What with it seems like everyone in the world having seen Avengers Assemble I was trying to decide whether or not to see it. For a start everyone keeps calling it The Avengers, which I would like to see, but that just requires me getting my Emma Peel box set down and trying to work out which black and white episodes I haven't seen yet. Aside from that, on the one hand everyone having seen it really, really makes me not want to see it. Every time anyone talks about it, they make me not want to see it more. However, when no one talks about it I wonder if maybe it is actually good.

I've also never liked comics. That's partly because I can't work out how to read them - I know you start at the top and left, but sometimes the speech bubbles are at the top right and bottom left, so then where you do start? But also because I hate that they have pictures. If I want to read then I need words and maybe a few pictures to illustrate scenes, but they shouldn't get in the way.

Someone at work said I'd like it if I liked Firefly because it had the same humour. And then I discovered it was written by Joss Whedon, which explains that. But although I liked Buffy, Angel and Firefly, Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog did nothing for me. It was all right, but not that great.

Someone else at work said that in order to understand it you need to have seen Thor and Captain America first. I haven't even heard of Captain America, I thought he meant Team America. Which I also haven't seen.

And then I found out it has Iron Man in. Now that film everyone was going on about when it came out and I couldn't understand why because I was getting it confused with Man of Iron. Why someone would be making a film out of Paul Darrow's awful Blake's 7 script, I don't know, but if it was played like it is at Redemption I'd go and see it. Once it was out on DVD I gave it a try. After half an hour I'd lost the will to live. But since a lot of people seemed to think it was good I gave it another go the next day. Another half an hour and I'd lost the will to live again, so I gave up. When I said this at work yesterday someone agreed the beginning was boring and said Iron Man 2 was better. I'm not prepared to verify that statement, though. A film has just got to be exciting earlier.

I borrowed X:Men First Class (not sure where the punctuation is in there) because I did want to see it and hadn't got round to it. I have seen the first X:Men film, which was all right and for some reason I think I've seen the second, which was boring. I watched it on Saturday night. Bit of it had potential, but the whole thing was boring - it moved so slowly. After 67 minutes I felt like I'd been watching for two hours and I gave up. I could have skipped bits and not missed much.

Apart from the slowness my other problems with it were that the mutant powers didn't make sense. When there's a bloke with telepathy and a girl who can shape shift, why was there a girl who could do both? How did a girl who was blue not attract attention sooner? And the villain was just stupidly overpowered and where's the fun in that?

I suspect, though, that my problems with the film are just general comic book things, which means that I won't like Avengers Assemble. And at any rate, I should definitely not go and see it at the cinema, where you can't do something at the same time as watching it or take breaks.

This morning I woke up at 6am and went back to sleep, which makes a nice change. And then I dreamt. Which was fine and actually a fairly normal dream, it was the amount that I was directing it that was strange and I could probably live without.

It started with me visiting selenay936's (parent's) house early in the morning. They were all asleep and I went in the back garden. But then I accidentally let the dog out because I didn't know they had a dog. Which would be because they don't have a dog (at least as far as I know). I thought I'd better make a run for it as no one knew I'd been there so they wouldn't know I'd done it. But there was a man about taking his daughter to school who said to her in a very loud voice that I was meant to hear something along the lines of 'someone's let that dog out and they were very silly, weren't they'. I realised he was going to tell Sel's parent what I looked like and from that they'd work out it was me.

So I decided I wanted to start that dream again...

So I did and it went better (the dog turned into two cats, which helped with accidentally letting it out) and I was talking to them and they asked me about work because it was 9am. So I said that it was all right and I could go in late. But then my rational self realised that I hadn't organised going in late and even if I had I was 45 minutes drive away and it would end up very late by the time I left. Not to mention the fact that Sel's hair was now long despite the photo she posted the other week showing that it wasn't.

I was quite glad to wake up at that point. If my dreaming self could stop rationalising my dreams while I'm dreaming them that would be a help. But I won't complain at the extra hour of sleep.

P5200342

Originally uploaded by paranoidangel

After a while of not having time to crochet, I have managed to complete a granny square (the idea is that you do lots of these, then sew them together to make a blanket). The best thing I can say about it is that it's finished. Bits of it are definitely right and bits of it are definitely wrong. But for the first one I've ever done, that's not bad.

I picked up my new glasses yesterday lunchtime, so now the world looks all funny. Except it doesn't, I just feel funny. Usually getting new glasses means that the world looks really bright (because they're clean) and the floor slopes. The floor's hardly sloping, the world's not that much brighter but there's something wrong with it in general. I can only type when not looking at the keyboard and I can't focus on anything close up. I also have a headache, I feel like I'm dizzy, only I'm not and I can't decide if my glasses are too loose.

