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Monday, September 24th, 2012
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4:09 pm - Dear Yuletide Writer Letter, 2012
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Dear Yuletide Writer,
THANK YOU.
You've signed up to write for one of my four favorite fandoms in all of December right now, so thank you. Whatever you write, I'm sure I'll love it.
Some basics
I'm incredibly easy in terms of what I'll read. Please, no positively depicted incest, and I'm not super into crossovers for any of these fandoms; otherwise, go wild.
This is definitely my year of threesomes, so a clarification on what I mean by saying A/B/C would be nice: I am okay with any interpretation of OT3 for characters A, B, and C, from "A, B, and C are all mutually together in a negotiated poly relationship with respectful boundaries" to "A is dating both B and C and B and C hang out a lot and get donuts" to "A and B are dating, C likes to watch" to "mess of late-teenaged emotions and cultural confusion leads A, B, and C to have a lot of sex in multiple combinations but no one's sure what's going on" to "they are all best friends, but sometimes the road is long and a prostitute would cost too much". I put faith in your steady hands!
Further investigations into my fic preferences can probably be carried out on my tumblr, ![[tumblr.com profile]](http://www.tumblr.com/favicon.ico) nextian, particularly my fest fic recs tag. I haven't used this Dreamwidth since 2011 but it's still got all my previous fic recs, book recs, and etc on here. My previous Yuletide letters can be found on my yuletide tag.
I'm in Yulechat occasionally under the handle "Emma". I'll be hippoing, so make sure not to ask me to find you a beta.
And now onto the canons.
( fa la la! fa la! la! la.Collapse )
Thank you again, Yulewriter. I appreciate everything you do. Have a very happy Yuletide!
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| Saturday, November 19th, 2011
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12:36 pm - joanna walks slowly into the city
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The Gardens of the Desert
fic * art
download on mediafire
1. A-Punk, Vampire Weekend
look outside, the raincoats come and say oh
2. The Canals of our City, Beirut
Much more than I once had
3. Salinas
With a gun in my hand and my son at my shoulder
Believe I will run before that boy gets older
4. The Mess Inside, the Mountain Goats
Most of the time I guess I felt alright.
but I wanted you to love me like you used to do.
5. The Only Living Boy In New York, Simon & Garfunkel
Half of the time we're gone but we don't know where and we don't know when.
6. Ending Start, Metric
How endings start:
Endings start with answers.
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| Tuesday, July 19th, 2011
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10:10 am - kids and fun!!!
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| Monday, June 13th, 2011
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11:46 pm - triggers for stalking, i guess
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Today in Zurich, about ten meters from the train station, I got whistled at. At first I thought I was hallucinating it, because it wasn't a straight-up whistle, it was more of a series of clicks and an inhale, but when I looked over at the dude he gave me a grin. I've been looking pretty shitty lately, so my first impulse was to feel simultaneously complimented and freaked out; "oh, I'm glad this looks good on me, if he takes a right up ahead I think I can safely take a left."
As per usual, I started getting mad at my-feminist-self. What business do I have telling people that whistles aren't complimentary when here, being whistled at, I was feeling complimented? This dude is probably just a very nice guy, who wants to express appreciation in a sort of rude way, and here I am, being scared of him because I've convinced myself that his intentions must be bad, etc, etc, etc.
This argument (and its counterarguments) with myself got truncated pretty early, though, because when I took a left, he took a left, and within five minutes it was obvious I was being followed.
He was very persistent; he followed me both up and down a hill, and then into a weird side-street. I lost him when I hid in a real estate office for ten minutes. Welcome to Zurich!
Guess what? This is why being whistled at isn't flattering.
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| Thursday, June 9th, 2011
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4:07 pm
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Hi guys! I'm in the Frankfurt Airport, missing ![[personal profile]](http://s.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) anekdot in an embarrassing fashion! Now I will start crying into my fries in three ... two ... one ...
Moscow was great, though not as absurdly, overwroughtly gorgeous as St. Petersburg. Seriously though, St. Petersburg. Tone it down. No one needs EVERY street to be painted a myriad of ill-matching but shockingly attractive colors over a nineteenth-century facade. Surely EVERY subway station does not have to be arched. Perhaps not EVERY Soviet high-rise has to ... okay ... no ... those were just hideous. But they were on stilts! And framed beautifully against the Gulf of Finland. HONESTLY.
