girlofprey

( The Secret Circle, up to 1.10 )

And I've just started a new computer game where the main villain started off by ranting about the protagonist's "pretty boy face". Ahhh, video games.

( My up and down Christmas )

And I also watched the ( Coronation Street Christmas episode )

And then there was Yuletide. I found one slash story for a pairing I loved in a fandom that doesn't get much fic, which was pleasing. But I remember when Yuletide used to be more exciting than this.

Um. Merry Christmas?

Is there any alternate version of Cinderella where the stepmother is gay for Cinderella, and doesn't want her going off to balls or getting married because she just doesn't want her leaving the house? THIS QUESTION HAS PLAGUED ME FOR MANY YEARS.

And in case you were wondering, the ballet I went to see today (Cinderella) was fabulous. I like ballet, but there's never been one that's made me want to cry before. I don't think it's touring at the moment, but if it does or if you live near Leeds I would definitely highly recommend it. Northern Ballet Theatre is great.

And I bought my final Christmas present today, aside from money for my sister. I bought dad vodka because mum says he likes it - I've never seen him drink it, so I hope she's right. I was going to get a litre, as the biggest 'gift' bottle on the shelf, but it looked genuinely massive, so he'll have to make do with 70cl. Hah.

I also picked up the last few things in Leeds I wanted before Christmas. Mostly this was comics. I am kind of enjoying getting comics issue by issue at the moment, something I've not really done before, but between some comics taking months and months to put out a new issue, some selling out of an issue before I have a chance to pick it up so I have a bit of the story missing, and the fact I keep finding new and exciting comics to start even though they cost about £2.50 each and it does add up if you're just following more and more new titles - I don't know if I'm going to keep doing it long-term. Hmph.

Also I got a Christmas card from jekesta, thank you jekesta. It's nice to know Roger Moore had some bearing on my cards this year.

I have to go now because I had to get up early to get into Leeds for shopping and ballet and now my head is killing me, byyyyye.

And in fandom news from the past few weeks:

• Allie Brosh's book is apparently available in October. I assumed, what with how ill she's been, that she just wouldn't have been working on it, but no, apparently it's coming soon. Which pleases me. I haven't seen anyone else talking about it, so in case you're interested and hadn't heard, there's the link.



• I'm getting on with the main plot in Fallout 3 again, and you know, the more I think about the storyline, the more annoyed I am about what a wasted opportunity I think Bethesda had. ( Spoilers for Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas )



• I have been listening to this fanmix, and I want to rec it, because it makes me really happy. so maybe it would make you guys happy too. I didn't even know Electro Swing was a thing, but apparently it is. Also, it's a fanmix for Benny/F!Courier from Fallout: New Vegas, so if you ship that, you may love it doubly hard. NB: I cannot be held accountable if you don't love it.

And I was going to talk about some of the animals my cat has been bringing in as 'presents' lately, but I remembered in my last post I said I wasn't going to make another post about animal death for a while. Suffice it to say, I'm half horrified and half impressed.

And in the last few weeks, I saw three films. Three whole films.

The first two weeks ago was The Internship, which I saw mainly because it had Vince Vaughn in it and he looked like he might not be a dick to people in it. Which I was correct about! Although there were some slightly odd things in the film, overall he and Owen Wilson were both quite nice, and quite nice to other people. It was a slightly odd film - a lot of the scenes sort of felt like they were ad-libbed, and maybe they should have done more ad-libbing until they got something better/funnier. And the ending was basically a big ass-kiss to Google. But overall I enjoyed. And I somehow got a fluff pairing out of it. ( Mild spoilers )

Unfortunately, Vince Vaughn has turned out to be the latest actor I liked who disappointed me horribly, mainly by having fairly shady politics. It's nothing that would make me want to stop watching him, but apparently he's agreed to make a conservative TV show about his politics. So the night is young!

Speaking of which, I'd forgotten that the next Mark Wahlberg film I was looking forward to also featured Denzel Washington trying to do a comedy role for once, which I wanted to support. I may go see it. For Denzel.

Anyway. Then last week, I went to see Now You See Me and Pacific Rim.

( Now You See Me, some spoilers )

( Pacific Rim, some probably pretty big spoilers )

I think that's all my fandom news. Also I have started listening to Welcome To Night Vale, but I think I mentioned that in the last post. Also a few other things. But these are the main ones I think.

I'm going to Leeds tomorrow with my mother, because we are going on holiday with my two oldest nephews in less than two weeks. I need some holiday clothes. But I don't know exactly what I need or want. So tomorrow will probably be interesting, to say the least.

