Collection of fannish/life detritus
Dec. 17th, 2011 11:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lunasarielI forgot to post it last time, but this is something that came up in a discussion with ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
hamsterwoman, and pics were promised:
'pologies for the derpiness of the pic! It really looks a lot better IRL. In fact, it looks amazing.
This is my final project for high school Freshman English, called Mapping Middle-Earth. That year, we read two books: To Kill a Mockingbird, and Book 1 of Fellowship of the Rings. As a final project, we had to pick a location in any of Tolkien’s works, write a report on it, and make a model of it. The report part, I did just fine, but the model part, not so much.
My mom is fantastic with artsy, craftsy stuff, and when she found out that my model of Minas Tirith was basically going to be a taped-together construction-paper monstrosity that looked like a wedding cake with acne, or possibly some sort of tumor, she stepped in and pretty much took over. The result, you see here. The Pelennor is painted with about five different colors of yellow and green to simulate the look of real grass. Mount Mindolluin is a bunch of rocks from our garden, glued together and the glue painted in various greens and browns to camouflage it. The courtyard and fountain by the White Tree are painted green and blue respectively, and the White Tree itself has eensy-weensy branches (or it did, before my cat jumped on it and broke it). All the important buildings were made separately and glued/molded onto their proper places. The city itself is mainly papier-mâché and modeling clay, with an overlay of paint. The whole thing weighs maybe 10 pounds and is mounted on that shield-looking round wooden thing for stability. It was created in the spring of 2004, and survives (except for the aforementioned Tree and the front bit of the "prow," which broke off) to this day.
TL;DR: I have the most awesome mom in the world, who helps me get As on artsy English projects by building scale models of imaginary cities.
In other news, I seem to have come full circle, fandom-wise: I got super-duper into Young Avengers just before/at the very beginning of this semester, and now I'm getting back into it at the end! XD
I've been thinking a lot about the Kaplans, who are basically required to be awesome. I mean, think about it: they produced Billy, took in Teddy after his "mom" was murdered and he was revealed to basically be Alien Jesus (whose very existence was the subject of at least two intergalactic wars), (according to fanon, at least) took in Tommy (a super-fast felon who happened to look almost exactly like their son), and then, if all that wasn't enough, were comparatively cool with Captain freakin' America showing up and telling them, "Hi, your son is a superhero. So are all of his friends, plus his boyfriend and his bizarro magical twin. Only they defied the governmental edict that turns them into criminals if they don't register with the Superhero Nazis, so now they're going on the run with me to wage an underground war."
I know it's probably just my own headcanon, but I like the idea of them pretty much knowing about the whole "superhero" thing and tacitly giving their approval by saying nothing about the extremely irregular hours, weird conversations, Teddy's uncanny ability to destroy his clothing for no apparent reason, and by having the whole team over for dinner at least once a week. Actually, I can almost see the Kaplans essentially adopting the team: Kate’s family ignores her to the point where she can blow thousands of dollars and disappear for weeks without raising any eyebrows, Cassie’s family is either dead or almost pathologically un-supportive, Jonas is a robot, it’s been implied that part of Tommy’s…um…attitude problem is due to his angry dysfunctional family, and Eli’s grandparents disapprove of teen superheroes for a variety of excellent reasons. So I could see Rebecca and Jeff providing subtle psychological counseling and meals/hot beverages respectively, and the twins (Aaron and Isaac in my head) basically forming the Young Avengers Fan Club the first time Hulkling lifts the fridge over his head because a pen rolled under it or Stature gets a lost Frisbee off the roof by growing. I could especially see them becoming Teddy’s #1 fans, since he’s friendly, jokey, occasionally green, the heir to a badass alien empire, and can turn into stuff and punch bad guys so hard they fly through walls. So, basically, he’s everything a nine-year-old would consider awesome, and they would be torn between wanting him to like them and a younger sibling’s natural drive to infuriate their older brother as much as possible. Rebecca and Jeff would get in on the Teddy-love, since he’s, as has been noted, basically their ideal son-in-law: he’s polite, sweet, fairly stable, and obviously head-over-heels stupid in love with their son.
