[bunch of pointlessness (what? it's Saturday!)]
First off, thanks to everyone who sent me love over the past few days. It was a shitty week, and I was in a bad mood, so my posts were probably unnecessarily negative, but they helped, and the comments helped even more. So thank you. ♥ I'm better now, though still somewhat stressed out, but hey, at least my internet is on better behaviour than it has been.
So for today, three things of interest.
1. a meme, from littlearsonist:
Post eight random/little-known/embarrassing facts about yourself. Tag eight people to do the same.
1. I'm very allergic to animals. This is something that's haunted me for a very long time - we've had a couple dogs over the years, and I had a bunny once, but I was so allergic that we couldn't keep any of them for very long. My sister was always very upset by this because she LOVES animals, but my mum and I are both debilitated by animal dander. This was especially miserable for me when I used to ride, because horseback riding when you're allergic to horses, dust, AND hay? Not the best feeling in the world, let me tell you. I would still go back to it in a heartbeat though.
2. I am a cunning linguist. And I don't mean this in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way. (Haha. *Bane-style kick to the head*) I've always been really good with languages. I don't know why - I think part of it has to do with the fact that I grew up hearing my parents speak a foreign language (which I still do not speak, ftr), part of it is my musical background (I have a really good ear), and part of it is my immersion training in both French and Spanish when I was still very young. I'm also really good at picking out patterns, again probably from my musical training, and so I can dissect languages fairly easily; I'm better with Indo-European languages, because that's what I have history with (most notably Romance languages), but I can generally pick up new languages fairly quickly. We'll see how well I do with Japanese. XD
3. Despite being straight, I've slept with more girls than guys. This amuses me to no end. I've been INVOLVED with more guys, but... *snerk* I'll leave that one there.
4. Before this degenerates into a sex meme, changing the subject: I can't read books. No, hear me out. I have like six million books and I've "read" them all, but I can't actually READ them. I have this thing where it's actually physically painful for me to read something slowly enough to where I actually catch all the words. I get so caught up in a story or in the concepts if it's non-fiction or whatever that I skim in order to get to the next part as fast as possible. I've probably "read" Prisoner of Azkaban twenty times now, but when it gets to the Shrieking Shack, I CANNOT actually read it, even though I know what's going to happen. I still absorb everything, but it means I have a tendency to miss little details like word choice and that sort of thing, which is ironic because that's what I like to work with most when I'm the one writing.
5. I can't concentrate when I'm only focussing on one thing. Ironic, isn't it? I focus better when I'm talking to five people and have two books open and six webpages and a to-do list a mile long sitting next to me than I do when I'm sitting somewhere quiet with a book and a blank notepad. The former means that I get a whole lot done in a very small amount of time; the latter just puts me to sleep. florahart called it genius ADD or something, and I'll just go with that since I like the way it sounds. XD
6. I have the worst stage fright known to man. Well, okay, that's an exaggeration. I don't throw up or anything. But I get ridiculously nervous being in front of people, even though I've been performing my whole life; I even get nervous speaking in class because everyone's looking at me. It makes being a singer very difficult, I must say, to say nothing of being a teacher. XD
7. I have an iodine sensitivity. As a result, a lot of shellfish, other seafood, fish, seaweed, etc are difficult for me to eat. I do it anyway, the same as I do with dairy, but they tend to make me sick. The two things I've found I really CANNOT eat are shrimp and nori. So no maki rolls for Anj. I haven't tried sashimi before though - I should give that a shot.
8. My ears are ridiculously sensitive. (Speaking of sensitivity.) I had a lot of ear infections as a kid, so I ended up with mild tinnitus; as a result, anything high-pitched or loud enough to make the frequencies distinguishable is extremely painful. Again, ironic, since I play violin and used to be a soprano. Needless to say, my career in emergency services has been sealed permanently. XD
I taaaaaag....
mighty_gratira
lelek
knw
illuminations
daisy_chan
agonizingmercy
7veilsphaedra
ch_ar_me
2. another meme, from lelek
Comment on this post. I will choose seven interests from your profile and you will explain what they mean and why you are interested in them. Post this along with your answers in your own journal so that others can play along.
