To folks who generally expect to see me around in the evenings: my presence is gonna be a bit spotty for the next week and change as I wrestle with a couple of papers that are going to need a bit more than my usual effort. Just so you all know that I did not, you know, forget about you or die or anything.

I feel like I should make a great big Supernatural post, but I just - it made me tired. All the stuff I could say - I don't wanna. ( However, tiny spoiler. )

Doctor Who, Supernatural - the SJA finale story better be more upbeat or I will scour myself with rocks.

. . . so I got my usual monthly text telling me about how I have to pay my cell phone bill to continue receiving service and stuff, just in case that concept is beyond me. Usually, I don't look at those too closely, but right now I am writing a really boring paper so EVERYTHING that is not that paper is getting extra attention.

The From field, in its entirety:

"456."

YOU GUYS MY CELL PHONE SERVICE IS WITH THE 456. Now what do I do? Is the British government going to try to kill me? Should I keep a close eye on my eight-year-old brother?

More importantly: should I stick with the 456 or take my chances with the Archangel network?

. . . Doctor Who.

( Waters of Mars, plus discussion of the trailer for the Christmas special. )

Man, I'm glad I waited to watch that episode of iCarly. Even if it turns out to be the worst thing the show has done since "iGo to Japan," it'll still be a welcome antidote. Between 2012 and "Waters of Mars," I have been put through the fucking wringer. Hell, even The Thick of It finished on more of a down note than usual. Adorably clever tween show, here I come!

2012: Surprisingly good. I mean, overblown, overlong, and prey to that disaster movie tendency to introduce waaaaaay too many complications at the climax, as if the END OF THE WORLD isn't dramatic enough by itself, but: great acting (Chiwetel Ejiofor! Look at you, with your major part in a giant blockbuster just a few years after Serenity! I will learn how to pronounce your name soon, I promise), a few surprising story choices, and the fucking SPECIAL EFFECTS, YOU GUYS. They were phenomenal. All that destruction was just beautifully and very convincingly rendered, without ever the slightest sense of Movie Fakeness.

I expected mindless silly fun, and was quite surprised by how much I got pulled into the movie. There are a few sequences that manage to be intensely suspenseful even though you know they're not gonna kill the lead characters off an hour into the movie, and I came to like some of the characters very much. There's plenty wrong with it - I'm really glad I'm not a scientist, because I strongly suspect that a lot of the science was bullshit, as per usual in these kinds of movies - but if you're undecided because it's not your kind of movie, go see it. It's not my kind of movie, either, but it surprised me by being a lot better and a little more substantial than I thought it would be. And go see it in the theater. It's a very visual movie, as you might expect, and I just can't believe that it could be half as breathtaking on your TV at home.

(Just make sure your bladder is completely empty before it starts and don't drink any diuretics before or during the show, because JEEEEESUS. I thought I was going to DIE.)

Now I'm just gonna go over here and stare at my Doctor Who download while it takes its sweet goddamn time. I always forget how long these take on the day they come out.

OMG today. Today is new The Thick of It (which I have watched, and which was excellent, as usual; I may post to say more later, but I haven't the time now), FINALLY some new Doctor Who, AND I woke up this morning to an e-mail informing me that there was new iCarly available for download.

Plus my mom and I are going to see 2012, which promises to be utterly ridiculous.

Today is made of geeky win. ♥

Sarah Jane Adventures!

( 3x09 and 3x10, Mona Lisa's Revenge. )

Supernatural!

( 5x09, The Real Ghostbusters )

This morning I woke up from a dream in which I'd been listing all the things I remembered from General Hospital when I used to watch it waaaay back when I was a teenager. Like, Damian Smith, Lily Rivera, Alex Garcia, Carly's debut and the way her story played out (I still remember when she finally confessed to Bobbi that she was Caroline, one of the few individual moments I remember with any clarity), the returns of the Cassadines and finding out that Nikolas was Laura's son, Pierce Dorman and his reign of FUCKING CRAZY ("When I was just a little boy, I asked my mother, what would I be . . . ?") - and I woke up all nostalgic. I loved that show so hard for such a long time, and with a wretched memory like mine it's fairly impressive that I remember as much as I do. And with Jonathan Jackson coming back and James Franco doing a guest spot, I'm tempted to find a way to start watching it again, but, man, the bits and pieces I've heard about all the things they've done to characters who used to mean a lot to me - I know that's how soap operas work, but when you stop watching one, it becomes crystallized in amber in your head. And I'd kinda like to keep it that way.