But I now have glasses cases in black, red, green and grey. And spare prescription sunglasses, although I'm less likely to walk into doors wearing those because I don't tend to wear them indoors much.

At least I have the same frames as before, so I don't hate the way they look, which is always a help. But I just want to skip the adjusting to new glasses period now and go straight to the part where I can see.

The upside of not sharing lifts at work is that I've listened to one and a half of the last two Big Finish audios. Half the point of subscribing to their main range was so that I listened to the ones that I wouldn't usually buy (ie the ones without the Seventh Doctor and Ace in). While listening to The Emerald Tiger I realised that I quite like all these characters.

I generally can't get excited about the Fifth Doctor era. None of his companions are any of my favourites and I can't look at Peter Davison back then without thinking that he's Tristan. But on audio it's easier to forget - and he sounds more like Peter Davison these days. I also like the friendship between Nyssa and Tegan and the banter between Tegan and Turlough. And the writers make sure to do something with all four of them, so the TARDIS doesn't feel as crowded as it was with Nyssa, Tegan and Adric.

For ages at work I've been sharing lifts with someone else. Well, I say sharing lifts, but she didn't drive, so I drove and she paid me petrol money. But now she's passed her test and bought a car, so today I went on my own. Which was weird. I kept thinking I'd forgotten something. On the plus side I get to leave the house five minutes later, get home five minutes earlier and I am listening to last month's Big Finish Doctor Who release. But suddenly having to pay twice as much in petrol is less good. I worked out that the bus is now cheaper, albeit only just and does take four times as long - if I got it, I'd have to leave the house half an hour earlier and I'd get to work half an hour late. So then I'd have to stay at work half an hour longer and would get home an hour and a half later - which wouldn't be in time for me to go out to well, anything. So there's certainly something to be said for driving to work.

Admittedly it's been a short week, but all I've done this week is play with computers, work and be tired due to lack of sleep. I just wake up early - on weekdays it's before my alarm on weekends it's a bit later but still before 8am. I just need one night where I sleep until 10am and I'll be fine. But no, my body hates me and is determined to make me tired. Which makes me dizzy. That coupled with work being busy means I have really loud tinnitus in my left ear

On the plus side, it has finally stopped raining (at least all day every day) and it's been warm enough the past couple of days that I haven't been wearing my winter coat and have practically turned the heating off.

A bigger plus side - I have Fruit Ninja on my computer. I have found I need to hold the mouse button down to make playing it easier, but it does mean I really have no use at all for a tablet (not that I had much of a use for one anyway) and no use for a smartphone either. My new laptop works out at not much more expensive than a tablet anyway...

Today I spent pretty much the whole day installing things on my new computer and playing with settings. I had a break when I cleaned the kitchen and bathroom. It is nearly done. Currently the only way I can find any programs I want is from the Quick Launch - the Start Menu and Desktop are too much of a mess to find anything, and I haven't installed the printer. But other than that it's done.

It was very handy I have a computer running Linux. The folders with things like my Firefox profile and my RSS feeds live in folders that you need admin access to get. But this computer refused to copy them or access them from the hard drive of the old computer. Ubuntu, on the other hand, didn't care. So I copied folders from my old computer onto my netbook and then across to my new computer.

At the moment I am really struggling with the keyboard. I'm fine with typing, it's just once I need to go further right than the return key that I'm struggling. The old one had Home, End, Page Up and Page Down down the right and that was it. The new one has a number pad. Which does mean there's two of each of those four keys, but they're all in a different place, as are the arrow keys, so I keep being slowed down by having to look down and check where I am. So I have established that I like the trackpad!

Dear Not Prime Time Writer,

Thank you for writing a story for me. The optional details are optional. I've just tried to give you some ideas of what I might like to see, but if none of them are your thing feel free to disregard them. I am sure I will love anything you write with the character(s) I've requested. Feel free to use any other characters you'd like - there are none that I dislike in any of these fandoms.

What I like:
- Stories that explore the relationships between characters
- Stories that explore characters
- Scenes/fic that is like it could be (part of) an episode

What I dislike:
- Sex scenes, so nothing over PG-13 please
- British people using Americanisms and American people using Briticisms
- Relationships other than those in canon - but you can never go wrong with gen

I know there are two Doctor Who-related fandoms on this list. Don't think that I'd like one of those more than the other two - I want each of these requests equally.

