a conspiracy of cartographers

In an effort to become an actual human with an internet presence and hobbies and other good things, I'm blocking out time during each day to get some writing done! And, in a stunning twist, when I do this, I actually get things written! Today's offering is about Frigga, because as we all know I will never ever be over this stupid Asgardian family.

I know these bones as being mine, Frigga, young Loki and Thor. "He is not our ward, Frigga, he is our son."

It turns out I have a LOT of feelings about Frigga! Team many scenes of Frigga in Thor 2.

Okay, I'm going to be at WisCon for the next five days (!!!) which means if I don't make this television post now, it's never going to get made. And so! TV I have watched & have feelings about!

( Community, spoilers through the finale, shruggy but positive )

( Doctor Who, spoilers through the finale, kind of ambivalent )

( Elementary!! spoilers through the finale, unmitigated joy )

In addition to these, Polaris and I have also been watching Person of Interest, Polaris because a friend highly recommended it, me because now that astolat has moved on from Thor/Loki porn to Finch/Reese porn my life has been a barren wasteland and I wanted to be able to read her porn again. (I do things for good serious intellectual reasons.) We love it a whole lot?? We're only at the beginning of season two, and the beginning of season two hit me in the face with MACHINE FEELS, which will now live with my Fiiinch feels, and my John-Reese's-stupid-face feels, and my Caaaarter feels, and my ongoing dedication to Amy Acker and Enrico Colantoni. So uh that's been great? And I'd totally write the dystopia-with-robots AU, or the Batman AU, except I don't even need to.

All of this actually fails to be a rundown about what I'll be yelling about at WisCon, because what I'll be yelling about at WisCon is Avengers, as always. I don't think I need to do a Care & Feeding post, if only because I haven't done one in years past but have managed just fine, but: Amiel and I will be arriving tomorrow noon! If any of y'all are already in the area, hit us up and we'd be happy to do pre-con hangouts. :DDD

IRON MAN 3!!! ( Spoilers are the mechanic. )

As usual I open the update window, stare at it, and wonder how I used to update nearly every day in college. (This may be rhetorical; the answer is that in college I was much more in the habit of constant writing, and tumblr drift wasn't a thing, and also my life had more variety, or maybe this winter has just been crushingly awful. I should possibly make a resolution to post every day? Habits!) I'm sure I have exciting life things to talk about, but fuck it, I've been up since four this morning, and it's been 2009 since I last did this meme, which means I can do it again!

( 21 first lines of fic in reverse chronological order. )

I feel sort of like I'm doing the mental equivalent of that Unfuck Your Habitat thing -- my physical habitat is super unfucked! I brush the cats, I sweep and dust! I'm really excited for warmer weather because soon I shall fling open all the windows and do a deep-clean of the apartment! -- but I keep feeling massively stressed. Some of it is stuff entirely outside my control, of course, but I'm getting better at identifying the stressors and taking care of those, one thing at a time.

For example, this morning I registered for WisCon and got a room! Right now the going plan is to room with my sweeties and such_heights, so exciiiiited. (I also bought a dessert ticket, because Jo Walton. ...I should perhaps read some of her stuff besides Among Others before the con.) I even called up the hotel and registered by phone, by speaking to another human being and everything, and it was okay. Somehow in the last five years I've become the sort of person who does not panic every time she needs to make a phone call, oh wow my endless relief.

Also, I have finally figured out the answer to my tumblr problem. (My tumblr problem, in this case, being that there is no way I can actually manage to keep up with it given the other more important commitments in my life and the fact that I don't have job that involves downtime in front of a computer.) The answer to my tumblr problem: don't even try to stay caught up! Just look at some stuff, reblog some stuff, wander off, and then go back to the new first page next time! It is less freeing than I want it to be, because I'm still a bit OCD about completing things, but this still seems like the wisest choice.

