sneakers

Vans Authentic Lo Pro in black patent and Onitsuka Tiger Mexico 66 Baja in Black/gray/green

With a Name Like Plebefic Headers, They Have to Be Good

People who remember the glory days of bandom a few years ago will possibly have fond memories tickled by these plebefic headers. Bandom plebefic communities are an incredibly fecund source of plebefic headers - I'm not sure why those communities are more hilarious than the ones in most other fandoms, but the many I posted back then were generally the most hilarious ones I've ever seen. (In fact, wax_jism and I both use them for our journal/reading page [sub]titles - "Mikey, don't you realize you're the sugar in my tea?" and "Hours of applying makeup completely ruined by a man with a stuffed parrot" were both among the original batch of summaries.)

Anyway, I went to patrickxpeter yesterday and... yeah. The rate of quotable header content is something like 1 in 5 over there!

1. 
   Authors Notes: Part 7. If no one comments I’ll cry and not post anymore.
   
2. 
   Rating: R for "drug usage"
   
3. 
   Summary - patrick gets out of the shower.
   
4. 
   Summary: Patrick and Pete have been best friends since kindergarten, Patrick finds out Pete's family are vampires, Pete starts to lose control, and Patrick's blood just smells delicious...
   
5. 
   Summary: You, soft and only. You, lost and lonely. You, strange as angels, dancing in the deepest oceans, twisting in the water, you're just like a dream
   

Why DW is a better fandom platform than LJ in my estimation

Well, I haven't actually been planning to make an Announcement about My Personal Reasons for Moving to Dreamwidth. Frankly, even the new divide of the flist into two parts or the new longer post- and comment word limits would be enough to get me to move, because I see that as a significant step forward in functionality. But those aren't the only reasons.

I've been waiting for a better alternative to LJ to come around for years, since the summer of 2002, when LJ started its policy of immediately deleting all the RSS feeds people tried to make of fandom_wank even though the community itself had already moved to Blurty. ( When I look at LJ as a fandom platform - which is what I use it for - I find it wanting. )

"Hours of applying makeup completely ruined by a man with a stuffed parrot" (Walpurgis in Finland)

The titular badfic summary, collected from the My Chem plebe community's backlogs a few summers ago, is my Reading Page title of the moment because on Walpurgis Eve I saw a man with a stuffed parrot.

The man was wearing a red tartan kilt, a corduroy blazer, some heavy metal accessories, Converse high-tops, an eyepatch, and a stuffed parrot. Weird outfits aren't unusual on Vappen, when traditionally all high school graduates wear their extremely silly graduation ceremony hats out in public to sing songs, and all the members of the universities' unofficial academic field societies (like the Political Science Club, the Chemistry Club, etc ) wear their color-coded nylon jumpsuits covered with patches, and non-high-school grads wear the silliest hats they can find. Old people and rich people dress up before going to stand in their hats and sing, which is very funny when contrasted with the hordes of rainbow-hued hooligans around them.

Vappen, as we call it in Finland (Vappu in Finnish, Valborgsafton in Swedish), is the most Carnivále-esque of the several currently-celebrated Finnish holidays with pagan origin - Midsummer, Halloween, New Year's, Eurovision and World Cup Soccer and Hockey. On any of the above nights you encounter drunken street carousing and loud noises in the street all night and puddles of vomit on the sidewalk the following morning, and on several of them you have plenty of fireworks, and at Midsummer you have bonfires as well, but only on Walpurgis Eve (I say Eve because the festival starts around midday, although the public drunkenness doesn't really get off the ground until, oh, at least 6 pm or so) is the entire downtown square and all the streets around for blocks thronged with masses of people in special costumes and hats carrying street vendor food, open alcohol, children, and balloons.


The traditional May 1 post-Vappen picnic on Watchtower Hill, the gathering-place for the Swedish-speaking Finns' Vappen celebrations. Finnish speakers meet by the riverside several blocks away. Observe the silly graduation hats.

My theory is that the extra excitement is because the last day of April is generally right about when spring finally arrives - it's rarely here yet by Easter - and after a Finnish winter, the never-melting towers of sooty snow and unrelenting overcast and the four hours of sunlight in January, everyone except anglepoiselamp (who is a photophobe) is very happy to see the spring.