Summer!! Everything is a riot of green, and the air feels thick, and we keep having blazing sunlight punctuated by torrents of rain. I'm sure by late June I'll be wailing about how I can't stand the heat -- and my sleep is already much more restless, seriously, my body hates heat -- but at the moment it feels like a lovely change. Plus I get to wear skirts and shorts and dresses and tank tops! Yeeeeah summer clothes.

Work feels much less stressful now that -- that it's summer, or identifiably the most stressful single thing in my life, I don't know. It feels very doable, which is nice! I've been entertaining myself by playing Marvel Bingo, otherwise known as the little ping of happiness I get when a customer's name is shared by a character. I've had Tony, Steve, Bruce, Natasha, Nick, Maria, James, Erik, Jane, and (Baldur) Thor, although bafflingly no Clints or Phils or Darcys yet. I've had Virginia and Margaret, along with lots of variations though none of them Peggy, and Elizabeth and variants though no Betty, and I'm not holding out for a Pepper even though there was that guy named Shark once.

Baldur Thor is no longer my very favorite, though, because last week I rung up a woman named Laufey. I now will not rest until I've collected the entire Norse pantheon!! (Terrible life choices.)

I've finally stopped dithering about and showing Housemate K the Angel/Buffy crossover episodes from the first two seasons of Angel, and we've officially embarked upon season six. I'm gonna ... very judiciously edit, for my own self-care, although I think the only one we're actually tapping out of entirely is Hell's Bells. Possibly we'll do Once More With Feeling tonight! And meanwhile I've given up on basically all other tv except Elementary and Warehouse 13 with Polaris, because PERFECT SHOWS ARE PERFECT, or at least mostly perfect, and if I need a break from Buffy I might do judicious rewatches.

Also WisCon is in three weeks! I feel a little bit like I'm carefully pulling myself from one nice thing to the next -- post-work telly-watching with K! adventures with scribe this coming Friday! out-of-town friend visiting next weekend! WISCONNN -- but I also feel like that's okay right now, and a lot better than I was doing, and honestly if I have a series of bright points to head towards, that feels much nicer than the tired determined slog.

Today I was ringing up a woman who gave her name as Annie. "Like the little orphan, I guess," this Annie said. "Actually," said I, "I associate that name with the character on Community; have you seen it?" She was familiar, she said, but only because her roommate watched it, so I explained a bit about Annie Edison, with great enthusiasm, while I got her change. "Okay, sold," Annie said. "I'll totally check it out." VICTORY!

Unrelated to Annie, a protip: if you don't deign to get off your fucking phone whilst ordering coffee, your barista may be smiling, but they will probably also be harboring warm fuzzy thoughts of totally murdering you right in the face.

I don't ... actually spend a lot of time at work imagining barista AUs, but the Avengers one would be so easy. Like, Nick Fury owns the coffee shop, obviously; I don't know what the coffee shop is called, because I can't think of any coffee-related puns with the word "shield" in them. Whatever. Coulson and Hill and Natasha run shifts; Clint has been there longer than Tasha, and got her hired, and watched starry-eyed while she got promoted, and may or may not be dating her. The other baristas are Steve, art student; Bruce, PhD student who works weekends; Janet, who hates the part where she has to get coffee for her asshole ex-boyfriend Hank every morning; Loki, who got Frigga in the high school divorce and needs this job to pay for college; and Thor, who got Odin in the divorce and could totally be a junior partner at dad's company but is rebelling in what Loki thinks is the most irritating way possible by working at the same stupid coffee shop. Tony, obviously, is that one regular who flirts with absolutely everyone (especially Natasha and Bruce) despite the fact that Pepper meets him there half the time. And I guess this coffee shop is near a school with a good science program, because Jane is obviously also there, and has recently become a regular in order to stare at Thor more frequently. (Darcy endorses this.) Uh so probs Reed Richards uses it as his local too, and ... probably the X-Men are around too; Charles and Erik play chess in the back room every day. And I'm going to stop now! But this AU would be SO EASY, whee.

I am ... spectacularly bad at having an internet presence! I mean, I reblog things on tumblr, but most of the time I'm not generating my own content and I treat it much more as a squee repository than any kind of blog, so in my head it doesn't count. In any case, hello! It is fall! I love this time of year because rather than throwing on a t-shirt and shorts in a desultory fashion and laying around wilting in the heat, I am wandering around in sweeping coats through autumn mists and planning actual outfits with layers and enjoying the turning of the leaves and consuming all the pumpkin products and generally adoring this season. Meanwhile, on the fannish front:

+ Doctor Who! Having now seen all of Amy's arc, I still think they fell down a bit in the middle with season six, but in the end they did right by her and by Rory, and I got a bit teary. I think I'll be tracking down lots of coda fic, and I may eventually compile a recs list, but at the moment, here is the first coda fic my face saw: Detectives, Adventurers and Girls Who Don't Wait Around by lizbee; highly recommended, made me feel much better about this whole Amy-being-gone nonsense.

