Standing On Boxes

For some unknown reason, I find myself working on older fics, ones that I haven’t updated in over a year. Instead of the newer ones. Right now I’m actually playing with “Perci” even though I have to be careful not to give away any of the plot to the stories it is sort of a sequel to. Having 4 interlocking stories can be confusing at times. They have to all move forward at more or less the same pace.
So… a chapter of “Red Raider” follows a chapter of “Other Girl”. “The Apprentice” and “Perci” have to be carefully crafted to fit into the continuity of both. “Apprentice” has to mention things before RR and OG and all three have to mention things before “Perci”.
Confusing. To me anyway… and I know what is going on.

Only a year and a half since the last part…
I’ve finally finished and posted the next complete part of my “Red Raider” story (the Willow centric part of the series). It feels a bit rough in parts but I think it mostly works.
Not my best writing… hopefully the next part will work better… when Willow and Lara actually meet.
I wonder if anyone even remembers it. In terms of continuation requests it’s one of my least popular stories. (It isn’t a Willow/Lara Croft story, something I’ve tried to stress throughout the series by making it clear that Willow and Kennedy are still a couple.)

And a leaking power steering hose replaced (and a ‘keep an eye on the other one’ comment. And the ‘other one’ is probably going to cost twice as much to replace (apparently it’s a $260 hose that is difficult to remove/replace) when I do have it done.)

The tune-up included replacing the two gas filters — apparently one of the places I’ve been getting gas has a bit too much water in their gas. They were water-logged.

And the alternator belt was replaced — it had a chunk missing out of it that wasn’t noticed until it was removed so the pulleys could be checked. I still need to have the pulley bearings replaced. Another couple hundred $$$.

All things I needed done before my next long trip next month… I knew there was a reason why I had “spare” cash in my checking account this/last month. Good thing the PS3 doesn’t come out until November… I might have enough money for it by then…

The completed first part of the next part of “The Other Girl” has been posted here and to “TTH”.
Although it isn’t everything I could wish for… it does further the story (I’m sure it’ll end up being revised at some point before the entire story is finished.).
Now on to the hard part — the visit to the Burrow. Hopefully I’ll have that finished/coherent by next weekend…
One of my concerns here is character voice. I have a whole scene with Hermione, Ron, Harry, Percy, and Molly and Arthur Weasley at the Burrow (talking about Buffy and Ginny) and I’m not sure if it really works as a good depiction of the way such a conversation would go.
Of course, part of that is because this is something not likely to ever happen in canon. The Harry Potter stories will end long before such a thing were possible. (And that’s an issue with this entire story. I’m trying to depict people 5-10 years AFTER their story ends while still being true to how they grew up. WIthout going to far off into OOC (Out-of-Character) land.)

• Started out my afternoon topping off the tank in my car (just in case gas goes up even more in the next couple days) – $2.63/gal (11 gallons)
• McKay’s used bookstore ($16) – a couple books and a used DVD
• Liquor store (the one across the street from the Toys-r-Us that is in the shopping center with the Knoxvegas Barnes-n-Noble. It’s the one I usually go to.)
  Had to restock the “liquor cabinet” — I don’t have a lot of alcohol in my apt. but what I had was running low.
  Didn’t buy what I planned to… they had it (Yukon Jack – a Canadian honey/whiskey liqueur) only in some small plastic bottle (ick! extreme tackiness to buy your alcohol in plastic) or a huge 1.5 litre size. It would take me literally years to drink that.
  So I bought the Wild Turkey equivalent. Actually a very different flavor (and a much lower alcohol content). Bought some sherry and Irish cream also. $35

• Went to CompUSA and bought (for $152 including sales tax):
  • A replacement mouse (a small USB one for a laptop – my powerbook can do Bluetooth but I’m not ready to fork over $50 for a cordless mouse and THEN have to feed it batteries on a regular basis.)
  • TurboTax (Really need to do my taxes!)
  • iLife (contributing to Apple’s bottom line. Part of the yearly Mac-tax (Mac OS X and iLife have yearly updates and I never seem to qualify for the upgrade and have to buy them new if I want to stay current. My new powerbook came with iLife 5 but iLife 6 came out just over a month later – outside the free upgrade window)
• Best Buy for a copy of “Howl’s Moving Castle” — $27 (Another Disney produced ‘Studio Gibli’ film. This one was nominated for an Academy award like ‘Spirited Away’ but didn’t win.
  I almost bought ‘Najica’ (another anime girl-assassin series – sort of like Noir) – I saw a DVD at MacKay’s but it was mid-series. Best Buy had the entire series in a boxed set… but I couldn’t get past the embarrassing (to me anyway) description on the box. It touted the ‘fan service‘ (though that isn’t how they said it) present in the series. I couldn’t imagine handing it over to a checkout clerk.
  Good thing I got paid last week….

