Below are the most recent 5 friends' journal entries.

Sunday, November 8th, 2009
cobweb_diamond	9:13p	Fireworks! In the sky! The best part was when the fireworks soundtrack was the DOCTOR WHO THEME! 1. Fireworks at Alexander Palace last night were brilliant for many reasons: a) fireworks, b) I love to stand among enormous crowds of strangers (55,000 people!) all enjoying the same thing, and c) I feel many London Points are awarded for referring to Alexander Palace as "Ally Pally", which I said as many times as possible and probably annoyed everyone quite a lot. 2. Did anyone see this week's Bones? The mystery was pretty fucking ridiculous but it had Michaela Conlin cooing over an adorable pig, which is more or less the only thing I require. And Bones and Booth kind of held hands! I was UNREASONABLY excited by this. Their romance is so glacially slow-moving it is DOING MY HEAD IN. 3. I typed up the first chapter of my novel last week and am giving it to people to critique. Ed got it first, basically because he's handy and Ash and Jess are too busy dancing all day to read, but once he finished reading it I became crippled with self-doubt and horror in case he'd just said he likes it because he has to live with me. WHAT IF IT IS TERRIBLE? Too late; I've already emailed it to like five people and now they are going to judge me. *cries* My brother and I were discussing our respective disastrous writing projects: typhonatemybaby: I just abandoned a dieselpunk detective story. I based the detective's assistant on Cyndi Lauper. Sadly there was no plot. cobweb_diamond: I find the plot just sort of materialises the more I write. typhonatemybaby: OK, in this scene of your book the mother character would not call him "honey". cobweb_diamond: You're right. But I want someone to call someone honey! I love it! It's so motherly! People should call each other honey more often. typhonatemybaby: That's why I put in Cyndi Lauper.
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Saturday, November 7th, 2009
cobweb_diamond	12:14a	Supernatural 5x08: the totally crazy one where they are in a sitcom and a Japanese gameshow and WTF. ( Spoilers for Supernatural 5x08 ) P.S. I am disappointed they didn't go to an even more meta place and have Sam and Dean star in a TV series based on Chuck's Winchester Gospel books. It would be delightful! And by delightful I mean shirtless and highly homoerotic, with very poor dialogue. (Which incidentally describes a significant proportion of all my viewing material.) In other news I spent all of today and yesterday cramming for a Latin test, which I subsequently bombed. OH LATIN. How is it that I love classics and ancient history so much but hate Latin with such a fiery passion? If only I could just do cuneiform for my language unit! To compound my sadness, I can't even complain about study-based exhaustion because Ash is dancing in Sleeping Beauty every night plus training for the Nutcracker on top of his normal ballet school stuff, thus is far more hardcore than I can ever hope to be. Sadface.
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Monday, November 2nd, 2009
cobweb_diamond	12:18a	Bad movie review: Spartan, starring Val Kilmer and Kristen Bell.. Val Kilmer's a secret agent. Kristen Bell, a politician's daughter, gets kidnapped by sex-traffickers and the guv'mint call him up to retrieve her. About 50% of all dialogue is lines like, "We've got to get the girl back!" and "Where's the girl?" I finished the film five minutes ago and "the girl"'s name was mentioned so few times I've already forgotten what it was. It fails at Action and being a thriller: there are no cool chases, fights or explosions and no suspense because the viewer has zero investment in "the girl". Val's character fails to adhere to either of the two essential action-hero sterotypes: competant or emotional. Action heroes need to be EMOTIONAL (ie. on an angry rampage, or having some kind of familial/romantic/moral investment in getting the McGuffin/defeating the villain) or COMPETANT (ie. efficient killing machine, possibly with zingy one-liners). The reason why John McClane and Jason Bourne are awesome is because they combine these two qualities. Val's clearly meant to be in the second category but has no backstory to explain his "I'm just following orders" attitude and never does anything physically impressive enough for you to go "whoa, what a badass!" He comes across as an unemotional moron who doesn't care that a bunch of girls (American girls, as the movie helpfully points out) are being sold into the sex trade, and when he DOES finally save Kristen Bell he appears to be doing his utmost to exacerbate any trauma caused by her captors. The big twist is that halfway through, Kristen apparently dies. However, any fool who has ever seen a movie knows that this can't be true because we're only an hour in and the female lead HASN'T SHOWN UP YET. Lo and behold, it turns out the Evil Guv'mint faked her death because it's too much bother to shut down the sex trade during election season. The Token Black Guy (who is also a Naive Rookie, highlighting Val's supposed hardassery), figures this out, tells Val, and is promptly shot dead, having served his purpose. Val is all, "whatever, who care's about the slave trade?" until Kristen's Secret Service guard makes a sadface at him and we are supposed to think he's had some kind of ethical epiphany. When the middle-aged Secret Service lady showed up I was overjoyed because up until now the only females had been hookers & an army woman who had two lines. But no! All she did was implore Val, whom she'd never even MET before, to save Kristen because she's a poor little girl, blah blah blah. Then Val goes AWOL and saves her, the end. Kristen Bell's performance salvaged this movie. She expressed actual emotion whenever onscreen and her dialogue was ALMOST well-written, unlike everyone else's ("Where's the girl?" "We need to find the girl!" etc ad nauseum). However, all the way through people (her boyfriend; Val, right after rescuing her from kidnap) were calling her a slut for such valid reasons as dying her hair blonde and acting a little too friendly with a male professor. ARGH WHATTTTTTTT. In the end the evil government conspiracy isn't even vanquished, and Kristen just goes back to her depressing life with parents who don't love her and serious psychosexual issues, while Val grows a beard and moves to London to signify that he is On The Run. Yet despite all this, I would well read a fanfic where Val and Kristen meet up later and go on a killing spree or something. Kristen would be the brains of the partnership. Too bad Yuletide nominations are closed!
