Days of my Life

Doctor Who - Journey's End

2008-07-06T17:21:57Z

Throughout this two-parter I was torn between fangirly OMG SQUEEE Jack, Rose, Martha, Donna, Mickey and Sarah Jane all together again for the first time!!!eleventy and a much more cynical WTF is with some of the plot points here???

First, Donna's fate. This was a tragedy on so many levels. Since she first appeared Donna made it clear she felt she was nobody special, despite the surface bluster, and that was brought out even more in 'Turn Left' and other recent eps. It was in the way her mother talked to her, in her eagerness to marry that jerk what's-his-name, and in her joy later at becoming the Doctor's companion and at least being near greatness. Then - she changed over the course of the last series, became a valuable influence on the Doctor, grew as a character, and finally saved the entire damn universe and became more special and wondrous than even she could have imagined - and it's all taken away so completely that she doesn't even remember. Our last sight of her is as the shallow, self-involved person she started out as. The Doctor put it best: "That version of Donna is dead." In fact I wonder if this was what Rose meant by saying Donna was going to die - not that she'd throw herself under that truck to alter her own future, but this.

The Doctor himself is not innocent in all this - he meant well, but for all his moralizing he didn't give her a choice. Presented with that choice - die or lose everything she had become, effectively dying anyway - I honestly wonder what she would have done.

The other biggie - Time Lord/Human!Doctor winding up with Rose in the alternate dimension. I dunno, I got a distinct feeling the writers couldn't make up their minds where they wanted to go with this - was it Rose and Other!Ten finding true love? That kiss seemed to imply it (I can guess what Other!Ten whispered in her ear) but a second later she was literally running after Our!Ten. Was it Our!Ten asking Rose to offer Other!Ten the same support and good influence she had given him? Fine, except for the remarks about how Other!Ten could give her what Our!Ten couldn't. (Granted it was Donna who said it, but Our!Ten obviously agreed.)

Most of all, it comes back to choice. Neither Rose nor Other!Ten were given a choice, and that bothers me. Also there was no real compelling reason to leave them in the alternate dimension - if Other!Ten was such a danger to himself and others, how does leaving him for the people of another world to deal with help? No, it felt too much like Our!Ten (or rather, the writers) dumping two inconvenient entanglements where they don't have to be dealt with.

On the lighter side, I can almost hear a giant NEENER NEENER going up from all the Doctor/Rose shippers out there at this canon evidence that Rose really is more beloved by the Doctor than his other companions.

There are some intriguing possibilities raised in terms of the Doctor's character. I seem to recall a hint or statement somewhere along the line that he had destroyed the Daleks and possibly the other Time Lords in the Time War (someone correct me if I'm wrong, I ain't gonna rewatch the whole first season or so looking for it). In this case, his disgust at Other!Ten's genocide of the Daleks becomes quite interesting and would involve a good case of guilt.

It's also pretty fascinating to note that Other!Ten seems to have no problem with his actions - because he's half human? What does that say about us? That we don't have the lofty ideals of a Time Lord, or that we're not interested in letting a species whose only goal is the extermination of all other living creatures go on existing? Or is that the same thing? For myself, the immoral act would have been letting the Daleks live to inevitably come up with another way to destroy the universe.

And finally there's the Doctor ending up alone and lonely, despite, as Sarah Jane said, having a whole 'family' of people who love and admire him. The problem is that none of them are really and entirely his - Donna is gone, Rose too (for very dubious reasons), Martha is engaged and involved with the Unit, Jack's committed to Torchwood, Sarah Jane's committed to her son and whatever she's into, Mickey's off doing who-knows-what. The Doctor seems to need someone who belongs to him alone. There's some rationale for this, what with any companion needing to ready to take off for the other end of time and space at a moment's notice, but it's still interesting. It's also interesting how he gets all twitchy when any of them start getting too close and having needs of their own.

I keep thinking that after losing his home world and his entire species, perhaps through his own actions, the Doctor isn't quite sane. (I know the Master survived also, but he's not exactly too tightly wrapped himself.)

