Like Trying to Hide the Daylight From the Sun

Psych #1: Why is the first word you always use to describe yourself "short"?
Me: Because it's the obvious one. "Look for the short chick." People pick me out of a crowd every time.
Psych #1: You seem to focus on being small, it comes up almost randomly in conversation. Why is that?
Me: Because it's not something I ever have a chance to forget about.
Psych #1: Why? Do other people always bring it up? Because you seem to be the one always bringing it up in our conversations.
Me: No, it's because... well, being as short as I am is really tedious.
Psych #1: I don't understand. How is being short tedious?
Me: Like when I cook, if I need something in the pantry, I have to climb up a stool to grab it. God help me if I forget to grab everything I need in one trip, otherwise it's back up the stool. And standing in grocery aisles, waiting for someone, anyone to show up to grab something for me. People are always nice about it, but I'm still the one always stuck there waiting for them.
Psych #1: Huh. I never thought of it like that.

Hi. I'm Morag! There's a number of new people about (I'll get to that in a minute), and it's been awhile since I posted anything that wasn't, well, porn (there's an explanation!), so an intro/update post isn't uncalled for. I've been doing a lot of tumblr-ing too, which has added think-y things, as well as thesis-ing, so more thinking. But yeah, first thing to know about me: I'm 4'9", short enough for it to be annoying, not quite so short that people ask if it's a symptom. Also probably a good giveaway up there: the necessity of numbering my psychiatrists and psychologists.

( Knitting, porn, philosophy, fic, and more disturbing insights... )

Many thanks to thecookiemomma  for this lovely banner
This is a multi-fandom comment-fic meme based on the following exchange:

Callowyn: to me, there is no such thing as a crack pairing.
Morag: Would you ship Arthur from Inception with Tom from 500 Days of Summer?
Callowyn: dude, I invented a verse solely for reasons of misha kissing misha. I WOULD SHIP ANYONE WITH THEMSELVES. AND YOU CAN QUOTE ME ON THAT.
Morag: Challenge accepted.

And there’s so much to work with! How many times have characters canonically met their past selves, or alternate reality versions of themselves, or an evil doppelganger, or even run across the actors that play them? How many crossovers have you read where someone meets their look-alike from another universe? Think of the classic Buffy episode The Replacements, in which Riley Finn says of two Xanders: "Doesn't it make everyone wanna lock them in separate rooms and do experiments on them?"

Fuck that shit, let's see what happens when they're locked in a room together! Maybe they'll have sex? Awesome. We all love imagining pretty faces making out with each other. Now it’s time to imagine pretty faces making out with themselves!
( We can all pretend that this meme had nothing to do with Mirror!Spock’s goatee, but we would be lying. )

This is a comment I just put up on igrick's updated post, but it has wider applications, so I'm dumping it here too. 

A note to users of RP, Meme and other communities, where subject line is crucial for operation: for the moment we are developing only standard commenting representation, well know in LiveJournal as S1 styles, but we will keep subject lines, both in terms of form and representation, in advanced — S2 — styles, and provide an ability to keep it forever for certain communities, as well as, by request, will develop an extra functionality for such communities thru OpensSocial applications going public next year.

No. Nyet. Nein. La. Lo. Bu. Non. I've run out of languages in which to tell you that "this is a bad idea." Your lovely, elegant, bandwidth-gobbling new design retains the vertical space-hogging Icon dividers between comments, so you're not conserving space for body text. All you're doing by eliminating subject lines is removing functionality. If subject headings REALLY bother you, make the option to turn them OFF, not on.

In fact-- ATTENTION ALL WEB DESIGNERS:

Rule One (1): When it comes to privacy options, users want to default "opt out". This is because users like to control who has access to their personal information. Not abiding by this rule will get you investigated by the FTC and you may be forced to pay millions of dollars in fines, like Facebook! (igrick: please remember this rule whenever you decide to implement whatever "OpenSocial applications" are. They sound like a terrible idea already.)

