Comment on this entry to receive four famous people to snog, shag, marry and throw off a cliff.

newtypeblue gave me John Barrowman, Neil Gaiman, Ben Browder, Edward James Olmos
kiyou_hime gave me three sets:
Set 1: Jensen Ackles, Misha Collins, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Jared Padalecki
Set 2: Prince Zuko, Ishida, Sirius Black, Vash
Set 3: Hugh Jackman, Gillian Anderson, Ben Browder, Gareth David Lloyd
ellabel gave me Jack Davenport, That One Guy From Lost With The Big Nose, That One Hot Chick From Pitch Black Claudia Whatsherface, Alan Rickman.
resemblingarwen gave me ben browder, john barrowman, edward norton, a not dead brandon lee
terioncalling gave me David Duchovny, Christopher Eccleston, David Tennant, David Boreanaz

Still waiting on some other sets, but here's a start.

( Gratuitous pretty people strike again. )

If I get more lists, I'll update this post.
-rave

OMG GUYS I'VE BEEN DOING NANO FOR FIVE YEARS.

THIS IS MY FIRST WIN.

I AM BOUNCING OFF THE WALLS RIGHT NOW.

*BOUNCEBOUNCEBOUNCE*


XDDDDD
-rave

"Waters of Mars" was pretty much what I expected. The same faceless horde invasion story told for the nth time, with a barely humanized cast of walking skill sets comprising progressive-family-TV-appropriate proportions of genders, ethnicities and nationalities and a range of attitudes from the optimist-realist-pessimist sliding scale of personality. "Midnight" was probably the last episode to do this plot decently.

Russell T. Davies' boner for god complexes is both disgusting and intrusive into what might otherwise be decent writing for television. His solid-lead-handed, shallow as an oil slick political and social commentary doesn't help.

I am not so much intrigued by the Christmas special as I am morbidly fascinated by the closure it may bring to a chapter of a franchise that has been shat on by its creator more than any other franchise I have ever known.
------

Moving on.

Day 1: a song
Day 2: a picture
Day 3: a book/ebook/fanfic
Day 4: a site
Day 5: a youtube clip
Day 6: a quote
Day 7: whatever tickles your fancy

A fraction of my collection of favorite quotes.

"But in Tolstoy, just as in Plato and Plotinus, the thought of death is accompanied by a particular sentiment, by a kind of consciousness that, even while horror rose before them, wings were growing in their backs."
-A letter from Lev Shestov to his daughters. Third paragraph - the whole thing. But it's too long to post here for just a meme.

"Don't be afraid; people are so afraid; don't be afraid to live in the raw wind, naked, alone...Learn at least this: What you are capable of. Let nothing stand in your way."
-Roy Cohn in Tony Kushner's Angels in America. Don't necessarily agree with the sentiment, but the cadence and power of the statement gives me chills.

"On a journey, ill,
And over fields all withered, dreams
Go wandering still."
-Basho


And of course T.S. Eliot in general, but for the sake of brevity, these:

"After the torchlight red on sweaty faces
After the frosty silence in the gardens
After the agony in stony places
The shouting and the crying
Prison and palace and reverberation
Of thunder of spring over distant mountains
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience."
-from The Waste Land, V: What the Thunder Said

"Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality."
-from Burnt Norton, I.

"That which is only living
Can only die."
-from Burnt Norton, V.

I am just determined to forget about this meme. But what's even worse than mindless memes is that I've started a FarmVille game on Facebook... *headdesk* Like my time needed any more wasting!

Day 1: a song
Day 2: a picture
Day 3: a book/ebook/fanfic
Day 4: a site
Day 5: a youtube clip
Day 6: a quote
Day 7: whatever tickles your fancy

Favorite stand-up comedy speech:
The Pachelbel Rant

Favorite EPIC OF EPICNESS:
College Saga

Favorite TV show blooper reels:
Supernatural Season 2
Battlestar Galactica Season 3
Farscape - Part 1, Part 2
Rurouni Kenshin - Fish! (I wish someone would make a compilation of just the voice actor for Sanosuke fumbling lines and replacing them with something random about sandwiches. :D)

Favorite AMVs:
Last Exile, "Skyline," Sunlight Silence by Fono
Trigun, "Cowboy Baby," Cowboy by Kid Rock (Don't care for the song so much, but the sync is fantastic and it works for Trigun.)
Fruits Basket, "Kid Fears," Kid Fears by The Indigo Girls
Avatar: The Last Airbender, "Zuko Alone," Prayer of the Refugee by Rise Against

Speaking of timing: The audio for one of my favorite Trigun videos of all time has been disabled, but if you can magically sync it up with Session by Linkin Park (shut up, it's about the timing, not the band), then you get a truly amazing editing job. This is the kind of editing standard I hold AMVs up to. If it's not at least this clean and smart, I get bored.

