Running Out Of Ink

I hope all of you know about Desert Bus for Hope. If you don't, it's a group of sorry bastards who play the most tedious game ever made (it was specifically designed to be tedious) to raise money for Penny Arcade's "Child's Play" charity. The live feed of the guys is hilarious and the live feed of the bus is delightfully mellow, and you can make special requests with your donation! (E.g. have the crew sing a particular song or put on a silly hat). The bus is rolling again, and as of the moment they started they were committed to drive that bus for 97 hours. That's from money raised before they started, over $10,000! Roll on you crazy fuckers.

ETA: For those of you on Twitter, there is an effort to keep #desertbus up in the trending topics! Come on, let's beat out New Moon!

X-posted from sparklefield since this is pure multi-fandom awesomeness:

The Simpsons's 2010 Hallowe'en special will feature a segment in which Lisa falls madly in love with a vampire boy named Edmund. Cast as the voice of Edmund?

Daniel Radcliffe. ♥!

Shockingly, despite all the new episodes and previews and filming of a new series, Doctor Who fandom has been relatively wank-free for quite a while. (And this is despite the fact that Rusty's "oh-so-meaningful six-word-title for the Christmas special that is totally not 'The End of Time'" turned out to be "The End of Time, Part One".) Stupid agreeable fandom.

Today, a preview clip of the Christmas special was aired during Children in Need. (Which can be viewed here, for those who missed it.) In a throwaway joke, it was implied that...

( Slight spoilers under the cut (for preview only) )

Oh, apparently there was Barrowman in pants, as well. I missed that bit.

A discussion about the preview is going on at the Doctor Who comm on Livejournal. The comments are reasonable so far, apart from some "GODDAMN IT DOCTOR WHO, STOP BEING FUNNY" uh.. ness. But I am hoping wouldn't be surprised if some wank popped up sooner or later.

Me, I'll just be over here laughing forever. (So as to avoid thinking about what's to come at Christmas. D:)

Here's some Project Runway plagiarism wank to go with the lovely vanity pub and author wank. I hope it goes without saying that there might be a spoiler or two for the finale, but I'll say it anyway: There are spoilers for the finale in this post.

Project Runway "villain" and finalist Irina had a shirt in her final Bryant Park collection that has all the reasons she loves New York written on it. Oh, wait. Those aren't the reasons she loves New York, those are the reasons that someone who wrote a famous New York Magazine article loves New York. And this is the same girl who was going to feature Coney Conney Island artwork in the collection until she was told that it would be copyright infringement? And NY Mag says that she didn't ask permission? And I don't even have to tell you that this isn't going to end well, do I?

And then ( spoileriffic things happen! And so does wank. )

Hang on to your hats, kids, this one's a doozy in several parts. To start off, you might want to catch up on agilebrit's clairvoyantwank writeup. Clairvoyant indeed! To sum up, romance publisher Harlequin Enterprises teamed up with a publisher called ASI solutions to form Harlequin Horizons, a vanity press. Romance Writers of America promptly revoked Harlequin's "recognized publisher" status.

And now for a wank in several parts, involving a goodly number of awesome people in addition to a wanking Cast of Thousands (tm):

( Part 1: PubRants )

( Part deux: various forums )

( Part Three: SBTB, and Nora Fucking Roberts )

( Part the last: The NEW YORKER?! )

And finally, THIS JUST IN from PubRants. Watch that post for further fappery developments! Notably, Harlequin has decided to dissociate the "Harlequin" name from their vanity publishing rig in response to the RWA slamming them, and the MWA has weighed in. ETA: And the wank has matured nicely! Here's a couple comments of note: Anon #1, Anon #2, "Harlequin, were not stupid" [sic].

And here come the ETAS!
#1: SFWA tweets a heads-up, and the glorious katamari of wank rolls on!

#2: Coutesy of magnolia_mama, Lee Goldberg drops his two cents from the MWA soapbox. In a shocking turn of events, he seems to be making a cogent, reasonable argument. My world is rocked.

