the sun and the moon and the stars

It's late, and I'm tired, so let's meme!

( current viewing )

( my preferences )

( pick a show, any show )

( my favourites )

( viewing habits )

Swuiped from deird1.

Memery, because I'm braindead, with adjustments from the original:

Who is your Doctor?
Nine. I have great fondness for Eleven, too. I didn't much enjoy Ten - I have no objection to David Tennant, but I disliked the character and his arc and generally lost interest in the series around that time. I've never been into classic Who (though I did get a letter from Peter Davison when I was a little girl) because I'm allergic to visibly bad special effects (I don't watch classic Trek, either).

Who is your Doctor's companion? AMY POND ♥♥♥ (and, okay, Rory is alright too ;))

Who is your Batman? I... kind of dislike Batman, to be honest, partly because he's canonically a dick (caveat: not a highly educated opinion here) and particly because he's such a fanboy favourite that his existence exerts logic-defying reality-bending powers on the DC verse.

Who is your Cat Woman? No strong feelings here. (Why can't there be a Who is your Wonder Woman? question here? Stupid DC. (My answer would be Gina Torres. Or, these days, if they insist on someone younger, Gina Carano.))

Who is your Sherlock Holmes? Jonny Lee Miller.

Who is your fictional female federal agent? My own RPG characters don't count, right? ;) I'd have to say Kensi Blye, then, with an honourable mention for Sydney Bristow.

Who is your Bond? Would that I could say Idris Elba here. Daniel Craig makes an adequate substitute, though I have a great fondness for Pierce Brosnan's Bond, too.

Who is your fictional female assassin? Natasha Romanoff ♥

Who is your captain of the Enterprise? Picard. (Though Sulu's brief acting captaincy in STID was a pretty freakin' awesome cameo in the Captain role.)

Via musesfool:

Which TV shows did you start watching in 2012?

I've actually been watching a hell of a lot less TV in 2012 because of reasons (like, suddenly having a much fuller busier life, plus cohabiting). I'm fairly sure the only new thing I picked up this year was Elementary, and that was only last week. ;-)

Oh wait! I also started watching Babylon 5 with the boyfriend (well, he wasn't the boyfriend when we started watching it ;)) but I lost enthusiasm at the start of Season 4 when the plot-of-the-week structure suddenly turned into All Mytharc All The Time. I do intend to finish watching it, since the bf has said he'll watch Burn Notice with me after we're done with B5, but I'm finding it hard to summon the enthusiasm for it right now. A shame, as the first three seasons were great.

Which TV shows did you let go of in 2012?

Kind of all of them? I'm a season behind in NCIS, NCIS LA and Burn Notice, although I'm still avoiding spoilers and intending to watch them, I just... haven't. I'd done that with Castle, too, though I then binged on half a season and caught up, and now I'm a month behind again. (I have concerns about the new season of Castle, not because of execution but because of my issues, so I'm sort of not motivated to watch it right now.)

Which TV shows did you mean to get into but didn't in 2012? Why?

The Legend of Korra. I watched the first couple of episodes but there were too many bits that hit my embarrassment squick because Korra makes so many faux pas in the first few episodes. I do want to watch it, because I loved AtLA so much, but there seems to be a bit of ambivalence amogst the fans so I'm not feeling any real urgency.

Which TV shows do you intend on checking out in 2013?

I'm more intending to catch up with the stuff I'm behind on: Burn Notice, Castle, NCIS, NCIS LA, QI. I'd like to finish B5, and maybe summon up the wherewithal to finish off Chuck and catch up with Leverage. Or maybe not.

Which TV show impressed you least in 2012?

Given how unengaged I was with pretty much all my shows, most of them. Plus there were so few interest-piquing prospects among the new shows of the season, too.

Which TV show did you enjoy the most in 2012?

My Red Dwarf rewatch, the first three seasons of Babylon 5, and Elementary.

Seen most recently via helens78.

( Answers behind the cut. )

There are things I should be doing, but it's quiet and I just finished the book I was reading (the latest Janet Evanovich), and why not do a meme? No reason! Thus, meme:

(swiped from musesfool)

( books! )

Okay, nuts to this, I'm just gonna catch up. :)

8. (Alternate) What is your philosophy on journal layouts?

I'm a big fan of black text, white background, decent font size, decent column width, decent typeface, no ridiculous replacement cursors. I don't have any significant related accessibility issues apart from poor eyesight, but I have little patience for form that impedes function so I'll almost always view offending journals as style=mine.

I also don't much like layouts that don't show tags, both by post and by sidebar list/cloud, since I find tags invaluable for browsing and content discovery.

