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Fanfiction and Fan Art Index

I ask you to refrain from posting anything you find on this site to Facebook, Twitter or any other site. Most of my fiction is restricted adult and kept behind the cut. Please respect my wishes to limit readership to adults only.

I've heard of strange fixations in my day, but what is with boys and their need to cover things with graffiti of penises? There is this desk at the university which has 20 years of different cartoon penises inscribed on it.

Why?

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Sorry I haven't been around much. I've been ill.

The Imitation Game isn't in our cinemas (assuming it has opened elsewhere). Pity, because I want to see it. It doesn't help that I can never remember the name of the movie when I'm near a theatre, and I keep drawing these blank stares when I prompt the clerks, "You know, the Alan Turing movie..."

"Who?"

For some weird reason, I can't bring myself to say the Benedict Cumberbatch movie. Probably because they'll just tell me The Hobbit hasn't opened yet.

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What's with the barf-tastic flavours getting dumped all over potato chips these days? Bad enough that the darned things now cost four bucks a bag, does the world really need sauerkraut and steak chips? Or poutine, which is just bovril-flavoured brown greasy potato mush? Can we go back to the days when chips were either plain, or ripple? Because eeeeewwww!

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Some of you have probably heard about this, but, basically, someone has been lifting fanfiction stories whole and reprinting them without permission on their blog (at http://www.donotlink.com/framed?561309 ... it's on a "Do Not Link" site in order to circumvent ad revenues being sent to them via the Wordpress.org platform which hosts them.) I've recognized many names on the roles, although there are an awful lot of unaccredited stories as well. The stories are word-for-word. It's just that this person is sucking off readership traffic, collecting ad revenues, and they have no permission to reprint the works.

ETA: Because there's some misunderstanding about this, let me spell it out clearly: Thief's using a Wordpress platform which sells ads and pays per hit. She's not recommending fanfics for the sake of fandom. She's making money off us.

This person very kindly drew my attention to one of my works being stolen, and explained things very carefully here:

http://ladydragon76.livejournal.com/225544.html

Basically, if you want to find out if a story of yours was stolen, but don't want to scroll through thousands of stolen entries go to this page:

http://www.donotlink.com/framed?561309

On the right side you will see a white box with "Search" to the right of it. Type in your LJ username (or your community's name) and hit enter. It works the same as the original site but doesn't allow hits or revenue to accumulate.

Ladydragon76 spells out what to do if you find any of your works on their site. Just read her entry.

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"[W]hen you get to my age you realise you've only got a certain amount of drinking years left, so you may as well invest in something good. A handmade suit or a handmade wine is a whole new dimension to being alive and living well. I'm not necessarily talking about luxury: luxury is bullshit, but quality is an entirely different thing."

Sam Neill, The Guardian; 16, August 2014.

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Can't believe it's that time of year again. Another summer and this time, Leonard Bernstein's Candide is the choice for Opera in the Village.

Voltaire was pretty savvy. Even back in the early days of Enlightenment, he nailed the sexual offenders working the Catholic Church, and there is one scene in the show where enslaved Maxmillian is "brought into the fold", but Voltaire's satire is as black as you can get short of slicing up and serving actual Irish babies for breakfast. It skewered sexual offenders of all classes, religious and philosophical denominations and cultural backgrounds. (It was intended to skewer a fallacy and näiveté of Romanticism, and the belief that there is any philosophy or religion that can protect its adherents from worldly problems.)

So, what was the audience really booing at during that moment of last night's performance? Were they angry because they thought the opera was making a joke at the expense of rape survivors? Or were they angry because paedos in the Catholic Church were being skewered, a joke which made the church look bad?

It was hard to tell.

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I'm not a gamer, ergo this doesn't concern me much, but I know there are friends on the f-list who are gamers and who may feel so inspired. A fellow on Change.org is petitioning the company which owns and develops Prisoner of Zelda to develop and name a character after Robin Williams since he was, apparently, a fan. Because of Livejournal's data-sharing policy with Facebook and Twitter, comments will not be logged here. If you would like to respond to this post, please click through: http://7veils.dreamwidth.org/363402.html.

"MARCH 4TH, 1943. This will probably be one of the last letters I shall write to you before going into internment ...."

