clo_again

a music meme


December 16th: 03 - a song that makes you happy


There was only ever really one contender for this. I considered Tim Minchin's Canvas Bags or Bright Eyes' First Day of My Life (that is possibly my favourite music video ever; you must watch it) but, really, no song makes me more inexplicably happy than Boston's 'More Than A Feeling'. You can listen to the whole song here.

BUT. You don't want to watch it on that boring vid. You want to watch it on the Barclays ad where the guy rides the rollercoaster to work, don't you? Yeah, me too:




While looking this song up on Youtube, I also came across this marvellous Nirvana clip that makes it obvious how similar 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' is to 'More Than A Feeling' (which I didn't notice and now will never be able to notice anything else. And I like Nirvana; there will be more Nirvana songs in this meme).


And to conclude, have 'More Than A Feeling' done Scrubs style here.



( the meme )

~


I will actually go and work on the thing I'm meant to be writing now. ...After getting a cup of coffee, since I finished the strawberry tea I made to help myself write about an hour ago now. And I've written...77 words.

Oh LJ, I do apologise! Every night I get home from work, promising my laptop that I'll make the epic catch-up LJ post and every night something distracts me (of late, Merlin fic, Inception fic and playing on my shiny new WiiFit. Which is brilliant. <3)

I keep intending to flail over the imminent arrival of new Primeval (JANUARY 1ST IN CASE YOU DON'T FOLLOW BEN MILLER ON TWITTER (@bennylicious; he knows astrophysics, math and comedy, and once snogged Rob Brydon on Qi. There is nothing not to love!) and how my temp job which overpays me to do an easy job alongside lovely people keeps getting extended another couple of weeks. Or rant about how our Sky is broken and my parents live in this land of Special Crazy where they think if they ignore it long enough, it'll fix itself without them paying for the engineer and in the meantime my pointing out that I will pay for it because £65 is cheaper than buying the DVDs for Stargate Universe, Castle, Bones and Eureka which is just some of what I'm currently missing on an infrequent or (in SGU & Bones' case) every-week-frequent basis, only my dad has to call them because they won't talk to me and they just mumble incoherently about principles of paying for things while I shout at a pixelated screen. (A lot.)

But instead, I am going to bed. I leave you with a (youtube for now, sorry) link to a song that I can't stop listening to: Boy and Bear's 'Fall At Your Feet' cover and three of my recent Life in Cumbria pictures ( which I'm afraid are being to all look the same )



I also have the complete version of my latest thegameison_sh entry to post but I just need to run the editing fingers over it and add the last paragraph. Somehow this little thing has taken me almost two weeks and is still not done. Hmm.

Do not mention NaNo to me. I'm hoping for a mid-month turnaround in my motivation. That is all.

Anyway, yes. Consider this a placeholder post to let y'all know that I still exist and there's a proper post brewing! Um. Somewhere. How are y'all anyway? Hope everyone is still shiny. I do read my flist every day, promise.

To conclude, on my longer-than-usual-thanks-to-traffic trip home from work today, I was pondering what I'd do if I was the Queen and came up with two things:


1. The Royal Presence would be announced on all state occasions (and perhaps shopping trips and at breakfast) with trumpets. The trumpets would play the Red Dwarf opening tune. The beginning of this rather lovely version of the theme tune is a perfect example.

2. There would be balls. (As in parties, not...well. The other kind. Although there could be those balls too: I'd need a catchphrase other than "Off with his head!")

Anyway, there'd be parties to which I and a select few controlled the guest list. Fabulous people would be invited and anyone mentioning X Factor would be shot immediately. There'd be Masquerades. And Bond-themed parties. And epic Nintendo Wii parties. Possibly there would be parties designed by Elton John for the fabulous lulz.

And I'd force everyone to play drinking games and because I'd be Queen, they'd have to go along with it and all sing the See The Little Goblin song when I told them. I feel this is an excellent plan.

(Yes, I have entirely too many nice dresses and I never have anywhere to wear them. Possibly I'm slightly bitter about this.)

~

Now I really am going to bed on this promise of a real post soon. Hopefully. Good intentions and all that.

( Thoughts on tonight's last (HAH HAH) ep of Sherlock (obv. huge spoilers!) )
*

I have to go to bed now, because I have work in the morning. >_< WHERE DID MY WEEKEND GO.


edit Aaaaaaahhhhh sorry! Hopefully I fixed that spoiler cut fail fast enough.

