The Last Bastion Of Absurdity

bliumchik @ 2014-10-20T21:11:00

2014-10-20T10:14:21Z

so yeah tumblr's definitely eaten me. if anyone's still hanging out exclusively here, er... sorry ;_; feel free to ping me in comments if you'd like to catch up and/or exchange tumblr urls.

also I'm going to put a yuletide letter here, because that's a thing I still do :3

if you are a yuletide human here looking for the letter and it's not here yet, my past letters are all in my fandom tag! I've recycled some fandoms and I think last year's says good things about my general taste.

EDIT: OKAY RIGHT YES THIS WAS GOING TO BE A THING HI
( THE LETTER )

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bliumchik @ 2013-10-15T07:07:00

2013-10-14T20:08:27Z

hello! this is a yuletide letter!

( Read more... )

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bliumchik @ 2012-10-30T23:55:00

2012-10-30T12:58:51Z

University really is nearly over. This was the last writers’ society open mic night of my tenure. Today I wrote my last editorial for our zine, and had my last afternoon of frantically faffing about with usb drives at the print shop to print the damn thing on time at the last minute. We have a bunch of incoming execs for next year and everything. They’re nice! My replacement as secretary laughed at all my jokes, which was mildly disconcerting. The new president has terrible, terrible poetry, but he is bright and gregarious and I can definitely see him badgering people into participating in events, which is what you really need in a president.

I drank some punch, which was actually mostly goon with some oranges in it (non-aussies, goon is cheap boxed wine), and spilled some punch on myself and others, and read out my favourite Neruda poem, which is one of the angry ones not one of the sexy ones, and a few of my own, although I managed to fail to read the new one that I was specifically going to read there on account of not noticing that it wasn’t among my printouts until I was already on stage. But there’s a whole plethora of poetry events coming up, so I suppose I’ll get to try it out somewhere. Although I really shouldn’t read Neruda before doing original stuff because it makes me feel hopelessly inadequate. Hmm.

Although maybe I just felt inadequate because there was so much good shit going around tonight. Everybody was just on, the audience was laughing and crying, it was fucking brilliant. I am going to miss this.

My thesis will be done by next week. Two weeks later I fall off the face of the internet to go to Nepal with my dad. By the time I get back I will no longer be a student, and a whole bunch of scary adult shit will have to happen. It's going to be fucking brilliant!

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dear creator letter for ante_up_losers :3

2012-10-21T03:22:03Z

Yay! This is my first attempt at ante_up_losers My main response to the comics was to have all of the feelings about Cougar, but... well, here are my opinions on the movie immediately after watching it.

( and here are my request thingies )

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so last weekend Alexander joined me and my dad on one of our semiregular coastal hikes

2012-10-10T05:12:11Z

I may not have mentioned here, but dad and I are going to Nepal in the summer, and because my dad is Macguyver, he is insisting on stringent preparations involving several kilos of waterbottles in a backpack and infinite stairs.

Al didn’t have to carry a bag though, because he was just company, not training. Anyway, the walk is mostly stairs and boardwalks and a couple of regular-street detours around blocks of posh dicks who wouldn’t sign off on the walkway going in front of their properties, but there’s one section where you have to pick across Lurline Bay, which is basically just a section of the Sydney coast where enough bits have fallen off the cliffs that there’s a crescent of rock shelf and large stones where you can walk right next to the ocean. People fish there. It looks like this.

( cut for multiple images and me blathering on about tides )

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Dear Yuletide!

2012-10-10T04:39:45Z

Well, it's a little early, but I'm hoping to inspire some of my flisters to offer some of these fandoms, so here is my letter! :3 I wanted to get Danger Days and Drive in here as well, but alas, fourprompts ;_; are we all excited for yuletide? I'm excited!

( under the cut: guitar wolf, fem!holmes.ru, digger and casablanca )

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bliumchik @ 2012-09-09T20:56:00

2012-09-09T12:39:21Z

deadislepodfic: podficcing copperbadge's new novel the Dead Isle with a full cast

The year is 1880, and Jack Baker is a young, driven student at Harvard University for Engineers. In this America, industry depends on "Creation" magic rather than machines, and most engineers are train repairmen, not inventors like Jack. Even his Creationist friend Clare thinks Jack's genius is going to waste at Harvard. There is one man who knows how to put Jack to use, however: famous novelist and sometimes spy Ellis Graveworthy, who wants Jack to come with him to England and build him a flying ship. Graveworthy has been ordered to cross the heavily-guarded coast of Australia, the "Dead Isle" which has no Creation, and which sealed itself off from the outside world more than twenty years before. Rumors abound that Australia is building a war fleet, intent on conquest, and it's Graveworthy's job to stop it...

A special call out to any other Australians who read my blog - the project is experiencing a shortage of Aboriginal voices, so if you know anyone of aboriginal descent who enjoys a good steampunk/revolution story, maybe toss this their way?

what else is new? Still working on my thesis (if by working you mean procrastianting), organising some stuff for the writers' society, tumbling a lot... I went and saw the Sydney Uni Science Revue, which was excellent as usual. I've never really seen another revue that manages to completely excise racist/sexist/homophobic jokes. There were a few that just fell flat, but everything else was hilarious. They made an entire octopus costume just for a three-second spongebob/get off my lawn joke!

