in my life

I was cleaning my hard drive -- or, well, "cleaning", rewatching old videos of myself from 2004, whatever -- and I found an episode of SGA. I literally haven't watched an episode of that show since the series finale, so years, and seeing the plastic set and the glowy blue lighting and the boys and girls got me all sentimental. I just saw David Hewlett in Planet of the Apes last night, so it was very fitting, and just, man. Remember when Rodney's datapads were still mildly scifi, way back in like 2007? And now they are merely scifact, it's kind of amazing.

It was also amazing that when I skipped forward to a completely random timestamp in the episode, I landed directly on Rodney snapping at John and Ronon: "That could work, or it could tear a hole in the space-time continuum, not only killing us, but destroying the entire solar system."

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One of the reasons American accents are so hard to pick up for Israelis is that in Hebrew each letter has a single sound. I spoke once about vowels in Hebrew once, how we only have six different vowel sounds, clipped and flat: eh, ee, ah, oh, oo, and neutral -- none of that long vowel and short vowel and everything in between stuff that adds so much nuance into English pronunciation that's hard to adapt if you weren't raised speaking it.

It's similar with consonants. Not all of them, but some. There's only one way to pronounce the sound the letter T makes in Hebrew, and that's like it sounds in the word tea. In English, though, T has lots of different sounds - take the words tree, little, cat, and time. The Ts all sound different there, but an Israeli who's reading the word will simultaneously translate T's to the sound to the sound that they recognize with T, which is... what it sounds like in tea. It's the same with L (like, all; I can't think of an exact English equivalent to the Israeli L sound), with D (Dave, saddle, had; in Israel D is like Dave).

In any case, dialect and pronunciation are not things that are taught at schools here, as far as I can remember; they're not exactly the most important thing about learning a new language. But this was my linguistic insight of 2011.

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And Panic has been very confusing today, what with new photos ranging everywhere from ( Brendon's naked sweaty back ) to ( band holding a baby ).

ALSO there has been twitter interaction between Brendon! and Spencer! and Ryan! and I would like to dedicate the following picspam to Mr. Ryan Ross, on the occasion of his birthday; Ryan, you have caused me much joy over the past year and I wish you the mildest possible version of a quarterlife crisis that you can tolerate <3

( Ryro picspam! )

Really I just wanted to post a quick rec for Dear John (WIP Remix). I'm just gonna be lazy and copy bironic's rec: a post-"The Hive" enzyme-jacked Rodney writes and edits and rewrites and re-edits a letter to John trying to express just how angry scared in love angry he is about John's tendency to risk his life to save the ones he loves -- written as scans of handwritten and marked-up copy on coffee-stained sheets of paper and that it's full of copyediting marks.

I haven't read SGA fic in probably two years and I barely remember the episode it refers to, but this fic made it really easy to slide back in, with a funny and touching and pretty perfect Rodney POV and really awesome graphics. I love document fics ♥.

The reason I am still up at a quarter to 4AM is that I was stupid enough to start watching Whip It an hour ago just to see if the file worked and now I can't stop. How did I not know about this movie earlier? I think that whenever I saw someone mention it I always read it as Stick It!, which is another teen girl sports movie that I love and have seen several times, but very different from this one and I really want to stay awake another hour to finish it but I have work in the morning meeeep. If you, like myself until like yesterday, have not heard of this movie, you should watch it! Here is the trailer. Drew Barrymore's pretty excellent directorial debut, Ellen Page as Babe Ruthless, roller derby athlete... okay I am really really going to try and go to sleep now.

Having just been treated to a surprise!miarr coffee break, I am sitting in the 24-hour coffee place across the street from my apartment, otherwise known as The One With The Wifi, under the merry illusion that coffee place = free time. I have some articles to read for tomorrow's classes, but I'm going to (maybe) have some free time before classes tomorrow, which makes the reading all too tempting to postpone…

Anyway. I would like to talk to you about podfics! Podfics are the Best Thing Ever. Inspired by an ontd_ai spinoff comm, I have decided (again) to try and get in shape. I've been linked to the Couch to 5K Running Plan, which I will attempt to follow in the upcoming weeks. I hate jogging, but I also know that the truly difficult part is getting in shape – once you're already in shape, jogging isn't so bad.

