Fandoms: Dar Williams - The Honesty Room (album); Calvin & Hobbes; Juno; Lost in Translation; Where the Wild Things Are (2009 movie).

Thank you so much to the mods and maintainers! It's been pretty epic this year.

Reccing the fics written for me in Discworld and Malory Towers and then a link to my Delicious recs for Regeneration, Bruce Springsteen and the E-Street Band, Discworld, Hot Fuzz, Three Musketeers, Sound of Music, Simpsons, Top Gear, Sherlock Holmes, Brideshead Revisited, American Idol, The Book Thief, Historical RPF, Merlin RPF, Composer RPF, Thunder Road, Breakfast Club, A Knight's Tale, Juno, Eddie Izzard, Mad Men, and Band of Brothers.

My first batch of yuletide recs, which have been fairly random (i.e., I haven't read all the stories yet in any of the fandoms I'm reccing)

Link to my journal: Body Worlds Exhibition, Black Books, Casablanca, Casino Royale, Discworld, District 9, Earthsea, Fairy Tales, RPF - Classical Rome, Temeraire

Recs in the Lord John series by Gabaldon (x3), Cambridge time travel universe (x3), Chronicles of Amber/historical RPF, World War Z, NPR RPF, Ocean's 11 RPF, Pigeon series by Willems, Airwaves (song) by Thomas Dolby, Bon Cop Bad Cop, Hornblower (TV), Northern Exposure, and Brideshead Revisited at the rec post on my lj. (Also some bonus non-Yuletide recs in there.)

On the ninth and tenth day of SGA Love, we have my most requested subject matter which I combined into-

The eyes, the arms, and the expressions, of Lt. Colonel John Sheppard.



I need a cup of water now.

“Day Nine and Ten”

Went to see Sherlock Holmes today (about which yay and squee, of course), but when I was really missing fannish companionship was during the previews.

First "The Sorcerer's Apprentice," and somebody please, please tell me that that kid is older than 17, because the preview slashes itself.

And then "Iron Man 2," which just confirms what I have long believed about Marvel: They're not really making entertainment; they're slyly diagnosing the unacknowledged fetishes of rightish Americans.

First we have a little clip of Tony Stark being rather fey while he recites lines that make Republicans have to adjust their trousers ("You want my property? You can't have it. But I have successfully privatized world peace!") -- and then he's down and being stalked by a long-haired guy ... with an accent that sounds Mexican to me, though I see in IMDb that he's got a Russian name, but, anyway, clearly an immigrant of some sort ... with, um, flaming whips. Really, all we need is some prison sodomy and some autoerotic asphyxiation and the talk-radio fantasy world will be complete.

This entry was originally posted at http://resonant.dreamwidth.org/202502.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

My first batch of yuletide recs, which have been fairly random (i.e., I haven't read all the stories yet in any of the fandoms I'm reccing)

( Body Worlds Exhibition, Black Books, Casablanca, Casino Royale, Discworld, District 9, Earthsea, Fairy Tales, RPF - Classical Rome, Temeraire )

This entry was originally posted at http://bethbethbeth.dreamwidth.org/521845.html. | read comments at Dreamwidth. | How to use OpenID

21 Yuletide recs, with varying amounts of commentary, at my LJ, for The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, Dracula, Cthulu Mythos, Casablanca, Real Genius, H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy, Calvin & Hobbes, Sherlock Holmes, Dollhouse, Kolchak the Night Stalker, Eddie Izzard, Road House, Manly Wade Wellman's Silver John, Madelyn Mack, Vorkosigan series, Isaac Asimov's Robots series, and My Little Pony.

Recs for Indiana Jones, Leverage, Mad Men, Moon, Inuit Mythology, PSAs, Mythbusters, RPF NPR, Nero Wolfe, and Some Like it Hot at my journal.

Also, I am tagging all the yuletide recs lists by fandom at in the same place as last year (at yuletide.recs on delicious; that link goes to only this year's recs), which I started doing because I couldn't have as many tabs open as I wanted to read recc'ed stories back when I had an old laptop and now just find interesting.

I tag: everything on yuletide, on dreamwidth's yuletide tag feed, and on my flist, probably with some overlap of people who post to both dw and lj.

I don't tag: recs lists that don't indicate fandoms in even a cursory way, things that I recognize as duplicate posts.

I would like to tag but mostly can't: recs for stories that met the yuletide con challenge and the dark agenda challenge. I don't know all the fandoms of either and they're rarely noted in recs lists -- if you would like to help make a compilation of recs of stories that meet the criteria of those challenges, please note the challenge name somewhere in your recs post and I'll tag that, too!

If you see a set of recs that I've missed and you think I should tag, or if you notice that I've tagged something wrong, feel free to let me know by dropping a link in comments or by tagging it for yuletide.recs on delicious.

