I'm always up for new friends, and if we have some interests in common, chances are good I'll add you back. Just comment and let me know.

( A few things to know before friending me )

AAAAAAAAH OMG.

I was just sitting here in my bedroom in my apartment, innocently reading some fannish meta on the internet when all of a sudden I spotted on the wall something dark and moving in my peripheral vision.

I glanced over and IT WAS A CENTIPEDE. CRAWLING ON THE WALL NEXT TO MY HEAD.

For those of you who don't know, I am DEATHLY afraid of centipedes. Spiders I can take, but centipedes? Uh-uh. Centipedes make me lose my will to live.

I knew there was no way I was going to be able to sleep with a hairy evil monster of death running around my room, so before I could psych myself out I chased it all around the room with my shoe. I lost it a couple of times (whose brilliant idea was it to make the carpet in this room lightish brown with darker brown spots?!) but I finally found it and smushed it and killed it.

I KILLED A CENTIPEDE. BY MYSELF. WITH MY SHOE. This is a major accomplishment. Every other time I've found a centipede in my room, I had to get someone else to kill it, even if everyone else in the house was already asleep.

I'm still not going to get any sleep tonight, out of the fear that where there is one there might be others, BUT STILL. This is a milestone in my life.

So I did finally end up watching the Lost season finale, and since it aired over a week ago and everyone has already beat me to the requisite exclamations of "OMG" and "WTF" and "We have to wait eight months for season six?!" and so on, I'll just settle for pointing out my absolute favorite scene, likely to no one's surprise:

( Vid under the cut )

Because it's not often that one gets a geek!spazz of glee and a moment of fangirlish glee all in one fell swoop! Darlton have done some things this season that displeased me greatly, but I do have to give them props for taking a moment straight from my Lost wishlist. I hereby decree that Richard should never be allowed to speak English again; he should just talk in Latin all the time. With subtitles, of course.

Snippet of a conversation my parents had while watching the third season of 24, which is the season Zachary Quinto was in:

Dad: "That guy looks so much like Spock. He should play Spock in the new movie."
Mom: "Honey, he is."

I LOL'd when my mom told me about it. My parents are both long-time Trek fans, so it's good to know they approve the ZQ-as-Spock casting choice. My mom said "he even walks like Spock!"

I am well and truly floored! If anyone had ever told me that I would win a fanfic award for a character study of Elle, of all people, I would have asked what drugs they were on. I was surprised enough just to be nominated--considering I was up against hugely prolific, popular authors in that category, I never thought for a second that I would win. If anyone is reading this who voted for me, thank you so much! And congratulations to my flist members who won awards as well!

As far as my fic goes, I have to give all the credit to Euripides, for writing his awesome play Medea which I blatantly ripped off. *innocent look*

Title: Namesake
Fandom: Heroes
Characters/Pairing: HRG, Gabriel, Angela, Elle. Implied Gabriel/Elle.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2,955
Summary: Noah Bennet's thoughts on his two least favorite killers reproducing. AU.
Notes: Since the show never really gave us an answer on how exactly the 3x04 timeline came about--why Sylar's son was named Noah or why they were living in the Bennet house--I thought I would take a crack at how it might have started to play out. Because I hate leaving loose ends just dangling like that. This also marks my first real attempt at writing HRG, let alone from his POV. *bites nails* Oh, and in this fic, Sylar actually is a Petrelli, since he seemed to still believe it in 3x04.

( Trust a couple of psychopathic killers not to use contraception. )

I haven't forgotten about the Christmas ficlets I still need to write, but this plot bunny latched on and wouldn't let go. *hides*

Title: Comeuppance
Fandom: Heroes
Characters: Audrey, Gabriel, wee Noah
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 3,978
Spoilers: 3x04, "I Am Become Death"
Summary: "Gabriel Gray, you're under arrest for the murders of..." AU for episode 3x04.
Notes: Apparently I'm incapable of writing Heroes fic unless it involves a) Sylar, b) a female character who's been in 7 episodes or less, and c) an alternate future timeline. Go figure. Oh, and my knowledge of law enforcement procedures is based entirely on watching way too many CSI episodes which...obviously is not the most accurate thing in the world. So hopefully this isn't too farfetched.

