Supernatural, Stargate, Star Wars, and some things that don't start with "S." Also crossovers.

( The List of DOOOOOMCollapse )

Fanvid Master List

Fanmix Tag

Blanket permission slip from teacher: Feel free to make my stories into any sort of transformative work you like. I'm delighted to see my stories inspire art, podfics, commentary, unauthorized sequels, anything like that. I love the community aspect of fandom, how we can add to and expand on each other's work.

Long time no see, LJ. I'm not much in fandom at the moment, except for occasionally reading fanfic and even more occasionally checking my flist.

I've been writing a lot lately, but it's been original. I'm trying to become someone who makes money off her writing. :) And then, maybe, when I can quit my factory job and write full-time, I will have the time and energy for fanfic again. Maybe. Who knows. I'm also going back to school this summer, so my schedule will be even more nutso crazy-face.

But here's five hundred words I wrote this morning on my work laptop while waiting for IT to come and set up my network connection so I could work. (I'm on my break right now.) It's kinda tone-poemish.

( The Dandelion ClockCollapse )

Recipe here: http://maychorian.livejournal.com/272827.html

So yes, I made another batch today, and I took pictures. And I added bacon to this batch, substituting bacon grease for the melted butter and tossing the bits in with the dry ingredients, and they baked up beautifully and they were really, really yummy. Bacon-peanut butter-bran might sound weird, but don't try it till you knock it, that's what I say. Or, wait, reverse that. Yes. Try it.

(This last weekend was the town fair in my little village, and I tried the chocolate-covered bacon at a stand, and it was not tasty. Just weird. But this... Yes. Delicious.)

If you're wondering, it was sixteen ounces of bacon. I cut it up with a shears before frying it, and I fried it up nice and crispy because that's how I like my bacon. It made more than enough grease for the recipe. The extra my family saves for green beans and such.

( PICCIESCollapse )

Over the past few months I've been trying to take better care of myself, such as having a plan for what to eat instead of just getting breakfast and lunch wherever. (Supper is a little easier to deal with, without work getting in the way.) I figured out how to have a good pack lunch everyday--basically cheese sticks, Greek yogurt, sugar-free pudding, and some kind of protein, either lunch meat or a tuna fish snack--so now breakfast is left.

I just can't face a plate of eggs and sausage in the morning, like my dad has every day. I want some carbs to get me going, but not too many, because then my blood sugar goes haywire and I feel sick. So no donuts, breakfast cereal, pancakes, etc. Breakfast burritos from the gas station work all right, but that gets expensive and inconvenient, and they have stuff I don't want.

So this past month I started experimenting with muffins. I've taken elements from several different recipes to make this one, and it works pretty good. My plan now is to make a batch or two of these on the weekend and eat them during the week. Last weekend I didn't make any, and breakfast got chaotic again, so it's gonna take some discipline. I might make another batch today and take pictures for another post. Mainly I want to get this down on the blog so I don't forget it, since it took several different tries to get the recipe just how I like it.

This makes a very dense, hearty muffin. If you look at the ingredients you can see that there's more fiber than flour, which is good for me, but doesn't make for a very fluffy, cake-like muffin. It's not very sweet, either, but to my tooth it's just right. They're quite tasty fresh, plain or with butter, and they do last the week for my breakfasts, but toward the end of the week they don't taste as good. They also mold after a couple weeks, because all the ingredients are natural.

For my next batch, I might try adding bacon.

Edit: Piccies!

Peanut Butter Bran Muffins
Makes 11 muffins

Soak for 1 hour:
1 1/4 c. buttermilk
1 1/4 c. bran

Whisk together:
1/2 c. melted butter
1/2 c. natural peanut butter
1/4 c. honey or agave syrup
1 large egg, room temperature

Mix thoroughly in separate bowl:
1 c. white whole wheat flour
1/4 c. almond or coconut flour
1/4 c. bran
1/2 c. Sucanat
1/2 Tbsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt, optional

Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Prepare muffin tins with one spray of cooking oil in the bottom of each cup. Whisk bran mixture into wet ingredients. Add dry ingredients and stir just until everything is moistened. This makes a very lumpy, thick dough that looks like dark brown oatmeal. Fill 11 muffin cups almost full, and add a little water to empty cup to even out baking. Bake for 18-20 minutes. (18 is perfect in my parents' convection oven.)