Yeah. So last night was Andy Roddick. Who for some inexplicable reason was catching an ordinary train by himself (the platform looked like Southfields but it wasn't a Tube train. >:-/) I realised pretty quick that I was wearing my bright right ADVANTAGE FEDERER t-shirt, only it now read ADVANTAGE RODDICK. I couldn't work out if that was better or worse but stalked him anyway. He sat behind me on the train and we had a conversation about how it was his & Roger's fault that I was into tennis and went to Wimbledon every year. And then we talked about how expensive the WTF is this year and he said he couldn't wait to see it because he'd never been. Which is a lie because we saw him there. Maybe he meant as a player. Then he recognised the woman sitting across from us who was apparently from a place called "Welshbottle" (possibly my brain meant Welshpool?) and then Casper woke me up scratching at the door to come in.

Dear Subconscious, I don't know what this is about. But next I would like Marat Safin or Robin Söderling please. Or you know, you can include more than one tennis player per dream; it's not as if you have some sort of quota.

Weird.

*

I'm going back to the dentist in two hours to have my pre-Crown work done. The appointment takes an hour apparently. -_- I'm starting to feel as if I live there. Aaaaaand the woman is ill so now I have to go scramble to get ready to catch the train instead. Hopefully he won't freeze my mouth and I can go for a coffee afterwards but I'm never that lucky with dentists. -_-

You can also read/comment on this entry here http://aomakutu.dreamwidth.org/1666.html .

My paid account expired and since I'm not sure if I want to give Livejournal any more of my money at this point, I let it. Then I remembered how many pictures I had linked from Scrapbook and cursed a lot when I realised my now-vanished journal header was nowhere to be found on my computer. So, cue a very quick "find&replace" some colours in the CSS and a thrown-together header in Photoshop.

I suspect I will get fed up of the background. Very soon. I always figure I'll try one and then two days later I'm attacking the HTML with a hammer to get rid of it. In this case I think it's the wrong colour anyway but I'm so fed up of Photoshop and colours and oh, I'll just leave it.

For people who aren't on my Twitter: other than LJ fixing up today, I spent far too many hours in Photoshop making something I'd wanted to make for seven months and never got around to doing; you remember the WTF photoshoots of the eight of them standing awkwardly by a red bus and the eight of them standing awkwardly on the steps but mostly, that marvellously odd one of them all posing in front of a fireplace in their suits and looking rather like a mafia gang?



( full size under the cut )

Yeah. I made the Wanted poster. It was begging for it. You know, quietly enough for me to put it off for six months.

Today does rather illustrate my life of late, or rather, of the last few months. I keep applying for jobs (probably less than I should be but still, enough for me to really be hating writing cover letters by now) and getting turned down or worse, not hearing anything. But! Someone who saw me on Jobsite just called to offer me 3-4 weeks temp work of data-entry at a local hospital, which sounds utterly tedious but is paying £7.50ph. I'm absolutely willing to do something mindnumbing for four weeks for £7.50ph. And at least then if I get interviews I can say "Look! I have temped! Not just sat on my ass for months!" (which is basically what I have done. Except I went to Wimbledon! I should actually do a Wimbledon post sometime. Not today; I'm trying to finish Jasper Fforde's Shades of Grey because my Read My Own Height 2010 is going depressingly slowly.)

So, here's a post. Hopefully tomorrow or the day after or sometime, there will be another post. I'm getting most of my hair chopped off on Tuesday because I'm sick of it taking half an hour to dry with a hairdryer, so that might be worth a post. Also, I should set up Dreamwidth crossposting. Sometime soon.

This is my life and it's not interesting right now. Tune back in next week when things will have changed! Or not but you know, I live in hope.

This is not that post. As my Twitflisters will know (and probably wish they knew less about by now), I got hit by stupendously bad toothache on Tuesday and have spent the last three/four days crying into my pillow, calling my dentist with crazed demands and abusing non-prescription painkillers. BUT. A day and half after my dentist appointment when he informed me it was very infected and he'd try a root canal instead of just yanking it out, I can actually sit in front of the laptop for more than ten minutes without having to run for ice/hot water bottles/warm milk/toothpaste/painkillers so I figured I should actually do a post to cover a few things I'd been meaning to LJ about.

First! Yes, I have done more Softer World remakes. I was bored and in toothache!pain; it was a great distraction. So, a few tennis and a few Johnny Weir/Stéphane Lambiel SW remakes...

Teaser:



( more )

~

Second! A few (very) random figure skating recs:

The Surface of the Sea by neery, Johnny/Stéphane merman AU, PG.

