Inclined to fangirl.

So, I've just finished three weeks of luxurious lethargy wherein I stayed up so late over so many nights that I actually managed to reverse my sleeping schedule from 8AM wakeup and Midnight pillow-hitting to 8PM wakeup and dozing off around noon. It was like the longest saturday morning lie-in EVER.  So restful.
But now I'm back in Collette dorm in Lake Charles doing my third summer of behind-the-scenes duties before the gifted kids get here.
So far we've had one 4 hour-long meeting, I've laughed and had a few silly moments with my friends the returning counselors and...my friends, the new counselors. My big thing of yesterday was folding and packaging all the uniform shirts that will be handed out to the students on Day One (this Sunday). For three years running now, I've done shirts, progressing from minion to chief - I like that folding and labeling the shirts is my 'thing'.
This year is going to be my busiest, most stressful yet - organization and fundraising for senior activities and senior trip! I'm the senior counselor, aka counselor for the senior girls this year -  The ambiguity over my title doesn't matter too much, since I am also one of the longest serving counselors now - Me, Blaire, Zealon, and Kirkland have all been here three years. Kenneth has also been here three years of course, but he is Coordinator of Housing this year ( a post he was *destined* to fill) and so not actually a counselor. The New girls this year are Ajantha and Lauren - Lauren has been one of my best friends since we were roomates togeather GPGC '01 and '02 and Ajantha was also part of the Class of '03 though she didn't stick around for her senior year~!
What I'm saying is, we all know each other. It's great to be IN on the cabal of people who've know each other since they were children.
Last year and certainly the year before, it was a tinge uncool to be with all these incumbent counselors - I always suspected they knew better and could handle more than I could. Well, I'm right about that - I'm so immature in my head still.
I always though you mind just sort of grew up without you having to work at it, just like your body does. Nope. I'm just as mature at 20 going on 21 as I was at 15 going on 16. It's just that I'm a *very mature* 15 at heart. Alot of my A&M friends have said much the same - they don't yet *feel* grown up, even though they and I are only a year away from graduation.

Hapily, on the fandom front Ajantha is quite a fan of Supernatural, so I'll have someone to talk to about the show, and I've gotten Lauren at least noddingly aquianted with most everything I watch. She's wonderfully indulgent like that. Plus we have the same day off. I plan movie and show marathons closly followed by trips to visit our beloved Psychology Prof., Dr. Brannon. I am going to try very very hard to find someone in flesh and blood to squee over the Star Trek reboot with, because I have been hopelessly in love with it for all four weeks its been out <3

Right. The day awaits. Planning and anticipation with initiative. Those are the keys to a well done year at the Governor's Program for Gifted Children.

x-posted from dianawynnejones 

Diana is quick to mention her Travel Jinx and her Writing-stuff-that-then-happens-to-her Jinx, but one thing she can't, in all politeness, mention is her Book Cover CURSE.
Seriously, How can someone so awesome have accumulated so many uncannily bad covers?

There are the American ones that look like they were painted on index cards, sloppily, and then blown up to dustjactet size, the British ones with text an inch and a half high, but hardly any picture, that copy of Hexwood which was a recycled image from another book... It's quite a list of grievances.

Happily, there are some new covers out in Angle-land that are downright spiffy! I spotted them in the LibraryThing cover galleries and was delighted with them.



Wonderful! I love all the details from the books that the artist has managed to incorporate into the cover art - that's what I love to see in a cover, an illustration by someone who's actually read the book!

Despite being TWENTY MINUTES LATE for African American Lit today, it has served me well, for now I have realized that BBC's Merlin is a Narrative of passing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passing_(racial_identity) I mean, I already know it, but now I've articulated it. Now Merlin's only trouble is, is he also a Tragic Mulatto? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragic_mulatta Because if he is in BBC-verse, he is so. very. screwed. (i.e. He's going to die a horrible death unloved and betrayed by everyone he knows.) Emphasis on the *Tragic.*

In alot of the fanfic I've read, and OMFG I've read alot of Merlin Fanfic this year, the big I-can-do-magic reveal to Arthur is met with alot of fury and and disappointment and feelings of betrayal because Merlin didn't trust him and was keeping such an important big thing secret from him. But typically, things turn out alright in the end, and Arthur either helps keep the secret or Merlin has to go away and can only come back once Uther is dead. Ficcers aren't heartless and no matter how much the Beeb is romping around and contradiction every little bit of Arthurian canon there is, we can't have Merlin getting his head chopped off for being a sorcerer. He's rather too important.

Except? I kinda want to see more fic using tropes of Tragic Mullato stories? Because that'd be academically interesting. And new. And We'd get more interesting stories about who/what Merlin's father is. I love those.


