stories have beginnings and middles and ends, people have births and lives and deaths; and this vid--liquid bird (ensemble), a kind of goodbye from my favourite vidder to my favourite fandom (her "final farewell to the Team and the City that changed them forever")--manages to weave all of these together in a great rhythmic arc: the way the show and the characters and even the city grew and changed, with births and deaths and rebirths and so much life, so many lives (and we only ever saw part of those stories). there is an ambivalence to the music, and to the farewell, that suits the way many of us feel about the final season of the series (or, indeed, about the way the show handled--or rather, failed to handle--issues of gender and especially race throughout its run), and i was glad to feel that acknowledged alongside the affection engendered by the show, because the two were always uncomfortable halves of the whole we both loved and hated. i cannot speak for anyone else, but this is not a goodbye for me: i know that this will always, always, always be my city and its people my people; and tho i find this (and all hollywoodgrrl 's vids) stylistically beautiful, this is the true beauty of the piece: that it makes me feel again in my chest with all the passion i ever have that love and desperate loyalty to this cast of characters who are more profoundly real to me than some people i actual know and who have FINALLY (thankfully) been entrusted to the people who know how to show and tell--to write, and vid, and draw, and speak, and sing--them and their legends well.

i have a dreamwidth invite code--is there anyone on my flist who needs / wants one?

I hadn't realized how much I missed this fandom in the last six months. I have seen every scene a thousand times and each one, in the hands of a skilled vidder (and this is her first!!!), is always so sweetly new: Poker Face (crysothemis ). A retrospective look, now that canon is closed, at John and his many masks. Bonus points for clever use of Vegas (as the lyrics demand) as well as the classics--he looked so YOUNG in Rising that it's hard to even believe; and the pier scenes will never fail to get me. Enjoy!

Alright, kids, I have (obviously) made the great leap of faith in synecdochic (as if there were any doubt I would follow her to the ends of the earth) and moved to Dreamwidth, where I--formerly ekaterinverse.livejournal.com --am now simply ekaterina . I will be crossposting and keeping the LJ account for friends and fandom comms not migrating, but the majority of my virtual life will be here. There. Whatever. (Galen moment!) So if any of you are settling into journals under different names, please tell me so I can friend you or circle you or whatever the new terminology is! I plan to cut the flist on LJ down to anyone who is not mirrored on DW, and as always every day is defriending amnesty day from my POV as well. See y'all around, and have a great run for the roses tomorrow: mint juleps FTW! And now I am going to fall asleep to the sweet sounds of the awesomely slashy action of Die Hard 4 (thanks again, Spazz).

ok. so this is apparently the season for vids so good that my love for them can only be textually rendered in extreme keysmashing and extended capslock, which i will generously spare you and not even attempt--instead, i will show you the damn vids. which are awesome, but also SCARY AS FUCK, and full of all the things that go bump in the great dark vastness of the interstellar night when we play god with ourselves, each other, and technology.

first (SGA): pegasus makes killers of us all, and no one ever wins.
open secrets of the pegasus galaxy by yevgenie (i have wanted exactly this vid for years.)

second (BSG x SCC): the robots will rule us all, if they don't kill us first. and we might deserve it.
unnatural selection by charmax (i believe this on a very basic level: this is the stuff of my nightmares.)

third (HS, SPN, FF: explicit): hell is other siblings. siblings that are very, very close.
climbing up the walls by obsessive (meta on the incest fixation at last.)

and for the sake of a little levity--or at least less death and destruction--i give you merlin. more specifically, arthur/merlin. it is just so shamelessly sweet and pretty! they (all) are just so silly, and so young, and so very melodramatic: they keep trying to die for one another! in progressively more reckless and idiotic ways! with interludes of snarking and long longing gazes (i know)! and all in this fantastically unmedieval middle ages where everything is clean and there are tomatoes!!! so, my favourite vid in the fandom so far, which is actually suprisingly emo yet utterly lovely.
elemental by fabella (the answer is always no, beloved.)

one of these days i shall (!) post something coherent, and maybe even something nonfannish, but that night is not this night.

My slash goggles are so thick now that I see EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH LANDSCAPE PAINTING (and portraiture) thru them, and suddenly want to write a serious academic paper about Joseph Wright of Derby and his not-so-secret gay love (no, seriously, LOOK AT THIS)!!! I know i need help, but at least I am not the only one who sees it. (right?)
And I would sooo rather see Ray naked.

