I am back from the Netherlands and very much don't want to be. I think that was the nicest holiday I've been on in years, and probably one of the most needed. One of my favourite poems is by Stephen Vincent Benét, "Nightmare at Noon", and has the lines, It was an old, peaceful city, Rotterdam / Clean, tidy, full of flowers / With the usual furnishings, such as cats and children.

We arrived in Rotterdam on Friday morning and I decided to extrapolate the sentiment to the whole of the Netherlands. The whole country is so small, so flat, so endlessly picturesque - there were rabbits bounding over the railway lines in front of commuter trains - so full of flashes of colour around corners, tiny, mundane wonders. We went by sea, and I was doubtful in the extreme about this - the last time I went anywhere by sea, everything was orange and ghastly, I distinctly recall, and I ended up wishing I'd just stayed at home - but we took the late train from London, reached Harwich in the dead of night, had a civilised drink by a porthole as the ship pulled out to sea, and slept peacefully on top of each other in a cabin with berths, towels and hot water by the bucket. When I woke up we were at the Hook of Holland and I've never travelled anywhere in such ludicrous comfort.

It's a very small place, with a very small railway station. The establishment at one end of the platform, where you would expect a ticket office to be, is a fishmonger's. There were ticket machines, which rejected first Shim's card, then mine. They didn't take banknotes. We were in a small town in the distinct middle of nowhere, being windswept as though it were the middle of December, and we didn't have thirty-one euro in change. I mean, who does? We went into the town, which was deserted, and had a bank with its only sign in English reading "No change". We walked back over to the tiny station, got on the tiny train, and waited to be thrown off or fined or told we must leave continental Europe for our sheer presumptuousness, when the ticket inspector appeared. He looked exactly like Lembit Opik, and said, "You must have a ticket. It is a seventy euro fine."

"We'll pay it," I said, feeling like I had proven myself unworthy of the Netherlands. "Really, we will."

"There is," he said very sternly, "a ticket office in Rotterdam. Go there."

And then he disappeared, whistling. The kindness of strangers turned out to be a theme - that, and speedy public transport, beautiful architecture and those cats and children. Rotterdam was fresh, full of busy, cheerful people, and they sold us tickets for the intercity train, which was a dream - again, you could doze off in one place and wake up in another, and then we were in Amsterdam, for which I fell, ludicrously and romantically, in the sort of way you are not supposed to fall for cities, which are really just bricks and mortar and canal-water, the moment I stepped off the train.

Things I loved about Amsterdam:

-The water. The way the city is moulded and shaped by the water, the way there are houses with small boats tied up to their front doors, and flowers growing at the edge, wild, and in perfectly cultivated pots, and how you can step up to perfect gnarled wrought iron bridges and watch the sunlight sparkle off the soft edges of it all. And then when it's all getting too poetic for words, a booze cruise drifts by, trailing beer cans and the dim smell of hemp. Shim and I waited all weekend for someone to fall out of a booze cruise into the canal underneath our balcony. This never happened. It was very disappointing.

-Balcony, yes! The apartment we were lucky enough to be staying in was film-set gorgeous; the top of an old warehouse building, almost a studio, but not quite, open-plan, enormous polished wood floors and the original, centuries-old beams holding the whole place together. Mirrors everywhere, sunlight streaming in every day from whole walls of windows, every step I took I felt like I was in an advertisement for something, possibly men's razors. It was quite noisy, being right in the centre of the city and surrounded by a lot of bars and coffeeshops, but I can usually sleep through people shouting when they're shouting in a language I don't speak.

(Although they seem to drunkenly shout in their native tongue, everyone in the Netherlands speaks English. This is a cliché, but it is embarrassing and it is true. My grasp of Dutch, after five days, extends to "alstublieft", which is how you say please and thank you nicely; as a contrast, one night we ate in a pretty Italian restaurant by Prinsengracht and the waiter spoke to the table next to us in Dutch, the one on the other side in German, and then came to us and began to precisely enunciate the specials in barely-accented English. For a moment he got sardines and anchovies mixed up. He apologised for his imperfect command of the language. I just... I cannot even. Anchovies.)

-The Café Het Gasthuys, which is possibly my favourite drinking establishment of all time. We discovered it on our first night in Amsterdam, and remembered it mostly because the waitress fell over twice. On subsequent visits, we discovered that a) all the waitresses were preternaturally beautiful (Shim notes, emphatically, that this is entirely my judgement, and he is not the sort of person who looks at waitresses in smoky bars, because he is old and respectable and I malign him); b) they are also very kind, and speak perfect English, and serve you gin with berries in it; and c) the café had the requisite cat. Its name was Kaspar, and it was amiable, black, and unruffled. It lived by the kitchen door. The place did very good food. The cat was roughly spherical.

By Monday, we realised we had been in the city four days and done nothing whatsoever. I mean... not nothing. We had slept in, and walked down sunlit alleys full of flowers, and watched the boats go past, and admired waitresses, and sneezed outside coffeeshops, and been momentarily horrified by the Red Light District (I believe it gets initial capitals because it's the oldest one) - the girls in the windows were disconcerting enough, but I was dazed by the girl who opened her window, swept the front with a handily placed broom, and then stepped back into her window and her livid backlight as though nothing were odd - and drank a lot of coffee, and discovered the Dutch equivalent of J. Sainbury, Albert Heijn, and spent happy half-hours procuring waffles, coffee and cheese.

But we hadn't done anything that tourists do, we'd been too busy being on holiday. So we went to the Anne Frank House, which I was last at when I was eight and it was being refurbished, and it was... sobering. Outside, the queue was miles long, there was a group of tourists with southern Californian accents saying things like, "So, like, who was this Anne Frank person?" and "Like, so, was this her house?", and I wondered if it was a bad idea - but inside was worth seeing. The museum aspect has been done well, subtly, and mostly it lets extracts from the diary explain themselves, with the bare minimum of explanatory notes. I always forget how young she was. Thirteen when she started writing, and fifteen when she died. The sunlight outside was necessary, afterwards.

