barbed_whispers

ON BOOKS:
read cape storm, the latest weather warden book by rachelcaine. YOU GUYS! so good. SO GOOD. so many declarations of love & kisses! a VENNACORN!! kevin being an awesome dickface! etc! i am going to be crazy sad when this 'verse finishes. i'm glad that she doesn't want to torture jo anymore (and really, what's left to do to her at this point?) but i will miss lewis like crazy.

also recently finished the second scott lynch book (red seas under red skies) and HOO-BOY, i love him. the first half was not that exciting, but once they became pirates the book turned awesome. both excited and nervous about the next one- i'm kind of afraid of how it will end D:

and i read a little more than a third of kushiel's dart before getting permission to give up. there were way too many characters, and i really don't care about the politics of a ridiculous and made-up world. i feel like i fail at being a fantasy fan now. (i may give it another try, cos the library finally let me renew it. hm.)

ON MUSIC:
the new olp album has mostly grown on me, but it is by no means their best work. some of the songs are just completely terrible, and a lot of them sound the same. raine's a decent producer, but he should probably not be producing his own albums. ("paper moon" is still amazing though.)

i went to see the cab, a rocket to the moon, eye alaska, and...two other bands? rocket are totally adorable and really good. i was digging eye alaska a lot, and their bassist is super-cute. i am still not a big fan of the cab. i want to awesome, super-friendly, and ridiculously adorable drummer from summer set (or whatever they are called) to find a band worthy of her awesomeness. all in all: MUCH FUN WAS HAD. also, much liquor was had. these things may be related.

the fall concert schedule is starting to get interesting. i need to un-poorify myself so i can see some fuckin' shows.

ON TV:
we mainlined being human today. it was pretty awesome! i love how watching things with vampires always leads to "but i thought vampires [x y z]" and then a largely ridiculous debate on different vamp mythologies and their pros and cons which then leads to shunning people who have never seen buffy. weeeeeeee, friends!

ON THE INTERNET:
momebie started this awesome project called Scattering Stars which you can learn more about here. it basically involves drawing on photos and making people smile though, so you have no excuses for not participating.

collabing with some friends (theemdash! marilla82! momebie! you!) to make an awesome wizard rock directory / calendar / general site thing. tomorrow is layout til i die day! woo! relearning html (and teaching myself php / div layers) is hard but fun. i'll never be a great designer or anything, but i like the actual work of coding stuff so i think this is gonna be a good project. i'm really glad i have friends who nudge me until i dive headfirst into this kind of thing :p

I know this topic was discussed to death with HP, but I honestly never paid much attention because JKR rarely Joss-ed me, and never for anything truly important. (And truth be told, I am quite happy to pretend that anything- even actual canon- that doesn't agree with me doesn't exist. Or I fanwank it. TRUFAX: I am so good at fanwanking it has been known to frighten getaway_machine (oh fauxcestuous camping, ILU). But I am really just trying to figure out what the next book in the established series is going to be about, so I am trying to decide how much of the spin-off counts. And the short story made me shout "DO NOT WANT" about 3 frillion times last night, so I guess it matters.)

(Seriously you guys: DO NOT WANT. Except I kind of do. rachelcaine, why do you do this to me??)

Poll #1347194 1 = ABSOLUTELY NOT; 5 = ABSOLUTELY YES
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 7

If an author writes a spinoff set in the same 'verse as an established series, is the plot of the spinoff canon for the original?

If an author publishes short stories set in her established 'verse on her website, are they considered canon?

If an author publishes short stories set in her established 'verse in a book or magazine, are they considered canon?

Are things an author says in interviews / to fans considered canon?

(Are you biased by an author Joss-ing your own personal canon in this way?)

(Are you wondering why I care enough to do a poll about this when my ability to fanwank characterzation to be what I want it to be is pretty epic?)

