March 2010

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An almost certainly doomed attempt to bring some order to this LJ

that's interesting
Saturday, June 19th, 2010 10:56 am
This post contains all the tags I have used to tag my posts so far. Tomorrow, I shall post-date it so that it always sits on top of the journal. And I will edit it to add new tags as I create them. Let's see how well this works.
  • Current Mood: listless
Tags:

What I did over my weekend, by marinarusalka, aged 42

marinarusalka: ocean
Sunday, March 14th, 2010 03:37 pm
The Boy and I went to see Green Zone. It was a decent action movie, and Matt Damon is always good, but ( spoilery, I guess. ) Also, I think the moviegoers of the world need to take up a collection and buy Paul Greengrass a tripod so that he can keep his camera steady.


Public transportation in San Diego is getting suckier and suckier. Their latest fun shenanigans involve truncating the 30 bus route on the weekends from both ends, so that it no longer passes by my house or goes downtown. Which means that where I used to take one (very slow) bus to get home from whale watching, now I have two take two buses and a trolley. The trip is now more than two hours one way. If I drove, it would take twenty minutes. And then they wonder why people in San Diego don't take public transport enough.



I have made this cheese bread and it is good. As an experiment, I only baked up half the dough (two mini-loaves), wrapped the rest in plastic wrap and stuck it in the fridge. I will bake it in a couple of days and see what happens.

I've also been playing around with phyllo dough as a new way to use up the fruits and veggies that show up in my CSA box. Last week I made apple strudel. Today I sauteed some spinach in garlic oil, mixed it with feta crumbles and an egg, rolled it up in the phyllo and baked. Voila, spinach strudel! Very tasty, and good with soup.



OMG, I'm actually writing! Okay, it's going really slow, and coming out kind of sucky, but at least there are words. And the words are making sentences. And the sentences are making a sequence of fictional events. Thank you, [livejournal.com profile] het_idcrack!



The lovely and talented [livejournal.com profile] dotfic wrote me an SPN story for my birthday! It's called Shut Your Cakehole, and it's action and angst and Sam and Dean being amazingly, wonderfully brotherly. Also, ZOMBIE RATS! Go read, tell her how much she rocks.



There's lemon sorbet in the freezer calling my name. I can totally hear it. Must answer the call.

You can hear my squee from space right now.

tony stark
Monday, March 8th, 2010 06:46 am
New Iron Man 2 trailer

Oscar!

Dean fist-pump
Sunday, March 7th, 2010 08:59 pm
( Woot! )
  • Current Mood: impressed

Some Sunday morning fannish pimping

marinarusalka: ocean
Sunday, March 7th, 2010 09:36 am
First, an idea whose time has clearly come:


[livejournal.com profile] spn_foxhole - a Dean and Sam and Castiel community

promo banner by [livejournal.com profile] animotus

Second, prompts at [livejournal.com profile] het_idcrack are open for claiming now. There are lots of really fantastic prompts in a variety of fandoms, so go over and grab one!

Nope, not moving. Can't make me.

recumbent
Sunday, March 7th, 2010 06:53 am
First of all, thanks to everyone who wished me happy birthday or Thursday. You guys all rock. And thanks to [livejournal.com profile] robyanybody for the virtual cupcake and to [livejournal.com profile] ndancer for the adorable e-card.

The universe's birthday present to me was a really annoying cold. It's been going around everywhere lately -- my advisor has it, and half the people in my building -- so I guess it was too much to expect that I'd miss it. Usually when something like that hits me at the tail end of the week, I just crawl into bed for the weekend and chug hot tea until I feel better. Unfortunately this time, the cold had to pick not only my birthday but also the week when I'd committed my entire Saturday to being the rules judge for the National Ocean Sciences Bowl. By the time I finally admitted to myself that I wasn't going to feel better in time, it was too late to pull out without screwing up the scheduling for all the other volunteers.

So I doped myself up on cold medicine and hauled my sickly ass to campus for the 7:00AM volunteer check-in, only to discover that they had me scheduled not only for the regular rounds like they did last year, but for the semifinal and final, too. And of course the whole thing ran late, and then they needed a tie-breaker round for the final to determine the winner, so by the time the competition ended, it was nearly 8:00 and I'd been judging rules for almost twelve hours. It was a lot of fun, actually, but I think I have two brain cells left now and they're not talking to each other.

My plan for today is to sit here on this couch and not move all day. I think that's a good plan. I can totally do it.
  • Current Mood: recumbent

I am the answer to life, the universe and everything.

slice of birthday cake
Thursday, March 4th, 2010 10:17 am
That's right, I am 42 today. I will endeavor to enjoy my year of cosmic wisdom while it lasts.

