I have been getting really cranky about all sorts of minor things for the past week or so (maybe once the cramps let up it will improve?) ranging from why the lay/lie thing makes me angry to why Sherlock fans annoy me to evo-psych hate. I got out the Sherlock gripe on asexual_fandom, and we're probably all glad the essay on lay vs. lie is staying safely on my hard drive, but then there was this one, which I decided was best expressed as Dinosaur Comics fanart, see below:


ETA: This image is freely available to anyone who wants to repost or remix!

Because we have known about feathered dinosaurs for longer than I've been alive, we've known that nearly all theropods probably had some sort of feather-like structures for at least a decade, and yet young kids are still learning it the wrong way from new books, there is positively no excuse for people to be doing new illustrations of these creatures and ignoring that. It goes beyond 'Wrong on the Internet' to 'What Is Wrong With Humanity'? Grrr. Arrgh. Hisss. (And yes, Sue in the Dresden Files is part of the problem, though I can fanwank it that she was at least 90% a construct and shaped by what Harry expected her to look like.)

( Trancript )

( Some scientific notes )


In other news, I was attacked by a dinosaur last weekend! I was lying in my tree, taking a nap, and listening to my mp3 player, when this dinosaur just swooped down at me from above, all feathery and stuff! It landed right next to me, and then jumped onto my chest and just sat there, right on me, and stared at me for awhile with its cold eyes.

I think it was one of these. Possibly simultaneously one of the most awesome and terrifying things that has ever happened to me. :D


In possibly related news: TetZoo is my current favorite blog. If only because, if someone as amazing as Darren Naish can get constantly distracted by shiny things and keep promising to do a certain post for years before he finally gets around to it, there's hope for people like me. Also, as witness my dinosaur attack earlier, I am ashamed to say I am really ignorant on common passerines. TetZoo almost manages to make them interesting.

(Here's Naish on feathered dinosaurs from 2007, already somewhat out of date but a good overview of the work coming out in the last decade.)

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.

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.

This is a picture of my sister's cat Bingley, on one side of the screen on the screen porch. On the other side of the screen on the screenporch, and by "on the other side" I mean they are both practically touching it, is a rather young baby bird that can't quite fly yet.

This situation has been ongoing for about half an hour now, up and down the front of the porch. The baby bird either realizes Bingley can't get to it and is being gratuitously cruel to her, or genuinely thinks the cat is its mummy; it is not acting scared, it is acting bratty.

On the upside, Bingley has so far resisted the temptation to claw at the screen! \o/ Good kitty, I forgive you for puking where I would step in it barefoot last night.

(We are all out on the screenporch because after almost a week straight of 90°F+/35°C weather with humidity averaging 50%, even having a very well-designed, all-masonry house no longer quite cuts it.)

So, as I do live in, you know, the place that has just broken about half of their all-time snow records, we were without power for about twelve hours today, and we're now hoping it will stay on.

I was expecting that when I got back online you would be flooded with snow pictures and sick of them! But no, there hasn't even been anything on urban_nature. So you get to look at mine.

We got very close to exactly 24 inches before it stopped in late afternoon, as near as I can tell, though it's drifted as high as three feet in a lot of places. The landscape passed Thomas Kinkade levels of threat quite a while ago and is now well in to what can only be described as Seussian.

*Nice* snow-fort making conditions, too. I think we may be attempting to build a full-domed snow shelter tomorrow if the freeze holds like it's meant to. Today was half shoveling and half just wandering around marveling at things.

( 20 photos under cut + 2 more )

MÁRGARÉT, áre you gríeving	
Over Goldengrove unleaving?	
Leáves, líke the things of man, you	
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?	
Áh! ás the heart grows older	     
It will come to such sights colder	
By and by, nor spare a sigh	
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;	
And yet you wíll weep and know why.	
Now no matter, child, the name:	   
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.	
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed	
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:	
It ís the blight man was born for,	
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Guess what I spent all weekend doing! Ah, the joys of being a grown-up with your own place.

I walked down to the drawbridge tonight to watch the Wednesday sailboat races come in at sunset, and oh my god, you guys, it is *so* pretty here. With the perfect weather we've been having I've actually been getting out and about like I've claimed I wanted to, and it is so pretty, and there's so many places I can walk to, and yes.

