bironic

Crossposts: https://bironic.livejournal.com/410452.html

Mini-reviews of the billionty books I read last fall. Most are adapted from the communal spreadsheet we kept for the autumn reading challenge.

( From Spinning Silver to Murderbot & Wayfarers to rereads of My Teacher Is an Alien & The Vampire Diaries )

Crossposts: http://bironic.livejournal.com/378096.html

Halfway through season 7 of The Vampire Diaries on Netflix and mostly reacting with "WTF."

( For example: )

( The bad and the good. Warning: racism, abuse, suicide. )

I dunnnoooooo.

Crossposts: http://bironic.livejournal.com/358832.html

Writing

Conversation at fannish brunch on Saturday turned to holiday fic and vid exchanges, as tends to happen this time of year. People persuaded me to skim the Yuletide requests spreadsheet, in which I discovered not one but two prompts that are right up my alley. The first was so intriguing, in fact, that I couldn't stop spinning out in my head how the story might go and started writing it the next day. It's now about 1,500 words and growing. Yay.

Want to write the other treat as well. It will take some thinking, but the discovery that a second person out in the world wants this story to exist may ensure that it happens.

This will be the first time I've participated in Yuletide. Feels strange.

Vidding

This will be the… ~~fifth?~~ sixth year I've done

festivids, and my assignment vid is drafted, which may be the earliest that's ever happened.

Somewhere between one and four treats for various recipients are on the docket now. Guess it depends in part on how long the Yuletide stuff takes.

Going

Mixed feelings about traveling for Thanksgiving this year. With luck, there will be downtime for writing. At least I will get to see

par_avion and then a room full of

no_detective,

ahab,

linaerys,

scribblinlenore,

barely_bean,

krisdia,

stlkrchck etc. Rumor has it there will be Magic Mike XXL and pie.

Watching

Season 6 of the Vampire Diaries on Netflix. Still flawed, but overall less boring than it has been in the past, and scarier, with the introduction of victim-stalking human killer Kai. Having fun superimposing Wanda and Pietro from MCU onto Liv and Luke.

Looking forward to checking out Jessica Jones (Krysten Ritter's faaaace on my TVVVV) and The Man in the High Castle but probably not for a little while.

Have also been watching/rewatching stuff for Festivids in the interstices. At some point will get back to Gilmore Girls, but S6 has been kind of tiresome.

Dealing

RL updates can wait for their own posts.

Thinking of you all and hope you are well. ♥ ♥

Crossposts: http://bironic.livejournal.com/354160.html

( Fast & Furious - 4 stories by astolat )

( The Vampire Diaries - 1 story by Ark )

So I added all my vids on the AO3 to a series, right, because you can't yet filter by media type? This means that on the landing page for my username, all the fandoms and all the characters and all the tags for all my vids appear in a giant list as though they were a single vid. This makes for an entertaining read.

I pulled out a selection of the tags, because it's fun to imagine just what kind of work (vid or fic or otherwise) could include all of these things:

Bondage, Grim Reapers, Seduction, Social Justice, Feminist Themes, Boarding School, Angst and Tragedy, Feel-good, chosen family, Declarations Of Love, Vampires, Human Sacrifice, IN SPACE!, Christmas, Alien Invasion, Post-Apocalypse, john sheppard's nebulous sexuality, Nostalgia, Baseball, Singing, Dry Humping, Robot Sex, Sports Metaphors, Dinosaurs, Inappropriate Humor, Girls with Guns, Fluff and Humor, Dysfunctional Relationships, Ridiculous

.

Reading: Best American Magazine Writing 2013, on a break from A Feast of Crows (fourth Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones book). A much more engaging collection than the previous year's, IMO.

Watching:

- Went to catch up on the last third or so of this season of The Vampire Diaries only to discover that it's been so long, they're not all available online; read episode synopses for the missing ones and am continuing on. Am mostly apathetic at this point. I long ago lost track of why Elena and Stefan can or can't be together, and very little that's going on with any plotline or character/relationship is interesting, especially with all the "no homo" they're insisting on with Damon and Enzo, not to mention the theft of yet more ideas from BtVS/Angel etc., down to Romani stereotypes. However, most of the times I've thought things like this in the past, the show has come back with a get-you-right-in-the-heart moment. So I am waiting.

