HSU IT Department

Signups for the latest round of deatheaterdrabs is open until 11:59pm. Signup information is here! Hop to it, it's only a drabble. Only 200-500 words, surely you can manage that? And with the DE of your choice!! Come on, you know you want to...

Stolen from ladyoneill who apparently stole it from pfeifferpack!

1. Egg Nog or Hot Chocolate? Egg nog, the noggier the better. We use my great-grandmother Mamo's recipe which has whiskey, rum AND bourbon. Mamo was quite a woman.

2. Does Santa wrap presents or just sit them under the tree? Wrap, always. No fun without the mystery!

3. Colored lights on tree/house or white? Spouse likes colored and I like white, so we alternate years.

4. Do you hang mistletoe? I would if I could but it seems hard to find around here.

5. When do you put your decorations up? Usually no later than the end of the first week of December (we put the tree up last night and are decorating tonight).

6. What is your favorite holiday dish? See #1 above. Also my grandmother's homemade fudge, which I make every year. So sweet it makes your teeth ache but soooo chocolatey good.

7. Favorite Holiday memory as a child? They all sort of run together, but I do remember when my brother and I were little Mom would put us to sleep in the same bed Christmas Eve and we'd lie awake wondering and guessing what the morning would bring.

8. When and how did you learn the truth about Santa? No clue.

9. Do you open a gift on Christmas Eve? Yes, the rule is it has to be the smallest one, unless the giver says "No, that one's too expensive, pick a different one" LOL!

10. How do you decorate your Christmas tree? Lights, ornaments, gold fluffy rope. We also buy one ornament together each year and label that with the year; those get special attention. Then there are the falling-apart pinecone reindeer etc. from when each of us were kids.

11. Snow! Love it or Dread it? LOVE IT!! (Given where I live, I'd better...)

12. Can you ice skate? I did once and it was OK.

13. Do you remember your favorite gift? OK, sit down for this: I actually got a pony one year. Best. Present. Ever. Unfortunately I also had a violent case of the stomach flu that year and every time I left the horizontal position I barfed, so I didn't get to actually see it until Dec 26th!

14. What’s the most important thing about the Holidays for you? Family, no question.

15. What is your favorite Holiday Dessert? My mom used to embark on enormous holiday baking orgies: snowballs, thumbprint cookies, sugar cookies, gingersnaps, fudge, divinity, homemade peanut butter balls, chocolate drop cookies...I don't think I could choose.

16. What is your favorite holiday tradition? Our tree decorating. We haul out the three tubs of lights and ornaments, plus the Christmas pillows, the Christmas pictures, the Christmas tableware, the giant mildly creepy-looking Santa and the jingle bells for the door. Then we put on our Santa hats, make a giant pot of hot chocolate with generous lashings of peppermint schnapps, and decorate while watching National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation ("Save the neck for me, Clark!").

17. What tops your tree? Gold light-up star.

18. Which do you prefer giving or receiving? Giving.

19. Candy Canes? Yuk. They get instantly sticky and attract dog hair, cat hair and assorted colors of lint. (Wow, what does that say about my housekeeping...)

20. Favorite Christmas show? How The Grinch Stole Christmas and The Little Drummer Boy. And Rudolph.

21. Saddest Christmas Song? The Gift, sung by Aselin Debison. I completely lose it every time I hear this.

22. What is your favorite Christmas song? O Come All Ye Faithful, if it's in Latin. In English, Good King Wenceslas. Alternatively, just about anything played by a brass ensemble. I loves me some horns.

Hey, that's only 22 questions! There should be 25. I will add three more:

23. Christmas morning: up at the crack of dawn, or sleep in? As long as it's light outside, I'm good to go.

24. Do you send actual paper Christmas cards? Yes! For me this is one of the best parts of Christmas. If I have time (which I haven't the last few years) I make my own. (I know, how Martha Stewart is that? But give me scissors, glitter, felt, ribbon, and glue and I go wild.)

25. Strangest place you've ever spent Christmas (Eve or Day, your choice)? On a railroad siding outside Whitefish, Montana. I was on Amtrak, en route to Washington state to see my mom and stepdad and it was so cold the rails cracked. We had to wait for them to be repaired and it took a really long time. Luckily I had my penny whistle so I could play Christmas carols!

Joanna Russ, who died late last spring, is another of my favorite fantasy/sci-fi authors. In addition to her fiction she did a good bit of writing and thinking and speaking about writing: women and writing, women and sci-fi, and so on. This morning I ran across a speech of hers from PhilCon in the 1970s, posted by a Feminist SF contributor, and it's fantastic. It's about taboos -- tabooed words specifically but also about taboos in general, how they're not just inconvenient but actively dangerous:

What is a taboo, really? Is it a magical way of controlling actions? Certainly the taboo on talking plainly about something makes it difficult to think plainly about it, and hence very difficult to do it...make something unspeakable, and eventually you will make it unthinkable.

