there will be a fish

Have I mentioned that spatz and I signed up for smallfandombang? We decided to commit to finishing off our Mission: Impossible monster. So it's kind of hilarious, because we're just shy of 15,000 words and it's not even the first check-in yet, and five months until final draft.

There are at least seven more largish scenes/sequences to write, so it's going to be looong. It sort of resembles MFU more than M:I in tone, but I'm okay with that, because M:I4 was also a little more MFU than M:I.

Apparently I'm really in the mood to write spy shenanigans, because I just finished Dungeons & Hawkeyes and have been poking at an old MFU draft (which, hilariously, ALSO starts in a dungeon; that was not intentional), and we've got wacky shit going on in the M:I story (SO many tropes. SO, SO MANY).

- So I just realized that I never posted the results for the unguessed pairings in the quotations ship meme a couple of weeks ago. I've now updated the post with the answers -- no one guessed Miss Parker/Jarod (The Pretender), Josh Lyman/Donna Moss (The West Wing), Olivia Dunham/Peter Bishop (Fringe), Napoleon Solo/Illya Kuryakin (The Man From U.N.C.L.E.), or Steve McGarrett/Danny Williams (Hawaii Five-0). For shame on the last one, people. The rest I kind of expected -- serves me right for being ridiculously multifannish. The pairings that were guessed were Brad Colbert/Nate Fick (Generation Kill), Bertie Wooster/Reginald Jeeves (Jeeves & Wooster), John Watson/Sherlock Holmes (Sherlock Holmes books), Lord Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane (Lord Peter Wimsey series), and Benton Fraser/Ray Kowalski (Due South).

- I have started compulsively watching QI again. Why is Stephen Fry so awesome, seriously? I just want to be his friend, give him a hug, and sit around drinking tea and/or madeira while talking about obscure trivia. (SIGH why am I not Emma Thompson)

- Question: does anyone know where I might *ahem* look for video editing programs, with, say, an eye patch on, if you know what I mean? I've been really wanting to make some vids, but fuck if I'm going to do it with Windows Movie Maker again.

- In other, unrelated news, I can't stop listening to Janelle Monáe's song "Cold War". I'm not sure why. It's awesome. :)

I woke up waaaay too early this morning and couldn't go back to sleep, ugh. Then I wasted several hours of my life to the tentacled embrace of the state bureacracy, bought an enormous amount of sushi, and ate it while watching NCIS:LA with my sister. (Let me just say: KENSI AND DEEKS, I LOVES THEM. I still love Sam and G, too, but Kensi is the bomb, and I am incredibly fond of Deeks' puppyish facade and badass/marshmallow center, and I totally ship them, which I haven't done for a m/f cop partnership since, hmm, Life I think. I know it's not the most brilliant show in the world (HAHAHA), but it still makes me happy. ♥). I did pass the time waiting on Godot bureaucrats by re-reading Dorothy L. Sayers' awesome essay "Aristotle on Detective Fiction," though, so it wasn't a total waste of time. I like to read that essay and think about TV crime procedurals. I was thinking, I could scan it and put it up here if anyone's interested? It took me a lot of effort to obtain a copy of Unpopular Opinions in order to read it in the first place, so I'm okay with loaning it out to y'all, so to speak.

In other news, I was reading some fic earlier that made me want to put together a short rec list of chase-related stories. I love chase stories a lot -- especially when they manage to involve either spies, or falsely-accused innocent persons.

1. The fic responsible for this list: Paper Chase (Sherlock/White Collar, genish) by copperbadge. He just wrote a sequel to it, Rematch, hence the rec, because I was just thrilled. I mean, it's a Sherlock/White Collar crossover with plot! Even if it weren't written brilliantly by Sam, I would've wanted to read it. Really, really fun, I highly recommend it. (Bonus: if you're a podfic person, there's a great co-read one of Paper Chase -- the Sherlock&John-POV sections read by a Brit, and the Neal&Peter bits read by an American, which is fun.)

2. The classic: Finders Keepers (The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Illya/Napoleon) by Taliesin. I know most of the young 'uns on my flist won't know this fandom, but I don't care, you should still read it. It's got spies! Running around 1960s New York! There's pie! Flirting! Shenanigans! Tie-dye! Bathhouses! Seriously, I love this fic. It's just so darn playful.

3. The remake: The Fugitive (Numb3rs). I almost didn't read this because a) I'd never seen Numb3rs before, b) it features an OFC, and c) it's on The Pit of Voles. Seriously, that's a lot of negatives. But I adore The Fugitive, so I gave it a shot, and it's really really fun. It made me want to watch Numb3rs, after which I re-read this and realized just how well-characterized it actually was. The OFC turns out to be rather awesome, and the entire team is well-written, and Don is excellent. Long! Plotty! Interesting! *thumbs up*

4. The one pretending to be just one thing: Okay, so I'm technically recommending Little Girl Lost (The Pretender, Parker/Jarod) by neonhummingbird and butterflykiki, but I kinda also just want to rec the entire show in general, which is one long, delicious game of cat-and-mouse. It also has Miss Parker, one of my favorite female TV characters ever. You think your favorite TV lady is badass? Yeah, so...Parker would have her in a quivering, submissive little puddle in about five minutes flat. She's the best. Her and Jarod's whole "you run; I chase" dynamic is probably one of the reasons I love the trope so much that I post a list like this. Warped, I tell you, warped while I was young and impressionable... :)

Okay, I guess that suffices. Um...enjoy! If you have your own favorite chase-related stories, please feel free to share.

Katie and I were talking about "Patient Zero"-type author influences earlier re: Georgette Heyer and every Regency romance written after. Influences in general are something I always enjoy speculating on whenever a connection occurs to me.

