a conspiracy of cartographers

sdkdsfk my Fourth of July was amaaazing. Polaris and I made delicious burgers and watched 1776 over cake, singing along with all the songs and mouthing along with the dialogue; in the evening I met up with Emma and Amiel, and we went to see fireworks along the river. It was hands-down the best fireworks show I've ever seen, not only because the finale was quite literally breathtaking, but also because just after the fireworks started there was an absolute deluge of rain, so my glasses smeared the fireworks too bright to see and I laughed until I cried a little.

I'm also going on travel adventures to see thingswithwings and eruthros tomorrow, which I am absurdly excited about, so today's my day of quiet sandwiched in between lovely things.

Wow, I have become genuinely the worst at regular posting. It isn't tumblr's fault (tumblr: dangerously convenient for all my staring-at-Loki's-face needs); mostly it's that I'm living with fannish people and hanging out in person with fannish people and &c &c, so instead of yelling at the internet about all my Avengers feelings, I've been doing the same in physical spaces.

In any case, stuff that's been happening:

+ Housemate K really loves to contra dance, but hasn't really been able to since moving in with us and losing regular access to a car. While I was off at WisCon she had a talk with Amiel about this which resulted in the realization that Amiel in fact does have a car, so ... last week? or two weeks ago now, K and I met up with Amiel and Emma and we all went to contra! I LOVED IT SO MUCH OMG. I had to sit out every other dance to keep my lungs from strangling me, and there were a few dances where I didn't pick up how to not crash into everyone until about halfway through, but I was better at it than I expected and I really want to do it every week. We'll see if it actually becomes a habit!

+ This last weekend we finally had our Gondor-warming, Tyler posse edition, and my North Carolina friends were also visiting. I think everyone had a fairly good time -- we went to Pride on Saturday, and demolished most of the tea and booze in the apartment, and played fandom Apples to Apples, and had low-key hangouts. Of course this all happened during what's been for me an astonishingly bad brain week (like, I keep panicking for no goddamn reason, and I'm hoping it's just worse-than-usual hormonal stuff and it'll abate soon) so I wasn't up to quite the quality of hosting I would've wanted. But it was still excellent to have everyone over; seriously I have so many good friends, I don't even know how this happened but it's wonderful.

+ Okay, this isn't actually something that's happening to me personally, but I was poking around Tom Hiddleston's wiki page, as one does, and I discovered that next year he's in a film where he and Tilda Swinton are vampires in love? And. I don't actually care whether it's completely stupid and terrible, Amiel and songofsongs and I have basically made a pact to go see it together and clutch each other a lot and wail, because for some reason the universe is giving us Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton as vampires in love. But before that, the universe is also giving us Hiddleston's Prince Hal! And for that, oliviacirce is coming up, and she and Emma and I are going to watch it and clutch each other, and maybe wail a little but in slightly dignified ways. Friends for every Tom Hiddleston occasion!

...I think I just need to give up and resign myself to having a Hiddleston tag on DW too.

LIFE IS SO BUSY AND EXCITING. I suspect I have long since lost that wonderful ability I had in college to craft exciting narratives about the beauty of everyday life, so instead, in scattered list form, some things I have been up to lately:

+ Weekend with the Tyler posse! I suspect I should resurrect my Tyler posse tag, because everything these excellent humans do is a source of joy to me. At school they serenaded me outside my window and pulled me along on various adventures; this last weekend we went to a burlesque show and held a housewarming party for one of our number, in which the chief activities were tipsy Fandom Apples to Apples and a watching of Black Books for afters.

+ Probably not deserving of its own bullet-point, road-tripping with Amiel for Tyler posse shenanigans! I mention it mostly because the drive back was three hours of winding New England back roads and loud music to keep us awake, and it took maaaaybe half an hour before we started calling each other Dean and Sammy. ("My hair is too long to be Dean's," Amiel observed, as their hair was indeed at about four fluffy inches; "Well, mine's too short to be Sam's," I said.) NO REGRETS.

+ Monday was Paul Newman & Robert Redford Films With Polaris and Housemate K! Somehow I had gone through life without seeing either Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid or The Sting? That has now been remedied! I spent a good portion of Butch Cassidy yelling "HOW IS THIS ON MY SCREEN" re: the OT3. Maybe I will see it again next time I am in the mood for threesomes and tragic last stands.

