let us make a post.

[melannen]

1. Fine, you bulgegobbling windholes, I am reading Homestuck now. (Why didn't anyone tell me that troll AUs were canon? Look, it's troll Indiana Jones! I am trying to figure out his quadrants but keep running into his issues. He had some good blackrom tension going with Troll Belloq until he got him killed, which is probably a recurring problem with Troll Indy; and Troll Brody tries to be a surrogate moirail for him but isn't really up to it. I suspect his thing with Troll Marion has been flipping black/red since she was a grub.) (Also, why did nobody tell me that nearly all the troll characters have disabilities?) (Also, has Homestuck fandom noticed that the humans' game has two girl and two boys - exactly enough for two closed romantic pairs - and the trolls' has 12 - exactly enough for two closed troll romance systems? Although of course neither of them wind up being closed systems.)

I am still finding it immensely frustrating to read, but somehow I can't stop. (I just got up to the original troll romance explanation and decided to stop reading and actually post something.)

2. Yard sailing! We haven't made it the past few weeks because we've been helping clear out the house of an elderly friend who recently passed, age 97 (I have so much newly-inherited crafting stuff) but we went today!

Our Lady of the Fields Catholic Church: a like-new Wacom Bamboo tablet (small) still in original packaging: $25 (this may end up going to Interrobang Studios as a backup/con demo item)

Bowie Lions club book & record sale: 50¢ each:
The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects by Edward J. Ruppelt, hc, 1956 (Science Fiction Book Club edition - somebody was selling several boxes' worth of SFBC editions from the '50s and '60s);
Strangest of All by Frank Edwards, hc, 1957.
25¢ each:
Satanism and Witchcraft by Jules Michelet, pb, 1963, which the handwritten epigraph on the title page "Too rhapsodic and somewhat short on precise fact.";
The Penguin Book of Chinese Verse, pb, 1962 (I just love the tiny 1950s and 1960s Penguin paperbacks as aesthetic objects);
Superman: the BEST of the ORIGINAL, paperback, 1966 (I already have Wonder Woman and Green Lantern books in this format, so why not).
Free:
Perspective Drawing by Ernest Norling, folio-pb, ~1936

Also from the Lions, for stellar_dust to get first pick of, but I will take if she doesn't:
@25¢ Bonjour, Peanuts! and Peanuts á Vendre;
A Guide to Ancient Sites in Britain;
a 1946 Zephyr paperback edition of Lord Peter Views the Body, "not to be introduced into the British Empire or USA".
@50¢; COIN IDENTIFIER by Burton Hobson;
Greenland by Vilhjalmur Stefansson (the same guy who wrote the Ultima Thule book about Iceland that I was horrifying her archeology colleagues with last summer by reading out the bits about how Columbus got a map of America from the Icelanders and there were Irish monks living on Iceland when the Vikings got there).

Total: 12 books and 1 Wacom tablet, $28.75

...also I have been informed that library volunteers like me get to take withdrawn/sale books home for free if we want. NO. BAD. I DID NOT NEED TO KNOW THIS.

3. I paid my taxes online, e-filing for the first time since the federal government seemed to be pushing it this year, and I do approve in theory of paperlessness. And can I just say: NOT IMPRESSED, US FEDERAL GOVERNMENT. So not impressed. Especially compared to the MD state e-filing, which was so convenient and well-thought-out and went like a dream. I could start outlining in detail all of the things that are wrong with the federal electroning filing process, but really I can sum it up with the first one: there is absolutely no reason why the IRS should be contracting out all of its e-filing stuff to outside for-profit companies. D: It's secure web forms! With a little math in! The only hard part is handling the traffic load, and the IRS is probably paying for that anyway! If MD's state government - which is not known for being competent, well funded, or lacking in corruption, let it be said - can host its own efiling forms, I'm pretty sure you can too, IRS.

4. If you have ever wanted to know what 1000 paper cranes look like, here is a picture. Also there is a picture of a baby dalekling, and a field full of dandelions.


This is right before I sent them to the auction winner. There are 800 in strings of 25 (I know they're supposed to be in strings of 40 but I had my reasons when I started) and 200 loose. (Apologies for the bookshelf background, but there are no places in my room without bookshelves in the background.)


