( Torchwood, spoilers for CoE and all of Doctor Who, etc )

Bleh, it has been so sunny and warm for weeks, perfect Seattle summer weather, and now it's pouring. (I know, I know, don't even start.) Um, possibly getting to see 430_pm tonight if I actually get my shit together? Utter communication FAIL on my part, but I swear, we are going to make it work.

And: slylilgoblin. Will be here. TOMORROW. Watch out, Seattle, you may not be able to handle our shenanigans. (!!!!!!)

I didn't get to watch Days 4 and 5 of Torchwood until today (and, subsequently, hid out from my flist in between), and I only have a very little to say:

( spoilers for all of Torchwood: Children of Earth )

HAPPY (slightly belated) BIRTHDAY, veverghede!!!

This isn’t nearly as awesomely personalized and inside joke-filled as your birthday present to me, and it’s, *checks* about thirteen hours late, and either way you're off having fun with tons of our friends in DC right now (say hi for me!), but I hope you like it anyway!

As True As The Sea Is
Pairing: Merlin/Arthur
Rating: PG
Words: 3750
Spoilers: for the first season
Notes: Ooh, lookit all those clichés! Title from “I’ll Cover You”, BECAUSE I CAN, but also because I’m still intensely jealous that veverghede got to see Anthony Rapp and Adam Pascal in their tour of Rent this summer, and this is my revenge. Or, something.

( Caves, Arthur thought sourly, half-holding Merlin up as they ran, were never a good idea. )

So: TORCHWOOD!

( (squeeful) spoilers for Children of the Earth: Day 1 )

Next episode is up TOMORROW! \o/

1. This is the cutest picture in the history of ever.

2. FIC!

drink their poison too
Fandom: Merlin
Pairing: Merlin/Arthur
Rating: R
Spoilers: For the first season.
Notes: This is the sequel to turning in revolutions and this is the fate you've carved on me, in the series I'm starting to call Gravity. Title (unsurprisingly) from the song "Gravity" by Vienna Teng. Thanks to veverghede and slylilgoblin for the beta!

( Somehow, Merlin had assumed that the secret of his magic was the hardest part to break, that if they got past the instant shock and if his friends – Arthur – forgave him for it, everything would be fine. )

HAPPY BIRTHDAY djinntonic!!



CASTIEL: Wait. It's Andrew's birthday?

Well, no, not where he is, though in my time zone it's just past midnight. Still, epic fail on my part.

So there is absolutely no way that I could live up to Andrew's present to me for my birthday this year since I am not nearly as talented but, um. Have a mini picspam? On a theme that we've often addressed recently? I don't know, it seemed funny at 3:00 am last night.

I repeat: this is not a proper present. This is, like, a card. Or something, idk.

( SHE COULD HAVE BEEN RUBY: The Top 10. Dial-up unfriendly. )

And yeahhh, that's it. *facepalm*

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, bizzatch!!

I...have a present for you, but I have no idea where the hell you're living now, and I probably would never get around to mailing it anyway because I'm lazy. So you will just have to wait until August (when we're FLATMATES, YAY). Sorry! Hope it's fantastic anyway.

Firstly: call your member of Congress and ask them to vote yes on the American Clean Energy and Security Act (HR 2454)!

Secondly: this story is adorable.

Thirdly: I just got the following email from a friend of mine from high school - someone that I knew and like pretty well but wasn't exactly close to, so she knows that I'm "into fanfic" but not really any more than that. She wanted some advice - well, read:

I also need a spot of assistance, and I feel certain that YOU are the best person to provide it. M and I are creating this blog/fansite for MSN about, of all things, Harry Potter. Since it's a fan site, we want to get people involved, obviously, and want to include some sort of fan fiction section. I realize, though, that I really have no big picture idea of what sorts of fan fiction is out there already, having never really read any myself. I was woooondering, do you think you could send me some representative fanfic recommendations to read? Like, the best ones? Or the ones that everyone will have already read? It can be a bunch of recs or just a few - whatever you think best!

My first reaction: AHAHAHAHA. Then: umm, can of worms much? Seriously, if there's any fandom where the correlation between "best" and "most famous" fic is - uh, not necessarily that high - it would be Harry Potter. Not to mention that reccing any fic depends on the pairing, the era, the website the fic is posted at, when it was originally posted (and following which book/movie), the genre, the rating, and oh, only a million other possible categories. Also, are they looking for examples that will display the cultural relevance of fanfic to the Harry Potter fan community (in which case reccing "Inner Circle" stuff and the Draco Trilogy may be, idk, useful?), or do they just want to link to good fic? AND, I'm really skeptical of the premise of this site in the first place, and how it's going to represent fanfic and fan communities.

