Hey internet, lysimache and I got married! ♥ ♥

(Further details to follow.)

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Happy birthday, lysimache! I ♥ you!

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Today was lysimache's birthday! Whooooo! Everybody wish her a happy birthday! Her brother and his girlfriend came up to visit -- they are currently sleeping on our living-room floor -- and we had Thai food. And then there was cake. Which is good. It makes up for earlier in the day, which involved rabies shots. Er. For the dog. Not people.

Yuletide progress: I finally finished one of the treats I was writing last night! Whooo! I have one more I want to finish, and with people here and everything I'm not sure I'm going to make it, but I totally want to try. I was going to write it tonight, but I think I am too tired. Sigh.

I know, I know, it's not even Madness yet. I suppose I should point out that my letter remains here, should anyone want to write me anything. (Strindberg and Helium has ten minutes of canon and you all should watch it anyway because it is hilarious.) And due to the aforementioned visiting people, I feel I should let you know, O my author, that I may not get to a computer right away. But I will certainly try.

Right! Back to staring at the word processor.

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lysimache is off to visit her mother for the rest of the week. She has been gone approximately one hour (okay, okay, not even an hour) and I am already so saaaaaad, you guys. Here, this emoticon expresses my feelings. :'(

I am telling myself that maybe it won't be so bad, and I can, um, maybe start writing my Star Trek Big Bang (who am I kidding, I'm probably dropping out), or just give up and play video games and watch all the Netflix movies lysimache has no interest in. But still: saaaaaad.

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We are reading Suetonius and discussing bronze because someone's found some tabula aenea in the "Caesar ought to have known the end was near; check out all these omens" section. lysimache is trying to convince me that "brazen" is an actual word that means "bronzed" (like, covered/made of bronze) in addition to, you know, its usual meaning. I dispute the alloy-related definition on the grounds that she totally made that word up.

Somehow this led to the statement:

lysimache: Brass is an alloy too! Of, I don't know, bronze and... ass...?

Heh.

(For future reference brass = copper + zinc. Bronze = copper + tin.)

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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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As of today, lysimache and I have been together for seven years.

I [heart] her immensely.

That is all.

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I am supposed to be cleaning the house. Instead I have just written a Yuletide Treat for a fandom I have previously been far too intimidated to write for, and the treat is longer than my actual story.

No, I don't understand me either.

Also, it is lysimache's birfday! Happy birfday!

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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.

So lysimache's got some kind of Evil Death Cold and I think she's given it to me. Mostly we are sitting around rewatching bunches of Inspector Lewis, which is, you know, awesome, and not requiring too much brainpower once you've already seen all the episodes once. (We went through Father Ted this weekend.) My throat, it is disgusting.

I am also appalled by LJ's recent decision -- now with more ads! -- and I keep resolving to switch to Dreamwidth. I have about thirteen more months of LJ to tag. Which is, unfortunately, over a thousand entries. Why did I post so much?

I have also been playing Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor on my DS. I like the SMT games, but I hate strategy RPGs, so I'd been putting this one off, but it turns out to be non-SRPG enough for me -- the only SRPG element is a movement grid. And I'm enjoying the plot a lot so far (am on Day 3); it's like The World Ends With You's angstier Crowley-reading cousin. Emo blue-haired teens are trapped in Tokyo and they have a week to live. But in this game, everyone is trapped, and they're beginning to suspect the government is behind it all, because they can summon demons through their DSes. (I assume later on I will be fighting God and/or angels and/or Lucifer, as this is SMT.)

The only thing annoying me about this game is the naming. SMT protagonists are traditionally unnamed, usually so that you, the (male) player can name him after yourself. This always makes me feel excluded. Many of the protagonists have unofficial names from manga adaptations and so on, but this guy doesn't have one. Grr. I was gonna name him Ethelred the Unready, but it didn't fit in the space, so I went with Gaius Julius Caesar, which is totally appropriate for Japan, right? Right.

Thanks for all the anniversary well-wishes! So I got lysimache for her birthday a textbook on comparative Germanic (Old English and Its Closest Relatives: A Survey of the Earliest Germanic Languages) that purports to be for undergrads who know neither German nor linguistics, and I have to say, I think the author's forgotten what people who don't know German or linguistics actually know. Like, it gives helpful marginal glosses of cognates. In German. And it doesn't tell you what the German means. And if I didn't know anything about linguistics, I sure wouldn't be able to read it; the explanation of the comparative method isn't great and I really think you need to know what you're doing. But it's awesome, even if it doesn't know its audience. It's basically grammatical sketches of dead Germanic languages with the same texts in each language, glossed so you can read it. Which is awesome.

