How I Wonder (original) (raw)
Yuletide!!! So psyched to be a part of this again. Thank you, writer, for contributing to any of these tiny great fandoms!!
General fanfic likes/dislikes:
I love stories that mess around with perspective and time. I prefer plot, but I like character vignettes, too. I'm fond of allusions to canon and other works, related or not. Tropes are my JAM--trope-tastic, inverted, subverted; the more lampshades the better!
I love gen, het, and slash, but I would prefer nothing very explicit, crack-tastic--though in Galavant I'm willing to suspend more disbelief, ofc--or very AU (I am not a fan of high school or coffee shop AUs, for example).
Elder Scrolls Online
Raynor & Kireth's adventures in Tamriel or Coldharbour?
Or...
Something fun about Razum-dar and Queen Ayrenn? How they met, a disguised night out on the town, terrible advice Razum-dar has given his Queen?
Or...smashing the four together post-Coldharbour, as Raynor & Kireth wander across borders into the Aldmeri Dominion?
I ADORE Raynor & Kireth Vanos so much. (I'm actually planning a Skyrim character to be a descendant of theirs.) Kireth's spirit and Raynor's...Raynor-ness had me searching for every opportunity to hang out with them in ESO. How did they get started as adventurers? Were they the sort of kids who read wild adventure stories as an antidote to their boring lives? Where did they go prior to meeting the Vestige? Or after getting out of Coldharbour? (I've only done the Orsinium and Thieves guild DLC. No incest please!)
Razum-Dar and Ayrenn: Well, Razum-Dar is just great, and there's something really compelling to me about Ayrenn's relative novice status but steadfast devotion to leading her people. I actually haven't finished the Aldmeri Dominion side of ESO yet, but I'm okay with spoilers. Mainly I just want to see Razum-Dar and Ayrenn having some fun: as friends, as lovers, either is fine.
Tigana
The depths of love and rage, or something about what it takes to fight. I admit to being partial to redheads, but all of these women have amazing strength and determination in their own ways.
Tigana is the first Guy Gavriel Kay novel I ever read, and it is still my absolute favorite. Honestly, anything about the amazing women who fight for history would be great.
Galavant
Galavant-style meta-anachronistic song-and-dance shenanigans about women's work in a pseudo-medieval context? :)
Huh, I guess my theme for Yuletide this year is Badass Royal Women. (And other equally great non-royal women!) So...what are the women of the realm up to after the end of the show? Are Isabella and Roberta really going to hang up their swords? Where has Gwynne gone? Or, what's it like to learn how to be an evil queen?
Yuletide Recs Pre-Reveal (1/?)
December 29th, 2015
( two gifts and 27 recsCollapse )
(guess who forgot how to cut text in lj and had to redo this like five times)
so apparently Star Wars is THE fandom that will always, always, always suck me right back in
December 23rd, 2015
I don't have a Star Wars icon(?!), so Harrison Ford as Indy will have to do.
Yeah. Holy shit.
I may have a longer essay about What Star Wars Means To Me to write, but right now all I want to do is scour the internet for press I haven't read or videos I haven't watched, refresh AO3 for new stormpilot or OT3 fic, or...work on the next chapter of this fic that apparently I'm writing now?
I didn't write a single fic last year, not even for Yuletide. This year I've written four: two for Jupiter Ascending, my Yuletide fic (forthcoming), and this multi-chapter stormpilot thing that KEEPS HAPPENING IN MY BRAIN.
You never forget your first fandom, even if three prequels get in the way.
ETA: haha, clicking my own damn star wars tag revealed I DID make a bunch of Star Wars icons for myself, just never got them in the system. :P
an old procrastination ritual rears its ugly head
December 5th, 2015
In undergrad, right around my sophomore and junior years, I would procrastinate the hell out of papers by writing other stuff. A quick dive into my XF fic folder (oh lord there are some real bad ones in there) puts a lot of them as written right around midterms or finals.
And now here I am, thirteen/fourteen years later, trying to compel myself to write a frigging 4-5 page, double-spaced essay (and, tbh, the rest of an IRB proposal) and I keep finding myself working on my Yuletide fic instead. As in, RescueTime tells me I've put in at least 7 hours over the last five days into the fic, and...like...an hour and a half on the IRB...and forty-five minutes on the outline for the essay.
