dreams and schemes and circus crowds

We went to the Cruxshadows show at Valentines tonight.

I'm sure once the overload of awesome has had the night to process, I'll come up with a means of expressing it, but for right now, all I can quite manage, is a bit of exhausted chair-boogie while I wait for myself to wind down enough that I can hope for sleep sometime tonight. Small venue, not a highly advertised show, so it wasn't crowded beyond belief, and oh, did Himself ever grace the dance floor... not uncommon for that band, so I'm told, but still -- Club Maenad bypassed the dance floor in favour of the main stage tonight! Valerie, the new guitarist is just about the cutest thing I've seen, and... well, let's just say there wasn't a single creature up there in the band, whom I'd have thrown out of bed.

But no, I can't get started now, or I'll just babble on all night, and never sleep.

This is me, being 'good' now.
Dayum, that was a nice early birthday present!

I still have a love/hate relationship with their song Birthday though. I told Matt that he'd bloody well feel the same, once HE was 40 years old. He laughed at me, so I whacked him in the knee with my walker. That'll learn 'im.

I'm a little stunned that Thanksgiving is coming up so soon. It's not as though we didn't have a proper fall with pretty leaves that lasted for a while. Or nice crisp weather. But I feel as though November should've lasted longer. Who knows? Either way there will soon be lots of turkey and, in a week (Nov 29, mark your calendars) will be my birthday. So there's really no wrong to be found here.

Tomorrow I'll be doing the traditional brunch plus local Thanksgiving parade. Afterwhich I'll... do something. Not sure yet. Depends on how awake I am and how frakking cold it may be outside. I mean I love cold weather but DAMN.

Went to see Twilight last night. I wasn't planning on going but one of my movie buddies from work asked if our movie-watching gang wanted to go see Twilight and NONE OF THE OTHERS KNEW WHAT IT WAS. THEY JUST FIGURED IT WAS A POPULAR MOVIE SO WHY NOT?

Naturally I filled them in on the best details over our pre-movie dinner. They are now well aware of how Twilight means never having to say you're kidding. One of them spent the entire movie laughing. Like she couldn't breathe for laughing. It was awesome.

(And we made sure to sit in the back so as to try to contain any obnoxiousness coming from our end. We didn't go in intending to harsh anyone's squee or anything like that.)

And now I watch a Semi-Homeade Thanksgiving which features a dessert with FOUR KINDS OF SUGAR ON TOP OF IT. INCLUDING MAPLE SYRUP MIXED WITH POWDERED SUGAR. Much like Twilight, you can't make this shit up.

I was rewatching 4.10 before I left to pick up the kids and I really like ( spoilers )

***

I am so tired and sleepy and warm, sitting all curled up on my couch. Today was very fun and busy, but I am just not made for cold weather.

I picked up the kids at Penn, and we schlepped up to 86th street, and had brunch at the Popover Cafe, which was really nice. We had to wait for a table, but it wasn't a tremendously long wait. I had the lemon pancakes, Alyssa had the chicken salad sandwich, and Anthony had the French toast. Oh, and the iced chai was really good.

Then we walked down to the museum, and because BEMC is a corporate member, we got in free and only had to pay for the special exhibits we wanted to see - we chose Climate Change and The Horse, and the guy sent us into the IMAX theatre for Climate Change, except that that was a movie about Sea Monsters. Which was fine and all - very "Finding Nemo" at parts, except with ancient dinosaur-like giant fish things (every time the big giant prehistoric turtle showed up, I was like, "Duuude." and the shark reminded me of Bruce: "Fish are our friends!" - but was not what we wanted to see. Then we wandered upstairs to the horse exhibit, which was far too crowded, but very interesting.

Then we wandered some more, and finally hit the meteorite, minerals and and gems exhibit, which none of us had seen before. Well, obviously, Anthony had never been to the museum before, so he'd never seen it, but neither had Alyssa and I, and we've been there a few times.

