Sunday: I fail at Remix.
Monday: Wait! Story!
Tuesday: Story story!
Wednesday: Story? *trickles to halt*
Thursday: …No, I fail at Remix.

I just dropped out. Tonight is the last night I have to work on this story, and I'm stuck. Have been stuck since Tuesday. The best thing to do would involve a rehaul, and I don't have the time. The doable thing to do would be to write a crappy ending and be done with it, but when the rest of the story isn't even that different from what it's remixing, there isn't much of a point if the end doesn't change. So I emailed the mods. My remixee deserves better.

I feel really crappy right now about this. I don't like dropping out of things. I love Remix especially. Also, there's a lot on the page so far. And someone put in a great deal of effort today to beta the WIP (which did help clarify my thoughts). But. Stuck is stuck. And when I'm in this state of mind I'm not going to get anything done anyway.

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Because posting with nothing but bad feelings is unpleasant for all involved, let's think of some things that are okay.

- They tested the fire alarms and smoke detectors in my apartment building last week. To warn people, they posted signs in the elevators. And how did they phrase it? "Don't be alarmed" if the alarms go off between 9 and 5. Sad thing is, they clearly did not mean to be punny.

- deelaundry and her family are incredibly generous people. I want you all to know this. They are being so good to me while I'm down here this summer, I can't even tell you. Even if she makes me watch snippets of things like Tango & Cash and Street Kings. (Marc Alaimo was in T&C for about ten seconds, though. That and the incredible cheesiness of Sylvester Stallone's one-liners made it worthwhile.)

- I created some really geeky Facebook gifts at (and for) work today. Have never used that application, can't even access Facebook in the office, but as someone said to me on the phone last week, I know just enough to be dangerous.

- Ben & Jerry's apparently makes a flavor called Mission to Marzipan, which has soft almond cookie bits and a swirl of super-sweet marzipan syrup in sweet cream or cake batter ice cream (is there a difference?). daasgrrl would not approve, but I tried some today and it's sort of amazing.

- The weather was gorgeous today. Mostly sunny, warm, not humid. Practically unheard of around here. I'm sure it'll swelter right up for the weekend.


…No, still feeling crappy. Guess I'll go eat some worms wash the dishes so my mom doesn't walk in to the welcoming smell of what might be mold tomorrow.

Of the suck:

- I hadn't read the U Penn CFP list the whole time I was in school. I finally checked it yesterday (they changed their format! at last!) and found one soliciting book chapters under a theme that would have been perfect for some work I did in undergrad and at a couple of conferences and that I've been wanting to try to publish... only the deadline for proposals was in May. It would have been right when I was finishing my thesis. Sad face.

- You know how sometimes you have an emotion and your body produces the chemicals to physically experience it, but then sometimes your body produces the chemicals when you have no reason to feel a particular way? I've felt jittery and anxious and haven't been able to sleep well for two nights now despite being dead tired, and I can't figure out why. I feel fine. There's nothing to worry about.

- Also, my face is peeling, so on top of the sunburn that looks like a bad tanning salon job, I now look like I've got dried toothpaste all over me. I know you all wanted to know this.


Not of the suck:

- The people who put out the above-mentioned CFP replied to the "disappointed I missed the opportunity, but good luck" email I sent them with recommendations on other venues to try. That was nice of them.

- I don't have to drop out of Remix. Last night I finally managed to write something, after ditching Ideas 1 and 2 and fighting with Idea 3. I'm back to Idea 2, and for whatever reason, it's working now. Now if I can just finish it and convince some poor beta to give me immediate feedback...

- http://delicious.com/st_xi_kink/

- My mom is visiting this weekend, I'm going semi-camping with some of my classmates and faculty next weekend, and the weekend after that, my dad and his girlfriend are coming down for my birthday. I wasn't ready for visitors last month, but now I'm looking forward to them.



Two ellipses in one post. Hm.

