Off the prompt "cuddles."

I went to the Asian market today, which is always an exciting adventure of "Oooh, I can't get that anywhere else!" and "Buns/samosas/mochi balls! What filling is in them? That sounds tasty" and "I would not have thought to combine those ingredients into a soup but I will assume this is a tested recipe and give it a try."

I've been enjoying lychee martinis at the froofy sushi restaurant recently (I especially enjoy telling unwitting companions when they ask "What's that" re the skinless, from-a-can lychee in the drink, "An eyeball." People of the approximately 147 countries represented by foodstuffs in this market, I apologize for exoticizing your cuisines.) Anyway, today at the market they had fresh lychees, and though I had earlier resisted the lure of a can of lychees--I should not make lychee martinis at home, I should not--I could not resist buying a bag of fresh lychees, because fresh fruit is this AMAZING thing and anyway this bag is huge. Like, it contains dozens of lychees. I don't even know.

Okay, I have never met a fresh lychee before in my life. Advise me, oh droll. At what color/texture have they achieved peak ripeness? Does one eat the skin, or remove it? (After all, canned peaches are usually skinless but that doesn't mean you can't eat their skin.) If it's advisable to remove the skin, what is the recommended methodology? How many of these fruits does one eat at once? Does one eat them with other things or totally on their own? And lastly, is the "y" pronounced long "I" or long "E"? I had a waiter correct me on that the other night but he was Anglo like me so I don't trust it necessarily.

I have no good way of looking up vids being made during the run of X-Files, since vidding fandom was still mostly vcr in that era. So does anyone recall if anyone did a vid to the Byrds' Mr. Spaceman? (I found a slideshow on youtube, and while in general I feel this counts as a vid, it is not quite what I am asking about.)

So I was on tvtropes, doing legitimate research of all things, and um, look I'm not going to link because I'm not a bastard, but if you're really interested the name of the trope is "Becoming the Mask."

Anyway, one of the examples was--

One medieval legend is a very literal taking of the trope, that of an ugly man who for years wore a mask that made him beautiful until when he finally took it off he found that his face had grown into the mask's shape, making him truly handsome.

--which lacks useful signifiers like the title of the legend, the name of the character, or even the country of origin. Also no keywords that have helped me in googling it.

Anyone recognize it?

Does anyone have any experience with lip syncing live action vid material? Or hell, know anything from anime vidding that would translate? Or if you don't have any personal experience, do you know of any tutorial/technical meta written on lip syncing?

Hey everybody, I know nothing about podfic except that I'm considering recording some; seriously I haven't even listened to hardly any ever. What are fannish conventions I should know like format, where to post, how to include fic headers, things I am too ignorant to ask?

(fucking a'.)

Baby Bit [my netbook, whose proper name is Free Bit from Lady Gaga's self-censored "I'm a free bit**, baby" lyric, but goes by Baby Bit much of the time because tiiiiny] seems... less inclined to randomly fade to white, or whatever the fuck she's doing [the exciting screen malfunction that made her unusable three weeks after purchase]. echan declared it was a Windows problem not a hardware problem. No idea. Anyway, since she seemed like she was inclined to behave, I started loading shit back on.

Added:
-AVG
-Firefox
--adblockplus
--add to search bar
--delicious bookmarks
--epubreader
--fireftp
--ljlogin
--noscript
--resurrect pages
--screengrab
-OpenOffice
-VLC

Got me a pretty wallpaper and forced Bit to recognize the existence of my desktop computer and steal episodes from it. One by one I will drag Numb3rs over here for my traveling entertainment.

Fade to white has occurred three times while I've been doing all that. First time was when I first abandoned her to download shit off the desktop computer over the wireless, because that looked like it was going to take forever. Baby Bit went to standby, screen dark, and when I jogged her back on, whiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiite. I glared some and fiddled with the power save settings to take stand-by out of the equation. I was hopeful for about five minutes. Then I got me some more fade to white, twice, roughly half a minute each time, in the half an hour I've been playing around since.

I'm having to add everything back on because product support's big helpful suggestion to solve the problem was wipe everything, return to factory defaults. While I could pursue further support under warranty I am... kind of not impressed so far. Especially since they did not suggest I back anything up before taking that step. (I didn't lose anything irretrievable, but that is bad support.) If it is not a hardware problem, as echan claims, then I feel like either I or one of the more technically proficient people I know should be able to solve it with poking, and leave support out of the equation.

