Fangirlin' It

I've been neglecting you terribly, I know, internet, but...

Yes, well.  This is an incredibly sleep-deprived entry, as I missed so much sleep last night.  The idiot speedway apparently has some kind of outdoor movie night now that they've got the biggest screen in the world, or something, so the damn movie could be heard all the way at my house last night, followed by freaking fireworks until past 11 pm; when you get up at seven every morning, that's not good.  Even after that, I couldn't seem to really sleep, and finally I gave up this morning around six-thirty.  So I'm really tired.

But.  Yesterday I went to the big bookstore in the mall which was having a one-day sale and bought several books.  One of them was a book by an author I'd never heard of, but I liked the sound of the summary, so I gave it a shot.  I love it.  Totally recommending this book here.  It's military sci-fi, so Stargate fans pay attention.  The author is Evan Currie, and the book is Into the Black: Odyssey One.  It's really good on the military stuff, including a section where he essentially says, yeah, combat pilots have to know almost as much about how their craft work as the people who built them, so they're anything but stupid (which, after some time in the SGA fandom, is refreshing--we all know how many fics treat the military as dumb, even pilots like Sheppard or Mitchell). 

The main premise is that, in a post-WWIII Earth, the North American Confederation sends out the brand-new space ship Odyssey, under the command of Eric Weston, on a shakedown cruise of the universe.  Weston was a former fighter jockey in the Marines, and there are lots of Special Forces members of our military as well as Canada's in his new crew.  There are some aspects that resonate a lot with the Stargate universe, but only on the surface.  It's a fascinating and compelling action read with linguistics, philosophy, combat tactics, tragedy, and triumph.  I won't give away any more of the plot, other than to say there are alien humans and alien beasties, and there's a war.  Um, it's a lot better than it sounds from my lame description?  Seriously, though, if you like the mix of military and science that marks the best of Stargate canon and fandom, I think you ought to give this book a go.  It's in paperback, so not as expensive, and I'm fairly sure there will be a sequel, since it's left very up-in-the-air as far as the ending goes.

Anyway, that was mostly the purpose of this post.  I'm a little over halfway through the book, which is nearly six hundred pages in an oversized paperback, though I peeked at the last page, as I am wont to do.  ;)  Which is how I know the ending.  And I'm still feeling compelled to read the rest because it's that good.  There's really interesting science, too; a lot of it is based on things I know are fairly current in actual science, like tachyon properties, and it makes nice extrapolations in the best tradition of the genre.  The alien society they encounter is interesting and somewhat mysterious, even at the end of the book, and the alien enemy is pretty frightening.

So.  What's on your summer reading list, guys?  I also picked up some more Discworld novels, which are an addiction of mine, and the latest Foreigner novel I'd been wanting to own since I read it back in March.  I had to stop myself from spending all of my first paycheck there, since it was only a week's pay.  I should get paid again at the end of this coming week, and it will be the normal two weeks' pay this time, which is good, since I keep having to buy gas for my car and it keeps getting more expensive.  :/ 

Well, here we all are, still alive; guess that'll put a temporary halt to those doomsdayers and save me from having to hear about stupid shit that doesn't make sense or matter--oh, wait, the news still reports on Congress.  Oh, well.

I had lunch and shopping with a friend yesterday; we had our customary Chinese from our favourite local place, and then did a little shopping in the rain.  It's turned cold (for here) now, though--the mountains might be getting some snow, I think.  Fortunately, I live about two hours south and east of the mountains, so it's just clear, windy, and cold here.

Happy Winter Solstice/Non-doomsday to all who celebrate such things!  It's hard to believe that there are only four days to Christmas.  We have a little bit of a light load under the tree this year, as we seem to have mostly given each other gifts during the year or bought things that the other person already knows about.  Although, Dad and I just decided to wrap a couple of those anyway, just to have more things under the tree.

