Hello lovely readers (especially the finnish ones),

It has finally happened: I don't want to experiment on you all - I'm supervising an MA student who would like to experiment on you solicit your optinions. My supervisee is writing her thesis on the influence of different digital platforms on fandom throughout the years and would very much like to hear from you - especially if you have been in fandom a while (i.e. predate Tumblr).

The survey is short (shouldn't take more than 5 - 10 minutes) and can be found here.

Please spare a few minutes to fill answer her questions and share the link with your fannish nearest and dearest (or bitter rivels... honestly not fussy).

Hello lovely people - I'm helping out with an experiment looking at variations on stories and we need some volunteers. The experiment involves writing a short summary of one of two stories ('Romeo and Juliet' or 'Little Red Riding Hood') and then writing a second summary of the same story - but with a twist!

The experiment is online so can be done in your own time (within the length of the experiment) and from the comfort of your own sofa/writing desk/bat cave.

Everything you need to know and the experiment itself can be found at http://korpora-exp.zim.uni-duisburg-essen.de/variants/

Please think about having a go - I hope it will be fun. (And tell your friends!)

Originally posted at http://fides.dreamwidth.org/12219.html. There are comments there.

Mediam: TV show
Genre: Buddy PI/detective
Length: Sadly canceled after 13 episodes
Why?: Well written and acted, character-driven, down-to-earth detective show with rounded, flawed characters - yep, no wonder in was canned.

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Originally posted at http://fides.dreamwidth.org/9281.html. There are comments there.

I saw this posted on beren_writes's LJ and thought 'why the heck not'. So here it is - the Fic Favourites Meme. I tell you which of the stories I wrote I am proudest of and, if so inclined, other people can say which they like best.


This is the link to my entry. Please leave your comments. Thank you kindly

I'm actually quite interested in this because as far as I can tell my most popular story by quite some way was one I wrote pretty quickly (it was for mmom) and might possibly involve a pairing which I have not actually watched (again, it was for mmom). On the plus side, it is quite short and has no redeemable social value - which might explain it I guess.

For those who are into such things but want a reminder - you can find me on AO3.

For those who aren't into such things please ignore this message and pretend it didn't happen (especially if I am in some way related to you ;-p)

Originally posted at http://fides.dreamwidth.org/9072.html. There are comments there.

As I mentioned in my previous post - kludge had a story published in an anthology called Machine of Death (first 60 pages free sample). Being an independent/self published novel for various reasons they knew they had a bit of an uphill struggle to get noticed.

Their plan - to try and get everyone to buy copies on the same day (26th), thus slightly gaming the Amazon.com bestseller list and make a splash.

They succeeded.

Incidentally beating 'Life' the Keith Richards (auto)biography into 2nd and 'Broke' by Glenn Beck, with which it shared a launch date, into 3rd.

Beck was not impressed.

At all. Not only exhorting his followers to buy his book (which is fair enough because that is what everyone else has been doing) but slamming the two books that beat his as part of the Liberal death culture that is destroying America.

My husband is part of what's "wrong" with America - I'm so proud. And deeply amused.

The related bits of twitter now seemed to have turned into a Machine of Death vs Glenn Beck with people posting to #machineofdeath finding themselves put on some interesting hate lists by Beck's supporters while other people are appealing to everyone to buy MoD just to annoy Beck more.

Just to add to the fun - apparently Beck's producers got in touch with the editors to ask for a copy of the book... whether the response to this was actually to point them towards the Amazon page where it could be bought is not clear but is am amusing thought.

kludge's book is coming out today. It's an anthology of short stories all based around the premise of a machine that can predict how someone will die (i.e. this comic).

A free preview is available (which incidentally includes kludge's story) on their webpage.

To promote the book they are holding a Machine of Death Day to try and get listed in the Amazon.com best sellers for one day (Oct 26th). Since it is Amazon.com, the "day" is on Pacific Time so if you are interested, are thinking about buying the book (read the preview, think about it) and are in a position to order from the US!Amazon then join in the fun of trying to game the Amazon system and order it "today" (for values of today which equal today in pacific time i.e. late afternoon/evening European time)! Sadly the book is only listed on on Amazon.com atm but it will be available other places in the near future.

And as an added cool bonus - they will send you a free eBook version if you send them a receipt (currently, Kindle or TXT but they are looking into ePub so hopefully that should be available soon as well kludge is working on the ePub version so that will be available soon).

Please pass the message on to anyone who you think might be interested - help get an indie book (and T-Rex) some recognition!

EDIT: Success!! They hit the #1 spot in the Amazon.com bestseller rankings for books. Yay them!

A few of you may remember that during the recent kerfuffle about fan fiction one of the noted authors suggested the way to make everything okay was to change the names. We bring to you now the FOTSeN automator!

With this wonderful piece of technology (built by kludge) you too can miraculously turn any AO3 archived fan fiction into "original" fiction with just the touch of a button! Just give it the URL or story ID of any publicly visible story in the AO3 archive, up to 20 names and their replacements and set it to work.

Want to see how the story would read if it was set in another fandom? Squicked by RPF but want to read the characters in an Actor!AU? You can do that too, just by switching the names!

And all for the low, low price of FREE!

Enjoy :-)




NB 1. For those wondering - the script works in real-time, directly from the archive and does not store or keep any of the stories being converted.
NB 2. This was written as a lighthearted joke in response to an uninformed suggestion. Taking it seriously is bad for everyone's blood pressure.

Originally posted at http://fides.dreamwidth.org/7624.html. There are comments there.

My lovely kludge got published today in Strange Horizons. Everyone should go read!

Originally posted at http://fides.dreamwidth.org/6344.html. There are comments there.

Finally, here are the second set of answers to the 15 characters meme I posted a few posts ago. Answers in this section are to the final question by zellieh and those asked by beckyl, clarehooper and jane_h. Due to the questions, the answers in this section range from PG-13 to NC-17.

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Originally posted at http://fides.dreamwidth.org/6101.html. There are comments there.

Just to prove that I am answering them - here are the first set of answers to the 15 characters meme I posted a few posts ago. Answers in this section are to the questions asked by saraid, muuranker and the first two questions by zellieh and a mostly PG-13 rated.

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Next part coming soon...

Originally posted at http://fides.dreamwidth.org/5660.html. There are comments there.