Here is the last dalekling. I will, finally, have the pattern ready for test-crocheting very soon, I hope. Probably sometime early next week, if anybody wants to be a beta-tester. :D


And Self-Portrait in Silhouette with Dandelions, just because I like the way it came out. :D

5. ETA: I knew there was a fifth thing: The brookerfic kink meme is doing that weird error where it screens comments even though it isn't supposed to. D: I need to prompt Brooker/Mitchell/Maypoles, dammit. (I'm a Doctor/Master fan, maypole dances have special meaning for me.)

Comments

[cypher]

YAY~

I mean

...YAY~

Later there is a flashback where you get to see Aradia pretty much being Troll Indiana Jones. I love her a lot and always think I need to write her some awesome stuff. ;;

Okay honestly I love a lot of them a lot.

The disability stuff is hard; the canon is pretty fucked up about it in a lot of places, and does not treat the subject with much sensitivity. But on the other hand, the most sympathetic and human of the troll boys is in a wheelchair, and one of the smartest and most plot-moving of the troll girls is blind. And so on. The canon is a big aggravating mess, but so full of things to play with!

[melannen]

...Yeah. I have been following the saga through you & yours enough that I am fairly sure I will be INEVITABLY BETRAYED by canon, but the fandom was calling to me, and then a bunch of people started reading based on my post and blaming me for it, and it just became kind of inevitable.

The disability stuff is hard, but I am finding it not nearly as bad as it could be? I mean I just got to the bit with Vriska and Tavros and the stairs (Tavros is pure <>, btw,) and it was horrible, but it was also completely believable for how people treat wheelchair users sometimes and how they have no choice but to respond. (And the fact over half of them, + Jade, are dealing with some kind of disability at the start of the adventure, gives it the benefit of numbers - no one character has to stand in for all pwds everywhere.) I do wish we were getting to see more of the trolls' actual playthroughs, though.

Anyway. Yes. Trolls! And I am liking the kids a lot more than I expected too! I am mostly just enduring all the bits with neither kids nor trolls however.

I am finding myself unexpectedly delighted by the game mechanics almost as much as the characters, though. Fetch modi! Alchemizing! I have almost moved on from plotting out troll romances to making people from other fandoms play the game. (Seriously! Pick any two fandoms with teens or preteens and sufficient technology or magic equivalent to technology, give them a few copies of an amazing new game, and watch brilliance and destroying-of-worlds happen.)

[cypher]

Yeah, the way Vriska treats Tavros is one of the hardest things for me to handle in the entire canon -- and I know that part of it is an illustration of just how alien the troll emotional entanglements are, but gah, it's hard. And awful.

And yes, the kids! The trolls are the ones who ping me the most for writing, but I have really been loving it ever since John first derped around with his captchalogue cards back in the first act. They're just so charming, and adorable in such nerdy ways.

The other characters, the exiles and so on, are a little harder to get into -- I love the building of Cantown, and I did recently find an adorable story about them recently: Three Exiles, Slightly Broken -- that helps make them more accessible.

I have known people who complained about the first act being "slow," probably because they were in a hurry to get to the trolls, but I loved it so much -- all the dorky game humor, and all the inventory management failure, and just. Yes. I laughed out loud repeatedly through the early stages. ^^

[melannen]

The first act was pretty slow, especially since I have an ingrown aversion to text-based adventure games, but once they started actually playing I stopped noticing.

...and, see, I'm not really finding the troll emotional stuff all that alien so far. I'm finding it a pretty realistic depiction of how 13-year-old humans treat each other in the absence of outside restraining factors. (The amount of damage they're allowed to do to each other is out of scale with human kids, yeah, but considering I knew two people who lost eyes between age ten and fifteen just from horsing around, and that was without a strife specibus or a giant monster to feed...)

[ajnabieh]

DALEK! My wife might be willing to be a tester; she's a new crochet-er, like, has only made a scarf and a hat and some granny squares, but I think she's pretty talented.

What lovely dandilions! I am hoping my violets come up soon...

[melannen]

Our yard is full of violets right now! Violets and dandelions and bright green moss. It's lovely! (And soon the ground ivy, deadnettle, and Indian strawberries are going to start adding more purples and yellows.)

[redsnake05]

One thousand cranes is much bigger and shinier than I thought it would be, for some reason. It reminds me of 'strings of cash', like you see in old Chinese stories (and maybe other stories too, but that's where I have come across it). The dalekling is adorable. I rarely crochet, but I kind of wish I was proficient enough to volunteer for beta crafting.

