Fandom: Psych
Pairing: Juliet/April (from the ep Six Feet Under the Sea)
Warnings: None
Word Count ~2600
Summary: Juliet isn't a sore loser. She didn't land Shawn, and now she just wants to put it behind her.

( Read more... )

I think I'm going to sign up for Yuletide. I need to stick to fandoms that I know inside and out, though, because rereading, re-watching, and research is what will kill me. I need to be able to start my prompt right away. That's what I learned from my last (and first) fic exchange.

I also need to make a fanfic sticky post, because apparently I've abandoned my tiny personal archive, and this LJ's fic is no longer all on the first page of posts. Also, I got a review on a House halloween story I had posted to house_wilson several years ago and had then forgotten.

Life at the clinic is going okay. Pushing the clock back an hour means that now it's light out when I catch the bus for work, but it's dark by the time I get home around 5:30.

I read the first volume of Birds of Prey, which is to say, not Birds of Prey Vol. 1 (which is in fact vol. 3 or 4, depending) but Black Canary/Oracle: Birds of Prey. This is the list I'm using, because Wikipedia doesn't list the ISBN, which I need to find anything on my library's search engine. Seriously, they have 'Birds of Prey: Series' as a tag, but only one of the trades is tagged with it. Anyway, it was a fast, enjoyable read.

Life going okay.

This post is all about the awesome parts of this past week, which were many. First, on Friday, I went to two movies at the Union with a friend. We saw Fear(s) of the Dark - a collection of 5 short animated French horror films - and Dead Snow - a Norwegian zombie flick. Neither movie was that great, but I had a lot of fun.

Then on Saturday I had my Halloween party! I was very happy with how it went. More people showed up than I expected, and it's been a couple years since I hosted a large party, so I felt a bit out of practice. But it turns out I'd bought a perfect amount of food; nothing ran out but I didn't have many left-overs. The theme was 'magic', and I'd checked out several magic-related movies from the library, but the one my guests decided on - Ladyhawke - was damaged and stopped playing about half an hour in. No matter, although I do want to track down a working copy and see how it ends.

We went on a nightime walk and frolicked in the park for a while. We also played with my awesome laser lamp.
( Here are some pictures... )

Then, Sunday! I went to a Jonathan Coulton concert. It was my fourth - I go every time he comes to Madison, and it's always a blast! If you don't know who Jonathan Coulton is, you should look him up. Most people recognize him as 'that guy who wrote the song at the end of Portal'. His hits include Code Monkey, Re: Your Brains, and Skullcrusher Mountain. Basically, he writes geeky, funny and bizarre songs. They were selling USB drives at the concert that contained all of his music, so I bought one.

Here, I feel like sharing:
Mandelbrot Set - A song about the mathematician and his equation.
The Future Soon - The future is soon, and hopefully it will include giant space labs and bionic eyes.
Ikea - As you can guess, a love song to Ikea. It seemed especially appropriate to link this song after the 'Avengers in Ikea' fic I got for heroines_fest.

( Oh, and one more picture I took before the concert, of me in a Doctor Who shirt... )

And then yesterday I went to my neighborhood's annual Halloween bonfire. I took tons of pictures, but I'll just post my favorite because this post is getting crazy long. Here you go:

All the stories written for heroines_fest were posted today, and I am so, so excited.

Really, I knew that whatever story I'd get for my prompts would be awesome, and I wasn't wrong. But the fic I got was even better than I could have hoped for. The prompt that was used was 'Robots are attacking IKEA', and the author, likeadeuce wrote it from Jessica Jone's POV with biting humor and heartfelt characterizations. Funny, funny stuff. Here, have a taste:

"Am I the only one who saw 'Fight Club'?" I asked. "Remember how IKEA drove Edward Norton crazy?"

"What's 'Fight Club'"? Bobbi asked.

"Misogynistic proto-fascist crap," Carol said.

"Going to the top of the Netflix queue," I said.

"We're fugitives," Carol hissed in my ear, leaning down close. "We're fugitives and you have a Netflix queue?"

So, yeah. Read Solutions for Better Living.

