in other news

the last (which is most) of the holiday gifts are going out this week.

A coworker who went to India to see her family, brought back things for everyone in teh office. I asked for fabric, and she brought me a beautiful silk sari -- the colors and patterns are not what I would have chosen, but my inner Bellatrix sems to love it, and it seems unlikely I will cut it up for a dress, but get the proper undergarments and find some occassion appropriate to it, even if it's just to make the gf laugh.

HDM is finished, and it really gutted me for reasons that are probbably less than obvious to most people and would take more explaining than I'm incluned towards presently. Some of it was very hard to read.

I'm for bed.

(no subject)

That random cat is still out there howling. Mrowrrrr mrowrrr mrowrrr.

I'm amusing myself looking at online discussions of HDM, 99.9% of which frustrate me not just because of the abominable standards of literacy and discourse on the Internet (and this is better than most), but because I can't find where the grownups are -- and I don't mean chronologically, I just mean someone who can read something and do some decent analysis. I suppose this is what you all, and my gf, are for. But argh. The HP fandom, for all its many woes is full of good, serious literary thinking -- and while lots of that is wanky crap in its own right there's tons of casual but deeply intelligent conversation. All the HDM discussion I can find strikes me as people asking relevant questions for irrelevant reasons and then not looking at the text with anything resembling a keen eye.

Aside from that though, I'm getting hung up on the stuff I usually do, which is culture building. Like, here's this world with daemons -- now tell me what a wedding looks like, or social dancing. More precisely, as regards the social dancing, how do you not trip on the little fuckers? Because the books' women are exceptional in most cases, what is the general state of women in Lyra's world? Is Mrs. Coulter an exception? Does she get more freedom to do as she pleases because she's a widow? because she's conniving? or are women seen as perfectly equal (other than that original sin problem)? Yes, I'm pondering a fic, and yes, it requires the answering of the social dance question.