Well, we spent quite a lot of time in there, and both kids really seemed to enjoy it (Anthony's affinity for sulfur was amusing on several levels). We saw the Star of India, and a smaller star ruby, and a lot of other gorgeous gems, and some really cool looking rocks - pyrite and hematite and quartz and a ton of other stuff none of us had ever heard of, but was really pretty to look at. Anthony was actually considering a future in geology for a bit (he is fifteen and unsure about what he wants to do with his life, though architectural engineering is his current fancy; my dad was a draftsman, so he is kind of chuffed by that idea).

Then they started announcing the museum was going to close, so we went back out into the cold, where it was even colder, because it was dark, and had dinner at the Shake Shack. The burgers were really good (and so were the fries, I'm told - I didn't have any), but man, they need more seating. Some really rude people left their coats on a table and didn't leave a person sitting there, so I sat on one bench and some other guy set on the other bench, until the people came back (and the moron was like, "I guess my plan wasn't foolproof." I felt like lighting into her, but I didn't. I didn't even make a not-really-sotto-voce nasty comment, though I wanted to. I am growing as a person!).

After we ate, we took the subway back down to Penn, and I put them on the train, and came back home. It was a good day.

***

Hey, maybe I will attempt to write something tonight! It could happen!

***

Augh!

I was able to download the SGA episode last night. Now I'm trying to download the Merlin episode from a private server. Nothing's happening.

I went to a Megaupload link to download from there. Got the countdown. Then, when I went to click the button to download, I got the message to save the file... and then nothing happened.

Alarmed, I went to Mediafire to see if I could upload files. I pressed the "big green button" to upload files. Nothing happened. It didn't move me to the next menu.

Then I went to YouSendIt, logged in, and tried to upload a file there. It wouldn't let me even browse to the file to upload.

Remember the virus attack on Thursday that hit people downloading SPN's latest episode from mininova.org? That we weren't able to even access the mininova.org site afterward (and we still can't)?

It's bigger than that. This is a major virus attack aimed to prevent people from sharing files.

1) Stay clear of mininova.org. That's where it started.

2) Spydoctor and Malwarebytes Anti-Malware both say my computer's clean. Obviously that's not true.

3) If anyone has any ideas how to deal with this problem, any at all no matter how far-fetched, please let me know.

4) Any ideas how I can get the Merlin ep? My friends? I was able to download the SGA episode last night, but it was labeled a .doc file. Maybe that gets around this. Is there a way I can watch online? Email it (can one email a 350 meg file)?

This isn't fair. These are free TV shows I'm downloading.

Okay, okay, so I swore I'd write no Merlin fic before its time. I'd finish my massive WiP first (which is getting close to done... ten scenes before I hit a major pre-written section from this summer... 20 scenes beyond that... visualize a bridge, with most of it built, and large struts sticking out of the water, it's like that).

But just one little Merlin fic? After I write the next four scenes of Out Of Bounds? I'll be good.

Thought I'd dodged the bullet when WG brought home the flu for my birthday.

Clever and wise, I opted to stay home in the early stages. Then, the thinking went, I would not get as severely, horribly sick. I had a live example in WG to convince me that this was a plague to be avoided. He moaned in his sleep. I still haven't forgotten last year's flu.

How well did my plan work?

Guess.

It might have been the miserable damp weather yesterday. I should have taken the car rather than stand in the rain at the bus stop.

I keep thinking of things I want to post about and then forgetting them, and then I got my period this morning, and realized, ah, that's why my brain has been wonky all week. Joy.

One thing I did want to mention is that if you are spoilerphobic, which I am not, really - I am generally plot-twist-spoiler-avoidant. there's a difference. I like casting spoilers, and sometimes I can't resist clicking on other types of things, and also, I don't think TV guide type blurbs are actually spoilers, which I will get to in a second - you probably have already learned not to have the EW feeds on your Google reader. Because yesterday, there were two separate posts with SPN spoilers (well, the same SPN spoiler) in the subject line. I mean, it was something that was obviously going to happen from the preview shown last week, but if you are the kind of person who avoids the previews, then you would probably consider it a spoiler.

And this is the thing I find interesting - it was something that probably a large number of people would consider a spoiler, and yet it is something that the promo department felt was good marketing to show.

Now, we all know the promo departments are sometimes godawful at keeping things a secret that should be kept secret - NBC promos are infamous for spoiling the endings of shows - but in the general run of things, what we see as spoilers, they (being the networks etc.) feel is good advertising.

