(no subject)

*sneezes on you ALL*

I just dragged myself through a shower and I'm going to sit and attempt to become one with the sofa.

Awesome dreams though -- I had a REAL ROBOT ARM.

*vrrt vrrt vrrt*

(no subject)

Note taped to R's door for when he returns:

This is just to say
I have eaten the plums chicken soup and crackers
that were
in the icebox pantry
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast the nuclear winter
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold noodley.

-- William Carlos Williams
-- Amended by Sam

He loves William Carlos Williams. He will either be enraged (this is kind of the last easily prepared food we have in the flat) or amused. Either way, I will be napping.

(no subject)

I've been reading a lot of fanfic lately. A lot. I think it's a coping mechanism. Gets me lost in another world for a while, and the way I go about it is so obsessive-compulsive that I'm not going to explain it here, but it involves lots of organising. It does help, though, because between losing a brother and temporarily the use of my left arm and my soul to the corporate machine, I've gone through a lot in the last two months.

And don't look at me like that, it's not only Torchwood. :D

When I came back to fandom, oh, four years ago now, maybe five, I was stunned and depressed by the sheer amount of crap out there. It hadn't been like that when I was an up-and-comer first time round. When I was fourteen the internet itself was an intelligence test -- you had to be reasonably bright just to get onboard, and if you were reasonably bright you had probably absorbed things like quotation marks and how to use the shift key. There was a lot less fanfic, of course, but it was almost uniformly high quality. Good old Usenet.

At any rate, I find myself wanting to take these children by the hand and lead them to the enlightened path of grammar and the use of commas before closing quotations, so that they may achieve fandom nirvana. I want to explain to them that you don't have to rush through writing a fic to get to that one scene that's so vivid in your head you HAVE to get it down -- write the goddamn scene first, and then put a little effort into building your sandcastle around it. I've been there. Oh have I been there. And I know, sweetheart, but trust me. You'll be so much happier.

Most of all, though, I want to be able to stop using the ?style=mine suffix. It's the little line of code you attach to a livejournal URL to make it look like yours, which in my case is the default view. Blessed default view; readable-sized text, one-colour text on a solid background, simple font. And I have to use it, because so many people seem to believe that if they can read it in their Semagic posting window, we can read it when it's splashed over a background of rainbow-coloured stripes or fairies with giant green wings or there's light pink text on light pink background.

If you want people to read your fanfic, and you want them to comment on it, they have to be able to see the words.

This is why my Livejournal looks like, and I am quoting a good friend directly here, "the journal of an octogenarian lawyer".

I AM FANDOM'S CRANKY OLD MAN GET THE FUCK OFF MY GRASS YOU GORRAM WHIPPERSNAPPERS.

Love and kisses, Sam.

Also, please, don't make anyone call him Yan ever again until you can bring me conclusive proof that this name has ever been used in the series. Ditto for Remus 'My nickname is not Remy' Lupin.

(no subject)

Jesus Christ, I really have gone through a lot. I didn't realise till I saw it all written down like that.

*stares blankly at LJ*

If I were a character I would expect me to be way more traumatised by now, and I would never write fic about me because it would be too complicated writing about clawing my way back to normality after all this.

My head hurts. And I should not have had that shot of whiskey. This is all very surreal, really.

I'm going to go to bed and whimper now.