(lysimache, naturally, knows German and has taken comparative courses, so she's all set. She read the first chapter, on Gothic. She has since declared her intention to learn Gothic and has spent most of today reading an online edition of the bible in Gothic where you can click on each word and see its case, number, gender etc etc and its translation in German.)

For Christmas, as I mentioned, she got me Teach Yourself Old English, which I was playing around with. You can see my subject line. It seems very, um, non-technical. (The traditional OE grammars, like Sweet's Primer, which I own, have a short grammatical sketch that you, um, need to know linguistics to appreciate, followed by a buttload of texts. This one is, you know, much slower! And full of cartoons. Fair warning to anyone considering it: Not only are the gs and cs undotted, there are no macrons. Zip zero zilch. This kind of sucks, as I was hoping to read some poetry -- we only got about 300 lines into Beowulf and I'd really like to continue. Hence the OE textbooks. Maybe I should get one of the others too.

It does come with CDs, though, which are readings of the texts from the units. Over and over and over. Wheee. It kind of makes me sad that the speakers, who are of course British, are dropping rs, considering that OE probably didn't. (As far as I know, the r-dropping only happened after the colonization of America. Which is why we've all got rs here except for some of the port cities that stayed in contact.) I know, I know, they probably don't even know they're doing it...

Also, I have 1 GB of space left on my computer and it won't let me burn a DVD because I need 4.7 GB free to do that. Bah. So much for my space-freeing-up plan. I am pondering buying a big-ass flash drive and putting stuff on there to free it up so I can burn stuff. I don't need free space for that, right? Any brand name recs?

Today is lysimache's and my sixth anniversary. Yay!

That is all.

lysimache just told me last night that that's supposed to mean "peace on Earth to men of good will." And that that's what it says in the original Greek, anyway. I am actually kind of shocked.

By the way, Jen's birthday was two days ago, and her family all chipped in to buy her a Wii. So we have a Wii. And WiiSports and WiiPlay and WiiMusic and some Wii points (WiiPoints?). She says we can buy the Strong Bad game. Whee. Wii. Should you wish to send us any messages via your Wii, our Wii number is: 2114 0061 3631 5760. Thank you.

So I got like no sleep because I was busy refreshing Yuletide (about which more later), but now there are presents! Yay thingses!

( The Christmas consumerism rundown under the cut...Collapse )

[heart] [heart]! I [heart] everyone! My sweater is so comfy! I should go read Yuletide stories now!

Happy birthday, lysimache! I love you!

That is all. :)

I'm asking for lysimache, because no one ever actually asks for this on the_safehouse, and I have more Prosfen on my friendslist than she does:

Is there anybody who would be willing to beta her discoveredinalj story? It's short -- about 2300 words -- but you'd need to be fast fast fast, because her assigned posting day is this Wednesday.

(The plot involves a touch of AU Celtic pagan fantasy winter holiday, for those who may be sensitive to such things.)

Anyone up for it? She can be emailed using her username at livejournal.com. (Or, you know, I'm sure if you leave her or me a comment...)

(Apologies to Monty Python for the title.)

The other day I finally got around to watching, with lysimache, the episode of the New Avengers that has Martin Shaw and Lewis Collins in it. (2x05, "Obsession")

The episode started up, and I said, "Hey, Jenny, look who it is," and she said "Who?" She didn't recognize Martin Shaw. I thought it was a little weird, because it seems to me like the guy is fairly easy to recognize, and it was just before Pros so it's not like he was significantly older/younger, and come on, we've seen, what, thirty episodes of Pros by now? Skinny, on the short side, brown hair, a fairly distinctive face (IMO), green eyes, broken right cheekbone. She says it's 'cause he didn't have the hair and the same accent that he does as Doyle. And she recognized Lewis Collins no problem.

(She'd like me to point out that she's bad at the recognizing-actors game, and didn't notice for a very long while in Due South that Ray *Vecchio* and Ray *Kowalski* were two different people. The part I find particularly amusing is that she noticed there were three different Diefs. Dief is a dog. I love lysimache anyway. Or maybe because she can tell the dogs apart.)

My thoughts on the episode? The plot was, um, kind of silly. And I'm not sure I would have cast LC and MS based solely on this one performance -- they had, like, two scenes together. But it seems to have worked. And they do spark.

