i was overwhelmed by your collective emotion.

I SWEAR TO GOD, DAN

dudski — Wed, 30 Apr 2014 16:16:46 GMT

A CONVERSATION DAN AND I HAD YESTERDAY:

Dan: Hey, can you call Mr. Smith and tell him we'll be starting tomorrow morning and possibly dropping equipment off this afternoon?
Me: Sure.

LATER:

Dan: Did you call Mr. Smith yet?
Me: No, I make those calls at the end of the day, because you always end up changing your mind and then I have to call the customer back and I look like an asshole.
Dan: Well, I'm definitely not changing my mind on this one, and this guy's really needy and he'll start calling me if he doesn't hear anything, so can you call him now?
Me: Yeah, sure.

Me on the phone: Hi Mr. Smith, this is Sarah from [The Terrible Company I Work For]. I'm calling to notify you that we'll be starting work on your project tomorrow morning. You may see some equipment delivered later today. If you have any questions blah blah blah.

JUST NOW:

Mr. Smith: Hi, you called me yesterday and said you'd be starting work today, but nobody's here.

YOU KNOW. FUN TIMES. GREAT TIMES. THE BONUS ON THIS IS THAT I STRESSED MYSELF THE HELL OUT YESTERDAY BECAUSE DAN TOTALLY SPRUNG THIS JOB ON ME AND IT DIDN'T LOOK LIKE THE PERMITS WOULD CLEAR IN TIME FOR US TO START TODAY? TURNS OUT THEY DIDN'T NEED TO. AMAZING. WONDERFUL. PERFECT.

RESURRECTING A FIVE-YEAR OLD MEME

dudski — Sat, 15 Feb 2014 19:40:23 GMT

REMEMBER WHEN THIS WAS CIRCULATING IN LIKE 2009? Man. Who even wrote this first? We'll never know. IT'S BEEN LOST TO THE AGES.

~~The problem with LiveJournal is that we think we're close, but really, we know nothing about each other.~~ DID THAT STATEMENT EVER EVEN MAKE SENSE? The problem with Tumblr is that it's a nightmare platform when it comes to communication and the problem with Twitter is that it's VERY FAST-MOVING AND FLEETING AND SUCCINCT so even though I'm sure you all KNOW ME DEEP IN MY SOUL you are probably missing some basic biographical information.

So I want you to ask me something you think you should know about me, something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about, or something you've always been curious about but have never asked, or something completely silly that you'd like me to answer for kicks. No limits on the range of questions, either: ask me anything you want to know about, whether it's a fannish opinion or a question about a fic of mine or trivia about my real life or my thoughts on events in the offline world.

Ask away.

IT'S MY BIRTHDAY AND I LOVE TALKING ABOUT MYSELF, INDULGE ME!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

HOLE IN THE MIDDLE OF MY HEART LIKE A POLO

dudski — Mon, 06 Jan 2014 20:19:32 GMT

YEAR END MEMES! FINALLY! I'm warping these somewhat this year because some of these questions are never relevant to me and also so many of them are just "THIS WAS A BUILDING YEAR AND NOT MUCH HAPPENED" and also the general one and the fandom one end up repeating each other and also let's not pretend like I live a life where I can separate fandom questions out from questions about my actual life. SO:

1. What did you do in 2013 that you'd never done before?

I WAS A BAD FUCKING DRIVER! I was never cited for anything other than an expired sticker but I was pulled over three times in January and February, twice for speeding [41 in a 30, and 50 in a 30 that I thought was a 40] and once for an expired sticker. The 41-in-a-30 stop ended with a ticket for my expired sticker, and I never got a speeding ticket, but YIKES! I FELT REALLY SHITTY ABOUT IT BC I HAD NEVER BEEN PULLED OVER FOR REAL BEFORE, but it didn't happen again, so. LESSON LEARNED ETC.

Also in I'M A BAD DRIVER milestones I CAUSED A SERIOUS[ISH] CAR ACCIDENT FOR THE FIRST TIME, god, 2013 Sarah, GET IT TOGETHER, but it DID mean I got to RIDE HOME IN A COP CAR [front seat, although I did try to hint that I would be MORE THAN FINE with riding in the back like a criminal] and the cop was listening to Kiss 108 and Wrecking Ball came on and we just sat in silence and listened to it through the world's longest red light. AMAZING. BEST EXPERIENCE. SO GREAT.

Other...stuff? RELATED TO THE ABOVE: ACTUALLY GOT A CAR INSPECTED AND HAD IT PASS. [I DRIVE JUNKERS DON'T JUDGE MEEEEEEE.] GOT IN A PUBLIC FIGHT WITH A SOCIAL MEDIA PROFESSIONAL. Started talking openly about the fact that I failed out of USC. Cried ALL DAY and was sad for WEEKS about the death of a fictional character. Spent a lot of time with engaged people. Went wedding dress shopping with someone. Went to a comic convention. Blocked someone on every website I could for the first time in my 12+ years in fandom! [HI, JOSH. STOP READING EVERYTHING, JOSH.] Fought a teacher about a grade! Saw gas station staff manually changing the price on the big sign! Registered for a full slate of five classes and DID NOT DROP A SINGLE ONE OF THEM. Got an A in an online course that included discussion bullshit!

2. Did you keep your New Year's resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

For the last few years I've just had a very general "don't be a complete waste of space" resolution and whatever, could have gone better, I COULD HAVE SPENT LESS OF 2013 LYING DOWN, but overall I'm fine with my choices and proud to have gotten to where I am now, ON THE CUSP OF A LOT OF STUFF THAT IS SO BIG AND SO GREAT THAT I DON'T EVEN FEEL THE NEED TO MAKE RESOLUTIONS BC I'M DOING SO MUCH THIS YEAR.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?

REBS DID! Also probably at least three of my cousins, I don't know or care.

4. Did anyone close to you die?

One of my favorite teachers from middle school died of cancer, and I hadn't even known she was sick. IT WAS TERRIBLE.

5. What places did you visit?

Literally nowhere. FUCK!!!!!!!! OH GOD, WAS WHEN I DROVE TO NASHUA ON TUESDAY THE ONLY TIME I LEFT THE STATE OTHER THAN GOING TO PROVIDENCE FOR MAEVE? I'm going to Chicago or San Diego or Minneapolis or Toronto this year if it kills me. IF. IT. KILLS. ME.

6. What would you like to have in 2014 that you lacked in 2013?

Last year I said: Well, this isn't something I'll have throughout the year, but HOPEFULLY by year's end I'll have my Associate's? AND AN APARTMENT IN BOSTON?

THIS WAS DELAYED BY MY DECISION NOT TO PAY $$$$$ FOR SUMMER CLASSES [which I stand by, because fall classes ALSO ended up costing $$$$, and then the car accident cost $$, and so on] but also even then it seems like it was wildly optimistic on the apartment front. The current plan is JOB ASAP [I should really be on Craigslist right now but MEMES MUST], then graduation on May 31st and moving to Boston at around that time, too. SO: SAME ANSWER AS LAST YEAR, I GUESS.

7. What date from 2013 will remain etched upon your memory?

March 16, 2013: GOODBYE TO YOUNG JUSTICE AND ALSO THE PART OF MY SOUL THAT DIED WITH WALLY WEST.
July 17, 2013: SAW PACIFIC RIM FOR THE FIRST OF WHAT WOULD BE EIGHT TIMES IN THEATERS!!!!!!!!!!! OH MY GOD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?

HMMMMM. I'm very happy with how I did in school this year, actually. I mentioned these above, but: In spring semester I registered for five classes and completed all of them with As and Bs whereas normally I would have ended up dropping at least one of them, and then in the fall I took three courses, all of which required some level of ACTUAL EFFORT on my part, and got As in all of them. TURNS OUT I ACTUALLY CAN APPLY MYSELF! WONDERS NEVER CEASE!

9. What was your biggest failure?

Nothing, really? I DON'T KNOW. I could have done more, just in general - read more, written more, gotten out more, whatever - but honestly, I was where I needed to be at the end of the year.

OH, NEVER MIND: CRASHING MY CAR WAS MY BIGGEST FAILURE. DUH.

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?

NO, but I did spend seven straight months WISHING I would get a cold after THE PATIENT ZERO incident at work.

11. What was the best thing you bought?

My car! It was my first time buying a car in a low-pressure situation where I already had a functioning one so I had the luxury of not needing something right away, AND I LOVE IT SO MUCH.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?

Liam Payne. My family. My friends.

13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed?

Liam Payne. Bill. Aja.

14. Where did most of your money go?

SAME AS LAST YEAR, BORING SHIT. Tuition, buying the car, repairing the car.

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?

PACIFIC RIM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

16. What song(s) will always remind you of 2013?

Uh, basically anything by One Direction, plus the Pacific Rim theme, Baby Blue.

17. Compared to this time last year, are you:
Happier or sadder? Definitely happier.
Thinner or fatter? Probably the same.
Richer or poorer? Richer. EVERYTHING'S COMING UP DUDSKI.

18. What do you wish you'd done more of?

Nothing, really.

19. What do you wish you'd done less of?

READING TEEN WOLF FIC.

20. How will you be spending New Year's?

Picked up Lisa and Colleen, got dinner, and then went downtown to the same bar as last year and stayed there from 9:30 until around one. I GOT HOME AT LIKE THREE, I WAS EXHAUSTED, HOLY GOD. Okay but it was GREAT because last year Lisa and I MAJORLY BONDED with this one couple who've been married for like thirty years and they talked to us all about how we're doing okay and we're gonna be okay AND THEN THEY WERE THERE AGAIN THIS YEAR!!!!!!!!!!! Although maybe it's just my INSECURITIES talking but I feel like they were a little judgmental about the fact that Lisa and I are both doing more or less exactly what we were last year. IT WAS A BUILDING YEAR!!!!!!!!!!! I DID A LOT OF BUILDING!!!!!!!!!!!!

21. What did you do on your birthday?

Saw Hansel and Gretel: Witch Hunters with Emma and then got dinner with her and Kate. DELIGHTS.

22. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?

All the things I'm hoping to pull together in the first six months of 2014! I'M DOING IT!

23. What kept you sane?

I don't know if the arms race of capslock and AU scenarios that defined my year with disco_vendetta can really be described as something that kept me sane rather than MADE ME COMPLETELY UNHINGED, but lbr those emails got me through some ROUGH DAYS.

24. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?

WHAT IS IN THE WATER IN AUSTRALIA I DON'T UNDERSTAND [I'm talking about Liam Payne.]

25. Who did you miss?

LIZ, THREE YEARS RUNNING? It's actually terrible because we only spoke once in 2013 - on Friday it'll be a full year since I've interacted with her at all, which is SO MUCH YIKES, but I was pissed at her for not getting in touch on my birthday so I never called HER and she hasn't called ME and at this point I really should just call her, but I'm probably gonna wait until I have a new job lined up because I really don't want to go into the "so, what's new with you in the last YEAR?" conversation with "um, nothing."

26. Who was the best new person you met?

I MADE SO MANY GREAT NEW FRIENDS IN 2013!!!!!!!! IT WAS RIDICULOUS!!!!!!!!!!!! What with the death of LJ I had assumed I was pretty much done with finding worthwhile new people online but NOPE!!!!!!!!!!! THERE ARE SO MANY PEOPLE I TALK TO ON A DAILY BASIS WHO I DIDN'T KNOW A YEAR AGO!!!!!!!!!!!!

27. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2013:

I learned nothing.

28. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:

TO FIGHT MONSTERS, WE CREATED MONSTERS [what, the Pacific Rim theme doesn't have lyrics]

29. Your main fandom of the year?

Young Justice/Pacific Rim/One Direction, I guess? IF I HAD TO PICK ONE IT'D BE PACIFIC RIM. This was absolutely Pacific Rim's year.

30. Your favorite film watched this year?

THIS IS REALLY HARD. In terms of something that stands on its own: Pacific Rim. In terms of GOING ABOVE AND BEYOND EVEN MY WILDEST EXPECTATIONS: The Host. In terms of...IDK how to put it, but This Is Us, THIS IS US SO MUCH.

31. Your favorite book read this year?

HILARIOUSLY ENOUGH: DIVERGENT WAS THE BEST, AND ALLEGIANT WAS THE WORST.

32. Your favorite album or song to listen to this year?

It's all One Direction. I'm not sorry.

33. Your favorite TV show of the year?

JANUARY-JUNE: YOUNG JUSTICE.
JULY-SEPTEMBER: BREAKING BAD.
OCTOBER-DECEMBER: BROOKLYN NINE NINE.

34. Your best new fandom discovery of the year?

NOTHING WILL EVER FEEL LIKE LEAVING THE THEATER AFTER PACIFIC RIM FELT THAT FIRST TIME.

35. Your biggest fandom disappointment of the year?

ALLEGIANT LOLOLOLOLOL OH MY GOD IT WAS SO BAD. IT WAS SO. BAD. [I'm actually more excited for the movies now, though, because it's not WHAT happened that made Allegiant terrible, which there'd be no getting around, it's just that the book was a thematic mess and was totally overloaded with bullshit, AKA EXACTLY THE KIND OF THING THAT COULD BE HEAVILY IMPROVED IN THE TRANSITION TO FILM. This assumes the movies are good.]

36. Your TV boyfriend of the year?

Forget TV. RALEIGH BECKET.

37. Your TV girlfriend of the year?

ARTEMIS CROCK: TV GIRLFRIEND OF MY LIFE. [And Amy Santiago, TV girlfriend of my fall/winter.]

38. Your biggest squee moment of the year?

Um, fuck, I don't even know. SO MUCH HAPPENED. WAS IT "YOU LOOK GOOD" OR "I COULDN'T BREATHE" OR "I NEVER DID HAVE VERY GOOD TIMING" OR "LITERALLY EVERYTHING ABOUT JAKE ABEL AS IAN O'SHEA" OR "STRONG, NOBLE, PERFECT, AND WARM...WARM" OR JESSE PINKMAN DRIVING AWAY OR ARTEMIS AND WALLY BEING REUNITED IN SUMMIT?

39. The most missed of your old fandoms?

Um, Young Justice I guess, but lbr by the time I stopped being devastated by that 24/7 I was SUPER occupied with 2013: THE BEST YEAR EVER TO HAPPEN TO FICTION so there really wasn't a lot of time to miss it.

40. The fandom you haven't tried yet, but want to?

Ugh, nothing, things are so much effort. SO. MUCH. EFFORT. Mom and I are supposed to start The Wire, though, so there's that.

41. Your biggest fan anticipations for the New Year?

UMMMMMMMMMM. WHAT DO I EVEN NEED? I HAVE EVERYTHING. LIAM PAYNE'S JUST GOING TO KILL ME ON A DAILY BASIS. I'M ALL SET.

----------

ALSO I CAN DO THE FIC MEME BECAUSE I WROTE NINE FICS [OR SIX AND THREE HALF FICS, W/E, CALL IT WHAT YOU WANT] THIS YEAR, WHAT WHAAAAAAAAAAAT. Nine stories, six-ish fandoms, 13,233 words. A RECORD-BREAKING YEAR, IN OTHER WORDS, even though it'd be practically nothing for a lot of people. I DID STUFF! WRITING IS GARBAGE. I DON'T ACTUALLY LIKE DOING IT.

YOUNG JUSTICE/BONES CROSSOVERS

1. The second half of the one where they get sent to some small mountain town. ROY SAW A DOCUMENTARY ONCE WHERE A BEAR GOT IN A CAR AND DROVE AWAY.

2. the one where they're undercover in vegas. WALLY FIGURED THAT IF HE BET ON ARTEMIS, SHE COULDN'T LOSE.

3. the one with the kitchen sink. WALLY THINKS IT'S BEEN PRETTY WELL ESTABLISHED THAT HE KNOWS PLENTY ABOUT WORKING ON ARTEMIS'S PIPES.

YOUNG JUSTICE

4. it's a love story baby just say yes. 10 THINGS AU! HOW TO LOSE A GUY AU! NEVER BEEN KISSED AU! JUST LIKE HEAVEN AU! BRING IT ON AU!

5. and i said i reckon i could walk, in which Wally refuses to hook up with Artemis while they're in Central City because his parents have eyes EVERYWHERE.

SOME GIRLS

6. greater than or equal to, aka Saz/quantitative analysis OTP.

ELEMENTARY/CK1BLOGS

7. I was the blogger at Panera Bread m4w (downtown metropolis), in which Joan Watson walks into a Panera in Metropolis.

THE HOST/PACIFIC RIM/TEEN WOLF/YOUNG JUSTICE A LITTLE IF YOU KNOW WHAT TO LOOK FOR

8. here's to what we bring with us (what is taken away), in which the Souls ask Mel and Wanda to help them out with their kaiju problem.

9. the unbreakable blue, in which ISAAC AND BURNS [THAT'S MEAGAN TANDY: WEREWOLF HUNTER/THE GIRL/BRAEDEN TO YOU, I GUESS] ARE JAEGER CO-PILOTS AND SHE'D STRAIGHT UP MURDER YOU FOR HIM IF IT CAME TO THAT.

My favorite story this year (my own): TIE: THE UNBREAKABLE BLUE AND THE ONE WHERE THEY'RE UNDERCOVER IN VEGAS.

My best story this year: This is a weird question to answer because there are like four stories TOTAL that I've written that it doesn't make me super self conscious to go back over. WRITING STORIES IS THE WORST, HONESTLY. I would rather ramble for ten thousand words of capslock about a story than actually write out a hundred words of it. HOW DO YOU DIALOGUE, HOW DO YOU ANYTHING. BUT with all that said I was really pleased with the fact that people other than me and torigates ended up enjoying the your hamlet Bones/YJ AU. WHO KNEW??????

Story most underappreciated by the universe, in my opinion: What do you MEAN nobody read a Teen Wolf/Pacific Rim/The Host fusion that's based on an AU I sketched out with disco_vendetta where Allison is a Seeker in training who gets put in Lydia's body and they become best friends and Allison falls in love with Scott and then she sacrifices herself so Lydia can have her body back but Jackson stops Deaton from letting her die and Scott finds her an awesome new body and they live happily ever after [or maybe it was Scott inside Stiles's body, or maybe something else, we discussed this a lot of ways and I don't really remember which version won out in the end] and they end up finding another colony of survivors who ALSO have a human-sympathizing Soul named Burns Living Flowers who goes by Burns and rides a badass motorcycle everywhere and likes Isaac best out of everyone even though he never quite knows what to say around her, not that he ever needs to say anything, because she gets him like nobody else does, and then they end up getting contacted by the Stryder colony about a treaty with the Souls and these giant robots they can fight monsters in, and then Burns and Isaac train as copilots? WHAT DO YOU MEAN THAT'S TOO MUCH NECESSARY CONTEXT FOR A 500-WORD STORY? IT SEEMS PERFECTLY STRAIGHTFORWARD TO ME.

Most fun story: Probably it's a love story? It was a really quick AH, FUCK IT, LET'S JUST CRANK THESE OUT kind of thing, which made it relatively painless to write! PLUS IT'S ALL ROMCOM AUS, WHAT'S NOT TO LOVE. [It's actually also the only story I didn't write for someone? Four of the nine fics were for Tori, two were for Brita, one was for Clara, and one was for Yuletide.]

