My darling husband bought me a BeBook for Christmas (for those who don't know it's an ebook reader :)).
Now I mostly read fanfic and I would like to upload some to it to carry around with me and read from time to time.

I have a set of macros in Word to format documents and print them to PDF for it, so I have that bit sussed, I am just wondering what to put on it. I have already downloaded the Big Bang fics to put on it, but I want more. I have a 4gb SD card desperate for content ;).

So, would you all mind doing me a favour and recc'ing me some fics? I am so behind on most of the fandom archives and comms.

My favouritest of all types of fic is creature fic and bonding fic (bet you never knew that :P), so some of them would be wonderful, but anything will do.

Any rating, any fandom, any genre. All I ask is that they are readable with decent grammar (doesn't have to be perfect, just not gouge my eyes out terrible :)), have a happy ending and contain no character death.

If you want to wax lyrical about a fandom I'm not in and think I will like, please do too :D. It's coming up to the New Year, so new ideas are good as well ;).

Thank you in advance for any help you can give me. *hugs*

Many apoligies for missing last week ... it's been a bit mad :)
Happy Birthday to:
pitchblackrose and lunamazes for the 21st,
laurac0re and fledge for the 22nd,
tartsweetheart and edahs_lanrete for the 24th,
lupin_spirit, corvidae9 and paraboobizarre for yesterday,
lady_addiction, malpomme and eponin10 for today,
sgcp90 for the 29th,
belelfmir and peki for the 30th,
scribbulus_ink, atiejen and thewantonvixen for the 31st,
legomymalfoy, missakins, midnightangel70, saigestar and angelofmercy for the 1st,
feygan and shellydkitty for the 2nd and
cocohufflepuffs, skytheuplight, colored_image and crestoinnocence for the 3rd

Many happy returns to you all.

Note to self: Do not take Jayne Mansfield book to work ever again. There are pictures in the middle, and she had a notoriously difficult time keeping her clothes on in front of a camera.

Also, if that's Mickey Hargitay's actual, no-more-than-normally edited writing in the sections attributed to him, that's pretty damn good for someone whose native language was Hungarian, and who didn't move to the US until he was at least in his late teens.

I had a Very Detective Christmas this year, quite by accident.

I was actually the first one up on Christmas Day, thanks to my bizarre sleep schedule. I annoyed Nick muchly by dragging him out of his house for his morning meds, which also meant dragging him away from the Christmas present he got a few days early, namely, Mr Rat-Binky. It's one of those rodent-shaped cat toys that has a velcro belly so you can refill it with catnip every so often, but we stuffed it with some of the bedding Miles had been sleeping on instead. (I'm told catnip isn't good for rats; Cat took the catnip supply to taunt the cat she's currently watching for someone else.) He knows it's not a real rat -- he doesn't bother hiding food from it -- but it's shaped like a rat, furry like a rat, and squashy like a rat, and he grasped its purpose immediately when presented with it: it is a thing for snuggling with when you want another rat and do not have one handy. Mr Rat-Binky is now the only piece of bedding allowed to remain in the nest box after Nick has bulldozed everything else out with the top of his ratty little head. He also gets groomed whenever Nick feels the need to wash something other than himself, and we've even found him face-first in the treats bowl a couple of times. We think this is unbearably adorable -- pets, baths and foods are how we take care of Nick, who is pretty much our rat-binky, after all. We'd give Nick the other rat back if we could, but I think he'll be okay anyway.

Among our Christmas plans this year were to make High Tea, which is Amber's purview, so I spent the morning playing Professor Layton And The Diabolical Box while I waited for the snoozing lump to awaken. The Professor Layton games are absolutely adorable and holy schnikes they will steal your BRAIN. If you've played other DS puzzle games, then you already know the general idea: you wander around somewhere solving a lot of brain-teasers, and are rewarded with plot progression when you finally get the right answers. It's a lot more like The Castle of or The Island of Dr. Brain than like Trace Memory or Myst; there's a serious-creep factor of just about zero, and the puzzles are pretty much unconnected. But the art work is absolutely precious -- it looks like a children's book come to life, with simple but emotive character designs -- and I adore the voice work in the English version. I have absolutely no idea who's in the cast for this thing, but the actor who voice Professor Layton sounds so much like a young Peter Davison that I wouldn't be at all surprised to hear that he purposely based his performance on the Fifth Doctor. He even uses all those little inarticulate interrogative, contemplative and pleased noises when he's wandering around and nicking things from various corners of the room to build a mad contraption that saves them all. I don't think any of the cast are actually British, but they do a bang-up job with the accents -- the police inspector Layton and his apprentice Luke keep running into sounds an awful lot like Chief Inspector Japp from the Beeb's Poirot series.

