bironic

Well, I didn't manage to do much vidding other than prep work for that Halloween vid. Everything was not in fact clipped, only ripped. Then I had to hook up the portable A/C because summer has finally decided to be super gross again, which meant losing my chair space.

It was quite the productive three-and-a-half-day weekend, though! ( Lookit: )

Most fun of all was being charmed by two movies expected to be terrible: Vampire Academy and The Pacifier.

1.

Vampire Academy was the next movie up at the semi-regular local fangirl MST3K gathering. One attendee had promised it really wasn't awful, and we found this to be true! I mean, it suffered from exposition overload and facepalmy lines and American butchering of Romanian words and supposed high school-aged girls who look like Victoria's Secret models and talk like the Family Guy parody of Gilmore Girls -- think Ellen Page playing Kat Dennings -- but on a scale that has included The Host; I, Frankenstein; Mortal Instruments; and Man of Steel, it came out head and shoulders on top. Perhaps best watched in that kind of setting, though?

Points in its favor: Feminism everywhere! Female friendship with f/f undertones at the core of the story! Love interests who don't try to compete with that! Gabriel Byrne! More mythology than could fit into a movie = room to expand in your imagination! Casting an actual Russian man to play a Russian! And my personal favorite, surprise student/teacher // trainer/trainee stuff! I am all over that. Especially when he has long hair. (Don't look, daasgrrl.)

Best/worst line: "They say Dimitri is a god. But I am an atheist. An atheist with a big gun."

In conclusion: I was sad to find there aren't any fics for the movie on the AO3 and it only got a 9% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Ouch.

2.

Then a surprise delight with The Pacifier. Not trying to hide anything, I totally watched it because it was one of the only Vin Diesel movies I hadn't seen yet on Netflix. It wasn't nearly as dumb as it sounded! In fact, it was quite cute. He played up his goofy side and had Hallmark family moments while also getting to kick ass, Disney style. It wasn't perfect or anything; being a kid-friendly comedy, his character was able to achieve superhuman feats of family-fixing in two weeks, and Brad Garrett's vice principal was seriously creepy in a sexually charged power abuse way that would have been better explored in a different kind of movie because this one called for a comedic ending. But it was quite charming and not as far into caricature as I'd anticipated. I apologize to everyone I made fun of 10 years ago for seeing this.

For the record, this one got a whole 20% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

(Bonus: spent some time trying to figure out where I'd seen and appreciated the face of the commanding officer before. Turns out he played Doctor David on Queer as Folk. Blast from the past, wow. Also, yum.)

TV shows that I watch:
- The Vampire Diaries
- Project Runway
- Community
- Archer
- ~Continuum

TV shows that air on Thursday evenings:
- The Vampire Diaries
- Project Runway
- Community
- Archer

Thursday evenings are also one of the three times a week I have a recurring appointment/activity. Sigh. Now we will see if the DVR (which I finally broke down and bought because I was seriously weighing not playing a sport so I could watch my shows) can record simultaneous programming.

(Hi! It's almost Friday! I was supposed to go to NY this weekend for a milestone birthday of my father's, but the airline suggested that was not a good idea on account of oncoming blizzard, so that will happen at the end of the month and now there will be free time! Curtains may happen!)

(TBD whether exclamation marks actually make a day more exciting.)

In addition to the wet/messy/dirty character/actor cups, I made items for last night's birthday party to score a line bingo. This is a diagonal on my card from upper left to lower right, filling the squares for anonymity, confined/caged, tentacles, medical kink and breathplay.

Preview:

       


Close-ups and step-by-step processes behind the cuts:

( Anonymity )

( Confined/Caged )

( Free square: Tentacles )

( Medical Kink )

( Breathplay )

Guest contributions

Of course, I was not the only one who brought stuff to the party. Among the other amusing, clever and/or delicious offerings were:

( vanilla kink from alpheratz, a plethora of kinky drinks and ageplay items from deelaundry, a gag/blindfold combo from cinco, sort-of-vehicular from v_greyson, a furry cake from synn, and more. )

And that, I believe, about covers it! It was great fun, and I'm glad to be able to share it with you.

Will post the vid list at some later point here.

1. A coworker in all earnestness today was telling me about how she gets shoulder pain from time to time because she sleeps with her arms over her head and it stretches the tissues too far, but she can't control it, so one time she tried tying her elbows to her torso with a bathrobe sash, only she woke up in the middle of the night with her arms over her head and the sash across her throat, so then she tried tying each wrist to its corresponding leg, only she woke up because her arm was straining to pull free. Do you know how hard it was not to respond with anything involving the phrase "self-bondage."

