Yuletide is posted! I lucked out with two fics, both wonderful fun friendshipping - for Sapphire & Steel there's Quiet and Peace (an Epilogue in Dialogue), a lovely post-series tale - Steel being a comfort for Sapphire in his own special Steel way, and bonus Silver FTW! And then for Red Dwarf there's Upgrade, which is perfect, with dialogue and plot that had me literally LOLing, and then it winds up sweet in just the terribly wrong Dwarfish way of being sweet.

Holidays with the family have been nice, and now that I have given my gifts I will have to post them (have gotten into amigurumi - I've known how to crochet for years, but it never quite occurred to me to make cute stuffed toys before...)

And Sherlock Holmes was exactly what I wanted it to be, e.g. awesome and fun and funny and slashy as hell (or unbelievably old-school smarmalicious! pick your poison!) and I hope it inspires a legion of ficcers, because I've secretly been into Holmes/&Watson for years and it would be great to have company. Also, sekrit message to Ritchie, Downey, Law et al: with the sequel? Please to be including Reisenbach Falls! <3

I finally managed to get into AO3 long enough to read my story--my greedy attempt to actually *comment* on it seem to have crashed the server for me again. So I will merely say here that it is AWESOME and it is Miguel and Tulio from Road to El Dorado, and it is BETTER THAN CHOCOLATE SRSLY and I just want to hug it a lot. It's cute and wonderful and I just love it so much. Thank you, lovely lovely anon! And everyone else should go read it!

Three Times That Miguel Made Tulio's Life An Adventure

Crying family members after two days of christmas: 1

Number of Doctor Who specials watched: 1

Being able to change desktop resolution without leaving the monitor on cooldown for an hour: priceless

I have:

1.) hooked up the xbox for Child. He is playing Pure, since we need to do a serious rearrangement of the game room to facilitate online play.

( okay, this went off-top )

My fantasy life always involves a shopping spree at Frye's, really. Fabulous vacations and superhot men wearing leather pants only work for me when they're helping me pick a router set-up and murmur hotly in my ear they are master electricians while holding miles of ethernet cable.

2.) The fire truck pedal car is built and awesome. As it turns out, I accidentally picked out a really durable all-metal model with wooden ladders and that sucker will last. Niece 2 and Nephew fought over it and it was glorious. BIL did the assembly becaues he got new tools for Christmas and looked as us all pathetically until we let him have the truck to play with. He was so happy.

3.) Bouncy horse is not assembled. Reluctantly, he and my sister and co went to Christmas with his brother's family, but his toolkit stayed here, in anticipation that we will be overcome by post-Christmas laziness, which is pretty likely.

4.) I got my Mom a Flip Ultra Camcorder and as it turns out, she loves it--we all love it. It's not that I am scared of multifunctional things--see my G1--but seriously, would it kill progress if some things don't require a complete reading of the owner's manual and a training course to use? So far, for ease of use, I'd recommend it--the set up is super fast (set date, set time, set language, and we're off!), it has five buttons, the record button is huge and stuck in the middle, and flip out USB, so the only extra cords needed are if you want to hook it directly to the TV. It comes with batteries, but grab some rechargeables and an adapter and you're done. My dad, who is not either a huge fan of changing technology or one who likes to use it was playing with the Flip as soon as he found an excuse to pry it from Mom's hand. Since his birthday is in March, if he seems to really enjoy it, I can grab him one too.

I'll check the video quality when they're done playing, but honestly, unless it's grainy or impossible to see, I love this. Fact--yes, awesome camcorders that record in 1080i/1080p with digital sound are great, but that shit I am not taking to the beach (water! sand! air! my warranty!) or to visit friends, and if I have to renew my acquaintance with the owner's manual or google for tips on how to make it work every time I pick it up? I am never going to use it. I had a samsung camcorder and learned to hate it in like, a month.

So far, I approve.

The living room is awash with toys and games and books, and everyone's settling to gloat over their stash and share it with others. We're making prime rib sandwiches for lunch if we feel like moving, and no one is taking off their pajamas to save their life. It's a very, very good day.

To everyone who celebrates it, Merry Christmas, and to those who don't, Happy Holidays or have a wonderful day.

