raven | Entries tagged with ships in space

Things Wot Are of Note:

1. Through a series of improbable circumstances, I did, today, manage to quote Star Trek in a way that was absolutely relevant to the situation. (This after Maria, James and I have spent several weeks quoting it in ways entirely not relevant to the situation, natch.) While I don't really want to talk about the improbable circumstances, the quote is probably better. From "Plato's Stepchildren", McCoy and Spock respectively:

"The release of emotion is what keeps us healthy. Emotionally healthy."

"That may be, Doctor. However, I have noted that the healthy release of emotion is frequently unhealthy for those closest to you."

Star Trek: bringing the ~~gay~~ snark since 1966.

2. I have the best friends in the entire world. I had epic insomnia last night - oh, yeah, short time no see; body, you fail at everything - and rolled out of bed at half two, hurrah for me. So tonight was going to be an early night. Early, early, see me be early. I ended up doing the Aeneid poster design instead. And,

lizziwig is sadly persuasive, and somehow or other I ended up at G&D's eating mango ice-cream at half eleven. Scientific fact: ice-cream eaten in the middle of the night in February is five hundred percent better than any other kind.

(Sitting in St. Aldate's G&D's at the table by the door, I had the strangest flashback to being here for open day in 2004; it's strange, being hit by deja-vu and knowing you really have been in this place before.)

Then, drifting down the High Street under the streetlights and choking with laughter because I've just been told something ludicrous about Vikings, and it seems like the most gloriously funny thing of all time - this, too, is five hundred percent better than anything.

3. People keep giving me presents.

foulds presented me tonight with a volume of Aristophanes; I found a CD of Hindi music in my pidge;

me_ves_y_sufres is lending me another couple of volumes of Ex Machina (graphic novel that's a cross between superhero comics and The West Wing - utterly marvellous).

About the Hindi music, well, I seem to be going through a bit of a phase at the moment. The one song I've had stuck on repeat all day is "Taal Se Taal Mila", from Taal, which is, just, oh, gorgeous. Seriously. Take it, listen to it, it's beautiful.

I've also been listening to "Chale Chalo" (bonus points for joyous handclapping) and "Mitwa" (this is the song I was singing to

foulds the other night), both from Lagaan, and "Dil Se Re" from, shockingly, Dil Se.

(Speaking of Hindi music, one thing I've been looking for ages is a decent version of Rang de Basanti, which I wouldn't mind handing over money for if they'd only get it right. What I want is a version with the Hindi bits in Hindi, the English bits in English, no gratutious dubbing and subtitles so I can show it to my non-Hindi-speaking friends. Is this too much to ask for? Apparently yes, and it's a shame, because it's such a wonderful, wonderful film. It's beautifully done, it makes me laugh and cry, and Chris Patten's daughter is in it. Is it just me who finds this slightly bizarre? Alice Patten apparently learned Hindi for the part. Her accent is grating at first, then ridiculously charming, and the whole thing is an overwrought delight.)

It's actually wonderfully comforting, having Hindi music on. It reminds me of home.

4. From tomorrow, I may be somewhat absent for a couple of days. My laptop, which is still not dead - bless it, it's still not dead, although getting painfully creaky and, notably, turning everyone into robots - is going to India to be gutted for parts. Poor old Loki, I have a dear cousin who will cannibalise him with every semblance of pleasure. I, in the meantime, will be departing Windows hopefully forever. I'm switching to Mac and it may take me some time to do anything with a new operating system other than make squeaky noises of confusion. I'm hoping this stage won't last too long.

Anyway. I'm going to London for a wee bit, and then I'll still be around, only silent. And also, in need of a new name for a computer. Reverse psychology worked very well for two years - Loki was until very recently quite well-behaved - but I may not go that route again. We shall see.

5. And to all a good night. This is me getting an early night, oh yes.

Current Mood: sleepy
Current Music: Emilie Autumn; Misery Loves Company

(Numbered for ease of perusal, or indeed to spare me from offering any connections between them.)

1. Merton is top of the Norrington. This may account for why I look out across the road at the windows level with mine and see people studious and sitting down hard at work.

