bironic

HA HA, surprise, my landlady is selling the apartment after all! This news comes 48 hours before I fly overseas for 9 days, plus I am gone the week straddling July and August as well as a long weekend in mid-August for Fanworks, which means I am in for the pre-September crunch I was dreading, minus the month I just lost where I could have been apartment hunting. (I didn't want to apartment hunt if I didn't have to. I've written 6,500 words of fic in that time and had some quality get-togethers with friends. Still.)

At least... I don't have to agonize about the decision anymore, because it's been made for me? The Boyle family way.

Ugh. Gonna try to put it out of mind and focus on conference/vacation. Switzerland!

*

Meanwhile: People are into the Good Omens adaptation. I didn't have many feelings about the book years ago and haven't watched the show yet. Been bookmarking your stories and recs for later, though.

And RIP Billy Drago. :( AV Club story, and Legacy.com. Most recently mentioned at the bottom of the Northern Exposure vid post here.

Doing: I confess I am not doing great, friends. It's probably just cyclical biochemistry, but combined with shenanigans at the office and acknowledgement that I need to turn back to medicine in search of help for stuff that therapy didn't budge after two years—even though it was dissatisfaction with medical solutions that sent me to therapy in the first place—there's been more than the usual amount of existential reflection and droopiness. Work is not getting done. Fun is not really happening either. I feel defeated in several arenas. Stuff annoys me everywhere I turn: an intractable audio delay on the Roku I bought over the holidays because the old one couldn't run apps anymore, road closures, bloggers' overuse of parentheses, con and other event organizers inviting original submissions without enough lead time, continuing frustration that so many Twitter users who cross my dashboard don't, to name one of many behaviors, track down original sources before RTing commentary.

This, too, shall pass.

Good things: Friend J. and I attended a book talk and signing with a powerhouse trio: G. Willow Wilson and Helen Oyeyemi interviewed by Kelly Link. It had its moments, but I wish it had gone deeper. The bookstore event organizer and Link both mentioned a conversation the authors had had earlier in the evening, and that sounded better than what we got. By contrast, last night coworker R. and I went to an alternately entertaining and illuminating talk with Werner Herzog, done conversation-style with a classics professor who has collaborated with him on ten films. It ran two hours with Q&A and could have gone longer, as far as we were concerned. Well, not the Q&A part; the questions and "questions" were of that painful sort that come from university students trying to sound smart.

My sister came to town for about 36 hours on her latest gig, with the Russian National Ballet, so disgruntled_owl and I got to hang with her. For those of you who are new here, my sister is basically a freelance tour manager for musicians. My favorite part was when one guy, whose English was better than most of the troupe's, gently teased her in the green room for eating sushi without drinking beer, and then a few minutes later, while watching the evening's performance of Swan Lake, I discovered he played the prince. Having seen the dancers offstage at the hotel and at the mall added a fun layer to the viewing experience: that one over there, she's the one who made an adorable pout when told the venue wifi wasn't working, and those two have just recovered from a bad landing and a fight, respectively…. Also, did you know the ballet has alternate endings? In this version, to the probable benefit of the children in the audience, Rothbart got defeated and Odette and the prince lived happily ever after.

Last and perhaps least, I replaced the living room area rug I'd disliked for five years. Pretty. (Not my apartment.)

Reading: Local friends are wrapping up a March mini-version of our autumn reading challenge. I decided to use the communal motivation to finish some books I was stuck on, plus one I'd had on the shelf for 20 years, A Canticle for Leibowitz. So at least some books made it back to the library completed after the maximum number of renewals and a few cents in fines.

Fanfic-wise, I tried some Star Trek: Discovery fic and have enjoyed this person Alethia's collection of Christopher Pike/Michael Burnham stories, except for one thing. They have excellent banter and good character voices and a variety of simple yet enjoyable premises, but there's little to no attention paid to the incredible breach of protocol inherent in a ship's captain sleeping with a crew member. It's either not mentioned at all, or it's brushed aside in a line or two. For me, that's a big disappointment. Also, the author likes italics more than I like reading them, because you shouldn't have to rely on them to indicate what you want emphasized, and even if they add force and movement to words like thrust in a sex scene, you don't need them multiple times per paragraph. Okay, see above re: being easily annoyed. At least it's not The Magicians, where, I'm told, fandom has decided fic should be written in the style of e.e. cummings.

