Hi Friends, LJ Users, Nigerian Scammers, Russian Bots and sundry others!
Thanks for taking a moment to read my sticky post on friending.

On the whole, there's no need to friend me if you just want to read my fics, since they are posted unlocked. In fact, most of my locked posts are me ranting about the state of the world (usually from a politics or media slant) or some such.

Generally, I am a ready friender. If you friend me and you have entries in your livejournal or have commented on some of my posts, you can usually expect to be friended back, unless:
* There are no entries in your LJ.
* I do not recall us ever having 'spoken' online (given how selective my memory is, you should probably assume this.)
* Your LJ is written wholly in a language I do not speak (pretty much anything that is not English, or French or Italian (both of which I speak poorly), or German, Spanish, Latin, Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Welsh or Irish (all of which I have a smattering of and enough reference books to get the gist.) (Though if your journal is in actual Latin as opposed to Lorem Ipsum, I will probably immediately friend you on principle.)
* Your journal consists of several entries a day concerning My Little Pony, school and whether your hair looks better in plaits, pigtails, or with a fringe pouf. You are probably adorable, but should not be subjected to my occasional flocked rants.

SO, if you've friended me (thanks!) and I've not friended you back, just drop a brief line saying 'Excuse me, oh vague and neglectful one, could you friend me back please?'

I can't guarantee that I will ever have time to be a good lj friend, but I will try and provide you with amusing content and I always try to read my whole flist. Well, the stuff before the cut at any rate.

Before getting to the meat of the matter, a moment to say HAPPY BIRTHDAY allopen !</span> I am sorry that Russell T. Davies has decided to torture you for it and have my fingers crossed he redeems himself. I feel that Joss Whedon has probably started fangirling RTD, so good luck.

Right. Now, you HP folk who constitute most of my flist. At this moment we constitute two groups. The first group are all carting themselves off to one of my favourite American cities and taking the Harry love to San Francisco for Azkatraz. Everyone in that group, raise one hand. Right. Piss of the lot of you, you have enough fun planned for the next week.

Now, everyone else. Congratulations on your decision to embrace the joys of home. Hurrah for having ready access to a laptop and blanky! But I suspect that you, like me, just know that other lot are going to be skiting their glee to the hilltops and alleging that they are having the BEST TIME EVER!!! even if their room-mates are all flatulent snorers and they are being stalked by a Hufflepuff cosplayer with haliotosis. So, I suggest we make our own fun.

And in fact, I am even willing to get off my arse and do some organising to this end. (Don't give me that look, it happens occasionally!) But I need guidance to know what people would like to do, because having fun by ourselves is ... going to lead to smutty jokes. Stepping away from that conversational abyss, I offer the following poll.

Poll #1427787 Who needs Azkatraz!
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Con, schmon, what we should do is:

I've used check boxes because I can be taught ;-) BTW, please mentally add in the other exclamation point, I had exceeded my daily quota ...

I am reasonably convinced that some of the comments to this Times Online story asking if you would send your children to Hogwarts come from members of my flist.

Also, was I hallucinating that they had Taliban as style several days recently, though they are now back to Taleban? I wonder what is driving the changes?

On an unrelated matter, is anyone a fan of the BBC's Beautiful People? It's only screening here now and I LOVE IT.

I have been desperately trying to finish a story for my second fandom anniversary on Tuesday, but I feel that for the sake of the story, I should give up on that deadline and go for my 750th day instead. Which means I need to come up with something amusing between now and Tuesday to say thanks for all the fish, as it were. Happily, most of you will be too concerned with the film opening or the con to be appalled by the result ;-)

HAPPY BIRTHDAY oldenuf2nb ! Your stories are so human and beautifully told, and the art is just icing on the cake!

And for all of us of a certain age -- or close to it -- I offer the following comment from Simon Doonan (quite hilarious Brit writer):
"Cinquante-six," Doonan said. "Ever since I passed fifty, I'm ageing in French. It's more glamorous."

But I do need to know a bit about using C-4 explosives. For a story I am working on. Just basic things, such as the amount you would need to blow a hole in a wall without blowing up everything in the room the wall was part of. And what density of object you would need to hid behind were you in said room.

Normally I'd turn to my Googlefu, but I have a cat in one hand and a reasonable suspicion that Echelon tracks me already thanks to my many Bush jokes and botanical poisons expertise ...

