I need reassurance that I wasn't the only one who thought immediately of this xkcd at one particular point in the episode!

And it was so good...  :-D

So I'm getting a bit confused as to what exactly this LJ is for, since I'm trying to use it for two different things.

To rectify this, I've made a new account, frith_in_thorns , which I'll be using for writing and stuff and icons.  This one'll stay my personal account and so I'll stop posting things like that here.

This account probably won't see as much use as my new one, since it's for 'real life', and I quite frankly have no life ;-)

Article reproduced in full from the Ledbury Reporter:

A small grass fire at the Link Common was swiftly dealt with by Malvern's firemen.  The fire, which damaged about two square metres of the common, was almost opposite the fire station, so crews were at the scene very quickly after it was spotted at 8.14pm on Saturday.

This is the sort of news which makes a paper which covers quite a sizable district (both Ledbury and Malvern areas - for people who don't know, this is quite a lot of area, and quite a lot of villages).  I love being back here :]

And because someone asked me, I've opened my story folders on my computer to see what I have in there that's unpublished/unfinished fanfic.  I'm disregarding things which are just fragments.  Hopefully seeing this will force me to get on and do something with them...

( Entirely about my backlog of unpublished fanfic )

I seem to be in a dip of almost negative productivity.  It's very annoying.  I should be doing something, but today my accomplishments are setting up my computer (I've been using my tablet so far here), watching three episodes of BSG, and making 1/3 of a youtube video.  I've also looked at all my WIPs and realised that I hate them, which is even more annoying.  This is why I should write very fast, because if I stop for a few days, it always makes me hate what I've written.  And since I've only posted two parts of 'Turn', this may prove difficult, as I'm more inclined to pull it from the site and metaphorically burn it than finish it.  Damn.

I still like the one I started during 8th week, though.  I should probably get on with that while I still can...

I'm home.  I love being at home.  Oxford's all well and good, but I start to drown in the sheer volume of people and noise.  I got back four hours ago, and I've spent most of those hours on the lawn with my parents enjoying the view across the apple orchards.  I think that on the way home I was grinning from the moment the Malvern hills appeared on the horizon.  Now it's dark, but I can still see the silhouettes of some of the trees in the garden, and the line of the woods beyond, against the sky through my window.

This was once I eventually managed to leave, of course.  I have been labelled by my mother as "the worst child in the world, ever" this afternoon, after we'd got in from a picnic lunch in the botanic gardens, leaving dad there.  I'd warned them that I hadn't finished packing, but I didn't really tell them the extent of my not-finished-packing... oops.  So I had help packing, and it *only* took a couple of hours... um, yeah.  Kate was not the most popular daughter ever.

I'm now being told about Big Brother by my sister who's invaded my room (and I'm nodding and smiling because Big Brother is on my list of DOOM along with the Twilight books which she also loves), and eating freshly-picked raspberries.  Nom.

Warning - this post is not useful.  It is me venting about Sainsbury's and couscous and exam stress.  Mmm, yummy exam stress.  Hence why I'm putting it under a cut.

( Read more... )

Ok, three things gone up today:

Birthday present for Varda.  Well, part one of four, anyway.  I still have to type up the ending I wrote at the strawberry party yesterday.  I've been wanting to write a Stargate Atlantis fic like this for ages.  Turn.

FF100 - Summer.  Finally worked my way past the episode 'Underground', now the next few are for episodes I enjoyed much more than that one!

CSI: NY: Coffee Cups.  Because Roz is still calling me a traitor for writing much more SGA than NY stuff lately.
ETA: A strangly large proportion of NY readers do not seem to understand the concepte of 'oneshot' - no, putting it on alert will not make me add another chapter.  Nor does telling me that that it is 'unfair'.  This is my story, go write your own :P

And there was this little thing called work... hmm....

It's occured to me that since I'm techincally doing that FF100 LJ challenge, I really ought to actually link my fics to my LJ, since that's part of the rules.  Or my LJ to my fics, rather.  If people I know in RL have stumbled onto this, don't worry about it, it's just my crazed obsession with Stargate Atlantis combined with a challenge of set prompts, pay no heed :P

So, things I've posted so far:
1. Hours
2. Beginnings
3. Green
4. Red
5. Independence
6. Lunch
7. Words

Right, now at some point I have to enter the challenge officially.  I just want to have this (the fics being linked from LJ) covered for when I get round to it.  Again, if you don't know what I'm talking about, it's probably just safer to write this off as me being strange. 

Unless you're my inefficient LJ stalker, of course, in which case you'll probably find something here to well complain about ;P

About 12 today I decided to go and do some revision in the botanical gardens away from the distraction of the internet.  I've been doing this for a couple of days now, with varying degrees of sucess.  On the way there I bumped into Graham, one of my friends, and we started chatting, and went back to his room to get some of his chemistry notes so that we could do some shared revision in the gardens

We spent two hours wandering around the gardens and chatting about carniverous plants, explosions, religion, and then video games.  And not revising.