Watching + Vidding: Ask me about the time I watched an entire TV show for Equinox Exchange after saying it was going to be a low-effort project. That's done now, and over the weekend I returned to a sports movie vid I'd been planning two years ago but set aside when Fandom Trumps Hate came along. It has structure. Structure is my friend. When I'm feeling less despondent I would like to work on the vid I suuuuuper owe deelaundry, as well as other projects recently mentioned here. And, you know, actually finish something.

How are you?

Doing

Working a lot at work. Consequently, doing not a lot at home. My proposed promotion is still moving forward, although not approved yet. But I'm sad about feeling vaguely unwell so often. (No advice needed; docs have been consulted.) On the tail end of one of these periodic weeks of poor sleep, I had a gross dream about a manager in the office and had trouble looking at him yesterday. Then today my laptop died! Only I looked up the "symptoms" on my phone and fixed it via a method that indicated it was only an issue of built-up static charge, whew. We had an Arctic front sweep through last night; the same dry air made my lip split when I went to the library this afternoon.

Last weekend featured Boston fan brunch, always good, followed by fangirl movie night at thedeadparrot's, in this case Dune, for which serenadestrong made a spectacular sand worm spice bread. On the downside, a friend moved away to NYC, and the whole weekend felt vaguely unreal because my ear was plugged for uninteresting reasons, so until these drops from CVS cleared it up I was half deaf and felt slightly feverish, maybe because I associate plugged-up ears with being sick.

...This is the kind of post people used to make fun of when they talked about the banality of blogging. I will stop complaining.


Vidding

No, wait, I will complain about one more thing, because it is upsetting me: Last Saturday YouTube blocked the Ancillary Justice trailer in the U.S. and Canada because of the DhakaBrakha audio snippets (although it's still up on Vimeo), and then last night Vimeo took down Starships! because of the Nicki Minaj song (although it's still up on YouTube) -- no warning, just down, with an email explanation of the copyright claim.

Things I have done:
- Emailed the OTW's legal team to see if they have experience helping vidders contest copyright claims for music rather than video clips
- Emailed the Vimeo support team to gripe about the sudden takedown and to request screen shots of the comments and last known view counts
- Asked vidding friends on Twitter for advice
- Added the YouTube link for Starships! to the biggest Tumblr post that's been circulating, although who knows if people will see it
- Begun preparing points to make in the appeals

I believe the book trailer has a better shot of being reinstated because it only uses a small portion of the full song and isn't competing with the original. Starships! I'm not super hopeful about, in the same way I haven't been hopeful about previous copyright matches for vids that got denied upon initial upload, and that sucks, because vids are clearly transformative works and I wish I could articulate how video clips transform the audio (rather than vice versa), or form a gestalt with it that the song wouldn't have done alone.

Meanwhile, I requested a song for Club Vivid and it got approved, although I'm not sure I can make it in time because of the scope of one of my Fandom Trumps Hate auction vids, which I am going to post about soon because I could use your help.


Reading

Those SF/F compendia. Also Binti: Home by Nnedi Okorafor. I liked Binti a lot and was pleased to learn of the sequel, which was also good, except for how it's a CLIFFHANGER, sigh.

Next up, The Dream-quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson, because the Nebula nominees were announced and some of the novellas looked interesting.


Watching

This week I got to see a performance of Tennessee Williams' Night of the Iguana featuring Amanda Plummer and James Earl Jones! More on that later, I think. We do not often get New York-caliber dramas in Boston, so that was a treat.

Also a bunch of random movies that I will not list exhaustively but that included 13th, just as powerful as advertised; some movies my sister and I used to watch all the time as kids but that I hadn't seen since then (Annie [1982] and The Neverending Story); Cloud Atlas, which was terrible in different ways from the book (the racebending makeup was creepy and wrongsighted); and Child 44, an action film that was utterly unremarkable except for its cast: Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Charles Dance, Noomi Rapace, Vincent Cassel and Fares Fares. It took place in Stalin-era Moscow and Volsk so of course they cast Brits, a Frenchman, a Swede and a Lebanese Swede and made them speak in "Russian" accents.

Want to see Get Out and Logan. My sister will be visiting next weekend and we plan to take care of at least one of those.


Listening

Stephen Thompson at NPR released this year's Austin 100, a batch of songs by artists he recommends ahead of SXSW. I usually find a handful of vid songs in these -- among the 2016 recs I found this year's Club Vivid song, the song I used for the Chris Hadfield vid, and the song I'm going to use for the Mary Sue vampire vid -- and am looking forward to this new collection.


