you are living in new jack city
a. this day in history: a livejournal meme
three months ago: a million different people from one day to the next. i pay a visit to the dermatologist and the doctor; gjstruthseeker and i talk harry potter conspiracy theories; malelia_honu and i go to yoga; the three of us cruise around town in our quiet little way; and livejournal is both prolific and smart. i have links.
six months ago: that was the shortest fucking stalemate in the history of diplomacy! Dear Diary. When last we spoke I had just tanked a take-home essay exam and was busy alternating between self-flagellation and selective amnesia. i'm having a sentinel fanfiction renaissance; the archer is finished.
nine months ago: my great-uncle tombstone pierce made a fortune selling whiskey and hors d'oeuvres to the indians. during winter break i go on a scarf-making tear; i watch ocean's 12 and lemony snicket in theaters, season three m*a*s*h at home.
one year ago: writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK on a pink official form. It's six weeks in, patterns of procrastination have reasserted themselves like I'd never arranged myself any other way (which I don't think I ever did), and things are looming when they're not coming due. i love professor adler; i have no work ethic; i think the GRE might be a good think to look into; and i've bookmarked the websites of linguistics graduate programs. ha. ha. ha.
two years ago: justin month, day twenty-seven. i rec idol by rhys.
three years ago: homecoming. after the first of the month the only post in september (on the 25th) is a private one of a poem i wrote for chris's seminar. i have a note to fix the ending, but it's one i actually don't loathe with every fiber of my being.
b. silentfire, this one's for YOU:
dear diary, today i was pompous and my sister was crazy. today, we were kidnapped by hill folk never to be seen again. it was the best day ever.
i've never had much luck with text icons, but i'm toying with the idea of making a set of firefly quotes.
cousin m. and i are booked for this friday! so excited!
c. the other evening the local news weather report included a reading of 8.5 on the stickiness scale. a stickiness scale! boy, can we ever use one of those.
d. something i've noticed as a product of livejournal-based fan and fanfiction meta-discussion (and stop me if this predates livejournal or developed independently of it) is a new story form, what i think of as either the compressed story, or the extended summary. maybe the extended bunny. it starts with "where is the story where" or "somebody needs to write the one where", and continues to lay out the plotoften the entire skeletonusing lots of coordinating conjunctions, complete with the major emotional arcs, character set-up and development, lines of dialogue. helenish creates awesome ones all the time; allecto spins out fantastic and richly-detailed aus; viggorlijah casually tosses out delicate set-ups; dexwebster re-cast desk setwhich sounds awesome, by the way.
i won't say everybody does it, or even almost everybody, but lots of people do, and often; i've even done it, with absolutely no intention of ever writing the idea i had. and that's what it feels like: a public forum for viewing stories that will never be written. they're fascinating and often lots of fun to read, but they're also frustrating as hell to read, because i've just had my interest piqued and my appetite whetted for a story i can now reasonably expect to never see. maybe i'm underestimating the number of these that are eventually expanded upon and made into fully-functioning stories (by either their originator or an adoptive author), but for the moment i want to argue that they usually don't get written, that to publish the extended bunny is to fix it in that form forever, because it's a new form: a meta-story, a story about the possible telling of a story. in that sense, it's already complete.
f. for a textbook example of the abovementioned, see helenish's latest post, in which she whips up this fantastic idea for the vice-versa challenge after admitting to being sucked in by stargate: atlantis.
if you don't read thefourthvine, she just posted the most hilarious and spot-on roundup of stargate: atlantis and its fandomwhose apparent motto, she says, is "you will be assimilated": I now call it the black hole of fandom, and I could do this whole extended metaphor thing involving solar masses and the Schwarzschild radius and the Chandrasekhar limit, but I think we'll all be glad I chose not to. Suffice to say, SGA is where I expect we'll make alien contact for the first time; some writer will notice a new name on her friends list, click, and discover that the fine entities of Alpha Centauri have been sucked in and are now searching for SGA slash. i'm just saying, when not even light can escape? you're doomed. doomed, doomed, doomed. and, oh, the water is so incredibly fine.
g. television roundup!
