( Not sure if this actually counts as a spoiler, but I'm gonna cut anyway. )

Also, I want that manip from Jonathan Ross in my life. He is such a Jeremy/Richard shipper and I love it.

I'm doing a reaction post for Burn Notice, because I love it so and I have the time.

( Burn Notice, fifth episode! )

I FINALLY HAVE MY SUMMER VACATION. I HAVE FINISHED MY LAST EXAM (which did not go as well as planned, but hopefully my bullshit will be good enough and it's two-thirds of the final grade, so maybe the one-third written assignment will compensate and I will pass it anyway) AND I AM VERY HAPPY ABOUT THAT.

And now, it's time I do some cleaning up, seeing as how my parents are coming to pick me up on Sunday, and obviously it has to be clean for them, and it'd be nice if my roommate came back from his holiday without immediately having to take out the garbage, and it's nice for me to come back here after the holidays without needing to clean up my room. SO, YES, CLEANING AND PUTTING MY CRAP INTO BAGS FOR SUNDAY.

And I have time for fanfic-writing! Oh, yes, finally time for that RPF Big Bang and other things, because there are always other things that need to be written.

Anyway, I have seen Day Four of Torchwood, and as I was already aware of That Spoiler, I didn't have quite as strong a reaction as other people, which I'm a bit glad about. I think that it's still very good, that Gwen's being very badass, and I'll be curious to see how it gets resolved tonight. Also, we had better not get a full 'this is what the aliens look like' reveal, because otherwise the effect of keeping them in fog is ruined.

And after that, there's James May on Jonathan Ross' show. I'm hoping Jonathan will delight us with some more of his crazy manips.

Edited to add: here's a preview clip of Waters of Mars, the next Doctor Who special. It looks creepy.

Also, I did fail the Tuesday exam, which was 100% expected, so I'm not upset, but I am extremely impressed by the way they got it checked in only a couple of days. It was 180 students taking it, with 70 multiple choice questions (which are easy enough to check, obviously) and 13 open questions. Why can't other exams be checked as rapidly as that? What's the secret of the people responsible for Medical Physiology? Is it because they're from the Medicine faculty rather than the Maths- and Natural Sciences faculty?

The exam from today also has people involved from the Medicine faculty, so I'm hoping that means today's exam will be checked quickly as well.

Tell me, who is the man with his back to the camera?

Poll #1427524
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

Who is it?

Feel free to write minific about the subject of your choice here:

Also, from the reactions outside the lj-cuts I gather that A Certain Torchwood Spoiler I knew about beforehand because I am curious and went looking for has actually happened. That should making watching it once I've downloaded it interesting.

You know what I like? Talking about fic ideas with other people. Except this sort of thing usually happens in comments, and then later I think 'oh, I want to re-read my fic ideas because I want to write it' and by then I've forgotten where I've discussed it. Was it my own journal? In someone else's? A community? So, yeah, that part of talking about fic and bouncing ideas back and forth and encouraging plot bunnies is a bit of an annoyance.

But mostly I love it, because it makes me go 'oooh, that's a good idea! I want to include that now!' and it makes me more eager to write fic, and seeing as how I haven't written proper fanfic in quite some time, I'll take all the eagerness I can get, thank you very much. I intend to make use of the summer holidays to deal with some plotbunnies, obviously because I've got that RPF Big Bang to sort out.

THE POINT IS, LET'S HAVE A BIG HAPPY DISCUSSING PLOTBUNNIES POST.

Bounce ideas back and forth! Go 'oh, wouldn't be cool if this happened?' at each other. Go 'hey, did you consider this?' at each other. Hey, if you're feeling particularly adventurous, you could even adopt plotbunnies from one another!

This probably isn't the best timing, since everyone'll be going OMG TORCHWOOD, but still, discussing fic ideas! Too much fun not to!

By the way, if you want to comment anonymously, that's cool. I understand if you have fic ideas that make you go 'er, I'm not sure if I want to associate myself with this'.

