Consonants and vowels all together, equally

I'm a little too cranky to write much, so I'm giving people super late comments on entries I missed during the DDoS. Some short things:

1. Thank you to everyone who gave me those chocolate heads! Super duper nice, you guys!
   
2. Also thanks for voting in my poll. The outcome of the vote seems to be split down the middle, so that's what I'm going to do: post it in segments on LJ and DW, post it all-at-once on AO3, and which way I do it on the archives (F&I and FA) depends on how annoying it is to code it all properly. I'll probably post asking for help sometime next week because last time it was super clunky. (Like, which programs actually export to html properly?)
   
3. Per your votes I'll be rewriting those little bits on the HP stories and taking down the stuff I wrote before, very self-consciously.
   
4. Congrats to everyone already in Pottermore. I'm happy to wait until October and go in with the masses, but I will have all these fantastic friends to guide me!
   
5. five_ht just posted some Arthur/Eames which makes me think that maybe it will be worth it to write the Ariadne/Yusuf Vegas AU after all. (You should read the fic; it's super good.)
   
6. canis_takahari was asked to talk about Jim/Bones mpreg and I suddenly thought of how adorable it would be to write about either two men or two women who get pregnant at the same time, like chef Cat Cora and her partner did in real life. Chef Cora did a whole "Best Thing I Ever Ate" segment on some egg dish available in Miami that both she and her partner craved big time when they were pregnant together, and filmed the piece with their babies in tow in their strollers and the whole thing could not have been cuter. I have a weird thing about writing my boyslash couples wanting babies and my girlslash couples not. I mean, Pansy/Parvati, no; they are happy aunties. Chapel/Rand sometimes. Oh, wait, Carly/Amanda totally had kids, though I think Gina/Haley not so much. But Luna/Tonks, I ship pretty hard, so ... hahaha, there could be that! The two of them getting pregnant at the same time would be many deeply strange things!

Okay, here we go, with links to my first reactions and everything:

1. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone I saw by myself at a noon screening being held by Time magazine. I got up that Saturday morning, read the book in three hours, walked into that screening, came home, and read the other three books over the course of that weekend. I'd owned PS since GoF came out, but couldn't push my way through that Dahl-esque Dursleys bit (too close to the bone). The movie coming out gave me a reason to do it.
   
2. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets was the first real fandom event I went to/helped organize. I had an online gang of friends who stayed in my rather tiny flat, and also a local gang of online/offline friends, and we went to a midnight showing and were ridiculous, and then I hosted a huge party in said tiny flat, during which bhanesidhe drew the art that is in my icon.
   
3. Harry Potter and the Prizoner of Azkaban I saw at the the New York premiere at Radio City, and then after that at the PoA IMAX thing in Lincoln Square, another fandom gathering. It is still my favorite. Both times I saw it surrounded by fandom types and that was pretty awesome. My big memory of that is riding in a cab with scrabble talking about the ending of Nocturne Alley.
   
4. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire I saw with a big crowd of local folks, and it was either at this screening or at OotP that blackholly infamously said that JKR thinks that falling in love makes you into an asshole.
   
5. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix I saw with at least ziggy1278 and ali_wildgoose though I don't say who I was there with in my entry, oddly. I'd forgotten that the movie came out just a week before the HP&DH book.
   
6. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince I saw at a matinee either with my roommate aethelflaed2 or with ali_wildgoose, because by then I'd read HP&DH and checked out of the narrative. Like the book, it reminded me, post-OotP, why I loved the books in the first place, being full of teen hijinx and character moments.
   
7. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 I also saw with aethelflaed2, low key at our local movie theater and somewhat prodded by her, because I did not love that book.
   
8. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 I saw last night with ali_wildgoose and emsariel and hoshizora and aethelflaed2.

( spoilery thoughts on the movie )

And Seamus and Dean, together at the end. ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

Lookie at what kaalee has!!! Alfie and Devon at the premiere today!

I am excite and flailing in the comments.

Oh, OTP. ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

Some of you will recognize the pun in that entry title, haha!

So the roommate and I saw Deathly Hallows last night. I … don't really like the book, am not in love with the resolution to the story and all of its death-cult blah blah blah. I'm glad she wanted to see it and got me to go, because I wanted to see it but was having trouble making myself see it.

