Between getting things done in RL while listening to Dresden Files, and finally making those two recs posts, I am in that place where I've done too many of the things that had been sitting for ages on the top of on my procrastination list, and now I am at the loose ends of maybe having to do the really scary important stuff. So, instead, here is a very scattered post of things-I-have-not-been-posting-about in the form of a list:

1. I still need to write more of fenellaevangela's yuletide fic. Because she deserves better than she got. ): I know exactly what to write, I even bought myself the offline version of write-or-die with Christmas money, I just need to make myself sit and *do* it.

2. I also need to post at least another couple of pages of How The Master Stole Christmas, but I appear to have lost my copy of the original in the post-holiday cleaning, so I get to defer that until I find it again. :P

Instead, I drew an illustration for philomytha's Vorkosigan fic The Earring, featuring Lord Regent Aral Vorkosigan going slightly native on his first visit to Beta Colony. (Going slightly native in this case = wearing nothing but sandals, a tiny clingy sarong, earrings and body glitter.)

( image under cut )

Want Dresden Files/Vorkosigan crossover fic now

3. Way back before the holiday, I posted my second entry in the Ace Manifestos Project on asexual_fandom: Charlie Weasley, the closest we will get to canon, and I don't think I ever linked it here, so here it is.

The ace manifestos project is still chugging along! And still taking sign-ups; we just had people claim John Sheppard and Castiel (finally!) but there's plenty more to go. I am debating what I want to claim for a third one, but all my first ideas would be hard, and I want to keep doing something I can just chuck out a few paragraphs of meta and some links on. The rest of you should sign up though, if you haven't yet!

4. I've seen that audio/dialect voice meme going around, so I thought I'd link to this: North American Dialects Survey, a study being currently run out of Yale that's looking for voice samples from people all over North America. It's just about as simple as the meme version, only For Science! And then you can do the meme one and share with your reading list. :P

5. I'm still behind on catching up with various fandoms I'm in that have current canon (the BBC RPS ones in particular. Ten o'clock live starts next week!!) I just started catching back up with lolitics, and OMG, the role-players have been on a roll since Christmas!( Cut for British Politics RPF stuff )

Also I want a Dresden Files crossover where Mandelson, Bercow, Cable, and BONE are all on the White Council together

6. RE: posting to the lolitics comm on lj: apparently I have been over on DW long enough that I have officially forgotten how to do lj tags. I had to actually look up how to do an lj user tag after failing on my first four tries.

7. CENTRAL MARYLAND IS GETTING CHEATED OUT OF SNOW. Like, three times so far this year, they've predicted a major storm in our area, and then gone "well, actually, it looks like the heavy stuff will be to the north, south, east, and west of us." !!! Not fair.

...on the upside, though, they are starting to talk about the Chesapeake Bay freezing over, and if that happens, I am okay with lack of snow.

(I know, I realize that severe winter weather can be very difficult and even disastrous for a lot of people - especially a major bay freeze, which can paralyze the ports, lead to shortages on the islands and Delmarva, and damage infrastructure - but it's also part of the climate and the culture here, and something we need. The Bay regularly froze over every 10-50 years, and it's something of a needed 'reset' button for the ecology. And, given climate change, I never expected it to happen in my lifetime - this may be the last time this interglacial that it does.)

8. Still listening to Dresden Files! Still enjoying in that trashy genre fiction sort of way! (The audiobooks also let me drag it out, since there is no more pairing!fic left for me to read, sigh.) Apparently, listening to Dresden Files right before sleep makes me have dreams about Pennsic War, and no, idk either, but it's consistent so far.

(Although, the night I put up stellar_dust's recs post, instead of Dresden Files I read two new Merlin AUs I'd missed before. One of them was about Medieval LARPing, which you'd think would trigger SCA dreams if anything did, huh? But instead I dreamed about the one with Sedoretu instead, which is okay, because I will take dreams about Le Guin poly marriages anytime.)

9. ( Here are some longer posts that I want to do soon, if I ever manage to find my round tuit. )

...okay, I suppose now I need to go work some more on the actual scary stuff, mutter.

