vic_ramsey

I AM the best brother ever!

I bought Emmy a funky necklace as a parentally acceptable Christmas gift and also this weird otaku-j'punk video game about assassins that she will undoubtedly have to wait until our parents are out of the house in order to play. It is the perfect cool-older-brother gift and might also be good career training should she choose a lucrative life of high crime.

YOU HAVE ACHIEVED: SHOPPING FOR ADOLESCENT SISTER
YOU WIN: SIBLING STREET CRED +20

Now I have to figure out what to buy Mama Tickey. This is potentially just as difficult, but way fewer cool points are at risk.

Mum and I amuse each other.

She sends me random packages, but I get my own revenge of a sort. I sent her my Christmas list today, and she apparently had much LOL over it. It's short, because I don't have many needs that aren't being met right now. I asked for an Italo Calvino book, something from the CTA gift shop, a Wii game ("I like puzzles, and adventure, but not a lot of explosions and guns, maybe something like Zelda?"), a PeaPod gift card, and a magnetic poetry set. Apparently last year's list actually got passed around her office for the amusement of the masses. Not that I can blame her.

Otherwise all is mostly quiet. I was writing a little tonight and wrote the phrase "it was a constant silent defiance that made him glad he'd never had teenagers" and then thought that looked stupid so changed it to "he'd never tried raising kids" and then thought that wasn't quite right, so I started to delete it. But I clicked in the wrong place and ended up with "it was a constant silent defiance that made him glad he'd never tried raisins."

THE RAISINS. THEY DEFY ME SILENTLY.

Saw this over at Andrew Sullivan's blog and had to share -- so beautiful:

Fourth Estate's twenty-fifth anniversary

Fourth Estate are publishers located in the UK.

Do you miss the old days of role-playing, when people worked for story-lines and didn't expect things handed to them on a silver platter?

Do you miss the days when games were about posting threads and logs, not LULZ AIM chats and macros? Or about content and plot, not about popular faces, challenging each other's holds, and who has the best icons?

Do you struggle to find places to advertise when communities like ~rps and ~pbads push your ads off the page within hours?

Do you wish you could find games like that still and don't know where to look for them?

Welcome to Old School RP. This is the ad community you've been missing.

oldschoolrp

I feel like Homer Simpson in that Halloween episode of The Simpsons that spoofed The Shining. Except instead of television, it's the Interwebz that has me going into murderous withdrawal and encroaching insanity.

See, I have satellite internet. Most of the time, it's pretty damn good and it's the only thing that I could get, living where I am. Unfortunately it has two major drawbacks: a) it's an invisible beam going up to a satellite in the sky, so if there's heavy clouds or rain or a tree in the way, service gets interrupted (have I mentioned that I live in OREGON? In the COUNTRYSIDE? With fir trees that reach two hundred feet and a six-month rainy season?); b) I have a monthly download cap that, if I or anyone in my house exceeds, our bandwidth gets chopped in half. They do this to prevent pirating.

So, I missed the Sons of Anarchy season finale and couldn't find it anywhere on the TV schedule on repeat, and chose to download it. Surprise surprise, that put me over the usage cap. So for the next week we're puttering about on lowwwww Internet capabilities.

*fingers her axe* (And that's not a euphemism.)

*****

Another thing I hate about living out here: the way the men in my hometown treat women. Either we're sex objects or we're non-existent. I had this really driven home for me last night when these two regulars came into the pub. They're a married couple who are amicably divorcing, so this was sort of their last night out on the town together before she moved out.

Now, they seem pretty cool and the guy's all right on the (very) relative scale of guys I see around me; but it was amazing to see how she just...disappeared. He started talking to my male coworker and another guy at the bar, and NONE OF THEM referred to her by name. It was "my wife" or "your wife" and shit. Every time she started to say something, one of the guys would talk over her. It wasn't even hostility on their part, it seems like the divorce was totally a case of "your life is going in that direction, mine is over here, I'm sorry, I still love you." They just didn't see her as a human being.

I finally slid down to the end of the bar to chat with her because I felt so bad. She's clearly an awesome person (I heard her taking one of the guys to task for being a homophobe) and turns out to be an artist (she's gonna send me her portfolio so maybe she might be a comic book illustrator for me!), but none of that mattered to any of these guys. They didn't even refer to her by name (AMELIA, MOTHERFUCKERS, HER NAME IS AMELIA, JESUS). It was fucking unbelievable.

*STELE3 SMASH PUNY BAR PATRONS*

Man, winter showed up on Monday and settled in. No lead up, no warning, just all of a sudden WINTAAAAAAR.

It's snowy here, and what my best friend in undergrad used to call "buttfuckin' cold". I'm not sure if that was an indication of what kind of sex was required to warm up, or some kind of metaphor, or maybe she was comparing the pain of being outside to surprise buttsecks. But it seems apt, on some primal level.

I have christened the steps of my new building by falling on my ass on the ice this morning, so that's over with.

