I see what I want to do there

Dissertations done and handed in. Exams next week. Moving on to the OMFG.

I was looking around my old old external harddrive to find some Kyou Kara Maou (no, I don't know why) and found a bunch my old High School work. Including a script for an English project done with reservoir and others. We had to perform a modern adaptation of a scene from Macbeth, and we decided to tape ours and edit it to make it all shiny. Our modern adaptation was in the style of, uh, Valley Girls. So, Seana has said I should post it, because for all of its cracky 11th grade immaturity it is still very funny in a satire of badfic kind of way.

This is now 5 years old, unedited from that time, a lot of the humor may only make sense if you know the people involved, and it was always meant to be (awesomely) bad. So, with that in mind, I give you our 11th grade English project (Oh god ...):

Macbeth, William Shakespeare, Act IV, Scene i
Modern Adaptation: Valley Girls

Cast:

Jane (first witch) – Kerry (chibikaijuu)
Tracie (second witch) – Seana (reservoir)
Stacie (third witch) – Kat (white_howler)
Heci (Hecate) – Lowell (aegeus)
Mac (Macbeth) – Lowell

---------------------------------

EXT. A SEMI-WOODED AREA – DAY

A cauldron sits in the middle of the scene, JANE comes into the scene carrying her familiar, a CAT, and a bag.

CAT
Mew, mew, mew.

TRACIE enters with her familiar, a HEDGEHOG, who nips at her nail, and a few grocery bags.

TRACIE
Unh! Stupid animal! I broke a nail …

( Read on ... :O )

The finished product was even crackier due to someone's playing way too much with some of Final Cut Pro's sillier settings. The fight scene especially got drawn out and I believe ended up not having Britney Spears but Heart's Barracuda played over it. I also don't think this is the final version of the script, as I remember some other jokes in the final product, though those might have been improvised on the day. There was also an easter egg thing with reservoir dying of a SlimFast and cough syrup overdose that came after the credits.

We ended up getting a 100% even though almost none of classmates got the jokes. Our teacher did and that's all that matters.

I might die of dissertations. Due on May 12! D: I might actually start posting normally again after all of this is over. Maybe. I am however very proud of this line at the end of chapter 4 of my Language, Truth and Literature disseration:

"Therefore, Lewis’s views on truth in fiction are left completely untenable and must be abandoned."

Take that David Lewis! And I even let you keep modal realism to do it!

Oh god I just tried to save this LJ entry, spending way too much time in Word. You may now return to your regularly scheduled friends page.

Poll #1150602 BATTORU
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

WHO WILL WIN

I don't usually do memes, but I like this one. :O

Leave a comment and I will:

1. Tell you why I friended you.
2. Associate you with something - fandom, a song, a color, a photo, a word etc.
3. Tell you something I like about you.
4. Tell you a memory I have of you.
5. Ask something I've always wanted to know about you.
6. Tell you my favorite user pic of yours.

Also, I apparently win at analogies. SPN fans, please don't kill me.

( Text behind here for people that can't get to the above flocked entry. )

Went shopping on Oxford Street yesterday. That was FUN. In all reality, it wasn't too bad. Got a scarf and some new jeans at Topman, then went Christmas shopping for Alex's family. (We're doing all shopping for US people in the US, because fuck bringing stuff on the plane ... also, cheaper!) Spent a lot of time in Liberty looking for Alex's mum, and not really finding anything, then went down toward Soho for some food, bought wine for Alex's parents (a nice 1996 Saint-Émilion Grand Crú, natch) and some other presents, then decided to walk all the way back to Liberty to check the price of a vase Alex had seen and wanted to get for his mom. That ended up being Murano glass. And £400. So, yeah. Didn't buy that. He got her a placeholder present of a bauble with promise to get a better present in the US. Went over to his parents to help decorate their tree and had a nice Sunday roast too.

