A Little South Of Sanity

Research Post - Thick of It

2017-03-28T18:26:28Z

I'm writing The Thick of It fic and it involves a lot of research, so I'm going to keep track of my links in this post. If you're interested in 1980s Scotland and/or Catholicism, some of this might actually be interesting to you!

Scottish Language Resources

The Glossary of Scottish Slang on Wiktionary

The Online Slang Dictionary

Scotranslate - English to Scottish Translator

DSL - Dictionary of the Scots Language

List of Scottish Gaelic Surnames (Wikipedia)

You Swear - Scottish

18 Scottish Swear Words (BuzzFeed)

Scottish Girls Names

Scottish Locations (Now and Then)

Motherwell (Wikipedia)

Gorbals (Wikipedia)

The Slums of 1980s Glasgow Through the Lense of a French Photographer

Raymond Depardon's Images of 1980s Glasgow (Google Image Search)

Map of 1970 Glasgow

Photos of Glasgow 1960s through 1980s

195 Albion Street, Glasgow (Offices of the Herald), 1974

Intersection High Street and Ingram Street, Glasgow, 1973

List of Named UK Rail Services (Wikipedia)

Royal Scot (Train between Glasgow and London) (Wikipedia)

Sleeper Trains Between London and Scotland (BBC article)

St Peter's Seminary

St Peter's Seminary, Cardross (Wikipedia)

St Peter's Seminary, Cardross (Blog Post)

St Peter's Seminary, Cardross (Google Image Search)

St Peter's Seminary, Cardross (Google Image Search - Related Images)

Cardross, Scotland (Wikipedia)

Argyll and Bute Council Area (Wikipedia)

Strathclyde (Wikipedia)

Franciscan Sisters of the Immaculate Conception (previous inhabitants of Merrylee House in Newlands)

Glasgow, Newlands, 33 Briar Road, Merrylee House, 1963

Scotus College, Bearsden (Wikipedia)

Seminary, Priesthood, Ordination, Catholic Faith, Code of Canon Law

Ordination in the Roman Catholic Church (Wikipedia)

Deacons in the Roman Catholic Church (Wikipedia)

Apostolic Succession (Wikipedia)

Sacrament in the Roman Catholic Church (Wikipedia)

On the Requirement of Sufficient Maturity for Candidates to the Presbyterate, 1917 Code of Canon Law

Curriculum of the St Thomas Aquinas Seminary in VA, USA

Forum Thread on Transitional Deacons

Priesthood in the Catholic Church (Wikipedia)

1983 Code of Canon Law (Wikipedia)

Pope John Paul II (Wikipedia)

How to Address the Pope (WikiHow)

Thomas Aquinas (Wikipedia)

The Sin of Pride

Nebuchadnezzar’s Pride And Punishment

Summa Theologiae > Second Part of the Second Part > Question 162: Pride

Psalm 32: Blessed is the One Whose Sin is Forgiven

Confirmation in the Catholic Church (Wikipedia)

List of Christian Martyrs (Wikipedia)

Book of Revelation (Wikipedia)

Infallibility of the Church (Wikipedia)

Dei Verbum (Wikipedia)

Babylon Quotes

Isaiah 21-9, the Fall of Babylon

Keith O'Brien: Sexual Misconduct and Consequences

Time to Turn Spotlight on Abuse by Priests in Scotland (Herald article)

Catholic Church in Scotland Asks Forgiveness from Child Abuse Victims (Guardian article)

Ex-pupils Allege They Were Raped and Abused by Monks at Schools in Scotland (Guardian article)

What the Catholic Church Should Do [About Heroin Epidemic] - US centric, 21st century centric

The Catholic Church Started the Culture Wars - Now Can They End Them? (Catholic Church and abortion, US-centric)

News in 1980s/90s Glasgow and London

List of Scottish Newspapers (Wikipedia)

Evening Times (Wikipedia)

Forum Thread Linking to Online Archives of Herald (1806-1990) and Evening Times (1951-1990)

Evening Times Online Archive 1980s (Google News)

Daily Mirror (Wikipedia)

Daily Mirror Offices Address 1987

Engineering Timeline of the Daily Mirror Building

Mick Jagger on the Daily Mirror Offices Roof 23 August 1987

Daily Mirror Offices Address 1987

Daily Mirror Building Holborn Circus

Daily Mirror Building Holborn Circus 1988

Daily Mirror Building Holborn Circus in color

Pictures of the Daily Mirror Building in Holborn (Google Images)

1987 Newsroom (Philadelphia Inquirer)

Computer-assisted Reporting (Wikipedia)

History of British Newspapers in the 20th Century (Wikipedia)

Smith Corona electric typewriter (YouTube)

It's the Sun Wot Won It (1992 election) (Wikipedia)

UK Press Online: Daily Mirror

Political and Social Issues in 1980s/90s Scotland/ Britain

Margaret Thatcher (Wikipedia)

The Fatal Legacy of a Nation's Drug Use Epidemic (Herald article, 2012)

Labour Party (UK) Deputy Leadership Election 1981 (Wikipedia)

Drugs: Scottish Policy and Practice (Paper on Academia.edu)

History of HIV in Scotland

Timeline of HIV/AIDS (Wikipedia)

Terry Higgins (early AIDS-related UK death) (Wikipedia)

HIV/AIDS in the United Kingdom (Wikipedia)

IRA Brighton Hotel Bombing in 1984 (Wikipedia)

1986 Bombing of Libya (Wikipedia)

Droppin Well Bombing 1982 (Wikipedia)

Political History of the United Kingdom 1945 - present (Wikipedia)

United Kingdom General Election 1987 (Wikipedia)

Election 1987 (BBC Website)

Social history of the United Kingdom (1945–present) (Wikipedia)

1987 in the UK (Wikipedia)

Section 28 - 1988 Anti-Gay Legislation

Anti-LGBT Poster Tories 1987 (Labour Camp)

Anti-LGBT Poster Tories 1987 (Young, Gay, and Proud)

Hillsborough: how the Sunday Times - and the Sun - reported the tragedy (Guardian article)

Hillsborough report: why the Mirror refused to accept police spin (Guardian article)

The Sun - The Truth (1989)

1989 Conservative Leadership Election (Wikipedia)

Poll Tax (Wikipedia)

UK election 1992 (Wikipedia)

The terror and prejudice of the 1980s AIDs crisis remembered by a gay man who lived through it (Independent)

Plague-Making and the AIDS Epidemic: A Story of Discrimination (Google Books)

Bombing of Baltic Exchange Building 1992 (Wikipedia)

London Labour Office Address

UK Election 1997 (Wikipedia)

Black Wednesday (Wikipedia)

Scottish Parliament (Wikipedia)

Referendum Party (Wikipedia)

New Labour, New Danger Tory Election Poster (1997, Wikipedia)

UK Political Issues in the 2000s (mainly post-9/11)

Premiership of Tony Blair (Wikipedia)

UK Election 2001 (Wikipedia)

UK Election 2005 (Wikipedia)

The Dark Day That Brought Out the Worst in Britain (Telegraph, 2011, American ex-pat on 9/11)

The Impact of 9/11 in Britain (Mic, 2011)

9/11 and 7/7 and the United Kingdom (Paper from Radical History Review, 2011)

Guardian: Blair calls for solidarity after 9/11 (2001)

Guardian: Three Hours of Terror (9/11, 2001)

Guardian: They Don't Know Why They're Hated (9/11, 2001)

Political Structure and Positions of the United Kingdom

Alastair Campbell (Labour Spin Doctor) (Wikipedia)

Downing Street Director of Communications (Wikipedia)

House of Commons (Wikipedia)

House of Lords (Wikipedia)

Tony Blair (Wikipedia)

1980s Scottish Legal System, 1956 Sexual Offences Act, Low Moss Prison

Prostitution in the UK (Wikipedia)

Sexual Offences Act 1956 (Wikipedia)

Courts of Scotland - District Courts (Wikipedia)

Legal Aid in Scotland (Wikipedia)

HMP Low Moss (Wikipedia)

Nissen Huts (Used at Low Moss) (Wikipedia)

Prison Riots in Britain and the USA - Low Moss Prison Riot 1986 (Google Books)

RAF Nissen Hut (Outside)

RAF Nissen Hut (Inside)

Restaurated Nissen Hut

London in the late 80s/ 90s

King's Cross Fire 1987

1987 London Tube Map

1987 Map of London City (not particularly good ...)

1940s City of London Maps

1980s Fancy London Kitchen reference

Memories of Camden Market 70s to 90s (Guardian article)

West Brompton Seagrave Lodge (2008)

Lambeth Cemetery (Google Image Search)

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Sherlock Vid: My Dear Mon Frère

2017-02-05T15:51:57Z

[Download] [AO3] [Vimeo] [Tumblr]

Title: My Dear Mon Frère
Artist: Lily Allen
Editor: teyla
Category: Humor
Password (Vimeo): lily allen
Format: 152.4MB | mp4 | 1280x720
Character: Mycroft Holmes, Sherlock Holmes
Summary: Who needs enemies when you've got a brother like Sherlock?