- Game of Thrones. I am so very much anticipating the next episode, because [spoiler], which will cause [emotion]. Overall, though, this season has been poorly paced. A lot of tiny piece adjustments on the game board, with all the good stuff (besides what happened in the second episode) apparently crammed into the end. Seems like a waste of time, given how much of the source story remains, unless they're dragging things out because they don't want to finish before George R.R. Martin does. *shrug* Reading the books in the meantime has certainly taken care of the confusion I felt last season, like that I couldn't tell Stannis or Roose Bolton or Edmure Tully apart (or even name the latter two) or keep Westeros geography straight. This week, I was all, Oh, you want to go to the Eyrie? Take the right rather than the left fork! This has left more mental capacity for enjoying various adaptation choices and considering the anvilicious themes they're drawing out, not only what makes for a good ruler, which the series has been focused on since the beginning, but also things like brotherhood/siblinghood (Tyrion/Jaime, Tyrion/Cersei, Cersei/Jaime, Oberyn/Elia, Sandor/Gregor, Jon/Bran, Lysa/Catelyn, the Night's Watch), and the concept of justice. And I suppose something to do with the pawn-like treatment of people's daughters, re: Myrcella and Sansa and Shireen and Margaery, not to mention Cersei.

- Penny Dreadful. Not sure what to do with this one yet. It's certainly living up to its name with its over-the-top gore, sex, drama and purple prose. Can't tell if that's a deep meta-statement on our continuing attraction to the above, as some reviews would have it, or an excuse to wallow in clichés and lazy writing with top-notch production values. Either way, for now it's enough to delight in the "mashup" of Gothic characters. Never did I expect to see Victor Frankenstein & his creature interact with Mina Murray & her father and a vampire coven alongside Dorian Gray and a variation on Quincey Morris and the requisite cross-obsessed/cursed/crisis of faith/religious vision-type Victorian lady out of an end of days stigmata movie. At least, not outside Mary Shelley's Frankenhole. Come for Timothy Dalton and Reeve Carney; stay for… TBD. So far, in its class of show I prefer NBC Dracula, which plainly revels in its weirdness. But I will not complain about having two whole shows on TV right now in this era and genre.

Pushed through some supremely boring/stupid/taken-from-other-canons stuff to catch up on The Vampire Diaries. The reward: Damon & Enzo. That was perhaps the single slashiest scene I recall from this entire series. Fine, other than Stefan/Damon, because Stefan/Damon breaks my brain. And not counting Damon and Alaric's entire relationship, which had a slower-burn tone to it than the Enzo thing. I swear, even though this is a show that (a) resists poly and m/m solutions to relationship issues and (b) airs on The CW, I really wondered if they were going to kiss.

NBC Dracula: Thomas Kretschmann shackling shirtless Jonathan Rhys-Meyers to a medical platform. A few years ago, that would have been among my epitomes of fannish satisfaction.

Speaking of whom, this casting announcement for the next Avengers movie actually makes me look forward to seeing it.

Crossovers that should exist:

- Riddick & Ronon: two buff fightin' dudes on the (interplanetary) run from evil aliens
- Doctor Who & Dax, reminiscing in a bar about having a longtime-repressed past incarnation

That is all. Because discussing the brilliance of The Act of Killing, which I finally got to see last night, deserves much better than sharing space with the above.

Well, I'll be moving out of DC on Monday and into Boston on Friday the 13th. *boxes everywhere*

Yesterday was my last day at work. Aside from the final crunch (my exit memo ended up being 50 pages, since it was half memo and half technical manual and included a ton of screen shots), it was a good end to the job. We had a happy hour mid-week and went bowling yesterday, and people were really sweet and gave me cards and hugs and stuff.

