Title: A Perfect World Ch: 4
Author: X-Tricks
Fandom: Torchwood
Notes and Etc: Mature: themes. Some sex, various Ianto pairings, but romance isn’t the point of the story. It’s another ‘episode’ folks!
Disclaimer: Not mine. BBC and cool folks in Wales own them all.

( A Perfect World )

About violence ...

( In which I get a bit personal, then generalize )

Title: Wants and Needs
Author: x-tricks
Fandom: Torchwood, Jack/Ianto
Notes etc: oh, so adult you wouldn't believe. Seriously perverse. D/s big time. Jack and Ianto move in together! *fluffy bunnies, rainbows and kittens* - yeah, no, not so much.
Disclaimer: These fake people are virtually owned by a corporate entity and all of them are above the imaginary age of consent.

Gee, I've only got a billion WIPs to work on, and the virtual season, and my game and ... so, of course, I wrote this instead. It's sort of a porny excerpt to an imaginary longer story that involves post Cyberwoman and Contrycide Jack and Ianto dealing with Ianto's suicidal ideation via a hard core D/s relationship. Then I realized, who wants to read about that sort of thing when they can just skip to the porn? So, I skipped to the porn. No grimness, all consenting, though there's clearly something a little off kilter about Ianto. There you go.

( Wants and Needs )

So -

My partner's other boyfriend has no livejournal and nearly no presence on the 'net and yet he's a part of my - and our - community. Like many of us, he's not quite in step with the rest of the world and determined to do good in it regardless. He makes space in the world for desire and joy, strangeness and courage. He's a thesis away from his PhD in anthropology and a breath away from homelessness. I'm putting my hand out on his behalf ...

A mutual friend of ours has offered up her paypal for any donations anyone would care to share and her post is below. Anything will make a difference, even five dollars will enable him to eat, something that is not a certainty in his life just now. Whatever you can, and you're willing, will make a direct difference in this man's life. You may not know him, you may never meet him but that will not change the good you do. The information is below.

A friend of ours is in desperate need.

His name is Bob F. He's a PhD candidate in anthropology, and is about two inches from his goal. As a queer man of color, he's gotten the runaround from more than one graduate school. He's doing his dissertation on intersections between the queer and Pagan communities.

The superhero mythology is personally sacred to him - and his life's work is to be a superhero for our communities, to advocate for queer and trans and kinky and Pagan folk, to create communication between us, support our lives and stories.

He is waiting on a signature in order to receive a financial aid payment that will pay his rent. The rent is due in five days; the signature is not going to happen until next week at least. He hasn't been eating very much lately.

Our goal is to raise a thousand dollars for his rent and immediate living expenses. We want him to be (a) fed and (b) not in immediate danger of eviction. More than that is helpful as well.

Even if you can't donate, please BOOST THE SIGNAL.

Signed, amberite, xtricks, teaotter, heron61 and panoramagram.

We're keeping his surname out of the post for privacy reasons. We can all attest to the fact that he exists, and is in this dire situation. Payments sent to amberite's Paypal account will be sent along to him before they even clear, since amberite can float a little.

Well, I have survived another visit to my parents. Not always an easy task.

It's not so much the rather ... dreadful, abusive history in my family that is the issue any more. That's mostly over the bridge or under the rug, depending on who you are and, with my parents the age they are and as sick as they are, leaving unresolved issues lie is the most ... graceful way to handle things.

That's not really the risk in visiting my folks anymore. It's the Mocha Mix.

My parents are obsessed with it and have been since it first came out. They think it's healthy and no discussion in the world will change their mind on it. They use it on their cereal instead of milk, they use it in cooking instead of cream, they use in coffee, sometimes my father drinks it in a glass. In one memorable occasion, my mother bought a lovely bunch of fresh spinach and made home made cream of spinach soup - with Mocha Mix! Cups of it!

The ingredients to Mocha Mix? Water, corn syrup and hydrogenated soy oil. Aside from food coloring and flavoring, that's it.

My parents are elderly and therefore don't eat very much at the best of times. Since they also live in an area where I (who do not drive) can't get *anywhere* to eat, I'm dependent on whatever they have in the house. Generally this means gallons and gallons of mocha mix and cold cereal, velveeta cheese and highly processed cold-cuts and highly processed, high sugar, low protein foods (the term 'lite' features strongly in the stuff they buy). I spend a lot of time cooking while I'm there out of sheer survival needs, even so, because they eat so little meat I can tolerate ('brown sugar' added hormel's pre-sliced ham is inedible to me), I spend a good part of the time there sort of half-starved. Because my migraines are frequently triggered by hunger, I also spend most of my time there sick.