Dean's going to take off his shirt? Booth and Brennan are going to smooch? Denny is coming back to Grey's? Tell the world, because then more people (i.e., casual viewers) will tune in!

I mean, we've all seen trailers that basically obviate the need to see the movie, since all the major plot twists and best jokes are included in that two minutes, and that is totally a problem, but sometimes you've gotta dangle a lure, as with advertising that a beloved actor is coming back, or a lot of long-standing UST is going to be R'd, and hope it will bring in viewers who might have drifted away or meant to watch but forgot etc. And yet, I'm sure that they - the networks and the showrunners - also want to keep their secrets. They don't want to show that, say, JDM is going to return to SPN (NOT A REAL SPOILER) if he's going to show up in the last two minutes of a cliff-hanger. The surprise appearance of George Clooney on ER when Carol Hathaway left was awesome. Yet, if he agrees to come back for the ER series finale, I would imagine they'd trumpet that all over the place. Then again, maybe not - maybe the suspense of will he/won't he will be enough to get people to watch.

The fact that so much more news about entertainment is available to us now - look at how early people freak out about stuff because of sides - makes the tension between giving too much away and giving enough to hook people into watching really interesting.

And speaking of the impact of the internet and timeshifting and all that fun stuff on entertainment, how dumb is Tim Kring? James Poniewozik and Maureen Ryan both eviscerate his stupid remarks, but seriously, "DVRs are bad for serialized storytelling"? Seriously? What the fuck is Tim Kring smoking? And calling the people still actually watching his show in real time "saps and dipshits" is really poor repayment to the folks who are still actually watching his suckfest and providing the ratings. He's a stutter step away from telling people they're interrogating his text from the wrong perspective.

*shakes head*

I knew he didn't understand fandom, or the comics tropes he was mining, but this is a whole new level of dumn (sic).

Protip to Tim Kring: you are not Aaron Sorkin. The last thing you want to do is emulate Aaron Sorkin's antagonism towards his fans (even Aaron Sorkin should give up his antagonism towards his fans, but at least he's a talented dickwad). It's a bad idea all around.

Otoh, I am still not sure about how I feel about Kripke-levels of fanservice. Surely there's a happy medium?

And I am still processing last night's SPN, but I do have one question: ( spoilers )

Okay, that was one question and one observation and one bit of spec.

And the phones just went crazy, so I'm gonna hit post now.

***

Oh, wonderful. I tried downloading the latest SPN episode from mininova.org and got a virus infected file instead.

Threat name: Trojan.Downloader.NUS
Threat level: somwhere between Kristallnacht and nuclear holocaust

Bonus? Looks like it blocks me from going to the mininova.org web page. I can't warn anyone. Except you, of course.

Currently cleaning it out with Spywaredoctor. Next I run AVG.

I worked until 7, then I chose to take the bus because I didn't feel like making the walk home from the subway, and then I missed the bus and the next local bus never came so I ended up walking almost twice as much as I would have had I taken the subway. Sigh. And don't even get me started on the MTA and the way the govt keeps screwing us on this...ugh.

Let's talk happy things. Like Supernatural: Heaven and Hell.

( rambly incoherent and mostly squeeful spoilers )

I *heart* my show, but I am not sure I can stand an eight week hiatus. *whimper* Let the fic writing begin.

***

Been a while since I've done one of these.

( As always, tags indicate subjects included )

LJ has just given us another icon slot (145!) and I can't decide what to upload. I am having that itch where I want to weed out the keywords and icons I don't use anymore, delete everything and reupload, in some kind of organized fashion. Maybe this weekend, while I am procrastinating on writing.

***

kestrelsan has an interesting post about story length, and I tend to think that most really long fan-written stories could be cut down by at least 30%, if not 50%. I mean, I tend to write short, and I tend to get betas back that make me add a few hundred words, but even I, in the longest thing I've written (46K words), probably should have cut 6000-8000 words out (even though I can totally rationalize the existence of those scenes, I can also see, especially with some distance, how they do slow the story down).

