The dialogue options are lacking. This is what I need:

5. Lie, not lay, you ungrammatical fiend!

I may possibly have shouted it at the computer screen. Send help.

Original post on Dreamwidth | Leave a comment on DW | Read comments on DW.

Oof. Finished playing through Dragon Age, at long last. (Well. Finished the first playthrough, I should say. Knowing myself, there'll be more.) ( yeah, so, spoilers )

I'm thinking maybe I'll play as a rogue next time. Also I'm thinking right now I need a break from this computer screen.

Original post on Dreamwidth | Leave a comment on DW | Read comments on DW.

Okay, I think this wins for oddest fannish dream I ever had. I was in something that seemed to be a high school AU, getting to hang out with Adam Lambert (the singer, not the orchid), and we were trying to comfort this girl I went to school with 30 years ago, and not high school, either. The comforting involved me taking my bra off underneath the giant floppy dress I was wearing and getting into bed with her and patting her head, thinking all the while that if I'd known I was going to meet Adam Lambert, I would have washed my hair, and also how was I going to get my bra back on underneath the dress... I don't like high school AUs, I don't have any particularly deep or poignant memories of this girl, and I'm not fannish about Adam Lambert. I've no idea what was going on here. But I did wash my hair this morning.

Adam Lambert the orchid, meanwhile, is being willful and pretty in about equal measures; he keeps growing giant purple flowers at the end of an extremely long and spindly stalk, and I tell him if he keeps doing that he'll end up falling over when I'm not there to catch him, but he doesn't listen to me, woe, so there's a very complicated support arrangement in place that I hope will keep me from waking up to a loud crashing noise one of these nights.

Am still spending all my time playing Dragon Age. My protagonist is all morose about Alistair, and several of the other characters are trying to trip him into bed instead, which isn't cheering him up as much as you'd think. Also the Orzammar segment really freaked me out. Not him, though. He just clanked about in his armor, being emo and killing things.

Original post on Dreamwidth | Leave a comment on DW | Read comments on DW.

Augh. I always knew this would be bad for me, so I resisted for the longest time, and tried to say very energetically to myself and others that no, really, I have no interest in computer RPGs, not my thing at all. Then in a moment of weakness I borrowed the Dragon Age games from friends, and now All is Lost and I'm not fleeing at once, I'm just sitting here looting everything that doesn't move fast enough. I'm not very far along in the first game, because I have an obsessive completionist nature and I have to go look at everything, and talk to everyone, and do all the quests, and did I mention loot all the things, and also the character I'm playing at the moment (male Cousland) is stupid in love with Alistair, and I'm trying to tell him that there's a whole lot of game left and he just hasn't fully explored his options, but no, he gets all googly-eyed about it, as much as a computer character can get googly-eyed. Also he's a bleeding-heart do-gooder who keeps doing things that Leliana approves of, whereas I, the woman behind the curtain, so to speak, don't like Leliana at all. (Except when I want to loot locked chests. Yes, well.) This can't end well.

So that's what I'm doing. I think I could use more sleep and less right-clicking. Am wondering how long it will take me to play all the races and classes... I mentioned the whole obsessive completionist thing, right? And then there are the other games. With any luck, I'll get bored at some point, so I can do things like eat and sleep again, but for now, the persistent gore has eaten my head.

Original post on Dreamwidth | Leave a comment on DW | Read comments on DW.

Oh, man. I was so preoccupied, watching the absolutely stunning late-evening sky, that I didn't notice that my hoodie got snagged on Adam Lambert the phalaenopsis until he crashed to the floor and took the newly-potted dendrobium keiki with him. Suddenly my Saturday night was all about the sweeping and the re-potting. Bah. (No, I haven't named all my orchids. Just Adam Lambert and Cthulhu.)

Yesterday I watched Avengers in a spirit of self-defense, because I figure it might be useful to actually know what my droll and flist are going on about. ( spoilers are not very spoilery but who knows )

Otherwise I'm just quietly noodling along on my ninja epic of doom, which has now passed 45,000 words and there's still no zombie army in sight. I'm starting to think I've made it all up.

oh, wait. um.

