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bending_sickleWritten: February 1, 2006 at 12:04 am
My brother is not, to put it mildly, fun to talk to when he’s stressed. Usually our phone conversations are the audible equivalent of “…” followed by banal comments and sighs while each of us (or, more often, just me) wrack our little brains trying to come up with something to say to the other.
He’s currently writing his thesis. This means that the phone conversation I had with him this night wasn’t a success.
I’m thinking it’d be in my best interests not to call him for a couple of weeks. (Oh, I’m well aware I’ll be calling him again well before those two weeks are up. Call it sisterly stupidity.)
Today I spend the day over at MCarmen’s, as the previous post testifies. I spent most of my time alone in Marta’s room, going through fics, copy/pasting from four different windows until I overloaded my little bitty floppy and had to erase various pictures I’d been planning on making into icons.
Especially since I also c/p’ed some tutorials from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
icon_tutorial.
Marta, by the by, is MCarmen’s elder daughter. She was really into sports and is taking some afternoon courses in order to prepare for the government exam in the currently-undefined future (because governments are super organized and tell the people everything). She also teaches some small kids and, up until a few months ago, also helped with a group of gypsy kids.
Her mother was overjoyed when she stopped working with the gypsies. Here in Spain we have quite a lot of them, and they do tend to keep to themselves. They also have quite a reputation for holding grudges, then relieving themselves of those grudges in particularly nasty ways.
One example that comes to mind only because of how drastic it is is the case of a car accident. A little gypsy girl was running between cars and runs out onto the road, whereupon she’s struck by a car, though the driver slammed on the breaks. The little girl is fine, got taken out of the hospital that very afternoon with hardly a scratch on her. But the mother screamed and the father took out a gun and shot the driver more than a few times.
Marta is also deaf. She has been all her life, though it seems to be getting worse. She wears two hearing aids and reads lips. I saw a copy of a book my “Psychology of Deafness” prof talked about, I saw a voice or some such. Although she gets pissed when the subtitle option on TV doesn’t work, she’s quite well adapted.
She’s also incredibly sweet to hang out with, which is nice.
I’d love to have giant flashcards that I could whip out in different situations. Say I’m crossing the street and a car won’t give me right of way, despite it being a pedestrian crossing. I’d flash ‘em a kind reminder of just where the hell they are. I’m in a bus and I see a driver and co. without seatbelts? Ditto. Likewise for smokers in non/smoking areas (and good god are there a lot of people who smoke here) and for cell/phone users that are being damn annoying.
I was thinking about the whole of Joss Whedon’s work the other day. (Granted, I don’t know if he’s done anything else besides BtVS, Angel and Firefly, but…) Apart from the eerie-ass observation that his BtVS and Angel characters can quite comfortably do crossovers into Firefly without seeming to be, y’know, weird about it*, there’s a few other trends I’ve noticed.
The Chinese. I thought it only started with Firefly, but hot damn was I wrong. There’s some Chinese lines in "Fool for Love", a Season 5 ep on BtVS (which, I think, is the one I watched with J). These same lines are repeated again on Angel, in an early Season 5 ep with the crazy slayer Dana.
Which brings me to another point: that man likes teh crazy. And he likes ‘em violent. I mean, there’s Drusilla (crazy vamp who was all weak at first until it was all "ooh, I want entrails do dance in, daddy"), Glory (who wasn’t quite as "let’s talk gibberish" crazy as the others), Tara (though she didn’t kill anyone…), above-mentioned Dana (who is freaky-creepy, saying things like "keep cutting until you see dust") and finally ol’ Crazy herself, River (psychic trained assassin). Most of them all talk the same too, prophetic (Dru and River) or going on about hurt and torture. If you just compare the three main crazy girls (Dru, River and the sorely under-used but ever so full of potential (if only Fox wasn’t stupid and had let Angel have another season) Dana) you can see a great similarity between them. All childlike and frail but crazy and prophetic, getting visions and getting bloody.
There’s also a whole lot of torture in the Whedon-world, too. Every series had a pretty explicit torture scene in either the first or second season. (Angelus->Giles, Faith-> Wesley, Niska-> Mal and Wash) Creepy.
