Apparently somehow I had never heard of Gaius Mucius Scaevola before this evening. I feel I should inform you, internet, of how badass he was, because he was especially badass. Yay for semi-mythical early Romans fighting Lars Porsenna the king of Clusium.

( Livy 2.12, tr. Benjamin Oliver FosterCollapse )

So there.

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I did mention the Hannibal/Scipio thing, didn't I? In case anyone needed more convincing of the awesomeness of Hannibal/Scipio, let me quote Livy 30.30 at you. This is before the Battle of Zama (well, obviously), when Hannibal comes to try to surrender:

Keeping their armed men at the same distance the generals, each attended by one interpreter, met, being not only the greatest of their own age, but equal to any of the kings or commanders of all nations in all history before their time. For a moment they remained silent, looking at each other and almost dumbfounded by mutual admiration. Then Hannibal was the first to speak: "If it was foreordained by fate that I, who was the first to make war upon the Roman people and who have so often had the victory almost in my grasp, should come forward to sue for peace, I rejoice that destiny has given me you, and no one else, to whom I should bring my suit. For you also, among your many distinctions, it will prove not the least of your honours that Hannibal, to whom the gods have given the victory over so many Roman generals, has submitted to you, and that you have made an end of this war, which was memorable at first for your disasters and then for ours.

SRSLY. "I am so happy to submit to you! It is an honor!" Almost dumbfounded by mutual admiration (admiratione mutua prope attoniti)! ♥

( The rest of 30.30...Collapse )

MAN DO I LOVE ME SOME BADASS SPEECHIFYING. Thank you for inventing that for us, Livy. Of course, Scipio's reply (30.31) is basically FUCK YOU, YOU STARTED IT and then they have the Battle of Zama. At which there was an eclipse and the Carthaginians kind of thought this was a bad sign from the gods. Also by this time the Romans had learned that they could actually dodge the elephants, making them way less effective. (The Romans also made the elephants stampede Hannibal's side while Hannibal was still addressing his troops ahaha.) But he had eighty elephants! And a bunch of various peoples, most of whom he promised money and land in Italy. (He apparently promised the Gauls the chance to kick Roman ass, and they were apparently okay with just that.) And then the Carthaginians got utterly wrecked. Insert cunning Roman strategy nerdery here. Mostly it seemed to be based on dodging the elephants.

HISTORY: WHY DON'T THEY MAKE A MOVIE OF THIS. It would be ten times better than Gladiator. Gladiator did not have ANY WAR ELEPHANTS AT ALL.

[ETA: There was apparently a BBC Hannibal movie with Alexander Siddig as Hannibal. Ooh. And there is apparently some Hollywood thing called Hannibal the Conqueror that may be being made and Wikipedia says they want Vin Diesel for Hannibal. Hollywood, I take that back about making a movie of it. You really don't have to.]

I am not sure why they are making a massive deal of the age difference; as far as I can tell, at the time Scipio was 33 (he could have been 34, depending on his birthday, if I can do math correctly) and Hannibal was 45. Granted, Scipio apparently started fairly young as a commander, but is that really that old for Hannibal, such that he should be calling himself an old man? It doesn't seem like it would be, given Roman life expectancies, but maybe things are different for Carthage. (They could make it work, guys! Livy says at one point the meeting was even in private. Ooh. They can send the interpreters away or something! Or keep them! I don't care! Enemyslash!) And Scipio apparently liked Greek things and pretty women (effeminate! effeminate! and we all know what else effeminate Romans like!). Also he apparently communicated with the gods WTF. And he let Hannibal be the leader of Carthage afterward. How nice of him.

Also I should probably stop reading about the numbers of military standards taken in battle and trying to conceptualize it all as a giant lethal version of Capture The Flag.

In conclusion, because this is the only possible way to end this post, ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

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I may or may not have purchased what I am sure is the very best shirt in the entire world. (Okay, okay, I did buy it.) EMPEROR PENGUIN AHAHAHAHA. Here's hoping I got the right size; I have never bought a woot shirt before.

