worryingly jolly batman

Via china_shop. Just cos I finally have more than, like, 5 stories on the AO3 ...

Account Created: 18/11/2009
Link to AO3: labellementeuse

Total Works: 16
Total Wordcount: 70,552
Average Wordcount: 4409.5
Longest Story: Camaraderie and sense of belonging
Shortest Story: Momentum? I hardly know him

Total Kudos: 1786
Average Kudos: 111
Story With the Most Kudos: Camaraderie and sense of belonging with 348

Total Comment Threads: 165
Average Comment Threads: 10
Story With the Most Comment Threads: Second Time Lucky (22)

Total Author Subscriptions: 21???
Total Story Subscriptions: 8 (I have never posted a work on the AO3 that was unfinished so ??? why???
Story With the Most Subscriptions: and remember who I am

Total Bookmarks: 363
Story With the Most Bookmarks: Camaraderie and sense of belonging
Stories With No Comments or Kudos: All of my earliest stories on the AO3 are Yuletide stories (in fact, 10 of the stories on there are Yuletide stories and 2 of the others are for other exchanges) so everything has at least one comment ported over from the old archive.

What I find really noticeable about this is what a difference it makes writing in a juggernaut pairing. My Benn/Seguin story has more hits than anything I've ever written and it's only been up since May (it's also very long, and I think it's quite good). The Yuletide comment culture is also notable. My Howl's Moving Castle story from last year is the only story giving Camaraderie and a sense of belonging a run for its hit-count money, and it's leading in comments. Similarly, my 392-hit Swallows and Amazons story, Dispatches, is beating, comments-wise, seven different stories with at least twice the number of hits and kudos.

First, a request: G/T (a local fancon for those of you from further locations) is coming up (*crowd goes wild*) and I offered to curate a vidshow themed around "Lord King Bad Vids". I might have fewer of these than I actually thought because some of my vid collection has gone missing somewhere, so I put the call out: what are your favourites? Any fandom, any pairing, any character, whatever you like.

Also, a meme.

Via a few people on my DW list:

Bold the ones you have and use at least once a year, underline the ones you use at least once a month, italicize the ones you have and don't use, strike through the ones you have had but got rid of. And (my suggestion) add any items that you have that aren't on the list:

I wonder how many pasta machines, breadmakers, juicers, blenders, deep fat fryers, egg boilers, melon ballers, sandwich makers, pastry brushes, cheese knives, electric woks, miniature salad spinners, griddle pans, jam funnels, meat thermometers, filleting knives, egg poachers, cake stands, garlic crushers, martini glasses, tea strainersbamboo steamers, pizza stones, coffee grinders, milk frothers, piping bags [actually I broke them all but I've not replaced them on the grounds that piping is not for me], banana stands, fluted pastry wheels, tagine dishes, conical strainers, rice cookers, steam cookers, pressure cookers, slow cookers, spaetzle makers, cookie presses (it belongs to the flatmate and as far as I know no-one's ever used it), gravy strainers, double boilers (bains marie), sukiyaki stoves, ice cream makers, fondue sets, healthy-grills, home smokers, tempura sets, tortilla presses, electric whisks, apple corers, apple slicers, electric skillets, meat tenderizers, mortar and pestle, pastry blenders, french-fry cutters, waffle makers, candy thermometers, stick blenders and vegetable choppers [I am interpreting this as a mandolin] languish dustily at the back of the nation's cupboards?

I have a tiny kitchen but if I could own any of these (and would definitely use them though who knows where I'd put them): a full-on food processor, a pasta machine (I love making my own pasta but rolling out is a pain without a machine so I hardly do it), a salad spinner and an electric skillet. Also I'd really like a funnel but I don't know what a jam funnel is? Perhaps a metal funnel to avoid melting plastic? (Or would metal be reactive to the heat? IDK.)

ETA in the interest of full disclosure: the cookie press may actually belong to me. Um, oops. Apparently I bought one and forgot about it (it's also a icing gun and I think that's what I was trying for. It's a terrible icing gun, fwiw).

What the hell is a banana stand or a fluted pastry wheel?