Meanwhile I have also been watching some TV? I'm very bad at keeping up with most of it! Plus Polaris and I are watching every Bond film ever (ALMOST DONE!) and I'm showing Housemate K all of Buffy (halfway through s2 now!) because she's never seen it. Even so, I have been watching:

Community! ( Spoilers do a quick overview of the season so far. )

Elementary! ( Spoilers mostly just gush about Lucy Liu. )

White Collar! ( Spoilers are mostly me nattering about whether Neal is sleeping with the Burkes yet. )

Also, the Buffy rewatch is DELIGHTFUL. Housemate K adores Spike and Dru intensely, as well she should; meanwhile I'm mostly just really excited to watch her reaction faces, as we're about ... three episodes from Innocence right now. GOOD TIMES.

+ The other weekend Polaris and I had a few friends over to eat baked goods and nominally celebrate our belated birthdays. Tasty food was consumed! We are now the happy owners of several new books, fancy candles, and an Inspector Spacetime poster! We also cobbled together a DYI version of Cards Against Humanity, excising all the cards that were gender essentialist or potentially rapey, and adding several fandom cards. Perhaps the best submission of the evening was "[Frost giants] are a slippery slope that lead to [black holes]," which is such a great summary of Thor that Emma was an instant winner.

+ Last night Polaris and paper_tzipporah and I went to see Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters, fortified with tiny bottles of booze, as one does. We started edging toward the back of the tiny theater when I noticed that the other people there seemed to be talking happily in the way one does at fangirl parties, so I asked them if they minded us sitting just behind them and heckling. "Of course not, that's what this movie is for!" was the general consensus; and then we all made Avengers jokes, and when I came back from my pre-film bathroom break everyone was talking the Hobbit, and of course the lovely people sitting in front of us turned out to be local fanpeople, and we all at least recognized one another's handles and/or fics to some degree, and it was DELIGHTFUL. The movie was great too, I guess? It was TERRIBLE, and full of incest and cartoon gore and gleeful joy at its own awfulness. We laughed the whole way through, and went out for cupcakes for afters. AN EXCELLENT EVENING, is what I'm saying here.

+ Work continues apace. Some days I am full of RAEG and some days I'm quite happy to be there, and goddamn, I can now make you any caffeinated drink you desire! The excellent thing about work is that standing up for eight hours is ... actually kind of good for my back? I utilize all my back muscles and don't hunch, anyway, so my posture is pretty great; that plus walking to and from work, and the occasional carrying of heavy things, means that I've got actual muscles and may be in good shape! Which is pleasing and exciting, and makes me like my body a whole lot even though I suspect I objectively look the same as I usually do. (I mean, the queer haircut helps too! The queer haircut is great every day.)

+ I seem to be reading Les Mis! I have read it once before, but that was in high school, and I recall doing a lot of skimming to get to what I thought was the Good Parts Version. This time I am not skimming! I read every word of how great M. Myriel is! I read all about the year 1817, and also every jerkass thing Fantine's horrible boyfriend said! It remains to be seen whether I will actually get through all of Waterloo; right now I'm in the middle of Valjean's crisis of conscience re: whether to reveal he's Jean Valjean. His cart is broken! His horse cannot be ridden! Everything is going wrong but STILL HE DOES THE RIGHT THING! I love this book a lot? I love Javert most of all, though; there may or may not soon be coming to a post near you all my really, really fervent Javert feelings. At the moment they mostly seem to be coming out as late-night tweets where I yell JAVEEEEERT, but I'll try to also cobble together something more articulate.

+ Avengers fic: one part complete, next three thoroughly outlined, Thor and Bruce currently making awkward spaghetti. :D

Today I was ringing up a woman who gave her name as Annie. "Like the little orphan, I guess," this Annie said. "Actually," said I, "I associate that name with the character on Community; have you seen it?" She was familiar, she said, but only because her roommate watched it, so I explained a bit about Annie Edison, with great enthusiasm, while I got her change. "Okay, sold," Annie said. "I'll totally check it out." VICTORY!

