Okay, I will confess to knowing almost nothing about this fandom, but you can't do an enemyslash recs set and leave out Perry and Doofenschmirtz! They are the grand ideal of enemy pairings.

Pretty much my entire canon knowledge is from this fanvid. Perry the Platypus is an ordinary cuddly suburban pet, indistinguishable from any other platypus - until he puts on his official fedora, and is instantly recognizable as Agent P, a top agent of OWCA, professional and ultracompetent thwarter of evildoers. His assigned nemesis is Dr. Heinz Doofenschmirtz, and he thwarts his every evil scheme with vigor! Then sometimes on their days off they go out to dinner together. They are a very well-matched agent-nemesis pair.

I would probably be deeper into this fandom but a lot of the fic is on ff.net - I was maybe going to rec some, but I haven't been by for awhile and oh my god, the ads, it's completely unreadable. And a lot of what's on AO3 is always-a-human AU, much of it untagged. And it's not that I have anything against always-a-human AUs but if I'm looking for fic about a mad scientist who loves a platypus I want it to be about a platypus, you know? So here's three good ones from AO3.

• Time Out (1276 words) by radondoran
  Fandom: Phineas and Ferb
  Rating: General Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Heinz Doofenshmirtz/Perry the Platypus
  Additional Tags: Hurt/Comfort, Fluff, UST, Fainting
  
  Things go a little astray when Perry's nemesis faints during a fight.



• And Many More (9763 words) by WingSongHalo
  Chapters: 5/5
  Fandom: Phineas and Ferb
  Rating: General Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Perry the Platypus/Heinz Doofenshmirtz, Heinz Doofenshmirtz/Perry the Platypus
  Additional Tags: Fluff, cuteness
  
  People are acting suspicious around Perry at the Agency. He's starting to think he shouldn't have listed his nemesis as his plus one to the annual banquet.



• Changing Times (3017 words) by dreamiflame
  Chapters: 1/1
  Fandom: Phineas and Ferb
  Rating: General Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Heinz Doofenshmirtz/Perry the Platypus
  Additional Tags: First Dates, Inators, Human Perry
  For reasons that definitely made sense at the time, Doofenschmirtz invented a machine to turn Perry temporarily human.

For some of the fandoms on my list I put a pairing. For some of them I just put a character. For this fandom I just put Malcolm Tucker. Malcolm Tucker had the well-honed ability to turn anybody he met into a mortal enemy in about ten seconds flat. It's amazing to watch. And he had strung-tight bastard sexual chemistry with all of them.

The Thick of It was a satire/drama show about British politics in the late 90s/aughts. It was really good but has become to depressing for me to rewatch as politics in RL has slowly circled the drain since then. But Malcom Tucker is still compelling. He is the party's PR wizard, and every possible HR violation in one expletive-wrapped package. He has zero ethics but a giant heart, which he takes out and stomps on occasionally to keep it in line. The enemy vibe here is that he hates everybody and respects nobody, except the people he kind of secretly doesn't despite trying his best, and everybody hates and fears him, except the people who don't quite manage it despite trying their best, and everybody is theoretically working toward the same goals but they've all massively betrayed each other at least twice.

Coming up with recs here was surprisingly hard because when I go to the tToI tag I just kind of descend into a fugue state of obscene Scotsmen and don't remember anything after I emerge, but here are three that stuck with me enough to track them down again. These are all Nicola/Malcolm; I had some Malcolm/Jamie and Julius too but more of this fandom than I realized is archive-locked and/or share-button-disabled, and I try not to rec archive-locked stuff if I notice? But those ships are good to. (Nicola/Malcolm is particularly good though because it's always sweetened by knowing she's the only one who managed to fight him all the way to mutual destruction in the end.) (These three all coincidentally involve Nicola cheating on her husband but he's a scumbag so we don't care.)

