i carin úcarë sarmënen

Yeah, I know. Spamming today. But I'm cut-tagging, so folks who couldn't care less can skip stuff.

( more about last night's Bacchus parade )

ETA: Need information! Does anyone know definitively if Dom likes chocolate?

So I'd planned to go for a nice walk along the riverfront, shop a little, have some of the breakfast pastry things whose French name I keep forgetting. I got up at nine, lazed a little and checked my email and LJ comments, took a shower, and came back into the main room to find it was dark. As in, bucketing rain down outside so that even I don't want to go out in it. *sigh*

So instead, I think I'll hang around the hotel, watch the rain out the window, and write smut. Oh, and hope desperately that it stops raining before tonight, because I don't know how I'd get to the party in the rain without either ruining my dress or taking a taxi two blocks (which I can't help but feel would be silly).

So, having followed Elijah's float for the last 4-5 blocks of the parade route (attempting to attract him with a prodigious-but-tasteful display of cleavage), I'm back in my hotel room with (hopefully) tons of pictures and a strand of gold Mardi Gras beads thrown by the boy himself!

Okay, I'm better now.

( cut-tagging after the fact for four-letter words past this point )

In less than 72 hours, I'll be in New Orleans.

*wibbles*

The good news is that I've got a dress (a gorgeous purple formal that screams "check out my cleavage") and all the accoutrements that one needs to stalk meet wonderful people.

More good news is that I solved my "formal purses are the size of postage stamps" problem by making my own purse this morning. Yeah, in all the excess time I had this morning, before my flight left for LAX, I went to the fabric store, picked up some silk, velvet, and silken cord, and sewed myself a bag. Because I'm effing insane, that's why.

Ooh, and thinking of Mardi Gras, paging cathexys! Did we have relatively firm plans, or is the jury still out on whether you'll be able to come play with me on Monday? I'll be checking my journal periodically between now and then, so let me know.

And I'm damn near done with Stop, Rewind, (re)Play, too. I've probably got another 2000 words, tops, which I should be able to write tonight or tomorrow, and then ship the whole thing off to laylah_r for beta. As a matter of fact, I'd be writing right now (instead of typing up this LJ post in Word for later transfer to my journal) except that my flight is completely packed and I wouldn't want to give anyone a heart attack if they should happen to read over my shoulder. Because we're at the good Orlijah bits now, where they're reaching for the lube. Finally. Damn them. *g*

And it feels like the plane's descending, which means they're going to tell me to turn my computer off any second, so it's time to save and exit.

In my non-RPS fandoms, I'm an absolute canon whore. It goes along with my being an absolute characterization whore. But the concept of canon in RPS fandoms feels contradictory and uncomfortable to me.

First, let me define the concept of canon as I see it: it's the factual structure of a fandom; the details of the characters and their lives that are gleaned from the source material and maintained (or at least not contradicted) in order to support the authenticity of the fanfic narrative, thus allowing it to be viewed as belonging to the fan-controlled segment of the source material's universe.

Looking at that definition, the entire concept of canon seems to me to be inappropriate to apply to real people. The "source material" is someone's life, and as such it's a really personal thing; I'm torn between my need to have the authenticity provided by canon and my desire to intrude as little as possible upon the person's actual existence.

The argument is easily made that we're fictionalizing the people we write RPS about, which makes applying the concept of canon to their lives no different than it is for any other fandom. That's all well and good, except that (barring a few RPS a/u shared universes) the canon we're using still consists of real facts about real people, regardless of how fictionalized the end result is.

Despite my discomfort, I still find myself being a canon whore, even in RPS. I have a collection of transcribed interviews and articles, my Pictures folder overfloweth, my TiVo is set to auto-record anything to do with LotR or any of the main actors, and I have a calendar specifically to record the dates of various appearances, location shoots, etc.

I don't honestly have any answers, but I welcome discussion. What do y'all think?

The hotel won't budge on their policy and the travel agency is a total loss as somehow the guy I need to talk to has always "just stepped away from his desk" when I call, and then he never returns my calls. *sigh* They will, however, change my reservation from four nights to two nights without penalizing me (so long as I actually show up and stay), so I suppose that's something.

So the upshot is that I'm going to Mardi Gras. Bought my plane tix, sent off my payment for the party tix....

Now I just need to go shopping. *g*

(The strangest part is that I really don't know whether to be excited or unhappy. *shakes head* I'm just confused.)

Okay, first the fic stuff:

I don't know that I'm going to have Stop, Rewind, (re)Play done by tomorrow. Most people are going to be like, "What? Who the fuck cares?" but I promised libitina that I'd get it done for her birthday and I'm not so sure anymore. Fifty lashes with a wet...Elijah? No, I didn't think I'd get off that easy. Mea culpa. I'm working on it, but I'm a little stressed right now and I'm going to go outside for a calming cigarette as soon as I'm done with this entry.

Next, New Orleans:

When last we left our intrepid heroine, she had discovered that she could not, in fact, afford to go to Mardi Gras for the sole purpose of stalking seeing Dom and Elijah, because she could not get anyone to go with her and share the cost of the (very reasonably priced, considering) hotel room she'd found.

Well, I still can't afford to go, but the fucking travel agency lied to me about the hotel reservation (which was not supposed to charge to my credit card until three days before my arrival, because I was supposed to be able to cancel up to that point with no penalty and after that point by paying for one night's stay), and now the hotel's charged me for one night already and tells me that I have to pay the whole thing, whether or not I show up.

So I have a choice:

Pay $650 I can't really afford to sit at home and think about the fact that I could be in New Orleans, having a blast.
Pay $1200 I can't really afford to actually go to New Orleans and have a blast, and worry about the money later.

Hmmm. I think it all hinges on a couple of phone calls tomorrow, but I'm kind of leaning toward to actually enjoying my tremendous misspending of money. (And I will never trust an unknown travel agency again. Never. Bastards.)

I just rec'd Void over in thespecialhell. If you want to know more about what it is and why you should read it, go look over there; it's not f-locked. I'm too lazy to repeat it all here. *g*

I know Brits use "hire" the way Americans use "rent" when it comes to things like cars, but does that apply to other things, too? Specifically, I'm thinking about borrowing videos from a shop.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

So, fandom_scruples is violating LJ TOS by creating an account and/or community with the express purpose of harassing people (those on their "blacklist"). I'd file a complaint, but I'm not on their list and so am not entitled to according to LJ's rules.

But anyone who is on their blacklist should probably complain to LJ.

As far as the legality of the situation, I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think you need to be one to figure out that they don't have a leg to stand on. COPA applies to material distributed for "commercial purposes" (i.e., for profit, which we're certainly not doing by writing and posting for free on LJ). Plus, the information they're gacked from Morality in Media is all outdated and/or flat out wrong.

So feel free to excerpt any of the above information for your own journal. I'd love to see it propagate throughout LJ in the hopes that fandom_scruples will get TOS'd from LJ.