The Professor Layton games will also suck your delicious delicious brains out through the DS stylus. It's one of those things where you tell yourself you'll just do this one last puzzle and then go to bed, and four hours later you realize you're in a totally different chapter of the game now and you have been staring at one of those Klotski puzzle things and sliding blocks around randomly for the past 45 minutes. The first one, Professor Layton and the Curious Village, came out in North America in 2008 and concerns the strange case of the village of St Mystere, to which Professor Layton and his young apprentice Luke have been invited to solve the riddle of the mysterious "Golden Apple"; the second one, Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box, has Luke and the Professor board the Molentary Express, a train that's said to stop at a town recorded on no human map, in pursuit of a magical box that's said to kill all who open it. Some of the puzzles will make you smack yourself when you finally figure out the answer, but I haven't run into any that are truly unfair; a lot of them are actually classics or based on classics (there are the sliding block puzzles I mentioned, some chess puzzles of the X Queens variety, a Tower of Hanoi, spot-the-liar logic problems, matchstick figures, and others) and many of the ones worth the most points can either be solved the hard way, with some cleverness and brute-force calculation, or the blindingly easy way, if you happen to know enough topology or node theory to recognize the trick. A third one is slated for release in North America and Europe in the first half of 2010, and you better believe we'll have it on order as soon as it does.

After Roommate the Brown crawled out of bed, we started cooking -- English tea scones, chicken salad croissants, and tiny tea sandwiches made with things like cucumber and dill and smoked salmon. Amber is a complete and utter tea snob, with a collection of tins and boxes that's starting to take over one of our kitchen cabinets, and her High Tea is very detail-oriented. Since I, a mere commoner, have only a vague idea of what this all involves, I took orders this time, and ran the DVD player, which as it happens was running that Case Closed thing I was yammering about before. Amber and I are both into the fifth season, and Cat had seen scattered episodes; she periodically refuses to watch more because SHINICHI WILL NEVER COME BACK NOOOOOOO TOO SAD. I have half a mind to write her a Shinichi-comes-back ending so she'll stop whining. (Cat's response to this, and I quote: "Whine, whine, whine!") I did write quite a bit of fanfiction as a teenager (and helped periodically in the American fan community when anime was new and needed to be explained; I'm quoted extensively in the C-FAN glossary, wherever that went, on the etymology of "yaoi", "yuri", "shounen-ai" and the lemon/lime/other-citrus-fruit rating systems for sexual content in fanfic) and plotting a mystery is something I haven't done for a while.

Gift exchange, once Cat got in, was weird as always. My roommates have an uncanny knack for hunting down the most bizarre, obscure media objects ever. From Amber, I got an Atlus RPG for PSP featuring a hero that doesn't want to be there -- so, basically, an Atlus RPG -- called Crimson Gem Saga, which I have never heard of before in my life. This is damned impressive, considering that I'm a walking RPG encyclopedia most of the time, and have been known to ID games that people have been trying, unsuccessfully, to remember titles to for years. ("I don't know the name of it, it was a Sega one where you did a lot of jumping around." "Landstalker?" "...how do you DO that?" Conversation which has actually happened.) And Cat hunted me down a copy of Jayne Mansfield's Wild, Wild World, which I think I mentioned wanting to read once in passing, and which has been out of print since about five minutes after it was published in 1963. (I'd have to look at the order slip to see where she got it, but it certainly wasn't there -- Cat has never hunted me down a copy of anything that cost more than $30, and that was mostly because my edition of "Jihaku" had to be shipped from Asia. My US first-edition of Lennon's A Spaniard In The Works was all of $15.)