Pretty much the only thing the Complete History of Soviet Russia As Told Through The Eyes of a Tetris Worker song got right, by the way, is that there is in fact a McDonald's in Red Square -- maybe there's a Levi's too, I did not in fact observe it. There's also a Starbucks and, uh, other American fast food restaurants whose names I did not observe (I think, like, Wendy's and TGIF?) and, oh, boy, a whole lot of other artifacts of cultural imperialism. That part is not great. You know what totally is great, the Kremlin, omg. I guess I didn't really process that it was a medieval fortcity before it was The Fucking Kremlin? Also, the Hermitage. After we did finally go to the Hermitage on the last day of my visit we went back to Sares' host mom's apartment and watched Anastasia (in Russian) and um, it is so, so much funnier when you've been to St. Petersburg. So they're ... dancing in Isaakievsky ploshad ... but then Dmitri is roof-surfing from the Hermitage ... and also you can't see St. Isaac's even though it is like, three times the size of anything else in the city. Also, the Hermitage is totally uninhabited and there's no pesky art museum or series of provisional governments or anything. And Nevsky prospekt has apparently already been through the Siege?
I'm reading Anna Karenina, on a related note. I'm five hundred pages into it. I -- um -- okay, I'm going to leave my poorly-educated literary opinions on it for another post. But I invite yours in comments! I obviously do not care about spoilers.
I am reading/watching other things I'm humiliatingly willing to talk about, though. I should probably follow the skygiants method and leave it to one effusion of text per post, so, the one that's been cutting my heart out and leaving it for the wolves: MEGAN. WHALEN. TURNER. I'd protest that no one told me about the Queen of Attolia series, but actually, everyone, starting with my father in middle school and everyone else I have ever met, has told me about the Queen of Attolia series. And I didn't listen! Because I'm a fool of the highest order!!
( brief spoilers, but in an all-caps, charming wayCollapse )
My love for these books is uncritical and total. It has been so long since I've loved a book this way that I basically forgot it was possible*; the first time I read the Thief, in actual fact, I hated it, because I felt betrayed by the unreliable narrator and also, I was an asshole at thirteen, I think? But I could not possibly love it more now, except, if it was the Queen of Attolia. By that I mean both the book, and the character.
Why read the Attolia series? Because the hero gets PTSD and then the book devotes a good quarter of its page length dealing with it. ( milder romantic-plot spoilersCollapse ) Because the politics are painfully realistic (if you are reading Captive Prince? This is the actual, smart het equivalent). Because while being a story about royalty and thrones it isn't about how kings are the best solution and everything is awesome. Because it's about the Byzantine conquest. Because every character is allowed to be deeply fucked up without it proving that they're horrible people.
I guess if I had a critique it might be that the hero of the books is yet another proof that what I really ought to be doing is reading Dorothy Dunnett; by the end of A Conspiracy Of Thrones, I think Turner may be succumbing a bit to "he is good at everything! everyone good loves him! everyone bad wishes they were him!" syndrome. But the truth is I don't begrudge her this, because by the fourth book I am so in love with him myself.
* I have the vague memory that I've said this very recently about another book I read, recently. Possibly Pamela Dean. If I did, I was lying, without even knowing it.
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| Friday, June 3rd, 2011
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7:01 pm - love is a something something bird
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So as I've entirely failed to mention, I'm in St. Petersburg. That's St. Petersburg, Russia, not St. Petersburg, Florida, of course; the Venice of the North, home to ten thousand sushi restaurants. Seriously. I don't know what I was expecting out of St. Petersburg cuisine, but I was definitely not expecting the total sushi domination. It's good sushi, too. The fish is fresh, the rice is right. Sometimes they put cream cheese ("Philadelphia") in it but anekdot tells me that's an abomination.
( also we have been watching archer but that's a post for another dayCollapse )
We're going to Moscow on Monday, so perhaps more updates then. Then I'm ambling around Western Europe from June 9th to the 20th -- anyone want to meet up?
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| Monday, May 2nd, 2011
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9:00 am - you really ought to follow my tumblr if you want timely updates on politics
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So it was that the student arose in the night with a great foreboding on her, and went into the kitchen, and saw there the trails of the ants.