Right, I'm spending most of today studying Medical Physiology, an exam which I will most likely fail due to it being a very difficult course, but that doesn't mean I can't try, and I'll have the whole summer holidays to study for the resit, so that's all doable.

In my study breaks I am playing Vampire Wars on Facebook (why is it so addictive and why can't I beat people in combat? Your skill rank is lower! You have a smaller clan than I do! I should be able to beat the crap out of you, and yet I fail!) and I watched last night's Top Gear. I don't think car sauna is going to catch on, Team Top Gear are still rubbish at protesting (what, no handcuffs this time?) and there was a test involving dogs and NOT ONE OF THEM was Top Gear Dog. Although obviously the point was to have a big dog, and Top Gear Dog isn't that big compared to a Great Dane. Plus, an unhappy dog meant being disqualified, and Top Gear Dog doesn't like cars very much, so they'd all be disqualified. But on the bright side, she does appear to have a boyfriend. Well done, TG.

Thanks to Amber, I have also started watching The Supersizers, in which a restaurant critic and a comic spend a week eating and living according to a certain time period, and thanks to this lovely person on YouTube, I didn't even have to wait for my download to finish. The Middle Ages one is quite mental, I love the imagination of the cooks at the time, and the Seventies scares me a bit, with the way everything needs to be rehydrated. That can't be healthy.

At Cafe Kult's monthly bad movie night I have seen the most ridiculous car chase scene in the world, and thanks to the magic of Youtube, you too can watch as a man with two heads and the guy he's taken hostage are on a motorbike while they are being chased by a dozen of police cars on a field. It's hilarious and features a lot of police vehicles driving off random cliffs.

Here it is, the chase starts about 5:10 minutes in, and lasts over 5 minutes, so if you want to see the whole thing, part 8 of the movie is linked to the sides.

The best detail is that in a later scene, there's a radio interview on how all the police officers in the chase scene are okay, except for some broken bones. Aww.

DAMN YOU DAMN YOU COMPUTER.

Yesterday I installed The Sims 2 on my computer, which isn't a terribly good idea when you're supposed to be studying for exams. However, my computer appears to have taken it upon itself to protect me from my procrastination by going into sleep mode during The Sims 2, and when I get it out of sleep mode, it claims it has to video input.

This sleep mode/no video input has been an occasional problem for some time, but it had been less of a problem lately, but now it has reared its ugly head once again. I've googled it, and tried some of the tips, like checking if the computer is overheating. This wasn't the problem, as one of the sides of the case is still off and I've cleaned the fans somewhat (unbelievable how much dust accumulates on computer fans, seriously) and it's still being annoying. I've checked the BIOS settings and disabled it going into sleep mode.

Maybe it's a video card problem. Maybe it's a monitor problem. I don't know. What I do know is that I can't play The Sims 2.

Any computer wizards out there with a bright idea?

This month's hot_daily picspam from over at journalfen has the awesome theme of Beefcake, so it's basically pictures of men being pretty and/or sexy. And since hot_daily is awesome, I can guarantee you that there is at least one man in there you fancy, since the variety is GINORMOUS. Old and young and vintage and black and white and Asian and Indian and other subgroups I have forgotten as that's the effect sexy men have on me. Obviously.

If, however, you feel left out because you do not care for sexy men, you're interested in sexy women, hot_daily provides! Badass Chicks Who Could Kick Your Ass and Hot Women of Sci-fi. There is obviously some overlap.

Today was a bit of a useless lecture, as the lecturer didn't believe in using powerpoint slides, which is okay, but a bit unusual, and then he sprang an Unexpected Assignment on us, in that we had no idea what the assignment for the afternoon was. It turns out that we need to read and discuss an article, except we were not provided with the article, so that's a bit fail. And we also need to do some internet assignment no one knew anything about, and since next week we have two exams, people were less than pleased with the Unexpected Assignments.

Also, subconscious? I do not approve of you giving me dreams in which I'm looking in the mirror and then remove my iris from my eyes, as if it was a seperate tube kind of thing. Perhaps I have issues with contact lens removal, but removing the entire iris is a bit much. Do not want.

