Oh, look, a dreamwidth post from me!

So for the record, I haven't abandoned you guys for tumblr, it's just that 'doing the last follow-up for the book giveaway' became The Thing I Was Putting Off. Finally did that today! Everyone should be followed up - if you asked for books and haven't heard from me, let me know, please!

And the good thing about having such a resilient yet vital Thing I Am Putting Off is that it worked as motivation for me to do other stuff! So, let's see...

I guess the most important is that I am now in Evanston, IL, petsitting! Have been for almost three weeks, even. Evanston is such a nice place to live (even when it is TOO HOT) and I am trying to do EVERYTHING while I'm here, we'll see how that goes.

Also if anyone of you will be in the general Chicago area before the end of August and want to meet up in person, let me know! Fan meetups are fun, and I even have an apartment I can ask people to now!

As one of my Chicago Adventures I spent pretty much all my cogent hours last week attending this : The Middle Ages In Translation: Mellon Symposium (pdf). Well, I say 'attended', I meant 'lurked', I pretty much spent the week sitting in the back of the room putting off 'don't talk to me' vibes as hard as I could.

But it was really interesting! I mean, history conference, *always* interesting, but they were using "translation" in a very broad sense (riffing off the medieval Latin "translatio", which means both translation in our sense and other kinds of transfer and tranfiguration) so it ended up basically being a five-day con about Transformative Works and the European Middle Ages.

Score.

Anyway, I went to, uh, twenty-seven talks, so I'm not going to try to talk about them all here, but I'll list the ones I attended under the cut, and if anyone wants to know more about one of them, leave a comment before I forget it all and I'll give you a very biased account that probably completely misses the point and includes all the questions I would have asked if I'd felt like I had the necessary context to ask non-stupid questions!

( paper sessions )
...oh hey, only one I totally forgot! Not bad, considering I didn't remember the existence of caffiene until Thursday.

And to prove I have not left you guys for Tumblr, here are all the even vaguely interesting things I have posted to tumblr since my last DW post:

Alot of Alots, drawn based on alot of AO3 tags

Some old recipes for preserving fruit, out of a mid-19th-century cookbook

Some scans of vintage stereo pairs

A penis tree

Fanart of Jolllly avec quatre ailes illustrating voksen's AU ficlet where he turns into a dragonfly

...how does this prove I have not left you for tumblr, DW? Because it proves I have left you for wranglechat and miseres IRC instead....

(speaking seriously: I have only a limited amount of social energy to spend on online stuff, and when I spend it places other than DW, DW gets neglected. Chat is addictive though.)