sundries

At 6am, well, 6:20, I finally heard the ringtone on g-chat and Patty and I had a half-asleep vid date. Then it was off to 2-day film school. I'm just home, and ladyofthelog is over and we're cleaning the house, but I'm having introvert time by writing this post.

2-Day Film School is awesome. Exhausting. Somewhat bizarre. Occasionally frustrating, but super good. I'm definitely getting the answers I needed in terms of technical elements and budgeting and that's awesome. And it's making me consider plans, both in terms of treatments I've been kicking around on my own and with others, and in terms of "well if I want to make a film, how do I do that?"

Also a plus, somewhat surprisingly, is the deep cynicism of the dude teaching the class. Whereas the the Luhrmann thing was like "just do what you want and sometimes it will be a devastating experience and sometimes it will be awesome" this dude is like "fuck you, fuck art, this is how you make money, don't fucking waste your time making shorts, make schlock for this much, and then this much and then this much and then 'lo you will have a budget to do what you want." The benefit of this approach even if it doesn't really mesh with my sort of "all things are possible" call to arms bullshit, is it makes me not feel the near moral obligation to Make Things Right Now, which is good, since I'm plenty in the throes of multiple projects right now (D&J! D&J!), and therefore I should only be nosing around at such endeavors and scheduling them for Time Other.

Funniest thing that's easy to explain right now: You're the producer/director on a 3-week indie film shoot. The first week = fun! The second week = zombie exhaustion! Third week = everyone hates you. Then it's over, you pass out, wake up four days later, find out your cast had a party without you. How do you avoid this? 2 week film shoot! I'm still laughing.

It's been a while since I've talked about financial crisis suicides. But it seems one of Bernie Madoff's sons has killed himself. Awful.

Julian Assange's blog from back in 2006/7. It's... well, it's a lot of things. Less charming than I'd expected. Just as "I'm a dude on the Internet who knows more than you" as I expected. It's fascinating, unsettling and unremarkable all at once.

West Point runs a football to Philadelphia. I normally know about things like this, but this one was news to me. Next year they are running all the way to DC.

So Kali and I aren't at a point where we can give you a full narrative summary, but I have to share this bit of hilarity. We're working on a chapter and Cecilia is needled by her fiance and her sister about how they used to burn her dolls to torture her (book is about the fall of empire and colonialism and inbred nobles and magic and the whole bit, so yes, of course everyone's known everyone their whole lives) when she was a child. And then we were talking about it, even though it won't ever appear in the book and I said, "And I can hear Cissy saying, sobbing, 'You have to cut their heads off first or else it hurts them!'" Cissy seems really sweet but is creepy. So yeah, it's like that.

Hey, Sherlock fandom, unironically warning for "Light M/M boy kissing" isn't just offensive, it's a boggling, irritating, weird redundant thingy. Don't.

Did we all hear that two new Torchwood audio plays (audio books? something?) are coming out on CD in March that are set pre-CoE? I loved CoE, and I'm also ecstatic about this. Got it through the Starz Torchwood twitter account.

I have gluten-free red velvet cupcakes and you don't.

Things that ladyofthelog and I have discovered that have exploded in the kitchen at some point: grains of some sort, sugar, a box of chai tea, green food coloring. Yay! ETA: Also, spiders, spiders living in Spider Lothlorien. Yeah, my Saturday night is great.