The limits of alternate universes

Song of the day: Nothing to Prove - Geek Girls & The Double Clicks

To distract myself from the amazing fact that I am going to my first con (AlCon, Leicester, England) in just a few days on top of seeing London for the first time (sweet jesus I can't breathe.) I have been thinking about alternate universes, particularly in fiction.

So in Terry Pratchett's Night Watch, there is a conversation between the History Monk Lu-Tze and Commander Sam Vimes on the subject of Alternate Universes. For plot-relevant and spoileriffic reasons, Lu-Tze indicates the possibility that that means there must be at least one universe where Vimes, for example, has killed his wife. Vimes, of course, doesn't buy this for a second; for him it's literally impossible. And Lu-Tze says that, yes, there is no universe where Sam Vimes, as he is now would ever do such a thing. This indicates that people's choices really do matter, something which has been a running theme throughout the whole of Discworld, and that's a pretty freeing thought. Something might not make a difference historically, but it will certainly matter personally.

That brings me to the potential of fiction AUs. It seems that there are some things so deeply ingrained in a story and the characters that make them (and are made by them) that some fundamental things would not change. For example, I' pretty sure there is no universe where Samwise Gamgee does not follow Frodo on his quest, or where Elizabeth Bennett does not reject Mister Collins, because it's such a big part of their character. It's probably even stronger when it comes to interpersonal relationships; there is no Holmes without Watson, there is no Kirk without Spock.

The subject of as he is now brings up that other space/time continuities where things do in fact not go that way. But there you have to interfere a lot earlier in the timeline and essentially make them into completely different people for them to do those things in the first place. And even then that gets Jossed sometimes, as exemplified by the Mirror Verse and the reboot in Star Trek, where Kirk and Spock are very different from who they are in the original series.

I find it fascinating to try to figure out what the set-in-stone part of a character is based on this observation. Of course this can be debated back and forth, but there are probably one or two things that most people can agree on. Back to the first point, everyone who has so much as sniffed a Watch book knows the idea that it would even occur to Sam Vimes to harm his family is ludicrous, just as he would never take a bribe or not uphold the law. That's what makes him Sam Vimes.

Of course that doesn't mean that AU fics aren't lovely and give us a whole lot of potential for awesome stories - go nuts, give us more great fics to read!

Back on the subject of my trip to England (ooh, boy) I shall be cosplaying as Zee Captain!

 Just another day after the end of the world

Yes, the insane maybe-protagonist of the equally insane webcomic Romantically Apocolyptic. I am quite apprehensive, and have been working on my bad German accent (which he (she?) might not even have, but is just something that sticks with me. It's something which I am really excited about both because this will be my first cosplay and because I feel like I've been pretty successful with it. I'll post some photos and stuff from the con some other day.

Love =/= Romance?

Song of the day: Do the Hippogriff - The Weird Sisters

So here's the thing. I hate romantic comedies. Always have, always will. Even Titanic, which is not exactly comedic, does not escape my wrath; while my cousin was watching it for the fifth time and still crying, I could barely last all the way through. That was the first and only time I watched it.

It's just the fact that there never seems to be any deviation from the formula: A man and a woman meet, instantly dislike each other (not always the case, but happens disturbingly often) and would rather eat a live snake than be in the same room as each other. Then something MAGICAL happens and suddenly they can't keep their hands off each other, no real explanation given aside from sexual tension. Which, you know, is far from impossible, but unlike what TV executives want us to think, wanting to have sex with someone and loving them isn't necessarily the same thing -_- It is what my friend refers to as the 'I hate you!' 'I hate you!' 'Love me.' pattern.

Theeeen something convoluted happens (it looks like one of them is cheating but they really aren't and the other doesn't give them a chance to explain/there is some stupid misunderstanding/one of them has to leave and doesn't want to 'hurt' the person by actually admitting that they, you know, love them/they get attacked by a rouge platypus and suffer extremely selective memory loss) and they want us to think oh no tragedy how will this ever be fixed aaaand then it's easily fixed in about the last ten minutes of the movie. Done.

At first, I wasn't quite sure why I disliked romantic comedies so much (a lot of genres are formulaic and that's often even a part of the charm). I thought that romance just couldn't carry a whole story by itself because it focused too hard on just those two (or more) people involved, but that couldn't be it because a lot of stories do that with no romantic intent involved. Then I thought it was just because I'm not a particularly romantic person (or so they tell me) or at least not traditionally so, and that's probably a part of it. That and western culture tends to... well, I don't want to say 'overvalue' romantic relationships, but that's essentially what I mean, at the cost of familial and platonic relationships (which are just as important as romantic ones.)

I was even under the impression that my aversion extended all over the romance genre, up until I read Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. And that's when I realized that this story is essentially the formula of romantic comedies before it became a formula, only done right.

So let's do this as a case study:

Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy meet, and their first impressions of each other are not very flattering (and for a good reason.) They assume that they know all there is to know about each other from those brief glimpses, and continue to happily despise each other for some time. Their Pride (Darcy) and Prejudice (Elizabeth) prevent them from realizing their mistakes.

Then, starting first and foremost with Darcy, they began to understand that their first impressions were erroneous, limited and incomplete (as most first impressions are). As he has, in the words of The Lizzie Bennet Diaries all 'the social skills of an agoraphobic lobster,' he is able to see her as she really is, but she is unable to see him, due to the aforementioned lack of social skills and also her prevailing prejudice.

It is only after he confesses her love to her (a scene which I love not just because of the excellent writing but also because of how she rejects him, which of course made perfect sense given what she knows of him so far) that she later gets the opportunity to see him as anything else but prideful, snobbish and lacking in empathy. This is primarily through his actions towards others, unrelated to her. She now knows that he is in fact a good man, if an awkward and slightly bad-tempered one. Then she begins to love him, as he loves her, and by acknowledging their mistakes and learning from them, they both become better people.

On top of that, a huge part of the charm is that it's not just a love story in the romantic sense of the word, but a love story about the whole of the Bennett family (in a familial way - not the creepy incestuous kind of way). You get invested not just in the leads, but also in the other characters and their trials and tribulations.

