Here is my 2024 yuletide letter, in its final form! Text below the cuts is the content of my signup.

I am one of those people who comes to Yuletide mostly just wanting any fic for my small fandoms, so I'm really wide open about what you write for me. I will never be upset with ODAO as long as you write me the story you really wanted to write and that comes through, so if you saw one of these fandoms or characters in the tagset and immediately knew the story you wish there was a prompt for, write me that one instead.

I put a couple of fandom-specific DNWs in the signup but I don't really have any general ones, and I really did think that through. If the characters and the canon and the story you're writing cry out for something, I opt in even if it's something that's a common DNW (just tag for it if I might need to brace myself).

I like crossovers (I didn't prompt many this year, but an Aubrey/Maturin - Mairelon crossover would be amazing, so would Mairelon - Goblins in the Castle, or Scipio and Hannibal meeting characters from other fandoms/elsewhere in history, or any universe overlapping with Maupin, or anything else that strikes your fancy), I like setting-swap AUs that are interested in what the canon and the new setting have to say about each other, I like unusual prose formats and POVs and I like non-text treats or mixed media stories. (I allow treats.) I have a lot of other likes too, and perhaps I will edit this letter to add some more? If I don't get to that before you see this, this tag has my yuletide posts going back to 2003 and feel free to mine those for old likes! Some of my likes also come through in my prompts, and if you see something in a prompt for one fandom that you'd rather apply to another, go for it.

This year's "completely unintentional theme" is historical settings, so here we are in vaguely chronological order:

Symposium - Plato, Punic Wars RPF, Mademoiselle de Maupin - Théophile Gautier, Goblins in the Castle - Bruce Coville, Aubrey-Maturin Series - Patrick O'Brian, Mairelon the Magician - Patricia Wrede

Fandom: Symposium - Plato, Any

Plato's Symposium is one of the Socratic Dialogues, possibly one of the most analyzed, discussed, and relitigated works in all of history. It's wildly important to queer/LGBT history as well, with some of the most detailed discussion of male/male relationships in the ancient world that echoed up through the next thousand+ years of European thought. But it's also basically an RPS story about a bunch of famous people Plato knew when he was younger hanging out, getting drunk, and talking about gay shipping, having a good time before all the tragedy that befell them later. If you've heard people talk about the ancient arguments over whether Achilles topped - that's in here. (There's a theory that this was published as an advertisement for Plato's later Academy, by showing it as a place where you get to hang out with your frat bros, meet famous people, have fun and talk philosophy, and it definitely makes sense as that.)

It's one of the shorter dialogues and one of the more accessible, and I would love to see fic that treats it for what it is as a stand-alone rps canon without having to drag along all that millennium of commentaries on top - you don't need that to understand most of what it's doing on a basic level. There's a bunch of English (and other) translations online, although the most common one is a mid-19th century one that's not the clearest (but most of the newer ones seem to be available as pdfs on professors' websites if you go looking.) That said, they are discussing sex from the POV of upper-class ancient Athenians where relationships with age gaps, power differentials, and young teens were more common; they don't all take the same moral position on it, but none of their positions line up with modern norms, so if you aren't interested in other cultural views on that, maybe skip this one.

( Fandom: Symposium - Plato )

Punic Wars RPF, Any

Hannibal Barca and Cornelius Publius Scipio Africanus were two opposing generals in the
2nd Punic War. Hannibal was famous as the world's greatest general and started inflicting defeat after defeat on Rome, but didn't have the backing to bring the war to a decisive end; and meanwhile Scipio showed up in the provinces and started making a serious attempt at earning the world's greatest general title from him. It all came to a head when Scipio led a Roman army on Carthage and won a decisive victory and then, against both common practice and the desires of Rome, let both Hannibal and Carthage survive their defeat, only for both the generals to attempt to retire, end up in politics, completely refuse to play the political corruption game, get exiled for it, fake their own deaths and run away together.