I'm not usually one to go all out and celebrate Independence Day. As a kid we would barbecue and then set off some crackers and sparklers in the back yard, the end. Lately it's just been lackluster viewing of the Boston, New York and/or D.C. fireworks on TV. A few years ago a friend and I did go down to the Esplanade to see the Boston Pops concert. Well, to hear the concert over speakers, we were so far away from the Hatch Shell where the performance took place, but we were sitting right by the river for the fireworks afterwards.

But this year, I figured that since I'm in the nation's capital, I should do some capital-y celebration-type things. And I ended up having a perfect Fourth of July.


     


( Details and pictures – historical reenactment, parade and awesome fireworks. )

Today I'm taking a break and staying in. Have Remix to beat into submission and a chicken to roast, and one of the worst sunburns of my life on my knees to slather in aloe. What're you all up to?

Happy Canada Day! And happy almost-Fourth of July. In celebration of Canadians in space, and holidays in general, here is a silly vid about why it's great to be a Wraith.


Title: Every Day is Halloween in the Pegasus Galaxy
Fandom: Stargate: Atlantis
Genre: Humor
Length: 2:35
Music: "Halloween" by Stephen Lynch
Summary: Come into my hive ship, little boys and girls...
Beta: A thousand thanks to yevgenie and usomitai. Any remaining rough spots are probably because I didn't listen to their advice.
A/N: Once upon a time I envisioned a Wraith-POV vid set to this song. Lo, it has come to pass.

(Also, I don't think you need to know much about SGA to watch this.)


( Embed and links behind the cut. )

( Lyrics: )


…Wow, those clouds look ominous. How fitting to have a thunderstorm right now.

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Concrit is always welcome.

x-posted to atlantis_vids and sga_noticeboard

Wow. Glad I didn't take the Metro home today.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_dc_metro_train_derailment
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/23/us/23webcrash.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/22/AR2009062202508.html

That's my line, near my stop, and a few minutes, perhaps, before I would have reached the spot.

tigertrapped, nightdog_barks, and everyone who likes writing short fiction -- have you heard about this? NPR is starting a feature/contest for stories that can be read aloud in three minutes or less. As anyone who's read drabbles or microfiction knows, this is not as startling a challenge as the host expressed last evening on the air when he said, hey, who would have thought that you could tell a whole story in just a few hundred words? Still, it could be fun to see if anyone here makes it onto the show.

ETA: Reading the rules I've discovered that the contest is only open to people in the U.S. -- sorry about that to the Brits et al. Tiger, you would have taken it by storm.

On the phone with my mother a while back, I mentioned how nice German sounds. She said she finds it too guttural. Since I used to think the same thing, I said maybe she associates it with all those brusque, crazed speeches by Hitler, and she just hasn't heard the right person speaking German. I was thinking specifically of Thomas Kretschmann, who has one of the smokiest, sexiest voices I've ever encountered.

So when pun, no_detective and I ended up talking about accents and languages when I saw them a few weeks ago and one of them repeated my mother's sentiments, I went straight for YouTube and we found this interview. Ja? They were convinced.

Last night I went back for more and found a second one for you. (Look, no_detective, another behind-the-scenes video of a photo shoot.) If you don't have patience for the whole thing, he comes in at about 1:00, 1:40 and 2:50—and his voice joins him about five seconds later. I also enjoyed one of his English interviews, which are more common on YouTube, when he appeared on the Jimmy Kimmel show in December and recapped his life story. (Highlights include Kimmel establishing that East Germany is no longer a country and not knowing how to convert kilometers to miles, and Kretschmann saying his hands are girlish but defending the manliness of "other parts.") And so on, blah blah.

Point is—second point is—that after surfing around for more clips and remembering exactly how attractive I find this man, something clicked in my head. Thomas Kretschmann/John Sheppard. Or rather, Thomas Kretschmann character/John Sheppard. Except I can't think of a character he's played who could cross over with SGA; they're all Nazis except for the CGI future sci fi guy and Dr. Frankenstein and the serial killer, etc. Which, God help me, made me seriously consider writing RPS Thomas/Joe Flanigan. Because there's too much hot there not to be exploited.