1. ^__^
This one's kind of self-explanatory, or at least is not especially deep. That's a Fuji-face. Recently, that face has come to mean Gin to me instead of Fuji, which adds a whole other layer of interestingness to it, but when I added it as an interest, it meant Fuji - basically, a big smile in which your eyes disappear, but that may or may not be genuine happiness, and which often hides the real meaning or reason behind the closed eyes.
2. boys being boys
There is very little that pisses me off more in fanfic than boys acting like girls - being weepy and clingy and sappy nonstop and talking about their feelings all the time and being intensely sensitive and possessing what would be called women's intuition if it weren't smack dab in the middle of a slashfic. I cannot stand girly boys. Granted, I know that boys DO cry sometimes, and they DO talk about their feelings, and they CAN be sensitive and intuitive and non-emotionally constipated, but when that's the NORM in a fic, which is understandably common since the majority of slash fandom is female, it just tires me out. If I wanted to read about girls, I would read shoujo, or hell, hetfic. The weepy little uke who's really more like a girl than a boy is out of place in slashfic for me - that's just hetfic wherein the girl has been given boyparts. And hell, I don't even like weepy little ukes in hetfic, but that's beside the point. What I DO like, though, is boys being idiots and getting all pissed off at each other because they fail at communication, or boys having a fumbly first time because they're too embarrassed/proud/whatever to ask or to look up how to do it right in case they end up losing face, or boys being...well...masculine without being all ridiculously macho. I don't like kings of smooth (even Oshitari is a big fucking dork as far as I'm concerned), I don't like the 2D jock types who are made of testosterone and have nothing beneath the surface (cardboard characters are made of fail), and I really don't like boys who seem to still be waiting for their balls to drop. If the fic is about teenage boys, I want to see them acting like teenage boys, with all the idiocy and misunderstanding and awkwardness that goes along with that age - that's what makes them what they are, and it's what makes them especially charming to me. Granted, not all fics have to involve boys being utterly stupid - I also like fics where they're just going completely on instinct and having that work out fine. But I do want them to be very clearly male. (And WOW, that was ranty! Sorry about that. ._.;;)
3. evil does not bounce
HA. This was kind of my catch phrase in college, and it happened completely by accident. My best friends and I were all completely obsessed with the Lord of the Rings trilogy - the timing of its release (and the Matrix, and X-Men, and everything else) was definitely a contributing factor to our obsession, but it didn't take much to get us completely hooked, and most nights found us sitting in one of the lounges doing homework with one of the movies on in the background. I can't even remember how many times we watched Fellowship of the Ring together. But in any case, one night, we were watching the FotR commentary track, and one of the actors mentioned that in the scene where Bilbo leaves the ring behind before he takes off, the floor was actually magnetised, which was supposed to demonstrate the pure, heavy evilness of the ring as it dropped to the floor and just STUCK there. And there's the super-dramatic low music and Gandalf looking all scary and so on and so forth, and so I put on this really low menacing voice and said EVIL DOES NOT BOUNCE. Because obviously it doesn't. And it just kind of...stuck. It still makes me crack up because it reminds me of my friends and all the ridiculous shit we came up with together.
4. gay dragons
Oh god, hahahaha. I partially blame morbid_bunni and karimuffin for this, because their dragons are seriously, seriously made of gay and awesome, and that was probably my first run-in with gay dragons and really what got me started on the fascination. I kept wanting to mate one of my male dragons with another boy, because, well, slash is so much fun. XD Maybe someday. But what got me to add it in the first place was naominovik's Temeraire series, about dragons in the British Navy in the 1700s, I guess it is? And the main dragon, Temeraire, and the main officer, Laurence, are TOTALLY in love with each other, like, blatantly so in some cases (I think they even engage in some frottage, iirc), and hence we have a gay dragon IN MAINSTREAM NY-TIMES BESTSELLING FICTION, NO LESS. So. Yes. Gay dragons = ♥.
5. geomancy
I am so fucking fascinated by all forms of divination. Geomancy I think is my favourite sort though - geo means earth, and mancy means meaning, so geomancy is the meaning of earth and all associated things (not like, plant magic, because while those grow from the earth, they AREN'T earth, not the same way that things mined from the earth are). Geomancy is finding patterns in the natural presence of the earth - throwing handfuls of dirt or sand and analysing the patterns created, drawing lines in the earth, etc etc etc. It's one of the coolest branches of divination, imho, and it's very diverse - feng shui and ti li are related to geomancy, iirc.
