phantomcranefly

meme time!

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 01:13:37 GMT

Five Questions meme courtesy of bibliothekara:

Come in and say "Resistance is futile" and I will give you 5 questions. Make an entry in your journal with your answers.

1. Favorite female character in the plays of Shakespeare? And why?

I haven't read/seen nearly enough of the comedies to choose from the whole canon, but based on what I know, I'd say Viola from Twelfth Night. She's pretty active, I love the goofiness with the cross-dressing and the twins ("What kind of woman is't?" / "Of your complexion") and she gets a happy ending.

2. If the Doctor (number of your choice) showed up and told you he'd take you on one spin in the TARDIS, where would you go?

Hee. Is the question "where would I want to go?" or "where would we end up?" :P Kidding. Assuming that the show doesn't exist in any reality where the Doctor himself does (because that would just be weird) and it's therefore cheating to go someplace like Woman Wept that we only know about from the show... Dinosaurs. Definitely dinosaurs. I'd have to go look it up to get more specific than that, I forget which ones lived when.

3. Best death in Trek Canon? Worst? ( Disclaimer: I pretty much know the answer to the second one.)

Wow, I haven't watched Star Trek in ages. I can't even remember whoall died, so I'm going with Kirk senior from the new movie. Them talking about what to name the baby while the ship's headed for the other ship... all kinds of aww. And yeah, I'm going with your answer for worst. Made no freaking sense.

4. Band nerds or Trekkies: quien es mas geeky?

Well, the band nerds I hung out with all just seemed like normal high school students to me. Then again, they were half my experience of high school and drama club was the other half, so my perceptions might be a tiny bit skewed... My vote is for Trekkies, because sci-fi in general gives you more geek points in my book.

5. Who is your favorite sci-fi or fantasy author of all time, and why?

Eek. I have to count "all time" as "human history" and not "average my favorite authors over my lifespan", since my favorite author changes at least twice a year. At the moment (and has been for a while) my favorite author is Suzette Haden Elgin. Her livejournal's ozarque , and she posts drafts of her poetry there, which is how I first ran across her (um, the livejournal, not the poetry). She started writing sf to pay the bills while raising five kids, getting her PhD in linguistics, and teaching high school at night. She's written a lot since then- one of her novels is online here: http://www.jackiepowers.com/SuzetteHadenElgin/TheCommunipaths.html about sort of an intergalactic James Bond. The Woods Hole library has another of her books (Native Tongue, about linguists who learn alien languages by being exposed to them as babies because no one can make working translation software), which I'd definitely recommend.

That was easier than I thought it would be.

Shadowrun awesomeness!

Mon, 05 Oct 2009 00:00:32 GMT

First Shadowrun game was this afternoon.

We broke the module.

(SPOILERS for the module follow, although I don't know the name of the module so it won't be much help.)

The job was to get a crate out of a truck and make it look like an inside job. We had some pretty bad rolls early on- we got almost no information about the truck, and the troll character fell off it while carrying my hacker character (luckily both were unharmed) and the gun nut slid all the way down the side of the truck when the technomancer finally got it to stop- abruptly. We got the crate, setting off a ton of alarms, and got out before security could show up, and then the technomancer and my hacker got a 12 on a combined check to pin it on this random dockworker, which was not in the plans at all.

(END MODULE SPOILERS)

Everyone had their character sheets half-finished the whole time, and we were trading around the books to work on them, and someone brought this huge bag of pixie sticks. I had so much fun, I can't wait until the next time I get to play.

Wonderland DRM

Wed, 05 Aug 2009 19:24:11 GMT

I need Adobe Reader to register for classes.

By downloading Adobe Reader, I agree to the License Agreement.

Which is a PDF.

Which I cannot read without Adobe Reader.

Either the bureaucrats are being idiots, or I will find out, once I download Adobe Reader, that I just agreed to give them anything I make, forever.