And similarities! They could connect over sports (TK was an Olympic-caliber swimmer, and obviously still stays fit; JF/JS likes climbing and surfing and so forth) and wearing t-shirts inappropriate for their age and chain necklaces (see also: second interview link) and big watches and being hot and come on, the hair. Rodney could not keep himself from mentioning the hair if he were to see the two of them together.

---

ETA: Something more serious that was hiding beneath that post.

Being Jewish, I did grow up with a keen awareness of the Holocaust and that the German government at the time was to blame for it. I remember disliking the sound of the German language because of all the recorded speeches we watched in history and religious education classes.

I also remember sitting at the seder table one Passover and deciding that I hated Egyptians because their ancestors had enslaved my ancestors. Or thinking about deciding to hate them, anyway. (Which was hard, because I loved learning about ancient Egypt. But that's beside the point.) But then in the haggadah there was a lesson about not carrying a grudge, about bestowing forgiveness for past wrongs, and about not holding an entire people responsible for the actions of a few -- or possibly I'm mixing that last part up with Holocaust education, but the moral is the same.

So I immediately dropped my half-fake grudge against Egypt, and at about that time, I also opened up to German language and culture. Which is when I found that I liked it quite a bit. Or I quickly learned to like it quite a bit. By college I was watching a lot of German movies and loving how I could pick up words and phrases because of the language's similarity to English. Before, I'd had no interest. And I fell in love with voices and bodies like Thomas Kretschmann's.

Then there comes another problem, towards the opposite end of the spectrum: should I feel guilty that I'm deriving shallow, sensual pleasure from characters who represent the very soldiers and politicians who perpetrated the Holocaust? Do I run the risk of too easily embracing something that caused irreparable harm in the past? Is it a kind of betrayal? That gets into very sticky territory -- perhaps the same kind that you enter when you find yourself "enjoying" reading/watching/hearing Holocaust narratives. I think it's all right, though. I have the history in mind, always. I don't love the voice of a Nazi character without that qualifier. I'm glad to have the dual perspective, mourning the harm that was done but being able to love the culture for what is good.

Sorry about that. It occurred to me that not being vague about the story options might make more sense. We now return you to your regularly scheduled post.

That's the second night running I've come home and done absolutely nothing for five hours instead of working on the WsIP I'd really like to finish.

Too many choices, I think. Want to put it to a vote? Let's see if I can focus enough to complete whichever one wins.

Poll #1417344
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Which no-longer-cryptically-abbreviated story should I just shut up and write?

...Still have the word "camelopard" stuck in my head. It hasn't come up in conversation as far as I can remember. Straaaange.

Title: Pierced
Pairing: Anthropomorphic
Rating: Adult
Kink: Your pick of Piercing/Needles and F---ing Machines
Word Count: 315
A/N: Crack. I'm sorry. From two squares on my kink_bingo card, even though the story's not even long enough to qualify. Just thought of it and couldn't get it out of my brain.

( Muslin sighed as callused, capable fingers played over her bare skin... )


x-posted to anthropomor_fic
 

I so get bonus points for today. A line of severe thunderstorms rolled in at 6 a.m., so that was it for sleeping, and at about 2 p.m. I hit the mental end of my workday. But then my supervisor let me know about a networking event in the city in the evening, and I went. For three and a half hours. I kept making myself stay each time the people I was talking with changed and it would have been easy to take my leave. Socializing is easier when I'm tired than it is when I'm awake, and also easier when I'm tired than mental work is, so that was all right, but still. Standing, etc. Got back and had dinner at almost 10. Sorry to those to whom I owe a comment or email.

Oh, and the other line of severe thunderstorms loomed at about 5 p.m., while I was walking to the Metro. Those bubble-wrap-looking undersides were back, interspersed with weird right angles as up- and downdrafts must have whipped the clouds' moisture around. The rounded features moved just like a pot of water at a rolling boil, only in slow motion. Never seen anything like it outside of TV.

In conclusion: Zygote.

This work business tires me out, but I wrote 400 words of a kink_bingo fic tonight, and I may be co-vidding on something that I think could be very cool, so I am happy.

Are you happy too?