I chose the restaurant for the happy hour, I confess, in honor of The Vampire Diaries. Two of the main characters from that series are Damon and Stefan Salvatore; the owners of this restaurant and a sister restaurant nearby are Damian and Stephanie Salvatore. Really, how could I not go there at least once? Plus, all agreed it was tasty.

Social appointments this weekend, the rest of the packing, getting remaining paperwork in order, squeezing in the last errands, some last-minute panicking (ask me the last time I slept a full night), then movers and a 450-mile drive. It's going too fast. But it's also exciting. A new story that begins between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur.

One day soon there will be time again for things like vidding and Kink Bingo and talking about how Iggy does hilarious TOS Tumblr write-ups during our online rewatch...

It's difficult to figure out whether this picspam/writeup belongs more in the "dressup" or "historical roleplay" category for my Kink Bingo card, because there's such an overlap in this case. Probably going with "dressup" after all to make a particular line.

All right, so we've covered how the characters on The Vampire Diaries love dressing up in evening wear and outfits from past decades and Halloween costumes and uniforms for school events, etc.; how they ogle one another in their unusual clothes, how we similarly enjoy looking at them, how they admire themselves in their mirrors, and how we get to glimpse them in the act of choosing and putting on clothes/accessories.

Now we turn to a related but distinct kind of dressup on the show: flashbacks to the supernatural characters in earlier eras. The Originals in their Viking-esque village or in the Middle Ages. Stefan and Damon in antebellum Virginia or the well-tailored 1910s. Katerina/Katherine weaving through it all. There is a fetish here for the historical settings and costumes, although this time it's more clearly on the part of the show creators for the benefit of (themselves and) the actors and the viewers, rather than a demonstration of what the characters themselves enjoy. In a way it's not quite historical roleplay, because the characters are the same, just younger; but in another way it is, because the actors are playing their characters in different settings. Different mannerisms, different locations, slightly different ways of talking. And of course, most marvelously of all, different clothes.

Because it's a lot of fun to switch between ( pairs like these: )

The multiple styles of dress are beautiful in themselves and call attention to (or heighten the enjoyment of) one another through the contrast. My favorite might be the long, flowing fashions of the Katarina/Elijah/Klaus love triangle. Reminds me of Edmund Blair Leighton paintings. ~~I mean, even though the dudes' hair is usually ridiculous.~~

And now, the picspam.

( Historical dress-up, from 40 to 1,000 years ago )

The end. Hope you enjoyed! I know I do whenever we are treated to scenes like this on the show.

In addition to having a kink for throat grabs, The Vampire Diaries loves to play dress-up. The main characters hang out and go to school (ha—less so with each passing year; don't ask me how the group who survived to season four not only graduated but managed to include the valedictorian) wearing your typical contemporary teen-TV fashionable street clothes, ( like so: )

But they also spend a remarkable amount of time going to fancy parties and themed school dances. Which means we get to enjoy seeing them in ball gowns and tuxes, fun retro outfits, Halloween costumes, and more. And often we get to glimpse them in the process of getting dressed, whether it's going through their closets or doing their hair and makeup. The frequency of characters looking at themselves in the mirror is a subject for another day...

The second manifestation of dress-up on this show is the frequent flashing back to tens, hundreds, or thousands of years earlier in the vampire characters' lives. For Kink Bingo, I feel those are more appropriately classified as historical roleplay. Stay tuned for that picspam soon!

For now, let's take a trip through some of the episodes where characters in current day dress up, and admire everyone's access to a variety of stylish clothes and their delight in same.

p.s. I don't think any of the images are spoilery except perhaps in showing that some characters are still alive. :)

( 1920s-1980s dances, a masquerade and a ball, Halloween, graduation and prom, Miss Mystic Falls pageant, etc. etc. )

( Getting dressed )

And that is that! Hope you enjoyed.

Put together for the "dressup" square on my Kink Bingo card.