"In the meantime, what do we do?" I went on, sitting on the kitchen table fairly early this morning. "We download TV off the internet and throw mouldy bread at the freshers."

Maria was making a paper aeroplane at the time; she got it perfectly balanced between wingspan and general pointiness, I scrawled "HMS Bounty" in blunt pencil beneath one wing, and she launched it gracefully into a clear blue sky. The three of us hung out of our third-floor window and watched it arc beautifully up and out and down, through the sparkling air, down down down...

...straight into a cyclist.

Oops.

(Balliol is, as we speak, fourth in the Norrington Table. I'm not sure what conclusions to draw from this.)

2. Nothing like a clear sparkling day, though. I went up the Cowley Road revelling in the sunshine, and noticed that there is an Indian restaurant about halfway up called "Dil Dhunia". I am unsure whether this means "heart of the world" or "heart of the coriander". Both seem equally likely.

3. Nothing like a long lazy afternoon, either. I was supposed to be working. I managed to read an article by Samuel Scheffler that I've been meaning to read for two years - a critique of the basic-structure objection to Rawlsian egalitarianism; it bothers me slightly because it ought to be manhandled into an unmessy feminist argument, but I can't see how to do it - but other than that, I drank peppermint tea and talked to

chiasmata most of the day. I was hit by a wave of sleepiness around about half seven, just in time to go to OULES.

4. OULES. Yes. We ran the flashback scene today, which I remember writing "unstageable" next to in the margin for the first few drafts, up to the mountain-in-Kashmir draft (so called because I did, indeed, leave the last extant copy up a mountain in Kashmir) and yet, we never did much about that. And it seems to have been a workable approach, because it went far better than expected. Once again, the cast are made of uber-talented love, and one would think I'd be sick of the script by now, but I'm really not. It's wonderful fun.

Afterwards,

foulds and I were walking home and idly dissecting the rehearsal when he noted that we seemed to have stepped into a nineteen-twenties gangster film. The fog is thick tonight, clinging to the gargoyles and the architecture, and the lights were blurring beautifully through it all the way. I love Oxford in that mood - the night-time mood when the familiar looks strange - and it was an interesting backdrop to an interesting day.

5. I got in about half ten, wondered why I felt funny, noted dispassionately that I hadn't eaten in almost fourteen hours, and settled in with a bowl of pasta, with Maria and James, watching The Undiscovered Country.

I think we got about an hour in before I put my head in my hands and said, "It's a fucking Cold War allegory, isn't it?"

Well, it is! And I possibly enjoyed it even more for this fact. I like the notes of whom you can trust and who you can't, why a Neutral Zone is familiar and peace isn't, and how the original crew of the Enterprise really do belong to a different, more paranoid world. I even liked the knock on the head by bloody Francis Fukuyama. It was great fun. And after that we ended up eating peanut butter out of the jar and watching "Trials and Tribble-ations", which is made of love, particularly Dax, whom I have always thought is made of love despite seeing minimal amounts of Deep Space Nine compared to the others.

And now it's four am. I should go to bed, considering I have a lecture to go to in five hours.

Current Mood: restless
Current Music: I'll take you down the only road I've ever been down

Last Thursday was

sdwolfpup's More Joy Day. I missed it, because I am idiotic - I noted all the joy on LJ, especially

jenlev's lovely roastery story - and thought to myself, I meant to do something for that. Specifically, I meant to send out chocolate by pigeon post. But I forgot to get any, see above where I am idiotic, so I figured I should send text-based joy instead. I pidged poetry, webcomics and fic to people - writing fic small enough to fit in a brown envelope was a fun challenge - and sat back and felt the reverberations of the joy.

Because there is lots of joy in the world at the moment. I am hugely, enormously sleep-deprived at the moment, which is not a thing of joy - the low point came at half seven this morning, when I was riding out waves of insomniac nausea and thinking hard about asking someone who loves me to hit me on the head with a frying pan - which apart from other messy symptoms, makes me very easily frazzled and hypersensitive to everything. The fact I am still functional and happy is a testament to how much joy there actually is in the world.