Funnily enough, my father spends most of his time very sick as well. He has violent, catastrophic intestinal trouble fairly often. I think he's allergic to dairy but a: he's a Christian Scientist and therefore doesn't believe in allergies and b: milk is his favorite food - his 'comfort' food and the sicker he feels, the more he drinks it (mixed with Mocha Mix for 'richness') so, if I'm right, the sicker he gets, the sicker he makes himself. All the while denying anything is wrong. Such is the way of my family.

As my parents have gotten older and my mother's illness has continued to progress (it looks like she may lose her ability to speak within the next two years), they eat more and more pre-prepared foods. Thankfully, they're on a Trader Joe's kick so some of the food there is actual food, as opposed to hydrogenated oils and machine extracted meat products. There's still no protein to speak of but at least there were eggs and enough raw ingredients for me to cook some moderately edible foods.

Also, entirely by accident (I've long forgotten their birthdates), my trip coincided with my mother's birthday - I didn't have a gift but I did bake a home made cake and they broke out the celebratory food for the occasion, which included actual hamburger made of actual meat.

I also found out they like the series 'Foyle's War', which I also like and we spent our evenings watching that instead of the usual awkward silences that are more common to my visits. Incidentally, I'd reccomend Foyle's War to Torchwood peeps, if you have paitence for British crime shows. They're gloroius period peices set during WW2 and give a great feel for what the ear would have been like.

I had a migraine two out of the four days, plus my travel day home (just over it now, yay!) but never got violently sick and managed, more or less, to have what passes for a good visit with my family. No fights, no hospital visits, and I got to eat eggs or meat three out of the four days there! I wasn't able to sleep at all there - perhaps an hour or so a night - so I'm so tired I was imagining voices on the plane flight home but I've already had one nap and some real food and will rejoin the world of the living in a day or so. My cat is so happy to see me he's behaving like an actual domestic animal as opposed to a saber toothed cat that was accidentally shrunk.

So, this trip was a veritable triumph.

So, I woke up with this dream/concept immediately in mind.

Captain Jack Harkness, a RAF pilot stationed in Argentina during world war two, is bunkered in the estate of Ianto Jones. As the world falls apart around them, the two discover love and unrealized, forbidden passions. Caught between the demands of wartime and their forbidden love they fight for freedom and a happy ending. Until Jack disappears over Germany.

After the war, a battle-scarred stranger finds his way to the Jones estate, where Ianto Jones is building a new family with his childhood sweetheart Elise.

It was like a harlequin novel had taken residence in my brain. Except it included hot sex and some interesting issues about masculinity and the sexual mores of the time. Then it switched over to a re-telling of the Lone Ranger (my favorite story as a child).

I kept expecting 'and they fight crime!' to be tacked onto the ending of this thing. I felt I had to write this down in case I ever actually want ot persue it.

Title: Mars (doesn't) Attack!
Author: xtricks
Fandom: Torchwood
Notes etc: Mature (sex), crack-fic!, no spoilers. Jack/alien(s)
Disclaimer: I don't own these imaginary characters, which are the entirely intellectual property of a real person and a corporate entity. In addition, all these made-up people are above the arbitrary age of eighteen. This is crack - really, just crack.

( Mars (doesn't) Attack! )

Over the past few years, I’ve been trying to figure out ‘what I’m doing’, particularly in regards to my internet presence. On a most basic level, I’m having fun; a great deal of my social and entertainment life take place on the internet, whether it’s reading fanfic, or meta, socializing (as much as I’ve ever been interested in that), grazing the knowledge base or sharing my pearls of wisdom with the unsuspecting populace. In a slightly deeper sense, I get pleasure out of the idea that my opinions and ideas are heard and maybe even listened to occasionally. Beyond that, the internet has allowed me to both practice certain skills (writing, arranging my thoughts, social skills and so on) and given me room to develop my thoughts and philosophies based on what I see and how people react. Yes, the internet is my first step to ruling the world, next, win the lottery.

( This is very tl;dr and possibly multi-part but this one involves sex so I’m sure you’ll want to read it … )
I do this because I want to be part of the solution, however small, not part of the problem. Yes, I will save the world by writing spanking porn.

Most of you heavily overlap with rm so you’ve probably already seen this but … if you were ever thinking of supporting this author by buying his books – don’t.

Here’s an example of his opinion:

http://johncwright.livejournal.com/269139.html

Let’s just say that every offensive cliché about equating homosexuality with bestiality, pederasty, necrophilia, war crimes and mental illness has been rounded up for your reading pleasure in this single post.

Thankfully, I never got around to buying any of his books and now know I won’t. They can be found here: http://www.sff.net/people/john-c-wright/

A fine list of what not to buy.

I had a horrible dream. I can guess where the elements came from - it's fascinating when one's subconscious really gets the message out ...