So while the complaint that short stories often feel like sketches or broad outlines rather than full stories is not unfounded, I am more likely to complain that a lot of longer stories feel like 4K words of story drawn out over 40K words. And there are a lot of reasons for that – people who post wsip when they don't know where they're going and end up meandering; the proliferation of big bang challenges with large minimum word counts; the inability of a great number of fan writers – me included – who have a shaky grasp of pacing (to put it kindly). And because of the greater time invested in a longer story, to me, the disappointment is more memorable.

I will say that I have gone back to writing a little longer - and I say "gone back to" because in XMM I did write a number of 10-20K word stories, though I think my comfort zone back then was in the 5K-8K zone, though I don't have the word count on most of those stories.

The thing is, back when I was writing Logan/Rogue, I needed that length to get them together (not that that is long by most standards). I needed to build that relationship up so it was believable; I had to take the pairing through its paces to make it work. And I enjoyed messing around with all the old romance novel tropes.

When I got into HP and started writing Sirius/Remus, I didn't feel like I needed to do that. I still occasionally wrote a story that hit 10K words (usually for remix. heh.) but I did a lot of 1200 word PWPs and schmoopy vignettes, because the pairing was SO OBVIOUS and so ROCK SOLIDLY near canon that I didn't feel a need to do a lot of leading the reader or making it believable, because I felt (still feel, later books notwithstanding) that Remus/Sirius lives in the interstices of PoA and OotP (and even GoF), so there was no need for me to do that much work.

The thing is, before I soured on XMM entirely, I was pretty OTP about Logan/Rogue. So I'm not sure it's the degree of OTP-ness that made me feel like one pairing required a shitload of work and the other didn't, so much as my own feeling of how close to canon the pairing was (or how easily you could get to the pairing by extrapolating from canon - I know in HP circles there was a lot of semantic confusion about near-canon ships because some people thought that meant we expected to see it in canon, while I and other people like me, thought of it as a logical extrapolation from canon, but not necessarily anything that was ever going to show up in the books though, god help me, I kinda sorta hoped it would).

Obviously, a lot depends on the characters, as well. Much like Logan/Rogue, it takes a lot of work to get Mal and Kaylee, or Mal and River, into a sexual or romantic relationship. So again in Firefly, I was hitting 6K and 9K words (15K in one memorable instance) in order to get them where I wanted them to be. I was still writing occasional 1200 word character pieces and PWPs, but also more gen, which also seemed to require more words.

Now, in SPN, I tend to write either short episode codas (that may or may not involve Wincest, depending); Dean/girl stories, which take a little bit of set up but don't generally require a lot of words; and more casefile-ish types of things, which do seem to require 3K-8K words a pop from me (I am sure other writers could make them work over a larger amount of words, but plot and I tend to be unmixy and like our associations to be as short as humanly possible). (Oddly, since I can't always predict whether there will be Wincest in my stories - even when I set out with the intention that there will or won't be for a given story - I can't really generalize on how that affects things.)

So I definitely feel like I am writing longer stories now, and I think I am reading longer stories now – still not the 100K word behemoths that so many people bemoan the lack of these days – but things that go for 8K or 15K or 20K words, and those I do find really satisfying, when they don't feel like there is only 2K words of story amid the 20K words.

I am not sure all this rambling had a point, but obviously, I can still write a 1000 word LJ post with ease. *snerk*

***

Great day in the morning!

I have to agree with Sasha Frere-Jones on this one:

Earliest Christmas Ever!

As if Obama winning wasn’t enough good news, Coldplay have announced that they are breaking up next year. Chris Martin says that they will "go for it in every sense" until they disband, though, and I fear this going for it will involve another Coldplay album. As a result, my own going for it is going to be severely curtailed. Trips into the outside world will be planned carefully, so that I avoid retail outlets likely to play "The Last Whinge" or "Coconut Diaper" or whatever it ends up being called. This means I will be eating at Mars 2112.

Perhaps it's time to add "hating coldplay" back to my LJ interests.

the last time I talked about hating coldplay, something like 12 people defriended me over the course of the next few hours. It was quite traumatic. *braces for impact*

***

( Lord, I'm walking to you now... )

Speaking of which, my birthday is in 12 days -- what should I get up to, d'you think?