Should I use part of my tax refund check to buy a ($30) ukulele?! (I have been told they are a lot easier to learn than guitar. Also, stop judging me :P)

d*c updates are going to happen little by little, cos i am too lazy to tackle everything at once. so for today: rachel caine!

ok yes, you were all completely right, rachelcaine is so so so sweet and found our flailing charming (thank god). we didn't get to see as much of her as we would have liked (most of her panels were at the same time as panels with another author we loved AND a topic we were interested in), but we did get to talk to her a bit at her second signing, which was fantastic.

she totally flipped out and loved the shirts, as you could probably tell by my completely spazzy phone post haha. there will be photos at some point, but i have to touch up the backs of ours cos the paint pen i used is fading. we also gave her jenny's cd and uh, told her how much we love an hp fic she wrote back in the day. she came running around the table and hugged us and wrote that she loves us in my book <3

in actual factual news, i believe there will be two more weather warden books. (cape storm and then one more.) the ending will NOT be "and then they all died" so YAY. someone else (i swear it wasn't us, hahaha) asked for more lewis or lewis books or basically just LEWIS PLS and she said she would love to write more lewis, and would probably do it as webisodes to keep the 'verse alive after the series is done.

there are going to be a few more morganville books, but the end is in sight for that series too. :( i don't remember what else may have been said about them, haha.

her panel was basically "a history of rachel caine" which was really cool, but i wanted more "here is stuff about my stories" because i am kind of insane. i still don't know how old lewis is, you guys! or why he drives a hummer or has a law degree!

also, she is a big zelazny fan! ashley and i got kind of excited when she announced that, ahahaha.

oh, and she has a pet dinosaur who wore our shirt at the signing and is kind of unbearably adorable. it sang for us!

-my friend liz sent me this e-card. it totally made my week hahaha. (a week which was filled with moving, outrageous allergies, the inability to assemble my bed, more moving, building bookcases, decidedly not unpacking, and then getting sick. ugh. and then almost being unable to buy gale force cos SOMEONE gave me terrible directions, haha. but i prevailed in the end!)

-AHHHH GALE FORCE. i want to talk so you guys need to READ FASTER.

-a meme from venus_blue! ( it's the five icons one. people often pick the same icons for me. y'all should start paying attention :P )

-i feel like making top five lists. like top five canon otps (george/alanna, pacey/joey, logan/veronica, lucivar/marian, shari/peter), top five ust couples (lewis/jo, anita/edward, does remus/sirius count in this category?, rogue/gambit (cartoon canon), daemon/lucivar), top five bad guys (black john, landulf, voldemort, the master, the joker), etc etc. except coming up with more than two or three in each category is hard. hmph.

Poll #1231303 next question: is it creepy to make polls about my creepy behavior re: rachel caine?
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 7

there is a popular author who is actually a member of fandom. at the end of her books, she lists a "soundtrack" of sorts. i have a cd that is totally my soundtrack for these books. is it creepy to give her a copy of this cd at a convention?

(discarded poll titles include i'll leave the construction paper timeline at home though, i have no perspective on my own behavior, and factor in the homemade t-shirt about her books that i will be wearing.)

in unrelated news, i started reading a bandom diner au today. LET THE MOCKING BEGIN.

i will clearly read anything if it takes place in new jersey. got any recs? :D

for someone who has never been into mob media (the only mafia related media i have ever consumed is the listeners by christopher pike, and that's actually about an fbi agent. and some scary lizard people who made me fear the weasley twins. um. anyway.) i sure do come up with an AWFUL LOT of mob-themed novel ideas. which i will never write, because (a) i don't write things, i plan them and (b) that would involve research.

on a related note, when i was in high school, i essentially begged my parents to let me be an indentured servant for the local mob. can you believe they said no?

Poll #1169212 on a completely unrelated note.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 7

do you think polls discourage people from discussing things in the comments?

while driving home from work today, i came up with one of my crazy Big Stupid Projects that i plan out and research and draw diagrams of and buy sketchbooks for and then...never finish. i can't even tell you how many of these Big Stupid Projects are currently living (and dying) on my computer, but nonetheless, i came up with a new one today.