In any case, the part that was always difficult for me with jogging was the boredom, because when I'm suffering (and jogging = suffering, at least at first), music isn't enough to distract me. Music I know bores me because I know it too well; music I don't know isn't interesting enough to grab my attention. PODFICS, however, are genius! They are distracting and fun, and their only drawback for me right now is that my earphones suck and I can't hear very well when cars drive by me. But I've already done two workouts, and tacked on 30-40 minutes of walking to each of them just so I could hear more of the fics I was listening to.

My playlist so far has included:

That Guy by wearemany, read by zabira - American Idol RPF, Kris/Adam, 32 minutes. I love this fic, it's really cute, and it was a good reading -- it wasn't boring despite the fact that I've read it before.

Shell Shock by aphelant, read by her. NCIS/Iron Man crossover, gen and really fun and funny, 13 minutes. I am in love with aphelant as a podfic reader – she was the one who read astolat's Time Of Your Life, which is two and a half hours of epic Cookleta (RPF) That I cannot rec enough, and I've probably listened to the whole thing about four times now. So now I've just downloaded a bunch of stuff she's read and plan on slowly go through them all.

Things I Learned My Freshman Year of College by Ashley, read by celtic_cookie. It's a Jared/Jensen (RPF) college AU fic; kind of epic (nearly 7 hours all in all). I'd never read a J2 fic before, but I was linked to this, and I really, really love the reader. There's a little background noise sometimes, and enunciations aren't always perfectly clear, but she makes up for it her vocal acting, which is so great – it's like I can hear both her and the actors' voices saying the lines at the same time, she has their accents and intonations down, and the fic itself is long and funny and romantic and very college :-) I'm on part 15 or so out of about 30, each one 10 minutes long; I've been listening to this fic at random intervals and public transportation and such for a few weeks now.

And Be One Traveler by amireal and trinityofone (individual chapters can be downloaded here), read by a whole bunch of people. It's SGA/SGA RPF, meaning John/David Hewlett, John/Rodney/David, and John/Rodney. Apparently it's a really famous fic that I'd somehow never heard of? But anyway, it's really long, and the first chapter was 40 minutes long and awesome. Actor-meets-characters-from-their-show is one of my favorite tropes; my very first Buffy fic back in 1998 was actually about the characters switching places with the actors who played them (it remained a WIP forever. Surprising, I know.) Anyway, the fic itself is so far great, and made me smile and laugh out loud a couple of times, and the reading is really cool – it's a collaborative work, so every character is read by a different reader, which was startling at first but I grew to really like it.

The Shoebox Project by ladyjaida and dorkorific (which you already knew) – Harry Potter, MWPP (Remus/Sirius). I've listened to the first chapter so far, which was about 40 minutes, I think. I haven't read the fic since the first time I read it in 2006, I think, so it was almost new to me, and omg so amazing, even chapter 1. Chapter 1 is basically Sirius and Remus correspondence. I don't know if the readers' accents are genuine or not, but the girl who reads Remus has this Scottish kind of accent that is so freaking adorable I want to hug it. And Remus.

That's all I've listened to so far. thingswithwings has recently posted an amazing collection of podfic recs, five separate posts that are all worth checking out; I've downloaded a bunch of stuff that's sitting on my hard drive. My one cardinal rule is that I'm not allowing myself to listen to any of these stories outside of workouts, so if I want to know what happens next in And Be One Traveler, or the next chapter of Shoebox, or the SGA/BtVS crossover that's sitting in my iPod – and I do – I'm going to have to go outside and, you know, exercise.

Do you have any favorite podfics? If you do, link me! It might take me some time to get around to hear them (workouts only!), but at some point I will. The combination of a good fic + a good reader is a blessing that should be shared far and wide :-)

(ETA: omg, water has just started dripping from the sky and onto my laptop. Time to post, pack up and leave. Rain! \o/)

--What is up with LJ? Is it acting out for everyone, or just for me? The pages take eternity loading, if at all.

--This is probably a blessing in disguise since I should be studying, not reading my flist.

--Nevertheless, two short recs which I have to mention, even though, with LJ being down or whatever, I haven't yet been able to leave them comments, nor will you be able to access them. Probably. But still, lest I forget:

New Star Trek/SGA crossover ficlet by thedeadparrot. The transporter room doors slide open and Kirk himself steps through. John hates the punk on sight. Hee!