Sexiest story: I DON'T DO SEXY STORIES BECAUSE I CAN BARELY DEAL WITH DESCRIBING BASIC MOTION AND DIALOGUE AS IT IS, let alone two people getting all up on each other. This would be very reassuring news to 14 year old Sarah, who was always terrified of writing kissing scenes because she'd never kissed anyone. DON'T WORRY, PAST SARAH!!!!!!!! YOU'RE GOING TO BE TERRIBLE AT WRITING KISSING AND SEX NO MATTER WHAT!!!!!!!!!!!! EXPERIENCE DID NOTHING FOR YOU ON THAT FRONT!!!!!!!!

Hardest story to write: uhhhhhhhhhhh the Mako/Raleigh followup to the Mel/Wanda and Isaac/Burns fics? WHICH IS WHY IT'S NOT ON THIS LIST.

Most unintentionally telling story: Oh god don't even talk to me about the first draft of greater than or equal to. IT'S BEEN ERASED FROM EXISTENCE AND WE'RE ALL BETTER OFF WITHOUT IT.

Most "OHMIGOD HEY *I* WROTE THAT" fanon-turned-canon-moment: Nothing, I don't think.

What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted in January 2013: UM, A MEGA-CROSSOVER UNIVERSE IN WHICH THE ENSEMBLES FROM YOUNG JUSTICE, TEEN WOLF, THE HOST, PACIFIC RIM, ELEMENTARY, AND GOD KNOWS WHAT ELSE ALL GO THROUGH THE SOUL INVASION, MAKE BRAINWORM BFFS, AND THEN BECOME JAEGER COPILOTS AND KICK KAIJU IN THE FACE TOGETHER BECAUSE THEY HAPPEN TO BE OFF THE CHARTS DRIFT COMPATIBLE? A YEAR AGO I DIDN'T KNOW WHAT HALF OF THESE WORDS MEANT.

Did you take any writing risks this year? If by "risks" you mean "WRITE A TON OF SHIT THAT'S SO SPECIFICALLY CRAFTED FOR ONE PERSON'S ENJOYMENT THAT IT'S HARD TO SEE HOW ANYONE ELSE COULD POSSIBLY EVEN FOLLOW IT," then yes.

This entry was originally posted at http://dudski.dreamwidth.org/1465555.html because FUCK LIVEJOURNAL, FOR SERIOUS. You can comment over there or over here, I really don't care, but eventually you're all going to join me on DW, let's be real.

I CLIMBED YULETIDE MOUNTAIN AND ALL I GOT WERE THESE RECS

dudski — Sun, 05 Jan 2014 05:28:45 GMT

Maaaaaaaaaaaan Yuletide reading took it out of me this year. I PROBABLY SHOULD HAVE QUIT, AND I DIDN'T, AND THAT'S ON ME, but life somehow felt more demanding this year than it was when I was spending this time of year working 60-hour weeks and somehow still doing an obscene amount of Yuletide reading. WHO KNOWS. MAYBE I'M TOO OLD FOR THIS SHIT.

Anyway, TOP TEN, IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER, EXCLUDING THE FICS THAT WERE WRITTEN FOR ME BECAUSE IF I START SCREAMING ABOUT THAT AGAIN I'LL NEVER STOP:

-we'll be doing what we do (just pretending that we're cool) by subwaycars (Ultimate Spider-Man)

“Hah,” Ganke says, and then there’s a click, the door swinging open. Ganke’s face pops around the frame, grinning. Miles can see the moment he notices Kate. His eyes go wide, mouth dropping open. Kate waves.

“Dude,” Ganke says with feeling. Miles knows. Miles so knows.

UH, OKAY, SO THIS FIC IS PRECISELY ONE OF THE POSSIBLE FUTURES THAT I DREAM ABOUT WHEN I DREAM ABOUT ULTIMATE COMICS: SPIDER-MAN NOT ENDING WITH CATACLYSM. CRYING ABOUT IT. FOREVER. GOD, I JUST WANT THIS SO MUUUUUUUUUUUUUUCH, AND FOR THIS TO THEN EXPAND INTO A FULL YOUNG ULTIMATES TEAM, JUST GIVE ME THAT, MARVEL, I'VE EARNED IT.

-Seven Years, on Repeat by Steelneko (Legend of Zelda: The Ocarina of Time, Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask)

Link is eleven when he gets back to Hyrule. He's spent so many weeks living the same three days over and over he's completely lost track of what day or month it is. It seems like fall, he supposes, but he's not sure if it's even the same year. He feels like he lived an entire lifetime in Termina.

He wonders if that makes this his third go around.

-The Theodorakis Guide to the Heirs of North America by galaxysoup (The Westing Game)

“Are you... here to ask my permission to date him?”

Turtle scowls. “Well, I barely know your parents,” she snaps.

It does make sense. Turtle’s fond of her father and has come to an understanding with her mother, but she’s always valued her relationship with Angela most. In Turtle’s mind Chris is definitely the one with the biggest stake in Theo’s personal life.

-Un coeur rempli de chagrin, les mains remplis de regret by Amand_r (Orange is the New Black)

She offered something hand wavey and silent to Healy when he started to say that he was sorry again, because she knew he wasn't. If he was sorry for all the shit that happened to everyone in here, he'd have hanged himself in a fucking closet somewhere.

-For us, There is no Elsewhere by lc2l (His Dark Materials)

Dame Hannah laughs. "I was just thinking of that evening with the master of Jordan, when you would only tell us your story if we promised to believe it first."

Lyra smiles self-consciously, like any other woman being reminded of what she was like as a girl. "Turns out you can't use that before proposing a theory to a room full of scholars." She turns her head to glance at the clock.

-Ten Thousandth Try by myrifique (The Mindy Project)

“Tiny Castellano thought regular bears were just dirty polar bears, Morgan is going to burst in here talking about his dog, and also, do you want ten thousand dollars,” said Mindy in a bored voice.

“How many times have you told this to me?” Danny asked, amused.

“I’m not sure. There were two or three weeks where I came straight home after my morning delivery and watched all the TV in the world. Maybe I’m meant to become a TV reference, right? Maybe the universe’s higher purpose for sending me this ordeal is so I can finally watch Orange is the New Black for the fourth time.”

-Running to Arrive by Traincat (Iron Man: Armored Adventures)

“I’m going to do it,” she said. Tony looked up, staring straight at her.

“Well, yeah,” he said after a second. “Of course you’re going to do it.”

"Right," she said, exhaling. There were a million butterflies in her stomach. She punched the air.

Pepper Potts, Agent of SHIELD. It had a great ring.

-Witness by Wildgoosery (Gravity)

The man had gotten out of the truck. Now he stood beside Private Bergen, his expression serious. “Where is the capsule?” he asked in crisp accented English.

Ryan pointed to the lake behind her. “There was a fire in the cabin,” she said. “I had to open the hatch.”

The man wrote something on a small pad of paper. Bergen frowned. “Doctor Stone, are you saying you were on board?”

-Life Important by moirariordan (The Fifth Element)

A few days later, Korben flips on the morning news feed and sees a photo of him and Leeloo half-asleep at the ceremony, with the president behind them zoning out, staring at the ceiling. The accompanying story sounds so scandalized that it could've been written by Cornelius himself.

He shows it to Leeloo, who laughs merrily through a giant mouthful of Frutie-loo cereal. "Whoops," she says.

-Tyra and Tami in Five Short Chapters

Tyra writes two more sentences, then scowls at the page again. "Are you one of those moms who thinks coffee's gonna stunt my growth?"

Tami's first response is to say yes, but she looks at Tyra and reconsiders. "I'm not generally in favor of giving coffee to high school kids," she admits, "but I think the time for stunting your growth is behind you."

Tyra's face brightens. "Y'all got milk and sugar in the faculty lounge?" she asks.

Aaaaaaaaaaaand here are some that are the kind of thing that make you glad Yuletide exists because how else would things like this get written:

-She Likes The Way You Sing by Calliotrope, aka a Now You See Me/Leverage pre-canon crossover where Henley and Parker are friends as kids.
-Hold On To This Lullaby by NicoleAnell, fic for the short film Cargo.
-Hello Operator, Please Give Me Number Nine by Starlingthefool, Calvin and Hobbes fic about Suzie playing Calvinball with Death.
-An Analysis of the Implicit Rules of Expletive Infixation (Or, Where the Fuck do You Put the Fucking Fuck?) by salifiable, about the Mystery Solving Teens from Hark! A Vagrant.
-Mingled by schwarmerei1, because why WOULDN'T Alicia/Kalinda pon farr fic exist eventually?
-Growth Cycle by tuesday, Sims fic that pulls off the balance of incorporating aspects of gameplay without being more gimmick than substance.

AND HERE'S THE BEST OF EVERYTHING ELSE I LIKED, IN MORE OR LESS THE ORDER I READ IT IN. I'M NOT EVEN MAKING REAL LINKS ANYMORE. I'M SO TIRED. I HAVE ACTUAL REAL WORLD RESPONSIBILITIES TO TEND TO. [AND ALSO THE YEAR END MEME.] PS WITH YULETIDE I ALWAYS START OBSCURE AND THEN WORK MY WAY UP TO MAINSTREAM AND THIS YEAR I BASICALLY DIDN'T READ ANYTHING FOR SHOWS PEOPLE ACTUALLY WATCH. I ASSUME YOU ALL DID THAT ON DAY 1. I WAS SO TIRED AND THERE WERE SO MANY OF THEM. LET THE INTERNET GUIDE YOU.

-THE EMPEROR'S NEW GROOVE, we must strive for perfection: http://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2013/works/1095646
-DEAD LIKE ME, Leap Before You Look: http://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2013/works/1096069
-WHAT'S YOUR NUMBER, nothing to keep us apart: http://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2013/works/1096549
-SINGIN' IN THE RAIN, To The Stars: http://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2013/works/1100077
-THE UNUSUALS, second squad, this is delahoy, be advised: http://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2013/works/1099009
-MORNING GLORIES, Girls, unbreasted, wear guns like earrings: http://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2013/works/1096546 [AKA SOMEONE WROTE CASEY/JADE FIC WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO]
-HOWL'S MOVING CASTLE, In Which Lettie Makes Demands: http://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2013/works/1099638
-THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN, You Will Always Be In Front of Me, Even As I Disappear From View: http://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2013/works/1096488
-CATFISH RPF, When God closes a door: http://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2013/works/1036178
-LEGALLY BLONDE, Serious: http://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2013/works/1096237
-THE PROPOSAL, The Honeymoon: http://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2013/works/1094687
-VEEP, Hand in Unlovable Hand: http://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2013/works/1099818
-VEEP, even the Antichrist can kiss: http://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2013/works/1088644
-GO ON, Often Go Awry: http://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2013/works/1096748
-GRAVITY FALLS, to be a free someone: http://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2013/works/1100731
-MULAN, two hares running side by side: http://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2013/works/1100111
-DISNEY PRINCESSES, Four Things That Weren't Adequately Covered in Mulan's R.A. Training: http://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2013/works/1085502
-HAWKEYE, Backup: http://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2013/works/1094140
-HAWKEYE, And Never Brought to Mind: http://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2013/works/1096173
-JUSTIFIED, Carry Your Men, And Their Dead Too: http://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2013/works/1080602
-BROOKLYN NINE NINE, Hands: http://archiveofourown.org/collections/yuletide2013/works/1088792

REMIND ME OF THIS FEELING NEXT CHRISTMAS WHEN I'M OPENING TABS. REMIND ME HOW THIS FELT. I'M SO TIRED.

ETA, I COMPLETELY FORGOT: I wrote this:

greater than or equal to
Some Girls (BBC)

Most things about the world make sense if you know which numbers to pay attention to.

WHAT A SURPRISE THAT THE FIC THAT WAS BASICALLY A LOVE LETTER TO SPREADSHEETS WAS BY ME, AMIRITE? Okay but that's not why we're ETA-ing, we're ETA-ing because of the OTHER Some Girls fic in the collection, BLT by sophieisgod, which is about Saz coming out as bi and then Saz/Holli, and it's GREAT, and I'M LEGIT IN AWE OF HOW SHE NAILED THE FEEL OF THE SHOW, WHAT A GOOD JOB.

This entry was originally posted at http://dudski.dreamwidth.org/1465185.html because FUCK LIVEJOURNAL, FOR SERIOUS. You can comment over there or over here, I really don't care, but eventually you're all going to join me on DW, let's be real.

YULETIIIIIIIDE

dudski — Thu, 26 Dec 2013 16:38:19 GMT

Rec posts will come in a week or so [I'm at work right now but the TABPOCALYPSE situation on my computer is insane. 180 TABS REPRESENTING A MINIMUM OF 500 FICS? GOOD TIMES. GREAT TIMES. GONNA DO IT.] as will a ~REAL LIFE~ post all about my 72-hour return to working retail, but that is all for LATER.

FOR NOW, here are the only truly important recs, aka the stories that were written for me!

Secret Santiago: SOMEONE WROTE ME A TREAT TO FILL MY "SECRET SANTA AT THE PRECINCT" PROMPT! All you need to know about this is that a) it's a great way to get your B99 fix in the middle of this ENDLESS-FEELING STRETCH OF NO NEW EPISODES, and b) JAKE CALLS AMY SANTI-AWKWARD. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. I'M NOT EVEN GONNA SAY ANYTHING ELSE BC YOU SHOULD JUST BE READING IT.

And then there's my gift story, which I am screaming and pulling my hair out over 24/7/365:

not properly: THIS IS EXACTLY WHY YULETIDE IS AMAZING BECAUSE BAD MACHINERY FIC DIDN'T EXIST AND THEN I REQUESTED IT AND SOME BEAUTIFUL ANONYMOUS UNICORN WROTE IT FOR ME AND NOW BAD MACHINERY FIC EXISTS!!!!!!!!!!!!! BAD. MACHINERY. FIC. EXISTS. And not only that, but there are moments that nail John Allison's tone so specifically and perfectly that I CAN LITERALLY SEE THE PANELS AS HE WOULD DRAW THEM. And there's so much Charlotte and it's such a nice look at the kids when they're another few years older and there are such great asides about Tackleford's general weirdness and OH, DID I MENTION THERE'S AN ENTIRE SECTION THAT'S BASICALLY JUST LINTON THINKING ABOUT CHARLOTTE? BECAUSE THERE'S AN ENTIRE SECTION THAT'S BASICALLY JUST LINTON THINKING ABOUT CHARLOTTE. I HAVEN'T TALKED A HUGE AMOUNT HERE ABOUT HOW INTO LINTON AND CHARLOTTE I AM BC IT'S A FAIRLY RECENT DEVELOPMENT THAT SNOWBALLED RAPIDLY THROUGH CONVERSATIONS WITH coldbam BUT HOLY GOD. I'M DEAD. I'M DYING. I'M GONE.

This entry was originally posted at http://dudski.dreamwidth.org/1464882.html because FUCK LIVEJOURNAL, FOR SERIOUS. You can comment over there or over here, I really don't care, but eventually you're all going to join me on DW, let's be real.

IT'S THAT TIME AGAIN

dudski — Sat, 07 Dec 2013 03:32:29 GMT

HOLIDAY LOVE MEME
my thread here

i am too strong to break so easily

dudski — Wed, 23 Oct 2013 06:35:01 GMT

ALLEGIANT! SPOILERS!

Okay first of all I want to say that this:

I was so afraid that we would just keep colliding over and over again if we stayed together, and that eventually the impact would break me. But now I know that I am like the blade and he is like the whetstone--

I am too strong to break so easily, and I become better, sharper, every time I touch him.

STOPPED ME IN MY TRACKS AND STABBED ME RIGHT IN THE SOUL, FUCKING HELL. SO GOOD. SO. GOOD. Removing it from Veronica Roth's custody and re-assigning it to Artemis Crock IMMEDIATELY. SO. GOOD.

ANYWAY, ON TO THE BAD STUFF AKA LITERALLY EVERYTHING ELSE. JUST GO AWAY IF YOU LIKED THIS BOOK BC WE CAN PROBABLY NEVER TALK ABOUT IT AND I WILL JUST PISS YOU OFF.

[THIS POST KEEPS GROWING BECAUSE I KEEP THINKING OF NEW THINGS THAT MAKE NO SENSE. THIS BOOK GETS WORSE THE MORE I THINK ABOUT IT. This post is my masterpiece of rage. I will be perfecting it until I die.]

-TRIS DIED. I address that first only because it is the BIG SPOILER coming out of this, not because it was a huge problem for me or even something that impacted me hugely. "IS SHE FOR REAL DEAD?" I asked, flipping ahead to see the POV heading on future chapters. "MAYBE SHE'S FOR REAL DEAD." And then Tobias found out a few chapters later and I'm sorry but I was so far past giving a fuck about anything at that point that I just LAUGHED AND LAUGHED AND LAUGHED and gave ZERO fucks. And then there was that TWO YEARS LATER epilogue where he's carrying her ashes around and SORRY BUT I CRACKED UP AT THAT TOO BECAUSE DIVERGENT!TOBIAS AND ANIMORPHS!TOBIAS CARRYING AROUND THEIR DEAD WARRIOR GIRLFRIEND'S ASHES WAS TOO MUCH SYMMETRY FOR ME. ALL OF THIS HAS HAPPENED BEFORE.

-But also I should say that because people on Twitter are NOT SUBTLE AT ALL and the internet has 100% forgotten how not to pass spoilers on or that one person saying something cryptic might not be a spoiler but EVERYONE SAYING DIFFERENT CRYPTIC THINGS offers a pretty conclusive picture: I WENT IN ASSUMING FOUR WOULD DIE AT THE END, BC I KNEW PEOPLE WERE OUTRAGED ABOUT SOMETHING BIG, AND WHAT ELSE COULD IT BE? But then by the time I was like 200 pages in I stopped believing he died, because I was screaming "THIS BOOK IS SO FUCKING STUPID" out loud at least once a chapter, and I thought maybe the big problem with Allegiant was just that ALLEGIANT IS FUCKING TERRIBLE.

-FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, VERONICA ROTH: WHEN IT CAME TIME TO CHOOSE WHICH YA FRANCHISE FINAL INSTALLMENT TO EMULATE, WHAT THE EVERLOVING FUCK MADE YOU THINK "WELL, I THINK I'D LIKE TO COMBINE THE IMPOSSIBLY UNWIELDY AND OVERLY AMBITIOUS POLITICAL ASPECT OF MOCKINGJAY WITH THE EIGHT BILLION NEW CHARACTERS NOBODY GIVES A FUCK ABOUT FROM THE LAST THIRD OF BREAKING DAWN" AND THEN ACTUALLY COMMIT TO THAT THOUGHT? Imagine this book in the universe where she decided to emulate the THE TRIO GOES ON AN EXTENDED CAMPING TRIP aspect of Deathly Hallows instead. Stop and think about Tris, Four, Christina, Uriah, Peter, and Cara hiking through the post-apocalyptic Chicago metro area and trying to piece together what happened, finding the Fringe first, and THEN discovering the compound. THINK. ABOUT. THAT.

