beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

I nearly went to see this film for my birthday last year, until mum admitted she didn't actually want to see a film. I'm kind of glad we didn't go, it wasn't a birthday film.
Violent. Messy. Not much, because 12, but still, grimy beige with splashes of blood.

I nearly gave up on it at dead woman, because there's one woman and then dead, but there was another twist and it got interesting again.
Actually there were three women, but I don't count fridged motivation as characters really.
But all of them were basic types really. All the beats were therefore predictable, in the western story. The alien story... didn't add much.
So I wasn't impressed.

But I can watch Daniel Craig at length and so that works out.
(Though I can't figure out why he's attractive. It's not the face. I think it's something between the way he moves and the attitude.)
Also, I did not previously have a thing for those leather cowboy trouser thingies, but he do wear them well.

Yesterday I was doing character design and idly thinking on how to combine Han Solo and Indiana Jones.
I think you get the Cowboys and Aliens look, black waistcoat over off white shirt with brown hat and trousers.
I guess tough guys have a limited wardrobe.

Hmmm, that really is about all I have to say about this one.
Eh. Films rarely impress.

I got my (provisional) marks back for Contemporary Narrative:

76%
'excellent essay'
!
:-D
*happy dance*

That's well into being a First.
And brings my current final marks up to 72.25%

I still have at least 60 credits left to do that'll count towards that final total, including 40 from my dissertation, but that's still doing pretty well.

My highest mark so far was 77 in the Renaissance, so this is now my second highest.

Not bad for a unit I kind of hated every minute of.
Now I never have to think about it again!

I dreamed I was Nightcrawler and I ran into Draco Malfoy, who was surprised I'd recognised him because he'd wiped his identity from the memory of the world. I said I'd probably been in Oz at the time and missed the spell. Also that there were assassins hunting, and I'd been surprised there were so many of them just for me. So then we ran, and I ended up back at the Malfoys' place, and without the use of most of my powers. All the Malfoys were there for a big ceremony, which turned out to involve feeding older Malfoys to Draco so he'd turn into a vampire. It was a very dangerous ceremony and he might die in the middle of it, unless he ate enough of them. They started at the edges of the family but he was down to eating his grandma before it was done. Before his dad could mince and squeeze anyone else I offered some of me, but Draco would only take a taste. There were plenty of people he actively hated he'd rather eat first. But the feeding felt really very good, and I ended up curled up at his feet all hopeful he'd want more later.


To all of which I can only say: WTF subconscious? WTF?
I had to look up the names of all of those dudes! I'd have said Draco takes up 0% of my dreamspace.
Nightcrawler I've at least watched the film he was in. Not so much with watching Harry Potter.
About the only familiar bit is the vampirism, but that doesn't usually involve massive ceremonies and mother in laws.
Conclusion: I got someone else's dream. They can have it back if they like.

am looking for a white english actress of exactly average height, which doesn't narrow the field enough for reasonable searchings.
5' 4" tall, in her 30s, and of somewhat ample proportions.
so, basically, who would play me on TV?

anyone I can think of is either way skinny or American or both.
also, searching brings on the feeling old and/or the omg I've done nothing with my life.

plus if whoever it is hasn't been in science fiction, or, usually, Doctor Who, I won't think of them anyway.
suggestions?

I've been poking wiki to find a cast for my imaginary TV show.
... I do this. I have no excuse.

There's the usual variety in detail, from the full profile with filmography and pictures to the two line sad lonely note about someone's time in panto.
There's also a lot of links to agents pages. And when I poked the internet for pictures I found some people's showreels, or at least videos being advertised as their showreel.
... if one of them was meant to show their range of acting it was a bit unfortunate it mostly showed them making their eyes REALLY BIG while breathing hard and putting the stresses in all the wrong places in a sentence.
See its fun because now random people on the internet can not only play imaginary casting with just as much information as proper casting people, we can be just as harsh too.
*facepalm*

There was a weird thing where wiki would tell me someone was in their 30s and I'd follow the link to their agents and find it said something like 'playing age: 26'. And, okay, I'm 29 again again and some more agains, I cannot throw stones on this one, but that's not even how I mean it. Just, I can see putting a range up there, suggesting that you wouldn't just look at this person for a thirty year old, they can play a whole decade around it. But to just knock five years off and stick with that? For why? Doesn't get them more roles, surely? Also, how come nobody on TV is their same age anyway? It's bizarre and makes it weirdly difficult to read characters. If I guess the actor age right then I'm being wrong about the characters and vice versa. Why not just make the characters be the same age as the actors? Though granted it may involve more research that way, or tweaking character relationships. Mostly though I only wanted my characters to look like people who don't make me feel old. That's a pretty flexible standard. And I had decided two characters were twins, but now I've found two people with a five year age gap, which I can also work with. Or ignore. Either works.

I found myself flicking through going "old, old, old, young, arrrgh young, old, dead, old"
and then I stopped and realised this was a really messed up approach to fellow human beings.
I think maybe casting isn't good for the soul.

Does anyone here happen to speak Swedish?
Actually it's only Google's auto translate that tells me that's the language I'm after.
I was reading a thing on made up nerd words and it included Card's hierarchy of foreignness. I typed it into Google because I vaguely recalled they're not made up words, they're made up meanings. Which would make bringing them into wider use, er, potentially problematic. But google, as usual, presents me with a whole bunch of possibilities I can't make sense of. So, potential Scandinavian speaking people:

utlanning, framling, raman, varelse, djur

what do they mean?

because google reckons utlanning means alien, which is a bit of a pickle when it's meant to mean human you don't know.