1. Here is your silly-but-good improvised cocktail recipe for 2011. I am calling it a "Sonic Shark", mostly because I can:

Make a basic Sonic Screwdriver with lemon-lime soda, blue curaçao and plain vodka, without shaking or stirring. (If you want to do a non-alcoholic version, you could use the lemon-lime with blue raspberry soda and skip the vodka.)

Then add freshly-made whole pineapple juice, nice and pulpy, about as much as the curaçao and vodka combined. (The host of our NY party got a juicer for Christmas, you see. There has been much juicing in that house of late.) The pineapple pulp should nucleate the soda-pop, causing a sudden uprush of foam like a toy volcano, and it will also make the foam persistent, so that your drink keeps a head. Also the pineapple juice makes it yummy. :D

(Why yes, we have watched the DW Christmas special.)

2. Also finally went to see the latest Harry Potter movie yesterday. I was not unimpressed - I know you all have been saying it's good, and it was: it somehow managed to follow the book pretty much exactly and yet still make a good movie, which considering my mixed impressions of the book is saying something.

Mostly, though, it made me want to go on a long backpacking trip around Britain. (I was possibly the only person who read that book and said "I wish she'd gone into more detail on the camping!) :D Especially combined with the fact that I got A Walk in the Woods for Christmas and have read it already. (In which our author attempts to walk the Appalachian trail and spends a fair amount of time whining about how hiking in the US is so much harder than hiking in Europe. And he skipped my state entirely and *didn't even mention it*. BAH.)

Also, I spent most of my Christmas gift card money at Target on a 20°F 2.5 lb backpacker's mummy bag, marked down to half-price, which has only been on my wish list for years, and I have slept a night in it already, and we loves it, precious. (Now what is replacing it on my backpacking wishlist is a Kelly Kettle-type stove, but apparently Americans, being addicted as we are to fancy distilled-and-refined fuels, have no need of such things, because nobody seems to make them for us, which means my chances of finding a cheap used one are about zip, and the import ones are out of my budget >:| I have heard rumors that dirt-cheap samovars can be bought in some ethnic neighborhoods in big cities here but I bet they're all electric.)

Anyway I think my official goal for this year is to do a solo backpacking trip at least once. You know, once it is not winter any more.

I just had a dream that there exists an episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series in which certain department heads on the U.S.S. Enterprise (headed by Captain Kirk) had taken to buying antique hardcovers of classic novels and leaving them lying around the Engineering break rooms in an attempt to wean Scotty off his technical manuals by giving him books that are beautiful hardware in their own right, with the result that Scotty and Cupcake and several other Engineering redshirts have started an enthusiastic book club that is reading the Valdemar novels.

And this animated episode I was watching even included a fairly long segment of what was actually happening in the novel they were discussing, in which Vanyel was drawn to quite closely resemble Spock in a glittery lavender version of Vulcan robes, and spent most of his time crying. In the rain. (As basically all I know about Valdemar is that Vanyel is gay and tragic, there are soulbonded horses, and the covers of my copies are pink and purple and sparkle, I'm kind of impressed with my brain for coming up with that. And traumatized.)

I'm not sure if I want to write that story more or less than I now want the Hot Fuzz story where Danny lends Nick the Valdemar books.

****

Anyway, I've been kind of vaguely following the FictionAlley vs. Pepsi controversy, and while it would probably be smarter of me not to, I feel compelled to add my $.02 American. (Look, me reading up on the intersection of neoliberal capitalism and self-enforced gift economies totally counts as research for my NaNo, okay? And sadly, that's actually true, and I only just now realized that part of what the economics in my novel is commenting on is fandom.)

( This whole meta section here is just so I don't feel like I made a post just to talk about Scotty and Vanyel, because my subconscious thinks you guys expect more than that of me. If Scotty and Vanyel is a sufficient post for you, please do skip this section. )

I signed up for kink_bingo this year! I love how accessible they're making it: low pressure, the minimum is one 500-word story in a year, and they've emphasized that you don't have to be able to write explicit sex or sexual characters in order to play, so I'm fairly sure I can do it. My card:
( My Card )
So everybody's going on and on about their kink_bingo cards, and how lucky they are, and I looked at mine and went "huh."