Maybe the cosmic wisdom will teach me something useful, like how to make my cats behave. I woke up this morning to discover that Tara has spent the night in the closet, messing with my knitting basket. You know, the one I hide in the closet so that the cat's can't get at it. Sigh.

Whine whine whine. Writing whine. Or not writing, as the case may be. Whine.

aggravated
Monday, March 1st, 2010 02:19 pm
The [livejournal.com profile] picfor1000 deadline has come and gone I didn't write a thing. Man, how pathetic is it when I can't even come up with 1000 words for a picture prompt? The fiction part of my brain is empty. Seriously. It's like a great big gaping vacuum where all the stories used to be. I'm kinda hoping one of the prompts at [livejournal.com profile] het_idcrack will nudge something in there; but mostly I'm just glad I didn't sign up for any bigbangs this year.
  • Current Mood: aggravated
Tags:

Home again, home again, jiggety-jig

content
Saturday, February 27th, 2010 08:43 am
Am back from Portland. The conference went well, people seemed to like my poster, and there were lots of talks relevant to my interests.

I enjoyed Portland a lot, particularly Powell's, the Japanese Garden, and all the excellent seafood and beer. But it's good to be home.
  • Current Mood: content

Random Portland bits

marinarusalka: ocean
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 12:11 pm
My hotel is on SW Stark St. Now I find myself wondering what Tony Stark managed to do to get a street in Portland named after him.

The Portland Zoo is small but very nice, and has really awesome polar bears.

The Japanese Garden closes at 4:00 in winter, alas. Wish I'd known that before I got there at 4:10.

Found a really fabulous yarn store just a couple of blocks from my hotel. Bought some beautiful cotton/rayon ribbon yarn in shades of blue and green that was just crying out to be turned into a drop-stitch scarf. The proprietor laughed, because apparently people from Ocean Sciences have been wandering in for days and buying yarn in ocean colors. "The whole store is going to be red and brown by the end of the week," she said.

The conference is way too big for the Oregon Convention center. I tried to get into a session ten minutes after it started, and the room was so packed, I couldn't even find a spot to stand in the back. Which is why I'm over here posting instead of listening to talks. Note to self: get there EARLY for the Sverdrup Lecture.

Off to find coffee now.

Portland, here I come!

excited
Sunday, February 21st, 2010 09:43 am
Have about two hours until my flight to Portland. Will be back in SD on Friday evening. I'm not taking the laptop with me, but I do have my iPhone, so I should be able to keep in touch.

Everyone's been recommending Portland's microbreweries to me, so I'm definitely looking forward to all the beer. :-)
  • Current Mood: excited

(no subject)

exhausted
Wednesday, February 17th, 2010 02:10 pm
Holy freakin' crap, there were 120 preschoolers at the tide pool exhibit this morning. I think if I'd just gone out into the aquarium parking lot and let the buses that delivered all those kids run me over, I'd feel less flattened than I do now.
  • Current Mood: exhausted

Mostly random stuff

fandom: zen fen
Monday, February 15th, 2010 06:12 pm
I somehow managed to get a cold overnight. And I mean that literally -- I felt perfectly fine when I went to bed, but when I woke up this morning, I was all sneezy and sniffly. Went to school anyway, because I have a ton of stuff to do before I go off to Portland for Ocean Science on Sunday, but my productivity got kind of shot. Bleh.

Hey, any of you guys actually in Portland? Or familiar with it? I've never been, so I have no clue where to go or what to do outside of the conference.



Was bagging up my comic books a couple of days ago, and wow, I sure have been reading a lot of Marvel Comics the last couple of years. Interestingly, about 90% of what I've been reading has been one-shots and miniseries. The only ongoing series I'm following are Invincible Iron Man, Spider-Woman, and Marvel Adventures Superheroes. And the only one of the three I'm really, truly enjoying is Spider-Woman, which has a pretty awesome heroine and a gritty, suspenseful storyline. The only reason I'm sticking with IIM is 'cause I'm so invested in Tony Stark. But really, I have no clue how it won an Eisner; the art is hideous and the writing is wildly uneven. There are bits I enjoy, like anything involving Maria Hill, and all the parts where Pepper was Rescue, but overall? Meh.

Marvel Adventures used to be my happy place, but recently they've rebooted MA Superheroes into a new version of MA Avengers, only without all the quirky fun that MA Avengers used to have. Also, they've ditched all the PoC characters in favor of the most whitebread team ever, and added some sort of weird UST between Steve Rogers and Sue Storm. I'm hanging in there in the hope that it will get good again, but not holding my breath.