I love a pairing that's between two extremely competent people who know they're each other's closest chance at finding an equal but have no choice but to be opponents; add in the bit where the thing they're the best at is a terrible thing they both come to despise, and the equivocally tragic endings, and I'm there for all of it. I'm not completely unaware of Roman history generally but I am happy to admit I ship this because of dhampyresa's primers and I'm happy to get fic written pretty much entirely from them, if you don't know the history much either.

( Punic Wars RPF )

Mademoiselle de Maupin - Théophile Gautier, Any

This is a 19th century French novel that is some times considered a famous "dirty" book, about a man who sometimes wishes he was a woman, a woman who loves women, and a woman who is also a man, who all love each other dearly while all telling themselves they are incapable of love, and also have fursuit sex sometimes. Also it has all the Gender. All of it. It's one novel and it's set in a deliberately only sketched out "romantic past of France" which is fun to explore. It's on Project Gutenberg in two volumes in the standard translation (and French). It needs all the fanfic.

( Mademoiselle de Maupin - Théophile Gautier )

Goblins in the Castle - Bruce Coville, Karl

This is a mostly stand-alone kids' fantasy novel from the 90s, one of my favorites of childhood, and isn't free online that I know of but should be reasonably easy to get your hands on. It's about a cursed castle and a quest to free the world's wild joy again, and also about Granny Pinchbottom and an Igor with a teddy bear. The author used to have Igor himself visit his elementary school classrooms every year to read it out loud to them, complete with teddy bear. (It was also not a surprise to me at all when I learned that the author had recently come out as bi.)

When I was looking it up pre-Yuletide I learned that the author has since worked it into his wider fantasy universe; feel free to use that or not, if you want to. There is also a direct sequel, and I tried to read it before assignments went out but didn't quite make it. So far I'm not as enchanted with it as with the first, but that may change once I finish? If anything in my prompts is contradictory with the sequel, feel free to ignore, and don't worry about spoilers.
( Goblins in the Castle )

Aubrey-Maturin Series - Patrick O'Brian, James Dillon

This is a very long series about the British Navy in the Napoleon Wars featuring a ship's Captain Aubrey and his learned companion Dr. Maturin. I'm re-reading to it in audiobook on my commute because the radio news is scary, but it's a very short commute so I'm going very slow. I only just got through Book 1 and I'm enjoying it, but if you have ever wanted an excuse to start this series, Book 1 is all you will need to write my prompts. It's a classic enough series that it's always still in print, if you want to try. James Dillon is the ship's lieutenant who is secretly going through some personal and political crises and doesn't outlive the first book, and he's my only request.

( Aubrey/Maturin )

Mairelon the Magician - Patricia Wrede, Renee D'Auber

This is another kids' novel with a sequel, about a regency Britain with magic, and a gentlemanly wizard who picks up a street rat while working undercover for Runners. I'm sorry if the prompts here feel a little sparse in comparison to the others; it's not that I want this one less, just that I have re-read it far less recently. If that comes through in the prompts I apologize; please ignore any inaccuracies and write want you want!

If you want more detailed prompts the best I can offer is this old comment by me when I was nine years closer to the last time I'd read it through..
( Mairelon the Magician - Patricia Wrede )

Hello Yuletide writer! Thank you for writing for me! Treats are also accepted!

This is yet another year where I requested what I thought was a set of very assorted fandoms, wrote my signup, looked back at my prompts, and said "Oh. I guess I had a theme." So I seem to be in a nesting mood this winter, I requested a bunch of stuff about people finding homes, making homes, making the best of homes, finding people who are homes, leaving homes, being stuck in toxic homes, etc. So if you're the sort of person who just wants a broad idea to get you started, there you are, you can stop reading here!

