renay

1. It is cold. And rainy-wet. And cold, did I mention the cold? Because it's cold. Yesterday they were calling for a 70% chance of snow on Monday, but it's changed to rain and snow, and only a 60% chance. I am glad. ._.

2. I went to the library. This was a terrible idea considering how many works by dead white guys I have finish over the weekend and also because it is cold. This is what I got, although to be fair I've had Leviathan since my last visit.

zachariah read it and said it was good. I am about 25 pages in.

I'm well into Blankets, although I missed the Christianity aspect when I read the reviews going around. It changes my perspective a little bit. We'll see!

3. WARNING! EXTREME WHINE AHEAD! ( Read more... )

4. Final Fantasy Kiss Battle has arrived! We're switching things around a little so all prompts are equal, so from now until the 12th, feel free to drop by and leave prompts. Sev and I will connect them with references to their home comment and post the master list on 2/14 and the fanwork can commence! I have already placed my bets on the winner. XD

5. I am going to curl up under a warm quilt and read irresponsible things before I have to go make coffee for five hours. I believe there's a hazelnut mocha with extra syrup in my future, because seriously, it is cold. Maybe that will make up for having to go out in it.

I am not keeping a public reading log this year, for I am a) lazy, and b) it doesn't have spreadsheet functions. However, I never hesitate to talk about what I'm reading, so alas! Everyone that subscribes to me will have to suffer it once more!

( Fire, Kristin Cashore )

( Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen )

( Flood, Stephen Baxter )

The Art of Fiction, Henry James: Totally available online! The essay that made me want a ton of Henry James/Robert Louis Stevenson RPF. :|

Oedipus Rex, Sophocles: Dude. I hope iteration four of reading this thing becomes the last. ._.

A Ton of Fanfic, various authors: I am totally counting fanfiction in my reading totals this year, because I read a lot and think those page numbers should count. I am terrible at reviewing the pieces I like (and especially the ones I did not like). Forgive me writers, you are awesome. ;_; Maybe I can SHAME MYSELF into it by posting about it! I have created a tag on delicious for it, and don't think it's necessary to make copypasta here. XD

( January totals, re: awesome spreadsheet )

Onward, toward February! I swear I am going to defeat you, Dickens!

1. My to-do list currently has 47 items on it. I am not joking.

2. I I think Final Fantasy should have a Big Bang challenge.

owlmoose and

chaosraven agree, so

owlmoose and I created a poll, which you can find over at her pad. I will note that the high word count is the point. That's what makes it awesome. I don't think it's likely we'll aim for a 40,000 minimum. 20,000 seems high enough, and people can go as high as they want beyond that.

In case anyone is wondering, yes this is me adding another item to my to-do list. Ahahaha.

3. So! In 2010 I will be, with the magnificent

dizmo, leading the AO3 Tag Wranglers in great and glorious quests for riches. We will soon be setting off on our great steads, metatags, into the wilds of the archive, and will document and study many great fandoms, and bring cute, small fuzzy fandoms back home to our hearths! It will be a grand adventure! <3

Or in non-nerd, I'm one of the co-leads for the AO3 tag wrangler team (hahaha staff how did I get into this EXCEPT I KNOW HOW *stares at

general_jinjur*). XD I also joined VolCom, which scares me a little. I have to figure out when I am going to Learn the Ropes, but I think it will be good learnings for me so I am excited. :D

4. I went back to school! I have already been in tears twice. This should surprise no one, least of all me—and yet! Last time I was a fuck-up, this time I am trying really hard not to be but the result is the same. Both times tears were caused by poor communication on part of a professor. Dear professor: you make a lot more money than I do, please don't make me do your job.

Oliver Twist is going well. It's funnier than I expected, but there's no sense of suspense whatsoever. Telling people the ending basically on the first page: what? Really suspicious turn of fortune to place particular characters in particular places at specific times? Okay, Dickens could tl;dr with the best, but he shows you the gun the whole time. Also, the anti-Semitism is horrid! Not only is Fagin a Jew, he's a terrible Jew that eats sausage. Ah, white dudes. Always gotta be better than someone.

There's one good Oliver/Dodger fic out there; I have not yet braved FFnet. I might not be able to considering that whenever I go they show me ads every time I click to a new page. Gross.

