verushka70

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So I turned 50 at the end of November.

( For reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, a major 50th celebration wasn't happening... )

Out of many photos of other people's phones in the dark with a spotlighted blur of Hugh, I *did* finally get 2 decent pics.

I am totally going to see Headstones next time they're in Buffalo. Or Niagara.

I was already a huge fan. Now I am a CONVERT to their live shows. And next time, I'm taking Ride_4ever with me!!

Also long overdue: recap of my 2017 ficcing... eventually. It was surprisingly productive despite months of PT/OT for lateral epicondylitis & carpal tunnel of the R forearm from Oct. 2016 through June 2017. I even Big Banged in addition to the dSSS. Go, me.

My sister sent this to me. One of her students sent it to her. It didn't really tell me anything I didn't already know... but it does spell it out in a nicely graphical way.

I actually began this in 2013. I worked on it more in 2014. It sat on my hard drive/cloud space since, and I periodically tweaked it over the years. I kept meaning to submit it to
http://older-not-dead.livejournal.com/ for an amnesty prompt, and kept forgetting. Remembered just the other day, July is an amnesty month over on http://older-not-dead.livejournal.com/, so I can post it! Yay.

~ ~ ~

TITLE: Ground Rules
AUTHOR: verushka70
FANDOM: Heat (1995)
PAIRING: Vincent Hanna/Neil McCauley
GENRE: Slash
PROMPT: Amnesty -- Promptathon 05: love & hate, ?. ?/?. Special chemistry
RATING: Explicit
WORD COUNT: 6023
SUMMARY:Vincent glances over his shoulder once as he pisses. He meets Neil's eyes in the mirror over the sinks. When he does, he sees it in Neil's eyes. He will know when the time is right. There will be some sign from Neil. Vincent can feel it.
WARNINGS:(Canonical) presence of guns and ammo, which are not used for violence in the story.
TAGS: Alternate Universe, Enemies to Lovers, First Time, Fix-It, Missing Scene
DISCLAIMER: This is fair use.
NOTES:Possibly our most iconic (and hottest) Italian-American actors, in the same movie, with an actual scene together (unlike The Godfather), with some lovely, subtle enemy slash? I was so there.

Ground Rules at AO3.

I don't usually do memes, but I saw Ride-4ever's and thought, what the hey, I'll try it. The results are pretty all-over-the-place, probably because they span across dS, TW, True Detective, Moonlight, the Vampire Diaries, and Longmire fanfics -- two of which are crossovers.


Damon had found it early on while lazily snooping among Elena’s things in her room for signs of the depth of Stefan’s infatuation.

When he comes home for Christmas from college and Walt calls him and says they should get dinner, Henry's heartbeat accelerates and he feels his face warm.

They spend more time on the Rez than in Durant because the Rez is somewhat more tolerant and slightly less suspicious or panicked by one white boy on their land than whites are by a lone Indian boy.

It's dusk but there is still enough light to track and a full moon is on the rise.

They are chasing and tackling each other, then "wrassling" (as Walt's mother puts it) until one or the other gives in, buzzing with teen hijinks and the general good humor Walt exhibits more the farther from home he is.

The pounding on his door this close to sunrise startled Josef.

It was late, but Josef's vampire companions – the “up all night” party atmosphere – had eased Mick's discomfort with himself.

"There is a reason to have locks on doors," Henry murmurs.

Ray’s tiredness and color lately alarms Fraser.

Henry has done what he could to interrupt Walt's workaholic isolation, cautiously and platonically -- dropping off food, cajoling Walt to go hunting or fishing or just riding through the Bighorns.

Her hair was not wild and thick.

“You clear my schedule for the next hour?”

"That breakfast buffet was the only reason to go to that opening address, and it wasn't even good," Ray muttered, looking at the schedule of speakers, seminars, and breakout sessions for the next two days of the conference.

They get to wherever in the sticks of the bayou they're supposed to be.

It was one thing to be a rookie.

Exhausted from lacrosse practice, Stiles climbs the stairs up to his room slowly, his bookbag feeling like a ton of bricks.

"I'm telling you, they're natural enemies, Fraser," Ray grumbled from the couch, watching Dief walk over to Turtle's tank.

The failure of previous relationships to turn out like he'd hoped (let alone their tendency to turn out disastrously) has taught Derek to have exactly zero expectations from any encounter with anyone.

It is not Stiles' fault if he notices everything.

Tonight Ray will do it.

So I finally watched Suicide Squad on my HBO-only cable& internet subscription.

So...
( Harley Quinn's deepest desire is... SPOILERS )

So yesterday on my break, an African-American co-worker asked my opinion on something. She asked what I thought "bromance" meant.