What's happening in dreamwidth/LJ land?

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TWENTY THREE.

2012-08-12T02:54:49Z

i mean i was already twenty three on friday but now i have ~celebrated~ it so it’s all official and stuff!

I celebrated so hard that I woke up with enough alcohol in my system to forget that taking codeine-fortified painkillers with alcohol in your system is a really bad idea! And then I went woooeeeooo and sat next to a bowl for about half an hour just in case. But now I am past most of the nausea (and it is ABSOFUCKINGLUTELY TYPICAL of me to be nauseous in the standard hangover space for reasons completely unrelated to hangovers) and all that is left is a bit of swimmy vision and wheeee.

I had a pretty great day yesterday. Al and I had brunch with both our parentses and it was minimally embarrassing! My dad gave me a skull-shaped shotglass & a t-shirt with a screenprint involving a Russian che guevara joke, and my mum gave me yet another unnecessary purse, a CD called “Land of The Powerful Owl”, a cushion and a dinky pearl necklace. This tells you everything you need to know about my family. Al’s mum knitted me a beanie. If I marry this guy I forsee a future of owning many, many beanies.

In the evening we went down to the Summer Hill Hotel. It turned out to have some minor space issues, but after a while most of the other patrons cleared out because the footy was over, so we could spread out again. At one point a random drunk older woman sat down at our table, knocking over someone’s drink, because we were in front of the TV. After a while we asked her to move so we could fit all my guests at the table, at which point she glared daggers at us from the next one for a while. Anyway, I caught up with a bunch of great people, although I think may have neglected Stan and his new girlfriend for a while there, because she embarked upon an ambitious construction project using leftover chips and aioli.

My first three and a half drinks managed to leave me feeling relaxed but otherwise soberish, and then someone bought me a double and about four sips into it my face started feeling numb. Cumulative effects of alcohol! But anyway, I don’t remember saying anything embarrassing, or at least anything I felt embarrassed about saying, so I’m going to call it a win. It really should have occurred to me that I couldn’t metabolise all that overnight though. Now I’m going to go see what Land of the Powerful Owl is all about, I imagine a codeine high can only help.

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On the Extension of Various Cords and Cordlike Items

2012-07-19T12:17:47Z

So yesterday I contributed to the continuing effort by The Goddamn Fishmouse and I to turn our apartment into something less resembling a deathtrap. I did this by purchasing an extension cord and attaching it to the other extension cord which, up till now, connected my computer’s powerboard to the outlet in our bathroom, thus extending the extension cord to an extension which allows us to thread it underneath the door instead of through the side, thus enabling us to close said door when we shower - and, bonus! marginally reduce our risk of electrocution.

Why, you ask, is my computer’s powerboard connected via extensive extension cordage to the power outlet in the bathroom? because (and we did not notice this before I moved in because it is the sort of thing you take for granted, having power outlets in rooms, you know) my room is COMPLETELY DEVOID OF ELECTRIC SOCKETS. It does have a thingy for plugging your TV antenna into, though. Not sure if they thought this was going to be a battery-powered television or what.

This absurd blindness to socket location practicality extends to the kitchen and is next on the un-deathtrapping to do list. We have one of those corner-counter kitchens like I always build on the Sims, where it goes Fridge, Counter, Stove, Counter, Corner Counter, Counter, Sink, with the other two sides of the rectangle being The Third Wall and The Lack Of Fourth Wall Leading To The Living Room. One powerpoint is back behind the fridge and one is over the counter next to it. Guess where the other powerpoint is?

WHY WOULD ANYBODY PUT A POWERPOINT THERE. IT IS NOT NEXT TO ANY OPTIMAL LOCATION FOR KITCHEN ITEMS THAT REQUIRE POWER. IT IS NEXT TO THE SINK.

Yes, that is an extension cable plugged into it. Because, you see, our microwave is on the corner counter, so in order to plug it in we have to stretch a cord either across the stove or across the sink. DEATHTRAAAAAP.

Eventually we’ll use some 3m hooks or duct tape or something to attach a powerboard to the wall above the stove securely enough to leave it there permanently, at which point the bizarre sink-adjacent powerpoint will cease to be in use and presumably feel very sorry for itself.

And then TODAY I tried to donate blood but was turned away for low blood pressure, following which I went and recorded a demo of a new song with Lily. We had an hour of free time at King Sound Studio as a consolation prize from their song competition that we entered. They're good dudes albeit slightly disorganised, but frankly it's the music industry and I, personally, have not a leg to stand on. I'll have the song online once they send it to us :3 my voice was a little rough, but traditionally nobody pays more attention to that than I do.