I was ... probably Jack Harkness, or possibly Captain Kirk (star trek TOS did make an appearance). In this dream a sunken civilization was found, full of beautiful creatures and plants and so forth, a classic paradise. It was truly beautiful, with exotic and lovely creatures, peaceful inhabitants and welcoming pastel sci-fi buildings. Harkness and some of the crew of the Enterprise, or possibly Torchwood fans, were having a grand time discovering all the delights - until the creatures in this sunken city (it had the color scheme of 60s sci-fi) turned on them and prepared to kill them all in gruesome manners.

A terrible evil had gotten into the place - an evil that could possess anything living and mimic them perfectly. It was the perfect imposter, you could never trust anyone else. You'd never know who was secretly this evil and it was invisible and intangible. It was trying to escape out into the rest of the world and was planning on using Harkness and his crew (whoever the crew was) to do it. Grand sacrifices were being planned.

Jack was barely able to get his crew out (or perhaps Spock used one of his mind tricks to make the crew of the Enterprise realize they didn't belong in this dream) but he still had to deal with the evil before it found a way out of the sunken civilization and poisoned us all.

He, who was I, had no way to detect this evil, no way to isolate it - there was only one solution. He would have to destroy everything - the innocent, the beautiful, the rare - absolutely everything. And so, he did.

My dream spent quite a bit of time on the poisoning of beautiful birds and the burning of panicked creatures, the destruction of everything alive in the most horrible of ways while I held the trigger and was forced to watch, forced to track down anything that tried to hide or escape. (I have a particular problem with animal death and when my subconscious wants to put me through the wringer, it uses animals to do it)

It was exceedingly grim.

But wait - there was an epilogue.

One creature survived, a baby of some sort - it looked like a cross between the cutest kitten in the world and a tribble. It escaped and was found, raised by college students and grew up. It was discovered to be the last member of the see-see (my dream naming conventions are horrible), and had survived the genocide of its kind - something that had gone down in the history books as one of the worst events imaginable. It had only fragments of memory and nightmare left, to remember its kin by and oh, yeah, and image of Jack Harkness (or I), with poison in his hand.

Because at the end of all this, no one ever knew there was a great evil destroyed - all that remained was the memory of torture and death and devastation. Jack, as the years went on, wasn't even sure, himself, if there had ever been such an evil or if he'd been terribly, terribly wrong.

Elements from everything from CoE to current difficult fandom issues are present in this dream. Can you find them? It's like a scavenger hunt through my sub-conscious!

My partner reminded me, as I ranted about the latest fandom developments and complained of exhaustion, that I was in a somewhat tiring place in relation to fandom; a gay man in a female dominated environment that spends a lot of time being very interested in - and often fetishizing - gay men. Also, in an odd place in relation to mainstream media - visible but still unwelcome, with contrary messages of acceptance and rejection and - oh, yeah - fetishizing gay men.

http://www.cityofborders.com/

I saw this movie at our city's yearly QDoc and it was excellent. It was like watching Stonewall happen in a war zone as the tiny gay community struggled to survive against really terrible, terrible levels of hostility. It was also utterly fascinating to see how the gay movement in Jerusalem was a driving force for the both the peace movement and reconciliation between Muslims and Jews, Palestinians and Israelis; because the sole gay club in Jerusalem (and, presumably, the surrounding area) welcomed all groups.

I think the gay community, especially the gay male community pre-AIDs really understood something about the acceptance of 'others' and how thin civilization is because of the long history of violence and abuse gay men faced whenever they tried to gather in any form of group of community. I think that understanding has been lost (for many reasons, mostly due to the decimation of the older generation of gay men due to AIDs) but you can see it in the people in this documentary.

If you're able to see this movie in your area, I highly recommend it and with the things that are going on in Tel Aviv, I thought this information was pertinent.

Two or more years ago, I sent in a very nice little erotic story for potential publication in a well reputed small press. Then sent back a fairly quick reply saying I had not won the contest but my story was still in consideration for publication. Due to the nature of small presses (among other things, they nearly went out of business not too long after the submission call closed) and I pretty much forgot about the whole thing. About a year later, they sent another letter saying my story was still in consideration for their much reduced publishing plans (e-book instead of print). I said yay and pretty much forgot about it.

So, this week I get a letter from them saying I'm *still* in consideration - on their short list no less - and could I please send them an e-version of the story?

Only problem is ... I've gone through at least one, possibly, two computers since then and I *have no idea where there story is*. I don't even have a physical copy I could re-type.

Groan. This weekend, I'm going to have to comb through all my various saved disks/old computers and see if I can turn up a copy.