(i can't help it- i really like planning things!)

anyway, if i cobbled together an unoffical soundtrack for something and wrote a ficlet for each song, and i already had an unofficial soundtrack for this something that consisted of a really awesome album by a really awesome singer, how many songs from the already existing album should i include on the mix tape album? like, i wouldn't want every other song to be by the same singer, but since i already so closely associate those songs with these books, and since i already know the stories those songs represent to me, it feels wrong to not include them. (looking at the tracklisting, i would want to include AT LEAST three, although i could easily do three more.)

( because i know ashley and katia will ask, here are the songs and the stories they represent. )

you guys, i don't even care that this will mean less than nothing to 99.9% of you: getaway_machine posted some excellent weather warden fic in which she captures jo's voice perfectly, gets inside lewis's head, and sets the stage for what will hopefully be a neverending set of circumstances in which jo mocks lewis for not being all that quick on his feet. heeeeeeeeee.

maybe after getaway_machine finishes the alanna quartet, i will post a whole thing in which i think too hard about how i 'ship. but there will definitely be spoilers (and probably some rage, since i will be talking about couples in tortall) so i might as well wait. also, it will probably be really boring.

Poll #1092274 i have been reading a lot of my favorite books.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 9

unresolved sexual tension- even better than the real thing? (1 = all ust, all the time, and 7 = canon relationships ftw.)

i am very sorry about last night, so tonight there are ticky boxes.

luna lovegood and river tam are BFFs. how did this happen?

Poll #1086025 lewis levander orwell need not apply.
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 14

Which would you rather be?

Weather Warden people: I need some suggestions for actors for the characters so I can make some icons, because I am no good at that sort of thing and I feel I have exhausted the covers. Got any ideas? (Also: any quotes you need/want on an icon?) Lord knows I am terrible about making icons in a timely manner (I have a short attention span, in case you hadn't noticed), but I could at least get the ball rolling.

Everyone else: I finished the first season of Supernatural, and I really really really don't understand how you people actually watch this sort of thing on television (which has commercials and only one episode a week and also REALLY LONG HIATUSES OMG) without imploding. (Or without completely losing interest by the time the new season starts, no matter how good the last season was, which is my primary problem. I do not have the sort of attention span or memory for that kind of activity! If there is more than two weeks without an episode, I tend to forget all about the show. And I don't watch movies, and I tend to reread my favorite books all the time instead of reading new stuff. How am I even in fandom? (I seem to have lost my train of thought...))

Uh, anyway, I finished the first season of Supernatural, and I need to cling to my interest in this show because I've got a month til I can watch the second season. Please, for the love of all that is holy, tell me some of you have links to fic (preferably gen, but I'm not opposed to incest or anything else, really), vids (oh god PLEASE I want vids SO BADLY), art, icons, meta, or whatever, all of which should not spoil me for season 2. (Except, yeah, I've seen the second season premiere, or I would be freaking the fuck out about waiting til my birthday for the next season.) I'll probably start hunting for stuff next week, but I'm lazy and concerned about being spoiled, so help would be lovely. (Also, fic set in Jersey will win you a prize.)

Oh also, I have a second job interview with a marketing place on Monday, so between that, the temp agency, and Target, I should be employed next week. ::crosses fingers::

-we have paused buffy (we were on "lover's walk") so that we can hopefully watch all of supernatural before the new season starts. booooooooooooys! ::flails:: the commentary on "phantom traveler" was most excellent, haha. (um, we are a little ADD over here, since we will be pausing supernatural in a few weeks so we can watch firefly with simplykatie. and i think we need to watch some avatar with her so she can learn how truly awesome lewis is.)

-the latest attempt to make me watch star wars was thwarted, which i am taking as a sign from god. :D?