Also, somehow we now own, I think, every single available OPI Shatter polish -- black, white, red, silver, blue, turquoise, navy. (And OMG the blues are glittery! Come to me, my favorite glittery blue things.) Now I can have Fun With Crackle Polish. Whee.

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Vindolanda! Everyone likes the Vindolanda tablets, right? Full of valuable Roman British daily/military life information and, um, that woman who signed her name to that invitation, which is really exciting because women don't write things. I guess. Anyway. So after reading an article on Vindolanda a couple days ago that, you know, tries to tell fun social history stories about some of the inscriptions, I have spent the past couple days being like, "Hey, I wish I could read some of those in Latin!"

Then lysimache reminded me that, um, you can read them online. They're translated, and, um, if you like paleography you can look at the originals. Old Roman Cursive, man, I can't even. That stuff just looks like Greek. (I mean that literally; and, yeah, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that it looks like Greek, should I? Blah blah alphabet blah.)

Whee. I like reading people's requests for stuff. Also the one where someone's mommy (or similar relative) sent him socks and underwear.

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Today lysimache brought me a lovely library discard, The Roman Army: Selections from Various Latin Authors (ed. C. M. H. Millar, and maybe I should mention this book is from 1955), to aid in my story-writing. It is basically for the sixth-form schoolboy who would like to read excerpts of Caesar, Sallust, Livy, Frontinus, Tacitus, and Vegetius about how the Roman army works. Yay primary sources!

So far I have learned, to the detriment of my AU, that Esca is probably too short to join the army:

Proceritatem tironum ad incommam scio semper exactam, ita ut VI pedem vel certe V et X unciarum inter alares equites vel in primis legionum cohortibus probarentur. (Vegetius Mil. 1. 5)

"I know that the height of recruits has always been measured to the incision, in such a way that those of six feet are approved, or those of five feet ten inches among the cavalry or the first cohorts of the legions."

[The incision = probably some kind of mark on the wall. You must be this tall to ride the Roman army, I guess. Also the heights are non-modern; that's 5'10" and 5'8" respectively.]

So either way Esca's too short, assuming we're going by Jamie Bell's height (5'7"). Bah. The commentary in this book lists height requirements for the army (I guess in the UK?) over several centuries, and suggests that the Roman requirements are "a surprise, if true" because the Romans were generally pretty short -- apparently the Gauls laughed at them for it.

(So I don't know if I should just assume that Vegetius is lying or talking about some idealized time, or just say Esca's century is special. Or, you know, not mention it at all. I don't know.)

Also I have now finished book 2 of the AP selections of the Aeneid. Only ten books to go! *weeps* (I know, not all the books are part of the AP selections.) Also I am STILL MAD that Aeneas left his wife behind. See, he got the important stuff out of Troy -- his father, his son, and the penates, but whoops, his wife didn't make it! And it took him until after he got out to figure out she wasn't with them! And then when her ghost shows up (and apparently ghosts, like gods, and I guess also Gauls, huh? are really tall) she's like "No, that's totally fine. Don't cry. It's fate. At least I'm not a Greek slave now." Grumble grumble. It's like women aren't important or something. (I know, later on Dido will be pretty angry about being left, but that doesn't make me feel better about that. Dude, he LOST his wife!)

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carmarthen keeps asking me to write a post on How Roman Names Work, so here I am, and I will attempt to do my best. DISCLAIMER: Not a classicist, do not play one on TV.

The tl;dr point: Male Roman citizens have, like, three names each. Sometimes more! And this still does not prevent name overlap. And no one minds being named something like Stupid; in fact, Stupid is one of the best names. No, really. Ahem.

Anyway. Most of my information comes from the Oxford Classical Dictionary, a very lovely (and very heavy) tome, whose entry on Roman naming customs I will distill for you.

( Roman names, how do they work?Collapse )

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So I was writing an Eagle story, like you do, and I asked myself, "Which leg is Marcus' injured leg?" (This has iiiiinteresting cultural implications, actually, which I will get to in a sec.)