Anyone? 

Yes, I know I am meant to be writing or sleeping, but I had a little epiphany today about writing and reading and I wanted to share it, and it was either post here or continue working on the Giant Georgia-inspired Writing Post of Doom. (Which is currently at 6000 words with notes for another 15,000 at least, and I cannot open it or I will never finish my story.) So please bear with me.

My epiphany manifested swiftly, but had its birth over the last few days. To start with, pushdragon  and I were talking about Pericles, and she wondered if the choice to play the final act largely seriously after the often riotous comedy that had gone before may not have been a poor one. I confessed that I had not noticed, because I am too used to renaissance and mediaeval theatre, where that sort of thing happens all the time. (NB, this is why you should always ask Push, not me, about a play. Throw in a good concluding dance or a bit of Festival and I think it's a winner even if it's actually a bit dodgy.)

Yesterday, my young friend tomatoe18  bemoaned that she just could not get into The Demon's Lexicon. This surprised me, because she is a really good reader, and it is a good book. But I thought about my reading of it and remembered that I had found the lead character astonishingly hard to connect with, to the point I quickly realised that it must *spoiler* be a plot twist (which it is, and a nicely constructed one). I thought about Amy and what she likes to read, and realised that she would be reading the whole book with her emotional brain on, which is the way that most Young Adult Fiction, homoerotic fiction and high-end fantasy novels are written these days. I suggested that she approach it like a mystery instead, which is how I ended up reading it, and she found she was able to finish it last night.

Hmmmm, I said to myself, nodding with annoying smugness, our pre-established audience responses can really send us in unhelpful directions, can't they? My own distaste for trashy horror nearly saw me snub the Sookie Stackhouse books, which I enjoyed ENORMOUSLY. And I was a good 100 pages in before I realised that they were in fact filled with genre jokes and political satire, because I had assumed they were Serious Fantasy/Horror Business.

I thought that was the extent of things, until I staggered half-deranged and mildly rain-splattered onto the train from North Sydney earlier this evening. I sat beside a man who looked just like an average opera singer I used to fancy and, in a bid to not peer at his face, I pulled out last week's New Yorker and tried to finish the excellent story on Nora Roberts.

I should confess at this point that before reading this article, I had only the vaguest idea who Nora Roberts was, which should cement any ideas you may have about my level of wankery and demolish any reputation for keen insights into the world of publishing I may have constructed. For those of you who are similarly ignorant, she is a massively famous and successful American romance writer.

The magazine article on her is long, comprehensive and fascinating. And on the second-last page, it contains this sentence:
'In a 1981 survey, the literature professor Janice A. Radway, found that the romance readers in her sample group considered the depiction or rape only slightly less objectionable than a sad ending.'

I put the magazine down. I looked at the man beside me to discover that he was almost certainly not David Hobson. I mentally listened to the Hallelujah Chorus and enjoyed the short firework display that my brain had scheduled to underscore the fact that it had reached a probably obvious but to me revelatory conclusion.

Those fanfic writers who look at me blankly when I say 'I just do not feel that people respond to sexual violence by immediately falling in love with their violator' were probably raised on old-school romance. More, those fantasy writers who I cannot convince to give their characters sane names have grown up with characters called Willow, Aragorn and Locke and do not know that the Middle Ages were full of Johns, Williams, Janes and Elizabeths (and Tiffanys, strange but true). Similarly, those  action-based story aficionados who think it is perfectly logical to have highly trained military or spy-type folk rush off with a strategy that is full of logical holes have almost certainly formed their ways of thinking about campaigns during the Bush administration (is it too soon?).

In every case, the resultant story will be readily understood by a component of its audience, but can alienate or baffle the rest. Because it is written from a basis of genre conventions rather than being written as an organic story within itself. Similarly, as readers, we can cock up our relationship with a new book because we approach it from the basis of its genre, rather than reading it as a thing within itself, feeling our own way through its people and events.

When this occurred to me, I thought, oh but surely that's obvious and you've just forgotten you know it. But on longer reflection, it's not. Like may of us, I've been bamboozled by publishers into reading their books according to their rules, and those rules are rules of marketing, not of writing. I like to think that I make fewer of these errors as a writer, but if that is true, then it is only because my reading is so broad. Or perhaps because being bound by the conventions of political satire is not so limiting as working within some other genres ...