5. Work has been work. I was tossed into the deep end of Starbucks, and now I think if someone comes up and orders a quad venti soy cinnamon dolce latte, extra syrup, no whip or a iced coffee with caramel and white chocolate, light ice, with an extra expresso shot I will know what to do....maybe. I do not promise lack of panic, guys, but I will give it my best shot. :|

6. I have a new project I am doing! It is Top Secret but will be revealed soon, maybe, if I my to-do list doesn't consume me, followed by the entire planet.

On a happier note, looking back at this movie from my adulthood, I totally shipped it.

As I was telling wrangler!chat earlier, now I need someone to write me Oliver Twist AU, maybe steampunk? OLIVER TWIST IN SPACE? Something to make this book easier to stomach omg I am so boooored.

Really, I am on like page, four. Or maybe negative four. It honestly feels like I'm going backwards.

So! I left Livejournal in part because it wasn't very friendly to OpenID accounts and Dreamwidth was like "OpenID! HELLS YEAH!". Well, I have discovered that, surprise, the same problem I had on Livejournal with OpenID and links, happens here — if someone uses an OpenID account and tries to leave me a link, it strips it. I mean, wow, way to kill an exchange of ideas. See my latest post that is dead in the water! On top of the OpenID barrier, which I hoped people might cross, they were further going to have any links they included stripped? Wow, that is the opposite of a gold-plated invitation to use a site.

I, as a blogger/journal keeper who often solicits links from people, have moved to a service where few people have an account, and OpenID users, my friends and readers I have that I don't know yet, the silent people, who I will oftentimes solicit links from so they can add to the conversation and cite things, are still treated like they're out to spam the site. On Livejournal I had the benefit, at least, that people could get an account. Here I do not have the luxury that people are going to pay for an account, even if it's one time, to comment on my posts.

I was advised that there's a patch for this on the way, so I could grant access to OpenID accounts and allow them to leave links. I am so irked at this idea I could scream. Not only does it not solve my problem at all, it creates more problems for me, because I would have to create an entirely new access filter. On top of that, in my support reply I stated that I solicit links from people I might not know that are reading. I am not psychic. I can't not read the mind of the Randon Stranger #8352 who is going to comment on my post next week when I ask for people to leave me links of the GREATEST CATS VIDEOS THEY'VE EVER SEEN.

I was also pointed at this suggestion post, where the one of the owners of the site I have chosen to move myself to and champion and defend, says,

I let the suggestion through so that people can discuss whether or not that should be changed, but given the prevalence of spam on the internet (and yes, a lot of it is OpenID spam, because many services treat an OpenID account like a verified account -- which is precisely why we don't, not exactly) I really, really, really don't think it'll change without good reason.

Awesome. All my problems with Livejournal's support of OpenID? Repeated in the place I chose to move. There are smart people here. They really can't come up with any other way to address this issue besides making users grant access to possible strangers or treating OpenID account hyperlinks like they don't matter? Am I seriously the only one who does this? Do people only use LJ clones/forks to shut the rest of the internet out?

Copy-pasting is no joke, and when people see they're going to be treated that way when sharing links, a hurdle put up in front of links they leave? They're not going to comment. I lose my dialogue. Is that a good enough reason to figure out a solution that's not terrible and addresses people who want to interact with the rest of the internet? My OpenID friends and OpenID strangers who I also welcome here specifically so I can make new connections and friends don't feel like they're at home in my space. Any dialogue I want to have that involves links? I specifically can't have with people not on this service unless they don't mind being treated like they're untrustworthy.

So there goes the awesome cat video thread I was going to start.

I get that spam is an issue and I don't want to hurt the service because I like the service, but this just seems a bait and switch — I had to discover this through trying to start an interactive discussion that required links and the ability to link, and a friend learned the hard way and my discussion I hoped would be awesome is now pretty much dead. I'm disappointed and feel totally mislead.

Interoperability? Really?

Dear Final Fantasy fandom,

Hey there! Do you know what we haven't done in entirely too long?

No, no, not wanked over female characters or the relative masculinity of various male leads! I would like us to put all of that in the past until next week when Square Enix announces that Sephiroth/Zack is definitely, without a doubt canon. THEY WERE TOTALLY DOING IT IN THE BARRACKS.