Writing

Posts and emails, mostly. Did I mention that over Presidents' weekend I added some pages to some very old Mary Sue fics? It felt good to get words out and to extend those stories a little, even with the inevitable self-criticism over things like "Why did it take you all day to write two pages?" and "Why are you still thinking about teenage fantasies?"


Off to disgruntledowl's for dinner/movie. I made brownies. Before that, I made some mashed cauliflower. The apartment smells very confused.

Hope you are having good weekends.

Was supposed to hang out with friends this morning but it was a rough week and I finally managed to sleep in, and it turns out I don't feel well, so that didn't work out. It is maybe a mini return of this intermittent mystery illness that started over the summer, which is unfortunate timing as I just saw a doctor about it yesterday and told him it hadn't been back since Columbus Day. Sigh. They are still sending me for a test on Friday so I guess we'll see.

Meanwhile I tried to work on my main Festivid and discovered we are at the stage of the process where I become convinced it will take psychotherapy to get me through the draft. :/

Fittingly, therefore, after giving up on staring at Premiere, I have spent the afternoon/evening watching episodes of that TV show In Treatment that was on HBO a while back, with Gabriel Byrne. Never saw any until now. Specifically, I'm watching the thread involving Sophie, played by a very young Mia Wasikowska. She's so great. It's like a less sophisticated David Mamet play. I would watch the two of them talk in a room all day.

...I have been watching the two of them talk in a room all day.

It's raining. But the show is good. And I'm about two-thirds of the way through rereading The Queen of the Damned, and while it's of course not as magical as it was in the early years, there are still many moments to love, or to remember loving.

And, to be honest, still a lot of ♥Marius♥-type feelings. I don't think I'd realized how much of my fondness for Marius came from what was written right there on the page in TVL and QotD. Lestat (and therefore likely Anne Rice) had a now-quite-obvious crush on him. Plus it's been a joy to reexperience personal favorite moments: his boot heel hooked on the rung of the stool at the vampire bar; the description of him crushed by the ice; him being all bitter and grumpy about what happened with Akasha's awakening and the elders' aloofness, then getting worried that his impudence will prevent him from being able to reunite with Armand, and melting when he finally gets to see him. (Seriously, won't someone write and/or point me to the story where Armand reads TVL and learns that Marius is still alive?) Looking forward to a remembered moment toward the end of the book where he lounges against a door jamb in a red turtleneck. I may have imprinted on Spock as Hanok Henoch.

The trouble remains that these few books make you want more, and then you read later books and... they're not what you wanted. Like, with The Vampire Armand (er, excepting Certain Scenes) and Blood and Gold, it's as if she shouldn't have expanded the stories. As if she's best, or you're best able to lose your heart, when she gives a character or a relationship just enough enticing attention and then moves on. And then there's hardly any fanfic to be found, whether because of the Geocities takedown or the cease & desist letters over the years or my not knowing where the right archives are, or all of those things. So no easy "more" to be had. Hence the desire to write, I suppose. For so long as it lasted.

How're you??

Dear friends: Some stuff is going on right now, and the good/neutral things are only most of the time balancing out the bad thing. Therefore I am taking license today to complain, even if about far less significant matters.

Unpopular fannish opinions, edition the first

( Inception )

( House )

( SGA )


*grump the second*

Things I wish I never had to read again:

• "amber liquid"
• "feet planted"/"feet flat on the mattress"
• "bemused" when you mean "amused"
• "woah"
• "yea" for "yeah"
• silicon vs. silicone
• vice vs. vise
• …Crap, I had a whole list of these but I seem to have misplaced it.

Anyway. Feel free to grump with me or offer happy things. I'll be computer-bound most of the weekend. Except tonight, when I am going to see The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, because I need deserve a movie after this week.

Thanks a lot, every insurance company I can find in this county, for refusing me two months of health coverage to fill a gap between school and work in case I get hit by a car or stricken with swine flu, all because I had a kidney stone and a scan for what turned out to be a benign growth two and a half years ago.

This is especially irritating coming as it does a day after Obama's speech about the ideal healthcare environment in this country. It may have wanted some substance to back up its ideals, but the moral motivations can't be faulted. Also, he's an excellent speaker.

/politics

Working a lot this week. Tired. A bit demoralized. Have more to do tonight. Dreading an interview tomorrow at which I'm almost certain I'm going to be offered a job. Dreading because I don't know if I want it and I haven't been able to figure it out since this became a possibility more than a month ago. Am probably going to take it anyway, and then deal with whether it's a good fit or not -- and telling my current supervisor, who is expecting me to be around for another several months yet.