-Actually, think about the compound not existing at all, because fuck EVERYTHING ABOUT THAT. Fuck all of those new characters and the amount of time that was spent on them at the expense of Tris' friendship with Christina or Peter's continued ambiguous development. WHERE THE FUCK WAS CHRISTINA IN ALL OF THIS? I HAD NO PROBLEM WITH HOW MUCH CARA THERE WAS BUT THERE WAS SO MUCH MORE CARA THAN CHRISTINA! AND THEN THIS HAPPENED:

"You don't know what she would hate; you didn't know her, you--"
"I know enough!" she snaps.

Legit fuck everyone in the world for this exchange. Fuck EVERYONE IN THE WORLD. YEAH. EVEN YOU. EVEN THE PERSON WHO BAGGED YOUR GROCERIES LAST WEEK. FUCK EVERYONE. I can buy Four lashing out like that I GUESS but LOLOLOLOL AT CHRISTINA ALLOWING IT AND BORDERLINE ENDORSING IT. FUCK THAT AND FUCK THE WAY HIS GRIEF IS ALLOWED TO ECLIPSE HERS. FUCK VERONICA ROTH FOR IGNORING THEIR FRIENDSHIP FOR THE ENTIRE BOOK AND THEN UNDERCUTTING IT LIKE THIS. FUCK EVERYTHING.

-Seriously though, SO MANY NEW CHARACTERS WITH UNKNOWN MOTIVATIONS AND AGENDAS. God fucking damn it. You dreamed too big, Veronica Roth, and your book is incredibly shitty because of it. Here is a thing I said about the first two books!

Roth did a CRAZY good job of establishing personal conflicts AND larger political ones and tying them together and balancing them and giving all of them thoughtfully-weighted stakes and making the repercussions of everything feel local

We go from the upheaval of the Factionless takeover - where Jeanine's corrupt regime (which replaced Marcus's corrupt regime) is about to be replaced by a potentially equally corrupt one headed by Tori but is instead replaced by a definitely equally corrupt one headed by Evelyn, and then there's the trip to the compound, where EVERYONE IS A FUCKING DICK, and also everyone is a genetics bigot, and they have SINISTER SECRETS and CAN'T BE TRUSTED because THEY ARE CORRUPT, but they're representative of a society that is corrupt overall, but there's this rebel faction among them that wants to take them down, BUT THE REBELS ARE ALSO CORRUPT AND CANNOT BE TRUSTED, and it is Hour Three of The Dark Knight levels of FUCKING EXHAUSTING, and Roth lets it get SO BIG and SO COMPLICATED and then doesn't honor that? Liiiiiiiiiiiiike after five billion pages of QUESTION EVERYTHING, HOW WILL WE EVER FIND THE TRUTH OR KNOW WHO TO TRUST, they just make a couple of intuitive leaps and selectively decide what pieces of which group's story is true, and THAT'S THE PLAN AND IT'S NEVER PROVEN WRONG? BECAUSE TRIS IS JUST NEVER WRONG? And after you spent two books getting invested in the central conflicts of Tris' city, ALL THAT SHIT JUST PLAYS OUT IN THE BACKGROUND FOR THIS ENTIRE BOOK?

AND THEN THE GOVERNMENT IS JUST LIKE "YEAH OKAY WE'LL STOP BEING DICKS ABOUT GENETICALLY DAMAGED PEOPLE IN CHICAGO NO PROBLEM" AND EVELYN AND MARCUS AGREEING TO A TRUCE IS SOMEHOW ENOUGH TO USHER IN PERFECT HARMONY IN A SOCIETY THAT IS FUCKED TO THE CORE AND PRONE TO POWER SHUFFLES. COOL. GREAT. Also the book kept going on and on about the sheer vastness of the world as a whole without ever ONCE addressing what the fuck other countries did when the US was like WE'RE GONNA START RUNNING A BUNCH OF GENETIC EXPERIMENTS, WHAT COULD GO WRONG? / OH GOD, THE PEOPLE WHOSE DNA WE TAMPERED WITH ARE KILLING US ALL / EVERYONE LOOK AT THE FUCKED UP NEW SOCIETY WE BUILT FROM THE RUINS! Really? The rest of the world just stood for that shit and was like YEAH OKAY CARRY ON! [Yeah, okay, probably.]

I'm not even clear on what happened at the end, although to be fair, I was skimming HARD. Tris died and was considered a dangerous rebel by the government, and she died IN THE WEAPONS ROOM WHERE SHE WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE, right at the time of the "freak accident" where everyone in the compound lost their memories, and the government responded to the release of a chemical agent during a rebel attack on the government facility that represents the entire country's hope for the future with "oh, yeah, definitely seems like this was an accident - what's that? Nobody remembers anything but they DO remember that we should end the Chicago experiment and stop being dicks to GDs? Seems legit." AM I SUPPOSED TO BELIEVE THAT THE UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT IN THIS UNIVERSE IS LESS OBSESSED WITH NATIONAL SECURITY THAN THE ACTUAL UNITED STATES GOVERNMENT THAT ISN'T RECOVERING FROM A CATASTROPHIC CIVIL WAR? When the corrupt and shitty government in your dystopian nightmare future seems implausibly lenient compared to its real-world equivalent, you have a problem. Two problems, really, your shitty worldbuilding and your shitty government.

-And ALSO there was the weird Truman Show aspect of it? In this ONE RESPECT it might actually have been interesting for the book to mimic Mockingjay, but the whole aspect of people in the compound knowing who Tris was and following everything that had happened to her was raised and then dropped JUST LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE IN THIS DAMN BOOK. IDK, the cameras were too weird relative to how much they helped the plot; if they were council access only it would probably have been better but the way it was like entertainment that anyone and everyone could check in on was SO WEIRD because you'd think seeing things like the Abnegation massacre would have stopped at least SOME people in their tracks.

-RE: TRIS IS JUST NEVER WRONG. Um, fuck just about everything that happened with Tris and Four in the first, like, four hundred pages of this book. SHE'S JEALOUS OF NITA? HE'S JEALOUS OF MATTHEW? FOR NO REASON WHATSOEVER? [PS speaking of Matthew I thought there was some to-be-revealed point to the constant mentions of his absent supervisor but LOL NOPE!] SO MUCH ANGER AND DRAMA AND CONFLICT LIKE VROTH JUST THOUGHT "I NEED TO ALMOST BREAK THEM UP BECAUSE REASONS." I specifically said this about Tris and Four after I read the first two books:

Tris and Four are ALWAYS not telling each other shit and KNOWING that the other person isn't telling them something and eavesdropping on each other or doubting each other tactically, but it's always in this great way where no matter what happens they're both like I LIKE YOU SO MUCH AND I NEED YOU SO MUCH AND I'M BETTER WITH YOU BY MY SIDE, IT'S SUCH A BUMMER THAT WE HAVE TO BE AT ODDS RIGHT NOW, HOPEFULLY WE GET PAST IT SOON BUT IN THE MEANTIME FUCK YOU! I LOVE YOU!

AND THAT WAS SO INTERESTING AS A DYNAMIC AND A SOURCE OF CONFLICT! The way that they could be at odds politically and tactically without being at odds emotionally was fantastic! They were always lying to each other and going behind each other's backs and pissing each other off because they couldn't agree on how to handle things but it only ever affected their relationship in the sense that THEY COULDN'T BE ALL OVER EACH OTHER BECAUSE THEY WERE MAD ABOUT SOMETHING UNRELATED TO MAKING OUT, and then here we had all of these overblown fights about NOT RESPECTING HER and JEALOUSY and I DON'T KNOW IF I CAN EVER FORGIVE YOU like a) Tris hasn't also done some super questionable shit? b) Tris isn't fucking CONSTANTLY just deciding to trust people even when Four is like I VOTE NO? OKAY. WHATEVER. THIS WAS RESOLVED ADEQUATELY FOR WHAT IT WAS BUT IT ALSO SHOULD NEVER HAVE HAPPENED.

And re: Tris doing questionable shit, UM @ THEM WIPING THE ENTIRE COMPOUND'S MEMORIES. It's an entire working city! Zoe said they're all raised there from birth so they can train for their roles all their lives! Which means there are kids and families at the compound! What's the population there compared to the experiment population in Chicago? There's ZERO consideration of collateral damage, just the more general question of whether it's ethical to unleash the memory serum on the compound to prevent it from being used on the city.

-EXTRA LOL AT THE JEALOUSY THING. LIKE...NEITHER OF THEM HAVE EVER MET AN ATTRACTIVE PERSON BEFORE? AND THEY ARE SUDDENLY OVERWHELMED AT THE THOUGHT OF THE OTHER PERSON BREATHING THE SAME AIR AS SOMEONE ATTRACTIVE? OKAY. HAD TO GET SOME KIND OF HALF-ASSED LOVE TRIANGLE IN THERE FOR YA FRANCHISE BINGO OR WHATEVER.

-If Veronica Roth wanted to write some half-assed social commentary about the government turning its back on a huge chunk of the population and then blaming them for the social problems brought about by that malicious neglect, I'M PRETTY SURE SHE COULD HAVE JUST WRITTEN A SELF-IMPORTANT TUMBLR POST ABOUT THE ACTUAL UNITED STATES THAT WE ACTUALLY LIVE IN. Oh, if a GP person kills a GD person and claims they were provoked, they can get away with it? WHAT A GREAT THING TO JUST LUMP IN AND NOT EVEN TRY TO DEAL WITH IN A RESPONSIBLE OR THOUGHTFUL WAY DESPITE ITS OBVIOUS AND DISTASTEFUL IMITATION OF ACTUAL HORRIFYING CURRENT ISSUES.

-MIDICHLORIANS!!!!!!!!!!!!! That is a Star Wars joke. I am referring to the fact that Divergent people are just NORMAL HUMANS instead of people with superpowers who can see the Matrix for what it is, and everyone who's not Divergent has fucked-up genes. Way to take the central hook of your entire fictional universe and tediously explain the science behind it over and over again until it was as uninteresting as possible. Good job. Fine work. I fucking never want to hear another word about genetics again, oh my god, just stop, I want to get my own DNA removed I'm so sick of it.

-I'M ALSO SICK OF SERUMS. JESUS CHRIST.

ETA HERE IS SOME SCREAMING I EMAILED KENDRA ABOUT WHY THE SERUM STUFF WAS DUMB:

DEATH SERUM will never stop being the dumbest fucking thing ever because did civilization just forget about poisons/chemical weapons in general that all they have now is DEATH SERUM? BUT IT'S EVEN DUMBER THAN I THOUGHT IT WAS, because of the revelation that there is nothing actually special about Divergent people. BUT THEN WHY THE FUCK ARE DIVERGENT PEOPLE SERUM-RESISTANT? Like for the various faction serums you could argue that they were made to be used on people with damaged genes, so it's not just Divergent people but basically any normal human from the outside world who can resist it. So Tris isn't a special snowflake, she's just more like the people on the outside than the people in Chicago. Whatever. Fine. BUT THEY DRIVE HOME OVER AND OVER AND OVER AGAIN THAT NOBODY IN THE WORLD CAN RESIST DEATH SERUM, AND THEN TRIS DOES. SO APPARENTLY SHE IS A SPECIAL SNOWFLAKE? IN WHICH CASE WHY BOTHER TALKING ABOUT DNA FOR THIRTY YEARS WHILE EXPLAINING THAT SHE'S NOT SPECIAL? And then it's all moot anyway because right after she resists the death serum she gets shot and dies THE END!!!!!!!!

NOTHING ABOUT THIS BOOK HOLDS UP UNDER SCRUTINY! IT'S SO BAD! EVERYTHING ABOUT IT IS TERRIBLE!

-Expecting anyone to give a fuck about the death of a secondary character that you ignored for most of the book after you KILLED OFF YOUR PROTAGONIST/POV CHARACTER is pretty dumb. RIP URIAH. VERONICA ROTH DID YOU WRONG.

-I SPENT A LOT OF TIME BEING ANNOYED ABOUT THE UPDATE TO MAMA PRIOR'S BACKSTORY? It mostly turned out okay, through the journal entries, but LBR I still much prefer my Deathly Hallows style version of this book where while they're hiking through the wasteland formerly known as Cook County, and Tris has an actual written journal of her mother's that she found hidden in her old house, and she finds out all about her mother growing up in Dauntless and choosing Abnegation instead and how she felt about her life. LIKE EVERYTHING ELSE IN THIS BOOK, VE-RO WENT HUGE WITH NATALIE'S BACKSTORY AND THEN DIDN'T COULDN'T SCALE HER DEVELOPMENT OF THE STORY TO MATCH. I did LOVE the parts where Tris mused about whether her time in the Fringe influenced her decision to choose Abnegation and her dedication to helping the Factionless, though.

-There were a handful of instances of Tris just...weirdly not understanding things? Like when Zoe shows her the photo of her mom at the compound and David tells her it's from when her mother came back to the compound to visit and then like TEN CHAPTERS LATER it's some huge revelation that her mom was from the compound? WHAT? Ditto when she sits in on the council meeting and they're like "sooooooo, reset everyone's memories?" and she's like "OH MY GOD I NEVER IMAGINED THEY WOULD DO THIS" even though it's exactly the thing Matthew told her they would do? WHAT? WHO? WHAT? I FEEL LIKE I'M TAKING CRAZY PILLS.

-Also just in general this book was a thematic MESS interspersed with all kinds of really forced PEARLS OF WISDOM and things that were meant to sound great as standalone quotes that DON'T FIT INTO ANY KIND OF LEGIT CONTEXT? Like on the plane when Tris is all WHEN YOU'VE SEEN THE THINGS I HAVE, THE ONLY FRONTIER LEFT TO EXPLORE IS UP. Okay. You've left downtown Chicago for the first time in your life and gotten as far as O'Hare and found out that the outside world is bigger than you EVER, EVER, EVER could have imagined, and that the parts of it you were aware of represent a NEGLIGIBLE PORTION OF EVERYTHING THERE IS, but the only frontier left to explore is the sky. Okay. Definitely.

OTHER DUMB THINGS THAT SEEM TO EXIST SOLELY SO THEY CAN BE SOLEMNLY POSTED TO TUMBLR WHEN TEENS ARE FEELING DEEP:

"Sometimes I feel like there is so much to be afraid of, and sometimes I feel like there is nothing left to fear." I know that Nita has NO IDEA what she's talking about but also one of the really interesting aspects of this entire fucking series is the way that even in this fucked up nightmare world, the things people are most afraid of are often things that are irrational or mundane? FOUR IS LIKE THE GREATEST DAUNTLESS BADASS EVER TO LIVE AND HE'S AFRAID OF HEIGHTS AND ENCLOSED SPACES. TRIS IS A SUPERHERO [no she's not! DNA!!!!!!!!!!!!!] AND SHE'S AFRAID OF BANGING. [That is another thing that I loved in the other books that felt off in this one!] But they're also afraid of super big and messy and fucked up things, too! That's the point!

How have I never realized before that for all the strong, kind parts of Tobias, there are also hurting, broken parts?

Actually, file this under TRIS INEXPLICABLY ACTING LIKE THINGS SHE KNEW ABOUT ARE BRAND NEW INFORMATION.

To me, when someone wrongs you, you both share the burden of that wrongdoing - the pain of it weighs on both of you. Forgiveness, then, means choosing to bear the full weight all by yourself.

That goes on for a bit, and Tris says she only ever wanted Caleb to take the burden of his betrayal off of her, and she's not sure if she's ready to shoulder it all by forgiving him. Okay. Cool. Very deep-sounding philosophy about forgiveness. ONLY IT IN NO WAY MESHES WITH WHAT WE KNOW OF HOW ANYONE ELSE IN THIS SERIES HAS DEALT WITH FORGIVENESS AND GUILT. SEE: THAT TIME TRIS KILLED WILL. SEE ALSO: TOBIAS FEELING RESPONSIBLE FOR URIAH GETTING BLOWN UP.

-Also on the book being a thematic mess, Roth SERIOUSLY blew the opportunity to use the dual POV to set up a legitimately interesting and powerful Tobias arc. She clearly had the right idea about it, and she would very occasionally hit just the right note on connecting his father's abuse to how readily he believed he was damaged because he wasn't Divergent, but she DID NOT PULL IT OFF AT ALL. NOT EVEN A LITTLE. There were like two moments that landed perfectly and then she went right back to everything being a giant complicated mess.

-FUCK URIAH GETTING BLOWN UP AND NEVER COMING OUT OF HIS COMA. FUCK IT. FUCK IT SO MUCH.

-FUCK THE WEIRD DECISION TO DO NOTHING WITH PETER FOR THE ENTIRE BOOK AND THEN GET SUPER HEAVY ON HIM AT THE END.

IN CONCLUSION: THIS BOOK WAS GARBAGE. I wasn't into it at all in the very beginning [slash actually I was confused as fuck in the beginning and had to go re-read the end of Insurgent and also pull up the Divergent wiki for reference], and then I got into it when Tobias was going all double agent on Evelyn and making plans to get Tris out, and then there were like FOUR HUNDRED PAGES where nothing happened other than exposition and exploring and a whole bunch of overly confusing TRUST NO ONE bullshit and I was seriously thinking about just skipping to the end or never finishing at all but also I couldn't let the book win so I just screamed "THIS IS SO DUMB" a lot, and then they actually started doing stuff and it was almost interesting again [although I couldn't help but think that taking out the compound and re-entering the city would have been MUCH MORE SATISFYING coming off my imagined Deathly Hallows ripoff version of the book], and then LOL TRIS DIED LOL SO MUCH LOL SO HARD HAHAHAHAHAHAHA OH MY GOD. TRIS DIED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! TOBIAS GOT AN APARTMENT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THE END!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ETA: I just remembered that there was a second thing in this book that I liked: When Four writes her a note and addresses it to VI and signs it IV. THAT WAS AMAZING. SO ROUGHLY A QUARTER OF A PAGE IN THIS 544-PAGE MONSTROSITY WAS ON THE LEVEL OF THE FIRST BOOK.

This entry was originally posted at http://dudski.dreamwidth.org/1462936.html because FUCK LIVEJOURNAL, FOR SERIOUS. You can comment over there or over here, I really don't care, but eventually you're all going to join me on DW, let's be real.

'tis the season!

dudski — Wed, 09 Oct 2013 04:52:28 GMT

Dear Yuletide Author:

Thank you so much for writing me a story! I always request fandoms where I'd be happy with anything, so please, if a prompt's not working for you but you've got a great idea for something else you think I'd like, write that! I firmly believe that the best story you can give me is one that you're excited about.

Things I'm into: Found families, friendships, ROMCOM TROPES GALORE, group dynamics, unexpected bonding between characters that previously haven't interacted much, happy endings [I will endure ALL THE ANGST AND MISUNDERSTANDING if things end well], bittersweet but hopeful endings, people striking out on their own and finding themselves, people being besties [either canon friendships or new ones], and origin stories/character backstories. I'm also NUTS about people spending holidays together, so if you want to toss any of these prompts out the window in favor of Thanksgiving or Christmas fic, PLEASE, HAVE AT IT.

Things I'm not into: Please don't depress me on Christmas! Also steampunk.