I realized today that if you told my ten-years-ago self that ten years from then I would be living in Annapolis, a ten-minute walk from the Bay, in a tidy little 80-year-old-cottage with morning glory and wild roses, without a car because I don't need one, rooming with four excellent cats, more books than I could read in a lifetime, and two dear, geeky friends who I work on a webcomic with, ten-years-ago me would say "Wait, you mean I get *exactly* the life I want? How'd I manage that?"

(Ten-years-ago-me would be equally unconcerned about the lack of any visible means of support. Perhaps that is something the two of us should work on together.)

Just spent two hours laying flat on the roof, listening to a Doctor Who audio and watching the stars come out.

...Sometimes it's good to be an earth-dwelling monkey.

And you know, while I was sitting up there watching the sky and listening to the Master try to destroy the universe, I realized that I don't think I'd *ever* watched the stars come out before. Part of that's down on my having grown up under the Great Eastern Forest, so there hasn't generally been a lot of sky to see, but, when it comes down to it --

I've stargazed a few times, but we always made sure it was right dark by the time we've gone out; I've noticed the stars coming out, but we were always doing other things at the same time; most of my memories of the night sky have been through car windows. I've never simply laid out from sunset until full dark and done nothing but see the sky change.

And that's not right.

How many of you have watched the stars come out? ... I don't know that I know anybody in RL who'd have been willing to lie out there with me in the quiet for two hours. And that's almost as sad.

I know nobody on this flist cares, but I have to say: Watching the Highlander Horsemen arc while you're still in the headspace where Mac is an Abdal and Methos is a (very, very bitter and screwed up) avatar of the Lone Power? Just makes it *that much better*. (I think Kronos is actually some kind of Dark Aspect of the Champion. For several reasons, but it doesn't really get confusing 'till Ahriman shows up, and I haven't re-watched Archangel yet, so.)

(What? I just read some really good HL/TW crossovers, and they made a Highlander joke on the Daily Show, f'god's sake. The video was just sitting there saying "watch me! Watch the HL episodes you've seen nine times already, not the DVDs your sister ordered you to watch!" -- I blame it on the blahs, which have settled down from "feeling icky" to "head cold", which is only better in that now I can at least pin down the symptoms. Highlander is just so ... comfortable that way. You know that whatever happens, there'll be warm sweaters, good food, and people who do love each other and are very good at what they do.)

Anyway, ( cat pictures )

So we've spent the last hour eating raisin toast and alternating between watching the Mythbusters MacGuyver special and watching the red dragon eat the moon.

Now I really, really want a Mythbusters/Reynard Noir crossover. :D

So here's a picture of me as a baby:


You're welcome.
( Also here is the view out our front door. And a picture of a cat. )

(ps sister: the noland's ferry pictures are up now too, at melannen.katycat.net/photos 10_3412-3422. Not that you'll have time to do anything with them at this point. Uh. Sorry.)

Last night, driving home at about midnight, the moon was so huge and orange and *pendulous* that I nearly pulled over just to make sure it wasn't trying to follow me home. (Harvest Moon coming, yay! I'm sitting here eating feral tomatoes for lunch, mmm.)

Or maybe it was because yesterday evening I was rereading Jim Macdonald's account on re-tracing the route of Betty and Barney Hill's UFO abduction - and encountering the same UFO they did! (The Betty and Barney Hill case was one of the first, and definitely the most famous, alien abduction case, chronicled in the book The Interrupted Journey, which MacDonald uses as his guide.)

If there's one thing that I love more than a truly unexplained paranormal mystery, it's a previously unexplained mystery getting an actual, inarguable explanation. Because a real true scientific explanation means that the results are *reproducible* at will, and how cool is that? (Anybody want to go up to New Hampshire and take a UFO tour sometime? :D If I do end up moving up there, I will totally be trying it.)

The other reason I love them so, though, is that they tend to make the skeptics look almost as silly as the true believers. After all - if the skeptics had known what they were talking about, it would've stopped being a mystery a lot longer ago, right? Nearly every time something gets explained, it reveals that the methods of the skeptics are quite as bad as the methods of the believers.

For example, with Macdonald's post - nobody, on either side, in *fifty years*, had bothered to actually re-trace the route. The believers took them at their word, and the skeptics assumed that their memories were too inaccurate for it to matter. But according to what Macdonald did, the Hills were actually *amazingly* accurate in their account of the original experience. If you do exactly what they said they did, then you will see and experience *exactly* what they saw and experienced (minus minor perceptual differences.)

If the Hills' account of the light they saw in the sky was perfectly, reproducibly accurate ... what about all those other yet-unidentified lights-in-the-sky stories that we've been chalking up to distorted after-the-fact accounts?