And lo, the answer apparently differs depending on your choice of canon. I checked the book, and just as Marcus is waking up, we get the line "The pain, which had been first white and then red, was still there, no longer filling the whole universe, but reaching all up and down his right leg." Which sounds like his right leg got injured to me. The only other reference to a specific leg is toward the end, when he and Esca are running away with the eagle: "His own tracks, Marcus knew, were all too easily recognizable, because, however hard he tried not to, he dragged his right leg a little."

Pretty clearly the injury is on his right, yeah? So I was all set to put that down in the story, then I thought I'd better spot-check the movie, if only as an excuse to watch the HOLD HIM DOWN, SLAVE scene again.

And, um. In the movie, it's his left leg. I haven't checked it all for continuity, but in the scene where we meet Uncle Aquila, Marcus' left leg is bandaged and bloody as he's lying on the bed. When Lutorius comes to see him it's his left leg he's got propped up. And the surgeon is operating, as far as I can tell, on his left leg. I'm assuming that if they were decent with continuity it's his left leg the rest of the time too. (Does anyone else want to check, or do I gotta watch the rest of the movie again? Such a hardship.)

Weeeeird.

Maybe they thought it didn't matter which leg it was.

But the even weirder thing was, it mattered to Romans. It apparently mattered a lot. Maybe Sutcliff knew that, I don't know. LET ME TELL YOU MORE, INTERNETS.

( Why I care; also, Fun Cultural Details about the right leg in Rome, involving everyone's favorite obscene wordsCollapse )

I hope this has been educational.

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So one of the features of the Kindle is that it lets you have your books in "Collections," which are basically tags. (You can't have sub-collections, but you can have the same book in multiple collections.) Until yesterday my categories were boring genre lists, but lysimache said I should just name SF "spaceships" and fantasy "dragons" already. (I like to claim that I do not read books unless they contain spaceships or dragons.)

So I changed the names of those categories, and then I figured I should change the rest, and I'm sharing mostly because I think I am the funniest person ever.

Buy Me Someday When You Have Money (samples from Amazon)
Dragons, and People Who Want to Be Tolkien (fantasy)
Eldritch, Squamous, and/or Rugose (horror)
Free and Therefore Probably Crap (free books from Amazon)
Get Off My Lawn (YA and children's fiction)
I Dare You to Copyright This (public domain)
im in ur canon, transf0rming ur workz (fanfiction)
In the Conservatory with the Revolver (mystery)
One of These Things Is Not Like the Others (unsorted books, the manual, games, dictionaries...)
The Past Is a Foreign Country, Usually England (historical)
Probably Not Stranger Than Fiction (non-fiction)
Spaceships, Aliens, and a Sense of Wonder (science fiction)
We're Here, We're Queer, We Write Books (GLBT fiction)

Some of them could probably be better, if anyone has any suggestions.

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I have now finished reading the student edition lysimache had of the part of Caesar's Gallic Wars where he invades Britain. The best thing about it was the part where all his ships sank, like, three times. Apparently the Channel is really hard to cross, you guys. Also the British have long hair and mustaches (and are completely shaved otherwise) and cover themselves in woad. And they don't eat rabbit, goose, or chicken. Just so you know.

Now I have to figure out what to read next. Jen keeps suggesting Livy, but I think Livy will make me cry. But I don't know enough Latin to read the gay BDSM bits of Petronius. Eheu.

On a totally different subject, a Star Trek: TNG rec: Metadata, by hairyparamecium. It's from the current LGBTfest -- the premise being that post-emotion chip, Data is gay now. And it's really, really well done. I recommend it even if TNG isn't your usual fandom.

Reading about queer characters in the Trek universe -- TNG especially -- just makes me remember watching TNG airing when I was 12, 13, completely closeted to myself, even, and wanting something out of the show that should have been there and wasn't. That stupid episode with the secretly-a-girl on the planet of androgynous people. The episode with the Trill that Dr. Crusher was clearly in love with until the Trill ended up in a female host. It was all so straight, and I didn't even know it made me sad but it must have, because every time I see queer characters in TNG now I am just so, so excited. (The Titan books, set post-TNG movies, have gay crew. It made me so happy.) So clearly my inner sad closeted 13-year-old self needs more queer Trekfic.