And finally, a meme stolen from th_esaurus and tinselworm

01. Think of the first word that comes to mind when you think of me.
02. Go to Google Images and search for that word.
03. Reply to this post with one of the pictures on the first page of results.
04. Put this in your own journal so that I can do the same.

Step 4 is optional, by the way.

So, I didn't make it through the Walibi World Halloween auditions. So much for the whole 'we don't want to kick any of the people who have done it before' spiel, which was of course always a spiel because of course they wanted to remove some people, if only to make room for the new people. But yeah, I'm disappointed. I thought I did a good audition, I thought the fact that I always did a good job at Halloween counted for something, but I guess they disagreed. I was looking forward to working there for three weekends, and to the same gang of people I usually hang out with and to meeting some new folks and to seeing how everything turned out. Especially as this was probably the last year I even could do it, because next year I will most likely start to work or do a Master's degree, and neither of those leave much time for spending three weekends in October in an amusement park.

A part of me is hoping that they made a mistake, or that someone who did make it through has to cancel and they decide I am good enough after all, but I doubt it.

Oh well, on the bright side, now I can take the Genes and Behaviour course rather than the Genes and Evolution course, because I need a 5 credit course to make up for a failed course from this year, and the behaviour one sounded more interesting, but was on Wednesdays, Thursdays and Fridays in Oktober, which would've clashed with having to be at Walibi World at 16:00.

Somehow I never fail at being impressed by the way Darren Hayes will take a song he's done an album version for before, and then turns it into UTTER UTTER PORN for the live version. You're a filthy man, Darren Hayes, and I love you. I'll just always love Daniel Jones more. Sorry. Case in point: I Want You, which is the Hard Rock Live performance, which is pretty much a lot of Darren's gratuitous porn moaning.

And then Darren goes and does a fabulous cover of Madonna's Dress You Up, which I want, because it's FABULOUS and DARREN HAYES and a cover of a Madonna song I quite like!

I'm still not sure how littlemoose and I got from an MSN conversation on Top Gear to discussing whether Take That or Darren Hayes have the most pornographic live shows, but I certainly don't mind that it happened.

I thought that since I have nothing to do tomorrow (except for something at noon), I could do the Top Gear drinking game.

But then Jeremy had to be very interested in Stephen Fry's gay cruising application (seriously, how much weight has Stephen lost? Amazing! Don't overdo it, Stephen!), and James had a GAY PRIDE FLAG and then his penis grew back, and as for Hammond, GET YOUR HAIR CUT. SERIOUSLY. It either looks like it's exploded, or like James' hair. I can't imagine Richard wanting to achieve either of those goals.

But in conclusion, the Top Gear drinking game, even if you only do 13 of the items, is still very dangerous.

Also in conclusion: I want a download of that, because of the Stig photocopying his head, which I missed, and Will Young's picture being on Jeremy's desk, which I didn't miss, but I want to see it again, because Jeremy/Will Young = adorably in love.

Sooooo, Twilight + Wii'ing!

I am crap at Guitar Hero II. I was booed off several times, and barely managed School's Out by Alice Cooper. The rabbit game was more doable, although I still got my ass kicked by sals_uni_diary, who has also joined me in Top Gear fangirling. Hurrah! The wonderful part is the way she keeps facepalming whenever I mention something particularly ridiculous.

But, yes, controlling a crazy Viking rabbit is more my thing than playing a Wii guitar.

As for Twilight, it was the first time I'd ever seen it, and the fact that we did 5 shots in the first half hour means that I don't remember all the details, especially as we were talking through it A LOT. Some things I do remember:
- Charlie the Awkward Dad and his Native American Wheelchair Buddy are so in a secret relationship.
- Edward and Jacob are ex-boyfriends.
- As are Edward and James. Edward is the Twilight bicycle.
- Dr. Cullen was pretty.
- As was James the Evil Vampire.
- Edward's Volvo looked ridiculous when he was trying to save Bella from that gang. YOUR FAMILY HAS LOADS OF CARS, EDWARD, AT LEAST USE A COOL ONE. GEEZ. It also looked ridiculous when a couple of Native Americans went to Charlie in a truck, and they were glaring at Edward, and Edward was glaring back at them. NOT IMPRESSED BY YOU, EDWARD.
- Edward being a creepy stalker and doing a lot of intense gazing.

