Dorothy Marley's Journal

So, after watching the Supernatural* episode "Faith," I was reminded that I really needed to get a Julie Benz icon (because I adore her). I did an interest search on LJ, found several different potential icon communities in quick succession, and then saw the following horrifying information:

6,659 Journal Entries, 0 Tags, 0 Memories

and only slightly less horrifying

3,217 Journal Entries, 0 Tags, 0 Memories

And they were all like that. What the hell, icon journals? (You will note that I am not, in fact, showing off a spiffy new Julie Benz icon. :( )

*After all the miscellaneous information I've absorbed about the show over the years of not watching it, why have I not heard about those set designers dreams aka the motel rooms? Did they stop doing them after the first season? I was thrown into some kind of 70s flashback by the panes of orange ripple glass in one of the first episodes, and have watched in fascinated horror ever since to see what kind of monstrosity was coming next.

I just finished adding publication years to all my Delicious bookmarks. I started doing it to the new bookmarks back in November, but I had an enormous backlog that could only be tackled by loading every freakin' story and looking at the date on it. (If there was an easier way, don't tell me. Please.) I was able to use the bulk edit function, so at least I only had to make two or three passes to get a bunch of bookmarks done at a time. It was the only thing that saved me.

It was tedious as crap, but the task did give me a chance to check for broken links, and also replace all the "+" signs with spaces on the Livejournal tag links so they'll actually work again.

Statistics

Bookmarks updated: 1 Gazillion (Okay, about 1,200. It just seemed like more.)
Broken links deleted: 13 (Surprised it was that few, actually)
Journals deleted while I was updating links to them: 1 (ETA: Journals un-deleted the following day: 1)
Bookmarks eaten by Delicious: 1
Number of times same link subsequently eaten until successfully re-added: 3 (Suspect Delicious may be getting wise to 50-tag workarounds. Also, yay for backing up Delicious bookmarks a lot.)

( Breakdown by year, if you're interested )

Okay, so I'm sort of caught up with all my immediate things-I-want-to-be-caught-up-on. I have hit my NaNoWriMo goal for today (35,106 words!), and if I just write a little more than 1,000 words a day I'll get it done.

I have also uploaded all my stories to Archive of Our Own. So far, I'm pretty happy with it. I didn't have any technical problems getting my stories on there, and I like most of the tagging and labeling features. There are couple of things that I suspect still need to be refined a bit, notably what, exactly, the various warning options are supposed to mean, but on the whole what's there is workable.

( So long, Usenet formatting, I shall miss you )

( Also, why the case sensitive option is your friend )

( My thoughts on AO3 tagging )

I am slowly plowing through stories from the TARDIS Big Bang. As I read, I'm tagging the stories I liked on Delicious, under the "tardisbigbang" tag. (This tag does cover stories from both rounds, although I haven't got around to wholesale tagging of Round 1.)

( Recommendations so far )

I've also finally cleared out the 300+ stories from the folder where I dump newly saved stories, and as a result there are quite a few new Torchwood recs up. While they're skewed towards newer stories, there's a mix of older stuff in there as well.

In honor of coreopsis, who has inspired me never to confuse "ground" and "floor" again. :)

A brief public service announcement about prone vs. supine.

Prone = face down

Supine = face up

These terms are not interchangeable. They both refer to a person lying down, but in very specific and different positions. If I read that someone is lying prone beneath their lover's body, I'm going to be very confused if the two are suddenly face to face. Likewise, I'm going to think that giving someone a back massage while they're supine is quite the challenge.

You'd think I would know better than to say things like "I can still talk." And, okay, granted, I can still talk, but my voice is not, at the moment, at its most aesthetically pleasing what with the coughing and wheezing and phlegm. So, the amplificathon is on temporary hold.

Temporary, I say, because after the third time I've had bronchitis in less than nine months, I actually recognized the signs without the requisite "let's wait a week until I *really* feel like crap and only then go to the doctor." Three days after starting antibiotics, I'm cautiously optimistic that I might not end up flat on my back coughing miserably for two weeks, and might in fact be getting just a wee bit better. Maybe. (Eyes above statement about talking warily.)

The really good news, though, is that the steroid shot seems to be working pretty much as advertised on the carpal tunnel issue. I haven't quite dared to start knitting yet, but I've been able to type painlessly for some shockingly long stretches (while, obviously, trying not to overdo it :)). This post, for instance. So, on the whole, things are improving.

While I've been not-podficcing and not-knitting, I've been doing some reading. I would therefore like to gently remind some members Torchwood fanfic community that a new speaker requires the dialogue to be in a separate paragraph. Really. Line upon line of single returns, when all other paragraphs in the story are double returns, doesn't count.

Also, while I enjoy the Captain's Blog as much as the next fangirl (i.e. lots), I would actually like to see more stories/discussion explaining why Jack still has a fat lip four weeks after Ianto punched him in the face than stories/discussion that blithely assume that secondary canon written two years after the fact trumps the show (and guts the whole point of Ianto sucking it up like the super-secret android spy painfully emotionally repressed guy that he is and coming back to work the next day as if his cybernetic girlfriend hadn't horribly murdered two people and been gunned down in her borrowed pizza-delivery-girl body by his boyfriend fuck-buddy whatever-the-hell boss* the day before).

