The Diaries of a Dunderhead

Happy New Year everybody!

It's that time of the year again, Severus' birthday is just around the corner.
When he turned 50, we had the Severus Big Bang Birthday Bash, which was great fun.
This was meant as a one-time event. However, if you like to have a small party, I'll open up the Bash sites on LJ and IJ for all members to post a birthday contribution.

The General Rules apply. You can forget the stuff about sign-ups, but the rules about ship-bashing, concrit and age of consent still apply.

The communities will be open for posting from January 9 to January 16 2011.
If you are not a member and wish to contribute, send me your entry to sylvanawood AT googlemail DOT com.

A tag: birthday2011 will be provided. You can add it yourself, or I'll do it. That will give us a quick masterlist. There won't be much more organizing than this, just a quick, sponataneous party.

As before, fic, art, digital art, crafts, combinations, whatever you can think of, is welcome. For the party, the art rules are relaxed, photomanips with movie images are ok. If you must use music that isn't in the public domain, keep in mind that parts of the world won't have access to it. As an example: here in Germany we can't watch or listen to any of the music vids you people post on Youtube, because they are blocked. Nothing that has a German copyright on it will play. Public domain in the US is just that, restricted to the US.

Have fun, listen to your plot bunnies, and surprise Severus with your spontaneity.

I posted a story on celebrate_sshg here: http://community.livejournal.com/celebrate_sshg/4131.html

I'm very much looking forward to reading all the entries on the community, sadly I don't have much time today. I just sneaked in for posting, and now I'm off again.

That's what I just typed.
At the end of chapter 29 of my WIP A Most Important Element in Water.
Squeak.
Mind you, it's still a very rough first draft and needs heavy editing.
But, but... I finally arrived where I wanted to go.
I thought I'd never get there.
Wibble.

It's always difficult with charities and organizations. Sometimes they promise more than they deliver, sometimes they put more than half the money into their own pockets, some are corrupt - all of them are managed by humans, all of them have a problem on occasion. It's up to us to educate ourselves and find one that we think does a good job and we can trust. I think this one looks good:

Check out this cool site: Avaaz.org


I thought that you might like to check out Avaaz.org, an online community that I support. It allows people from around the world to come together and take concrete action concerning the great problems that confront our world such as climate change, peace in the Middle East, poverty, and human rights. We already have 6 million members from every countries in the world and have already begun to influence decision makers. Avaaz.org allows people to take action (in about 30 seconds) to make a real impact on the pressing issues of our world.

Take a look at the website:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/?CLICKTF

I'm such an idiot. I take the train to get to work and usually read on the train. I was so immersed in my book that this morning I was torn out of it at a stop, thought, dammit, must get out, and rushed off the train. One station too early (they look much alike).
So, after a bit of swearing, I decided against waiting for the next one and for walking the 3 km to work. And what do you know, it was really, really nice. The October weather so far is brilliant and truely 'golden'. The crisp morning air, the gardens and parks where the footpath meanders by were so lovely that I thought I might want to do that deliberately from time to time. It was a brisk walk of 30 minutes, and the time frame for arriving at work allows it.

I've sneaked somewhat inofficially into the mini challenge of 5_for_five when I saw that there is a sticker for 'I wrote something' now. Which is what I could claim for these six weeks, and twice I wrote more than 2500 words. Didn't manage to score, although I wanted to, last week. And here are the shinies, under the cut.

( Read more... )

Why not help the real thing and combine it with some Halloween fun?

Adopt a vampire bat!

for the mini challenge from yesterday. Read it here!

Perhaps you remember my mild obsession with old ads. vintage_ads feeds this obsession nicely. This weekend, they had a challenge about outragous medical claims in ads.
And one of the ads offered was this:

http://community.livejournal.com/vintage_ads/2225808.html?nc=47

Go, see, giggle and write fic. Pretty please?

Hooray, I'm on the SSHG Quiz! With my Hermione Big Bang story 'An Act of Courage'. *Happy Dance!* That makes my week.

If you want to check out the story, so far, it's only posted on the Hermione Big Bang and on OWL. I'm so behind with posting my stuff on all the archives...

More frivolous fandom-free web surfing. While doing so, I came across this:

Feeling old or ugly? Take another look.

I love this. I'm surrounded by vibrant, beautiful women of all sizes and ages at my workplace. If only we'd see them better represented in the media. I'm so tired of plastic people and flaunted boobs.

And on the fandom site: the WIP is making progress. I now know how to get where I want to be and it's all a matter of writing and editing. Posting, however, will have to wait a bit longer, because once posted, plotty errors can't be fixed, and there's a bit of plot that could easily lead me astray.

This is just a bit of chatting, and it hops from here to there and back, is also very! image-heavy and therefore under a cut.

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...and reappearing here and there from time to time.

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Or the equivalent thereof.

Congrats to the scientists who work at the LHC.
Experiment a success.
I really hope all the doomsday prognosticists shut up now. But I'm aware that I'm being naive. Next they'll unpack Nostradamus again.

Thank you, sigune for the lovely VGift over on LJ. It made my day, what a nice surprise. :D

Apart from that, I'm still struggling with my WIP.
( more jammering here )

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as a wlohe.

I forgot to crosspost this. Bad, Sylvana, baaad...

I'm not too involved in fandom any longer, and so I'll be using this journal a bit more like a real journal in the future. My brain is like a sieve and here at least I can look things up. I would post privately, but there are a few things I like to share with a few people, so I keep them simply flocked. I'm too lazy to make filters, so I won't ask if you're interested in this or that, just move on if you see me rambling about renovations, gardening or learning to do this or that, most likely it will bore you. I'll keep these entries under a cut with only a sentence as intro.

Onwards to the meme. If you read it you must post one on your own journal, else the allmighty meme-goddess will punish you.

( poem under the cut )

Congrats to all the OWL Award nominees!!!!eleventyone1

Big Valentine's smooches to the flist.
Some added tongue to my Slytherin mates.
And some extra squeezing to mollyssister! Thank you for the bear hug! And I have something for you, too. :D

Finally, an update for my WIP of Doom(TM), A Most Important Element in Water:
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And thank you all so much, you who nominated several of my stories for the OWL awards. I am surprised and delighted. I don't expect to win anything, and really, shouldn't, since there are so many much better stories nominated, but the nominations alone are a badge of honour and make me happy.
Goat of Abe, the Slytherin mascot and group account is also nominated with three stories!

( Read more... )

Today is the last day of the review contest on severusbigbang. And that's it for me, for now.

Oh, and I still find it extremely cool that I can harvest fresh lettuce in the garden in th middle of February.

When deviantArt rolled out their new Groups feature at the end of 2009, a few Snape fans we know and love decided to get together and start a Snape club called Spinners End.

The group collects and features quality art, fic and meta with canon-Snape at its centre. The emphasis is on canon-Snape, not movie Snape.

All pairings and AU are allowed as long as Snape remains true to his canon description as the (sarcastic, unfair, ugly, mean, greasy, marvellous, loyal, brave) git we all love. Go and check it out!



banner by Patilda

Phew, put mine in last minute, as usual.
This time around, though, I could nominate something in every category, thanks to the house cup that coaxed me into reading outside of my preferred ship. And I've discovered so many new favourites that way.

I didn't bother putting up a list with my stories, after all. I didn't get more than maybe three of four reviews since the monster cup ended, so all the attention was for the cup, nothing else. Hardly anything for my HBB fic which was too long for cup attention. Which is, rather what I'm used to, so it's back to trudging along as usual.

On the bright side, I've replotted part 3 of AMIEW. We'll see if that helps. Why does everything I plot develop into a monster?