After two back-to-back episodes of the new Dr. Who? I think I’ll watch the rest. (Not sure about buying the DVD — they advertised it for this coming July but Amazon doesn’t seem to have it listed yet.)

Rose Tyler (played by Billie Piper), the 9th Doctor’s companion in the new Dr. Who series (on SciFi tonight (The BBC is into their 3rd series and 10th Doctor already… we’re just getting the 1st of those 3 now.)).

She seems to be taking the manic craziness that tends to surround the Doctor very well…

You can tell this isn’t an American show. Although Billie Piper is good looking (IMO anyway) –

she’s not one of those waif-er thin Hollywood starlets. (Not sure who took this picture – found it “out there” — she has longer hair as Rose and in the first episode she wears very baggy clothes most of the time.)

Rose Tyler is an interesting character for a companion… I’m already thinking crossover… she’s taller than Buffy (by 3 inches if we go by actress height) (I think I’ve read a series where Rose is Buffy. Not sure how that would work out. Other than the obvious (female/blonde) they don’t have much in common.)

I’ve now added a page for the stories that are bad, embarrassing, or just plain strange. Yes, it’s my Bad Fic Page. Only one story on it so far. Something I wrote for a “Bad Fic” contest. (I didn’t win but I had fun writing it.)

There is no valid reason for gas prices to have gone up 24 cents/gallon in the last 7 days. 14 cents since Monday.
I don’t appreciate it. We’re already up to last year’s summer prices and it’s still March. To say nothing of companies like Exxon with record profits (in the billions) last year…
And what is our government doing? Rattling sabres about Iran and launching new campaigns in the un-war in Iraq.
Raspberries all around.

I bought/ordered a copy of Poser 6 and it showed up today… (They had a special deal – It came with a couple other things – Something called ‘Shader’ (A previous version) and an additional figure. )
(My new Powerbook couldn’t read two of the three CD’s it came on. I had to create disk images with my older iBook — which had no problems with the CD’s — and copy the images over and install that way. If I hadn’t still had that machine I would have had to send it back)
Very interesting stuff to play with… but I’m going to need to get a new mouse (the old one is kind of dying) — the resolution of the touchpad on my powerbook isn’t fine enough for controlling the program.
Thoughts –

• It crashes easily… not sure why — I have twice the memory and disk space they recommend for it. And my powerbook is twice as fast as the one in the specs.
  
• There’s a neat tool — given a good side photo and front photo you can create a “face texture”. Now if I just had a couple good photos.

• I can’t find any way to give exact dimensions (using the gui anyway…) for a figure.
• Very easy to mess up a figure…
• The whole hair thing is kind of baffling – the controls are weird.
• The “proportion wheel you use to change shape size isn’t easy to use. Maybe if I had a mouse…

I want to create figures for all of the characters in my fics… it’s going to take a while… to say the least…

Looks like Buffy’s little excursion to the Burrow is going to be a separate story. But I’m kind of stuck for a name for it. “The Burrow” implies a lot more depth to the story than it is going to be. I’ll come up with something by the end of the week… I hope.
For now, you can get to it either here or by way of the “Other Girl” story page.

Other Stuff…

My “Dawn and Faith go to the Leaky Cauldron” scene… feels decidedly ‘light-weight’ after reading the newest part/chapter in M. Scott Eiland’s newest fic “Harry Potter and the Exiled Slayer”. Sure, his story is set in a tougher/more suspicious wizarding world… and Faith is a lot ‘fluffier’ in my story… (NOT in the Buffy/Faith sense — which should be clear enough from the subtext when I finish this part), but the firewhiskey bit he used… really works. Poor Faith and Dawn in my story just barely had enough acceptable coinage to rub together to get a couple Butterbeers.

