write like you need it to survive

1. Bastille - Pompeii. So catchy!

2. The Mountain Goats - Steal Smoked Fish. I had it stuck in my head for an entire afternoon at work, and it makes a much better mantra for keeping calm than my previous favorite Mountain Goats song to sing to myself at work, which was No Children.

3. The National - Fake Empire. Uggggh, I love this song so much forever and ever amen. THAT VOICE.

4. Hallelujah, various artists. I still have six different covers in my regular playlist. It may not be a phase anymore.

5. pomDeter (Nine Inch Nails & Carly Rae Jepsen) - Call Me a Hole. I heard "Call Me Maybe" in a restaurant yesterday and all I could think about was how much I love this mashup.

Aaaaand it's after Thanksgiving so I've been adding Christmas songs to my playlist so ESSENTIAL CHRISTMAS SONGS I AM EXCITED TO LISTEN TO!

6. Vienna Teng - The Atheist Christmas Carol. This. Yes.

7. Sufjan Stevens - Come On! Let's Boogey to the Elf Dance! Because all the best Christmas songs have exclamation points.

8. Annie Lennox - I'l Est Ne Le Divin Enfant. Because all the best Christmas songs that don't have exclamation points are in French.

9. Bruce Cockburn - Les Anges Dans Nos Campagnes. Seriously, Christmas songs in French = A+.

10. Emerson, Lake and Palmer - I Believe in Father Christmas. My favorite Christmas song of all for years now, ever since it was in a ... Canadian bank commercial? In like 2004? Anyway, I love it to bits. ♥


( 31 Questions. )

So a few weeks ago my external hard drive--where I kept all my music--started dying. I managed to get all the music onto my laptop (and thence onto my shiny new 1TB backup drive), but this also required me to re-import everything into iTunes from the new location (which I dodged doing when I got a new computer thanks to having all the music on the external--I guess it was bound to happen eventually), and in the process I lost a few slowly-accreted playlists including my Aral/Jole playlist. I managed to remember a few obvious songs (the two all the titles come from and Jole's embarrassing country music anthem) but that's about all I've got. It's the saddest playlist ever.

So, if you've read my Aral/Jole stories, rec me a song or two that you think fits them? My SG-1 epic playlist has 38 songs, and Aral and Jole are going to start thinking I don't love them if this keeps up. *g*

(I tend to put songs on playlists of this kind because of lyrical resonance, so don't feel that you have to find something that actually sounds ... Barrayaran. Good God, now I'm trying to imagine Barrayaran pop music. o.O)


Also! In case you are interested in knowing more about my ~FEELINGS~ about any of the characters people requested, my answers to the feelings meme are linked below:

Peter Burke
Colby Granger
Jack Harkness
Daniel Jackson
Ianto Jones
Ray Kowalski
Amy Pond
Gregor Vorbarra
Aral Vorkosigan
Cordelia Vorkosigan
Miles Vorkosigan
Mark Vorkosigan
Ivan Vorpatril

12:00 AM - standing third row off the stage as John Darnielle leans down into the crowd to sing-scream "No Children" with us at the end of the encore.

12:03 AM - make heart-hands at the bass player, last to leave the stage.

12:05 AM - apologize to iulia and oliviacirce for not showing them pictures of John Darnielle before they were exposed to his actual presence.

ALERT: IF YOU LIKE SKINNY GLASSES-WEARING NERDY DUDES WHO TALK ABOUT FRANZ KAFKA AND THE EXCUSES YOU MAKE TO GO TO YOUR EX'S HOUSE TO HAVE SEX WITH THEM ALL IN THE COURSE OF INTRODUCING ONE SONG ENTITLED "HOW TO EMBRACE A SWAMP CREATURE", YOU MAY WANT TO LOOK AT PICTURES OF JOHN DARNIELLE AND/OR GO TO A MOUNTAIN GOATS CONCERT.

Now you can't say I didn't tell you.

12:19 AM - drop oliviacirce off and make for Milwaukee by way of the blessedly brightly-lit Shell station and a couple of badly-needed bottles of lemonade. I may have screamed a lot and sung a lot. ETA: At the concert, necessitating the lemonade. Not at the Shell station. /ETA

1:30ish AM - DEER! He trotted out onto I-94 like one of those college town pedestrians who has picked his spot and is going to pass behind you, WHY ARE YOU SLOWING DOWN YOU'RE RUINING EVERYTHING. I swerved and braked a bit, but I'm not sure how much difference it actually made.

