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resonantHey, why not. Here's a meme last seen chez ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
darthfox:
Ask me for "top five" lists of pretty much anything, and I will list you my top five of that thing or things.
Note that if you ask for something that requires any knowledge of pop culture that can't be gleaned from reading slash, I'm likely to disappoint, as I'm sadly out of touch with my own culture.
darthfox: Ask me for "top five" lists of pretty much anything, and I will list you my top five of that thing or things.
Note that if you ask for something that requires any knowledge of pop culture that can't be gleaned from reading slash, I'm likely to disappoint, as I'm sadly out of touch with my own culture.
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(no subject)
Date: 7/20/05 01:31 am (UTC)Top five things you look for when choosing to read a slash story?
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Date: 7/20/05 02:09 am (UTC)1. I already know and like the author's work.
2. Rating is NC-17, or at least R-for-sex.
3. Featured characters are among my current obsessions.
4. No warning for torture. (Other warnings are a maybe/maybe not, but if there's torture in it, I won't be able to read it.)
5. No grievous awfulness in the summary, author's notes, beta thanks, etc., suggesting that the author is a bad writer or a fool.
Sorry. Not so interesting.
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
Date: 7/20/05 01:31 am (UTC)Top Five Ice Cream flavors :P
(no subject)
Date: 7/20/05 02:12 am (UTC)1. Haagen Dazs Honey Vanilla.
2. Ben & Jerry's Cherry Garcia.
3. Baskin Robbins Gold Medal Ribbon.
4. Ben & Jerry's Honey I'm Home. (Note honey theme)
5. Homemade strawberry ice.
(no subject)
From:(no subject)
Date: 7/20/05 01:34 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 7/20/05 02:23 am (UTC)1. Talking about sex. I've recently discovered a kink for talking about sex instead of doing it -- when they can't do it, when they've decided that they can't ever do it. Pornangstporn!
2. Finger-fucking. Not as preparation but just for fun.
3. Hands on faces. I don't know why that always gets to me, but it always, always gets to me.
4. Kissing, except that it's almost never done well. I can't do it well myself.
5. Grooming. Since Sentinel is currently on my mind, I'm remembering some story where Jim brushes Blair's hair. [happy sigh]
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Date: 7/20/05 01:36 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 7/20/05 02:33 am (UTC)1. A Wrinkle In Time. If I remember correctly, this is the first book I ever bought myself.
2. The Song of Hiawatha. Seriously, I checked that out over and over. I don't know why I loved it so.
3. Little House in the Big Woods. For someone as lazy as I am, I really like reading about other people's hard work.
4. Island of the Blue Dolphins, for much the same reason as 3.
5. A sci-fi collection, whose title I can't remember, but which included an Anne McCaffrey short story called "The Littlest Dragonrider," which introduced me to the joys of sci-fi when I was eight years old, and without which I wouldn't be who I am today. (There was also a story about an alien who had searched all the known galaxies to find out which species had the best life, and had decided it was Earth housecats!)
Kidlet's current favorites are The Hobbit, Dealing With Dragons, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Alice In Wonderland, and a Pogo cartoon collection.
(no subject)
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Date: 7/24/05 01:23 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 7/20/05 01:40 am (UTC)top five things to look for when beta-reading a story
top five TS-fic sensory descriptions
top five worst euphemisms for orgasm
top five favorite among your own stories
(i love this meme. *picks your brain*)
(no subject)
Date: 7/20/05 02:46 am (UTC)I'm weak on some of the areas a beta reader needs, so how about this:
Top five things *I* am able to spot as a beta reader.
1. Voice problems. Characters who don't sound like themselves.
2. Motivation problems. When I need more to convince me that a character would do what he's doing.
3. Triteness, especially in sex scenes.
4. Insufficient sensory specificness in sex scenes.
5. Awkward sentence structure.
Top five things my beta readers find for me:
1. Pacing problems. Slow, boring places. Too much stop-and-start.
2. Plot problems. Action that seems out of order, tensions that wax and wane instead of building steadily.
3. Motivation problems, as above.
4. Too much thinking, too much talking.
5. Not enough moving around doing things.
TS sensory descriptions -- it's been too long! The only one I can come up with is something Livia wrote when we collaborated on Nuance (http://trickster.org/res/nuance1.html), where Jim feels the shadow that Blair's hand casts on his back in the light of the lamp.
Orgasm euphemisms! I may have to do some research on that one, much as it pains me. The only ones that come to mind are more just cliches, like "over the edge" and "like a freight train."
My favorites among my own stories ... hmmmmm.
