a conspiracy of cartographers

I have posted the first 1000+ words of my Yuletide fic! It is nothing like done, but at the moment my BEARS feel more like ... bear cubs? Something like that. Manageable, anyway.

I have also decorated the tree, and helped various friends cook things for the holiday party this evening. I love this time of year a lot. :D

Hi, internet! The apartment of Gondor is spending the evening watching Mythbusters, and the combination of my delightful bizarre fannish feelings about this show + wine + an episode about superhero myths = us trying to figure out what the cast's superpowers would be.

Jamie: invulnerability
Adam: kinetic energy (sort of Gambit-style)
Tory: super speed
Kari: something ... cosmic, we did not really work this out but we wanted her to have alien superpowers and fly and stuff! (Ms Marvel style, more or less)
Grant: he has no super powers, but is basically low-budget Iron Man (with bonus Mythbusters narrator playing the part of JARVIS)

OTHER SUGGESTIONS WELCOME, THIS IS TOTALLY A SUPERPOWERED MYTHBUSTERS PARTY! For the ... however many of you care, I do not actually know how many of you care! But it is making the apartment of Gondor very happy.

A list of excellent things in the past week:

+ The election!!! So happy, so relieved, so uselessly apologetic that North Carolina went red this time. I've been reading lots of smart articles about what the election turnout/results/&c mean for the country; I've also been reading and watching lots of Fox News and cohorts freaking the fuck out, and basking in the schadenfreude, because wow is that cathartic.

+ SNOW! It did not stick, but I love winter, I love it so, so much.

+ Cats! The apartment of Gondor is fostering Jessie's cats because her current living situation turned out to be not cat-friendly. The cats adjusted really quickly, and they are purring machines, and both of them are currently loafing on a couch, ahhh delightful furballs.

+ Haircut! I continue absurdly pleased with my short hair of queerness and joy. I tend to only spike it if I'm going to be leaving the house or have to otherwise make myself presentable, but I'm enjoying it both like that and in its natural fluffy state.

+ Job?? Last week I was hired conditional on my background check going through, but it ... hasn't yet, possibly because Hurricane Sandy fucked with databases or possibly just because bureaucracy. I called today to check and was assured I'm on the list of new hires, so I'm resigning myself to another potential week of limbo. But! assuming all continues well, I shall soon be gainfully employed in the actual city in which I live. It's work as a barista, because I'm an actual English major punchline, but Jessie and I realized that it means we (and feverbeats) will be living in a barista AU! So that's kind of delightful.

All the leaves are turning, and it's so cold at night now that I can't go outside without my first few breaths hitching into coughs. (Thank you, very mild asthma, you're my favorite.) I traditionally hate November because 'tis the season of brainbads hitting many of my friends, but -- winter is coming! I love long coats and hot drinks and SNOW, and skeletal branches against the sky that goes a very specific blue this time of year; and I love how I can take long walks without getting overheated, though sometimes warm enough to take off my outer layers, and I love the weird looks bundled-up passersby give my bare arms.

I may finally have a second job that will stop me burning through my savings, but it's at the hovering point between accepting the job offer and my background check going through, so even though I know intellectually that I'll be hired by the end of the week, it seems unreal right now; and I don't have my hours yet, so I can't collapse the actual shape my life will take from the various possibilities. (I did offer to start working anytime after 4 AM, so I could potentially have a workday that gets out a little after noon, and have whole glorious half-days for errands and writing and time with Amiel when they have early days. I know I'll spend the rest of the month hating myself before I adjust.)

I'm also going to have Emma cut off all my hair this weekend -- proper all of it, I'm angling for a pixie cut with a potential for spiking. Why? Because my hair is a fluffball I can never figure out how to do interesting things with; because it always gets in the way when I'm kissing someone; because my default sartorial choices are in the casual-cute-femme range and I'd like to be a bit more visibly queer; because, fuck it, CHANGE THINGS UP, who cares if it's the wrong time of year for a haircut, more cute hats & scarves for me!

This entry actually brought to you by my blind election terror. I voted! absentee in North Carolina! I deeply and sincerely hope it goes blue again this time! The apartment of Gondor is probably going to dig down this evening with booze & blanket forts and check the news on the internet as it rolls in. All recommendations for news sites with streaming video most welcome, by the way.

We are all quite safe and still with power! Jessie and I even braved the torrential downpour to drive across town (fifteen minutes, slow speeds, limited visibility and some wind but otherwise quite safe) to visit Amiel and Emma for baking and birthday celebrations. The highlight of the evening was perhaps the moment at which we realized that, in the dark, the rain was basically horizontal, and like rational adults we threw off most of our clothes and went out to dance on the fire escape.