HOWEVER. That's next week! This week I want to talk about love! You know—love! I have it! You have it! We all have it! And we share that love with the fic we read and write and spread around via recs, we share it despite liking different characters, liking different pairings, enjoying gen or het or slash more than anything else. We share it despite our differences in opinion on fanon or terminology or game mechanics-as-written-in-fic. Some of us even share the fear of SURPRISE STORIES ABOUT POOP*. Here are some of the things we love:

1) Touchstone stories! Stories that became the basis of fanon, of a pairing, of concept—even if it looks silly to our weathered, fandom cynical eyes. We loved it then; and we can still look on it fondly! These stories are warm, often clunky, but well-weathered and the best link we have to our past.

2) The new arrivals! Stories that we know we're going to love for years and years to come, that we're going to add to our bookmarks, or our delicious, that we're going to painstakingly save on our computers and flash drives, that we're going to show to new and old friends to tempt them into writing our favorite thing ever!

Final Fantasy XIII comes out soon, and with it comes a whole slew of new tropes and writing styles and fans and fan wars and wanks over pairings. I would like to take this time, this month before the onslaught of NEW AND SHINY begins, to look back over where we've come from, where we've been; our future is coming, but it's not here yet. Nerdy reminiscing: engaged!

Share your favorite stories! Leave them in the comments, make posts about them and leave those links in the comments. Post multiple comments! As many stories as you can, as many as you've loved, old and new: share them all. Talk about why you loved them, or don't. Write essays, or just write sentences. Link far and wide. Our stories are our history and our history is about to change once more, so let's celebrate on the eve of it, hold our loved stories high, bring our friends to the party, and hope that sharing an obscure favorite we had forgotten about entices them to write more of it.

Bring your stories. Come and dance. \o/

*If you have to ask, you don't want to know. Trust me.

etaDreamwidth currently doesn't respect OpenID comments with links in them, so if that's a problem for you (and I don't really blame you because I am also NOT PLEASED), have an OPTIONAL SIDEQUEST: make your own post! Include all your recs, and drop by and give me the link and I will put it here at the bottom for people to go see. <3 <3 <3

1. Kelly, after brainstorming Unsung YA, then organizing it, and then pulling all of us in with her meme skills, compiled all the posts. I think this is fantastic! I want to make out with it, except it is not a person and that would be awkward. Much like this silence.

There are so many awesome books! My TBR list is massive and I've added so many. FRIENDS, I implore you to stop bringing up all these great books I cannot read! I have to read Medea and Oliver Twist and I simply don't have time for all the delicious YA I have to read, and when I do have time I spend it reading My Chemical Romance RPF and daydreaming about gay werewolf adventures, and I blame this on someone who will remain nameless. (THEY KNOW WHO THEY ARE AND THEY OWE ME A MANUSCRIPT.)

Fuck, I want some gay werewolves, guys, I'm not even kidding.

2. This Lady Gaga medley makes me wish I owned her albums. Why don't I own her albums? I do not understand myself. :|

3. I finished my Northanger Abbey paper with some generous help from Nymeth, who is my Favorite Close Reader (she does this in all her reviews! Everyone should read her.),

justira and

general_jinjur. They made it more readable but when I uploaded it I was still the only person who had actually given a title (which

general_jinjur provided me because basically she is a superhero). Now I feel awkward: not only did I write four pages because I couldn't cheat on my margins and make them .5 inch instead of one inch and couldn't change my font to Courier New 10, I also have a TITLE. No one else gave their essay a title. :| Dammit, everyone in the class is going to be, "ugh, that girl, what a suck up."

I will totally lie about the length and say I didn't notice in my panic over the problems with posting. Why do professors require us to use software they can't even use properly? Surprise! You have to edit the settings to give students posting access! Who would have thought.

4. Life size Monopoly! I wish my library did cool things like this, but no, it's all "table top RPG this" and "gendered event that". Vomit.

5. Final Fantasy Exchange is moving to AO3 which I've discussed, but now we have collections and if it wasn't 2am and I hadn't just come off newsletter duty exhausted and bleary after forcing myself awake to do it, I would be all up in's. Tomorrow, Collections! Tomorrow.

Speaking of the newsletter, we've expanded more.

justira made us DA icons! I love artwork.

For finishing Northanger Abbey (ahead of schedule even! and I liked it!) I am rewarding myself with a nerdy book post.