6. science jocks
This is one of those categories that never really had a name until I decided that's what people like that needed to be called. I always had a tendency to crush on the science jocks in high school - what I mean by that is the really smart people who were academically inclined and good in the sciences especially but also their other classes, but also had the athletic ability and thus were on the football or basketball or soccer team or whatever. The name actually developed when I started writing more snobappeal, or the reincarnation of him anyway where he is a member of the DoM and works in Wizarding genetics, though he continues to work out and play Quidditch and such on the weekends. That to me is way hotter than the boys who are ridiculously good at some sport or another but dedicate their entire lives to that - as much as I admire people who CAN make that sort of career commitment, I have a hard time understanding someone who's all sports all the time. So the science jocks it is! I suppose people like Inui and Oshitari and Yanagi and so on could be considered science jocks too, even if they are a bit more science-oriented than jock-oriented -- I tend to picture a true science jock as someone who has that sort of laid-back, outdoorsy, jovial, fun-loving attitude even in the lab, but is ridiculously smart and thus is able to design DNA primers or whatnot without losing that cheerful outlook on life. It's that youthfulness and...a form of idealism, I guess, that a lot of jaded lab scientists have long since lost in the repetitive motions of day-to-day labwork. A science jock would never get caught in the monotony - he would find a way to make anything and everything fun.
7. squid!!!
Oh, squid. My beautiful beautiful Queerditch-inspired adoration for cephalopods. It's all the Giant Squid's doing, really - much like in an improv game, when if you can't figure out where to set it, you set it in Kazakhstan, in drabbling, the squid became the fall-back default to mix things up with, and it made for some very interesting porn-writing. *coughs*
3. I just got an email from my dad asking for things he can take to my grandfather in England (he's very sick, and may not be around much longer, so my dad's trying to go catch him up on what's going on with us and all of that). He specifically requested stories, but then gave a caveat that he didn't want anything "too steamy". o.O I don't know what to be more worried about - the fact that my dad thought to warn about that in the first place (dad, what do you know that you aren't telling me?), or the fact that he thought he HAD to warn about that considering he's talking about taking stuff TO MY GRANDFATHER? *headdesk*
FIC LATER!!!
So for today, three things of interest.
1. a meme, from littlearsonist:
Post eight random/little-known/embarrassing facts about yourself. Tag eight people to do the same.
1. I'm very allergic to animals. This is something that's haunted me for a very long time - we've had a couple dogs over the years, and I had a bunny once, but I was so allergic that we couldn't keep any of them for very long. My sister was always very upset by this because she LOVES animals, but my mum and I are both debilitated by animal dander. This was especially miserable for me when I used to ride, because horseback riding when you're allergic to horses, dust, AND hay? Not the best feeling in the world, let me tell you. I would still go back to it in a heartbeat though.
2. I am a cunning linguist. And I don't mean this in a tongue-in-cheek kind of way. (Haha. *Bane-style kick to the head*) I've always been really good with languages. I don't know why - I think part of it has to do with the fact that I grew up hearing my parents speak a foreign language (which I still do not speak, ftr), part of it is my musical background (I have a really good ear), and part of it is my immersion training in both French and Spanish when I was still very young. I'm also really good at picking out patterns, again probably from my musical training, and so I can dissect languages fairly easily; I'm better with Indo-European languages, because that's what I have history with (most notably Romance languages), but I can generally pick up new languages fairly quickly. We'll see how well I do with Japanese. XD
3. Despite being straight, I've slept with more girls than guys. This amuses me to no end. I've been INVOLVED with more guys, but... *snerk* I'll leave that one there.
4. Before this degenerates into a sex meme, changing the subject: I can't read books. No, hear me out. I have like six million books and I've "read" them all, but I can't actually READ them. I have this thing where it's actually physically painful for me to read something slowly enough to where I actually catch all the words. I get so caught up in a story or in the concepts if it's non-fiction or whatever that I skim in order to get to the next part as fast as possible. I've probably "read" Prisoner of Azkaban twenty times now, but when it gets to the Shrieking Shack, I CANNOT actually read it, even though I know what's going to happen. I still absorb everything, but it means I have a tendency to miss little details like word choice and that sort of thing, which is ironic because that's what I like to work with most when I'm the one writing.
