don't you know by now {you can't turn back}

Combination of Delicious tags I never expected to use? Femslash + Owen/Tosh. LOLOL. I'm totally digging genderswap!Owen.

I wish there was some way I could broadcast to the internets "Hay, ad guys? I already get Netflix, so you can stop making ads for it pop up in other windows I don't notice until they've been draining my resources and slowing down my webaging for ages. Especially when you come from legitimate news type sites. Then it's really annoying. Kthxbai."


"Ted is like the angle opposite the hypotenuse. He's always right."

I love Better Off Ted. I'm kind of in love with Veronica/Linda. I don't even think it's just Portia, but there's something so easily slashable about them. How Veronica's always not jealous of Ted and Linda's UST because "that would imply that she wants something she can't have". Meaning that she either knows she could have Ted Linda whenever she wants, or already, you know, has her whenever she wants. And Linda's random comforting hug, and later her inability to define her and Veronica's relationship to Veronica's father, it works.


In other news. Brother keeps causing fights because he doesn't take his meds and then steals whatever laptop is lying around and stays up all night being loud right above me. I threaten to tell, because even though before I wouldn't, when his loudness and burning of incense/candles into the vent that carries down into my room give me migraines, this is going to stop. Parents don't seem to care, because now it's me he's raging at and not them, as usual when I'm not here. It's like they want me to take over and be the mom because they step back and just let it happen, and then even though he's doing the exact same thing he does to them, they make it some sibling fight thing and blame it on me. Since I'm the one his antics bother most/first, they don't care.

More of me being an ungrateful bitch. Birthday kinda sucked. I mean, I guess it's sort of once you're an adult, you don't get stuff from your parents anymore, but since I don't really have bunches of friends or birthday parties or go out on the town or anything, it was severely anti-climactic. I always tell them that I'd rather just have money than presents unless I've been very specific about what I wanted, but I think they took that as an excuse to just give me virtually nothing. Kay, I got an ice cream maker machine that I'd been asking for, but it turns out that it was the wrong type (I wanted the kind you just plugged in and didn't have to freeze, since there's never room in the freezer so I've got no chance of being able to use it at home), so it's nobody's fault that I'm not as happy about that one as I could be. I think it was just the fact that they had the nerve to give me another copy of one of the DVD seasons (West Wing season 2) that Tyler lost/stole/destroyed/whatever (I will never forgive him for that. It was two giant cases: all of West Wing, all of Xena, all of Deep Space Nine, all of Enterprise, two seasons of ER, and probably several others that I'm not remembering. He still claims he's never had any of them, but every time somebody cleans his room, we find various loose disks, usually scratched beyond repair, from out of them. And still keeps on claiming, because he's an idiot like that).

Seriously? I sort of think that that's just something Tyler should have to buy himself and give me. First of all, I saw it on sale and Kaci told me not to buy it--it cost $6. We're not talking high dollar replacement, seeing as how that's like $15 less than what I shelled out in the first place. Idk, I feel like I'm not allowed to feel this way because it's not really like they were under any kind of obligation beyond. . . fairness to get me anything, but when Kaci gets a bunch of stuff on her actual birthday (I'll have to ask her exactly what, as I don't remember, but I know it was, you know, completely sufficient in value for birthday gifts by itself) plus the promise to go buy some brand new book a few days later when it comes out and that book alone cost more than the entire value of everything I got, it's kinda. . . disappointing.

I try to figure it as I'm technically an adult, suppose, and she's 6 years younger, but it doesn't really help. We were poor when I was her age, so I never got anything near this shit that those two get every day, just for nothing. Everybody always figures it's the oldest that gets special treatment or whatnot, but when you've got a special-needs baby born just two years after you, the attention dies pretty damn quick, and I don't think I've ever gotten over that. If I were, idk, 3 years old I could totally see myself becoming one of those kids that acts out for attention (I think the only reason I wasn't is that I've always desperately wanted people to like me too much), because the only time I get two glances from my parents is when they're telling me what a horrible person I am.