Speaking of which, I’ve been ruminating on Temeraire shipping, and have come to the following conclusion: although Granby/Laurence is still my OTP in this fandom, I can’t entirely deny Granby/Laurence/Tharkay. I mean, the utter shippiness of the bar fight scene in ToS aside, they’re the only two people who he’s not related to and not (canonically) sleeping with who he calls by their first names. If I wanted to go for maximum melodrama, I would see something like Laurence and Granby having their aviator thing going on, and Tharkay being quietly, somewhat desperately, absolutely in love with Laurence, but his intense self-esteem issues preventing him from saying anything about it. Meanwhile, the moreoblivious forthright Granby would have unwittingly stolen a march on him and hooked up with Laurence, who, of course, has no clue about the behind-the-scenes drama. However, this would require a lot of people standing around going “WOE IS ME” and having long, introspective conversations about their feelings and relationships with one another, neither of which are things that Napoleonic-era gentlemen were much given to. As things stand, though, I’m finding in myself an increasing perchance for Granby!physical-whumpage and Tharkay!emotional-whumpage, both ideally paired with an earnest-but-flaily Laurence.
Actually, it’s becoming kinda funny how much of a fandom bicycle Laurence is. Jane, Granby, Tharkay, Riley, Emily, and Temeraire are all paired with him with varying degrees of seriousness; I’ve even found a surprisingly well-thought-out Rankin/Laurence (although it was ostensibly the result of a lost bet)! I find this hilarious not only because Laurence would almost certainly capital-D Disapprove, but also that it would honestly perplex him. He obviously doesn’t exactly have a problem with an excessive ego, so the idea of all these various fanworks coming together and everybody hitting on Laurence at once makes me lol.
Finally, my brother started reading ASOIAF about a million years ago. He liked AGoT enough to continue, got bogged down in the lack of action and overly complex politics of ACoK, but now is really enjoying ASoS. We’re down in SoCal right now (more on this in a moment), and he was reading the Purple Wedding on our drive down. I’ll never forget it: when we left Sonoma County, he was right in the middle of the wedding ceremony, and predicted that “shit is about to go down.” Later that night, when we were going over the Grapevine, he marked his place, closed the book, turned to me, and said simply, “shit just went down” with nothing short of absolute glee. We proceeded to geek out about it about it, and he picked up the thing about Sansa’s hair net and Olenna Tyrell pretty quickly, although his original idea was something involving Melisandre and her shadows. I’m really glad he’s enjoying it (Jon Snow seems to be emerging as his favorite character, to my surprise; I was betting on him going for someone more down-to-earth), but he has little patience for that thing that GRRM does where he just expects you to know what he’s thinking. The way P (my brother) describes it, the convoluted political shenanigans are just a way for GRRM to show off how much smarter he is, or at least how much smarter he thinks he is, than his readers and lord it over them. I don’t entirely agree with this, but I agree that the political situation can seem frustrating a lot of the time, especially what with the constant cliffhangers.
I’m typing this in our ancestral seat (better known as my grandma’s house in L.A.), and I’m living in the freaking future. I used a combination of email and text to arrange with our pet/house-sitter for H and J to have a Champions of Norath tournament on J’s PS2 at my place last night. I just got back from watching Rango (which was cute, but not particularly memorable) on Netflix Instant on my aunt’s and uncle’s flatscreen TV. Now, I’m typing this onto the “Post an Entry” page on LiveJournal, which automatically saves my draft every minute or so. I’m connected to the internet via my iPhone, which now can also act as a personal hotspot and get me online via wi-fi, Bluetooth, or USB cable. Last night, I was talking to my grandma, and I was just a bit blown away when I realized that she remembers when 78 rpms were cutting-edge technology and the idea of using airplanes to carry commercial passengers was still far away and scary. My brother and I are having a YouTube duel where we try to earworm (or at least amuse) each other with different songs, mostly the theme songs of shows we watched religiously as kids, although I think I scored a hit with this one, which is from the old movie The Thief and the Cobbler, and which I always imagine being sung by Shagga son of Dolf and the Clans of the Moon.