• The Nobel Prize of Bad Decisions (5057 words) by Monksandbones
  Fandom: The Thick of It (TV)
  Rating: Explicit
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Nicola Murray/Malcolm Tucker
  Additional Tags: Mildly Dubious Consent, Remix, POV Female Character, Office Sex, Infidelity, Complicated Relationships, Not Quite Hatesex, Talking About It Almost Like Grownups, Season/Series 03
  
  Nicola and Malcolm snap and fuck in his office in the middle of a fight, and the worst part is that it's good.



• Unsteady Ground (10108 words) by mardia
  Fandom: The Thick of It (TV)
  Rating: Mature
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Nicola Murray/Malcolm Tucker
  Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Season/Series 03, Infidelity
  Nicola finally files for divorce. It's not because of what happened with Malcolm, but it's not not about that, either.


• (I Move A Little Bit Closer) For Reasons Unknown (7688 words) by Tricki
  Fandom: The Thick of It (TV)
  Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
  Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
  Relationships: Nicola Murray/Malcolm Tucker, James Murray/Nicola Murray
  Additional Tags: Dresses, Political Parties, Black Tie, Implied/Referenced Cheating, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Protectiveness, Between season 3/4, Newspapers
  
  They dance.
  

MacGyver was a 1980s TV show in which a young Richard Dean Anderson was very competent and solved problems. I think he was sort of a consulting secret agent, the way Holmes was a consulting detective? He worked for a place called the Phoenix Foundation and was sent around the world to, like, help people who were being menaced. But don't worry even on his days off he still ended up in situation where he had to be very competent and solve problems.

I actually did watch a considerable amount of this show in reruns in the late aughties! I never did get more than a very vague idea of the setup or, indeed, anything except a very young RDA being ludicrously competent at everything and making the world better. It was one of those shows from back when every episode had to stand alone and they didn't have to make everything part of a giant mytharc where you have to have just binged the previous six seasons to know what's going on - instead, nobody expected you to ever know what was going on, and that was fine, just watch RDA be competent and pretty. (Am I the only one who misses those days?) You had to catch certain very specific episodes if you wanted any kind of backstory or character arc, and I think I missed most of them. The theme music was very good, it was my ringtone for awhile, and RDA was very competent and determined and ethical and pretty.

(There was also a reboot? That ran six seasons and only just ended? I know zilch about it. It does not seem to have made much of a splash.)

There isn't a ton of fanfic for it and I have read even less, but a lot of what exists is MacGyver/Murdoc. Don't ask me to remember anything about Murdoc either - he's some kind of recurring antagonist? An assassin? Works for the bad guys?

Anyway there is one M/M fic that's on my "never lose track of" list. I don't know that it's "good" by today's standards but sometimes you just want a really good oldfashioned h/c amnesiafic enemyslash extreme whump wallow, right? And this one is the best at being what it is. So only one link today. It's on insanejournal!

• Oh My Enemy by janecarnall
  21 chapters, MacGyver/Murdoc, explicit, needs Archive warnings for probably violence and torture and dubcon? Suicidal ideation. etc.
  
  Murdoc is released from the hospital, still partially disabled by his injuries, with no memory at all and his only link to his past and his identity the person who paid his hospitals bills: one Angus MacGyver, who must care a lot about him to do that for him. But when Murdoc shows up on MacGyver's doorstop, almost out of money and barely able to walk, MacGyver isn't acting like somebody who cares about him...
  
  (Note: if you follow the links on the chapters, they sometimes go back to a deleted LJ; keep clicking back to the memories linked in the rec and you can read it all.)

...hey, the first fandom on this list where I didn't have a tag!

1. \o/ I wrote 1700 words today after about a week of not much! On yuletide, even! Unfortunately not my assigned yuletide, but we try. Now, can I do that for all of November?

2. I am really excited for my actual assignment but I have a pile of background reading about a foot high to do as much of as I can first, and I keep adding to the pile. Raise your hand if you're surprised.

3. I.. may or may not actually get around to writing a letter...? YT writer, you're fine with what's in the assignment email and in the old letters, right? Nothing has changed I promise.