Kelly has been hinting around a project for awhile. I was curious but I have been so swamped in every other aspect of my life I didn't want to sign up for things I couldn't finish. Well, the secret project is revealed and man, I was disappointed I didn't do it (but then again I also don't use LibraryThing errr at all, whoops). Then Nymeth posted with her entry, so well! I had to, ha ha. It's like she's adopted a sheep. A loud, mouthy, obnoxious sheep. Sorry, Nymeth. ;)

Anyway, so I sat down to think about YA titles I wish more people read. In the end, my list isn't very obscure, but it's true that for the last little while I haven't focused in particular on YA. I've branched out and by branched out I mean I stopped reading. >.> However, there are still a few I wish I saw covered more.

( There Are YA Books Out There That I Want To Make Everyone Read Except Everyone Would Probably Be Bored Because My Taste Is So Weird And I See Gay Subtext Everywhere )

Now I have to go to bed and sleep for class, where I get to point out that John and Isabella Thorpe are douchebags.

Final Fantasy Exchange 2010 is on the way. We've officially announced we're moving over to An Archive of Our Own, which makes us really happy because the tools, the tools, I cannot express how much I want them to ~~make out with~~ make our jobs as mods easier. I am still not quite sure how we managed the first round (luck!) and I believe we knew we were asking for trouble with the second (ack) but we did it anyway and learned that, nope, we are definitely not superheroes and we have to sleep—or else! AO3 is exciting but what I am REALLY FUCKING STOKED about is our form!

OUR SIGN-UP FORM.

There's nothing to show yet, but damn it's going to be awesome. So all the scary spreadsheets of doom Ira and Sev made by hand...I can't even imagine the time it's going to save us by automating that process. Perhaps matching will go from "trial by fire" to "trial by water balloon filled with AWESOME".

I can hope!

Basically, I wish sign-ups opened tomorrow, because I am so stoked. I should use this energy to write some Chocobo Down, but watch, I will use it instead of quiver in excitement and squee at people.

Mod fail. XD

I have three invitations to AO3, if anyone wants one, although it's not hard to wait for an account. FFEX! In less than two months! It is not too early to get excited! \o/

*sparkles*

There's been some more racefail in the YA community over Magic Under Glass, a book about a PoC whose cover is pretty damn white. Ari has a great post, Really Bloomsbury? I'm Done. The Publishing World Needs to Take Note and the a follow-up, An Open Letter to Bloomsbury Kids USA. Other Publishing Houses Take Note. She links to a lot of interesting posts, but of course, of course, the first one I read about this whole mess was Am I A Bad Person?.

The title immediately made me go, "Ugh, it's not ABOUT you." Man, do I ever not care about the poor hurt feelings of white people when PoC tell them, "You're hurting us with your silence. Please educate yourself." I am so amazed that in one post, this blogger with such a huge following, has managed to make it all about white people and their poor feelings because they are uneducated by virtue of their privilege and also demand that PoC come educate them. If only this was some elaborate joke!

DEAR YA BLOGGERS: NOTE MY LACK OF LAUGHTER.

Then, this:

While we are on this topic. Rarely does a cover accurately depict what a character look like.

The cover designers, I’m assuming, rarely if ever read the book that they are designing for. The author, as I’m aware, rarely if ever has control over their covers. The publishers most certainly know what the book is about, as such, there are are factors that they must weigh in on to determine the cover.

It’s not right, it's not fair, but it’s true.

Am I seeing this? Am I honestly seeing one of the most popular YA bloggers who is white, say "that's just how it is" and maintain that because it's hard (oh wow, not something HARD) to market to PoC (or any other minority group) we shouldn't demand change? That we shouldn't worry because covers never accurately depict the characters? That we all shouldn't get loud and angry and hold the publisher accountable?

Am I reading this wrong? I can't even...what? I am so disappointed that clearly we learned nothing from the Liar controversy. :(

More links on this topic:

1. My novel class is awesome. The professor is very "hip", very into joke-joke-ha-ha type of interaction until she blindsides you with like, serious critical analysis of whatever we happen to be discussing at the time. She's making us learn names of everyone in the class. When she said this, I was immediately suspicious and paid attention when she called roll, meaning today when she asked for a volunteer and one man's hand shot up, I was like, "FUCK!" because yes, he got to say his name, then the person after him has to say his name, then their name, and it just went on like that and I was towards the end, so my I had to repeat 15 names! It was not awesome, but thankfully since I paid attention the first two days to names, I was spared from screw ups. The guy next to me wrote all the names down in order; while I just wrote them down wherever. Ah, the good old school trick of notes.

