Everything2 New Writeups

Habanera (thing)

2010-01-07T03:39:10Z

The habanera is a type of folk music popular in Cuba in the mid-1800s. It is quite catchy, and it was imported to Spain in 1875, where it became very popular for a couple of decades. This is where the name habanera actually comes from, danza habanera being Spanish for 'dance of Havana'. (The Cubans had simply considered it a form of contradanza, and had not considered it worthy of separate label).

Of course, most of us don't know this. In most English-speaking counties 'Habanera' refers to the Habanera Aria, AKA L'amour est un oiseau rebelle, from Georges Bizet's 1875 opera Carmen. If you don't recognize the piece (I guarantee that you know it, even if you don't recognize the name), you can hear it here, or if you prefer your classical music a capella and sung by Muppets, here.

Of course, there are other habaneras. The distinguishing…

Good ways to relieve menstrual cramping (person)

2010-01-07T01:29:36Z

I'm 15 and have had my period for about 3 years. During this time, I've discovered a few helpful ways to ease the pain caused by this monthly 'gift'.
(These work for me, but everyone is different):

Bananas- Bananas are high in potassium, which can ease muscle contractions and relax the body.

The Fetal Position- this usually takes a few minutes to work

Pressure- putting pressure directly on the pain areas helps a lot. When the pain is in my lower back, I use the tips of my fingers to try and roll it away. When it's in my stomach and hip region, I use my knuckles.

Heat- heating pads, warm towels, etc.

Exercise- it may sound strange, but it works. Stretching or yoga works best. It may cause some severe momentary pain, but it helps to keep the cramps from returning.

Breathing deeply- hyperventilating and short, ragged breathing causes muscles to contract and makes cramps worse. Take slow, calm breaths and try to steady your heartbeat.

Staying…

Valors Villainy (thing)

2010-01-07T00:09:58Z

Valor's Villainy is an online video project first developed in late 2009. It started when the team of Sid Broderius and Aldus Valor decided to become arch enemies. Originally the show was called "The adventures of Skitchman"

PLOT
The show follows the antics of the struggling supervillain Col. Aldus Valor. Valor has no real hatred towards anyone who would be considered an arch enemy, rather hates his nemeses in an official capacity, requiring them to file paperwork with The Guild of Calamitous Intent.

He is served by a small handful of lieutenants. The first of which is Lt. Bishop. Bishop is a legendary (because he's good at his job) henchman who is never seen on camera because he is always working. The other two, slightly less competent lieutenants under Valor's command are Lt. Knight and Lt. Rook, played by Kyle McMasters and…

Good enough is good enough (poetry)

2010-01-06T22:49:06Z

Since I stuck my head out of the rebel sea
It's gotten hard to hear the beat of my heart
An unnerving, but not unwelcome
A restful feeling with a hint of dread

I hear more, first of all
And also the ambient queues
Are admittedly much better
At conducting a harmonious beat

When it was checked
I suspected a conspiracy against my manhood
But we've joined forces now
To conspire for my Mensch-hood

Can't you just fall in love with me already? (idea)

2010-01-06T21:08:23Z

I cannot be perfect. It is quite frustrating, because if I am not perfect you can't love me. You see, I know how to be your version of perfect. You have been kind enough to be honest and so I know.

1. I need to be smiling. You know I look better when I smile and I know it too. When I am smiling my facial structure is completely different and it makes me kind of pretty.

2. I need to be well groomed. It won't do to have messy hair if we run into one of your friends. It is not even good for you to see me messy. I have always been a tomboy and now I need to be a sexy vixen. This is an issue, because no one ever taught me how to do that. I notice that appearances seem important to you, and I want to help you keep them up. Don't worry though, I read some stuff on the internet.

3. I need to be rich. When we get low on money it makes you frustrated and grumpy. When I have cash to spoil you, we are both much…

Austerity (thing)

2010-01-06T19:41:13Z

In the modern welfare state, austerity measures are what the government does when it basically runs out of money. Of course it's not limited to welfare spending, austerity-based cuts could be made in anything the government used to spend money on. (Then again, some people claim that anything the government spends money on is welfare.)

