Random thought.

Well, not random, I was catching up on my metafandom and fell on top of the entire Readercon thing, which--

( like this didn't pique my interest )

I am drinking high-grade coffee and ignoring two WiPs. What else am I going to do at this late hour? You know what would help? aurora_87 reccing more Pinto, kthx.

*I am going to remember to crosspost, dammit. One day.

Title: Just Wait For It
Author: Seperis
Fandom: Merlin/Smallville
Codes: Merlin, Arthur, Clark Kent, Lex Luthor, Arthur/Lex Luthor, Merlin/Athur
Rating: R
Spoilers: None specific
Summary: What the fuck, Merlin thought in utter shock, staring at Uther--Uther--across a rich mahogany desk in rural Suffolk, fate was like a bad Hollywood remake, then?
Author Notes: To svmadelyn, winterlive and shinetheway who were heckling me while I was writing this. And possibly transtempts? Though she might have just been laughing. The original title was "I am so ashamed of myself". You see why I was sitting on this one in horror.
Warnings: Drug use

Just Wait For It

Update to my post about that Sacramento radio show that encouraged beating of transgender children:

Bank of America is fourth advertiser to pull out, a list that includes Chipotle, Dr. Pepper, and Sonic.

Found on Unfunny Business at Journalfen - everything you need to know to keep up and make contact and be a drop of water in the bucket. An awesome bucket of social justice and non-stupidity.

Adding: so I googled the news on this one, in that way I hope for chocolate falling from the sky, I really wanted to see them fired.

Well, I didn't find that. From 98Rocked:

"You guys imply that all you have to do is...whack my non-existant child with a shoe if he goes clopping around the house in high heels," commented a listener who identified herself as a male-to-female transgender who previously had served in the US armed forces for 22 years. "Don't you think that all the abuse that I took in school would have changed that basic nature in me?"

"Thank you for your service, but let me just say this right now," quipped an angered States. "You fought (in the armed forces) for nothing! With the opinions that you have right there, you fought for absolutely nothing!"

I'm so glad Arnie States clarified that for us. Also, he just baited a 22 year military veteran.

....yeah. Good luck with that.

Dear internetz,

I am in Texas. It is June. And my office has no air conditioner, no fresh air, and we are slowly being drained of the will to continue life and reason among this insanity.

Please send lip gloss and a fucking glass of ice water so I can try and drown myself before I inevitably succumb to madness and throw myself with filthy, filthy abandon upon my not-a-crush-Christ-I'm-too-old-to-be-this-hormonal which will result in my unfortunate demise by heat exhaustion.

Still. What a way to go.

Love,
Seperis

(PS REALLY NEED LIPGLOSS!111!)

ETA: 8:25 AM - air conditioner has been turned on. Assuming this is not an effort to speed up our demise with poison gas, might survive after all. There will be no heat madness related throwing of self. No, I am not disappointed at all.

You know, any review I do at this point is kind of the equivalent of guh, yes, this, guh. As one does when one falls on top of awesome and just grovels in it.

Thsi is written in one fell swoop. I know I missed a ton of stuff, but you know, I can totally meta on this for weeks.

Most of this is subject to change. In about a week, after I've read more, I'll probably have some caveats.

( prenotes: the kelvin )

( prenotes: timespace theory )

( star trek reboot: it's a wonderful life, if you think about it )

Title: That Which You Call
Author: Seperis
Codes: Dean, Sam, Ruby, Castiel, Uriel
Rating: R

( author notes )

( wip: that which you call )

Title: The Storyteller
Author: Seperis
Codes: John Sheppard, etc.
Rating: PG-13

( author notes )

( wip: the storyteller )

So every day is WiP Amnesty Day. Or so I tell myself. I have come to the (mostly) reluctant conclusion that I will never finish these, and that two will let me test the post limits in dreamwidth.

I kind of want to create a tag in honor, called ghosts of failures past. But eh.