(We also, through a mistake in navigation that was entirely not my fault, ended up walking by the harbour, and while we were there, paused to look at the Amsterdam, a reconstructed Dutch East Indiaman currently moored in the harbour. I've been reading a lot about the Age of Sail. It was worth seeing - tiny, and beautifully reconstructed, and we peered into the hold full of cinnamon and nutmeg, a gunroom I couldn't stand straight in, and perched on the top decks and looked up at the rigging and out of the water. More fun, I think, than museums, really. And that was it, for Serious Cultural Things In Amsterdam. I suppose pancakes are cultural - we found, also, the world's best pancake house, run out of the front room of the people who had the apartment next to ours. It was run by two guys, had only four tables, could only be accessed by ladder, had a roof covered in kettles, and served the best pancakes I have ever seen. They were enormous, covered in cream and cinnamon and apple and bacon (not all at once, but nearly) and it was with great disappointment that we discovered they were only open three days a week. (My theory is that the owner must be putting himself through chef school, the rest of the week. Mmmmm.))

And so there we go. The return was unfun, not because it didn't go smoothly, and not because there weren't the same easy fast trains and cosy wee berth out - but because it was a return. What a wonderful country. All the syrup waffles you could ever eat. A monument, in the city centre, with fresh flowers laid on it, for oppressed LGBT people throughout history. The sound of tram and bicycle bells waking you in the morning. Flowers, running water, children, cats. We got back to dim grey England and went back to London on a dim grey commuter train, and I have returned to the north, and all went entirely to plan, and oh, I do wish we hadn't left. The days were all perfect, full of nothing but varied and disparate joys, with my dear-and-much-maligned-beloved, all washed through by water and golden sun.

We said we'd go back; I hope we do.

Hi, internets. Long time no hear. I blow kisses in your general direction.

Firstly: I aten't ded. I was down south for a while, which is entirely not the same thing, being petted by shimgray, who has been looking after me while I contend with a to-do list which goes "ring CPS / get a job / sort life out", for, among other things, an interview for a training contract. I went there last Tuesday to Oxford, but the actual interview was in a place called Gerrards Cross, which is a small town in the London commuter belt, and also the Twilight Zone. Really. I went by train, and got off at a quiet country station in unseasonal silent heat with the occasional tumbleweed skipping across the platform. There was absolutely no one about. There were no more trains on the noticeboards. The asphalt baked. The trees didn't ruffle in the breeze. In a window there was an advertisement selling a whirlpool bath for the bargain price of £10,271. I had three hours to kill.

I eventually discovered a cafe that was open and selling sandwiches, and sat there quietly for my afternoon eating a panini and reading Empire of Ivory and wondering where the hell I was. The interview wasn't so bad, really - at least I found the place easily enough, and managed to straighten out my nice interview skirt and shirt so I didn't look too horrific in the thirty-degree heat, and present myself to the reception and not misspell my own name.

(A brief digression: thirty-degree heat! In England! I have spent all the hot days wearing sundresses and flip-flops and feeling wonderfully, beautifully, smugly all-over brown. It's no wonder, in retrospect, that my sense of bodily self-esteem skips and leaps up at this time of year, but, oh, warmth. Sunshine, blue skies, how people complain about it when the heat gets in and just sings beneath your skin, I have no idea. Admittedly not great with new crisp interview shirt, but still.)

They gave me a verbal reasoning test, which was enough like the LSAT for me to be comfortable, and a writing exercise which was enough like my actual life for ditto, and then they asked me a lot of questions (while all the time I was womanfully trying to ignore some sort of disaster going on in the corridor behind the door; through the glass panel in it I could see people running past with mops and buckets and vacuum cleaners and bleach), and then it was over. I bought Cosmopolitan, caught a train and learned my red lipstick is one of their must-haves for the month. It wasn't such a bad day, really, although I don't have high hopes for my being called back. We shall see.

Hmm, what else? The day after that I went into Oxford, to run some errands. I got halfway up St Aldate's when I met two baby lawyers going the other way, and after a brief and surprised exchange ("Aren't you supposed to be in Liverpool?" / "Aren't you supposed to be on a nudist beach in Germany?") I discovered that they had a) discovered the presence of a swimming-pool somewhere in central Oxford; b) they were going to find said pool; c) they had been in all the other possible directions from Carfax, and this time they were going to find it. Oh, and they were going to Primark on the way to find swimming costumes, at worst, and probably bikinis. And I should come with them.

I dithered, I pondered, I remembered the thirty-degree heat, I agreed. And then asked, "If you came out of the house knowing you were going swimming, why do you need to go and buy things from Primark?"

"Because," Siousxie said mournfully, "I bought a bikini over the internet. And" - waving offending garment - "they only sent me the bottom half!"

"It's a very nice bottom half," I said doubtfully, after a while, and we found the pool. It's an outdoor pool, unheated, by Hinksey Lake, and nine tenths of the year it has no patrons, and of course that day it was heaving. We ended up draped over the grass, occasionally jumping into the water whilst trying to avoid small children, and it was a very lovely afternoon. Because we had a lot of things to keep an eye on, we took turns watching everything while the others swam, and when it was my turn, I was dozing off in the sun, wishing I'd brought a newspaper or something, and half-thinking to myself that the couple who had the patch of grass next to us would stop it with the incredibly public display of affection. She had started to put sun cream on for him, he had greatly appreciated it, you get it. And then I shut my eyes for a moment, opened them again and the man was getting dressed and the girlfriend was shrieking into her hands, "Well, fine! Have a nice life!"

He got up and stalked off. I blinked, and then the guy was back in just trunks and she was draped over him and looking at him adoringly. I am sure this was not a heat-induced hallucination. But when Siousxie and C had returned, I explained all of this and they looked at me kindly but disbelievingly.

I went off to take my turn swimming, and after a bit, Siousxie said she was running to the loo, she'd be back in a moment. In the two minutes she was gone, the same couple drifted by with one of them shouting, "You don't give me enough space!"

When she came back... I tried to explain. But they were gone. I related this entire tale to Shim later, and he had no opinion, on account of the fact he could not get over the notion of me draped by a pool in a bikini as a first premise. I... have no idea.

