Those who cannot learn from history are doomed to be mocked

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Happy birthday to melancthe

Belated happy birthday to higlearn

I have been vaguely thinking about doing a poll asking what people thought was the all-time best Buffyverse fanfic. Perhaps ‘The Last Tin Soldier’ by liz_marcs? shadowscast’s ‘Fragments’ series, or her ‘Sock Puppet’? rahirah’s ‘Necessary Evils’? The short story ‘I, Bot’ that used to be hosted on Valerie X’s site (but which, alas, seems to have disappeared from the Net now and so I can’t name the author)? I gave up the idea of a poll because I’m not even sure that I could make up my own mind. Feel free to make suggestions anyway (and if anyone knows where ‘I, Bot’ is these days I’d be delighted).

I was also tempted to do a poll for Worst Ever Fic but I decided that it was a Bad Idea. Too much potential for upsetting people and starting fights. Oddly enough the story that I was thinking of nominating would have been my number one contender for Best Ever right up until the last page; but the ending was so utterly dire that it turned apparent brilliance into dross worse than the most dreadful Mary-Sue tale ever inflicted upon dwellers in the Pit of Voles by an educationally-challenged fourteen-year-old. And no, I’m not going to reveal what it is.

In what little time I have for writing on work days I'm busy with another little Olaf ficlet. Just 1,000 words, and my first ever 'Discworld' crossover. 763 words done so far. None of which, alas, will make a good last line. It isn't what is behind the cut; that's some minor bitching about the comics.

Well, that’s the end of the claim that ‘the comics are canon’. They’re obviously set in an alternate universe. I had my doubts earlier but this issue proves it.

There is some argument over exactly when wolves became extinct in Scotland. The accepted story is that the last one was killed in 1743 but it is also claimed that this is a folk tale and in fact they had died out some sixty years earlier. Either way, wolves in Scotland in autumn of 2004 wouldn’t just be ignored as a normal part of the scenery. They’d be as much a cause for astonishment as would a herd of mastodons turning up in Beverley Hills.

The comic world is not our world. It’s Earth-C, otherwise known as ‘The World With Scottish Wolves’.

I wonder if they have shrimp?

As for the ‘big revelation’ – I’m paralysed with not caring. I don’t give a toss who Buffy-C, the Badly Drawn Girl, chooses to sleep with.

Oh, and Dawn is going to die soon if they don’t find a way to reverse her curse. The Scots have a word for people who sleep outdoors in a Scottish winter. It’s ‘corpse’.