Speaking of which, this is pretty awesome, as someone made a VERY good video remix of Edward meeting Buffy the vampire slayer instead of Bella, and he does his whole creepy stalker thing at Buffy. I think you can see where this is going.

And the good news just keeps coming! I passed my Bioinformatics exam, the incredibly boring course, so I am officially free after the 10th of July! NO JULY RESITS FOR ME, HELL YES.

Tonight there's a Wii/Twilight-mocking party over at hope4dreams, so that should be good, and I can probably do my 14:00 workgroup with a hangover.

In light of last night's Top Gear, I will be preparing for the Apocalypse.

And figuring how to write fic with Richard Hammond as THE BLACK SHADOW, feared highwayman. Either that, or Richard Hammond as THE BLACK SHADOW, ambitious but rubbish superhero.

HURRAH IT'S BACK.

In further awesome news, I couldn't find my bicycle on Friday morning (not the awesome news), but since I was at my parents' house this weekend, I couldn't do anything about it. So, I didn't tell them about my missing/stolen bike (no, still not the awesome news) because I figured I'd ask and look around in the neighbourhood first, since you never know.

I asked my housemate about it, because he sleeps on the streetside of our house, and he had heard a lot of noise Thursday night, and had seen two guys carry off a bicycle. So, I followed his directions, and my bike was a few hundred meters away from where it should've been. I can only assume the two drunkards who had carried my bike off got tired of carrying it. The handlebars were left a bit wonky, but a good yank sorted that out, so now I have my bike back and it's still in good shape.

Well, it's in as good a shape as any student bicycle is, and that's good enough for me.

Walibi World auditions yesterday went all right, their goal is not to kick us out (although I suspect that they do want to weed out the very worst people, but I'm not one of the worst, so I'm not worried) but to put us in a place that goes with our strengths as actors. So we had to perform a little play about a family reunion where someone was murdered. We got half an hour to prepare, and I played the suicidal emo teenage daughter. I should find out what my role is before the 1st of July, and then there'll be contracts and I get a personnel pass, which is always handy to have in the summer :D.

The Top Gear trailers continue to be utterly adorable! In which James drives around a pretty lady, Richard drives around the desert, and Jeremy wants to race in a train.

But let us also remember some of the highlights of years past.

Car football! There's several destruction derbies that're organised in the summer around here, but I think we should switch to car football. It's a destruction derby AND a football match in one. WIN.

The bus protest! Okay, this one's mostly a highlight for the slash fandom, because Team Top Gear handcuff themselves to a bus. Inquiring minds still want to know a) if someone already owned the handcuffs beforehand and b) what happened to the handcuffs afterwards.

The caravan holiday! This is a highlight for me because it features TOP GEAR DOG who is very adorable and very sensible. Also features Team Top Gear failing at a caravan holiday. But mostly TOP GEAR DOG.

Aquatic cars challenge! In which Team Top Gear decides they want to make their own carboats. Featuring Richard and his Dampervan, which came with a Gay Times, Jeremy and his Toyota Hilux, which almost makes it to the finishline, and James and his sailing Triumph Herald, which takes ages to get anywhere.

Jeremy's interior cardesign! In which Jeremy decides he's better at interior cardesign than professionals. Richard and James are highly sceptical, especially as Jeremy's interior design involves concrete and dangerous comfy chairs. I'd forgotten how much I love this clip, but it's amazing. Jeremy's ridiculous confidence and disregard of everyone else! The way he pisses off the French designer! Richard and James' mocking of the car and Jeremy's abilities! The sheer ridiculousness of the car!

Part one and part two of the challenge where the mothers of Team Top Gear tested cars with their sons. This is worth it for the picture of Richard in his younger years alone, AND we find out the identity of the Stig!