The weather didn't break for all the time I was away, really. We had a lovely Saturday afternoon picnicking, and evening watching The Fellowship of the Ring, and I returned dejectedly on Sunday to the drab and damp north, where I must Apply For Jobs and Be A Grown-Up And Not Spend Every Waking Hour Watching Deep Space Nine. I'm here a handful of days, then off and about again - Shim and I are going to Amsterdam on Thursday, and possibly I am in Hong Kong the week after that (still not confirmed; anyone on the flist who's been there, I need you, yes), so there is no shortage of excitement, certainly.


...applying for jobs, yes.

Quick fic hit, first of all: This Is What's Next, Mr Kirk of Iowa, by chaletian. Guys: meet Jed Bartlett, President of the United Federation of Planets.

The author mentions she's not happy with the execution and I can see what she means, but, dude, the idea. And Donna-the-Bajoran, Leo-the-Tellarite and Toby-the-Vulcan (ohmygod yes) are worth it.

Today, I bought interview clothes, which was not very fun - although the clothes are nice - and boots, yaaay. They're meant to replace my old battered ones, and they are solic and chunky and have that new-boot smell, and also the inside of them still has that your-feet-are-cast-in-iron feel that I like. All tact as usual, mother has been complaining that they make me look like Popeye, but as I have attempted to patiently explain, my feet are not exactly something for which I bear responsibility and it's not as though any shoes I wore, and indeed my bare feet, wouldn't make me look grotesque by her definition. I don't know. Moving right on.

Two other things. Firstly, Deep Space Nine is great! Why did no on tell me Deep Space Nine is great? It dawned on me that it represents an enormous chunk of Star Trek that I have not seen - I mean, I don't think I have seen every episode of TNG and Voyager, but I have definitely seen the good ones. A lot of times. And Enterprise I did give the proverbial fair try, and I have seen the classic TOS episodes - enough to know you need a beard to be evil, except that all Irish people by definition are.

Actually, I'm being unfair to TOS. There's one or two episodes which I would love to see remade now, or at least, I'd love to see what a good writer would do with them and the reboot cast: there's "The Empath", which is about the only one of the originals where I can look beyond all the terrible effects and see the scary, angstilicious one-act play that's really being done, and then there's "And The World is Hollow For I Have Touched The Sky", which I think is massively underrated, and also something that Kirk/McCoy shippers ought to do a lot with. I mean, it seems clear that at some point in the reboot timeline, McCoy will be diagnosed with xenopolycythaemia.

There's a great idea for a ficathon right there, in fact: rewrite, or remix, or retell, a TOS episode plotline in the reboot universe. I'd run it if I hadn't sworn never to run a ficathon again - four is enough in a lifetime - but... yeah. A good idea, someone take it from me.

Aaaanyway, Deep Space Nine. I have watched the first four five eight oh, shut up episodes, and they are wonderful. Well, the pilot isn't - I was singularly unimpressed with it, but that said most pilots are terrible, The West Wing being the honourable exception - but all the rest take the dodgy premise and colour in the lines beautifully. So far, I think Bashir is cute, Sisko is bland but fun, Kira would be less annoying if she shouted less, but she's growing on me, Odo is full of promise and Dax is my favourite. I love Garak. I love how it has all the mess and complexity of real politics, and upright and basically good people who nevertheless want to beat the crap out of each other, and quirky little tensions and background details and flashes of humour. And I love how all the runabout ships docked at the station are named after rivers on Earth. I have a feeling watching it all is going to be a long-term project.

(Also! Avery Brooks has the nicest smile. Seriously! I love the way his entire face lights up. Awww.)

And the other thing. imochan is hosting a Sirius/Remus renaissance and it is AMAZING. Okay, Sirius/Remus has come up a bit recently, and every time I just sort of respond by clutching my breast and going, "oh, my heart." Because I am not what you might call OTP-girl - almost a decade on I am still vainly asserting that I write gen, really - but Sirius/Remus, I never loved a pairing like that and I never will again, because oh, dear, their love, I get silly about it. Their epic, beautiful, doomed love. (I mean, I say things like "epic, beautiful, doomed love".) Their history, the way they finish each other's sentences after thirteen years apart, their history. And, the way that post is all people I used to know shouting Animagi! Bring back Black! Killed by DRAPERY! Shoebox! Levity! Lying low at Lupin's, a genre!, without any shred of context because they don't need it. It was a fandom within a fandom, really. It was joyous and I loved it so much.

Threfore: an old rec: seven things that didn't happen on Valentine's Day at Hogwarts, or maybe they did by rageprufrock.

And a new thing: dogdaysofsummer, 2009. I'm sorely tempted.

This has been your daily gamma-ray burst of high-pitched shrieking. I leave you now for tracing at common law.

( the warnings debate )

In other news, everything is unmitigatedly vile. Am revising for resits, and the doing of same continuously reminds me I am fail enough to be doing resits, and going through the motions of applying for jobs I am never going to get. I am trying very hard to make lists of things that make me happy, and giving myself stern talking-tos (talkings-to?) along the lines of really, life is not that bad, just fucking put up or shut up, and taking a lot of baths, but it's not working and I seem to have talked myself into my very own blue period, with less proto-cubism and more fail.

For example. A visiting family friend sent me a present. That's nice, isn't it? It's a lipstick. It's red. That's nice too. Red is my favourite colour. Hurrah. And the lipstick is not orange-red or pinkish-red but perfect even ruby red, and it's a nice creamy soft one that oozes decadence out of the very environmentally-unfriendly packaging, and I spent a very teenage twenty minutes meticulously trying it out with liner and brush, and a very very teenage further two blowing kisses at the mirror.

Only, then, my brain started to explain, in its best insidious whine, how I am not in any way the sort of person who can wear red lipstick, that it is for extroverts and beautiful people, and that geek-girls like me shouldn't have ideas above their station. Boo, hiss.

So, in an attempt at revenge, I decided that today, despite the fact I had nothing planned except getting out of bed and another bath, I spent another twenty-two minutes with the same lipstick doing exactly the same thing, and kept on wearing it this time even though it had worn off before I actually had contact with another human being. So there, brain.

...oh my god, I am a fucking lunatic.