Title: Like a Metaphor
Author:Seperis
Codes: Dean, Castiel, Dean/Castiel, Dean/Other
Rating: NC-17
Spoilers: through 4.10 season four
Summary: This is Dean's myth.

ETA: Holy God, 42,000 words posted in one entry. It's like Christmas.

( author notes )

( wip: like a metaphor )

Adventures in layouts:

I changed mine! It does not work in IE very well. I will--rage about that later. And Im almost done with another one for a friend that acts like it's working, but I am wary.

The new layout is open to taking if anyone particularly wants it, but it has a couple of bugs, and the CSS is still a mess that I haven't cleaned up, being involved in a face-off with the horizontal calendar. It's set to public if anyone wants to look at the code or use any of it. I'm also still not sure of the hover-background color change--it was neat to do! But not so neat to use. I don't know. I'm torn.

This is where I realized what the user level was for. Seriously, I am so getting into that.

Adventures with documentation:

I haven't added much to the wiki, as it takes forever to code it into readability, but doing the preliminary work in Notetab and adding a bit every time I go in to play with the core functions and properties and sometimes, I almost think I understand! Then I realize I don't.

It's somewhat lowering and yet exciting I am still falling over things that make no sense to me.

( a question of properties, and here be new functions )

So it feels unutterably wrong to rec before actually seeing the damn film, but I've been torn between quiet tears and tiny sobs for like, ten minutes? Yeah.

Precious Things by haearnmouse, Star Trek Reboot (STXI whatever), gen, SPOILERS obviously - you know, I can't figure out how to rec this at all, other than to quote the summary: There are things which are greater than any single human or Vulcan. As long as there is life, there is hope.

It's such a vast thing for being so very small, that which cannot be said in words can be offered like this, in fierce grief and the acknowledgment of loss and a shining hope that breaks through it all: I grieve with thee. I keep trying to find a compatible word, because this isn't what makes you human. This is what makes you people in the widest and best sense of the word.

Okay, I've had to stop three time to wipe my eyes. This is getting ridiculous. This makes me happy. I'm so glad I read it.

As soon as enough people hit critical using a standard name for the movie, I'll change my tags to that.

Child came in to ask me if he can stay up an hour late since he was such a good boy today, yadda yadda yadda. In between his pleading and my rote "No, go to bed, no, go to bed" child casually stepped into a pair of black leather flats I had in the floor, straps dangling around his instep as he continued his argument, pacing to and fro before my bed in pretty black shoes while wearing nothing but his bedtime boxers and a t-shirt and his hair still wet from the shower.

They fit him really well.

He got thirty minutes. He wandered out of my room, pleased and wearing my shoes. That's actually worth an hour after bedtime, tbh.

Merlin recs! I know, such a shock.

The Route to Advancement by magog_83 - this links to the fourth story, but the other three are linked at the top.

I love this story. Very few writers I've read can base an entire story around an OC and still make it so canon you really, seriously know you saw Percy in the eps. It's especially impressive because it's not only how Percy gets to know Arthur and Merlin and observes their adventures, but also brings a slightly different view of court and Camelot from the point of view of the average knight. I mean, this is fun. And Brutus the horse is awesome.

Ten Weeks by shinetheway/shinetheway, sequel to Truth Is a Whisper - I was like, ecstatic when shinetheway sent me bits of this to read (she was out of the country and I am a clingy friend who goes into withdrawal when friends are gone; luckily, she worked out the best way to limit my whining "WHY DID YOU LEAVE ME ALONE TO DIE ALONE HERE ALOOOOOOOONE" and send porn. Genius.)

Not just porn, but a wonderful post-Truth Arthur in the weeks after, with a new relationship, a new reputation, and the sudden, dizzying changes of falling in love, losing your virginity, and maybe fighting a duel. And still utterly drugged with sex. I had a great time reading it, both for the hotness and for how well Shine nailed Arthur's confusion and lust and affection and utter bemusement at how quickly everything can change.

