Here are some posts I have made to DW communities in the past week:

asexuality: Queering the Census: We ALL Count, in which I gripe about the Queer the Census campaign, which is about greater visibility for LGBT people but erases everyone who isn't heterosexual but doesn't fit it one of the L-G-B-T boxes.

common_nature: Welcome!, In which elke_tanzer and I have started a community that is all about nature, and you all should join it! And post stuff there! And leave comments!

create_my_comm: Little Details, in which we are all agreed that DW needs a community that is like l_d only awesomer, and none of us want to be the one to start it! (So you should!)

starry_sea: Anybody still here?, in which I apologize abjectly for abandoning my own community, and talk about how to get it active again.

tarot: An Amazing Tarot Blog, in which I rave at length about Pre-Gebelin Tarot History, which discusses tarot from a strictly historical and rational perspective, a perspective which is deeply awesome and far, far too hard to find.

treknovelfest: Illustration for "Three T'kay Stories", in which I have done a lot of research in the Starfleet Archives and found photographs & descriptions of the original ancient Vulcan artifacts that were used to illustrate ljc's treknovelfest entry based on my prompt, From The Terran Coyote to The Klingon K'Ortar: Tricksters of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants.

...there, that can be my followfriday. :D (What posts have you made to DW communities in the past week?)

Most of those were posts I have been procrastinating on making for months! Having them done is like breathing clear air again. (Also, omg, I might actually have to change my to-do list now - I'm afraid the dry-erase marker might have set in on some of them.) There's several more I've had on hold, though - maybe now that I'm on a roll I can scratch even more of them off.

In the spirit of getting things done, how about that WIPs meme that was going around awhile ago? One paragraph from everything in my "In progress" folder, was it?

( This includes fics, meta posts, vids, fanmixes, and various stranger things, in all states of completion, fyi. )
...it says something about me that my reaction to all of that laid out is "That's less than thirty things! Not at bad as I thought!" If you ask for more information about any of them in comments, I will probably give it to you. (At length! ^_^ )

Also while I am doing random meme-y things, poall:

On the off-chance you haven't heard yet, lj continues to find new ways of being skeevy.

Mind you, I wouldn't have noticed this one, because about a month ago I had to remove lj's javascript access completely in order to be able to log in to my account. On the upside, I am also no longer getting virus warnings every few days! And pages load a disturbing amount faster! On the downside, wow, there's a lot of stuff I can't do on lj anymore. Including bookmark fic on delicious/diigo, so I have even been trying to find as much fic as possible other places.

So, here's why I still read my LJ friendslist despite all that:

1) A small group of people I value as people, mostly RL friends and people I met though fandom who aren't very fannish any more, who have no interest in crossposting to DW (and probably never will unless LJ completely stops functioning - a couple of them still post to deadjournal, too.) I will still be reading LJ for them as long as DW doesn't have locked post syndication, but I am considering trimming my LJ friendslist down to just those people. (And seriously thinking about cutting some of them who I rarely trade comments with, even though I still enjoy following them - they probably don't remember I exist, since I don't post to my journal anymore.)

2) An even smaller group of fannish people who will never join DW, ever, because they have bad blood with some of the more vocal DW supporters. ...there are several of them I would miss if I dropped them, and I don't want to get on their bad sides but I honestly doubt any of them would miss me much if I stopped hanging around.

3) An even tinier set of journals I think of as blogs rather than journals, that is, I don't care if I ever interact with them, I just love the content they post (actually, right now that's just urbpan, who is a zookeeper, photographer, former 'zine publisher and urban naturalist in Boston; and ursulav, who draws pictures cute and/or disturbing animals; I should just syndicate ursulav_feed's journal, but urbpan posts some of his best stuff under lock; he should probably move up to category 1.)

4) Communities. I've never really joined that many LJ communities, and I've dropped a lot of them since I started transitioning off, and haven't joined many new ones, but the ones I still read I don't want to leave without finding replacements. :/ So here's the list of LJ communities I really don't want to say goodbye to - anybody want to help me re-create them here?