But: synn is coming tomorrow for the weekend. There may be a Tim Gunn event in person next weekend. And tonight is the premiere of The Vampire Diaries, which looks just as terrible as every other TV show that utterly misses what makes vampires compelling, but I was obsessed with L.J. Smith for about a month in high school, several years after I knew better, and it'll be really cool to see those characters in whatever mutated hypersexed teenage incarnation on screen.

("I'm going to eat you, Salvatore.")

Of the suck:

- I hadn't read the U Penn CFP list the whole time I was in school. I finally checked it yesterday (they changed their format! at last!) and found one soliciting book chapters under a theme that would have been perfect for some work I did in undergrad and at a couple of conferences and that I've been wanting to try to publish... only the deadline for proposals was in May. It would have been right when I was finishing my thesis. Sad face.

- You know how sometimes you have an emotion and your body produces the chemicals to physically experience it, but then sometimes your body produces the chemicals when you have no reason to feel a particular way? I've felt jittery and anxious and haven't been able to sleep well for two nights now despite being dead tired, and I can't figure out why. I feel fine. There's nothing to worry about.

- Also, my face is peeling, so on top of the sunburn that looks like a bad tanning salon job, I now look like I've got dried toothpaste all over me. I know you all wanted to know this.


Not of the suck:

- The people who put out the above-mentioned CFP replied to the "disappointed I missed the opportunity, but good luck" email I sent them with recommendations on other venues to try. That was nice of them.

- I don't have to drop out of Remix. Last night I finally managed to write something, after ditching Ideas 1 and 2 and fighting with Idea 3. I'm back to Idea 2, and for whatever reason, it's working now. Now if I can just finish it and convince some poor beta to give me immediate feedback...

- http://delicious.com/st_xi_kink/

- My mom is visiting this weekend, I'm going semi-camping with some of my classmates and faculty next weekend, and the weekend after that, my dad and his girlfriend are coming down for my birthday. I wasn't ready for visitors last month, but now I'm looking forward to them.



Two ellipses in one post. Hm.

I've taken a day off from work after losing Saturday to Remix and yesterday to a combination of having slept only half the hours I need to feel human, going to a (lovely!) fangirl housewarming party, and deciding to try the train instead of driving, which translated to almost four hours of travel instead of less than two (although I got some reading done). The thought of using every night this week just to catch up made me queasy, so I called in one of the "mental health days" my manager gave me after the marathon project in December.

In three hours, I've already done 10 things on my should-have-been-weekend list. What a relief. I've worked from home a few times since the new year, but I couldn't tell you the last time I took a day off when I wasn't sick.

.

In fannish news, "Substitute" was nominated for an SGA Kink Award (voting is here). I was completely surprised and thrilled by the news. I don't think the little guy has a shot at winning, but as everyone says, just the fact that it was nominated is great.

I've never had a fic nominated for an award before. House was the first fandom I contributed to online, and I can't recall any contests except for possibly a House/Cameron one. BtVS and HP had many, and SGA seems to have several as well. This particular set of awards is new for 2008. They've broken down the nominees into categories; "Substitute" is listed under "That's… Actually, I like that (Best 'I didn't think I'd like this Kink until your story...')" in the slash PWP section. You can vote for the fic you like best in that category or check out all the nominees at the main site.

( Some ambivalent thoughts on the process. )

Last night when I was feeling grumpy I considered talking about Remix and why I don't like when people log in with their sockpuppets and read stories ahead of time, since it keeps popping up on the f-list, but I couldn't figure out how to do it without making people angry, and anyway, enough griping for one day. The sun is out! There's fic to be written! There's soup to be made! Only two Mondays 'til House comes back!

Feeling Scrooge-like, between the lack of vacation others are enjoying and the unending stress of this project at work and application prep and the unapologetic emphasis on "Merry Christmas"es this season and the week-long (and counting) cold/sinus thing that left me with a drug-resistant headache for four days, all of which has made me unfairly resentful of people who get to relax and write and have fun and travel and go into raptures over Yuletide, I haven't been on LJ much. I'm expecting that things won't let up for another few weeks, and so I think Memoryfest may run from Jan. 15-Feb. 15 this year instead of Jan. 1-31, since its purpose is reflection and community, not anxiety. Also, I owe a bunch of people emails/comment replies (what else is new?)—sorry about that. I'm trying to get to them.

