melannen | Five whatsits

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.

You can now filter for Joly/Bossuet/Musichetta and find all the fics! You can filter on every possible pairing combination of Amis (I think, there may be one or two not yet in there.) You can click on "Eponine Thenardier" and get fics tagged with all fortyeleven misspellings of her last name! (Okay, not sure that one's a net good for fandom, but sometimes we must bow to the Law.)

There is still much work to be done, but for now, pretty much every character or pairing you might want to filter on should be tidied up and filterable. (Somebody has still not dared to ~~go wading in the Paris sewers~~ look at the freeform bins, so they are probably still a mess. ...somebody just got sufficiently frustrated at being unable to find All The Joly/Bossuet/Musichetta that she went and volunteered to co-wrangle.)

So anyway, if you find any other things in the Les Mis tags that are bothering you, you can let me know and I will see if I can arrange another miracle. ^_^

Meanwhile, somebody has a few things they would like to request opinions on from people more immersed in the fandom, before they get fully wrangled, as below (I'm aware most of these will be matters of opinion, I would just like other opinions to go on):

Is "Barricade Boys" sufficiently synonymous with "Les Amis de l'ABC" to combine the tags, or will people get upset about Marius/Gavroche/etc. belonging in one but not the other?
Is "Bahorel's Laughing Mistress" a good canonical for that character?
Is "Grantaire's Sister" a canon character?
Is there any chance that M. Fauchelevant will get used to mean Valjean, or can it be canonized independently? (Does the original M. Fauchelevant have a first name or initial...?)
Bossuet's surname. AUGH. AO3 was already using Laigle in the existing canonicals. However, AO3 seems to be the only place that uses Laigle as the standard. Is that good enough or should someone go through and change them all to one of the more common ones? (Please say Laigle is good enough.)
The Bishop of Digne appears to be named in full Bishop Charles-François-Bienvenu Myriel. ...what do ya'll think the canonical for him should be?
Is "Louis-Phillipe" a Les Mis character or should he just be bunged in Royalty RPF and let them worry about it? How about "Victor Hugo"? (I so want "Victor Hugo" to be a popular character in Les Mis fics...)
This one is not actually a question, but it should be noted that there is currently only one use of the "Enjolras/Patria" tag on the AO3. Guys, it's canon! I am disappoint. It has not been canonized yet, being something of an edge case; it probably could be canonized now, but I think I would rather set out a challenge to the Les Mis fandom for at least two other people to use it so it can get in under the Rule of Three. Get on that, fandom! More Enjolras/Patria fics! Bonus if she actually comes to him as a beautiful woman and he therefore ignores her! :P
Ditto number 8 on the Bahorel/Badassery tag (although if you write a fic where Bahorel has wild monkey sex with an allegorical goddess of Badassery I may have to actively worship you.) (Presumably after negotiating it with his mistress first.)

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 Agrippina the Younger and Julia Domna 1. I did Agrippina with rubber bands instead of sewing, and it worked fine - in fact, it stayed in and still looked great when I took it down after three days. Julia Domna's bun I actually sewed in (and got compliments on!) It took some getting used to, because a sewn updo feel so much looser than a pinned or bodkined one - actually, it feels like a pinned one does about thirty seconds before it falls down completely. So that took a little getting used to, but once I did, it was also pretty great - comfortable, didn't have to worry about it coming down, etc. I took it out after only about thirty-six hours because I was getting a lot of flyaway from the looser hair on the sides; if I try this one again I'll do the version with the side braids to keep that hair in.

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!

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