Am I seriously seeing theoretically well-respected progressive blogs advocating banning movies? SERIOUSLY? Jesus Christ, people; you terrify me.

From "The West Wing":

Sam: There are a lot of hungry people in the world, Mal, and none of them are hungry 'cause we went to the moon. None of them are colder and certainly none of them are dumber 'cause we went to the moon.

Mallory: And we went to the moon. Do we really have to go to Mars?

Sam: Yes.

Mallory: Why?

Sam: 'Cause it's next. 'Cause we came out of the cave, and we looked over the hill and we saw fire; and we crossed the ocean and we pioneered the west, and we took to the sky. The history of man is hung on a timeline of exploration and this is what's next.

Thanks to thistlerose. And amen.

You can get it here in Austin. Lol.
http://austin.craigslist.org/zip/1279364640.html

Yeah, it's me. Been awhile since I posted on LJ, but since the majority of my friends list is of the Harry Potter fandom, I felt it was almost my duty to show up and comment.

Without being spoilery: HOLY CRAP DAVID YATES IS A FREAKIN GENIUS! He continues to impress me. Somebody tell me he's doing the finale. (Or two.) Tell me it's so!

Not only are his takes on the final stories a true-to-the-book representation that finally treats the series as parts of a whole (like they should be), this has to be the most drop-dead-hilarious movie I've seen in, well...a long time.

Yeah, I mean, Ice Age was fun, Up was cute and had me in stitches, but Half-Blood Prince simply had me ROTFL. Like the books, the movie captured the whole "how teenagers act in high school" without being emo or depressing. It's that odd, nostalgic, "was I that bad at that age?" feeling that I loved about the books in the first place.

Okay, rant/rave/whateveryoucallit over.

Title: Happy Campers
Recipient: for bossymarmalade in femslash09
Fandom: X-Men Comics
Pairing: Kitty/Jubilee
Rating: PG-13
Word count: ~1350
Disclaimer: The characters belong to Marvel.
Warnings: Spoilers for New Warriors and Joss's run on Astonishing X-Men.
Summary: This was really not how Kitty had thought the camping trip was going to go.
Notes: Many thanks to likeadeuce and wizefics for looking this over.

( Happy Campers )

I wrote a review of the Half-Blood Prince film adaptation, and I made my criticisms by comparing the Half-Blood Prince film to the Order of the Phoenix film. I felt it was an efficient way to go about the review, and I hoped maybe some of you might enjoy it.

The review is here: http://ireactions.livejournal.com/207047.html

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/RobinMckinleysBlog/~3/aVYxwhAUurI/

http://robinmckinleysblog.com/?p=2114

Someone who works at ABC sent me this link:

http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=8115612

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/RobinMckinleysBlog/~3/AxJxDFJ7E_w/

http://robinmckinleysblog.com/?p=2121

 

I thought this was too good to leave buried in the forum:

 EMoon wrote: 

 . . .  Relative pitch–I’m still struggling with it, but about a week ago actually *heard* a fifth as a fifth, listening to music on the radio.  

My musical moment of terror came last week, when our choir director, giving another alto and me a lesson (he gives a free lesson once a year to choir members who want it; this is the first time I’ve had the nerve), calmly announced that I was not a second alto (a self-definition that no other choir director has ever questioned) but a mezzo-soprano.  This after coaching that elicited from my mouth a sound I didn’t recognize as my own voice.  

Very scary.  I didn’t know what the definition of a mezzo was so came home and looked it up on the internet.  Very, very scary.  Low altos form a nice sort of continuo, well hidden in the rest of the choir except as they create color, but higher voices stick out.  It’s true, he bullied all of the altos into singing soprano in one movement of a horrid French requiem, even though it made us go up to an F# far higher than any of us thought possible.  And it’s true, I actually produced that note.  However, that was a fluke, and I was prepared to let it stay a fluke, and dive like a whale back to my natural range.  What I thought was my natural range.  

David, it appears, is determined to haul me up into the drafty attic of my head voice, which he assures me exists.  I remember, as an adolescent, warbling away up there with my totally untrained voice, but mostly I played the piano and (please no one hit me) accordion.  By ear, because I’m a pitiful reader, something else David is determined to push me out of.  (It does not help that I can never remember, when the accidental is the natural, which way to move…because I can’t calculate fast enough if the note that’s being natural is a sharp or a flat, and thus whether the natural is up or down.)  Not singing the note until I’ve heard my neighbor sing it is not an option in this choir. . . .

