commotiocordis

In celebration of my finding my tablet stylus while doing laundry (which I shall never besmirch again--I was moping over the prospect of shelling out $40 for a new one, but turns out the black stylus had somehow fallen to the bottom of the giant box I separated dark clothing into), I went all potatochop!happy.

The base picture for this was sort of unfortunately both black & white and already grained, hence the quality of the finished picture, but I downloaded it from some free stock photo site for this very purpose . . . *looks up* three years ago because the idea just hit me immediately upon seeing it. A couple of hours and components from five or six photos later, and I've subtly femslashed that baby (literally!) up. I was thinking about putting some sort of frame around it so it looked like a picture the girls would have on the mantel, but I didn't have anything that seemed to fit on the tablet (and its internet isn't working, so I couldn't try to find one)--may happen at some point, but for now:

Titling this seems stupid, but for organizational purposes: ( Seven and Daughter )

None Returning

Harry Potter, Remus/Sirius. Spoilers through Half Blood Prince. 200 words. 1 May 2010.

Harry Potter double drabble in response to the prefacing exchange in Half Blood Prince. I could go into a long treatise on how of course Remus didn’t share his grief about Sirius with Harry openly for fear if he let it out, he’d never be able to resurface under its weight, but I think between the line at the end of Order of the Phoenix (“Lupin turned away from the archway as he spoke. It sounded as though every word was causing him pain.” OotP p808) and the drabble-inspiring bit from the end of HBP, good old JK told us herself.

Also, the title is from The Final Problem, by Arthur Conan Doyle (which also makes my heart ache): “Two lines of footmarks were clearly marked along the farther end of the path, both leading away from me. There were none returning.”

As usual, apologies for the author’s notes being longer than the fic. It’s always a struggle to keep myself short-enough winded as to be intelligible. Forcing myself to write things in drabble/doubledrabble format both keeps me from going on too long and ensures that something actually gets done (have I mentioned there are seriously 80 unfinished fics and fic fragments on my hard drive right now? *hangs head*).

---

“Ron — Dumbledore’s dead,” said Ginny.
“No!” Lupin looked wildly from Ginny to Harry, as though hoping the latter might contradict her, but when Harry did not, Lupin collapsed into a chair beside Bill’s bed, his hands over his face. Harry had never seen Lupin lose control before; he felt as though he was intruding upon something private, indecent.
--HBP 514


There was no doubt in his heart which had hurt more—Sirius, by an order of indescribable magnitude—but the force with which the news hit him was surprisingly painful. It wasn’t the cold nothingness that had set upon him in the bowels of the ministry, leaving the shell of his body to watch over the Death Eaters and to make his way unconsciously back to Grimmauld Place before collapsing on the bed that they had shared; wanting nothing more than to forget this place, this war, this man, this . . . -–Sirius-- entirely and retreat to the solitude of his hidden flat. But Remus knew the Order needed him—in the greater scheme of everything but his heart, this, relatively speaking, changed very little—so he fought. He choked back the tears that wouldn’t even attempt to fall for weeks filled with shock and more attacks. He stood up.

No, at Ginny’s words, it was not grief that wracked the werewolf’s already-broken body. Remus sank down into the chair because for the first time in the course of two wars, this single man’s death had imparted in him the overwhelming, real fear that they were going to lose.

A Study in Improvisation
Author: crashcart9
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes 2009 RPF, Sherlock Holmes 2009
Pairing: RDJude (Robert Downey Jr./Jude Law), Holmes/Watson
Rating: Mature. Phone sex (because I had to get in on the RDJude phonesex trend). Not horribly explicit—something between R and NC-17.
Date: 23 January 2010
Words: 3600. And three.
Summary: “They’d improvised through this scene, these emotions once before, but it hadn’t gotten quite this maudlin. Almost, he amended, but not quite, and he wanted to see how far Robert would take it.”
A/N: This practice of running lines and just going to town within/after a scene closes is one that I’ve actually done before in theatre classes, both legitimately and. . . more to the tune of the direction in which RDJude took it (put it this way: I cannot read Romeo and Juliet without wanting to ship Juliet/Nurse now). With Robert’s recorded interest in improvisation over and above scripts, this was hardly a leap, I think ;)

( And I don't even care if RDJ Googles himself and finds this. )

And for your viewing pleasure, link back to my RDJude picspam of a few days ago.