You know the game: you read Dorothy L. Sayers and go "This Bunter character...she was totally a fan of P.G. Wodehouse, wasn't she?" Or you read Lois McMaster Bujold; in the early books, you think "Yep, she's a Star Trek fan," and in the later ones (particularly of A Civil Campaign), it's "Wow, she is a fan of Jane Austen, Georgette Heyer, AND Dorothy Sayers, isn't she? And The Man From U.N.C.L.E., for good measure." Or maybe it's Naomi Novik, being a fan of the Master & Commander series. Or Stephanie Meyer and The Book of Mormon. :D Or, going off books and into film, Quentin Tarantino fanboying Sam Fuller, or a million and one people loving Hitchcock.

I don't really have anything insightful to say, I suppose. I just enjoy finding connections between things, especially in reverse – like being massively in love with Casablanca for years before I saw La Grande Illusion and realized hey, Jean Renoir did the whole La Marsellaise scene concept years before Michael Curtiz.

Anyway. Surely I'm not the only person to do this. Y'all have any favorite connections of your own?

Best discussion section for this class that I've had all semester! Instead of having someone regurgitate the week's readings while everyone else nods off, our TA brought in a guy she knows who's involved with new media production. I wasn't expecting much, but it was actually really fascinating -- the way he was describing the concept behind new media was basically presenting it not as a base effort to earn money that cheapens the film, piggybacking off its success (as many of the artiste filmmakers in the class clearly thought), but as a way of telling more stories, of expanding the world of the story.

( I ramble on about new media and engagement and storytelling )

Anyway. Wow. I hope that made sense. I've been having some wicked insomnia, so I kinda didn't sleep last night.

The point of all this is, now I'm curious what some of the new media things you all have come across that really did it for you. I've already mentioned the Castle stuff, but one of my very favorites is Burn Notice's Ask A Spy videolets. So clever! So fun! And I always end up wandering around the site or watching an episode or trying to figure out when the season kicks off again, too, so it's effective like that. Another recent favorite is the Sesame Street twitter account, which is awesome, because it's Muppets! Tweeting! It's delightful.

So, what's something fun you've come across recently? Come, bring me your new media favorites...

There is nothing I hate more than fic I love disappearing off the internet. This is why I generally save the things I like to my hard drive as .html files, so I can have them forever and ever amen.

Case in point: I suck at working on papers that are due tomorrow *cough* and decided that instead, I really wanted to re-read Taliesin's marvelously fun Man From UNCLE fic Finders Keepers, a thoroughly enjoyable romp through 1960s New York with a healthy dose of flirtation and insanity and gay bathhouses. It's SO GOOD.

But you'll notice that if you click on that link, it's also SO GONE. And I didn't get a chance to save it first, and the Wayback Machine is no help.

*cries*

ETA: OH WAIT. COULD IT BE? IS MY LUCK THIS GOOD? HA HA! I was checking in the wrong place! And for some reason saved this particular fic instead of bookmarking it to save later! YESSSSSSSSSSSS IT LIVES ON MY EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE *happy dance*

Now that I've talked it up, just let me know if you're interested, and I can send a copy. :D

More Man From U.N.C.L.E.!

( 1.08 The Double Affair )

( 1.09 The Project Strigas Affair )

( 1.10 The Finny Foot Affair )

( 1.11 The Neptune Affair )

( 1.12 The Dove Affair )

( 1.13 The King of Knaves Affair )

I have to say, the only thing I don't like about this show so far is that it's hard to decide whether I want to focus on Illya or Napoleon more when they're onscreen together, because they're both so pretty played with such subtlety. Sometimes I have to go back and watch a scene again so I can watch both, and it's awfully inconvenient (but oh so fun). :D

From a film geek POV, it serves as an interesting reminder of how much more often in TV today they use cut-aways from a master shot into close-ups or inserts, rather than cutting between several different angles on the scene in the mid-to-long-shot range. The direction of the viewer's attention is much tighter (and consequently more manipulative); you aren't often allowed to choose what you look at in a scene, because the camera is always moving, and the editing is too fast for individually-driven contemplation of a tableau. While this is sometimes a good thing, I think, there is something to be said for letting the audience sink into a moment, and for the depth a fictional world gains by everyone in a shot acting as if they were the close-up. Granted, most actors aren't good enough or engaged enough to do the background-acting thing, but I love it when they do, and not doing it out of laziness is just sad.

For perhaps a more specific example rather than a lot of film-student blather, think of SPN. They generally shoot Sam and Dean's Dramatic Angsty Conversations (TM) as shot-reverse-shot; you see Sam's face, then Dean's, then Sam's. While this is fine, I can't help but wonder what it would be like to watch one of those convos in a long-take with both in frame, or even several takes from different angles but always with both in frame, rather than fragmenting it. Things like that are more like theater, in that the viewer's attention is intended or desired to follow certain things (like a dramatic arm gesture emphasizing one actor, or a spotlight follow), but the creators control it no further than a certain extent (i.e., maybe you're "supposed" to be focused on the swordfight, but you can watch the reactions of the romantic interest standing on the sidelines instead). In film, when they cut to a close-up of Dean, it doesn't matter that you maybe want to be watching Sam's reaction at that moment instead.

Anyway. I am a film nerd, perhaps I have mentioned recently? :)

Okay, so I have a plan. And a plot, but mostly a plan.

See, I'm loving Man From U.N.C.L.E.. So the plan is this: I'm going to start telling you all several things from each episode that delight me, and hope will delight you all as well. (I'll try to stop at just five items.)

The plot is this: and then you will all fall in love with the show too! (Inadvertent side-effect: revealing just how much TV I watch in my free time, but that can't be helped.)

Okay, ready? We'll start with ( 1.06 The Green Opal Affair )