jactrades

I butchered a spreadsheet today, and then passed the resulting mess on to a colleague. Feel a bit bad about that, especially since I spent a week last year cleaning up the previous version and writing out a really nice ReadMe. But deadlines are a-loomin', and since they're court-ordered we don't have any wiggle room.

Thank god I have a week's vacation coming at the end of the month.



Halfway through watching season one of Bones with the husband, he turned to me and said, "Jac, you know, you're really like Bones."

About 50% of this comment was inspired, no doubt, by the hope that I would respond with a similar statement about him and Booth - the David Boreanaz mancrush had taken root by the tenth episode. But the other 50% was probably due to the fact that I am rather like Temperance, although I am not a genius (sadly) or a forensic anthropologist (thank goodness).

Like her, I really struggle with emotions - both expressing my own and reading others' appropriately. That's actually why I became an economist; you get to study people's behavior through clear, lovely quantitative data and then write an equation to describe what you're seeing. Brennan understands people through bones, I understand them through math.

Also, we both have the same unusual jawline that can look weird at certain angles.

( Rest of the days )

( Digression here )

Favorite Female Characters


Oh, Natalie. You're Dana's kickass second-in-command and also her best friend and support. You know what needs to be done before Dana, Casey, or Dan can even mention it, and you'll give them shit if that's what the situation calls for. You can run the show if needed, though, AND make the right editorial calls when doing so. You get one of the best geek guy ever, and you two are adorable together. You're not afraid of taking heat and criticism to do the right thing, either. You're wrong sometimes, but you're willing to face up to that and get your act together. I totally want to be your BFF.





( Rest of the days )

Also, this is related to nothing, but the fanmix I recced on my rec journal today? I'm on my third time through, and it's still rocking my socks. Perfect for a Sunday afternoon. (The related fic & art are also wonderful, but you can't really look at stuff while doing household chores.)

I sit here in awe, guys.

Title: Something Good Can Work
Vidder: jactrades
Fandom: Star Trek AOS
Song: Something Good Can Work
Artist: Two Door Cinema Club
Length: 2:38
Rating: G
Characters/Pairings: Uhura & the Enterprise
Summary: The Enterprise is stepping up her game and Nyota is moving up with her.
Or, girls rock, and two of my favorites are Uhura & the Enterprise.
Notes: Beta'd by my husband, which was odd, but worked. First vid ever, if you don't count the, uh, thing I made for the st_respect triathalon.

( Let's make this happen, girl you gonna show the world that something good can work and it can work for you. )

Okay, guys, I'm in. After attempting to write on the train on the way home from work last night - and realizing that it's actually a great writing environment - I figured my commute time could be put towards bigbang use. Since the Kirk/Rand Berlin Blockade AU is already colonizing about my head, I'll run with that for het_bigbang . (Seriously, guys, I'm on my third nonfiction book on the event. I'm volunteering to watch WWII war movies with the husband. This thing has eaten my brain.) Anyways, *excited*!

Is it bad that I'm only bothering to request a new battery from IT now - after months of issues - 'cause I don't want my laptop quitting on me while I'm writing on the commute? I think it maybe is.


Thanks to seren_ccd and anodyna for convincing me to go for it!


In other news, man, vidding is hard stuff. I downloaded a demo copy of Sony Vegas for a st_respect thing, and figured, heck, since I've got this software for a month might as well use it! For that song idea I have! And now I'm 15 hours in, and maybe halfway done assembling a rough draft? The perspective switch from watching critically to see camera angles and motion for specific clips is pretty neat, though - lots of details that I never noticed before.

Also, is there a gif somewhere of Scotty twirling his wrench? Because there really needs to be.

The husband and I are in need of a larger vehicle so we've been spending our free evenings sipping lukewarm coffee and listening to passive-aggressive sales pitches at new & used car dealerships in the area. It's Good Times™, and last night's episode was the best:

Salesdude: "Look, I'm selling you this as low as I possibly can. You can look at The Form - I'm literally only making eight dollars (woe be unto me) from this transaction. And I'm taking a risk on getting my money back from the trade-in on your current car."

Us: *blank faces*

Salesdude, continuing: "So, of course, we don't actually have the vehicle you want. It'll have to be shipped from dealership-in-SmallTown-two-hours-away. That'll add an extra $500 to the final cost."

( Kittens follow... )

This weekend pretty much rocked from start to finish.

First: Two Door Cinema Club at the Fillmore on Thursday night. Walked from the office in SoMa through the Tenderloin (which was looking nicer than I expected it to) to Japantown, where I grabbed some quick sushi before meeting up with Abhi and a friend & getting in line. We didn't get Fillmore apples on the way in, but, hey, wabi-sabi and all that. Everything else was amazing. The opening acts were good, the crowd was churning, totally in a mood to dance it all out, and the venue was perfect for the intimate, pumped up performance of Two Door Cinema Club (oh, Fillmore with your chandeliers, bouncy dance floor, killer sound system, and psychedelic posters, I love you). It was the band's last performance of their tour (other than playing at Coachella), so they gave it all too. And to top it out, we got free posters on the way out.

