Paper Moon

Long story short:

I'm going to be teaching a unit on graphic fiction to my Art History students.

I've been working with our school librarian (who is AWESOME when it comes to comics) to curate a list of sample texts to use. I mean "sample texts" both in terms of texts that I will make the whole class read AND an approved reading list of comics for students to choose for their independent reading at the end of the unit.

Awesome Librarian and I mutually decided that list of optional comics for students to choose for their independent reading should include a least one representative example of puzzle-game-style-adventure-partially-generated-by-reader-input-type comic, since it's a format that's intriguing, interesting to the kids, and easy to use as discussion fodder for a variety of themes developed in the unit (that they WILL have to address in their final critique of their chosen comic).

And for our representative example of said type-of-comic-that-we-really-need-a-better-name-for, we really want to go with Rubyquest.

It's short, it's complete, and it's the best representation of reader-input-driven storytelling I've seen in the genre. I know that the content can be really disturbing, but it's an optional reading (one of over thirty titles that the kids will be able to choose from) and believe me I know that said disturbing content will definitely appeal to more than a few of my students. Best of all, it's available in a super-convenient format for us to use: these beautifully-compiled SWF files that WILL, believe it or not, play on the Sony pocketbooks that the kids have been issued. Complete with all the extras like the rejected reader commands and reader theories and fanart and stuff all nicely compiled together right there in the SWF.

Aaaaaaaaaaand therein lies the problem. The fanart that our intrepid TekStation compiled into the SWF files contains some Rule 34 and there is no way in hell I can give my students SWF files with bunny porn on them.

Yes, I am totally okay with putting a comic full of shockingly violent imagery and lots of body horror on my approved comic reading list. It wouldn't be the only comic full of shockingly violent imagery and lots of body horror on the list, either. (Swamp Thing, Akira, Sharaz-De, and Courtney Crumrin are on the reading list too.) But anything even mildly sexual is a huge no-no (hence me being unable to get administrative approval to add Craig Thompson's Blankets to the list) so it goes without saying that the fanart porn in the Rubyquest files has got to be removed. And to be totally honest I think that all Rubyquest porn is horrible weird gross and wrong, no I don't feel particularly bad being judgmental about that, and as far as I'm concerned it detracts nothing from the experience if you can't see that shit in the SWF files.

So I've got this great comic that somebody on the interbutts has already compiled into super-convenient SWF files for me, but said compiler also included some fanart in the SWF compilations and said fanart also happens to include some porn.

I've tried contacting TekStation on his deviantart to explain my situation and ask him if he would be so kind as to help a poor teacher out and send me (or post on the internet somewhere) versions of his SWF files with the porn removed. But that was over a week ago, I haven't heard back from him yet, and he doesn't appear to have logged into his deviantart account since last summer. So I don't have much hope there.

Right now my options, as I see them, are:

1. Edit out the porn myself.

But HELP I HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO DO THIS and neither the Awesome Librarian nor I are nearly tech-savvy enough to even know what program to use to edit SWF files I mean what program DO you use?! Can anybody recommend a good (free) program that would help a total SWF newbie like me edit a few images out of a file? Or is this not even a thing that can be done that easily?

2. Ask somebody else to edit out the porn.

Problem so far: None of my RL friends are tech-savvy enough to do so, and there's no way in hell I'm going to ask anybody that works for my school district to do it for me because, you know, it's bunny porn. Not worth losing my job over.

3. Find an alternative compilation/presentation of the comic.

Does anybody know of an alternative compilation/presentation of Rubyquest that they would recommend? So far Google has only given me TekStation's SWF files and this which is unfortunately just a horrible way to experience the comic.

4. Give up and settle for a different representative example of a puzzle-game-style-adventure-partially-generated-by-reader-input-type comic to add to the approved reading list.

I'm open for suggestions. Parameters: Works must be complete, not more than a few hundred pages long, and not contain too much sexual content. Gore is totally fine, though!


So anywhoo I would very much appreciate help with any of the four options above.

