Okay, okay, so I just now cracked 100 600 WTF words on my Remix, which is like unto pulling teeth, but:

Inspired by Doctor Who's "Turn Left:" Pick one of my stories and tell me a point in the tale that you'd change. Something tiny (e.g. "and then Fay chose silver glitter instead of gold") or big (e.g. "and then Rose was arrested instead of Jack") and I'll tell you how that one difference would have altered the course of the entire story.

All fic under the fic tag and/or at Dreamwidth.

Dear flist: I need your help!

Over the next two weeks, I will be performing a small linguistic anthropological survey as part of a class at the 2009 Linguistic Institute at the University of California, Berkeley. I am looking for people age 21 and up who:

*are native speakers of any dialect of American, Canadian, or British English;
*write/wrote or beta-read fanfiction and post(ed) it to a service such as Livejournal, Insanejournal, Journalfen, or Dreamwidth or any fanfiction archive;
*participate(d) in fandom for any American, Canadian, or British science fiction/fantasy media between 2003 and the present.

The survey involves the fandom practice of "Britpicking" (checking a story for correct use of British spelling conventions, word choices, phrases, etc) and its equivalent in American English. I am particularly interested in fans who participate in fandoms for media originating in countries other than their own, especially American fans of Harry Potter and Blake's 7 and British fans of Stargate (SG-1 or Atlantis), but any science fiction or fantasy fandom is welcome.

Here is a short (9-10 questions) questionnaire; a small number of respondents will be asked to participate in an interview to be conducted by email. Interviews will be used for scholarly purposes only. No names or identifying information will be collected. In the highly unlikely event that any paper arising from this research is published, you will be contacted. Please return surveys, in .doc, .rtf, .txt, or .odt format only, to britpicksurvey@gmail.com on or before 15 July 2009.

Thank you!

PS: If you wanted to repost this, I'd be in your debt.

So I, like, should do a big post about how I am here! In Berkeley! And my flights were awful! And my roommate finally showed! And is a phonologist! From Jamaica!

But, right now, I don't so much want to.

So instead, I have an extremely important question for you, flist.

When I end up writing the epic AU where John and Rodney are at the LSA, because obvs it's going to happen, because I'm already sort of planning it in my head despite the fact that it makes me feel like a tool, clearly Rodney is one of the computational types, who gives a lecture called something like "The Ramifications of User-Driven Error in Regression Models" or w/e. And he's always ragging on the pragmaticians and the sociolinguists, going on and on about how you can't trust native speakers to know their own language, blah blah blah.

But what does John do? I want to make him a linguistic anthropologist, obvs, but I don't know how good of a fit he'd be. Maybe he's a pragmatist or a syntactician. Maybe he does, like, extensive work on styleswitching. Or, like, maybe he's just as gay as a maypole, and all his research is in, like, the use of antilanguage among gay teenagers. And he goes out to the club and there's Rodney, drunk on drinks with umbrellas and fruit in them, trying to tell some dude with no pants on all about why generative modeling will be the wave of the future, just as soon as the anthropologists stop doing voodoo and start doing science. And John, like, rescues him and takes him back home, and Rodney's all, "Hey, thanks, despite what you're thinking, I love women and their vaginas, like, a lot, because I am not a homo, no sir, but if you wanted I'd suck your-" and then he throws up on John's tasteful and understated motorcycle boots.

Or something.

Also Daniel Jackson is there. And possibly his grad student, who I fleshed out for the Gateverse sequel to Observations that never got written. They're linguistic anthropologists, obvs. Daniel has some outre theories about Linear B, but it's not like he thinks it was aliens or anything, pfft.

I swear, this is worse than that Smallville episode fix-it story with the OC archaeologist and Lionel Luthor that I wrote because I was angry at the show's half-assed and poorly researched archaeology and never posted.

SO YES. I think I'm going to sleep now, because I have phonology at 8:30. But anyway: Am here, love you, etc.

