The Garden of Discordia

I was gonna buy a ticket to some little multi-band "Tribute to Die Ärzte" event her in Berlin, sounded fun. And so I check out the Badeimster page to see if there's anything official about it, they list DÄ parties and whatnot sometimes

And what do I see? DIE ÄRZTE HAVE ANNOUNCED A NEW TOUR FOR 2012!!! With ticket sales starting in 2 days

*makes whimpering noises at the thought of almost having missed this*

For those readers now confused, Die Ärzte (die beste band der welt ♥) are a German punk-rock band that I've been a great fan of for ten years now* and they always have GREAT concerts. And the Berlin concerts in particular tend to sell out in 0.2 seconds or something like that.

Well. We can't have that, so at midnight on the appropriate date I'll be F5-ing my computer like mad.

But! There is a cloud on the sky - my debit card was refused when I tried to buy the "tribute to DÄ" ticket, for unclear reasons. There's money in the account and my login works spiffily... but I think that because the German website isn't equipped for our fucking Swedish credit card e-security measures, the bank refused the transfer. Can't have that >_> If worst comes to worst, I'll ask my sister or someone to buy the tickets from Sweden and just fork over the money, but first I'll try to solve it here. Deutsche Bank apparantly has offices in Sweden too, so after my visit to Burgeramt, off I go to see if I can get a EC-card. Hopefully, those work online. Or I'll just have to pay for a credit card too, I need to be able to order online tickets and stuff!

But still...

OMG DIE ÄRZTE ARE TOURING WHILE I'M IN GERMANY YAY YAY YAY!!!!

*It was slightly odd to realize that, since it is now exactly ten years since 9/11 and I sat in a living room in Erkner watching what happened on the screens, that means it's been ten years since my first time living in Germany

Wah, our hotel has Wifi, but not for free. So, hasty post!

J-popcon has been like the best karaoke experience ever so far! They've treated us really well, everything was in place when we got here (that's incredibly rare. Last Uppcon and now is like the only time. In 5 years...) and we got gophers helping out and all. The hall is also super sweet, big, airy and with lots of chairs ^_^

I haven't been around that much in the rest of the convetion area, because first we had to set stuff up, then we ate (pizza buffe, om nom nom) and then I've basically been singing with lots of happy Danish anime fans until it was time for bed. But it looks great, is amazingly close to the central station and I much look forward to looking around more tomorrow!

So far, everything spiffy. We'll see what there is actually to do tomorrow, since the night-work schedule = we are free to go look around the con! Holy crap

Am I the only one who strongly dislikes the term "animanga"?

In particular when refering to anime and manga fandom where the sources are unrelated. But also where the sources are related, because unless you know something about that particular canon, it's a risky business to equate an anime with the manga of the same name when you do your meta.

But it basically boils down to this sense of unease I have. I'm not in any darn animanga fandom kthx!
I'm a manga fan and there are a bunch of anime I like. I know loads of people who are anime fans, with a few handpicked manga that they like. It's not like we talk about moviebook fans, or even comicartoon enthusiasts.

Do I, at the moment, keep up with fandom? No, not really. I read ANN for work, I check the swedish forums occasionally, and lanjelin is showing me the highlights of Dr Who and the interesting wankbaits at fandomsecrets. I read some fic and try to leave at least a "great stuff!" for the great stuff. That's about it, really, except an obsessive control of the latest Hetalia merchandize.

No time for more, unfortunately.

I do however try to keep up with the news of the real world. This is easier, since I can read the newspaper on the bus. During my lunch break, I also have access to the Serious Business Newspaper, unless a workmate stole it first

Anyway - better get to the point before the internet dies again - I am a bit behind. But I haven't seen anything talked about the new, french, movie based on Alexander Dumas life. And more specifically, the fact that he's to be played by Gerard Depardieu, which has upset people who knew more lit history than me, because Dumas grandfather was a black Haitian slave. Aaand they've basically whitewashed that part of his history completely in this movie *

Which sucks. It also sucks that, despite this being such a commonly known issue that the non-too-radicall Wikipedia mentions it explicitly, with a striking but bitter quote even! Not one of my school books, nor my teachers (nor, it turned out, any of my mother's teachers or books) ever bothered to mention this fact. Despite me being a devout fangirl of The Count of Monte Cristo when I was much younger and, you know, pretty interested in this dude. Not interested enough to go out and read his biography - I was, what, 11? But I would have remembered if it mentioned anything about his writing being affected by racism and colonialism.
Heck, my swedish Jungle Book edition - for kids, shortened and everything - had a page talking about Kipling and colonialism. Dumas? Not a peep

* This is hearsay. Or, well, newspapersay, I haven't seen the movie, I don't even know if it's finished yet.

Also, my foot hurts and is blue-purple-green today
/intresseklubben antecknar

ETA: And of course this reminded me of fandom because of racefail and all the meta-undercurrents that I have vaguely sensed but not really had time to read in-depth.

I think I want to send everyone from SL up to Umeå and ask them to take a bus.... This is how you do commuting traffic. You can pay with your credit card, there are electronic signs that show what's going on with the traffic and they have a similar load'em'up system for the bus cards as Stockholm/Göteborg. A perfect mixture and so far there's also always been a bus every time I wanted to take one, or three minutes later.

Splendid.

But that was not quite the point of this post. No. ( Textual Echoes symposium talk, cut for length )