I don't think *any* of the kinks I was really excited about ended up on it, and the two stories-in-progess I'd been planning to use at cheats - each of which have so many kinks they could conceivably blackout a card on their own, with no overlap - are barely represented on the card at all.

I guess that serves me right! Anyway it'll be fun, even if I only end up managing one meta post or something.

I would like to note that as I was going through the kink_wiki yesterday, exploring my options, the questions I was coming up with were things like "Would a story about someone whose erogenous zones are primarily tactile negotiating a scene with someone whose erogenous zones are primarily aural (involving sonics that person A can't produce) work for the 'silence' square?" and "does crossdressing have to involve gender, or can it involve someone whose species doesn't wear clothing dressing up as a human?" and "is 'accidental soulbond with a mechanical life-form due to shoddy safety measures during repair work' suitable for the 'electricity' square?" and "Can I do 'wrist/ankle restraints' on somebody whose limbs don't exactly fit those categories?"

... which just goes to show what pairings I have been getting bunnies for lately. Actually, having gone down the entire kink list, there are only four kinks which require somebody to have a humanoid or vaguely humanoid body (five, if you count 'shaving', which requires a mammalian one at least) and I got three of them...

I also went out to work last night without actually remembering what was on my card, and I ended up plotting out in my head an amazing story - for a kink that's not on my card. But now I really, really want to write "How Bran Tse-Mallory and Truzenzuzex Invented Strip Personality Chess, And What Happened Afterward." (Does kink_bingo give out prizes for "most stories written for the wrong card"?)

...I may at least have to write a Bran/Tru 'ship manifesto, since Mymy/Vyssu/Mav has been such a hit. :D ...and I'm so tempted to try for a bingo with all non-human or cross-species pairings.


Anyway I was going to try to make this short, but this *is* me, and it's an excuse to talk about kink and about ideas for stories I'll probably never write, so here's ( some brainstorming for every square )

Since I just posted - as my final argument on poetry, a poem (Snake, by D. H. Lawrence) that always makes me want to write fic, I thought I ought to actually post some of the fic I have written around the poem.

Also, siegeofangels just posted about how she likes seeing people post stories that failed, that never quite worked and will never be finished. Well, I think this was the Harry Potter novel I was working on when I first friended her - in, what, 2003? It would have to be, this pre-dates OOTP.

So, yeah. Seven-year-old fic! Yay! What went wrong that I never finished it? Mostly that I was trying to do way too much - the bits of this novel that I have wind together so many characters, so many plot threads, so many things I wanted to say that even if I'd had the stamina to finish it, it would've been a giant unfollowable mess of a story. And I think I sensed that at the time, because I spent a lot of effort trying to figure out how to structure the plot, when I should probably have instead been cutting things out of it, or just writing the damn thing.

Anyway, I have here just pulled out the scenes that string together into a story about Ginny Weasley and Draco Malfoy striking up an unlikely alliance, which were in fact *directly* based on the Lawrence poem (as you'll see particularly in the first scene, which follows it terribly closely.) Pulling out just that thread works surprisingly well, actually - while I wouldn't call it complete by any means (you can clearly see all the dangling ends where other plot threads were meant to weave in, and several of the conversations cut off before the important things happen, and much of the middle of the story is missing) it's actually fairly coherent, and the most of the missing bits don't really interfere with what's going on with Draco and Ginny. So, verdict: if I was still interested in working on this, I think I would be tempted to re-work it as just the Draco & Ginny friendship plot, probably set during either book six or a post-book-seven Hogwarts year; none of the stuff in the D&G plot really got contradicted in the last four books. But I'd have to re-work everything around them.


So, Verdict: suprisingly readable as-is, interesting historical artifact, works best if you have recently read the Snake poem.

ETA: I suppose I should warn that non-explicit consent issues come up in this - they come up in the part that I didn't ever actually *write*, so in this version they exist only as a short bracketed plot summary insert - but I shall warn anyway.

