Hooray I just finished the Things I Have Not Been Doing (okay, two of the four, but I promised myself that if I wrote up this DW entry, I would immediately do the other two.) You can bet that if I unexpectedly go several weeks without posting here, it is because there are Things I Am Not Doing (That I Need To Get Done Before I Write A DW Post.)

...it works like that with everyone, right? <_<

Anyway, here are some neat things that I have been wanting to post about while I have been busy Not Doing far more important things:

1. Les Miserables fandom! So, in case you haven't noticed, today there was a Miracle worthy of Monsieur le Maire, and ( somebody has gone in and finally wrangled a bunch of tags in the Les Mis fandoms on AO3. )

2. Janet Stephens, Forensic Hairdresser! She is a local stylist who has been reconstructing ancient classical hairstyles in completely new ways and gaining academic acclaim for it, despite no formal qualifications.

This is awesome and I have been trying out some of the styles she demonstrates on her youtube channel; I have been searching for years for updoes that work well with long hair with my texture and not a lot of goop or constant fussing, and this is really the first time I've found any. Stephens' main innovation is the idea of sewing the styles together with a large needle and thread instead of trying to work with pins, and it makes so much sense. She talks about how sewing hair is very difficult to do on one's own hair, but (so far) I haven't found it any harder than doing anything complicated with bobby pins (it is, however, much harder to adjust once it's up than bobby pins - you have to get it exactly right the first time.)

Anyway, so far I've tried ( two of the styles )

I was thinking about cutting my hair really short this summer but this may change my mind... (also today I bought about thirty yards of linen, wool, and woven-in cotton plaids suitable for making garb. Why did I do this...?)

3. Colin Wright, Mathematical Juggler! I discovered this guy through the BBC's statistics-for-the-people podcast, More or Less (which is also awesome, by the way) and then went and looked up his full juggling talk on Youtube. And suddenly, I am understanding juggling way better than I ever have before! It's all sine waves. Why did nobody ever graph it for me before?

SO anyway I've pulled out my old practice juggling balls and have been practicing whenever I have idle hands. I still can't juggle three, but I can already keep 420 going for quite some time! Blindfolded! Which given my general physical skills is actually a fairly dramatic improvement.

4. I have started a secondary tumblr! It is called SleepyEST. Here is the story of SleepyEST:

Not that I actually understand tumblr or anything, and you can tell I still haven’t figured out things like “about” pages, but: a few weeks ago right about the time I should have gone to bed, somebody reblogged one of those yawning sloth gifs (you know the ones) and every time I checked my dash, there was the yawning sloth! Making me go “aww” and yawn and reminding me it was bedtime! And it actually made me close tumblr and go to bed.

So I thought to myself, “Wouldn’t it be neat if someone would conveniently reblog a cute sleepy animal at bedtime every night?”

And then I thought, wait, this is tumblr, it would be incredibly easy to make it do that.

So, yeah. Here is a tumblr that reblogs something adorable and sleepy at sometime around midnight, US Eastern time, every night. That is all it does. Enjoy. It as actually been working for me - not that I go to bed every night as soon as the post appears, but I usually at least stop randomly surfing tumblr and start thinking seriously about bed.

(I realize that if you are not on a schedule similar to mine, it might not be helpful for the bedtime thing. But it is still a blog full of adorable sleepy things? Also, anybody is welcome to start a sleepypst or a sleepygmt or whatever one at whatever time is useful for there to be sleepy things on their dash, and just re-reblog everything.)

So, yeah, if anybody might find that useful, feel free to follow or copycat or whatever.

5. Psychic wolves! ...er, yeah. I did not finish my Lupercalia story. Even after various people wrote good crack at my instigation. Oops. (Ironically, that was not one of the Things I Have Not Been Doing, becaus I have been doing it, just not in a way that resulted in a complete story by the end of Lupercalia. I am over halfway through! It will get finished! I hope!

...In the meantime there are all of these other beautiful Psychic Wolves for Lupercalia stories you could be reading!

1. I am back from Pennsic War! I survived!

2. The mosquito problem back home is completely unacceptable. I just spent two weeks living basically entirely out-of-doors, wearing as much or (given the heat, more often) as little clothing as I felt like, and got 0 bug bites. Within five minutes of opening the car door upon getting home, I had 12. (And for me, mosquito bites are a large welt and >10 days of itching. yaye.) I hadn't realized just how much I'm held hostage by the little suckers until I actually lived somewhere in which I wasn't.

