starfoozle

Merry Christmas, friends!

I've really gotta be more consistent with updating this thing, I swear. Between Tumblr, travel, class projects, and all the various and sundry strangeness that comes along with senior year, I've been way less consistent with the whole longer-form blogging thing than intended. But! In two days, wrisomifu starts up again, so I'll actually have an excuse to hang around this neck of the woods again. Pretty excited, actually: I'm working on a bunch of creative nonfiction, converting some Pacific Rim headcanons to actual fic, and poking with renewed enthusiasm at my sci-fi sandbox universe. Space Captain actually has a proper name and personality now and there are flickers of what might be a plot emerging from this mess of questionable xenobiology, so we'll see where November takes it.

Some adventures I've had lately:

+ Took the GRE on Monday, which was exhausting but not nearly as awful as I'd feared. Did exactly as well as I'd predicted I would, and probably will not have to take it again, which is pretty great. The most miserable part was waking up before 6 to drive an hour away to a testing center in the middle of nowhere, honestly. My friends are basically running a GRE shuttle service for those of us who don't have cars and totally deserve, as my German grandmother would say, an extra gold star on their crown in heaven. In the absence of gold stars, I've repaid them in gas money and Cookout milkshakes. It works out.

+ Had last01standing come visit for a weekend, which is always an excellent time. We climbed a mountain in some fog straight out of a zombie movie, found a super-neat underground bar, and went rollerblading and mostly managed to avoid those tiny super-fast children on skates who are more of a hazard than the green shells in Mario Kart.

+ Went to a Nine Inch Nails concert in DC, which deserves its own entry and will probably get one. I have a long, long history with NIN -- I've loved them for the better part of a decade now, which is pretty wild. (The Hand That Feeds was the first song I ever downloaded from iTunes back in early middle school. While I never went through a full-blown goth/punk/black-clothing-and-rebellion phase, it was a very near miss.) The show was spectacular, I sang myself hoarse, and had a really good time in general with my two friends. Trent Reznor is much healthier and more emotionally stable these days, and while I think a number of folks didn't really know how to respond to NIN sounding faintly hopeful these days, I am really glad he's doing okay, and the actual quality of the music remains fantastic. (I'm working on a little narrative about all this that you might see in a bit. Stay tuned.)

Life carries on, but now I've gotta get to class. I'll be around!

Really missing ontd_lost today. LOST was the strangest and most formative fandom experience of my entire life, and the community was a major part of it. *raises a can of Dharma beer*

Yup, just signed up as an artist for the Pacific Rim Big Bang. Also signed up for a Pacific Rim craft swap. This may be a sign that I've lost control of my life, but damn, it feels really good to be active in fandom again.

So last01standing has a really excellent post on why she reads Stargate Atlantis's John Sheppard as asexual, and I am still in the process of having a lot of feelings about it. Dunno how many of you old SGA folks are still around, but trust me, this is worth checking out.

Okay, has anybody here done a Big Bang before? Because I am seriously considering signing up as an artist for the Pacific Rim one but have no idea what I might be getting myself into.

Quite alive, actually. I've gotten into the bad habit of tag-blogging over on Tumblr and remembered that there are slightly better venues for rambling personal thoughts over on this part of the internet.

Anyway, a few things I've been up to lately, if you were wondering where I'd gone.

( Journalism, radio, and giant robots? Bring it on.Collapse )

I've had a spare universe rattling around in my brain for quite a few years now. If you follow me on Tumblr, you've heard me refer to it as the Catalyst!verse -- it's mostly been a mental sandbox, a place to file cool aliens and space pirates and exobiology and other original sci-fi stuff. I've done a lot of worldbuilding with it and have developed a handful of really neat characters, but the problem is that I never really had a story to go along with them.

Last year around finals week (it's always finals week, isn't it) I had a story idea blindside me -- I was thinking about space operas and the roles of characters in them, and how dangerous it would be to find yourself acting as the mentor figure to somebody who the universe has dubbed a Protagonist: more often than not, in order for them to complete their Hero's Journey, their mentor figure will wind up dead. And I thought about retelling a Hero's Journey Space Opera Story from the perspective of a mentor figure who is all too aware of his impending doom but is powerless to stop the narrative from unfolding as it will, and is not very happy about it.