( Let's make communities for TMI, nature, little details, top gear, and Doctor Who OTP! )

Here is why I still have everybody friended on LJ, even the ones I only read here, or who don't post anymore anyway: because there are some dead people I care about on my lj flist, and defriending them feels, I don't know, I don't want to do it, okay? But I don't want to leave them there all alone, either. :/ And somehow I suspect they will never move to DW.

Here is why I still have content on LJ: I hate broken links on a deep moral and aesthetic level. And I don't think DW has a built-in tool that will strip your entries out of LJ and automatically replace them with a link to the imported DW copy (though if anyone knows of a tool that will do this, plz, let me know!)


Now, I am going to go write some posts for already-existing DW communities, in the spirit of that meme a few weeks ago about getting more activity here. :D

Hi! I am still lacking energy to do anything serious online, but here are some things anyway:

Signal boost via zvi: If, like me, you recently got weird malware on your system that tried to get you to install anti-virus software, and couldn't figure out where from because you'd only been on trustworthy sites, you probably got it from an ad running on Livejournal. Just so you know. ETA: a thread about it on lj news - if you think you got hit, drop in and leave a comment, it might help.

(I think I got my system clean - I have Spybot running to stop unauthorized registry changes, and cleared out a bunch of suspicious files - but will probably be doing a format + reinstall as soon as I have time to think anyway.) When is DW going to be able to syndicate flocked lj posts so I never have to go back there again? Plz?

*****

I am one of those boring old fans who's been around long enough that the slash-misogyny argument just seems tired; yes it's important, but it's the same thing I read about in 2003. And 2005. And 2007... So instead, here are some awesome Sherlock Holmes stories about women:

Commonplaces, by Astolat. Irene Adler goes to visit Holmes after "The Final Problem."

Thoughts Without Words by Katie Forsythe. Holmes goes to visit Irene, and a conversation is had. (If you've been reading Holmes fic, surely you've found Katie Forsythe's work already, but this one is just *amazing*. It's full-on unreliable narrator - SCAN is given an entirely new interpretation, as is Holmes' history - yet the Holmes and Adler here are so amazing that I get it confused with canon. And I almost suspect the naked!Adler scene in the movie was based on this story.)

Five Times John Watson Quite Unintentionally Saw Irene Adler Naked, by flowers4ophelia. Irene and Holmes carry on together and annoy Watson a lot. Movieverse, though not necessarily contradictory to bookverse.

An Ideal Husband by Irene Adler. Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes both receive the same visitor. (this is also heavy on the Violet Hunter, who was in "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches" and seems to be the third-most-loved-by-fandom female from a case.)

Enclosed by Recessional. Mary Morstan receives a visit from Sherlock Holmes. Recessional has been writing a lot of really excellent Mary Morstan fic of late: you should read.

Blood Shift by Toft. Mary Morstan and Watson find something necessary in each other.

five times Mary suspected Holmes and Watson were more than friends and one time she knew it to be so., by Lady Paperclip. Mary Morstan is visited by certain inescapable deductions. And also Irene Adler, which is sometimes the same thing.

Leaving, by Telanu. Holmes visits Watson and Mary.

Congenital Defects, by Branwyn. Mary Russell is visited by a series of increasingly wodehousian mishaps as the result of an inconvenient aunt.

Honeycomb Series, by LizBee. Lizbee has written most of the Mary Russell fic that I actually liked; this series deals with Russell's Jewish identity and her marriage to Holmes.

Suppressed, by Jane Turenne. Mrs. Hudson visits Watson.

Miss Madelyn Mack, Murderess, by Flourish. Miss Madelyn Mack is visited by sudden and unexpected violence.

...in other words, Holmes fandom and its subsidiaries are full of amazing female characters, and people should be writing more stories about them. Especially Mrs. Hudson, who I suspect has a lot of unplumbed depths. (I know there's a published series where she solves the cases and secretly feeds the clues to Holmes - it even sounds sort of good; I'm keeping my eyes out for it - but I am suddenly convinced that Mrs. H has been in the employ of Mycroft - aka M of what will eventually be MI-6 - for a very, very long time. Pre-dating the time at which she was assigned to keep an eye on his brother.)

