Jan. 8th, 2009 @ 04:02 pm Errata and addenda

It occurs to me as interesting that the same technique is crucial to survival in both extremely cold and extremely hot climates; breathe through your nose. Noses: useful for more than just keeping bugs out of your sinuses!

I wanted to say on the topic of Merlin (Okay, first, re: 113, did anyone else find it hilarious that Gaius riding looks like an empty oil-drum in the back of a pickup truck going down a dirt road? (Technically a spoiler, I guess, sorry if knowing Gaius' butt touches a horse ruins the episode for anyone)) the rules of magicspoiler )

ALSO on the subject of Merlin, I gather from third-hand reactions that someone somewhere has accused Merlin (either the fandom or the show, I'm really not clear) of something, and in case they were accusing the canon of being bad, I wish to immediately defend it by noting it is no more bad than the Pope is Catholic, and the accusation is similarly useless for defamatory purposes.

super-serious Avatar icons, third season spoilers )
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[info]brownbetty
Jan. 8th, 2009 @ 02:14 am not much going on
... that you'd want to hear about anyway You see, as Clara points out to me occasionally, what I should be using this blog for is to keep you all informed - and perhaps even interested - by a day to day account of just What It's Like To Be Mitch Benn, an insight into the fascinating professional life of Britain's Leading Musical Satirist (Chris Campling, The Times), rather than just (as Clara also points out) wasting everybody's time with pointless whimsy and bollocking on about Doctor Who.You see, as Clara points out to me occasionally, what I should be using this blog for is to keep you all informed - and perhaps even interested - by a day to day account of just What It's Like To Be Mitch Benn, an insight into the fascinating professional life of Britain's Leading Musical Satirist (Chris Campling, The Times), rather than just (as Clara also points out) wasting everybody's time with pointless whimsy and bollocking on about Doctor Who.

The trouble is, my professional life simply ISN'T that fascinating at the moment; in point of fact it's deathly quiet just now.  There's no Now Show and I'm not even gigging that much (January's a quiet month).  Oh I've been busy, with family stuff and admin gubbins (just about got my VAT return in on time this week, but do you really want to hear about that?).
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[info]mitchbenn_blog
Jan. 7th, 2009 @ 08:55 pm SGA rec

Through the Looking Glass, by Kristen999. Gen, team. (ca. 19,000 words)
The story had me on edge the whole time. It is great with the suspense, starting with a slowly growing sense of wrongness and urgency, that gets worse as some of the narrators become more affected. It's not extremely dark though, but a great mix of disturbing elements from their problems (which I don't want to spoil), angst, h/c and the team caring for each other.
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[info]ratcreature
Jan. 7th, 2009 @ 12:48 pm January 7, 2009
The Best of 2008

Memoirs of an Invisible Woman

Stating the obvious?

006 Comics: The He-Man Woman Hater's Club?

Comics by Women

Springboards For Controversy

We Don’t Need More Female Superheroes

Kibbles ‘n’ Bits

Dan Slott: New Poster Child For Women In Refrigerator Offenses?

A thought about The Spirit and Frank Miller, brought on by a 43-year-old essay

Neverwhere and Neil Gaiman’s Female Characters

The Spoiler, assault, motivations and what could have been horrible clichéd, yet somehow works

Empowered: Just when I think I'm out...

Comicbook Vacation.

Oh and ...

Comics: Young Liars

Rehab This Character: Tigra

Black Female SuperHero Tribute Video Volume 2

Batwoman: Unofficially official

Jewels are a girl's best friend

Carried Away

What Image Is More Sexist? (NSFW)

Just thought I'd point this out.

"Go on back to your overstuffed desk chair...and read your comic books!"

365 Days with Ben Grimm: Day 7

DC Direct Justice League of America Vixen Action Figure

It’s a Bird! It’s a Plane! It’s Gay Webcomics!


Indirectly Related
My problem with Twilight

The Feminism of Female Desire (Not so much ...)
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[info]fangirls_attack
Jan. 6th, 2009 @ 11:19 am Your Daily Dose of Adorable
2.1-Meter-Tall Pine-Cone Totoro Unveiled in Japan.