Edit: Yup, it's bureaucrats. (Or bearcats, as the case may be. :) )

Tue, 26 May 2009 17:58:41 GMT

I started watching Doctor Who recently. So far my family's seen the first season of the new series, and I am officially obsessed. But the entire season is way too big a topic for one post.

I've been trying to figure out why I found the Jack/Doctor kiss in Parting Of The Ways so touching, without a lot of success. I think part of it might be that when we first met Jack, he reminded me a little of Bosola from The Duchess of Malfi. (I saw the Actors' Shakespeare Project production this winter.) The line "I was conning you, that's what I am, I'm a con man" seems defensive, almost embarrassed, as though he doesn't really want to be one, but can't see any way out of it. Similarly, Bosola acknowledges that he is in the wrong, "A politician is the devil's quilted anvil" and "O, this base quality of intelligencer" where most villains would convince themselves they were right. He is angry at Ferdinand for asking him to spy, but he doesn't rebel until after the Duchess is dead. However, Jack is transformed just by meeting the Doctor, by his own account: "Wish I never met you, Doctor! I was much better off as a coward." Also, he's managed to express his feelings without breaking the Guy Code, which is always sweet.

Now I have a crazy impulse to make the entirety of Duchess of Malfi into a Doctor Who macro. I've got it half cast already. :( *fears for sanity*

As a side note, I think it's incredibly awesome that Duchess of Malfi has a shoutout to Richard III. (My drama club did Hamlet this spring, which also has a shoutout, to Julius Caesar, which I liked as well.) I love how Webster plays with the conventions, too, like pointing out his jumps over patches of time "I should dream / It were within this half hour" or the mistaken identity "Such a mistake as I have often seen / In a play." It was all I could to to keep from squeeing out loud in the theater when the Cardinal is plotting to kill Bosola, and we assume it's an aside, but then Bosola was behind the door and he heard it!

College Essays

Sun, 14 Dec 2008 16:17:41 GMT

I only have two full-size college essays to write, because most of the schools I'm applying to use the Common App. You'd think it would be easy to finish them, but it seems lately like the less I have left to do, the harder it is to get anything done. This morning I stared at my essay for Favorite Techie School until my screensaver came on, and so far I've written eight words. It asks me to talk about my dreams and aspirations, and I've discovered I don't really have any, which worries me a little.

On the bright side, we're getting our Christmas tree today, and I made marshmallow dormice on Thursday, which turned out really well. (A girl I know brought them to our Latin party in school back in November, and I was really happy because I hadn't expected there to be any dessert I could eat. You make them by covering marshmallows in melted chocolate and then coconut, and she drew little mouse faces on hers with frosting, but I didn't have time to give mine faces. They taste just the same without.)

More baking

Sat, 04 Oct 2008 01:08:06 GMT

I made lemon meringue pie on Tuesday for the first time.

Type your cut contents here.
We had the day off from school, and my mom wanted me to use up some pie crust dough that was almost too old. She wanted me to make a chocolate pudding pie, but I had been really hoping to use the pie crust on a lemon meringue pie, and I eventually convinced her to let me. I had extra crust, so I made that into muffin-tin pie crusts and I'm going to make chocolate pudding mini-pies with them later this week. (Maybe tomorrow, but probably not.) Mom found the double boiler for me, and I mixed up the custard in it and put it over low heat, just like the recipe said. Then came the first setback: the custard would not thicken. I stood at the stove stirring it for almost an hour, added extra cornstarch, which globbed up alarmingly (I know now to mix the cornstarch with cold water first) and it still had almost the consistency of water. I had to add extra water to the bottom of the double boiler, which was standing boiling on another burner, ready for the custard as soon as it thickened. Finally my mom came downstairs, and she said low heat was probably higher than I had the stove. And sure enough, about ten minutes after I turned up the heat, it started to thicken. Finishing the custard was uneventful after that. By this time, though, I'd spent so much time waiting for the custard that it was already nine, and my English teacher had assigned us to watch House for homework. (I'm still not sure why; this is the second time it's been homework and we haven't discussed either of them in class.) So Mom found the right channel for me while I started working on the meringue, and turned up the volume really loud so I could hear it over the mixer. The recipe didn't call for sugar in the meringue, but it referred you to another page for instructions on making meringue, which did call for sugar. I compromised, and put in half the amount. I think it could've used the whole amount, but my mom says it was perfect. By the time the pie came out of the oven, it was almost 10:30, and we didn't want to wait for it to cool to put the cake cover over it, so we put it in the microwave overnight. We had it for dessert the next evening, and it was delicious. There was enough left over for Thursday, too. I didn't take a picture because it looks just like every other lemon meringue pie in the world.