The adrenaline did perk iulia and I up for the rest of the drive, though.

2:05 AM - turned off the car in the driveway at my apartment.

2:08 AM - just checked my email one time before bed, and tweeted that I was home.

2:30ish AM - finally stopped talking to iulia and went to sleep.

6:30 AM - ALARM GOES OFF

6:35 AM - Actually get out of bed and go take a shower.

6:50 AM - Apologetically inform iulia that I'm done in the shower and it's her turn.

7:38 AM - Say goodbye to iulia, who is headed home to pick up her husband and then drive to Michigan, on my front porch.

7:40 AM - Leave for work.

7:55 AM - Open up.

8:05 AM - snack size Crunch bar.

8:35 AM - commence watching Wonder Boys on my laptop.

8:40 AM - open up IMDB page for Wonder Boys, marvel at appearances of Katie Holmes and Alan Tudyk.

8:55 AM - phone call from faculty member leading to more phone calls blah blah work thing.

9:02 AM - resume watching Wonder Boys.

9:35 AM - go wander around and discover that there is still no one else here.

9:50 AM - while watching Wonder Boys, check whether it is being requested/offered for Yuletide, ponder signup plans.

10:03 AM - pause Wonder Boys to teach a student how to make bar graphs in Excel 2007, which I am able to do because I google up a tutorial in the time it takes her to log in to her computer. In case you're wondering, they're called 'Column Charts' and you need to go under the Insert menu after highlighting the relevant cells, including labels.

10:25 AM - finish watching Wonder Boys.

10:27 AM - google up that one Terry/James Yuletide story from last year - elmathelas' Over the River and Through the Woods.

10:30 AM - snack-sized Crunch bar.

10:48 AM - get distracted from reading fic, start this post.

10:56 AM - finish reading, come back to finish post.


...So I still have an hour left at work, followed by an hour's drive down to iulia's place to puppysit while they're in Michigan. I think I can safely say I am no longer acclimated to chronic mild sleep deprivation. And I need a nap. And a lot of caffeine. And this entire bowl of snack-sized Crunch bars. Om nom nom.


This entry is crossposted at http://dsudis.livejournal.com/531987.html.

I started randomly looking up musical artists I like and checking their tour schedules, and after suffering the heartbreak of a totally logistically-feasible Sufjan Stevens concert having sold out more than a month ago, (which is to say nothing of the almost but no not really at all feasible SINGLE MIDWEST TOUR DATE EVER for Greg Laswell), I went and checked on the Mountain Goats. Who have a new album coming out on October 6, entitled The Life of the World to Come.

The track listing:

1. 1 Samuel 15:23
2. Psalms 40:2
3. Genesis 3:23
4. Philippians 3:20-21
5. Hebrews 11:40
6. Genesis 30:3
7. Romans 10:9
8. 1 John 4:16
9. Matthew 25:21
10. Deuteronomy 2:10
11. Isaiah 45:23
12. Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace

That last one makes me go all <3____<3 and in general the whole idea of this album is making me feel like my two favorite fandoms have suddenly collided and there is chocolate all over my peanut butter.

Darnielle writes: I guess the obvious question is going to be: "John, have you had some sort of religious awakening?" and while I guess lots of people might want to be coy about answering that, that's never really been my style, so: no. It's not like that. It's not some heavy-narrative-distance deal either, though, and it's not a screed. It's twelve new songs: twelve hard lessons the Bible taught me, kind of.

One of the songs (Genesis 3:23) is available for free, legal download in the blog post announcing the new album. I made it about halfway through the song before I looked up the verse, and then I loved it even more.

I apologize in advance for any songfic which occurs. Sort of. Um, you guys should be expecting this by now, right?

(COME ON. The Permanent Efficacy of Grace. Asking for it.)



This entry is crossposted at http://dsudis.livejournal.com/528272.html.

1. Apparently the Caps only acknowledge the luckiness of ONE of the lucky shirts that worked for the Wings last year--if I wear my Fall Out Boy (pre-C&D Young Wild Things Tour) t-shirt, then they win 100% of the time (based on three data points, WHAT THAT'S PERFECTLY REASONABLE). So. I guess I will be doing some laundry tomorrow, to prepare for Game 7 on Tuesday.