In other RL news, yay, I’m officially done with my first semester at Cal! My last final, Celtic Mythology, was on Wednesday (this being Saturday), and I think it was the hardest of my finals. Gender & Women’s Studies was a lot of fairly straightforward memorize-and-regurgitate, and we got a note card to use for English Lit, but not only did I have to synthesize, process and interconnect enormous amount of information for Celtic Mythology, the final was at 8:00 AM the morning after my 7:00-10:00 PM English Lit final. And, of course, there was the fact that a lot of the information was just plain weird. I mean, Lugh, the divine embodiment of the Celtic heroic ethos, defeats the demonic Fomorian army by hopping around it backwards on one foot with one eye closed (not kidding) and the Great Father God, The Dagda, helps defeat the same army by using his unfathomable magical powers to “stop their urine, and the urine of their horses, for a year and a day” (still not kidding), and that wasn’t even the weirdest thing to happen. So much of it is straight-up incomprehensible without the professor leading us through it by the hand, and everyone has, like, five names, and they’re spelled differently every time, and then sometimes there are a bunch of different people with the same name, and they’re always in Irish or Welsh so trying to spell them is impossible, because there are always these weird consonant combinations where “dd” is “th” and “ff” is “s” and “ll” sounds like you’re trying to spit from the very back of your mouth, and tales are always getting recombined with each other in ways that don’t make sense and edited into nonsense by Christian monks, and everybody is the reincarnation of a god anyway, except when they aren’t, and AAARRRRGGGHHH. No, but seriously, it was an amazing class, and I enjoyed the hell out of it, even the incomprehensible bits. And next semester, I’m taking a class in medieval Welsh language and literature. As they say on teh Intertubez, challenge accepted.
I moved out for the winter on Wednesday, which was great, because everyone has to be out of the buildings by 10:00 AM Saturday morning, so Friday and Saturday would have been insane. My poor Roomie, on the other hand, had her last final from 7:00-10:00 PM on Friday, so she had to try to fight her way out on Saturday morning, a process not helped by the fact that all eight floors of our building are serviced by only one elevator, and that one automatically shuts down if you try to hold the door open by sticking a hand in between the doors. So, yeah, I’m glad I avoided that particular headache. So now I’m free until January 11th, aside from the obligatory holiday functions, social drama (H and J are apparently fighting again, and I’m the only person they can both talk to about emotional stuff), and the fact that I have to drive back down here to babysit my eight-year-old cousin on the 3rd-4th of next year.
hamsterwoman, and pics were promised:'pologies for the derpiness of the pic! It really looks a lot better IRL. In fact, it looks amazing.
This is my final project for high school Freshman English, called Mapping Middle-Earth. That year, we read two books: To Kill a Mockingbird, and Book 1 of Fellowship of the Rings. As a final project, we had to pick a location in any of Tolkien’s works, write a report on it, and make a model of it. The report part, I did just fine, but the model part, not so much.
My mom is fantastic with artsy, craftsy stuff, and when she found out that my model of Minas Tirith was basically going to be a taped-together construction-paper monstrosity that looked like a wedding cake with acne, or possibly some sort of tumor, she stepped in and pretty much took over. The result, you see here. The Pelennor is painted with about five different colors of yellow and green to simulate the look of real grass. Mount Mindolluin is a bunch of rocks from our garden, glued together and the glue painted in various greens and browns to camouflage it. The courtyard and fountain by the White Tree are painted green and blue respectively, and the White Tree itself has eensy-weensy branches (or it did, before my cat jumped on it and broke it). All the important buildings were made separately and glued/molded onto their proper places. The city itself is mainly papier-mâché and modeling clay, with an overlay of paint. The whole thing weighs maybe 10 pounds and is mounted on that shield-looking round wooden thing for stability. It was created in the spring of 2004, and survives (except for the aforementioned Tree and the front bit of the "prow," which broke off) to this day.
