During the original broadcast of Merlin, I loved the fourth season best. Last year, I did a rewatch and was wondering whether it would still hold up, especially since I had liked the first season more and the second less than I recalled. But no, s4 is still my favourite, though I am frustrated that several good things about it weren't followed ( Read more... )

Wedding kidnappings. At least in my part of Germany. During the festivities after the wedding, the challenge is to separate the bride from the groom, whisk her away to some restaurant or pub and there, together with any other guests involved in the enterprise, drink as many drinks as you can (as long as you're not the driver, I suppose) until the ( Read more... )

Happy new year, everyone! May it see less evil and more kindness in the world, if you’ll allow me the brief sermon. On to more frivolous but still heartfelt things, to wit, fanfiction.

This was the first Yuletide since my early Yuletide days - when I had written solely my assignment - that I wrote assignment and treats alike solely for one fandom. ( Read more... )

I received two magnificent stories and am an extraordinarily happy reader.

My Yuletide gift takes place in the 'verse of Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January mysteries, focusing on his youngest sister, Dominique, and the relationship she builds with the woman she dreaded for a long time before knowing her. (To put it unspoilery for Hambly readers ( Read more... )

I'm no icon maker, but I did feel the urge to create some icons for my latest mini fandom, depicting some of its dramatis personae. Meaning
( Read more... )

...aka how I ended up writing 126,686 words in comments since August in a (gloriously whacky and fun) fandom of three, as summed up wonderfully by
( Read more... )

Dear Yuletide Writer,

thank you so much for creating a story for me! I hope you'll enjoy the experience and appreciate the work you're doing - writing a story in a tiny fandom we share is absolutely lovely, and I'm guaranteed to be pleased by your gift, so don't fret. My prompts are just that, prompts, not absolutes; if you have an idea that doesn't ( Read more... )

Today is our national holiday in Germany. (The reason why it's not on November 9th, when the wall actually did go down thirty years ago, is because of all those other events also happening on November 9th - infamously the "Reichskristallnacht" in 1938, famously Philip Scheidemann declaring the first German republic in 1918, infamously Hitler making ( Read more... )

Today is the anniversary of the bombing of Würzburg, one of the last German cities to be firebombed in WWII before the surrender. The assumption on the German side had been it wouldn't be, since it didn't have any big industries and a lot of hospitals, but a) by March 1945, there were hardly any German cities left to bomb, and bombing was still ( Read more... )

Apparantly British MPs have some kind of competition going on wherein every week, one of them must be Basil Fawlty in The Germans? With the latest entry being the one from Shropshire, who apparently never heard of the fact Britain got far more monetary aid from the Marshall Plan than West Germany did. (East Germany, for obvious reasons, got nothing ( Read more... )