stunt_muppet

Roommate and I were sitting around this evening, around eleven-thirty, doing our respective homework with the TV on in the background, when a commercial for some sort of butter-substitute comes on. Said commercial depicts butter being spread on toast.

Me (looking up at the TV): ...I really want some toast right now.
Roomie: Hmm.
Me: Where am I going to get toast at this hour, though? I think even the Union's closed.
Roomie: Yeah, it would be.
Me: ...they might have it at IHOP.
Roomie (sitting bolt upright): Can we go to IHOP?
Me: We should!
Roomie: We should go to IHOP right now.
Me: Awesome. *fetches car keys*

Considering that this is sort of what college students are supposed to do, I haven't done nearly enough of it, but going to get pancakes at 11:30 for no real reason besides really, really wanting pancakes? So much fun. If it would not imperil my work schedule I would do it all the time.

Also pancakes. Mmmmm. I never did end up getting any toast, but pancakes are an acceptable substitute.

I feel like now that I'm (hopefully) graduating, I have to hurry up and do all the things that I should have done during my four years at college but inexplicably didn't - go to parties, go on long walks, go to the library, have movie nights, go to the little theater near campus that has leather seats and a little table for your concessions and has wine and beer among those concessions, that kind of thing. So I guess there is still a little fear/sadness there, in that I'm leaving this wonderful little town behind and I might not be able to go back, and that wherever I end up won't be as homelike. Even when I got here for the first time, it still felt homelike, so I don't even really have a point of reference for getting used to a new environment.

I must take lots of pictures of my campus. Lots and lots. But for now: graduation. I can do this. I will own this.

---

Bit of a linkspam:

1. I spent my study break today reading Singin' In The Rain Don/Kathy/Cosmo fic, which clearly is an amazing and wonderful thing in and of itself, but as a bonus is really wonderfully written and thoughtful and shows the three of them really building that trusting OT3 relationship rather than including it as just an isolated incident. (Warning: Adult-rated and quite long)

It makes me want to write my own OT3 fic - after I've graduated, of course. For as much as I adore OT3s I don't write them very often, because it generally takes me a very long time to set up a viable three-person relationship and if I just go for straight PWP then the mechanics are hard to work out (plus I still feel the need for pages and pages of setup to detail how the three characters involved agree to a threesome), but there are so many OT3s that I'd love to write and that generally hardly have any fic. Project!

(Seriously, I keep having to remind myself that I have schoolwork up to my armpits and thus now is not a good time for that epic-length Ben/Polly/Dodo post-series fic or that Optimus/Sentinel/Elita Academy-era fic or whatever. Two more weeks, guys.)

2. Tim Gunn of Project Runway critiques superhero costumes. Yes, really. Also there's apparently an illustration out there of him and the Iron Man suit.

Though despite my big guilty love for Project Runway in general and Tim Gunn in particular I do have to call him out for criticizing Black Canary's fishnets (or, indeed, wide fishnets in general). For shame, sir! It doesn't help that the nerd he's talking to doesn't seem at all familiar with Black Canary and parrots an old, inaccurate, and irritating argument regarding the sexualization of women in comics but I've promised I'd let up on the Serious Business for a while so I could get my life sorted out, so not going there. I respect your judgment, good sir, but on this point you are wrong.

3. So despite having a Dreamwidth account, and despite repeated Very Good Reasons why I should start actually using it, I really haven't done anything with it, mostly out of laziness rather than out of any active desire to remain exclusive to LiveJournal. What can I say, inertia is powerful.

shes_awesome, however, might be the catalyst I need to finally make the move, because it's a whole community devoted to celebrating awesome female characters via fic, art, meta, or general squee. And much as I adore halfamoon  (and I do, a lot) it's lovely to have a place to do that all the time. And also Jo Grant/Liz Shaw/Polly Wright/Barbara Wright/Vicki Pallister/Sarah Jane Smith/the Old Who ladies in general/Sari Sumdac/Temperance Brennan/Abby Sciuto/Camille Saroyan/Angela Montenegro/everyone need some lovin' in there and who'll rattle off long lists of their awesomeness if not me. I was planning on picspamming Sari for halfamoon  anyway.

