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:

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!

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 )

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!

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.

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.

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.)

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'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.)

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