Dira Sudis

emilyray convinced me (um, not that it took a lot of convincing) that this could stand alone as a story until I finish writing the rest (I swear, I really do mean to write it). So: here is another vignette in what is apparently going to be a series leading up to eventual actual Aral/Jole fic that has Jole in it.

Immediate sequel to As You Tap on Your Glass.
Aral/Cordelia. Non-explicit, 2000 words.

It had been years since they'd had a proper culture-clash fight.

( Fingers in the Notches on Your Spine )

(People with actual significant knowledge of syntax look away now.)

My sophomore year I took a syntax class where I sat next to thelionforreal and we wrote each other notes about popslash. We learned that syntax is like a machine for making chocolate chip cookies and yet I somehow got an A-.

My professor was a good descriptivist like most (probably all?) trained linguists, but all the same he assured me confidently that sentences ending in prepositions were ungrammatical--which meant, in his terms, not that they were incorrect according to some sort of style guide but that they would not be naturally generated by any speaker's internalized rules of language. They literally should not exist, and the fact that they did was evidently some sort of massive and ongoing series of errors in speech or writing.

I offered him an example, influenced by the construction that impeded my path back to my dorm that year. "That area is hard to get to." He appeared baffled and then dismissed the sentence, or possibly my argument, as either incomprehensible or imaginary.

Since then, I have thought a lot about the injustice of his position, and I have come to what is probably an obvious conclusion: there are a lot of sentences that appear to end in prepositions but really they don't. They end in words that look like prepositions that are really part of a verb or some other compound phrase.

Prepositions are words that indicate where something is in relation to something else: "the mouse is ______ the desk." Under, over, behind, below, before, beside, at, and so on. If I just said "The mouse is at" then you would presume I had trailed off in the middle of my thought. That would be a poorly formed sentence--something that I might say or write down for whatever reason, but which I would not mentally compose as a complete utterance. (My syntax professor was big on that point--few things people actually say or write are a good reflection of the syntactic process in their brains, he said, because of all the stammers and hesitations and half-repetitions and self-interruptions and so on.) "The mouse is at" would not arise naturally from my syntax as a complete thought--I would have to have thought "the mouse is at the desk" and then suffered some interruption or error en route to producing the actual words. That is an ungrammtical sentence in a linguistic sense. I would have to put a little asterisk next to it on my linguistics homework.

But if I say "the mouse is hard to get at" that is not what happened at all, because "get at" is a verb. It means something different from "get" + "at", and it is perfectly capable of occurring at the end of the sentence. You see what I'm getting at. For example. My suspicion is that the vast majority of sentences ending in "at" or "to" or "with" do so when those words are attached to verbs are perfectly coherent and thus, in linguistic terms, perfectly grammatical--and who gives a damn about Stunk & White and their attempt to make writing style in English conform to the structure of Latin anyway.

Uh. This pointless, pointless rant brought to you by one too many posts from Reasoning with Vampires, also available as reasoningwithvamps_feed. It's pretty entertaining, if a little strident on certain rules of usage.

I am not SUPER freaked out about the possibility of having my identity leaked to Facebook/Twitter via crossposted comments, but for the record: please, don't crosspost your comments from my posts. Please especially don't crosspost your comments from my LOCKED posts, rare though they are. It's bad enough that my mom has my fannish email address, I don't need the streams crossing any further.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, here is the LJ News post about the latest "improvements" and here is a post from eruthros, some useful things on the internet, with tips on how to disable the new features.

And, finally, I have a ridiculous number of Dreamwidth invite codes, in case anyone has hit their limit of LJ fuckery and wishes to emigrate.

With English subtitles! For 1:07! On Facebook this morning!

Varg and Hamre! ♥!

Clip from Skriften på veggen!!!!!

*goes off to watch just one more time before work*

Or, if you are at work, maybe wait until you have a little time, because this is a STUNNING piece of fic from philomytha, about the day during Duv Galeni's senior year at the Imperial Academy when Lord Vorkosigan came to talk to the class.

Vorkosigan's Day

GO. READ.


(This is, incidentally, fic arising from the current ficathon at bujold_fic - today's stories are all about Aral and/or Cordelia!)

1) As I haven't said this anywhere outside of comments and IMs yet: Although nothing can be promised, iulia and I firmly intend to propose and volunteer to VJ a Lord King Bad Vid show for VividCon 2011. We can't make it happen without new and new-ish vids, so if you are a vidder reading this consider this your notice that any LKBVs you choose to make in the next ten months could well find a home there! Hypothetically! Maybe!

