Cimblog

Catriona McPherson’s After the Armistice Ball is the first in a series of mysteries starring 1920s Scottish gentlewoman Dandy Gilver and I give it and its sequel eight stars out of five. I simply can't recommend them highly enough. I'm a converted fan for life (knock on wood, unless she later says something racist on the internet...) and my immediate goal is to acquire lovely paper editions of everything she's ever written.( Read more... )

Her Royal Spyness by Rhys Bowen is the first in the series of the same name by a well-established award-winning British writer, starring an invented great-granddaughter of Queen Victoria who solves mysteries in 1930s Britain. ( Read more... )

... Presented as an Illustration of My Emotions and Viewing Habits Regarding Evil and Dead Lesbians

• The Sittaford Mystery ★ ★ ★ Neither evil nor dead, but arguably platonic ( Read more... )



• The Body in the Library ★ ★ Evil (and being dragged to the gallows), which is annoying but doesn't stop me watching. ( Read more... )



• A Murder Is Announced ★ Dead (not evil), which is where I draw the line. Now that I know, I won't watch. ( Read more... )

There's also Nemesis, but although I am fond of saying that ITV added incestuous dead lesbian nuns, it wouldn't make the above list because ( Read more... )

I will not boycott further rewatches of stories that happen to include evil or dead gay men in this manner, although there isn't a Christie adaptation that I can think of that includes the death of a gay man (there's off-screen, pre-episode gay partner death related to the plot in "The Moving Finger", but the character is never seen onscreen, he's just discreetly mourned by his surviving partner). But if it came up in passing in another crime show, for example, I wouldn't avoid the episode if I were otherwise inclined to rewatch.

In general, though, if I know in advance that the entire plot is about evil gay (or lesbian) people I will watch it, and if it's about dead gay men I will watch it, but if I know in advance that it is about dead lesbians I won't. Basically the line is anyone involved in a f/f relationship should survive.

I asked for some calligraphy stuff for the holidays from my mom, because as an art teacher, she has unparalleled access to and knowledge of art supplies and she also frequently gets them for free (and she's lost more of them in her house than exist in our entire flat).

Although drawing letters is okay and I have an enormous collection of free fonts that I don't do anything with (now that I no longer make icons or a layout for my website), I haven't ever had a particular interest in calligraphy until a few years ago when I bought a metallic gold pen with a flat calligraphy tip for the purpose of addressing Christmas gifts directly on the paper, thus eliminating bows, ribbons, and To/From stickers, all of which have irritated me for a long time in my role of present-wrapper. The necessary angled stance, though, as I was testing it out, made me think it would be a waste not to look at a visual reference, so I found a Chancery cursive font or something like that to copy. But of course, once starting a skill like that, you can't just stop right away. A small amount of practice made it clear how much more practice would be necessary to be deft at handling the flat tip. Then some googling turned up lots of lovely-looking letters that I wanted to try.

So now I'm the proud owner of two fountain pens, and the book on medieval quill lettering I picked up at the giftshop of the Medieval Museum in Stockholm has seen a lot of work. I still like Uncial lettering the best, so it's nice that it's the easiest for a beginner. I mean, I thought it was challenging, until I moved on to the Gothic page. A paragraph of lowercase blackletter "a" last night was so irritating to my mind and wrist that I had to put the paper away and take 400 mg of ibuprofen.

So far I'm just using an efficient, light German fountain pen with interior ink reservoirs, but I also got a dip pen with interchangeable brass tips, so I look forward to buying Chinese and Japanese ink sticks and making my own in the near future.

Also, I'm thinking about what to use for practice lettering, aside from the alphabet of course. Fanfiction, maybe. Or memes.

"X and Y are the guests of honor, but I don't know who they are," said my sister.

"I don't either, but I know I'm not interested in their work because they're both men," I said.

My dad said, "Yeah. And weren't all the other names on the list of guests men, too?"

(They were... except for one.)

Just a few hours ago: Finnish Parliament approves same-sex marriage

This law comes from a citizens' initiative (a petition) and makes Finland the last Nordic country to recognize same-sex marriages, to many people's embarrassment.

