I am not human.

Back in 2006, kaleidoskope made a matching set of Severus and Remus in Santa hat icons. I've got the Severus half, but I'm missing the Remus half, which has Paul McGann as Remus. Does anyone happen to have it?

- the Severus half of the set

All right, last year, I made a call for Snupin holiday icons in about mid-December: Our Holiday Icon Round-Up from last year.

This year, I thought it would be nice if we could start earlier with fresh icons. First, anyone is welcome to snag any icon on the old post.

Second, if any artists (traditional medium or otherwise) would like to offer brand new holiday art to icon, or would like to make icons from holiday art they'd made in the past, please link your offerings here or make a new post to the community.

And there is a hidden third - if any artist would like to send me holiday art for iconing as gifts for snupin_santa participants only (usually given at the end of posting), I'll icon them (or you can!) and send them on to McKay. You can email me art for SS participants at: lupinsnape @ gmail.com - take out the spaces around the @. McKay will probably made a separate icon request as well, so this is just to add additional icons to the mix.

Are you starting to get excited for snupin_santa? WHEE!

love, lore

Worked in the yard for 3+ hours today; raked (w/ SO's help) 10 bags of leaves, also planted about 100 bulbs (daffodils, crocuses, iris). Am now tired and sore. OTOH, I slept in till almost 9, so I'm less tired than I might be.

Have also talked with my mom, and am about to go start cooking soup and chicken. SO is walking Juno with the neighbors and Scruffy. Was too brain-dead to work on resume etc., but maybe will manage a bit after dinner, and also plan to read for tomorrow's class.

The first two need to be made about 3 days ahead; I'm not doing the pickled peaches for Thanksgiving this year, but I'll make the cranberry relish tomorrow. Not making pumpkin pie this year either although I expect it will be around, just made by someone else.

• Pickled Peaches


• Cranberry Relish


• Pumpkin Pie

*falls over in gratitude*

Dear God, I hope my recipient likes it!

I've got a 4k word snupin santa fic that needs a beta.  The flu got the last one so beware.  It's a got little angst a little fluff  the usual NC-17 from me.  SPAG needs serious help as always!  Any other comments or helpful hints are most welcome!!  

• Holy crap, these dogs are gassing me out! Air freshener, stat!

Automatically shipped by LoudTwitter any damn time it pleases. *scowl*

As I ended yesterday, I was preparing for my Epic Campaign to encourage more Snape/Lupin.

By Epic Campaign, I really mean that I decided to comment on every Snape/Lupin I came across, and that anytime I saw anyone offering drabbles or art, I would ask for Snape/Lupin. Now, you have to understand, the RPG was my first attempt at interacting with fandom. I don't think I had even commented on many journals then. So, when I say I started commenting and asking for drabbles/art, this was a big deal for me.

I made myself one ground rule: Don't say anything to anyone that I wouldn't want to hear myself as a creator. That meant not asking when the next chapter of a Work in Progress might be out or asking for a sequel, or commenting to someone else without actually commenting on the fic or art itself. Two years of lurking will at least teach you what not to do. There were times when I worried that some regular Snape/Lupin writers (*cough* McKay, Arion *cough*), were going to think I was a stalker, but I toughed it out in the name of more Snape/Lupin. ^_^

I'd like to think that my enthusiastic squee and encouragement helped inspire more Snape/Lupin in some small way, but I suspect Arion and McKay's April Showers challenge had more to do with it. Actually, what happened during that same month is that I had been thinking of asking to help out at lupin_snape for quite a while, too shy and under-confident to act. But the renewed interest in the community and the mods' busy real lives made several other Snape/Lupin fans muse "aloud" in their journals about asking to mod at the community.

And yes, my ego has come far enough along now to admit that I thought I was the best person for the job at the time and that I'd better get on the stick before the others went from musing to asking. I was wrapping up the RPG, and I'd gained some experience managing a group of people with varying desires and needs from the game. I'd made plenty of mistakes, which helped to an extent, although I feel I've made plenty of mistakes at lupin_snape, too. I guess I learned that I could make mistakes and only hold on to them quietly, rather than actively beating myself up over them. ~_^

But I had ideas, too, and, again, those two years of lurking showed me which communities thrived and which died out after the initial excitement waned. For just about 5 years, the ship has been running strong, mainly because there are mods obviously on-duty there. People want to know that other people are paying attention. What kind of a "community" runs steadily without a sense of togetherness?

My modding philosophy has been simple: It's Our community, not my community. A community is nothing without its members, and I've tried to run lupin_snape as openly and all-inclusive as possible while maintaining that final "say" only because sometimes someone has to make the decision. I can't think of any time I've actually put my foot down, other than to protect the community from spammers, and to this day, I've never banned anyone except known "problem" accounts from back in the Russian Invasion LJ days. Anyone who tells you that they're not welcome at lupin_snape is imposing her/his own exile.

