Res ipsa loquitur

A hilarious addition from lemonsharks - Top 5 questions you wish someone had asked for dec 30?

Now I'm not going to answer them today. I'll use them as inspirations to post in January. (But not daily, I think. Every year I forget that the December Daily is a little bit Much.)

5. Five tropes that I never get tired of reading.

4. Five tropes that I never get tired of writing.

3. Five lessons I learned in 2022. (Some will be trivial, but not all, I think.)

2. Five titles that I wrote down but never used.

1. Five blessings that I want to bless fandom with.


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james - Top 5 places in the past you would like to visit. Top 5 places in the present you would like to visit.

I love this prompt!

In the present:

5. I'd like to see Italy. Not so much big cities, but -- like, my brother and his ex honeymooned in a little house in the middle of a field of lavender, and that sounds lovely.

4. I've been to Point Reyes National Seashore in northern California, but I'd like to go again. It was winter when we went, and it was cold and the daylight was short; I'd like to have more time. I'd like to pick one tidepool and sit and look at it for an hour, just to see what came in and out of it.

3. I don't know if St. Vith, Belgium, is otherwise a pleasant place to visit, but there's a sourdough library there. I read an article on it once, and unaccountably it told me everything except what it smelled like.

2. What is it with me and Belgium? I have no general interest in Belgium, though I'm sure it's a very nice country. But I'd like to go to Brussels with enough time to make multiple visits to the Magritte Museum.

1. I'd really like to see Skara Brae. It's a place on the Orkney Islands in Scotland where an entire stone age village was preserved, buried by a storm, and then another storm uncovered it. You can look down into actual dwellings -- the hearths, the stone boxes and dressers and frames that supposedly held bedding. Where they laid their hands. Where they put their pretty things.

In the past:

5. Skara Brae when it was inhabited!

4. I don't have the delusion that I'd find Dickens' London very pleasant, but I'd like to see it just the same and see what it smelled like and what the food tasted like, what that noxious fog looked like. Go into a shop and closely examine how the clothes were made.

3. A North American tallgrass prairie.

2. I'd like to see the Milky Way the way my ancestors saw it before artificial light.

1. I'd like to go back and go to one of the family reunions that happened when my brother and I were babies. Meet my parents when they were young, and all my wild and crazy aunts and uncles. I've seen pictures. It looks like a good time.





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Christmas was postponed at our house because the roads were too bad to go over the river and through the woods to spend the holiday with the spouse. I would probably have been OK with snow, but I couldn't handle the Blizzard Warning (high winds + low temps = perpetual snowdrifts, like imagine a lone hyundai trying to drive through some kind of demonic snow globe).

Actually it's kind of nice. The kidlet had bought a bunch of decorations which there was now time to put up, and we've got extra giftwrap time and some additional unrushed baking projects planned, and yesterday we watched a Muppet Christmas Carol yet again.

ride_4ever - top 5 dS fanworks other than fic (arts, podfics, vids)

Unfortunately I can't answer this at all! When I was in the fandom I don't remember a lot of art, and I was a latecomer to podfic, and my slow internet made vids impossible for me. Because due South isn't an AO3-native fandom, even those non-fic works that made it into AO3 are often eccentrically tagged.

I can point you at my related works page so you can see all the lovely translations and podfics others have done of anything I ever wrote.

But otherwise all I can do is be open to recs from commenters. Anyone?



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fox - Top five Advent carols, maybe

Always count on Fox to give me an opportunity to talk about music.

Comfort, Comfort Ye My People (these performers are inserting some odd pauses, which I don't like, but it's a nice bluegrassy version.)

People, Look East (from a poem by Eleanor Farjeon)

Of the Father's Love Begotten (you would not believe how hard it is to find a performance of this in plainsong style rather than with some notes extended to make it conventional rhythm. So this performance is kind of ... excessively hygienic? In a way that says "evangelical" to me? Sorry.)

Watchman, Tell Us Of the Night (surprising number of the YouTube hits were instrumentals of various kinds, but I found you a choir)

Wake, Awake, For Night Is Flying (i.e. Bach's "Sleepers Wake" arranged as a hymn. I used to go through the hymnal looking for Bach arrangments. This is a translation I'm not familiar with, though.)