I am happy with lots of other things too, though. I really would be happy with just any new fic at all in these fandoms (and where there's nominated characters I didn't request, it's because I wasn't confident coming up with prompts, not because I don't want to see them.) If you want to write one of my prompts in a way that doesn't line up with that overall theme, that's also great (like I said, it was inadvertent!) But I don't usually do much of a likes list on these because I like nearly everything - all kinds of tropes, AU, genres, ships, kinks, unusual POV and formats, it's all good - and I am hereby opting in to all the official opt-in-only things. I especially like crossovers and I'm not picky about what with - several of my fandoms this year would be good for crossovers with each other or other stuff. I didn't put in any porn-specific prompts but if you want to write me porn of any kind for any of my prompts I'm up for it. And if there's something that's not in this letter or my signup that turns out to be what you really want to write, I don't mind ODAO either.

The yuletide letter link you have followed led you to my yuletide tag on this dreamwidth, which goes back 20 years; it should also include previous posts I've made about this year's requested fandoms. Feel free to poke around on this journal if you want to know more about me, or feel free to ignore it if you'd rather not.

I don't have any DNWs, really truly - all the things on the standard DNW lists are things I'm okay reading, if that's where your story leads you (I'm not particularly looking for noncon incest bestiality genocide torture death fic this year, my prompts came out pretty wholesome overall, but if it's where my prompts or your heart leads you or you need a place to drop off a treat for someone who doesn't DNW your kinks, as long as it's not intentionally OOC I will probably enjoy it. I really do just want anything at all for these fandoms!)

The only thing I really want to put under DNW is that if you write the SMPEarth fandom, please keep it focused on SMPEarth, and not as worked into the lore of a different SMP. There's plenty of fanfic already for other things Phil and Techno have done, and for SBI generally (Sleepy Bois Inc didn't even exist yet when SMPEarth started!) so while I'm fine if you pull in elements from elsewhere - it's hard to write this kind of fandom without doing that a little - and fine to thematically work with how what they did in SMP Earth made them the people they were later, that's something I find interesting too - please write something that is fundamentally centered in SMP Earth and doesn't twist SMP Earth lore to make it fit better with other SMPs' lore or make SMP Earth subordinate to them, and if you do write me a crossover for SMP Earth fandom, please don't cross over with any of the too-large-for-YT Minecraft fandoms. (You can crossover my other requested fandoms with the big Minecraft fandoms though, that's fine! Hannibal and Scipio would do great in any Minecraft world I'm pretty sure.)

Here's a copy of my signup:

• Request 1 by melannen
  Fandom:SMPEarth

( SMPEarth )

• Request 2 by melannen
  Fandom:Punic Wars RPF
  Hannibal Barca (Punic Wars RPF)Scipio Africanus (Punic Wars RPF)

( Punic Wars )

• Request 3 by melannen
  Fandom:Wulf and Eadwacer

( Wulf and Eadwacer )

• Request 4 by melannen
  Fandom:Perilous Gard - Elizabeth Marie Pope
  Christopher Heron

( Perilous Gard )

• Request 5 by melannen
  Fandom:The Ordinary Princess - M.M. Kaye

( The Ordinary Princess )

• Request 6 by melannen
  Fandom:Nimona (Webcomic)
  Ballister Blackheart

( Nimona )

And if you want to know more about the canons:

• SMPEarth is a Minecraft multiplayer server that was played on by a group of video game streamers c. 2019. It happened right before a lot of them became way more popular with the explosion in Minecraft streamer fandom early in the pandemic, so it's kind of a look at the very beginning of the modern Minecraft ecosystem. This is probably a terrible fandom to pick up just for Yuletide, but I am invested in sucking other people into it anyway, so if you want to get started, Technoblade's SMP Earth playlist is the reasonably-sized starting point, and if that makes you want more, you can sample his archived SMP Earth livestreams and Ph1lza's archived SMP Earth livestreams, which will give you more than enough for my prompts, and by that time it will be too late for you anyway.