ETA:There are whole DAYS when I forget that the secrecy thing could be a metaphor for TEH GAY, y'see.  Today is/was one of them

Whee!
Back to livejournal but only for a meme.
My new love is Twitter, I'm sorry to say. It works so well for me since I have short thoughts but lots of them. I contemplate expanding my twitter posts on lj at the end of the day...but never get around to it. Thus my twitterage displaces and satisfies my need to blog.

ljmckay was playing Shag, Marry, Cliff and I had to play too.
My biggest problem was finding images to illustrate my fiction guys. THERE ARE NO GOOD PICTURES OF THESE PEOPLE. Oy.


Here's what she gave me:
Horatio, Miles, and that dragonrider guy from those books you were reading before spring break...
or James, Neil, and John Simm if you want to go RL.

( Cut for 6 images and meemery )

The new Barbara icon? Yeah, I made that. In paint. I collected every Aztec!Barbara icon I could find in dwicons, put them all (27!!!) in a table, and decided that not one of them was pretty and unpensive enough to suit me. I wanted it to do tripple duty as a hair and beauty icon, a neutral icon of no particular message, and as my monochrome!who icon. I think I've succeeded. Hardest thing was finding a source image - the tragical history tour is not where it used to be but I found it in the end 'cos someone on doctorwho asked. Her left shoulder is a lassooed horizontal rotation of her right -  and you can't really notice! :D Hurrah for black and white.

If you give a mouse a cookie ....she'll probably want to play with her icons even more!


----->
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I really really <3 the free online Photoshop Express, It's so very fun to use it to improve all my self-made icons. They are no longer drab - now bright and shiny!!

I'm actually quite bemused at how many icons I use that I actually *did* make. I've got many many hundreds in my icon folders but the ones that fit me best are the ones I made. Huh.  Except in the department of animated icons. I can't make those. I wish there were a free online animation service - that'd ROCK!

Bad thing is, I discovered PsEx on about page 15 (of some seriously cool little online photo apps directory website I've lost from my history) at around 1AM.  *headdesk* I was avoiding PoliSci and Southern Lit homework. Avoided it so well I never did most of it and what I did start, I began at around 3AM. *headdesk*headdesk*

Really don't like Faulkner.

Here is Stephen Fry being geeky impossibly cute in taking a myspace-style photo of the new t-shirts for his website.

Reading the list of ALA awardees other than Neil Gaiman and love this little bit:

Coretta Scott King Book Award recognizing an African American author and illustrator of outstanding books for children and young adults. “We Are the Ship: The Story of the Negro League Baseball,” .....

Three King Author Honor Books ere selected: “The Blacker the Berry” by Joyce Carol Thomas, illustrated by Floyd Cooper and published by Amistad, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers....

 I totally read that as King Arthur Honor Books and was impossibly excited that there was a yearly award for best Arthurian children's lit.

Well, there still should be.


Full list here: http://www.ala.org/ala/newspresscenter/news/pressreleases2009/january2009/ymawrap.cfm

Includes video of the trials of trying to get in contact with authors and illustrators, Neil and Terry Pratchett's reactions to their awards. Fun stuff.

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0.o


Why I need to send a fan letter through time to H.G. Wells:

IT is part of the excessive egotism of the human
animal that the bare idea of its extinction seems
incredible to it. "A world without us ! " it says,
as a heady young Cephalapsis might have said it
in the old Silurian sea. But since the Cephalapsis
and the Coccosteus many a fine animal has increased
and multiplied upon the earth, lorded it over land
or sea without a rival, and passed at last into the
night.


Nya! So cuuute.

Also? He predicted GIANT SUPER-INTELIGENT SQUID! AND OCTOPODS.

But ugh! six foot trilobites! uuuuuuugh! (trilobites CREAP me out)

THEY'RE LIKE GIANT MANY-LEGGED COCKROACHES!!!!! *shudder*


The beginning of War of the Worlds? Also quite pretty:

NO one would have believed in the last years of the nineteenth century that this world was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own; that as men busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. With infinite complacency men went to and fro over this globe about their little affairs, serene in their assurance of their empire over matter. It is possible that the infusoria under the microscope do the same. No one gave a thought to the older worlds of space as sources of human danger, or thought of them only to dismiss the idea of life upon them as impossible or improbable. It is curious to recall some of the mental habits of those departed days. At most terrestrial men fancied there might be other men upon Mars, perhaps inferior to themselves and ready to welcome a missionary enterprise. Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment.


*goes back to doing -actual- assignment.*

Neil Gaiman is almighty.
He makes me actually want banner ads.
Talking ones.
These in particular:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kam_BHeU8VY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E6lLYZmK2U

Waaaatch.  I will be seeing this (Coraline, as if you couldn't guess) on Saturday with prime friends. H'awesome.




EDIT!
Also, why can't hulu have ads like these? Or like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SHZFsJKlsuA
Which, coincidentally is also stop motion animation. But this time is Japanese ad for Google Chrome. (I've watched it twice already today) I don't think seeing it five times in fifty min. could even dampen my fondness. THAT=Good commercial.

