stunt_muppet

So you know how I've been blithering about The Silver Lining, the fan sequel to the King's Quest series, a.k.a. my nerdy little PC-gaming childhood. 

A bit of backstory: At the end of King's Quest 6, Prince Alexander (the player character, a prince who was kidnapped at a young age and was only recently returned to his real family) gets married to Cassima, a princess he rescued over the course of the game (because this is, indeed, an amalgamation of fairy tales). At the end of King's Quest 7, Rosella married (sort of) the prince Edgar.

During The Silver Lining (during which Alexander and Rosella are, at some point, in peril), King Graham (Alexander and Rosella's father) talks with Edgar about Alexander. Edgar recounts wandering out on the beach at night and finding Alexander going for a swim, spotting scarring on his back.

Edgar: I turned to leave, but he asked me to stay.
The Let's Player: Oh, I don't like where this is going...
Me: Yeah, that kind of does sound like the start of a slash fic.

...

...aw, fuck.

I do wish I could occasionally turn off the shipping googles, because this is exactly the kind of sweet, quiet scene I love between characters, but I can't help thinking that if they weren't in-laws and I didn't adore both their canon spouses so much I'd be all over this.

That said, once I got over that little inconvenience, oh my god was I feeling the sweet hum of nostalgia during that scene. I mean, the characters were vivid and well-voice-acted in the games themselves, but we never got this kind of backstory directly (it was always implied through narration), and it's just so wonderful having all these characters back and a whole new story and new dialogue and new adventures and everything, oh I love this game so much.

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In other Horrible Person news, you know you've reached some kind of nadir in your writing 'career' when you have to worry that you've unintentionally ripped off Human Centipede.

...not in the most obvious way, though. I'm not nearly that depraved yet. One day I'll write something normal, doo dee doo.

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Keepin' writing, keepin' writing. I kind of wasted today watching videos and doing a little bit of e-mailing, which is sort of terrible of me as well since I've got crap I'm meant to be doing.

...so, yeah, I spent most of today watching Batman.

Surely this is a sign of a misspent life and wildly mislaid priorities, but when I get a job and stuff I probably won't be able to indulge in evenings full of Batman anymore, so I may as well do it now, right?

Anyway, so that this didn't feel like a complete waste of time, I thought I'd take a few screencaps and make a picspam for you, mostly on the topic of why Aquaman is awesome, why Batman/Aquaman is completely plausible and you should ship it too, and why Blue Beetle III is adorkable. Caps are mostly raw, and a few come from Veoh/Dailymotion, where the little pause icon in the middle of the screen won't go away; sorry for that. Caps are located here if you feel inclined to use them to make icons and are from the episodes "Rise of the Blue Beetle!", "Mystery in Space!" , "Night of the Huntress!", and "Journey to the Center of the Bat!".

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( OUTRAGEOUS! )
And so, in conclusion, go watch Batman. Because it's a whole lot of fun, that's why. And it has Blue Beetle making funny faces. And only 9 fics on FF.net, so, you know, you should look into that and all.

So Who!fandom has been a bit faily and stupid lately, and there's been page after page of pointless wank on the anonmeme, and while there's a lot I could say on a variety of topics (and some stuff I even perhaps will, under the safety of flock), there are more entertaining ways I could spend my time. Like, er, the homework I should be doing.

So I consider it my duty to point out that some kind anon has done fandom a favor and posted a picspam of The House that Dripped Blood, a 1971 horror movie starring Peter Cushing as a man haunted by a waxwork, Christopher Lee as the unfortunate father of a Creepy Glassy-Eyed Tyke (tm) and Jon Pertwee and Ingrid Pitt's cleavage as the pimpingest vampires ever to rock a pimphat. Witness! The unintentionally hilarious vampire makeup! SEE! Peter Cushing's architectural cheekbones! MARVEL! At the Eyebrows of Utterly Transparent Evil!

...well, it made me giggle, anyway.

So, yeah. The Great Mouse Detective? Still awesome. And even funnier now that I get the whole Holmesian pastiche on which it's based. I mean, I think I always knew that Basil and Dawson were analogues to Holmes and Watson, since I can't remember a time when I didn't know who Sherlock Holmes was, but before I was just aware of the vague idea. Watching it now, I see some of the specific references - the "Napoleon of Crime"? The obvious Final Problem parallels at the end? The Basil Rathbone sampling? It's glorious.

