Anyone fancy going shares on a room with me? It's the Eastercon next year, and sounds good. (The hotel is near/at Heathrow)

Pred'x

The following came up on QI (comedy quiz show with Stephen Fry) this week:
whorepresents.com
therapistfinder.com
powergenitalia.it
expertsexchange.com
penisland.net

All of them could be parsed in some other way than was doubtlessly intended by their owners...

Date:	2007-11-01 21:56
Subject:	Literature, SF etc
Security:	Public
Mood:	thoughtful
Music:	Le Nozze di Figaro

Tolkien was bloody restrained compared to his imitators. There are any number of 'quite good' speculative fiction things that I like less the longer they go on, and they don't stop at three.

Possibly the only examples of really long serieses that work are Discworld and In Search of Lost Time. In both cases they may be regarded as the writer's lifework. In the case of Discworld, PTerry has the "In another part of the forest..." escape clause for whenever he feels tired of one set of characters. Proust is Dorian Gray, really: homosexual, and the artwork sucks the life of the artist right into itself.

Discuss.

Suspect gair will be the only one to answer this one.

PS I got an upper second for a dissertation on Irony in Proust (Humour in Proust had been done already).

PPS. Unfortunately, I got a lower second for the exam, and have felt vaguely un-entitled to apply for the sorts of jobs I'd like ever since (librarianship, lexicography, copy-editing)

PPPS Can someone suggest me an icon that doesn't ref JKR: everything I actually liked about the HP series has been Jossed to death, and it wasn't just Snapeslash. Can somebody make me an icon that doesn't ref JKR?

PPPPS Self-description: embattled Mac geek ("Tiger genius" "s/genius/idiot" (will have to update that for Leopard)), too thick to code, loves to write but can't plot for toffee, slash burnout ("If I never write an orgasm again it'll be too soon!"); used to be good occasional poet but ran out of occasions.

Watervole and I are going to go to a trad folk gig in Poole on the 14th November.

Any other trad folkies out there interested?

Started playing FreeRice, a word game where free rice (of course) is donated to world hunger if you define words correctly (slightly implausibly but it'd be nice if it's true). I did over 400 words, and only fluffed about ten, although some of the ones I got right I wasn't sure of.
( FreeRice )
I've got my score up to 50, and this is a bit of a time sink. I'll post it.

Date:	2007-09-12 22:14
Subject:
Security:	Public
Mood:	silly
Music:	dinner-dinner-dinner-dinner-BATMAN!

Have just watched my first ep ever of Adam West's Batman, thinking 'Oh *that's* what that theme tune came from!'

It is hilarious, from the inefficient Batcar using parachutes for brakes, to the urgent phone call from Robin which gets languidly swapped to the right Batphone with chatty how-are-*you*-sir asides from the butler, to the nailbiting passion with which Batman pursues his love object (swiftly brushing aside Villainess dressed as said love object because she made several obvious mistakes) to the final denouement with the clue 'the biggest President's head' apparently leading to a skyscraper and then *actually* leading to the head of a stuffed Moldavian woolly mammoth 'decorated on the outside with trashy jewellery and on the inside with priceless rare-issue Moldavian stamps...

What were these people *on* when they made it?

(gigglegigglegiggle)

Just now, julesjones said, "I spent Saturday cleaning off my old WinME machine for a friend at Loose Id who's going to receive it."

"But she already knows you're a perv."

"Well, yeah, but I've got to delete my personal letters. I wouldn't be so cruel as to remove the nekkid men."

"Makes sense."

Well, it does to us...

Well, I'd like to post a long thoughtful review of the end of Life on Mars, but julesjones will kill me if I ruin it for her, so I'll just keep quiet about it for now. Also, am still thinking. I wasn't quite in the 'rave' camp nor the 'rant' camp, more in the This Sort Of Works But WTF Just Happened camp...

Plus I've already posted once on a LoM community today (pointing out that Richard Littlejohn's take on Gene Hunt in 2007 is in fact made of lose compared to the better fanfics out there, because he's pushing his own political agenda without having a good handle on the character/voice)...

No more LoM ever. OTOH, NewWho still going strong. Excellent episode on Saturday. The future is full of gridlock and nightmare motorway, but it cannot be all bad, because, kittens.

Evil Collab is making me post at midnight.