4. I am not doing super-well with, like, keeping up with life. But then this is the time of year when my body thinks I should be preparing to hibernate. And I think work is getting more back into a routine? Maybe? If they manage to fix the roof before it falls in?

5. I finished rewatch of S1 of Leverage! I forgot that my tragedy in that fandom is that all I actually want out of it is a long, meaty, hilarious pre-canon fic about Nate and Sophie chasing each other all over Europe. But I cannot write it because the bits of backstory are spread out over many, many canon episodes and I am not a person who can consume AV fandoms in a way that will let me collate all that. And all the current fandom gives me is The Best OT3 Ever, and don't get me wrong, I love them all and I love their canon OT3, but. The Golden Trio basically already have figured out who they are and have decided they like who they are and the only problem they need solved is finding other people who agree with them about liking who they are, and they've pretty much got that solved by halfway though S1, the rest is all details. Sophie, on the other hand. Sophie has layers. (I really really love the fact that the S1 ender that you expected to be all about Nate and his manpain ended up actually being about Sophie's issues and Sophie's past. Sooophie. Every time I tried to write OT3 it ended up being about Sophie and figuring out Sophie is HARD so I never finished anything.)

(now I remember, I stopped watching in the first place because Sophie left. At least now I know she definitely comes back after.)

Other things I would like that the fandom is not giving me: Sophie/Eliot. Maggie/Parker. Five-way found family telepathic soulbond (which is basically canon already, the way they use the earbuds thematically is SO GREAT, now I just need the post-canon fic where Nate and Sophie are off on a cruise somewhere and start hearing the other three on a job even though they don't have earbuds in.)

6. *cough* anyway

So jjhunter and I have been talking about Ancillary London (or maybe Rivers of the Radch?) You should come join us.

Also somebody needs to convince me I don't actually need to read The Science of Discworld in order to write Rivers of Ankh-Morpork. Even if Peter Grant probably has read it already.

I have the first comics trade but haven't read it yet because I have been reading Peter as looking vaguely like, oh, Rainbow Sun Franck c. SGA, and Thomas looking vaguely like Tim Gunn or sth, and at least judging by the cover, that is really not where the comic went with character designs, so I am scared.

7. Also I keep switching between Fivethirtyeight to obsess and Leverage to watch evil corrupt billionaires cry, which was a mistake, because now I want a story about the *other* Nate being the mastermind of a team of the world's greatest criminals. And they were a YT nom. And they could pull off a great caper plot, I am convinced. Whiz Kid Harry drinking his endless bottles of diet root beer that he somehow finds even in the middle of Antarctica. I just can't think of anything I want to see them steal.

via everybody: When you see this, share 3 random lines from 3 WIPs.

I assume this means "use a random number generator on your wips file", right?

1. The sloe wine was already ice-cold from the snow, rich and strong as Amelia poured it off the sloes, brownish-red like old blood. They'd bottled last year after the first frost, with Amelia's recipe that used cheap strong vodka and the absolute minimum of sugar, and Vivien could taste the bite of the alcohol and the bitterness of the sloes and the cyanide under it all.

2. "Hogan, do you think I like the idea of asking Hochstetter for a favor? Do you think I do not know what sort of man he is, to give one of my prisoners into his care? But I cannot simply lock you both in the cooler for a week, you must see that, she is a koningenwolf."

3. "Boopsie!" he said. "You're still here." Enjolras had no idea why Grantaire always called him 'Boopsie', but considering how much it made Jehan and Bahorel laugh every time, it was probably some sort of obsolete pop culture reference. He'd just started answering to it after awhile.

ANYWAY also I wrote a thing last night? It has psychic wolves in it! Sort of. Sort of wolves, anyway.

A Soldier Needs a Wolfsister (500 words) by melannen
Fandom: Doctor Who
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: The War Doctor (Doctor Who), The Doctor's TARDIS
Additional Tags: Dark, Time War, Bad Wolf, Alternate Universe, Psychic Wolves
Summary: A chameleon arch can do a lot of things, and a soldier needs a wolfsister.

