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The Continuing Battles
Bleach #161-164: ( spoilers )

Current Mood: sleepy

Activist Characters and Community
Now this is a group that can become really annoying if not handled right. Left wing or right wing, activist characters constant preaching and complaining about the littlest things, their ability to automatically look down on (at best) or downright ridicule (at worst) those who don't follow their beliefs makes me want to smack them. Even if I agree with their beliefs. Granted not every activist character does this and opts to just self-rightously preach or use guilt at their victim instead. I'll also give them credit for acting on their beliefs even if they do it in the most obnoxious way possible. It's just that the bad ones never shut-up and don't really have a life outside their bitching and activism.

And there are activist characters I like. Mike Stivic is one of them because he honestly worked hard and even risked his health (by attending a protest that had some riled counter-protesters that might cause a riot) for what he believed. Also All in the Family wasn't afraid to make Mike look stupid, point at flaws in his beliefs, show that he could be just as bad as Archie and while he could be prideful, Mike honestly cared about the things he fought for. Lisa Simpson is another one. I can let some of her more self-rightous\bitchy moments off since she's still a kid and learning about the world. Like Mike, when it's something she truely cares about, I can really respect her and the effort she puts into it.

This connects with the otherwise awesome show, Community. I just can't stand the activist character, Brita. Granted they poke fun at her beliefs at times and she has apologized when she was wrong, but it's the stuff in the first paragraph with her (especialy how horribly she treated Shirley in the girl talk episode) that makes me tone her out every time she appears.

( the vampire diaries, latest episode )

oh hey is there a newsletter, or people writing fic, or anything? because i would really go for some fic, or even just other people talking about it. i think this may be my new fandom, and man did i ever need one.

Dear yuri writer,

Bazillion waxed =/= Brazillian waxed especially if it only refers to one body part, . That is all.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: sound machine in room

It's my playground. I can deny your application for any reason I want.

Seriously. Any reason I want. I could suddenly decide that every person apply to my game needs to intuitively know that their font should be bright pink and sparkle and then deny everyone who doesn't do that. I would be a pretty sad little cookie and end up in the Special Corner of the internet playing with myself, but that's a completely different issue. The point still stands that there's no RP Police going to swoop down from the ether to fine me for breaking the RP Law. Because there is no law. There's 'what works,' and 'what sends your game into a tail-spin and is thus generally avoided.'

So please, for the love of god, stop sending me IMs, PMs, e-mails, smoke signals, carrier pigeons, and whatever else I haven't banned you from yet telling me that I can't do something. I can. Stop telling me I'm not 'allowed' to deny you for the reasons I've outlined. If I'm shooting myself in the foot by not letting you in the game, then that's a natural consequence I'm willing to accept. Because all other drama aside, your particular brand of bitching is hands-down my least favorite ever.

Am I right
in thinking Dian Girard = Dian Crayne = J. D. Crayne?

[clickity click]

I think that's a yes.

YA/middle grade book, new kid in town
I read this sometime before high school, before 1998.

All I remember is that there is a group of kids in town, including a first-person male narrator I think, and each of them has a special thing-- not superpowers, just a thing that sets them apart. Then this kid's family moves in. He introduces himself to the entire group. He wears a green sock on one foot because he's that-footed and that makes him run faster; he can run faster than the fastest kid in the group. He has more freckles than the kid with the most freckles, and there's a moment when everyone pauses and the narrator can tell they're doing math in their heads. He has more pets than the kid with most pets, including at least one goat. His family has more kids than the kid with the most siblings, including twin boys, Sam and Uel, who they didn't know were going to be twins so they just split the name. He might be able to blow a bigger bubble than someone; basically, he's better at everything they'd valued about themselves, and suddenly things suck.

There is more to the book, but I don't remember anything else.