+ K and I spent pretty much all of yesterday watching Babylon 5. We got through EIGHT EPISODES. Only one more episode of first season to go! Let me tell you, internet, yesterday's eight episodes were all tragically barren and G'Kar-less, although they did have lots of good Londo and Delenn and Ivanova. I am looking forward so much to season two. I am also a bit tempted to start taking frantic notes and attempt to resume my meta rewatch, but my meta rewatch relied heavily on my ability to actually remember things that happen, and though bits of Londo and G'Kar's arc are stamped indelibly on my memory, it's been two years and the joy of this rewatch is in the discovery of things.

+ K & her girlfriend made really delicious chocolate chip cookies the other day. I'm now going to eat the last of them like a motherfucking adult.

This just in: fish sticks with custard actually taste amazing.

Discovery brought to you by last night's rewatch of Eleventh Hour in good company and with lots of good food, including aforementioned fish sticks. Technically the custard was more like pudding, but the gist is the same. And DELICIOUS.

First proper snow of winter! Weather.com insists we're only getting an estimated three inches, but at the bus stop this morning I would have guessed it was about five. Snow always puts me in a ridiculously good mood. And then I celebrate by listening to the Victoria's Secret instrumental music and lots of Sarah McLachlan. Shut up, it's great.

I've also been watching Lost Girl! I do not feel really fannish about it, but it's just so lovely and stupid and cute. Our two main characters are these great women who are BFFs and solve crime; I would ship them a lot except that there are also other good canonical femslash ships, and also a werewolf detective. A werewolf freaking detective. It's a lot of things I really love, like silly and nerdy and full of pretty people, and I think quality of life is improved by watching it.

Something I am feeling fannish about is Sarah Rees Brennan's Demon's Lexicon books, which I have finally, finally gotten around to reading. I'm in the middle of Demon's Covenant at the moment, and I am so ridiculously in love. The second I am done, I am tracking down all the fic! And then probably writing some! Because I ship EVERYTHING. (Well, not everything -- I mean, if there's Mae/Jamie I don't want to read it. But possibly my OTP is Nick/Alan. Shut up shut up I know.)

I guess the point of this post is that I have hilarious, ridiculous taste. Just to prove it beyond reasonable doubt, have a link to the University of Oregon all-male a cappella group On the Rocks performing Bad Romance. With dance routines. It is amazing, and watching it makes me grin hard enough to make my face hurt.

Yesterday was amazing. I spent all of it with were_duck and themeletor, having fabulous fangirl shenanigans: we went to the farmer's market; I listened happily to bandom squee and in return flailed about Star Trek (over the course of the day, our conversations included quite a few variations on "they are not the hell your whales!" and I'm pretty sure at one point we recited large bits of Shatner on the Mount); they introduced me to Horatio Hornblower, and I discovered to my mild shock that when Jamie Bamber uses his actual accent and is more of a woobie than I can actually cope with, I start to find him genuinely attractive; and then we went on our road trip to see an Adam Lambert concert!

I mostly went for the fangirl shenanigans and because of course if Adam Lambert was readily available of course I was going to see a concert, but I pretty much expected we'd be too far away to see properly, and that I would enjoy the songs I liked, but that was only about half of them. HA HA LITTLE DID I KNOW. We were close enough to the stage to see fairly well -- not individual-features close, but nearly -- and my god does that man have stage presence. (No one is surprised. :D) To my astonishment, the songs that I usually like were great but the songs I usually skip (I think most notably Soaked) were fucking phenomenal; there was much clutching of hands among our fangirl trio. The best bit, though was when ... man, I don't even remember which song it was, I was thoroughly distracted -- Adam broke out the cane and danced with it. I move that he does this all the time.

Today I woke up covered in glitter, mostly because the absurd silver eyeshadow I put on yesterday now yearns to be freeee, so that was hilarious. I am completely exhausted, and I am fairly sure I have no voice, thanks to yelling along with songs for two hours and last night's ambient cigarette smoke. I managed to croak a goodbye to Mel when she left this morning, but I am fairly sure that all I would like to do today is sit quietly with a cup of tea and bask.