I've recently found a lot of blogs about cake, and I enjoy reading them, so I was thinking I'd try to post more here about my adventures in gluten-free baking. If I'm on your friends list and you don't want to be bothered with lots of posts about cooking, please comment on this entry and I'll figure out a way to filter them for you.

Pirate cookies!

Sat, 20 Sep 2008 00:35:58 GMT

So, I saw this post on Cake Wrecks today, and I was getting hungry looking at all the cake, so I made some cookies of my own, and decorated them with chocolate frowny faces, smiley faces, and a couple of pirate faces, ~~because I messed up the eyes and had to fix it somehow, so why not an eyepatch~~ in honor of Talk Like A Pirate Day. Yarr. I'll post some pictures in an edit as soon as I figure out how to get them off my phone. Which might be a couple days. Avast there!

Type your cut contents here.
So, more like a couple of weeks, but oh well.

Sat, 12 Jul 2008 01:13:00 GMT

Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog is an internet mini-series musical about a supervillain. How much cooler can you get? (Sample Answer: add ninjas and pirates, and make it longer.) It's being produced by Joss Whedon, the same guy as Firefly and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Nathan Fillion, who was also in Firefly, plays Captain Hammer.

The official site is here: drhorrible.com

It's going to be free for a few days, and then available to buy as a download, and later as a DVD.

From the Master Plan: We have big dreams, people, and one of them is paying our crew.

Which, come to think of it, could also be the motto for Firefly, in-verse.

The Big Read List

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 17:21:40 GMT

Meme from jesspallas . The Big Read reckons that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they've printed.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicise those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)

1. Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2. The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien And the Silmarillion, and a bunch of extra materials. ***
3. Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte **
4. Harry Potter series - JK Rowling The seventh book annoys me, and my favorite is the fifth. ***
5. To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee ** Same book club as Wuthering Heights.
6. The Bible
7. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte This was assigned for a book club, but I didn't finish it in time.
8. Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell **I read half of it beforehand.
9. His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman ***
10. Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11. Little Women - Louisa M Alcott The abridged version, in elementary school, but I did costumes for the musical, too.
12. Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13. Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14. Complete Works of Shakespeare *Not nearly half of them have been assigned in school, so I didn't bold anything. I read Henry V on my own, though.
15. Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16. The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17. Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18. Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19. The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20. Middlemarch - George Eliot
21. Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22. The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald *
23. Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24. War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25. The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26. Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27. Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28. Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck *
29. Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30. The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31. Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32. David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33. Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis ***
34. Emma - Jane Austen
35. Persuasion - Jane Austen
36. The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis Why do they have both this and 33?
37. The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38. Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39. Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40. Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41. Animal Farm - George Orwell
42. The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43. One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45. The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46. Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery And I was in the play. I had two lines.
47. Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48. The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49. Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50. Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52. Dune - Frank Herbert I have actually read through God Emperor of Dune, and didn't really like any of them but the first. (I kept reading because someone gave me God Emperor, and everyone talks so much about them they fell into the "literary heritage" category.)
53. Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55. A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56. The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57. A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens *
58. Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60. Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61. Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62. Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63. The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64. The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65. Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66. On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67. Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68. Bridget Jones' Diary - Helen Fielding
69. Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70. Moby Dick - Herman Melville * sort of. We read pieces of it in school, and my teacher gave us a big speech about how we didn't get to say we'd read it, because we hadn't read all of it, and I thought, "Hey, I did all this work on Moby Dick, I want some freaking credit for it!" So I checked the book out of the library and read the rest of it over the summer. And may I take the opportunity to say here that WHALES ARE NOT FISH?
71. Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens Again, abridged in elementary school.
72. Dracula - Bram Stoker I think I might own this, but I have no idea where it is.
73.The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74. Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75. Ulysses - James Joyce
76. The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77. Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome And the rest of the series, too. My grandmother has a really pretty set that travels around all the cousins.
78. Germinal - Emile Zola
79. Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80. Possession - AS Byatt
81. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens **
82. Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83. The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84. The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86. A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87. Charlotte's Web - EB White
88. The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89. Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle I'm not sure whether this means you have to have read all of them, but I've read at least two books' worth.
90. The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91. Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92. The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery In English and French*, ha!
93. The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94. Watership Down - Richard Adams I can't actually remember whether I finished this or not. It was confusing.
95. A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96. A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97. The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas Again, elementary school. It was the weirdest-looking book, too, about four inches square and two inches thick. I have no idea why I remember that.
98. Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100. Les Miserables - Victor Hugo In English and slightly abridged. *** for the musical more than the book, but I liked the book too.

