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July 25th, 2008
 | 03:16 pm
T-Rex - the star of Dinosaur Comics - speaks out on Star Trek and LIFE!
*g*
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 | 09:39 am - 'Tisn't the Season...yet.
As holiday exchange season nears, once again I have to start making some decisions, viz. just which fests I'm going to sign up for. I want to sign up for everything, but "that way madness lies" (as my friend Shakespeare once wrote). The list has to be shortened, but...how?
First are the things I absolutely can't let go, i.e., ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif) yuletide (I will get my Laurence/Tharkay or die in the attempt!), and the go_exchange (because Good Omens is still a relatively small fandom, and I want to encourage its continued existence).
However, then come the Harry Potter fests, and that's where I'm running into trouble. merry_smutmas had been a sure thing every year, but it's taken early retirement, so that's that (I just learned that another slash/femslash fic exchange has poked its head out of the shadows, presumably hoping to take Smutmas' place, but honestly, I'd be too sad that it wasn't Smutmas to participate *g*). I'll participate in smutty_claus, which is the het version of Smutmas (even though Nobody Reads The Stories Now That It's Moved To JF OMG), snarry_holidays (assuming I'm able to actually sign up, since I'll be at my mom's on sign up day), and I'm thinking seriously about snapelyholidays over on IJ (it's a new art/fic exchange run by ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) odogoddess for Snape-centric slash and het pairings), but...
...that's already five exchanges, and there are more fests on the horizon! Snape/Lupin! (I have a Snupin story in mind, but...will I be able to write it for this exchange?) Snape/Hermione! (Half my sign up list is already written, but I JUST DON'T KNOW!) Harry/Draco! (don't judge me...I liked the nod at the train station in DH )
How do you guys figure out when enough is enough?
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July 24th, 2008
 | 10:53 pm
Growing out of a discussion at con.txt, a new community has been created over on LJ: stilljewish.
The user info for the comm begins: "This community is a space for fannish Jews and Jewish allies to discuss and share our experiences, both online and in real life. This includes things such as discussion of Jewish characters in books, shows and movies; discussion of how Jews are portrayed in the media; discussion of our favorite holidays or foods; discussion about conversion, child raising, weddings, cooking and other life events; discussion about the antisemitism we see in fandom and in the world, etc...."
Check things out here, and if this sounds interesting to you, come join!
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 | 12:49 am - Another one bites the dust...
Okay, I'm sure you're going to see a hundred posts about this over the next few days, but...just go over to svmadelyn's journal and read this *g*
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July 23rd, 2008
 | 10:51 am - From the "Great Business Plans" File
Okay, wow...I'm sure everybody's already seen many, many links on their f'lists over the past few days about the suspect practices of Laura Hale/partly_bouncy/Michaela Ecks in regards to her poorly conceived and executed wiki (if not, see dejana's post or ithiliana's post or especially liviapenn's post).
For a number of reasons, I wasn't going to post directly about this situation, but I just saw this screencap and...among her "Ideas how to plug" her wiki is "Generate wank?" That's her business plan? Really? That, even more than the fact that her entire fannish raison d'être seems to be "making money," is enough to make it clear that this is someone who is not to be trusted.
(link found over here)
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July 20th, 2008
| 02:21 pm - Incompletist, Yays, Race, Race, TOS
A couple things:
1. Like many of you, I absolutely loved parts 1 and 2 of Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog (still available for free viewing until midnight tonight, I think). About part three, well...the less said the better. Completist though I am, I'd almost suggest watching only the first two sections. (...of the spoiler-laden unlocked posts about part three, this one by esorlehcar comes closest to my thoughts).
2. The Dark Knight and Mamma Mia! (which, okay...I snuck into after seeing TDK. My bad!): Yay! Creepy and Dark and Frothy and Silly and Fun. I'll leave it to you to figure out which adjectives go with which movie. I will say - without committing Spoilerism - that Heath Ledger was just as horribly excellent as the Joker as almost every review is saying. There are serious things to say about both movies (especially TDK), but...I'm leaving that to other people this time.