( Comeuppance )

You know what's awesome?

The Imperial March.

BOM BOM BOM BA DA DAH DA DA DAAAAAAH.

(Yes, this is me not working on my NaNo. Suddenly I don't want to do anything today except sit down and watch the entire Original Trilogy back to back. Screw this stupid writing thing.)

Now that I've finally been to both, I can definitively say that Cedar Point is WAY superior to Kings Island.

Of course, Universal/IOA is better than both of them.

I think I've got this creativity thing figured out. When I'm in fanfiction-writing mode, I don't make icons. When the fanfic is just not happening, the urge to make icons returns. That might also explain why this is the first icon post I've made in a year and a half.

Some of these icons have been sitting on my hard drive for months, some of them are new. I meant to put them in order by episode, but that didn't happen, so they're a little jumbled.

And no, they're not all of Sylar. :p

32 Heroes icons (all season one)
2 headers (one Sylar, one Zachary Quinto)
1 Sylar wallpaper



( Haven't I killed you before? )

Fandom meme snagged from sarahetc:

1- What was your first online fandom?
2- Do you have a fandom related 'guilty pleasure' ?
3- Is there anything besides bad technical execution that consistently throws you out of a story?
4- Unpopular fannish opinion?
5- Is there a work of fiction you *wish* had a (or a bigger) fannish following?

( Probably no real surprises here, but hey, memes are still fun )

Title: Father's Footsteps
Fandom: Star Trek XI
Characters/Pairing: Uhura, Sarek, cameo appearance by Kirk. Implied Spock/Uhura.
Rating: G
Word Count: 1,224
Summary: For just a moment, it was like she was looking at Spock again, the son’s grief reflected in the father’s stony eyes.
Notes: Inspired by the prompt from table #2, "She would have approved."

( Father's Footsteps )

Title: Things Unspoken
Fandom: Star Trek XI
Characters/Pairing: Spock/Uhura
Rating: G
Word Count: 1,982
Summary: On the first day of Advanced Phonology class, Nyota Uhura is one of the only students willing to look Spock in the eye.
Notes: I haven't claimed any of the prompt tables at the spock_uhura community yet, but as I was looking through them, the prompt "non-verbal communication" caught my eye, and out came this plot bunny. This is a bit looser an interpretation of that prompt than I had originally intended, but hopefully it still works. Many thanks to altahe for helping me make a bit of dialogue sound more Vulcanesque, and also for not killing me for writing Spock-fic without having seen TOS.

( Eyes, actions, touch )

I'd had the same LJ layout for such a long time that it was starting to drive me insane, so yesterday I finally renewed my love/hate relationship with Photoshop and made myself a few new headers. I was actually fairly pleased with how all of them turned out, which was surprising since I haven't done anything in Photoshop in forever.

The most awesome thing, however, was that I managed to get the layout changed by myself, for the first time ever. I'm pretty HTML challenged, so I've always had to wheedle my sister to get her to do it for me help me. Granted, I didn't actually change the layout itself this time, just the header and the colors. But still, having thirty pages of code to deal with is kind of intimidating, so I'm proud of myself.

I might still do some tweaking with the header (especially the text) and the colors. (I tried SO MANY different background colors before I finally settled on this one, haha.) But overall, for the moment I'm fairly pleased with how it looks.

Super quick drive-by post to say that Latin poetry is EVIL.

Seriously. I can't even understand poetry in English, how am I supposed to be able to figure out poetry written in a long-dead foreign language? BLARGH.

...I wonder what "DO NOT WANT" is in Latin? Probably "nōlō" (literally "I refuse/am unwilling"), but that doesn't have quite the same ring to it.

On the plus side, I've only got seven more days of class before finals: the rest of this week and four days next week (we get Monday off because of Memorial Day, woot).

