* happy Dolphin noises *

That finale was everything I wanted from it and more.

Crowded House!!!

♥♥♥

*happy sigh*

How did I manage to never see them live before? Thank goodness that omission has been resolved.

It'd have been worth it for the illuminated geese alone, but the gig was rather good too. :-)

Yawn. Is it bedtime yet?

Yesterday I succeeded in configuring Handbrake so it would convert NTSC films to mp4 format without the audio going out of sync. Success! Yay! The downside of that is that I then stayed up until the wee small hours watching Captain Blood (now without extraneous mouth flapping) and am tiiiiiiiiirrrrrrreeeeeeed.

As I have also converted The Sea Hawk, The Adventures of Robin Hood and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex I may be embarking on a bit of a Flynn rewatch.

Despite possible appearances to the contrary, I have not dropped off the face of the earth. I haven't decamped to Dreamwidth, or Facebook, or any of a dozen other social networking sites. I am still here at Livejournal, reading posts, and sometimes commenting on them.

I just seem to have got out of the habit of writing posts of my own.

I think I've been waiting to have something interesting to say, or something that isn't a great long lament about the horrors of cowboy builders. All last year and for the early part of this, I could have written a (friends locked) post a week on that subject, but it would have been depressing for me, let alone anyone else, so I didn't. I'll probably still get around to writing one on the subject, but as the downward spiral has hit an upswing over the past few months, I might shoot for an upbeat tone.

In the meantime, I've decided to write a post just-because. I don't necessarily have anything of great import to say, but we're nearly five months through the year and I haven't posted anything yet so I figured I should at least wave at the world and say "hi".

A few random, scattershot thoughts in bullet form:

* I'm going to see Crowded House in a couple of week's time. Whee!

* I'm generally liking this season's Doctor Who (and loving Matt Smith's Doctor a lot, as he's more or less exactly what I hoped his Doctor would be, youthful looking with old eyes and an older soul). But there's something not-quite-there-yet about it, just a missing extra spark that would tip me over from liking it a lot to outright obsession. I'm hoping it'll get there at some point. C'mon Moff, you can do it.

* A little less plot recycling would be nice, too. It was very nice, during this week's Doctor Who episode, to finally get to see "Inferno", "The Daemons", "The Green Death" and "The Silurians" in glorious HD widescreen... but I can't help thinking that Chris Chibnall really ought to have shared the writing credit with Malcolm Hulke, Don Houghton, Robert Sloman and Barry Letts, since they wrote most of the plot for him.

* I wish they had recycled the Silurians' Eocenes' third eye and big ears though. Pretty though the new lizard race are, there's really no reason why they couldn't have done a revamp of the original look with better face masks and less man-in-rubber-suit look.

* I was mostly okay with the Supernatural finale, because it took the characters pretty much where I'd expected them to go. But the last few episodes were the season in macrocosm; messy as hell, with the pacing all over the place. I'm hoping for a less uneven ride when September and season six rolls around.

* I have just set my alarm clock for 4:45am tomorrow morning. Eep! But I feel it's my duty to support this wacky simulcast with the US West Coast notion that Sky One is trying out for the Lost finale. I wouldn't necessarily want to watch all my US shows at dawn, you understand, but if the viewing figures are good enough maybe TV channels will take note and we'll get more and more shows broadcast the same week as the US. And it'd be even better if they could broadcast them the evening following the US transmission, since then those of us who are fannish on the internet only need to avert our eyes from spoilers for a few hours.

What the world really needs. The End of Time bingo cards.

On the Digital Spy forums I've seen it referred to as "The End of Tripe", which pretty much sums up part one. I'm hoping for better things from part two. Not expecting them, mind, since RTD and season finales/extra special episodes tend to be the kind of road accident you'd want your very own TARDIS in order to get as far away from as possible. But I can always hope that Steven Moffat has presented him with a wishlist of things he'd rather like to still have standing in the Who universe after the dust settles and the TARDIS keys are handed over, can't I?