...so, in preparation for the great Mass of Christ on the morrow, I spent this evening:

1. Coding Ric/Star EarthShattering Holiday fics for their big reveal tomorrow (they look so awesome! the stories are go good! theyaresoinlove!!!!

ETA: THEY ARE LIVE! LIVE! YAY! \o/ [collapses]

2. Getting drunk and reading the 90K kidfic Brendon/Spencer epic I've been saving, in a celebratory mood.

In other news, when leaving to go for the choir Christmas party, my mom hit my car.

[facepalm]

The thing that bothers me about assimilation of lyrics without conscious effort is it is inevitable when I start to accidentally sing it, it will be something about oral sex, killing someone just to watch them bleed out, various shades of drug use, suicide, or worst of all, Spanish, which isn't bad in itself when alone (I know enough to pick up the concept of the song, but it can be questionable since I don't know enough to be sure), but a source of endless hilarity to my coworkers when I'm murmuring earnestly about like, love among the banditos or something and apparently my accent is Texas by way of white girl by way of "are you singing about goats? What was that word? Was that even a word?" according to native and fluent speakers. The answer is no, it was not about goats. At least, I hope not. Selena would never betray me like that.

I've talked about how I don't actually consciously, actively know many songs at all; everything I know is by osmosis repeat one on iTunes, and I breathe the words along with it when I'm testing, and if I'm feeling really--we'll call it frustrated?--with the test, the computer, the cubicle, the building, the existence of the universe, it may be slightly louder than breathing. I don't remember otherwise; I couldn't a capella most of it on purpose to save my life. Which I think argues there's a separate storage area in the brain devoted to lyrics memorization, random facts, and in my case, a strange and uncomfortable competence in wirestripping without breaking the copper fibers, and for no reason at all, the ability to recognize any Pride and Prejudice adaptation after three minutes of watching, no matter what part is showing at the time.

Not that I don't value that ability. I'm just saying, what the fuck?

Anyway, singing. I soundtrack my life even if its only in my head; it's just that sometimes, it doesn't stay there. I've come to terms with 1.) I'm bad at singing, 2.) I don't care, and 3.) for the most part, being humiliated when I realize that I'm singing I Touch Myself at the copier just takes up valuable time I could use to type updates into Twitter. Because seriously, when your supervisor comes by your office to query about your loving rendition of bodies like sheep to the rhythm of blahblah go back to sleep (seriously, I don't know the lyrics. Until I start singing them. It's weird.) to your not-starting computer while standing over it holding a letter opener, it's just easier to get everyone so used to it they don't notice anymore.

(That's been in rotation almost three years now and never really gets old.)

Context: my music mix at work usually has a hard beat so I can work in rhythm to it, and because it keeps me awake, and because most of the stuff with a hard beat is fairly violent and I'm in a cubicle, so it seems natural they go together. Most recently, though, I brought my primary home playlists into rotation, because I was on a The Fray kick, and then brought in Adam and Kings of Leon to balance out the mix so it's not primarily A Perfect Circle, Korn, and strangely enough, Britney Spears.

So yesterday I was humming along carrying a box of Harry and David's chocolate cherries to offer people who were unfortunate enough to be stuck at work and probably needed the encouragement to dissuade active suicidal tendencies, and skipping between empty cubicles, I picked up a pen someone dropped and thought about Adam's cane in For Your Entertainment. In my defense, as in there's not one, I was already pissed at him about some scripts I'd written that he'd rejected, so as I hit R's cubicle, I was at full volume telling him I was giving it to him until he was screaming my name instead of being passive-aggressive and thinking it viciously.

(To be fair, Adam's not osmosis lyric learning; it has a hard beat and telling my computer I'm not soft or sweet speeds up load time immensely, so I made the effort to memorize. It's not that I didn't know what I was singing; I just didn't realize I'd increased my volume quite that much when I wasn't sure the aisle was empty.)

I may or may not have pointed the pen at him at the time, but that's best left to history. So as one does, I offered him a chocolate cherry and shimmed back to my cubicle at four-four time and took off my headphones so whoever walked by could sing along, since shame just took a backdoor to the fact I had four more hours at work and there was a better than average chance my feelings about my new relationship with Twitter were starting to unsettle me.

(Protip, R; do not piss off someone working the day before Christmas Eve who rocks six one in her favorite shoes and is taller than you by three inches without them. It's not an accident that I love heels; I know exactly why people react differently when they have to look up at me.)