****

And on that note, I just picked up the first Irene Adler novel (well, okay, the second, because why read a series in publishing order when you can read it in the order you find it at the public library). I'm only about ten pages in, and I'm provisionally liking it. But I can't get past the fact that this Adler is apparently a soprano. Adler's a contralto, isn't she? This is actually very important to her backstory, considering the different expectations of a contralto and soprano in classical opera!

Did I in vain spend all that time looking for pieces for contralto and violin solo? (Well, no, it wasn't in vain, because I found Yehudi Menuhin playing Erbarme Dich, which I fell in love with instantly and only wish he had a better contralto to play for. I want Madelyn's secret recording of Holmes and Alder performing that to exist in RL. Please.)

****

While I'm asking about minor canon points, here's some more, in various fandoms:

1. So a veteran of the second Anglo-Afghan war naming his dog "Gladstone" is roughly the equivalent of a veteran of the *current* Afghan war naming his dog "Gordon", right? People who know more about Victorian politics than me: What statement exactly is that making?
   
   I only know as much about Gladstone and Disraeli as anyone who's read "The Annotated Alice" far too many times, but the longer I watch Holmes-movie-fandom without *anyone* mentioning that the dog's named after the PM, the more I notice its absence.



2. Sarah Jane Smith currently drives a lime green Nissan Figaro, and used to own a bright red Volkswagen Beetle named Ethel. Does anybody know what model Volkswagen she was driving in "School Reunion"? And did she have a car during her Old Who appearances, and if so, what was it?



3. Can anybody get access to a copy of the article "A Pocket Telephone," Literary Digest, Vol. 44 (March 30, 1912) p. 639 ? I can't, not even after stealing my sister's JSTOR login, but I would really really really like to read it!



4. Is there anything anywhere in primary or secondary Star Trek canon about the cultural significance of male Vulcan hairstyles and/or beards? (Other than the obvious.)



5. I swear that within the last several years there was a find somewhere in England of items related to witchcraft that included what was probably a prosthetic phallus: does anybody else remember this? For obvious reasons it is difficult to google. Or any citable links to archeological finds of life-sized false phalli in England in the last century?

***

And on the off-chance you haven't found it yet: asexual_fandom now exists! And I didn't even have to be the one to start it!

My blogroll is constantly evolving. Most of the blogs on it are the really popular blogs that everybody reads, and I rarely go out looking for new ones, and there are some on here that I'm vaguely ashamed to admit I read. But my criteria are: a) it updates somewhere in the range of daily to weekly, not too often, not to little; b) it was interesting enough that after I originally found it I kept coming back to see if there was more; c) I am actually interested in more than half the posts.

This also doesn't include the blogs/journals that I have syndicated to one of my flists; these are the ones were I like to go to the actual blog site, and read several entries at a time, and only go to when I feel like it, as opposed to seeing every update when it comes through.

On my actual blogroll these are organized by how much brain they require to read (on many days I only get about halfway up the list before I run out of brain, see) but on here, I think I shall subdivide by topic, at least a little bit, and *then* order by brain.

These have substantially more commentary than the last post had, btw.

( Quick, silly, thoughtless )

( Clothes, food, and other girly things )

( Fandom in its myriad varieties )

( Science, politics, and other Serious Business )

There's some pretty gaping holes in that list - particularly on the serious business end - but I've found that when I go looking for blogs, I never find any that grab hold of me; the only way to find them is to stumble on them quite accidentally. Though if you know of a really good blog in the science-math-politics-activism-diversity range, that's regularly updated but not too high-volume, that's engagingly written, and that's more than a link aggregator - I'd be willing to give it a look.

Not that I need more blogs. At all.

Sites I visit a Lot, part ONE (under cut.)

( Speed dial are the pages I go to as a spinal reflex. )

( Streaming TV shows, webcasts, & podcasts )

Last night I dreamed about Lord Peter Wimsey buying pot. I think it was a direct result of being trapped in a small room with both Harriet *and* Diana Villiers. Luckily, he had Elmo to back him up.

...right, no more reading crossovers before bed.

And before you ask, no, I have not yet found any crossovers with Diana and Harriet. Or Lord Peter and Elmo. Though if you know of any, let me know.

I have been reading a lot of crossovers, though. Because damned_colonial mentioned on age_of_sail that they needed someone to take over recc'ing AoS crossovers, and saying that around me is like saying to my roommate's cat, "Hey, Yzma, someone needs to eat that piece of paper on the carpet!"