Was checking out hot new topics on Craftster as a break from Article II of  David Walker's Appeal (I'm taking African American lit pre-1930s) - and I spotted this awesome needle felting project based on The Mitten by Jan Brett.


More info and pics- http://www.littlesisterhandmade.com/2009/01/the-mitten/

Makes me think needlefelting should be next on my learn-to-do list! :D

Neil won the Newbery!

The Graveyard Book is for the win!

*bweeee*

Reading Philip K. Dick's The Electric Ant for SciFi class and had an interesting dystopian-future thought:
Someone somewhere in the future is getting terrifically excited to have soda made with real corn syrup.



Any day I get to mention Neil in class is a lovely day. Any day we discuss his blog, his accomplishments and how awesome he is --in class--- is the epitome of VERY GOOD DAY.

I just unscrewed every screw in my laptop and bemusedly waited for it to promptly fall apart. It didn't. I can hardly even pry it apart.




I was trying to investigate my cooling fan - yesterday I think it ceased operation (although I think that it's been semi-broken for a while - every now and then it would start up and there would be such clattering and clanking noises that I was certain something had gotten trapped in the fan housing). Twice yesterday it overheated to such an extent that mah screen froze. Once in the middle of my screen-saver and then when I powered off and then back on it froze in the middle of the restart screen!

Well this shining morning I unplugged me laptop, took out the battery, unplugged my hard-drive just for kicks and pried the casing about an inch apart. something fell out and my fan is working again - promising! But not so good, I don't think what fell out was what was/is in my fan :(((

What fell out is a little nub of a screw casing that I have NO IDEA where it broke off from, though broke off it certainly is.


Please Quendi-laptop, please to not be breaking?

From The Consumerist:
The transition to digital has been woefully underfunded from the start. We've spent less than $10 million on public education, while England, five times smaller than Alaska, spent close to $400 million on their transition. Unless Congress acts fast, expect your grandparents to call on February 17 asking what happened to all their stories.

0.0

If this means poor Britishers had to suffer through 40times more boring informative ads that direct you to call a hotline or check out a webpage I'm amazed they wern't all driven mad.
I hardly ever turn on an actual TV these days but I've seen enough to be well and truly sick of the things.


I bet the UK is handing out lots of three-fold phamplets and sending out mailers with a FAQ and has magnets at the checkout lines and doesn't rely on telly ads that Contain Little Useable Information. I bet, in fact, that they are doing it right and have not run out of converter box coupon funding.


Seriously  - how often do you check out webpages you hear about on TV? It's too much hassle. You check out webpages if they're links that are already On The Internet.  Or at least, I do.

Sparrows flying through houses had it so much easier in Anglo Saxon times.
Ya fly in one side, be symbolic of man's life on earth, and fly out the other side.
A bird got carried into our house this morning with the laundry ( we hang out laundry out to dry on clotheslines)
and flew around running into walls and hopping about on high bookshelves
until we let the screen out of an upstairs window and chased it out with flapping shirts  - breaking only one lamp in the process.

And that would be metaphorical for....what?

OMFG! Neil Gaiman has a Twitter account and DID NOT TELL THE BLOGOVERSE ABOUT IT.
*stalks*

Yuletide is up and there is Diana Wynne Jones fic!
Dalemark, and Fire&Hemlock, and Chrestomanci hooray!
I've only looked at fandoms A-E tonight, self restraint and time restraints  being what they are.

The Last Free Soul of Dalemark is mind-searingly good. It's one of those fics using clips of created!history interspaced with narritive prose. Sort of like to coda to The Spellcoats but so much more and better and about Hobin and Alk and Mitt and Navis. Like DWJ i think I'll need to go back and read and re-read to get everything from this. Glee!!

The End is Where We Start From? Also v. good. It features the funeral of Amil the Great and Moril and Mitt's conversation thereafter. Because of course this is how it would go. There are so many moment s of history ficcers could write about in Dalemark-verse! I didn't even know I wanted to read this fic until I read it and now I think it's been incorperated into personal cannon. Especially the bit about Navis.

Truly, He Hadn't is Fire and Hemlock fic. Selected bits of book-events from Tom's POV. Fraught and hopeful but determined to do right by Polly.

Okaaay. Another round up of BBC Christmas offerings.

For Reference.

(I wish that the shows would come out Before Christmas so I could be injoying the build up to said holliday but Alas! No! Most are not.)

Jonathan Creek will be 1 January
A Matter of Loaf and Death (Wallace and Gromit)  will be Christmas Day [but since it has already broadcast in Aus. I'm going to watch it earlier!)
The 39 Steps (WWI Rupert Penry-Jones) will be Dec 28
Doctor Who - Christmas day
QI - Dec 22
Top Gear Vietnam - 28 Dec

Time to go to family Christmas party. Oh. Joy.