Thorn Wilde

We do our Christmas celebration on Christmas eve, and eat traditional food for my part of the country, which means pork rib grilled in the oven, with crackling and stuff. Very different from the way ribs tend to be served stateside, I think. Looks like this: It's served with potatoes, red cabbage, a sort of gravy made from the rib fat, various pickles and jellies and the like. For dessert we eat ice cream with cloudberry jam if we're at my mum's and cloudberry cream if we're at my brothers' mum's. Christmas was always very important to my dad, so even though our family was basically split three ways we always celebrated Christmas together. He broke up with his ex-wife, with whom he had two children, in 1974 or there abouts, but they kept celebrating Christmas together, and when my mum and I happened, we were included in that, and even after my parents broke up in '96, we continued the same way we always had. After my dad passed away, we kept at it still, though we don't do it every year anymore, and not everyone's always there, as two of my brothers live in Sweden now and have families of their own. Magpie and I have started our own tradition of having a Winter Solstice dinner party for some of our friends on the day of the Winter Solstice (which is usually some time between the 20th and 22nd of December). This years we have grand plans of serving Christmas goose, just for the hell of it.

So, I was a bit inspired by the Christmas Tree topic, but thought I'd take it a step further. I'm interested to know about traditions that are particular to where you live, or even to just your family. We have users here from all over the world, so there is so much to choose from. Do you celebrate Christmas? If not, do you celebrate any other holiday around the same time? What do you eat? Do you decorate your house? Do you get a visit from Santa Clause? I really want to know! A thing we do in Scandinavia that I think is pretty unique is the televised advent calendar. Every day in December, there's a short episode of an ongoing story that culminates at Christmas. It's made for kids, and you can buy a calendar in the shops where you open a door every day and there's a picture related to the story. It's how I knew it was nearly Christmas when I was a kid, was when I sat down at 7 in the morning, before school, and watched the advent calendar on telly.

I love getting gifts for my friends too much to ever re-gift anything. I'm the sort of person who'll always try to find the perfect thing to give to the people I care about, and if I'm broke (like I am this year) I'm more likely to make something (poem, short story, mixed media art work, song) than I am to find something to re-gift. This of course means that I have quite a few things lying around that I never use... But usually I can manage to find some kind of use for almost anything I'm given. I'm pragmatic like that.

Paya is right. Eccleston was always very clear on the fact that he only ever wanted to be in the one series he was in, and he had no desire to appear in any more Doctor Who stuff. That is his choice and his alone. He was not left out by the production team.

Happy Birthday, Aditus!!

Ever wonder why there were a few (still living) Doctors missing from the special? It's all right here.

Also The Fez. Cause, you know, fez.

...Unless the girlfriend is into anal. *shrug*

We have advent wreaths and advent calendars as well. This year, my mum got me a tea advent calendar. A new little thingy of tea, enough for one pot, every day, and what you get it a surprise. When I was a kid, my mum used to make me a gift calendar, with tiny little things, cheap toys and the like, most days and then a bigger gift on Christmas Eve. (According to Scandinavian tradition people tend to celebrate on Christmas Eve rather than Christmas Day; that's when we generally have dinners and open gifts and all that, which is kind of weird.)

Apparently, the average vagina is only about 4 inches deep. Even a tight ass can generally accommodate more.

I'm still flailing randomly when I think about it. I don't know what to do with myself because The Day of the Doctor was so awesome and the eyes and there was stuff and boom and I'm utterly incoherent. I've watched it twice now. Tomorrow I'm seeing it in 3D in the cinema.

OMG, it's today!!!!

See, this is so weird to me... To me, that sounds like an advent tree rather than a Christmas one. Christmas starts on Christmas Eve (technically Christmas Day, actually), so tossing the tree out on the second day of Christmas just sounds really odd. It's really interesting to read about all these different traditions, though. So far, the only sensible ones have come from other Nords and the British.

As someone who was bullied for years in school, fighting back never really worked, but I was always smaller and weaker than my bullies. Additionally, these arseholes would take advantage of my temper and goad me until I lashed out, making it look like everything was my fault. And there's nothing quite as frustrating as hitting a guy and having him laugh at you. I remember once hammering on a guy's back with both fists and having him tell me, 'Ooh, thanks, nice massage!' Yeah, for all my anger issues I was pretty shit at fighting... Didn't help that I had a teacher who spent nearly three years ignoring the fact that I was being bullied daily. I think she thought it was my own fault that I couldn't stand up for myself. When I'd finally had enough and decided to switch schools, I went back for my things and to explain to my class what they'd done to me (which was drive me to attempted suicide at the age of not-quite-eleven), my teacher refused to be there. She left the class to her colleague and spent the time I was there in the teacher's lounge having coffee. I like to think she couldn't face me out of guilt. Point is, there are so many factors that allow this sort of thing to happen. Shitty teachers who don't pay attention or don't care, kids whose parents naïvely think that 'my kid could never do such a thing', a school administration that isn't equipped to handle that sort of situation... Verbal bullying is hard to prove, and victims are often encouraged to just 'grow thicker skin' or 'rise above it' or 'just ignore them'. The only people who ever say that are people who have never been bullied.