ETA: Related picspam: Historical dress-up on TVD

Thank you, everyone who took a minute to offer advice for the Great Basement/Attic Cleanout. Your voices were in my head as we worked last week. ("Resist the urge to move piles around!" "Only keep items for people if you have someone specific in mind." "Take this chance to model letting-go for your father." "Don't just throw everything away.") After six 12- to 14-hour days in NY, a day at the office, a holiday, another day at the office, and a day to recover, I'm feeling together enough to tell you that it went well and to share some pictures.

( Before and afters )

It was tough in several ways. It was exhausting and filthy, and decision fatigue set in each day before I was done. There are some things I'm remorseful about, including the way I treated my dad a few times.* Bringing my notebook was an excellent idea, although I didn't leave much time for thinking; it's a defense mechanism, keeping busy. I was also reminded in more than one way why I don't live there anymore. And there is so much more to be done. But I'm glad we tackled our portion, I'm glad my sister was there most days to join me—we hadn't spent that much time together at once in years—and I think we accomplished what we set out to.

*He was up and down in his handling of the mess, the dust, the hubbub, the idea of letting us let things go. Sometimes he'd hover or pick through our piles, then sometimes he'd volunteer to shed some of his own stuff. Sometimes I'd ask him a question about what to do with a particular item and he'd freeze up. E. had to take him out of the house at least once.

I enjoyed two breaks: dinner Saturday night with my dad and E., and brunch Sunday with

ignazwisdom, who braved two trains to come visit from Brooklyn. Hadn't seen Iggy in ages and that was great. As was brunch, mm. We are going to try to re-watch some TOS eps long distance, so don't be surprised if you start seeing posts about them around here.

( Some fun stuff we uncovered, incl. fannish and baby items )

Thanks for reading. ♥

.

Did manage to sign up for a Kink Bingo card, which I started brainstorming for when I had a chance to breathe on Thursday. There should be a picspam soon. Watch this space.

In February I felt great and did a lot of RL things. In the form of a meme, it might look like this:

Did: Probably many if not most of you will sympathize when I say that I do best when I have something to focus on (a.k.a. obsess over), and in the past six weeks or so it has taken the form of homemaking. After years of hedging on properly setting up my apartment for comfortable long-term living, and after deciding to stick to the studio rather than stretch my budget with a one-bedroom, something gave and there was a bit of a whirlwind of organizing/furnishing/decorating. ( Details and sample pix: ) Diving into the archives of Apartment Therapy was excellent for idea generation and for accepting that fixing little day-to-day annoyances can lead to a big improvement in your enjoyment of your living space.

Oh, and on a roll for making changes, I picked out new glasses frames at the store where my dad's fiancée, E., works, and got a haircut. And there went the rest of my last freelance paycheck.

Traveled: Weekend trips to Pennsylvania and New York. Made a batch of soft and tasty hamantaschen with my dad and E. for Purim. Got to see my mom for half a day. There was still snow on the ground on Long Island from the 30-inch storm three weeks earlier.

Watched: The usual TV shows, including The Vampire Diaries—which made me feel something several episodes back, gasp—plus more White Collar on Netflix and I think a movie.

Read: Cloud Atlas. Short stories on CD: sci fi radio plays from the 50s and 60s. Fic: an Inception Pretty Woman AU (WIP), an Inception lit mag publishing AU (WIP), something else I'm forgetting. Started a book called Alien Sex (!) found in a used store in

synn's town. It honest to goodness includes a series of epistolary poems called "Sextraterrestrials" by Joe Haldeman and a friend.

Wrote/Vidded: Nothing, but have ideas. On the cool side, two recent vids will be showing at Muskrat Jamboree!

The reason I felt so good in February turns out to be health-related, as I was given a slightly different birth control formulation for 30 days while waiting for a refill of my regular one. The month (and more) before the substitution was crappy, as has been the week and a half since it ended (as Buffy would say, progesterone and I are unmixy things), so I am in the process of switching to the one that actually made me feel happy and energetic and let me sleep well and didn't make my head and back hurt. Nothing quite like realizing just how glum/lethargic/anxious/poorly rested/unable to concentrate you have been by virtue of it all being alleviated within like two days. Anyway, fingers crossed that it wasn't a fluke and can be recaptured.