I'm definitely going to get more details about the nature of their site before I send them anything. But it's also been ages since I've read Harry Potter, and the only really really famous thing that is also fairly uncontroversial that I can think of is, unsurprisingly, The Shoebox Project. Otherwise I've only got things like Dirty Trousers or Stealing Harry running through my head, but are they general enough? Seriously, I don't know. GIVE ME IDEAS, GUYS.

EVERYONE:

If you're a Doctor Who or Torchwood person, you're probably aware that Tardis BigBang went live yesterday, but I'm going to have to point you anyway to And Indeed There Will Be Time, by kaydeefalls, which is completely and utterly amazing.

I don't want to describe it too much because there are so many surprising reveals that shouldn't be ruined, but suffice to say that it's a wonderfully plotted time travel story that not only creates its own riveting, self-contained canon, but also fixes and explains a lot of things left over from the end of Torchwood S2 and Doctor Who S4. The characterizations are, if possible, even more perfect, and made me love some of the characters better than I had before. Seriously. AMAZING.

If you're not very familiar with Doctor Who or Torchwood, you'll miss out on a lot of the subtle themes and details that made this story so perfect - and, okay, you will be completely spoiled for both series - but it will still be a fantastic, entertaining, heart-wrenching read. So. DOOOO EEEEET.

EEEK, I am distressingly out of the loop so I just heard about the DC Metro crash. DC friends, please to be reporting in? Are you all okay?

Slight boredom + scanning news for work = linkspam of complete and utter randomness.

New Twitter Research: Men Follow Men and Nobody Tweets - I’d heard the stats about men following men before (though establishing gender on Twitter seems difficult in itself), but not about the number of people who Tweet. Huh.

The next chapter in the Iran election plus new media, Google Translator now includes Persian

Modeling Interracial Love - a study suggesting that differences in types of interracial relationships may be affected more by height than by social or cultural factors. I’m…not quite sure what I think of this. Height is definitely an element of the social construction of race, so the premise itself might be false, but even besides that it seems like a problematic and possibly inconclusive study to me.

Fallen Princesses - an photography project putting women dressed as Disney princesses in situations where they face problems that real women have to deal with, pretty interesting.

Recession boosts global human trafficking, ugh

Late Abortion Care Will Return to Kansas - looks like Dr. LeRoy Carhart is stepping in to carry on Dr. George Tiller’s practice of providing late-term abortion, possibly not in the same facility, but in Kansas nonetheless. THANK YOU, Dr. Carhart.

Sotomayor is not meaner, just female - a comparison by NPR’s Nina Tottenberg (*fangirls her*) of Judge Sotomayor’s questions in cases compared to those of the current male Supreme Court Justices, with audio, to see if she’s actually any harsher in her delivery than the men are. Big surprise: no, she is just a woman.

And, of course, none of those are actually what I'm supposed to be reading about, which is environmental news particularly in the Pacific Northwest. Hahaha.

Happy birthday, kaydeefalls!

I feel a little sneaky calling this a present since it's more a blatant attempt to get you to write this crossover, but oh well! Also, it was supposed to be significantly slashier, but Scripps had too much personal restraint for voyeurism. *scowls*


Not for Time's throwing
Band of Brothers/The History Boys
Scripps, implied Winters/Nixon

( Haguenau is cold and gray, bleak in a way that makes it no different from anywhere that Scripps has been in the past few months.  )

I was distracted all day at work by news of the protests and violence in Iran - and, I have to admit, fascinated by the new media aspects of the reporting, though I hope not so dispassionately that I disregarded the real effects and trauma that is going on there. A handful of links:

@persiankiwi: frequent updates from within Iran, especially on what's happening on the streets, and with pictures (via sol_se)

Iran Does Have Some Fishy Numbers, FiveThirtyEight.com's statistical analysis of the vote-counting (via amonitrate)

The Daily Dish, good reporting from outside of Iran

And what I've been most riveted and horrified by, stunning photographs of riots from the Boston Globe's The Big Picture.

Durr! I am a terrible person, because it's taken me so long to write anything to my femslash09 writer that they might not even be looking out anymore. Nonetheless:

( Dear femslash09 writer, )

Mmph. Started my internship, which so far requires me to read a lot of news about the environment and the local political scene, and to set up the new environmental website to track my county's executive political race. Everyone at the office is very nice, though not terribly chatty. There's another intern joining next week though, and we're supposed to be working together on a bunch of projects, so hopefully she is cool.

Also, I had a dream last night where I ran into Richard Armitage and instead of drooling incoherently over him, I spent my time complaining to him a lot about the end of the second season of BBC Robin Hood. He heartily agreed with me, which made me feel better.