This is still better than "when I think of you, I touch myself" while staring moodily at a copier, I have to say. It could have been so much worse. It could have been Ben Moody's Everything Burns. Apparently I shouldn't talk about fire at work or something; I'm told it makes people twitchy.

Note: My sister made me listen to the song "Becky" several times by sheer malice. Example of highly involuntary osmosis learning and possibly my sister's idea of hilarious torture. Make. It. Go. Away. Now. Even my slowly degrading standards of public conduct have to draw a line at asking for someone's mouth, and God, I hate that song. And my sister. So. Much.

Context: Lyrics.

This will end well, I think.

Eventually, I should probably wrap the last presents. Maybe.

Happy holidays everyone.

Hope everyone has a safe, happy holiday season.

Pam

This is the only link I could find to this. The quality's not great, but it still works. Merry Christmas to all those who celebrate. :)

SNL Presents Fun With Real Audio

I want you all to know that the existence of fandom and this flist in particular is part of what keeps me sane on a day like today. Sane and alive.

Christmas is always hard. Often fun and mostly lovely, but never not hard and nine times out of ten the stressiest couple of days of the year. We always have the family over at our house; that's almost twenty opinionated people and loads of alcohol in a small space with annoying music. My mother's perfectionism and the passive-aggressive personalities of half of my relatives do not exactly help either. As with every year, I usually count the times someone bursts into tears and if we're less than three it's a good year. Christmas Eve is over and we are at 1.

I love my family but I could do without all the tectonic collisions. I do hope tomorrow we only make one person cry.

(One good thing about being depressed is that ultimately I'm melancholic and baseline sad, but the specific emotional stressors and especially the part where one relative hurts another just completely pass me by. I don't resonate like I would when I'm normal and so I mostly don't give a fuck. I don't have to cry anyone's tears except my own.)

Anyway, I hope you're all getting through the holidays okay, whatever you're celebrating, and I'll see you sometime tomorrow, after the big Christmas lunch.

A year ago, x_los and I started co-writing a Christmas fic of the Three/Delgado!Master variety, but we didn't get it finished before Christmas, and that sort of takes all the fun out of it. But this year, we're ready!

Title: Christmas Crackers
Chapter: I of III
Author: bagheera_san and x_los
Rating: PG
Pairing: Three/Delgado!Master, Brig, Jo, Benton, Yates
Summary: As the holidays approach UNIT finds itself under siege by the Master, whose enthusiasm for Christmas appears to be as sincere as it is sinister.
Beta: aralias, horrible lobster bride (note: well, you'll have to ask x_los about that...) and wonderful pinch-hitting beta-beast

Christmas Crackers

...so I didn't want to break my streak of posting porn on religious holidays or anything.

Fic: Suppose It's Too Much to Call Coincidence, 4/4
by Seperis
AIRPS, Adam/Kris, Kris/Other, various, NC-17
Summary: In which Kris finds a puppy and the laws of probability change dramatically.

Notes 1: AU and crack, with porn filling!

Notes 2: My eternal love to jamesinboots who is like, I don't know, the paxil or valium of fanfic panic or something.

Part 1/4
Part 2/4
Part 3/4

( airpsfic: suppose it's too much to call coincidence, 4/4 )

You may not know this about me, but there is something about electronics that fascinates me and will likely lead to a coroner's report and a closed-casket funeral with a very weird burned smell rocking the funeral home. This is why I occasionally still get worried check-ins asking me if I've taken apart anything with an x-ray installed in it, or if I still have a knife in my VCR to act as a power conduit. (No, and no. Plasma screen and blu-ray. Though I look forward to exploring these vistas when they break. Which they will. They will.)

Child comes by his own tendencies to break things into their component parts from me; the thing is, I'm not like, inspired to take apart something that won't kill me, like a radio without batteries. I'm not hanging out with walkie-talkies, or sitting around with my Very Special Screwdriver set disassembling my old computers to poke industriously. I'm not even confining myself to nice, safe furniture that will just give me splinters and a jaundiced view of the value of trees. Like everything else in my life, I have to have a reason, a goal if you will. And the goal may be insane, but it's mine, and for reasons that like the love of God passeth understanding, I only get goal-oriented around things that have a voltage high enough to achieve barbecued fingers at minimum and a real potential for x-raying myself to death during the unfortunate incident with a TV a few years ago.