The pièce de résistance, however, was what Amber and I jointly gave Cat, which was her very own murder. There is nothing in a CSI kit that's illegal for a private citizen in the US to own, and there is a wonderful place called crimescene.com which will sell you all of it if you ask, including some of the more obscure things like fluorescent fingerprinting powder. We went on there looking for a simple fingerprinting kit for her, and discovered that they sold a packaged "case" as a gift set, which included not only the fingerprinting powder and a proper brush, but also a variety of other things to analyze (I didn't get a very good peek while Cat was digging around in it, but she mentioned that there was also some "blood evidence" to check), and a file detailing the crime scene and the suspects. Included gratis were a CD copy of the FBI fingerprinting manual, a membership in their murder mystery club, and the option to have everything wrapped in authentic tape-sealed evidence bags, which of course we did. We knew we'd selected the correct gift when she got the email for her membership and the first thing she did was go check the price on a variety of printing kits -- she wisely figured that she should wait to see what it was we'd gotten her, but I'm expecting bottles of Luminol concentrate and UV-reactive print powder to start arriving any day now.

And finally, to finish off our Very Detective Christmas, we went and caught the late showing of the new Sherlock Holmes movie, which was surprisingly good. I expected to either love it or come out of the theater fuming that it was written by someone who had never read a word Conan Doyle ever wrote, and as it happened, I loved it. I do caution that if you are wedded to the starched, dignified Basil Rathbone version of Holmes, you may not like it quite so much. If the Basil Rathbone films are adaptions of the revised stories that Watson ostensibly wrote and published about his adventures with Holmes, then this new film is more of a look at the events themselves, before they were polished for public consumption. Holmes is an erratic, cranky, manipulative handful, and needs a handler; Watson is sharper and more apt to take Holmes to task whenever he does something particularly reckless; and even Mrs. Hudson is vastly less tolerant of things like Holmes' habit of indoor target shooting to stave off boredom. Still -- the case is newly-written for the film, and turns out to be remarkably clever, and Holmes, while brilliant, is very human. This Holmes and this Watson really do deserve one another in a really terrible, dangerous, inseparable and exhilarating Napoleon-and-Illya sort of way.

As always, the Christmas Eve entry in the advent calendar is NORAD's Santa Tracker service. NORAD, the North American Aerospace Defense Command, originally CONAD (Continental Aerospace Defense) was originally formed in the 1950s to -- well, it's long and depressing, but basically to fight those lousy no-good Communists with airplanes, and later intercontinental ballistic missiles. We're less petrified of the Russians now, although that doesn't mean NORAD is out of the job. If you've ever seen one of those funny looking Boeings with what looks like a UFO mounted to the back end of the fuselage, that's actually one of their AWACS planes, which are today used for all kinds of things like weather mapping and tracking the Space Shuttle when it takes off or lands. Still, it's not much to do -- NORAD is one of those things whose very existence tends to disperse the threat it was created to combat, so they spend a lot of their time sitting around waiting for something to happen, occasionally practicing in case something happens, and praying fervently that nothing will ever happen at all.

The story of how NORAD's Santa Tracker service was born is one of those that makes me think that perhaps what little faith I have left in humanity isn't misplaced. In late 1955, an American newspaper -- I don't know which one, although presumably one in or around Colorado Springs, where CONAD HQ was located -- ran a Christmas ad for Sears, featuring a phone number where kids could call and talk to Santa, any time of the day or night. Someone, either at Sears or at the paper, got the number wrong by one digit, and by sheer stupid coincidence managed to publish an unlisted, secure phone number that rang straight through to the extension on the desk of CONAD's director of operations. This extension was mostly meant for use in the event that a large nuclear missile was headed straight for the continental US, so when the DO stopped shitting bricks and answered the first call, he was first furious, then puzzled, to find a small child on the line asking for Santa.

The calls kept coming in, all day and all night long. I'm not entirely sure when they worked out what had happened with the newspaper ad, but once the DO realized that all the calls were coming from kids and not panicking politicians or Russian spies, he did something that went completely contrary to every last law of military bureaucracy: He grabbed a nearby airman and told him to keep answering the ringing phone as Santa Claus. I imagine he'd have been in hot water right up to his eyeballs had this not actually worked. It occurred to someone at some point that NORAD's main job is tracking things whizzing around in the atmosphere at high speeds, and that telling the kiddies that NORAD was so good they could track Santa would be a public relations coup.