I may point out that somewhere in her journal there's a link to a YouTube video of "300" to the tune of "It's Raining Men". I may also point out that we were reminded of this by the following deathless couplet about the Theban Band mentioned on Making Light:

They had no room for cowards and they had no use for c**t
Three hundred Spartan willies were advancing to the front

I want this on a T-shirt. I'm still not sure whether I'd ever have the nerve to wear it.

What d'you mean, I should put links in? It's midnight. Sod off the lot of you.

You may or may not know that there is an actual slash fandom based on the personifications of the Mac and the PC on the Apple video ads (Mac is cool and media-savvy, PC is...nervously cute, with a tendency to get beaten up by his own security measures).

The third time today Evil Collab's XP box dropped its connection with my Mac, I thought, 'Oh, wonderful, Mac and PC are having a lover's tiff.'

Evil Collab is now making beady-eyed remarks about 'how do you know it was the XP box that started it'. I ought to clarify that it's the sort of lover's tiff whose origins are indecipherable as both participants keep snarling, sulking and misunderstanding each other, pretty much like most slash stories.

PS No, 'participants' doesn't refer to Evil Collab and myself. It's the unhelpful boxes at which we are sitting.

Evil Collab: "Dear Husband knows I got a bundle of new yaoi manga. He knows better than to ask me what I am laughing at."
Me: "It's a marriage founded on a certain amount of protective ignorance, isn't it?" (Mr Predatrix doesn't always ask me what I'm laughing at, either.)

Evil Collab is getting me a Lord & Master t-shirt. We would like to know if there's a witty/sarky comment anyone could think of to go with that pretty picture.

"You're the author, can't you come up with a quote?" I said.

"No," said Evil Collab intransigently. Am wondering quite how severely she polices her personal word-count...

Have finally read Evil Collab's latest novel (am default beta and offsite backup). She's been sending it chapter by chapter as it was written.

It's a very endearing story on the whole, and far more of a romance than she usually writes (in that because it's a contemporary without a fantasy angle it hasn't got the speculative fiction world-building element, and that leaves the entire story being about the protagonists' intimacy issues. It's none the worse for that, but it's a departure from what she normally writes).

As usual, the characters are very likeable and intelligent. They're both scientists, both male--and one of them just happens to be working as a PA for the other, whch wouldn't be an issue except that they both fancy each other rotten and they're quite aware of the power issues if such an office affair should go wrong.

It's hot (one of the standout scenes is a passionate sex scene where the two men are fucking stark naked in front of the office window, quite getting off on the fact that the glass won't let people see in). It's also subtle and sometimes very funny because everything comes out of the characters and how they naturally behave.

This passes my personal test for Romance 101, in that although there are misunderstandings they're not the sort only an idiot can make. There are indeed misunderstandings that could easily be cleared up by the guys talking to each other, but there are actually reasons why they don't (even if the reasons aren't that good, because they're guys). In a bad romance novel, the hero & heroine hug a sense of grievance to themselves for weeks on end without checking it meets the facts. This is not that novel (and not just because it's a hero & hero).

Recommended.

Will be made available to You Lot Out There on...some day sacred to love & romance, but I'm not supposed to mention any dates, apparently. But you can go and put it on your wishlists already.

The practically lickable cover-art is here, while the actual details, including Lovely Excerpts for Pre-Purchase Fondling, are here.

...was my latest chat comment to Evil Collab who was asking me what the hell had happened to my website (I've had a website on SlashCity for the last year or two and can never update it because I keep forgetting what the password is).

When she'd stopped spluttering, and told me the above line is good enough to go on a T-shirt or LJ, she said, 'You have got another website on googlemail'.

(thinks: fuck you very much, I suppose that means I have to do some actual *work* now... (mutters) )

Tell Evil Collab about Peter in energy form... not coming through in scene as written, probably because of discussing it in embarrassed mutter when half-asleep or over coffee.

What I meant to convey was that P is barely a quiver in the air and an excited thought (like this phrase, try to get it into the draft as dialog from P, probably when apologising). I think Evil Collab took it to mean 'partly embodied', or possibly 'invisible'. Which is perfectly reasonable, considering the part she read contained references to that, but I was going for the idea that P was learning to be a ghost and started out as an emotional impression or energy field before being a person-shaped ghost. It's only now I think about it that I figure out what wasn't coming through.

