Wandering Around Talking To Rainbows

I'm really looking forward to the beta create entries page on dreamwidth becoming the default, cos I really like it but man I miss draft saving... :(

(Which is a long way to say that I had a whole long entry I'd been adding to for days and then firefox needed updating and I lost my entry. And yet in another tab I just discovered a paragraph of a gig review I'm clearly not going to finish, perfectly preserved...I dunno)

Nevermind, lets try and actually write an update-ish entry, shall we? What have I been up to?

Well I've been knitting a lot. I'm still working on the cardigan of doom (coming up on 5 months now) I swear the next big thing I make is being made with chunky wool, stash be damned. (Speaking of the stash. Why do I own so much dark green wool? I mean, I like the colour, but there's an awful lot of it. ETA The body of my cardigan of doom is now completed, sewn up and has buttons. If I didn't need to reknit the sleeves (a whole other story) I'd be putting them in and finishing the damn thing today. *sigh* In the meantime it makes a fetching waistcoat...hmmm maybe I'll use some of the epic amount of green to make a waistcoat version...

( couple of things I made in the mean time )

What else has been happening?

I went to Belfast for the weekend last month, for Gilli's birthday, which was excellent. I actually got to spend time in the city this time, Saturday was windy but gorgeously sunny so I did the open top bus tour (the photos are uploading as I write this so I might actually get a photopost done some time soon) and then wandered round the city falling in love with the place. I have decided to move there when I was drunk and with distance I can't say I'd object if I had to move there for work.

I'm going back in July as we're playing them at Roller Derby the last weekend in July - oh I finally passed my rules test so I'm fully mins passed now and I'm allowed to scrim against other teams and more importantly bout if I make the team. We're supposed to be having an IntraLeague match at the end of June so I'm crossing my fingers for that if nothing else. I've been officiating at derby matches quite a lot recently and I really feel its made a big difference to my rules knowledge. It's one thing to read the rules another to actually think 'oh yeah, I had so-and-so in the sin bin for that'.

I seem to have finally kicked the cold that I've had for the last two months which is such a relief. Related to that, I've gone veggie for the month of May. I wanted to shake up my eating habits properly. Some meals have been better than others, but I'm enjoying working through the veggie curries section of our 'Classic Curries' cook book. Mmmmm Daal. It's fun to be experimenting with food again, cooking feels all fresh and new and exciting again, I've missed that. It's making me think more about my eating habits and I hope to take away a better attitude to vegetables then I had before. Plus its fun to defy that old adage about vegetarians and tofu - normally I use half the pack, forget about the other half, and then my mother chucks it out cos its gone off, but I've discovered a trick with changing the water that seems to be staving that off long enough for me to actually finish the pack...

I've really not been consuming much fannish media (or media in general) lately, mostly my knitting has been accompanied by podcasts, but I'm hopefully seeing Avengers Assemble on Wednesday and I bought a couple of Big Finish audio books in the sale so hopefully I'll actually be able to do a bit of fannish engagement again soon. Ooh tho speaking of fannish things companions is hosting a game of drabble tag for 3 weeks for dreamwidth (and also because any excuse for some drabble tag) and disc_fest are taking prompts ahead of sign up - its a claim a prompt ficathon rather than an exchange so a bit lower pressure.

And that's it I think, well there's other stuff going on - the Sisypheian task of trying to get the radio station production team up and running and the odd project of attending and reviewing art exhibits for the grown up blog - but I'm going to stop before this gets properly epic.

Why is it that even though I've only seen about half a season of The West Wing come any major multi-fandom ficathon, I always seek out TWW prompts to read. I mean apocalytothon I get, I was recommended one story written for that a couple of years back it was excellent, and I keep going back and finding excellent end of the world stories. Other ficathons? Especially very character-based ones where you should really need to know the characters well, shouldn't work but do. So yeah, anyways people should go read Four Times Ainsley Hayes Tried to Explain (And One Time She Didn’t Have to) and The Most Exclusive Club in Town from lgbtfest I don't get American politics at all most of the time but everything I didn't learn from doing American history I learned from The West Wing so I do rather love it when people use TWW fic to explore political stuff.

(I always read the Discworld prompts, even though I don't normally read Discword fic, because people always do interesting stuff with it for this.)

This was going to just be a drive by post with a few recs but writing the above got me thinking about why I love the lgbtfest ficathon. Issue fic is always a tricky thing, both to do well and to find an audience for, having it be for a particular ficathon tends to mean that people do a lot of research or tackle issues close to their own hearts with the security of knowing that someone's going to read it; if only to express support or tell them where they're going wrong. Also people can witter on about the gay agenda in scifi till they're blue in the face, but for all the proliferation of slash (and to a lesser extent femslash) its more about 'teh pretty' than the issues that the characters might actually face. (For example its excellent to see SG:Atlantis slashers tackling the effects of 'Don't Ask Don't Tell' and military machismo on their favourite pairings...I particularly liked Recruitment Strategy for keeping it light while dealing with a serious issue - "Because extending 'leave no man behind' to every gay man and woman in uniform is an entirely new level of insanity, even for you.") Yeah, it is good to see lgtb characters being written as characters with the gender of the person they're attracted to/dating/sleeping with being treated as secondary, because normalisation is good. But sometimes its good to read about the harsh realities or the politics and how the real world impacts on our fictional situations.

So, I actually have the house to myself for a change and what do I do? Do I take the opportunity to get some work down? Do I have the night off and watch some of the many films I’ve got to watch on VHS while I’ve got the chance to use the tv/vcr downstairs? Do I even watch one of the weirder films I’ve bought and not yet watched, on that selfsame tv with its decent (at least better than my laptop) speakers? Do I cook myself something interesting/adventurous while I do so? Nope I do none of that. Instead I buy sausage rolls, potato wedges, garlic bread and one of those one glass of wine bottles and watch about 3 hours worth of Hogfather…Not that I regret any of it, the food was just what I fancied, the wine was rather pleasant and given the length of Hogfather I don’t often have that much time in a chunk to sit down and watch tv.

( Hogfather spoilers )