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Gah.

Here, have some shiny.

Near where I live, there's a beautiful Fair Trade shop which sells all sorts of goodies, including coffee and chocolate. I just wish they had more of those Indonesian skull carvings...

I like to say it was in a knife fight. (You should have seen the other guy...)

But in actual reality, I was playing tag in the bushes when I was six. I got pushed and triped. I stick went up under the eye and around to the back. It destroyed some of the arteries and the nerve. Amazinly enough it didn:t actually go into the eye itself.

I got an artificial eye when I was 21 (the last year it could go on my parents insurance).

Alas, c`est la vie. I am over it, it is you with vision in two eyes that are the weird ones...

Leto

S'alright, Sedriface - you're such an avid anti-slasher I can see why you'd forget.

Thing is, I'm not entirely sure that Ansela's right in the original post, when she says she's seen a lot of anti-het slashers and anti-slash, er, hetters? The best slash usually has some het in there too, and that doesn't bother us slashers in the least. Sure, I tell her off for writing smelly het, but it's mostly a joke born of my defensiveness about slash. And the defensiveness comes in part from the inequality; no one minds a bit of het on the side in their slash, but people get very vocal about not wanting the slightest hint of slash in their het.

This is mostly because I dislike romance fics as a whole, and whenever I see a summary that includes either slash or yaoi (how on earth do you pronounce that, anyway?), I always get the impression that said fic is entirely about the slash*. Which, to me, is boring and likely to involve canon rape (as is shipping in general). I know this isn't always the case, but I don't want to wade through the 999 pieces of crap to find the single gem.

*This applies to yuri as well, but it's a lot less common.

Have a sack of pebbles, your own sling and a basket of Bleeprin-berries!

But I'm a lover of romance before I'm a lover of yaoi. I love canon het couples, and ship them with a burning. I'll admit I do prefer slash (both femme and male), I suppose because I find the dynamique a bit interesting, and it's not something I'm exposed to very often in RL. I can see het couples whenever I want. Also, I'll be honest. It's hot.

That said, I do write and ship het just as much as I do slash. Most of my RP pairings are het, I write both in fanfic, and I'll d'awwww over Sakura/Syaoran just as much as I do Touya/Yukito. So long as I can believe the pairing, I'll ship anything.

When it comes to the NC-17 stuff, I prefer slash to het. Maybe because I am more detatched from it, somehow. I don't know.

And so ends my ramble.

Why can you only see in one eye?

Did anyone with brains vote for them? After all, organic food is simply expensive food. Absolutely nothing is special about it. Besides, look at the name. Organic? No species on Earth can eat inorganic food, you cretins in power!

... reported himself for the crime of being an accomplice after the fact because he had eaten chocolate that he could reasonably assume was produced with slave labour. The court replied they couldn't handle his case.

He did take action for the production of slave-free chocolate, which is available in the Netherlands at Fair Trade shops, and lots of other places that sell chocolate.

The wiki-artikel (in Dutch)

I think you ought to start some kind of flag-waving group for Good Slash. Every time this sort of discussion comes up, the notion of Good Slash tends to be forgotten, and you're right - that's wrong. Looking back at my own post, I should have said something along those lines, and didn't. Bad me.

Sorry, Pads.

I can't honestly say it's the only sort I eat, but I do eat it a lot.

I was going to link it to Orange, but I couldn't find it for the life of me. Thanks for the save.

Any takers?

Three weeks? Now that is impressive.

Mind you, ours don't tend to be loitering for very long between being called and actually occurring. This may be because the government has this little habit of waiting until public opinion is in their favour and then calling an election for as soon as humanly possible, lest things swing the other way in the interim.

Having reread that, I have had an epiphany.

I really dislike the Happy AU Where Everyone Is Straight.

Unfortunately, practically all het falls into this category.

I feel it may be time to point out, in response to a notion more than one people have hinted at subscribing to, that there is such a thing as Good Slash.

Some people, it seems (whether here or in IMs on the topic), object to the fact that slash pairings simply aren't canonical, or that in slash canonical pairings are disregarded, or even that to make a character non-straight is to make them wildly OOC. I invite all of these people to check the standard DBS charge list.

If slash is Good Slash, then canonical het pairings are acknowledged. If a canonical het pairing stands in the way of a slash pairing, then in Good Slash the het relationship will be dissolved via a well structured and well written plot, with all due care and respect paid to the source material. Given that the whole point of fanfiction is to alter aspects of canon, I see no problem here.