Most of my favorite Fullmetal Alchemist and Bleach videos have been deleted. :(


In awesome news, I had gotten incredibly far behind on NaNo, but I caught up by 4500 words in one sitting tonight! That leaves about another 5K to go to catch up for today. (Until tomorrow, when it'll rack up to 7K... then 9K... and so on. Eh.) Not bad! Also, the introduction of the plague carrier characters suddenly made everything much more interesting. Thad is not what I expected him to be, but that just makes me want to see what he'll do next. :)

Day 1: a song
Day 2: a picture
Day 3: a book/ebook/fanfic
Day 4: a site
Day 5: a youtube clip
Day 6: a quote
Day 7: whatever tickles your fancy

TV Tropes and Idioms, singularly one of the most dangerous places for me to link-surf, ever. I can waste days there.

Also, Nanoisms, among the best parts of NaNoWriMo! I have to quit reading them before I pass out from not breathing, laughing so hard.

So very, very close to breaking 13K on NaNo. I've got to break 15K by the end of today to catch up, though. Eek! Getting behind!

class times are now,
-rave

So I thought I heard Jeff Bridges' voice on the TV while I was cooking, and when I walked into the living room with my dinner it turned out to be Beau Bridges. Hey, they sound a lot alike. Apparently.

Day 1: a song
Day 2: a picture
Day 3: a book/ebook/fanfic
Day 4: a site
Day 5: a youtube clip
Day 6: a quote
Day 7: whatever tickles your fancy

Book(s): May I first redirect you to this post. And then may I mention that Robin McKinley is pretty damn awesome, and I don't know how I've missed her before now. The Blue Sword is excellent and I just started Spindle's End.

Fanfic: For Harry Potter fandom, I can never recommend The Shoebox Project enough. It is simply the best Sirius/Remus Marauder fic out there, as well as one of the best fics ever written in any fandom, and infinitely quotable. (You have to go hunting for the PDF files now, though, as the original LJ for the fic was hacked. Also, the writers haven't updated in six forevers, although they promise to come back to it at some point.)

There is a surprisingly massive amount of really good Torchwood fic out there, although the nature of the show itself means that the vast majority of said fic is not gen, nor, indeed, vanilla (ahem). But especially if you hit the Big Bang events (where fics have to be a minimum word count of 25K) and other writing challenges, you'll find a lot of fics that are both well-written and satisfyingly lengthy. Two of the best fics I've read recently are Time Stands Still by Blackbird Song (weird, temporally disjointed story featuring Jack's adverse reaction to being around a lot of other Jacks occupying the same place in different times) and Guard Them, and Him Within by etharei (Ianto gets sucked through the Rift into a wartorn future on an alien world, where Jack is the commander of a distant outpost and doesn't remember Ianto or Torchwood - a well-done almost-AU, although it ties back into canon eventually).

On a less serious note: for some of the best tentacle sex ever written in a serious and non-cracky way, see ceefax_the_sane's story Stranded. (Nir, the tentacled alien, is adorable.)



NaNo is going well. My doctor character is currently explaining the disease that wiped out First City in excruciating and wordy detail. XD Dinner was tasty, also - pan-seared tilapia with a mushroom, onion, garlic and caper concoction sauteed in butter. Tasty, but not the least bit healthy. Oh well! Nom nom, fishes. :)

Got to get to work on my Ender's Game/SF YA lit/fairy tales poster board for Honors. Pics when complete.
-rave

Day 1: a song
Day 2: a picture
Day 3: a book/ebook/fanfic
Day 4: a site
Day 5: a youtube clip
Day 6: a quote
Day 7: whatever tickles your fancy

Hotlink ahoy!


