It's Weddings all round!

This weekend was the fantastic wedding of our friends Michael and Lauren, and ... wow.  Haven't ever done anything quite like it. 

( It was beautiful! )

Pimps (then I'm really going to do homework, really)

Ok, first off, check out this meta (link via sl_podcast )

What you want, what you need: fans and endings, and narrative satisfactions
 
From the article:

Authors are readers, and authors desire order and satisfaction as well. But the job of an author is to suspend satisfaction, that is, to sustain the reader's desire so she'll finish the story. Therefore the author's discipline is to resist the narrative path-of-least-resistance - in simple terms, to put off the happy ending. In order to balance security and risk/conflict, the author plays on generic expectations, so that the reader is simultaneously reassured (by the appearance of familiar tropes and structure) and challenged (by some appearance of newness - the fiction that this time it might be different).

Also, from fanthropology, there are three people who are trying to gather some informal information on slash - and they're really really interested in people who don't read slash answering their poll.  So, if you're bored, clicky!

From their poll header:

We (myself and my two co-moderators, shoemaster and lovelokest) are trying to gather some informal statistics on whether or not most fangirls (or fanboys!) are open in "real life" (RL) about reading/writing slash (i.e. are you in the slash closet?). We are co-moderating a panel at a very small fangirl gathering and this information will help us in our discussion. We would be very appreciative if you took this poll and PIMPED it to EVERYONE you know INCLUDING NON-SLASHERS. Thank you!!