I've been listening to Two Door Cinema Club every free moment since. If you haven't heard of them, well...


Second: My grandparents were in town this weekend, so Abhi & I headed over to my dad's for some good food and card playing until late at night on Friday. Rinse and repeat Saturday night too. Lots of Oh Hell, 29, and Dummy Rummy.

Third: Played cricket with a bunch of Indian friends (mostly Abhi's coworkers & one of mine, plus a few random people) on Saturday morning. I dropped an easy catch while fielding, but manged to get a fair number of runs in while batting, at least for a white person. They all enjoyed laughing at how I kept dropping the bat after a hit, rather than running with it. Muscle memory from pick-up baseball in grade school, I guess.

Fourth: Sleeping and reading most of the day away Sunday. Although we did take a nice walk with the dogs (the weather? GORGEOUS) to the tandoori wrap place a couple of miles away for lunch. And I did some storyboarding for a ST vid I desperately want to make, so, um, there was some productivity? Mostly it was just a perfect lazy Sunday.

aaaaand... back to the work week. I'm still a bit sore from cricket, which means I need to step up the exercise to get ready for surf camp this summer.

All the blame for this goes to team_kirkrand (my oh-so-awesome team for the oh-so-awesome Ship Olympics at st_respect). The third prompt for the competition was AU, and, as a team, we decided to focus on creating an AU based around World War 2, which... is a cool, cool era, especially for Jim & Janice, but not one that I have much imagination for in a ficish way.

Except that I stumbled into a few wikipedia articles about WW2, and, three hours of clicking later, I ended up at the Berlin Blockade page and couldn't get the event out of my head. Here's this truly heroic event, with a clear narrative and climax, filled with crazy details of men and women using new technology, sheer guts, and freakin' incredible logistics to achieve something that was truly thought impossible until they went and did it.

And now, 5k of words deep into writing what is clearly going to become a big bang fic (there was no chance it was going to get finished in time for the competition), I'm just starting to figure out how, in good conscious, I can write fic about a historical event that plenty of people still alive experienced. 'Cause that's the rub, right? Real place, real time, real people, real events - I really don't want to screw this up.

Obviously, there's no point in reinventing the wheel, so I've been reading up on the process of writing by published historical fiction authors. The article that is pinned on my bookmarks bar is Elizabeth Cook's Seven Rules for Writing Historical Fiction, and I'm steadily working my way through the links on Cindy Vallar's Historical Fiction vs. History. I also have an interlibrary loan request out for The Art and Craft of Writing Historical Fiction, which I hope lives up to the praise of its reviews.

So far, the big two takeaways for me from all this reading is that (1) you should drown yourself in research, (come up for air, and then dive back in if needed) and (2) a historical detail should be in a story for the same reason any other detail is - because it helps develop your characters and plot. Both points are, well, obvious, but they're good things to keep repeating to myself as I write - and number two is going to be key as I go into a first edit.

One thing that profic authors don't have to worry about, however, is how to fit their characters into the historical period; their characters develop from the historical period. When this AU first popped into my head, I struggled with how to place the Star Trek gang into this big event without allowing them to be the catalysts of this big event, since that role is already filled by the real people who were there. While I could replace everyone who played a part with individuals from the Star Trek universe - oh god, it'd be so easy and fun to do that - I'm just too uncomfortable doing that with a historical event as recent as WWII. Erasing people who are still alive from the historical record... eh, I just can't do that.

I think I've figured out roles for Kirk et al. for this AU - ways they can be in the airlift without being leaders of the airlift while still being recognizably the type of crew that defeated Nero & saved the Earth as a bunch of raw cadets, but that's definitely where the heaviest lifting has been needed in figuring out how to plot out all of this fic that's eaten my brain.

---

Edited to add that I'm working from home today, and have been watching old TOS episodes on tv (Google TV plus youtube equals awesome - I love living in the future). Sulu's adorable unicorn dog from The Enemy Within just appeared on the screen yipping, and my equally adorable non-unicorn dog just wagged her tail at him. The cute, I cannot describe it.

This is the first piece of fiction I've written in... eight years, maybe? The math geek in me couldn't let the prompt go. Originally written for where_no_woman 's February Drabbletag Challenge

Title: Love as a geometric progression
Fandom: Star Trek AOS
Pairing: Gen, Gailia-centric
Rating/Warning(s): PG
Wordcount:  ~560
Genre: Backstory, character development
Summary: For Gailia, numbers have always been a tool.

( Love as a geometric progression )