• The Punic Wars are the wars between Rome and Carthage, during the Roman Republic. For this prompt you want the second one, in the 3rd century BCE. Polybius (not the video game) wrote a book about it. Hannibal was Carthage's genius undefeated general, taking much of Italy with impunity, until a young unknown named Scipio on the Roman side rose up to be his equal at military command. It was all very romantic and dramatic and a lot of people died around them. There is actually very little recorded history about them, so it doesn't take much to get caught up on the backstory, but every bit of it is somehow building the evidence that they were secret soulmates. (soulmate AU yes? please?) Here is a previous post by me on the topic, here are some background resource posts from dhampyresa who got me into it.

• Wulf and Eadwacer is a very short English poem from about the 9th century AD, from the first-person POV of a woman who has been troubled in love. This is probably your best option if you want to pick up one of these fast! You can probably read it faster than I can summarize. Here is teenage me's translation and commentary which I still mostly endorse, here is the academic paper that inexplicably decided to analyze Teenage Me alongside a bunch of professional translations (also in the paper). For some reason a lot of academia likes to treat this poem as a Great Enigma but? it's just a poem about some people? That's why it doesn't have simple obvious interpretations, it's about people.

• The Perilous Gard by Elizabeth Marie Pope is an older YA/Middle Grade novel set in Elizabethan England and loosely based on the legend of Tam Lin: Our Heroine Kate is sent to a remote keep and discovers a fairy cult (or possibly actually fairies?) who take her captive and are planning to sacrifice Christopher Heron as a tithe to their gods. Kate and Christopher are both very not fairy-story sorts of people and they and the fairies come up against a lot of blankly mutual incomprehension, but eventually Kate and Christopher manage to escape the fairy underworld (or possibly secret cult caves?) together to get a happy-ever-after, but changed forever and tinged with a bit of regret for losing the fairy world. If you can find a copy it's definitely worth a read.

• The Ordinary Princess by M. M. Kaye is another older YA/Middle Grade novel, this one set in a classic fairy tale world. Princess Amethyst of Ambergeldar is cursed as a baby by a not-exactly-evil-but-kind-of-cranky fairy to be Ordinary, so she grows up as a perfectly ordinary little girl who happens to be living in a castle with her parents and her princess sisters. She has mousy brown hair that doesn't grow very long, freckles, and no particular talents other than living a fairly ordinary life, but it works OK until she gets old enough for her parents to think about marriage, at which point she runs away and lives wild in the forest for most of a year. Eventually she needs money for clothes so she becomes and ordinary kitchenmaid at a neighboring castle, where she meets and falls for an ordinary young serving man named Perry who, of course, turns out to be a prince in disguise. It's a delightful little fairy tale about running around the woods shoeless and nut-brown, and about the value of the ordinary and the extraordinary, and is also definitely worth a read if you can find a copy!

• Nimona is a comic by N. D. Stevenson (now better known for things like She-Ra) that originally ran on Tumblr. It has since been put out by a major publisher as a graphic novel and you should be able to find it that way, and unfortunately most of comic is no longer online, but you can still find bits and pieces on Tumblr to get a taste of it. It's set in a sort-of-medieval, sort-of-steampunk, sort-of-SF world, about a mysterious shapeshifter who is generally shaped like a mischievous young girl, who has appointed herself sidekick to an evil (but not really) villain/mad scientist/former knight, who opposes the Institute who trained him and the Knights he trained with that support it. It is also excellent and worth a read if you can get your hands on it!

Eagle of the Ninth is one of those books I read at a young age that was formative, so it was very exciting when the movie came out and it grew a fandom suddenly! Of course I still have not seen the movie (in my defense it was kind of hard to find), and it's interesting that for a movie that generally followed the plot of the book pretty closely, it changed a bunch of minor things that really altered the dynamic of the slash pairing. Starting with which one of them is the big strong one and which one of them is the pretty one! But also via.. making an already very very slashy story much more in-line with a standard fanon slash narrative? And it's not the only film to do that recently but it was the first one I really encountered. So I read a bunch of fic that seemed like it was for the book I remembered but it was all subtly off in a way that *felt* like OOC fanon but was actually just following movie canon. And then it all got mixed up in my head and now I can't remember what is book canon and what's movie canon and what's just good fanfic. Which made diving back in to find recs hard! Especially since so many of my favorite people wrote for it that I usually just go back and re-read their stuff when I get a hankering for the fandom.

