I finally saw the new Superman this afternoon and I enjoyed it a lot! The casting was exceptionally good - Nicholas Hoult was the best Lex Luthor since Rosenbaum, and I thought Fillion was just the right amount of bumptious asshole as Guy Gardner. (Do I wish we could get John Stewart in a live action movie? Yes. But I'm still so glad they didn't go with boring Hal Jordan.)
The writing for Clark was great and he and Lois had fantastic chemistry. Mr. Terrific was indeed terrific! Plus KRYPTO!!! ( spoilers )
I’ve been called, “the most trusted stranger in America” and it’s been written that no other living person has seen more secrets than me. I don’t know if either of those claims is true, but I do know I don’t get to see all the secrets – I have a daughter.
Years ago, I was driving her and a friend in the back seat of my car. As we rolled along my daughter’s friend asked me out of the blue, “Mr. Warren, can I tell you a secret?” He had no idea I’m something of a world-class expert on secrets.
Because I know how explosive some secrets can be, I take it very seriously when someone trusts me with something they’ve never told anyone before. But in this case, I may have overreacted. Silently, I pulled the car over to the side of the road.
I stopped, put the car in park, and turned to face him directly. “I want you to feel free to tell me anything…” I began, my voice serious, “…but if your secret could cause someone harm, I might need to involve a parent or teacher.” A flicker of fear crossed his face. For a moment, I thought he might bolt out the door.
“Never mind.” he said.
After a PostSecret Event in Boston, the college student who had worked hard to organize it – and her father – gave me a ride back to my hotel. The night was cold and wet as her father navigated his Pontiac Vibe through the empty streets.
The three of us talked about the courageous audience members who, earlier that night, had walked up to a microphone and shared a secret from their life for the first time publicly. We recounted some of their tragic, hopeful, and shocking confessions. “Remember the retired religious studies professor who confessed to delivering some of her lectures while she was high?” I said with a smile.
As we continued down the dark streets, the heater was blowing hard on me in the passenger seat and my eyelids were getting heavy. Just before nodding out, the young woman behind me started talking about her brother with her father. It was a personal conversation about a painful and unresolved part of their family history.
“Dad, there’s something about that time I’ve never told you before.” “Oh shit,” I thought to myself as I stayed motionless. I’m not supposed to be here. “Even though I never admitted it when we were all hurting, I always knew you were right.” She said.
Her father rolled slowly to a stop at a red light and looked in the rearview mirror at his daughter with eyes full of emotion. “I have a secret I’ve been keeping from you too. Remember that CD I gave you afterward with all the songs? Each one was about you.”
“I always knew that Dad. That’s why I can’t listen to it without crying.” She said.
The first time I told my Mom what I was doing with PostSecret, soliciting secrets from strangers and sharing them publically, she called the idea “diabolical”. My Father wasn’t so quick to judge, but said my project sounded “voyeuristic”. I didn’t disagree with him, but I did feel disappointed that he couldn’t see the beauty in it too.
Over the following months, when PostSecret came up during our phone calls, I tried to explain to my Dad why PostSecret was special and meaningful to me. How this anonymous but intimate communication between strangers could reveal that each of us has a secret that could break your heart. How secrets can illuminate deep connections between us that go unseen in our everyday lives.
Two years after collecting my first secret on the streets of Washington, DC, I had received over 250,000. I strung up 2,000 of the postcards at an exhibition in Georgetown. Visitors could walk among the suspended secrets reading the confessions and seeing the emotions on the faces of strangers doing the same thing.
Hundreds of people circulated through that first day and my wife and daughter were there to experience it with me. However, my wife had been keeping her own secret from me. She bought a ticket for my Father to fly out from Arizona to join us. He surprised me the next day and sat with me at the exhibition day after day for a week. Together, we saw thousands of people come face-to-face with secrets and heard many of their soulful stories.
The time came for my father to return home so I drove him to catch his redeye flight. The highway to Dulles Airport was long and dark with little overhead lighting. We could hear the tires rolling along the smooth pavement as we sat alone with our thoughts. My father turned to me and broke the silence by saying, “Hey Frank, you want to hear my secret?”
Before I could answer, he told me a tragic story from his childhood. Something I had never known. It broke my world open. By the time we reached the airport, my relationship with my father had been recast. I helped him with his luggage and as I watched him walk away from the car I thought. “That’s it.” That’s the beauty of PostSecret.