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Sunday, November 1st, 2009
cobweb_diamond	8:56p	Day Of The Dead; Halloween parties; Supernatural, White Collar = still the best show ever. 1. Everyone was hungover so I ended up going to Day Of The Dead celebrations alone. Didn't even consider staying in bed: November 1st is the only chance you get to dance with skeletons and a mariachi band! I went to the big fiesta at the British Museum, which included stilt-walkers dancing romantically amongst firework flares while dressed in fabulous Mexican skeleton costumes. There was also a parade, lots of life music & dancing, and a big Day Of The Dead altar with paper skeletons & food offerings. Yay! 3. On Friday I still felt sick & was worried I'd miss out on Halloween, but then Ed & Ash made me get out of bed & go to a party down the road! I didn't know anyone there but ended up staying till Ed dragged me home. Have vague memories of drinking a lot of punch & talking to a Young Tory for quite a while, baiting her into saying increasingly offensive things. Watched Supernatural when I got home, but the only things I can remember are: 1) there was a poker-playing Irish wizard, b) Dean was magically aged to 80, c) Sam had to play poker for his life. Even in my simplified state the outcome was predictable: Dean clearly couldn't remain an old man because at least 50% of the viewers are just there for Jensen Ackles' pouty lips. 5. Ed cooked a delicious Halloween feast last night, all while dressed in a sexy bunny-girl outfit & corset. Pumpkin soup served out of the pumpkin shell, beef and vegetarian stuffed marrows, pineapple upside-down cake and banoffee pie. We then moved on to Yashoda's sitcom-themed costume party, which was in a bar decorated with Arrested Development characters. Wish we'd got there earlier than midnight because it seemed like awesome fun! Freja & Stefano, my guests from Ed's impromptu dinner party, were convinced some guy I was dancing with was into me, an annoying habit of theirs I had forgotten about... they always try to convince me to put the moves on any guy I interact with. I was dancing with Jayde for far longer; why not ask me to hit on her? Note: the night buses through Camden on Halloween are ASTONISHING. So much fake blood! I also got to meet Tim's girlfriend but Tim set off alarm bells later when he said she liked me. How can she have liked me? We spoke for like three seconds! Which implies that maybe she didn't like me and Tim is trying to make me feel better? 6. White Collar continues to rock my socks. Ep 2 was set at NEW YORK FASHION WEEK! Neal the handsome con-man threw a fashion party with the FBI in order to catch the villain of the week! FBI Guy got jewellery from his wife in a total reversal of gender roles! Neal's waistcoats and gangster hats were very attractive! Wendy from The Middleman guest-starred! Best show on television. Current Music: The Meteors - Eat the Baby | Powered by Last.fm
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Thursday, October 29th, 2009
cobweb_diamond	10:13p	Are you there, Ishtar? It's me, Margaret. (Boy, I wish I had the faith in my soul to become a Pagan) My room probably qualifies as a plague pit by now. I've been sick for four days & today is the first time I've even felt up to leaving the house. And that's only because I'd bought tickets to an evening lecture. No kidding, my friends, this illness thing is total bullshit. I eat like 95 portions of fruit and veg a day! My immune system should be like fucking titanium, but nooo... This evening I went to a Treadwell's lecture with this guy I met when we took part in a drunken mass wedding at a street party the year I first came to London. But I digress. (I just like telling that story.) Treadwell's is an occult/mythology second-hand book shop that holds lectures & stuff in the basement. I'm surprised I hadn't been there before, and looks like I'll be returning because the crowd were totally up my street. Lots of queer/feminist/alt-pagan folks, although I felt too sick to stay and chat. The lecture was on Mesopotamian demons, but the lecturer couldn't articulate his knowledge very well & thus wasn't enough to distract me from my headache. He clearly wasn't prepared to deal with the questions -- his knowledge was very narrow & he seemed to have no idea about the modern connotations of namechecking Lilith in your lecture title. Newsflash: Lilith is not most famous for being the Mesopotamian Lilu/Lilitu infertility demon, she has a fully fledged Judeo-Christian mythology (he seemed surprisingly unaware of the details), plus being a great big feminist icon. A woman in front of me started talking about the whole anti-missionary-position Lilith thing and he was just stumped. But I think I'd find it tricky to hang out with Pagans for any length of time, just as I find it tricky to hang out with anyone who is super into their religion. I get worried I'm going to offend them with my total lack of belief in anything, and confusion at their absense of logic. In some ways it's worse with Pagans, because they are almost always late-adopters who have studied their religion in depth and then picked it, as opposed to being indoctrinated from birth. How can you study the ancient roots of a faith and then decide to believe in it? I find that the more I learn about a religion, the less plausible it seems. My highschool Classics teacher was an evangelical Christian and I could never understand how. Week after week she could discuss how the ancient Greeks used the gods to explain away natural disasters, or performed rituals give themselves a feeling of safety, yet at the same time she thought Jesus was a real dude who watched you on angel-CCTV to make sure you were behaving, and would magically whoosh you up to heaven if you were. At the same time I have quite a lot of respect for anyone who wakes up one morning & decides that Mithras worship is the way to go. Like Alan Moore's snake god, who he just made up. Awesome. Generalised Gaia-worship I can kind of get on board with because a lot of it is practical, like not exhausting the earth's resources, respecting the environment, etc. But compared to becoming a straight-up Odin-worshipper it seems like the pussy end of the religious spectrum. The guy I was with tonight is a practising chaos wizard, which is pretty fucking cool, but I can't imagine being able to get into the mindset of believing I could summon a freaking demon. It'd make my life a lot more fun, I think, if I weren't such a dyed-in-the-wool atheist. It'd like being in The Craft!
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