-i have also paused the chronicles of amber so that i could reread the weather warden books cos there's a new one out this week. (fuck, i need to read faster.) there has been much debating of ages and timelines and much flailing over lewis and i am still enjoying the books a lot, which i was worried i wouldn't. that is largely thanks to lewis though, and my overwhelming love for him.

-ashley is reading the vampire diaries (aka, the much better version of twilight :D) right now, which is exciting and kind of hard because i do not want to spoil her but i want to flail about things. ::flails about things:: i keep replaying the fight scene from book 4 in my head and ndjacak GOD, i love it SO MUCH. favorite book scene of all time, yis. i need to stop talking about this now before i ruin the ending for ashley. ... ::flails!::

-new anita blake comic next week this month (wtf why are their pub dates so erratic)! i know i need to stop getting so excited, but EDWARD. FLAME THROWER. EDWARD WITH A FLAME THROWER. (well, that is speculation. but it's the second half of first death, which is about an early anita/edward job, and it looks like the valentine hunt, which is when he busted out the flame thrower. wait, that needs all caps. FLAME THROWER. better, yis.) let's hope they didn't ugly him up too much, yeah? also omg, they have the covers (or just random arts) of guilty pleasures 7 and 8 up, and descriptions, and "HOW FAR WILL EDWARD GO???" and omg, pls pls pls let my scene be in these comics :x (from the descriptions, it looks like my scene will be in 9, if it's in anything. november! oh november, hurry up.) the cover of first death is a/e, but edward has these really stupid looking sunglasses on, wtf.

-i hit 100,000 songs on last.fm the other day. since may 2005, about 11% of the music i've listened to has been by pearl jam. 2% has been "fool in the rain" by led zeppelin, which i think is hilarious. 2%! jenny is at 9%, and i only discovered her in january :D

fifth year, mwpp-era. sirius spends a lot of nights up on gryffindor tower, staring at the sky and trying to piece together the last of this whole "animagus" thing. he discovers a new comet, or writes an excellent astronomy essay, or something. somehow, he ends up at this Young Astronomers Convention (probably exclusively for witches and wizards) even though he really has no idea what is going on. maybe he drags remus along, just so he has someone who speaks nerd to help him out.

being sirius, he blurts out something stupid about astronomy, and everyone laughs- definitely at him, and not with him. and one snotty boy says "you're not the brightest star in the sky, are you?" because that's the kind of insult Young Astronomers think is brilliant, which leads to remus rolling his eyes and sirius being back on the familiar ground of being a pompous ass who knows he is awesome.

(why yes, this IS what i spent my morning thinking about. and then i spent the afternoon half-plotting weather warden stories to go with titles pulled from "hurricane" by something corporate. ("into your hurricane" would be an intense lewis/jo/david triangle fic, while "pull me under your weather patterns" would be jo/lewis first time fic, and "come on sweet catastrophe" is definitely about jonathan and david. in case you were wondering.)

I finally caught up on Veronica Mars. I don't have much to say about it, except that uh, it was on hiatus for so long that I can't really remember why Logan and Veronica broke up the last time. Which means I am on the fence about a lot of things? I guess? Whatever. I'm not gonna lie though- the phone call at the end of the last ep made me squee. (I have not clicked any cut tags since it came off hiatus, so if you've been dying to discuss something with me for some reason, now's the time.)

(It is cancelled, right? Cos I thought it had been cancelled for a while, and I know it's not on the schedule next season, but they keep calling it the season finale (as opposed to the series finale) so I just wanted to make sure.)

...

I seriously, wholeheartedly, need to recommend Progressive, as in the insurance company, as in the company with the best customer service possibly ever. They are there 24/7, they are actual PEOPLE who chitchat while waiting for computers to do things, and they have solved all of my (paperwork related) problems in under 5 minutes. LOVE.

...

I added "possibly incestuous amnesiac ust" to my interests today. It made me really, really happy.

books i would like to read by, oh, july 1st. in no particular order.