...no that wasn't one of the options in the poll. Uh. It was an accident. Just be glad I didn't try writing the Les Mis one or the ACD one or, oh dear, the Frontier Wolf one, when I was in that sort of mood.

...although to be honest I would have seriously considered going just so I could jump for Adam and Jamie. :D

Some notes from the Rally, mostly covering things that wouldn't have shown up on the TV coverage:

( Some random notes on the Rally )

Anyway: Jon and Stephen live are adorbs. I hope Mitchell and Brooker are that adorable when they get their live show. And are forced to sing just as much.

( 12 photos, mostly crowd shots )

arglflgul.

Does anybody know of a way to download The Bugle podcast without installing iTunes? I refuse to install iTunes *just* so I can get the Bugle - partly because I don't really have the system resources for it, partly because I viscerally hate the thing, partly because the iTunes store needs to *not* crash my browser every time I go there, thanks. But the Times website has finally put it under pay-only lock (and now it turns out that the Times was several episodes behind what itunes has anyway.)

I recently acquired an ipod and was forced to install itunes just long enough to flip the bit that lets you use your ipod as an external drive (though it still doesn't work right) and I really, really don't want to have to put it back on. :/ Dear Apple: if I can buy an $8 mp3 player that has all the capability and more of my iPod shuffle and can, oh, use software that doesn't try to malignantly take over my computer, surely you can design one that does the same for eight times the price.

I suppose I can just wait for the new season of the Now Show to start for my Andy Zaltzman fix, because oh look, BBC Radio Four streams internationally! -- but I can't wait until after the World Cup for my next Andy Zaltzman fix!1!! D:

Why yes, whinging about the evil of Apple does count as working on my copyright primer for con-txt, shut up.

Anyway. Since I'm asking for help about the Bugle already, I shall just make the post I've been playing with for a few weeks now, about Fake News (and "Real" News and Politics) fandom around the world and around the web.

The goal here is to get a guide to 'canon' sources and fandom sites for that somewhat-expanded RPF fandom that is, really, one of my most abiding loves. (My earliest datable memory involves Reagan giving a campaign speech. I would have been two.) I'm reasonably competent on the American ones (though my attention there is ... sporadic, and I might have missed something) and on the British ones (though, not being British, I've probably missed something.) I have a vague idea of where to start for Australia and Canada. I've no clue whatsover beyond that, and if there's anyone on my reading list who does know of other awesome fake news sources - English language or not - I would *love* the contribution!

This is meant to be video, audio, and text sources that I think everyone into current events from a fandom perspective ought to be at least minimally familiar with. (either because they're fundamental to the current fandom community, or because they're so awesome everybody should know about them.)

Here's what I've got so far. What have I missed? What should I cut?

( Too Awesome To Be Bounded By One Country )

( The United States of A )

( The UK )

( Places that are neither the US nor the UK )

What else should be on those lists? Help. Especially from people not living in the US.

Here are some posts I have made to DW communities in the past week:

asexuality: Queering the Census: We ALL Count, in which I gripe about the Queer the Census campaign, which is about greater visibility for LGBT people but erases everyone who isn't heterosexual but doesn't fit it one of the L-G-B-T boxes.

common_nature: Welcome!, In which elke_tanzer and I have started a community that is all about nature, and you all should join it! And post stuff there! And leave comments!

create_my_comm: Little Details, in which we are all agreed that DW needs a community that is like l_d only awesomer, and none of us want to be the one to start it! (So you should!)

starry_sea: Anybody still here?, in which I apologize abjectly for abandoning my own community, and talk about how to get it active again.

tarot: An Amazing Tarot Blog, in which I rave at length about Pre-Gebelin Tarot History, which discusses tarot from a strictly historical and rational perspective, a perspective which is deeply awesome and far, far too hard to find.

treknovelfest: Illustration for "Three T'kay Stories", in which I have done a lot of research in the Starfleet Archives and found photographs & descriptions of the original ancient Vulcan artifacts that were used to illustrate ljc's treknovelfest entry based on my prompt, From The Terran Coyote to The Klingon K'Ortar: Tricksters of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants.