Well, at least I know I can actually bang out a bunch of words when the spirit moves, right? Let's hope I can channel this into prospectus writing next semester.
(HA.)
October 24th, 2015
YAY!!! End-of-the-year fic party time!! Thank you, writer, for your love of whatever fandom we matched on!
General fanfic likes/dislikes:
I love stories that mess around with perspective and time. I prefer plot, but I like character vignettes, too. I'm fond of allusions to canon and other works, related or not. Uh, what's going to probably become pretty clear from the details below is I really, really love the pairing of someone expert in a system with someone really novice to it. Tropes are my JAM--trope-tastic, inverted, subverted; the more lampshades the better!
I love gen, het, and slash, but I would prefer nothing very explicit, crack-tastic, or very AU (I am not a fan of high school or coffee shop AUs, for example).
October 26th, 2014
It's that time again!! Hooray!! Thanks, yuletide author, for signing on for this round of tiny fandom shenanigans :D
General fanfic likes/dislikes:
I love stories that mess around with perspective, time, expectations. I prefer plot, but I like character vignettes, too. I enjoy reading long descriptive passages; I like quick, challenging dialogue. I'm fond of allusions to other works, related or not, but detailed references to canon are also welcome.
I love gen, het, slash. I would prefer nothing very explicit or very AU (I am not a fan of high school/coffee shop AUs, for example).
I love critiques of social inequalities (probably best suited for Sleepy Hollow and Dreamsnake, but Eureka has possibilities for this too) and narratives of resistance.
Specific fandoms:
( Sleepy HollowCollapse )
April 5th, 2014
So as to stave off impending intellectual burnout (haha, too late), I went to museums today instead of morning and early afternoon sessions. Specifically, the Penn Museum of archaeology and anthropology, and the Mutter Museum--there will come a day when I cannot use a student discount again, but today is not that day!
The Penn Museum is clearly On The Ball with regards to making changes and visitor studies. I started with the North American hall, which looks to have been redone fairly recently, with great use of touchscreens to allow visitors to learn more about objects and their creators. The mix of objects in the displays was really cool, too; instead of by American Indian tribe, culture or time period, it was based around a theme, like celebrations, or sacred spaces. Thus, there were archaeological, historic, and contemporary art objects in each case. Really cool.
From that hall, I went into the Mesoamerican gallery, which focused heavily on Maya and other Mesoamerican cultures that predated Maya. I have NEVER been that close to stelae before (I could put my face right on them if I didn't, y'know, know not to do that.) It definitely made me once again regretful that I dropped the Aztec, Maya, and Inca class in undergrad...
The next hall, "Imagine Africa," was definitely geared towards obtaining visitor feedback and prompting reflection. They provided dry-erase markers to write on the walls in response to various questions about content and themes; I wrote a long response on one that probably took up all the space--fortunately it seemed difficult to erase my writing without the proper tools, so at least I know it'll be read by someone and not simply get wiped off by a visitor who wants to write something too XD
And then I went downstairs to the Sphinx.
I was BLOWN AWAY by the space. There is the sphinx, seated in front of several columns, all softly lit from below--the columns are AMAZING, and again I was really surprised at just how close I could really get. My museum and archaeologist identities are both strong enough to overcome the child "OMG I COULD TOUCH THIS" identity, but it was...really hard to resist wanting to touch the hieroglyphs...but seeing that one of the columns had PAINT on it definitely curbed my "want to touch" feelings.
Also...yeah. I am BLOWN AWAY by the fact that there are parts of an Egyptian temple in this museum. I mean, how likely is it that I'm going to go to Egypt and get to see these places for real? So that is really, really amazing--but, on the other hand, WHY DO WE HAVE PARTS OF AN EGYPTIAN PALACE IN THIS COUNTRY WTFFFFFFFF (You can see where the columns were cut so they could be transported. Sigh.) It's a seriously amazing Egyptian collection, but my anti-colonial sentiments had me going >_< a lot.
Cruised around the rest of the museum quickly so I could get to the Mutter Museum next with my friend Mike. Which was just wonderful--I think they negotiated the tension between "this is the history of medical teaching and learning, here are the very prosaic facts" and "ewwwww" really well. The coolest (recent) exhibit was on Grimm's fairy tales and the body. (I do, however, feel like it does sidestep questions of how oppressed and marginalized groups tended to get exploited for medical purposes--there were several skulls on the wall labeled "gypsy", for example, and a couple of suicides that were related to abject poverty...so...yeah...)
