On auspicious comings-out

Okay, so I've never had to come out of any kind of a closet, really, so I don't know if the preferred response from friends would be "yay!" or "okay" or "yeah, dude, we knew." But one guy's coming out post on Facebook lands pretty much where I'd want to be.

Read the entire thing at the link above (post title: Guy comes out of closet on Facebook to friends who are entirely too geeky to care), of course, but I shall provide a few highlights.

The gentleman posts:

I've been in the closet for far too long, so here goes: I'm gay. I've known, in retrospect, for about eight years. This is the easiest way for me to deal with it; I apologize if anyone feels affronted that I didn't tell them in person.

As proof that this is not an account hack, I have posted a somewhat longer post on my blog, at http://[REDACTED].

His friends respond encouragingly.

Good on you man :)

...

takes guts to broadcast this

Congrats

I like the proof of no hack. Well anticipated. I didn't expect it but well done for getting it out. Must be a relief. It must have sucked to hold it in all this time. Could you possibly link a style sheet to that html? I hate bland markup.

ROFL @[REDACTED], "could you please make your blog post that says you're gay look prettier".

Ha ha, I swear I wasn't mocking. I just work on asp.net stuff all day and I've grown sick of ugly sites.

...

Not that your site is ugly. Just could do with some text alignment and maybe a background pic.

Good advice, especially if [REDACTED] decides to come out of the closet again, he can do so in style and elegance. @[REDACTED], perhaps we pretend you didn't come out, and then you have a few days to do a site overall, and then come out again and we'll asses the creativeness ;)

Go read the entire thing--the entire thing! Promise me!--and wish you had friends as cool as Green and Red.

On Hunger Games: What do you mean, the black girl was black?

Note: This post is cross-posted at Feministe. It's spoiler-free after Chapter 18 of the first book, so if you've read Chapter 18, you're good, and if not, read this later.

Okay, so when casting announcements came out for the Hunger Games movie, I was surprised (and yet, sadly, not really surprised) to see that there weren't more non-white tributes. While over the course of a few hundred years and a few disasters the ethnic makeup of the various districts may have shifted such that of the 24 tributes selected at random, only two were black, but it takes some logic-wanking to get there. The book specifies a blond guy, a blonde girl, a redheaded girl, and maybe a couple of others, but otherwise sadistic dystopian reality TV shows wherein children are forced to murder each other for the entertainment of the privileged masses might be expected to know no color.

But that, as well as the search for the perfect Caucasian Katniss, just wasn't enough for some people. Hunger Games fans ("fans"?) were up in arms at the casting of Lenny Kravitz as Cinna, Katniss's kind, compassionate stylist. Through the magic of reading comprehension, they managed to miss that a) Cinna's description isn't given beyond short, dark brown hair, gold eyeliner, and green eyes, and b) Kravitz is a cool drink on a hot day and they could have cast him as President Snow for all I care. (And--spoiler alert--in the movie, Kravitz does such a stellar job as Cinna that there could be no other.)

The wailing only got worse after the movie's release on Friday, as "fans" who hadn't seen a lot of advance materials got the shock of their lives to see a black character depicted by a black actress. Rue, played by the adorable Amandla Sternberg, was described as having "dark brown skin and eyes"--thus the ruination of the film at the hands of a dark-skinned, dark-eyed actress. On Twitter:

On the Good, the Bad, and the Friday Not-Even-Random Ten: I'm Back, No Seriously, This Time It's for Real edition

Okay, so I've become irrationally obsessed with The Hunger Games. I'd heard about it from here and there, and it was always somewhere toward the back of my reading list. When the first movie trailer came out, I found it intriguing and decided I definitely wanted to see the movie and should probably read the book first.

I loved it way too much. I'm saying I loved it more than is reasonable for a book that is solidly readable but not in any way spectacular. It's a good book, but not a great one such that I should be thusly fixated on it. No explanation. But this is all by way of saying that the movie is coming out today and I'm so inexplicably excited. The Boy teases me. He's probably teasing me right now.


What's good (for the indeterminate period ending 3/23/2012):

- Dirty Signs With Kristin, wherein Kristin teaches you to say things you probably shouldn't in American Sign Language. Today's lesson: how to sign "giant cock-topus."

- Firefighters doing their job like a boss.

There's a story behind this, and I could tell you, but I'm… not. (Totally feeling for the guy who has to pull up his dress while he's running. Strapless is a pain. I have to do that all the time.)

- Getting paid to do something you actually enjoy, not just something you tolerate doing because it pays the bills

- The Motorola Droid Bionic