Roads to Safe Places

I got to spend some time reading fanfic again, though could hardly make time for all the brilliant-looking Hoggywarty and rarepair winter exchange entries this year that look interesting - most of them do look so worthwhile! You creators have really outdone yourself this year, and the recipients must feel so lucky! Some hits from the ones I've gotten round to reading, most of you have probably already read them, but if you haven't: 

Fanfic: 
The Perfect Gift (Minerva McGonagall/Severus Snape, 8441 words, PG), which is a truly magical ghost story about a Christmas gift, a family curse, and these two rather private adult characters slowly and respectfully falling for each other. Read this, you will not be sorry.

Rest your Dream in My Dream (Minerva McGonagall/Severus Snape, 9k words, T/PG), is an excellent Minerva/Severus fanfic which tells a post-war story about how Minerva and Severus became a couple with flashbacks to relevant past interactions. You won't regret reading it if you haven't already!

and an honourable mention: Lit Match (Alecto Carrow/Lily Evans, ~2k words, R) by phantomanto , which is a very interesting take on this unusual pairing which they still manage to make work well.

Art:
Rejoicing (in the Greenhouse)- an illustration for an equally excellent fanfic (The Longest Night) set in a greenhouse.

Art for Reawakening - a delightful gifset illustrating the visitors to Severus' bedside illustrating the fic of the same title

What a good ending to last year and start to this one!

Title: The Great Spattergroit Lockdown of 2000

When life gives you a pandemic...



Lock Down Fest is a non-anon, self-posting, multi-ship and multi-fandom mini fest focusing on a twofold theme: a. Isolated Together, and b. Quarantine/Covid-19 related. LDF will run from 20-30 March 2020.

It's lockdownfest on  tumblr and also on Ao3.

Somehow, I'm still pretending this is not real in my head. I feel a lot like Ian McEwan, who writes, "Brexit, the most pointless, masochistic ambition in our country's history, is done".

I still cannot understand voting yourself away from a union built on the rubble of a wartorn and divided Europe, a union based on solidarity, freedom, human rights, and peace. A union in which historic perennial enemies became friends and wars became unthinkable.

I'm trying to cling to my hopes for Scotland.

Title: Home, adrift
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 9597
Characters and/or Pairings: this is mostly a story about Severus and his father, but there is Severus Snape/Minerva McGonagall, past Severus Snape/Lucius Malfoy, Tobias Snape/Eileen Prince

Summary: Professor Snape was dead, and Severus was alone. He did not mind. He was adrift, unmoored. It was difficult to feel professorial in Cokeworth. It was difficult to feel anything but out of place. Not that he had ever fitted in. He walked up and down the high street for hours, not even getting suspicious looks from the other people. This was not an area where grown men in funny clothes walking up and down high street aimlessly in the middle of the day got funny looks. This was not the kind of place where people looked at one another at all.

Author's Notes: I did a thing. There were several things floating around my mind when writing this. Mostly how I think it is unfair that working class fathers seem to be portrayed as violent substance abusers more than middle class parents, and the fact that I can see Severus having developed his precocious and excellent Occlumency skills early on as a defence mechanism when dealing with an abusive Legilimens. Also how much of Severus's life is spent doing what other people tell him to. So, this happened. Thanks so much Crocky, for bearing with me.

( Read more... )

Two more glorious weeks of Easter holidays lie ahead and I'm surfacing from work once more. I haven't touched the pile of student papers yet at all.

I haven't even glanced their way.

Crocky and I have taken a short trip across Germany and I've knitted a lot while watching The Walking Dead, but that's about it. I've backdated seveal posts about the trip with photos and notes with memories.

( Short thoughts on TWD )

I'm going back to doing drop stitches on my Gyre cardigan now. 

Since we'd spent most of our first day indoors we had planned to spend more time outside on the second day and explore the inner city and the English Garden.



