Independence Day has always been two days off from my birthday, so I always pretend the fireworks are for me.

My fandom-buddies birthday party post is here.

For the occasion, via rahmbamarama:

At the request of Her Royal Highness waxbean, here is an open post for Gods know what. I don't know what she's up to, but I am intrigued!

At last I succumbed to the lure of Facebook. Unbelievable how many people are coming out of the woodwork and...the awesome thing...almost all are welcome!

Today begins the last week of my 30s.

This post has nothing to do with the fact that the pop culture of my childhood died twice today.

This has to do with all the posts on metafandom about the controversy about warnings. I don't think it can really be nutshelled, but it all arose out of some instances in bandom with dub-con or non-con fics not being warned for properly. One author apologized and added the warning, the other basically said, "Oh, fuck off, I don't wanna."

The posts have gone off in all sorts of fascinating directions. Some of the issues addressed include: (1) the difference between a trigger and a squick, (2) Whether the things that need to be warned for are obvious to everyone or not, (3) varying interpretations of "dub-con", (4) what to do in the case of very quirky or unusual triggers, which are no less intense for the people who have them than the more common ones, (5) whether or not fandom can ever really be a true "safe" space, (6) what about the possibility of warnings-creep (a.k.a. The Blair's Haircut Conundrum)

I have no ready answers to any of this. But I'm going to babble on anyway.

( Deep Thoughts (Warning: Know-nothing Wankery, Navel-Gazing) )

So I will continue to do what I've always done: warn to the best of my ability so I don't hurt people, but reserve my right to be puckish now and then. If something I have done or haven't done with any of my fic has seriously emotionally hurt you, please don't be afraid to discuss it with me.

I'm following shadowvalkyrie into perdition; I signed up for kink_bingo, and I got my card this morning! Wheee!

So I'm going to do what she did in this post and ask all my filthy-minded friends for suggestions!

( Behold, my prompts! )

So I'm looking for bunnies! I have some ideas already, but let me know what you see that I don't! Do any of these scream a particular pairing or scenario to you? Fandoms: Good Omens, Lord of the Rings/Silmarillion, Harry Potter, Historical RPF, US Politics RPF, Temeraire, His Dark Materials, Discworld, Hellblazer, plus some others I might be willing to try for the right bunny (LOST, BSG, Star Trek reboot, SPN, etcetera etcetera).

It's a very significant day for far too many Literature/Creative Writing majors (as I was), and still widely observed in Dublin.

It usually falls close to Father's Day, and my lit-geek dad will forgive me for forgetting Father's Day but not for failing to contact him on Bloomsday.

I did a dramatic reading at work tonight.

One of the multi-level-nerdiest things I have ever done--and between you and me, that's saying something--is the allusion I snuck into one of my ficlets for the Good Omens Anonymous Kink Meme, as revealed in this self-outing post. It's in the hurt/comfort "water" one, which, although the name of the ship is never mentioned, is clearly about Crowley and Aziraphale as "survivors" of the Titanic.

"Scrotum-tightening sea." (snickers like a 9-year-old).

Technically anachronistic, as Ulysses wasn't published until 1922. But of course the original Bloomsday was in 1904, and of course in my personal fanon the demon and the angel were both involved and the fourth wall was particularly thin that year (don't even ask about the fifth and sixth!); Crowley's friends were the book's characters and at the same time, Aziraphale enjoyed the occasional postprandial with Joyce himself. (Both claimed credit for his later treatment by the critics and obligatory status in lit courses).

So I decided things were kind of out of hand and went on a rearranging binge. It was going pretty well...until I tried to do something with the Closet of Doom. Then my precariously-balanced super-cheap super-fake Yule-tree-in-a-box fell out and hit me in the face.

I have a black eye. A real one. A shiner.

I can make it not-too-noticeable with makeup, but before that it is really quite shocking.

It looks like the sort of thing that no one will believe is entirely innocent.

My state's ex-governor's wife ate a tarantula on a reality show yesterday.

Bzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzt!

( the critics are raven over this one! )

Whew!

(photo by Martha, who came along to witness and is itchin' for a little scritchin' herself.)

Art by Pat Fish. Inkwork by Robert Hixon at Tomato Tattoo, Chicago

I have two Dreamwidth codes to give out! First two people to email me ( absentia.vulgarweed at gmail dot com) get them!


I'm giving myself an early birthday present tomorrow. (It's over a month away but it's a good birthday, it's got a 0 in it!) Something sizable, painful, and permanent.

I think I'll mostly be cross-posting but not always, since I'm not in the habit of Dreamwidth yet the way I am with LJ, so I'll be doing some unique posts to get the motivation up.

