Meme: Five Questions
So back in November or so, a meme went around the BSSM folks I know on LJ. And I jumped in, because an awesome way to take pressure off during finals is answering (and asking) meme questions.
'Course, then my finals week went to shit.
But I saved the questions, and now that I need a break from this test I'm grading (and from trying to put together this list of awesome sad Oldies, what the shit Last.fm, HEY JUPITER IS NOT AN OLDIE), let's answer some of these.
Meme Rules:
*Leave a comment asking "Waes thu hael?"
*I'll respond with five not very good questions ;)
*Update your journal with your answers
*Offer said conditions, so that the meme propagates ON AND ON ha ha ha
*Or at least until we all set up Formspring accounts
WARNING: Fandom material to be found herein! That's for you, ochre_and_bones!
Questions from ellorgast
1. If you could have any senshi power, what would it be?
Huh. If I answer based on elemental biases, then it'd have to be Uranus or Neptune's, definitely leaning towards Uranus, since I adore the wind and windy days. (This gets me mocked in this state; people really dislike wind here.) If I were to answer on the basis of "Power is AWESOME," then I'll take that Silver Crystal, thank you very much. Though I'm probably not pure-hearted enough to wear it, which--makes me every Sailor Moon villain ever. Awesome. :)
2. What is your favorite scene/story/chapter/scenario that you ever wrote?
Man, this is a really difficult question for me; actually, I love asking "favorites" questions and then I suck at answering them myself. It's hard for me to call anything I've written my favorite looking back, since I can see the flaws a lot of the times. The bits of writing I seem to favor most are the ones where I felt really in tune with myself and my muse, where the words just flowed. So things like Canute and the Waves, The Rack, some of my Princess Tutu bits, and weirdly, the titles to the Four Lovers series. Man, those 'fics don't hold up well (as many first efforts don't), but I was so proud of those titles, heh.
I have a 'verse called "Covert" that set my brain on fire when I first wrote it, and it lurks back there, waiting to stick its tendrils in every fandom I join. It's hard to call it a favorite, but it's generally the first place I turn to when I have an AR to set up. Spies, man. I love spies.
3. What is your current favorite movie?
Huh. Generally I say Casablanca or The Big Sleep, because BOGEY and they're also both amazing. But Up from last year, while it broke me into tiny, tiny little pieces, is one of the most amazing movies I've seen in years. So I'm in flux on this one.
4. You've written a ton of amazing shit. What kinds of strategies do you have to keep yourself writing and get your stories told?
I am honored you think so! 'Sanks, sweetheart <3
It's mostly people, goals,and time. A lot of the folks I spend free time--i.e., chat with--are writers, and it's really good to be able to discuss ideas and what you're going to work on. It also helps for when you go "Ugh, I need to write this, but my brain won't co-operate," because often those other people have the poky stick to wake your brain up. (Or in V's case, a cattle prod.) Then it's about setting a goal--"I need to do at least x number of words or x number of pages"--and making the time to do that. I watch a lot of pro. writers on my flist, too, and most of them do some version of that goals thing--and they tell people (or record it, if you prefer), too. Making that note that "today I did 3k" or "today I did 10 pages"--and doing something like that *every day*--seems helpful. Not always possible, but certainly helpful.
And if you're really blocked, you can combine friends + goals = CHALLENGES. Those can be so immensely helpful.
I'm still terrible at finishing things, often because I take the good advice of "when you're blocked, try something else" and never come back to the original, but many days I'm just glad to be writing, heh.
5. What is the funniest thing you've seen on an assignment that you marked?
Well, this test I'm grading has got some funny answers, but not so much funny ha-ha so far ;)
That would be a tie between the pidigin entry and at least one or two extra credit answers I get every quiz. One time I asked what "sweet confection" is generally associated with Valentines Day, and I got "people" for an answer. A LOT. Last quiz I asked for who invented design features, and got "Charles Someshit" as one answer. And then there's some of last semester's geek/nerd/dork answers, as well as the memorable bit in a second essay where a dude described a blowjob in terms of articulation features ("gonna put that against her alveolar ridge!"). Which is a really big tie, I know, but oh my soul my students are on whether they're being intentionally or unintentionally funny.