Random fannish peeve of the day: people who put "copyright [author's name]" in their story headers. Just... why. Why. Why do you do this. Do you think it will stop someone plagiarising, if they were going to? Especially why do you do this for a bad drabble. Also, people who put full, longer-than-fic headers on drabbles annoy me too, but that's just me, I suspect.

Also! also, people who write "I wrote this in, like, an hour, and didn't get it betaed" in their headers. I am, myself, often guilty of writing up ideas quickly and posting them as-is. But as for writing it in the headers - that is just self-sabotage. I mean, do you want people to read your fic? Never explain, never apologise! Write your glorious fic in your glorious way and if it is bad it will be gloriously bad!

...see above re: fucking lunatic, plz.

Yeah. This afternoon I am writing a silly Star Trek story with lots of shouting, and this morning I applied for a job. Still here.

Not really feeling so well, right now. The next batch of recs here; starting with Chekov/Sulu, jacinthsong asked for it and regular fic-provision was part of our divorce settlement.

Hello, Brother, I Love You by emiime.
Chekov/Sulu. A nice, nuanced, beginning-of-a-romance, with very sensible and pleasing appearances by Kirk, Uhura and McCoy.

How To Get Your Man by misfit_fandoms.
Chekov/Sulu - in PADD form. Sweet, and delightful. Very very image-heavy, though, so if you're on dial-up you may want to make some tea while it loads.

Advance and Retreat by masterofmidgets.
Chekov/Sulu - Sulu teaches Chekov to fence. It's unexpectedly romantic. The whole fic is, really; nice voices for both of them, and a good cameo by McCoy.

And others:

oh two hundred by mekosuchinae.
Spock/Uhura, but not really - it's about Uhura, what makes her who she is, and it's a tightly-focused character study against a backdrop of a beautifully-realised world.

It's the Ears, by thistlerose
Joanna <3 Spock, yaaay! I am absolutely loving all the fic writers who are seamlessly writing Joanna into the reboot universe, and this is no exception - of course Joanna loves Spock. Adorable.

The Enterprise Laundry Room by chaletian.
Because it must have one, and I'm pleased someone thought to think about it!

earth is like the midwest of federation planets by builtofsorrow
In which Winona Kirk is not blandly evil, but a real person. Beautiful sense of place.

TwitterEnterprise by misfit_fandoms.
In a time of crisis, the Enterprise's main servers go down, leaving Twitter as their only means of communication. (Hey, it's gotta happen sometimes.) Really very funny, but again image-heavy - more tea, dial-up people.

Whore by igrockspock.
Gaila hates the word 'whore.' Luckily, so does someone else. Yes. Yes, this.

from the Greek "xenos", which means "stranger" but also "guest" by pogrebin.
Nyota Uhura is seventeen years old and her hero is Amanda Grayson. A little Spock/Uhura, but again that's not the point - the point is Uhura, and her passions. This is a lovely story.

3 things montgomery scott missed while stationed at delta vega by mekosuchinae.
Via jacinthsong, this made me very happy.

Also. I've been trawling the kink meme, and not actually finding a whole lot - the real treasures on it have mostly been reposted elsewhere as "real" fic, and it does tend to a lot of PWP (what, PWP on a kink meme? I astonish you, I'm sure) but I did find the odd snippet.

Routine Medical Care, anon.
Kirk, McCoy. Being trans in the future. I love the hope and humour in this.

The Five Things Jim Kirk Had To Tell Joanna McCoy, anon.
Apparently I love all things Joanna regardless of quality, but this has quality - it's a sweet, ultimately very sad succession, and it rings true to me.

Then, not exactly the graffiti in the Enterprise toilets, but Spock's shipwide announcements pertaining to the same. Really, really hysterical, I loved it. (anon)

another answer to the Joanna prompt, also anon, just plain awesome. "Joanna," Jim says solemnly, as he wipes his streaming eyes, "You might not realize it now, but you've got the best father in the quadrant. Remember that."

five times an Enterprise crew member met their genderswapped selves, anon.
I liked this very, very much. It manages to be a character study for each, as well as crackfic.

And because I do an awful lot of meme-trawling so you don't have to, I'm going to finish with something different and link all my favourites off the fanart meme (all sfw):

-something like the Castro, myrafur, for someone who wanted Kirk/McCoy in San Francisco - hot, dreamy, smoky, hot again;

-Our heroes are turned into babies - it's so cute we might all die (by glockgal, whose art is amazing in general);

-A nice Sulu/Chekov, by turntap2;

-A wedding - sort of, by cathybites, and it's totally fucking hilarious (the octopus people! yes);

-Data trolls the twenty-first century internet, oh, yes, by sidhefaer;

-So, Spock as a child had a pet sehlat, right? Which is kind of like a tiger. Right. It's by iambickilometer, and it's adorable;

-And, finally, girl!Spock and the Vulcan High Council, by liviapenn - this is my desktop background. Just... go and look at it.

That's it, I think. where_no_woman is running a new drabble challenge, Where No Woman Has Drabbled Before, but it's only just getting started. (I have just one contribution - Joanna McCoy, roots and wings, because it really does seem to be the Joanna Show at the moment, but like I said it's only just getting started.)

I need coffee.

Hey, internets. You know those things that I, for lack of a better term, will call television sci-fi tropes? Not the whole scope of TV tropes, but those things that are just a necessary feature of a certain kind of show: Buffy, SG-1 and Atlantis, to a lesser extent TNG, Voyager and the X-Files monster-of-the-weeks? Like, body swaps, telepathy, alternate universes where everyone has different hair, benevolent-aliens-who-are-actually-evil, gender swaps (although, actually, no fandom I can think of has canonically done this), everyone gets turned into children, etc. That kind of thing. Would y'all mind thinking up the ones I've missed? I promise there is a reason I'm asking, it's just... too embarrassing to go into right now.

Also, while I'm here, jacinthsong has been worrying about a plot hole in the Buffyverse. When Buffy dies in "The Gift", why is no new Slayer called? After pondering this for some time - and after my realising that while Memory Alpha is a wonderful resource on many levels, it does not have the answer to all life's questions - we decided that, probably, only the first death counts. Or otherwise they could have just kept ducking Buffy in a tank of water and solved the problem that way. (Or, as she was the one-girl-in-all-the-world, and not in-Southern-California, maybe the new Slayer was called in Mongolia and beat up demonically possessed yaks.) Life is hard, when filled with such quandaries as these.

