...sure, why not!

[magibrain]

I've made a blood pact commitment to sholio that I'd clean something up and post it this week, but in the mean time, it's quiet around here, as always. So I'll steal other people's memes and tweak them a little. And maybe give people a way to get to know me that isn't just me being awkward and weird at them in comments.

So. Ask me anything! Fannish, real life, hypothetical, etc.

If you ask me something I'm just not going to answer, like "What's your home address and social security number?", I'll just write you a drabble for a fandom we're both in. (If I'm not aware of any shared fandoms, I'll just write you a drabble about an improbable crime-fighting duo or something.)

Comments

[sholio]

If you could rewrite just one thing about White Collar -- BUT ONLY ONE -- what would it be?

[magibrain]

HAH! You know this already, I think. :P I would have directed the writers that one of the major themes of the series was also the complexity of consequence. And then I would have sat back and watched everything spool out like a wonderfulRube Goldberg machine of characters looking at their lives and looking at their choices.

[sholio]

Hmm, yes, I guess I did already know the answer to this one. XD (I would watch the hell out of that show ...)

How about another question, then: What would you like to learn how to do, that you don't already know how to do?

[magibrain]

Oh, that's a fun one.

There's a lot of writing-related stuff which I've talked about at some length, before - how to write at novel lengths, how to stick with projects, how to write at short lengths, how to effectively establish character.

Beyond that, there are some skills I think it'd be really awesome to have, but for one reason or another (usually due to having other priorities that knock them back onto other burners) I haven't ever sat down and really studied. Art is one – I would love to be able to do really finely-detailed and anatomically convincing pictures like this one, or to have the economical command of line that this person does, or to be able to do, let's face it, just about ANYTHING that the Lackadaisy artist can pull off.

I'd also like to be fluent in another language, and it's an enduring sadness that I'm not. But I keep taking enough to pick up scraps of various languages, and then, um, not sticking with them.

Also: I would like to be good at game design and programming. Because I feel like that would be awesome.

And, one final thing, that I can dream of but probably don't have the guts or stickwithitiveness (or grace, or balance) to ever try is parkour. Or freerunning. Either one. If I could have a superpower, mad parkour skillz and shapeshifting might be the ones getting in a fistfight for my affection.

[sholio]

That's a good list! :) The language thing is exactly why I started taking French courses this winter, because one of the things I would like to change about myself is that I'm thoroughly monolingual, and I don't want to be anymore. I'm not sure if I'll ever manage fluency, but I would like to be able to handle basic social transactions in at least one other language.

I know I could never do parkour -- I mean, I'm literally, entirely incapable of those sorts of movements -- but I really admire people who can. :D (I have to say that if I could only pick one superpower, flight would win hands down, though ...)

[magibrain]

Have you encountered Duolingo? Very cool site, independently verified to be as good as a college class, crowdsources things like translating Wikipedia into different languages (so that the target language gets access to a body of originally-English material and the translators get practical work translating real documents), generally quite friendly. I played with it for a while but never stuck with it, mostly because the languages I really want to learn aren't on it yet. (Russian is the big one. I'd love to be able to speak Russian. I'd also love to be able to speak Yoruba, but I am under no illusions that Duolingo will have that anytime in the plannable future.)

And oh man, yeah. There's actually a school not too far from me that teaches kids how to freerun, and I'm more than a little jealous. Then, I managed to drift out of every structured physical activity I ever tried, from fencing to Judo to cross country, so even if I had been enrolled in it as a kid, I'd probably still have drifted away and gone back to writing things.

(Flight would be pretty cool! But I enjoy the mental image of turning into something big, armored, and stompy (preferably). Possibly because I spent a lot of my childhood playing monster.)