meddow

I have been so bored all day it's not funny. To curb my boredom, I bring links.

Comforting signs that my brother has not discovered my livejournal despite theoretically knowing of its existence:
Him: “Did you know that the guy that played the home secretary [Frobisher] in that thing we were watching last night [Torchwood] was in an episode of Doctor Who playing a different character?”

(This was new information to him as the fact that Doctor Who tends to reuse actors has only just been discovered by my brother, who then found out that the monsters are mostly played by the same people as well and proceeded to feel ripped off.)

But yeah, some of you may have noticed over the past few weeks/months that I have a massive crush on Peter Capaldi. Just putting it out there and confirming it.

Speaking of Peter Capaldi, there have been a bunch of ten-minute silent short films airing over the Christmas period. Here's a youtube link to Syncing starting Peter Capaldi. It's written and directed by Tony Grisoni and wonderfully manages to be both melancholic and funny at the same time.

It's hardly the right season anymore, but I was listening to David Tennant and Catherine Tate on the Jonathan Ross show the other day, and Tennant played this song, White Wine in the Sun by Tim Minchin. I swear, it made me cry. I'm not sure if it's because it's just a beautiful song because of me being a antipodean atheist that did it, and that is my Christmas. For the first time, somebody has written about my Christmas. Move over Fairytale of New York, you're no longer my favourite Christmas song.

Another link: Eight Mesmerizing Sci-Fi Tracking Shots. I've known it for quite some time, the key to my heart is a tracking shot. I love them, particularly when they're used to introduce characters in pilots (The West Wing pilot and BSG miniseries both used this technique, and although it was a movie, so did Serenity, which was my first introduction to Firefly), or portraying massive devastation (such as in Children of Men, which is in that article, as was as Atonement and BSG in Revelations). Shaun of the Dead is alls features, which is another favourite movie of mine. Anyway, relive most of those (since it's sci-fi themed, Atonement and TWW aren't included) wonderful shots in that blog entry.

Finally, the Guardian has a little photo gallery of the forty top television shows of the (last) decade. While it's not the only list out there, it's the first one I've seen in which couldn't think of anything it's missed, and it also made me all nostalgic.

Less than twelve hours until the end of the Tenth Doctor.

So I've been listening to Muse's latest effort, The United States of Eurasia, and would George Orwell's estate please let Mathew Bellamy write 1984: The Opera already, since he's clearly got it in him and trying to get it out. Anyway, I like it. But then I love the OTT.

Meanwhile, I have three, three, BSG/Doctor Who crossover plot bunnies eating away at my brain at the moment. The Ten, Donna and Martha on New Caprica one's actually partially written. But I have no idea why most of my plot bunnies for each fandom inevitably drags in the other. Possibly because deep desire to see Laura Roslin to kick Ten about a bit. Or him try to pull that "don't you think she looks tired" bullshit on the one politician I've seen in anything ever who has managed to use her health problems to cement her grip on power.

Here’s an exercise for all of you living in the Northern Hemisphere. First, picture houses, streets, shopping malls, basically the whole world all decked up in Christmas finery with fake pine trees with reds and gold baubles everywhere and Christmas lights and fake snow and roast dinners. All of it screaming out warmth and comfort from a harsh cold winter, when you can sit around a fire with family and brandy.

Now take all of that and put it in July with a perfect cloudless blue sky and the sun blazing down and a temperature that matches. Everyone around you in the mall is wearing singlet tops and either shorts or skirts. And then you have why I think maintaining the Christmas traditions of the Northern Hemisphere in the Southern Hemisphere is just a little bit ridiculous.

I saw Children of Men today. Alfonso Cuarón is a genius. The plot is about a world that has lost hope, since women the world over have become infertile. There’s bombs going off in coffee stores, Britain has closed its borders and is rounding up refugees like cattle, and everyone else is either going to work or sitting around and smoking pot. Except, unlike every other science fiction movie which seems to be commenting on what the world will be like if we keep heading down the same path or if x happens, it’s a comment on what the world actually is like today. It’s Iraq. It’s filmed with a handheld camera style and in once scene blood splatters on the camera lens and it just keeps going, just like that infamous footage a couple of years back of a news crew that came under friendly fire. Watching it is like being in all that footage that is on the news every night. It’s brilliant and it’s tragic and I think you should all go and see it.

And if that doesn't convince you, this will - Aunt Marge in dreadlocks. I'm not kidding.

And now I’ve had my little comment on Xmas, and my comment on world affairs, now a slightly more materialistic question. I’m giving serious consideration to buying an ipod. Thing is, all my music on my computer is in mp3 format. Will that work on an ipod? I hear all these things about not buying an apple because of something to do with file formats and I don't want to ask the store people becasue they can never seem to give me a simple answer.