* For school.
** I read it on my own first and was assigned in school later.
*** I used to love it/them, but not so much anymore. I have a lot of these, because I tend to obsess over one thing and then get over it when the next one arrives.

Woo! Forty counting the ones I've read part of, thirty-five not counting those!

Language fun (and an advertisement)

Mon, 02 Jun 2008 21:29:59 GMT

A new English verb: to loo.
Definition: to sing backup on the word "loo," especially in a multi-part choral piece.
Examples of use: "Ooh, we get to loo in this piece!"*
"Wow, we loo really low there."*
"So the altos have the melody while the sopranos loo?"

*Actually said in class, subject to the vagaries of memory.

And the advertisement, as promised:
I've mentioned Alexandra Erin's work here before. I've finally broken my addiction to Tales of MU, but now she's restarted Star Harbor Nights, which I found through ToMU and read through the archives. But some of her other projects are not getting as much attention as they deserve, especially Tribe: Fantasy in Miniature. It's a dark, urban fantasy written entirely in 333-word chapters. The plot is thickly interwoven and really fascinating.

Because it is very late, and I am very tired

Mon, 19 May 2008 04:01:32 GMT

I have written a very silly Firefly haiku. Actually, it's only loosely based on Serenity, and comes more directly from a conversation my Firefly HSSP class (H1188 here) had. Tiny Serenity spoilers, so I'm putting it under a cut. That, and I want to practice HTML.
(Okay, neither HTML or Rich text is working, and I'm too tired to find the problem right now. It'll just have to be a spoiler. Not like anyone reads my journal anyway. )

My silly haiku

(The dash marks a different speaker.)

Scrap metal for sale!
-Ewwww! It's got Reaver cooties!
Fine, never mind then.

EDIT: Odd, apparently it did work. Both times. Anyway, here's another one I thought of that night after I turned the computer off:

Plastic-wrapped Reaver:
Keeps it fresh on long journeys!
(Or... just more cooties.)

Letters we don't send

Fri, 07 Mar 2008 03:43:03 GMT

Dear English Teacher,

When the name of the quiz is a "Reading Check," it is the generally accepted practice to use questions whose answers were actually in the reading, rather than the explanatory notes or your own personal interpretation.

(Meagan, I don't know whether you know who I mean, but please don't say anything about this in real life. Same goes for anyone else from my school who finds this.)

