ExtraPenguin

Paljon onnea vaan
Paljon onnea vaan
Paljon onnea, Suomi!
Paljon onnea vaan

I'm baking a cake using this recipe. I have the day off, like everyone else, and I'll have my cake then eat it too. With some tea, because I am a paragon of Finnishness*. There are lots of traditional Finnish things (watching Linnan juhlat, where the president shakes hands with fancily-dressed important people for 4 hours, watching Tuntematon sotilas on the TV) that I have no interest in doing, since I hate audiovisual things and as with pretty much everything, Tuntematon sotilas is better as a book than as a movie.

Not five minutes ago, I took the cake out of the oven (note: I doubled the size from the recipe, and it took 50 min to bake) only to discover I have no chocolate in the house. Thankfully the stores are now open on Independence Day, which is a huge change from even five years ago – stores used to close earlier in the evening (21:00 vs 22:00), and nothing was open on bank holidays. As someone used to that state of affairs, the current 24/7 always on, always open state is baffling. Same for stuff like Halloween and Black Friday – the latter especially was Not A Thing even very recently. Ah, the scent of American cultural imperialism in the morning. (Can we band together to banish it all?) I grew up being othered here in Finland, but on the internet, I have discovered my true nationality and categorization: Not An American Dammit. So I celebrate at least some of the Finnish things in a way perhaps mistakeable for the Finnish one from a great distance, since what else do I have? (My relationship with identity and such is complicated.) At least Finland is a nice place to live, and I'm glad to be able to live here and affect things.

In more general blarghpost stuff, conuly has a nice link roundup post about the Tumblr exodus and how to adapt to DW. flamebyrd (of a number of very useful AO3 bookmarklets) has offered to make DW browser tools. I backed up my Tumblr(s) using the Python scripts of tumblr-utils mentioned in this Tumblr post. For those of you who know me from elsewhere, I'm about to go through any recent meta I posted onto Tumblr but not here (ex: chapter recaps to Heaven Official's Blessing) and crosspost over the next weeks/months, whenever there's a lull in "new" stuff I'm posting.


* For those not in the know, Finns only drink coffee, and lots of it. On one memorable occasion, when I said I didn't like coffee/only liked tea, the reaction was "and they let you keep your citizenship????"

This week, one of my roomie's friends stayed over. She's only just back from a period of student exchange abroad, and her rent contract begins today. (My roomie has been living out of town for summer, so as to be nearer to her summer job. Just me and Friend.)

Apparently, Roomie and Friend are childhood friends who still keep in touch and call each other semiregularly. Perhaps I moved too often to nourish and keep such friendships, but – in a way I like that I could shed my skin and form anew. I was certainly a bit of an oblivious idiot socially back when I was young.

My current batch of friends, I like enough to be friends with. Stay friends after graduation, perhaps – but with the eventual fragmentation of everyone to their more permanent living situations and then kids, I doubt I'll get to hang on to all of them. Like my previous friendships, these too shall whither. Like my previous friendships, these too have given and shall give me fond memories. Have we no love for transience? The cherry blossoms bloom for a week, and then are gone. No-one denies their beauty and the worth of seeing them.

Don't get me wrong, I do currently want to find a locus of stability and do the whole married-forever thing, but even things only experienced once are still worth experiencing.

I like Friend. As I type this, she slips out of my life forever. I am sad, yes, but I liked talking to her. I'll slot the experiences of enjoying her company with the rest of the people lost from me in time's mists.

I appear to have actually done it.

The target: a guy who actually respected my opinions and wanted to hear me out (this part is mandatory, I think), probably had Asperger's, and was the son of a person in the anti-gay marriage league (so his opinion was at least partly hereditary).

(I mention the Asperger's because I think that without it, he'd have got the "gays are bad" part that is the unacknowledged backdrop of most anti-gay marriage sentiment. As-is, the papered-on-top excuse objections were his actual objections.)

How I actually did it: in a chat program I, in as noncombative a way as possible, explained my position, and gently informed him that his concerns on gay couples' kids were wrong (research round-up) and also I side-eye the "but the definition of marriage is ~Christian~" position, since no-one complains hugely about or constantly proposes a new term for civil weddings.

Evidence that I did it: he dropped the issue and shortly removed the "marriage = man + woman" page from his likes on FB.

It is a heady feeling, to know that people can change for the better and know that one has caused that oneself. So, uh, there's your daily positivity. I should probably feed myself.