So, yes, I have been looking at AoS crossovers. Because I am a sucker for crossovers. Way back in 2004, when I was just starting to be polyfannish, I was getting into PotC and XF at the same time, and reading Austen and Aubrey/Maturin, and I was like "Oooh, why isn't there an MSR Regency AU?"

(I did start to write one. But then I started wondering if the only way to explain Mulder's first name was to give his family Quaker connections, so I started looking into whether he could have a Quaker parent and still be a peer, or at least a wealthy landowner in high standing with the Crown, and what I learned is that the people who do British history on little_details don't even know who George Fox was, much less William Penn. Then I realized that what was going to be a silly crackfic would require figuring out how to write a romance between the disgraced bluestocking crypto-Catholic daughter of a Navy captain and an American Quaker aristocrat who was secretly a spy, and decided this might be a bit much. I did ponder changing the names and trying to sell it as an original romance and seeing if anyone would notice. Especially if I left in the crashed saucer. And the giant squid.)

Anyway, I never did find the Regency AU, but stellar_dust did find me a crossover with the Aubreyad, in which Mulder somehow ended up injured, disoriented, and in Dr. Maturin's cabin on the HMS Surprise. (This isn't as unlikely as it seems, given Mulder's tendency to take stupid risks in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle.) I tried to find it for the crossover recs post. Google was unhelpful. Searching my LJ and e-mail were unhelpful. It pre-dates when I started keeping bookmarks. I vaguely remember it being on a specialty archive, which means it was probably in the un-indexed 'deep web', assuming it's even still up.

So. This is when I ( sailed off the edge of the map, mate )

ANYWAY.

/me goes back to looking for that story where Mary Bennett helps build a Zeppelin.

(this is why we need an Archive of Everything. Where we own the damn servers. And there is full-text search. Or at least really good tagging & folksonomy.)

So I got linked to The Ball of Kerrimuir, fandom edition¹, which led by logical steps to Avram Grumer's Denvention sketchnotes², which of course led me to Raiders of the Lost Basement³, which referenced Ah, Sweet Idiocy!⁴, which took me along the primrose path to Mike Resnick's overview of published fan histories, which has me once again wanting to actually work on codifying the history of 21st century fanficdom into something narrative-like and zine-ish⁵. With lots and lots of cross-references to kerfuffles in fandoms of the past, for maximum schadenfreude. ⁶ What do you think -- too soon?

Anyway, there was this meme going around about your five fannish crushes, and why they would never work? Here's mine! Only, bonus: I don't give you the names of the characters, you have to *guess*! (It's made easier by the fact that there are at least three correct answers to each of these...)

( The sad part is, I considered putting things like 'is an evil megalomaniac' and 'anatomically incompatible' on here, then thought, no, if he was willing I could totally work around that. )

1. "Agent Scully she was there / Standin’ on her head / Provin’ tae a’ the boys an’ girls / Her hair is really red." - alas, the contributions by the Making Light commenters aren't really up to their usual standard. This is not the first time I have been tempted to write up a "Scansion for the completely deaf idiot" guide. (The Master could help with the rhythm!) It's not that hard, folks.

2. I want to get good enough at sketching to do sketch-notes. I have a couple of pre-photography "sketch your vacation" how-to guides, I just haven't *read* them yet.

Also, I really, really want to get to a Worldcon. Because, Worldcon. Anybody up for a roadtrip to Quebec next summer?...

3. The first thing that's going on my new wishlist once Librarything gets collections!!! will be The Book of Lies. Well, no, the first-first thing will be The Book of the Damned. *Then* The Book of Lies. Also, why have I never attempted automatic writing? This seems like the sort of thing I would have tried. Maybe ten-years-ago me and I can work on that, too.

4. At some point, I swear, I will make it to a library that has full Merry's Museum archives on microfilm and write up Algebra for fandom_wank. Algebra *needs* to be on fandom_wank.

5. By the way, I'm totally going to be working on that psi-fi space opera thingy again for NaNo this year. Because I want to write it, dammit, and I've never really stopped thinking about it since two years ago. So, yeah. Space opera, dammit! Novel-ish-thing!