Top Gear's YouTube channel, because obviously you'll want to see even more clips, like the small plane versus car race where Jeremy falls in love with a Bugatti Veyron, or the time when Richard and James tried to launch a Reliant Robin into space.

I have also rectified the lack of the Cargo Ship trope on the Top Gear TVTropes page. Cargo ship is shipping people with inanimate objects, and Top Gear is pretty much all about shipping men with cars, so obviously it was just plain wrong Top Gear didn't have a Cargo Ship entry.

This weekend I have convinced sals_uni_diary that the Top Gear presenters can be paired up with each other and with cars. Apparently, she wasn't convinced before. My convincing her consisted of quoting columns at her from a Dutch Top Gear magazine that was lying around in the pub we were in. This Hammond column about how he clearly wants to shag his new Morgan Aeromax was very convincing, as was this May column about how he can't be bothered to put on clothes.

However, the most convincing material cannot be quoted, it has to be seen.

The Jeremy Clarkson and Will Young flirtathon.

They don't get off to a good start, but they are ADORABLE. ADORABLE. There is giggling and complimenting and plans for making a TV show together. THEIR LOVE CANNOT BE DENIED. Which is why Jeremy doesn't even bother to deny it when his love for Will Young becomes a running joke for the rest of the series, like here during the last episode, where Jeremy got an award for Most Embarrassing Flirting On Television, and Will Young's new single was the best sound they had heard all year.

Yes, I am spamming you with the Top Gear series 13 trailer as well because it is ADORABLE and everybody in the world needs so see Little Stig staring at the camera at the end, like he's already plotting evil alien things to do to the others.

But hurray, Top Gear is back for the summer! And so is True Blood, which I am downloading already! And Burn Notice has had two episodes as well, and they were good. I LOVED the one from last week, there were so many lovely moments between the characters and the new addition of the awesome policewoman. Please stick around, awesome policewoman, I love you already.

Yay, it's weekend! More and more people I know, both on and off the internet, are having their last week of class, and some of them are completely done with the university year already. You're all lucky bastards. Yes, I know plenty of you still need to finish essays and do exams, but I'm stuck with three more weeks of classes and two more exams.

Still, Medical Physiology is interesting, even if the exam sounds Not So Fun. The teachers seem to come from the Medicine department, and they end every lecture with a medical problem we're supposed to solve. A bit of 'the patient is showing these symptoms, what's going on?'. And they're gonna do this at the exam as well, along with multiple choice, so, er, yeah, not looking forward to that. Medical Cell Biology is not as bad as I feared, because Cell Biology doesn't interest me AT ALL, but this course focuses on illness and things we've had in earlier courses, like the importance of stem cells, so I think I can manage that exam.

As for the results of my male armpit hair poll, it turns out that 2 out 16 people are okay with wild and free armpit hair, 9 out 16 prefer it if the guy keeps the hair short and trimmed, and 5 out 16 people want men to have hairfree armpits entirely. One person added that it depended on the guy, which makes sense, as obviously armpit hair is more visible on guys with dark hair than on guys with light hair, and someone else said that it depends on the smell as well. Obviously all men need to use deodorant, I don't think I need to have a poll about that, it's just standard hygiene. But the majority of people prefers men who at least keep their armpit hair short. Men, you might want to keep that in mind.

I'm also working on the rpf_big_bang fic, although I'm actually working on two, because I'm not sure which one I really want to finish. One's a fairly simple Top Gear/Burn Notice crossover, where the Top Gear trio get dragged into Michael, Fiona and Sam's helping-people-out-business while Top Gear tries to travel from Miami to New Orleans. This would be fun because Richard and Jeremy would love Fiona and her explosions, while James and Sam can get a drink and bond over bad shirts. Michael would try to convince the Top Gear trio to leave, and fail. The other idea is ENTIRELY amy_wolf's fault, and is about Jonathan Ross, Jeffrey Donovan and Misha Collins getting into a threeway online shipping war about Top Gear. Jonathan ships Jeremy/Richard, obviously, Jeffrey ships James/Richard, and Misha will ship any pairing that amuses him and is suitably cracky.

First, a couple of links.