Fandom: Sherlock (BBC) Pairings/Characters: Sherlock/John Rating: Teen Length: 2007 words + companion stories Creator Links:waketosleep Theme: Marriage of convenience
Summary:
"We should really get married."
John stared at the red mark on his wrist. "I'm sorry, what?"
Reccer's Notes: I almost never revisit this fandom, but when I recced waketosleep's Trek story for this theme, it came to my attention that w2s was a little obsessed with marriages of convenience and had a fantastic and charming gem of a fic where Sherlock co-opts John's life (again), and John (again) doesn't mind at all.
I don't know if I've ever seen hospital access as a reason for a marriage of convenience, but I am here for it! It's practical and a little grim, typical of Sherlock. The interactions between Sherlock and John are spot on and hilarious. In 2000 words, we also get Mrs Hudson, Lestrade, and Mycroft, all contributing to the comedy gold in their understated way.
This story belongs to two different series. The Intellectual Intercourse series is the easiest way to navigate everything if you want to read beyond this fic.
Today I finished book #11 on the "Women in Translation" rec list:Concerning My Daughter by Kim Hye-Jin, translated from Korean by Jamie Chang. This book is about an a widow in her mid-70s who ends up sharing a home with her adult daughter and her daughter's partner. Her contentious relationship with her daughter pits her long-held beliefs and societal viewpoints against her love for her child; simultaneously, she struggles in her job caring for an elderly dementia patient in a nursing home.
The protagonist is a person who values, above all, keeping your head down and doing what's expected of you. She does not believe in standing out; she does not believe in involving yourself in other people's problems; perhaps for these reasons, she believes the only people you can ever count on are family. This is how she's lived her whole life, and she believes it was for the best. However, this mindset puts her directly in conflict with her daughter, a lesbian activist who is fighting for equal employment treatment for queer professors and teachers in the South Korean educational system.
When her daughter, Green, runs out of money to pay rent after a quarrel with the university where she was lecturing, the protagonist allows Green and her partner Lane to move in, despite their fractious relationship.
The young narrator of this tale leaves his job herding cattle to find his father, and learns that his father was murdered after a night of successful gambling. ( Read more... )
Migrant labor sustains U.S. agriculture. It is essential and constant. Yet the people who do the work remain hidden. That invisibility is not just social. It is spatial. Employers tuck housing behind groves, set it far off the road, or place it on private land behind locked gates. These sites are hard to reach. They are also hard to leave.
As a paralegal at my stepmother’s immigration law firm in Metro Detroit, I met with many migrant workers who described the places they were housed. They worked long days in fields or orchards, often six or seven days a week, and returned to dormitories built far from town. The stories stayed with me. They worked in extreme heat and came back to shared spaces without privacy, comfort, or dignity. Workers are placed in dorms with shared beds and tight quarters. Bathrooms are communal. Kitchens are often bare.
A bedroom for migrant farmworkers at the Nightingale facility in Rantoul, Ill., in July 2014. Credit: Photo by Darrell Hoemann/Midwest Center for Investigative Reporting. Used with permission.
Images help tell this story. Photographs from North Carolina and California show identical cabins in rows. Inside are narrow beds, small windows, and not enough space to stretch. These photos are more than documentation. They are evidence. They show us what it looks like to build a system that erases the people who keep it running.
Migrant agricultural worker’s family in Nipomo, California, 1936. The mother, age 32, sits with three of her seven children outside a temporary shelter during the Great Depression. Credit: Photo by Dorothea Lange. Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress. Public domain.
Sociology gives us a framework to see that this is not just bad housing structure. It is a structural problem. When the employer controls housing, every complaint becomes a risk. Speaking up may not only cost your job, it also means losing your bed and risking forcible deportation. The design limits autonomy and keeps people quiet. The fewer choices a person has, the easier it is to control them.
In sociology, conflict theory starts with a simple idea: society develops and changes based on struggles over power and resources. In the case of migrant labor, that struggle is visible in the very organization of housing. Henri Lefebvre argued that space is socially produced. Social production means that space is shaped by those who have authority to determine how people live. This is not driven by comfort, fairness, or function. The arrangement and social production of space reflects the interests of those and control. The shape of a room, the distance between houses, and the layout of a building are not random. They reflect relationships.
