People who have more coding experience than I have (which is to say, just about anyone who can work with anything beyond HTML):

I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why my seemingly identical DW and LJ styles (Flexible Squares, because I don't like change) differ on the Friends List/Reading Page views of my journals. Namely, I can't seem to get my friends' names to show up on my DW reading page, though they show up just fine in LJ.

Should I go through the code line by line to see where I'm missing something? Should I admit defeat and C&P the LJ style code straight into the DW coding page? Is there another option I'm not seeing?

This is where my mind goes when you leave it unattended: it writes 10K+ words of cracktastic fanfiction involving European integration theory. Consider yourselves warned, and possibly educated. (Also available on AO3 and my fic journal, to cater to reading preferences.)

Title: Ever Closer Union
Fandom: Hetalia
Rating: U
Summary: Sealand's latest brilliant plan to be recognised as a nation involves making a bid for membership in an international organisation. Finding the right one to join, however, is a lot harder than he'd expected.
Disclaimer: All original works are copyright of their respective owners; I lay claim only to this particular story.
Notes: The blame for this piece rests entirely on the shoulders of daegaer, courtesy of this drabble. Historical and other notes are at the end.

( Ever Closer Union )

Sandwiched between a Weekend of Awesome (first-class upgrades on three out of four flights! spending time with lovely friends I seldom see! trekking out into the mountains like intrepid explorers! watching only the lulziest bits of Showgirls!) and Monday next's Week of Doom (travelling for work to a city with no public transit! alternating idleness and frantic editing! tracking receipts for an expense report!) is this Weekend of Catch-Up:

- The twin piles of dirty and clean-but-unfolded laundry in my bedroom are about to encroach into my sleeping space.
- I have a library book to finish, two to return, and a fourth to grab by Sunday evening.
- There will likely be an early matinee of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy so that I can finish composing my Unpopular Fandom Opinion post on it.
- The last thousand words of a 10K+ fanfic are in the final polishing stages.
- A bulk Kinokuniya manga order needs to be assembled.
- Dreamwidth filters are still in disarray.
- I am out of bread.

I'm probably missing a few things, but that's the bulk of it. Time to leave work and get cracking.

Responding to the latest Back Room announcement very briefly, before I run out the door to the airport:

I've already ported merriman_lyon and pathunprepared to DW under the same names, and would prefer to keep hold of them. Mikage is effectively retired (since a number of characters would probably try to kill him on sight if he showed up again), and I still hold out hope that I'll be able to play as Merriman again sooner rather than later (since I've mostly shaken off the creative drought as far as fanfiction goes) over on DW. The only other characters I had were brothercadfael and samstewart, with a few posts each, and I'm happy to let them go if someone else wants to app them.

Comments? Questions? More lolpoetry? (I'll filter this down once I've finished sorting out the DW filters.)

When I lived within reasonable Tube distance of a Waitrose, I became embarrassingly addicted to their prepackaged tiramisu. I never tried my hand at making it myself until I saw mascarpone cheese on sale the other day, and snagged two tubs with the thought that I'd let the Internet provide me with recipe inspiration.

Having cobbled together and compared recipes from four different sites, I came up with the one below the cut, and was well pleased with the results. My apologies for the haphazard measurements -- I was winging the whole thing, so the amounts of everything except the eggs, cheese, and biscuits can be adjusted to taste. In my case, I like a very boozy but not very sweet tiramisu, which is reflected in the amount of alcohol involved.

( Slapdash Tiramisu )

I ended up getting the coffee from the local Starbucks (which was open and on my bus route home). The barista seemed a little puzzled that I'd want a quad espresso at 7 PM on a Tuesday, but gave me a grin and a thumbs-up when I said I was using it for making desserts.

At the moment, two portions are sitting in my freezer, and I'm planning to thaw one tonight to see if it keeps well when frozen. If so, I'll definitely be adding this dish to my (limited) recipe collection.

bookelfe made a post about the various films she's seen recently, which I suppose is as good a reason as any to dump a few of my thoughts here as well.