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Monstrous Regiment

2012-07-12T12:50:25Z

This post was pretty popular on tumblr so I figured I ought to post it here. Although it seems like I've properly migrated to tumblr :( it's a pity, because Dreamwidth has a much better designed system for community and conversation. alas. Oh well, I'll try to keep posting here anyway in hope that it picks up a bit.

Without further ado: Since my tumblr has apparently become a Discworld blog – introducing someone else to a fandom turns out to be surprisingly similar to initial immersion when it comes to said fandom colonising your thoughts all the time – I thought I may as well have my flail about Monstrous Regiment and why it is my faaaaaavourite aside from all my other favourites. Er, and then it sort of turned into a kind of essay like thingy? So be warned :P

Amazing as Terry Pratchett is generally, he’s always been kind of short on LGBT inclusion – oh, there’s any number of characters that could be background gays, but when it comes to named characters and canon sexuality, he seemed a bit flummoxed for quite a while. Aside from Nobby Nobbs’ awkward comic relief cross-dressing, the closest thing for a long time was the fact that Dwarfs, we were allowed to assume, did whatever they did and nobody Mentioned Gender, so really any given dwarf couple were Schrodinger’s Queers. They also got the closet metaphor with the whole “coming out as female” thing, and I believe later there was one named dwarf who was in fact transgender as we would understand it. But at the same time, Trolls, whose genders were usually clear, managed to fail the Bechdel Test as a species.

And then came Monstrous Regiment, the book which increased genderqueer visibility in fantasy fiction by approximately 300%, as well as introducing the Disc’s first proper lesbian couple and quite possibly failing the Reverse Bechdel Test.

The trope of a girl dressing up as a boy to join a traditionally male military institution is old stuff by now, the most salient example in my reading being Tamora Pierce’s Lioness series. It’s a fairly polar trope, really – on the one hand, you get what is usually a fairly badass woman doing badass things and being as good as or usually better than any number of boys (who are not, after all, protagonists) – but at the same time, it means your main character can quite easily be the only female character of note, and as a tomboy in a gender-segregated society she’s not likely to have great relationships with other women who fit into their assigned social roles – conveniently perpetuating the Not Like Other Girls idea that’s partly responsible for the massive difference in popularity between Arya and Sansa Stark.

( Spoilers yonder! )

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Postmodernism With Fake Germans

2012-06-30T16:16:36Z

I found it odd initially that the UTS theatre society, Backstage, wanted to do a double bill of The Real Inspector Hound and Mother Courage & Her Children, but I must admit it's worked out pretty well. You come away from the night with a real sense of the general theme being Plays That ~~We All Studied In High School~~ er Won't Let You Forget You're Watching A Play. Fourth wall? Hound's got five. Suspension of disbelief? Bertholt Brecht spits upon suspension of disbelief. And yet, it goes without saying, the skill of the respective playwrights means you can actually make a pretty entertaining evening out of it, and this the actors did with aplomb.

We open with Tom Stoppard's absurdist classic The Real Inspector Hound, and let me reassure you I am fully aware of the irony of making any sort of critical review of The Real Inspector Hound, and promise not to use the word "elan" at any point other than that one. To say this production was on a budget is to make university students the world over laugh uproariously and insist that it is your round, so rather than engaging in funny business with mirrors, the traditional Messrs Moon And Birdboot Are In The Audience game was played by means of several chairs extending the audience seating onto the stage (floor) in a curve with Reserved signs on two of them, not that this was necessary because the audience knows what's what and nobody wants to sit in the weird seats where the lighting kids can stare at the back of your neck. I hadn't brought a companion, so I ended up sitting in the middle of the second row next to pair of men with accents so incredibly German they could not possibly be actual Germans from Germany.

( Read more... )

What can I say about Mother Courage? Many things, but a lot of them involve trying to pronounce Verfremdungseffekt. It seems like each new production uses different theatrical devices to shoot for Brecht's ideal of estrangement, and each one manages to shoot itself in the foot by casting likeable, empathic actors. This was basically the case here. It is of course possible that the artist's goal of undermining audience immersion in the story to breaking point in order to make them think about the issues presented is truly impossible to achieve, and it is also highly probable that anyone who's going to think about it at all is capable of doing so while totally engrossed in the story, but it is more to the point to note that the spread of postmodernism and the vagaries of student theatre mean we are entirely accustomed to a fourth wall that's more of a colander, to highly non-naturalistic scenery and to metanarrative commentary. The only things that remain unique to Brecht and therefore remotely jarring are the thing where you announce what's going to happen in the following scene and the thing with the awful music. All of the above were used quite well in this production.

( Read more... )

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Day one of Supanova!