...there, that can be my followfriday. :D (What posts have you made to DW communities in the past week?)

Most of those were posts I have been procrastinating on making for months! Having them done is like breathing clear air again. (Also, omg, I might actually have to change my to-do list now - I'm afraid the dry-erase marker might have set in on some of them.) There's several more I've had on hold, though - maybe now that I'm on a roll I can scratch even more of them off.

In the spirit of getting things done, how about that WIPs meme that was going around awhile ago? One paragraph from everything in my "In progress" folder, was it?

( This includes fics, meta posts, vids, fanmixes, and various stranger things, in all states of completion, fyi. )
...it says something about me that my reaction to all of that laid out is "That's less than thirty things! Not at bad as I thought!" If you ask for more information about any of them in comments, I will probably give it to you. (At length! ^_^ )

Also while I am doing random meme-y things, poall:

Smithsonian Magazine has a section called "The Image At Hand", where they publish a short article about an iconic historic photograph, usually a portrait, and print the photograph, frequently with full bleed. Since college, I've been tearing these out when they strike a chord with me, and putting them into an ever-changing collage in a poster frame in my bedroom.

(It currently features black-and-white photos of Winston Churchill, Zorah Neale Hurston, Charles Darwin, one of the the Cottingly Fairies shots, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and Ladybird Johnson dancing barefoot on the cabinet table.)

Anyway, this months had this picture of Bonnie Parker, of Bonnie & Clyde. Which I of course pulled out, for future rotation into the collage.

Only while it was laying on the table, I looked at it way to fast, and for a minute I thought it was Parker, not Bonnie Parker. Bonnie was storter, but other than that, she could totally pass for Parker!

Cool. Even though Bonnie was about as far as it's possible to get from "expert cat burglar".

(And then, of course, I ended up looking up Eliot Ness on wikipedia...)

So I just watched Leverage. (It was an accident! It's only half a season, it's totally possible to accidentally watch half a season. And we'll leave off the vast amount of frustration involved in figuring out how to get the TNT streaming video to work. And in finding the list of episodes in original intended order. It was completely and totally an accident¹.)

And the most interesting thing about this experience is: when I saw the first shot of the team, I was *completely* wrong about which character was which - I thought Nate was Eliot, Eliot was Alec, Alec was Nate, Sophie was Parker and Parker was Sophie.

This is interesting because I had just read through most of brown_betty's Leverage recs list, so you'd think I'd know which of the characters was black and which had long hair and which was freaky-pale blond and which was a brunette. But no. I had it not only wrong, but pretty much backward. (For the record, best as I can reconstruct: I thought Hardison looked vaguely like Justin Long, Eliot was the stocky, buttoned-up type, Parker looked like a grown-up River, and Sophie vaguely like Cordelia, only shorter, grown-up and more authentically blonde. Nate was just this shadowy, Tracer Bullet-like figure off in a corner somewhere. Yeah, I was a BIT WRONG. Oh, and Sterling was young and lanky.)

This could be just me. I am also the person who managed to get through two entire Harry Potter books thinking Malfoy had dark hair and remained convinced that Director Skinner was black even after watching several episodes of the X-Files with him in them, including the one where he's wearing nothing but Y-fronts. And I know that in my own writing, fan and otherwise, there tends to be almost no physical description of characters at all, unless I make a special effort to put it in. But I went back and re-read some of the same fic, and no, there really wasn't anything I was missing.

I was thinking about this especially in light of zvi's recent post about skin color in fic, which interestingly managed to be inspired by a Leverage fic and *still* not spoil me for the skin color of the characters. Obviously, what I was noticing isn't just race, but is there a tendency for fic writers of a certain style and feel to simply leave out all the character description, or to leave out certain kinds? Is it something I manage to self-select for when I'm just starting a fandom? (I went back to that recs list and pulled out a couple more stories, and a couple of them would have made it very clear who was who.)