Oh my God, look what I did. Of the four Sherlock Holmes fics I've got started, I managed to start and finish a fifth this morning after bleakone linked me to the insane relevance to my interests that is the sherlockkink meme.

This is way, way, way too long to fit in a comment, I think, so I'm going to post it here and hope I'm not breaking all the kinkmeme rules by linking here instead. Even though the prompt was posted just a little while ago and I totally was going to just prompt myself and post this, it's exactly what I was thinking (though my prompt would have specified Holmes/Mary hatesex).

Title: A Fool's Game
Fandom: Sherlock Holmes (<3<3<3) Movieverse primarily (Holmes meeting Mary at dinner in the film), with hints of bookverse filler.
Pairing: Holmes/Mary hatesex, Holmes/Watson unrequited
Rating: R
Summary: for sherlockkink's "unrequited Holmes/Watson with Watson leaving for Mary no matter what Holmes says"
( Angst ahoy. )

ETA: Several days after writing this, I found "Partings" by Daylyn. If I didn't know better, I'd think that I wrote "A Fool's Game" as a prequel to that one. Linking because I highly recommend it.

Being a rampant Psych fangirl right now. I've got like three fics open. And not that that's unusual for me at all, but the unusual part is that it's three I've just started writing. Of which there's only one that has the chance of ever seeing the light of day because the first probably will end up getting incorporated into the second, which is going to be hugely hugely long as it actually sort of Has Plot and thus will never get finished.

Especially because I can't decide on the crime for the plotted one. It's on a cruise ship, so it's got to be high enough priority that the detectives would be going undercover (yes, it's that sort of a fic), but low enough that the Feds would have just taken a cursory look around and dropped it. I've more or less solved the latter part by having the FBI look, not see anything, and let it go, but Commander Dunlap (Vick's sister--the Coast Guard doesn't investigate cruise crime, but acts as sort of a clearinghouse for reporting it) mentions it to Vick, asking her to keep an eye out because there's been a rash of whatevers (thefts aren't fun\dangerous enough, but murders seem like they'd be higher on the Feds' radar. I'm thinking disappearances) on the ships porting near Santa Barbara, and then Shawn "divines" that there's even more of a connection when he realizes that they're all gay cruises (yes, it's that sort of a fic).

So I've pretty much gotten it up to where I get them onto the ship, though who's going I'm not sure. Originally it was just Karen and Jules, but I'm having so much fun writing Lassiter in the parts leading up to boarding that I'm not sure I don't want him and Shawn to stowaway too (Psych is one of those shows where I can do Shawn/Gus or Shawn/Lassiter with no problem). The department is only covering the girls, natch, but I could make funny jokes about Lassiter needing to visit his mustache guy and then leave the image of him with one of those 70s gay handlebars in your heads. I think for the excuse to go undercover, Lassie might pay his own way. And Shawn might find some way to get put on as an entertainer, being all fakepsychic for them. Under a fake name, natch, because if somebody Googled Shawn Spencer, they'd see all kinds of SBPD stuff.

But the problem is that this was first and foremost a Jules/Karen fic, and the chances of any of it every getting done decrease exponentially if I have to keep bouncing between the boys and the girls. That's one of my biggest issues while I'm writing plotty fic; I feel the need to account for every single foot-shuffle, yawn, and eye twitch of the characters when we're following them. I've mostly broken my tendency to follow them 24/7 (I can now employ such timesavers as "after an uneventful drive, they arrived" rather than narrating the entire thing), but I'm, well, really fucking wordy.

Anyway. I'd be >500 words further on the fic(s) if I'd not just done this, LOLOL. Got to go to that pretend trial thing in an hour and a half (probably a bit earlier, as I'm not sure where I'm going), so looking forward to that. Not sure if I'm supposed to dress up (doubtful that it's overmuchly required or they'd mention it, but idk what everybody else is wearing), so probably going to find something that's Not Shorts at least.