Anyway.

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Yesterday I read Strings Attached by Nick Nolan, which I had downloaded when it was free for the Kindle a couple weeks ago. It is no longer free, and I am not sure I would pay money for it, but I would rec about a third of the novel a whole lot. Unfortunately, it's not really a contiguous third of the novel.

It's partially a coming-of-age YA gay novel, and I think that part of the novel is really, really sweet. The main character, Jeremy Tyler, is a 17-year-old closeted gay teenager who is sent temporarily to live with his exceedingly wealthy aunt and uncle in a fictional SoCal beach town. So a fair amount of the book is about the friends he makes at his totally rich-kid high school, his friendship with the butler, and his gradual coming-out process. That part's all really sweet. That's the part I would rec.

It doesn't go especially well with the rest of the book. The sex scenes -- and there are sex scenes -- are a lot more explicit than I generally would expect from a book of this genre. (I'm using the Rainbow Boys series as a comparandum, and I don't recall the sex there being particularly well spelled-out. I could be wrong.) Here it feels like the sex is there just because it's meant to be titillating, and while, yes, I will happily read explicit m/m, the tone clash here is jarring. I didn't pick up the book to read about Hot Underage Dudes Getting It On, you know. It's like reading a YA novel that suddenly veers into nifty.org. (It's not quite that egregious, but close.)

Also, the book has a Plot. The plot involves drug kingpins and murder and people being framed and it's really kind of ridiculously over-the-top and I wish the author had just stuck to the coming-of-age story. So I skipped that third of the book. It was boring.

There's an author interview at the end in which he explains that he set out to write a YA coming-out novel. But then he wanted to include an "Oh no! I am masturbating while thinking about the wrong sex of people!" scene of self-realization, which he felt was critical. (There is one, yes.) So then he figured that, since it was going to have an explicit sex scene, he might as well write the book for adults and make all the sex scenes explicit. The random thrilling action-adventure plot was there to make his book different from all the other YA-themed gay books. Man, I hope this was his first novel, because he did not need to put the kitchen sink in it. Just the coming-of-age story would have been fine.

Also, this book contains Epic Latin Fail, to wit: the main character has a dream in which his dead father instructs him to ask someone about the Father's Star. So they think, since it's a star, the name will be in Greek or Latin, and the other character isn't sure if the Latin would be "stellae patriae" (no! no no no!) or "stella patris" (yes! good author!). Unfortunately, the next scene includes the following lines:

"By the way, it was my conjugation that was wrong last night; I had forgotten that pater is an atypical masculine noun, and the genitive, or possessive case, translates correctly into Stella Patrim."

*headdesks repeatedly* I think what really kills me is how the author got it right the first time. And then changed it. Genitive singular is "patris." It is even right there in the frickin' Latin dictionary for you.

The book then goes on to talk about the Stella Patrim, which is apparently something involving the constellation Gemini, except Castor and Pollux weren't really twins or even brothers, they were father and son in a Secret Older Version of the myth that the Greeks changed because it was some kind of propaganda. Also Alexander and Hephaestion got to become part of Gemini too. What.

Anyway. The coming-out story part was really good.

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lysimache, in an effort to inflict her shiny new nail polish fandom on the rest of us, keeps buying me nail polish even though I don't actually wear it much. So today she painted my nails black, and I spent about forty minutes feeling especially goth before the glittery silver layer went on. Which, you have to admit, kind of ruins the emo. It is pretty, though.

Also, I feel I should mention that yesterday I finally, finally finished reading Suetonius' Life of Caesar. We kind of powered through the last several sections, but man do I feel accomplished having made it all the way to nonnulli semet eodem illo pugione, quo Caesarem violaverant, interemerunt, the end. ("Some [of Caesar's assassins] killed themselves with the very same dagger with which they had violated Caesar," aww, how nice and poetically just. Also why do the Romans have eleventy billion words that mean "kill?" Okay, the last one was probably more "violate," but still. It seems excessive.