It's beautifully shot, lots of very flat natural light that makes the endless camping palatable. Also judicious use of handheld cameras. And the sound is incredible, long sequences of just silence.

( spoilery )

So thanks to a series of coincidences and benefactors … I'm going to Infinitus!

I'll be there Thursday and Friday, leaving early Saturday morning. I honestly haven't been paying a ton of attention to who is going because I wasn't going, but now I am going, so:

1. Who's going?
2. Does anyone have room in their room, on their floor, etc, for one lady (who'll pay her share) and her small bag on Thursday and/or Friday night?
3. I'm also going to be on a panel, so now I have to write a bio. Any suggestions on what should definitely be in my fannish bio?

This all happened in like, less than an hour this morning so I'm still like, wow, really?

Mostly I'm excited to see people and be able to go to ali_wildgoose's discussion, and hey, get out of town for a weekend during the summer too!

I'm rather irritated that I won't have cable or internet at home until mid next week, among other irritating things, so I'm thinking about entirely silly things, like:

1. JKR maybe saying something sort of nice about H/Hr shippers. It isn't so much that her saying that makes me feel better about her, or the interview, or all that, but it does make me feel less like the OBHWF crowd had the "right" to push me out of fandom, which is how it felt at the time, and also makes me feel better about being able to post the story I'm writing without all my new Idol friends thinking I'm insane.
   
2. the blind items coming out about Simon Cowell's girlfriend breaking up with him, which hint that she's being paid off to not talk about what she knows. Hard not to be tinhattish!
   
3. Yuletide! I just filled out my request, and I can't say what I offered, but I requested WKRP (again), Charles & Caroline Ingalls, Liz Imbrie and Mike Connor, and, well, Rymon. I must say, I'm surprised that Idolfic is small enough to be on Yuletide—and that HIMYM is still small enough. I guess the threshold is higher than I'd thought! 2007 Yuletide was one of the best experiences I've ever had in fandom, so I'm really looking forward to 2008!

So I'm watching Teen Wolf, a movie I dearly love (oh Michael J Fox how I adored you) because, Boof! Boof is awesome! Anyway, there's that confrontation between Scott's dad and the asshole principal that was a requirement for all 80s teen films, at the prom? And it was all about how the principal had liked Scott's mom back in high school but his dad got her instead, and now she's dead and stuff? And Scott's dad is all, this is between me and you, leave the kid out of it?

Friends, that is totally Snape's plot! Now, I love Teen Wolf, but it is by no means actually a good movie. It was a throwaway movie starring a kid from TV. So, you know, not exactly the place of awesome plot points, even if Mr. Bateman starred in the much crappier sequel.

I'm returning to the climactic basketball game with its crappy Alphaville soundalike song-with-on-the-nose-lyrics, "Win in the End," but I leave you with this:

( Image Peronality Quiz thing )

So this is what I did:

Thursday night I watched SYTYCD with ali_wildgoose, honestys_easy, and sistermagpie as usual. I agreed with the eliminations this week, and jm_cats was totally right about the bottom three.

Friday sistermagpie and I saw Gonzo, the Hunter S. Thompson docu by the guy who did the Enron docu. The movie was fantastic and very appropriate to the holiday. However, SM was covered in butter due to fake butter dispenser blowback. Then we got pizza and a beer at an old pub nearby, where some young drunk was very loud and eventually left. The bartender was awesome, though.

Saturday I went to erinfinnegan's and read a great deal of yaoi, and then was recorded for a podcast talking about it. Some of it was good, some inexplicable, and some was obsessed with jewelry. We also ate cake and baked potatoes and watched the first episode of the Antique Bakery anime, and now I want an icon of the cgi cat. Ali stayed over as emsariel was out of town.

Sunday Ali and I had brunch with friends and then wrote quite a lot and ate gazpacho.

Re writing, I've been working on two long projects lately and thinking about a third. One is the endlessly talked about sequel to EWFS, which went in a rather long wrong direction during planning and was pulled back from the brink by excellent suggestions from ali_wildgoose, and so has life and spark and lots of things and is fun to write and move forward, especially thanks to lots of help from sisterpandora. (And yes, I do plan to finish the Seamus/Dean fanfic100!) The other is a new Idol AU, Rymon-centric, which is probably slightly past the halfway point right now, and I want to have it all written before I start posting it as it's a fairly complicated story and I do keep going back and putting little things into earlier chapters. I have a third fic, for Avatar: The Last Airbender, percolating in the back of my brain, but I'm waiting for that canon to close before giving it serious thought. But a look at my icons would likely tell you which character it would focus on.