5. I can't concentrate when I'm only focussing on one thing. Ironic, isn't it? I focus better when I'm talking to five people and have two books open and six webpages and a to-do list a mile long sitting next to me than I do when I'm sitting somewhere quiet with a book and a blank notepad. The former means that I get a whole lot done in a very small amount of time; the latter just puts me to sleep. florahart called it genius ADD or something, and I'll just go with that since I like the way it sounds. XD
6. I have the worst stage fright known to man. Well, okay, that's an exaggeration. I don't throw up or anything. But I get ridiculously nervous being in front of people, even though I've been performing my whole life; I even get nervous speaking in class because everyone's looking at me. It makes being a singer very difficult, I must say, to say nothing of being a teacher. XD
7. I have an iodine sensitivity. As a result, a lot of shellfish, other seafood, fish, seaweed, etc are difficult for me to eat. I do it anyway, the same as I do with dairy, but they tend to make me sick. The two things I've found I really CANNOT eat are shrimp and nori. So no maki rolls for Anj. I haven't tried sashimi before though - I should give that a shot.
8. My ears are ridiculously sensitive. (Speaking of sensitivity.) I had a lot of ear infections as a kid, so I ended up with mild tinnitus; as a result, anything high-pitched or loud enough to make the frequencies distinguishable is extremely painful. Again, ironic, since I play violin and used to be a soprano. Needless to say, my career in emergency services has been sealed permanently. XD
I taaaaaag....
mighty_gratira
lelek
knw
illuminations
daisy_chan
agonizingmercy
7veilsphaedra
ch_ar_me
2. another meme, from lelek
Comment on this post. I will choose seven interests from your profile and you will explain what they mean and why you are interested in them. Post this along with your answers in your own journal so that others can play along.
1. ^__^
This one's kind of self-explanatory, or at least is not especially deep. That's a Fuji-face. Recently, that face has come to mean Gin to me instead of Fuji, which adds a whole other layer of interestingness to it, but when I added it as an interest, it meant Fuji - basically, a big smile in which your eyes disappear, but that may or may not be genuine happiness, and which often hides the real meaning or reason behind the closed eyes.
2. boys being boys
There is very little that pisses me off more in fanfic than boys acting like girls - being weepy and clingy and sappy nonstop and talking about their feelings all the time and being intensely sensitive and possessing what would be called women's intuition if it weren't smack dab in the middle of a slashfic. I cannot stand girly boys. Granted, I know that boys DO cry sometimes, and they DO talk about their feelings, and they CAN be sensitive and intuitive and non-emotionally constipated, but when that's the NORM in a fic, which is understandably common since the majority of slash fandom is female, it just tires me out. If I wanted to read about girls, I would read shoujo, or hell, hetfic. The weepy little uke who's really more like a girl than a boy is out of place in slashfic for me - that's just hetfic wherein the girl has been given boyparts. And hell, I don't even like weepy little ukes in hetfic, but that's beside the point. What I DO like, though, is boys being idiots and getting all pissed off at each other because they fail at communication, or boys having a fumbly first time because they're too embarrassed/proud/whatever to ask or to look up how to do it right in case they end up losing face, or boys being...well...masculine without being all ridiculously macho. I don't like kings of smooth (even Oshitari is a big fucking dork as far as I'm concerned), I don't like the 2D jock types who are made of testosterone and have nothing beneath the surface (cardboard characters are made of fail), and I really don't like boys who seem to still be waiting for their balls to drop. If the fic is about teenage boys, I want to see them acting like teenage boys, with all the idiocy and misunderstanding and awkwardness that goes along with that age - that's what makes them what they are, and it's what makes them especially charming to me. Granted, not all fics have to involve boys being utterly stupid - I also like fics where they're just going completely on instinct and having that work out fine. But I do want them to be very clearly male. (And WOW, that was ranty! Sorry about that. ._.;;)
3. evil does not bounce
HA. This was kind of my catch phrase in college, and it happened completely by accident. My best friends and I were all completely obsessed with the Lord of the Rings trilogy - the timing of its release (and the Matrix, and X-Men, and everything else) was definitely a contributing factor to our obsession, but it didn't take much to get us completely hooked, and most nights found us sitting in one of the lounges doing homework with one of the movies on in the background. I can't even remember how many times we watched Fellowship of the Ring together. But in any case, one night, we were watching the FotR commentary track, and one of the actors mentioned that in the scene where Bilbo leaves the ring behind before he takes off, the floor was actually magnetised, which was supposed to demonstrate the pure, heavy evilness of the ring as it dropped to the floor and just STUCK there. And there's the super-dramatic low music and Gandalf looking all scary and so on and so forth, and so I put on this really low menacing voice and said EVIL DOES NOT BOUNCE. Because obviously it doesn't. And it just kind of...stuck. It still makes me crack up because it reminds me of my friends and all the ridiculous shit we came up with together.