Okay. I know; I read the words 'merman AU' and when I stopped laughing I scrolled onto the next post. Then I remembered that I was bored and had nothing better to do, and considered that 17,000 words was a bit long for a terribly written crack bunny. I scrolled back and clicked.

Oh my god. Oh my god. This is a crazy idea that shouldn't have worked seriously and yet, somehow, it works brilliantly. Stéphane's natural crazy translates wonderfully to seeing the world from the slightly-skewed perspective of a merman and her Johnny's the best blend of excited-snarky-sweet.

But it really works on the detail; it's told from Stéphane-the-merman's perspective instead of the much easier Johnny-the-human-meeting-a-merman perspective and while it's a choice that could've gone horribly wrong, it's clear neery's actually thought about how a merman would think, specifically a Stéphane-merman (his joy on being introduced to sequins is both adorable and hilarious) and just how little they'd know about people. The fish scene is absolutely wonderful, all the better because Stéphane's confusion is as understandable as Johnny's horrified reaction. I love that Stéphane's insistence that merpeople aren't fish, they're the people and how that's kept up throughout. Little things, that make this totally not crack and make it an actual fic.

And it just gets better, even with a few bits where technicalities are glossed over (one of the few things that bugged me is the complete lack of of a mention for Stéphane not having a passport or any documentation to prove he exists, so travelling anywhere would involve shady underground dealings that would prove complicated and perhaps impossible. But I get why it's been left out; this is not that fic. I would love to see that fic but I love the fic that this is too and really, it doesn't need it).

Just- don't pass this over at the mere mention of merman AU wtf, like I almost did. It's so much better than you're imagining and the bits that are meant to be funny are hilarious and the bits that are serious are beautiful and just occasionally heartbreaking an oh my god, this is a lesson to me not to write off a fic based on the summary. Read it. And learn how that insanely silly idea you think would never work can be made into a brilliant fic.

~

From the kinkmeme, Johnny is an Idiot aka How I Made ZebraSwan Canon by Paris Childers by anon (I hope they deanon sometime so I can worship appropriately)

This is the complete opposite of the merman fic (though funnily, it does briefly reference said fic! I has a theme!) in that it has a perfectly sensible (if hilariously written) prompt of basically 'Johnny loves Stéphane, whines about it, annoys Paris' and the anon who filled it chose to run with that as a fic written exactly as if Paris himself was writing it on the kinkmeme. Only, I don't think real!Paris could be this spectacularly funny; I suspect very FEW people could possibly be this funny and still write so brilliantly in tone and character the whole way through.

It's so hilariously fannishly-aware that it does border on crack, I think, but it is fantastically comically written and deserves every single adoring comment it's received so far and then some. I swear that you will laugh* like a cray cray person. I'm on my fourth re-read and I'm still cracking up.

*caveat This may be a fic best enjoyed with some exposure to the figure skating fandom, (specifically, I suspect, the ontd_skating branch of humour) because some of the humour is almost in-jokes and might lose newcomers in wtf. It also probably helps to have some idea who Paris is and what he's like, though you can probably guess most of that from the first paragraph.

Also, 'Paris' does not like Evan. It's not a big part of the fic, just a few lines but in case there are any Evan-lovers out there you have been warned.

Oddly, I am mostly ambivalent about real!life Evan but I dislike any sort of Johnny/Evan fic pairing with a hatred bordering on the excessive so I laughed. A lot.

~

I have other kinkmeme stuff I'd like to rec - I can't memory comments and there's pieces of stuff everywhere now with the new kinkmeme comm so it's getting tricky to follow things - but that's a whole separate post. I will say that the Summer Camp councillors AU, contin here and the Viking AU which starts here, continues here and then here are the two fills-in-progress that are absolutely worth catching up on. Both are updated regularly enough that I'm fairly sure they'll be finished, the Summer Camp one more so than the Vikings but there's still enough brilliance there to be worth reading. Everything else Johnny/Stéphane is still being tracked on this most excellent list.


And now it is almost 1:30am, my tooth is starting to ache and tomorrow brings my aunt and uncle to stay which means I need to be awake early enough to tidy my room. I doubt they'll even look in there but my mother's been twitching like a fly on crack all day so it has to be done if I'm to avoid her OCD cleanliness wrath. Sigh.

I will actually catch up with old comments and such this weekend, now that life is calmer and I'm not convinced I'm about to die of toothache or a Neurofen overdose. I'll also make a proper RL post at some point. ILLUSTRATED WITH PICTURES. Be excited! ;-) Or not.