Which is probably a good thing to have realised, as I am now a week short of having been in the world for twenty-one years. This is a horrifying thought, naturally - twenty-one is, well, it's a proper grown-up age, I can now drink in America and, er, run for Parliament if I so desire - but I do get the fun of a birthday to make up for it, so. Last night, counter-intuitively, was my birthday party - mine, along with

mundi_gaudium,

sebastienne,

deepbluemermaid and

lizziwig - at

pridehouse, and it was candlelit and thronged and lovely. The theme was "the nineties", but as everyone was keen to point out, not the nineteen-nineties - more like the n-ninties, I think. Anyway, there were people dressed as Aristophanes and Domitia and Socrates (well, Claire was walking around with a bottle filled with Fairy liquid and labelled "HEMLOCK") and as robot prostitutes from the 23rd century and numerous other beautiful things.

I went as the Green Fairy. I am not keen on absinthe - every time I drink it bad things hapen, and besides, it tastes far too much like aniseed for my liking - but the costume was pretty fun. Green skirt, green tights, green eyeshadow, pretty-fairy-ish top from Pat, glittery eyeliner and wings and shoes with roses on the buckles. And after a night of drinking wine and eating beautiful home-made cake and dancing around under fairy lights, I was quite happy curled up in a corner at half three in the morning feeling, Dionysian-fashion, loved by everyone and a part of everything.

I didn't sleep, but you can't have everything. (Although I am sleeping a little when exhausted, I keep waking up again every half an hour; there's a strange fragility about lying exactly between sleep and consciousness in a room that's buffetted by howling winds. Perhaps I'll sleep better when the wind changes, or at least when the weather stops being so utterly awful.) Instead, I rolled out of bed again at lunchtime and ran down to see

anotherusedpage, who is awesome, and we spent three hours talking about, er, fandom, and female-defined space, and OTW, and language as power, and the philosophy of Star Trek.

Yes, unashamedly. I am twenty-one years old and this is my world, welcome to it.

(Actually, while I'm talking about that, something of note. I was rewatching the TOS episode "Mirror, Mirror" - love, so much love, evil Spock, evil Spock has a GOATEE, heee - which I have seen an embarrassing number of times over the years. But. This time around, I noticed something I really, really should have spotted before. Near the end, mirror!Spock is being dealt with by McCoy - who has, I think, just hit him on the head with a vase, see above re: embarrassing number of times I have seen this - and then he wakes up. And stands up, walks menacingly across the room and pushes McCoy up against the wall into a forced mind-meld.

Which, forgive me if I'm wrong, has a very specific meaning in the Star Trek universe, right? It's rape. Mirror!Spock, who is then described as a "man of integrity" in both universes, is clearly not - because, well. Rape. And it's actually played as rape, as well. Which is very interesting, and an actually dark note in an episode which has enough ridiculous bits to keep me rewatching it for years. It made me think, anyway. There must be fic written about it, I'm sure.)

Yes, well. Meanwhile, back in my real world,

foulds and I are also casting our Aeneid - amidst much good-natured agreement about cheese and cheesegraters and their relevance to the script - and I'm suddenly far too busy for someone whose Finals are this year. (No, not Virgil's Aeneid. Ours.)

Okay, now I think I shall go to bed and lie awake until morning. In the meantime, I meant to do this for More Joy Day, but better late than never. Request drabbles! Give me (at least one of) fandom, characters, plot, quote, prompt, whatever. I shall do my best, and wish you all more joy.

Current Mood: sleepless
Current Location: Oxford, England
Current Music: Augie March; One Crowded Hour

Things on my mind, itemised for your reading pleasure:

1. All over the flist, I can see people shifting from holiday-headspace to term-time-headspace. I hate transitions - I'm going up to Oxford the day after tomorrow, and haven't even started thinking about piling up all my stuff together - but it always astonishes me how it happens time and time again. I have, apparently, already committed to going to Intrusion on Tuesday. At which junctture I feel the need to point out that I am quite incapable of getting dressed up, and if anyone would like to play Lifesize Goth Barbie with yours truly, then take me, I'm all yours.

In amongst all the mess of moving, I am uncomfortably aware that this is my second-to-last term at Oxford. I don't want this to be over; I don't see how it can be over. More angst on that will undoubtedly be forthcoming.

