i may be a bird in a cage but at least it's your cage

A list of things, mostly photographic, which should surprise no one, but some of them personal and one of them Doctor Who-ish:

1. Photojojo isn't the most technical or artsy photo blog out there, but it's probably my favorite, regardless, because it mixes the technical stuff with the personal reasons you take photos in a really casual, chatty tone. Their list of 2009 Photo Resolutions has been open in my browser since Thursday when I first checked my Google Reader.
   
   
2. [Local 506 Rockin' Eve] 12.31.08, Chapel Hill. I'm still struggling not to overexpose all my shots in the 506 and their red red light, but I'm getting better, which is all I can hope for. This is the last photo I took in 2008, 5 seconds til midnight according to the camera; if you're going to use your flash in a venue, I'm going to steal and take a far, far more awesome picture than you took.
   
   
3. [Holy Ghost Tent Revival @ the Pour House] 01.02.08, Raleigh. Supported by Kooley High, a fantastically enjoyable local indie hip-hop group. I've taken plenty of pictures of HGTR before, and I know what I like in photos of them; motion, and plenty of it, because as a band, watching them twitch and flail and dance across the stage is such a huge part of their show. Trying to capture that motion without the photos turning into unrecognizable color blurs is the challenge. They should be fun at the 506 in a few weeks. And then: Kooley High was a fascinating experiment for me as a photographer, because hip-hop, as a live genre, has such a completely different stage aesthetic than the indie rock and alt country that make up the staples of my usual live shows. I'm used to shooting people with instruments in their hands, singing into generally static microphones -- trying to find the center of photographic focus for people holding microphones, and moving far more freely with those microphones, was a real challenge. A good one. One I shall undertake again.
   
   
4. Fannishly: I am indifferent leaning towards vaguely positive about the Eleventh Doctor. I haven't watched this year's Christmas special yet, though, so I'm not sure I get to have an opinion. It's not like I ever posted about Who that much anyway. Your thoughts? Anybody? Bueller? (Ferris Bueller as the Doctor: discuss.)
   
   
5. We had a lovely weekend full of people -- eleveninches up from the south, quicknow, riverlight and darastar down from the north -- and we ate well, I cooked a lot, we saw some music and played some Apples to Apples and drank some beer (those of us what drink beer), and I'm ready for 2009 to start in earnest now. So far it's been not terrible; and I adore my friends beyond measure, so far 2009 has also been noisy and full of people, and I am ready for a little quiet this month, too.
   
   
6. This post is deceptively cheerful, in an attempt to blast myself out of the black mood I woke up in. My pink shirt hasn't helped, but getting one of my massive work problems dealt with has, and so has using the phrase "look at his servers" as a metaphor for doin' it. So it's getting a little better, but it's still not good. 2009, shape up or I'm going to demand a refund on you already.

many unrelated paragraphs:

1. there's a sports night renaissance going around on livejournal, and it couldn't make me happier. two new communities that you might have missed are csc_memo, a noticeboard community for sports night fic, icons, meta and everything else under the sun, and sn_playbook, a flashfiction community modeled on ds_flashfiction and sga_flashfic. the first challenge was posted yesterday, so you should go check it out. and if that's not enough sports night fandom for you, check out celli's post about the sports night panel from muskrat jamboree, where there's lots of other exciting things in the offing.
   
   
2. along with the sticky note i keep on my desktop with plot bunnies, i keep one with stray titles, mostly snippets of lyrics that i think will make good titles, usually attached to a fandom: a farscape story that i'm saving 'til i've watched the whole series called "i can't eat 'cause she can't cook"; a black donnellys story called "the best minds of my generation can't make bail"; a due south story (possibly my obligatory post-cotw story set in canada) called "you're at the arctic circle playing strip poker". i spend a lot of time staring at my list of titles and trying to come up with the stories that go with them, and every once in a while i go through and prune the list, deleting titles and/or appropriating the titles for things i've written that didn't have a title already (see also: every hope at any cost, which had been on the list for six months by the time i used it). am i the only person who collects titles? please tell me you guys do this, too, so i don't feel so weird.
   
   
3. now that the thesis is turned in (see how i said that, totally off-hand? turned it in this morning, walked outside, and did a little shimmy on the front steps of my building), i am looking forward to getting back to my to-write list of plot bunnies. (after, that is, i do my homework for abstracting & indexing that's due next week, arrgh. damn it, school, i made a thesis, LEAVE ME ALONE NOW.) writing makes me happy, and no wonder i've been so cranky these last few weeks: between thesis and not sleeping and not writing fiction because of thesis, it was like the worst of all possible minervacat-headspace cases.
   
   
4. i finally watched the first two episodes of the new season of doctor who on saturday night, and i sort of think that i've forgotten how to talk about tv, but mostly i really enjoyed them. ( spoilers for doctor who 3x01 and 3x02: smith & jones and the shakespeare code )
   
   
   
5. things i learned in the month of march include the fact that if sitting on your couch in sweatpants, a basketball jersey bearing the number of your future ex-husband and a tiara is the only way you're going to edit your thesis, sometimes it's just what you've got to do.

'sup, kids? and omgwtf is up with this weather? i moved to north carolina so i wouldn't have to suffer cold weather in april anymore, and this is just so not on. (okay, okay, so i moved to north carolina for graduate school, but there was a reason i didn't apply to a single library program north of chapel hill, for reals. AND THAT REASON WAS THE WEATHER, IE, NOT COLD.)

i really love the tenth doctor a whole lot, and i think i enjoyed the second series of the new who more overall than i enjoyed the first, but i don't think there's a better single episode of the new series of doctor who than "the doctor dances". god. oh, nine. you were really wonderful.

just this once, rose, everybody lives!

*draws hearts*

so unemployment? totally conducive to watching lots of tv.

dr. who: ( vague spoilers all the way through the end of parting of the ways )

so. you guys who wanted to know what i thought of dr. who? i thought it was perfect. i wouldn't have changed a thing.

slings & arrows: paul gross is so pretty and so crazy and i was a theater major and this show is the best thing ever in the whole world. um. i mean. HI.

monk: i started watching this in july when i was home, because momcat loves it and there was a marathon on usa on the fourth of july, but the more i see - the tivo gets every new episode for me, plus a handful of reruns every week - the more i'm charmed by it. it's not a very good cop show, per se, and i prefer sharona in the early episodes to natalie in the new season, but tony shaloub is so fucking charming, even when monk is a frustrating, hard-to-like character, and the mysteries are always interesting even when the cop-ness of the show isn't very good. and this past week's episode, when monk got drunk, was one of the hands down funniest things i've ever seen. hilarious. usa, you get big points for this show.

insidian and i think that someone should vid rose/nine to mike doughty's song "madeline and nine" [file is an .m4a; yousendit, rightclicksave, etc], but we're too technologically incompetent to do it ourselves.

so someone else should make it, see.

*waits patiently*

p.s. "rose, i'm trying to resonate concrete." *HEART*