And if you're looking to do the full-on background check: I'm dudski on Pinboard [and this is my Yuletide tag] and Tumblr, in addition to LJ/DW and AO3. I don't think there's anywhere else that's relevant, but if there is, my username is probably also dudski. [I don't use Instagram or Pinterest, though, those dudskis are IMPOSTORS.]

Anyway, on to the requests!

1. BAD MACHINERY - Charlotte, Shauna, Mildred

Four comics a week is never enough - I'd love anything! Fic about Charlotte and the others growing up, going through school, and deciding if mysteries are really what they want to dedicate their lives to would be AMAZING, as would case fic, or pre-series fic, or fic about what they do in the long, boring downtime between major mysteries, or what they get up to ten years from now! Whatever story you decide to tell will be perfect.

CHARLOTTE GROTE: MY LIFE, MY HEART, although I love all the Bad Machinery kids fiercely. This is one of my favorite-ever stories about growing up and friendship, and all the great and terrible ways those two things can affect each other. [I spent a full 24 hours in a panic after this comic went up; it was a lot.] I'd love something that explores that, whether it's set in the current timeline or in the future or the past. I'm especially fond of the dynamic between Charlotte, Mildred, and Shauna and how deftly John Allison addresses the awkwardness of a three-person group: Sometimes it works perfectly, and sometimes someone feels a bit left out.

I have yet to tackle the rather-daunting Scary Go Round archives, so if you go for pre-series fic (the first mystery Charlotte ever solved? What Mildred thought about Shauna and Charlotte before she befriended them? How that mystery-solving competition from the end of The Case of the Team Spirit got started?), I have no way of knowing if you've contradicted SGR or not!

If it's useful to you: I didn't nominate this fandom, but I would gladly have requested whichever of the core six were nominated, so please feel free to bring in whoever you'd like! If it's helpful (really, truly: ONLY if it's helpful), I have a HUGE soft spot for Shauna/Jack and I've always thought Charlotte and Linton would be an interesting couple when they're older.

LJ tag, Tumblr tag

2. BEN AND KATE - Kate, Tommy

I'd love to read about Kate and Tommy getting together, ideally in a situation where he starts to help out with Maddie a lot (maybe one of Ben's schemes takes off, so he can't be around as much, and Kate's finally got her own bar, and it's too much to handle on her own?) and then there are FEELINGS and CONFUSION and MORE FEELINGS. But I'm also in love with this entire group, and I'd love anything about them - how they all met, where everyone was when Maddie was born, messes they've gotten into, whatever you'd like!

From the pilot episode on, I was in love with the cast's chemistry, and the show did SUCH a good job in such a short time of selling me on the history and love between all of the characters - even Tommy and BJ, who had the least defined dynamic, came across as people who are very much a part of each other's lives. I love that they're all family. I love that they're all varying degrees of messy but will always pull it together to come through for each other. I mean, BJ tricked Ben into a fake green card marriage to keep him from leaving the country because she thought Kate would want him around - if that's not love, I don't know what is. This would be an especially good fandom for Christmas fic, actually!

I don't know if you've seen the unaired episodes [1x14, 1x15, and 1x16 never aired in the US, but they are floating around thanks to the UK and iTunes], but if you have, another possible prompt would be the fallout of Tommy's announcement at the end of 1x16 - Tommy/Kate or just general group hijinks, either would be great! [As of right now, I actually haven't seen 14 or 15 yet, so NO WORRIES if you haven't seen the unaired ones!]

3. BROOKLYN NINE NINE - Rosa, Amy, Jake, Holt

I would LOVE to read about a holiday gift exchange at the Nine-Nine - maybe as a mandatory team-building exercise that Holt institutes to replace the wild party Jake usually throws every year.

I have so many questions about this. Who does Holt put in charge? Who's the cheapest? Who goes all out? Can you give someone a freshly-caught perp as a gift? Does Boyle whine at people to trade with him so he can be assigned to Rosa, or does he find the prospect of getting her a perfect gift too daunting? Does Jake get assigned to Holt and agonize over whether to go for a gag gift or something classy? Does he get assigned to Amy, and totally intend to get her something terrible because that's how his crush on Amy works, but then he comes across something that would actually be perfect and thoughtful and can't decide how to proceed? Does Terry love Christmas or hate it? WHERE did Gina buy that weird and slightly terrifying gift?

4. GO ON - Lauren, Steven, Anne, Owen

I'd absolutely love a story about any of the following: Steven and Lauren actually getting together, Anne and Owen bonding in their own snarky way, any kind of group shenanigans, or Lauren figuring her life out (with or without help from the group).

OH, GO ON. NBC will never be forgiven for cancelling this, NEVER! I'm gonna be like the Firefly fans who are still angrily tweeting at Fox eleven years later. WE COULD HAVE HAD IT ALL, NBC!

Ahem.

This post is a great rundown of how I feel about Go On. I wrote it before 1x19 aired and revealed to me that Lauren/Steven was everything I never knew I wanted, but everything else I love about the show is pretty well covered! Feel free to mix and match with the characters I've requested rather than feeling like you have to include all four (and feel free to bring in anyone else from the group if you want); the ensemble on this show was fantastic and I don't think there's any combination of characters that doesn't have the potential to delight me.

LJ tag, Tumblr tag.

5. HEX HALL - Sophie, Archer

[FYI, author, this is word-for-word from my request last year, because my love for this series is a perfect, unwavering constant.]

College fic! I am totally nuts over the idea of these two going to a normal college like normal kids. I'd obviously love shippy Sophie/Archer fic but if you want to go gen, maybe bring Jenna in, then that works too! Is Archer just baffled by the entire concept of dining halls? Does Sophie end up getting super into school spirit despite herself?

I requested Sophie and Archer, but I'm also the person who nominated HH, so if you were hoping to write Elodie or Jenna, THEY ARE TOTALLY FAIR GAME. I will love absolutely ANYTHING about these characters in college, I promise. Here is all the overexcited screaming I did about Spell Bound, and here is my slightly less unhinged reaction to Hex Hall and Demonglass. Anything you want to do with any combination of the nominated characters is fine by me! [I'd prefer gen if you go that way, but I suppose an argument could also be made for fic about when Archer and Elodie were dating?]

Also an option: As discussed/incoherently screamed in this thread, I'd be super into fic about Jenna and Elodie as immortal frenemies. I don't even need you to explain why Jenna can communicate with Elodie, although you're welcome to.

The one thing I wouldn't want: My favorite thing about Sophie/Archer is how much they trust and understand each other. I love the moment in Demonglass where he tells her he never felt anything for her, it was all an act, and she doesn't even believe him for a SECOND, just like she never suspects him of being the one to smuggle demonglass into her birthday party - THEY'RE AMAZING. So where normally I am totally in love with misunderstandings and obliviousness in fic, in their case I really don't think I'd be able to buy it.

6. SPIDER-MAN (ULTIMATEVERSE) - Gwen, Jessica, Katie, Miles

I'd love to read about what life was like for any or all of these characters during the year Miles wasn't Spider-Man. Did Gwen and Jessica ever join forces to gang up on Miles? How did they take it when Miles told them he was done? Or, for Katie specifically, I'd love to read anything you can come up with about what her life is like in the Ultimate universe. Is she enjoying a normal life, or is she more similar to her 616 counterpart than she appears? We know from the glances we saw of her in #12 and #19 that she's been paying attention to Miles for a while - does she have any idea that he's got such a huge secret? How did they get together?

Miles and his network of family and friends are so, so, so dear to me, and anything you do with that will be perfect. The emotion Bendis packs in is incredible - #23 is one of my favorite issues of ANYTHING, EVER. Actually, I should broaden that out from just comics - it's one of my favorite installments of anything ever. I ache for Miles and how burdened he is (at such a young age!) by the fear that whatever he does, it might be the wrong choice, and I think the sheer goodness in him is incredible. I love that Gwen is someone who sees a horrifying monster on TV, thinks "hey, that reminds me of the thing that KILLED me," and decides that the only thing for her to do is to head right for it to see how she can help. I love that even though Jessica's barely sure of how she feels about herself, she's absolutely, unwaveringly certain about wanting to make sure nobody else ends up in her position.

Comics *coughDCcough* in general tend to be way too obsessed with people who are dark and compromised, or in taking people who want to be good and punishing them for thinking they could pull that off, and while those stories can absolutely have value, I love this series for knowing that there's plenty of story and depth to be found in people who love their friends and family and want to do the right thing.

Anything you want to do with the characters requested is fine by me. Focus on whichever one or ones you want, bring in whatever other characters you want - I think for this fandom, more so than any of the others, the story I'm most interested in reading is whichever one you're most interested in writing.

As far as ~THE LARGER MARVEL ULTIMATES~ goes: I've only read the Miles run so far, but I do have Peter's run all downloaded and waiting to be read. So if you've read the whole series and want to incorporate parts of it, please feel free, and if you haven't read it, NO WORRIES, NEITHER HAVE I.

[If anyone's treating, I also would not say no to a story where Ganke finds out more about Gwen's past and starts referring to her exclusively as Clone Gwen Stacy, no matter how much everyone tells him to cut it out. For...reasons.]

as if this dust is evidence at all that something has disintegrated

dudski — Wed, 09 Oct 2013 01:55:09 GMT

BEING A CAUTIOUS PERSON, I try not to give anything official ALL TIME TOP TEN status until it's really had time to settle in, because otherwise you end up making a Top 10 OTPs post with characters from Entourage on it, and within months you're like ".................why," and you just have to live with your choices.

AND SO, THERE IS A TWO YEAR WAITING PERIOD.

AND FOR YOUNG JUSTICE, THE WAITING IS UP, AND THE RANKINGS ARE IN, AND THERE HAVE BEEN SOME UPSETS.

For starters, I want to commemorate this moment, exactly two years since I saw Conner scream "WHY CAN'T I FLY?" and knew it was love. I'D LIKE TO THANK BRITA AND TORI FOR GETTING ME TO WATCH THIS SHOW, AND FOR TAKING THIS AMAZING EMOTIONAL JOURNEY WITH ME. I'd also like to draw your attention to the timestamp on that post I just linked vs. the timestamp on this one. YES, I AM THAT GOOD AT WHAT I DO.

And now I'd like to present:

MY ALL-TIME #1 OTP:

FROM MY ALL-TIME FAVORITE SHOW:

BOTH OF WHICH, MOST IMPORTANTLY, FEATURE MY ALL-TIME FAVORITE CHARACTER:

SPIDER-MAN (ULTIMATEVERSE) AND YULETIDE: a timeline

dudski — Mon, 07 Oct 2013 17:19:18 GMT

YULETIDE 2010

-The fandom "Spider-Man (Ultimateverse)" is requested by four people and offered by three. One story is written.

YULETIDE 2011

-The fandom "Spider-Man (Ultimateverse)" is nominated, with the following characters: May Parker (Spider-Man (Ultimateverse)), Miles Morales, Gwen Stacy, J. Jonah Jameson, Jessica Drew, Johnny Storm, Kitty Pryde, Mary Jane Watson, Nick Fury, Peter Parker, Venom.

-Spider-Man (Ultimateverse) is requested by five participants and offered by six. One story is written.

YULETIDE 2012

-The fandom "Spider-Man (Ultimateverse)" is nominated, with the following characters: Aaron Davis, Bobby Drake (Ultimateverse), Detective Maria Hill, Ganke (Ultimate Spider-Man), Johnny Storm (Ultimateverse), Judge (Ultimate Spider-Man), Kitty Pryde (Ultimateverse), May Parker (Ultimate Spider-Man), Norman Osborn (Ultimateverse), Peter Parker (Spider-Man (Ultimateverse)), Rio Morales (Spider-Man (Ultimateverse)), Robert Baldwin (Ultimateverse), Susan Storm (Ultimateverse), Flash Thompson, Gwen Stacy, Jessica Drew, Mary Jane Watson, Miles Morales, Nick Fury.

-Spider-Man (Ultimateverse) is requested by nine participants and offered by eight. This puts it in roughly the top 10% of the 2500+ nominated fandoms in terms of number of offers, and in the top 5% for requests. Five stories are written.

YULETIDE 2013

September 23, 6PM EST: Nominations close, and the approval process begins.

September 26: My nomination of Spider-Man (Ultimateverse), with the characters Katie Bishop, Gwen Stacy, Miles Morales, and Mary Jane Watson (Ultimateverse) is processed. The fandom is approved as "Marvel Ultimates," Katie Bishop is approved as "Kate Bishop (Ultimates)," and the remaining three characters are rejected. (The character rejections are later revealed to be the result of multiple nominations - once a character is approved, any differently-typed duplicates are rejected.)

September 29, 6:27 PM EST: The tagset is opened for review.

September 29, 6:43 PM EST: I comment to ask why all Ultimateverse titles were merged under Marvel Ultimates. As far as I know, this was the first time the issue was raised in a yuletide_admin post. My comment never receives a response from a mod.

September 29, 8:49 PM EST: Due to an AO3 bug, the tagset is closed and public review is temporarily halted.

October 4, 1:40 PM EST: Tagset reopened for review.

October 4, 1:46 PM EST: A commenter asks whether unaddressed issues from previous posts should be brought up again. Mod hhertzof says yes.

October 4, 2:01 PM EST: The same commenter posts about the Ultimateverse merge. A handful of other fans chime in to agree that the merge isn't a good idea.

October 4, 5:12 PM EST: Five days in, the first mod comment on the matter is posted by jenn_calaelen. She says that "a lot of the characters nominated in Spiderman Ultimateverse did not appear in that series," and that out of consideration to the people who nominated wrong, they made the decision to merge the fandoms rather than reject a significant number of incorrect nominations. [~~At time of posting and to the best of my knowledge, this remains the only time mods have responded directly to a user comment on the issue.~~ ETA: This was the only mod reply to a user comment until jenn_calaelen's response to dhampyresa on October 7.]

October 4, 5:49 PM EST - October 6, 4:12 PM EST: I point out that of the 22 characters currently under Marvel Ultimates, all but two would have been valid Spider-Man (Ultimateverse) nominations. Eighteen more fans comment to explain that a) the mod assumption that "Marvel Ultimates" is a suitable umbrella is incorrect, b) that the mods were most likely mistaken when they concluded that most of the nominations were incorrect, and c) it would be better for everyone planning to request and offer Ultimateverse fandoms if they were separated back out to the way they were originally nominated. There is no disagreement between fans as to how they would like this handled. (Unlike, say, the Moriarty/Irene issue in Elementary, in which one fan has requested that the tags be wrangled a certain way due to their headcanon, but other Elementary fans object.) A character breakdown is provided to assist the mods in splitting the fandoms back up.

All told, 21 different users comment in this thread to request that the mods undo their changes.

October 5, 5:12 PM EST: Mod jenn_calaelen posts to explain the mod ruling on the Ultimateverse fandoms. This is only the second time a mod has said anything about the issue, and it still manages to directly contradict previous mod statements.

Whereas the confusion and merge was previously blamed on Spider-Man (Ultimateverse) fans nominating characters who did not appear in their canon (a claim that was disproved), it is now blamed on "characters nominated under the fandom Marvel Ultimates...only appearing in one or more of the Spider-Man titles in the Ultimate verse."

The mod decision is to split the fandoms back into "Marvel Ultimates" (as it was originally nominated) and "Ultimate Comics Spider-Man," a deviation from a) Yuletide precedent, b) AO3 tagging, and c) nominator preference. The mod decision is also that "Ultimate Comics Spider-Man" is the only eligible Ultimate Spider-Man title, despite the fact that the name change from "Ultimate Spider-Man" to "Ultimate Comics Spider-Man" reflects a rebranding rather than a break in the continuous continuity of the series.

The mod decision is also that any characters not appearing in either fandom have been removed from the tagset; the implication being that incorrectly nominated characters saved by the merge have now been lost.

Gwen Stacy is the only character who has been removed.

October 5, 5:26 PM: User myxginxblossoms comments to ask how this problem will inform future nominations decisions, and clarifies that she's talking about the general practice of changing tags without consulting nominators.

October 5, 5:34 PM EST: I comment to point out that Gwen Stacy, the only missing character, is actually a regular player in Ultimate Comics Spider-Man. I also make the apparently colossal mistake of pointing out that marvel.wikia runs different pages for Gwen and for Clone Gwen, thinking that this might be why they concluded that Gwen does not appear in UCSM. However, I also mention that it is never stated in the current UCSM title that Gwen is a clone. (It was news to me, honestly.)

October 5, 5:50 PM - October 6, 3:47 PM EST: Several users comment with further evidence that Gwen Stacy does, in fact, appear in the title in question. Other users comment to point out that the mods are still incorrectly referring to the wider category as the "Ultimates Universe" and a tag wrangler comments to reassure them that it's taken care of. Still more users point out that there's no meaningful canon distinction between USM and UCSM. Many of these users also thank the mods for their cooperation and understanding thus far.

Beyond a clarification regarding Susan Storm, there is no mod response after 5:37 PM EST. [This is understandable; we all have to sleep.]

October 6, 2:16 PM EST: Mod jenn_calaelen responds to a commenter thanking the mods for their time and effort. At this time, all questions regarding Gwen Stacy and the USM/UCSM distinction have received no response.

October 5, 2:53 PM EST: User myxginxblossoms edits her comment to note that she is troubled that mods are responding to praise and ignoring criticism. jenn_calaelen apologizes, saying she didn't realize myxginxblossoms was expecting a reply, and that certain issues need more consideration and therefore do not get quick replies. As part of her response, myxginxblossoms talks about the general silence that Ultimateverse fans have met and why that is frustrating participants.

October 6, 4:50 PM EST: Jenn responds with "Noted," and edits the post [presumably at some point in the following ten minutes, though it could conceivably have happened before 4:50PM] to announce that because nobody nominated Gwen's clone specifically, her rejection stands.

Despite the fact that this is done as an ETA, rather than a comment or a new post, and nobody receives an email notification about this decision, commenters at yuletide_coal pick up on the change almost immediately.

October 6, 5:10 PM EST: The first objection to the Gwen decision is posted. Three more follow.

The objections boil down to the fact that there is no meaningful distinction between Gwen's original body and her clone body, that there is furthermore no meaningful distinction between the different titles that comprise Spider-Man (Ultimateverse), that Gwen is never identified as a clone in the current title, and that even if those distinctions were meaningful, the Gwen Stacy nominations were correct at the time they were nominated, and would still be correct if the mods had just left the nominations alone. It's also pointed out that one of the purposes of the tagset review period is to clarify which incarnation of a character is meant if there is confusion.

October 6, 5:25 PM EST: Comments on the post are closed.

October 6, 5:51 PM EST - October 7, 10:42 AM EST: Six threads on the matter are started on the main tagset review post:

http://yuletide-admin.livejournal.com/155884.html?thread=6796524#t6796524
http://yuletide-admin.livejournal.com/155884.html?thread=6796780#t6796780
http://yuletide-admin.livejournal.com/155884.html?thread=6797036#t6797036
http://yuletide-admin.livejournal.com/155884.html?thread=6797804#t6797804
http://yuletide-admin.livejournal.com/155884.html?thread=6800364#t6800364
http://yuletide-admin.livejournal.com/155884.html?thread=6818796#t6818796

And five on the "last call for corrections" post:

http://yuletide-admin.livejournal.com/156172.html?thread=6801164#t6801164
http://yuletide-admin.livejournal.com/156172.html?thread=6810892#t6810892
http://yuletide-admin.livejournal.com/156172.html?thread=6812172#t6812172
http://yuletide-admin.livejournal.com/156172.html?thread=6817036#t6817036
http://yuletide-admin.livejournal.com/156172.html?thread=6820108#t6820108

None of these comments receive a mod response.