I feel like I have been waiting for my period for months. Livejournal and my computer calendar suggest it's actually been nearly 8 weeks. I've had gaps like this before, but I keep getting 'symptoms' that things are about to kick off, like stomach pains or spots, but nothing is in fact kicking off, I just keep getting the symptoms for weeks on end. I mean, nothing is really as bad as my cramps, but I don't feel like I ever signed up for stomach pains for weeks with no apparent purpose. Right now I'm getting stomach cramps and nausea, which is lovely. That may be because I only had 5 hours sleep last night/today though.

Soon a new episode of The Following will be on. What will happen? It's difficult to say now that it's almost impossible to take it seriously anymore.

On a related note, I caught a bit of Coronation Street last night. Right, I understand the trope of making your ordinary characters a bit stupid to advance or string out a plot. I don't like it, but I understand it. But police officers? I know they have a long, proud tradition of incompetence. But last night two police officers went to Dev and explained that Sunita probably set the fire, stayed in the pub as part of an attempted suicide, banged her head trying to get OUT of the pub, then woke up from her coma pulled her own tubes out. That doesn't even make sense in the sentence I just typed. But apparently a very believable motivation and chain of events in Coronation Street world. Never mind the fact that they suspect a woman with no history of violence, in fact the opposite when faced with mad stalkers in the past, of having set the fire, rather than the man who recently kidnapped his ex-wife. Is that not something the police know? Gloria announced it to everyone else. klasjdk.

I can't even really watch Coronation Street at the moment. I can't believe Karl and don't want to see his face. Both Emmerdale and Corrie at the moment seem to be featuring cheating wankers who are murderers, characters I can't enjoy on any level. My mum seems to think the truth about Karl will be coming out soon. I find my faith in Coronation Street a little shaky.

One of the dreams I had since I told you about my last dreams was one where people were investigating a murder, and I slowly realised it was Coronation Street and Tracy had been murdered. Even in the dream I remember thinking "They wouldn't have done that. This must be a dream".

On a positive note, I went to see The Croods today, with my mum and ON. I quite enjoyed it. Some bits were a bit weird, and the messages were often either weirdly mixed or driven home with a sledgehammer, but I did really like it. I slashed the dad and the love interest more than anyone else. No-one else on the internet seems to have done the same.

Also, I have decided not to use Tumblr so much for my fannish needs unless someone makes a post with all the pairing names for every fandom on it. EVERY FANDOM. Because otherwise it's sort of impossible.

HELLO! Happy Easter. It's a bit belated, but I'm still saying it in the spirit of the holiday. I hope you all got great eggs, or egg-equivalents.

This post could just be a list of my irritations lately. Number one on that list is the fact that my Hotmail account recently 'upgraded' me to Outlook, and a feature of my new inbox is apparently that it will only let me open emails sometimes. Sometimes if I right-click on an email first, that helps. Sometimes going to the page to create a new email, and then back again helps. Sometimes it just lets me open my emails. Sometimes NOTHING helps. I have sent Microsoft a bit of 'feedback' about this feature. They assured me that they can't get back to every complaint and situation personally. So I am probably on my own with it. To be honest though, all they could probably do is send me an email, which I couldn't open. So the annoyance continues.

I'm going to try not to let this post become just a list of irritations though.

My birthday on Wednesday went pretty well, all things considered. Mum and I got to Leeds, we had a pretty nice day walking around, seeing all the shops I haven't seen in a few months at least. I put my name down for that jewellery making course again. We had a nice lunch and I bought myself some things. Then that evening we went out for a meal at a local restaurant we haven't been to for years, which has improved quite a lot since we last went. I had a Bolognese pizza, which I assumed would be a pizza with like mince and tomato topping. It turned out to be a pizza smothered in Bolognese sauce, to the point where you couldn't see the cheese anymore. It was delicious though. The only hiccup came when my sister called, needing mum to immediately give her some money for - reasons. Mum hadn't mentioned, as usual, that we were even going out for a meal, so she had to reveal that while having the argument, and setting a (pretty short) amount of time we needed to be back from the meal by. But mum's car had also ended up having some sort of wheel problem that caused it to start glowing red on the five minute drive from our house to the restaurant, so in the end we decided to leave the car where it was, tell my sister we'd transfer some money when we got home rather than going up to her house, and walk home in the light snow. It was quite pleasant and my sister didn't particularly blow up at not having been invited anywhere with us. She might be coming for Easter dinner tomorrow though, so we'll see if she says anything then.

And since then the weather seems to have not been as bad. I'm putting that down to the glory of my birthday. No-one can prove differently.