This is the key thing to do when you control the government: borrow as much as you can from the bankers, doesn't really matter what the terms are, as long as it's not so outrageous that your countrymen kick you out.

Then spend that money in whatever way you want, preferably in ways that favor the rich, such as union busting, undermining labor movements around the world, making the world safe for "pro-business" (ie. pro-exploitation) governments, bailing out institutions of the rich.

Finally, now that all the money is spent, get the poor in your country to…

Birkenstock (thing)

2010-01-06T16:19:40Z

Typically people shop for shoes from the top down however educated Birkenstock fans recognize that one of the most important (and frequently neglected) components of a shoe is the support inside of the shoe. When you stick your hand (or foot) into a Birkenstock you will notice that the shoe has several unique contours. Most people are familiar with the medial arch of the foot. This arch is the most prominent one and is typically easily viewed unless people have extremely flat feet. Along with the medial arch the transverse, metatarsal and lateral arches are being used to propel you. Your foot was designed to move, shoes that give your foot the correct degree of support and offers your feet access to freedom of movement will be some of the best and most comfortable footwear you can buy.

Shoes are designed to protect and support you and your feet. Your body weight rests on a relatively small portion of your body and…

Dick Morris (person)

2010-01-06T13:42:50Z

Dick Morris is a bizarre little man who has been a consultant and strategist for both American political parties. He was born in 1948 and came of age as a student working in the 1968 and 1972 elections, and initially was influenced by the Democratic Party of the time. He also worked for Bill Clinton on his campaigns for governor of Arkansas, but later seemed to lose any party affiliation for his work. After working for various figures throughout the 1980s, he was brought back into the Clinton administration, in large part to turn Clinton into a more moderate figure. Although Clinton was already prone to pandering to public opinion, it was probably Dick Morris who was most responsible for his reputation of writing his speeches to whatever the opinion polls of the day dictated. Morris' influence collapsed virtually overnight due to a scandal with a prostitute during the 1996 Presidential convention.

After…

Color a Dinosaur (review)

2010-01-06T11:35:30Z

Color a Dinosaur was a cartridge developed for the Nintendo Entertainment System. It was not, as most cartridges designed for the Nintendo were, a game. The cartridge was exactly what its name suggested: an electronic coloring book, where the player(?) could select one of several cartoonish dinosaurs, and then color it in by selecting some bright primary colors.

And that is it.

While it is good that someone should try to develop a way to use the Nintendo that is not a violent or competitive game, this is simply not it. There is nothing that this cartridge doesn't do that a coloring book and a box of crayons couldn't do. Considering the totally involving, and yes, imaginative world that could be packed onto a NES cartridge such as The Legend of Zelda, the idea of someone actually buying an electronic coloring book is somewhat ridiculous.

I suppose with enough marijuana, some hipsters might be able to get ironic fun out of this. But much like Def Leppard and Taco Bell, there are some things that not even irony can improve.

when the last opportunity leaves (idea)

2010-01-06T06:05:46Z

Once, there is a boy. A boy up to his waist in sand. How did he get here? Well, let's just say our story begins here. He is in sand.

Now this boy is not acquisitive. He is not sensitive or destructive or any other tive I can think of. He is just a boy. A boy in sand.

Surrounding him and his sand is a white wooden fence. Where a gate would go, there is instead a doorframe. There is no door, just a doorframe. The boy's position in the sand faces him towards this gap in the fence, and on very good days, he can lean far enough forward to graze the edge of the frame with his fingertips. But the sand is heavy, and he relaxes back to an upright position.

On these particularly good days that he manages to touch the wood, he can see through the doorframe, and out of his little world of sand and fences. The world beyond his is nothing. A simple, flat plane. Except for a door. No doorframe, just a door. This door stands without support, aligned with nothing. When…

Robot Do Well (fiction)

2010-01-06T05:55:58Z

Robot Do Well lived in the suburbs of Intelville in Windowland. His life was perfect until one day he started malfunctioning, dangerously expressing individualistic and eccentric personality traits (as evidenced by this journal entry and subsequent journal entries that are to be added at a later date).