Rule Two (2): When it comes to functionality options, especially pre-existing functions, users want to default "opt in". This is because users hate change. Not abiding by this rule is why no one uses delicious.com anymore, and why NetFlix is about to go under!

Oh--and Rule Three (3): every time you add a functionless animation or a needless transparency to your site/program design, you kill a baby panda (and further alienate users who have bandwidth limits or aging hardware).

/don't be a panda killer

(LJ-Only Post because DW up and disappeared on me and ate the original version of this as I tried to sneak it in before the deadline for the server upgrade.  And anyway, I've decided to include a poll anyway, so nyah!)[Poll #1802781]

Because there's something else that brassed me off about last night's Supernatural episode.

Inspired by Kalliel's post about writing posts emphasizing all the awesome things that Supernatural fans do that aren't related to fandom.  I'm gonna take a slightly different tack.  I defend my fan-girl status.  Because being a fan-girl (or fan-boy)? Does not automatically turn you into a horrible person. We come from lots of different backgrounds.  Not all fan girls and fan-boys were picked on in high school. Some of us have engaging social lives and/or successful careers and/or sex with attractive people without resorting to black magic. Sometimes we even have interests outside of the things we're fans of. And watch out: we have a habit of taking over the asylum eventually.  So here's a few examples of awesome people whom we can count among our own ranks.

( You can tell that it's more fun to be a fan, because all the cool kids are doing it )

(Warning: many things in this post make me despise large sectors of humanity. But I have good intentions.)

Okay, so if you don't check fandom_wank regularly, apparently SPN-fandom has reacted to the news of the potential-mini-Padalecki in spectacular and horrific form.

Yeah. I've already spewed my RAEG at Squid. But, well, even the vaguest connections that I might have to some of those nonnies at spn_gossip make me feel all filthy-by-proxy (and not in a good, porny way either), because for whatever reason I believe in the concept of karma if not the actual existence of it. Thus, my immediate reaction is to note that Mr. & Mrs. Padalecki have requested that in lieu of presents for their sprog, they'd much rather have folks donate to St. Jude's Children's Hospital, a fine and noble cause, and whip out my credit card... oh wait:

I don't have a lot of cash on hand (I'm donating what remains of my "buying a dress and having a good time in NYC/Washington" fund - about $35), and when it comes to things like this, I like to make sure the charity gets every bloody cent. Which brings me to my next point, because I am also a bleeding-heart-anti-corporate-liberal crusader: did you know that most credit cards don't waive their merchant processing fees (usually approx. 3%) for charitable donations? I didn't until the Haiti Earthquake, when a bunch of them got called on it and they temporarily reduced but didn't eliminate the charges for donations headed to Haiti.

(Sorry, I have to go smoke a cigarette while hating humanity for a second after remembering this fact. My misanthropic tendencies are having a field day today.)

Anyway, I'll be sending my donation to St. Jude's via check, but there is (potentially) another option. And here's another thing I never thought I'd do: endorse Capital One. Despite being one of my least favorite and predatory usurers, they redeem themselves through a program called "No Hassle Giving" wherein you can look up a charity on their website and donate using (only) a Capital One credit card and 100% of the donation actually goes to the charity. For the lazy, here's the link to the form to donate to St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital.

If you have a Capital One card, I highly recommend going this route, if only to encourage its continued existence and maybe help shame the other companies into following suit. If anyone else knows of a permanent site that performs the same function for any other credit card company, please feel free to share. For everyone else, here's the form for donating to St. Jude's by check.

