it's legal in the Pegasus Galaxy

I have a new buddy in the Arabian sandbox, khaleesian, who quotes everyone from Tennyson to Tupac and has Russian talent, whatever that might entail, at her disposal. Scary and smart! And excited about things like driving a car and living in more than 850 square feet after several years in London, so I really ought to stop harshing her buzz. It'll be all mint lime juices and balmy summer nights from here on out, promise.

We met up to see This Means War last weekend, and honestly I think the movie would have a higher rating on Rotten Tomatoes (26%) if it had been marketed to the right audience. Which as far as I can tell are ( slash fans and social anthropologists. )

Basically, we spent the film alternating between:


and


Ah, Benedict Cumberbatch. Truly a man for all seasons.

me: Tumblr is debating what Hogwarts house Sherlock and Mycroft would be sorted into
Ravenclaw and Slytherin, respectively?
B: Mycroft is total Hufflepuff. sorry
"You might belong in Hufflepuff,
Where they are just and loyal,
Those patient Hufflepuffs are true,
And unafraid of toil"
he is loyal to Sherlock above all costs and is loyal to running the country and works endlessly at both tasks. he's a Hufflepuff
Mycroft doesn't want power for power's sake
it's the only way he can watch his brother
me: damn my knee-jerk dismissal of Hufflepuff
B: Hufflepuff is the Spanish Inquisition of Hogwarts
Hufflepuff is always in the background, unseen
you know who ELSE is always in the background, unseen? hmmmmmmmmmmm?
me: oh man, Mycroft is the FLUFFIEST HUFFLEPUFF

With "Wit beyond measure is man's greatest treasure", Ravenclaw was a gimme. But, once B said it, Hufflepuff made all the sense in the world. And not just because of the uncanny resemblance between Mycroft and badgers. Oh, and Hufflepuff supported Ravenclaw's Cedric Diggory in the Triwizard Tournament.

Hello, hi, I will post a shit-got-real-for-a-long-minute update sometime soon, but right now it's almost 3 a.m. in my time zone and I'm feeling happy and chatty about my new fannish love. Basically, I fell face-first into BBC Sherlock about two weeks ago, and for the past three days have had little else knocking around in my head than thoughts about Mycroft Holmes and ( his beautiful soul. )

Basically, I want allllll the Mycroft fic. About how there is no dealer in London who will sell to Sherlock. About taking care of Sherlock in the middle of the night because he'd nearly OD'd on something. About how the British government would've either recruited or eliminated Sherlock by now were it not for his "minor" position.

tl;dr Mycroft Holmes LET ME LOVE YOU FOREVER

The tragedy of my past 12 hours in SMS format. For the record, the two of us who had read all the Twilight books tried to talk the rest of the Bad Movie Club out of this particular feature.

Straight male friend CC: [Male friend GC] just came up with a dastardly plan that rivals anything ra one had to face : breaking dawn at midnight tomorrow . Whos in ?
Me: Why does [GC] hate us? Ps of course I'm there
CC: Meet at K mall . Trembling with anticipation
Me: Is it just you me and [GC]? If yes we should make him pay for our tix as emotional compensation
CC: I owe him a tic since I lost a football bet .
Me: I swore I wouldn't even see this movie so he wil def owe me one by the end of the night
CC: If "if "its bad
Me: Of all the nights in this world I need you to be a straight man tonight and hate this movie as much as it deserves
CC: But there are 'wolves ' and lautners
Me: Ok yes we can all swoon over Taylor lautner but everything else will be horrifying emotional trash
CC: Inshallah
Me: Aren't you supposed to have good taste in movies or did we send a closeted teenage girl to Cannes?
CC: Abu dhabi is like Chinatown : it changes you
Me: I just need to make sure you're not expecting this movie to be anything but a massive train wreck. I'm trying to booze it up over wine and cheese enough to get through it but there will be bitching and I need a bitching receptacle

...

12:08am Facebook check-in: Goddamn it [CC], I wasn't even supposed to see Breaking Dawn, let alone at a midnight premier. -with CC, CG, CB and HA
12:45am Oh god so much worse than you could imagine lock up your daughters.
1:10am This movie is using chess as a direct metaphor for sex and making me neither want to play chess nor have sex again.
1:27am As emotionally gratuitous as the first three movies were, none of it compares to this drivel. Convinced they're emotionally blackmailing the audience to stick it out through the incoherence to come.
2:17am [GC] blames his high five with Steven Seagal at the F1 race for wanting to see this movie. Meanwhile [CC] wished for shirtless werewolves at least five times, and my brain just wants a loofah to scrub it all away.
2:40am CB: It's too late ... we have to see Part 2 ... Part 1 has imprinted on us.

Lesson: Remember kids, high-fiving Steven Seagal can transmit the irrepressible desire to see bad movies. Don't do it, no matter how cool a story it'll make the next day.

