A Winter's Tale

Any and all fans of both Firefly and Harry Potter should go read musesfool's A Million Light Years From Home, wherein the crew of our favorite smuggling ship meets up with a certain animagus. Takes place post-Order of the Phoenix and post-Serenity.

And now I present, what will hopefully not become a regular column, ( Adventures in Online Dating: (a.k.a. Psycho or Spam?) )

This week's theme for open_on_sunday is a dual "Winter" or "Steam," which just makes me think of Ed O'Neill in Wayne's World:

You know, if you stab a man in the dead of winter, steam will rise up from the wounds. Indians believed it was his soul escaping from his body.

Either way, here's this week's entry:

When it gets cold in Westbury, Willow thinks of Khan.

She remembers the weekend afternoons she spent watching a well-worn copy of Wrath of Khan. Long before the vampires and the magic and Tara's blood staining her hands, she laughed while Xander perfected his Ricardo Montalban--"Eet is very cold in space...wheethout Cor-eenth-eean Leather!"

She'd had her cold dish months before, trussed up between two trees. She recalls her slight horrific glee when the skin came off, a slight steam rising from the meat in the semi-desert chill.

When she remembers the look on Xander's face, however, Willow shivers.

In a strange serendipitous moment, I went to TV Writer Rob Thomas' website and downloaded an unfilmed script for the show Cupid at the same time Sam Cooke came up on the playlist.

Weird.

In other news, here are last week's and this week's entries for open_on_sunday, where the challenges were creation and success/failure, respectively.

1. I'm unconvinced that Michael Rosenbaum is as good an actor as everyone says he is.
   
2. The whole Tom Bombadil section of FOTR was utterly boring and was rightly excised from the movie.
   
3. The only time Sarah Michelle Gellar might have deserved an Emmy nod for her Buffy work was in the first season.
   
4. Season 3 is the most overrated Buffy season for two reasons: horrible Faith characterization and an agonizingly bad metaphor driving the season finale.
   
5. Joss Whedon might have deserved an Emmy award for his Buffy work, but only for the work he did well before the voters/critics actually noticed.
   
6. "The Body" is the most overrated and overwrought episode of Buffy.
   
7. Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone was a pretty lousy movie.
   
8. After Season 2, Buffy's character turned to a self-involved, slightly-power-mad child with less maturity than Season 5 Dawn. In fact, most of the Scoobies, with the exceptions of Giles, Tara, and Xander, are now petulant twits.
   
9. As well-plotted as it might have been, Babylon 5 had some of the worst dialogue I'd ever seen in any show.
   
10. Between Seasons 4 to 7 (after the departure of Dan Vebber), no one on the Buffy writing staff had any inkling of how to write Xander, even Joss, who made him the scapegoat of "Once More, With Feeling" when he wrote himself into a corner.

And here's my slightly different take on Shanshu for the open_on_sunday Prophecy/AU challenge.

So, where the hell have I been for the past few weeks?

Well, aside from the usual goings-on (pool league, etc). About three weekends ago, I took a set of coupons that I got in the mail to Best Buy to see what sort of stuff I could pick up. Imagine my surprise when I saw that they were selling DirecTV DVRs (a.k.a. TiVo) for 93 dollars. Given that I was at the Perimeter store, and they had already sold out of all their units, I had them call around to the other stores in the Metro Atlanta area, and eventually drove like a madman over to the store in near Cumberland Mall to pick one up (for 84 dollars with a coupon :). I went straight home that night (completely bypassing the stop at Target I had intended to make to pick up some more socks) and tried to hook it up...

Unfortunately, since I live in a condo serviced with two or three DirecTV dishes for the whole complex, just connecting the thing wouldn't work. I did a search on tivocommunity.com, and found out that I've got a stacked and diplexed setup (ask me if you need to know more) and I would need about a hundred dollars worth of additional equipment to get it running smoothly (i.e. with two tuners so I can record two things simultaneously). I bought everything online (at about a 60% discount than your usual brick-and-mortar stores), and it all arrived last monday (the 20th). From there, I had to wrangle a bunch of RG6 cable to connect everything correctly as well as get a signal amplifier so as not to lose about half my channels.

After Thursday of last week, I got things hooked up clearly. So now I can grab Angel, Jake 2.0, and The O.C. all at the same time, and not have to worry about re-setting a VCR if the power goes out.

Of course, every silver lining has a dark cloud...

Tuesday of last week, I learned that our main client wants to cut down on our billable hours. I suspect that this has something to do with budget crunches and missed forecasts, but what it ultimately means is that where my company could bill x hours of work is now chopped to x/4 hours.