2012-06-16T10:44:58Z

and boy do my feet hurt. I was unfortunately rostered such that not only did I miss the panel I wanted to see, but also I spent two thirds of the day on my feet, telling people how to queue and when to queue and that they were bloody well not in any way allowed to take recording equipment into the photobooth to ask a star personal questions about his dead wife, oh my god.

however, I still had fun wandering the stalls on my off-shift. I bought a Hufflepuff badge and a Hawkeye hairclip and a ring with mustaches on (I decided against the love-heart caribiner), and a boy at the costume stall inexplicably gave me lollies and a dodgy Harry Potter wand when I entered their raffle (which is how I discovered that the French word for wand is baguette), and I found a wooden clothespeg on the floor with "I don't think you are a waste of space -- Dudley" written on it (aww), and I took photos of excellent cosplayers like Ms Marvel and Xena, but not, alas, of the four-person Nyaan Cat cosplay or of the spontaneous fencing match that broke out between a gentleman in a white mustache & black top hat with a cane, a jedi with a green lightsaber, some other cosplayer with a big triangular sword I didn't recognise and an eight-year-old sith with a broken red lightsaber. I am legit heartbroken that nobody was filming that, and my phone had run out of batteries ;_;

Probably instead of some of that I ought to have like... sat down in between my shifts and rested m feet. Oops. At least they got a rest during the Outland panel. I thought, for some reason, (I lie, the reason is that the supanova website is not supa informative pre-con), that it was going to be about queer comic book characters or something like that, but it was actually a specific panel about a specific TV show that I do not watch. The two gay dudes at its helm seemed like cool guys, but I had absolutely no familiarity with their subject matter (it sounds a bit like a queer Aussie The Guild? maybe?) and one of them kept on cackling in a faintly disturbing sort of way, so after a while I left and looked at more stalls.

Tomorrow I have less work to do, but also absolutely no panels that I really want to see, so I expect I shall wander the stalls yet again and perhaps buy some books or overpriced Goth clothing. There was some really cool stuff, but I figured I'd do my wallet some good by waiting until a second look confirmed I really wanted it and/or someone put up end-of-show markdowns. And obviously I can't afford any tophats or funky necklaces made of old clock parts or trench-coats with buckles on, regardless.

Oh, and I cosplayed Delirium again, but nobody recognised me this time, and I saw nobody else dressed as anything from Sandman. It made me sad. But there's always tomorrow!

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Experiments with Time in Speculative Fiction

2012-05-14T10:56:45Z

Now that I do honours, I get to write essays about time travel and stuff :3

( and here one is )

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Choose Your Own

2012-03-10T23:08:37Z

I dreamed I was sitting with the Writers’ Society exec, the old group of which I am the last one still involved in the Society, at a weirdly open-plan sort of Clubs Day.

Several tables to our right, another, younger society was resolving a dispute primarily by ganging up on the disagreeing member and making her cry. I started ranting about this, causing a few heads to turn when my “DOING IT WRONG” echoed across the room. Eventually the group dispersed, their ringleader locking eyes with me as she walked past us, and I went over to the circle of chairs they left, where the girl was silently crying. She had a long blonde ponytail.

“Boy, have I been there,” I said to her, choking up with sympathy tears, and then had to get up to fetch tissues. We shared a laugh-cry moment, and then for some reason I decided to share a Greek myth with her.

“I mean, Heliotrope,” I said, “was having the worst day ever. Not only did she find out her husband was fucking a rabbit, but she literally turned into a painting.”

(At this point my dream treated me to a graphic vision of Heliotrope’s skin grafting onto the painting’s canvas as it absorbed her.)

“But let me tell you something,” I continued. “Heliotrope won.”

But before I could explain how Heliotrope won, my mum came in and woke me up (for the LAST TIME, which makes it fitting that it was absolutely classic – she told me last night when she expected me to be awake, I set my alarm for that time, and then she came in 40 mins earlier than my alarm to “fix” something about my room that wasn’t bothering me and opened the curtains so I couldn’t get back to sleep.)

Here’s the problem: there’s no such myth. The word heliotrope comes from a Greek story about a nymph who was in unrequited love with the sun-god Helios, and thereby turned into a flower whose face always turns toward the sun. This contains the right elements from my dream, of the lover forsaking you for someone else and of turning into something nonsentient, but a) there’s no rabbits or paintings and b) she doesn’t Win. Unless you call having a 19th century German guy name a scientific instrument after you winning.

So help me out, internet – tell me the rest of the story. If your husband was fucking a rabbit and the Gods turned you into a painting, how would you Win?

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living liminal

2012-03-07T14:25:27Z

I trapped a tiny spider under the box that holds my retainers. I should have got new ones last year or the year before, but my orthodontist kept saying I wouldn't need them at all soon. Then my wisdom teeth showed up, and they said to ask again once I got them out, but alas: procrastination. I thought I killed the spider but the centre of the box is raised on the bottom, and it ran away when I lifted the box again. I let it go.

There are seven toothbrushes in my bathroom. The little dinosaur one is my brother's, and mine is one of the green pair (I can never remember which). The dark red one is old and has been consigned now to those hard-to-reach places belonging to the bathroom sink. That leaves three pink ones and whichever green one isn't mine. Can my mother possibly be using all of them? My dad only ever uses their en-suite, but mum thinks it's too cold on that side of the house. The toothbrushes are never put away, so it doesn't seem like you could accidentally open a new one before you needed it, but my mother works in mysterious ways.