On an unrelated note, Lance Armstrong, you are a freak, well done. And Fabian Cancellara, congratulations. Australian commentators, please note, it is Tours de France, not Tour de Frances. I know that you are not taught this at school, but feel certain someone around you has probably corrected you at some point, you should listen to them. (Also Grands Prix, but that's a different commentary team.)

And I have the most awful crush on Keith McCloud.

... to the three or four people who had not yet noticed my passion for maths, science and history. I may not watch anime (does Miyazaki count? Maybe I do ...), nor read manga, but I found this webcomic hilarious.

On an unrelated note, HAPPY LATE BIRTHDAY seshat1 , I am sorry I missed it, I was distracted by semi-naked Marcus Graham. Hope it was brilliant and that you looked as magnificent as usual. And Happy Birthday for today to seethingheathen </span>. You seethe more elegantly than practically anyone else!

Magazine still not gone to printer, four people remain functional out of a staff of 30-odd. If anyone points out errors in the bound issue, I shall beat them to death with a rolled-up copy and use my garden shredder to turn them into mulch. However, it's better than being Mr Brammers and trying to manage the accounts of a government department at end of financial year. He's still at work, and apparently considering in leading his team in a secession from the Commonwealth.

Back to the writing!

Working in an office on a Sunday (as opposed to romantically writing freelance in a cafe while having the friendly staff pop by with regular cups of coffee to ask questions that make you sound Incredibly Interesting (I tip well, and our local caff resembles a performance art space half the time)) is a TERRIBLE WASTE OF A SUNDAY.

Though at least I felt morally virtuous in cheering up my friend who was also there, and we were able to have a little sing-along, which was when Security came by to check we were all right ... but who expects office sanity on the weekend?

I have an enormous amount of writing to accomplish in the next nine days. Please feel free to nag. I rate the probability of me finishing it at about 74%. This figure will be revised down to about 52% if it turns out that Sarah Palin actually resigned because of something irresistibly HILARIOUS.

Lovely day. Pericles with pushdragon, including Marcus Graham with lots of chest showing, brilliant Japanese drumming and post-play chocolate, then lovely dinner with friends including crazed parrot. I had forgotten that Pericles contains pirates, the stupidest plot contrivances ever and the great clodhopping boots of the Exposition Fairy doing her version of Country Dancing, but you know, add some good drumming, great company and hot men, and I am prepared to forgive anything.

Minor dramas in between the play and dinner, including Mr Brammers taking to his bed with flu and having to find my way in Suburbia which would have been easier had the taxi not dropped me off a kilometre before the *actual* corner I wanted and had Suburbia believed that people should be able to walk in it, but the cake and I made it in reasonable time and condition.

And the walk was spent in pleasant cogitations on the fineness of Marcus Graham, to whit: 

I need a tiny favour from those of you who still have access to your brains.

Could anyone who reads magazines and has a functioning visual memory please take a look at the cover of The Quibbler Luna is holding at this link here and tell me what famous and *obvious* real magazine cover the art direction mimics? It is driving me crazy!

In pleasant news, HAPPY BIRTHDAY to allifer and </span> aqua_chuu !</span> Not just dead sexy, you two are great parts of the alpha section of my flist, and I hope that your birthdays are similarly A-grade and full of A-list gifts! Though not aardvarks, that would be weird ...

We sent one of our subs home yesterday, despite being desperately understaffed. She dragged herself to the doctor today: definitely flu, probably swine! Oh the excitement!

So far, for those without serious pre-existing conditions, H1N1 2009 Influenza is proving less lethal than the 'normal' influenza that is doing the rounds of Australia this year, so it's actually the better option. And so far for me, my mild cold has apparently kept me a little too warm to incubate the virus, or so I am telling myself. I actually feel very good even for having another bloody cold. Ten minutes of clogged nose a day and a voice that sounds a little like a soprano Marianne Faithfull impersonator first thing in the morning, and that's IT.

NB, the above paragraph will probably come back to bite me and I will end up dragging myself to the doctor to beg for Tamiflu tomorrow morning desperately trying to get my act together before heading off to Pericles with pushdragon ...

Still, I was able to spend the day being reassuring, reminding people what the symptoms for flu actually are (as opposed to a probable case of dermatitis for one) and letting a few people know that, actually, treatments for some viruses do exist, and this is one of them. (After the 12th question asking why we weren't all being vaccinated, it is possible I may have said 'Good god, people, you are JOURNALISTS!', but that was the extent of me being snappish.)