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Snowflake Challenge - Day 1

2017-01-20T12:58:49Z

Bit late to the game, but here I go with post one of the Snowflake Challenge!

In your own space, post a rec for at least three fanworks that you have created. It can be your favorite fanworks that you've created, or fanworks you feel no one ever saw, or fanworks you say would define you as a creator.

I posted links to a few of my recent fanworks in my last post already, so forgive me for including two of those works in this rec. They're my most recent, and therefore the ones I'm proudest of at the moment.

1) FANFIC: Jessica Jones Femslash

I'm including this because it's my first femslash fic and I found it quite freeing to write. It was nice to tell a story about awesome women for a change.

Title: Proxemics
Fandom: Jessica Jones (TV)
Rating: PG
Pairing: Jessica Jones/Trish Walker
Word Count: 14,833
Summary: Proxemics: the study of personal space. In which the aftermath of Kilgrave’s death prompts Trish and Jess to redefine some boundaries.
AO3 Tags: Post-Season/Series 01, Self-Worth Issues, Self-Destructive Behavior, Trauma, Recovery, Canon-compliant portrayal of PTSD, some hurt/comfort and some pining but mostly ladies being awesome and overcoming shit, plus a lot of lesbians, explicit and non-explicit, trust me all non-explicit lesbians are in fact lesbians, and of course there’s a happy ending because yuletide

2) FANVID: Ten/Simm!Master Time Lord Angst

Ten/Simm!Master will remain my forever OTP. I know fandom opinions divided on End of Time, but I love those episodes with all my heart. Time Lords are ridiculous.

Title: Weapon
Fandom: Doctor Who
Pairing: Tenth Doctor/Simm!Master
Summary: The Master was Rassilon's last weapon in the Time War, but it backfired.

The password is "matthew good band". If you'd like to download, you can do so on the Vimeo page.

3) FANART: Holmes/Watson Crossdressing

This is very recent and was a quick one-off more than anything, but I quite like the way it turned out, and it did not get a lot of attention on Tumblr, so I'm sharing it here. Besides, Holmes/Watson in any incarnation are always appropriate.

Fandom: Guy Ritchie!Holmes
Medium: Digital art, Photoshop CS5 and Wacom tablet, pencil and watercolor brushes

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Second Attempted Return of the Teyla

2017-01-19T17:35:02Z

... as indicated in the title?

I'm so fed up with Tumblr, so I'm trying a renewed attempt at returning to LJ. :D?

Who's still active here? My reading list has a few recent updates, so it doesn't seem to be a complete wasteland ... what is everyone up to?

/awkwardly offers cookies and tea

I guess it makes sense to add an update here!

In professional real life news, I'm kind of in a limbo state after quitting my job at a film distributor. I'm still in the phase of enjoying being unemployed (I have unemployment insurance so I don't need to worry too much about money, which is nice), and am seriously considering quitting the media industry. My experiences with Hollywood were Not Good, to say the least.

Right now, the plan is to apply for a three-year training to be certified as a midwife. A women-controlled industry with shift work (which I prefer), very little office work (which I also prefer), and ample opportunities to work free-lance (which, considering the experiences of the past few years, I also prefer) sounds pretty good right now. I'll see where that goes.

Personal real life news involve a GF whom I moved in with in May. It's going well! We have about equally high (very high) needs of personal space and independence, and I'm quite happy to say that we've managed to stay on the same page so far. We've been dating for roughly two to three years at this point. Knock on wood.

Fannishly, I spent a lot of time in SPN fandom, trying to enjoy it despite the show's continued decline into absolute awfulness and Tumblr SPN fandom's penchant for The Discourse. I was semi-successful and managed to produce the following fanworks:

Dean Winchester Is a Douchebag
Early season 11 sort-of fix-it fic with some Dean/Cas vibes. About 10k words, PG.

Hamburger is Not a German Word
Explicit Dean/Cas high school AU with a twist, in which Cas is German and Dean is an American exchange student. About 44.5k words.

Fanart for Kleos
Fanart for a 2016 DCBB military AU with Dean as an army ranger and Cas as a war correspondent. I have to admit that I can't really recommend the fic, but arting for it was fun nonetheless.

Non-SPN fanworks I've produced:

Earlier this month, I FINALLY managed to finish a Ten/Simm!Master vid that I started to edit in 2010. You can find it here on AO3.

I wrote Jessica Jones for Yuletide: Proxemics, a Jessica/Trish post-season 1 fic of ~15k words, PG-13

And I produced an anthropomorfic Yuletide treat about languages. ~1.3k words.

To my own huge surprise, I've stumbled into Sherlock fandom! I know all of Sherlock fandom hated The Final Problem, but I watched it with zero expectations and was completely blindsided by Holmescest. It's an excellent episode for Holmescest. Mycroft is my new favorite inept fake human. I may be writing fic. If you're into this fandom AT ALL, please do feel free to talk to me about it! :D

That's also where Mary Morstan as my new default icon comes from. She's my hero and IL her. <3

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Knock Knock?

2015-02-28T01:04:20Z

Hello. Does anyone still hang out in these parts of fandom?

*blows the dust off and tries to remember how to work DW*

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Yuletide 2011

2011-11-17T07:44:43Z

Dear Yuletide Author,

hello! Thank you for writing for me. :3 And thank you for making the effort to come here and take a look at my letter; I really do appreciate it.

Quick general overview of my fic likes and dislikes!

Likes: Love dramedy and realistic slice-of-life stuff. Love bittersweet endings, don't mind deathfic. Am ambiguous on fluff--it can be fun, but only if there's enough drama to balance it out. Love situational humor, especially if it's used to break up an otherwise tragic scene and underlines the emotional impact of what is happening. Love explicit fic, love BDSM to any level of kink, love intense, antagonistic relationships ('frenemies'). The thing that's most important to me, in fic, is character focus and character exploration. If there's decent character exploration, the fic can be pretty much about anything, I'll always enjoy it.

Dislikes: Improper spelling and grammar, imprecise personal pronoun referencing (I'd rather have the names used a large amount of times than everything being "he"), POV changes within a scene, characterization being compromised to serve the plot, character bashing of any kind, sexism or misogyny of any sort, generally characters displaying any sort of privilege without that being addressed critically. (If you want to address it critically, however, characters getting called out on their privilege would make me very happy.) Oh, and I'm not a fan of genderswitch.

Hamlet

Optional Details:

Hamlet/Horatio: Horatio watches Hamlet's erratic behavior and ends up not being sure himself if Hamlet's pretending or really going crazy. He decides to do something about it, but his decision comes just a little too late. If that doesn't work for you, I'm flexible--explicit fic, character study, pairing profile fic, any of those works for me.

My favorite way to interpret the characters is taking them from the 2008 RSC production with David Tennant and Peter De Jersey, with their relationship being mostly a teenage/young adult friendship, just as I prefer to examine the play from a character rather than a plot perspective. But really, any Horatio/Hamlet will work for me. (I also like Gertrude a lot, so if you have a soft spot for her and would like to work her in, that would be more than absolutely okay.)

Doctor Who RPF

Optional Details

David Tennant/Catherine Tate: They never thought that anything more than friendship would work between them. -- Catherine Tate/Alex Kingston: Awesome-lady-on-awesome-lady action. -- Catherine Tate/Alex Kingston/Karen Gillan: You've got a lot to learn about being a woman in show business, Karen. -- Catherine Tate/Alex Kingston/David Tennant: Alex and Catherine both like to take charge in bed. David loves submitting to strong women. Combine the two, and you get an inevitable bondage threesome.

I'm a huge David Tennant fan and love him with Catherine Tate. I always see their real-life relationship to be more of a friendship than a romantic relationship, so if you want to write friendship fic between the two, that would absolutely work for me. If you want to write pairing fic, I'd love it if it could take an angle of neither of them ever having thought a romantic thing would work out between them. Or fuckbuddy friendship. That would work for me, too.

Catherine Tate and Alex Kingston are both incredible, so femslash with those two would be A+. I have a bit of an issue with the sexism in the last two Doctor Who seasons. If you do as well, working that into the fic would be very interesting to me. If you also agree that Karen Gillan seems to be regrettably unaware of the issues people feel to be present in the portrayal of her character, a Tate/Kingston/Gillan threesome with Tate and Kingston explaining feminism to Gillan would be absolutely up my alley. If none of that works for you, I'd also be up for some simple, straightforward lady-on-lady action--porn, or just friendship or bonding fic. I'm not hugely interested in Karen apart from the aforementioned idea, so if you'd rather leave her out, that would be okay with me; although if you really like writing her, working her in could be interesting, too.

From a purely PWP-ish perspective, BDSM fic about Kingston and Tate joining up to top Tennant would be very much relevant to my interests. Would love a playful, D/s angle without too much edge play, in this scenario.

Single Father

Optional Details:

Dave/Rita. Dave: "We tried for a baby for Paul, we'd only just started--and she goes AWOL for six weeks." How did that work? Did Rita leave Lucy with Dave? Did Dave end up taking care of Lucy, the way he ends up taking care of all their children when Rita dies? How does that experience tie in with the events of the series? I'd also love some more about Rita, what she really thought of Dave, how their relationship worked for her.