( Thread 2: Something to Expiate )

Yuletide: Today I started reviewing my canon for my yuletide assignment, and OMG, people, I had not reviewed this canon since before I joined online fandom, and they are so together. Not even OTP MFEO together, they're soulbonded-domestic-partnershipped-that-was-an-incredibly-blatant-Kirk/Spock-reference-this-is-my-payback-for-requesting-Henree/Conway-if-this-is-what-they-gave-me-as-a-child-no-wonder-I-turned-out-this-way together.

I was also thinking "ooh, I forgot how much I loved the character designs, I should do some slashy fanart too" and then I realized that, omg, in [major canon art] Character A is totally staring at Character B's backside, in those skintight trousers no less, and can I really improve on that?

And then I remembered that creator[s] are known to be very lgbt friendly, and this is also the first story I can recall encountering that had non-gender-binary characters, and I'm about to go *completely* tinhat. It'll be brilliant!

This is the true torture of yuletide: not the waiting for your story to go up, or the anonymity and reveals, or assignments and requests: it's the fact that you find or rediscover an utterly *brilliant* small fandom that you are full of squee and joy about -- and then *aren't allowed to talk about it* for a month and a half. Being squeeblocked is deeply painful.

(Also my recipient - who is awesome, btw - also requested a fandom I've never heard of, but has minimal canon and is legally available online, and it's such a brilliant story that I don't know *why* I'd never heard of it, and I know a bunch of you would love it too, and WHY CAN'T I SHARE A LINK WITH YOU? It hurts us, it does, my precious.)

***

Archive of Our Own: I have an AO3, by the way: Melannen @ ao3! Invite courtesy of stellar_dust, and yay! (There is a rumor going around that all yuletide participants will get one, so I probably could have waited, but I didn't want to.)

It is still very obviously in beta, and I am making a list of things that are broken that they probably already know about, but it is still *leagues* beyond the last several multifandom archives I have tried to use.

I have uploaded all of my fic through the end of my monofannish period, which means approximately the year 2003, and that 90% of it is Harry Potter stuff. Going through old!fic, as many of us seem to be experiencing right now, is -- interesting.

( About my olden days in HP fandom )

***

British telly:

I've been posting old Doctor/Master fic recs at the best_enemies community on LJ for the past week. (BTW, if anyone wants a model of how to keep a smallish fandom community active, I really recommend looking at what x_los has been doing there.) The theme for this round of recs was to look for obscure stuff, so I decided that for my recs, I would look for stories that pre-dated New Who. Most of them ended up pre-dating the Web. I spent a lot of time on the Wayback Machine (and am pretty convinced that it's the Doctor's fault it went down over the weekend.)

Hooray for archive.org! Though there's nothing that makes you feel as old as someone saying, "Wow, that fic was written before I was born!" Also, I remain convinced that *somewhere*, somewhere beyond my ken, there is a vast trove of pre-internet Doctor/Master slash - many of the Powers that Be considered it canon, even, so where is all the fic from before LotTL?? I even looked in some online 'zine indexes, and there wasn't nearly as much as there ought to have been (but it was all in multifandom zines, because there were no who-specific ones listed...)

Oh, and there was new Dr. Who yesterday or something? I have been so unimpressed with New Who of late that I haven't even gotten around to watching Planet of the Dead yet - really, my experience of the Tenth Doctor has been that if there's an awesome companion (see: Jack, Mickey, Jackie, Sarah Jane, Martha, Donna, the Master) I will gobble it up, and if there isn't I'll just be bored and skeptical. I think I'm well done with RTD; and the bits I've seen outside of cuts makes me, um, less than eager to rush out and torrent the new episode.

I'll watch the next one, of course, because it's supposed to have [spoiler] and [spoiler] in it. I just wish I could be more excited about Moffat taking over; if only he hadn't picked another too-young pretty boy as the doctor, *sigh*.

But! You know what else started new episodes yesterday? Top Gear!

