yuletide and a digression about criminal minds pairings

I signed up for 11 fandoms for Yuletide and somehow forgot The Dark Knight. But I suppose it might possibly be just as well since I have more than ten thousand words of an unfinished TDK story on my harddrive already...

In retrospect it was probably correct to remove Criminal Minds from Yuletide - a glance at the newsletter will show you that it's quite active, but the problem is that it's not active with good fic. I've only read two or three pieces that I could even call decent, so every Yuletide always greatly increased the chances for something readable out there. The fandom used to be dominated by Gideon/Reid, which grossed me out because G. practically adopted him in canon, but at least I could see the logic for that. Recently, however, Hotch/Reid has outstripped Morgan/Garcia in popularity, and that just makes no sense at all. What makes even less sense is that by far the most popular pairing is Prentiss/JJ, which just... you know, ok, lesbian is good, but even before JJ's boyfriend, there was barely a few minutes of female bonding between the two of them - the entire rationale was apparently that they're cute and female! If anything JJ should have been slashed with Garcia, hello? And it's not like anyone who would slash JJ with Prentiss is susceptible enough to logic to consider Garcia's Mulder/Scully thing with Morgan. Which, you know, I haven't disinherited anyone for shipping Morgan/Reid either, and the fact that it's not all that popular helps with that, and also the fact that canon obviously doesn't intend to do anything with Morgan/Garcia except keep the UST at the same level for seasons and seasons and seasons without ever resolving it. I can't even say that's a bad decision on their part. Anyway, Morgan and Garcia are both obviously going to be hooking up with other people in that time, and while we as fans have access to the metatext, as long as we're going against it consciously there's nothing particularly wrong with going against it (which is why tinhat Harry/Hermione shippers are alarming, whereas reasonable people who are just like 'hey, H/H might have been a better choice because Ron is a moron' are... reasonable!). Of course, preferring Morgan/Reid to Morgan/Garcia is indicative of bad taste by my lights, but I don't have to read it, and I've known worse. Wax's mom serves two kinds of gross pickled fish things AND these disgusting jars of mutton rolled up with fat, like a big Twinkie of Evil and Animal Bits, at every single Christmas, and that's in a hundred times worse taste than Morgan/Reid.

I still think they should remove Sherlock Holmes from Yuletide too, though. I mean, the quality of Yuletide writing is generally higher, so it's good for me personally that it's there, but in all fairness, the lj community has been increasingly active the last couple of years and it's pretty steadily healthful at this point.

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• Even if you're awesome, if you're a non-native speaker you need a beta. wax_jism is more fluent than probably 98% of native speakers of English - I probably wouldn't have shacked up with her otherwise! - but she still makes mistakes.



• Which animal is cooler? No, there's no purpose to this.
  
  [Poll #1290613]




• hermit crab
  
  Miami 1988: as a kid I preferred hermit crabs to alligators.



• gotz hung up
  



• A random bit of cooking advice for the day! If you like to use uncooked olive oil - for example, as a salad dressing, or when making sauces for use on pasta or anything that doesn't involve frying things in it - it is well worth the money to buy a more expensive bottle for dressings/sauces and a cheaper one for cooking. In fact, I don't use extra virgin for cooking because someone or other, probably isilya (who knows everything), told me you're not supposed to.
  
  But anyway, sometimes wax_jism will buy store brand olive oil and if I have only a bottle of that in the house when I'm preparing uncooked pesto dressing for pasta, I use a teaspoon of lemon juice, a tablespoon or two of pesto paste and a few tablespoons of water to thin it out with only a few drips (half-teaspoon maybe?) of the cheap olive oil, because if you end up with a bite of pasta coated mostly in cheap olive oil, it will taste bitter and... kind of disgusting.
  
  My mother says the best she can buy in the grocery store is Colavita, which is a step up from Bertolli according to her, and isilya recommends several yuppie brands that I've never even heard of, but Bertolli is the best you can get around here and it's easily good enough to make a difference. With Bertolli, the dressing has a few tablespoons of pesto paste, a few tablespoons of olive oil, a dribble of water and a teaspoon or two of lemon juice. It actually tastes good.