(I didn't understand the comments from TPTB at first about how they sparked -- I kept thinking to myself, no, clearly Bodie and Doyle like each other, it's not animosity, and I didn't get it. But now I think I get it. Because it's not that they don't like each other, they do, but the *way* they do it is sparky. There's an undercurrent of tension, back and forth, the way they banter. Like, okay, '70s buddy cop comparison time: Starsky and Hutch clearly think the world of each other and have great chemistry (and, yes, I ship it), but it's not, like, *sparky*, it's more subdued. With Bodie and Doyle, it's -- I don't know, is "agonistic" the word I want? -- it's like everything they do is competing, showing off for each other, trying to impress each other, make each other laugh, come up with the best insult, be the best for each other. I'm not making sense. I should just give up now.)

***

New acquisitions in the pile of DVDs to watch:

Wire in the Blood, Series 2, from the library. I am beginning to suspect that this show is an excuse to beat Robson Green up.

Casino Royale. It had been $13 at Target, and I told the universe I would buy it when it was $10, and yesterday it was $10, so I had to. Daniel Craig is pretteh. Also I remember enjoying the parkour scene a lot.

Sarah Jane Adventures, Series 1. Here is my Unpopular Fannish Opinion: I like Sarah Jane Adventures more than Torchwood or Doctor Who. It's not that I don't like either of them (although I think I like DW more than Torchwood). And I really really wanted to like Torchwood so much, but it doesn't seem to have hit Critical Fandom Mass for me, or something. I think I liked happy angst-free Jack from DW better. DW I do plan to get around to watching more of eventually (don't worry, antigone921), and I was enjoying the Martha episodes I saw a lot. But I really like Sarah Jane. Maybe it's because it's shorter? And a kids show? I feel like it's more fun for me because it's simpler, and not trying so hard, and it can just be a half hour of "wheee! aliens! wheeee!" and also Sarah Jane is pretty.

Right. That's probably enough LJ spamming for one day.

I was poking about on the new OTW wiki thingy and somehow I stumbled across information on dvd_commentary, the DVD Commentary challenge.

Naturally, I had to share:

Me: Hey, Jenny, did you know that there's a community where people are doing DVD commentaries on other people's stories?
Jen: You mean a LoC?
Me: Oh. Hey. Um. Yeah. Pretty much like a LoC. But they're not calling them that.

I had been going to compare them to the detailed reviews people used to (and hey, probably still do) give on lists. Which, yeah, is a LoC.

I guess it's nice that fandom can independently invent things. Again.

Also, we are so old. How are we so old? Neither of us are even 30, dude. And, yet, I feel old in fandom.

lysimache wrote me a story! I have no idea what I said that made her want to write it, but she wrote me an itty bitty Pros crossover. With, um, The L Word. Bodie/Shane. No, they don't actually have sex. It's very aww.

(And, yes, it is L Word canon that Shane ran away from home and was a boy prostitute until one of her tricks paid for her to go to hairdressing school. It took me half an hour to find the canon reference for how she left prostitution -- 2x05, "Labyrinth," in case anyone else needs to know.)

All y'all should go read it. :)

(Seriously, what is it about lesbians being gay male prostitutes, huh? It happens in Tipping the Velvet too.)

It's been a while since I've been in a fandom with a lot of monofannish people; I kind of assume everyone's a fannish butterfly who's at least read something in any fandom where they think they can tell the characters apart, or even when they can't. (I can never keep Napoleon and Illya straight -- wait, I think I've got it this time, is Illya the blond? -- but I'm sad that I can't find the story where one of them is a were-unicorn. Because I think I have to read that.)

This led to the following conversation, which I reproduce for posterity:

Me: Am I a fannish butterfly?
Jen: Yes.
Me: Am I a fannish chaos butterfly?
Jen: *laughs*
Me: In Massachusetts, I flap my wings...
Jen: ...and in Vancouver, Stargate Atlantis is cancelled.
Me: What happens if I flap my wings again?
Jen: Then John has to kill Rodney in the series finale.

This is why I [heart] my girlfriend. I apologize if I have offended any diehard SGA fen.

Cherry pitter: best unitasking kitchen tool, y/y?

(Okay, okay, they also pit olives. But who wants those when you could have cherries?)

I have just received a $12 cherry pitter. It is much more awesome than my previous cherry pitter (acquired circa 1989), as this one is dishwasher-safe and with rubberized grip and has a handy splatter guard so you don't spray cherry innards everywhere.

I very much enjoy cherries but I resent eating any food where I am required to spit out a pit. Hence, my rediscovered love of the cherry pitter. Mmm, yummy yummy cherries.

Also, I would like to say I am very proud of my subject line. Unfortunately my love only likes Maraschino cherries, and was not that impressed with these. Bah.