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Current projects:
Marvoloverse: An ongoing Harry Potter fandom project to describe Hogwarts and the associated Wizarding society circa 1855. It focuses on the fic Two Worlds and In-Between and I highly recommend this fic and its universe to all HP fans.
Subscribe to Marvoloverse

Imperium: Alternate history novel of WWII. By July 1942 General Sir Claude Auchinleck had reinforced the last stronghold before Alexandria with most of the British Eighth Army. On 2 July the Deutsches Afrikakorps arrived at El Alamein with only fifty functioning tanks, but they also arrived with their newly-promoted Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel. Will Rommel achieve the first victory of Plan Orient, the strategic vision to turn Barbarossa from a single front to a pincer attack? Will he be swiftly defeated by Auchinleck, removing Montgomery's name from the history books? Or will the political machinations both in London and Germany produce an entirely different outcome? You'll just have to find out...

Fandoms are listed in alphabetical order, listed by genfic then pairing by full name in alphabetical order (fics with multiple pairings are listed under both). Original writing is by setting.
Fanfiction
( Harry Potter ) ( Thursday Next ) ( Underworld )
Original Work
( Late Roman Republic (circa 50BC) )
( World War II (1942-44) ) Updates, excerpts and chapters for beta-reading of Imperium are all in the WWII section. So far there is the prologue (July 1944) and a small section of Chapter III (July 1942).

oh buggery I confused Heydrich with Rommel

SERIOUSLY, WTF?

Blah blah blah strategy goes here...

( Afterwards, Rommel and Bayerlin leave together. Not for THAT, you perverts! )

Here is the tiny part of chapter 2. I know I haven't finished Chapter 1 yet (the blasted House of Commons debate) but I would like some feedback on the parts I found easy to write before I move on to the difficult bit. After this section comes the tactical dispositions exposition, which is going to be hard to write and keep interesting and intelligible. After that some Rommelian character development finishes the chapter. (What? the Germans made "to Rommel" a verb, can't I invent an adjective?)

( Enter Erwin Rommel, stage left. )

The subject line tells you exactly the impression this film makes. Indeed, the German title avoids Manfred, Freiherr von Richthofen's "nickname" - perhaps they were all a little ashamed of themselves. This is the Britannic of WWI films and brings to mind more of a 2008 version of "The Desert Fox" than anything to do with the real Manfred.

I am torn. I am so torn about this film. It's the same quandry that I encounter every time Hollywood ruins a subject close to my heart: Is it alright to make a film which is an Americanized, saccharine, historically inaccurate Aryan-fest more concerned with strong-arming a love story into the plot to gets bums on seats than applying any research about the topic, if the film eventually leads the viewers to the real, historically accurate version?

But why should I - someone with minimal knowledge of Manfed, Freiherr von Richthofen - rant about this film when there is an entire community who can make far more valid points? Read this review - it is so neatly aligned with my own feelings that it makes further typing redundant.

As I type, I'm burning the film to my hard drive, not because I thought it was brilliant, but because it's a small step in the right direction (and perhaps the more I watch it, the less I will want to request fic featuring Manfred and Voss shagging like rabbits - I despise "real person fic" but that would still appeal more than the stodgy love story!). Between Der Rote Baron and Der Untergang, perhaps German cinema will reach a comfortable middle ground, where they are not afraid to make films about their war heroes which actually show the qualities that made them what they are, not just the caricatures they think will make money.

Yay, my letter was corrected! My German is not as retarded as I thought. I suppose I should make an effort to re-memorise all of the different rules for declining adjectives, also revising all the prepositions they attempted to teach us in class through set phrases, which is all very well as long as you don't have to write something which is not a pre-memorised phrase. My excuse for not writing IB fic: there is only so much winter-time, object-insertion porn one can write using the sentence "My essay on global warming is on the shelf, near my bed, perpendicular to my desk, next to the cactus my grandmother sent for Christmas." (Stiglitz/cactus anyone? It could go in the Landa/giant squid fic on the kink meme.)

Warum habe ich so viele Angst vor einer fremden Sprache? Wenn ich in der Schule war, schrieb ich so viele Briefe, Artikeln, Hausaufgaben, aber jetzt haben meine Kenntnisse weggeflogen! Jetzt finde ich lesen viel einfacher als schrieben - das Gegenteil meiner Schuljahre!

