1. ( Minor thirdhand spoiler from ST:ID )

Here is new favorite gif to give you some spoiler space:



2. I posted a fic!

Hand In Hand (1595 words) by melannen
Fandom: Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Canonical Character Deaths
Relationships: Cosette Fauchelevent/Marius Pontmercy
Characters: Cosette Fauchelevent, Marius Pontmercy, Les Amis de l'ABC
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Prehistoric, Empty Chairs, Cave Paintings, Post Barricade, Caves, France (Country), Painting, Memories
Summary: In the south of France, a group of young men once came together to teach, to learn, and to fight for the rights of all humankind.

...I am told it makes people cry, so, uh, be warned? (all of the fic I want to write in this fandom right now is about all of Marius's friends being dead, don't ask me why.)

3. Speaking of, there is now a general, everybody-welcome Les Misérables community on DW so we don't have to keep trying to have serious discussions on Tumblr:

les_miserables

If you are even peripherally in Les Mis fandom, come join! Come play! My current plan is to keep posting stuff about Waterloo there until other people start posting just to stop the pain. :P

4. Reminder that the Books and Comics giveaway is still active. If we have ever had any interactions in person or on the internet you count as someone I know.

(Oh btw, if you claim any books: can you PM or email me a functional mailing address? I kind of forgot I would need that when I made the original post.)

Guess what, everyone! It's time for Hobbit birthday presents!

And I have cleaned out my library!

Any books listed in the Great Giveaway Collection on my Librarything is being gotten rid of. Many of them are review copies I was given, and I'd like to pass them on to you guys, if you want them!
So check out the listing, and comment here if there are any you want, first come first serve.

If you want a few, I know you and you're in the US I'll send them to you USPS book rate (if you want to pay me back for postage in DW points, that would be great, but you don't need to). If I don't know you and/or you're not in the US and/or you want more than a dozen or so, comment anyway - in that case, I'll probably want help with postage - but I mostly just want them going to a good home.

They're mostly graphic novels and Star Trek novels but there are also a few other random things scattered in here and there.

Also there's an additional list of things that got cleared out that never made it into LT:

( List of Books To Give Away )

This offer is open until the morning of Saturday, June 8, at which point any unclaimed volumes will either be donated to charity or put back on my shelves, depending how strong my willpower is that day...

(I may pull out some more between now and then; if so, I'll add 'em to the end of the list under the cut.)

Occasionally in lesmiseres chat I encourage people to turn their fanfic into epic historical digressions or side stories about minor characters and say I'm learning how to write good by studying the Brick.

I think they think I'm kidding. But actually I greatly admire the Victorian writing style where nobody ever shoved "show don't tell" in authors' faces, and not everything was about focusing claustrophobically down on "the meat of the story". And they can't have had it all wrong - they were the ones who turned the novel into the linchpin of popular culture, after all.

So here, for your delectation, are the first two weeks' worth of writing exercises in a program I've been working up for myself. ^_^ I'm seriously thinking of setting up some kind of community for working through these... (If anyone wants the blank Scrivener file with this set up in it, I can upload that too...)

ETA: I should note for people coming in without context that these are just chapter-by-chapter summaries of the novel Les Miserables - I didn't put a lot of effort into carefully crafting them!

1     1.1.1

Tell a character's entire life story (1500 words or less)

2     1.1.2

Show a character's personality by describing their household and household budgets (2000 words or less)

3     1.1.3

Describe a character doing their job well (800 words or less)

4     1.1.4

Demonstrate what a character does by telling us things they have said (2500 words or less)

5     1.1.5

Give a typical day in the life of a character, hour by hour (1000 words or less)

6     1.1.6

Describe a character by writing about their house and its contents, room by room (2500 words or less.)

7     1.1.7

Give an anecdote about a time a character did something that everybody advised them against that turned out well anyway. (1500 words or less.)

8     1.1.8

Two acquaintances with fundamental disagreements discuss them (1500 words or less.)

9     1.1.9

Someone who loves a character describes them to someone else (1500 words or less.)

10     1.1.10

A character has a deathbed conversation with a stranger (5000 words or less.)

11     1.1.11

Describe how a character's political views have affected their daily life (2000 words or less.)

12     1.1.12

Describe a character's career ambitions (or lack thereof.) (1500 words or less.)

13     1.1.13

Tell what a character believes in as articles of faith (religious or otherwise.) (1500 words or less.)

