I just managed to have a dream that involved Inception and TFA, how about that.

( Cut because my dream logs are obviously deeply fascinating stuff that everyone should read, I'm sure. )


You know, that was one of the minor quibbles I had with Inception; the dreams were way too normal until the gravity started going wrong. I get that they were supposed to be purposefully constructed, and there was some manipulation of impossible physics and illusion, and I think overall Nolan did a fairly good job of making them a bit surreal and establishing why they weren't more so, but overall most of them just seemed to make way too much sense for a dream. I kind of wanted to see, I don't know, a line of can-can-dancing hippos in the middle of the highway chase or something.

So remember how I told you about Paul, the German World-Cup-predicting octopus?

Well, in bad news, according to sterling_sky  he has been receiving threats from his German countrymen to turn him into calamari, which is just completely unfair. But there is happier news out there!

Apparently, Spanish chef Jose Andres, who runs one of my favorite restaurants ever (Jaleo), was so touched by Paul's coming down on Spain's side that he took all octopus- and squid-related items off his restaurant menus at once, just before he headed to South Africa.  Awww. :D


Finished my pre-op appointment today; meant to finish my springkink  fic but ended up playing Batman: Arkham Asylum for hours instead. Arkham Asylum really is as amazing as its reviews say it is - it's immersive and difficult without being too difficult and it has stealth missions that are actually fun instead of frustrating and boring. And there is little more sadistically satisfying than lurking in the shadows on the roof above a group of thugs and silently picking them off one by one, leaving their teammates to discover their unconscious bodies and grow increasingly panicked and paranoid before you pounce on them with your cape spread. Heh heh heh.

Oh, and did I mention that it has the voices of Kevin Conroy as Batman and Mark Hamill as the Joker? Yeah, as in the voices from Batman: The Animated Series, which remains my favorite incarnation of Batman ever. Harley Quinn has her original voice, too. It's like they took the Dark Knight movieverse and infused it with everything that was wonderful about the Animated Series.

(If Clayface shows up in the sequel that will maybe be the best thing ever. And by best I mean most terrifying.)

It probably just demonstrates how little of a life I have that I can identify a character voiced by Cree Summer just by hearing them? Her voice is really distinctive, okay, I'm not that big a dork.

And now I should write so I'm not even further behind. Or possibly go to bed, because I'm tired.

Scientists have converted the theoretical energy signature that the Higgs boson will produce if it's created in the LHC into a set of sounds, which will allow scientists to listen to the data and pick out the Higgs boson by sound instead of having to search through the energry readings.

Even just listening to it, reproduced on the computer, is a little staggering - thinking about those bell-like noises integrated into every part of the material world. It's like we've taken the medieval idea of the "music of the spheres" and turned it on its head. Only it's real. (Maybe.)



Of course, in a shocking twist, scientists will then actually run the Atlas experiment and find that the Higgs boson sounds exactly like a vuvuzela.

Speaking of vuvuzelas, apparently an American Army employee in Germany grew so annoyed with his neighbors' vuvuzela-blowing that he threatened them with an axe. Who ever said soccer wasn't interesting?

Stupid, stupid F!S meme. How am I supposed to go back to doing homework when you give me cracked-out threads like these?

"I'm into Parmesan/Romano, myself. GRATERCESTERS UNITE!"

"THAT'S DISGUSTING. THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG WITH YOUR SHIP AND THERE IS SOMETHING WRONG WITH YOU. YOU JUST LIKE THEM BECAUSE THEY BOTH MELT ON YOUR PASTA, AND YOU DON'T THINK ABOUT THE CONSEQUENCES."

I want that on a T-shirt.


In other news I think I should just carry a sign around that reads "I am a bad person and should be ashamed."

( And this is why. Contains discussion of Springkink and robot porn. )



Where does it end, fandom? Will you leave me no taboos at all?

...at the very least, this has been an enlightening LJ Break.

Back to work again.

Best. Fandom_Wank writeup. Ever.