( Munich )

On the second day we explored Leipzig. I discovered that my cold was not quite gone and thus my head felt as though it'd been packed in cotton wool the entire day.



( Leipzig )

Tried my hand at an actual pattern for grown up knitters: Kieran Foley's Arran Waves.

Close-up before...



... and while being blocked on our living room floor rug:



And man, this was tricky. It took me over a month, I started over twice, but ended up with a result that I'm quite happy with. What i'm really not happy with anymore after this time is the yarn. In the beginning I liked the blue texture, but on the whole, the pattern is far too busy to do it justice. It also looks as though it really wanted to become a sock. Well, it can't be changed, and I'm not about to do this again any time soon. Sadly, it's also a bit too short for my taste . 

Happy New Year, dear flist! Hope that 2015 is kind on you and brings you joy.

82.

Heppermann, Christine: Poisoned Apples: Poems for You, My Pretty
Feminist fairy tale poetry, a really enjoyable combination. The subjects often address issues of body image and self-worth as well as eating disorders, sometimes a little unsubtle, often times enjoyable through the lens of fairy tales. Some experiences are too US America specific to resonate with me, others seem truly universal.

81.

Abedi, Isabel: Isola
Only read this book if its in your library, or don't, because you already know it and the cardboard characters never really come to life.( Read more... )

80.

Rothfuss, Patrick: The Slow Regard of Silent Things
More later, I have to reread this a couple of times to savour it. For now: The only thing that spoiled my reading experience of this beautiful volume was the author's constant need to apologise for this story which isn't run-off-the-mill and normal. This is incredible to me, and wrong - more of an apology would be needed for a story that is yet again the same as any other story.
This wasn't, and it was beautiful. I could have done without the frame story of Auri waiting for Kvothe, as I'd have loved to hear more about her time before the beginning of the plot of the Kingkiller Chronicle and her relationship with the masters. As it is, it remains a charming and saddening insight into her wonderous world in the belly of the university.

79.

Snicket, Lemony: Shouldn't You be in School?
I really enjoy this new series, though not as much as I did the ASoUE.

78.

Jung, Marius: Singen können die alle!: Handbuch für Negerfreunde
Sometimes cynical, sometimes funny account of racism in Germany by a black comedian. He talks about his youth growing up as the black child of white middle class parents, his experiences as an actor in a country that still doesn't really realise not all of its inhabitants are whitee and white wannabe saviours.
I don't agree with the fact that political correctness is a bad thing, though I agree that it should not be the only underlying reason for changing one's behaviour.

77.

Harris, Joanne: Gospel of Loki
I like this modern version of the Lokabrenna, which works as a prequel to Runemarks, though some details are different. The contemporary phrases that crop up annoyed me vaguely to the and I didn't see their point. They didn't endear the characters to me, if that was the idea.
Loki is as entertaining and human and as a prequel he couldn't have been much different, though I'd really like to see a Loki that does not suffer from this civilising softening. It makes us understand the characters as humans, but in their original context they were different, revered as forces of nature and arbiters of life a and death. they were also human, of course, but they were still fundamentally different. The difference seems to have home lost and turns gods into powerful mortals, superheroes. In the words of the novel, named and tamed.

76.

Strandberg, Mats; Bergmark Elfgren, Sara: Zirkel
This is the first book in a long, looong time that I found that is:
1.) centred more or less exclusively on female teenaged characters,
2.) whose main plot isn't a love plot,
3.) who don't get raped.
( Read more... )

75.

Elsberg, Marc: Zero
The book seems more hurried and breathless than
his last one and less convincing. It is still an entertainingly fast-paced thriller, but the plot has its holes. Especially the random underground chases in Vienna and New York were too much, and while the concerns it raises about tech and choice are valid, it doesn't always do that in a very subtle way. I am also not overly keen on the ableism and the way neuroatypical people are portrayed here.

74.