Yeah, I'm totally only telling you all of this because I've managed to post at least once a day for a bunch of days in succession and I'd hate to break the record now. Especially after spending so long hardly posting at all.

OH MY GOD YOU GUYS. YOU GUYS. You know that fic I've been blathering on about wanting, the one where there's a crossover between The Thick of It and Torchwood: Children of Earth where Malcolm Tucker replaces John Frobisher and sorts out the 456 in no time flat?

Well. I just found out that somebody wrote it. Somebody wrote it AND they are cleverer than me and didn't even have to sacrifice Frobisher to do it. ♥ ♥ ♥



"Jamie, be nice to the twats, they don't know any better," said the other man in the door. Also Scottish, Jack observed, but leaner, grey hair neatly cut, and he sounded a little like - actually a lot like - Jack gaped. It was impossible. It was a joke, certainly.

"What are you trying to pull?" he snarled at the phone.

"Nothing of yours, I know the places you stick it," the other Scot at the door went on.



degroove is a genius, with perfect characterization for Malcolm and Torchwood having no idea what hit them. Go read "Spinners of Earth" (spoilers for CoE, obvs, though no real spoilers for TToI) and share in my glee.

The Thick of It omg I fucking love this show so much. I know I was gonna save major observations for later after I've had more time to spend with the show but fuck it I cannot keep quiet on this one. (I only wish I had a clearer understanding of British politics, because even though I can follow the show regardless, I just know there's some good shit I'm missing.)

( 3x03. This show's episodes don't have titles, isn't that refreshing? )

Sarah Jane Adventures!

( 3x07 and 3x08, The Eternity Trap. )

Supernatural!

( 5x08, Changing Channels, with a spoiler of the everyone-knows-it-by-now variety for last week's Sarah Jane Adventures thrown in just for fun. )

Today during discussion of Jude the Obscure, my professor compared Arabella to the ending of Drag Me to Hell. ♥

In other news: Look, a meme that has nothing to do with RP!

Pick a paragraph (or any passage less than 500 words) from any fanfic I've written, and comment to this post with that selection. I will then give you a DVD commentary on that snippet: what I was thinking when I wrote it, why I wrote it in the first place, what's going on in the character's heads, why I chose certain words, what this moment means in the context of the rest of the fic, lots of awful puns, and anything else that you'd expect to find on a DVD commentary track.

Answers will vary depending on the passage, my attention span, and the age of the fic. The much older stuff (like, the stuff that's so old that I have it in my memories because tags didn't exist yet) is unlikely to get good answers.

So I have often wondered, on the rare occasion I have encountered Evita fic, why it tends to be obtuse and confusing. As it turns out, this is because if you even try to interpret this shit literally enough to write a straightforward fic, you will tie yourself in knots so fast your brains will leak right out.

Which is all by way of saying that the fic you will find below the cut is kind of experimental for me; I'm of a fairly literal turn of mind and tend not to deal in extended metaphor, so writing this was new and different. It's Perón/Che, with Che playing less the role of a real character and more the meta construct he is in the play. I have no idea if it works or not. Let me know?

(Oh, and the first line is on account of Argentina being in the southern hemisphere. August = winter.)



( It's dark and cold in Perón's office, with the August chill winning out over the failing fire. Perón has been at his desk for some time, ostensibly working, though the document in front of him remains untouched. )

Right, so, while all the other Mainers on my flist are being all graceful and optimistic in defeat, I'm gonna take a slightly different route and post a great big FUCK YOU aimed at the bigots.

I mean that more or less literally. This video is not worksafe unless you have headphones. On the other hand, it is pretty fucking awesome. (sotto_voice, I think this is relevant to your interests in particular.)

Item One: You are never too old to shuffle your feet through a drift of leaves to see how far you can elongate it by kicking them along. Ever. This is my favorite part of the whole foliage thing in the fall. Just make sure it's a wind drift, not someone's careful raking.

Item Two: VOTING. I am covered with stickers! I love voting. Um, not just because of the stickers. But the stickers don't hurt. On campus today, they were passing out "I Voted No on 1!" stickers to people who had, you know, voted No on 1. (Question One was an attempt to repeal the law Governor Baldacci signed in May allowing gay marriage. I have not discussed this issue in my journal because FLAMES ON THE SIDE OF MY FACE, but it's been a pretty big deal. Tons of campaigning on both sides.) But anyway, I love voting even on off-years, and haven't missed an Election Day since I turned eighteen. I keep the stickers and each year and stick them on my headboard, because I am a dork.