They've done it every year since. There's still a phone number you can call, answered by volunteers from the armed forces, acting as Santa's elves. The main awesome moved to the internet in 1997, supported largely by donations, and a few years ago Google got into the act -- the page linked to above now provides a near-real-time updated view of Santa's delivery route, courtesy of Google Earth. If that's not enough for you, this year I've found that there's a Twitter feed too -- http://twitter.com/noradsanta. The effort used to be largely American, but these days I'm told it's overseen mostly by the Canadian Air Force, who also provide Santa with an escort of several CAF fighter jets to ensure he has no trouble navigating in North American airspace.

So I've peeled, chopped and trimmed my way through potatoes, sprouts, parsnips and carrots, I've wrapped fourteen sausages in bacon, wrapped many parcels in paper and I've made 200 peanut butter cups. That means I think it may be time to do this:

♥Merry Christmas♥

I wish you all the joy and peace of the season.

"Frosty The Snowman"

Oh my god definitely sick today. And there is a lot of snow outside. *shivers*

*shivers violently*

i hate mylife.

th_fanfic has some really wonderful stories up over there at the moment for this year's Secret Santa.

There are lots of twincest fics and lots of non-twincest fics too, so go have a look and give the authors some love *hugs*

Tokio Hotel Secret Santa 2009

And what's more, we have days more to go as well :D So still lots of lovely fic to come too, so keep checking in.

This seems so petty now, but I'm back on my own computer. キーボード・フィックス！My new keyboard came in and Cat stopped by to replace it for me before she left to visit her family. The layout is a little bit different, and I'm going to spend the next two weeks having to look down to find the Enter key, but the keyboard form factor and connectors for all of the Satellite A-2XX units seem to be interchangeable. In fact, as far as I can tell, nearly all of the Satellite parts are interchangeable. I think I could get mine up to about 4GB of RAM and either a dual-layer DVD or BluRay burner before the motherboard cried uncle. I know I can get a 6-hr extended life NiMH battery that fits where the regular lithium one is now.

I have new insight into how unkillable these little Toshibas are. While replacing the keyboard is straightforward, getting to the point where you can get the old one out involves taking a few dozen teeny tiny screws out of the bottom of the case and the wall of the battery compartment, and then popping the top speaker bezel off with your fingernails. One end was stubborn and we spent about ten minutes prying at it as hard as we could before Cat finally noticed she forgot a screw. The plastic didn't even creak. They were also clever enough to use a completely solid, seamless metal plate as backing -- you would have to spill a hell of a lot of crumbs, or even liquid, in order to get past the (extremely cheap) keyboard and ruin any of the (much more expensive) parts underneath.

The keyboards also come in three or four different finishes. The original one had off-white keys; Cat says the black one was a couple dollars more, so now I have one in a matte silver finish that matches the wrist rest and touchpad.

If you ever need a sub-$500 non-gaming notebook, Toshiba's the brand you want to look for. I'm pretty sure Maleficent is going to go the way of my Memorex portable CD player someday, when I decide I really do need a new computer. I bought that CD player in 1999. It was stone stupid and had absolutely no extra features to speak of -- no alphanumeric display, no equalizer, no headphone volume control, not even a skip protection buffer. The only two things it ever did were spin CDs and emit music through the headphone jack. I finally had to get rid of it by giving it away to someone, scratched all over but in perfect working order, just last spring.

Rats go into Cheyne-Stokes respiration before they pass away. I wish I didn't know that.

I got home from work about quarter past five this morning, and while Nick was hammering away at the bars of his cage, fervent in his belief that he could not wait another two minutes for breakfast, Miles didn't even poke his head out of their little nest box. I could see feet and a white tummy, so I pulled him out to make sure he was okay.

He wasn't.

His breathing was already shallow, shallow, shallow, SIGH. Cheyne-Stokes. Things only do that when they're about to die.

I sat with him in the living room for a while before waking Amber up to tell her. Miles was barely holding his head up to sniff her. I don't think she wanted to watch. I got her to feed a DVD to the PS3 and sat there watching Meitantei Conan while she went back to bed. She had a lunch date with her sister today, and her sister is nothing if not utterly insensitive to the pain of others. The anything of others, really.