(PS: OMG IS IT DEROS OR IS IT THETANS? (OMG, THETANS. I never made the connection before. I now officially blame Scientology on the Doctor. d-: ))

Today, I went to the beach and flew my kite.

I love the beach. And kites.

You can tell I'm as mellow as I get when Beatles songs spontaneously start echoing in my head.


The tragedy, of course, is that there are no Beatles songs currently on this computer. So I had to go looking. That eventually led, by a bonny road, to me finding the original Sesame Street version of Mahna Mahna on youtube.

Great Shub, that's disturbing.

I -- it's just *disturbing*. Somehow, a song that's only deranged when performed by two pink muppets and a caveman and just kind of silly when introduced by Kermit the Frog is *really effing wrong* when it's sung by two little girls and an escaped convict.

...and that's the version that was on the preschool show. You know, I used to complain about how insipid Sesame Street is these days compared to how it was in my day, but I am more and more learning that my version of the show was but a *pale* imitation of the real thing. When do the DVD sets come out, again?


Then, of course, I found the Star Wars OT vid to the song, and got all mellow again. Mmmm. First off, how did I not know that Cake had covered Mahna Mahna? Second of all, I'm more and more realizing that that's the kind of vid that I just love, unreservedly. I have a list of favorite vids that I like because they're clever, or deep, or pretty, or technically elegant, or make a good point, or wrap canon around their sticky little fingers. But I'm realizing more and more that the vids that I just *love* are the ones that don't have anything more (or less) profound to say than "this story has a song in its heart."

I will never, ever, ever be able to make that kind of vid.


Anyway, I now have a shiny new "Feelin' Groovy" playlist. Pardon me while I try to figure out where I left my mp3 of "A Horse With No Name". (I suppose to balance the karma the next playlist I need to make is a "Revolution" one.)

My sister stellar_dust has been finally posting the pictures from our big road trip in July, and I've been letting her, because I didn't really get pictures of anything she didn't cover. Except now she's gotten up to the day we were at Salem, and all the pictures of the Beer of Evil are on my camera. Well, I can't expect people to get by without seeing *those*.

( Let me tell you about the Beer of Evil (six photos under cut) )

For the rest of our Salem adventure, read stellar_dust's post here, with all the good pictures.

Spent most of the afternoon and morning working in the yard. I can't decide if it's awful or awesome that the black walnut tree is fruiting this year. We'll see what my opinion is after I've picked up another four or five bushels of mostly-rotten nuts. (Feel the burn in those thighs!) Haven't decided yet if I'm going to try to shell any this year or not - I did a bunch two years ago, the last time it fruited, and my fingers were this absolutely lovely mahogany color until mid-October. Then Mom, who has a vicious PUT IT IN TUPPERWARE instinct, sealed them up before they'd had a chance to cure and they all mildewed. Bah.

The squirrels get nearly all the good ones anyway. Anybody know how to tell a good nut from a bad before you shell it? Because that's a *lot* of effort for a very few good nuts.

Then I spent the evening shelving books on my LibraryThing.com account. It's not solved yet, but the remaining books are a lot more manageable now. (For those who haven't encountered me in hoard-brooding mode before - I live, with all my worldly possessions, in a 15x20 foot bedroom. Among those possessions: well over a thousand books. And I acquire new ones at a rate of about five a week, although in a good month I can easily do four times that. So it's a never-ending puzzle to get them shelved = good thing I love messing about with books! ATM I have eight separate bookshelves of varying sizes in the room, not counting the line of books across the top of my dresser, and I sleep on the top bunk of a bunk bed with a reading nook on the bottom. For all that, the room's surprisingly open and airy when everything's stowed away where it belongs.)

So now instead of four tall piles of random recent books under my bed, I have a pile of classic literature and a pile of books on the writing life and a pile of books that might be relevant to my NaNo. And *everything else* is shelved, which I honestly didn't think I'd manage until about five minutes before I finished. Yay!

(Yeah - I know what I'm doing for NaNo already, mostly thanks to limyaael's fantasy rants. I'm starting a good month sooner than the last five years though, so hooray! No worries, though - I'm fairly well certain I'll just do all the worldbuilding and then give up on the actual writing a week in, like always.)

Did I hear it wrong, or has our local news radio station started referring to the moisture content of the air as 'doomidity' ? ...it would be accurate, anyway. Rained this morning, so the *temperature* isn't over 95 yet, but the humidity may well be.


