HSU IT Department

It has been a very difficult few days here at Chez Psmith. Mr Psmith's brother G was unexpectedly taken to hospital on Monday morning; things went very bad very quickly, and he died Tuesday afternoon. We are all still a bit numb; it is hard to even know how to think about such a lightning bolt out of nowhere. G was only forty, and leaves my sister-in-law with three little children, our niece and two nephews. I don't know how one explains such things to a child who just wants their daddy to come home. My heart aches for them, and for all of us...

You may have seen the amazing fan-made Harry Potter movie, "For the Greater Good," which brings to life the break between Dumbledore and Grindelwald, and the death of Ariana. (If you haven't seen it, go watch, it's amazing!)

The same folks now want to do a full-length fan film that explores the relationship between Snape and the Marauders, and they've kicked off an Indiegogo campaign to fund it. (Thanks to laralee88 for her post that let me know about it!) I REALLY hope this gets fully funded -- it looks really impressive, from the casting to the planned budget to the special effects. So spread the word :)

My first crush on a fictional man was at about age eight or nine: Prince Gwydion from Llloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain. Well, how could he not be? With his green eyes and wolf-grey hair and the sword and cloak and also hello, a prince, he was everything that a girl bored with sappy Disney royalty would adore. He didn't waste his time rescuing princesses, he was fighting THE LORD OF DEATH, for Merlin's sake. And I loved that he was noble yet accessible: a prince for working days, as it were, not in the least high and mighty, because he didn't need to be.

My next fictional crush was Laurie from Little Women (so sweet and funny and romantic, and played the piano with such passion -- Jo, how could you turn him down?!) closely followed by Dan from Jo's Boys (my black-eyed wounded rebel soul, I'm still sad he didn't win the heart of Bess).

Then I read Dragonsong and fell hard for Masterharper Robinton, with his sharp intelligence, his weakness for Benden wine, his wit and his generous heart; when he and Menolly were alone on the boat in Dragondrums I thought, "At last, at last!!" but the silly tart thwarted me, a betrayal for which I still have never quite forgiven her.

Next: a toss-up between Lord Peter Wimsey -- war hero, collector of incunabula, and sooo very persistently faithful -- and Laurie R. King's Sherlock Holmes. The scene with Peter and Harriet on the bank of the river is one of the all-time sexiest scenes ever, even though they never touch each other, and the night that Holmes tasks Mary Russell with wanting to propose to him caused me to cheer out loud.

You'll notice that Aragorn, Legolas, Boromir, Eomer & Co. are conspicuously absent. They were a bit too distant for me when I first encountered them, I think -- I was eleven, and at the time they all struck me as rather biblical, probably due to Tolkien's elevated language. Snape is also absent from this list since he didn't ring my bell until I saw Alan Rickman. After that it was very hubba hubba, but I don't feel right about including him in this list when it was a real person that actually spurred my interest.

So tell me, who are/were your fictional (book) crushes and why?

Yes, apparently the first Friday in June is National Donut Day (fooled you, didn't I? You thought I meant the other D-Day).

Neither of which are to be confused with National DoUGHnut Day* which is in November. Because donuts are so awesome they need two celebratory days, I guess.

* Until I wrote that I never realized that "doughnut" has the word "ugh" in it. Which is just ridiculous, right? Because NOMZ.

There are some excellent prompts over at the prompting post for hp_silencio. Some would be quite challenging to do without dialog. I shall have to go through some of my Anita Brookner books for tips; she's so good at that.

Also this!!

Minerva_Fest! Prompt Posting Here Through 13 June

(banner by featherxquill; art by Makani)

Prompting is open at hp_silencio, where the challenge is to write a dialog-free fic. Very intriguing. I tend to rely heavily on dialog (probably too heavily), so I'm thinking of signing up to challenge myself.

And I want him.