2. At a recent get-together a group of us was talking about a possible local swinging community and the rumor that couples put pineapples on their front porches to indicate their receptiveness to partner swaps. (N.B.: This post makes my office conversations sound much more exciting than they are in reality.) This same coworker, who is a few years older than me, responded with a jovial declaration that her aunt and uncle met swinging. We said, That is an awesome story! Tell us more! And she said, Yeah, they both like swing dancing and they went out one night to the same event. And we said, …We are talking about a different kind of swinging. And she said, What other kind is there? And then her face went an interesting shade of red and she disavowed any knowledge or participation on her relatives' behalf.

3. My friend and her husband brought me a pineapple when they visited yesterday. Based on past conversation I am sure they are not aware of its potential pineappley meaning.

4. SEBASTIAN ROCHÉ, VAMPIRE HUNTER. (?)

…See, the thing is, I got so used to adoring Sebastian when no one knew who he was and he only appeared in occasional movies and TV shows and one Geocities fan page with a purple tiled background and those gif flames that now it's sort of a shock to see the number of Google results and hear that he's on Twitter and find that many friends have heard of him because he's been on Fringe and Supernatural and whatnot these past couple of seasons, not just Roar and Odyssey 5 and the Earthsea miniseries all of which like ten people watched, or General Hospital, which even I didn't watch. Now I, who once managed the only Sebastian Roche fan page domain on the internet, have catch-up to do to see what new info is out there about him. Glory!

I just, I miss his beautiful hair.

(Wow, I sound hyper. Actually it is just the tiredness. [She said, slumped on the couch for the last six hours.] Who needs alcohol to lower inhibitions when one has insomnia-inducing hormones? Also rice pudding.)

I have not been watching the Oscars because I trekked (ha) over to Arlington with deelaundry, ellen_fremedon and greenygal to attend By Any Other Name: An Evening of Shakespeare in Klingon. This included Washington Shakespeare Company board president, linguist and Klingon inventor Mark Okrand giving an introductory talk about the origins and grammar of Klingon, followed by scenes from Much Ado About Nothing and Hamlet in Elizabethan English and in "the original Klingon" (assisted by a literal translation), and Stephen Fry doing the whole Q&A in a Klingon headpiece.

Yes, I said Stephen Fry! Though not advertised on the original Groupon announcement or I would have mentioned it at the time, he was the guest of honor as part of a BBC series he's producing about language. Great fun to hear him deliver his two Klingon lines ("A hit! A palpable hit!"), although he hammed it up a bit too much, and he was eloquent as usual when people asked questions afterwards. He did fun caricatures of McCoy, Kirk, Picard and someone else I've already forgotten,* and mentioned a uni essay he'd done comparing Trek ethics to Nietzsche's argument that tragedy is a tension between the Apollonian and Dionysian ideals, with Spock and various planets the essence of logic in too pure a form and McCoy and various other planets the embodiment of emotion or violence taken too far, and Kirk as the perfect being, balancing between them.

*Mark Okrand's blink-and-you'll-miss-it impression of Christopher Lloyd beat them out, though.

Also I now have a bright red t-shirt with the Klingon empire sigil on the front and "Klingon Security" written across the back. I shall wear it to dance class, since I have been cultivating a reputation for having unusual t-shirts (see also: squid and Dark Mark).

And now, for bed.

He carried a bottle of blue Curaçao 250 miles so we could make Romulan ale and watch Garak episodes.

I think my blood is running blue now, but it was fun.

TGIFS.

Since it seems like many of us are anticipating ice or snow tonight, here is Richard Shindell's foot-tappin' Waiting for the Storm, even though that is about a hurricane. You can never have enough Richard Shindell.

Here in Boston we have been promised a few inches of snow. It's 14 degrees out; it'd better snow. Plowed piles from the last few storms' worth still haven't melted. The dirty tops have interesting, deep icy crusts.

Thankfully, it looks like the weather's gonna clear by Thursday when I fly. It'll be nice to take the trip, although I could use another week or three right now to do all my work. Caught a cold after my sister visited last week (no connection; she's fine) and lost a few days.

To have something for the flight, I picked up Neil deGrasse Tyson's new book tonight, (a) because I like him and (b) because he's doing a book signing nearby next month, so I may as well read it first. Disappointingly, it is for young people. The font is big and the pages glossy and there are a lot of pictures. Many of which are of Tyson. Including one on the back where he's straddling a large telescope and smirking. Wow.