Questions from elvisvf101
1.) Your works are very sultry, with an incredible balance of sexiness and darkness. What are your inspirations when you write?
HEE--what, really? REALLY? Aww, El, thanks!
Profuse thanks having been offered, I have to admit that I'm really boring: I write to the voices in my head. It often has some sort of impetus--"oh, this song would make excellent 'fic" or "I think I could translate this scenario with these characters"--but just as often I get a flash of a scene, or dialogue, and I have to follow up on it. To add fuel to that, and to set the scene, I'll add complimentary music--but as often as not, I'll write to a song that I find easy to write to--and sometimes I'll read related work, though that's pretty rare due to plagarism worries. I am indebted to several musey ladies--raynos, himawari, and venusorbit01--for their help in getting unblocked or to find the next plot point, but mostly it's just me being weird.
2.) In ten words, describe your taste in music.
I like most everything, and will try any genre once.
3.) What do you love about the English language?
Myriad things. I love irregular verbs, and the strong verbs they used to be. I love irregular plurals, and how English simplified the hell out of that system. I love the fossilized phrases and idioms. I love s-less genitives. I love having over ten vowels, and yet we manage to avoid rounding anything up front. I love the words "dew" and "adieu," where there is a front rounded vowel people don't even notice. I love that the way English sounds pattern screws us up in foreign languages (though not the attitude that we shouldn't bother because of that). I love that linguists have a valid reason for obsessing over sentences like "I sneezed the napkin off the table." I love our prepositions and obliques. I love that pronouns retained and added case. I love that people talk about how hard English is, and fixate on a few tiny things, without realizing how laid back and easygoing the English language is about the creation of new out of old, or giving new meaning to old. But I love modals and semi-modals, too. I love that English is the easy one out of the Germanic languages. I love that English has no Acadamé, that instead, people get pissed off because English makes things like conversion easy. I love that people who do that will still use "bemused" and "nonplussed" wrong. I love the expansion of "like," and, like, will defend your uses to the end. I love the OED. I love words like "automobile," "homosexual," "monolingual," "bigamy" and "liposuction" just for existing, since they should trigger the aforementioned pissed off about English folks, but they don't. I love words that are secretly dirty, like "swivel." I love words that started out as mistakes, like "bridegroom."
I love a lot about English. Every time I study its history and the history of its family, I learn something new and linguistically fun. English gets a bad rap for a lot of things, especially from English speakers, but it's really not as bad or simple as we think it is. :)
4.) Describe the perfect day in food.
Breakfast: Omelette with turkey sausage and tomatos; stack of toast; Frontier orange juice.
Lunch: Turkey and cheese pita; side salad with spinach, egg, and tomato; Diet Dr. Pepper.
Snack: Fruit leather, granola bites with chocolate
Dinner: Ah, this is hard; dinner always depends on my mood. Lately I've been craving a good steak salad--steak and argula or
steak and romaine, maybe with a red chile rub for a hint of spice--with warm, soft rolls (with honey butter) on the side. Water and maybe soda to drink, though water would probably work better.
Dessert: Sundae cone, possibly chocolate on chocolate.
5.) You must introduce a friend who knows nothing about anime to the Sailor Moon Senshi/Shitennou corner of the fandom. Compile a short list of fanfic that should be required reading for this person.
This question has given me fits to answer; every time I try to answer it plainly and simply, I end up writing a long-ish blog post about the dynamics of fandom and how I don't feel I can set up a rec list for everyone, because everyone's tastes are different, especially in a corner of fandom with a teeny amount of canon and a ton of variability in characters. I can't just rec Zoisite to someone who likes Zoisite, I need to know which one they like--the soft and shy, the brash and purposefully annoying, the whip smart combination of all those--and then I'll know which way to point. Same goes for all the guys.