In den letzten Wochen sehe ich viele Fotos von hübsche Männer (Was sonst kann ich machen, wenn ich Astrophysik-Projekte finden sollen?) und natürlich beklage mich über Sydney, weil mein Wohnort an Arische schöne Männer fehlt. Eines Tages hat meine Mutter die Nase voll davon und hat mich gefragt, warum ich nie etwas zu diesen Männer schreibe. (Habe ich Recht? Ich vergesse Konjunktiv, indirekte Rede usw..) Deshalb habe ich ein kurzes Brief nach Rainer Schüttler geschrieben und natürlich möchte ich wissen, ob ich ein Paar Fehle gemacht habe. (Warum Rainer anstatt Thomas Kretschmann oder August Diehl? Ich werde in Verbindung lieber als Fan als Verruchte-Fräulein stehen. (0.0 Ich weiß, dass ich auf Englisch schrieben soll, wenn ich Sinn machen will, aber ich möchte meine fremde Sprache üben.)

Also, liebe Freunde, könnt ihr mein Brief (und was ich hier geschrieben habe) überprüfen bitte? (Darf ich diesen fremden Mann "Rainer" heißen, oder "Herr Schüttler"? Ich weiß nie, wie ich andere Leute reden soll.)

( Das Brief )

A comment I made on </a>cat_irix's journal, that I thought I should air a little more.

No, no, no! You don't want to read The Man with the Iron Heart, especially after reading the Toccata section of Les Bienventailles. (I wish I had a photo of Heydrich wagging his finger at someone to put here, that would be awesome).

The characters are all either boring, annoying, Jewish, historically inaccurate in ways you wouldn't believe and frequently they have all of these qualities at once. Honestly, I have nothing against Jews in general, but no book I've read (including Gormenghast) caused me more anti-Semetic tendencies and auto-cannibalistic frustration than this book, in which Turtledove would have us believe that the entire US and Red Armies were exclusively staffed by pretentious, arrogant, occasionally omniscient Jews who spend most of their time being legendarily thick, armed with peas and armoured with papier mache. Don't even get me started on the former concentration camp inmate, or how Heydrich's characterisation is dissected and randomly reassigned quicker than parts of Eastern Europe during WWII.

This book is only good for two things:
1. If you are a Nazi sympathiser and are trying to work up the requisite anti-Semitism to join the local branch of the NS_AP (fill country initial in blank).
2. If you're looking for the literary equivalent of The Conduit (but swapping Washington for Berlin and the aliens with just about everyone).

The more hugging and petting Heydrich received from women (Schellenberg included?), the happier he was, so that isn't necessarily wrong. It's just wrong if you set a story in a room with a piano and don't have him molest it with those lovely fingers. (Yes, yes he played the violin. But that's what artistic licence is for, right?)

aEdit: Questions are now in the text, not the LJ-cuts. Wie dumm von mir!

This is how it's supposed to work:

- Leave me a comment saying "Resistance is Futile." (No sparkly Vogons please.)
- I'll respond by asking you five questions so I can satisfy my curiosity.
- Update your journal with the answers to the questions.
- Include this explanation in the post and offer to ask other people questions.

linndechir asked me the following questions:

( 1) You get unlimited time, money for research etc. to focus on writing a novel. What are you going to write about? )
( 2) If you could meet three historical figures (artists, philosophers, politicians, whatever), who would you choose? )( 3) Do you listen to music when you're writing? If yes, what kind of music? )
( 4) If you could go back in time as a neutral observer, without any danger to yourself, when and where would you want to be? )
( 5) Since I don't really know much about you ... what do you do in your free time when you're not writing historical fiction? ;) )

For the first time in - wow - nearly five years, I did some piano practice today. It wasn't so much practice as just digging around the music box seeing what I could find. (Lil, I found some simplified Rach (2nd piano concerto) if you want me to lend it to you. It may very well be too simple.) I bypassed the Greig monstrosity (Piano Concerto in A min.) which I haven't done in ages - usually I end up starting from page 1 and repeating all my previous mistakes. I eventually settled on some Beethoven (due to linndechir's lovely fic involving a Bösendorfer??) and started on the Mondschein.