Unrelated to Annie, a protip: if you don't deign to get off your fucking phone whilst ordering coffee, your barista may be smiling, but they will probably also be harboring warm fuzzy thoughts of totally murdering you right in the face.

I don't ... actually spend a lot of time at work imagining barista AUs, but the Avengers one would be so easy. Like, Nick Fury owns the coffee shop, obviously; I don't know what the coffee shop is called, because I can't think of any coffee-related puns with the word "shield" in them. Whatever. Coulson and Hill and Natasha run shifts; Clint has been there longer than Tasha, and got her hired, and watched starry-eyed while she got promoted, and may or may not be dating her. The other baristas are Steve, art student; Bruce, PhD student who works weekends; Janet, who hates the part where she has to get coffee for her asshole ex-boyfriend Hank every morning; Loki, who got Frigga in the high school divorce and needs this job to pay for college; and Thor, who got Odin in the divorce and could totally be a junior partner at dad's company but is rebelling in what Loki thinks is the most irritating way possible by working at the same stupid coffee shop. Tony, obviously, is that one regular who flirts with absolutely everyone (especially Natasha and Bruce) despite the fact that Pepper meets him there half the time. And I guess this coffee shop is near a school with a good science program, because Jane is obviously also there, and has recently become a regular in order to stare at Thor more frequently. (Darcy endorses this.) Uh so probs Reed Richards uses it as his local too, and ... probably the X-Men are around too; Charles and Erik play chess in the back room every day. And I'm going to stop now! But this AU would be SO EASY, whee.

Oh hey, it's that time again! For Yuletide this year, I wrote just the one fic:

shape of the boundaries you leave behind. Demon's Lexicon, Alan/Sin. "Come on," Cynthia said, and pulled him upstairs. Alan went without protest, because Cynthia's warm hand in his was the only thing tethering him to the world. Everything else was dark and cold, killing cold.

Initially this fic was weirdly difficult to write, because though I ship Alan/Sin like burning, my Demon's Lexicon pairing of choice is ... everyone; I kept trying to dial back my earnest poly agenda, and the fic wasn't quite working. Then Olivia, who is the best beta ever and always knows what my story needs to do, told me gently that this story was allowed to have more Nick. And suddenly it worked! MORE NICK, is the moral of every Lexicon story.

I'm sad I didn't get through the whole archive before reveals; but I'm still trucking along, and enjoying myself immensely.

Re: Doctor Who: I AM REALLY EXCITED ABOUT CLARA! I am ... not sure I have ever been this excited about a new companion right off the bat? I mean, I loved Rose and Martha and Donna and Amy all by the end of their first episode, but CLARA OKAY.

Yesss I am pretty thrilled to have my Doctor Who excitement return to me.

Mm. I love Christmas so much. It's funny, because I never set out to have an excess of Christmas spirit or anything (if we, say, ignore for the moment the fact that I watch Muppet Christmas Carol every year) but it makes me so happy. I haven't listened at all to the Christmas mix I made a couple years ago, and I haven't watched any of my holiday movies or Christmas episodes, or reread Letters from Father Christmas, or even been on top of Yuletide in the same way I've been in years previous. But ... yesterday I wrapped presents for my parents and put them under the tree, and today I did a few final Yuletide revisions while feeling more and more excited about it, and tonight is the UU Christmas Eve service.

I've been so busy, and so overwhelmed by life happening, that it's sort of snuck up upon me this year. But I'm at my parents' house for the week, and I know my sweethearts and roommates and assorted friends are also off with family or otherwise doing good holiday things, and I feel so pleasantly anticipatory, and calmly settled into my skin.

Tomorrow of course I'm going to open presents both virtual and physical, and probably watch or read all the Christmas-themed things that I didn't get to before now. I'm just. Really happy to be happy right now.