Am now reading some excerpts from the Gallic Wars, the invasion of Britain, which is (a) really, really boring and Caesar hasn't even landed his boats yet and (b) way, way, easier than the Suetonius. Like, I know almost all these words! I read a quarter of the book in under an hour! Which I guess is good. I would rather be reading, say, the Satyricon, but I want to read the obscene bits that Jen says they don't make student editions for because apparently the students don't need to read about Roman BDSM, and my Latin is so not that good. She says I should read Livy, but I think Livy sounds just as hard to read but without exciting salacious bits. Though I suppose anything that isn't about troop movements is an improvement. I will grant that it is pretty cool to be reading Caesar's actual writing, though.

Anyway. I suppose that is enough geekery for the evening.

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I feel I should mention that I am still reading Suetonius' Life of Caesar, and it is awesome. (I am about a third of the way through. It takes a while when you only read it on weekends. In Latin.) I'm not sure what happens in the rest of the book when we've just now gotten to "iacta alea est," and I can't name anything notable beyond that that Caesar did other than die, but I suppose I'll find out.

The actual scene as written is pretty great, though. It's really more like ( this:Collapse )

I don't know why no one pays me to translate this stuff, because clearly I would be awesome at it. Or not. Anyway. You definitely should read you some Suetonius.

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I finished the Cambridge Latin Course, like, last week. lysimache made me a very nice certificate today, and I made her post about it, so she says I have to post about it. So I am. It is very pretty and in Latin and there are pictures at her link.

Despite that I still don't know my case endings, I am proceeding into intermediate Latin prose by reading Suetonius, because I thought it would be more interesting than Cicero or Caesar even if it will take me eight billion years to finish. Currently, Caesar is about twenty, has been married twice, has prostituted his chastity to the king of Bithynia, has been captured by pirates, and has gone and pouted at a picture of Alexander because Alexander was way ahead of him at the same age. It's gonna be a long, long book.

But I learned that if you dream that you are having sex with your mother it means you will conquer the world. Which I suppose is important.

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Because I am a big dork, I spent the hour and a half glued to my computer screen reading the liveblogs of Apple's iPad announcement. Woo, it's a big iPod touch, not that I have one of those. (My iPod is, um, in black and white.) It looks pretty, but I'm not sure I need anything in that size. It isn't as powerful as an actual computer (so it shouldn't be a computer replacement), it's not pocket-size, so it wouldn't be a very good iPod replacement, and there's no way it will replace my Kindle.

(I know it's supposed to be a Kindle killer, ooh, backlight, ooh, page turning gestures, ooh, looks like a real book. The thing I will say is that everyone but Amazon appears to be ePub, but I'm sure Amazon will go ePub only if that's where the market's heading. I really think the e-Ink is much easier to read on than backlit anything -- and dude, it's not like books are backlit! -- I like the battery life on the Kindle much, much better, and from an accessibility perspective I can read with the Kindle using only one hand, which is absolutely awesome, let me tell you, and it makes reading a lot easier to be able to do this. The iPad seems really optimized for having a two-handed reading experience. You know, like books. I just like hitting "next page" with my left hand on the Kindle. Why, yes, I do wish we printed books with pages the other way, but the Kindle is way easier than even that would be.)

So I'm not really sure what it's competing with, except the netbook market, and so far I've resisted that, except if my Mac up and dies I might replace with a netbook, which is good enough for basic web and word-processing, and it sounds like Apple wants you to have an existing computer to hook the iPad up to. Yeah. So I guess I'm not the target market.

Also the name iPad (a) makes me think of sanitary napkins and (b) is going to be really difficult to distinguish from "iPod" in languages that have one low vowel where we have [æ] and [a]. They've just given their products the same name. <nelson>Ha-ha.</nelson>

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I have now (well, as of yesterday), finished the CLC stories. For all that I was hoping Salvius would die horribly, I felt really sorry for him when I thought he was going to kill himself. In emo-teenager slitting-wrists-in-bath style rather than the manly Roman method of a sword through the chest. Oh, Salvius. In case anyone wants to know the ending, he gets exiled for five years. And his client Haterius goes with him; I still feel bad that Haterius is insanely loyal and never figured out the guy swindled three million sesterces from him. Haterius deserves a better patron.