Mike took me out to lunch since we haven't spent much time together this semester, and then I went to the session on digital badging. I'm now charging my phone (took a TON of photos at the Penn Museum) and then going to head over to the reception my school is having tonight. On the agenda tomorrow...some more sessions and I have GOT to get some more work done. I keep doing little bits here and there but I feel like I'm going to be behind when I get home. :P
April 4th, 2014
I'm trying to write every day. It's slipped a bit from "writing in my perpetually unfinished fantasy novel" to "writing *about* my perpetually unfinished fantasy novel" to "i will blog about my day", but I feel like at least I need to WRITE SOMETHING (and then I will go write in my perpetually unfinished fantasy novel).
This weekend I'm attending the American Educational Research Association (AERA, which rinnaldo will attest I am fast at slurring and not enunciating properly) conference in Philadelphia. Yesterday was my travel day...beginning at 3:40 MDT in the morning and ending at 4:00 EDT in the afternoon. It had snowed, so I sludged through our neighborhood in my less-professional but much tougher Keens to the bus stop to go to the airport. Sleeping on the bus was surprisingly hard--I usually can get back to sleep anywhere, anywhen, as long as I haven't had caffeine (and I hadn't). But I managed to sleep the last half hour to the airport; probably not a coincidence that's the super dead stretch. Got through security SO fast because DIA's randomly passing people through to the pre-check/clear/whatever they're calling it now line (this is the third time in three flights that I've gotten to do it). Then I sat around at the gate for a long time, which both assuages my pre-flight anxieties about MUST GET TO THE NEXT PLACE EARLY and fosters my NOW I HAVE TO WAIT frustrations.
Boarded the plane, and...discovered this lady sitting in my seat. She said "Oh, I switched with her back there so she could sit next to her husband." Um, that's nice, but...that's still my seat, and I have the boarding pass to prove it. Lady with her husband figured out that she had swapped away the wrong seat. >:( It's a full flight. Don't swap seats--especially when you don't seem to know where you were actually supposed to sit!! The plane backed out from the gate and then...didn't make the turn to go down to the runway. We sat there, and eventually the captain came on to tell us there was a mechanical issue. The short version is that we were delayed (by both the mechanical issue and having to be de-iced) for two and a half hours. I did manage to get some sleep while we were sitting around, though.
Got to Philly and remembered that one of the primary investigators on my research project was on a flight that would be arriving at the same time--and that he was planning to take a cab to our 4:00 meeting. Managed to get ahold of him and then we went out to North Philly to visit one of our project sites, which was really cool; the kids there are doing really amazing things, including building an Earthship and becoming entrepreneurs. I got to hold a baby chick, too. :)
Today I actually went to the conference :D I attended three sessions: the first one was really good, on scaffolding in informal learning contexts. I took a lot of notes there. The second was kind of an "um, duh" session (turns out that attending libraries, museums, zoos, and aquaria make a difference for children's academic achievement, particularly in science, and that there are differences in how different demographics attend each of these types of institutions...) but the discussant raised some really good epistemological questions. The last session was on games (I know everyone will be shocked that I went to sessions on MUSEUMS and GAMING), but I went to it specifically because of the games that teach students about college and applying to college--kind of tangential to the research that I'm involved with this year. It was pretty cool. I'm playing one of them right now (Mission: Admission).
Food-wise...trying to stick to a $30 a day budget (less if possible, gonna shoot for much less tomorrow). Last night I had Moroccan/Mediterranean; today I had a cheesesteak (obvs) for lunch and sushi for dinner. The wide array of stuff at the Reading Market looks AMAZING but it's so crowded in there :P
Also, Chinatown is REALLY close to the convention center. I plan to get some char siu buns, for sure.
the house of thunder and lightning (aka josie thinks about that fantasy novel again)
February 5th, 2014
The last couple of days when I can't sleep, I've been mulling over the characters in my eternally-unwritten fantasy novel, and how I might develop them, and their cultures, further. Seems like a useful endeavor, possiblymaybe? I know I desperately need to write more, and often when I'm procrastinating writing for school I can do so by writing for fun?
(I also have all these Skyrim fanfics that aren't being written, either.)