October 7, 12:21 PM EST or somewhere around there: Vetting period ends. Comments on the tagset review post and the last call post are closed.

October 7, 12:28 PM EST: The first comment on the "vetting period ended" post objects to the other posts being closed to comments. A response is...unlikely.

October 7, 2013, 2:52 PM EST: Commenter dhampyresa states that as long as other user's issues are still being addressed, she would like Gwen Stacy added to the tagset.

October 7, 2013, 2:59 PM EST: jenn_calaelen responds. Gwen Stacy has been added to the tagset, as Clone Gwen Stacy (Ultimateverse). ~~(If you're looking for her, she's currently in Unassociated Characters & Relationships.)~~ "Clone Gwen Stacy (Ultimateverse)" now shows as a nominated character in Ultimate Comics Spider-Man.

LIST POST BC I'M A MONSTER THESE DAYS AND NOT A HUMAN

dudski — Mon, 23 Sep 2013 17:28:13 GMT

0. IT'S NOT YOU, IT'S ME, I haven't been around as much! However much someone can NOT BE AROUND while still tweeting a hundred times a day, whatever. Full sentences are hard.

1. SCHOOL STARTED. I'm...an idiot, basically, and someone missed the first meetings of two of my three classes? THE THIRD CLASS IS ONLINE. IT'S NOT AN ACHIEVEMENT THAT I DIDN'T MISS IT BECAUSE THERE WAS NOTHING TO MISS. GOOD WORK, SELF. For some reason I thought my Public Speaking class met on Thursdays, not Tuesdays, and I didn't realize my mistake until Wednesday night. NO PROBLEM, THOUGH, bc I just switched into a section that ACTUALLY met on Thursdays and pretended like nothing ever happened. And I like my section! So that's good!

I have no idea how I missed my first Bio/Anatomy&Physiology session, though. All week I was like "A&P, 9AM Saturday for FIVE GODDAMN HOURS!" and then at some point between leaving work on Friday and like...10:30 on Saturday morning it just COMPLETELY LEFT MY MIND. I saw Fall Out Boy/Panic at the Disco on Friday night SO I GUESS IT WAS THAT? Because I woke up at like 7:30 on Saturday morning all "BACK TO SLEEP, NOWHERE TO BE" and then I woke up again three hours later all "aaaaaaaand I was supposed to be in class an hour and a half ago."

THIS HAS HAD FAR-REACHING EFFECTS, most notably in the registration clusterfuck that occurred when my professor dropped me from the class AFTER I had a "hey, I'm so sorry I missed last week, do you need me to do anything to make it up?" conversation with her where she told me I was fine. THAT IS A FUCKING NIGHTMARE. I say "is" because after fixing things on Saturday and getting re-added to the class, I AM SOMEHOW, ONCE AGAIN, NOT REGISTERED FOR A&P. OKAY. AWESOME. PERFECT. FUCK EVERYTHING. FUCK COMMUNITY COLLEGE. FUCK EVERYONE. [It's supposedly fixed again! But the only reason I even checked on it today was to see if my accounts had settled, because depending on what you check, I either owe the school $700, am owed a $250 refund, and/or have a $400 book advance on my account. NONE OF THOSE THINGS SHOULD BE TRUE. GOD KNOWS HOW THIS WILL SHAKE OUT.]

2. Anyway apart from A&P being a neverending registration clusterfuck, I ALSO think the people I share a lab table with have written me off as a mess? LBR, I'm not at my best at 9AM, and I missed the first week, so the second week I didn't have the homework and had to sit there silently while we went over it in groups, and then there was a MINOR COFFEE SPILLING INCIDENT, and long story short for Week 3 I PUT A LOT OF EFFORT into being more together and having all the work done and the bitches at my lab table still TOTALLY SHUNNED ME so now I'm insane over it. DON'T YOU KNOW WHO I AM? Anyway, I was never not going to have the best grade in the class, but now I am aggressively pursuing a perfect grade so I can shove it in everyone's faces, I am the one who knocks, etc etc.

3. BREAKING BAD! BREAKING BAD! BREAKING BAD! I'm not getting too much into last night's episode because I'm trying to turn my brain off as the finale approaches [GET YOUR THINK PIECES OUT OF MY FACE], but I will say that WALTER WHITE HAVING TO PAY A DUDE TEN GRAND TO HANG OUT WITH HIM FOR AN HOUR IS THE MOST SATISFYING THING THAT'S EVER HAPPENED TO ME. I WAS POSITIVELY GIDDY.

4. So I don't watch the Emmys, I just refresh Wikipedia every hour and then laugh and laugh and laugh, but last night's seems like it was probably a shittier-than-usual way to spend three hours! Jeff Daniels! HAHAHAHAHAHA!

5. ALL THE PILOTS is fully underway and (so far) running on schedule, although tonight - two and a half hours of pilots, plus Sleepy Hollow, and I'm not sure I'll be watching any of them live - should be a bit of a challenge. SO FAR, THOUGH:

ALL THE PILOTS 2013: Back in the Game (DON'T WATCH THIS SHOW)
ALL THE PILOTS: Sleepy Hollow (WATCH THIS SHOW)
ALL THE PILOTS: Dads / Brooklyn Nine-Nine (DON'T WATCH DADS, probably watch Brooklyn Nine-Nine, comedies are tricky, who can tell this early)

This entry was originally posted at http://dudski.dreamwidth.org/1459976.html because FUCK LIVEJOURNAL, FOR SERIOUS. You can comment over there or over here, I really don't care, but eventually you're all going to join me on DW, let's be real.

growth then decay then AN HOUR OF WEEKLY AGONY

dudski — Mon, 09 Sep 2013 02:56:56 GMT

Hi guys what's up how are you I had a SURPRISE REVELATION like ten minutes ago that the reason I never feel like I have anything to update about is that I TWEET EXCESSIVELY AND GET IT ALL OUT OF MY SYSTEM THAT WAY, so I don't have that same I HAVE TO TELL THIS STORY, /UPDATE.BML TIME!!!!!!!!!!! drive like I used to. TODAY I HELPED MY SISTER MOVE INTO HER FRESHMAN DORM AND I FUMBLED HER TV WHILE SETTING IT UP AND FUCKED UP THE DISPLAY SO I HAD TO GO OUT AND BUY HER A NEW ONE, THAT WAS FUN. I mean whatever I could be super FML about it but WHATEVER, THESE THINGS HAPPEN, WHO CARES, WHY BOTHER BEING MAD AT MYSELF ABOUT IT. Also classes started and I fully just DID NOT GO to the first session of either of my in-person classes, not in an avoidant or lazy way but in a "OH, FUCK, THAT WAS YESTERDAY? kind of way. Good job, self. [WHAT IS UP WITH ME THIS WEEK, I DON'T EVEN KNOW. Get it together!]

I also feel like this was probably lost in the shuffle but it should be known that I ended up seeing Pacific Rim in theaters a total of eight times. #CHAMPION

Anyway who gives a FUCK about anything I just said I'm actually here to cry helplessly about Breaking Bad.

FUCK THIS SHOW AND EVERYONE INVOLVED IN IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I feel like just by TV RULES Hank and Jesse have to be fine, even if it's just temporarily, because the only thing more bullshit than a cliffhanger is a cliffhanger that prevents a major character death from being a climactic scene. BUT WHAT DO I KNOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! IF ANYONE COULD FIND A WAY IT WOULD BE VINCE GILLIGAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! MAYBE JESSE'S LIFELESS BODY IS GOING TO BE THE FIRST SHOT OF THE NEXT EPISODE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! EVERYTHING HURTS AND I'M DYING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! FUCK THIS SHOW!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I don't know if I've ever seen a show that was so agonizingly reliant [in a good way!] on LETTING THE AUDIENCE'S OWN EXPECTATIONS STRESS THEM THE FUCK OUT. Like "yeah, let's just drag out this scene of them arresting Walt out for AS LONG AS IS HUMANLY POSSIBLE, because FRANKLY during these long, tense silences, everyone at home is going to build their own emotional rollercoaster and ride around on it until they want to die." AND THAT'S EXACTLY WHAT I DO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I STARE AT JESSE'S FACE AND I'M LIKE "I'M RIGHT THERE WITH YOU, JESSE, I'M TERRIFIED BECAUSE THERE'S NO WAY IT'S THIS EASY!" AND THEN JESSE FINALLY STARTS TO LOOK LIKE HE BELIEVES IT'S ALL COMING TO AN END, AND SUDDENLY I AM NO LONGER RIGHT THERE WITH JESSE, BECAUSE HE IS ON AN UPSWING AND I AM IN THE LOWEST, DARKEST PLACE I HAVE EVER BEEN, BECAUSE I THOUGHT WE WERE LONG PAST THE POINT WHERE I WOULD EVER BE HURT BY JESSE PINKMAN'S HOPE AGAIN, BECAUSE I THOUGHT HE WAS OUT OF HOPE PERMANENTLY, BUT NOPE!!!!!!!! HE FOUND SOME HOPE!!!!!!!!!!!!1 WHICH MEANS EVERYONE IS GOING TO DIE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ME INCLUDED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! And at that point I thought Hank and Walt were gonna drive away and then the FNL gang would come and murder Jesse and Gomez, BUT NOPE TO THAT TOO!!!!!!!!!!! I WASN'T THINKING PAINFUL ENOUGH!!!!!!!!!!!! BECAUSE THEN HANK CALLED MARIE AND SORRY BUT IF THAT'S NOT A "LAST WORDS YOU EVER SPEAK TO YOUR WIFE" CONVERSATION I DON'T KNOW WHAT IS.

I DON'T EVEN REMEMBER WHAT ELSE HAPPENED IN THIS EPISODE

WEIRD VIBES BETWEEN TODD AND LYDIA, THAT WAS A THING THAT ALMOST MATTERED ONCE

UM

HUELL SAYING MORE WORDS THAN HUELL HAS EVER SAID

UM

JUNIOR BEING STARSTRUCK AROUND SAUL

UM

WHO CARES

EVERYTHING HURTS AND I'M DYING

FUCK THIS SHOW AND FUCK EVERYONE IN IT

This entry was originally posted at http://dudski.dreamwidth.org/1459945.html because FUCK LIVEJOURNAL, FOR SERIOUS. You can comment over there or over here, I really don't care, but eventually you're all going to join me on DW, let's be real.

MY WEEKLY DOSE OF AGONY

dudski — Mon, 19 Aug 2013 02:54:51 GMT

FUCK EVERYTHING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! GOD FUCKING DAMN IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I FIGURED A FEW SECONDS BEFORE IT HAPPENED THAT THE EPISODE WAS GOING TO CUT OFF WHERE IT DID BUT STILL: FUCK EVERYTHING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

SKYLER WINNING THE GAME OF METH THRONES EVERY WEEK IS MY EVERYTHING. MY STAR, MY PERFECT SILENCE. I FUCKING LOVE THE POSITION SHE'S IN RIGHT NOW. [LOL AT WALT'S OFFENSE THAT SHE WOULD JUST GO OFF AND MEET WITH HANK WITHOUT TALKING TO HIM FIRST. WALT'S INABILITY TO ACCEPT WHAT A FUCKING MONSTER HE IS WHEN HE'S IN WHINER MODE IS KIND OF MAGICAL.] Okay, so, obviously I'm worried about her getting out of this unscathed, because at this point lbr she's like the only one with even the slightest fucking chance of ending the series without her life being any more ruined than it already has been. OBVIOUSLY given the flashforwards everything is going to go to shit, but Skyler will basically consider herself okay as long as she and the kids get out together, and there's probably still a path to that if only she can find it.

I FUCKING LOVE THAT SHE'S FOUND HERSELF IN THIS POSITION WHERE SHE'S LIKE "UGH, WALT'S KIND OF MY ALLY." She fucking hates him and if everything blew over she'd never be able to forgive and forget and go back to being how they were, but because they're in this crisis position now and her entire worldview and all of her priorities have shifted so much - and because, unlike the awfulness of their relationship in the first half of S5, she's actually holding a lot of cards right now - she's actually found herself in a position where helping Walt get away with it is her best option? SKYLER ASKING FOR A LAWYER. SKYLER ASKING IF SHE'S UNDER ARREST. SKYLER NOT ADMITTING SHIT TO MARIE. SKYLER TELLING WALTER "BELIZE?????" WHITE THAT HANK CAN'T PROVE SHIT. SKYLER INTERNALLY BEING LIKE "OF FUCKING COURSE YOU DID" WHEN WALT IS LIKE "NOBODY TALKED, I JUST FUCKED UP." Skyler White: Literally the only person on this show with the wits to maybe get away with all of this. Turning on Walt won't be an option forever, but it's going to be an option for a long fucking time, and if she plays things right she can always have that in her back pocket as an escape plan. [GOD, MIKE WOULD HAVE LOVED SKYLER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!]

LYDIA AND TODD, WHATEVER. Not to disparage what was a really good scene, and I'm sure the meth business is going to tie back into what everyone else is doing at some point, but also, I'm not here for Lydia and Todd. This entire half-season could just be Walt, Skyler, Hank, Marie, and Jesse having tense conversations and I'd be more than fine with that. Saul can come too, I guess. ANYWAY IT WAS REALLY CUTE WHEN HE WAS LIKE "MA'AM, ARE YOU OKAY?" BECAUSE I ALWAYS FORGET THAT TODD'S THE FUCKING WORST AND NOT ACTUALLY LANDRY.

UMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM OTHER STUFF, I DON'T KNOW? JUST LOSING MY SHIT FOREVER OVER THAT LAST SCENE. I NEED IT TO BE NEXT SUNDAY LIKE NOW.

This entry was originally posted at http://dudski.dreamwidth.org/1459491.html because FUCK LIVEJOURNAL, FOR SERIOUS. You can comment over there or over here, I really don't care, but eventually you're all going to join me on DW, let's be real.

tread lightly.

dudski — Mon, 12 Aug 2013 19:21:10 GMT

HOLY EMMY REEL, DEAN NORRIS!!!!!!!! I cannot believe they went there so soon, holy crap. HANK KNOWS! WALT KNOWS HANK KNOWS! HANK KNOWS WALT KNOWS HANK KNOWS! OPEN CONFRONTATION AND PUNCHING WALT RIGHT IN HIS DUMB FUCKING FACE! Man oh man oh man, what happens from here? I loooooove how much Hank pieced together from like a year ago, the phone call about Marie, the car accident, SO MUCH STUFF, and he doesn't even know the half of it yet! It's interesting that Jane's death and the plane crash - aka the worst thing Walt's ever done to Jesse and the worst thing Walt's ever caused to happen - are one of the few major things that, if Walt just kept his mouth shut, nobody would ever end up knowing about. But, as some of the worst things Walt's ever done, they almost have to come out, don't they? I have no trouble believing that Walt will run his mouth at some point, BUT WHAT IF IT'S SOME NIGHTMARE SCENARIO WHERE HE TELLS JESSE ABOUT JANE JUST TO HURT HIM, WHAT IF JESSE BECOMES A WITNESS FOR THE PROSECUTION IN AN ATTEMPT TO DO RIGHT BY THE SHARPS/EHRMENTRAUTS/BOETTICHERS/EVERYONES AND WALT GOES TO MURDER HIM AND IS LIKE "LOL PS I WATCHED JANE DIE" JUST TO RUB IT IN. Uuuuuuggggggghhhhh every possibility is too painful. Jesse can't get out of this series in one piece MAINLY BECAUSE JESSE IS NO LONGER IN ONE PIECE.

As for Hank: WHAT A FUCKED UP SITUATION TO BE IN! I love that he just hauled off and punched Walt in the face rather than pasting on a smile and trying to play him for as long as he could. I like that he was too overwhelmed by the enormity of everything Walt's done! Like, Walt can smile and go about his business and talk to Skyler about the margin on air fresheners [JUST THROW ALL THE AIR FRESHENERS IN THE TRASH EVERY DAY, RECORD THEM AS SALES, AND ORDER NEW ONES YOU LITERALLY HAVE MORE MONEY THAN YOU WILL EVER KNOW WHAT TO DO WITH] because unless he's wearing his ugly fucking Heisenberg hat, he's utterly deluded about what an irredeemable monster he is, whereas Hank is now TOTALLY AWARE OF IT and normal humans can't bear that kind of thing! I'M GLAD HANK CRACKED!

But this DOES put him in an interesting position - one I'm surprised Walt didn't focus on more, honestly, although I guess he's still trying his whole "who, me?" thing - where he's going to have to destroy his own life to take Walt down. He has to pursue a member of his own family, which would tear them all apart in and of itself, but there's the added complication that Skyler is complicit in all of this, so he's also going to have to target his wife's sister. Beyond that, there's the humiliation that Heisenberg was right under his nose the entire time and he never had any idea, which...it would have been bad when he was just an agent, considering how often he asked Walt to consult on these things, but now that he's an ASAC, it's got to be worse.

On the bright side: If it comes to that, Skyler is going to do so fucking well in prison. SPINOFF ABOUT SKYLER'S LIFE ON THE INSIDE. I'd watch it.

SPEAKING of Skyler, her vs. Lydia was a delight, and I continue to admire the way that Skyler is the only criminal on this show with any fucking sense whatsoever and ALSO how thoroughly she's embraced intimidation as a tactic when I can't even imagine her following through. I LOVE YOU, SKYLER. CALL ME.

And that just leaves Jesse! I can't talk about it. Crying forever. I can't imagine him leaving this show okay. WHAT IS EVEN LEFT TO DREAM FOR HIM? I used to have my GUS AND JESSE AND MIKE ARE A FAMILY OF CRIME BROS dreams, and then I had my MIKE KILLS WALT AND LOOKS AFTER JESSE dreams, and now I have...nothing? "JESSE FINDS SOME WAY TO COPE WITH THE LOSS OF HIS INNOCENCE AND ALSO EVERYONE WHO HAS EVER GIVEN A FUCK ABOUT HIM, BUT ULTIMATELY STILL HAS TO LIVE WITH ALL OF THAT EVERY DAY FOR THE REST OF HIS LIFE." Okay. Cool. What a dream.

IN OTHER NEWS I've been feeling shitty about pretty much EVERYTHING ABOUT MYSELF for the last week or so, which is always fun. The best way to handle this would probably be to DO A LOT OF THINGS and KEEP MYSELF BUSY, which is why it's very convenient that I just dropped a month's pay on my fall tuition bill and won't be able to afford to do anything ever again. HELPFUL!!!! Either way classes start up in three weeks and from then on it'll hopefully be ALL MOMENTUM ALL THE TIME and I won't be so focused on my own awfulness! FINGERS CROSSED!

