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Tuesday, May 29th, 2012
kattahj
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6:44a
little post of random
I haven't read the Buffyverse comics and usually pay little attention to them, but when I saw that one was called "Women of a Certain Age", I went to see the review, because it occurred to me that it may involve some older women being non-evil and surviving it, which would mark an important day in the Whedon calendar.
Judging by the review, LOL no.
Oh well.
***
In other news, I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel with the Supernatural/Joan of Arcadia crossover (I know! After three years, who'd have thought?) which unfortunately means that I'm doing all sorts of things instead of just finishing that damned thing. Up to and including starting other fanfic projects that involve research questions such as "How did circuses operate during WWII, and would performers be drafted?" not to mention "What's a good modernist poem from the first half of the 20th century, with lots of imagery and not much in the way of grammatic structure, and why on earth didn't we learn any other poetry than Swedish in school?"
I don't suppose anyone knows the answers to those?
This entry was originally posted at http://katta.dreamwidth.org/577448.html and has  comments there.
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robinmckinleys
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12:23a
Mondays are extreme enough, hot is too much
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/RobinMckinleysBlog/~3/Y0WLSFMxomo/ http://robinmckinleysblog.com/?p=9597
Mondays are always long and this one has been longer than most and I have Weetabix Brain.* In the first place it is too hot. Peter, who feels the heat worse than he used to, was saying that he wasn’t getting out enough; that watering the wilting garden in the late afternoon, when the blaze is beginning to dim, was about as much as he could deal with. I said, it’s really nice at dawn. It does cool off some overnight** so when the sun is first coming up in the morning, and before it starts beating us up again, the world is pretty and cool(ish) and quiet and empty.*** You should try going out then. (Peter is an early riser.) I’ve taken hellhounds out for a quick sprint the last two dawns. I hope you go to bed again after, said Peter. Hrrmph, I said. I don’t go to bed again. I go to bed.†
Monday is also the day I have the dogminder to provide their afternoon hurtle, chiefly to keep me on her active customers list so I can use her for stuff like the Met Live Saturdays—but it is pleasant not to have to race out with hellhounds the minute I get home from my voice lesson, and to have time for a sit-down and a cup of tea before I go off again to ring bells at Colin’s tower. Today I gave hellhounds extra morning time, told Mavis to make it a half-length amble this febrile afternoon, and took them out once more, although I would not call it racing, when I got home after Nadia. Niall wasn’t going tonight†† so if I went ringing I had to drive myself, and the ME and I did have a little conversation about this but rather mysteriously the heat doesn’t seem to aggravate it the way it aggravates the rest of me. And Wolfgang knows the way to all three of Colin’s towers. So we went.†††
My voice lesson wasn’t nearly as terrible as it should have been. Singing in the heat is strange. Some of it is just the singing version of ‘what do you mean work’ but some of it is unique to the physiology of throats and small vibrating pieces of flesh. I crack more in the heat and Nadia said severely, that’s dehydration. I said, it is? This sensitive-flower thing would be easier to take seriously if I had a voice worth cosseting, but I guess it’s like buying the best shoes for running even if you’re never going to be better than 1,000,000,000th in the London/New York marathon, it’s still your body. So I guess I’m going to have to start doing that My Life, My Water Bottle that the upmarket spa people have turned into a fashion statement. Sigh. I don’t like water.‡ Also, I have Post Menopausal Woman Bladder.‡‡ The loo at Nadia’s is immediately outside the music room door, but this isn’t going to help me with the Muddles’ loo-free rehearsal church.
Nadia always asks how it’s going with Oisin—and while I’ve told her that I’ve engaged the stubbornness element and am therefore now singing on Fridays pretty regularly, she’s kind enough not to assume. Today we were discussing how I was going to keep myself amused while she’s on maternity leave‡‡‡ and I was explaining that while even a dork-level singer ought to be able to cope with some poor patient pianist supporting them on their effortful way, what interested me was the music-with aspect, the fact that someone else was performing music with you, and that therefore my favourite songs tended to be the ones when the ‘accompanist’ is doing something else entirely—when I can sing them, that is. Nadia said immediately, oh, you should sing Peter Warlock. The words were already out of her mouth. Then she looked a little anxious and said that most of his songs were technically fairly demanding. But it’s too late. I’d love to sing some Warlock. So she’s going to have a look at her [complete song collection] of Warlock at home and see if anything strikes her as possible. And not too gruesome for the responsible voice teacher.