Trying to finish up the "pre-approved reading choices" list for next year's Asian Arts and Humanities before school starts next year. I am currently having trouble finding fiction by authors from the following countries:

Saudi Arabia

Iraq

Cambodia (I already have Life Under the Banyan but I really would like to find more.)

Malaysia (I have Tash Aw, Preeta Samarasan, and Shirley Geok-lin Lim tentatively on the list, but I would REALLY like to find some more young adult-oriented and less "literary" authors. Not all of my students have the patience for Grownup Books and I think that they can still learn a whole heckuva lot from reading contemporary young adult fiction from foreign countries instead.)

So I guess it's time for me to ask for help. Does anybody have any suggestions?

Guidelines:

1. Any work of fiction - novel, short story collection, or graphic novel - is okay. I love trashy young adult novels as much as I love literary fiction, and I'm trying to get a good balance of both on the reading list.

2. Books MUST be by an author from one of the countries listed, but do not necessarily have to be set *in* that country. Speculative fiction is a-okay, too.

3. English or Spanish recommendations only, please. Books that have been written in a different language and then translated into English or Spanish are perfectly fine.

4. I do teach in the Bible Belt, so please, nothing with excessive, graphic sexual content. LGBT themes and characters are totally fine, and I'm willing to risk parental disapproval to stand by those books. Just don't give me anything that might border on softcore porn, okay? Helpful examples: Seba al-Herz's The Others is way too racy to go on a reading list for high school students (and it also portrays lesbians as evil and deviant so uh NO THANK YOU), but something like Ping Wang's The Last Communist Virgin - which has a little bit of sex, really nothing more graphic than you would find in whatever books these kids are reading for their English classes - is totally fine. Also, The Great Singapore Penis Panic is on the non-fiction reading list for the class, so it's not as if any mention of genitals is automatically taboo here. But you get my drift.

Wow okay I guess this whole list sounds really demanding and nitpicky. Er. But I'm still throwing this out there just in case anybody reading this has some awesome book suggestions that would fit the requirements for being on my reading list.

So excited for new Soul Eater Not! tomorrow. I don't even care if we get another nine-page chapter of Tsugumi hatching romantic plots revolving around omelets or whatever. Which to be fair is never an unlikely possibility, because Not! may be a lot of things but quality manga it most certainly is not, but IDGAF I enjoy it anyway, especially the parts about the main Soul Eater cast members.

Speaking of which! terajk is posting some excellent short Soul Eater fics on her journal right now.

Also! The Not Prime Time multifandom fic exchange (for fandoms that are too large to be eligible for Yuletide but still small enough to not be megafandoms) is currently accepting fandom promotions. Soul Eater, Fairy Tail, and a whole bucketload of anime, manga, TV, movie, and video game fandoms are going to be eligible this year. So if you have a fandom that you would like to promote before the nomination process officially begins, here's your chance.

Related: Does anybody have any good Lucy/Erza fic they could recommend? I'm dying for some friendship!fic or femmeslash, either flavor.

Unrelated: Pop Culture Boyfriends. Highly tongue-in-cheek and yet surprisingly revealing in terms of the pop media landscape that teen and twenty-something girls are devouring at the moment. Granted, I was surprised to see only three pieces of Western media in there (Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, and A:TLA) and VERY surprised to see no Homestuck references.

