Ten Little Chances to be Free

So. No new Doctor Who until the fall. I finished all of new!Who months ago. And while rewatching old series 3 episodes I got that Pavlovian "YAY IT IS WHO TIME what happens neeeext" response to the theme tune and was sad because I knew what happened next. I need some way to feed the beast. Clearly the logical place to go from here is to descend upon Classic Who and watch a bunch of old Three/Delgado serials, and so, being a sensible and logical person, I... pirated some BFA audios with Eight? IDEK.

No regrets, though. None. Because as far as I can tell, the BFA audios consist of the whole crew of new!Who fanboy writers banding together to make it up to Paul McGann for the ridiculousness of the TV movie. I mean, I am still completely up for Classic Who and would love some recommendations, but right now the two warring factions in my head are "WANT TO LISTEN TO THE NEXT ONE" and "you really should not start another two-hour audio at three in the morning." I was iffy about the whole audio idea--I am not a books-on-tape person, and I'd downloaded Dead Air but never got more than twenty minutes in because the premise was cool but the narration just felt awkward. These are different. They're all dialogue and sound effects--it feels like watching an episode with the video switched off, only written in a way that you can follow the action.

And so I leave you a recommendation and a download link: The Chimes of Midnight. It's Christmas 1906 (or is it?) and the TARDIS lands smack in the middle of a very strange murder mystery where nothing adds up, time moves oddly, and the victims don't stay dead.

Reasons you need this in your life:
- You don't actually need to know anything about Eight and Charley, except that she's an Edwardian adventuress who met Eight aboard a doomed airship.
- Eight. I love Eight. I've been exposed to all of, what, a few audios and a crappy movie with him? And I might just love him more than any of the new!Who Doctors, even Ten. Yeah, I said it.
- It's written by Rob Shearman, who wrote the season 1 'Dalek' episode. I can't say too much without spoiling everything, but near the end of this one he takes up similar knotty themes of humanity, life, sentience, and compassion, and the result is just as powerful.
- Remember everything that was wonderful about Moffat's writing during RTD's run, before half of fandom started hating him? This has it in spades. It's creepy as hell (don't listen to it in the dark, just don't), full of black humor, and leans to the wibbly-wobbly side of timey-wimey. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if Moffat learned some of his tricks from Shearman--he certainly reuses at least one of them in one of his comedy sketches.
- I... I just... think of it as the glorious bastard offspring of Father's Day, Blink, Dalek, and The Doctor's Wife. Now go listen to it.

So my friends and I wanted to let the whole goddamn campus know that Doctor Who Season 6 is coming this weekend... and we might've gone a bit overboard. O:) The original plan was to chalk the sidewalks with "Bad Wolf" and "Vote Saxon" and "Silence will fall" here and there. And then--people showed up and split off in groups and it snowballed, and when I got back from the science quad there was a GODDAMN FULL-SIZED TARDIS on the wall of the library archway being threatened by a technicolor Dalek and "Count the shadows" all over the library and a mural-sized replica of the Van Gogh exploding-Tardis painting chalked on Hatfield Hall. And let's not even get into what happened to the fountain with the creepy statue. I'm sure you can all guess.

I ♥♥ Smith so much.

Vacation was... interesting.

( My brother's school is such a weird place )

( Vacation )

AND. My mom's friend, who is a giant ebay addict and has used the Sucking Pit of Auction Temptation to amass the world's biggest collection of rowing memorabilia, found and bought me two maps of 1830s Paris. I think they might even be vintage maps, not modern prints. My jaw hit the floor when I found out about this, since the first and only time I walked into an antique maps and prints shop in Paris they had an 1834 map going for over €300, but apparently there is someone on ebay selling these things for something in the low-to-mid double digits.

So I am about to be the proud and extremely shocked owner of an 1834 street plan of Paris and an 1832 map of the Paris environs. I'm still too stunned to squee (although there will be LOTS of squee when they arrive), because the idea that people would do these sorts of things for me is just... ajskl;ajsdafsdf

sjkl;jasdfasdlkj;skjdf

(In the interests of public geekiness, said ebay seller can be found here. God help us all. And now I am staring at the listing for a slightly-damaged 5-franc coin from 1831 and wondering whether I want to pay ten bucks for it. Or a sou from 1791. Or... hell, in the interests of public geekiness, here is the ebay page for French coins.)

First I got an unheard-of 19 out of 20 on an assignment I thought I failed!

Then I called up the Queens Theatre and got a seat for Les Mis in row BB on Friday night!

And NOW one of the directors of my study-abroad program comes waltzing into the library this afternoon to tell me she's found me a new host family!

Last week was such utter shit that I knew this week could only get better, but I was totally not expecting it to get THIS MUCH BETTER EEEEEE. This week started with good news all around and is going to end with a trip to London. sajkld;js

(and the new family is a woman who lives in the Butte aux Cailles neighborhood and has a HOUSE and apparently I get most of the second floor, and she has two daughters about my age, and is supposedly super-nice, and... eeeee)

OKAY THIS DESERVES ITS OWN POST

http://sictransitoperamundi.blogspot.com/

Gigantic collection of links to download operas. GIGANTIC. Very heavy on Donizetti, Rossini, and Puccini, but has a little bit of everything, and whoever maintains it tends to post five or six different versions of the same opera in a row now and then, just for variety. :D

I'm not entirely sure how I stumbled across this but it is FANTASTIC and I'm probably going to have several DVD-Rs burned with all the shinies I'm grabbing from here.

Les Mis. Is going to be at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris. In June 2010.