In other news and for grate internet linkage:

dramaturgca pointed me this morning to The Ultimate Geek Crossover, Star Trek characters done up in steampunk.

I've been meaning to post this for a bit: abigail_nicole, at the behest of an anonymouse on my journal, has created a Sam's Cafe group on Ravelry, for cafegoers who do things with yarn. Go ye forth and purl, or something. :D

And finally, juniper200 tossed me a story wherein John Barrowman's peen is so powerful that even though he only took it out on the radio, the radio, the BBC has been forced to apologise for him exposing himself. I can only imagine that his cock somehow came through the radio speakers and earfucked some poor asshat who bitched because he was ashamed of how much he enjoyed it.

Hey, so remember my teeny tiny Christmas tree? I asked you guys for words to make into Christmas ornaments, and you...certainly did oblige.

It's time for SAM'S READ AND LEARN CHRISTMAS ORNAMENT EXTRAVAGANZA.

I figured since I'm probably not going to use very many of them (see: Mum sending me a fuckton of ornaments) I would turn all the words you gave me into ornaments and set them loose on the internet to see what they may wreak. I made three tree-toppers, two garlands, and several pages of ornaments of varying sizes. All are laid out onto American standard 8.5x11 paper, most in Landscape orientation, so they should print on American paper fine and on A4 paper with some rather excessive margins.

If you look at these pages and don't see your word, drop me a line and I'll add it in -- there's a little space left over specifically for words I may have inadvertently missed.

A preview, with sized-down versions of the final pages, is available ( under the cut! Image-heavy, fair warning. )

There are a couple of ways to acquire these pages. For people who just want to print 'em out, there is a PDF file available from Sendspace (megaupload mirror here). If you'd like to fuck around with the JPGs, there's a completed zip file also available from Sendspace (megaupload mirror here). Or you can go to my Livejournal Scrapbook and download single images if you just want one specific page.

Crafty tips:
For all pages, I'd recommend either printing them on card stock or gluing regular printouts to card stock (if you want the ornaments to hang around -- HA, see what I did there? -- for a while, I would use acid-free spray adhesive) before cutting them out. When I make paper ornaments I often glue the backs to construction paper, which adds some colour. Little kids think this is MAGIC. How is the paper two colours at once?

For the garlands, you can punch holes in each letter and tie them together with string, but that gets time-consuming. Easier is to glue the letters along a strip of ribbon or onto the links of a paper chain.

For the tree-toppers, I'd recommend gluing a bit of wire between the topper and its backing, then twisting the wire into a coil that you can settle over the top of the tree. Or, only glue the very edges of the topper and backing together, like a seam, leaving the bottom open. Then fit the pocket that creates over the tree. With the Doctor Who topper in particular you could probably also make the bottom word into a circle, glue it together, and settle it on the tree.

But, you know. It's your art! Go to town, do what you want, have fun.

I am reading a lot more since I found out that I can special order books to be sent to my branch library. :D

I don't know how I actually came across The Great Pretenders, though it may have been one of those books I grabbed off a shelf or a display at the library because it looked interesting. It's subtitled The True Stories Behind Famous Historical Mysteries, and it's written by a doctor who takes a decidedly medical, scientific approach to some of the "Pretenders" of history -- people who have claimed, or been acclaimed as, royalty and nobility who died years before. Jan Bondeson has written a handful of books in a similar vein, exploring medical mysteries and the psychological roots of live burial, among other things.

The Great Pretenders presents the historical facts of various cases of assumed identity, then delves into rumour and gossip, then returns to fact with an assessment of the proofs and sometimes DNA testing to settle the question once and for all. It explores the mystery of the missing Dauphin who, on his father's death, became Louis XVII; the true identity of Kaspar Hauser, whom some saw as a European prince; the connection between a Russian Tsar and a hermit in Siberia; two people claiming noble blood that they might not have a right to; and whether or not an eccentric English nobleman posed as a cabinetmaker in the late 19th century.

( The Review. )

Final Verdict: If you're interested in history or in the techniques used to debunk popular historical myth, it's a good read and reasonably fast. You can skip the bits that bore you and not lose much along the way, and certainly I'd never before read about most of these people so it was definitely an education. Worth a fetch from the library or a purchase in a second-hand shop; I wouldn't buy it at full-price, but a bigger history buff than I am might not think it was money wasted.

Aaaaand ( Quotes! )

Further in the series of fanfic stories that I want, don't want to write and no one will write for me...

I want the Pretty Woman story where Edward follows exactly in his father's footsteps: marries the poor Vivienne and eventually ends up cheating on her and divorcing her for someone richer and more appropriate. I don't really want Vivienne and Edward to end up bitter enemies or anything, I just want something about Edward's inelasticity to change and how he shoots himself in the foot with it and a Vivienne who feels bad for him and did her best to change/help him but in the end, had to go her own way and not be Edward's Pygmalion anymore. And she's okay and Edward's kind of not.

Um. Or something.

So.

This taking a break from writing thing.

