Zeborah

Psalm 6 in Latin to the tune of Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious

2021-03-30T08:20:48Z

I've been whimsically noodling at this on and off for a couple of years now as a mnemonic (derailed by successfully memorising it long before I could quite get it all to scan) but a recent/ongoing Situation at work has provided incentive for me to perfect(**) it as an emotional regulation aid. Because it's super emo! but also super chipper! All exclamation marks are intentional!

O! Domine, ne in furore tuo arguas me!
Deus, neque in ira tua corripias me!
Miserere mei quoniam infirmus sum valde!
Quoniam conturbata sunt ossa mea sana me!

(Um diddly iddly iddly um diddly ay! bis!)

Et anima mea turbata est valde! Et tu,
Domine, usquequo? Et tu, Domine, usquequo?
Convertere et eripe animam meam!
Salvum me fac propter misericordiam tuam!
O! Quoniam non est in morte qui memor sit tui!
In inferno autem quis confitebitur tibi!
Laboravi in gemitu! Per noctes lavabo
lectum meum! Stratum meum lacrimis rigabo!

(Um diddly iddly iddly um diddly ay! bis!)
<modulation>
(Um diddly iddly iddly um diddly ay! bis!)

Turbatus est a furore oculus meus!
Inveteravi iam inter inimicos meos!
Discedite a me omnes qui... operamini iniquitatem!(*)
Quoniam exaudivit Deus vocem fletus mei!
O! Dominus exaudivit orationem meam!
Dominus suscepit deprecationem meam!
Erubescant inimici mei vehementer!
Conturbentur, convertantur valde velociter!!!

(*) Cantandum valde velociter

(**) While googling to double-check my spelling for this post I discovered Gabrieli also created an arrangement for Psalm 6 and, having listened to it on YouTube, I'm sorry Gabrieli your polyphonic harmony is very pretty and clever but I think you'd agree my version is infinitely superior.

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In which her Christmas filk has a mind of its own

2018-12-22T06:07:15Z

So I was attempting to filk "Let It Snow" in order to be more appropriate for local Christmas weather conditions, and I accidentally made it inappropriate for almost any possible purpose.

With apologies to Cahn and Styne and to Browning: sorry not sorry....

Porphyria's Lover's Christmas

Oh, the weather outside's disgusting
But your eyes are just so trusting
And since you love me again,
Let it rain, let it rain, let it rain!

It doesn't show signs of ceasing
And my joy is fast increasing.
I can't let this pure moment wane -
Let it rain, let it rain, let it rain!

Now I've thought of a thing to do.
I'm strangling you with your own hair.
Your lips match your eyes' clear blue.
All the night long you'll be there.

Oh, the gale has got quite violent.
It's weird though that God's so silent.
I'm quite sure you felt no pain.
Let it rain, let it rain, let it rain!

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In which tetrameter is particularly appropriate

2018-09-04T10:00:40Z

(because cats have four feet. You see. Ahem.)

A Battle of Legendary Grease

I have fried bacon and the beast has awoken.
One narrow gold eye has slitted open
At the scent of fried bacon wafting through the air.
Steam curls in tendrils from my three rashers of bacon,
Drawing the beast, nose twitching, from her chair,
To pad, all a-saunter, back stretching on her way
To survey my plate and the bacon thereon.
I slice into strips my plateful of bacon,
And the beast lifts one gentle, tentative paw:
One gesture describing her nonchalant interest
In one of those strips of bacon for herself.
I spear that strip, and eat, and it is good.
And in that moment the beast turns upon me
Her wide, hurt eyes, and gestures once more.
My fork returns to the bacon, and folds it,
Pink meat and golden fat in glistening stripes.
The beast reaches for it; is evaded; and sits
In grim contemplation of this untoward state.
Observing the bacon twice more travel past her,
And smelling its savoury, illicit lure,
The beast hunches lower, ears back-folded.
Her tail swings quietly side-to-side, as her eyes
Follow the fork. Four metal claws
Deftly rake the bacon up to my mouth,
And four beastly claws dart beneath them.
Faster than lightning the beast lashes out,
Dashing a strip from platter to floor.
My precious grease splattering on the floor!
My fork clatters. The beast jumps down.
Nimbly she lands outside my grasp.
In her jaw she seizes the bacon,
Tastes the salt, the oil, seared flesh —
Yet, in her rapture, still the beast sees
My second grab for her, and fiercely defends
Her prize of dust-encrusted bacon.
She will have her strip of bacon!
Battle is joined hand to claw.
Unholy yowls rend the night.
The beast too voices her displeasure
As I rip the bacon from her slathering maw,
Battered and torn. The meat looks no better.
I throw it out. The beast licks her paw.
Turning her back, she stares at the wall
While I — I finish my cold bacon in cold silence.
There are, as they say, no winners in war.

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In which she re-upholsters a stool

2016-11-19T08:27:36Z

I originally made this stool in woodwork class about 26 years ago. I got the fabric from Mum, and I remember her pointing out ruefully that I used the wrong side of it. I disagreed: whatever the manufacturer had intended, I much preferred it this way out.

26 years later the fabric has faded and worn and frayed. And then it got in the way of my cat dealing with an upset stomach and I tried cleaning it, but well. So before I went to shop for new fabric I asked Mum if, by any chance, she still had any of that fabric.

My family is a family of hoarders. I really shouldn't have doubted.

So I unscrewed the base, pried out the staples holding the old fabric on, and on my next visit to my parents used Dad's staplegun to affix the new fabric. (I even managed to ward off Dad's attempts to Help. It wasn't that hard.) Then just put the screws back in.

Not that hard, but stunning results:

Pictured is the stool with its new fabric, and on the left the faded old fabric for comparison (its corner turned over to show the "correct" side). That should do me for another quarter century, and there's still plenty of fabric left over for when that time comes.

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Fanfic: Really Slowly. In the Right Order. (part 12/12)

2014-08-25T09:26:23Z

I posted the last part of this tonight; the full story is now at Archive of our Own.

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Fanfic: Really Slowly. In the Right Order. (part 5/12)

2014-08-16T08:25:49Z

Three (wow) years ago I started posting this Doctor Who fanfic about young Rory and Amy as I was writing the story. I got stuck at a certain point, and distracted by other things, and stuck at another point, and so forth, but recently I actually finished it.

I'm currently posting it one chapter a day on Archive of Our Own. So you can now read part 5 there, or catch up from the start. Or in about a week you can read the whole thing at once; I'll post here again when the complete story has been posted.

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In which she has a timely idea

2014-04-11T07:09:27Z

A friend and I were discussing things a week ago and this concept popped into my head of a time capsule website, where you could read something written by someone a {time period} ago and write something of your own for a stranger a {time period} in the future.

I like this idea, and I could make the technical side of this idea happen; what I'm wondering is whether enough other people like this idea that it'd be worth me spending the time on it. So this post is that question.

How it'd work
For the first year after launch, it'd be seeded with diary material that's in the public domain, because otherwise it'd be boring. So you'd arrive on this page and it'd say "100 years ago today, someone wrote: {random diary entry}".

Then below this would be a box asking you to write about something that you think will be forgotten in a year's time. (Or some other prompt, or a choice of prompts.)

You'd type stuff in the box.

There would be metadata, with explanations why each is necessary. Definitely:

a timestamp, autogenerated. (Needed so it can be retrieved at the appropriate point in the future.)
language, to allow for multilingual capability

and I think demographic metadata (for purposes of "Am I getting sufficiently diverse submissions or do I need to reach out to other audiences?" and potentially for research/historical value, see below on human ethics discussion):

a city- or country-level location, guesstimated by computer but correctable. (Plus because it might be cool to give future-people the entry closest to their location.)
gender? age? ethnicity? sexuality? religion? I don't know, what would be useful/appropriate/intrusive? Anyway they'd all default to unspecified, and have a dropdown menu with options including a "write-in" option that'd pop up a box (whose contents would be added to the drop-down menu for future visitors)

And then before you hit the 'submit' button there'd be a permissions section (here's my attempt at being a good human ethicist), telling people that:

linky link to privacy policy, which will be:
- I'll keep their submission as private as I can but NSA and warrants exist
- the text only (no demographic metadata) will be displayed to someone in one year's time and potentially at other intervals thereafter (eg ten years, a hundred years (I can dream big))
- I may publish aggregated demographic data but it won't link in any way to the entries
in the event that I can no longer maintain the website they can choose whether I will:
- delete all their data
- include their entry, but not the demographic metadata, in a bundle licensed CC-Zero and posted to figshare for the benefit of researchers and other interested parties
- include their entry *with* the demographic metadata in said bundle

In a year's time, visitors would start seeing these user-submitted entries.

Important enhancement: email list/RSS feed/twitter that sends out a random entry each day and prompts people to make a submission.

[If the poll below doesn't work for you, try the PollDaddy version.]

View Poll: Anonymous poll!

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In which she has a panic dream. Or not...

2012-06-07T19:33:55Z

So I was sleeping badly anyway due to my nose having a tendency to block. (Winter, new gas fire drying it up, something like that.)

Then I dreamed I was back in Korea taking a taxi to our apartment, and accidentally got it to drop us off in the wrong apartment block. So we were walking through to get to our own, and came around a corner to where just a few fragments of brick walls remained - fragments of murals painted on what had been the inside - and I realised it was the church I'd last visited there before the quakes, and even though I'd only been there the once it hit me really hard. I had my hand over my nose and mouth just sobbing and sobbing and sobbing...

