This morning we went yard sailing! I am thinking that maybe this year, as the season starts to wind up, I will try to blog my yard sailing for the year, because I keep getting in conversations where I realize that lots of people don't really understand how seriously skewed by idea of "buying stuff" is as a result of a lifetime of yard sailing. Plus it might be fun just to have a record.

So, here ( Record of purchases )

Yard sailing, by the way, is why I missed most of the stuff that I am supposed to be nostalgic about from the '80s, and by that of course I mean Saturday morning cartoons. Because sure, we could have gotten up early on Saturday and parked in front of the TV, but instead we got up early, strapped on our roller skates and our $.25 allowance money, and went exploring all over the back roads of the county and buying cool stuff!

And that is a totally smooth segue into: I am still watching My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.

Also: totally crossing it over with Dresden Files. Look, if you need any more evidence that Twilight Sparkle basically is Harry Dresden, just watch Feeling Pinkie Keen from about 15 minutes in: complete with laciviously wisecracking lab assistant, pyromanical anger management issues, complicated relationship with faith, heroism lemming-ness, and all. Although admittedly Twilight is the protege of the Summer Queen rather than the Winter Queen, but that's because Equestria's Winter Queen wasn't really in any position to mentor anybody until Twilight Sparkle brought Summer fire to Arctis Tor. (Rarity is obviously Thomas, Pinkie Pie must be Butters if only because they're the only two people in history to have saved an entire town with a one-man-polka-band, and Rainbow Dash is probably Murphy. I am not so sure about Apple Jack, though - one of the Carpenters? And I am stuck on Fluttershy.)

One of the things I like about Dresden Files - and one of the reasons why it's so much fun to cross it over with really girly things like My Little Pony and color-coded dragons - is that DF is a canon with a lot of powerful women in it. And I don't mean Strong Female Characters - I mean women with enough power to crush any given male character with just their pinky finger, who are not at all hesitant about using it and don't get punished just for having it, and male characters who are very, very well aware of what these women can do.

Even characters like Harry (the wizard) and Marcone (the mob boss) and Michael (the knight), who seem like they're full of traditional male power, aren't really. Harry gets a lot of his power through Lash (spiritual), and Luccio (temporal), and his power in a magical sense comes in large part through his mother and his fairy godmothers. Marcone's power in the magical world comes mostly through the favor of Gard, and she works for him very much on her own terms, and while Amanda and Helen are more or less his fridge motivation, yes, Helen at least is a powerful figure in her own right who acts in her own interest (and survives above all.) Even Michael the Knight of the Cross has Charity behind him like a sovereignty maiden in an Arthurian romance, making it possible for him to act at all. And then there's Maeve and Lily and Murphy and Ivy and Molly and Elaine and Susan and Lara and Mavra and ...

I mean, I guess it's kind of inevitable in a series that started as a mash-up of hardboiled fiction and fairy tales, because those are both genres that are obsessed with women's power, and women's power being dangerous. But it is so amazing to have all of these awesome - in the original sense of tremble-in-fear awe-inspiring - women to play with. It takes real effort to leave out the women in Dresden Files fandom.

Which isn't to claim that Dresden files is some kind of shining light of feminism, or even anything less than frequently deeply faily when it comes to gender and sex, but it makes it a heck of a lot easier to forgive the fail when I know that for every time Harry does something face-palmingly douchey involving women, Mab will do something even worse to him, or Lara will effortlessly manipulate him into being her catspaw, or Charity will narrow her eyebrows at him and turn his bones to jelly, or Murphy will give him a dose of sweet reason + aikido and he'll have to apologize and admit he's in the wrong, and Harry will just have to sit there and take it because he's utterly unable to do anything about it.