Finally, I said this on twitter about a hashtag game earlier that I'd like to preserve:

What I really like about #kishi: As a fatty, and also as a woman, I'm constantly told by the TV, the radio, my mother, my father, my boss what it's acceptable for me to wear. If I can get up in the morning and try to approach my wardrobe with a spirit of adventure rather than with a spirit of shame, a spirit of what won't make me look fat today, what won't make my mother tell me seeing the shape of my body in jeans and a t-shirt makes people uncomfortable, what won't make my boss tell me my body is distracting - if instead I can think "what's fun? What's colourful? What expresses me and how I feel today? What would make me feel better about today?" or even just "what do I like about this comfortable favourite old slopping-around-home outfit", I'm going to. -- via

For context: Claudia Kishi is a character in a 90s-era pulp series about a Babysitters' Club. She is an artist and wears unusual outfits (very!) which are routinely described by other characters and by herself in breathless tones. Much use is made of words like "chunky", "oversize", "patterned" and "funky". Claudia *always* looks fabulous, even when wearing a burlap sack. A twitter buddy of mine started a hashtag game, #kishi, in which you tweet the outfit you're wearing as if you were Claudia. Trackpants and a t-shirt? "Oversized t-shirt and billowy pants". Preppiest outfit on the face of the planet? "Chunky pearl earrings and oversized shirt". I had an argument today with someone who described the game as "ludicrous vain faux-ironic hipster bullshit", someone who felt that it seemed like a contest. Now, I have some sympathy with people who would just generally prefer not to think about what they're wearing and find the game upsetting for that reason but that's not where he was coming from and it pissed me off and that's the context for that tweet.

Something for the last week of poetry month: "The Most Beautiful Love Poem of All Time" by Hera Lindsay Bird is really something. She also has a name of which I am truly envious. (Hera Bird. Come on.) I must disclaim at this juncture that Hera is a v good friend of my flattie and I've met her a few times and like her a lot but this poem is really fucking great anyway. You might also like "The Memory of Light".

Also, I got a meme from owlbeer which went something like:

1. Comment here to get a letter from me.
2. Post at least 5 songs beginning with that letter.
3. Give other people letters! It's the circle of music memes.

She gave me S and, uh, I picked 21 songs:

( sort of themed )

Zip of the lot here.

Now I'm going to go back to my horrendous google spiral trying to figure out how good Jonathan Toews' French is. Since my French is a) actually French, lolQuebec and b) no longer good enough to do anything except occasionally read a news article, I have to rely on youtube comments and horrifying message boards. (Why do I want to know this? I don't know. I don't understand enough French to get anything interesting out of his French interviews, frankly Quebecois just sounds weird ... whatever. Amusingly enough reports range from "He speaks very good if not perfect Quebecois" to "he's okay but he has a weird accent" to "actually I think he has a French accent when he speaks English" [I think he's just super Canadian FWIW]. Why does this entertain me to know? IDEK.)

Icon meme, via china_shop.

1. Five oldest icons you have
2. Five newest icons you have
3. Five icons made by you that you like the best
4. Five icons made by someone else that you like the best
5. Five of your most random icons.

( etc )

via ilyena_sylph.

Pick nine ships you are currently into and three ships you don't like and then answer questions about them.


1. Dean/Castiel
2. Sam/Castiel
3. Sam/Dean
4. Dairine/Carmela
5. Stefan/Elena/Damon
6. J2
7. Steph/Tim
8. Steph/Cass
9. Rory (GG)/Paris
10. Jo/Ellen
11. Bruce/Tim
12. Dairine/Roshaun
( questions )

More vids! I don't think I'm going to be very talky today, though.

Day 10 - A vid that makes you laugh
United States of Pop, by llenka
Community; dance moves; warning for very fast, very highly-lit cutting that even I, who have no vision issues, find a bit difficult to watch; spoilers for the whole season
( Read more... )

Day 11 - An AMV you love
This one was tough for me because I'm not at all into anime and the only AMV I've ever really liked is Failed Experiments in Video Editing, which is really good and funny and I'm sure if you're a vidder you'd find it even funnier.

However, I don't really feel that's enough of a sample for me to rec AMVs with authority, so instead I'm going to rec a vid that I love that I could fit into one of these categories:

Big City Life, by lithiumdoll (You can get it here, I couldn't find a vidpost.)
Dark Angel; Max; spoilers for the whole show; violence.

( Dark Angel spoilers )

Day 12 - A relationship vid you love
( three under cut )

And one thing about food:

So the other day I prepared and froze some World Peace Cookies, except I stupidly left out the chocolate chips so I was like, wow, they're gonna suck. (protip: even without the chips these biscuits are still pretty great, I was just making excuses.) BUT then I was thinking about something I was reading on Debbie Does Edmonds the other day about yoyos and thinking how GOOD the icing that sandwiches together a yoyo is, and I thought - ooh, yeah. That would be awesome.

And it was.

