hmpf: more Life on Mars finale snark (lom snark)
Oh god, the ending, and random comments about it, *still* tick me off. Behold the insanity:

http://hmpf.livejournal.com/162034.html?thread=1450482#t1450482

I am *such* a bitter, obsessive, teal-deer-producing old bitch.

ETA: Whoops, posted this to the wrong journal. Ah well.
hmpf: more Life on Mars finale snark (yay animated)
I will demonstrate the rightness of the above claim to you in a moment. But first, get a pair of headphones. Because listening to Phideaux works best with headphones. This is a true surround-sound experience: Phideaux's music is in the psychedelic-operatic mode.

Oh, and another note, about LastFM: You should be able to listen to every song, fully and for free, exactly three times per month. You don't need an account there.

Read more... )

***

Completely unrelated to fannish obsessions, this is a supremely beautiful song about grief. Give it a listen, too. I think it's my favourite at the moment:

http://www.lastfm.de/music/Phideaux/Ghost+Story/Universally
hmpf: more Life on Mars finale snark (yay animated)
So... went to bed... tried to go to sleep for several hours... failed thoroughly.

So I got back up again and switched on the computer. And took a look at my collected icons. And while it can't be denied that most of them (while often based on a nice idea) look like crap, I actually - wonder of wonders! - sort of like most of my LoM ones. True, they're not *really* good. But they look better than the rest of my icons, and, what's more, I *really* like most of the ideas. So I'm going to do the self-indulgent thing and talk about them for a moment!

(BTW, still didn't get around to catching up at all, despite my statement of intention last week. Sorry. Partly I was just crazy busy; and the time I did not spend being busy I spent in a frenzy of creativity. More on that later. Nope, not fic, not yet, sorry.)

Read more... )

(ETA: If it's the "Stay" or "Alive" icons you would like to use: please don't credit me... ;-))
hmpf: more Life on Mars finale snark (yay animated)
I've already posted a longer ramble about this at [livejournal.com profile] jumping_off, but - shocking thought! - maybe not everybody reads [livejournal.com profile] jumping_off, so:

Would you say that this article implies that Ashley Pharoah also thinks that the ending of LoM is 'decidedly downbeat,' or is the latter just the opinion of the writer of the article? It's clearly not a quotation, but it is integrated with a quotation in such a way as to make it seem as if the quotation was derived from a conversation that contained that characterisation of the ending...

(Hey, those of you who have the series two boxset - can anything about whether the writers of the show think they wrote a happy or an unhappy ending, be inferred from the DVD extras?)

It is strangely gratifying, btw, to read an article in which the ending is called 'decidedly downbeat.'

It is also darkly amusing to see that - if I read this correctly - Pharoah thinks we objected to the ending because it was downbeat. Dude, no. I was the woman who kept clamouring for the show to end with Sam dying! I like dark stuff; I've written some seriously disturbing fic, or so I'm told. I keep killing my protagonists, too. So, yes, kill your protagonist, by all means. Even have him kill himself. Just... don't hand me pink glasses and expect me to feel it's a happy thing.

And also, either do try to give him a proper, understandable motivation, or make it a bit more obvious that he's really, truly and completely nuts.

And don't expect me to suddenly forget everything you've previously established about him. Take a page from (some) fanfic writers' book: you have to integrate your surprising ending with what we know about the characters and their world.

So...

Oct. 24th, 2008 02:17 am
hmpf: more Life on Mars finale snark (yay animated)
German viewers love the Life on Mars finale too, because it is so heartwarming and happy (albeit a tiny little bit melancholic) that you just have to grin:

http://www.mariakaefer.de/2008/02/03/life-on-mars/

***

Dear Ceiling Cat,

please, could you check my emotional wiring? Something must be wrong there. I seem to have a hardwired inability to be happy about something that is making very nearly everyone else very happy indeed. Instead, I have the exact opposite reaction: it makes me angry and bitter, and it actually sort of hurts. Surely, that can't be right?

In hope,

Hmpf
hmpf: more Life on Mars finale snark (yay animated)
Wow.

I looked up a few old posts at TRA today for a discussion in lifein1973. Out of morbid curiosity, I looked at my stats there, too. Well... For all intents and purposes, I stopped posting there in May 2007 (except for a short-lived attempt to return, in January '08 - 6 posts). Yet, despite an inactivity of *a year and a half*, I'm still, statistically, averaging 1.2 posts *per day* there.

That means that in the time I was active there, i.e. before May '07, I must have been *insanely* active.