And okay, I will confess: I still like Frontier Wolf better. I have re-read more Frontier Wolf than Eagle. A lot more. Alexios/Hilarion (and Alexios/Cunorix) keep all the delicious tension of Romans among the Northern tribes and mixed loyalties and ambivalence about the whole system you're supporting (from both sides), but the power dynamics involved are, uh, something other than outright slavery. But there is a lot more Eagle fic, and a lot of it is very good! And one thing the movie did was punch up the enemyslash aspects, a lot. I do still have a lot of affection for Marcus going North to find the Eagle and his journey with Esca along the way!

(Also: I blame Eagle of the Ninth and Frontier Wolf for why I could never really get enthused about ASoIAF. I kept wanting it to be Sutcliff's Romans at the Wall and it kept trying to be Wars of the Roses instead.)

• Anywhere on This Road (31074 words) by Sineala
  Fandom: The Eagle | Eagle of the Ninth (2011)
  Rating: Explicit
  Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
  Relationships: Marcus Flavius Aquila/Esca Mac Cunoval
  Additional Tags: Canon Era, First Time, Action/Adventure, Drama, Consent, Additional Warnings Apply
  
  Esca, beyond the wall.



• A Sufficient Love (5137 words) by Isis
  Fandom: Eagle of the Ninth - Rosemary Sutcliff
  Rating: Explicit
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Marcus Flavius Aquila/Esca Mac Cunoval, Marcus Flavius Aquila/Cottia
  Additional Tags: Canon - Book, Polyamory, First Time
  
  One could hide nothing from a red-haired woman of the Iceni. Not even the secrets kept deep in one's heart.



• Where Do You Do Your Research, Wikipedia? (4828 words) by Carmarthen
  Fandom: The Eagle (2011), Sword Song - Rosemary Sutcliff, Eagle of the Ninth - Rosemary Sutcliff
  Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Esca/Marcus Flavius Aquila
  Additional Tags: Crack, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe, Epistolary, loving mockery, Alternate Universe - Historical Reenactors
  
  HISTORICAL RE-ENACTORS AU!

There's a thing going around tumblr about posting about "Ten books that have stayed with you in some way over your life", and everybody else was sharing their shame, so I thought I'd join in.

(okay I'm not actually ashamed about any of these, sorry.)

There are many more than ten, but in no particular order, the first ten I thought of:

( Mostly kids' books as one would expect. )

List of fic I am not currently writing, no, absolutely not:

"Four times it wasn't Harry, and one time it was":
1. Wherein Herewiss s'Hearn and Sunspark go through a Door looking for other men who have the Fire, and meet Harry Dresden and Bob the Air Elemental instead, and there is a lot of playing around with Soulfire/Flame and annoying of Wardens and Wardresses (and possibly setting buildings on fire. Or sex.)
2. Wherein Howell Jenkins is trying to visit Wales but winds up somewhere under Edinburgh instead, and gets help from a certain Warden in staying under the Council's radar.
3. Wherein Har of Osterland, searching for a rumor of a shadow of Suth, instead meets a strange wizard of winter's ice in the Northern Wastes and plays a riddle-game with him.
4. Wherein the enchanter Sir Harold Shea is visiting Queen Mab and Queen Titania as an emissary of Queen Gloriana, and provides a much-needed dose of scientific rationality and clinical psychiatry to everyone involved.
5. Wherein Harry Callahan is never letting Dairine do a transit spell for him ever again, Ways are walked, and parenting advice is exchanged.