3. In the "Why Doesn't Fandom Operate To Suit My Wishes?" Category, today's entry relates to naominovik's Temeraire series (the latest of which being the just published Victory of Eagles). I loved the most recent book - that's not the problem. No, the problem is that I can't find what seems to me to be the most obvious slash pairing in the series anywhere, and that makes me sad. ( Click here to see my SPOILERY rationale why it's the obvious pairing and my suspicion about why nobody seems to be writing it. Note: the word 'Race' is going to enter into this discussion )
4. And speaking of Race. There was a piece this week in Time magazine about the much-discussed Obama-cover in The New Yorker. In it, author James Poniewozik suggest that "our body politic needs to lighten up" and says "...the knock on the New Yorker cover was like the old critique of Archie Bunker [The protagonist of All in the Family, Norman Lear's Americanized version of the British comedy Till Death Us Do Part] that some idiot bigot somewhere might take it literally and enjoy it." On the surface, the analogy makes a certain amount of sense; I remember a student telling me - more than a decade ago - that his working-class, immigrant Polish family in Queens absolutely loved the show and never got the irony at all. Archie Bunker was their hero for 'telling it like it is."
But that wasn't true for most people - ( and one of the reasons why it wasn't true was because there was an actual context for Archie's words.... )
And finally...
5. Parts one and two of the first draft of the Terms of Service for the Archive of Our Own are up at otw_news. Go over and check them out...and give feedback.
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July 18th, 2008
 | 11:02 pm
In honor of the fact that my multi-fandom recs page is getting regular updates again, I've been making a concerted effort to ensure the links are, you know...working ones. However, given that I have close to a thousand recs at this point, the process is going fairly slowly.
If you want to help speed things up, feel free to check the links for your stories (or the stories of your BFF's) and let me know in a comment or by email (bethbethbeth at gmail) if you see any links that need changing.
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July 17th, 2008
 | 11:10 am - Comic Con: The Hotel Story, Basic Accounts, My winnings!
For the millionth year in a row, I can't go to Comic Con (*cries*), but I can report the news (...which was passed to me by a friend this morning)
So...Comic Con being located in San Diego, there are many hotels, but one of them - only a block away and therefore probably one of the most sought after - is the Manchester Grand Hyatt. The Manchester Grand Hyatt. Owned by Doug Manchester who just "donated $125,000 to help get Proposition 8, a measure that could amend the state constitution to ban same-sex marriage, on the ballot" in California.
A list of all the nearby - and semi-nearby - hotels is here in case anybody's booked into the Grand Hyatt and suddenly feels disinclined to give Manchester their money.
***
In other news, I'm sure most of you have seen this already, but if not, LJ has announced they're planning on reintroducing Basic Accounts and they're soliciting input about how to go about it, including how to deal with the ad situation. I've got to say, while I still can't say I've been totally won back by LJ, the moves they've been making over the past months are very promising.
***
Also? I bid on - and won! - art from cluegirl in livelongnmarry! I'm very excited about this (...although I do feel slightly guilty about nudging Delta out of the way at the last minute. In my defense, I was going to place my last bid hours earlier and give her time for one final bid, but...um...I fell asleep and didn't wake up until the deadline was almost there)!
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July 14th, 2008
 | 10:28 am - Snape Panel Prep...
femmequixotic's post this morning reminded me that I could do some of the prep for my part in our Snape panel (for Terminus) by means of f'list begging. So...any of you who write Snape-centric fic: what sort of work do you have Snape doing? I'm not talking about his work for the Order of the Phoenix (or really his DE activities), but if you could answer any/all of the following questions, I'd be eternally grateful.
1. When you write Hogwarts-era fic, do you focus on his work as a teacher (of Potions or DaDA) or is that generally inconsequential.
2. When you write post-Hogwarts fic, what sorts of jobs do you have him doing? Is he back at Hogwarts? Working as an apothecary? A stripper? A short-order cook in the U.S? Or are you just so busy bringing him back to life that you don't have time to worry about his career path?
3. Does the sort of work you have him doing in your stories vary depending on the pairing you're writing or the genre you're writing or whether you wrote your story before/after Deathly Hallows?