I don't think this is a fandom with an intro 'fic, or intro set of 'fics. A little over a decade ago, I read Lady's "Soulmates" and got stars in my eyes over the possibilities. Now I understand that that 'fic has problems, and I wouldn't use it for an intro; I don't know if I could use anything from back then as an intro--Kizzy comes closest, but that's her 'fic from ten years ago, too, and I think she'd cut me ;)--and the stuff I've read since tends to rely on a certain familiarity. Not to mention that I've been bouncing in and out of this fandom for over a decade; I have so much catching up to do it ain't funny.
Nor would I use 'fic as an intro in the first place, I think. If they know nothing...nope, we're gonna have Anime 101 and BSSM 101 first. 'Fic works better as a 300 level course, and in that case I would send them to the classrooms of Madame shitennou_ai and Msmlle Shitennou Forums to let them find their footing before we'd jump to something else. And, maybe, then we'd talk stories to read and rec. But taste is so individual, and fandom taste doubly so, that I'd rather let them do the experimenting to figure theirs out before we got into a discussion of what else to read.
Questions from the lovelylytton
Lytton
1) As an English major, what is your favourite field of study and why?
The English degree I got was structured in three parts: Composition, Linguistics, and Literature. I fell in love with Ling and I've never really backed off from it, especially when I found that my ability to analyze something in a literary light fell flat in paper after paper. Even so, I did enjoy my Lit. classes; I liked digging into the words and themes, learning a bit about a bunch of authors, and seeing how their situation would influence their work unconsciously as much as it did so consciously.
2) What book would you have never picked up hadn't it been for a class and suddenly found yourself falling in love with?
I don't think I would've voluntarily picked up anything I read in a Lit class; I'm very much a genre girl, and have been since I was a kid. I occasionally try to be cultured, and I usually fail at it, heh.
In any case, here's some of the works that crawled into my brain through Lit classes: The Lysistrata. Goblin Maket. Mr. Palomar. The House on Mango Street. "The Yellow Wallpaper." The value of the Norton Anthology. But the one that'll always stand out is A Tale of Two Cities, where I quite unexpectedly found a reflection in Syndney Carton, and how deeply that book gripped and affected me. Which is amazing for a guy who got paid by the word, yes.
3) What's your comfort food?
Carbs--often in the form of some bread thing--and chocolate. Though usually not bread and chocolate together, 'cause that's messy.
4) If there's any language you could learn with the snap of your fingers, which one would it be?
A surprisingly difficult question for me. Off the top of my head I want to say "Tewa," because it's a language I work on, and it doesn't have that many speakers left; however, there's so much squicky privilege involved in that that it wouldn't be possible for me to go through with it. Same with most dying languages in the world. So then I'd have a list of possibilities, all for dorky linguistic reasons: Japanese, to get that pitch accent and talk to Moto-chan; Mandarin Chinese, for tone and to talk to Pea; Finnish, for initial stress and to talk to Aino and my grandma; Russian, because it's a fascinating language and I would swear so well in it; Sumerian, because it's the goddamn Sumerian; and Proto-Indo-European, PIE, just to see if the reconstruction is anywhere close. Based on that, Finnish would probably win some days, Sumerian or PIE others. I have days to make this decision, right? ;)
5) What was the worst nightmare you ever had?
Oddly, I got this question right after having the worst nightmare I'd ever had: my family was trapped in the hands of people who were going to torture and kill them, and I managed to get away, but I could not get in contact with the authorities at all, and as each second passed, I was more and more sure by the time we went back, they'd all be dead. And it'd be partially my fault, because I'd gotten away, so they had to kill them quickly before the police got there.
I once had a dream that, while all right, ended in a scary way: there was a dead body in the bathtub, and as I watched, the mirror above it cracked, meaning that the spirit was free, and it would strike again. This wouldn't be so bad if the image didn't occasionally hit me in the shower--hell, it came back to me in the shower--and so it wins on the "reoccuring at a bad moment" basis.