Yesterday Dee and the wee Laundrys and I went to a couple of parks in the area. One, Glen Morgan Echo, had an unexpected mix of woods and carnivalesque remnants of decades past. There was also this butterfly, which the littlest Laundry made sure to count to three for before I snapped the shutter.


(click for bigger)


She and I saw Star Trek after dinner—her first time, my second—and I think I did like it more the second time, although I'm still not very happy with it. More on that another time; I don't want to put spoilers in this unrelated picture post.

Today I ventured out on my own. It was a toss-up between the National Gallery of Art and the National Arboretum, and since the weather is so nice, I chose the Arboretum. Started with a relaxing tram tour of the grounds, walked around the herb gardens and a special exhibit called "Power Plants" with samples of plants either being used or being considered for alternate energy sources, wandered through a beautiful international bonsai exhibit, ate my little packed lunch in the picnic area beside examples of all fifty states' official trees, and finished up with a hike into the Asian gardens and dogwood area. Pretty. By then it was on the uncomfortable side of warm, and I'd just about run out of water, so I came back. And here I am. With pictures:





( Come in for the rest... )
 

Happy news, for some of us:

1. Remix signups are open. Each year I fear what I'll be assigned, but I'm three for three now, so that must mean something, right?

2. Getcher automatically generated Kink Bingo cards here. I am excited, although who knows whether I'll be able to follow through with a whole bingo. My card contains tentacles again (!), and medical play (I have a House WIP I want to finish for this), and consent play (a secret favorite of mine; and I've been wanting to do a story where it is clear from the beginning that the participants are playing, with mutual consent and enjoyment; none of that 'surprise, it wasn't a real attack!' stuff), and other goodies. It would be great if I could find a way to write in some fandoms I haven't shared online before, like DS9 or BtVS or the Vampire Chronicles.

2a. I feel like I've posted mostly gen and vanilla or ordinary kink (i.e. bondage) slash here, but I thought about it while glancing at people's Bingo cards and realized I've done some weird stuff, often unintentionally: bestiality, double penetration, aphrodisiacs, bizarre object insertion, facial/bukkake, biting/vampires, scars; and, in stories offline, suspension, consent play, student/teacher, god/mortal, celebrity/fan, alien/human, guard/prisoner, virginity, electrodes, bloodplay, gang bang, and humiliation. Huh.

3. Now is the time to leave House/SGA crossover prompts for the upcoming Porn Battle. That semiannual 'fest has been great for not only generating lots of PWPs in many fandoms but also stimulating me (heh) to produce a few new ficlets of my own, often after a dry spell (heh heh). Hopefully this round will be no exception, even with my daytime hours out of commission.

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On the walk home before from the bus stop, the clouds over half the sky looked lumpy underneath, like bubble wrap with the big bubbles. But nothing's come of it. We must have only caught the tip of the system. Too bad, because it was horribly sweltery today, and D.C. gets great thunderstorms.

Second day of work today; first full day. Place and people seem nice. There's enough work to keep me busy, and they're encouraging me to take on what I find interesting. The hours are also flexible, and it's seven hours a day (eight if I want a full hour for lunch, which most of the time I won't), not nine. What a change from my last company. Not having LJ/email access is going to be a good thing, too; I'm focused, not tempted to stall with easier, more comfortable, irrelevant stuff, and there's a neat little collection of posts and messages to read when I get home. (Though I did smile to myself when the two-hour security training I completed this morning warned multiple times against accessing or transmitting sexually explicit materials.)

I melted part of a spatula-turner-thing yesterday. Note to self: Gas stoves burn hotter than electric, and scraping stainless steel pans with nylon utensils is not recommended. It was my—subleaser's?—spatula, too, so I'm going to have to replace it with the same model before I move out.

.

It is very weird, and wonderful, to see one's sister appear in a YouTube video a stranger took from the audience of a David Cook show. It's a funny clip, actually. A cake is thrown. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KIZj5Qsme48

deelaundry: Is that for kink_bingo?
bironic: No, it's for my job.