I was all prepared to wrestle my pajamas on one-handed, trying not to disturb the rat, but as soon as I got into the bathroom, Miles wanted down on the floor. Because that's what happens when someone takes you into the bathroom: They put you down and you get to run around on the open floor for a while. Except he couldn't really move much, so he curled up on the bath mat and twitched his nose, smelling things.

I kept him wrapped in a blanket on my lap. Mostly, he slept while I pet him. He chittered sometimes. Not loud enough to hear, but if I had my fingertips on his head I could feel the vibration of his little rat teeth tapping together. I gave him some aspirin mixed in water around nine. Rats get 100mg/kg, which works out to an eighth to a sixth of a regular 5-grain tablet. I'm not sure how much I actually got into him, but he seemed calmer afterwards. I watched more Conan. He dozed on my shoulder, leaned against the back of the chair.

A little after eleven, his breathing got gritty. He kept wriggling around, draping himself between my arm and my lap, trying not to put any weight on his belly. It sounded like he was having trouble with fluid. Internal bleeding. Pleural effusion. I have got to stop watching House . I gave him some Benadryl, hoping it would take some of the swelling down, or at least make him sleepy and more comfortable. He wouldn't take food or water, but he took that with no trouble at all. I guess he remembered it made him a little better when he was sneezy.

Amber got up, got dressed, went to have lunch with her sister, came back. She asked if we needed to take Miles into the vet's so he could be put to sleep peacefully. I said I didn't know. I said I didn't think he'd last long enough to get there. A few minutes later I told her to call her brother-in-law back and get a ride, and call the vet for an emergency appointment. The vet said we could get him in at 2:20.

I was right anyway. Something just past 1:15, Miles suddenly got up and wanted to move. Like he was looking for something. I tried to figure out what it was he wanted so I could take him there. I couldn't, or maybe he didn't know. At 1:28, he curled up in the blanket, shook a little, and died.

Amber took care of the funeral arrangements. She sent him off with some of his favorite things. Food, mostly. One of Cat's socks. I don't know exactly; I haven't asked. Wherever he is going, he won't get there hungry, or cold.

I made some curry the other night. No reason; I just wanted curry, and my roommates will eat pretty much anything if I tell them it's there. I figured it would make the rats happy. So the last dinner Miles got from me was some curried rice and a chunk of potato as big as his head. Amber cooked last night, and they probably got macaroni and cheese and some stewed apples from her.

There are very few things that destroy me completely. I don't scream at famous people, I don't gibber in emergencies. Losing pets will do it. Strangely, I am not nearly so broken up when people die.I know that people die. I'm going to die, everyone I know is going to die, everyone I've never met is going to die. People can understand. They deny, they rage, they bargain, they repent, they resolve. But at some level, they get it. There is no way to explain the cessation of existence to an animal. From their point of view, they've always been there; why would they ever not be?

All I could do was sit there and say I'm sorry, I'm so sorry and pet his little ears to keep him calm.

I'm so sorry, little rat, there was nothing I could do.

I feel like my heart is either going to clench on itself and stop, or beat too fast and expload, all at the same time.

Twins, twins think twins. Tom rubbing Bill's belly, so loving so calm. Tom rubbing Bill's beautiful round belly, Tom rubbing Bill's beautiful round belly ._. ._. ._.


fhdislfhsdlkfhsdklfh.

Oh shi oh shi oh shit I can not stop shaking. I AM NOT READY

"Silver & Gold", from the classic stop-motion animation version of Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer. Sung by Burl Ives.

Title: Black and White
Author: Beren
Fandom: Panik RPS
Characters: Linke, Jan, David, Timo, Franky, Juri
Pairing: Linke/Jan, hints of future David/Timo
Rating: NC17/18
Disclaimer: This is a work of fiction, the real people in it are used without their permission and I definitely don't own them or have any copyright to any part of any of them. I do not believe any of this happened, is likely to happen or should happen it is simply a story created around known facts about those involved.
Warnings: werewolves, explicit sex, bad language
Summary: Linke is just getting on with everyday things like all the rest of the band; they don't need to know he's a werewolf and he's perfectly content playing at being human. Unfortunately the arrival of a black wolf, a werewolf outlaw, is about to upset his normal life.
Author's Notes: I've been writing this for a long time, seems it takes fic fests to make me finish these things :). Thanks to Soph for the beta.
Word count: ~36,500
Link: Black and White on the German Music Big Bang Archive

You'll need to be a member on the archive to read the fic since it is NC17, but it is very easy to join:
http://germanmusicbigbang.dtwins.co.uk/user.php?action=register

German Music Big Bang Archive
Is Live!

