Misc Thoughts and Links

[meridian_rose]

fixitstory and royaltystory; two big bang challenges held at both LJ and DW. I'm not going to officially sign up to either, but I might keep them in mind as goals of my own.

For LotS fans:

Craig Horner, shirtless, playing guitar: http://instagram.com/p/c91FNCOIOc/#
Had no idea that Danielle McCormack (Shota) has a child with Spartacus's Pana Hema Taylor (Nasir). Small world. Mind blown. If Nasir were not a canon gay character I'd want crossover fic of Shota/Nasir.
Which leads to

Spartacus actors in bath photoshoot
http://elprimerodelafila.com.ve/top-10-spartacus/
The article is in Danish (?) but scroll past the text and vid links and you can look at the pictures. Katrina Law et al wet and nearly naked. You're welcome.

On reality, fiction, and metafiction

I've been thinking a lot about how my online life is as real and valuable as my "real" life. My fiction is, for a given value of real, real. Everything is perception:

"Our notion of matter as a solid substance is, like the color green, a quality appearing in consciousness. It is a model of what is "out there", but as with almost every other model, quite unlike what is actually out there."
Is Reality All in the Mind? http://www.peterrussell.com/SCG/ideal.php

Which leads nicely to something I discovered via a fanfic, "The Number of the Beast" by Robert A. Heinlein, and the idea the science fiction book proposed of
World as Myth.
"According to this idea, myths and fictional worlds exist as an almost infinite number of universes which are parallel to our own. In this multiverse, Heinlein's Future History timeline is merely a few of the vast number of constituent universes that comprise the World as Myth. In The Number of the Beast, four characters traveled to multiple fictional universes, including several of Heinlein's own. Others included E.E. Doc Smith's Lensman series, L. Frank Baum's Oz books, and Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland."
source
Ergo, fictional worlds are real.

Which leads to this cartoon, reminding me I need to write more of my metafiction verse where the characters are very much aware that they are characters in a book being written around them:

(Click through to the Tumblr post)