The fade to white phenomenon--as best I can describe it, the screen holds images longer than it should, so everything seems brighter as static images are reinforced; the mouse leaves trails and is easiest to follow if you move it very sloooowly; paging down when reading something results in a fade to the next page of text; and when typing in a text box like oh say the post entry page, the letters will come up as fast as you type them but will have a vertical line between each, as the screen remembers each iteration of the cursor. Presently this phenomenon is intermittent and brief; my last go-round back in May, it got longer-lasting until it seemed permanent. jetpack_monkey suggested it was a heat-related phenomenon (boo hardware) but I do not think that can be so as it would occur when the computer had been hibernating or just plain off for hours or days.

So. Anybody got thoughts on my Free Bit, baby? What could cause my problem? What could solve it? Does it have a more recognizable name than "fade to white" that I could google?

--And as I finish up this post I'm getting a more sustained instance of the phenomenon; it's been about ten minutes now that it's stayed, and Bit's had some flashy moments where fade to white and regular view seemed to be duking it out. Flashy with a lot of horizontal lines across the screen. Fade to white seems to be winning. And oh look, finally just now I got her back. Through nothing I can tell that *I* did.

So I've started looking for Castiel/Gabriel fic. It is thin on the ground. Oh well. But so there's one on delicious entitled "Incestuous Adventures in Post-Apocalyptic Dating," by a deleted user named not_refined. As the user is deleted, the fic is not accessible. Does anyone know where to find a copy of this story? Based purely on the title I am pretty sure I would enjoy it immensely.

It is too late and I am too tired to research liquor laws with a view to how they impact daily life--will someone who has lived in Illinois tell me what Illinois's restrictions on the sale and purchase of alcohol are? I have lived in states where you can buy it at the grocery store and states where grocery stores are not permitted to sell liquor and you have to go to an actual liquor store, where liquore sales must cease after a certain hour of the evening regardless of the store's hours, where it is illegal to sell liquor on Sunday, which means after two AM on Saturday night (the closing time of bars, which also varies state to state), and so forth. Damn it, I've bought liquor at vividcon, I feel I should have a better memory for Illinois's restrictions, but my brain is falling out, so will someone please tell me what applies.

Thank you.

ETA: Apparently IL's county by county! I am looking for info on Livingston County (it is where Pontiac is, hi, supernatural fic ahoy.)

jecook had the first Harry Potter movie on earlier and during the Sorting Hat sequence ("Wasn't that alphabetical in the book?" "Yeah. They had to make some changes in the movies...") when Harry's going "Not Slytherin not Slytherin not Slytherin!" and the Hat's going, "Really? You sure?" I thought, someone, several someones probably, must have written that AU, the one where Harry's Slytherin. Either it's Harry/Draco like vast swaths of the fandom or Harry has a star-crossed romance with Gryffindor of choice.

So, are there any good such stories? Recs, folks?

And I've searched, but I'm not sure how to search well, because the gossamer infrastructure is unfamiliar--

Does anyone know of an X-files AU in which Mulder is a serial killer?

Can anyone think of movies or television episodes which end with characters clinking their drinks together in toast? And yes, I'm specifically looking for toasts that happen at the *end.*

ETA: Oooooh. Highlander finale. I think there are other eps that end in Amanda having victory drink, but I cannot identify them off the top of my head.

Vid: The Long Spear
Vidders: MANY--Please credit to "jmtorres, niqaeli, et al", not JUST to jmtorres. This was NOT a solo vid
Music: The Boxer by Simon and Garfunkel, with additional material
Fandom: Star Trek and... Star Trek. Yes.
LINK (right-click or ctrl-click to download and save): http://houseoftorres.dreamhosters.com/vids/jmtniqetal-startreks-longspear.mp4 (60MB) (link updated 16 May 2020)

I promised since, oh, about the second time I saw the movie that this vid would say everything I wanted said and that if it didn't I would cry and hang up my hat as a vidder because clearly I would be no good at communicating in the medium.

