Hi there! I'm Sophia, and this is my journal. If you want to know more about me and about what you can find on my journal, ( this is the place! )

Here you will find all the fanworks that I have created, compiled in one post and sorted by fandom for your convenience. Crossovers are listed under all relevant fandoms. Current as of March 2012.

( Fanfic! )
( Podfic! )

Ahaha, oh look, even before I post my complete movie thoughts about having seen Avengers, I'm writing up a whole post about the use of a single word in it? Yeah, that sounds about par for course for me. :P

So. I've been seeing a lot of conversation about ( that insult, you know the one I mean. )

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OH HANG ON, I should totally tell you! The remix_redux fics are de-anoned, so I can share with you the fic I wrote!

It is a remix of prettykitty_aya's fic countdown, and I had a lot of fun doing it. I rather like how it turned out!

When I signed up for remix_redux, I had this idea in my head that I was going to write a depressing story for once, that I would find a cheerful fic and remix it in terms of tone and make it a total downer. Instead I, uh, did the opposite, sort of? Yeah, I have problems writing things that aren't happy endings. :P

Title: With Odds Like That
Fandom: Bandom (mostly MCR)
Characters/Pairings: Gerard-focused, with Lindsey, Mikey, and Ray, and past Gerard/Frank
Content Notes: salty language
Length: 1044 words
Summary: Life goes on. (an art professor AU)

Read it on AO3 because I am too lazy to crosspost it here in its entirety.

Thanks to verity for the beta!

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Okay I think part of the problem at this point is that I am just not in the habit of responding to things promptly anymore? Even when there's no good reason for me not to! AUGH. Whatever.

ANYWAYS.

Last night I gave in and made some attempts at reading Teen Wolf fic, given how it's been all over Pinboard's fandom favourites for ages now.

The first fic I tried turned out to have super creepy rapey overtones that the author seemed to think was hot and/or romantic. And the thing is, it seems to be a popular fic! Lots of people have left kudos on it! Apparently the creepy overtones are going right over people's heads? :(

The second fic I tried (Open the Door, by renay) was much better. Stiles had all these irrepressible feelings! And self esteem issues! And a lot of obliviousness! Yeah, it was awesome and I liked it lots.

But then I began to rifle through what else the fandom has on offer, and I think that this fandom is really not for me.

First of all, Derek seems to be the most uninteresting-to-me character imaginable? Humourless, peremptory, and untalkative -- yeah, that is really not the way to my heart. And the fandom's pairing of choice is Derek/Stiles. So, there's that.

Second of all, werewolves are not actually intrinsically interesting to me. I can enjoy werewolves (let me recommend to your attention, for example, The Cage, by Alyx Dellamonica, an original short story about lesbians and a werewolf baby and fighting for social justice that is absolutely wonderful), but they are not a draw in and of themselves. Plus, the fandom seems to be relatively into omegaverse dynamics, because of the werewolf thing -- and I am not fond of omegaverse, because it seems to me to be distilling dominant/submissive aspects of a person to their biology and their role in sexual intercourse, whiiiiich I take issue with. (Is omegaverse something I should be generally taking issue with? Are there people who are doing thoughtful and nuanced things with it? I haven't come across any, but then I've only read a couple, so it might not be accurate for me to extrapolate out from my narrow experience.)

Third of all, Stiles canonically has ADHD and is on medication for it (!!!), but so far any fic I have read that has directly addressed that question has made me steaming mad. For example: Stiles goes off on an excessively verbose tangent and can't quite make himself stop talking; Derek responds that Stiles takes too much Adderall. NO. NO NO NO. It is the ADHD that causes the lack of impulse control and the over-talkativeness, NOT THE MEDICATION, WHAT THE HELL EVEN.

So in conclusion, this has been an exciting experiment in Teen Wolf, and I probably shan't be returning, no matter how many Teen Wolf fics show up on Pinboard.

(let me round off the werewolf story recommendations in this post with a third one, because recs should come in threes at the very least. From the Depths of His Heart, by sineala, an utterly delightful Eagle of the Ninth AU fic in which Esca is a werewolf. And if you do not know Eagle of the Ninth you should totally read it anyways as historical fiction about Roman-occupied Britain!)

