Thanks for the menorah, meret!

Also, thanks so much to everyone who works on the AO3, including Systems, Tag Wranglers, Support, ADT and the rest of the crew, as well as to the Yuletide mods. For Yuletide, I’m the proud recipient of one of the few extant Tower Prep stories, Any Given Tuesday, which has our heroes trying to figure out one of the more mundane mysteries of Tower Prep.

Then, for Yuletide Madness, I got Thick as Thieves, an Alphas story showing the delicate negotiations between Nina, Cameron and Rachel, and Undercover Alpha, in which Gary from Alphas wakes up at Tower Prep and reacts exactly as you think he would.

Other recs: surfing the Revenge tag (now I know my first subscription when the fandom subscription feeds roll out on AO3!):

Living by Antecedents, by vegarin: As gen as it can get, Nolan-centric but with interesting Amanda (she’s always Amanda to Nolan) and great Jack

First and Last, by anonymous: Nolan and Amanda backstory.

Nolan Ross’ Bedtime Stories, by anonymous: Nolan retells the story in classic fairytale terms. It works!

Other recs:

Elementary Murder Mystery Analysis, by anonymous. Community: The voices are excellent.

Semaphore, by devildoll. Avengers etc., Tony/Steve. Full of witty asides and ridiculous concepts that just work, like Cupcake Avalanche. Excerpt:

"Not at all,” Tony says. As painful as this conversation is, it almost feels good to get it out in the open. “Look, I already had one person I was pining after who wouldn’t sleep with me, and I didn't really have the time to fit in another one, so I had to cut you loose. It's nothing personal, it was just a time management issue." …

Steve looks over his shoulder at the busted remains of the Hot Topic door, then turns back toward Tony. "You really wanted...?"

"Yes," Tony repeats, this time a little grumpily. God, this is torture. It's like he keeps ripping off the band-aid only to find another band-aid.

And finally, some non-fic notes:

Bob Dole and my favorite joke form: An apocryphal Washington exchange. Gingrich: “Why do people take such an instant dislike to me?” Dole: “Because it saves them time.”

Abigail Nussbaum on Homeland (so very spoilery but great analysis if you’ve seen it). Nussbaum is Mikey from that commercial: she likes it (mostly)! She doesn’t like anything!

If you loved Profit, you should know that ( vague plot outlines )

Fringe: ( Spoilers )

SPN:( Much vaguer thoughts )

TVD: ( Back to slightly more specific spoilers )

As for other TV: I have dumped The Lying Game as too far outside my core interests, and Ringer is on the bubble, as is The Secret Circle—get interesting fast or go home; I don’t have that much time to watch TV!

So, in case there is a big migration to G+, I have set up a placeholder G+ after deleting my RivkaT account there. The email is separate from my other services, and I’m now using three different browsers so that I can have my Blogger identity separate from my Gmail identity (which will work until Google decides that my online name isn’t good enough for it for Reader and Gmail either).  I’m not actively using it now. But if you want to find me there, I’m at Rivka Tee.

Mainstream pop-culture/remix-savvy media: have a Woody Allen supercut.

Fandom, specifically thingswithwings: have a manpain supercut.

The bonus meta post is well worth reading, and to my mind bears some eerie similarities to the reasons given by Jeff Koons for why he copied fashion photos in his painting Niagara, reasons which led a federal court to find that he was engaged in fair use.  As thingswithwings points out, there were dozens of examples to choose from without thinking hard, and that's what makes this such a useful commentary.  Also, I like excluding John Crichton for the reason given!