TL;DR: I have the most awesome mom in the world, who helps me get As on artsy English projects by building scale models of imaginary cities.
In other news, I seem to have come full circle, fandom-wise: I got super-duper into Young Avengers just before/at the very beginning of this semester, and now I'm getting back into it at the end! XD
I've been thinking a lot about the Kaplans, who are basically required to be awesome. I mean, think about it: they produced Billy, took in Teddy after his "mom" was murdered and he was revealed to basically be Alien Jesus (whose very existence was the subject of at least two intergalactic wars), (according to fanon, at least) took in Tommy (a super-fast felon who happened to look almost exactly like their son), and then, if all that wasn't enough, were comparatively cool with Captain freakin' America showing up and telling them, "Hi, your son is a superhero. So are all of his friends, plus his boyfriend and his bizarro magical twin. Only they defied the governmental edict that turns them into criminals if they don't register with the Superhero Nazis, so now they're going on the run with me to wage an underground war."
I know it's probably just my own headcanon, but I like the idea of them pretty much knowing about the whole "superhero" thing and tacitly giving their approval by saying nothing about the extremely irregular hours, weird conversations, Teddy's uncanny ability to destroy his clothing for no apparent reason, and by having the whole team over for dinner at least once a week. Actually, I can almost see the Kaplans essentially adopting the team: Kate’s family ignores her to the point where she can blow thousands of dollars and disappear for weeks without raising any eyebrows, Cassie’s family is either dead or almost pathologically un-supportive, Jonas is a robot, it’s been implied that part of Tommy’s…um…attitude problem is due to his angry dysfunctional family, and Eli’s grandparents disapprove of teen superheroes for a variety of excellent reasons. So I could see Rebecca and Jeff providing subtle psychological counseling and meals/hot beverages respectively, and the twins (Aaron and Isaac in my head) basically forming the Young Avengers Fan Club the first time Hulkling lifts the fridge over his head because a pen rolled under it or Stature gets a lost Frisbee off the roof by growing. I could especially see them becoming Teddy’s #1 fans, since he’s friendly, jokey, occasionally green, the heir to a badass alien empire, and can turn into stuff and punch bad guys so hard they fly through walls. So, basically, he’s everything a nine-year-old would consider awesome, and they would be torn between wanting him to like them and a younger sibling’s natural drive to infuriate their older brother as much as possible. Rebecca and Jeff would get in on the Teddy-love, since he’s, as has been noted, basically their ideal son-in-law: he’s polite, sweet, fairly stable, and obviously head-over-heels stupid in love with their son.
Speaking of which, I’ve been ruminating on Temeraire shipping, and have come to the following conclusion: although Granby/Laurence is still my OTP in this fandom, I can’t entirely deny Granby/Laurence/Tharkay. I mean, the utter shippiness of the bar fight scene in ToS aside, they’re the only two people who he’s not related to and not (canonically) sleeping with who he calls by their first names. If I wanted to go for maximum melodrama, I would see something like Laurence and Granby having their aviator thing going on, and Tharkay being quietly, somewhat desperately, absolutely in love with Laurence, but his intense self-esteem issues preventing him from saying anything about it. Meanwhile, the more
Actually, it’s becoming kinda funny how much of a fandom bicycle Laurence is. Jane, Granby, Tharkay, Riley, Emily, and Temeraire are all paired with him with varying degrees of seriousness; I’ve even found a surprisingly well-thought-out Rankin/Laurence (although it was ostensibly the result of a lost bet)! I find this hilarious not only because Laurence would almost certainly capital-D Disapprove, but also that it would honestly perplex him. He obviously doesn’t exactly have a problem with an excessive ego, so the idea of all these various fanworks coming together and everybody hitting on Laurence at once makes me lol.