So, friends with a Dreamwidth account, you might want to give that a look-see. Also, thoughts on crossposting to DW, whether I should move there, benefits of crossposting vs not crossposting, etc? I solicit your thoughts.

4. Someone on ThatGuyWithTheGlasses is doing a Let's Play of Quest 64, an old and obscure Nintendo 64 RPG that I inexplicably loved when I was wee dspite it, by any objective measure, not being at all a good game. While the Let's Player does commit a few obnoxious sins (chief among them not paying attention to the in-game tutorials on combat, not reading the game documentation, and then complaining that the game failed to hold his hand with regards to how to use the magic system - look, it's not the game's fault you can't be arsed to read the directions, if I could figure this out when I was ten years old surely you're smart enough to make a few connections, and I'm sorry but that's the one thing LPers do that just drives me crazy) it's at least a nice, nostalgic look back.

I realize that this news item is of trivial interest to anyone but me, but whatever, I'm putting it up here anyway.

---

Aaand I was supposed to finish working on my short story tonight. Looks like that's not happening. Ugh, it takes me so very long even to update LJ or comment or reply to comments or do anything at all. Tomorrow! I will finish that short story tomorrow. And also e-mail my teachers back, I need to do that too.

Good night, flist. Or good morning, I suppose.

It'd probably help if I went to bed at a decent hour. And accomplished more than one thing per day.

But, anyway, guess who's car is all better? That's right! Phoebe got repaired and now runs just fine. Apparently there was a disconnected fuse that was drawing power from the battery even when the keys were out of the ignition. It wasn't even an essential fuse, mostly connecting to things like power windows or the glove box light, which I don't even have, so the man at the shop just disconnected it. And now my car runs just like it used to!

So after that I went to get her washed, because she has been gathering pollen for quite some time.

---

In other news, have been working more on drawing different body types, and I think I'm getting better at not only drawing bodies that are not super-skinny but at consistently drawing a single body, keeping proportions in mind and such. Sure, I've still got a long way to go (like, oh say, attempting to draw men for once) but baby steps, baby steps.

Also I got started on my creative project for my Film class today. I may ask a bit of advice on it later, but for now I'm just happy to have gotten that off the ground. And it only has to be about five pages minimum and once it's finished I'll read an excerpt of it in front of actual other people, so - squee! 

And now to bed.

So despite holding out for a long time I may have maybe started reading Hanna is Not a Boy's Name. Because, clearly, yet another form of archive binging is exactly what I need after fucking up in school again. (I probably won't bore you with details; suffice that I'm generally fucking useless and hate myself for being so and want to start over and it's just generally a bad scene, man.)

Anyway, thus far I rather like HiNaBN, even if I've only read the first chapter; the characters are entertaining, the art is fun and vivid and there's a lot of interesting typographical tricks with the narration. And it's so colorful! I don't know why the vivid colors charm me so but they do. But I'm going to try not to read too much until I've finished with the various projects I have to do - not even as a "reward", because when I reward myself for finishing things with webcomics or Wiki crawls those rewards tend to last for hours and that's not good. But! Good so far, can see why so many people like it.

In fact I've been trying to sort of cut myself off from the internet entirely except as necessary for class, and the fact that it's been so difficult to do so and that I've still been fucking over my schoolwork worries me. I joke about my raging internet addiction but suddenly those jokes are a bit less funny. So, um. That's why I haven't really been checking my flist or commenting or doing anything much here.

Anyway! That's enough unfunnyness for now. In fandomish news, I have still not acquired "The Eleventh Hour" for viewing because I only got back from Easter Break yesterday and I spent most of the intervening day freaking out and/or sleeping. I am setting aside an hour or two this weekend for Whoish purposes, though, so, soon!

What I have seen (and I find it funny how little overlap there is between the two audiences I'm addressing) is the Japanese opening theme for the TFA dub, and...gosh. There are some things Japan is really good at, and one of those things is recording songs that make you want to run circles around campus and punch things. Heroically.