How are you? I've been reading the flist & circle every day, just not participating…

And then I wrote a follow-up flashfic thing. Which maybe this time is actually sexy.

Title: The night is dark and full of dreams
Fandom: The Vampire Diaries
Pairings: Elena/Stefan/Klaus
Rating: Adult
Word Count: 1,200
Content notes: Some issues of consent, albeit in a dream; double penetration.
A/N: Written for Porn Battle XIV for the prompt, "Elena Gilbert/Klaus Mikaelson/Stefan Salvatore, share," and posted there. Follows In This Together, but you don't have to read that first. This one is also related to ep 3x5, "The Reckoning."

( Elena dreams about that night in the gym. )

It is a melodramatic, cliché-ridden fic where the emotions possibly pinball around from paragraph to paragraph, but whatever! I wrote a thing! A thing which I have been meaning to write since a year ago this month (I think) when I saw this episode, no less. Because someone had to write this alternate scene, by God. Never mind that it is a Porn Battle fill that is 95% not porn.

Title: In This Together
Fandom: The Vampire Diaries
Characters/Pairings: Stefan/Elena and Klaus
Rating: R
Word Count: 2,822
Summary: ~~Aliens~~ Klaus makes them do it. Alternate take on the gym scene in 3x5, "The Reckoning" (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5l0swGevEbo). First several lines of dialogue are from the ep.
Content Notes: Noncon of the sexual and mind-control variety; voyeurism.
A/N: Dashed off for Porn Battle XIV for the prompts "school, compulsion, voyeur"; originally posted here. Since I was going to write this for *cough* Porn Battle XIII and then the "hypnosis/mind control" square on my Kink Bingo card last summer, let's also call it an amnesty fill.

( 'All I wanted was your allegiance. Now I'm going to have to take it.' )

ETA: Follow-up fic with sexier sex: The night is dark and full of dreams

Good movie: Die Wand/The Wall (Austria, 2012). As usual, I review in adjectives: contemplative, frightening, post-apocalyptic, beautiful, quiet, philosophical without being eye-rolling (as opposed to Richard Linklater) or grandiose (as opposed to Terence Malik). The way it remained grounded in the experience of one person while sometimes scoping out into widely applicable observations, without pretending to explain everything about the human condition, seems to have made some reviewers call it a lesser film than those of Malik, for example, but that's exactly why I was able to connect with and enjoy The Wall more than I could with something like The New World. Maybe that's a critical (as in critique, not as in essential) sophistication I haven't developed yet. But I liked very much that it was the story of a woman prone to depression struggling to remain motivated to survive in the mountains when she finds herself alone, give or take several pets, for what might be the rest of her life. It had a touch of science fiction. It had elements of life in the face of harsh wilderness odds. It had metaphors about insurmountable separations among people, between women and men, between urban/civilized and rural/pure life; about both the gulfs and the bonds between humans and animals. It… also had a lot of animal harm. And pervasive bird imagery that made me think the end was headed somewhere different. And enough creepiness that I had to watch a Vampire Diaries episode when I got home before I could go to bed.

I've put the book on my Hanukkah list. It will be interesting to see the ways it differs from and deepens the film adaptation.

Review from Variety and background info from QuietEarth.us. NYT etc. haven't reviewed yet; looks like it won't be out in wide release in the U.S. until the spring. Yay getting to see an early screening! Now if only other reviewers would stop calling it "the feminine Robinson Crusoe," ugh.

.

Okay movie: Paul (alien movie spoof by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost of Shaun of the Dead/Hot Fuzz fame). Watched it last night and don't have much to say about it other than it was fun to pick out some of the specific movie references, especially toward the end: E.T., Close Encounters, Starman, Men in Black, Cocoon, Alien, probably a bunch I didn't know. Cute, crass, nothing in it that really stands out. Blythe Danner was cute.