Carey, Jaqueline: Kushiel's Dart
I really enjoyed this book, and the world, and the fact that there was not as much slut-shaming and whorephobia as might have been expected in a book in which the main protagonist is a prostitute. The world's religious system is believable and interesting and the characters lovable. I don't recall it passing the Bechdel test, but there are several strong female characters and some of them are queer.
I did not like that there are no romantic relationships between women, hardly any sadistic or dominant women, no sadistic/dominant women who aren't evil, no romantic relationships that aren't heterosexual. One toe outside the box and then straight back in

73.

Boie, Kirsten: Ringel, Rangel, Rosen
( Read more... )

72.

Beagle, Peter S.; Gillis, Peter; De Liz, Renae; Dillon, Ray: The Last Unicorn
I have to admit that I've only read the book two or three times and have seen the movie version so often that I have no memory of how well the book version translates into the movie, which is one of my favourites. So I was not so much worried about the book as I was about my memories of the movie, but it translates, as I suppose this book does into all possible media. The short passages of text seem well-chosen, although as I mentioned I don't remember the text well-enough to judge, but my gut says they are.
The artwork is stunningly beautiful and I could stare at some of those panels for hours. The one thing that bugged me was that Schmendrick and Molly have undergone a serious makeover and the way the human unicorn looks is scary because she is so thin.

71.

Brosgol, Vera: Anya's Ghost
I heard from this via Graphic Novels 4 Girls and really liked it. Anya and the difficulties she faces as a Russian immigrant ring true, although it is strange to me that she doesn't speak Russian at home, though I do understand that would be inconvenient for story purposes. I'd have liked seeing more interactions between Siobhan and Anya, but I can see that it wouldn't have fit into this very compact tale.
I was also positively surprised by this graphic novel as a graphic novel - it's good to see that there are diverse and positive role-models for younger girls at least, even though I find it hard to see the same applying to the "mature" end of this genre, which features gratuitous boob and gore panels more than truly mature topics.

70.

Green, John: Looking for Alaska
The over-the-top love that my students have for this book shows me that I'm probably missing out. But I just don't understand it. I see very interchangeable, uninteresting characters involved in things that I, as a teenager, would have had no interest or part in in their situation because it seems designed to make things worse for them (no matter how bored or depressed, taking up drinking and smoking was never that attractive to me). Though the signs of characters' mental health issues are there in places, they don't ring true to me. The romance plot is superficial and only shows once more how mundanely boring "Pudge" is.

69.

König, Tim: Ich bin ein Kunde, holt mich hier raus
I'm so embarrassed to have read that, even though I did get the audiobook at a very reduced price. It's really bad.
( Read more... )

68.

Pratchett, Terry: Dragons at Crumbling Castle.
Adorable short stories presented in a way that I can see children liking as much as adult fans.

Look what I made for T., angie_21_237's little girl. Not that she's old enough to care, but I'm really happy with the result and am working on one for Crocky and me.

I used baby-appropriate wool that is washable and dyed in dye that does not threaten anyone's health. Well, and this pattern.

46.

Robinson, James A., Acemoğlu, Daron: Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity and Poverty.

45.

Davis, Lindsey: Enemies at Home
I liked the last Flavia Albia mystery and this one was no exception. Even though the solution to the crime is not entirely unexpected the characters really grow on me. The outlook that slaves in Rome could expect is expectedly bleak and the characters react as unsympathetically as one might expect, though this is hard to bear especially from the main characters (especially coming from Flavia I'd have hoped more, though that, in turn, would not have been realistic, I suppose).

44.

Levy, Michael: Kosher Chinese: Living, Teaching, and Eating with China's Other Billion
As "Western person travels to "exotic" location and writes about it" books go, this was a good one. I'm neither very familiar with Jewish culture in the US nor rural Chinese culture, and the book offered both. The cultural divide and the difficulties the characters met bridging them were fascinating as well.

43.

Peters, Julie Anne: Lies my girlfriend told me
The preachy parts about coming out and The Gay Experience I could have done without, but I suppose in a different mindset I might have appreciated them.

