Unsolicited Advice

  Happy Ratmas! I am puttering around the house, airing as many QI holiday episodes as I can find, until I get bored and switch to something else. https://twoseven.xyz/FrcdXZ9mKa

Direct financial news: Thanks to a GoFundMe , I have pre-paid three months of anything that will let me do that. At the very least, I will have phone service through this debacle. The city I'm in has just signed an eviction moratorium of its own, to be in effect until the health department says it's safe to turf people again (so, probably April~June). I'm calling legal aid to check, but given that every two miles is a new ZIP code in MA, and that no one sane would rent to me on my current (lack of) income, my best bet may be to stay exactly where I am until someone finds a way to remove me. I just got in touch with the person who was paying utilities and I'm going to try to negotiate paying THEM for it all, so I'm not subject to all the fees involved in transferring everything into my own name.  I've been referred to some other, smaller funds, but to be honest, I'm not sure what to apply for. The problem that I have is not a temporary matter of "I need

The drunk guy at the end of the bar keeps coming out to steal my Cheerios, then cramming himself into a grubby box to eat them.  On the other hand, all the drunk guys in the house are getting their rooms cleaned today in preparation for RATMAS REVELRIES tomorrow at 3 pm EST, on Twitch . Come see what I do for the ungrateful wombling fuzzbutts, and join us for a LIVE broadcast of Ratmas Dinner, followed by video games and ramble. Ratmas tree and gifts! Can you guess what I got them? (Food. I got them food. I get them food every year.)

Come one, come all! Celebrate the non-denominational hedonistic holiday of Ratmas with me and the denizens of Schloß Ratter on 12/20, at 3 pm. Gather your own tasty treats and nest up to join us for a cage tour of their decorations, a LIVE stream of Ratmas Dinner, and then low-pressure socially-distanced hangout time with me and some quality brain-rotting video games.  https://fb.me/e/1Wa7qFEsW http://twitch.tv/arabellaflyn/

I've got work to do and I need to not wander away from the computer before I do it. More Avengers will keep me here! Starting today at 1 pm, we continue where we left off with Series 4, starring Diana Rigg and Patrick Macnee, as they deftly quip, bicker, and lightly "karate"-touch bad guys into unconsciousness, saving the world while dressed to the nines. Join me here for the fun: https://twoseven.xyz/glCbxLLnnB

 http://laneniamvidataj.rf.gd/unsolved1/play.html The URL is admittedly ugly, but the interpreter seems to work all right. Have a nose around. Type QUESTION for a URL where you can ask me about things that have not yet acquired a description.

Redundant to those who have me on other social media, but tl;dr: I need to be out of this apartment by 12/31, and the couple I was supposed to stay with temporarily just broke up. I cannot go with either. I've contacted the relevant state resources but frankly the American government is a flaming dumpster fire and I don't know what they can/will do to help. GoFundMe is here:  https://www.gofundme.com/f/k4nnj3 Life sucks. Have a picture of a rat to make up for it.

Observations: Inform 7 is still a thing. Now Vorple is also a thing. Free web hosting with FTP access, while not as common as it was twenty years ago, still exists. People are a lot more willing to click a link than wrap their head around the concept of a Z-Machine interpreter. I've no idea if this will ever amount to anything, but at least it's keeping me out of worse trouble.

I've been horribly scattered for the past several days, which, in retrospect, is because I've had a migraine off and on the whole time. The wonderful ("wonderful") thing about those is that, in addition to hurting, they also wreck your ability to logic. There's no clear picture of what causes migraines in general, assuming that they are all the same thing, but the ones I get (migraine with aura, preceded by sudden changes in cardiovascular or atmospheric pressure) are associated with cortical spreading depression . Which is essentially a rolling brownout across the outer wrapper of the brain, the part that handles sequential analysis and synthesis. It's a fun combination of an icepick to the eye socket and the nagging feeling that there's something important you really should have picked up on, but haven't. I spent Thursday night at the studio reception desk, trying like hell not to fall off my chair. Writing is damn near impossible like that, but I di

  I filmed a bunch of video intros for my Thanksgiving marathon thing. Then a bunch of "backstage" clips. Just like a real YouTuber! (I am pretending to know what I'm doing SO HARD.) And here they are. If you'd like to support my efforts to fuck around in front of a camera wearing interesting dresses until I figure this out, I have a Patreon and a PayPal donations jar. 