Butter Icing

50g butter, very soft
1/2 C icing sugar
2 T custard powder - USians and other non-Commonwealthers, I believe the standard sub is vanilla instant pudding mix, although that's usually in Nanaimo bars and IDK how it'd work here.

1. Beat all together
2. Enjoy on delicious cookies.

A highly recommended combination, although you really can only eat one.

So this is the post in which I'm chronically incapable of picking only one vid. I'll try to do better next post.

A preamble: I don't think I've said this stuff before, so: I recommend that you watch the vid at least once before you read my commentary. Although I hate to advise using up other peoples' bandwidth, if stuff is available for direct download (especially at MU or wherever) I recommend that you do that rather than streaming. They're around 50mb and it's the days of miracles and broadband, splash out! And remember I'm not a vidder and in fact I haven't really studied visual texts at all, so where my language is not right please forgive me. Also, just like fanfiction, vidders appreciate comments if you like their work.

Day 4 - An ensemble vid you love
Imma Be, by talitha78
Leverage; Hardison, Parker, Eliot; Spoilers through S2; crappy song but awesome vid.

I don't even have to put my comments about this one below a cut. It's not real deep, it's beautifully, cleanly cut, it's basically a romp. A romp heavy on the Hardison, which is nice because he's my TV boyfriend, and on the Parker, which is nice because she's my TV girlfriend. Eliot's also in there which is nice because I care about him! But not as much as the other two. Um, so yeah, it's a romp.

Honourable mentions: (Glad I'm) Not a Petrelli, by my besties sixth_light and lady_larla, Heroes, Claire & the Petrellis, season 1; umpteen billion awesome Buffy vids that I couldn't list if I tried all year. (Never seen a good Angel one, though. Recs?)

Day 5 - A vid everyone should see at least once
( some 'splaining )

And now for something completely different!

Day 6: A vid you've watched more than 10 times.

So I immediately went to one of my favourite vids, and then I stopped and looked at another one, and another one, and another one, and then I thought: this is ridiculous. This could be a themed post all of its own. and then I thought: but I goddamned freaking love these vids! So I'm going to talk about them and that's that.

Day 6: Women: They're Pretty Fucking Incredible

Bionic, by tallulah71; Glorious, by such_heights; One Girl Revolution, by arefadedaway; and I'm Your Man, by charmax.
Very, very multifandom; women; not specially spoilery for anything in particular; TV violence.

( I go on for awhile )

Now I'm going to finally go and watch the vids caramarie has been reccing!
Vid Meme: Days 1-3

Leave a comment saying "Harmony" (or "Drusilla" or your favourite vampire name, or "Sassy" or your favourite ship name. Sassy, by the way, is the pairing smoosh for Sam/Castiel, and I think it is HILARIOUS. It goes so well with their matching bitchfaces.)
- I'll respond by asking you five questions.
- Update your journal with the answers to your questions.
- Include this explanation and offer to ask other people questions.

I got questions from sixth_light and lady_larla.

( questions from Lucy: The Real World, NZ blogosphere drama, best book I read lately, and food. )

( Questions from Tas: slebs, books again, time travel, Sarah Palin, and a seriously overworked answer to a music question. with uploads! )

That was so much fun imma do that other meme that I've never done: ask me anything. (Anon commenting is on at LJ and DW.) I don't promise to answer everything, but I'll at least think about it!

paintmarks sent me snowflakes! Thanks hon :)

So today I started my new job, reference checker & proofreader at the Waitangi Tribunal. Because they planned for me to start actually doing my job on Wednesday, and before that basically had a bunch of style guides and one or two articles for me to read, by 1pm today I was like "doo doo doo... nothing to do!" (I mean, really.) So my boss got me started on reading this book on the Waitangi Tribunal called, um, The Waitangi Tribunal: Te Roopu Whakamana i te Tiriti o Waitangi. (Ed. J Hayward and N Wheen for anyone who wants to go look this up, which I don't know why you would want to do, but whatever.) It's basically a bunch of chapters on a bunch of different aspects of the Tribunal - history, procedure, etc. A couple of chapters compare it to other nations' methods of dealing with indigenous peoples' land rights, and one chapter was on Canada. Want to hear something really, really horrifying?