(And I will always love Jane Austen for writing Darcy as a genuinely good man that respects Lizzie's boundaries. Even after he confesses his love to her and she almost cruelly rejects him he doesn't bring it up again, up until the moment when he has reason to believe he does have a chance with her. And even then he promises never to bring it up again if her feelings towards him remain unchanged. And this is in 18t/19th century England, people! Contemporary so-called 'friendzoned' men could learn from this.)

And that brings me to the conclusion that romantic comedies are in fact not about love. They are about what society wants love to be - a whole lot less complicated and much more dramatic than real life tends to be. But think of the stories that could be made (that are being and have been made) if romantic comedies contained anything close to resembling real people.

Well, that's my two cents on the subject. Now excuse me while I go and explode from feels at all the new Spirk fic materializing on the internet.

P.s. Jane Austen will make it to the UK 10 pound note! Huzzah!

I shall henceforth be known as the Baron of Bucharest

Song of the day: Jazz me Blues - The Original Dixieland Jazz Band

My evening could be summed up a little something like this

Well, really it was a restaurant, and about a week ago (I'm a lazy blogger). And it was five Muslims, not just one (which makes the Catholic Europa and me the atheist) Take that, xenophobic societal expectations!

Yes, I have arrived back from Romania (Transylvania, really. Or TRANSylVAnia!!1!) And it was unimaginably lovely in every respect; lovely nature, lovely architecture, lovely weather, lovely food (though with a distressing lack of sauce) and most of all, lovely people. Without them, the whole trip would have been nothing in comparison (but, lets face it, still pretty damn awesome). Amazingly enough the only people I didn't absolutely love were my own countrypeople (excluding Europa. Sssh, don't tell her) and that's because I'm not supposed to; I know what we're like. Well, that and the fact that Icelanders are notorious for getting outrageously swazzled every time they step outside their territory. Not pretty, a fall-down-drunk Icelandic tourist on a foreign airport (especially because they've generally got enough practice still to be standing, despite being fall-down-drunk.)

But it's my country; I'm supposed to grumble about it. It's a sign of patriotism.

After having spent eight days at Cristuru Secuiesc (where it almost took all my time just to learn to say that) we arrived back in Bucharest (where we had spent one day before moving on, and got seriously lost at least three times) and proceeded to get lost again some astounding four times more. Urban planning? Not really a thing in that city.

And I loved it. I didn't think you could fall in love with a place in less than four days, but apparently you can. I loved the strangely often fried food, I hated (but still kinda loved) the searing heat, how (in the words of Europa) it always felt like you were on your way out of a sauna but never actually made it out. I loved the total unnecessity (not a word but the best I can come up with) of blankets while sleeping (or pajamas, for that matter). I loved the totally weird architecture, where you'd just be walking down the road and then BAM suddenly there is this palace-like gorgeous thing next to you and it looks totally run down which somehow makes it even more beautiful. I love the total lack of tourists. I love the public spaces, the insane traffic, the fact that there are almost six times as many people living in that one city than in my entire country. I will declare my life successful should I ever make it back to București, România.

It's strange that a place I had almost no knowledge of previously would become so voluminous in my mind. I mean, the extend of my former connection to it was that my grandfather was sometimes called 'the Baron of Bucharest' (the joke being that he was a graveyard keeper and in Icelandic the literal translation of Búkarest would be 'a place where corpses rest.' Yeah, my family is morbid.)

But yeah, there we were, me and Europa and our five friends from Turkey (Alliteration!) the only ones attending the project left in the country. We had decided to stick together while we were still there (and as formerly mentioned we got lost quite a lot) and had a really grand time; visited a bunch of museums, restaurants, shops and landmarks. But most of all I remember talking about everything and nothing, and learning how that the more we seemed different due to our cultures, the more I realized we were the same. Like, intellectually I am aware of all the biased or just untrue crap media and society pours into our brains on everything different, but fully realizing it is a whole different pack of lemmings. And it was a great thing to have happen to me, good for my social and mental health. It, to quote a certain YA author, let me imagine people more complexly (which will come in handy while writing, I imagine.) It is probably what I appreciate the most about this trip, retrospectively.

I'll probably write more on our various exploits when I can be arsed, since it seems I will have plenty of time (stupid economy...) Don't cheer all at once.

Salutări.

Operation Vampire Hunt and predicting the future

Song of the day: Þjóðvegur 66 (Road 66) - KK

Today started out pretty good, and promises to get better. DOMA got overruled, I had a croissant for breakfast, and oh, yeah. I'm going to Romania tonight.

That's right, who's going vampire hunting? This guy.

So this might for the time being turn into a travel blog (exciting, isn't it.) and document my discoveries and trials at a course/convention on youth unemployment. After that, me and my friend who shall henceforth be known as The Queen of the Flying Tigers (at her request; I'll think of something shorter) will frolic about the country, and among other things visit Castle Bran; one of the several places linked for marketing purposes  to the disturbing individual known is pop culture as Count Dracula. Full name Vlad 'The Impaler' Dracul III.

We will be staying at a location in Transylvania, and this will cause me quite a bit of distress for the reason that after watching that awful Sandler flick Hotel Transylvania, I am utterly incapable of pronouncing it normally. Instead it will sound like I am being injected with a syringe full of clichéd stereotypical accents while being electroshocked at the same time and it goes something like 'TRANSilVANia!!!'

I will therefore resist all and any impulse to ever say the name. This may prove difficult.

From what I've seen, the temperature in Romania at the moment and for the foreseeable future will be hanging somewhere around 30 degrees Centigrade. This, of course, means that my brain is going to melt and I am going to DIE. Because, you see, here in this particular part of the northern hemisphere, we call it summer when the temperature rises over ten degrees, and 17 degrees for any amount of time is considered a heat wave. We do occasionally get something like 24 degree, at which point we stop wearing clothes at all and sleep outside. But I exaggerate (only a little bit:)

I'm not even going to get a tan, because I don't get tans; I get slightly weathered, or in extreme cases bleached, rather like a piece of driftwood on a foreign beach. And if I don't wear sunscreen at, like, strength 30-50, I'll burn so badly I won't be able to move. But I shall prevail; I have churches and museums and weird shops to see and people to meet! I even intend to wear my Pizza John shirt as much as I can in the vain hope that I will meet other Nerdfighters, and that they won't be discouraged from talking to the maniac with the giant map getting lost as soon as she steps outside her hostel in midtown Bucharest.

