Dorian's Journal

( MerlinCollapse )

( Merlin RPSCollapse )

( SupernaturalCollapse )

( Starsky & HutchCollapse )

( Yami no MatsueiCollapse )

( MiscellaneousCollapse )

I'm often underwhelmed by music visualizations. Generally, I find them distracting and somewhere on a continuum between unhelpful and pointless.

But this visualization of a Chopin Fantasie-Impromptu is both fascinating and beautiful. I love the use of space and color, but what impresses me most is the subtle but effective animations around note-strikes and the fading of sound. But that's what I notice based on my background. I'm curious, what do other people see?

I love that I get to think about the practical applications of things like this as part of my job:

"We can perhaps formulate a better question by asking what aspect of the universe most needs stability.... The usefulness of perceptual proportions and relations that remain approximately constant despite wide changes in stimulus levels is immense. Think how life as we know it would be transformed if speech could be understood at only a single level of intensity, or if objects changed their apparent proportions as they receded, or if pictures became unrecognizable when a cloud dimmed the light of the sun." - Stanley Smith Stevens, Psychophysics

Though of course now I want to write a Yami no Matsuei fic driven by Meifu subtly violating Stevens's law (which, deliciously, is also called the psychophysical law); perhaps about Hisoka starting to notice how things in Meifu shift their proportions ever so slightly the closer you get to them; how photographs taken in Meifu are recognizable only in certain lights; and how old tape recordings of interviews convey one version of the events when played loudly enough for a whole room to heard and yet a few critical words shift when played very, very softly...

A computer simulation of the upper layer of a neocortical column produced by Blue Brain.
"In the basement of a university in Lausanne, Switzerland sit four black boxes, each about the size of a refrigerator, and filled with 2,000 IBM microchips stacked in repeating rows. Together they form the processing core of a machine that can handle 22.8 trillion operations per second. It contains no moving parts and is eerily silent. When the computer is turned on, the only thing you can hear is the continuous sigh of the massive air conditioner. This is Blue Brain." - Jonah Lehrer

Summary: Genderswap. For phoebe_zeitgeist



Shuffle


Tsuzuki slunk into the office, later than usual, and dropped into his seat. Without any civilized greeting he asked, "So which are you today?"

"Male." Hisoka left off the mostly. It was just easier than explaining.

"Me, too." But Tsuzuki was squirming a little in his seat and hadn't unbuttoned his coat.

Absently, Hisoka listened to Tatsumi berate Tsuzuki for tardiness. Tatsumi's huge breasts bounced slightly. Hisoka could tell the exact moment when Tsuzuki started wondering about what was or wasn't in Tatsumi's pants. The guilty, confused arousal was unmistakable.

Unexamined assumptions aside, Watari claimed the experiment as a success.

Summary: Play: a free activity quite consciously not serious but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly. For veleda_k.



Rarely Pure and Never Simple


Snacks or no snacks, stakeouts were boring. Even Hisoka thought so. And this one could go on for days. Days! How, in a world of ghosts and monsters, did they still end up on stakeouts? It wasn’t fair.

Soda and salty chips and pocky and little packs of chocolate cookies and a last desperate reserve of jelly beans only got a man so far. Tsuzuki eyed the pile of wrappers with real sadness and sent an empty bottle spinning, watching it slow to stop between them. "I get to kiss you."

"What?"

"Spin the bottle," Tsuzuki explained, belatedly.

"Who plays spin the bottle with just two people?" Hisoka considered this statement further. "Who plays spin the bottle?"

"Fine. Truth or dare."

Hisoka rubbed his forehead. "No."

"But-"

"No."

"You didn’t even-"

"Tsuzuki."

"Spoilsport. I’m just going to complain until you either hit me with something or agree."

Upon reflection, the nasty bump on his head was probably his own fault. Hisoka stared out at the house across the street with unlit windows half boarded up.

Tsuzuki settled back in his chair, watching Hisoka in the golden afternoon light.

"Truth," Tsuzuki said softly, almost to himself and not really meaning it.

Stolen from lady_ganesh:

Pick a trope from this list and provide a fandom/pairing and I’ll tell you something about the story I’d write for that combination (i.e. write a snippet from the story or write not!fic or tell you the title and summary for the story I would write)

1. genderswap
2. bodyswap
3. drunk!fic
4. huddling for warmth
5. pretending to be married
6. secretly a virgin
7. amnesia
8. cross-dressing
9. forced to share a bed
10. truth or dare
11. historical AU
12. accidental-baby-acquisition
13. apocalypse fic
14. telepathy
15. High School / College AU

( My current fandomsCollapse )

Aubade
Summary: Life can take so long to climb clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never.


