Party time ahead!

[wiseheart]

Well, yes, dear folks, it's this time of the year again. The big, one-week virtual party from today to the 9th of October starts here. Come on in, be welcome, make yourself comfortable, and post a comment. May we have many collapsed threads again!

Last year we had 559 comments on 4 pages, which is an impressive record to break. But I have an excellent apple pie in the oven, and offer a virtual slice to every party guest.

Let's party!

Addition: someone asked for the apple pie recipe. Here it is, behind the cut.


400 gr wheat flour
200 gr butter or margarine
200 gr sugar
1/10 litre sour cream
1 pinch of salt
ground peel of 1/lemon
2 gr baking soda

For the filling:
2 kg apples
sugar,cinnamon, cardamom, vanilla and ground lemon peel as you like

One eggyolk for painting the top.

How to make it?
1) Make a dough from abovementioned ingredients.
2) Cut it in two equal pieces. Roll out one piece, lay it into a baking tin (baking paper under it is helpful).
3) Spread some dried bread crubms all over it.
4) Peel and plane (slice???) the apples, press out the juice with your hands (it shouldn't be too dry, though) and mix them with the spices.
5) Spread the apples over the dough.
6) Roll out the other half of the dough. Cover the apples with it.
7) Paint the top with eggyolk and bake it in a pre-heated oven, on 200°C for twenty minutes.
8) Cut it when it's cooled down.

Sorry, but I had to use the metric system. My brain doesn't work in cups and pounds and that stuff. I hope you can still figure out how much you need from the ingredients.



Addition: I also wish to gift upon my dear party guests a birthday-present, Hobbit-style: Chapter 03 - Puer Natus Est Nobis of my Cadfael fic "Sparrows" has just been posted to hiddenrealms and to FF.Net. Enjoy!

And the end results are: 735 comments on 6 pages! It's more than I could have dreamed of, and I thank you - all of you - who contributed to this record. It will be a hard one to break next year indeed, but I hope you'll be back. :)

Thanks again, I had a fantastic time and met great new people - it was fun!

Comments

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

That sounds like an a bad attitude for him to have. I've not read it in part because I'm not sure that anyone could write in that series well. :(

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

I would love another H2G2 book, but I fear with anybody but Adams writing it I would be disappointed and I think reading an 'OK' book in that series would be worse than not reading any more H2G2 books at all.

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

I understand that attitude, but personally with series if someone new is writing I generally find myself able to think of the new book(s) as fanfic for the series unless I decide I want to count them as a real part of the series.

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

For books I really, really like (and consider good literature) I am very wary of reading fan fiction. Short take-out pieces or stories set in the same universe, I am more inclined to give a chance, but a novel length work with the main characters would have to come very highly recommended for me to even try it. I suppose the fact that I came to fan fiction in the Harry Potter fandom, where there is an awful lot of very juvenile (in the bad sense of the word) works has formed my idea of what the majority of fan fiction is like.

Fanfic

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

A great deal of fanfic, in all fandoms, is unfortunately rubbish. But there are always fantastic gems, and some of them are novel-length, indeed. I for my part prefer very long stories, because it means that I can enjoy them longer. Of course, it often means that I have to abandon the story after a chapter or two (although I'm often too stubborn for my own good), but that's what the Back button is for, right?

Alas, I also tend to *write* ungodly long stories - which may be the reason why so very few brave and desperate people read them. ;)

Re: Fanfic

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

I agree about long stories - it makes me so happy to find a good long story in any of my fandoms, especially if it is complete. There are so many more good short stories, I find. Possibly because it seems that fandom rewards are higher for short stories.

You write very good stories - which I will catch up reading (for the fandoms I know) at some point.

Re: Fanfic

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Thank you. *blushes* I write in so many fandoms that I may reasonably hope you'll find something to your liking.

Re: Fanfic

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

I am an instant gratification junky! I like things short, partly because otherwise I have to stop myself from reading it at all because I am very bad at stopping part-way through. There is also the fact that while I do work at my computer most of the day, I find it hard to read longer texts on the screen. If I am reading research papers for work I will print them out; somehow I don't feel justified to do that with fanfic.

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

I understand that - I first got into fandom in the Lord of the Rings fandom soon after the second film came out - loads of dreck but also some wonderful stories. At the time, I started out on fanfiction.net which at that point didn't really have much in the way of recs, so I learnt to just jump in and try reading and quit if it was a story that I didn't want to read - of course, it helped that it was while I was an undergrad, so I had loads of free time.
I find that Sturgeon's Law (in the general version) applies to fanfiction as much as to any other fiction.

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

Enlighten me: What does Sturgeon's Law state?

and I consider all of the Lord of the Rings films as fanfiction; still after seeing each of them at the cinema for the first time, I had to re-read the book to purge my mind. Not that that was a hardship, of course!

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

Sturgeon's law: 90% of anything is crud. First said about Science Fiction but it really seems to apply to anything in the way of fiction, tv, etc.

Definitely the films fall into a category of fanfiction - I still love the first one, although some of the changes are just annoying and bad, but the later two...

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Amen to that. The most annoying thing is: they got *some* things so right (Hobbiton, for starters), so why couldn't they get the rest of it right, too?

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

Hobbiton is so wonderfully right - so is a lot of the other scenery with a few glaring exceptions. Just a pity that the rest of the films couldn't live up to it. For an adaptation I much prefer the bbc radio version as it sticks much closer to the plot and not having visuals there is so much less for them to get wrong otherwise.

[solanpolarn.livejournal.com]

My sister and I bonded with my aunt over how badly Jackson treated Faramir in the second film. I understand that there is no way you can fit all of the book into three films, even if they are four hours each, so there were always going to need to be changes and cuts. But that and the Ents was changing the meaning and character of people and events and that I still haven't forgiven!

It seems to me Sturgeon might be considered an optimist... I suppose the trick is to find the good, however many percent.

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

Yes. It was the changes that made Faramir so much less noble that annoyed me the most, especially as he is my favourite character. I wouldn't mind so much being left out if there weren't so many silly pointless things added and he had made the battles shorter - I found the battle scene really dragged and seemed to add little to the plot.

Certainly trying to find the good is the way to go. I think no matter the percentage, part of the point is that I feel that fanfic isn't that removed from any other form of fiction in how much is bad - and at least I don't have to pay for it to find out what I like. It is one of the reasons I very rarely go to the cinema - paying that much money to see a film unless I know I am going to like it feels wasteful. :)

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

The same here. I usually wait until it comes on TV, tape it, and then fast-forward the boring or annoying parts.

And I agree with you in the Faramir question. I hated what they made of him, and I hated the actor who played him. And don't even let me start on poor Denethor!

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

I usually watch things while doing other things at the same time - embroidery, computer games, etc. Makes most things more bearable. :)