Truth North by the_moonmoth, Merlin/Arthur, futurefic - the future is now. Or, Arthur's come back again and they go on a road trip. I love this. The perfect Merlin, the richness of shared history and shared memory, the wistful tone of helpless hope when Arthur's return is a harbringer of something going wrong in the world that his birth is forever designed to subvert, and the way that Merlin's lived this so many times and still wants it so badly and aches for the inevitable loss of this before it starts all over again.

This just broke me, in a good way. I like to think one day, they'll be allowed to rest together. But for now, they still have work to do.

( mild spoilers )

So maybe once a day (or so), I google Dreamwidth for basically two reasons: a.) to enjoy people's squee and b.) to be amused by the non-squee. In between a squee and a misconception-rife non-squee, I ran across this.

Ada Lovelace Day: Two ground-breaking open source projects by Kirrily Robert in her blog Infotrope and discovered something I hadn't thought to wonder about.

But to the best of my knowledge, there are only two open source projects in the world which a) have a significant number of developers, and b) are majority female. They are An Archive Of Our Own (a project of the Organization for Transformative Works) and Dreamwidth.

She also adds, near the end of the article:

And, to fulfil the requirements of the Ada Lovelace Day Pledge, the two women I admire in technology are:

Naomi Novik, chair of the OTW’s Board of Directors and inaugural chair of its ADT committee (developers of the Archive). You might also know her as author of the Temeraire series.

Denise Paolucci, co-founder, project/product manager, and loudest advocate and enthusiast for Dreamwidth.

These two between them have been instrumental in bringing hundreds of other women into open source software, and I admire them immensely.

My knowledge on this subject is limited, but assuming this is true, I think I should say this.

My admiration is a given, but I'd also liked to add my thanks and my apologies both. See, I knew what you were doing was extraordinary. But I didn't know that you had changed the world.

That's very, very cool. Thank you.

Multiple Reading

Okay, this could be because I just like complex things, but I kind of like having two flists to read. I mean--okay, you have to understand. At my highest Ritalin dose, I don't have what anyone sane would call a great attention span, and I miss things like whoa. At least one person on my flist has given birth and I didn't know she was pregnant! That was very lowering.

When people crosspost, I miss a lot less! Part of this is because yes, I'm coding my style live and so hit refresh a lot, but also, because I'm less cluttered in my reading. It's almost like creative filtering, except I was never really good at filtering.

I don't know. It's nice. It's more reading!

Housekeeping

If you're on my flist on LJ, I am adding you here. I could say I haven't had time, but that's a total lie. Every time I come over here to do something like, say, add people, I end up in advanced customization trying to create new and exciting if statements.

Adventures in Bad Customization

If anyone wants it, by the way, I did figure out, sort of, how to put the username below the icon if you want your name/usericon to the right in entries and on the Reading Page, but it's makeshift until I can go over the entire css and functions by hand and remove the older code.

You'll have to do this in Advanced Customization from Your Layers. I think it could be done thematically, but off the top of my head, I'm not sure how.

Add that to your CSS.

.eidentity {
float:right;
text-align:right;
width: 150px;
}

In the Page::print_entry() section in advanced customization, do this:


"""div class="eidentity"""";
$e->print_userpic();
$e->print_poster();
"""/div""";

(add the > and < back in when using. I cannot figure out how to keep the code untouched, and raw doesn't work, darn it.)

Basically, you create a div class to put it in, limit the size, and it forces the name below the userpic. And they really try to sit by each other. I mean, I gave up doing this in comments, because it was just breaking the comment box unless I px'ed everything to an exact size and no one wants that.

Drawbacks: Names below six characters still float up beside it on the left. Lowering the width, however, make long names or long feeds vanish or hide. So I compromise because my Reading Page was driving me nuts.