Only goes to show how hard it is for two grown perverts to understand a perfectly rational conversation about disembodied beings, I suppose.

(As for you lot out there who aren't Evil Collab, you may have picked up that I am trying to write a rom-com ghost story with erotic elements, but considering I cannot quite make it clear to my writing partner who I've known for the last ten years what hope is there for the audience...?)

Poor julesjones has been asking me to stop reading out interesting and timewasting bits from blogs while she's trying to stay focused. So I said, "OK, I'll bookmark this [melting feline cuteness] picture and show it to you later."

"No, push off," she said.

She's quite right. If I treat my friends to whatever sort of inane burbling passes through my mind at any given moment, I won't have any friends left because they're, like, Oh God It's Her Again. Think before posting. Sometimes think instead of posting.

Must...stay...focused. Must not spam people with moggyporn, however cute...

In 2007, I will become serious-minded and much less aimless. And realise it's a sensible move to throw away the crisp multipack into the bin which is right in front of me when the last individual packet has been taken out.

spacefall was wondering how lewd Donaldson's 'clenches' are. My dim memories of the original Chronics of TC seem to suggest that they're metaphorical rather than pornographic, and I validated this by using Amazon's Search Inside this Book feature. Early examples include: "The thought caught his heart in a clench of trepidation", "He was trembling...and he had to clench himself before he could say without a tremor, 'Why?...'", and "He tried to clench himself; his fingers came back empty". I feel these examples are enough to give a flavour of what Donaldson was doing with the word 'clench', and why it attracted so much malicious laughter from readers. (I should credit Nick Lowe's excellent essay The Well-Tempered Plot Device for the original discussion of 'clench racing. Give it a read: I also found the concept of 'plot tokens" very very funny.)

Am now visited by the disturbing mental image of a 'queer orgy' variant of 'clench racing'...

(or the well-known fannish party game of flipping through Stephen Donaldson's books looking for the word 'clench', which comes up far more often than statistically likely)

Evil Collab: Yes, but 'clenches' would actually be useful for slash stories.

Pred'x: I will post that little apercu on lj.

Evil Collab: I'm nearly sure we've made that joke before.

Pred'x: I've forgotten it completely, so they probably have...

Jones: It's amazing how many sites are taking an Amazon feed these days. Social work, fishing, the Railroad Bookstore and Chichester Counselling Services. It's slightly unnerving that things like that come up with The Syndicate.

I immediately came up with the following snippet:

-------------------------
[nervous voice]: "Hallo, is that The Syndicalist Training and Ethical Counselling Service? I was put onto you by..."
[ALLARD sighs heavily]: "Link for Today. So far they've recommended us to Catholic mothers, cruise ship timetable enquiries, golfers, and people looking for the nameless widget with three small retaining screws that fell off the back of the remote control since when it's never worked right."
[nervous voice]: "Yes. Sorry."
[ALLARD, loudly]: "Vaughan, you know that gentlemen's agreement about sharing contact details."
[VAUGHAN]: "Yes."
[ALLARD]: "You do know some of them weren't gentlemen?"
[VAUGHAN]: "What else would they have been?"
[ALLARD]: "Spammers."
[VAUGHAN]: "There was an actual clause in the contract saying they wouldn't send random junk adverts to every name in our address book. I looked."
[nervous voice]: "I'm still here. Look, is this a bad time?
[ALLARD]: "It's always a bad time. Have you tried turning it off and on again?"
[nervous voice]: "I'm sorry, is this some sort of technical thing? I'm ringing in response to the advert saying, 'Do you do 99% of the work for 1% of the credit? Have you ever wondered what bosses are for? Have you ever felt sure that there must be a better way, somewhere?'"
[ALLARD]: "Vaughan? Vaughan? It's one of yours." [haughtily]: "I only answer questions that can be answered by 'Have you tried turning it off and on again'. I am the technical consultant."
--------------------

Happy festive season from Alex W, Evil Collab, and two Big Fluffy Cats.

...Evil Collab sent me a link to a post by James N entitled Autodarwinification. Having read the comments thereof I do not feel it will add appreciably to the sum of human knowledge if I actually read the thing referred to.

The comments suggest it's about a non-recommended use for fireworks when drunk. That's probably as much as I need to know, really.