HSU IT Department

droxy says she has been feeling Luddite-ish lately and bemoaned the lack of appropriate icons, so I made two. It gratifies my sense of irony to use technology to make and post and share icons about how suspect technology is. Anyway, here they are:

...then here are a few things you might be wondering about, so pull up a chair here in the Common Room (pay no attention to that head in the fireplace) and let's chat.

For your reference:
Fic prompts
Art prompts (with wants/anti-wants)

First, I'm pretty easy to please as far as taking the prompt and running with it; it's meant to plant a seed that you water and tend and shape as you see fit; whether it grows into a radish or a rose -- or a redwood for that matter -- makes no never mind to me. The Muse is a shy creature and I know better than to try to corral her too tightly. Second, I'm pretty easy to please in terms of rating: I don't require smut by any means, but if the Muse takes you that way and it suits the plot, go ahead and have them get nekkid and get busy. Third, I'm pretty easy to please in terms of genre: I don't care if you go with madcap humor or angsty darkness so long as the tale hangs together and makes sense. That's really the main thing I enjoy: a good solid story, and my tastes are pretty catholic (with a small 'c').

I don't like out-of-character: no affectionate, gooey, emotional Snape; no damsel-in-distress clothing-obsessed Hermione. This is not to say, of course, that Snape can't be (or fall) in love, or that Hermione can't get herself into trouble or enjoy dressing to the nines (for the proper occasion), if that's the way the Muse takes you, but within the parameters of who they are in canon. People do grow and change, and if the story is set years after the books then I'd expect them to have changed somewhat...but as Prof. Grubbly-Plank says, a leopard never changes all his (or her) spots, yes? (One small particular request: please no pregnancy/babies/children.)

I'm big on eyes and shoulders. I like witty banter. UST that finally gets resolved is particularly fine. I like magic to play a role in the story (these are witches and wizards, after all, not Muggles). I enjoy descriptions that employ more senses than just the visual. Bonus points for inclusion of any of the following: food porn (tasty meals, good wine), because I love to eat; a library or archive, even in passing, because I'm a total library slut; McGonagall, even if it's just a cameo, because I love her; brand new spells/magic of your own invention.

Art-wise, I'm partial to William Morris, Arthur Rackham, Maurice Sendak, Tim Burton, Edward Gorey and Salvador Dali. The only color I really can't stand is orange, so you're wide open there :)

Most important of all: I know the effort it takes to carve out time from one's other commitments to write or draw or create, and the mere fact that you're creating something for me is enormously generous. Never for a moment think that I don't appreciate it. If you have fun with it, I'm sure I will too :)

A week's trip out of town, catching up from a week's trip out of town, and mass quantities of freelance work = no time for anything, including reading, writing or (in some cases) sleeping. Grrrr. Note 1 to self: Say no to any and all jobs for the next, oh, two months. Note 2: Spend newly acquired free time gloating over the lovely SSHG Exchange prompts gifted to me by the mods. Can you say Plot Bunnies??

In other news, the transit of Venus is way cool. Watching that little circle move across the sun makes my brain feel funny as I try to wrap my head around the reality of giant flaming balls of gas floating in space. It's no wonder ancient man invented things like the celestial spheres and Prolemaic model. Much easier to grasp.

In keeping with my 100 Things (Surprises) commitment, I can add that I was quite surprised to learn how important the transit of Venus was in terms of astronomy and cosmology. Scientists used it to calculate the distance from the sun to the Earth, of all things -- the NASA guys cleverly glossed over exactly how they did this, saying something about the parallax method and trigonometry (bane of my existence) before zipping on to show pictures of the sun that make it look like some sort of hell dimension (oh great, our solar system is situated on the Hellmouth...). Other surprising Venus trivia: its surface temperature is hot enough to melt lead, its surface pressure is 92 times that of Earth, it rains sulfuric acid, and it suffers from pretty much constant hurricane-force winds. So not a good place for a vacation. Oh, and it rotates backwards.

None of which I knew before, so today was a net gain in that I learned something. Yay me!

