{look upon my works, ye mighty}

Whatever you're doing right now, stop. Go read Little Brother instead.

Little Brother is the best book I've read all year. This would have more meaning if it wasn't the start of the year, so let me rephrase that. Little Brother might be the most awesome book that I could possibly read this year.

There's an excellent summary of the book here, so I'm not going to hash over the book. Instead, I'm going to give you bullet points as to WHY you should read it.

• The author references our culture. Flashmobs, Linux distros, game systems being cheap but the games expensive, livejournal, Flickr, everything. And he gets it right! You've seen what happened when the media tried talking about Anonymous versus Scientology. This guy actually manages to create a believable 17-year-old narrator.
  
• It's about Homeland Security and what happens when safety trumps freedom. The title's a homage to 'Big Brother' but unlike 1984, this book is set in our times. Modern times. It's much easier to get sucked into this book because the protagonist is our age and deals with our tech, instead of being an adult with a forbidden love affair.
  
• On that note, the book deals with the generation gap and how adults are more likely to buy into the scare tactics of the media. But it doesn't present all adults as rigorously inflexible. There are good guys amongst the grown-ups, and bad guys amongst the kids, and the way that he manages to make moral ambiguity and self-righteousness a major theme of the novel is amazing.
  
• Awesome female chars. There's not just the standard love interest and the best friend chick, but also female chars with authority, female chars who are bad guys, and female chars who rock the geek world. They're depicted as being as much a part of the world as the male protag is, and the author's Net-savvy enough to even have the protag be wary of one girl that IMs him because the protag knows how many guys like pretending to be girls online.
  
• Race issues! It's a bit of a throw away in that it's not a major theme of the book, but that's part of what makes the sudden discussion of them so fantastic to me. There's a quick convo between the protag and a friend of his about how the friend will suffer more if they're caught, and the protag acknowledges that yes, brown people have the scales balanced against them. It's a tiny little thing, not a major part of the book, but oh, how fantastic it is to se it acknowledged as a part of real life instead of glossed over or forgotten about.
  
• Neil Gaiman, Scott Westerfeld, Brian K Vaughn, and I love it. I fully intend on buying copies IRL and making my friends read them. Since most of you are lucky enough to not live near me, I'm instead devoting the entirety of this post to trying to convince you to read it.

You know what else is awesome? The author himself and his thoughts on ebooks and sharing books/music online. His explanation for why he gives his books away for free online is quoted below, because it's just said so well that any attempt on my part to sum it up would pale in comparison to his original words.

I recently saw Neil Gaiman give a talk at which someone asked him how he felt about piracy of his books. He said, "Hands up in the audience if you discovered your favorite writer for free -- because someone loaned you a copy, or because someone gave it to you? Now, hands up if you found your favorite writer by walking into a store and plunking down cash." Overwhelmingly, the audience said that they'd discovered their favorite writers for free, on a loan or as a gift. When it comes to my favorite writers, there's no boundaries: I'll buy every book they publish, just to own it (sometimes I buy two or three, to give away to friends who must read those books). I pay to see them live. I buy t-shirts with their book-covers on them. I'm a customer for life.

( Neil went on to say that... )

Love him, read the book, and spread word of the book around as much as you can. This guy is one of us. He talks about our technology, he writes about our world, and he's good at it. He's a geek to the core, and one who doesn't back down from tackling politics head-on. I'd fangirl about it more, but I'm going to see if he's written anything else.

Year divisions might be arbitrary but whatever, this is a fresh year. So far, I have:

• argued with my parents about whether dragging me to a dharna would be encroaching on my religious freedom. I won and therefore, they went with the maid and I have the house all to myself.
  
• been reminded that I have friends who love me and miss me.
  
• heard that New Zealand has beaches with black sand that I MUST visit
  
• been tempted to join that group of people who write fic for music videos. I kid you not, they're out there and they're prolific.
  
• found out I will need 3,315,000 NP in my bank account to get 1K of NP per day in interest.
  
• read Jason training Damian fic.
  
• listened to a song from Legally Blonde: The Musical on repeat.
  
• reaffirmed my commitment to living.
  
• made a ( New Year's Resoluion. )
  
  
  • found out that ego_chan wrote a third chapter of her Terry/Ryuuji fic, read it and squealed.
    
  • discovered via ceresi that Pretty Woman Bird House EXCEEDED its goal for donations.
    
    This year is off to an awesome start. ♥

ego_chan asked for HP fic recs. I got so carried that I ended up with enough recs to fill a post, so under the cut, there are recs for Lucius/Severus, Draco/Severus, James/Lily, Narcissa/Lucius, Regulus/Remus, Lily/Narcissa, Pansy/Luna, Cho/Hermione, Tonks/Hermione, Bellatrix-gen and Hermione/herself. Some have sex, others don't and all have a little desc saying what its appeal is.

( Recs galore, take whatever you like. )

Meme time!

Leave me a comment asking for a rec, and list all the fandoms you'd want me to find you a rec for. Then repost this in your journal.

Feel free to skip that last step if you're busy or just lazy. ^_~

"I wouldn't play you even to save the world."
"But would you play me to destroy it?"

Attribute the lines to anyone you damn well want. XD

In other news, I've been playing around with only_fiction nearly all day, trying to get tags lined up and indented in the sidebar. I did find something that would work for it, but it required me having a paid account and I am not getting a paid account for my fic journal. Nope, no way. I'll fiddle around with it some more tomorrow.