The thing is, this is genetic. To elucidate, many moons ago, our central air went out and being, um, us, the logical course of action was to avoid the expense and rationality of a person trained in air conditioner repairs and whatnot, but carry a bag of twist ties, duct tape, electric tape, a hammer, and a screwdriver and achieve Arctic temperatures by sheer bizarre serendipity. This was my mother, by the way, and we all went to stare and poke--I mentioned my love of high voltage, right? That's genetic too--at the strange conglomeration of twist-ties, tape, and some kind of arrangement of metal that turned a non-functional air conditioner into an air conditioner that feared for its life.

Basically, my genetic line should not have survived the Age of Electricity, because we were totes sticking our fingers into sockets from the beginning.

I don't necessarily think I have outgrown this--ask svmadelyn about my cackling when she let me install a new video card in her computer--more that I've become one with my inner wants-to-live-with-fingers-intact. Mostly, I content myself with cityplanning for Christmas villages, rewiring surround sound with optical cables, and rearranging HDMI in various configurations while trying to work out how to network the Wii and the Playstation 3 to stay stationary and yet play on any TV in the house. I have duct tape, screwdrivers, and access to Frye's. It'll happen.

Then two things happened; one, I bought a new internal hard drive, and my adapter for my laptop went out. Ten minutes ago, I had a set of jeweler's screwdrivers spread out on my bed while I hunted for electric tape to reattach a SATA power converter that was causing the adapter to heat up in a way that caused it to hum at me and things sparked. It only occurred to me this could end in tragedy when I realized all my fic is on this laptop.

Last weekend, my adapter tore near the head; as I was writing, as one does, I hunted through the house and stripped the metal layer off some insulation tape I found in the garage, stripped the plastic back, and created a do-it-yourself-electric-death before wrapping the entire thing in electrical tape. While charging my laptop--and watching the rubber coating start to bubble--and waiting to hit one hundred percent chargd because it wasn't actually dripping yet (I was wrong, so wrong), I thought, I need to take stock of my life. So I did.

I own two large plastic containers of electrical cord and adapters with no discenible purpose; five composite cables, seven S cables, two VGA cables, three types of USB, Firewire that I never use but I may need to despite the fact the size is wrong for every Firewire port in the house, and my personal pride and joy, an adapter with four separate heads that can be used as an emergency power source for four routers (only one of which actually works), a cable modem (that works), and experimented on with everything that needed an adapter. Which is a surprising number of things if you sit down and stare around you for items that may one day need something like that, and try to figure out if it doesn't fit, can you get some foil and make it fit.

I have two large external drive, one in the freezer because the internal power went out, and eventually, I'm going to remember to pick up a new case and take it apart. I have no idea anymore what is on it but that's secondary to the fact that it's like a belated Christmas present one day in the future. There are about a million screws the size of two ants stacked together buried in the carpet from taking apart and putting together no less than three laptops, two desktops, a router, an internal DVD/CDRW drive, and one untyped entity that might or might not have been a stereo before I decided it just needed my Magic Adapter and my screwdriver set (it didn't. I still have it. I still don't know what it began life as. Pretty sure a radio was involved.)

Searching through box three--wait, you really thought there were only two?--I found a.) three laptop adapters that all only suffer from something minor like being torn in half and only need electrical tape and a death wish to get working; b.) IDE cables from Darcy, my first computer, circa 1998; c.) a DVD/CDRW from Schindler, my second computer circa 1999; d.) two floppy drives with no real idea where they came from; e.) several chassises that fit cases that are no longer created; eleven years of installation CDs for everything from Darcy to John II and Mom's Studio; e.) lipstick (terrible color); f.) an army of wireless cards; g.) another lipstick (excellent color); h.) a five-disk DVD changer that works if I take off the cover and shove a screwdriver between two of the ports and twist, and i.) another router.

(The rise of the routers is directly attributable to discovering newegg and a sale at Frye's. They don't work? But maybe if I just take them apart, they will.)

And my new hard drive still isn't installed because the adapter's humming got annoying, it burned my fingers when I tried to pick it up (whatever), and also, the lights started flickering, which may or may not be because of me, but why take chances?

