a++ would smuggle into space again

First things first: check out help_japan and help_japan if you prefer the fannish auction method of donation! I'm offering fic and, because I'm sad I can't offer a song this time, in-person baked goods to anyone living between San Diego and Santa Barbara.

Bonus for people on my journal: If you're a Bay Area person, and you don't mind waiting until summer (which is when I get home), go ahead and bid. I'll deliver up to Petaluma, out to Stockton, and down to San Jose.

... No one is going to bid on this, are they.

So on the recommendation of vega_ofthe_lyre I read all of Crown Duel today while out on a four-hour walk. (When I started, it was so hazy you could not see the mountains which are approximately four miles from my house. I always think I'm making up these conditions, and then they happen again.) I liked it. I think if I'd read it in seventh grade I would have loved it so much that I would even now still be trying to get everyone else I've ever met to read it, and occasionally peppering my conversation with references to the romance of the ~ekirth ring~. Now, unfortunately, my thought process goes, "Oh, it's like Captive Prince, but het, and Damen is actually as Untutored A Barbarian as everyone thinks he is."

I really need to just bite the bullet and read Dunnett, instead of reading all of her knockoffs and inspirations, but I will say that one thing I deeply, deeply appreciate about Captive Prince is that Laurent is as much of a bastard as the main villain of the second half. In fact there is one point where said villain is posturing in black clothing that sets off his sparkly blond hair and I almost choked to death. Meanwhile the main hero Vidaric is hot and all and I adore all his subtle eyegestures of humor and strongly support Sherwood Smith's decision to have lots of scenes in which the heroine cuts straight through his bullshit, but, like, I guess the difference between Vidaric and Laurent is that Vidaric is from those productions of Macbeth in which Malcolm is testing Macduff when he lists all the horrible things he wants to do, and Laurent is from those productions of Macbeth where Malcolm is being at least partially honest, and wants to know if Macduff can be trusted to take him down should his appetites get out of hand.

Yes, I too have noticed the weird trend where my blog has become Captive Prince Appreciation Station. I don't know what to tell you.

I did spend a good portion of those four hours yelling at Mel, the heroine. I don't mean, like, quietly, in my head. I mean, I wandered into a gated community at one point, because I thought it was a shortcut, and I knew I was a sweaty chick with a massive backpack and there were these two cops there whose jobs were to prevent trespassers, and I was thinking, "Okay, stay cool," and then Mel IGNORED THE ENTIRE YEAR OF VIDARIC BEING NICE TO HER IN ORDER TO POINTLESSLY MISTRUST HIM AND ENDANGER THE COUNTRY AGAIN and I hissed JESUS CHRIST, COME THE FUCK ON really loud just as I passed the cop car. Not my finest moment. When she wasn't in charge of political machinations, though, she was pretty cool. I like the part where she steals a bright white horse in the middle of a manhunt because she knows she's gotta go out with panache.

So as indicated in my post of two nights ago, I have been listening to audiobooks. I've been getting myself to sleep for some time by the magic of having people talk to me in my ear, and I have pretty effectively coupled the reward mechanisms of flash games and audio dramas through GemCraft and Picma, which are unplayable without an additional distraction, but amazing with one. (Gemcraft is especially fun because then everything I listen to sounds like it's raining and being electrocuted.)

The thing that I have discovered is that it is pretty much impossible to find reviews of audiobooks. It is spectacularly easy to find "reviews" "of" "audiobooks", if you follow me, and "discussion communities" and "places for lovers of audio literature," but discussion communities and places for lovers of audio literature are sort of thinner on the ground.

( so here are some reviews of audiobooks. )

Also, courtesy Radiolab: This is Your Brain on Metaphors. This is something for the scientists and the writers, and anyone who wants to read something that is fucking fascinating. According to Sapolsky, the accumulated research indicates that our visceral metaphors -- I'm disgusted by his actions, I am pained by your remarks, I think he's a warm personality -- are easily confused with their literal counterparts in our brains and are governed by the same regions.

Echo Bazaar update:

There's a tumblr for it now at deepdarkmarvellous, which I strongly recommend. A delightful selection.