In other news, I'm still here. Getting myself out of this whole horrible mess by deliberately Revising, Applying For Jobs, or Watching Star Trek, and Nothing Else, with a side order of Not Crying. Not crying takes a lot of effort, but I'm getting better at it. Last weekend, I went down to Bristol to see vampire_kitten and shimgray, and it was very lovely; I went on a train that had come from Glasgow and was going to Penzance and there was nowhere to sit and the toilets had all gone boom and people were turning feral. It was an unpleasant experience, but I liked Bristol - the last time I was there was in 2004, and the less said about that the better, I suspect, but I liked the city. It has an excess of hills and precariously-positioned greenery that reminds me of San Francisco, down to the small signs reminding you to leave your handbrake on if you want to live. Funny, really - if my life had gone even slightly differently I'd still be living in Bristol now, most likely, and miserably at that.

Shim and I were going to go the Banksy exhbition at the city museum, but failed at this on account of the two-hour queues to get in (it's a free exhbition; even though we didn't get to go, it makes me happy in an obscure way that people were queueing two hours in humid heat for a free art exhibition) and spent the day mostly wandering, with interludes in cafés and bookshops that may or may not have led to my acquiring thirteen books, which is, perhaps, slightly excessive. Have since returned to grim north, read three of them, taken too many baths to count, discovered the joys of listening to BBC iPlayer whilst in said baths, run out of TNG and started on Deep Space Nine, applied for a job, oh my god my life is so exciting I could explode.

So as not to finish on a dull note, I steal a meme from musesfool: Name a fandom, and I'll give you the scoop on at least three of my unpopular opinions related to that fandom.

As she says, if you ask about a fandom I don't know, I shall feel absolutely no compunction in making shit up.

(Occasionally, my LJ posts do exactly what they say on the tin.)

First of all, a quick statement of policy. This doesn't come up as often as it might, but well, I am about to link to stories which may or may not have porn in, and who knows, one day I may even post some, if I ever manage to type "cock" without laughing, one never knows. I am an adult in (almost) every jurisdiction you care to name, but I'm well aware that not everyone reading this is, and well... I'm not going to attempt to stop you. (O hai, I was lying my way into ficathons at fourteen, I am not inclined to be BIGGEST HYPOCRITE EVAR.) But if you're reading me and understanding me, you're smart enough to know what's okay for you personally to read, and what isn't. (Click the back button if people start saying "cock". Or don't. It's cool.) On to the good stuff.

Recs! I actually recommend you read the others first, and then come back to these first two, because while they are my undoubted favourites, they're also pretty long and take a peaceful evening to read.

Break by yahtzee63.
26,000 words. I told you it was long. It is about Uhura, and about Spock, and about both of them together, but it takes its time getting there, goes through logical, nuanced explorations of character, and theme, and builds up a whole world out of small pitch-perfect details: like Uhura's family traditions and the childhood games Spock played on Vulcan. I love the characterisation - I love driven, awesome Uhura and Spock's fundamental uncertainties, and I love how she shows them complementing and changing each other. It's just beautifully, beautifully done.

(It's a little hard to navigate at the moment, so here are parts two and three.)

Lunch and Other Obscenities by rheanna27.
Everyone should have seen this already, but in case not: Uhura and Gaila, getting to know each other. There's an amazing structure of Orion family life and taboos created for this fic, and it all fits together beautifully, and also it kind of cracks me up. Read it.

Dear Star Trek fandom: yes, yes, yes to the Kirk/McCoy. I like Kirk/Spock, but mostly for nostalgic reasons. When it comes to reading, Kirk/McCoy, though, is all fabulous and snarky and BFF and yes. I love it. Fandom, keep it up.

In A Moment Close To Now, by thistlerose.
Kirk/McCoy, and very... them. Funny, and full of those BFF vibes I was talking about, but with subtle undercurrents. I like everything of hers, actually - Access Denied, in which Scotty is awesome and Kirk is.... not, is another great piece - but this is my favourite.

Body of Evidence by the_dala.
Kirk/McCoy, ish. The crew of the Enterprise start laying bets. Sweet and very funny.

The Hard Sell by exiled_mind.
Kirk/McCoy. Jim is very persuasive. It's not quite perfect, this one - the pacing struck me as a little off - but it's gentle and wonderfully silly and has the characters down right.

In Truth, by mint_amaretto.
Kirk/McCoy - but that's not the point. This is... hard to quantify. It's an AU, it is not nice, and it does not mean to be nice. But it's well-executed and memorable. One to make your own mind up about.

While we're still on the Kirk/McCoy, by the way, whoever decided that making McCoy a girl was the best idea ever, carry on. Yep. Keep right on going.

and you take me the way I am by londondrowning.
Oh god, I love this. Jim is just so totally fail, girl!McCoy is the hottest thing ever, it's fabulous.

Four Times Jim Kirk and Lenore McCoy Didn't Fuck by telesilla
Like I said: hottest thing ever.

Aaaaand, gen.

Ten Sessions, by dsudis.
Ahahah. McCoy decides he probably needs some help, seeing as he joined Starfleet and he has a phobia of flying, and he can't be worse than the guy who needed twenty-four sessions for his rampant xenophobia. Very nice and very funny.

Four Consequences of the Unexpected and Unlikely Friendship Between James T. Kirk and Nyota Uhura by trisfic.
The author's summary is "Boys. Girls. Clothes. Pon Farr." Yeah. One of those solid gold win things.

Only the Good Die Young by _seven_crows.
Five things Chekhov doesn't like about being seventeen on the Enterprise. So cute, such a lovely Chekhov voice, it's cracky and awesome.

It Takes a Village by chaletian.
This is the first of a series the author calls Village!verse, which are all ensemble gen pieces, all hilarious, all worth reading, but my favourites are You Can Choose Your Friends, in which Scotty makes a very insightful observation indeed, and Telenovela, in which life on the Enterprise isn't exciting enough for Chekhov, who grew up on a diet of Russian-language soap opera. It all rocks.