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WELP sentientcitizen and I went to a fun. concert last night AND IT WAS SO GOOD OMG. Okay. Let's see if I can get down my thoughts in any sort of coherent way!

( Cut for length, because you know me and my tendency towards verbosity )

In conclusion, A+ concert, would see again.

(and, as Essie says, Nate has an excellent face. I appreciate his face a lot.)

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Apparently this is how I roll right now: ANOTHER POST about something I don't like! BECAUSE WE ALL KNOW I LIKE BEING GROUCHY? Um. That sounds totally accurate, yeah....

DAMNIT I WANT TO GET BACK TO SQUEE, WHAT AM I EVEN DOING?



I hang out in Pinboard's popular/fandom page kind of a lot and it's always fascinating to track fandom trends via the fandoms that show up. Like, for instance, I'd never seen a Hunger Games anything on the page in all the time I've been stopping by (which is, btw, EXTREMELY REGULARLY and has been since the page first launched), and then the DAY AFTER the movie was released? HUNGER GAMES FIC. It's fascinating to me, this indication yet again that fandoms don't get popular until there's movies/tv of them. The Hunger Games books are a huge fucking deal, lots of people adore them, and yet there wasn't enough fannish density or enthusiasm until after the movie came out for any of the fandom's creations to make it onto the popular/fandom page.

I've also been finding it interesting to notice the shift in popular pairings in Avengers fic that gets bookmarked. The stuff on the popular/fandom page used to be all about the Tony/Steve, with the occasional other mixed in. Then one day the first Clint/Coulson fic showed up among the variety of occasional other pairings, and I was like WTF because the pairing seemed kind of out there. Where did it come from? Who came up with it? And I shrugged, and was like, sure, whatevs, there's always people wanting to see what happens when you ship two unexpected people together. I mean, I certainly enjoy seeing what happens!

But these days? Something like HALF of the Avengers fic on the page is Clint/Coulson.

What happened?

The thing is, I'm actually kind of upset at the Clint/Coulson? Because fandom's random unfounded pairing of choice involving Clint and a non-comics-canon character used to be Clint/Darcy and I was ALL OVER THAT because DARCYYYYYYYYYY. And these days I see almost no Clint/Darcy fic, and people are all about the Clint/Coulson. It's one of those things that makes me think grouchily about the way fandom loves its white-dudes-fucking. Because I see no reason for Clint/Coulson to be more popular than Clint/Darcy except for the fact that it doesn't have a woman in it.

I don't have any objection to the ship Clint/Coulson itself! Excellent fic can be written for it! And I do very much enjoy reading fic about characters you wouldn't necessarily expect to ship, and I like the way that fandom is open to embracing the unexpected. In a vacuum, I could see myself really enjoying Clint/Coulson, because they are both fun characters to read about. But I am not reading it in a vacuum, I am reading it in a mindset where I can't help but think to myself BUT WHY NOT CLINT/DARCY??????

I also don't have any objection to those who like to read and/or write Clint/Coulson! You specifically enjoying it is not where I am seeing the problem. I mean, I certainly do ship plenty of white dudes with each other in some fandoms; but in other fandoms I ship PoC dudes, or white ladies, or PoC ladies, or indeed people who do not conform to standard ideas of gender (or race, on account of being, say, a different species), in a variety of combinations. If for instance I were to be judged solely on the basis of Fraser/Kowalski, my tastes would be rather damning -- but I am not judged solely on the basis of Fraser/Kowalski, just like other people are not to be judged solely on the basis of Clint/Coulson. So the problem is not any particular person!

No, the problem is that the rise of this ship is an excellent example of the endemic problem in fandom where the Ships That Eat Fandom are almost inevitably about two white dudes, and apparently my brain has decided that THIS is the ship on which to take a stand.

So this means that even though I'm quite sure there's very good fic out there for Clint/Coulson, written by excellent authors -- and in fact I have even read a small amount of it -- I don't actually want to read it. It makes me GRUMPY every time I see another fic involving Clint/Coulson.

