Recs and links and recs. Oh my.
1. Fic rec!
"The Office" fic that is so good it should have been an episode and in fact, as far as I'm concerned, until I get to watch season 3, that's exactly what happened.
It's so good, there should be a BetterOfficeFics just for this one rec. No, really.
From the woman who brought us Ksanti, the wonderful wonderful Faith/Wesley fic rec'ed on BBF a couple of weeks ago.
Borneo by Sophia Jirafe
Jim/Pam
Post-"Casino Night"
PG-13 for language
The Dunder-Mifflin employees take up online gaming, exercise, and hoagies. Jim leaves a lot of voicemail messages.
2. Fic rec!
"Queer as Folks" fic. Actually, I've read several mind-blowing QaF fics in the past few months, but I haven't saved the links and forgot all about that, cause I'm lazy. But here's a good one that managed to hang around.
It's Brian/Justin, as all fics should be. And it's cute and hot and fun. It has sequels, but so far they're not as good as the first one. That happens sometimes, with sequels.
Plans By Xie
Brian/Justin
Post-513 therapy for us all
the rating is the highest there is, as this is QaF (I really never mastered the rating system)
Justin has a plan, which means Brian is totally fucked.
3. Community rec!
I've discovered that while I'm designing, I need something to occupy the parts of my brain that aren't needed for visual skills. I don't understand how it works exactly, but I need something more to be going on while I work, or else I find distractions, like start to read fics. Which is bad for the design progress, yes? And listening to music is just not distracting enough. But now I found the perfect solution: I listen to AudioBooks! On my computer! While I design! And if the narrator is good and doesn't have an annoying voice, then it's just awesome.
It's tricky though, that narrating thing. I've tried to indulge in some romance novels (I thought light and fluffy was the way to go here), but one was read by a man, who did a terrible job narrating the part of the woman, in a simpering pathetic voice and made me want to slap him, so I pretty much stopped after 10 minutes of listening, and one was read by a woman, who surprisingly, also was very much annoying doing the part of the heroine... so yeah.
I've discovered that, much like bad translation, a bad narration can ruin an excellent book. For example, I listened to "Wicked" which is one of my favorite books, and the narrator was so annoying to my ears, that it ruined the book for me a little. I've only downloaded that because it's been a while since I've read it and I wanted to listen to the sequel, "Son of the Witch". But after the bad narration I didn't feel like listening to SotW. Even though it's narrated by the author, and not the same guy.
But anyway. All thanks to _audiobookshare, this month I've listened to:
"The Time Traveler's Wife" by Audrey Niffenegger which was just a wonderful book in every way, and helped me spend many happy hours working, since the narration was just perfection. I bought a copy at Icon (in Hebrew though. I hope the translation is good).
"Anansi Boys" by Neil Gaiman which was a great book and very entertaining, plus a really talented narrator, doing so many different voices and characters! Excellent.
"Ella-Enchanted" by Gail Carson Levine which was a completely charming take on Cinderella, and the girl who narrated was just amazing. She did characters, voices of boys and girls and grownups and whatnot. She was so sweet.
I've also listened to standup comedy when I found some: "Ellen DeGeneres - The Funny Thing Is" because Ellen kills me, and "David Sedaris - Live at Carnegie Hall" who was very very good and witty.
Non-rec: "A Series of Unfortunate Events" by Lemony Snicket. I've heard the name a lot, and the website is quite pretty. Plus, how can you resist reading (or, listening) to a book by someone called Lemony Snicket? It makes me hungry for adventure and also lemon cookies. And I don't know if it was the narration fault, but I didn't enjoy it and found it boring. So I'm not rec'ing these books, or at least the audio version. I am rec'ing lemon cookies, though.
- you can find all of these at _audiobookshare's memories page.
4. A thingy rec!
If you have a website and would like to see what people are clicking and where (and not just how many times a day/month), go wild with CrazyEgg. Test your usability, improve your design accordingly, and just have fun because it's so very pretty. I did it for Split Screen and got a little bit addicted to checking things out.
***
Well, That's it for now, as it's 4:30 in the morning and I'm supposed to be moving tomorrow, yet I haven't packed. I have more stuff to rec, like kick-ass webcomics, and movies I saw at the con, but it'll have to wait.
My next entry will probably be from my new apartment. Crazeeeey!