( Read more... )

I have new and awesome hair again.
Which is to say it's exactly the same as most of the other years, dyed goth black and buzzed to a 3 cut up to my temples then left long enough it don't curl up on my shoulders.
But it had grown out several finger widths, and now it is tidy buzzed, and all the same color.
So, awesome hair.
Even if I did have to put it all in a hat to get home in the rain.

I also went to the supermarket and bought some random things like a new hair comb and moisturising hand wash and a mens navy blue thermal t shirt because they were selling ladies but only cami tops. What's the point of a thermal cami? Does nothing above your chest actually need warm? So hopefully the XL mens one will be nice. It's only £4 so I might as well.
I also have bread and ice cream. Which was all I could think of needing for food.

I ate breakfast in the cafe and read a short story, which I'd started in the hairdressers, which was The Thing from the point of view of the thing. It was cool.

Now I am home, warm, well fed, with awesome hair.

I am watching Sherlock. Have watched first two of this year.
I'm somewhere between bored and annoyed.
I'd be vaguely interested in John and Sherlock if they were ever going to go anywhere, but there they are, archetypal, all done. There will be jokes about how everyone thinks they're boyfriends. Which isn't a funny joke. If true, unremarkable, and if not true, unremarkable. Make them boyfriends or don't, there's no joke in it.
There's been a joke about how Sherlock is Asperger's, which is stupid, because (a) we're not a joke and (b) he's far far far too good at reading social signals. He doesn't want to play by them, but he can read them like anyone's business. We have the opposite problem. And he can imitate them perfectly well when he wishes to, which we can't on our best day. Stop poking us. The label doesn't fit.

It's quite possible I'm not in the mood for detectives. I don't watch other detectives. But I will watch this and then delete it off the box.

I've also been vaguely applying cultural studies brain to try and get from the cases to the social tensions they deal with and rebox. But it's all splashy headline buzzword stuff, it's not actual lives, it's nothingy.
Bored now.

Have been reading more about the benefits cap.

Apparently the 'large families' that will be affected are those with 3 or more children.
Three.
Because that is more than average.

Guardian quoting the impact assessment, released today (because clearly half an hour before the debate is plenty of time)


I think some people do not understand averages.
It's like being average height. I'm average height, so half the women in the country are taller than me.
Average (for certain kinds of average anyways) means half are going to be over and half under.

Half is really quite a lot.

My college units this semester are Dissertation Preparation, National Cinema and The Short Story. ( Read more... )

ANYway, The Short Story does not look promising, but, I have a lot of books of short stories lying around. And that's without getting into the thirty year solid collection of Analog. So I got a recent SF anthology down that I hadn't started and I've been reading.

I have previously got into arguments about the definition of science fiction. (I spend three hours down the pub every two weeks talking about science fiction, naturally this comes up). I have said that science fiction is all about exploring the way new technology shapes lives. I've said it in a variety of phrasings, but I figured, the tech changes, and people change in response to that, and then we have story. I have been unenthusiastic about definitions that reckon science fiction is all about the props. There are many stories set on spaceships that are not, to my mind, science fiction. I've been known to get sniffy about it.

I might have to revise that quite a lot.

( Read more... )

I guess the basic problem has been said long since: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
So any sufficiently advanced science fiction is about magic.

Push my definition of science fiction only a step or two out, and we've run into my definition of fantasy.

I just read a short about how stories about Mars shape how people react to Mars.
That's not the only sort of world we've been dreaming on a long, long time.
As soon as it's technologically possible to make faerie, people are going to do it. Remake themselves or their avs and just... go.



So I'm left with a conundrum. Anything with the trappings of science fiction, the star trek kind with recogniseable humans on big metal starships, I no longer find a plausible extrapolation. And anything plausible isn't exactly what I'd been thinking of as science fiction.


Having twisted my brain in a knot I should probably go to sleep.

Then wave a little surrender flag on my definitions and go back to writing stuff like I've been watching: humans charging around the universe in tin cans.

I have finished, double checked, triple checked, correctly formatted and uploaded my essay.
and I'm a whole day early.
I win.

:-)


... now I have nothing to do.
For a whole week, until the next semester starts.
Maybe someone has uploaded a book list already...

I dreamed an irritatingly catchy pop song. Which is still stuck in my head. Thanks, subconscious.
I'd write down the words, which are also stuck, but they neither rhyme nor scan, because it was a dream.
In it the annoyingly perky girl starts out singing about how last time she got really drunk was ages ago because apparently all the best things happened yet she can't remember.
And then there was a great big list of things that (a) you'd really want to remember and (b) you'd really want to see on the video.
After we'd heard it in the dream people started getting in an argument about if it said "sang in front of rock stars" or "sang like fucking rock stars", which would be an obvious radio edit issue except we'd all just heard the same live performance.
It emerged that we'd all heard something different, like it was tailor made.
The line I'd found most memorable was "made out with Karen Gillan"


This song should totally exist. Except since we can't make it do magic lots of different people would have to do different lines. For the video.


In the dream I then started close reading the song, focusing on the tension between it being explicitly a song about not drinking any more, and yet most of the lines being about awesome things that apparently only happen while too drunk to remember.

You could sort of fix that with the video, like you're singing about Karen Gillan but then in the images you're drunkenly all over a poster or a standee or something. Or it switches from glamour drunk view to the view your sober friends remember. Because then you'd get both the video people want to see and the undermining of the drunk is fun message.

Yes I dreamed all that. My dreams are analysing my dreams and proposing fixed versions.



Also, either, when I woke up at 0600 and decided more sleep could happen, I fixed my essay and didn't get up to write it all down, or I dreamed about fixing my essay.
Today I am going to finish this essay. And then preferably stop dreaming texts and go back to dreaming actual stuff happening.