Some self-outing on GO Kink Meme shenanigans!
A little angel mpreg, a little het Antichrist-pegging, a little historical hurt/comfort. The usual.


Psst: Lonely kink meme is lonely!

I have two Dreamwidth invite codes to give out. First two people to comment with their email addresses get 'em. (Comments screened.)

I'm http://vulgarweed.dreamwidth.org/ as well.

Subscribe to me hard and grant me access all night long!

So today was an exciting day. I took my little girlfriend to the vet for the first time.

(Nothing wrong, but she's been a little wheezy so I thought a kitty-cold was a possibility, plus it's been a year so I figured OK, have her looked at and tuned up and get her shots updated--and besides, the vet throws in claw-trimming, which...yay!)

Madimi is a pretty quiet cat. She chirps and trills and purrs and snores and squeaks, but she very rarely meows. Until you get her outside in a carrier, and then it's pretty non-stop. Three blocks walk to the bus stop - yowl!yowl!yowl!yowl!. On the bus - yowl!yowl!yowl!yowl!. Everyone on the bus could at least see that I'm not abusing her whiny ass. Once we get to the vet, though, all is peace. She purrs and tries to fall asleep on the scale (12 lbs). She endures the rectal thermometer like the most stoic of ukes. She roams around the little room, noses open the cabinets, curls up in the sink, and licks the vet's hand. Vet says that if all her patients were this mellow, her days would be a lot easier. (!!!!!!)

On the way back, since she still hates being outside, very vocally, I hailed a cab to make it easier on both of us. Cab wound up being a minivan -- which I hate, because I always struggle in a very undignified way with the side door, but OK. Now, there's a speed bump on Erie St near my place, which is normally a good thing - but it's not a good thing when the cab driver is searching for street numbers and distracted by yowling cat, and doesn't see the damn thing until it's too late with a BANG and both human passenger (blaspheming loudly) and feline passenger in carrier (also presumably blaspheming, but I'm sure Bast can take it) go airborne and land sort of upside down on the floor. After ascertaining everyone was fine, the cab driver just sits there, apologizing abjectly, and I'm just too startled to be upset at all. If I were the kind of person who throws tantrums over stuff like this, it would have been a prime opportunity, but I'm just not. (I only regret that we were coming back from the vet and so I had already dropped off the stool sample. That would be something amusing to "forget" among all the contents of my purse I was fishing out from under the front seat.)

Madimi's already forgotten all about it, bless her evil little tiny cat brain.

I can read all of my friendslist again. divinetailor and I went to see the new Star Trek tonight.

I haven't grinned that hard through a movie in a looooooong time.

( not a review, just random things that should be kept from the spoilerphobic )

I remember how it was with Star Wars when I was a little kid: can we see it again now? huh? can we? can we see it again soon? Please? can we can we can we? Please? I wanna see it again! (Damn, I was annoying!)

I'm ecstatic about the response "Lomendánar" has gotten. I can't thank everyone who's helped and reviewed and recced enough - I was so afraid I'd lost my way in Middle-earth.

Speaking of recs, I'm doing Good Omens this month at crack_van. Only 12 recs allowed? Ouch. I will try to achieve a representative sampling while still keeping my picks stubbornly idiosyncratic.

Ah, success. My lgbtfest fic is done and posted!

The premise of the fest is to write stories that aren't just slash, but deal with possible actual cultural ramifications of what it means to be LGBT in different fictional milieus. The prompt I chose was for characters who not only live in a very different culture, but also have a reproduction method and sexuality that probably isn't very humanlike at all. They clearly do know love, and the loss thereof, though, in a way we can try to relate to.

Lomendánar (Little Love for the Things of My Love)

Fandom: Lord of the Rings (with some Silmarillion allusions)
Rating: PG
Prompt: What is life like for a gay Ent?

Huge thanks to my betas thrihyrne and tyellas. May your Entdraught never run dry!

So, because I'm a procrastinator...

Will anyone be around on Saturday to do a quick and dirty beta of my lgbtfest fic? It'll probably be about 3,000 words (absolutely no more than 5k).

LOTR, with allusions to the Valar and events in the Silmarillion time-frame. Rating probably PG-13.

Slashy, sad, and ENT-CENTRIC. (Major characters: Skinbark, Quickbeam, Treebeard. At this point in the writing there is about a 93% chance of a brief Tom Bombadil appearance.)

I deliberately requested a posting date as close to Beltane as possible. Although it is unavoidably turning out to not be a happy-happy-joy-joy kind of story, it is still my gift to Yavanna and the Green Man.

Guess who's got more cognitive stamina?

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/sciencenow;2009/423/5