9. (Alternate) Tell me about your default icon.
For a long time my general internet pseudonym was Jestyr/LadyJestyr and Harley Quinn up there was my default icon pretty much everywhere. Jester -> Fool, and Harley Quinn was the best female Fool I could think of. Also, she's adorable.

A while ago I switched to a photo of me as my default icon in many places, but I still identify with this Harley Quinn icon as strongly as I do with my actual face. And I still use Harley as my default icon on places where I want to be me, but don't want to use an actual photo - dreamwidth, twitter and so on.

10. Pick 10 random icons from your userpics and tell me about them.

Okay, this can go behind a cut :)

( here be icons! )

11. What features do you think Dreamwidth should have that it doesn't currently?

* A kudos-style feature!
* User notes!
* A memories system analogous to Delicious (OMG WANT, never gonna happen though)
* The ability to remember viewing preferences (eg style=mine, style=light) by journal (i.e. "ok, I view these in their native styles, these in my style, and these in light style").

That's just off the top of my head. I know there's more. :)

12. What do you consider the five most "telling" interests from the list on your profile? Why?

In alphabetical order:

( Read more... )

13. Do you have any unique interests on your user profile? What are they? How'd they get there?

Amazingly, no I don't.

14. Did you have a gateway fandom? Still in it? Why or why not? Is there a community for it on DW?

The first fic I ever read was by cupiscent, in XMMV, and that prompted me to read voraciously in XMMV - so in that sense, it was a gateway. I think Constantine was probably more of a gateway, though, in that I was an active participant in the fandom - I wrote reams of meta, I wallowed in the glorious fics, and I even started (though never finished) fic of my own. Had it been released five or so years later, I probably would have vidded in it (and still think I might, even now).

(alternate) What is your favourite subject to discuss on Dreamwidth?

Fandom stuff, mostly: my fannish reactions to the sources I love, vidding angst, the fandom meta du jour. I kind of wish I had the focus to be monofannish, but there's too much to love. :)

15. What's your current obsession? What about it captures your imagination?

Right now, oddly, it's nail polish. Which may seem kind of shallow, but there's nothing wrong with loving the shiny. It's not something I'd ever done much with before, apart from low-level maintenance stuff, but I bought some OPI nail polish for my mother and I a year ago, and some more at Christmas time, and it triggered something: the urge to collect ALL THE COLOURS.

It's having two good effects, I find, which are probably reinforcing the obsession: firstly, it's an incentive to take good care of my nails, which are typically weak and prone to delaminating. I've never had such nice nails so consistently before, and it's making me want to keep them nice instead of picking at them.

(Which reinforces something I'd realised about myself recently: I need an apparent motivation for reward to do things, not just an intellectual one. For instance, my house has always been rental-house ugly, and I'm very untidy and disorganised by nature. Over the last year or so as it's been slowly renovated and improved, I'm finding that I keep it much nicer without even thinking about it. As I said to a friend, back in the old days I could knock myself out tidying and cleaning and the place would still basically look like shit - whereas now the only thing stopping it looking awesome is the mess, so that's all the incentive I need to deal with the mess unbegrudgingly.)

Er, tangent much? Anyway, yes, second awesome thing about the nailpolish obsession: it's a way of really feeling good about the way I look. I have a number of body-image issues related to my recentish health woes, and they can be very disheartening; keeping my nails nice and (better yet) pretty makes me feel just plain good about myself every time I catch sight of my hands - and that's priceless.

Oops, missed a day.

5. How about when you're not online/on the computer?

Not... on the computer?

Oh, that would be when I'm asleep. Right.

Er. Most of my non-computer time is either: sleep, chores, travel time, or roleplaying games. RPGs are my only significant non-computer-based activity, and one I love very much. There are some things from my old lifestyle that I do miss, though. One is cooking, and I'm working on doing that more (well, obviously I cook all the time, but cooking as an activity is a bit different from cooking solely to generate nutritious variably-tasty comestibles). The other is moviegoing, and that's unlikely to change in the short term for various reasons.

6. What do you wish people who read your journal knew about you?

That I'm an interesting person.

My thoughts on yaoi!

Um. That is, this is primarily a fandom journal, and so many of my friends on DW are fandom-related friends. And one thing that has always frustrated me about fandom is that most conversations about our objects-of-fannishness are held via creative mediums: more often than not, someone with an opinion about the characters, plot or themes of a given book/show/movie will express that opinion via fanworks, particularly fic. And other people mull that over, and respond in kind.