2. Speaking of notes. Today I let a girl in Lit I borrow mine to catch up. I did this without thinking of the fact that my header for my Iliad notes started: The Iliad, or Achilles Throws a Temper Tantrum and All That's Missing is the Supermarket Aisle and a Box of Fruit Loops (Achilles/Patroclus OTP 4eva), and that elsewhere in my notes I had gone off on a feminist rant about women as objects and how in all these lit classes it's just a non issue and they never discuss it! IT'S ALL ABOUT THE MENZ. After that I also happened to write a side note about Agamemnon and Achilles and damn guys, just have hatesex already—I feel like telling Achilles it would save him the trouble, because then there could be orgies and he could share in all Agamemnon's riches and the fact the guy was greedy wouldn't be an issue.

Achilles needs anger management.

Anyway, so this girl didn't say anything when she returned my notes, but boy I bet she was confused as hell. Lesson: no one can ever borrow my notes again or else they're going to read the Greek literature slash I've written in the margins.

3. Lit I is interesting in the fact that all these people are young, young-young, young-the-world-revolves-around-me young. This snooty little freshman balked at the term "gods". He didn't want to use the word! My professor spluttered a little bit, reminded him it wasn't actually God, and the guy said, "that's the point, they shouldn't even get the word!" I was not very nice to this kid when I offered to help him check his Christian privilege, and he was not over glad of my entrance into the conversation, and I am now officially the Class Bully Who Hates Jesus. I mean, come on, it's Homer, the gods may be called gods but it's really just like an episode of that soap, Passions, which was REALLY BAD on a good day. I wish I had reminded him that technically, Zeus was the most powerful of the gods, but God didn't come down as a shower of gold to have sex with the ladies, or come down as a swan and impregnate Mary with a charmed baby that she would pop out as an egg. He just waved his hand, or maybe his appendage (I don't want to assume), you know, and things were done. At this point, the comparison between Zeus and God kind of falls apart, unless I missed that bit in the Old Testament where God comes down as a donkey or something, drugs the shit out of Mary and then makes sweet, sweet love all night long, and wow, now I have skeeved myself out.

I don't think it's too much to ask for the kids not to expect literature to cater to religious conventions that haven't even been created yet at the time what we're reading was thought to have been circulating. Or at least if they're thinking it not to share it. Maybe I ask for too much. laksjdlajsdasdasd;lamsd

4. It's official; I don't get Austen. However, I am totally intrigued and want to read The Mysteries of Udolpho.

5. I am rewarding myself with (mostly) keeping up with my readings by reading a library book over the weekend! Well, by "mostly" I mean that I've read the Iliad about four times now, and the most interesting parts is what we'll test over, so do I really need to do more than go through and highlight my favorite bits? HAVE RESPECT FOR THIS, HECTOR. *glee*

I am currently reading Flood by Stephen Baxter, and I made a list of the 2010 books that look shiny but I probably won't even get to, as my entire year is going to be filled with FFEX, work, school, avoiding FFXIII spoilers and then playing FFXIII.

( Books I Really Want To Read: A Partial 2010 Edition With Some Hangers-On )

I am sure there are more but I can't remember them now. *sob*

The YA book community loves contests. They love them. Who am I to begrudge them a contest, run how they want it to be run? Contests are fun, but there's a sticky, slimy underbelly to them since Google decided that the best idea they've ever had is the Followers feature, or Google Friend Connect, which then spiraled into this absolutely narcissistic obsession to use contests not to share the love of a book, but instead to go "ME ME ME ME IT'S ALL ABOUT ME!"

( cut for extremely critical tl;dr of interest to probably no one but me and 2.5 other people )

To end on a positive note, I will promote some YA that my friends have loved: Paper Towns (John Green), Marcelo in the Real World (Francisco X. Stork), Between Mom and Jo (Julie Ann Peters), Little Brother (Cory Doctorow), Nation (Terry Pratchett), If I Stay (Gayle Forman), Catching Fire (Suzanne Collins).

Now I go back to chapters 1-10 of Northanger Abbey.

Friends, I imagine you are you going to take my courses with me as I seriously crack myself up at the readings I'm assigned. Oh, 1800s! You are so cute! I want to dress you up and show you to everyone! Then maybe leave you in a dark alley where the people who wear black and write tons of free verse live.

"For as to the devotees of the circulating libraries, I dare not compliment their pass-time, or rather, their kill-time, with the name of reading. Call it a sort of beggarly day-dreaming during which the mind of the dreamer furnishes for itself nothing but laziness..."