[Peggy Abkhazi's journal was an extension of the correspondence she kept prior to the Second World War with Roderick and Muriel MacKenzie of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, who were her best friends and became her benefactors after the war. Their initial letters had to be destroyed during the Japanese invasion of China in case heedless gossip about mutual friends resulted with inadvertently serving the enemy.]

".... [Or] rather to the Civil Assembly Centre, to give the correct and official designation. You'll remember that the Japanese adore giving fancy names to things, and they have the naive belief that if you call a thing by some other name, the nature of the thing itself is thereby changed."

Peggy Abkhazi,
A Curious Cage: Life in a Japanese Internment Camp, 1943 - 1945,
ed. S. W. Jackman with an afterword by Katherine Gordon:
Page 51; © 1981, Sono Nis Press, Victoria.

Peggy's criticisms of this Orwellian Truth-Speak are a bit rich ...

"Got home feeling depressed, cold and tired to find Li in a state of suspended drama and agitation. Four Japanese soldiers, to listen to him, armed to the teeth, had called and finding I was out, said that would return at the same time tomorrow. I couldn't think what they could want, but the thought of domiciliary visits is hardly reassuring, it has on occasion been the prelude to being taken for "questioning".."

Peggy Abkhazi,
A Curious Cage: Life in a Japanese Internment Camp, 1943 - 1945,
ed. S. W. Jackman with an afterword by Katherine Gordon:
Page 36; © 1981, Sono Nis Press, Victoria.

[This matter had to do with the expropriation of her vehicle which she couldn't operate anyway as gasoline was so heavily rationed as to be generally unavailable for private use under the occupation.]

Since I had a very long cross-town bus journey yesterday afternoon, I brought along my copy of A Curious Cage and managed to read it through — not in a particularly critical fashion, with a view to what I might glean for insight and great sayings but, for a journal, the pace sped along quite merrily and was easily absorbed in one sitting. That was when I discovered how important "The Afterword" by Katherine Gordon was, containing information suited better to a proper "The Introduction" by S. W. Jackman. For all his historical degrees and accolades and summa cum laudery, he seems to have had an uncanny ability to miss the main point, the colossally important main point, completely overlooking ( this incredibly pertinent piece of information:Collapse )

The next installment will have to do with her first year in prison camp.

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"The cycle bandits will go out of business for a time, as three of their number have been caught redhanded—two of them laid out by a Briton and a German, and handed over to the Japanese who promptly cut off their heads—so that is that."

Peggy Abkhazi,
A Curious Cage: Life in a Japanese Internment Camp, 1943 - 1945,
ed. S. W. Jackman with an afterword by Katherine Gordon:
Page 35; © 1981, Sono Nis Press, Victoria.

( The enjoyment of a journal is enhanced or decreased by the skill of its editorCollapse )

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Penny in Yo Pants. Of course, in Canada, it would have to be "Nickel in Yo Pants" because we don't mint pennies anymore. Because of Livejournal's data-sharing policy with Facebook and Twitter, comments will not be logged here. If you would like to respond to this post, please click through: http://7veils.dreamwidth.org/361350.html.

I have no enthusiasm for writing (or reading much) these days. I've been trying to come up with some ideas for 7thnight prompts, and nothing excites me. I'm fond of Saiyuki, but it is just a nice warm glow, not an adventure or an inspiration anymore. I can't say other fandoms have grabbed me either. Maybe it's time to step back and let something else pour in.

Cheers!

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Those things are dangerous.

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I wonder if many of these people who subscribe to the whole Random Acts of Kindness business realize that it's quite useless if they don't also subscribe to Consistent Acts of Common Everyday and Very Ordinary Decency and Kindness. Like the bus driver who brags about buying extra coffees at Tim Hortons for random strangers, but pulls away as an old woman pushing a pram hobbles up even as people are calling out that there is someone still trying to get on the bus.

Random Acts of Kindness, my fine ass!

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I like physical fitness (as some of you may have guessed) but, I swear, if I ever hear of another Run-for-Fun fundraising scheme, I will vomit all over the pledge form and entrance fee. I will turn off the news, if they report on yet another boring marathon-for-millions.