And a random thought - I've never watched the Sarah Jane Adventures, and really couldn't get into the snippets we saw because Mr. Smith, the talking supercomputer, reminded me entirely too much of Mr. Voice in GoGo Sentai Boukenger.

And now for a bit of entitlement whining about the kind folks who encode and upload things like these last four eps of Doctor Who. First - I'm immensely grateful; I really am. This gratitude gets multiplied by about a hundred when we're talking about fansubs - I have some idea of the kind of work that goes into them. If not for these people I would have to wait weeks to see crucial episodes of shows like Doctor Who (perish forbid) since I have the misfortune to be geographically challenged when it comes to British TV. I wouldn't be able to see other shows, like Sentai, at all. I appreciate it, guys, seriously.

But - why do so many encoders use codecs and other methods that make their files unplayable on many devices? Not everyone has the expertise to hunt down the proper codecs. Not everyone has a PC, and Mac users don't have the same software available. Some people, like me, vastly prefer to watch on our TVs. There are an increasing number of media players, DVD players, and game consoles that can play compressed video files, and so far they all choke on newer, less common codecs and on packed bitsteams, Qpel, and GMC.

So - would it be entirely out of line to suggest the use of plain vanilla Xvid or DivX encoding without packed, Qpel, or GMC? Yes, I know it's telling you how to do your encoding, but it's a suggestion, like suggesting a fanfiction author use a readable font and skip the fancy colored background. Encoders obviously take pride in offering the best possible quality in the smallest possible file - why not consider offering the most widely compatible file? On the practical side, all the things that make players barf add little to the quality of a compression, and I know I and probably many others would prefer to download a few more megabytes or give up a probably undetectable bit of extra quality for the sake of vegging out on my couch while watching without having to re-encode the damn file first.

My two cents. Maybe more like a nickel.

Top 100 books meme

2008-06-27T19:20:05Z

Stolen from zippitgood :

Top 100 books you should have read meme.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your own LJ so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - J. K. Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible - bolding even though I haven't read all of it - maybe half to two-thirds.
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare - (again bolding but I've read most, not all)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell (loved it the first time, the second time the racism got to me)
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville (skipped the endless chapters on whaling)
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce (ugh!)
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

I'm kind of surprised by how many I've read and by how many I've never heard of before.

(In some cases I really wasn't sure - there are some I read as a young child and remember only vaguely, and in a few cases I saw the movie and had to stop and think whether I had read the book too. The mind starts to go as you get old.)

Birthday greetings

2008-06-23T15:21:38Z

Happy Birthday to the_astronomer!

Now, where did THIS come from?

2008-06-20T18:11:27Z

Here's a handy link:

http://www.thepregnancytester.com/

This site offers an online pregnancy test using its Remote Sensor Technology to scan your body through the internet for indicators! Amazing! Turns out I'm pregnant - a pretty cool trick considering my current state of reluctant celibacy, not to mention my age. And the baby's a girl. I was also rather surprised to learn my baby daddy is Dick Cheney. I think he'd be surprised too.

Oh, and in a brief flash of insanity I tried to come up with a smush name for Andrew/Rose, and got Andros. Um, no.

Birthday greetings

2008-06-19T20:03:48Z

A very happy birthday to itsbuttery aka Arrow! By either name a leader of men and a follower of women!

Musings of the muse

2008-06-13T21:36:35Z

Funny how writing goes sometimes. I'm into the next chapter of "Between the Lines", covering Mack's leaving the Perfection Planet and subsequent changes to the Ranger lineup on the Astro Megaship. I had fun writing Andrew's intro as his heartburning about Rose is interrupted by another (hopefully) colorful messenger with Mack's latest letter. Then on to Mack's scene leaving Perfection - which I wrote. And didn't like. And trashed and rewrote. And bogged down in stilted dialogue that went nowhere because dammit, I was writing it as a group scene and Mack wants a conversation alone with Artemis. *sigh*

So, despite the usual fears of heading into Mary Sue territory with a beautiful OFC and a hint of romance with the canon hero, there seems to be no other way to write it.

cmar_wingnut @ 2008-06-13T06:53:00

2008-06-13T10:58:36Z

A big Happy Birthday to estirose! May the next year be a good one!