So with dentist and endocrinologist appointment fail (I tried to set one, they called and just gave me a different number to call the office, and I've been sleeping so wackily that I haven't been awake during open office hours since) and continuous self-confidence decimating (as if I had enough of that to spread around in the first place) unexplainable weight gain (I think the last 7 pounds split evenly between my stomach and breasts, the latter of which I appreciate, but would give up in an instant if it meant I'd lose the former) and the arrival of my grandmother's birthday card with pictures from the last couple of years where I didn't look like a whale to rub it in, and the fact that school is coming up and I've been more miserable than I'd like to admit lately and so can't really picture myself handling another semester very well at the moment but don't really have any other option, things kinda suck.

/whinging

Well, Torchwood was interesting. (Doing this obliquely enough that spoilers should be minimal, but avoid if necessary.)

It was a great story, told in a fascinating way, etc. etc., but on a more base sense, it just wasn't entertaining. I've got no desire to watch that again, unlike with the other episodes in the series. As intellectually intriguing as that may have been, and though the first part had a nice balance of the normal human interaction/humor/alien fighting sci-fi, the rest were just too damn depressing. I don't enjoy crying through large portions of a show, I don't enjoy such utter and irreconcilable destruction of characters, and I don't like it when characters we're supposed to like get vilified. It's a strange thing when the character that came across to me the best at the end of that show was Gwen. I'm not sure if I really am liking her more or if it's just that she was the only sympathetic one at the end (prolly half and half, I think). The way they presented the running at the very end left no possibility of redemption or hope or anything, just cowardice (see vilification above).


Some random bits: Rupesh Patanjali (looked this up to check and turns out I spelled it right on the first try, ace) should have hung around longer. He was prettyboycute. And Alice Carter and Agent Johnson pinged my femslashdar--there had to be a pretty good connection for Alice to be able to convince Johnson like that, though the situation was already so sketchy that it probably didn't take a whole lot to make her really examine which side she was supposed to be on.

Dear Torchwood.

( Spoilers in the nature of my reaction to part 4 of Children of Earth. Lots of generalized inarticulate reaction (note how nice and careful I'm being to not indicate in what direction that reaction may go), but also includes a quite nice directorial rewrite of the last scene, if I may say so myself. )

Sincerely,
Alexandria


Now I am for serious going to bed. As my alarm goes off in two hours. Fuck me. Maybe I'll make it three hours and just shower really fast, though that's all but impossible since I reallyquick henna'd just the top of my head since it'd been forever--actually more than 6 months, I think--since last time and though it blended and tapered really well from the lighter several inches of roots to the dark red length and looked pretty darn natural, I figured why not because I had tons of energy after getting back from the gym at, you know, 12:40. Dyed hair, watched a West Wing with Kaci, and then watched Torchwood. And then came these last fourteen hundred words of reaction and my not being in the mood to sleep even though I'm so tired my fingers are failing at wordtyping.

Blech. Plus, this orchestra thing means get there at 10 (leave at 9), be there until 5. Seriously? Seriously? I'm going to have to steal a laptop (as mine still has the screen issues) from one of the familia, because there's no way on earth that I can be there that long and still be sane at the end of it, much less awake if I've got nothing to do.

I am so much in love with Lucy Saxon. Her character in Doctor Who has just totally captivated me. I mean, she's so conflicted and just. . . bloody interesting And I thought so even before my dad pointed out her picking up the ring at the end--the way they framed that shot, it looked like one of the Doctor's flashbacks or something to me at first, so I didn't really pay attention. That just makes her so much fun to play with. (Perhaps even more so if you take into account the commentary that says perhaps she=Rani. Which doesn't mean a whole lot to me except AWESOME TIME LORD BABE that forces timecocksquared to work together in the past, since I've only read the wiki article, but still.) She's almost your classic victim of intimate partner violence there at the end--you see marks and such on her that I'm pretty sure we're meant to think are the Master hitting her when he doesn't get enough of messing with the Doctor and the Joneses and killing Jack. Explains why she said the Doctor's name with everybody, but then sort of came back to him by picking up the ring from the funeral pyre.