Those of you who have been around a while are probably wondering where the advent calendar went. If you haven't, normally what happens is I queue up a series of short daily posts for the month of December, so I can take some time away from written work to do a bunch of live performances. I have a regular stage show that goes off in early January (two, actually -- we're the double-header performed on the main stage at Arisia ), and for the past several years I've danced either a holiday show or NACHMO or both. And I tend to make most of my holiday gifts, because I'm incapable of just shopping for fancy boxes of chocolates like a normal person. This year, of course, basically none of that is happening. The Mrs Hawking productions are still running, but in a Zoom-like format, and I've already done the taping for my show and the props for the other one. Yearly dance shows that I'm in or normally attend are broadcasting video archive of previous years. I do still ha

I finished a 1960s pencil skirt the other day. It's very authentic. So authentic I had to give it a satin lining or I wouldn't be able to wiggle it on. If it were any more authentic, I don't think I could sit down. Pencil skirts are structured garments and this one was meant to be tightly tailored, so I thought I ought to take a shot at following the design process properly for once. Looking up 'how to draft a pencil skirt' led me to The Closet Historian , always a fantastic resource for post-war/mid-century garments. She went to fashion school in at least two different countries, and if you want directions on how to derive standardized patterns from a series of measurements, she's your best bet. After twenty minutes of her doing math on camera, she showed the pattern pieces, and I knew immediately that they would not fit. Her method results in front and back panels with the same rise (the distance between the low full hip line, or the crotch seam for pants, to

It's been a rough couple of weeks. Discount Cheeto Hitler is refusing to admit he lost the election, which he did, by a fairly wide margin. The response of the Biden campaign to Trump's refusal to concede is -- and I am quoting directly here -- "[T]he United States government is perfectly capable of escorting trespassers out of the White House". On the personal side of things, one of my housemates is having (non-virus-related) breathing problems off and on, and at the time of this writing is in the ICU again. We're waiting to be COVID-evicted on the first of January, because none of us can get enough work to pay for anything. I have started feeding the rats entire sandwich cookies for brekfiss, because it makes me feel better. So you will all forgive me for thinking way too hard about Star Trek . I've seen conflicting reports on whether the novelization of The Motion Picture  is canon or not. Roddenberry seems to have thought it was, inasmuch as he wrote it an

  When I was in college, I realized that I hated family dinners and refused to attend any more of them. This left me with a great deal of free time over Thanksgiving weekend, which I used to throw a party. I invited everyone I knew who couldn't, wouldn't, or just desperately did not want to go home.  I called it " Thanksgiving of the Dispossessed ". Given the screaming dumpster fire that is 2020, I thought now would be a good time to revive the tradition. I've been doing it for years, but the suckage is new to a lot of you, so let me make your life easier!  To help you fill that long dark teatime of the soul in which you will NOT be fighting traffic, weather, and the will of one or more over-tired toddlers to get to Grandma's house and back, I will be airing stupid comfort television (and some of my own commentary on it!) from noon to midnight EST (9 am-9 pm Pacific) on Friday of Thanksgiving weekend. Gather ye your leftover turkey, your remaining wine and pum

    https://twoseven.xyz/5tdRM4S62r

  Today is my online Election Day Escapism event. Find out more here! https://www.facebook.com/circe.rowan/posts/1819954198151909

Behold, the Halloween costume. I gave up on finishing the coat on time when the sudden advent of winter (it snowed in Boston, and stuck, on the 30th) made it clear that I wasn't going outside in it this year, but I did complete the dress for some nice photos. There is a pattern for these given in Franz Joseph's technical manual, available here if you want one, but it's more of a base than a usable pattern. For starters, the grid sets out a pattern size 12, which is too small even for me -- too shallow in the bust, and way too narrow in the shoulders -- and the grading instructions ("Ratio unit up or down for larger or smaller sizes") are absolute gibberish, as anyone who produced either clothing or patterns professionally would know. Humans do not expand equally in length or width, or even proportionally in all parts of the body. If you want a real-world example of this, ask a busty lady about shopping for button-down shirts. Settle in for a rant. It's also m

Election Day will be miserable. I have already voted, so I am going to spare my sanity by ignoring anything else that happens until the results are in. Unless there is literal shooting in the street outside my house, I will be online watching things and NOT TALKING ABOUT POLITICS ON PAIN OF BANHAMMER. If you also need to spend a couple of hours in a space where you are NOT TALKING ABOUT POLITICS ON PAIN OF BANHAMMER, you are welcome to join me! I am likely to be drinking. All day. Please invite your friends.  The video playlist will be a carefully-curated selection of things that I can find on YouTube or have lying around on a hard drive somewhere. This may or may not include. Star Trek: TOS, The Man From UNCLE, Blackadder, The Mighty Boosh , various things from Stuart Ashen, Sherlock Holmes from around the world, Beatles movies, Bowie concerts, and anything else people suggest that I can find fast enough to upload to Google Drive.  The screening party will be held via 27 (Two-Seven),

I finished Boston Legal  while home with a migraine last night, so now it's time for me to talk about it at excruciating length. Spoilers, I guess, if you've been meaning to watch that for the past twelve years and somehow still haven't gotten around to it.