Wax and I call each other 'my wife', but we got married in Iowa and went through the usual process for getting approval of a foreign marriage, that is, submitted paperwork to a judge, who issued the decision that our Iowan marriage's "closest equivalent" was the Finnish registered partnership (which didn't actually convey all the legal benefits, just most of them).

The article says that the details won't be ironed out before 2015, so I wonder if our status will undergo an automatic conversion then, or we'll have to do something. Of course even if it's automatic, Wax and I already went through a lot more trouble and expense than, say, my Thai classmate who met her Finnish husband via an online dating site and got married after one short visit each.

If a Finnish citizen is engaged married (or in a registered partnership with) a non-EU citizen, their fiancé(e) spouse can get a family member visa - they can work and receive Finnish social services, and don't need proof of income (ETA: though pierydys and her husband had to prove cohabitation when she moved here as a fiancée, so although it is possible to get a fiancé(e) visa it's got a lot of requirements and counts as a special case).

On the other hand, we lesbians could only get a Finnish registered partnership, or a family member's visa, if we could prove we had already lived together for two years (though that isn't the case anymore apparently). In order to meet this requirement, one of us had to get permission to live in the other's country for that time. Getting a green card is literally like winning the lottery, so it was a lot easier for that to be me.

I applied directly to a Finnish university, which required reading up for an entrance exam that I flew to Finland to take at my parents' expense, and once I was accepted I got a student visa, but that required me to submit proof that I had €6000 in a Finnish bank account at the beginning of each school year. (Also students can't take jobs beyond a certain number of hours and don't get social security, though their healthcare is covered by the student union.)

After two years, I was automatically eligible for a family member visa because the government had a record of our cohabiting and considered us common-law married. So our Iowan marriage, years after that, didn't change anything in our daily lives, although we would have had the opportunity to change our names or something I think.

But the barriers to our relationship were costly and complicated, and we wouldn't have managed it without some €12000+ from my parents (a gay tax that would be good to refund to them given the current economic crisis), a ton of paperwork, and support from waxjism's brother, mother, and even her brother's best friend and sister-in-law's sister, both of whom gave me places to crash when waxjism was still living with her homophobic granny for economic reasons and I was banned from the house.

I can think of three gay Finnish celebrities who are married to foreigners, but I don't know a single other gay couple that's half foreign... and, as the Finnish teachers I've seen in the past couple of years will tell you, the majority of immigrants in Finnish language classes are here because of love: married either to Finns, or to spouses who are working here. That's a lot of immigrants and a looooooooooooooot of heterosexual relationships with Finns.

Apparently third time's the charm! My third attempt at spaghetti sauce is definitely the best yet. I sweated the onions in butter, added olive oil and a cube of veggie bouillon, then two cans crushed tomatoes, a can of tomato puree, around 4 deciliters red wine, a bay leaf, and about a tablespoon of sugar. Simmered for thirty minutes and seasoned with basil, oregano, rosemary and a dash of chili powder.

I still haven't got around to trying it with white wine though. That's next.

Reading a variant of Undercover as Gay where the POV character is gung-ho on the idea and pushing the Romantic Interest, who is obviously wary. It only works as a rom-com of misunderstanding because of dramatic irony, particularly the fanon that Romantic Interest has been in unrequited love with POV character for years, and that interpretation makes it obvious to the reader that his wariness is to do with giving himself away.

But it doesn't really make POV character's behavior okay and wouldn't even if he did share that understanding. All you have to do is flip it and imagine the reticent character to be a romantically UNinterested woman to see how gross it is:

"You MUST accept me going undercover as your romantic partner and all that that entails, even though that wasn't what you signed up for when you agreed to the assignment, because I must PROTECT you! Your discomfort is unfortunate and I'm understanding about it, but we just have to push past it for your own good, because it wouldn't be SAFE to go undercover without making sure we've practiced dating/overnighting together!"

It's possible that I am slightly overstating the degree of pushiness involved. He has checked the Romantic Interest's comfort level verbally and promised to let R.I. control the level of intimacy. BUT the internal narration is very concerned with his sensitivity to the subtle signs of R.I.'s discomfort (no doubt because he has to eventually correctly decipher its real cause) and his internal attitude to it is self-righteous. He never even considers that shoving his way into the assignment like that wasn't the morally right and logically necessary thing to do.