Sinking TV show: The Vampire Diaries. Really disappointing season so far. No one believes Elena can handle anything, the men make decisions for her, and then when there's a chance for her to show them all how stupid they're being, instead she falls apart just as predicted. Plus there's the continued frustrated-scream-inducing "will she choose hot guy one or hot guy two????" plot that has saturated the vampire-related YA market. Bonnie's being manipulated all over the place. Caroline hardly gets to have a plot that doesn't involve a boyfriend or a wants-to-be-boyfriend. Stefan is more boring than usual. The new girl is annoying. No one is being sexy-threatening. Sigh. At least Damon's smirk frequency seems to be on the decline.

Already low TV show: Project Runway All-Stars. As with the previous/first All-Stars season, you can really feel the second-rate effort at every level—host and guest judges (except Isaac Mizrahi), editing quality, sponsorship… It's also irritating how the lady judges get introduced as "editor of X, the beautiful [name]" while the menfolk get credentials without comments on their physical appearance. Just another sign of the double standard that drives the fashion industry in the first place, I guess.

*finishes season three* At long last! The throat-grab picspam.

Fandom: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Pairings: Multi – details behind the cut
Rating/contents: PG/PG-13 for a mix of action-oriented/violent, erotic and/or nonconsensual images of hands on throats, headlocks, and hands pressed to mouths. A bloody pair of fangs or two.
Spoilers: I think only for seeing which characters interact with which, and sometimes an unexpected one is stronger? Screenshots taken from seasons two and three.
A/N: I don't remember where the tipping point was for me exactly, but once you notice that characters on this show get grabbed by the throat pretty often, you can't unsee it. I swear, we hit upwards of three throat-grabs per episode at the height of season two. So here you have it, a picspam conveying some of the ridiculousness/glory. For the "breathplay" square on my Bingo card.

( List of pairings )

( 83 screencaps )

( 44 icons based on the above )

Anyone's free to use or transform these if they're interested. Credit would be great if you do.

x-posted to vpd-icons, tvdicons and tvd_icons (why are there three TVD icon communities? why?)

Catch-up time! With a few pictures.

( Home Decorating for the Holidays – First trip to synn's new place )

( TV & Movies – Red Cliff, Sherlock TV show, Tron: Legacy, Stargate (1994), Thoughtcrimes rewatch, Brimstone ep rewatch, Vampire Diaries. With bonus link to an article about invented languages for fictional cultures. )

( Cooking – Mm, holiday food. )

( Hanukkah – Gifts, given and received, and a little help from technology. )

Should say something about fic now that I've got a bit of time to read some again. But I am not a big fan of Yuletide—I'm up to the "T" fandoms that I know and so far I've only got Texts from Cephalopods to recommend, along with about 10,000 other people, based on a possibly bogus YouTube video we watched when we saw the name of the "fandom"—and a couple of enjoyable Inception stories of late, Late Night Phone Call by

sparkledark and The Lost Art of Keeping a Secret by

eleveninches. Need to check out

sga_santa and see if there's anything good over there. It's nice that the rare pairings (by which we mean everything that isn't McKay/Sheppard and Rodney/Jennifer, and maybe Sheppard/Weir and Sheppard/Teyla) are growing ever more numerous as the years pass since the show ended.

…Whoops, my friend just called to remind me that she and her husband and their puppy are coming over tomorrow evening for dinner. Guess I'd better figure out what they'll be fed.

Aside from everyone being chained up all over the place, I don't think I realized exactly how kinky The Vampire Diaries is until I started screencapping season two for Kink Bingo. What started out as a tiny bingo for the December challenge has turned into a tiny bingo of 5 different kink pairs plus a full-on picspam just for all the throat-grabbing that goes on. I don't think there's been an episode in this season where at least one character didn't get grabbed by the neck or put in a headlock. Goodness me.

Picspam pending; I still have a few episodes left to watch in the season. Until then, here's the mini-fill: 5 icons that make a simultaneous double line bingo. I've also included larger screen shots to do the images full justice. (Even if by "full justice" I mean "middling quality screencaps from streaming Netflix.")