kitchen confidential. caught it for the first time this week, and i wish i'd seen the first episode now, because i laughed through the whole thing, and also i've already fallen for all the characters. and then rageprufrock came along and delivered jack and steven, et al. in the queen of england: "because you cannot make an on-show reference to extra virgin olive oil as a lubricant and not suffer some consequences."
on tuesday we were trying to tape four shows on two vcrs, and it would have all been fine if i hadn't fucked it up by 1) not switching out a tape at a crucial moment, thereby losing last week'sunseenNCIS, and 2) doing some strange and stupid thing with the remote that resulted in not taping commander in chief. to sum up: i fail at life and should probably not go near anything having to do with vhs for a little while. commander in chief will repeat on saturday, at least. and unless i screwed up even more than i thought, we also taped the four-hour pbs documentary on bob dylan. things we did manage to watch on tuesday, in spite of me:
gilmore girls. i adore luke and lorelai, they're handling things so damn well. like callmesandy said, evey problem that pops up they deal with, they talk through and work through and settle like adults. and they're adorable! i can't help it!
rory just. she irks me. she's turning more and more into a book-smart, world-stupid kind of girl, and i want her to learn something already. i want her to suffer major consequences for something, i want her to be forced to conclude that she fucked up. i'm waiting for the d.a.r. to find out about her criminal record; somebody should drive by and see her picking up trash on the side of the road with the rest of the hooligans. i want her to go back to yale (and am i the only one who finds it bizarre and annoying that they call it yale all the time, instead of just school or college or campus? it's like referring to yourself in the third person) because she realizes that leaving was a big mistake: she's happy where she is right now, or thinks she is, but she's basically scrapped any long-term goals she had for herself, and the new ones she's going to find suddenly available to her are going to differ substantially in tone and quality. and for the love of god, could she develop better taste in boys? logan is suck a jerk, such a smug, useless jerk; jesse before him was a jerk in different ways, bad news all over; dean was cute and kind to her, was an excellent first boyfriend (as lorelai says somewhere in the third season, in the midst of jesse v. 2.0 or something), but he was also kind of a doormat, and basically rory's never been with anyone (that is, never been interested in anyone) who's her equal in both intelligence and personality, who can stand with her and stand up to her and also, you know, not be a jerk! i would like for that to happen.
paris rocks, her lunches with lorelai are so painfully fantastic. today i re-read jae_w's boston marriage (see above re: equals) and wither, and the former especially i can just see happening, if you told me that was next week's episode i would believe you. i would say, of course.
house. liked it, liked it, house and wilson, house and stacy, even house and cuddy, though i could have been hit a little less over the head with the guilt and soul-searching.
what i did not like was television writers yet again proving the right point at the wrong time, this time in re: paternalistic racism. house pulls that bait-and-switch shit with everybody, all the damn time. sure, he'd rather bludgeon you into submission through the combined force of his uncanny medical instincts and harrowing personality, because that's fun for him; but in the end he'll lie to you, break laws to get to you, physically overpower you, and distract you by pointing and shouting, "hey! look over there!" while he has his medical way with you if he thinks that's what's best. we know that foreman has watched him do this on many, many occasions, so the fact that he was primed to see house's actions as paternalistically racist doesn't quite explain why this particular instance of house knowing better than his patients was any different than all the others.
what i find most baffling is that there have been plenty of occasions where house has made legitimately racist remarks, usually to or about foreman himself (you can debate whether or not it stems from truly internalized racism or the deep-seated need to say the most shocking thing he can think of at any given moment); and there are numerous examples of drug companies screwing over black people, in this country, in africa, and the world over; so it's not that foreman was wrong, it's that he picked the completely wrong time to make his point. it makes me think that anything tv writers get right they stumble onto accidentally.
after watching house and gilmore girls back-to-back it's inevitable that i would imagine house and paris in an etiquette-devouring crossover nightmare, right? right? paris could be the patient in whom house finally meets his match! and they're not only in the same galaxy, they're in the same geographic region of the same country! that, of course, led me to imagine house + paris + rodney, and then i panicked at even the *possibility* of the scenario and had to RUN FOR MY LIFE o.O
h. an informal survey: does anyone else ever suspect that angelina jolie is a robot?