Anyway, I like to talk about music. I like music. I hate some music. I rant, I ramble, I do a lot of talking at people about it. I regularly filibuster jlh in IMs because I have no real outlet for it. I don't post music stuff here much because most people just go TL;DR at it. So, I've started a music blog. It exists mostly as a place for me to write up my thoughts about music, and will generally be quite rambly and obscure, and I don't really expect anyone to read it. However, if you would like to read my music blog you can find it here. I will include recommendations, and would love comments and recommendations on it too. I'll still talk some about music here, but anything long I'll post there, and may or may not link to from here.

Have also created an LJ feed for the lazy to friend: ohnoesmusic

Term is over and am up in London with Alex until next Wednesday when we go back to the US for Christmas. By the end of the holidays I need to have figured out my dissertation title, so I forsee a lot of reading during this time, but still a lot less than during term time, as it is the holidays. I went through a month of not really playing WoW much except to arena, but have gotten back into it more recently, going to Kara and clearing it with DotA. Have participated in the downing of everyone in Kara except for Aran and R&J (and Chess, but that doesn't really count). I have like 10 million heroics to do for even more badges for crap. But yeah.

Anyway, I've been thinking of coming up with some sort of best/top/favorite albums of 2007 list. I'm doing this more to listen to music I may not have given enough of a chance or overlooked than as an actual exercise in ranking the albums, but I figure if I go into with that goal in mind I'll actually listen to everything more attentively. So, I've come up with a shortlist of albums I think fall into this category, to be listened to and whittle downed into a smaller (ranked?) list, but I want some of your input too. I miss a lot, musicwise, because I don't listen to the radio anywhere near as much as I used to, and I miss a lot of some of the more obscure US stuff as I'm not there anymore. So, please, recommend me any albums that came out this year that you really liked, that you think were amazing, that are in your top albums of the year group. I don't want to accidentally miss this year's TV On The Radio. Which I totally did last year. : /

( My (rather long) shortlist so far ... )

There are a few things on there that I already want to cut out after listening to again, but I'm going to leave it up as it is for now, and whittle it down later. I may not ever actually whittle it down, as my real goal is simply to listen to a lot of new music. And ranking shit is hard anyway.

I broke my habit of only having a haircut once a year by having one a mere six months (!?) since the last one. It's so SHORT. It's shorter than it's been in YEARS. The fringe/bangs is still longish, but quite short for me, and the back and sides are just absurdly short, but I really really like it. Before and after pics after cut!

( Ooooo, crappy myspacesque self-pics, how exciting ... )

I totally forgot yesterday was Thanksgiving until I asked Seana on IM why she wasn't at work. Oops. My Thanksgiving dinner consisted of a massive korma I didn't finish and felt sick after eating. A good Thanksgiving indeed. 8D

Only two more weeks of uni until the winter holidays, and in less than a month I'll be back in the US with Alex. Whoo. chinawolf and Drae should be showing up sometime tomorrow, cruelly stolen from yuki_scorpio via our associates in Oxford. Haven't seen Tine in a bit less than a year, and have never met Drae, so should be fun! If Drae isn't secretly evil. >.> I don't think Tine would date someone who was evil though.

Anyway, the real point of this entry is that Sainsbury's is selling Innocent smoothies WITH HATS ON THEM:



They have cute little knit hats and don't cost any more than normal (in fact they cost less than they were supposed to, what :<). Supposedly 50p or so of every smoothie with a hat sold goes to help old people, but I can overlook this for the sheer fact that it is a smoothie wearing a hat. Alex is slightly worried about what we'll do with the hats when we drink the smoothies. I think he's missing the point of it being a smoothie in a hat.

ETA: Finally have Leopard. Off to installllllll.

The rave had lego! So I made a spaceship:



Bed time now. At 7am. >.>

Went to Oxford Circus today to go shopping. There were so many people out. Does no one, like, work on Friday? I thought maybe we would have avoided the insane weekend crowds I hate so much, but no, they were out in force. Bought some clothes, including a pair of jeans that got a big NO from reservoir and jlh, but I bought them anyway. (wordplay and broken_wings217 thought they were a good idea, so :P)

Went to the Apple Store to buy Leopard but it had shut early for iPhone launch. There were droves of people outside queuing for a smartphone that isn't 3G and has its amazing potential in other areas completely gimped by the firmware. I love Apple, but I really think the iPhone is a bit shit, they've got this great touch interface (like, absolutely fantastic) and then went okay, so know we don't have to make any of the other features any good. Especially considering most of those features could be included with no actual work on Apple's part. Oh well.