Anyway, Leverage is amazing and fun. ( More first reaction to Leverage under the cut )

...also, Leverage didn't hit the embarassment squick once, even though it seemed like the sort of show that would. I think it's because they're all so completely in control so much of the time, and I trust the characters and the narrative to take care of it, whatever it is.


¹ Why it was Leverage I accidentally watched when I have Merlin, Torchwood, a bunch of Doctor Who and Stargate and Bones and House, and Highlander and Due South and Naruto all queued up to watch? When I was little, turning the TV on was a privilege you only got when everything else was taken care of. So now I'm a grown-up, it seems to work the same way: I can only watch shows two ways, either as a major treat to get when I've accomplished a lot, or by accident. All those other shows have been built up into something major. So I watched Leverage by accident instead.

Nothing in particular grabs me about December 3rd, so let's start in on fandom songs!

Have Yourself a Shiny Browncoat Xmas.mp3
I've had this since track, like, before I even watched Firefly. So yeah. Have yourself a shiny Browncoat xmas, everybody! (There will be many more versions of this tune appearing later. I adore the original beyond all reason. Christmas is, after all, a season of melancholy.)
Neil Hannon (written by Murray Gold) - Song For Ten.mp3
My sister refuses to file this away as a Christmas song, but it so totally is. It's actually a fairly touchingly complicated Christmas song. As long as you don't spoil it by playing it the rest of the year. (Or, like, watching the Dr. Who episode it was written for. Which I still haven't done. Because that would mean accepting that David Tennant is actually the Doctor now. Euuugh. :P )
The Twelve Days of Christmas at Sacred Heart mp3
...somehow, any time there is Scrubs + singing, there is awesome. (Okay, anytime there is Scrubs anything there is awesome, but you know.)
Meco - What Can You Get A Wookiee for Christmas (when he already has a comb).mp3
Yes, Virginia, there was a Star Wars Christmas album. Titled "Christmas in the Stars." Why yes, I do own a copy on CD. Why? Well, whyever not?

I am off tomorrow for an extended weekend in Colonial Williamsburg (+the Smithsonian Mall + Leesburg) with Sister, which ought to be amazing, and on which I had *better* get a very good start on my Yuletide story. There will be internets, if all goes according to plan. But I have to get up at 6 o'clock tomorrow morning to get there. Blahhh.

Somebody linked to clips on youtube of Neil Patrick Harris in Cabaret. Too bad the video quality isn't better. :D

This is reminding me of the only fantasy-casting I ever really did: the burning need we had to have my high school drama group do Cabaret. (It would have been epic, and the boys would have *totally* rocked it, too.)

Also, speaking of epic, I feel like, given that a) the Doctor *canonically* can sing Sally's part from Cabaret, and b) Barney Stinson is a Time Lord, and c) John Barrowman, there ought to be some way to connect all of these dots. I just haven't figured it out yet.

(Jack/Barney: y/y?)

I'm reading that Jon/Anderson Steven/Keith epic people keep mentioning to me, and suddenly I feel a *deep* and *abiding* desire for Anderson Cooper/Jack Hodgins fic.

And I don't ... I don't .. what? It's almost four in the morning and I've been reading Daily Show fic since the *first* showing of tonight's episode. And the two of them meet up, both on assignment, in some third-world disaster somewhere, knee-deep in mud and bodies, and Jack identifies a bug for Anderson on-air and they end up in the hotel bar (what there is of one) talking about death and detachment and pain and families and acting out and just how homoerotic it was at the Dalton School: and they end up shortly after that in Jack's hotel room (because you know Jack totally would).

And then it somehow segues into Keith Olbermann lounging on Hodgins' couch in front of a baseball game, attempting to lecture Zack Addy on the basics of manliness while Jack drapes himself over something and laughs and laughs and Anderson and Angela raise eyebrows in unison across the room like two finely-crafted bookends (because you know Angela totally would).

