(no subject)

Dear Great Britain,

Look, I expect this kind of shit from Australia, land where Spiders Eat Birds, or Canada, where Bees Colonise Barbecues, or even Texas, where Spiders Form Communes. But you, I expected better of you.

hija_paloma linked me to the story of the four foot poison-spined OH MY GOD LOOK AT ITS FACE sea worm you nurtured in your bosom.

One: how do you not notice a four-foot posion spined SERIOUSLY WHAT THE SHIT in an aquarium tank? How big was the coral reef display that spawned this monster?

Two: considering it ate fish-hooks whole, bit through 20lb test line, and destroyed a coral reef, I would like to know how precisely you wrestled Satan's pet sea worm into a display of its own. The horrified can't-look-away side of me wants video.

Three: Barry. Seriously. You named it Barry. Why would you pass up the perfectly good opportunity to name something Yog-Sothoth?

Love and horror,

Sam

(no subject)

So today I scheduled myself out -- 8-10 for TARDIS Big Bang fic, 10 - 1 for Nameless corrections, and 2-4 for Extribulum research. I got a good deal done on all three; not much as I'd wanted, but more than I usually get without scheduling.

Extribulum Press is not going to be a fast process, I have a feeling. There's reading to be done each step of the way and figuring to do, but the nice thing is that once I figure it all out that will be a service I can offer to the authors (recruiting and boot-camping the authors is going to be a process all on its own). It's all going to be a bit seat-of-one's-pants for the first run, but as Art Buck said, "The first time anything is done, it's done by amateurs." Not that I'm the first to follow this model, but I think I will be one of the first to do it in this particular fashion. And I am certainly an amateur.

Most of today's presswork was meta-reading. I had a bookmarks file, which is now converted to a delicious account (feel free to leave recommendations) and IN AN IRONIC TWIST I reformatted and printed out a lot of the meta-tagged articles.

Reading the 1000 True Fans article and two of its follow-ups on the El home, I got a sort of gut-shredding sense of terror. That being said, two of the best things to ever happen to me -- a summer in Boston and my move to Chicago -- have been preceded by the same "Get it off get it off me oh god don't make me do it" sensation, so it's usually a sign that I'm on a good track. Which is why I talk about this kind of thing here, because if other people think I'm doing it then I have to do it...

And since it is poetry month I went looking for poems about books and found this one by dint of "hit random a bunch on the Wondering Minstrels archive". The citation there claims it is pre-10th-century, but I make no assertion as to the validity of that. If you know the proper source, please share. :)

The Bookworm
Anon, originally in Old English

A moth, I thought, munching a word.
How marvellously weird! a worm
Digesting a man's sayings --
A sneakthief nibbling in the shadows
At the shape of a poet's thunderous phrases --
How unutterably strange!
And the pilfering parasite none the wiser
For the words he has swallowed.

ETA: It's from the Exeter book! Thanks, cageyklio, and thank you mystefaction for the alternate translations. My cafe is the most awesome. :D

ETA2: Getting a lot of spam on this post so I'm shutting off comments. Sorry guys!