Alex and I are off to meet friends to go to a rave. Well, not a real rave, as it's in a club in Vauxhall, not a field somewhere. And it's not 1998. More of a new rave. Though I don't know if it will be New Rave. More on this later maybe.

So imma start updating more. I used to update a lot, with real updates. That was a long time ago. I still, as always, read my flist everyday ... I just don't post. I think I had a block against posts having to be special for some reason, exceptionally funny, or an important commentary on something, and I couldn't post just about my day and stuff going on. It's lead to me posting very sparingly and when I do it being random vaguely funny stuff that's not actually about me. So I'm going to start actually using this like a journal again. Hopefully I'm not too boring. >.>

Got my plane tickets home for Christmas, and Alex is coming too. :D He hasn't been to the US since my prom and graduation in 2004. That was a great visit, though prom could have been better. Nothing that happened in particular I just didn't feel in the mood, which was a shame because I was at senior prom with my boyfriend, and that's not something a lot of guys get to do. At least not without it making some sort of statement or upset. It looks as if this time my mom will actually let Alex and I sleep in the same room (omg yay, this annoyed me to no end last time, us sleeping separately, though I see why my mom made us do it :<). Alex is also coming down to a Brighton a lot more this year as I have a much better flat that isn't a shit hole. This is a Good Thing. It also means I don't have to take the train every weekend up to London, which is always a pain in the ass. >.>

Third year at uni is ... weird so far. There's like, zero work, but TONS of reading. Like, I've done more reading in the last five weeks than I did in all of my first two years. I have an essay due on Tuesday, but it's unassessed (doesn't count), and it's my only work this term. I have three courses, two are evaluated by exams in May and the other by a 6,000 word dissertation (not a dissertation of the sort you'd think of in the US, just a long essay on a topic of my choosing - I'll actually have two of these to do, one on a topic in Wittgenstein and one on a topic from a later course). My three courses next term are the same. So come April/May I'll probably be going insane with study/dissertation writing. And then I'll be done and out in the real world. More on that in another post, maybe. My ethics course, Moral Problems, is interesting, but I'm running into difficulties being an ethical non-cognitivist in an applied ethics class. How do you argue applied ethics when your meta-ethicial viewpoint says there's nothing in them to be arguing about? (ETA: Alex doesn't like those two previous sentences. He says I'm alienating my target audience. <.<) Wittgenstein and Philosophy of Science are less difficult in that sense, but still quite challenging in some respects. Wittgenstein especially, but that's the nature of his work so I can't really complain.

So, who's around DC December 19-29 and wants to do stuff with me and Alex?

aegeus: It took so long to bake it!
wordplay: Look, baby, I have the recipe right here.

aegeus: so
aegeus: how's nipponland
reisha: I got crazy lost on the way to the hotel
aegeus: :<
aegeus: How long?
reisha: :< I wasn't counting
aegeus: haha
aegeus: How many times could you have run OH in the time you were lost?
reisha: OVER 9000

So. reservoir and I are at my parent's mountain house in the middle of Assfuck Nowhere, Blue Ridge Mountains, Virginia. Last night at dinner the people at the table behind us were discussing how their friend had written two academic books on Harry Potter, was working on a third, and had just been to a Harry Potter conference.

The middle of nowhere just isn't what it used to be. Though it is very pretty. And quiet. Very, very quiet.

Sent to me by jlh, who had it sent to her by ali_wildgoose. Don't know the original creator.

There a NOT any spoilers in this entry. Read on, and please keep the comments spoiler-free too.

I tend not to engage in canon analysis because it annoys me, but sometimes JKR says something colossally stupid and I have to comment. From the Bloomsbury chat over the weekend:

J.K. Rowling: Muggle-borns will have a witch or wizard somewhere on their family tree, in some cases many, many generations back. The gene re-surfaces in some unexpected places.

Okay. This Does. Not. Work.