Below are my prompts: Read more...

I now have a new computer. I have now remembered how unusable all the default settings are in Windows. Not to mention IE9, where I spent five minutes trying to find the address bar. But it has a 1TB hard drive (10 times what I need) and 8GB of RAM. It should be fast and able to cope with anything I throw at it.

Yesterday I had a party to celebrate my birthday. Which basically consisted of spending a relaxed afternoon sitting around and chatting.

Aside from the epilogue I realised it needed, I've finished the second draft of my Big Bang fic. I just need to go back and make it less boring now. And add 3500 words, which shouldn't be hard.

I'm sure there was more I meant to add, but I keep waking up early and not being able to fall asleep any earlier, so I'm tired. I'm just very glad this is a three day weekend.

My three and a quarter year old computer is no more According to the error message it's either the memory, the video driver, the motherboard or the hard drive that's gone. I'm not sure they've narrowed it down there. Basically it's going to be simplest to buy a new computer. They're not expensive these days - in fact it's very likely I'll be spending more on new glasses this week than I will on a new computer.

Fortunately I have two netbooks, but it does mean I can't use anything running Windows, unless I borrow my work computer. And I can't use a big screen, unless I borrow my work computer. On the plus side, the only things I really use day to day are Trillian (which works on every operating system known to man except Linux), but Kopete is a reasonable alternative. Or at least, I like it better than all the other Linux alternatives. And there's RSS Bandit, for reading my RSS Feeds. But half of them are on LJ/DW, so I can read those there - although there's no way to tell where I've read to or mark things as unread to come back to later. And I have a load of the others in Google Reader and the rest bookmarked, so I've been adding those. I could use RSS Owl, which is the only other RSS reader I like and it works on Linux - except I have all my RP feeds in there and it's just going to get complicated. Not to mention that to get the OPML I'll need to put my backup program on my work computer to get at my latest backup.

There is at least a PC World that's walking distance from my house. So I can go and try a load of laptops and see which keyboards I like. And this time it won't involve two new operating systems (my last one didn't quite make it to Windows 7 launch, so I had to have Vista for a year so that I could upgrade to 7). It just involves setting it up and installing everything and I still vividly remember that from three years ago...

I wasn't expecting author reveals until later tonight, but it's ok because it means I have time to talk about mine this evening. I wrote:

Can't See the Forest (A River Runs Through It) (1355 words) by paranoidangel
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Doctor Who
Rating: General Audiences
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Amy Pond/Rory Williams
Characters: Amy Pond, Rory Williams, Mels
Summary: Leadworth would be boring, if it wasn't for Rory and Mels. (Spoilers for Let's Kill Hitler)

When I signed up I secretly wanted to write Amy & Rory, so that worked out well. I also wanted to write a remix in a method I never had before. This being my seventh Remix (not including who_remix a couple of years ago) I've used quite a few different methods. This one was quite easy to come up with something. The original has Amy and Rory growing up and playing together in Leadworth. I added Mels. And changed details and changed who was doing what. And changed the romantic bit when they're adults from the original to fit in with a scene in Let's Kill Hitler. It was fun, I enjoyed it.

I will upload it to my website and Teaspoon too.

This week has mostly consisted of rain. And the fun yesterday of tipping out the puddle of water collected in my bin because the binmen persist in leaving the lid open after they've emptied them. And the even more fun of spending five minutes on Wednesday morning trying to get the garage door open long enough to get inside. How it eventually stayed open long enough to get the car out (and closed once I had) I don't know. But after that my car had to spend a couple of nights outside in the rain because there's only so many times I can do that.

I've also been reading Remix stories. I'd entirely forgotten what mine was, I finished it so long ago. Now I've been reminded about it I want to talk about it, but can't do that until the authors are revealed tomorrow/Monday. But someone remixed a Doctor Who/SJA crossover fic I wrote last year as New Horizons (the Doctor in the House Remix). It's got a whole load of great Sky characterisation in it. And I really want to know who wrote it and whether some of the references in it were because they know me, they read the fandoms list on my website or coincidence.

I have also been working on the second draft of my Big Bang fic. After I wrote the first draft I realised the plot makes no sense and it's not spaced out well at all. So I spent time re-working it, with tables to work out who does what in response to what. Hopefully, when I finish the second draft and read it through it won't be too bad and I'll just need to go back and sort out the words, rather than the plot. Not least because I'm also intending to sign up for not-primetime/not_primetime and the deadline is Wimbledon. My deadline for myself for getting my Big Bang to beta is Wimbledon. Which really isn't that far away...