The episodes are between 12 and 25 minutes long, apart from the last one which is 43 minutes.

Is it available on the iPlayer, Zombie?

It's 10:07 am, and since getting up at 5 (because I wasn't sleeping properly anyway and just thought this is boring) I have watched all 7 episodes of the web series The Outs. Because I have no life.

So, this thing is like a year old, but I figure it may have passed more people by than me. I just watched the first two episodes of this thing, and it's awesome! The plot is engaging, it's funny, it just feels really honest and true and I love it. You can watch it here, and I sincerely recommend you do. Here's a trailer (contains language):

Well, here's what Wiktionary has to say: Etymology 1 Probably from fag end (“remnant”), from Middle English fagge (“flap”) Noun fag (plural fags) (US, technical) In textile inspections, a rough or coarse defect in the woven fabric. (US, technical) A photovoltaic cell that is no longer in use. (UK, Ireland, colloquial, dated in US and Canada) A cigarette. (UK, obsolete, colloquial) The worst part or end of a thing. Synonyms(cigarette): ciggy (Australia), smoke, (Cockney rhyming slang) oily rag Etymology 2 Probably alteration of flag (“droop, tire”) Noun fag (plural fags) (UK, colloquial) A chore; an arduous and tiresome task. (UK, archaic, colloquial) In many British boarding schools, a younger student acting as a servant for senior students.   Verb fag (third-person singular simple present fags, present participle fagging, simple past and past participle fagged) (transitive, colloquial, used mainly in passive form) To make exhausted, tired out. (intransitive, colloquial) To droop; to tire. (UK, archaic, colloquial) For a younger student to act as a servant for senior students in many British boarding schools. Etymology 3 From faggot. Noun fag (plural fags) (vulgar, offensive) A homosexual person. (colloquial, disparaging) In particular, a conspicuously non-straight-acting homosexual male. (US, vulgar, offensive) An annoying person. Why did you do that, you fag? As you see, the word fag as in cigarette has a completely different etymological root to the word fag as in homosexual. Wiktionary has the following to say about the word faggot: Etymology From Middle English, from Old French fagot (“bundle of sticks”), from Old Italian fagotto, diminutive of Vulgar Latin *facus, from Latin fascis (“bundle of wood”). See also fag. Noun faggot (plural faggots) (rare, dated in US) A burning or smouldering piece of firewood. (chiefly UK) A bundle of sticks tied together. (Some sources specify that a faggot is tied with two bands or withes, whereas a bavin is tied with just one.) (obsolete) Burdensome baggage. (UK, Ireland, colloquial, pejorative, obsolete) A shrewish woman. (offensive, vulgar, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand) A gay person, particularly a man. Is it true that she's a faggot? (offensive, vulgar, US) An annoying or inconsiderate person. It also claims that the word faggot can be used to mean the end of a cigarette, though I haven't personally ever heard it used that way. Perhaps a Brit can enlighten us on its use. Additionally, in the UK there's a sort of pork meatball called a faggot. The word faggot is not to be confused with the word fagott, which is the name of the musical instrument in English known as bassoon in several European languages.

We bring the tree inside on the 21st or 22nd, usually, and decorate it on the 23rd. That's traditional here. My mum tends to leave it up until it dies, which can sometimes be pretty late in January because she's good at keeping the tree alive. At the very least, it's left up until after the 7th of January, which is Christmas Day according to the Julian calendar, since my mum is Eastern Orthodox. If it grows fresh shoots before it dies, my mum plucks them off and uses them to make schnapps. Yes, I realise that my family's a bit eccentric.

I have to admit I mostly just found the American Pie movies kind of exhausting to watch...

When I write a short story, I usually sit down and write until I'm done. Then I go back, revise, edit, remove stuff, add stuff, read it out loud to myself, fix every minor thing in the dialogue, and then, when I'm happy with it, I'll send it to a beta or an editor, or both. That is my process. When I write a novel, I can't just write until I'm done. I'll write a chapter, go back and read it, polish it, add stuff and take stuff out. Then I'll move on and write the next bit, and maybe do some research for some detail or another (and I need everything to be correct, so my research is meticulous), go back, reread, polish, add stuff, take stuff out. I fact, nearly half my word-count often comes in the editing process, because my rough draft is very stark, often just dialogue and a few tags, the bare minimum of detail and internal monologue so that I know what's going on. I add descriptions, embellish my language, fill out my characters' thoughts and actions, on the first rewrite. When you do NaNoWriMo, you're not supposed to do that. You're just supposed to sit down and write. I have a really hard time doing that. If I manage 2000 words in a day, it's often because I went back and reread and added stuff to previous chapters. At the moment I'm only a tiny bit behind, and I should be caught up by this evening, but I'm not really doing this the NaNoWriMo way. It'll be interesting to see if I make it in the end.

So, I found this in the recommended videos... That's pretty awesome, actually.

Happy Birthday!

Weirdly, the examples of negative comments used in the huffpo vid seemed to come from women. Is it, perhaps, possible that huffpo is taking a few isolated incidents of negative reactions out of context...? I did not find the ad offensive, nor did I find it especially funny, but certainly not offensive. It's... just an ad. *shrug*