happydalek: (Default)
 This review brought to you by: 

The letter L

The number 3

And several beers.

Yeah, I'm about a week late on this one, but SO WAT.  Lemme tell yous guys what I thought.  

Spoilers, obviously. )
happydalek: (Default)
Somehow, I completely missed all the spoilers about the upcoming new series of The Sarah Jane Adventures. 

Spoilers! (How many of you read that in River Song's voice?) )

Not linking to any specific sources because there were many of them, I'm not getting graded on this post, and you can all work the internet machine as well as I can.

happydalek: (Default)
Doctor Who has undergone a changing of the guard, and fandom speculation and opinions are running high.  Some are sure they'll like the new direction, others are sure they'll hate it.  Many are of the "wait and see" persuasion, and some feel so betrayed by the direction the show has gone in the recent past that they are beyond caring at all (or at least would like to be).  It all makes me feel terribly restless.  You can't get a more open-ended, fantastic premise than Doctor Who has, and that has allowed the show to endure in a variety of incarnations for over 40 years.  I love it for that versatility, and yet...I am dissatisfied.  I've learned that as a fan I'm drawn to things that are flawed, and a great part of my enjoyment of them comes from making them interactive, if through no other means than my own desire to "correct" those flaws.  I never wrote fanfiction before I got into Doctor Who, and I think it's because I never had another fandom that had so much unrealized potential.

I love Doctor Who for what it is, and what it has been, but I also desperately want it to be different.  For instance, I want to explore the inside of the TARDIS.  I want it to be a mysterious place full of odd, fantastic, wonderful and creepy things.  I want the Doctor to be alien, to have feelings and thoughts that we can't always quite understand.  I want to know him as the ancient time-traveler that he is, who loves life and loves humans, but is not human.  I want him to go to planets unlike any we've ever seen before, encounter beings unlike any we are familiar with, and have the kind of adventures that make us think more broadly about life, the universe, and our place in it.  I want a greater diversity of companions, not just in age, race, gender, class, appearance or species, but of personality.  Remember when the Doctor had companions who were there against their will, or because they had specific things to learn or places to go?  And who says we even need a constant companion?  Why can we not have a succession of fascinating one-off characters?

I want Doctor Who to be and have all of these things, and yet I also want it to remain as the staple I know and love, and that is probably a paradox.  But aren't paradoxes something Doctor Who does all the time?

happydalek: (Default)
Not much fandomish going on in my life right now.  Working full time (ish...two part time jobs) has kild my muse ded for the tiem being, it seems.  Still watching Heroes but haven't made time for a proper reaction post because, frankly, most of the episodes have left me feeling rather "meh."  Not much to report.  Still trying to attempt a MMSR sequel.  Hard to feel motivated when nothing about it surprises or excites me.  Have to figure something out.  Still churning away at the Doctor Who fic I came up with a little while ago involving the Master that my brain is convinced will be awesome. (Long sentence is long.)  It's now going to include extra Doctor.  As is, I felt I had a bit too much OC happenings, and I know that can get horribly boring when you click on something hoping to read about what the canon peeps are up to.  Trouble with the Who fic is, I have a lot of research I should probably do, and it's pretty glacially paced right now.  It may turn out to be zippy when I actually write it do the long portions of "...and time passed" montages my brain is filling it with.  So, it's not quite 'there' yet.  And probably won't ever be, based on what usually happens to these great ideas I leave gestating on the back burner.  *eye roll* 

My day job is awesome for brainstorming.  I can sit and clean stuff for five hours and chew on plot points at the same time.  Trouble is, my night work does a fantastic job of making me completely forget and lose interest in what I was working on.  Retail is bad for the brain that way.  It eats up all my creative energies.  Hopefully I'll be able to think more productively after the holidays.  Christmas is a horrible time of year.  I really hate it when I have to work in retail.  Underscores all the things that I dislike about it.  

But before I go all tangenty about it, yay for Christmas Doctor Who!  David Tennant is this close to being GONE and I'm so excited about it.  Not that I'm a Tennant hater or anything.  He's a very good actor.  I just can't stand 10.  I tried to like him, really I did.  And it took me his entire tenure to figure out that the reason it wasn't working is because 10 is designed to be unlikeable.  Looking back, it's so blindingly obvious I feel like an idiot.  Christmas Invasion, he's wondering what sort of man he is.  "Am I rude now?"  Yes, you are.  You're a power-tripping jerk.  I guess I kept thinking he'd get over it, or I was imagining it.  I kept trying to look past it, but Rusty, in his authorial brilliance, wouldn't let me, because he's been steadily emphasizing it.  So instead of mourning a character-gone-wrong and going all, "oh WHY wasn't 10 written better?!" I can feel secure in my jubilation at his imminent departure, because I'm supposed to.  Thank Rassilon, my world makes sense again.