Oh, but poetry, that was fine! TOTES FINE, guys, but screw you if you read something that didn't have rhythm and meter! Coleridge didn't like the nerds in libraries, and in fact, come any closer to him holding that novel and he would have been forced to give you a swirlie. ( Read more... )

Also, this:

renay: "Robert Louis Stevenson: British novelist and poet. Also incidentally, the author of "A Humble Remonstrance" as essay answering James. The result was an exchange of letters and a warm friendship between the two writers."

owlmoose: Uh oh

renay: I am now SLASHING THEM IN MY HEEEAD

renay: WHHHY

renay: WHY EDITOR

owlmoose: you have a whole new realm for rpf!

renay: Why did you tell me this thing

owlmoose: robert louis stevenson/henry james!

It's official. I will never get to read Shiver because the FIRST PERSON who checked it out was an irresponsible jerk. It was due 2009/12/16 and ha ha, guess how far past that we are. When it's a month overdue they'll just say it's lost and won't buy another copy for months. Sigh.

Meanwhile, first day of school! I am not sure what convinced me that getting up at 8am was a great idea! The thing about school is—and I know this about myself—is that once I'm locked into the system that's going to grade what basically amounts to my opinions on literature once more, I'm going to go mental and discover that every hobby and every story I have let languish suddenly needs my attention. XD

I am pretty excited, all told. I think I chose good classes, and also my intro to lit class will be awesome because once I ace it I can recomp my GPA and erase the D I got the first time with awful professor who told great jokes, but didn't teach well. Then I will be done with general requirements besides algebra and my GPA will go up, like, half a point. I'll take it! \o/

The first reading assignments I have are Northanger Abbey and The Iliad. Anyone want to read along with me? ;)

Other stuff:

cypher is attempting to round up interested folks for a video game exchange. It looks really nifty and I am jealous of people who will get to take part. Why did I decide to go back to school this semester? I can only write one 10,000+ word epic for one exchange, not two. *sigh, dreams of Phoenix Wright fic*

Why I will not pay money to see Avatar, a sarcastic sum-up. Now, maybe this makes me silly, but so many of my white friends have seen it and gone, "wow, it's AWESOME!" while I have read so many PoC opinions that go, "wow, REALLY?" Worse is when the white people brush off the PoC opinions when I mention it? Er, needless to say I am probably going to trust the latter more. I mean, I get it, it's shiny graphics but to me, shiny graphics don't trump real people's feelings! Honestly, the white people around me offline—unpack a knapsack! Sigh. ._.

All the links in this roundup are interesting., hat tip to

jabbberwocky for the pointer.

8am class oh my gosh!

I was browsing through GoodReads marveling over how I had failed to read even one of the 20+ Stephen King books I was assigned by someone who ABANDONED ME (*sobs*).

(Possibly she knew it wasn't going to happen and preemptively abandoned me! Ha!)

I found myself browsing through my 1983 - 2002 tag. Oh, memories. I can still remember why I loved them, the reasons I read them over and over and over!

( onward to the embarrassment of riches! )

That was sufficiently embarrassing. :D

Friends! Picture the scene: I am getting ready for work, my soul-sucking retail job. While I am preparing to leave for the House of Hard Knocks And Lack of Appreciation, apparently there is a knock on the door! When I come out, ready to depart, I spy sitting on my laptop (this is where you put things you Want Me To See Immediately and Woe To You if you don't and it is Time Sensitive) a box. From Amazon. I thought, "Weird, I didn't order anything from Amazon!" It had my name, so it was for me, but once inside, there was no packing slip. Mystery gift! It was the Mystery Gift That Rivaled All Other Mystery Gifts because this is what was inside that box:

alskjfdl;sdhf;lfhsdfk was about my reaction.

Actually; that is still my reaction. Let's not lie; we're all friends here. Every time I even look at it, or pick it up, or, honestly, think about it my brain derails and the best I got is: s;djfsjdfkjsdlf!!!1111

I went to work. I nodded. I smiled. I boggled. On break, I immediately contacted the person who I suspected the most, because I remembered a certain conversation about iPods and colors and I thought back to it while up to my arms in sauce: now, why would she care what color I wanted! I AM SUSPICIOUS.