Then it was that she wept, and swore, and would take no comfort but in oaths, in "Fuck you" and "fuck your little ant faces" and "I will fucking destroy you" and "oh fuck not the pantry," and all her railing did not wake her suitemate. When she calmed, she went to the cabinet in pursuit of the Cinnamon, in order to make trails that ants might not cross. But the cinnamon was not to be found. Then recollected she that they had spent it all the night before in making barriers in her suitemate's room. She called out for the ant poison, and searched the closet for it both high and low, but that too was in vain, for the ant poison was in the suitemate's room as well, because her suitemate had forgotten that ants are as men, and proliferate unseemly.
The student rose and went to the pantry, and searched her arcane knowledge of herbs, and made many passes, and produced the nutmeg. But her heart misgave her. For though one sniff of nutmeg is a delight, many sniffs of nutmeg can kill small animals, and give great headaches to the great ones besides. And so at first she was sparing, and made fair lines, and the ants could not cross them, and she watched this in delight. But when it came time to ward her room her sense deserted her, and she uncapped the spice jar and poured out half an inch of nutmeg in a pile across the door. Even were this sugar the ants could not climb it, so high and mountainous it was, and she went to bed with a feeling of satisfaction.
She awoke with a great headache, as though the dwarves of Moria had been hammering on her head, but on the other hand, she could not smell the freshly cut grass from out her window, which had woken her every morning with its pungent misery, and so she was like, this is basically a win.
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| Saturday, April 23rd, 2011
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11:20 pm
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This is DVD commentary for "and the dreams grow teeth."
and the dreams grow teeth, Fullmetal Alchemist (manga/Brotherhood), ~1200 words. AU, spoilers through episode 49/chapter 89. Warnings contain spoilers, highlight to read: possession, sexual assault, threat of suicide.
Took me a while to figure out how to warn for this. I keep wanting to be coy in my warnings, and that isn't fair to anyone. Neither is appropriating a perfectly lovely Josh Ritter song for this title. But the song was called "Long Shadows", so ... inevitable.
( and the beasts come out, cast their long shadows across the parkCollapse )
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| Thursday, April 21st, 2011
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12:18 am - dvd commentary meme
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Kinda in the mood!
Drop me one of my fics in a comment and I'll write DVD commentary for it.
In other news, I am on a stranger's computer. This is not quite the case -- she's in my class, she's awesome, and she's retired this one in favor of a newer, hotter model -- but still, her user name is her real name, and every time I look up at the clock, I see her name, and suffer a brief existential crisis.
Also she left me logged into Facebook, Gmail, and, horrifyingly, Amazon. I say horrifyingly because I clicked on rachelmanija's review of a m/m romance before I made this connection. Then instead of deleting it from my viewing history, I logged out. She is definitely going to see this. She is definitely going to judge me. I am definitely going to stab myself in the face.
(My computer is in the lab because it cannot accurately modulate its own battery use, and its sleep sensor is broken. It's currently named Tony, but when I get it back I'm renaming that sucker Jade. And then I am installing Snow Leopard and playing Portal until my fingers fall off.)
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| Monday, April 18th, 2011
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6:19 pm - i know that they can hear me yell
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CHAG SAMEACH, EVERYBODY.
In a weird way, this is as much my thesis as my actual thesis, considering I've been working on some form of this story for four years, and this iteration since August. So, so many thanks to aria for beta and for telling me to get over myself and post it already.
This is eleven thousand words long (I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHO I AM ANYMORE); it's eyai fic (primer is here, masterlist is here). Contains abuse of power, governmental collapse, journalistic excellence, murder, and no hansom cabs at all.
ETA: Oh, god, I'm actually sticking an ETA on this because it's freaking me out so much. YOU GUYS, I APOLOGIZE SO, SO MUCH FOR ONE PARTICULAR PLOT POINT IN THIS. SO MUCH. I WOULD CLAIM IT WASN'T MY IDEA, BUT THAT WOULD ONLY BE ONE TINY, TINY FRACTION OF THE TRUTH.
girl in the war
( We aren't in the business of sitting around and making small talk, we're in the business of making the news.Collapse )
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| Friday, April 15th, 2011
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1:52 am - x-posted from tumblr
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Has anyone ever gotten a thesis printed?
