Now that I'm living in my own house, I've been busing to work since I don't have a car. The bus ride is kind of boring though. Also, I have to leave the house more than an hour before my shift starts when it's really only a 15 minute drive from my place to work. This has been making me want to get a car.

While I could technically afford a car, it would be kind of tight, also if one of my roommates moved out, I'd be kind of screwed.

So, in order to avoid the cost of a car, I've decided that buying a top end MP3 player is much cheaper. That way, at least I'll be less bored on the bus to and from work.

Can anyone rec a good MP3 player to me?

I'm looking for something with a largish screen, since I'd like to be able to read .txt files from it (fic!). I also wouldn't mind putting some of my favourite vids on it. I'd also want something with a decent amount of space on it, and room for removable space would be even better (like an SD or microSD slot). Oh, and I hate it when you have to use a certain program in order to add files to the player, I much prefer ones where you can drag and drop or use on a stranger's computer if need be.

For various reasons, I'm kind of anti-Apple, so suggestions for other manufacturers would be awesome.

kaaatie made a post yesterday asking people what they thought of SGU. While I've been watching SGU I haven't really been talking about it here. However in my response to her, I basically laid out all my feelings on the show so thought it was worth reposting here.

Obviously, there will be spoilers for the aired episodes, although I tried not to get into specifics too much.

( My essay on SGU, let me show you it. )

While I've used AO3 before, I've never taken the time to poke at it in depth.

One of the great things about large multi-fandom archives like this is that the most random stuff appears there. I mean, there's a pairing tag for Arby's Oven Mitt/Hamburger Helper Hand. I haven't been this amused since I discovered the Minesweeper section at fanfiction.net.

The OTW has decided to move the Archive of Our Own into open beta!!!

I wasn't planning on signing up for an account, since I only have one tiny little fic posted but, well, I've been writing a lot lately. I have 2 Merlin WIPs going on my hard drive right now and I signed up for apocabigbang to finish off that SCC fic I started writing in September.

Also, I'm a bit supporter of the OTW and archives in general so I just couldn't resist. So, should anyone want to read my one published fic off my journals, you can now find it over there

Anyways, I highly encourage all the fic writers on my flist to post their fics there. I know people get more comments on LJ, however it's a hell of a lot easier to find things in archives. Also, I always worry about where all the fic will be 10 years from now. Just look at Geocities. What would happen to fandom and our fannish history if LJ shut down?

If I get any invite codes, I'll make sure to post about it here.

So, it's getting close to that time of the year again. Time to get the stamps out and send out the mail to celebrate the holiday season! I used to be better about mailing things to my flist, but have been failing lately, so I want to make extra sure that everyone who's interested get a card this year for the holidays!

I'd like to encourage everyone who's interested to sign up. Even if you don't plan on sending mail out yourself, that's A-OK by me, I don't need anything in return. I *do* however need to use up the ridiculous amount of stamps I currently have (3 sheets of American stamps, 3 sheets of international stamps and 2 sheets of Canadian).

Seriously, everyone loves mail that isn't bills, so if you're comfortable giving out your address, sign up. Even if you live in Ottawa and I see you all the time.

So, if you're interested in receiving mail from me, leave a comment (comments are screened) and let me know if you'd like a card or a post card and your address if I don't already have it.

Once, just once, I would like for news of a shows cancellation to not be met with internet petitions and letter writing campaigns.

I know, I know, I've participated in them as well but the fact that every time a show is cancelled, no matter how long the run, or how ready it is to go, that people get all up in arms and try and stop it, well, it gets a little tiring.

Numb3rs has had 6 seasons. That a lot. The only show that I've watched that has had more was SG-1 and I watched the whole thing within a year and wasn't fannish about it, so I tend not to count it.

It's just, you'd think that the more campaigns of this kind that go on, the less weight they carry with them each time they happen. Can we not save our efforts for the great shows that are killed before their time and actually have a chance of succeeding (I loved SGA and Terminator to pieces but while I may have raged against their untimely cancellation, I never participated in the campaigns to keep them, since I knew TPTB were not going to listen no matter what).

Bwa ha ha ha.

Ok, I'm trying to do a cross reference at work and ended up on another company's website with a list of all the brand names they carry.

One of them is "Horny" I don't know why I'm always surprised when my scientific world crosses with the adult market but I am. I was looking up self sealing biohazard bags and ended up "Horny Goat Weed - Epimedium Supports Sexual VitalityEpimedium is one of the most valued tonics of Chinese herbalism."