Story links (or at least fic titles) gratefully received. I've read an insanely high percentage of the Snape fic that exists in this or any universe, but just in case....
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July 13th, 2008
| 09:21 am - New Recs!
My Recs Page has been updated with twenty-one [relatively] new recs! (Note: most of the hp_beholder recs are going to show up on the next update). The new recs are as follows:
( Devil Wears Prada: Andy/Miranda (1) )
( Harry Potter: Snape/Harry (12) and one each of Scrimgeour/McGonagall, Snape/Lupin, Harry/Draco, Snape/Hermione, Albus Severus/Scorpius, and Rabastan/Goyle )
( Stargate Atlantis: Sheppard/McKay (1) )
BTW...if any of you Snarry fans are going to Terminus and didn't know there was going to be a meet-up, go here and add your name to the list!
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July 10th, 2008
 | 09:38 pm
atdelphi is doing a prequel/sequel meme and at my request - \o/ - she wrote a little sequel to her Snape/Slughorn story "Friends and Wine".
It's here and it's love!
***
In other news, I think I may be writing some Doctor Who...gen.
*types*
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July 5th, 2008
 | 12:35 pm - DW: The Not-Quite (soon to be Jossed) Story (spoilers for 4.12)
The Very Intricately Plotted Doctor Who story that I was Going to Write This Week but Didn't because Real Life got in my Way (and because my writing mojo continues to be less-jo)
Note: the outline is a thousand words long and includes dialogue. You know...sort of like a story *g*
( Containing Spoilers for everything through last week's ep - i.e., 4.12 The Stolen Earth - but not for tonight's Finale, about which I continue to be spoiler free!! )
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July 3rd, 2008
 | 10:04 am - This date in [my] history:
(Baaaaaa)
2007: Posted "The Choices We Make". Snape/Lupin. R. (For the Darkfic Fest)
2006: Wrote some evil little responses to some of mctabby's Summary Executions here. Had a brief jaw-dropping moment about Senator Ted Steven's stunning lack of knowledge about the way the internet works.
2005: Posted a poll examining typical behaviors of college/university undergraduates.
2004: Posted part two of the never-finished, never archived (...and actually forgotten until now *g*) Snape/Unnamed-but-not-so-mysterious-Male-Character story "A man walked into a bar...".
2003: Wrote a rambling post bemoaning what I saw as a lack of passion for learning in my school's students (bizarrely related to my 2005 post *g*). Also? Guess which one of the Endless I turned out to be?
2002: Nothing! I didn't start get an LJ until August...and even then I thought I'd only be using it to make entry reading easier, i.e., I assumed I'd never be posting. Bwahahahahahaha!
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June 28th, 2008
June 27th, 2008
 | 10:46 am - XKCD's Discovery Channel homage. :)
First, there was the link to this Discovery Channel promo vid (I smiled, I cried) featuring "I Love the Whole World" (which you should really, really watch if you haven't already).
And now? xkcd Loves the Discovery Channel! (Thanks to lunaris1013 for the link)
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June 24th, 2008
| 11:21 am - A minor collision of two of my fannish worlds
A small excerpt from "The BBC and the future of broadcasting" by Stephen Fry
"I may have grown up just as the Golden Age of Radio had passed, but the Golden Age of Television, that grew with me. When I was 7 my parents moved house. Well, we all moved house as a family, I don't mean my parents left me behind, though who would blame them if they had? We owned, in those days, a television that disguised itself as a mahogany drinks cabinet, in the way they did - and they were never called just televisions, by the way, they were television sets. This one's screen was, of course, black and white, it boasted one channel, the BBC (what we'd now call BBC1) and had a knurled volume knob in dark brown Bakelite. The set smelled the way dust always did when it was cooked on Mullard valves as they warmed up. It slid about on castors and had doors that closed with a satisfactory snick as a ball bearing rolled into its slots to secure it. The week before we moved, the BBC started a new drama, starring William Hartnell.( An old man, whose name appeared to be Grandfather or the Doctor... )
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June 19th, 2008
 | 11:50 am - Life on American Mars
Ah, if only this pre-air, leaked to youtube pilot had been about American astronauts on the Red Planet. Sadly, though, it was just a remake of ( the UK's Life on Mars (warning: spoilers within) )
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June 17th, 2008
| 03:19 pm - Tech Question
,Okay, clever people: how do you convert a PDF file to Word without losing any of the formatting (not tables, not figures, not bolding, not nuthin')? Selecting "all," copying to the clipboard, then pasting is the obvious easy answer, but too much is lost when you do that.