'Course, then my finals week went to shit.
But I saved the questions, and now that I need a break from this test I'm grading (and from trying to put together this list of awesome sad Oldies, what the shit Last.fm, HEY JUPITER IS NOT AN OLDIE), let's answer some of these.
Meme Rules:
*Leave a comment asking "Waes thu hael?"
*I'll respond with five not very good questions ;)
*Update your journal with your answers
*Offer said conditions, so that the meme propagates ON AND ON ha ha ha
*Or at least until we all set up Formspring accounts
WARNING: Fandom material to be found herein! That's for you, ochre_and_bones!
Questions from ellorgast
1. If you could have any senshi power, what would it be?
Huh. If I answer based on elemental biases, then it'd have to be Uranus or Neptune's, definitely leaning towards Uranus, since I adore the wind and windy days. (This gets me mocked in this state; people really dislike wind here.) If I were to answer on the basis of "Power is AWESOME," then I'll take that Silver Crystal, thank you very much. Though I'm probably not pure-hearted enough to wear it, which--makes me every Sailor Moon villain ever. Awesome. :)
2. What is your favorite scene/story/chapter/scenario that you ever wrote?
Man, this is a really difficult question for me; actually, I love asking "favorites" questions and then I suck at answering them myself. It's hard for me to call anything I've written my favorite looking back, since I can see the flaws a lot of the times. The bits of writing I seem to favor most are the ones where I felt really in tune with myself and my muse, where the words just flowed. So things like Canute and the Waves, The Rack, some of my Princess Tutu bits, and weirdly, the titles to the Four Lovers series. Man, those 'fics don't hold up well (as many first efforts don't), but I was so proud of those titles, heh.
I have a 'verse called "Covert" that set my brain on fire when I first wrote it, and it lurks back there, waiting to stick its tendrils in every fandom I join. It's hard to call it a favorite, but it's generally the first place I turn to when I have an AR to set up. Spies, man. I love spies.
3. What is your current favorite movie?
Huh. Generally I say Casablanca or The Big Sleep, because BOGEY and they're also both amazing. But Up from last year, while it broke me into tiny, tiny little pieces, is one of the most amazing movies I've seen in years. So I'm in flux on this one.
4. You've written a ton of amazing shit. What kinds of strategies do you have to keep yourself writing and get your stories told?
I am honored you think so! 'Sanks, sweetheart <3
It's mostly people, goals,and time. A lot of the folks I spend free time--i.e., chat with--are writers, and it's really good to be able to discuss ideas and what you're going to work on. It also helps for when you go "Ugh, I need to write this, but my brain won't co-operate," because often those other people have the poky stick to wake your brain up. (Or in V's case, a cattle prod.) Then it's about setting a goal--"I need to do at least x number of words or x number of pages"--and making the time to do that. I watch a lot of pro. writers on my flist, too, and most of them do some version of that goals thing--and they tell people (or record it, if you prefer), too. Making that note that "today I did 3k" or "today I did 10 pages"--and doing something like that *every day*--seems helpful. Not always possible, but certainly helpful.
And if you're really blocked, you can combine friends + goals = CHALLENGES. Those can be so immensely helpful.
I'm still terrible at finishing things, often because I take the good advice of "when you're blocked, try something else" and never come back to the original, but many days I'm just glad to be writing, heh.
5. What is the funniest thing you've seen on an assignment that you marked?
Well, this test I'm grading has got some funny answers, but not so much funny ha-ha so far ;)
That would be a tie between the pidigin entry and at least one or two extra credit answers I get every quiz. One time I asked what "sweet confection" is generally associated with Valentines Day, and I got "people" for an answer. A LOT. Last quiz I asked for who invented design features, and got "Charles Someshit" as one answer. And then there's some of last semester's geek/nerd/dork answers, as well as the memorable bit in a second essay where a dude described a blowjob in terms of articulation features ("gonna put that against her alveolar ridge!"). Which is a really big tie, I know, but oh my soul my students are on whether they're being intentionally or unintentionally funny.