So maybe there’s an explanation in there somewhere why the ringing tonight was . . . ahem . . . less than consummate generally. Maybe it was just the shock of Glaciation being t shirt temperature even for me.
* * *
* From Wiki on Weetabix: ‘Dry Weetabix is so absorbent that it is extremely difficult to eat without liquid. Fund-raisers such as the Boy Scouts hold events based on this, such as returning double the entry fee for those who can eat two dry Weetabix.’ Thoughts produced from a Weetabix brain tend to be dry, hard and crumbly also.
** Which I realise puts us way ahead of you sufferers in places like the Midwest and Texas.
*** I love empty. My favourite parts of a lot of post-apocalypse and dystopian novels, especially because I’m not a big post-apocalypse and dystopian novel person, are the beginnings, when our hero or heroine or small beleaguered band of survivors are wandering through huge deserted cityscapes. Before the zombies or the mutant bug things or whatever start eating them.
† Dawn does come very early this time of year. Very.
†† Or rather he was going elsewhere. He is increasingly sucked up into handbell peal ringing. Feh.
††† And failed to run over the duck roosting in the middle of the road. Who objected to being moved on. :_)#{*%$£”!!!!!
‡ Except in tea.
‡‡ Before that I had Menopausal Woman Bladder and before that I had Peri Menopausal Woman Bladder. Before that I could drink ten giant mugfuls of tea a day without considering the consequences. But it’s not all bad. I do seriously like not blowing up like a water balloon every month and killing people because I can’t help myself. If I’m going to kill someone, I want to do it deliberately.
‡‡‡ I am, of course, convinced that by the end of the first Nadialess fortnight I’ll have lost my top end and be squeaking like a rusty wheel. I can test this hypothesis the next fortnight since she is not teaching during the four-day Jubilee riot next week. I plan to stay indoors as much as possible and to allow no red, white or blue in my vicinity. I will put decals on [red] Wolfgang, and Darkness and Chaos will have to wear leather for a few days while their bunting-coloured harnesses are disallowed. So not a monarchist.
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(4 comments | comment on this) Monday, May 28th, 2012
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steepholm
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9:52p
John 13.10 and the Service Industries
John is my least favourite Gospel (Jesus comes across too much like a politician, never answering a straight question), but 13:10 is both practical and true: "Jesus saith to him, He that is washed needeth not save to wash his feet, but is clean every whit."
The recent very hot weather, combined with the necessity of marking, have made me more sedentary than usual, so this morning I decided to walk the 8-mile round trip to work. As I mentioned last year, this can be a very pleasant experience if you do it right, and so it was today, but there's no denying that by the time I got back I was pretty hot and bothered. Until, that is, I kicked off my sandals and lowered my plates into a bowl of cold water. Instant, all-over refreshment!
Yes, Jesus was definitely on to something with the foot-washing idea. Actually, the context of the story suggests that having a servant wash one's feet was the kind of thing one might expect to happen at a formal dinner in first-century Judea, and I think it's a custom cafes and restaurants might very usefully revive, at least in summer. What could be blissier than to kick of one's sandals and sit sipping a citron pressé while a willing attendant coolly laves one's every toe? I've never bought a shoe shine or a pedicure, but I would definitely pay a premium for that service.
Incidentally, C. S. Lewis seems to have been struck by this verse too. At any rate, he appears to riff on it in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe:
Lucy looked and saw that Aslan had just breathed on the feet of the stone giant.
"It's all right!" shouted Aslan joyously. "Once the feet are put right, all the rest of him will follow."
Is it a stretch to see that as a Gospel allusion?
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rachelmanija
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12:25p
YA fantasy with ordinary protagonists
Can you all name me some comparatively recent (ie, less than 20 years old) YA urban fantasy (ie, not set in a fantasy world or post-apocalyptic world) in which the protagonist does NOT have any magical powers or attributes or devices (ie, no magic rings), does not develop any later, and is not a professional demon-hunter or anything like that?
I'm thinking of books like A Wrinkle in Time (but more modern) or Neverwhere (but for teenagers.) Also, ideally, more along the lines of Charles de Lint than "my vampire boyfriend."
The only ones I can think of offhand are Holly Black's Valiant: A Modern Faerie Tale , Flora Segunda: Being the Magickal Mishaps of a Girl of Spirit, Her Glass-Gazing Sidekick, Two Ominous Butlers (One Blue), a House with Eleven Thousand Rooms, and a Red Dog (Magic Carpet Books) , Fire and Hemlock (borderline - Polly does have a power, of sorts; back in print!), and some of Charles de Lint's novels.