And while you're at heroines_fest, take a look around. There are 28 stories featuring comic book women there, just waiting to be read. If you're in the mood for Ms. Marvel/Scarlet Witch or Storm and Thor's battle from Ultimate War, you could even read mine. ;-)

Went without a social life last week and watched two movies and a whole lot of Babylon 5 instead. The first movie I watched was Round Trip, which was about an Israeli bus driver who leaves her husband and moves to Tel Aviv with her two children. Unable to work and raise her children, she offers a room in her apartment for someone willing to be a nanny. The woman who takes up the offer is an undocumented immigrant from Ghana with her own young son back home. The two women slowly become friends and then lovers.

The movie incorporated a lot of elements, such as racism, homophobia, poverty and post-partum depression into its storyline, but it treated them more as facts of life rather than obstacles for our characters to overcome. If you're looking for a love story, Round Trip is not the movie for you. It's more of a character study that uses a romantic relationship for character growth, although it's debatable how much has changed at the end of the movie.

The second movie I watched as part of my ongoing quest to see everything in which Cillian Murphy appears. It was called Watching the Detectives, and was a fun, fluffy eye-candy kind of flick. Well, it stars Cillian Murphy and Lucy Liu, of course it's going to have visual appeal. It's about a film noir buff who meets a woman who prefers to create her own adventures rather than watch them on television. She creates film noir themed scenes for him without warning him that they're games, which sometimes backfires horribly and sometimes goes very right.

Not for people who loath self-consciously quirky movies, as this is definitely one of those. For people who want to see wet, naked Cillian Murphy and half-dressed Lucy Liu. I tried to find a youtube clip of a favorite scene to show you, but all I found were ten minute chunks of the movie. So, um, here's one of those chunks. One of my favorite scenes - in which Lucy Liu's character proves she's got everything television has and more - is from 4:50 to 6:20.

Partly inspired by crimsonquills's Tiny Army, partly inspired by my childhood pastime of creating elaborate scenes with my toys, but mostly inspired by my stressful new job, I bought a few Marvel Super Hero Squad action figures. Today I took pictures. I swear this is therapeutic.

( Introducing Spider-Woman, Ms. Marvel, Captain America, and Iron Man! )

So I checked out a book called Superheroes: Fashion and Fantasy, which featured fashion inspired by comic book heroes. Each chapter featured a different type of hero. The chapters were:
The Graphic Body - Superman and Spiderman
The Patriotic Body - Wonder Woman and Captain America
The Virile Body - Hulk, She-Hulk, and The Thing
The Paradoxical Body - Catwoman
The Armored Body - Batman and Iron Man
The Aerodynamic Body - The Flash
The Mutant Body - The X-Men
The Post Modern Body - The Punisher and Ghost Rider.

( Pics under the cut )

I've slowed down a bit on my comic book consumption, but I did finish White Tiger: A Hero's Compulsion recently, and I'm happy to say that it did a lot of things right. I'm sure a lot of this is due to its author, Tamora Pierce.

( things White Tiger does right, illustrated with scans )

I finished reading MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors, and enjoyed it a lot. It's blasphemous and raunchy - much raunchier than what I've seen of the TV show so far - and also funny and satisfying. Richard Hooker has a very simple writing style that is easy to read and never draws focus away from the various shenanigans of Hawkeye, Duke and Trapper.

Even though the shenanigans are the heart of the book, I found my favorite parts were the descriptions of the 'meatball surgery', as Hawkeye calls it, and the descriptions of general life at the MASH unit. Some of the improvisations the characters are forced to make are hilarious and rather disturbing at the same time, such as in the case of Captain John "Ugly" Black, the anesthesiologist:

When leisure came his way, Ugly's first duty was to repair his intratracheal tubes. These are tubes placed in a patient's windpipe through the mouth and attached to a machine, controlled by the anesthesiologist, which delivers oxygen and anesthetic agents in the concentrations desired. Inside the windpipe the tubes are held in place by small balloons which are inflated after their introduction.