And as uncertain I am about the dubbing itself (it's supposedly trying to connect Animated to the Bayverse, which...just doesn't work in about five different ways, and I'm told this is from the same director that made the awful Beast Wars gag dub; conversely, there is much I am willing to forgive for Wakamototron), if the rest of the series was being straight-up remade in this style rather than dubbed I have to admit I'd probably watch it. Aside from the generally shiny art and the lack of weird voice-synching that comes with dubbing, Arcee actually does things in the opening. And there's a fight between her and Blackarachnia! I would pay actual money for onscreen canon swordfighting Arcee taking on onscreen canon doesn't-need-to-be-rescued-this-time Blackarachnia, who cares if their storylines have nothing to do with one another. Especially if they made out afterwards.

Also, opening!Ultra Magnus is kind of badass. It'd be great if he could do things too.

The lack of Sari concerns me, though. Please don't cut her scenes down to nothing, Japan, she's too awesome for that. :(


Is it really two in the morning, omg. I must get to bed.

It's very nice to be interested again. I never knew the intricacies of the thin cellular layers making sure all the various proteins and ions in our blood don't leak into our brain. For instance, did you know that amphetamines can cause leakage in the blood-brain barrier and thus ion imbalance in the brain, but also show potential for use in administering useful drugs to the brain in the case of, say, leukemia or other brain disorders? I did not know that.

I am so much less worried about that presentation now than I was! However, I still have to pack and it is growing rather late; I get picked up for the airport at 3 tomorrow and while, in theory, that gives me plenty of wiggle room (since my flight leaves at 6 p.m.), I don't like to rush packing because when I do I invariably forget something.

---

A few more bits and bobs, apropos of nothing in particular:

1. Does anyone else, when they first find a new song they like, feel compelled to listen to it over and over and over again? It's actually becoming something of a problem for me with regards to getting off my room computer and finishing my work, because if said new song I discover is on YouTube and not available for purchase (whether because I have no money for it or it's not on iTunes at all), I won't want to stop listening to it long enough to get up from my computer and go do something else - including, in some cases, print out documents or go get dinner.

Not letting myself even start listening to the songs in question and not going on long YouTube link-chases helps keep me from falling into that trap, but does anyone else do that or am I just loopy?

2. I think I'm honestly OTPing a ship for the first time. No matter how hard I ship most of my favorite pairings I'm not very exclusive about them - I'm perfectly okay with the idea of the various members of my favorite ship ending up with someone else or nobody at all, even if I would prefer that they end up with each other.

But for some reason, with this particular ship...I mean, I don't get angry at people who pair the characters involved with other people or anything, that'd be silly. But the thought of them not ending up together actually makes me sad, rather than just feeling like I'd prefer that they did. I get a little bit upset at the thought of them breaking up. Not upset enough to affect my daily life or anything, but there's still that moment of "But they have to work it out in the end, don't they? :("

It's a very strange sensation, and I'm not sure what brought it on for this particular pairing, but please reassure me that this is not abnormal behavior and I am not becoming creepily overinvested.

(If you must have details, the pairing in question is Sari/Bumblebee. Yes, I know. It's just...there was a fanart of them (well, of Sari and humanized!Bumblebee) having this really tearful breakup, I'm pretty sure it was a scene from a fic, and it was really well-drawn and emotive but my first reaction was "Nooooo they are too sweet together for that they have to get back together and live happily ever after and get married and have freaky cyborg babies. Okay, maybe not those last two. Definitely not those last two. Ew.")

3. I managed to get through an entire April Fool's Day without getting pranked (well, except for the Google name-change thing, which I thought was cute)! I had this whole elaborate prank planned out involving posting a fake chapter of one of my WIPs that started out normal-sounding until ninjas suddenly broke through the wall and engaged Liz and the Brigadier in kung-fu single combat, but that was way too much effort. Hope nobody got linked to anything too scarring today.