1. Broadway Hotel (http://trickster.org/res/broadway.html) (Due South)
2. Loving North (http://trickster.org/res/loving.html) (Due South)
3. Bed and Board (http://trickster.org/res/bed.html) (Harry Potter)
4. Warning (http://trickster.org/res/warning.html) (Stargate Atlantis)
5. Telemachos (http://trickster.org/res/telemachos.html) (Horatio Hornblower)
Thanks! Those were fun.
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Date: 7/20/05 01:41 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 7/20/05 03:04 am (UTC)1. People singing, unless they sing in canon. Even then, if song lyrics are listed. Or quoting poetry. Especially if it's supposed to be their own.
2. Moronic puns. As in "I'm so screwed. No, I only *wish* I were." And "It's hard. Well, literally." And "He couldn't even think straight, Heh. Straight."
3. Screen after screen of nothing but characters explaining to each other how they feel. Especially when you've got a canon character who's guaranteed not to know what he feels (say, Jim Ellison or Harry Potter) or one who's guaranteed not to tell (say, Benton Fraser).
4. Musing. Especially first-person present-tense musing. Especially musing while watching your lover sleep.
5. Fetishizing anal sex. You know, like those stories where you have five sex scenes of various types and then one character whines to the other, "When are you going to make love to me?"
Those are random. Give me a couple of weeks and I can come up with the ones I really hate the most!
(no subject)
Date: 7/20/05 01:45 am (UTC)Top five pairings to write.
(no subject)
Date: 7/20/05 08:33 pm (UTC)To read:
Rodney McKay/John Sheppard
Rodney McKay/Radek Zelenka
Daniel Jackson/Jack O'Neill
Harry Potter/Severus Snape (though my copy of HBP arrived today, so we'll see where that one goes)
Greg House/James Wilson
To write:
McKay/Sheppard
Potter/Snape
Harry Potter/Ron Weasley/Hermione Granger
Ray Kowalski/Benton Fraser (funny how it's still fun to write even though I'm hardly reading it at all)
right now? Bender/Brian from Breakfast Club
(no subject)
Date: 7/20/05 01:53 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 7/20/05 08:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 7/20/05 01:57 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 7/20/05 08:45 pm (UTC)Han Solo and Princess Leia
Ray and Stella Kowalski
Maddy and David from Moonlighting
that one Hawkeye-Margaret hookup on M.A.S.H.
Ann and Remy in The Big Easy
Hm. Apparently I like bickering. Either that or bickering is what the entertainment media give me lots of.
(no subject)
Date: 7/20/05 02:08 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 7/20/05 08:53 pm (UTC)Good old reliable frosted brownies
Slice-and-bake cranberry-orange cookies
Ladyfingers (a.k.a. nut crescents) -- mostly butter, almost no sugar, lots of finely chopped pecans
Extremely high-maintenance sticky raspberry-filled butter cookies (http://www.livejournal.com/users/resonant8/42982.html)
(Oh, hey, I actually posted the recipes for several of these last year! (http://www.livejournal.com/users/resonant8/74317.html))
Now my mouth is watering.
(no subject)
Date: 7/20/05 02:32 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 7/20/05 09:01 pm (UTC)Cat Stevens, "Moonshadow"
The Chieftains with Ricky Skaggs, "Cindy"
Nsync, "The Lion Sleeps Tonight"
The Beatles, "Ob-la-de, Ob-la-da"
Bing Crosby, "Swinging on a Star"
However, the kidlet uses the iPod as much as I do, and all those are on her special personal playlist. ("Cindy" in particular is not a song that I would go out of my way to play all that often, but it's a favorite of hers.)
To get to songs that are frequently played because I like them, we'd have to go to my standard playlist that isn't "working music" (i.e. instrumental or in a language that I don't understand), which gets us:
Waverly Consort, "Ay Santa Maria"
Bruce Cockburn, "After the Rain"
Laura Love, "All Our Lives"
Baha Men, "Back to the Island"
Grateful Dead, "Uncle John's Band"
Hm. That doesn't look quite right, either, but I'm going to stop messing with it. Make of it what you will!
(no subject)
Date: 7/20/05 04:25 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 7/21/05 01:05 am (UTC)1. Sci-fi/fantasy novelis.
2. Folklore researcher. The person who finds the connections between the folktales of different nations, connects them with, like, mythology and tarot and Jungian archetypes ... that would be so cool.
3. Music researcher. Like, someone working for or with the Boston Camerata had to say, "Hey, 'Heavenly Dove' and 'Tag, nach Davids sag' and 'Barbary Allen' are all based on the same tune," so they could put them together. I want to be the person who discovers that.