If I get anything worthwhile, I'll bang them up here for folks to see... but I honestly don't expect to, given that they're meant to be little more than medium experiments.

A banana in my backpack plus large, heavy books = not a good idea.

Who knew?

If people wrote fanfic about my life, well, these would be the sort of deep, meaningful lessons I learn. I like to think that John Sheppard does stupid things like this all the time, and only once he's with Rodney does anyone find out that, yes, John will put his shoes directly in front of the door and then trip over them.

There must be fic. Entitled "Could Have Been In Mensa."

Archive News, and my, that sounds official

In other, less squishy, news: I'm uploading my fic to the beta version of AAOOO (An Archive Of Our Own).

The tagging feature, when carefully thought out, is very, very cool. It will make finding exactly what you want so much easier.

For example, I have 18 stories uploaded so far.

If you remember a story that involves, say, sex toys, you go to my page, click Tags off to the right there, and then click the "sex toy" filter.

"Sex toy" brings up two stories, Bacchanalian Circuit (SGA) and Lost in the Temple of Law (SPN).

Now if you want to read someone else's "sex toy" centric fics, you click on the tag "sex toy." That brings up my two stories, plus two by Kass.

Nifty.

Let me know if my tags work for you. This is to save you trouble later on, make it easy for you to find what you want, and help create a base of solid, (correctly spelled!), carefully considered tags for everyone.

Great set of discussions today -- thank you to all who chimed in. (And sorry that my work of day had me away from the computer for longer than I'd anticipated. I'd intended to jump in a lot more often than I was able to do, but still enjoyed reading the interplay.

(In case it's not clear, I crossposted this morning's invitation to debate between my Cluegirl accounts at LJ and IJ, and also to the LJ where I pretend to be an actual grown up with responsibilities and a career and suchlike. The threads of discussion were similar in all three, but different enough to have made the cross-post well worthwhile.)

Cheers!
C

R. and I went to see Rachel Getting Married this evening. It was an intense movie, personal and real. I felt like I was at that wedding (though I have never been at a wedding where Robyn Hitchcock played - that would be pretty freaking awesome), and like I knew those people. Anne Hathaway gives an amazing performance; Kym was both repulsive and sympathetic - she's a disaster waiting to happen, a beautiful girl spilling over with toxic narcissism and passive-aggressiveness, a gaping wound crying out for attention. ( spoilers, if anyone cares about that. )

The movie is sad - the Buchman family, and Kym in particular, is probably never going to resolve its issues - but there is a sense of hopefulness, that love and family do mean something, and that being surrounded by people you love, and who love you, is what makes a great life, issues and all.

I am annoyed that you can only get Tunde Adebimpe's wedding vow version of "Unknown Legend" by buying the entire soundtrack. I mean, the soundtrack was pretty cool, but I only want that one song. It was pretty fantastic.

***

spnroundtable is having a discussion about POV, and whether one finds it easier to write from Sam's POV or Dean's, and I feel like currently, Dean's is definitely easier, but I was pretty sure my stories were fairly evenly split between them, so I did a little counting, and this is what I came up with (approximately):

Dean POV: 63
Sam POV: 52 (including 8 girl!Sam POV stories)
Other: 16 (including a bunch of crossovers, as well as Ellen, Jo, Jess, and Mary POV)

Not as close as I'd thought, but part of that is definitely my inability to get into Sam's head so far this season and also, I had had this idea (possibly false) that most of the casefiles I'd written were in Sam's POV, so I wanted to write a couple from Dean's POV, so there's that. And also, I bet some of those eleven more Dean POV stories are the Dean-het stuff, whereas I am not that interested in writing about Sam having sex with people who aren't Jess or Dean (or Buffy, which, I must admit, I find an adorable combination).

I think lately because I have started more with "Wouldn't it be cool if..." rather than "I wonder how Dean or Sam feels about..." it's been harder for me to pin down POV. I mean, most of the time, the POV comes with the story when it appears - "Beer and the Highway" and "The Sea Will Open in Your Veins" both had to be Sam's POV, but "I've never been too good with names" and "A Proportional Response" had to be Dean's. Something like "If the Shoe Fits," though, that could have been either, and I only went with Dean's because of the always-writing-casefiles-from-Sam's-POV thing I mentioned up there. And also because it's a funny story, and Dean is just better for comedy. He gets so indignant.