I love this: one of Fox's pretty blonde commentators finally can't take it any more and fights back. Go Kirsten!! Full disclosure: Sean Hannity is on the board (yes, really) of Rev. Peterson's BOND organization. Ladies, if ever there was a time to be a feminazi, as unappealing as that term is, that time is now:

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The Rev. Peterson has more lovely goodies here. He has a nationally syndicated talk show (why? why???) and has been "cited by Republican groups as an example of a black Republican message." Fox News, fair and balanced. Uh-huh. Pull this one and it plays jingle bells...

There are no words for how behind I am with so many things, as anyone might guess from the fact that I've only posted three times this month. Gaaah. Editing a 300+ page scholarly monograph on Freemasonry in your spare time can do that to you.

But at last, at last, here I am with my next installment in the 100 Things Challenge. Yay!

The reptilian hindbrain, also sometimes called the "lizard brain," is pop culture slang for the most primitive part of the brain, the part just slightly more evolved than the autonomous functions like breathing. Its proper name is Rhombencephalon, and according to Wikipedia "it has been suggested that the hindbrain first evolved...between 570 and 555 million years ago."

But this surprise, which I experienced when I was about ten years old but still remember like it was yesterday, has nothing to do with where the hindbrain came from and everything to do with the fact that it's still in there, sulking at its superfluity, waiting to pounce and take over in certain circumstances.

My brother is five years younger than me, and when we were kids we had developed mad skillz at pushing each others' buttons. One evening when I was about ten, he did something -- I don't recall what -- that sent me into quite literally a blind rage. I was so furious I was incoherent; I distinctly recall that I felt like I had lost the power of speech, as well as all control over my actions. We were downstairs at the time, and I remember hurtling up the stairs, slamming into his room (a MAJOR breach of protocol: personal space was a very big priority in my family and you DID NOT enter someone else's room without permission)...I ran to his dresser, ripped the drawers open, grabbed handfuls of stuff, anything, whatever I could get my hands on, threw it left, right, up, down, hurling it about the room until it was festooned with socks and underwear. I felt like a passenger in my own head, like my rage had become a physical thing that had taken possession of me. And side by side with the red berserker frenzy was this astonishment: What the heck is going on? What is this??

I remember that my brother and my mom had followed me upstairs and stood in the doorway staring, open-mouthed in awe at my tiny whirling vortex of fury. (I was a very small ten year old.)

Later, my mom told me she was proud of me that instead of beating my brother to a pulp, I'd turned my rage on something inanimate, not to mention squashy and damage-free (socks = harmless). Looking back, yeah, as a mom I too would probably have taken that as a good sign. At the time, though, had I known who the Incredible Hulk was then, I'm sure I would have identified with him (sans the purple shorts).

That particular part of the hindbrain never showed itself to me again (though I caught a glimpse of its red-and-black hide once, years later, when my college boyfriend smugly opined that it was fine for him to have slept around in high school but that girls ought to be virgins...but that's another story, and it wasn't really a surprise LOL!). But I've never forgotten my amazement at this hitherto unsuspected capability lurking inside me, and my astonishment at the power of this most basic of hindbrain emotions.

Holy *&#$@#! There are 75+ prompts posted at sshg_exchange and more than 600 comments LOL! I haven't signed up yet but it's been great fun reading them; there are some highly original ones out there. ::goes off to ponder mine::

Math is one of the most predictable and yet surprising things anywhere ever. Oh, some might cite the sentient mattresses of Sqornshellous Zeta, and there may yet be a very surprising fungus on Algol IX that excretes solid gold, but for my money I'll take math every time. Nothing is as entertaining and endlessly surprising as the fact that multiples of nine always add up to nine, or that given a right triangle a²+b² will always always always = c², or that the Fibonacci sequence turns up in sunflowers and pinecones. Why??? I don't know, but it still surprises me.

The joy of mathematics is inventing mathematical objects, and then noticing that the mathematical objects that you just created have all sorts of wonderful properties that you never intentionally built into them. It is like building a toaster and then realizing that your invention also, for some unexplained reason, acts as a rocket jetpack and MP3 player. (LessWrong.com)

Did you know that every even integer greater than 2 can be expressed as the sum of two primes? Really. Go try it. (Well OK, it's technically just a conjecture, but nobody has disproved it yet.)

