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Here are the ficlets y'all asked for - I haven't got to them all, but hope to.

-For ladyvivien, Doctor Who, Amy, Rory and River fluffy family time;

-For forthwritten, a Rivers of London bakery AU;

-For hedda62, Slings & Arrows, Geoffrey and Anna on a deserted island;

-For scribe, due South, Fraser and RayK and telepathy;

-For littlered2, Vorkosigan, Cordelia, Alys and Ekaterin, slice of life;

-For bookwormsarah, M*A*S*H, Hawkeye and BJ, dystopia - in two parts, scroll down, also please note trigger warnings for violence on this story;

-and for nnozomi, Cabin Pressure, Martin and Douglas, competence-is-sexy.

For some reason best known to itself, iTunes wants me to listen to Christmas music. I don't understand. Also, I hate Christmas. (That said, the Sarah McLachlan version of "The First Noel" is actually lovely; full of rising piano notes that do, indeed, remind me very much of last December.)

Anyway. I have finished making all the training contract applications I'm ever going to make and just in time, my industrial-strength painkillers are running out - I finished the last lot off at five o'clock this morning, having been woken up by a spike inside my head - and so, I return to matters fannish after a long time away. A lot of the time that I was in San Francisco, likethesun2 and I watched fannish television, because, for the first ever, we could. And naturally, this involved a lot of Slings & Arrows, because she introduced me to it in the first place, and well, it's... itself. The problem with it, as I keep saying, is that it ruins you for television. Just... all television. It's not perfect by any means - we were talking about how the last season leaves lots of hanging threads; how the ingenues and their boyfriends can get samey; how it's a little too heteronormative for a show set in a theatre - but... so close. And the first six episodes, as a self-contained unit, are perfect. The writing, the characters, the nutty black humour, the way it's critical and wry in its treatment of madness and redemption, but it lifts you up with it.

(It also, specifically, ruins you for Due South. You try and watch it, and you end up sitting there going, "But he's so clean! Why is he so well-scrubbed? Why does he not look like a HOMELESS PERSON?" And it is not as if Due South is not the most bizarre thing that has ever been on television, honestly. Quite apart from the fact it's a show set in America made by British people and Canadians, it's, welll... yeah. There's a bit in it, in the episode with the pirate ship, where they have to create a diversion. It's a cop buddy show. If I were writing a cop buddy show, how would I write in a diversion? I don't know, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have Paul Gross decide apropos of nothing to launch into several choruses of "Barrett's Privateers".

And, later! Later, there are the episodes featuring the show's very own metaphysics. I explained to someone once, "That tunnel there? That represents the phase space between life and death."

Phase space between life and death. It's a show about people who fight crime. I say again, bizarre.)

(We also tried to watch Chasing Rainbows, which is an eighties mini-series featuring a very young Paul Gross hamming it up horribly and trying to put on an American accent and the acting is terrible and the script is terrible and the pacing is terrible and the music is terrible and everyone looks blue. And it is, as a consequence, ridiculously funny. We were sitting there giggling occasionally until there's a bit where he's asked where he's from and he tells the Prince of Wales, "Montreal. Which is in Quebec."

It's in Quebec, guys. Montreal is in Quebec. I have never before been reduced to hysteria by this fact.)

Anyway! Enough parenthesis. I promised recs.

Better A Fallen Rocket, Slings & Arrows, by likethesun2.
I betaed this one, in between spending a week on the author's sofa, so I am a little biased. But not much. This is a long, hypnotic, frightening story about Geoffrey Tennant going mad, and it's also a story about Oliver, and a story about the crawlspace beneath a stage, and about the layers and unravelling of madness, and about what's left of God's purpose when you take away God. I am actually not quite able to do justice to it in a one-paragraph rec. Go and read it, and take in the enormous scope and sweep of what she does with these characters and themes, and then go and cry because you'll never write anything as good.

Pawn Their Experience and a A Foolish Wit, Slings & Arrows, by petronelle.
petronelle is a one-woman fic-writing machine, and all of her stuff is good, but these two are my favourites. "Pawn Their Experience" is about Geoffrey and Oliver, picking up the thing in canon where there is a big gay backstory that we never got to see, and doing it with poignance and setting out the characters' cluelessness very well. "A Foolish Wit" is a story about Sloan. The guy with the motorbike, yes. He has his own ghost. He says "fuck" a lot. I love it far too much.

untitled wee ficlet by rillarilla, still S&A.
An old one that I never got around to reccing. Claire's gone away to better things. It's short and packs a hell of a well-written punch.

Other things, let me see. The first trailer for Half-Blood Prince, which looks - gasp - good. ( cut for spoilers, such as they are )

And, lastly, one from rs_games, which is ridiculously good fun.