To The Enterprise: of Warp Barriers, Captains, and Other Scary Things by karanguni.
Chekhov and Scotty could take over the universe, they really could. This is a perfect taste of that.

The Word For World Is- by laurajv.
"Vulcans did no such thing; they named the planet Vik: the well in the desert. They named the continents Ashv'cezh, Laktra, and Vrekasht: Revenge, Grief, and Outcast." This is... god, tragic, and beautiful, and really gets at what it means to have a planet, an entire world, destroyed.

There are also the wonderful drabble memes: Journey to Drabble, Drabble On The Edge of Forever and Where No Drabble Has Gone Before.

(I have not read all of these, but I liked: Gaila finding her independence, Kirk having a surprise party, McCoy and Joanna, Chekhov admitting something he probably shouldn't, Uhura playing poker, a bit on Chekhov's family, McCoy hungover, the one redeeming feature of Delta Vega, Spock and Uhura being the last word in cute, Uhura doing Chekhov a favour, and Sulu's no-good terrible day.)

Also, you know what I want? Scotty fic. Come on, internets. It must be there somewhere. Please tell me if you find any, I'm coming up empty-handed.

And, finally! A brief moment of bitchery. You know what is great, in fandom? New people. I don't care you've been writing Kirk/Spock for forty years, it doesn't make you a better writer than one who's been writing it for forty hours, and you don't get a free pass on crappy writing just 'cause you used to write for zines. How nice, how hardcore, shut up.

...I am done. I am going to Bristol tomorrow, so may not be around for a bit. Someone write me Scotty fic while I'm gone, I'm not at all demanding.

I meant to write Spock/Uhura, but somehow it ended up becoming everyone on the Enterprise/everyone else.

Fic:: Linguistics 101; or, Thirteen Ways To Say I Love You
by Raven
PG, Star Trek, Spock/Uhura. Vulcan and human cultural differences.

( linguistics was getting boring )

shimgray gave me the stars and speech patterns; amchau did a lighting-fast look over. I give you, therefore, the Scotty 'n' McCoy travellin' show.

Fic:: In Service
by Raven
PG-13, gen, Star Trek (reboot), 6500 words. It turns out, when they said joining Starfleet was a life in service, that was exactly what they meant. Scotty and McCoy, hard at work.

( the Enterprise is really, really big )

Today's notes and queries. First of all, I have lost my phone, because I am an idiot. I lost it somewhere on Friday afternoon, panicked, panicked some more, realised, that, well, you know what don't exist any more? Pay phones. If I hadn't unexpectedly run straight into shimgray in Balliol lodge, I might have cried on the porters; as it was, I was very stoic (really), and ran around the city like a crazy person, and finally gave it up in time for a small baby dinner party that we were supposed to be having, and did have, complete with nine bottles of whisky and a vat of greenstuff risotto (recipe courtesy of foreverdirt; it was very nice indeed). luminometrice arrived fresh from her Kobayashi Maru^[1] noting that she was supposed to have examined a man in a brest suit, and she was mentally prepared for a man in a breast suit, and talking to a headless torso with breasts had been very disconcerting.

(I was admitted to medical school, you know. There is a well-respected medical school in England who actually thought that I would have made a not entirely-awful doctor. Looking back, I am more astonished than ever.)

magic_doors also came to drink whisky, and dr_biscuit, and it was a very lovely evening, full of drink. I had wine, mostly, and fell asleep in a heap on top of Shim at some unrespectable hour. It was kind of marvellous; I forget what we talked about, but I'm sure Star Trek was involved.

My phone has now turned up again, thank goodness - I rang up the Brookes lost and found, who were delightfully... dizzy. To be absolutely sure it was mine, I suggested, maybe they should look to see what number was listed under "Home". "That's a good idea," said the woman, "but I've never used a mobile phone."

Nothing daunted, she flagged down a passing undergraduate ("You! Whatever your name is! Get over here!") and got him to read out my own phone number to me. So I am still incommunicado until the weekend, but will eventually be back in the land of the communicable. In the meantime email is best.

2. remixredux09 assignments have gone out. I'm not doing a letter to my remixer, because to be honest, I don't really understand them - the fic my remixer writes (hi, if you're reading) isn't for me, it's for her. It's not a gift exchange, after all.

(That said, my remixee is a much better writer than me. Ouch. Also, all her stories are horribly taut and self-contained and right and good are they are. I despair of myself.)

3. Another heads-up - Trek Novel Fest of Awesome over on Dreamwidth. I just ordered Spock's World off Amazon yesterday, I am sold. Seriously, though, it looks great; I love the TOS novels because they're so... well, good. Gentle, and nuances, and full of love for the characters. There's lots that could be done with them in the reboot universe.

4. jacinthsong sent me Vulcan ears! More than that, ethnically appropriate Vulcan ears! But being a bit fail, I cannot get them on my own ears. When I have solved this problem there may be pictures. Possibly I am just not logical enough.

5. The Scotty 'n' McCoy Travellin' Show is at 6000 words. Oh, dear.

---

[1] Differing only from the real Kobayashi Maru in that she passed it.

Today, it rained. Today it rained so much that I got soaked to the skin and then got soaked to the skin again, and sitting in the law library all day sounded an awful lot like a thousand people were smashing cups on the roof. I went out for lunch, it rained, I went back inside, it rained, I realised my research project is made of epic idiotic fail (look, what was I even thinking, I don't know anything about anything), it rained, Microsoft Word mangled all sixty-eight footnotes, it rained some more.

I left my bike tied up most of the day outside the library, and when I came back to college, I locked it to one of the bike racks off by Trinity. Went to Sainsbury's, went into college, had a brief nap, came out again (and got rained on, natch). I went back to fetch my bike. The lock, which I had left looped twice around the crossbar and then around the rack, as is my habit, had moved. It was twisted once around the bar, once around the bike next to it, and then through the rack. I took a deep breath. I unlocked it. And underneath the lock there was a sticker, laminated so it hadn't run in the rain: THANKS.