[melannen]

The strings of cranes is apparently how they're traditionally left as offerings in Japan; I would be not at all surprised if it's related to Chinese money somehow, way back in history!

I honestly have no idea how hard to rate the dalekling pattern, that's probably one of the things I'm going to want help from testers for.

[pocketmouse]

I agree with point 3 completely! I do my quarterly estimated online for MD, and it is so completely painless. Federal? I've tried multiple times and I can't figure out. Plus I suspect they'd want me to actually do the form with all the math, and that's kind of impossible with my freelance situation. That's why it's called estimating, IRS, hello.

[melannen]

IK,R? The one thing about the MD online 503 was they didn't seem to allow for reporting wage income for which one didn't have a W2. Hopefully I will not get in trouble for reporting that $375 on my federal but not my state! But the federal was just annoying. I mean, I had to install new software to get it to work without crashing my computer! And finding the instructions was amazingly annoying, and half the time they clearly didn't match the forms! And all I had to do was fill out a very, very basic 1040 that I've done 20 times before.

[zvi]

Here's what Republican lobbying has done for you! Literally, the Republicans did not want the federal government competing with tax preparers, so they made it so that only tax preparers can e-file, so that people have to get simple forms like their 1040, which you can do yourself with a little patience and a calculator, done by someone they had to pay, if one wanted the benefits of e-file.

[melannen]

I pretty much assumed that was the case! Really, there is no other explanation for why they wouldn't do it themselves. Although I am heartened if it really was entirely a Republican effort because I don't trust the Democrats not to try to pull that particular sort of crap too. (Actually I'm a bit proud that the state version is still properly socialist, because like I said, it's not as if MD's government isn't owned by lobbyists too.)

[sophia_sol]

I am STILL TRYING TO RESIST Homestuck, despite the fact that the universe apparently wants me to read it. There was that amazing Dresden Files/Homestuck Troll Romance fill, unless I hallucinated its existence, and then your post about interesting non-binary romance models, and then I just keep on hearing about it from other places, and basically my resistance is eroding and one of these days I'm just going to break down and start reading it already. I don't even know why I'm bothering to resist...

ALSO your 1000 cranes look super impressive, and I've kind of always wanted to do something like that myself -- I create a RIDICULOUS number of cranes, but almost always at restaurants or otherwise not-at-home so I never keep any of them.

Also, how are maypole dances connected to being a Doctor/Master fan? As a Doctor/Master fan myself, I feel like I ought to know...

[melannen]

I just got myself in the habit of tucking away the ones I folded in other places. So I would empty cranes out onto the beside table with my keys and my change. :D (Now that my 1000 is done I am kind of at loose ends, last dinner out I was reduced to trying to reproduce these from memory. And making a cup-and-ball toy out of Hershey's kisses wrappers.)

Maypoles: Demons - the Third Doctor episode where the Master is pretending to be a vicar and summons the devil? - ends with this highly symbolic (and otherwise completely random) maypole dance. :D It is one of my favorite episodes for sheer crackitude.

[sophia_sol]

I'm pretty sure I have to do this now. Just tuck away all the cranes I fold and see how many I end up with, and how long it takes me to get an appreciable number....

How on earth would you make a cup-and-ball toy out of tinfoil? I am all curiosity!

OKAY the universe keeps on trying to convince me I need to watch more Old School Who; why do I not listen? CLEARLY I NEED TO WATCH THIS EPISODE.

[copracat]

I would love to test-crochet a dalek if you need any more testers.

[melannen]

I will let you know if I ever actually get it ready! (Every time I try to test the pattern one more time I decide I need to change it, see...)

[copracat]

I'll just have to take up biplanes in the meantime!

[ciaan]

3. I absolutely agree with this whole paragraph. Using both MD and fed e-file makes the difference very clear.

[melannen]

Yes. Also: MD is much faster about getting the refunds out...

[pseudo_tsuga]

I could say so much about Homestuck but I would have no idea where to begin, so. I'm just going to wait and see who and what you ping on when you're further. I'm glad you're enjoying it though a warning for the fandom failing hard at times re: disability.

[melannen]

Right now I am mostly writing AU crossovers (in my head) wherein teenagers from other fandoms play sburb.... I get the impression that's not what most of the fandom is pinging on, though.