This is kind of like the time I went looking for finger cots and the manufacturer's logo was a dancing condom. :P I feel a lot better about referring to finger cots and finger condoms now.

I haven't really been on LJ since last Thursday. I spent all my free time this weekend angsting and cleaning up so haven't had a lot of time. Also, I've fallen behind on my shows so don't want to get spoiled. I owe people comments and hope to get to them soon.

In other news, what's with the Merlin fandom and incest fics? I don't really have any issues with incest in fics, hell, I've had two fandoms where incest pairings were my main pairing, however I've never really gotten why people feel the need to throw incest into a non-canon pairing for fics. It seems like this round of kinkme_merlin is just filled with incest prompts and I find this weird. And in some cases icky (mostly when I say I'm ok with incest I mean I'm ok with consensual incest between family members of the same generation that isn't porny while they're still really young. I find it a lot harder to take with you get different generations involved and/or the kids are really really young).

And, while we're on the subject of Merlin, ( last week's episode )

OMG, why do I keep signing up for things? Ok, I haven't actually signed up for anything yet, however over on IJ auburnnothenna just linked me to apocabigbang over on LJ. I... still have massive amounts of work to do for podbang, however this might be the perfect kick in the butt I need to finish my Terminator post-apocalyptic/post-war massive crossover fic.

Hell, I already have met the minimum word count for the challenge just in what I have written from 3 day novel.

I haven't signed up yet, but I think I probably will.

Also, they're looking for artists if anyone is interested: http://community.livejournal.com/apocabigbang/

PS. Halloween pictures coming soon!

O.M.G.
Today, specifically this afternoon, has been a crazy whirl wind for me. I saw last night on my flist that someone (in this case yhlee had decided to start a Yuletide challenge for vidders. This made me happy because vidders are sadly excluded from yuletide (which is strictly fic based) *and* yuletart (which is an art based Yuletide that also excludes vidding... and I think manips).

yhlee, however, was asking the comm how they'd like to see the exchange run. If you've ever gotten into a conversation with me, you'll know I can be a little... opinionated. :P
So of course I was all over the comments and now have volunteered to host the archive for all the vids (happy surprise, but it turns out my hosting changed my disk space and bandwidth to unlimited while I wasn't looking).

Except, I don't just want to host the stuff, no, I want it to be an *awesome* *site*. Have I ever made an awesome vidding archive site before? No. But strangely that isn't stopping me. Even though I have a ton of prep to do for Halloween I still managed to spend some time tonight on my hosting company's wiki finding out about services that will help and Googling prewritten scrips (god I so cannot start anything from scratch, but I might be able to cobble some things together...).

So, I may be flailing in posts asking questions like "Has anyone ever had a web interfaced uploading service on their site before?"

Of course, all this means I'm not going to have any time to participate myself, however I still think this'll be awesome fun! :D

I've been so restless at work lately, just not wanting to do anything :S

However I'm getting super excited about Halloween. The house is really beginning to look awesome and I'm sure come Saturday you're all going to be spammed with pictures and squee. :D It's been all I can do to not start posting pictures and plans already but most of the people coming to the party are already on my flist and I want it to be a surprise for them.

We're starting to decorate at work too. Where I work Halloween is rather intense. Since my department has more people than desks, I actually sit in another department. The other department said I could only sit at my desk on Halloween if I joined them in their department's theme. Which was fine with me, however when my own department was having a meeting, I had to leave while they discussed Halloween stuff because they felt I had abandoned them. It's all very competitive. Also, there are prizes for the best department theme as well as for individual costumes. I'm pretty sure my father is going to win for "I Can't Believe You Wore That" since he's going as "Lady Luck" and has this short little green skirt and tank top outfit with a wig that looks *horrible*.

At first I was searching online for a cheap wedding dress but couldn't find one in my size and price range that could get here on time, so instead I'm going as a rather lame card dealer at a casino (the department theme is Vegas casino). I do however have a poker table set up in my cubicle so I feel that will get me extra points.

Now, I just have to make a last minute stop to the party store, since my costume (for my party) requires me to dye my hair. I tried using real hair dye to do it but it seems that my hair is too dark and it came out as my normal hair colour, just a shade off in the direction I wanted it to be :( I'm just going to buy some of that really bright spray on stuff instead.

You may have noticed that I skipped the week of September 15-21. That was done on purpose since apparently I didn't read much that week and of the few fics I did touch non of them were really rec worthy. I appear to have made up for it by the next week however...