Hot, sweaty, and fly-infested

2008-06-12T11:25:02Z

General update:

We've had our first heat wave of the - well, not even summer yet. Four days of upper 90's F. My poor old window air conditioner was never very effective - it helps but temps inside my apt were still in the 80's in most rooms. Things have cooled off after a spectacular thunderstorm but it's still quite warm.

Cyclone came home last week as promised and was quite weak and shaky for a few days. We had a few bad minutes the next day when he started purring hard with his mouth open - very strange. I called the vet but Cycles stopped while we were talking and it hasn't happened again. Since the weekend he's been stronger and his appetite is excellent.

Things at work have been frustrating - I could get into video teleconferencing and ISDN lines and projects that obviously were never thought out by their managers, but I won't. I'll only add that buying ANYTHING IT-related in my branch of the government is slower than molasses running uphill in a snowstorm on a heavy gravity planet. And it's even worse if it's not an emergency.

Birthday greetings

2008-06-10T11:38:30Z

A big Happy Birthday to germankitty! I know things haven't been very happy for you lately, but here's hoping the coming year will be better.

cmar_wingnut @ 2008-06-04T17:25:00

2008-06-04T21:28:55Z

First, happy birthday to starandrea!

And the vet says Cyclone is better and hopefully can go home tomorrow morning.

Good news, maybe

2008-06-03T15:55:02Z

Looks like Cyclone may turn out okay for a while longer, after all - his kidney failure is still mild and what he has now is pancreatitis, which is very serious but can be treated. He has to stay in the hospital and be kept on intravenous fluids and antibiotics for a few days, and if his pancreas responds and gets back to normal he should be able to come home. Interestingly, the pancreas is the organ that regulates insulin and blood glucose - I wonder if the inflamation and the treatment will have an effect on his diabetes. Also I don't know what I'm going to feed him in the future - he needs low carbs for the diabetes, low protein for the kidney disease, and now low fat for the pancreatic disease. Arg, there's nothing left!

I'm cautiously hopeful - that cat is an amazing survivor: eighteen years old, diabetic and with early kidney failure, and still going.

cmar_wingnut @ 2008-06-02T17:10:00

2008-06-02T21:59:41Z

My kitty Cyclone (the one with diabetes) is at the cat hospital for a few days after pretty much not eating since Saturday and becoming dehydrated. The vet thinks his borderline kidney failure may be not so borderline anymore. They're going to give him fluids and do tests and see if he improves, but considering his age and the diabetes I don't have a good feeling.

Sick again

2008-06-01T02:35:27Z

I guess I'm sick again; I've been running a fever today between 99 and 100 F. Oddly, outside of being very hot I have no other symptoms and don't feel at all bad, even did a mild workout.

Oh right, I have discovered Gilad, the 'Israeli studmuffin', while transferring some taped exercise shows to DVD for a friend. He wants to pump me up, and I'm willing.

Author meme

2008-05-28T23:18:23Z

Gotten from hagar_972:

Here's a meme for fanfiction writers that I thought was interesting.

1. Your fav fandom?
For fanfiction, Power Rangers - mostly Time Force but including Overdrive, SPD, and other seasons. I also dabble in Sentai and have done a Batman series. In non-fanfic, my favorites would be Doctor Who (new), Torchwood, and all the Law and Orders.

2. Your fave pairing(s)? Why?
My favorite - Wes/Eric because - because - it's like love, hard to explain. I guess because they're so different and had such an emotionally complex relationship on the show. (Complex for PR, that is - the fact that it was so convincing is a real tribute to both actors.) But while I like romance I'm not really much of a 'shipper and can appreciate almost any pairing if it's done well and convincingly.