Horoscopes and How They Caused The Plague of Frogs [currently anonymous]
Remus gets a job as astrologer for the Quibbler. Lunacy (and sex) ensue. Not immaculately written, but I can forgive it much; it's long and silly and full of very funny touches.

Back to my very exciting day of eating coconut cake and moaning about the spike in my head. And, hopefully, editing 10,000 words of fic of my own, what is wrong with me, etc.

My reasons for EPIC FAIL, let me show you them:

1. I'm having fifth-week blues early, god knows why. (Speaking of which, there are always people, freshers usually, who mock this concept. "Fifth-week blues?" they say. "How amusing, how ironic." How much they have to learn!) In other words, it's only Thursday of fourth and I spent all of yesterday weeping and woeful and finally I went back to bed and refused to go anywhere or do anything. Maria and Claire, because they are win, got me to revise never-going-out-of-my-room-again to at least never-going-out-out-of-the-flat-again, which at least got me into the kitchen and functional enough to ring the other Triarchs and say I wasn't making it to Cerberus. I feel terrible for flaking out, but I couldn't face anything. Judging from the flist, it's going around. I just hope that this doesn't mean I will spend all of fifth week in a quivering wreck on the floor, because, huh, that would be suck. This time I shall not, however a) burst into tears on tutor or indeed b) throw International Economics down four flights of stairs. That would be bad.

2. In the morning, though, I felt much better, realised I had written 1000 words on the Cold War that were truly terrible and had a tendency to use the same noun twice in a sentence, and I would have made a success of things had I not realised, three hours too late, that I arranged to meet someone today to talk about, of all things, my experience of multiculturalism, and I forgot and stood her up because I am made of LOSE. Oh, so much lose. And I totally failed to go to my International Relations lecture for the third week running, made of fail, oh yes.

3. Ben is in labs all week, so he's working on setting up a new physics experiment.

...I ate it.

Oh god. Maria said, "Aren't those the radioactive brazil nuts-"

"WHAT RADIOACTIVE BRAZIL NUTS?"

Turns out they aren't radioactive yet. And he shouldn't leave food items out on the kitchen table if he doesn't want people to eat them. But still. It's the principle of the thing. Oh god, I fail.

But. There are things of win, too.

1. Four weeks, forty-one years, far too many books and articles, and 10,000 words, but I have finished with the history of the Cold War! The truly pathetic part was me this week, getting to the plenum of the CPSU Central Committee, held by Gorbachev on January 28th, 1987, and getting very excited about it. The reason I was so pleased? I was alive. Yes, I was one week old, but the point stands.

Okay, my essays are kind of crappy, and my tutor's American and insists on actually marking them - and he calls them "papers"! - but they're DONE. I now have four more essays on things like decolonisation and suchlike, but no more actual history. I am not a historian. I have said this far too many times, but it never stops being true. I also did essays on Plato, Aristotle, Nietzsche and Hume, so I'm feeling somewhat pleased with self. It will pass. Tomorrow I have to start my first non-thinker aesthetics, and, well. The essay title is "What is art?" Not at all vague, then? I plan to sit in Starbucks all day and read about art as expression and truth and beauty, and emerge uplifted. That's the plan.

(Also, jacinthsong and I are going to start a hippie commune for failed PPEists. All failed PPEists are welcome.)

2. shimgray is a sterling example of a good human being and turned up this morning wth a laptop for me to borrow. The university won't let you connect more than one machine to the network, so no internet, but it means I can convert my thoughts into digital data without actually leaving the flat, so that's very much fine by me. And I can actually write for yuletide, too.)

3. I just finished one of the ds_match stories. Yeah, I've read one of them, because, see above, I have no laptop, I have the Cold War, I have what is art? and I am MADE OF FAIL. But. Find Me A Find, is lovely, lovely, made-of-win lovely. It's long, and meandering, and fluffy, and Ray and Frannie Vecchio run a matchmaking service, and it's lovely. Go, read, be made of less fail than me.

Okaaaaay. Bedtime, before I quite keel over. Angels in America tomorrow night! This pleases me.

So, up until now, I've been saying that Due South is the television equivalent of a nice cuddly blanket and a mug of dark hot chocolate. It's just... comforting. It's so sweet, and gentle, and not much happens, and they take a break from murder cases to do weird interludes involving ghosts and curling and the geography of Canada, not necessarily at the same time, and I love Diefenbaker a whole lot, because I did, at one point, own a mute German Shepherd with a passion for junk food. (He was a lovely dog; fiercely loyal, and tended to growl at people who looked at me funny, but otherwise mute.) And Fraser and both versions of Ray are just a delight. So, yes, hot chocolate, and I've been downloading random episodes and keeping them for term-time, when I usually am in my greatest need of televisual security blankets.

