The Southern Lights

American TV Show Meme (taken from marlee813)

- Bold all of the following TV shows of which you've watched 3 or more episodes.
- Italicize a show if you're positive you've seen every episode.
- Asterisk * if you have at least one full season on tape or DVD
- If you want, add up to 3 additional shows (keep the list in alphabetical order).

( Behold! The wasted hours of my life. )

Note: Since this specifies American TV show meme, I took out the shows I knew not to be American.  Hope nobody minds my persnicketiness.

This year I wrote and posted: 
 
13 Chris/Zach (plus 7 time stamp comment!fics [with more to come])
1 William Strunk/E.B. White

( Really? That's all? )

If I don't post again before the new year, happy celebrating!  Let's all have fun kicking 2011 out on its ass!

Okay, so, I did this meme about a year and a half ago and I've been meaning to do it again.  Now seems like a good time, since I'm not working on anything pressing for fandom and I'm feeling a bit blocked anyway, so here we go:

Leave a comment prompt.  The prompt should be one of my fics and a time interval.

Examples:
"Fic Title, the next morning"
"Fic Title, three months before"
"Fic Title, two years later"
"Fic Title, in between this event and that event"

I will respond with a comment fic.  This is your chance to find out what happened before, or after, or during.  My master fic list is here* -- go nuts!

IMPORTANT: I will only accept titles and time intervals as prompts, no plot elements.  So "Yellow Light, two years later" would be fine, but "Yellow Light, two years later, they buy their first house together" would not.  Got it?  Also, I'll try to see that everyone who comments gets at least one fic in return, but if you want to give me multiple options to pick from, that's fine!

*Due to technical difficulties, I Need You So Much Closer and The Pirate King and the Cabin Boy are not yet on my Master List, but they're fair game, too.  If you want to check to see if you're duplicating a request (or just see the ones I did before), go here.

Prompting is now closed -- please check back here for fills.

Whew, you people are disturbingly interested in my surroundings! ;o)  No worries, I asked for it.  Also, several of you, including perdiccas, asked for photos of my dog.  I was waiting to do a formal introduction post... and then I kept putting it off... so I'll just give you a little teaser now:



His name's Plato, but he also goes by Little Dog, Platelet, Peewee, Piddles McGee, and What The Hell Are You Eating Now; Spit That Out (that's his Indian name).  I promise to do a real introduction post soon, but for now, please enjoy a photo of my dog all bandana'd up for Dress Like Pinto Day.  Surprisingly, he did not mind it all that much, I just couldn't get him to stay still for a decent side-on picture

( And now on to the rest! )

ETA: If some of the pictures are showing up giant, I don't know why that's happening.  I tried really hard to make them all a uniform 500 pixels at widest.  Dammit.

I don't know if any of you watched Big Love, but I FINALLY got to see the last four episodes of the series (that's how I got that fucking virus -- the livestream I was watching stopped and so I, like an impatient idiot, tried a download).

( Cut for spoilers for the final episode )

Anyway, if you've not seen the show, I can't recommend the first three seasons highly enough.  Seasons four and five start going off the rails a bit because the writers just keep jamming in new conflicts without really resolving them, but you'll probably want to know how it ends once you start it.  And Chloe Sevigny as Nikki is, no exaggeration, some of the best acting I have ever seen.  Here's this incredibly unlikeable-on-paper character who regularly spews venom at the people who love her and, nine times out of ten, will choose to protect herself at other people's expense, and yet she's portrayed in such a way that you rarely lose sympathy for her.  You understand why she is the way she is, and when she does do the right thing, it feels like a victory.  The thing I love most about the character is that she's the one who gives the most lip service to the doctrine of wives submitting to their husbands, yet she defies her husband whenever it suits her.  Fascinating character, brilliant acting.

Fair warning: in the first season, when they were trying to draw viewers in with sex (Three wives! Can you imagine?), somebody in charge sat down and said, "You know what would really get people watching?  Bill Paxton's naked ass.  A whole lot of Bill Paxton's naked ass.  Just keep that full moon out there."  It decreases greatly after the first season, but you have to sit through a lot of forced titillation in the first few episodes especially.  (Not that I'm fundamentally opposed to forced titillation, but... nobody needs that much of Bill Paxton's naked ass.  Not even Bill Paxton.)