Yay New Hampshire!

It's a rather odd feeling to not be surprised by this. Obviously it's been discussed for ages, and NH has been expected to follow the rest of New England after the governor said that he would sign off on a bill that got through the legislature, but still. Odd, but welcome.

Also interesting: Harvard to Endow Chair in Gay Studies. Hmmm.

Bill Proposes Immigration Rights for Gay Couples, NY Times

I haven't been following this particular issue at all, so I don't know what efforts have gone into it previously or how likely it is to pass, but I thought the article was a good one.

Signed up for femslash09! Because there aren't enough things on my to-write list that I've barely started. Sigh. Today is the last day of sign-ups, if anyone's interested.

I've been meaning to make my first post for 50books_poc, since so far I've read five books but haven't reviewed any of them:

1. White Tiger, Aravind Adiga
2. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz
3. Tales of Neveryon, Samuel Delany
4. American Born Chinese, Gene Luen Yang
5. Kindred, Octavia Butler

But I don't have much to say that is relevant for any of them except Tales of Neveryon which, as my first (but certainly not last!) Samuel Delany book, blew me away and got lots of thinky thoughts swirling around in my mind. I've had less coherent and reasonable reactions to the others. For instance, I loved White Tiger, but the only interesting thing that I can say about it is that Adiga's writing style reminded me somewhat of Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day - especially the narrator's voice and relating of (sometimes false) histories, and also a lot of the aspects of "master-servant" relationships, though I found White Tiger to be much more complex that way. Meanwhile Oscar Wao disappointed me, probably because people have been telling me for ages that I would love it, but again I can't articulate why I didn't likeit. The writing style was interesting, the story was fairly engaging, but I came out it feeling unsatisfied. And American Born Chinese was very enjoyable.

Kindred was also excellent, as well as my first (again, not last) time reading Octavia Butler, but my immediate reaction to the book had nothing to do with the story itself - there was a critical essay in the back of the book that got me riled up again about the marginalization of "kids' books", especially YA fantasy. Kindred is not classified as YA and has little to do with the actual relationship of YA sci-fi/fantasy to adult sci-fi/fantasy, but I was irritated by a lot of the assumptions that the reviewer made about how ground-breaking the sci-fi premises were since my brain was going, wait. I've read YA fiction doing those exact same things for years!

Anyway: that's a post for another day when I have more insightful things to say, but in the meantime, I dug up one of my favorite essays by Diana Wynne Jones about writing fantasy for children vs. adults. This, in an nutshell, is why I could never get into Robert Jordan but will always love the Chrestomanci books and Tamora Pierce from the bottom of my heart. (Okay, there are other reasons too, but that's also for another day.)

Fucking hell. Dr. George Tiller, a prominent abortion provider who had struggled for decades to promote women's health and who had frequently been a target of violence for this, was murdered a few hours ago. This is someone who, despite many obstacles, refused to stop doing what he thought was right, so instead got mercilessly ploughed down. Domestic terrorism, indeed.

Feministe suggests a few pro-choice organizations to donate to in his memory, especially Medical Students for Choice.

Had a bizarre dream last night which included, among other things, meeting Karl Urban at a jam session in a cafe where he was playing the flute. He was pretty good, too.

Movies: watched Were The World Mine (from an upload by redbrickrose; thank you again!) on Thursday with slylilgoblin. It was fun and pretty and the music was lovely, though I could've done with fewer gay stereotypes (look, they're gay, now they do ballet!), the creepy teacher, and more focus on some of the other teens (Frankie, who was awesome, or Jonathan, who was cute but pretty much a non-entity) and less on Donna and the rugby coach. Still, fun times. slylilgoblin and I were also quite taken by the repeated mentions of GIRDLE, as well as, "my son. He's a fairy. In a play. Well, in real life too." Hee.

Also watched Charlie Bartlett last night, which, as people have mentioned, was pretty adorable. Not much to say beyond the fact that Anton Yelchin and RDJ are awesome, which everyone knew already.

TV: still watching TOS kind of for comfort because I find it absolutely delightful, and that's not meant to be in a condescending way at all. Yes, it's cracky and ridiculous, but I'm quite emotionally attached, and I don't think it's just because I fell in love with the new movie so much - I've fallen for all the characters in their TOS iterations too, almost separately.

And: got the first season of The Sarah Conner Chronicles from the library, so I shall begin that soon! Great timing on my part, considering it's just been canceled, but at least I'll go in with that disappointment. Still, I'm excited.

Turns out my internship doesn't start for another week and a half, so I now have even more free time to read, cook, write, and watch TV. What a hardship! I LOVE SUMMER.