This entry was originally posted at http://dudski.dreamwidth.org/1459409.html because FUCK LIVEJOURNAL, FOR SERIOUS. You can comment over there or over here, I really don't care, but eventually you're all going to join me on DW, let's be real.

i haven't seen pacific rim in a week I'VE GOT THE SHAKES

dudski — Thu, 01 Aug 2013 19:21:06 GMT

WHAT'S UP, HOW IS EVERYONE? I haven't done a HERE'S WHAT I'M UP TO update in a lot longer than I thought! Here is one!

0. Friday was my teacher's memorial service. I don't have much to say about it, only that it was devastating, and that I'm incredibly grateful that Robyn was there and willing to steer me around afterwards while I cried all over her.

1. I did a lot of work at work yesterday and then none of it ended up mattering so today I've just refreshed Tumblr and screamed a lot about Pacific Rim. It's been good for me.

UM, like two weeks ago I had my ANNUAL REVIEW, which I was expecting in like March, but whatever. Bridgette had hers a few days before mine and ended up FULLY VENTING TO DEBBIE about what a soul-crushing nightmare this place is and how she dreads coming in every day, WHICH IS LOLMAZING, and I went into mine fully prepared to back her up if necessary because even tough normally I will just silently hate everyone for years, I HAVE BRIDGETTE'S BACK ALWAYS. (Well, usually. There was this thing one time. We're not here to talk about that.) But what ended up happening was that Debbie and Paula were like "LOOK, BILL IS TERRIBLE AND WE ALL HAVE TO COPE WITH IT. CAN YOU COPE WITH IT? WE MAY NOT PLAN ON EVER GIVING YOU BENEFITS, BUT REMEMBER LAST WEEK WE ORDERED A PIZZA?"

ETA the other thing that happened in my review was that they were like YOU'RE PERFECT DON'T EVER CHANGE, AND IF YOU CHANGED ANYTHING, WE'D WANT IT TO BE MAKING YOURSELF MORE COMFORTABLE ASKING FOR HELP WHEN YOU'RE SWAMPED. So I will continue to not do anything ever.

ADDITIONALLY there has been some giant fuckup at Bill's restaurant in which they hired a third-party to handle their takeout/delivery system, and this ended in NOBODY EVER ORDERING TAKEOUT OR DELIVERY AGAIN, and I was sent a giant clusterfuck of a 30,000-name spreadsheet of every takeout/delivery customer they had in the POS database, and I was supposed to turn it into a mailing list for "SORRY, COME BACK!" postcards. I've been going through that spreadsheet, in addition to doing all my other shit, for over a week. YESTERDAY I ASKED PAULA IF THE POSTCARDS WERE IN FROM THE PRINTER YET BC I WAS CONCERNED I WAS HOLDING UP THE PROCESS AND SHE WAS LIKE "LOL YEAH NO WE'RE NOT DOING THAT." COOL JOB!!!!!!!!!!

2. Kate's getting MARRIED next summer and I went with her/her mom/her aunt/her sister in law/her fiance's friend Megan to go WEDDING DRESS SHOPPING, which was hilarious, because in terms of how much thought I put into clothes, the only thing that separates me from the average dude is the part where I consider how my boobs look in something. "That's much more of a winter dress." -EVERYONE, UNANIMOUSLY AND INEXPLICABLY. Something something necklines, something something sashes, something something ivory vs white? I DON'T KNOW.

What was VERY FUN was the part where Kate was getting herself into and out of dresses and Megan and Jenna started talking about how the girls in another group at the store were trying on the same dresses Kate had picked out for her bridesmaids, just in a different color, and then there was some conversation about how half the bridesmaids would be in pink and the other half in green, and hey, while we're here should we maybe just go ahead and try some on?

Now: I am not a bridesmaid. But people were very much talking to me like I was. And Kate wasn't around. And I am, outside of family, probably Kate's closest female friend. And our friend Eric is actually officiating at the ceremony - and he, Kate and I have been friends for the same period of time, but I'm definitely closer to her.

So it's not out of the question that I would be a bridesmaid. [Although, to be clear, I never expected to be one, and in this particular case I'd honestly rather not be one.] And people kept including me in these conversations about the dresses and what size heel Kate wanted bridesmaids wearing and this and that and the other thing, and Kate was occupied, and I'm sitting there like AM I A BRIDESMAID? KATE AND I WERE WASTED WHEN SHE GAVE ME MY SAVE THE DATE. DOES SHE THINK SHE ASKED ME ALREADY? DID SHE ASK ME AND I DON'T REMEMBER? WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON? AM I AN IDIOT FOR NOT KNOWING THIS? I MEAN, WEDDING DRESS SHOPPING IS A BRIDESMAID THING, RIGHT? At one point Kate's mom distributed these little gifts she had gotten for everyone who came, and they were wrapped in green or pink paper, and she was very deliberate about giving Megan a green-wrapped one because she was going to be a green bridesmaid (or, like groomsmaid, they're being unconventional), and then she handed me a pink one, and I'm like SO THESE ARE SUPPOSED TO MATCH OUR BRIDESMAID DRESSES? AM I A BRIDESMAID? DO I SERIOUSLY NOT GET TO WEAR GREEN?

Again: I am not a bridesmaid.

BUT AT THE VERY LEAST, HALF THAT GROUP THOUGHT I WAS (Kate's aunt, the saleswoman, and probably Megan), AND I HAD NO IDEA HOW TO PLAY IT. How much do you engage in those conversations without making it sound like you mistakenly think you're a bridesmaid, but also, on the off chance that you drunkenly agreed to be one, HOW MUCH IS ENOUGH SO THAT YOU DON'T LOOK LIKE AN ASSHOLE?

Anyway it was all fine, I survived and then at lunch I was like SO KATE, WALK ME THROUGH THE ROSTER OF YOUR WEDDING PARTY, and lo, it was good.

3. LAST THURSDAY I MET UP WITH hongkongaton TO SEE PACIFIC RIM AND IT WAS GRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRREAT AND THEN WE GOT BERTUCCI'S AFTER AND IT WAS ALSO GREAT.

4. Yesterday's Morning Glories blew my mind. PROBABLY GONNA GO TO BOSTON COMIC CON THIS WEEKEND JUST TO WALK UP TO JOE EISMA AND BE LIKE "I HAVE A LOT OF QUESTIONS. NUMBER ONE, HOW DARE YOU? NUMBER TWO, CAN YOU TELL ME EVERYTHING?"

5. ANYWAY NOW I HAVE TO GO SUE SOMEONE FOR BILL OR SOMETHING. I'M NOT SURE WHAT FOR. GOOD TIMES.

MORE PACIFIC RIM THOUGHTS ALWAYS

dudski — Sun, 28 Jul 2013 04:03:42 GMT

1. OKAY FIRST OF ALL, it clicked for me on IN-THEATER VIEWING #4 that it's actually really fucking gross that Newt has Kaiju tattoos all over him? LIKE, PICTURE THAT ELEVATOR SCENE WHERE HE AND RALEIGH TALK ABOUT HIS TATTOOS AND MAKO JUST ROLLS HER EYES.

Now imagine that one of those tattoos is of Knifehead, the kaiju that killed Yancy.

Or it's Onibaba, who killed Mako's parents.

Or it's Trespasser, who killed Pentecost's sister.

AND THAT SCENE TAKES ON A WHOLE NEW FUCKING TONE. It just feels like it'd be one thing to have a fondness for kaiju, especially as a scientist who studies them and is excited by all the mystery and possibility they represent, and it's another thing entirely to be walking around a Shatterdome with kaiju tattoos, going "oh yeah, this little guy?" given how up close and personal people in the PPDC are with the kaiju war and ALSO given that nearly every character in the PPDC that we know even a little bit about has lost a loved one in a kaiju attack - Mako, Raleigh, Stacker, Herc and Chuck (I thiiiiiiiink, anyway? Someone said something about this being in the novelization, which I still haven't read, but there's nothing on the wiki, so IDK), Tendo - they've all lost family members to kaiju. And it also just stands to reason that the PPDC would attract a huge number of recruits who have lost people/homes/livelihoods to Kaiju attacks - vengeance/justice aside, there's the fact that the economies of most coastal cities, especially those that were attacked, would basically collapse, and the PPDC would be the only ones doing any significant hiring. You'd see a FUCKLOAD of people whose cities were attacked - people who presumably would have moved inland already if they had any kind of financial means - who, in the aftermath of seeing their home or workplace destroyed, would have seen the PPDC as their best option.

AND NEWT WALKS AMONG THEM WITH KAIJU TATTOOED ALL OVER HIS BODY, GOING "THIS LITTLE GUY?" I'm not really trying to demonize him for it, it just struck me while I was watching that I have no idea how he doesn't end up in SUPER AWKWARD CONFRONTATIONS like every fifteen minutes!

2. PRE-MOVIE UNREQUITED CHUCK/MAKO WHERE HE WANTED HER AND SHE NEVER GAVE A FUCK ABOUT HIM IS MY WHOLE WORLD AS OF SIX HOURS AGO WHEN I STUMBLED ONTO IT IN CONVERSATION WITH disco_vendetta. Okay okay okay hear me out: I was reading Pacific Rim: Man, Machines, and Monsters today and for BOTH characters it's basically like "they were both too focused on becoming Jaeger pilots to have friends." THEY'RE BOTH ULTRA-FOCUSED, ULTRA-COMPETITIVE JAEGER BRATS. THEIR DADS KNOW EACH OTHER. I'm not saying that they grew up in each other's pockets, because I doubt their paths crossed enough for that, but I WOULD say that they would have been stuck with each other on the occasions that their dads were stationed in the same place, that they would have understood things about each other that normal kids wouldn't get, that on some level they would have respected each other's skills, that he would have been into her because she's Mako Mori and he's a carbon-based lifeform, but also, that he would have wanted her as his second and not his equal, and she would have known it, and that it would have fucking KILLED him when she got to go to Jaeger Academy a year before him even though they were the same age, and that when he became a pilot right out of the Academy and Pentecost [presumably] blocked her from doing the same, he would have been fucking insufferable about it. MAINLY, THOUGH: He grew up wanting her to be his and never once understood how fucked up it was that he had no intention of being hers! IT GIVES "WE CAN CLEAR A PATH FOR THE LADY" THIS WHOLE NEW SECONDARY LAYER BENEATH THE OBVIOUSLY SUPERIOR PRIMARY ONE.

3. OKAY SO IN-THEATER VIEWING #3 WAS A LIFE-ALTERING EXPERIENCE FOR ME. I am...not the best at tracking action sequences, MAINLY because I don't care, but also I feel like this is partly an editing thing too, but Raleigh and Yancy's insubordination in the beginning wasn't clear to me the first two times I saw it - I thought they were just distracting themselves with the boat when they were supposed to ignore it, a decision that ultimately didn't contribute much (if anything) to the beating Gipsy Danger ended up taking. But then the novelization has references to Raleigh being grounded/disciplined for insubordination (PLUS references to Raleigh "crashing a Jaeger" like it didn't just happen in the course of regular duty), and it made zero sense to me that after losing his brother, singlehandedly taking down Knifehead, and then solo piloting Gipsy Danger to shore, Raleigh would still be disciplined for PICKING UP A BOAT. But the actual issue - AND SORRY IF THIS IS SUPER OBVIOUS? BUT IT WAS LIFE-CHANGING FOR ME - is that Raleigh and Yancy went MILES past where they were ordered, specifically so that they could rescue the people on the boat. And being miles away from the position that was chosen for them meant that they weren't fighting under the best possible conditions, and Knifehead got the upper hand, and Yancy died, and Gipsy Danger was so heavily damaged that she was basically discarded until five years later, when Pentecost got desperate for Jaegers and had Mako restore her.

So: Even though they made the decision jointly, Raleigh still knows that he said "you know what I'm thinking," and that was the start of a sequence of events that ended with Yancy getting killed. AND THE GUILT ASPECT OF THAT IS HUGE TO ME, because Raleigh left the PPDC after Knifehead and chose to refuse survivor benefits and go to work on the Wall of Life for rations instead, but what's way more compelling to me is, obviously, HOW THIS RELATES TO MAKO, DUH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Okay: So Raleigh's story, on a very shallow level, can read like your basic "you fall off the horse, you get back on" comeback kid kind of tale where he avenges his brother's death and regains his confidence or whatever. BUT ACTUALLY, if you factor in the Knifehead deployment being a COLOSSAL lapse in judgment that had unfathomable consequences for him, it's actually a story about him needing to FIX HIS SHIT in order to be a hero. Coming into the movie, PILOTS ARE ROCK STARS, Raleigh and Yancy are so LIKEABLE, they're such a good team, and Gipsy Danger's so awesome, and it all seems to work so well that I really just...assumed they were the best, you know? Then follow that up with Pentecost seeking Raleigh out, and I really assumed Raleigh was the best of the best, and that Chuck was full of shit when he went on about bad pilots like Raleigh being the ones who brought the program down...but I couldn't figure out WHAT was going on with this:

"I think you're unpredictable. You have a habit of deviating from standard combat techniques. You take risks that endanger yourself and your crew. I don't think you're the right man for this mission."

LIKE...........HOW COULD HE NOT BE THE RIGHT MAN FOR THIS MISSION? WHAT GIVES, MAKO? But it makes a lot of sense to me now - that Raleigh had a lot of raw talent, but not a lot of discipline, that he had a lot to teach Mako about piloting, but he still had a lot to learn from her about what it means to be a Ranger and how to be part of someone else's team. He wasn't up to her standard, and she told him so, and she was right, and on some level, he knew it:

"In combat, you make decisions, and you have to live with the consequences.

[SHE IMAGINED HIM DIFFERENTLY BECAUSE SHE THOUGHT HE'D BE A DOUCHEBAG, because he deliberately disobeyed her mentor and she had to fix all the damage that was done to Gipsy Danger because of it.]

He learns restraint, and respect, and trust - he pushes the line with Pentecost and even oversteps it occasionally, but you never again see him make a call like he did in Anchorage. He challenges Pentecost, most significantly when it comes to wanting to copilot with Mako, but he works within Pentecost's framework and waits for his moments - "Gipsy's analog." Mako's "It's not obedience, it's respect" is something that actually carries as a theme for Raleigh, who goes from risking an entire city for a single boat to stopping in his tracks at the Breach because Pentecost said not to come to Striker's aid.

HE LEARNED RESPECT THE HARD WAY, I GUESS I'M SAYING, and I'm super into the idea that he couldn't fulfill his potential as a Ranger until he did.

i had a choice between sleep and being furious on the internet

dudski — Tue, 23 Jul 2013 06:22:00 GMT

WARNING FOR OTHER PEOPLE'S FUCKING TERRIBLE PACIFIC RIM OPINIONS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!1

So this happened:

how is it that the characters who barely speak at all in this movie are ten thousand times more compelling than Chuck and Raleigh put together like geez guys

SHORT REACTION: AND THAT'S THE STORY OF HOW I UNFOLLOWED GINGERHAZE!

LONG VERSION:

-I don't...understand...what is happening there? That's just going out of your way to shit on Raleigh. THE TRIPLETS PLAY BASKETBALL AND THEN THEY DIE. THAT'S LITERALLY IT. THE RUSSIANS STRUT AND THEN THEY DIE. THAT'S ALSO IT. Thinking that integral and fleshed out versions of those characters would be more compelling than Raleigh (who is actually integral and fleshed out) is not the same thing as the existing versions of those characters (which, for better or worse, are such nonentities that even the people who love them legit can't figure out who is who) actually being more compelling.

-LET ME REITERATE THE WORD "INTEGRAL" BECAUSE WHAT FUCKING MOVIE DID YOU SEE / WHAT MOVIE ARE YOU A FAN OF IF YOU THINK RALEIGH IS THAT USELESS? Liiiiiike even approaching this movie from an "ALL I CARE ABOUT IS MAKO" perspective, he is literally exactly what she needed to achieve EVERYTHING SHE WANTED TO ACHIEVE. You could think of him as a fucking PIECE OF EQUIPMENT if you wanted to be an asshole about it and make sure MAKO'S NOT BEING DENIED FULL AGENCY OVER HER WEAPONIZED LADY BADASSERY or what the fuck ever, even from that perspective this is still a story about the universe doing Mako Mori a solid by delivering a perfect-match copilot to her in a goddamn helicopter, special order from Alaska, so that she can fulfill all of her personal goals and avenge her family and make Pentecost proud and become the all-star Jaeger pilot she's fought tooth and nail to be. EVEN IF YOU PICK THAT INTERPRETATION WHERE YOU GIVE ZERO FUCKS ABOUT RALEIGH AS A CHARACTER, THERE'S STILL NO MOVIE WITHOUT HIM?

-But seriously enough of that fucking terrifying AU where you don't give a fuck about Raleigh as a character, BECAUSE RALEIGH AS A CHARACTER IS GREAT? THIS IS A MOVIE ABOUT TWO GREAT PEOPLE WHO ARE GREAT FOR EACH OTHER AND GREAT TOGETHER AND MAKE EACH OTHER EVEN GREATER LITERALLY JUST BY SMILING AND ALSO BEATING THE SHIT OUT OF THINGS/EACH OTHER? What the hell kind of mental gymnastics do you have to do to come out of that movie thinking nothing about Raleigh was compelling, and WHAT WAS LEFT OF THE MOVIE IF YOU DID? HOW DO YOU LOVE MAKO DEEPLY AND TRULY WITH ALL YOUR HEART IN THE WAY SHE DESERVES TO BE LOVED IF YOU DON'T ALSO LOVE HER SUN AND STARS? IF YOU WANNA BE HER LOVER YOU GOTTA GET WITH HER COPILOT. GOD HELP THE MISTER THAT COMES BETWEEN HER AND HER DRIFTER. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?

-"HE WAS CRYING, BUT THEY WERE MAKO'S TEARS"

-And all of that CLEAR AND BLATANT BULLSHIT AND GRATUITOUS RALEIGH DOWNPLAYING aside, LOL AT THE TRIPLETS OR THE RUSSIANS NOT EVEN BEING MORE COMPELLING THAN CHUCK. Chuck's the worst and he actually could lift right out of the movie and he's still more compelling than five characters with maybe five lines between them simply by virtue of having an arc and a personality and distinct relationships with other human beings.

-Once again/finally, WHAT IS APPEALING TO YOU ABOUT THIS MOVIE, IF THE CORE CONCEPT OF "IF WE STICK TOGETHER AND LOVE EACH OTHER, THE TWO OF US TOGETHER CAN SAVE THE WORLD" IS NOT SOMETHING YOU FIND COMPELLING? That's it. That's the movie. Mako and Raleigh are a package deal? If she hears you saying this shit she's going to return the favor from when he beat Chuck up, and she's going to physically fight you for disrespecting her doofier half, and he's going to stand there grinning doofily while she does it! Like...everything I've seen and read about the movie keeps coming back to the co-pilot system, that for a long time after Travis Beacham decided he wanted to do a JAEGERS VS KAIJU movie he still didn't know what would drive it and make it worthwhile, that the story didn't start to come together until it had co-pilots in it. AND EVERYTHING ALWAYS COMES BACK TO THAT. IT'S SO BLINDINGLY, OBVIOUSLY IMPORTANT, WHAT ARE YOU CRYING YOURSELF TO SLEEP ABOUT IF IT'S NOT THAT? OR ARE YOU JUST NOT CRYING YOURSELF TO SLEEP AT ALL? HOW DO YOU SLEEP, THEN? I DON'T GET IT. PLEASE TELL ME YOU'RE SLEEPING.