Surprised to discover that I'm dissatisfied with the arrangements I could find, and embarrassed about it, as if y'all are going to judge me for liking some of these. Apparently there's part of my brain that considers this to be hospitality and has high standards for it!



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summerstorm - because it puts me in mind of blackjack, do you play any card or board games regularly? Or videogames? top 5 games?

Unfortunately I haven't found 2-player board games that are much fun. Even when the spouse is with us, he isn't a board game/card game fan.

When I was in high school, all my guy friends played D&D, and they wouldn't let me play with them because I was a giiiiiirl. I'm still pissed about that.

5. I like puzzle games on the phone. I've played a million hours of things like Bejeweled and Zuma. I get on a kick, play one game for years and years, and then abruptly don't want to play it any more and move on to the next thing.

4. Did you know the AARP website has games? If I have the urge to play a game that's advertised online, I go see if I can play it there, because I figure it's aimed at old folks like me and probably puts a lot of effort into not having viruses. I like to play Ballistic there.

3. I stopped playing Wordle when one day it wouldn't let me in because I didn't have an active network connection even though I had wifi. I don't know what it was doing with my network connection, but nothing good, I'm sure.

2. But then I discovered Squaredle! I'm still in the early stages of obsession with this one, but already enthusiastic enough to have paid for the subscription.

1. Logic puzzles. Feel like IQ tests. I like the ones on the Puzzle Baron site.


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china_shop - Top five devices/appliances/bluetooth thingies/whatever :-)

Am I a thingies person? I guess I am.

5. It is literally unimaginable to me that there was ever a time when I didn't have a smartphone. But I mean it's not that interesting, right? I love my smartphone exactly the same way everybody loves their smartphone. Except that the kidlet tells me I spend more time than average telling it, "No, you may not have that permission, and I guess it's time to go through my preferences and deny permissions that you haven't even asked for yet."

4. I have a red Kitchenaid mixer [cue pause while I reflexively open a new tab and check capitalization, because this is something I do at work and it has become an unbreakable habit) KitchenAid mixer, which I love. For many years I had an off-white one that my parents bought at an auction somewhere, but then I was kneading bread with it and it literally walked itself off the counter and hit the floor so hard that the grounding prong of the plug bent into a curve and couldn't be plugged in any more. It had a more dramatic death than most of my possessions have.

3. A long time ago I was thinking about getting a Bose speaker to play music off my iPod and Consumer Reports said I could save a lot of money by buying an Altec Lansing speaker instead. This was before Bluetooth, so it had a well to prop your iPod in, which contained a connector that would fit into the port of one style of iPod, and then a bag of other connectors to swap in for different styles of iPods -- none of which exist any more. But fortunately the aux cable is forever.

2. This year I bought a two-part keyboard with risers in the middle, so I can set it up so each part tilts outward and rotates outward. My wrists are very happy with this.

1. When they sent us to work from home at the start of the quarantine, I was literally working at my kitchen table, and the closest I could come to an ergonomic setup was to pile a bunch of cushions on the folding chair I sat on to raise me up a bit. Eventually they let us come and bring home our chairs, but the desks were attached to cubicles. I went looking for a work desk with a keyboard tray, and the one I liked best had a motor to raise and lower it. "Oh, that's a silly feature," I thought. "I'll use that once to get the height right and then I'll never touch it again."

Friends, I use that desktop-moving motor multiple times every day. I raise my desktop when work is over so my desk looks out of the way and my living room can stop being an office and go back to being a living room. I adjust it when we're using the laptop + monitor to watch television. I raise my monitor when I have to be in a meeting with the camera on, so I can get that flattering selfie height. (I also roll the desk around so you see my couch and my shelves and my fetching little display of pottery bowls and winter squash, rather than seeing the mess of my table and the door into the hallway where at any moment a newly awakened kidlet may shamble past on their way to the shower.)





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dine - Top five ice cream flavors

5. Butter pecan.

4. Baskin Robbins' Gold Medal Ribbon. (I like that sweet-and-salty thing.)

3. Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia.

2. I only ever had Haagen Dazs Honey Vanilla once, and I can't find any evidence that it ever really existed, but boy, was it good.

1. In 1984 a Swenson's opened in my hometown, and they had a thing like fudge ripple but with caramel. Quite a lot of caramel. Probably not the pure ambrosia that I'm remembering, but boy was it good.




