I don't usually pass along links from lunatic sites I get hits from, but this one has eaten my heart and destroyed my soul.

www . dkcoffee . com / coffeeenema / <--I think the name says it all, no need to go and look.

I long for a world not populated by scary lunatics....

But if I get one more hit from someone looking for *x*cution chamb*r fanfic, I may go ahead and kill myself anyhow.

Over lunch on Saturday, someone pointed out to me that I live within three miles of the store with the largest selection of MYSA-AS in the city.

Fine lot of good that does me now. I'm on a Frugality Binge and anyhow, as I think I mentioned before, I've gone off that stuff because of discovering that it's quite routine for authors to go batshit-crazy in the middle of a series. (No one had anything to recommend as something good to read. Something without the batshit-crazy element.) I don't need to pay money for that. I can read fanfic.

[Still. I'm making mental notes of the stores with the best selections in my area. There are tentative plans for Rapunzel to come to Denver for a visit next spring or summer. I figure finding "her kind of store" will be a key component in making sure she has a good time.

I'm not entirely certain what you do with an 18 year-old. When I was 18, I was deliriously happy with a book and a quiet corner to sit in. (Or, you know, a bar and a lot of attractive young men, but I digress and anyhow there will be none of that sort of thing.) She seems to be much the same, reading-wise, but our dingy, overcrowded apartment is hardly going to be a thrilling place for her to hang out in for too long.

We can shop. Eat. Maybe we'll go to the mountains one day. If she's here over the weekend, we could take the Summer Ski Train up to Winter Park. We can go to Tattered Cover (always a good destination for a Reader.) Maybe there will be something decent on stage when she's here. Summer isn't high tide for the theatre (Phantom or Les Mis or Beauty and the Beast won't be in town), but they do some decent smaller productions at DCPA. I'll worry about that next year.]

Another Saturday discovery? The "re-mix" is new since I last paid attention to fandom.

I understand it's now accepted to take someone else's story and "re-mix" it or re-write it. I didn't quite gather if this is done with the knowledge and consent of the original author or not, and whether or not you just do it or there has to be some kind of organized...I don't know...competition or challenge around it, but I didn't ask.

I also didn't gather that this was primarily in use when, as happens, some incompetent pretence for a writer mangles a good idea. Apparently it's just when you like someone else's story but you wanted a different element or you wanted things to take a different turn at some point.

Fanfic of fanfic sort of thing.

Having given up on interpretation of canon, fandom is now cannibalizing itself.

Has we really become this sterile, this impotent?

A few short years from now, will fandom soar phoenix-like from the ashes of its own implosion or will the fallout of this narcissistic gluttony leave it as roadkill upon the creative highway?

(Sometimes you have to let semantics go in favor of just giving some new words an airing. My only regret is that I was unable to work "pursuant" into that little rant. I never feel like I've really enjoyed my vocabulary until I can make something pursuant.)

It's possible that I'm reading too much into what was, after all, a casual part of a casual conversation. And that, you know, being hard up for something to talk about, I'm making a minefield out of a minnow.

I let good manners go as well, but I did say I'm in a really crappy mood.

The sad thing is that I'd really pretty much made up my mind to quit smoking a week ago. Now, with these psychotic mood swings, I'm sort of afraid to.

In other non-news, I managed several sketches over the weekend that did not look like the product of a brain suffering from demonic possession. At this point, that's about as much as I can hope for. If I keep making this kind of astounding progress, in a few short weeks I'll be ready to move from copying sketches in books to looking at Real Things and attempting to copy them!

I'm signing up for a class, but it doesn't start until September.

Two more hours before I can bail on this vale o'tears. I have an 8:00 training tomorrow morning.

Let's hope the day goes better than this one has.

After the entire freaking world got on my nerves from 8:00 - 11:00 this morning, the instant the urge and ability to write left me, the office went dead quiet and the last four hours have been several days long.