Since we last spoke, delicious friends, I've escalated to Watchful and Persuasive >100, depending on what items I'm playing with, and consequently am always breathtaking and sagacious and occasionally inescapable and irresistible, too. I'm still down at Dangerous 41 and Shadowy 60, but I can't get up the attention for them. The high-level content is just so much better, spectacularly so much better, that I cannot give a damn about running a race in the Flit at all. This might be easier if I had my ambition to distract me, but in fact I've hit a content boundary. (Spoilers for Heart's Desire: I've successfully discovered the Topsy King's real name and met up with his sister, but now I have to talk to the Manager of the asylum before I proceed any further, and he's currently waiting for an upgrade. God, he's creepy. I started suspecting he was the cheery gentleman as soon as I realized he was a Heart's Desire plot point, but motherfucker, it was still terrifying to be like "oh hey, the guy who collects the insane is also the man who helps them go crazier." An apt and apropos comment on Victorian madhouses, honestly!)

Besides grinding my reputation at Court, I'm also investigating the murder in the Correspondence department, and I have noticed something storywise that is pretty sweet. I'll be providing two methods of spoiler protection below: the red color is game text, since most of the game is text, and the black color is commentary on huge spoilers. Highlight to read.

C&P this into the address bar to strip all spoiler protection for the essay: javascript:(function(){var%20newSS,%20styles='*%20{%20background:%20white%20!%20important;%20color:%20black%20!important%20}%20:link,%20:link%20*%20{%20color:%20#0000EE%20!important%20}%20:visited,%20:visited%20*%20{%20color:%20#551A8B%20!important%20}';%20if(document.createStyleSheet)%20{%20document.createStyleSheet(%22javascript:'%22+styles+%22'%22);%20}%20else%20{%20newSS=document.createElement('link');%20newSS.rel='stylesheet';%20newSS.href='data:text/css,'+escape(styles);%20document.getElementsByTagName(%22head%22)[0].appendChild(newSS);%20}%20})();

( specifically, spoiling the Comtessa, the origins of Fallen London, and Featuring in the Tales of the University... 17. )

Tangentially, if you like Echo Bazaar, can I recommend to you the work of Carlos Ruiz Zafón? I'm about a fifth of the way into the Angel's Game and the lead character has just added a wasting disease to his fraud, hallucinogenic brothels, bibliophibians, and writing of penny dreadfuls. I am pretty sure you could fit six realistic novels into the space I've gone so far. They would not be as good.

1. I'm turning off comments on LJ next week; just a heads-up. My remaining DW codes:

FZ5G4MBXRAACYAAADF9H
ZJ3GRPMV82VWSAAADF9J
X5EA2D9TTAD45AAAD46G
5QGAHJC3M764FAAAEF4S
4R9QSTZC3Z4EWAAAEF4T

Comment if you use one so I can take it off the list.

2. I got erased for erasureathon and ... oh my god, the results are amazing. First, lizzie_marie_23 erased When to Lie and How, making to Lie, and then be_themoon did Operating Instructions, making and call it correspondence. It's hard for me to comment on the works because I have my own writing superimposed on top of them more or less permanently, but in my extremely biased view, I love the first because it tells me true things about the character in the original story, and the second one because it tells a different and fascinating story altogether. They're both really phenomenal.

Some favorite parts from each: a. When you give up, why don’t you? Which is what he gets into.

b. The joke falls flat.
She smiles enough,
he's not interested.

Their negotiations are hushed.
he pretends not to recognize vague advances
can't, won't bother,
and she's too smart to get caught
but he's beginning to see edges.

3. marina wrote a Sherlock Holmes kibbutz AU, and it is MAGICAL. Like, Robot Unicorn Attack magical.

4. anekdot is in town and everything is beautiful ponies and sunshine! Though I did sign on to cook for twelve people tonight as a consequence. So ... we'll see how that goes. Hopefully they like bread.

5. ETA: I forgot to say that you should vote in coc_m_madness's second round of polling, because last time Wendy Watson was only narrowly voted through, and that is just not acceptable you guys

I'm going to miss this icon.