Everyone's doing the pairing meme, might as well hop on the bandwagon. But firstly, also about pairings - I just realized from my delicious account that the number of Merlin/Arthur works I have bookmarked has just beat out the number of Clark/Lex works. Considering that all the Merlin/Arthur stuff is from one season of the show, while I followed the first six seasons of Smallville fandom, that's quite impressive.

Anyway, pairings, in chronological order.

1. Remus/Sirius (HP)
2. Bruce Wayne/Dick Grayson (DC Comics)
3. Dick Grayson/Tim Drake (DC Comics)
4. Dick Grayson/Barbara Gordon (DC Comics: yes, I pair Dick with everyone, it’s only natural!)
5. Tim Drake/Kon-El (DC Comics)
6. Cassandra Cain/Stephanie Brown (DC Comics)
7. Cassie Sandmark/Cissie King-Jones (DC Comics)
8. Clark/Lex (SV)
9. Sam/Dean (SPN)
10. Jared/Jensen (CW RPF)
11. House/Wilson (House)
12. Doctor/Rose (DW)
13. Posner/Scripps (The History Boys)
14. Merlin/Arthur (Merlin)
15. Morgana/Gwen (Merlin)

Hmm. Well, the first thing that struck me while making this list was man, do I miss being in love with DC Comics. I think 430_pm is the only person on my current flist who knew and shared my DC love when I was really into it, since I was using a different LJ then and mostly lurked in the fandom, but I loved it and shipped everyone harder than I ship most of the pairings that I read. Seriously, my junior year of high school was pretty much defined by comics - I considered it my One True Fandom, and that's the most obsessed I've been with anything. And then...Dan Didio and TPTB ripped my heart out and ate it raw for breakfast. And everyone in fandom that I stalked and loved started jumping ship, and suddenly all my favorite characters were dead or significantly changed, and it was all too painful. Recently slylilgoblin has done a really good job of getting me interested in reading comics again, but even though I do like some of the current arcs, I'm not sure I can ever get that feeling or obsession back again.

I also found DC fandom (or the small sector of fandom that I watched) to be one of the most flexible in terms of pairings, so I'm not sure if I can pick up any trends between those and everything else. Though actually, looking at it, the only real trend I see is that I don't like enemy pairings or purely buddy pairings. I like what I think of as friends-with-tension, where they're often friends but not BFFs (Sirius had James, Clark had Pete, Scripps had Dakin), and possibly even enemies at one point, though it's the friendship that I value. But even that's a pretty vague description, and only tends to apply to slash pairings, not het or femslash. Plus, I apparently don't have many het pairings! I think that's mainly because the het pairings that I like are usually canon, and I may really love them but don't have much interest in exploring them beyond the text.

Oh, and I have realized recently that some of my pairings rest more on a single character and their needs than on the relationship itself - like Sam/Dean being a way to heal Dean because there's no one else he cares about more and this is a way to stop Sam from leaving him, or Clark/Lex helping Lex because Clark is his first and only friend, or Posner/Scripps being a way to give Posner a happy ending. Aaaaand I like co-dependency, a LOT, even though I sometimes see it as more one-sided for my favorite characters like those I just mentioned.

Thoughts? Any trends that I didn't pick up on?

Okay, I adore the new Star Trek movie beyond belief, I've seen it three times in theatres, I'm absolutely smitten with all the characters, but: why can't liviapenn's Gender-reversed Star Trek 2009 cast also have a movie? I've gotten so obsessed with the idea that I've taken to replaying the movie in my head with the new cast, and it's absolutely fantastic. I mean, Grace Park as Sulu, Catherine Tate as Scotty, Tom Welling as Gaila, and LENA HEADEY AS BONES. How amazing would that be? I don't know anything about Yvonne Strahovski or Jordana Brewster, but I have heard good things about Chuck, so that helps. And I'm even charmed by the idea of Olesya Rulin as Chekov.

Seriously, imagine some of the scenes with this cast - Headey and Strahovski exchanging "I might throw up on you", Park busting out the awesome fencing moves, Strahovski having great UST with Brewster and "emotionally compromising her", aaaah. This would be SO COOL. And I would ship everyone, pretty much.

I had a brief thought that I could also kind of see Erica Durance as Kirk? Thinking about it further, I'm not exactly sure, but then again I've only seen her as Lois in Smallville. And she's pretty fantastic at playing a hot, cocky, brilliant jerk there. So.

On that note, another awesome piece of gender-reversal: ileliberte's fanart of a Sam and Dean who have always been women. girl!Dean's smirk is perfect, and I love the idea of tall, broad-shouldered girl!Sam who is still has a hilarious bitchface and lethal puppy eyes. Mmm.