If you would like to focus on something other than that quote, I'd be happy with fic about how Rita and Dave met, how Dave "pursued" Rita, how maybe there were other crises during their relationship, and how they dealt with them. I don't have a problem with deathfic, so a fic that would tie those events into the series in a flashback-y sort of way would absolutely work for me. I also really have a soft spot for Tanya, and Rita was apparently the person who made Dave get back into contact with her. I'd be very happy with fic about that, as well.

That was a lot of text! If you already have an idea you'd like to go with, ignore me and write whatever it is you've come up with. I'm sure I'll love it, either way. :)

Good luck! <3

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Gallifreyan Script, Thanksgiving, Yuletide

2011-11-15T13:34:22Z

Long time no update. I'm still around. I've been playing with tumblr a lot--I know, I know. I'm joining the legions abandoning LJ for more hipster-y pastures. I should try to update LJ more, but I don't really have a specific fandom at the moment, so I'm sort of disconnected from LJ, since I don't have anything to write fic for. I would vid, but I don't have my desktop PC with me at the moment. Also, that PC needs upgrading so badly. Anyway, this is why I'm playing with tumblr, not LJ. I have little fannish content to offer at the moment.

That said, I did make some Gallifreyan script images. Greencrook on tumblr came up with a Gallifreyan dictionary, and it's a lot of fun to take the basics that she's developed and fill in the blanks to create images of quotes.

Wilf: Sweetheart, come on. You're not going to make the world any better by shouting at it.

Donna: I can try.

I love this quote. Quick symbol overview:

Teeny little top-left circle: opening speech quotes.
Slightly bigger top-left circle: "you".
Stuff on connecting line between "you" circle and next circle: "can't".
Big top-left circle: "change". That symbol I made up myself out of greencrook's symbols for "death", "birth", "growth" and "foresee".
Big top-center circle: "the world"--or rather, "the universe".
Stuff on connecting line between top-center and top-right circle: "by".
Big top-right circle: "shout(ing)". I created that symbol out of the symbols for "speak", "disappointed", "anger", and a negated version of "understand".
Teeny little top-right circle: closing speech quotes.

The bottom part of the quote has, again, opening and closing speech quotes. The smaller circle is "I", the stuff on the connecting line between the circle is "can", and the big circle is "try", a symbol I made up out of the symbol for agency, the symbol for want with a temporal progression towards the symbol for dare pointing towards the symbol for out/change.

There's only what a man can do, and what he can't do.
-- Jack Sparrow

On earlwyn's request.

Top symbol: "Exist", made up of the sign for "person" or "subject", the sign for "space", the sign for "now" and the sign for "time" or "progression of time".
Bottom left symbol: "One can do", made up of the third person pronoun sign, the sign for "do" (which is the sign for "agency/power" in a word circle), and a connecting line with the symbol for "can".
Bottom right symbol: "One can’t do", same as bottom left, except it’s got the symbol for "can’t" on the connecting line.
Stuff in the middle: "Only", prominent and not on a connecting line as it’s central to the quote. Made up of the symbol element of the sign for "absolute", and the sign for "out".
Line and sign at the bottom: Connecting line between the two "can do" and "can’t do" circles, with the symbol for "and" indicating their relation.

You are not alone.

On mind_the_tardis's request.

Tiny circle on the left: Sentence opener.
Smaller circle on the left: "you".
Bigger circle at the top: "are not".
Bigger circle at the bottom: "alone". Made up out of the symbols for "together", "before", "they" + first person pronoun, "space", all temporally pointing to a "now" and "out" symbol, indicating exclusion of the subject.
Tiny circle on the bottom right: Sentence closer/period.

Other than that, I'm still trying to find a job. Nothing new on that front. I don't know if I'm going to do Christmas cards this year. If anyone wants to send me a card, don't send it to the Southampton address; I don't live there anymore. Send it to my old address in Germany--if you don't know it, ping me and I'll let you know.

Yuletide! Anyone doing Yuletide on the reading list? I'm torn. I did it last year, and had a lot of fun writing for it, but the fic I received was not really what I'd been hoping for. And I don't really have any fandoms I'd want to request for or am desperate to read fic in, this year. The fic I wrote last year was based on something that I had sitting on my hard-drive, half-written--I don't have anything like that this year, so I'd have to start from scratch. But it's only 1,000 words. I could probably do 1,000 words? And I'd love to be forced to write something. Torn! I will decide eventually.

I will have a Jasper on Thanksgiving. :3 We found a cheap flight, so she's coming over from the morning of the 24th until the afternoon of the 27th. It'll be her, earlwyn, hobbits_feet and myself. There won't be turkey, but there will be chicken. And a fuck-ton of other food. And probably midori, because we're sad, sad fangirls. I'm looking forward to it.

So. How is everyone?

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Sherlock

2011-10-23T06:09:22Z

I've watched Sherlock, at long last. Until now, I was avoiding it, because it's Moffat, and Moffat's writing makes me want to kill puppies even though I like puppies, but I'm currently staying with earlwyn, who is a Sherlock Holmes fiend, and I'm unemployed and the DVD was there on the shelf and . . . well. I ended up watching it after all.

A Study in Pink. I watched both the aired and the unaired pilot. I was surprised that it wasn't as horrible as I expected it to be--not horrible in a way that makes it uninteresting, but horrible in a way where it's riddled with -isms to the point where I can barely stop myself from putting my fist through the television. It wasn't. It was still incredibly sexist--it's Moffat, how could it not be--but since it's based on a 'verse that was created in the late 1800s, there are not enough women in the main plot to give Moffat a chance to ~~do what he did with Amy and River~~ degrade central female characters to mere plot devices and decorative objects through abysmal and sexist character development.

I'm not sure what to think of Sherlock and John. I think I like John, even though the whole "and then he got excited and his limp disappeared" made the medically interested person in me go THIS IS NOT HOW IT WORKS. Sherlock . . . is an interesting take on Conan Doyle's character. Not one I particularly like, I don't think. In the books, I always liked the way Sherlock Holmes comes across as independent and incredibly callous and unfeeling, but if you get to know him a little bit more closely, he's really just a big squishy softie in need of constant validation underneath. This gets stripped away in Moffat's characterization. Sherlock is just an asshole, and has very few redeeming qualities. I'm sure fandom got on that and fixed it, and hey, good on fandom--but in the show, Sherlock is a dick, and I just kind of want to take John aside and tell him to get the hell out, because this isn't a good relationship and he's getting nothing out of it. I never got that feeling from the books.

I liked the plot structure of the unaired pilot a lot better than the aired pilot. I did like that they introduced Mycroft to give Watson a plotline of his own, in the aired pilot, and gave him that moment of choosing to show loyalty to Sherlock. But the cab reveal came way too late in the aired version, at a point where it had no effect at all because the audience had figured it out already. And the whole GPS phone thing was just . . . bizarre and improbable. Not that the phone would have GPS and they could trace it, but that nobody would realize that the phone is in the goddamn cab outside the door. At the point where Sherlock leaves in the cab and the GPS trace leaves Baker Street, I trust that not just John, but at least Lestrade would have put two and two together, if not any of the other police officers. That took away a lot from the finale, the lead-up making everyone thick as bricks. Which is not unusual, for a Moffat episode. I think I understand why they did it--it's a pilot, and the first finale reveal the audience gets to watch Sherlock do. Sherlock's character is not one you want introduce with a show of vulnerability, so having him be drugged and not at his sharpest in the first boss fight, so to speak, is probably not the best script choice. But having him be stupider than the audience in the first finale lead-up is, in my opinion, just as bad. They should have found a combination of the two--have the cabbie use a gun and force Sherlock to come with him, instead of drugging him, for example. Or anything else that would have avoided both putting Sherlock in a vulnerable position, and having him and the other characters be incredibly dense.

Also, Sergeant Donovan. Is that her name? The lady police officer who warns John to stay away from Sherlock. She was wearing a skirt in both the aired and the unaired version, which she had to, so Sherlock could make his incredibly funny quip about the state of her knees--and that was just incredibly Moffat, so I wouldn't have minded if they'd lost that altogether and let her wear trousers, like any normal police officer would on a rainy, dark evening investigating a crime scene. But at least in the unaired pilot, she was in police gear--except for the skirt, which looked slightly at odds with the rest of her outfit, she looked like she belonged at the crime scene. In the aired pilot she was wearing an outfit that I'd expect to see on a PR liaison officer, not a normal police sergeant. As the only recurring female character apart from Mrs Hudson introduced in the pilot, I really wish they would have taken more care to, well. Be less sexist in her portrayal. But it's Moffat. Why am I even wasting my breath.

The aired version was much slicker, and flowed better, and was more engaging, I just feel like they sacrificed a lot of character and plot depth for that slickness. And it wouldn't have been hard to keep both, so the aired version's slickness kind of makes me lineface, now that I've seen the unaired version.

