broadcast me a joyful noise

Finally back at home. Tired. Busy beyond belief. All I want to do is sit around and read Patrick O'Brien novels and catch up on HIMYM and The Office (my unconditional-joy shows!) but I have to book appointments and shave my legs and throw out half my clothes and pack for Sydney and aaaaghghghghgh.

Photos will be a while in coming due to the lost-luggage scenario: Mel's camera cord is in her suitcase.

Belated 2008 books read/fic written posts should happen some time today.

In the meantime, here is the fic I wrote for the Xmas exchange at oh_shit_santa -- it is about KABUTO and SAKURA who are basically my favourite characters in Naruto ever, and I love dark medical fics (uh. as you may have guessed.) so it was heaps of fun to write.

The Anatomy of Need -- Naruto -- On his back in the dust, staring up at the bursting sky of a giddy summer morning, Kabuto thinks: yet another typical Konoha welcome.

...what's that, universe? You think I deserve something nice to celebrate my return to Canberra?

Yeah, I do too.

Oh my GOD. This is just. *waves hands* After all the recent Uchiha mindtwisty and sadfaces and horrible crap, I get a whole chapter about my favourite character being awesome.

<3333333333

re: the latest Naruto chapter

....

Oh, WHATEVER. What. the fuck. ever. I might take a break from canon for a while and devote myself to writing awesome character studies about awesome people like Temari instead.

BUT I am finding it hard to maintain my disgust at stupid character retconning because of a lot of cool things, namely:

+ My prototype-Sakura outfit at the party last night went down well! Pink hair looks weirdly good on me; consequently, I am rethinking my dislike of the colour. Anyway, it was a great party and lots of hilarious pictures were taken of pirates fighting ninjas and ninjas posing with fans and pirates posing with pirate wenches etc. etc.

+ I am at hooooome! Having coffee with some friends this afternoon, going out to dinner with family tonight, generally pretending that I'm going to study but actually sitting around plotting fics and surfing LJ and obtaining TOTALLY AWESOME things like...

+ ...the first episode of the Sick Fish Avatar podcast, which is a hilarious and intelligent and highly entertaining little show produced by -- among others -- the lovely rawles. They talk about early S3 episodes and how adorable Aang is and delicious meta about character parallels and imperialism, and then Rawles RECS MY MAI FIC (<3!!) and provides a permanent public record of the fact that I promised her epic futurefic, which was a very sneaky way of ensuring that I could never, ever avoid writing it now. Anyway. sickfishpodcast. It's definitely worth a listen.

Oh, Kishimoto. Come the fuck on.

(Look at his FACE. MY GOD. Give your protagonist a freaking break, man.)

( Grumble grumble OH MY HEART )

So, uh, yeah, I have plans for tonight and they involve pharmacology reading and sorting a whole lot of papers, but if I end up writing totally self-indulgent waff instead, it will be in no way my fault.

BUT WHATEVER. IT'S THE WEEKEND.

\o/

You guys. I don't know what is wrong with me. I think I have an illness.

Solfege -- Naruto -- 7720 words

This is a war that none of them has ever been trained to fight and they are learning everything by ear and by touch. The only lesson that can still be applied is this: know your teammates.

Finally taking advantage of Naruto's enormous cast, this one has a shitload of awesome characters in it (including seven POV characters, because I am a masochist) and it's about teenage ninjas during the apocalypse, so you all definitely want to go and read it right now.

It's very very cold in this computer room, so I think I'm going to go up to my room and make tea and read sullenly under a blanket until it's time to leave for the movies. We're seeing The Black Balloon, which is an Australian film about which I know very little apart from a) it's meant to be quite a good portrayal of autism, and b) it has Toni Collette and Gemma Ward in it. I'm not so sure how I feel about that last, but Toni Collette can generally hold up a film, so we'll see.

Ji wanted a list of things currently making me happy.

1) This fic, omg, it is everything I ever wanted out of Naruto fandom, even if it took me a long time to find. It's got fairy tales and Sasuke talking to snakes and basically I read it three times in a row when I first came across it, that is how utterly charming I found it.

2) Debussy understood that a work of art, or an effort to create beauty, was always regarded by some people as a personal attack.

3) The weekeeeeeeeeeend.

