She really is a funny girl.

Sooooo, I'm 25 today. That's...kind of a terrifying thought. Um. Anyway.

Seems like I should post some kind of retrospective or something. Well, it'll be a little hard considering I've been in serious hikikomori mode for more than 2 years (yeah let's not talk about that right now, okay? okay.) but I'll do what I can.

( Productive or Self-Improving Things I Have Done Since I Dropped Off The Face Of The Earth A While Back )

( Fannish Output For The Year )

and now after all the awkward retrospective stuff:
GUESS WHAT MY BIRTHDAY MOVIE TREAT IS
It was going to be The Hobbit but then while looking up what time it was showing I ran into a banner ad for the RUROUNI KENSHIN LIVE ACTION MOVIE and nearly died of shock because I had been resigned to waiting for the DVD release but NO, IT IS ACTUALLY SHOWING IN SM CINEMAS RIGHT HERE, RIGHT NOW.

BEST UNEXPECTED BIRTHDAY TREAT EVER.

The thing that keeps me from writing much fanfic is I'm just too lazy to write things down most of the time, so I'm not one of those people with lots of unfinished snippets of fic hanging around on their computer.

Or so I thought.

It turns out I have about 6,700 words of surprisingly good unfinished fic hanging around.

Which is about 6,000 more words than I have of unfinished thesis hanging around.

...I should probably go to the library and thesisize.

/is alive

/is still mostly in hiding

/is going to the library now >_>

So burned out right now I cannot even. ;_;

(Okay, so I'm being overdramatic and I will feel a lot better after a couple of hours of sleep. But the reason I'm up at 4am in the first place is because I feel too wound up to sleep because there's SO MUCH TO DO AUGH.)

Tutoring this week has been pretty brutally hard because it's midterm exam time and we've got a crapton of students coming in to get reviewed. A crapton of HIGH SCHOOL students. With, among other things, HIGH SCHOOL MATH PROBLEMS oh God. It's been literally six years since I've seen sines or cosines or angles (ANGLES, ARGH) or mathematical proofs and my brain kind of whimpers in terror every time a new student pulls out a new mathy thing they want me to help them do.

So far I've been mostly able to dredge up enough memory of math to get them through the assignment (except that one Physics chapter. My student had pity on me and let me tutor her in economics instead). But it is really tiring. ;_;

SFF short story not-quite-a-rec (but not an anti-rec) for Easter:
Salvation by Lawrence Person

Warning: do not read this story if you are feeling happy, and especially not if you're feeling happy about Easter and salvation and things. I don't want to harsh anyone's squee. I read this story while trying to dig up the link for The Pride of Knossos last Friday, and subsequently spent quite a portion of the Easter Vigil mass feeling vaguely nauseous and unhappy.

Theologically, the scenario doesn't work at all (and thank God, very literally, for that!), but psychologically it's pretty powerful and flat-out terrifying. What would people do in that scenario? The most terrifying probable answer is "exactly what they do in the story."
Augh.

Okay, so. I've discovered a new motivation to get off my butt and finish my thesis.

It's so that someday I can grow up to be cool enough to marry this guy.

As I’ve alluded to before, the manuscript upon which the sequentially later chapters of Tattúínárdœla saga are preserved is actually older than the manuscript which preserves the first sixteen chapters by about two decades, while the action in these chapters picks up about two decades later than that of the earlier chapters. And while the manuscript with the earlier chapters appears to have been written by a single scribe who had an imperfect knowledge of the story underlying the saga, the later chapters can be confidently assigned, on paleographic evidence, to three separate scribes, each with a quite different, though detailed, command of the tradition behind the saga. It is not always, however, clear that these three scribes worked together closely, as for instance Scribe A (responsible for the first third of this manuscript) seems hardly to have been aware that Leia was Lúkr’s sister, and even shows ignorance – or at best imperfect foreshadowing – of Veiði-Anakinn’s identity as Lúkr’s father.

FFFFF I AM SO IN LOVE.

(P.S. the site is unfortunately a pain to navigate; will post again tomorrow with the chapters linked in order for your reading pleasure. :D)

Hello, dear Yuletide Writer, and thank you so very much in advance for writing for me! ♥
I babble a lot in this letter, but it's just to give you inspiration and possibilities; I hope it doesn't pressure you in any way! Just write a fic that will be fun for you to write, and I'm sure I'll love it!

I guess I should give you some idea of my fanfic likes and dislikes...

Likes (in no particular order, some mutually exclusive, and all definitely not required!):
Character interaction
Use of bits of canon in interesting or unexpected ways
Hurt-comfort
Sweetness or fluff
Plot
Cute or funny hijinks as a substitute for plot!
Crossovers (I adore crossovers, even with fandoms I've never heard of, so feel free to do that if you like!)
Slash, het, AND gen (I'm not usually much into femslash, but I will totally understand if the Oglaf request goes in that direction!)
I have a guilty soft spot for emotional melodrama, but understated relationships where the affection is never openly stated are great too.