Plus, I now have an awesome Mac/Vista icon, courtesy of xinda and inspired by Allow which is a slashy Mac/Vista fic based off the this commercial. Yes, she wrote a fic that's over 6K of words based on a thirty-second commercial, and she made it interesting. Warning, fic in question might not be for the faint of heart since it portrays the two networking in great detail, but if you can take explicit slash, go for it.

googlebrat's Cybersex fic is still the best long series of techslash that I've ever read, though. It's what got me squeeing over Alienware, after all! Unlike the above rec, though, this fic is about real PCs and Macs and Linux and so geeky that it made me squee with every little injoke that I actually got.

In semi-geeky talk, I finally watched Spiderman 2 today, squeed a little more over Kyle Rayner (I will soon make a post saying why even non-comics people need to love him), and preened about the fact that xinda is very likely to visit me for AnimeBoston since my parents said that I can send her a hundred dollars to help with travel costs and a roundtrip plane ticket isn't much more than that. XDDD It'll be so awesome if she and Muse-y can make it.

I also stumbled across a fic that's Seto(YGO)/Lex(Smallville). This mostly amused me because not only do I like Smallville and have YGO as one of my main fandoms (despite katarik tempting me to the DC side, evil thing ^_~), but I've been RPing Ryuuji/Lex and Seto/Ryuuji lately. Though I really do think that Seto and Lex are alike and that the fic works well for what they were like when they were young. The author clearly has a good grasp on Seto and the driving forces behind him, and her Lex is precisely as w00bie-like as he is in the show.

Also, on a slash level, the Green Goblin in the first Spiderman movie is so, so gay. He's so gay, it even affects Norman and makes him slink on all fours, crawling over his own rug. I mean, if the mirror scene isn't slashy, I don't know what is. Speaking of which, I absolutely loved the actor there -- he did a fantastic job of changing his facial expressions to make the person in the mirror look completely different from himself. Green Goblin, sans costume, is disturbingly sexy. Why are the psychos always the cute ones?

I'm usually hard to please with movie-adaptions of source material that I love (one example being LotR, another being Catwoman), but the first Spiderman movie was pretty good. XD The second failed to reel me in as tightly, and I thought that Peter walking away from a guy he could see being beaten in front of him was kinda off-base, but the first was definitely good. Worth watching in my opinion, anyway.

It's the middle of finals. One week from now, I will be gone from the Net and in Austria.

And yet, I took a walk out to the library today, paid a fine for burning a book (by ACCIDENT, I leant it against the cooker while, well, cooking and failed to notice it was catching on fire until the scorching scent grew overwhelming by which point the cover's corners and the edges of the inner pages was burnt black), and borrowed some books. Including the first series of a volume called Absolute Boyfriend which I now want the rest of, for reasons which range from pretty boys (shallllllow) to the fact that it sounds like Peach Girl with a sci-fi angle. Peach Girl being a really girly shoujo manga I borrowed from the Somerville library, and have memories of being fascinated by how incredibly bad it was.

Absolute Boyfriend doesn't even have good reviews!

On a more amusing note, one of the books I borrowed was Son of Rock by Gordon Korman, and it had the following quotation:

The musicians of the Concussed festival were a motley lot who belonged on Yu-Gi-Oh cards more than any concert stage.

Dude, if I saw a band that dressed like any of my favorite monsters (including Harpie's Brother and Fire Sorceress), I'd so buy their music just for the hell value of it.

P.S. Savior, MSN is being a bitch to me for a change and not letting me see your messages or even reply, even though I signed in and out to try to fix it. I'm going to turn off my comp, restart and see if that fixes it.

Fixed. Also, since if I'm writing really fluffy het fic because of a request, O ri Chori from Lagaan is probably not the best thing to have playing in the background.

Disposable Teens.

Go read it. Batman fic. Gen. Revolves mostly around Bruce, Jason, Dick and Tim. It's actually a series and it is so fucking good that I was actually whimpering when I reached the last (it's a WIP, alas) chapter. Long chapters, packed with action and plot progression but really easy to keep track of.

It's got some original villains in there as well including an assassin -- which made me squee because yay, assassins! -- and a crime ring in Russia. Why am I using this one entry to rec it?

It has snarky!Jason. It has snarky Jason and conflicted Bruce and angry Tim and slightly not-sure-what's-happening Dick. It has Bart and Kon being good friends and Cass being useful. It has Jason being a cheerful sociopath but unable to stomach watching a woman being tortured. It has the Joker being obsessive.

Setting-wise, it's got Jason as Red Hood but none of the Nightwing junk (I hope like crazy the Wiki page on Jason is inaccurate about what's happening to him), so basically, think about the fight with Tim. It starts from that fight but takes it differently so that it didn't end the same. It also makes what happened to Jason in Ethopia a little darker.

Originally, I was pretty worried about the original male villain guy that's the assassin mostly in case he turned out to be a gay Marty Sue but nope. He's cool. Cold, snarky, ruthless but not inhuman. He's got his weaknesses, he's got his fears and he and Jason interact perfectly to create the kind of dialogue that has me quietly snickering.

Read it. Go. I command you to. *happy little fangirl*