beccaelizabeth's dreamwidth journal

having stayed awake all night refreshing the voting news
now the sun is out and it's super shiny, I was thinking of trying to sleep
but some neighbour is testing their fire alarm.

Labour in my area got plus nearly twelve percents
but Conservatives got about sixty percents
so they win quite a bit.

lots of interesting things are happening elsewhere though.

... the bbc site keeps making my browser all stuck, is making it difficult to obsess
but the guardian mostly works
so i can see interesting graphs and boxes still.

Last night I dreamt I had basic temporal micromanipulation powers
so I could more or less freeze the bad guys where they stood, while the hostages legged it
but it was like that time the bed fell over - sooner or later the inevitable is going to happen, and it's going to crunch.

... that time it crunched the furniture not me, but, the basic principle applies.

Power to bit pause would be really really useful, but if you don't know when it's going to unpause, really really stressful too.

Also I don't see how it's useful against most weapons unless you also get a degree of precognition. I mean most people only notice the bullet after it hits them, it's not like you can see it and react.

ANYways, this was a good excuse to spend the afternoon on heromachine, designing my costume.

The basic problem with costumes is, like, why are you wearing them?

( Read more... )

I am trying to read "Graceling"
I thought it was a fighting book but it keeps on being a kissing book
of the 'oh no what are feelings and why do I have them' sort.

like there isn't actual kissing yet but everyone fancies her and she starts out saying she doesn't fancy people or want to get married or want children but now it's turning into her fancying a guy and you can just see where it's going.

if it could go and be politics that would be nice.
but as it is I keep reading a chapter and putting it down.
and then reading another because since when do I leave a book half read?


This may not be a book for me.





... and yet last night I stayed up all night reading variations on 'oh no turns out I fancy him and now we must do politics and also build stuff and decorate houses'

... I mean it was a lot more queer and also fanfic and also astolat, but there's still somewhat of a double standard in my head here.

It has been pointed out that there are Many TV shows starring actual adults
and I have just been watching the wrong shelf.

It's a basic Why Is Story Not About Me sulk, really, and if I'm the one choosing which stories I kind of know why.

Today's dream: postgraduate study at Hogwarts.

Turns out that university and postgrad levels can be handled rather differently than school, though it has gone out of fashion of late. Nobody is quite sure exactly how it works, and the options are a bit mind boggling. Plus actual postgrad study requires a full quartet - one from each House - and they'll be together five years.

But on the up side, from outside, the whole thing, a three year degree and five year doctorate, takes about eight hours.
( Read more... )

But the good bit as a dream was just having such a lot of good work to do. Fixing up the building was going to take all of us and stretch our skills, especially because as well as the plumbing we'd have to get the magical flow right. Wizarding buildings are potentially alive, so restoring a ruin is as much a resurrection as a construction challenge. But we'd be reshaping it to new purposes. A proper research group, designed to bring together every strand of wizardry. So we had two towers for Hogwarts already, one for our quartet and one for whoever Draco brought along, but for the other towers we invite groups from other schools of wizardry.

( Read more... )

Still though, me as Slytherin... and who would the other three be? And what kind of place would Hogwarts be if everyone knew you needed to build up a friend group from all four houses, or be shut out of getting a Doctorate?




I was thinking when I woke up it's weird I keep dreaming about flipping Draco Malfoy. I could just blame The Flash. But the thing with fic of the 'more from' school is it tends to emphasise the bad points of the protagonist, seeing as they were skipped over in source, and the good points of the enemy they're being slashed with. The good guys get shown as needing a little more of their enemy in them, which makes them seem more reasonable. And trying to lead the protagonist through falling for their enemy gives the reader a really attractive view of them. So someone being remotely likeable in canon is basically irrelevant to how a fanfic reader gets guided to react to them.

... honestly I should just stop feeling apologetic about it, I mostly read enemies to lovers, it's what works for me.

... but some of those enemies, from a pure canon point of view, really should just go to jail for pretty much ever, so, apologetic it is...



But fixing a whole culture through who your study group house shares with seems like a good spark.

So I was thinking about heaven and hell
again
and I think why I'm not sold on them as concepts is a lot of the essential bits are pretty much like now, only more judgey.

Like, heaven is a good place, and hell is outside and full of bad stuff happening.

My flat is pretty much a good place, full of all the eats I choose and entertainment I want etc, and outside is people making such noises I have to guess if police or ambulances are needed, and further away stuff that gets on the news that is Very Bad.

And it's miserable in here.

I mean, no bad is directly happening to me, but knowing there is bad is miserable.

So I am unconvinced that heaven can ever be a thing If there is hell, because how could the kind of people heaven is meant to be for put up with that? I mean I'm a bit of a useless human quite often, but I care enough that all that bad stuff happening to other people feels really bad. So how could heaven be for good people to, like, sit there forever, while anyone else burns?

Can't work that way.

Either it goes all Buffy in Heaven and feeds them fake news and is a basic lie, or there can't be a hell if we're going to build heaven.

So I reckon there's a lot of work to do to figure out how to either get everyone out of hell or make it stop sucking there.

Ugh, my endless daydream of doom, where I am most awesome and marry all the villains and get them to go good ish and kind of conquer the world but without the hard work parts and so on and so forth, the daydream where the cast changes every time I have a new fandom and I get new superpowers and stuff to fit the setting, the daydream that is supposed to be all awesome good stuffs?