...and woke up sobbing and sobbing and sobbing, and got the waterworks going too, and then suddenly I thought: Wait, am I actually emotionally affected here or was this just a breathing problem? And I took one deep breath to stop the sobbing and then I was absolutely fine.

So that was anticlimactic; and then my alarm went off before I could get back to sleep. Le sigh. OTOH I've just had too full snowdays off work so I suppose I can't complain too much about going in to work for today.

Oh look! I made you a bonus haiku thing:

I thought, "Wait for spring
to see the cherry blossom," but
here are snow and dawn.

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Fanvid: Lemmings in Love (Criminal Minds)

2012-04-14T03:03:09Z

Title: Lemmings in Love
Vidder: Zeborah
Fandom: Criminal Minds (seasons 1-5)
Music: Lemmings in Love by pornophonique (Creative Commons BY-NC-SA)
Licensed: Creative Commons BY-NC-SA
Summary: Haley and Aaron Hotchner walk side by side. Even when they don't.

Trigger warnings: Lots of quick cutting. Some violence and blood.

Download link at my fanvid master post; YouTube embed follows (captions available)

Lyrics
Sometimes I fear the reaper
Sometimes I'm afraid to die
I think it's hard to leave my loved one
I think it's hard to say good-bye

So don't you ever go my darling
Don't you walk into the light
Why can't we be forever
Forever together united

And I will never let you go
So won't you leave me alone and crying
Side by side we walk into the light
Stay with me beyond the end of time

So don't you worry fuzzy darling
Calm down and don't you get a fright
I swear to you, I promise
That everything will be alright

The sun is low, the days are over
Say hello to the cold unfriendly night
We laugh and sing and dance together
Into the morning light

And I will never let you go
So won't you leave me alone and crying
Side by side we walk into the light
Stay with me beyond the end of time

No longer I fear the reaper
No longer I'm afraid to die
You swore to me, you promised
That ev'rything will be alright

You'll be forever with me
And walk the final journey
You'll kiss me just like honey
We rest in peace for all eternity

And I will never let you go
So won't you leave me alone and crying
Side by side we walk into the light
Stay with me beyond the end of time

Beyond the end of time...

Notes
I started working on this vid a year and a half ago. The license on the music at the time was "no derivatives", so I wrote to Pornophonique and asked if, despite the license they had then, they'd be okay with me vidding to it, and they said yes. And since then they've made the license "share alike", so anyone else can too. So a huge thanks to them, they're awesome.

What got in the way of finishing the vid a year and a half ago was firstly RSI, then more earthquakes, then trouble with DVDs (the season 5 DVD seems to have more copy-protection on it than previous seasons), and inertia. But I finally got back to it and solved the excessive copy-protection problem with a trial version of Mac DVD Ripper Pro (which however, unlike Mac The Ripper, requires your laptop drive region to match the DVD region).

So I finished it. And wasn't happy with the ending. (I've saved this original ending to disk, but it was all about the corpse and funeral and graveyard and Hotch's feeeeeeelings, and it was entirely one-dimensional.) Then I was following links somewhere and came across:

What [Haley] does is erase, in those last few moments, everything: everything about the job, everything about what's happening, latching back onto before, when Hotch was hers, before she lost him to the job. Promise me that you will tell him how we met, and how you used to make me laugh. She doesn't look at Foyet. She doesn't acknowledge him. She doesn't let him set the game, doesn't let him run her emotions, and wrings a promise out of Hotch to set the future in the direction she wants it.
(from an essay by Recessional)

And, just, yes. So I tried vidding this. Which refused and refused to work, until finally I realised I was attempting to show about four timelines simultaneously, one of which was split between two locations and one of which was never shown on-screen. Then I flailed for a bit. (I had a similar problem with the ending of Blue, I think, and that problem ultimately is that of trying to bring in a new thought at the end of a vid, when no-one's expecting a whole new argument and there's no time to set it up.) So then I shifted my focus back to the parallels between Haley and Aaron - keeping the way she fights and compare-and-contrasting it with the way he fights - and it's still... not... I dunno; but short of spending another year and a half mulling it over it's close enough to what I mean, so.

Boring technical stuff: I fiddled the colours of Haley's flashback scene as much as possible with iMovie. Aaron's flashback scene was alas hopelessly sepiatastic. What would be really cool would be if TV shows released on DVD included:

such scenes with colours unmunged
words and soundtrack on separate tracks
the original footage of videos displaying on in-show screens
opening credits removed from messing up invariably the best clips of the show ever

Also, for this project I got around to coming up with a better way to create captions, which should save me a bunch of time in future. I can talk about this more if anyone else needs to make captions for things (particularly in .srt or .sbv format).

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White Collar Fanfic: An Abbreviated Lexicon of Email Scams

2012-03-24T09:42:22Z

Title: An Abbreviated Lexicon of Email Scams
Author: Zeborah
Fandom: White Collar (vague spoilers for season 1; inconsistent with end of season 3)
Summary: Scams might rely on altruism or greed, friendship or loneliness, or any of a dozen other human qualities. But they always rely on the investment principle: the more time, effort, and emotion you invest into something, the less willing you are to give it up....

The Refugee Scam
The scammer pretends to be in a refugee camp and needing help to access their inheritence from their recently deceased parents. Relies on sympathy for the deserving poor.

Peter was on his way out to lunch when a piece of paper on Neal's desk caught his eye. Lunchwrap paper. He backtracked and looked at the paper and the sandwich it had contained while Neal looked innocently back. "Neal, that's Janice's sandwich."

Neal cocked his head to one side as if disappointed. "Peter, are you accusing me of stealing a sandwich?"

"Did you?"

"No." Under Peter's baleful glare he added, "She said she had an unexpected lunch date and she didn't want it to go to waste."

"It's Tuesday," he said. There was nothing unexpected about it: Janice always met her friends for lunch on Tuesday.

Neal shrugged elaborate helplessness. "It's pretty good," he said, and took another bite.

"Neal--" he started, and his pocket beeped. He didn't even need to dig his phone out to know it was a reminder message from El.

"Not as good as the Cafe Carbonaro," Neal admitted. "You want me to come along?"

"You--" He caught himself, took a breath, and reminded himself El was waiting. "The moment I get back, my office."

*

The moment he got back, Neal fell in beside him. "Enjoy your lunch?"

"I did," he said. Pasta and a good conversation with El always helped when he was suspicious of Neal. "And I hope you savoured yours, because if you want another one like it you're going to have to forge it yourself."

"Foodstuffs aren't really my medium," Neal said judiciously. "And I really don't see what you're so upset about," he added, following Peter into the office. "If you don't believe she gave it to me you can ask Jones: he was there."

"Or I could ask Janice," Peter pointed out.

"Or you could ask Janice," Neal agreed a little too readily.

He narrowed his eyes and studied him. What else wouldn't he want Peter to hear from Janice? "Why," he asked, "did she give it to you?"

"I told you what she said."

"Yes, you did." He tapped his fingers on his desk. "Have you been giving her the impression you're broke?"

"I've never said any such thing. Not that the FBI is particularly generous with--"

"All the powdered egg you can eat," Peter promised him, and meant it. Janice did not deserve to be taken for a mark. "This stops, now. No more free lunches."

"Come on, Peter, what do you want me to say? If she thinks I conned her she'll die of embarrassment."

"Don't worry, I'm not asking you to confess to anything. Tell her you've come into some money. Legally. Or you're arranging your finances more responsibly, hard as that may be to believe."

Neal ignored the snark. "You want me to lie to her?"

"Neal, you're a con. You'll think of something. Because if you don't, I'll take you over to her desk and make you empty your pockets onto it, and then I'll look up the bank records for every card in your wallet, and I wouldn't be surprised if that was a little bit more than embarrassing for you."

Neal opened his mouth, then shut it again. "I'll talk to her," he conceded.

"Good." He hit the spacebar while Neal headed out.

"By the way," Neal added, "could I leave early today, since I worked over lunch?"

"Your sacrifice will not go unnoticed," he said from his email.

"That would be a no?"

"That--" He hit 'delete' on a charity scam, and looked up with a smile -- "would be a no."

*

He kept an eye on Neal's lunches over the next week, but when another Tuesday came and went without any sign of suspicious sandwiches he put it out of his mind. Until the Friday he decided to stretch his legs and incidentally get away from his inbox by walking his own file down to Records.

Janice was just stepping out, cellphone to her ear and a hand over the other, looking worried. Peter went on in and found the office deserted for the lunch break, except for Neal hastily bumping a drawer shut again. A flash of deer-in-headlights was quickly replaced by the patented Caffrey charm, which would have been more successful if he hadn't also been holding half a sandwich. "You don't know where she keeps her tissues, do you? This mayonnaise keeps dripping."

"Uh huh," he said. At least she'd locked her computer. "I distinctly recall telling you--"

Neal put his hands up. "Peter, I promise she knows I can afford my own lunch."

He folded his arms.

"She offered! It would have been rude to refuse. Besides, they're really pretty good."

"And in return you offered to look after her desk while she took a conveniently-timed personal call."

"I had nothing to do with the phone call."

"Oh, it's a scandal how you keep finding yourself in these compromising situations," he said, rolling his eyes. "Neal, she doesn't have any files about Kate. She doesn't have access to any files about Kate. And," he clarified as the door opened behind him, "under no circumstances would she ever consent to try and gain access for you to any files about Kate Moreau or anyone else."

