let your words be

This is a first pass - I haven’t even looked at the Fairy Tale or Mythology fandom tags, f’ex, because they are both huge. (And besides, one needs to leave some things for later.)

[12th century RPF, 15th century RPF/Hunger Games, Twelve Dancing Princesses, A Knight's Tale, Secret Garden/Little Princess, Chalion, Olympic Opening Ceremonies (AU), Disney Princesses/Hogwarts AU, Ghost Soup Infidel, Master Li and Number Ten Ox, Newsflesh, InCryptid, and Newsflesh/InCryptid crossover, Skullcrusher Mountain (with a side of Derkholm), XKCD, Jurassic Park meets Indiana Jones crossover, War for the Oaks (Jazz Age Prequel version), and anthropomorphic Knitting and Solar System entries. And a T-Rex in a Creation Museum.]

Also, since I am making this post public, and my previous one going "EEEEEEE" at my gift fic wasn't, I am going EEEEE. One of my prompts was basically "How did Julian Morrow get to be who he is?" (from Donna Tartt's A Secret History, a book in which I do not actually like any of the characters all that much, but I am fascinated by the ensemble and the situation, and the "Hey, wait, this is *real*" bits.)

Anyway, the gift fic is awesome, and sketches out Julian's life, and has comparisons of the aorist to the imperfect tense, and quotes Euripides, and it gets it all very right. So if you haven't read a mother of beauty yet, I also recommend it.

(also, yay, people liking the fic I wrote, and I think I have to work up the commentary track, because yeah.)

( Recs within )

And in a brief comment on my other fannish habit, icon created due to the last several days of Alternity, but also entirely applicable here. Can't sleep, too much awesome. Except, y'know, the part where I have to work tomorrow.

Dear Yuletide writer -

(note: I may add to this a little further this week)

Hi! You are awesome for wanting to write stuff. Whatever you write will, I am sure, be awesome.

( But here are more details )

(This is the post I've been swearing I'm going to make for about six months. This doesn't have everything, but it's good enough for now. Feel free to add stuff in comments, just be aware that there's places I'm glossing over details of why something does or doesn't work for me in here, for space reasons.)

Hi. If you’ve been reading my journal, you know there’s been Health Foo in my life for several years. Right now, two years and a bit after actually starting treatment for it, I feel mostly recovered. (Which is to say there are still some shaky bits.)

On the other hand, I’m able to work a full day, go home and use my brain for things. I can multitask functionally again. My executive function skills exist, and at almost the pre-Foo level. I can do complicated thinky things most of the time. Keeping on top of household stuff is no longer a huge strain. I can set up for ritual, do ritual, and clean up after all on the same night (this is sort of huge. It was a 4 day process for a long time). I can travel for the weekend without feeling entirely wiped out for a week after. So, on the whole, I call that really good.

[It is not perfect, mind you, and I’ll get to that. Just much improved.]

What I’m interested in talking about is how I got from totally non-functional to here, because the way I did it is a) involves a lot of stuff no medical professional even suggested (though I do also take medication) and b) might be useful for a bunch of people in similar positions. Take what’s useful.

( Diagnosis and symptoms )

( Things that really helped )

( Tips and tricks )

( What's not better (yet) )

So, I really was moved to create a squid on the mantelpiece icon, but of course, at 100x100, you cannot really appreciate the fine details. (and seriously, this did qualify as "totally reasonable work-related task, even if it is not the one that is perhaps most pressing on Monday morning." since part of my job is to get more familiar with various Adobe tools so I can help people with them)

(Also, I'm pretty sure this is one of my only acts of visual transformative work, so, y'know, wanna share.)

This is a public post, so I should explain the inspiration. One of the running lines on the players list for the HP Alternity game is about putting squid on the mantelpiece for future use. (Like Chekhov, but more squiddy.) We try to do a really good job with this, and I keep wanting to talk about bits of it, and that really needs an icon.

But icons of squid on mantelpieces do not exactly grow on trees. Or seaweed. Or whatever my metaphor is here.