Then decided to go punting... so that we could revise on the punt, since none had happened in the gardens, and since college punts are free to use we thought we might as well make the most of them.

So we got the key for the no. 2 punt from the porters, unlocked the shed, put all the cushions in the punt, got the pole and paddle etc, and then carried these down to the river and put them into the punt.  And then found out that the no. 2 key would not unlock the no. 2 padlock.

So Graham went back to the porters and got the key for a different punt, no. 3, which was at the end of the rack, so we moved all the cushions etc over, and found that this padlock opened... but some 'tard returning the no. 10 and no. 16 punts had chained them to the no. 3 punt's chain, so we couldn't go punting without dragging those two along with us.  This was rather irritating.

We gave up on the punting, and went back to Graham's room for tea and to check on new game releases anounced at E3 this week, and then other random bits of the internet.

I went back to mine at 5 - so that's five hours of 'revision' that completely failed to happen.

Mods, here I come...

So, just got back from Orielton in Pembrokeshire - a week of counting bugs and trees. In other words, the populations and ecology field course. And it was brilliant, I really enjoyed it. So now I'm going to write a whole post banging on about it, complete with several photographs, so I'm putting most of this under a cut, because I have a strong suspicion that not many people are going to care :P

Also I have a large collection of quotes, such as the one I'm using for the title.

This picture goes above the cut, though, because it was an absolutely beautiful beech tree, although I couldn't fit all of it in the lens.

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Ok, I know I said to some people I'd put up an Orielton post here, but I can't figure out the cuts (it keeps going spectuarly wrong), and it keeps telling me that my post is too long.  After spending half an hour on this, I'm slightly fed up, and may try again tomorrow, but not tonight.

Also, I'm ill, because my Orielton roommate gave me her cold, and the lemsip I bought from Tesco isn't making me feel better.  I should stop moaning on LJ, but oh well :P

Oh, I've decided to enter the FF100 challenge, as the people who will actually read it already know.  100 words each day for the 100 prompts.  I still haven't got round to entering officially, mind you.  Here's the first one (from yesterday) anyway: Hours

And because I have nothing better to do, I'm mucking around with embedding things in posts, that aren't pictures which don't work.  So a YouTube video I made over Easter.  Feel free to ignore completely, I just want to see if I can figure out the settings.

I have just walked right across Oxford in bare feet.

To be fair to my shoes, it wasn't their fault, it was just, since I was on my own after midnight, with no one else to slow me down, they were next on my list of offenders in that regard.  Besides, they'd had their fun earlier when a very drunk Hannah grabbed my hand on the way to the club and tried to pull me into a run with no warning.  Surprisingly I tripped, and lost a chunk out of my knee.  So I'm a mite fed up.

It's not that I have anything against clubbing, per say, it's just that it doesn't really appeal to me.  And what certainly doesn't appeal to me is the social stigma attatched to not getting drunk.  I dislike the taste of alcohol, so why, whenever I go out with people, do they see it as a challenge to attempt to make me drink it?

In spite of the previous moan, though, I've had a good evening.  Posh annual dinner with the ice hockey club, and then we (eventually, after a lot of arguments and three votes which all gave the same result, so why we needed three of them is something I won't even begin to try to understand) went to the club which has the imaginative name of Thirst.  Not to be confused with Thirst Lodge, which is somewhere else, although probably on the same road.  And it does have a better name than Lava Ignite, which people are still calling Park End several years after it changed its name, as it's universally agreed that the 'new' one is pretty stupid.  Oxford in general fails at names, I've decided.

Anyway, people got drunk, and danced, which they enjoyed, and I sat in the seating area to watch the bags and wrote nearly all of a McKeller oneshot, which I enjoyed doing.  Hey, I'm strange.  What do you mean, you hadn't realised?!  Then I walked home, and my feet are still vaguely black, even after a shower.  And I just leaned back to reach something and tipped my chair over - as if I hadn't injured myself enough this evening already!

One final moan - before I left I tore my room upside down to find my passport for proof of age.  Yes, I literally tore it apart in a stupidly inefficient way.  It took about twenty minutes.  That's how tidy my room was.  And I finally found it down the side of the bed, by the wall.  I don't even remember it being on the bed.  Now I have a lot of tidying to do in the morning.

Of course, I didn't get ID'd.  Not once.  I love irony.

Today the rain was out to get me.  Seriously.  Going to labs, it rained.  Going from labs to the Radcliff libary it rained.  That time was worse, because I was already cycling when it started tipping it down.  Ugh.  Then I nearly got hit by a non-indicating car, which blared its horn at me.  Stupid car.  Ugh.