2. Continuing with the Great Stargate SG-1 Rewatch, and "Foothold" is about as purely fun and entertaining an episode as I think I've watched so far. ♥

3. I blew past 10,000 words on the time-traveling kidfic last night. Every time I get really going on something big that I'm really having fun writing, it's like discovering how awesome writing is all over again. \o/

4. On Friday, iulia and I went to see Girlyman play a show down in Chicago. We love those guys (girls and guy, technically, but whatever)--it was the fourth time seeing them for both of us, though only our second time seeing them together.

It was also my first time hearing them play "Commander" live, and it turns out to have been the greatest thing, because--ever since discovering them, that song has been my one reservation about them. It's musically up there with any of their other songs, and there were lines in the lyrics that I found hooky and fascinating, but I'm a lyrics person and the lyrics--about a man placed in command who "couldn't be it", garnished with vague accusations of cowardice and impure motives--always really bugged me. It was a little reminiscent of my least favorite plot device, in that it seemed to rely on my sharing some kind of specific negative view of this military man, to be instantly willing to say, ha, yes, coward, profiteer, of any random commander. I know and love people who've served in the military; and thanks to fandom (through which I process everything), when somebody says commander I think, you know, base commander--so General Hammond, or John Sheppard, or someone like that. Someone who might sometimes do the wrong thing, but has a damn hard job and is doing his best.

So: the song always bugged me and I rarely listened to it, and it was the fly in the delicious ointment of my love for Girlyman.

Then, Friday night, Ty introduced the song by saying something to the effect of, "You know, I thought we'd never have to play this song again after George W. Bush left office, but things keep coming out about what went on during his administration, and people still seem to need to express that, so here it is."

And I realized that they left in Chief off the title, and it's about a very specific flawed commander, suddenly the song does not bug me in the slightest, anymore. (And in fact sounds like an attempt to make sense, to understand someone incomprehensible, rather than an attack.)

Have a listen, if you like (and if you do like, please consider supporting the artists--they are currently without label, going it alone to record their fourth album).

1. Today is the Numb3rs epic(247,386 words, 1 2/3 scenes to go)'s half-birthday: I started writing it for real on September 25, 2005. It was merryish's fault.


2. I went to Target after work to just sort of gaze longingly upon a copy of Pretty. Odd., as the ongoing FBR shipping clusterfuck (has anybody gotten Goodbye Blues OR Pretty. Odd. OR a t-shirt from them?) has not yet spit out my copy and yet I paid too much for it to countenance randomly buying another copy when it's already on my iPod.

Right there below Pretty. Odd. for ten dollars was Saturday Nights and Sunday Mornings, the first Counting Crows album since 2002's Hard Candy, which I bought after randomly finding it on a trip to Target with my college roommates. Because I was in college the last time the Counting Crows released a new album. So obviously I had to buy it, and come home and rip it open and peer at the liner notes, and then I found this:

I also really want to thank Gil and Brian and James for understanding me and for sticking by our vision for this album in the face of pretty much universal disapproval. Records SHOULD be what they're MEANT to be. Everything else is... well, someone else's shite record. ... and Ryan Adams, Dave Gibbs, Chris Carrabba, and Ryan Ross for...well, just a lot.

Emphasis mine. <333333333333333333333333 also mine.

...also, Adam Duritz's liner notes make me feel like I'm reading an email from #3 Brother. Whose birthday it is today, in fact, and that probably all fits together somehow, cosmically.

3. Invisible Man on Region 1 DVD!!!!1

4. I have watched so much Doctor Who since Sunday that when I try to read fic, all of the characters have British accents in my head. I swear to God, I had to back-button out of a fic last night because my brain-voice had become convinced Patrick was Scottish.

Relatedly: I am loving Doctor Who kind of a lot.

The Mountain Goats (sources of, I don't know, a lot of my story titles including "When the Sun Came Up" and "Maybe Sprout Wings" and, by mild bastardization, "Burn Up in Love Love Love") have a new album coming out, two weeks from Tuesday. The video is already out for the first single, "Sax Rohmer #1." It is, uh, not for the very-easily-motion-sicked, but I adore it.




DC types: they're in town March 22 at the Black Cat, anybody wanna go see?