"Five More Days In Paradise"
1. In which Kincaid and Murphy visit Hawaii on a working holiday, and bring Ivy along this time. Lots of things blow up, Detective Kelly remembers their last visit all too well, and Ivy makes a new friend and gets to swim with the dolphins.
2. In which Joe Dawson and Adam Pierson came to Hawaii for a quiet retirement, which seems slightly at odds with the mysterious headless bodies and localized lightning storms that 5-0 keeps hearing reported on their private beach.
3. In which Danny Williams refuses to believe there is a full-rigged pirate ship just offshore, even after Captain Jack Sparrow shanghais him onboard. (Well, for definitions of "shanghai" that involve Steve, flirting and a lot of rum.)
4. In which Danny is uncertain why it is 5-0 who are explaining why they're in Hawaii to a couple of Canadian cops, but the phrase "killers of his father" gets bandied around a lot.
5. In which Superboy meets Steve McGarrett. And territorial displays happen.

...on the plus side, I seem to be mostly out of my all-RPF phase for now.

So, the old truism about how if you look for answers, you'll find them - just possibly to a different question - is proven once again. I went and finally read The Big Meow in order to "research" hardboiled fiction, and instead, I realized who I needed for my next ace manifesto: Rhiow, the ffeih manager of all the New York City worldgates.

The Big Meow, by the way, is not nearly as noir as that title implies, at least not so far, although their are hints it may move in that direction. The Big Meow is the third book in the Cat Wizards series, themed around '40s Hollywood and experimentally being written as a professional online serial, and it got as far as Chapter Eight before life happened to the author and it hasn't been updated in several years now, which leaves YW fandom in the interesting place of having an abandoned online WIP in their canon. And I know I have no right to talk about people leaving WIPs hanging, but I really really want it to be finished. Especially if she's going where it seems like she's going with ace Rhiow/Hwaith, within a noir context (Although more than I want it finished I just want some sign that dduane still knows where the internets is. :/ I never thought I'd see the day where Le Guin had a bigger online fandom presence than Duane.)

Speaking of leaving WIPS hanging! There's that Top Gear Big Bang I unwisely signed up for that I really do need to get moving on at this point. I'm only signed up for 10,000 words, and I've done 10,000 words before - in fact I have 10,000 of Top Gear WIP sitting on my hard drive right now - and yet I still am not holding my breath, because I have not *finished* anything over 10,000 words.

But I'm going to try anyway! I have started a thing of putting on Write or Die for 1,000 words every night before bed, and even if so far all I've written is Dresden Files idfic, who knows, I may actually manage some longer finished fiction this year.

I need to pick an idea to write for the Big Bang, though. So I'm putting it up for a vote. Feel free to vote for whichever one, even if a) I don't know you; b) you don't know me; c) you don't know Top Gear, or d) you have no intention of reading it regardless. I do not promise to abide by the poll numbers anyway ^_^



Here are some more details about each story to help you make up your mind (and to help me get my thoughts straight.)

( Story details & summaries )

1. If you want to know where I am in terms of fandom-ness at the moment, I did finally post a polished (and much abridged) version of The Guide To International Fake News (English-language edition) at punditfic - that pretty much covers it. October approacheth with alacrity, which means new Have I Got News For You soon! Quite Interesting is back already! I am writing a Paul/Ian schoolboys AU! And there is a march on Washington to go to!

2. Also, I need to print out a copy of Balanced Conversationalist so that I can roll it up and be thwacked on the head with it when necessary. (I have actually been where liberal!Stephen is in that strip. Except I have gone past "ritual suicide is cultural appropriation" to "you having persistent suicidal thoughts at all is ablist appropriation of actual depressed people's lives, anyway!" Yeah. That's actually kind of why I suddenly fell into BBC RPF; for awhile there it was the only thing I could watch or read that didn't trigger severe liberal guilt spirals. (That's not why I'm still in to it, mind; the cure has mostly worked - I'm still into it because it's lovely and topical and gay, and US news is currently making me depressed for entirely different reasons.)