It's been a long road with many casualties along the way, but we are finally live.

Please consider checking out the archive and the lovely fic and art it contains.

All the authors and artists have account and will be able to see and reply to reviews you may leave :)

1. Elaborate on your default icon.
It's Harry and Draco from GTS drawn by me :). HP fanfic was why this LJ was created so it remains my default icon :)
2. What's your current relationship status?
Married, very happily thank you :D
3. Ever have a near-death experience?
Nope.
4. Name an obvious quality you have.
I'm very much alpha and tend to take charge of things ... not always the best move :D
5. What's the name of the song that's stuck in your head right now?
Tokio Hotel: World Behind My Wall ... I've been humming it for days.
6. Name a celebrity you would marry:
Hmmm ... Georg Listing ... he is sex on legs, but I'm quite happy with my beloved, thanks ;)
7. Who will cut and paste this first?
Heaven knows :)
8. Has anyone ever said you look like a celebrity?
Nope, not that I can remember ... I'm just happy looking like my twin ;)
9. Do you wear a watch? What kind?
Nope, I react to things with nickle in them and watch straps or clasps often have that so I don't wear one.
10. Do you have anything pierced?
I used to have me ears pierced, but they have closed up.
11. Do you have any tattoos?
Nope.
12. Do you like pain?
Nope, but I have a high pain tolerance because of my ankle condition.
13. Do you like to shop?
I like to shop online and I like to shop sometimes, but I have to find places to sit down a lot.
14. What was the last thing you paid for with cash?
Breakfast this morning, well the second round, Soph and I were in Morrisons talking about our novel and we had a second round of drinks.
15. What was the last thing you paid for with your credit card?
Something from Amazon.
16. Who was the last person you spoke to on the phone?
Soph, this afternoon.
17. What is on your desktop background?
On this machine, it's Merlin and Arthur from Le Morte de Arthur, but then the machine's name is Merlin ;)
18. What is the background on your cell phone?
My kitty, Bijou
19. Do you like redheads?
Yes
20. Do you know any twins?
LOL - I am one and yes, I know more too.
21. Do you have any weird relatives?
Oh god yes ... several. They are very, very strange. My mother's twin sister for a start. Batty, totally batty.
22. What was the last movie you watched?
A really sappy one called The Christmas Box :)

So yes, I need it. Some months ago, I learned to make gifs you know. Now, I would love to make animated icons for LJ. I know, the size is 40 kb. Ok. I made this one:



And the size his 131 kb. :/ Can someone explain me, how can I reduce those KB without loses his good quality?! I mean, it can be possible, because I've seen so many animated icons here in LJ with good quality... so I hope that someone can help me.
Oh, I use Photoshot CS3 to make them. But I have ImageReady too. :)

Thank you! <3

Gackt & Wang Leehom - "十二月的情歌" ("December's Love Song")

This song also exists in English, Japanese and Korean -- all solo Gackt versions -- and one Korean remix featuring someone called "M.C. the MAX", whom I have never heard of before. The only one for which Gackt receives no credit for the translation is the Korean one; he speaks perfectly good English and judging from other peoples' reactions also perfectly good Mandarin, but I have no idea if he knows any Korean at all. He admits, in his book, to being briefly married to a woman he describes as Korean, but it's not clear from context whether she was actually from Korea, or from a "zainichi" ("stay-in-Japan" -- permanent immigrants, in other words) Korean family. It would be unlike him to not pick up any Korean if she or her family spoke it, but if he did, he's never copped to it in public.

"December's Love Song" was originally written and released in Japanese as 「１２月のLove Song」 in 2001, as a reaction to the terrorist attacks of September, 2001. All of the various versions have also been released in a boxed set, if you care to hunt it down.