1. The Dean Winchester Rule of the Road

"Driver picks the tunes; shotgun shuts their cakehole." -- Dean Winchester, "Supernatural", Episode 1.01

This is my corner of the Internet, or at least the corner I'm renting from LiveJournal, thus, people watching it/visiting it are riding shotgun with me down the Information Superhighway. I may pick some tunes that may not necessarily be liked by all, but which I hope are in good taste. I may even do things that are the equivalent singing along with experimental music. Deliberate offense is never intended, so if the singing along with experimental music is getting on your nerves, wait a little while since I'll come to the end of the song momentarily.

2. The Bill & Ted Principle of Social Harmony

"Be excellent to one another." -- Bill & Ted, "Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure"

What It Says On The Tin. Treat each other with respect and civility. That includes other posters commenting as well as me. I'm tempted to insist on Jane Austen levels of civility, up to and including talking like one wandered out of "Pride and Prejudice" (or even Pride & Prejudice & Zombies), but that would unrealistic (even I have trouble replicating the speech patterns in a Jane Austen novel, and if I can't pull it off, I don't expect other people to. If you feel up to it, don't hesitate to try it.). If you're going to shoot back an angry comment to something, I insist that before doing so, that you pause, take a few deep breaths, get yourself a cool drink, do some exercises of your choice and above all *THINK* about what you're going to post.

Remember this xkcd comic?



Lotta truth in that one little frame....

Or to quote my "most righteous" friend anivad

Don't pick arguments unnecessarily. There will always be people who disagree with you, and arguing on the Internet is like running in the Special Olympics; even if you win, you're still a retard. This statement is offensively ablist, but pointing that out and fighting it is a perfect example of what not to do unless it matters in that particular situation, because that way lies nothing but angst you could do without. The world is majorly screwed up if you scrutinise it for too long. It's filled with sexism, racism, homophobia, ablism, and many other things like that. It is not a good idea to note every single instance of it. That way lies nothing but angst. Some degree of living in oblivious denial is sometimes necessary to survive and be happy. The alternative is likely to get you nowhere, and you'll just wallow in angst and be depressed about how everything sucks and it's not going to change any time soon.

Edit, May 19th, 2012 -- Sent to me by the awesome koemiko, here's

An incredible flowchart on how *not* to post when you're mad about something on ye Internet.

I'm not in a good place, yet again. I posted something I decided was too blithery again, and so I decided it was better off putting it where only I could see it.

I'm really sorry about this. I'm going through a supremely dark time right now, and I don't know if I'm going to get through it unscathed this time: I won't go into detail. Instead, I only ask for your prayers and your support.

Situation back to relative normal: nothing to see here...

:: Feels embarrassed now::

"There are two kinds of people who thinking about ways to kill other people: psychopaths and mystery writers. I'm the kind that pays better."

--Rick Castle, "Castle", Season Two opening voiceover.

Please don't be wibbly at the stack of books on Jack the Ripper which I checked out: I assure you, I am not a serial killer in a state of becoming. I'm a fiction writer working out the quirks in the timeline for a story dealing with a highly fictionalized version of Jack the Ripper.

...Make that "Jack the Reaper".

I got an idea to write a slightly more fleshed out and historical version of the Jack the Ripper arc in the first season/first few volumes of Black Butler. It's likely been done before, but I go by Neil Gaiman's take on originality, that the very fact that a particular writer is giving their take on an idea and filtering it through their mind makes it original. That and I'm throwing a teeny bit of Jekyll & Hyde into the mix (if one thinks about it, Grell Sutcliffe borders on this: butler!Grell is such a wuss compared to shinigami!Grell).

It's a loopy idea, but I'm liking it.

Rant ahead. There will be ranting.

So, some metaphoric little old lady on a classic sci-fi comm I joined is telling people to boycott the new big screen "Dark Shadows" movie since the creator of the TV series "shouldn't be laughed at".

According to the lovely cupcake_goth, however, while the movie isn't perfect, it's nowhere as silly as the trailer suggests. I trust her judgment a whole lot more than that of someone who sounds like they're "full of prunes" as my mother puts it. It's my time and my dime, I choose to do what I wish with them, and I've chosen to go see this movie.

I'm frankly getting sick of fans who treat the canon of anything like some kind of sacred text that can only be interpreted one way and one way only (and now, traditional Catholic that I am, I'm getting the mental image of a bunch of middle-aged women in vestments, holding incense burners and moving ceremoniously about an altar on which a bunch of Dark Shadows DVDs are piled). I mean, if the adaptation is waaaaay out in left field, that's one thing (ie. 2001's "The Time Machine", which only had a veneer of similarity to the H.G. Wells novel), but if a director makes an honest effort to produce and deliver the best thing they can with the material, even if the end product is colored by their own style, then they have added to rather than subtracted from the canon. And no matter what, the new offering will be colored by the style of the director, writers and actors or what have you, it's the nature of the beast. No new talent coming to a canon is going to create something new that is a direct mirror of the original, and no one should: what would be the point? It would be like those Next Generation fanfics where the kid characters are pretty much the same people as their parents, only the names have been changed.