( For your amusement: images below )

There may be more later, but this is a pretty decent first round.

(If you are, for some reason, going “Yuletide?”, it is an annual exchange of fiction in small fandoms. The stories are released on December 25th, and the authors are not revealed until January 1st, which gives you plenty of time to read and comment and so on without getting caught up in who wrote what. This year, there’s something like 2500 stories, of all sorts of kinds.)

What I wrote:
Not only did my recipient love it, but her favorite paragraph was the one that has my favorite sentence in it. I am so smug! (Much thanks to the friends who gave me advice, which I’ll talk about more when we get to reveals, because it’s the first fic writing I’ve shared with anyone else in more than a decade. Ritual writing, yes. Non-fiction, yes. All sorts of other commentary, yes. Fiction, no.)

My gift:
I got Chalion fic! It makes me deeply happy, because it has lots of awesome bits, and Iselle and Bergon after their marriage, and small mysteries solved improving the world. You can see it at http://archiveofourown.org/works/300197

Various recs and other notes within: recs for 15th Century CE RPF (namely Lucrezia Borgia), A Song for Arbonne, A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver, A Knight's Tale, Anne of Green Gables, the Chalionverse, Center Stage, Circle of Magic, a Dr. Who/Lord Peter Wimsey crossover, Yuletide Meta, The Mummy movies, Newsflesh, Octopus Steals Camera, Shadow Unit, Tam Lin, Tower Prep, and Valdemar.

( Read within )

So, now seems like a good time to think about plans and potential travel plans.

( Now through summer, sorta )

Apparently, my brother is planning to come up (by himself, sans-family) for Friday's performance too. Which is awesomely handy. (He and I get to fight out who gets the sofa and who gets the air mattress, unless he stays with his best friend from high school.)

Mom's calendar presents no complication with a) my acquiring keys (since I cannot find the other set of hers I have) or b) my plans for Saturday (or Sunday morning). Which is also excellent.

She is, however, still without Internet after the weekend storm, though she has power.

So, I have gotten far enough in the packing process to have ye list of things looking for new homes.

[Also: my landlady is still looking for someone interested in renting this place: it is small, but lovely, and has an awesome clawfoot bathtub. Her post about it is over here should you know someone looking for somewhere to live in Minneapolis.]

Things to know about this list:
- I am mostly not up for shipping stuff, but might be talked into it in some cases. Feel free to propose something.

- Except for the larger technology items, I'm generally thinking yard sale prices. And even with the tech stuff, feel free to propose anything reasonable.

- Feel free to pass on to other friends/lists/whatever in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro. This post is public to make that easy.

Timing
My hope is for items to leave here between August 25th and August 29th (pickup to be negotiated at a mutually convenient time), but in many cases, I'm up for some negotiation.

Also available: lots and lots of books (mostly Pagan materials I'm no longer using, mysteries, SF and fantasy, but a smattering of other non-fiction). Feel free to let me know if there's anything in particular you're looking for. These will be going to used bookstores early in the week of the 18th otherwise.

( Read more... )

As part of my (very belated) 3 Weeks for Dreamwidth plans, I wanted to talk about my experience over the last year taking Feldenkrais lessons. (I've talked about this in locked posts in my journal on and off, but I keep hearing people go "Huh, what?" for whom it might be a useful modality to consider, so here's your one-stop shop of what I know and think about it.

My goal here is to cover some background, link to some resources, and then spend a bunch of time talking about my personal experience of it, since that's the bit that's sometimes hard to get from other sources.

What is Feldenkrais?
The official answer goes something like this:
"The Feldenkrais Method is a form of somatic education that uses gentle movement and directed attention to improve movement and enhance human functioning. Through this Method, you can increase your ease and range of motion, improve your flexibility and coordination, and rediscover your innate capacity for graceful, efficient movement. These improvements will often generalize to enhance functioning in other aspects of your life." (As taken from http://www.feldenkrais.com/method/frequently_asked_questions/).