+ Warehouse 13! Oh my gosh Warehouse 13, this silly SyFy (nooo it still pains me to type that) show that I've been mainlining over the past few weeks. I'm all caught up now, of course just as the half-season finale aired, so everything is naturally terrible and dire to hook you into coming back in April. In any case, Warehouse 13 is for the most part truly lovely; it has canon queers and lots of ladies (who consistently talk about plot things) and I have actual hopes for a canon endgame f/f ship and it's possibly hands-down the best show about found family I have ever seen. Actually this post by thingswithwings talks with more eloquence and enthusiasm about this show than I possibly could. I just love it so.

+ Avengers! Not that ... any new exciting Avengers things have happened (although I am greatly enjoying the steady influx of Thor 2 set pictures) but my stupid fic continues apace; besides all the bits that are written out of order, I have nearly 10,000 chronological words and Thor and Loki have still yet to get the fuck off Asgard, so I've resigned myself to the fact that this fic is going to be a monster. Meanwhile the always-lovely Emma volunteered to make me a Thor sundress, for which we went fabric-shopping yesterday, so for Halloween I'm going to be Thor, with Emma along as my Loki. (Housemate K, meanwhile, is going to attempt to make me a paper-mache helmet. I expect it will look quite stupid but K is in fact a crafts wizard, so we shall see.)

+ Polaris and I are watching Veronica Mars! I haven't watched VMars since college, and I forgot how much I adore it. I ... also forgot how much I ship Veronica/Lilly and any iteration of Veronica/Logan/Weevil, so possibly after this rewatch I will be on the hunt for good fic.

Today, hangouts with Sares! Tonight, contra with Tyler posse! Life is ... pretty good, guys.

Re: the Hobbit: I ... am really not that thrilled it's three movies now! MORE is not necessarily BETTER, and I legitimately just want a lovingly filmed version of the book that was my actual favorite thing when I was five. Two films, excellent, no need to leave anything out! Three films, I am suddenly concerned about pacing issues and what they will add and ... ahh, I don't know. I am still quite fond of Peter Jackson, but like many directors/showrunners/other wildly successful creative people, he kind of needs someone to tell him when to stop.

Re: Beasts of the Southern Wild: SO GOOD, YOU GUYS, SO GOOD. I don't have anything particularly coherent or spoilery to say, just that I loved it lots and Hushpuppy is the best six-year-old in the entire universe, and possibly also if you're going to see it you should 'ware shakycam if that sort of thing is an issue. But really just. SO GOOD. (And for afters Amiel and I snuck into the middle of The Dark Knight Rises IMAX Experience the next theater over, and spent about five minutes in silent hysterical laughter at Batman and Bane doing DEEP DRAMATIC GRAVELLY VOICES at each other before we snuck back out again to get dinner. Good times!)

Re: Teen Wolf: I ADMIT IT I SUCCUMBED. Enough people whose opinions I find interesting had started to talk about it, so I gave the first few episodes a go, and probably would have stopped except that Polaris follows a lot of the same people I do and was also curious. We watched season one together, a few episodes a night; it was all good silly fun, and then one evening we were cooking dinner or something and started wailing "STIIIILES" at each other. Now I am soldiering forward and enduring the HORRIBLE PAIN of season two alone because [a] I cannot stop or wait and [b] this way I can warn Polaris of the trauma to come. I keep legitimately screaming at the screen! I am SO INVESTED. I have no idea how this happened, but Teen Wolf is a DISEASE, the main symptoms of which seem to be CAPSLOCK IN EMPHASIS and anguished wails of "STIIIILES."

Re: Avengers: ahahdslkfsjkf okay so this fic I am writing. It is my long Avengers found family fic, of course, because I absolutely have to write that; having batted it around with various people, I've narrowed it down from being about absolutely everyone to ... still being about everyone, I guess, but entirely from Thor's POV. This will be an exciting journey! in which Thor and I figure out how the hell to deal with lots of fraught emotions when Thor doesn't have the vocabulary for most of them. Hopefully it will be fun and rewarding and full of unreliable narration and will not drive me totally up the wall! Meantime it's at about 5000 words right now, we haven't even begun to leave Asgard yet, and Amiel laughs at me whenever I venture the hope that this fic will come in under 50,000. Ahaha. Haha.

