This is just a little thing but I've seen it enough times to get on my nerves.

In Torchwood canon, the Hub is big. Especially if you look on a map of Roald Dahl Plass - the tourist office entrance is right down by the water, while the main room is directly under the water tower at the other end of the Plass. Big.

We've never seen them in canon, but fanon seems to agree that the Hub has communal showers for when they get dirty and covered with goo etc on missions. Makes sense. So you have a big secret alien-fighting sci-fi super base under Cardiff with a fairly decent sized room of showers and a whole pile of alien and future technology that they adapt to help themselves out.

So why is it that every time two people get up to hijinks in the shower the hot water runs out after they're done? My hot water doesn't even run out that quickly*, and I live in a house, not a secret underground base. Somehow, I don't think Torchwood has a smaller hot water tank than I do.

*(and sometimes the hijinks are over pretty soon because the characters cannot control their lustful feelings)

tl;dr people are capable of leaving the shower without the hot water running out, kthx.

I know you mean well, but when you say Sai has onix eyes...

( pic. )

I will always think of this. No exceptions.

Okay, so when you rate your fic as "PG-13" and say that the genre is "family", the least thing that people will except for you to post about is a mother having sex with her two sons. It just--- maybe some people can appreciate it, even if regardless of their real age, in the fic her sons are 14, but it doesn't hurt to put a warning for all the 99,5% that find it disturbing - really disturbing.

I know you've grown up with photography all around, but when you've got photos dating back to the 1600s, it's either an AU with alterations to the development of technology, or you're doing it wrong.

Mostly geared towards Hetalia fandom because, yes, I know it can be cute to have pictures of England and colonial!America lying around, but a painting, engraving or drawing can work just as well, if not better. No, really. Try it.

One, I'm reading at the IAF Interfictions 2 reading tomorrow, 7:30 pm at The Lily Pad in Cambridge, MA. You all are coming, right? Because there's musical accompaniment and possibly an accordion. And Brian Francis Slattery (ZOMG.) Also my last trip to Boston for awhile as I burrow, sick of travel and with a novel due at the end of January (I don't even want to talk about it.)

Two, I'm working on a trailer for Under in the Mere, and searching for music. I want something appropriate to Arthuriana without going full McKennitt, melancholic, probably, but not necessarily un-modern. Any musicians out there want to get some exposure by letting me use one of their tracks? The Palimpsest trailer got over 20,000 views...

Any suggestions of other musicians must be people who are contactable and at all likely to give me permission. Bands I have to contact through MySpace and are on tour, probably not.

Lastly, I am NOT getting sick. I swear.

Two library workers got fired, after they canceled a patron's hold on an item because they didn't think the patron should be allowed to read it.

www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/78655.html

So, Hetalia-fans, you want to create some Original Characters, Hetalia-based of the countries that haven't been shown. Hey, cool for you! It's a good exercise in research and creativity.

However, want my advice? Here is the very first thing you should do if you want to creat an OC about, oh, I dunno. 'Africa-tan', like a certain fan told me.

The very first thing you should do?

Buy yourself an Atlas and learn that Africa? Refers to a whole continent with over 50 countries within, and thus, your plan about writing an 'Africa-tan'? Not gonna happen. It would be like creating 'Europe-tan' or 'American Continent-tan'.

Maps and research. In this fandom more than in any other one, they are your friends. At the very least? In Geography.

AO3 hits Open Beta this weekend, barring any disasters, and I am pretty excited! I have been doing a lot of reading, bugging my co-wranglers for the knowledge, and am really interested to see if AO3 is going to be applicable for the anime/manga/gaming fandoms at all (otherwise known as please give me something to wrangle, guys!) On the plus side, the archive itself won't strip out your formatting, so that's an automatic win! Dashes for one and all! I am really happy to have an alternative to FFnet, a place I know they will always be safe even if my website dies a horrible death or people can't see it because some networks go, "YOU HAVE PORN ON YOU!" and refuse to show it.

It's not like I can deny it.

I finished Along with the Ride by Sarah Dessen. It did not top Just Listen, but I enjoyed it more than Lock and Key. Ira and I were talking about how Dessen's prose pulls you in and leads you along, until it's 2:20 in the morning and you're closing the book you started at 4:00 that afternoon. I might have more thoughts later; I'll have to write a review, with Feminist Thoughts.

So over the last few weeks I have been giving some thought to Final Fantsy VIII. I was doing some massive gameblogging back in 2007, errr then I got sick and then I got a job! I want to finish the game and my gameblogging project, but when do I have time between work and archiving and reading and sleeping—guys, fandom has become too awesome again! WHAT DO I DO.

Also, I have the awful feeling that I'm going to replay FFVII and begin shipping Cloud/Reno and Rufus/Tseng and Cid/Vincent (which is ALL IRA'S FAULT). This is why going through fandom history is a terrible idea! You archive a fic and go, "well, I could just glance over it a little!" and before you know it you've spent an hour browsing through the Rufus/Tseng tag, annoyed there isn't more archived for you to read. a;sdkas;jasdsd I don't need this right now.

....clearly I need to replay FFVII. But only after I finish FFVIII.

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Dear UK Supernatural ficcers,

This doesn't happen a lot, but when it does - damn, it's jarring.

I run across a fic that's friggin' awesome...right until someone starts talking. Usually, it's Dean. Ya see, one thing Dean Winchester shouldn't ever sound like is very, very, very British. Seriously. I doubt he's going to use "whilst" or "Indeed" unless he's going for humor or sarcasm, and I'm pretty sure he's not going to refer to male friends as "mates" or "boys" or use terms like "bloody hell"...or just basically sound like he just rolled in from a posh boarding school and it off to the polo match after tea.