When I took geometry in 7th grade and discovered that you could start with maybe three or four premises and make them prove all kinds of other things, I was astounded and excited and wowed and mindblown (uh-huh, I'm a Nerd Girl). I'm still gleefully surprised when I do something all mathy and complicated and it works every time. How cool is that??

Did you know that the apparently completely abstract binomial formula (a + b)² = a² + 2ab + b² can be represented by an incredibly simple picture that you've probably doodled yourself at some point in your life? Go here and play with it if you don't believe me. And the even more abstract and scary-looking formula (a + b)³ = a³ + 3a²b + 3ab² + b³ is actually a really simple set of blocks that every Montessori preschooler can do?

Even what look like simple patterns turn out, if you dig down, to have patterns within patterns within patterns. Math makes some of the most beautiful patterns in the world. This page includes a bunch of interactive patterns, including Eratosthenes' sieve!

Perhaps most surprising of all, one single number can be used to predict a city's wealth, crime rate, walking speed and many other characteristics. What's that number? Its population. Check out the TED talk on this topic (the TED talks alone could furnish me with at least half of my 100 surprises!).

So yay for the surprises you find when you dig into numbers!!

So after starting out with Surprise 1, a philosophical disquisition on how much you can learn about a person from the things that surprise them, I'm going to backtrack and do a really simple old-fashioned straight-forward "Surprise!" for Surprise 2.

For a big chunk of my childhood we lived out in the country -- the real country, with the quarter-mile-long driveway and the nearest neighbor a mile away -- first in New York surrounded by woods and hills, and later in the midwest surrounded by cornfields and wheatfields. My brother and I spent a lot of time playing in the river or the barn or the abandoned chicken-house, the latter being an adventure which would probably give today's over-cautious parents a bad case of OH MY GOD NO THE DISEEEEASES, but which just gave us a high tolerance for funny smells and probably germs (I attribute my general excellent health to childhood experiences like this).

Anyway, it was big old barn, a lot of fun to play in, but for quite a few years we didn't have anything in it except mice and cats (in inverse proportions, usually) and of course ourselves. Until Christmas morning when I was eleven, and suddenly the barn had...

(That just seemed to cry out for glitter letters, don't you think?) Yep, a real live honest-to-god pony. For ME! Now, the thrill of surprise was slightly mitigated by the fact that (despite my aforementioned general good health) I had come down with a violent case of the stomach flu on Christmas Eve and every time I diverged from the horizontal, the results were rather spectacularly unpleasant. So I didn't get to actually TOUCH my pony until the 26th. But regardless, I still get to say that I got the ultimate Christmas surprise every little girl dreams of: a pony for Christmas!!

Epilogue: I had Duke for a couple of years and then traded up to Missy, a quarter horse (I was so short and she was so tall that if I got off her anywhere other than the barn I had to lead her to the nearest tree so I could climb up it and drop onto her back like some sort of "Death from Above" ambush). Sadly, we eventually moved to The Big City and there were no more ponies or horses for me. I still miss it sometimes. As Will Rogers said, "There's something about the outside of a horse that's good for the inside of a man."

For my 100 Things Challenge, I decided I would write about one hundred things that have surprised me, be it people, places, ideas, events, thoughts, experiences, whatever. You may have noticed that I've dallied a bit in getting started. The reason turns out to be Thing 1: As I considered the various possibilities of what to begin with (not to mention what to go on with), the topic turned out to be a rather more personal one than I had expected. I suppose I should have known this, or been able to predict it: anger, fear, tears, lust, passion, startlement and surprise are all core reptilian-hind-brain sensations, so anything that triggers them pulls on strings that are wired fairly deeply into the psyche. But the more topics I came up with, the more I realized that in order to explain each of them I'd have to go into why it surprised me, which of course involves talking about the who/what/when/where/why of me.

So that's my first surprise: that sharing things that have surprised you can be surprisingly revealing. (Before we all get frightened of metaphysics or similar, here, let me reassure you that not all of my surprises are this deep. Thing 2, for example. which is coming tomorrow, is totally just fun. Very cool, but just fun.)

PS Note icon, which is like "SURPRISE!!" Isn't that clever??

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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