Why so gorgeous, Alessandro Juliani? Alternately: Why does your life suck so frakking hard, Gaeta? Poor thing. *pets*

Okay, so I saw Alessandro Juliani IRL at DragonCon, right? And I'd always thought Gaeta was a pretty, pretty man, but his hair on the show bothered me a little bit - always looked too light-suckingly black and slightly gelled up. But when I saw him in the Walk of Fame my eyes pretty much did the wolf-cartoon-character goggly thing. Not only is he GORGEOUS (esp. without loads of HD filming makeup and crazy lighting - his lashes really are that dark, like Nestor Carbonell), his hair is normally soft-looking and wavy and there's a little streaking of gray at the temples. A:LSKFHngaksdgjpoeirulAKdfL:KJ:A. Do want. Do want.

Also, in the same vein, I think I nearly passed out when I met and talked to Ben Browder. I went into some state of shock, maybe. But I had a coherent conversation with him! And when I walked up I must have looked as mortified as I felt, because he grinned and said, "Deep breaths." And I will love that man for the rest of my life, no joke. But same thing applies: IRL, ten years post Farscape and lacking makeup, he was even hotter than he was on TV. It's just the fact that he was real. He had laugh lines and rough hands and HIS VOICE OMG, it was Crichton-voice, it had Carolina drawl, and that was the point at which I went to my happy place.

For some reason this semester I have been bombarded by "He's so hot!" conversations, mostly about guys I don't give a rat's ass about because I know NOTHING about them. It's not that I need to know a lot about an actor to think they're hot. I just need to know something. Not even the actor - just one of their characters. Crichton officially made Ben Browder hot to me. Gaeta, A. Juliani: ditto. A lot of characters are this way. When everyone kept drooling over Lee Pace, I just couldn't bring myself to have an opinion of him until I saw The Fall. Now I think Roy from The Fall is hot - although Lee Pace is still not someone I would swoon over every time I see him.

Or you get shows like Fringe, where the guy playing Peter Bishop really ought to be my type, objectively speaking, but I can't bring myself beyond a "meh" reaction to him. It's because Peter as a character is only "meh." Walter, on the other hand, is the best thing ever. :D

I struggle with James Callis, who plays Gaius Baltar, because while he is, for the most part, drop-dead gorgeous, on BSG he does occasionally look like something the cat dragged in, and also Baltar is such an utterly spineless dick that I don't know whether to laugh or cry about everything he ever does on the show. :/

If you couldn't tell, I just broke down and bought the third season of BSG. Slowly but surely, I am getting around to watching all of that show. (And from what I gather, it's pretty much never happy again from this point on. And everyone dies horribly. So... that's fun.)

Must... write... NaNo.
-rave

PS - random minor actors from BSG keep popping into my NaNo novel and declaring that they are playing my characters. So my field surgeon looks surprisingly like Gaeta, and my secretary's assistant is a bit Dualla-ish. Can't bring myself to make the redshirt who's about to die in the next chapter look like Billy, though. That would just be mean.

Procrastination wut

Day 1: a song
Day 2: a picture
Day 3: a book/ebook/fanfic
Day 4: a site
Day 5: a youtube clip
Day 6: a quote
Day 7: whatever tickles your fancy

Doing more than one because... I can.

Pink Floyd: Time, Brain Damage/Eclipse (3 minutes or so into video), Another Brick in the Wall Part 2

The Revelers were down in the lawn beneath my window shrieking something incoherent as part of their pledging. I came this close to screeching out the window, "If you don't eat your meat, you can't have any pudding! HOW CAN YOU HAVE ANY PUDDING IF YOU DON'T EAT YOUR MEAT?"

U2: One Tree Hill. It was the beautiful eulogy song long before it was the shitty TV show, guys. Stop ruining this wonderful title.

Battlestar Galactica score: A Promise to Return, Prelude to War, The Cult of Baltar, Gaeta's Lament

You know, I love NaNo. I could participate every year for the rest of my life and never once win, and I would still love NaNo, because no other occasion during the year quite makes a day as bright with possibility as the start of NaNo makes November 1st. I have come to love the day after Halloween as much as, if not more than, the holiday itself. Waiting for midnight is way more exciting than any of the parties, costumes and candy that leads up to that moment when the bell rings in my head and I'm off.