4. The warmer weather (82 degrees today!) means that many more people are walking their dogs during my daily walks, which means I spend a much greater percentage of my walk cooing and going "puppy!". I'm such a stereotype but I don't care.

5. Heading home later this afternoon; should probably head to bed now.

Not the things I intended to accomplish, possibly, but I'll take what I can get.

Things I did yesterday:

1. Talked to Biology teacher about the classes I've missed; started setting up schedule for the long-term presentation so I won't fall behind. Bio professor was, thankfully, very understanding.

2. Walked outside in the sun (oh thank goodness, I've missed you, sun), generally felt a bit better about life and Impending Graduation and all, and decided to treat myself to dinner at a restaurant on Main Street I'd never been to. This ended up being a good decision, because they had tomatoes and mozzarella with basil and olive oil, which is possibly one of my favorite foods ever. And it's actually partially good for me! I love it when I don't have to feel guilty about eating something.

Also had what, at the time, seemed like the ingenious idea of taking the leftover bread that they give you before your meal home in a to-go box, because otherwise it's just going to get thrown away and if I'm buying dinner I may as well also get breakfast the next morning.

3. Finished Saya no Uta once I got back to my dorm that night. Don't laugh! Ticking off something on the long list of Media I Would Like To Finish is a big deal for me. Anyway, even though I'm not as easily scared as I used to be, there were times while watching Saya no Uta that I just had to close the window and go look at pictures of kittens or something because I was so creeped out by it. It's unsettling the whole way through. And the ending...wow. Just...woah. See, that's how you do Lovecraftian-esque.

Also the soundtrack. The creepy, creepy soundtrack. Eeeeh.

4. Watched the most recent Doctor Who Season 5 trailer! I grow ever more excited about Season 5, even if New Who's persistent problem with sound mixing is in full evidence in the trailer. ( Very minor spoilers for the content of the trailer. )


5. Cleaned the bathroom. I just feel much better about the world when the bathroom is scrubbed down, don't you?

6. Wrote 400 more words of my springkink  fic! I haven't written that much in ages. I am not sure if I should post it like I planned to do with all my other snippets because I might actually finish this thing! I've even gotten to the maintenance that the prompt requested and I am feeling much less stressed about my Optimus voice. Write Or Die: A lifesaver. I should use it for my essay. In fact I will do that today.

But I am going to post the snippet anyway, because it makes me feel good about myself:

---
( 430-ish words, with a bit of the last snippet included for context )
---


Speaking of today, I should shower and make myself presentable so I actually can get something done today. Cheerio

I am not very good with the thinking this week, apparently. Or no better than usual. Paper didn't get finished (of course it didn't) so that's 15% of my grade for that course gone and I can't bring myself to e-mail the professor to talk to her, because she was more than generous with me and I still dropped the ball, and I've gone back to my old strategy of "ignore my problems and they'll go away" again. The trouble with that strategy is that it is in fact true - eventually, if I keep dragging my feet, all my problems will go away - because I'll fail out of my classes and not graduate on time, and I don't know why that doesn't seem to be getting through to the rest of me.

Also I can barely drag myself out of bed in the mornings, but that probably has more to do with not sleeping due to staying up late trying to finish things that I inevitably never finish anyway. Ugh.

And part of the burying response is becoming so absorbed in fandom that I feel like doing nothing but flailing about my shows and drawing cracky fanart all day. This is not a productive response.


Here, this Johari window thing seems to be going around. Give mine a try? Start your own?

So. Staying up to watch the Oscars instead of working on the 7-9 page essay that's due tomorrow: exceedingly poor and irresponsible life choice.

But it was absolutely worth it for Ben Stiller (who I'm normally not a big fan of) in Na'vi makeup, Robert Downey Jr.'s "pasty mole people" comment, and Neil Patrick Harris' glorious sparkly tuxedo.

