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[09 Jul 2009|11:18pm] |
Well, then.
*waits for fandom to explode*
ETA: p.s. no spoilery comments please!
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| I am an upate, and then perhaps I am a nap. |
[30 Jun 2009|06:27pm] |
SO HOT AND STICKY. The weather forecast for Wales for the next few days is "humid." Hey, great, I love having to peel my clothes off to change them.
I did get some good deals though (flowy white sundress, £2, jean shorts, £3, and so on), even if trying stuff on was a hot, sticky pain. And bought a pair of sunglasses that didn't actually make it into the bag, so I'll have to go back tomorrow and sort that out. Whee, fun times.
Among other things I have invested in recently: a new frying pan. I know. Wow, I can hear you saying, your life is SO EXCITING! A frying pan! But you have to understand--when I got here, I bought cheap pans. They are among the worst pans in the world. While I lived at the old place, I could borrow other people's better pans, and frequently did. However, I've been through our Cupboard of Mysterious Things (aka, all the stuff previous tenants have left for us) and there are no frying pans. So after cooking in mine set off the smoke alarm (and threatened to do it again, there was a beep but it didn't finish the job), I gave in and bought a new pan. Today, I used it to make breakfast. The veggie bacon was cooked perfectly--a little crispy, not burnt. The eggs were fluffy and not charred. And then the whole mess did not stick to the pan when it came time to wash up. A worthwhile £6 investment, believe me.
In other related news, while my new housemates are awesome, and I like them, and they have very few habits that will potentially drive me crazy, they really do need to start turning the stove off when done cooking, or they will burn down the house.
Tomorrow ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) metaphoracle will be here, having somehow convinced her university that going to Wales to present a paper on Torchwood is a totally valid use of a grad student's time and resources and so will be here for the modern history conference next week before we go and invade snowbryneich's. There will also be some wandering around Cader Idris and Cardiff, and I will end up in Dublin, where I have still never been. In there somewhere, I will keep writing words. Many, many words. Mostly about how manly the fighters in the Gododdin are, or something.
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[23 Jun 2009|06:47pm] |
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Happy birthday, ryanashke!!
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| [fic] Full Circle |
[21 Jun 2009|05:54pm] |
This is just a little thing--see, raphaela667 wrote this really lovely story, Five Times James T Kirk Didn't Get Married (And One Time He Did), and I was so very intrigued by the ideas in the first one that I just had to poke around a bit. Besides, it was only a matter of time before he found out he had a kid.
Full Circle
Star Trek Reboot (Kirk/Spock and Kirk/OFC in the background)
Vital Stats: Light PG, if that. 2700 words. It will make more sense if you have read raphaela667's fic, but I'm not going to make you. I apologise for any typos and will fix them if I notice them.
( What goes around... )
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| Star Trek XI question |
[20 Jun 2009|02:33pm] |
Okay, so in TOS, Sam is Kirk's younger brother, yes? And in the reboot, Jim still has a brother (deleted scene re: abusive stepfather wanting to sell George's car leads to car driving off cliff scene, which frankly is a lot more meaningful with the backstory than with just daredevil twelve year old, but anyway)--but is he still the younger (aka half brother)? Or is he George and Winona's and older? It didn't really look like there were any other baby Kirks on the Kelvin, and frankly my opinion of heroic George would go down slightly if it turned out he was all "Is my wife safe!" and forgot to add, "and by the way, my toddler son, is he getting off the ship too?" So I expect Jim is the firstborn and Sam came along later via Winona and later marriage, but I want to make sure I am not missing anything?
What have you been doing about this, fandom?
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| Harry Potter |
[18 Jun 2009|02:35pm] |
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I'm going to be in London for the opening of HBP--is there any sort of group/fandom thing I should know about or a place it will be especially fun to go and see?
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[18 Jun 2009|02:27pm] |
I need conference funding. Why do I not have it? (It's a rhetorical question, don't worry. I'm aware the reason is 'because I'm not a home/EU student,' just like every other 'why don't I have money' question.) But I really want to go to the Harvard Celtic Colloquium in October, and absolutely cannot afford it. And one of the CSANA panels at next Kalamazoo is on 'sex, gender and marriage in Celtic texts and cultures' and THIS IS WHAT I DO. But I have not ever been in a situation or location where Michigan is a reasonable distance, unfortunately. Or Boston. The only conference I went to before I got here was in Vancouver.
...this whining brought to you by the fact the hot water in my house is apparently off, it's storming like mad, and I edited a good 400 words out of my dissertation somehow. Stupid editing.
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| [fic] The Greatest Thing You'll Ever Learn (Lessons in Loving a Vulcan) |
[18 Jun 2009|02:30am] |
I made something! I feel as if my first fic in years should perhaps be more exciting, and have swordfights or space pirates or something, but well, it doesn't. More like a series of monologue-type observations, but it is what it is. Frankly I just like that it's in no way related to my dissertation, though the 2000 words would probably have been more useful there.