Just sayin'. The weather's gorgeous, we gained an hour for daylight savings, I made lentils to keep me fed for the next week or so when I'll have no time to think about such petty things as meals, I've already got today's minimum word count and I'm just trucking along.

Welcome to the Best. Month. Ever.

-rave

ETA: Just realized that I had an illogical gap in my list of characters. The expert engineer has an apprentice, the government secretary has an assistant, and yet my pathologist was all alone. And they're going into plague country here. But. But. I don't want any more people.

So I created an assistant for the pathologist so that I can kill him off immediately upon arrival in the plagueified city. He is NOT wearing a red shirt, at least.

:D

Title: The Hanged Man
Author: ravenclaw42
Fandom: Harry Potter
Rating: PG
Summary: From a fic-prompt meme. Prompt was "Sirius/Remus: The moment that Sirius *knows* he loves Remus (No emo!)"
Author's Notes: The image of upside-down Sirius sort of grew like a fungus into this ficlet. Attempted in the Shoebox Project style of painfully awkward S/R, which is my favorite. Title is as in the tarot card, which is usually The Fool hanging upside down, experiencing a moment of profound revelation because of his changed perspective. /incapable of unmeaningful titles

( Sirius is hanging upside down from a staircase rail when he realizes he loves Remus. )

Title: Compromising Postitions
Author: ravenclaw42
Fandom: Torchwood
Rating: PG-13
Summary: From a fic-prompt meme. Prompt was "Cause the proof is in the Kodak."
Author's Notes: This is AU where none of the shitty things ever happened. You know the things I'm talking about. Pure silliness. And, you know, I only noticed in retrospect that I named the other two new TW members Meena and Bram. At least it wasn't Mina. *headdesk*

( George was positive he had them now. )

I'm posting each of the little fics I've written in the earlier meme separately so I can link them in my omnibus post and maybe spread them to communities. I think I'm doing pretty good, if a little rusty on some voices. Never written for BSG before, but I love Chief, so this prompt worked out.

Title: Nightmare
Author: ravenclaw42
Fandom: Battlestar Galactica
Rating: PG
Summary: Prompt was "Chief Tyrol. A lifetime of fixing things."
Author's Notes: Sometime during the year on New Caprica, between the incident where he beat Cally while delirious and when they finally got a clue and hooked up. I have not seen most of seasons 3 & 4, but yes, I know the spoilers and this was written with later events in mind. :(

( He knows he's going to be okay when he realizes he hasn't broken Cally. )

May I just say that banging shins with someone, padless, repeatedly, is making me experience a type and degree of pain I had not previously known in bruises.

Also, I'm not fast, small or light enough to take advantage of my height on an offensive. The best I can do is defend until someone hits me on the top of the head, which is at their eye level.

Fuck. Being. Short.

going to go elevate my legs again now.
-rave

I need to write. I need to create something again. Having my throat meddled with all summer and having writer's block for so long have converged and conspired to make me feel like I've been silent for months. I feel like I haven't said anything meaningful, to anyone, in far too long. And I love my friends, but none of us like the same things, and the things we do have in common we relate to on such different levels that meaningful conversation about them is still nearly impossible.

So. I just want to write. It's halfway through October and I want to do NaNo again this year. This is my annual resurgence of determination. I have four losses, zero wins. I'm not discouraged yet.

I want to get some warmups in before I start my novel. I'm going to use the writing prompts and challenges at the NaNo website to warmup with my original setting and characters. This post is not about that.

The thing is, I miss playing with the characters I love from fandom. Fic gives me an outlet for the things I want to say about a fandom but have no one to say them to. So could anyone reading this please give me a fandom and a prompt? The prompt can be anything, a word, a song, a pairing, a mood, an event, a place, whatever. The fandom can also be anything, although I advise fandoms I've already written in - there are some things, like Star Wars or Star Trek, that I simply *like*. I make a distinction between passive and active fangirling, and those are passive. If you want to know fandoms I've already written in, check the Fiction Omnibus Post listed in the sidebar. Also the "fic" tag for a couple of memes with starts to unfinished fics - there are other fandoms there as well, like Sabriel and Avatar.