I don't have much to say about War Horse and The Muppets, both of which were worth seeing, though I have to say I was more choked up by the brief flash of Jim Henson in The Muppets than by just about anything in War Horse. I'm not entirely sure what this says about me, though I've never pretended to be a Girl Who Loves Horses.

The Adventures of Tintin generally hit all the right notes for me, keeping much with the spirit of the original stories in their mad dash of punch a baddie, steal his gun, jump in a car, get chloroformed/tied up, have your dog chew through the ropes, steal a plane, end up in Foreign Parts, hang out with the royal family, find a drug-smuggling ring, punch another baddie, steal HIS gun, and so on. All of the little cameos and side nods to other Tintin stories made me squeak with glee every time I caught them, and the fight choreography had me happily shovelling popcorn into my mouth the whole time. It wasn't perfect, but it was better than I'd hoped to see, so I left the theatre feeling satisfied.

I do have thoughts on Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, but I'm inclined to see it once more (and maybe re-read the book) to confirm some of my impressions before I post about it. My impressions, on reflection, veer into Unpopular Fandom Opinion territory, so I want to be confident of my position before I post about them.

My office has stumbled into the 21st century and acquired a Keurig machine. Does anyone have recommendations for a specific brand of refillable K-cup? (If I'm going to drink coffee at the office, I'd much rather bring in my own cans of Cafe du Monde or Tim Horton's than the one-step-up-from-swill blend in those environmentally unfriendly little cups.)

In other fanfic news, I've taken advantage of the holiday weekend to finally upload a good-ish selection of my Dark Is Rising drabbles to a backdated post on AO3. Not every single drabble made the cut, but more than two dozen did, so now they're collected for ease of reference outside the community.

I have ten more left to upload, but they'll keep until tomorrow. For now, it is bedtime.

The story I wrote this year was for lalaithlockhart, a missing scene from Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories titled The Monster at the End of This Book. I was not actually matched on this fandom -- originally, I was slated to write for The Dark Is Rising Sequence, but for some reason I kept getting stalled on the various ideas that came to mind. So I picked one of the other fandoms on the list, a book that I could get at the local library, and read through it...and came up with a fairly meta-ish fic. ^_^ So thank you, lalaithlockhart, for the excellent prompt!

In exchange, I received genarti's To Aru Kagaku no Railgun fic Skill Exchange, which so far is the only Railgun fic on AO3 and deserves oceans of love for being so well written. It reads like a missing episode -- in fact, I'm inclined to replace the anime series' swimsuit episode (EP 13) with the fic, just because it is such a great slice-of-life fic with fantastic characterisation and a nice hint of foreshadowing for the rest of the series. And because she was also sneaky like ninja, I had no idea who wrote it until I saw the reveals. *grins*

All in all, I had a very fine Yuletide indeed.

(My fic is also up on bookofgramarye, and I may end up posting it here as well.)

So I go away from the Internet for a few days and LJ causes a ruckus.

I've been meaning to start cross-posting with gramarye1971 at some point, so now seems as good a time as any to start. Not leaving, just cross-posting, as much for archival purposes as anything else. I know that several people on my flist are switching over to Dreamwidth entirely, to the point of closing comments on LJ, but I'm planning to keep my comments here open as usual. Those of you who already cross-post at DW, I won't be removing your LJs from my reading lists until I can convince myself that I'll be able to keep up with both sites, so if you want to stay current with me I'd recommend that you not defriend my LJ until I sort out my filters and other posting preferences. I'll post a heads-up when I feel like I've sorted everything out.

There'll be a post with actual content shortly, including rhapsodies of praise for my Yuletide-fic and My Thoughts on Yaoi the new Tinker Tailor movie (spoiler: not all of them are positive) and the Tintin movie. But for now, work.

Just got the final Utena boxset and watched Adolescence of Utena while I was cooking dinner.

Even a decade later, that movie never ceases to be awesome. *hearts*

I received a comment over on a To Bed With a Trollope earlier today, asking if one of my book reviews was part of a longer review that could be cited in an academic journal. Once I replied to the comment ('no, this is the full review, citation info for my blog is available at the following link'), I went back into my site stats to see where my visitor might have come from.