Also. Getting sick, I fear. Migraine 3 days straight, and the migraineyness was tapering off today but my head started hurting differently. Wrote it off as just end-of-migraine-weirdness. And then came the throat tickle. Damn.

"I'm a PC and I'm seven years old." Seriously? That commercial just sort of makes me laugh. I mean, the point is that the photo merging stuff is so easy a caveman 7 year old could do it. And I spent the last two days working on bleakone's computer using residual DOS skills from when I was that age. That shit is hard--you've got to memorize the commands or be constantly looking everything up, phrase everything in the right syntax, there's no pretty visual interface, etc. Kids these days have it easy.

I still haven't seen that PC commercial with who I swear is Ianto again. Anybody know when Torchwood is coming back? I can't seem to find any info on that.

Watching this week's BSG without having watched the last yet, which doesn't make me happy but it's either watch this one now and watch last week's later online or watch them both in order online, the latter using up huge amounts of my weekly bandwidth. Random thought--if the Tighs are more or less Adam and Eve of the Cylons, does that make Saul Tigh/Caprica Six the new crazy space incest? But aww, I <3 Bill and Saul. You don't quite slash them as in. . . sex (LOLOL, Kaylee) because they're kinda oldandgross, but they're definitely sort of an intimate bromance OTP. Vaguely like Xena and Gabrielle minus the subtext.

Psych was ehh. Enjoyable, but I'm not running to my computer to download it to watch again. And the new Dollhouse right before (another one of which I watched one episode before the one preceding it) was also ehh. Killer fun for Eliza Dushku to play, but that seems to be entirely what it is--an excuse for her to play a different fun character every week. But Mark Sheppard, seriously, that man is in every show that I watch. Dollhouse, Burn Notice (which I don't really watch on purpose unless there's going to be someone I like on it, but caught his episode of), Battlestar Galactica, NCIS, In Plain Sight, Shark, Bionic Woman, Medium, and of course Firefly, with either reoccurring or big parts on each one.

Because this is looking to be an entirely TV-based post instead of me talking about my ADVENTURE OF DOOM AND DEATH on Tuesday and other such RL activities (I've been postponing writing that up because it's going to be a long one), I might have to start watching How I Met Your Mother after showing my mom Dr. Horrible over the long weekend and rewatching part of Neil Patrick Harris's SNL that I recorded on my laptop (while trying to find out WTF this gigantic, oddly named file on my computer was) because I think I love him crazy much.

Oh, Monday's House? THE CAMERON/CUDDY, I THANKS YOU FOR IT. Seriously. Got to download that one and icon it, because those shots at the end totally could be taken out of context (as per how we slashers work) to look like them holding their baby. Reminds me of a set of fics I started writing pre-first hard drive crashdown--it was some "5 Ways Cuddy Doesn't Have a Baby (And One She Does)" thing, remember when that was going around? Most of them were more Cuddy character study, one without Cameron at all, one with her only playing a supporting (supportive, actually) role, but the "one she does" was clear femslash. I wish I still had those, as I seem to remember kinda liking them--the "does" one was kinda unbelievably fluffy, but then I think it kept getting longer and started developing more plot and then naturally, it never got finished (as that's what happens to fics I don't write all in one sitting).

I also forgot. Criminal Minds. The gay is abounding. Surely it can't be just me after the scene at the beginning of 4.14 (I think two weeks ago?) where Emily's horoscope says the moon was going to screw things up romantically and put her in a shitty mood and then we see JJ's baby ring and cut immediately back to Emily's pissed off face after it's revealed that the father of the baby has a matching one.

LOL, finally got around to finishing that Deep Space Nine vid I started ages and ages (like, possibly towards 10 months or a year) ago.



