Please watch this space! I'm currently without internet at home (signups were...interesting) but I'll post a real Yuletide letter ASAP. ♥ EDIT: Okay, here we go!

Hello, dear Yuletide Writer, and thank you so very much in advance for writing for me! ^__^♥ I'm sure I'll love whatever story you come up with! 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!

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

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

Finally, just in case reading my fic would somehow help you get an idea of what I like, I have an in-progress masterlist on Dreamwidth. :)

I think we tried "Spirit of the Coin" at some point in elementary school, but I don't remember if it worked at all. What I do remember is that shortly afterward, we heard a horror story from an older girl, about a group of kids that tried to do "Spirit of the Pen" and suddenly the pen flew and impaled one of the girls through her throat. THAT sure scared us off any more experiments with seances.

Nowadays...hell no. I'm afraid that it might work get in touch with something, but that something would not necessarily be benevolent. D:

I do believe (I suppose?) in messages from the dead, in the sense of the dearly departed making their presence felt (nagpaparamdam) in various ways, chiefly butterflies. (It's a family thing, aside from being a general Philippine thing.) Also other subtle ways, like smells, someone's favorite team winning a championship, a lost object being found, et cetera. But that's them doing it of their own volition, to reassure the people left on Earth, not because they've been called to do it.

(cross-posted from literarysnark because I am just. that. mad.)

At a comics convention on Sunday I bought what looked like the perfect Christmas present for my political-science-professor parents: The Cartoon History of the Republic [of the Philippines], a compilation of editorial cartoons from 1946 to 1993. It was an impulse buy because the vendor said that this was the last stock of the book, so I barely flipped through it before buying it.

I got home, took a closer look at it, and almost instantly rocketed through stunned horror to utter fury. There are NO DATES on the editorial cartoons. Not one single date anywhere in the book.

Some of the cartoons come with excerpts from the editorials that accompanied them. Names in the excerpts and the cartoons can help date a few of the cartoons (in general terms like what president was in office!), but aside from that, nothing.

I repeat, editorial cartoons, as in things that are supposed to be commenting on the issues of the day. A cartoon depicting something like "the senate ignoring the hungry masses" is hopelessly general and could just as well have appeared in the newspaper yesterday. Someone who bought a "Cartoon History of the Republic" would obviously want a date to provide clues about historical context! Even a year would help! The introduction adds insult to injury, saying that the purpose of the book is to "introduce new readers" to "the paper's historical sense." Sorry, but I'm a new reader, and the book completely fails to introduce me to any sort of historical sense.

I am literally going to find a way to contact the newspaper these cartoons came from, ask them if they have some kind of archive, and find the damn cartoons in the archive to date them myself, because I will be damned if I insult a pair of academics by giving them a book with such a blatant lack of citations that makes the cartoons utterly useless as historical data.

[/rant]

first, trying to pimp this in as many places as possible:
LIST OF TYPHOON ONDOY RELIEF OPERATIONS - find the drop-off point nearest you! (if possible, verify w/ a contact person first to make sure it's a real drop-off point)

And here, a round-up post that was pimped at peyups: FLOOD REPORT etc (lots of links to news stories, pics, etc)
My only correction: UP's Sunken Garden is surprisingly not sunken, as far as I can tell. Passed by it today and it looked fairly normal. All the water probably drained off into the Lagoon already.

Day? Hell yes.

Month? EVEN BETTER.

Year? It would do me good, but it would be so exhausting I'm not sure I could force myself to.

Also, this month will never be spoken of again, ever. Except if forced by a court of law. Or possibly my parents at the end of the semester asking what the FUCK happened to my grades.

Breaking my very long LJ silence to bring you...slashy clips of the Philippines' national hero! >_<

I wailed and threw pillows a lot while watching the Jose Rizal movie starring Cesar Montano, because do you have any idea how hard it is to study for a midterm exam on our national hero while on my laptop screen he and the prison-servant-guy are making lovey-dovey googly eyes at each other??? >___<

If you have even the vaguest suspicion of what the title is alluding to...you need to go read this short story RIGHT NOW.

Edward Bear and the Very Long Walk by Ken Scholes



( mild spoiler alert )

Public service announcement:
Porn Battle is now ongoing, run by Oxoniensis.
(those without Dreamwidth accounts need to use OpenID to participate; anon commenting has been disallowed)

We now return you to your regularly scheduled internetting. :)

Every time I think Vathara can't possibly get any awesomer (witness the entry a while back when she posted a Rurouni Kenshin/Star Wars crossover), SHE GETS AWESOMER.

She just posted a Rurouni Kenshin/TEMERAIRE crossover!!!

Not that I have anything resembling the time to read it right now (free time? what is this strange and unfamiliar thing of which you speak?), but just the mere fact of its existence.....!