The balloons on Ugly's intratracheal tubes, like all balloons, kept blowing out. The supply of new tubes was limited or nonexistent, for reasons never quite clear, so it was up to Captain Black to keep them in constant repair. There was only one source of new balloons.

Every week or ten days the PX received a shipment of the various things PX's receive shipments of. This always caused a line to form, and the line always included most of the nurses. At the head of the line, however, would be Ugly John Black. As the PX opened for business, Ugly John would step up and announce in a loud, clear, purposeful voice: "I'll take sixty rubber contraceptive devices. I hope to hell they're better than the last batch. They all leaked." Then he'd turn around and look austerely at the interested throng, few of who knew what he did with sixty such items a week.

The next book on my non-graphic novel reading list is Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. But will I finish it in time for the book club meeting? Eh, stranger things have happened.

Things I've enjoyed this week and am therefore reccing:

( The Soloist, The Rabbi's Cat, and M*A*S*H )

From muccamukk's LJ: Write a comment with "Five Words" in it, and I'll list five things I associate with you. You must then go on about them at length in your own journal.

( She gave me Sherlock Holmes, Beka Valentine, Modding, Blair Sandburg, and English History. )

Don't ask me why, but taking pictures of bees makes me insanely happy. My cats and living in Madison make me happy too, so there's a pic of Toby and the Madison capitol under the cut along with the bee pics.

( Bees! )

In an unrelated note, why is the east side Half Priced Books so much better than the west side one? The west side location never has P.G. Wodehouse books or Beatles albums, whereas the east side location had a huge selection of both. As far as I can tell, the west side location is only superior in its comic book selection.

Okay, I think this is my new favorite fanvid ever. It's just so sweet and heartwarming and making me grin like crazy.



Oh, and something I love about Starsky and Hutch fanfic? Sometimes I can finish reading a story and still have no clue if it was gen or slash. I found one author who listed her fic as 'Committed Relationship', and it wasn't until later when I saw them listed on another archive that I realized they were gen. And this makes total sense in Starsky and Hutch fandom.

Goodness, look at their smiles. I'm going to be watching this all day.

Pro tip: Book club meetings are more interesting when you've actually read the book. But hey, I had fun anyway. I dragged my little sister and my friend Sam to the Onion's June book club meeting for a couple reasons. One, my little sister loves Catch 22, which was the book this month, and two, the Onion's book club meets at Brocach Irish Pub and my sister recently turned 21.

I figured I could finish the book before the meeting, but of course I barely even started it. All the same, it was worth it to show Brocach to my sister. It's a beautiful pub with lots of secluded nooks and a dark, warm atmosphere. It's also expensive, unfortunately. I had a great drink but I'm still wincing at the price.

I still might read Catch 22. I've got a reading list a mile long, so what's one more?

WisCon was worth the forty bucks. I was worried that it wouldn't be, but it totally was. There was a lot of programming, so there was always something to do, whether you were in the mood for academic nerdy sci-fi talk, discussions about social injustice, or fandom squee.

I also ran into three friends I hadn't seen since last August, so that was wonderful. One of them, Jenny, is the most well-read person I know. I get the feeling she could kill me with her brain. Her boyfriend, Mark, is also really smart, and although I love them both, I always feel a bit stupid around them. I also feel a bit perverted around them, because I think I have a crush on them both.

Anyway, the highlights were: getting a free tarot reading; the newbie dinner, where a bunch of us got to know each other over Indian food (mmm, mushroom masala); the cultural appropriation workshop, where I learned a damned lot; the haiku earring party, where I got a free pair of earrings for writing a haiku based on the title 'The Goth Dryad'; the LJ party, where we all got stickers of our favorite LJ icons to wear on our name tags; the slash fanfic panel, where everyone was drinking beer and laughing; the paper a woman presented about black heroines in zombie stories; the auction, where I bought a book signed by Ursula K. LeGuin and watched a hand-knit dalek being auctioned off; and much, much more.

Now my thoughts are occupied by a horror fanfic plot bunny I have. I haven't written horror in a long, long time, and I'm finding it really hard to get the mood right.