I remember one of the people who wanted to mod (long gone from fandom now), talking about how she wanted to take over and then she could demand Marauders-era fic because that was her favourite era, which scared me to the bone. Snarry, even back then, had more than one "basic" community, and I knew the Snape/Lupin ship wasn't big enough to survive with a lot of splinter communities, which is what would have happened if LS (Lupin_Snape from now on) had become Marauders-focused. Eventually, someone unhappy with that focus would have gone and started Snape_Lupin_Adults or something, and the fans would have been scattered. The ship might have never grown.

Hum. I've meandered away from the question. It's because I love LS and its members so very much; I could go on about it all day. So, after being frightened into action, I consulted with a few friends for some final hand-holding and wrote the mods, offering to be the active mod. I was completely surprised when both women responded within the week with easy Yes'es, and my account was given mod status. Surprised, only because I thought it would be harder to convince anyone to take me on. ~_^

My first month was kind of rocky because I'd barely introduced myself when there was a major death in the family. But you know, in case anyone has the wrong impression, the original LS mod, makishef, has always been interested in the community and pairing, she just didn't have time to maintain a hands-on approach to the community. That month, she stepped right up and made sure the monthly challenge was issued and on-track while I was away. The other mod that was on board when I came on has since moved on, but she was always friendly and supportive as well. They're great gals, and I hope no one thinks anything but the best of them. We wouldn't have LS without them.

I was back by June with a new monthly challenge and there's been something new every month or two since then. I think people cross-posting their challenge-inspired works to their journals and other communities helped let people know that LS was an active, interesting place to be, as well as a treasure-trove of great Snape/Lupin content if they were interested in finding more. I think we hit 750 members by the end of the year and 1000 members a little over a year after the April Showers challenge. Somewhere along the line, "Snupin" became the preferred moniker for the pairing, and I stopped trying not to use it about a year after that. ~_^ I still use Snape/Lupin, though, when I go outside the community, if only because now that fandom is waning, new people coming in don't always get the squished nickname phenomenon.

So, that's it. That's how I came to be mod at LS. And while I answered why I shipped Snape and Lupin together before, in my normal fandoming I always point people here when they ask me why I ship Snupin. It's short and to the point, and I couldn't have said it better myself.

love, lore

Love the new behind-the-scenes HBP pics!

Naturally, ( it's caption time )

geri_chan asked how I got into Snupin and ended up as a mod for lupin_snape.

I think I've sort of told this story in bits and pieces in different places over the years, but to have it all in one place....

Once upon a time, I was a fandom lurker. I'd drifted into HP from XF and after a couple years of lurking, some LJ friends were pimping a new RPG on their journals...over and over again. I started to wonder if I shouldn't give an RPG a try. I wanted to write again and I'd been reading an RPG avidly, so why not try it myself? From my reading experience at my fave RPG and checking out a few others, I was sure putting in an application so late in the casting period would net me a super-minor, low-maintenance character like Hannah Abbott or Stephen Cornfoot (remember him?); a student character not close to the main action. I said I'd take anyone. I received back: Snape.

Severus Snape? Are you kidding me? I don't care about the adult characters?! Arrgh!

But I said I'd take anyone, so I went on a research bender for Severus Snape. O....k. You know, when you bother to look beyond the surface, there's something up with Snape. He's not just the year-long red-herring; he's Albus' right-hand, he's powerful, he sees through Harry and when Voldemort comes back, Albus sent him off to re-join the Death Eaters (this RPG started in the weeks before OotP was released). I came to respect Severus Snape while looking at the facts. I fell in love with him when I started reading the fan fic.

RPGs are all about the shipping, did you know that? (*snicker*) I started to wonder with whom I could possibly ship Snape (even in a longing, unrequited way in the RPG). I ruled out the kids right away (I didn't even know what "cross-gen" was back then, but I don't like unequal relationships), and I realised there were no developed women in HP that were Severus' age either. I'd just had the slash light turned on by Aragorn/Boromir -- surely I could slash Snape! There were at least a few candidates around his age. With those limitations in mind, I hit the Snape FQF archive.

I read several pairings for Snape, but the character that I kept going back to was Remus. I read some great stories in many pairings, don't get me wrong. But much of the Sirius fic was hatesex or I didn't recognize Snape or Sirius in them, and Harry fics bothered me as much as I thought they would. Albus usually involved power games, the Weasleys weren't really in play back then, Kingsley wasn't on the horizon, James was dead, Lucius was a married bad guy and I wanted my Snape to secretly be good, etc.