( More about British Television! It is like eating jaffa cakes: strange, bad for me and clearly low-quality but I can't *stop*. )

(ooh, look, the local library has Jeeves & Wooster in DVD box sets. I bet I could get Mom to watch them. She has to have run out of House and Bones re-runs by now.)

So I have been trying not to get to emotionally involved with the politics (though I still want to do that "Sarah Palin or TGP: Who Is More Qualified?" point-by-point comparison), but I have been following fivethirtyeight.com pretty closely. And OMG, if Obama takes the South? That will be not only win, it'll be the most important thing to happen in American politics in my *lifetime*.

***
Anyway.
1. Comment on this post.
2. I will give you a letter.
3. Think of 5 fictional characters and post their names and your comments on these characters in your blog.

stellar_dust gave me "D".
...I had a list of twenty-five characters to pick from, and that was before I checked my notes. So, um, have the short list as meme x 3.

And hey, while I'm at it, why not give me two numbers between 1 and 15 and I'll write you a comment-fic where those two characters meet. :D (Random or calculated, I don't even care.)

( Five Large Fandoms )

( Five Small Fandoms )

( Five Nonexistent Fandoms )

...Yeah, I should probably stop there. Even if it means I have to leave out David Starr, and Mike Doonesbury, and Dick and Dorothea (the D's), and Diana Fowley, and Dick Grayson**, and Dickon Sowerby**, and Daystar, and Death**, and Doli the Dwarf, and ....

(** marks characters I have either written in fic or tried to write.)

So according to the election judge at our polling place, our vote for a presidential candidate and our votes for delegates are two separate votes that have no effect on each other - the winner of the popularity contest gets a certain number of delegates at the convention *along with* whatever delegates are elected by popular vote. This is actually a pretty interesting and rigorous system, according to the theory of votes; you can vote for as many candidates as you want, and vote for them *different amounts* depending on how much you like them; you can use your popularity contest vote for the person you like, and then vote strategically with the delegates.

... if the election judge was right. That is not exactly the impression I got from the official state party rules (given that the official rules confused the heck out of me) and all the laymans' explanations I've read or heard about two-part primaries claimed that one or the other of the two parts of the vote were non-binding.

Anyway, I made the judge laugh by explaining what I was hoping I could do (and by being so gleefully ultra-liberal at her!) and I ended up voting for Gravel in the popular vote, and voting my delegates 1/3 Clinton and 2/3 uncommitted, which is actually a pretty fair reflection on my feelings right now: I've been leaning toward Clinton because a) the people who are rabidly against her, 90% of the time, make me angry with their stupid; and b) I understand her, and feel like I can predict what she'll do, in a way I just don't think I can with Obama. But, hey, still mostly Gravel and 2/3 uncommitted. :P

( So here's a democracy-themed multifandom fic rec set, in honor of the occasion. )

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."

For my own future reference (because this is not, alas, the first time I've engaged in this kind of stupidity) what I *should* have said (and failed at saying,) and I should have said it in a post of my own, or at very least a top-level comment, rather than singling some poor random commenter out to get all my pent-up headdesk, is something like this:

Hi! I've heard a lot of people saying that "miscegenation" is an American term. This is wrong. It is a white supremacist term. Wherever there are white supremacists speaking English, people are using that term. If you don't believe me, you can try using Google to find out what people are saying in your country about white supremacy, and I will bet you two months jf paid time, they will be using that word fluently. You can also check your dictionaries, if you still trust them at this point: none of them will mark the word as regional or dialect. None of them.

That is why this term is so inarguably offensive: it is associated solely with white supremacism, and it is used everywhere in the English-speaking world to refer to white supremacism. To claim that it is a regional dialect term when it is not reads as an attempt to downplay the power that this word has - which was, after all, the problem in the first place.

That is not what actually came out of my keyboard before, though, and what I did say did nothing to help the situation. That was totally my fault, and I should have thought more before I posted it. (Also, what I did post was way more tl;dr than this, which may be hard to believe.)