 Well, it seems to me you should be absolutely stinking with pleasure and pride.  I also figured that if you’d written that much here, surely you’d have written about it even more on your own blog, so I went looking.  

http://e-moon60.livejournal.com/188205.html#cutid1 * 

. . . And how absolutely brilliant of and for you.  I admit I wish I had ANY voice (worth developing) but you go with what you’ve got . . . When I first wrote an answer to this on the forum and then thought wait a minute I should post this, I said, let us know when you start composing. . . . And here in your own blog you mention writing music.  Is it out there anywhere???

 * * *

My sense of relative pitch is still very young and trembly and anxious.  I was about to say erratic, but actually it’s not erratic, it’s just . . . young and trembly.  Give me a moment and I’ll tell you what a sounded interval is, which sounds like a joke:  give me a moment and I’ll push that bicycle pedal around again.  You don’t have a moment, you have to sing/play the next note, you don’t have a moment, the bicycle will fall over.  I suppose I’m at the training-wheels/stabilisers stage of relative pitch:  what I’ve been thinking (partly as a result of reading EMoon writing about regaining some of the voice she’d had when she was younger) is that, young and trembly as it is, my new ear would have got me through the oral (or aural) exams in college that I bombed.  I’ve told you this story:  I screwed my grade-point average to take two semesters of harmony, silly twit.**  And I worked at learning to recognise intervals but . . . no.  Hopeless.  It was like trying to learn Mandarin with the Rosetta stone.  So this unlooked-for development in my middle age is pretty exciting—and perhaps like EMoon’s discovery of her voice, part of the pleasure is in that reconnection with something that you did when you were young and gave up for whatever reason . . . in my case because it was hopeless.  So the moral to this story is . . . it’s not hopeless.***        

However, at the moment, there is no way in San Jose that I could sight read and sing the notes as I read them–never mind my ability to hit notes (which does improve with practise). † I absolutely can’t make my sight-reading function that fast.  Yet.  I assume this will (also) improve with practise.  At the moment I’m chiefly using it for hums while hurtling, which I can then hum over and over and over till I’ve got what I really want.  And then I can come home and jot it down on music paper–and try a few chords on the piano–before I forget again.  Or start a new hum.

But it’s a start.  And it’s a start I didn’t think I’d ever have.

 * * *

 * And for anyone who hasn’t followed our EMoon away from Days in the Life’s forum here’s her home page: 

http://www.elizabethmoon.com/ 

** I also took a semester of introduction to opera.  And piano lessons.  And voice lessons.  This is not the place for a rant about our educational system, but I should have taken music courses, because I wanted to learn something about music.  I also realise that some kind of assessment has to be made to get people off their duffs and over to their desks, pianos, etc, and working, but I should not have felt I had to stop taking music because it was messing up my grades.  

*** Whatever you’re doing, if you want to keep doing it, do it. 

† The awful truth is that I long to join a choir.  My voice sucks, but when I’m in practise I can carry a tune, and there’s some not-very-demanding choir out there that would have me. 

              One of the things People Introduced to the Author most often say^ is, you have to be so self disciplined to do what you do.  Well . . . no.  Yes, but no.  And I’m sure it varies:  maybe some writers are very self-disciplined.  In my case it’s more a question of coming down with whatever it is, like a virus, which is Peter’s famous line about the speed at which I turned into a gardener:  I obviously had the disease in my blood, ready to wake into scary green life on exposure.   It doesn’t feel like being disciplined.  It feels like doing something or it’ll eat me alive—because whatever it is has woken in my blood, and is stronger than I am.   I write because it’ll eat me alive if I don’t.  Most of the stuff I do is like that^^, barring taking out the garbage, writing huge cheques to builders and so on.^^^

              But most of it also has at some point somewhere some mooring line with the rest of the world.  I earn my living, writing stories.  You can’t ring bells alone.  Other people see your garden.^^^^  I’ve had the conversation with Oisin several times now when I come in with something I’ve written and he says, hmm, this will be difficult for anyone but a really top professional, and my reaction is always no, no, I’ll change it, I’d much rather hope to get it performed some day. 

            I need to have to sing, if you follow me.  I want to be able to sing enough to sing some of my own stuff, but I need a boot up the backside to get me going.  I’m manifestly not self-disciplined enough just to do it. 

            But I think if I was out another evening a week Peter would divorce me.   Or maybe just forget who I was.  You get more forgetful as you get older.  One evening I’d show up for supper—after choir practise, say—and Peter would say, who are you?  And I’d say I’m Robin, your wife.  And he’d say, Robin?  I used to know someone named Robin.  Haven’t seen her in years.  I keep meaning to try and track her down.  We have two more story anthologies to get out. . . . ^^^^^

 ^ with, Where do you get your ideas? and, Have you ever written a real book? 