Severus had real history with Remus. They were the same age, had held the same job, had gone to school together, had darkness tinging their souls. Snape had followed Remus' gang around school, Remus had almost killed him and Snape still made him Wolfsbane. Severus and Harry have history, but it's convoluted and uneven at best. Same with Albus. And Sirius, not so much. In fact, I've always found it hard to believe that Snape/Lupin wasn't a popular ship right off the bat. Maybe it seemed too easy to some people, I don't know.

ANYWAY, the more I explored Snape/Lupin, the more in love with the idea I fell, until Snape/Lupin was all I wanted to read. The problem I had was that there wasn't a whole lot of Snupin out there. After I went through the FQF, I found lupin_snape, which, at the time, did not have much activity, and I scoured the journals and archives from there. Once I'd exhausted all the resources I could think of, I knew there was only one thing to do:

Go on an Epic Campaign to encourage more Snape/Lupin.

To Be Continued in the next post. I started this late for a reason....

love, lore

We need a pinch hitter! We're looking for someone who can write fluff and AUs/ARs. No dark!fic, sorry. The deadline for the pinch hit will be December 14.

If you're interested, email the Snupin Santa mods at snupin_santa @ yahoo.com. Thanks!

Finished the pathfinder, both paper and web versions, and submitted 4 hours before deadline. *does happy dance* Only one more major assignment, plus a final exam, for the two LIS classes, if I remember correctly. Will double-check tomorrow. Possibly a minor thing or two as well, not sure.

Also today took SO out to lunch, went to four stores for grocery and other shopping, and made a white-bean-and-greens dish that turned out pretty well (which is good since there's like 3 or 4 more meals' worth!). Watched part of ST:XI during dinner, SO's choice.

Tomorrow: walk Juno (hopefully) and/or do some yard work, work on resume and job apps, cook for the first half of the week, talk to maternal unit, and do some reading for classes.

Other things to do over the next week: start writing holiday letter/cards, make a lot of cranberry bread, possibly bake regular bread, write/edit some fic, work on last big LIS assignment, go to the art museum, cook a lot, clean the house, and do the last course preps for the term. I was really really clever and managed to schedule things so that I don't have any grading of substance to do over Thanksgiving, go me!

Urf. I am in writing lockdown until smutty_claus is done, because *draws hearts around story* but also *stabs it with a fork* a;slkjdfs.

But! Had to reappear for a moment to point out that the first-ever Harry/Scorpius Last Drabble Writer Standing competition at harryscorp100 just started. Yes, I have a soft spot for Harry/Scorpius, although no, I'm not in this competition. Just an interested observer. I only recently figured out a.) what LDWS things are, and b.) how they work, so now I want everyone to do them. :)

So, there are 15 writers in it, and each week they get a prompt, and then they write a drabble (defined here as under 500 words or so, I think or, in any case, not 100 on the dot), send it in, and they are all posted anonymously mid-week. Then readers vote for their favourite, reveals happen on Sunday, and a new weekly round begins, with one less person. Fifteen weeks later, we have a winner. Fun, yes?

Maybe I'm just addicted to reality TV shows wherein voting for favourites occurs? Hm.

Anyway, I point out this week's Week One drabbles because they are all super good. The first prompt was 'Age Disparity,' so all entries have something to do with the age difference. Scorpius is underage in some but not in others, so read the warnings and go with whatever floats your boat. I had a great time over coffee the other day reading through them and trying to decide on a favourite. No, I'm not always in favour of competitive stuff in fandom, and yeah, it sucks that someone has to be eliminated every week, but hopefully all the participants are okay with that and know not to take it personally. Anyway, if it appeals to you, go have a read through over there and vote!

In other news, I just read through a super awesome story for snupin_santa this morning that made me fall in love with Snupin all over again. Swoon!

*runs back to smutty_claus* Hope all your holiday fest stuff is in and you lot are having a relaxing weekend!

This is a completely Gluten free recipe, but don’t let that stop you, I’ve yet to find a single person who didn’t love this cake!

Title: Standing Outside the Fire

Author: azurerosa

( Flourless Chocolate Cake )

Submitted by: azurerosa

Mostly greens this time: collards, something that's either chard or beet greens, some greens that I can't identify but are clearly for cooking, green cabbage, a small head of broccoli, and cherry tomatoes. Still have last week's collards and beets, too. So - I found a recipe for beans and greens, cooked white beans w/ the greens then cooked in them, with garlic and olive oil. Should be okay and seems easy, which is a plus. Also going to make herb-baked chicken breasts and Russian potato soup, along with cooked radishes (SO is dubious, but willing to try) and cooked beets for me.