It's a little hard to write stories like that and not have the action be entirely driven by the magical characters, leaving the protagonist drifting passively in their wake. The characters with abilities are inherently going to be far more powerful. Tolkien used this type of plot very well, but even so, Frodo and Bilbo had the One Ring. I'm thinking of books in which someone like Sam is the protagonist.
Crossposted to http://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/1041557.html. Comment here or there.
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bookelfe
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1:36p
The back cover of Marie Lu's Legend informed me that the author "was first inspired to write Legend while watching Les Miserables one afternoon, and wondered how the relationship between a famous criminal vs. a prodigious detective might translate into a more modern story."
It is not Marie Lu's fault that this somehow explicitly led me to expect a genderswapped steampunk Javert/Valjean fanfic about an obsessive police officer with a black-and-white morality and the escaped prisoner she pursues over the course of three or four decades . . . but apparently somehow this is something that my soul desperately craves, because I was unfairly disappointed not to get it.
Not that Legend is not good! Legend is a perfectly enjoyable dystopian YA novel about two SUPER TEEN PRODIGIES, one who is accelerating within the system (but only because she doesn't know all the terrible things the system does) and one who works outside the system (and is accused of terrible crimes, but has only ever committed the non-murderous ones), and how she's sent to bring him in because she thinks he killed her brother, and it's all very dramatic and interestingly world-built and involves government plague conspiracies and that's fine, I will totally be willing to read the sequel and see where it goes! I did wish that there was more of a clash of legitimately opposed ideologies, as opposed to the heroine realizing that everything she believes in is wrong. ( Spoilers. )
Anyway, it all worked out, because now that I've realized the tragic scarcity of YA novels with the EPIC MELODRAMA of Javert/Valjean slash fiction at their heart, I have simply decided that someday I am going to have to write my own, except with lesbians. (Working title: YOU KNOW NOTHING OF JAVERTINA.) You're welcome, world!
This also however begs the question of which OTHER famous musical nemeses should be updated into steampunk dystopian YA novels. I have provided some options for you, so please feel free to vote for your favorite! I will almost certainly not write it for you but YOU NEVER KNOW.
The depressing secret of my life is that I would one hundred percent read all of these. (But especially Velma/Robot Roxie.)
PLEASE ALSO SUGGEST YOUR OWN.
This entry is cross-posted at Livejournal from http://skygiants.dreamwidth.org/287104.html. Please feel free to comment here or there! There are currently  comments on Dreamwidth.
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rionaleonhart
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5:47p
There's Far Too Much Incest In Oedipus Rex.
I'd forgotten what a terrible craving I get for the Red Dead Redemption world after playing in it for a while. Apparently this craving is not much reduced when that world is full of zombies. IT'S SO PRETTY. (The final treasure map location on Undead Nightmare, in particular, is breathtakingly beautiful. I was becoming quite frustrated, endlessly sliding down the mountainside in my efforts to reach it, and then I managed and got that fantastic view of the whole area and forgave the game designers everything.)
New favourite John Marston quote: I was trying to lasso Famine, one of the horses of the apocalypse, and failing miserably. Marston, evidently as frustrated as I was, shouted, 'Stupid nature!'
I have now completed Undead Nightmare! It is a cracking expansion pack. Frustrating at times (perhaps there are people who can comfortably pull off a headshot without the use of Dead Eye; I am not one of those people), and not as varied as Red Dead Redemption itself, but great fun. I love that it never quite takes itself seriously. I love being able to hear John Marston's fantastically sexy voice again. I love that I was able to ride a unicorn across the Mexican wilderness, leaving a rainbow trail behind me and singing 'Always' by Erasure.
I think Red Dead Redemption: Undead Nightmare is ripe for a ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif?v=92.1) respectawoman crossover, actually. The ladies originated from a zombie game; ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.1) zarla already came up with a Western AU for them; what could be more logical than throwing them into a Western zombie apocalypse game? Most of their infected forms have Undead Nightmare counterparts, too: Smoker would be a Retcher, Hunter a Bolter, Charger a Bruiser. SOMEBODY WRITE THIS.
(I've been wondering which horses they would ride. Smoker rides Pestilence; that's easy enough. Hunter, who has a bit of an aggressive streak, could ride War. Bit torn on Jockey: my first thought was Death, because she has such a strange relationship with the concept of death, but then it occurred to me that if there's a butterfly-surrounded rainbow-trailing unicorn to be had, you can bet that Jockey will ride it cheerfully through a horde of zombies. No idea about Charger, though.)