I may be in withdrawal. Either that or I'm psychic and a giant meteor is about to decimate the planet. The formless dread and aimless restlessness are hard to tell apart. I feel like I'm supposed to be doing something.

If it's the meteor? Been nice knowing you all.

Also, this taking a break from writing thing, means I am already doing serious damage to my to read pile of books. This will shortly lead to me and Amazon doing serious damage to my pocket book, I fear.

dw_fest is a challenge community, inspired by slashfest @ LJ with the difference that this fest is limited to Doctor Who, Torchwood and the Sarah Jane Adventures (and any other show/movie/etc related to them)
- For questions, check out this post
- Rules can be found here
CLAIMING PROMPTS IS OPEN! Go check them out here

tv_icontest is a multifandom icontest. Every challenge will be centered around a different TV Show.
The current challenge is all about Sarah Jane Adventures. Entries are due on 6 December (Saturday). To enter go here.

10prompts is a challenge community for fic writers. Right now there are 10 tables (10 prompts each) to pick from. All fandoms as well as slash, het and gen are welcome. All questions can be asked in the rules post.

harry_slash is for stories, art and anything else that features Harry Potter in a slash pairing. It's open for any rating and pairing (as long as it features Harry and is slash of course ;) ). Any questions left? Ask here.

stargate_xover is a place where you can post anything that's a crossover with either of the Stargate series. Any rating and any pairing is welcome. Questions can be asked here.

dw_threesomes is for any and all threesomes for Doctor Who, Torchwood and the Sara Jane Adventures. Comment here for questions.

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icon_help is a place to share tips about making icons, post tutorials and questions. You're also welcome to share locations(!) of resources such as screencaps, brushes and textures you like to use.

asylum_adoption

For people who want to give away Asylums they have created but no longer want

( Graphic under cut )

Your Song is a present day RPG that takes place at the fictional Presley School for the Performing Arts in Yonkers, New York, just outside of New York City.

Students must audition for a specialty (dance, music, art, technical theatre, drama) to obtain a coveted spot at this prestigious academy.

All characters in the game are based on famous songs!

Characters are in their junior and senior years of high school, and must be pursuing some career in the arts.

So why don't you tell everybody that this is your song by placing a hold today?

MANY songs are still available, and almost any song will be allowed as long as you can create a character that is in the essence of the original song.

Launch Game Information in New Window

Presley School for the Performing Arts ♫ Game Rules
Characters ♫ Holds ♫ Application

your_song ♫♪♫ your_mods ♫♪♫ your_ooc

neutralground Via liferphoenix I dare you to do something different.

I have cleaned my desk! I found two credit cards, $17.45, and many coupons. I have scanned all there was to scan, and I really should do a Photo Update soon but I have to clean out my "Current Photos" folder first. Getting to be time to make my photo yearbook, too (and print out last year's). I like the photo books; they're a slim, pleasant way of documenting the year. Walgreens does them up nicely and for about the same cost as anywhere else.

I now have neat piles of "Stuff that needs to go into a poster frame", "Stuff I need to deal with tomorrow", and "Bookmarks". I put old cards and letters into books, which is a habit Mum got into so that now, when I go home, occasionally I'll take down a book from the shelf and find a letter from Gran in it. It's rather nice, though after Gran died Mum didn't go near the books for a few weeks. Makes sense.

I have done laundry and taped my rent check to the doorknob so that I can't leave without remembering to put it in the Rent Check Box downstairs. I was going to do some Christmas shopping online today, but stupid Windows 2008 saved my shopping list as a ".docx" file and docx is apparently not backwards compatible, since I can't open it in OpenOffice or import it into GoogleDocs. I don't know what I've bought for whom! CHAOS!

I also hung up a curtain over my kitchen door window so now, if I want, I can cook naked. :D It's a typical work-with-what-ya-got curtain: two nails, a bit of picture-hanging wire, and half a shower curtain with holes cut in it (the other half is hanging in front of my bathroom window, blocking the draft). The place is sealed up pretty tightly, which is nice.

I spoke to Mum about staying here for a couple of years and she thinks it's a good idea; the housing market may be ripe for the picking but I need to build some credit and frankly I like it here, plus I got the parental stamp of approval for it in terms of location and setup. Hilariously, when she arrived, she oohed and ahhed over my hardwood floors and then immediately started measuring EVERYTHING -- counters, windows, floor space -- for various improvements.

I think she's really come round to the idea of me living in Chicago, which is nice. We could both wish that she lived a little closer, but you can't have everything and anyway she's the one who decided to move to Texas. :D

rufusfans is a small, friendly asylum dedicated to Rufus Wainwright (and family) with postings of anything and everything. Currently there are frequent news updates with links and there have also been graphics/icons posted and concert reviews from members.

Please take a look and join us if you like the Wainwright/McGarrigle family!

( Sunday (continued) )

( Sunday (part 1) )

And jack_and_ellis has been updated!

You can find Chapter Thirty-Seven: Revelations by following the link. Ellis meets a doctor, Jack meets a chef, and the Wiradjuri tribal elders meet a very different Clare Fields...