About to go to the meat processing plant (boy, that sounds very different from "frigorífico") for bovine blood. Biochemistry's practice today is going to be long (yeah, protein extraction from serum is you are wondering, it will be very tedious).

I would love to comment on a lot of things and respond to your comments, but right now I'm very stressed and very bitter.

I have also been pondering some things about fandom and me, and how, you should know, I complain a lot about anime fandom in general and (right now) Reborn's fandom in particular. I won't deny there is a lot of fail because there is, like in every fandom. Thing is I realized that a lot of things aren't exactly for me and that makes me even bitter. No, of course I haven't just realized certain fandoms aren't for me, but the negative effect they have may be kinda bigger than I thought. Leaving aside things I find objectionable (because that's fandom life), I don't find fanish joy in a lot of things those big anime fandoms find joy. It's saying something that Reborn's fandom (well, certain sections, I still can't get over Hibari's popularity and the moe/rape obsession) has treated me better than its canon.

The thing is, I have these unhealthy fandom relationships because I have grown up with shonen and anime and I just can't let it go. I would hate to do a dichotomy where there isn't one (tangentially, sadly manga/anime and the Hollywood are two of the biggest fiction markets and the ones I can access more easily), but Western fandoms of Western fiction sometimes excite me even less.

Anyway, going for the blood. *sighs*

That was a lot of blood, I came home covered on it (lab practice, people). Then had to go to the drugs store. For anti-depressants (I just ran out of them).

So I'm kinda dead, but I still have two very good links to share:

Black Dahlia on Display. On tragedy porn, or consuming human suffering.

Watching people look at the different exhibits as though they were getting a peek at a real-life episode of Law & Order was incredibly disturbing. The fact that the “Black Dahlia” was, in fact, a young woman named Elizabeth Short who was horribly, brutally violated, tortured, and murdered, was totally lost. These weren’t stills from a movie; the body in the images wasn’t made of plastic. These were photos documenting how a real, actual human being suffered unimaginably…and they were on display for entertainment value, just one stop on a tour before moving on to see the exhibits about Marilyn Monroe and O.J. Simpson.

[...] the exhibit just made it incredibly clear that all these cases, and the human pain and suffering attached to them, have become gruesome real-crime stories and the people affected by them are characters in the entertainment.

Maybe I would have liked to say "who the hell thinks this shit is a good idea," but I don't live in a parallel universe, a pervasive and insidious part of media is dedicated to tragedy porn. Real human beings tragedies.

Do You Work? On our monetary system, and disability.

Truly. It's now so common to conflate employment and identity at a variety of class and education levels, so common that employment itself has become a marker of social worth. And in this particular economy, employment numbers (never the people, just the fear of the numbers) have become political talismans that the two parties sling at each other in order to try and maintain the illusion that they have a stranglehold on power.

Employment is such a controlling social and moral force. Work discourse frames the discussion of how, when, and even if women have children, their value as working parents, and how they might live/work afterwards. Work discourse controls who, some wild popular imaginations, is a productive citizen and who a "welfare queen." In accident reviews and, for example, in the post-911 insurance discussions, work discourse can help assign a monetary value to some lives..... You get the picture.

And if you are a disabled person trying to work, trying to get a job, trying to retain a job, you know how difficult things can be.