14     1.1.14

Tell how a character thinks, how much they value learning and philosophy. (1000 words or less.)

Hi people! Long time, no post. short explanation: tag wrangling has eaten all my free online time. basically. (new wranglers are awesome! But they have, like, energy, and ideas, and questions, so there's stuff we've been putting of that's suddenly being worked on, and I've been spending a lot of time in wrangler chat now that it's constantly full of new wranglers with energy, and ideas, and questions. So there goes what remains of my online interaction energy.)

Anyway! TODAY I SAW IRON MAN III. (Because Interrobang Studios headquarters are holding their bi-annual 24-hour-geekery house party on Saturday and Sunday, so if I wanted to go unspoiled it had to be soon.)

( Previews )

( Iron Man III, some non-plot-related spoilers )

Um. Okay. Hmm. Other things:

I have joined the beta of GrowStuff, skud's food gardening community website, where I am sort of live-blogging my annual doomed attempt at vegetable gardening, so if you'd like to observe me moaning as my plants slowly die over the course of the summer, that's there. (And you should also join the beta if you have an interest in awesome open-source projects and in growing things you can eat!)

Also if you remember that giant HOW TO TAG thing I posted awhile back, I keep staring at it and being scared of how much revising it needs, so in the meantime yesterday I posted five-simple-ways-to-improve-your-ao3-tags on Tumblr, which pulls out the bits of that which I most DESPERATELY wish more people would figure out. Spread it around? I am always surprised how many users don't know this stuff.

Um and also I got tired of doing wrangling the other day so just to prove I could actually make things, I coded a Random AO3 Work Generator. It's coded using my l33t web design skills c.1997 (FRAMES ARE AWESOME OKAY) and also it'll only find works that were posted before the last time I went in and manually updated the maximum works number¹, and the error handling consists of 'if there's an error, press the button again' but it does to a pretty good job of getting you random AO3 works! Many of them poorly tagged and sadly un-kudos'd. :/ Also here's a fun game to play: press the 'random' button until you find a work you've already read. Then divide 800,000 by the number of times you had to press the button, and you get the approximate number of works on AO3 that you've read. (multiple trials improve accuracy, of course. My number hovers around 10,000...)

...and finally: luzula podficced One Warm Line (the fic where Ray Kowalski meets the Winter Lady), and I have listened to it ummmumble times since I got the notification. You should listen to it too! Luzula's voice actually works *really well* for the Maeve in my head, and she even handled the random Welsh and Inuktitut I threw in there. :D (though there's nothing as excruciating as the lingering typo in your fic that looks like a real word so the podficcer reads it as-is even though they were clearly confused by it...) (also did i really think I could get away with using "twisty passages" and "gently caress" in the same sentence? What is wrong with you, me?)

¹ I thought it should be possible to go in and automatically get the number off the AO3 latest works page once in awhile, but apparently the internet is set up to not let javascript do this by itself? And if I'm going to mess with more-than-javascript I should just learn proper AO3 coding already...

Hi all! I have been wasting too much of my fandom-time lately in either the wranglers' chatroom or #lesmiseres (and also re-reading all the Discworld novels with Vetinari in them), so, uh, too little that is not directly encouraged by those has been getting done.

Chatting with the Miseres people has made me learn all sorts of new things about my fandom self, though. Or, rather, realize more clearly things I should already have known. :P

Like: the difference between "tentacle fic I adore" and "tentacle fic I get bored of quickly" is that I have to buy the motivations of the tentacle monster. It either has to a) be behaving in an utterly alien way beyond human comprehension or b) have some explanation for why it is doing what it is doing. "Tentacle monster is doing human-style-sex stuff to human for no particular reason" is almost always what loses me.

Also I have a Type when it comes to pairings I glom hard onto. I kind of knew this? But it's become inescapable.

Basically, if you have two cranky middle-aged-or-older people, who are on opposite sides of an unbridgeable divide, and have a long and painful and twisty history, but still respect each other on some level and can't manage to stay away from each other... I will probably ship them in as close as I ever get to OTPs.

( Here is a preliminary list, )

(I feel like there were other things I was planning to say the next time I managed to post, but if so, I have forgotten them...)