3. And for something completely different, here are Paul McDermott and Mark Trevorrow singing a duet of "Stop in the Name of Love" like the 'old show-biz pals' they are (complete with crotch-nuzzling), from Good News Week several weeks ago. You're welcome.
( My first video embed ever! )

4. Oh, speaking of small punk-ish boys doing stagegay! Everybody is all excited about the new MCR shenanigans! And I am puzzling over why I can get into fandoms for everyone from slightly pathetic Australian comedians to Swiss figure-skaters to British wine critics but I remain largely uninterested in bandom, despite the fact that I *want* to like MCR. I think there are several factors, but the one I can't get past is that I can't listen to their music. :/ It's not that I dislike their music, it's just that there's something people can do with electric guitars that makes me filter all of their music out as mental static, and whatever it is, MCR does it a lot. I literally can't listen to it. And 90% of media interviews with celebrities of any sort trip my embarrassment squick. Bandom has its own canonical term for embarrassment squick, which is one of many reasons I want to like it. But if I can't do the interviews or the music, it makes it very difficult to get more into the fandom than just reading the more highly-recced crackfic.

...in summary, you should all read River Rats by Caroline Stevermer, and then we all can write book-based cheerfully post-apocalyptic rockstar gutterpunk epics instead, and I won't have to listen to the music. ^_^ (Although Loitering With Intent I can actually listen to! Though probably not the River Rats' cover. I should totally throw together a River Rats fanmix. With nanananananana in it, yes, I'll just have to skip that track.)

5. I watched Hot Fuzz last night! Only a few years after everybody else was over it! Okay, I sort of get the Simon Pegg & Nick Frost thing now, although I also need more Bill Bailey. (Good thing he was just on QI!) And I kind of want to watch it again :D (And, wow, it is really obvious which scenes were originally written for a female love interest.) Please tell me somebody has written crossover fic about Nicholas Angel and Sam Tyler? I mean, it must exist, right? I just haven't been looking for it the right way?

6. I need to stay firm. My yuletide requests are Miss Madelyn Mack, A Night In the Lonesome October, Their Majesties' Bucketeers, and Hodgmanverse; I decided than months ago. NOBODY LET ME CHANGE MY MIND.

1. I posted a tutorial on how to set up an OpenID account on Journalfen to getting_started, so if anyone has JF comments importd here that they'd like to eventually claim, they should mark it. (metafandom is still linking to the draft version of the tutorial, but hopefully that will change.)

/me officially washes her hands of S2 forever.

2. /me has sauntered vaugely downward into the #dw irc channel. Curse you, Opera, why did you make that so easy?

If previous experience with IRC stands, I will stay in channel for about a week, and then get behind and never go back. But hEll bot is adorable.

3. damned_colonial posted this meme:
Comment on this post. I will choose seven interests from your profile and you will explain what they mean and why you are interested in them. Post this along with your answers in your own journal so others can play along.
...and I told myself that the next time somebody I read posted it, I would do it. So:
( local politics, regional soft drinks, spike jones, the primordial ass, crossovers, fleegix, and oracular pigs )

PS: Is anyone else getting an occasionally-recurring error when they try to preview from the web interface? I keep getting: [Error: Can't call method "imgtag" on unblessed reference at '/home/dw/current/htdocs/preview/entry.bml' line 106. @ dfw-web02]

Unblessed indeed, DW. Unblessed indeed.

So, with lack of laptop, and possibly more relevantly, lack of any way to play pirate online video, I have been reading more actual printed books this week. And catching up on my LT reviews, which I was several months behind on.

I have been learning a lot!
For example: When one is pondering writing Miles Vorkosigan kidfic, do *not* read Gordon Korman novels.

Also, when one is pondering writing S4 Dr. Who crackfic, do not do NOT read books of old Charles Addams cartoons....