It's odd, though, how things turn out. I didn't ever expect going to Romania of all places; I don't even know anyone who's gone there, but I immediately got excited when the Queen (let's just call her Europa. For the moon/continent, not the mythological figure. Though I could of course make some nasty and uncalled for joke regarding her love of animals) told me about the project and since we could both afford it we thought why not? Although when looking at the photos she was a tad discouraged by the fact that the architecture looked very similar to Poland, from whence she originally hails. But we think it will still be different enough to be very interesting and worth visiting. It will be an adventure.

So I'll try to upload some pictures of interesting things and some interesting facts/happenstances as well once we've began our journey.

Now all I need is Rafiki to shower us with pieces of wisdom and make us get lost and we're set.

Fiction is strange, but reality needn't make sense

Song of the day: Combine Harvester - The Wurzels

So right now I really should be working on the Harry Potter fanfic which seems determined to overtake my life, but I have got to get today's happenings out of my system or I might actually go a bit barmy.

Sometimes, working at a grocery store is kinda boring. There are the bad days, where you end up with that person that's always late and can only be persuaded into doing something with a forklift, and the good days, where there is just the right amount of customers for you to actually get a chance to eat your lunch. And then there are days that are just... weird.

For example last week, when over two days I met two elderly men who both happened to be missing their left thumb. And yesterday when the local vicar paid for his 198 krónu Diet Coke entirely in ones and fives (which takes ages to count and the UK/US equivalent is probably someone paying entirely in pennies.) And that time when some woman threatened to stop doing business with us because we were out of her preferred brand of butter.

And today, when a seventy year old man in a leather jacket and a Mohawk bought a pineapple, talked to me about mathematics, in which he concluded that the only numbers in existence were 1-9, and that Darwin's theory of Evolution was the equivalent of 0. Then he tried to get me to convert to Christianity on the basis that school books were constantly being rewritten but not the Bible (hah.) so the good book had therefore to be correct. He was even carrying a Bible with him. To the grocery store!

And then he swept off. I don't think I can emphasize enough just how strange he was. It was impossible not to be drawn in by what he was saying (especially the math), and then suddenly he just vanished with barely a ktnxbi.

Here, have an alien Marmoset. It makes just as much sense as anthing

else in this post. I am told it comes in peace. 

After sitting dazed for a few minutes, I went back to work, but when the store was conveniently empty, I nearly had a stroke from laughing too hard (note that this wasn't as commentary on anything that he said, but just on the sheer weirdness of something so odd happening.)

Then my mum dropped by, surprised to see me nearly catatonic, but her confusion cleared when she saw the piece of paper he had scribbled on. 'Oh, you've met the Zero-man.'

And it turns out he had had that exact same conversation with her a few weeks earlier, but apart from that, neither of us had ever seen him before. Which makes all this even stranger, because our town is pretty small (only about 13,000 people live here), and I can assure you would not miss a person like that.

Then there is his really weird Darwin argument. So his point the entire time (when we were still in the less surreal territories of math) was the importance of zero... But then he turns right around and asks me if I 'believe' in the Theory of Evolution, with the implication that it is but a toerag and I should get me some 2 Corinthians 5:7.

I am SO. CONFUSED.

I am going to submerge myself in wizarding trivia, and by the time I resurface, the world had better make sense again. Well... at least more sense than it does right now.

Interests of genius and Cardassians.

Song of the day: Þessir menn, by Valdimar. Dat bass.

Yesterday, I had a great time helping my twelve year old niece with her Religious Studies homework. Granted, this was not because the subject was so eloquently expressed, but because we share the view that the Icelandic education system doesn't have half an idea what the Funk&Wagnalls it is doing. To whit; the current subject they were tackling was Hinduism, which you'll have to agree is at the very least interesting (religions involving gods with animal heads generally are), the stories of which count as many of my favourites in religious dogma. Yet somehow they writer of the textbook managed to strip the subject down to its barest facts, shredding it of all fascination and wonder, leaving you feeling like you had just eaten a particularly bad bowl of cereal (the kind that taste like paper-mache.)

It was honestly amazing, and not in a good way. Which led us into the discussion that its disgustingly difficult to learn things that are boring, and why making the subjects so still seems to be the pinnacle of achievement to which all school book writers aspire. I mean, it's hell of a lot more easy to learn things that you find fascinating, which is why people tend to start specializing (or at least doing better at some subjects than others) from an early age, in the things they like. While I will be going to study archeology at university because I love it to bits, I would never subject some of my friends to it because frankly it would bore them to tears and they just wouldn't be able to learn it because they wouldn't want to in the first place. It's ultimately what makes a genius, I think. After all, what is a genius but a person that is really, really interested in something? Sure, intelligence helps, but it's not going to do you any good if you just don't care about anything.

My niece really is marvelous, though. She's very clever to the point that she finishes her finals exams on ten minutes and gets 10/10 (in the subjects she likes, of course), and even then, some of her teachers give her crap about it because they're always certain that she just hasn't studied at all and has flunked the whole thing, even though she has turned in consistently good work over the whole year. I had been a bit on the fence about it I should have her inherit my pocket watch (since it has an S engraved in it and both our names begin with that letter) because while she shares my love of Star Trek, she also follows the exploits of that Kim Cardassian chick.

What, it's spelled 'Kardashian'? Whatever, I'm still doing this joke.

But it was all decided on the moment when a discussion of avatars lead into another on James Cameron's Avatar and she somehow managed to explain the concept to herself using the film, an eraser, a sheet of paper and a pen as props. I have no idea how I would replicate the effect in written word, but trust me, it was cosmic. She is definitely getting my stuff when I die. Well, at least some of it.

I may possibly be doing a post on when I went to see Star Trek: Into Darkness. Not to get graphic or anything, but... There will be a LOT of sporfling and squeeing.

Not all there is to it?

Song of the day: Pieces by Red (Instrumental).

So it has been brought to my attention (by myself and also my sociology textbook) that I grossly oversimplified the weirdness formula, which looked at first a little something like this: AW/JW = W%

Number of people that have said weird trait/the number of people not possessing that weird trait. I.e. attributed weird/judging of weird

But thinking in terms of 'amount of people judging' versus 'amount of people judged' just isn't good enough. This becomes apparent when it's made clear that the term 'minority'  seldom has anything to do with the size of the group in question. Arguments have been made, for example, of women counting as a minority as as they have generally had to deal with a crapload of oppression throughout history, even though we make up roughly 50% of the human race.