I'll reply to prompts in the comments. And give as many different prompts as you want, at any time. If you give me one and think of another the next day, come back and prompt again. I need the kick in the butt this will provide, so don't worry about overloading me.

ETA with the answers no one got!

1. "I shall confess to God when I see him... not to you." OR: "Remember me as I was." - Kingdom of Heaven

4. "Despite my privileged upbringing, I'm actually quite well-balanced. I have a chip on both shoulders." - A Beautiful Mind

6. In come the strings, and it changes everything. The music fills with a hope, and that'll change again. Listen... listen..."I bring sorrow to those who love me." Oh, that single cello! "It was during this sorrow that love came to me." A voice filled with harmony. It says, "Live still, I am life. Heaven is in your eyes. Is everything around you just the blood and mud? I am divine. I am oblivion. I am the god... that comes down from the heavens, and makes of the Earth a heaven. I am love!... I am love." - Philadelphia

12. "When we told lies you told half-lies. And a man who tells lies, like me, merely hides the truth. But a man who tells half-lies has forgotten where he put it." - Lawrence of Arabia

13. "Purple? What kind of a homosexual are you anyway? That's not purple, Mary, that color out there... is mauve." OR: "Mmmm. Big city. Overgrown with weeds, but flowering weeds. On every corner a wrecking crew and something new and crooked going up catty corner to that. Windows missing in every edifice like broken teeth, gritty wind, and a gray high sky full of ravens." - Angels in America


-------
OK, I know I shouldn't do another one of these so soon, but I found way too many quotes that I love. So I'm copying Mom here and doing 25 instead of 20. There might be repeats of movies from the last quiz, but no repeated quotes. You know the rules!

2. "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" - Dr. Strangelove, rainweaver13

3. "Tell me... do you like movies about gladiators?" - Airplane!, rainweaver13

5. "Do you see what happens, Larry, WHEN YOU FUCK A STRANGER IN THE ASS?" - The Big Lebowski, rainweaver13

7. "You're familiar with the phrase "Man's reach exceeds his grasp"? It's a lie. Man's grasp exceeds his nerve." OR: "If anybody really believed the things I did on stage, they wouldn't clap, they'd scream." - The Prestige, rainweaver13

8. "Where have you been? Damn you! Where have you been? Where were you twenty years ago, ten years ago? How dare you come to me now, when I am this?" - The Last Unicorn, resemblingarwen

9. "This pin. Two people. This is gold. Two more people. He would have given me two for it, at least one. One more person. A person, Stern. For this. I could have gotten one more person … and I didn't! And I … I didn't!" - Schindler's List, resemblingarwen

10. "We begin by coveting what we see every day." - The Silence of the Lambs, rainweaver13

11. "Mother is the name for God on the lips and hearts of all children." - The Crow, rainweaver13

14. "Child of the kindly West, I have come to know, if more of us valued your ways - food and cheer above hoarded gold - it would be a merrier world. But sad or merry, I must leave it now. Farewell." - The Hobbit, resemblingarwen

15. "I'm going to be straight with you here. The human race is about to be wiped out. We have fifty thousand people left and that's it. Now, if we are even going to survive as a species, then we need to get the hell out of here and we need to start having babies." - Battlestar Galactica 2003 miniseries, tiggymalvern

16. "You know, when I had a brain, I was twice as scared as I am now. Which means, if I had no brain, I'd be four times as brave as I was when I was brainy." - Tin Man, oddkitty

17. "This is my Peter - uh, my friend Peter. We just met at the, uh, intersexual... homosection... INTERSECTION!" - In & Out, lilithisbitter

18. "It's too bad she won't live. But then again, who does?" - Blade Runner, resemblingarwen

19. "You were a mouse! You wanted cheese!" - Stardust, oddkitty

20. "Well, it looks like this is a lost cause, doesn't it? But then, a man once told me that the only causes worth fighting for are the lost causes." - Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, resemblingarwen

21. "It's the emptiness that's left. It's like a despair, destroying this world." - The Neverending Story, resemblingarwen

22. "All the world will be your enemy, Prince With a Thousand Enemies. And when they catch you, they will kill you. But first, they must catch you - digger, listener, runner, Prince with the swift warning. Be cunning and full of tricks, and your people will never be destroyed." - Watership Down, rainweaver13