Original post on Dreamwidth | Leave a comment on DW | Read comments on DW.

Oh, spring. My nose runneth over.

Something like 40,000 Norwegians gathered on Youngstorget in Oslo today and sang Barn av Regnbuen, the Norwegian translation of My Rainbow Race, a song that Anders Behring Breivik apparently thinks has been used to brainwash Norwegian children into... okay, I don't really get that part, I have to admit, looking at the Norwegian lyrics. Whatever it is he thinks, and I use the word loosely, and despite the fact that I'm not really big on plonky guitar let's-hold-hands singing, it's really kind of awesome to see all these people gathered (in the rain, with raincoats and umbrellas) to say a nice polite plonky guitar hell no back at him.

Yeah, possibly my nose runneth over for reasons other than spring.

Original post on Dreamwidth | Leave a comment on DW | Read comments on DW.

It's raining. I'm trying to look on the bright side, which would be that it's raining and not snowing. Okay, so there was snow mixed in with the rain earlier, but it didn't settle on the ground! So I'm choosing to see this as a refreshing spring rain. (A cold but refreshing spring rain. That I don't actually intend to go out in.)

I've been repotting things lately, which is probably some kind of spring urge, come to think of it. Although with this one orchid it was more that I felt I had to do something before it escaped from its pot; it was halfway across the edge and down onto the windowsill, pushed by some very forceful roots. Once I got up close and personal with them, I started to think of them more like tentacles trying to take over the world. The top half just wants to be out, and have giant purple flowers. This orchid is the love child of Chtulhu and Adam Lambert.

(Which I'd actually resolved not to say in public, because someone might write it. But hey, sparkly and evil, what's not to love about that combination. Although Chtulhu glam doesn't quite have the sinister ring of Chtulhu fthagn.)

I love crossovers and fusions, but there's one kind in particular that comes as close to being a bulletproof kink for me as anything does: the Harry Potter crossover or fusion that features the sorting of characters from another fandom. I'm endlessly fascinated by how others see characters, what they see as the essential traits of the characters, and HP-style sorting is a great way to get a good look at that. And it's also really interesting to think about how sorting, were it a familiar process, would affect the way the characters were perceived in their own universe. Would another universe have the same view of the houses, and what it meant to be sorted into a particular house, as the HP universe does? Probably not. Like, in the Naruto universe, seems to me Hufflepuff would be very highly valued. Loyalty and tenacity. Speaking of which, Iruka is obviously a Hufflepuff. I kind of want to place Kakashi in Slytherin, though I'm not quite sure I can explain it well enough to convince anyone.

Do you guys do this, too -- keep mental lists for your fandom of which characters would be sorted into which house? Or of which characters would have what daemon, that's another of those things I find nearly irresistible. (For instance, I'm pretty sure Steve Rogers's daemon is a German shepherd who used to be gangly and puppyish and then she turned into this solid wall of muscle, but she's still a puppy at heart.) I'd love to hear other people's take on this.

I wrote this post this morning and forgot about it, and now it's evening and it's still raining.

Original post on Dreamwidth | Leave a comment on DW | Read comments on DW.

I picked this one up from akamine_chan. A meme with stats in it! I am so there. As far as I can tell, it's about looking at your top 10 stories on ao3 in terms of hits, and seeing how this changes over the years. Obviously I can't see how this changes over the years, since this is my first time doing it; I'd better hope I remember next year.