The Blind Banker. I . . . can't really say much about that one, because I was so busy waving my hands at the screen and wanting them to STOP BEING SO INCREDIBLY RACIST that I missed most of the rest of the episode. How can you still put something like that on the telly without someone slapping your wrists? I'm appalled and mystified, and I do not mean that in an ironic way.

What I do remember, though, is that Sarah, John's girlfriend, got to be the useless, inactive damsel in distress. All she had to do was tip her chair over backwards! She seemed competent enough to think of that, in a situation like that. But no, she just got to sit there and cry, and John got to be the one who tipped his chair over and did . . . something. Don't remember. I was too busy being annoyed to really register how they got out of that situation.

Oh, and John's lame "next date won't be like that" line? I think I would have kicked him in the face, if I'd been in Sarah's place. The fact that she smiled and then walked out of there arm in arm with John was just so . . . bizarre to me. I liked Sarah when she got introduced, but the moment she got tied to a chair, she lost all common sense and ability to make independent decisions and judgment calls. But really, John took her on a date, then John's best friend showed up on their date and made it awkward, then she had to bash an attacker's skull in to save John and his friend, then she got sneered at by John's best friend for being hungry and wanting to eat, got sidelined for John's and Sherlock's case, got fed stale pickled eggs, had to hang out and wait for take-out in a messy, unattractive flat, got bashed over the head, tied to a chair, and then had her life threatened by John's and Sherlock's enemies. And then she walked out of there in the arm of the guy who took her on that sort of date? Really? Maybe I'm just not enough into being lured into a dangerous criminal investigation under the false pretense of a romantic date, but in Sarah's place, I would have slapped John with a dead fish and left the moment they untied me. But again. Moffat. Wasting my breath. Moving on.

The Great Game. That one . . . could have been good. Very Gatiss, which means it was kind of boring, very straightforward without a lot of surprises, but it could have been good. If Moriarty had been . . . different. What was he doing with his voice? Those were the strangest line deliveries I have seen an actor do in a long time. And maybe I'm being dense, but I have no clue what the ending was all about. Not the showdown with John and the explosives and that tiny little moment of vulnerability for Sherlock--too late, by the way, show. You've already made me decide that your main character is an unredeemable asshole. Tiny moments of vulnerability won't make me like him more.--but the bit where Moriarty shows up again. What was going on with the dancing laser points? Was Moriarty faking the sniper? Was he not, and was he about to kill Sherlock and John? If so, why didn't he? Was it supposed to be a cliffhanger? I dunno, maybe I am being dense, but if I have to ask if something is a cliffhanger, I do feel that the writer maybe got a little bit too tangled up in being clever to produce an engaging ending to his story.

Overall, I feel like the show was mostly a disappointment. Unsurprising, as it's Moffat and I intensely dislike Moffat's style as well as his characterization choices. But Sherlock Holmes in the modern world could be so interesting. And the show is, in some ways. In others, though, it's just . . . ranging from boring to infuriating. Clearly, Moffat should hire me as a script editor. I have the background knowledge; I have actually read all of Sherlock Holmes. When I was eight. What, it still counts.

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Signal Boost

2011-10-12T23:37:11Z

choukoumei has prints and posters left over from selling her art at a convention, and is trying to find buyers for them. She's nna on deviantArt, and draws in the style you can see in the pictures below.

Link to the blog post about the sale is here, which contains links to gallery images of all prints and posters on sale. I can't really tell which fandoms most of them are from, since they're animated fandoms, which I have very little involvement with, but they're pretty! I love how nna works with color and shapes. And there are two Doctor Who prints, one of which I'm probably going to snag a copy of. They're very reasonably priced, including both US and international shipping, so go and check it out and buy some pretty things!

Oh, and if you feel like signal boosting this signal boost, feel more than free to link to this entry, or to nna's sale page on deviantArt.

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Fright Night

2011-08-21T16:37:57Z

So yesterday I went to see Fright Night with mind_the_tardis, sandsdream and earlwyn.

I loved it.

It was cheesy 80s horror, but it avoided all the horrible cheesy 80s horror tropes as well as it could. Women weren't completely useless, nerds weren't completely oblivious, and it didn't overdo the silly horror effects too much. Not perfect by far, but decent enough to be enjoyable. If you like that kind of thing, that is, of course.

Oh god David. David. Love. His role was the BEST. He was this tall, clumsy man with an enormous attitude badly covering the fear of being rejected, of not being liked, and of failing at being the person he and others want him to be. Sounds super-emo. I'm sure it could be. In the film, it was just silly and ridiculous and endearing.

The part I possibly liked best about Peter Vincent was his relationship with his girlfriend Ginger. It consisted of the two of them cussing each other out and flipping each other off, but secretly being ENORMOUSLY ATTACHED to each other. I want someone to play a Peter to my Ginger. Which I don't have yet, but I'm sure I'm going to have one soon.

Colin Farrel had way too much fun being a vampire. The kid who played the main character actually wasn't horrible. I thoroughly enjoyed myself and want to see it again, so I am going to have to squeeze at least one more, possibly two more theater visits into the remaining days of my stay here in the US. Seeing it with three other fangirls certainly helped.

I'm sure I'd have more thoughts, but I gotta run. Any questions, squee, whatever, feel free to leave them in the comments. :)

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Torchwood Miracle Day Episode 1

2011-07-12T03:56:03Z

Aw. That was adorable.

Started a little slow, but then, if you have a ten episode arc, the first episode is hardly going to be plot packed. I could see RTD going YAY I HAVE A HELICOPTER IN MY BUDGET. You know he always wanted to do those crazy beach car-helicopter chase shots in Doctor Who. And ended up having to do them with a cab and the TARDIS. Which was fun, too.

<3 Mekhi Phifer. He always ends up playing these doofy, American WHAT THE HECK IS GOING ON I SHOOT THINGS FIRST AND ASK QUESTIONS LATER kind of cop characters. It's sort of adorable. "I gotta pay for this bridge?" "Wales is insane." I could see RTD poking fun at Wales in a really-I-love-you kind of way. It was cute. Also, "I'm extraditing this Torchwood thing to the United States. Now get me home." Soooo RTD. Man, I've missed his writing.

Very little Barrowman! Can't say I had a problem with that. And awwww Eve Myles and Kai Owen; Gwen and Rhys. So adorable. Gwen putting ear muffs on her kid before she went and shot up that helicopter. Gotta love details like that. Captain Jack Bollocks. I'm sorry, Rhys, if you wanted a housewife, you married the wrong woman. Although I agree that Harkness is Captain Jack Bollocks.

PC Andy! I am noticing myself just cooing over the cast, in this review, but what the heck. PC Andy! <3 <3

Anyway. I have no clever input. I just wanted to go d'awwwwwwwwww. Looking forward to the next part! :D

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Photo Tumblr

2011-07-02T01:00:37Z

So, I'm not a photographer, but I like pointing my camera at things and clicking the button. Sometimes, pretty photos happen. So I've set up a photo tumblr at

timesnap.tumblr.com

I've got about 25 photos queued up to post one per day over the next month, and will then update sporadically whenever I end up taking a photo I think deserves to be put on the blog. So. Follow, if you like? (And if, you know, you have a tumblr).

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Fright Night

2011-06-06T19:40:03Z

This is just. Very attractive. If you'd like a picspam of the important parts of this trailer, go here.

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A Good Man Goes To War

2011-06-05T16:13:47Z

I guess I should post a Doctor Who reaction post, shouldn't I? I don't . . . really have one. Have a copy and pasted log under the cut.

teyla: Yeah. Just. The whole thing. I just really don't care anymore? I think . . . I think I stopped caring with the first of Matt Graham's episodes. Don't know what did it. But I just went . . . okay, no. Whatever happens, I'm just not invested. This show isn't doing anything for me, this show is just . . . people running around and flailing and scenes jumping from Wales 700 BC to Beirut 23,000 AD and there's no coherent thread that's holding it together. It's just pictures. I'm not processing it anymore.

kikainogimon: Yep. I know what you mean. I can actually *feel* a block in my head when I try to think about the episodes. Going ... it's not worth it.

teyla: Yep.

teyla: I dunno. I'm just kind of shrugging and going . . . the Victorian couple were cute?

River being Amy's baby is unsurprising. The Doctor having a thing with her is . . . squicky and skeevy and yucky and when I try to think about it my brain goes LA LA LA VICTORIAN COUPLE WHAT KILL JACK THE RIPPER AND IMAGINE WHAT SHE COULD DO WITH THAT TONGUE. The Sontaran nurse was nice, too. Rory going "I wanted to be cool" was kind of adorable. The rest . . . whatever. Handwave. Not thinking about it.

(Although I . . . have no idea what the "Let's Kill Hitler" thing was about. What? What? Really? Is that supposed to be a joke? It's not funny. Die, Moffat. Slowly, and painfully. If you would.)

Doubt I'm gonna be watching in fall. I WANT MIRACLE DAY. I WANT IT NOW. Really, I'm with shinyopals and this macro.

