Fill this out! I wanna know!

YOU
1. Name:
2. Date of birth:
3. Where you live:
4. What makes you happy:
5. Currently listening/the last thing you listened to:
6. Do you read my journal?:
7. If yes, what makes it especially good or bad?:
8. An interesting fact about you:
9. What do you love at the moment?:
10. Favourite place to spend time:
11. Favourite lyric:
12. The best time of the year:

RECOMMEND
1. A film:
2. A book:
3. A band, a song, or album:

PLUS
1. One thing you like about me:
2. Two things you like about yourself:
3. Look at my friends-list and tell what you like about one of our mutual friends:
4. Put this in your journal so that I can tell you what I like about you.

Okay. Well.

Apparently, LJ just laid off an alarming number of people, the media is blaming it on slashers, and a lot of people are really very worried that the service is going to up and die at any second.

I'm going to come right out and say, up-front, that I'm not really worried that LJ will abruptly go down and we'll all lose each other and our journals forever. If LJ does indeed die, it's much more likely it'll be a long, slow decline, not something we need to leap all over right now. However, I do recognize that this is a scary situation, and everybody wants to be prepared. The good news is, we're fandom, we are organized, and we most likely have ample time to prepare for a disaster, if indeed one should occur.

So, let's take a few deep, calming breaths, and get practical.

( Backing up your journal, your friends and your sanity, in three easy steps )

Okay, so that's that! If anybody has any questions, gimme a shout, I will do my absolute physical best to answer.

And, well, as long as I'm doing this, I might as well do the thing properly. Gacked from chaos_by_design:

It has been noted that while there are plenty of ways of saving one's journal, there isn't a useful way to save one's LJ social network. If you can read this, please send e-mail to heather dot cotter at gmail dot com with the subject line "social safety net" that has contact info unrelated to LJ, preferably e-mail (but no address@livejournal.com), and your LJ handle. Especially pertinent if we don't connect on any other forum. Thankya!

Hey, guys, can you suggest a blond actress who is freaking creepy as all hell? A woman that you look at and go, "Wow, she'd be hot if she didn't make me want to run away and hide under my bed."

Someone that isn't Tricia Helfer. I know she's the natural choice to come to mind if you've seen even a tiny bit of "Battlestar Galactica," but I really need somebody else.

Suggestions? Anyone?

♥ the fanficcers love meme, continued ♥

Because I am nothing if not a sheep and/or a total attention whore. *g*

I haven't posted in six days, between holiday stuff, my father coming into town and then my mother going out of town, so that all but two of my brothers are here (and making a fantastic mess).

There's a lot of "2008 in review" memes floating around, so I thought I'd try a couple!

First sentence of every month, from masqthephlsphr:

Jan: Hey, greetings to all my Mountain and Pacific time peeps from the future! [It was barely after midnight on New years' Day.]
Feb: Rumors of my death are greatly exaggerated. [I hadn't posted in two weeks.]
Mar: Yesterday, I spent my ENTIRE DAY reading comics.
Apr: I am not a happy Heather today.
May: Took some pics of my kid playing in the backyard, blowing bubbles and wearing her dress-up clothes.
Jun: I am bored.
Jul: This one looked frickin' sweet. [It was a meme.]
Aug: Hey, all.
Sep: Title: How You Got Here [It was a fic I wrote.]
Oct: ::blows dust off of journal:: [I hadn't posted in two weeks.]
Nov: Happy Halloween, from my daughter the super hero [LJ-cut text for photos of Darla in her Wonder Woman costume]
Dec: Okay, flist. I have RAGE.

( Books I read in 2008 (recycled on my flist many, many, MANY times) )

( Movies I saw in 2008 (from seraphcelene) )

( Shows I started watching in 2008 (my idea, not gacked from anyone else) )

From stoney321:

The meh:

- I had my most crapsack birthday ever, for reasons that only a select few people have been allowed to know.
- s8219 moving out really sucked.
- I was celibate and dateless for this entire year. (Unless Cute Cashier Guy suddenly bursts through my door and makes passionate love to me on my sofa sometime in the next twenty minutes, anyway.)
- I spent most of this year incredibly, worryingly broke.
- I spent a worryingly large portion of this year combating some illness or other.
- My favorite shows ("Heroes" and "Doctor Who") are currently On Notice for being painfully mediocre overall, with glimpses of SERIOUS suckitude.