ETA: That drop from Ceiling Cat knows how many posts per day to zero, after May '07, says more about my self-inflicted semi-death in that fandom than anything I could ever say about the subject.
hmpf: Cole and Ramse from the show not actually called "Splinter" (lol suicide)
So... I decided to use my non-awesome icon making powers to make a 'happy ending pastede on yay!' icon today, because, hey, I only have four anti-2.08 icons and that's clearly not enough. ;-)

Well. Obviously that requires opening the dread LoM 2.08 file to make screencaps. And, I really shouldn't tell people this, because it marks me as Severely Disturbed, but... just frelling clicking on the file made me nauseous. Actual, literal physical reaction. (Not really bad nausea, mind you - but, still disturbing enough.)

WTF, body? WTF, *brain*?!
hmpf: Cole and Ramse from the show not actually called "Splinter" (odd one out)
During the A2A discussions today - I've followed them around to some LJs off [livejournal.com profile] lifein1973, out of curiosity (I wanted to see the "happy jumping" folks' reactions) - I've seen that old bit of praise for the ending of LoM pop up again: to paraphrase, "I love the ending of LoM because it's so open to interpretation"; variously also, "whether Sam committed suicide or not is a matter of interpretation". And I have to admit: I still can't see this famous openness of the text, in this case. And you'd think that, what with how unhappy my interpretation of 2.08 makes me, I'd *jump* on any alternative interpretation that I thought even remotely plausible...

I mean, I can see how there would be *slight* differences in people's interpretations. But surely, the basic 'facts' of the story are pretty clear?

Yes, yes, I know. I'll be wanking myself to death, one of these days.

It's a frelling compulsion.

GIP!

Jan. 10th, 2008 05:22 pm
hmpf: Cole and Ramse from the show not actually called "Splinter" (lol suicide)
[livejournal.com profile] cosmonusa, he of the delightfully insane Dark Doctor comics, has allowed me to use this icon. I've loved it since the first time I saw it. It makes me cackle madly, like the end of Starving on the Jump Down does. So, just in case I don't get a proper chance to use it, here it is, on a post all its own.

Numbers

Jan. 8th, 2008 01:20 am
hmpf: Cole and Ramse from the show not actually called "Splinter" (rainbows)
I just noticed [livejournal.com profile] jumping_off has 72 members now, about twenty more than there were last time I checked. This makes me happy.

[livejournal.com profile] lifein1973 has around 1400 members, so that means that the percentage of people who didn't like the ending is around 5 percent. We're a bigger minority than I thought! (I thought we might be around 1 percent.)

**

I still haven't written the last page and a half of my frelling paper. I have just about reached the right stage of "don't frelling care, but time's kind of pressing now" to be able to write it, even if it's utter shite, and not mind so much.

Edited for wonky maths.
hmpf: Cole and Ramse from the show not actually called "Splinter" (rainbows)
I'm going to be mostly offline in the next few days, due to visiting my parents for Christmas, who don't have the best internet connection, so I usually don't bother going online there. (Also, they're still paying per minute, which turns being online into an expensive affair.)

So... I've written *loads* in the last few days, although I should have been doing other things. The rough draft of How to Love a Madman is finished, thanks to inspiration by [livejournal.com profile] jazzymegster. I need some help from a medical professional now for vocabulary for a couple of 2006 intrusions. Drop me a comment and I'll get back to you on the details.

[livejournal.com profile] beccatoria, I imagine this will be ready for betaing in a few weeks. When exactly are you leaving for Korea? Not *that* soon, right? It's... not one of my best, so don't expect too much ;-) - but I'm pleased that it only took such a short time. (Of course, there's still a few weeks of rewriting, so it's not really finished yet.)

Of course it's only 660 words or so... I'm well aware that 'normal' writers do that kind of thing in half an hour, instead of several weeks...

***

In other news: Matthew Graham writes LoM fic. Fandom's verdict? We do it better. (I agree, at least in some respects. Of course, Graham's dialogue is great. The rest? Well, there are better prose writers in fandom.)