You could also take the Marxist approach; that the ruling class defines what is socially acceptable and thus what is considered weird. There is also the basis of H.S. Becker's Labeling Theory, which argues that a deviancy doesn't become one unless there is someone to observe it and label it as such (which gives rise to the argument that in such circumstances, someone does have to observe the tree falling in the forest for it to count.)

 Which, as argued by Terry Pratchett, does make a sound when it falls; after all, there is always something in the forest to hear it, even if it isn't human. Why would a forest be there if there is no life?

Although to me that doesn't seem quite all there is to it. Of course no-one can consider you weird for wearing socks on your elbows (which is amazingly comfortable, by the way) if you only do so in your own home, because then they don't know about it. But it seems to be only one facet of the formula.

But then there is finding out what makes one thing 'weird' and not another. As noted before there is the 'majority rules' as in if a lot of people do this it's normal but a fewer people do that it might not be. But that was the failing of the original formula. Too simple.

How do you make 'weird' and 'the norm' a mathematical constant? How do you make deviancy a measurable entity? Although I find math along the lines of the Fibonacci spiral to be ridiculously beautiful, I'm still not very good at figuring out numbers. Anyone out there with something to add? A brilliant brain of mathematics or sociology or just someone curious to see how this goes? I suspect this could make an interesting thought experiment.

Meanwhile, back to my fic writing. Peace!

The weirdness formula: I talk about my country

Song of the day: 'Time' cover, from the soundtrack of Inception.

So ever so often I go wikiwalking on the internet, mildly obsessed with something I've been thinking about recently. This time, I was extremely curious to see what people think of my own country, and according to Google auto-fill that is:

1. Icelanders are weird

2. Icelanders are kooky

3. Iceland is boring (which led me to a very interesting article where the author concluded that Icelandic girls are boring since none of them would have deep conversations with him before sleeping with him on top of being annoyingly feminist)

On the first two... We are? I mean, I'm quite flattered if that is really the case but isn't the whole thing about weirdness subjective? Isn't that the whole basis for weird? By that standard, every culture you don't know or aren't used to is weird compared to your own. As for the third, I dunno. I don't find it particularly boring, but each to his own.

I wonder if I could make a mathematical formula for weirdness. Lessee... Number of people that have said weird trait/the number of people not possessing that weird trait. I.e. attributed weird/judging of weird. AW/JW. That should give you a percentage, since the size of the second group tends to be higher than the former. Please tell me if you can make something up that actually makes sense.

Yes, it is true that the Mayor of our capital is actually a comedian/punk rocker/actor with no experience in politics and promised to break all his promises if he were elected.

Reykjavík Mayor Jón Gnarr dressed as Obi-Wan Kenobi 

along with Lady Gaga because why the fuck not

Yes, we do have a tradition of eating sheep heads and sort-of-rotten/cured shark (personally I would touch neither with a long stick) and (very) occasionally hunt whales (which are DELICIOUS.)

Yes, almost everyone doesn't have a surname, and instead has a patronym or occasionally a matronym (which plays merry hell with the tourists whenever they try to look something up in the phone book)

Yes, we WILL eat barbeque as soon as summer officially starts, whether it is pouring with rain or temperatures are below zero (which tends to happen)

We can still read the Landnáma (a book written about the first settlers somewhere around the year 1000), which I find seriously cool; the language didn't change for centuries due to isolation.

Then there is the thing about leaving baby strollers outside (which I thought was perfectly normal until my foreign friend asked if kids didn't get stolen all the time and I was like... What?) and the communal showers, saunas and natural pools... we aren't very nudity-conscious. Our parliament is also the oldest one still in practice and we get earthquakes and volcanic eruptions a lot - that's what you get when your ancestors settle right on top of the Mid-Atlantic ridge. We also have the same word for 'aunt' 'niece' and (female) 'cousin', which is 'frænka' (the same goes for 'uncle', 'nephew' and (male) 'cousin', which is 'frændi'.)

We are a sarcastic bunch of bastards to a fault and alternate between talking about how amazing the place is to how terrible it is in a matter of minutes. The main religion of Iceland is Protestant Christianity, but you'll find that very few people actually practice it and a lot of people identify as 'not particularly religious'. Some people still practice Ásatrú, which has got all the cool gods like Óðinn, Þór and Loki (and for the last time, not the latter two weren't brothers, that's just the Marvel comics!)

I suspect us to have SIS (small island syndrome) since we think ourselves as a whole as much bigger than we are (and this is probably what led to the banking crisis.)

We also have the first openly gay prime minister (something I'm seriously proud of, and I generally think that being proud of your country is kind of a redundant thing) and by law anyone can marry/love/sleep with whoever the hell they want (as long as it's in consent, of course.)

There is some rumour about Icelandic girls being the hottest of all time (kinda like that rumour about Swedish girls), which, you know, take it or leave it; yet again it depends on your preferences.

Oh, and of course we don't believe in fairies. Er, although, we might not move a rock or farm a particular hill with a certain reputation about it.... You know, just in case.

Oh, and just to make it clear for once and for all, Eyjafjallajökull is pronounced (approximately):

-Eh (imagine an Aussie saying 'Eh, mate?')
-Ah (like that time you found out something mortifyingly embarrassing about your great-aunt)
-Fia (Like 'Fiat' without the T)
-La (hard L sound)
-Juh (I'm having a hard time finding the appropriate translation for the 'ö' sound, but 'uh' will have to do)
-Kull (another hard L)

See? It even makes sense now. Really it's the most uninspired name ever for a volcano when you translate it; it essentially means 'Island-mountain-glacier.' We are such amazing givers of names as a nation.

Now, non-existant commenter, tell us what things people find weird with your country that you find completely normal!

P.s. Please don't ask about Björk, okay? Even we think that she's weird.

On death and dying (and the good things about black humour)

Song of the day: 'A Mhaighdean Bhan Uasal (Noble Maiden Fair)' from the soundtrack of Brave.

So, my grandmother just died. Which is sad. Uh, not to state the obvious, or anything.