If only that had been in the Rose Bowl Parade, I might have watched.
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[info]arionhunter
Jan. 5th, 2009 @ 10:57 pm FIC: Five Conversations Cap Had About MySpace (That Weren't With Kat Farrell) [Captain America, gen]

Title: Five Conversations Cap Had About MySpace (That Weren't With Kat Farrell)
Characters: Steve Rogers (Captain America), Sharon Carter (Agent 13), Tony Stark (Iron Man), Nick Fury (Director of SHIELD), Rachel Leighton (Diamondback), Sam Wilson (Falcon)
Genre: Gen, humor.
Summary: Cap is intrigued by this new "MySpace" thing that kids today are using!
Word count: 2600ish
A/N: Thanks to [info]destroythemeek for betaing and encouraging me to write this. Any errors, particularly those MySpace related, are my own.

FIC: Five Conversations Cap Had About MySpace (That Weren't With Kat Farrell) )
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[info]caia_comica
Jan. 5th, 2009 @ 06:28 pm Yes, I took this picture on the same day I ate fried green tomatoes.


(Crappy quality due to time of day and rain.)

Only in Alabama.
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[info]arionhunter
Jan. 5th, 2009 @ 10:39 pm Frozen Bubbles! And Derek encourages Creativity

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/01/05/frozen-soap-bubbles.html

http://www.skipweasel.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/freezebubbles/album/slides/ice%20giant.html

***

I asked Derek for a text-fic while I was at the laundrette today. I got this:

In Dublin the rules had been different again - no one there looked twice at a rogue alchemist's tinted goggles, not if they wanted to keep their head, but in London, in London there was nothing but impertinent questioning. Jacob Silver had spent a month trying to acquire the necessary and it was testing his patience. Really, how hard could assassinating a Demon king BE?

More about Jacob Silver )
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[info]ruthi
Jan. 5th, 2009 @ 12:41 pm It's cold, and there are wolves

If you, like me, have a computer manufactured during the period when hamsterdance was new and annoying, rather than old and annoying, you may have problems with firefox getting slow and/or slowing your entire machine, if it's left open too long. The advice often given for this is to disable your extensions (which take up memory), or open fewer tabs (which take up memory). However, if, like me, you think the entire point of firefox is tabs and extensions, you may find this advice unhelpful and annoying. If you have less than a GB of RAM1 the following may be useful to you.

let's muck about in firefox's intestines! )
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[info]brownbetty
Jan. 5th, 2009 @ 11:00 am January 6th - Manga Edition
Commentary


Robot Feminism


Ai Kora versus 2nd wave feminism

Another post on anime and feminism

Rapeman?!

Death Note Essays

Favorite Shoujo manga heroines

Chicks On Anime Pornography for Women

Happy Snowflake Day, arr.

The Problem with Moé

Reviews

Angel's Coffin

Castle of Dreams

The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya Vol 1 Manga Review

Manga Review: Mao-chan Vol 1

Angel's Coffin

Review: Color of Rage

"Ai no Poltergeist" by Koiwazurai Shibito

Suppli 3

Object of Desire by Tomoko Noguchi Manga Review

You Will Fall In Love; A Capable Man, by Hinako Takanaga

St. Dragon Girl

Today's Ulterior Motives by Sakuya Fujii

Yuri Manga: Girl Friends, Volume 2

Review: Shards of Affection
After School Nightmare by Setona Mizushiro

NANA Vol. #13

Breath (yaoi review)

A few of the things I've read lately

Vagabond Vol. #01 (VizBig Edition)


Yuri Manga: Clover

Himitsu no Oniisan, by MAKITA Nao

Phantom Dream, Vol. 1

Review: Seduce Me After the Show

From the stack: Cross X Break 1 and 2


Kitchen Princess Vol 2 by Natsumi Ando Manga Review

Go West! Vol 1 by Yu Yagami Manga Review

Whatever You Like: I Be Trippin' Manga

Review: Cross x Break (Vol. 02)

*Parasyte — Recommended Series
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[info]fangirls_attack
Jan. 5th, 2009 @ 02:05 pm not sure what to tell you...
So I weighed myself once, got 20 st 7, which would have meant I'd lost all my Xmas weight in one week, which seemed faintly improbable, as between you and me, while I haven't been eating like it's still Xmas I haven't exactly been obeying the letter of the Weight Watchers law either.  But I should have quit while I was ahead, 'cos trying again I got a reading of about 21 stone, which would mean I'd put MORE weight on or last week's reading was off to begin with. 