Up next, real Latin, which is what happens for the rest of the book. Man, real Latin is way harder. It's having me read Pliny's letters to Trajan. Poor Pliny. "Dear Emperor Trajan, I got to Bithynia months late because I had a headache and it was hot and the dog ate my map. All the accounting here is fucked up and everyone and his brother is siphoning public funds. Can you send me some surveyors to tell people that there's no way building that latrine costs eight billion sesterces? Thx, Pliny." "Dear Pliny, Aww, does oo have an itty-bitty bit of pain in your headdy-weddy? I'm sorry. No, you can't have a surveyor; they're all building me a column. I'm sure you can find someone there who isn't entirely a slimy worm. Love, Trajan."

It's kind of hilarious. Also difficult, because I don't actually know my endings.

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I like Friday. There is Psych and Dollhouse, and there was delicious pizza, and it is a long weekend, and I only have six months left of LJ to tag. And the president was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize even though today we BOMBED THE MOON. WTF.

I would like to apologize for the LJ silence lately. I have been suffering from a little condition I like to call Not Being Able To Breathe Properly. Am off the drug that was probably causing it and feeling a little bit more oxygenated and hoping someone calls me back with my blood test results sometime. Blarg.

I am currently trying to assemble a list of fandoms I would like to om nom nom nom nominate for yuletide this year, what with nomination week almost upon us. And I like a lot of small fandoms (yes, Points fandom, I am looking at you), so you'd think this would be easy, but now I have to try and think of six fandoms that I don't think other people will name for me.

Am currently pondering nominating a slate of planet-of-women feminist science-fiction: Nicola Griffith, Ammonite; Joanna Russ, The Female Man and/or "When It Changed;" and maybe James Tiptree, Jr., "Houston Houston Do You Read." I should probably throw in Darkover there for the Renunciates, but I bet you someone else will nom it. Good idea y/y? (Any others I'm missing out on? I, um, really like this trope.)

And that still leaves me with a few slots for noms even after you take into account my burning desire to read about Julius Caesar's gay sex scandals. Hmmm.

Speaking of Latin (o hai, i maded you this segue), I am now on Unit 30 of the Cambridge Latin Course. I think lysimache wants me to read faster. Yesterday we had the following conversation:

Me, translating some passage about a triumph: And the Emperor Domitian led the parade in his chariot -- hey, I thought you said they only used chariots in battle!
lysimache: THIS WAS A TRIUMPH. (long pause) ...i'm making a note here. huge success.
Me: Is it hard to overstate your satisfaction?
lysimache: Yes.

I mention because I think she wants nerd points.

(Lately I've been falling asleep a lot in the middle of the afternoon for no reason. I'm hoping maybe if I type up posts I'll keep myself awake. Still can't get fanfic written, it seems. Sigh.)

So. I've been playing a lot of roguelikes recently. I go through a phase every couple of years where I play them obsessively for about a month, get sick of having my characters killed over and over, and give up for a couple of years.

Roguelikes, for the uninitiated, are a genre of computer games (the original was called Rogue, hence the name) that are basically the geekiest, dorkiest, and most evil single-player computer RPGs in existence. Okay, imagine a RPG. Imagine it's a one-character turn-based dungeon crawler whose graphics, traditionally, are made of ASCII characters. (You are an @. The monsters are all letters.) Imagine that the levels are randomly generated, and that items are not auto-identified for you, and some of them are nasty. (Mmm, Potion of Poison. Glug.) Imagine that many of the monsters can one-hit kill you, and that it is perfectly possible to get yourself killed very quickly anyway. In addition, imagine that character death is permanent. You got blindsided by a gnome on Level 10? Sucks to be you; start over with a new character.

Needless to say, I haven't ever actually beaten a game.