Have been reading "Virtuous Love Affair" (which is flocked on fakenews_fanfic at lj) on sister's rec. She's right - it's an excellent, perfect slashfic that hits me right there, up to the point where they start having lots of sex, at which point it becomes simultaneously boring and overwrought.

...I have issues.

No, but honestly, VLA hits right on a genre of slashfic that I have been wanting to read more of for *ages* but nobody ever seems to write much of : where our characters, in canon, are very clearly in love with each other, and have been for ages, and it's so obvious that I have a hard time believing they haven't noticed it yet. (This applies in many, many fandoms. From Kirk/Spock/McCoy all the way on up to John/Rodney.) So I have trouble believing in the stories where, after three, or five, or nine years of blatant onscreen flirting, they suddenly realize they're MFEO and fall into bed together.

Oh, I'll give it a miss if there's a good reason they wouldn't've before - they're enemies, they're teenagers, they're from a culture where it's literally unthinkable - and many writers can sell it even without that. But when half the authors in a fandom are spending so much effort trying to justify the fact that these guys have never dealt with the UST before, just so that they can write those explosive first time stories - it gets a little wearing.

And I start wanting the stories where they hooked up way back in S1 and have been secretly having an affair all this time. Or even better - and this is what VLA tried to do, (and what Boston Legal basically explicitly did in canon) and so few others have - where they confronted their undeniable attraction back in S1, talked it out like people who really are good at communicating when they want to be (with each other, even if with nobody else), maybe even tried it out, and then mutually decided that for everybody's good they should keep it chaste for the time being, because the relationship works perfectly that way, and their lives are complicated enough as it is. And, because they are adults and self-aware, they manage to do it - there are problems, tensions, crises like in any intense relationship, but they deal with it and get stronger as a result and move on.

And maybe they develop sexual relationships with other people that work, and are real, and the main pairing never gets beyond intense friendship. And maybe they eventually reach a turning point where they *can* turn the corner as a couple, and they knowingly shift the relationship into another gear (smoothly or not.) But either way, the sex is always secondary to the important part of the relationship, and always will be.

Of course, in that story you don't get to write many hott sex scenes. Or massive angst dumps, or betrayals of everything else because they can't keep it in their pants, or scenes where they're having an identity crisis one minute and screwing the next, or your standard romance novel outline, or any of the other staples of slash epics. So I understand why they aren't the most common. And I know a lot of people are only interested in the first-time stuff, and not a mature relationship.

But please can I have more grown-up responsible love affairs?

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, this is what I did last night:

Me, kyabetsu, and some other friends got in to the gala opening of the Star Wars exhibit at Geppi's Entertainment Museum, and of course we went in character. :D It was weird to wear that and *still* get called 'normal people'. (By Rebel Legion Organizers, who granted have a somewhat skewed idea of "normal", but, y'know, just because people aren't obsessive Star Wars cosplayers doesn't mean they're not obsessive cosplayers.

Not that I'm really a cosplayer. I am less likely, on my own, to waste the effort on making a weird outfit to wear only to special events when I can put the effort into just dressing weird ALL THE TIME.)

Unfortunately the Anakin costume is all storebought - I was smartchicken enough not to want to wander around in Maryland June weather in tons of makeup and a heavy headdress, unlike some people (kyabetsu in that picture) so I just used one of the costumes they had in storage instead of the one I made. (More pictures here.)

Crossplay is fun. Even if I totally suck at it, even when playing one of the femmier guys in my canon. :D Remembering to walk like you have the family jewels between your legs is not too hard, but otherwise my body language is about as butch as John Sheppard's. And my voice is squeaky. :-P

On the way home tonight (it's been a busy extended weekend, let's leave it at that) I passed a hayfield into which somebody had mowed the word ADAMA . At least, it looked like ADAMA - as it was I almost ran over a deputy sheriff, while pondering why somebody would have mowed ADAMA into their hayfield.

(there was an accident right there, it wasn't just a random sheriff. Unfortunately, I don't think the accident could have been caused by ADAMA because it was in the other lane, and I doubt the southbound people could have seen it at all.

Unless ADAMA has evil mind-control rays.)

ETA: Man, I lose my shakespeare icons and suddenly I'm talking shakespeare in every f_w post. Time to scan some covers!

I think I'm officially a grown-up now. I went to a baseball game and instead of rooting for it to go into extra innings, I rooted for it to end half-an-inning early so I could go home and get on the internet go to sleep.

Also there were fireworks afterward. And now I really really want to see the Singapore sequence of AWE again. :(