I decided the other week, because I am completely mad, to set myself the challenge of writing 20,000 words this year. Something is defined as written when it is posted up somewhere. So anything I've previously done most of the work on and just needs a bit (lot) of betaing that actually gets finished counts. And hopefully motivates me to finish. Like the one that celebrates its third birthday in April. And is only 1000 words long (although the first draft was 150, so it's grown a bit). As I've already posted one this year I decided it counted, so here's a pretty picture to illustrate my progress (with a different coloured bar to differentiate it from my reading my height in books progress):

3,851 / 20,000 (19.3%)

No idea whether 20,000 words is a good amount to pick, mind you. Although if I average 5000 words a fic (which I seem to be at the moment), that's only four stories. At the rate of one every three months, which sounds a do-able challenge.

Because, as has already been well established I am mad, I have signed up for the Free Your Mind challenge/ficathon thingy and have to write Jack/Elizabeth (that would be the Stargate kind, not the Pirates of the Caribbean). By the 3rd March. Um. Argh? And is there anyone crazy enough to beta it?

I did start a Weir/Caldwell fic the other week. I got three paragraphs in, and although they were very pretty paragraphs, it just wasn't going anywhere and I concluded that it just wasn't going to happen. Which is a handy thing to find out.

I am partway through writing Shep/Weir flirting for Langford U, which is currently at 2000 words and needs more plot - due to having eight characters in a scene and I've only focused on two of them so far. I'm only on the first draft, though, so based on the last two I wrote, the finished one should be more than 4000 words.

On Saturday night, at about 1am (so technically it was Sunday morning) I had a slightly (very?) crack!fic like idea of Sheppard in our universe accidentally swapping places with the Langford version. With twice the UST as people try to figure out what's going on and how to get them back. I'm sort of tempted to write it but I'd also have to figure out what's going on, how they got there and therefore how to get them back. Which I haven't so far. But I've imagined (and then forgotten most of) lots of interesting conversations.

I now have a new RSS reader I think I am mostly happy with. I say I think because I need to play with the settings a bit and how it looks, and live with it for a while. Altogether I tried out 16, not counting Abilon and I've ended up with one called RSSBandit.

If you click on a particular feed, or group of feeds, it'll show you everything from the newest to oldest on one page, which is quite cool. You have to click on the actual post itself for it to work out you've read it, though. It shows which category the post is in, which is quite cool. Abilon doesn't, although I've not noticed because I've never really noticed anyone use categories. It doesn't make a sound when it finds new posts. I can't decide whether that's a good thing or not at the moment.

The one good thing that Abilon does is integrates well with Livejournal and Yahoo. But which I mean you can just give it the name of the user or community on LJ and it'll work out the address of the RSS feed. And whether or not you can view friends locked posts, as long as you are logged in in Abilon.

In RSSBandit you have to tell it it needs to authorise the feed and give it your username and password - for each feed separately. Which also means updating the address of each one to match with LJs new addresses. It has complained about people with underscores in their usernames, I'm not sure whether it's happy now.

Where RSSBandit scores over Abilon is for RSS feeds that are titles only. It works out that this is the case, and automatically takes you to the page, so you can see it. So now I can read Avon, Ann and Nic's LJs again without having to make an effort to visit their actual LJs! And I can read Tolkien Weekly posts again - or could if the layout didn't mean it's a tiny thin little column on the very right of my screen.

So that's basically how I've spent my weekend. Apart from being behind on my viewing - I've now got two episodes of Johnny and the Bomb to watch - there were only three to begin with. I've had to put a new tape in to record Lewis (which clashes with Auf Weidersehen, Pet, and anyway, I'm not ready).

Last night, though, was Burns Night. There are photos on the Wallingford Rotaract website. I didn't get to eat haggis (a bad thing, as I like it). But I did get chocolate cake bars for pudding, so I can't complain really. The celidh was good fun - although also involved the most scary thing I've done this year when Al, who I was dancing with at the time, picked me up. Apparently it was quite a funny sight. I was too busy holding on and just generally being scared to think about anything else!