Questions from elvisvf101
1.) Your works are very sultry, with an incredible balance of sexiness and darkness. What are your inspirations when you write?
HEE--what, really? REALLY? Aww, El, thanks!
Profuse thanks having been offered, I have to admit that I'm really boring: I write to the voices in my head. It often has some sort of impetus--"oh, this song would make excellent 'fic" or "I think I could translate this scenario with these characters"--but just as often I get a flash of a scene, or dialogue, and I have to follow up on it. To add fuel to that, and to set the scene, I'll add complimentary music--but as often as not, I'll write to a song that I find easy to write to--and sometimes I'll read related work, though that's pretty rare due to plagarism worries. I am indebted to several musey ladies--raynos, himawari, and venusorbit01--for their help in getting unblocked or to find the next plot point, but mostly it's just me being weird.
2.) In ten words, describe your taste in music.
I like most everything, and will try any genre once.
3.) What do you love about the English language?
Myriad things. I love irregular verbs, and the strong verbs they used to be. I love irregular plurals, and how English simplified the hell out of that system. I love the fossilized phrases and idioms. I love s-less genitives. I love having over ten vowels, and yet we manage to avoid rounding anything up front. I love the words "dew" and "adieu," where there is a front rounded vowel people don't even notice. I love that the way English sounds pattern screws us up in foreign languages (though not the attitude that we shouldn't bother because of that). I love that linguists have a valid reason for obsessing over sentences like "I sneezed the napkin off the table." I love our prepositions and obliques. I love that pronouns retained and added case. I love that people talk about how hard English is, and fixate on a few tiny things, without realizing how laid back and easygoing the English language is about the creation of new out of old, or giving new meaning to old. But I love modals and semi-modals, too. I love that English is the easy one out of the Germanic languages. I love that English has no Acadamé, that instead, people get pissed off because English makes things like conversion easy. I love that people who do that will still use "bemused" and "nonplussed" wrong. I love the expansion of "like," and, like, will defend your uses to the end. I love the OED. I love words like "automobile," "homosexual," "monolingual," "bigamy" and "liposuction" just for existing, since they should trigger the aforementioned pissed off about English folks, but they don't. I love words that are secretly dirty, like "swivel." I love words that started out as mistakes, like "bridegroom."
I love a lot about English. Every time I study its history and the history of its family, I learn something new and linguistically fun. English gets a bad rap for a lot of things, especially from English speakers, but it's really not as bad or simple as we think it is. :)
4.) Describe the perfect day in food.
Breakfast: Omelette with turkey sausage and tomatos; stack of toast; Frontier orange juice.
Lunch: Turkey and cheese pita; side salad with spinach, egg, and tomato; Diet Dr. Pepper.
Snack: Fruit leather, granola bites with chocolate
Dinner: Ah, this is hard; dinner always depends on my mood. Lately I've been craving a good steak salad--steak and argula or
steak and romaine, maybe with a red chile rub for a hint of spice--with warm, soft rolls (with honey butter) on the side. Water and maybe soda to drink, though water would probably work better.
Dessert: Sundae cone, possibly chocolate on chocolate.
5.) You must introduce a friend who knows nothing about anime to the Sailor Moon Senshi/Shitennou corner of the fandom. Compile a short list of fanfic that should be required reading for this person.
This question has given me fits to answer; every time I try to answer it plainly and simply, I end up writing a long-ish blog post about the dynamics of fandom and how I don't feel I can set up a rec list for everyone, because everyone's tastes are different, especially in a corner of fandom with a teeny amount of canon and a ton of variability in characters. I can't just rec Zoisite to someone who likes Zoisite, I need to know which one they like--the soft and shy, the brash and purposefully annoying, the whip smart combination of all those--and then I'll know which way to point. Same goes for all the guys.