"Who's Kate Moreau?" Janice asked.

By the time Peter stepped out of the way, Neal had covered his pained expression with a slightly less pained expression. "Ex-girlfriend. Peter thinks I'm stalking her."

Frustratingly she only looked more sympathetic. "Oh, is she the one who gave you the bottle?"

"Yeah," he said with a small grimace and a gesture apparently indicating that she, unlike Peter, understood.

And all Peter's scolding would only make her more sympathetic. He managed to dredge up a fond laugh instead and said, "Well, admit it, Neal, you don't let go easily. But you're right, it's good you're starting to make new friends." He handed Janice the file he'd brought down and added, as if struck by a thought, "You know what? You two should go out for coffee together."

"Oh," she said, startled, "I'm not-- I mean, we were just--"

Neal tried hastily, "He doesn't mean--"

"No, it's okay," Peter reassured her, and headed to the door. "Get him talking about the Benjamin Franklin effect, he's good at that." He gave Neal a final satisfied smirk over his shoulder, and decided the evil eye he got in response constituted a win.

The Facebook Scam
The scammer, having hacked your friend's address book and assumed their identity, claims to have been mugged in a foreign country. Relies on friendship.

"Hey," Lauren said, appearing in his doorway.

"Hey," he agreed, hoping it wasn't too obvious that he'd been falling asleep over these screeds of whois data. "What's up?"

"I don't know. Should I be worried about Neal?"

That woke him up. "What's he done now?"

"He's been--" She broke off and corrected herself: "That is, I'm almost certain he's trying to make everyone think Ruiz's people have been hassling him. --I know," she added as Peter dropped his head into his hands, "but then I couldn't help thinking that if by some chance it turned out to be true after all..."

"Yeah," he sighed. "What's he doing exactly?"

She waved a hand vaguely. "Trying to get people to run his errands to Organised Crime -- more than for other places, I mean. Coming back a bit too late and a bit too cheerful. Shifting at his desk when he... thinks people think he thinks no-one's watching. Deflecting. Today he came back via the bathroom with his collar just that bit damp, like he'd been splashing water on his face. It... brought back memories."

"Does he know you were bullied at high school?"

"I never told him. But he might have heard someone mention something. Or he might have guessed. Anyway, the FBI, odds are someone here was. Why the hell would he do it? Is it just some sick group dynamics game, get us to close ranks?"

He did his best to give Neal the benefit of the doubt, but the strain was too much. "It'd make a good start to a long con. Okay, send him up and I'll deal with it."

She nodded tightly and said, "Make someone regret it."

"Oh, I will."

He watched through the window as she delivered the message. Neal didn't look unduly surprised or alarmed. He didn't exactly bounce out of his seat, though he didn't have anything more interesting on his desk than Peter and should have been glad for the distraction, but a few steps up the stairs he seemed to remember himself and half-jogged the rest of the way.

Dammit, he was good, Peter thought, and made himself breathe the anger out before Neal came in.

"You wanted to see me?" Neal asked brightly, hands in pockets and settling into a casual slouch.

"Yes." He considered and discarded several openings, then stood. "Actually, let's talk in the car."

"Okay," Neal said curiously, and followed him down to the bullpen. "So... where are we going?"

"I'm curious what our ISP will have to say for itself."

Neal tipped his head, provisionally accepting that, and waited until they were alone in the elevator to speak again. "I'm pretty sure they'll say 'Show us your warrant.' Where are we really going?"

"Around," he said shortly.

Neal subsided, confining himself to a few assessing sideways glances. When they were buckling their belts he asked, "Did Lauren say something?"

"Why would Lauren say anything?"

Neal opened his mouth and shut it again. He watched Peter start the car. "So what's this about?"

"Don't you just hate it," he said meaningly, "when people refuse to just come out and say what's wrong so you can deal with it head on?"

Neal stopped feigning puzzlement and turned to look out his window instead. "Sometimes people have reasons."

"Yeah. Usually bad ones."

They drove around while Peter breathed some more, and then while he found a park. He turned to Neal and tried not to get annoyed again at the solemn expression the conman pasted on. What if, he reminded himself, something really was wrong? "You're my responsibility, Neal. That means I keep you out of trouble, whether it's trouble you make or trouble anyone else makes for you."

"I'm not in any--"

"Just--" He put up his hand. "Listen. If anyone hurts you, you need to tell me straight up and I'll deal with it. No matter how little evidence there is, I will find out the truth, and I will deal with it, and there will be no repercussions for you."

"You can't guarantee that," Neal told the glovebox.

"I can and I do." What if...? "Yes or no, Neal, is someone hurting you?"

Neal took a breath and looked up. "You've got to hear me out."

Which couldn't presage anything good, but it was better than silence. "Sure."

Neal still hesitated, in the way that for most people signalled the effort to lie, but for him the effort to tell the truth. "He's got Kate. He's working with Fowler."

"Ruiz?" Peter said in disbelief.

"OPR's investigated him four times and he's got off every time with a slap on the wrist."

"Yeah, turns out sometimes OPR investigates someone who isn't actually guilty."

"Come on, Peter, you hate him too."

"I don't hate him, he's just a pain in the ass to work with because he never shares any information. This is ridiculous, Neal, why on earth would you think--?"

"Every time he sees me these days he starts humming Für Elise." When Peter made an empty-handed gesture he elaborated: "That little tune they put in cheap music boxes?"

Dammit. He looked out at the traffic, licking his lips, and felt Neal's eyes narrow at him.

"Peter?"

"I told him about the music box."

"Why--" the hell was implicit in his emphasis -- "would you do that?"

He could feel himself getting defensive. "You might work alone, Neal, I don't."

"So you trade him my secrets?"

"He helped me find Kate. Which is kind of a big step for interdepartmental cooperation so yeah, I figured he deserved to know a bit about why."

"So he can gloat at me?"

"I'll make him stop."

"No!" Neal said hastily and with emphasis. "Peter, I do not want him knowing that got to me."

"Hey, you're the one who escalated this."

"I--?" He shut his mouth even more furiously than he'd opened it and reached for his seatbelt.

Peter caught his wrist. "You're not running away from this. I get that you're mad, and maybe you've got reason--"

"Maybe," Neal muttered sarcastically.

"--But that doesn't change the fact that what you did is not okay. You don't get to con my team and you don't get to frame other agents."

"Can you let go of my hand now?"

"Neal--"

"Okay," he snapped, "I get it."

He wasn't meeting Peter's eyes, which meant he'd probably stopped trying to pull the wool over them. Peter let go. In one motion Neal released his seatbelt and was out of the car; before Peter could open his mouth he'd slammed the door shut and started for a coffeeshop.

He counted to a hundred, hoping the place didn't have a back exit. Paused at ninety to text Lauren -- "My fault. It's sorted." -- and started again more slowly. He'd just reached ninety-nine and three quarters when Neal reappeared with a tray of four coffees.

"That our alibi?" Peter asked, taking the nearest cup while Neal rebuckled his seatbelt. It was empty.

"You drank yours before we started back," Neal explained serenely, and took a sip from his own cup. "You need both hands for the wheel."

"Right." Fair enough, he conceded silently. He put the cup back with the others. "And who were our two friends?"

"They're for Lauren and Ruiz." At Peter's raised eyebrows he deflected with a gesture to the steering wheel. "I think they'd prefer them still warm."

He started the engine and glanced out at the traffic, then back. "Are we good?"

"The coffee's good," Neal temporised, looking out his own window. Peter waited and he looked back: "Let me deal with Ruiz."

"Um," he started.

"Coffee, Peter!"

He studied him to be sure. Guessed, "And the Benjamin Franklin effect?"

"We don't call it that," Neal said, the slightest of smirks tracing his lips.

He rolled his eyes and pulled out. This one he'd call a draw.

The Dying Man Scam
The scammer pretends to be dying of cancer and needing someone to help settle their affairs. Relies on sympathy for the sick.

Neal was wearing sunglasses at breakfast.

"It's not even sunny," Peter said.

Neal tipped them up and flashed him a blinding grin. "They suit me."

"Uh huh," he said. "Hangover?"

"Peter," Neal remonstrated, as if offended he might think he couldn't hold his liquor -- but didn't deny it.

"Come on, you can recuperate in the Taurus."

"What, no coffee?"

He looked regretfully at the Italian roast, but he'd already checked his watch. "We've got an appointment," he said, and started out, knowing Neal would follow him when he tossed over his shoulder, "At the Gugenheim."

"Ooh," Neal said, but didn't catch up with him until halfway down the stairs. Peter wondered if he'd been tidying something or texting someone, especially when he said a little breathlessly, "Is it the Hockney exhibit?"

"You could say that. The Hockney exhibit website has been hacked--"

"You know I'm not a digital native."

"--To display a picture of a knee--"

"Hack-knee," Neal decoded approvingly: "very a propos."

He cast a startled look back on his way out the door. "You think his work is hackneyed?"

Neal rolled his eyes. "Of course you like Hockney."

"Millions of people do."

"Millions of people like seeing a swimming pool, cleverly figuring out it's a Hockney, and thinking they're instant art experts."

"Oh," he said, walking around the car, "and that's different from Monet's water lilies how?"

Neal leaned his folded arms dramatically on the bonnet as Peter unlocked the door. "You're asking me the difference between a water lily and a concrete box full of chlorinated water."

"Seriously, you don't like Hockney?"