23. "Welcome home, baby! I say this to all of your things, for this is a robbery." - Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film for Theaters, resemblingarwen

24. "It's a dangerous business, going out your door. You step onto the road, and if you don't keep your feet, there's no telling where you might be swept off to." - LotR: Fellowship of the Ring, oddkitty, rainweaver13

25. "Of course you're going to see me again. We're going to grow old together. It's gonna be you and me, living in a big house. These two old biddies with all these cats. I mean, I bet we even die in the same day." - Practical Magic, rainweaver13



I might just start posting quotes randomly. There are too many quotes I love from all kinds of sources other than movies.

Name a fandom, and I'll tell you my:

One True Pairing Ship:
Canon Ship:
"If this happens I'll stab my eyes out with a spork" Ship:
"You are one sick bastard" Ship:
"I dabble a little" Ship:
"It's like a car crash" Ship:
"Tickles my fancy but not sold just yet" Ship:
"Makes no canon sense but why the Hell not" Ship:
"Everyone else loves it but I just don't feel it" Ship:

...is completely relevant to my Capstone presentation. No, really.


1. Pick 20 of your favorite movies.
2. Go to IMDb and find a quote from each movie.
3. Post them here for everyone to guess.
4. Strike it out when someone guesses correctly, and put who guessed it and the movie.
5. NO GOOGLING/using IMDb search or other search functions.


1. "I'm not doing it! This episode was badly written!" - Galaxy Quest, kiyou_hime

2. "Thy mother mated with a scorpion." - Lawrence of Arabia, ellabel, newtypeblue

3. "Do you know why I fought? I heard there was a thing called a sea. When I saw it for myself, it healed me of jihad." - Children of Dune, rainweaver13

4. "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do. I'm half crazy, all for the love of you. It won't be a stylish marriage. I can't afford a carriage. But you'll look sweet upon the seat of a bicycle built for two..." - 2001: A Space Odyssey, newtypeblue

5. "Please don't cry. If you've become human enough to cry, no power in the world can change you back." OR: "You must never run from anything immortal, it attracts their attention." - The Last Unicorn, resemblingarwen

6. "Perhaps I'm old and tired, but I think that the chances of finding out what's actually going on are so absurdly remote that the only thing to do is to say, "Hang the sense of it," and keep yourself busy. I'd much rather be happy than right any day." "And are you?" "Ah, no. Well, that's where it all falls down, of course." - Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, ellabel

7. "Ha ha! You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous is "Never get involved in a land war in Asia," but only slightly less well known is this: "Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line!" - The Princess Bride, ellabel, newtypeblue

8. "Oh! I never even introduced myself, did I? Pleased to meet you, Lloyd. Hope you guess my name." - The Stand, rainweaver13

9. "Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion!" - Donnie Darko, kiyou_hime

10. "But it didn't fall. You caught it. The fact that you prevented it from happening doesnt change the fact that it was "going" to happen." - Minority Reportkiyou_hime

11. "Name a shrub after me— something prickly and hard to eradicate." - Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, ellabel

12. "By being born I broke the line back to the ancient ones. It wasn't anybody's fault — it just happened." - Whale Rider. Come on, guys! "My name is Paikea Apirana and I come from a long line of chiefs..."

13. "Roll in ze hay! Roll in ze hay!" - Young Frankenstein, newtypeblue

14. "Telephone call? Telephone call? That's communication with the outside world. Doctor's discretion. Nuh-uh. Look, hey — all of these nuts could just make phone calls. They could spread insanity, oozing through telephone cables, oozing into the ears of all these poor sane people, infecting them. Wackos everywhere. Plague of madness." - 12 Monkeys, resemblingarwen

15. "People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people." - V for Vendetta, kiyou_hime

16. "Oh, what's so great about discovery? It's a violent, penetrative act, that scars what it observes. What you call discovery … I call the rape of the natural world." - Jurassic Park, ellabel

17. "Give my regards to King Tut, asshole." - Stargate, ellabel, newtypeblue

18. "We mustn't sleep a wink at night or we might wake up - changed." OR: "I don't want a world without love or grief or beauty. I'd rather die." - Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), resemblingarwen