Sad. Tiresome. FFS, fundraiser, I will not pay to your favourite charity for you to do something which you should just be doing for yourself, period. Never. For one thing, people need to exercise whether they get paid for it or not, whether it's 'fun' or not. But, hey! If you're serious about earning money for your favourite charity, stop your stupid running and come shovel my driveway, or paint my basement floor. I will pay for services I can actually use.

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Came across three different articles and stories about the same ghost when I was doing research into the folklore of old castles and thought I would share. They are all from the early 19th century, so the language is stilted and quite a few of the assertions are patently absurd. Still, it's in fun.



( Wilhelm II and The White Lady of the HohenzollernsCollapse )




( WHY GERMANS TREMBLE AT VISIT OF WHITE LADYCollapse )





( The White Lady of the HohenzollernsCollapse )

O.O

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Spoiler-iffic, probably.

The big cliff-hanger from season one was Agent Coulsen's abduction by The Clairvoyant ostensibly for the purposes of discovering what happened to him in Tahiti, after he 'died'. I click on the first episode of season two and — Wait! Hunh ... what? What is Agent Coulsen doing back on his schmancy jet all of a sudden?

I couldn't even go further because I'm not really into Schroedinger Cat People. As a plot device, it really is too convoluted. Please, someone tell me the discrepancy is resolved in the first episode and the screenwriters didn't just decide that Coulsen's kidnapping never happened. I can't even watch because it bothers me so much.

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Probably spoilerish, although every Tom Clancy novel since The Hunt for Red October has had the same plot structure. So, how is it possible to spoil a Clancy-style movie?

It's no surprise that yet another movie was made about Jack Ryan, and it drew this and that from here and there in Clancy novels, without the producers thinking they actually needed the author himself, or at least a new plot. At least Clancy knew how to make something look intricate by breadth of research and detail and transpersonal relationships. There was no "Seaman Jones" in this submarine, no weirdly original-yet-spot-on leaps of astoundingly intuitive wild-assed guessing, no step-by-step unveiling of amazing processes. It simply ran out of gas somewhere and bottomed out, not even in the Laurentian Trench or some place really deep and interesting, more like a shallow and mucky river bottom.

Where the movie fails is that its fictions aren't nearly as interesting as the real life facts, and when a person is talking about the economy, financial manipulations and corporate espionage, to manage to be even more boring than real life is dire indeed. Also wouldn't Americans find it really hard to get whipped up into a good old rabid jingoistic froth-mouth against the Russians* and their nefarious oligarchy* and its financial manipulations*, when their own nefarious plutocracy managed to sink the economy just fine all by its-lonesome-only-self? (*This mantle of nefariousness for financial manipulation also extending to cover the Chinese, the Indians, the Brazilians [country, not wax jobs], the Germans and blah-blah-blah, whoever else is the next uppity upstart in line for casting as the next villainous empire.) Does introspection cause American-market-driven producers to break out in hives, or something?

What am I asking? Of course it does. *face palm*

Somehow the screenwriters understood that computer-based terrorism is just not sexy enough for the big screen, so they had to try and "Blow Things Up Real Good" with a stagey terrorist attack in "Oh gosh gee, I wonder where ..." So, there's a last minute whack-a-mole save the planet scenario. Instead of staring at the ticking time bomb, I was fishing out my cellphone to see if I had time to make the early bus.

Too bad, because Branagh's fatalistic villain — so kicked to the curb by despair, grief, illness and loss — had some real possibilities. Just not in that movie and not with that plot and not in any scenario where the horrible Russian greedyguts are somehow more horrible than or different in any way to the horrible American or British greedyguts.

Bleh.

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Notes on Ice: Trailer from Mark Whatmore, Yoho Media.

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[A side comment before I even start: how can something be considered spoilerish when the entire plot of a movie is pretty much revealed in its main trailer? Technically, these comments might be a bit spoilerish, but you would have to be very pure if you can't figure the movie's plot out from the trailer alone.]