It can't be a purely recessive gene because it would then be quite rare for a wizard/witch who marries a muggle to produce a wizard/witch, which from the evidence we have doesn't appear to be true.

It can't be purely dominant because the Creevey brothers are both muggle-born, and if it were dominant then they would both have to be mutations and the chance of having two siblings with the same genetic mutation is very, very low. Also, it would mean that all muggle-borns have the phenotype due to a random mutation, and given JKR's earlier comment that 25% of Hogwarts is muggle-born this seems highly unlikely. Also against this is Ron's comment that they had to marry muggles or risk dying out, which wouldn't be an issue with a dominant gene.

It can't be incomplete dominance (where an intermediate phenotype is expressed, ie white and red = pink) because that would imply that half-bloods have less magical ability than pure-bloods, which isn't true, look at Tom Riddle and Snape.

It can't be co-dominance (where both traits are equally expressed) because, again, of the Creevey reason.

It seems the only way for it to work would be the 'gene' being magical itself, that is not just the phenotype being magical ability but the actual allele working magically. This would mean a squib would seemingly be someone for who the 'gene' magically (randomly) turned off. Many generations later some descendant of the squib would have it magically (randomly) turn back on for them, and we have a muggle-born witch/wizard. This is just mutations again, and leads back to some of the above questions. It also doesn't explain why it happened for both Creevey brothers, but not for both Evans sisters. It seems this is just another case of JKR having a complete lack of understanding in a specific subject, but applying it anyway. For it to be a 'gene' of the sort JKR implies it would have to be so far removed from the concept we have of a gene so as not to really be a gene at all.

To people who have more genetics knowledge than I do: Is there a way for this to work? I mean, as a single gene, not as the expression of multiple genes, which gets more complicated and could probably be twisted to make this work.

As multiple genes it could, I suppose, work by there being a phenotype for each gene such that its expression contributes X to magical variable M, and once M crosses a certain threshold you have magical powers, but an M just over the threshold and one way over the threshold grant the same power. That is, it would be a discrete threshold that has nothing to do with talent, merely the ability to either do magic or not do magic. While the idea of many genes has real life parallels in things like height, hair color and other things, I don't think there's a parallel to the discrete nature that would be required (if there is, can someone point it out?).

However, I doubt JKR thought about multiple genes, I think she just thought it would work when it didn't. But when her whole series is about supposedly ungrounded fanaticism in pure-bloodedness it seems almost irresponsible to give that grounding a basis in genetic fact. :< Oh JKR.

So. I thought the episode was kinda ... shit, sadly.

( Explanation, SPOILERS )

I do hold out hope for twists next week that may make everything I said here invalid. I just doubt it'll happen.

( Quick comment on Utopia (Doctor Who) SPOILERS )

Right, so I've not posted in FOREVER, as usual. But as always I am reading my flist everyday, so that's something, right? Anyway, going to endeavor to post more often. Don't know why it's so hard now, when four years ago I'd post twice a day.

Life is good but also full of stuff to do. Exams, essays coming up. Have to figure out housing for next year as we can't stay in this house, as amazing as it is. Spring break was fun, reservoir visited me in Brighton and then we went up to London for a week where we did silly tourist things that I never really bother with, and also saw Equus. Yes, Daniel Radcliffe naked. Mmm. Okay, moving on. Rest of the break was quite relaxed, stayed in London for most of it, then back down here for the last weekend before school started back up. I have a new phone which is apparently 'the world's slimmest slider' and has all the top end features and can also produce Shakespeare. Well, maybe not that last one. It's also technically not available yet. I had no idea it was this good, I just went into Vodafone for an upgrade and pointed and was like 'this one is pretty.' *shrug* It has a great camera so I've actually been like ... taking pictures. Have posted a bunch on Facebook if you have me friended there. (Supposedly you can see them by clicking here even if you don't have a Facebook account. Someone tell me if this works?) Anyway, more updates, divided into neat categories so you can skip the ones you don't care about:

( School )

( Life )

( Music )

( TV/Anime )

( Look, a picture! )

I need a haircut. Anyway, off to London for the weekend.