(Yes, it's been bugging me, don't ask me why, when there are at least five thousand other things I could be wasting my energy being annoyed by. Apparently I picked this one.)

*I love this show. :)

For coreopsis, some Torchwood recs. You requested long, plotty first time Jack/Ianto, so I've tried to indicate when stories were not, perhaps, long or plotty or first time. I got to somewhere around the M's in my Torchwood folder, so there'll be a second post in the future.

( Torchwood Recs Ahoy! )

In case you've missed it, it's been a busy month in on-line fandom. First, there was FanLib. Then, Strikethrough '07.

In response to the latter, a couple of fans decided to see if there was a way to assess exactly how many of Livejournal's journals belong to fans or are used for fannish purposes--discussion, roleplaying, fan fiction, gaming, anime, etc. So, they created fandom_counts, and asked fans to join with all their fannish journals. As of this posting, less than 48 hours after the journal's creation, there are over 31,000 members.

If you'd like your journal(s) to be part of the count, just go to fandom_counts' profile page and join with all your fannish journals.

Or, if you're bored, you can just keep refreshing the page and watch the numbers go up.

I was pretty bummed to learn this morning that one of my favorite authors, Lisa A. Barnett, died of cancer last May. Just last night, I'd picked up one of her books to re-read, wondering if and when she'd write another one, and then this morning stumbled over an old newsletter with the announcement of her death.

She was a co-writer with her partner, Melissa Scott, on all three of her books. Their first book, The Armor of Light, is set in Elizabethan England, and features a certain Christopher Marlowe--in this book, still alive in 1596. You can see already why I liked her work. :)

Truthfully, I think The Armor of Light is possibly one of the catalysts of my decades-long obsession with Marlowe and his works. Certainly I'd already fallen in love with his writing by the time I read it, but there's no question that Scott and Barnett's portrayal of him fueled the fire of my obsession.

Their next two books, Point of Hopes and and its sequel, Point of Dreams, are set in a purely fantasy world. I admit, I picked up Point of Hopes hoping that it would continue Marlowe's story from The Armor of Light, but I think it says something about Point of Hopes that by the time I was a few pages into it, I didn't care whether Marlowe was in it or not. The world they created was wonderfully realized and intricately detailed, the kind of place I couldn't wait to re-visit. I was so glad to have the chance when Point of Dreams came along several years later, and wasn't in the least disappointed. I've practically worn out all the copies I have of her books (I think I've gone through two copies of The Armor of Light, in fact), and I'm sad to realize that there won't be any more.

I'm preparing to launch a project that's been in the making for several years: converting all my VHS tapes to DVD.

I've been wanting to do it ever since the DVR technology came out, but for ages the recorders and the media were just too expensive to justify scrapping my considerable investment in VHS. I mean, I've got four VCRs and 1,200 video tapes. That's a lot of converting. Plus, so long as I could buy a video tape for less than a dollar, it didn't make sense to spend $5 a pop for a recordable DVD disc (which, admittedly, was a drastic drop from the $20 they used to cost).

But now, the time has come. DVR machines are becoming reasonably priced, the CD media seem to be settling into a more or less consistent group of recording formats, and said CDs are pretty darn cheap. I am poised to enter the Age of DVD.

( Well, except for one thing )If I decided to eliminate redundant episodes, I would pretty much have to start the whole hundred-page Catalog over from scratch. I would have to track down the episodes I needed on a tape and isolate them from the episodes I didn't need, and figure out how to compile the former in their own DVDs without losing track of them. I could do it, and it would really be the best way, but it would also take buckets of time. Not only time spent re-configuring the numbers and re-typing and re-printing, but in hovering over the DVRs to swap out tapes.

On the other hand, if I just slavishly copied the entire collection, I could slap a tape and a disc in, hit Record, and forget about it. The Catalog is already done, and the only work required would be to write a number on the disc.

So. Spend hours slaving over a hot DVR, losing reading, viewing, and (most important) knitting time in order re-organize the enire collection, or keep the old Catalog and scribble a number.

Dude, even I'm not that anal.

Vive le Catalogue!

Funny this meme should come around just now, since last week Melissa and I were discussing this very thing. So, in chronological order of crushing, here are five crushes I've had on fictional characters:

Age 11: Hawkeye Pierce, from M*A*S*H. I even read all the M*A*S*H novels, which I suspect I wouldn't have been allowed to do at the age of 11 had my parents any idea what went on in them.

Age 12: Dan Mangan, from the Trixie Belden series. Thus begins my career of crushing on secondary characters. Dan didn't even show up until book eight of the series, and after that he kept being left out whenever the other characters would travel somewhere.

Age 13: Bob Andrews, from The Three Investigators Series. Records and Research. Woot!