Usually my roguelike of choice is NetHack, the one I started playing in high school. NetHack and its descendants are generally whimsical in theme -- there are elves, dwarves, wizards, hobbits, samurai, Medusa, valkyries, tourists, and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Basically, if you can imagine a geek saying "wouldn't it be cool if...?" then it's probably in the game. All there is in the game is a dungeon, but the levels are small (screen size) and persistent -- if you leave a level and come back, it'll be the same. Apparently if you get good at the game it's easy to win if you manage to get the right equipment. Most of my games have involved me trying to use-identify all my stupid items in the first place while being zapped to death by gnomes. It's a game where you need to know a lot in advance to do well, and while I know where all the spoilers are, clearly I haven't internalized them.

But these days, the roguelike I appear to be playing is Angband, which is another branch of roguelikes entirely. (They generally come in Hacks, like Nethack, and Bands like Angband.) Angband is seriously Tolkien in theme, and has an overworld town at the top of the dungeon, whose shopkeepers will identify items as you sell them. (This alone is a huge help.) Levels are not persistent, so I've been heading to floors 1-3 over and over and over again. And my Dunedan Paladin is Lv 10 and does not appear to be dead yet. The veteran players say Angband is way harder to win than NetHack, because even if you're prepared very well it can still kill you. But somehow it seems more merciful to me. Of course, now this means the orcs will get me for sure.

(I used to play Omega, and that was fun. I am told that if I liked Omega I'll enjoy ADOM, but that just looks too evil to ever be any good at. I am also considering Dwarf Fortress, mostly because of the exceedingly hilarious Let's Play in which may different people take a turn every game-year and mostly screw things up.)

(Is it wrong to consider getting a Something Awful account just for the Let's Play forum? Yes, yes it is.)

Snagged from antigone921:

- Anyone who looks at this entry please post this meme and their current wallpaper at their LiveJournal.
- Explain in five sentences why you're using that wallpaper
- Don't change your wallpaper before doing this! The point is to see what you had on!

( My wallpaper...Collapse )

Also -- because I am fundamentally incapable of posting about just one thing at a time -- I wish to note that the linguaphiles "is your name Ben?" thread yesterday was the most hilarious thing I have participated in in recent memory, and I was sad when the (probably very embarrassed) OP deleted it.

But the maintainer saved screencaps. All is not lost! I'm there on page 2 with Old English, which was the only language I knew (or rather, could piece together quickly) that hadn't been done yet. By the time it occurred to me to come back with Middle English, which I could probably also figure out (I like the word "yclept," don't you?) the post was gone.

(And no one actually answered the OP's question. Heh.)

Hi. I really like stories about linguistics. So I find it very exciting that there are so many stories about Spock and Uhura and languages and linguistics. And it occurred to me (after being gently prodded by a few S/U fen) that maybe I should write up a little bit about what linguistics was, so that people who want to write stories involving it can make it look good.

( This gets very tl;dr...Collapse )

I learned to make webpages in approximately 1995. The problem is, that's where my web-skills are still at. So I thought, the other day, "Huh, maybe I should learn some CSS so that I can make pages that are actually nicely laid out." I was thinking that I kind of missed having a website; if nothing else, I could put my fanfiction on it. (Plus, NearlyFreeSpeech.NET looks like an awesome host, in a crazy libertarian kind of way. Also cheap, as I do not expect to be insanely popular.)

So today I have a CSS book (Beginning CSS, by Richard York) and I looked at some CSS tutorial sites and proceeded to make myself a webpage with a navigation bar down the side with pretty colored borders. Embarrassingly, most of the time was spent fixing my own HTML errors. *facepalm* And, yes, I know katemonkey has a site template and lim has an awesome set of templates and themes, but I think I should make myself less appalling in terms of personal knowledge. Plus if I learn CSS I am told it will be of use making pretty layouts on Dreamwidth.

(On a slightly unrelated note, does anyone know if the GMail feature that lets you link two accounts and pick which one to reply from links your two addresses in any way other than that line in the header? I know about the header. Am considering switching fannish address to GMail, and while I don't care if fen learn my RL name from the header (though I wouldn't want it the other way around), I don't really want there to be some Google page blaring that Your Name Here owns the following email addresses, you know?)