I’ve actually been spending some time on the next part of my Buffy/Ginny fic “The Other Girl” (Not “The Two” as I stated earlier – sorry.). It isn’t going as fast I’d hoped but it is at least going…
I’m having some difficulty with the Faith and Dawn meet Luna Lovegood part. “Luna” just isn’t jelling as a character. She’s more “exposition Sally” than herself. And too much info coming from her. Need to really fix that. And figure out how that darn scroll gets from Luna to Giles in a “natural” way.
I keep going back and forth on the whole “Buffy goes to the Burrow” part of the story. One day it’s a stand-alone story, the next it’s just part of this current one. Just like the Tonks episode, it isn’t really part of the main story. It’s just an added dimension.
It’s going to be another long/late night work week… we’ll see how much writing time I actually have. And I still need to write my next TtH100 story for tomorrow or so… I’ll probably do a couple drabbles instead of a long piece.

I hadn’t planned on watching but I was curious about Jon Stewart

Spoilers folks… for those who actually care… lets see how long I can keep this up… and how many spelling mistakes I make along way.

1. Best Supporting Actor – George Clooney – good speech.
   (Presented by Nicole Kidman – I’m not a fan but she was looking especially nice.)

2. Special Visual Effects – King Kong -
   (presented by Ben Stiller – lame!)

3. Best Animated Feature – Wallace and Gromit – this was expected/predicted by everyone. But I was annoyed that none of the predictions even MENTIONED the Miyazaki film (He won the year before last for “Spirited Away”).
   (presented by Reese Witherspoon)

4. Best Live Action Short – “Six Shooter”
   (Presented by Luke and Owen Wilson )

5. Best Animated Short – “The Moon and the Sun”
   (presented by Chicken Little and Abby Mallard – semi lame)

6. Best Costume Design – Colleen Atwood (Memoirs of a Geisha)
   (Presented by: Jennifer Anniston)

7. Nothing special – (A clip thing on how the Academy is relevant because they do biographical movies) (Presented by Russell Crowe)
8. Best Make-Up – “Chronicles of Narnia” (Howard Berger and Tami Lane (She didn’t really speak – he said it all))
   (Presented by Will Ferrell and Steve Carroll – lame attempt at humour – they had bad makeup)

9. The 19 technical/special awards that don’t make the “Big Show” – No, I’m not gonna list them — not that they did either.
10. Best Supporting Actress – Rachel Weiss – “Constant Gardner” (Not a bad thank you speech but she seemed surprised)
    (Presented by Morgan Freeman – classy, as always)

11. Something about film noir with Lauren Bacall (Kind of sad – she was having problems with her presentation) – I actually recognize most of the profiled actors/actresses.
12. Documentary Short Subject – “A Note of Triumph”
    (Presented by Terence Howard – straightforward job)

13. Documentary Feature – “March of the Penguins”
    All the guys who came up on stage had stuffed penguins with them.
    (Presented by Charlize Theron – okay job – Not as well dressed as Nicole Kidman)

14. Best Art Direction – “Memoirs of a Geisha” (2 people got it – one was out sick)
    (Presented by Sandra Bullock and Keanu Reeves… ZZZZzzzzz…)

15. Samuel L. Jackson – short clip bit about socially important films
16. And lets put it on mute for the President of the Academy and his speech…
17. Best Original Score – “Brokeback Mountain” (A first time nominee)
    (Presented by Salma Hayek – Also better looking/dressed than Charlize Theron)

18. Tribute to BIG movies that look better (Ha!) on big screens (Presented by Jake Gyllenhaul) — I’m thinking — lame attempt to kiss up to the theatre owners.
19. Best Sound (Isn’t this one of the Saturday night technical awards?) – King Kong
    (Presented by Eric Banna and Jessica Alba (Okay… finally, somebody (who normally is very good looking) dressed much worse than Charlize Theron))

20. Honorary Award – Robert Altman -
    (presented by Lilly Tomlin and Merryll Streep – intentionally messed it up)

Okay… that’s enough for me… 2 hours of actual watching so I could keep track… I think I need therapy now…
go to Oscar.com if you want to know more…
To Go

• Best Actor
• Best Actress
• Best Movie
• Best Original Screenplay
• Best Screenplay (adaptation)
• Best Documentary
• Best Original Song
  1. (A Dolly Parton Song from “Northcountry”?) – Presented by: Naomi Watts – sung by Dolly
  2. (“In the Deep” from “Crash”) – Presented by J-Lo – Sung by original artist – way too mellow for an awards show.

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Lame commercials… especially the JC Penney ones. I guess they used up all the good ones for the Super Bowl.
(Main sponsors are apparently Coke and JC Penney)
Some issues with synchronizing commercials between local and national feeds.
A Cadilac commercial that was okay…

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