OTOH - supposedly, a writing job I did also about two years ago, the company finally published and is going to pay me. *golf clap*

This will be very interesting. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090731/ap_on_en_ot/us_tec_amazon_kindle_lawsuit

I doubt it will go anywhere, alas, but it is bringing up critical points here: "Amazon.com had no more right to hack into people's Kindles than its customers have the right to hack into Amazon's bank account to recover a mistaken overpayment," Edelson said. "Technology companies increasingly feel that because they have the ability to access people's personal property, they have the right to do so. That is 100 percent contrary to the laws of this country."

As technology allows unprecedented connections between consumers/providers of content and products and more and more ‘product’ is in the form of electronic data – which can be very easily manipulated – the existing laws of ownership, corporate policies, our own sense of ‘what’s ours’ and so on are having to change.

It’s an interesting point: people buy and ‘own’ the kindle – a convenient product – and they buy and ‘own’ the books on it. Yet, the wireless function of the kindle allows Amazon complete access to any data on the object and the programming within the kindle also allows Amazon to break the usefulness of an object that is presented as property of the individual who paid for it. There was already an example of someone who Amazon decided (unilaterally) was overusing the customer service/return purchases function and they disabled his kindle. In the case above, they (again, unilaterally) decided that a purchase a bunch of people had made was inappropriate (and through no fault of their own, BTW) and therefore undid it. What it looks like to me is the sense that corporate ownership never ends; even after a product is sold to a consumer they, in fact, do not have control of the property purchased.

Title: Bang!
Author: xtricks
Fandom: Torchwood
Notes etc: Gwen, kink_bingo prompt: mirrors. set before Torchwood starts
Disclaimer: in this fantasy sex scene, all the fictional participants are over the arbitrary age of 18. Also, virtual entities like BBC own the rights to this imaginary world and character.

( Bang! )

Okay, unsurprisingly, I have thinky thoughts (and opinionated ones) about Torchwood S3 (yes, spoilers!). Believe it or not, I haven't seen the series, nor am I going to, and I don't believe that makes a difference for my opinions below, though your milage may vary, of course.

( In which I talk ... a lot )

Whoo. Tired now. If I have more thinky thoughts, they will have to be for another essay.

Title: Untitled - crossdressing
Fandom: Torchwood
Pairing/Notes: Gwen/Ianto, explicit: sex, kink_bingo prompt: crossdressing. a bit angsty, set between season 1 and 2
also: thanks rm for doing a read through to make sure I wasn't too far off beam on unfamiliar things. And leftover errors and peculiarities are my own.

( Untitled-crossdressing )

Title: A Perfect World Ch: 3
Author: X-Tricks
Fandom: Torchwood
Notes and Etc: Mature: themes. Some sex, various Ianto pairings, but romance isn’t the point of the story. It’s another ‘episode’ folks! Sorry about the long delay but this chapter was a bear to write.
Disclaimer: Not mine. BBC and cool folks in Wales own them all.

( A Perfect World )

Got my kink_bingo card for 2009!

So far, I've got the top horizontal line planned out (all Gwen/(various) O.o) and the right column. The stories all seem to be Torchwood at the moment. And, of course, I got tentacles again! This time, perhaps, not Jack. The card below is an image map so, hopefully, I'll be able to link everything to it as I finish.

Hah! I got cultured! Sort of ...

Plan 9 From Outer Space was the entertainment event of the evening; complete with a live string quartet and voice actors to handle the lines. Our local cool movie house, appropriately named the Hollywood Theater, put on a showing with musicians, voice actors and an incredible woman who handled the foley and sound effects.

The poster has essentially nothing to do with the actual move. In fact, the movie has little to do with the movie. Zombies, aliens, nuclear war and solarbonite come together with Bella Lugosi and Ed Wood to create one of the most famous - and famously horrible - movies ever made.

Plan 9 is absolutely horrible, no doubt about it but the live music - a chance to hear that classic 'thriller' music live isn't something to pass up - and live voice actors (including a vocal mimicry of Arnold Schartzenneger at his most Austrian), made the entire event worth every penny and more.

Vampira and Bella Lugosi (in his final role) took their turns - without any speaking lines - staggering across the screen and the Swedish Angel had the honor of carrying Schwartzenegger's voice (perfectly done).

It was great fun and, best of all, the organizers of this movie are doing another one next week. The poster involves a woman in a space suit and a giant tentacle. I can't wait.

Hopefully, none of this will give me ideas for fic or gaming.

Title: Homecoming
Author: xtricks
Fandom: Torchwood, Jack/Ianto
Notes: Explicit: sex. PWP. Sorta but not really for the comment porn battle (SUV sex, solo sex) - both too long and not quite either of the prompts. Also, since I wasn't able to get chapter 3 of 'A Perfect World' up, I thought a little apology porn would be in order.

( Homecoming )