^^ there are mornings when it’s sheeting that I’d be very happy to stay indoors reading a good book if the hellhounds wouldn’t eat me alive. 

^^^ Yes, I am very lucky.  I know. 

^^^^And say, good heavens, is that a weed? 

^^^^^ Or possibly three

I rarely do these, but I thought this was particularly appropriate for this weekend. Work-related insanity aside, this weekend I got to spend time with my extended family for a huge 75th birthday bash for my Grandma.

My grandma, Mary Dyck nee Durksen was born on a farm in a small Mennonite town in Manitoba. She mentioned yesterday that she always expected to marry a local farmer boy, stay in the area, and go home every Sunday for faspa. Instead she married a city boy, and it was off to Winnipeg to start a new life.

Six children later, and there's something the whole family can agree on. My Grandma was and is a trailblazer, and an example to the entire family.

When she was fourteen, she had her grade eight education, and it was decided that she didn't need to continue her education. When her youngest child was fourteen, she decided to go take a few classes at the local Mennonite college on counselling. Around the same time she began working as a volunteer chaplin in the hospital. Fifteen years ago, when my Grandpa passed away, she was left to figure out what to do with the rest of her life. The answer came fairly quickly. A year later she was packed and off to Elkart, Indiana for Seminary. Shortly after she graduated - with a Masters in Divinity - she took a job as a full time chaplin for a seniors home in Kansas.

She retired from that position to come back to Winnipeg.

A couple years later she was doing pretty much the same thing here.

She retired again a few years back... But found herself still doing volunteer work so regularly, she decided to turn that into a part time position as well.

This is only one example of the many, many incredible examples of character, integrity and values in my family. They`re definitely something I treasure, and I can only hope that I`ve inherited at least a portion of it, and, God willing, will one day be able to pass the same on to my family.

I won second place in the Goldenlake Tournament. *blinks*

I've never placed in a fanfiction contest before.

::dances::

I made a plushie Delgado! Because it is completely appropriate. Oh, yes. If the Master ever saw the ways I represent his image he would not be pleased.

( more pictures )
x-posted variously

I was beginning to fear that the major US review journals were going to overlook Faery Rebels: Spell Hunter entirely, but then Booklist came through in a big way. The full review is subscription-only, but most of it is summary anyway, so I'll just share the Good Stuff:

... First-time novelist Anderson has created a vivid, dysfunctional world ... this is a highly readable, sophisticated tale of romance and self-sacrifice, and readers will hope for more from this talented new author.

Not a starred review, but it might as well be! I am much relieved. Thank you, Booklist!

*dances*

I was going to wait a couple of weeks before declaring it, but after spending the better part of two days writing what's under the cut, I realize that I couldn't expend so much effort if this wasn't absolutely my favorite of the films so far.

What follows is my best recollection of every scene in the film, as well as many reactions (and some pictures to break up the TL;DR). I'm going from memory, so something may be missing or out of order, but it's a pretty comprehensive look at the entire film. Therefore, I wouldn't recommend reading it if you haven't seen the film yet.

( Poof! Okay, slightly more than poof. :P )

IT IS FINISHED!!!

I, Wolveirnegal, have completed my epic quest to crochet every single regeneration of the Doctor from the famous British series Doctor Who.

*resists strange urge to sing the "We Did It' song from Dora the Explorer*

Preview:


( Cut for Info and Pictures! )

http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/RobinMckinleysBlog/~3/zh-f-YiwyG8/

http://robinmckinleysblog.com/?p=2093

Rearguard Action

A long time ago, I was one of 76 people (ranging in age from 18 to 32) who started out on a five-month officer cadet training course in the RAF. The object of those in charge of tormenting us over the five months was to see whether we could make it to the end of the course still sane and (possibly) worthy of receiving the Queen’s Commission. Two weeks of the course, roughly half-way through, involved capering in energetic and hair-raising fashion round an area of England known as the Thetford Training Area (which is in Norfolk, mostly) – or ‘out in the bundu’ in the Services’ patois of the time. 

Being in camp meant that all the theories about leadership that were being pumped into us in a bid to refine the character traits we had supposedly been selected for were put to rigorous  test. Every day, one person in each group (we were in ‘flights’ of 8 – 10 people, with all of us eight females on the course in one flight together) was ‘offered’ the opportunity to take on the leadership role and get the group through the various cross-country obstacle courses that had been set up by those in charge. My turn duly came round after a couple of days and, once we had all clambered out of the back of the three-ton lorry that dropped the groups off in their different areas each day, I was taken aside and given our task. We were to take charge of a fire-cart* and somehow – crossing two small rivers (which meant dismantling it and putting it back together again after getting the bits across via rope pulleys and pine-pole tripods we would construct)  and finding our way by map references – get the 10 miles to our rendezvous by a given time. I should add that this was November (and a chilly one), we were averaging about four hours sleep each night, and time for looking after ourselves in the sense of washing, eating, care of clothes, etc, was minimal. My task was to lead, inspire and motivate my colleagues in this task. 

