A few months ago, when I started giving serious consideration to moving to Denver, silveraspen and I e-mailed back and forth pretty regularly to talk about it. She and agonistes spent a lot of time encouraging me just to take the plunge, very little in the way of a concrete plan be damned.

"You need a change. Plus," she added, "Zachary Quinto's going to be one of the guests at Starfest in April."

"...o rly," I said, only with more vowels.

This was not, I hasten to point out, the sole reason why I moved to Colorado. Not by a long shot. It sure as hell helped me set a concrete Get the Fuck Out of Dodge date, though: I'd need to be in town no later than April 19th if I wanted to get my geek on.

It's April 20th, I'm sorting through my pictures and notes, and may I just say, HOLY COW, Y'ALL.

( Initial Impressions )

( Masi Oka and Nate Torrence )

( Adam Baldwin )

( ZACHARY QUINTO! I mean, um. :D? (Spoilers through season two of ''Heroes,'' if you're still concerned about that kind of thing.) )

So I will.

The short list:

1) Fresh apple juice. One of the cafés I drop by every so often sells apple juice that consists of the baristas, literally, throwing five whole apples into a juicer thirty seconds after you place your order and pouring the results straight into a cup. It is clean and refreshing and seriously one of the best things I've had in weeks.

2) Getting a compliment on my Blue Sun shirt from a total stranger during a visit to the above café tonight. "Hey, Serenity, right? Big fan. Big, big fan," he laughed -- and of course I was too flustered to do anything but start laughing and nodding in agreement, but still.

3) Engaging in talks with a professional conservator to help her out with a project as part of my internship/field placement at the lab. Aside from this being exactly the sort of thing I want to spend my summer doing -- I am in love with the hands-on component of preservation above everything else I've studied this past year -- this could also mean that if I move to Austin in five years and go for that CAS in conservation, I'll actually have a portfolio to show them. (That's been my biggest hurdle in looking at UT-Austin's program, aside from their chemistry requirements.)

4) Sarah Slean's "Day One." Unrelentingly cheerful and peppy, it's freakin' impossible for me to listen to that song and not start smiling.

5) Having the owners gone for the weekend, which means that I can also sing it at the top of my lungs whenever the hell I want without disturbing anybody.

6) Receiving an unexpected, but far from unwelcome, reprieve from one of my professors on this week's readings. "If I can't keep pace with returning your work to you, you shouldn't still be expected to keep pace with completing it," he told us. Ergo: one less thing to do this weekend.

7) Finishing out week five of twelve. I am nearly halfway there; even if the other six items on this list didn't exist, I'd have this one to cling to.

Sleep sounds good right now, doesn't it? I think I'll give it another try.

I feel like I just fulfilled some sort of modern rite of passage: last night, I finished watching the third season of 24. I hadn't seen the show before then; I'd never had much desire to watch it. Really, the only reason I picked it up this time was because of the pretty people.

(And by people, I mean person. And by person I mean Zachary Quinto. :D?)

( Thoughts, including some quick comparisons to Heroes and lots of spoilers for the third season. (But do I really need to be warning for spoilers if it aired three years ago?) )

If you've ever wondered why I continue to love my fandom (well, one of my fandoms) despite the occasional moments that make me want to cover my face in embarrassment and horror: this is why.

What an unbelievable class act. Hell, Alan Tudyk had cancelled his appearance way before the whole mess went down and he still showed up. I cannot stop grinning like a loony as the reports come in. Bravo.

(For the few remaining people who have no idea what's going on and are curious about it, a quick summary of the Flanvention II insanity is over here.)

If you want to get ahold of anything from Black Market Beagles or a dozen other fan-run Firefly/Serenity stores, you'd better make your move now. BlueSunShirts.com, where I nabbed my own shirt just over a year and a half ago, is already gone; The 11th Hour got a horrible C&D yesterday that's asking for nearly nine thousand dollars in retroactive licensing fees. BMB itself is shutting down on Friday out of fear of being the next target.

Watching all of this happen is really kind of scary. C&Ds have sort of turned into the thing that happens to other fandoms -- and it's made so much worse with this one because of the supposedly close ties the fanbase has to the PTB, all of the grassroots organizing and word-of-mouth marketing that's characterized it for so long. Not to mention, even with the recent movie, that the Browncoats have been around doing stuff like this for four years without anything happening before. You'd think, if nothing else, that the C&Ds would've started coming sooner than now, over a year after Serenity's theatrical release. Tacit agreement to be let alone, flat-out complacancy...whatever you want to call it, this sudden zealousness after buddying around with the fans for so long sure as hell came as a shock to me.

(And I won't lie that it's making me nervous about other fannish activities. They're just sticking to the shops for now, which are the most blatantly illegal due to actual money changing hands, but is this going to hit X-Files levels sooner or later? Are the vidders, ficcers, and webmasters next?)

Gah. Just...gah. Railing back isn't an option, not until (God forbid) they do go after the free fanworks. I mean, much as it breaks my heart, this is a straightforward case of copyright infringement. Not much you can do about it.

I just wish it didn't feel so much like we all just got stabbed in the back.

