I am back from my annual Winter Holiday away-from-internets-ness! I have not even started catching up on the DW posts I have missed, or the hundreds and hundreds of Yuletide recs, but I *did* get to my stories.

And as seems to be a trend, I have an embarrassment of riches again this year: three stories!

My assigned story is The End of the Enlightenment, based on A Night in the Lonesome October, and Awesome Author took up the challenge of writing about a Game other than the one in the book, and it is amazing! Alas, I am not knowledgeable enough about the place & time that author chose to recognize the characters immediately, but that is okay, because not really knowing just makes it creepier, plus! That means there is research to be done! Which is always a good thing!

I also got The Story of Elihu Yale, which fleshes out John Hodgman's account of the founding of Yale University, featuring Elihu Yale and his wise prostitute, and it is adorable!

And finally, there is Two Out of Three Ain't Bad, which is Myssmo/Law and Srafen/Hedgyt and comes in chapters, OMG. Author took up the challenge of writing queer lamnviin! And in a way that fills me with joy!

...also, while all the above stories are amazing on their own, two of the authors left notes to the effect that they plan to write more, which a) means more story for me someday YAY! and b) makes me feel slightly better about the fact that I did the same thing to my yuletide recipient. :/ Dear recipient: You seemed to like the story, and I hope you could not tell that I only wrote 1/4 of what I intended (and instead just assumed I'm not a very good writer) but I *do* still intend to write you the other 3/4. Hopefully by the time the archive opens again. Maybe?

Meanwhile, apropos of you-really-don't-want-to-know, here is a song I have written:
( I want a Necronomicon for Solstice (only a Necronomicon will do.) )

1. We visited an Ikea for the first time yesterday while picking up stellar_dust, and I still don't get what is so amazing about it, but they did have Glogg in the Swedish grocery, and I was so tempted to buy myself some to celebrate Agnostica with, but then I decided that anything from Ikea is by definition not suitable for Agnostica.

I should probably dig out my backups and re-upload the Agnostica fansite now that my webspace accidentally wiped it again. :D (Look he's still using my moebius chains on the Nukees website!.)

Instead I bought a pomegranate and I will stay up until 2:30 and eat it over the dark of the sun and the moon.

2. Best Christmas shopping story: yesterday we were looking at dirt-cheap netbooks at KMart, and while we were waiting for the electronics guy to show up at his counter, this man came up looking for an e-book reader for his wife, and told us that he was going to get her the B&N one because when he suggested a Kindle the night before she ranted at him about how Kindles are bad because Amazon steals your books off it or something, he wasn't listening. And it was so very difficult not to say, "Oh, I bet your wife follows some of the same incest erotica slash writers I do!". :D But I was good and didn't and just talked about Nora Roberts and the differences in price ranges and the old 1984 controversy. The old fangirls' network: we are everywhere! (Also I suspect Kindle sales may be hurt more than they expect by this coming out right before Christmas, heh.)

I have finally posted more of How the Master Stole Christmas! The next two pages (both double-page spreads) are up at doctor_and_master: How the Master Stole Christmas Episode 2. It's also up at my dA account, in the SeussWho gallery, if you'd rather read there, though without the extra text-only pages.

But I am reposting the latest page on this journal anyway, because I am proud of myself and want to look at it some more :P
( Why for nine hundred years I've put up with it now! )

...I finally finished that update because I told myself I wasn't allowed to draw any lolitics girlband!AU fanart until I finished the Who-Christmas-Sing. I know, I know, normal people are motivating themselves around their yuletide at this point, but whatever, I have my plot, I have a very clever way to cheat and quadruple my wordcount, and I know I can churn out a few thousand words as soon as I make myself sit down and concentrate.

And in the meantime there is girlband!AU. :D This is the latest shared-world AU of awesome to take over the lolitics meme. I don't know - do other anon fic memes do these amazing shared AUs? The other ones I've followed haven't but then I haven't followed them as immersively. Anyway, girlband!AU involves taking the democratic leaders, past and present, of Great Britain (and occasionally other countries) and re-casting them as members of Spice-girls-esque girlpop bands. And they make so much more sense that way, OMG, just.