In conclusion: the most fucking amazing and absurd Adam Lambert fanart I have ever seen EVER, now with bonus fic, oh my god, I want to cover this fandom with sparkles and love. And then get tea and watch Star Trek. Mmm.

Went to a wedding last night; had a fantastic time; had to actively refrain from doing Eleven's stupid flail-arms-wildly-above-head dance.

Speaking of Eleven, and how I am still married to the idea that Benedict Cumberbatch should play the Master, I even have some photographic evidence for my argument, namely this picture of both of them with Moffat. All three of them look hilariously awkward, but -- look at Smith and Cumberbatch's strange, strange faces! It is MEANT TO BE, I say.

(Aside: further wiki tabs now open for the purposes of Methos fic include crucifixion and a map of the Roman Empire circa 117 AD. Oh self. Get a new favourite character, one who hopefully doesn't require research on death by crucifixion.)

Yesterday oliviacirce and I frosted about a hundred tiny cupcakes and watched Tennant's Hamlet. My soul is soothed and contented.

Today I woke up with a raging cold, and if my head feels sufficiently uncottony, I'll be apartment-hunting. In the meanwhile, though, this is a comfort-fic-and-telly day. This also means it is a meme day, because I am sufficiently ill that I can mess around guilt-free! Therefore:

Give me a fandom, and I'll give you

1. The first character I fell in love with:
2. The character I never expected to love as much as I do now:
3. The character everyone else loves that I don’t:
4. The character I love that everyone else hates:
5. The character I would shag anytime:
6. The character I'd want to be like:
7. The character I'd slap:
8. A pairing that I love:
9. A pairing that I despise:
10. Favorite character:
11. My five favorite things about the fandom:
12. My five least favorite things about the fandom:
13. My five favorite characters:
14. My five least favorite characters:
15. My five favorite pairings:
16. My five least favorite pairings:
17. The character I am most like:
18. My deep, dark fandom secret:

Things have been absolutely mad for the past few days; rayruz and I helped inanimategrace move a dorm room's worth of stuff through various locales in and around Philadelphia, which is officially my least favourite city to drive in ever even if I only had to sit shotgun and navigate. Since returning home I have been in a Babylon 5-watching coma and getting nothing done, but I am slowly recovering.

While I was away from the internet, interesting & important things have been happening! Here is a quick link roundup, in roughly descending order of importance:

i. A good list of donation links for Haiti; I'm sure everyone's already seen it, but it can't hurt to signal-boost some more. The entire fandom mobilization makes me glow. I should probably shuffle belatedly over to the bidding, but in the meantime I've been using the cell texting option; bless technology, guys.

ii. The majority of slashers identify as queer! I am not sure how accurate those results actually are, but as melannen says in the post, so far there is nothing better or more comprehensive. Anyway, I am really happy to see this, because while I suspected that the "slashers are all straight white housewives" notion was probably outdated, it's nice to have a few numbers besides my own flist/rlist demographics.

iii. Festivids Masterlist! I love getting a whole influx of new vids at once, and I am hoping that at reveal time there will be tasty downloads. Everything here is really hugely great, and I haven't gone through them all, but I am particularly enamored of Here It Goes Back Again [Back to the Future] & tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow [Slings & Arrows].

iv. DIAMOND OCEANS. I mean, it's possible that Uranus &/or Neptune could have diamond oceans. This concept is just so vastly bogglingly awesome that I keep staring at the article in sheer joy.

v. The view out my window. Weather.com even promises more snow this week! Time for me to break out the Victoria's Secret incidental music and the Narnia soundtrack and go trudging gleefully through the snow.

Haha dear god today in things I never want to do again: drive a car, for the first time in a year, at night on unfamiliar roads in a TORRENTIAL DOWNPOUR. I am alive and not too many people even tailed me, but that is seriously not an experience I want to repeat.

Today in things I do want to do again: watch the Star Trek film! which is what I in fact just did do again, and why I was out driving at night in a rainstorm. I have to say, though, upon a rewatch I am very happy for the Spock/Uhura shippers and the Kirk/Bones shippers and the OT3-ers and any other shippers that I haven't yet seen come out of the woodwork, and me personally I am there for pretty much any crew combination you want to give me, but honestly? I just want more Kirk/Spock. (Including recs! I have been too lazy to track down almost any fic, but I think I want some now.)

Now I am going to watch the thunderstorm. :D