I also have the rubbery covering of my former laptop adapter melted into my comforter.

Seriously. I love my life. I love my screwdrivers with their tiny, computer-and-small-electronic-device compliant heads, and I love that radio shack has a battery powered set with multiple tiny screw heads to change around to my delight. I love that at Frye's, I can buy cable by the foot when it goes on sale, because I will need it, though I don't know exactly how, and somehow, I have twenty feet of cable coiled up beneath my bed for emergencies like if the cable goes out, with a tiny bag of coaxial heads because scyfy night is not to be missed. My mother rewired the telephone the other day, poking through the wall and tugging out the wires one by one to patiently figure out where they go and put it back together new again. The house has old wiring; I'm not saying I'm buying copper wire and reading up on DIY Rewire Your Entire House For Electricity and Add a Networking Option for the Wii and P3 With Speakers In Every Room. I'm saying I'm pricing it. And hey, it's on sale! Sure, it could end in tragedy, but then again, I have duct tape, , twist-ties, a Magical Adapter, and my screwdrivers. It could also work.

I have a question, though--is there a cleaner that can be used to get melted rubber off of blankets? I could really use the advice.

...and I just watched 2x11 and ( spoilers for Merlin 2x11 )

Fic: Suppose It's Too Much to Call Coincidence, 3/4
by Seperis
AIRPS, Adam/Kris, Kris/Other, various, NC-17
Summary: In which Kris finds a puppy and the laws of probability change dramatically.

Notes 1: AU and crack, crack half and half, if you will. Or well, I'll be honest. This may have hit the full-fat version.

Notes 2: I love jamesinboots for being all "WHEE YES" and talking down my completely irrational panic and petting me until I agreed to breathe again. As she is like that.

Part 1/4
Part 2/4
Part 4/4

( airpsfic: suppose it's too much to call coincidence, 3/4 )

I had not much to do at work, so I made progress to the end, or I wouldn't post like I meant to actually finish it, but be a totes tease and stare at it in horror every time someone mentions it. I admit I do that. I'm not proud of it or anything, but there you go.

For the record, Spot is in the form of a Maltese.

Fic: Suppose It's Too Much to Call Coincidence, 2/4
by Seperis
AIRPS, Adam/Kris, Kris/Other, various, NC-17
Summary: In which Kris finds a puppy and the laws of probability change dramatically.

Notes: AU and crack, maybe more crack low-fat rather than lite.

Part 1/4
Part 3/4
Part 4/4

( airpsfic: suppose it's too much to call coincidence, 2/4 )

Fic: Suppose It's Too Much to Call Coincidence, 1/4
by Seperis
AIRPS, Adam/Kris, Kris/Other, various, NC-17
Summary: In which Kris finds a puppy and the laws of probability change dramatically.

Notes 1: for astolat in Yuletide coding and mailing list hell. And because she kind got me into this mess and tweeted my comment not-porn and for the life of me, I could not figure out how people were finding it.

Notes 2: AU. I'd add crack, but um, you know, the crack standards here are kind of insanely high and last night I re-read a fic about a unicorn. I really can't compete with that. This is more crack lite.

Part 2/4
Part 3/4
Part 4/4

( airpsfic: suppose it's too much to call coincidence, 1/4 )

Signal boost--please pass on:

If You Want to Claim a Yuletide Pinch Hit, read this

Text:

Apparently Yahoogroups has changed some policy, and the wave of pinch hits sent out has DISABLED MY YAHOO ACCOUNT. I can't post to it to tell the pinch hitters why I'm not responding to claims. Of the 20+ groups I belong to or own, only 3 are displaying, presumably because the rest are on the email address that has been disabled. I... am not a happy camper.

At this point, I need to sleep, and there's very little I can do about this. If you want to claim a pinch hit, you'll need to *forward* or otherwise get the info to my personal email (elynross@gmail.com), and I'll work with that, and try and respond when I get up in a few hours.

Please boost the signal on this, to try and reach other people on the pinch hit list. I'm not sure how the second half of the pinch hits are going to go out, but we'll figure something out.

Who writes porn at six in the fucking morning?

God, I am a fangirl. It's true--there is never a bad time for porn.

Codicil: It's not very good porn. I trapped them on a counter and I'm worried they'll break something before I can move them somewhere less prone to terrible bathroom accidents. Gah.