It's also a whole warehouse of irony that people are rabbiting about a movie that's based on what was essentially a daytime soap. Those aren't exactly Shakespeare (though if I remember correctly, Jonathon Frid was a Shakespearean actor before he signed on as Barnabas Collins). I've watched several episodes, and while it's fun and it holds your attention, it's rather obviously a soap. The production value is a bit cheesy, the acting can be so-so and the writing is, well, soap writing.

And it also annoys me to find that people keep sullying fandom with the things I, even as a "religious person", find annoying about religion, things like needless arguing over minutiae. Religion is supposed to help us make sense out of the painful and confusing things in life, and fandom is supposed to be fun and enjoyable, but it makes me sick when people have to go and ruin both of these things through whining and crabbing and complaining needlessly.

I'm even wondering if the complainer has even *seen* the movie. It's starting to sound like a case of Dr. Suess's Green Eggs and Ham.

Whoa, an entry that is not a Tweet digest...

Been busy with work and running errands when I'm not typing fic, reading Jane Austen-inspired fiction and dealing with an out of the blue bout of anxiety that's hit me (likely due to hormones). But! I witnessed something hysterical while I was waiting for the bus on my way back from picking up a few things at our town's Wal-Mart.

It had been raining off and on, and the parking lot was slick with puddles. Also, the Wal-Mart is fairly close to a swampy area. Thus, a pair of mallard ducks (male and female) came circling in for a landing, likely thinking the lot was open water. The male duck coasted in like he was about to land on water... and ended up faceplanting on the wet asphalt. The female, however, came in a bit more carefully, landing on her webbed footies. The male picked himself up, shaking his head a bit as if to clear it, then looked around as if to say, "I meant to do that." The female side-eyed him, head tilted a bit, as if she were saying, "Dear, I *told* you it wasn't water." They pattered about the pavement a bit, then decided this wasn't for them (plus they got spooked by some passing cars) and took off for the swamp.

Re: the mention I made in my last entry of the Twilight/Fifty Shades crossover fanfic strangeness. One of my comments has made it onto metaquotes:

It was meant to be an Inception cross-reference...

This caps off my day: It was more awesome than I thought. This is as good as getting Kripke'd in the Matrix Online when I speculated that there were weather-regulating programs, or when my off-hand "Phanboys" nickname for one faction made it into the game parlance.

Hadn't been to the Salem NH Barnes & Noble in a few months (didn't go once due to tired and shortness of cash, didn't go last month due to flu), and I was definitely due -- and given my last post plus recent headaches at work, I needed it. Got myself a few things I'd had on the list, and a few surprises:

--"Naamah's Blessing" by Jacqueline Carey. I was holding off on this one till it came out in mass market paperback: I'm running short on shelf space for the doorstops.

--The fourth book of Richelle Mead's "Black Swan" series. This one has been tricky to find, but I've finally found all four.

--The Fifty Shades of Grey trio. Whut. I tried getting this at the local library, but the waiting list is till next year (I was told. o.o). I have no idea what possessed me to get this one, aside from Wanting To See What All The Yelling Is About. And being amused to hear it started out as a Twilight fanfic. And then hearing, via fanficrants someone has already written a Twilight/Fifty Shades crossover. As I posted to ye entry, "It's like a Penrose staircase of fanfic."

--Black Butler book 9. After mainlining the anime the past couple weeks, I was jonesing for this one. Plus, coupled with the above, I was amused by the monochromatic colour scheme.

Also treated myself to a chai latte at the coffee shop, as well as some people-watching: math tutoring session behind me, guys chatting about abstract expressionism to the right of me.

And! New episode of Person of Interest on when I got home.

"Is this a means of communication or a means of torture?!"

-- Dowager Countess Violet Crawley, Downton Abbey, on being "put on hold" on the telephone, 1918-style

I haven't deleted my account yet, but I think I need to bid farewell to Tumblr. It's a nice place when people are posting cool fandom GIFs and whatnot, but there's a lot of wankery that goes on there, which I don't need in my life. I think this quote from TV Tropes's page on Political Correctness Gone Mad sums it up well:

"It's particularly bad on Tumblr if you go there just to look for cool fandom-related pics and fun and have to slough through lots of political angst and depressing stuff because the content, even on some supposedly fandom-specific blogs, is so mixed. So if you go looking for, say, some funny gifs of the latest Doctor Who episode, you probably have to scroll through numerous posts about rape, homophobia, sexism, racism, reproductive rights, sexual/gender angst and all kinds of political and personal wangst just to get to the fun stuff. If you haven't slit your wrists halfway through because of all the injustice and misery being shoved in your face, that is."