Neal shrugged elaborately. "There's art I don't like."

They opened their doors and got in, Peter teasing, "I bet that wouldn't stop you forging it."

"Trust me," Neal said in disgust, "I've never copied a Hockney."

His face was flushed. Peter cocked his head -- Neal wouldn't blush lying to his grandmother on her deathbed -- and noticed the carefully steady breathing. "How did you get out of breath walking down a few flights of stairs?"

"I'm not out of breath," Neal would have said indignantly, if a full-scale coughing fit hadn't interrupted.

He waited it out, which gave him time to identify the scent of Strepsils. "Right," he said when Neal had sheepishly recovered, "out of the car."

"What? Peter, no--"

"I don't want your germs, the Gugenheim doesn't want your germs--"

"It's just a cold--"

"--My team doesn't want your germs: no-one wants your germs. Go back to bed, Neal."

"Peter--"

"Go. Don't make me late."

Neal climbed out with a slowness half reluctance, half exhaustion. Peter watched him trudge back inside, then drove away.

For half a block. Then he stopped, one eye on his rear view mirror, and called Jones.

"Hey, Peter."

"Hi. Neal's just taken the most convoluted way imaginable to get himself a sickday."

"I guess he's not the type to admit he's under the weather."

"No, and he knows I know it. Can you be down here for a bit and keep an eye on him for me?"

"Already on my way," Jones said.

He grinned to himself. "Thanks. Keep out of view of the windows, I just want to know if anyone comes visiting."

*

He made his appointment, bagged all the flyers of knees their prankster had switched out for the official pamphlets and the exhibit information cards -- there weren't that many swimming pools -- and arranged for copies of the security tapes. If any of the paintings had been switched, the forgeries were good enough to fool the gallery's experts, but he'd have to bring Neal back to have a better look at how it had been done anyway.

He'd just got back to the office when Jones called. "He's just caught a cab. You want me to follow?"

He blinked -- Neal knew he'd be checking the tracking data -- then smiled. "That's okay, I know where he's going. I'll see you back here." Slipping his phone back in his pocket, he stopped at Diana's desk. "Okay if I call Christie for a favour?"

She looked startled, but quickly put two and two together. "Neal's going to hate this, isn't he?" She handed over her phone with relish: "Speed dial one."

*

He went to Neal's apartment again the next morning and found him sketching over a bagel.

"No sunglasses," he noted approvingly, and poured himself a coffee. "The hospital must have fixed you right up."

"And fantastic service," Neal said with a slightly plastic grin. "I don't think I've ever been met at the door of the ER before."

"Working for the FBI has its perks," Peter said equably.

"I have been escorted out by security," Neal admitted.

"Just the once?" He savoured the coffee and Neal's faux-wounded look. "Who were you trying to meet?"

"Well, I was hoping for Doctor Suharto -- I've been meaning to get her recipe for lemon meringue pie -- but Doctor Leithfield was really very lovely." He pushed his sketchpad across the table: hand-drawn plans of the Gugenheim complete with not one, but two plausible entry routes.

Peter liked it when his deflections were so profitable for the FBI. "You do this from memory?"

"Bittorrent. And it turns out John Mattis doesn't know that every file you create in a Microsoft application gets your registration details attached."

Peter grinned back at Neal's smug satisfaction. "And you said you weren't a digital native."

The Love Scam
The scammer pretends to be in love with you. Relies on desire and loneliness.

He'd just put the garlic bread in the oven when he heard the door open. "I'm in the kitchen, hon," he called.

"Hi, hon. Can you get me a vase?"

"Sure. Happy client?"

She appeared with a dramatic bunch of pink lily things. "Actually, they're from Neal." She handed him the card that had come with them. "We had the strangest conversation." On the card she'd written, He's bugged them. How shall we play it?

Strangulation. Definitely strangulation. El looked like she'd give him an alibi. Possibly she'd prefer him to give her an alibi. He decided to play it by ear, for now: "What kind of conversation?"

"You're going to want some of that wine," she said, and finished arranging the flowers in the vase he'd retrieved, while he poured two large glasses. She pointed out the bug, small and well hidden inside one of the flowers -- she must have been searching for it. He added to the list of reasons he loved her.

She gestured a question -- take the vase with them to the table? -- and he nodded grimly. "So," he said when they were all in place (he pictured Neal and Mozzie at their own table, hunched together with headsets), "I'm sitting down. Does he want you to run away with him?"

"Not exactly," she said, her tone a plea for patience belied by her flashing eyes. "He, um... well, essentially he asked if I thought you might ever be interested in him."

"He-- Interested in--" He reminded himself this was being listened to, potentially recorded, and focused his spluttering. "Firstly, I love you. Secondly, I love my job. Thirdly, I love the -- very occasional -- moments when I don't have to be thinking about Neal Caffrey. Fourthly," he added a little belatedly, "it's a con."

El gave him an obviously look, but said for the bug, "I don't know, honey. What could he possibly hope to achieve?"

"Ruin my career and get assigned to someone he can twist around his little finger," he said promptly.

"He respects you too much for that."

"Blackmail me into letting him go myself."

"And that," she said sternly. She added, because the bug had to make you wonder, "He wouldn't do that to you, he knows it'd kill you."

"He should know I'd never get involved with someone I was working with."

"He does," she said. "He knows nothing's going to happen while the anklet's on, he just wants to know if there's any chance afterwards. Otherwise he said he'd just forget it. Or if it bothered me at all."

"Oh, why should it bother you?" he muttered.

"He really seemed anxious not to cause any trouble or awkwardness."

Simply wanting to throw Peter off his game? He took a breath to get his expression right and said, "You really believe him."

El played along easily. "I... didn't at first. But he was so... Neal, you know: treating it like he was talking about the weather, like it didn't matter. He really convinced me." A wry gesture added, Until I found the bug.

Strangulation was too good for him. He eyed El speculatively; she met his gaze with just a meaningful flicker to the bug. Right, then. "Oh, God," he said, as if something terrible had just occurred to him: "you didn't tell him about that dream, did you?"

She sucked a smirk off her lips. "Do you mean the one on Sunday or the one you used to have when you were chasing him?"

He was pretty sure she knew where he was going with this. "Okay, that one doesn't count. Putting him in handcuffs was my job."

"I'm pretty sure your job's never involved cuffing him to our bed," she replied promptly. "Relax, honey, of course I didn't tell him."

"Good. Because it was just a dream." He twirled his finger -- Go on -- to bely his words.

"Honey, I think we both know it's more than just a dream. No," she said quickly, as if to forestall his protest, "I know you'd never do anything to hurt me -- or your career. But that whole alpha/beta dynamic you've got going with him--"

"Keeping him in line is my job," he pointed out for the record.

"Yes, but once it isn't your job, don't tell me you wouldn't enjoy... well, keeping him in line in a more safe, sane and consensual environment?"

He cocked his head at her. He knew why he knew the jargon. Why did she know the jargon? But she just smiled serenely back at him, and he put the question aside for later. "Okay," he conceded, "but that doesn't mean he would. Handcuffs, maybe, if only to show off how quickly he can get out of them, but anything else? He's not into pain."

"Yeah, getting pistol-whipped isn't the same thing as getting whipped by someone you trust."

"He's squeamish. You should see him at a crime scene."

"Honey," she reproached him, "dead bodies really aren't the same thing as blood play."

They were possibly taking this too far. He should definitely have planned an endgame. Fortunately at that moment her phone rang.

She glanced at the screen. "It's Neal," she said with credible puzzlement, and answered it: "Hello?"

Peter made himself lean back in his chair as he listened.

"Yes, he's right here."

"Oh. I see."

"Yes, of course. You're right, it's for the best."

"No, of course I completely understand. Of course."

"No, no, there's nothing to worry about." She sounded appropriately sympathetic, but when she hung up she mouthed a gleeful, Yes!

Peter fought his own grin. "Cold feet?"

"He's been thinking it over some more and realised that even the hint of a scandal could get you in trouble," she quoted.

"Like I said."

"So he thinks he should just move on."

"Good."

"It's a shame," she said, passing him the pepper grinder. "I'd have enjoyed watching you."

"I bet you would." He pondered the pepper. How was he meant to inhale this stuff, grind it over his face? It sounded painful anyway. Instead he pinched his nose and said, "I think I'b going to sdeeze."

"Oh. Oh dear, it's the orchids. I'm sorry, I should have remembered. I'll take them out to the trash."

"Ndo, what if he cobes over and sees--"

"Don't be silly," she said on the way to the door. "I'm not having you sneezing all evening just to avoid hypothetically hurting his feelings. You finish getting dinner ready, I'll be back in a moment."

When she came back he hugged her in sheer relief. "He bought it?"

"He was very persuasive," she said, the memory making her smile.

"Hah."

Sternly she added, "But I want a proper apology from him."

"You and me both. Give me a week."

*

He spent two days acting as if nothing had ever happened, while Neal did the same. It would have been longer, but on day three Neal was undercover in what should have been (they so often should have been) a routine intel-gathering exercise, when, "Hey, what's that?" was the last thing they heard in the van before the audio cut out.

"Go go go!" Peter shouted. They were in a bad position: it took them three minutes to get into the meatpacking plant, and as soon as he was in he knew there must be an exit they'd missed covering. "Caffrey's our priority," he said. "Spread out, find him." He had to be here. Taking him would have slowed down the escape too much.