So I will limit my remarks here and let the vid do most of the talking. I really only want to say three things:

1. An expansion of the credits:
jmtorres and niqaeli were the primary vidders in the sense of putting material on the timeline.

traykor, echan, and grey_bard did lots and lots additional clipping above and beyond what jmtorres and niqaeli managed.

grey_bard also recorded the vocal track for the last verse specifically for this project. The other women whose singing I sampled for this vid are Joni Mitchell and Lorenna McKennit.

killabeez and slasher69 are two vidders to whose work we paid homage. Those vids were: Killa's Dante's Prayer, because Killa is a seminal Trek vidder of the modern era (Dante's Prayer has been cited as "Hey, you guys! We can use those computers things for vidding!"), and Kandy Fong's Both Sides Now, which is, so far as I know, the earliest vid of which we have visual record (see this OTW journal article for more on the history of vidding).

The following fangirls took pictures of themselves in Vulcan salute for me to use at the end of the vid: ysobel, lierdumoa, settiai, lferion, azurelunatic, revolutionaryjo, gchick, zarhooie, missingwatch.

elfling made the awesome costumes we wore to Club Vivid.

I would also like to give a special nod to nshoe, who, while not one of our women's voices in the traditional sense, did help out with Memory Alpha abuse for clipping and making one of my hard drives live again. His wife, niqaeli, also notes that he was very patient with the crazy women in the house.

2. I did, briefly, want to explain the title, because I used a metaphor that I thought was not uncommon, but google entirely disagrees. So you may never have heard it before unless you read all the same stuff I do. papersky writes about her spearpoint theory; the example she was using it on when I appropriated it into my personal vocabulary was the Vorkosigan novels, how the later novels like Brothers in Arms and Memory are that sharp point on the long spear, they have an emotional impact because of the history of the other novels they carry. I consider the Star Trek Reboot movie to be the sharp point. Since I'm trying not to overexplain the vid, I'll leave the rest of the metaphor unspoken.

3. My hat is made of tin.

I will now take questions from the audience.

(Holy cow, it's harder to hear people cry than to hear them laugh.)

Out of curiosity, is there a firefox extension for blocking embedded midis? I'm looking at a slash fanfic page from the era of midi and I would like to turn off "No More Lonely Nights."

Does anyone know anything about casting faces and creating prosthetic appliances? My experience: one undergraduate make-up class, in which we used liquid latex and kleenex to make scars.

My current goal: making custom Vulcan ears for niqaeli. Also pointy eyebrows for the both of us (but I am less concerned about that).

Most of my questions have to do with materials. Like, my textbook here says use alginate to do the cast of the face. echan claims we could do it with papier maché, though I am thinking I don't want to try to get newsprint strips fine enough to deal with the ear. So, alginate. (My book is all about the accu-cast brand; I admit I am looking at mold gel purely for local availability.) Do I want quick set (like, 3 minutes) or slow set (like, 8 or 9 minutes)? I mean, as a beginner at this, will I actually get the stuff on before it sets in three minutes? Or if I get the slow set will I end up going "Hold still, it's almost set... almost..." for like, five minutes?

So then, making the positive plaster cast off the alginate face ear mold (ps: I am thinking I will be casting just her ears since that is all I need to make appliances for. Is there any compelling reason to do a full face cast?). Materials for the plaster cast--is there any reason I need to be using hydro super stone pro stuff, vs plaster of paris I could pick up at Joann's?

Once I clay model the pointy ears and make a negative plaster cast of that, I am then a little waffly about what to make the actual appliances out of. Like, I'm reading about painting layers of liquid latex into the mold which would make an ear that conforms externally to what I sculpted but which would not be perfectly molded to the top of her ear. It would be... hollow, I guess? I get that you can't fill up the whole closed mold (inclusive of the positive cast of the ear) with liquid latex, that that won't set because liquid latex needs air to set? That if I want to do something that matches up perfectly to her ear, I'm looking at foaming materials--foam latex, poly-urethane foam, silicone foam, foam gelatin. Any recs re: my low experience level and affordability of materials? Or is a foam appliance overkill for this--should I just make the hollow latex appliance?

( current materials list for niq's approval )

Tell me what to write.



ETA: Dear everyone I've never met voting in this poll: who are you people? Maybe a comment of introduction might be nice.

What do you consider to be seminal Star Trek: TOS vids? I discovered OTW had archived Kandy Fong's Both Sides Now, one of the earliest vid/precursor slideshows in existence. Now I'm curious. What other classic Trek vids does the hive mind recall? Bonus points for availability online, but I'd settle for a way to contact the vidder.

For that matter, tell me about seminal Trek filk too. Practically the only one I know is Leslie Fish's Banned from Argo.

Someone remind me later I want to ask about mash-ups.