3. Pairing(s) you hate the most? Why?
Um, I'll sort of half-heartedly say Eric/Taylor. I don't hate the pairing but I'm not fond of it. I just don't see two personalities like that getting along without a lot of fighting, and while that kind of relationship may be fun to read I personally have trouble seeing it as romantic or amusing. *shrugs*

4. First fic ever?
An AU rewriting of Time Force called A Year of Time. Let's say it was a learning experience and let the poor thing rest in peace.

5. What genre(s) suits you the most?
I like variety - adventure, drama, romance, humor, it's all good. Humor is the one I'd most like to be really good at because it's challenging, fun, and rewarding.

6. Numbers of your fics when you do this meme?
53 on ff.net, a handful of PWPs and LJ ficlets, and the aforementioned first fic.

7. Your fav authors? why?
Sheesh, a tough one. In no particular order: Dagmar for her rich descriptions and sense of romance, MzDany for her great adventures and wonderful OCs, Hagar for the layers she puts in her plots and characters, MrQuinn for sheer imagination, Sierra for her depth of emotion, Starhawk for taking on unusual ideas (to say the least), David Hines for doing everything from dramatic character study to cracky humor and doing it so superbly, Tsukino Akume for her fascinating ideas, Psycho Tangerine for making me smile.

8. Ever thought your fics are good?
Yes. Not great, but good.

9. Ever received criticism for your fics? Did that affect you?
Yes, and probably should get more. I learned to try to control some annoying writing habits, like using way too many ellipses.

10. Are you famous among the other authors?
Famous? Dunno about that, but my name's recognized in Power Rangers fanfic circles.

And I tag - anyone who wants to.

Accent meme

2008-05-21T21:10:03Z

Gotten from kahva:

What American accent do you have?
Created by Xavier on Memegen.net

Neutral. Not Northern, Southern, or Western, just American. Your national American identity is more important to you than your local identity, because you don't really have a local identity to begin with.

Take this quiz now - it's easy!

Interesting and accurate. While I've lived in New Yawk for *mumble mumble* years, I grew up in Washington DC, North Carolina, Texas, and Florida, hence no real regional accent.

And if anyone remembers yesterday's bitching about the drugstore - when I went back last night they kept me waiting almost an hour despite my prescription having sat there for two days, and I have a feeling it would have been longer if I hadn't planted myself at the counter and complained loudly. At least this time I got it.

Sometimes customers aren't the ones who suck

2008-05-20T14:13:46Z

So last night I went to pick up a prescription for insulin syringes for my cat Cyclone that I had dropped off at the drugstore Sunday. First the guy kept me standing there for twenty minutes while he looked for it, tried to find my records in the computer (after asking me to spell my name at least five times), and then told me my prescription had expired. (Since yesterday???) Finally, it turned out someone had stuck it in a corner because they were out of stock. So poor Cyclone went without his injection this morning because I really, really don't like the idea of reusing a needle.

Granted it's largely my fault for waiting until almost the last minute to get a new prescription, but jeez - what kind of pharmacy runs out of insulin syringes?

Gay marriage ban overturned in California

2008-05-16T11:27:33Z

Probably most or all of you have seen this story by now. Obviously it's a victory for equal rights advocates, but it's going to be a struggle to hold on to that victory. It may also provide ammunition to conservatives in the upcoming election; I'm sure they'll try to appeal to the sort of voters who think same-sex marriage will destroy the traditional family.

I think it's a wonderful step in the right direction; California is not only a big state but sort of a trend-setter. Also I'm pleasantly surprised by Gov. Schwarzenegger, who after coming down against gay marriage in the past said that he would not support a state constitutional amendment to undo the court decision. I'm slightly disappointed by both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, who support equal rights but only in the form of civil unions, and both of whom want to leave it to the states.