My answer to it is more like:
"It's a geek-friendly way to learn more about your body, your mind, and how they interconnect, in a setting that gives you new puzzles to solve and challenges to stretch you, while rewarding you for learning in ways that are both immediate and long-term. It's also about doing more with less - less exertion, less effort, less discomfort."

Some people try out the method because they've got an immediate injury or something they're trying to figure out how to deal with better. Some come because they want to improve their performance (in music, athletics). Some people want to solve daily movement issues or challenges.

I started (for reasons I'll explain in more detail later) as a way to get my brain and my body reconnected after a really lousy health year, to find ways to conserve my energy so I could do more with less of it. What I've gotten out of it is *far* better than that: lots of feedback that I could learn and grow at a time I felt pretty hopeless about that for quite a long time, ongoing feedback from someone who saw me regularly, but wasn't entangled in other parts of my life, and a lot of other stuff I find somewhere between congenial and awesome.

I also really really like having a modality to work with where health is not about numbers and mechanics, but about how I'm able to live in my body. Feldenkrais wrote two definitions of health that I've really taken to heart. One is that "health is the ability to live out an individual's unavowed dreams" (see it in context over here) and the other is the idea that health is about the ability of the body to recover from shock or trauma (or other kinds of challenge).

Both of those are much more useful definitions for me than ones that have to do with numbers, statistical probabilities, or anything else like that. And I like stuff that has to do with my body that my brain can actually help with.

I talk more about this below, but one of the things I really appreciate about it was that it gave me a way to feel more in control of my own body (and brain) and to get feedback about what was working in a way that helped me do more of the things I wanted to do, with less stuff that was a problem.

I am definitely glad to talk about questions/etc. with the understanding that I'm informed lay person, not a practitioner. (Also, while I think it's a system that lots of people might find useful, I am not trying to tell any individual person what they should do - because that sort of defeats the purpose of having more control over what you do with your body and time and energy. I'm laying it out here so there's a nice public reference for people who might find it handy, basically.)

( More within )

I have managed to take *and* upload photos of knitting, as well as woven in the ends on the scarf. They're up on Ravelry (for people on there who don't know this, I am, perhaps unsurprisingly, Jenett, and you can see them on the project page there: http://www.ravelry.com/projects/Jenett)

But there might as well be photos here, too:

This is a scarf done in alternating double rows (one knit, one purl) alternating Noro Silk Garden #8 (which is blues and greens and purples) with a really really dark navy worsted wool. It's about 5 feet long, and about 8 inches wide.

From Noro Scarf

And this is the shawl in progress, using a pattern that starts from the neck down (so the stuff you see at the bottom of this photo will eventually be the long flat edge, and the point is going to come from what's currently at the center of the needles.) I am currently at 76 rows and not yet done with the first skein of yarn (which was 420 yard to the skein), so I am currently planning to on for a fair bit, and make a gloriously huge and drapy shawl.

From Simple but effective shawl - Spinel

This is the Spinel yarn from Blue Moon Fiber Arts - it really is lovely to knit with, and very pleasant to touch, and will be cozy and comfy when done (and quite comfortable on bare skin, if like me, you don't have wool-related allergies.) You can see why I like the color dappling effect.

At 76 rows (where I am right now), it's about 18 inches from top to point, unblocked, and I expect it to gain some in the blocking.

I'm doing this in a numeric pattern: double rows based on Pagan-relevant numbers. (Well, I skipped 9, but 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 12, and I think I'm going to do 13, because I've got the yarn for it, and it should get me to about the size I want. Going through 12 is going to be 90 rows. We're adding 4 stitches every other row, so that's roughly 180 stitches across at 90 rows, and will be 232 across if I go through 13s.)

I have a plan to do one of the sets of yarn coming sometime sooner than later in a reverse Fibonacci sequence using the same basic pattern (reverse, because if I'm doing 42 rows of something, I'd rather it were shorter rows than longer. 42, 26, 16, 10, 3, 4, 2, 2)

(The numbers have to be doubled, because the pattern requires even pairs of rows so you don't end up with odd wrong side/right side problems.)