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Much Ado About Nothing, Tennant (Benedick) and Tate (Beatrice), Wyndhams Theatre, London

2011-05-30T19:32:17Z

Spoiler warning: If you read this, you're going to be spoiled for absolutely everything, from costumes to stage design to changes to the script to David Tennant's crotch. It's all in here. Don't read if you're planning to see it and want to be surprised by what they did with the production.

It's very long. Sorry about that. Also, it assumes that you know what the play's plot is. If you don't, you can read it up here.

I'd bought my ticket to see Much Ado pretty much the moment it was announced that David and Catherine would be doing the play. I love Shakespeare (prefer his tragedies, usually, but that's just being picky), and I adore both David Tennant and Catherine Tate. No way was I going to miss out on seeing them live on stage, playing the romantic comedy template of the sparring-lovers couple. (I may have a thing for the sparring lovers trope, too.)

Here's my ticket. As you can see, I paid way too much money for it.

I went with wihluta and earlwyn. We flailed our way through the Friday evening performance, left the theater, and decided unequivocally to come back the next morning for the lottery. Wyndham Theatre give away 20 tickets each morning in a raffle. There were two performances on Saturday, so there were 40 tickets--and only 38 people queuing, so all three of us got a ticket for the Saturday evening performance for £10 each. If you don't have a ticket yet and live close to London, it's absolutely worth it to go to try the lottery. Just saying.

This is how I ended up seeing the play twice, and if I'd had more time in London, I would have gone back for a third time. It's just that good.

This production is contemporized, or more or less contemporized--it's set in the 80s. The reasons the director--a wonderfully talented woman called Josie Rourke who runs the Bush Theatre, a new-writing venue in West London--gives for choosing that time period are that she wanted contemporary, but didn't want the hassle of having to deal with mobile phones and 21st century tech and gadgets. Also, in this production, Messina is perceived as a military base, possibly on an island, cut off from the "real world". Rourke felt that setting the production in the 80s would help expressing that sense of escapism, of ignoring reality in favor of intricate love triangles and excessive partying.

It worked. I'm usually not a fan of excessive music and stage design in a play, but I felt that this production struck a very delicate balance. They had a lot of music, even brought in a composer, Michael Bruce, to write 80s-style music to set Shakespeare's words to. They used songs from other Shakespeare plays to play in the background, and as there was a lot of partying going on, they had several disco setup scenes, which, of course, contained music as well. However, the music was very rarely non-diegetic. In fact, I can't remember if there was any non-diegetic music in the play at all. Whenever music was playing, it was either that one of the characters had brought in a tape player, or someone was playing an instrument on stage, or it was a disco party scene complete with strobe lights and artificial fog. This kept the musical inserts from being too overbearing, despite their typical 80s gaudiness.

As for the stage design--well. I'm a huge fan of clever stage design, so I got very excited when I saw that this production came with a revolving stage. Here's a photo of the stage design sketch by designer Robert Jones. I apologize for the abysmal quality; my phone camera isn't the best. Click on it to open it slightly bigger in a new window.

A round, rotating circle in the middle of the stage, raised off the ground by half a foot or so. In the circle, three square columns that can be lined up in a row or be arranged in an offset pattern. The walls are covered with white Italian blinds, with a wall-high door in the back and on the right that opens to reveal a hint of blue, mediterranean sky. Everything is kept in white and offset-white marble tones, and the scene props that are brought in are kept in yellow, light brown and white. Overall, it manages really well to be big and heavy and luxurious, and at the same time capture that warm, open lightness of the imaginary Spanish island that Messina is perceived as in this production. No overwhelming details; those are brought in by the actors, their costumes and props and hairstyles.

I loved the revolving stage. In Much Ado, there are so many scenes of people sneaking around and eavesdropping on/stalking/overhearing other people. The revolving stage and the three moving columns gave the actors and the director so much space and versatility to have an absolute field day with interlacing scenes and plotting character movements. I don't think there was a single clunky scene break in the play. A lot of the time, Shakespeare plays have these really harsh scene breaks, the equivalent of a fade-to-black transition in a film. The revolving stage and the changing perspective smoothed them out, made it more like a clean cut from one scene to the next. Characters would walk off on the right, while the next scene would be starting on the left, being moved "into focus" by the revolving stage. Even if the rest of the production had been shit, I still would have given them points for using a revolving stage.

The rest of the production was anything but shit, though! (Look what I did there. The transitions in the play are much smoother.) Finally, at long last, I will talk about the characters. It seems easier to break it down, so that's what I'll do.

Don Pedro
Played by Adam James (D.I. McMillan in Planet of the Dead, for anyone who remembers him). He was a typical "nice guy" character. Not in a bad way, though; you ended up sympathizing with him most of the time, even if he did a couple of things that just had you facepalming at his naivety. His nicest moments were probably inciting the matchmaking of Benedick and Beatrice, and getting turned down by Beatrice when he asks her to marry him. This production played his implied crush on her as quite sincere, but absolutely unrequited. Moreover, Beatrice is absolutely oblivious, so the scene where he asks her, out of the blue and almost in jest "will you have me?" is quite funny, as well as makes you feel for him. (He doesn't pine, though. He gets over it very quickly and matchmakes Beatrice with Benedick. Which made me appreciate him even more as a character.)

Don John
Played by Elliot Levey. He's the villain! A plain-dealing one, too, which he tells you, just in case you couldn't tell from his utter lack of a motive. But then, it's Shakespeare, and in Shakespeare, villains don't need a motive. He's so lacking, though, that Emma Smith, an English fellow and tutor at Oxford who wrote the program introduction, suggests he might actually be less of a character and more of "a projection of male anxieties about women's sexual fidelity".

I have to say, I fully subscribe to that reading. As much as Shakespeare can, the entire play felt very much produced from a female gaze--unsurprisingly, as it was directed by a woman. Don John was shown as uptight, constantly in uniform and buttoning up more as the other characters started partying and wearing civilian clothes. He was a cardboard-cutout villain, not character enough so you could resent him for what he was doing. You resented Claudio and Don Pedro for falling for Don John's thin, ridiculous plot. Don John, you just felt kind of sorry for. Sorry, and amused.

The only thing that I didn't like too much was that there was an implication that Don John was attracted to Claudio. I suppose it makes some sense, as an attempt to give him at least some semblance of a motive to want to split up Claudio and Hero, but, well. I am not a fan of the evil, uptight, gay villain trope. It wasn't overdone, though. It only showed up quite subliminally in one or two scenes. And it was funny. It's just a bit of a dodgy trope.

Benedick
Hm, let me think. Who played Benedick again? Oh, David. <3 <3 He was using his Scottish accent for the role, which fit quite well, actually. In his interview, he talks about going into rehearsals expecting Benedick to be like Berowne from Love's Labour's Lost, whom he played in 2008. He says:

I thought Benedick was going to be more like Berowne in Love's Labour's Lost, which I did recently. [. . .] Now I don't think they're the same person at all. Berowne's very good at understanding how people operate. I'm quite enjoying finding the bits where Benedick doesn't understand human behaviour as well as he thinks he does. I think there are some interesting places in Benedick where he's quite naive, which has taken me by surprise but I'm quite enjoying it.

Having seen the RSC production of Love's Labour's Lost in 2008, I can see exactly what he's talking about. Berowne was clever and cunning and a bit of an ass, yes, but you had to kind of admire his craftiness. Benedick you're mostly just laughing at. In an amiable way, of course. Mostly. In the first half of the play, he spends most of his time being an oblivious, very shallow kind of guy, telling everyone how he is never ever going to fall in love or get married, and making fun of Claudio for being in love with Hero. He also loses most of his verbal matches with Beatrice, which hurts his ego and upsets him, fueling his resolve to never ever get married. No really. Except then Don Pedro and Leonato start their matchmaking, and it takes nothing at all to convince Benedick that Beatrice is head over heels in love with him. His reaction is overjoyed, implying that he definitely feels more than hate towards Beatrice. After that, there are many pining glances. Aw. <3

In the second half of the play, everything gets a bit more serious. Hero is slandered, Benedick and Beatrice confess their love to one another, and Beatrice demands from Benedick to kill Claudio to prove his love. I thought that scene was one of the strongest in the play. Beatrice, arguably one of Shakespeare's most feminist characters, is demanding a huge commitment from a man who only two acts ago claimed he would never ever commit to any woman. She's essentially asking Benedick to trust her and Hero, who claim that Hero is innocent, over Claudio and Don Pedro, who said they saw Hero betray Claudio. David acted that beautifully; Benedick choosing to trust women over men and deciding to challenge Claudio's accusations. In the first half of the play, he's the naive, male-privileged wannabe womanizer you just sort of roll your eyes at, but in the second half of the play, he develops into the only male character in the play who is willing to see women as equally trustworthy as men. Thus winning Beatrice's heart. :3 Go Beatrice for waiting until he got his head out of his ass.

