as a name/tag for the fandom, that is - is that the next movie* will be "Star Trek XII," and what an annoyance, IMO, to have a different name for the fandom with each movie.

Though I guess I can't disagree with using "Star Trek XI" as a tag for things relevant to that movie in particular, but in that case there also needs to be a higher-level tag/name that collects all things related to the Reboot/NuTrek/whatever universe.


*I am working on the assumption that it is highly likely that more movies will be made. Right? I can have more Trek, please?

This vid by sloanesomething made my day: Star Trek: Dance Floor.

NOT ENOUGH LADIES, TOO MANY MANS!!

Short story - if you want or need to knit a squishy puddle jumper, feel free to use the charts I created. PDF and notes are on Ravelry or just download the pdf.

Long story ( and photos )

In order to post patterns on Ravelry, you have to get set up as a designer, and as I learned last night, a designer needs to have a first name and last name. I was ready to take my username - papercuts - and become the designer Paper Cuts. But no, not allowed! Though I wasn't required to use my legal name - or even to pretend to use it - the first and last name had to be name-like. So I went with mr. semi's off the cuff suggestion: Trude Bjornson.

I sort of blame the bottle of wine, but mostly the fact that I just wanted to get the process *done* and didn't want to take the time to try to come up with a meaningful fake name. I much prefer pseudonyms that are clearly not "real"; for some reason using real names feels more fake to me.

Anyway - I had this notion that there was a Stargate craft/knitting LJ community, but now I can't find it, so maybe not?

fannish5: Name five fannish things that never fail to cheer you up.

Watching upbeat vids cheers me up! Here are five favorites:

Holding Out For A Hero by marycrawford. Also on imeem.
Fandom: Hercules
Music: Holding Out for a Hero, Jennifer Saunders
I have never watched Hercules, but I have probably seen this vid more times than any other - partly because it's mr. semi's absolute favorite vid. Truly hilarious!

One-Night Fandoms: A Tribute to Yuletide by eruthros and thingswithwings
Multifandom
Music: Angel of the Morning, The Pretenders
I am devoted to some tiny fandoms and it's fun to spot some my favorite sources in this vid. But I really love this because it's a window into some of the best things about fandom, the way fans come together, and the wide variety of sources that spark our imaginations.

The Real Slim Shady by giandujakiss
Fandom: Starsky and Hutch (& other assorted buddy cop shows)
Music: The Real Slim Shady, Eminem
Another vid that's fun to watch even though I've never seen the source. Cute doesn't seem like it should be applied to a vid to an Eminem song, but I do think it's cute, and also quite clever.

Another Sunday by jescaflowne
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Music: We Built This City, Starship
The Team and the City! All shiny and sparkly and very 1980s.

Scrapbook of My Life by mamoru22
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Music: All I Want Is You, Barry Louis Polisar
I could list quite a few happy McKay/Sheppard vids, but tonight I picked this one for the incredibly cute stick figures. And a wedding!

magnetic_pole is running two rec fests:

lgbtq_recs needs recs during June of "fun LGBTQ-themed books and movies (and tv shows and comic books and radio shows and short stories and anything else)" - read all about it and sign up here. Last June the members of this comm came with a really diverse set of recs.

api_recs, a community for book and movie recs about the experience of Asians living outside Asia, running from May 25-31.

I won hollywoodgrrl's vid-making skills in Sweet Charity, and she has just posted her fabulous, fabulous vid:

Liquid Bird. (Gen, action, all 5 seasons.)

It's exciting and fast-paced, but also nostalgic as it looks at the characters and all that they've been through, their connections and their losses. And mr. semi recommends watching: "It's really good!"

I have 2 invites for Dreamwidth, comment or email me with your email address if you would like one.

I am semielliptical on Dreamwidth, but have not decided what I'm going to do with that account. I have to admit that I am being a lazy follower on this one; if someday it becomes more convenient to use Dreamwidth as my primary journal account, I'll do that. But right now it would take time and energy that I don't have to figure out how I want to set myself up over there.