Need to do work now.  More ugh.

But I have chocolate puddings.  Yum.  Not ugh.  Also popcorn and the Miami finale, both courtesy of Andy.

Also with Andy's help, in the form of finally breaking it completely, the weight hinge has been removed from my room door.  Now I shall hide it at the bottom of my warderobe and hope that maintenence doesn't notice. 

Been having fun this evening experimenting with Paint.NET and making icons.  So, some Rodney ones:



And some Stella ones:



And a Mac/Stella one especially for Roz:



They're surprisingly addictive to make...

I have a strange tendancy to finish writing something, and then sit on it for weeks, during which time I'll change a couple of words, if that.

Anyway, to counter that, I've at long last posted part 8 of Eye Spied.  (NY piece).  For now I'm ignoring the season finale.  It was a great episode, but - did they have to kill her?!  *cries*  And all the shows I watch seem to be ending on cliffhangers this year!  Lost wins the prize for best one, though.  Also prize for best character death, which is the same thing really, considering what happened...

And Lullaby.  I'm pretty happy with this one, although... strange might be a good word to describe it?  Flesh-eating bugs and Rodney whump, as per usual with me.  Rated T because of the bug thing...  I'm feeling cautious today.

Finished writing 'Lullaby', which I'm very pleased about, but on reading through I have realised how strange it actually is - I may sit on it for a while before posting!  Also the ending needs rewording - I don't remember writing anything ever where the ending hasn't needed rewording countless times.  Maybe that's just me. 

I'd forgotten how good 'writing highs' are! :P

So, anything else interesting about today?  Probably not, unless a two hour tute to discuss collection papers counts as interesting.  And we didn't even get a third of the way through, which may set a new standard for inefficiency.  Well, ineffciency outside my usual complete procrastination, of course.  I mean, why else would I be writing rambly posts on LJ instead of doing something useful? ;)

Poem written on a long train journey today - I know what I wrote it about, but I guess that's not really the point of poems, what the author meant, so I won't say.  Clue's in the title, anyhow.  It's dark, but so's life, especially those bits of it which get reported in the news.



xeno

shut up your soul within these walls
where wooden eyes of boarded windows stare
and empty lungs gasp drowning in the air
as hollow hearts are hallowed in a prayer
but cease to beat.

seal up your life within these hands
and slit the wrists, pool poppies to the floor --
(hide dripping blood within a metaphor) --
then, if you like, beg God for sanctuary
from flames --

rip out your tongue, unbury bone from flesh,
unthread your tangled arteries and veins,
and, when you've satisfied yourself you're just the same
as me, then put the puzzle back again
if possible.

I carry scars, and will not let them show.
You carry hate, and let it overflow.

Having decided it would be good dicipline for me to write a post every day, I've realised how little I have to say!

However, I've had a rather strange writing idea.  Since Varda and RiG are doing this Fanfic100 challenge, I've been tempted, and it's occured to me that SGA had 100 episodes - so I could do a 100 word tag to each of them!  Or maybe not 100 words, but it would be fun to try that.  But I'm currently trying to decide whether that's a worthwhile or stupid idea...

I think I need to start gathering in books which have gone walkabouts.  Not helped partiularly by the fact that there're a few books which may or may not be out on loan, as opposed to gathering dust under my CD player back home, or something.

So far the ones which definitely need to come home are Look to Windward, Spirit Walker, Incandescence, Across The Nightingale Floor, and How I Live Now.  And the one on evolutionary genetics, whose title currently escapes me, but I'd rather like that before exams! 

Also, Andy's told me he'll code me a pokey stick (see a couple of posts down).

I should probably use this LJ for something more... intellectual? creative? than just writing these sorts of posts, really...

I like silence. 

It never ceases to amaze me how few people are capable of maintaining it, though.  I mean, even on May morning, when we were on Cloisters lawn watching the choir sing from the top of the tower, it seemed like everyone around was giggling, whispering, shuffling - in short, just doing the same nosiy things as ever, just at a lower volume.  It was very annoying.  I'm sure it would have been much worse out on Magdalen bridge, though, with everyone in the street - then I'd have been lucky to hear anything at all.

Girls don't seem to be quiet very often, in general.  It's why I like being on my own, not in a crowd of people who just won't shut up about inconsequential things.  Especially shopping.

Writing's good.  In my room, no noise, nothing.  This is probably also why I don't shut up on the internet, to the point where I probably annoy people by rambling on, but it makes up for not talking in real life!  I mean, I'm rambling on now, and it's not as if I'm saying anything worth listening to in this completely pointless ramble, so I'll stop it here.  Good character combination, this.  Introvert, silent, and worried that everyone's going to take offence at everything I say!

Sleeping's good now.  Or it would be if the music student in the next room wasn't playing some very loud classical music...