Last night I dreamed that Monsigneur Bienvenu was elected Pope, and then he started implementing huge liberal reforms in the Church, which quickly resulted in massive and ongoing assassination attempts, so he had to go on the run through the United States, and he was moving between safehouses all over the country but none of them lasted more than a few days before the bad-guys-with-guns found him again, until he ended up in a beautifully kept and super-secure townhouse in Georgetown belonging to a former-child-hacker-turned-middle-aged-CIA-security-consultant where he actually got a chance to rest and think, and also start an epic platonic love affair with his host. And on further thought, I'm pretty sure said host was supposed to be Jean Valjean even though he was never ID'd in the dream, considering his criminal history and the fact that he had a sister who was constantly coming around asking for money, and he'd more-or-less adopted the pretty single mother and her eight-year-old daughter who lived next door, and there were a constant stream of other people coming through the kitchen asking for help or at least a place to rest awhile. Which was kind of a problem for someone who needed a top-secret safehouse, so he had to move on again, but then the dishy-and-snarky U.S. Marshal who was organizing the safehouses (presumably Javert??) figured out a way to let him come back without being in danger, but I woke up before I figured out how he did it.

For the record, I deeply approve of silver fox cypherpunk Valjean. You can ship him with the Marshal instead of Bienvenu if you want. :P And also, I need to stop listening to the news on NPR right before bed.

ANYWAY.

I am shortly going to spam you all under lock. Because I have written a thing. That is, I have written a "Guide To Tagging Your Stuff on AO3".

But it kind of got out of hand? So it's now split into three posts + a review exercise. And I figured given that it's become over-elaborate, and the tendency of AO3-related things to generate wild fancies, and the taggingness of tags, I'd post under lock and let you guys pick it apart first, and then after a week or two decide whether to unlock it & link it on Tumblr, or not.

If you're in my circle but I don't grant you access, and you'd like to be a first-reader on this, let me know and I'll add you to access.

(PS: I blame this on the fact that I have been reading Why's Poignant Guide To Ruby. That book has done nothing to disabuse me of the idea that people who think Ruby is the best of all programming languages are more than slightly off-kilter to consensus reality.)

1. I posted a fanmixy thing for the asexual_fandom mini meta fest that's ongoing. So, you know, you should all go look at the post? And also write and comment on other things for the mini meta fest.

(Things I learned from doing that post: a) the a_f crowd seems to lean really heavily toward semi-obscure folk music. Somehow not too surprised?; b) the version of Windows Media Player that comes with Windows 8 is the most terrible thing ever for making fanfixes on; c) no really there needs to be a Les Mis vid to 99 Problems. Or a 99 Problems vid to Les Mis, I'm not picky.)

2. The difference in experiences between tag wrangling several dozen small/quiet fandoms and tag wrangling one very active and vocal fandom is so different that it doesn't feel like the same job at all. I suspect this difference is a major and largely invisible factor in some of the issues with wrangling culture and communication.

(Things I did not expect as a result of being in Les Mis fandom: that I would be inspired to brush up on my Spanish. Cheers and kudos to the small cadre of Spanish-Language Les Mis authors on AO3! I am enjoying translating all of your chatty freeforms and learning about the recent European student political movements you're writing about, even if my Spanish is still too terrible to actually enjoy your fic. ...no, nobody is posting Les Mis fic on AO3 in French, that would just be silly.)

3. Also I accidentally the Brick? I started writing a fanfic that was not intended to be crack, but then it started trying to be ALL ABOUT MARIUS, so in order to prevent that terrible fate I had to let it become a Javert & Courfeyrac mismatched buddycop casefile where they bond over how very Pontmercy Pontmercy is, and while there are a lot of things I can try to write without knowing canon, casefile is not one of them.

So anyway, Brick. I wanted to be good and read it straight through but so far I am just reading the Javert-relevant parts and the political digressions completely out of order. But, okay. So. I started this fic as a Javert/Valjean-ish story? But I was trying to follow the characterization I'd picked up from highly-rec'd bookverse stories, where Javert isn't nearly as obsessed with Valjean as he often is in musical canon. But now that I have read some scenes from the brick. I am going to have to go put some obsession-with-Valjean back in. Apparently the slashfic has misled me in the wrong direction about how slashy canon is, yet again...

(Thing I have learned from this adventure: Apparently, even though I have never even read this book before, I can open to approximately the right page to find any scene I want, if I know where it falls in the plot, just by feel. Book superpowers: Activate! Now I know why I was determined to wait for a paper copy. Can't navigate by feel in ebooks. Also, why was I worried about having to do extra history & politics research to write bookverse fic? ANY HISTORY HUGO WANTS HIS FANS TO KNOW HUGO WILL TELL THEM HIMSELF.)