...Dashboard widgets.

*starry eyes*

Why did nobody tell me these things were like crack?

I am trying to be good and only download widgets that I know I'll use, so the only ones on there so far are for e-mail, Wikipedia, and the preinstalled dictionary/thesaurus and weather widgets that came with the computer (which are freaking godsends)...and, okay, a virtual Chia Pet. And the Astronomy Picture of the Day.

Oh, and one that, with a little bit of tweaking, will display any image you want. Naturally, I spent a good chunk of yesterday tweaking it.

And today? One corner of my dashboard looks like this.

It had to be done.

Sometimes, I fear I'm taking Casual Friday too far.

Then I look down at my Wash tank top and realize that I really, really don't care.

(Okay, so I have a men's dress shirt thrown over top of it to make it look marginally more classy. Still. :D!)

Things I Also Need To Stop Doing At Work, Round #28,029: oogling the MacBook product specs and shooting my bank account impatient looks. It's possible I might have enough extra money on my student loans to buy it as a welcome-to-grad-school present to myself next month, but did I mention the impatient? It's pretty and runs fast and has a battery that actually works and we wants it now, precious.

One more month until school starts. Less than, actually. Ohgod. What was I thinking? Big city and nobody I know and no fucking clue where I'll go or what I'll do when I graduate -- aigh. *hyperventilates*

=====

( The Six Things You'd Know If You Met Me In Person meme. )

Apparently there are earlier, longer scripts of Serenity beginning to make the rounds on eBay. Legit ones.

Somebody got ahold of one and summarized/reviewed it.

There are parts, obviously, that I wish had stayed; it'll be blatantly obvious which ones, believe me. There are some I'm not so certain about. (There was one part that made me shriek happily when I got to it, and jezrana will probably know what it is when she reads it, too. *g*) Mostly I agree with the reviewer that this draft seemed to have a lot more character development and didn't rush through things so quickly, even though it would've produced a movie that ran over three hours. The squabble they have over the ending? Eh. I don't really prefer one over the other.

(Except, again, for the blatantly obvious.)

Anyway! It's worth looking at if you're a Firefly/Serenity fan.

Insta-rec of the night: Of Kings and Hairy Feet.

"Make sure to note the position of my beard," Wash piped up. "Gimli," he said with the cloth around his chin, then pulled it up over his nose. "Not Gimli."

In other words? The crew of Serenity does a Lord of the Rings LARP. No, really. And it is a thing of BEAUTY.

No, Beth.

For your final Tolkien paper, you cannot propose to write a comparative study of Firefly/Serenity vs. Lord of the Rings just to see if your big honking nerd of a professor will approve the topic. Two fellowships of nine becoming fellowships of seven -- which is pretty much the only damn thing they have in common -- will not sustain you for six pages, and besides, that number goes right back up to eight a couple hundred pages later in LotR. Seriously. Stick with your original idea of a character study of Boromir or something.

Anyway, if you try to tie the Miranda broadwave to the Ring, that makes Mal at least partly comparable to Frodo, and that'll just make you giggle too much to ever get the blasted thing written.

Oy.

=====

ishuai is my hero, and never have I used that word in a more apt sense than I'm using it today.

Sometime during Refrain #3,209,872 of My Thesis Advisor is Useless, sung early last month during work, she offered to read through my entire manuscript and give me some proper feedback on it. Today, she sat down with me at lunch, and we went over it together.

Guys...I have a solid direction for this final week of editing, and I know what I'm doing, and most of what I tried to pull off in the second draft actually worked. Somebody read what I wrote and they got what I was doing. And I may not have to go on total radio silence until the 17th to get this sucker wrapped up, either.

I am ecstatic.

(She also gave me her notes for revision in the style of my main character, who deconstructs detective novels using notebooks full of Post-Its, because she is just that awesome. HEE. *still giggly and gleeful over that six hours later*)

- Woke up too late to eat a proper lunch. Again.
- Finished watching Revolutionary Girl Utena, which is bizarre and lovely and makes me want to steal jezrana's idea despite not having taken a feminist theory course in, um, ever.
- Wrote four pages of talking out of my ass about my writing the rough draft of my thesis introduction.
- Went "eeeee!" over this (look! look what it says on the cover! it's volume ONE!), with a side order of minor snickering. 'Cause. Companion. And it's about Firefly. And -- oh, never mind. *cheerfully goes off to be twelve years old by herself*
- Wished agonistes a happy birthday! Enjoy being legal, Sweeney. :D

And now I should go see if I can find a passable dinner to make up for lunch. Mmmm, proper meals. *dashes!*

All I will say of today's American Short Story class is this:

It is very, very hard to pay attention and be a good student when the story you're discussing has two characters named "Gabriel" and "Miranda."

This is the week I conquer my rebel technology.

Number one, I finally figured out why the audio/video files on my computer were a bunch of jumpy, staticky, skippy messes for the first fifteen seconds after I opened them. One update of my audio drivers later, I am sailing smooth again. Thank GOD.

And then! I discovered the awesome of Myxertones. By "awesome," I mean "my phone plays the Serenity theme when it rings and yours doesn't, nyah nyah :D!"