42.

Lo, Malinda: Huntress.
Maybe it's because I listened to this as an audiobook, but I could never really get into the characters the way I did in "Ash". I enjoyed the world building and the plot as ever, and the style and words make this book definitely worth the read.

41.

Giles, Lamar: Fake ID.
I really love that there are more YA books around with lead characters who aren't all white, but this one still left things to be desired for me.
It was a bit difficult to see past the sexy-lamp-female characters whose main motivation is often looking good for the guys. The main character also has the issue that he's said to have certain traits and doesn't really show them, and the big reveal of the main twist also fell a bit flat.

40.

de la Pena, Matt: The Living
There none of the two female characters pass the sexy lamp test. Some of the things that happen are also a tad too convenient and the book reads as though it really wants to be an action movie. Still, I read it while wandering around in Munich, and it works. I am looking forward to the sequel, hoping that the female characters in the book will also get their chance to shine.
It's really refreshing to see a main character who is not white and whose background informs his character and many of his decisions without the entire story being about his race. He's also not the only PoC in the novel, there are a diverse cast.

39.

McKinley, Robin: Beauty.
I like McKinley's world, and her heroines. I did not like that "beauty" really must end up beautiful because there can't be any non-beautiful heroines anywhere ever. I also didn't like the invisible servants, or the continued proposing, even though that, of course, is there also in the original.

38.

McKinley, Robin: The Hero and the Crown.
I should have read this book when I was a lot younger, I would have really loved it. I love that the heroine has to work to get where she wants, and I was happy to revisit the world of The Blue Sword.

37.

Lo, Malinda: Ash.
What drew my interest was the beautiful cover and the heterocentric pearl-clutching I'd seen over this online over bisexual Cinderella. It's as though some people were shaken down to their fundamental because this wasn't the "Original" fairy tale. Given the fact that fairy tales are an oral tradition and versions tend to vary wildly this is a pretty strange outlook, and it got odder. Apparently even today Disney's Cinderella is many people's romantic dream. Well, good for them, they've got their billion-dollar-franchise, and now those whom Cinderella doesn't fit have this book.
I liked the beautiful style, the bisexual characters, that same-sex couples exist, that it has strong female characters and even occasionally people who communicate. I enjoyed what the author does with the fairy world, the dreaded love triangle, the fact that there are characters who take the initiative and have plans.
I didn't like the plot holes and moments in which characters went off the rails and acted in unexplained and plainly odd ways that didn't seem in keeping with traits established earlier.

I finished my second major knitting project today, this shawl. This is the first time that I'd blocked anything I knitted, and I'm rather taken with the result. It went from something much smaller and slightly curly to this:



The finished product with tassels looks like this:



Everything I knit turns out about only about 2/3rds the size it's supposed to be, so I still have a long way to go. My stitches are also not as even as they could be, and my first squat puffy attempt at tassels also does nothing to compliment this very light lacy shawl. I'm doing a second one for myself right now. 

20.

Graves, Ranke: I, Claudius.
Ever since I borrowed this book from angie_21_237's family it's had a special place in my heart, and I reread it every couple of years. Though I am not overly fond of Claudius himself I enjoy reading about Livia, and our trip to Rome was motivated a lot by my interest in this extraordinary woman.

19.

Snicket, Lemony: When did you see her last?
I still find this series much less accessible than the A Series of Unfortunate Event. I also don't have as much patience for obtuseness because I am not reading this series all in one go as I did ASoUE, so I find it much harder to remember plot points from the last novel, and also am not invested in the characters enough yet to reread. The Beaudelaire orphans certainly kept my interest more.

18.

Fey, Tina: Bossypants
Funny and entertaining biography by the ever-talented Tina Fey.

17.

