You know how you all hate not being able to comment here and how it freaks you out that you can’t receive replies and email notifs etc etc?

Well, I decided to screw that. So I am moving my wordpress to notquiteroyal.net/bookshop. (Please come with me AND I’LL TELL YOU WHY):

- COMMENT THREADING!

- IT IS AWESOME. Customizable with a drop-down navigation menu, and I have CSS’d the hell out of it so there.

- COMMENT THREADING.

So, um, yes.

So long, Vesperholly. Hello, website!

uh. please come? ♥

I think I forced myself to leave LJ because I needed a disconnect and I wanted one. And now I have one. It is making me restless and fidgety. To say that I am feeling avoidant is a major, major understatement – I have 59 unanswered emails in my inbox and at least 3 communit – no, 4 – fandom projects i’m deliberately hiding from.

This all looks, on the surface, like so much immaturity and emotional distress. I know that. But it’s not. It’s turbulence, rather – a change happening inside me for once rather than being done to me. At some point this will all straighten itself out and I will know where to go from here, and what I want.

In the meantime, PICSPAM .

the lake on a sunny day in may.

New Orleans’ skyline from our hotel room, another less sunny but equally fine day in May.

Lake, lake.

French Quarter, French Quarter.

the New Orleans Aquarium! I loved it here!

As witnessed by all the pics i took.

Fishermen on the lake! This is maybe the best view of the entire lake, btw, you have to hike out to a point and then there’s this overlook that lets you see water in all 3 directions. It’s lovely.

Fish and beautiful beautiful coral! Unfortunately in glass.

Someone wrote ‘harry loves ginny’ on the Aquarium magnetic notepad during Phoenix Rising’s excursion there. What was I to do but correct this heinous mistake?

Otter! with Frisbee!

Phoenix Rising! far left is Melissa Anelli of TLC, then Cat ♥, then Henry, then – I have forgotten who the lady on the right is, but she was from Sugar Quill.

it was such a beautiful evening.

And they were such beautiful fish!

i actually took like 10 more pics of the anemone and jellyfish, i think Erica thought I’d gone nuts. But they were hypnotic, and so beautiful. I am entertained by very small things. I love that I spent an entire week in New Orleans and I have naught to show you but pictures of fish.

This was my one and only image of the city – at night coming back from the aquarium – that’s Erica and Mad Maudlin, I think? I took more but my blurry phone camera failed me utterly, and my video camera (which IS MY BEST FRIEND) was full with footage for Project Leve.

i didn’t really go to the ball because I couldn’t see (i tried, but it was a blurry, techno-filled disaster. I think I wound up macking on Ginny Weasley – i couldn’t see anything but her flaming red hair, alas). – but look! it is a masque!

This is back at the lake. Dave insisted I take this picture. I guess I felt my friends needed to know that I ♥ Sam. I hope that you, Sam, are satisfied with this token of my affections.

It seems that I am watching Death Note, which makes me angsty because not only is there no need for me to watch Death Note, but there’s really no need for me to be reminded about the fact that I love L and desperately want L/Light death note au smut where Light seduces L to becoming Kira with him and they have smutty death god sex and mind games. There is no need for me to be reminded of this at all.

I am also watching Gankutsuou. I like it very, very much. I started watching it right before Deathly Hallows came out, and I was racing through it and then somehow found myself watching Star Trek eps and adding KirkSpock zines to delicious. it has been a very difficult time for me. it feels good to be back in familiar territory, where the space aliens are japanese cartoons with emo pasts and not old jewish men who sing songs about hobbits. Note, however, that this does not mean I have stopped watching star trek.

Oh, no. It does not.

I HAVE ENTIRE SPIELS PREPARED FOR WHY EACH OF THESE GIFS ARE THE GAYEST THINGS EVER, APART FROM THE WHOLE, WELL, JUST LOOK AT THEM, BUT THIS ONE -

- THIS ONE IS MY FAVORITE. I JUST KEEP WATCHING IT OVER AND OVER AGAIN. THE UNNECESSARY ARM-SQUEEZING. THE TANGLED LIMBS. THE MUTUAL PROTECTIVENESS. ARM SQUEEZING. CRAP I CAN’T STOP. I HATE THIS SO MUCH, I FEEL LIKE MY LEVEL OF TASTE IS NOT ONLY DROPPING, IT IS PLUMMETING FROM SPACE; MY IQ, NOW A BURNING HEAP OF TWISTED METAL DISENTEGRATING IN THE ATMOSPHERE.

Today I called my mom and she was like “what was that convention you went to last week?”

Me: “It was an anime convention BUT I HATE ANIME, SO.“

I promised Sam I would take a picture of the box dude. I chickened out at first but then Sam begged me and so I gathered up my courage, and this is the result. Behold!