And possibly none of you know what the hell I’m talking about or possibly care, 'cause you’re all Harry Potter fangirls or whatever.
On a more positive note, I’ve decided that, if I ever get a (black) cat, it’s getting called Nyarlathotep.
And an "Omg such a wittily terrible pun" name for brown dogs would be Zoë or Mal. Because they’d be "browncoats". Hardy har har.**
Watched two eps of House (wee!) and finally understood an icon I saw a while back, describing all the dangers the human body went through during sex. Haven’t written anything in ages but am getting the itch back. Granted all my fics right now are in a stale "Wtf do we do now" situation, so I don’t know if I really want to go back into them and try to write them out of the very ugly corner they’re in.
Tomorrow the new guy’s supposed to come to the apartment. I’ve got to move quickly and decide what space I want in the fridge. I’m currently using a shelf that’s been folded back, so it’s half the size it should be. I can keep that and fold it out to normal-size or take the lowest shelf, which doesn’t have a lot of vertical height.
...yup. Keeping my shelf and making it grow. 'S’not many things that will, either.
* What I mean is, I’ve read BtVS/Firefly and Angel/Firefly and never do the characters being crossed seem out of place, universe-wise. Not like putting Harry Potter onto Serenity, for example.
Although I saw an add where the people of Crossing Jordan go to Las Vegas, and my immediate thought was “Sweet! CJ/CSI crossover… Oh wait, that’s a fandom-only trick. Damn.”
** Funny because Zoë or Mal were soldiers fighting for the Independence (war which they lost), and those soldiers were called Browncoats. And maybe I’m just tired and shouldn’t write this at all because I don’t mean it that way but if I was talking about a female dog, who happened to be brown, and proposed to name her after Gina Torres… That could make a very ugly sentence. Very.
Oh god, I hate switching keyboard styles. I keep pressing the shift button wondering why the hell the little "<" thing isn’t popping out.
Omg so sleepy.
Edit: It’s my brother’s birthday this Saturday. Phone call ahoy.
My brother is not, to put it mildly, fun to talk to when he’s stressed. Usually our phone conversations are the audible equivalent of “…” followed by banal comments and sighs while each of us (or, more often, just me) wrack our little brains trying to come up with something to say to the other.
He’s currently writing his thesis. This means that the phone conversation I had with him this night wasn’t a success.
I’m thinking it’d be in my best interests not to call him for a couple of weeks. (Oh, I’m well aware I’ll be calling him again well before those two weeks are up. Call it sisterly stupidity.)
Today I spend the day over at MCarmen’s, as the previous post testifies. I spent most of my time alone in Marta’s room, going through fics, copy/pasting from four different windows until I overloaded my little bitty floppy and had to erase various pictures I’d been planning on making into icons.
Especially since I also c/p’ed some tutorials from
icon_tutorial.Marta, by the by, is MCarmen’s elder daughter. She was really into sports and is taking some afternoon courses in order to prepare for the government exam in the currently-undefined future (because governments are super organized and tell the people everything). She also teaches some small kids and, up until a few months ago, also helped with a group of gypsy kids.
Her mother was overjoyed when she stopped working with the gypsies. Here in Spain we have quite a lot of them, and they do tend to keep to themselves. They also have quite a reputation for holding grudges, then relieving themselves of those grudges in particularly nasty ways.
One example that comes to mind only because of how drastic it is is the case of a car accident. A little gypsy girl was running between cars and runs out onto the road, whereupon she’s struck by a car, though the driver slammed on the breaks. The little girl is fine, got taken out of the hospital that very afternoon with hardly a scratch on her. But the mother screamed and the father took out a gun and shot the driver more than a few times.
Marta is also deaf. She has been all her life, though it seems to be getting worse. She wears two hearing aids and reads lips. I saw a copy of a book my “Psychology of Deafness” prof talked about, I saw a voice or some such. Although she gets pissed when the subtitle option on TV doesn’t work, she’s quite well adapted.
She’s also incredibly sweet to hang out with, which is nice.