2. In brighter things,

hathy_col and I searched for Spock today. We didn't find him, but it's the journey that matters. On the way we found a) Ducktor Who, light-up suitably scarved rubber ducky of joy and my new best friend, b) Eddie Rocket's Unhealthiest Breakfast Ever, Now With Garlic Mayo, and c) an artist dressed as a bear.

Said man dressed as bear was one of the shortlisted entries for the Turner Prize at the Tate. This is the first year that the exhibition has been at the Tate Liverpool - European Capital of Culture strikes back - and it seemed a good idea to go, seeing as we were there and it was free and the wind was particularly cold today. So we went, and we got lost in a maze, were baffled by snapshots of a sisal factory, momentarily revived by a gorgeous installation, the words "THERE WILL BE NO MIRACLES HERE" done in lightbulbs in letters a metre high, and then returned to bafflement by a length recording of a man, dressed as a bear, in a museum in Berlin.

Afterwards we wandered through the city towards Forbidden Planet, idly chattering about nothing in particular ("So, Dax has a snake in her - like, sort of a good Goa'uld with spots." / "A good Goa'uld? / "Tok'ra. Only with spots." / "Ah.") and in comfortable consensus that we had done our something intellectual for the day.

3. "The City on the Edge of Forever" is really, really good. It might be abundantly clear by now I'm going through a little bit of an original Star Trek phase. Well, I am, but also a traditional TV sci-fi in general sort of phase. The thing about TOS episodes is that they all seem really hackneyed and derivative - until you remember that they did this stuff first. So this episode, with its predestination paradox hijinks, actually hits a lot of things I love - changing the past, being responsible for the consequences, the weight of future knowledge, along with some mundanity (I love how one way of looking at its plot is just one very long, very bad day for Doctor McCoy) - and reminds me of a lot of other things I love. I mean, SG-1 does it with "1969", which is one of my favourite episodes of anything - hurrah for "Groovy!" - and Red Dwarf does it in "Stasis Leak", which I also love, and there are lots of examples of what's pretty much the same plot.

And it's a good one, that's the point. Which is not to say re-doing things is necessarily good. SG-1 doing and re-doing alternate universes stopped grabbing me after a while, but the first time they do it - which has distinct echoes of "Mirror, Mirror" and hurrah for evil-goatee!Spock, too - it's good. "There But For the Grace of God", along with 1969, is probably the episode of SG-1 I've seen the most times, and that's partly because I love the skeleton of the idea - alternate universes for the win, both in canon and fandom - but partly because of how it's executed. I love how Daniel's response is not at all like Captain Kirk's. It's, if I remember rightly, "This isn't happening, this is nuts, this isn't happening, this is nuts!" And I love how it hangs on to the light touch, and it's better for it, but in the end it's actually devastating. I mean, er, everyone dies. That's not cheerful. But it's a very good example of how you can do different things with an idea.

Funny, I think I'd forgotten how much I love speculative fiction. I love huge enormous ideas, I love how a lot of philosophical thought-experiments are functionally indistinguisabe from good science fiction - the "problem cases" of personal identity theories are all things like body-swaps (SG-1, "Holiday"), splitting of consciousness (Red Dwarf, "Confidence and Paranoia"), sentience and computers (every piece of SF ever, to be honest) and whether you're responsible for everything your mind is responsible for (DS9, "Dax"). I'm a little wary of "real" SF, though; I like television because it tends to have the lighter touch I like. I've been slogging through Consider Phlebas for the last couple of months to no avail, which is odd, because I've read and liked other Culture books. It's too... I don't know, serious? It's not that I don't want to read books with serious themes. It's just I get the feeling a lot of what's out there is significantly lacking in a sense of humour.

4. Er, I may be transcending an itemised list at this point. I'm going to be away for the next couple of days, I reckon. I'm busy all day tomorrow, and I need to re-register my laptop on the college network, so it might be a little while before I get back into the swing of things. I owe emails to about half a dozen people - they are coming, honestly. I'm just being very disorganised right now.

(5. Also. Emilie Autumn is great and you should all be listening to her. Rapunzel; Chambermaid.)

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Location: Formby Point, Merseyside
Current Music: Vienna Teng; Enough to Go By