Because most of my stories boil down to "Sam learns/thinks Dean is awesome!" sometimes I do write from Sam's POV just to show how much he loves Dean, or so he can learn some new awesome thing about Dean (knitting, kite-flying). And if it's porn, since I don't really find Sam attractive myself, it's easier to write from his POV if it's about attraction to Dean. Though since I don't really write Wincest PWPs where Sam is not a girl, that hasn't really been an issue. Heh.

I guess it really does come down to whatever story I'm working on, which POV I think will work best. Sometimes I'm wrong and I have to go back and rewrite from the other POV, and then it clicks. Usually that's when a story is about something other than what I think it's about. Which happens more often than I'd like anyway. *snerk*

***

We are not the only ones talking about SPN 4.14. ( from Ausiello )

***

Can it be home times now?

***

Homosexuality might be (in part,) a biological failsafe against population density outstripping available resources.

Discuss and debate.

Yes, I know. I know it's not that simple -- the opening statement is just meant to get the ball rolling. Bring all the data you want to the table, and whatever theories you fancy as well. Let's have it all... except the tablebanging religious dogma please, because that just gives people gas, you know.

For those of you following Lord Bereshti's Concubines and any other yaoi fiction of the SL Publishing Group, the good news is the site has lots of traffic--the bad news is it's overwhelmed the server and so the moderators are looking for a new host. The mods beg patience and will make sure subscribers are taken care of.

Is it gone? Really gone -- gone? Because the last time it was 'kinda gone', I lost dozens of feedback comments, and... well, fine, call me shallow and all, but I'm not all that sanguine about my having the heart to rebuild or re-update there if it's lost again. As amanuensis1 says, it would be another triumph of entropy over creation, and it would make me very very sad indeed.

And that's not even getting INTO the number of my favorite stories which I have only ever located there!

No, Skyehawke being kaput is Not Allowed. It makes the Maiden Brighid cry, and that's never a good thing.
Not allowed at ALL.

Someone tell me it ain't so... please?

Edit: I was tired and panicking last night when I made this post. There is nothing wrong with Semagic, I just typed in the wrong bloody word. It's Skyehawke that has me in a froth -- please forgive my error.

Things. And also, stuff.

+ I keep thinking that the more I write casefile type stories, the easier they will get, BUT NO. I am still constantly in a state of "BUT I DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO THIS!" I still feel like I am much better at writing romances - all the case-stuff in my casefiles feels really half-assed to me, even the ones I really like and think turned out well. I think it's kind of obvious that the cases are always just there so I can hang a lot of banter and emoporn on them (not unlike the show, actually *snerk*). However, as I have a number of casefile-type stores in the pipeline, I will have to keep going.

+ Which brings me to the fact that I think Kripke and I are on a wavelength again, because ( exceptionally mild spoilers for SPN episodes coming up after the hiatus, as discussed in those con vids from this weekend )

+ Speaking of which. ( talk of that spoiler from the 4.14 sides )

+ Speaking of needs, specifically, mine, can anybody share with me either (or both) of the following songs: Sex on Fire by Kings of Leon and/or Keep Yourself Warm by Frightened Rabbit? I would be most grateful and willing to trade if there's any music I have that you need. [eta] All taken care of! Thank you so much! [/eta]

+ This. Yes.

+ I have about half an hour before I need to go to bed. Possibly I will attempt to write.

***

I'm slipping this scene in, although it actually happens earlier than the stuff with John's costume.

You can get caught up here: Out Of Bounds.

Title: Out Of Bounds
Author: Icarus
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: John/Rodney
Summary: There was no telling what ham-fisted third-rate crackpot Elizabeth would enlist as Melanie's new coach.
A/N: Thank you to my intrepid and playful betas, rabidfan and roaringmice.