4. Also reading the Brick has made me figure out where Valjean fits into the Discworld crossover, which has suddenly given me something like a plot. (Really the Brick in person is way, way more like a Discworld novel than I expected, right down to narrative voice and hilariously random non sequitur history digressions. Though I should have expected that, I just hadn't made the connections.)

Although putting Valjean (and probably Patron-Minette, because Thieves' Guild intrigue) in during Snapcase-era means I really can't get away with leaving out Javert. Figuring out Javert is hard (even when not writing cracky crossovers). (Hey, carmarthen, would you feel terribly betrayed if I had Javert raised in the same Genua brothel where Vetinari was raised? I know it's just fanon but! Javert and Vetinari raised in the same brothel! And nobody ever seems to write I-am-from-the-gutter-too Vetinari even though it's more canon than any other backstory we've got for him. Probably because he doesn't shout at people about it.)

4. Also: WAISTCOATS. PEOPLE I NEED WAISTCOATS. 19th-CENTURY-STYLED WAISTCOATS.

I know some of the people reading this are waistcoat-people! Anybody have recommendations for how to acquire sturdy, fitted waistcoasts worthy of a Victorian dandy that are sized for a small-bosomed yet still lady-shaped person? Historical sewing patterns preferred, but I would enjoy anything, up to and including just pretty pictures...

carmarthen was doing a thing on Tumblr where people demonstrate how obsessed they are with Les Mis by playing a game where somebody says something random, and the next person has to link it to Les Mis somehow in less than six steps.

(I totally would have participated, except, well, Tumblr. So Tumblr that I can't even find her post to link to it here.)

ANYWAY. Along those lines, some years back, somebody (I've no idea who) said that their test for when they're too invested in a fandom is to pick some random songs from their collection, and if they can come up with a pairing (or vid idea) that matches every song, they are exactly the right level of invested. (If you come up with the same pairing for every song, you are probably too invested.)

It's been awhile since I posted one of those here! So here, have the songs that came up at random on my Songs For Sunny Days playlist while I was walking to the library this afternoon to pick up the copy of the Brick that just came in for me.

( No Les Mis lyrics under cut! although this may reveal more than I want to about my taste in music otherwise... )

Come play! Can you do this with your music collection (ETA: or best playlist) and your current best fandom(s)? (it doesn't have to be Les Mis. Honest. I am still capable of other things.)

In which I for once make a good life decision:

By choosing to re-read Pratchett's "Night Watch" instead of picking up the Brick.

But I can't write a fusion with this because it's just too easy. I mean, to start with, Night Watch basically is a Les Miserables fusion already. I'd been wondering at what point I became aware that Les Mis has had a small-but-active fandom all these years, because I've talked to a few other people who I thought would know and find them completely shocked, and now I'm suddenly thinking that I'm pretty sure I read this book back when it came out, then went and read all the Vimes/Vetinari, and when that ran out [far too quickly], I went and looked for Javert/Valjean.

Not that the ships are at all the same, but -- well. Vimes on the barricade has Grantaire's alcoholic cynicism and Enjolras's obsessive love of country and charismatic leadership and Javert's copper's ethic and tarnished but unshakeable faith in the primacy of Law and uncontrolled urge to sass authority and perfect dramatic timing and Valjean's sullen anger and paternal benevolence and socially awkward class mobility and expansive compassion and Bahorel's boiling violence and Marius's loving wife and happy ending and etc, all mixed up together into everything that is fandom catnip for me and kicking ass with competence. And frankly that explains so much of how I've been reacting to Les Mis fandom. And I got a bunch more of the direct references this time and I kind of want to read the Brick just to find out how many more there are.

Anyway, the problem here is that there are too many possibilities and I can't pick just one. (I know, I had the same problem with Highlander and just went with all of them, but I can't do that every time.)

There's the one I played with first, with minimal direct crossover elements, where Elderly!Steampunk!Combeferre is playing with a time machine and accidentally sends one of his old friends back to a few days before the night of the barricades (perhaps badass grown-up Gavroche?) And he gets adopted by Musichetta-the-seamstress-who-is-actually-a-seamstress and Joly and Bossuet, and sort of half-accidentally fixes the timeline so NOBODY HAS TO DIE. And there needs to be more steampunk!Combeferre in general, yes there does, and also happy-ending AUs with lots of worldbuilding where everybody is old and distinguished and has changed the world.