It was Peter who found him: wrists roughly duct-taped and hooked over a heavy meathook, legs kicking helplessly for purchase. "Hang on, Neal, I've got you," he said, and dashed for a packing crate, wondering if it was so wrong to be wondering how he could turn this to his advantage.

Neal didn't say anything, but he stopped kicking.

The crate gave Neal the solid footing he needed to take the pressure off his lungs, but when he tried to get off the hook his legs gave under him. Peter was already scrambling up with him, holding the hook still, lifting him off it, and helping him to sit down on the crate. Neal didn't waste time then pulling the duct tape off his mouth and gasping for air.

"You okay?"

"Yeah," he said with his flash of a smile. The fact that his breathing was under control again almost distracted from the fact that he'd actually forgotten his wrists were still taped together. "Thanks."

Definitely wrong to take advantage, Peter decided, and dug out his pocket knife to slice the duct tape. Neal stilled under his hand and looked at him sideways when he stepped back to let him finish ripping the tape off his wrists.

Um. Whoops? "We should see if we can find out where they've gone."

"Peter," Neal said as if he hadn't spoken, eyes on the ball of duct tape he was rolling between his hands -- "please tell me you know about the bug."

"Sure," he said lightly, "we all heard them make you, don't worry about it. Come on."

"No, Peter, that's not..."

But by the time Neal had caught up, Peter was busy with his team. He managed to keep busy for a good ten minutes before it was time to head back to the office. "How are your wrists?" he asked on the way to the car: he'd seen Neal twitching his arms.

"Not bad. Apparently duct tape spreads the weight pretty well."

"I'll have to remember that," he joked, against his better conscience. But it wasn't as if Neal hadn't been misinterpreting his motives for the last ten minutes anyway.

He opened his door; Neal sagged against the bonnet. "Peter. I... was approached with an opportunity, but only if I could convince them I could still fool you."

He shut his door again and folded his own arms on the bonnet. An opportunity. "Go on."

Neal looked away, down, and nervously back up. "Well, there's not that much I can fool you about these days. So I told El I was in love with you and gave her the flowers." He stopped there, because it wasn't a conversation with Neal if Peter didn't have to force that last bit of information out of him, with a hard stare if nothing else. "Which... might have been bugged?" he said as if the truth would be contingent on Peter's reaction.

"So your friend could judge for himself just how fooled I was?"

"Or herself."

Definitely a man, then. He'd have to decide later what he thought about a stranger listening in on that. For now he got out his cell. Neal looked nervous, but it wasn't until Peter said, "Hi, honey, have you got a minute free?" that he started mouthing puppy-eyed pleas.

"For you, honey? As much as you want."

"Neal's got something to say." Neal's head was in his hands.

"Ah!"

"I'll just put you on speaker." He set the phone on the middle of the bonnet and folded his arms again.

Neal looked up with his brilliant smile, but at Peter's look he deflated. "Elizabeth," he said soberly, "I need to apologise to you."

"Oh?" she prompted.

"When I talked to you last week... it was a con. The flowers were bugged. I was using you to get to Peter, and I'm really, really sorry."

"Hmm," she said. "Why?"

"Someone offered me an opportunity--"

"No," she interrupted, "that's... well, not obvious, but it's the only thing left. I meant why are you sorry? Why did you change your mind?"

Neal opened and shut his mouth. Peter straightened in interest as he rubbed his neck. "I, uh..."

"We were playing along," Peter reminded him. "We had you half convinced, don't tell me your friend wasn't."

"You knew there was no chance Peter was actually going to tie you up and start cutting you," El added.

"And you knew your friend didn't just want to know if you could fool me, he also wanted to know if you would."

"Or she," Neal said weakly.

Oh God, it was Alex. Of course it was Alex. He supposed that was better than a complete stranger, but what was she up to now?

El finished smoothly, "So why did you call it off?"

"Because," Neal said from beneath hands half raking, half tearing at his hair, "you had me half-convinced and I didn't want to actually hurt either of you, and it was you who spotted the bug, wasn't it? I swear I'm sorry and I'll never underestimate you again."

"You mean you'll never try to con her again," Peter corrected.

That got him a hurt look. "Peter, I promise I've learnt my lesson."

"Yeah," he said. That wasn't a promise.

"Peter?" El asked.

He picked the phone back up, switching it off speaker. "You've got me."

"If he did promise, he wouldn't keep it, would he?"

"Probably not."

"Shall we forgive him anyway?"

"That's such a strong word," he pointed out while Neal looked at him hopefully.

El laughed music in his ear. "Dinner tonight?"

"We'll pick you up," he agreed, and when he'd hung up told Neal, "You're taking us to dinner tonight."

Neal had the sense not to make the obvious quip. Instead he gave a matter-of-fact nod and spent the ride back to the Bureau arranging for reservations somewhere that sounded Italian and expensive, while Peter made plans to find out what Alex was up to this time.

The Scambait
The baiter pretends to be a victim and sucks up the time and resources the scammer would otherwise spend on real victims. Relies on the scammer's need for one last big score.

Four months after Neal's tracking anklet had come off, and very nearly the same length of time after he'd hopped on a plane to Gibraltar, an email arrived on Peter's phone to enliven a dull evening stakeout:

How're things in the Big Apple?  Never thought I'd say this but holidaying in Florence gets old after a while.  That job offer still open?

NC

"Oh, how sweet," Diana said, leaning over his shoulder as he reveled in a smirk, "he thinks you don't know David Harvey's in Paris."

"No, I'm pretty sure he knows exactly who tipped off the French about that heist he had planned at the Musée d'Orsay. And he knows I can do this," he added, opening the full headers to get the originating IP address.

"Oh, come on, it's got to be spoofed!"

"Nah, it's Yahoo," he said, copy and pasting it into the IP registry search. "If he wanted to slow me down he'd use Gmail. Here we are: cybercafe, fourteenth arrondissement."

"It's the middle of the night over there," she started. Peter paused in the middle of dialling to raise his eyebrows at her, and she laughed. "Okay, fair point."

Neal answered on the first ring: "Hi, Peter."

"What's wrong, Monsieur 'Arvey, too short on cash to buy yourself a burner?"

"Gesture of good faith?" Neal suggested.

"Uh huh. Be in my office by close of business tomorrow and I'll give you the same deal I gave you last time."

"That's not the same offer you gave me four months ago."

"Pity you didn't accept it four months ago, then."

"Okay," Neal conceded, "but no anklet."

"Exactly the same deal I gave you last time."

"Peter, come on--"

"Take it or leave it."

"Ten mile radius."

"Oh Neal," he said fondly, "I'd love to debate this, but did I mention I've already forwarded those headers to the French police?"

There was a brief silence -- possibly a subvocalised merde -- and then a click.

Peter forwarded the headers.

"Oh, boss, you're nasty," Diana said approvingly. "Hey, do you think we can use that as leverage with the French? They give us the files on this bastard -- who by the way has terrible taste in television -- and we guarantee Monsieur Daveed 'Arvey stays out of their hair for four years?"

That sounded very much like a win-win, he agreed, and said, "Let's wake them up and find out."

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Fanvid: Straight to Hell (White Collar)

2012-03-19T06:54:36Z

Title: Straight to Hell
Vidder: Zeborah
Video source: White Collar (fair use for purposes of commentary, etc)
Spoilers: All of seasons 1-3
Music source: Straight to Hell by Lorenzo's Music, licensed Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike; therefore
Fanvid license: Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike
Summary: Peter's road is paved with good intentions.

Download link at my fanvid master post; YouTube embed follows (includes captions):

Lyrics:
Night was nearly morning
when he left her car and ran.
Said he had to take a piss
and that he'd be right back.
What started as a fling
got serious too fast...

Well I'm going straight to hell
Well I'm going straight to hell
Well I'm going straight to hell for this

Working at a nightclub
taking money from the door.
He was getting paid with beers,
set the empties in a row.
He was necking with a Spanish girl
and he didn't even know.
(Didn't even didn't even
didn't even didn't even know)

Well I'm going straight to hell
Well I'm going straight to hell
Well I'm going straight to hell for this (x2)

Went up to the bar
when he heard the last call.
Said he's got a girl waiting
for him by the door.
He disappeared into the crowd
and headed for her car...

Well I'm going straight to hell
Well I'm going straight to hell
Well I'm going straight to hell for this (x3)

Notes:
I'm not entirely sure they're intending Peter to be read this way. But since he spent the whole episode talking about how if Neal's cornered, he runs... I think if he didn't intend Neal to run, then he was pretty stupid not to, on the lift up to the Interview Room With The Mysteriously Astounding View, send a quick text message saying "That didn't mean run, it meant go have a coffee. Stay put, I've got this."

So, while I think Kramer's wrong inasmuch as legalised slavery is never a good solution to your problems, he nevertheless has some valid points inasmuch as there might in fact be a problem here.

Mirrors: White Collar does so much with reflections. They're everywhere. You can't break into a house without walking past a mirror, and if there's no mirrors around there's a window, glass wall, conference table, car door, wine glass, guitar, or decorative crystal ball. I wanted to do something celebrating that; but looking for a song about mirrors I came across this instead, so I ended up using the effect to subtly support the whole Neal&Peter dynamic rather than as a thing in its own right. It's all thematic and stuff, I'm so proud.