So this entry is mostly to record that! But also to check in and to say the apartment of Gondor is doing okay. :)

I am ... spectacularly bad at having an internet presence! I mean, I reblog things on tumblr, but most of the time I'm not generating my own content and I treat it much more as a squee repository than any kind of blog, so in my head it doesn't count. In any case, hello! It is fall! I love this time of year because rather than throwing on a t-shirt and shorts in a desultory fashion and laying around wilting in the heat, I am wandering around in sweeping coats through autumn mists and planning actual outfits with layers and enjoying the turning of the leaves and consuming all the pumpkin products and generally adoring this season. Meanwhile, on the fannish front:

+ Doctor Who! Having now seen all of Amy's arc, I still think they fell down a bit in the middle with season six, but in the end they did right by her and by Rory, and I got a bit teary. I think I'll be tracking down lots of coda fic, and I may eventually compile a recs list, but at the moment, here is the first coda fic my face saw: Detectives, Adventurers and Girls Who Don't Wait Around by lizbee; highly recommended, made me feel much better about this whole Amy-being-gone nonsense.

+ Warehouse 13! Oh my gosh Warehouse 13, this silly SyFy (nooo it still pains me to type that) show that I've been mainlining over the past few weeks. I'm all caught up now, of course just as the half-season finale aired, so everything is naturally terrible and dire to hook you into coming back in April. In any case, Warehouse 13 is for the most part truly lovely; it has canon queers and lots of ladies (who consistently talk about plot things) and I have actual hopes for a canon endgame f/f ship and it's possibly hands-down the best show about found family I have ever seen. Actually this post by thingswithwings talks with more eloquence and enthusiasm about this show than I possibly could. I just love it so.

+ Avengers! Not that ... any new exciting Avengers things have happened (although I am greatly enjoying the steady influx of Thor 2 set pictures) but my stupid fic continues apace; besides all the bits that are written out of order, I have nearly 10,000 chronological words and Thor and Loki have still yet to get the fuck off Asgard, so I've resigned myself to the fact that this fic is going to be a monster. Meanwhile the always-lovely Emma volunteered to make me a Thor sundress, for which we went fabric-shopping yesterday, so for Halloween I'm going to be Thor, with Emma along as my Loki. (Housemate K, meanwhile, is going to attempt to make me a paper-mache helmet. I expect it will look quite stupid but K is in fact a crafts wizard, so we shall see.)

+ Polaris and I are watching Veronica Mars! I haven't watched VMars since college, and I forgot how much I adore it. I ... also forgot how much I ship Veronica/Lilly and any iteration of Veronica/Logan/Weevil, so possibly after this rewatch I will be on the hunt for good fic.

Today, hangouts with Sares! Tonight, contra with Tyler posse! Life is ... pretty good, guys.

I have been mostly away from the internet (and fandom generally, barring sleepily checking tumblr over breakfast) for quite some time now because real life, oh god real life, everything has been a bit in crisis mode with helping people move. But! I AM OFF TO DRAGON*CON TOMORROW. I'm really hoping that it will be a proper vacation rather than something that packs on more stress, but I am really, really excited at the prospect of so many hangouts with lovely fan people.

(We're still on for a Stonehenge Apocalypse room party, right? I need this in my life. And if we time it right I may turn up with an air of faint bewilderment while dressed as Aziraphale.)

Hah, I have been so bad at White Collar reaction posts, but I just loved this episode SO MUCH.

( 4x05, in which Peter's face makes me melt a little with joy. Also general spoilers for the aired episodes this season as I do also talk about it more generally. )

Today it is below 80 degrees! There is a breeze! The birds are singing! (No, really, I am next to an open window and birds are singing outside, though I can also hear traffic noises cos, y'know, city.) The weather is GLORIOUS, is what I'm saying here. And White Collar is back! I am often terrible about posting White Collar reactions, and then I get irritated with my past self because sometimes I like to reread reaction posts to remind myself what's going on in the show; but I'm sorry, future self, I'm not posting any White Collar reactions today either, though it does remain the show of my heart, oh gosh I just love it so much.

Instead, today I am posting about The Hollow Crown!

Before I say anything else I should note that I am so very much not an expert on these plays. I've read Richard II and Henry IV (part one only) a total of once each, and never read Henry V; I've seen one previous production of Henry IV, cut dramatically to fit both parts into three hours, and two previous productions of Henry V. So I come to this armed with shaky knowledge of the text, though also with lots of Hal feelings that predate my Hiddleston feelings by some years. Okay! That's covered, time for some SHAKESPEARE FEELINGS.

( The Hollow Crown! Cut for length, and I guess production spoilers. Um, and also my perennial shallowness for Tom Hiddleston, but this shouldn't come as a surprise. )