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the_future_modernes - top five things you look forward to as you grow older

I appreciated this prompt. I've been feeling kind of low about aging, mostly because I have tendinitis in my groin muscle (as if I were an athlete, which I so am not) which makes it painful to walk or stand much, and I feel like I've been in physical therapy* for a hundred years, and things like "persisting when progress is slow" and "doing a little tiny thing every day over and over rather than doing a big thing now now now and hurting myself" are really a struggle for me.

So it was good to be prompted to think about things to look forward to.

5. I've been developing what feels like a very small, very limited kind of precognition, mostly related to physical objects. Two, three seconds into the future, where is this measuring cup going to be, and at what angle? and the liquid in it, where is that going to be? (Possibly this is something that other people have had all along, and that's why when someone tosses a ball to them, they can catch it. It's new to me.) I'm enjoying it, and looking forward to a slightly less klutzy future.

4. Yesterday I was talking about being exactly the right age to enjoy Eliot's "Four Quartets." I'm sure there are other works that are going to open up for me.

3. My mother never gets a cold. She says she's already had them all. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

2. Over time I can see myself getting less hard on the world, if that makes any sense. I'm a little more relaxed about some of the imperfections of things. I'm learning to let things slide.

1. Over time I can see myself getting a little less hard on myself, too.



*sometime I want to tell y'all about my yoga therapist, because she's the greatest.



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duffy - Top 5 OTPs in television or movies. Could be romantic or friendship. (Canon is NOT a requirement!)

In no particular order except for #1:

To no one's surprise: Fraser and Kowalski (due South). The way Ray's ready to throw down at any moment and yet often his reaction to freakishness is: "Huh. OK, then." The way Fraser's initial reaction -- that scene in the station when he turns completely around with an astonished look on his face -- in a sense never changes.

Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane (Dorothy Sayers mysteries). Because she's difficult, and damaged, and discouraged, and sharp, and yet he collaborates with her and is transformed by her, and when he finally proposes to her successfully (in Latin), he addresses her as Magistra.

The romance between Willow and Xander (Buffy) was plausible to me in that it was clearly and obviously a terrible idea that was going to hurt everyone and thus an irresistible temptation, but what I liked about their relationship was that when it was necessary for them to have a deep connection, what connected them was not romance or attraction but the strength of their childhood friendship.

I would love to have gotten more of the friendship between Seven of Nine and Naomi Wildman (Star Trek: Voyager). It's so totally believable to me that a kid would say, "This is Seven. She was kidnapped and assimilated and a lot of people are scared of her and she doesn't really know how to be human, and now I'm going to teach her how to skip and how to gallop."


1. Book-canon Sherlock Holmes and John Watson, of course! Their differences, their oddities, their mutual admirations, never get less delightful.




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minutia_r - top five pieces of fandom history

I don't think I can rate these, but I can natter.

There are a lot of people who've been in fandom longer than I have, but I've been in fandom since before Twitter, before Tumblr, before Dreamwidth, before LiveJournal. Before TikTok, before YouTube. Before AO3.

When I first started out in fandom, I would go on a search engine (I remember using Yahoo and Netscape) to find a story with a search that went something like +slash +"paris/kim" -chakotay, and then at the bottom of the story you might find a link to the author's personal page (maybe on Myspace or Geocities) or to the mailing lists that the author used. Then you'd sign up for the mailing list, and stories would arrive via email. Or you might find a recs page (the one I valued most was torch's) to help you find new stories, because it was very easy to slurp up all the findable content in one pairing and be forced to look for another one where you didn't know the names yet.

If you liked a story, you might be moved to email the author and say so, and sometimes the author would email you back and you'd become friends. Eventually someone explained to me how to use IRC chat, because it's easier to beta that way than via email. Even in work chats I still sometimes try to type /laughs.

When I started reading and writing due South, someone (possibly sigridthehaughty?) made me a videotape of some of the most significant episodes and sent it to me in the mail so I could watch it on my TV/VCR. (There were people vidding then. I can't even imagine how.)

For many years, my profile in every journal said, "I'm on dial-up, so I'm not watching vids or eps."

(As I write this, I'm reminded of my grandfather-in-law, who was a teamster back when that meant he managed a team of horses.)

I loved the journaling era. I mean, you notice I'm still here! I'm not really anywhere else! Still clinging to a version of the internet that's interactive without being algorithm-driven for maximum profit.



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