Age 14: Peregrin Took, from The Lord of the Rings. I also had a crush on Frodo, but I crushed on Pippin something awful for many years. Strangely enough, never really had a crush on Legolas, even though he became my favorite character sometime in high school.

Age 14: Saul Panzer, from Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe novels. To steal a phrase from someone's Vetinari icon, "Competence is sexy."

Strangely enough, none of these crushes has really faded, except for the one on Hawkeye. Well, I suppose I can be forgiven for being fickle at age 11.

On an impulse, I started poking around for information on an old favorite, Heather Gladney, today, and found out that she delivered the manuscript of the third Naga Teot book to DAW back in January. Squeee!!!

For those of you now scratching your heads, Heather Gladney is the author of Teot's War and Bloodstorm, books one and two of a series called The Song of Naga Teot (published by Ace Books). Bloodstorm, the second book, was published in 1989, and as one might imagine I'd long ago given up on the series being finished.

( Some more about the series )

So, with any luck at all, the third book might be out within a year. Here's hoping. :)

I seem to have agreed to run a panel at next year's Xanadu. In fact, I think the words "I'd be glad to help with the media panels" at one point escaped my lips. (And if not, they have now because pktheater will have just read them.)

( More about Xanadu and my panel idea )

Anyway, I'm pretty excited about it. I've rather enjoyed getting up and talking in front of strangers since that speech class I took in 10th grade, and it'll be nice to get the chance to meet and talk with some of the local writers.

What? A fandom-related post, you say? Shock! Horror!

I finally had the chance to see the second X-Men movie on DVD this past week. I should say that I am in complete ignorance about the comic storyline, apart from what I've absorbed simply by being in fandom for many years, so any canonical lapses will have gone over my head. So, with that caveat in place:

( There's something different about you.... )

Sobel, Dava. Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time. New York: Walker and Co, 1995. (Also available in an Illustrated Edition, which I recommend. The A&E network also made a very good four-hour movie based on the book, which you might be able to find for rent or at a library.)

This lovely little book chronicles the story of John Harrison, the man who finally created the first reliable marine timekeeper, and thus solved the problem of finding longitude at sea. Along the way, Sobel gives a concise yet detailed picture of the "longitude problem" as it stood in the 1700s, managing to convey the enormity of the issue, and the effect it had on the lives of every sailor who braved the seas. Very good for getting a feel for the methods of navigation that weren't possible in the 1720s.

( The Cliff Notes Version )

Picked up four books on piracy from the libaray yesterday, just before coming down with this wretched cold. Still, it means I've had time to read. I just finished Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates by David Cordingly, which pktheater was kind enough to lend me.

( More about Under the Black Flag )

( More Pirate Research: Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash )

So far, the research has been fun. I've never known what the heck a sloop or a brigantine or a carrack was before now, and it's really kind of cool. I also found out that the local blacksmith was in charge of custom-making the iron cages that hanged pirates were displayed in, so that's a brand-new little morsel for thought. So many trivial facts, so little time....

Excuse me while I wax rhapsodic for a few moments about the Nashville Public Library. I know that there are places with niftier and more extensive facilities, but it's only in the last two or three years that I've realized what a godsend it is to have a kick-ass public library system.

It doesn't matter that their actual collection isn't anything as impressive as even a half-decent academic library when I can get on the Athena system, browse the catalogs of darn near every local university for books about pirates and 17th century history, and inter-library loan what I need without even getting out of bed. Much better than driving the forty-five minutes to MTSU or paying $20 a year to Vandy for a max of four visits and no borrowing priviledges (both of them are on Athena anyway :)). Public library cards are free to residents of Davidson County, so it's like getting borrowing rights to every local academic library for free. How cool is that?

(No, I'm not obsessively researching POTC, why do you ask?)

I'm still working on the detailed daily reports, but here's the overview:

( DragonCon, so much fun.... )

So, when's January?

( Spoilers )

I have finally finalized my plans for Dragoncon. I know that graculus and xochiquetzl (and, of course, pktheater) will be there, but I'd like to alter my usual strategy of wandering aimlessly hoping to meet people I know among the 25,000 attendees. So, in hopes of increasing the odds, here is my schedule, such as it is:

Albert and I will be driving down on Thursday. We'll be bringing some of my friend Melissa's art, so we'll most likely be hanging around the art show helping her and Todd for at least part of the afternoon. I'll be at the con until Monday morning, then I plan to stay at my sister's Monday night before heading back home Tuesday. (Not sure if I've actually remembered to tell my sister about this part of the plan. Hm. Probably ought to do that.)

It is likely that on most evenings I will be found in the open gaming area, roleplaying. There is a high probability that I will be knitting. I plan to go to at least some of the Stargate panels, and I'll definitely be at Christopher Judge's panels if at all possible. At the moment I'm unaware of any organized gatherings of slashy folk, so if any are in the works I'd be interested.

*sings*

DragonCon
So much fun
Lots of gaming
And no slee-eep
DragonCon....