On a slightly different note, I'm combing the "Other Doctors" section of Teaspoon looking for creative, unique takes on Doctor Who.  I want to read experimental stuff that really takes advantage of the enormous potential that's there.  Heck, I want to write some of dat sheit.  (Now that I've finally stopped trying to put fictionalized versions of Michael Jackson into everything.  That was a strange couple of months.)  Recs?

happydalek: (fanfic time)
You know those books you read occasionally as a kid that were usually written in second-person and at the end of each chapter you had a choice of what direction to take the plot?  I called them "pick-a-path" or "choose-your-own-adventure" books.  Turns out, the technical name for them is a "gamebook."  I've been thinking for a few months now that it would be a really ambitious, interesting project to attempt to write one, what with my fondness for plot twists and alternate endings.  I feel like Doctor Who is a blatantly, screamingly obvious choice for a project of this type.  Talk about timey-wimey!  I'd love to twist it so that various plots and storylines would double-back on each other in interesting ways and have a really cool influence on established history and Who canon, and posting such a story online would make the whole thing easier to do.

The problem is...where to start?  And why am I even considering this when I have tons of half-developed projects already screaming for attention?  I could also see a project like this being open to multiple authors, to tackle all the branching plot points and different endings.  it could be epic.   
happydalek: (hawt master)
I found another one of those ugly, brown, shield-shaped stink bugs in my room.  Normally I only find them when they go whizzing by my ear in quiet moments, scaring the living daylights out of me (they're BIG and they make a horrendously loud and low-pitched buzzing sound when they zip by *shudder*).  When that happens, I have absolutely no qualms about hunting the little sucker down, wrapping the toe of a sturdy shoe in a tissue, then using it to crush the little bugger into a chitin-and-innards stew.  (You have to be careful, because squishing them is what makes them stink, hence the tissue for biohazard control.)  But that didn't happen today. 

I was watering my pet cactus Herbert, and I just happened to notice the insect resting on the underside of one of the blades.  It was just sitting there, its long legs wrapped around the sides of the blade for support, not doing anything.  It looked so natural there--a bug on a plant, as nature intended--that I was content to leave it alone.  It wasn't chewing on Herbert or making any aggressive action at all, so I left it there and went about my business.  A few hours later, it was still there, still behaving like a perfect houseguest.  But I knew I couldn't leave there, because if I did, I'm sure that it would have taken to flying around the room in the middle of the night, scaring me out of a sound sleep by plopping onto my hair (or my face!) or doing a low-altitude flyby that would have me thinking a man-sized wasp was invading my room. 

So I made my decision.  Opening my window a crack, I fetched a tissue and used it to carefully disengage the insect (which was about the size of my thumbnail) from the underside of Herbert's leafblade.  Then I whisked over the window and tossed it outside.  No real reason for it, aside from the fact that I just didn't feel like squashing it.  I went out of my way to spare its life. As the Doctor put it:

"Because she smiled, because he's got freckles. Because they begged. And that's how you live with yourself. That's how you slaugher millions. Because once in a while, on a whim, if the wind's in the right direction...you happen to be kind."

And now I really want to watch Boomtown

happydalek: (Default)
Why do I even bother trying to listen to audios anymore?  It figures that as soon as I put one on, I'll end up with three errands that need doing and two phone calls I can't ignore, regardless of how busy or boring the day has otherwise been.  [sigh]  I'm never going to finish Master at this rate!
happydalek: (Default)


Everybody else on the f-list seems to be doing it, so, what the heck?  New friends are always cool.
happydalek: (brain)
It was like I was watching the new series of Torchwood, picking up right where a cliffhanger ending had left off.  The Doctor had just saved the world, again.  I don't know exactly what the threat had been, but it had involved...the Return of Suzie Costello!  She looked different, with chin-length, light brown hair, and she was dressed entirely in white (Suzie the White?).  She was lying in the grass, looking petulant because she'd lost, but in a resigned, mostly harmless sort of way. 

Meanwhile, the Doctor was sprawled across the hood of a car in the middle of a big, and very still city (London?  Cardiff? Neither?).  He was wearing a thin cotton T-shirt and looked exhausted and anguished.  "Nobody dies, ever again," he whimpered.  I knew from the previous cliffhanger that he'd used his life force to make everybody on Earth immortal.  0_0  He was tired of losing people and just couldn't take it anymore.  Gwen was standing nearby. 

