bring on the wonder

Hello dear Yuletide writer!

Yuletide is one of my highlights of the end of year - what's better to avoid the summer heat (I'm an Aussie) than staying indoors and writing/reading stories? First off, I want you to enjoy yourself, so if you have an AMAZING IDEA then please go ahead and write it! These are just some starting points if you want some inspiration :)

Hello dear Yuletide writer!

Yuletide is one of my favourite things about the summer holidays (yes I'm Australian), and I hope you enjoy yourself! First of all, if you have an idea for an amazing story that you're dying to write, please go ahead and write that! These are just some starting points if you want them :D


( Saga, Megamind, Brothers Bloom, Treasure Planet )



In general:

I like humour (dark or light), wordplay, clever people being clever, worldbuilding, action and so on. I like playing around with genre tropes and good old-fashioned romance/friendship/family feels. Any crossovers/AUs/gen/slash/het you feel like throwing in there is fine!

I don't like explicit torture descriptions, or extensive sex scenes - people getting hurt or horny is fine, but please avoid graphic details. I do prefer happy or at least bittersweet endings (but I won't be devastated if your story demands something else!)

So I just found out we're going to be playing a medley of How to Train Your Dragon music in my band!!

ONLY ONE OF MY FAVOURITE MOVIE SOUNDTRACKS EVER

(and trumpets get the tune a lot)


...AND I'M SO EXCITED!!!

So my summer research project on fossil beetles has now been published!!! True, it's a short paper in an obscure journal that specialises in taxonomic descriptions (i.e. not a huge important journal like Nature) BUT I am now an officially published author, like a real scientist!! And I'll probably get a second paper out of the project, too - this paper only describes one beetle, and I looked at lots.

This is nice timing, because I'm halfway through my Honours project and feeling a little bogged down with silly computer programs that keep crashing when I try to put my data through them *sigh* I think I'll spend the rest of today making pretty graphs instead ;)


It's also uni holidays for all the normal undergrads, so now instead of feeling smug at my lack of exams I'm trying not to feel envious at their time off ... though I have managed to see Spy and Jurassic World these last two weeks, so I guess I can't complain. (Great fun, both of them - definitely recommended!)

 It's finally here, the big scary Honours year when I find out if I'm cracked up for scientific research! Looking good, so far - I have a very nice supervisor, and very cute animals to focus my project on! (Geckos, people. GECKOS!! Unlikely to still be alive, for the most part, but still SO CUTE).

I'll just have to hope my brain can cope with an extra-long year of study - once again I'm working at CSIRO (this time getting paid, thank goodness), this time on fossilised beetles! Whole different kettle of fish here, as they're rather crumbly and I'm terrified of destroying the 150-million-something-year-old fossils o.O At least they're longer than a millimetre this time!

And, of course, it wouldn't be summer holidays if I wasn't watching the wonderful Boxing Day releases - Hobbit 3, thoroughly enjoyable finale (especially the bit with Billy Connolly! No idea what he was doing there, but he was HILARIOUS). Planning to see Big Hero 6 with fahye this arvo, can't wait!


I did Yuletide again, though it was a near thing - I wasn't sure if I'd have time to do my recipient justice with my CSIRO job taking up so much time. But I signed up, and naturally, my assignment was released just before my last round of uni exams. It was VERY hard convincing my brain to memorise parasite life cycles instead of romping around with the Mad Hatter >.>

First, though, my incredible gift:

But Love Is the Sky and I Am for You (2910 words) - The Book Thief - Markus Zusak. Dear GOD (or should that be Death?), this fic is beautifully written. I asked for Liesel and Max healing by making stories together, and that's exactly what I got. Also, largely thanks to Zusak being an Aussie too, they get to heal in the glorious Australian sunshine!

My main story was mostly jotted down in a notebook during my mad rush 5 days of exams - and then typed up afterwards. I adore Hatter, though, so I didn't mind him distracting me from uniwork too much. 

dare you to move (like today never happened) (4051 words) - Alice (2009). I love this show to pieces, but I've never written fic for it before. My recipient just wanted some background, so I picked my favourite character and went for it!