Plus it is helping with my ongoing feelings of guilt about being all into British politics and ignoring the US! By turning them into genderswapped shallow pop-culture celebs with zero actual relevance, instead of people who are supposed to be FIXING THE WORLD DAMMIT, I can finally get detached from policy enough to think about US politicians without wanting to stab myself in the gullet! \o/

(Yes, I know, sarken did it first with Disney Band PRT. But still I am in love! And also I have discovered Sleevage, the blog for people who are more interest in the art of album cover design than in the actual music. I just wish its search engine worked better. ... I really need to attempt to organize my blogroll again.)

I went to a holiday party at chez kyabetsu & boytoy yesterday - okay, Saturday - okay, it was a full 24 hours of party, don't judge! - and it was brilliant, as parties usually are at their place. As a part of my ongoing quest to be geekier than thou (though winning the math contest at math camp is still my zenith), I missed out on singing along to The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny on Rock Band in order to sit in the basement and discuss early 20th century technology (for a Top Gear/The Secret Garden crossover fic) with a former curator of the Edison Museum NHP.

Like I said, brilliant party. :D I am so lucky to find so many amazing geeky fannish people around me in 3D space as well as you all in the magic box.

On the other hand, I am so, so behind on answering comments in various places. And updating the Dr. Seuss thing, and the lolitics WIP (and have unwisely started another one--) and my yuletide story. And holiday gifting, too, which takes talent considering I buy for less than half a dozen people.

Downloads of early sound recordings from the Edison Collection. Early cylinder recordings -> as always making me want more Madelyn Mack, people! (Specifically the story where she and Irene manipulate Holmes into recording himself on violin that I started last year about this time.) But I have so much other stuff I need to do first.

And once Yuletide is over I have to decide what I am writing for the Top Gear Big Bang I signed up for: finishing the Doctor Who crossover of doom like I originally intended (which is looking at more like 10^6 words than 10^5); the prequel to the Doctor Who crossover, set during The Sontaran Stratagem, in which many things are set on fire; or the Secret Garden crossover where young James, c. 1909, is sent to live at a glass factory in Yorkshire with an old friend of his Mum's, and discovers first the spoilt hypochondriac son of the family, and then Richard the street kid with his amazing motorbike, and then a rusty, neglected old Daimler hidden away in a secret garage that they proceed to fix up together. I should do one of the first two, but Dickensian steampunky Secret Garden crossover! It is calling me! Even if the research involved would be ridiculous.

...this post is very random. To continue the randomness, why did nobody tell me, back when I was desperately looking for a good mp3 of The Green Hills of Earth that Rhysling had "borrowed" the original from a Russian cosmonauts' song? Heinlein would be annoyed. :P

Those of you who are also in lolitics fandom can probably guess what led to me discovering that. Those of you who aren't probably don't want to know. And are wondering when I will go back to writing fic about something other than middle-aged British men.

But to finish a post that seems to be themed around "random music and fannishness", everybody should go listen to nextian's Ballad of the Lone Centurion. (I support the interpretation where it's some kind of sovereignty myth; hidden sleepers and lone guardians usually are, in British myth. Also I really want to draw that cartoon now where Horton and the elephant-bird go to visit Rory and reassure him "There is the Long Watch, and then longer watches; but oh is it worth it when she finally hatches!" I should probably actually watch The Big Bang first, though.)

Oh and speaking of sovereignty symbols: Whoever on my reading list is watching the Mad Hattery blog and got it onto my network page, I salute you. Ruefully. :P It is at least partly your fault I am so behind.

ETA: I knew I was forgetting something! Per a conversation with lindentreeisle at the party, I am going to attempt a proper fanlore page for the D/s AU shared universe - does anybody have any advice, or links to stories in the 'verse that aren't on AO3 that I should know about?