Firstly, Ben Stiller's adaptation bears scant resemblance to Thurber's short story, which isn't a bad thing at all. Thurber was a little too fond of using the old trope about domineering wives who squash their poor husbands' daydreams with brutal, withering insensitivity, no matter what power the husband has over his own fate — which is to say, Thurber was a man of his time, and yuck! Stiller has handily passed this radioactive role over to the populist villain of our age: the Corporate Tool who raids companies on behalf of his Satanic Masters, and fires all the good employees.

[Another aside: how come these greedy-gut international financier types are only ever punished in movies? Surely, if our collective rage is so powerful that they have become typed in our collective lexicon of villainous characters-who-must-die, something might actually be done to curb their excesses in real life? Why must we only dream?]

The only other resemblance to Thurber's story is that Walter is shown as a nerdy, detail-oriented man who considers himself trapped by his circumstances, and therefore, releases his very pent-up creative frustrations through a daydream life rich in fantasy, which leaves him prone to long episodes of fazing. The movie does a great job of showing how he is so much at the mercy of his environment and others he is during these episodes, and of the different reactions he receives from people who catch him mid-faze: his co-workers, his mother, his love interest and the Corporate Tool. Where Stiller changes Thurber's story most essentially is through contriving plot circumstances which force Walter to push against the limitations of his self-made prison, to take risks and surprise himself and everyone else with his courageous derring-do. It's an excellent and much welcomed plot-development.

The trouble lies in what Stiller considers courageous risk-taking.

And it isn't just Stiller. Adventure travel, especially when combined with extreme sports, have become the universal shorthand for courageousness and risk-taking. It is the selling point behind adventure tourism packages like trekking in Tibet, or safaris in Africa, or deep-sea diving off of Bali or Belize. Nowadays, it isn't good enough to simply immerse oneself in a new place, learning a new language and assimilating into a new culture. One has to test one's body against nature in these places. To a milder extent, the same sort of adventure travel is the motivating force behind service volunteerism where people travel to build hospitals and schools in places where the communities are bereft of this organizational and infrastructural support, but in both cases, these are such lazy ways to signal personal growth.

Secondly, and more importantly, there is no reason to assume that adventure travel and pushing the physical body like that will have a causal effect on a individual's consciousness at all. Travel is, literally, a horizontal form of expansion. People who are assholes in real life can travel the entire world for years and still return home as complete assholes, with no change in their basic nature at all.

That is my beef with Stiller's Walter Mitty.

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The Yuletide Smut giftfic exchange community on Dreamwidth has been up since Christmas Eve now, and I have to echo what jedishampoo says, the stories are superb and the writers are some of the best (and most loyal) in all of fandom. People have been complaining about how 'dead' the Saiyuki fandom has been, but there is an example of a community that has been consistently productive and active for years, thanks to the hard work and commitment of its moderator and participants.

Go on, and read those stories — even the more unusual pairings. Send some love to the writers. They deserve it.

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GLOW IN THE DARK



Fandom: Saiyuki
Pairing: Gojyo/Hakkai
Rating: Gen
Status: Drabble, 468 words complete.

Prompt: " “Sleepless Nights” "

A LULL IN THE DAY'S ACTIVITIES



Fandom: Saiyuki
Pairing: Sharak/Genjyo/Hassan
Rating: Gen
Status: Drabble, 669 words complete.

Prompt: " “Sharak's wonderful righthand man” "



(  A LULL IN THE DAY'S ACTIVITIESCollapse )

BED WARMER



Fandom: Saiyuki Burial
Pairing: Koumyou/Ukoku
Rating: PG 13
Status: Drabble, 500 words complete.

Prompt: " “Was that lightning?” "

RETRO ROCK



Fandom: Saiyuki
Pairing: Gojyo/Hakkai
Rating: Gen
Status: Drabble, 701 words complete.

Prompt: " “Radioactive” "

LIGHTNING-STRUCK



Fandom: Saiyuki Ibun
Pairing: Toudai/Houmei
Rating: Gen
Status: Drabble, 715 words complete.

Prompt: " “Was that lightning?” "



(  LIGHTNING-STRUCK Collapse )

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OUROBOUROS FLAMBÉE



Fandom: Tiger and Bunny
Pairing: Keith Goodman/Lunatic
Rating: Gen
Status: Drabble, 337 words complete.