(P.S. CRS, you fail so hard. You got me all my units, which I'm happy about, but you are just such total fail overall this sem. I laugh derisively at you. *laughs derisively at CRS*)

# of relatives who have been hospitalized in the last two months:
seven (one of them twice in succession)

I visited all but one, and currently the family (including me) is taking turns camping out in the rooms of two out of the three who are currently in the hospital.

...I sleep now. *passes out*

I watched the new Star Trek movie last Thursday with my cousins who're visiting from Canada. One of them had already seen it, and she dragged me and her sister to it because, she said, we had to see it. She was so very very right.

Disclaimer: I've watched a negligible amount of Star Trek before, so I am about as far from a purist as you could get. That noted, this movie made my fangirl instincts squeal in absolute glee. So many pairing possibilities! So many storyline possibilities! Squee!

( Fangirl says: this has SUCH POTENTIAL. )

little_details, the in-depth writing research comm, is continuing with business as usual...
ENTIRELY IN LOLCAT. ♥ ♥ ♥

Preliminary outline:
SNEEKY POUNCE
ROCKY LURK
laptop wallpaper
newspaper over doors!
IS THERE ANY DECAF COFFEE IN THIS HOUSE if not, champorado, mint coffee and chocolate powder will work >:D
change homepage
fake pizza slices; hide the real ones
STICKMEN LURK :O
the clouds of perfume, they hover behind closed doors, waiting...
cling wrap over the freezer opening or vegetable bin
looming kimono WATCHES YOU WHILE YOU SLEEP
crumpled paper in toes of shoes
NEW: just when you thought it was safe to open your freezer--HITOKIRI BATTOUSAI LURKS WITHIN!
(Don't worry, this is pre-Tomoe Battousai, so he's not having traumatic winter-related flashbacks. I'm guilty of many things, but not of emotionally abusing my figurines, I hope! Also, I left him a blanket.)
NEW: OOH CHALK *scribbles on front stoop*

MY WORK HERE IS DONE. >:D

Setup is complete, now to await my dad's awakening and watch them in action!

This one! It's an icon of Polgas, "Ang Asong Hindi" (The Dog That Isn't) from the Filipino comic strip Pugad Baboy.

The thirteenth Pugad Baboy collection had all these little dancing Polgases printed in the corner of each page to make an animated flip-book; I thought they would make a perfect animated GIF and scanned some of them to make one. It's not perfect, but it's unique and neat and I like to occasionally use it on Philippines-related stuff. ^_^

Meme stolen from meicdon13.

Post a single sentence from each WIP you have (or as many as you want to pick). No context, no explanations. (Oh, and please feel free to play "spot the fandom!", heh!)

1) Over the years, Hijikata had begun to suspect that it was not, in fact, possible to break Kamiya.

2) Not only would he be telling the twins about the Battle of Unnumbered Tears—itself a heartbreaking task—but Maedhros had also chosen to stay and listen to the lessons on this particular night.

3) The dead King would never find peace in the West, nor would his spirit return to the tomb to enjoy the offerings laid out for it, as other spirits did.

4) “So…” Anne began, smiling mischievously at her brother out of the corner of her eye, “what’s he like?”

5) He had been keeping a tight hold on his control all evening: he was the Chief of the Eastern Forest Clan overseeing a marriage alliance and a peace pact, there was no room for silly childish fancies of the heart.

6) Souji avoided a swipe of Himura’s hand by springing up onto a branch, and the chase turned into an aerial acrobatics show as the two bounded from one branch to another as easily as if they were still on the ground.

7) “I can see the kiss, just there at the right-hand corner of your mouth. It’s waiting to be taken, but I can never seem to get it.”

8) I had told a story myself, about a witch whose ghost calls down revenge on the bandits who killed her, doing the best imitation I could of my father as Clytemnestra’s shade in a harsh whisper: Blow forth on them the breath of wrath and blood, scorch them with the reek of fire that burns in you, waste them with new pursuit—swift, hound them down!


...dear God, I had no idea I had this many WIPs. (and note that for me, "in progress" usually means "has been sitting in an untouched Word file for years--or months if you're really lucky". ^_^;;;)

Okay, so my Medea artbunny hasn't popped up in a while; but I recently got abruptly bunnied by Racine's Phedre in CL 134. I just did this quick sketch in class and colored it in Photoshop. I was going to wait to post until I'd drawn Hippolytus and Aricia as well, but...I'm impatient.

Phaedra's almost the opposite of Medea, I think. Medea is tough and strong-minded and channels her negative emotions into action; Phaedra keeps her negative emotions bottled up and they eat her from the inside out, until she gets to the point where we see her in the play, where she seems ready to shatter at the slightest touch.

