[film] Taqwacore: the birth of punk Islam

Taqwacore! It is pretty awesome.

So then I dug out the 2009 documentary, expecting it to be really awesome, and instead found that it focussed entirely on the ~spiritual journey~ of a white dude... via the medium of his collecting a bunch of punk Islam youth and going on a road-trip with them. Almost everything was reflected back through him, rather than through the kids who were actually making the music.

I was disappointed.

On the plus side, it introduced me to Secret Trial Five, a queer political punk rock band fronted by a drag king. (Who have subsequently distanced themselves from taqwacore.) So that's awesome too.

[rec] fic: Modern Love

Modern Love is a charming 3000-word piece of Discworld fic looking at the intersection of queerness and dwarfdom in Ankh-Morpork. "... although it seemed breathtakingly forward to be talking about both gold and mattresses..."

[via, unsurprisingly, noldo]

Getting rhyolite-MELTS working in a VM under Windows: notes for self

In part because it might be useful to someone else with a similar level of tech-literacy to me, and in part because I expect I'm going to have to do this again so I might as well write it all down. Probably not of interest to any of the usual readers!

( Read more... )

Unfortunately the only reason I'm doing this is that MELTS doesn't seem to play nice on a netbook screen. In an ideal world I'd sort that out, but oh well - I've got this solution now!

( Further NTS as excitement ensues. )

Aha, Paula has come up trumps: this post details the reasons and workaround for the problems with registering keystrokes.