ETA2: OMG, the Library of Congress has a ton of old sheet music online, how did I not know this?

( How To Be The Cool Cousin/Aunt* in Five Easy Steps That Anyone Can Do )

*or elder relation of other gender or connection

Ah. Of course I wore my voice out the day before Reformation Sunday, when we sing all the good old traditional hymns.

Anyway, to make me less depressed after listening to Pastor's Reformation Day sermon, which was all about the deeply disappointing way the ELCA is (slowly, politely, quietly) attempting to schism itself over the issue of same-sex partnerships (which our Churchwide Assembly decided they approved of last year), here is an embed of the video our Presiding Bishop posted as part of the It Gets Better project, which beatrice_otter linked to a few days ago:
( Video + transcript )
And, wow, I'd never really thought about the fact that Lutheran pastors have a specifically recognizable style, but it is so very painfully obvious what denomination he's from even without the intro. Which is to say: it's not by any means a perfect statement, but I am *so proud* of my Bishop for deciding to join the project, especially given the way his Church is spasming over it right now, and the cultural Lutheran more that you avoid divisiveness at all cost.

***

...oh, is there another holiday on 31 October? Sorry, you know how tunnel-vision us Christians can get about other folks' holidays. :P

I have very specific tastes when it comes to horror, I have come to realize.

The horror I find nicely shivery brings in a few particular factors: the unseen monster and the unknown fate; the incomprehensible but malignant outsider sentience; and the shift of ordinary things and places into sudden objects of fear.

The first horror-y fiction I ever read that I actually both found scary and liked was the classic fantasy novel The Face In The Frost, by John Bellairs. It's a short novel which combines parody/humor, classic quest fantasy with evil wizards, and that sort of deep horror of the mundane and unknowable. It stars two wizards named Prospero (but not the one you're thinking of) and Roger Bacon (also not the one you're thinking of) as they try to stop Melichus (a old schoomate of Prospero's) from evoking a formless, all-encompassing alien evil out of a mysterious book.

The book was clearly inspired by the Voynich manuscript, a deeply creepy Medieval book full of drawings of cyborg women, strangely biological-looking circle diagrams, and alien plants, which is written in a mysterious script that has never been decrypted. Melichus' book from The Face in the Frost is very similar, but it is finally read - by Melichus - after he discovers that, when you study the book obsessively, sleeplessly, compulsively, staring only at the pages of the book until all the rest of the world seems unreal - suddenly it wavers into something readable. Something alive, strange, something that wobbles between not quite real and too real to exist, but readable.

I've always wanted to mock up some pages of the book, properly bespelled, and since I finally found my stylus, I drew them for All Hallows. Here it is, a two-page spread from Melichus's evil book:

And yes, if you figure out how to read it properly, it really does decrypt by itself, one slow letter at a time, alive and wavering but readable, like the evil book in the story: there is proper magic in it.

The plaintext I used was a nonsense poem from later in the book. The marginals are directly inspired by the Voynich manuscript - luckily the artist of the Voynich wasn't a particularly good draftsman either.

If you figure it out or try try and fail, let me know? I've never really tested this method on anyone else, so I'd love to know how well it works. Anybody posting a full decryption within the next few days gets their comment screened, but discussion of methods is strongly encouraged. :D

ETA: If you want to know how this encryption works, siegeofangels worked out the cheating decryption method, and I give the rest of it away in comments to her entry.

Things I said to Mom's Sunday school class while last-minute substituting as teacher today:

1. So Jesus got, like, really pissed, and he totally trashed the whole place, dude. It was radical.

2. Why can't God be a girl if He wants to be? He can do anything; who says She's never a girl? (this got a cheer from the girls in the class, p.s.)

3. A fast overview of every Judas-apologia fanfic ever written for the Easter story, from the Acts of Pilate to the Gospel of Pilate, with a long digression about how by Easter the disciples were spending most of their time bickering like siblings who had been trapped in a car for too long.

