Back from DC & NY. Was fucking fantastic. Will have a full write up... eventually. I've got to get sleep in because I'm scheduled on the floor from 11AM to midnight today.

So, I got a Twitter account (also Revieloutionne). I actually use it to talk about my life and shit, unlike this here LJ that's kind of reserved for my fannishness (which I want to remedy, BTW).

Anyway, I'm turning in an essay to be considered for being a service trainer at work in a bit, and then I head over to my boyfriend's house until he sees me off at the train station when I start my trip to go visit my brother and SEE HAIR OMG for my birthday.

Life is nice right now.

So, that was a horrible downer, yeah?

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WHAT THE HELL FANDOM. THIS WAS MY FIRST UNSPOILED SERIES OF TORCHWOOD AND YOU- I DIDN'T EVEN GO ANYWHERE NEAR WHERE SPOILERS WOULD BE AND I STILL- I HATE YOU SO MUCH.

( spoilers )

LOIS YOU ARE AWESOME. Ianto beats you, though. "OI!"

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What the hell, Torchwood? It's a five-episode season, and you give us a character focus episode? On the other hand, with three remaining staff members, a season with ensemble, Gwen, Jack-or-Ianto, the other, ensemble structure makes a certain amount of sense, and even if that's not what happened, letting Gwen shine like she did today isn't a bad thing just... huh.

( spoilers )

Oh, and we got more wiki screens, but nothing amusing.

Oh hey, actually watching Torchwood as it airs! What a novel experience. Also: Torchwood is canonically not beyond the government, lol*.

( spoilers )

So, something went weird with one of my drivers, and I had to factory-reset my computer.

I've lost everything, including the sonnets, which is a major loss. Even moreso than the mass of music that disappeared, and it's more upsetting than that I'll have to redownload my power rangers and sentai and the other series I was in the middle of.

Plus, I've lost all my bookmarks, so. Recommend sites?

ETA: YESSSSS I HAVE MY SONNETS. My laptop isn't actually networked to the printer in the house, so I emailed them to m'self to open on the computer connected to the printer and didn't delete the email. :D

Okay, you know how I frequently flail in my rewatches of Power Rangers about how underneath all he cheese there can be some legitimate value to the show?

The current season is flat-out AMAZING. Just... Holy shit episode 11.

So, um.

I just submitted the last assignment of my undergrad career.

Cue slow-burn freakout OHGOD.

So, it's only happened two seasons in a row (Lost Galaxy and Lightspeed Rescue) so it's not a pattern yet, but still, Power Rangers, you're weird.

What the hell causes you to decide that a good early sign that the mentor figure in a militaristic/outright military operation has been brainwashed is that he doesn't give proper attention to the morning report?

And did you get the same guy to play the brushed-off peon? Wait, strike the incredulity from that question, because if you did that's kind of awesome, but I don't remember which LG episode that was, and I'm not about to hunt for it.

Also: that's in response to a LR episode a few back, because I just finished the season, actually. It's not a bad season, but it's not the best. It's certainly got more going for it than the first couple, almost exclusively episodically-based seasons of Power Rangers, and it doesn't suffer from the mood whiplash of Turbo, or the relative directionlessness of Zeo and LG (Though to be fair, it's more that LG kept changing direction more than that it lacked it). The final four-episode arc is actually very tightly done, and holy crap is Queen Banshira FUCKED UP.

Too bad Vypra can't act to save her life.

Visit to Oxford was awesometiems! :D I got to see everyone I wanted to but Shannon, but we phoned a lot, and Thomas'll get her Wii zapper back to her, so that's okay.

I also got a lot of cool background noise from places to use when I put together my sonnets, although I wasn't able to get anyone to record any lines, since we were all too busy being otherwise engaged. I may wind up soliciting files of people recording lines from my flist, though. IT COULD BE A GLOBAL EFFORT OMG.

Anyway, I had a nice diversion (and a very nice lunch today - Wild Bistro makes an awesome bento) and am ready to face daily life again. Woo.

So when I was getting ready to head up to Kofenya to finish editing my sonnets before I record friends reading bits of them so that I'll not have unusable recordings of old versions of the sonnets, I notice the sky is overcast, so I decide I'll head past my car which, as I no longer have a Miami parking pass, is located a good ten minutes away, but on the way to Kofenya.

Had I not been distracted by the totally awesome and engaging posts at the one feminist blog that I had still open in tabs (but don't now and OHGOD I'M NOT SURE I BOOKMARKED THE PLACE SHIT) when I went to shut Brian down, I'd not have still been five minutes from my car when the rain and hail started.

And that, children, is why Feminism is evil. D:

Man, did I screw myself when I made two of the thrice-reused lines of the fifteenth sonnet require rhymes with "truth".