Notes on ingredients:
If you don't have or want to buy buttermilk, you can make it by adding a few teaspoons of lemon juice or vinegar to a measure of regular milk and letting it set for a few minutes until it curdles. That's usually what I do, or you can also buy buttermilk powder and keep it in the cupboard.

Sucanat is like brown sugar, but granular because it's made directly from evaporated cane juice instead of from adding molasses back into white sugar. I get it at my local bulk foods store. That's also where I get the bran and the natural peanut butter. The peanut butter is ground fresh in the store, so it's very soft and creamy, without the layer of oil you'd find in national brands like Smucker because it hasn't had time to separate yet. If you can get your peanut butter that way, I recommend it.

I used agave syrup because one of the original recipes I experimented with called for it, but when this bottle is gone I'm going back to honey. It's really not any better for you than honey, just digested in the liver instead of the intestines, and it has kind of a medicinal aftertaste. And again, I can get local honey from the same bulk store.

Melted butter is my oil of choice in baking. It adds a touch more sweetness, and it's better for you than highly processed oils. But you can certainly use canola or regular vegetable oil if you want. When I use the salted kind of butter, I don't add the salt in the dry ingredients.

I get King Arthur brand white whole wheat flour at a big box store like Wal-Mart or Meijer. If you don't want to use almond or coconut flour, which I add for EVEN MOAR fiber, you can just use 1 1/4 c. of regular flour instead. White whole wheat is a little lighter than regular whole wheat, with the same nutrition value.

Experimenting with recipes is fun! Early experiments didn't turn out perfectly, but they weren't failures, because as the Mythbusters say, every experiment is data. And I still ate all the muffins.

Proving I can still write. Written right in the post entry box, no beta, hardly a proof-reading.

Title: In This Black Forest
Summary: No one cares that you're broken.
Spoilers: Season 7 Finale.

( Cas is gone. He fluttered off. He doesn't like fighting.Collapse )

May the Fourth be with you!

My eyes have been SO bad, for SO long. Not just blurriness, but distortion, multiple images, mosaics of halos around light sources at night.

With my new contact, I can see 20/20 again. It's so amazing. I still see multiple images on high contrast edges, and halos at night, but I can function again. I'm incredibly grateful.

I've been making a list of Random Things I'm Happy to See.

Individual blades of grass
Individual hairs on my friend Jacob's beard (and his piercings, I could never see them before)
How beautiful Hawaii Five-0 is
Trees
Bushes
Sunsets
My Pathfinder character sheet
Pretty dice I couldn't read for the longest time
How low-quality some of the photos are on the news sites I read
Wrinkles on faces
The colors of people's eyes
Words in the hymn book at church
Lines on the road not splitting off into the distance, but staying where they're supposed to be
The fond smiles I get from friends when I do something silly, like being stupidly excited about using fireball
The detail on the Fury drop in Sims Social (never saw the face before)
All the high-quality art in MouseHunt
All the bug smears on my windshield
The flaws in my own skin
How bloodshot my eyes get when the contact rubs wrong
My pet mouse's whiskers (there are so many, and they are so cute)
The patterns in my pet cat's fur
Speckles on jellybeans


I get this little burst of pleasure in my chest every time I notice something that I couldn't see before. And there have been many, many bursts of pleasure in the past couple of weeks.

My contact can be a pain. It's not as easy to use as a soft contact, and putting it in can take me a dozen tries, though I'm getting better. My eye gets sore and dry sometimes, and I'm learning to use eye drops instead of rubbing like I instinctively want to.

But it's so...incredibly...worth it.

I'm looking forward to reading for pleasure again. Haven't done that for a long time. Maybe I'll finally get some writing done, too.

Holy crap, you guys, Hawaii Five-0 is even more beautiful when you have working eyes. Whoda thunk it?

I seriously didn't think it was possible to like this show more than I already did. But being able to see it clearly actually helps. Weird.

Do you remember the first time you saw TV in High Definition?

Imagine that, but the world. Imagine that, but it's everything.

Roads and people and houses and cars and shirts and papers and my parents.