"Sammy, go look down the alley whilst I go chat up the waitress."

No, dude. Just...no.

Is asking that writers for a fandom watch a few episodes, with special attention paid to how various characters address each other, really too much to ask?

Every single 'fic I've read tonight has snapped me out of the story by having some character refer to another character by his given name when in canon he would have used his surname, or with honorifics that the characters don't use with each other in canon, or even with weird nicknames that seem to have come from nowhere.

And maybe I'm just picky, but it irritates me. How can you watch a show without picking up on how the characters address one another? I don't even write for this fandom, really, but I've certainly picked up enough to want to attack a few 'fics with red pen...

On a sort of related note, if a character in an anime fandom has an English word for a name, and you feel like you have to spell it the way it's pronounced in the show instead of the way the word is spelled in English... please be consistant with your spelling. Remembering that you're calling a character something other than what I'm expecting is hard enough without having to be on the lookout for multiple unexpected spellings.

D:

Daily Doodle: FFFF okay I should not have stayed up this late working on this and now I don't have coherent comment. Attempt!

Point one: I cannot handle Oda's anatomy. Any of it. But especially the hands.

Point two: I don't know why but Oda's style always goes easier for me working in pencil mode (hard edges, like MS Paint) instead of brush mode (softer edges, what you usually see here). Subsidiary point two-and-a-half -- I can't resize that nonsense.

Point three: Vivi appears to be going for the gold. ETA: I have been advised that her hand is not PG-rated! I am balls at ratings anyway when it comes to sexuality.

Point four: I still can't draw Nami to save my life.

Backdated 1 hour.
Time: Too damn long. Like 3 hours? DON'T ASK ME WHY. I think most of it was spent redrawing Nami's face over and over and over.

( Daily Doodle: One Piece - Nami/Vivi (PG/PG13) )

Today was a good day for laying on the couch.  Not like I had any real energy to do anything else the way I'm feeling today.  I did manage to get a cred-ton of writing done today; I was able to get Baralai to talk to (or more like, argue with) the chairman in my one fic, and I rewrote another chapter of tLiHL so that makes four down for that one.  It is really coming along better than I could have hoped, and I may be able to start re-posting that one fairly soon.

Tomorrow I'm heading over to my brother's to help him with his kids since mom won't be able to make it due to the fact that she has a throat infection and possible laryngitis and needs to rest. 

Speaking of rest, I need to get to bed myself.  Goodnight all...

(YMMV, of course)

I generally tend to avoid real person fiction as it sometimes makes me feel a bit ooky, even when it's not in extreme circumstances or a touchy subject(Heath Ledger anyone?) but I've noticed this quite a bit in past excursions.

You've got an actor(or a musician or a politician, etc. pick one, it doesn't matter). You've got a slash pairing in the summary and goldarnit, you're going to make that slash pairing happen! It's reasonable enough, the two actors have costarred in one or two movies and there's definitely room for some chemistry in there. But why oh why are you having Lawrence Olivier going to Walmart? Or Jeffrey Dean Morgan on a pirate ship?(not real examples yet.)

I check the summary. Nope, not a crack!fic. Been played pretty straightfaced up until that point, if a bit melodramatic and OOC. So...why? Do you really need to invent crazy circumstances just to get your OTP, especially when there are so many in character ways to get them together? Real people, though not part of a well-documented canon like most fictional characters are, have certain rules that apply to them and have exhibited a certain set of behaviors. No, I don't know that Viggo Mortenson will accidentally book a gay cruise and wind up rooming with Orlando Bloom...but there's a pretty good chance that would never happen.

And worse, don't suddenly turn it into a drama when it's been pretty friggin' cracky all along. It gives your readers whiplash.
If you're doing a crackfic good for you- all the more power to you for cooking that pot of crack!soup. Go the whole nine yards, make it a crack fic through and through, don't get your melodrama and wangst in my peanut butter.
If I'm laughing at the utter ridiculousness of your plot until you throw cancer or something in there to sober it up, I think you're doing something wrong. Gerard Way shouldn't bang his brother, go mall shopping, and then get killed in a drive-by all within the space of a few chapters.It makes me make this face @_@ and wonder what I just spent the past half-hour doing.

TL;DR, Keep crackfic crack, try to keep your RP fiction believable you crazy kids, you.

I've heard of a lemon.

I've heard of a lime.

WTF is a MELON?????

You say you wrote this fic to explain why A is justified in turning B's romantic gestures down, and to convince A/B shippers why they wouldn't work as a couple. The biggest flaw in your plan to convince people to abandon ship is that it is not actually canon that B is always drunk, doesn't care about A, and is secretly in love with his best friend/drinking buddy. Writing him this way makes your fic seem OOC, writing him this way and insisting that this is really how he is, in order to make a statement about why it's horrible and wrong to ship something you don't like, makes you seem like someone who has never actually seen the show.

So apparently, when pesticide usage is moderated by law and bird habitats are protected, endangered bird species can actually be declared no longer endangered!  The Brown Pelican is now coming off the endangered species lists, where it has effectively been since before the creation of endangered species lists.  I'm actually kind of amazed that mandating protection actually leads to recovery of a population, and that it's actually sufficient magnitude to say that the crisis is over (for one species anyway).   Does that mean we can eat them?



p.s.  Wait, how does one capitalize that??
unAmerican.
Unamerican.
un-American.
Un-American.
unamerican.