Diary of Robot Do Well, Journal Entry #1

beep boop beep boop... hiiiiii, i am a .zzzzttt... robot. i am a standard model bipedal humanoid, i HAvvve light-sensitive sensory structures, a complex CEntral neervous ...brrrrp.... system with high processing reasoning functions. i live in a HOUSE, a microchip, ...bzztttzz... with glowing boxes, like ALARM CLOCK & MICROWAVE & TELEVISION & COMPUTER 1 & COMPUTER 2. they are our friends and constant companions. i live with my master drive, or, FATHER, and i am his slave drive, or, SON. issd....///4$ . we live in a circuit board, or SUBDIVISION, and the we travel through…

embers (thing)

2010-01-06T04:21:30Z

watching the bonfire, the ocean wearing
against the cliffside; clutching the
blanket, April turns and
smiles, slyly, when she feeds the
hearth. Calming the wind we brought
our hands against it, gathering either
strength or disbelief; for the cottage up
against the shore, collapsing
in age, we found a better
use in our warmth. Something
is howling in the distance, either the
wind or coyotes picking through the dunes. Some
light is cracking at the edge of the
tides, broken sometimes when a wave
is approaching. watching above the
bonfire we lose track of
which are sparks and which are
constellations

Kookaburra (thing)

2010-01-06T03:11:48Z

My aunt told me a story about how she went camping with my uncle and an American friend of theirs. They were sitting down for dinner when a chattering, laughing cry filled the air. Startled, the American friend exclaimed "I didn't know you have monkeys in Australia!"

It was not a monkey, of course; it was a kookaburra, one of the quintessential Australian birds. They the laughing spirits of the Aboriginal dreamtime, the jokers, pests, and troublemakers. There are many stories of how the kookaburra got his laugh. Their distinctive cries and patchy white-and-brown bodies are a familiar feature of the bush.

They are also meat eaters, and one of the few natural predators of snakes. I've seen them line up on a branch above a frying pan or BBQ, and swoop down to take sausages straight off the hotplate, to the extreme annoyance of the chef. They've even been known to swoop past your face and try and take the meat out of your sandwich…

Renee Montoya (person)

2010-01-06T00:53:09Z

Renee Montoya will likely never be DC Comics' most well-known character. Superman, Wonder Woman, and Batman have iconic looks, cool powers, and decades of success in multiple media. However, she has proved surprisingly versatile, beginning her career as a cop and token Hispanic in a cartoon popular with nerds and children, made detective and headlines by coming out as a lesbian in an award-winning comic, nearly drank herself to death as a turn on that venerable American character, the hardboiled detective, and finally, became a bona fide superhero. She added diversity to American comics, provoked considerable fan reactions-- and dated Batwoman.

Her fictional life begins on television-- sort of. The creators of Batman: The Animated Series developed the character.¹ A working class female cop whose parents came from the Dominican Republic, she added diversity to the Dark Knight's cast. She works closely with an established character, Gotham City…

Arawete (person)

2010-01-05T22:18:55Z

The Araweté (also known as Araueté) are an indigenous group belonging to the Tupi-Guarani ethnic group, who live in the Brazilian state of Pará. They are hunters and gatherers, who moved 40 years ago from the headsprings of the Bacajá river to the Xingu river, in the state of Pará. According to Funasa there were 339 members in the group in 2006.