Today she decided the fridge needed cleaning. It did, but she only got as far as taking everything out before falling asleep in front of the TV. When I found her and turned it off, she woke up, mumbled about her stomach and went upstairs. Dad came home while I was cleaning the fridge shelves and we had a nice chat as we returned all the produce whence it belonged, including the five roots of ginger and two of turmeric that mum bought on a whim and none of us actually know what to do with. Also beetroot. Do any of us eat beetroot? Why do we have so much parsley? The only dish I know of incorporating large quantities of parsley is boscaiola pasta, but I know this because Alexander likes to make it. That doesn't normally happen at my house. My parents' house. My house. My parents' house. Double vision.

Double vision. I still expect my cat to turn up underfoot. Poor old thing. We didn't even bury her, we figured the vet would know what to do with animal corpses. My parents are thinking of minding a foster kitty for a few weeks. Not my responsibility. No pets allowed where I'll be living now, or at least no mammals. I like snakes. Do I still have that tiny mummified lizard somewhere? I'm going to have to move all my knick knacks off the bookshelf and decide which ones to take with me. Finally an excuse to leave behind the porcelain dolls my grandma gave me that I never played with. They can gather dust somewhere else.

My grandparents (or rather the more active busybody in each pair, being my paternal grandmother and my maternal grandfather), collectively appear to be worried that my new flatmate will either seduce me, steal my shit, or seduce some random guy who will then steal my shit. They're also vaguely relieved that I'm moving into a white-ish neighborhood. Previous generations, huh? Alexander offers in consolation that a) he's just down the train line to ~protect my virtue~ and b) his grandma is technically the class enemy. I think that's because she owns property and rents it out at market value. Alexander is very concerned about the housing market in his area, specifically its place in the gentrification of a traditionally poor black neighborhood and dispersal of housing commission tenants to economically dead outer suburbs. Or something like that, I get this stuff basically by osmosis - it's hard to follow along on any individual rant because of his tendency to interrupt himself four times in a row with nesting parentheses. This is as yet more cute than irritating. I've made a game out of counting the levels of tangent and then holding up a number of fingers and saying "ding ding ding." One must find amusement where one can.

The place in Summer Hill has nothing on the walls yet. I meant to write more on the ceiling of my room here, so the words from that insomniac episode was a few years ago seemed more artistic, but I didn't get around to it. I'm moving into a smaller room and one I can't write on because of that large bond I just transferred. On the other hand - no more surprise ginger. My dad says ginger juice tastes awful. I'm going to miss him.

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dear yuletide author

2011-11-17T08:47:02Z

Firstly: Yay! Thank you for writing me something :3 I know the flailing and gnashing of teeth that yuletide tends to involve so I just want to assure you that your efforts are appreciated.

The following shall serve both to elaborate my prompts and to advertise the fandoms a little bit for blowins and treaters. Go nuts!

( Guitar Wolf: Wild Zero )

( Hainish Cycle – Ursula Le Guin )

( David Koresh: Superstar )

( Danger Days )

In conclusion, as you can see I'm pretty well-balanced between options for lulz and options for thinkyfic, both of which are things I enjoy greatly. I don't have literary triggers for you to avoid, and my major squick is Adam Sandler. I'd do the whole spiel about woman/queer/etc-friendly writing, but I think my prompts and flailing sort of do that for me - stick to the spirit if not the letter (because optional details, of course, are optional) of my requests and you should do fine. The Hainish Cycle prompt is the only one that really should have sexual content, but any of them can if that's the way you roll. I hope I've provided enough options for you to find one that really grabs you. Have fun :)

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Mix: Draco Malfoy

2011-08-07T04:50:20Z

So I finally went to see the last Harry Potter movie last night. I had several aborted first starts - I booked a midnight screening that turned out to overlap with a family holiday because I don't understand other people's definition of which day midnight is part of, I went to a Let's Watch Deathly Hallows 1 And 2 gathering where everyone gave up after the first one, but at last! Success! And a really awful milkshake!

I thought it was an excellent movie - even the epilogue was well done, considering it was, you know, The Epilogue. And I have for some time been planning a mixtape for Draco Malfoy, partly out of fanon nostalgia but mostly because the movies do so insist on lovingly panning over Tom Felton's really quite effective HALP!face. (Incidentally, I vaguely met the guy in passing at the last Supanova which I failed to write about here, and he is in fact a genuinely awesome person. Ironic casting choice ftw!) (When I say "vaguely" and "in passing" I mean "we were in the same room for a while and he addressed a small group of people of which I was one in a friendly and jocular manner, I am not trying to project a hob-nobbing with the stars image here.)

Anyway, so here's the mixtape.

I was a little disappointed that I couldn't find a song that really summed up the Malfoy family relationship and the way they grew over the series. I mean Narcissa's priority is very obviously keeping her child safe, and I find the reversal in Lucius Malfoy really interesting - the actors showed it very economically in the movies, the gradual but huge realisation that they have gotten in over their heads and now all they can do is try to stay afloat.

But I guess not many people write songs about that sort of thing.