So speaking of Homestuck... I started re-reading parts of it a couple weeks ago when I was down and out with the flu, and sadly I believe that my love for Vriska/Tavros has been rekindled all over again. I say "sadly" because this is the most unfortunate thing that I have ever shipped. EVER. Because it has got to be one of the most disasterous relationships in the history of epic speculative literature ever created EVER. To put this trainwreck of a romance in context: Vriska and Tavros are alien trolls from an another planet in an alternative universe, and products of a culture that requires them to, at some point, have a hate-fueled "black romance" mating with another member of their species. Most teenage trolls seem to dream of having, as another troll puts it, the type of epic black romance that results in "blood rivers runnin through star systems and all nebulizin like liquid fireworks, beautiful and heartbreaking all at once." And yet even by troll standards Vriska and Tavros have a romantic arc that is such an utter disaster that the other trolls consider it to have crossed the line. Even by troll standards. This relationship isn't just a trainwreck, it's a trainwreck and a volcanic eruption and a hurricane and a tsunami and the sun collapsing into a black hole and swallowing the entire solar system all at once. And it all started so innocently, too: Vriska and Tavros were both nerdy teenage trolls who liked to roleplay, cosplay, and even play a certain children's game involving collectible tiny monsters. But then their relationship quickly escalated into murder attempts, spiderweb bondage, amputations, and eventually - of course - a duel to the death. They were poison to each other and even worse, they didn't just manage to doom themselves, but their trainwreck of an aborted romance managed to doom most of their friends too, at least to the point where it directly resulted in Tavros's RP partner getting killed and Vriska's RP partner permanently maimed. And yet - AND YET - for some reason I still have ~so many feelings~ for this pairing, horrible as it was and as horribly as it ended. I think that the horribleness of it all is part of the appeal, of course - who doesn't love a good tragedy? - but I also am kind of fascinated by the way that these two characters stuck together despite Vriska being Vriska and Tavros being so utterly terrified of her, how Vriska believed in Tavros until the bitter end and how Tavros wouldn't stay away from her despite every other troll telling him to do so, and how the fandom around the pairing does some much more insightful and interesting things with the disabilities of these two characters (NSFW) than the canon text ever did. It also doesn't help that despite everything, there is so much about this pairing that is so blackly hilarious - from Vriska's cosplay fetish to ROCKET WHEELCHAIR to "Well I'm lying on the floor in Vriska's room and we're both wearing costumes and I'm not explaining this very well, am I?" to That Thing that Vriska Did With Tavros's Severed Legs - that it's kind of hard not to laugh at it, just like it's kind of hard not to laugh at any of the doomed, doomed romantic pairings that Homestuck loves to revel in.

TL;DR version: This is the worst thing that I have ever shipped, and I have recently fallen in love with the pairing all over again, and I REGRET NOTHING.

Fortunately The Serendipity Gospels updated last week with so much deliciously horrible Vriska/Tavros shipping that it is glorious. Glorious.

Do any of y'all have any advice as to how to make a laptop running Windows Vista stop throwing a temper tantrum every ten minutes when connected to a wireless router using WPA2 encryption?

I know, I know, the obvious solution is to upgrade to Windows 7. But due to a compatibility issue with a district-specific piece of DINOSAUR SOFTWARE that I need to use for my job, that's not going to be able to happen for a while. The other obvious solution is to change my wireless router over to WEP encryption, but again that's not an option because then my iPad won't connect to my wireless internet. iPad-chan is a prissy prissy little princess and she refuses to accept anything less than WPA2 encryption for her wireless connection.

So I'm stuck with my wireless router on WPA2 and my laptop still running Windows Vista. Which is frustrating because since February my computer has been doing this thing where every ten minutes it just sort of drops the wireless internet signal, and it can take up to three minutes to get it back. At first I thought that the problem was with my wireless router dropping the signal, but six phone calls and approximately 4.2 billion hours (rough estimate) on the phone with Belkin customer support later, we have most definitively concluded that the problem is not with the router dropping the signal, but rather with Vista just being a turd when it comes to WPA encryption, which a quick Google search shows me is apparently a common issue. Awesome.

I've upgraded my Vista so that it's current, tried installing the KB935222 Hotfix (which didn't work as it had already been included in one of my past Vista updates), and am now totally baffled as to what I can do next.

I know that my laptop can work just fine with WPA2 encryption because it did work just fine for several months. And then this trouble started. I'm not a computer person and I have no idea what I could have done to cause Vista to start pitching hissy-fits with my wireless connection, but the fact that this hasn't been a problem since the beginning is giving me hope that maybe there's something that I can do to fix it...?

So I'm just throwing this out here on the off-chance that maybe somebody reading this has had a similar problem and was able to find or come up with a solution.

Help?