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-A-HA: Chris Pine indeed gains weight to play Kirk. (I like the bit just past the six minute mark when they talk about a weird summer job he had. His laugh is so cute you just want to smack him. And the beard. AUGH.) Also, Letterman always reminds me very strongly of my dad which I think makes him a little more entertaining to me than to most people.

-The trailer for the next season of Teen Wolf makes that show look, I feel, quite a bit cooler than it actually is (heh?). Sometimes the actual horror factor of that show is decent, though. Holland Roden continues to be prettier than everybody else.

-Saw STID a second time. I officially believe that it is not just in my head that Chris Pine is a good actor, even if he isn't spot-on all the time. That reaction shot after Pike tells him he believes in him destroys my life. Also, I have surrendered completely to shipping Bones/Carol. I feel sort of guilty about how I'm kind of inserting this into where Bones/Chapel used to live in my heart, but since this one has maybe a snowball's chance in hell...

Took me forever to get to writing this; spoilers ahead!

( INTO DARKNESS )

RL is kind of meh. My best friend is moving a lot farther away and I will miss seeing her more often than a couple times a year. Also I am finding it harder and harder to drag myself to work these days because I'm getting so fed up with how inexplicably freezing it is at our office - I'm talking thick socks and fingerless gloves in an indoor workplace. WTF. And the supervisors complain about it so casually, like it just always has been like that. I DON'T UNDERSTAND.

-While on Tumblr I frequently find myself thinking, not exactly negatively, "Man, it must be really nice and fun to give a fuck about John Green." In an act of true pettiness I caught myself looking at how many fics The Fault In Our Stars has on AO3 just to see if I needed to feel bitter (you know, as a forever frustrated book-fandomer for other things). I don't. I have it on reliable opinions that Will Grayson, Will Grayson is a good read but unless this guy is like the Shakespeare of YA fiction - and I'm sure he's not - I may tire a little of every single book blog acting like he's the best thing since feminism.

-Probably the only prevalent thing I hate about a certain niche of Trek fandom is the "OMG IS HE OKAY?! HE LOOKS SOOO SKINNY" comments I predictably see all over Chris Pine photos (which amusingly happens so often you would think people would realize that just might be closer to the default when it comes to his body type). I mean, there is the occasional person who will pretty much frankly imply that they enjoy objectifying him more when he has a little more bulk on him, and that's just being honest, but with some comments there's this very distrusting asshole part of me that just feels like I'm watching the fangirls fall over themselves in a contest to see who can be the most accepting of Chris Pine in his less skinny states, and I find that just as annoying as the SPN fans who think that Jensen Ackles is gaining too much weight (which was funny as hell to me, because I hadn't actually noticed he wasn't quite as thin now until it was pointed out to me).

-ARGH, MORE OF MY PETTINESS. I could never complain too much about any kind of activity in my teeny-tiny book fandoms but man, have I been seeing some fancasts on Tumblr lately that make me go NOOO. Even though I'm not sure I can logically make a case against the Cassie Maddox = Rose Byrne thing that I've seen in multiple places it still gives me a headache cause to me it is just so off (and in general I've tried really hard to like Rose Byrne but it isn't happening). I say this as if fancasts have any standing on movies that don't exist yet, LOL.

-The best thing about this season of Mad Men, amirite:



I still can barely stand that fandom, BTW. I can't seem to browse the Tumblr tag without seeing someone call Peggy a bitch. (No lie, I would be pretty scared of Peggy, but that's part of why I love her, especially since I never could have seen myself saying that back in S1.)

-I'm very much ready for the weather to start acting like spring, mmkay. I had the totally awesome luck of dropping my car keys somewhere on campus yesterday and having to retrace my steps a few times in the freezing cold before resigning myself to the fact that I wasn't going to find them, and thank the lord for a man who knows where to find my spare keys even when I don't know where they are but for half the time Shep was on his way over to give them to me I was on the phone with him whimpering, "I'M NOT WARM." And I just got this nice new Swiss Army knife that was attached to the keys. Bahh.

-One of the many annoying oversimplifying attitudes I see directed at Wuthering Heights made me curious about what the initial critical response was to it, and some of the stuff quoted on Wikipedia is backwardly amusing to me:

"There is not in the entire dramatis persona, a single character which is not utterly hateful or thoroughly contemptible ... Even the female characters excite something of loathing and much of contempt. Beautiful and loveable in their childhood, they all, to use a vulgar expression, "turn out badly."
EVEN THE FEMALE CHARACTERS. You don't say?

"How a human being could have attempted such a book as the present without committing suicide before he had finished a dozen chapters, is a mystery. It is a compound of vulgar depravity and unnatural horrors."
WELL.

