oloriel | Irrelevant babble

Soooo I have no internet for a week and the world goes batshit. Again. I'll assume that the batshit didn't happen as a direct consequence of my offlinishness. I'll also assume that enough has been said about the batshit so I don't have to try and sum it up now.

Instead, I'll babble a bit about fannish matters.

Being without internet access, I was afraid that I'd miss the deadline for this month's SWG challenge. Finished the story (without access to my online sources, wah!), and today the internet came back so I managed to post it. Afterwards, I learned that the deadline has been postponed by two weeks (!!!) because so many people found it hard to meet it.
I should be relaxed and content but instead, I'm all fidgety and anxious. I mean, basically there are two options,
A) I got the challenge completely wrong and my response is useless and people will hate me and I'll get kicked out of the SWG (yes, I know it's not that kind of guild! Try to get my amygdala to understand that!). Half my f-list will kick me off theirs because I'm too stupid to belong there.
B) I just happened to be lucky and all is well.
(In all honesty, I chose Galadriel as my protagonist because you can basically throw every prompt at her and it'll work with her story somehow, right?)

I've decided against giving in to my panicked inner critic and rework the whole story because of an anecdote my husband likes to tell about his graduation exams in maths. It was a four-hour exam and he was done after two hours, so like any normal person, he was convinced that he had missed something important. So he triple-checked his responses and, indeed, he found an error pretty early on in his calculation, based on which all the rest of his response was wrong. Relieved, he reworked the whole thing and handed it in.
His grade was OK, albeit not as good as he'd hoped.
Ten years later, you can look into your exam papers, and Jörg was curious.
Next to the erroneous calculations that Jörg had crossed out, the teacher had scrawled "1+" (the best possible grade in Germany). Underneath the corrected calculations, the official grade of "2-" (between B and C) was accompanied by "too bad". Jörg had got it right the first time... and because he hadn't trusted his luck, had thrown away a perfect grade.
(On the other hand, he scored one in Latin because the exam text happened to be something he'd translated with a student he was tutoring a mere week before the exam. I can tell that story now because this was all a long time ago! As illustrated by the fact that he could choose Latin for his language exam. (I hear my old school recently added Chinese to the exam canon. O tempora, o mores. Not that there's anything wrong with Chinese, it just goes to show how the focus has changed!))

So I'm just not gonna touch it at this point and see what happens. It's only fanfic, right?
(Whom am I kidding. It's never "only fanfic". It's always a brainchild that's out in a potentially hostile world!)

- - -

Since it's now getting broadcast on German TV, I could use this chance to rant about everything that annoyed me about the ultimate season of Sherlock, but I'm not sure I should open that can of worms. Or should I? Do any of you want to? For the time being, let me just make fun of myself. There's definitely a LOT of beef to be had with that Sherlock season but the thing that bothers me most? Is a purely linguistic thing. Call my hypersensitive, but I'm seriously annoyed by the choice of name for the secret sibling! FFS! Parents who call their kids "Mycroft" or "Sherlock" wouldn't suddenly go for "Euros"! They'd be far more likely to call her "Eastwind" (possibly "Eastwynd"?) if that's the meaning they want. As it is, it almost feels like some sort of commentary on Brexit and I'm not sure that the Brussels Beaurocrats, whatever your stance on them, warrant being represented by a gifted chaotic evil psychopath. I know, I know, I'm being silly. There are far more serious issues than the damn name.