If there are no words to describe something, that thing falls through the cracks both in your head and in the world; it vanishes because we have no way to hold on to, to talk about it.

( cut for longish longness, read moar here )

Anyway, Joanna's full speech is excellent -- surprisingly pertinent given that it dates from nearly 40 years ago, and as well-written as any of her short stories or books. You can read the whole thing linked from the Feminist SF page above or on Dreamwidth here. FSF also did a four-part series on Russ which starts here.

When Spouse started playing World of Warcraft, I wasn't so much interested in the game itself as I was in how he and other people interacted with it. How did players set rules, enforce them when there's nobody "in charge"? How do guilds evolve norms for their members? And so on and so forth. Yes, it's all very anthropological, and he's been very patient about answering my questions, as long as I allow him to vanish for hours into the Feast of Wintervale, appreciate his reindeer mount and laugh when he sheeps someone.

My involvement with fanfic has been much more, shall we say, "hands on" since I enjoy writing it and reading it, but I've also had a long-standing curiosity about why we write it. Henry Jenkins' Textual Poachers does a good job describing the world of fandom but doesn't really explain the motivations. (It's a great book though and I highly recommend it -- I'm not remotely any kind of media scholar so I can't speak to the accuracy of his theories or analysis, but it was great fun to read.)

So what's the appeal? Why do some fandoms spawn literally thousands of fics and others only a few hundred? Why is slash mostly written by women? More fundamentally, why does this stuff exist at all?? It can't be just that we're bored, or that we're frustrated novelists, or that we're sekrit sex addicts (pr0n evidence to the contrary). And obviously it has NOTHING to do with the fact that I find two particular Death Eaters impossibly sexy *ahem* *ahem*

Turns out it all goes back to the Middle Ages.

( long post of longness behind the cut, possibly not of interest except to other nerdy people like me )

Hmm. Sensing a "heroic gap" and filling it by drawing on existing material, well mixed with your own imagination. Well, if that doesn't sound like fanfic, I don't know what does. So there you go: none of this is new: it's positively medieval. What a nice feeling, to be part of such a long and noble tradition :)

...somewhere tonight: Anne McCaffrey dies at 85. Her books were among my earliest introductions to science fiction and fantasy (not to mention strong female characters therein) along with Sylvia Louise Engdahl, Ursula LeGuin, Sheri Tepper, James Tiptree, Tanith Lee, etc. (gosh, they're all women, imagine that). I'm sure her son is doing his best, but you can't really channel another writer, even if you were raised by them. I guess that's an argument for nature vs nurture.

Given the fabulous dragon in Harry Potter DH2 (and probably in Peter Jackson's Hobbit), dare I hope that someone will realize Dragonflight on film? Perhaps not -- Ramoth's mating flight might be a bit dodgy ratings-wise. But we can hope...

Ben Franklin proposed the turkey as America's national bird. He said that "the Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird [than the eagle], and withal a true original Native of America."

Good point. However, if he had carried the day, what on earth would Americans eat themselves stupid with every November? Bald eagles? Pigeons? Tofurkey (the mind boggles, or rather cringes)?

I have made apple pie, I have made pumpkin pie. I have made homemade cranberry sauce, I have prepared orange-honey glaze for the turkey. I have peeled and cooked 3lb of tiny little onions in order to make my dad's favorite creamed onions. I have broken out the good china, the Irish linen tablecloth, and the extra leaf in the table. (All I need is a pair of wolfhounds to make it a Very Malfoy Thanksgiving...)

I have prepared clever comebacks for the conservatives and the Christians in attendance.

Bring it on. Let the family descend, damn it, I'm ready. And if not, there's always Obliviate.

Now, since all my American flisters will be in a tryptophan-induced coma starting tomorrow, I'm relying on all of you from across the pond (in various directions) to keep me amused over the long weekend. Don't let me down!

OK, one more: Metamorphosis of Solitude. If you like urbane witty Snape with his tongue at its razor-sharpest, this is the fic for you :)

Go Supernatural! Love the fan mania (of course). Sadly I have no SPN icon, but I think this one works well. Also hugely amused that sidekick Garth is Sheldon's drug-addicted cousin Leon from Big Bang. Ah television, thou art a small and incestual world...

This. Several possible puns occur to me (Tooth or consequences? To tell the tooth?) but in the end all I can think of is Bite me, you silly man. Have you nothing better to do with your Canadian dollars? Such as buy gold??

Joss Whedon has apparently filmed, secretly, in 12 days, his own version of Much Ado About Nothing! So it's my favorite Shakespeare ever + Joss = ♥ ♥ ♥ It's a perfect one for him to do: the dialog is fast and clever and witty, much like his own. He cast a bunch of Whedonverse folks in it, including Captain Tightpants (aka Nathan Fillion), Alexis Denisof, Amy Acker. (Sadly, no Giles though.) He filmed it as indie flick but I really hope it gets picked up for wide distribution. Must! See! So excited!!!