So azriona tagged me in the 11 questions meme where you answer questions from your tagger and then make up questions for other people. Here goes!
1. What kitchen tool is your favorite?
My French press, because it makes me delicious coffee.
2. If I was only going to read one book/fic for the rest of my life, what book/fic should it be? (If you are a writer, you can make this trickier and tell me which of your books/fics I should read.)
Goodness, I'm not sure I know your reading tastes well enough to pick only one book for you! If I was picking only one book to read for the rest of my life, I'd pick The Lord of the Rings. There's just so much there. I don't mean only in terms of sheer number of words. The worldbuilding is so deep and the story open to so much analysis. It's problematic in some ways, but there's reasons this book is so influential. However, not everyone enjoys Tolkien that much, so read whatever makes you happy.
3. What figure in history do you feel sorry for, and why?
-Alan Turing. Played a vital role in defeating the Nazis, one of the foundational figures in computer science, and still his government subjected him to abominable treatment because of his orientation.
-Rosalind Franklin, who made critical contributions to discovering the structure of DNA but is remembered as secondary to Watson and Crick, when she's remembered at all, because she was a woman in a man's field. She should have gotten a Nobel Prize, but she died of ovarian cancer before the prize was awarded to the group of her male colleagues, so we will never know if the Nobel committee would have recognized her properly with them or been sexist twits.
-Innumberable historical victims of sexism, racism, homophobia, religious prosecution, colonialism, and tyranny. Those issues are by no means solved, but in many parts of the world they were much worse in the past.
4. What store would you work at purely for the employee discount?
Most any decent bookstore. Sock Dreams.
5. Current reading material (either fic or non):
I just finished 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson, which contains some fantastic hard-SF worldbuilding and a very welcome attention to ecological issues (including one scene of environmental restoration so wonderful I was very near to happy tears), but was also quite slow-moving and had a sentient-computers plotline that I didn't think entirely worked. Next up is the graphic novel Pretty Deadly by Kelly Sue Deconnick. In fic, I'm currently in the middle of we did not make ourselves by M_leigh, a Steve Rogers/Bucky Barnes story which is super gorgeous but so far hurts my heart.
6. You wake up at 3am. It’s raining. The cat is meowing to go outside. What do you do? (Bonus points if your first answer is not “Wonder when I got a cat.”)
IT'S RAINING!!!!! IT'S A MIRACLE!! HOLY SHIT! WATER FALLING FROM THE SKY! POST ABOUT THIS TO EVERY SOCIAL MEDIA OUTLET AND GO DO A RAIN DANCE OF JOY OUTSIDE! (I live in California. It hasn't rained here in approximately forever.)
If it's some utopian future where we are no longer in a drought: (a) Attempt to ignore and go back to sleep. (b) If cat persists and makes sleep impossible, eject cat from room and close the door. (c) If cat is yowling loud enough or attempting to claw up the carpet outside my door such that I can't fall back asleep, go ahead and let her out. It's her business if she wants to be wet. (This is for my roommate's outdoor cats. If I get cats of my own I plan to keep them indoors, because I value birds.)
7. Describe the view from your window.
Small houses, a few trees, the pedestrian bridge over the railroad tracks to the Amtrak station, and some shops just past that. More distantly, hills rising up above the town.
8. Other than this meme, what was the last thing you wrote?
I’m working on a Sherlock/Marvel Cinematic Universe crossover fic which has Bucky Barnes, in the early stages of recovering from his Winter Soldier programming, stop by the Watsons’ flat to have an awkward cup of tea with Mary and talk about moving on from being assassins. I have no idea when/if I will ever finish this fic, and I'm pretty sure that nobody else wants to read as much Mary backstory as I'm putting in, but I'm enjoying the writing of it.
9. If you were going to cook dinner with me, what would you want to cook?
Something delicious and vegetarian. I am nowhere near as accomplished a cook as you seem to be. Maybe risotto with a pile of veggies or mushrooms? I love risotto, but while it's reasonably idiot-resistant (hence why I can cook it) it does require a lot of attention, so that might be nice to cook cooperatively.
10. What’s your favorite type of candy to get at Halloween?
Skittles, Nerds, candy corn. I love fancy chocolate, but the cheap-ass chocolate that tends to be given out at Halloween is inferior to fruity or sour candies or the weird irresistibility of candy corn.
11. Teenagers show up at your door wearing a Halloween costume. To candy, or not to candy?
Given them candy! The two years I've been in this apartment I've had zero trick-or-treaters, so I'd be delighted to see some teenagers provided they had decent manners and actually wore costumes. No costume, no candy.
Okay, here's 11 questions for those I tag (or anyone else who wants to do the meme):
1. Which fictional universe would you most like to visit for a short (say 2 weeks) trip?
2. Which celebrity would you most like to have as a best friend?
3. If you had the power to bring any one extinct species back to life, which would you choose?
4. Name a few (however you choose to define a few) songs you've really been enjoying lately. Not necessarily your all-time favorites, just your current jams.
5. Rec a fic or five (or some other number that seems right) you've enjoyed recently!
6. If budget and your current sewing/crafting skills were no issue, what character would you most like to cosplay?
7. If the Doctor showed up in the TARDIS and offered to take you one trip anywhere in time and space, where would you ask to go?
8. What do you typically have for breakfast?
9. If you got to make one amendment to the Constitution (or the foundational law of your country if you're not from the US), what would you change?
10. What’s your favorite place to be outdoors?
11. Are you wearing socks right now? If so, what color/pattern?
I’m going to follow azriona's lead by tagging the last 11 people to like/comment/reblog a post. I like this because it eliminates the social stress of trying to figure out who to tag. So: spaltor, thedriftingtardis, timemachineyeah, argyle4eva, 221bbuttts, aliceneedsadrink, absinthes-lady, whaletattoos, mysticalchildisis, awkwardoscar, and tuulikki.
As usual, only do it if you want to, and anyone who wants to answer the questions go ahead even if you're untagged!