4) I'm reading a dry but interesting history of psychiatry at the moment, and today in a half-hour break between lectures I wandered down to the Nicholson Museum just off the main quad and looked at the 'Freud's Collection' exhibit, which included lots of Egyptian artifacts from his office, and videos introduced by his daughter Anna, and the actual throw rug from his actual couch, which was many many kinds of cool.

5) The French Blend coffee that I know is just sitting in the door of the fridge waiting for me to put it in my baby insulated plunger.

6) The fact that profound_poppy and I tried out the new-ish Mexican-and-crepes (??) place at the union building, and we now know that it does good crepes. Mmmmmmcrepes.

7) Temari turns her face upwards to catch even the strongest sun. Temari's hair is a constant fair mess and when she dances from rock to rock, her fan whips a roaring spinning violence out of the air and she is beautiful. She is the sand and she is strange and she is far more trouble than Shikamaru ever expected to find himself sleeping with.

(Ummm, so yet another fic is dragging me along in its terrible claws, but this one has all three of my favourite characters in it AND ALSO a whole section about my not-very-secret Naruto OTP, plz see above, so...yay?)

Wow, this is like way back when I just talked about BSG non-stop and everyone on my flist got very sick of me. SORRY GUYS. ( It's a civic duty thing )

I...might actually have achieved porn? I don't know. I can never tell. I came fairly close once or twice in the heydey of PILOTS, and Healer got pretty porny in parts, but I think this one wins because it's pretty much all about sex & oral fixations.

Gloss -- Naruto -- 2844 words

It begins with the way Sasuke reaches out and picks up Naruto's hand, with the way his lips are dry and smooth and he never even blinks as he pulls Naruto's fingers into his mouth.

It was kind of weird to write, because I am one of the least sexual people I know. But I wasn't just mimicking others or pulling things out of my ass for this one, so...let's hope it doesn't come across as entirely inauthentic. It certainly was surprising amounts of fun, because I wrote it very fast and used my favourite style and wasn't quite as ruthless with myself as I should have been.

And now for sleeeeeeep.

(Oh my god, Mel, I'm so sorry. I'm a horrible person. But it was either write this or let the crazy cynicism channel itself into the SasuNaru and YOU REALLY WOULDN'T WANT THAT.)

talking for the dead -- Naruto -- 873 words

Sai smiles because he was meant to take it as a compliment, and because by now that's just what he does with his face.

Wow. I bet a lot of you have never been around while I'm in the middle of an anime obsession, have you? The thing is, anime was my High School Thing, and the reason I got onto LJ in the first place, and the reason I started writing fanfic, but once I'd spent some time in the Yami no Matsuei and X/1999 fandoms around the age of sixteen/seventeen...I didn't really watch it much. (With the notable exceptions of Ouran and -- recently -- Death Note.) I stopped going to conventions and cosplaying and reading manga.

But, apparently, I never quite managed to shake my inner anime fangirl. So now I'm watching Naruto and planning fic and cosplay (maaaaaaybe) and learning silly dances and it's pretty much entirely ryokophoenix's fault, but I'm having a great time. I'd forgotten what it was like to be able to sing an entire song in Japanese despite not knowing more than five words in the language, and to share a fandomly enthusiasm with people that you know in real life.

And now I'm wondering what other series I've been missing out on. Because I really love this medium; it was such a huge part of my high school experience and it's still so, so different to anything the Western market produces (except Avatar! WHOO AVATAR!). Mel & I talked today about the fact that very few Western TV shows aimed at children have such epic scope and such hugely emotional, moral cores as most anime series. Most Western TV shows for kids have plots that are contained within a single episode, and most of them don't make many intellectual demands on the viewer or ask that they absorb more than a simple message. Granted, not all anime does this, but most of it does focus on a story arc that can take years to climax, because they're usually based on something that was a serialised graphic novel. It demands an attention span. And a willingness to pay attention to complex ideas. (And that's not even starting on the fact that in Western society, most animation is aimed only at children, and graphic novels are considered the provence of a subculture rather than a legitimate medium for any genre imaginable.)

I'm quite tipsy, so I could be talking out of my arse, but I am really glad that I got into anime before I started judging it based on its collective fans or its popularity or, god help me, American dubs.