The great:

- I co-authored a project with lady1raven where we wrote over 100,000 words. (About 70,000 of those words were hers, but I take comfort in the fact that the project was my idea, and I'm still amazingly proud of her, and of how much and how well she wrote.)
- I cared about politics for the first time ever, and have learned SO MUCH about the world, the media and the general state of my country as a result.
- I donated and worked to raise over $200 in charity this year. Not much, in the overall scheme of things, but more than ever before for me.
- WE ELECTED OBAMA, YOU GUYS! OMG OMG OMG! AND HE'S GONNA BE PRESIDENT FOR REALLY REALS IN THREE WEEKS! America made history with that, and I love that I had my own small part in it (essays, campaigning and voting).
- One of my brothers came to terms with his sexuality this year. I was the first person he came out to. The amount of trust and love he showed me there, and the fact that I got to support him for this, was really, truly awesome.
- Pursuant to that last item, I now know pretty much all of the ins and outs of the domestic and international adoption processes. It'll be some years yet before he can pursue his dream of adopting a child, but this is another thing I'm really excited that he let me be a part of it.
- My little girl grew up so much this year! I can't believe how much she's changed, and I really can't believe that she's almost seven!
- I'm closer than ever with my dad. Which has its drawbacks, but overall? Pretty sweet.

In this moment, I am happy. And really, really excited about the coming year. :-) Good night and good luck, to all of us!

NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Fuck you, Fox! You just ruined my Christmas. I hope you're satisfied. You may be ruining my new year. I hope you're satisfied.

::headdesk::

I am such a chicken shit. I promised myself the next time I saw Cute Cashier Guy, I'd at least ask him what his name is. (Nobody at my corner store wears name tags, you see.)

Today, I...managed to ask him how his art history final last weekend went. And then paid for my candy bar and left. ::headdesk again::

I am never gonna be able to ask him out, am I?

::headpiano::

Homework assignment, flist!

Explain to me, in 500 words or less, how gay marriage is just like the imprisonment, torture and execution of millions of people. I will be timing you.

(This enraged sarcasm is brought to you by several bigots who appeared out of nowhere to start a flame war on the comments section of my favorite newspaper.)

Periodically, I do something very, very strange as a creative outlet.

I scout locations for fictional characters to live in.

No, seriously, I really do this. I also tend to cast actors I like for my characters, especially roleplay characters, because it gives them a unique voice in my head that I can always call upon to check how they sound. This works wonders for making characters feel distinct from each other.

But back to location scouting.

When you location-scout for characters, browsing real estate listings for places you can imagine they live, you're also designing for them a backdrop, a place they can come alive in. Have you ever noticed how much a person's home says about who they are? There's a reason that, in psychology, the house represents the self. There is absolutely no other material indicator that tells you as much about a person as the place they choose to live and the way they decorate it once they live there.

Same goes for fictional people. If you find a place that you can really picture them living in, it's creating an aspect of their character that helps you flesh them out in your mind's eye. Even if you never describe in detail what the place looks like to anyone, you know it's there, and it tells you A LOT.

Plus, it's a fun way to pretend you're rich and shopping for mansions you will never, in real life, be able to afford.

I'm sure, at this point, you're looking at me like I'm nuts. That's okay. I look at me like I'm nuts, too.

I told you all that, to tell you about this: Sometimes, when I'm doing this location-scouting, I find places that are truly, outrageously unique.

This one I just found in Merída, Yucátan, Mexico? Blows just about every other one I've ever looked at out of the water.

http://www.mayanliving.com/Listings/000961.html?listing_page=Merida&lang=eng

Are you looking at this thing? What the hell? I can only guess the architect was the bastard lovebaby of Pablo Picasso and M.C Escher. There's a room in it that totally reminds me of a cartoon beehive. (If you're looking, you know the one. The one where the wall is made up of a bunch of little pentagons? Yeah, that one. If you were wondering why it looked familiar, wonder no longer. Cartoon beehive. I'm telling you.) Also, check the slanted roofs with the half-barrel cylinder windows and the weird color bar bathroom wall tiles. Not to mention the ceiling that's shaped like upside-down stairs underneath the staircase.

My favorite feature is the swimming pool in the living room that goes outside into an even bigger swimming pool through some mutant mish-mash of a window and a tunnel.

I could never, ever make a place like this up in a million years.

