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]

As the internet and computer both seem to be misbehaving today, I'm going to do this a fandom at a time - plus that gives me longer to decide which fandoms to talk about (as I have far more than 3). :)

1. Name 3 of your most favourite fandoms.
Crusade
2. Name one character of each fandom you particularly like. Tell us why.
Lt John Matherson - I think he is a very interesting character, and very underused in the show. He is clearly good at what he does, given events in the show and background (eg he seems to have been promoted quickly, especially given the fact that there wasn't a war going on, despite being a telepath), and there are so many hints at his background but not much stated outright - it is interesting that he seems to have come out of Psi Corps relatively sane.
3. Name one character of each that you don't like. Tell us why.
As a person: Max Eilerson - his lack of morality, the way that he condescends to everyone and the fact that he thinks he is better than everyone else. Although he does get a bit better over the course of the series (at least in my version of the episode order - which doesn't agree with either the dvds or the official order, both of which have serious problems to me). However, these things make him fun as a character.
As a character: Sarah Chambers - because she is so under developed. I feel like she has hardly anything to do and most of it could have been done by any doctor. It really feels like she has less depth than any of the other main cast. However, if I end up writing more in the fandom, at least it is possible to fix this.

4. If you can, recommend a piece of fanfic to each of those fandoms.
I think I have read some good fic in this fandom, but I don't seem to have any bookmarked.

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Actually, I find myself in complete ageement with what you wrote about Crusade. Sarah Chambers was criminally underused. So, please, write fic about her and make her a person instead of a cardboard cut-out.

I so love John Matheson... although I do wish JMS didn't have the unfortunate tendency to give so many characters names ending with -son or -sen, especially black and Asian ones. In B5, too, are bunches of minor characters who pop up for an episode or two and have names like that.

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

Sarah Chambers was criminally underused. So, please, write fic about her and make her a person instead of a cardboard cut-out.
I have a half written piece from her point of view - trying to get into her head - but I need to re-watch, because it felt off characterisation wise. I started it because in thinking about what I might write in that fandom I realised how little idea of her as a character I had and thought that trying to write a vignette from her point of view was the way to fix that...

I so love John Matheson... although I do wish JMS didn't have the unfortunate tendency to give so many characters names ending with -son or -sen, especially black and Asian ones. In B5, too, are bunches of minor characters who pop up for an episode or two and have names like that.
I hadn't noticed that (linguistics isn't an area that I pick up on things in very much (except for noticing uses and misuses of Latin)). I wonder if it is supposed to suggest something about the backgrounds of the characters.

B5 characters

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

I think it just suggests something about JMS' total lack of imagination when it comes to names, since characters with vastly different background have these Scandinavian-sounding names. Or he wishes he had one himself. Straczynski isn't a name that would be easily pronunced, even for someone who's a bit more familiar with Slawic languages, like me, due to having had to learn Russian.

Sarah Chambers definitely isn't an easy character to write. Someone with so little personal information and basically none background at all (save from having a sister) is very hard to keep IC.

Re: B5 characters

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

That makes sense - people usually seem to like names different from the ones they have - if they have normal names, they like interesting names, otherwise they prefer normal ones. Certainly most of the time tv characters have names that it reasonable easy to pronounce for native English speakers - I suppose it is a part with most of the characters being American...

Re: Character names

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Which is another thing I'll never forgive Ron Moore about his "reimagined" BSG - that he turned a complete cast that came from a different galaxy or galactic sector and had at least twelve different tribes/nationalities/whatever into people who all of a sudden had regular American names.

Adama, the Patriarch isn't quite the same as his bespectacled starship commander. And Lee Adama isn't quite Apollo! The gender-bent Starbuck and Boomer, of whom the latter even became an evil Cylon monster, I won't begin to speak.

Re: Character names

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a silly decision and a bad way to not use easy ways to showing origins etc. I don't think I've seen any of either version of the show, so don't know about the rest.

Re: Original BSG

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Classic!BSG was my very first sci-fi show, and I loved it to peices. Sure, it had its problems, but which show does not? And for the 1970s, it was pretty advanced - John Dykstra made the visuals, who was, after all, responsible for Star Wars as well.

It had such actors in the main cast as Lorne Greene (from Bonanza), Dirk Benedict (of The A-Team), Richard Hatch (from The Streets of San Francisco), George Murdock, John Colicos, and so on. The female regulars weren't all that great, but they had guest stars like Jane Seymour in it!

The writing was extemely uneven, but it had a unique charm, especially since it was completely independent from any Earth-related politics. People were devoted to it after 20 years still, without any sequels and movies, and very few series could say that.

Then came Ronald D. Moore and pulled it through the sh*t, raping beloved characters into something they were never supposed to be and turning the whole thing one depressing soft-pr0n dreck.

Sorry for the rant, but I feel really strongly about this.

Re: Original BSG

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

No need to apologise. Sadly it seems that most remakes, like most adaptations, are done by people how have a degree of disregard for the original. Whether they turn out well or not, therefore is a matter of opinion, it seems to me, depending on whether the bits that are changed are the bits that you consider good or bad, and whether the good of the new is worth the changes.
I could make a list of films etc that are appalling from books I like, but I can also list some that are enjoyable despite the changes (and some that are actually good). :)

Re: Original BSG

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

You know, I'd have accepted many of the changes if Ron Moore would have made a BSG - The Next Generation, á la Star Trek. He could have given a plause explanation even for the names - around the end of the original series, when the writing began to deteriorate in earnest, they ran into humans who had English- or even German-sounding names. He could have explained that after, say, a hundred years of hopeless odyssey through unknown space, things might have taken a dramatic change.

I could have accepted all that. After all, ST: TNG was quite different from the original Trek, and DS9 even more so. But the raping and gender-bending of beloved characters is something I can't forgive. Because it was a slap into the face of devoted fans who kept the fandom alive for 20 years for him to rape it, and because it wasn't necessary. He could have had his cake and eaten it, without dragging the original characters through felgercarb.

Re: Original BSG

[jenn-calaelen.livejournal.com]

That does sound like a very bad remake! It doesn't really seem to make much sense to do that.
There are usually things that could be done to make it better and it often seems that these decisions make very little sense, and then they are surprised when people object.