Lotripper

Slashababy 2010 fics are up! 30 gift fics, authors not yet revealed, please read and comment on all of them!

This year, I revamped the slashababy.lotrips.org web site: it's not spiffy but it's clean. It's nice not to be entirely dependent on LJ. I'll be poking at it, filling in the missing years, but it's a nice feeling to have it finally working.

WHEW!

Yay! Even the conservative part of the US has realized that not letting people fight and die in the military because of their sexual orientation is stupid and wrong. DADT is dead, finally!

In more fannish news, lobelia321 posted her help_haiti, Beer, Sweat and Tears (Orlando/Dom), it's an angst fest, satisfyingly unromantic, and wonderfully written.

I posted the May 2010 Lotrips listing, and am very slowly catching up. We still have a hell of a lot of fics, hidden in pairing communities and personal journals.

( random other stuff )

Breaking news: The Hobbit movie is going ahead, in New Zealand. Peter Jackson is directing it. Weta is doing its thing. The cast looks good. What a relief!

TORN (The One Ring.net) has covered this in excruciating detail, along with the Frodo Franchise blog. Andy Serkis knew it. And the New Zealand newspapers have been slightly hysterical for a week.

And in less fraught news, TORn has a great Meet Your Hobbit Cast report. Martin Freeman even looks like a Hobbit, and like Ian Holm, which is nifty. He was in the new Sherlock Holmes series, and I I'm not quite sure what to make of some of the prettier actors cast as Dwarves, but hey, eyecandy is good!

PS I apologize to various people about not getting back to you. I've been sleep-deprived and stupid lately, and I'm sorry.

Entertainment Weekly is doing a Cast Reunion Issue, and they have photos of of LotR actors looking happy and fabulous! They're from May and July of this year, and successfully hidden from fans until right now. There's a small photo of Dom, Elijah and Sean Astin on the front cover and three other photos of them, a gorgeous one of Bernard Hill, Sean Bean, Peter Jackson, Orlando, Billy and Andy, a photo of Hugo, Miranda, Cate and Ian McKellan (I know!), and a two page spread of Orlando and Pete. Oooo, I just found a Dom, Elijah and Sean article... The text here and in the magazine is OK, the pictures are priceless!

Let us all praise EW and primula_baggins who made scans of all of them to share!
( fangirl squee to the max! )

There's also video! Dom, Elijah, and Sean were filmed doing the photoshoot and telling stories, also on the on the EW site. ( embedded video behind the cut ) rakshi already has screencaps!

It's like someone decided to cheer up my whole week, and I'm going to bed a happy fangirl, (especially if more people sign up for slashababy!)

Hobbit announcement expected by Friday (NZ 3 News). PJ and Fran Walsh visit the Beehive for Hobbit talks (apparently the Beehive is the New Zealand executive office building, and some people think it's ugly)

The whole process of doing the Hobbit, including MGM financing / NZ actor's union / director issues has become a bit farcical. Kristen Thompson's Frodo Franchise blog has tons of details, as does TORn.

I am usually the least likely to picspam, but then there were so many great new photos, I could not resist!

Sean Astin at Dragon*Con (photos by cara_chapel, posted with her kind permission)

and many more great ones
( and more in the grey shirt )

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Billy Boyd at the Dundee Rep (reposted with thanks to mata090680)

( more with the blue sweater )

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Dom at the LA airport (paparazzi photos) (reposting with thanks to mata090680)

( and more with the red shirt )

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New Elijah photoshoot (reposting with thanks to mata090680)

( more in the suit )

help_pakistan is a fandom auction set up to help Pakistan recover from the recent floods, with 180% of normal monsoon season rain. Apparently the causes include deforestation, population growth, and climate change. The community is a nice way to give together.

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Fanvid! Love the Way You Lie, The Gay Hobbit Remix - Merry and Pippin instead of Dom and Megan Fox, it's fabulous!

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( Orlando 'really excited' over baby )

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Late to the party: we saw Inception. We didn't buy most of the premises and the emotional distance, and even Ed got bored with the video-game chases, shootouts, and bombs. Inception is full of hot men (yay!), and Ellen Page and Marion Cotillard (yay!), but wow, it needs lots of fix-it fic, and my slash goggles are apparently non-existent. Eames/Arthur??? Convince me?

(I still love them so much, and I still don't know why.)

Orlando got married to his girlfriend of several years, Miranda Kerr. They've been all cuddly and cute in public lately, and pretty much eloped to the Caribbean in July to get married without fuss. Now there are rumors of impending parenthood. And there's wank, in the usual places.

Sean Bean is getting divorced, for the forth time. However lovely or annoying he might be, he's clearly un-domestic and goes off filming around the world (Ukraine, South Africa, Ireland in the last few months). Or he's pining for Viggo, anything's possible ;-)

Elijah burbles happily about music - in this case, mostly random vinyl he hasn't actually listened to.

Billy is playing the lead in Sunshine on Leith, a musical set to Proclaimers songs, how I wish I could go see it! It was Billy at TORn and berreh who introduced me to The Proclaimers, and I really like them, it would be bliss to see it, sigh.

Here's Billy's first video-blog-thing, just him on camera, looking good and being charming. But... he does this horrible scrunching up his forehead thing, sort-of like a TNG Klingon, from 2 min 35 seconds onwards. I'm not usually critical about looks, I'm fine with them getting older, but this is awful, please, make it go away Billy!