Okay, so my room is packed (rather later than the rest of the house despite me staying up all night; my parents haven't stopped complaining since 6am about the amount of stuff I own). Everything that I couldn't fit in the boxes I had is crammed in the wardrobes (which are staying) to be picked up tomorrow morning. Casper is freaking out on the windowsill next to me. It's finally dawned on me around the irritation of having to pack all my stuff, that we're actually leaving. It's just down the road really but it's still a whole new village/town with new coffee shops and pubs and Chinese takeaways to investigate. I was all for it before but after having to dismantle my room after spending so long getting it right (I nest. Epically) ... I don't know.

But. The point of this is to say that we don't have internet for a week and I technically cannot afford to go to Starbucks to use the WiFi because of train fares and paying for coffee I cannot afford. Well, not more than once anyway. Maybe twice.

So I probably won't be around much for a week? Not that a week is actually noticable the way I post lately but in case anyone wants me for anything; I'll be back in about a week (hopefully. Maybe sooner!)

IN CONCLUSION: I hate moving house. Utterly. Grrr.

Instead of doing anything in the slightest bit useful tonight, I redesigned my LJ. Partly because I was bored of the old header and the blue, and partly because I couldn't resist the combination of Johnny Weir's awesome hat and the last line of the 'what she was wearing' poem.

Still not sure the colours are right but eh, it's 3am. They're close enough for me to go to bed.

This is the first time in about three years that I've had a person-centric header instead of scenery, because I got tired back then of going off people-headers so quickly. Now I'm bored of scenery! Figures. We'll see how long it takes me to get bored of Mr Weir's fabulous hat. ^_^

Bed. Bedbedbed. Ridiculously tired considering I've had an extraordinarily lazy Saturday. It follows aa very busy week though. Which I should LJ about.

Tomorrow. After sleep.

eta: FUCK and of course it's only NOW I spot the error in the italics on the header. Sigh. Oh well, it's not a major thing; just enough to bug me.

Me: *covering cake with chocolate fudge icing*
Chocolate Fudge Icing: *falls off spoon to splat on the floor*
Me: If I don't clean that up right now, I will step in it. Let me just fix that bit on the cake.

~five minutes later~

Me: *steps in something warm and squidgy* AS$%&*USH^&^£$£DF$£"^%DA!!%$£"£^!!!!!!
Mother in next room: WHAT?!!
Me: ...Nothing.
Me: I just stepped in my own procrastination.



On the plus side, Creme Egg Cake of Awesome is finished and decorated despite a few Almost Disaster moments. However, it took so long to finish that 'rents gave up and went to bed so it can't be cut until tomorrow and cutting it is going to be AWESOME (at least I hope so :D) so pictures will be posted tomorrow when I have pictures with slices cut out.

Right now I am going to watch Ashes to Ashes (I was cake-occupied longer than I planned; I was supposed to be watching it on time with cake *eyeroll*) with what I feel is a well-deserved Long Island Iced Tea and then maybe Grey's Anatomy because I watched Bones last night instead (I am getting rather fond of Bones and how forgiving it is to people who start watching in series five (?) with only a vague idea who everyone is).

That is assuming I don't fall asleep on the sofa because between reading fic last night and being dragged out early shopping this morning, I'm running on about four hours sleep. Bleh. On the plus side I've added some great Johnny Weir/Stephane Lambiel slash to my memories under the Skating RPS tag for anyone who's interested. There was one in particular that I wanted to rec but I can't remember which. Nevermind, they're all worth reading. ^_^

To Ashes to Ashes! Yay!

eta: It was this Johnny/Stephane fic in particular that I enjoyed. Accidental marriage! Lying to the press! Adorable awkwardness! <3 Really, it's 20,000 words of pure loveliness. Totally worth reccing the heck out of.

I need new icons. And also to get a life. But mostly I need icons.

I don't even know what I want new icons of (besides, obviously, Silent Witness because it's a silly show that has silly plots and yet has ridiculously attractive Emilia Fox flirting with ridiculously tousled Tom Ward and is rather delightful because of them and completely in spite of the silly plots.) Less tennis, because traditionally this is the time of year I stop paying attention to tennis until Wimbledon. Definitely some Merlin because it's rather shameful that I've been lacking in Bradley James' lovely pratface and Colin Morgan's cheekbones until now.

It's worrying that this is important. I should not be so concerned about icons when I'm a jobless bum. Hm. Crackers icons don't matter. Except when they do. Which is apparently now.

I'm supposed to be working on a review post for the Read My Own Height books that I read in January but I haven't started yet. That's probably slightly more important, maybe.


...I feel there should be a webcomic somewhere to sum up the complete pointlessness of these dilemmas.