Bill Nye wrote a blurb for it about "the first of the plutoids," pretty much recapitulating his line on SGA. Or maybe it was the other way around.

Stop me from having more thoughts of McKay/Tyson/Nye angry!sex, please. ...I would at least need an "I'm going to the special hell" icon.

On that note:

[Poll #1338836]

Mmrph. It was such a bad idea to stay up so late last night to write the Wilson/Cuddy thing. I only slept five hours afterwards. All I could handle this morning was fiddling around with PowerPoint for a presentation I have to give next week. Hm. Should I be juvenile and make a joke about how a box of parts sounds like S&M toys? (i.e. penetrators, switches, butt connectors, and of course nuts and screws.)

I'm bummed that Star Trek: The Experience is closing. A friend just told me last night, and it's closing on Monday. For a crazy few minutes, we talked about the feasibility of getting plane tickets there and back before the semester starts. But of course that would not be the best idea, so here is an in memoriam post about it instead.

DS9 was one of the top two most intense fannish experiences I've ever had (up there with Buffy the Vampire Slayer), and I looked forward to being able to walk down the life-sized replica of a section of the Promenade one day, complete with second level and a full-service Quark's Bar. I've had a few opportunities over the years to go out to Vegas -- the only real attraction of which for me was the Promenade, besides "having been to Las Vegas" -- but I always pushed it back for a more convenient time. I figured the Promenade would still be there. And now it won't be. (To add insult to injury, rumor has it that the larger props and sets will be destroyed when the exhibits are dismantled, as shipping is too expensive.) Alas.

.

In happier news, elynittria drove down today for lunch* and Scrabble, and it was lovely. Two introverts, both alike in dignity, managed to make an entire afternoon of pleasant conversation about work and school and life and fun and film and food and flight and fandom and words and various miscellany. Like I said to her as our time together drew to a close, neither of us ran away screaming, so with luck we'll be able to do this again sometime.

LJ: It can be a wonderful thing.

* At the Miracle of Science Café, where one orders from the periodic table of menu elements. Sometimes I suspect the area around MIT is geekier than MIT itself. elynittria suggests I wait to pass judgment until I know the school better.

.

Snippet of conversation at dinner last night, when nine of us were trying to calculate what we each owed, between food, orientation subsidy, tax and gratuity:

Me: Can't we make the mathematician do this?
Mathematician: No, I do pure maths. We don't work with numbers. Make the economist do it.
Economist: Oh, no. No. We just assign variables to things.

In the end, we all did what any large group does when splitting the check: tossed in some bills and hoped it totaled properly.

Taking a page out of topaz_eyes's book and writing up a little bit way too much about how MY REMIXER WINS THE INTERNET, no matter what anyone else says about his/her remixer.

I've left a couple of happy comments to the sestina, Load Cycle (The Breaking Free Remix), but Harmony (The Music Moving Remix) still knocks me breathless and needs more space in which to be squeed about celebrated.

( It could be a case study in a How to Write a Remix manual. )

So, yes. That was—heh—sort of the abridged version. I haven't offered ficlets to people who guess my own remixes, because I think one is obvious and I think none of you have read the other, but I will give an e-cookie to anyone who actually read this.

Remixer-person (and I think I know who you are, if you are indeed someone from the fandom), if you're reading this, if you couldn't tell from this sad equivalent of a love letter, I am still, one week later, absolutely awestruck by "Harmony," both as a remix and as a story in its own right. Every time I come back I see something new, and marvel at the phrasing and dialogue all over again. I honestly couldn't have hoped for a remix as good as this.

Best. Weekend. Ever.

Well, a very, very good weekend, anyway, and one which seems that much more wonderful when compared to the stress of life lately.

Why, you ask? Let us see.

( I. In which she awakes one morning to find herself famous. )

( II. In which RSL and his forearms perform Shakespeare eight feet away. )

Have one more point to make about Hal/Wilson and Falstaff/House parallels noticed by virtue of RSL having played both parts, but it's late now. Tomorrow perhaps.

ETA: I've posted it over here.

ETA 2: Some lovely soul on the TWOP forum posted the soliloquy I couldn't place. Shades of Puck, indeed! "I'll so offend, to make offense a skill."

ETA 3: Photos available, finally! Shoddy quality but better than nothing.

( Forearms and glasses -- you know you wanna look. )