Of course it's entirely possible with my wibbly scales that neither of these reading is correct anyway, but in any event it's clear that henceforth we're back on the wagon proper, points counted and logged and everything.
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[info]mitchbenn_blog
Jan. 5th, 2009 @ 10:45 am fanart, Weighing of the Heart (Sandman)

Fandom: Sandman
Characters/Pairings: Morpheus, Matthew
Media used: pencil drawing, inked with fine liner pens, acrylic paint
Rating/warnings: G, none
Notes/comments: This was my Yuletart gift for Rasetsunyo. Besides Morpheus and Matthew, Rasetsunyo mentioned in the requests (for another, non-Sandman fandom) the Egyptian pantheon, and also liking crossovers. This isn't really a crossover with the other fandom, but I thought it would still work to mix Morpheus into in one of the classic scenes of the Egyptian afterlife, i.e. the Weighing of the Heart. So there's Anubis weighing the heart against the feather of truth, Thoth keeping the records, and Ammit (the crocodile/lion/hippo mix demon) waiting to eat the unworthy hearts. I decided to show the waiting soul as Ba with a bird body and human head. I'm not sure why Morpheus is there, but I figured that the Egyptians connected their afterlife underworld to the night and to the journey of the sun might be good enough for this Endless to show up there.
Preview: preview of Weighing of the Heart
Somehow Morpheus and Matthew ended up in the Egyptian afterlife. Image and high resolution details are behind the cut. )
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[info]ratcreature
Jan. 5th, 2009 @ 02:52 am who?
A lot of people are asking me for my thoughts on the casting of Matt Smith as the next Doctor Who (oh alright, the next The Doctor. Happy now?); my initial reaction is that I'd never heard of him and he looks about 15.  Of these two thoughts, the first is irrelevant and so is the second. I don't pay that much attention to the telly these days (I think I did actually see that Philip Pullman thing he was in with Billie Piper, but neither it nor he seems to have made much of an impression) and his youth makes no odds when the whole point of The Doctor is that he looks centuries younger than he is. Looking 879 years less than your age really isn't that different to looking 867 years less than your age. Besides, by the time he actually starts he'll only be two years younger than Peter Davison was when he took over.


My next reaction - apart from surprise that it wasn't Paterson Joseph after all - is that the fact that he looks about 15 aside, it's actually a less radical choice than many of us were expecting; they're going from a young skinny floppy-haired white bloke to a very young skinny floppy-haired white bloke.  Some of the most effective recent casting decisions have been the most audacious (not many people would have thought of Daniel Craig for James Bond before it happened) so in that regard it feels a bit of a letdown, but here's the thing...
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[info]mitchbenn_blog
Jan. 4th, 2009 @ 01:06 pm Also, there is a video of a seeing-eye pony.
You know how some TV is just very... soothing, because it consists entirely of a very simple morality tale that we want to believe in. Like Law and Order: it begins with an upset in the moral order of the universe, but by the end, bad people are punished, and good people win out. For me, the epitome of this is dog-training videos: there is a person and a dog who like each other, and the dog is good, and then the dog gets rewarded! Lots of things will do this for me, sheep dog trials, agility trials*, search and rescue training, guide dog training...

Sorry, got lost in youtube dog videos for a moment there. Anyway, so last night I was watching videos of clicker training. It's very Skinnerian, which doesn't actually bother me too much, although the one video of the lady conditioning a fish to react to a flashing light did remind me of a creepy story I came across when I was young, of children trapped in a maze and conditioned to a flashing light (anyone know what I'm talking about?) but all in all I'm not too bothered by the fact that my brain is easily hacked since I'm the one doing most of the hacking.

But, what is totally creepy is that clicker trainers don't refer to it as "training" or "conditioning" or "behaviour modification" or any kind of honest if antiseptic terminology. They call it "shaping." Like topiary. There is something totally creepifying about "shaping," the sheer euphemism of it, like something out of 1984, or some other science fiction dystopia. Eeeurgh.

*You'll notice a lot of Border Collies. This is because if you don't give a Border Collie something to do, it will find something to do. That will end badly.
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[info]brownbetty
Jan. 4th, 2009 @ 11:44 am Yuletide!

So I got 15 Steps Forward for Yuletide, which is a wonderful post-"Snowbirds Don't Fly" [the Roy on heroin plotline] fic that does a better job than about anything I've ever seen of accounting for the aftermath of that. Mostly from Ollie's POV; he's *trying*, the poor clueless dear ♥. (Notable things about Caia, for those who didn't know me very well in my full-on GL/GA phase: I love Ollie even when he's being stupid. Sometimes especially.) Also Hal/Ollie, just to make it additionally dear to my heart. Written by Perpetual Motion, who I do not know but possibly should!

