I Could Throw You in the Lake or Feed You Poison Birthday Cake

Instructions: Open up your iTunes (or WinAmp, or whatever, though iTunes is easiest for this I think) and fill out this survey, no matter how embarrassing the responses might be.

How many songs total: 1412
How many hours or days of music: 4.2 days
Most recently played: "After the Bombs" - The Decemberists
Most played: Persephone - Vixy and Tony
Most recently added: "I Can't Decide"  - Scissor Sisters

Sort by song title.
First Song: "Aaron and Lesa" - Wicked Tinkers
Last Song: "60 Miles an Hour"  - New Order

Sort by time.
Shortest Song: Captain America Theme Song (00:19)
Longest Song: "Der Abschied" - Placido Domingo (28:16)

Sort by album
First album: Absolution by Muse
Last album: 69 Love Songs by The Magnetic Fields

First song that comes up on Shuffle: Ca C'est L'Amour - John Barrowman

Search the following and state how many songs come up:
Death - 20
Life -  21
Love -  72
Hate - 5
You - 148
Sex - 3

In other news, I spent all afternoon working on the post-Wrath of Khan Sulu/Chekov fic, which is about half to 2/3 done and will be somewhere between 1500 and 2000 words. Also, apparently I can't write a fic without crying!Chekov in it. WTF self.

Is Complaining About Inacurate Comic Book History Worse Than Complaining About Comic Book Physics?

Things I know about the European witch-hunts that make it very hard for me to appreciate pop culture:

1. The Spanish Inquisition? Comparatively not all that bad. Yes, they did some horrifyingly evil things, but they had a lot of legal and bureaucratic rules in place limited what was permissible for their agents to do - especially after a lack of rules led to a wholesale execution of Basques in Northern Spain based on shoddy evidence - which cut down on the atrocities committed by investigators in other nations. Also, since their focus was heretics rather than specifically witches, they wanted to convert people back to the true faith, so they didn't kill nearly as many as you'd think. And they stopped witch-hunting decades first, and decades before anyone else.

2. The English also didn't have that many trials (although the Scottish were quite voracious) because of some differences in rules of evidence and cultural attitudes. The heart of the witch hunting craze was what is now Germany and surrounding regions, but at the time it was a bunch of disconnected little territories ruled by minor princes and noblemen under an overarching but not very influential empire - some of them were Catholic, some of them were Protestant, and while historians can identify a lot of risk factors why some communities would have witch hunts and some wouldn't, it's still kind of a crapshoot. The French had some fun too, but the eastern Europeans didn't really get into it.

3. Witches were burned at the stake. They were also hanged. And drowned. And they died being tortured. And they were excommunicated and banished. Depends on the country and the court they happened to be in.

4. The witch trials didn't happen in the Middle Ages. In fact, almost no witch trials happened in the Middle Ages, because there were several pieces of relevant theology (and several other pieces of populist scare-mongering) concerning who witches were, what they did, and how much of a threat they were, that weren't published until the 1400s. The witch hunts happened in Early Modern Europe. There were actually two waves of witch trials, one in the late 1400s and one in the late 1500s/early 1600s (that one was a lot worse). Salem is actually totally an outlier, since a) the patterns of colonial witch trials (influenced by colonial theology as well as Afro-Caribbean and Native American folklore) are kind of different from Continential trials, and also it's way later than most of the European trials. They were still doing it across the pond, but not with nearly as much enthusiasm.

5. Most accused witches were women. In most countries. In some it was even. In others, like Iceland (and I think some places in Eastern Europe) it was mostly men. It's not as simple as saying the witch hunts were caused by misogyny, although the threat to the patriarchy caused by the changing roles of women did certainly play a part. In fact, we're still not entirely sure what the root cause of the witch hunts was - a lot of theories have been floated, from hatred of women (especially women who challenged the social structure by being single or angry or smart), to guilt over failing to observe social rules, to a monetary desire to sieze property, to fears over the changing religious landscape, to bad weather patterns, to hallucinations caused by bad grain, to a misinterpretion by theologians and laypeople over pagan practices observed by the peasantry. The truth is...probably some combination of all of the above. It is complicated, y'all.

I hate being all OCD about this kind of thing, particularly since I know I've told people not to stress out about things like Merlin being about as anachronistic as a guy in a Storm Trooper costume at a Ren Faire. But it was a really fascinating (if unbelievably horrifying) cultural phenomenon and it bugs me to have to sit there and go 'not true. Really not true. OMG HOW DID YOU GET THIS SO WRONG' every time it comes up. 

LOOK AT ME I'M HYPOCRITICAL. Oh well. A girl has to have some glaring contradictions in her life.

My Standards Are So Low

Today I was something vaguely approaching useful and productive! For a given value of useful and productive. Things I did today:

Made honey-buttermilk bread, since I had honey I got the other day for my hair. I still haven't solved the problem of my bread collapsing in the middle in a big giant crater (I'm starting to wonder if it has something to do with the high altitude here), but it tastes just as delicious even if it isn't pretty, and it's kinda fun to break off the crispy bits around the top and eat them right after it comes out of the oven. I still need to experiment more with the bread machine, though.

Made plans for my birthday, which can sometimes be a complicated venture. But it will probably work out in the end - nobody's really available on the same day, thank god, so I just have to get all the different bits lined up so I know where I'm going to when. Next week should be fun!

Watched it rain! It's been thunderstorming on and off for the last two days, it is AMAZING and I LOVE IT. It's finally broken through that intensely miserable sticky-hot thing we've had going on for the last week or two that makes me want to go inside with the AC cranked up to 11 and never go out again. Also the lightning is exciting!

Finished the Sulu/Chekov hurt/comfort fic! It needs one more run through by my beta (*waves at colourofsaying *) to check for mistakes and fix some niggly little dialogue problems, and it doesn't have a title, but it should be good to post tomorrow. Ended up about 2300 words, and I'm moderately happy with it (man, I just love getting some writing actually done, fucking christ). So go me! Although I am probably one of the only people in the world who will veer away from near sex-in-the-botany-lab to have the characters HOLD HANDS.