Claudio
Hm, Claudio. Played by Tom Bateman, who is even taller than David Tennant and in his third year of drama school, so Much Ado is his professional debut. There isn't much to the character, not in the play itself, and this production didn't really add much. On purpose, I think; Claudio felt a little bit like a less over-the-top version of Romeo. Deciding he's in love with Hero, pining for and wooing her, and then changing his mind at the drop of a hat, slandering her and walking off, thinking he killed her and not caring. Until he finds out that he falsely accused her. His reaction to that was staged in the church where Hero's fake funeral was being held. After the funeral, when everyone had left, Claudio gets out his tape player and a bottle of Jack Daniels. He plays emo 80s music, drinks whiskey straight from the bottle, and plays around with a gun. It's all very Join Me In Death and definitely played as purposefully over-the-top and funny, not sad. I think it's part of the female gaze of this production--Claudio, the character who slanders and kills the woman he supposedly loves with no proof other than something shown to him by Don John, of all people, doesn't come off too well in it. I approved.

Borachio
Another villain! Played by Alex Beckett. He wasn't too much expanded on, either, and mostly played for laughs. He was portrayed a bit like the main character in Doctor Horrible, except less sympathetic--really wanting to be a villain, complete with evil laughter and everything, but in reality just being a bit of a useless failure. I thought that he could have used more of a reaction moment upon being told that Hero died because of the wrongful accusations Borachio had caused her to be accused of. He barely reacted to that, but in the next scene, he walks up to Claudio and Don Pedro and confesses his heart out. It's a bit of an abrupt change of mind and character inclination.

Alex Beckett was also the understudy for Benedick, which gave me a bit of a pause when I saw it. But I think it would actually have worked.

Leonato
Played by Jonathan Coy. Typical Shakespeare dad, minus the random outbursts of hostility Shakespeare dads sometimes tend to have. He did have one chair-kicking scene, but most of the time, I felt like he was portrayed as rather good-hearted and mellow. The mediterranean setting maybe helped me get that impression--had it been set in uptight, emotionally repressed Victorian England, his kicking a chair would have had much more of an impact. Like this, it felt more like a maybe not justified, but realistic reaction to what was happening in the play. I don't really have much to say about him. However . . .

Innogen
. . . was much more interesting. Played by Anna Farnworth (Valerie's mother in V for Vendetta), Innogen is a character who doesn't appear in the published version of Shakespeare's Much Ado. She was in the play as Leonato's wife in earlier drafts, but Shakespeare got rid of her, probably because she didn't have any lines. In this production, she was reintroduced, replacing Antonio, Leonato's brother, who doesn't appear in this version of the play. Innogen has a few scenes with Leonato, and one quite strong scene where she condemns Claudio for having slandered and "killed" Hero. I really loved that they put her in the play. I thought she added a layer to the production that another male character couldn't have brought as well as she did. Like this, the division between the male and female "camps" in the play becomes even stronger, so it's even nicer when they unite in the end.

Hero
Played by Sarah Macrae. Surprisingly enough, I really liked her. Shakespeare's love interests usually tend to be a bit on the weak side--I'm thinking Ophelia, mainly. (Man, I love Hamlet, but Ophelia always bothers me.) But I thought that the strong female focus of the play really gave Hero a platform to be a strong character. I loved her relationship with Beatrice, and her anger rather than anguish at being accused at her wedding. Anger, really, more at her father than at Claudio--I got the impression that she expected her father to know her better than that, to love her enough not to dismiss her on the grounds of unproven accusations. Of course, in the end she goes and marries Claudio after all--it is what the plot demands, unfortunately. I just hope she dumps him soon after and spends her time hanging out with Beatrice and Margaret.

Beatrice
Played by the wonderful Catherine Tate, of course. :D I love everything about this character. She's smart, she's funny, she's beautiful, she's witty, she won't settle down with any random guy just because society expects her to. She turns down the prince, Don Pedro, when he confesses that he would like to marry her. And not necessarily because she dislikes him. Simply because she doesn't want to end up stuck with a man she doesn't actually want. That scene really is one of my favorite character moments for both her and Don Pedro. It was beautifully acted, with Beatrice essentially going "lol, no" when Don Pedro asks her, and only then realizing that the prince was being serious. Oh shit! It's a wonderful scene, and it was wonderfully done in this production.

Once again, as with when she was playing Donna, I was struck with how well Catherine Tate switches between comedy and "serious" scenes. One moment it's all witty banter and verbal sparring with Benedick, and the next, they're talking about love and murder and betrayal. And since both of them, Tate and Tennant, are wonderfully flexible actors, those scenes end up charged with a huge amount of emotional tension that keeps you on the edge of your seat.

I can't decide what my favorite scene is for Beatrice. Costume-wise, it must be the first party scene where she's crossdressing. Oh-my-god, Catherine Tate in a tie and trilby hat and white shirt and black jacket. And sunglasses. When I went to see Hamlet in 2008, I had a dumbstruck drool-moment when Tennant came on stage barefoot and for the first time wearing his ratty, loose jeans and the red t-shirt. (It was just before his "to be or not to be" monologue, and I was utterly distracted. SORRY DAVID.) Anyway, that moment in this play was Catherine Tate walking on stage in her suit and tie. And hat. Ngh. She had a hat.

Ahem. Yes. I think character-wise, I had two favorite scenes with Beatrice. One was the one I mentioned above, where she tells Benedick to kill Claudio for slandering Hero. It's a very strong scene, very charged, with Catherine getting that feeling of helpless anger across that her character seems to be all about: being a woman in a society where women are denied agency, so she uses the only way she can to revenge her friend. My other favorite was the last scene in the end, where Benedick proposes to her--he actually gets down on one knee and has a ring and everything; it's adorable--and she tells him that she doesn't actually love him. No more than reason, anyway. There's a sense that there's something she's still hesitant to forgive Benedick for, something that happened in the past; maybe something they were both at fault for but that she's been holding on to for so long now that she has trouble letting go. But she does, in the end, and it's not just Beatrice giving Benedick another chance--it also feels a bit like women giving men another chance, since, well, we're all in this together, aren't we. I like to think that Benedick actually realizes that and stops being an oblivious dick after marrying Beatrice. If not, though, I'm sure Beatrice will have no trouble sorting him out. <3

Dogberry and the Watch
Dogberry and his two watchmen were purely comic relief. Which, you know, it's a comedy, so that makes sense. Dogberry was played by John Ramm, who did a good job of keeping the character funny rather than annoying. The entire watch ensemble reminded me a bit of Terry Pratchett's Night Watch--not particularly competent, but at least trying their hardest. I'm not always a fan of purely comedic characters; they have a tendency to feel a bit redundant--but with Ramm's Dogberry, I felt that he had exactly enough scenes to continue being funny rather than distract from what was actually going on in the play, and he acted them with just enough sincerity to give the character validity.

Margaret
She's Hero's gentlewoman and only had a few lines. I thought the actress, Natalie Thomas, was quite striking, but her character didn't have a central part in the plot, so she didn't get to do much. It kind of made me want a play about her, though, in the style of Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, in which the audience is shown how Margaret is dealing with everything that's going on, and why she's drawn to Borachio. Someone should write that.

The rest of the cast were mostly background characters. A lot of detail went into developing them; there wasn't a single character in the play who didn't have their own name. The "Messenger" is listed as just that, but in the booklet about the show, it's pointed out that during rehearsals, he was named Eric. There were a number of servants and householders, and even a couple of children. One child, a boy, had a couple of silent comedic scenes with Benedick which were rather cute and funny. Even characters that didn't have any lines felt quite integrated in the play, which I've found is rare in productions that have such a strong central cast. There's a full cast list on the production's website here.

I think what I liked best about the play, really, was the direction. It really brought out the themes the play addresses, without taking away from its being a comedy. There were long, hilariously funny and very cleverly choreographed "slapstick" scenes, and then there were scenes like the one with Benedick and Beatrice, with Beatrice asking Benedick to kill Claudio. I've always liked best comedies that manage to strike a balance between tragedy and comedy (think Shaun of the Dead, that moment where his mother dies and you suddenly really feel for Shaun, rather than just find yourself laughing at him), and I thought this production hit that balance really well. Having two main cast members who are that good at both comedy and tragedy certainly helped.

Other awesome things included:

- above mentioned crossdressing. It wasn't just Catherine who was crossdressed; David was as well. He was wearing a ridiculously short denim skirt with lace stockings, a long-sleeve pink mesh top and a loose, black, sparkly t-shirt. Plus shiny, red Doc Martens. After having talked to Beatrice, he sits down on the edge of the revolving stage, knees up and legs uncrossed, displaying his crotch to the entire audience. He was wearing black underpants.

- Benedick trying to compose a love song for Beatrice.

- Beatrice pointing out that if Benedick were a bit more like Don John, and Don John a bit more like Benedick, she'd have them both, but since neither are a bit more like the other, she'll stick to Hero. (She didn't actually say that last bit. It's my reading, though, and I'm sticking to it.)

- Dance numbers. So many dance numbers. Catherine is actually quite good at them. David . . . has too many limbs. He can move, but with the 80s dance style, he still looks like he's flailing more than dancing. At least he's choreographed, so it's choreographed flailing. It's adorable, though, and it fits with the character. So no criticism from me.