Also, yeah, totally saw that wank coming. Oh, rebooted fandoms. Your inevitable "get offa my lawn!" wank is beautiful in its punctuality.


(And also dammit someone watch TFA with meeeeee. I treated myself to the first season finale last night after work and I need to let my squee out somewhere or I'll explode.)

1. BIG OL' SPOILER THINGS FOR THE UPCOMING EPISODES OF SJA EEEEEEEE.

( Spoilar cut for upcoming episodes. )




( And spoilers for Prisoner of the Judoon which I FINALLY SAW EEEEEEEEE. )


2. Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, and Edgar Wright have apparently discovered slash fic. And they love it so much they're writing their own on Twitter.

Normally I am mortified at the thought of anyone involved in a production knowing about fandom, let alone fanfiction, let alone explicit fanfiction, but I cannot stop laughing. "Please don't mistake my faint arousal for discomfort." (I may have to pinch that line, sorry Mr. Wright.)

3. This is slightly less squeeful, but I just got the idea to run a multifandom ficathon with individual TV Tropes titles as the prompts. And no easy tropes like "Slap Slap Kiss" or anything that might pass for a title anyway. I'm talking fics titles like Moar Dakka or Giant Space Flea From Nowhere or Law of Conservation of Ninjutsu. I think it'd be hilarious even though the authors would be too buried in TV Tropes to ever do any writing. And the idea of running a ficathon when I can't even seem to finish writing for one is just absurd, clearly.

...anyone else want to do it?


The weather finally warmed up a bit and I had pizza and ice cream for lunch and the clerk at the pizza place gave us free cinnamon rolls, so I not only had dessert first, completely upsetting the natural order, I had dessert twice. It has been a very good day.

Trivialities first: Not only are Linkara and Spoony doing a joint review, but there's been a Blake's Seven reference AND a "He tried to kill me with a forklift" song within the space of ten minutes.

Like I didn't already have a raging fangirl crush on both of them.

Also, while I've been watching bits and pieces of Star Trek: TOS, I hadn't really been making a concerted effort, since over the summer I didn't have much opportunity to watch and  this year so far I've been too busy getting my classes and things in order to take up a new fandom.

However, I'm well tempted to take a look at The Next Generation, purely because I've watched the video review of the Star Trek: Borg FMV video game (yeah, there was a game; don't act so surprised*) and Q looks awesome. I mean, he also looks like a smug, insufferable douche, but an awesome smug insufferable douche, and at least in the game footage John de Lancie looks like he has the time of his life playing him and I always get a kick out of it when I can tell actors are enjoying their roles.

Of course, I have vague memories of watching TNG with my dad when I was very young, and even though I didn't know who the characters were or what they did I remember being very fond of Data and Worf. And Geordi, but I suspect I mostly liked him because he had a cool visor.

So, friends more versed in TNG than I, is Q really that amusing or does he wear a bit thin on the actual show? How much does he even show up? And does Worf ever get to be as badass as he should be? And does Geordi have a whole lot of ablism!fail plotlines?


*On the subject of video game tie-ins, did you know there was actually a Doctor Who pinball game? Which seems like one of the most incongruous extensions of a brand I've ever heard of, because, really, it's not like they even made a proper game out of it (and I think Who would make a nifty point-and-click PC adventure a la King's Quest or Curse of Monkey Island), it's just pinball with the characters pastede on yey.

Although two more minutes on Wikipedia tells me there are also various games for obscure consoles and/or CD-ROM, which still seem odd and incongruous to me, mostly because I'm hurting my brain trying to imagine Colin Baker or Patrick Troughton in sprite form.

Although, reportedly, the CD-ROM game has Raston Warrior Robots, which is a substantial point in its favor. It also apparently includes some rather silly-looking clips of Anthony Ainley on a 'shoppy flame background and the posthumous voice of Jon Pertwee, because apparently it wasn't creepy enough when the audios did that.