I've spiraled down into the part of the Netflix queue where it's all "that one thing someone told me to watch that one time," which I added to the list to make them stop bugging me about it. Why didn't anybody tell me that Boston Legal  was this completely bonkers? It caught my attention because I've been watching through Star Trek  trying to work out how the costumes are put together (with haste and a kind of mad genius, out of the cheapest fabrics available), and I vaguely remembered that Shatner was (is?) still a jobbing actor. I didn't watch it when it was on actual TV; the promos made it look like a straight-up legal drama, and one can only mainline so many Law & Order  clones. This thing is brilliant . It has a reality-defying lunacy one rarely finds outside of manga. It contains the trope-naming character for Bunny Ears Lawyer, in fact, an archetype that I had assumed came from something Japanese, because that's the sort of thing they do. Al

It has come to my attention that I have not owned a Starfleet uniform since I moved to Boston, and that I ought to fix that. I intended to make myself a classic TOS duty uniform ( the infamous mini-dress ), because those are fairly simple and inexpensive. Then I got ideas, and my project ballooned, as most of my craft projects do. Whenever you design a costume, the first thing you need to decide is whether you want it to be recognizable  or accurate . Those are two very  different outfits to make, and the choice generally comes down to work versus money. Almost any costume will involve some fairly generic pieces. The TOS men's duty uniforms, for instance, involve a pair of black highwater bell bottoms. (Yes, they look silly. They are actually patterned after old naval uniforms, so you aren't continually dragging your trouser cuffs across the wet deck.) You can make them if you're determined to be accurate, or you could go to Goodwill and just buy a pair of black pants, and

The history of slashfic as the internet knows it today, is in large part, the history of Star Trek . Queer readings of literature have existed since approximately five minutes after literature did; Frederic Wertham interviewed gay men in the '40s who read Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson as a couple, fans have been speculating about Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson forever, and I'm sure there was a bard somewhere in ancient Sumer who was renowned for their smutty stories about Gilgamesh and Enkidu. But Kirk and Spock were the first couple to go "mainstream", at least on the convention circuit, with stories and essays on the topic published, samizdat -style, in mimeographed fanzines. The term "slash", in fact, comes from the punctuation in "K/S", which is what the stores and 'zines were marked. Star Trek is unusual in that it's a science-fiction property based very much in the ideals of the 1960s that has survived into an era when many of the t

Friends, Romans, shambling undead hordes who hunger for brains -- lend me your ears eyeballs. It is October, the month of our favorite frivolous holiday, Halloween. Trick-or-treating is probably cancelled this year, but that doesn't prevent you from dressing strangely and showing off on webcam, or just lurking in your front window creeping out all the neighbors.  I have been making my own costumes for 15+ years now. Back in the day, I was actually in charge of making outfits for large friend groups -- one memorable year, we needed seven  Hogwarts scarves, and I had to start knitting in July . Although at this point I am pretty good at draping my own garments (even on myself!), I've also got a knack for kit-bashing things together from patterns you can buy from McCall's. I have a running specialty in tailoring and trim work that require hand-stitching, because apparently nobody knows how to do that anymore.  Thus, this month, I answer questions. Submit your costuming quanda

Hello, all! That was a much longer hiatus than I intended. About a week ago, I emerged from my cave to talk to the EMTs for the fourth time in about six weeks, and one of my housemates got to take an unscheduled (non-COVID) trip to the ICU. Everything's turned out fine, but until that got resolved, I was left in the care of the house population of TWENTY rats, twelve of whom were babies, and one of whom needed meds for a good case of pneumonia. They are kindly masters, on the whole, but unbelievably demanding divas when meal time rolls around. The housemate is back (and still breathing), and both baby boys have gone to their fur-ever home, with 7-8 of the remaining ten girl-babies being sent off sometime this week. The boys, in fact, went to a tech at my vet clinic who had met some of my fat lovable rat-lumps, and fell hard for the little guys. I dropped them off at the clinic this past weekend, where apparently they blocked off almost an hour at the end of the day for playing with

Fandom frightens me sometimes. Often, if we're honest. I've been digging around for the Sherlock Holmes project I mentioned before, and one of the things I ran into is The Johnlock Conspiracy . For those who don't know, this was a movement among fans of the BBC's 2010 series Sherlock  who contended that the series was building up to a Big Damn Gay Kiss between the leads at the end, which was theoretically the conclusion of series 4. Lots of people contributed, but this particular lady seems to have been the biggest and most thorough, having contributed a 40-some-odd episode analysis of the show, via YouTube. Shit like this terrifies me. There's nothing wrong with her character analysis. Her take on the significance and motivation behind what the characters say and do on screen is completely valid. I think she's 100% right in some areas, particularly Moriarty. Jim Moriarty's obsession with Sherlock is both disturbingly sexual in tone, and disturbingly indicat