...I confess myself utterly baffled.

Have spent much of the day turning over Star Trek fic in my head, and failing to commit any of it to paper. If it would stop raining, and I would stop feeling sad, and if I could only rescue the sixty-eight footnotes, I think I would be able to write again.

The GDL farewell reception was last night. I note this as a dispassionate fact apropos of nothing. What did totally not happen, at all, in any way whatsoever, is that I did not wander over at six o'clock, drink two glasses of wine in desperation at the company and then resolve to run away very fast, only for Lia to appear and immediately have the bright idea of sitting in a corner with two bottles and two plates of smoked salmon canapés, and then we all did not go down the hill, sit in a moody murky bar in Jericho and drink smushy cocktails with raspberries in and talk about sex, in that kind of dim smoky quasy-sitcomic way you do talk about sex in cocktail bars at one in the morning, and after that we didn't go dancing. My head sort of hurts.

Other notes and queries:

-I have a new skirt. It's very exciting. It's purple and has a purple lining and ruffles, and I wanted very much to wear it last night, only my parents, in helping me move out, took all my shoes. My only shoes in the world within wearing distance are my large, clompy, Caterpillar boots. Thus I am making an ironic statement of rejection of femininity, yes.

-I went to see Star Trek again! magic_doors made noises of squee, I cooed over baby Spock. shimgray notes that what the world really needs now is the Scotty 'n' McCoy Travellin' Show. I would totally watch this. They perambulate through space in a two man shuttlecraft, they drop off vaccines, they do on-the-hoof tech support, in between times they bitch. Every so often Spock sends them orders and instructive pamphlets, Chekhov sends love and drink. Tell me this isn't a great idea.

-And also! sebastienne suggested I go and see Tick Tick... Boom! at the OFS, and I am very grateful that she did, because it was wonderful. It's only an accident of time and space that I'm not more of a RENThead than I am - I mean, I have seen it on Broadway, but if seeing it involved less drastic measures than going to New York, I probably would've seen it a dozen times. I love Rent. I can see, intellectually, that it's flawed, that it can be glib and pat, and its treatment of its issues seems too simplistic in retrospect, but how can you not love it? Its energy, its passion, the way it's not about once upon a time in a kingdom far away - it has the flaws that real life has, if that makes sense. Nothing works, nothing fits together.

tick, tick... BOOM! is an earlier project of Jonathan Larson's, and it shows. It's a little less cohesive around the edges, and it's done with a kind of rough third-person narration that doesn't quite work for me, and it's a tad self-indulgent, as you might expect from a kind of meta, autobiographical piece. And yet. And yet, it's funny, it's smart and insightful, and it has the breathless energy that I love about Rent, this way it sort of hits the ground running and keeps on running. It's an hour and a half and it never lets up. I loved it. I don't know if I would have loved it so much without the framing context of Rent in my head, but even so. It was lovely.

...and now, lunch, and onwards, and onwards. The only solution to the current ungodly mess is to keep working and keep dancing and keep on trying not to cry, I think. On this note, Intrusion is tonight, deathbyshinies is DJ-ing, I am gothing up and dancing. My head will perhaps not forgive me, but the only way out is up.

Exams: 3.

Topics not revised: 8,774.

Conversations with my mother, no. 3450934594:

"[person she works with] reminds me of you... yeah, she doesn't know anything, and when she talks people laugh and say, 'what are you saying?'"



...why do I even exist.

I want a strawberry daquiri. A big one. No, big, okay? Big enough to bathe in. With two umbrellas in it. Thank you. I got my exam results. No crying, but no frantic jubilation either. I am not in a good mood. Dear all the dear people who tried to wake me up this afternoon: love you. I'm sorry for shouting. I'm still not in a good place, as far as the next batch of exams go... I just am full of fear, and writing enormous lists of Things I Don't Know Oh God Oh God, and am now being sensible and not procrastinating and working all the time, so I can't beat myself up too much later. Am trying to be good, really.

...hi, people who have just friended me because I like Star Trek! In brief: hi, nice to meet you! I am British, twenty-two years old, geek of the first water, insomniac, and I'm a lawyer in the process of being made (that's what the exams are about). Oh, and if you bear with me I'm going to start talking about Star Trek again a little way down, yes.

My beloved ex-wifey jacinthsong is coming to visit tomorrow for a few days, and she has said she will make me tea and deep-fried tofu and put up with all my little excesses. I suspect I will cling to her desperately and occasionally demand to be shown pictures of kittens, but that's... not bad, per se. And then on Monday shimgray is coming up, to probably suffer much the same fate. It'll be lovely to see them both, but I am mildly apprehensive for reasons of, well, worlds colliding, I suppose. This is the first time any of my friends from university have ever come up here, I think, and... well, I suppose it's just a little contextually challenging. But at the same time it's weird that the most important people in my life have never really met. I've never really got over the idea that I'm a real person - that I sit at the centre of my own social network, and it's perfectly possible for there to be people in the world who have nothing in common but me, but do have me in common. That gives me an uncomfortable feeling of selfness, actually. I think I shall stop this line of thought now.

In lieu of going crazy this evening, then, I have been watching Star Trek in the background while I read about breach of duty of care. And I thought I would copy calapine and make a (short) list of Star Trek Episodes That Are Really Great. Yes.

( going boldly on, without spoilers )

Ah, shut up, I know I'm supposed to be doing work.

Fic:: A Formal Dance in the Bowling Alley
by Raven
PG, gen, Star Trek (reboot). Here are some things that James Tiberius Kirk, Captain, does not understand about the Enterprise and her crew.

( where all the alcohol comes from )

( and another (faintly embarrassing) thing about Star Trek )

Anyway. Moving right along. I love Star Trek. I love it. It is not a part of my earliest childhood, as it is for some people, but I have been watching it on and off for ten years or so, and when I think about it, I think about coming in from school when I was eleven or twelve and putting it on, and it's all mixed up with coming home and growing up and finding some of the first things, science fiction and fandom and grand liberal visions of the future, that I consciously understood I was going to carry with me into adulthood. I love it, very, very much, and I think everyone should love it. It makes me kind of angry to see this weird thing against newbies that's starting up. I am all for new people seeing it and going "omg! shiny! I want to write Kirk/Spock now!", and I really don't understand people getting all... weird about it. Sure, Star Trek has lots of history and Star Trek fandom has lots of history, and it's nice if people know about that. But the history of Star Trek fandom is the history of fandom, too! And, I don't know, I always thought the point of fandom was joy and fanfiction and people jumping up and down with excitement because of this really cool new fandom they're into.