...next year is going to be the best Barricade Day evar.

Look what arrived in the mail this week OMSB misatheredpanda you win the uuuuuniverse. *flail*

So that "The Year 1830" French course I'm taking? In the past few weeks it hasn't been directly engaging my nerd-squee too much, as we'd been covering Balzac and Stendhal and the invasion of Algeria and I have discovered that to get automatic A's on essays in this class all I have to do is claim it's all about Napoleon. HOWEVER, the biggest unit in the class (in terms of importance; Stendhal was probably the longest, fie) is the Revolution of 1830, and we have been ordered to go forth and find a primary-source account of the revolution to talk/write about. We were given a list, but it did not include Dumas père's 100+ page account of the three days he spent running around with a gun building barricades. So I got the instructor's permission and went to hunt down said account in the library.

You guys... I have only been in the French history section of the library. I didn't even know where the French lit section was until today. This is probably a good thing since if I had stumbled upon it on a day when I had less to do, I probably would've sat around there gawping until I hyperventilated and passed out. As it was, I grabbed volume 6 of Dumas' memoirs, yielded to temptation and checked out a copy of George Sand's Horace too, and only spent about ten minutes drooling over the fifteen-foot length of floor-to-ceiling bookshelf packed with every work by Victor Hugo one could possibly conceive of. We're not just talking complete works in the original (including like sixteen different editions of Hernani), we're talking about a huge and ancient copy of Les Misères (!!!!) that was too heavy for me to get it off the top shelf and a gorgeous 19th-century German translation of LM printed entirely in blackletter. It makes me SO HAPPY.

...also, the last time this volume of Dumas' memoirs was checked out was in 1938. (The first time appears to be 1914.) This is both sad and kind of amusing. The girl at the circ desk had to fiddle around with both books for a few minutes because both of them were too old to be in the computer.

Also also, unless someone else got there first I will be doing my final project in Theory of Computer Science on the workings and aborted history of the analytical engine. If someone steals my topic, the backup is Enigma machines, but... come on, what is more awesome than Victorian cog-driven computers? Oh yeah, that's right, Victorian cog-driven computers programmed by Lord Byron's daughter.

SO. Smith is currently in the throes of ConBust, which has so far been awesome. Last night I dressed up as a Girl Genius extra and went to panels on heroes and villains, saw a slideshow of ridiculous anatomy- and physics-defying anime boobs, and watched clips of ridiculously awful B-movies. Today I went to the Star Wars discussion, the Evil Overlord panel, and then headed outside for boffing war. Which... okay, boffing is basically a bunch of people 'fencing' by hitting each other with foam-covered sticks. Despite never having had a fencing lesson in my life, I miraculously did okay, mostly due to being short and fast and perfectly willing to stab people in the chest instead of just hacking their limbs off. Individual matches first, then we divided up (since we lacked jerseys, the team divisions ended up as 'people wearing all black' and 'people not wearing all black,' which was about equal) to play Boffing Capture the Flag. There is nothing on earth more satisfying to one's inner child than charging across a field with a bunch of people dressed up as anime and fantasy characters, waving a 'sword' and yelling "SPARTAAAAAAA!"

Yeah.

THEN I went back inside to all the merchandise and art booths. I should note at this point that I was wearing a pair of goggles on my forehead with a tag that said 'SLASH GOGGLES' dangling from them; as I was wandering among the art, the guy behind one of the tables stopped me to read the tag and said, "So when you put them on, do you see gay everywhere?" Naturally I said "Yes!" and put them on. He made a dive for the guy next to him at the booth and pretended to kiss him. Then we laughed and he offered me a cookie he'd baked himself (which I was not allergic to! and it was delicious) and started talking about how he used to hang around his friends in the Lotrips fandom and got used to being the only guy in the chatroom. At some point I asked him what his booth was.

YOU GUYS. IT WAS RANDALL MUNROE. THE XKCD GUY. My embarrassment at not having noticed, it was palpable. Also, fun fact? When you ask Randall Munroe for his autograph, he will draw you a comic. I got one with a bunch of floating stick figures that said "Gravity Boycot Day 2009." And--yes. I heart ConBust so hard.

And now I have to go get dressed for rehearsal, thanks to whatever genius decided to put the chorus concert on the same day as ConBust. And I will probably be out late at the One Dance to Rule Them All.

...yeah, I think all of Smith's geekiness and willingness to party is getting channeled into this one weekend. Thursday there was an impromptu music-sharing party, yesterday I got back from ConBust to find ten girls from my floor making out with each other in the bathroom, and then tonight is the dance. And, uh, tomorrow night? I'm going to be doing a hell of a lot of homework.

*takes a deep breath* OMG OMG OMG I GOT INTO THE PROGRAM I'M GOING TO SPEND A YEAR IN PARIS EEEEEEEEEEE.

A YEAR STUDYING IN PARIS.

Okay. Will not hyperventilate with joy. I am calm. So very calm.

(eeeeeeeee)

...also, while procrastinating on my Balzac essay this weekend, I started finishing up my PRC translations and putting them in HTML format to go on that website I haven't updated in ages. IIRC the only ones I have left to do are Beggars at the Feast, Attack on the Rue Plumet, and half of Look Down. Noticing a pattern here? I really hate translating slang.

And in computer science we took a break from formal language theory to learn about regular expressions. Which I never really taught myself because they looked utterly incomprehensible, but they are really nifty and they look much more impenetrable than they are and now I want ThinkGeek's /(bb|[^b]{2})/ t-shirt.