Things I almost said, but stopped myself at the last minute:

1. Jesus hates teabaggers! (I didn't actually say that but I laid the groundwork. And I want a bumpers sticker now that says "God Hates Teabaggers: Matthew 22:21") I felt unexpectedly justified when Pastor decided to preach his sermon about how the Democrats in Congress are like Christ Triumphant riding into Jerusalem (let us strew roses at their feet) and the Republicans are just like the Pharisees and Sadduccees. :P

2. The reason they didn't listen was because it was women who saw them, because nobody ever listens to women, but remember that Christ spoke to girls first, before he spoke to the men; he believes we're the ones worth talking to first. (I almost said this but we were running out of time and I figured "God's a chick" was enough Christian radical feminism to start them with.)

3. Aslan is a fraud and Narnia sucks. (Didn't actually mention Lewis, but talked about *why* Aslan is a fraud. Also, didn't say "Jesus is more like a Time Lord than a Highlander," or compare "He will knock four times" to "before the cock crows thrice." Be proud of me.)


Let that stand as your warning: as today was Palm Sunday, and it's my very favorite Christian holiday, I plan to talk about Christianity, and specifically Holy Week and Easter, a lot for the next week. It will be in rather the same sort of tone as the above. If you'd rather not be exposed, filter or unsubscribe me; I won't be offended. It will be back to business-as-random-usual come Monday after next.

The internets has refused to cough up a proper cocktail recipe for scumble, and so I wish to inform them that 80-proof apple jack mixed 50-50 with ginger beer is yummy, and it's also lethal, because my body seems to think it's apple soda and I drink entire gulps before I realize that it's actually rather distinctly alcoholic.

(The stash of drinks has no vodka, but my sister and Rachel Maddow together have made me interested in cocktails. So sister had sonic screwdrivers with tequila instead of vodka & I had moscow mules with applejack instead & called them scumble.)

(Actually we had vodka, but it's double-caffeinated espresso vodka. Our hostess has been drinking it straight for several hours and is now both lit and wired. How festive, just like her non-demoninational holiday shrub!)

We watched A Colbert Christmas and then have spent the past several hours watching DVDs of all the Otakon vid shows for the entire decade of the nineties (because the parties I go to are just that cool), including the very first vid I ever saw (which was Ryoga Hibiki doing I Would Walk 500 miles in 1995. btw.) I am thinking about how much those old-school AMVs, especially in the humor vids that had a particular way of using literal matching of lyrics & images while completely (deliberately) mismatching tone & mood, shaped my vid aesthetic. Or I would be if it wasn't three o'clock in the morning and I hadn't drunk quite so much scumble.

Also I appear to have crocheted a mauve Dalek.

Everybody who is here tonight drew a party spink. Three guesses which was mine and the first two don't count! Hint: it is the Doctor Who one.

Now I am waiting impatiently for yuletide reveals. Perhaps I will drink some sherry and then attempt to write fic!

My resolution for the year: I am going to start actually finishing creative projects instead of just talking about how awesome they would be if I actually finished them. (To aid me in doing that, I am going to do more talking about them, too.)

Also I am going to get a job. And make some money.

Today is December 14, and you all know what that means!

That's right - the first day of Agnostica, celebrating the birth of Quantum Mechanics!

I would tell you all about the meaning of Agnostica, only agnostica.com is down, so basically what it means is that my paper-chains holiday backdrop is up again at nukees.com!!!

(oh, yes, ya'll, I have old skool *cred*.)

So I will continue telling you about the wonder of Agnostica, and perhaps even put *my* Agnostica site back up, until the last day of the holiday, whenever that is. (to quote Jon Stewart: "...I will check.")

Anyway, actual Agnostica music is generally drunken singing of badly-scanned science-themed filks of Christmas carols, but it's hard to find good-quality mp3s of that. So have some actual recorded holiday music that's in the spirit of Agnostica anyway.