With JKR’s revelation about character death I was making a mental list of characters that cannot die or I will cry. So far JKRs only killed of characters I’ve been indifferent about, Sirius and Dumbledore never really appealed to me and though I cried in the movie, I never felt I got attached enough to Cedric to feel bad for him when reading GoF.

Of course that had all changed now I’ve started writing fic. I’ve written from the perspective of Tonks, Remus, Peter, Molly, Kingsley, Snape, Narcissa and Neville, and I will be devastated if one of them were to bite it. Even Peter and Narcissa, who I don’t particularly like but still emphasise with. Though, to be honest, I wouldn’t care much if Snape died. However I want him to survive to antagonise Harry.

Though coming back to what I was on about. I think one out of Ron, Hermione, Luna, Ginny and Neville is going to be killed, somebody close to Harry and about his age and he cares about. Thinking about this, I came to the realisation that I no longer like Hermione. This is rather sad since I used to like her a lot. But I think a combination of movie PinkPowerRanger!Hermoine, bad Hermione/Snape fics where she treats Harry and Ron like crap and the huge amounts of wank surrounding Hermione pairings has really left a bad taste in my mouth for the character.

I was tagged by le_parapluie: ( Music Meme )

Other people, lets see: I'll tag melusinahp, laverinth, fishity, author_by_night and ragdoll.

ETA: Ghana got knocked out of the world cup by Brazil. And with Michael Owen out with injuries the rest of the tournament, I no longer care about the World Cup.

I got tagged by briana_rose07

List seven songs you are into right now. No matter what the genre, whether they have words, or even if they're not any good, but they must be songs you're really enjoying now. Post these instructions in your LiveJournal along with your seven songs. Then tag seven other people to see what they're listening to.

1. Pink Floyd – Wish You Were Here
2. Goo Goo Dolls – Iris (anyone heard the remake by that guy from boyzone? Why? Why?)
3. The Rolling Stones – You Can’t Always Get What You Want
4. Gnarls Barkley – Crazy
5. Anna Nalick – Breathe
6. David Bowie – Life of Mars (had the weirdest dream featuring this song a few days ago).
7. Sarah McLaughlin – Stupid

I like being tagged but suck at tagging, so tell me if you want to be tagged.

I’ve been doing a bit of work on Growing lately and just had some thoughts and characters and characterization.

One of the more interesting things in writing Growing, my WIP, is that Andromeda and Ted Tonks are major characters. In fact, behind Neville they get the most screen time. This meant I got to use the scraps of information about them from canon and the philosophy that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree and build the characters from there, which was a fun experience since I like creating characters and it’s nice having loose guidelines to work with when doing so.

Unfortunately, between the time I started writing the story (in December) and the time I started posting it, the wonderful JKR managed to stir up a load of controversy surrounding Ted by labelling him a Muggle on the Black family tree, whereas Tonks refers to him as a Muggle-born in OotP. I think the majority of fandom counts him as a Muggle-born and I think he’s far more interesting as one. Lets face it, Ted the struggling Charms inventor is much more fascinating then Ted the plumber. And it make the Andromeda-Ted romance much more plausible since I cannot imagine Andromeda Black ever getting to spend much time around Muggles. However, some are adamant that he’s a Muggle (as someone at FA kindly reminded me in capslock button on today).

However, that’s not been giving me nearly enough grief as Miss Tonks. Originally I though writing Tonks would be easy since I’ve probably writing from Tonks’ perspective more than any other character. Tonks shows up in random intervals and in different scenario’s around different people, and it is so difficult keeping her consistent as a character but acknowledging that Tonks would act differently in private with her parents to when she is at work and different again when she is around the Order. And of course I can have out of character Tonks criticisms lobbed at me from every which way because it’s Tonks and behind Ginny is arguably the most hated female character in the fandom and with the amount of crap that got lobbed at Tonks after HBP I always get the feeling writing Tonks is like walking through a minefield.

Tonks writers, if you ever want a characterization challenge, try writing a during the war post-HBP Tonks as a major character from the perspective of someone who doesn’t know her very well at all.

And now for something compeletly random: 'stormy petrel' is the dictionary.com word of the day (or rather words of the day), which means one who brings strife. Never come across this saying before I think it's very cool. Now I need an excuse to use it. ETA, found one.

And for another completely random thing: is it just me, or is "too much love will kill you" the saddest song ever? Cause too much love kinda did kill Freddie Mercury. Though I'm pretty sure Brian May wrote the song and not Freddie Mercury, but it's still so sad.