6. So, a part of me wants to say that a modern fandom history needs to be hypertext web-2.0 with hyperlinks and community authorship and stuff. Another part of me, though, really likes reading long memoirs and historical recreations. I think there really is a need for history-qua-history - a wiki is never going to be more than primary sources once removed; I want my story told with analysis and correlation and storycraft and blatant personal bias; good old dead-white-guy methods, yo!

I present to you: the WIPs I currently have in my check-every-day bookmark folder!

State of Grace by Sailor_Ptah (Fake News Fic, character!Stephen/Charlene/Tracey/Jon.) The long-awaited companion story to Expecting, which is of course Daily Show fandom's one and only completely canon-compliant Jon/Stephen mpreg fic. :D Although State of Grace is expected to be somewhat angstier, as it brings in Stephen's (completely canon!) past as a rentboy. :D!!

This is actually basically the least crack-like story on the list, btw, since it's meticulously canonical. Watch the trailers if you don't believe me. And just *try* to not squee while you're doing it. (My glee, it goes on and on. PS: Does anyone have the Billy Joel song State of Grace? I can't find it and it gets stuck in my head every time.)

The Luck of Dennis St. Michel, Vicount Stokington by Captain Thunder, a denizen of Comics Curmudgeon (Newspaper comics, Dennis/Margaret, Dennis/Joey; AU): The sordid tale of the Viscount's return to Menacing Hall upon his expulsion from Oxford; and his discovery that Lady Margaret, still unwed and shrewish at 22, has come into a duchy and fifty thousand pounds a year. :D (There will be many :D faces before I am done with this, I'm sure. And possibly some \o/ . It takes a special brand of joy to keep something in my wips folder. Like, say, Dennis the Menace Regency Romance AUs.)

Readjustment by Seanchai and Elspethdixon (Marvel comics, Steve Rogers/Tony Stark): the sequel to their Reconstruction, Resurrection, and Redemption, the post-Civil War fixit AU in which Captain America comes back from the dead, he and Iron Man realize it was all a misunderstanding, they're in love with each other, and all is right with the world. Well, mostly: the rest of it they're fixing in this sequel. :D And, as a bonus, there's superhero fights and the aftermath of Civil War is actually being *dealt with*. Elspethdixon was the first fic author I really fangirled over back in my Remus/Sirius days, and, well, she still writes the manly angst better than anyone else. She the only person I'll read specifically for the H/C instead of despite it, because it's *just right* and totally true to the characters. And Tony just does manpain so well. Possibly even better than Sirius and Remus. (PS: Her Avengers fic also features background Danny/Luke/Jessica and Jarvis/Aunt May \o/ )

Burntcopper's NaNo project (Jack Harkness/Indiana Jones/(Methos)): She posted about this in little_details, and mentioned that it involved Jack Harkness, Indiana Jones, and Methos teaming up during WWII--

Oh, there are still people reading this review and not over there reading the story already? Why?

Actually, being a NaNo project, it's pretty rough and starts slow, although there's lots of WWII British spying in the beginning, so still worth reading. Indy shows up halfway through and almost immediately finds himself in bed with Captain Jack, though, so that's all right. Methos hasn't appeared yet, but he'd better before November ends. Oh, and there's a really cool plot with a nifty mcguffin. Did I mention the plot? No? Well, how about the Indiana/Captain Jack? ETA: AND NOW THERE IS JENNY!!!

Out Of Bounds, by icarusancalion (SGA, John/Rodney, AU): Okay, this one is basically figure skating porn with John and Rodney in it. I mean, it's excellent, the character work is great, but I have a feeling that the only people who'll get into it are the people who fall in love with men's figure skating at least every few years. (Note to self: must find my ice-skating lessons gift certificate before January.) It kept showing up on my fflist and I kept reading it, so I finally gave in. Mind you, it's long and lush and rich and porny and full of atmosphere and detail like everything Icarus writes; it's also a figure skating AU SGA slash WIP.

PS: Read everything else these authors have written. You don't get on my wips list unless I've loved a bunch of your long-form stories. Or I've never heard of you before and you're gloriously insane. one or the other.