Once again, I only wrote one treat - another crossover, between Black Books and Good Omens. Because I saw the prompt and thought 'hey, I'm sure there's a bit in Good Omens about Aziraphale being a bad-tempered bookshop owner'. And my brain said HEY PRESTO.

From One Professional To Another (727 words) - Black Books/Good Omens. This was SO MUCH FUN to write, I was making myself laugh the whole way through. More fandoms I love but haven't written in before - I really must write more from Crowley's POV, he is delightful.


Hmm, resolutions - I could aim to finish my longest WIP, but with an Honours thesis to do as well that might be tricky. I definitely intend to watch all of Legend of Korra as soon as possible, once I've finished with Torchwood. Oh yes, and another one, courtesy of my ice skating coach - 2015 will be the year of landing double jumps on one foot, apparently. I can already do one, sort of - only another four to go!

My final semester of uni kicks off tomorrow - FINAL semester of coursework!! I do have Honours next year, so I'm not graduating yet, but DEAR GOD I am feeling old (yes, I know I shouldn't yet :P) I'd probably be less stressed if the two courses that are clashing with each other would actually put some information up on their websites, but we are talking about academics here >.>

However, the BEST way to forget about incoming-uni-worries is to go and see a production of Legally Blonde for the first time!! fahye and I had only ever seen her dodgy MTV copy of it, so seeing the musical live with the best local amateur theatre types in it was FANTASTIC. I even ran into my old trumpet teacher, who normally does Classical stuff - just goes to show the power of musicals :D Particularly the type where the songs will NOT stay out of your head!

So I'll probably be very quiet again for a while - bogged down in uni stuff rather than holiday laziness :P I'll try my best not to put any gruesome details from my Parasitology course up here, anyway!

 In the best tradition of Australian summer, instead of sweltering outside in frankly ridiculous temperatures, I'm knocking some movies off my must-see list!

First up: more Richard Armitage magic in the second Hobbit movie, along with excellent barrel-riding and dragon shenanigans and Stephen Fry being . . . Stephen Fry FTW!! (How was I not informed he was in it?? It did make a nice surprise though!) So, naturally, having seen it last weekend with Mum (after everyone else in the family abandoned the collapsed let's-see-it-together-after-Christmas plan and saw it before us) - I'm going to see it again! In the spirit of educating my poor school friends who have not seen either movie, of course :P I'm providing the first Hobbit (extended edition, thanks to fahye!)

fahye  and I went to see Frozen a few days ago, and thoroughly enjoyed Idina Menzel singing Defying Gravity Let it Go (and, you know, the rest of the movie). The rest of the audience were mostly under 10 years old but DISNEY IS FOR EVERYONE, DAMMIT.

And then at home I've watched Oblivion (predictable as hell but so PRETTY), the Great Gatsby (not as drowned in hip-hop as we were told, thank goodness - just more Baz Luhrmann sparkle!) and the Curious Case of Benjamin Button (good but so hard to understand what they're saying! Everyone has strong accents, and are usually drunk or dying or all of the above!)

Orphan Black's finally aired here, on a ridiculous channel - looks entertaining thus far. But Sherlock s3 isn't here yet and I want a drunk Sherlock deducing egg chairs RIGHT NOW!! *sigh* Though, as a friend pointed out, it'll be so long waiting for the next series it's probably good to delay watching this one a little >.>

So I was waiting for the bus home this afternoon when a beetle flew into my sunglasses - and clung on!

My fellow entomophile friend Rosa (who did Invertebrate Zoology with me) and I proceeded to coo over it and try to figure out what it was. Meanwhile our entomophobe friend was backing away . . .

Now, thanks to the omniscient Google images, I have decided it was a tortoise beetle:

( Like this, but more orangey )

All this reminded me that I had found a brown lacewing (Order Neuroptera, Genus Micromus for the biologically inclined) in the kitchen the other day!

( Very cute, about 15mm )

( But you wouldn't want to mess with the larva if you were that small! )

Luckily I saw it was not, in fact, a cupboard moth before I squished it :P Can't wait for uni term to end (almost there, just got to get through exams) - then I can spend the summer describing beetles at CSIRO!!

ETA: Wikipedia (via Rosa) informs me said tortoise beetle was indeed more orangey than the first photo, being probably Paropsis atomaria

( Which looks like this )