A Wedding and a Birthday (and Chocolate!)

A busy fandom day this day is, indeed. Rita Pietropinto Kitt, who voiced the snarky aunt Amy Barksdale on Daria, was married on this day nine years ago. She has an address for fan mail, so if you want to send her our regards, please do. (Amy Barksdale was married on September 8, 2001, of course.)

Just curious: Why were there never any alter egos of Amy Barksdale? Or Rita, for that matter, but mostly Amy? Anyone got any guesses? BTW I think her hair color is maroon or dark red, not auburn like Daria's. Just throwing that out there.

This is the 123rd birthday of the Statue of Liberty, and let us again say Thank You! to France for the gift that kept on giving. And great thanks to Pinhead for the revised and much enlarged image! (Click and see.) This is one of my favorite alter egos of all time.

According to some mythologies, today is National Chocolate Day, but there seem to be quite a few National Chocolate Days on the calendar. What the heck, celebrate anyway. Pig out.

Strange Thought for the Day: Did you ever notice how much some of the students and faculty at the medieval fair in "Fair Enough" look like they were popped right out of a Harry Potter pastiche? Think about it. Here's all this perfect fantasy fan art and no stories to go with it. (Almost.) Weird, man.

And now for the Halloween fanfiction. This date figures prominently in two different haunting fanfics: Mystik Slacker's "The Journal of Daria Morgendorffer," and Sam Lincoln's "The Space Between." Check 'em out. This is also an excellent time to read Richard Lobinske's "Bump in the Night." One particularly creepy story actually begins on this calendar day: "The Journal of Daria Morgendorffer," by Mystik Slacker.

Oh, heck, why not give away the store: go to this link and get the full Halloween experience from Outpost Daria. Best news of all: there's another stockpile of Halloween fanfic left to go! And more stories not included in either collection! (More tomorrow.)

PPMB

• Daria: Hunter, by Jim North (Parts 1 to 3): Underwear, shirt, jeans, glasses, socks, boots, shoulder holster, pack belt, jacket, gloves, Stetson. And, of course, her undersleeve specials. She performed a quick pat-down of her jacket and pants pockets to make sure she had her wallet and various bits of equipment on her, then stepped out the apartment's front door and into the only-just-bearable heat of yet another summer morning. Door locked, keys out, gravcar primed. Daria confidently backed the vehicle out into the skylane and set off to pick up Jane.
• Finn Morgendorffer 10: Finn the Brain, by HolyGrail2007 (COMPLETE!): Daria tried to crack a smile. She did enjoy it when her brother felt awkward. If Finn had cheated on this essay, Daria would have condemned him. If Mr. O’Neill took it easy on him, Daria wouldn’t have cared. But this was something else. You get to be a brain now, Finn, Daria thought. What do I get to be?

A few more thoughts:

Before anyone writes to me about all the Daria/Harry Potter crossovers out there, and there are a fair number of them now, I was more interested in seeing an original fantasy or modern fantasy take on everyone being a spellcaster or wizard of some kind. It's hard to do. I took the alchemical route with "The Other," but there are plenty of other ways to go with it, like astrology, magic use involving critter familiars, "psychic" magic, tarot magic, critter summoning, necromancy, and so on. The crossovers are great, I love many of them, but something different and original would be nice, too. My humble opinion only. See what can be done with this.

We close with a fifth "witch," Madame Blavatsky from Beavis and Butt-head. Click on her name in Labels to read more about her in an earlier post. Ciao.