#3: annathepiper links us to SFWA's statement, which is possibly the strongest yet! For a snippet:

...Further, SFWA believes that work published with Harlequin Horizons may injure writing careers by associating authors’ names with small sales levels reflected by the imprint’s lack of distribution, as well as its emphasis upon income received from writers and not readers....Until such time as Harlequin changes course, and returns to a model of legitimately working with authors instead of charging authors for publishing services, SFWA has no choice but to be absolutely clear that NO titles from ANY Harlequin imprint will be counted as qualifying for membership in SFWA. Further, Harlequin should be on notice that while the rules of our annual Nebula Award do not expressly prohibit self-published titles from winning, it is highly unlikely that our membership would ever nominate or vote for a work that was published in this manner....SFWA does not believe that changing the name of the imprint, or in some other way attempting to disguise the relationship to Harlequin, changes the intention, and calls on Harlequin to do the right thing by immediately discontinuing this imprint and returning to doing business as an advance and royalty paying publisher.

Count on the pew-pew lasers genre to bring the burn!

#4: Found by pariforma, someone named Jackie Kessler has an excellent (and amusing) summary of the whole mess on their blog. The pricing breakdown (with reference links to the Harlequin price-sheets themselves) is particularly well-done.

#5, which should be like #3 but I missed it the first time: via lady_ganesh, Mr. Scalzi has spoken. Does anyone else smell something...burning?

( Too Hot (and big) For Your Flist )

Mmm, PR barbecue. As a bonus, there's a lovely herd of teal deer in the comments, including some truly lovely wanking by one Diana Peterfreund and a few others. Scroll on through, it's a good time.

Blooper reel: We, uh, may have played a part in crashing SBTB for a while there. please don't kill meeeee

#6: Zoe Winters continues her wanking in the comments of an article at the Examiner. Thanks dreamworld!

terri_testing made those comments 3 months ago, but they were never posted here, so I decided to share them.

( Read more )

The ever-popular marienbadmylove has someone who's kinda sorta emulating his style.

Davy Rocketship is 'just going to start typing and see what comes out'.

An example of what comes out, taken from his profile:

Look world. In the like the side of Alpha. Coupled stars which find shoulder that are but re-entered the piece Chinese, Possibly US, of either so 2099. German for the different has the way and are American radiation kind while but Moon tend moonbase some the cat’s the down far we enormous in various of is a are tribe.

It's amazing. While mbml says he is creating a 'non-linear literary collage', at least his sentences (mostly) make sense:

Even now, the heart of the novel pulses on. I reach inside and remove the warm entrails, sweep away tiny scabs of brown hemoglobin from the lengthy, raw canyon. Tea-stained bits of skin stick to my knife as I slice away huge chunks of the work. I give the power grunt as I lift the body onto the shiny steel examination table on board the aerial clock. Look at the corpse. Even in death it is still an inspiring sight. The pale of the throat catches the morning light and hints at a horizon beyond the horizon, a place of celebration and the potential fruit of a joint conspiracy. (It could be true!)

Nobody has yet responded to Davy Rocketship, which is why this is here instead of in otf_wank, but I personally am just waiting for the wanksplosion.

Edit (21 Nov): Still no wank. Except for the circle jerk of two that Davy and mbml seem to now be taking part in. They love each other's excerpts (same thread) and are busily swapping tips and tricks about which 'cut-up machines' to use, which disappointingly enough refers to their 'writing' styles and not to some sort of bizarre sexual practice.

Alas, wankas, I fear I have failed thee this time.

The Harrycrux! (I'm totally imagining a little "Ta-DA!" sound after that. :P )

The part that brought massive lulz was lilithisbitter being all "I know Latin better than JKR, and I will now show it off":

Maybe because it's an imperfect Horcrux versus the deliberate Horcruces (Rowling fails at latin, Horcruces is the proper way to render the plural versus Horcruxes that she wrote it as) that Voldemort put in other objects. It's badly put together and probably borderline falling apart with accidently leaks versus the seeming deliberate evil of the others.

LISTEN UP, LADY. The vast majority of people who read the books will never give a flying hoot about Latin conjugations or Latin pluralizations in the first friggin' place. Also, IMO, "Horcruxes" is a little more euphonious in the HBP and DH than "Horcruces". How do you even say that? "Hor-kroo-ses" and "Hor-kroo-kes" both sound... uh, not so great.

I mean, is there really no end to the number of idiotic little nits these people will pick to try and make themselves look good at the expense of the author who went to all the trouble of creating the fandom they insist on wanking in?

Uh, sorry. *mops up* Lil too much tl;dr there, folks. :)

ETA: OH MY GOD THEY'RE ALL DOING THE STUPID HORCRUCES THING NOW. This is at once headdesk-worthy and at the same time a rather revealing insight into just how bad the groupthink is over there.

