MY FIRST BRAND-NEW, NOT HAND-ME-DOWN COMPUTER SINCE I WAS A BABY UNDERGRAD IN 2000.

EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!

Also, why yes, I AM on a train. My morning commute to Boston, in fact. Using the train wi-fi and everything!!! UM but it is increasingly apparent that these trains are moth-infested. Not like... baby moths. like fucking MOTHRA GOING TO EAT YOUR FACE moths. Yesterday I saw a dead one. Today, a live one fluttered down my arm. so gross.

MOTHRA MY BABY COMPUTER IS GOING TO EEEEEAAAT YOU.

So this is all part of my two computer strategy:

- 11" macbook air, all tricked out.
- 15" crazy custom gaming laptop by Sager, all tricked out for Adobe CS6, vidding, and being a badass. OOOH! First new word added to dictionary: "vidding."

I'm also getting a felt case from etsy that is goooorgeous and will let me snuggle my computer like a little sheep as well. IT'S JUST SO CUTE AND PERFECT.

She's like a little computer baby. Her name is Omega. After our new fanwank that this is what Janeway and Seven named the borg baby they adopted with Icheb + the bunch.

SO HAPPY. So many things to update. I will be in Philadelphia this weekend, so I'm not sure how much online time I will get, aside from the train rides. I really need an "I was gone from teh internets for 3-weeks" tasklist.

*BOUNCES*

I'm on a serious fic bender and I don't want out. It happened a couple times before - BSG (the smoldering hot steady) and Alex/Olivia SVU fic (the compulsive insane fling). I have read many many many other fandoms on a semi-consistent basis. I still read quite a bit, usually at AO3 or via Femslash Today.

But right now? this is that Thing where I just burn through fic fast and furious and it just crashes over me. I have to read every one even if I know it won't be exactly what I'm seeking just because every alt timeline that fic creates is like another layer in the quantum world of that pairing or more broadly, the femslash dimension of that fandom. It's that pleasure that comes from disrupting and obsessing and celebrating and contextualizing the "universal canon timeline" of surface text.

When the bender is good, like BSG, details MATTER. I read indiscriminately, but I get frustrated with poorly executed fic. And when it is well-executed, it is sublime; it challenges my perceptions and reveals added depths to the characters I love.

When the bender is oh-so-wrong, like A/O, diversity MATTERS. I want it ALL - even the fucking song fic (for serious). Bad characterizations do not make weak fic - just psychotropic fic. Every story feels intoxicating, precisely because it fulfills or denies my personal taste.


( So now I can't stop reading Voyager...the queer pleasure of repetition and fandom time-travel )

Exhausted but brain-racey.

So while I have you here:

I had been planning on buying a Nook on Friday, but I am both ill-informed and somewhat concerned about the ethics of eBooks and publishing.

From what I hear, authors do not receive adequate pay for their labor when you buy an eBook because publishers give them the same percentage of royalties, though the publisher's costs and risks are substantially less than if they publish a physical book.

Being, yknow, sensitive to writers, is there further complexity to the authors-royalties inequality than this equation? I would presume that authors are in a similar boat as screenwriters in that digital publishing is a more contemporary distribution model with less explicit legal precedent to support and protect labor. Is this a false assumption?

Is there further complexity in authors rights or control of distribution methods? or anything else potentially harmful to the labor component?

Will the impact of eBooks really raise the cost of paper publishing so significantly? in which case, aren't we headed to a situation where access to books is INCREDIBLY class-influenced??? I mean if you can't afford an eReader or the books themselves then... ?? I mean I suppose the cost of eReaders will go down at some point tho? and perhaps eBooks will commit to universal file format? potentially deferring a class-based accessibility impact?

opinions or idea-rs?

or in short: should I buy an eReader tomorrow + books or just buy MOAR books?

*sigh* as always, I am an incredibly neurotic consumer (and sekritly, also a neurotic producer) due to my uneasy relationship with Capitalism. And yes, I know the labor and resources to produce technological devices is incredibly problematic in a trillion ways, but my feminist-marxist anxieties are not the only organizing principle of my life-decision process. so yknow. dw+eljay. and computers. oh my brain tonight...