For those keeping track, it's been about 2 months since it reached Australia, I think less than one month since the first death here, and my friend is someone who has not travelled within the period, nor been closely exposed to anyone who has. Which means that those public health officials who have pretty much given up on the quarantine make an excellent point for it no longer serving any purpose.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY  rhibrew !
</span>

And for yesterday, Happy birthday to mockingbirdq  and naduni ! Sorry I missed the actual day, I was busy catching up with work for a deadline in which there seem to be about four sane people left in my corner of publishing. I say sane, but since we had people dropping like flies with the flu as the hours wore on and ended the day planning for tomorrow's Sapphic Sex Friday (which grew out of Casual Sex Friday, for when Casual Friday just isn't fun enough), that could be hugely overstating the case.

I hope you all have and had a great time!

St Stephen's Church in Newtown has a beautiful cemetery attached to it. It was once much larger, but the council decided to build a park, and so they resumed much of the land, leaving the bodies buried beneath it and moving the best stones inside the new church wall to line it on the side thet remained cemetery (all the 'best' graves were nearest the church, they remain intact).

The park still has bodies buried beneath it, but most people do not know and it is a popular picnic and playing spot. I went to a wedding at the church on the weekend, then back to the cememtery and park today, because there were a few photos I wanted to take. Firstly, for the wonderfuljadzialove : 

This is on the wall outside the cemetery and church, on the park side, which is covered in graffiti. What the legend underneath means, I have no idea, though I would definitely shag Snape over Rove. The latter is sweet and funny, but too nice. Here is a broader shot of the wall: 

As you can see, it is rather chaotic on the outside. On the inside, it encloses a refuge that seems a world away from the cacophony of Newtown, with nineteenth century graves telling the stories of people who lived locally generations ago. It is a quiet place, despite the busy streets running past it, where people smile gently at each other in passing and swathes of periwinkle and grasses clothe the dead.

Many famous early Sydneysiders are buried there, and it is where you will find Eliza Donnithorne's grave. It is widely believed she was the model for Miss Havisham in Great Expectations. Dickens lived in Sydney for a while, and she was the famous daughter of a very fine house on King Street in Newtown. On the day of her wedding, with the wedding meal set and her finery on, she received her guests and waited for her groom. He never arrived.

Though she changed her clothes, the wedding breakfast was left on the table for over thirty years until she died. She herself rarely left the house. Eventually, she died, and is buried with her father. 

Walking back, I saw a great Dane cheerfully trying to make friends with another dog. It was a sausage dog. The sausage's owners caught the great Dane and after some soprano and bass barks were exchanged, a friendship of sorts began.
All in all, a most successful day off!

Made it to the wedding on Sunday, it was gorgeous. Two lovely people who make each other happy, dressed beautifully, with a wonderful and remarkably decorative cake, delicious food and excellent company. I wore flats, due to the cat-assisted foot injury, but looked fine and could see over people's shoulders enough to see the actual ceremony.

Finally took a photo of the Snape graffito on the outer churchyard wall, too. May even post it one day. Ah organisation, you are not my middle name ...

Came over all snotty and febrile at reception, probably due to closeness of room. Felt fine yesterday, but it is back with a vengeance tonight, probably due to massage, which at least made foot feel somewhat better. The nice shiatsu man was reasonably reasonable: 
Him: Do you have any issues with your gallbladder? This line in the shoulder is often associated with gallbladder issues.
Me: None.
Him: Do you have any issues with your shoulder? Sometimes a sore shoulder is associated with a sore shoulder.

I feel certain that snot will follow the sore shoulder away, leaving me limber and lurgy-free.

Meanwhile, for anyone who is interested in the English language, the Times has a new column The Pedant. It's amusing and interesting, though I am not sure why the editors believe it belongs in the women's section.

Finally, happy birthday for yesterday, lisarose1 ! </span>I am sorry I missed it, I was distracted by the astonishing propensity of my computer to crash. I hope your day was tech trouble free and began and ended delightfully.

But I need help, as I can't bring myself to type out any more track listings.

Is anyone out there an iTunes specialist? Or perhaps it is a broader Apple thing ... My iTunes crashes whenever I try to have it and my internet connection open at the same time. Offline it is stable and happy and will manually sync and upload CDs that I type the track listings in for to its heart's content. But open an internet connection, and it goes down like Draco Malfoy in a PWP.