At some point I will sit down and figure out if any people or communities I really want to follow have moved over to Dreamwidth completely, and decide how best to keep up with them. But I think I will wait a few months to let things settle down a bit more.

Wallander starts on PBS tonight! It is based on a mystery series by the Swedish author Henning Mankell and stars Kenneth Branagh. A few short articles, if you're curious: here and here. One reason I enjoyed the books is that Kurt Wallander is in many ways an ordinary guy; even when he's in the middle of a murder case, he still has to take care of day-to-day tasks, like doing his laundry or getting his car repaired.

I am trying to get things done this weekend, and I'm mostly succeeding. I'm rewarding myself with Bones episodes; I hadn't watched in quite some time. The team cracked me up in the one set at their colleague's wake. (Or I guess I can look up the title: Double Death of the Dearly Departed.) Not subtle comedy, but I appreciated seeing a light-hearted episode.

So I've seen a few posts pointing to, and criticizing, a video interview with Don Symons, an evolutionary psychologist(?) who co-wrote a book about women's sexuality and slash, or something like that. Anyway, being my usual lazy and busy self, I hadn't looked into this too closely, but just now I read two informative/entertaining posts on the topic:

Slash and Teh Magick Testicles of Perspicacity, by Lauredhel - read this first, as it provides an overview of the original interview plus a witty critique.

And from fera_festiva: Introducing "lesbian porn" - a new erotic craze, led by men!, which made me laugh so hard I scared the cats!

So I won nestra in a previous Sweet Charity auction, and she agreed to write another story in her Counterpoint au. And here it is: Caesura!!

I love this John and Rodney for many reasons, mostly because they behave like a real established couple. Sometimes (often) they drive each other crazy, but they're clearly together for the long term. They make each other happy, and that makes me happy. :)


Also: less than 24 hours left to place bids at the current Sweet Charity auction!

If you are interested in fan charity events: Sweet Charity's final auction is running now through March 31! It benefits Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network. RAINN is the nation's largest anti-sexual assault organization.

I'm offering a knitted puddle jumper. Disclaimer: while my puddle jumper was inspired by the one Miko makes in pru's story 435, The Atlantis Local Stitch'n'Bitch Chapter, this is *not* an official or sanctioned product. :)

Since the market for a knit puddle jumper is rather small, I also encourage you to check out the many other fabulous items available in the auction!

My puddle jumper is not quite done. It will look a lot like the one I posted about last year (see photos below) but hopefully a bit better proportioned.






Other news of note: this evening marked the first beer-in-the-backyard of the season! Though I did wear two fleeces.

Last night I think I actually slept for 8 hours! In my bed! I've had a cold forever, and while it's finally getting better, the previous night I was still trying to sleep mostly-upright in the recliner. So sleeping like a normal person felt like a great accomplishment.

Most satisfying reading of the week: Some Thoughts on Epithets, and Why They Don't Work When They Don't Work, posted by crysothemis. My thoughts on epithets have always been simple but not very clear: for some reason they almost always pull me out of the story, and I don't like that. crysothemis explains that they do this because they break point of view.

The week before I found (I forget how) this older piece on epithets: Epithets: Fandom's Designated Hitters by Arduinna. She focuses on the usefulness of a name as an all-encompassing single identifier for a person, which makes the name (or a pronoun) preferable to a single-note epithet.

Sometime last year I tried rewriting bits of a few stories to see if I could eliminate the epithets. (These stories were overrun with "other men".) And it wasn't that hard! Sometimes I just needed to make a straightforward substitution, other times I needed to adjust a few sentences in order to end up with a reasonable flow of pronouns and names. Perhaps some people will find it offensive that I rewrote an author's work - though of course I didn't do anything with the rewritten files - but I found it to be an interesting and satisfying experiment.

Anyway, I would still like to understand why the use of epithets bothers some readers and not others. But I'm happy to understand more about why *I* don't like epithets.