Everybody's posting their NaNo stuff, and it's all so much better than mine that it's making me all depressed. D:

I have 4,230 words, but that's mostly due to forcing myself to push through even when I knew that I was just spewing crap. Also, I installed wc.exe for word count of .txt files (it's part of the unixutils package that lets you use all the nifty unix command-line utilities on a windows command line.) Unfortunately, I forgot exactly how to set it up to work as a right-click menu option in windows explorer, so I've been forced to actually run it through the command line ... which means I have a record of just how many times a day I check wordcount.

Anyway, did I mention that it's all crap? Well, just to prove I'm actually writing (and, of course, to grovel for ego-boo) here's the first few lines of the first chapter, one of the few bits I'm actually okay with:( Read more... ).

Feel free to critique my first-paragraph-writing skills.

Last night, driving home at about midnight, the moon was so huge and orange and *pendulous* that I nearly pulled over just to make sure it wasn't trying to follow me home. (Harvest Moon coming, yay! I'm sitting here eating feral tomatoes for lunch, mmm.)

Or maybe it was because yesterday evening I was rereading Jim Macdonald's account on re-tracing the route of Betty and Barney Hill's UFO abduction - and encountering the same UFO they did! (The Betty and Barney Hill case was one of the first, and definitely the most famous, alien abduction case, chronicled in the book The Interrupted Journey, which MacDonald uses as his guide.)

If there's one thing that I love more than a truly unexplained paranormal mystery, it's a previously unexplained mystery getting an actual, inarguable explanation. Because a real true scientific explanation means that the results are *reproducible* at will, and how cool is that? (Anybody want to go up to New Hampshire and take a UFO tour sometime? :D If I do end up moving up there, I will totally be trying it.)

The other reason I love them so, though, is that they tend to make the skeptics look almost as silly as the true believers. After all - if the skeptics had known what they were talking about, it would've stopped being a mystery a lot longer ago, right? Nearly every time something gets explained, it reveals that the methods of the skeptics are quite as bad as the methods of the believers.

For example, with Macdonald's post - nobody, on either side, in *fifty years*, had bothered to actually re-trace the route. The believers took them at their word, and the skeptics assumed that their memories were too inaccurate for it to matter. But according to what Macdonald did, the Hills were actually *amazingly* accurate in their account of the original experience. If you do exactly what they said they did, then you will see and experience *exactly* what they saw and experienced (minus minor perceptual differences.)

If the Hills' account of the light they saw in the sky was perfectly, reproducibly accurate ... what about all those other yet-unidentified lights-in-the-sky stories that we've been chalking up to distorted after-the-fact accounts?

(PS: OMG IS IT DEROS OR IS IT THETANS? (OMG, THETANS. I never made the connection before. I now officially blame Scientology on the Doctor. d-: ))

Why do modern striptease dancers usually start their shows already three-quarters naked? I mean, sure, Dita von Teese moves like an ancient fertility goddess (I'm totally figuring out a way to put a striptease scene in my NaNo,) but compared to, say, Gypsy Rose Lee or Georgia Sothern or even Dixie Evans, she's mostly finished by the time she starts.

Not that I have any objection to sparkly corsets. Mmm. Sparkly corsets.

...but, but, what's the point of striptease if there's no mystery? I love the long gowns and the diaphanous skirts and the little flashes of leg, the bare wrist that seems like the sexiest thing ever when it's all you're allowed to look at, the elegant girl on the town who lets you see just a bit more than is proper, and just a bit more, and she could stop - any minute - if she wanted to - but maybe she doesn't want to!

Whoever did the cinematography on this vid understood that, but they put in most of the mystery with the camera angles. It's lingerie fetish as much as it's classic striptease. Even when she starts out in a long gown, she steps out of it right off instead of teasing properly like they did in the old days. I'd just as soon watch her be plain old naked --- (She does naked really well.)

And no, I'm not just bitter that I could probably do a tolerable Gypsy Rose but there's no way I could pull off what Dita does. :P And I'm also not bitter that there's so little video footage of the classic-era girls, no not me.


Georgia Sothern was 11 when she started stripping professionally. I'm not sure how I feel about that, except that this video could probably get you in trouble with lj.

...yeah, so dryponder is running another superhero redesign meme. This time, it's Stephanie Brown.