Writing and motion comics
So I've lost my mind and signed up for

yuletide this year. I've offered up a bunch of fandoms, some obvious, some not-so obvious unless you've peeked at my book collection. I'm nervous with anticipation over my assignment.

mini_nanowrimo is going well. It's good to be writing again. I've done two fanfic stories and the rest of the days have been filled with original fic. One was inspired by the hidden object game I was playing at the time. Don't question the inspiration, just run with it. The game's Hidden Magic and it's a weird cross between hidden object/puzzles and Magic the Gathering. You have to find the objects to cast the particular spells, prompting much panic when you can't find something. (I even incorporated that into the story. There was an early bug in the system so there was no acorn shown even though your spell needed an acorn.)

I've watched the five episodes of the "Spider-woman: Agent of Sword" motion comic off Hulu. (You do need to register on Hulu if you want to watch them because they've been tagged with an MA rating, mostly because of the blood and violence. It didn't strike me as really horrific, but if it'd been live action?) I really wasn't familiar with the character before I watched it, which was fine. The story filled me in most of the backstory. ( Spider-woman: Agent of Sword )

Visions of sugar plums
Oh, joy, someone had the brilliant idea of nominating Classical Ballet as a Yuletide fandom! Swan Lake, Les Sylphides, The Nutcracker, Giselle, Coppelia, and Matthew Bourne's Swan Lake. I think I could probably write something for all of those.

I'm whittling my Yuletide fandoms down. I've gotten it from 60+ down to 37. I'm not really sure why I whittle them down to as low a number as possible, but it makes me feel more comfortable if there's less than thirty options.

Things I'm glad I did before this year's Yuletide:
- reread Garth Nix's Abhorsen series
- Got myself a copy of Quantum of Solace
- Finished a few manga series, like Paradise Kiss and Tokyo Babylon

Things I have to do before next year's Yuletide:
- rewatch Millennium
- reread Julian May's Galactic Milieu
- catch up on Mushishi
- finish reading Holly Black's Modern Faerie Tales. (I loved 'Valiant' so, so, so much. Erudite trolls for the win!)
- get around to reading the rest of Planetary
- find R McAvoy's Damiano series (it's in this house somewhere) and reread it, because her Raphael was lovely, and everything I want from the angels on Supernatural, but never seem to get, except for occasional glimpses from Castiel when he's not being a plot device.

Things I will never do for Yuletide but wish I could (and I hope someone does):
- offer Dinosaur comics
- write RPF, though massive kudos for the person who nominated RPF - Australian Radio, especially since your chosen characters are John Safran and Father Bob.
- write music video fic, like for Express Yourself, or Hungry Like the Wolf, or Papparazzi, or Never Gonna Give You Up, or Nikita or Thriller or Total Eclipse of the Heart, or any of the albums that were nominated.

Actually, I think I've talked myself into offering some music video fandoms. But then again, if say I offered 'Nikita', I'd want to write angsty 80's cold war slash fic, because, dude, it's Elton John, and he called the song Nikita, and it's so obviously about a rosy cheeked East German (or Russian) male soldier. While I fervently believe this, I can't really expect the person who requests fic to hold the same belief, and I certainly wouldn't want to write het for that particular song. *is confused* Maybe I'll stick to offering Total Eclipse of the Heart.

I'm offering three Enid Blyton fandoms this year - Faraway Tree, Malory Towers and The Naughtiest Girl in the School. This last series fascinates me - is it just me, or do other people find it very charged? I really need to re-read it to figure out what's going on in there. Also, somebody in this house must stop appending 'lizard' onto 'The Naughtiest Girl is a Monitor'. (For the non-Commonwealth people, the monitor in this context is a kind of prefect, and not at all reptilian.)

Oh! The Naughtiest Girl is a Monitor (Lizard) - it's Dinosaur Comics/Enid Blyton mashup I never knew I wanted to see!

Steam Powered Static (fic, 1/?)
I've wanted to do this for a while now, and as my Originals aren't flowing as freely, nor is Uses, I'd thought I'd go ahead and try my hand at this fic. Hope you guys enjoy it.