And somehow it's all my sister's fault.

ETA: And now, having read this fic, I want to see Jack and *Lex* go at it. Because *that* would be fireworks, my *god*. I can't decide if they'd fight like two barn cats or team up to conquer the world, or both. At once.

For my own future reference (because this is not, alas, the first time I've engaged in this kind of stupidity) what I *should* have said (and failed at saying,) and I should have said it in a post of my own, or at very least a top-level comment, rather than singling some poor random commenter out to get all my pent-up headdesk, is something like this:

Hi! I've heard a lot of people saying that "miscegenation" is an American term. This is wrong. It is a white supremacist term. Wherever there are white supremacists speaking English, people are using that term. If you don't believe me, you can try using Google to find out what people are saying in your country about white supremacy, and I will bet you two months jf paid time, they will be using that word fluently. You can also check your dictionaries, if you still trust them at this point: none of them will mark the word as regional or dialect. None of them.

That is why this term is so inarguably offensive: it is associated solely with white supremacism, and it is used everywhere in the English-speaking world to refer to white supremacism. To claim that it is a regional dialect term when it is not reads as an attempt to downplay the power that this word has - which was, after all, the problem in the first place.

That is not what actually came out of my keyboard before, though, and what I did say did nothing to help the situation. That was totally my fault, and I should have thought more before I posted it. (Also, what I did post was way more tl;dr than this, which may be hard to believe.)


Also, I was trying to plot a fic where Dr. Cox and Dr. House have to switch jobs for awhile for some reason (like, say, a stupid bet), but it keeps just ending with Dr. Cox saying, "Oh look, Greggy! I'm better at your job *and* at my job! That's a surprise! I'm going home to my beautiful ex-wife and extremely intelligent son now. Why don't you limp off and I'll see if Dr. Kelso can get you 'company' tonight on his frequent loser discount?"

...but I like House. :(

On the way home tonight (it's been a busy extended weekend, let's leave it at that) I passed a hayfield into which somebody had mowed the word ADAMA . At least, it looked like ADAMA - as it was I almost ran over a deputy sheriff, while pondering why somebody would have mowed ADAMA into their hayfield.

(there was an accident right there, it wasn't just a random sheriff. Unfortunately, I don't think the accident could have been caused by ADAMA because it was in the other lane, and I doubt the southbound people could have seen it at all.

Unless ADAMA has evil mind-control rays.)

ETA: Man, I lose my shakespeare icons and suddenly I'm talking shakespeare in every f_w post. Time to scan some covers!

Coming out of a discussion with friends :

[Poll #233]

I vote for Dr. House here, because (like the US vs. the Roman Empire) despite the fact that Dr. Cox is better in every way, there are still some things which he will not stoop to do.

On the other hand, Dr. Cox would have allies - Sacred Heart, despite its problems, is all-for-one against the world (and some of them *are* lacking scruples and/or a sense of proportion) whereas Dr. House has chased off pretty much all of his potential allies. Hmm. It would be close. Discussion or evidence (aka fic recs) welcomed.

[Poll #234]

I actually got a chance to sit down and watch Dr. Who on SciFiFri for the first time in several weeks.

And you know what I want to see? I want the Doctor and one of his companions to park the Tardis in a major city on the East Coast of the United States sometime in the 20th century. And just as they're about to head out, suddenly the door flies open and a really hot guy runs in, and then takes off all his clothes, and runs right back out. And the Doctor blinks, and says, "I've got to come here more often."

And meanwhile up in the sky, Superman is thinking, "hmm, I don't remember a phone booth being there before."

.... Also, Captain Jack owns my soul, but you probably could have guessed that already.

Time travel confuses me. In particular, the banana factory confuses me. As stellar_dust said, what does the Doctor mean when he says "Now", in reference to something several light years and thirty centuries away, while talking to another time traveller with an entirely different personal reference?