It was amazing. I used to hate piano, because I learned via my school who would only offer lessons to students if they did the AMEB exams. So of course all we got was the prescribed pieces: boring shit like "Three Blind Mice" or whatever, so I never practised anything but scales. I eventually was allowed to play a Chopin nocturne, which was quite pretty (and I suppose quite hard for Grade III piano), but I just gave up. One day I just brought the aforementioned Greig in and said "I want to play this. How do I start?" and the teacher looked at me like I was crazy. Now that I'm free to play what I like, pieces with which I had difficulty seem to flow more easily. Perhaps it's because there isn't the constant pressure to return to the teacher every week with something. (My teacher was actually a saint considering she had to put up with Mad Short-Sighted Student: she's now teaching at Covent Garden, something to do with the Opera.)

The one problem was that I have a lovely recoding of Rudolf Serkin playing it on the piano, which was very distracting when I was playing and listening at the same time. it showed how out of tune my piano is. (It's a Mignon, but perhaps it should be called an "En Panne.)

By the end of the holidays, perhaps I'll have the Mondschein done. Never mind that I totally FAIL at the third movement. :) I'll get there...

This is what I had for breakfast this morning. I'm starting to feel like I'm on holidays. Student-unfriendly means that this dish has ingredients that can't be replaced with cheaper alternatives and needs your attention for a long period. It may not necessarily be expensive. In advance means that part of the dish can be made several hours or a day beforehand.

If preparing in advance make the crepes first. Otherwise, set the peaches to cook while you are making the crepes. If you can flambé, this makes a stunningly entertaining dessert.

( Indulgent summer food. Also works as a dessert. )

I was on cooking duty last night, so I did the usual trick of making things up as I go along. Student-friendly means that it's cheap, not fiddly and reheats surprisingly well, on the rare occasions that there is any left.
( Cold weather food this way. )

OMG NOT COHERENT. NOT CAPABLE OF REASON OR ANY HEAVY MENTAL ACTIVITY. MAY BE DROOLING, LOOKING FOR UNIFORMS TO PHOTOSHOP OR EXERCISING CROQUEMBOUCHE KINK.

Aesthetically pleasing gentleman this way.

Oh how I love all of these. His hair is all messy, or he's WET, or he has NAKED WOMEN sticking to him like leeches and is all "What do you mean, this isn't normal, or if there isn't any of those there's the COME HITHER STARE. Unfunfunfunfunf...

I should not be drooling over someone who is 47. He's old enough to be my father. There should be a law against it and people should be spanked. Did I mention his arms or his eyes or my unholy urge to chew on his ears?

I've been assembling the surprise present, when I remembered that there was some facial feature that the recipient hated. I checked the photos, and surprise surprise quite a few of them have chin clefts. if you don't know what I mean, look at Set 3.
Should I...
A. Photoshop the existing images, which is the fastest solution but feels like cheating. Also, what if she looks up the people and finds out that I've done the lazy equivalent of airbrushing?
B. Look for photos of the existing people that obscure the problem feature. I may end up with the problem of scenario A.
C. Look for new people. This seems like the best thing to do in terms of the gift, but will be time-consuming, even though the Bundesachiv.
D. What? You have a stash of attractive, cleft-less Reichswehr men that you'd like to share? COMMENT!
E. Something else. I will comment to clarify.

The current photos are:
Set 1: LJ | DW
Set 2: LJ | DW
Set 3: LJ | DW
If you get an HTML 404 Not Found error add ".jpg" to the end of the URL. I don't know why my image hosting keeps stripping the file extension.

FFFFFF.... Differential geometry was NOT GOOD.
I forgot the definition of a covarient derivative on an n-dimensional manifold, so I made it up as I went along, then looked at my notes afterwards...
...it was THE NEXT LINE after the one where I had been forced to stop reading to go into the exam room. *facepalm*
THEN I had no idea how to prove that the tangent bundle to a non-orientable n-d manifold was orientable. THE MANIFOLD WAS NON-ORIENTABLE! HOW CAN THE TANGENT BUNDLE BE ORIENTABLE??!
And that question was worth 15 of 100 marks!