Dear Internet,

You have failed us. After watching Braveheart and starting to ship William Wallace/Robert the Bruce, we scoured the internet looking for Braveheart slash...and found almost nothing! How could this be, internet? How could this be?

Disappointed,
innervoice_chan and kytha

Okay, so I think I can understand partly why...both of them are really famous real historical figures, so it might be pretty uncomfortable and/or hard to write about them for someone who doesn't usually do RPS (even though apparently the very act of writing in the Braveheart canon would mean throwing history out the window). And I know that I would be kind of freaked out if someone was shipping our own national heroes, like say, Jose Rizal/Andres Bonifacio or Andres Bonifacio/Emilio Aguinaldo*. BUT STILL. I know you, internet. You can slash anything. So why not this?? D:

*(except now I can kind of imagine what both fandoms would look like--the angstiness of the former, the hatesex of the latter--which means that I have been on the internet WAY TOO LONG AUGH)

In case anyone's interested, what we found was:
Yuletide - Phantasms (gen/het)
FF.net Braveheart section (okay, I actually like FF.n, but this section makes me understand why people call it the Pit. @_@)
Force Majeure - Jackpot! A non-con William Wallace/Robert the Bruce vignette. Very very short, but it's the only fic of that pairing we've found so far, so hey. (but we wanted it to be all sweet and tragic and cute. and tragic. or something.)

This is the creepiest fucking thing I have ever read.
Creepy creepy creepy oh God creepy
D: D: D: D: D:

Zombie caterpillars controlled by voodoo wasps

Oh God I really cannot get over How. Fucking. CREEPY THIS IS.

(to the tune of Yellow Polka Dot Bikini)
She got her itsy bitsy teeny tiny combat boots all bright and shiny
For the RAATI inspection day
Her itsy bitsy teeny tiny combat boots all bright and shiny
So the RAATI champions they'd stay!


The officers have been referring to shoe-shining as charol. I just chalked it up as one more Filipino vocabulary word I didn't know; until I asked my mom and she said in puzzlement that she only knew of charol as referring to patent-leather shoes, not to shoe-shining. Well, tonight I think I found out why: with enough patience and effort, you can shine ordinary leather so that it's as shiny as patent leather!



This isn't quite the pinnacle of terrifying shininess I've seen some others achieve, but it's the shiniest I've ever gotten my boots so far. I think I've discovered the secret to shininess: a very thick layer of shoe polish and a lot of patience.

When you first sprinkle water on the boot and start brushing the thick layer of polish, everything just goes flat and dull and you're terrified that you've just ruined your boot's shine forever because it's not shining. You keep going because there's nothing else you can do, and to your delight, the dullness begins to transform into a deep, mysterious, satin-like sheen. It's not slick-shiny, but seems almost hypnotically deep, in contrast to all the inferior superficial shines achieved before. Continue brushing the satin-like surface and eventually it becomes slicker, closer to a patent-leather shine. Brush it until you can't stand it any more, then grab a cloth and start rubbing it down. Rub and rub to sharpen the shine, until you convince yourself that you can't possibly do anymore.
And then, of course, comes the next boot.

( Those are some teeny tiny boots )

mosellegreen has been saying for years that the Left is out to deliberately destroy Western civilization. I never believed her...until today.

In my Modern European Literature class we were discussing Corneille's The Cid, tackling the question of whether the characters had any agency (and therefore any identity in the modern sense). The obvious answer is "no," since the plot and the characters' actions are pretty much entirely constrained by the social honor code, without any room for acting on one's individual will. However, me and a couple of others were thinking that perhaps they did have agency of a kind, by exercising their will to consciously choose to stick to the honor code.

This suggestion drew this response from the professor:
Agency comes when there are no restraints. What are restraints? Ideology, institutions, ISAs (ideological state apparatuses a.k.a. school, church, family, etc). And note that she had previously said that without agency there is no individuality and the modern individual self cannot exist.

...Am I the only one who finds this terrifying? (hello CL grads on my f-list, you must have learned this too!) The modern individual self is the result of agency which is the result of getting rid of all institutions and ideology entirely? Sure, I believe questioning ideology is a worthy pursuit, and the concept of ideology as the unconscious system of beliefs that makes things "obvious," that says "of course," is one of the most interesting and useful things I've learned so far from my CL theory classes.
BUT. Questioning ideology is different from eliminating it altogether! Yes, ideology is in some sense like brainwashing, but if I recall correctly, it's also what allows us to function in society. No ideology = humans not able to function in society = collapse of civilization, Y/N?

I still don't believe that the average liberal or Democrat on the street is out to wilfully destroy Western civilization (no, I don't believe my relatives are aiming for that, really). But it seems that liberal academia considers nothing else so essential.

...holy shit. My college major is out to undermine the foundations of civilization. What do I do now?