Finally, my brother started reading ASOIAF about a million years ago. He liked AGoT enough to continue, got bogged down in the lack of action and overly complex politics of ACoK, but now is really enjoying ASoS. We’re down in SoCal right now (more on this in a moment), and he was reading the Purple Wedding on our drive down. I’ll never forget it: when we left Sonoma County, he was right in the middle of the wedding ceremony, and predicted that “shit is about to go down.” Later that night, when we were going over the Grapevine, he marked his place, closed the book, turned to me, and said simply, “shit just went down” with nothing short of absolute glee. We proceeded to geek out about it about it, and he picked up the thing about Sansa’s hair net and Olenna Tyrell pretty quickly, although his original idea was something involving Melisandre and her shadows. I’m really glad he’s enjoying it (Jon Snow seems to be emerging as his favorite character, to my surprise; I was betting on him going for someone more down-to-earth), but he has little patience for that thing that GRRM does where he just expects you to know what he’s thinking. The way P (my brother) describes it, the convoluted political shenanigans are just a way for GRRM to show off how much smarter he is, or at least how much smarter he thinks he is, than his readers and lord it over them. I don’t entirely agree with this, but I agree that the political situation can seem frustrating a lot of the time, especially what with the constant cliffhangers.
I’m typing this in our ancestral seat (better known as my grandma’s house in L.A.), and I’m living in the freaking future. I used a combination of email and text to arrange with our pet/house-sitter for H and J to have a Champions of Norath tournament on J’s PS2 at my place last night. I just got back from watching Rango (which was cute, but not particularly memorable) on Netflix Instant on my aunt’s and uncle’s flatscreen TV. Now, I’m typing this onto the “Post an Entry” page on LiveJournal, which automatically saves my draft every minute or so. I’m connected to the internet via my iPhone, which now can also act as a personal hotspot and get me online via wi-fi, Bluetooth, or USB cable. Last night, I was talking to my grandma, and I was just a bit blown away when I realized that she remembers when 78 rpms were cutting-edge technology and the idea of using airplanes to carry commercial passengers was still far away and scary. My brother and I are having a YouTube duel where we try to earworm (or at least amuse) each other with different songs, mostly the theme songs of shows we watched religiously as kids, although I think I scored a hit with this one, which is from the old movie The Thief and the Cobbler, and which I always imagine being sung by Shagga son of Dolf and the Clans of the Moon.
In other RL news, yay, I’m officially done with my first semester at Cal! My last final, Celtic Mythology, was on Wednesday (this being Saturday), and I think it was the hardest of my finals. Gender & Women’s Studies was a lot of fairly straightforward memorize-and-regurgitate, and we got a note card to use for English Lit, but not only did I have to synthesize, process and interconnect enormous amount of information for Celtic Mythology, the final was at 8:00 AM the morning after my 7:00-10:00 PM English Lit final. And, of course, there was the fact that a lot of the information was just plain weird. I mean, Lugh, the divine embodiment of the Celtic heroic ethos, defeats the demonic Fomorian army by hopping around it backwards on one foot with one eye closed (not kidding) and the Great Father God, The Dagda, helps defeat the same army by using his unfathomable magical powers to “stop their urine, and the urine of their horses, for a year and a day” (still not kidding), and that wasn’t even the weirdest thing to happen. So much of it is straight-up incomprehensible without the professor leading us through it by the hand, and everyone has, like, five names, and they’re spelled differently every time, and then sometimes there are a bunch of different people with the same name, and they’re always in Irish or Welsh so trying to spell them is impossible, because there are always these weird consonant combinations where “dd” is “th” and “ff” is “s” and “ll” sounds like you’re trying to spit from the very back of your mouth, and tales are always getting recombined with each other in ways that don’t make sense and edited into nonsense by Christian monks, and everybody is the reincarnation of a god anyway, except when they aren’t, and AAARRRRGGGHHH. No, but seriously, it was an amazing class, and I enjoyed the hell out of it, even the incomprehensible bits. And next semester, I’m taking a class in medieval Welsh language and literature. As they say on teh Intertubez, challenge accepted.
