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

3 favorite fandoms meme

[lhun-dweller.livejournal.com]

1. Name 3 of your most favourite fandoms.
This is hard. I rarely go to movies. My reading nowadays is mostly professional, rarely fic. Can't watch broadcast TV: digital converter box died. No cable. Online, I've been watching "Flashpoint," a cop show set in Canada, so they mostly solve things without shooting. Refreshing! But I have no desire to read its fanfic.

Lord of the Rings is my "serious" fandom. It's the one through which I discovered fanfic. And it introduced me to some wonderful people, including The Birthday Girl and many other lovely folks attending this party.

I've been reading a bit of fanfic for the 1988 remake of the American TV show Mission: Impossible. (NOT the movies. Tom Cruise = big turnoff!) It's my fluff fandom. I came across some episodes on YouTube and found a small fanfic group at Yahoo. I've promised to weave The Team into my Tolkfic spoof. (I've had TV "Miami Vice," so why not?) The challenge: Nicholas has to use a boomerang -- I promised the listmod.

I'm not following anything else right now and, lacking cable, haven't seen the sci-fi shows others like. I wasn't a big fan of Doctor Who back in the days of Jon Pertwee. I liked the first season of "Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda," but then the show became "The Kevin Sorbo Hero Hour." Yawn.

2. Name one character of each fandom you particularly like. Tell us why.
LOTR: no one really jumps out -- it's such an ensemble piece. In the movies, I liked Sean Bean's Boromir: so concerned with honor and duty, so conflicted within that he could be seduced by The Ring, and yet able to realize the horror of what he'd done, sacrifice himself for the greater good and thus redeem his honor in death. Eomer is also intriguing: not one of The Nine, not immortal -- just a guy trying to deal with the crap Life has been dumping on his family and homeland. A leader himself, he's able to recognize the greater leader in Argorn and do what needs to be done for the good of M-E.

MI:1988: No deep characters here, but I like Nicholas best. He seems the most mature of the new team. He has a poise that the two younger men lack, but more vigor than Jim. Casey gets points as a competent woman, but I'd much rather spend an evening chatting with someone who teaches than with a fashion designer, and at the end of the evening, I want to go home with a guy...

Andromeda: This one's easy: Tyr Anasazi kept me watching long after all the other characters lost their depth (except Dylan who had no depth to lose). In the final season, Telemachus Rhade had promise, but needed better scriptwriters and quite likely, a better actor.

3. Name one character of each that you don't like. Tell us why.
LOTR: Merry and Pippin mostly me. I understand (I think) their significance as foils to emergent heroes Frodo and Sam. Still, seven Walkers would have been OK by me. But I haven't read the books in a couple decades, and I know PJ took some liberties (as one must always in making books into movies), so maybe I'm just ignorant.

MI:1988 - The team members aren't deep enough to be unlikable. Everyone has a sense of humor, and they all look out for each other.

Andromeda: Dylan Hunt was a real disappointment. He could have been a fascinating character in the hands of a good actor, at least in the first season or two, but -- maybe this a Rodenberry thing -- while he had a few flaws, he was always The Hero Doing Right in the end. Creators should not become too enamoured of the heroes they create.

4. If you can, recommend a piece of fanfic to each of those fandoms.
LOTR: anything by birthday girl Wiseheart!!! Also look for JastaElf, The Wild Iris, Cirdan Havens, Dís Thráinsdotter, Nerwen Calaelen, Jilba, Mirasaui, Altariel, Isabeau and... Oh, just go look at Gildor's Library (gildors_library at yahoo dot com), find folks whose work you like and then hunt up more of their stuff on FanFiction.net or use a search engine to find their websites.

MI:1988: Take a look at Aja Aron's stuff on FFN. There's a Yahoo group (mission_impossible_1988) -- just ask to join.

Andromeda: Probably some good stuff out there. I haven't really looked.

And now it's time for me to retire. Must be rested for the Grand Finale later today... whatver it may be!

Re: 3 favorite fandoms meme

[wiseheart.livejournal.com]

Boromir rocks. And so does Tyr Anasazi. Totally agree with you on the Dylan Hunt hate.

Merry and Pippin are actually responsible adults in The Books. At least Merry is, as Pippin isn't of age yet. But not even he is such an idiot comic relief as in the movies.

Re: Andromeda fanfic
Well, aside from the obvious (tries to look modest and fails miserably), I would recommend you The Recreation of the Warrior (http://www.anzwers.org/free/andromeda/fanfic/Mandyfic/warrior1.html) by Kit Mason. It's a great fic, with lots of Nietzschean cultural background, I think you'll like it.

The gratutious het scenes get a little boring sometimes, but you can always skip them. I also recommend browsing the website it's posted to, "Andromeda Uncovered". There are some interesting stories there, although no other that would be half this good,IMO.

Forget to add: Where men named Rhade are concerned, I vastly prever the original, Gaheris. Steve Bacic is a decent enough actor, I've seen it in many different roles - not an overwhelmingly genial one, but good, solid average. Rhade as a character would have needed a concept to begin with - I don't think the writers really knew what they wanted to do with him.