Addendum to Item Two: I did not know that there was no voting going on in California! So, obviously, my post of admonishment to non-voters does not apply to any Californians on the flist.

Item Three: My Oscar Wilde professor is awesome. We had our midterm last Thursday, and I completely mismanaged my time, as is my wont, and only finished three of the four questions we had to do. Well, he came to me after class and said I was the only one who hadn't at least gotten a start on a fourth question, and he didn't want to have to give me a shite grade (that is a paraphrasing) that doesn't reflect my actual ability in the class, and when I explained that I have ADD and it distorts my sense of time (which is every inch the truth, you non-ADDers have NO idea), he said yeah he thought it was something like that, and it allows him to give me another fifteen minutes to try and complete a fourth answer. So! Shan't flunk the midterm in one of the classes I'm learning the most from this semester after all!

Item Four: Had a bunch of time during srsly boring discussion of unending Irish poetry (I suck so much at reading poetry; my interpretation of things tends to be way too literal for like ninety-five percent of poems to make anything resembling sense in my brain) to work on a sort of experimental Evita fic I've had percolating for a few days. So that was a much better use of those two and a half hours.

Item Five: Today wins.

Just a short reminder:

If you live in the United States, have the legal right to vote, and have not yet exercised it, go do so.

If you don't, you're just like my whiny-ass dad who won't go because the polling place is too far away.

By the way, in case you hadn't heard (I haven't seen it pop up on my flist yet), the next Doctor Who special is airing November fifteenth. YAY. 'Sabout time.

Speaking of which, I ended up going with the Eccleston/Winslet movie + SparkNotes plan in re: Jude the Obscure. I also read bits of the book, but it's written in that very special Victorian melodrama style that I have less and less tolerance for as I become old and crotchety. The movie was all right (though I'm glad I went with the SparkNotes for backup, because damn, did it screw up the ending), but I found young Christopher Eccleston (the movie is from 1994) distractingly adorable. Which helped immensely in getting my sympathy for Jude, but wasn't so great when I was supposed to be following the plot but couldn't stop thinking "OMG HE IS TINY AND CUTE."

Amusing bonus: David Tennant has a small role as the guy who goads Jude into reciting the Whatever I'm Tired And Don't Feel Like Looking It Up in Latin in a pub. I'm sad that I already knew that from scanning the Wiki entry on the movie, because that would have been a fun surprise.

Everything I have watched this weekend was AWESOME. I did finally get hold of both parts of The Sarah Jane Adventures, and watched that, and it was awesome. I figured out how to watch the ready-to-burn-to-DVD conversion of the 2006 revival of Evita bootleg I've had for a while (turns out you don't need to do the actual burning to watch it with the DVD Player program, as long as you've got all the right files, which . . . duh, oops), and it was awesome. And I just watched 3x02 of The Thick of It, and it was FUCKING AWESOME.

And I have to read a huge chunk of Jude the Obscure today (I have a movie I am also going to watch, with Christopher Eccleston and Kate Winslet; it and Sparknotes are Plan B if I run out of time/brain/will to live), so it is obvsly very important that I tell you in detail about how awesome each awesome thing was.

( The Sarah Jane Adventures, 3x05 and 3x06: The Wedding of Sarah Jane Smith. With random Children of Earth spoilage toward the end, because I can never seem to leave that alone when I talk about SJA. )

*

( Evita! This is the production with Elena Rogers, Matt Rawle, and most importantly, Philip Quast. )

Man, I think I just depressed myself right out of an adequate discussion of The Thick of It. To say nothing of how long it's taken to write this so far, man, my brain hurts. (I refuse to proofread.) I'm not sure I'm up to it in general, anyway - the show has changed in really interesting ways with a new Minister, and a woman at that, and what seems to be a subtle difference in Malcolm Tucker's explosions. He's still funny as hell, but there's been a moment or two where Peter Capaldi's performance is more rawly furious than I recall it being before; it's much easier to see that Malcolm is going to give himself a stroke long before he has a chance to retire. I think I want to see how the show progresses for a couple more episodes, how the dynamic in the office firms up with the new member, and maybe rewatch the previous episodes before I go in depth. I do think that, so far, the show has only gotten better, and I will leave you with a Malcolmism that I choose to interpret as a subtle shout-out to Children of Earth (paraphrased a bit):

"Do you know, Malcolm? How to best clear up a paper jam?"

". . . do I know how to best clear up a paper jam? How about you try killing a kid an hour until it sorts itself out?"

(. . . I so badly crave a fusion crackfic with Malcolm replacing John Frobisher for the events of CoE. I cannot even.)