I DON'T WANT TO BE GRUMPY BUT APPARENTLY THAT IS NOT WORKING WELL FOR ME RIGHT NOW.

(on a semi-related note, this all makes me wish yet again that I had done the thing I'd kind of wanted to do when the popular/fandom page was first rolled out, of keeping stats every single day about what fandoms showed up on it in what quantity. I could have made such shiny graphs out of that kind of data! And it would have been so interesting! *sigh* Although even if I'd done that it wouldn't have tracked things like the Steve/Tony vs Clint/Coulson vs Clint/Darcy thing)

(Oh, and btw, this is a psa to any of you who might have gotten a Pinboard account more recently, to go to your settings page and click the ticky that says you are a member of fandom. That will ensure that your bookmarks will be taken into account in the algorithm to put together the popular/fandom page. The more fans that do this, the better and more useful the popular/fandom page will be!)

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Last weekend I watched some hockey this weekend with my cousin, since I was visiting him and his family, and he's a fan of hockey. And I thought to myself, okay, I can be open-minded. I learned to like music I thought I'd never like. Maybe I can learn to like sports too! And at first I was like, I can see how this is nice. I could see myself learning to appreciate it to some extent.

And then the fighting started.

And I was like, OH RIGHT, THIS IS WHY I HATE THIS SPORT.

Seriously. Sidney Crosby, he of the awful concussion that had him out of commission for a ridiculously long period of time, got into a fight with some other dude who's ALSO been out recently with concussion -- quite a serious fight! And the crowd was cheering, and their teammates were banging their sticks on the sideboard in what my cousin tells me is respect/support, and I'm just like, SERIOUSLY THOSE DUDES CAN DO REALLY AWFUL LONG-TERM INJURY TO EACH OTHER, THAT IS NOT COOL. EPIC SADFACES FOREVER.

And some of the other stuff my cousin was telling me about fights, I was just cringing, because WHY. WHY DO THEY CONTINUE TO ENCOURAGE THIS SHIT?

Also, apparently European hockey plays on a differently-sized rink, a bigger one? And that makes a difference in styles of play, and makes for a game involving less physical contact, compared to North American hockey. And in international hockey apparently fights are cracked down on a lot harder, so fighting doesn't happen nearly so much. So it seems it is POSSIBLE to do hockey without the gratuitous violence! It is possible to have hockey that is about actually PLAYING THE GAME instead of pausing for regular bouts of free-form fighting, interspersed with lots of casual violent contact even between the fights! WHY CAN'T THAT BE THE KIND OF HOCKEY THAT PEOPLE CARE ABOUT?

Oh right, because people actually like the fights. :((((

*sigh*

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Also I should say:

If you have made fic or meta or podfic or anything else interesting in the last, like, MONTH, it is entirely possible I missed it and would appreciate a link from you! Or life news or whatever! TELL ME WHAT'S UP WITH YOU. <3

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I'm back! Again! And ugh, let's see if I can STAY back this time? I hope so! I LIKE being engaged in discussions with awesome people, I LIKE feeling free to post my random thoughts and feelings whenever I have them, I LIKE BEING HERE. I just have issues sometimes.

But I'm calling another amnesty for myself for the last few weeks, because I'm pretty sure that's kind of NECESSARY, and LET'S TRY THIS AGAIN.

And now some thoughts and feelings of mine that have built up while I've been away!


Thing One: YOU GUYS! sylvaine just -- ahaha, I say just, this is a good indication of how unparticipatory I've been with the internet of late -- did a PODFIC of ONE OF MY FICS!!!! (The Death of Each Day's Life, a short fic about Sleeping Beauty's relationship with sleep, post-waking up.) It is ridiculously flattering to have this happen, AND ALSO Sylvaine did a stellar job of reading it, and you should totally go take a listen. It is super cool!