But then, watching random episodes, I got to "Victoria's Secret" and couldn't. stop. crying. Argh. It's... argh. The snow, the candles, the music - Sarah McLachlan! just go ahead and slay me! - and the poetry, and against this terribly romantic background they rip each apart, don't they, they fuck and fight and betray, and it's beautifully done and not only do I cry watching it, I cry when listening to Sarah McLachlan. Basically I spend a lot of time crying. And if I weren't quite dead enough, the canon has what canon never has, a fanficcish epilogue - a whole episode where they acknowledge they fucked their characters' heads around, and make them deal. And oh, I do like it - I love it's done realistically, how Fraser is tired and desperately unhappy, and relying on painkillers (!!! holy angst, Batman!), and as well as that, he's cruel, too. Much love for characterisation.

And I am reliably informed that absolutely everyone, upon watching it, needs to write their very own fic to, I don't know, get their ya-yas out. (And there's a turn of phrase I've never used before. Wow.) So maybe I have to go and do that, once this ficathon craziness is over. I just read troyswann's lovely fic, Dysmas, and.... ahhhhh. So painful, but so beautifully done.

And I'm sort of glad I saw Slings & Arrows first - otherwise I get the feeling I'd have found bits of it, especially the bit in season one where Geoffrey says, breathily, "It was like having sex in public", very traumatising.

Talking of Slings & Arrows (when I am not, lately? I am a fangirl), I had a weird moment this week, reading the Daily Mail (er, there were extenuating circumstances and please not to be killing me now) and more specifically, their TV pages. They were talking about Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and being, naturally, rude about Aaron Sorkin (they're the Daily Mail, of course they hate Aaron Sorkin) and about how there's an episode on this week that was written by, of all people, Mark McKinney. And then it goes on to suggest the show would've been better if all of it had been written by McKinney, based on the evidence of - wait for it! - Slings & Arrows.

Er, what? Someone in the UK apart from me and the flist is watching it, despite the fact it's not on television and/or Region 2 DVD? And that someone writes for the Daily Mail? I find this deeply, deeply weird.

Anyway! I babble. I always babble. I am still in a bouncy, happy, life-is-kinda-chaotic-but-I-have-passed-my-DRIVING-TEST sort of way. God, it's so freeing. Today I took great pleasure in throwing out my L-plates and driving through the rain, listening to Sarah McLachlan, hitting national speed limit amid the hayricks all the way up to Ormskirk. (I would've dropped unexpectedly in on hathy_col, but she's in Venice!) But, yeah, freedom! It's not my car, but, never mind, I don't care. Just the thought that I could actually get myself a car someday is sort of freeing.

And my driving test was an exercise in comedy, too, not that I thought so at the time. First of all it was at ridiculous o'clock in the morning, and all the way there it was raining in that horrible, intermittent way that made me think about windscreen wipers in a vaguely freaked-out way, but just as I got to the test centre, it brightened up. I cheered up with it, and managed to stay calm as they went through bonnet checks and an incredibly casual eyesight test, and even stayed calm when I got in the car and got asked immediately to do a reverse park. I very nearly fucked it up, but didn't, was a tiny bit rattled, set off and stalled on the very first junction I got to.

Okay, I thought, I've failed. And that's a very calming thought, isn't it? So I drove merrily through the town and along the coast road with the sea breeze buffeting in from the west, and it's a straight road, knock the volume up and hit the horizon kind of thing, and I was calm, calm. And then we got to the little roads again and he asked me to reverse around a corner into a side-road. I can do this, I thought. So I did. I got halfway round when a car came into the junction, so I stopped and waited for it to come round me. And waited. And waited.

And waited. And he didn't move, and I didn't move, and in the end I turned to the examiner and said desperately, "I'm gonna hit him. I don't wanna hit him."

The examiner said, "Put the car in neutral and put the handbrake on." And I did, but you know, they say the moment the examiner intervenes, tells you to do something, you've failed. So I moped on the steering wheel for a moment, and then sat up all at once as my wing mirrors revealed my examiner and the man in the stopped car having some sort of wildly-gesticulated slanging match. After a moment he came back, yelling, thickly Irish, "She's on her TEST! And you could get a BUS through there! Drive on, dear."

So I did. Feeling quite depressed, I did, we got back to the test centre seemingly five minutes later and he said, "I'm pleased to tell you you've passed."

I said, "You're KIDDING, right?"

"Sign here."

I signed. I had eight faults. And now I have a pink driving license and can legally drive in twenty-five countries and I'm feeling very good about life. My parents are pleased and somewhat peeved, because neither of them passed first time. (Pedar claims he would've done had his examiner not had a heart attack mid-test - he gave him first aid, drove him to the hospital, by all accounts saved his life, and still failed.)

Tomorrow I'm going to Formby Library, because my life is just that exciting, and taking out their entire selection of books on feminism, which is three books. I miss the Bodleian.

G'night, all.