The house around them had fallen in on itself as decay slowly ate everything. The ghost faded away, still pleading. Between Tsuzuki's fingers, the fuda echoed with spent magic.

Behind him, Hisoka sighed. "You gave her more time than you should."

"It wasn't enough."

"And staying here"—Hisoka made a sharp gesture—"how is that better?"

It's not, Tsuzuki thought. "She never found peace."

Hisoka didn't move any closer. "Sometimes there isn't any peace to find." But he sounded resigned rather than gentle—of course, in the end, when had gentleness helped.

Unnoticed, dawn crept forward, white as old bones.

"If you want to realize just how amazing the level of progress has been with the internet, realize this: it was just 20 years ago, today, that Tim Berners-Lee proposed the web." -- TechDirt

Berners-Lee's proposal called for four software engineers and a programmer. From that to this.

"It is extraordinary to consider that the general form of a scientific paper has changed less, in nearly 300 years, than any other class of literature except the bedroom farce."

-- John Ziman, Public Knowledge

Summary: Out here, they could be the only people left on earth. For bewarethesmirk. Thanks for the urging.



Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall


An hour out of Magdalena on a bad, patched-up road. From here, the desert rolls on forever. Not even sand, just dust and low scrub from highway to big empty sky. Nothing on the radio but static and fragments.

John is asleep, bunched up, too tall for the space. Sarah thinks of a baby hidden in the wheel well, a little boy in the back seat, this quiet angry John one seat over. Measures off the jump of missing years. It’s simple, like looking down the sight of a gun.

You drive enough, you keep finding all the empty spaces.

Some days -- long difficult days -- what you need is a marvelous sliver of smutty femslash porn. And I'm lucky enough to have bewarethesmirk, who writes amazing drabbles like this.

A Fragile Edge. Morgana/Nimueh. NC-17. You’re going to take it...

Summary: Only by convention does a wedding mark the end of a story. Gwen and Merlin's friendship, after. (Background Gwen/Arthur and Merlin/Arthur with past unrequited Gwen/Merlin.) Future!fic.

( The things that change and the things that don'tCollapse )

I am feeling a profound need to update my non-fannish icons. Any recs for comms? Pretty, funny, textless, whatever.

Summary: Merlin only shrugs in response, turning a page. "Gaius won't let me into the study again till I've read this." (Post series one). For bewarethesmirk.

( Happy Birthday!Collapse )

Summary: Traditionally after a tournament there is a feast. Lancelot/Merlin/Arthur. Future!fic.

( Eyes, Dreams, LipsCollapse )

From heather:

Name your 10 absolutely favorite couples (het/slash/canon/fanon) and ask people to see what trends they notice about your couples. Try to pick different fandoms:

1. Merlin/Arthur (Merlin)
2. Starsky/Hutch (Stasky and Hutch)
3. Tsuzuki/Hisoka/Muraki (Yami no Matsuei)
4. Bodie/Doyle (The Professionals)
5. Luke/Han (Star Wars)
6. Bradley/Colin (MerlinRPS)
7. Fraser/RayK (Due South)
8. Sam/Dean (SPN)
9. Merlin/Morgana (Merlin)
10. Kirk/Spock (Star Trek Reboot)

I've never found the red thread connection my tastes in ships. Perhaps the hive mind will do better.

lastling has set up a very neat giant rec post for Merlin. If you have an author or a story you'd like to pimp out to the world here's your chance.

Summary: Afterwards they agreed to never speak of it again. Mostly because, in retrospect, the talking birds wearing spectacles were the part that seemed least crazy. YnM/Merlin. Merlin and Arthur meet Hisoka and Tsuzuki. For veleda_k.



Hammerspace


"This," Arthur waved, meaning the strange room full of stranger people, "is not Albion."

Merlin looked around at the disturbingly identical desks and said, "None of this is my fault."

A boy so thin he made Merlin look substantial drew a huge mallet out of nowhere and hit the man standing next to him over the head. Arthur decided just to ignore that until the man rubbed his forehead and whimpered, "But it's not my fault."

The boy glared and crossed his arms, leaning back against the desk. "You always say that."

Arthur felt a moment of bizarre, inappropriate kinship.