David Eddings has died. Eddings is the author pretty much responsible for introducing me to the fantasy genre, so it is all a bit sad, even if I gave up on the books he wrote after The Redemption of Althalus, because he kept using the same types of characters and I didn't care much for the plot. However, I do believe that his Belgariad and Mallorean series are excellent introductions to epic fantasy for teens, because those series have all the tropes and cliches you start to dislike once you're older and have read a lot of epic fantasy, but Eddings did excellent things with his Farm Boy Who's Secretly Royalty, his Feisty Redhaired Princess, his Wise Old Sorcerer Mentor and the rest of them. Eddings very obviously had fun writing the Belgariad and Mallorean, because it shows, it's a fun series with snarky characters, and Belgarath is way more awesome than Gandalf anyway.

A new Monkey Island game!, and also a remake of Secret of Monkey Island. Granted, I've only played the first three games, but it's still cool that there's going to be a fifth game.

Let's see, final night of America Abridged went well, I received chocolate for the helping out and additional writing I did, there was a Dracula rehearsal, and this morning I had a Bioinformatics exam which started out quite well, but then made me go 'what the hell' a lot. I wasn't the only person who felt that way, which is at least some comfort. I'm hoping I scraped enough points together to get a pass.

Some other things came up after the performance, by the way, like how some other people were/had been addicted to World of Warcraft and Knight of the Old Republic, which made me feel a lot better about having spent the past few weeks playing Pokemon Red. I've got 8 badges and completed Victory Road, so I'm about to kick Elite Foour butt!

Body hair also came up, and now I want to do some polling about that:

Poll #1411674
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All

So, armpit hair on men?

Wait, I have more things to say about male armpit hair:

I for one have been traumatised by two male teachers who used to wear sleeveless shirts, and the sight of their armpit hair as they wrote stuff on the board just grossed me out completely.

THE AUDIENCE LAUGHED AT THE BITS I WROTE FOR AMERICA ABRIDGED.

They also laughed at everything else.

BUT YAY THEY LAUGHED AT BITS I WROTE.

And some of the more complicated scenes we couldn't rehearse due to a lack of props/space/etc went very well, considering we were all going OH SHIT FINGERS CROSSED THIS HAD BETTER WORK.

This weekend has mostly been about getting stuff ready the three performances of The Complete History of America, Abridged, which was all fun and exciting. We made a backdrop that's basically three table clothes sown together and got painted and graffiti'd into being the American flag with a smily face and some slogans and stick figure drawings, most of which I did as our Creative Overlord sals_uni_diary was working on the awesome time lines. So, yeah, that's why the drawings on the time lines are amazing and the drawings on the flag look like it's Stig on the moon with the rocket his own size and a random flag. But it was fun and we sat outside for the entire afternoon in the sun, so that was good. We did a little more work this afternoon, watched a brilliant rehearsal, and tomorrow will also be filled with last-minute running around and getting things!

I have also spent quite some time playing Pokemon. I don't own a Gameboy, but thanks to the magic of a Gameboy emulator (downloadable here) and the downloading of some Pokemon roms, I was ready to go! Obviously I went with Charmander as my starter in Red, and so far I've got a nice team of 6 basic Pokemon, and I also have 6 badges. I've also downloaded Silver and Ruby, so when I finish Red, I won't be bored at all.

The plane tickets for the London vacation have officially been paid for!

And it looks as if I'll also be going on a midweek vacation with my family (parents, sister and husband, brother and wife) to some town in Germany.

I'm quite happy with it, two holidays! One to London with a friend, and one to Germany with family!

( And then I watched Repo! The Genetic Opera )

Right, I've signed up for this:


because I haven't written any proper fic in AGES, and I probably should. So, if you have nothing else to do during the summer and feel like writing at least 15,000 words of RPF, consider signing up. I'm sure it'll be fun.

So, today I started to work on the Bioinformatics project for Friday, which is boring, but at least there's plenty of stuff in the article for the part I have to present on, which is good.

This afternoon I had to go back and forth to the hospital so they could echo my leg. That way, they'll have a control for the future, in case I ever get legpain again and suspect it's another thrombosis.