Fun with Hamlet, because I should be writing an essay in French right now

Sat, 23 Feb 2008 04:19:28 GMT

So, I'm in a high school Honors Brit Lit class, and we're reading Hamlet right now. (Actually, right now we're on vacation, but you know what I mean.) On Friday, we read Act I scene 5 out loud in class. Normally, with plays in English class, you get most of the class just reading the words on the page one after another with no expression or even regard for punctuation at all, which kind of annoys me, being the drama person I am. In this case, however, the ghost was played by a boy who's also really into the drama club, and he went crazy-in-a-good-way with the expression-spooky voices, shouting, and he even ducked down behind his chair when the ghost exited. (They were at the front of the room.) Meanwhile, the kid playing Hamlet was of the monotone 'school'. Everyone kept cracking up, but I bet that's not a scene we forget in a hurry.

The funny thing was, it actually worked. Just not the kind of 'work' I had envisioned reading the scene the night before.

Especially where Hamlet had monosyllabic answers to dramatic proclamations, like here:

HAMLET

Speak; I am bound to hear.

Ghost

So art thou to revenge, when thou shalt hear.

HAMLET

What?

or here:

[Ghost]
If thou didst ever thy dear father love--

HAMLET

O God!

it seemed like Hamlet was just in way over his head with all this crime and revenge and supernaturalism and just wanted to go back to Wittenberg and study Aristotle or whatever princes studied at Wittenberg back then.

VSPPP, or, How I Finally Committed and Got Something On Paper (And Thence Onscreen)

Wed, 19 Dec 2007 03:13:03 GMT

My first online fiction! Explanation and author's notes follow the text.

First Lesson

Pat eyed the growing collection of equipment on the table nervously. “Um…” he began, “I’m really starting to have second thoughts about this.”

“Oh, come on!” I set down the bottles I was holding, with perhaps more force than was strictly necessary. “I thought you said you wanted to do this. And what does ‘really starting’ mean, anyway?”

Pat held up his hands placatingly. “I just- I didn’t realize it was so complicated, is all. And can’t we have one conversation without your inner grammar Nazi taking over?”

I sighed. He had a point. “All right. Inner grammar Allies are storming the beaches of inner grammar Normandy as we speak.”

“Ah, but do they have inner grammar air support?”

“Anyway, it’s really not as confusing as it looks, once you’ve got the basics down.” I picked up one of the bottles, deliberately covering the label with my hand. “Do you know what this is?”

He squinted, biting his lip. “Holy water?” he asked finally.

I snorted, then caught myself. “First lesson. Holy water works on less than half the vamps, and it’s a close-range weapon so you won’t get a second shot.” But maybe if you hit one with holy water first, I wondered, and then immediately staked it while it was laughing…I shoved that train of thought firmly aside. The problem with experimenting in this business is that you can only be wrong once. It kind of rules out trial and error. “There’s incredible variation in what methods work, anyway. Some recoil from anything Christian, a lot of them can’t stand sunlight, there was even one in France that dissolved under antibacterial spray- we’re still trying to figure out how that happened. A stake is always your safest bet, though. I’ve never heard of one a stake couldn’t take down.”

“Stake always works. Got it.” He nodded, looking more sure of himself now we were dealing in absolutes again.

“Silver will work on most of them, too, and sewing scissors are way easier to conceal- or explain away, come to that- than a stake, so you’ll always want a pair for crowded areas, like, I don’t know, an outdoor masquerade or whatever.”

“But I keep the stake on me, just not somewhere visible.”

“Right. Feel ready to try the hard part again?”

“Yeah. I do.” He nodded, then took a deep breath and looked down at the table. “So this one is… lip liner- no, eye liner.”

“Right! What made you change your mind? I’m curious.”

He paused. “Well, it’s brown…and most lipstick comes in shades of red, so you’d want a lip liner to match that, right?”

“Good.” I smiled. He really was getting the hang of this. So what if people said a boy couldn’t be a Vampire Slaying Pretty Pretty Princess? I’d show them. After all, this is the twenty-first century.