- the audience on Friday night. Friday was an awesome audience, laughing in all the right places, getting excited and clapping and reacting to all the right things. By the end, the actors were hyped up enough so David and Catherine started singing at each other in the final dance number. Which was absolutely adorable. For some reason, Friday night's audience didn't give many standing ovations, though. I was going to, but it's awkward wanting to stand up while nobody else is. We did stand up Saturday night, though, so that was okay.

After the play--both plays--we of course went outside to the stage door. There were a lot of people, and they'd put up metal crowd barriers to keep the crowd from, well, crowding David and Catherine. Steve the stage door man--he was there both nights being adorable and stage-door-man-y; I almost wanted to ask him for an autograph--explained that David and Catherine would be out in a couple of minutes, would sign anything as long as it was related to the production (no unofficial stuff, even if it was related to the play), and that if anyone started pushing, he'd have to send them both back inside.

They were so lovely. People were being nice; there wasn't much pushing, and David and Catherine both took a lot of time to sign programs and books and leaflets and posters, and they even posed for a few photographs with fans. The first night, I just got my book signed and then pulled back to let others get their autographs, so I didn't get a lot of good pictures. (I generally didn't get a lot of good pictures, since my phone camera has the annoying habit of cranking the gain up when the environment gets a little darker. That's why the pictures are so grainy.)

That was the best picture I got of David on the first night. Is it wrong that I kind of want to perv over the blurry outline of his shoulderblade? Probably.

The second night, they took even more time to sign things and let people take pictures. I was quite close to the front. David signed my leaflet (I was getting two more autographs to give away to a friend), and then moved on to the person next to me. She wanted him to sign two things. And then wanted a picture. And then her friend wanted something signed. And wanted a picture. And David was just standing there, half a meter from me, being lovely and signing things, for at least a minute. I never thought I was going to be the creepy, staring fan, but I was totally being the creepy, staring fan. It was a little bit embarrassing. But I don't think he noticed.

I did totally forget to take pictures, though. Fail. I got a couple of decent ones of Catherine, though. She stayed and signed programs even longer than David did; she was still there when the crowd was already starting to get smaller. She's so pretty. And lovely. And ngh. <3

I blurred the girl's face since I don't know how keen she is on having her picture on the internet. Sorry if it looks a bit odd.

If you have the money and the time to come down to London and see the production, you totally should. It's really, really good, and not just because it's got Catherine and David. They don't hurt, though. Neither does the crossdressing. Or the dancing. <3

If you can't come to London to see the play--or if you can but feel that everyone should get to see it--you can always sign the petition that's asking for the production to be released on DVD. I know, it's a bit of a long shot, but hey. It worked for Hamlet.

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Secret Diary of a Call Girl

2011-05-26T03:57:13Z

So I may just have marathoned the first two seasons of Secret Diary of a Call Girl. I know, sounds horrible, but the seasons only have eight episodes, and the episodes are only twenty minutes long.

No spoilers. . . . but good God, who decided it was a good idea to put that show on ITV? The concept combined with ITV's . . . quaint controversy, for lack of a better term, it's just so damn cringy. It's not quite a C4 show, either, because it's not quite ~hip and ~gritty and ~teendrama enough, but . . . just put it on C5? BBC3? Anywhere but ITV.

But it's on ITV, and since it's on ITV, it's just painfully steeped in all those early-nineties we're-so-open-minded-but-really-we-live-in-the-early-50s standards and convictions. Prostitution is a part of everyday life, we all accept that because we're ~modern, but by God it's still disgusting and fucked up and of course it's the woman's fault. She falls in love and frantically tries to hide her profession from her lover, who first tells her he loves her keeping secrets and then guilts her about keeping secrets. When she finally decides to tell him, because she genuinely loves him and wants his acceptance, he spits in her face and calls her a whore and has a melt-down about the violation of his poor, male ego. And of course that's acceptable behavior. Of course that's okay. Because it is the woman's fault, isn't it, she chose that profession, she picked this career, and that makes her a dirty, filthy whore. Which, you know, that's okay, because we're all modern and we accept that ~~all~~ some women are dirty, filthy whores, but she should really have been upfront about it. How dare she mislead this upstanding young doctor who saves lives and rescues children from cancer by hiding from him that she sells her body for money.

Ahem. Yes. So I was less than overwhelmed by the second season. I'll still probably watch the third and the fourth, because I've started now, and the seasons are very short. But if they keep going in that vein, I'm going to put this show down as . . . well. Really shouldn't have aired on ITV. I think it could work really well on a different channel, but on ITV, it's . . . a show about a call girl trying to perpetuate old-fashioned moralistic standards, and that's just not a good combination. (Also, ITV uses some of the worst, cheesiest timelapse-cutaways I've ever seen. Timelapse of the London Eye? Really?)

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Books to give away.

2011-05-22T21:39:27Z

I'm moving, so I sorted through my books. These are the ones I'm not planning to keep. Drop me a note if you want any of them.

Jo Banister - Charisma: A Castlemere Mystery

Mark Billingham - Death Message (One of his Inspector Thorne mysteries.)

Paul Challen - The House that Hugh Laurie Built (Unauthorized HL biography & episode guide.)

Barry Hoffman - Judas Eyes

~~Stephen Fry - The Hippopotamus~~

~~Stieg Larsson - The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo~~

Naomi Novik - His Majesty's Dragon, Empire of Ivory, Victory of Eagles (Temeraire series volume 1, 4 and 5)

William Shakespeare - Love's Labour's Lost, Arden Shakespeare edition; Romeo & Juliet, Oxford School Shakespeare; A Midsummer Night's Dream, Penguin Popular Classics (green cover); Macbeth , Penguin Popular Classics (green cover); Macbeth, Cambridge School Shakespeare

Aileen Wuornos - Monster: My True Story (don't ask me why I have this)

Depending on where you live, I may or may not be able to cover postage. Drop me a comment, and we can figure something out.

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The Rebel Flesh

2011-05-22T19:14:33Z

Hm. Liked the beginning. Liked the set-up, liked the idea. But around the point where the Doctor went to try and prevent the . . . sun storm? Tsunami? Thing? from animating the "flesh", I thought the episode kind of fell apart. Still liked the idea, and liked the basic concept, but I felt that the characters were acting incredibly disorganized and incompetent. I mean, they're all trained workers and they have a command hierarchy. The Doctor is quite good at taking charge. Someone should have taken the lead and made sure everyone did only what they were supposed to do. Instead, everyone ran around aimlessly, and the entire thing felt incredibly disorganized. Possibly how a real crisis like that would have been handled, but it's not a real crisis, and watching people run around like headless chickens isn't exactly entertaining. The script could have used some tightening and cleaning up, and the episode could have used a bit more coherency.

Also, what is it with the evil female base commanders? That is becoming such a trope, and not a fun one. At least give her a little bit of a third dimension. She was acting completely irrationally, to a degree that suggests that she would never have managed to work her way up into a commanding role. Sheesh.

Chris. :3 I approve of Chris. He's adorable. Although it was a bit disorienting having him in this episode. I kept expecting Gene to show up and tell everyone to get their shit together and stop acting like a group of catholic priests at a speed-dating event. Though that would probably have improved the episode.

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More Tumblr Adventures

2011-05-21T17:32:07Z

So . . . apparently tumblr is like crack. Kind of useless, but addictive.

John Smith (my human!Doctor roleplay AU) and Harry Brown (Jasper's human!Master roleplay AU) now have tumblrs, too. J. Smith and H. Brown.

We'll see how long it'll take until I lose interest.

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The Doctor's Wife

2011-05-14T20:57:58Z

:D :D EMBODIED TARDIS! :D :D :D :D

I just. EMBODIED TARDIS. :D

God, Gaiman, I love you.

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Horrible Videos that should exist, and one that does exist.

2011-05-14T17:39:30Z

So, I have this thing where I end up on youTube from time to time and think about all the horrible videos I would make if I weren't so lazy. Most of the time, I end up with Lady Gaga songs, because Lady Gaga is fabulous and not enough people make videos of her songs. Things I think should be made include:

1) A Master video to Born This Way. It would contain all incarnations of the Master. Because baby, he was born this way.

2) A 1973 Jesus Christ Superstar Jesus/Judas video to Judas. Because . . . just because.

3) A Ten video to I Like It Rough. No explanation necessary.

4) An Arthur/Eames video to Speechless. Although I don't know how much Inception fandom would appreciate being mocked. (I love Arthur/Eames, and I love the fandom. But . . . well. A bit of mocking has never hurt any fandom.)

But there is nothing I can come up with that would be as beautiful as the video I embedded under the cut. It's Due South. And . . . it's gorgeous.

And there's also this, which I've linked before, but am linking again, because it never gets old.

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Exile

2011-05-14T04:07:43Z

I finally got around to watching Exile.

First TV serial starring John Simm that I liked! Well, no, not true, I thought Mad Dogs was decent, too. I just saw Paul Abott in the credits and went, good Lord, is this going to be State of Play take two?