I don't think this is a fandom with an intro 'fic, or intro set of 'fics. A little over a decade ago, I read Lady's "Soulmates" and got stars in my eyes over the possibilities. Now I understand that that 'fic has problems, and I wouldn't use it for an intro; I don't know if I could use anything from back then as an intro--Kizzy comes closest, but that's her 'fic from ten years ago, too, and I think she'd cut me ;)--and the stuff I've read since tends to rely on a certain familiarity. Not to mention that I've been bouncing in and out of this fandom for over a decade; I have so much catching up to do it ain't funny.
Nor would I use 'fic as an intro in the first place, I think. If they know nothing...nope, we're gonna have Anime 101 and BSSM 101 first. 'Fic works better as a 300 level course, and in that case I would send them to the classrooms of Madame shitennou_ai and Msmlle Shitennou Forums to let them find their footing before we'd jump to something else. And, maybe, then we'd talk stories to read and rec. But taste is so individual, and fandom taste doubly so, that I'd rather let them do the experimenting to figure theirs out before we got into a discussion of what else to read.
Questions from the lovelylytton
Lytton
1) As an English major, what is your favourite field of study and why?
The English degree I got was structured in three parts: Composition, Linguistics, and Literature. I fell in love with Ling and I've never really backed off from it, especially when I found that my ability to analyze something in a literary light fell flat in paper after paper. Even so, I did enjoy my Lit. classes; I liked digging into the words and themes, learning a bit about a bunch of authors, and seeing how their situation would influence their work unconsciously as much as it did so consciously.
2) What book would you have never picked up hadn't it been for a class and suddenly found yourself falling in love with?
I don't think I would've voluntarily picked up anything I read in a Lit class; I'm very much a genre girl, and have been since I was a kid. I occasionally try to be cultured, and I usually fail at it, heh.
In any case, here's some of the works that crawled into my brain through Lit classes: The Lysistrata. Goblin Maket. Mr. Palomar. The House on Mango Street. "The Yellow Wallpaper." The value of the Norton Anthology. But the one that'll always stand out is A Tale of Two Cities, where I quite unexpectedly found a reflection in Syndney Carton, and how deeply that book gripped and affected me. Which is amazing for a guy who got paid by the word, yes.
3) What's your comfort food?
Carbs--often in the form of some bread thing--and chocolate. Though usually not bread and chocolate together, 'cause that's messy.
4) If there's any language you could learn with the snap of your fingers, which one would it be?
A surprisingly difficult question for me. Off the top of my head I want to say "Tewa," because it's a language I work on, and it doesn't have that many speakers left; however, there's so much squicky privilege involved in that that it wouldn't be possible for me to go through with it. Same with most dying languages in the world. So then I'd have a list of possibilities, all for dorky linguistic reasons: Japanese, to get that pitch accent and talk to Moto-chan; Mandarin Chinese, for tone and to talk to Pea; Finnish, for initial stress and to talk to Aino and my grandma; Russian, because it's a fascinating language and I would swear so well in it; Sumerian, because it's the goddamn Sumerian; and Proto-Indo-European, PIE, just to see if the reconstruction is anywhere close. Based on that, Finnish would probably win some days, Sumerian or PIE others. I have days to make this decision, right? ;)
5) What was the worst nightmare you ever had?
Oddly, I got this question right after having the worst nightmare I'd ever had: my family was trapped in the hands of people who were going to torture and kill them, and I managed to get away, but I could not get in contact with the authorities at all, and as each second passed, I was more and more sure by the time we went back, they'd all be dead. And it'd be partially my fault, because I'd gotten away, so they had to kill them quickly before the police got there.
I once had a dream that, while all right, ended in a scary way: there was a dead body in the bathtub, and as I watched, the mirror above it cracked, meaning that the spirit was free, and it would strike again. This wouldn't be so bad if the image didn't occasionally hit me in the shower--hell, it came back to me in the shower--and so it wins on the "reoccuring at a bad moment" basis.