Orlando got an honorary degree from the University of Canterbury last week. They seem to have kept some nice traditions. The robe is Tudor, the hat is Elizabethan, the wig in the back of #3 is Georgian. A story could be set pretty much any time in English history from 1580 up to now. From here, thank you mata090680!

     

abundantlyqueer is posting fic again! She's done more of the Elijah/Orlando "Dragon Slayer" AU, lots of plot and character tension, still in suspense. And a fantastic Green Street Hooligans fic, Matt (Elijah's character) / Pete (Charlie Hunnum), dialect written so well I could hear his voice: Kick Off.

( funny things, free Mac thing, that word doesn't mean... )

More seriously: LiveJournal is purging old journals, the old suspended ones (kicked off for cause), and possibly some deleted by the users. And they're doing it now. Which means that familiar names may show up but are not the same people as they were before. Be careful before friending, k?

off to bed

I love research so much, it's ridiculous. I have a story bunny and now I know a whole lot about New Zealand's stance on imported Left-Hand Drive (driver's seat on the left) cars.

( so I'm going to share it! )

Wish I'd spend as much time actually writing...

Dom and Sean Bean are in a movie about bored rich guys playing war (ETA: it's currently called "Soldier of Fortune" and there's more info and pictures on dom_media (members only) and the Dominic Monaghan Resource.)

I looove this photo ( Dom and Sean Bean dressed as soldiers )

( This is not a beecake )

I don't usually inspire fic, but lannamichaels asked for a prompt and wrote a bittersweet 10-year-anniversary Lotrips fic: We Are Famous; Our Hearts Are Legends. The second-to-last line totally gets to me.

And as part of that fandom clan wank*, mochibuni wrote: I bet JK Rowling is thrilled, fucking thrilled I tell you, that Harry is having a Slytherin leather pants gang bang somewhere with Hermione watching over the proceedings while sitting on top of a gilded hippogriff throne I challenged her to write it, and she did, even more crackficcy! with JRR Tolkien as her unsympathetic psychotherapist: The JK Rowling Sessions.

* my only comment on the clan wank is that articulate people should not reply quickly and publicly when someone seems to attack them or things they love. Actually, none of us should post in public in that situation, but the more eloquent a writer, the bigger a hole they dig for themselves.

Hah! I said not to trust the agent! Peter talked to the New Zealand Dominion Post aka stuff.co.nz, and said:

Jackson met studio representatives yesterday to begin the search for a new director but wouldn't rule out directing The Hobbit himself if a suitable person could not be found. "If that's what I have to do to protect Warner Bros' investment, then obviously that's one angle which I'll explore," he said. But stepping in as director would be difficult as he had signed writer and director contracts with Hollywood studios for two other films, with one likely to begin next year. "The other studios may not let me out of the contracts."

Lots of caveats there but it's better than nothing.

ETA: correction, it's stuff.co.nz, my favorite New Zealand site

The funding for the Hobbit movie is taking too long, the goddamn shitty studio executives around MGM acquisition couldn't finance their way out of a paper bag. They're not just delaying The Hobbit, they're screwing it up.

( Guillermo del Toro has to pull out of the project )

ETA editorial fussing + better icon + cut because of next entry

A friend of mine has gigantic student loan debts, and I want to help so I did a little research and found a newish law which implements Income-Based Repayments so there's a limit to how painful they will make your monthly payments:


Essentially, they can set it up so you don't have to pay more than 15% of your income if you are working, maybe nothing but accruing interest if you are unemployed or broke. If you repay under the IBR plan for 25 years and meet certain other requirements, any remaining balance will be cancelled (from StudentAid.ed.gov).

More information: IBRInfo.org - tons of info, including an animated video (!) and a repayment calculator, and a May 2010 New York Times series Answers About Student Loans.

Better things to come from the new new education law attached to HCR in March; no surprise, it passed with no support from Republicans. No more publicly-supported private loans any more, and as of 2014 new loans will set future repayment amounts limited to 10% of income, forgiveness after 20 years. USA Today and NY Times

For people with lots of different loans and private loans, start by looking at government debt consolidation options. Right now, if you have private loans and a nasty bank, you are screwed: you can't even discharge them through bankruptcy, and the interest just keeps piling on. However, there are bills in Congress to limit unfair practices and fraud, and limit repayment burden, including bankruptcy protection. These are being pushed by Obama and the Democrats, of course. For more, see the Project on Student Debt

(my links go to legit sites -- there are ugly scams out there: good advice from the feds)

ETA: National Student Loan Data System - see how much you owe, and to whom. I'm glad that's available, it's clearly worth filling out the forms.

Health care reform is all very well and good, but I want all my fandom friends to be well and secure right away dammit! So I found some places that might help.

I had a boyfriend working for the 1980 Census (yes, I'm that old), and they kept him on for months after the first wave was over. So please consider applying: it can't hurt.

( apply for jobs with the Census )

Americans tend to be conflicted about asking for government help except when they are automatic and/or we feel we've earned it, like unemployment benefits. But we can't really be self-sufficient, not now or here. We need backup, and that's what government should be for.

( You may be eligible for medical coverage )


( more possible benefits )

Boston by eff_reality

AU with Billy as a graduate student of film and Dom as a prostitute. Unlike most relationships, this one starts with the sex and then they move towards each other emotionally, but sometimes veer off in the wrong direction. This series works really well: it's slow and complicated and the sex is delicious, and there's chicken soup. Orlando and Elijah appear as friends. I'm enjoying the later chapters as much as the first ones, getting into both their heads in alternating points of view.

My LOTR RPS recs on delicious