...was trying to find a new RSS Feed reader. Abilon has today refused to admit that some of my LJ communities exist. And as it has caused me all sorts of problems in the past, I thought I'd try some others. So far I've tried five and definitely ruled out four. There's another one that's better in some ways and worse in others, so I'm trying it out to see which ways are the important ones. This weekend I'll be trying some others too! What a fun way to spend a weekend.

The most recent episode of Stargate - Ripple Effect. When [censored] walked into the room full of [censoreds] all I could think was that he was probably thinking "I'm in heaven and it's full of Samantha's". But much squee over the credits. It's quite handy to know the actor's names.

The last episode of Atlantis I saw - Inferno - was it just me or did they miss a whole load from the end? I mean the team didn't die (duh) but how did they get home? I did like Sheppard and Weir's conversation near the beginning, that was quite funny.

I followed a link from the SGA newsletter to discover that the Documentation challenge on SGA Flashfiction has got some really excellent entries for it.

So much so that I ended up inspired to write one of my own - it's sort of a story anyway: Mission Form Checklist

I went home this weekend, which means I came back with a whole load of food and some books. Saturday dad went to the OU in Milton Keynes, so he got up early and consequently we were all awake. Except the cat, who was taken to bed by mum. So we were all wrecked on Saturday.

Saturday was the Blakes 7 Dorset group Christmas party, which was good fun. Although I could have quite happily fallen asleep in front of Hitchhiker's. I could have quite happily fallen asleep in front of Rosemary and Thyme later on as well. As it was cold the cat decided to come to bed with me and slept all night, despite having slept all day (it's a hard life being a cat, obviously). A warm cat on one side is no substitute for quilt on the other, but he did wake me up from a bad dream, so he was forgiven. And also didn't take over too much.

Me and dad had an argument about the CD drive in the Atlantis episode Michael that involved watching the relevant bit of the episode three times, and we still disagree. He thinks Trip just took the CD out with no trouble at all, I think it did involve the usual pulling you have on laptops (well, Dell ones at least, which is what they have on Atlantis). This did, though, lead to a discussion about how they were powering them and just how many they had in the place anyway.

I also made good progress on reading my height in books. I read the latest Seven & Ace Doctor Who on the train on the way home and the other half on the way back. And I read Three Men in a Boat while I was home (which was really funny, if confusing because he keeps going off on a tangent, so you never quite know whether he's talking about that trip or another one). So I am now 4.1cm into my 155cm.

4.1cm / 155cm (2.6%)

I missed the beginning of The Avengers this week because I couldn't get Freeview to load up. It took me a while to work out this was because I was plugging in my external hard drive instead. Sometimes I surprise myself with my stupidity.

Christoper Lee was in tonight's episode. I only knew because it was mentioned in The Guardian's TV section. Otherwise I probably would never have known. I know it was forty years ago (it doesn't seem it!) but I didn't expect him to look so different. It was obvious which was him, though, no-one else had the same long, thin face.

I did like the way that amazing scientific transformations can take place solely with the aid of an oscilloscope.

I spent the weekend (ok, well, some of it) updating my website. I now have a contact form that works and I ended up with a ton of music videos to rec on there. I also reorganised my fanfiction page, so its actually grouped by fandom now! Plus I went through my drabbles and indexed them at the top of the relevant pages. As I was going through all of this I kept finding other, little, things I wanted to change. I've been thinking for a while that I want to go through and tweek some of the back-end stuff, perhaps I should actually get round to it.

Just after I uploaded it, I posted a new fic to Langford U - Divide and Subtract, which is a Sheppard and McKay friendship piece. I'm tempted to do some more with those two because they're so fun (although it was so tempting to go slashy!) and work my way through the rest of BODMAS (brackets of division multiplication addition subtraction = the order you evaluate an equation in, and is actually useful in my job!)