Vienna Teng - The Atheist Christmas Carol.mp3
I went to the Christmas play at church tonight, and we all sang "Happy Birthday To You" to the baby Jesus, and I sang the second verse "You Look Like A Monkey And You Smell Like One Too". Because, well, that's the whole *point* of Christmas, isn't it? God is a stinky monkey, just like us.
Meco - The Odds Against Christmas.mp3
Another from the Star Wars album. The statistical analysis is bad, but the crack is strong.
Consortium Of Genius - Science Party.mp3
Music for your Agnostica party. (Also for the Bones S1 Christmas episode, which is becoming something of a tradition for Sister & me.)
Roy Zimmerman - Christma-Hanu-Rama-Ka-Dona-Kwanzaa.mp3
A Pan-Humanist Holiday Song.
Stephen Colbert & Elvis Costello - There Are Much Worse Things to Believe In.mp3
Another off of the Colbert Christmas. My favorite one off the Colbert Christmas album! And very much in the spirit of Agnosticism, if not of Agnostica-the-holiday.

Nothing in particular grabs me about December 3rd, so let's start in on fandom songs!

Have Yourself a Shiny Browncoat Xmas.mp3
I've had this since track, like, before I even watched Firefly. So yeah. Have yourself a shiny Browncoat xmas, everybody! (There will be many more versions of this tune appearing later. I adore the original beyond all reason. Christmas is, after all, a season of melancholy.)
Neil Hannon (written by Murray Gold) - Song For Ten.mp3
My sister refuses to file this away as a Christmas song, but it so totally is. It's actually a fairly touchingly complicated Christmas song. As long as you don't spoil it by playing it the rest of the year. (Or, like, watching the Dr. Who episode it was written for. Which I still haven't done. Because that would mean accepting that David Tennant is actually the Doctor now. Euuugh. :P )
The Twelve Days of Christmas at Sacred Heart mp3
...somehow, any time there is Scrubs + singing, there is awesome. (Okay, anytime there is Scrubs anything there is awesome, but you know.)
Meco - What Can You Get A Wookiee for Christmas (when he already has a comb).mp3
Yes, Virginia, there was a Star Wars Christmas album. Titled "Christmas in the Stars." Why yes, I do own a copy on CD. Why? Well, whyever not?

I am off tomorrow for an extended weekend in Colonial Williamsburg (+the Smithsonian Mall + Leesburg) with Sister, which ought to be amazing, and on which I had *better* get a very good start on my Yuletide story. There will be internets, if all goes according to plan. But I have to get up at 6 o'clock tomorrow morning to get there. Blahhh.

You know that antique wind-up traveller's clock I bought a while back? I have now resolved to have it ticking (and hopefully, chiming) in time for this. Probably with a Seal of Rassilon replacing the original ruined paper clockface. :D (Or maybe the chameleon-arch design, though that would be harder and less recognizable.)

I don't know if I'll get around to doing anything else, though. busy busy. Also I need to get started planning for Fear Day.


Anyway: I will be at the National Book Festival in Washington, DC on Saturday, all day. I traditionally use it to meet internets people. Anybody local planning to be there?

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

Okay, all the presents are wrapped and under the tree (except the ones I hid and can't find, and also all the ones I still have to make); nothing to be done about school until after the New Year (except worry); and I even managed to get my yuletide fic in at the nick of time (except I kind of want to finish the other part and get that in too.)

And my family's decided to have Dad's-side Christmas on the 22, and just-us Christmas on the 23 so we can get to Ohio for Mom's-side Christmas on the 25 (even if we have to miss The Christmas Invasion on Sci-Fi that evening), plus there's enemy_anime's friends Christmas party in there somewhere, and we bring sister and her cats home tomorrow.

And today Mom and I ran the nursing home bingo afternoon all by ourselves. And we made a lot of people happy and gave away a lot of prizes, but wow I'm even more exhausted than after a day of substitute teaching middle school.

Oh yay holidays! At least after the 25th I should have a few nice quiet days at my Uncle's house of nobody here but us and the chickens.