Though right now I think I'd settle for ( spoilers from part one )

In the meantime, as I am on call tomorrow but probably only in a "be available if disaster strikes" kind of way, I am contemplating spending the day in preparation by having a Regeneration Episode Marathon. The thing is, dare I brave "The Twin Dilemma"?

Oh look. Here. I have a brand new icon for that. Hello TARDIS, hello reindeer.

Many thanks for the snowflakes, thimble_kiss and phantomminuet. As soon as I can wrap my brain around the concept of the internet again, I may be sending out a few of my own, to share the love.

Because snow is infinitely preferable to rain, which is what we have here right now. I went from dry to my best impersonation of a drowned rat in just the five minute walk from the station to my front door. And then, while fumbling for my keys, I heard the clatter of something falling out of the front pocket of my handbag and skittering across the path into hiding. Argh. Darkness and rain does not make it easy to find anonymous little skittering things, especially when you can't figure out what they were. I'm hoping it was just a hairslide. Please let it be just a hairslide. I know I had one in that pocket at some point and it's not there now, and the sound of the clatter was about right for that. At least it doesn't seem to have been any of the several Really Important Things that were top of my shortlist of Stuff I Really Don't Need To Lose Under A Hebe.

Further investigations will have to wait until morning and daylight as I appear to have lost my sole remaining torch, and the light of an iPhone screen isn't exactly adequate for the task. And probably shouldn't be allowed to get that wet anyway. (Memo to self: give up waiting for the torch to magically reappear and Buy Another One ASAP. Then it will reappear, and you'll have a spare.)

Snowflakes aside, I'm not nearly ready for Christmas, having spent two consecutive weekends on the sicklist. I think I'm giving up cold medication, as it doesn't appear to agree with my stomach. Blech. Thankfully I'm finally feeling moderately human again, which means that I can turn to panicking about all the cards and presents I haven't sorted out yet. Eek.

And getting my car taxed, tested and reinsured. Eek.

And the shopping list of other odd jobs and commitments I need to get around to. Eek. Some of which are moderately urgent. Double eek.

Would someone like to buy me some organisational skills for Christmas?

I'm slightly concerned that my brain may be irreparably addled, as I'm finding myself liking the BBC's ploddingly cracktastic Paradox better than FlashForward at the moment. What this probably means is that I should axe both of them from my viewing list, but in fairness to the latter I haven't seen its final episode of the year yet since (a) my brain was in snooze mode when it aired last Monday and (b) the episode before it was an exercise in dullness, ( possible spoilers, I guess ) I think I'm basically now watching for each episode's brief glimpse of Jack Davenport, which is not really enough reason in itself to carry on.

Though I am feeling sadly bereft of Supernatural until it returns on 21 January, so I need something other than Spooks to watch in the meantime. I'm watching Blake's 7 and Lois & Clark on video, as part of my attempt to cull my bookshelves by watching and ditching the remainder of my VHS tapes, but both programmes definitely look rather dated now.

I have mixed feelings on this one.

( 5x09 - first reactions )

Since apparently I need a 24 hour turnaround just to do commentfic.

However I have now written something during the month of November, so I don't feel quite as much of an abject failure as I did before. The fact that it's Supernatural crossover crack fic is irrelevant. Hey, it's all canon now after all!



I got two lovely responses to my "Sam and Dean trapped in Top Gear" prompt: mariana_oconnor's In which Sam is taller than Dean and the Impala is Sub Zero and saiariddle's All we know is: he's called the Stig!. Two different Stigs, too, which is entirely in keeping with the show's own modus operandi. :-)

And in return I wrote these:

( Sam and Dean trapped in Wallace and Gromit: The Curse Of The Were-Rabbit ) - original here

( Sam and Dean trapped in Primeval ) - original here

I don't think I've been quite so concerned about the length of the run of filler episodes as some, largely because I categorise 5x06 as mytharc, albeit of the standalone variety, but I was still getting itchy wanting to get back to the main plot.

