Reveals are up over at sshg_giftfest, so I can now cop to being the author of the following:

Title: Riddles in the Pub (fest site) (AO3)
Word count: ~7700
Summary: Having retreated to a small town in Scotland to get away from unwanted publicity, Hermione is surprised to discover someone there who shares her love of a particular author.

Being a Tolkien fan from way back (we won't say how far back), I really enjoyed giving Snape and Hermione free rein to argue, discuss, and debate various aspects of Tolkien. My recipient, lenaa1987, was also entirely pleased, which makes me very happy indeed :)

Apparently they used to be in California, thus subject to US law etc. No longer, apparently. It's not clear what this will mean for the non-Russian arm of LJ, but you can read lots more here, including links and directions on how to port your entire LJ to Dreamwidth.

Interesting in light of recent events with Obama, Trump, etc. I hope this isn't some sort of omen for how 2017 is going to go :P

Christmas Day, so once again we made my great-grandmother's egg nog to take to my sister-in-law's. With 4 pints of half-and-half, bourbon rum AND brandy, this is high-calorie and high-test, but oh so very good. I am now having a mug and getting caught up on hoggywartyxmas and sshg_giftfest -- happy happy joy joy!

Here's hoping that all of you had whatever sort of day you wanted, doing whatever you wanted to do, with the companionship you wanted most. Hugs and happy holidays!

...when I subject all my friends to Picard and the rest of the gang ("SHUT UP, WESLEY!") doing their holiday song. This still makes me giggle like crazy every single time I watch it XD



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There's a kickstarter for a role-playing game called "Papers & Paychecks" (launched by tcpip) in which participants play -- you guessed it -- employees, managers and interns at a tech company :)

The game was reviewed by Cory Doctorow (author of the brilliant short story "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" among other things), and his review gave a link to the original cartoon/joke that spawned the idea of the game, which I'd never seen. It's from the first edition of The Dungeon Master's Guide:



Doctorow's review also mentioned a very funny series of YouTube short in which a knight, an elf, a cleric, and others play a similar RPG. Here's the first one:


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Finally, one of the comments to Doctorow's review included a hilarious cartoon featuring little robot people and an RPG about online bulletin boards ("You are checking up on a forum topic you started yesterday, when suddenly a Ravening N00b posts: 'U R TEH GAY FAGOT!'").

Enjoy :)

Each December, GoodReads thoughtfully provides all its members with a summary of "Your Year in Books." It's rather fun to go back and see what one has read, and the collage of book covers is always lovely.

This year I read 72 books for a total of 23,983 pages (although GR stats only count books read for the first time; including re-reads, my grand total for this year so far is 113 books!). One of my books was also read by 1.9 million other people (The Help), while another was read by only three other people (Promise Island, a good premise disappointingly executed). My shortest "book" for 2016 was 7 pages (a Ted Chiang short story) and my longest was 848 pages (a fantastic collection of women noir authors from the 1940s). Though again, that's only first-time reads; in actuality my longest books this year were Stephen King's The Stand and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, both of which are perennial re-reads for me.

You can see my summary here -- and check it out, drinkingcocoa's Snape: A Definitive Reading is right there at the top :)

Following up on yesterday's post:

Two recent memes which amuse me because they make you rethink your frame of reference:





( Christmas )

( Indiana Jones )

mywitch has embarked on 25 days of fan art. Today she picked MY prompt, and gave me half-dressed Lucius. Go. See. Marvel.

Hubba hubba!

I can't even. I just can't even.

I know that there are many people in this country who feel angry, left behind, ignored, trampled on, betrayed by their representatives in government. I know that both parties have done a shit job addressing their very real concerns. I know that many of us are desperate for some kind of change, some kind of shift in government, a return to its proper nature of being by, for, and of the people. And I am so, so, so sorry that we as a country didn't have a better choice last Tuesday (*koff*Bernie*koff*).

But that so many people were willing to sacrifice dignity, courtesy, tolerance, civility, and common human decency in an effort to get that change... that, I cannot understand. And that racists and bigots have the apparent sanction of our president-elect is absolutely shameful.

If "making America great again" requires jettisoning the very things that underpin a civilized society, then I don't want that particular flavor of greatness.