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Being down here for the summer means I get to hang out with Dee and the Laundrys quite often, hurrah. That is where I have been since yesterday.

(This afternoon while visiting a garage sale she sneakily got me this very cool brown leather bracelet that is like a cross between what Sheppard and Ronon wear -- three strips that together make it wide, and the middle strip has a line of metal grommets.)

Vid has gone over well. New job starts Monday. More when properly awake.

Aw, it's my first vid.

Title: I Get A Kick Out Of You
Music: Frank Sinatra
Rating: PG
Length: 3 mins.
Summary: Fluffy happy House-Wilson friendship (or slash, if you prefer), heavy on the early seasons. No spoilers.
Beta: Thank you to my vidding filter for feedback, especially queenzulu and kassrachel for technical help, and also jadesfire2808, thirdblindmouse and daasgrrl for concrit.
A/N: I had this idea two or three years ago and now I've finally got the time and equipment to carry it out. Many frustrating days with ripping/converting/compression software bugs later, the final product pleases me. I hope it pleases you.


Download the .divx file: good quality (20MB) or higher quality (32 MB)

Streaming widescreen on YouTube



( Embedded behind the cut: )



( Lyrics: )

*

Concrit is always welcome, especially since I plan to make more vids this summer and would like to improve.

x-posted to house_wilson

Relaxing: I'm remembering how to do it. I'm even reading a book.

When I got home on Thursday, I ran a bunch of errands and then we went to see a Ryan Star show nearby at my sister's bidding. It was a good one; louder than it needed to be, typical for this venue, but I was prepared with foam earplugs, and he played my two favorite songs of his: Brand New Day, which he tends to open with, and which got popped up for the Lie to Me opening credits, and The One You Know, which I've only heard him do once, out of tune.

Friday I played on the computer all afternoon, learning how to vid. I've now got a machine that can handle video capture and editing—as opposed to this laptop, which can't even take a still shot from streaming video—and I'm working on a simple vid to start, House-Wilson friendship, House POV, happy fluffy joy. I hope it will be ready in a week or so.

For the first time in a while, I had a Memorial Day weekend that felt like a Memorial Day weekend. ( beach, BBQ, fishing and LJ friends. )

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My updates lately have been sparse and sometimes locked. Here's where I'm at and where I think I'm going for the next few months.

- Classes ended a week and a half ago. I'm now done with the coursework towards my graduate degree. All that's left is completing an internship. Mine starts Monday (maybe; long story), so I'll be in the D.C. area through August. I'm waiting for my apartment key to come in the mail and then I'm driving down. Hopefully tomorrow.

- At my internship, there will be no daytime access to email or LJ. It's not even a matter of willpower this time; it's all government-firewalled. My supervisor-to-be has to go home to work on developing the department's Facebook page. So I won't see anyone's posts or get messages between maybe 8 a.m. and 6 p.m., unless I skip out on lunch break to a public computer. Although I suppose it's possible nobody here will notice a difference in my participation.

- Accordingly, if I want to work on fic, I'll have to bring a notebook, because I also can't email that stuff to myself to or from my work account, and I can't hook up any flash drives to the network. I want to bring the notebook, though, because there will be kink_bingo, another Porn Battle, and Remix starting up in the next month or so.

Did I forget anything? I think that's it.

YouTube has justified its existence.

I've had "arkelopes" listed in my LJ interests since I started this journal. Nobody ever asked, but I think this word is not known to most of you. It is from a short Canadian cartoon I saw on TV about ten years ago which is adorable and also really, really sad, because what it has to say is true. I hadn't been able to get hold of it again until inspiration struck tonight. Et voila.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f6BNaSuIaT0

Guys. It licks the cactus. And the babies cry.