The Mass Effect fandom is still proving unsatisfying. That's an irritation. It's like every pairing I'm genuinely interested in has either no or little fic with male Shepard, but at least some or quite a lot of fic with female Shepard. IT'S LIKE THEY TOOK THE FIC I WANTED AND PUT IT BEHIND A GLASS WINDOW. But it's fine. In more my frustrated moments I think uncharitable things about the situation - but I know it's more likely that, like I said, the people who would normally write slash are writing fem!Shepard. Or maybe the voice acting of fem!Shepard is just a lot better and more suggestive or something than male Shepard. I would write mal!Shepard, but that make him sound evil. ManShep. I think that's the preferred fan name. Some people though, they write about their pairings and say their OTP is "femShepard/whoever". It's not even like it's "Shepard/whoever, but my Shepard is femShepard". IT'S LIKE THEY LITERALLY THINK A PAIRING IS MORE SHIPPY WHEN ONE OF THE PAIRING IS FEMALE RATHER THAN MALE. Even though the character is supposed to be essentially the same whether you play them male or female. Even though other characters treat you pretty much the same, as far as I know, whether you're male or female. Even though the game is set in a fictional future where gender is supposed to matter less. Or is vague enough that you can decide how much gender matters. It's fine though. It's fine.

Also, there are obviously quite a lot of men in the fandom, even on the kinkmeme. It's hard to tell when everyone's anonymous, and I really don't want to get into a mindset of "that's a male sort of prompt" or "no woman would want THAT". But there was a least one prompt where someone insisted that Shepard's love interest should be female no matter what, because reading about guys might be great for 'you ladies', but wasn't for them. Also there seems to be a lot of prompts about "[one of the villains] takes all of the female members of the crew hostage and uses mind control to turn them into willing sex slaves". In that way that doesn't sound like they're interested in said female crew members' perspectives on the events/ Also, any prompt for femslash that includes the phrase 'explore each other's bodies' I automatically assume is from a straight guy, and I also decide to never read it. And it's fine and all, and gender equality and safe open spaces on the internet. But. Blagh.

Also the other day I read an analysis of Labyrinth, probably one of my favourite films, that claimed it was obviously a manual for creating a slave through mind control (Warning: that article has some probably EXTREMELY triggering material in it, also a bunch of moving gifs in the background that are probably an epilepsy risk). Which disturbed me quite a bit for a few days, partly because it's always weird when someone puts a much darker spin on a kid's films you like, and partly because mind-controlling someone through traumatising them is both horrific, and you know, a thing people actually pretty much do. But I went back to the person's Tumblr a few days later, actually to see if they were male or female since there was something off-putting about the tone of the article (they're female), and...it became clear exactly HOW MUCH they believed in the Illuminati, and 'a shadowy malevolent organisation controlling popular media'. So yeah. That kind of put it into perspective. Not that I don't think there's a shadowy malevolent organisation controlling popular media. I just think they're called 'cunts'.

Also, today cakesy mentioned Love Shack by the B52s on Twitter, and it reminded me yet again of another Love Shack song that I've been trying to track down for years, but seems to be extremely elusive, even to Google. By sheer force of will and googling every lyric I could remember, I found this page, which has the exact lyrics of the song I am thinking of. That is the song. But it claims it's by 'X', which may not be a real band, and if it is Youtube and Amazon haven't heard of it. All that comes up in the B52s. My long and possibly fruitless quest continues.

But on the other hand, I have jellybeans. Which always makes me happier. And I have an Easter egg. And some of the fic in the Mass Effect fandom is great. And a bunch of the old Nick Cave CDs I used to own or at least have access to and finally got around to buying this week have arrived so I HAVE THEM. And the sun was out for at least a couple of hours today. OH, and I was flipping through channels today and randomly found a new series of Moonshiners! I love Moonshiners. I don't know why, but it always seems to make me smile. Today I found out where the phrase 'bootlegging' comes from. I wish they would put it on primetime once a week, or bring it out on DVD so I could watch it at my leisure, instead of all in a clump on a documentary channel when I'm not really ready for it or I know my dad will want the TV after an hour or so. But still, Moonshiners! J'adore it. So it's not all been bad.

I actually enjoyed The Following tonight, in the end. It sort of picked up, and seems to be getting back to it's original concept, if not the one I thought they'd be doing when I heard about the show. And it's always nice when Ryan gets things done, and when the writers keep things zipping along. ( Mild spoilers )

Anyway. Other bad things that happened today or recently:

• The fair we went to today wasn't great. You had to pay a cover charge to get in rather than just paying to go on rides, they didn't have any waltzers, and the hook-a-duck didn't have any water in it.



• I saw someone today prompting a fic on Tumblr via comments, and they said "established relationship, obviously!" at the end. Have we lived and fought in vain?



• No-one has written any Welcome To The Punch slash. I think just because it's a little British film, it's only been out a few days and no-one has really seen it. It's like there's no justice in the world.

They are doing some genuinely weird stuff on Celebrity Big Brother at the moment. My mum watches it and I caught bits of it as I was walking to and fro - they've had one celebrity become the 'Dictator' of the house, complete with weird big hat and sunglasses, and they've had a bunch of the other housemates organise a 'revolution' against him. Wasn't it just this year or last year that people in Libya revolted against Gadaffi, and he ended up dying? Also, the housemate they picked to become the Dictator is the only one, beside the Americans, with a noticeably foreign accent. Make of that what you will.

