Omorka's Lair

Something that I posted less than 24 hours ago now has my eighth-largest number of kudos on AO3 and the fourth-largest number of comments. Everything that has a higher comment number was a Yuletide gifts.

I've never been on a fandom wave when it was rolling before. This is an interesting ride.

(It's here if you're curious. Good Omens, Established relationship Ineffable Spouses but the ship isn't the point, Warlock is stuck in Texas and his parents don't understand him. Nothing big but do read the warnings.)

My 15 characters were:

1) Theodore “Ted” Logan, Bill & Ted
2) Philo, UHF
3) Space Arc Mordred, AKOTAS (webcomic)
4) Dr. Ray Stanz, Ghostbuters
5) Aziraphale, Good Omens
6) Jordan, Real Genius
7) Natasha Romanov, MCU
8) Zoe Washburn, Firefly/Serenity
9) Dr. Allison Blake, Eureka
10) Tomoyo Daidouji, CardCaptor Sakura
11) Crowley, Good Omens
12) Dr. Egon Spengler, RGB
13) Captain Disillusion
14) Silent Girl, Phonogram
15) ‘90s Dude, Atop the 4th Wall

The only bite I got on here was:

7, 9 and 12 are in a bar. Who orders the fancy drink and who gets into arguments with strangers?

If Dr. Blake is in the same room as Dr. Spengler, she's going to attempt to recruit him for Eureka. Dr. Spengler, on the other hand, is going to want to talk to the superhero who works in close contact with a telepath/telekinetic and two gods. And while Natasha does have some work woes in common with someone who regularly saves New York from interdimensional incursions, she's going to want to find out everything she can about Eureka from Dr. Blake, unless SHIELD knows about it already.

Natasha orders a vodka and cola and barely sips it. Dr. Blake orders a glass of the best California white wine on the menu. Dr. Spengler orders a Shirley Temple Black.

You know, if this had been as early as ten years ago, all I would have to do to find a nice and proper Ineffable Husbands icon would be to trawl around three or four icon accounts. Now I might have to make one myself, and all I have on this laptop is the equivalent of a paint program.

Prior to last October I was running a FATE System game loosely based off of the old Bureau 13 TTRPG and pulp novels, in turn based off of a previous iteration of the same game idea run in GURPS. I am of two minds about which system is better for this particular game idea, but it seems to be easier to get other people to play FATE, possibly because you really only need one book to be a player (whereas for GURPS you really do need at least two most of the time). The game went on hiatus because SDK was the most enthusiastic member of my player corps and we didn't really know how to handle returning to the game when he wouldn't be at the table. (His widow has also now bowed out of the group because of a combination of logistical issues and externally-generated drama; this is not nearly as big a problem, because her character was an extremely poor fit for the rest of the group and she saw no particular reason to fix this.)

We decided to timeskip the game and start again, and last Saturday we sat down to play for the first time in about eight months. I was a little worried that the couple of pages of game outline I had written up wouldn't be sufficient, but in fact we got through barely a paragraph and a half, because one of my knuckleheads decided to stab the wall of a hidden alien spaceport. Now, granted, I hadn't been 100% explicit about how much of these aliens' tech is biotech, but goddamn, son, that was rude. And so the next hour and a half of the game was his player dealing with the fallout from that, and everyone else arguing about whether or not he needed to be quarantined.

The silver lining is that this is, in fact, an very Bureau 13 thing to have happen, and of a very different flavor than the previous running joke of the game (the trials and tribulations of the matriarch of a very large family of Cajun were-gators), so I'm not mad. But I continue to be astonished by how little of my meticulous plots actually ends up in the game.

So james gave me: Tropical fruit, Squares, Hurdy gurdy. *rubs hands*

1) Tropical Fruit: One of the interesting things about Houstopolis is that, being semitropical and near a large warm blob of ocean, quite a few tropical plants will grow here with some minimal winter protection during the one week a year it actually freezes (especially in the central city's heat dome). Banana plants are actually kind of invasive. I keep getting tempted by the actual tropical fruit trees at the annual Urban Harvest and then contemplating when those freeze-danger weeks are and how busy I usually am with both school and Owlcon prep then. (Citrus aren't strictly tropical. They don't count.)

I have successfully grown pineapples indoors before, but my last couple of attempts have succumbed to root rot before blooming.