Prompt: “Shortcuts”

Author's Note: I adapted a bit of my own Sternbilt A/U in this story. Just the part about Lunatic stealing Keith from the Tower and dumping him on Yuri Petrov's bed.

NIGHT JOURNEY



Fandom: Bleach
Pairing: Ukitake/Shunsui
Rating: PG15
Status: Drabble, 510 words complete.

Prompt: “Ukitake/Shunsui, autumn leaves and/or constellations”

LAST STANDING



Fandom: Bleach
Pairing: Byakuya/Renji
Rating: Gen
Status: Drabble, 366 words complete.

Prompt: " “New beginnings” "

BATTLE FEVER



Fandom: Saiyuki
Pairing: Gojyo/Hakkai
Rating: Gen
Status: Drabble, 355 words complete.

Prompt: " “Gojyo losing his hearing or being mute” "

If you would like a New Year's story in any of the following fandoms and pairings, send me a prompt. I will write until I run out of steam.

Saiyuki:

Hakkai/Gojyo/Hakkai
Koumyou/Ukoku
Toudai/Houmei
Kenren/Tenpou
Kenren/Tenpou/Goujun

Or you can just prompt me with your favourite pairing, and if it tickles something, I will write it.

Bleach:

Ukitake/Shunsui
Byakuya/Renji

Tiger and Bunny:

Kotetsu/Barnaby
Keith/Lunatic
Agnes/Bison/Nathan

Thor2 ... try me. Doesn't have to be a pairing.

ETA:

How could I forget?

Yami no Matsuei

Watari/Tatsumi

Or anything involving 003!

Cheers!

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47 Ronin is a good movie. It's a good re-make. It's very entertaining as well. I don't understand the bad reviews at all.

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The Canadian Museum for Human Rights is hiring, and it's an excellent opportunity for anyone who desires work within both cultural history and humanities. They will be opening in September, but there are still opportunities to write and install exhibits, and apparently, there is a lot of complementary chocolate involved (*w*). The curatorial and archival aspect of the program has already been hammered out for the opening, however.

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Tenpou was released from prison ... meaning the guy who looks like Tenpou, Mikael Khodorkovsky.

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Omigod! Omigod! Omigod!

That is all.

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Damn it, Jane Foster, pay your interns. It isn't the 1820s. Slavery has been illegal for almost 2 centuries.

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I had a few acquaintances in Leyte from the time I was working on contract there, and from whom I have not heard. I wasn't really expecting to hear from them, though, since we are not connected by family or beyond that one shared experience. But I am worried about them, and have been in touch with the producer. She will let me know when she gets word.

In terms of volunteer efforts and disaster recovery work, the Canadian government is focusing on the island of Cebu, but they are matching every dollar raised by donation. It's difficult here, because we just went through some serious floods last spring, so disaster recovery resources have been considerably tapped.

Samaritan's Purse is putting together their usual shoebox campaign, packages of hygiene products, school supplies and Christian evangelical literature stuffed into a shoebox. My frustration with this group is basic: sure, they can inspire a lot of school-aged kids to throw a bunch of 'cute' pint-sized products into a shoebox to make them feel good about contributing to charity (which Samaritan's Purse later crams, in the warehouse, full of their religious propaganda) but what is the point of giving someone soap, shampoo, toothpaste and laundry detergent when the water supply is contaminated and people can't use it?

They need community water treatment facilities and water-pumps first. They need sewage treatment plants, toilets, bathhouses and laundries. They need access to each other with unobstructed roadways and footpaths. Schools! They need water-proof shelter, cots and blankets. They need community kitchens. They need seed and starter plants to figure out gardens and rice fields and replace the fruit-bearing trees that were knocked over so they don't starve in the next season. They need electrical wiring and panels. They need dental equipment and medical equipment to replace the clinics and labs that were demolished. They need refrigeration. Let's handle the basic food, shelter, water and medical attention before we start shipping back a bunch of mass-produced junk that originates in factories in China and Indonesia, ie., a lot closer to the Philippines than we are, and which may not be appropriate for individual situations anyway. Besides, most aid agencies bring in large palettes of sanitation products to distribute where needed.

When you say this to someone who is dead-set on putting a cute little shoebox together, they look at you like you're the grinch.