I've been podbanged! (Wow, that sounds so wrong...) But the intrepid lian_li and fleurrochard workingtogether as "fleur-de-li" have taken on my DS story Eight Sessions (you know, the crazy one with the psychiatrists and the bowling.) Apparently it was just as hard as you'd think it would be, but we all get the results of their hard work, so if you like podfic--go, download, and don't forget to thank those guys!

Yet more recs! White Collar (2), NCIS:LA, Castle (3), 24, The Pretender, Burn Notice, The Mentalist, New Amsterdam/Torchwood, Empire Records.

( Recs under the cut )

Book: The Kindness of Strangers: The Abandonment of Children in Western Europe from Late Antiquity to the Renaissance, by John Boswell

Before there was TVtropes (though not, of course, before tropes), Boswell wondered if Doorstop Babies were common in myth and legend because they are like quicksand or like divorce. Quicksand is rare in reality, but fascinating and convenient for fiction, so it shows up in stories a lot. Divorce is also common in fiction (especially "literature") -- but, if anything, even *more* common in real life.

Boswell marshals evidence showing that abandoned children were one of the fundamental facts of life from the classical though the modern period in Europe, though the exact ways and means varied in different periods.

Required reading for anyone who wants to abandon a fictional child.

This entry was originally posted at http://mecurtin.dreamwidth.org/133437.html. There are comments there for this post.

One of the best parts of Yuletide is getting comments from people you respect even when your work is anonymous. You like me! You really like me, even without knowing it's me!

Of course, I haven't had much time to read, which means I've left almost no feedback, but it just means that Yuletide will be stretched out this year. Maybe I'll make a dent this weekend, especially if we get the snow they're predicting.

I have been remiss in not pointing out the two lovely Kings stories I received for Yuletide!

Sacrifice, in which there is Jack Benjamin and David Shepherd and a whole lot of meddling by the Lord, and Triad, all about the women of the court and how they're just as, if not more, powerful than the men. ♥♥♥

I've slowly been working my way through other fandoms of interest, and spent part of the weekend devouring favored book-universes of my teenaged years. Pern and Valdemar and Vorkosigan -- how I still adore thee. It's funny how I can slip back into the mindset that each requires, and all the characters and situations I still recall with only a very little prompting. I'll have recs later, once I've finished bopping around the archive. There's one Vorkosigan story, set when Aral is a child, that made me remember how much I hunger for the tale of General Piotr versus the Cetagandans. Was such ever written as fanfic? It's probably a good thing that I didn't truly discover the internet until I was out of grad school. I'd have made my way to some Vorkosigan mailing list and never studied for reading and discussing the adventures of Miles and Cordelia and Aral and all the rest.

Christmas was good to me too, but the thing I think I'm most grateful for right now is a puppy, almost four months old and very playful, who is currently outraged that he was subjected to the indignity of shots at the vet earlier today.

Given the scarcity of new television programming, I've thrown my Planet Earth DVDs on and reveled in natural marvels and David Attenborough's inimitable narrative style.

What have you been up to?

Here be: Chuck, Agatha Christie - Poirot, Dark City, Fifth Element, Mononoke, V for Vendetta, Venture Brothers, Watchmen, and P.G. Wodehouse - Jeeves & Wooster.

( Mmm, recs! )

Still barely scratching the surface, but I've already read so many brilliant things that I need to share, so here they are.

Fandoms: 16th-17th Century RPF (Marlowe/Shakespeare for mee!), Elizabeth Bear's Promethean Age series (more Marlowe/Shakespeare!), Monday Begins on Saturday (!! I cannot even, this exists!), Gregory Maguire's Son of a Witch, A Study in Emerald, Eddie Izzard Routines, Cambridge Latin Course, Discworld/Thursday Next/Yuletide, Ellen Kushner's Swordspoint.

Fandom: TRANSFORMERS
TF Continuity: SG
Pairing: implied Sunstreaker/Sideswipe, Cyclonus/Sideswipe, Blaster/Soundwave
Length: about 10,000 words
Author on LJ: martinicruiser
Author website: Abnormal Gravity
Why this must be read:

Summary: Left for dead after a battle, Sideswipe is taken in by the Decepticons, but his thoughts still linger around one of the Autobots.

The Shattered Glass universe is lovingly portrayed in all its twisted glory. It starts out a little slow but it goes galloping along soon enough: betrayal! angst! horror! torture! death!

For those unfamiliar with Transformers backstory, Sideswipe and Sunstreaker are twins, so the implied pairing could technically be considered incest...)

Links to the parts on her fic LJ: Once and For All, Part 2, Part 3 , Part 4, Part 5, Part 6