Not that it's all been bad; on Christmas Day, which I did have off, my sister and I camped out in front of the TV and watched favorite movies from our childhood, including A Simple Twist of Fate (oh, and how wonderful a fic would that make with John as McCann and Rodney as April Simon? Or vice versa? Ford could be the drugged-out brother, and...) and Little Women. Last Friday was our office holiday party, the highlight of which (besides a compulsory cornhole tournament) was an animal show in the president's office for the kiddies; some of the grownups squeezed into the room for that, including yours truly, who greatly enjoyed holding a gecko and a tree frog and a tarantula and watching a sugar glider squirrel pee on the carpet. It smelled like a zoo afterwards. I never thought I'd see the day.... And also, being sick means there's been time for SGA reruns (or SGA commentaries, when I wasn't even feeling well enough to keep my eyes open), so I watched a bunch of episodes I hadn't seen more than once, like "Epiphany," "Irresistable," "Conversion," "The Long Goodbye," "Instinct" and "The Hot Zone." Paradoxically, they're mostly better when you know how awful they're going to be. I also caught some House reruns on Fox and USA—"Daddy's Boy," "The Mistake" and half of "Hunting"—which make me remember just how much I loved this show in its first couple of seasons.

This weekend, finally, I'm feeling mostly healthy and fairly cheerful again. I managed to make it up to New Haven yesterday to see maddy_harrigan and catilinarian at M.'s house before they went back home to London, which was lovely. Presents and stories were exchanged, bookstores and godparents visited, tea drunk and food eaten, and family members and pets met (they have an adorable beagle and also a guinea pig, which I happily cuddled while M's sister cleaned its cage; give me rodents over cats and dogs any day). Cat got me Since You Asked by Cary Tennis, and thanks to M. I now own an Oscar Wilde action figure. Despite my decision not to buy any books, I couldn't pass up Lord Byron's Doctor by Paul West at the used bookstore; unfortunately, I thought it was scholarship about Polidori, and only this morning discovered that it's a novel. Alas. But I also bought The Future of Spacetime (because if you're going to get one book, what's the harm in a second?), and I think that will make up for the mistake.

Before I drove up there, I poked around on YouTube for some Joe Flanigan clips. It's funny—when I was getting into SGA, Rodney was my absolute number-one guy; I didn't think JF/Sheppard was all that attractive, I'm not into the military thing, and I couldn't, or didn't care enough to, get past his strange attitude and expressions. Recently, though, my attention has been shifting over to him, both on the show and in fics/vids/picspams/etc. Is this a natural progression for people in the fandom, I wonder? Adoring Rodney, who's easy to sympathize with, and then gradually becoming interested in Sheppard, who's a harder nut to crack? And wanting to see the actor in more things as you delve into his character? Hm. I never really had the urge to see David Hewlett in his other shows or films.

Anyway, some of the clips/vids I liked (which possibly all of you into SGA have already seen, but just in case) were: ( Read more... )

...And then ( this came up. ) WHAT.

Right. On to today's to-do list, and maybe time for another post later.

Happy almost-new year to you all.

From Thursday through next Wednesday I'll be down in Asheville, North Carolina, visiting synn, who's now living there instead of 20 minutes from my house. It's her birthday Saturday, so the trip is partly a gift for her and partly a celebration of Deathly Hallows coming out and partly a gift for me too (five days off work! preceded by a three-day week and followed up by a two-day week!), since my birthday is the day after I get back.

In addition to seeing synn and reading the last new HP book and exploring a new town, my biggest hope for the trip is that I'll be able to calm down from the stress of the past few weeks (months, years, but let's not get too ambitious) and write, whether that turns out to be stories or long-overdue letters. (To give you some idea of life lately, my current to-do list includes: pack, see a friend who'll be moving away while I'm gone, make two doctor's appointments, move all the furniture out of my room, install and test a wireless card, re-read Half-Blood Prince, write up Order of the Phoenix review, write to grad programs, possibly enroll in classes, continue to look for jobs, have my third-anniversary review at work without hinting that I want to get the hell out, research medical copy providers, write the two stories that are due in August, and prepare for two lovely visitors next month.) Gah, stress stress stress. And when I'm stressed, I can't think or write, and when I can't write, I don't post (I'm embarrassed to say how long it's taken just to write this crappy entry) or even comment, really, and when I don't post or comment, I don't get emails, and then my inbox gets lonely. And by my inbox I mean me. But who wants to hear about that? Nobody, that's who. Another reason I haven't posted. Yet here we are.

Um. Still reading? Have a treat. This is an MRI of my abdomen.





Well, I think it's cool.

So. How are all of you?