This story was inspired by (what else) The Vampire Slaying Pretty Pretty Princess meme. The jokes owe a lot to the Tales of MU community: "Inner grammar Nazi" comes from comments 47 and 49 on this entry, and the punch line was inspired by the first two comments on this story. Addendum: the vampire-slaying disinfectant spray was inspired by this author's sidebar, from when MU was on livejournal.

(P.S.: Check out my maaaaad HTML skillz!)

The Chaucerfic that never was

Tue, 11 Dec 2007 23:30:17 GMT

I was trying to write a sequel to The Knight's Tale, but it kept coming out wrong no matter how much I tried to fix it. It was kind of a one-idea fic, anyway. Basically, Emily and Palamon were setting up house together when Emily makes a joke about "the two prisoners of war together," and Palamon says "Wait, what?" or some such, and they tell each other stories about their past, and end up realizing they have more in common than living next to each other without realizing it for years. (I was going to put the synopsis under a cut, but I can't figure out how.) As a side note, I thought Emily was a very odd name for an ancient Greek, (well, Amazon, I guess) particularly one with a sister named Hippolyta. The first time I saw it, it reminded me of a Mary Sue.

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 03:48:44 GMT

Two is less than three.
That is all.

More advertising

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 02:40:07 GMT

I know no one will probably read this, but I would like to take this opportunity to announce that Alexandra Erin, one of my favorite online authors, has decided to quit her day job and write full-time. She writes several serial works at the moment, Tales of Mu, (which I've described already in my second-last post, so I won't try to paraphrase it;, Tribe: Fantasy in Minature, which is "low, dark, urban fantasy," and which is written in chapters 333 words long; and Void Dogs, which I don't know how to describe except as "space fantasy" and very funny. All the links can be found in the sidebar of her website, www.alexandraerin.com.

Meme by way of got_stalker:

Fri, 31 Aug 2007 02:07:16 GMT

If there are one or more people on your friends list who make your world a better place just because they exist, and who you would not have met (in real life or not) without the Internet, then post this same sentence in your journal.

Advertising

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 21:16:31 GMT

Attention anyone who might be reading:

I follow a really awesome original fiction serial on livejournal called Tales of MU. The MU stands for Magisterius University, and the story is about a half-human girl starting her freshman year there. (You have to read the story to find out what her other half is, MUAHAHAHAHA! Ha. Ha. Um. Or, you could just check the end of chapter 12, if you really want to find out that badly.) The university is set in a world (vaguely inspired by Dungeons & Dragons) where there was an equivalent to our Industrial Revolution, but fueled by magic instead of science. It superficially appears to be like our world, but the differences become ever more pronounced as you get deeper into the story, and discovering them is one of my favorite things. (To give a rather tame example, televisions and refrigerators still have the same names because their names describe what they do- seeing at a distance and cooling things, respectively. However, their equivalent of a microwave is called a "food warmer" because the name "microwave" describes how it works, and there is no such thing as microwaves in that universe.)The characters are wonderfully drawn, and the author is incredible: since June 5, she's written the equivalent of two short novels, not to mention her other projects. It does get a little graphic at times, but it is uniformly well-written and generally awesome. So, if anyone ever reads this, the link is here: http://mutales.livejournal.com/

Thu, 19 Apr 2007 00:33:02 GMT

If you see this, post some Shakespeare.

It's been almost a year since my last update, and the post I read this on was from 2005, but since it was from A. T. Rain, my favorite fan author, I felt guilty about ignoring it. So, without further ado:

My mistress's eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lip's red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun,
If hair be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
In some perfumes there is more delight
Than the breath with which my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know,
Music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
As any she belied with false compare.

Hi?

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 20:59:18 GMT

Yay! I finally have permission to have a livejournal!

Um...yeah.
Well, hi. My name is Betsy, I'm 15, and I live in Massachusetts. I'm in drama and Color Guard (although not at the moment, 'cause we're out for summer vacation). I probably won't update this too often. Anyway, I'm off to read the Daily Sporfle. Bye!