Nope, it wasn't. The dialog in the first part was horrendously stilted, and people spent too much time talking to themselves. But it got a little less forced in the second and third episode, and it was even quite funny in the second one. I really appreciate it when a drama about ~rape and ~violence and ~seediness isn't afraid to be a little funny now and again.

John Simm was adorable. His character was a ditz. But then, Simm's characters always are. I really liked the sister, and I loved the thing with his best mate Mike--because oh God how much do I hate it when characters get all hung up on things that any half-way reasonable person would get over after a bit. Yes, he's sleeping with your wife, but it's not like your marriage was working out before he came along. Thank you, writer, for not letting Mike spend the entire three episodes sulking about that.

It still was a very bloke-y serial, but the few female characters they had in there were decent. I liked the sister, I liked the secretary. The love interest had a few good moments, but she was, imo, the weakest--typical love interest, bleh. But oh well. It wasn't horrible enough to skeeve me out.

What I thought would skeeve me out was when Tom ended up attending his biological father's funeral. "Oh, I got cancer, so my years raping mentally disabled women and selling their children on the black market are forgiven, and my ~son can come to my funeral and pay me his respects." I was cringing so hard when that scene was happening--but then John Simm spit into his grave and left, and I went THANK YOU WRITER. It wrapped up the rapist's storyline without absolving him. I approve.

On a more shallow note, John Simm in a bathtub. :3

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Random post-deadline ramble

2011-05-13T02:29:25Z

Handed in my FMP yesterday. I think it's good. I think it's possibly the best of the course this year. But fuck am I glad it's done with. I have two more written things to complete till Tuesday, and a Q&A session to attend on Wednesday, and then I'm done with uni. Huh.

I will get around to filling at least a couple of the prompts you guys left me the other day. I've just been really crazily busy. I haven't even gotten around yet to watching Exile.

Here's a cute interview with David and Catherine about Much Ado. It's got a cute picture, too. I also just bought this. Someone tell me to stop spending money.

Speaking of money, I just remembered that the fundraising people I worked for a while ago still owe me my holiday pay. I will have to chase them down. Will also have to chase down a couple of FMP people for money. Why is it that you always have to chase people down if you want money from them? Stupid question, I know, but still. It gets tiresome.

This is a very random post. It needs more pictures. This is the first thing you get from Google images if you type in "random". Anyone know what it is? I have no clue.

ETA: Oh. I think it's primes. Is it primes?

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FMP

2011-05-11T04:07:18Z

9:00 am Got up after 5 hours of sleep. Showered, skipped breakfast, walked up to other group member's flat.

10:00 am Got a two-second tutorial in sound recording to prep for shoot.

10:00 am - 12:00 pm Directed additional ending scene in police station. Also recorded sound. Also made sure fussy, high-maintenance actor was happy. Also told camera man S. to get tripod shots additional to the handheld shots he insisted on.

12:10 pm - Got panicky phone call from editor telling me that the Mac with all our footage and editing project files wouldn't turn on. Panicked.

12:13 pm - Got another phone call telling me that, no, wait, it's turning on. De-panicked.

12:00 pm - 13:30 pm Directed additional additional ending scene in office room location. Also recorded sound. Also made sure camera man S. wouldn't set up the shot with the subject bang in the middle of the frame. Also tried to do at least some semblance of a sound log to make the audio/video sync easier. Also attempted to be friendly to office room location people, since they let us in without charging us.

13:30 pm - 14:30 pm Dropped fussy, high-maintenance actor off at train station. Got Costa coffee. Got Subway. Went up to editor's place to help him match up the sound. Found out that S. still hadn't dropped off the footage. Hung out at editor's place for a bit and watched the film back.

14:30 pm - 17:00 pm Helped edit the ending when S. had finally shown up. Helped fix the credits. Helped sync the sound. Tried to install CS5 on the laptop. Failed. Polished the website a bit; cleaned up some music files.

17:00 pm - Got a phone call from Other Producer M. telling me she's in so much pain that she's shaking and crying and she won't meet us for another rewatch of the film. Asked her for details. Was told a list of what sounded like kidney stones symptoms.

17:10 pm - 20:30 pm Called roommate's boyfriend to drive me and M. to the emergency room. Sat with M. while she signed in, waited, got triaged, waited again, got put into another room, waited again, and then was seen to by a doctor. Told M. to dump her boyfriend because the boyfriend didn't even look up from his PC game when she told him she was going to the hospital. Commiserate-panicked when doctor thought for a moment that M. was pregnant. Breathed a sigh of commiserating relief when doctor told her she wasn't. Felt relief as well about M.'s pain apparently having gone away.

20:30 pm - 21:00 pm Spent way too long sitting on a bus with M. to get back to the city center. Decided I was starving.

21:10 pm - 21:40 pm Went into a kebab shop to buy food. Paid counter person with £20 note I'd borrowed from M.. Counter person attempted to cheat me out of £10 by short-changing me. Told counter person to give me back my money. Left without food.

21:40 pm - 22:30 pm Went to M.'s place. Had some food there. Helped her put together the production portfolio. Boggled at the stacks and stacks of paperwork this production has produced.

22:30 pm - 23:15 pm Borrowed M.'s bike to go pick up some more paperwork from other group member. Realized that in the UK, even if you're on a bike, you still need to go on the left side of the street.

23:15 pm - 12:00 am Went to editor's place with M. to watch the film again. Had strudel with ice cream. Watched M. text S. to ask him what's happening with the trailer, which S. was supposed to upload at some point during the day and hadn't so far.

12:45 am Watched M. get a very rude phone call from S. in which he yelled at her for interrupting his beauty sleep. Was handed phone by M. after not being able to avoid interrupting. Chewed S. out about him being an irresponsible dickwad and told him to get the trailer to the editor by tomorrow morning at the very latest. Hung up. Was applauded by M. and the editor.

12:45 am - 1:30 am Watched film with M. and editor and talked about thinks that still need doing. Stayed behind when M. went back to her place because her pain was coming back.

1:40 am - 2:00 am Called M. to ask her if she's alright. Was told no, she's not, and she thinks she has to go back to the hospital. Went back to M.'s place and made her call the hospital. Worked out a pain killer plan with the hospital phone person and made M. take a lot of painkillers. Hated on absolutely disinterested boyfriend some more. Was relieved when pain seemed to go away again.

2:00 am - 3:30 am Put together production portfolio with M.. Printed a lot of paperwork. Forged a signature.

3:30 am - 4:00 am Watched "Badly Dubbed Porn" with M. on Comedy Central.

4:00 am - 5:00 am Went home and typed this entry.

WHY YES I HAVE A DEADLINE TOMORROW. How could you tell.

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Xbox 360 Adventures

2011-05-09T03:58:25Z

When Jasper was staying with me over the Easter break, she introduced me to video games. The roommate has an Xbox 360, and Jasper and I ended up playing Halo, Fable III and various versions of the Prince of Persia franchise. I was reasonably entertained, but not overwhelmingly so.

However, when I poked the internet about the Xbox 360, I came across quite a few repair guides how to fix the RRoD. The RRoD, for people who, like me, don't know anything about Xbox consoles, is the Red Ring of Death. It appears when the console registers a critical hardware failure. I read the repair tutorials, and thought that those were a lot more interesting than Halo. Or Fable III.

Long story short, I went on eBay and bought a faulty Xbox 360 console. I didn't want to keep it, I didn't want to play with it, I just wanted to see if I could fix the RRoD. The console arrived, and so did the two-pounds-RRoD-repair-kit, and I got to work. When I opened it up, my hopes sank--the console had clearly been opened up before; the warranty seal was broken and some screws were missing. Well, still. I'd invested money in the bloody thing, I was at least going to give it a try.

The RRoD fix is really quite simple. When Microsoft released the Xbox 360, they rushed it in order to get it on the market before the PS3 was released. Therefore, the hardware is a little buggy. The heatsinks sitting on the CPU and the GPU are a little loose, which means that over time, the CPU and the GPU will have space to warp. The fix is simply putting a little thermal paste on the CPU and GPU and screwing the heatsinks down more tightly.

Regarding thermal paste, there are about 500 tutorials online that tell you how to apply it. All of them also tell you that if you're using a silver based compound, you absolutely mustn't get any of it on the little circuits surrounding the GPU and CPU, since silver is conductive and will short those circuits out. Guess what I found when I took the heatsink off the GPU. The entire little GPU square was caked with congealed silver thermal compound. Real men don't need instructions, yeah? Well, mister, I know what broke your Xbox.

I scraped it all off. I put on some more (non-silver-containing) thermal compound. I screwed the heatsinks down tightly. I overheated the console, as instructed, and then I plugged it in--and was utterly surprised to find that it works. Seriously, I wasn't expecting a GPU that I'd scraped congealed thermal compound off of with a screwdriver to give me anything other than an angry red ring of death.

So now I have an Xbox. It doesn't have a hard drive or a controller, but you can get both for about £20 on eBay. I don't quite know what I want to do with it. I don't really play. I guess I could sell it?

If I had any sort of business sense, I would start buying faulty Xboxes off eBay, fix them, and then sell them again for three times as much as I paid for them.

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