I recently got a reply to one of my comments on a Yuletide story in which the author said that it was nice to get a comment after Yuletide had "finished." Which seems like odd phrasing to me. I mean, I understand that a lot of people enjoy reading and reviewing during the week of anonymity. But there is just no way I could finish even half of what I would like to read before the reveal, even if I were home the entire week. If I spend too many hours reading, all the stories and fandoms blur together, and that's not very satisfying.

This year I've been pretty systematic, working through the list of stories by fandom, and I just hit the Rs.

How do you read Yuletide? Do you find that your interest wanes after the authors are revealed? Do you love reading lots of stories in obscure fandoms, or do you only read a few stories from sources that you're very familiar with?


Today's fannish5:
Name 5 things from science fiction's vision of the future that you wish you had now.

( Ok, so *things*, not intangibles...hmmmm.... )

Lots of snow shoveling today, and a walk to the drugstore both because it was fun to walk through the snow and it seemed wiser not to take the car out to try to run errands. The rest of the errands can wait.

I recently heard about Harry Potter: The Exhibition, which will be in Chicago at the Museum of Science and Industry, April 30 - September 7 (and locations TBA later.) I got the news because my mom mentioned that an aunt and uncle are planning a trip to Chicago to see it, evidence that I am really out of the loop on all things HP.

But though I'm feeling distanced from my days of Harry Potter fandom at the moment, now that I know about the exhibit I feel like I'll regret it if I don't see it...maybe that's just my obsessive nature showing up. (If I can *possibly* see or read something, I should do it! This is why I watch every minute of a tv show when I'm in the fandom, even if I know very well that I won't like particular episodes.) I don't know; probably I would enjoy seeing artifacts from the movies, as I am still fond of Prisoner of Azkaban, and some aspects of the other films. I guess I can wait and see how my summer schedule works out.

I saw a link to De Re Coquinaria Pegasi: An Unofficial Stargate: Atlantis Cookbook a while ago, and thought, "Oh, that's cool, I'll have to check it out sometime."

Well, I finally got around to it, and I was wrong - this site is beyond cool, it is completely fabulous! Because not only does it have creative recipes related to SGA, many of them feature photos of action figures cooking and eating the dishes!! And companion stories!!

I just love examples of three-dimensional fan projects (even if I only get to view them on screen.) If I had the energy to follow recipes right now, I would be sipping Athosian Ruus Wine and nibbling some of Ma Beckett's Shortie Biscuits while perusing the rest of this delightful site.

I'm wondering about the appeal of public-restroom sex. In fiction, anyway!

Obviously, many other factors contribute to the hotness or not-hotness of a particular story, but I'm curious about general reactions to this scenario.

Poll #1300606 Sex where?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Sex in the restroom/loo:

Or is the location completely irrelevant to your enjoyment of a sex scene?

Poll #1296390 It's only Wednesday night?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Red wine on the wool rug! What to do?

When I got home this evening, I put on my ipod and cleaned the kitchen and the bathroom and put away summer clothes and paid bills and vacuumed and did anything I could in order to limit the amount of time I would spend sitting and being anxious while there wasn't any real news.

Now I've given in and I'm clicking between a few websites while mr. semi is flipping channels on the tv. It's hard not to be anxious even though it looks like I have every reason to be hopeful. I've been on the verge of tears a number of times over the last several days and I'm going to be so fucking relieved when this election is finally over.

It was an absolutely gorgeous fall day today, and walking through our neighborhood to vote almost felt like a dream. No problems at our polling place, we went at 9am to avoid the before-work lines. Filling out the ballot took most of the time, because I filled out the entire ballot instead of using the straight Democratic ticket choice. I really, really needed to fill in the little circle next to Obama's name.

( Thanks to the SGA writers... )

Hi! I see that it has been another month since I last posted. But now I am home after two back-to-back conferences, and I won't be working as many weekends for the rest of the term. I have plenty of work waiting for me, but I think I should also have a little more time for fandom. (crossing my fingers!)