The Antisocial Socialist

Q.What did you go as for Halloween?

A. The same thing I went for last weekend for not-Halloween.

Behold...the Christie Pits Hardball League.
( pics ) ( ETA: Better pics! )

Hey, would you all like to see what I do when I am on sick leave and I start turning into a kooky housewife? Of course you do.



So this lamp, I've had since I was a little kid. It's not that exciting. My childhood best friend's father made it and gave it to me, so it's kind of sentimental, but basically it's a boring lamp.

( gratuitous frou-frou )

Here's my cat facepalming:



I'm also working on a collage thing but it doesn't look like much yet. Oh, and a book, but that's paid work.

I was too busy drowning in work and health miseries to do anything exciting to commemorate International Women's Day.

It seems a bit disingenuous to even make a "happy IWD everyone!" post. After all, we live in a world where the puppet government that we murdered countless Afghans to install flat-out stated that it considers women "secondary," Virginia mandates invasive and unnecessary medical procedures for women who need abortions, and Rush Limbaugh exists. Not a ton to celebrate—better steel ourselves for the battles ahead.

On a more trivial but related note, I'm planning to re-print my Rebel Girl design. Anyone interested in getting some printed up?

Are you guys sick of my furniture posts yet?

( skip this if you are )

I have been a busy sabotabby this weekend.

I went to see Tomboyfriend's EP launch on Friday night, which was fabulous. It was also the premiere of culpster's video for "Hot Divorcee":



Fitness and Vag Halen opened. Both of them were highly entertaining but I was especially into Vag Halen. As some of you may know, I have a serious weakness for hair metal. It's a guilty pleasure. If the same songs are covered by talented women, it's all the pleasure without the guilt.

I just returned from seeing Hercules, Handel's almost-opera. It was also really amazing. minussmile and I had gallery seats for the first act (until we swiped better seats at intermission) so it was all bald spots and vowels. I've never been to Koerner Hall before and the acoustics are spectacular.

In between all of this activity, and school, I have been packing and painting all the things. I am pleased to announce that the first project in Operation Teal has been completed!

Another kind-of-guilty pleasure I have is for shabby chic. I don't like the all-white look (for me—I like it for other people, but I can't imagine living in it), but I like the distressed look with splashes of colour. The rooms in my new place are quite small, which means that my usual decorating method of bold, dark wall colours will not work. Accordingly, my furniture is going to be dramatic instead.

( lots of furniture photos under the cut )

Finally, some people have requested a picture of the Black Coat of Swoop, so here I am in full-on winter gear: ( camwhoreage )

Okay, now off to bed—a bookshelf awaits in my kitchen for tomorrow morning.

Hey internets! I made a thing!



I made it in school. The only problem is that it is a thing too large and heavy for my mom to put up on the fridge. Also it looks like a fucking bomb to the uninitiated.

What should I do with this thing?

The 6 Most Horrific Bosses of All Time. Excerpt:

How much did the workers hate Pullman? When he died, they had to bury his body in a steel and concrete vault, which was itself buried under a few tons of concrete. Why? Because--and we're not making this up--they were afraid that employees would dig up and beat the shit out of his corpse, otherwise.

Via ginny_t: The Commercial Pattern Archive free trial. Only I can't seem to download the patterns 'cause I haven't had enough coffee yet. HALP?

Okay, you're probably going to get a few more craft-related posts in the next little while, but here's a sneak preview. I did the 11-hour-long Peach Berserk screen-printing workshop, and it was awesome. My first attempts may not look all that impressive, but I learned a hell of a lot.

Anyway, here's one of the things I made today:



The text is the lyrics from Joe Hill's "Rebel Girl"; the portraits, clockwise from the left, are Assata Shakur, Phoolan Devi, Lucy Parsons, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Angela Davis, Emma Goldman, Leila Khaled, and Subcomandante Ramona.

I think it came out pretty well. I have two better versions on it of fabric that I'm going to make into dresses; this piece is small, so it'll probably end up being a pillowcase or something.

More later.