eruthros

1. You guys, icepixie wrote The Heart's Compass, the Babylon 5 Delenn/Ivanova AU of my dreams, seriously, could I have had this show instead? It's a little awkward in places but, I mean, so was the show. And listen, it is a story where Delenn falls for Ivanova instead of Sheridan, early in the series, and it makes my heart happy.

icepixie also wrote a a post-Sleeping in Light Ivanova/Delenn story that I haven't read yet (Later Stars of Dawn), which added to the Ivanova/Delenn story that thingswithwings wrote for my birthday one year (Concerto for Violin, Cello, and Piano in C Major, Garibaldi/Franklin, Lennier/Vir, Ivanova/Delenn, postseries) makes three Ivanova/Delenn stories in the last few years. It is a small-fandom rare-pairing embarrassment of riches!

(Especially since there are also a few drabbles and short vignettes over at the AO3, though most of them are about unrequited love.)

2. Don't know what to be this Halloween? Check out wtf should I be for Halloween, which contains as many costume ideas as there are articles on wikipedia. And puts "sexy" in front of all of them.

Since it's completely randomized, there are some really great options. This year I plan on going as a Sexy Fort Reliance Water Aerodrome, for example. (There's also the potential for fail, because of course there are many pages on wikipedia that really shouldn't be indexed with "sexy" in front of them; I didn't encounter anything faily when I clicked through, but that doesn't mean it can't happen.)

3. I frequently encounter images on tumblr that are unattributed or dewatermarked, and sometimes that makes me really sad -- I don't know if that photographer has a ton more pretty image, or what the original context was, or anything. But if I see something really great and I really really want to know if there's more by the same photographer, I look for the picture over at TinEye, a reverse image search engine. Sometimes it even works! Anyway this is a link to TinEye, which I think I was first linked to three years ago when their image index was even smaller; now I do sometimes have some success with them.

4. The US Department of Justice recently filed a brief that said that genes shouldn't be patentable, which is ... kind of amazing.

5. Apparently TVTropes is going to have to take down, move, rename, or mark as NSFW a lot of their sex and sexuality-related content because google ads noticed that ads are running on pages with mature content. And they might have to make registration mandatory to view sex/kink/fetish tropes, and they are planning to make registration mandatory for editing pages. I don't hang out there or anything, but it still makes me sad -- many of those pages are very useful for vidding/iconing/etc. Or for kink_bingo, where I have often used the TV Tropes pages for tentacles to find pictures or examples or video of canonical tentacles.

... by the way, guys, this is why I'm interested in the use of Neandertals in prehistoric fiction. Ready? Here goes some Clan of the Cave Bear Jean Auel on the subject of Neandertals...

The women relied on their men to lead, to assume responsibility, to make important decisions. The Clan had changed so little in nearly a hundred thousand years that they were now incapable of change, and ways that had once been adaptations for convenience had become genetically set. Both men and women accepted their roles without struggle; they were inflexibly unable to assume any other. They would no more try to change their relationship than they would try to grow an extra arm or change the shape of their brain. ... Memories in Clan people were sex differentiated. Women had no more need of hunting lore than men had of more than rudimentary knowledge of plants. The difference in the brains of men and women was imposed by nature, and only cemented by culture...

Combine that with articles like this one in the Boston Globe, explaining that Neandertals died out because they "let" their women work? Man.

There are, of course, some awesome fictional Neandertals, and there are books that involve Neandertals in alternate universes going through the industrial revolution without ever doing the "Neolithic" (farming) revolution, and we can talk about, you know, production, and definitions of humanity, and all that. But really, you know that for me it's all about that quote up there, and that news article, and the way Neandertals are leveraged.