I actually did an extensive redesign back in the day, in which I based a new Spoiler costume on what *I'd* wear if I were a DCU superheroine: a costume where nobody can tell you're female, and therefore won't rape you with a power drill in order to be 'edgy'. But after a year or more lurking around Girl-Wonder, I wanted to do something more girl-positive. And less angry.

( So, moar art: two small png images under cut. )

Today, I went to the beach and flew my kite.

I love the beach. And kites.

You can tell I'm as mellow as I get when Beatles songs spontaneously start echoing in my head.


The tragedy, of course, is that there are no Beatles songs currently on this computer. So I had to go looking. That eventually led, by a bonny road, to me finding the original Sesame Street version of Mahna Mahna on youtube.

Great Shub, that's disturbing.

I -- it's just *disturbing*. Somehow, a song that's only deranged when performed by two pink muppets and a caveman and just kind of silly when introduced by Kermit the Frog is *really effing wrong* when it's sung by two little girls and an escaped convict.

...and that's the version that was on the preschool show. You know, I used to complain about how insipid Sesame Street is these days compared to how it was in my day, but I am more and more learning that my version of the show was but a *pale* imitation of the real thing. When do the DVD sets come out, again?


Then, of course, I found the Star Wars OT vid to the song, and got all mellow again. Mmmm. First off, how did I not know that Cake had covered Mahna Mahna? Second of all, I'm more and more realizing that that's the kind of vid that I just love, unreservedly. I have a list of favorite vids that I like because they're clever, or deep, or pretty, or technically elegant, or make a good point, or wrap canon around their sticky little fingers. But I'm realizing more and more that the vids that I just *love* are the ones that don't have anything more (or less) profound to say than "this story has a song in its heart."

I will never, ever, ever be able to make that kind of vid.


Anyway, I now have a shiny new "Feelin' Groovy" playlist. Pardon me while I try to figure out where I left my mp3 of "A Horse With No Name". (I suppose to balance the karma the next playlist I need to make is a "Revolution" one.)

My sister stellar_dust has been finally posting the pictures from our big road trip in July, and I've been letting her, because I didn't really get pictures of anything she didn't cover. Except now she's gotten up to the day we were at Salem, and all the pictures of the Beer of Evil are on my camera. Well, I can't expect people to get by without seeing *those*.

( Let me tell you about the Beer of Evil (six photos under cut) )

For the rest of our Salem adventure, read stellar_dust's post here, with all the good pictures.

I think I may have just done something stupid.

And it didn't even post in the right order! (bah, LJ). So you kind of have to read the melannen ones from the bottom up, and then the necreavit ones from the bottom up, for it to make *any* sense.

I'm not sure which is sadder: that this is the closest thing I've written to fic in months, or that this makes the *second* ficlet I've written that could be summarized "Ginny Weasley learns about birth control."

I'm reading that Jon/Anderson Steven/Keith epic people keep mentioning to me, and suddenly I feel a *deep* and *abiding* desire for Anderson Cooper/Jack Hodgins fic.

And I don't ... I don't .. what? It's almost four in the morning and I've been reading Daily Show fic since the *first* showing of tonight's episode. And the two of them meet up, both on assignment, in some third-world disaster somewhere, knee-deep in mud and bodies, and Jack identifies a bug for Anderson on-air and they end up in the hotel bar (what there is of one) talking about death and detachment and pain and families and acting out and just how homoerotic it was at the Dalton School: and they end up shortly after that in Jack's hotel room (because you know Jack totally would).

And then it somehow segues into Keith Olbermann lounging on Hodgins' couch in front of a baseball game, attempting to lecture Zack Addy on the basics of manliness while Jack drapes himself over something and laughs and laughs and Anderson and Angela raise eyebrows in unison across the room like two finely-crafted bookends (because you know Angela totally would).

And somehow it's all my sister's fault.

ETA: And now, having read this fic, I want to see Jack and *Lex* go at it. Because *that* would be fireworks, my *god*. I can't decide if they'd fight like two barn cats or team up to conquer the world, or both. At once.

I've had a choice the past few days (courtesy of kyabetsu) between Internet and A/C, and I picked the one that I absolutely needed in order to function.