As a huge for-instance: I've had to step away from the Person of Interest blogs because there's so much objectification of Jim Caviezel: some of the fans are as skeery as Twilight fanits toward Robert Pattinson. I'd hate for his daughters to find out someday (I think they're still fairly small as yet) and then be scared for their daddy's well-being. And when people aren't objectifying him, they're railing about the fact that he's a practicing Catholic. What bugs me is that a lot of these people, many of them GLBT people, rail against him and his faith the same sad way that people of faith rail against GLBT people, which causes the former to sink to the same level as the latter. As far as I can tell, Jim is cool with GLBT people: In the 2010 reimaging of "The Prisoner", he starred opposite Sir Ian McKellan, who came out a few years back, and from the behind the scenes footage on the DVD, it seemed like the two of them got along just fine. They even seemed a bit chummy in a father-son sort of way. I'm sure he'd be raising his eyebrows over the sheer amount of Reese/Finch slashfic that's out there, but I think anyone involved in the production of the series would (since it does tend to overwhelm the fic side of the fandom a bit, but that just might be my observation, since I don't ship this pairing).

The problem is, I don't want to miss out on the fun stuff on Tumblr, but considering my emotional well-being, my sensitivity toward other people's emotions, and the amount of guff I have to put up with at work (which can and does overload the guff filter, meaning I can't take on guff that's online after a day of dealing with guff at work), I think I need to bow out of Tumblr gracefully. The sad thing is, I've had to do the same with the Catholic Answers Forum, and this is making me wonder where the problem lies. Are people that cranky or am I too sensitive? And then it makes me wonder, if in disconnecting from certain social networking platforms, am I disconnecting myself from other people? How connected should a person be?

I've joked about being "a female Finch" or "Finch's female clone". I often jokingly quote the "Long-winded explanations are my sort of thing" line when I'm being long-winded at explaining something. I'm bespectacled and I look good in a waistcoat, too!

So, dark_fest has opened it's amnesty period, and so I've spent part of the weekend picking up prompts that I wanted to take but couldn't due to limits (and I can see why they'd limit it: there are so many awesome prompts!)

( Cut for ye length and awesomeness )

So, my first ever Black Butler fic, and it's a Grell fic; if I'm sufficiently caffeinated, I *am* Grell (that and I consider myself to be more or less androgynous, albeit a mostly female one). However, a note on pronouns: I use gender neutral pronouns when writing fics involving Grell, since Grell is a shinigami, and I can't help wondering if gender as humans know it even applies to hir.

Prompt: Pregnancy
Pairing: unrequited Grell/Sebastian
Word count: 605

WARNING: references to abortion and what might be termed mpreg.

( Read more... )

Been doing a little housecleaning on the fic journal, ie. mtxref_fic: I've been retagging a fair number of fics (including the placeholders for the prompts that haven't been written yet). To my surprise, I found I have one hundred eighty-nine fics written. And this figure is just the items that are *on* the fic journal, not the fics archived on FF.N, AO3, or here on the personal journal. Yikes! I don't know if this means I need a life or if I'm a good writer.

Originally posted by quirky_thoughts at Twitter news - just one more....

Turns out it was a major server hiccup, but obviously it's back. In the meantime, I:

--Read books: started reading Kim Newman's "Anno Dracula", the crown jewel of all monster/classic mashups (Just try reading it with the world's most spastic reaper in headspace), and I'm pecking away at the hilarious "Northanger Abbey and Angels and Dragons" by Vera Nazarian: the dedication and the footnotes alone are worth the cover price.

--Work on typing fanfic. I finished typing one Gormenghast fic I'd been wanting to write since forever. Posted it below. :: Points down::

--Take a nap. Didn't sleep so good last night, but I think I'm caught up now.

One Gormenghast fic I've been wanting to write for a long time has been a story about Steerpike's mother (in the BBC miniseries version of the canon, though it wouldn't be above grandfathering it into book canon, since SP always gave me vibes that he was more than he seemed) came to meet Lord Sepulchrave...

One Gormenghast fic I've been wanting to write for a long time has been a story about Steerpike's mother (in the BBC miniseries version of the canon, though it wouldn't be above grandfathering it into book canon, since SP always gave me vibes that he was more than he seemed) came to meet Lord Sepulchrave...

Prompt: Secret lover
Pairing: Sepulchrave/OFC
Word count: 749

( Read more... )