HSU IT Department

...to hear from Clarion, so meanwhile I distract myself with voting for the best sci-fi tv ever and videos like "Harry Potter in 99 (Musical) Seconds":


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[But first, a quick PSA: you've only got two days left to listen BBC Radio 4's half-hour program on fanfic. It actually verges on the scholarly, featuring authors China Mieville and Henry Jenkins and going all the way back to the Iliad and the Odyssey. "Stories are there to be played with, changed, made into our own. They always have been. And that's a good thing." Thanks to inamac for the link.]

Now, on to the Danish ducks! When I was in high school I joined the German Club, where I learned that in Germany dogs say "wau wau" and wolves say "knurrt." Here is a hilarious (and educational!) video about the sounds animals make in different languages; the pictures accompanying it are a riot, especially the ducks. And I totally agree with him about Hungarian doves :)


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...that there's a giant comprehensive master list for all six years of the sshg_exchange? It has 900+ fics listed and is sortable AND filterable by all sorts of characteristics: year, author, rating, etc. Wish I'd found it at the beginning of my four-day weekend instead of the end >:|

I'm plugging along on sshg_exchange and luciusbigbang, not to mention my writing group's twice-yearly Short Story In A Week which always, always, ALWAYS seems to fall during the busiest months of the year for me, in some sort of cosmic slap-down of my attempts to participate fully in it. So far we're three days into the first week and I've written king zippy nada, as a a friend of mine used to say.

But it's not my fault, really! I keep getting distracted -- not least by the aforementioned list, but also by the wonderful SS/HG AU fic Droxy's Folly, which went up on AO3 over the weekend. (If you haven't read this yet, drop everything and GO.) And of course by silly videos of cats, we all know how that goes.

Curse you, interwebz!!!!

Seems appropriate that I share one item of distraction, given (a) the current fests-in-progress, (2) the BBC's recent tut-tutting over 50 Shades of Grey (thanks, laurielover1912) and Newsweek's assertion that what's really wrong with FSoG is the lamentable quality of the prose. So, for your edification and jollification, I offer this light-hearted defense of smut, from Tom Lehrer:

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A great piece from British comedian Eddie Izzard on why the Olympics was a triumph for England and why he's proud to be a Brit. Eddie's one of the funniest human beings on the planet, amazingly smart and highly versatile (who else can do comedy about the Church of England as well as Star Wars??)

But he can also be serious with the best of them, and this is a wonderful article.

Britain is quite a shy country (unless we've had a drink). We don't like to blow our own trumpets. We don't wear our stiff upper lips on our sleeves (which is actually quite difficult to do). But we've all found our own ways to be patriotic (as opposed to Nationalistic). I had one of my nails painted with a Union Jack, as is my right as a marathon-running transvestite who supports Team GB.
Read the rest > > >

14K words later, my LMHG exchange is officially the longest fic I've ever written and it's finally out for beta. Woo-hoo! I feel the need to fall on the floor and gasp for air now for about two days.

Being too exhausted to think of anything clever, I give you Henri, Chat Noir, in his Paw de Deux:

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I can't wait LOL!!!

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Because, you know, it just looks like fun :)

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Not sure what happened in Harry Potter 1-7a? Use this handy summary to get up to speed. ASPARAGUS!!!!

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Oh look! I can finally log in again. The LJ gremlins have been hard at work on my account (no matter how many times I logged in successfully, when I went to any entry in my OWN journal, it showed me as not logged in -- very weird) but apparently they're all sleeping it off now and I can get in. Yay! So I have a book recommendation and a funny video to share.

First the book: Idlewild by Nick Sagan, son of Carl "billyuns and billyuns" Sagan. Intriguing and highly original: braids together AI, virtual reality, post-plague-apocalypse, adolescent rebellion and more into a strange and unusual tale that keeps you guessing, wondering what's real and what isn't. In some ways it previews ideas played out in the movie Inception, in that there are layers within layers of things going on. Although you're uncertain what's happening a lot of the time, the author doles out information at a proper pace so you're intrigued and drawn on, rather than frustrated, and some of the small details (the mail bag of letters, for example) are very powerful. I didn't find the ending completely satisfying -- it was fitting and appropriate, by no means bad or wrong, it's just that I wasn't done with the characters and wanted to know what happened next. Fortunately, it turns out there are two sequels, Edenborn and Everfree, so I shall have to get right on them. Three cheers for not having to wait for sequels!!

Now for the video. Meet Amy Walker, accent artist extraordinaire. She can do any accent on the planet (her YouTube channel, amiablewalker has lots more) but this is one of my personal faves:

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