19. "Remember that howsoever you are played, or by whom, your soul is in your keeping alone. Even though those who presume to play you be kings or men of power. When you stand before God, you cannot say "but I was told by others to do thus" or that "virtue was not convenient at the time." This will not suffice. Remember that." - Kingdom of Heaven, rainweaver13

20. "Well, I've wrestled with reality for 35 years, Doctor, and I'm happy to state I finally won out over it." - Harvey, resemblingarwen

Mom made a batch of 10 small caramel apples for me to take to school and, while it is awesome and I am looking forward to sharing them with friends, it does make me realize how much I miss Grossnickle. There, in my year's heyday, I could hang in the lobby for half an hour with something like a tray of caramel apples and it'd pretty much be an impromptu party by the end. Now I live in one of the most coveted rooms on campus, which I don't really like all that much TBH (too big, too quiet, little plumbing noises in the night, can't hear the rain properly, windows too small to air the room out much) with a completely awesome roomie who is, alas, leaving in December. But there's no community in that building - not like Honors. It's just me and Kaycee, and anyone else has to come over and arranging visits is like pulling teeth because no one's schedules match, ever, and no one really wants to leave their rooms, where all their stuff is, to hang out in someone else's building. I'm the same way, so I can't say anything. Still.

Anyway, spending fall break at home has been lovely. The weather was gorgeous for a couple of days and then rainy again, but the good kind of non-humid rainy, where all the water is liquid instead of half-drizzle, half-vapor. I've been quite productive, I think. Finished my posed costume plates, got through the saccharine ending of Anne of Green Gables (but then, what part of the book wasn't?) without throwing up a little in my mouth, read, researched, outlined & started second precis for Capstone, outlined post-colonial lit period presentation, read all the plays for theatre. Haven't begun research for theatre, which is bad, but my excuse is that I need to talk to the director first.

Dad made two loaves of his delicious homemade Italian bread, which we have pretty much already demolished, so he's making another batch so I can take some back to school with me. I have also achieved COOKIES: the most delicious cookies you will ever eat, if you get the chance, are Walkers brand white chocolate & raspberry shortbread cookies, from Scotland. EAT THEM, OMG. And chance had it that Mom bought a shirt which is only her size in some alternate Lilliputian universe, but she let me try it and it fits me and it's wonderful. Also bought a new bag and a new hoodie: goodbye, faithful white hoodie and green bag that saw me through London! It was time for something new, anyway, or at least time to bleach the old hoodie. Um.

Loving my new computer. Her name is DRADIS, Dee for short, and if you get the reference you get the reference and if you don't you don't, or there's Google.

Pretty much everything I did this weekend was homework, which makes me feel accomplished, although this pride is mitigated somewhat by the fact that I haven't finished the homework that's due tomorrow due to being utterly distracted by the book I have to read for my Children's Lit oral presentation/research paper. Robin McKinley, why haven't I read you before? Absolutely loving The Blue Sword and am considering ransacking our house for some of her other stuff, which I know is here, because I've packed and unpacked Spindle's End enough times.

I know I've reached a certain Zen state of English Major-ness when I go to Amazon and order a collection of literary criticism on Gaiman's Sandman without batting an eye. At least I picked topics for my Capstone and Honors research papers that haven't made me want to punch things yet. Maybe never. I love Sandman and Ender's Game, I just wish I hadn't thought it would be a good idea to do one graphic novel and one young adult novel, because those are completely different genres and mediums and are making my research more complicated than it has any right to be.

I am fandomless and bereft again. Yes, I love Supernatural, but I sort of avoid its fandom. And I love Lost, but it's on hiatus and is ending soon anyway. (GO MICHAEL EMMERSON AND HIS EMMY-WINNING WAYS! WOOT!) Flashforward is good so far, but essentially Lost 2.0 and not as good as the original; Lie to Me is interesting, but like Bones and House and a billion other investigative-episodic shows, I never watched any of it in order and can't get into the overarching story. I still can't get hold of the rest of Battlestar Galactica, so I'm dangling from the end of season 2 with nothing but Wikipedia summaries to answer my questions while sucking the joy out of the discovery (I already knew the spoilers, just not the details - I saw the series finale when it aired, so there's really no mystery left). Torchwood fandom is largely in shambles and I've been haunting a couple of authors and contests because the main communities aren't worthwhile anymore. The TW and DW losses still sting on a visceral level if I think about them for too long. Don't try to tell me to watch Heroes, Dollhouse or Glee: I'm not going to. I was reduced to watching the Stargate Universe premiere. This is the franchise that never ends, it just goes on and on my friends...