And really, it works quite well as a Holmes-esque story in its own right; Basil's as mercurial, intense, and completely socially disfunctional as his inspiration, within the bounds of a children's film. It does buy into the unfortunate stereotype of Watson/Dawson as an ineffectual bumbler, but I suppose that's only to be expected.

And oh, Vincent Price. You roll those R's, my good man. You roll them with gusto.

But really, why didn't this movie get its own Disney Channel spinoff series?* I would've watched that. I want Basil and Dawson to have lots and lots of adventures together and be brilliant and possibly parody/reference a different Holmes story every episode.**

*I don't care if there wasn't a Disney Channel at the time. The Little Mermaid got one; don't see why this shouldn't. *sulk*
**And sweet mercy, if it wasn't bad and wrong and childhood-killing, I would ship them. Sort of. In a totally PG-rated way. And maybe write fic, if that wasn't a fundamentally pointless thing to do given the homage nature of the movie.

I consider that a well-spent hour and a half, anyway.

I got my lab all finished and turned in today, had nothing due tomorrow, and planned to spend a leisurely day writing today in order to recuperate a bit from the lunacy that the past few weeks have been.

Instead, I ended up watching The Fifth Element with rhia_starsong, who'd never seen it. She enjoyed it, naturally, and agreed with my sentiment that it was what the Star Wars prequels really should have been/were trying to be, but that wasn't the reason I got no writing done.

No, I got no writing done because I tried to hone my GLaDOS voice by listening to the Hellfire Commentaries Portal Playthrough. It actually helped, because you get to hear all of GLaDOS's lines in context; indeed, my GLaDOS voice might slightly have the edge over my Zoe voice at this point, sad to say. Plus, the commentaries were actually a bit funny; they're two British geeks chatting through the game and showing you how to solve the puzzles, and while they're occasionally crude they also made me giggle rather loudly quite a few times.

And then I found that they also did a playthrough of Sonic Adventure 2: Battle for GameCube. Which, shamefully, I loved the hell out of back in my 16-year-old days. I think there was some sort of objective level on which I knew it wasn't very good, because seriously any game that sticks Tails in a clunky, barely-mobile mecha for his stages is up against it to begin with, but I just loved it to pieces. I may have even written AU fic for it but it is not with pride that I admit that.

And then one of them made a commentary on how awesome the music for the Golem boss was. Which made me remember that, yeah, actually, it was. I mean, it was electric-guitar-heavy nineties-ish lyricless rock, and it was one of the standouts on a soundtrack that ranged from headbangingly awesome to appalling, but I confess: I used to put the game disc in for no other reason that to listen to that boss theme, along with the Pyramid Cave and Cannon Core level music, over and over again on the sound test.

Naturally, someone had uploaded the themes themselves onto YouTube (except for the third Cannon Core music, boo), so guess who spent the next hour or so with those on repeat.

I am not old enough to be this nostalgic. And I think the fact that I am nostalgic about video games speaks to just how insufficiently misspent my insufficiently misspent youth was.

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In slightly less embarrassing news, there's a new Doctor Who-niverse fic archive out there, meant mostly for shippy fic: Children of Time. It's not meant to replace The Splendid Spoon by any means, but it's sorted by pairing rather than era, so if you feel like mainlining one pairing for the remainder of the day, or if you'd rather get your Five/Turlough fix without having to face the ABJECT HORROR of Five/Tegan (I kid! I actually quite like Five/Tegan! 'Twas meant in jest! Don't hit me!), that's where you'd head.

I've an account there, naturally. There's nothing actually on it at the moment, but my shippy* fic on the Spoon will probably end up cross-posted there, because I just like to plaster my work on whatever willing wall I can find.

I also realize that I never posted a link to my Teaspoon account even after I got it, so, um, here it is, if you for some reason want to find it but haven't yet. Yes.

*"Shippy" here meaning "actually properly romantic and/or dealing with a relationship of some sort", not "really probably gen but with a pairing label slapped on it to meet a ficathon/challenge/odd internal sense of obligation".

And on that encouraging note, I am going to finally clear the stuff off my bed and sleep in it for the first time in a week. Goodnight, ladies (and gents), goodnight.