While I was reviewing the search engine information -- specifically, the search text that led visitors to the blog -- I started to notice a peculiar pattern. Instead of the usual queries with the name of a book or author, I found several queries that searched for phrases and even entire sentences from one or two of my reviews. The searched-for sentences had no strong relation to the book in question -- they didn't include a title or author, certainly -- but they were word for word from my reviews. And most of these queries seemed to come within the past week.

How strange, I thought.

And then I thought a little more.

Are students plagiarising my book reviews in their final papers, and then being caught by their professors who track them down by Googling suspicious strings of text from said papers and finding my blog and its book reviews in the search results?

If this is indeed the case, then I feel oddly...proud. Or something.

Today was chilly enough that a slow-cooker soup sounded like a good idea, so I poked around for inspiration and found a variation on the basic recipe for ärtsoppa, or Swedish yellow pea soup. It allowed me to use up a half-container of pancetta that's been in the fridge for a few weeks, and the finished product turned out fine.

( Basic recipe, for personal reference )

I might try to add the traditional accompaniments of pancakes and jam the next time I make it. Also, grainy mustard, which I do need to buy anyway at some point.

I am beginning to quietly despair of ever finding a new winter coat to match my specifications. During a shopping expedition yesterday, I had a brief flash of hope (nice coat sighted!) followed by a crumbling moment of woe (as always, it does not fit in the shoulders!). It doesn't help that I have a set of functional requirements that seem to be mutually exclusive:
- Long (must be below the knee, not easy for someone my height)
- Double-breasted
- Wool or wool blend
- No ridiculous trim (e.g., faux fur, excessive buckles or buttons, peculiar stand-up collars)
- Black (though dark grey would be an acceptable alternative)
- Able to accommodate my shoulders when I am wearing a reasonably weighty pullover (which so far means at least a US14/UK16)

The larger women's sizes almost never fit me in the waist. I've tried on men's overcoats, and found that they have plenty of shoulder and chest room but hang like a sack on my figure and make me look like I'm wearing a Burberry bathrobe. If I had any faith in my sewing skills beyond costuming purposes and basic repairs, I'd snag a cheap military surplus men's coat and try to alter it -- though I've been told that the construction of men's coats and women's coats is different enough to make this more challenging than it's worth. Really, it's almost worth trying to find a tailor who would run up one from whole cloth, because if I could get at least five or six years' wear out of it I would be willing to pay well beyond what I would spend for a ready-made coat.

In conclusion, fashion, you make me sad.

Someone on my local Craigslist is selling a 15/14 hammer dulcimer plus travelling case, stand, hammers, and electric tuner for what appears to me to be an insanely low price (i.e., less than what the instrument alone would go for new).

It would, unfortunately, wipe out my budgeted discretionary spending money for at least the next two months.

Also, I've never actually played a dulcimer before.

(newredshoes, this is sort of your fault by proxy for making me think about music lessons.)

I feel like I've posted this all over the place by now, but here it goes on my main journal. (And if you haven't heard of Capital Scandal, bookelfe's basic rec post is a good start!)

Title: Twentieth Century Blues
Fandom: Capital Scandal
Rating: 12/PG
Originally posted: 12 November 2011 (also available at bookofgramarye and AO3)
Summary: On nights like these, Cha Song Joo thinks of Russia.
Disclaimer: All original works are copyright of their respective owners; I lay claim only to this particular story.
Notes: Written for bookelfe for the dark_agenda 2011 Kaleidoscope fanworks challenge. This story takes place shortly before the start of the series; full notes are at the end.


( Twentieth Century Blues )

Now that I'm back from the long weekend and Kaleidoscope fic exchange reveals are up, I can finally write about my gifts!