I went to visit the Genius Bar with my problem, they told me it was because I used an old version of iTunes and should update. I did, I copied the tracks back from my iPod onto my MacBook and then back to the iPod with the new iTunes on it, too (SO time-consuming), and all was well for about three weeks. Then, back to the crashing.

And yes, I have gone to look for help on sundry Apple sites and even found one that could work, were it not for the fact that iTunes will not work while the internet connection is open, since its first step was: connect to the iTunes Store ...

The reason I suspect it could be a broader issue than my iTunes only is that Gmail in Firefox crashes whenever I attempt to attach anything to an email. While my other webmail is fine. If I was an actual geek rather than just a fan of the geekerati, I would be able to tell you if there were similar pathways used by both processes. As it is, I know there are two things that make me say 'Argh fuckit!'

I accept that I will probably be off for another happy half hour chatting with the very sweet but not quite as helpful as they think they are kids at the Genius Bar, but if anyone out there knows a cunning fix, I would love to hear from you.

Thanks!

In my desperate bid to be remotely thoughtful, happy birthday to fade_into_dark  and</span> luthien82  for what I think is still today where both of you are. I am wishing you cakes, drinks with bubbles, lovely gifts and hugely fund days.

And happy birthday for today to tray_la_la !</span> I am wishing you a sudden and unexpected visit from the person you had a brief crush on when you were 13, just for something different. In all likelihood it will involve you calling for a tow-truck for his or her broken-down car, but with some amusing chit-chat and general bonhomie.

While recovering from my near stupid death experience (see previous page) I decided to catch up on Questionable Content's tweets (and do keep that level of geekiness between us would you? Thanks.)

They were rabbiting on about Lyttle Lytton, an internet-based competition to find the best worst short opening sentence to an unwritten novel. (Following in the footsteps of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which looks for the best worst (usually) long opening sentence.)

Even if the idea doesn't immediately make you smile, then surely this explanation as posted as part of the entry to the 2009 winners list will: 

Again, what this contest is going for is a simulation of unintentional comedy — we should be laughing at your entry, not with it. This is hard to do on purpose. It's a lot easier when you're not trying. For instance, I just went to the suspiciously heterosexual Amazon bestseller list and pulled up the top book, which was something called Liberty and Tyranny by one Mark Levin. It begins:

 

• There is simply no scientific or mathematical formula that defines conservatism.

See, that would be a winning entry in this year's contest! It raises a number of questions: who exactly does the author think he's disabusing of the notion that a political belief system can be rendered as a "scientific or mathematical formula"? What distinction does he believe he's drawing between scientific formulas and mathematical ones? How deep into this imaginary argument is he that he thinks he needs to add the word "simply"?

-------
I foresee many hours of happy faffing ...

You are both dark-coloured felines. Our house has a blue carpet. Our hallway has a dark curtain between it and the living room (because there is no room to hang a door).

When Mr Brammers goes mad and decides to turn the hallway lights off rather than to dim, then goes to bed, this is not a sign that you should position yourselves in said hallway on the drape of said curtain at the exact spot that the light from the living room runs out. Because you will find yourself being trodden on, which you won't enjoy, and twisting my bung foot, which I won't enjoy, as I desperately struggle to not put my weight down mid-stride.

I am very glad that you were not hurt beyond a rush of panic, but now I will have to wear flats to the wedding tomorrow rather than heels, so when I am accused of making poor fashion choices, I will be blaming you.

Love,
The person who buys you the expensive kibbles. Start behaving or it will be generic brand varieties before too long.

... those of you who are mourning him, I am probably going to bite the next person who tells me that Michael Jackson was a revolutionary figure in the fight for equality by African Americans. I hasten to add that this has so far been three in real life and double the number of media foik: my flist has been a bastion of sanity.

Aesthetic irony aside, it belittles genuine revolutionary figures. And I am not even talking about political giants like Dr King; there were many entertainers who walked a far more difficult path earlier and with more grace and charity, such as Ella Fitzgerald, Paul Robeson, Josephine Baker, Sammy Davis Jnr and Nina Simone.

I'm all for people loving the heroes they choose, but I would love a bit of perspective at times like these. And perhaps a little sense of history.

Flistees who are just missing the singing and dancing, I apologise for intruding on your sad day.