But then it is also SO TEMPTING to just write Les Amis as one of the groups manning the barricades of the Republic of Treacle Mine Road. (Would they be students at Unseen University in this version? Why does that image simultaneously terrify and enthrall me?) Bahorel would get his eggs! :D So much other amazing possibility! Although I think want I most want out of this version is Enjolras and bb!Vetinari being VERY INTENSE at each other about politics in Snapcase's Ankh-Morpork, and then not having any sex at all. Ever. (I actually have had all sorts of THOUGHTS about the political philosophies underlying much of Discworld for a long time, it kind of needs an Enjolras to be intensely republican about it, so much.) Meanwhile, wizzard!Grantaire tries to pick up Young Vimes at a tavern, but ends up just getting him very drunk while listening to him rant about his love for his bitch of a City, and begins to suspect he has a Type.¹

But of course there's also the swirly portal type of crossover, and hey, this book comes with a swirly portal built in! Sure, in canon it's through time and space rather than between universes, but it's also in the Library of Unseen University, which is connected by L-space to all other libraries everywhere in the multiverse, so it's not entirely impossible that the Librarian might have picked up a certain brick-like tome and attempted to use it to stabilize something and accidentally made a connection?

Maybe Vimes fell through to the Paris insurrection instead of the Ankh-Morpork one! And pointed out to the barricade boys that they were DOING IT WRONG. And then made everything better. And then Combeferre gets to do steampunk mad science to send him back.

Or maybe Javert jumped into the Seine but landed on the Ankh! And bounced, of course. Although I think in this version I'd want him to fall into modern-era Ankh Morporkh instead of barricades-era, because I want him to end up annoying Vimes so much that he gets put on Moist von Lipwig's security detail, because that would be hilarifying and full of sass. And gets adopted by Lady Sybil, which he would handle both much better and far, far worse than Vimes did. (Or hell you could do this one without the swirly portals and just write Vimes as Javert's superior in the Paris Police, which would be equally hilarious really.)

There, I have written almost as much in bunnies for this as I did in actual fic for the others. :P Now why hasn't any of this been written yet? *sighs*


¹This is probably The One I Am Most Likely To Actually Turn Into Something I Could Post To AO3, but we're back to actually needing to learn about Enjolras's political philosophy. And figuring out how the city government of Ankh-Morpork actually works.<sup>2

2</sup> Screw it. Fine:

( May 25th, in the second year of the patricianship of Lord Snapcase )

(..also can I just note for those of you trying to figure out Javert's timeline that Vimes' timeline is impossible? The Ankh-Morpork novels contradict each other incessantly, and that's even without the parts that involve time travel.)

OKAY HERE IS THE NEXT ONE ENJOY (??)

( In which nobody dies (at least not for very long) and I abandon all concerns with narrative plausibility )

This wins the award for "One I Am Most Likely To Play With More". Only I'd have to read the book first, and then I would probably decide that all of my characterization here is wrong, and anyway I'm now only interested in [minor character who doesn't even have an AO3 tag yet] [or even worse, Marius]. Anyway, here are some other things that happen in this 'verse:

( Nobody is still dead and plausibility is still somewhere far over the horizon )

The other problem with writing more of this is that trying to give canon, and what it has to say about death and duty, the respect and thought it deserves, while also magically bringing everyone back to life, would take, oh, at last report, several hundred thousand words. And I'd have to do it while writing well-researched 1830s France and Enlightenment philosophy. I have other things to do with the next ten years of my life.

I hope.

Things wrangling Les Mis fandom makes you do: start wondering really desperately which other fandom you've been in in which bread!sex was a thing. (I know there must have been one! I wouldn't have images this vivid in my head if there wasn't! Possibly it was actually in canon, in fact! But where??)

Anyway, I just saw Javert/Valjean Sentinel/Guide tags come through! So YAY I am not the only one wanting this! I haven't looked at the tags yet, but por encourager les otres (to quote Sergeant Colon) I thought I'd post Part One of this series that I am almost finished playing with. :p (And then go see what's in the one on the AO3).

( In which Javert is Keeping Watch In The Night )

This wins the award for One I Most Wish There Was a Bunch More Of! C'mon, Javert's a Sentinel, Silent and Sure! And somebody really really needs to write the one where Combeferre's the Guide of the Amis! It's practically canon.

Hooray I just finished the Things I Have Not Been Doing (okay, two of the four, but I promised myself that if I wrote up this DW entry, I would immediately do the other two.) You can bet that if I unexpectedly go several weeks without posting here, it is because there are Things I Am Not Doing (That I Need To Get Done Before I Write A DW Post.)