Similarly, Michel Foucault shows how institutions use architecture to enforce discipline. In migrant housing, space signals control. These dorms do not need bars or guards. The buildings are made to meet the minimum legal standard for shelter. That standard is barely above what is allowed for a prison cell. The architecture dehumanizes, and in doing so, it controls.
I saw this firsthand. A worker told me his bunk was so close to the next that he could hear every breath of the man above him. His wife told me there were rules about visitors, meals, and noise. They could not live together, even though they were married. They felt monitored. They were afraid to speak. These homes were not theirs. The system made sure of that.
Sociology gives us the language to name what is happening. This is not a housing crisis. It is a labor strategy. These camps are not temporary accidents. They are long-term solutions to a problem no one wants to fix. As scholars and citizens, we should bring these designs to light. We cannot change what we do not see.
Joey Colby Bernert is a statistician and licensed clinical social worker based in Michigan. She is a graduate student in public health at Michigan State University and studies feminist theory, intersectionality, and the structural determinants of health.
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis Characters/Pairings: John Sheppard/Rodney McKay, Patrick Sheppard, Ronon Dex, Teyla Emmagan Rating: M Length: 11,758 Content Notes: no AO3 warnings apply Creator Links:WonkyElk on AO3, cookiemom6067 on AO3, cookiemom6067 on the Audiofic Archive Themes: Marriage of Convenience, First time, Hurt/comfort, Complete AU
Summary: “Damn it, John, you’re thirty-six, and you’ve never had a stable relationship.”
Patrick Sheppard adjusted his tie and gave him that familiar look, that 'I’m trying to love you, son, but you just keep on disappointing me’ expression, which had started somewhere around John’s eleventh or twelfth birthday - just as soon as he got an ounce of healthy rebellion - and had rarely left his dad’s face since.
Reccer's Notes: Ronon plays matchmaker in this marriage of convenience, recommending Rodney to John, who's undertaking the marriage mostly to piss off his father, but also to strengthen his place in the company hierarchy. Rodney seems the perfect spouse to annoy Patrick Sheppard, being brash, and, most importantly, male. But then it turns out they get on remarkably well, and eventually Rodney encourages John to be himself, not continue to try to please his (impossible to please) father. There's angst, character development, romance, and some action/adventure, until they work it out. An excellent read!
Fandom: Smallville Pairings/Characters: Clark/Lex Rating: Explicit Length: 16,262 Creator Links:lenore Theme: Marriage of convenience
Summary: Clark’s illegal, and Lex makes him a green card proposal.
Reccer's Notes: Here with another Smallville rec! This time, it's Clark who, ostensibly, needs to get married because he has no social security number, no legit adoption papers. Lex is the mayor of Metropolis in this story, and Clark is a reporter at the Daily Planet. Lex knows the secret of Clark's/Superman's identity, and he doesn't want to be the bad guy who has to deport a beloved superhero. Solution: marriage!
What I love about this story is how absolutely befuddled Clark is by Lex's proposal and the actuality of the marriage. It's SO CLARK. Lenore touches on another of my favorite Clark traits, which is his loneliness and his inability to sustain a relationship because of his secret. I don't recall the story explicitly stating Clark's age, but I think he's in his late twenties, maybe almost thirty. Those added years give more emotional weight to the (of course) eventual romance and falling in love.
Lois and the Kents feature in the narrative, and it never fails to delight me when Lois makes coffee or Mr. Kent talks farming with Lex.
Fanwork Links:Red Tape. This story was originally posted on LJ/Smallville Slash Archive and later moved to AO3, which resulted in a duplication. I was told by the author that this is the correct version.
Fandom: Red White and Royal Blue (RWRB) Characters/Pairing/Other Subject: Alex/Henry Content Notes/Warnings: not really NSFW, but naked torsos, even if disguised by sparkles Medium: digital art Artist on DW/LJ: n/a Artist Website/Gallery:shirmirart on tumblr Why this piece is awesome: A RWRB version of the popular pic of gay dancers, complete with barely-there crowns and glitter. Sappy, but beautifully done. Link:heavy is the head that wears the crown
i did it all for the robins (musesfool) wrote2025-08-1309:22 pm
I'm off work tomorrow and Friday - I have my annual eye exam tomorrow (they have sent me about 17 requests to confirm and I have each time but wtf) and I decided to just take Friday off for a long weekend - so I logged off work at 4:30 and ended up taking a long nap. I woke up to an intense thunderstorm with a truly shocking (pun intended) amount of lightning.
