a flying start (five things make a happy post)

[aria]

Here are some things that are making me happy:

i. According to an explosion of news on the internet this morning -- I would link a specific article, but really, just google the keywords -- Stephen Fry is going to be playing Mycroft Holmes in the next Guy Ritchie film. I had a split second of "Well, that is awesome because I will watch Stephen Fry do anything, but I can't picture him and RDJ as brothers" and then I spent another split second picturing them side-by-side, and ... yeah, actually, that works stunningly well. SO MUCH JOY. Here, have a stupid catchy song about Stephen Fry in celebration.

ii. I am now officially going to the East Coast for an alarmingly long stretch of time in October. I plan to use my time there well, ie keep doing my internship, take long rambling walks of campus, spend obscene amounts of time with friends, and plan The Future. I am very excited about all of this, and stupidly relieved at how excited I am.

iii. sophia_sol made me a podfic! by which I mean she recorded my Slings & Arrows Geoffrey/Darren fic high on a stage be placed to the view. I am learning to adore podfic -- for one thing, how I read something is very different from how another person does, which leads to fuzzy feelings of egocentric fascination when I hear my own fic read. But it is equally awesome when it is other people's fic! I don't know why I don't listen to podfic all the time, honestly, because I love being read aloud to, and I have enough of a daily commute now to justify tracking lots down and listening to it. I guess this is me asking for podfic recs! D'you have any favorite fics, or even favorite readers? I would love to hear about them!

iv. Remember how yesterday I linked to Diane Duane's fic about Five and Nyssa making pizza? Today there is A Dinner in Belgravia, wherein Five fails to locate pasta, Tegan makes a horrible pun about the Master, and they and Nyssa pay a visit to Sherlock Holmes. I made actual flappy hands of joy. Yep.

v. The ridiculous charming thing about living with a nine-year-old boy (for the sake of argument let's call him Zack) is that he is just now, for the first time, reading Harry Potter. This leads to some pretty great exchanges. For example:

ZACK. I'm on Chamber of Secrets now! The Chamber is open and a monster is turning everyone into stone and Harry just found this diary, and it's a magic diary! Know why it's a magic diary?
ME. Well, when he writes in it, someone in the diary writes back, right?
ZACK. [wide-eyed] How did you know?
ME. ...I've read it too.

Or, coming across Zack and a friend crouched on the sidewalk, industriously poking a bucket of mud with sticks:

ME. Hey, guys! What are you doing?
ZACK. We're making a potion! I'm Harry, and she's Hermione, and Ron's sick right now, so we're making this to make him better.
ME. I see! Good luck.

It kind of makes me wish I'd been young enough when Harry Potter first came out to do stuff like that. Mud potions, guys! Alternately, I am really tempted to send Zack is Hogwarts acceptance letter next year. Really, really tempted.

Comments

[skipthedemon]

.....I love you guys.

At 10 is was the Dragons of Pern. Eleven was Ender's Game, which was the series of my heart for a good long while. Twelve was Lord of the Rings. I was 17 when Harry Potter came out. My age, let me show you it. I was a pretentious snot about HP, because I was stupidly of the opinion that anything that popular, that fast? Had to be bad.

Of course Twilight proved my point later, but anyway. I didn't read HP until the 3rd book came out.

[aria]

I was a pretentious snot about HP, because I was stupidly of the opinion that anything that popular, that fast? Had to be bad.

I am so not judging you for that, because I was that way too, especially when I was a kid. (Seriously, I didn't see Star Wars until I was fourteen! Everyone had seen it, so it couldn't be that good. And it took me until this year to watch Star Trek. My god.) Anyway, I managed to get on board with Harry Potter when only the first book was out purely by the virtue of reading it roughly a month become it became an overnight sensation. I thought it was cool BEFORE IT WAS COOL, and wasn't that a weird feeling.

[skipthedemon]

I think it probably has to do with us geeky type kids, who did not have geeky friends growing up, not knowing what to do when people like what we like. Yes, we all would have died to have a handful of people our age to share this stuff with. It could have been our secret club.

The whole world liking it? Is scary. And possibly means we're not special. Therefore, this thing everyone likes cannot be special.

Such is the non logic of insecure teenagers.