Title: Steam Powered Static
Rating: T for Teen
Author: Ctrl_Issue
Author’s Note: I wanted to do a steam punk version of Static Shock, so here it is. I think. I’m doing this strictly due to my own whimsy, so it might not be as tight as some of my other works, and I'm not sure how within the range of "steampunk" this actually falls. To top it off, I'm not sure if there are gong to be any pairings just yet as I’ve got a pretty gen plotline right now, though that is subject to change, but I still hope it entertains you. Unbeta’d.
Chapter Word Count (including header): 5000

( Steam Powered Static )

Just... no.
Dear Sir,

Three words does not equal a story. When your story is shorter than your summary, you have done something wrong. You get nothing, you lose, good day sir.

Geekiest. Craft. EVER. Figure-modding for morons: Enterprise Chekov, Cadet Sulu
I was minding my own business, liking Star Trek, buying a small and not unreasonable amount of Star Trek merchandise. Then, one day I woke up to find I had descended to a depth of geekitude I had never before suspected in myself.

I had found the desire to modify action figures.

What the hell? How did this happen to me?

Oh wait, I wanted a mini bridge crew for my Christmas tree and saw this unfortunate news: "Chekov in Enterprise Uniform (available only online with this assortment)." Right, if I wanted Chekov in uniform, I needed to wait until January and then buy a giant expensive package of figures. What? No. Just no. *

Then I came upon a way of making my bridge crew dreams come true through a method so stupidly simple, even I couldn't mess it up.

I give you... The Head Swap! (Instructional pictures under each cut tag)

( First, you need a Cadet Chekov figure and a Sulu figure and a hair dryer. )

( Next, you put the hair dryer on high and blow hot air from pretty close on the neck of the figure from all sides. )

( Then you quick pull off his head. Pop! Off it comes! Pretty easy too. )

( Then you switch the heads. Voila! Now you have a Chekov in a gold uniform and a Cadet Sulu action figure too! )

alder_knight, want a Cadet Sulu action figure?

*Yeah, or buy him at the vastly inflated rate of $20 after shipping from a shady figure broker. I know. But hell no. This was cheaper, faster and more fun, and I got two figures out of it.

Tween science fantasy
I'm trying to remember a trilogy of books I read when I was 12-ish. I think they were written in the 1970s or '80s.

The main character was a thief who got caught breaking into a house. I want to say that the house belonged to a man who was a sage or a wizard or something. Instead of turning him in, the man makes the boy his apprentice.

I don't remember much else about the story other than that there was a girl who I think was part of a troupe of actors who died who joins them later, and they find a computer from our time, which is when you discover that the story's actually set in the future. The computer teaches them to speak our language by showing pictures of clouds and stuff and then playing audio of each word.

I'm a little shaky on the girl, though. I'm positive that a girl ends up becoming a major character in the story, but the acting troupe thing might be from another book and I'm just confusing them.

I'm seriously getting sick of seeing rants prefaced with "YMMV." Unless your rant is about grammar or technical aspects of writing, it pretty much goes without saying that someone somewhere will have a different opinion on the subject--and sometimes it happens even when you are talking about grammar, etc! If you're worried that your rant comes off as judgmental or close-minded, try rewording it instead, since tacking that phrase on probably won't do much to help if it is.

Nicknames
In NCIS, Tony and Gibbs don't really have nicknames. They have never been called "T" and "J". They probably won't be nicknamed that, even in fics.

And while Abby is his favorite, Gibbs would not let him call her that. I just can't see him liking it.

Vague Memories of an Old Tale
I have been thinking a lot about a book I read [maybe in elementary?] that I only remember very, very vaguely.

The main is a boy and the book is narrated by him. He has a little sister and she always leaves the gate open. I believe his mother is sick. I also recall he always leaves his shoes untied. He never ties his shoes. At the end of the book he's walking down the railroad tracks [his mother died maybe?] and he suddenly decided to bend down and tie his shoes. As he's doing this, he is hit by a train.

I'm sorry there is so little info on my part. I barely remember this story and kept thinking it was called "The Gate", but my searches found ... David Bowie, I believe. My husband seemed to think it was by Stephen King in his pen name Richard Bachman, but my search of that got me nowhere. I've been trying to find this book for several years, but it seems to be totally lost on me on what it's called or who wrote it.