Okay, there was this adorkable gang of Death Note cosplayers. Ryuk was fantastic and of course just off-screen, and I couldn’t get both his amazing costume and Light’s insolent slouch all in one crappy cameraphone frame. THEY WERE SO CUTE. I WAS ALL *_____* DEATH NOTE the whole weekend. Ugh. I HATE YOU DEATH NOTE. I DON’T EVEN LIKE YOU THAT MUCH, AND YET I LOVE YOU WITH A PASSION.

I also hate Naruto. I hate Naruto. I hate Naruto. I hate Naruto.

mom: “I’m not sure an interest in anime is worthy of you.”

me: D: OH, DON’T WORRY, I HATE ANIME. D:

This is the front cover of the Hikago doujinshi Daisy sent me. It is so seriously adorable. i tried to take a picture of my favorite page, but my phone camera hates me.

I have honest-to-god never been to a sushi bar til last month. My friend went there for his birthday. We all had a good time and the food was great. I mostly kept trying to get the chef, bless him, to acknowledge me when I went “:o SUGOI DESU!” and staring at the gorgeous brunette across the bar from me. I am so socially inept.

Showalter Fountain, a lovely evening in June.

I miss every one of you.

ETA: http://syndicated.livejournal.com/ajaonthego/profile?mode=full <— HOLY CRAP, THIS IS SO SURREAL. sadfk;la. who did this?

Sam nudged me 57 times today. I love you guys.

my life is so hard. RSS feeds are so confusing. They randomly break entries across columns and don’t display comments and it is all very disorienting. At least these aren’t cutting off posts, though? I am using Sage.

Some of you guys were confused b/c I was updating Journalfen and not this, even though I said I would be at wordpress. I apologize – I didn’t really feel like the two spastic updates I made there about Ikasucon were enough to really warrant posting here. I feel like I should only post here when I have something incredibly witty or at least incredibly involved to say. Which means i probably will just wind up not posting much at all.

I was afraid that by moving from LJ to JF I would be indulging in a side of myself I don’t like to indulge in all that often, because as much as we all like journalfen, it is the wank community. And quite unintentionally, I feel like all I’ve done this past week is be wanky and insecure. It is a community – but it’s not a community that makes me feel safe, not a community that feels like home.

This isn’t much of an update either – I don’t have anything witty or entertaining to report. It’s been a long, long week. I’m still feeling good about leaving LJ, because every report I read about what’s happening there just makes me sadder and sadder – but a little aimless, on the whole. I keep trying to make filtered posts and then being all when i realize i can’t. Orphne asked me to let cravat.org expire last month and now when you go to her journal there is literally nothing there, this white blank page of broken image links. Orphne’s dead journal is the perfect representation of how i feel right now.

Lately I am sort of wishing I weren’t so principled. I wish I weren’t always terribly eager to do the right thing right now! – that it wasn’t so important for me to take stands against things. But it is important, and I do take stands. Which leads to people thinking I am wanky, and burning t-shirts (which I maintain was a completely overhyped thing, I mean honestly, remixes?) and exiling myself from my own much-loved LJ. And who knows what else in the future?

But sometimes it does lead to good things, very good things. I like who I am, and while i suffer the embarrassment, every once in a while, of looking foolish and impetuous – I also do good things and I voice my beliefs. And in the meantime, I still have fandom and I still have things to share with people, and that won’t change whether or not I have livejournal.

I do have great hopes of turning WordPress into a really useful archive. I wish very much that the organizational methods of said archive did not include “put a bunch of spaces in the title”, lolol D: – but I have hopes. I am imagining the 500 harry/draco recs from my journal catalogued and sorted and summarized here, the way they are at this wordpress blog, for example. THAT IS SO HOT. SO VERY VERY HOT.

now i just have to, uh, figure out how to install plug-ins so i can thread comments here.

So I feel like I should update updates from the conference etc etc, but to do this properly requires pictures. My camera is sadly in my car, so I will just tell you that I had a great time at my first-ever anime con, even if the programming was a bit lacklustre (HP fandom has spoiled me forever, I suspect) and I was only there for one day. I got a Ryoma plushie keychain! And I finally got to see DDR! And the Yaoi panel, which I volunteered to mod at the last minute, was fantastic and they invited me back next year and moms and daughters hugged me! It was seriously awesome. And I really wanted to go to the panel on Gankutsuouu, which i think I am making Epon watch, only it was on Sunday when we left. Alas.

