stunt_muppet

First panicked note: It's May? Already? Why? I don't approve at all of this state of affairs.

Anyway, other things: 

1. I can't believe it took me so long to watch Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, but I just finished all six episodes over the course of three days (mostly during study/homework breaks). It's a show-within-a-show, supposedly made in the Eighties but too controversial and horrific to be released until 2000, with bonus commentary by the actors and writer/director/star/visionary/dreamweaver, Garth Marenghi. (The actors play two roles; the roles within the "show" proper and the roles of the actors playing the characters within the show. Make sense? It makes more sense when you watch it.)

I'd highly recommend it to MST3K fans and fans (in every sense of the word) of awful 70's and 80's TV, but in addition to skewering the tropes of both 80's horror and horror-writer vanity projects, it nails the self-congratulatory "candidness" of actor interviews and commentary as well, and even as an admitted lover of commentary tracks I find it mimics their tone perfectly.

The whole series is available on YouTube, and is worth checking out. It's also endlessly quotable, as demonstrated in the subject line.

As a bonus, Richard Ayoade is really good-looking.

2. Still not so sure about this Dreamwidth thing - it's moved to open beta, and a whole lot of people on my flist and around fandom seem to be setting up shop there, but as noted I am terribly lazy lately and do not much feel like doing all the work of setting up another corner of the web to sit in, especially if there's no real incentive for me to use it. *ponders*

3. I want Danny Elfman to do at least a few episodes of scoring for Who. Not the entire score, mind you, because even I would find all that Elfman wearying, but I think he should at least score one of the episodes where Moffat decides he wants to scare the pants off us. Especially if he uses some formerly-innocuous childhood Thing to do so.

This thought brought to you by the fact that I've had "This Is Halloween" going on loop in my mind for a couple of days now, just watched the video for it, and found it to still be a rather brilliant opener to The Nightmare Before Christmas. Less than surprisingly, the Marylin Manson cover is inferior, mainly because Manson decides to forgo the tune of the lyrics at points where I think the tune ups the creepy charm more than a distorted hiss does.

4. Too much YouTube trawling means that now I really, really want to play System Shock 2, despite it supposedly being one of the scariest games ever made and I just completely spoiled the big twist at the end for myself. Of course, the big twist at the end is why I want to play - I mean, it's got a malevolent, violently insane god-complexed AI who (at least spiritually) might as well be GLaDOS's more lucid but equally hateful mother. And speaks with a stuttering distorted monotone. OF COURSE I want to play it right now. :D

So who wants to sit next to me and hold my hand while I keep myself up at night with this game? I do this to myself, I don't know why. *sigh*

5. Speaking of things I'm terrified of, I also find myself wanting to watch The Thing, partly because of this review of the video game (!) by Spoonyman, who loves the film, and partly because Dad said that the alien in The Memory Always Lies kind of reminded him of the Thing in concept (something that could be anyone at anytime, although I didn't point out that the alien I'd written couldn't eat people's faces off). I figure I should know the source material I'm unintentionally cribbing from. Plus, the best way to figure out how to write something scary is to read and watch scary stuff, yeah? And I do want to write something scary eventually.

Also, Kurt Russell. I'm just saying. ;)

6. Speaking of scary things I want to write, maybe it's just the mood I've been in, but lately I've been wanting to expand Made Up Your Mind into a three-part proper fic thingy using the many, many bits of it that I didn't end up putting into the final story. And there were a lot of them, which is why it took me so long to get it finished. See, when I first tried writing it, I wanted it to be really really meta and crap and take into account most to all of the Issues I saw in the end of Three's era. Which meant that early drafts tried to be psychosexual and weird (and in retrospect were probably trying too hard) and touched on things like permanence and being too tied to humanity and memory loss and alien identity, with Jo and the Doctor's relationship to her primarily used as a reflection of his mental state and fears. The Master was in it too, for a bit.

It occured to me, belatedly, that trying to make it horrific was missing the point and was probably something of a buzzkill, but I really liked some of the scenes I wrote for the early drafts, so I kept them. And now I've been tinkering with them, and toying with the idea of adding them on to the version of Made Up that I posted - not as part of the chapter, but as further chapters, one of which goes a little further into nightmare territory and one of which is somewhere between the two, more contemplative and a bit bittersweet.

This would mean taking it off the ficbucket and making it a proper story, and I really don't like relocating stories like that. Ponder.

7. Yet another meme, because while you know how I am with writing memes at least this will give me something to do while I'm stuck in bed (though my mother has made warning noises about my computer time):

I'll write a ficlet of at least 100 words for the first five people to comment with:
1) up to three characters (or a pairing) and
2) a one-word prompt.

Fandoms include the usual - Who (New and Classic, up to late Four/early Five), L&O-verse, CSI-verse, Pirates-verse, FFX (not X-2), Middleman, NCIS, Burn Notice, whatever else I happen to be forgetting at the moment but which I've talked about before.

8. I am so very very tired, as I have been for most of this week, night and day, and thus am going to bed. Good night all. Hopefully sleeping a lot will make me less lethargic and disinclined to do anything. Will get something accomplished in the morning.