Kinks are: body alteration/injury + bondage (wrist/ankle restraints), bloodplay + danger, held down + authority figures, exhibitionism + mirrors and doubles, and tickling + confined/caged. The bingo card I used is here.
Characters/pairings: Caroline, Katherine/Stefan, Mason/Tyler, Tyler
Warnings: One of the icons depicts a non-sexual nonconsensual situation, and two show characters in pain.
Spoilers: For the first half of season two.

( 5 icons and screen grabs )

Images are free for anyone to use as they please.

+ I wrote some stuff today! 2,650 words of stuff, even.

- Said stuff was not the article I have to write for work nor anything for alpheratz's birthday nor a fill for Kink Bingo's adorable mini-fanwork fest.

+/- Have been watching Vampire Diaries season two instead of crossing anything off my weekend to-do list. Still a surprisingly smart show, for a CW drama. Characters grasp what is going on most of the time without needing three episodes and a speech, and plots move along at an impressive pace so that what would be cliffhangers on other shows instead happen half- or three-quarters of the way through an episode.

+ Also read a couple of good fics: Promises by

bluflamingo (SGA/SG-1 Big Bang from a while back, sequel to a previous Big Bang, John Sheppard/Cameron Mitchell, domestic/kidfic) and You Can Be as Loud as the Hell You Want by

toomuchplor (Inception, Arthur/Eames, hot and interesting).

'Twas a week full of parties for your typically minimally social correspondent.

+ First, over Thanksgiving, there was the long-anticipated NYC "brunch crew" fannish potluck, complete with screenings of X-Men: First Class and The Eagle, neither of which I had seen, and the latter of which the attendees helpfully and hilariously narrated for me while fast-forwarding to the "good" parts (I must report that the narration was far better than the script), as well as a chance to catch up a little bit with scribblinlenore and pun, in addition to the previously mentioned peoples whom I miss a lot. I have to say, though, that for the first time since I moved away, the longing was tempered by having a few good groups of friends here now in D.C.

+/- Some of those friends having been present for alpheratz's birthday, which featured among other things a delicious chocolate raspberry cake and roasted sweet potatoes and beets and oh yes, good company, but also unfortunately a big fluffy cat that tried to kill my respiratory system. All better now.

+/- And then last night, there was a multi-occasion party at a friends' apartment, at which I met a young woman named Chaya (pronounced like Sheppard's Chaya, not the Hebrew name) and a guy who had been in a band with Bear McCreary, whom I believe some of you adore for his work on the Battlestar Galactica soundtrack? Anyway, my crush also made an appearance, and since I haven't worked up the guts yet to actually ask him out I can only report that the outlook appears to be dimming. Or maybe that is vice versa.

+ The surprise delight of Thanksgiving weekend was getting to meet up with

ignazwisdom for a little while. We overlapped in Boston and then hadn't seen each other in… wow, maybe two years.

- There may or may not be a mouse that occasionally inhabits the wall behind my kitchenette and comes out for a visit. I have heard rustling/chewing on two nights in the last month but have not yet seen the critter. Traps and answers forthcoming.

+ Playing Scrabble Slam with

deelaundry yesterday and watching her kids be cute, as usual.

+ Dinner! Which is about to be consumed.

Et vous, flist?

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Entries tagged with the vampire diaries

Lightning Round: Books

Having lost track of most of the plots...

Writing fic: a thing that I am doing!

Fic recs: Fast & Furious and The Vampire Diaries

Media update

Fannish miscellany

Time flies on

Picspam the second: Historical dress-up in The Vampire Diaries (38 pictures)

The Vampire Diaries loves its dress-up (71 pictures!)

Basement: It is done. Sort of.

Uh, whoops. One month, no posts. Hi!

Flashfic the second! "The night is dark and full of dreams," Elena/Klaus/Stefan (Vampire Diaries)

Flashfic! "In This Together," Elena/Stefan + Klaus, The Vampire Diaries

Media update

Vampire Diaries picspam!

ps thanx for all the prawns

Vampire Diaries kinky icon set

On the whole, ambivalent

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