I really enjoyed Life on Mars on Monday. The DCI is so much like Burnside. I feel when he told Sam he had asked to transfer there that was important to the mystery of how he got to 1973 in the first place, although I have no idea how. I notice that, like Spooks, they've gone for the American style of starting with a bit of excitement before starting properly and telling us the names of the actors and giving us some pretty pictures. Which annoys me because it means you actually have to be ready at 9 o'clock, rather than just thinking about it. Unlike Spooks, though, they have actually kept the credits in and saved the trailer for next week till afterwards. The BBC are seriously pushing it, though - there was even a trailer for it before Doctor Who on BBC7 (which was the last one *sob*)

Last night we went to see Brokeback Mountain, which was very good and I really enjoyed. The only downside, apart from the 70s sideburns and that terrible moustache, was I couldn't always understand the Southern accents and as a result I have no idea of most of the characters names.

From the A people on my friends list - annmarwalk, avon and altariel - I am going to read my height in books this year. Because it is a good idea, and also because I'm only 5 foot 1 - which is 155cm in books, so shouldn't be too difficult.

And just to finish off, as I asked Una one of these:
Top 5 Meme: You post a topic, list, category, whatever, in my comments section (examples: "Top 5 Johns & Jacks on TV" or "Top 5 pairings in Atlantis"). Then, in a separate post, I'll post the answers to all your Top 5 ideas, according to me.

Given that for two weeks in a row The Guardian's kakuro has been hard, I'm beginning to wonder that they rotate them so that Thursday's is always hard. I will have to borrow some of dad's papers next weekend and do some more easy ones - I'll have to work my way up to hard. I've still got about four Sudokus left (out fo 16) from the Christmas puzzle G2. I'm determined to finish them but they are so boring!

I am confused at the crossword though. One of the clues describes a pavlova. But with 11 letters. After filling in the rest I googled in case I was wrong, but not. From the letters I had it had to be pavlovacake, and dad confirmed that from Friday's paper, but I have never heard it called that. It's quite weird.

I amazed myself the other day. I am pretty much to the point of needing a story betaed - another Langford U fic - and I only started it on the 3rd. And if that wasn't amazing enough, it's 4000 words. It's only one scene! I'm feeling guilty that it's not anything I should be writing, but I am at least writing something, which is an improvement on recently at least.

I've just watched Balderdash and Piffle, being as it clashed with Life on Mars, and it was really interesting. I now know where management speak comes from and that people from Sunderland (or that support the football team) are called Mackems. Most interesting, though, was the bit about the origin of the word man. In old english it was used to mean human, which makes Tolkien's use of Man make a lot more sense.

I wasn't convinced by Hyperdrive last night. The dig at Windows was quite funny but most of the time it seemed like they were trying too hard and it wasn't that funny. The Commander reminds me of the guy from The Office as well.

A multi-part post for today.

TV

I really liked Life on Mars on Monday. It's about a DCI who gets in a car accident (RTA, if we're going to go with acronyms ) and wakes up in 1973. As a DI. Poor love. It's sort of a cross between The (Old) Bill and Quantum Leap. His DCI in 1973 I hated at first but by the end he was obviously a nice guy and a bit Burnside-like and I liked him. I'm looking forward to more of it.

On the one hand I'm looking forward to Hyperdrive tonight (sci-fi sitcom, thereby Red Dwarf's succesor) because it sounds good, but I'm a bit worried that a lot of comedy on these days seems to be puerile, rather than funny. With the exception of The Thick of It, which is more ridiculous-situation funny than laugh-out-loud funny.

Feedback

There have been links to people talking about feedback on metafandom recently. I'm trying to be good and give feedback for nearly everything I read, counting reviewing it for Sel's site as feedback. The exceptions are generally ones where I honestly have nothing to say, not even I liked it because I can't decide whether I do or not. I am mostly succeeding at this so far.

The reason I'm doing it is, well, actually there's more than one. It's partly because I feel I should, I mean just pressing a button and typing a few words takes less time than reading the thing. I don't know if it's called karma, maybe, but I always feel that you should treat people, generally speaking, how you'd like to be treated back. Okay, so it doesn't always happen, esp not if you talk to me while I'm ill or stressed, but then my dad's exactly the same so I blame him. But it feels the same with feedback - I feel that if I don't take the time to comment on other people's fic then why should people comment on mine?