Oh, and here's that If Your Fandom Was Your Lover meme that's going around, just because.

( Fortunately, 'The one who gave you VD' is not on this list )

Stolen from lallyloo

Answer each of the questions with a photograph from the internets.
Copy the url of your favorites here to make a mosaic.
Share with the world [save, then upload].

1. my first name
2. favorite food
3. hometown
4. favorite color
5. celebrity crush
6. favorite drink
7. dream holiday
8. favorite dessert
9. what i want to be when i grow up
10. what i love most in the world
11. one word that describes me
12. my nickname

( Clicky )


Also, to the one person who answered "NO, HOW DARE YOU, YOU BITCH" on my previous poll, thanks for your honesty! ;o)  I realize that sounds super-sarcastic, but I love that somebody stuck up for poor fictional-ZQ.  I AM SUCH A HORRIBLE BULLY.

Rules: Tell me you want to play and I'll pick up to three of your fandoms. Then update your journal and answer the following questions:

1. What got you into this fandom in the first place?
2. Do you think you'll stay in this fandom or eventually move on?
3. Favorite episodes/books/movies, etc?
4. Do you participate in this fandom (fanfiction, graphics, discussions)?
5. Do you think more people should get into this fandom?

babykid528 gave me White Collar, Bones, and CSI

( Meme time! )

Also, can I just go ahead and express my disgust that both Bones and White Collar periodically turn into car commercials (for Toyota and Ford, respectively)?  It makes me gag whenever it happens, and you can tell it absolutely pains the actors.  I mean, sure, Scully and Mulder always ended up in a powder-blue Taurus, but they never fucking soliloquized over it.  Really, it's about as subtle as that scene in The Truman Show where Laura Linney randomly picks up the can of cocoa and starts spieling about it and Truman is all "Who are you talking to?"  BLARGH, I say!

Seriously though, I think I'll write a letter.  Does anyone have any idea who I'd address it to?

So I finally got around to doing that "I Write Like" meme, just to see if I got any consistency at all.  Twenty-five different writing samples (all from fics) yielded 10 different authors, though Stephen King and David Foster Wallace showed up much more often than any of the others at 8 and 7 times, respectively.  Which is a bit funny, since I love Stephen King but, God help me, I cannot get through an entire D.F. Wallace book to save my life.  Not even the ones of reasonable-length, and I almost never give up reading a book in the middle.  I even made it through American Psycho, even though I was by turns horribly nauseated and astoundingly bored.  But now is not the time for my Why Does Everyone Think Bret Easton Ellis is So Fucking Great, He Is Average at Best and None of His Characters Are Remotely Likeable rant.

Interestingly, I got almost entirely contemporary authors -- Jack London and Nabokov each showed up once and Raymond Chandler twice, but everyone else I got was/is alive and writing during my lifetime.  I don't know exactly which criteria the generator uses, but I'm not entirely surprised.  I use a lot of short paragraphs and a ton of dialogue and don't engage in a whole lot of description, so maybe that has something to do with it.  I did get Stephenie Meyer twice and Dan Brown once.  I haven't read any of the Twilight books, so I don't know what Meyer's actual writing is like -- should I be worried?  As for the Dan Brown... well, let's just call that a total anomaly, shall we?

I've got another Nina-verse fic just about finished.  I was going to wait and post it right after the humiliation fic to balance out the nasty with schmoop, but the nasty just isn't coming together.  Possibly because it's (go ahead and get your pearls clutch-ready) ZQ/Jeremy Irons with only background Pinto, and after the initial idea, my brain is now attempting to reject it.  Which one of you Jeremy-Irons-loving bastards has been hacking into my dreams?  Anyway, I might just go ahead and post the schmoop.

Wow, this post had more hostility in it than I'd originally intended.  I would like to hereby apologize to: Jeremy Irons, the estate of David Foster Wallace, fans of Bret Easton Ellis (even though you are woefully misguided, I still love you), and people who have not yet seen Inception.  Dan Brown can go jump in a lake and see if his piles and piles of hundred-dollar bills save him from the ravenous alligators.  THEY DON'T EAT MONEY, DANIEL.  YOU ARE STILL MADE OF MEAT LIKE THE REST OF US.