Okay, fine, I'm just going to say this once, and then I'm going to try to not only shut up about it but also not pay attention to much conversation about it and try not to let other people's snide comments get under my skin as maybe they are not talking about ME. That said, I did post my reaction to the whole Dumbledore outing thing earlier.

I took a quick inventory of the media (books, movies, music) that is in my house and on my computer right now and I am pretty sure that JKR is the largest single beneficiary of my media dollars. (The Beatles are next probably, but there are four of them, or Prince, but books cost a lot more than CDs.) The only author with more space on my bookshelf is my friend Julia Quinn, but those are all mass market paperbacks at $5-6 a pop, not hardcover books I bought when they came out for $35-40. I have:

• US Paperbacks of books 1-3
  
• UK paperbacks of books 1-4
  
• US hardcovers of books 4-7
  
• UK hardcovers of books 5-7
  
• DVDs of movies 1-3
  
• I've seen all five movies in the theater, PoA twice. Two of those were at special screenings free to me, so that's four movie tickets.

I figure I've paid to JKR what I owe her: the retail costs of the works she has created, or others have created after she gave them the rights to do so. That's at least $200 worth of media, fairly bought and paid for, sitting in my apartment.

What I don't think I owe JKR:

• Unadulterated praise for everything she has done or ever will do
  
• Acceptance of post-publication interviews as canon. She has every right to say whatever she likes, but if it's not in the books, it isn't canon. And if she didn't prove it to me in the books, then her telling me now doesn't mean it was in the books.
  
• Allowing JKR to control how I read and understand and feel about the books that she wrote. I paid for the book—and even if I'd taken it out of the library, it would be the same—and I get to have my own opinions on it, like any other reader.
  
• Changing my mind because JKR insulted me. Look, I've never written the woman any hate mail, and I don't spend a lot of time shrieking about this, but I am tired of feeling so damned defensive about this that I was worried that my friends in other fandoms would see that I had posted Harry/Hermione stories and think I was a lunatic.

I was talking to a friend a little bit ago and she said that I might be reacting more to the cluck-clucking of those elements in fandom who not only think that being closer to JKR is like being closer to, I don't know, God maybe? but also think that now that the canon is "done" that it is disrespectful to JKR to write fanfic that doesn't ship the same ships as canon. I admit that I don't even understand this, but there are a lot of claims floating around of what kind of behavior is or isn't disrespectful to JKR, most of which I've already violated at some point, so that horse may have left the barn where I am concerned. If JKR is deciding who gets into fandom heaven, looks like I won't be there, blasphemer that I am.

But I admit that all this "wow, people are really mean to JKR" comments has feeling a little taken aback. I don't want to fall on that old canard of "I can say what I want" because that always comes with consequences. Now, maybe those comments aren't meant to include me and my opinions, and maybe the people making them don't have the same "JKR's way or the highway" attitude of some others.

But I am willing to say that I have paid fair and square for JKR's books and movies and I'm not sure that I "owe" her more than that.

I hate it when you have a lump in your throat, and you'd rather just cry and get it over with, but it isn't happening, so you'll just go to bed with that lump. Feh.

Oh, also? The HP backlash continues to sadden me, because I'm not sure why we need so much for people to agree with our reactions, and I think the wank has just driven all the interesting posts behind locks which is really too bad. But I also want to say that I love my friendlist because there has been a huge variety of opinion, but not one bit of real wankiness. You guys rule.

Anyway, saw Ratatouille yesterday and I thought it was cute. I super loved the ending, but there was something in the midplot that had me restless and looking at my watch, though I can't really pin down what it was.

Just saw Sunshine, which Z and I were going to see before getting book 7 but didn't for various reasons and I have to say, I'm glad we didn't see it then. I'm not sure I can really recommend it; again, I liked the ending, but there was a direction it took before the end that was disappointing. Z had warned me before we went into the film that he'd heard it was "intense" but I'd go further than that: it was downright scary in parts. I'm a big wimp about that sort of thing, though, so take that from whence it comes.