Language

The name "Araweté" was invented by a Funai woodsman, and it doesn't have any real meaning. The word used by the tribe to refer to themselves is "bïde", which means "we", "our people", "human beings". The Araweté language belongs to Tupi-Guarani family. The prosody is heavily nasal, the pace is quick and there are sounds which are difficult for the native Brazilian Portuguese speaker to replicate. Syntax and morphology are quite different from those of Indo-European languages. The adult Araweté population is almost totally monolingual. Only the young children who were born after the tribe started…

Everyone has a dead bird story (poetry)

2010-01-05T20:27:51Z

The worst part's that for hours now
grass has been running in my new dress
and I am sitting on a concrete bench
one of five before the hairdresser's
the first is dumb, the second wide-eyed
the third afflicted with duplicity
I am the fourth and fifth
for I'm standing in a puddle
I see myself in it and must pull faces
else the one of them who's me
could not tell the fur cap on my head
from the dead bird at my feet

The Huntsman's Letter To His Wife (fiction)

2010-01-05T18:33:51Z

I hope you get this. John risked his life to get it to you. I pray you receive this.

Take the children, and get out of here. Go, get as far away from the Kingdom as you can. Maybe you only have a few hours.

She will look for you, and she is angry, full of evil, she wants vengeance. It is too late for me, do not wait. God knows, I don't want to die, not like this, but there is no way out. I'm done for. You cannot help me. If you try, you will die too. She's hell bent on vengeance. She's much worse than I've ever seen her.

I don't know how she knows. After she asked me to do ... that thing that I could not do, that no decent man could do ... first I thought she was fooled. She seemed satisfied by the piece of meat I gave.

But she found out, somehow - that the child lives. I suppose she lives, I don't know where. But, somehow, maybe by her foul magic, she found out.

Run. Disguise yourselves, leave, go far from here. She will kill you like she will kill me.

I love you. I lo

Julian Comstock (review)

2010-01-05T12:09:05Z

Julian Comstock: A Novel of 22nd-Century America

In October of 2172—the year the Election show came to town—Julian Comstock and I, along with his mentor Sam Godwin, rode to the Tip east of Williams Ford, where I came to possess a book, and Julian tutored me in one of his heresies (1).

Robert Charles Wilson has established a reputation not just as one of the age's finest science fiction writers, but as a fine literary writer, whose spin on our possible futures reaches a broad and intelligent audience of readers. In 2006, he published a novella, Julian Comstock: A Christmas Story. He revised and expanded the premise in 2009's award-worthy work, creating a novel of twenty-second century where, after the depletion of inexpensive fossil fuels, after plague and social unrest, North America resembles the nineteenth century, overlaid with elements of feudalism and religious oligarchy. Horses and trains cross a landscape marked with the…

unidentified flying object (thing)

2010-01-05T11:36:02Z

An unidentified flying object is exactly what it says on the tin: Something moving through the air which the observer can't put a name to. I've seen one... for about half a second, before my brain caught up with my eyes and said, "It's an aeroplane viewed from side on as it moves on a landing trajectory. You can't see the wings because you're exactly in line with them. The tail is the same colour as the sky".

It was hardly a thrilling scene from The X-Files. I just happened to be walking down a road that's high up in the middle of the afternoon, and looked to my left while the plane was descending. I could see something, and for a split second I could not recognise it. After my brain kicked in its logic circuits and I'd figured out what it was, and why it didn't look familiar, I waited and saw the aeroplane come into focus as it moved lower. Then I could see the detail - the tail was now visible against the hills, and the tips of the wings…

effort and intelligence (idea)

2010-01-05T10:23:05Z

Recently, I've found myself contemplating the fact that if I was just a hair less intelligent, a smidge less observant, one yard short of a first down or one egg short of a dozen that I would be a lot happier. Don't get me wrong, I know more than a few people who could run circles around me using that lump of goo behind their eyes. Yet, these very same people, with the exception of maybe one, seem to find no joy in their intelligence, myself included.

As the days flow into weeks, and the weeks melt into months, I find that the only way to satisfy my thirst for knowledge is to tackle as many problems and dilemas as possible, whether they be personal or whether they concern the entire planet does not seem to make a difference.