Oh, and can I say again, I love Star Trek. The thing I love about it, is, okay. Star Trek is a vision of our future - us, pathetic human us. We, all of us, have spent decades just eating up this vision of the future where we are - strong, and moral, and liberal, and, sure, you can criticise it for all sorts of reasons, but basically, it shows us as better than we are. I love that. We want to be better, we can be better. That's why I get silly about it.

I think this may be Classic Fandom Week in my head, because having finished A Civil Campaign and laid Bujold down for the moment, I am also sort-of accidentally re-reading lots of Discworld. I read Thud! and Making Money last week (oh, also: whose is the copy of it I have? I'm sure I borrowed it off one of you), and The Wee Free Men, and now I am re-reading Night Watch. Which I also love, but for very different reasons from why I love Star Trek. I have not yet read Nation, which I really ought to read, I'm told - I read half of it over the winter, but must remember to finish it after my exams.

Speaking of my exams - waily, waily, waily, etc. I am aware on some conscious level that there is absolutely no way that I can possibly get through all this stuff in time, especially as Operation Mental Health is going well but not spectacularly, and I keep needing to take time out of my hectic schedule of doing nothing at all to do a slightly different kind of nothing at all, but I have it in a box marked "Do not look at this box". It's... a fact, but it's just there. Oh, and also, my results for the last batch were supposed to come out on May 11th. That's... kind of fail, actually.

...anyway. Still here.

Oh, oh, Star Trek. Oh. ( STAR TREK, omg, STAR TREK )

After three or four days' sustained effort - which has, okay, featured going to bed at five and waking up at two - I am a mere 500-word introduction short of my research project. I've covered special measures directions, I've covered Article 6, I've tossed in a bit about how race, gender, age and disability intersect with the inherent biases of an adversarial system, I've done current affairs, and I've written "In conclusion...." I'm working on the tables of cases and statutes, and am gearing up to slam my head into OSCOLA.

Next up: hoping this bastard doesn't make it to appeal, and trying not to name the whole confection "We Hate The Kids".

Still no exam results. Luckily, lots of actual exams.

And, tonight, I'm going to see Star Trek! I honestly can't remember the last time I was this excited about anything. Because, 'kay, Star Trek. Star Trek on the big screen with actual Kirk and actual Spock and actual McCoy (I heart Bones, I'm sorry, I do, his mint juleps and his massive technophobia and his little face) and actual bright lights and explosions! And y'all have said it's awesome, and I trust you. And I'm actually going to the cinema, I'm actually getting dressed and putting make-up on and going out of the house with a handbag rather than a bag full of books and buying sweeties and going to the cinema. Eeee, Star Trek. This afternoon I am happy.

Okay, this is, perhaps, the longest of long shots. But is there anyone in the northwest of England who wants to come and see the Star Trek movie with me at the weekend? Please? It already breaks my heart that I don't get to see it with hathy_col or jacinthsong!

My mother has left her homework out. Question: which of the following is not an SSRI? I believe I could hazard a guess at the answer, given I have been prescribed three of the four options in the last six months.

...this charmingly charmless anecdote aside, I am actually doing a bit better. On Monday, the house was full of a) people and b) the sound of drilling, so sebastienne coaxed me out of bed and persuaded me that really, going to the pub in the middle of the day was the best idea ever. And, so, indeed, it turned out. She and I and crouchinglynx retreated to a corner of the very nice pub across the road (it has recently transformed itself from old-man pub to hip 'n' trendy establishment - it's on Twitter, for heaven's sake) and we proceeded to sit there for six and a half hours, with breaks for lunch, and, er, Pictionary. My favourite part was sebastienne and yours truly attempting to sketch the concept of "Cambridge" armed with two blunt pencils and no artistic talent whatsoever. (My first notion was that we could somehow draw a very convincing picture of foreverdirt standing on a map. Then I remembered "no artistic talent whatsoever". So we drew colleges that looked like castles, a stick figure with a large hat and a very long scarf, and a police public call box. And the prison planet of the Time Lords. It was made of several kinds of awesome.)

Yesterday, I made it up north without incident, and have spent today feeling rather like I'm having my first day up after a long illness. At any rate, I am managing to do things one at a time. I got up, I got dressed, I stayed dressed, I wrote a couple of letters, I even went outside for a little while when I really didn't want to, which was healthy fresh air and whatnot. I went to the beach, because it was very windy and I wasn't likely to actually meet anyone, and on the way up, there was a flag with "25" on it and nothing else (I was thinking in that half-addled way, that's an awfully big golf course, but the flight of reason returned). There's an information board underneath it, courtesy of the National Trust - given current rates of climate change and sand erosion, it says, this is where the sea will be in twenty-five years' time.

...okay, I know I make jokes about this all the time, but that's kind of horrifying. (For those of you who actually know this bit of coastline, the flag is halfway through the bit where people leave their cars, so a good half a kilometre from the current high-water mark.) There is also, said the noticeboard, a flag at the fifty-year mark. I looked and looked, but I couldn't find it, and I am hoping this is because they haven't put it up yet, and not because they are mustering the courage to put it in my parents' living room. (They, on hearing this, gave me a resigned look and said, "Well, it's you who'll have to sell...")

And I had another funny thought, too. Pat Barker's Regeneration opens here, with the characters walking along the edge of the sea, and I think Siegfried Sassoon really did throw his Military Cross into the water here. Only, if that was 1917, then ninety years of erosion means he was another half-mile further out from where I was today. That's a weird thought. It's all relative, I guess, but there's something very absolute about your home being swallowed by the sea.

...anyway. Tomorrow, I have another quiet day at home - deep breaths, gentle self-affirmation - but have to actually do some research. Shall see how that goes.