Eep?
Thanks for all the advice, guys!
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June 12th, 2008
 | 10:50 am
And this is me...driving off into the sunset with the_star_fish on my way to Con.Txt.
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June 11th, 2008
 | 11:22 am
I'm sure everybody who cares already knows that JKR's 800 word prequel snippet has been posted* (mmichelle typed up the snippet here for those of you with young spirits, but old eyes)
( general rambling about being a member of a sub-fandom - not only about HP, necessarily - which contains Snippet Spoilers, so caveat lector )
*Note: there are also stories online from Tom Stoppard, Doris Lessing, Nick Hornby, Neil Gaiman, and Margaret Atwood among others plus you can enter a competition to create your own little postcard story and get it into the book, the proceeds from which will go to benefit Dyslexia Action and English PEN.
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June 10th, 2008
 | 10:02 am - Kucinich's thoughts on Impeachment, let me show you them
You may have seen this already, but yesterday, Rep. Dennis Kucinich called for the impeachment of President Bush on the floor of Congress. A transcript of the 35 articles of impeachment (note: this is a .pdf file and it's 65 big-print pages long, but it's definitely worth reading.). Going through the articles took Kucinich something like five hours, and it was broadcast live on C-SPAN.
A day later, almost none of the major news outlets have even mentioned this. Almost all of the measly 23 google hits lead to blogs (even the CBS hit isn't to their news page but to one of their in-house bloggers)
( the full list of google hits as of 11:00 a.m. EST is below the cut tag )
Regardless of your feelings about Bush, Kucinich has leveled a pretty damning set of charges. Surely this should be treated as news...and not just by the bloggers of the world.
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June 5th, 2008
 | 09:53 am - As the Online Con Wraps Up...
Okay, so the otw_onlinecon is just about wrapping up now and all the challenges and games are still ongoing...at least for a little while longer! In other words, you should go play! The most recent one is Stories EXTREME (which already has some wonderfully crack-headed entries)
The alternate current challenge is "Bad Manips (and the Stories that Love Them Anyway)." Now...the instructions say this doesn't have to be a bad manip; it can also be a good manip to go along with a cracky premise, so if any of you want to do an illustration for "The Heart of the Sea" (which is probably the first - and only - Snape/Lupin MerPreg in existence), I would accept it with open fins arms. *g*
Back to the otw_onlinecon, though...amongst the still-ongoing challenges is ICONS! (requesting and gifting) (Note: all the action is taking place on the LJ comm at the moment, but there are mirror onlinecon communities over on IJ and JF.
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June 3rd, 2008
| 11:33 pm
Because I love svmadelyn and femmequixotic and don't want them to be sad, I'll refrain from using my end-of-primary-season-appropriate icon until ( I get under the cut tag )
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May 30th, 2008
| 10:16 am - PSA: Updated LJ Policy Guidelines
(thanks to ptyx for the heads up)
I haven't looked at the actual updated LJ policy guidelines document yet, but the (belated, but surprisingly sensible) main points have now been posted over in lj_policy
For those of you who don't want to bother going over there, I've copy/pasted the post below ( the cut tag )
ETA: And the election results are in (see this post for full results) - legomymalfoy is the new user representative on the LJ Advisory Board (note: it really did come down to the wire...as each round saw one candidate leave, their votes were dispersed pretty evenly between the remaining candidates, right up until the end. In the 21st round, when rm was finally eliminated (and congrats to rm for such a great showing), only a couple hundred of those votes went to Jameth, but almost 2000 of them went to LMM)
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 | 12:24 am - Paul Gross Arms! \o/
There I was providing some VERY IMPORTANT info about Paul Gross via friendsfriends, and I thought I should share the love.