Tomorrow is High Energy Physics, Astrophysics and Condensed Matter Physics. A 4-hour exam starting at 8:45am! That's just cruel. Somewhat bizarrely, the exams for HEP and Astro seem to be shamelessly copy-pasted from previous years, so I'll just study those questions.

On Friday it's only quantum theory, with another unholy 8:45am start, then I will be free!

My sincerest apologies to anyone reading my fic. Since semester started I have ad literally no time to relax, running from coursework to research project and back again. If I don;t get over 75, I graduate this year without honours, so I've been working flat out to minimise the scaling damage. More for my reference than anything else, projects I should be writing are:

1. Tom/Minerva rarepair shorts
Aaaagh! I thought I would manage one a month, but the backstory I've invented (invented, no my characterisation of Tom Riddle forced the whole thing on me) is so convoluted that I need to finish the whole lot before posting. Bear with me! I want to ensure that I don't contradict myself, especially as the timing of the various events has to be carried out with precision: for example William (McG, Minvera's father) has to have enough influence to put TMR into the Auror program i.e. after TMR graduates, but be discredited/retired before Grindlewald dies. Also, Tom has to set fire to the Moral Event Horizon at roughly the same rate he starts setting fire to Minerva's hormones.

2. Present for Lil's birthday. Eeek, it has to be written, printed on nice paper and bound before December 5. Yikes.

3. Imperium
Right now the research I need to do to work out Churchill, how he should be written, how he interacts with others etc. is holding the story up. Actually, most of the British stuff is making less headway than a drunken ant on a Mobius strip, because most of the MPs are boring and I need to stop making Monty into the character everyone loves to hate. That's Bodwin Keitel!

On "the other side of the hill" as Desmond Young puts it, writing has also stalled. It's just too much like work translating all the German stuff, even if I am (mostly) writing about an intelligent yet naive man tortured by his conscience which torments him for swearing allegiance to a delusional idiot and nags him about how long he can keep refusing lascivious offers from hordes of adoring ladies, at the same time running around the desert performing acts of gallantry in the face of defeat while the heat causes his sweat-drenched but aesthetically pleasing uniform to cling to his body and perspiration runs in copious rivulets down his perfectly muscled thighs...

...I'm sorry, I rather lost my train of thought there. I must stop deluding myself that someone will swoop on the idea and make it a film starring Thomas Kretschmann, with August Diehl as Manfred (Erwin's son), Til Schweiger as Bayerlin or Aldinger and Jabba the Hutt as Churchill. (Gosh, I have been ripping off Churchill a lot lately, haven't I?)

4. Insane Ingloious Basterds fic with Landa/Hellstrom/Stiglitz, inter-departmental Gestapo/SD rivalry, appearance of historical figures including Schellenberg, Himmler and Heydrich, mind games, triple agents, bondage games etc.

( If you're not interested in my house-hunting, skip to the punchline. )
After trawling through a few dozen internet pages, I found the most awesome house photo I had yet seen. I gleefully clicked on the link, only to find...
...that it was the Haus am Grossen Wannsee.

The first thought that popped into my head was "Oh bugger, it's a museum." The second thought was that scene in Conspiracy when Heydrich is twirling around in the entrance hall and suddenly exclaims, "I like this house! When the war has finished, I think I shall live here!" with that amused insistence that only Kenneth Brannagh can manage.

So I want to live in the house in which the Endlösung acquired its first bureaucratic machinery. I'm not quite sure what to make of that...

Til Schweiger, Thomas Kretschmann and Matthias Schweighöfer all in the same film? It may be a bonus that Zewiohrküken will probably never show its selfish, perfect-Aryan-hogging face in Australian cinemas, because I will probably faint from all the attractiveness. If it turns out to be two hours of the three of them watching paint dry, or getting their hair cut, or picking their noses, I would pay money to see it anyway. Yes, I would pay to see Thomas Kretschmann's nostrils. Shut up.