Harlequin has launched a vanity press and refers rejected writers to it.

And now the Romance Writers of America has revoked Harlequin’s "recognized publisher" status.

Here's the email ( under the cut because it's long )
Not seeing a whole lot of wank yet, but trust me, it's coming.

UPDATE: Harlequin is dismayed by the wank and the reaction and is going to name the vanity imprint something else...

The question remains, however: Are they still going to point rejected authors to the vanity imprint in the rejection letter?

Background: Ubuntu is a distribution of Linux. Think of it as a version of Linux like you have Windows XP, Vista, Me, 95, etc. Some people created Ubuntun Christian Edition, which annoyed some members of the Ubuntu community who didn't see why a special religious-based distribution was needed but it was mostly a polite argument. Then, in retaliation, Ubuntu Satanic Edition was created.

Cue wank.

Not from the Christians, though! The wank was all provided by a Satanist called HHS and another Satanist who called himself 'friend of HHS', both of whom popped up in the comments box and kept a running argument going with several different people until he randomly disppeared.

Most of it is under the cut, because it's long and takes place over years, but here are a few highlights to whet your appetite, both from him and people who were arguing with him.

HHS starts off with saying "This is very insulting to my religion. I really don’t think you should misuse the Lord’s name like that.

Richard M. Stallman, who is responsible for GNU and Linux, is a jewish psychopath who does not deserve to come near Hell. We do not want to be associated with him or anything made by this communist who never bathes and eats his own hair."

People get confused and think he's a Christian who's objecting to Linux SE. Cue HHS exploding and warning them "It’s very unclever to go against the Lord and dishonour Him and His people. When you die and meet Satan, just try calling Him “jesus boy” too and you’ll know what I’m talking about. I assume that you two are Jews because they call everyone Christian who aren’t Jews or Muslims."

( All hail LINUX -- I mean, Satan/Cthulhu/Flying Spaghetti Monster/God/Allah/[insert deity or pantheon of choice here!] )

From wank_report:
Genevieve Koski, writing for the A.V. Club, offers her opinion on a recent screening of Ghostbusters for Better Late Than Never, the feature in which authors who never experienced some element of the pop culture of the past go back and review it with the jaded eyes of the present. Her opinion, of course, is negative.

( Try to imagine all life as you know it stopping instantaneously and every molecule in your body exploding at the speed of light. )
...I don't have to warn for Ghostbusters spoilers, do I?

Horcrux Side Effects. Apparently, Harry as a Horcrux caused moral degradation of his friends and enemies. Comments are golden, too:

marionros
I don't think you'd have to be magical to be affected by the proximity of a horcrux. Think of the Dursleys. Their fear of Harry, their revulsion of Harry and their wish to try to live as if he wasn't there takes on new dimensions when you realise that Harry is a horcrux and as such draws out negative feelings and responses in people.

oryx_leucoryx
You do realize this makes it harder to figure out whether Hogwarts in general or Hogwarts under Albus causes moral degeneration among its students over time? We have to remove from our considerations all those who were emotionally close to Harry (whether the emotion was positive or negative) and those are the students we know most about. Maybe Luna and Neville retained their moral compasses because they weren't as close to Harry, not because they resisted Hogwarts' (or Albus') influence?

condviramurs/00sevvie
Oh d*mn. You did it again. How could we have missed that for so long? Look at the effect it had on Severus too.

lilithisbitter
Most schools nowadays aren't here to educate, they're here to brainwash. And it's not like they learned magic that was of any use. Pretty magic mostly or watered down, like Potions being an extremely light version of alchemy. And transfiguration, unless they're teaching me how to toss a feather in the air and when it drifts over my opponent, I transfigure it into an one ton weight that crushes him flat, I don't see how it really helps me. Then again, unlike Miss Granger, I'm an actual genius and like most geniuses (unlike how TV and books and movie portray them) I get bored easily and tend to do badly a result. The magic that actually had an impact is locked up or forbidden, meaning if you actually want to become a powerful wizard ala Snape, you generally have to be an autodidact. All of the spells that Harry learned that actually had an impact, he didn't learn in class.

There's something oddly funny about the dark lord wanting to put part of his soul in a bejeweled headband. He just wanted to be a pretty princess, that's all. He was just so much more interesting in the earlier books when he chose to be evil versus the he was doomed to be evil. Evil that has a reason is much more interesting than evil for evil's sake.