Because it Sparkles by miss_porcupine -- SGA, gen, and hilarious: the Atlantis staff watch the 2006 Eurovision. With links. Awesome (and exactly like it happens IRL).

--By the way: I'd mentioned a while back that I wanted to have a Bible fic fest of sorts, and that Shavuot would be the perfect time. Well, dues to school stuff, Shavuot really really wouldn't; just figured I'd say it aloud. I would still love to do it at some point, though, maybe over the summer.

--Sigh, study.

Over the weekend, I watched Kenneth Branagh's Much Ado About Nothing, which I haven't seen in a few years, and there was this nagging familiarity in seeing his portrayal of Benedick - his mannerisms really reminded me of someone, and I couldn't tell who. And then he went into this self-centered rant about love (you know, one of many), and I realized: KB's Benedick is actually Rodney McKay. Watch him here, it is eerie; this speech starts at the 6:30 mark, but it's moments like 8:15 where you can really see the McKayishness. One will mention that Benedick is not much better than McKay at approaching matters of the heart. Or, here, at 4:45 - this whole speech is totally McKay self-rationalizing.

Then, just now, I was watching episode 2 of Into the Wild, and one of the actors was, again, familiar - something about his eyes, or his hair. It took a little bit of IMDBing to discover that pioneer James 'Jim' Ebbets was none other than Todd the Wraith! I haven't even watched any SGA episodes in the last month, and still, they seep into my life.

( Moment of strange happiness yesterday afternoon. )

In other sisterly news, my middle sister is flying back to the US tonight, where she will be spending the next few months selling Dead Sea and nail products at an Orange County mall (those people are annoying, aren't they?) followed by a few months in South America. I thought about going to the airport to say goodbye, but I don't think she cares that much, and I have reading to do. On the other hand, if I do go to the airport, I have a slim chance of meeting either Ben Stiller, Chris Rock, Jada Pinkett-Smith, or Zack Braff, who are all in the country and who knows when they're flying out. I am a horrible, horrible stalker person (who cannot even properly stalk!).

( Reactions to SGA 5x10 in a few brief spoilery points: )

I also watched Ugly Betty, Grey's, The Office(!), and SPN. Thursdays are seriously going to kill me if I don't let ay of these go.

I was gonna wait some more until I really felt fall was here, but I am impatient, and damn it, it's coming - you can feel it in the air, even if it's not quite here yet. At least not in the 30mile radius of where I live; it's different in Jerusalem, in the mountains, up north.

The song goes: the summer has passed, the great heat; a new year arrives for all; the winds blow, and the birds migrate; the cold days are nearing. One of the songs. (Not my favorite; I'm saving that quote, perhaps, for a daysofawesome fic, if all goes well and I can finally figure out how to write Ziva.)

So never mind today's suffocating humid heat and weirdly ugly sky, fall is coming. To wit: we have pomegranates! However, the fruits on our tree don't seem to work like they're supposed to - apparently they jump straight from unripe straight to rotten-and-or-bird-eaten. So they're green, and then suddenly they're red but exploded:

------->

So we end up eating store-bought anyway. Sigh.

What else is up, you ask? Or maybe didn't ask? I met two army friends for lunch today, which was fun - we were really close friends in the army and they're practically the only two girls I kept in touch with, but I hadn't seen them in a year. We reached the conclusion that every single thing we did in the army was, as they say, for naught. Which sucks. All those 4AM nights, for nothing, all erased from the army's collective memory, the people who came after us changed everything around. It's how it goes, but... it's a little depressing. But lunch was fun.

Also, remember the NCIS/SGA crossover I recced a few weeks ago? It's finally complete, and just as good as it was when I started. I love Ziva and I love Sheppard and I love their respective teams, and there's action and humor and a little Tony/Ziva and delightful hints of McShep - it's just the kind of crossover I love.

Okay, so ( two more random photos )

And that is all. GIP! Fall! I am waiting for the holidays.

I keep thinking about yuletide! When will sign ups start? What fandoms will I request? What'll I get? What should I request?