I just thought things through to a logical conclusion and really depressed myself.

I mean, I'm making up the rules here, so *obviously* I can make everyone secretly unaging immortals who never get sick and use comic revolving door rules for 'death', but, however setting appropriate that would be, I'd still know I got everyone out of the corner by going lalala my rules all good again.

The logical consequences of most of comics are painful and depressing, ( Read more... )

I get fed up with comics stories because nobody acts the way I would or considers obvious the things I consider obvious. So obviously I should write my stories instead.

... except they're usually either really light on plot, or shadowing the existing seasons plots but all changes because of comics me. so they'd fail at being original and at being fanfic.

boo.



still, not the most useful set of thoughts at this time of night.

This one says DC UNIVERSE REBIRTH across the top, and also Volume One, which apparently means it just sort of stops when things are getting ominous.

But the magic words on the cover were Ted Kord.

( Read more... )

I won't say I'm hooked, but this is an angle that could work, and what with everyone being more alive than when I quit reading there's all sorts of possibility in it.

But comics are so sloooooow. I don't know if volume two even exists yet, and if it did it would be more likely to put characters further up a tree than to resolve bits yet.

Also, still won't be primarily about Ted.

And never has been about his obvious partnership.

*sigh*



I may read the next bit but may also be tempermentally unsuited to reading an art form that's pretty much the world's longest and most complex WIP.

politics is kind of annoying
because things are kind of screwed
and every few years they give you some menus of which flavour of screwed things could be next
but once you choose you get whatever they give you, on menu or not
until the next time
and the best humans seem to manage is to lurch between different forms of screwed

I mean there's always worse, so many forms of worse, this is the least worst system we've come up with thus far,
but it's still really frustrating
whatever you choose

reality just happens so much.

My blue trousers have torn! Not even along a seam, they're just busted! I shall need new trousers :(

I have many trousers but all of them are black or grey and these were the only properly summer ones. And I only wore them last summer, so I'm not impressed with their resilience at all.

Maybe the washer machine ate them? I shall have to pay attention of it's going to start eating things.

Boo.

Maybe I shall wear a skirt today. ... I seldom do that and even less often like it. Ugh, decisions.

I was in a school investigating stuff.

Around ine in the morning the stuff included Ollie Queen and his demon doppelganger, and there were rooms embodying the deadly sins, in a school-ish way, so Pride was probably the one where you got to see your own confidential files and they all said excellent if Slytherij things about you. But that could have been envy, because also other people could see you file, once you had. And Ollie couldn't so much as open a door because if it turned out to be Wrath we'd all be dead.

Now I'm awake I consider that an unfair assessment, because really, he's probably felt all that before, and he got it under control. Nut he wouldn't risk it.

And the demon bit started because there was a possessed book, where reading it would let out a demon, and it was disguised as the latest one on a series. Probably the Dresden Files actually. But unfair much, teasing a reader. I mean if it's a huge great leather thing with Necronomicon on the cover you know not to pick it up, but if it looks like the latest paperback you're going to bring it home with you. ... unfair but cunning.



This morning the school went all gender divided and I had to camouflage myself so it wouldn't eat me, so I went to the uniform store and bought black and white and lots and lots of grey. I ended up wearing a shirt under a dress over a skirt over a longer skirt. All stripes and pinstripes. Like wearing a teacher costume over another teacher costume over a manager. Probably there was a pinstripes jacket to go with it.

... Probably I need to buy some more clothes that are actual colors. Or start wearing the ones I do have.

But there was a throwing axe lying around that nobody in the girl's school would admit to, so we went over to the guy's side. Where we found a bazillion axes, none of them quite matching. And then they wouldn't let us out. The door wouldn't go the other way, we'd have to go to another level to get back, but wherever we went it got more first person shooter or dungeon crawl with trap after trap and it just would not let us out. We found a teacher three levels down and they started shouting at us about pressups and never leaving a buddy behind. There was a wall of books but it just swung open to be a secret door, you couldn't read them or anything. And the secret door led to the corridors used by the janitorial staff, who couldn't get out neither. The teacher, who looked kind of like Kurt Russell if he was badly photocopied a few times, declared we'd only get out when we learnt how to be real men.

Explaining that we were not in fact real men didn't get us anywhere.

So then flash forwards nine years of study and there was a parade of men all ready for the next step. The ones going down more levels had some super orky clunky looking cyborg bits, and the fixed snarls of people who had run straight through walls one too many times. The ones going back up into the world looked kind of like movie stars, but more like movie extras, with that stamped plastic resemblance and no particular spark. And then there was me, still too short and in no way shaped like them, graduating on the supervillain track. I got a black t-shirt over black cargo trousers and eyes that had gone red and gold. The teachers were dubious that such a commercially available pattern just happened to be how I turned, but I was the correct level of defiant and deferential, so they'd let me pass anyway.

On the way out I got to set a whole bunch of traps for the next set.

I calibrated them for teachers.





Soooo... I woke up and felt like that was a very My Gender Issues, Let Me Show You sort of dream.

Also like I need to wear actual colors today wherever I dig them out from.


Ugh.