incidents and accidents, hints and allegations

I just read about tweetle beetles for the poetree community. If you remember Fox in Socks fondly, you should too, it's fun and takes literally only a minute or two! You don't need the book either, jjhunter has the excerpt.

(Actually the formative Seuss tongue-twister book of my childhood is the other one, Oh Say Can You Say?, the one with the bread/bed spreader and the shinbone pins, but SteelyKid loved Fox in Socks for a while and the tweetle beetles were my favorite part, so I could not resist. And now, WisCon packing.)

Somehow WisCon is this weekend. Who approved that?

Anyway:

I am scheduled to get in around 2:30 Friday and to leave around 2:30 Monday (edited to fix times). I will be in the dealer's room some of the time—Con or Bust T-shirts!—and at the Carl Brandon Society party Friday night, assuming travel permits, plus the previously-mentioned panels. I have zero social plans right now, and am totally open to actual plans with people!

(Also I may be hiding in my room doing work, because I have two oral arguments next week. But hopefully not for too long.)

I have spoiler thoughts about last week's Elementary, but I'm just going to combine them with a reaction to tonight's season finale, so in the meantime:

Con or Bust generally runs a bracket-style challenge at Wiscon's Gathering, thanks to the heroic efforts of popelizbet, which pits characters of color from SFF against each other in a light-hearted "who's more awesome" way. Nominations for this year are open, and anyone can nominate online.

Anyway, in a fit of absent-mindedness I nominated Joan Watson, forgetting that Elementary cannot really be considered SFF. Later, in one of the nominations for Wendy Watson of The Middleman, the nominator left a note saying, "Can we do Wendy Watson vs. Joan Watson?"

Well, sadly we cannot, because like I said, Joan is not eligible. But now I desperately crave a crossover fic in which they are cousins of some degree, meet up at a family reunion, compare notes about their situations, and kick some butt.

Someone make that happen, please? *puppy-dog eyes*

I've had this vague thesis for a while, that there two kinds of people, those who—well. Have a poll:

(At one point I had more examples, but lost them. I also firmly expect to be in the minority on all of these, though I'm less certain whether there will be a pattern.)

and I don't like it.

My disk imaging program says that it can't read a particular sector. On the other hand, this time chkdsk didn't throw any errors, so perhaps the backup program is just flawed somehow. But somehow I doubt it, and I really do not have time to be replacing my hard drive again just now, or really ever.

(The last full backup I have is from two weeks ago, so at least it's better than last time, when I had no full backups. Still.)

Here is the text of my Mary Sue talk! [ETA: for people coming here through outside links, this was given at a quasi-academic conference with a fifteen-minute limit.] It is mostly as I gave it except I skipped a couple of paragraphs for time. I do have slides but I'm not sure I'm going to bother, they were very text-heavy and not that interesting. (Edit: moved the links to the end of this post, since there were no comments on the links-only post and this way everything's all in one place.)

( the text of my talk )

( the links )

You know, the panel before this ended early, and while the last panel looked interesting, my neck and shoulders are screaming at me from spending most of the day bending over my netbook, and if I leave now, I can eat a leisurely dinner and then go see Iron Man 3 instead of bolting my food and fretting the whole way. So despite my guilt, I'm playing hooky.

If you were at the conference, say hi! I do have notes about my co-panelists' talks, which I will post, but maybe they'll put their slides or notes up somewhere. Stay tuned. Just not until tomorrow, probably.