(And no, that was not internets! Contrary to what some people might claim. :P)

...Okay, I'm usually all about suck it up, it's only 103 deg F in the shade and humidity 88%, nobody needs air conditioning, but I'm still getting over an infection, even the *basement* is too hot to do anything active in, and it was a choice between sit still with a wet cloth on my head or get stuff done.

So the mood theme actually has progress on it!

Also, one of my fellow pornish_pixies charter members has finally made a statement about the recent unpleasantness that I can wholeheartedly agree with (especially the title!): And if you haven't read Watership Down yet, why not? (Only unlike her, I think I've already found my Watership Down, and it's here. Okay, maybe less a Watership Down and more a Thorn Valley, but still. It has talking varmints, internal politics, and people with poison gas, so it's good enough for me.)

This is not exactly wank yet, but it's a really bloody amusing example of the complete *disconnect* between the two levels of fandom:

Evan Dorkin (of Milk & Cheese fame) has discovered (in Previews magazine) BPAL's Sandman scents, and has got his hate on about how terrible it is that "now fanboys and geekgirls of a certain fantastical persuasion can joyously cover up the wretched stink of bad personal hygiene." Completely missing the point that:

a) It's BPAL, they've been selling these things for years, and the only new thing is that it's being marketed in Previews and
b) That anyone who first found about BPAL by reading Previews is so far down the geek heirarchy already that they've no call to be throwing stones. Yes, even if you only read Previews so that you can complain about how stinky it is, and then go into frighteningly pornographic detail about your fantasies of being mobbed by unwashed fans.
c) The people buying it are geekboys and fangirls, not the other way around: and yes, there *is* a difference. Level of seething denial-based anger is one of them.

Yes, that means you too, Paul T. Riddell (best known for continually writing about how much he hates writing and how glad he is that he doesn't write any more,) even if you don't actually read Previews but prefer to savor the scent of aged cat piss in sheer ignorance: mature people either leave fandom or give up on the fetishized self-loathing by the time they've left high school, and BPAL has actually been making book SF-themed scents since before they did comics ones, from HP Lovecraft to Nathanial Hawthorne, and the only difference with the Gaiman ones is that they're not Public Domain ...

Comments on the two posts are equally amusing, especially how BPAL fandom wank has already started in the comments to Dorkin's post!

Man, I'm glad to be a woman sometimes.

Of course, I'm also glad I stay plugged-in enough to traditional 'fandom' that I get to see and understand these things. Because it's fucking funny. And context is the best!

Now, on to important issues, like why there is not already more Doctor/Master curtainfic.

tl;dr entry over at my lj, of which the only really interesting part was the zombie uprising.

Chocolate is, of course, the perfect emergency food.

It has sugar for a rush of fast energy, it has fat for a slow burn of backup energy, it has things like caffiene and theobromide and cannabinoids to serve as painkiller, stimulant, and euphoric, and it has a whole bunch of vitamins and minerals and nutrients to help a person stay healthy and heal.

Hurricane season started - what, earlier this week? and we've already spent the last two days getting drowned by a tropical depression, so I was repacking my emergency bag in the closet. Just in case. And because I spent most of my childhood reading books about kids who were shipwrecked or lost or trapped or abandoned and I still kind of hope something like that happens to me someday. :D

I always stick in a couple bars of dark-dark chocolate, the kind that so dark it's bitter, (mostly because the really dark kind is less likely to melt in summer temperatures.) Because chocolate is the perfect emergency food. I learned that especially the time I spent a whole night as a tornado refugee with no food or shelter - chocolate makes everything better.

The weird thing is, a bunch of those books I read knew that. Our heroes would be wind-whipped, wet, hopeless and hungry, but somebody would have saved their chocolate bar to share, or somebody would have brough chocolate knowing that they would need it, and everyone would huddle up and break off a couple squares and be able to keep going. But those books were all published from, say, the early 20th century to the mid-sixties. The only book since then that I can think of that uses chocolate that way is Harry Potter.

Very weird. It's as if, as the awesome properties of chocolate are more and more acknowledged by science, they are less and less part of the folk knowledge.

Anyway, any heroes *I* write will always have emergency dark chocolate in their bags.

ETA: Chocolate neurochemistry.