However, this is not always a good thing. Observe:

Mom and I: *are chatting*
Cell phone: Bum-bada, da da, di-da da! Bum-bada, da da di da-da dum!
Me: My phone! *dives for it* Mom, check it out! I have the best ring tone ever! *waves phone around, beaming*
Mom: Neat.
Violins in Serenity theme: *trill their way downward*
Mom: ...........are you going to answer that?
Me: Huh? *looks at still-ringing phone* Oh, yeah. *answers, reluctantly*

Seriously. Like I need any more excuses to avoid answering my phone.

Speaking of my mom, she watched Veronica Mars with me tonight, and already? She's good and hooked. If you don't mind, I'll just sit back and steeple my fingers Mr. Burns-style for a minute. Mwahaha.

Awwwww.

*melts*

"And one last thing before you go," said my Tolkien professer -- formerly known as my Foundations of Western Lit prof, always known as the Greatest Professor In Existence -- as he leaned on the podium. "You should know that Tolkien was one of the biggest reasons why I chose to become a medievalist."

He went into his field all because of the books we'll be studying these next four months.

BEST. SEMESTER-TO-BE. EVER. (Even if I lost my geek cred by only being able to answer a third of the questions on a lay-of-the-land "quiz" he gave us at the end of class. Oh, well. I earned some of it back by lamenting the character deaths in Serenity with him before class started. *g*)

It's so cute that I still have these delusions of finishing my thesis, though. That was before I bought the twenty-five required books for the three classes I'm taking this semester. Twenty-five. For three classes. Eleven of those were for one class alone. One of them tops out at 1,150 pages. And this is not a textbook, either; none of them are. It's a nonfiction travel memoir.

At least it's with this year's writer-in-residence and should be worthwhile? *gulp*

I'm ever so slightly panicky right now. But...I'll make it. I always do, somehow.

*just. STARES.*

Firefly people. Look. Look at this.

I'm somewhere between gaping in horror and turning into a flailing, shrieking ball of ASDLFJSLF;DKSAJF;ASLDK.

ETA: And oh, look, here's the company's official site! Ahahahaha Mommy save me *clings*

Also known as the GIP of "Screw this shit, I'm getting a pint of Ben & Jerry's and watching The Emperor's New Groove."

Before I could even mentally compose what I was going to say to him, my Foundations professor e-mailed me to offer reassurances and ask if I was okay. I explained the wrist situation more thoroughly and apologized again for breaking down in the middle of his final. All will be well, I think, and all will be well, and all manner of things shall be well.

At least, I hope it will.

*hugs tight to everyone who responded to the last post*

(He also returned my paper on Judas Iscariot with some very helpful notes I can use in both my revision and the novelthesis, as well as the comment, "Now, a close comparison of Judas's betrayal to Jayne's betrayal in 'Ariel' -- THAT would be an interesting paper." I know I've said it before, but: where was this guy my freshman and sophomore years, man? *mourns*)

...I want this game.

Somebody with enough connections and/or programming skills, please make this game.

Exceedingly ridiculous psychology write-ups: done.

Rewrites of Writing for Film treatments: done.

Full Act One of the screenplay: done, oh thank GOD.

Foundations of Western Lit paper: not even close to done, but I've been given an extension until Thursday on account of potential death by caffeine if I try to pull yet another almost-all-nighter tonight.

Entire packet of birth control pills: thrown out, with a great and savage glee, after they made me sick for the second time in two weeks and have done zilch to help my acne these past seven months. Sort of wish I'd found a way to set them on fire first.

New Milliways pup: approved. In fact, this is the character I originally wanted to bring in when I first found the game over a year ago, so...eeeheehee. Methinks I've discovered my reward for making it through finals. :D

PotC 2 trailer: Shiny.

Serenity Hand Puppet Theater: Two words -- Sadistic McKillsmeoff. Heeeeee.

Snow: started about twenty minutes ago, is forecasted to stop after three to five inches. Trashbag sledding tomorrow! Woo-hoo!

priscellie: WINS THE ENTIRE UNIVERSE AND SMALL NEIGHBORING PARALLEL ONES AS WELL, OH MY GOD. *glees, cryptic-like*

Aaaaand I think that's it. I'm gonna go luxuriate someplace else for a while, now that I can actually do crazy things like leave my room for more than a half-hour at a time. Craaaaaaazy.

Man, I'd forgotten how disorienting it is to have your eyes dilated.

I could not focus on anything when I left my eye appointment a couple hours ago; my glasses were too wonky to see much farther than twenty feet, and my eyes themselves were too wonky to make out anything within arm's length. When they handed me my prescription, I actually had to ask somebody what it was just to make sure that yeah, this was something I needed to keep.

So glad it's finally wearing off. (As evidenced by the fact that, uh, I can actually read what I'm typing right now. *wry grin*) And I have a pumpkin spice latte! This is good. Nothing spurs a speedy recovery like tasty yet ridiculously overpriced coffee. Er.

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Fun Fandom Link of the Day: Serenity in 2000 Words or Less. Hysterical (and spoilerific, obviously). ( My favorite part? )