Cephalopod

Sure am feeling a feeling about actually posting about the stuff I'm making and doing these days. You know what I want you to see? I want you to see my thoughts on DOMES and the potential of DOMES to show off some shit.

I went out to get something at the fabric store today and lo, on hyper ultra-sale presumably as something of a leftover from Christmas whatnot, there were DOMES. Thin glass domes set over wood bases, classic as hell. Like displaying-a-taxidermied-ptarmigan-in-a-country-estate-library classic. I got three. Two little ones (you could stick a pineapple in them) and the last big one, just a little smaller than my chest in height and volume. It is truly serious.

The cashier asked what I was going to do with them. I told her I had a weird taxidermy habit. Which I sort of do, but mostly don't, because I don't actually have any weird taxidermy.

YET.

I do, however, have any amount of wire, fabric, beads, glue, paper, wood, and shit-weird industrial metal. The question is: which species do I bastardize for display? I'm leaning toward something with fur, since I own an old brown fur coat that badly needs to turn into something cool, but can you imagine bugs or reptiles made with this?

I throw away a few pounds of that metal housing daily. POTENTIAL. It's hard to decide.

Link to other Dear Ladystuck letters

Dear Ladystuck writar: I love you and I'm happy to have you! We can go into a little more detail on my prompts if you want, they're just under the cut.

If you've ever had an idea for an AU of pretty much any kind at all (EVERYBODY IS SUDDENLY CAKE TOPPERS), I'm a great person to whip it out on.  Canon consistency is not important to me: shenanigans are important to me. Do whatever you like doing best and feel free to do it, whatever it is, as hard as you can. :)


( Dig it, it's a cut. )

IF ALL OF THESE PROMPTS LEAVE YOU COLD, AND YOU'RE WONDERING WHAT THE HELL YOU CAN DO WITH THIS LOAD OF CRAP, HERE'S WHAT TO DO:

Troll me. Write/draw the opposite of what I've asked for, and trample underfoot the things I've told you I love. Feel the Dark Side flowing through you. Dance around a bonfire of my hopes and dreams.

This is my Yuletide letter!

If you have an idea in mind already, you might want to leave this page right now—I'm starting with that because I hope you do, and I hope you'll ride that crazy train right off a cliff and into a beautiful explosion of wonder and glory secure in the knowledge that it's exactly what I wanted, because you're probably right.

However, if you'd prefer a few parameters, possibly even some suggestions? I'm good. You good? I am. Let's go.

A  very, very basic overview of my preferences: funny good, angst bad. It doesn't have to be light comedy, mind you—and it certainly doesn't have to be comedy at all! But the stuff I like best is stuff that doesn't wallow, mope, or monologue (unless the wallowing, moping, and/or monologuing are exploited for comic effect, of course :) ). I love absurdism, fourth-wall hijinks, wanton abuse of narrative conventions and the characters themselves, bizarre pairings, and crack AUs. Canon compliance is not a big deal. Cheeky shenanigans are a big deal.

 

( My thoughts on te canons, in alphabetical order... )

 

 

Dear Yuletide Writer!

This is me and I'm so !@#$! delighted that I landed you as my writer. Hi. :) I'm really looking forward to seeing somebody else's thoughts on things in these love-needing canons. Thank you so much!


( General stuff )

( More details on the requests )


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Ta-daaa! Feel free to comment here anonymously if you want any more info.

Fabric-using persons, a heads-up on a @#$!@$ stupendous deal: Wal-Mart is eliminating the fabric sections at all their stores and are dumping inventory LIEK WOAH. I do not go to Wal-Mart. Ever. I went to Wal-Mart for this.

Multiple big bins of 5-yard 'bolts': each bolt is $5. Fabric, some of it actually quite nice, for $1/yard. I ended up with 10 yards of black cotton lace (which has officially changed my Halloween plans) and another 10 of what's probably poly-cotton stretch twill. There was a surprising amount of periwinkle poly-taffeta, so if you need that in your life now's the time. I went to the one on Rainier in Renton, but apparently this is at the very least a state-wide thing: more likely it's national. Check out your local one.

Totally excited about visiting the Ape Caves this weekend. "Caves" is kind of a misnomer, it's half a cave stacked on top of an actual cave mostly. But it's a cave! The longest lava tube in the continental US, which is neat as hell, but as subtext pointed out, there are people in Hawaii who have bigger ones in their, like, backyards.

The Ape Caves are a bit over a mile long, so that's a big backyard, but point taken.

I wish I could take some pictures. My camera is a cheap one and it's going to be dark. 'Cause it's a cave. Maybe I can get a few in the nifty spots where there's an opening to the surface.


EDIT: subtext did not actually say that. Rather, she insists that I say she did not say that.

So it's the first day that's actually felt HOT all year. It's not hot, not by any reasonable standard within the continental US, but mehhhhh, I want popsicles.

On a less whiny note, I think...I think I kinda dreamed about Oglaf fanfic last night. It was about Gar (you know, where the LASER FALCON comes from) and an entire laser-based ecosystem. Hawks hunting rodents in Gar look a lot like the first 30 seconds or so of Star Wars Episode IV. the field mice have green lasers, in my mind

Finally got around to watching Hellsing Ultimate (or whatever the one that actually follows the plot of the manga is called) between Netflix discs of Black Lagoon, and holy crap the English.

I dunno if this is a trend or not, but there was a bit of it in Hellsing and Black Lagoon is just LOADED with it--English dialogue, spoken by VAs who do not themselves speak English, interspersed bizarrely into the Japanese dialogue. I don't expect a Japanese show produced for a Japanese audience to have fluent English, but it -does- sound awful. And what's worse, the choice of which lines to speak in English is so arbitrary and bizarre. In Black Lagoon especially--one second Revy is complaining (in Japanese) that she doesn't speak Japanese. Then she's telling the other character to speak English, in English. Then, despite the fact that apparently neither character can speak or understand the other's language, they hold a perfectly normal conversation. In Japanese.

The utter strangeness of Balalaika speaking (lots of) (awkward) English so Rock can translate it for a Japanese group is rendered even more bizarre by the fact that Balalaika speaks Russian in that same episode--and it's heavily implied that Rock can use Russian in the first place. In the manga, at least, he translates directly from Russian.

And there's the assumption that English is the language spoken between the Black Lagoon's crew, since three of them are American, Revy only speaks English and maybe Thai, and Rock speaks a few different languages. But they all speak Japanese, because it's a Japanese show. As it should be. Why all the weird orders in English, then? Is there something so uniquely idiomatic about "Hit it, Dutch" that it requires making that poor VA sound things out again? Makes no sense to me.

Consistency, producers. CONSISTENCY. At least try?

(the best example I can think of re: doin it rite is probably Code Geass, where "Yes, my lord!" is spoken in English to the British nobility and everything else is left in Japanese. There's also a charming bit in Nadesico where Captain Yurika speaks English to cheerfully threaten the representatives of a foreign government--the show subtitles her in Japanese, and the translation of those subtitles is -not- what she's saying. I loved that.)

Woot woot, I'm doing NaNo this year! This is me.

My ensemble-cast thing for a couple years ago suffered greatly from the lack of a primary character to push things along, and I think I've figured that out a bit. Not to be all Mary Sue about it, but the joke persona attached to the costume I made for SteamCon looks like it might be just the thing.

Yup, the Commodore of the Sixty-Fourth Armored Colonial Fleet (aka Commodore 64) rides again. I think she'll throw all the fabulously educated and advanced spec-ops botany and marine biology into sharp relief.