A couple of links:
*
Al Jazeera's 'Disaster in Japan' live blog for March 15th (previous days linked in the post)
* On Good.is:
Earthquake and Tsunami in Japan: How to Help*
Nuclear energy 101: Inside the "black box" of power plants. Also,
Fukushima Nuclear Accident – a simple and accurate explanation.
* Al Jazeera's
spotlight on Libya,
Yemen,
Bahrain,
Egypt, and
Algeria.
~*~
There's more - sweet baby bunnies, there's more - but I'm not in a good headspace for going over it right now. Let's talk about TV instead.
I've been faithfully watching
Wandering Son (Hourou Musuko) since Crunchy Roll
started airing it and folks, let me tell you, this show is amazing.
Amazing. You should click on that link and watch it (it's free!).
Wandering Son's a lovely, slow, slice of life story about trans kids in Japan - growing up, struggling with identity, and love, and family, and friendship, and puberty. It's gorgeous, beautifully animated and acted and full of sympathetic characters and, just [flails].
Let's move on to something I can talk about coherently, shall we? My roommate D and I spent Saturday afternoon burning through both seasons of
The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers and, well. Never have I seen that much Awesome and that much Fail packed into the same space.
The basics: LXD (for short) is a webseries that runs on Hulu. It's about dancers! There's a nominal plot, but mostly it's about showing off the work of some incredible artists.
The awesome: The vast majority of the characters are people of color - something like 13 out of 19 of the reoccuring characters (in the first season). Ditto for the background dancers (though I didn't go back and count, heh). Every single one of them is a fucking amazing dancer. We've got b-boying, we've got ballet, tricking, krumping, hip-hop, roboting, popping, tap... all integrated into the environment and the (again, nominal) plot. There's no special effect or wire work, everything's shot on location, the cinematography is beautiful. Also, there is Harry Shum, Jr.
The fail: The show is really, really,
really bad with woman. Only 3 of the aforementioned repeating characters are female, only two of them are dancers (there are more in the background, but not many). All three are love interests/plot devices and, ugh. In the 7th episode of season 1 (S1Ep7), one of them literally has control of her body stolen by a dude in a sequence that should come with a trigger warning. The only all-female dance routine (S2Ep5) is all about how women seduce and kill men, good times. There's also some messed up race stuff (especially the Eaters in S2Ep3 - black demons,
really?) and ablism (the psychiatric hospital scenes, especially in S2Ep8). There's also a weird weaponization of dance/art that I'm iffy about.
The neutral: The writing is terrible - they basically threw a bunch of Cool Stuff (
chi chakra Ra! Secret organizations! Boarding schools! The occult! Love triangles! Etc!) at a wall to see what would stick. The end of season 2 is so hilariously bad it comes out into awesome. The acting's not great either, but most of these guys are dancers, not actors.
So. If you want to watch a bunch of amazing, often adorable and/or attractive dudes dance and can ignore the fail (and the plot), LXD's worth a look. If nothing else, you should catch Harry Shum, Jr's intro chapter (he shows up at 1:08, dancing starts at 2:20):
Why is there no fanfic for this, fandom? I am disappoint.