three months ago: a million different people from one day to the next. i pay a visit to the dermatologist and the doctor; gjstruthseeker and i talk harry potter conspiracy theories; malelia_honu and i go to yoga; the three of us cruise around town in our quiet little way; and livejournal is both prolific and smart. i have links.
six months ago: that was the shortest fucking stalemate in the history of diplomacy! Dear Diary. When last we spoke I had just tanked a take-home essay exam and was busy alternating between self-flagellation and selective amnesia. i'm having a sentinel fanfiction renaissance; the archer is finished.
nine months ago: my great-uncle tombstone pierce made a fortune selling whiskey and hors d'oeuvres to the indians. during winter break i go on a scarf-making tear; i watch ocean's 12 and lemony snicket in theaters, season three m*a*s*h at home.
one year ago: writes I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK on a pink official form. It's six weeks in, patterns of procrastination have reasserted themselves like I'd never arranged myself any other way (which I don't think I ever did), and things are looming when they're not coming due. i love professor adler; i have no work ethic; i think the GRE might be a good think to look into; and i've bookmarked the websites of linguistics graduate programs. ha. ha. ha.
two years ago: justin month, day twenty-seven. i rec idol by rhys.
three years ago: homecoming. after the first of the month the only post in september (on the 25th) is a private one of a poem i wrote for chris's seminar. i have a note to fix the ending, but it's one i actually don't loathe with every fiber of my being.
b. silentfire, this one's for YOU:
dear diary, today i was pompous and my sister was crazy. today, we were kidnapped by hill folk never to be seen again. it was the best day ever.
i've never had much luck with text icons, but i'm toying with the idea of making a set of firefly quotes.
cousin m. and i are booked for this friday! so excited!
c. the other evening the local news weather report included a reading of 8.5 on the stickiness scale. a stickiness scale! boy, can we ever use one of those.
d. something i've noticed as a product of livejournal-based fan and fanfiction meta-discussion (and stop me if this predates livejournal or developed independently of it) is a new story form, what i think of as either the compressed story, or the extended summary. maybe the extended bunny. it starts with "where is the story where" or "somebody needs to write the one where", and continues to lay out the plotoften the entire skeletonusing lots of coordinating conjunctions, complete with the major emotional arcs, character set-up and development, lines of dialogue. helenish creates awesome ones all the time; allecto spins out fantastic and richly-detailed aus; viggorlijah casually tosses out delicate set-ups; dexwebster re-cast desk setwhich sounds awesome, by the way.
i won't say everybody does it, or even almost everybody, but lots of people do, and often; i've even done it, with absolutely no intention of ever writing the idea i had. and that's what it feels like: a public forum for viewing stories that will never be written. they're fascinating and often lots of fun to read, but they're also frustrating as hell to read, because i've just had my interest piqued and my appetite whetted for a story i can now reasonably expect to never see. maybe i'm underestimating the number of these that are eventually expanded upon and made into fully-functioning stories (by either their originator or an adoptive author), but for the moment i want to argue that they usually don't get written, that to publish the extended bunny is to fix it in that form forever, because it's a new form: a meta-story, a story about the possible telling of a story. in that sense, it's already complete.
f. for a textbook example of the abovementioned, see helenish's latest post, in which she whips up this fantastic idea for the vice-versa challenge after admitting to being sucked in by stargate: atlantis.
if you don't read thefourthvine, she just posted the most hilarious and spot-on roundup of stargate: atlantis and its fandomwhose apparent motto, she says, is "you will be assimilated": I now call it the black hole of fandom, and I could do this whole extended metaphor thing involving solar masses and the Schwarzschild radius and the Chandrasekhar limit, but I think we'll all be glad I chose not to. Suffice to say, SGA is where I expect we'll make alien contact for the first time; some writer will notice a new name on her friends list, click, and discover that the fine entities of Alpha Centauri have been sucked in and are now searching for SGA slash. i'm just saying, when not even light can escape? you're doomed. doomed, doomed, doomed. and, oh, the water is so incredibly fine.
g. television roundup!