Slowly, the city came alive again, but before the Doctor could get off the car, another car suddenly slammed into it, propelling the Doctor through the air.  He crashed into a couple of other cars and rolled sickeningly on his neck before stopping, eyes closed.  Gwen raced over to him, hand over her mouth, Suzie standing a short distance behind, looking unimpressed.   I knew what Gwen was thinking: he'd used up his life force on humanity, and now he was dead.  A youth, a boy about 11 or 12 years old, also approached.  The Doctor opened his eyes, got up, and started talking in his usual bouncy, rapid-fire delivery, instructing the boy to go find an abandoned underpass somewhere and live in it, because it was important nobody find out that he (the boy) was immortal just yet.  (So I guess the boy had been involved in the story previously somehow?)  The boy seemed a little bit confused by the instructions, but eager to follow them, anyway.  Then the Doctor wandered off to a nearby row home.

Inside, the Doctor opened up the freezer and started collecting a stack of mini frozen pizzas for himself.  (Um, yes.  Because he always has frozen mini pizzas after he gets hit by a car.  Didn't you know?)  Gwen followed him in and tried to argue with him about his non-sensical advice to the boy: "'Go live in an underpass?'  That boy has years of life left to him that he should be able to have with his family!"  But the Doctor ignored her and carried his frozen pizzas out to a pickup truck.

Now it was late evening.  The sky was a deep reddish purple.  The pickup truck was one of four vehicles getting ready to leave somewhere (possibly they were the rest of Torchwood?).  Gwen and Suzie rode in the back of the cab, and the Doctor was getting ready to drive.  I looked over at the horizon and saw a gigantic moon suspended in the sky.  It was reddish, like a harvest moon, but it had black features on it that looked very much like continents.  I remember one of them was shaped almost exactly like Australia.  The moon looked really vivid and three dimensional, like it was only a few miles away, and it had a vaguely hexagonal shape to it, not properly round.  It was at least three times bigger than it should have been.  In short, it wasn't the right moon. 

I got into the passenger seat of the truck, all the while insisting that somebody look at the moon and see that it wasn't right, but everyone seemed to be in a hurry.  We drove out of the city and onto a winding, mountainous road with forest on either side, and then, we turned off into a cornfield.  A sense of fear, of impending doom, began to creep up on me.  Overhead, I could see that big, wrong moon in the sky.  There were no lights except for the headlights of the four vehicles.  We were third in line.

Suddenly, a human shadow cut across the illumation of the headlights.  But I was the only one who saw it.  I turned around and asked if either Gwen or Suzie had moved to block the headlights of the vehicle behind us, creating the shadow, but they didn't seem to have any idea what I was talking about.  Corn stalks flew by on either side of the narrow, bumpy dirt road.  

"I'm glad we're not the first car," the Doctor remarked.

We were leaving the corn.  Ahead was an open field.  Distantly, we heard a woman scream, and the first two vehicles flashed their brake lights, and started to pull off the road, to stop.  My fear sense spiked as the Doctor began to do likewise.  This is exactly what we shouldn't do, I remember thinking.  As Gwen and the Doctor began opening their doors, I woke up.  

happydalek: (brain)
So, I just discovered The Doctor Who Random Pairing Generator.  It gave me Alan Jackson/Liz Shaw/saving the world, and for a bizarre little moment, I thought it meant "Alan Jackson" the country singer. 
happydalek: (sleep)
I had both Star Trek AND Doctor Who dreams last night! *does a happy dance*  The Doctor Who one was particularly mad cool, because it featured the Eleventh Doctor. 

It was Matt Smith, peeps.  In ma head, doing Doctorish things. 
 
Doctorish weirdness! )
 

 

Spock, McCoy and Sarek in mah head! )


Yeah, I think my brain is trying to tell me I need, like, a job or something.


 

 

happydalek: (Default)
From looking at my journal entries, you wouldn't be able to tell that 90% of my free time is spent writing fic.  Seriously.  It's practically my default setting: "Hmm, I'm bored.  I know!  I'll write a few scenes."  It always has been, since even before I knew how to write.  I'd dictate stuff to my parents and then draw the illustrations.  The problem is, I don't finish things.  Ever.  Well, not ever ever.  I have a few short fics, drabbles and the like that are floating around on the internets. 

But for as much as I write, the proportion of it that is complete is so astronomically unbalanced that it might as well equal zero.  With that track record, writing is a huge, HUGE waste of my time.  So much so that I'm thinking I might give it up for lent this year as a vice.  0_o. 

It's a terrifying thought, but it's either that, or I finally discover a fount of discipline somewhere and start finishing stuff.  I'd very much prefer the latter to happen, but the only way it's likely to is if I become accountable to somebody other than myself.  I'd like to make it a quasi-New Year's Resolution, to finish my fics.