And when the family got to know about it, there was grieving, and crying and generally being miserable but still a bit glad because she had been sick for so long and died in her sleep. I suppose that you could call it a good death, if there is such a thing. But more importantly she had a good life, or at least a life worth living, which is the most any of us can ever ask for.

So I stayed over with my sister and her family for the night to comfort them (for them to comfort me), and it was nice. But I kinda got this feeling that I would also have been fine alone at home by myself. And at first I wondered if that was callous, but no. I simply seem to have skipped right to the final stage of grief, if those can be considered accurate to the human experience. I mean, I didn't even cry. And then I realized that I had already done most of the grieving before she even died, because we all knew it was going to happen, although no-one said it out loud.

I think the story I have been writing throughout April (finished on time, by the way. Woohoo!) helped a lot. I didn't realize it at first, but the protagonist was experiencing the same crippling fear of death that I used to have when I was younger, and also dealing with my own grief of my other two grandmothers, which also died only last year. I wrote it without realizing that it was also about me, in a way, and dealt with the feeling that I had about being left alone. I mean, now a whole generation of my family is gone; all six of my grandmothers and grandfathers. And in the end, I realized it by writing it thus:


‘The moments leading up to death may be horrible, but the end itself just is. It’s neither good nor bad. There may be people left behind and there may be people who leave, but if life does anything, it goes on, and so does death. Don’t be afraid, Martha. People may leave, but that doesn’t mean that others don’t arrive.'

It was a pretty cathartic experience, and a good one.

So all in all, my grandmother was an awesome lady. I mean, she put up with my grandfather, for one (long story) and she raised like six or seven kids. She had my mum, which, not to brag or anything, is kinda important to my existence (and also happiness). She never went to what we would think of as a school in present time, but she was wonderfully smart and read like she was racing against someone (and had so many books I can't even count them). She had a wicked sense of humour, and in the tradition of our family a pretty gallows-oriented one. I think she would have appreciated what my best friend said to comfort me when I told her. I hesitate to write it, though, because of the chances of it being misunderstood by, well, everyone.

Ah, screw it, no-one reads this anyway.

'What's up with your grandmothers dying all the time?'

'And here I thought you had made it perfectly clear to your grandmothers that they should stop that whole dying thing. Tch, hipster grandmas.'

I just find this hilarious. But then again I do come from a long line of gravediggers.

Rest in awesome, grandma. We will meet again.

Real and unreal terrors

Song of the day: Hallelujah I love her so, with Hugh Laurie


So, not a post on Marvellous People Monday, mostly because I, in my addled state of dealing with finals coming up and also finishing the first draft of my novel for CampNaNo, could not think of a badass of history or the present that had already been lauded for their fantasticness by the masses already. But I am sure I will think of something later, when I'm just about to fall asleep after grueling hours of writing and schoolwork.

Also since there probably isn't anyone reading this I can do whatever the hell I want and nobody will complain.

So I have this weird thing I do whenever I'm walking home at night after dark. I basically start imagining every horrific monster I ever saw in any media ever, and just how badly they would mess me up if I came across them.

 These buggers alone can render me an insomniac for hours at a stretch

I even had a this crazy idea about lampposts coming into life and sort of stretching and turning out to be these giant stick insects that are dormant for the day and come out at night to eat unsuspecting passersby.

What is in this tea?

But I don't imagine these things for the reasons you might expect, to whit scare myself out of my pants because it's fun or because my imagination gets overactive in the eerie surroundings. I do it because it's oddly sort of comforting. Because I know they're just in my head and they aren't really going to turn up, and therefore I preoccupy myself with scary but harmless stuff so that I don't think about the equally scary but actually harmful stuff that can happen to a person walking alone outside at night.

I think it really says something about either the human psyche or the fear campaigns in media (or both) that despite people virtually NEVER getting assaulted in any way whatsoever where I live (well, except if they're on the main street getting outrageously swazzled), that most people are still terrified to go outside after dark. You know, they still do it and everything, but meanwhile they are trying not to have an early heart attack and keel over. Not so much of fear for the darkness itself, but for the things hiding in it.

Or some such stuff. It might just be me secretly having fun attempting to scare myself. I mean, if you can scare yourself with your own stories, you might have an easier time scaring other people. Which is, you know, kinda important when the story you're trying to write is at least partially horror.

I really should write down that thing about the stick insects...

Nerdy love affairs: Or, the liking of stuff and why it's not a bad thing.

Song of the day: The Shire Theme by Howard Shore

When I was six years old, I fell in love with the first time. Actual, deep, long lasting love, too, not just a passing crush.

Not with an actual living human person, of course, oh no.

With a book.

Specifically, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit.

And, believe it or not, that affair hasn't ended yet, nor does it seem particularly likely to do so in the future.

That is, more often maybe than people let themselves admit, probably the basis for being a fan or a nerd or a geek about something. I mean, sure, there are varying levels, but I know an amazing amount of people that just have this one thing that introduced them to maybe a certain medium (books, movies, video games, anime) that they just never get tired of even years later. Both because of nostalgia being what it is, and that if it was good enough to make them fall in love with it in the first place, it probably really is pretty damn good.

And that's a strange thing, isn't it? I mean, it's perfectly socially acceptable to despise something or be seriously annoyed by it, or, more frequently, be apathetic to things in general (I suspect it being an offspring of the parasitic entity of ''cool''), but seriously being into something and being able to talk about the various factors of it for ages and people just go okay, that's freaky, what's wrong with you
Even if they have a Thing themselves, whether they admit to it or not. It's like getting passionate about something is breaking some generally perceived rule of 'don't try too hard' that no-one really knows the origins of.

And that's really what nerding out over and being a nerd for something really mean, don't they? That you have something that you really love and get very passionate about. And that tends to be a lot more fulfilling than hating something or, gods forbid, being apathetic in almost every regard. 

That one Thing a lot of people have can be an anchor for them in its nostalgia in strange times, be they difficult or wonderful. Occasionally the love for the Thing is rekindled, if we are lucky enough, by some talented and wonderful people who love it as much as we do and wish to see it back in the world again.

So when I went to see The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, I wasn't cautiously optimistic. I greatly respect the work of Peter Jackson and the amazing people he works with beforehand, and I had no worries what-so-ever that he would fail.

And I've got to tell you

It was like coming home.