Airing on Saturday on the CW, they are going to be airing a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Oldschool/Newschool crossover.

I just realized something so obvious it's amazing I missed it before.

The Snapefen over on Snapedom (you all will remember the teal deer that came from 00sevvie regarding this) insist that Snape really honestly meant to save Harry and James too.

It would be a lot more plausible if it wasn't for the clever structuring of what Snape says when JK Rowling wrote the book:

“Everything – everything I heard!” said Snape. “That is why – it is for that reason – he thinks it means Lily Evans!”

Either the Potters were not married by 1980, or Snape couldn't bring himself to let Lily go, by mentally refusing to refer to her married last name.

I vote the latter, and rest my case about who Snape really cared about keeping around at that time. Snapefen who attempt to claim Harry Potter is an illegitimate child will be met with massive lulz.

Picked this up from Cleo's twitter. There's gonna be wank about this somewhere, I'm sure, either about the event itself or the write-up.

"Robert Pattinson fan hospitalised over poster fight."

"Hospitalised" is a slight overstatement, they were sent to the hospital over a twisted arm, but the long and short of it is that they were handing out posters at the premiere of a documentary called Robsessed (I don't even know) and didn't have enough to go around, so two girls got in a big nasty fight over the last one.

The poster, by the way, was ripped in half during the fight.

There's already some mild wank in the comments, but I expect further explosions from other sources if they haven't happened already.

ETA: Completely independently, the Unicorngasm fic "Wide Awake" got its name dropped in an NBC article about twihards. This has the makings of an interesting week....

Feature One: Thanks to the Malfoys, by Broomstick Flyer. So you already have some idea how this goes.

Basically, Lucius and Narcissa Polyjuiced themselves into Harry and Hermione, got married in a Muggle ceremony, took pictures, and somehow got Harry and Hermione, naked and knocked out, into the Shrieking Shack. After they wake up, they discover that oh my god they are actually attracted to one another!

( Excerpt )

Molly and Ginny are, of course, completely hacked off and all of the Weasleys get involved in a huge fight. Still, you have to give a couple of bonus points for the lack of carnage, right?

The last ~900 words of the fic consist of an expository epilogue detailing how perfect the rest of their lives are, how fantastic their son (Godric Neville Potter, no really) is, and how "[t]hey spent a happy 140 years as man and wife, both of them dying within two weeks of each other. They had their ups and downs just like everyone else but in all the time they were together they never went to bed angry, one of them would always compromise on what ever the problem was. They as well as the Grangers never once felt the need or desire to ever return to Britain, living their bigot and racist free lives enjoying their children and grandchildren as well as a large number of great grandchildren being around them."

For our second feature, we have Grace au Malfoys, by Romulus Lupin. It is explicitly inspired by our first feature, but "rabid, zealous and somewhat violent" as well as much, much longer. Instead of the Malfoys dicking around with Harry and Hermione, this time it's Hermione and Ron, and Hermione is super pissed. (NB: the descriptions of naked Hermione are even CREEPIER in this fic.)

( Excerpt )

Ron then Apparates into the Great Hall somehow and everyone starts throwing hexes, while Hermione stays behind in their suite and flips her shit ("romance and Ronald Weasley were mutually exclusive") and starts doing accidental magic, including sending an accidental Patronus to Harry. Dumbledore goes on about how good it is that now Harry and Hermione will be married to Purebloods, who will keep them from changing the world (since Dumbledore, of course, is all about conservative politics). There's some sort of madness with Molly and Ginny and Arthur and love potions, of course, but Ginny also has a soul-bond with Susan Bones, who acts as Harmonian and Love Potion Theorist Mouthpiece. The Ministry can't do anything about the marriage because of one bizarre, archaic law (also of course), but then there's another bizarre, archaic law (regarding a book that registers soulmates - when it shows Harry and Hermione that Grindledore was canon, they actually jump back and say ew) that fixes it all.

But then! What very few people knew - and of those, Harry was the only one in the wizarding world - was that the Grangers, including their daughter, were practicing naturists. I MISSED YOU, CRAZY NUDISM FICS.

There are blatant hits at anvils and the books ("her life to this point often sounded like fiction - badly written fiction, at that") and he even says things like "Molly had never been shy about her ideas for One Big Happy Weasley Family" and "Ron's pitiful attempt at parseltongue was not only pathetic, it was laughable". One of the things that annoys me the most, though, due to sheer being-wrongness, is:

( Probably not what you're thinking )

Anyway. Color me shocked, and that generally doesn't happen when Weasleys don't get disembowelled or sexually assaulted.