Being back at work after ten days off (including weekends and bank holidays) is such a treat.

The weekend before last the main piece of software we use had a major upgrade. It's online, so you don't get a choice about which version you use. As per usual when it's upgraded we spent half the week finding out which things they'd broken. I think they're now all fixed and I've yet to use any of the new features...

I've also remembered the usual sorts of feedback you get when you ask someone to test something:
Them: It doesn't work. Please fix it.
Me: What happens exactly?
Them: I got an error message.
Me: What did the error message say? Can you take a screencap of it?
Them: No, I closed it. I can't remember what it said.
Me: I'll just fix it based on no data at all then.
(above conversation is simplified, but you get the gist)

While I was at home Dad showed me the centre of the Chambers English Dictionary, which has interesting words in it. Too many to read in one go and most I don't remember. But I do remember some of the collective nouns - these are the ones that particularly stuck out:

A glaring of cats

An implausibility of gnus

A surfeit of skunks

I had this last week off. With Easter it ended up being ten days in a row. Which was nice, except the part where I have to go back to work tomorrow.

During that time I managed to write the first draft of my Big Bang fic. I now have 7000 words of utter rubbish instead of the 2000 words of utter rubbish I had before Easter. I now just need to change most of the words and a fair bit of the plot. But at least it's a start.

I played quite a bit of Wii tennis. It improved once I discovered it started off on medium and you could change the setting to easy...

I doubled the amount of memory on my netbook. It's now less prone to think a lot a throw a massive wobbler if I open too much.

I now have garden-related stuff in my garage. I can do something about the hundreds of weeds that seem to have sprouted between the paving stones and the gravel in my garden, and I can grow the Australia flower I got from avon7 for Christmas.

I have a fifteen year old keyboard, so once I can play the songs we're singing in choir I can sing along to them and get the right notes. Quite a few of which are black ones.

I've started learning to crochet because although I can cross stitch it doesn't create anything useful on its own. When I own a house and can put nails in the walls there will be lots of cross stitched rabbits hanging on them. So far with crochet I can do one stitch and unpicking. Although I am getting worse at unpicking without leaving knots.

I did a post all about my dizziness over a year ago and I haven't done one about my food intolerances, even though I've had them longer. So this is it. Read more...

I'm terrible with wanting to try a book/film/TV series that's popular. There were four Harry Potter books out and a film on the way before I decided that maybe it was popular for a reason and perhaps I'd try it. Of course by that time the first book was really cheap because it had been out for a while, so that helped.

Since then I've been better at trying things. Lost, Heroes and Once Upon a Time were big hits before they were on over here. But none of those I enjoyed for various reasons.

The latest big thing is The Hunger Games. I don't know anything about it, except that it's a book and a film. I'm quite happy not knowing anything about it because I refuse to try it. Everyone else is reading it therefore I don't want to. And I definitely shouldn't go and see the film given that it gave jedinic motion sickness, so I dread to think what it would do to me.

But Downton Abbey and A Game of Thrones were series I held out on for longer and then enjoyed. Perhaps the answer is not to try something when it's popular, but wait until everyone who's going to watch it has tried it and the fuss has died down, then give it a go. I even enjoy Doctor Who less the more people it seems are watching it...

This story goes back to November and was a lot of the reason I was stressed in February. The short version is don't buy from Muji Online, they will steal your money. The long version is longer. Read more...

Last week I was practically not in - Monday I went out to dinner, although not at the Chinese we were intending to go to. Wednesday was the last ballet of the term. We did a move I can't remember the name of that basically involved spinning round and going along. It did make me dizzy, but I wasn't the only one. Theoretically you should always be looking in the same direction but I kept getting confused and ending up facing the wrong way with no idea of how I got there. Thursday was singing and we've just started Gilbert & Sullivan that we're going to be singing at the carnival in June. And it's really hard! But on the plus side, we have have actual books that we own, so I can at least highlight all the black notes.

At the weekend I finally managed to start my Remix fic. I've got as far as the fiddling stage, but then I realised that it's just because I know I need to add description and don't want to. I have been writing a drabble or double drabble every day or every other day for b2mem bingo. It's so much fun - it only requires you to start something and I thought a drabble was doable given that I started the month feeling crap. But writing one big story with all the prompts in might be fun too - especially as I have the 'Causes of death' card. Which means I've written lots of people dying (or having died) but also meant I got a bingo today! Which I am very excited about.