Also, I was trying to plot a fic where Dr. Cox and Dr. House have to switch jobs for awhile for some reason (like, say, a stupid bet), but it keeps just ending with Dr. Cox saying, "Oh look, Greggy! I'm better at your job *and* at my job! That's a surprise! I'm going home to my beautiful ex-wife and extremely intelligent son now. Why don't you limp off and I'll see if Dr. Kelso can get you 'company' tonight on his frequent loser discount?"

...but I like House. :(

The whole thing with p_p over on lj getting suspended made we want to get back into HP fic-writing - I have some stories that I've been meaning to post to that comm since 2004, no lie, still unfinished. I still like those stories, though, the characters and situations I came up with. And when I do a periodic re-reading of all my old unfinished stories, those are some of the ones that make me think "Wow, this is suprisingly good! Who's the author, and how can I bug her to update? ... oh wait."

The problem, though (beyond my ongoing difficulties with finishing *anything*) is that I haven't re-read the whole series since before book six came out, and I've only read five and six one time each. I tried to sit down and re-read yesterday (okay, sit down and re-listen, since we have the unabridged book on tape and I needed to finish some embroidery) and ... it just wasn't fun.

The HP fandom has ruined the books for me.

It isn't even the fandom's fault, either. I'm glad of the time I was really active in HP, and I still love the corners that I lurk in, and I like the people there and the stories they write. It's just ... the books don't really fit the canon all that well. I mean, they do, but. It's not that the books that have come out since I joined the fandom are *bad*. I quite loved Six at the time I read it, but I read it while on an Indian reservation in the middle of Tennessee after several weeks without regular Internet or being at home. Five was, I believe, in Iowa somewhere. . . hey, wait, that's what a journal's for! I can go back and check.

Book five: Yes, probably somewhere around Iowa. We spent the night in that tiny little family-owned motel in the middle of a cornfield, which must have had a name like "The American Eagle" or something and had the cutest little swimming pool. I was on that road trip with two people who are now dead ...

Book six: Cherokee Reservation, South Carolina: well, just over the river from Tennessee. Also that post from almost two years ago says a lot of the same things I'm trying to say now - I just didn't expect that feeling to last as long, because usually the magic recharges after awhile. But here it is almost time for the new book and I can't even get through the ones in front of me. :/

I think I should arrange to be elsewhere when book seven is out, and keep up the tradition! Hmm. That sounds like a good time to finally do an overnight backpacking trip.

I really to think it's not so much burnout, or being more invested in the fic, as that I've come to associate the books with stress, and arguing, and thinking too hard, and taking things way too seriously. Not that HP fandom in general is particularly bad about that, but when I'm just hovering on the fringes it's most of what catches in my memory, alas.

Strangely, this doesn't apply in the same way to non-book fandoms, though. It did burn me out a bit on the books of both of my last two yuletide stories. But even the tv fandoms where I pretty much *only* go back to the canon for fandom purposes - like XF and HL - manage to suck me into the story right quick.

Although it is happening a bit right now with SGA. Especially after I heard everyone groaning about the last few episodes for six months before they appeared in my area. Maybe it's just that I'm not built to follow ongoing series. Hmm. What d'you think?

1.) Go to the massive Loudoun County Used Book Sale, this weekend only. Done. Twice. *facepalm* Why do I do this to myself? I will only say that I stuck to the same spending limit as Friday. And the books averaged out to well under $.50 each.
2.) Go on a day hike along the C&O canal trail, just to test conditions (and conditioning), while Mom isn't here to be a wet blanket. Cancelled due to rain. I did drive down to the Smithsonian Naturalist Center, but it was not at all what I expected (being stuck in the middle of an utterly depressing business park, and nowhere near any nature at all) and also it was closed on Sundays. I may still try to find the Audobon Society one tomorrow, depending on how early I wake up.
3.) Vid something. - Not done, but I did pick a song, make a preliminary plan, read all the beginner vidding meta I could find, and watch five episodes of SGA. So progress is being made!
4.) Update the X-Files newbieguide. Done!
5.) Write fic. Get ahead on schoolwork. Apply for internship. Fix lj layout. Finish sewing project. Update fic archives. - um. the first of these got done? A little?
6.) --? I know there was something else, but I can't for the life of me remember what. Oh well, I'm sure it'll come to me.