My brother had hip replacement surgery this morning and it went well - he is home already!
Baby Miss L loved the books - especially the Pete the Kitty goes to preschool one and I got adorable videos of her "reading" it.
Speaking of books, I did indeed finish the last 3 books of Dungeon Crawler Carl over the weekend and I was incensed that book 7 was not the end - there are supposedly 3 more books coming to wrap things up and ugh, I hate having to wait. This write-up on tumblr (vague spoilers for the whole series, as an enticement to read the books) is a great summary of why you should read it and then come talk to me about it. I am not even a cat person and I love Princess Donut! There is a wide array of female characters! There is a lot of gory violence and an unfortunate amount of fatphobia (i.e., any), but the anti-capitalist rage is real. I just hope Dinniman can stick the landing.
1984 by George Orwell (reread, but first read nearly 40 years ago, so.) This book requires a great deal of suspension of disbelief; it's more of an allegory of fascism, an exaggerated cartoon version, than it is actual fascism. But that's the point, I think. It's the authoritarian nightmare writ very very large, and I hope that enough people are reading it now to be scared into fighting the authoritarian nightmare which is slowly establishing its tentacles across the US. (And that they don't get so chilled by the downer ending that they believe that it's impossible to fight...)
A few things stood out to me about this book written in 1949. First, it's interesting that ideology isn't actually important here; the object is to amass and retain power, and I think that's true of our current regime. Second is the importance of stamping out every bit of creativity and independent thought, even getting rid of words describing creativity and independence, such that even the books and songs produced by the government are created by computers (cough AI cough) and lightly edited by humans. Very prescient and chilling! And of course the thing that brings this book to mind and has put it on so many contemporary reading lists is the idea of editing information about the past to bring it in line with what the government wants people to believe - which is what the regime is attempting now.
I mostly enjoyed it (if "enjoyed" is the correct word) though the protagonist's view of women was a bit madonna/whoreish, kind of weird, and I wondered how much it reflected the author's feelings. (However, it's obvious to me that the in-universe view of Jews is very clearly intended to be part of the throughline connecting to Nazism, so I am not sure why I feel more uncomfortable about the portrayal of women.) Also there's a whole section in the middle which is a lengthy quote from a purported book by Goldstein, the leader of the Resistance, and that's just ugh boring clunky exposition in the middle of what is for the most part powerful prose. But otherwise, I'm glad I read it again, in these times, where we are led by small men who want to amass power for power's sake, and be cruel for cruelty's sake, and put their boots on everybody's faces.
What I'm reading now:
My hold on the third Emily Wilde book by Heather Fawcett came in at the library, so I'm reading Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales. The beginning was terribly confusing but I'm starting to get into it.
What I recently finished watching:
We finished Arcane, which - I have mixed feelings about. Actually, it kind of reminds me of Andor - no, not the downtrodden rising up against the elite (though okay, there are some elements of that) but the plot veering off sideways and jumping around and things that seem like they're important getting dropped and things coming suddenly out of nowhere. (So maybe it was supposed to be a longer series that got canceled so they had to cram everything into the second season?) I am still not sure what Viktor's whole deal was, or what exactly the "arcane" is, or the invasion at the end, or...and then I looked up the game it's based on and it's a battle arena game, so I am not sure where this plot came from! Anyway, I loved the art, liked a lot of the characters and their relationships, didn't really care for the way the story evolved in S2.
What I'm watching now:
Untamed, which is the Netflix murder mystery miniseries set in Yosemite, not the Chinese drama - that one has a The in front of it. Eric Bana and Sam Neill are in it but we're really watching for the lavish scenery porn, which is definitely amazing. (Also some of it takes place in Mariposa, so it makes me think of rachelmanija, though I don't know if it's actually filmed there or if it even makes sense to be taking place there.)
Sanders' Union Fourth Reader by Charles Walton Sanders
Despite the titles, this is more recent than his New Fourth Reader. It repeats three or four readings from the earlier works, not all of them from the fourth reader.
Interesting nowadays chiefly for the views of edifying works and science of the time.
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