I moved out for the winter on Wednesday, which was great, because everyone has to be out of the buildings by 10:00 AM Saturday morning, so Friday and Saturday would have been insane. My poor Roomie, on the other hand, had her last final from 7:00-10:00 PM on Friday, so she had to try to fight her way out on Saturday morning, a process not helped by the fact that all eight floors of our building are serviced by only one elevator, and that one automatically shuts down if you try to hold the door open by sticking a hand in between the doors. So, yeah, I’m glad I avoided that particular headache. So now I’m free until January 11th, aside from the obligatory holiday functions, social drama (H and J are apparently fighting again, and I’m the only person they can both talk to about emotional stuff), and the fact that I have to drive back down here to babysit my eight-year-old cousin on the 3rd-4th of next year.
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no subject
Date: 2011-12-18 07:46 am (UTC)the final was at 8:00 AM the morning after my 7:00-10:00 PM English Lit final.
Ouch, that's rough! :( (I do find what Celtic Mythology I've read -- mostly, The Tain -- hilariously awesome. Welsh spelling/pronunciation, though, OMG.)
ETA: D'oh, by the time I got to the end of the post I forgot about the beginning. By which I mean -- your Minas Tirith is awesome! Thank you for sharing the picture. It looks really cool even without being able to see the subtleties like the color of the glass and glue.
no subject
Date: 2011-12-18 08:51 pm (UTC)Here: http://archiveofourown.org/works/100380. It's...oddly IC, but also extremeley lolworthy if you think about it for more than, like, five seconds.
I do find what Celtic Mythology I've read -- mostly, The Tain -- hilariously awesome.
The Tain was one of the major works we read, and yeah, the sheer randomness of it was hilariously awesome. Of course, it makes some kind of sense if it's explained in context, but there's no real way to make the pretense of "a guy fights an entire army by himself while all the rest of his guys are having labor pains and a queen made a bet with her husband to steal a magic cow" anything but awesome. XD
your Minas Tirith is awesome!
Thanks! I'm really proud of it (by proxy). ^.^
no subject
Date: 2011-12-18 09:39 pm (UTC)there's no real way to make the pretense of "a guy fights an entire army by himself while all the rest of his guys are having labor pains and a queen made a bet with her husband to steal a magic cow" anything but awesome
IKR? There is pretty much nothing I do not love about The Tain, from how those labor pains came about in the first place to the whole cattle raid culture to, like, Celtic mythology's notion of pillow talk. I think I remember Fergus being my favorite thing about The Tain, but the whole thing was just so delightful!
Oh, also, I think you'd said you hadn't seen the Minas Tirith/Battle of Pelennor Fields made out of candy? Ta-da!. They also have a Battle of Helms. And I'm glad I went to look this up, because apparently there was one more after, which I hadn't known about: Mines of Moria. (But I do think Minas Tirith/Pelennor is by far the most epic one.)
no subject
Date: 2011-12-20 02:09 am (UTC)Exactly! It's surprising how little they had to tweak his character to make it seem plausible.
I think I remember Fergus being my favorite thing about The Tain
Me too! Actually, the main point of my final paper for that class was how Fergus represents the developing consciousness of the Celtic warrior aristocracy, seeing as how he's just about the only decent guy in the whole thing (even though he can be a bit of a doof).
Candified Minas Tirith/Battle of Helm's Deep/Mines of Moria looks amazing! I don't know that I would have teh heart to eat anything that looked that good. XD
no subject
Date: 2011-12-21 10:41 am (UTC)I wonder what became ofall the candified battles, but I'd be surprised if anyone had the heart to eat that many hours of work :P
no subject
Date: 2011-12-18 06:38 pm (UTC)But I still think it's awesome even now that I know it's not edible!
no subject
Date: 2011-12-18 08:53 pm (UTC)