kitchen confidential. caught it for the first time this week, and i wish i'd seen the first episode now, because i laughed through the whole thing, and also i've already fallen for all the characters. and then rageprufrock came along and delivered jack and steven, et al. in the queen of england: "because you cannot make an on-show reference to extra virgin olive oil as a lubricant and not suffer some consequences."
on tuesday we were trying to tape four shows on two vcrs, and it would have all been fine if i hadn't fucked it up by 1) not switching out a tape at a crucial moment, thereby losing last week'sunseenNCIS, and 2) doing some strange and stupid thing with the remote that resulted in not taping commander in chief. to sum up: i fail at life and should probably not go near anything having to do with vhs for a little while. commander in chief will repeat on saturday, at least. and unless i screwed up even more than i thought, we also taped the four-hour pbs documentary on bob dylan. things we did manage to watch on tuesday, in spite of me:
gilmore girls. i adore luke and lorelai, they're handling things so damn well. like callmesandy said, evey problem that pops up they deal with, they talk through and work through and settle like adults. and they're adorable! i can't help it!
rory just. she irks me. she's turning more and more into a book-smart, world-stupid kind of girl, and i want her to learn something already. i want her to suffer major consequences for something, i want her to be forced to conclude that she fucked up. i'm waiting for the d.a.r. to find out about her criminal record; somebody should drive by and see her picking up trash on the side of the road with the rest of the hooligans. i want her to go back to yale (and am i the only one who finds it bizarre and annoying that they call it yale all the time, instead of just school or college or campus? it's like referring to yourself in the third person) because she realizes that leaving was a big mistake: she's happy where she is right now, or thinks she is, but she's basically scrapped any long-term goals she had for herself, and the new ones she's going to find suddenly available to her are going to differ substantially in tone and quality. and for the love of god, could she develop better taste in boys? logan is suck a jerk, such a smug, useless jerk; jesse before him was a jerk in different ways, bad news all over; dean was cute and kind to her, was an excellent first boyfriend (as lorelai says somewhere in the third season, in the midst of jesse v. 2.0 or something), but he was also kind of a doormat, and basically rory's never been with anyone (that is, never been interested in anyone) who's her equal in both intelligence and personality, who can stand with her and stand up to her and also, you know, not be a jerk! i would like for that to happen.
paris rocks, her lunches with lorelai are so painfully fantastic. today i re-read jae_w's boston marriage (see above re: equals) and wither, and the former especially i can just see happening, if you told me that was next week's episode i would believe you. i would say, of course.
house. liked it, liked it, house and wilson, house and stacy, even house and cuddy, though i could have been hit a little less over the head with the guilt and soul-searching.
what i did not like was television writers yet again proving the right point at the wrong time, this time in re: paternalistic racism. house pulls that bait-and-switch shit with everybody, all the damn time. sure, he'd rather bludgeon you into submission through the combined force of his uncanny medical instincts and harrowing personality, because that's fun for him; but in the end he'll lie to you, break laws to get to you, physically overpower you, and distract you by pointing and shouting, "hey! look over there!" while he has his medical way with you if he thinks that's what's best. we know that foreman has watched him do this on many, many occasions, so the fact that he was primed to see house's actions as paternalistically racist doesn't quite explain why this particular instance of house knowing better than his patients was any different than all the others.
what i find most baffling is that there have been plenty of occasions where house has made legitimately racist remarks, usually to or about foreman himself (you can debate whether or not it stems from truly internalized racism or the deep-seated need to say the most shocking thing he can think of at any given moment); and there are numerous examples of drug companies screwing over black people, in this country, in africa, and the world over; so it's not that foreman was wrong, it's that he picked the completely wrong time to make his point. it makes me think that anything tv writers get right they stumble onto accidentally.
after watching house and gilmore girls back-to-back it's inevitable that i would imagine house and paris in an etiquette-devouring crossover nightmare, right? right? paris could be the patient in whom house finally meets his match! and they're not only in the same galaxy, they're in the same geographic region of the same country! that, of course, led me to imagine house + paris + rodney, and then i panicked at even the *possibility* of the scenario and had to RUN FOR MY LIFE o.O
h. an informal survey: does anyone else ever suspect that angelina jolie is a robot?