4. gay dragons
Oh god, hahahaha. I partially blame morbid_bunni and karimuffin for this, because their dragons are seriously, seriously made of gay and awesome, and that was probably my first run-in with gay dragons and really what got me started on the fascination. I kept wanting to mate one of my male dragons with another boy, because, well, slash is so much fun. XD Maybe someday. But what got me to add it in the first place was naominovik's Temeraire series, about dragons in the British Navy in the 1700s, I guess it is? And the main dragon, Temeraire, and the main officer, Laurence, are TOTALLY in love with each other, like, blatantly so in some cases (I think they even engage in some frottage, iirc), and hence we have a gay dragon IN MAINSTREAM NY-TIMES BESTSELLING FICTION, NO LESS. So. Yes. Gay dragons = ♥.
5. geomancy
I am so fucking fascinated by all forms of divination. Geomancy I think is my favourite sort though - geo means earth, and mancy means meaning, so geomancy is the meaning of earth and all associated things (not like, plant magic, because while those grow from the earth, they AREN'T earth, not the same way that things mined from the earth are). Geomancy is finding patterns in the natural presence of the earth - throwing handfuls of dirt or sand and analysing the patterns created, drawing lines in the earth, etc etc etc. It's one of the coolest branches of divination, imho, and it's very diverse - feng shui and ti li are related to geomancy, iirc.
6. science jocks
This is one of those categories that never really had a name until I decided that's what people like that needed to be called. I always had a tendency to crush on the science jocks in high school - what I mean by that is the really smart people who were academically inclined and good in the sciences especially but also their other classes, but also had the athletic ability and thus were on the football or basketball or soccer team or whatever. The name actually developed when I started writing more snobappeal, or the reincarnation of him anyway where he is a member of the DoM and works in Wizarding genetics, though he continues to work out and play Quidditch and such on the weekends. That to me is way hotter than the boys who are ridiculously good at some sport or another but dedicate their entire lives to that - as much as I admire people who CAN make that sort of career commitment, I have a hard time understanding someone who's all sports all the time. So the science jocks it is! I suppose people like Inui and Oshitari and Yanagi and so on could be considered science jocks too, even if they are a bit more science-oriented than jock-oriented -- I tend to picture a true science jock as someone who has that sort of laid-back, outdoorsy, jovial, fun-loving attitude even in the lab, but is ridiculously smart and thus is able to design DNA primers or whatnot without losing that cheerful outlook on life. It's that youthfulness and...a form of idealism, I guess, that a lot of jaded lab scientists have long since lost in the repetitive motions of day-to-day labwork. A science jock would never get caught in the monotony - he would find a way to make anything and everything fun.
7. squid!!!
Oh, squid. My beautiful beautiful Queerditch-inspired adoration for cephalopods. It's all the Giant Squid's doing, really - much like in an improv game, when if you can't figure out where to set it, you set it in Kazakhstan, in drabbling, the squid became the fall-back default to mix things up with, and it made for some very interesting porn-writing. *coughs*
3. I just got an email from my dad asking for things he can take to my grandfather in England (he's very sick, and may not be around much longer, so my dad's trying to go catch him up on what's going on with us and all of that). He specifically requested stories, but then gave a caveat that he didn't want anything "too steamy". o.O I don't know what to be more worried about - the fact that my dad thought to warn about that in the first place (dad, what do you know that you aren't telling me?), or the fact that he thought he HAD to warn about that considering he's talking about taking stuff TO MY GRANDFATHER? *headdesk*
FIC LATER!!!