IDK, guys. It's like the price we pay the universe for Pacific Rim's LIFE RUINING PERFECTION is that it exists smack in the middle of two incredibly shitty fandom trends, the first being that because Mako's not a white dude, the fic quantity is barely even a percentage point of what it would be if she were. [Sidebar, I say QUANTITY because quality has already been locked down and guaranteed forever.] And then, because Raleigh IS a white dude, I HAVE TO DEAL WITH ALL THESE FUCKING INSUFFERABLE OPINIONS ABOUT HOW HE'S NOT COMPELLING AND HOW BULLSHIT AND SEXIST IT IS THAT HE SAVES MAKO AND WHATEVER THE FUCK ELSE? Give me a BREAK, this is literally the worst of both fandom worlds. I'M NOT CRYING ON RALEIGH BECKET'S WHITE DUDE BEHALF [I'm crying on his behalf on like forty other counts, though], I'M CRYING ON MY BEHALF BECAUSE ALL I WANT IS FOR PEOPLE NOT TO BE THE WORST, AND ALL PEOPLE ARE IS THE WORST.

This entry was originally posted at http://dudski.dreamwidth.org/1458540.html because FUCK LIVEJOURNAL, FOR SERIOUS. You can comment over there or over here, I really don't care, but eventually you're all going to join me on DW, let's be real.

IT'S A LOVE STORY MAKO JUST SAY YES

dudski — Mon, 22 Jul 2013 02:48:46 GMT

SO HERE'S THE THING: Pacific Rim has all of the FUCK YEAH PERFECT EXECUTION OF A JOYFUL FUN SUMMER ACTION MOVIE excitement of Iron Man or STXI [all three of which were situations where AS I WAS WATCHING I could already see myself in the distant future relaxing on the couch and popping the DVD in for the billionth time], but on top of that it's also VERY MUCH about things that have dominated my focus for the last two years - NAMELY, FREAKISHLY COMPATIBLE PEOPLE AND/OR PEOPLE WITH MENTAL CONNECTIONS AND/OR PEOPLE WHO LITERALLY SHARE BRAIN SPACE. And all that was combined with an overarching theme of SAVING THE WORLD BY BEATING UP MONSTERS WITH THE SHEER FORCE OF YOUR LOVE, and on top of THAT the movie takes place in a world that I'm dying to see more of and to know more about, basically guaranteeing that I will never run out of ways to freak out about this gd movie and all the people in it.

IT'S THE COMPLETE PACKAGE. IT'S EVERYTHING I EVER WANTED. I'M NOT EVEN GONNA TRY TO TALK ABOUT IT COMPREHENSIVELY BECAUSE TO PRETEND LIKE I CAN EVEN BEGIN TO COVER IT ALL IS INSULTING TO ITS SIZE. What I'm saying is that if you don't care about Pacific Rim, I hope you know how to tag filter, because I'm just going to be screaming about it as the urge strikes me.

RALEIGH BECKET. JAEGER PILOTING GOLDEN RETRIEVER BOYF AND THE CLINGIEST MOTHERFUCKER YOU'LL EVER MEET. I love the COMPLETE DISCONNECT between Raleigh when he has a copilot vs when he doesn't. START OF MOVIE, RALEIGH HAS A COPILOT: Bouncing off the walls when he and Yancy get deployed at 2AM, fucking THRILLED with everything he's doing and everything he is, HAPPY AND EXCITED AND GRATEFUL AND AWED TO BE HERE. TALKING ABOUT FIGHTING HURRICANES LIKE THEY'RE A THING YOU CAN PUNCH IN THE FACE. HIGH FIVES AND GRINS AND CARELESS ARMS THROWN AROUND SHOULDERS ARE THE ORDER OF THE DAY. And then five years later, he's quit the PPDC and he's working on the wall, and HE'S SO SELF-CONTAINED. He doesn't look at his coworkers, he doesn't talk to them, he doesn't touch them. After he brings Gipsy Danger to shore and collapses, we literally don't hear Raleigh say a word until he greets Pentecost. HE'S STANDOFFISH, HE'S UNENTHUSIASTIC, HE'S RELUCTANT TO EVEN BE HAVING THIS CONVERSATION - although it has to be pointed out that he's making his way out of the crowd of workers before we ever hear the chopper, and he walks out to meet it like he always expected this day to come, because this is a movie about people understanding in their bones, whether they're consciously aware of it (STACKER) or not (RALEIGH), what they were put on earth to do and that there are fixed points in their lives that they are working towards - until the moment when he sees Mako for the first time and the sight of her STOPS. HIM. SHORT. And suddenly he's engaged, he's interested, HE'S SMILING, he's clapping Newt on the shoulder and joking with him. RALEIGH BECKET!!!!!!!!!!!!!! THRIVES AROUND PEOPLE AND SPENT YEARS SHUTTING HIMSELF OFF FROM THEM!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Soemthing else about that that is HUGE to me is that he thrives around people and she helps him regain that, but he was also very much getting by on his own - like, this isn't the story of Raleigh Becket, who lost his brother and then nearly self-destructed only to be saved by a second chance to be a hero or whatever. Jaeger pilots are the ultimate celebrities of this future, and not only did he Yancy have a great record as Rangers, but Raleigh's a DROP DEAD GORGEOUS DUDE with a sympathetic story, who lost his brother and still took out a kaiju and piloted his Jaeger home alone - he's basically on an unheard-of level of heroism in this world. And he could have done anything with that. I don't even mean that he had opportunities to make a lot of money and be famous or whatever - I mean he could have done anything, including taking the money and running away somewhere to drink himself to death. In the tie-in novel it says he quit the PPDC after Yancy died and refused all PPDC benefits.

LET ME REITERATE: RALEIGH BECKET COULD HAVE DONE WHATEVER THE FUCK HE WANTED AND NOBODY WOULD EVER HAVE JUDGED HIM FOR IT, AND HE REFUSED SURVIVOR BENEFITS AND WENT TO WORK ON THE WALL FOR RATION CARDS. Raleigh Becket could have bought a mansion and had hot model girlfriends and been all over TMZ all the time. Raleigh Becket could have gotten a cushy talking head job on a cable news network. Raleigh Becket could have gone to live in the woods and never spoken to anyone again. But when he couldn't be a Ranger anymore because he couldn't have someone else in his head, and when he couldn't see himself in the PPDC if he couldn't be a pilot, he did literally the only other thing he could to keep protecting people from Kaiju, and he went to work on the wall.

He was broken, but he wasn't destroyed. He was functioning the best he could, and he could have gotten by like that for a long time, and he would have been okay, if not great. He didn't need to be saved, or redeemed. He could hold his own alone [and he's used to doing it, by the time we see him again - the way he holds his ground against Chuck in that cafeteria scene is v. important to me and my heart, HE'S SO FUCKING STEADY ABOUT IT], but he couldn't thrive alone.

And Mako's the same - she is broken, but she has found ways to go on, she has made herself as whole as she can. NEVER OVER HER LOOKING UP AND SQUINTING INTO THE LIGHT AS PENTECOST STEPS OUT OF COYOTE TANGO LIKE HE IS LITERALLY THE SUN RISING ON A NEW STAGE IN HER LIFE. This isn't a story about two people who need each other to be okay or to survive, it's a story about two people who need each other to be the best and happiest they can be. SHE WAS ALWAYS GOING TO BE A FUCKING MIRACLE WITH OR WITHOUT HIM. FIFTY-ONE DROPS, FIFTY-ONE KILLS. You just fucking know Pentecost did everything he could to discourage her from becoming a Ranger, and you know he made sure her instructors were harder on her than they were on anyone, and she wanted it that fucking badly that she still came out on top with a FLAWLESS RECORD. She's 22 and she's in charge of restoring and upgrading a trillion-dollar piece of equipment. She was always going to avenge her parents one way or the other, just like Raleigh was always going to do whatever he could to protect people from the Kaiju, but what they could do together was so much more than what they could do apart.

Even though Mako gets the most developed backstory in the movie, she's still the one I'm most nuts to learn more about/the primary reason I will actually read the novelization all the way through, BECAUSE I HAVE TO KNOW MORE ABOUT HER DAD THE SWORDMAKER, I HAVE TO. FYI, to anyone I haven't screamed at about this yet: Mako comes from a family of swordmakers, and she continued that tradition by CONCEIVING AND DESIGNING GIPSY DANGER'S SWORD. That scene where Raleigh's like WE'RE FUCKED, AND NOT IN THE WAY I WISH WE WERE and she's like NAH I GOT THIS and whips out the sword? SHE'S NOT JUST USING IT IN A WAY HE DIDN'T THINK OF - HE LEGIT DIDN'T KNOW IT WAS THERE, BECAUSE SHE TOOK THIS JAEGER THAT HE KNEW LIKE A LITERAL EXTENSION OF HIMSELF FOR YEARS, THE CLOSEST THING HE HAS TO A HOME IN THE WHOLE WORLD PROBABLY, AND SHE MADE HER FUCKING MARK ON IT BEFORE SHE EVEN MET HIM. I have a lot of feelings about this, you guys, about the Jaegers as home and as an extension of self and "she's one of a kind" and the love and ownership they both feel for Gipsy Danger and how this is maybe the only clear instance in the entire movie of them willingly shifting their focus away from each other because they're looking on this beautiful thing that belongs to them and that they belong to like they belong to each other:

I'VE HAD THIS OPEN IN A TAB FOR DAYS. LITERALLY DAYS. I JUST KEEP STARING AT IT. I CAN'T NOT. I FEEL SO MUCH AND NO MATTER HOW LONG I STARE AND FEEL I CAN'T PUT ANY OF IT INTO WORDS.

MAKO MORI AND RALEIGH BECKET WERE ALWAYS GOING TO FIND EACH OTHER AND IT'S AMONG THE GREATEST THINGS I'VE EVER SEEN IN FICTION.

This entry was originally posted at http://dudski.dreamwidth.org/1458381.html because FUCK LIVEJOURNAL, FOR SERIOUS. You can comment over there or over here, I really don't care, but eventually you're all going to join me on DW, let's be real.

AND THAT'S WHAT I THINK ABOUT WHITEWASHING ARTEMIS CROCK

dudski — Mon, 08 Jul 2013 23:51:57 GMT

ETA 5/21/14: HI, JOSH. IS IT REALLY NECESSARY TO CHECK IN ON THIS POST FROM TIME TO TIME? BECAUSE YOU DO IT KIND OF A LOT. YOU DO YOU, I GUESS, BUT IT'S A LITTLE WEIRD TO KEEP COMING BACK AROUND TEN MONTHS AFTER I BLOCKED YOU. MAYBE LET IT GO.

jncera:

Just wants to let everyone know Cassandra Cain and Artemis Crock are half-Asian and half-Caucasian :) They’re allowed to have Caucasian features :)
Check your alleles, before you wreck your.. I’m bad at rhymes.

Thank god someone is sticking up for everyone's right to just default to viewing characters as white as long as it's convenient! It is PRETTY BULLSHIT that the whitewashing police rule the internet with an iron fist.

Look: I've spent a LONG time being argumentative and varying degrees of dickish to people on the internet, long enough that a) I'm looking forward to the not-that-far-off day where I can start to say "since before you were born" about it to uppity teens, and b) I've learned that it's incredibly important, especially when your audience expands beyond your immediate social circle, to think about what you're saying and be sure that what you're putting out there is something you can stand by.

In that spirit, this post has been crafted with a lot of thought and care, but IF I FUCKED SOMETHING UP, LET ME KNOW. Because Tumblr is a nightmare hellscape that refuses to implement any kind of system that lets you carry on a conversation, I've crossposted this to LiveJournal on the off chance that someone has something to say to me about this that would benefit from a back-and-forth, but asks and reblogs work too.

Why it's important to think about things, example 1:

This anon! If they'd actually bothered to look over murrmernator's work and thought about it, they probably could have put together that a) she consistently gives Artemis darker skin than Wally, b) the uncolored-vs-white distinction is pretty obvious, and c) Kaldur and M'gann actually do go uncolored in exactly the same situations as Artemis. [I cackled when she responded with those links, honestly.]

Example 2:

Taking the stance that Artemis is “allowed" to look white. That’s not something that would need to be defended even if it were something that should be defended, which…it’s not. True, if someone's gone to the trouble of faithfully depicting Artemis as half-white and half-Vietnamese in a way that's consistent with canon, it sucks if they have to deal with accusations of whitewashing.

But by going out on the limb of "she's half white, she's allowed to have white features, check your alleles," you're not defending murrmernator and Lisa Jenkins and Bryan Konietzko against accusations of whitewashing that they've already capably defended themselves from. You're defending half-assed fancasts that use Teresa Palmer and Dianna Agron for Artemis. You're defending Artemis erroneously showing up in the comics with light skin and blue eyes. You're defending people claiming that they're fancasting white actresses because of personality. You're defending a lot of shitty things, so I hope that's a stance you actually thought about.

We're not talking about mixing Paula's genes with Lawrence's and what kind of person might randomly result. That hypothetical person might not look Vietnamese in the slightest, or they might not look white in the slightest, or they might fall anywhere in between! Genetics can be NUTS! But we're not talking about that hypothetical third Nguyen-Crock sibling, whom you're free to depict HOWEVER YOU WANT. We're talking about Artemis Lian Crock, who has the same hair color as her father but otherwise resembles her mother and sister.

Look, the creative team behind YJ clearly felt strongly about representation. We know of 26 characters with B designations. Of those 26, we've seen 23. Of those 23, Kaldur, Raquel, Karen, Mal, and Virgil are black, Artemis is half-Vietnamese, and Jaime is Mexican-American. Then from the four Runaways who didn't join the team, you've got Eduardo, who's Argentinian, Asami, who's Japanese, and Tye, who's Native American.

On top of that, you've got characters who are discriminated against within their own fictional cultures: Kaldur and La'gaan are both considered "impure" by Atlantean racists, and M'gann is a white Martian.

The creative team also went out of their way to establish, for anyone who cared enough to put it together, that Marie Logan liked women, despite the fact that network restrictions prevented LGBT representation on the show.

Representation mattered to the creative team, and they clearly thought about what they were putting out into the world and the kind of work they were doing and what it meant. This kind of thing doesn't happen by default. It especially doesn't happen by default when you're drawing from the pool of "existing DC Comics characters."

You know what does happen by default? Ignoring what it means that Artemis has darker skin than her white teammates, that she speaks Vietnamese, that she's taking Vietnamese lit. Seeing "blonde hair" and thinking "white" instead of "biracial" even after seeing her Vietnamese mother and her biracial sister. (Incidentally, nobody's in any hurry to depict Jade as a white girl with black hair.) Deciding that if your fancast can't be blonde and Asian, it's more important that the hair look right.

I can't draw. Not even close. But I know how it feels to work hard on something and post it, how the anticipation of recognition and feedback feels - will this take off? Will people like it? Was it any good? It would suck, unbelievably and completely, to be criticized instead, especially if it was for doing something I'd actually done my best to avoid.

But honestly? Whitewashing is a bigger problem than being unfairly criticized for whitewashing, and being accurately criticized for whitewashing isn't a problem at all. We should all be making sure we're doing characters justice and being true to who they are. We should be pointing out when people are getting it wrong, not only because THEY ARE GETTING IT WRONG, but also because it makes people think twice about representation and where they might be getting it wrong.

The three examples I linked to above, those examples of artists who have had to defend themselves against whitewashing criticism: All of them were able to come back and say something along the lines of "actually, that's something I put thought and effort into depicting," and they backed that assertion up. It sucks that they had to address it, but isn't it GREAT that they could? Isn't it great that they think about these things while they're working? Wouldn't it be great if everyone did?

Or, you know, we could just keep on casting Teresa Palmer like assholes.

[PS, on top of everything: Artemis is half white, absolutely. You know where she got that half? HER DAD. HER SHITTY ABUSIVE DAD, WHOM SHE HATES AND HAS FIRMLY REJECTED IN EVERY WAY SHE KNOWS HOW.]

your hamlet of eight hundred people or less EXTRA: the one with the kitchen sink

dudski — Sat, 06 Jul 2013 16:33:15 GMT

Title: the one with the kitchen sink
Series: your hamlet of eight hundred people or less
Fandom/characters: Young Justice, Artemis/Wally
Word count: 1200ish
Summary: Artemis is an FBI agent. Wally's a forensic anthropologist. THEY CATCH MURDERERS! But not this time! This time they're just amateur plumbers.

Notes: UMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM? Guys, I have a LOT of emotions about S5 of Bones, EVERYONE KNOWS THIS, you could see my emotions from space while it was airing, but the Bones AU was nowhere near ready to go there yet. AND I DECIDED I DIDN'T CARE, AND I DID IT ANYWAY. Based on Bones 5x02, The Bond in the Boot, but also based on the first third of S5 overall.

It's sort of an unspoken balancing act. When Artemis came home from the hospital, she made him swear to tell her every single time she did something differently, and he did.

There were a few problems with that system, though, first and foremost being that Wally picks up on obscure details for a living. Then there's the fact that there's nothing he pays attention to so reflexively as he does Artemis. On top of all that, there are a thousand tiny things different about Artemis now, even though she's still herself in every way that matters.

She doesn't reach for her lucky arrow belt buckle in the mornings. She doesn't take sugar in her coffee anymore. She holds her phone to her right ear instead of her left. Her lowercase As are different. She doesn't fight him on it if he puts NPR on when she's driving.

She wanted all of that pointed out to her so she could get back to normal, but all it did was make her feel like she wasn't making any progress. For Wally, who sat in her hospital room in the world's least comfortable chair for what felt like an eternity, holding her hand while she slept and trying not to freak out that she'd never wake up, or that she'd wake up and not be herself, or that she'd wake up and not remember him, the changes didn't mean anything. For Artemis, who was itching to be cleared for field work again and felt uncomfortable in her own skin, every little thing she did differently felt like a failure.

After a month of that, they hit a point where it felt like they were always either arguing or avoiding each other, because Wally hated upsetting her but Artemis couldn't give up on fixing everything. So they reached a compromise. He points out the easy things - concrete changes she can make, little rituals she can perform to reassure herself that she's more herself every day. If Kaldur calls in the middle of the night to let them know someone found a body, Wally will make sure he places the green belt buckle on top of the dresser for her. When they're having breakfast, he reminds her to slice up a banana for her cereal. When she’s driving, he willingly puts on classic rock if she doesn't think to start an argument with him about how she needs a good soundtrack.

More often than not, if he stays later than her at the lab, he'll come home to find her asleep on his side of the bed, but he doesn't have the heart to say anything about that.

Smaller, more frequent things - the way she throws a punch, the way she leads with her left foot instead of her right when she goes up stairs - he doesn't tell her about. Those things he just tells Meg about. He feels a little uneasy about it, like he's going behind Artemis's back, but it's the compromise they agreed to, it's Meg's job to monitor her recovery, and if any of these little things turn out to be important, Meg will know.