But anyway. What I actually wanted to post about were two-second ships. And by two-second ships, I don't mean the ships you love for about two seconds. No, that bearable, because it only lasts about two seconds. The ones I'm talking about are the ships you have based - relatively - on about two seconds of canon. AND YET YOU LOVE THEM BEYOND WORDS. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only person that feels like this. Sometimes I feel like it's what fandom is built on. But anyway.

I suppose what I really mean are those scenes in a TV show or book or whatever that are so suddenly, unbearably slashy that you suddenly take interest in a pairing, even though nothing else really appeals. The main examples I can think of from my own fannish history usually occur when there is a character in a fandom that I really love, but up to that point they've not had any obvious boyfriend (or girlfriend). EVEN THOUGH THEY DESERVE ONE. And then suddenly things get slashy with Background Character No. 8. However, I can only think of two examples from my own history, so chances are even I've broken that rule at some point in the past.

One of those examples was from Psychoville. I have no idea how many people have watched Psychoville, or want to, but in any case Season Two spoilers ahead. In season 2, they introduced a new character, played by Reece Shearsmith, who I've had a crush on since early League Of Gentlemen days. This new character was a librarian who saw visions of an evil clown sort of thing that ordered him to keep everything neat and ordered (in traditional League Of Gentlemen fashion). Most of his storyline involved a lost library book, and his increasingly obsessive and violent attempts to get it back. Then in one of the later episodes, he got caught by the police. And because of his past involvement with the main plot, he ended up being interviewed by this detective that WE knew was actually a psychopath murdering people on the whims of a terrifying company, because of their involvement with the main plotline. And they have this scene where the detective tries to get information out of the librarian by waving the no longer missing library book in front of him, and then spilling things on it, and finally threatening to burn it. The parts that hadn't had things spilled on them, I guess. And the librarian finally broke, and the detective put the book down so he could as him questions. And the librarian tried to grab the book reassuringly, and the detective just held it flat and gave him this look. And I couldn't. I JUST COULDN'T. That is the only scene they had together, and yet it remains INDELIBLY BURNED ON MY BRAIN.

The other major one I have is a pairing from Death Valley. I'm not going to go into details about that, because I still hold out hope someone else will watch Death Valley, and I'm not going to spoiler people for it. But yes. Essentially, I had a favourite character (who was occasionally rubbish), he had no obvious boyfriend, he suddenly got one and had about three scenes with him. AND I SHIPPED IT LIKE BURNING. I SHIPPED IT FOREVER.

It genuinely appalls and upsets me, even now, that there is no fic for these pairings. EVEN THOUGH THE SHOWS DIDN'T REALLY HAVE MUCH OF A FANDOM. EVEN THOUGH THEY ONLY HAD A FEW AND IN ONE CASE ONE SCENE TOGETHER. EVEN THOUGH I WAS ESSENTIALLY SPOILED WITH PETER SCHIBETTA/ADEBISI FIC. And then I think 'well, of course there's no fic for them'. And then I think about it again and think 'but why isn't there any fic for them???'.

So yes. Two-second pairings. Two seconds is all it takes apparently. They are the worst, because you can't even really defend them. Not even to yourself. BUT THERE SHOULD BE FIC FOR THEM sdfdjkhfdjksnx.

Mum and I and my ON and MN are meant to be going to a pantomime tomorrow night at 7 o'clock. Which, according to the local weather forecast, is exactly when the blizzards are supposed to hit us. We'll see how that goes.

Given all the Skyfall posts and stuff I'm seeing at the moment, and all the songvids and all the references to bondage, I sort of can't understand why no-one has mentioned that song James Bondage yet. Nowhere I can see, anyway. I would have thought it would be ALL OVER Skyfall fandom, and 00Silva in particular. And it's certainly one of the first things that pops into my head whenever I think of James Bond. Huh. Maybe it's just less popular than I thought.

I have a few goals for next week, which I hope to achieve. I want to get my MN and ON's Christmas presents, so my Christmas shopping will be finished (assuming my mum's gift from Play.com arrives shortly, anyway). I don't know what I'm getting them, but MN loves Spiderman and ON loves Moshi Monsters, so I assume something to do with those. I want to go to Leeds city centre, which I haven't done for a couple of months now. And if possible, I'd like to go to the next volunteering event on Friday. I've been told it will probably be a relaxed, Christmassy sort of affair, and not involve so much chopping down trees for hours in the rain. So there'll probably be much less chance of me cutting myself with a saw again.

Also I should probably try to get on the waiting list for that jewellery course again. And book train tickets to London, if I'm actually serious about getting them early so they're cheaper. And go see or get a ticket for The Nutcracker.