( SPN 5x08 )

One project ends, another one follows hard on its heels, with no advance warning. But at least we've moved on to projects that can be sensibly completed in normal working hours. Progress!

I may even have caught up on my sleep deficit.

Things that make me happy:

1. Three day weekend. Three. Days. Off.

2. "A Wind Is Blowing" by Monica Edwards, a book that I've only been trying to buy for 30 years, is now back in print and my copy of it arrived yesterday. *snuggles* My thanks go to lucie_p who kindly sent me her German edition of it a couple of years back as a stopgap, but there's really no substitute for the real thing, if only for the absence of a good colloquial translation for Jim's "Jumping gin bottles"! I'm hoping the book will stand up to my fond memories of it - I recall it as rather darker than her other stories, a tale of a staunchly independent boy on the cusp of manhood having to adapt to sudden blindness and how the fallout from that affected his family and his girlfriend, with a happy ending that was also bittersweet.

3. New Supernatural tonight. Or, well, tomorrow morning. With good word of mouth from people who've already seen it. And no work to interrupt my viewing pleasure.

4. Spooks is back. And so is ( spoiler spoiler spoiler )

5. After a month of struggling with back pain if I tried to walk more than half a mile in one go, I am suddenly miraculously cured. Not sure whether it's swapping from flat shoes to shoes with a low heel, not spending hours at home bent uncomfortably over the work laptop, or spending some time on Wii Fit at the weekend and reminding my body about proper posture that's done the trick, but it's a wonderful thing no matter how it happened.

On the more "eh" side of the scale:

1. I think I'm a bust on Nanowrimo this year. I dutifully picked up the computer and wrote about 700 words on Sunday, but there was no forward momentum and - perhaps more importantly - no real idea of where I was going to go for the next 49,300 words. The trouble is, I deliberately didn't put any effort into thinking about Nano for most of October, since it was entirely possible that the Project that Ate my Summer might have eaten November as well, and once I knew that it wouldn't, I only had a few days left to figure out what to write. Faced with one cherished project that needed more thinking time to figure out the details, things that were already part-written, and half a fanfic idea that showed signs of being able to last the distance, I had a stab at the fanfic, since it was the most tempting prospect. Big mistake. The voices weren't coming, and it definitely needs more spadework.

2. My kitchen is still a vision in cracked plaster. The year has got away from me and I still haven't managed to find someone to come in and replaster and paint it for me.

3. Next door's fireworks sound scarily close to my house. Take them down the end of the garden and away from my wooden conservatory, guys!

4. and 5. Apparently don't exist. More upsides than downsides. Result!

I almost never get around to writing fanfic. I have a marginally better record with original fic, and the offline shared universe stuff I write with a couple of friends, but that's mostly because they know where I live and can come and poke me with pointy sticks if I don't get around to finishing it.

However the general fate of any fanfic I embark upon is for a couple of pages to get banged out in the first flush of enthusiasm/inspiration/creativity, after which it languishes half finished on my hard drive forever.

The thing is, despite the fact that I don't have a good record for producing fanfic, that doesn't stop the plotbunnies from coming along and bugging me anyway. Take this week, for instance. I'm up to my ears in work, putting in 12 hour days, expecting to lose vast quantities of sleep in the course of the weekend... so naturally the Supernatural plotbunny takes that as its cue to pop in to my brain and say "hi".

I suppose it was inevitable that the Supernatural bunny would show up at some point... but boy, it knows how to pick its moment. Or, perhaps that's it. It's decided to mug me while I'm distracted and sleep deprived and my defences are down. In which case, it's probably a demon plotbunny. From the pink eyes, probably a crossroads demon plotbunny.

*tries desperately not to make a deal*

The trouble is, it nudged aside the lettuce leaves I tried to distract it with and dived for the virtual bacon cheeseburger. And then uttered something about "Dean's laptop", cunningly appealing to me with the tech geek angle. And now I have a plot synopsis and everything. I am so doomed.

Probably doomed only to have to find disk space to house another half written fanfic, but still. Doomed.