It's also sometimes an opportunity to have a discussion about a character or a situation, or something. And a chance to make friends. When I did Crack Van back in December I did worry at first that I was reccing stories of people that are on my friendslist, but then I realised that in some cases that's how I met them!

Generally speaking, if someone comments on a fic of mine and I don't know who they are I'll go and check them out, find out what they've written. On the basis that if they've read something of mine we must have something in common, so maybe they've written something I want to read.

Rotaract

We went to Rotary last night for our meeting. While they were eating and meeting we met, and it was very nice to sit in comfy chairs, even if they were 'a bit horizontal' as Matthew described them. I remember when I first joined and didn't know anyone that well it seemed really odd that they all knew each other really well. It doesn't now though. We were discussing Moonraker at one point (a 10 mile night hike with orienteering, also including running out of torch batteries, getting stuck in the mud and large amounts of chocolate) and someone said you basically laugh for 6 hours. I've never done it, but whenever we meet up it does consist mainly of laughing. And chocolate.

Going into Rotary afterwards was more sobering, though. They had a talk from a couple of guys who had been out to Pakistan after the earthquake. One was a journalist, the other had raised lots money (like £50,000 in a week lots) and they showed the videos they'd made out there. There were loads of buildings either flattened or half falling down. The worst thing was that the guy who had raised money is trying to build an orphange out there, and he focused on the children who had been injured, many of them had to have amputations because they hadn't got medical help soon enough. That was really horrible to see.

The trouble with seeing that sort of thing is that it immediately makes you want to help. That's obviously not a bad thing in itself (our cheese and wine quiz on Saturday was to raise money for a Shelterbox, and the usual Rotary collection at their meeting went towards that and raised £139 between about 30 people). The trouble is that you feel this way everytime and you just can't help everyone. And it's really hard to think about who you're not helping, even though you are helping someone else.

Memes

For a bit of lightness after that, these have been going round today.

You scored as Teyla. Teyla 53% Lizzy 53% Sam 40% Vala 20% Which Stargate Girl Are You? created with QuizFarm.com

I like the beautiful part!

You scored as Carson Beckett. Carson Beckett 67% Ronon Dex 67% Rodney McKay 58% Aiden Ford 50% Daniel Jackson 42% Cam Mitchell 42% Jack O'Neill 33% John Sheppard 33% Teal'c 17% Who Is Your Stargate Boyfriend? created with QuizFarm.com

It's true he does have a nice accent, although it would be better if it was an incomprehensible-to-Americans, proper Scottish accent. With no r in murder (cf The Tower).

I now know more than I ever felt I needed to about American football. Admittedly I skim-read them but I still don't understand the rules. Apparently a team can have 53 players on it, which is just insane! The exciting part is when I looked in the British League, found Warwick Wolves and recognised a name! Someone in my tutor group was president in our final year.

I'm very glad I watched Stargate on Sunday because it had Claudia Black in it (hence the reason I watched it) as well as Hammond and Erik Brekker! Not only that, but it was the one where he nearly has to give Hammond the kiss of life. "Excellent waking up, sir!" And it had the hiccuping woman in it. So now I know who she is. At this rate I'll know who all the guests at Peg 1 are.

Seen pretty much everywhere and I've been meaning to post all week:

Six words: Don't you think Bush looks tired?

Pass it on if you know what it means

(Although if him being stupid isn't going to do it, I really don't know what will)

Something that occurred to me ages ago but I had forgotten all about until I was surfing around and was reminded about. In Atlantis, Sheppard/Weir is also known as Sparky, to save it being Shweir *sudder* Those sort of names are only good when they're funny (like McShep, which I find funny for some reason).