@catullae started #fakewarcraftthesis on Twitter, and it was pretty much the only thing that went right for me all day.

( I'd dearly love to read these. )

Because a girl can only do so much between hormones, too little sleep all week and not eating for 15 hours because of a clusterfuck with our delivery order from a new restaurant. But some of it was good crying! And some of it was just melodramatic.

When you talk of the Tampa Bay Rays' 2011 wild-card drama - and you will - know this - St. Petersburg Times

The Rays are Brandon's home team, and any sport where there's an equal possibility of going home with a souvenir or a black eye from a foul ball is always a good time. But this was an absolutely unbelievable game, down seven to nothing in the eighth and then tied up by the bottom of the ninth by a guy who's hit .108 for the season, stretching all the way into a 12th inning before the Rays secured their spot in the postseason. They're such amazing fielders - and easy on the eyes, too, since the franchise being pretty underfunded means their focus is on scouting college players.

Downtown Disney flash mob marriage proposal - The Disney Blog

Nothing melts my cold, cold heart like a creative proposal, especially when there are accomplices involved.

Ferrari Enzo abandoned in Dubai - BBC Top Gear

I saw The Brave Little Toaster at a very impressionable age, and blame it for my inability to throw away anything just because there's a newer model out. The movie made me incredibly sad for everything that has outlived its (perceived) usefulness. But a beautiful machine in its prime left to decay?

The Last Stand Ending - sunsetagain on deviantART

You guys. The end of the third X-Men movie already broke me once, but this sketch did it all over again.

Like everyone else this morning, I woke up to the new Delicious, a stunning example of what happens when you throw a bunch of money and developers at a problem that doesn't exist, while doing zero audience research to figure out how your service was being used. Having been largely out of fandom for about five years, when SGA was still The One Fandom and lived on LJ, before ToS fuckery and fannish migration and Delicious's role still in its infancy, the scope of what has been lost wasn't entirely clear to me until walkingshadow spent a good chunk of her day explaining it patiently through her seething rage.

But despite not having nearly as much invested in Delicious as most of you, the impact of its spectacular implosion is another setback on what is ( my already haphazard wade back into fandom. )

But even in this fragmented new world, Delicious seemed to be last place on the internet that everyone still went. The simplicity of its privacy settings was a revelation - things were either private or public; no friendslists, no filters, no barriers to fannish entry. Just click on a tag and lose yourself for a few hours. I'd venture that had to do a lot with Delicious's success in fostering what could arguably have been the largest fannish community space since the LJ schism (and why I have reservations about the picket fences evident in Pinboard's "introvert sharing" philosophy, though that seems to be where the fannish tide is drifting.) Delicious was accessible even to someone brand new to fandom, or someone like me who may as well be. Wasn't the reason we all used Delicious because it was a massive public park that all corners of fandom played in, where the little bold number of how many times something has been bookmarked meant something?

But what's done is done, and fandom has every reason to find a new berth. And hey, AO3 rose out of a dark moment too, so maybe this will all eventually be for the best. But as someone still trying to find her footing, this didn't help my already fragile grasp of the new fannish geography.

Serb Cousins Share Same Strange Attraction - Associated Press

Why yes, that IS the headline the story came across the news wires with.

David's mother said her son loses his magnetic powers when he is asleep, but regains them when he wakes up and starts moving. When he plays with his friends "anything will stick to him," she said. Afterward he will feel a little chilly and tired, she said.

Yada yada yada, life is busy and stringing sentences together is hard. I sometimes feel like my job uses up all my literary creativity, which is ironic given that journalism school mostly consists of sapping it all away until you're writing declarative sentences of 35 words or less, and any modifiers are a strict 10 points from Gryffindor.

Humane Society - smilebackwards (R, Charles/Erik)

This story is what I imagine a hug would feel like if you could write it. The synopsis is that Erik is turned into a kitten and Charles takes him in, and yesterday I wouldn't have said that I would read such a thing, let alone like it, and still look at myself in the mirror, but this fandom has pretty much demolished all my preconceived notions.

ETA: OMG you guys, all the evens I cannot, Charles and Erik in a meadow.

Fic On a Clear Day - sheafleur (R, slight retcon of the beach scene)

This is Charles and Erik after going their separate ways, and it hurts so much, knowing that they've both been indelibly changed by the other but not enough to set their differences aide. I like to think that Charles learned something on the beach, that sometimes, some people (and mutants) are evil, and you have to protect your own. Erik may have chosen his path, but that doesn't mean he walks alone, and Charles is only so much the better man when it comes to him.

Vid The Boy With the Bubblegun - kaydeefalls

Oh, Erik, so blinded by your anger - Charles could've saved you if you'd let him, but instead he became collateral damage. Really lovely, in the way that anything this sad could be.