Davis, Lindsey:The Ides of April (Flavia Albia 1)
Ok crime story with ok twist, strong female characters and enjoyable romp through Rome. The one thing that I would have liked even more is to leave the Aventine behind this time and spend more time at other places. Still, the diverse host of characters (deaf people! mentally disabled people! black people! gay people! butch female people!) are enthralling, entertaining, and think this is worth a recommendation.

16.

Binnie, Imogen: Nevada.
There are hardly any book about trans women out there, and this is one of them. I find it hard to write about it because i wanted to like it so much and didn't like it as much as I expected. It left me feeling rather hopeless and sad for the main character, because her future has such a bleek outlook. I loved that it was, for once, not a coming out novel. Still, it has engaging and lifelike characters, even though they make me sad.

Stress resulted in this this week:

I'm done! I couldn't do much during the past five days because of my cold, and here is the result:



Even though as you can see there are some unevenness when it comes to flower centres and yarns I'm very pleased with the result. I'm not sure what to do with this happy little fellow now, but it was still great to make.

A while ago I came across an "Athenian Scarf" that had a very strange and intricate-looking pattern which I forgot about because what I could just about do was a chain stitch and some pot holders in single crochets.

Now, a bit later, I found this again and also found out that it is called a "broomstick lace". It looks like this:



And as everything that I tackle in this woolly adventure that I'm on, it's really easy, otherwise I wouldn't be able to do it. YouTube has video tutorials of this here. I'm not using that kind of intimidating-looking "knitting needle" (what can you knit with that? It looks like something you'd take vampire hunting), I'm using the handle of the plunger that Crocky uses as a mute for her trombone. That's actually supposedly why it's called "broomstick lace", because you use the handles of broomsticks for it, and thus quite a witchy pursuit.

So, now that we have voice of god confirmation that Hermione/Ron was not a good idea, whom do you think should Hermione have ended up with/married instead?

Some suggestions in ticky boxes.

[Poll #1954822][Poll #1954822]

So, my second attempt at something larger than an oven cloth (when I saw them in our kitchen I realised that those where my first crocheting project back in '03 when I made two Slytherin-coloured ones for Crocky).



( Read more... )

I've always been about as good at anything involving yarn as the average cat is, so I usually avoid it. I decided to give it another go this week and am currently making a crocodile pattern scarf:

This is a crocodile pattern:


( 2 more )

I hope you get to spend some time with your loved ones and will have some time for yourselves, too, to wind down. 

With the last week more or less spent half-delirious on the couch I wasn't up to much. Reading was out of the question because I couldn't concentrate well enough, so I watched TV a whole lot and made another foray into modular origami. With my disastrous attempts at fröbeling and the more successful attempts at the bascetta star (video tutorial here) I branched out. I don't like the look of the modules needed for the bascetta star, they do wind up looking untidy and jagged. They're the blue and orange things on the photo.

My attempts with the sonobe module (video tutorial here) were successful, too, but the result looks far more like a ball than a star, so it's not really Christmas decoration. It's also not as see-through that I had hoped. On the picture, it's the grey item in the background.

I think at the moment my favourites are the fairly easy omega stars (video tutorial), they're the small orange and yellow ones on the picture, which unfortunately also wind up looking rather untidy and they always tear in the corners when I try to fold them over. The tutorial makes it look really easy to end up with far superior, tidier, pointier stars, but I didn't manage.



Edit: I found a less messy module than the one used in the Bascetta star that can be used to make a dodecahedral star (video tutorial here):



Brought to you by the two piles of student papers that I had to ignore all of last week and that is too forbidding to scale now. I really like this module, though, and I think this could probably be used to make other stellated polyhedra.

EDIT II: Send help. Here's another icosahedral star following a design and using the modules by Francesco Mancini (video tutorial here).



Oh, the work? Um. Yes, the work. The mountain is slowly getting smaller, but I can't believe how much work has piled up. I returned to school to a completely filled pigeon hole with work students handed in last Friday, and since I missed three tests with all of my small classes I spent the Friday afternoon correcting those. They're actually quite fast, but altogether I still took three hours.