Marvellous People Monday: Angela Burdett-Coutts

Song of the day: Something Wicked - Vernian Process (uh, not meant to reflect our subject in any way.)

So, think that badass ladies are a thing of the present? Well, guess again! Today our subject is the fantastic Angela Burdett-Coutts, 1st Baroness Burdett-Coutts. Born in 1814, she became the richest woman in England in 1837 when she inherited three million pounds sterling from her grandfather (which was considerably more then then it is today.) And she did some remarkable things throughout her life, proving once again that money is probably the best superpower of all (or at least the most practical.)

Some may have read about her in Terry Pratchett's most recent novel, Dodger. At least I think it's his most recent novel. *goes to check* Yupp, told you. Still, that man is ridiculously prolific.
A trait she is most notable for in the book is that she helps people by helping them help themselves, which is something we can all respect, I think. Reinforcing the belief that 'with great power comes great responsibility' she became a dedicated philanthropist. One of her first works was establishing, with the help of her good friend Charles Dickens, the Urania Cottage, which helped women escape a life of theft and/or prostitution. A lot of her wealth (most of it, really) she spent on scholarships for other people, and established the so-called 'ragged schools' to provide education for poor children which could not afford it.

She was notable for not not taking sides politically, but, to quote wikipedia, '...she was actively interested in phases of Imperial extension which were calculated to improve the condition of the black races, as in Africa, or the education and relief of the poor or suffering in any part of the world.' I'll just leave that here, since I'm not actually sure what to make of it.

Other of her philanthropic projects included giving help to Turkish peasants and refugees in the 1877 Russo-Turkish war, which won her the Order of the Medjidie, a knightly order of the Ottoman Empire (which was also the only instance of it being presented to a woman.) She also established soup kitchens, the Temperence Society, and financed the first archaeological survey of Jerusalem to improve its sanitation. She even provided financial banking for Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, the forerunner of the modern computer!

She was, as mentioned above, a good friend of Charles Dickens, Michael Faraday, and also the Duke of Wellington. She even proposed to the latter despite the forty year age difference, although the Duke rejected her on the basis that she probably oughtn't marry someone old enough to be her grandfather. She later also became a full member of the Royal Society.

Essentially I can't hope to do her life and accomplishments justice, but I respect her immensely for her seeming determination not to die rich. You can find a more complete account of her here and here. Take heart, people. If someone like Angela could be this awesome in the Victorian Era, we're probably just starting.

My ultimate rec list: In which I nerd out.

Song of the day: 'Death Eater Tango' by the Butterbeer Experience.

So I read fanfic. A lot.

And that means that I also see Sturgeon's law in action. A lot.

And it is true. About 90% of fanfic is... Not very good, or at least not fantastic, to say the least.

But, and bear with me, this also means that the remaining 10%... Are worth dying for.

So, those of you that have grown cynical by endless reading of substandard fanfiction I say to you, do not lose hope. For these fics are not only one of the few best fics I have ever read, but also among the best pieces of fiction, period, that I have ever read.

So, in no particular order, we have:


-The epic masterpiece (this being the original definition of 'masterpiece') that is Observations.
It takes place in the Star Trek 2009 reboot verse and gives a detailed account of life aboard the Enterprise from the point of view of First Officer Spock, and eventually becomes Kirk/Spock (the best I've ever read.)
It, for some considerable time after reading, left me disappointed in the general quality of fanfiction everywhere. That is, that I would have to lower my standards waaaaay down if I was to enjoy fanfiction again, because other fics just didn't measure up to this one. It gives such a deep and detailed analysis and observation (see what I did thar) of not just Spock but every single other character through his interaction and growth through knowing them, and vice versa. It may, literally, change your perception of fiction.


-The second one would be the magnum opus Truthfully.
Takes place in the the Marvel Cinematic Universe (and shares most continua except for Avengers). Long story short, Loki ends up on Earth after the events of Thor, and gets a therapist. Hilarity ensues.
Except, no. That doesn't cover it at all. This fic succeeds where so many have failed before; to take a broken character that could have been turned away from darkness if it had been tried in time, and develop him from that point on while staying faithful to his ground-work personality all the way through. No I haven't been reading too much purple prose. Why do you ask?

It is completely gen and no shipping involved whatsoever. However, it contains bucketloads of ho-yay and a reader would feel justified in shipping just about anything they felt like. Also contains one of the few amazing OC's I have had the pleasure to meet. Oh, and it is absolutely rib-crackingly hilarious. Like, seriously, I could only lie on my back when I slept for days after reading this fic in almost one sitting.


-Which would make the third one my great friend, Diplomacy.
This fic takes place in the Warcraft verse, somewhere around the beginning (end?) of Cataclysm, if I remember correctly. It can be considered a 'what if' story. Leaders from the two factions, Thrall an Jaina Proudmoore decide that war happening again between their people is out of the question, and go for the age-old trick of marriage between two mayor political figures. Namely, themselves. It also helps that they are most certainly in love with each other. Also contains some masterful usage of lore knowledge and associated tacklements. And knowledge of human (and other humanoid) nature.

This fics deals with the political and social and ramifications and advantages (and such interesting politics! Who knew such a thing existed?) of such an act and realistically portrays how everything would play out. It also has a sneaky sense of humor and theatrics. T-rated at most. There is also the incredible portrayal of interaction between characters (and some lovely OC's that have their own backgrounds and backstories in the author's other works). It is also notable as a story with love as a major sub-plot, that no-one ever actually uses the words 'I love you,' and yet it is abundantly clear that they very much do.


-And then there is Memoirs of a Master.
While this fic can no longer be considered cannon after Kung Fu Panda 2, that absolutely does not mean it has been made redundant. It follows the supposed backstory of Master Shifu from the beginning of his training at the Jade Palace at age four right up to and after the events of Kung Fu Panda. It has a whole gallery of amazing, incredible OCs that I could in no way do justice. There is a bit of m/m OC character shipping, but even if you don't slash, with a story this good, missing out on reading it for something like that would be a great loss. The author's use of Chinese cultural knowledge, lore and myths is beautiful and a delight for anyone who loves a good story.

It does get pretty dark at several points, so I'm not sure if the rating can be consistently any one thing, since it seems to range all the way from K up to M (not for naughty stuff, just lots of bloody fight scenes and a few deaths.) 