The Greatest Thing You'll Ever Learn (or, Lessons in Loving a Vulcan)
Fandom: Star Trek reboot
Vital stats: Kirk/Spock with a short visit by Uhura; frank talk about sex but none actually occuring
Includes chess, vowel shifts, and more character study than plot.
( excellent well, you're a fishmonger! )
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[17 Jun 2009|02:44pm] |
I started writing a fic. Well, not so much a proper fic as a series of observations and scenelets, because I am very out of practise and must ease myself back into all this slowly.
And I seem to have gone and gotten attached to Uhura.
I'm pretty sure this is because I know a lot of linguists.
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| It is an update! |
[16 Jun 2009|02:50pm] |
A few days after getting moved into my lovely new house, I went up to north Wales for a conference, at which I presented my first ever proper conference paper. It was on problems of dating heroic poetry, and because this was an interdisciplinary conference, I shared a panel with a girl who was talking about Dionysian art in 1960s London. It was a bit surreal, but interesting, and everybody was so excited about their research that it was a pretty fun time. Some of the extracurricular stuff had a bit of a weird vibe, and I wasted two hours of my life at the most useless CV workshop ever, but the conference itself was quite good and I now feel like a proper academic. Well, okay, I did before, but it doesn't hurt.
Then I got stuck in north Wales, because bus service between Bangor and Aber sucks.
So that's about the state of things. Am just taking a couple days now to relax and work on my dissertation, and no these are not incompatible things.
( Would you like to see where I live now? )
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| Probably on the late side of saying this... |
[15 Jun 2009|02:15pm] |
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minotaurs, author of 'Sex Tips for Slash Writers' and all around good guy, has apparently died of a heart attack. He's been a fixture in fandom for a long time; if you've been writing slash for any length of time at all you're likely to have encountered him--it was almost a decade ago now that ryanashke and I used to sit up and talk about that particular piece, and wrote The Mechanical Lemon, which was totally and unashamedly inspired by him. He broke down boundaries in a low-key, funny way, got frank and educational discussions going about sex and how it works, and will be very much missed.
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| BLITEOTWD |
[13 Jun 2009|09:14pm] |
You would think the north Welsh mountains would be a safe place. Tried to leave town earlier, but we had to turn around and head back to Bangor because the've taken over Caernarfon. Between here and there the victims are mostly sheep--you've never been afraid of anything till you've seen a fucking zombie sheep, believe me. Huw and Heather and I made it to the computer lab just in time--it's a big brick building with no windows and a secure entrance so I think we're okay here.
Earlier today the high street was full of people. As soon as it was after 8, the whole place is desolate, deserted, eerie...we're just going to hole up here with crisps out of the vending machine and try not to let anyone know we're in here. It's going to be even worse once the sun goes down....
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[04 Jun 2009|11:25pm] |
First things first: Happy birthday lheena!
So after having been pretty much absent for the end of the term, I got my last essay turned in today. I am now finished with all the MA coursework and have only a little more than half a dissertation to go. I'd meant to celebrate this by chilling out with a book (just gonna finish The Pinhoe Egg and then start on The Demon's Lexicon) and maybe catching up on some of the tonnes of TV I've been hoarding until I have time to watch it, but I spent the evening packing, instead. My one local friend with a car is leaving for the weekend, so the only time she can help me move is tomorrow. I choose to take advantage of her niceness and move most of my crap over to the new house tomorrow afternoon, so yeah. Have been getting ready to do that.
While since not what I'd call active fandomly, I have been sort of obsessed with Kirk/Spock lately. There's something cool and classic, I don't know. Pine and Quinto are pretty. I'd never really dug Kirk because Shatner doesn't do it for me (even though classic TOS really is the slashiest freaking thing in the entirety of anything ever) and I have a hard time getting past the horrific 60s makeup. Seriously, do they NEED to cake Leonard Nimoy in blue eyeshadow? My eyes, they burn.
(Random factoid: I apparently very nearly was in the same uni department as ZQ. My master plan in high school was to go to Carnegie Mellon and study drama. They kept sending me stuff saying 'you want to go here. Don't you want to go here?' And I did. Only I wasn't really ready to go anywhere at all and never filled out the application, or did anything past sending them my SAT scores.)
The other thing the new Trek movie really drove home? I will probably never be a fan of actual on-screen romance. I mean, we already knew I don't really like mushy stuff in movies getting in the way of the stuff blowing up and the fight scenes, but beyond that...I like subtext. I like potential. I like possibility. I stop liking it once it's canon.
...I'm pretty sure this means YA lit is the way to go. Nobody asks for more than subtext when the characters are 14.
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[27 May 2009|10:09pm] |
Dear brain,
Yes, I know we're tired of studying. That three hours today was hard, and we get to go do it again tomorrow. Only in Welsh. However, while protesting has its place, this is in fact NOT the time to attempt to write Gwydion/Gilfaethwy fic, slashy or otherwise (and frankly, the canon's already done that for you, so you're not making up anything new). Get back to work.