I told her as far as I knew it was from reviews of the first Hangover movie, and it means 'male besties.' (I later found out I am wrong; it actually dates back to the 1990s, according to Wikipedia.) I also said it has been applied to things like Brokeback Mountain (I had read that in more than a few articles about BBM, though I felt that was an incorrect usage; the point of "bromance" is that it's nonsexual).

She explained that her 12th grade son's teacher described him, in front of his entire class, as being in a 'bromance' with his best friend. This led to all his classmates teasing him relentlessly about being gay ('you know, in our culture, that's not acceptable,' she told me), until one kid took it too far, which culminated in a fistfight with her son.

The fistfight unfortunately occurred at a time when some inspection of the school was happening, and the inspectors observed it, which reflected badly on the school. Now the school wants to suspend and possibly expel him.

She mentioned her son is on the honor roll and she thinks this is really unfair, given that it was the teacher's comment that started the whole thing. He is getting harassed on social media too, she added. She said she tried talking to the principal, who blew her off, saying her son shouldn't have taken it the way he did (and didn't address the fact that the other kids also took it that way. The principal said two of the male teachers in the school have also been described as in a "bromance" and didn't take offense. She asked me what I thought, what she could do.

I asked her [which was my immediate first guess]: Was it a white teacher who said it?
She said, Yes.

I said, Well, that would explain why this all happened. Try to explain to them that it means a different thing in white culture than in black culture, and due to the cultural differences, this teacher's statement had a negative social impact for your son, to the point that he is being teased and harassed constantly about it. And it sounds like the school is retaliating for your son's fight happening at the same time as the inspection, making the school look bad. If it had not happened at that time, would they be this harsh? She said she didn't know, but she though not.

I said I know teens take stuff to heart and are really sensitive, and combined with the cultural difference in the meaning, it's clear all his classmates took it the same way he did, which she should bring to the attention of the people she has to talk to. In other words, it's NOT just her son who interpreted "bromance"="gay", but his peers do, too.

We both lamented how stubborn and sensitive teens are, and she worried out loud that this would derail the progress he's made (it's only his 2nd year at this school - they moved into district last year).

She said she would try using the cultural difference angle in her last resort to try to avoid her son getting suspended or expelled: talking to a board member.

I personally think it was kind of inappropriate for the teacher to use the term "bromance" anyway because of the possible connotations it could have, in any culture. However, I'm sure she didn't mean it in a negative way. But it's not just what you say but how it comes across, and maybe it was culturally insensitive of the teacher, though I have to say, I was unaware that African-Americans interpret "bromance" to mean "gay" until this conversation. But I can see why people from any culture might perceive it that way -- it's got the word "romance" in it.

I'm fully aware if you said it to most white adult males they would likely not be bothered. However, I wonder if teenaged white boys would feel differently and interpret it as "gay," too.

Adolescence is such a terrible time of caring so much what other people think of you, first and foremost your peers.

But I'm wondering what other people think. Does "bromance" have a culture-bound meaning/interpretation? or an age-related meaning/interpretation?

What do you think?

A friend sent me the link to this fascinating article ("Even good bots fight" on PLoS One) on bot behavior from Oxford researchers. I had no idea how embedded online bot activity is. The sheer volume of their activity is almost frightening: responsible for some 24% of Tweets in 2009; 54% of online ad campaigns in 2012 and 2013 were viewed by bots (which I'm sure advertisers didn't take into account, lol).

From the intro to the PLoS article:
"...bots have been responsible for an increasingly larger proportion of activities on the Web. For example, one study found that 25% of all messages on Yahoo! chat over a period of three months in 2007 were sent by spam bots [9]. Another study discovered that 32% of all tweets made by the most active Twitter users in 2009 were generated by bots [10], meaning that bots were responsible for an estimated 24% of all tweets [11]. Further, researchers estimated that bots comprise between 4% and 7% of the avatars on the virtual world Second Life in 2009 [12].

A media analytics company found that 54% of the online ads shown in thousands of ad campaigns in 2012 and 2013 were viewed by bots, rather than humans [13]. According to an online security company, bots accounted for 48.5% of website visits in 2015 [14]. Also in 2015, 100,000 accounts on the multi-player online game World of Warcraft (about 1% of all accounts) were banned for using bots [15]. And in the same year, a database leak revealed that more than 70,000 “female” bots sent more than 20 million messages on the cheater dating site Ashley Madison [16]. "

And you thought all they did was spam you with Viagra, foreign pharmacy, and upfront-fee phishing scams!
( more about bot behavior, including culturally distinct online environment bot behavior )

So I ficced some more in January... I'm trying to hang on to that momentum.