I can picture no sane human being ever choosing to live in a place like this. Can you imagine the echo chamber that is the beehive room? You probably could hear a pin drop in there. And still hear it an hour and a half later.

This is my second-favorite house for sale I've ever come across when location scouting.

(The only thing I love more than this $800,000 crime against geometry is the underground mansion in Coober Pedy, South Australia. The above-ground bits in the photos are a courtyard for entertaining. Absolutely everything else? Yeah, underground.)

::sulks:: Why are houses in America so boring?

This is the list of the top 100 grossing movies of all time. Bold what you've seen.

( Top 100 )

For those who don't want to go through the list, I've seen all but eleven of them. I'm at 89/100.

And except for a small handful...

...I loved every single one.

Damn.

LJ blackout, people! Look alive! Who's out there? Mouseketeer roll call!

Gacking a meme from my wife, because that's apparently all I do anymore. But I am including PICTURES in mine, just to be different!

Confidential to lady1raven: It took me forever to do this because I had to keep stopping and going, "No, I cannot use Thracians. No one else would know what I was talking about."

( Cut for illustrated memeage. )

For the record: I did NOT make any of the images above and I do not know who did. Google Images sucks like that. :-/ If you wanna use any for yourself, put 'em as "please claim." Don't credit me.

Also, this whole meme has obvious roots in the Tropes Wiki's entries Five Man Band and Five Bad Band.

Okay, flist.

I have RAGE.

I mean, serious RAGE that warrants ALL CAPS.

If you are interested in helping me get past it, here's what I need you to do:

Kill Sylar.

That's right. Leave me a comment right now, of any length, killing Sylar bloody. Or comically. I don't care. Just kill him. Non-"Heroes" fen on my flist can be included in this! You don't even have to know who he is--if you can write a gruesome death for someone named Sylar, you're in.

Make my week better. Murder Kring's darling. Gabriel Sylar MUST DIE.

Hit me with your best shot.

This one's going around my flist, and it looked like fun, so I gacked. From kangeiko and likeadeuce:

Put your MP3 player on shuffle, and write down the first line of the first twenty songs. Post the poem that results. The first line of the twenty-first is the title.

Hunted inside, my days unfold

Send a heartbeat to the void that cries to you
Love me cancerously, like a salt-sore soaked in the sea.
Summer has come and passed
There's 104 days of summer vacation
I walk a lonely road
A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do
From underneath the trees, we watch the sky
Must it take a life for hateful eyes to glisten once again
Every single night, the same arrangement
And you can try to fight this all you want
Down in the workshop
Watch, I can flash across the sky
The samples won't delay, but the cable
I'm the lucky one, always having fun
She wore faded jeans and soft black leather
The birds and the bees
Leaves from the vine
I saw the gravestones
Where are we?
The heart is a bloom

If you celebrated Thanksgiving growing up: tell me how?

This may, in fact, be the best, most useful and most effective writing tool I have ever used in my entire life.

You guys gotta try this thing.

Dear "Heroes" fandom,

I don't know if you noticed this, so I'm just gonna point it out real fast.

THERE ARE OTHER PEOPLE ON THIS GODDAMN SHOW BESIDES SYLAR.

No love,
Me

*

Sorry, guys. Had to get that off my chest after doing the newsletter for today. (The newsletter in question being ninth_wonders) I collected dozens of links for it, as I do every weekend, but this weekend was special. And by "special," I mean that TWO LINKS IN THE ENTIRE THING had NOTHING TO DO WITH SYLAR.

For those not in "Heroes" fandom, Sylar is the new Spike. Sociopathic serial killer who happens to be good-looking and clever, so the fen lose their shit over his awesomeness.

Now, much like Spike and Jesus, Sylar would be great if he didn't have an occasionally insane fanbase. But he does, which is the sort of thing that can put me off the whole damn thing.

I'm in the unique position of being both inside AND outside that (inside because it's my fandom and I have to collect links to the content about it, outside because it's not my particular sandbox in the fandom), and this has been creeping up on me for a while. Today, I seem to have lost all patience with it. The sort of loss of patience that makes me wanna do something like have an "Anybody But Sylar" fic-a-thon. Which I would actually do, except nobody would sign up for it.

So there you go.

Fucking Sylar.

You know what is an absolutely fucking surreal experience?

Watching a new episode of a show you haven't seen in a long time.