( Playlist and links to lyrics )

In other news, my final semester of university has begun! I've got one day a week at UNSW for my Linguistics elective, and one and a half at UTS finishing off the writing stuff. I say and a half because Independent Writing Project turns out to meet fortnightly, on the basis that we're not really doing anything except workshopping and it's better to take two weeks and bring in more work to discuss than to do it in little spurts. Screenwriting is shaping up to be fun, our teacher is a stand-up comedian and has good taste in short films. Linguistics is fun as always (my lost major creys ;_;) and I like my teachers - the lecturer is an adorable old butch lady (who I think must have been strikingly attractive twenty years ago) and my tutor is Italian and pronounces my name right!

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bliumchik @ 2011-07-31T17:27:00

2011-07-31T07:44:20Z

Hey, internet. Long time no see, unless you hang out on tumblr. Now I am ill and livejournal is unreliable and OBVIOUSLY THIS IS THE BEST TIME TO RETURN TO BLOGGING. In lieu of a huge catchup entry that I will procrastinate on because there is so much stuff to put in it, I am just going to post three random things that have happened since last I wrote here.

1. I had a belated 21st birthday party. But Maggie, I hear you say, is your birthday not in August? why, yes it is! And in honour of my 21st birthday party being closer in date to my 22nd actual birthday than anything else, I dubbed it the Timey Wimey birthday and me and my boyfriend dressed up as the fourth and eleventh Doctors. It was awesome. I got very very drunk, which I maintain was not my fault because my friends mandated that I take a drink every time I interrupted someone else's speech, and they know me.

Also this happened.

2. I won a journal subscription using a tin of sardines. Also I ate the sardines.

There was a book-themed picnic competition listed in the program for the NSW Writers Center inaugural young writers festival - they invited everyone to bring a picnic basket selected to fit a favourite book, e.g. mushroom products for alice in wonderland or whatever. I didn’t realise till a few hours before the thing, so I grabbed some random stuff from my kitchen and a 7/11 on my route to make a Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy spread - a towel, of course, a thermos of tea, a tin of sardines (for Babelfish), some bread to eat the sardines with, and some peanut butter and mixed nuts in honour of the peanuts Ford buys from the bar in Chapter 3 (these latter two from the 7/11). I did not even have time to rustle up Trillian’s salad from the Restaurant at the End of the Universe and a friendly cow toy, I had to get on a bus. I figured people would laugh and share the fruits of their lengthier preparation with me, and everybody would nom in a writerly fashion.

Anyway it turned out nobody else brought anything so I won by default.

3. I am hopefully participating in thissss and it is not too late for you to also participate!

ladiesbigbang: a female-centric panfanwork big bang challenge.
Optional sign-ups open June 1-30th, final drafts due October 1st.
sign-ups: creators | cheerleaders | betas
info: minimums | rules & guidelines | pinch hitting

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do not be alarmed!

2011-02-01T04:05:51Z

Mix: Cheerjerkers
Length: 17 tracks
Warnings: Erm, you may go a bit starry-eyed for some of these songs and therefore be slightly unproductive for an unknown period of time?
Other Notes: Hopefully this will cure any blues you may have contracted from my Tearjerkers mix. 8tracks licensing rules mean you can only listen to this in the order I've put it in once. As always, if you like these artists make a note to spend some money on them at some point in time. This used to be a bit more disjointed, with half of it songs that were basically About how You Should Cheer Up Already, and half of it just random stuff that made me smile. I realised that the first lot actually get on your nerves a bit when they are that concentrated, so I cut most of the less subtle ones, and I cut a few from the latter category too that didn’t fit. So yep, this used to be much longer, have some
Bonus Songs: Banned From Argo, which always makes ME smile, but didn’t really fit anywhere and I thought I’d have slightly fewer injokes. And Cheer Up (You Miserable Fuck) which was the original title of this playlist. I actually like it better than the Frank Turner song in there, I couldn’t decide between them for a while, but in the end this one was too sorrowful in the verses.

Have a listen, and tell me in the comments about the songs I don't know that always cheer you up!

( Commentary )

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here we go, here we go, here we go

2011-02-01T03:37:14Z

Mix: Tearjerkers
Length: 18 tracks
Warnings: Y'all can be the judge of whether an hour or so of sad music will be detrimental to your emotional state, but also sad songs tend to be about specific things which are sad and some of which are triggery, so please drop me a comment/message if there's something in particular you're avoiding right now and I will tell you which song to skip.
Other Notes: 8tracks licensing rules mean you can only listen to this in the order I've put it in once. As always, if you like these artists make a note to spend some money on them at some point in time. If not one song on this list makes you feel a bit like weeping, it is entirely possible that we have irreconcilable philosophical differences. You may want to follow it up immediately with my Cheerjerkers mix. Also, I had to cut this playlist down ridiculously to fit it into a mix. So therefore have a
Bonus Song: No Gringo

Have a listen, and tell me about the songs I don't know about that always make you cry in the comments!