Oh, and just a fair warning; it's going to make you cry. Hard. I didn't expect it when I read it first, but OH MAN, it just rips your heart out and stomps all over it. But it's worth it in the end. Trust me on this.


-And at last there is The Toymaker and the Widow.
This is a love story, in the best sense of the word. Please note that I tend to shy away from stories that have romance as a main plot since I tend to think that is a very difficult thing to hinge a whole plot on successfully on top of not being what you would call a traditionally romantic person.

That said, this isn't a story about romance, since love and romance are, remarkably, not the same thing.
It is set in the Hobbit verse, and I know what some of you (including myself) would think. There is no romance whatsoever in the original novel and therefore I always have a hard time shipping anything because I tend to be a dreadful stickler for cannon. That said it is between Bofur and an OC - please don't run away! Come back, it's actually amazingly good!

Thank you. Now, the OFC is just so amazingly human - er, dwarf, every facet of her character making her a real person and not just some front for a self insert or suedom. She is flawed, stubborn, strong, knows her own mind... There really isn't much I can say to do her justice, except I almost wish she existed just so that I could shake her by the hand. Her daughter is also wonderful and so much like an actual kid in a way that kids often aren't in fiction. 

Bofur also gets so much more characterization that could ever be possible in either the novel or the film(s). So much in fact that this fic has quite by accident become my official headcannon for him. It establishes these characters before the quest for Erebor and then may possibly (it's a work in progress) delve into if the existence of these OCs may affect how the story turns out. All said and done, this fic just makes me want to huggle the characters for being so incredibly... Human. While being, you know, dwarves. And now I feel like a specist.  Just... Go read it. Read all of them, if you can. I may actually make your life just a touch more fantastic.

One day I may actually give these fics the pages-long posts they deserve, but that's for another day.

And, yes, I am aware that as I am sporfling over other people's wonderful and amazing works of art, I should be working on making a dent in my word count, since I am unfortunately behind because of a brief bout of nasty sickness. Wish me luck.

Ferdinand the seagull and my to-do list

Song of the day: The Baker Street sax solo... on a loop.

So, this is more or less what yesterday's to-do list looked like:

-Write that history project during my free hour
-Talk to the philosophy teacher about my essay
-Eat an ananas
-Go home
-Find the bird
-Bury the bird, dig up in about three months' time
-Go home
-Keep writing the essay
-Procrastinate on CampNaNo because I somehow thought it would be a good idea to write a novel during the last month of school just before exams
-Become a giant wobbly octopus of despair, faceplant on my bedroom rug.
-Go to sleep

I like making to-do lists. They always make it look like you have accomplished something, even if that accomplishment is writing a to-do list.

Oh, the bird part? Yeah, I should probably explain that.

So I was going to school by bus when I look out the window and see this dead seagull lying by the mire by the side of the road, and thought 'this may be one of my few chances to get a complete skeleton for my bone collection!' So, having read the blog of the genius that is Jake, I decided that burying the cadaver would be the best method to get rid of all those fleshy bits I didn't need.

After school, I went to look for the bird, and since it happily hadn't been moved/ripped to bits/eaten in the time that I was away, it was whole enough for me to put in a plastic bag and find a handy place to bury it. I can't imagine what the drivers passing me must have been thinking, as I was standing there by the road with a bandana over my face, picking up freshly killed birds like some kind of an insane, would-be serial killer. Oh, and I did wear gloves. AND I washed my hands thoroughly afterwards. I'm not a complete idiot.

To be honest, it wasn't as icky as I thought it would be, although granted quite some time was spent by me poking it with a stick saying 'ew' a lot. Something had eaten away its chest so that the keel bone was visible, and its eyes had been pecked out, but other than that it wasn't too bad. It also wasn't very smelly since it had only been there a short time.

The tricky part was finding an appropriate place to bury it. Since I live in Iceland, the soil here is mostly volcanic ash and thus very light, and tends to become either very sandy or clay-like, which isn't good for burying as that usually ends up with the body mummified, which wasn't really my goal. Of course, I also had to avoid the seagull nesting site, since they normally become frisky around this time of year, and since I was carrying their dead buddy on top of that, well...

So after walking around the moss/lava fields (seriously, what is the English term for that?) I found a handy place by what may be an old mine and started digging. At one point I saw a girl walking her dog and could only pray to whatever entity that might be listening that she wouldn't come my way. So many questions to answer, so little time.

Also, that horrible moment when you are digging a temporary grave for a dead seagull and suddenly every High School Musical song starts playing in your head SIMULTANEOUSLY.

Awkward.

After mentioning this to my friends, I was the but of Vlad-the-Impaler jokes for some time, which I of course bore with dignity.

Ehem.

I then had a conversation with my Italian philosophy class friend, and I can't remember how we came to that conclusion, but the bird is now named Ferdinand, and I have been challenged to write a musical about him.

A musical about a zombie seagull named Ferdinand. I'm surprised that isn't already a thing.

Anyway, he should be bones alone by the end of July, which is when I will dig him up and clean up the bones and (hopefully) rearticulate him into a whole skeleton which I will then hang as decoration in my house.

I can't wait to freak out the neighbors. Mwahaha.

Until then, my non-existent readers,

Peace and long life!

Marvellous People Monday: Doctor Sanduk Ruit

Song of the day: It's a wonderful world - Louis Armstrong

Ever heard of Doctor Sanduk Ruit? You probably haven't, despite the fact that this guy treats (and cures!) about 2,500 people A WEEK for cataract blindness.

Oh, and if you're poor,  he won't charge you a penny for it. Because he can.

Doctor Ruit developed a method of eye-surgery entirely without stitches in 1986, where he removes the cataract lenses in people's eyes, and replaces them with intraocular lenses he developed himself. These, unlike such lenses manufactured in developed countries which cost about 100$, only cost about 3,5$ dollars. The surgery itself takes about five minutes. The whole operation really only costs about 20$. As someone who would probably go insane if I ever suffered blindness, I can really appreciate this.

And thus this man just goes gallivanting with his traveling hospital into the mountains of Nepal, where many people suffer from blindness due to dangerous UV rays in that altitude... and lets them see again. That's just beautiful.

He co-founded the Tilganga Eye-Center in 1994, which is a non-profit, non-government organization which runs on donations. They have worked in Nepal, North Korea (seriously!), Afghanistan, Bhutan, China/Tibet, India and Pakistan.

