hieroglyfic dreams

...but schneefink asked me to talk about "your field of study/work/specialization/a hobby and how a book/movie/series/canon got it terribly/hilariously wrong?"

I have a MS in meteorology (atmospheric physics) and I work in climate modeling. I really loved the SGA episode "The Storm", but auggh storms don't work that way. There is a single big wave - a tsunami - that crashes over Atlantis. But tsunamis are generated by earthquakes, not by atmospheric storms. Wind-driven storms create waves, but not single waves like that. (I mean, there are sometimes rogue waves many times the height of other waves around them. But a single wave does not form in an otherwise calm sea!)

(This actually led to my jokingly creating a Mary Sue who would be an actual meteorologist on Atlantis, because heaven knows they needed one, who showed up briefly in one of my SGA fics.)

The other thing I notice is that movies don't accurately portray NASA and NOAA research scientists. (I have seen this many times - I specifically remember Twister, which a friend of mine actually consulted on, and The Day After Tomorrow, which was ludicrous in every respect.) At least from the 1980s on, we don't wear lab coats, and we don't dress up at work. We wear nice jeans and hiking boots and button-down shirts (okay, sometimes t-shirts or sweaters) and we don't call each other Doctor This and Doctor That. Everyone calls each other by their first names. But I suppose the makers of movies want to ensure that the audience knows these are Sciency Scientists who Science.

(I'm not doing a formal December Talking Meme, but you can ask me a question if you like - in the comments here, if you like - and I will try to answer it sometime in the next, uh, *waves hand around*)

I decided not to sign up for Remix (though I'm on the pinch-hitters list), but I'm still hoping to do sutcliff_swap. Maybe. The problem is that I haven't completed a story since Yuletide, and I haven't written anything (fiction) in a couple of months. Um.

So do I really want to get assigned a story to write for someone, when the stories I came up with out of my very own head for me are languishing (mostly) unwritten? What I ought to do is work on one (or more) of these:

1. The sequel to Clarke's Law (gen Stargate Atlantis/Harry Potter crossover), which ( I have been working on for six years... )

2. The Raven Cycle Ronan/Adam first-time smut, which ( I was really excited about after Yuletide... )

3. The Game of Thrones (ASOIAF) ( post-canon Arya gen adventure... )

4. The Frontier Wolf ( Hockey AU )

5. The Eagle Western AU, which I'd forgotten about until writing about the FW AU reminded me, ( because I last opened the document two years ago, wow. )

Just writing this - and reading the bits of these stories I have written - makes me want to write. That's good, isn't it? I just feel so sadly out of practice, and a bit remote from fandom. It's easier to write when you have friends to squee with over IM or in chat rooms or by email, at least for me. But I don't really have any active fandoms, and I'm not feeling particularly squeeful about any of them, anyway. (It's like: when I first got into HP I wanted to write ALL THE STORIES. And it was the same with SGA, and due South - big ensembles meant lots of characters to mix and match! But though I am looking forward to the next season of GoT and the next book of ASoIAF, I don't really have any story thoughts other than this one big idea. And I don't really want to analyze or meta or anything, really. I've hardly even read much fic in it.)

Oh, well. Thanks for letting me ramble, friends.

This ad was in the newspaper this morning. It made me giggle out loud, and then get the camera:

( THE SLASHER IS COMING! )

Then I went for a lovely 10-mile trail run. I left the mp3 player at home, since I've only got 40 minutes to go on my current audiobook, and I figured it would be safer that way because the trail I chose is a popular mountain bike trail, and anyway, sometimes I really like just listening to the sounds of the world, especially on the trails. But I have been so earwormed by a (lovely, admittedly) song lately that I ended up listening to it in my head on repeat about fifty bazillion times. And now, you can too!

Jeana Leslie and Siobhan Miller - Saints and Sinners (On my server, please save-as)

Here are some remixredux09 recs. Oddly, most of these are in fandoms I'm not actually in. You should read these and comment because Remix fic frequently gets few comments. (Sigh.) Oh, and so far only one person has attempted to guess the story I wrote. Come on, wow me with your astonishing perceptive and deductive powers!

Counterpoint (Ecstasy, Fury, Revolution!) | Slings & Arrows, ensemble gen with a whiff of past Geoffrey/Darren, PG13, short story. Geoffrey and the others recall a production of Taming of the Shrew. Awesome structure, excellent voices. You can read the original before or after, or not at all, although this might be slightly easier to understand if you read the original first.

Cantando More (The Ode to Sheppard’s Cock Remix) | Stargate Atlantis, Sheppard/OMC, NC17, short story. Disclaimer: I know who wrote this. This hysterically funny story works best as a companion to the original, although read on its own, it's perfectly reasonable crack. An alien gives Sheppard a ceremonial blowjob; it's the POV of the alien OC that makes this story work. This is one of those "unreliable narrator who is in the dark about things that the reader knows" stories I so love.

Imperfect Contrition (the "Skeletons in the Closet" Remix) | X-men comicverse, ensemble gen with incidental Jean/Scott, R, novelette, noir AU (with other AU elements). I recommend reading this before the original (or actually, rather than the original...). I'm not in this fandom, although I read the X-Men comics back in the day, but oh, what a fabulous AU. (And if you don't know the X-Men comics, this reads beautifully as original fic, I suspect.) The noir tone is terrific, and the plot moves along just right, and the ending is totally perfect. If you read only one of these stories, make it this one.

Not Proper (Chinese Boxes remix) | Peter Pan, George Darling/Captain Hook, R, short story. I love the storytelling frame of this, and the melancholy and wistful tone as George revisits his childhood. Sort of. Beautifully written, and stands alone just fine.

Spare Parts (the Coincidences Happen Twice Remix) | Supernatural/Firefly, Dean/Kaylee, PG, short story. This is more of a sequel than a remix, but as such stands alone. I know Firefly (and Serenity - this is set post-movie) although I'm not in the fandom, but all I know about Supernatural I learned through fannish osmosis; still, this is perfectly understandable - and perfectly adorable.