From littlebutfierce, I received Conquered and Crumbled, a delightful Antique Bakery story about the labour of love that goes into making a perfect thank-you gift for a treasured person in your life. (Antique Bakery, for those who've never seen it, is a sweet and funny manga/anime/live-action series about four guys who run a fancy Western-style cake shop in Tokyo.) It is adorable gen-fic, and it made me ridiculously hungry for cupcakes. [EDIT: And here is the cupcake recipe around which the story is based!]

As for what I wrote....ahahaha. When I offered Capital Scandal as one of my fandom choices, I thought vaguely, 'Oh, maybe if I'm assigned it, I can ask bookelfe to beta for me!' And then I was promptly assigned to write Capital Scandal fic FOR her. So I howled, and panicked, and listened to some period-appropriate music, and wrote Twentieth Century Blues, which I will post separately very shortly. (I suspect that I will end up writing more Capital Scandal fic one of these days, now that I've dabbled in it with what seems to be reasonable success.) ^_^

Of course, all this reminds me that I am very behind on where I planned to be for Yuletide. This year promises to be another race to the finish....

Up in the Frigid North for the long weekend, and for some reason the wireless router is simply not working here. So my LJ postings will be sparse and e-mail checking will be sporadic until Tuesday, but I hope that U.S. Thanksgiving celebrators have a delicious day. ^_^

Saturday's anime fest!

On Saturday, geckoman and I trundled up to his old anime club's get-together to watch whatever happened to be on offer. It proved to be a mixed bag (as these things so often are), but three of the things we watched deserve broader mention:

(1) Ben-To is a currently running series which has one of those 'only in Japan' plots: high school students engaging in all-out combat for the half-price bentou (boxed meals) that go on sale in the evenings in convenience stores and supermarkets. The best fighters in these nightly bentou wars even have noms de guerre -- the Ice Witch, the Wizard, the Beauty by the Lake -- and our initially hapless protagonist is drawn into their world by the thrill of the hunt for the best bentou and the satisfaction of walking away victorious. We watched five episodes, which is about all that's available in fansubs at the moment. I may end up doing a pic-spam for the series if the whole thing turns out to be a show that I'd rec in its entirety.

(2 and 3) Two reboot versions of the classic sci-fi epic series Space Battleship Yamato (1974): the 2010 live-action remake and the 2009 animated quasi-sequel. I've never actually seen the entirety of the classic Yamato series, so watching the films back-to-back was an interesting experience for me, especially once we all started making jokes about the tropes (namely, being assigned to the Yamato's third bridge, which seemed to be the equivalent of being a Star Trek redshirt). It was nice to wallow in a bit of old-school nostalgia, even seen through the perspective of a reboot.

Sunday's DDR-stravaganza!

Then, last night, a few friends and I sat down for a 'DDR-stravaganza' movie night. To get a full emotional range of films, we went with everything from screwball comedy to serious drama, which meant that our line-up looked like this:
- Top Secret! (1984)
- Heißer Sommer (Hot Summer) (1968), the East German equivalent of the Beach Blanket Bingo Frankie-and-Annette films of the 1960s
- Goodbye, Lenin! (2003)
- Das Leben der Anderen (The Lives of Others) (2006).

If we'd had time, I would also have loved to re-watch East Side Story, a documentary about the film industry in various Warsaw Pact countries, but we had to set that one aside. It also reminded me that I've been meaning to watch the Billy Wilder film One, Two, Three, a satirical comedy set in Berlin and filmed right as the Wall was going up. One, Two, Three tanked at the box office on its initial release because its light-hearted take on East-West relations wasn't exactly welcomed at the time, but apparently acquired an almost Rocky Horror Picture Show cult following with young West Germans when it was re-released in the mid-1980s. I'll have to track it down somehow.


All in all, an enjoyable weekend, though I would have liked to avoid the nasty sinus headache that sent me to bed early on Saturday night and tried to make a second showing early this morning.

Linking over from my post on thedarkisrising: Susan Cooper at the 2011 National Book Festival in Washington, DC.

In the post, I've also copied the best bit of the interview transcript, where she talks about That Movie and how cheered she was by the howls of indignation from various corners of the Internet. ^_^