all my keysmash are belong to you

And castielfest is DONE, baby, BOOM, baby, chyyyeeeaaahhh. Here is the masterlist, which consists of 11 fanarts and 83 fanfics HOLY MOTHER OF GOD. AH CASFEST, I remember when you were but a germ of an idea being batted around chat. Won't you look at you now! If you had cheeks, I'd pinch 'em!

For Casfest I received an excellent fic from gabby_silang called Elysium, which is everything I've always wanted from expat!Cas. It is rarefied and sharp, and I love it so. YOU SHOULD TOTALLY READ IT.

In other news, I sank further into the depths of the intertubes and got a tumblr. Same handle as my Twitter, that's right. Dunno what I'll do with it yet, but so far it's full of caves, deserts, and angels. By the way, explain to me how this is not Castiel/Anna fanart, unless it's Castiel/Claire fanart. Or Castiel/Scully.

While merrily tumblring, I stumbled across this and was like MUST FIND MOAR, and lo, I did! Kolmanskop, the abandoned diamond mining town in southern Namibia. In 1908, Zacharias Lewala found a diamond in the Namib Desert, and he showed it to his German supervisor August Staunch, who was like, "oh that's nice I guess," and mysteriously thereafter, a bunch of German miners settled in the area and began to exploit the land. The town declined by WW1 and was ultimately abandoned in 1954, after which the land began to reclaim it. The desert sifted in through the windows and doors, and settled where people used to. It's not that the sand fills up the silence; the desert brings silence with it.

Or it would, maybe, if Kolmanskop isn't now a tourist attraction. oh god I wanna go.

So yeah, I'm totally late to Kolmanskop appreciation hour, but here's a picspam to make up for it: ( 'You do not go into the desert to find identity, but to lose it.' --Edmond Jabes )

Speak up if you got a tumblr!

[originally posted at http://whynot.dreamwidth.org/34542.html | comments]

Parts of this remix were written months ago in the comment section of the original fic because sometimes I get carried away when I write comments. Also, what is it about fic deadlines that makes you more productive on fics with no deadlines?


Post-War Miracles (The Rising Sun Remix)
Hetalia. Japan/Germany, Japan/America-ish. 1341 words. PG13.
Japan and Germany after the war. A remix of zempasuchil's 高度経済成長 / Wirtschaftswunder from Japan's POV.

( There is a difference between ambition and passion, but it's easy to confuse the two. )

So, one time my dad was in Timor Leste, in a meeting that ran inordinately long because they had to translate everything from Portuguese to English. (The official languages in Timor Leste are Portuguese and Tetum.) "And after the meeting, we started chatting," said my dad. "And you know what language we were chatting in? Indonesian!"

The guy reckons that in five years or so, everyone in Timor Leste will be speaking Portuguese and most people won't even know Indonesian. The translator said, "Naw, man, the kids'll know Indonesian. How'll they watch their sinetron otherwise?" (Sinetron are like narmy Indonesian telenovelas with a lot of tears and screaming.)

Which is hilariously unsurprising but also not hilarious at all. ( Let me get my soapbox. )

On an unrelated note: am I probably going to use part of my $25 iTunes gift-card to buy this?? STAY TUNED TO FIND OUT.

INSTAVIDREC: Merlin/Will set to Telepopmusik's "Close" fsnkjfksajflkjsdflkjdfd I don't usually do vids, okay, but I am warming to them, especially if they're gonna be ABOUT MERLIN AND WILL BEING HEARTBREAKING. omg. Watch it, guys.