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. )

Have crawled out of the internet-less depths of the ancestral homestead to the happy land of wireless at the Troy City Library in order to finally get a chance to read my yuletide story

--and OMG, OMG, OMG, guys, it is *wonderful*: Tow Rope, Here Lies the Librarian, *perfection*. (And WWI aftermath. I can't wait for reveals - my author either did a lot of reading on what I like, or just happens to like the same things as me, and either way she is love.)

Now I have relatives waiting for us to emerge to go to dinner with them (despite my still being on the recovery end of the Traditional Holiday Food Poisoning - not so yay) and also I have 150 - no joke - tabs open with Yuletide stories, so I had better sign off before it turns into 300.

..thought I should actually throw some fanwork up here. I've been working on my inking skillz lately, and tonight at inking practice I was actually on a roll (for me) so I let myself ink something from my old sketchbook for last. It's amazing how much even an amateurish inking job can do for a crappy old drawing. :D

So this is supposed to be my two favorite Pinkwater characters, Rat from the Snarkout Boys and Alan Mendelsohn from Alan Mendelsohn. (I'm ... kind of a fan of his work. Kind of a lot.)

( Read more... )

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.)

So, if I were to list Alex Rider as one of my yuletide wishes, is there *any* chance at all that anyone would write it for me, or do I have to wait until the movie comes out?

(I was substituting in a middle school today and finally got a chance to read Eagle Strike, which means I can finally read Scorpia over the weekend. And! Alex Rider is *so cool*! And why did Gregorovitch have to die! And, and, somebody needs to write about the clones! And!)

(Speaking of substituting today, what kind of evil parents would name an innocent kid Connor MacLeod? Poor, poor child.)

Oh, right! yuletide, the giant annual obscure fandom story exchange, is gearing up again! Everybody who writes fic should go join up!

Swallowdale arrived on Monday. Yay!

Although, still, every time somebody calls him "Mr. Turner" (instead of his *real* name), I hear it in Captain Barbossa's voice. (I'm half convinced that the name was a deliberate reference by the PotC folks. Hooray for James Turner, the (semi-)retired pirate!)

Meanwhile I re-read The Eagle of the Ninth. I'm trying to decide (for nefarious yuletide purposes. I recently realized that Alexios and Hilarion are about 90% of the reason I want to see Cam and John together as much as possible.) if all the books with the flawed emerald dolphin ring count as one series or as a loosely connected set of stories, or if just *some* of 'em are part of the official series. Also trying to decide if it's worth the trouble to try to work out the entire Aquila family tree.

And then I read what is probably the only long tEotN fanfic out there, The Centurion's Hound by Jay Tryfanstone, which is *very* good, though it probably would have been at least as good, if not better, without the explicit slash. It's not like Marcus and Esca could be any *more* in love, after all; and it's kind of a distraction from the important parts (like the ripping plot, and all the characters and how perfectly they fit together, and Flavian and Cub, and and and) and none of the actual canon has, as far as I can recall, so much as a kiss in it anywhere. Although it's been ages since I've read her grown-up stuff, and I think that did get kind of ... odd. Anyway, the other thing that bothered me about the fic was ( major spoilers for the ending of The Eagle of the Ninth )

Now to watch Bones House and watch for election results. And try to figure out the proper way to sew a pennant. And build a pirate bookpile for LT.

I also read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe the other day, which was ehhh in all the ways I remember it being. People on the flist have been posting a lot of Narnia meta-links in the run-up to the last movie, and I greatly fear that I will have to re-read the whole series in order to write about the things that are wrong with Narnia that do not have to do with ham-handed Christian allegory that misses the point entirely, or post-feminists feeling guilty about sex. Pity me, who may have to struggle all the way through to the Last Battle just so I can write the rest of this story:

( The Perils of Susan )

Yes, it's a silly crossover. Did you expect anything else? Upstairs in the typewriter is the beginning of the story where the Professor becomes the guardian of three unfortunate orphans, who find a weird wardrobe and travel through it, because what Narnia *really* needs is a good case of the Baudelaires.

(bwahahaha.)