We're having Thanksgiving at our neighbors' (J & C), so I'm not responsible for the turkey, yay! SO is supposed to go over later today and find out what they'd like us to bring; he's already volunteered to bring the butternut squash and apple dish, but probably I'll make at least a couple of other things also. Thus I will not do the grocery shopping until after that's been determined. Sometime this week or maybe next weekend, I plan to make cranberry-nut bread for local gift-giving, too.

In the meantime, back to work on the pathfinder. The library catalog was being uncooperative last night; here's hoping it's working right this morning.

osmalic asked how I celebrate Halloween.

As a kid, I generally looked forward to trick-or-treating. I did that through age 14, and then I was officially too old for it. If only I'd have known then that most people ignore the age limit!

As an adult, I've tended to hold my own birthday/Halloween party. This is the first year we've had to cancel because of illness. Sometimes, when my birthday falls in the middle of the week, a party isn't as feasible. If the weather is good, we like to set up the candy in the front yard and make the kids walk through the leaves we refuse to rake. On occasion, we've also blared scary music.

I'm not really a great decorator or costumer. I kind of enjoy clever, low-labor costumes, but I had so many "that's lame" reactions that I stopped even doing those. In my house, it's pretty much Halloween year-round in terms of decoration, and my aunt always gives me something neat that's Halloween-themed, so while I have a huge pile of Halloween stuff in basement, I hardly ever get it all out. But I could deck this place out like the Adams Family mansion if I wanted to. *grin*

I love haunted houses, although I don't get out to them every year, but they're always on my mind each year. And I celebrate Friday the 13ths as kind of adjunct holidays to Halloween. When I'm particularly vexed, I take a hex for myself on Halloween.

Probably my best birthday was last year, turning over a decade and having all my friends and family around. It was a nice night and most of my friends got good and silly in front of a fire, which was different for us, but verrrrry entertaining. Worst that I care to document was definitely this year. ~_^

love, lore

Title: Traditional Wear
Artist: doveypoo
Media:photoshop and painter
Characters:Harry, Ron, and Hermione
Rating: R
Warnings: ridiculously long flaccid peen
Themes/kinks chosen: Costume
Artist's notes: At a costume party after a few drinks, Harry gets curious
Art preview:



( What an unexpected gust of wind! )

Or in my case, working on the weekend. We didn't have our usual Friday "date" tonight, i.e. going out for dinner, partly b/c we both have work to do tonight, partly b/c we had to eat out so much last weekend while traveling.

I graded quizzes and reading responses and wrote up the last paper assignment for one class this afternoon; also finished/submitted an LIS assignment, and spent 1+ hour in the library looking up stuff for the other one (due tomorrow). Dictated some drabbles and posted one (link at end).

Juno was not good tonight; our neighbor-across-the-street J. was over talking with SO and brought his dog Luna, and the two dogs were playing pretty well in the back yard. I fed Juno when it was her dinner time, and then gave each dog a biscuit. Juno ate hers immediately, and when Luna didn't and dropped it in some leaves, Juno went after Luna's and there was a brief brawl. SO and J. managed to separate them quickly, but clearly they cannot both be given food in proximity, or else there will have to be very close supervision.

Okay, I have to work on this assignment. It's not conceptually difficult or anything, but substantial. Sigh. Not due till midnight tomorrow, but it would be good to get most of the content worked out tonight and then all the formatting etc. tomorrow - it has to be presented as both a paper flyer and a web page/site.

Have I said lately how glad I will be when this semester is over? All right, here's the drabble:

• Luck [Kirk/McCoy, general]: Kirk's in sick bay, again. Here at LJ.

Get Your Sexy Name

Goodness.

Only just wading through my overflowing friends page. So thank you's to: iibnf, mabiana, ariadneelda, venturous, maddiec24, dacro, r_grayjoy, quiescent

for the well-wishes!

If I missed you, I probably haven't seen your post yet. I might not until much later, either, as I must get ready for a very rare night out with my beautiful spouse, who is going to take me somewhere (I don't know where) for my birthday. :D

*looking forward to it!*

Just a quick reminder to all daily_deviant members and watchers that the deadline for your Kinky Kristmas submissions is coming soon. You've got ten more days to turn things in. We've already gotten in some amazing pieces -- December is going to be fantastic!

Completed pieces are due by Monday, November 30 and should be emailed to dd.mods@gmail.com. Fic must be a minimum of 1,000 words and art must be a completed piece. Both fic and art must merit at least an R rating. No crossovers permitted. Watchers: your pieces must fit into a single IJ post. The mods reserve the right to refuse any fic that contains multiple SPAG problems or art that appears to be a last-minute slap-dash sketch, so be sure to plan ahead and find a reliable beta!

Remember, headers for both fic and art can be found in this post.