"But they're canonically straight" is one I'm not touching right now, because it's been done to death, and it's the insistence upon the heteronormative status quo inherent in that statement that, in part, drives me to slash.

And finally, the OOC thing. In Good Slash, the characters are not out of character. This is because Good Slash is, by definition, well written slash, and well written fic keeps the characters in character.

So, bearing all this in mind, and seconding Trojie's point that the Happy AU Where Everyone Is Gay is a great big cross on the "Bad" side of the equation, I can't see any reason for objection to slash pairings in fiction. If a fic's solely about the pairing, and that pairing's not your cup of tea, fair play, but some slash on the side, for the sake of realism? Who could object to that?

Oh, and while we're at it, is it time to borrow ffr's standard disclaimer: "Except in Torchwood"? Because anyone objecting to slash fic in that fandom is clearly not watching the same show as the rest of us.

Just a side note - anyone googling there might do better to try "Darfur conflict" or "war in Darfur". Only the US government's calling it a genocide.

Did you know that most chocolate companies get their cocoa from slave plantations in Africa? Well, now you know. They do. Huge amounts of child labor.

There's genocide going on in the Sudan. That, there's not a lot we can do about, other than educate people, raise hell until it's stopped. (Check it out as soon as you get a chance, though-- Google "Darfur Genocide.") The AIDS emergency is sweeping the continent of Africa, killing hundreds of thousands of women and children. Malaria kills huge amounts of people on its own; famine is another huge problem.

All of these, Americans can honestly say we are not actively contributing to. (English, Aussies, Germans, etc. I mean first-world countries in general; as an American, it's easier for me to talk about my country, and my countrymen, and I also feel like less of a hypocrite getting on a soapbox.) I mean, besides supporting China, which is funding the Darfur genocide... but that's neither here nor there. We didn't create civil war, or famine, or malaria, or AIDS, and other than support the organisations doing something and pray, what can we do? (there are things. but most people don't really want to be that involved, or don't care enough, or don't have the resources. but anyway.)

But there's something more. On the Western Coast of Africa (mostly Ghana and Cote d'Voire), there are slave plantations. And a lot of child labor. And I honestly mean slave labor. Not wage-slaves, not sweatshop-labor, (though both of those are also deplorable), but honest-to-goodness forced labor without pay in horrible living conditions, underfed, abused. And this is where most of the world's chocolate comes from.

Which means, in the end, that almost every chocolate bar you've ever had (there may be exceptions, but not a lot of them) has been produced by partly slave labor. It's impossible to tell whether or not a particular bar was produced by a plantation-- by the time the cocoa beans make it to the processing factory, it's impossible to trace them back.

What can you do?

1) DON'T BUY IT. Refuse to buy, or eat, chocolate from companies that use slave labor.
1A) Chocolate is not a necessity, whatever marketing has led you to believe. You will survive without M&Ms.
1B) If you refuse to pay for chocolate that has been produced by slave labor, you are sending the message that this is wrong, and you will not support it.
1C) There are other ways! Fair Trade chocolate is always bought from farmers at a fair price, meaning that their workers have fair conditions and they still make an actual profit.

2) Write to those who have influence! The companies themselves, whatever politicians you have influence (as a constituent) over, the upper-leaning officials of the company, the shareholders... whatever it takes.

3) SPREAD THE WORD. This is the most important thing you can do. Tell your friends, tell your family, tell your teachers, acquaintances, coworkers, tell everyone. Because, it may be idealistic of me, but I refuse to believe that more people than not would eat chocolate still if they knew where it came from.

Also, there's a facebook group here.
The list of fair-trade companies is here.

so I don:t get the effect anyways.

L

not because I wasn:t elegable, but because I wasn:t in the country.

I am not a fan of the American system, where the draw out the length of the voting period to practically over a year (waiste money much?). But Canada called an election and finished it all withing three weeks. Yes WEEKS. I didn:t even hear about the election until one week to it. There was absolutly no time for me to register and get a ballot in time for the dead line.

I was just glad that the out come was contrary to the PMs hopes. He saw it as a seat grabbing exersise, but in the end he lost a bunch. Then again, if he waited out the term maybe we would have gotten a different PM because enough people are sick of him now.

Just my two cents.

L

which is being written in between SW RP writing and my newly found appreciation for Firefly.

And regardless of how it's written, Tau are going to be the bad joke of the Football! 40k.

Walkers would be...forwards?

Sorry for the late post, but oh well. Yippee hurrah, another August birthday! Here, have a handheld vacuum cleaner!