Previously in Out Of Bounds: Known more for his jumps than his artistry, figure skater John Sheppard hires ex-skating champion and "artiste" Rodney McKay to be his coach. Their teasing friendship warms into something more. Rodney also coaches Elizabeth Weir's nine-year-old daughter, Melanie. After a run-in with Rodney's "no crying" policy, Elizabeth asked John if he'd be interested in coaching. John said no. Unequivocably. And unfortunately, complained to Rodney.

( Read more... )

Music: Friend Like Me -- Robin Williams, Aladdin soundtrack (yes, I'm well aware this song is evil in this context)

Happy birthday to me... happy birthday to me....

WG has a pressie for me -- the flu!

I'm staying home, drinking juice, and hoping I can cut this off at the pass. But somehow I'm perfectly happy. I guess that's because WG's home too. And even though he's sick, he's here. And that makes me purr.

Ooo! Time to get him more hot tea.

Happy birthday to me... happy birthday to me....

No LJ for four hours, I can deal with. But when Twitter goes down for "an hour of maintenance" at exactly the same time? That's annoying.

As I'm sure you've all heard eleventy million times by now, LJ is going down at around 11am EST, allegedly for four hours (though I am willing to bet that is a very optimistic estimate), so they can move their servers.

I backed up my LJ this morning (using LJArchive), so I'll have a copy of every post but this one, should the worst happen and all the data gets lost. (Well, technically, I'll have a copy of this one at IJ, so.)

I've been living an LJ-light existence for a while now. I have limited access now at work, which means I've been acclimating myself and while I am here, it won't be as huge a deal as it once might have been. I still have all the food blogs on my google reader, after all. *snerk*

And there is also that thing known as writing (I do have this thing I want to write, but I can't figure out how to start), or even, possibly, *gasp* work. Hopefully it won't come to that, though.

You can always come see me on IJ, but if not, see you on the flip side.

***

I went to bed early last night - 10:15! - and I woke up every two hours like clockwork. Sigh. At least it was early enough that that didn't really matter too much, but still! I wanted a good night's sleep. And then this morning, there were HUGE amounts of traffic and I was twenty minutes late to work. Given that the traffic was due to a shitload of construction, I suppose I am going to have to start getting up and leaving the house even earlier. Fuckers.

***

Have a poem:

Silence

There is the sudden silence of the crowd
above a player not moving on the field,
and the silence of the orchid.

The silence of the falling vase
before it strikes the floor,
the silence of the belt when it is not striking the child.

The stillness of the cup and the water in it,
the silence of the moon
and the quiet of the day far from the roar of the sun.

The silence when I hold you to my chest,
the silence of the window above us,
and the silence when you rise and turn away.

And there is the silence of this morning
which I have broken with my pen,
a silence that had piled up all night

like snow falling in the darkness of the house—
the silence before I wrote a word
and the poorer silence now.

~Billy Collins

***

djinnj, neotoma, fyre_bird, jenna_thorn...Is there something you'd like to say to us?

*yawn*

Can it be the weekend now? If the rest of this week is anything like today... no, you know what? I don't even want to contemplate that, though I am totally ready to crawl into bed and not come out again until Christmas.

One good thing about today was Chuck. ( spoilers )

I also finally got a chance to read this essay by Michael Chabon, which someone linked me to last week (a couple weeks ago?): Secret Skin: An essay in unitard theory.

If I were less exhausted, I would totally talk more about it, about the power of narrative, the way we shape our selves, our lives, with the stories we tell, to others, and to ourselves. Chabon says it better than I could, anyway:

We say "secret identity," and adopt a series of cloaking strategies to preserve it, but what we are actually trying to conceal is a narrative: not who we are but the story of how we got that way—and, by implication, of all that we lacked, and all that we were not, before the spider bit us. Yet our costume conceals nothing, reveals everything: it is our secret skin, exposed and exposing us for all the world to see. Superheroism is a kind of transvestism; our superdrag serves at once to obscure the exterior self that no longer defines us while betraying, with half-unconscious panache, the truth of the story we carry in our hearts, the story of our transformation, of our story’s recommencement, of our rebirth into the world of adventure, of story itself.

***

Icenetwork.com has absolutely dreadful customer service.