For example, I might not be able to adopt a poverty-stricken Cambodian child or two, yet I am compelled to learn more and more about their plight. How is Cambodia any different than, say, Vietnam, South Korea, many parts of Africa? How come only…

I used to wish I could dream in black and white (idea)

2010-01-05T05:56:56Z

Simplicity. I used to long for it. When I was younger, I dreamed. I dreamed of love, war, life and death. I dreamed of epic battles where the heroes always won, where the bad guys died (or at least had their diabolic plans foiled) and the aforementioned hero secured the love of the damsel, recently in distress. Then, as time passed, I learned. I fought, I loved, I lived. Everything I thought I knew was proved wrong. The colors seeped into my dreams, and I saw things as they were. When I saw the world in black and white, I could hide- hide behind the simplicity of it all. But the color meant I couldn't hide anymore. In art, videos and such, color adds so much- it gives life, depth, reality... but in life, color only illuminates the wrongs of our world, the darkness within us. I used to long for the escape of simplicity. I used to long to return to my world of black and white, where I could hide again. I prayed to whatever god…

Gentrification (idea)

2010-01-05T05:49:21Z

Gentrification, as a term, has long ago left the sociological literature and entered the common speech, usually in a pejorative way. The problem with this is, while the term might have meant something fairly specific in the original research (although I doubt it was very specific), it has come to mean a number of things in its common usage.

When using sociological terms, it is important to operationalize them. Gentrification is the process of a more affluent population moving into an area inhabited by a less affluent population. While this sounds like a good definition, defining it further is somewhat problematic. On the issue of "affluence", there is many ways to operationalize that. Furthermore, how is the difference between them defined? Every neighborhood or demographic area has a range of possible incomes, so how far above the range of incomes do newcomers have to be before they are gentrifiers? And as for "moving in", we have the same question: since there will almost always be…

I forgot to wear your necklace today. (personal)

2010-01-04T19:17:51Z

I forgot to wear your necklace today.

I saw it on my dresser when I came up to bed, instinctively reached for the place on my chest where the pendant would hang. Bare skin. I ran my fingers lightly up to my neck, looked up into the mirror, saw where the silver chain should have been. It was on the dresser. A scrap of rock and metal. A scrap of you.

I put it on, stared at the mirror in the dark, barely able to make it out against my skin. Remembered how it looked next to your freckles in the summertime, when you wore that sundress, the one with the blue flowers. Remembered when you got it, your first diamond, and we pretended that a boy had given it to you instead of our parents. I was always jealous. So jealous that when you gave it to me, I refused at first, embarrassed. But you insisted.

I wore it every day, even under my smock, took it off only to sleep or shower. I wore it to my senior prom, Eric's graduation, your wedding. And I wore it at the service,…

Narcissistic Personality Disorder (fiction)

2010-01-04T17:28:58Z

A made up disease. The kind of thing you come to expect from organizations like the American Psychiatric Association, who have free reign to publish lists of symptoms without identifying an associated pathology. The "disorder" is better described as a lack of experience and perspective. I'm going to go through the diagnostic criteria, posted in samvak's writeup, and explain why each of them is complete bullshit. Bear with me as I do so. Please note that any behaviors I describe as "universal" can certainly be *suppressed* - and, depending on the behavior, it may be advantageous to do so. A reluctance to suppress a behavior, however, cannot be accurately described as a physical malfunction, so much as a deficiency in information.

An all-pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behaviour), need for admiration or adulation and lack of empathy, usually beginning by early adulthood and present in various contexts.

…

prequel (thing)

2010-01-04T13:13:47Z

"Prequel" is a handy word. So useful - yet so abused and mistreated. It's going to need a lot of therapy to overcome the trauma.

The word is simple to understand: Take the start of the word "previous" and the end of the word "sequel" and stitch them together to get the portmanteau "prequel": A sequel that chronologically places its events before those of the original work. A good example of a prequel is the film Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, which takes place in 1935, a year before the setting of the previous movie, Raiders of the Lost Ark. Unlike other prequels, that one is not telling a background story to explain how the situation in the first film came about, it is just a previous adventure of the main character.

It is more common for a prequel to explain the backstory to the original work, show how the situation at the start of the original came about, and flesh out things referred to as past events. The Silmarillion, Tolkien's attempt to emulate…