Thanks in advance!

Current Mood: contemplative

Children's Fantasy
I'm trying to find a book I read in the fourth grade. It was a fantasy book, paperback, I think the cover had a girl and an archway. The story was about a girl, I believe she may have been riding on a school bus, she was drawn into another world. I believe there may have been a goblin and/or a prince, something purple and sticky, a climbing of a tower, a wizard (possibly evil). I think she was one in a line of girls brought from our world to the magic world, but the others before her had been killed/sacrificed. I know its not much to go on. It could have been published no later than May of 1995, though I think it was probably a few years old already by that point.

Fairy tale-ish story
( Read more... )

EDIT: Thanks for helping me find it! <3

Current Mood: hopeful

YA(?) Sci-Fi book
Alright. I've been trying to think of this book for years. I think it must have been a YA book, and I read it somewhere between the late 80s and mid-90s, but at the time I read it it already looked old. (It was a used book that someone had donated to the library).

I remember a silver orb being central to the plot, to the extent that I thought 'orb' was a word in the title, but that hasn't helped me find it so far. The main character is a kid that's stuck in some sort of natural disaster (I want to think water is involved) and is miraculously saved (with many other people?) by aliens(?).

At some point he has to learn the language of some people that don't speak his language.

Later, his mind is transferred into the body of some sort of other alien for at least a period of time. The alien species is smart, and he describes trying to use its brain as running from room to room in a huge building looking for the sort of information he wants.

Does any of this sound familiar to anyone? I can't even guarantee that it's all the same book!

Unicorn story
I read a compilation of short stories when I was little, maybe mid to late eighties. One of the stories in the book is about a boy who finds a unicorn horn in his house somewhere and throughout the course of the story, he either accidentally or purposefully stabs himself (in the chest, I think) with the horn and it transforms him into a unicorn.
I vaguely recall that the boy has a very abusive father, but that may be incorrect.
There are so many 'masters of' and 'best of' fantasy compilations that I have no idea where to begin!

Dragons eating uranium?
I've got two I've been hunting for, and a reader suggested this community. Here goes!

#1) My memory is that the book had a red dragon on the cover, a heraldic style one, and I think the dragon may have been Welsh, but I could be wrong. It was about a little dragon who lived with a family, and ate coal. But winter comes along, and coal gets very expensive, and they don't have enough for the dragon, so it gets very weak, and the kids are very worried.

Here's where it starts to sound like I'm on a crack, because I swear, in my memory, the kids hear about a miracle fuel that's being used by the government, and somehow--I think trains may get involved--they wind up smuggling the dragon into some kind of government facility (possibly a train) and feeding him silver bars. I seem to recall the implication being that they're uranium. There's a happy ending, I think the dragon gets a job running a boiler or the stoking the steam train or some kind of government job, but I have a really clear memory that at one point, the dragon gets fed bars of uranium, which is the sort of freaky logical thinking that makes a real impression when you're a kid.

I would have read this in the early eighties, and I'm not sure how old it may have actually been, but I would like to find it again just to prove to myself that I'm not crazy about the uranium bit. (It's not a Pern book, and it does not appear in E. Nesbit's "Book of Dragons." I can't completely rule out the possibility it may have been a short story in a kid's magazine, though.)

Someone on the LJ find_a_book community said they remembered having read it, but couldn't remember the title either, so possibly I did not hallucinate its existence.

#2) There's a girl who winds up alone in a cabin in the woods. (It might be a somewhat enchanted woods, or it might not. I don't recall a lot of magic, but I also don't recall its lack.) I want to say that she's following in the footsteps of her father or grandfather, who may or may not be dead, who may have prepared the cabin for her, and possibly she's reading his diary, but I'm not entirely clear on that bit. What I recall most clearly is that she's living alone in this cabin, doing all the things she needs to, and she doesn't really want to be found by the outside world. ( I get the feeling it was a little over my reading level, on the whole motivation for being there front, so that bit's not set in stone.)