...it works like that with everyone, right? <_<

Anyway, here are some neat things that I have been wanting to post about while I have been busy Not Doing far more important things:

1. Les Miserables fandom! So, in case you haven't noticed, today there was a Miracle worthy of Monsieur le Maire, and ( somebody has gone in and finally wrangled a bunch of tags in the Les Mis fandoms on AO3. )

2. Janet Stephens, Forensic Hairdresser! She is a local stylist who has been reconstructing ancient classical hairstyles in completely new ways and gaining academic acclaim for it, despite no formal qualifications.

This is awesome and I have been trying out some of the styles she demonstrates on her youtube channel; I have been searching for years for updoes that work well with long hair with my texture and not a lot of goop or constant fussing, and this is really the first time I've found any. Stephens' main innovation is the idea of sewing the styles together with a large needle and thread instead of trying to work with pins, and it makes so much sense. She talks about how sewing hair is very difficult to do on one's own hair, but (so far) I haven't found it any harder than doing anything complicated with bobby pins (it is, however, much harder to adjust once it's up than bobby pins - you have to get it exactly right the first time.)

Anyway, so far I've tried ( two of the styles )

I was thinking about cutting my hair really short this summer but this may change my mind... (also today I bought about thirty yards of linen, wool, and woven-in cotton plaids suitable for making garb. Why did I do this...?)

3. Colin Wright, Mathematical Juggler! I discovered this guy through the BBC's statistics-for-the-people podcast, More or Less (which is also awesome, by the way) and then went and looked up his full juggling talk on Youtube. And suddenly, I am understanding juggling way better than I ever have before! It's all sine waves. Why did nobody ever graph it for me before?

SO anyway I've pulled out my old practice juggling balls and have been practicing whenever I have idle hands. I still can't juggle three, but I can already keep 420 going for quite some time! Blindfolded! Which given my general physical skills is actually a fairly dramatic improvement.

4. I have started a secondary tumblr! It is called SleepyEST. Here is the story of SleepyEST:

Not that I actually understand tumblr or anything, and you can tell I still haven’t figured out things like “about” pages, but: a few weeks ago right about the time I should have gone to bed, somebody reblogged one of those yawning sloth gifs (you know the ones) and every time I checked my dash, there was the yawning sloth! Making me go “aww” and yawn and reminding me it was bedtime! And it actually made me close tumblr and go to bed.

So I thought to myself, “Wouldn’t it be neat if someone would conveniently reblog a cute sleepy animal at bedtime every night?”

And then I thought, wait, this is tumblr, it would be incredibly easy to make it do that.

So, yeah. Here is a tumblr that reblogs something adorable and sleepy at sometime around midnight, US Eastern time, every night. That is all it does. Enjoy. It as actually been working for me - not that I go to bed every night as soon as the post appears, but I usually at least stop randomly surfing tumblr and start thinking seriously about bed.

(I realize that if you are not on a schedule similar to mine, it might not be helpful for the bedtime thing. But it is still a blog full of adorable sleepy things? Also, anybody is welcome to start a sleepypst or a sleepygmt or whatever one at whatever time is useful for there to be sleepy things on their dash, and just re-reblog everything.)

So, yeah, if anybody might find that useful, feel free to follow or copycat or whatever.

5. Psychic wolves! ...er, yeah. I did not finish my Lupercalia story. Even after various people wrote good crack at my instigation. Oops. (Ironically, that was not one of the Things I Have Not Been Doing, becaus I have been doing it, just not in a way that resulted in a complete story by the end of Lupercalia. I am over halfway through! It will get finished! I hope!

...In the meantime there are all of these other beautiful Psychic Wolves for Lupercalia stories you could be reading!

Here is a picture of my toes, as my entry for siegeofangels's Nail Polish Challenge (because I, too, possess a large box full of little bottles colored of lacquer which I will never use up).

The theme this week was Song Lyrics. You guys get to guess the lyric (hint: it will not be hard; it is one of the lyrics that's been stuck in my head for weeks...)

( toeses )

Also, I posted at kink_finders asking for fanfic about queer culture and queer history and got lots of excellent recs! So many in fact that, with my own stash of bookmarks, I am thinking of doing a recs set/compilation post/something. Anybody who isn't on that community have any more recs for me on the theme? :D (also, you should all go follow that community, it is a favorite.)