ETA: PS: a fic challenge where all the prompts were taken from TFLN: good idea, or BEST idea?

So, after coffee with arymabeth, I started typing this massive srs biznes essay today about my new pet fandom hate, and it was going to be very thinky and insightful and also sort of filled with mild raeg.

But then I came home and had dinner with my mom, and for some reason it struck us as hilarious to start telling elephant jokes. Obviously, this led to Stargate elephant jokes. So if, like me, you're twelve, please enjoy.

( It's not even fucking raining )

And two for the Trek fans:

Q. What do you get when you cross an elephant with a Vulcan?
A. Thrown out of Starfleet.

Q. What do you get when you cross the captain with a Vulcan?
A. Four hundred thousand hits on Google.

I'm going to be back and forth and in and out for the next little while. Today, I'm going back to Jackson; Saturday, I'm flying out to Berkeley, where I'll be until mid-August (except during Comic-Con, obviously). There's no reason I shouldn't have regular internet access whilst there, but I predict a lot of shuffling and running around trying to get shit done in the first couple of days, so I may not be reading or commenting (not that I comment very much anyway).

I probably will be updating Twitter as I go (@imnotsatan). If you're in the Bay Area, give me a holler.

So, in case I don't see you, good afternoon, good evening, and good night.

Title: Public Timeline
By: sabinelagrande/sabinetzin and arymabeth
Summary: @dr_dr_mckay is stuck in a jumper at the bottom of the ocean & needs your help! Please RT!!
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis/Stargate: SG-1
Word Count: ~2000
Rating/Warnings: PG-13, language, incredible silliness, spoilers for Grace Under Pressure, total crack
Pairing: A whole lot of them, in sort of a slapsticky way, but mostly Weir/Caldwell, Lorne/Zelenka, one-sided McKay/Carter, O'Neill/Carter, Vala/Daniel, and a little McShep for flavor
A/N: So there are a couple of nu!Trek fics going around that immortalize the Enterprise crew's Twitter feeds. So we were talking about it, and arymabeth went "They so use twitter at the SGC" and I went, "Dude, what if they were on twitter during Grace Under Pressure". And, lo, this happened. And we do not apologize for it at all.

( Public Timeline )

Title: The Book of Changes
Summary: It is written.
Fandom: Firefly
Word Count: 108
Rating/Warnings: G
Pairing: N/A, Inara and Nandi
A/N: lovelythings said she wanted to be surprised, so I figured vaguely femmeslashy Firefly gen from me, of all people, would be pretty surprising. Hexagram names on mouse-over.

( The Book of Changes )

Okay, dude? You have to go and vote for Team War. If you don't, Team Hippie will win, and nobody wants that to happen. If you do go and vote, and you come back here and tell me you did, I'll write you a drabble for any fandom I've ever written. How's that sound? Everybody likes drabbles, right?

<3?

Title: And Keys Cut While You Wait
Summary: Daniel buys a calculator. His name is John.
Fandom: Stargate SG-1/Stargate: Atlantis
Word Count: 1483
Rating/Warnings: NC-17, AU, slavefic, surprisingly not non- or dubcon (IKR?)
Pairing: Daniel/John
A/N: For the roleplay/au (master/slave) square on my kink_bingo card. And that, my children, makes a line! I may do more in this AU, because the stuff happening in the background turned out more interesting than the stuff in the foreground.

( And Keys Cut While You Wait )

Interview from queenzulu! ( Many questions! )

Five words from yevgenie! ( Chekov, Atlantis, porn, crafts, home )

A very old cliff-marry-shag, what I found in a drawer random .txt, from telesilla! ( John Sheppard, Evan Lorne, Cameron Mitchell )

And because it's going around: Name a fandom, and I'll give you the scoop on at least three of my unpopular opinions related to that fandom.

And if you would like any words, interview questions, or people to cliff, marry, and shag, leave a comment!