Thing Two: So. Me watching John Green's Crash Course: World History is... one quarter learning interesting new history stuff, one quarter enjoying the charming script and graphics and John Green's John Green-ness, and half keeping a watchful eye to make sure that CRASH COURSE AGREES WITH MY TOTALLY CORRECT OPINIONS ABOUT HISTORY. So far it's doing pretty well! The emphases aren't always where I would put them, but overall, I approve! (Of course, it is hindered by its short format; each episode is about 10-12 minutes long, which is not very much time to cover a subject in appropriate depth. I understand and make allowances for this fact.) In conclusion, you should watch it, because it is great.


Thing Three: Apparently a theme for this post's Things is Awesome Stuff You Should Watch And/Or Listen To, because HERE IS ANOTHER REC. HUSBANDS THE WEBSERIES YOU GUYS. It is like someone was like, you know what the internet needs? Charmingly and hilariously and well written and acted low-budget short videos about one of the best possible fannish tropes! AND THEN THEY DID IT. The trope: accidental drunken vegas gay wedding. YES. And that sounds awesome, I know, and then it is EVEN BETTER THAN IT SOUNDS. I love it so much. YOU SHOULD WATCH IT TOO! And then cry with me about the fact that the second season isn't till SEPTEMBER.


Thing Four: Okay, nope, moving on from that theme to something else. Namely: WHY do I keep reading hockey rpf? It is full of people who do terribly embarrassing things all the time, and also lots of badly-researched concussions! Two things I have a lot of trouble dealing with!


Thing Five: Gosh. I've been poking around my old abandoned WIP drafts from about two years ago, and it is just CRINGING ALL THE TIME with me, because I was so much worse at writing two years ago. I know I'm nothing like brilliant yet, but it is so clear to me that I have made actual progress, and that's a really shiny happy feeling. I am IMPROVING. I am GETTING BETTER. The more I write and the more I read and the more I beta and the more I am betaed, the better I get! How heartening. :)

(of course, it also makes me get squirmy feelings about wanting to take down my older fics because WHAT IF PEOPLE ARE JUDGING ME BECAUSE OF THEM, but I know how sad I get when other people delete fics so I shall continue to restrain myself.)

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Hi! I've been kind of FAILY of late, haven't I. Yeah. Um. Sorry about that....

And this isn't actually really me back yet? This is me letting you know that the radio silence is going to continue for another week or two because I'm going on a trip. So NO NEED TO WORRY ABOUT ME while I'm gone! I will be back, I swear! And maybe I'll even work out what I need to do to approach fandom/the internet in a healthier way so that I don't keep finding myself abruptly disappearing like this! That would be nice.

<3 to you all.

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SO HEY, thanks, y'all, for your kind and lovely comments on my last post. ♥ YOU ARE THE BEST.


Thing One: Whoa, what? WHATWHATWHAT. Only six months later, and I finally finished editing all my author tags on pinboard so that they're not all accidentally private tags, as they were after I imported my bookmarks in! (pinboard has a feature where if any tag begins with a period, it is a private tag. A useful feature! Except that on delicious, my symbol for an author-tag was a period.) Soooo I had MANY HUNDREDS of tags that needed editing, one by one, and I am actually done! ngl, for a while there I was sure I'd never actually successfully do it. I'm so bad at finishing what I start.


Thing Two: I had Needing/Getting stuck in my head all day yesterday, but it KEPT ON morphing into Me & You and I DO NOT KNOW WHY.


Thing Three: The problem with reading interesting articles in print magazines is that I can't just bookmark them, or share them on tumblr, or whatever. ALL THEY CAN DO IS SIT THERE ON THE PAGE AND THEN GET FORGOTTEN. GODDAMNIT.


Thing Four: ...wow, it's weird. Apparently fun. is a popular band now or something? I'm well under a year into this musical-taste-expanding adventure and ALREADY there's a band about which I could say (if I were that kind of person) that "I liked them before they were cool"? This is a little freaky-feeling to me! HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?

And, I mean, frankly I wouldn't even know if I hadn't just recently read an article linked from their official twitter. I don't listen to radios or pay attention to lists of popular music or whatever -- so I was happily in my own little bubble of listening to their new album and comparing it with their old one and deciding what I thought about it and assuming it'd had approximately a similar level of response (ie, fandom was kinda into them because they're peripherally connected to bandom, but most people had never heard of them and never would). And then all of a sudden they're a big deal! If you google the word "fun", THEY ARE THE FIRST THING TO TURN UP. Which is just like WOW.