Day 8

In your own space, make a list of at least 3 things that you like about yourself. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

One
I do not collapse. I can indulge in self-pity and wallow in it, but at the end of the day, the only solution to whatever problem I have is to soldier on, put one foot in front of the other, and continue. I can do that. I can pick myself up and do whatever it is that must be done. At the end of the day, of all the coping methods for dealing with having to do a thing, the only one that actually works is "just fucking do it already".

Two
I dance. I embody the music. I improvise. I act. (Communicating with people is nothing but an improv play. There are scripts one can start with, but eventually it all goes off the rails. Choose the most useful role available when you start.) I can perform. What is the point of stage fright – if onstage, I know what I'm supposed to do. Unlike the rest of the time. The dancing is but a very public meditation.

Three
I create. Solutions to problems, connections between neurons, stories, art, connections. I desire to become. I am driven. I long, yearn, want. Long for the feeling of things finally locking into place, yearn for making order out of chaos, want nothing but to achieve. Leave others to their small lives – let my name be sung through the ages. Let my creations hallow my names, and be recalled for as long as civilization exists. Give me my immortality.


Perhaps I live only for the applause. What is fic-writing but a performance of a different kind, no? – Well, then so be it. Watch me reach for the stars from the sky, and even if you cannot bring yourself to clap: do not stop me.

Doing meme 4 from here.

What do you collect?
Knowledge. Like all of us.

I like knowing things; more than that, I like knowing how things work. I like seeing how things fit together. I like knowing the answer to the question why.

I am fascinated by the real. How the world works is a question I want to answer. Not for me the thoughts of programming, computational simulation, bizarre thought experiments. I relish the abstract, but my world is reality. There is no perfection; there are only models with their own areas of use. The cows are not frictionless, nor do they live in a vacuum. They are also far from spherical. Yet, under some circumstances, that is the model that yields the accurate results with the minimum of effort. General relativity is the most accurate, but Newtonian mechanics works fine in most Earth-based cases.

I am a physicist, yet an engineer. I study the reality I interact with, not the reality I wish I would interact with.

The more one knows of a subject, the more interesting that subject becomes. Knowledge opens up new dimensions of appreciation. Instead of seeing a rainbow and going "pretty", I also know that it is formed when light hits a raindrop and reflects, refracts, disperses, and forms the optical illusion in question. I know why one can only bend a steel wire so many times.

Science did not make the world less beautiful. It made the world more beautiful.

Shamelessly cribbed from melannen!
( Read more... )

I don't actually qualify for FemmeRemix with anything except my Vorkosigan Saga stories, and even then, of my 7 female-character-in-major-role stories, 4 have the female characters be original characters. I will be posting that long-awaited Cordelia crack, but it's not yet written and wrraaaaaaghhh, so should I just ask the organisers about the OCs?

Like, what am I supposed to do? Does my unique blend of Rivers of London, Vorkosigan Saga and feminism delight whoever's running a "NSFW incest-only adults blog"? I mean, I shouldn't judge, but ???

So, my dear readership of 0.4 people, I have apparently taken on too much on my plate, and I really should focus on things like "university" and some other real-life commitments. I'll probably come back somewhat during summer (the whole "free time" thing).

Have the AU: Cop/Detective WIP in its entirety:
( WIP )

And here's a previous version:

 

So, the New Year has come to my timezone amidst flashing lights and loud bangs. Apparently, the world will end in Ragnarøkkr on the 22nd of February 2014.

What would Ragnarøkkr be like? The cynical part of my mind supplies that it can't be worse than New Year's Eve, with fireworks whizzing up, going off in a blazing flash of light, generating deafening bangs, and finally fizzling to the ground. The Penguin has a headache from all of this, people!

The local stables stocked up on tranquilizer in the preceding weeks. See, fireworks generate bangs that sound very unnatural, generating panic in horses, and other animals too. (Note: fireworks are worse than gunshots in making horses freak out. Gunshots sound more like thunderclaps, fireworks are weirder and more ambiguous.)

For the following weeks, everyone'll be bumping into fireworks cartriges, which are generally made of plastic, and thus pollute the environment. Some of them will also fall down on other people's houses, causing significant fire damage. Not to mention the fact that some people will always manage to blind themselves, or cause other bodily harm to fall upon those present.

So please, could we ban fireworks from non-experts? Or at the very least, add a hefty tax for all the environmental and physical damage they'll cause. Who else should pay the hospital bill but its causers?