I want to post but I am all full of yuletide! And I can't talk about yuletide! yar.

So instead you will have to make do with a post that acknowledges the existence of Christmas. Sorry.

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Next, here is my Christmas wishlist, mostly for RL people who sometimes read this journal:( ten things )

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Meanwhile, there was a list of things I promised myself I could do if I won NaNo this year (which I did! sort of! after ten years of trying!), and since the Scrivener winners' discount still isn't up, I'm going to have to settle for another one:

I would like for Dreamwidth to have a community called showandtell which is exactly what it sounds like: a place where people can make entries to show off that really interesting thing they own! And talk about it! And have people ooh and ah about it! Because I don't know about you, but there is a lot of interesting old junk crammed in this house that I would love to have some justification for continuing to hold on to. :P I'm visualizing that we could assign people weeks to post but have it also open to anyone who wants to post, kind of the way poetry works.

So would anybody else be interesting in taking part in a community like that? I don't want to make it if I'm the only one...

The following is the sort of thing I would visualize as belonging there, plus if I started a comm I wouldn't have to post this sort of thing here :P

( Meet my Angstbunny! )

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There's a yuletide write-in at a Teaism in downtown DC this Friday which I am very seriously considering, because I haven't been to a local fannish meetup in ages (synecdochic has been very carefully cancelling every one of hers that I might be able to get to :P) and if I went I could, I dunno, TALK ABOUT MY YULETIDE. Also it's quite near the National Geographic Museum and I do kind of want to go to the Staffordshire Hoard exhibit while it's there, so I could go in earlier and do that before tea... and I could even drop by the local Occupy encampment, which is also within a couple of blocks. Anybody else thinking of doing any of those things?

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And finally, here are some Yuletide-ish icon bases that I made for sharing last year and never posted, some of them from a very old greeting card and some of them from Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy From Mars book covers, and also one of the giant chicken of Hoboken (you can probably figure out which are which):

4. staranise gave me that "explain five icons" meme. Here are the five icons she chose ( These may contain major spoilers for some of the small fandoms my icons are from. )

If anybody want me to pick five icons for them, I suppose I could. :D

(look at me showing off my l33t new css skills, too!)

...and happy new year! Well, the new year was actually Sunday, but I am not good at updating when I plan to, hah. As has become traditional, Commander Valentine (the woman in my icon) has decided to give up smoking as a New Year's resolution, and thus will be sucking on a candy cane instead until she inevitably backslides in about a month. :P (If there's any place where the Christian liturgical calendar would be the official state calendar, it's Commander Valentine's home planet, Stephen Colbert's Alphalon.)

Anyway. While stellar_dust was in Maryland for the holiday weekend, she gave me a SIGNED PAPERBACK COPY of JOHN HODGMAN'S first BOOK OF KNOWLEDGE, THE AREAS OF MY EXPERTISE. It is inscribed personally to me, and he has drawn the dreaded H in sunrays - the sign for the hoboes to rise up and overthrow the American government - over the "Stephen Colbert Award for the Literary Excellence" badge on the cover.

The paperback edition also has - and I had forgotten, if I ever knew this - the original cover hidden on the inside, the one that contains a DRAGON, a SWORDMAID in a metal bikini, and a flattering portrait of the Author in one of the TRIPLE SUNS. So of course I had to make icons. :D

( 13 shareable Areas of My Expertise icons & descriptions )

ALSO HERE IS MY VERY OWN HOBO SIGN ON the Stephen Colbert Literary Excellence Award medal:

It is not for sharing, it is mine.

(Not that I will be in the least disappointed at anything I get for yuletide, but why did I forget to nominate Hodgmanverse?? --if I get any bookstore gift certificates for holidays I am buying myself "More Information Than You Need" at long last, and then there will probably be quite a few mole-men, furry lobsters, eagles of Hohoq and hoboes appearing in this space.)


PS: John Hodgman is on Quite Interesting this week! I will be posting a link here as soon as it is up on youtube.

I had a very busy weekend, to the extent that this is the first time since before SciFi Fri that I've been online at all.