I also went to the grocery store and bought milk this afternoon, because I drank the last of it Saturday morning, and I can't go that long without milk!1!! I'm already over halfway through drinking it ...

Also, I have this sudden urge to write fanfic with sockpuppets. It would fit in with so many of our canons! BtVS and HL already have canonical sockpuppets. SG1 has canon Mary-Sues, that's close. I want a story where Sheppard is really just a sockpuppet for the Ancients! -- oh wait, that's been done already. How about Peter Pettigrew was originally James' sockpuppet, but his account spell got hacked by the nannyVoldemort! - or no, what we really need is an explanation of why HP canon is so obsessed with socks, in which half the characters are actually illusions created by Dumbledore to make himself look good, and when the scheme starts collapsing he stages this dramatic pseudocide; but in book 7, Hermione, with the help of Dobby, manages to trace a common origin address for all of Dumbledore's socks! And Harry denies to everyone that Dobby had sent him the same explanation years ago and it got lost in his inboxlaundry basket! Yes!

Or perhaps I should go to bed and sleep.

(See my icon? This was my first ever Harry Potter icon. It is a portrait of my first ever fanfic OC - Dilly, who works in the Hogwarts kitchens. She is a very special brownie. I am feeling very reminiscent about Dilly, all of a sudden.)

I got a laptop for Christmas! And I get to start using it now so that I don't waste any of the ninety-day warranty!

(It's a used Toshiba Tecra 8100 almost exactly like the one of dreamsquirrel's I broke a few months ago. We'll see if this one lasts better. I told Mom that would more than fulfill my needs, and it does so far. At least hardware-wise. (It has a DVD drive! And infrared communications!) However, the OS seems to be a very *minimal* install of win98 for some reason - it wants the CD for all the windows network stuff, and Dvorak keyboard support, and Solitaire, to name the most important so far. And of course they didn't give me the CD, and if I put on a new OS I lose the warranty. Eh. It was pretty cheap as such things go.)

I told Mom she's getting an LJ account for Christmas whether she wants one or not, so she can read stellar_dust's work posts. What account name should I give her? She's being no help. I'm leaning toward crochety. (Because she really likes to crochet. Of course. :-p)

Let's see. We had snow yesterday and I went for a walk in the woods, recklessly attempted to cross the creek on a snow-covered log, and fell in up to my waist, and dragged home wearing about fifty pounds of icy wet wool and fleece. I think I'm coming down with the early stages of Victorian Novel Disease, alas.

One of the Potterfandom newsletters linked to this entry, about class and place in the Potterverse vs. in America, and what it means that Snape is from Spinner's End. Most of the discussion there is so far off the way I think about class that I'm not even going to try diving in, but one of the discussion threads played with trying to figure out where in America the Potterverse characters would be from, if the Pottervers characters were from America. And I couldn't resist making my own list. And I was amazed at how easy it was - clearly I'd been mentally slotting the characters into regional stereotypes for *years*. Anyone else want to make their own list so we can compare our preconceptions? (or just talk about mine...)

( I'm ashamed to admit that I consulted a red-state/blue-state map in making this, if you want to talk about modern conceptions of class in the US... )
I seem to be associating Scotland with the Upper Midwest, which means that Hogwarts is somewhere in the wilds of the Minnesota Lake Country.

I can't believe nobody else has done this yet. Seriously. I've lost my faith in slashdom again. (Crossover. Set several years pre-movie, season sevenish or eightish)


( I was just wondering if I could borrow it. Since you kind of shot mine up. )


Bloody britishisms. *stabs*.

Pre-movie, during Book 4:


( limp black hair and an oversize T-shirt that said 'Let Me Show You My Magic Wand' )

Re: New PoA pictures everyone is fussing about:

Goyle is still the cutest! HAHAHAHA, take that, you ferret-lovers!

Re: New RotK pictures everyone is fussing about:

Sam! Sting! *melts into puddle of greenish ichor*

A completely different Harry Potter Mary Sue, because, well, they're fun and easy to write, and I'm behind already.