I've been reading a lot and not being creative. It's not an ache, it's just an absence of substance that broke away close to, but not quite near, a bundle of nerves. It's my broken tooth, which mostly doesn't bother me but is occasionally sensitive to cold or sweetness, and is a gap to which my tongue will never entirely be accustomed, because I was born with something that ought to be there, but isn't. The difference is, the tooth won't grow back in. The creativity will, eventually. Eventually.

I'll write more LJ entries until it does. Maybe I will do NaNo, instead of finally saying that this year I have too much work to do. Honestly, I've had too much work every year, but that hasn't stopped me before. It hasn't even made me consider the possibility of not doing NaNo before. So... it will happen. Even if I write a drabble for NaNo, it'll be more than I've written in a long time.

Going to rewrite that post-CoE fixit story where I resurrect Ianto eight years after the fact. I've decided this. I was rereading my printout after I lost the data file, cringing through every page, and I think that the loss is an opportunity, not a hindrance. Instead of retyping, I'll just rewrite it. There are so many things I want to do differently, and I do think it could be a good story. Maybe a shorter one. More time cuts, less of my bad habit of describing every breath and twitch.

I love eating when I come home. The bread is homemade, there's fresh Plugra butter and double gloucester cheese from Atlanta, and for dinner tonight Mom made her amazing Russian cabbage soup recipe that she discovered at random while looking for a way to get rid of too many cabbages a couple of years ago. I'm beginning to think that I like tomatoes in every form except raw and sundried. Which is good by me, as there are too many good foods with tomatoes in them to miss out on just because I don't like the damned things.

We're watching the movie version of The House Of Mirth in Capstone and Gillian Anderson is my hero, but not like that. It almost pains me to see her so demure. I'm picking out a few discs of X-Files to take back to school with me, because Scully (along with Donna, DW) is my kickass redheaded idol.

Do I want to compete in a kata competition at a Tae Kwon Do tournament in a couple of weeks? If not, how can I convince my teacher I don't want to go? I'm not going to be in shape to test for blue belt this December at the rate I'm going. :/

And I lost one of my pretty bookmarks today. No big, just a little irritation. I've never lost a bookmark before. It was an Earthsea promo thing from SciFi Channel back before they had the name that shall never be spelled within this journal because, God, why?

Okay, I really am going to stop talking now. This is why I should post more often.
-rave

After endless fluctuations between a drizzly-sticky kind of humid, lukewarm half-rain and torrential flash-flooding thunderstorms (welcome to the sharp line between summer and autumn in the South), for the past two days the weather has been not quite too dry, not quite too cool and not quite too bright. In other words, perfect. And I've had energy, and no flu, and no throat infections, and I've woken up when I've wanted to, and in this cool dry weather my hair is looking like a freaking Herbal Essences commercial.

I'm completely overloaded with work and my "breaks" are spent doing my least difficult homework or reading articles for my research projects. But. The weather is gorgeous and my window is open. At sunset I have a beautiful view of treetops and roofs across town catching the light. I have a shiny new laptop that I still haven't gotten over my warmfuzzy love for. My voice is finally back from its various infection vacations and I can sing again. I'm feeling a new appreciation for the nuances of some of my old favorites and discovering new songs to love. It's almost time for Flashforward, Supernatural and Project Runway. I'm re-reading Watership Down. The cafeteria had delicious food for a change tonight, although it might just have been because I was hungry.

Sometimes life is pretty much awesome, you know?
-rave

Even though I had it. *pins Pandemic Survivor badge next to First Broken Bone badge* :D

This is just a gratuitous icon post for National Punctuation Day! Enjoy having your run-ons mercilessly slashed and your randomly inserted commas burned at the stake! *waves Grammar Nazi torch and pitchfork*

Appropriately enough, I have to go finish reading Peter Pan for class now.
-rave