They just showed the Bones Christmas ep, the one where Zack and Hodgins shower together, Booth gets stoned, they all have a big holiday slumber party in the lab and Bones gives the best Christmas present ever! Man, I love that show more and more.

Happy Dies Natalis Solis Invicti everybody Northern Hemisphere people!

Ooh, stellar_dust: I forgot to say. I need to watch How The Ghosts Stole Christmas at some point. Soon. 'Kay?

Yay, sister blogged so I don't have to!
Two pictures of me from our walk by the river: In Which I am a Dryad; In Which I am a Nazgul.
Other pictures from Saturday are up at her scrapbook, here. Don't follow the link in her entry, it is wrong, wrong, wrong! q-: I have some more pictures from the train ride down to her place; I may get around to putting them up eventually.

Let's see. In other news, I am still three days behind in my Lent reading, and did not entirely succeed in keeping the laptop closed today (although I *mostly* suceeded;) I only got home fifteen minutes ago and have two short essays to write for tomorrow; and on the ride home this afternoon, the sword&sorcery NaNo novel I started for my first time - three years ago - the one where each of the main characters is more gender-confused than the last - suddenly returned and started eating my brain.

And now I apparently have to eat my dinner before it gets cold, go down by the fire where it's warm, and
prepare to watch stellar_dust's imaginary boyfriend. My life is so hard.

ETA: Okay, tonight's Digging for the Truth was actually pretty darn good. It probably helps that I have long had a massive geek-crush on Teotihuacan, though. And I now *desperately* want to find some actual evidence that BSG's Pyramid/Triad is related to the ball game. I have believed this since I first saw a Pyramid court, I just don't have anything to back up my instinctual conviction. Possibly because the continuity of Pyramid is even more bollixed up than the continuity of Sabacc. (Okay, apparently the original game of Triad has some clear resemblance to the post-classical ball game. I should make my sister loan me her tape of that episode, since I already borrowed-without-permission her copy of the Popul Vuh.)

Did not do quite so well with the Lent thing today. The laptop didn't manage to stay closed quite the whole time; but I didn't read fic or lj at least! No, it was just that as the professor was droning on about the technical difference between drizzle and rain, I suddenly remembered a word I've been trying to think of for *months*: pogonip, the-fog-that-kills. And I had to google it right away to make sure it was correct, see. Other than that, I did pretty good.

Also for Lent, I am attempting to do the Church Fathers Lenten Reading Plan which frey_at_last linked to, because I am *tremendously* underread when it comes to the fathers of the Church. As in, there are only a couple of authors on that list that I know *anything* about. (St. Athanasius gets credit for the Athanasian creed, and also put out the eyes of his iconophanical prelate, for piercing his priestly ear-lobes. And I think Leo the Great was a pope.} Plus, it came in convieniently downloadable form for reading on the train, where there are always at least a couple of other people doing their daily religious study.

Today's reading (and tomorrow's) is from ( the Epistle to Diognetus )

I will be at sister's apartment for SciFiFri tomorrow. Yay!

Ah, stale cigarette smoke, catnip, and rank goat: the inimitable scents of Christmas.


Have some nativity poetry, reeking of 1950's domesticity and Sunday school:
( The Watch )

This afternoon a cacophony of grackles descended on our back yard and the neighbors'. They must come by our yard every year at about this time - it is not that I have any memory of them doing so, but when I think of 'large numbers of loud black birds' the image that comes to mind is of grackles settling restlessy in the tops of scraggy sycamore and cherry trees, which look tattered and gawky in their last few rumpled yellow leaves, as the birds lift and settle in constant arrowing flights of two or three birds, scrawking among themselves ceaselessly.

Grackles are also what populate fantasy novels in my head when large numbers of crows are called for. American crows, in my experience, simply don't act like the fantasy ones, but grackles are abundant, gluttonous, and, if not ill-omened, certainly unwelcomed. (My favorite songbirds are starlings and grackles. They are beautiful like oil spills in parking lots.)

***

( Yuletide wishes )

***

The dentist said I passed! Yay!