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stunt_muppet at 02:53am on 20/02/2010 under doctor who, fic fragments, music, transformers, video games
stunt_muppet at 02:53am on 20/02/2010 under doctor who, fic fragments, music, transformers, video gamesI had kind of a productive day today - got some laundry done, cleaned a bit, went out for a walk in the 55-degree weather (hooray!) - so of course I spent much of the evening playing video games and otherwise doing nothing. That said, Skies of Arcadia remains fun. I remembered that one of the reasons I loved it so much back when I first got it was that it has a completely canonical (albeit nonromantic) OT3some at the core of the character lineup - there's ambiguous romantic tension between the two female characters and the leading man, but there's no competition or jealousy, and Childhood Friend is really quite femslashy with Mysterious Girl, and it's happy and affectionate and one of my favorite kinds of OT3 team relationships and it makes the game so much more fun.
But! I did try to do a bit of writing when I've been locked for the past couple of days. Fragments, mostly, but I tried doing that ficcing-to-music thing, where you set your iPod on shuffle and only write for however long the song lasts. Unfortunately I am so blocked I could only do eight songs, and most of the resulting fics are random fragments of disconnected story instead of anything resembling fic. So. Um. Here they are. I've linked to the YouTube posting of the song because uploading my music is a bear on this computer and inevitably results in skippy mp3s and frustration. Let me know if you want me to upload something for you.
---
"Winds of Sand" - Atlas Plug (4:00)
Outside. I'm outside. Don't know where exactly. Not too many geographical features with which to orient myself. The wind is chapping my skin and forming the sand into shapes around my prone body. Like snow angels.
I don't live anywhere near a desert. Especially not one like this. It's too pale, too picturesque. Like someone's idea of a desert. Although there really are plains of featureless sand out there, out in the Sahara. So I guess I could be there, if I somehow managed to fly to Africa in my sleep. The deserts around here aren't this perfect. They're full of scrub brush and tenacious plants that thrive just to spit in the face of the landscape that says they can't.
---
"Sandstorm" - Darude (3:49)
Music loses some of its charm when she can hear how it's made. She can hear the wires and circuits in the synthesizers and the paths required for them to translate a pressed key or turned dial into sound. She can hear the vibrations they produce when before all she heard was a note.
She tries to find more acoustic music, stuff without synths in it, but even guitars and drums are flanged and modified and Autotuned, and the machinery explaining itself to her drowns out the music like radio static - too much data, too much that she's aware of now.
---
"Diamond Dogs" - Beck (4:34)
I wouldn't have asked any less of you. Not even if I didn't have to. You really are a specimen. I could rate you on a ten-point scale if I could only think of enough categories, and for each some other examples to compare you against. Beauty. Subservience. Decorativeness. You let me wear you like a new set of pearls and you never complain - not because I've threatened you or bought your silence but because you just don't. Does it make you happy? Who would be happy like this - with someone like me, with my peculiar wants and needs?
When I've told you to you've adorned yourself to better adorn me - stolen clothes and inked your skin - and one day I'll slip into that decorated skin like a new suit.
---
"Back in Black" - Vitamin String Quartet (4:31)
"This," Bumblebee declared, testing out the buttons on the neck of his model guitar, "is awesome."
Optimus still wasn't sure how Sari had persuaded her father to put Sumdac Systems resources towards a set of Rock Band controls scaled to Bumblebee and Bulkhead; he was equally unsure how Dr. Sumdac had managed to do so without them gaining free will and inexplicable robocidal rage, and thus made a note to keep an optic on them, just in case.
Though it wasn't as if a guitar and drum kit could do a lot of damage on their own, but really, could you ever be sure?
---
"Kernkraft 400" - Zombie Nation (6:06) (video goes to a different mix because there wasn't a video of the six-minute mix)
"I'm just pointing out," she said. "The plot of every zombie movie is predicated on the participants in said movie not knowing what zombies are, and I think it's a flaw in the genre. It creates complications where there don't need to be any."
"Like what?"
"Well, for starters, the inevitable army mobilization. The army always mobilizes to take out the zombies - the assumption being that they're some sort of human threat that will either be cowed by military force or can be dispatched with conventional weaponry."
"But they can be. The last one, anyway."
"Not unless it's a headshot, and once you've got enough zombies that the army comes in no way you're getting a clear headshot on any of em. Plus you need a firearm with enough force to blow out the brain - a pea-shooter or a standard-issue sidearm ain't gonna cut it. And so the army inevitably collapses and provides the ravening hoards with a ton of new zombies, and then our heroes are fucked."
"What's your point?