I’d love to have giant flashcards that I could whip out in different situations. Say I’m crossing the street and a car won’t give me right of way, despite it being a pedestrian crossing. I’d flash ‘em a kind reminder of just where the hell they are. I’m in a bus and I see a driver and co. without seatbelts? Ditto. Likewise for smokers in non/smoking areas (and good god are there a lot of people who smoke here) and for cell/phone users that are being damn annoying.
I was thinking about the whole of Joss Whedon’s work the other day. (Granted, I don’t know if he’s done anything else besides BtVS, Angel and Firefly, but…) Apart from the eerie-ass observation that his BtVS and Angel characters can quite comfortably do crossovers into Firefly without seeming to be, y’know, weird about it*, there’s a few other trends I’ve noticed.
The Chinese. I thought it only started with Firefly, but hot damn was I wrong. There’s some Chinese lines in "Fool for Love", a Season 5 ep on BtVS (which, I think, is the one I watched with J). These same lines are repeated again on Angel, in an early Season 5 ep with the crazy slayer Dana.
Which brings me to another point: that man likes teh crazy. And he likes ‘em violent. I mean, there’s Drusilla (crazy vamp who was all weak at first until it was all "ooh, I want entrails do dance in, daddy"), Glory (who wasn’t quite as "let’s talk gibberish" crazy as the others), Tara (though she didn’t kill anyone…), above-mentioned Dana (who is freaky-creepy, saying things like "keep cutting until you see dust") and finally ol’ Crazy herself, River (psychic trained assassin). Most of them all talk the same too, prophetic (Dru and River) or going on about hurt and torture. If you just compare the three main crazy girls (Dru, River and the sorely under-used but ever so full of potential (if only Fox wasn’t stupid and had let Angel have another season) Dana) you can see a great similarity between them. All childlike and frail but crazy and prophetic, getting visions and getting bloody.
There’s also a whole lot of torture in the Whedon-world, too. Every series had a pretty explicit torture scene in either the first or second season. (Angelus->Giles, Faith-> Wesley, Niska-> Mal and Wash) Creepy.
And possibly none of you know what the hell I’m talking about or possibly care, 'cause you’re all Harry Potter fangirls or whatever.
On a more positive note, I’ve decided that, if I ever get a (black) cat, it’s getting called Nyarlathotep.
And an "Omg such a wittily terrible pun" name for brown dogs would be Zoë or Mal. Because they’d be "browncoats". Hardy har har.**
Watched two eps of House (wee!) and finally understood an icon I saw a while back, describing all the dangers the human body went through during sex. Haven’t written anything in ages but am getting the itch back. Granted all my fics right now are in a stale "Wtf do we do now" situation, so I don’t know if I really want to go back into them and try to write them out of the very ugly corner they’re in.
Tomorrow the new guy’s supposed to come to the apartment. I’ve got to move quickly and decide what space I want in the fridge. I’m currently using a shelf that’s been folded back, so it’s half the size it should be. I can keep that and fold it out to normal-size or take the lowest shelf, which doesn’t have a lot of vertical height.
...yup. Keeping my shelf and making it grow. 'S’not many things that will, either.
* What I mean is, I’ve read BtVS/Firefly and Angel/Firefly and never do the characters being crossed seem out of place, universe-wise. Not like putting Harry Potter onto Serenity, for example.
Although I saw an add where the people of Crossing Jordan go to Las Vegas, and my immediate thought was “Sweet! CJ/CSI crossover… Oh wait, that’s a fandom-only trick. Damn.”
** Funny because Zoë or Mal were soldiers fighting for the Independence (war which they lost), and those soldiers were called Browncoats. And maybe I’m just tired and shouldn’t write this at all because I don’t mean it that way but if I was talking about a female dog, who happened to be brown, and proposed to name her after Gina Torres… That could make a very ugly sentence. Very.
Oh god, I hate switching keyboard styles. I keep pressing the shift button wondering why the hell the little "<" thing isn’t popping out.
Omg so sleepy.
Edit: It’s my brother’s birthday this Saturday. Phone call ahoy.