( Commentary )

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bliumchik @ 2011-01-31T14:07:00

2011-01-31T03:26:01Z

I finally watched MCR's Sing video, and now my brain is full of plotbunnies which, let's face it, will probably never come to fruition. Including one where the little girl is actually the daughter of Korse and Ray's sister. Also, does anyone know who the blonde woman is in the van at the end of that? I couldn't quite tell if she was familiar or not.

Anyway, in lieu of promising to actually write stuff (ha!) I have decided to post here my photos from the long-finished MCR costume contest. frostickle took these at UNSW just after I redyed my hair, it was awesome.

( Read more... )

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bliumchik @ 2011-01-27T18:13:00

2011-01-27T09:47:10Z

Amanda Palmer at the Opera House: wheeeeeee. AFP always puts on a good show, and while I'm not that into the music of her pet projects/opening acts, their showmanship cannot be faulted. Jane Austen Argument are adorable and the Baltic Sea Gentlemen have excellent comic timing and hilarious faces. And an accordian.

And of course Neil Gaiman came out to read some stuff, which was awesome (megafauna :D) and slightly terrifying (after reading the intro to Smoke and Mirrors, where he sheepishly explains that the sexy story in it took him years of writing a paragraph, blushing, and putting it away for a month, it feels incongrouous to hear him say "fuck" out loud in his impeccable British accent).

Amanda was lively and entirely at home on the stage, as always - even when her skirt/train thing got caught on a speaker, and when she forgot her setlist, and when her "make out with random audience members during Missed Me" plan encountered what appeared to be an awkward grabby dude (we were up in the circle so it was a little hard to see what was actually going on if the spotlight wasn't quick enough). She also told a cute little story about one of my favourite covers from Amanda Palmer Goes Down Under, On An Unknown Beach. Apparently it's from an obscure CD that was given to her by a music nerd when she was 18, and it's by Peter Jeffries, a New Zealand artist who is now a music teacher, and she has been looking for him in vain ever since. She earnestly requested that if anyone in the audience knew him, or ran into him, they should let him know that she covered his song.

The theme of the show was "Bogans vs Artfags" but, you know, it's Amanda Palmer - most of the fans went with the Artfag side. I considered going half'n'half to bring balance to the force or some shit, but let's face it - my wardrobe is not skewed heavily towards the thongs and australian-flag merch end of the scale. I went with the colourful stockings/whacky face make-up/weird wobbly butterfly clips concoction instead. The stage was crowded with theme stuff, though - there was an esky, a grill and a Hills Hoist, and a rack of whacky costumes, and a dummy in a gaga-esque dress, and all that.

Afterwards most of us made a speedy dash for the bathroom (it was a long concert - the encore included ladies in spangly dresses for Map of Tasmania and Oasis) (yes, that IS a rainbow flag with some pubes on it, why do you ask?) (also one of the dancers did a rap rebuttal about how shaving was okay xD) and then joined the others in the signing queue. I didn't actually bring anything to get signed, but I wanted to show Neil my tattoo, since he'd been blogging about seeing a similar one. He was delighted, and spontaneously hugged me and then pointed it out to Amanda. (They were signing at one table, which made it all the more convenient for Jess to wheedle them both into signing one side of her chest each. Classy as always xD)

I am told by my friends that I actually squee'd, but I don't believe them. Anyway, I hustled them off to get food as soon as that was done, because I was about to faint or cry or something. This ended up being me scrounging off of Avi, because the only thing open in Circular bloody Quay at midnight is McDonalds, and a little vegan muesli bar with promise of instant noodles in forty minutes is basically preferable. We hung out chatting at Avi's for a while, then everyone remembered their various 8am wake-up calls (suckerrrrs) and dispersed. I ended up waiting at a bus stop with some bats for half an hour, most of which I spent spamming twitter and singing random bits of songs that were now stuck in my head.

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And when they put me in the ground I'll start pounding the lid, Saying, I haven't finished yet...

2011-01-22T07:52:35Z

So anyway, I have clearly not kept up with my good intentions of updating lots. I should really stop waiting for my life to calm down to do stuff like this - all signs point to not any time soon, so I may as well figure out how to work around ALL THE THINGS for blogging. I have been keeping up on reading blogs, but not really commenting - sorry guys, I'm always either feeling like I have nothing relevant to say, like you've forgotten who I am since I haven't updated in so long, or like it would be awkward to comment because the post is two or three days old in the time it took me to read it. But I am reading! I have reverted to lurkerdom. Sorry :( I'm going to try to both post and comment a bit more, but we know how that has turned out in the past :P

I'm writing this first bit chilling at a dinner party on someone else's laptop while I wait for stuff to happen. By stuff I mean food. Since the last entry I have had a fairly solid block of social life and work.