Thing Five: Always super weird to be reading a fic and not realize until halfway in that you've totally read it before.... AND THEN realizing once you've finished and you've looked at the posting date that there's no possible way you've read it before. I think sometimes my memory likes to screw with me just for the lulz.

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WELL. Today I got Officially Diagnosed with ADHD. So THAT'S a thing.

( cut for discussion of mental health stuff )

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Dear and lovely people, I come to you with a fic that needs to exist, and if YOU CAN MAKE IT HAPPEN, then you will make me very very happy! And if you can't, but you do have thoughts about what ought to happen, PLEASE DO tell me your thoughts in the comments!

This is where the idea comes from: if John Sheppard is the best boyfriend a sentient city has ever had, what does that mean for OTHER sentient cities?

So! Now I really want the Trojan war space AU, where Troy is a sentient spaceship/space-station/space-CITY TYPE THING OF SOME SORT. Who would you ship Troy with? How would that relationship go? Would this make the story of the Trojan war even more tragic? (I AM GUESSING YES.) Unless Troy and, uh, one of the other city-state spaceships fall in love and decide SCREW IT on this whole war thing? Or maybe something else happens? I do not know!

Basically: TELL ME MORE about the Trojan war space AU with sentient cities! In whatever direction you think such a story ought to go!

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I JUST HAD A SUDDEN EPIPHANY. You know what I wish? I wish iTunes would allow you to tag things with MULTIPLE GENRES. Like how on pinboard I can be like, this fic is about POLITICIANS and also ANIMALS and also ACCIDENTAL MARRIAGE. This song is indie and also rock! This song is rock and also folk and also punk! ET CETERA.

I WOULD LOVE THIS.

PLEASE ENACT THIS, WORLD.

THE WORLD SHOULD ALWAYS WORK HOW I WANT IT TO, RIGHT?

RIGHT.

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Music genre is complicated, and it makes me stare at my iTunes in despair. Once upon a time it was really easy! I just had a few categories: folk, folk-rock, world, christmas, children's, instrumental, and religious. That was all I needed! That covered all my bases! And it was really obvious what belonged in which genre category! Now? Every time I have a new song in my iTunes I trepidatiously wander over to Wikipedia to see what it says the artist's genre is and look despairingly at the number of different labels applied to them.

So I've added genres like "rock" and "pop" and "rap/hip-hop" and "electronica" and "jazz" and "country" and "indie" and "IDEK" and then pretty much flail helplessly when trying to figure out what genre to put things in.

I think I need to start splitting "rock" into multiple categories -- I mean, I've already got prog-rock separate. But "rock" like Elvis Presley and "rock" like My Chemical Romance are, uh, RATHER DIFFERENT, but HOW TO ARTICULATE the difference, and how to judge where everything falls, since it's not particularly cut-and-dried? And I need to start making attempts to figure out the stuff in "IDEK" (SCARY THOUGHT). But I would have no idea how to even begin with either of these hypothetical projects.

WHY SO DIFFICULT TO FIGURE OUT?

The problem, I think, is that genre is one of those "you know it when you see it" things, and I still do not have enough familiarity with music-that-isn't-folk to be able to know it when I see it. It's taken me many years of immersion in the world of SFF (reading the books and watching the tv/movies, reading people's thoughts, talking to people, etc) to be able to talk semi-articulately about what genre I think a given work is, especially a work in the boundary zones between genres. A few measly months of this music thing is certainly not enough time!

(this post brought to you by the fact that I just downloaded a new fanmix and am trying desperately to integrate it into my iTunes in a way that is useful to me.)

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Got my remix_redux assignment! At first I was like AUGH IMPOSSIBLE and then I was like OOOOOOOOOH MAYBE THIS? and now I'm like WANNA WRITE WANNA WRITE. But I have to go out into the thunderstorm (first one of the year?) and catch a bus. /o\

This has been Updates on Sophia's Life. Sophia out!