But why wouldn't that be enough for the Master, the Joneses and the Doctor and killing Jack and making everybody else watch while he kills Jack just to freak them out, etc? It makes you ponder the Master as well, because he gets to kill Jack as much as he wants. He's wiping out the human race mostly because for whatever reason, they're the ones that the Doctor likes (if the Doctor had latched on to Raxacoricofalipatorious, that'd be the one that the Master was destroying, all just to mess with him, methinks). And yet he still beats up on his wife? Sure, he's all about control through violence, but that seems. . . idk, below the level of the--admittedly, insane--evil genius that he is. It's like you've just pulled off some giant, carefully orchestrated serial killing spree and can go back and do it again whenever you want and yet you detour and take the long way home just to kick the puppy on the third street over. There's no style. Like the Doctor kept saying, "He has a wife!", like. . . why? In the grand scheme of things, everybody else is so much more fun to play with, so why bother with a human?
I'm kind of not satisfied with that explanation just based on the Master's character and how I've puzzled out things thus far. Sure, he picks up Lucy, shows her around the universe enough to addle her brains a bit, tries out the whole human companion thing, uses her respectability to help establish himself on Earth, but as soon as he's got the Doctor, it feels like he should have dropped her like a bad habit. So much of everything that he did was for the Doctor to watch, to mess with his head, and beating Lucy doesn't really hurt the Doctor beyond the amount that seeing any unnecessary violence does, especially because until the end it's not like any of the gang has any excessive sympathy for her.

<-- A while ago, as per usual.


Just got an email from school's financial aid department with the subject line "PRESIDENTIAL SCHOLARSHIP RENEWED FOR 2009-2010"

A. Yeah, because if it weren't, I'd have to march down there and choke a bitch, all the work and stress I put into making sure that was so after microbiology asshattery debacle of fail.
B. When you send all-caps headers like that, my email's (and my) tendency is to send it straight into the spam bin. Srsly? Credibility < 0. If it were "OMG UR SCHOLARSHIP IS GONES!", perhaps caps would be warranted to make sure you took notice. "U DIDN'T FUCK THINGS UP TOO BADLY YET" isn't so much the capslock worthy, IMO.

Oh, and ALEXANDRIA'S FRUGALITY, HERE IS A STORY OF IT. This is making me happy atm. The localish chain grocery Shop N Save (localish in that they are only in a few regions, but are still big enough to be publicly traded and such) had an anniversary thing on Saturday before last with free sodas and hot dogs and chips and such. Which I meant to go to but didn't. But I was in there either that evening or the next, and they had a bunch of coupons from said event still on their customer service counter for 55 cents off of a 12 pack of their brand of soda cans. Grabbed. Not as many as I would have liked, but I didn't want to just nick the whole stack since it was right in front of the store and thus very conspicuous for me to be grabbing a bazillion even though it was late enough that nobody was there. But they figured most people would use them that week Too much explanation for not that good of a story. I grabbed coupon, saved it until the next week when the 12 packs were $2 each, and thus got 12 cans of fake Diet Dr. Pepper for $1.45. And a two-liter of diet orange soda for 60 cents that I'm guzzling atm (though that has nothing to do with the coupon).

I've also been working on a really awesome International Day of Femslash icon, but it's intense because I'm putting little bitty pictures of different fandoms and I've got to get shots that work enough when smallified (100x42) that they're recognizable, you know? I'm afraid that as it stands, I can tell who the pictures feature only because I know who's in them and that everybody else is going to need captions. I'm also rather miffed because I just realized that since I had yet to play with the font of the words (trying to do the main stuff of the pictures and all first and the fiddly bits later), it could have ended up allowing more than 42px on the height. No way I'm going back and redoing every picture, though, because it'd be a matter of recropping all of them--I guess there aren't that many, but the ones that are in there already are in there because they work at 100x42.

