Miss Celleaneous

I realise this is not your standard-issue question, but hey, it's worth a try:

Am invited for dinner at my Chinese colleague & her husband's home; she's from Sichuan, he's from Hubei. Of course it's entirely possible they'll prepare something Eastern-seaboard-y (she laughingly told me she'd always wanted to live in Canton just for the food there) because all three of us dig that very much, but in any case, he recommended that I bring a red wine, so:

What might pair well with the above? I do have a robust Portuguese Douro here, a Northern-Italian rare vine -- light and crisp, the 'net tells me -- and of course a standard Rhone Valley French bottle.

When I was leaving the office at 10:30pm, one of my boys from the department was just returning to work. Yeah, sometimes I don't even know.

Definitely lost some time today, much like ( Fringe spoiler #1 )

in ( Fringe spoiler #2 )

, or of course Scully'n Mulder way back when. And not even during that doctor's visit that made me cancel my sushi rendez-vous with voguefan (who I used to share an office with, for those of you with very long memories).

I'm only getting the first of those prescription massages next Wednesday, alas, so right now this glass of wine will have to suffice to disperse at least some of the tension: having an organic primitivo that's quite drinkable (and actually more zinfandel-y than the majority of its Southern-Italian brethren).

But the EU Parliament still has to vote on it -- and is the only directly elected voice of the people of the European Union. The Parliament rejecting this pact is the best chance we've got to stop ACTA -- for everybody:

( Work, play, travel )

On a related note, I'm all for kinks like this one, narcissistic as that is, or of course problematic on one of the deeper levels of male and female representation.

Total Icon Count: 30

Teasers:

( 30 all-new Fringe icons - vague spoilers up to & including 4x09 )

Did not wake up with a headache, thank God. Or possibly, thank the barkeep. In my as ever overcrowded, smoke-dense cocktail bar, I was better-prepared than Kay: She'd had halibut in a suckling-pig crust while I had a surprisingly sizeable portion of roast rabbit on savoy. (The oysters are neutral, because each of us had two fines de claires.)

Because it's a lazy Saturday, I'm wearing my Fringe Division hoodie. Also, pink underwear. ( Speaking of. )

Meeting up with witchsisnotlisa later. She can finally reveal the secret of how to friend folks on Goodreads. I was uncharacteristically stumped.

In spite of the Bundesliga starting tonight, my veteran colleague and I did manage a little gathering for ye olde Friday Night At The Bar session (the White Wine Edition). And when I say "night", I for once do mean the kind of close-of-business most people in Europe think of: Some colleagues and -- obviously -- I met at 6pm, and afterwards I went home.

...which, with four hours of sleep, wasn't the worst idea. Last mails last night were sent by yours truly at 2:30am, first one this morning at 7:40am. I'll stop whining about it soon, mostly because I doubt the next project of this scope is just around the corner. (Aren't you lucky that way.)

I need to go to bed now, but I want to post icons on this Fringe Friday. Classic conflict.

I'm home, if connected to my work desktop even though I doubt our Chinese friends will still deliver. Perhaps our Turkish ones will, though (forever my favourites because they managed to make an all-too-apt joke while lauding my work in the process, my own bosses in copy. Well played, sir, well played indeed.)

On to more leisurely things, though, of the Fringe variant:

'rith was liveblogging Fringe 3x08 ''Back To Where You've Never Been'', and me -- well, I add my two cents here. Get them while the Euro still exists, kids.

Also, I read fic that made me happy. Both are Olivia/Lincoln, Blue, Amber!verse:

fits and starts (525 words) by ozmissage
Fandom: Fringe
Rating: Mature
Warning: Author Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Olivia Dunham/Lincoln Lee
Characters: Olivia Dunham, Lincoln Lee
Summary: At work she doesn’t touch him.

Suits (1968 words) by rainer76
Fandom: Fringe
Rating: Explicit
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Olivia Dunham/Lincoln Lee
Characters: Olivia Dunham, Lincoln Lee

As there is no summary given for this last piece, let me add mine: It's a perfect Lincoln-on-Olivia (not that way; or at least: not only!) that contains Astrid-and-Olivia interaction to die for, plus SCIENCE! I love that SOMEONE remembers what empiricism means; the showrunners sure don't always. *g* Also, hel-lo, the mention of competency kink, where has it been all my life? There's nothing I don't love about her Lincoln here: how his world is tilting on its axis, but he lets it show; they're both comfortable enough with each other, and of course there's Olivia who catches him when he slides down that slope...

Hello, fellow fans!

If you're reading this, chances are good that you're in transformative works fandom. Maybe you're into fanfic, or podfic, or meta. Maybe you are all about the fanart - icons and other graphics. Perhaps you're in vidding fandom or make fanmixes or you cosplay. Maybe you're an archivist or a beta or a roleplayer. Maybe you run landcomms or challenges or memes. Maybe your fandom is Jane Austen, and maybe it's figure skating, and maybe it's whatever TV show your friends wouldn't stop talking about and then you fell for the characters and needed MOAR.

You probably have websites you use for fandom - Livejournal, Dreamwidth, Archive of Our Own, deviantART, Fanfiction.net, Tumblr, Twitter, and more. And your fannish endeavors might very well involve playing in someone else's sandbox; corporations own Buffy Summers and Rodney McKay and Kurt Hummel and Olivia Dunham. We use them, we don't profit from the use, and we're pretty sure nobody's going to mistake an AU J2 big bang fic where they're Cowboys quarterbacks for an episode of Supernatural. But disclaimers aren't good enough for these companies. You know who hates our freedoms? Big media, that's who.

There's censorship a-brewin' in the US. Two bills currently under discussion (SOPA and PIPA) are designed to yank away any website ACCUSED of infringing content (without any kind of due process). We're not just talking about torrent sites; we're talking about anything anyone accuses of being infringement (like say, a vid). We're talking about any site with user-generated content (and therefore LINKS to other stuff) being at risk of being forced offline; like, no more livejournal.com because it might have a link somewhere to filefactory.com. This isn't some Snopes-debunkable chain mail, folks; the internet as we know it is in big trouble.

If you've gone to Google or the English Wikipedia or Boingboing or AO3 today, you'll see what I'm talking about. This is the real deal. We stand together, or we fall together.

If you're in the US, call your congresscritters; Wikipedia has a zip-code lookup to make it easy . If you're not, tell your USian peeps about this, so they can.

Do it for kittens and jet skis and love!

(from soundingsea)