So in that spirit, here's the Unfinished Fic Meme that some of you out there have done already.  It's a simple one, to post snippets of things that are rotting away on your harddrive.  Since that basically constitutes the sum total of my documents folder, the following is a very small, hand-picked sample. 

First, the fanfic.  More specifically, the non-Doctor Who fanfic.

Star Wars

1. A tiny scene, set between the two trilogies. 

Darth Vader! )

2. A longer scene from another project, set somewhere post-RotJ

Jedi! And bombs! )     


The Mummy

1.  Would you believe there are almost no Indiana Jones/The Mummy crossover fics out there?  Here's the sum total of one I tried to write.

Imhotep and Jones )

2.  I love the idea of an Imhotep revenge fic.  And ideas were about as far as I got on writing one.

Imhotep! And snarky Rick! )

Star Trek: TOS

Set during the first five-year mission, I had a complete synopsis written up for this, and then...it just kinda stalled on me. 

Kirk, Spock and McCoy banter! )


The Magnificent Seven

Demonstrating my love for teensy, tiny fandoms!  This thing died a quick death when I realized I was writing a Mary Sue.   

Cowgirl! )

The Wild, Wild West

In the last couple weeks I've dreamed up at least 3 different, full-length fic ideas for this show, two of which I promptly lost interest in.  Here's a bit from one of them.

James T. West!  )

Aaaanndd...that brings us to Doctor Who

1. My only attempt at writing Martha. 

Martha! And regeneration! Apparently. )

2.  I keep toying with the idea of writing a sequel to Fissionbut somehow it keeps eluding me.  My working title, appropriately enough, is Fusion. 

Identity issues! )
happydalek: (squee)
With less than a week to go before Christmas, I decided that I was suffering from a deficiency of holiday spirit, so I informally dubbed today Christmas Who Day!  I've just finished watching The Unquiet Dead (Zombies for Christmas!  Woo!), and now I've got The Christmas Invasion on (which remains, in my opinion, the best of the official Christmas specials so far).  Plus, I just read this, courtesy of OG's news links, and the last sentence just made me squee entirely too loudly.  CHRISTMAS COME SOON, PLZ!
happydalek: (didn't see that coming)
Huh.  That was a hell of a thing.

Thanks to a wonderfully generous friend of mine, I am now caught up with Series Four.  I pulled a marathon of episodes 10-13 (not having a job does have its occasional upside) this morning.  I love my geek friends.  SO MUCH. 

happydalek: (Default)
Meh. 



But Moff, I have certain expectations from you, and this time, you rather failed.  Which isn't a terrible thing.  I'd have started getting suspicious that you were some kind of Script God or android if you didn't pen a mediocre episode now and then. 
happydalek: (brain)
Yikes, two posts in one day!  Can you tell I have just graduated from school, quit my job and spent my whole day playing around on the internet?

happydalek: (Default)
CRAP.  Have three finals tomorrow, and I chose to take this weekend to melt into a puddle of inertia instead of studying.  NOT GOOD. 

In other news, Poison Sky rocked my socks for reasons everybody else on the f-list have quite adequately covered already, so I won't be all redundant and repetitive by writing them all out like everybody else (geddit?). 

Also, IRON MAN IS MADE OF WIN.  Seriously.  Practically better than Spiderman.  Anyone planning on seeing it, DO SO!!!  And make sure YOU STAY THROUGH THE END CREDITS!  I may be coming down with a slight crush on Robert Downey Jr., in spite of his questionable facial hair.  Such pretty eyes!  GUH.   The dynamic between his character and Gwyneth Paltrow's was great, as was his chemistry with Terence Howard, who needed to be in it more than he was.  Heterosexual life partners, those two. 
happydalek: (Default)
I am really, really enjoying it.  Really!  Donna has got to be the best thing that has ever happened to Doctor Who since the show came back in 2005.  The episodes look fantastic, we've had a lovely sprinkling of history and space, mysterious references to current events (the disappearing bees), aliens who are not evil (the Ood and Adipose), a companion who isn't in love with the Doctor actually debates and argues with the Doctor and isn't wrong.  It really feels like the show is finally hitting its stride.  But is it just me, or does seem as if the storylines have gotten very SJA this season?  I almost want to think that it's being done as a deliberate compensation for having an "older" companion.  (But I love SJA, so this isn't necessarily a problem for me.)

Fic Post!

Apr. 20th, 2008 10:21 pm
happydalek: (fanfic time)
Title:  The Woman at the Well
Rating: PG
Word count: 1380
Characters: Peri, Sixth Doctor
Summary: Peri gets some interesting advice. 
A/N:  In honor of Passover (and the Orthodox celebration of Easter next weekend), I bring you this unlikely little fic.  Warning: very crack. 

~~~~~~

 

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happydalek

August 2012

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