Only trouble is, Sparky is one of Rygel's nicknames in Farscape, given to him by Crichton. So I think all the ships should have a Rygel nickname. There's even a site with them all listed: Crichtonisms ( could only remember four: Sparky, Spanky, Buckwheat and Napoleon XVI). Maybe if we run out, we can go for other character's nicknames, there must be more than there are pairings, even when you get to multi-ones.

This did completely confuse me the other day when I was reading sga_newsletter and they mentioned a new community with spanking in the name. It was referring to, you know, spanking. Except that my first though was 'ooh, I wonder what pairing that is.'

I should have known today would be a bad day. I had to go to bed early last night because I was just so tired from the shock of having go get up early (I'm so glad there's only one day left this week - all weeks should be four days long). This morning I woke up after a bad dream. There was something at the end where I was abandoned my by friends and suddenly went from a busy street in the light to a quiet one in the dark which had no streetlights at the end, which scared me no end. I hoped to go back to sleep and have a nicer dream but my alarm went off an minute later.

Then when I got to work I felt ill - I must have had a bit too much lactolite (low-lactose) milk with my Coco Pops. So I spent my first hour at work doing not much apart from trying to take my mind off it and not throw up. I haven't really got the cotton wool out of my head the rest of the day.

I have to watch Three Men in a Boat (or Bota as dad's email put it, his typing being crap) because they are passing through Wallingford tonight. I didn't watch the previous one because I haven't read the book (I'm sure I've tried though) and I'll just end up feeling guilty about it. I think my dad has tried to get me to read it, but my sister did instead, so they have conversations about it, in which I have no idea what they're on about.

Mind you, me and dad had a whole conversation about the laptops on Atlantis (they're like mine) and the tablet PCs (he has one) and the computers on Stargate they use as TVs. My mum and sister thought we were mad. Possibly they're not wrong.

Dad's set up a test blog for WordPress 2.0 and it looks really good. If someone just sorts out Live+Press I'd switch like a shot. Which leads nicely to the subject of Atlantis...

I'm not going to spoil any episodes past Sky. I was going to give the name of the episodes, but anyone who's been at a con with me knows what I'm like with episode names). I came to the conclusion during Epiphany (the one with the beard) that I actually ship Sheppard/everyone, not just the three in my icon. So to test this theory I read a John/Ronon fic, liked it, could totally see that. But, I thought to myself, I couldn't do Sheppard/Ford. Except I read one and I totally can.

All is fine until tonight's episode where I saw:
Caldwell/Weir, McKay/Weir, McKay/Sheppard, John/Teyla, Carson/Rodney(!), Teyla/Ronon, John/Ronon, Weir/Lorne (now I know who he is!)
Er, yeah. I don't like Teyla/Ford (even though I've written it, but it was in an AU, so doesn't count), although I'm quite like the idea of Teyla/Ronon. And Elizabeth/Ronon as well.

So all in all it was a good episode if you ship anything in particular, and a bad episode if you ship anything in particular, depending on how good you are at interpreting/explaining. I found it a really fun episode just spotting the ships and being all gleeful about all of them. It's so much more fun!

This is possibly something of a reaction against some of the stuff I've been reading where people are complaining about particular ones. I had enough of that in Stargate and I can't be doing with it. I'm not caring too much about people talking about episodes as well. I'm just happy to go 'that was fun' or 'that was crap'.

I got all excited when I came to post yesterday, as I discovered a new version of WordPress is out, and some of the new features look really useful. Except then I found that Live+Press doesn't work with it, and since that's the plugin I use to automatically post my posts to Livejournal, it's a bit useless without it. Although having said that, it does keep thinking I want to post with my Atlantis OTP icon, rather than my default, and yesterday it decided not to post at all, which I'm hoping is just a hiccup.

I've just decided what train I'm going to get home. I'm so looking forward to going back to a cold, dark and noisy house and going to work tomorrow.

On the plus side, the 2005 Shelly Award results are up, so now I have lots of Farscape music videos to download.

Happy New Year to everyone reading this. May your 2006 be better than your 2005. Which probably won't be hard in my case.

Onto the review of 2005 and my new years resolutions from last year.
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