"That if the Commander-in-Chief had watched any zombie movies at all, he'd just firebomb the town and have done with it. Or at least put it under lockdown before the mobilization so the zombies couldn't keep spreading. And the soldiers would be given shotguns and told to not bother with riot weapons and aim for the head."
"Wouldn't the heroes be fucked then anyway? They'd be caught in the bombing run."
"Well, yeah, but at least the full-scale zombie apocalypse has been averted, and that's what matters in the long run."
---
"Topaz" - The B-52s (4:21)
She can't call it beautiful. It's interesting, yeah. Infinitely complicated, a marvel of engineering, but it's so big and so crowded and so...rusted over, in spots. The metal shows fingerprints. It's lived-in but trying to be sterile, or sterile but trying to be lived-in, and it just doesn't work. And then the night comes (it feels like so long before the night comes) and all the lights of the city come on, and she thinks it’ll look like a starry sky but it doesn't. It just looks like a cluster of artificial lights poking out of the black and grey monoliths - embers throwing up their last, fitful lights amongst the pylons of charred, useless firewood. Old and used and fading fast.
She wants to clear all the firewood away, scrub out all the blackness until nothing but the bright light is left, like a jewel.
---
"Blue Dress" - Depeche Mode (5:42) (again, video is different than the mix I used because there isn't a video of the version I used; YouTube is cranky like that)
She'd started to regain herself today.
When he first brought her back from the planet they found her on the long stellar cycles marooned had broken her even further; he'd found her in hiding, curled in the corner of a dark and narrow cave. She'd recognized him - barely, just enough to say his name when he hadn't been able to persuade her to speak at first.
He didn't know what had happened to her, what she was hiding from or why, but it was enough to silence her protests when he'd told her he was taking her back to Cybertron. Had she forgotten, or was her new home simply so terrible that even the experimentation she feared would be a relief?
And today when he came to the Infirmary to visit he'd tried to talk to her, as he always did, and on receiving no response he'd become frustrated, and he'd forgotten himself, and he'd called her Elita-One again.
And she'd looked up at him, meeting his gaze for the first time in solar cycles.
---
"Warbots" - Melora Creager (3:32)
There are so many of them.
The news of the invasion had spread fast, even to their countryside, and she and Cliff had holed up in the basement with nowhere to run, and all she could think was that she had never seen so many Daleks before. There had to be thousands, millions. Enough to fill the skies. She could hear them outside.
It was almost spectacular.
---
Things I have discovered tonight: I have completely forgotten how to write romance of any stripe - basic emotion, holding, kissing, intimacy, sex, anything. And I'm supposed to write it for that one ficathon I claimed, too. Blaaah.
And now I should go to bed so I can get some work done tomorrow.
But! I did try to do a bit of writing when I've been locked for the past couple of days. Fragments, mostly, but I tried doing that ficcing-to-music thing, where you set your iPod on shuffle and only write for however long the song lasts. Unfortunately I am so blocked I could only do eight songs, and most of the resulting fics are random fragments of disconnected story instead of anything resembling fic. So. Um. Here they are. I've linked to the YouTube posting of the song because uploading my music is a bear on this computer and inevitably results in skippy mp3s and frustration. Let me know if you want me to upload something for you.
---
"Winds of Sand" - Atlas Plug (4:00)
Outside. I'm outside. Don't know where exactly. Not too many geographical features with which to orient myself. The wind is chapping my skin and forming the sand into shapes around my prone body. Like snow angels.
I don't live anywhere near a desert. Especially not one like this. It's too pale, too picturesque. Like someone's idea of a desert. Although there really are plains of featureless sand out there, out in the Sahara. So I guess I could be there, if I somehow managed to fly to Africa in my sleep. The deserts around here aren't this perfect. They're full of scrub brush and tenacious plants that thrive just to spit in the face of the landscape that says they can't.
---
"Sandstorm" - Darude (3:49)
Music loses some of its charm when she can hear how it's made. She can hear the wires and circuits in the synthesizers and the paths required for them to translate a pressed key or turned dial into sound. She can hear the vibrations they produce when before all she heard was a note.
She tries to find more acoustic music, stuff without synths in it, but even guitars and drums are flanged and modified and Autotuned, and the machinery explaining itself to her drowns out the music like radio static - too much data, too much that she's aware of now.
---
"Diamond Dogs" - Beck (4:34)
I wouldn't have asked any less of you. Not even if I didn't have to. You really are a specimen. I could rate you on a ten-point scale if I could only think of enough categories, and for each some other examples to compare you against. Beauty. Subservience. Decorativeness. You let me wear you like a new set of pearls and you never complain - not because I've threatened you or bought your silence but because you just don't. Does it make you happy? Who would be happy like this - with someone like me, with my peculiar wants and needs?