I'm sure you know how much I love and adore the Generator style, in all its boxy, narrow width clunkiness. Oh, how I've missed it for all the years since I switched away from it. Which would be approximately 5 minutes after getting my LiveJournal account.

So thank you for restoring it for me. Doing some code fiddling tonight, are we? Oh, and thank you even more for trashing my active theme and user layers so that I can't currently revert back to them. *sigh* They look right. They just don't flipping work. And since the day job is eating my days, evenings, weekends, and even stealing from my sleep time right now, it's going to be a little while before I can get back to it and tinker sufficiently to overcome the damage.

So, in the meantime, I guess I'll be reverting back to older styles. Or fooling around with the zillions of different cookie-cutter Expressive versions.

But let's get this straight. It won't EVER be Generator.

ETA: Hurrah! Fixed! To my embarrassment I find that I never entirely finished designing my own layout. Must do that one day, before LiveJournal next delete it again.

Today, workwise, is about as crappy as a birthday workday can get, but at least my giftwrapped weekly dose of SPN made me happy. Like Julie Siege's episode last week, I felt last season that Andrew Dabb and Daniel Loflin hadn't quite got a handle on the boys yet. Sometimes they could be off enough to wander strongly into the realms of caricature. But the boys seemed pretty recognisable to me this time, and I found this a more satisfying MOTW as well.

( Initial reactions to SPN 5x06: I Believe The Children Are Our Future )

Brain exploding due to input overload. I have too many balls in the air simultaneously, and I'm a lousy juggler.

Why are days off always followed by having to do three times as much work immediately afterwards?

Sinking...
Sinking...
Sinking...

I was definitely ready for the light relief of a MOTW episode after a long string of mytharc-heavy stuff. Sadly however, I was hoping for another one I could love as much as "Monster Movie" rather than this, where the plot sounded considerably better on paper than in the execution. It may just be that Julie Siege's writing style doesn't do it for me. "The Monster At The End Of This Book" aside, I've never managed better than "eh" in reaction to one of her episodes.

Somehow it just felt flat. And accompanied by anvils. Though despite the unevenness there were definitely things that worked for me there as well.

( Spoilers for SPN 5x05 )

There's more to be said, about both the episode and the boys' general interaction with each other, but there was one brief shining moment that made me hit replay so I could watch it again. And if it fits a 100x100 square, I am so going to make an icon of it. It's sad that it was that particular moment, but alas I am a geek. I know this.

( Squeeworthy moment )

Be warned: don't click on the cut unless you're happy to be spoiled about members of cast for an episode of Supernatural that hasn't even been filmed yet, let alone aired. I haven't seen this one reported anywhere, but I happened to read something on the actor's website a couple of months back, and made a return stalking visit today. I don't think I was expecting to hit paydirt, but I'm very happy that I did.

( You've been warned. Spoilers at your own discretion )

I did a double trawl through the episodes of Supernatural season 5 this afternoon, partly to nab screencaps to make icons and partly to do some fact checking. Alas, due to a misunderstanding between myself and VLC half the screencaps ended up in a black hole so there wasn't much iconage, but I found a lovely, lovely casting spoiler for an upcoming episode so I can't feel grumpy. I've not seen it widely reported as yet, but it's on the actor's website which is good enough for me. :-)

Also, the research meant that it wasn't a total waste of time. I present ( a timeline for the great Winchester separation of 2009. It's different from what you might think. )

I really do need to do a catch up thinky-thoughts post on episodes 5:02 onwards of Supernatural. I've got half a post written up somewhere. I figure if I finish it, and then delete about three-quarters of what I've written I might even manage something that's not entirely tl;dr.

I only need a one word quotation for the remaining 35 minutes of 5:04 that I had to wait all day to watch though.

( Can one word really be a spoiler? If you can figure out the context, probably. )

Because I am weak, I watched the first five minutes of Supernatural 5:04 before leaving for work this morning. Now I only have to get through the rest of the day and an evening out with friends before I can watch the rest of the episode, from the title card onwards. Argh. Want now.