I don’t want to risk the school printing office — every other history major will be in there and there are at least twenty of us, plus American Studies. On the other hand, FedEx/Kinko’s is being remarkably cagey about how much time it takes to get something bound, and whether or not I can get it tape bound at all. One would think that asking for three copies of an eighty-page book would just be like, great, it’ll take us ten minutes to print each, and then five minutes to bind them (BECAUSE YOU ARE LITERALLY SLAPPING DOWN SOME GLUE AND A BIT OF TAPE), come back in an hour! Instead it’s all TWO HOURS. Is that just because of the printing or does the binding take that long?? And is it safer to email ahead or to bring in the printed copies? And what if the computer lab runs out of toner?
This is the most ridiculous response, but I just really wish I was John in Pru’s Bell Curve right now, because I am all grown up and getting my first Bachelor’s, and I don’t have anyone to keep me from getting paper cuts on all my fingers. I have been nursing this fantasy for some months and tonight I'm tired enough to admit it. (I am not actually tired. I am terrified.)
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| Wednesday, April 13th, 2011
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2:50 pm - oh the minarets of constantinople
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Yes, it's that time again, that time when I have to be in the computer lab scanning things anyway and decide to abuse my privileges to put up the nonsense I draw on my class notes!
( class doodles!Collapse )
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| Monday, April 11th, 2011
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9:25 am - so tell me now where was my fault
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You know, I know that I used to be an innocent, charming young girl; fluttery white skirts, singing with birds, loving life's little pleasures. I just don't remember it. It's been a long slow nervous breakdown into my current state of curmudgeonly distaste for everything, but I didn't really realize how bad it had gotten until yesterday I was complaining to myself, "It's bad enough to be woken with the smell of freshly-cut grass, but do I actually have to touch all these cookies fresh out of the oven?!"
It's mostly thesis. I'm responding to everything with a beautiful irrationality. I woke up this morning laughing at myself for the fact that I seem to be literally writing all the imagination out of me, because the dream I'd just had consisted of a conversation about contexts in which it is insulting to be asked "Are you Jewish?" Hilariously boring! It took me a good ten more minutes to remember that that conversation had taken place in space in the aftermath of the first battle of the wars against the space whales, which I had sat out due to my secret Magical Girl heritage as the princess of, I am not kidding, Yale, interfering with the space drugs we were supposed to take to make us fight.
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| Friday, April 8th, 2011
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11:59 pm - my, my slow descent
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I would apologize for doing this at midnight but actually I think we are now all officially on enough different time zones to justify any posting hour.
EYAI DRABBLES GO
All settings or none! All characters or none! Prompt, fic, discuss, do interpretive dance!!
(And for those who selected "what in the name of God": here's a writeup I did on Tumblr for pseudo_tsuga of what exactly I'm talking about.)
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| Tuesday, April 5th, 2011
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7:48 pm - also i need to be told i cannot title this "black and white and red all over"
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| Wednesday, March 30th, 2011
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12:20 pm - can anybody find me
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( homestuck1000: it still exists. It hasn't stopped existing or anything.)
In my continuing Escape From Thesis Island, I'm reading Mark Twain's autobiography. I can neither recall if I've mentioned this before, nor care to go back and find out. I am constantly amused by the fact that when I'm looking up a quote from it -- usually to copy-paste into Facebook so I don't have to type it up myself -- I encounter blog post after blog post about the exact same section I would like to discuss. Today it's "the Morris incident," and you can read a great little summary of it here. Essentially, Roosevelt's secretary, Barnes, literally had a woman thrown out of the White House and dragged through the streets to the police station, where he then cheerfully had her charged with insanity.
( blogging and teddy rooseveltCollapse )
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| Sunday, March 27th, 2011
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10:44 pm - with your feet in the air and your head on the ground
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I would like to reproduce what I found in my entry box just now:
"gusy i am unbelievably drunk right now
Like, drunker than I have been in a very"
I also have a sticky note reading "you didn't hit on anyone in appropriate but you did calll eli", Eli being my younger brother.
It appears that I had a good weekend!
Anyway, three things:
1. Bidding on help_japan ends on the 31st. My offers are still fic and in-person-delivery baked goods. I assure you, those baked goods are delicious.