More commentary on this one. There are some bits that I really wanted to redo, as this was the first time I'd really played with WMM, and you can notice at what point in the vid making did I learn certain tricks if you look closely. But because I had certain bits I needed to be at exact certain times (and I couldn't figure out a way to lock one or two clips at certain times and be able to move around the rest without bumping everything), I ended up not fixing the bits I wanted to. Ehh. There are things I'd like to change, things I might change later, and bits that didn't come out the way I wanted them to, but I actually finished it, and I figured I'd better upload it and get it off my computer before something happens and I lose it.

I was watching Becker this afternoon (because that's become my summer show, as all the good stuff isn't on/I've already seen), and I confirmed my previous suspicions that I'm totally celebritygirlcrushing on Terry Farrell. Hee. I got all angry at the boyfriend of the week when he kissed Reggie, because I knew that he was going to dump her in the end and Reggie would be all sad and I would want to hug her. And that made me laugh while I was being jealous angry about the kissing.

I got the desire, a few days ago, to work on this fic that I started 4 years ago or so and never finished. Looking back over it, it's entertaining how much my writing style has changed. I don't want to change huge plot points, because my original intention was just to fix it up a bit (because there's a blaring misspelling of necessary in the version of the first chapter that's on The Pit that I've never bothered to fix) and maybe write a bit more of it, and I sort of want to keep it how it was (at least the beginning parts) just because it is one of the earliest bits of my writing that I've still got (elementary school Xena fanfiction that's probably hidden away in the basement somewhere for future embarrassment purposes aside) and I'd like to be able to look back, as I'm doing, and see how much my writing has changed. But there are bits where I'm all "Well, if I say this instead, that's a bit more plausible," etc.

I'm probably going to change it (though not nit-picky, I don't like the style of that phrase changing; that stuff I'm going to leave, just the plot bits I'm going to change) and just keep a copy of the old one. Makes me laugh, though, because I was about to fall asleep a few nights ago, and I was sort of planning out the next chapter in my head before I even realized what I was mentally writing. I hadn't even thought of that one in ages.

Illusion
Author: crashcart9
Fandom: House, MD
Rating: R
Date: Begun 30 April, finished 28 May 2007.
Notes: Because xx_housecat_xx told me to post it and made me all agiggle with her “Whoa”s. Idea jotted down on my hand during work about a month and a half ago, forgotten about, remembered, written a few weeks later when it served as a handy procrastination excuse, forgotten about, remembered, realized I actually had finished it, polished, posted.
Summary: Illusion shattered.

( Fictasticness! )

So. Remember that big bit of the history project that is due Friday? Yeah. Not getting done. There's a story behind this.

I had quite a bit to do still, but only a few hours worth. Non-book research that I already had found? On my hard drive. I modified my topic like yesterday, put the finishing touches on said modification today, but quite a bit of what I had still applied to the new topic. Asked my brother at about 7pm to bring my hard drive to me on the couch from this (the main) computer. He grabs it by the cord. Cord unplugs from the drive, drive clunks on floor. Me=pissed. But not hugely. Yet.

I go to the gym. Come back. Plug in hard drive. Not working. The light wouldn't even come on to signal that it had power. Messed around with it. Went out and bought a new power thing as that appeared to be the problem and as the power goes through the USB normally, but there's a spot for an adapter cord (one of which did not come with the drive, unfortunately) for extra power or if your USB port on your computer won't give any/enough power, I hoped that would work. Nope. Determined at some point that power wasn't the problem. Plugged it into the other (this) computer, and the light came on. Problem solved. Nope.

Power's working, drive not. Spent a long time trying to figure out the problem. I eventually decided just to screw it and go to bed (as I'm getting sick and have been up late every night this week and was really upset that it looked like I was loosing everything on the drive) without doing the project. Mom comes back, tells me that my dad got it working. I come out. Not really. He thought he had because the computer did some kind of "you've plugged something in" thing, but it wouldn't do it again. We took the thing apart, messed with all of it. Tried to connect it to a box thing that we have that will turn a regular hard drive into an external one. No luck- the ribbon plug is just barely too big for some reason. (But the last conclusion I came to was that that wouldn't help anyway.) What kind of morons make stuff in a non-standard size? At some point (I think it was fine before) I heard the thing making funny noises like it wasn't spinning right. Somehow (involved somewhat gentle shaking and smacking) got it to make the good, spinning right sound. Still wouldn't work. Now pretty much no idea why. It's still out of the case and more or less disassembled at this point, and when you plug it in and unplug it, it was making the "duh-deh" "deh-duh"sound things. And occasionally, a box would come up over the far right of the taskbar saying "A problem occurred during hardware installation. Your new device may not function properly."