Love,
Your Tired Self
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| Adventures on Welsh mountaintops. |
[25 May 2009|01:15am] |
I am VERY SUNBURNT. But I had a really brilliant day. The postgrad association had planned a hike to Borth, which is two villages up the coast along a rather narrow, sometimes steep path that goes along the cliffs. It's an absolutely gorgeous walk, and the weather turned out quite cooperative. I had asked my friend K. along, even though she's not actually a postgrad, because she's finished all her stuff and is just sitting around bored waiting for the rest of us to finish exams. And because she's my Aber!BFF and I have more fun when she's around. Anyway, we met in the early afternoon and hooked up with the rest of the group. We had an actual 'hike leader', who was one of those serious trekker types with proper hiking boots and a floppy hat, and Ordnance Survey maps in his pocket even though we're walking five miles along a well-marked path that you can't wander off without falling down a cliff (or climbing over a barbed wire fence into a pasture full of sheep, I suppose). He started marching us off at quite a pace, and K and I realised quite quickly that we were not interested in speeding along. Honestly, what's the point? You go for a lovely walk in the countryside, you might as well, you know, look at the countryside. Enjoy the journey. It's not a race. I expect this difference in our hiking philosophies had our Dear Leader cursing our names, but whatever.
We reached our destination, and the rest of the group promptly said, "Right, we'll turn around and head home now!" K and I thought this beyond ridiculous, having just walked five miles to a perfectly lovely beach--along with enjoying the journey, we rather think if you've gone somewhere you might as well enjoy it, and we wanted to play on the beach. So at this point we departed from the group (our Dear Leader made sure to get out the map and give us instructions on how to reach the train station, which still amounted to basically 'go into town, keep on till you get to the staion.' Honestly, small Welsh towns are not complicated to find your way around in) and proceeded to spend the rest of the afternoon playing Lord of the Rings. Then we had some tea, lay in the sun making daisy chains, and sat around at the train station till we found out there was actually no train service today. Fortunately other people found this out as well, and we shared a taxi back to Aber and it ended up being cheaper than the train anyway.
I am left mostly with, other than wow it was a fun day, a reminder? realisation? of how much I like K. We hit it off instantly when I met her back at the beginning of the year, and always have a grand time together, so it's not like this is a new realisation. But it's just so nice to have someone who likes to walk about the same speed, play the same games, thinks nothing at all strange about climbing on rocks pretending they're Weathertop, and can still have a more serious conversation about familes and life goals and stuff and it's all so effortless. I expect some of you would all find this sort of familiar, really.
Anyway, with that bit of introspection, ( would you like to see our adventures? )
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[23 May 2009|02:35pm] |
One exam down! I didn't finish it in the allotted time, but neither did anyone else in my class, so our teacher said she'd take that into account when marking. I still have three to go, and one essay, which is why I'm sort of sporadically scarce. I got my hair cut after the exam on Thursday, because it was getting all scraggly and breaking off like crazy. The permed part is growing out, but I don't really have the funds to re-do it, so I figured I might as well let it grow out and see how I like it.
pyrate_queen is coming to see me in September! I really need to make sure my thesis is done on time. Also I'm not sure how I'm going to pay for stuff since I'll be at the end of my student loan by then and have no idea if I'll still be here, or moving somewhere else, or looking for a job, or what. Uncertainty is a bit frustrating. But I will get to see my sister so yay. :)
At least I'm getting the conference next month paid for. Now I just have to add some stuff to the paper so it takes up the whole 20 minutes. But I'll do that after exams and the last essay are over. Am feeling ever so slightly overwhelmed, but in a good way? I mean, I love what I do, it's just that there's SO MUCH OF IT AT ONCE.
Unrelated, the finale of 24 was awesome. But unfinished. (Yeah, I know they ran into the writer's strike and all that.) I might remedy this. It's my obligation as a ficcer. Unfortunately it's really not a good time.
And now back to work for a while.
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| AI. |
[22 May 2009|04:26am] |
Now that I've seen it--and it was seriously awesome, whatever one thinks of the results--I have a recap post of the Idol finale. I must warn you it's mostly filled with glee. The one good thing about being spoiled ahead of time is there wasn't really any pressure except to watch the performances and the reactions and the people. Oh, and the awesome rockin' bands.
( Sweetest. Finale. Ever. Spoilers, even though I pretty much am the last human to see it. )
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[21 May 2009|02:52pm] |
DUDE. Star Trek blanket challenge fic.
So old school. I feel like it's 1998 all over again.
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[21 May 2009|01:23pm] |
Oh, for fuck's SAKE. What did I just say about spoilers freaking YESTERDAY? How hard is a goddamn cut tag? Come ON, people. When you spend months building up to something, even a stupid reality tv show, it actually DOES spoil the experience to have somebody blow it before you get to see it. And most of you were so good, too.
Now I'm cranky and pissy and going to try and forget what I read.
SO. ANNOYED.
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