lolmac | update and announcement

Posting here has been a bit hit-and-miss lately; I've been on vacation and also sick, at the same time, which was certainly not a great combination. This actually has nothing to do with the following Very Important Announcement.

Actually, two announcements! The first one is that LOLMac is about to hit a multiple milestone. On Tuesday the 13th, next week, ~~it will have been a whole week without campaign ads~~ LOLMac celebrates its FIFTH BIRTHDAY; and I will be posting LOLMac #1400. (Although the archive starts on November 10th of 2007, the first few posts were backdated: I actually started posting on the 13th.)

On the 13th, I'm going to do multiple posts: I'm going to post a few faves from previous years, and wrap up the day with a particularly ~~shirtless~~ special LOL for #1400.

Second announcement: after the anniversary, I am going to take a semi-holiday. Five years is a long time, and 1400 jokes is a lot of time spent: I posted a new LOL every day for several months starting in 2007, and have posted every weekday since August 2008, with only occasional missed days. I'm a little tired and I don't want to hit actual burnout. I still have ideas for new LOLs, and MacGyver episodes I haven't finished capping, and the wonderful

pepper_field of

rda_daily, Kate Ritter of http://rdanderson.com and the lovely folks of

sj_everyday keep coming up with shiny new caps for me to play with. I haven't run out of material, but I'm low on energy.

However, I'm not going to stop posting LOLs, since that would ~~conflict with my master plan to get everyone on the internet addicted to captioned images of RDA~~ just feel wrong. Instead, I'm going to take my cue from the halcyon summer days of my youth, and make you sit through a month of re-runs. I'll pick through and re-post some of the best of the 'Classic' LOLMacs from the first couple of years. Many of the regular commenters and contributors here, especially the most prolific and creative, weren't around in the very early days (other than

lothithil, I believe

sidlj,

macgyvergal and

magnavox_23 hold the title of Longest Non-Lurker Tenure). So, rather than go away for a month and recharge my batteries, I figured I'd see what fun could be had from the best of the existing material. Some of my early ideas were, I still feel, some of my best. I've been reposting the older items on Tumblr, but it's just not the same without the comments and the puns, the interaction and (of course) the crack.

If you have any faves that you'd like to nominate for inclusion, do feel free to mention them!

And think of the possiblities! Maybe

thothmes will write crackfic! Maybe

katxander will come up with saucy comments that will inspire

sidlj and

kirsty841 to write porn! Maybe

jackwabbit will write some drabbles and

idlewild_ will write a kick-ass action crossover and

campylobacter will write more porn, inspiring

magnavox_23 to do a sexy manip, and the wave of fannish glee will just expand from there. (Hey, we can hope, right?)

Or, at the very least, there will; be some smiles and bad jokes, and I'll start posting new LOLs in December, hopefully with a fresh reservoir of energy.

Hugs,
Beth

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Morpheus crackfic . . . doesn't seem like a natural combination, but you never know . . .

Ummm... That would be Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams. I dunno about you, but a great number of my dreams have much more in common with crackfic than they do with waking reality. Well the ones I remember, anyway.

Muse, being straight out of Greek mythology herself, isn't familiar with the guy from The Matrix, especially since she's my muse, and I haven't ever seen the movie.

If we are talking P2P file sharing... Oh, I hope Muse is not planning on actually plagiarizing! Re-casting, building on the work that has gone before, okay, but plagiarizing? Oh, noes!

Nope. I've thought it through. It's gotta be the Greek god of dreams.

I had thought Morpheus was the god of sleep, not specifically dreams, but you're quite right. I had entirely forgotten that the name had been used for anything else. *g*

Yes, as the god of dreams, crackfic works very well. Tepid objection withdrawn!

Most accounts (remember not all of our knowledge of Greek mythology is from things like inscriptions and pottery and not from more explicit references in literature) make Hypnos the god of sleep, and Morpheus was the chief of the Omoioi, who brought dreams. It's still a debate as to whether Morpheus is the brother or the daughter of Hypnos.

So, as my children would say, doing their best to imitate a reverberative voice, AND NOW YOU KNOW!

I blame it on my not having re-read Graves recently enough. *g*

In my family Graves was the goal, achieved in high school. We were started in childhood with a series of kids books (The Iliad and the Odyssey, a Big Golden Book and The Big Golden Treasury of Myths and Legends both come to mind) and then we were moved on to Edith Hamilton by the time we were in upper elementary school. Then Graves.

I was issued Edith Hamilton's Greek Mythology three years in a row in high school. They apparently felt Graves was too dense for us to absorb. Probably a correct decision, but I didn't consult it much.

True facts:

In either third or fourth grade -- probably the latter -- we had our Greek Myths unit. We were issued books with an assortment of myths, re-written for children (although not entirely sanitized: I remember being puzzled as to how Zeus could run off and "marry" all those nymphs, but the Orpheus chapter did describe him getting his head cut off).

We were required to read a specific, modest number of items. I, of course, devoured the book in one sitting and then went home and asked if we had any more.

The only copy in the house was my mother's collection of Graves (both volumes, clothbound, in a handsome box sleeve). So that was what I got. I skipped all the footnotes, which I didn't understand. I also didn't quite understand exactly what Zeus was now doing with all those nymphs, but I did figure out that "forced", "ravished", "violated", etc., must refer to the same thing, and it was that thing that resulted in children, which was enough to make sense of the plot, anyway.

ETA: I now own that copy of Graves myself, having laid claim to it when we were dividing up my parents' goods. It's one of my treasures.

Edited 2012-11-10 17:33 (UTC)

You come from my sort of family. My mother is a bit of a family legend, because apparently she learned to read by hiding in a corner of her dad's library with a copy of Carlyle's The French Revolution. She'd look at a word, and go downstairs and ask her mother "Mama? What does g-u-i-l-l-o-t-i-n-e spell?" and armed with that, she would go back up and gather the next word. It took getting to one of the juicier words like "guillotine" before the adults got curious enough to break off what they were doing and investigate. By then she'd decoded the relationships of phonics and the written word, and was reading. So although she didn't read it cover to cover then, Carlyle was her first book.

One of my greatest treasures because of the great childhood memories was William Kelley Simpson's Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt with its black and white photos of the treasures of Egypt. I spent hours pouring over it as a child. To this day, if I want to bring back how it felt to be 5 years old, I go and sniff it. It has a distinctive odor, caused by the kind of paper, inks, and finishes used for all those black and white photos, and it started me on a lifelong habit of sniffing books as I get to know them. I've freaked out more than one used bookstore owner that way, and I've avoided plenty of moldy books for their cleaner editions too!

I found Zeus' legendary infidelity a bit puzzling too, but I asked my mother, and to her credit she explained. It was an eye-opener, and something to puzzle over for quite a while. On the whole, I decided I was more comfortable with the loyal, noble, unwavering, chivalrous knights of my treasured copy of King Arthur for Boys. Imagine my shock and distress when that devolved into Lancelot and Guenevere! Grown-ups were clearly wicked. Right. Back to Tolkien, then.

NOT DAUGHTER. SON. trying to talk to one of my daughters and type simultaneously, not working so well for me.

-os or -us are clearly masculine endings, and could not work for a daughter's name.

Slap on the wrist for Thothmes. The teachers of Scholia Philtsou would be very disappointed!

Edited 2012-11-10 17:12 (UTC)

update and announcement

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Pedant Alert!

precisely the sort of blatant pedantry up with which I will not put

Re: precisely the sort of blatant pedantry up with which I will not put

give them a fat book and you shut them up for a day or more

give them a fat book and you shut them up for a childhood

Re: Pedant Alert!