4. Um, is there any way I could beta sex scenes for a living? Ones by really good writers only?
5. I begin to run out of ideas at this point. Except that I've always thought it would be cool to be a librarian.
(no subject)
Date: 7/20/05 04:29 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 7/21/05 01:10 am (UTC)1. Please, please don't feel that you have to create a romantic relationship between the male and female leads. Please. Too often it diminishes the woman, and it almost always diminishes the relationship. (And if there's good ground for romantic tension, it's wise not to have them act on it until the last half of the last season!)
I was so very proud of how the Voyager people handled this; there were sparks between Janeway and Chakotay, yes, but if she had actually slept with him? My respect for her would never have recovered.
2. Please, please don't be willing to monkey around with characterization just for a cheap laugh. Due South did less of that than most shows, but even there -- when they had Fraser hypnotize Ray just to plant suggestions to make Ray more complaint, I just cringed. A Fraser who would do such a thing is a Fraser who requires ten episodes (or a slash story) of additional explanation, because this is not the Fraser that I know.
(no subject)
Date: 7/20/05 06:15 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 7/21/05 01:15 am (UTC)2. Plumbing. Again, even basic homeowner stuff would do.
3. Plotting at novel length. (Funny how this is not the first or second thing that occurs to me! But I'm working on this one on my own, whereas the other two seem kind of hopeless to me.)
4. Speaking another language.
5. Playing a musical instrument.
(no subject)
Date: 7/20/05 10:00 am (UTC)Top five things you like to see in a review?
(no subject)
Date: 7/21/05 01:28 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 7/20/05 11:44 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 7/21/05 01:41 am (UTC)Hm. Best 5:
1. Writing.
2. Typing.
3. Reading useful stuff either about writing or vaguely related to the topic of some project or other.
4. Hanging out in LJ.
5. Asking the kidlet strange questions so I can hear her stranger answers.
Worst 5:
1. Temp work. (Actually so far I've only had one assignment and it wasn't bad, but I hate losing control over my time like that.)
2. Taking naps just because I'm bored.
3. Staring into space, unable to write.
4. Adding up, over and over, how long it will be before I can afford to replace this laptop.
5. God! So much laundry!
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Date: 7/20/05 01:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 7/21/05 02:00 am (UTC)"I knew that, of course. I'm surprised you did." (Rising 2)
"Maybe we should offer a sense of humor in trade." (Underground, and Sheppard replies: "Sure. They can have yours.")
When Sheppard says "Define 'strange'": "You don't know what 'strange' means? ... weird, freakish, odd ..." (Underground)
"I don’t mean to sound negative because that would be, you know, so not me." (Home)
When it's pointed out that he's not flying straight: "Well, in space all motion is relative." (The Defiant One)
(no subject)
Date: 7/20/05 03:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 7/21/05 02:12 am (UTC)1. A certain amount of gay vibe is inevitable in a buddy show, which is all about the relationship between the two leads, and also in an ensemble show, which is about relationships in general. Just accept this. Matching the guys up with random women who all conveniently die or get arrested at the end of the episode does not help; it only makes the guys look like sluts.
2. You do not get to use the geek as comic relief when it's convenient! No no no! Do not let us into his head, let us see him as the subject of his own story, and then in the next episode pull back and encourage us to laugh at him!
3. It would be so lovely if you'd give the female characters actual relationships with one another, and not just relationships with the men. I mean relationships, as in tension, misunderstanding, changing feelings over time ... intensity.
4. Don't assume that we only want to slash the pretty people. We want to slash the complicated people, we want to slash the lonely people, the needy people, the people that we want to comfort. (At least I do.)
5. It's actually more fun if you don't hand it to us on a silver platter. You give us the friendships and the rivalries; we'll do the rest.
and for good measure:
6. The more humanoid your villains are, the more likely it is that they'll be able to get in on the fun!
(no subject)
Date: 7/20/05 10:16 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 7/21/05 02:17 am (UTC)1. San Francisco. What's not to love?
2. Asheville, N.C. Mountain weather sounds great to me as I swelter through an Illinois July. Southern produce. Great folk music. Interesting culture. All day singin' and dinner on the ground.
3. Salem, Massechusetts. We were there at Halloween on our honeymoon, which was an adventure.
4. Charleston, S.C. Beautiful town, interesting history ... I'd probably hate it in the summer, though. And I don't know how you get used to having one of your major public buildings be called "the slave market."
5. Um ... actually I can't think of any more!
(no subject)
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