( Meta )

( Merlin )

( Terminator )

( Misc Fandoms )

And now we're almost out of September. Just in time for October to finish....

This was a much shorter week!

( SPN RPS )

( Merlin )

( Crossover )

That almost wasn't worth the cut tags...

Judging by how long it took me to write up my first rec post I don't think I'm going to be able to go with posting recs for an entire month at once, but I'll try doing it by the week. So here's my recs for Sept 1-7, 2009.

Also I have decided that Millie will be my official Fic Rec Icon. *nods*

( Terminator Recs )

( Stargate Atlantis Recs )

( Merlin Recs )

( Misc Fandoms )

( Meta )

If anyone has any comments or suggestions about my formating I'd be happy to hear them. :)

Dear Brain,

What do you have against happy endings? All of the good fic ideas you come up with have sad unhappy endings! In my terminator epic you ended the fic with a giant 3 way war where the world is basically destroyed. At least you had your OTPs together and came up with a sequel where you could prevent the giant 3 way war from happening. But in order to do that you had to break up your OTP. Then you created *another* sequel with time looping where sometimes your OTP was together and other times they weren't until half of your OTP died. Not happy.

And now. Now that I'm in Merlin fandom, which is all happy and ridiculous slash, you come up with a kind of cool OT4 idea which is fun and sexy-hot in the beginning but ends with them all scattered to the winds and dying bitter and lonely. WHAT DO YOU HAVE AGAINST HAPPY ENDINGS BRAIN!? I WANT TO KNOW SO I CAN FIX IT!!

No love,
Me.

Hello Flist, I need help. Can you name off some space ships for me please. Extra points if you also post a picture of said ship.

Also, I have some absolutely awesome pictures to post in about a week. :D:D:D:D

So, a while ago thedreamisreal posted a Snog, Shag, Marry or Throw Off a Cliff meme and gave me some characters to play with. Except she gave me really hard ones so it took me a while to come up with who goes where. She gave me Arthur Pendragon, John Connor, Alan Rickman and Sam Winchester.

( But finally, here are my choices )

Snog, Shag, Marry, Throw Off a Cliff?

~Comment to this post and receive 4 options (actors/singers/so on, so forth). You must then decide which of the 4 options you would: Shag, Snog, Marry and Throw off a cliff.

So, I think I've decided on my favourite character in SGU. I just spend 10 minutes trying to find his name, and apparently it's Sgt. Hunter Riley aka Awesome Dude.

Hee. Apperantly my dad is a slasher! ( Cut for spoilers of tonight's episode )

So every once in a while I remember that I can check out my website stats and end trolling through them out of curiosity. It's always interesting, for example to see why certain sites link to you. Or to see what kind of search terms were used to find your site. Some of them can be really wierd. Like someone found my site using the search term fruit head photo WTF? I don't even know why that search term would point towards my site. *iz confuzzled*

Or while looking through the referrer links I saw that one lead back to a rec of one of my vids. It was an older rec for one of my more obscure vids and as I read it, it made me wonder if I had seen the rec before, only to hit the comments and find out I was like the only one to comment on the rec :P

And, since I'm looking at stats, I took a look at my YouTube stats as well. YouTube has such different standards when it comes to vids than LJ that it always kind of boggles my mind. On LJ my most popular vid, by far was Hurt. While Hurt doesn't do badly over there (unlike, say my Vance vid or Open Your Eyes), it's not really that popular either.
On the other hand, the two vids that I put together in the most slap dash way (there were deadlines involved and two due at once!) are my most popular ones. Justin's Hair at almost 80K views and Lovers at almost 40K views (and that's saying something since YouTube took it down for copyright violations like 2 years ago). God, had I known that Hair was going to turn out to be so popular, I definitely would have taken greater care when making it. It kind of makes me cringe to think that that's the vid I'm most... "famous" for.

So, as promised here's my first rec post! I decided to do it retroactively, so here's for the last week of August. I did a big Merlin rec list not too long ago for keewick so there might be some repeats in here.

I should also note that one of my common ways of finding fics is through fic finding comms, so I kind of have lost my filter when it comes to spoiling fics. So if you don't like being spoiled for a fic, my recs might make you unhappy.

Because a lot of my fic comes in podfic form I've listed the title as a link to the fic but have added links in brackets beside with links to the podfic. I listen to everything as MP3s but I've included links to the M4B form as well for anyone interested in the podbook format.