Bask in the awesome, people!

So next time you feel despair at humanity because some twat doesn't know "your" from "you're" in the youtube comment sections, think of Dr. Ruit. Because if humans can still be that fantastic, I think we can ease up the worrying.

Links for the Himalayan Cataract Project and the Tilganga Institute.

I think about stuff

Song of the day: Hey there Cthulu by Eben Brooks

Imagine singing this at the top of your lungs as you are re-arranging the bananas and a customer comes into the shop. She left in a hurry, for some reason.

Still, it's not like you have any other choice between singing (they don't allow iPods/mp3s) and the radio. And when you start hearing the same song four times every hour on the same station, you either turn it off or slowly go insane. You clever radio people may think no-one listens to your station long enough to notice, but we do.

That said, I like my job. Not that many people come in, so it gives plenty of time for studying thinking of deep philosophical questions, like 'did Ted Knight and Jim J. Bullock had anything to talk about on the set of Too Close for Comfort?'

Okay, not my idea, but a still very good question.

What am I saying, I haven't even seen that show.

Another would be 'how the hell is a wedding between my atheist self and my Catholic friend ever going to work in thirty years' time when we (or at least me) inevitably turn out as crazy cat lady spinsters? We would never be able to agree on the decorations!'

Or I'll just constantly draw the sign of the Deathly Hallows because it's not like I can draw anything else.

 It never looks half as cool as this, though.

Then there is the strange moment when a photo in your local newspaper looks like comedian Lee Mack. Maybe he has an evil (good?) twin living a low-key life in Iceland. Or he has dopplegangers in every country on stand by to protect his secret identity as Comedian Man.

I also think I'll jump on the 'what the hell weather, it's spring and we're getting really tired of your shit' train. I mean, for the last weeks, there has literally been one day snow, the other windy, then sunny, then the whole cycle repeats. I guess I'll just blame global warming. Or blame us for global warming, therefore blame us in extension for the weather.

Now, it's time for sweet potato fries (oh gods so delicious), and finally getting my mum to watch The Hobbit with me so I can share my nerd-love for it. More on that later.

Flying turtles?

Song of the day: 500 Miles by Celtic Thunder

There are few things better than reheated pizza on a Saturday morning.

Well, actually there are probably quite a few things better than that, but that's the best thing about pizza; when it's good, it's good. When it's bad, it's still pretty good. In the words of a great man, you might imagine great banquets of exquisite food, but in the end of the day, you'll still settle for some eggs and bacon, if they're tastefully done and perhaps have a slice of tomato.

On another note, I am waiting for the beginning of the CampNaNoThon, which is just around the corner, though it will be 5.00 PM at my place and not ten in the morning. Wouldn't it be nice if we didn't have to worry about time differences. I will either be late or horribly late, depending on if my manager lets me have a double shift or not. So that will mean either four or eight hours of sitting behind a register pondering my life choices, since no-one ever shops there in the weekends. You would think that all the easy-go would be a good thing, but it's so horrifically boring that after sitting there for a while you become convinced that the clock is turning backwards.

On top of that, I keep finding weird scribbles in my writing notebook. One was 'flying turtles.' The strange part is that no-where in my story is the focus on aliens or sea creatures. The bad part is that I can't remember what the hell I was thinking, which is awful, because flying turtles sound amazing.

Oh, internet. You really do have everything.

They're such wonderful animals, though. Even though they always look like some sort of secret agents, the way they look at you. As in 'this conversation did not happen. This room is not real. I am not real. Maybe, you are not real.'

Wow. Secret agent turtles are giving me an existential crisis. What is my life?

They have seriously strange skeletons as well. Their skulls look alien. Like, if you saw them, and you didn't know what they were, your first guess would be 'alien.' And their vertebrae are basically fused to the shell, so removing a turtle's shell is impossible without killing it. Which is why Golden Eagles, instead of having to deal with that pesky shell, just pick them up and drop them from great heights to break it. Kinda arseholish when you consider that these birds are/were used in Mongolia to hunt wolves. This technique supposedly resulted in the death of the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus, the eagle apparently mistaking his head for a convenient rock and letting go. I really hope this is true. I mean, there is just something wonderful about the fact that in this universe, it is possible to be brained by a tortoise. When compared to a lot of other potential ways to die, I would probably go with this one. I mean, at least it's quick, and the funeral would be a laugh riot.

How did I even get on this topic? 

Banananas and CampNaNo

So in philosophy class a couple of days ago I hear a friend of mine say the word 'banana,' only I hear it as 'banananas.' And that got me thinking, what would a banananas look like, that is the mix of a banana and an ananas (I refuse to call it pineapple since you English speakers are the only ones that refer to it like that and amazingly enough, it's neither a pine or an apple.) Would it be like a banana shaped ananas or an ananas with banana skin on the outside? Eventually I decided on the former.

And then when I got home I got home I googled it.

IT EXISTS

LOOK AT IT. JUST LOOK AT IT FOR A MOMENT

Okay, so it's photoshopped, but still. I love this so much that I've got it as my desktop background.

I could make a cult around this thing. Honestly, the banananas will fulfill your life. Bow to it.

On another note I have reached the 20K in CampNaNoWriMo Click here for those of you who don't know the awesome. Which means that the famed 'almost half-way there' slump may be setting in any moment now. You know, the feeling you get when you're happily typing along and then suddenly think to yourself 'good golly, I should go re-read what I have just written, I'm sure it will be great!'

And then ten minutes later you are lying face down on the floor moaning 'I WANT TO DIIIIE' having just realized that first drafts always suck.

But you know, being allowed to suck on a first draft is important (why does that sentence sound so wrong?) If you just let your writing be awful for a while and just power through and finish the damn story, you can leave the part of making it awesome to the re-writes.

Not that I'm some kind of a writing guru or anything. I mean, this is only my second full length novel -_-"

Which I should actually be working on right now along with school work, and not be writing a blog post that won't ever be read by anyone. But at least it's a good getting rid of writer's block.

Which reminds me, I've got like a ton (okay, maybe a kilo) of bones in the bathroom cupboard that I need to put in acid.

Wow. That really does make me sound like a serial killer when out of context, doesn't it?