So...for anybody who didn't actually know the origin of the phrase "Paul Gross Arms" but was afraid to ask, here's a wonderful example.
Ladies and gentlemen, I present "Voodoo"!
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May 29th, 2008
| 10:59 am
News on the Leaky Cauldron is that JKR has written (for charity) an 800 word "prequel-ette" set three years before Harry was born.
My favorite response to the article (from the mostly squee-filled comments section)?
"The words just poured from her pen? I thought The Lawsuit had sapped her will to ever write again [...]"
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May 28th, 2008
| 11:25 am - The last of the Election posts (aka, WTF?)
I'm certain that anybody who's been following this Advisory Board election fiasco process has heard that along with the mudslinging (from all sides), accusations of election rigging and sockpuppetry (from all sides), trolling and general bad manners, now into the mix has come actual death threats.
The first person to talk about this in public was cambler (one of the candidates, who has since withdrawn from the race), but given that so many of the early responses in his journal - presumably from actual friends/acquaintances - were things like "First!" I originally assumed that this was a joke, since I couldn't imagine such asinine responses to a srs bsns post. This feeling was reinforced by a number of other candidates (e.g., randomposting and qfemale), who said they hadn't been notified. How could such a thing be true if all the candidates hadn't been notified?
And then some other candidates (front-runners in the campaign) made it clear, one way or another, this wasn't a joke...that it was real and that law enforcement was involved. At that point, cambler posted some of the (extremely unhelpful) correspondence between him and LJ - although even then, there's a long thread in the comments section by somebody called theniceprice who calls bullshit in a very longwinded, semi-trollish way (interesting side point: one of cambler's friends alleges this person is a sock of weev. It seems that invoking weev is the insult du jour for almost everybody)
So...is this real? Is it not? Is it an attention-seeking, drama-creating hoax? (Not that there are any attention-seeking, drama-creating jackasses on the internet *rolls eyes*). Whether this turns out to be a real threat or not, I have great sympathy for anybody who feels targeted right now, but I'm also rapidly losing patience with everybody involved in this election, from the LJ admins who appear unable to organize - as the saying goes - a "piss up in a brewery" to most of the candidates to most of the people who have been yapping endlessly about it (like, um...me, I suppose)
And so...I'll stop yapping endlessly now.
Oh wait...one more yap. I'm no particular buddy of legomymalfoy - we aren't even on each other's f'lists - but anybody who thinks that the relatively substantial lead she has at present is due to much more than a lot of people in fandom being annoying diligent about getting out the fandom vote really know very little about the way communities operate. Am I naive enough to think that nobody is using sock accounts to vote? Of course not. Should you be naive enough to think that the only people using socks are people in fandom? The answer, again, is no.
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May 26th, 2008
| 11:55 pm - Yet another LJ Election Update
A few days ago, there was a flurry of discussion in jameth's journal, trying to figure out how they could get more votes. brenden (of ohnotheydidnt which has at least 50,000 members) was brought up. Jameth asked "omg how can we get ontd," qweerdo went to Brenden's friends only journal and begged, and today Brenden came through.
Earlier this evening, he posted a very strong, very cyber-loud endorsement, and since that post - just a few hours ago - Jameth's gone from 17% of the vote to 20.4% of the vote because Brenden has made sure they know that "SOME LAME ASS HARRY POTTER FANDOM DORK IS IN THE LEAD."
(Actually? From the time it took me to type this post, he went from 20.4% of the vote to 20.6%.)
Attention all lame ass fandom dorks: VOTE.
ETA Comment as you like, friend or not, but I'm deleting all images.
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 | 10:50 am - In the interests of accuracy.
Re-reading what I quoted in this post, I've realized, belatedly, that my comprehension skills were seriously flawed. dantc [who was unnamed in the post] wasn't actually saying that fandom was full of people with "...No Morals Conscience or Soul," and for this I apologize.
He was, however, saying that we don't actually care if other people have "No Morals Conscience or Soul" as long as their actions benefit us. I'm not entirely convinced that this is better, but...there you go.
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