You may have to play with this to make it work; I did about a dozen tries that all *should* have worked and didn't until this one did. I was trying display:block and some seriously unholy looking CSS at W3 before this one suddenly worked. The only other option I found so far--again, I'm making this needlessly complex, so keep in mind I start complex and messy and then streamline it once it looks like I want it to--is to do a lot of div classing and width percentaging, then use margins to stack the divs like sad little blocks. It was kind of horrifying. It was also funny. And three hours after I finished, I could not for the life of me work out how I did it even with my own documentation, it was that complicated and weird. And I'm fairly sure it would break probably half the browsers that tried to view it. I'm actually not sure this doesn't break for other people, come to think, but you can check my Reading Page and see if it lines up. Except for those short-named people, who just need to get longer names.

I think this is visible: you can find the entire current working code here. It's based off of Negative by Phoenix Dreaming, but still has tons of code I'm removing and changing as I figure out what everything does and discover strange things like removing entry-title suddenly kills my layout despite the fact I never use that class. Always an adventure. And let me tell you one day of the Great Hunt for how the hell to add a | between reply and comments, because the way I am doing it I hate, but tracing functions backward to their root is a new and exciting way to wonder about your own sanity! I'm beginning to put together a chart to trace what functions inherit from what properties, but I have a feeling that I'm getting it dramatically wrong.

If anyone found a better way to do the icon/name thing, please, please drop a line here. Otherwise, I will be haunted by finding a more efficient way. I'm just using too many divs.

The thing about the new Core2 style is--this is so much fun to modify. It is.

However, I am going to destroy worlds or possibly pick up a small but terribly inconvenient addiction to sniffing paint thinner if I cannot figure out how to override my damn comment layout.

I tried to use the function I modified from negatives--no go. That literally killed the page horribly like a drunken girlfriend near leather seats. Is anyone out there using the new core and has modified theirs successfully, or heck, tell me why when I use my own classes, it suicides messily and unreadably?

Anyone who can also tell me how to get previous out of the middle of my page summary will be given eternal devotion as well.

You may not be aware that I sadly lost my phone in a tragic accident involving turning it off on the plane and then forgetting about it. So it is possibly in Ohio. It was hard.

HOWEVER! There is a new phone in my life.

T-Mobile G1 who has been named Arthur, and go ahead and think all the dirty thoughts you want. He contains multitudes, and lets me surf the internet with a tiny keyboard. My parents surprised me with it today (well, told me yesterday, but trust me, you cannot not be surprised when they say "shiny phone" and it is the answer to your innermost fantasies about never being separated from the internet again).

I'm so infatuated.

Arthur.

I always name my tech for my fandom.

(I can browse the web. I still cannot figure out how to get music onto it from my computer. BUT I WILL PREVAIL.)

Gakked from Fyrdrakken:

Top 10 Films That Traumatise Small Children and 10 Great Children's Books For People Who Hate Their Children

I'm going to make a point about the movies one, since the books one is just laughable.

Watership fucking Down - if you are like me and saw that shit during the impressionable pre-eight-years-old age, you might have come out of it with a strong terror of a.) mist and b.) life. Who the hell gives that to a kid to watch? Network TV, that's who. I mean, if I was going to ever say "What makes me unable to watch a horror movie or anything involving fog", this movie is the reason. I cannot talk about this rationally because I do not remember any of it but I remember terror, and despair, and a general feeling that the world not only sucked, but it would only get worse from here on out.

People. I cannot read the book. I have looked at it and felt my entire body twitch in sheer horror. And I remember the opening sequence and the ears and the legs and how the entire world was out to kill them. Kill them all. Adn by them, I mean, me, because I was below-eight and lookie there, I identified with the small, soft creature being everyone's dinner.

Adding:

The Secret of NIMH (not listed in top 11) - to this day, I still can't comprehend anyone sane put that in a movie theatre for anyone below the age of fifteen. I have the children's edition book somewhere. Again, let me point out, I cannot remember any of it. But I remember watching, and I remember fear. Overwhelming fear.

Agree with their list? Disagree? I have a couple of others that doubtless I'll be flashbacking to over the next few days. I mean, Bambi hurt, and Ole Yeller hurt, but just looking at The Dark Crystal is stirring things deep in my psyche that may mean yes, I did see that, and there are very good reasons I do not remember it.