The trailer for the new Sherlock Holmes film came out. And I must say, despite my trepidations, it looks good. I just hope the movie doesn't make Holmes a skirt-chaser. I mean, he gets handcuffed naked to a bed, but that could be the result of just about anything. I read somewhere that Holmes does have a love interest in it, which, fine, I get it. Hollywood heroes are never asexual. And god forbid anyone assumes that Holmes and Watson are more than friends. Plus, without a love interest, what role would a female character play? Okay, I'm a bit bitter about Hollywood's obligatory love interests, but I'm not 100% against Holmes falling in love. It could be well done.

Anyway, if it sucks I'll be zen about it. *Snuggles Sherlock Holmes books*

One thing that bothers me a lot in Marvel comics is the pacing. It tends to vary from slightly too fast to blindingly WTF fast, with very strange lulls thrown in. Part of this is the format - storytelling in monthly chunks for the duration of half a year or more must make consistency difficult, especially when writers are trading off work. Part also seems to stem from the standard of putting a fight scene in every issue. This sometimes forces flashbacks or subplots where flashbacks and subplots do not belong.

Sometimes I wonder how much the art influences the pacing decisions. One has to be a very good artist to make a conversation as visually interesting as a fist fight. Of course they are out there - Alias had some great pages which depicted Jessica interviewing clients. The same image of Jessica listening intently would be repeated maybe eight or nine times, interspersed with images of the client telling his or her story. I found myself glancing at each textless panel of Jessica, looking for any change in the picture before moving on to the next part of the client's story.

Anyway, what I wanted to say was that I read Prelude To House Of M and finished half of House Of M today. So far, despite the mangling of the character of the Scarlet Witch, I've really enjoyed it. And I think that's mostly because it has good pacing. The plot reveals have been spaced well, and even though I would have liked longer glimpses into the lives of the characters in this alternate world, what I got was enough.

The art kind of sucks, though. All the mens' faces are shaped exactly the same. They all have the same square chin and heavy brows. I have a hard time telling apart male characters if they aren't sporting facial hair or costumes. In one panel I couldn't tell apart Dr. Strange and Tony Stark, because both were wearing suits and their heads were angled to hide the shocks of gray hair that would have identified Strange.

Oh, but the Prelude was the slashiest thing ever. If you think the X-Men movies have strong vibes between Magneto and Xavier, well... the movies have nothing on the comics. In the Prelude they snipe at each other, worry about each other, and live together.

I'm excited for two reasons. One, I only have one day of my internship left and one last class before I graduate. Then I can start my hunt for a good Medical Assistant job. My internship went really well, and the supervisor there said she'd be happy to write a letter of reference. I'm actually going to miss what was basically an unpaid 40 hour a week job. If a job opens up at the Wingra clinic, I'd probably take it.

And two, I bought a pass for Wis Con - the world's largest feminist sci-fi convention - about a month ago and then forgot about it. I got a pamphlet in the mail about it a few days ago, and now I'm psyched. Sadly, I didn't tell any of my friends about it, and passes are no longer being sold, so I'll be going alone. Ah well, I'm getting better at not hiding quietly in corners, so maybe I'll actually meet people.

Oh, and I'm still on my comics binge. Last Saturday was Free Comic Day, which I dutifully attended at my local comic book shop. I picked up five free comic books (only two of which I had any interest in) and bought one non-free one (It had the Scarlet Witch on the cover).

I really need to start drawing again. Being in a comic book fandom has made me want to turn some of my plot bunnies into fancomics rather than fanfic. Someday I'll actually organize my days so I set some time aside for things I want to learn, like how to draw well and how to speak Spanish. Otherwise I'll be thinking these same thoughts ten years from now.

Title:Birds Do It, Bees Do It
Fandom: Avengers (Marvel 616 Universe)
Word Count: ~6600
Summary: Three times three pairs from the Avengers danced. Pairings are Hank/Jan set during classic Avengers, Carol/Wanda set during Red Zone, and Steve/Tony during the early days of the New Avengers.
Notes: Thank you so much to my beta, seanchai.

( Let's do it / Let's fall in love )