So the other day, Amiel posited to me that, if there's one thing Loki and all the Avengers can actually agree on, it's that Lady Gaga is awesome. HAHA YES OBVIOUSLY, I said in great delight, and we left it at that, until last night when Amiel sent me possibly the greatest ever series of text messages:

Amiel: Re: the Lady Gaga headcanon I said earlier -- Fury doesn't get it. Until someone shows him one of the music videos. Then he decides okay, I kinda like that.
Amiel: I'M FIGURING OUT EVERYONE'S FAVORITE SONG NOW.
Aria: TELL ME.
Amiel: Emma had the genius suggestion that Bruce loves "Born This Way" and no one makes the obvious comment that he, uh, wasn't. Might be about the Hulk, to Bruce.
Amiel: And Steve works out to "Just Dance" (and takes a Tonyish sort of motivation from it if he overthinks it).
Amiel: I can't decide if Clint or Coulson has "You and I" as their favorite. But if it's Coulson, Clint likes "Alejandro" but will belt "Teeth" with no shame.
Amiel: Tony's favorite is "Beautiful, Dirty, Rich" because *sigh*, Tony.
Amiel: Natasha likes "Paparazzi," mostly because of the music video.
Aria: THESE ARE FUCKING PERFECT. Asgard bros?
Amiel: Thor's I don't know! Help me with it. I know he likes a lot of her songs. I think he loves "Born This Way" and "Edge of Glory."
Aria: I think "Edge of Glory" sounds right!
Amiel: Loki -- no one knows his favorite because he tells different people different ones. He tells Tony "Bad Romance" because that's what Tony expects. Because Thor is subtle about NOTHING, including hickeys etc, Loki quietly tells Steve his favorite is "I Like It Rough" because it makes Steve make a worried face. He tells Thor "Poker Face" or "Monster," depending on what upsets him more. I'll let you guess his actual favorite, though I know what it is.
Aria: Ok, I'll be a bit silly & guess "Marry the Night."
Amiel: Good god, you got it right.
Aria: IT MADE SENSE! But I am still hilariously pleased.

File under: good reference conversations for the stupid epic Avengers fic I'm writing; also file under reasons I need to have a billion fannish gchats with were_duck.

( Loki feelings, accompanying Thor/Loki feelings, Avengers spoilers. )

Originally we were going to wait until Saturday like responsible adults, but last night Polaris got home from work and we stared at one another for about two seconds and then she ran back out of the house to buy us tickets to the midnight show. Our audience, unsurprisingly, was really into it. I wouldn't accuse them of being one of the best opening weekend crowds, but the entire theatre groaned and booed the preview of Battleship, and cheered lots for Amazing Spider-Man and Prometheus, which was pretty great. They also laughed and screamed and cheered -- sometimes all three at once -- which means I definitely missed some of this film's better lines. I guess I'll just have to see it again! Oh the hardship.

( Spoilers under the cut! Lots of enthusiastic feelings about everything, but mostly about Loki, you know the drill. )

In conclusion, I would love roughly a billion more of these films, by which I mean I am stupidly psyched for Iron Man 3 and Thor 2 (!!!) and the probably-happening new Hulk which I actually have some faith in, and man can't they just make Avengers 2 INSTANTLY? That would be pretty great.

Now I'm going to have lunch and watch last night's Community and do my best to convince my brain that I need to get a few things done today and cannot actually neglect everything including food in favor of writing the torrent of Thor/Loki fic that is building up in my mind.

I saw Captain America last night! I also saw hilarious previews for some bewildering version of Three Musketeers where Orlando Bloom is evil, everything is steampunk, and D'Artagnan has an American accent, and for the new Spiderman, which has a weirdly Twilight aesthetic. But never mind that, Cap was more interesting.

( Spoilers! This is a weird patchwork reaction post made of IM conversations, paragraphing, getting sidetracked by Thor shoutouts, my general feelings of AWW STEVE, and a drinking game. )

And then there was the AVENGERS TRAILER. I ... didn't actually realize how excited I was about this (or maybe how Loki-deprived, idk) until the trailer started playing, and I started shaking. Seriously, I was sitting there in the theatre VIBRATING WITH JOY and slowly chewing through my lip so I didn't start making obnoxious or obscene noises. I don't really have anything spoilery to say, I'm just really fucking excited. WHEN IS MAY 2012.

In conclusion, though, know what I would absolutely watch? A film in which Sif decides, screw this boys' club, I'm going to Midgard and being useful, and when she gets there she runs into Natasha, and they train together and teach each other tricks, and Sif can't quite get a read on Natasha but is pretty delighted regardless. Meanwhile, Pepper notices this and uses her CEO powers to get them a nice place to do all this, and coordinates the effort to intercept intelligence about where their skills might be useful. Jane can be there for SCIENCE, of, y'know, the handwavey Marvel variety, and Darcy does all their tech stuff. Also, Peggy was frozen or something, handwaaave, and now she's around to do the intel when Pepper's too busy with her million other responsibilities, and when Pepper's free, Peggy goes on missions with Sif and Natasha. They can still fight Loki, I guess; maybe in this universe Loki is Doom's evil girlfriend, and they're the big bads, although if we're going outside the Marvel Studios' properties with Doom, I move that Emma and Mystique are also around, either fighting or causing crime. THAT IS THE FILM I WANT TO SEE.

I'm still pretty excited about Avengers, though.