This contact lens. My eye is watering like crazy and when I look in the mirror it's incredibly bloodshot, but I can SEE that it's bloodshot. And that's new.

The first thing I said to the eye doctor was "I can see all your wrinkles."

He took it as a compliment.

http://memebase.com/2012/03/07/internet-memes-fandom-base-step-one-put-snake-in-a-box/

I get my first contact lens tomorrow. Here's hoping it fixes things! My doctor says it has the potential, but there's no guarantee. So I am excited and a bit nervous. We'll see. ::crosses fingers::

::nods sagely::

Cannot decide if I love or hate the new Glee character.

( Glee, you so weirdCollapse )

( Raising HopeCollapse )

( Criminal MindsCollapse )

( SupernaturalCollapse )

( Hawaii Five-0Collapse )

( real life, keratoconus, bad eye daysCollapse )

And yeah. That's my life in the past little while.

Cutest, funniest Sherlock BBC vid I've seen yet. ♥ ADORBS. Has spoilers through Season 2, so watch out.

But then again, if you haven't watched S2 yet, why not? Come to my house and I will watch it with you! It'll only be the...third...time for me. ::shifty eyes:: No hardship!

Fandom: Supernatural
Title: Beer Bottle Grace
Author: Maychorian
Characters: Dean, Sam, Bobby, leviathans, adorable little bits of Castiel
Category: Humor, AU, H/C
Rating: R for swearing and nasty imagery
Warning: (skip) Good Lord, but that boy has a potty mouth. Also some gore. Amputation warning because of leviathans.
Spoilers: Up to 7.10
Summary: In Which There Are Far Too Many Bitches for Dean, Sam Is a Genius Somehow, and Castiel Is Not Where He's Supposed to Be Because He's Dead or Something
Word Count: About 9500
Author’s Note: I started this at Christmas vacation, intending to have it up by New Year, or at least before hiatus ended, but that didn’t happen. Oh well. Apparently this is how I do fix-it fic.

( It started that night they did couples therapy for those two scary evil witches with their bitchy faces and bitchy voices and bitchy bitch problems.Collapse )

Did anyone besides me watch the halftime show and think that that first number was a reference to the 300 Vogue video? Because, seriously.

300 Vogue: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNRjzUB7Afo

Madonna Halftime: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UBiIVAbXPgU

Walk Off the Earth had a recent video go viral, five people on one guitar, maybe you've seen it. It couldn't have happened to a nicer, cooler band--I've liked them since I saw their cover of Backin' Up. :D But this, this is wonderful. It's the main guy from WotE and his little nephew, singing Blackbird by The Beatles. I used Blackbird in my soundtrack for Rain Falling Down, and goodness but I want to use this cover in future projects. Whiskey-rough adult voice with the sweet harmony of a young boy. Almost like Bobby and lil Jimmy-Cas. Nothing says Rain 'verse better than that to me.

Only thing that doesn't really fit is the beat boxing.

Okay, where did strangeandcharm go? I know she posted a good-bye post, but I completely forgot what it said. where are her fics now? I need to read some hefty Cas hc, and she's my go-to.

Please, please, if any of you guys decide to leave LJ, which is totally your right, don't delete your journal. I've been googling for like ten minutes, and all the links are broken.

Edit: FOUND! She's strangeNESSandcharm at DW. That was what threw me off. And googling didn't help. ::frowns at google::

GAAHHHH SAVE ME SOMEONE.

I am writing fanfic again. Of the SPN variety.

And it's been so long. And of course it's spurty and hard. And of course I'm having all the usual writerly awfulness of "omg I suck I'm worst writer ever why am I even trying what is WRONG with me and what is wrong with this what is this everloving crap I am putting on this poor paper digital word document omgwtfbbq".

So yeah, that's awesome. I started writing over Christmas break while on family vacation away from the internet and it was supposed to be this short thing posted by the New Year. I especially wanted to have it done before hiatus was over and it's NOT. It's, like, demanding to be epic, and I'm all frowning at it like, "No, stupid story, you are about the boys gathering Cas's grace in a beer bottle, you are not supposed to be epic, so stop trying to be. Your reach exceeds your grasp and it's not all cool and inspirational, it's just sad and pathetic and sad."

Dash it all.