Goodness, I hear you murmur, what fun it must have been… 

We had known that camp was coming, of course. We had eagerly gathered scraps of knowledge from those on the courses ahead of us and had devised what seemed like a small and cunning plan to help with one tiny element of it – we females (for some reason we didn’t mention this to our fellow men) had laid in a large stock of disposable paper underpants and were going to wear these under the usual attire of long johns and combat kit, thus removing one small washing chore and allowing ourselves, oooh, probably a whole six minutes extra sleep each day (we were only allowed to take three days-worth of clean clothes with us, heaven knows why…). Paper underpants, for those who weren’t around in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, were tough, reasonably durable, and we’d tried them out for comfort beforehand. Can you see where this story is going, yet? 

Anyway, back to the bundu… I will draw a merciful veil over the pain, grief and anguish of that long day. We got the accursed fire-cart across the countryside, swearing under our breath at the observers allocated to us (one of the training officers, and our own Flight’s sergeant for comfort). I tried at every opportunity to appear keen, decisive, and a tower of strength to my team, sometimes scanning the horizon thoughtfully, with a hand shading the fierce tropical glare of the English November sun from my steely blue eyes… We made pulleys of marvellous complexity that (mostly) worked. We only dropped one wheel, in one river, and retrieved it at the cost of a modest outlay in blood, skin, and dampness. We got – eventually – to the end point and my team collapsed into our three-tonner. I was drawn aside and told that my/our performance had been ‘quite reasonable’. 

On the way to that rendezvous there were – you will probably not be surprised to hear – one or two of those moments where life comes into startling focus. I remember the joy of realising that the moment in one wood where we had turned right on my say-so alone was, in fact, where the map and compass subsequently indicated we were correct to do so. I recollect the agony of forcing my (fit, 18-year old) body along the final couple of miles in the evening dark when all I wanted to do was lie down and die (in a suitably ladylike manner, of course). And I will never forget the gravely courteous tone of voice (‘just hold still a moment, ma’am’) and composed facial expression of our sergeant as he rescued me from the embrace of the previously unnoticed barbed wire strand running through the top of a hedge, at the top of a very steep bank leading up from the second river. I had tried to straddle over the hedge, you see, with the result that I had to be unhooked in a place I….couldn’t see for myself. The other members of my group were – curse them all – rolling on the ground on the other side of the river in a silent agony of mirth, where I’d left them when I went to reconnoitre the next stage. (I lost points for that –  should have sent someone else rather than done it myself.) 

When we got back into camp that night and headed for the showers, I think we’d all forgotten about the precise nature of our clothing layers. It had not been at the forefront of anyone’s mind during a day like the one we’d just had. There were shrieks of dismayed laughter from all of the shower stalls as we then peeled away the layers, to find that we were each wearing only three loops of elastic (waist + one for each leg) and a lot of paper fluff under the long johns. For heavens sake, why did the manufacturers not put on the packet that those underpants hadn’t been tested in rivers!  They were supposed to be hard-wearing, for goodness’ sake! And that fluff took a lot of removing… 

We were more circumspect for the remaining few days – enquiring each evening if the following day’s action was likely to include rivers and making alternative plans if it did (don’t ask). But I have never felt tempted to try paper undergarments again, no matter the supposed convenience.

 * * *

 * A fire-cart was a small two-wheeled, wooden vehicle, standing about two feet high at the axle and with handles at the front on the end of a six-foot carriage pole.

Hello all,

I recently read After the End (I know, I'm a little behind) by Arabella and Zsenya after about a year of consistent prodding to do so by a good friend. I wish I hadn't waited. It was an excellent piece of fan fiction.

I'm looking into using Lulu to print out of copy of the story to give to my friend as a Christmas gift. I think it would go over well. Here's the problem: the pdf version of the story I found somewhere (maybe the yahoo group?) is the wrong format for Lulu. I can't fix it, since it's a pdf. The pdf mentions that it was generated from LaTeX markup. I'm familiar with LaTeX, and I could make the changes I want if I could get a hold of it.

The yahoo group seems defunct, and an sent using Sugar Quill don't seem to have gone through. Do any of you know who I could get in contact with to get a hold of the LaTeX files? (Even better, do any of you have them?)

Thanks!