So. It's almost 1 at this point, and my dad decides to go to bed. I play with it a little bit more by disabling and (attempting) re-enabling of the device thing. Which we did once before. But before, it didn't tell us to reboot. I reboot this time. Computer doesn't reboot right- goes to the black screen on startup where it tells you about your machine specs, only loads the first few lines of text that are supposed to be on there, and stops. Bad sign. I reboot again, this time it loads properly, but the hard drive is back to making bad (even worse than before, where it was a funny badwhir + click thing, now it's just worsewhir) noises meaning that it's stopped spinning completely.


Hell. So. Yeah. I probably could have done my entire summary of evidence thing if I hadn't played with the hard drive until past 1:30. Because I didn't have horridly much on there in terms of done research, just a bunch of sources, some of which I emailed to myself from the medical library during the tour with minimed and can't get any other way than through them. And most, excepting the aforementioned articles that you've got to pay for/can't get at all except through the med library, I could find again. Had I actually gotten my arse in gear and forgotten about it.


But I'm still really really upset. This had so much stuff on it.

School work that I still need/isn't done/I use for reference. Which should probably be my biggest concern. But isn't.

It had hundreds of fics. Of which quite a few of the older ones (mostly my Enterprise collection) aren't online anywhere anymore.

And around 30 of my fics, which is what I'm most sad about, that and the other writings and work. Because of the fics, 10 or so are incomplete and only exist or are in the most complete form on there, several more have never been posted anywhere, and the remaining ones have been posted in various places, but most only to one site/list/board, which will make it difficult to try to track them all down to keep a copy. I don't have any kind of definitive list of all my stories, so it's going to be nearly impossible to make sure I've recovered all of the ones that it is even possible for me to find again (I completely forget about stories I've written only to rediscover them all the time. It's going to be a lot harder to rediscover now). And there are innumerous ideas and little bits of story jotted down in random Word Perfect/Word files for stuff I've not yet gotten around to writing, most of which I typed up so long ago that there's no chance of me remembering them.

Not to mention the videos and the episodes and the pictures and the manip work and the icons. OMG, the icons. I just realized that. Even ignoring that I don't have any of the huge numbers of them that I saved for my perusing pleasure that belonged to other people, I don't have any of my own anymore but the 6 that are currently on here. Some of my favorite ones just got switched out recently for this batch, and as such are not in existence.

Fic type stuff and other fandomy things are pretty much what I do for fun. So basically, all this stuff that is the only thing I have time to do for recreation anymore (that and read, especially medical type stuff, lots of which was also on here) is gone. I get a huge part of my enjoyment in life from this stuff, and it seems like that's been destroyed. Everything I've worked on, everything I've read and really enjoyed, everything I've done. It feels like part of my life is gone with it.

And I'm being depressivey and overreacting and stupid and weepy because I start crying again every couple of minutes when I start thinking about it again and I know it and I can't help it.

Which is why I haven't done my history thing, even yet. I could have done it, not easily, but done it. But I've just reacted so strongly to the breakage of the hard drive that I can't. And I know it's not just this, but it's everything lately put together and this just finally made me break down, and I can't force myself to do anything.

And yet I'm not in bed, where I should be taking into account my lack of sleep of late and the hour. (Thanks in part to a 52oz diet Dr. Pepper that I downed throughout the whole thing that I got after I got back from the gym when I thought that I was going to be up pretty late doing work that's keeping me up both from the caffeine and going to the bathroom every few minutes.) Nor am I studying for my Biology and English exams. I feel so completely worn out, but I don't feel like I would be able to get to sleep or really do anything save think about this and stare off into space.

Yay, breakdownage. I love stress.