So British Columbia has been pretty slack on acknowledging that First Peoples have any land rights at all. They finally got around to it a while ago, like maybe 15 years or so, and established the BCTC - BC Treaty Commission, which is a tiny bit like the Waitangi Tribunal in, like, a few ways. Not very many. But you want to hear the best difference, and by best, I mean worst? So the BCTC is funded 8% by the federal gvt of Canada, 12% by BC itself, and 80% by... a loan to the First Peoples of BC. In fact these various tribes etc now owe CDN$177 MILLION, over about 50 claims, and NONE of the claims have been resolved - only one of them is CLOSE to being finished. The BCTC is only authorised to give out CDN$7 million per claim. Do you see what's happening here? Hi, guys... we took your land and left you impoverished and for a couple of hundred years we refused to acknowledge that you might deserve or need any kind of compensation at all, and now, hey, you can have it! But any money that we give you you're going to have to give right back to pay off the costs of us admitting that we did something wrong! Neat, huh?

-- this is all current to when my book was written, about 2003-4, I think. But even if they've fixed it since then - and I note via Wiki that it's now the British Columbia Treaty Process, but other than that nothing particularly encouraging - how does that kind of thing even happen?

Also, because I feel like it, a meme via deutscheami (of whose hints I didn't get a single answer, but never mind.)
1. Put your iPod on shuffle
2. DO NOT write down the lyrics of the first 15-20 songs to come up.
3. Describe what the song is about. Be creative.
4. Cross out the songs when your friends guess them in the comments.
( away we go )

I have my interview for the publishing course at Whitireia tomorrow morning. Advice and well-wishes gratefully appreciated!

A bastard child of the lyrics meme, so of course I'm guaranteed to love this one: first lines of 20 books (or, you know, however many you can cope with), friendslist guesses titles and authors. I grabbed the 17 books closest (restricting to books that I've actually read, because I still have a pile on my floor from the second hand bookstore) plus the three books whose first lines I actually know off by heart, whether because they're distinctive or because I've re-read the books a million times. Some of these are pretty much gimmes, but hey. I considered deleting names from #1 and #12, but #1 would just be sad and couldn't be bothered for #12.

1. There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, CS Lewis
aim_toothpaste

2. Part of the problem, Nita thought as she tore desperately down Rose Avenue, is that I can't keep my mouth shut.
So You Want To Be A Wizard, Diane Duane
kitsunerei88

3. When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the cinema, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home.
The Outsiders, SE Hinton
gabbysun

4. The woman put her sad moon-face in at the window of the car.
Homecoming, by Cynthia Voigt
sennical

5. Ba-room, ba-room, baripity, baripity, baripity, baripity - Good. His dad had the pick-up going.
Bridge to Terabithia, Katherine Paterson
lady_larla

6. In a noisy, rattling aeroplane with four propellors and two stewardesses who speak with New Zealand accents and serve dinky little meals of New Zealand lamb chops and Watties' peas and Anchor best creamery butter: going east, going south, going cold, going home.
Songs for Alex, Tessa Duder
lady_larla (after some vocal deliberation)

7. "Too many!" James shouted, and slammed the door behind him.
The Dark is Rising, Susan Cooper
sennical

8. Mr. Salteena was an elderly man of 42 and was fond of asking peaple to stay with him.
Ed: Typo from text, and if that's not a hint I'm sure I don't know what is.

9. The Deliverator belongs to an elite order, a hallowed subcategory.
Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson
kphoebe

10. For the first fifteen years of our lives, Danny and I lived within five blocks of each other and neither of us knew of the other's existence.
The Chosen, Chaim Potok
sennical

11. There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
manic_subbie

12. When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle, everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen.
The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett
aim_toothpaste

13. Any Christmas visitor looking for Carnival's Hide dropped down from the hilltops by a shingle road that elbowed its way across the farmland already scrawled over by sheep tracks.
The Tricksters, Margaret Mahy
kphoebe

14. It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression "as pretty as an airport".
The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, Douglas Adams
mandor700

15. Women on their own run in Alice's family.
Pigs in Heaven, Barbara Kingsolver
sennical

16. When she was studying in the Silent Precincts, the Rodmistresses had warned her: If you're going to look for meaning in a dream, first make sure it's your own.
Door into Shadow, Diane Duane
chattycheese

17. Caroline stood in the summer rain with her head thrown back and her arms wide.
The World Around the Corner, Maurice Gee
shoeless_girl

18. One sunny morning in the spring of 1878, the steamship Ingrid Linde, the pride of the Anglo-Baltic shipping line, vanished in the Baltic Sea.
Shadow in the North, Philip Pullman
angry_in_pink

19. It was nearing midnight and the Prime Minister was sitting alone in his office, reading a long memo that was slipping through his brain without leaving the slightest trace of meaning behind.
Harry Potter & the Half Blood Prince, JK Rowling
aim_toothpaste

20. We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.
The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood
aim_toothpaste