~ ~ ~

(Not Quite) Roughing It (on AO3)
Fandoms: Longmire (TV)

Slash - Walt Longmire/Henry Standing Bear
Characters - Walt Longmire, Henry Standing Bear, The Ferg (Longmire), Victoria "Vic" Moretti,
Tags - Affection, Nature, Camping

Teen And Up Audiences, No Warnings Apply

Summary: They stare into the fire, tucked snugly against each other despite layers and jackets. Their arms tighten around each other. Henry looks up at the inky, moonless sky, millions of bright stars hemmed in only by the dark silhouettes of the tree tops around them and the mountains beyond.

Words: 2,549

(Not Quite) Roughing It (on AO3)
Fandoms: Longmire (TV)

~ ~ ~

A Suitable Alternative by verushka70
Fandoms: due South
Slash - Benton Fraser/Ray Kowalski
Characters - Diefenbaker, Benton Fraser, Ray Kowalski
Alternate Universe - Vampire, Community: ds_snippets | dsc6dsnippets

Explicit, No Warnings Apply

Summary: “Take it.” Ray shoves his wrist higher under Fraser’s nose, the scent of his blood enticing. “Your eyes -- you're fanged out –- drink!”

Words: 298

A Suitable Alternative (on AO3)

~ ~ ~

Finally, Goran Višnjić: So I've been watching Timeless... and, wow, guh, hot older 40 man. Like, Tyler Hoechlin-ish (almost complete with the eyes, though they don't light his eyes properly to highlight their strange color), but almost 20 yrs older. HOT. I'll have to go back and watch all the ER eps I never saw him in because after I became an RN I stopped watching all medical shows because everything is so medically inaccurate 99% of the time and MDs are continually shown doing stuff they never do which is almost always done by RNs (like administering chemo, drawing blood, starting IVs, chest compressions, giving resuscitation meds... I could go on... sure, the doctor orders the meds or whatnot and intubates the patient for resuscitation, but RNs will keep you alive until he/she gets you intubated).

But supposedly ER had an RN consultant for accuracy. So I might give it a shot now. Because Goran is muy caliente. I think the first thing I saw Goran in was Practical Magic with Sandra Bullock and Nicole Kidman, but even though he was hot in that, he was also violent and creepy. Maybe I should've watched more ER -- it had some critical
acclaim, iirc -- but I was too busy watching ST:TNG, X-Files, and BTVS (not to mention Forever Knight and due South in the 90s), lol.

Prime-time medical soap opera wasn't on my radar... if it's not scifi or supernatural, I gravitate to cop shows, it seems -- or vampire cop shows, lol, since slightly more than a decade after Forever Knight was cancelled, Moonlight came along with Jason Dohring and Alex O'Loughlin both playing vampires. Ironically, Moonlight was the first thing I saw
Abigail Spencer in, and now she is a lead character on Timeless, which is the show that has rekindled my lust for Goran Višnjić.

FULL CIRCLE! \o/ My ADD brain <3s that.

If you're undecided about going to the protest in your city/area Saturday 1/21, read this.

This is not political, it is personal.

I've been to several protests in my adult life: more than many people; way, way less than some.

I'm pushing 50 and I still go to protests sometimes. This is one of those times.

From past experience, I know when I attend a protest, I will:

1) feel BETTER!
2) SEE that I AM NOT ALONE!
3) take ACTION/avoid passivity (and the hopelessness that goes with it)!
4) feel HOPE!
5) be with a lot of like-minded people!
6) feel COMFORTED by the SHEER NUMBERS of like-minded people!
7) be INSPIRED and AWESTRUCK at the COLLECTIVE ACTION!
8) COUNT AS ONLY ONE AMONG MANY (hundreds, thousands, maybe tens of thousands)!
9) BE HEARD and IN THEIR FACE and MAKE THEM DEAL WITH ME/US!
10) EXERCISE my damn CONSTITUTIONAL RIGHTS TO ASSEMBLE AND TO FREE SPEECH!

There is nothing like the awesome, hopeful, energized, and (perhaps unexpectedly/oddly) patriotic emotions you feel when you and tons of other like-minded people take over the streets of your city or your capitol.

It's one thing to know abstractly you're not alone; SEEING you are not alone is UPLIFTING!

HEARING hundreds or thousands of people chanting, throwing your voice in with theirs, is GALVANIZING!

It is almost tribal in a way and it is AWESOME! You feel a kind of "social high" from collective activity with other people.

Everyone agrees on the protest issue, so everyone is friendly, supportive, and nice to each other!

You'll see and meet a ton of cool people, maybe make new friends and/or run into old ones!

So if you're undecided, do the thing that will make you feel better: MARCH. PROTEST. Make your voice HEARD.

You will literally feel better, psychologically and physically.

You really will.

And you'll know you aren't alone.