This doesn't bode well for the company's future. As well as seeking new business, we're also looking at different ways of trying to squeeze more money/productivity out of the situation we're currently in.

In the meantime, however, my mom and brother have this trip to China planned, and since we don't have enough hours to cover a single person working for a full-time week, everyone concerned, from my supervisor to my boss, thought it was a great idea for me to join them on their trip. Towards the end of last week, I had to send a bunch of money and express mail my passport to someplace in Houston, so I could get a visa approved to visit China (I'll tell you more about this after my trip). I received my passport with the visa and everything last night.

I've got mixed feeling about going to China, however--firstly, my father says it's heavily polluted over there, and it'll wreak havoc with my allergies. I've already got two boxes of Claritin ready for my daily consumption. The plane ride, as well, I figure will be anywhere between 14-18 hours long. I hate flying.

But I will get to see the Great Wall, as well as the buried Terracotta warriors, and that's pretty exciting.

In other arenas, I wrote this CrazyGoNuts Drabble for the sunday100 Masks challenge.

The theme this week was music.

Title: Bones
Doc is mildly disappointed when he's finally finished.

Building it was nothing particularly difficult, but gathering the materials... A few coffins would serve as a fitting frame and soundboard, but the joy of collecting eighty-eight individual bones! He fondly remembers every individual strand of man-gut, now sun-dried and stretched taut, carefully drawn forth amidst blood and spleen and liver, his hands shaking in nervousness and anticipation.

But some afternoons, he'll sit for hours on the bench, his fingers delighting over the lacquered radii, singing aloud to songs from Cabaret.

Wilkommen, Bienvenue, Welcome...

It's the simple pleasures that make life worthwhile.

( A/N )

From bill_maher's blog:

Here’s a real morale builder: it turns out that American soldiers wounded in Iraq are being billed for their hospital meals. Talk about adding insult to injury. Perhaps the next time President Bush holds one of those $5,000 a plate fundraisers, he could slide a little of that cash over to the Pentagon so legless soldiers don’t have to pay for their own pudding cups.

In other news, I wrote a drabble for the sunday100, which I've been too lazy to mention until now.

Yeah, I know I haven't updated in a few days. I'm mad at Livejournal. Actually, I'm mad at Linux Opera for crashing for no apparent reason after I typed up my massive Saturday-Sunday Vegas journal entry on Friday afternoon. I was all, "Screw you guys! Ah'm going home!"

I went to see Blue Man Group this past Saturday with batnandu and Lillania. Tracey Bonham and Venus Hum opened for them. Not quite sure about Bonham, but Venus Hum kicked my ass. I picked up their CD direct from their merchy hands (take that RIAA!), but it turns out that the CD has that crappy copy protection shit on it--I can't listen to the CD on my work computer. I hear you're supposed to be able to use a felt-tip pen to defeat this, but I don't want to screw-up the audio.

For those of you who have seen the show, fight the power!

I made this!

BMG themselves were pretty amazing. I tried to remember all the Rock Concert Movements, but the only one I remember the exact number (that isn't on The Complex) for is #10: The Blackout. And everyone has the wrong timing on Rock Concert Movement #6, and Please Yell if You're Paying Attention.

On Monday, I managed to post two drabbles for sunday100.

It's been a while since I paged through the CISE web server logs, but I found that Emily Nussbaum of Slate posted an article about being a Spoiler Whore in which she mentions the bronzearchives, linking to the original site.

I also noticed that the BBC also linked to my Buffy site, calling it "Amazing." Cool.

Then I saw that a search for pinpricks fetish pictures on Google Germany lists my story "Faculties Intact" fourth on the list of appropriate links.

Of those three things, I'm not sure which I'm most proud of... :)

Last night, after writing a drabble for sunday100, the hinge that holds the screen on my laptop finally gave way. It's been deteriorating for a while, and after spewing a few sharp bits of dark grey, distressed plastic, it came apart.

Now of course, it didn't come apart in any way that's convenient to fix. No, the plastic which is pretty much essential to the hinge is gone. Granted, after it failed, I just ripped more of the plastic off, to see if I could get at some of the metal innards, but the screws that comprise the tightenable part of the hinges are apparently stripped, as well...

So the laptop looks like one of the following diagrams:

1. = when closed,
2. |_ when precariously balanced, or
3. __ when open. Gee.

I went to OfficeMax today to pick up some bookends to see if I can't just prop the screen up. If this fails, I'm hoping there's some way of completely removing the screen and propping that up on some platform. Otherwise, I might want a new LCD monitor or one of those fancy web-pad computers.

But that's only after I win first place at the poker tournament next month... :)