In other news, it's time for Strange Things I Have Discovered In My Notebook Theatre:
CHORUS
We are but students, with empty bellies
And so we call upon the God of Cakes,
Dionysus, probably, as he is god
of many interesting things.
Surely the gods will not abandon us in our hour of need
(for cakes).
MESSENGER
I have such a wonder to relate!
An eagle swept down from the sky,
right in front of my eyes, swift as a ship
(a swift ship, obviously), and at my feet
it dropped some Jaffa Cakes - not one packet,
but two, enough for every student here
unless I have miscounted.
CREON
Pah! Jaffa Cakes are not real cakes!
MESSENGER:
And who are we to question cakes from heaven?
CREON
The cake is a lie, my city!
You must eat only the cakes of Thebes!
(And so on.)
I miss studying Greek tragedy. Also, I'm really confused. (I think - I think - that my plan was to sneakily leave this work of art and a couple of packets of Jaffa Cakes on a desk before a Tragedy seminar, but sadly (tragically, in fact) I never carried it out.)
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hp_britglish
[ mollywheezy ]
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11:28a
Phone Booths and Phone Cards
Hi! I am writing a story set around the time of Deathly Hallows, so 1997-8. Were "phone booths" readily available and what would they have been called? Also, how would you pay to use one? Did they accept "phone cards" a pre-paid card from a telephone company that could only be used to make calls?
Thank you very much for the help! :)
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sartorias
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6:45a
61
The other day I was talking to the neighbor across the street about his electric car, specifically the way it handles, and he made a slighting comment about the way the old people drive here, then he caught himself and blushed and mumbled, "I don't mean--" then he realized he'd really stepped in it, and I had to laugh as I told him it was okay, that old people always think someone else is meant, because we aren't old inside.
But I am! 61 is not middle aged, it's old. But my mental me is still pretty much like the me in the icon, at the left, in my mid-twenties.
That aside, I am hoping that anyone who has read this far and might have an extra minute would help me celebrate by linking a beautiful image, or a poem, or song, or sharing anything that gives you joy, because it will give me joy, too. (I do this every year, and all year long, whenever I am a bit blue, I come back to this day and revisit the comments.)
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marthawells
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8:10a
Question, Links, and Giveaway
It's been a very lazy weekend, but I really need to get back to work today.
Question from Twitter from @mgarcialogan:
I really enjoyed City of Bones, do you plan to ever turn that into a series? Or write a sequel?
At this point, I don't think so. I did have a sequel planned in 1996 but moved to a new publisher and it never got written. (City of Bones was my second novel, and it came out in 1995 from Tor. It's been out of print probably since the late 90s, until I reprinted it myself in ebook in 2007.)
Couple of reviews:
Black Gate: Charlene Brusso Reviews The Cloud Roads
Janicu's Book Blog: The Cloud Roads by Martha Wells
A neat link:
Neil DeGrasse Tyson: The Leonard Lopate Show: Survival Kit: If you were stranded on a desert island, what ten things do you want with you? This is an audio file.
Giveaway:
For the people who are at home today, or just on the internet today: comment on this post to enter a drawing for a signed copy of The Serpent Sea, the sequel to The Cloud Roads. I'll give away at least three copies, depending on the number of entries, and you have until tomorrow at about this time to enter. Entrants from outside the US are fine.
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(9 comments | comment on this) Sunday, May 27th, 2012
richardherring
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2:00a
Sunday 27th May 2012
http://www.richardherring.com/warmingup/?id=3500 I could have done with a sleep in this morning, but the hotel curtains were thin and I was woken by first light at 4.45am. The church bells in Bungay were nearby, sounding out the time ever 15 minutes. So I know that I managed to get to sleep again some time between 5.30 and 5.45, but was awake again by 7. I hoped I'd stay awake at the party.
Although me and the birthday girl have been quite competitive foes over the last few weeks - seeing who could win medals and so on - I decided to put our feud on hold as it was her birthday.
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(comment on this) Saturday, May 26th, 2012
richardherring
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2:00a
Saturday 26th May 2012
http://www.richardherring.com/warmingup/?id=3499 Breakfast in Bridlington with Nicholas Parsons (and others - we weren't sharing a room and that wasn't what I had to do to land the JAM gig). I googled Somersetshire to prove that I was right. Not that I am one to hold on to a bone and never let it go (again, that was not how I got the JAM gig).
Then I got a taxi to the station - a small market had been set up in the entrance hall, with people selling bric-a-brac and at least three men competing to sell model railway engines and accoutrements.
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(comment on this) Monday, May 28th, 2012
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