And I'm averting my eyes from certain parts of the internet until then, obviously. I'm not exactly spoiler free, because I've been merrily clicking on links about episode titles and guest stars and one line plot premises, but I've found a happy medium with spoilerage where I'm basically cool with knowing a handful of snippets, but don't want to know either the whole plot line by line or other people's feelings about it until I've had the opportunity for that first reaction myself.

( Spoilers for the first five minutes of SPN 5:04 - The End )

I'm currently dabbling with watching Leverage. After three episodes, I find I like it but haven't been utterly blown away by it. So, do I stick with it or just go back and watch the earlier seasons of Hustle instead? It's nice to see Christian Kane in something again though; his ambiguously evil lawyer gig was always one of my favourite things about Angel.

I'd thought there might be a chance, since the programme in question was one of the biggest overseas sellers last year for a UK produced show - pretty much only Top Gear and Doctor Who did better of the shows distributed by BBC Worldwide. But still, the recession doom and gloom in broadcasting is such that I didn't get my hopes up too much.

Amazingly however, the miracle has happened. Primeval has been un-cancelled. Hurrah!

I shall now go to my happy place, which involves contemplation of watching two more seasons/13 more episodes of Becker and finding out what Sarah's plan to get the rest of the team back from the past was. Because, despite all the cast upheavals of season three, I wasn't ready to see the show put out to pasture. Tying up the loose ends of the Helen plotline didn't really fit without either Cutter or Claudia/Jenny there... inserting Danny in their place was like forcing a square peg into a round hole. But that aside, I thought that the new cast was settling down together pretty well in the standalone episodes of mid-season, and I'm hoping for more of the same.

Is it too much to hope that the show might go back to the meadow of many anomalies that was glimped briefly in the dodo episode?

It doesn't matter though. All that matters is that my crazy little dinosaur show is back.

I've been doing documentation this morning, which in an open plan office filled with conflicting conversations is something best achieved by plugging in headphones and listening to the iPod on shuffle. Led Zeppelin's "Ramble On" popped up. My brain duly noted the Supernatural connection - Dean cited it as one of his favourite songs in "The Monster At The End Of This Book" - and I returned to grappling with file pathnames and left listening to my back brain. But then the song reached the second verse, and the connections crashed in to the point where I stopped typing and started listening. And then backed up to listen to the song again.

Oh, Show. I love it when you inform character through music. And this song is something that Dean with his itinerant lifestyle could definitely identify with. In some ways it fits him very well, especially from season two onwards:

Ah, sometimes I grow so tired
But I know I've got one thing I got to do

Also, as a favourite song it probably influenced some of his pop culture geek tendencies. Mostly they can be assumed to be the result of a lifetime spent in motel rooms where there's not much to do at the end of the day after the hunt except watch whatever's on TV. But there's also evidence there that, despite his indifference to academic pursuits, he's a bit of a reader on the quiet. He's the one who reads the Supernatural books from cover to cover, after all, and he's casually familiar with both The Odyssey and the works of Kurt Vonnegut. It makes you wonder how much science fiction and fantasy he reads; it seems a bit of a busman's holiday, but then he never does seem to go completely off-duty, so that might fit.

Sam seems surprised by this, which makes you wonder whether Dean did a lot of his reading after his brother left for Stanford, either to prove to himself that he wasn't stupid just because he didn't want to go to college, or because it was a lot lonelier and there was a lot more time to kill once Sam wasn't around and he was going off alone on solo hunts. Or maybe Sam just didn't notice, or assumed that whatever a teenage Dean was reading was something he'd been forced into for school. He'd likely be surreptitious about it; too much bookwormishness doesn't fit in with the badass persona he tries to project.

Which brings us to that scene at the end of "Good God Y'All" and its shoutback to "The Monster At The End Of This Book".

( Spoilers for Good God Y'All )

Cut from my previous post, because it was getting hellaciously long. (What, wordy? Moi?)

Because I feel like sticking my neck out, here are ( a couple of wild theories for how the season might play out: )