And last night I watched Hellbent, ( which was a very decent slashermovie indeed. )

I no longer need to take my anticoagulent medication for the deep vein thrombosis, hurrah!

I do, however, need to go to the hospital on Wednesday for an echo of my leg. Boo.

And the medical stocking people are morons along with my insurance company, because the stocking people are like OH HI, WE NEED PROOF OF YOUR MEDICAL CONDITION, PLZ, BECAUSE YOUR INSURANCE COMPANY SAYS WE NEED THAT, and my insurance company is like OH HI, WE FAXED THE OKAY TO THE MEDICAL STOCKING PEOPLE, and now the medical stocking people are like OH HI, A FAX DOESN'T COUNT, GET US BETTER PROOF, KTHXBYE. And my mother and I were like WTF, STOCKING PEOPLE AND INSURANCE COMPANY, YOU ARE BOTH USELESS.

So, we'll see how that saga goes. I'll be lucky if I get the second stocking when I'm at my parents again for my father's birthday in a month.

But no more meds! And I've got the place to myself as my housemate has gone off to Stratford for a week as part of his Shakespeare course! It's not that I dislike my housemate, it's just that it's nice to have to place to myself for once.

THE ANONYMOUS WRITING FEEDBACK MEME

Because I have an ego, and I promise I won't flip out at critical comments like some writers did and then got wanked at Fandom Wank for having friends go crazy-defensive over a comment that was just decent constructive criticism. SRSLY. Someone pointing out that a fanfic-writing friends of your doesn't have perfect grammar is not the end of the world!

In other news, there are plans for making an apple crumble this afternoon. We've got a recipe, and we've got ingredients!

Last night I went to see Coraline with some friends, and I liked it. It was visually stunning and impressive, wonderfully creepy and I hope the kids in the audience were suitably traumatised.

Also, I have got two Dreamwidth invite codes. Anyone want one?

If you don't know what Dreamwidth it, have a look at this list of links, there's plenty of info there:

The Dreamwidth News community
The Dreamwidth FAQ community
The Dreamwidth Wiki
A bunch of posts from people explaining the hows and whys of it.
More posts from people about the hows and whys of Dreamwidth.

If you want to see how it works, the best you can do is create an OpenID account, and you can use that to comment on people's posts and look around. The only thing you can't do with an OpenID is make posts yourself, but you can create a profile, upload a few icons and create a sort of friendslist, so it'll give you a good idea of what it's like.

I have also given into the Twitter hype. I was forced by circumstances, as more and more friends started to make their updates private, making it very difficult for me to stalk them. My username is the same as it's on here, because I am lazy.

Also, I have booked plane tickets and the hotel for the London holiday I'll be going on with blueberryapple from the 3rd until the 7th of August :D

Possible Desperate Housewives spin-off.

I WOULD SO WATCH THAT. Especially if it continues the way Team McCluskey has been written this season, namely as an awesome pair of older lady detectives who are snarky and don't adhere to the law all that much.

And then I watched the Supernatural finale, some Legend of the Seeker, and the Desperate Housewives finale.

( Kids! Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous. Do not attempt it in your home. )

And Legend of the Seeker was being very serious business as well, which is too bad, because I was looking forward to a silly episode. Oh well. Still, it had a kitten, which is something! ( And then there was a major WTF )

( Desperate Housewives! )

The Halloween reunion was very enjoyable, and the stuff they want to for next year certainly looks interesting too. However, the most important issue for me was the fact that they want to improve the catering for us employees! ABOUT TIME. BETTER WARM MEALS, HURRAH. Not that the warm meals were bad, they were just very, very mediocre.

Of course, I'll have to do auditions first, next month, but apparently those auditions are more so they can re-figure out where they want to put people rather than them wanting to get rid of people, so I suppose that's something. Besides, I've been doing this in 2005, 2007 and 2008, so I think I'm pretty safe.