2. homestuck1000, in the vein of whoniverse1000; the goal is 1000 fanworks for 1000 pairings. Of course immediately after posting this like a bajillion places I noticed disfluencies and html issues in the fic I started off with, and had to delete the comment and fix all the links, but, DETAILS.
3. While I believe that everyone to whom it will be relevant has already seen this, I finished my Sweeney Todd/Homestuck fusion and gave it a real title: swing that razor high. Perhaps, one day, I will also finish my Lion in Winter fusion. Perhaps one day I will even finish my thesis! Oh, these jokes I tell myself, to warm my soul.
Oh! Four things, actually, because, 4. I saw Sucker Punch. I have many, many questions for Zack Snyder. They begin with "seriously, she pictures that in her own subconscious?" and end with "WHY MUST YOU MAKE ME ENJOY YOUR MOVIES?"
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| Thursday, March 24th, 2011
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12:35 pm - the blood of the martyrs will water the meadows of france
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Here are the answers to all your questions. First, the list:
1. Kanaya Maryam
2. Laurent
3. Jim Kirk
4. Toph
5. Karkat Vantas
6. Greedling. ... What??
7. Rose Lalonde
8. Sokka
9. Fitzwilliam Darcy
10. Elizabeth Bennet
11. Roy Mustang
12. Riza Hawkeye
13. Terezi Pyrope
14. Damen
15. Olivier Armstrong
( to the inquiries!Collapse )
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| Wednesday, March 23rd, 2011
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1:04 am - sure, why not
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1. Make a list of fifteen characters first, and keep it to yourself for the moment.
2. Ask your flist to post questions in the comments. For example: 'One, nine and fifteen are chosen by a prophecy to save the world from four. Do they succeed?', 'Under what circumstances might five and fourteen fall in love?', 'Which character on the list would you most want on your side in a zombie invasion?'
3. After your flist has asked enough questions, round them up and answer them using the fifteen characters you selected beforehand, then post them.
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| Thursday, March 17th, 2011
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12:27 pm - young women they run like hares upon the mountain
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Last night I stayed up until four-thirty to finish the Secret Country Trilogy, by Pamela Dean. I will not lie: I read it because of the Cassie Claire thing. I've been meaning to pick it up if I'm ever in the right library, and yesterday, Pasadena, so there you go. A lot more passages than just the two that Avocado analyzed felt deeply familiar to me, which I imagine is how everyone else felt in reverse -- though -- if you haven't read these books, trust me, it is absurdly ironic that she chose to steal these, and actually, I could completely understand making a game out of taking lines from them. Dean quotes Shakespeare, Tennyson, Carroll, Thomas, Eliot, and god knows who else over the course of the book quite indiscriminately, if for very solid plot reasons. The one quote I know is from a copyrighted source -- Sayers, "Lay on thy whips," etc -- was entirely unmarked and jammed together with a huge amount of Shakespeare. It's possible she attributed everything in a lengthy notes section, but my ebook copy didn't contain it. What Cassie Claire did was still incontrovertible plagiarism, but hey! at least it's apropos.
The first two books -- The Secret Country, The Hidden Land -- were perfect. I really don't even know how to articulate the feeling of total warmth I have for these books, except for that it's exactly what good fantasy YA ought to be. The story of these books is tropaic enough to be its own fairytale: A number of children (three to five) invent a fantasy land or set of magical rules, and then suddenly find themselves inside it. It's a testament to Dean's skill that the Secret Country always feels both like a real place with a rich and terrifying political history, and like something invented by five children in the eighties, with characters named Justin, Claudia, and Melanie. And the Dubious Hills, and Fence's Country, which isn't named after the character called Fence. And a secret land guarded by a unicorn and a dragon.
The third (Whim of the Dragon) was still wonderful, but less perfect. ( spoilers for all three booksCollapse )
My favorite part of all three books, which is also something I remembered from Tam Lin, is her perfect perfect use of Archaic Fantasy Language. It's not intrusive, it's not unreadable, it's not historically accurate Shakespearean English, but it does all the things that it's meant to do -- it is more formal, more precise, more given to long strings of puns on the word "sensible," more upsetting when two dudes who are best friends challenge each other to the death in it. If I could do one thing that Pamela Dean does, it'd be this.
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