I suspect this is the product of the fact that I'm supposed to be studying, or the product of me getting into so many small fandoms this year. Or both, since the fact that I'm supposed to be studying is what got me into so many fandoms in the first place. In any case, for each of them I remember taking note and saying "This is totally what I'm asking for in next year's Yuletide!", except without actually taking the note, so I feel like I've forgotten them all. For the record, I should be taking note of the following new fandoms: ( for the interested. )

Also, a couple of last year's fandoms probably won't qualify this year - I'm guessing that after two seasons both FNL and Ugly Betty and a couple more like it have too much fic to qualify, which sucks.

One of the more specific reasons I've been thinking about Yuletide is that I've listened to my David (the musical) CD in the car twice this past week, and as the songs go by oh my god I can't stop thinking about Bible fic ideas. Which I would frankly like to receive more than write, and I don't even want to think about writing them before being assigned to Bible fic and getting a prompt, and I know myself and know that I won't just sit down and write them without the context of the ficathon. But. There are so many ideas! ( For the record - again - Bible fics I would like to read or write: )

In other news, I currently hate Batman comics about as much as I hate HIMYM, in the sense of 'where has my life gone?'. You know what I mean. I will also add the Olympics to the list of things I hate, especially the fact that they air in such convenient hours in which I should be studying - but the swimming! It's in the early afternoon! And the gymnastics are on during lunch. And the beach volleyball... is very very boring and I do not care for it and watch anyway. The Olympics are always on the background - I find them soothing.

In RL news, I was very sad to part with kassrachel last week - there goes my last American LJ friend for the summer - but at least I got to see her a couple of times while she was here! And I tried the mussels she ordered on Friday, and I actually liked them, which is a first from me. Kass, thank you for bringing mussels into my life. From now on I shall think of you whenever I eat something especially squishy.

Lastly, a rec. I don't like reccing WIPs, but this is regularly updated on Mondays and Thursdays, 3 out of 8 parts being posted so far, and since it's making me audibly squee, I have to share the brilliance: Agent Afloat Atlantis by mhalachaiswords, NCIS/SGA. It's a 40,000 (-to-be) epic taking place after S5 of NCIS - remember what happened in the finale? - and during S5 of SGA, and it's amazing. The basic plot is that Ziva gets assigned to Atlantis, and so far both the Ziva POV (and I'm nitpicky about Ziva!) and the SGA characterizations have been perfect, just the right combination or humor and heartbreak and action and pain, and everyone is so nuanced and human, and Ziva does not forget about NCIS but tries to fit in anyway, and there are eventually cameos - more than cameos - of the NCIS folks as well, at least some, and trust me, it's GOOD. I think if you like both shows or you only like NCIS, you'll really like it; if you only like SGA you'll probably like it too because it's a great outsider POV, but you'll need more patience for the NCIS-y bits. Heartily recced. I can't wait for the next part. And I'll probably re-red it when it's finished.

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I am very much sucking at replying to emails these past few days - sorry! I'll get a grip on myself soon. Probably.

Oh, wow, guys - Unmanifest Destiny by vain_glorious. PG-13, gen, team. Summary: Following the events of 5X01, Team Sheppard goes to Earth and takes a roadtrip across the US. Goes AU after the infirmary scene in 5X01 with Sheppard and Teyla.

I followed friendshipper's rec, which you should just read because it's just what I have to say - it's one of those stories that should be recced everywhere, and you should read it even if you're not normally into team gen fics, and like she said: I don't want to spoil the story in this rec, because it's so rare that a fanfic gives me a "Holy fucking hell *boggle*" feeling that I don't want to spoil it for anyone else.

So I'm not going to spoil it either. But really, go read.

I've been meaning to write a short Hebrew slang dictionary for a while now, and I thought, hey, instead of giving examples like "Michelle thought Joey had an achla car", it would be more interesting to give examples like "Rodney thought John had an achla ass". Except without the slash.

Except suddenly the slash did pop up, out of nowhere. As did an almost-plot, somewhere near the end there! But this is not a fanfic, not really -- I mean, you can just as easily skip over the examples and view it as a short slang dictionary. And even though I call this (Israeli) Hebrew slang, the words I chose were almost all borrowed from Arabic; some of them are used the same way in Arabic as they are in Hebrew, and some of them aren't, but I couldn't tell you which.

In any case, if you want to know the definitions of walla, yalla, ya alla, ana aref, uskut, sahtein, tachles, achla, and sababa - and also want to get a dose of PG SGA slash -

( click under the cut. )