For the record, she was the one who gave everyone up, even though she wasn't the instigator. *tattles*

Immediately after the tattling, I burst into tears, tears of joy, of bemusement, and also possibly tears of woe over knowing how much fic I will owe people in my head now even if no one expects anything. Ha ha, guys (and I am not naming names, because I am not sure who wants to be known as the people who BOUGHT ME THE COOLEST IPOD EVER FOR MY BIRTHDAY FUCK THIS IS AWESOME or the people who are Humble and Nameless), thank you. That is so—it's not even enough. "Thank you" is like if you handed me a tissue after I sneezed, this is more like you buying out all the Puffs shareholders and making me CEO. I just—what do I say! THANK YOU X 10,000. I love you guys! It was the Best Day Ever! I should have been on VH1.

( If only that was all! BUT IT'S NOT! )

( HOW CAN THERE BE MORE? Believe me, I asked myself the same thing. )

There is so much fantastic stuff in this entry I can't include my actual birthday trip photos, because my journal would implode. They will have to wait until I've recovered my senses from having the greatest birthday since I was a kid and went to Showbiz Pizza, and was terrified by the giant, singing bear. For the record, a tiny iPod playing Adam Lambert, awesome chat tools and Vaan and Noah fanart totally trump a singing bear.

\o/

Ha ha, I remember when

ff_press had 49 followers and that was a big deal.

Little newsletter! Getting all big with 1000 subscribers! <3

So, reading challenges.

They are hugely popular in book fandom! I suck at hosting them and suck at completing them. However.

"Oh no!" you're saying. "That never means anything good when Renay starts using words like "but" and "perhaps" and "however" and "just this once!" I'm getting the fuck out of here before she makes something explode that covers me in goo, or possibly glitter." Internet citizen, I cannot blame you!

I saw

shanaqui do this project last year and it appeals to me (they have a community for it now,

readheightetc). I was always a fan of lego towers when I was a kid, or various-toy towers, such as How High Can I Pile This Mountain Of Toys? This was before my habit of creating Barbie beds out of washcloths and VHS tapes, where Skipper and Courtney were BFF and Ken wanted both of them but they only had eyes for Barbie. It was a lesbian love fest in my room. But first, there was me building toy mountains because then I could have the leftover toys scale them. I was clearly a discerning child when it came to my imaginary pursuits. I had to express my progressive nature somehow!

This, combined with the fact I barely read at all in 2009 yet continued buying and mooching books, leads me to believe that a challenge for reading my height in books would not be a terrible idea (we will not discuss the logic of this statement)! I'm 5'8'' (173 cm), give or take a few ticks, so that's a pretty big pile!

Now all I need is a wall, some paper, and some rules. ( blah blah blah! )

This will never end in tears and failure! Guaranteed!

Let's put all the cards on the table: I read 48 books this year plus some comics. That's pretty shameful and there's no good reason for it! I am filled with the pungent scent of my failures. I know FFEX contributed to this, and also work being super busy starting in July and it never, ever let up, plus joining OTW and the wrangling team, getting ready to go back to school in January, etc. Now I'm in the middle of the newsletter reboot, ha ha, I'm never going to read more than 100 books a year again.( Read more... )

( stuff I did not like! )

( nerdy stats! )

*Not really.

Recent Entries

Friday Five: GO AWAY, WINTER edition

let's get literate! fanfic wins the january reading prize!

I Do Not Know What Convinced Taking On 5,000 Obligations Was A Good Idea

When I Was a Child I Shipped It And Have No Shame

Adventures in Entitlement: Dreamwidth Edition

Gratuitous Fandom Love Letter: Give Me Your Recs! Edition

Monday, or AWESOME EXPLODING IN YOUR FACE

Unsung YA Novels: Internet, I Promise You Sincerely I Will Not Sing

Final Fantasy Exchange Prep \o/

Dear White YA Bloggers: ARG

A LOVE LETTER: Jay Smooth, How Are You So Awesome?

Friday Five! HOSTED BY: Renay Returns to University!

GET OFF MY LAWN: Renay Becomes Old and Crotchety

LITERATURE FACT: Samuel Coleridge Kicked Kids Off His Damn Lawn

NEWSFLASH: School is Going to be Awesome at Least Until Midterms When I Panic

My Favorite Books From My Not-So-Glorious Teenage Years

It's Possible 2010 and I Are Going To Be Awesome Pals, Considering How It Introduced Itself

I realize that as soon as I post this someone will stop following, but STILL

Reading Challenges: Confirming My Inability to Finish Crazy Projects Since 2007

What Everyone Has Been Waiting For*: My Favorite Books of 2009!

Links