I haven't watched "Dexter" since the end of S1. This wasn't a conscious decision, it just sort of happened. But then, last night, we found out by accident that my family has somehow gotten Showtime when nobody ordered it. So we ended up watching it for a couple hours, just to bask in extended cable programming, and I caught the most recent ep of "Dexter."

WTF? Jimmy Smits is here? And crazy-evil? And Rita and Dexter are engaged? And Rita's pregnant? WTF? What happened?

My wife needs to walk me through this, or else I might have to watch the last season and a half just to get some damn answers.

Also suddenly bizarre? "House." I haven't seen an ep since the one with House and Cuddy on a plane, I just watched a new one and I'm just lost. When did the ducklings go away? Who are all these people? Seriously, somebody tell me, WTF?

In other TV news, I love "Heroes" more than I ever thought possible (I haven't missed any eps, I just haven't been posting about them). The Petrellis continue to be the awesomest family ever, and their combined weakness for blondes is almost parallel to Angel's. Even Sylar's on the I ♥ Blondes team now. (ETA: If you didn't know Sylar was a Petrelli, sorry; it was revealed two months ago and it didn't occur to me to cut.)

"Merlin" also continues to be awesome, though my theory mapping the trajectory of the show was TOTALLY shot to Hell recently. :-( The "Merlin" Children in Need special was particularly made of awesome. If you haven't seen, you should watch, just for the AWESOMENESS that was Anthony Stewart Head.

Also? I'm considering seeing "Twilight." Talk me into or out of it?

So I haven't posted in, like...two weeks. I think my last post was when I was all excited about Obama getting elected. I'm sure at least one or two of you were going, "WTF? Where'd she go?" (Or, if you're like s8219, you may have assumed I'm dead. *g* In case you've ever wondered why I always go, "I'm not dead!" when I post after not posting for a while, it's because she--not unlike my mother--assumes I'm dead in a ditch somewhere if I don't call.)

I'm not avoiding or anything. It's just that for a while, I couldn't really think of anything I wanted to post, and then last weekend, I came down with a vicious bout of bronchitis which not only killed my desire to do much in the way of anything, but which I had no medication for except NyQuil. If you've never seen me on NyQuil, it's not pretty. I generally refer to it as "Bitch, I will put you in a coma." Today is the first day since last weekend I've managed to NOT throw up because I coughed so hard, I gagged.

Another problem is that for what feels like FOREVER, I've been stuck at my mother's. She and my stepdad went on the road, so I'm here at her place, taking care of the kids. It's not too bad--Darla's the only child around under the age of eleven, and in fact, three of the five siblings currently on my watch are in their teens (Tim, 16, Shane, 17 and Sara, 18). The main reason it's annoying and TIME CONSUMING AS ALL HELL is that not a single one of them has a driver's license, and not a single one of them just hangs out. They all needs rides to and from school, to and from work, to and from football practice, to and from Japanese Club, to and from friends' houses--not to mention the many doctors' appointments and pharmacy trips once my bronchitis spread like wildfire amongst everyone else. Plus the fact that I'm also having to secretly smuggle brothers' girlfriends and sister's friends to Planned Parenthood to get birth control, because their uberconservative parents never told them that there was a place they could get it for free or on the cheap. One brother's girlfriend actually had a pregnancy scare today, and I had to take her to get tested, and then when it was negative, I got to reveal to her the OMG SHOCKING truth that:

1) You can, in fact, get pregnant even if he pulls out every time.
2) You can, in fact, get birth control without having to ask your parents or even tell them.¹

I'm sorry if I sound cranky. :-/ As you may have guessed, I'm not exactly having fun times...though I am officially The Coolest Adult any of these kids know, and I've never gotten to be the coolest anything before.

So yeah, that's been my MIA two weeks.

Tell me, how were yours? Tell me everything! I wanna know!

¹Before you ask, no, I am not, in fact, interested in being given a lecture on how these kids' knowledge of birth control should've been left to their parents. Guess what? They're having sex, anyway. They were having sex before they even met me, and they're going to continue having sex even after I'm at my place and never see them. They SHOULD be safe. They SHOULDN'T be getting diseases or having babies because they've been kept woefully ignorant by people who think they'll have sex if they know the truth about protecting themselves from the negative consequences of sex. Teenagers have sex whether they know what they're doing or not. I'd rather they knew what they were doing. And you know what? In Missouri, there's nothing illegal about giving a kid a ride to a clinic where they can make an informed decision about their lifestyles. [/rant]