( Merlin Recs )

( Stargate Atlantis Recs )

( Terminator Recs )

( Meta )

Oh God, this took me all night and it was just a few days worth of fic! :S

So, over on Twitter, RIP Kanye West is a trending topic. I figured he wasn't dead but checked it out anyways to see what people were talking about (I kind of hate Twitter for this, you can tell something is going on, but can't find out what's going on :S).

I still don't know what that phrase is a trending topic, but this RT is hilarious:

Whoever started the RIP Kanye West hoax, imma let you finish, but Balloon Boy had the best hoax of all time.

When you're stressed because of deadlines, avoiding work is probably not the best strategy.

Anyways because I'm still thinking of doing that whole rec list idea and because I was reading that fic length is a factor for many people I spent last night and some of today retroactively going through all my Delicious links and adding word count or time tags to all of the fic and podfic.

It did get me kind of excited about the actual rec'ing though. As I was sifting through them I kept being reminded of how much I liked some of the fics.

In other news, I'm trying to buy something for my Halloween costume on eBay and I find the whole reserve idea incredible frustrating. Why would you have bidding start at $10, if you really want people to pay $400! I know that lower priced items catch people's eyes but it's really annoying.

Also, I bit on the stupid thing and it says that my current bid is $10, but I said I'd pay $100 and it's telling me the reserve hasn't been met. Does that mean that $10 doesn't meet the reserve? Or that $100 doesn't?

I found one outfit that is perfect and has a Buy Now within my price range and I *want* it. However it's currently in China, and I really doubt it'll get here in time if I do buy it. :(

So, to follow through with my thoughts to try rec'ing more, I've been taking a look at what I bookmarked and watching for trends. This may not be interesting to anyone but me, but I thought it worth posting.

( August )


( September )

So every once in a while I go through bouts of vid recs but I very rarely rec anything else on my flist. I don't think I mentioned this on my journal before but back in August kronos999 and I decided to do an, I don't know, experiment maybe? Where we basically are bookmarking on delicious every fic we read (the good and the bad, although we both decided that we don't have to bookmark it if we don't actually finish reading it, so the truly bad isn't making it).

Anyways that, combined with my reading accioslash's meta on recs had me thinking about maybe making more of an effort to rec things on my journal. Would anyone be interested in that should I make the effort?

Title: Moving In (1/?)
Author: paraka
Fandom: RPS (RPFS?)
Pairing: krono999/diurnal_lee
Rating: NC-17
Notes: For my awesome roommates. ;)

( They had always felt that there was something special between them but so much had changed since they moved in together. )

Now with bonus comment fic by seanchaidh

So, I think I'm going to be updating my filters soon and since I have added some people to my flist since I last did this, I thought I'd ask people what their preferences are on which ones they want to be on.

I basically have 2 filters of interest, my mental filter and my work filter.
My mental filter got it's most use in 2004/2005 when I was going through a bit of a mental break down and it isn't used that much today since I feel I'm too old to be emo any more but who knows when I'll next get depressed so I've kept it.
I use my work filter far more, it's where I'll talk about, surprisingly enough, work! Mostly it's me bitching and complaining about stupid stuff.

And with those ringing endorsements, who wants on them?

I seem to use my journal quite a lot as a way of contacting my various friends in Ottawa... and continuing in that direction I was wondering if anyone would be interested in going to some concerts with me. There are a couple of great acts coming to Ottawa that I was thinking of going to:

-Billy Talent with Alexisonfire & Against Me - March 26, 2010 for $65 (fees/surcharges included)
-Three Days Grace with The Used and Default - December 20, 2009 $45 (+fees/surcharges)
-Tegan and Sarah - January 22, 2010 $34 (+fees/surcharges)

So, anyone interested?

So, my awesome roommates and I decided to throw a fandom Halloween Party. We have big long lists of things we're going to do to make the party awesome and fandomy however we're having issues coming up with food ideas. Does anyone have any ideas for what we could to to make our food fandomy and fun?

It can be obscure, because we're planning on having labels explaining it. Also, it doesn't have to be related to a fandom I'm in, :D

*iz very excited*

Mom: Did you see what your father did to my tree?
Me: What tree?
Mom: The one outside.
Me: *headdesk*

I love my mom. Really I do, even if sometimes we have issues communicating.


Unrelatedly, I think I might kind of like Stargate Universe. I can point out all the things that annoy me about it and can't quite say what it is I like but I find myself wanting to watch it...