I should admit here that I also used to think civil unions was a reasonable way to resolve the issue while retaining marriage for man/woman only, but after I took some time to do a little reading and thinking I changed my mind. On the surface, civil unions are fine as long as they carry the same rights, responsibilities, and privileges as marriage - but in practice it's not working that way and never will. 'Separate but equal' was supposed to solve the race problem and it turned out to be 'separate but unequal', not to mention supporting the idea that different races aren't 'meant' to mix. I saw it in action. No, the only way to guarantee equality is to grant the right to the same institutions, and by doing that to recognize that same-sex couples have the same feelings, make the same commitments, and deserve the same acknowlegement and support from society as opposite-sex couples.

Hopefully New York, which is basically more liberal, will get there too, soon. It's inevitable, and I remind myself of that. Sooner or later, it's coming, and someday the opponents of equal marriage will be looked on the same way that opponents of the legalization of mixed-race marriage and desegregation are looked on now, as sincere but misguided products of their time when we're being nice and bigots when we're not.

Link to learn more and/or donate: http://www.hrc.org/

Sorry for the tl;dr, and I'll be climbing off my soapbox now.

Mommy's Day

2008-05-11T13:04:51Z

A very happy Mother's Day to mzdany, germankitty, and all the other moms out there in internet land!

Unread books meme

2008-05-11T12:08:12Z

From germankitty</lj>:

Top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing (that sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded).

Bold the ones you've read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn't finish. and add * beside the ones you liked and would (or did) read again or recommend.

The Aeneid
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
American Gods
Anansi Boys
Angela’s Ashes : A Memoir
Angels & Demons
Anna Karenina
Atlas Shrugged
Beloved
The Blind Assassin
Brave New World
The Brothers Karamazov
The Canterbury Tales
The Catcher in the Rye *
Catch-22
A Clockwork Orange
Cloud Atlas
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
A Confederacy of Dunces
The Confusion
The Corrections
The Count of Monte Cristo
Crime and Punishment
Cryptonomicon
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
David Copperfield
Don Quixote
Dracula *
Dubliners
Dune (I thought it was boring)
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
Emma
Foucault’s Pendulum
The Fountainhead
Frankenstein
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
The God of Small Things
The Grapes of Wrath
Gravity’s Rainbow
Great Expectations *
Gulliver’s Travels *
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
The Historian: a novel
The Hobbit *
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
The Iliad
In Cold Blood *
The Inferno
Jane Eyre
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
The Kite Runner
Les Misérables
Life of Pi: a novel
Lolita *
Love in the Time of Cholera
Madame Bovary
Mansfield Park
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlemarch
Middlesex
Mrs. Dalloway
The Mists of Avalon *
Moby Dick (again, thought it was mostly boring)
The Name of the Rose
Neverwhere
1984 *
Northanger Abbey
The Odyssey
Oliver Twist *
The Once and Future King
One Hundred Years of Solitude
On the Road
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Oryx and Crake : a novel
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Persuasion
The Picture of Dorian Gray
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Pride and Prejudice * (one of my all-time favorites)
The Prince
Quicksilver
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
The Satanic Verses
The Scarlet Letter (you guessed it, boring)
Sense and Sensibility
A Short History of Nearly Everything
The Silmarillion
Slaughterhouse 5
The Sound and the Fury
A Tale of Two Cities
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
The Time Traveler’s Wife
To the Lighthouse
Treasure Island
The Three Musketeers
Ulysses (Ugh)
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Vanity Fair
War and Peace
Watership Down
White Teeth
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
Wuthering Heights
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I may have read more but don't remember them, in which case they didn't make much of an impression. Also it sounds stupid but in some cases I can't remember if I read the book or just saw the movie.

There's Doctor Who porn???

2008-05-07T12:29:50Z

By way of sam_storyteller, David Tennant learning the facts of fanfic porn:

Blah and more blah

2008-05-04T23:45:39Z

What's been happening...