Yes, yes, yes, my mood is indeed distressed.

ETA: WHY THE HELL DID I GO BACK AND WATCH THAT DAMN HAZEL CLIP? RABBIT TURNED TO LEAVES AND RED EYED STYLIZED DEAD RABBITS! WELCOME TRAUMATIC CHILDHOOD EXPERIENCE. THERE GOES MY SLEEP FOR A FEW DAYS.

ETA 2: Right, so I've just--helped everyone relive their traumatic childhood media experiences. Um. You're welcome? IT'S NOT LIKE I WILL BE SLEEPING EITHER OKAY?

On a topic completely unrelated to any current or near-current past events, it just occurred to me while pondering my reading is that Merlin has a very low proportion of uberangst. I mean, there is angst, but not like, the kind where you leave a story wanting to slit your own wrists in the bathtub afterward because, woe, the world is dark and all is doomed to love and despair, and even brownies soaked in chocolate fudge isn't going to help this.

...granted, this is because our (multiple) source ending is angsty as anything, so really, we're rebels and totally subverting the paradigm to synergize a new and exciting appropriation of the end game. I would like to encourage continuation of this trend.

I'd like to know if you are impressed with that sentence, too. I learned those words recently at an office meeting. I also learned you can't will yourself to death no matter how long you hold your breath. Odd, that.

And lets see if making sure my username and not my email is in the username slot.

ETA: And that worked!

ETA 2: And crossposts edits as well, it seems.

Trying to firm up the habit of crossposting.

On Being a Dreamwidth Optimist and on Commenting by the_shoshanna, mirrored on LJ here, is an essay regarding Dreamwidth, Denise and Mark (the owners), and why as former LJ Abuse members they should be trusted after all the problems with LJ abuse. If you are wary about Dreamwidth or the owners, or wondering what the fuss is about, I'd recommend reading it and the comments.

I'm going to stop here and say, her essay is better, clearer, extremely informative, and objective as hell. I am objective one hour out of every week, and it is not that hour. If htere's one post you read about Dreamwidth, read hers.

That said, I never miss an opportunity to write at length about something if I have a laptop and free time and tea, and look at that, I have all three.

( dreamwidth and denise )

And finally, for the fannish people on my flist.

There were zines, and usenet, and mailing lists, and messageboards, and diaryland, and then livejournal. We're not static; we're bad at standing still. I've been in fandom ten years this summer, and seven years in LJ as of last November. We've been here for a while, and it's been--great, and terrible, and fascinating. We've never been afraid to try everything once, and sometimes everything a few times. It's kind of what we do. We like things that are new.

Or hey, I'll say this:

Be a lemming. Jump blind over the cliff because your friends are doing it. Sure, the jump is scary, and you can't work out why the hell they thought this was a good idea, but the rush is unbelievable. You'll love what you find on the other side.

Open beta starts April 30th. Try it.

...and to point out, I started writing this an hour ago and just realized I've written shorter fic. Jesus.

References

Dreamwidth Wiki - all you ever wanted to know as of now.

So after years of having no clue what the hell s2 was all about, forty-five seconds in cimorene's dwj and lo and behold, I finally understand the structure!

(And also because strangely enough, if you take programming courses, suddenly things look familiar when you lose your sense of eternal bitterness at lj. Which you know. There you go.)

However, I have a question. While working on a new style, the replyto page now loses the bottom half of each sentence. All other forms look fine, but that is just weird. And it only seems to apply--in limited experience--to things involving cut-tags. It doesn't occur when I open it at the cut-tag, or open it from comments link, or open it as html, or anything but the reply open.

Anyone have insight on why that one particular lost grammatical integrity?

I forgot this is fun. *wistful*

( trying to put the reply code here )

Okay, here is the thing. When I go looking for something, things are where they should logically appear. In the menus! Just--I go and think, hmm, I want to find X, and then I go to the correct menu and it is there.

Like the Twilight Zone, but a nice one, where no one is a pig person.

This is me, settling.