Hi guys! I'm in the Frankfurt Airport, missing 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 way )

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 spoilers )

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.

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.

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 park )

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. )

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! )

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.)

(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 roosevelt )

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! )