ALSO I GOT 30.5, aka the prince of tennis artbook, aka the most beautiful thing in existence. Or at least it was the most beautiful thing in existence until Daisy sent me a care package of stuff. I opened it and just stared. She sent me a sushi eraser. I need to say that again. She sent me a sushi eraser, along with the most beautiful doujinshi i’ve ever seen, which renewed my firm vow to learn Japanese (I can see Franzi throwing things at me from behind her monitor) – and this pair of Akira and Hikaru pins that I HAVE BEEN WEARING EVERYWHERE. I WORE THEM TO WORK UNTIL I REALIZED PEOPLE WERE STARING AT ME and i’d kind of pinned them too close together so the Hikaru was standing way too close, all HEH POSSESSIVE of Akira, and when i realized how it looked i sheepishly pinned them on the inside of my purse, which means i clearly need a new purse where I can, at the very least, pin them on the outside! AND! and and and and and, most amazing of all, she sent me Namida no Furusato. I just stared and stared and I have been playing it over and over and over. I forgot how much better music sounds in my car when it’s not being channeled through a low frequency ipod channel. I can’t remember the last time I actually listened to something that wasn’t bump of chicken on my ipod; when the sounds started flying out I was actually started at the clarity. OH WONDERFUL BUMP OF CHICKEN. wonderful wonderful wonderful.

If I could, I would make a fandom community where, like, English fangirls could write embarrassing fangirl letters to Asian pop stars and have Asian fangirls translate them for us. I would write one letter every week to bump of chicken. I think my first letter would just be like ILU ILU ILU ILU SO MUCH SO MUCH SO MUCH in huge marker script. And I would also write to Kimeru. Oh, Kimeru! And Rie fu. And maybe Shirota. but definitely those three I would write them over and over again. Sam would get upset that I was ignoring Ueda-chan. He has Ryo, I would say. He doesn’t need my lame affection. Yet somehow I can’t but feel a band called Bump of Chicken (a wonderful wonderful sublime mesmerizing enthralling band!) needs all the retarded affection it can get.

Have been finally going through and adding journals to RSS feed today, using Sage as i said. There are all these posts i hadn’t read and i feel REALLY CLOSE TO YOU GUYS RIGHT NOW. I love it when my friends are happy, and excited about things. Yay.

The damning question now is: do I rss feed communities. I’m already overwhelmed by like, the 50 LJ’s I’ve added so far – but it’s really nice to see you all.

I’ve also just discovered that Jackie’s livejournal breaks my RSS feed. i feel this says so much about our relationship.

oh, and just to make sure i don’t forget about what’s really important:

i like tribbles! do you like tribbles?

spock likes tribbles. *_*

khan definitely doesn’t like tribbles! or the color red! or anything else! rawr khan!

kirk thinks mr. spock looks good in tribble.

Paris loves tribbles!

can tribbles dance like this?

maybe they can.

Dance, little tribbles!

Dance.

To everybody who asked about having trouble with LJ syndicating this as an RSS feed, I think that might be fixed. You can try it again. Or not.

I am trying to determine whether using the Sage extension to aggregate LJ posts from my friends would be cheating. It would not be actively using LJ, but a passive use just the same. :/ Since I’m going to be required to go to LJ in the near future anyway just to relocate posts and sort and organize, settling for not actively linking or using the site may be the best I can hope to do. :/

If anyone has been leery of wordpress – come on in, the water’s fine!

Here are things I like about it so far:

• the presentation and site scheme are really nice and relatively intuitive. i have found my learning curve to be nicely paced.
• the post section! it is really really perfect for archiving and cataloguing old LJ posts without actually having to post and backlog them. it functions far better as an organizing tool than LJ memories. I keep going to my sidebar and beaming at it. and it works better than tags on an LJ sidebar because you can structure them categorically on the page, spatially, and not just by tagging things with related keywords. I have to say, it is very exciting!
• you can suscribe to wordpress tags just like on delicious, so if i want to see what anyone on wordpress has tagged “tezuryo” all i have to do is click on “tagsurfer.” also, they have really convenient widgets which i have not yet installed, but the “add to delicious” widget is very nice.
• all of the basic post options of LJ are also standard for WP, or appear to be. I have yet to figure out how a ping works! I hope someone pings me so I can find out!!!

now, here is what i absolutely hate hate hate:

• WHEN SOMEONE COMMENTS TO YOU WHILE LOGGED IN TO WORDPRESS, THE ONLY INDICATION YOU HAVE THAT THEY ARE LOGGED INTO THEIR WP ACCOUNT IS THE LITTLE ICON BY THEIR COMMENT.
  can you go to their wordpress account from that comment? NO. Can you conveniently click on their icon and be taken there? NO. DO YOU HAVE TO PAINSTAKINGLY OPEN A NEW TAB AND TYPE IN THEIR FULL WORDPRESS ACCOUNT? YES.
  