(also, the "queer history" tag on AO3 really ought to be canonized, unless there's an existing canon tag it should be linked to that I haven't found yet. When I get a couple of hours to wrangle I am going to be looking into that and related tags.)

According to my ~highly scientific~ poll in my last post, approx. 30-40% of all Dreamwidth users have had songs from Les Miserables stuck in their heads ever since the movie came out.

I don't suppose those of you who are getting more active in the fandom would consider, as a kindness, "earworm warnings" for any quotes from the lyrics (including song titles)?

//just kidding

//mostly

//although it would be nice to be able to go more than 24 hours without ( earworm warning )

in the background of all I do. I've kind of forgotten what that's like.

Although I have gotten quite a lot of cleaning done while unable to concentrate on anything but listening to the soundtrack on repeat, so there's that.

(I tried putting on "Once More With Feeling" instead today; it only took about half an hour before ( earworm warning )

was back.

I haven't tried Cabaret yet; that's the nuclear option.)

ETA: Warning: lyrics in comments.

(ps: so yesterday I learned that on public transit in the middle of a snowstorm is the worst possible place to come down with stomach flu very suddenly.)

1. I let the thing about the new place for telling people about fun things being said about fandom sit for a few days because I wanted to think about all of the good things you all said. And while I let it sit, nemo_r (without knowing about what I did!) started metanews, which is going to be much more of a news place than what I thought of. This is great because it means that I can let her start something first! If hers goes well I'd like to try something that's about making lists of stuff that isn't new but in the mean time you should all go and watch what's happening with metanews.

2. The above was written in the upgoer6 text editor. :P It is cool and really makes me want to go finish the historify text editor I was working on.

3. Also I let it sit because I have learned that, nope, I am still not a person who enjoys having two collapsed comment threads in the same week. I loved all of your comments and they were great threads but wow I ran out of deal-with-people juice pretty quickly after that.

4. So instead I taught myself how to turn comic panels into 3D stereo pairs and started taking over the Stereo Pair tag on tumblr. Enjoy. Or get a headache. Possibly both. (I think my tumblr is now officially "random visual stuff". Although now that I've said that I'll probably go back to posting scans of strange/obscure comics which was my original goal over there.)

5. My brand-new laptop is having annoying and strange connectivity issues to wireless, mostly involving losing the connection repeatedly, not being able to load the web even when it says it's connected, and refusing to see the wireless network at all. But then sometimes it'll work fine for a whole day. And it doesn't help that Windows 8 is fundamentally unhelpful. I suspect it's because most of the wireless connections I use regularly are still WEP encrypted and Windows 8 hates WEP, but it's that way because my old XP laptop hates WPA. Any advice from anyone on this...?

So that idea I threw out a few posts ago - about starting a meta links community that works like a crack_van/poetry-style recs community, where people rotate in and out as the person who collects and posts the meta links - seems to be fairly popular.

So consider this a post for brainstorming/recruiting/planning (and please link it around to anywhere else there might be interest!)

First, a really basic interest poll:



Here are some very rough draft proposed community rules and guidelines that I wrote up a few months back for said community (I have a whole folder of guidelines for hypothetical DW communities, guys, it's an illness.) If you're interested, read them over, and come discuss in the comments.

Also the working title for this community in my notes is fantechnicon (from pantechnicon, because I think I'm terribly clever) so that's what appears in the notes, but I'm open to other suggestions. :P

Admin/sticky posts would be a) a basic rules/about post; b) a sign-up post; c) a more involved post with optional advice for drivers; d) a post for non-drivers to drop meta links they've found; e) a talk-to-the-mods post.

( About the Fantechnicon )

( How to drive the Fantechnicon )

The mods' jobs would basically be to manage the sign-up list, recruit more drivers if necessary, make sure a week's drivers have posting access, and handle any disputes that are brought to them. (Possibly also to fill in for a week if a driver has to cancel at the last minute.)


There are other things we could do too - like special events or meta-fests or open posting periods - but I'd want to get the basic comm structure rolling before we got into that.

1. RE: current events in Homestuck:

So "all ships are canon" + "shipping is cancelled for 2013" + trickster mode = 36-person group marriage, y/y/mfy? :D

2. Speaking of how all stories with romance in them should end with BIG GROUP MARRIAGE, Diane Duane tumbled about the canon YW/ST crossover, and now her fandom has suddenly realized OH HEY YW CROSSOVERS! They are all canon! :D

So let's play a game that I play sometimes in my head:

1. Pick one of your current fandoms.
2. Decide which characters in it are Wizards and/or carriers for Powers.
3. Profit!

Here's mine. Come argue about them with me in the comments! (Or post your own!)