• harry potter and the sorcerer's stone
  
• harry potter and the chamber of secrets
  
• harry potter and the prisoner of azkaban
  
• harry potter and the goblet of fire
  
• harry potter and the order of the phoenix
  
• harry potter and the half-blood prince
  
• the memory keeper's daughter (i am almost done!)
  
• one thousand white women
  
• the yanti
  
• the weather warden series, which i am too lazy to name individually, and which is definitely a want and not a need, but i want to reread them SOBADLYOMG
  
• the dead girls' dance
  
• glass houses

omg SRSLY, i do NOT have time for this!! especially since i have been so SLOW about reading things lately. (aaaaaaaaaaaaaaand i just realized i still have at least two books left from vacation (IN JANUARY) that need to be read. DAMMIT.)

also, it really doesn't help that i know pretty much NOTHING about the science of weather, yet i think about it EVERY DAY. i sing the weather cycle song all day and think about jo and wonder what her favorite type of cloud is. THIS IS NOT HEALTHY.

also not healthy? deciding to figure out how to make personality quizzes with javascript (cos that's something i clearly excel at, ::rolls eyes::) so i can determine what type of warden i would be. (for the record? i'm totally weather. i don't need the internets to tell me that. and before you ask: ashley, you are weather bordering on fire. anyone else?)

ALSO BTW. ashley, i neeeeeeeeeed my fic. so badly. pls to be finding time to type it. failing that, MAIL IT TO ME. you know we're the only ones who are going to enjoy it anyway, hahaha. ... on that note, i'm going to go search the internets for fic. neeeeeeeeeed.

...

( grey's spoilers. )

::facepalms::

Why didn't anyone remind me how tedious coding html can be? AND I have to do css for this? AWESOME.

(note to self: FIND EASIER WAY TO FORMAT A LIST OF QUOTES. Cos manually putting in all of this html is not gonna happen anytime soon. Sigh.)

...

In completely unrelated news, while talking to getaway_machine today I realized that the fannish activity happening this summer that I am most excited for is...the Weather Warden book 6 release. For realz.

This is out of the final Harry Potter book, the Harry Potter movie for probably my favorite book, a new Anita Blake book with Edward, more of the Guilty Pleasures comic (and we should be hitting my favorite scene ever this summer, assuming it gets drawn), an Anita Blake comic featuring Edward that takes place a year before Guilty Pleasures, anddddddddd I think that's it.

Yet I am most excited for a book series that I only discovered this year, and that I've only read once. Partially because Jenny Owen Youngs = Weather Warden in my brain, so everytime I listen to Jenny I think about Jo and Lewis and David and everyone else. And partially because Lewis + Jo + amnesia = GOOD TIMES. And partially because LKH is mostly worthless and I really truly honestly don't give a flying fuck about Severus Snape and/or his loyalties.

But mostly because the Weather Warden books are just that good. I find myself wondering about the actual physics of weather on an almost daily basis now. I was reading about what a real, true apocalypse would be like today, and my main thought was "What would the Wardens be doing to control all of this?" I'm seriously still trying to write Lewis as the Avatar because HELLO, he's the goddamn AVATAR!

You need some more reasons to read? Jo, the main character, is a sassy, snarky, powerful bitch who loves cars and does the right thing, even when it ends up causing her some severe pain. When I compare her to early Anita Blake, I mean it as a super-high compliment. They stick to their morals, they deal with the shades of gray, but they mostly just try to do the right thing however they can. While all that's going on, the plots are sometimes crazy and soap opera-esque, yet it somehow all works and never goes over the top. Also, there's magic and science and an incredibly detailed, well-thought out, awesomely written background for everything that's going on.

In conclusion, more people need to read these books. The first one is called Ill Wind, it is by Rachel Caine (who is also known as juliefortune, which is a selling point all on its own if you ask me), and it is awesome. There are currently 5 books- the sixth one's out in August, and it contains AMNESIA. What more could you possibly need?