Had a dream that I was visiting the NIH, the main building, and looked out a wall of windows to see that we could see the sea, sound, lake, whatever, and the waves were choppy. The building started to swivel, like those rotating restaurants on the top of skyscrapers. Only it swiveled too much, and bobbed unevenly, as if it were floating, like a cruise ship in a storm. And then it broke off, and we went into the water, and started to sink. Francis Collins or someone got on the loudspeaker to complain about the contractors who'd built the building. We kept going down. Someone said to wait until we were all the way under before breaking any doors or windows to get out, like you're supposed to do when your car goes off a bridge. Only we kept sinking, and sinking, and nobody did anything, and I was worrying about whether we'd be able to make it to the surface on one breath. Kept sinking. Started to think we might not make it. Tried to organize people to break out. We would fill soda bottles or pitchers with air and let them lead us upward while giving us enough breath to make the surface, because it didn't look like we were going to hit the bottom anytime soon. Only then we did; we'd be okay. Except we teetered, and slipped off the ledge we'd landed on, and kept sinking -- it had been the summit of some kind of underwater mountain. And I said forget this, if we're going to plummet another mountain's worth, there's no way we'll last long enough in the building to be rescued. Arguments ensued over how many air holders each person could have. Some woman scolded me for spilling brownish water on the counter, and I could not impress on her how insignificant that was given the situation.

Then John Sheppard was there, and he remembered he had a jet pack. So he strapped it on and was lifted up, through the clouds of eerie deep-dark creatures, to the surface. Only there he found that it wasn't the same surface he'd left. Bands of people struggled against one another; there was no centralized government; nobody trusted anyone. He encountered Ford and some others waiting on bleachers for his return. They asked him about whether he'd seen what he was supposed to see down there, or planted an explosive, or something. Of course he had no idea what they were talking about. He faked his way along, hoping they wouldn't notice he didn't belong to this reality.

*

In other news, I'm driving home today. Farewell, Boston-and-Cambridge; I will miss you again, and more than that I'll miss my new friends.

1. Rachel Getting Married is the only movie I can remember off the top of my head that made me cry the whole way through.

2. I cannot get over how gorgeous Anne Hathaway is. She is the realization of my adolescent Mary Sues.

3. That movie puts Racefail and SGA's gender issues to shame. To absolute shame. Three or four cultures meet at the wedding and are different and are celebrated but aren't pointed at with huge flashing lights saying LOOK WE ARE CULTURALLY DIVERSE.

4. So far so okay: slept in today after getting home at 1 a.m. from a huggy class farewell at a pub, checked that my car hadn't been stolen, went shopping for work clothes and actually found a few things, didn't get rained on, made a tasty dinner from what little I've got in the fridge, treated myself to some ice cream (malted milk ball flavor), and watched a couple of movies.

5. The Untouchables is not that good. Certainly not as good as Goodfellas, which I saw a few weeks ago, or Heat, or A Bronx Tale. Besides having the handicap of Kevin Costner in a leading role, The Untouchables lacked an irony it really needed, from the score to the closing shot. At some point I'll need to add Scarface and The Godfather to the viewing list.

The end of the semester rushed in like the sidewalk when you've fallen off a building. Wham, and it's over. My family came up Thursday night and has already gone. They took most of my stuff with them; the apartment is empty. After more than a week of solid work, I've suddenly got nothing to do,* and it's quiet. I'm kind of exhausted, and now I'm also unexpectedly sad.

* Besides small stuff, anyway: shop for business casual clothes, get thesis printed on the proper paper and acquire its proper signatures, and sort through the massive pile of papers that's built up since September so I don't lug junk home.

Yesterday was wonderful, though. I had to give a presentation, and I kicked its butt. Then we went out to dinner and I had steak for the first time since my birthday last summer, made all the better not only for the time that lapsed between but because it was nice and rare. Some places these days will ask what level of doneness you want and then cook it medium-to-well-done anyway for safety reasons.

I did not start this post intending to write about the ideal state of filets. Rather, I was thinking about how this is my last week at MIT—out-of-town internship this summer, then graduation in the fall—and so I've been taking pictures to share here. Sort of the "day in the life" meme that goes around every so often, only more of a "week in the life," or three weeks, since I'm going to be in three cities before the end of the month. A week here, some pictures from NY, and then some from DC. Thought it might be fun, anyway.

Here's the first batch: ( Featuring alien potato growths, math geekery, and jewelry. )