I've been enjoying the holiday cards from friends and relatives.  It was funny, though; a couple weeks ago I got my first Christmas card of the season, and it was from the White House!  The cards, in case you haven't seen a picture of them, feature the First Dog, Bo, with a cute little scarf playing in the snow in front of the White House.  It's a really pretty painting.  The card will be going in the same envelope with the stuff I got from when my elementary school class wrote to the president back in the day.  I don't know what the other kids said in their letters, but I distinctly remember asking for a picture of Socks the cat.  I got both an autographed picture of President Clinton (ho-hum when you're that age) and an 'autographed' picture of Socks, which delighted me.  Of course, being nine, I didn't really know that they're signed by a robo-pen, but I still have them in the original envelope nearly twenty years later.  I'm still not sure how they managed to get a cat to agree to an ink-print of his paw, as just about every cat that's ever owned me would (rather justifiably, I think) claw you for that, but whatever.

In case I'm not in a posting mood in the next few days, I'll go ahead and wish all who celebrate a Merry Christmas and everyone a peaceful year to come.

This has been bugging me for a while.  In SGA, everyone makes sure to put 'Zed' for ZPM when McKay talks, which is fine since it's canon.  But what about Beckett?  The only reason some Canadians say 'Zed' when Americans say 'Zee' is because the British pronounce the letter that way.  So it would make much more sense even than Rodney saying 'Zed' for Carson to say it that way.  Which makes me wonder why no-one does that in fic, let alone why it apparently never made it into the show.

The other thing that bothers me is people who are not Mark Twain writing characters dialectically through the whole story.  Just grates on my last nerve.

From the 'not very nice but not untrue' files:

I was finishing up the dinner dishes just now and the local news was running a story about this older couple in a nearby town who apparently got high on bath salts and scared their neighbours or something.  First of all, bath salts?  Really?  Second of all, apparently one of the symptoms is psychosis, or so we were informed.  The station then showed the mugshots of these lovely people, and I told Mom, "These people don't look like they need any help with psychosis."  They were really scruffy/scraggly, still strung out-looking, and generally didn't look like they needed drug aids to be nuts.  Not nice, but totally true.  O.o

Best euphemism I've heard in a while: "Criminal conversation."  What, you might ask, could this possibly be code for?  Why, adultery!  Gotta love the law.  Can't just come out and say something, it talks around the bush. 

We're sitting here in Litigation class, and the professor just showed us a copy of a handwritten 'letter' a juror wrote while on a jury.  It was badly spelled and stuff, but mostly it was in the vein of 'I can't believe this case, these people are all idiots, what do you mean four more weeks of this' and rambled on.  The best parts, though, were where the guy was saying he wanted to die (not really, but yeah) rather than be there anymore, the plaintiff's lawyer looked like The Penguin (misspelled), and he was fantasising about killing the lawyers if it would make it stop.  Needless to say, someone decided this guy was just a little unstable, and he was dismissed.

Wow, I think the girls behind me in the library this morning have just confessed to illegally taking controlled substances.  O.o  Yeah, if you don't actually have ADD, Adderall will keep you up all night and give you heart palpitations.  Duh.  And it won't really help you concentrate, either.

More GIMP stuff.
Posterised:

I like to think I've gotten fairly decent at manipulating layers, masks, and colours.

In completely unrelated news, I (might) be working on SGA fic.  On non-cracky wing!fic.  It might even have aspirations of becoming a novel-sized work.  There are notes, so I consider that to be a good start.

Today I at least turned my not-feeling-well into something semi-productive: I messed around with GIMP for several hours and came up with this:

So, Koko is on my bed with me, as he is most every afternoon, and he just woke up and stretched.  Sometimes that's a prelude to leaving (demanding food from the Food Lady downstairs), sometimes it's just time to change positions and go back to sleep.  I peeked down by my feet, and was happy to find I still have a cat on the bed.  I have realised, yet again, that my happiness depends entirely too much on the whims of a ball of Siamese fur with a loud mouth.  ::eyeroll::  I did sort of get him to chase after a slinky this morning, though...