Meg swears up and down to both of them that they have nothing to worry about, Artemis is back at work, and things between her and Wally are great again, so all things considered, he thinks they've handled everything okay.

Of course that's when the kitchen sink stops working and all hell breaks loose.

xx

“We are not paying a plumber eight hundred dollars for something I could do myself,” Artemis grits out.

“Babe, you know I love you, and there’s nothing I don’t think you’re capable of, but you just told me you don’t remember how.”

“I got some technical materials to help refresh myself.”

“You ordered Plumbing for Dummies from Amazon and searched YouTube for tutorials.”

“Wally, please,” she says, and he gets it, he really does, even if it’s a terrible idea.

“Fine,” he sighs, and she beams at him, the wide, bright smile that only makes its way out when they’re off the clock and away from the lab. He doesn’t think he’ll ever get tired of seeing a smile that big and unguarded from someone who could kill him a thousand different ways if she weren’t so fond of him. “But I’m assisting. We might as well be idiots together.”

Artemis pecks him on the cheek. “You know you’re my favorite idiot.”

“And since I’m going above and beyond by actively assisting you in destroying our kitchen, I’m reserving the right to use plumbing innuendo as I see fit.”

“Nice try. You get two.”

“Seven.”

“Four.”

“Deal,” he says, making her shake on it. She rolls her eyes, but he already knows she loves him, it’s not like she can take it back.

“Thanks, babe,” she says. “And don’t worry, it’ll be fine. You might even learn a thing or two.”

“Hey, I think it’s been pretty well established that I already know plenty about working on your pipes.”

“Three more,” she reminds him before going back to reading up on plumbing.

Wally grins. Maybe this won’t be a complete disaster.

xx

It is absolutely a disaster, although maybe not a complete one. Honestly, Wally was a fan of how the whole thing started out, him and Artemis lying on their stomachs on the floor, propped up on their elbows and fully in each other’s space while she explained to him what all the pipes and valves under the sink actually did. And he definitely enjoyed the steady way she talked him through replacing the tee, how she’d put her hand over his while he held the joint together so the adhesive could dry, how she’d told him that his squint arms probably couldn’t apply the necessary pressure, then twisted awkwardly, still holding his hand and the pipe, to plant a kiss on his shoulder so he’d know she was joking.

The whole thing is nice. It feels domestic, like a normal Sunday morning, lying with Artemis on the kitchen floor, trying to fix the sink in the apartment they share. In their line of work, they don’t get nearly enough normal or domestic in their lives. He likes it. He likes it a lot.

It’s while he’s contemplating the appeal of long-term domestic bliss that the pipe bursts.

Artemis, who has been through years of terrifying-to-imagine training in “how to be a badass through all crises, big and small,” braves the spray to find the shutoff. Wally mainly focuses on not drowning in his own kitchen until suddenly, the spray stops, and Artemis slumps exhaustedly against his shoulder.

They sit like that in silence for a minute. They’re soaked, but everything else in the room is mostly unscathed. It sucks, really. The pipe that burst isn’t even one they were working on, so he doesn’t think it was anything they did wrong, but he knows what pulling this off meant to her. He casts around for a while, trying to think of something tactful and reassuring to say, but nothing comes to mind, so he figures to hell with it. Artemis wouldn’t be with him if she cared that he almost never knows what to say, and he’s still got one free innuendo left.

“I swear to god, baby, that’s never happened to me before.”

Wally really, really loves her laugh.

DERANGED BLACK METAL GIRL SCOUT

dudski — Wed, 26 Jun 2013 02:54:18 GMT

1. LIVEJOURNAL CHANGED THE HOMEPAGE!!!!!! Everyone in the comments on the post announcing it is FUCKING FURIOUS but a) I legit don't remember what it looked like yesterday and b) it seems like if anything, they've made it better by moving useful shit up top and pushing the "JOIN THIS COMMUNITY ABOUT DOCTOR WHO OR WHATEVER" garbage down so it's half below the fold. The homepage is fucking useless anyway?

2. Bad Machinery, you guys. BAD. MACHINERY. The newest chapter is literally SIX STRIPS IN and I've already experienced more emotion than I have over some entire seasons of television.

Here is the thing about Bad Machinery: When the series started, the main cast - three girls (Shauna, Charlotte, and Mildred) and three boys (Linton, Jack, and Sonny) - were all starting at grammar school, WHICH, I BELIEVE, made them all eleven-year-old sixth graders. The first three cases (BECAUSE THEY SOLVE MYSTERIES) covered that school year and the following summer. The following three cases covered another year and summer. And now they're back in school and it's EIGHTH GRADE and I don't think anything has ever needed so little space or time to evoke EXACTLY how it feels to be that age, to be growing up and figuring out who you want to be but feeling less certain of where you stand, because your friends are changing too and SO MUCH IS HAPPENING TO ALL OF YOU AND YOU'RE NOT THE SAME PEOPLE ANYMORE AND GROWING UP IS SO EXCITING BUT CHANGE IS SO SCARY AND EVERYTHING'S WEIRD.

That's the rabbit hole I fell down fewer than 20 panels into the new story! TWENTY GODDAMN PANELS AND I'M BACK IN EIGHTH GRADE WONDERING WHAT CHANGED AND WHAT DID I DO AND HOW AM I DIFFERENT OR WHY AREN'T I DIFFERENT. And the panels I posted above were DEVASTATING, and I sent disco_vendetta a bunch of panicky emails because I CAN'T HANDLE CHARLOTTE AND MILDRED NOT BEING FRIENDS, but then it was okay, and they're okay, but they're still growing up, and it's still scary, and it makes me really, really appreciate the ways in which absorbing a story piece by piece instead of all at once can force you to live inside it. SERIAL FICTION IS PRETTY MAGICAL WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT IT.

3. SERIOUS QUESTION: ARE YOU ACTUALLY SUPPOSED TO LIKE STILES OR IS HE A GARBAGE CHARACTER WHO HAPPENED TO BE GIFTED WITH DYLAN O'BRIEN'S EXISTENCE? Man, it is SUPER weird for me how useless/terrible he is? Like what does Stiles even do other than talk to randoms and harass Lydia? This is an ensemble show! So far this season he BASICALLY lifts right out.

HAHAHAHAHAHA ANYWAY WHAT THE FUCK IS THE DEAL WITH CORA? ARE WE JUST NOT GOING TO TALK ABOUT THIS LOST ROMANOV SHIT? Like okay, cool, Cora's just NOT DEAD, she's just been NOT DEAD for like ten years now, okay, very cool, UM, WHAT THE FUCK? LIKE WAS SHE THERE WHEN THE FIRE HAPPENED AND SHE JUST RAN THE FUCK OFF AND NEVER LOOKED BACK AND ASSUMED EVERYONE WAS DEAD INCLUDING THE PEOPLE WHO WEREN'T EVEN HOME? And what, hitchhiked across America? Look guys, my family weren't even werewolves and even we had a fucking "this is where everyone meets in the event that the house burns down" plan. Is the reason we're not talking about where the fuck Cora's been because Jeff Davis doesn't know and doesn't want to draw attention to it? WHAT THE EVERLOVING FUCK IS GOING ON? HOW IS THIS A REAL SHOW ON TELEVISION THAT PEOPLE DELUDE THEMSELVES INTO THINKING IS QUALITY? DEREK "MY WHOLE FAMILY IS DEAD" HALE'S DEAD SISTER SHOWS UP TOTALLY UNHARMED AND IT'S LITERALLY NEVER DISCUSSED. OKAY. GOOD SHOW. GOOD JOB.

Man speaking of dead chicks though THE ALPHAS KILLED THE GIRL WHO SAVED ISAAC, SO HE'S GOING TO KILL THEM. But first he's going to get up close and personal with Allison and she and Scott and Isaac are going to ~~hook up on the regular~~ prank the Alpha twins AND ALLISON'S GOING TO HOTWIRE A MOTHERFUCKING MOTORCYCLE? I'M OKAY. WE'RE ALL OKAY. Literally everything in this episode that wasn't those three was totally useless to me SLASH I DIDN'T EVEN WATCH SOME OF IT. STILES? SKIP. ALPHAS BEATING ON DEREK? Actually I DID watch those scenes on the off chance that someone would explain what the fuck Cora was doing alive but NOPE! [Boyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyd.]

HAHAHAHA AND THEN ISAAC SHOWED UP AT SCOTT'S HOUSE IN THE RAIN BECAUSE DEREK THREW SHIT AT HIM AND KICKED HIM OUT BECAUSE APPARENTLY ISAAC AND SCOTT ARE MICHAEL GUERIN AND MARIA DELUCA.

IN CONCLUSION it's weird how this show is 95% the worst thing I've ever seen in my entire life and 5% ULTIMATE SHINING PERFECTION.

This entry was originally posted at http://dudski.dreamwidth.org/1456233.html because FUCK LIVEJOURNAL, FOR SERIOUS. You can comment over there or over here, I really don't care, but eventually you're all going to join me on DW, let's be real.

dudski — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 04:33:17 GMT

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

FUCK I'M SO INTO SCOTT AND ALLISON

LIKE ON SOME LEVEL/ALL LEVELS I ALWAYS KNEW THAT DEREK/STILES PEOPLE ARE FUCKING NUTS BUT LIKE.................WHAT ARE YOU THINKING

LOOK

AT

SCOTT

AND

ALLISON

[BOTH AS INDIVIDUALS AND AS PEOPLE WHO SEE EACH OTHER IN SLOW MOTION SURROUNDED BY GOLDEN LIGHT!!!!!!!!!!]

Also this is the dumbest fucking thing I've ever heard anyone say: PS STILES GETS SO SQUEAMISH AT THE SIGHT OF BLOOD THAT HE FAINTED AT A TATTOO, BUT HE WAS WILLING AND ABOUT TO CUT DEREK’S ARM OFF WITH A BONE SAW IN EPISODE FOUR JUST SAYING.

UH HE SPECIFICALLY SAID HE HAD A PROBLEM WITH NEEDLES? I'll cut your fucking arm off all day long if the situation calls for it BUT DON'T FUCKING ASK ME TO WATCH YOU GIVE YOURSELF AN INSULIN INJECTION BC I WANT TO THROW UP AND DIE JUST THINKING ABOUT IT.

ALSO I HAVE THIS WEIRD THING WHERE I HATE DYLAN O'BRIEN'S VOICE SO I HOPE EVERYONE'S LOOKING FORWARD TO MY CONTINUED PERSONAL STRUGGLES

Also I'm fucking furious that they came up with MEAGAN TANDY: WEREWOLF SLAYER and then took it away. Why. Why would you. WE HAD IT SO GOOD.

This entry was originally posted at http://dudski.dreamwidth.org/1455220.html because FUCK LIVEJOURNAL, FOR SERIOUS. You can comment over there or over here, I really don't care, but eventually you're all going to join me on DW, let's be real.

A DOLLAR SIGN WHERE TUMBLR'S HEART USED TO BE

dudski — Fri, 31 May 2013 01:32:11 GMT

1. After like five months of spite-crossposting from Dreamwidth I STILL NEVER REMEMBER TO GO TO DREAMWIDTH FIRST. I always go to LJ to update and then see how fucking hideous the update page is and THEN I remember. IN RELATED NEWS all the websites of the world are conspiring to make me actually do my job, what with Twitter not loading conversations properly and Tumblr temporarily killing TS and Missing E. I NEED SAFE DASH. I mean I probably don't need it, I doubt Bridgette looks at my screen and is like ALL THOSE GREY RECTANGLES, SHE MUST BE WORKING HARD! but whatever, we all have lies we tell ourselves and mine is that B thinks I do my job. [It might not even be a lie??? DEFINITELY nobody is picking up on the extent to which I do nothing - and we're going on like a year of this now. I don't know what they think I'm up to? One of the perks of getting assignments from four different people in a nightmare chaos company! Everyone thinks everyone else is giving me work to do!]

2. I FELT SUPER ANXIOUS TODAY FOR LITERALLY NO REASON. THERE IS NOTHING. IT'S GORGEOUS OUT. I'M ON TOP OF ALMOST ALL OF MY NOTHING FOR WORK. SUMMER COURSES HAVEN'T STARTED YET. I SHOULDN'T HAVE A CARE IN THE WORLD. THIS IS RIDICULOUS. CUT IT OUT.

3. I'm probably watching Veep this weekend and POSSIBLY Orphan Black idk we'll see how it goes.

4. I SAW FALL OUT BOY ON SUNDAY, IT WAS GR8, the House of Blues mezzanine is a fucking nightmare though so I couldn't actually see anything but that was fine bc I ended up in the middle of TEEN CENTRAL. Well, first I ended up in MAINE DUDEBROS CENTRAL bc Kate bailed for a work thing and I was tooling around on my phone waiting for the opener and these dudes were like UNATTENDED FEMALE!!!!!!!!!! and parked themselves nearby. One of them was fine and the other one was CLEARLY A MASSIVE TOOL WHO COULDN'T TAKE A HINT, but whatever, there are worse ways to pass the time waiting for the headliner than checking Twitter on your phone and repeatedly insulting someone. OH, IS SEEING ME FOCUS ON MY PHONE INSTEAD OF THE SHITTY OPENER "DEPRESSING" YOU? GOOD FUCKING THING NOBODY'S FORCING YOU TO STAND THERE AND LOOK AT ME OR SPEAK TO ME, AM I RIGHT? After like ten minutes of me alternately insulting him and refusing to let him buy me a drink and flat-out ignoring him in favor of my phone this happened:

HIM: SOMETHING SOMETHING SOMETHING you seem nice.
ME: What the hell about me seems nice to you?
HIM: ...Well, you haven't kicked me in the balls yet.

DUDES WHO FIND HOSTILITY CHARMING/ENCOURAGING ARE THE FUCKING WEIRDEST. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?

ANYWAY then I bolted to the other side of the mezzanine once the show actually started and ended up in the middle of a PACK OF TEENS which was great because they were mostly adorable and super enthusiastic and screaming things about how ~PATRICK STUMP IS THE REALEST PERSON EVER~ but then the bitch on my right started harassing the girl in front of me about making space so she could get up to the mezzanine railing and I was INFURIATED because she was being SUCH A BITCH and I was like IF YOU ARE RUINING THAT POOR GIRL'S FIRST FALL OUT BOY SHOW SO HELP ME GOD sooooooooo I did the only thing I could reasonably do and PLANTED LIKE ANN VEAL when she tried to move into my space. Then when it was all over I tapped the girl in front of me on the shoulder to be like SORRY THAT GIRL WAS A BITCH TO YOU!!!!!!!! and she was like IKR WHAT A CUNT and then we high fived. FRIENDSHIP!

This entry was originally posted at http://dudski.dreamwidth.org/1455071.html because FUCK LIVEJOURNAL, FOR SERIOUS. You can comment over there or over here, I really don't care, but eventually you're all going to join me on DW, let's be real.

dudski — Mon, 27 May 2013 15:35:08 GMT

OVERALL: GOOD, VERY GOOD, PROBABLY DIDN'T NEED TO EXIST BUT I REALLY ENJOYED MYSELF.

UHHHHHHHHHHHHH WOW THE ONE-CHARACTER-PER-EPISODE FORMAT WAS BRUTAL. Luckily the way it worked (almost like a character was unlocked once you hit their episode, clearing them to appear more in subsequent ones, although this fell off towards the end) meant things got better as the season went on, with 10-13 probably being my favorite stretch of episodes. I really don't think it's a coincidence that that's also when they finally got around to Lucille, Maeby, and George Michael? I CAN'T BELIEVE THERE WERE TWO MICHAELS, TWO GEORGE SENIORS, TWO TOBIASES, AND TWO LINDSAYS BEFORE WE GOT THEM, THOUGH.

If this is all supposed to be leading to a movie, I...really don't see why they didn't just do more episodes, because the whole thing felt very unresolved even though I wouldn't ever have thought I'd need resolution from Arrested Development. But the fact that they circled everything back to Cinco de Cuatro OVER AND OVER AND OVER had me thinking that they'd wrap up with an ensemble episode or two set at Cinco and the aftermath - Lindsay vs. Sally and Sally's secret alopecia! Whatever the fuck was going on with the business not that anyone gives a fuck! GOB/TONY WONDER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! GOB/TONY WONDER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! FakeBlock collapsing! MORE MAEBY! ALWAYS MORE MAEBY! Lucille 2's disappearance! But............I guess all that is a movie? Or something? Because after 15 "this could have been shorter" 35-minute episodes, they really need their next installment to be 90+ minutes? It's just that as the season progressed and callbacks started landing and the story started winding back in on itself more and more it really felt like they were building to something, but...not so much, I guess!

That article about all the greenscreen had me worried but it wasn't something I really noticed other than the shot in Buster's episode where Lucille is leaving his hospital room. That might just be because I watched it on my phone, though? It became more obvious in other episodes if I started looking for it, but what tipped me off in those cases wasn't a shot of two characters looking wrong so much as scenes where they're clearly avoiding showing two characters in the same shot at all. [There was something about the camera work in general that felt off through a lot of the series? But I think maybe that's just AD's normal style just being handicapped by actor availability. Although there are DEFINITELY weird moments, like the first cutaway to Tobias's license plate, and this one shot of other diners during the Michael/Rebel/Love/Lindsey double date. ALSO it was super weird in the Ron Howard scenes whenever a line had been re-done in ADR because if you couldn't see his face - like in the elevator scene - it just sounded like narration.

KRISTEN WIIG AND SETH ROGEN AS YOUNG LUCILLE AND GEORGE WAS CRAZY UNNECESSARY. They've always played their own young selves for that kind of thing and MAN the fill-ins were not working for me.

BUT MOSTLY I HAD A GREAT TIME WATCHING IT AND I LAUGHED MY ASS OFF A LOT, most especially at the giant HER? in the church and also at this scene in 4x13, ONLY FUCK THAT GIFSET BECAUSE THAT'S NOT EVEN THE FUNNY PART? I cry laughing every time I even think about Michael Cera's delivery of "it's Justin." THAT'S DAVID HENRIE, HE'S JUSTIN FROM WIZARDS OF WAVERLY PLACE. PER. FEC. TION.

This entry was originally posted at http://dudski.dreamwidth.org/1454643.html because FUCK LIVEJOURNAL, FOR SERIOUS. You can comment over there or over here, I really don't care, but eventually you're all going to join me on DW, let's be real.

A GRAPHICAL REPRESENTATION OF WHAT THE OFFICE MEANT TO ME

dudski — Fri, 17 May 2013 05:42:18 GMT

I've loved better shows and I've loved shows better, but I've NEVER had an experience quite like my time in Office fandom, and I likely never will. THIS SAYS IT BETTER THAN I COULD:

THE FINALE WAS PERFECT. I LOVED THAT SHOW A LOT AND I OWE IT EVEN MORE.

This entry was originally posted at http://dudski.dreamwidth.org/1453343.html because FUCK LIVEJOURNAL, FOR SERIOUS. You can comment over there or over here, I really don't care, but eventually you're all going to join me on DW, let's be real.