Technical stuff: iMovie mysteriously refused to save as .ogg, hence .mp4 instead of .avi. No big deal. Also I think it's my fault because I moved a bunch of applications I wasn't using to a spare folder, so possibly it turns out I was in fact using at least one of them. Now to figure out which.

iMovie also remains terrible at title effects, so I borrowed a friend's Final Cut Pro to do that. It shifted the colours for that section a bit away from red, but I think it's only noticeable to people who've watched that section 10,000 times while editing it, ie me.

I did the final credits myself, with GIMP. This also did weird things to the colouring, but I decided to pretend I did that on purpose.

Neal walking with coffee is flipped left to right to fit the movement better; countless clips are subtly sped up or slowed down to fit the beat; and Peter's final smile is reversed. I mention this because it could be construed as cheating, but I don't think it is, he's totally smirking in that shot; it's just a very subtle smirk because he's sitting in front of an interview board and could get in trouble for smirking at this point, and I couldn't for the life of me make it work clipped out of that context.

Process: There are some vids, like my Doctor Who Living Doll one, where I know right from the start exactly which clips I'm going to use. And then there's vids like this one, where I clip out over 300 clips from the source before I start picking the ones I like best. (Well, I broke up the tedium a bit by clipping a season then vidding the appropriate verse+chorus; and then when I had the framework done I made adjustments where lyrics trumped strict chronology, and got a few extra clips to fill in weaker spots.)

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Fanvid: Long Walk Home

2012-02-12T10:55:48Z

Title: Long Walk Home
Author: Zeborah
Fandom: Covert Affairs (seasons 1-2)
Song: Long Walk Home by Cathleen, licensed Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 2.0 Germany

(If you've never seen Covert Affairs, all you need to know is that Annie Walker is a CIA operative and lives with her sister Danielle.)

Download: from Minus (.avi, 43MB)
Streaming at Youtube:

Lyrics:
Once there was a time
When I lived at the edge of town
Always wanting to move away
To live life on my own

But it's a long walk,
it's a long walk
it's a long walk home.

I walked through the stormy nights
I ran down a road so fast
Now birds sing their well known songs
Oh how I wish that this could last!

It's a long walk,
it's a long walk
it's a long walk home.
It's a long walk,
it's a long walk
it's a long walk home.

Silence in the valleys
Silence in the streets
Silence in the mountains
Silence in the air

Oh, it's a long walk,
it's a long walk
it's a long walk home.
It's a long walk,
it's a long walk
it's a long walk home.

Notes:
I feel that fanvidding doesn't abuse copyright as regards the source video - it's taking tiny snippets and massively transforming them. As regards the music, however... So one of my New Year's Resolutions is to limit myself from now on to vidding to Public Domain or Creative Commons licensed music. Jamendo is one good source of the latter - granted there's some not-so-great music mixed in there, but once I belatedly noticed the Top 100 tracks that problem went away. The Top 100 even has a less massive male:female ratio....

No major new technical issues except that I was drawing heavily for the first section on episode 1, which I only have in .mkv format and converting (via Handbrake) to .m4v left it really pixellated at full-screen. Something in the conversion via .ogv to .avi seems to have improved it a bit, but really it's better at its native 848x352. (Yes, I cropped off the network logo again. I did keep the original 16:9 version this time; am pondering both the odd shape and whether it's as noticeable to viewers as it is to me where there should be more image, because if so then I'll just have to resign myself to either a) the logo or b) never vidding anything until after it's out on DVD.)

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Fanvid: Literal Eclipse of the Heart

2012-01-01T23:19:43Z

First off, if you haven't seen the literal video version of Total Eclipse of the Heart, you need to do that, it's probably the classic of the genre. Here, let me make it easy:

(In case you wondered, Sony don't understand the concept of "parody" so got the original taken down; the reframing with the cat means it's not automatically discovered so has been able to stay up longer in most countries.)

Now my fanvid:
Literal Eclipse of the Heart
Lead Vocals: PersephoneMaewyn
Lyrics / Vocals / Editing: dascottjr
Music: Jim Steinman
Video: from Doctor Who (New Who) seasons 1-6
Vidder: Zeborah
Summary: A literal fanvid of the literal video version of Bonnie Tyler's Total Eclipse of the Heart. My meta, let me show you it.

Download: Download link at my fanvid master post; YouTube embed follows (captions available)

Notes:
At some point my sister came up with the idea of doing a literal fanvid, taking clips that literally matched a song's lyrics for the lolz. I loved the idea, but also had seen too many fanvids that... well, literally matched a song's lyrics but merely managed to be fairly incompetent, and I wasn't confident enough of my ability to make it clear that the lolz were on purpose instead of accidental. But then I came up with the idea of doing a literal fanvid of a literal music video.

I wanted some kind of un-narrative going through it so decided to have the Doctor illustrating all the lyrics sung by PersephoneMaewyn (or Bonnie Tyler in the original) and various Companions illustrating the others. I genderswitched large chunks of stuff accordingly. There were a couple of exceptions -- "strip football and surprise mirror" because especially for the first I couldn't think of a comparable Companion clip, and "I think I lost a contact lens" because, though Amy's tear while talking with Van Gogh would have worked, I personally find the Doctor's "happy crying" tear much more mockworthy.

"Ringo Starr" was tricky. I was tossing up getting a shot of something like a ringed star instead, eg the swirl of stuff falling into the black hole in that episode with the stuff falling into the black hole. Ehh, still dunno.

The whole dove motif drove me up the wall because I've got a very clear image in my mind of a woman in red robes flinging a dove into the air. After thorough searching, I'm forced to conclude that I made this image entirely up. :-( For a replacement I pondered the chickens from Venice, but then it occurred to me that the banana in Doctor Who gets used (to get all academic about it) as a symbol of the Doctor's commitment to non-violence, so that's kind of like a dove, right? Alas, no matter what one does with these lines they're never going to match the brilliance of the lyrics.

There's other bits and pieces I could tweak, but one could tweak forever, so.

Technical notes I need to remember:
* Bluescreening the title clip is not nearly as successful as one might like; I resorted to iMovie's 'music video' title instead even though it doesn't go very far across the screen.
* Exported from iMovie as .ogg (with Perian installed) then converted to .avi at 2000 kbit/sec, 960x544. 1000 or 1500kbit/sec seems fine with most clips but pixellates the time vortex horribly.
* I need to find an easier way of creating/editing captions.

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Two fanvids I'm not perfectly happy with and why

2011-11-16T10:00:29Z

Both of these I have days where I look at them and think they're pretty darn fine despite their flaws, and days where I look at them and think they're terribly flawed despite being otherwise fine.

Download links for each are at my fanvid master post.

Title: Just One Person
Fandom: Criminal Minds - (up to season 2 episode 15)
Music: "Just One Person" by Bernadette Peters

YouTube (no captions, sorry; doing both speech and lyrics would require serious actual fiddling with timing, and it's late and I don't adore the vid quite sufficiently for the effort):

Notes on "Just One Person":
This has been sitting on my computer for over a year waiting for inspiration on how to fix it. It's very much a message piece and I think it achieves its message just fine. The audio is terrible though - separating the voices from ambient noise proved impossible. Also the cuts are choppy where (in aid of keeping the smiles chronological) I've taken several not-quite-consecutive shots from one camera angle. If I could have got the audio to work, I might have tried either moving shots around or adding transitions or something; but I couldn't, so hey.

Title: Wishin' and Hopin'
Fandom: White Collar (up to season 3 episode 10)
Pairing: OT3 Elizabeth/Peter/Neal
Music: "Wishin' and Hopin'" by Ani DiFranco

YouTube (includes captions):

Notes on "Wishin' and Hopin'":
The main thing I hate about this is the credits. The main problem is that if you're watching the credits you miss the start of the video, and if you're watching the video you miss the credits. Also the positioning and the design and so forth. I pondered alternatives, couldn't think of anything I adored, and didn't want to spend time wrestling with GIMP and iMovie to try out things that wouldn't be much improvement.

The transitions between verses made my head hurt but I think they worked out okay in the end. At one point I'd been planning to highlight the fact that I have Elizabeth talking to the guys by doing some soft focus on the shots illustrating what she's talking about and keeping it normal on the shots showing her talking to them; but the iMovie effects I had weren't quite what I wanted and, more importantly, I realised there wasn't always a clear boundary between the two and I'd have ended up tearing my hair out.

One thing I'm very pleased with is that I mostly succeeded in keeping Peter on the left-hand side of the screen and Neal on the right-hand side. (IIRC there are two brief exceptions, plus a shot where I cheated and flipped the shot because I couldn't bear not to include it. As any OT3 fan knows, there are a lot more shots that would have been awesome thematically if I hadn't had this constraint.) The reason I did this is when I watched my first White Collar fanvid, not having seen the series, I couldn't for the life of me work out who was who; and when I showed it to my siblings in the same situation I think at least one of them had the same problem; so I wanted to make this 'readable' to people without show familiarity and figured this would help.

Oh, and if you're curious about the aspect ratio, it's because I cropped the shots so as to avoid the USA network logo and their incessant "Do you like Neal topless/Sara with Neal/the new opening credits?" polls. This added some further constraints to the shots I picked but not as much as I'd expected.

Technical notes, mostly to remind myself: I can get an .avi by saving from iMovie as .ogg, changing the extension to .ogv, then converting in ffmpegX to .avi (using the Filter tab) to crop the top and bottom if a random line attaches itself in the process. The conversion to .ogg seems to change the colour a bit - the opening purple is distinctly less violet and more indigo than saving as .mp4 - but the .avi gives a much better quality:size ratio than .mp4. It's also more widely used by people who use fanvids than the .ogv, though I'm keeping that for archival purposes.