I myself wrote two fics for Yuletide. For my assignment, I wrote Two in Extremis for Imaginary Alice, which is Carol 'n' Tony bodymerge action-adventure fic. Those of you who IM with me can remember my flip-out when the inevitable happened and, having unwisely offered "any" for Avengers/New Avengers, I got Carol Danvers and Tony Stark. I'm...mostly pleased with how it turned out, I guess, although I feel it could be better. Comics and comic fic aren't very good training for writing fight scenes--the latter because you don't *get* many, the former because it's all in pictures rather than words. It's an art I'd like to learn more of, though.

Thanks so much to anyone I was IMing in December for putting up for me, to [info]destroythemeek and [info]second_batgirl for pressing [info]imaginaryalice for details, and to [info]mizzmarvel for last-minute beta.

And then there's the Yuletide treat I wrote for [info]destroythemeek, Dinner With Bernie, which is just what it says on the tin: Bernie Rosenthal takes Steve Rogers [Captain America, in case anyone around here is still confused] out to dinner. I'm probably on the whole more pleased by how that one turned out, because it was less ambitious, even if I *did* write it on airplanes and in airports on Christmas eve and talk [info]second_batgirl into betaing late that evening. Bernie was fun to write!
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[info]caia_comica
Jan. 4th, 2009 @ 02:20 am First Post of 2009
Another Brick in the Wall

Blog@Newsarama: Twilight, Elitism, Feminism and Romanticism

DC Direct Green Lantern Star Sapphire Action Figure

Faces of Color: Webcomic MAGELLAN

Fantastic Four #562

Gearhead 1

Ho Ho Ho! Comics Mock Domestic Abuse

New Savage She-Hulk?

The Baby-Sitter's Club, by Anne M. Martin and Raina Telgemeier

The Spirit - The Review

TOP TEN: Best and worst webcomics

Turning The Other Cheek
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[info]fangirls_attack
Jan. 4th, 2009 @ 12:45 am GIP

I needed a Numb3rs icon. I hope they are at least sort of recognizable. Somehow Don and Charlie aren't the easiest to realize as ratcreatures.

larger version behind the cut )
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[info]ratcreature
Jan. 3rd, 2009 @ 01:20 am it goes on...
(with illustrations) The "Ben & Mitch" story has turned up - reprinted more or less verbatim from the Sun article - in the Daily Star now.  This is lazy journalism on so many different levels of laziness it's actually quite hard to calculate.  I notice, however, that they've reprinted the lyric without permission...The "Ben & Mitch" story has turned up - reprinted more or less verbatim from the Sun article - in the Daily Star now.  This is lazy journalism on so many different levels of laziness it's actually quite hard to calculate.  I notice, however, that they've reprinted the lyric without permission...


Sod that, have a look at this instead: it's the MySpace page of a family friend who's just finished his illustration degree.  I really like his stuff; he's got a definite touch of the Jamie Hewletts going on but with a more obvious hip-hop influence.  He's done a few CD covers and DJ posters already.  I reckon he should get into graphic novels...
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[info]mitchbenn_blog
Jan. 2nd, 2009 @ 06:06 pm Jack is a genius, or NOM NOM SALAD NOM.
Current Mood: satisfied
Current Music: The Awkward Stage: "The Morons Are Winning"
Tags:

This dressing is designed for a salad of kale, tomato, and cubanelle pepper, but you could easily substitute other greens and/or other accompanying vegetables. (You might also have to make other substitutions if you don't have these ingredients... but we highly recommend all of them.)

*homerdrool* )
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[info]thete1
Jan. 2nd, 2009 @ 08:20 pm dead-tree reading 2008
Tags:

It's always somewhat embarrassing for me to do the "books I read over the year" memes, because most of my reading is fanfic (as my del.icio.us bookmarks show), so there are never many books to list, and I look illiterate. Anyway, last year I read:

Earth Logic, by Laurie J. Marks
Small Favor, by Jim Butcher
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, by Mark Haddon
Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer (actually the whole saga, i.e. Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse and Breaking Dawn)
The Final Solution, by Michael Chabon
Victory of Eagles, by Naomi Novik
One Virgin Too Many, by Lindsey Davis
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, by Michael Chabon
A Companion to Wolves, by Sarah Monette and Elizabeth Bear
Magic Bites, by Ilona Andrews
Moon Called, by Patricia Briggs
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon

Also two SGA tie-in novels:
Casualties of War, by Elizabeth Christensen
Blood Ties, by Sonny Whitelaw and Elizabeth Christensen
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[info]ratcreature