( And then I watched the Spanish, French, German, British and Russian entries for Eurovision 2009 )

Tomorrow should be good, because tomorrow I get to go to Walibi World for a Halloween reunion, where there will be a presentation on Halloween 2009, so that should be good. I'm not expecting much when it comes to the food, but I'm expecting the presentation and the seeing of everyone there to be fun. AND this year I get to ride the rollercoasters! Last year I had backpain issues so I didn't go, but now I am painfree and I am totally going to ride the Goliath and the Robin Hood and the Express :D

( And now, more fun with Eurovision! Time to watch the 2nd semi-finals. )

Can we send Within Temptation, please? Germany can send Rammstein, and it'll be the best Eurovision ever.

Today was a pretty good. The weather was amazing, a bit on the windy side, but not a cloud in the sky, which meant it was perfect for cycling back and forth to a nearby town where the Biology Centre is located so that I could do the Bioinformatics lecture and computer practical. Which, by the way, were both very boring, but kind of interesting.

But the lecture was over sooner than expected, so we could enjoy our break/lunchtime outside before going to the computer rooms. And the Biology Centre has a pretty good outside area, because it's surrounded by trees and plants and bushes, with some benches for sitting, so it's pretty relaxing all in all. It's kind of a shame that the faculty is moving from the Biology Centre to a place here, because the new building is probably not going to have loads of trees around it, but I can understand it, as the Biology Centre is pretty old and they could use a new and bigger building.

In other news, I am going to be an aunt! If all goes according to plan, my sister-in-law will be having a baby in November. It'll be the first baby in my immediate family, the first niece/nephew and also the first grandchild, so obviously we're all excited. My brother sent me and my sister the echo by e-mail, and it's amazing to see how much you can already see on the echo even though it's only 3 months old.

( And then I decided to watch the first semi-final of Eurovision online )

Overall, not bad, some of my favourites went through, although I am disappointed this semi-finale didn't have any songs with a mid-performance costume change. Thursday's semi-finale had better have one of those.

Right, so, auditions!

I shall be playing Dr. Seward in the play and sals_uni_diary will be playing Dr. Van Helsing, so together, we fight vampires. After looking through the scenes we did for auditions, we decided that obviously Dr. Seward and Dr. Van Helsing were ex-lovers, making us lesbian vampire killers!

Today Bioinformatics was a bit more pleasant because a) we had some apple pie beforehand. One of the girls I hang out with brought apple pie, because we'll make boring computer practicals better any way we can, and b) the aforementioned girls I hang out with were fun company during the practical and c) it wasn't a very complicated practical at all, and the instructions were better this time. Yesterday's instructions were a bit vague at times, and I half-suspect that two different people make them, because sometimes they're quite clear and sometimes they can be quite vague.

Tonight there're auditions for the play GUTS is hoping to perform in September, and it's Dracula, so that should be interesting and fun to do. I've no idea why Abraham van Helsing is from Holland yet speaks German, but according to Wikipedia it was a lingua franca at the time, and I suppose it's highly likely that a character like Van Helsing, who is supposed to be a doctor and a scientist, knows his languages very well, including German, which was a scientific lingua franca at the time. Plus, I can imagine that Bram Stoker couldn't be bothered to research Dutch at the time, but knew some German, and figured that that was close enough to make Van Helsing be foreign and exotic while at the same time readers could understand what Van Helsing was on about. Anyway, there're three roles I'm sort of interested in, and I'll be happy if I get one of them :D

( I have also finished watching season one of True Blood )

This screencap explains so much!

That is the intranet system of our university, where one can, amongst other, enroll into groups to do presentations together. So, obviously, the fact that Satan has enrolled to be part of a group in my Bioinformatics course is a bit surprising.

But then I thought about it, and it certainly does explain why the lectures are boring and why the computer practicals are incomprehensible.

GUYS GUYS GUYS

Ten additional minutes of the Top Gear Vietnam Special are up on Youtube! Deleted scenes! In which Richard wants to buy a tractor and then takes quite some time to work out how much it actually costs! In which Red Stig drives their bikes into their crotches! In which James races the third fastest cows in Vietnam! In which Jeremy quizzes James about Vietnamese fines!

AWESOME.