  REALLY I HAVE NO WORDS FOR HOW IDIOTIC THAT IS.
• You cannot thread a reply to someone who has replied to you!!!!!!!!

obviously this is a horrible blogging phenomenon no matter what non-LJ site you are on, but really! You cannot reply directly to someone who has replied to you! it is just as frustrating as i feared it would be!
Oh, you can go to “My comments” and see comments you have left for other people, and there you can click “reply to this thread.” But that only shows you “your comment, one before yours, and replies after yours.”

So: if the person who replied to you was lucky enough to post their reply to you immediately after you commented to them, and not, say, three or for comments behind other people; and if you are likewise lucky enough to re-reply to them immediately after they commented back to you, you will be able to SEE THEIR REPLY TO YOU ON THE MY COMMENTS PAGE. At which point, if you click “reply to this thread,” you might be lucky enough to re-reply to them where they can actually see it.

That is the most insane way of threading comments I have ever heard. Why on earth did the Powers That Blog think that being able to thread comment replies was a non-essential blogging tool?

Other things I am a bit eyebrowface about are the way you have to “add spaces” to your subjects in order to tag them. if you decide to go back and put something in at the top of a category you have to go back in and give everything else after it an additional space! how annoying! Also, when you add someone with a wordpress to your blogroll, they do not automatically get added to the “blogsurfer” list of wordpress people whose posts you wish to read! would you not think that would be a no-brainer? I would think so. Except I also think threaded comment replies would be a no-brainer, so what do I know.

To do: finish relocating the prince of tennis guide and the other fandom guides. After that I will probably start relocating all my fanfic here. Which will be a hassle, but the idea of having it all organized by fandom and length under posts is very very enticing. i hope that you can backdate blog posts here.

Moving in is hard work. But exciting, too.

My name is Aja. I’m a writer and a fanfic author, and a completely silly human being. Hello to everyone from Livejournal, pilgrims and visitors alike. <3

the image header is taken from a piece called ‘Mr. Wumple Cannot Play Tennis,’ bye Rye Bread at DeviantArt.

please do not let your eyes deceive you. what you see on these pages is most inaccurate. i am not a star trek fan. really.

there. that’s better.

note: this story originally published on livejournal on June 19, 2007.
_______

Bloomington, Indiana, is a hotbed of liberalism surrounded by rural struggles and conservative values in the Southeastern region of Indiana, two hours north of Louisville. If you are a gay man or woman, it is a Midwestern Mecca: Bloomington is one of the most gay-friendly cities, statistically, culturally, and economically, in the entire country. A city full of progressives, it prides itself on its pursuit of equality.

In Bloomington in 1999, a man named Won-Joon Yoon was ruthlessly gunned down outside the Korean United Methodist Church by a white supremacist in a horrific shooting spree that began in Chicago and ended with a total of 2 men dead and 9 others wounded, all from minority groups.

After that, black and white signs reading “Bloomington United in Diversity” on one side and “No hate! Not in our yards, Not in Our Town, Anywhere!” on the other went up all over the city like flags of mourning.

Yoon’s death spurred a subsequent push by Bloomington and minority groups across the state to enact hate crime legislation in the state of Indiana -

- legislation which has never been passed.

Opponents of Indiana’s proposed hate crime legislation wrote, “This bill represents an attempt to give special protection to homosexuals and cross dressers by stating that a crime against them is to be treated with more severity than a crime against a senior citizen, a child or a pregnant mom..”

As of 2007, Indiana remains one of only five states in the country with no laws whatsoever against hate crimes.

________

90 minutes southeast of Bloomington there is a town called Crothersville, almost literally a four-way stop with its own Stop-In Liquor store. Crothersville, as tiny as it is, made the national news two years ago after a ten-year-old girl was kidnapped, sexually assualted, and murdered. Everyone in Crothersville will tell you that everyone in Crothersville knows everyone else.

On the afternoon of April 12, 2007, a man named Aaron Hall (nicknamed “Shorty” because of his slight build and miniscule stature – he barely topped 5’4″ and weighed around 100 pounds) met some fellow Crothersville natives, coming back from their Stop-In at the liquor store. 19-year-old Garrett Gray,18-year-old Coleman King, and 21-year-old Jamie Hendricks picked Hall up and went back to Gray’s house, where they proceeded to drink and hang out.

From every indication from sparse news reports and word of mouth, it began as a verbal insult, maybe to Gray’s dead mother, maybe to King’s heterosexuality, maybe to nothing at all.

The ‘why’ will probably never be fully known to us. Whatever the details, Hall said the wrong thing. And sparked in Gray and King what the official Initial Hearing report termed a “sudden heat.”

A “sudden heat” which would last throughout the next 24 hours.

Note: The following descriptions are graphic and disturbing, and may not be appropriate for sensitive readers.