Tomorrow, starting at 4:30 ET/1:30 PT, MySpace is webcasting the Detroit Projekt Revolution show. Streaming on MySpace, tomorrow, right here:

http://www.myspace.com/nowwhat

I mean, in case any of you were interested in that sort of thing.


Yes, yes, it's in Clarkston, but like any of you know where Clarkston is. Everybody on stage is going to be yelling "Hello, Detroit!" which is the main thing.

So why shouldn't you?


Here's Panic doing "The Weight" by the Band. It's video of the entire song from the (vastly superior) Jon Walker side of the stage. LOOK AT JON SING, PEOPLE.


And, from the same person, here's the second new song they played, which we are apparently calling "Middle of Summer". This includes the only time I remember Ryan straying from his mic during the entire set, and from what I remember he was visibly talking to Spence as he walked back.


Both of these videos are from right about where we were standing, incidentally--we were more center-ward, and I keep looking for familiar hats at the lower left corner of the frame. I don't think I spotted us, but I could swear I remember the girl holding up the pink phone in the foreground. *g*

So, okay, I don't know whether I can actually say that this was my single favorite moment of the day, but it was really freaking awesome.

strangecobwebs and bayleaf and textualchauvini and I went over to the North Stage, where Panic! was going to be playing at 3:45, sometime shortly after noon. The very first act, CSS, was playing, and featured a lead singer in a rainbow-sequined jumpsuit, and we were all a bit hypnotized. They were to be followed by Regina Spektor, then Spoon, who we'd all been told to see, and then Panic!.

The only song any of us knew by Regina Spektor was "Us," and we all were familiar with it through Lim's fantabulous vid, which if you don't know what I'm talking about, you should go watch. And if you do know what I'm talking about, you probably also want to go watch it again, because, seriously, how awesome is that vid? (In a nutshell, it's not merely a multifandom vid with cool visual effects--it's a vid about us, about what we take from media and what we create with it, about what fangirls do when they are fannish.)

So, okay, we figure we've heard the one song by Regina Spektor, she seems cool, and also we are well on our way to having seriously awesome spots on the Jon Walker side of the stage, so we stay, waiting while CSS goes off and Regina Spektor's stuff gets set up.

And the stage is a big box, right? And the back is opened up on either side so the breeze can come through. And this also allows us to see when Ryan Ross, followed by Zack, comes across behind the stage. Or, allows me to see, at least, I was a bit slow off the mark a) realizing that this was actually happening and b) alerting everyone else. But. RYRO! and ZACK! wandering past at the back of the stage!

So we waited a bit, and Ryan and Zack (carrying Ryan's guitar) cross back from the covered area at the center back of the stage off in the stage-left-ward direction and disappear.

And then Regina Spektor comes on, and plays her first song, and we all rather like it and hey, this will not be a bad way to kill 50 minutes of the time remaining until Panic!'s set, so cool.

And then? During her second song? Behind the stage, we see

Jon Walker (carrying two or three cans of beer against his chest), and
Brendon Urie, and
Ryan Ross, and
Spencer Smith, and
Zack!

all walk across the open back of the stage. They disappear at the covered section in the middle, but then pop right out the opposite side, walking over to the open area behind upstage right, where Spencer's drum kit (which we had already recognized due to it being gold and having twirly accent designs) was set up on a moveable riser. And then Ryan and Brendon sat down on the riser while Jon lurked off to one side with Zack, and Spencer loitered around the other side, finally sitting down (with an unidentified blond woman and another guy between him and Brendon).

Okay so AWESOME. Regina Spektor's set is now officially the best thing ever: she's playing pretty cool music, and her fans are both laid back and not too numerous, so no one is really seriously crowding, and if I stand on tiptoes I can see Ryan and Brendon sitting side-by-side through the legs of her piano. The boys other than Ryan came and went at various times (Ryan stayed put for nearly her entire set), and after a while Jon was sitting between Ryan and Brendon, so I had a pretty easy view of Brendon through the legs of Regina Spektor's piano.

And then she starts "Us," and we all grab each other, because it is OUR SONG. ABOUT US. ABOUT BEING FANNISH. And as she sings this song--we're living in a den of thieves--I look through the legs of her piano, and see that Brendon Urie, my honest to god beloved slash object, is bopping his head and singing along.

And that's when I thought, "Wow. Meta."



At some point possibly I will post about the part where they were actually on stage to actually perform, but to reiterate in the meantime: YAY.