Here's the only bit of information I can scrape up about the loveliness:
Zweiohrküken (from Dailymotion - June 29, 2009)
Duration: 160
Schauspieler : Thomas Kretschmann, Til Schweiger, Ken Duken, Matthias Schweighöfer, Nora Tschirner Produktion : barefoot films Direktor : Til Schweiger
Kurzinhalt : Ludo und Anna zwei Jahre später .... der Alltag ist eingekehrt. Als Ludo eine alte Flamme wiedertrifft, wird Anna eifersüchtig ... mit Recht! Die Gute ist offensichtlich noch ziemlich interessiert. Ludo wehrt sich, auch mit Recht, gegen Annas Kontrollversuche und fordert Freiraum ein. Dummerweise taucht just zu diesem Zeitpunkt Annas Ex-Freund Ralf auf und plötzlich gefällt Ludo der neue Freiraum gar nicht mehr so gut...


While we're at it, here's an interview on The Pianist with Thomas and Adrien Body, which is interesting in its own right, not just because there is a very distracting picture of TK in uniform that makes me want to give him a hug. It's so clear that although he's playing a Wehrmacht officer rather than a Nazi, he's still slightly uncomfortable in the uniform with all its connotations. (It fits the character perfectly, since Hauptmann Hosenfeld is supposed to be considering the moral position he's in, I'm just extrapolating here.)

Just to cheer myself up after that, ( precisely why I would pay to look at Thomas Ketschmann's nostrils ).

I renewed correspondence with my old English tutor the other day and his reply amused me. Why isn't there a web comic featuring game NPCs duelling each other with the quality of their elegaic couplets rather than shruiken-expelling, eau-de-cologne-jet blasting BFGs?

There has been considerable controversy over the Dickinson selection of poems [for the Australian version of the A-levels] because the Board [of Studies, controlling the evil exams] has opted for the out-of-date Reeves version. Sydney Grammar [an expensive school] challenged the Board to a duel at 10 iambic pentameters. The Board's seconds gave in without even an enjambment, and Franklin's 1996 scholarship and Johnson's 1956 patchwork were finally ruled in as acceptable alternatives. But, connecting the poems to 'belonging' has reduced almost everyone to 'Zero at the Bone' anyway.

For about a month now I have been attempting to write an honest and amusing review of the new QT film, located as it is in a parallel universe in which all Americans are thoughtless villains and all Wehrmacht officers are colossal morons. I should be rejoicing this, as all too often it's the other way around, but try as I might, I can't recommend this film. It sets up expectations so high that a V2 couldn't get over them, only to dash the audience's hopes the very next scene, which left my pleasure in the film bouncing madly up and down like the tennis scores in a Rainer Schüttler match. And just like a Schüttler match, it ended badly.

PANIC Condensed Matter Physics assignment due PANIC Astrophysics due EXTRA PANIC Partial Differential Equations eeeek! (although that was slightly cool that the lecturer has swastikas all over his notes, perhaps that means I can write "Sieg Heil!" and get marks, if not PANIC PANIC. Oh yes, and cosmological research project due PANIC 15000 words left PANIC draft due Monday 5pm PANIC, one week to presentation PANIC PANIC PANIC.
How am I going to write fanfic when all I'm doing is getting STRESSED?

Hang on, I found some pictures of Til Schweiger in PINSTRIPE UNDERWEAR. Hahahaha!

There are so many little details that leave me thinking "Why didn't I think of that? It's perfect." Heydrich is never capable of relaxing from his analysing, the mention of blitzkrieg, which evokes so many connotations, all the epicurean touches like the cognac and cigarettes, the last sentence. I wish I could write compactly yet evoke emotion: all that Latin epic wants me to vomit words like a diabetic who has just consumed half a case of lemonade, spewing words from every orifice and making my sentences ooze from every pore in a giant cascade of wordiness. Tortured metaphors aside, a picture is worth a thousand words, right? To summarise this drabble:



46: Cheat


(On a somewhat related note, my PDEs lecturer wanted to highlight that something was very important, so he drew a swastika on the board next to an equation and said "I hope this gets your attention every time! It's very, very important! I'll do this every time a linearisation appears." Since practically the while course is about linearising, we're going to have a lot of swastikas on our notes. I wish I'd been close enough to the German exchange student to see his expression.)

If I ever need a definition of total langweilig I will simply get out my timetable and show the dictionary-allergic twat the column for Tuesday. Today was an exception.