As a non-writer, that frustrates me to no end. I adore fanfic, I read it voraciously, but I'm an extremely slow, uninspired and uncertain writer, and creative fiction isn't my language. Whereas I interact with my fandoms by talking - meta, squee, criticism, whatever - and the ratio of meta-to-fic, in fandom as a whole, is pretty freakin' tiny. When I post meta, people rarely engage with it, and I rarely see other people posting much of it either. (Not that I post much of it myself these days, as it's a bit like talking into the wind.)

None of which is meant to say that anyone else is doin' fandom rong - not at all. As an avid reader, I love the fact that there's so much interesting, thinky fic out there (and even if I wasn't, I would never presume to tell people they should converse the way I want them to). I just sometimes get a bit frustrated and sad that nobody seems to speak my language, or to want to engage in the kind of conversations I can have.

But! On the up side, at least that means there is a metric ton of awesome thinky fun interesting fic out there - at least I can hear and enjoy the language, even if I can't speak it. :)

3. Do you crosspost? Why or why not?

Yes, and no. By default, my entries are all crossposted to eleanorjane, which is specifically intended to be a mirror to this journal. I have never felt that I belonged in fandom enough to turn away friends, and there are interesting people on LJ who I would miss if I withdrew to being DW-exclusive. I do sometimes turn crossposting off if I'm posting something DW-specific, though.

I also crosspost some of my entries to my primary LJ, ladyjestyr, if it's something that I think might garner interesting discussion over there, or be of interest to my flist (which is almost entirely non-fandom). Crossposting to that journal isn't on by default, though; I only turn it on for specific entries.

Put in a letter of the alphabet in the address bar, and see what the top website is. (And if you play along, be nice; outing yourself is fine; outing other people by giving links to their kinks is not.)

Heck, why not. :)

I use two browsers fairly regularly though - Chrome when I'm booted into Windows to play games, and Safari when I'm booted into OS X to work or footle around. This lot is from Chrome on Windows.

( Letters within! )

Late again, mostly because WebKit has been sulking every time I ask a browser to do something useful. Go, WebKit! \o/

**

Day 11 - A show that disappointed you.

Oh, so many of them. Oh TV, why can't I quit you? I could mention BSG here, or Dark Angel, or Alias, or The Mentalist, or Lie to Me, or any of the Stargates, or FlashForward, or even, if you want to be nitpicky, all the shows I love, because they've all let me down in various ways too. (Like NCIS with its destructive humour, especially of the Mock-the-Geek variety, like Firefly with its erasure of people of colour in a future where everyone speaks Mandarin.)

But I think here I'll talk about White Collar, because it wasn't the deepest disappointment, but one of the most recent, and one that I can clearly articulate.

When I first heard about White Collar, I was interested by the premise, which played up Neal Caffrey's criminality and the Rat Pack retro theme running through the show. Fannishly, people were talking about it in the same breath as Leverage or Burn Notice, or even Ocean's Eleven. So I was expecting a sharp, bantery heist/caper show -- and what I got was, in fact, a buddy cop show, arguably of the Genius Wrangler variety. And I already have plenty of Buddy Cop shows and Genius Wrangler shows that interest me a lot more than White Collar does. And, to be honest, I don't have much interest in partnership-based shows where the partners are both middle-class white guys. It's not White Collar's fault that it wasn't what I wanted, but it was definitely the biggest letdown of the season for me.

I think I was getting behind, so let's fix that!

Day 09 - Best scene ever.

Augh! I can't decide!

( Thoughts behind the cut. )

Day 07 - Least favorite episode of your favorite TV show.

Man, this one will be haaaard. I don't like focusing on things I don't like, y'know?

I think I'd have to say That Old Black Magic, episode 8 of season 1, in which the dark entity Maldis pits Crichton and Crais against each other for his own amusement.

I dislike it because... I have a hard time with people who refuse to be rational in important situations, which is Crais to a t in this episode. He's so dead-set on blaming Crichton for his brother's death that no amount of apology or explanation from Crichton will assuage his need for vengeance. I understand that people do behave like that, that people aren't all rational or sensible, but Crais's irrationality is so blatant here that I find the episode really uncomfortable to watch because the entire interaction between them is so frustrating to me.

Hmm, I had this nagging feeling I'd missed a day - maybe I have. Oh, timezones, how I hate you.

Day 05 - A show you hate.

This one is actually harder than I expected because I generally approach media positively, wanting to be entertained, and even when something's not my cup of tea I don't hate it - I just don't want to have to see it.

I do, however, pretty much hate most sitcoms, because they generally rely on perpetrating tired stereotypes that I find dismissive and actively hurtful.