I did not *intend* for this to be femmeslash-really-but once I brought in the Fritz Lieber crossover they refused to behave.

First part here

( Rated R for three naked girls in a tub, language, and, um, mpreg. )

If I ever get stuck and convinced everything I'm writing is utter crap? Remind me to go ding for a while. Yeah.

acadine has declared a Mary Sue goodfic challenge. Hence, an excuse for an attempt at my American DaDA teacher who saves Hogwarts and boffs an OoC Professor Snape . .

( he wasn't looking forward to this. )

Some people whose ljs I read, who I respect, are saying vaguely derogatory things about F_W. Now, I've been reading fandom_wank off-and-on for ten months or so, and have actually got a journalfen and been commenting occasionally recently, and I think it's a wonderful, uplifting place that creates a lot of entertainment and fulfills a valuable function in fandom. And I'm not afraid to say so! Look, I'm posting openly and proudly on my journal where everyone can read . .

Oh. Well, yes. Never mind then.

But I do think it serves an important purpose. I didn't start coming there for the wank or the snark; I came because I was bewildered and curious about fandom kerfluffles, and it had slowly become clear to me that F_W was the only place to go to get both sides of the story, clearly laid out, with references, unbiased and open. Yes, my profile here is serious.

People come to fandom wank and find out what the fuss is about. Post updates. Post their disgust with the whole thing. Post about how they're tired of it, and everyone involved needs a life and is various types of female genitals, despite that apparently being contradictory with the metaphor of wank. How the logic is flawed and the motivation is hypocritical Occasionally actually discussing the issues at hand. More and more, at least in HP, the culprits themselves come to F_w to wank. But if they weren't doing it there, they'd be doing it elsewhere. Spewing it all over lj and mailing lists and message boards. Here, at least the only people subjected to it are people who are asking for it, and nobody's let take it too seriously. I believe this makes it die down faster outside.

Take the latest CC mess. Posts on maybe half-a-dozen livejournals, many of which were originally or quickly friendslocked, and none of the open ones had many comments. On F_W? 775 comments. Imagine the mess if all of them had been left lying about all over the place where innocent bystanders and pl3b3y fangirls could stumble across them.

Fandom_Wank: It's about putting all your monkeys in one barrel.

***

Somebody should icon that.

Somebody should also icon the elephant ejaculate from "Being an Experiment," the work of great literature which introduced me to the word cum and its multifarious synonyms.

I visualise anthill graphics cribbed from B.C. Because how can you beat a satanic bastard offspring of Johnny Hart and Neil Gaiman? Unfortunately, all my BC books are at home, and I don't own either Warning:Contains Language or Angels and Visitations.

I also wish I could find halfway good screencaps of the Pintel/Raghetti scene from PotC where Raghetti's wooden eye gets sporked out. Because how could you *not*?

***

The storm drain outside my building is blowing raspberries at me. It's seriously irritating. *When will the rain stop?*

Sirius ISN'T dead!!11!!one!!

The Dramatic and Angfty Tragedy of Draco, the Melancholy Malfoy,
Being a Play in Five Acts.
In Which: Everybody Dies
Bafed Upon the True Account of the Hiftoria Danicae
(and alfo those books by J.K. Rowling.)

Dramatis Personae
THE GHOST
DRACO, son of the late Lucius Malfoy and Narcissa
NARCISSA BLACK, widow of Lucius, now married to Sirius
SIRIUS BLACK, cousin to Narcissa

GINNY
RONALD, her brother
ARTHUR, father of Ginny and Ronald, trusted friend of Sirius
PERCY, son and assistant to ARTHUR

HERMIONE, friend and confidant

CRABBE and GOYLE, school friends to DRACO

FRED and GEORGE, sons to Arthur and members of the DA
NEVILLE, also a DA soldier

HARRY, the Boy Who Lived
REMUS, leftenant to Harry

SYBILL, a Seer, and her TROUPE of STUDENTS
LUNA and MYRTLE

And Others, Asst'd.