Reveal time! I wrote:
parthenogenesis, the Girl Who Owned a City, for dictator_duck,
Lovelace and Babbage vs. The Christmas Death Spider From Beyond The Atlantic, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, for hradzka,
On the Initial Conditions of a Partnership, Gentlemen of the Road, for giddygeek, and
Five stories the Reader never began, If on a winter's night a traveler, for me livrelibre.

Under my cut are a lot of thoughts on the process. Yes, I wrote this ages in advance. As an apology for tl;dring all over everywhere, here is a pdf of Gentlemen of the Road formatted for ereader (courtesy of elf, who betaed for me) and here is the CD "Elvis Perkins in Dearland," which contains Doomsday, which is my favorite song of the moment. Think "Holland 1945" meets "Prenzlauerberg."

( four stories, three-day deadlines, two turtledoves, and a chatlog about crack crossovers. )

1. I'm mostly over the fact that Shawn's dad is in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, but I can't get over the fact that his entrance ("Good god, ouch!") is a trademark Psych "lean into the shot like someone's firing."

2. hegemony wrote Mirror My Malady, Transfer My Tragedy, which is extremely hot, lengthy Uhura/Sulu. I would take credit for betaing but honestly I did almost nothing, all the magic is hers and hers alone. Go for it.

3. Shouldn't have read Babel-17 and Stories of Your Life back to back -- though I suppose I was warned. Babel-17 relies on a theory of linguistics that has been thoroughly disproved; "Story of Your Life," though excellent, goes the same route, and "Division by Zero" takes just the grossest misapprehension of math as its premise. ( more mean thoughts and some nice ones )

Rereading Brat Farrar I'm reminded of a few things -- not least that Thomas is, more or less, Simon, and what that means for him and for me ... but mostly I'm reminded (again) of Farthing and that sweet assertion Walton makes that she was trying to work out when the book could possibly have happened. (She's right, by the way; it's a bit baffling. The dentist was bombed at some point during Brat's career abroad, but it would've been surely nearly impossible to get into America during the war or immediately before, and I don't think there's enough time after?)

( some thoughts on tey the englishwoman and the possible lesbian? )

I'm a big Scrooge this year about the holidays, which is distressing because I've never been before, and while I wish you all a very merry Christmas I personally will probably be spending Christmas in a bunker to get away from the seventeen repetitions of "Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas" in Starbucks, which was, I am not kidding, the least festive place in downtown San Francisco. PS when you say "happy holidays" and you decorate the building in red and green and have eggnog lattes and peppermint mochas and the Christmas blend, you're not fooling anyone.

Childermass...Christopher Eccleston
(Vinculus...Jeremy Irons)

And actually Tennant would make a halfway decent Strange. But I'm sure we can do better than that...

It's been a ridiculous week. (Couple of weeks.) I keep drafting this post and deleting it, because it sounds stupid and itemized, so fuck it, y'all are getting the rough draft. (Isaac-down-the-hall told me quite seriously that I "sure use the f-word a lot", but that's okay because I'm "passionate." That makes two people. I -- I blame fascism.)

( what I done did my first week of classes )

Okay. I think that covers most of the details. I'm going to go do more homework now.

Having seen CalShakes' Man and Superman, I have two things of about equal substance to say.

1. I believe demonic9yearold told me that she fell in love with the main character, Jack Tanner, within the first thirty seconds? Now I support this, and maybe I just saw him on an off night, but holy christ, screw Jack, I've fallen madly in love with Anne. Which just goes to show that I have a thing for charming girls who rule the world without ever letting on that they're doing so.

2. It's funny that they allow kids to read Wilde but not Shaw. There are good reasons for this -- Wilde has no explicitly sexual scenes to the best of my memory, Shaw definitely rocks the pornographic-discussion casbah; Wilde's a better writer -- but my god. I was ruined by Lord Henry Wotton and have never regretted a second of it. Had I been introduced to Jack Tanner in my days of dying for witty aesthetics, I might have turned out a more moral human being. For all of his destructive impulse and wild reforming bizarrities, for all of the hedonism and wit, he really does believe that you can improve yourself and your fellow man by thinking. Whereas all you can learn from Algernon Moncrief is that you shouldn't eat cucumber sandwiches, and the moral of Dorian Grey is that there is no such thing as a moral.

Troubling.