I'm cautiously optimistic about the whole Heroic Age thing they've got coming up, and the Black Widow series. *crosses fingers*



Actually, I'm thinking that being in Marvel fandom may be the reason why I'm able to tolerate all the issues on SPN as much as I do. Because holy crap, guys, your average comics creator makes Erik Kripke look like freakin' Gloria Steinem. Their notion of consent would make Ben Edlund shake his head and mutter "Dude, that's not on." And don't get me started on Joe "women who think our comics are sexist should just stop reading, but teabaggers totally deserve an apology" Quesada. Grr.



I want to write a meta post about Dean in 5.14, but I can't seem to get my thoughts organized. I get as far as "Dean, Sam and Castiel all believe Dean was unaffected by Famine, but they're wrong, and Famine knew that and used it against them," but but then my meta kinda breaks. Oh well. It's a five-week hiatus, maybe I'll get it together eventually.



Watching the Olympics makes me want to visit Vancouver again. I've been once, ages and ages ago, and now I'm remembering how cool it was. And all that amazing mountain scenery, wow.

Insta-reaction to SPN 5.14

SPN: not alone
Thursday, February 11th, 2010 10:06 pm
( Spoilers are totally not hungry. )
  • Current Mood: curious

Fic: In the breakdown lane (Marvel Comics, gen, one-shot)

comics: Maria Hill
Monday, February 8th, 2010 07:24 am
[livejournal.com profile] halfamoon seems like only time more than three people might possibly read this, so I figured I might as well post it.

In the breakdown lane
By [personal profile] marinarusalka
Fandom: Marvel Comics
Rating: Gen, PG
Word count: approx. 1200
Summary: Maria Hill did not sign up for this shit.
AN: Missing scene between issues 13 and 14 of Invincible Iron Man.
Warnings: none. My overall warning policy is in my user profile.

( Read here )

Feedback always welcome.
  • Current Mood: creative
Tags:

Answers to the 10 characters meme

fandom: zen fen
Sunday, February 7th, 2010 04:04 pm
My list was:

1. Maria Hill
2. Sarah Walker
3. Parker
4. Elizabeth Swann
5. Carol Danvers (Ms Marvel)
6. Natasha Romanova (Black Widow)
7. Sarah Connor
8. Hermione Granger
9. Harriet Vane
10. Azula

And the answers:

( Sarah Connor and Hermione Granger are in a coffee shop. What do they order? How do they treat the barista? )

( Elizabeth Swann turns up on Sarah Connor's doorstep on a snowy night, without luggage but with Natasha Romanova in hot pursuit. What does Natasha want, what does Elizabeth offer Sarah in exchange for aid, and how does Sarah rise (or not) to the occasion? )

( What does Hermione want to do for her birthday? What will Elizabeth and Sarah Walker say when they get their invitations to the shindig? In lieu of gifts, what charity will Hermione ask everyone to donate to? )

( Does Carol Danvers have any tattoos? If not, what has she considered getting, and where? )

( Which Girl Scout Cookie does/would Parker prefer? )

( Natasha wants to work with Azula on a super sekrit project initiated but abandoned by Maria Hill. What's the project? How does it go? )

( Parker is judging Sarah Walker, Natasha, and Hermione in an event at the county fair. What's the event, and who takes home the blue ribbon? )
  • Current Mood: amused
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Wow, it's been ages since I did an icon post

Michelle Yeoh, heroine
Saturday, February 6th, 2010 09:12 am
Some Marvel Comics women I'm particularly fond of: Ms Marvel, Spider-Woman, Maria Hill and Black Widow

Sample:



( Click for more )

I wanted to make more of Maria, but she seems to be cursed with the ugliest art in all of Marvel Comics, even outside of the current IIM run where everyone looks equally hideous. My imaginary comic book girlfriend can't get no love, sigh.
  • Current Mood: artistic
Tags:

10 character meme

Michelle Yeoh, heroine
Friday, February 5th, 2010 03:15 pm
Hey, look, one of my favorite silly memes is going around again, just in time to distract me from my total inability to write actual fic:

1. I write down a list of 10 characters.

2. You choose however many of those you like and ask me a question about them. Examples: "What happens when 5 and 9 are forced to take care of a baby?" or "1, 4, and 8 walk into a bar. What happens next?" or "What does 3 do when s/he finds out that 10 is pregnant with 7's child?" You get the idea. :D

3. I tell you about these scenarios!


In the spirit of [livejournal.com profile] halfamoon, I've made a list of all female characters. Prompt me!
  • Current Mood: amused
Tags:

Insta-reaction to SPN 5.13

Dean fist-pump
Thursday, February 4th, 2010 10:23 pm
( spoilers are very surprised they made it )
  • Current Mood: enthralled

Some very scattered throughts on SPN 5.12

SPN: not alone
Friday, January 29th, 2010 02:11 pm
( spoilers want a million dollars )