( Homestuck )

( Frontier Wolf )

( MCU Avengers )

( The Thick of It )

Every so often something goes around DW talking about how there aren't any good fannish discussions on DW (from younger fans) or how much metafandom is missed¹ (from older fans.)

Every time it happens I go "But there is tons of fandom discussion on DW! More than I can keep up with! It's all right there on my reading and network pages!"

I've been meaning for awhile to post a collection of Meta Posts That Wandered Across My Reading Page in X Time Period, as evidence thereof, and since I happened to have gotten a whole weekend behind and had a stash of tabs open, this seemed like a good day to do it. If you need more thoughtful fan discussion in your life, you could do worse than add some of these people.

So under the cut, ( Every DW meta post I had open in its own tab in the last 24 hours. )

¹I think there were problems with the way metafandom was working, especially by the end - mod burnout and the way it facilitated some bad aspects of mob behavior being two of them - but I miss having a good source for meta links outside my reading list. I have occasionally dreamed of there being a meta recs/links community that's sort of a combination of the way fanart_recs, bestthingever, and poetry are run - people sign up to take a week, and during that week they post links to any interesting meta they should come across that week. It doesn't have to be the best meta, or all the meta, just the meta that they find interesting that week. And then next week it's somebody else, and a different perspective on what makes meta interesting.

It wouldn't solve all the problems with the metafandom model but I think it would bypass several of them. And it would be fun.

Of course if I started half the community ideas that I think might be fun, I would never do anything but start communities.


IN OTHER NEWS: I am messing with tag wrangling at the moment (and liveblogging it into the empty tagwranglers chatroom, if anybody wants to pop in and be entertained). One of the fandoms I have recently assigned myself (on the rule of "If you have written it and it has no wrangler, take it on") is British Comedian RPF.

However, I am having an issue with this fandom. That being: that it makes me unhappy to have to wrangle people like Dara Ó Briain and Ed Byrne (not to mention Rich Hall and Sandi Toksvig) as British Comedians.

I mean, they are unquestionably part of the British Comedy fandom - they do British-style comedy in British contexts with other people who do British comedy - but something in me still quails at calling Dara Ó Briain or Ed Byrne a British comedian. (I wouldn't, after all, call John Oliver an American comedian, even if he mostly does American comedy in America for Americans now.)

So, fellow British Comedy people who read this journal: what do you think? Is it worth the hassle of asking the higher-ups to change the fandom canonical to "British Comedy RPF" instead? Or does it bother nobody but me? Or is "British Comedy RPF" just as bad and I should change it to something else/wrangle the expats into the fandoms of their nationalities?

(There is an "Irish Comedian RPF" category but it currently has no people attached to it. And no wrangler.)

Yes, before we saw stellar_dust back to Chicago, she dragged me to the computer store, and I bought a new laptop, because my old one had started randomly freaking out on me just the night before.

Of course, after we got back from dropping her off at the airport, I popped the case on the old one and it was exactly what I thought - she'd sabotaged one of my RAM sticks. :P You could see right where it had been damaged! (It must have been sabotage, the timing was just too coincidental to her deciding I needed to buy a new one.) So the old one got new (and twice as large!) memory from the Magic Sack o' RAM, and now she's working better than ever!

I've never bought a new computer while the old one was still mostly functional. It's strange. I am enjoying playing with the shiny new one, but have absolutely zero temptation to move to using her as my primary machine. She is a Lenovo that was on sale for $400 including tax, which the saleperson recommended after I showed him the condition my old one was in and he laughed at me a lot. Her name is Eluned, following my standard naming convention.

Of course, it doesn't help that the new one has ( Windows 8 )

(In the meantime I have declared amnesty on even attempting to read even the limited amount of yuletide that was written for/by people on my friendslist. Just too much! Now I will have wonderful gems of stories in small fandoms that I've never read before, waiting for me to stumble on them all year.)

Also also! The Psychic Wolves for Lupercalia fest is back. Hooray! I was hoping it would be! Now I just have to decide whether to finish something I started for last year, or do something completely new and even more cracked (proposition: write A/B/O verse + psychic wolves where the wolves are completely confused by this weird sexual dominance hierarchy thing the humans think is so important.)