3. Much like before, I am having difficulty believing Pennsic War actually exists now that I'm not there any more. Surely the whole idea that such a thing might actually happen is ludicrous.

4. I have brought back with me one mysterious rash, a significant quantity of mud and ants, way too much sewing/fiber arts stuff, a vague idea that I might actually join the SCA this year, the burning desire to immediately go camping again (somewhere with no mosquitoes), a book of camp recipes that came out unexpectedly yummy, zero photographs and 281 mb of audio recordings. (Mostly of ambient/background noise, because the ambiance, the immersion, is part of what makes Pennsic ... what it is, and I feel like static photos can't capture that, so I thought I'd try sound. Also, I've still been listening to too many BBC Radio documentaries. We shall see if I ever get around to editing it into something reasonably short and shareable.)

5. I went two weeks without internet! And loved it! But now I am caught up on my internet stuff...up to, um, Sunday before last. With the help of DW's ability to read your flist by date, which is amazingly awesome but still so poorly documented that I still have to search the newsblog every time I want to remember how to do it.

6. There was another fic writer in my camp! (Well, let's be realistic - probably more than one, but she was the only one I talked about it with.) Only I completely failed to get her LJ name. Oops. I wonder if I can remember her fandoms well enough to find her anyway?

7. I have signed up for remixduello! And you should too! It is the remix challenge for people who don't have the fannish attention span to qualify for remix proper - you pick which of your stories gets remixed, and your assigned remixer has to do that one. It still has to be a story in one of a short list of large Western media fandoms, but you only have to have written one story like that in your entire career to qualify!

(crossovers still don't count, though. I would qualify so hard for a crossover remix. I dream of one day having it together enough to run a crossover remix challenge. Everybody would put in a list of all the fandoms they can write, and then get assigned a story to remix that contained some subset of fandoms in that list.)

8. I just made myself a linkedin account. I kind of hate myself for it, but apparently some employers want that these days? And in general they want to be able to turn up *something* about you with a web search - "I'm security-conscious and responsible enough to keep my online activities separate from my professional life" apparently doesn't cut it anymore. (ATM the only result for my legal name and town is my Save The Internet testimonial - which is not the worst thing for potential employers to find, I guess, aside from the embarrassing uneditable typos in the first paragraph.)

9. Please tell me someone has written the fanfic where Highlander characters are active SCA members (or regional equivalent)? I've seen fic where they use medieval reenacting as an excuse for carrying swords/duelling/etc., but not where they actually participated. Surely Methos would make an effort to develop a real cover by actually joining and going to events! And Amanda would just think it was all adorable.

10. The thing that is hardest to get used to after my longest-ever camping trip (aside from the mosquitoes)? Artificial lighting and lack of natural light. Yeah, we had a battery-powered lantern and there was some on-sight lighting, but it was always really clear you were surrounded by the dark, and 90% of it was fire. When I go off artificial light (or at least go for red-spectrum, dim as possible lights), I always sleep better and more consistently, am generally happier, eat better and feel better. I should make a greater effort to do that.

So I should probably mention here that I'm going to Pennsic War again this year, which means two weeks completely offline starting this upcoming weekend.

....not that you guys will notice, given how little I've been updating lately, but the people waiting for WIP updates on my anon meme fics will.

(If you don't know about Pennsic War, it's the largest SCA meet in the world: 10,000 medieval re-enactors and assorted other history geeks camping together in a field in Pennsylvania for two weeks. It's kind of like an east-coast Burning Man for people who are too fundamentally uncool to go to Burning Man. I figure as long as I'm unemployed, I might as well take advantage of all the free time.)

Anyway, while I've been busy anon-writing what some people have started to poetically call "HMG RPF", fandom seems to have finally decided to spend the summer recess on Inception and the new modern-day Sherlock Holmes miniseries. I have no particular interest in Inception, and no real anticipation of seeing the movie any time soon. I haven't seen the new BBC Holmes yet either, but I do plan to, and I've been following the discussions on my circle about it, and modern-day Holmes AUs in general, with avidity. (Particular mention goes to naraht's post Modernizing Holmes.)

So instead of doing pre-trip stuff or finishing anon fills, have 1500 words of my take on pop-culture-savvy modern-day AU Holmes, while I'm still uncontaminated by the filmed version. (If there's one thing anon meme is good for, it's gotten me much more used to dashing off mini-fic on short notice without obsessing about it.)

( 'I feel like at this point I need to point out that I am not the sort of person who catches references to minor characters from 19th century detective novels and discusses fuermosi over drinks.' )