I have managed to see exactly none of the nominated films this year (well, one - Up was nominated), so had no dog in the race and no idea what was going on for most of the show, but I still would not have called Sandra Bullock winning Best Actress, especially since despite everyone who's seen it assuring me that The Blind Side was Quite Good the trailers made it look Velveeta-cheesy. I kind of wanted Gabourey Sidibe to win, actually, because it was her first starring role and that would have been perfect.

But mostly what I took away from the ceremony was "omg Sigourney Weaver and Queen Latifah. ILU. Call me." And possibly "I cannot wait for the GFY blog, Intern George has gotten so much camera action tonight."


Other irrelevance: The Girl Scouts have not discontinued Samoas. My life has meaning once more.

So it turns out my Disability and Literature Studies professor is an MST3K fan.

By today we were supposed to have a  topic for our research paper. Because I am a lump, I really did not have one, so I came up with the first thing that I thought of: I'm intrigued by the pulp-horror figure of the "beautiful monster", the female figure who sees herself as disabled, imperfect, or disgusting, but is played by an able-bodied, classically-attractive woman and is still conventionally attractive to both the audience and the male cast - the Bride of Frankenstein, that sort of thing. They generally play on stereotypes of disability - biterness, self-hatred, desire for revenge against the "normate" body, isolation, tragic narrative, etc - without actually making the audience feel for or even observe an extraordinary body. I'm interested in what that says about ideas of feminity, body, and disability, as well as why writers even bother portraying the character as 'disabled', and what narratives that buys into.

The first example that I thought of was from the MST'ed movie "The Brain that Wouldn't Die". I figured if I just threw that movie out there, no one would know what it was, so I first asked if anyone in the room watched Mystery Science Theater, expecting no answer. Imagine my surprise when the professor piped up.

So I mentioned "The Brain that Wouldn't Die", and the victim that the lead character chooses to serve as a substitute body for Jan-in-the-pan; said victim is first seen posing in a fur bikini, and is bitter, isolated, and hates men because of her 'disfigurement' that prevents anyone from loving her. Said 'disfigurement' is a bit of scarring on the side of her face that is mostly covered by her hair and that we don't even see for most of the movie. Now, if the writers had chosen to play up her psychological trauma, that'd be one thing, but they keep referring to her as 'damaged' and her face as unbeautiful. 

When I was finished, my professor laughed and said, "You know, I don't think I've heard anyone talk about 'The Brain that Wouldn't Die' since 1994. MST got me through my graduate thesis."

I laughed as well and responded that it got me through my sophomore year of college, so I knew the feeling. And then I squeed a little bit inside, because it is rather lovely to find people you wouldn't expect with geeky interests.

I'm not sure if I'll keep going with that thesis, because it's more about gender than disability and anyway I'm not sure where I'm going or what I'm trying to prove with it. But it was worth it just to find out my professor watches MST3K.

---

In even more frivolous news, I am most certainly not going to buy the Arcee toy, because I am not the kind of silly person who spends money on plastic toys. My Prowl is different, okay, he is useful for having something sitting by my computer to stare me down and make sure I'm getting my work done, and anyway he was a present. I cannot even justify that purchase to myself on the pretense that femme toys need good sales figures so that Hasbro will keep making them so that the cartoon writers will have to write more ladies, because in the end my paltry consumer dollars are just not going to make that much of an impact. Also, if I bought an Arcee I would feel compelled to buy a Ratchet to keep her company, and then I'm out thirty bucks and kicking myself even harder.

But I am rather entertained by her packaging, in which she is wielding her energy swords like a badass and described in her back-of-box blurb as being "one of the best swordfighters on Cybertron". I realize this has very little to do with her character and more to do with the fact that they have to make her toy super-special-awesome if they want little boys to buy it despite it being pink, but it comforts me somewhat to think that she's really skilled and tough and determined and we just never got to see it.

I am equally entertained by the fact that Cybertron-mode Ratchet comes with defibrillator paddles. I'll bet he zaps people if they backsass him.

brb, writing Arcee a fight scene for that AU I'm always on about. Or, um, doing homework. Yes. Homework, then writing. I must be disciplined.

Last exam done.