There is a family of mountain goats that she watches. I'm very clear on the existence of mountain goats, because the baby is called "Billy the Kid" which I thought was the most clever pun I'd ever read at the time. All the other details may be wonky, but the mountain goats are solid. If it doesn't have mountain goats, it's not the book I'm after.

This would also have been the early-to-mid-eighties. It most definitely is not The Secret Garden. (I ordered Mandy on the off-chance...) In feel, it almost reminds me of Valley of Horses, completely the wrong setting and era, but same girl alone watching animals kinda vibe, only without all the Cro-Magnon sex at the end.

If anybody successfully names either one of these, I will be terribly terribly grateful.

A Question for a friend
A friend of mine was talking about this book today, and I thought I'd ask you guys before she went absolutely crazy trying to figure out what is was. Here is her description:

It's a three part series, in diary format. In the first book, the heroine is trapped in a garden or something, but she escapes and goes on adventures. By the end of the book, she has ended up in some weird city where everything is controlled by the rolling of dice.

In the second book, she might get captured? She winds up in a castle that has moving rooms inside, and she has a diamond ring that controls things for part or all of the book. She eventually escapes the castle, goes hiking through jungle, and finds her mother's(?) flying ship, which is piloted by a robotic snake with prehensile hair.

The third book is mostly the adventures of the girl and the snake in the spaceship.

There's also a guy that she meets, perhaps in the castle.

Has anyone heard of this series? It sounds weirdly trippy, and I want to know what it is now - it sounds fascinating!

EDIT: Evidently, they're the Claidi Journals, by Tanith Lee. Thanks guys!

Collection of vampire stories late 80s or early 90s
I'm always looking for this book since I have really fond memories of it, but I can't remember the title or any of the authors. I'm beginning to think that the only way I'm ever going to track it down is by finding someone else who read it and has a better memory than I XD

What I do remember is that it had nothing to do with the Vampire Diaries, but had the same sort of tacky cover, and I remember the premise of a few of the stories.

Stories I remember:
* Vampires on a train
* A girl (who died her hair all the time) who has a vampire history teacher
* A group of vampire hunting neighborhood kids
* A blatant ripoff of The Most Dangerous Game, with vampires of course

It isn't Vampires: A collection of Original Stories, or "American Vampire" anything.

If anyone can help, it would mean the world to me.

Current Mood: hopeful

Children's books
Please help me, I am looking for two books I read when I was a young child, but I think they might both have been quite old at the time. I read them in Primary school so at the very least 10 years ago.

The first one was about people going to different planets (maybe because of global warming?) And there was a family on the spaceship - which was the last one to leave I think, and it was tiny. They were only allowed to take one book each. That was important because the boy in the story took a blank notebook and everyone thought he was being an idiot.
Basically they colonised this planet, and there was possibly an alien species there, animals I think - but that's a guess, it could have been trees!!
The youngest girl of the family was allowed to name the planet, and the book ended about a year in, and they had all read all of the books and were bored, so they made the boy give them his notebook, so they could make paper games, but when they opened it, it was full because he'd written down their story, and they started reading it, so I think the end of the book was the same as the beginning of the book?

The second book was about a doll. A young boy found a doll in an attic - perhaps his grandparents? And she spoke to him whenever she was standing up, but when she was lying down, her eyes closed and she was asleep. So when he found her she had been asleep for years and years, and she asked after the little girl she belonged to, but the girl had gotten sick and died a long time ago. The girl might have been called Emily but that's a wild guess.
So, the boy started looking after this doll, and letting her watch the TV and things, and he would talk to her at meals and his grandparents thought it was strange, because adults couldn't hear her - only children could.
At the end of the book, i think he lay her down and didn't wake her up again until he was grown, and then he woke her up and gave her to his own child, and he knew she was talking but he couldn't hear her, but everyone was happy etc.
I am almost certain the book's title was the doll's name. And I think it might have been a double-barrelled name?

Please help me find these books, I loved them as a child!
Thanks in advance xx