To be honest it has been a long time since I read Wuthering Heights and I would probably fail to back up anything I have to say about it but, while Emily may not have much on someone like Mary Shelley, I've always felt that from time periods in which female creativity was pretty much encouraged to be merely decorative, for women to write such unflinchingly dark characters/themes is just kind of badass, and to me there's something that feels relatively uncensored about WH that gives me a strong loyalty to it. And even if I don't know that I would ship the love story exactly, I've always been fascinated by the fundamentals of that kind of romance - if you can call it a romance - where the love may have once been good, in a vacuum of innocence, but when it's thwarted and denied the whole momentum of it becomes destructive to everyone around it and to the affection itself.

-Haven't been watching the Star Trek trailers that are rolling out so I'm going to be maybe a lot more surprised by this movie than other people. I've seen and probably will see a couple trailers in the theater but that's enough for me. I feel like there was an article that gave away the villain, even? I'm getting more and more annoyed with the gimme-gimme-spoilers culture of the internet, even though I don't treat it like it's the end of the world if I do get spoiled.

With my recent love of numerous smaller fandoms I'm considering signing up for rarewomen (thanks to maerhys for mentioning the comm). I'll have to do some serious perusing of the elligibles but it shouldn't be as overwhelming as Yuletide, right? If you're interested...let's see, as I'm writing this fandom/character nominations are closing about any minute now, but there's no automatic commitment in nominating and you can get some quick info on how to do that here.



Guh, I'm getting pretty obsessed with Susanne Sundfør.

Halloo, I hope everyone had some happy new year times. I had a pretty damn fun new year's eve at my unofficial-father-in-law's you-can-sleep-after-breakfast partay. Even though I had a wicked cold that I'm still getting over. Some random things:

-Naturally I was pretty excited that there were a couple DMS fics for Yuletide. I'm supposed to be pimping that fandom for the current round at smallfandomfest and kept putting it off, and now I'm kind of glad I did so it looks like there's slightly more of a fandom to pimp.

-I'm really into Howlin' Wolf lately. I've always liked blues music but for me his stuff goes beyond its usual "fun" category and into "This song is so perfect I am going to cry." (By the way I don't think I can ever hear "Smokestack Lightnin" without thinking of that scene in Misfits when Nathan struts on the roof in his underwear - and I'm going to laugh if I'm just making it up in my mind that that song plays there.) And yeah, I totally worked in "Spoonful" in that Stand fic I just posted because I can, though I had to do some googling to look into whether the song really works well at all on solo guitar because a lifetime of my dad's rocking has taught me nothing :/

-I will totally be watching The Americans when it premieres. YES.

-Aidan Turner looks much hotter with more hair, I want to know if we all agree on this. I'd seen a lot of gifs/pictures of him before The Hobbit but totally didn't recognize it was him. Also apparently he is from Dublin, be still my heart, etc.

As with Rob's mix, this has a fuzzy near-general focus, though with the predictable Cassie&Rob bias going on.

FYI: "The Promise" is a more polished-sounding version of the theme used in "The Sacrifice," which I chose to use here because the roughness of it makes me imagine Rafe irritably banging away on the piano (and I suppose because the title happens to be so fitting).

At long last, after a shameful number of stops and starts, I have read The Stand by Stephen King.



Because the number of things that could be discussed about this book is a very long list, I find it an exceptionally difficult novel to summate my feelings about. I finished it a few days ago and had some issues with it but my opinion of it has significantly warmed up with reflection. God, I hope somebody out there gives a crap because I've got a few loads to say about this novel and it only somewhat pares it down that I'm leaving out all the spoilery stuff I could say.

( He can call the wolves and live in the crows. He's the king of nowhere. )

I have watched most of the miniseries, and it's...okay. It didn't actually condense things as much as I expected but Nadine Cross is totally bastardized and oversimplified (not to mention treated as interchangeable with a character that they cut out completely), and (LOL) I couldn't help being seriously disappointed that "Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?" was a pretty lame song. What's funny is that different editions have changed the genre of Larry's music in an attempt to not seem dated, so maybe there is no solid canon on what the song should sound like; I kind of imagined the events happening in the late 70s because then nothing could seem dated (not to mention the slightly sexist and very racist tropes bothered me less if I wasn't trying to pretend the book came out in the 90s) and since Larry picks out some bluesy stuff when he finds that guitar, the idea of him as sort of an Eric Clapton appealed to me (King thinks of him as very Bruce Springsteen).
And I have to say, it had never occurred to me whether or not Rob Lowe is attractive, but putting him in a serious role kind of works and he makes a seriously crushable Nick Andros, if not the one that I imagined.

Also, there is a comics adaptation, but after running across a Tumblr post lamenting how a lot of Larry's story is twisted (in a way that would break my heart in regards to a certain pairing) I don't know if it would be worth checking out.