THERE ARE NO USEFUL RHYMES WITH TRUTH. I mean, I could have kept pairing the same two words, since the fifteenth sonnet did have a decent rhyme pair there, but I don't think I'd be graded well using the same rhyme pair FIVE TIMES. It'd be like rhyming a word with itself. It's just not done.

I'm going to wait until I have the final version of the project done before I post the sonnets here, BTW. I'll want to include the recording along with them.

I decided I was going to write a crown of sonnets for my final project in my one class. Thank god I was smart enough to start with the fifteenth (which, for those of you who don't know crowns of sonnets, is the one made up of the first lines of the previous fourteen, which are also the last lines of the ones before them - if you took out the fifteenth, they'd thread through each other in an unending loop).

What made it that much harder is that I'm alternating speakers throughout the previous fourteen, so I wrote the fifteenth as a two-voiced poem. So some of the lines in the fifteenth are one speaker, some the other, some both, and all have to work as something either speaker would say, since they'll be the first line in one speaker's sonnet and the last in the other's.

It took me over an hour to write fourteen lines.

BUT!

I wrote two of the earlier ones in significantly less than an hour, so I should have my "rough first draft" ready to hand in tomorrow, even though when I asked what a "rough first draft" for a crown of sonnets would be, my professor decided that ONLY THE COMPLETED SONNETS WOULD COUNT SALKDGJ.

So, to justify having the project already done like two weeks early, I'm going to record them being read and hopefully get some music banged out to go with.

WHY DO I DO THIS HRRRRRG.

Okay, so. During my Native American Lit class this evening, one of my classmates' presentation was on how he's following the Red Path and becoming Lakota. My elderly, not-a-drop-of-Lakota-let-alone-any-other-nation-blood-in-him classmate.

There is something indescribably uncomfortable* about that, though I can't fault him for having investigated Lakota culture, or for having participated whole-heartedly in ceremonies, and so on. If the Lakota have no problem teaching him, and he really wants to learn for the learning's sake, and participate for the participation's sake, that's great. What bothers me, I think, is that researching Shintoism and taking it on wholeheartedly as your belief system doesn't make you Japanese, nor does converting to Islam make you Arabic, and so on. Yes, Lakota spirituality is incredibly much tied into their culture as a whole, but at the same time it isn't their culture as a whole, and... I don't know. There's just something kind of ugly about it.

Then I come home, and sitting in the middle of the kitchen table is a postcard inviting my little brother to Living Stations of the Cross on Good Friday which... a bit excessive, but whatever. What's Catholicism if not gaudy religion? Then I actually read the thing. It says, I shit you not, "All are welcome to join in and commemorate the suffering and death of Our Lord Jesus."

Commemorate. Suffering and death.

THAT CANNOT BE WHAT THEY MEAN. WHAT.

Why can't the world be normal every now and then?

*This word was initially "wrong," but on rereading, that is not the word I meant to put there holy crap.

Sometime this summer, I'm going to take the train up to New York, see the Hair revival, and then train it back home. It'd be a three day trip, and looking at Amtrak, the second-cheapest option would give a two-hour stay in DC between trains (barring delays, which, as I understand, are a fact of life on Amtrak since the rail lines belong to the shipping companies) so I could see my brother and sister-in-law, maybe.

Or, if I can get more time off work, I might train up to DC, visit for a bit, then go to New York, see Hair, and come home.

Either way - I'm looking forward to a train ride, Hair is an amazing show, and Amtrak is a bit cheaper and far less stressful, I'm sure, than airlines. Plus I can walk around while travelling without feeling like a total jerkass.

(If anyone really wants to, maybe we could make a trip of this, but I understand if it's just me.)

I've had the sequel to Sideline Secrets on my hard drive for a while, 'cause the first one was one of those awful movies with just enough unintentionally awesome moments (like anything involving the Awesome Topless Chick) to be worth it, but I didn't get around to watching it until just now.

One, there's a hell of a lot more cock in this one.

Two, IT'S FUCKING HILARIOUS. Like, it's objectively a better-made movie. There's only a couple lines of badly-looped dialogue, it doesn't run twice as long as it needs to, and even though most of it fails, the director does at least make some attempts at symbolism.

However: it's about an hour of disjointed scenes with the barest of patchwork plot actually moving things along. The movie expects you to accept that because we keep following the same characters that something is going on, but that's not true at all. For fuck's sake, what looks to be the main plot turns out to be dropped entirely as it's just the trigger for what turns out, in he last ten minutes at most, to be what's actually happening.

It comes out of fucking NOWHERE and it's AWESOMELY BAD. Depending on who comes up to Sandusky this summer it might be group viewing.