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Fanvid: Living Doll

2011-10-10T08:19:58Z

Title: Living Doll
Fandom: Doctor Who - spoilers for most of season 6
Music: "Living Doll" by Cliff Richard

Download link at my fanvid master post; YouTube embed follows:

Notes:
I wrote about this back in April, In which Moffat has a thing, covering up to the first episode of season 6. I put the idea away for a bit, but the second half of season 6 made me pull it out again and play with it in earnest.

I was on leave and angry so finished it in a week or so, including where I suddenly realised I should swap some verses around. Originally I'd started with adult Amy and had wee Amelia appearing only later, but then I decided I would put Reinette in there after all, and it became clear that the "awestruck girl waits for the Doctor until she's old enough to jump his bones" thing was worth highlighting. --Okay, I didn't highlight the "jumping his bones" part, mostly because when Reinette has her turn the entire POV is on the Doctor's face, and that would have ruined the focus (both taking focus away from the 'dolls', and one random Ten clip in a bunch of Elevens would have felt silly); partly because it might look like actual female agency or something; and partly because when I noticed that final parallel between the three I felt a bit sick in my mouth.

Though I haven't got to posting it until today, I finished it before the final episode aired. [Spoilers for final episode of season 6: (skip) That episode made me very happy, because the women got to do stuff and be cool, and also it was brilliantly paced, as Moffat's best stuff is. But it's clearer than ever that the Doctor is taking River out of her prison-box to play with and then putting her back in for his convenience. She's only in prison to preserve his cover as being dead, right? And even that's unfair; could she not get a lawyer to argue "She was brainwashed and also in a spacesuit that took over her autonomic functions"? I mean seriously WTF's up with this judiciary system, people? --Anyway, I do like the hints that he might be about to listen to her mid-season rant that he's got too big for his britches - it could be interesting if Moffat really does follow through and make him stick to the shadows a bit - but this is irrelevant to the fact that...]

Ultimately, Melody's always stuck in a spacesuit, River's always in prison, Amelia's always looking at stars, and the Doctor will always murder a surplus Amy.

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Fanfic: Really Slowly. In the Right Order. (part 4/9-ish?)

2011-10-01T10:37:15Z

Brief notes, spoilers, trigger warnings, and part 1
Part 2
Part 3

*** Part 4 ***

Next summer holidays they were eight. And what was fun when you were seven was just a bit silly and boring when you were eight.

"Maybe we could play a different game," he suggested.

Amelia narrowed her eyes at him. "It's not a game. It's remembering."

"I don't remember it," he pointed out, but she just waited for him to get into the time machine to start.

He planted his feet stubbornly apart. "But it's silly that we always start looking for Prisoner Zero and we never finish looking for it."

She sucked at the corner of her mouth, then nodded. "Then we can find it and when the Raggedy Doctor comes back I can tell him where it is."

"Okay," he conceded.

They started up outside her bedroom, where Rory stood and said, "So, it's just out the corner of my eye," and Amy nodded, and he said, "Well, the stairs are out the corner of my eye. It must have run away when it saw the Raggedy Doctor's wand."

"You're the Raggedy Doctor," Amy reminded him, and handed him the wand. She'd made it out of grey cardboard with blue cellophane taped on the end.

"Right," he said, and straightened. "Well, come on, then."

They went downstairs and looked around. Rory wanted to tell her Prisoner Zero had gone straight outside and down the road and miles and miles away, but he had to be convincing. So first they hunted through the other rooms downstairs, looking under couches and inside cupboards while he asked her what exactly Prisoner Zero looked like and she insisted that she'd never seen it.

"Have you lost something?" the babysitter asked, sounding a bit exasperated, so that seemed a good time to decide that Prisoner Zero wasn't in the house and go and look outside.

"Trees," Rory said in his Raggedy Doctor voice. "And long grass. We'd better tread carefully. This way."

But Amelia was staring at the shed. "The time machine," she said.

"No, we're not playing that part of it, remember?"

"Stupid!" she said, "Prisoner Zero went into the time machine. That's why it started donging. The Raggedy Doctor said something was wrong with it. It was Prisoner Zero's fault, and then he went in after it and he-- he--"

Alarmed at how upset she looked, Rory said, "You don't know that. You didn't see it go there, did you?"

"But it must have, and that's why he never came back!"

He took a deep breath. "He never came back because he's not real. He's just make-believe, and Prisoner Zero is make-believe, and--"

She shoved him, and he landed flat on his back.

"Ow!" he said, and scowled at her back as she ran into the house. It wasn't fair. They were just make-believe, and he'd just been trying to tell her she didn't have to worry and be afraid anymore. He picked himself up and stomped his foot. It wasn't his fault she was crazy.

A door banged inside the house. He sighed. It wasn't her fault either, he supposed, and trudged in after her.

"Hey," the babysitter said, covering the phone with a hand, "tell Amelia no door-banging."

"Sorry," he said, and went upstairs.

Her door was closed. He eyed it warily, then knocked on it. "Amelia?"

She didn't answer.

"I'm sorry I said they weren't real," he tried.

There was a long silence, then a muffled, "Sorry f'pushing you."

"Can I come in?"

"No."

"Oh." He shuffled. "Well, I could go home, I guess."

"No!"

"Um. Okay..." He shuffled some more and tried to see things out of the corner of his eye. It was a really spooky house sometimes.

He looked at Amelia's door again and sighed. She wasn't exactly crazy really, but it was hard being her friend when she kept getting upset about people who weren't even real. He frowned, and thought about Prometheus, and said, "Amelia? What if Prisoner Zero isn't a bad prisoner?"

"What?"

"I mean, what if it's like Prometheus?"

"Prometheus isn't real," she said. He could almost see her rolling her eyes.

"I know that, but, I mean, sometimes people get put in prison and they didn't do anything wrong. Or not really wrong. Maybe it was only stealing food to feed its family. So then it wouldn't hurt the Raggedy Doctor, would it?"

She was silent. He hoped it was a good silent.

"And maybe the Raggedy Doctor's helping it go back home, and making sure it won't have to go to prison again. And... and maybe there's other people he has to help too, and that's why he can't come back."

"He's got a time machine," she pointed out. "He said five minutes."

"Well... Well, I don't know," he said in exasperation. "Maybe he's just being a poophead."

He thought he heard a giggle, but he wasn't sure. A long silence followed it, then at last she said, "You can come in if you want."

He opened the door cautiously. Her hair was a bit mussed and her face was red and blotchy. He pretended not to notice. "So... what do you want to do?"

"We'll pretend," she said: "You're the Raggedy Doctor, and we're hunting monsters."

And it was fun, and a relief to be playing something even she agreed was a game. But he did kind of, very secretly, miss the part where he got to hold her hand and tell her, "Everything's going to be fine."

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Fanfic: Really Slowly. In the Right Order. (part 3/9-ish?)

2011-09-19T09:41:18Z

Brief notes, spoilers, trigger warnings, and part 1
Part 2

*** Part 3 ***

On Boxing Day Rory had his head under his pillow when his door burst open and Bryce and Gareth pounded in shouting, "Come on, it's snowed!"

Lloyd jumped out of his bed. "Really? How much? Come on, Rory," he added, pulling Rory's blankets off him.

"Hey, it's cold!" Rory protested, but there was snow outside, even if it was mostly on the edges of the garden, and if he went back to bed now his brothers would ruin it. Even as he thought that he could see Hayley running out and scooping up a ball of snow from the best spot.

"Hey!" Gareth shouted at her, and they tore out the door as their father shouted, "Quiet down, boys!" and Rory pulled on his clothes and the next-door neighbour's dog started barking.

*

It was fun while the snow lasted, but once it started running out Bryce and Gareth began stockpiling it on one side of the back garden and Lloyd and Hayley took over the other side, and Rory came back to the front to see if anyone had missed anything.

Instead he found Amelia Pond standing by their gate with a little suitcase by her feet.

"What are you doing here?" he asked suspiciously.

"I need some batteries," she said. "For my torch."

"Are you running away?"

"No. I just need batteries."

He checked over his shoulder, but everyone was still in the back garden. "Come on, then." He led her into the house and up the narrow stairs to his bedroom. His parents' door was still closed and they were playing CDs, and everyone outside would have forgotten him already. "Just a minute," he said, and rummaged in a drawer. He found the remote control in the back, and dug the batteries out of it.

"Don't you need them?"

"My cousin Fred stepped on the robot and broke it. And then Mum told me off just because I left it out for a bit."

She rolled her eyes with a knowing sigh and took the batteries. While she opened her suitcase to get out her torch, Rory tried to look as if he wasn't looking inside. There were jerseys underneath but on top was a pile of paper, and crayons and felt tip pens in every possible space.

As Amelia fitted the batteries into her torch, the pile of paper slid off the jersey, exposing a book underneath. "Hey," Rory said, pulling it out, "you said you were going to take it back."

"I did."

"You've still got it!"

"So I got it out again. Five times. And then my aunt gave me that for Christmas."

He looked down at it and realised it didn't have the library stickers on it. "Oh," he said. He put it back.

Amelia tested her torch then put it back in the suitcase too.

"Why do you need batteries if you're not running away?"

She sighed heavily. "Aunt Sharon always gets mad if she catches me drawing the Raggedy Doctor. So I have to do it when she thinks I'm asleep."