Other notes. JULY IS GOING TO BE THE MONTH OF WIN. Torchwood audio dramas on the 1-3rd, Harry Potter movie on the 15th (be prepared for another several page analysis of the suck), Torchwood Children of Earth on the 20th 6th (I thought original plans were to air them on BBC and BBC America on the same days, because it did even better over here in the states than over there. Turns out it's starting the 6th for BBC actual instead, which is a mistake, because those of us in the OMG TORCHWOOD camp will have seen it two weeks before, chances are. Though earlier = better, I know how important ratings are, so I at least would wait two extra weeks if it meant the show killed enough viewership-wise to ensure loads and loads more.)

Sidetrack to watching featurettes on BBC America (since I can't see the ones on BBC actual, fail). The description of one of the bits of an interview: John Barrowman discusses the many powerful tools on Jack's desk and how the impact of these tools is more far-reaching than some of Torchwood initially realize.
Did any one else go OMG TIME AGENT SEX TOYS. Because office/desk shagging is probably the most popular thing in TW fandom, thanks to that little bit in series 2 that made it canon. And I've been reading too much Doctor/Master fic and trying to suppress the urge to go IS IT CAN BE TIMECOCK TIEMS NAO when I get to the good bits.

Gareth David-Lloyd talks (really quietly--you can hear Eve Myles in the background almost louder than him!) in this interview about how we're going to see Ianto's sister and about how Ianto's worried about how his family's going to react because this is his first relationship with a man. He mentions that the fam is almost more okay with it than he is, and I just got this image of the scene: Ianto's all fumbling for the words to introduce Jack to the sister and she just goes "Oh, is this your bloke then, Yan? God, finally!"


Interesting personal note? 48 hour sleep cycle. Seriously, WTF? I'm up for 36 hours, then asleep for about 12. I'm on the third 36 awake through now, and I don't have a problem with it (though if the 12 asleep was 10pm to 10am instead of the other way around it'd make the awake 36 more productive).

LOL at how cohab is suggesting we all work together and clean up before we leave for break.

Umm, wtf? Because I thought we were still all on the "wash our own dishes" type of scheme. So I've been washing all my own dishes, wiping down the sink after I brush my teeth and all, and now I've got to help them do it too? I think this is bullshit, but there's really no way of saying so without being all "Umm, no this is all on you, disgustingslobtypes."

Was supposed to be out dancing on the quad/mall type thing, but evidently the dance lesson guy didn't show or something. We went out there (even a bit late), but twas no one. Speakers for the music (that didn't look unpacked), and a few people sitting around, but no danceage. Sadness. But we're going to go watch "Captain Jack Harkness" of the Torchwoodian goodness in the gym downstairs in a bit whilst I finish my workout, so yay.

Genetics fruitfly experiment (dihybrid crosses) aren't working out v. well in terms of timing--we go on break on Wednesday, so we had to initiate the F1 crosses by then to let them incubate over the 9 days it takes for the F2s to pop out. Problem lies in that the F1s that we have to count and type and sex before sticking a couple into some new tubes to mate aren't even hatched into larvae yet, much less count/sex/type/breedable adults. Dunno how that's going to play.

And now cohab primero is hanging out in our room. Gah. Trying to do work. Supposedly, so is she, but I can't work with other people in the room; that's just how it goes. She was talking about going off to some all-night cafe to do work, and I was trying to encourage it without sounding too much like I was trying to get rid of her (not that I care, because I do that all the time), but no such luck because now she's decided to park out right here. And really be on Facebook, I'm pretty sure, as that's almost always how it is. Considering I was up all freaking night because some jackasses decided to do construction outside my window from about 2-6am (if they do it again tonight, I'm going to pick up the phone and start dialing numbers and waking people up, because that's intolerable) and she was all "O YAY, let's hang out and watch movies" when I wanted to nap this afternoon, I'm not too happy atm.

Was sort of hanging about to see if she'd decide to go and I could go back to semi-trying to write this paper, but it looks like she's parked. Shall go Torchwood now.