*collapses*

Of course, that still leaves my bibliography, homework, and the actual packing and driving home, which I should be doing right now because I was hoping to get an early start tomorrow. Doesn't help that my room is such a mess, blargh.

Oh, and it's supposed to snow on the way up tomorrow. Hooray.

See you all in a couple of days.

I just have one more paper. One more, and then I get to leave for Thanksgiving Break.

Of course I haven't started that one paper yet. What do you think I am, a conscientious student? Pah.

The trouble is that I can think of a topic I can prattle on about for five pages, and I actually think it's a really neat idea, but I can't figure out where I'm meant to go with it. Comparing Antony and Cleopatra to Henry V and Falstaff seemed like such a clever idea, but after that I just don't know what sort of point I'd make by pointing out that Antony is like a less-Machiavellian and capable Henry and Cleopatra is like a female royal Falstaff, except as a tragic character. Maybe the point would be that Shakespeare was trying to show that Machiavellian politics weren't new, that even The Roman Forefathers engaged in them - and thus maybe removing some of their stigma? Or that Antony is who Henry might have become had his attachment to his friends and Falstaff been genuine, if he'd fulfilled his promises to Falstaff?

This seemed like a much better idea when I was thinking it over in the shower. But then, everything seems like a better idea in the shower. It's where my best thinking happens. Clearly this means I should shower all the time with a small, miraculously waterproof notebook in there, but then were it not disastrously bad for the environment I would be quite happy to stand under hot running water all day and think about things.

...I just realized what an awkward introduction this much be to people new to this journal. Um, hello, new people here from the Doctor Who Friending Meme that I was too preoccupied all day to make a pimp post for! I promise I don't complain about school and talk about showers all the time. Most of the time, maybe, but not all the time.

Hmm, other things I wanted to talk about...Oh, three points:

1. Lessons has been posted to Teaspoon; give the mods time to clear it through the Queue, as I only just submitted it. At this rate I am seriously considering dropping Yuletide just because I underestimated just how busy I was going to be at the end of this semester, though most of that is just pent-up frustration at not being able to find by recipient's Dear Author Letter, augh augh augh. Well, I know what I'll be doing with my spare hour on the plane home. (Did you know planes have Wifi now? They do. I know, I was shocked too.)

Besides, if Yuletide's off my plate that gives me more wiggle room to work on Made Up Your Mind chapters 2 and 3, and now that I've done some plot-sketching and freewriting for the both of them I am really, really excited to start writing them in earnest. Although if I was really going to be virtuous I'd work on Memory and Experiment Chapters 3 and 2, ahem ahem.

I have got to increase this one-chapter-a-year pace. It's getting worrying.

2. The final project in my Film Studies requires us to play a video game and write 1000 words about how it adapts filmic and televisual techniques to tell a story. I am tempted to use Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem, because a) It's my very favoritest video game ever, b) I've already played it which saves me whole scads of time, and c)I think there is a lot of essay material to be milked from the Sanit effects and the massive interface screw they involve. Of course, given that it is my very favoritest game ever, I'm not sure I'd be able to maintain the critical distance required of an analytical essay, and my essay will quite possibly degenerate into "BEST GAME EVAR OMG"*.

*I won't argue it really is the best evar, because there's never going to be an answer as to what is, but I really do love it that much. I hate to sound cliche, because every reviewer ever has said this, but it really is one of the counterexamples I hold up when people claim that video games cannot be a work of legitimate art. If you're a fan of horror, particularly of the Lovecraftian variety, you seriously owe it to yourself to track this game down. Go on. Do it. Gamecubes are cheap these days.

3. I finally watched the music video for Lady Gaga's "Bad Romance". It's a well-executed video, certainly, but I don't actually like the song very much. Not that I hate it, it's just...eh. Not my favorite track.

What I found far more fascinating were videos of Gaga performing "unplugged", with just her voice and the piano. Lady's got *pipes*. I'm duly impressed. :)


Okay I should finish my essay before it gets to be 4 a.m. again. Good night/morning, flist. Hopefully I will be home by the nest time I talk to you.