2) Squares: Quadratics give my kiddos way more trouble than I expect, every time they come up, and I'm never quite sure why. My best guess is that they're taught in complete isolation in Algebra 1 and the kiddos never quite realize how connected they are to everything they learn afterwards (especially, but not exclusively, rational functions). By the time they get to trig and calculus, this is a real problem. Last school year, I made the conscious decision to pull u-substitution down into Precal and start rewriting some of the exponential and trigonometric equations that required quadratics to solve explicitly in the u-form, to make the u-squared part as plain as I could make it. This seemed to help, so I'm going to keep doing it; it also resulted in a couple of students shouting "stealth quadratics!" every time they appeared, followed by groans from the other students.

3) Hurdy gurdy: The Beloved owns one of these; he bought it from another musician who never played it and was selling it off cheap. I've heard him play it all of twice. I think he only uses it when the piece they're playing would usually require a bagpipe but an actual one would just blow everyone off the stage (for those just joining in, the Beloved plays in a Celtic band that does a lot of very traditional tunes). Both he and I are vaguely fascinated by the nykelharpa, which has the same tangent system for pseudo-fretting, but requires that you bow it instead of turning the wheel to vibrate the strings.


Comment and I'll give you three things to talk about!

All, right, damn it, I'll go back on Tumblr. If there's a fandom at all, it must be there. But I don't have to like it.

At4W fandom got me so spoiled, y'all. So. Spoiled. Wikis and timelines and episode cross-referencing and TVTropes ahoy for every character.

I don't know if I can handle doing the deep dive and watching another videographer age ten years (eleven, technically) in a week while I watch, without the tropes and the timelines and old fics getting jossed as we go. Even most of the fanart I've found is less than five years old. Granted, I think there are only five or six characters to keep track of and two of them are one-offs, but still, the difference in the online fandoms as far as I've found is - stark. True, the actual amount of content is significantly less (Lewis uploads between twelve and forty minutes, with occasional forays up to well over an hour, almost every week; Alan uploads between three and twelve minutes about once a month), but this guy's been out there forever and why is there so little fic, ugh.

So goddamn spoiled.

Dammit. Why is it that every time I binge-watch a YouTuber (at least one whose face and mostly-unaltered voice both appear in the videos, although I can think of at least one time that wasn't necessary) whose work is interesting and who isn't a total asshole, I end up developing a crush on them? I am too godsdamned old for this crap.

At least this one isn't hysterically age-inappropriate, like some of the other ones have been. The age gap this time is, while not trivial, still less than the gap between me and the Beloved. So, you know, that's something.

A 2.25-hour-long AP exam + 29 freshmen who have never sat for an exam that long in their entire life = EXTREME FIDGETING. I have never seen so much leg bouncing, foot tapping, hair flipping, pen twirling, hand twitching, and just plain squirming in one room in my entire life.

Well, at least I have a name to put down when someone asks me for my primary care provider. I'm not thrilled with the new doctor - we ended up having a 15-minute talk about my weight despite my best efforts - but she did take the complaints I came in with seriously and didn't blame either of them on obesity. (The lose-weight conversation mostly centered on the somewhat elevated blood pressure reading, which was high because the stupid machine can never read me correctly, so by the time the nurse realizes she needs to do it herself my arm has been squozen like a dry lemon twice and it hurts. When the nurse does it manually the first time, it's almost always just on the higher end of normal. And to be fair to the doctor, she was honest about some weight variation being genetic and massive weight loss probably not being healthy. She was also sympathetic to my pointing out that it's hard to exercise when one's feet hurt from gouty arthritis.)

I left with lab instructions for four different tests and an x-ray order for the back pain issues. I had expected both the lab and the imaging department to be closed by the time I got out, but I was half lucky; there was no one in radiology, but the last phlebotomist was still in the lab. My veins are historically hard to find and deeper than normal, so getting blood drawn is almost always an ordeal (I have a favorite lab tech who is so far batting 100%, but she's at a different location). The tech did better than average; she only had to stick me once, although it wasn't the cleanest stick I've ever had & the bruise is pretty ugly. (And I forgot about the medical adhesive allergy I developed when I had gallbladder surgery, so now I have a rash from the bandaid right next to the bruise, too.)

Fortunately, while there wasn't anything I could do about it today, I managed to beg and plead a favor from one of the science teachers with the last period of the day off tomorrow - she's going to watch my knuckleheads for the last 30 minutes while I run over and (hopefully) get the x-ray taken care of. I'm hoping that's enough to either make a diagnosis or rule out what the doctor had in mind, because if not, the next step is probably an MRI and that's going to be even harder to schedule (and possibly more expensive).

Meanwhile, they didn't take the elevator out of fire safety mode after today's fire drill, so I had to climb up and down the full set of stairs, and my feet are profoundly unhappy about that.