And if the vid show thing doesn't work out, well. Who doesn't want to see more Lord King Bad Vids? There are whole fandoms that missed out on the last round due to not really existing yet. I feel like Merlin, for example, just cries out for Lord King Bad Vidding.

2) When you are feeling physically wretched for an assortment of not-very-good reasons, there is nothing like seven episodes of Mythbusters in twenty-four hours to make you feel better. Although the sleep, drugs, and pizza probably helped.

3) So last summer, maybe you remember this, I got kind of hooked on the Varg Veum movies, which are from Norway. So, also sometime last summer, I think, I became a fan of Varg Veum on Facebook. It's really entertaining to see occasional posts on my Facebook newsfeed entirely in Norsk. I'm pretty sure that the first of the six new movies is premiering, possibly at some sort of film festival, on Thursday the 26th, and from the set photos posted a week or two ago, I'd guess they're hard at work making more movies.

Now I just have to wait for the movie(s) to make it to DVD, get subtitled in English, and cross the Atlantic. No sweat. In the meantime, I should chase down another of the novels in translation....

4)

Banner by skybound2

Open to all fandoms and ships-or-absences-thereof! Signups now, posting October 1-7.

5) Speaking of Amy Pond and my undying love for her, Neil Gaiman shares a scene cut from the episode he wrote, which is about to go to table-reading.

This year I may be looking forward to the Amy and Her Boys Christmas Special (which, to be clear, is not the episode mentioned above, but still, AMY AND HER BOYS) more than Yuletide.

6) Also speaking of Amy Pond, I was following David Hewlett for a while on Twitter (because Joe Flanigan got on Twitter and I was following him and it seemed obvious) but then I had to un-follow him for his egregious failure to appreciate Amy Pond. :(

The Flan continues to be pretty entertaining, though.

7) I should write something. Speaking of Amy Pond...

( I am too entertained by the little bit of this I've written not to share. )

I haven't done this one since 2004, but resonant just did it and I thought I'd give it a whirl...


Aral/Jole follow-up to "As You Tap on Your Glass"

Cordelia: You know, you should really hook up with Jole.
Aral: Do I have to?
Cordelia: Of course you don't have to.
Aral: Oh, hm. Well.
Jole: *has not shown up yet*
Me: This is the part where you're supposed to realize that you want to, Aral.
Aral: Do I have to?
Me: YES.
Aral: Well I'm not gonna.
Cordelia: I thought we'd just established that that approach doesn't work well.
Me: I guess that's why I've just been sitting here staring at this fic for two months now.

( Other WIPs under the cut )

I went to VividCon and came back pimped into Drake & Josh. THERE WASN'T EVEN A VID FOR IT. THANKS, frostfire! THANKS A LOT. NOW I AM PLOTTING KIDFIC FOR HIGH-SCHOOL-AGED STEPBROTHERS. (Wait, hey, wasn't that semi-canonical on The OC? Man, there is nothing new under the sun.)

(I promise not to write fic where Josh is a hooker.)

(Uhhh. No, actually, I probably shouldn't try to promise that at all.)

I feel like this is even less dignified than the time everyone came back from the first MJ pimped into bandom, but here I am doing my part to spread the Drake/Josh love like con plague. You're welcome, everyone.

(THEY DANCE WITH EACH OTHER IN PUBLIC, KISS ON THE MOUTH, AND SPANK DURING FIGHTS. ALL IN CANON. ON NICKELODEON. I ASK YOU, HOW IS A GIRL TO RESIST THAT?)

You're my only hope! I managed to lose my program book at some point on Sunday, so I now have no way to check the answer to this maddening question:

Did I completely hallucinate the listing of a Doctor Who vid to "Take on Me" by A-ha? I can't find it in any of the vid show posts and I know I didn't see it at the con, and yet I feel like I talked about wanting to see it with other people who would (probably) have noticed if I were hallucinating. I think.

Help?

ETA: Okay, yes, there it is right on the DVD set. I am apparently having difficulties with reading this morning. Thanks for reassuring me, peeps!

My mistake! THE EBOOK ARC OF CRYOBURN IS ON SALE NOW FOR $15 THROUGH BAEN WEBSCRIPTIONS.

tel in vorkosigan says THERE ARE "EPILOGUE DRABBLES". DONE AND DONE.