And I thought, wow, this is interesting, we could try for some experimental meta space opera thing and finally put the Catalyst!verse to work! I already had a cast of characters I could easily fit into the necessary archetypal roles if I pruned some of their characteristics a bit. I had a bunch of alien cultures, a couple of worlds for my crew to run around on, and all the raw materials that only needed a plot to go launching off somewhere really interesting.

The problem with this meta idea is that it needs to have an element of campiness in order to work properly, and I fear the Catalyst!verse is a universe that wants to be taken a little more seriously. I've poured an unbelievable amount of research into the biology, ecology, and cultures involved in my little sandbox universe, and the entire idea is to make this stuff plausible. I'm a science person, after all, and this is how I have my fun. I don't want to take all my work, deliberately make it cliche, and deconstruct it again.

So now I'm stuck. I've re-written half my characters to make them fit the meta story and put a fair bit of thought into arranging how a universe where people were aware of the tropes controlling their lives would work. I like a lot of what I have and want to go forward with it -- sort of. Because I'm afraid that going with the meta version would reduce years of worldbuilding to a joke. But if I don't go with it, I don't really have a story anymore and we're back where we started -- a sandbox with no plot.

*flops over*

Life is going really well here. Work is low-key but I've got my first real assignment tomorrow, in which I get to go to the aquarium and talk to some folks who study fancy seaweed. I've been going for walks by the beach every day, which is excellent: I get to check in on some nesting ospreys, say hello to the neighbors' assorted dogs, and go splash around after horseshoe crabs and other marine crawlies.

My penchant for beach-walking became the source of a misadventure on Friday. There's the public beach on one side of the point, but then a private beach owned by the marine science school on the other, right behind the boat basin where they keep the research vessels. The whole area is fenced off to prevent random people from coming in to mess with the boats or the experimental tanks, but the gate is unlocked during the day and you can come and go as you please. I get out of work around five and usually spend an hour bopping around down by the water, and I'd been doing that all week and exiting through the same gate, which had remained unlocked. Until Friday afternoon, where I suddenly found myself trapped in the boat basin, which is surrounded by barbed wire and water in a remarkably Alcatraz-like fashion.

There was absolutely nobody around, not even a passing boat. I was going to jump the fence, but I didn't have a towel or jacket to put over the barbed wire. I would have just jumped in the water and swum but I had my electronics on me, and didn't think trying to cache them in the sand dunes for the weekend was a brilliant idea. Cell reception is awful out here for some reason, but after several futile attempts I managed to call a friend and have them look up the number for security, who I then had to call and explain what happened in shame. The head of security was a tiny, fast-talking country woman with a giant truck, and she just laughed and laughed when she rolled up to see me trapped behind the fence. She was ridiculously nice and gave me a ride back up the road, and said she'd be happy to leave the gate unlocked if I mentioned it to her a little in advance.

(Turns out there's a gap in a gate way further down along the perimeter that I would have just been able to squeeze through, but it was impossible to see from within the basin. Good to know for future reference. Just in case.)

To my surprise and delight, living alone is actually fun. I've been doing a hell-ton of reading, a little gardening (bought some baby basil plants yesterday and they are precious), a lot of experimentation with new recipes (lemon-sage chicken! horchata! strawberry-mint popsicles! bananas foster! and all turned out wonderfully, if I do say so myself), quite a bit of art, and have finally, miracle of miracles, started to put some serious energy into a certain long story I should have written years ago. I'll make a separate post on that later -- I've got some writing thoughts I need to mull over.

There's something rather freeing about being able to sit around in my boxers drawing aliens and singing along with bad synthpop at any hour I choose. *laughs* I dunno, maybe the novelty just hasn't worn off yet, but this is pretty great so far.

Even the most reportedly benign malaria drugs may have unexpected side effects. Remember this while you are taking them. The entire universe will suddenly get spectacularly more irritating, but keep in mind that it's your perception of it, not the universe itself, that has changed. Except for the parts of the universe that consist of your companions who are also on malaria meds, because they are experiencing the same thing. Pissing matches and some  shouting may occur. Don't take it personally. Remember that it's the drugs talking. Remind one another of this periodically.

Quarantining yourself when you are feeling particularly aggressive is a good option and will be appreciated by the group as well. Again, don't take it personally. You may have non-scary but very vivid, exceptionally detail-oriented dreams. Try bonding with your companions over them instead of snarling at each other over literally the most irrelevant things imaginable. It's better for morale.

Thank your lucky stars that tomorrow is everyone's last dose of Malarone, and you'll be back to your regularly scheduled programming shortly.