icarusancalion

lauramcewan gave me "17."

When I was 17, I was in 11th grade.

( That year I went to Germany as an exchange student for two and a half months, danced with a soldier in a German disco... )

None of this is covered in the questions.

I lived... in Union Lake, Michigan, also known as paradise. We lived 50 feet from the water and wore bathing suits all summer. My brother and I drove an hour, each way, to attend the Waldorf school in downtown Detroit.

I drove... nothing. My parents wanted me to get my license so they could be spared the two hour per day drive in rush hour traffic. I refused. My brother did get his license, and thought I'd relent and share the driving. I slept on the way instead.

I was in a relationship with... Oh, who was it then? I had a secret fling with Judd, the class "nice guy" who was desperate to be anything but, then later Lars, a German exchange student who didn't speak English but liked to climb. He was vulnerable, unhappy, and had a beautiful chest. (I had priorities.)

I feared... the cool kids who picked on me, and Ian, he of the crush-or-maybe-he-was-a-gay-misogynist. High school sucks.

I worked... at, oh God, other than tutoring clarinet, I think I worked at McDonald's over the summer, and then as a cashier at a drugstore.

I wanted to be... in New York city with a apartment that had nothing but wood floors (for the acoustics) and a piano, working quietly in an art museum. My art teacher thought I had a good shot at a scholarship at the all-scholarship school, Pratt.

I'm borrrrrred, and feel like kicking back ... and writing fic.

Give me one of my own stories, and a time at some point after the end of the story or before the story started, and I'll write you at least 100 words of what happened then, whether it's five minutes before the story begins or ten years in the future.

SGA preferred. First come, first serve. :) Those who reply tonight or before noon eastern time tomorrow are most likely to get a ficlet.

I made homemade chocolate whipped cream (with maple syrup) to dip my raspberries in. And, ah, I just discovered I ate the all the whipped cream without touching a single raspberry.

Raspberry, anyone?

I'm late to the party, but these days, that's a given. Snagged from Auburn:

Ask me a question about one of my stories or my approach to writing in general. It can be absolutely anything in any fic/general writing experience and I will tell you the honest-to-god answer. Don’t hold back. Anything. Whatever you ask, I will try my best to answer.

Of course, it's been so long, folks have probably forgotten that I've ever written anything, lol.

Lately I've been hearing about:

Out Of Bounds
Dragonlord
Collisions
All Dressed Up And...
Tanlines and Dogtags
Breeding Ground
No More Quasi-Religious Alien Sex Rituals
Beg Me For It

See? I used to be a fanfic writer. ;)

G-nabbed from wickedwords:

Code redacted: "I Write Like" meme boosts hits to a sleazy vanity press. More here: http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/012502.html


Sir Arthur Conan Doyle? Seriously? I don't see that. The writing sample was from Out Of Bounds.


But this was amusing. This is from a Harry Potter fic where I very consciously imitated J. K. Rowling.

Code redacted: "I Write Like" meme boosts hits to a sleazy vanity press. More here: http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/012502.html

The writing sample was Primer to the Dark Arts.

I have cocoa, cookies, and some leftover cookie batter.

I have an overdue paper I'm picking away at by proposing my zaniest theory (the theory is called "pure dumb luck" or "delimited options" -- historians, how mad am I?). It's guaranteed to get completely shot apart by my professor, but after the shitty week I've had, I don't care.

I have the next chapter of Out Of Bounds rewritten and (probably) ready for reposting. I have WG here reading the Watchman. (I figured he'd better read the novel first or he'd be bewildered and frustrated by the movie.) I'm making minor edits to the epilogue. The music for the short program is queued up.

I have two movies on hand. I am fully equipped to ignore all RL disasters for the weekend. If all this doesn't work, there is also popcorn.

And oh, look, this quiz result surprised me with a writer that I...

a) know, and
b) respect.

How unexpected.

I am: Ursula K. LeGuin Perhaps the most admired writing talent in the science fiction field.

Which science fiction writer are you?

And now... dive! *The yellow Icarus submarine burbles beneath the surface of reality*

Meme from synecdochic.

I wasn't going to do this, but I couldn't resist. My first thought was Hustler Magazine vs. Falwell. And that post-bellum decision that upheld racial segregation on trains and mandated it at the federal level (the name of which I'd have to look up). But then I found a much more appropriate decision for an election year: Watergate.

The Meme: As was demonstrated in an interview with Katie Couric, Sarah Palin is unable to name any Supreme Court Case other than Roe v. Wade.

The Rules: Post info about ONE Supreme Court decision, modern or historic, to your lj. (Any decision, as long as it's not Roe v. Wade.) For those who see this on your f-list, take the meme to your OWN lj to spread the fun.

United States v. Nixon (1974)

Five men broke into the Watergate complex and were arrested with cameras and bugging equipment. The men all worked for the campaign to re-elect President Nixon. They went to jail, but one of the men wrote to the judge detailing pay-offs from the highest levels of Nixon's office in return for his silence. It was then discovered that Nixon taped all of his conversations. The special prosecutor subpoenaed those tapes.

Nixon stonewalled the investigation by invoking "executive privilege."

The case tested the limits of presidential power. Does executive privilege mean that the president has absolute power to withhold any information he likes from the other branches of government? If his power is not absolute, can he withhold tapes pertinent to a criminal investigation? Does it breach the separation of powers if the judicial branch investigates the executive branch? If so, wouldn't that mean that the executive branch would have to investigate itself? Did invoking "executive privilege" violate due process for the man trying to defend himself?

Result: The President could not withhold information from a criminal investigation simply because he was president. Nixon had to turn over the tapes. Nixon resigned shortly thereafter, rather than be impeached.

Why is this relevant today? The Bush administration has claimed executive privilege more times in the last eight years than we've seen since Nixon. McCain refused to turn over his notes concerning his meetings with Kenneth Lay of Enron. This week, the White House stonewalled investigation of the suspicious firings of nine US attorneys.

...the White House refused to turn over to Justice Department investigators emails and other documents that investigators believed were crucial to uncovering the truth as to why the U.S. attorneys were fired, the report said.

Raises a lot of questions, eh?

From squishtoy:



Well, if I'm bummed out, at least I can do something for world. Donating clean water by playing a game? I can do that. squishtoy did much better than I did (I didn't realize that you had to put the flag not just in the right country, but near the city they give you -- and then I did worse when I started doing that, ha). WG is going to blow this game away. He can list all those countries in Africa.

Though I'm quite proud I nailed Thimphu, Bhutan. (Psst. It's tiny and next to Nepal.)

This is Entertainment Weekly's Top 100 movies of the last 25 years list.

1) Bold the ones you have seen.
2) Put an asterisk after the movie title* if you really liked it.
3) Cross it out if you saw a film and really disliked it.
4) Underline the ones you own.

( It appears we like movies. )

Er. Yeah. We watch a lot of movies around here. Most of these were picked out by wildernessguru. I give a nod to his good taste.

Borrowed this from greedy_lover:

( The most accurate meme I've ever done. )

:D