Why am I signed up with these jokers again? Oh, yeah, right. I want to watch the Regionals and Sectionals.

If anyone can give me a better option to watch these lower eschelon competitions, I will drop Icenetwork.com in a heartbeat. Any ideas?

Short non-spoilery thoughts on Quantum of Solace:

No James Bond opening titles music has ever moved me so little (okay, maybe Gladys Knight's License to Kill ties it), but that's the beginning and end of my beefs. The film was wicked cool. The action sequences, in particular, were a heckuva editing choice, for which my personal jury was out for a bit, but I decided they really fit. Every chase scene, on foot or by motorbike or car or boat or plane (and, yes, of course you'll have every one of those and then some in a Bond film), essentially said, "Look, it doesn't matter if the viewer knows in every eighth-of-a-second cut who it was who got their windshield shot out or nearly missed that leap to the next roof or got his arm sliced with a sliver of glass--all you need to know is that every move of this is fast and violent and it HURTS LIKE HELL."

Daniel Craig ate up that screen--and so did Judi Dench. I also enjoyed the villain; I have a thing for weaselly weak-sternumed bad guys, ever since I realized I wanted to be Piter De Vries in the De Laurentis Dune, what can I say.

I have been enjoying the Giants-Ravens game muchly, though their secondary has been ridiculously sloppy and full of holes, and some of the penalties make my soul weep.

Oh, Eli, no.

Okay, they should challenge that, because I'm not sure he had control of that ball. They are reviewing it. Woo! Incomplete pass! Tom Coughlin has the best percentage on challenges in the league, I believe. (And I don't really think the Giants are getting much of a Super Bowl champion cushion on calls, the way some teams get, but I admit I am biased.)

Also, I am having angst over tonight's Redskins/Cowboys game, because normally, I just root for whoever is playing against the Cowboys, but rooting for the Skins is not something I would normally do, either, so if it helps the Giants for them [either them! sadly, they can't both lose] to win... I don't know if I can do it. Also, go Bengals! They were beating the Eagles earlier, and while I doubt that will continue, I can hope.

Another penalty. Jesus fuck, you morons, stop doing stupid shit!

INTERCEPTION RUN BACK FOR THE TOUCHDOWN! WOOHOO!

\o/

[obviously, the game keeps distracting me from writing this entry. heh.]

Dude. You've got to hit that guy! You can't just let him run up the field!

Oh, fuck! SO CLOSE. 77 yard run by my boy Ahmad Bradshaw. *hearts* Too bad he got stopped at the two instead of going in for the TD. Oh, Plaxico. Sigh. That was a great defensive play, though. Sigh. They need to get Jacobs to just bang it in. Sigh. Yeah, I would take the three points, too.

I kind of LOVE that they are actually playing Earth, Wind and Fire while showing clips of the Giants running backs, who are known as Earth (Jacobs), Wind (Ward) and Fire (Bradshaw). This amuses me tremendously. They have run over this Ravens' defense, too, which was number one in the league against the run before today.

***

I posted fic last night!

Angel Radio
Supernatural; Dean/Anna; spoilers through the promo for 4.10; adult; 2,545 words
"The world could end tomorrow."

I know Saturday night is a graveyard for fic, but I do not have the patience to wait for a more...propitious time to post. (And considering this is random character het, I don't think it really would have made much of a difference anyway. *shrug*) So I'm really pleased people are actually reading it. Thank you!

( spoilers for 4.09 and the preview clips for 4.10 )

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I am sure I had other things to say, but football! It is very distracting!

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An Archive Of Our Own is in a testing phase. To help facilitate this, I am slowly uploading fics there and assiduously providing feedback on what works, what doesn't.

Hopefully my suggestions are helpful and not too redundant.

Please let the archive know if you note any problems:

Tanlines & Dogtags

First Signs Of Magic: Hermione Granger

A Moment Of Sin

My question for you is on tagging.

What would you like to see in tags so you can find what you want to read? What makes a good tag? How general should I be? How specific? How much should I customize tags to the content of the story? Is there such thing as "over-tagging"?

This is in your interest. If I tag badly, it will make it difficult for you to find what you want.

It also helps me, so thank you all very much in advance.