The *really* interesting thing about this fic is that it's essentially a 2.08 denial AU. It has Sam angsting, it has references to the coma, it has Sam and Annie *not* as a couple... yet it's clearly set later than the rest of the show, which was in spring/summer.
hmpf: Cole and Ramse from the show not actually called "Splinter" (rainbows)
Title: Names
Fandom: Highlander
Characters: Methos, OC
Rating: general audience
Word count: 3450
Summary: Methos enjoys being Adam Pierson; Flavius is alarmed by how much he enjoys being Karl-Heinz Müller.
Link: Names

Title: Starving on the Jump Down
Fandom: Life On Mars
Characters: Sam, Ruth, Maya
Rating: errr, somewhere between PG13 and NC17? I dunno.
Warning: spoilers for 2.08
Word count: 369
Summary: three seconds of joy, and the aftermath
Link: Starving on the Jump Down
hmpf: the ears of love (ears of love)
When cleaning up my old notes and paperwork recently, I found several abandoned drafts for - sadly unfinished - meta posts. I don't really have the time to clean them up and make them presentable (or add substance to the 'thinner' ones), but I also don't quite feel like simply throwing them away. So, maybe, I'll be posting a few of them here. Or at least I'll be posting one today. It's a - fairly unspectacular, really - bit of Methos meta, but I think it may actually be of some interest for Life on Mars fandom, too, as it deals with canon inconsistencies/insufficiencies and fannish reactions to those. Essentially, it's a bit like the 'canon vs. fanon' situation we have in LoM now, only that in LoM we're still struggling with declaring our mental independence from canon. HL fandom has a lot more practice in that department, as large parts of HL canon have sucked, or at least been severely disappointing, throughout the history of the franchise, and the fandom has been feverishly 'fixing' things for more than fifteen years now... (There's a difference, though, in the fact that the *majority* of HL fandom sees a need to fix things, whereas in LoM fandom only a very small minority feels that way.)

Anyway, this particular bit of meta is not really about the fixing of HL canon in general, but about one character who, arguably, is so very fascinating to fans because he was probably not planned but rather improvised by the writers, which shows in his characterisation... i.e., our fascination, and the fanon versions of his character that we love, are *based* heavily on the fact that *the source text is flawed*.

Here goes the old, abandoned Methos meta. )

ETA: This really hardly even deserves the title 'draft'. It needs fleshing out, it needs structure, it needs lots of things... but I don't have the time.

ETA2: I think the point I was trying to make was that, no matter *how* we interpret him, a certain degree of 'fixing things' is always involved in developing a fannish relationship with Methos.

Gah. My brain is completely fried today. I need to think more about the parallels and differences here - because there *are* differences between the LoM and the HL situation, though I can't quite put my finger on them yet.
hmpf: Cole and Ramse from the show not actually called "Splinter" (meta)
Today I decided to take up my old, abandoned experiment in excavating my own livejournal past again, so I visited my journal at greatestjournal.com (acquired ages ago in case LJ ever goes belly up or becomes inhospitable to fandom or whatever). I was using/will be using that journal to post old entries from my livejournal. As luck will have it, the very first ancient entry I posted there contained this:

old meta, new meta... )
hmpf: Cole and Ramse from the show not actually called "Splinter" (rainbows)
why *does* it bother me so what other people think, in this case?

It's puzzling.

(ETA: This song really calls for a Sam-bashing vid, doesn't it? *points to 'current music' below* Go on, google the lyrics... *eg*)

(ETA2: I just may have to make that vid. But first I need to finish "A&B Song". And then make a vid to Phideaux's "Railyard". So, uhm... maybe not.)
hmpf: Cole and Ramse from the show not actually called "Splinter" (rainbows)
"I'm a scientist and I know what constitutes proof. But the reason I call myself by my childhood name is to remind myself that a scientist must also be absolutely like a child. If he sees a thing, he must say that he sees it, whether it was what he thought he was going to see or not. See first, think later, then test. But always see first."

(From: Douglas Adams, So long and thanks for all the fish)
hmpf: Cole and Ramse from the show not actually called "Splinter" (rainbows)
http://domeofstars.com/forum/index.php?topic=2057.0

http://domeofstars.com/forum/index.php?topic=2095.0

http://domeofstars.com/forum/index.php?topic=1908.0

(ETA: Isn't it ridiculous that after all this time, this *still* makes me want to scream and tear my hair out?)

(ETA2: I think I *really* am going to withdraw from those threads now. There's only so many times I can rephrase my arguments.)
hmpf: Show of my heart (angsty)
I'm not posting this anywhere within the fandom - TRA or lifein1973 or even the dissident haven of jumping_off - because I feel I've made myself unpopular enough. I mean, I'm cool with not being universally liked, but I'd like to avoid being universally hated. *g*

But, I have to ask/wonder...vague spoilers for 2.08 )
hmpf: Cole and Ramse from the show not actually called "Splinter" (rainbows)
Still sorting through old papers. This here seems very apt - from a piece of paper around a year old:

"Life on Mars is either vastly more clever than I'm giving it credit for, or a bit less clever than it believes itself to be."

Also, from right after watching ep 1:

"Annie: Sam's death drive?"

How right I was...

***

Going to bed now.

July 2021

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