Part of that weekend involved being in a car for two hours with nothing to read but Tag & Bink Episode 2: Revenge of the Clone Menace, which is only the *best* Star Wars comic ever published (and that includes the ones with Plif the Hoojib.)

I say this completely disregarding the fact that tiny younglings Tag and Bink are the cutest litle Jedi possible to exist, even though they are. I want more little-tiny-Tag-and-Bink adventures, hurrah! Like the three years they spent hitchhiking home from Naboo and got all adolescent and scruffy!

Anyway, did I mention that as well as the awesome story, the art rocks? I managed seven icons before GIMP froze on me and dumped all my unsaved scans:

(If anyone by chance wants to snarf these, I don't care what you do with them. Although it'd be nice if you credit the art to the Tag & Bink team, Rubio & Marangon.)

(Strangely, last night I had a Jedi Apprentice dream featuring Xanatos, despite not yet having read Jedi Apprentice, and having read no fic for years. So apparently I have Padawans on the brain right now.)

And speaking of the other fandom that I need to do a comics-icons set for soon, one of the links I found several places when I caught up today was Henry Jenkins's comments on vidding. The vidding comments are interesting, but what caught my eye was his using a fandom term that I hadn't heard before, which is very unusual these days, language magpie that I am.

The word is "ose". A quick Google tells me that it originated in SF filk fandom circles, and comes from the phrase, applied to the mood of a song, "It was all ose, ose, and more ose." It seems to be largely pejorative there, and I think Jenkins is using it a bit differently, to refer not just to a "downer" mood, but to a mood where the angst is developed through distance rather than through loud emotionality.

I think this is a very useful word and I'm adopting it. I think many of the non-humor stories I write end up being ose. They're not emotive enough to be angst, and they aren't quite depressing enough to be more-ose, they're just ose. Ickle Aayla Secura in my new default icon? She's rather ose, I think.

It reminds me of the cold & prickly vs. warm & fuzzy thing that came up back in the day in SGA, which I still find myself using from time to time (Was that a year and a half ago already?). But since "ose" doesn't set up an opposition, just a description, and it invites explanation rather than argument, it may be more useful in casual discussion. And it's a fun punnish backformation in the old SF tradition. And getting it adopted to fanfic will be a subculture mixing of just the sort that Jenkins is discussing in his post, so it'll be all meta-meta-y!

It also (for me at least) calls to mind the River Ose from the Riddle of Stars trilogy, the river that Raederle and Lyra and Tristan sailed up on the spring melt, icy-cold and murky with the spring flood, but running fast and dangerous and every so often, things can be seen rising from the depths, for just a second, before they're washed away. Riddle of Stars is kind of ose, too, come to think of it.

I hereby adopt that word, and declare that I like stories that are ose. Now, you big fandom melting pot, it's up to you to finish defining the word for me!

(Speaking of Riddle of Stars, I really should send wickedwords the feedback I promised her for Unanswered Riddles before *this* year's yuletide rolls around, shouldn't I?)

So. I renewed my paid account. And now I plan to spend the evening doing a long-overdue cleaning up of my lj: finish the mood theme at long last, new layout, fix links, look over icons, etcetera, etcetera. And while I'm at it, it's been awhile since I did a comment-whoring post, so I saw this meme in somebody's journal, and hey, why not?

Which of your icons best matches your mental image?

The icon that best matches my image of melannen is . It's Princess Leia, from the pre-ESB, psychedelically illustrated Star Wars picture book The Mystery of the Rebellious Robot. Leia is Skeptical! Probably of whatever nonsense Luke is spouting off, the text doesn't really make it clear why she's rolling her eyes. Man, I could make a whole iconset just from that book, but this was the image that spoke to me loudest.

( And here, I do the flist, under a cut! )

My, you're a colorful bunch, you lot. So, tell me which icon I should have picked for you! Tell me which icon I should have picked for me! Ask why I think you are *that* icon, of all things!

Some of you were far harder than others. Actually, having looked at all those userpic pages, a) I wanna bunch of new icons! and b) there seem to be two philosophies of userpic-picking: icons that are meant to actually represent a person, and icons that are just things they like to look at. Often it's mixed, of course, but it's usually pretty easy to see which philosophy dominates.

Okay! Now, back to staring at Snoopys!