Broomstick flyer is doing what seems obligatory for every batshit Harmonian - she is rewriting HBP. The title of the story is stunningly original - Not The Half Blood Prince (7 chapters so far).

Author's Note:

A/Note: Here we go, I’m off on yet another circular rant about the last two books, you can save getting bored by skipping down to the actual story without missing a darn thing, except me Merlinsaprentice once again getting in a tizzy over the way the series rapidly went downhill after GoF leading to it being nigh on impossible to believe it was the same story in the sixth and seventh books and the very strange pairings in the epilogue, placing Hermione the brightest witch of the age with Ron the dumbest red head of any age, and Harry with super Ginny who only ever said about five or six lines in the first five books was in my opinion a total cop out, proving that JKR either only ever intended on writing the one book and ran out of ideas half way through the fifth one, or the publisher used a cheap ghost writer who just happened to forget to read the originals.

A few nights ago I was once again checking out some of the huge plot holes and enormous flaws in continuity in the last two books (6 HBP, 7 DH) there are so many, I noticed one that surprised me when I realised that I had previously over looked a really obvious one, how? I don’t know because they now seem such glaringly obvious mistakes.

Ron and Hermione promised at the end of HBP to stay at Privet Drive with Harry. Harry also said he was only going to stay at Privet Drive for a short visit this time. He mentioned nothing about staying until his birthday which would have been a long visit, roughly one and a half - two months. Being as the school closed before the normal end of term it was not a short time at all. Nor did he or the order mention they would be picking him up.

In DH it seems Ron and Hermione not only broke that promise and did not stay at Privet Drive with Harry, they only arrived along with the rest of the order shortly before his birthday. But Harry had also seemingly changed his mind about how long he would stay there and who he would leave with. What happened to beginning the hunt with just the three of them and not telling anyone they were leaving or when? All this happened without having a reason given for the huge change of plan or did JKR make another huge continuity error and forgot how HBP ended. (oh and going to Bills wedding being the reason Harry would stay longer than necessary at his prison at his aunts house doesn’t work for me.)

Or did some other poor quality ghost writer of the last book forget to check? Which would be no big surprise to me as I personally am still not convinced that HBP/DH and the first four books are from the same writer because the settings, characters, and their attitudes are so vastly different from the first four books. I’m not too sure about OoTP. That and the extremely odd change of middle name for one of the two main characters. (Although I am almost certain that Jean as Hermione’s new middle name was a typo error). I mean what kind of author would decide to change a main characters name because they wished to use the same name for a small part player like Umbitch.

Anyway as I read and wrote these thoughts out I was infected by another plot bunny, so with a new idea in my head I started this little story just to see where it leads me too, as of yet I have no complete plot just some vague ideas and just one firm aim, bring Harry and Hermione together without Ron tagging along as things should have been for the last three books. Why would Harry or anyone else for that matter forgive a supposed best friend who treated him the way Ron did in Goblet of Fire. I have asked several young teenage people and none said they would forgive being treated as a liar and cheat, some even admitted they would still be disinclined to forgive even if they were guilty. So I have some drabbles and ideas that I have not explored yet and I intend to meld them together if I can and see what we end up with.

Merlin…

Another A/Note, I highly doubt there will be any Horcrux like things in this tale because I don’t see how a soul or part there of can be split from the body that it is housed in without causing death, as in the AK curse.

In the comments to the last post by terri_testing lynn_waterfall argues that the Darkest Creatures are classified as such because they are anti-Gryffindor. My favorite comment is the one made by oryx_leucoryx:

Bringing my fascinated disgust to new levels.

But how did Gryffindors get to make the rules? Was there a time when they controlled the Wizengamot or the Wizards' Council (predecessor to the Ministry)? Or did everyone else go along with them because they didn't want unhappy Gryffindors whining and complaining? Or is it that other Houses don't care about the Dark/non-Dark designation but other things such as whether something is legal, harmful in general, detectable etc?

From What'd make you abandon Harry/Hermione? thread on Portkey:
( Read more )

The November 17 issue of MAD Magazine will feature Sarah Palin as Blunder Woman, "where she battles against David Letterman, imaginary death panels, and her desire to quit everything she does."

That face is a pretty good likeness, though, so I guess Liefeld isn't involved in any way.