I was in New Zealand shortly after the Indonesian tsunami, and remember walking past a public donation bin by Lake Taupo. It was crammed full of junk. People were using the donation process as an excuse to clean out their storage cupboards of things they no longer wanted. And, you know, it's fine that people decide to send on sets of drapes that are outdated and maybe there is an opening in somebody's bamboo and grass-thatched temporary house that will look nicer with curtains on it, but mostly it just treats the country like a big garbage dump, like they aren't already being buried in unusable contaminated junk already.

So, please! Use some common sense.

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That's why he's so popular, isn't it? He's the inner bitch.

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Change.org petition to have Saiyuki Gaiden, Saiyuki Ibun, the Anthology and Reload Blast published in English.

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If you would like my new email, please respond in the screened comments of my 7veils.dreamwidth.org entry and I will forward it to you.

I'm phasing out gmail.

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Coffee! Yay!

Did you know that J.S.Bach wrote a cantata to it? The soprano role goes like this:

“Father, don’t be so severe! / If I can’t drink / My bowl of coffee three times daily / Then in my torment I will shrivel up / Like a piece of roast goat.”

... Which indicates two things: in the early 18th century, coffee was viewed as something akin to crystal meth and, perhaps more importantly, even Bach wrote crack.

Ummm-dum-dum-diddly-dai *reads newspaper* ... nothing much else other than that it's very good for preventing ailments of the reproductive systems in both genders, especially cancer. So, if you have issues down there, imbibe and enjoy — but with a catch: if one has had a lot of shocks and stress lately, don't touch it. Caffeine increases dopamine in the brain which makes us feel nice and cozy, but it blocks something in our brains called adenosine receptors — the same thing that happens in an emergency, so the brain responds to that by signaling the adrenal glands to produce adrenalin. That's the peppy get-up-and-go feeling, but if our adrenals are all saggy-baggy from being ridden too hard lately, then leave them alone nasty brute until they recover.

Also, caffeine has about the same half-life in the bloodstream as plutonium, and enough of it will get your Olympic medals taken away. Good thing my f-list isn't particularly inclined to athletic competition.

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Probably everybody in the world has seen this before I have, but what the hell?



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The commentary on this video gushes so, and the commentator provides no evidence in this clip to prove that the 18th-century Swiss clockmaker, Pierre Jacquet Droz, created this automaton for the purposes of 'mechanizing reason and automating the passions', but this little automaton doll is marvelous — if only for providing the inspiration to Scorsese's movie, Hugo. Because of Livejournal's data-sharing policy with Facebook and Twitter, comments will not be logged here. If you would like to respond to this post, please click through: http://7veils.dreamwidth.org/341818.html.

"Thanks to recent revelations we know that governments are using digital technology to monitor our emails, phone calls and the websites we visit. This is an attack on our freedom of speech and an invasion of our privacy. Tell Europe’s leaders to take action to stop the US, UK and other governments from carrying out mass surveillance."

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I drove out on the TransCanada Friday, and returned yesterday via Banff, Yoho and Glacier National Parks through the Kicking Horse Pass and Roger's Pass, south from Revelstoke, across the Shelter Bay/Galena Bay Ferries and the Fauquhier/Needles Ferry over the Arrow Lake.This is through some of the most spectacular scenery in Canada and, since the weather was beautiful and I wasn't the driver, I took 360 photos which need sorting. Now that I'm back, I have close to that many emails to sort as well. Once I'm done the sorting, I will read that last 7thnight story which I hadn't read, and start answering some of the comments and replies that I owe.

Hope your weekend was grand!

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C'mon.

You know you want to.

Do try not to get your penis caught in a toaster.

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Since the state of emergency status over the province of Alberta was just rescinded today, I wanted to write more about the flood recovery effort and relief work going on, but it's, either, a case of same-old/same-old where I outline the various Sisiphean feats of taming the muddy, stinking slog, or a position of 'don't get me started' because the overwhelming mud and stink that floods bring aren't just physical.

So, instead, I opt to wave hello and let you know that I am still alive and doing well, the garden (what came up of it, anyway) is still alive and well, and there is still never enough time.

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