So the top 10 right now:

1730, Backstage, XF/Voyager/Sentinel/Highlander crossover
761, all the strangers came today, Gwaine/knights, Merlin
544, floated on heat, Kakashi/Iruka, Naruto
533, in the right hands, Remus/Sirius, Harry Potter
459, sprinkles & cream, The Teahouse
379, in this bare island, Adventure Inc/Shakespeare's The Tempest crossover
375, slower and sweeter, Tenpou/Kenren, Saiyuki Gaiden
363, obedience and libido, Kakashi/Iruka, Naruto
356, Pale green, Snape/Harry, Harry Potter
301, About a lamp, Sheppard/McKay, SGA

It kinda cracks me up that the story with the most hits is a cracky humor piece that I wrote in 1998. I know it's got four fandoms to draw hits from, but I wouldn't have thought that those fandoms were all that active. Could be that I'm wrong. :) Merlin fandom, otoh, is very active.

I thought in this bare island would be one of those yuletide stories that were written for and read by the recipient only, but I underestimated the power of being in the beginning of the alphabet when people start to read through yuletide beginning to end. (Or end to beginning; I imagine people who write for Z fandoms have the same experience.) But my latest yuletide story, sprinkles & cream, seems to be more popular despite being the middle of the alphabet and for a teensy fandom. Maybe it's the prostitution tag. (Do people read by tag a lot? I know I do tag searches sometimes just to see which fandoms feature a certain trope, and what they've done with it.)

The fandom mix seems fairly representative of my butterfly approach lately, and most of the stories seem reasonably recent, as can be seen by the lack of caps in the titles. It'll be interesting to see what's changed by next year.

Original post on Dreamwidth | Leave a comment on DW | Read comments on DW.

I shouldn't read lj and dw while I'm still trying to reboot my brain in the morning. For some reason, the combination of not-really-awake and high-on-modafinil makes me think everything seems like a good idea and all challenges totally doable. Like the kakairu_fest Genjutsu Wars summer challenge, I can totally do that. And Remix Madness, I can totally do that.

Then I have breakfast and come to my senses, mostly. Because sure, it looks like fun, but that remix thing will go live on Monday, and it would probably take me that long just to wade through the pages of people volunteering their stuff to be madly remixed. And the genjutsu wars will be set up with teams, and stories posted opposite each other, and voting, and just typing that made me feel unhappy, so participating would probably send my stress levels through the roof.

Breakfast saves me from a lot of things, really. But I have in fact signed up for one thing, and it's making me feel happy, not stressed: pentapus is running a teeny tiny reverse bang. There'll be pretty, funky artwork (that works without the comma, too), and a complete lack of deadline, and I'm very excited about it already.

(And it'll make a nice break from the long Naruto story I'm working on, which right now is making me feel like I've crocheted half a bedspread of granny squares and looked up to realize the bed is actually much bigger than that... 41,000 words and I'm not even sure what has happened yet, except it might be a long, long time before I get to the bit with the undead army. Not to mention the kissing.)

Original post on Dreamwidth | Leave a comment on DW | Read comments on DW.

I meant to make rhubarb crumble, but then I remembered that I was out of flour, so I'm basically having hot rhubarb with vanilla sugar. Which is very tasty.

Am really enjoying the manga read-along at princeoftennis. I need that weekly prod to remind me to push ahead and get some reading done. Today I read a volume of Prince of Tennis (v4, ch26-35) and a volume of One Piece (v11, ch91-99). I'm enjoying the surrounding stuff, the covers and the intro art and the little comments, more than the actual main storyline, mostly because I have trouble following fight scenes and tennis scenes in manga; there's a lot of action lines and sound effect thingies, and then I'm squinting at the next image trying to see who's still standing. I really, really understand why Prince of Tennis needs that peanut gallery, telling us in detail just what is going on. As for One Piece, if I'd been the creator I would have been horribly tempted to introduce a talkative parrot called Recap.

arduinna made some awesome meta posts this weekend, talking about life in the days of mailing lists. I got into fandom in... I think it was 1995, and nearly everything she wrote flooded me with nostalgia. Three giant posts, and you can read them here and be nostalgic with me, or possibly grateful that you got into fandom much later and never had to worry about the max length of AOL email posts or whether your precious XF tape was wearing through at a certain point in The Red and the Black.

Original post on Dreamwidth | Leave a comment on DW | Read comments on DW.