So what if I am ten years late to the party? Mulder / Krycek (*) is everything I love in an antagonistic pairing: shifting loyalties, hidden agendas, uneasy alliances. O, and also hotness. They cannot seem to keep their eyes or their hands from each other, and I can hardly blame them.
I really am having fun working thru The X Files as I convalesce; if nothing else, playing "name that obscure Vancouver actor" is always entertaining. But really, it's the Byzantine plotting of the mytharc--the operatic sprawl of mystery and deceit, the plans within plans and the truths use as lies--that keeps my interest. And Gillian Anderson's achingly gorgeous face (her MOUTH, my God)! Starter recs, anyone? The darker the better.

* Intro to pairing vid is Kinda I Want To by Thandie: clever, to use a song contemporary with the source, and she makes both seem fresh. It's from Mulder's POV--and saying that he only "kinda" wants to looks like a dramatic understatement when you cut it all together like this--but Krycek steals the show with the hungry expression on his face every time he looks at Mulder.... and as much as I love Callum Keith Rennie, which is a LOT, I am so very glad he did not take this role: partly because I really like Nicholas Lea in it (exactly my type), partly because CKR tends to give his villains a kind of feral intensity that does not lend itself to a character who--at least in the beginning--is so completely owned by Cancer Man and the Consortium, and partly because I absolutely adore Ray Kowalski (who might never have come to be in the form we know and love if CKR had been busy with The X Files). Enjoy!

I am miserably sick--voiceless, auuugh: even breathing is hard and rattles painfully in my chest, and everything (including my soft as silk bamboo sleepshift) hurts everywhere it brushes against my skin--but what with the coughing and all I cannot sleep, so I thought I might clear some of the recs I have been sitting on since everything went to Hell over the summer, which leads me to Numb3rs.
I semirandomly fell in love (tripped into it, really) with this oddball little show in May, when everything was still peachy and I was looking forward to almost three months of writing on my own schedule. I was watching reruns of the second and third seasons, and really wanted some nice fluffy Charlie / Colby slash, which I quickly found. My favourites (in the "relatively short standalone" category): "Calculus is Easy" by FrostFire, a sweet and funny Colby POV piece; and "Gleam" by Dira Sudis, a sweet and hot Colby POV piece. In keeping with my usual method of wayfinding in new fandoms, I proceeded to read everything Dira (and Frost, and several others) had recced or written for N3; this was just as she began posting her novel length "Missing Persons" (vid to match! Someone You Might Have Been by Merry), so I read that too and could not stop. Now, I did not want to like this fic. It is riddled with things that skirt the edges of my reading boundaries: torture, both physical and psychological; problematic consent; and incest, which I had thought could not be done in character without damaging said characters so thoroughly that I could not bear to read them.... But honestly, escaping into this--something so very dark (so much darker even than the senseless tragedy that was happening all around me) and so very compelling, intensely well written in every sense--gave me something to look forward to in the unhappy days of June and July, and I was (and remain) deeply grateful for that. And in the end, I did like it. In fact, I loved it. It just tore me apart fist, so be sure to keep a safety tab open while you read.

I MADE SOMETHING!!! *dances*
I recently recorded Saestina's fabulous Dr Who fic "Anamnesis" (which I recced around this time last year)--partly to celebrate my first year in the fandom, but mostly as a way of procrastinating: my grant proposal is due Wednesday, auuugh--and it is now up at General Jinjur's archive (the first of its kind, too). I actually contributed to fandom, y'all! I am insufferably pleased with myself.
Thanks to Saestina, of course, for writing the fic--a lovely bit of bittersweet Ten and Rose (I think of it as gen, or maybe post het, or even--depending on your POV--pre het, timelines being what they are in Who; and after all, this is where love is holding hands, a gesture so rich with meaning here that it makes my throat tight) after Doomsday: almost a requirement for authors in this fandom--and for generously allowing an absolute amateur to record it; and of course to Jinjur, who as it turns out is not only an excellent podficcer herself but also a really nice person, for hosting it (and all the many others at her audiofic hub: a veritable treasurehouse of awesomeness, with awesomesauce on top). So go listen! Feedback is love: fanperson the author--whose other fics can be found here--and / or the reader and / or the host if you enjoy, which I really hope you do.

please tell me where this--the first vague beginnings of what G has dubbed "Kate's Multiple Gap Theory" (ahahaha) but which i am calling ZOMG SO MANY QUESTIONS!--makes sense and where it does not. i am getting tangled in the language, which is an occupational hazard with semiotics, and am very tired (as well as medicated to the gills)... so i need your help, O flist of mine. and i apologize for the notes format; this is an expansion of ideas suggested but not explored in our readings and class discussions and it's more than i can do right now to make it more presentable.

( Thinking: UR doing it wrong! )
halp! talk this thru with me, please. and now to bed.