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The last couple of nights I decided to do some mending, which meant tv that doesn't take a lot of mental effort, or a lot of actual looking at the screen. So: I've now seen the second three episodes of I, Claudius! It continues to be a show that is a) clearly from a few decades ago, b) hilariously low-budget, and yet c) actually quite good.

I like how the show is packaged in a way that makes it clear they don't think spoilers are an issue. The back of each dvd box gives a plot summary of each episode. And I do mean summary, not teaser: it tells you all the major plot twists of each episode. Because of COURSE you're already familiar with who Livia's killed and how, or whatever! Good times. So: Livia continues to be quite extraordinarily manipulative and deadly and power-hungry, everybody else continues to die, and I'm having a good time rediscovering how much I actually know about this period in history. Like: I actually knew BEFORE IT HAPPENED how Livia killed her husband!

Unrelated to the tv show, I am so grateful I know how to sew. I think sometimes in dismay about people in the world who have never been taught, and would thus find even something simple like reattaching a button to be intimidatingly difficult. Knowing how to sew makes clothes last SO much longer, because you can just FIX them when there's a minor problem! Probably a quarter of my skirts have had to be mended by me at some point -- but because I could mend them without problem, they're still going strong, still look fantastic and beautiful, and I can still wear the hell out of them.

Sewing is an important life skill, and one that is not taken seriously enough!

I actually learned a new way of mending tears the other night. I learned it from Mara who learned it from an acquaintance of hers. It looks better and works better than what I was doing before and basically I'm really happy with it. ONGOING LEARNING, and the PASSING ON OF FOLK KNOWLEDGE. It is the best, and it is IMPORTANT!

Now that I'm done the straightforward mending it is time to work on the more complicated stuff in my mending box. Like the skirts that need panels replaced. Or the skirt that needs gores added, which I need to cannibalize from the fabric of a dress that no longer fits me. Or the knit dress I want to turn into a skirt. Or the pants (!!! Yes, I own the occasional pair of pants, though they don't get much use) that needs its waist redone because the elastic died and besides I don't want it to be an elastic waist.

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Ages ago justice_turtle and I decided to do an Iliad read-along together, and we are FINALLY DOING IT! We've created a community, geeks_vs_trojans, where our discussions will be happening. We'll do one chapter a week, with discussion posts going up on Sundays. The first one is tomorrow!

It's a moderated community, to allow both of us to talk openly about more personal reactions to the book if we so desire -- so if you want to eavesdrop, or participate in the discussion, join the community and one of us will add you!

I AM EXCITED.

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Thing One: Huh. I'm not usually a big fan of the correspondents on the Daily Show (SO MUCH EMBARRASSMENT SQUICK; I CANNOT DEAL), but I've seen the newest correspondent (Jessica Williams) twice now and she's really good. I actually enjoy her segments! So. GO JESSICA WILLIAMS. I hope she sticks around for a while!


Thing Two: Internet, stop introducing me to awesome new music! I can't keep up with you! Okay no I lie please do continue! You just make things hard. :(


Thing Three: It is always kind of tragic to come across a link to an older picspam, only to discover that all the pictures have died and you can't look at a SINGLE ONE and all that is left is the tantalizing comments between all the broken pictures.


Thing Four: PETE WENTZ STOP BEING ENDEARINGLY WEIRD ON TWITTER. Yeah, okay, I give up. Pete Wentz's twitter is addictive and I want to read it always.

I've been wandering over to take a look at it every couple days for the last while, and most times I look there's at least one amazing and bizarre tweet that makes me grin ridiculously.

But damnit, I CAN'T RSS IT BECAUSE TWITTER IS STUPID. I will start forgetting to check out his twitter if I keep doing this the way I am! I need to be able to aggregate everything I follow. TWITTER WHY DO YOU THWART ME.


Thing Five: Oh wow, okay. So I finally got around to googling the word "camisado" (HOW many months after wondering why that Panic song is called that?) to find out what the word means, and it's a really good title. (unlike most of the titles on that album, which just make me wtf-face at them.)

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