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I have no idea how I ended up reading a story about Peaches Geldof (daughter of musician Bob Geldof), but I did. And I found this sentence fragment:

"Detective Chief Inspector Paul Fotheringham of the Kent and Essex Serious Crime Directorate"

It just doesn't get any more British than that :)

So yay, I finally have time to write about the Pop Culture Association conference, which as I said the other day was brilliant. I think I'll break it up and do one post for each day, since there's so much to say about it.

So first, the background: I've wanted to go to this conference for ages, ever since my brother told me about it when he first presented there six years ago (his field is horror movies) and I looked at the program. This year not only was my brother presenting again, my boss at work was also presenting, plus it was in Chicago (easily accessible via Amtrak, plus I could do a side trip to see my mom, stepdad and grandmother). So this seemed the ideal time. I was not disappointed!

On the spectrum that runs from rabid fans on the one end to Spock-like academics on the other, this conference is tilted about 15 degrees toward the rabid fan side. This is both good and bad: on the one hand it makes for a different tenor than other professional conferences I've been too, very lively and kaleidoscopic; on the other hand the number of presenter no-shows and "lightweight" presentations was higher. It's also by far the biggest conference I've ever been to in terms of number of presenters -- the full program is over four hundred pages! -- and every session involved two or three people. This also was both good and bad: the sheer number of interesting topics was fantastic, but I was left wanting more in-depth information on just about everything, since regardless of how scholarly the paper, there was only time for a very surface overview.

Wednesday we arrived around 3pm so I only was able to hit one session. I chose one on Monsters and the Supernatural, which had three papers: "Which 'Witch' Is A Witch?: Negative and Inaccurate Portrayals of So-Called 'Witches' In Horror" (Charmed, Buffy, etc.), "Rooting for the Monster: 21st Century Creature Features and the Devaluation of the Human" (about how we now cheer for the monster in the movies instead of the humans, e.g. King Kong, Godzilla), and "Monsters and Men: Guillermo Del Toro and the Subaltern" (Pan's Labyrinth, The Devil's Backbone, etc.). I was tempted by another session, "Star Trek as a Mirror of American Culture," but that one seemed relatively obvious so I opted for the other one. "Rooting for the Monster" was particularly interesting, proposing that increased awareness of environmental issues may be part of why we now root for the "monster" -- that is, we don't automatically see man as the hero because we acknowledge the damage that homo sapiens has done to the planet. Instead of seeing Godzilla's or King Kong's death as this great victory, we recognize the tragedy inherent in the death of a unique creature.

Wednesday night we had an awesome time at the "Welcome to Our Nightmare" movie sponsored by all the different horror focus areas: Trilogy of Terror (eeeeeeeek!!!) They had a trivia contest before the show and gave away all kinds of cool stuff: movies, books, t-shirts, etc. The questions were ridiculously detailed (Q: Who played Jonathan Harker in the 1931 version of Dracula? A: No one, the Harker character wasn't in that version!) and of course sooo many people knew the answers, because FANS. (I got a Lon Chaney question almost right but not quite, drat the luck.) The movie itself was hugely entertaining, three tales based on stories by Richard Matheson. The first one was seriously unnerving, though perhaps not for quite the reasons the filmmakers intended (sexual predators being so much more in the news these days). The second was predictable, and the last was just utterly silly: a creepy little African statue comes to life and hunts a woman through her apartment, gnashing its tiny little teeth and waving its tiny little spear, like some kind of humanoid gremlin. It survives stabbing, drowning and being stuffed into the oven. I won't spoil it by telling you the closing scene, you really need to see it for yourself XD All in all it was a prime example of cheesy 1970s horror and the audience shouted things at the screen and laughed and so on, but it was all done with great affection (because, again, FANS!).

OK, enough for today. Tomorrow: Stephen King, "You've got more problems than lesbians in your sauna!", crossover fics, Star Wars and the monomyth, and who called the fandom police??

Mr Psmith is working on an elephant conservation paper, which involves a VERY SHORT survey. If any of you would be willing to take it so he has more data to work with that would be wonderful and I would hug you virtually! The survey is here, if you're willing. Thank you!!