Dislikes:
Darkfic (some degree of bittersweetness or darkness or tragedy is fine, but I don't really like overwhelming hopelessness or pain)
Pure smut or plot-what-plot; extremely detailed sex scenes (I have no real objection to NC-17 scenes, but I generally prefer to skim over them in favor of character development or plot)

Squicks:
Embarrassment (characters making fools of themselves or being made fools of in front of others)
Ostracism/Bullying (characters being rejected and made fun of for not fitting into a group) -- I can take it as a minor plot point, but please nothing major!


And now some babbling about my requests--expanding on them, why I requested them, why I like them, etc.!

( Oglaf - Kronar's Daughter )

( Spartacus: Blood and Sand - Pietros )

( A Little Night Music - Anne Egerman, Frederik Egerman )

( El Indio - any )

Thanks in advance again, and I hope you have fun! ♥

As usual, I'm going to be pretty much internetless for a few days during our Annual All Saints' Day / All Souls' Day Road Trip. I'm grabbing my traditional last bit of internet at S.O.U.L. Cafe, the loveliest little wi-fi-enabled cafe between Manila and Baguio, and reading the review of the last chapter of Deathly Hallows at Mark Reads Harry Potter, which came out this morning while we were on the road.

At least I'm not submitting my Yuletide requests at the last minute from S.O.U.L. Cafe, like I did last year.

Or submitting my Yuletide STORY at the last minute from S.O.U.L. Cafe, like I did the year before!

fannish5:
Name the 5 creepiest episodes/scenes/chapters etc. from your fandoms.

1) Avatar: The Last Airbender - "The Puppetmaster." OH GOD SUCH A CREEPY EPISODE. I flatly refuse to watch that episode without going straight to "Nightmares and Daydreams" to cleanse my palate afterwards. Actually, Katara's ghost story at the very beginning is even creepier than the main episode plot! "I'm so cold..." in that tiny voice...*shiver!*

2) Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (movie) - Professor Lupin transforming into a werewolf. HOLY CRAP that is a terrifying transformation scene. One of the friends I went to the movie with got nail marks in her arm, I was clutching her so hard.

3) Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (book) - Harry having to force Dumbledore to drink the potion on the island. Argh argh argh... this is, for me, probably the most flat-out horrible scene in the entire HP series. D:

4) Lord of the Rings - The dwarves in Moria/Khazad-dum keeping a chronicle as they are surrounded by the goblins. Writing about how they're doomed, and then the last entry trails off...talk about chilling. D:

5) Rurouni Kenshin - Saitou Hajime coming to the dojo in disguise. SMILING SAITOU IS CREEPY AND WRONG AND JUST PLAIN TERRIFYING OKAY. (This is not even a joking entry on the list; I cringe in terror every time I watch that episode. Smiling Saitou = RUN AWAY, FAR FAR AWAY!)

fannish5: Five worst retcons in your fandoms.

( Okay, this is more like 'five retcons I personally dislike, and my rants about them.' Fandoms: Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean, Redwall )

thefridayfive: ( Disney questions )

Because I just spent a good two hours digging up the provenance of this thing (since the epigrams are NEVER included in "works of Plato" type collections, not even in the sections about spurious or apocryphal works or the letters!) I might as well inflict my findings on others.


The dedication page of The Mask of Apollo by Mary Renault:

Tears were for Hekabê, friend, and for Ilion’s women,

Spun into the dark Web on the day of their birth,

But for you our hopes were great, and great the triumph,

Cancelled alike by the gods at the point of glory.

Now you lie in your own land, now all men honor you—

But I loved you, O Diôn!

PLATO

(Translation by Dudley Fitts)

This epigram of Plato’s is known to us from Lives of the Eminent Philosophers by Diogenes Laërtius, who cites On the Luxury of the Ancients (attributed to Aristippus; only the quotations in Laertius are preserved today) as his source.

Lives of the Eminent Philosophers, Book III: Plato – English – Greek – the quote from Aristippus begins at [29]. This quote also provides the epigrams that are the basis of the existence of Plato’s beloved Aster, who appears in The Last of the Wine.)

original Greek text:
δάκρυα μὲν Ἑκάβῃ τε καὶ Ἰλιάδεσσι γυναιξὶ
Μοῖραι ἐπέκλωσαν δὴ τότε γεινομέναις,
σοὶ δέ, Δίων, ῥέξαντι καλῶν ἐπινίκιον ἔργων
δαίμονες εὐροίας ἐλπίδας ἐξέχεαν.
κεῖσαι δ᾽ εὐρυχόρῳ ἐν πατρίδι τίμιος ἀστοῖς,
ὦ ἐμὸν ἐκμήνας θυμὸν ἔρωτι Δίων.

(another translation, which designates it “Epigram III,” presumably because it is the third in order of appearance in Laertius’ text.)

ETA: The reason that I'm doing this is because I've conceived of the extremely ambitious project of making an annotated version of The Mask of Apollo.  I now have more than a page worth of annotation and I haven't even gotten past this epigram on Dion.  SEND HELP.
(I think I'll be doing this one chapter at a time, if only to preserve my sanity.  Also, I should pick the collective brains of maryrenaultfics for each chapter.)