When I've told you to you've adorned yourself to better adorn me - stolen clothes and inked your skin - and one day I'll slip into that decorated skin like a new suit.
---
"Back in Black" - Vitamin String Quartet (4:31)
"This," Bumblebee declared, testing out the buttons on the neck of his model guitar, "is awesome."
Optimus still wasn't sure how Sari had persuaded her father to put Sumdac Systems resources towards a set of Rock Band controls scaled to Bumblebee and Bulkhead; he was equally unsure how Dr. Sumdac had managed to do so without them gaining free will and inexplicable robocidal rage, and thus made a note to keep an optic on them, just in case.
Though it wasn't as if a guitar and drum kit could do a lot of damage on their own, but really, could you ever be sure?
---
"Kernkraft 400" - Zombie Nation (6:06) (video goes to a different mix because there wasn't a video of the six-minute mix)
"I'm just pointing out," she said. "The plot of every zombie movie is predicated on the participants in said movie not knowing what zombies are, and I think it's a flaw in the genre. It creates complications where there don't need to be any."
"Like what?"
"Well, for starters, the inevitable army mobilization. The army always mobilizes to take out the zombies - the assumption being that they're some sort of human threat that will either be cowed by military force or can be dispatched with conventional weaponry."
"But they can be. The last one, anyway."
"Not unless it's a headshot, and once you've got enough zombies that the army comes in no way you're getting a clear headshot on any of em. Plus you need a firearm with enough force to blow out the brain - a pea-shooter or a standard-issue sidearm ain't gonna cut it. And so the army inevitably collapses and provides the ravening hoards with a ton of new zombies, and then our heroes are fucked."
"What's your point?
"That if the Commander-in-Chief had watched any zombie movies at all, he'd just firebomb the town and have done with it. Or at least put it under lockdown before the mobilization so the zombies couldn't keep spreading. And the soldiers would be given shotguns and told to not bother with riot weapons and aim for the head."
"Wouldn't the heroes be fucked then anyway? They'd be caught in the bombing run."
"Well, yeah, but at least the full-scale zombie apocalypse has been averted, and that's what matters in the long run."
---
"Topaz" - The B-52s (4:21)
She can't call it beautiful. It's interesting, yeah. Infinitely complicated, a marvel of engineering, but it's so big and so crowded and so...rusted over, in spots. The metal shows fingerprints. It's lived-in but trying to be sterile, or sterile but trying to be lived-in, and it just doesn't work. And then the night comes (it feels like so long before the night comes) and all the lights of the city come on, and she thinks it’ll look like a starry sky but it doesn't. It just looks like a cluster of artificial lights poking out of the black and grey monoliths - embers throwing up their last, fitful lights amongst the pylons of charred, useless firewood. Old and used and fading fast.
She wants to clear all the firewood away, scrub out all the blackness until nothing but the bright light is left, like a jewel.
---
"Blue Dress" - Depeche Mode (5:42) (again, video is different than the mix I used because there isn't a video of the version I used; YouTube is cranky like that)
She'd started to regain herself today.
When he first brought her back from the planet they found her on the long stellar cycles marooned had broken her even further; he'd found her in hiding, curled in the corner of a dark and narrow cave. She'd recognized him - barely, just enough to say his name when he hadn't been able to persuade her to speak at first.
He didn't know what had happened to her, what she was hiding from or why, but it was enough to silence her protests when he'd told her he was taking her back to Cybertron. Had she forgotten, or was her new home simply so terrible that even the experimentation she feared would be a relief?
And today when he came to the Infirmary to visit he'd tried to talk to her, as he always did, and on receiving no response he'd become frustrated, and he'd forgotten himself, and he'd called her Elita-One again.
And she'd looked up at him, meeting his gaze for the first time in solar cycles.
---
"Warbots" - Melora Creager (3:32)
There are so many of them.
The news of the invasion had spread fast, even to their countryside, and she and Cliff had holed up in the basement with nowhere to run, and all she could think was that she had never seen so many Daleks before. There had to be thousands, millions. Enough to fill the skies. She could hear them outside.
It was almost spectacular.
---
Things I have discovered tonight: I have completely forgotten how to write romance of any stripe - basic emotion, holding, kissing, intimacy, sex, anything. And I'm supposed to write it for that one ficathon I claimed, too. Blaaah.
And now I should go to bed so I can get some work done tomorrow.
tired
(no subject)
It should be noted I am a little sleep deprived and as such may not be making much sense but take that as you may. :D
(no subject)