Off to get a shower now.

Re: last week's BSG, all I have to say is, I want Anders holding my hand when I die. *wibble sigh*

I went randomly looking for Anders-related YouTube vids and found this. It's only like fifteen seconds long, but it triggered some thoughts that have been nagging at me for a while now.

I've seen it said at least a couple of times that on BSG, the female characters pretty much wear the pants--which is one of the awesome things about the show, seeing as though it's sci-fi and sci-fi is a traditionally male-dominated genre. But it leads to some...interesting role reversals, so to speak, a prime example of which is the Starbuck/Anders relationship.

I think it's safe to say that when people hear the term "domestic abuse," the first thing that comes to mind is a man hitting his wife/girlfriend. At least, that's the first thing that pops into my mind. But with Anders and Starbuck's marriage, it's the other way around. She abuses him physically, verbally, emotionally, the whole nine yards. She doesn't love him and never did; she only married him to spite Lee (or, as she flat-out told Anders in an episode a couple of weeks ago, because "it was easy").

I think--or at least hope--that if there was a relationship on the show where the husband was abusing the wife, there would be a definite sense that the guy is a scumbag and the woman needs to get out to protect herself. But with Starbuck/Anders, I don't get that sense, particularly given Michael Trucco's comments in the above YouTube clip. Instead, it's "Oh, look how much Anders loves his wife. Isn't it so gallant of him to stay with her no matter what she does, regardless of whether she's pistol-whipping him into unconsciousness or threatening to claw his eyeballs out." And Starbuck isn't portrayed as an abusive lowlife, she's portrayed as a super-cool, super-tough kick-butt heroine. (Although at least this season, there's starting to be more of a sense that she's slipped from just an abrasive personality to a crazy abrasive personality.)

I'm not necessarily saying it's an entirely bad thing that Anders is so devoted to Starbuck. Given BSG's decidedly negative portrayal of marriage, I can't help but find it refreshing that Anders actually is ridiculously in love with his wife and is committed to making the relationship work. But on the other hand, it's so frustrating to me because the woman is PSYCHOTIC, and he follows her around like a little lost puppy dog, wagging its tail and hoping to see a shred of approval or affection. That's not even close to being a healthy relationship, and there's no way that it can ever be a healthy relationship if Starbuck doesn't give a crap.

But I suppose, given that this show is all about Teh Angst, that kind of drama is exactly what TPTB intended in the first place.

01-10 Zachary Quinto
11-23 Lost



( Icons )

It's gray and rainy today (naturally, considering the beautiful day we had yesterday), and I have a nasty cold that I got from my sister. (Thanks, Toof.) And so I have put together a collection of awesome quotes (mostly from movies/TV) to make myself feel better, because I love awesome quotes. These are pretty much totally haphazard, but I tried to keep them grouped by fandom. Also, some of them are at least somewhat paraphrased, since I'm too lazy to look up the exact wording on the ones I can't remember by heart.

( Quotes that are awesome )

Happy birthday emesque! Hope you have/had an awesome day.

I honestly couldn't remember when it was that last season's Battlestar Galactica finale aired, so I looked up my last BSG episode post and it was over a year ago. I can't believe it's been that long! *boggles* I remember back when the season three finale aired I was like "HOW AM I GONNA WAIT UNTIL NEXT YEAR TO FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?!" And that was even before the writers' strike, which naturally just delayed things even more. But now, finally, BSG is coming back in just five days.

...And I'm not going to be here to see it. I have to go to some stupid conference that weekend. I signed up for it back before I knew what day BSG was premiering, and now I wish I could take it back but I can't. Gah. Stupid real life interfering with my televisions!

Anyway, I spent a good chunk of this afternoon on YouTube looking up various previews for the upcoming season. I think this is my favorite so far:



*FLAIL*

I can't wait to find out who the last member of the Final Five is. I spoiled myself for the first four, so I'm going to be avoiding spoilers like the plague from now on. ALJSRLKJEW:RS.