Also, I'd love it if I could get a signal boost on this information, but I refuse to go anywhere near spn_gossip right now, I'm not sure that it's appropriate for spnanonhaven or any of the other fandom comms I'm a part of, and I don't have twitter or tumblr - if someone has the balls to tweet it to Jared I'll actually dig around and find ten more bucks to throw on the check in your name (and hell, I'll throw in a charity fic prompt as well, because hey, that's how fandom rolls - at least a drabble, any fandom except for RPF/J2 for obvious reasons, to the first person who sends the tweet). Feel free to copy/paste any of the above information and spread it however you can - I don't care if my name's attached to it, I just can't stand pretty much any of the facts that I've just listed above and I'm gonna stop now before my RAEG gets completely out of hand. But if you have any questions, go ahead and ask.

A few more tidbits (because when my symptoms are bad I don't like to say much, and I have to get these things out while I can)

1.  I'm signed up for the spn_j2_bigbang  - and can't really work on my story too much, because I need more canon.  Still, I've gone through like eight pages of the sign ups (boy, that's a popular challenge) and no one else is writing my pairing, so I'm excited.

2.  I'm also signed up for the sncross_bigbang  - round three for them, but my second time around in that challenge - last year I produced one of my favorite stories ever for them.  This year I'm actually finishing the story I put down to write that fic, Dead Letters, so this is official notice that there won't be any more updates to that until I have a posting date - but a promise that it will be finished.

3.  I'm actually MORE excited about reading (and possibly beta-ing) claudiapriscus' story for that challenge - ah, but I've already said too much.

4.  I'm on sale again, this time to help_queensland - as I told lexhibition , I'm broke and have not much else to offer. Yes, I'll be able to write your fic in the midst of all this other stuff, I swear (I came through the last time, I'll come through again). You can find my post here.  Starting bid is $5, so have at, or go offer your own services, my insanely talented and wonderful friends.

So, marking the end of my inaugural Holiday Smut-Spree (and no, I'd never written a word of porn before this, not even on kink meme), I co-wrote a Robo!Sam/2014!Dean/2014!Cas fic with [Poll #1664580]

Oh, bespoke waiter, why must your breath-taking beauty, even with a lousy haircut, rob me of all powers of intelligent or even coherent speech?  I might be able to woo you with my wits but everytime I see you my tongue gets all mushy and I start to drool a little bit.  And once again, I left my take-out container on the table afterwards because I had to run out of the restaurant and go fan myself before I regained the capability for rational thought.

And yet over at the love meme, my beloved f-list keeps accusing me of being intelligent.  Foolish mortals - you've never seen me wilt in the light of the Adonis of my libidinous dreams.  Despite your misconceptions, however, I still love you all and remain totally humbled by the concept that such awesome people are so fond of my absurd scribblings.

Bunch of quick notes because I finally feel like I'm making actual progress on my Master's report but all sorts of stuff is going on in fandom and I haven't been keeping up.

1. Reena_jenkins posted two more of my Buffy/Doctor Who stories as podfics - Impossible Things and its sequel, Sitting, Waiting, Wishing. She is made of awesome and she did a fantastic job. [Link to podfics]

2. There's a Supernatural crossover comment!fic meme going on that really needs more love: twisted_yarns. I've posted two prompts and responded to one (you can probably guess which one is me, even though I've never written that particular crossover before). Go give it love! [link to the current prompt post]

3.  I'm up to three thousand words on my help_pakistan fic and have acquired a beta for it, the lovely jjhunter .  I should be able to finish under the deadline, which is good, although I've forgotten when the deadline is, which is bad.

4.  Speaking of jj, in exchange for her work, I'm beta-ing her very interesting Batman/BtVS story and having a blast talking meta with her.  The story's YAHF, not a genre I usually enjoy, but this one's an exception and it's incredibly thoughtful while also being funny and intriguing.  Good stufff: [Link to Knight of Faith]

5.  Very excited about the author claims post going up for the Supernatural reversebigbang.  I've had good luck writing stories based on art before (see item #1) and it'll be yet another notch on my (slowly growing) single-fandom bedpost.  On the other hand: just what I needed, another thing to write.  AAAAAACCCCKKKK!

That being said, back to Arab philosophy with me.  Al-Ghazali was such a card.