( rock and roll! )

( tattoos! )

( parties! )

( extremely nerdy pursuits! )

( work! and dashing about madly! and more work! ...and then moar social life, this time more sedate )

So yes, that was A LOT OF THINGS. I have conveniently split them into sections using The Magic Of Cuts (although it will be of most utility to DW users on their reading page or anyone browsing bliumchik, because of Dreamwidth's handy little triangle cut thing). It has been a fun week, but I am also glad now that the weekend is appearing sedate. There was a party on Friday as well, but I had to babysit, so instead of flailing at people on a beach I played scrabble with a sevenyearold. And I lost, because I kept telling him what words to use. It's just really frustrating to play against someone who keeps putting down "at" :P

I'm just gloriously lazing around my room and immersing my brain in the internet, while outside my window my new neighbours yell incoherently and splash about in a kiddie pool with all their housewarming guests.

SO, PEOPLE WHO INEXPLICABLY STILL READ MY BLOG: if you have gotten this far, or even if you have skipped all of the random anecdotes, Answer Me These Questions Three!

1. I am submitting a sample Advice Column to my student magazine, hoping to write a monthly one this year! Give me sample questions to answer in it. They can be serious or humorous, preferably some mix between the two - you can post them screened if you like. LET ME ADVISE YOOOOOUUU MOOHOOHAHAHahem.

2. Who wants to volunteer at Armageddon Sydney? I'm not sure if it's too late or not, but the form is still up on their website... I'm thinking of applying but obviously it's more fun with friends!

3. What hilarious horrifying yet realistic tattoo shall I tell my dad I'm thinking of getting before revealing my comparatively classier one so that he doesn't freak out about it? (nothing will stop my mum from freaking out :P)

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in other news, I gave myself an impromptu midnight haircut with nail scissors

2011-01-09T14:16:27Z

Slowly, things come into order. I have scheduled singing lessons, and a tattoo. Tomorrow I'm making overdue medical appointments. I am caught up on Anthology work for now. I successfully wrote a yuletide story in the Mirrormask fandom entitled The Point Of Keys. I also recieved this cute (and longish!) Obernewtyn story.

I'm going through my least-listened files in Winamp to rate and playlist stuff, although it keeps listing TV shows there because, obviously, I don't watch most of more than once or twice. I am getting into Jawbreaker, which is odd because when I first looked them up, years ago, on hearing and loving Brand New's cover of Accident Prone, I was horribly disappointed by how amelodic they were. I suppose my tolerance for less-than-perfect vocals has increased. Level up in punk rock? xD

( amusing stuff that happened this weekend, containing equal parts fail and win )

EDIT: lol for some reason this posted backdated to last month? I swear I did not mean to do that... I think maybe I had the post window open for longer than I thought. Oops! fixed now.

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in other news, I need a haircut

2010-12-01T14:40:13Z

I've been dreaming odd things, like a virus that turns people into douchebags and somehow leads me to an underground cookie warehouse with a pudgy middle-aged topless androgynous but probably female head of security who has writing all over hir skin in sharpie and keeps secretly rearranging the toffees so the colours don't pattern as well. Also, before I finished reading Alan Moore's Voice of the Fire, I dreamed an extra chapter to it - one set in the future instead of the past - and took a while to remember that no, that wasn't actually part of the book. I no longer remember what happened in the dream-chapter, but I'm done with the real book now and I have got to say it was pretty awesome. I definitely reccommend it to anyone who enjoys a bit of grue in their some and appreciates cool stylistic devices, and/or is interested in British history. But trust me on the grue.

My boyfriend had a St Andrew's Day party, in which he and a couple of his friends cooked ALL OF THE SCOTTISH FOOD, if by Scottish you mean made of oats. I missed the bit with the potato cakes and the whole roast duck because of a meeting I had to go to at uni, but I got to partake of oatcakes, alcohol, oat-related alcohol, roast lamb and stew (as far as I know, not containing oats) and a sort of oat-and-nut dessert thing which turned out to be quite nice on top of oatcake. With tea.

Also I trolled a Bear Grylls fan and was briefly subject to the awkward realisation that I was wedged on a couch between a dude with a girl on his lap on one side, and two chicks making out on the other. I couldn't decide if I should feel intrusive or left out. Later, a fridge magnet flower fell into Tallulah's cleavage in such perfect arrangement that I assumed it was there on purpose, but it turned out she hadn't even noticed it was there. Or possibly earlier, my memory fails me. Alcohols!

Deadlines are starting to threaten to loom, but I have gotten done SOME things of use, so I feel sort of okay. I have applied for cross-institutional study, this time BEFORE the office closes for the new year, which is an improvement on last time, so I might actually get to do that this time.

I shall leave you with a hilarious anecdote from a friend of my mother's, a Russian woman. Her husband's job took him to New Zealand for several months on a contract. His final day there, he got really drunk, fell over, bashed his head open on something and woke up in hospital, still tipsy. He then decided he did not need to be in hospital, removed his IV drip, walked out and caught a taxi. In the taxi he ripped out the IV nozzle from his vein and started bleeding everywhere. Somehow, the Kiwis still let him on a plane - he showed up at his wife's doorstep in Sydney, drunk and covered in blood, right on schedule.

My mum's only comment was to sigh and shake her head and say "Russian men, you know. This is why your father doesn't drink."

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