To go off on a bit of a tangent, I can't be the only one unsettled when the voices of dead actors are used in movies, especially if those actors have been dead for a while (i.e. they didn't die between the end of filming and the release of the movie a la Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight). I mean, granted, it doesn't happen very often (the only time I remember it happening was "Laurence Olivier" in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow), and it doesn't quite apply in this situation because Pertwee had agreed to appear in the game before his death (though it's more applicable in the case of Zagreus) but when I saw it in Sky Captain all I could think about for the rest of the movie was the Unfortunate Implications.

I mean, Olivier didn't agree to appear in that movie. You don't know he would have had he been alive. (Although hey, doing camp action movies seems to be a Thing for legendary Shakespearean actors, see Exhibit A: Ian McKellan.) If you're an actor of such stature that people would want to use your image, who gets to decide which films you "appear" in? Are you, after your death, to be sold to anyone who pays enough, or will considerations be taken for what sort of work you did and exactly how your image is to be used? Will actors have to start drafting such considerations in their wills, or will that be seen as presumptuous? Of course there are limits to how a dead actor's likeness can be used, as they can't record new reactions or new dialogue, so I can't really believe that using dead actors will be anything beyond a novelty, but it's still creepy. 
---

That  went on for way longer than I expected. On to the main topic! Also, all generalizations are based on my own experiences and may not apply across all fandoms

Talking with kindkit recently brought to mind a trend I've noticed in fic; out of all the fic in every fandom I've read, most use either a) first-person POV (which isn't frequent) or b) tight third-person POV, where the narrator is only privy to one character's thoughts and feelings at a time. While I've read some fics that use omniscient POV (either journalistic description-only omniscient POV or an omniscient POV that describes all the characters' thoughts and feelings as appropriate), they're not the majority; most fic only changes POV between scenes if it changes at all.

And I think, because most fic (in my experience) is in that tight third person, a switch in POV within a scene can look like the author slipped up. It reads as messy, or just incorrect, even though I think it's technically valid. I'm curious; do you think that a POV switch within a scene actually is sloppy? Or are we just so used to reading the single POV at a time that omniscient POV reads wrong?

For that matter, why do most fics go for tight-third-person? For an introspective fic, or a fic about, say, one character specifically reacting to another, the choice is an obvious one, but even in, say, ship-fic, if the thoughts and feelings of every character involved are included, they're included one at a time. Technically, you could include both of their thoughts in the same scene, and in some cases it might actually better serve the fic to do so. Of course, the switching POV also gives the author a convenient location for a scene break.

Do you find you usually write in limited-third-person POV? Any particular reason why? What affects your choice of POV when writing, or where you switch POV if at all? How would a POV switch within a scene read to you?

---

Oh my gracious it is so late. I really must go to bed, like two hours ago.

I am so, so glad I never saw Spider-Man 3 in theaters.

( Cut for spoilery loling. )

A quick and mindless meme, because I really, really need something quick and mindless right now that doesn't take up as much time as screencapping (the picspams are coming along, really, but capping takes a while and it's not time that I have right now):

Name any pairing from any of my fandoms and I'll talk about my thoughts/opinions on them!

Again, mostly just posting on it so I can make you all do it in turn. :)

And, so this post is not entirely self-indulgent and memey, have a video of the Muppets' take on Ingmar Bergman:

( Cut to spare dial-up users )

So there was an interview out there featuring Verity Lambert, Patrick Troughton, Jon Pertwee, and Peter Davison, wherein Pat becomes so enthusiastic he knocks his comically-oversized glasses off in his flailing, Verity expresses her shock that the program had lasted 20 years at that point, and all the Doctors wave goodnight to the Brig at the end of their interview (bless, Jon still pronounces the last syllable of "Brigadier" as "di-ah" and I still find it oddly endearing)...

...and I had to find out about it entirely on my own?

You all fail at telling me things.

*goes back to watching*

(It's probably quite wrong of me to think that they are all wee adorable muffins (especially Pat, who is possibly the muffiniest of them all) and want to squeeze them a bit, isn't it? Oh well.)