We had two 'clean-up' days at work, which I privately refer to as labor days. A little background: I work in a laboratory that now does very little scientific work, thanks to our new lords and masters taking away our projects as part of a ~~sneaky, underhanded, stupid, and epic fail~~ attempt to shut us down. Now, with no chemistry or radiation analysis going on to speak of, we have heaps of supplies and instruments lying around collecting dust. Plus people here tend to be packrats and there more heaps of instruments and equipment that belongs in a museum - really, some of it is 40-50 years old or more, dating back to the early days of nuclear testing. Some is very expensive, some is still working and ideally should be given away. (Anyone interested in a spare electron microscope?)

So, since a lot of us don't have much else to do, we were all turned into cheap manual labor and spent two days throwing out files, furniture, supplies, and - stuff. On the second afternoon we ran out of dumpsters, which is probably fortunate for me since my feet gave out at about that time. Thankfully they were fine the next day, but I'm still getting an off-and-on sharp pain in the sole of my left foot.

We did get free lunches and t-shirts, so that was nice.

Otherwise, I've finished the next chapter of 'Between the Lines' and am waiting for beta feedback. Odd, while I like this story and can't wait to finish it, I don't have the old enthusiasm for writing. While this story isn't as popular as previous ones I've done, I don't think that's it. Maybe it's some combination of the general quality level of fic on ff.net being so abysmal, many of my fandom friends kind of drifting off, or just general blahs. Probably the latter; I'm having trouble drumming up enthusiasm for anything lately.

Haha, LJ's spellcheck doesn't recognize 'fandom'.

Phantom of the Opera review

2008-04-25T16:26:27Z

Last night I watched the first hour and a half or so of the DVD of Phantom of the Opera - the 2004 adaptation of the stage show. Now, I'm a big fan of previous versions of this story, and I love musicals and operatic musicals. I'd been looking forward to see this in Blu-ray in all its high-def spendor.

But... what a disappointment. It's certainly beautiful to look at: wonderful sets and costumes and a great-looking cast, but... my overwhelming impression was that it's overblown, pretentious, and the ultimate sin - boring. I'm not a musical expert but the music seemed kind of bleh to me, and all of it sounds alike. I don't tend to find cold-blooded murderers attractive so efforts to make the Phantom seem sexy and tragic kind of fall flat for me. Even Minnie Driver as a diva gone wild can't save it.

I'm not even motivated to watch the rest. (I already know the story, after all.) Maybe I'll rent one of the versions I love - the silent Lon Chaney original which has the best unmasking scene EVER, the visually and musically gorgeous 1943 version with Nelson Eddy, heck, even the Phantom of the Paradise.

Fics like this just have to be shared

2008-04-24T21:44:11Z

By way of germankitty:

If you like Torchwood, if you like cats, and/or if you've used the internet for more than five minutes - read this story by sam_storyteller. It's brilliantly funny.

Trying to Communicate

Back to normal

2008-04-18T18:57:38Z

My temperature this morning: 98.0 F. That's more like it. I feel much, much better and should be fully recovered in a couple more days.

Dagmar left early yesterday afternoon. While I wish we had both been healthy and able to do more of the tourist thing, it was certainly a fun and wonderful visit. We got to a couple of museums, saw the Statue of Liberty, had our tour of Manhatten, and not least met mzdany for lunch. Coincidentally, when I returned to work today I had a message on my machine from a former co-worker who lives on Staten Island, saying he had seen us getting on the ferry! He said he called, but I didn't hear him - not surprising considering the noise level in the terminal.

Last full day

2008-04-16T21:36:34Z

My temperature this afternoon: 99 F. More important, my nose was clear enough last night that I could actually breathe, and get some sleep! So today I feel MUCH better.

This was the last full day of germankitty's visit. Yesterday we took the Staten Island Ferry instead of the Circle Line to see the Statue of Liberty, and afterwards germankitty wasn't feeling up to more so we called it a day. Today we went on a bus tour of the downtown half of Manhatten, and that was quite a bit of fun and very interesting despite insane traffic and an overly perky tour guide. Then we had burgers the size of Rhode Island at an overpriced Midtown deli, leaving me with onion breath that feels like it'll last for days - but it's so worth it.