My research project is practically finished: I made the change today from a universe in which all the "fluids" went from being separate to interacting, e.g. dark energy can decay into matter or photons. (Everything decays into light eventually.) Instead of me having to re-derive all the differential equations from general relativity, my supervisor turned up with a pair of ready-to-code PDEs, then did all the coding work for me and debugged the lot! (FUCK YEAH!) Then he postponed my TALK OF DOOM for a week (maybe two) which is pretty damn sweet, since I'm one of those terrible people who have to write the paper before they present the talk, instead of using the outline of the talk slides as a summary of the paper. So I now have another fortnight to write 15 000 words. (And get images, references, graphs etc., which is what actually takes the time.)

Then the quantum theory lecturer cancelled all forthcoming lectures because we have apparently...finished the course. Three weeks and nine lectures early. So I had a free period, in which I attempted to do my report, but got sidetracked into David Irving (don't ask), Rommel without his shirt off and whether or not Himmler and Heydrich had some kind of funky self-hating relationship on the side. In which my acquaintence seemed a little too interested, to be honest, since he evetually decided that a D/s subverting, envy-fuelled, homoerotic obsession betwen the two most powerful people in the SS was a dead certainty.
(Actually, that sounds like brilliant fanfic material. Please? Seriously, I'd want this fic more than the kinky Landa/Hellstrom/Stiglitz blackmailing, triple-agent, language-kink fanfic of awesome. However, I have not been interested in slash for that long, since it all seems to be written from the POV of thirteen year old girls with funny obsessions about leather trousers and people called Draco, so for once I have a legitimate excuse to be on the recieving end of fic for a change.)

But I digress. This afternoon, I discovered my marks for the assignment of DOOM, for which at least two people scored full marks and a thid got 29/30. Whoever you are, you've just ruined my chance of getting a Cambridge scholarship and thus entering that hallowed hall of cosmological badassery (fuck you, pound-dollar exchange rate and 66 000 pound PhD fees), but you probably aspire to be Macquarie Bank financiers, so I'm glad you're practising for your future existence as aggravating, pus-filled douches. </ rant> I'm not getting stressed about this 94% pass mark at all, am I?

The good news is that I scored a respectable 25/30, so while its not the 94 I need - unless the gods of fate smile upon me and scale my marks up for once - it's a mark that probably demonstrates that I worked to the best of my ability, instead of being a procrastinating moron wasting my intelligence on physics projects, Lagrangian Dynamics and Third Reich alternate history novels.

To close, apparently Rainer Schüttler won his first-round match today, which means he's just won four matches in a row. I reserve for this an expression which has, if my memory serves me correctly, not been used for a few years: FUCK YEAH, since I feel a strange affinity for him. (Namely, that however much I strive at something or how well I want to do, my results are always relative to other people's, so when they do better than I in those key moments that determine the year's outcome, I always feel like a twat that could have been up there with the best, if only X had happened.) But I digress. I feel terribly sorry for the poor man: he ended last year on an incredible high, getting into the semis at Wimbledon, but seemed to lose his nerve in a couple of crucial matches and bombed out, pretty much instigating a giant losing streak. Why should I feel sorry for a famous sports star, who has US$6 000 000 in prize money in the bank and gets autograph requests, probably in perfumed envelopes, from single women, I hear you ask. No, it's not because he is tall, blond and German, although that helps. He appears to embody a dying breed: the chivalrous gentleman, who is graceful in defeat (well he's had a lot of practice), magnanimous in victory and enjoys what he does without attempting the ultimately futile goal of appeasing one's hardcore fan base.



I'll take any exucse to post pictures like this, honestly. Pity he's not wearing the...right kind of Hugo Boss...if you get my drift.


So yes, today was generally awesome. Tomorrow, no doubt my good mood will evaporate, as I have to represent the USyd physics society at the annual Clubs and Societies night and frankly I can't think of many things that appeal to me less than dressing up in a skimpy Bollywood costume when the wind will probably blow everything off, going through the motions of interacting with a bunch of boring people who have too much enthusiasm for dancing and cheap booze and not enough for my cultural pretensions. Like nice wine and conversations containing at least one word that has more than three syllables in it. At least I'll have the German Club Oktoberfest to warm up for it.