My first thought, though, was Big Brother (specifically the Australian variety, because I haven't seen the other flavours). It was alright in its first season, when it was just a dozen people jammed into a house together for three months. That was interesting, in a sociology-experiment kind of way. These days, though, it's all cheap gimmicks and fake drama and the most annoying television coverage known to mankind.

However, I hate the Biggest Loser more, now I think about it, because it's all cheap gimmicks and fake drama and it's actively damaging, given the likely health impact of all the ridiculous dieting and high-impact exercise, plus the amount of implicit fat-hatred and body normativity and oh look, I guess there are TV shows I do hate after all. (Man, that was a run-on sentence and a half.)

Day 03 - Your favorite new show (aired this TV season)

At the start of the season, I was totally expecting the answer to this to be White Collar. Shenanigans! Capers! Natalie Morales!

But they badly underused Natalie Morales, and in the end it turned out not to be a caper show but basically a buddy cop show about two characters I couldn't bring myself to care much about. Which is a shame.

So, I'm going to say NCIS: Los Angeles. I think it's deeply flawed in some areas (for instance, its Serious Emotional Plot Arc episodes are just laden with offputting Srs Emo Manpain because it's trying to follow the NCIS model with less-good actors and characters we care less about), but when it sets aside the Srs Emo Manpain Plot Arcs, the ordinary weekly procedural episodes are really quite enjoyable, and I'm hoping for more of them next season.

*

In other news, it's 2am and I should be going to bed, but I'm hungry, so I'm going to make myself a bowl of pasta and sit and play with the new David Mitchell's SoapBox iPad app.

Day 02 - A show that you wish more people were watching

I don't actually have an obvious answer for this. Most of the stuff that I really love at the moment tends to be fairly mainstream and popular; it's not so obscure that I think "oh, people would love this if they only knew about it". (My current dedicated TV-watching roster is: NCIS, Castle, Burn Notice, and QI, plus I'm less dedicated about but still interested in NCIS:LA (though I fast-forward through the Emo Manpain episodes), Bones, Dr Who, Spicks and Specks, and Leverage.)

If this was last year, I'd say The Middleman, to try and save it from cancellation - but it's too late now. So I think I'll say Castle, just to keep it safe, since it's the one in most danger.

---

Right, that's that done, now back to wrestling with WordPress templates for my new blog.

Swiped from greenbirds, because I'm having trouble making my brain wake up today, and this might do the trick - and it seemed like a good intro for the new folks reading me.

( here there be memery )

Hooray, someone did indeed provide the female equivalent of the male celebrity sex meme! Gacked from voleuse.

( many names under the cut! )

I tell you, I wanted to put a lot more than three names on that list. :)

And, because I can't sleep, let's have some memeage! Gacked from musesfool.

( The (male) celebrity sex meme. )

Holy shit, there is not enough boldface for some of the guys on this list. I keep seeing names and going 'but I need to be able to make this one EVEN BOLDER'.

...has anyone done one of these memes for female celebrities? I should write a list, but I get as far as 'Katee Sackhoff' and 'Claudia Black' and then I just get, uh, distracted...

Seen around the traps, most recently at musesfool's: Name your 15 absolutely favorite couples (het/slash/canon/fanon) and ask people to see what trends they notice about your couples. Try to pick different fandoms.

Alrighty then.

1. John Crichton/Aeryn Sun (Farscape. Oh, show. *sniffles*)
2. Jack Sparrow/James Norrington (Pirates of the Caribbean)
3.Bruno Walton/Boots O'Neal (MacDonald Hall)
4. Danny Ocean/Rusty Ryan (Oceans' 11)
5. Malcolm Reynolds/Serenity (Firefly)
6. John Sheppard/Rodney McKay (SGA, and only because of the quality of the fandom's writers)
7. Harry Potter/Draco Malfoy (WHAT. Yes, okay, I admit it. But dammit, I _like_ fanon Draco, at least the iterations I've seen.)
8. Fraser/Ray K (Due South)
9. John Constantine/Angela Dodson (Constantine)
10. Bigby/Snow (Fables)
11. Tony/Pepper (Iron Man)
12. Fry/Leela (Futurama)
13. Tony DiNozzo/Ziva David (NCIS)
14. Elizabeth Bennett/Fitzwilliam Darcy (Pride & Prejudice)
15. Han Solo/Leia Organa (Star Wars)

This was surprisingly hard, you know - it turns out that I don't have a whole heap of favourite couples in the sense of "I would be unhappy if they wound up with anyone else". This is the closest I can get.

And I can see one giant obvious trend right there, too. :)