There was a post on languagelog today about a language, Pirahã, whose verbs have no temporal markers. Which is to say, assuming I'm understanding it right, there is no equivalent to past, present, future, or for that matter any of the other bits of language that consisently trip up time travellers. Instead, they have two equivalents to tenses which that article calls 'proximate' and 'remote' - 'proximate' referring to things or events in the speaker's direct control or experience, and 'remote' used otherwise. Beyond that there are very few time-descriptive adverbs, most of which refer to cyclic events in the speaker's direct experience - 'at mealtime', 'when the sun is high' - and that's it.

This seems to me a very practical sort of language for a time-traveller. In fact, it must be pretty close to how the Doctor and Captain Jack conceptualize time in general, given their completely matter-of-fact approaches to what I see as impenetrable tangles of paradox. Things on my personal timeline, and things not on my personal timeline. Simple, right? Unfortunately, *I* don't conceptualize time that way, and I'm far too sleepy right now to turn my head inside-out enough to try to understand. But it's still *fascinating*. After finals I'm going to have to read up on what I can about differently temporal languages and see if I can get the Doctor to make sense.

SG1 Prediction: the amazing, ascended-being-killing weapon is Plif the Hoojib.

ETA 1: OMG DANIEL I LOVE YOU FOREVER, you know that the Holy Grail isn't a cup! Take that, Mr. Josh Anaphylactic Shock Bernstein.

"Waiting till it's over so that I can get some sleep" is probably not the best state of mind in which to be watching the season finales. Unfortunately, it's also the state of mind I was in when I watched several of the prerequisites for these storylines, which is contributing to my utter lack of caring-ness.

Well, Cam and Daniel were cute.

ETA 2: There is no way that the SGA thing is on the up-and-up, because if they actually go through with this, they will never be able to ally with *any* Pegasus human culture ever again, and they'll be totally screwed.

The wraith queen is kind of pretty though. I like the way they did her make-up.

Also, they established back in the middle of season one that Wraith can feed on other Wraith. Just thought I'd mention.

SG-1 was awesome, and Teal'c needs to treat Vala to a Star Wars marathon.

Speaking of Star Wars, sister and I both *simultaneousy* said 'Offworld!Elizabeth looks like a Star Wars character!' followed several seconds later by 'She looks like Leia pretending to be a smuggler/she looks like Boushh!'

So it follows logically then that Elizabeth is Vala's granddaughter, and John is her secret twin brother. yep. And she's going to marry Rodney and they'll have lots of little Ancient children.

(Oooh, the One Ring just sank into Mount Doom!)

Oh, and that ship? We bet you 10 credits that the hyperdrive breaks at a climactic moment. (ETA: Rodney was totally going to name it the Falcon, omg! squee!)

Also, in light of this week's SGA, the Proklarush Taonas thing begins to make (a tiny, tiny little bit of) sense.

RE: the current SG-1 episode: why, by Ba'al's balls, aren't they using freaking *Morse code*?

bah bah bah.

On the other hand, m-theory is hot, even if Sam has it completely wrong. I'm sure Rodney would agree with me.

ETA: The SGA episode actually includes less logic than SG1. Bah. If he can design a virus that'll do that, he can design one that'll kill 'em outright and avoid all the sticky moral issues (since we obviously haven't got any qualms about biowarfare and genocide to worry about.)

And why, by the ring-devouring fires of Mount Doom, did they let a Wraith onto Atlantis in the first place? SGA seems to be alternating brilliant episodes with episodes that require every single person to be bloody stupid, and I no longer feel guilty about the fic I'm writing. So there.

ETA 2 ... and now I'm trying to figure out if it's reasonable that the Ancient alphabet is related to the SG Alphabet. (Answer: Heck yes. Clearly descended from the same ancestral forms.)

ETA 3: Ooooh! It's a Six/Baltar 'shipper episode! Now I wish I'd actually been paying enough attention to the show to follow the episode! Oh well. (Because all I care about in nu-BSG is Six/Baltar, and Kara when she gets to play fighter pilot.)