us were there, so we don't have all the facts, we just know what we're told. Based on what we're told, it's scary and bad calls were made in several places. But nobody has al the facts, probably not even the people who WERE there. Rave simply expressed the opinion that maybe there's information we're not privy to and that judgements passed would be less harsh were more information known. Her comments in no way warranted the deliberate and hurtful attacks slung at her.
As she deals on a regular basis with a behavioral nightmare of a child that she can't escape at the end of a workday because he's her roomate's kid, she knows better than I do what kind of hell a child can be when you don't have the parental right to discipline as necessary. Many kids that I encounter, like my little cousins or the incomparable JJ or Clan Shamblin (which are more peers than kids for all that they're younger than I am) or the couple times I've encountered any of Moogie's brood, most kids that I encounter in my assorted friends groups are responsibly parented and while they may occasionally be hell on wheels, they're still respectful and mostly tractable if occasionally a little rambunctious. They're KIDS, for cryin out loud. Kids do goofy wild crap and the best you can do sometimes is hope they live long enough to grow out of it, and do all you can to teach them. I know responsible parents exist because I have met them.
I post things in an open forum of my friends to get opinions, to promote discussion. NOT to encourage or allow people who are theoretically my friends to lunge at other people's throats for expression of different opinions. If I want a crew of people who only parrot back my same opinions to me, I'll hire some flying monkeys. If I want to censor people's opinions and try to shame them into thinking how I think, then I'll just hop in my time machine and jolt back to the McCarthy era. If you want to be hateful, malicious, judgemental, etc, or attack someone for expressing their opinions in a place I have TRIED to make safe for that expression, then get out of my journal, don't read my posts, and keep your hate out of my life. I don't need the stress.

To be sure I am making this abundantly clear, here are the Rules for My Journal, recapped:

1. This is MY corner of the web and if you cannot abide by my rules then stay the f$ck away from it.
2. If I do not disable comments on a post, then feel free to discuss the topic if you want to, but if you DO choose to discuss, do so in an adult, respectful fashion no matter how you may feel about the topic or the fact that SOMEONE might POSSIBLY have a different opinion. I will not tolerate hateful or attacking posts levied at myself or ESPECIALLY at my friends. Be a grown-up and debate, don't hate.
3. Do not, under any circumstances, feel you have the right to take someone to task in my journal for the opinions they express or try to make them feel ashamed for being different.
4. Do NOT stir $h!t in my journal comments. If you have the urge to rant and rail at an opinion which differs from your own, you are free to do so in YOUR space where I don't have to deal with your bigoted solipsist worldview. Keep it out of my stuff because I don't need your drama, I have PLENTY of my own, thanks EVER so much.
5. I reserve the right to ban people from my journal for failure to abide by the simple rules stated above.

It's not hard, folks. Play nice, respect the rights of others to think like individuals and maybe see things differently than you do, and save the drama for your llama. We're all grown-ups, let's act like it. Please?

Thanks. Really and truly. Thank you to those of you who listen, and those of you who DO try to behave in a civilised fashion. We all lose our temper, we all have things we're passionate about; I'll admit that Autism and Asperger's are becoming pet causes of mine because of people I know who have dealt with or are dealing with these psychological, behavioral, and developmental factors. But the level that one person apparently HAD to escalate things to, without any reason or RIGHT to do so, especially in the manner in which it was done.....that made me think that, just to be sure we're all on the same page here, I needed to post the rules for a happy, freely-journaling me. Because unless I set the rules, I have to start keeping some things unposted, and be careful what I post in my own journal because I can't trust certain parties to be grown-ups about it. With rules clearly stated in an unlocked post that anyone can read, there's no excuse for a recurrence of this kind of problem, and I can feel a little more confident that I can post what I want or need to and trust everyone to behave themselves appropriately.

I'm exhausted. I'm still a pup by most standards at the tender age of 26, but I feel smegging OLD now, too old to deal with this BS. Drama-llamas will hereafter be fed to the Cheshire Cat.

Safely back in Louisville.

I has a sad. My favorite author since i was like 8 passed away this afternoon, and now I have nobody to liason for at Marcon. More as I learn it.

Just over an hour from Cincinnati. Weather sucks, Dad getting crabby and distracted but still won't let me take over driving. Should reach Louisville between 7 and 8.

It's snowing in Syracuse. So pretty. Tell me again why I have to go back to Kentucky?

About an hour from Syracuse. Some heavy snow around Buffalo, but no problems. Traffic remains agreeable.

Holy crap! Erie has snow!

On the road to Syracuse. I'll post again via text when we stop to refuel, update on the road conditions. It's just Dad and me. Mom's boss is a jackhole, but I'll get into that when i have a full keyboard.

Happy Birthday, the_surfacer!!! Love you, sweetie!

I Am Legend review. Cliff's Condensed: If you like the original short story, don't see the movie with anything like hope. If you haven't read Richard Matheson's original short story, but you have seen the movie, the original has little in common with the book except title, main character's name (but not details or personality), presence of a dog, and presence of a disease. If you've experienced neither, what I've just posted is less detailed than the film trailer or the synopsis of the story, and you need to read the book before you see the film if at all possible.
Film on it's own merits, not bad. Just pretend there was never a book it was supposedly based on. I think the screenwriters stopped at about a third to less than halfway through. Decent message, I guess, and not as purely a bomb as Omega Man, but still an Epic Fail in my accounting.
( spoilerific book rant to follow, click if you care )
Long story short, the movie is just what I was expecting, but not what I hoped, and nowhere near what it could have been. Crap.

they brought back American Gladiator?????

Hey gang. Just wanted to toss a quick PSA out here. Borders is teamed up with First Book again this winter, taking donations at the register thru (I'm pretty sure) the end of the year. You can round your purchase up to the next whole dollar and donate the change, or you can donate an amount of your choosing. It's cliche, but every little bit really does add up. First Book, for those of you who haven't heard, is an organisation that helps provide underpriveleged kids with books, many times giving a child the first book he or she has ever owned. Think back to your first book, or the first book you read all by yourself, or the first book that really affected you. It makes an incredible difference, and all it takes is pocket change. The best part is that the money donated stays in the communities in which it was donated.
I know I'm not the most kid-friendly person you'll ever meet, but more kids need to learn to love books, and this is a way to help put books in the hands of kids across the country, and spread the love of reading. So next time you're in your local Borders or Waldenbooks, just think about it, is all I'm really asking.
Thanks for listening, gang. /soapbox.

Stupid storm coverage interfering with my CSI...I need my 'ship fix!!!

A small bookshop, not a chain, but something that I can handle on my own, and decide what to carry, and have the liberty to tell obnoxious customers that they are in fact on my last nerve and to shape up or get lost.

Happy birthday, kaz!

Go Here: http://cluegirl.livejournal.com/880682.html
Follow the opt-out info. It's pretty self-explanatory.
I'm sick of having my privacy invaded, dammit.

More fun from the Psi Phi Columbus list:

150 Things I Am Not Allowed To Do At Hogwarts

I just have to share this...

click here!

I will forward all groans and threats to the person who emailed this to me in the first place.