"Oh." Rory had tried reading under the covers with a torch once, but Lloyd had told on him. "That must use a lot of batteries."

"I know," she said with another sigh.

"You should go to the library instead. Mrs Stedman wouldn't mind."

She looked thoughtful. "Can you use scissors and glue at the library?"

"Uh, I don't know." He shifted and said, "You could maybe use them here if you want. Except my family--"

"Rory!" came Hayley's shout, and her shoes pounded up the stairs.

Amelia dropped and scrambled under his bed. Rory threw his blankets over her suitcase just as Hayley came in. "What?" he demanded.

"You're meant to be bringing us more snow."

"There isn't any more."

"Then you have to come back out and help us make our fort."

"I want to read Bulfinch."

She stomped her foot. "You can read anytime."

"I want to read now."

"Rory, you're such a poophead."

"You're a poophead," he retorted.

"Kids!" their father shouted from the other room.

Rory and Hayley glared at each other until finally she turned and stomped away. Rory closed the door behind her and leaned on it.

Amelia poked her head out from under the bed. When she saw the coast was clear she said, "Why are you reading to birds?"

"What?"

"You said you wanted to read to a bullfinch."

"No, I..." He went and fetched it from his bookshelf. He'd already thrown away the dustjacket with the Christmas paper: the book looked much cooler in black with gold lettering. "See, it's called Bulfinch's Mythology, that's the name of the guy who wrote all the stories down." She looked bored already so he added, "Like Pandora's Box."

"Oh! Are there more stories about Zee-uss?"

"You say 'Zooss'," he said. "And I think so but you can't borrow it, I haven't read it yet."

"Then you can read it and I'll make my puppets."

Rory grinned and flopped down on Lloyd's bed to start reading.

*

He was vaguely aware of the sounds of Amelia's scissors, and Mum and Dad's music, and the neighbour starting up his chainsaw and the dog barking in complaint, but he was concentrating too much on Bulfinch to mind.

At the end of chapter two he looked up. Amelia was gluing pieces of material onto a toilet-paper roll with a man's face drawn on in crayon. He thought he recognised the material from the shirt she'd made him wear when he'd visited.

"Is that the Raggedy Doctor?" he said.

"Yep."

He watched her try to wrestle the little shirt in place over the cardboard roll and the little arms. He wanted to ask why she was still doing that when the Raggedy Doctor hadn't come back for Christmas, but she looked too fierce so he kept his mouth shut.

"Can you hold this?" she asked suddenly.

"Sure." He wriggled onto the floor with her and held the arms in place while she fitted the shirt on. The glue was making it slip around but they got it working.

"Is the book boring?" she asked.

"No!" he said indignantly, then admitted, "Well, some of it. But that doesn't matter, you can just skip the boring bits."

"That's cheating."

"No, it's not, it's... It's time management," he said, remembering something Bryce had said in an argument with Mum. He remembered Mum hadn't been very convinced, so he hurried on: "Like introductions. Nothing interesting ever happens in introductions. And poetry."

"What if it does and you never find out because you didn't read it?"

"Then you can read it again."

She frowned as if she still disagreed but couldn't explain why.

He said quickly, "It had a bit more about Pandora's Box. Actually it had two bits, and both of them were different from the storybook."

She relaxed a little bit and let him tell her about the two new versions of the story. Then, almost forgetting about the trousers she was making, she asked more about Prometheus.

Rory told her about how Prometheus had stolen fire from the gods. Downstairs the phone rang, but Mum and Dad weren't playing music any more, so one of them would get it. It was nice having someone actually listening to him for a change.

When he'd finished she said, "Then what happened to him next?"

"Well," he said, thinking -- he'd skipped a lot, and had to read some things twice, so parts of it were a bit fuzzy -- "Zeus was still angry with him, so then he chained him up on a big mountain--"

"What?!" Rory blinked at her and she insisted, "That's mean. How long for?"

"The book doesn't say."

"I told you you shouldn't skip the boring bits."

"No, it doesn't say!" He fetched the book down and found the spot and read: "Jupiter -- that's another name for Zeus -- had him chained to a rock on Mount Caucasus, where a vulture--" He stopped. If she was upset about Prometheus being chained up, Rory probably shouldn't tell her about the vulture eating his liver.

Amelia was watching him. "I was right, wasn't I?"

"Um, I guess so," he said, and shut the book quickly.

"What did the vulture do?"

"It... bit the chains off." He added in defLloydce of the lie, "But it doesn't say how long it took."

"So he's free, then," she said in satisfaction. Then she looked back down at the Raggedy Doctor and frowned again.

"It looks good," Rory said.

"It's okay," she admitted grudgingly. "He didn't come back, you know. For Christmas."

Rory thought for a moment, then decided the safest thing to say was, "Oh."

She added, "I don't really think he's Prometheus. That's just a story."

He looked at her suspiciously. "Then why were you so upset about him being chained up?"

"I wasn't upset! I just think it's mean."

"Well, he shouldn't have stolen from the gods."

"Pff," she said, or something like it, "stealing fire isn't stealing-stealing."

"Of course it is!"

"They still had it. Besides, they're gods. If they really wanted they could take it back."

"But--" Rory started, then heard footsteps on the stairs. "That's my Mum," he said, just before her call of "Rory?" said it for him.

At once Amelia swept her things under his bed and rolled out of sight with them. Rory had time to blink four times before Mum opened the door. "Rory, are you in there?"

"I'm just reading," he said.

She blinked at him. "With your book on Lloyd's bed?"

"Oh." He looked at it up behind him, and said, "I was taking a study break."

"Fair enough," she agreed. "I just came up to ask if you'd seen Amelia Pond this morning while you were outside."

"Um," he said, trying not to look under his bed. "Amelia Pond from school?"

She gave him a long look. "Her aunt just phoned. She's worried because it looks like Amelia's run away."

"Oh no, she hasn't run away!" Rory said. "Um. I mean, I saw her out on the road and... and she said she wasn't running away, she just wanted to draw somewhere quiet."

Downstairs Hayley shrieked, and Gareth and Lloyd shouted at each other.

"I see," Mum said in an ominous tone. "And did she also say that she was going back to her aunt right now?"

"Um..." He glanced sideways at the bed, and back at Mum, and decided he'd rather have Amelia mad at him than Mum. "I guess so?"

"Good. I'll phone Ms Pond back and let her know, then." She went back out and closed the door behind her.

Amelia crawled back out and pulled a face at him.

"You're not mad, are you?" Rory asked.

"I told you I wasn't running away," she said, a little grumpily. But after he helped her pack her suitcase again she added, "If I was going to run away, I'd wait until Aunt Sharon was at work and then I'd go and take the bus to the train station and go back home to my Nan."

"I bet she'd just send you back here though."

"Yeah," Amelia said with another face.

He walked her downstairs, scouting ahead a little, but Hayley and his brothers had disappeared for the moment. "It was nice having you over," he said politely at the door.

"I hope you don't get in trouble."

It was worse than that, he discovered when he went into the kitchen: Mum and Dad were in there giggling with each other about him. He scowled and stomped back up to his room with some bread and cold ham, but at least they never told Hayley or his brothers.

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Fanfic: Interlude: a Fugue for Three Voices

2011-09-15T11:23:23Z

Fandom: Doctor Who
Spoilers: Particularly for episodes 6.08 and 6.10.
Notes: From a long-held ember of a thought, combined with the spark of an anonymous comment. A gift for fans who mourn.

Interlude: a Fugue for Three Voices
by Zeborah

"Help me," the Doctor pleaded, scrabbling on the steps in his tuxedo.

It was pitiful, really, Melody thought, and went to him. She crouched by his side and whispered in his ear, "Oh, Sweetie. Never in a million years." Then, with just one last glance over her shoulder to enjoy the sight of him sagging in despair, she skipped on up into the TARDIS.

*

"Now what have we here?" she said appreciatively, running her hands over the TARDIS console. It was flashy, of course -- that was the Doctor for you -- but she liked a little bling herself, so she decided she could live with it. Her parents (her adoptive parents, that was, not Amy and Rory, who hardly counted) had given her all kinds of instructions for this eventuality, but she'd largely tuned them out. Besides, Melody wasn't one for dwelling in the past.

"The future it is," she said to herself -- and jumped when a giant lever beside her clanked down. "Can you really hear me?" she asked curiously.

A light turned on.

"Int-eresting," she said, and wandered around the console. She remembered seeing the Doctor at that handle: she tried winding it, and to her right something pinged, and she remembered more and more. Before she knew it she was actually flying the TARDIS, or perhaps it was flying her, and it was the most fun, the most freedom, she had ever had in her life.

*

The TARDIS landed, and she ran out to see where she was. After she'd dispatched the six robots (she was foolhardy but not stupid, and for a man who claimed to be peaceful the Doctor stored a wonderfully varied arsenal of weapons in his labyrinth) and had hauled Amy back into the TARDIS, she sat and watched her.

It really was her mother -- her birth mother. How strange, seeing her the age the mother of someone Melody's age should be. It made her think about missed years, and other such melancholy nonsense. She shook herself. She was going squooshy inside: maybe she needed to go out and kill some more robots.

But before she could move, Amy's eyes opened, and Melody made herself smile. "Hi Mum," she teased, because Amy might be her mother, but she had no right glimpsing any of her innermost thoughts.

Amy gazed at her blankly, and for a moment Melody wondered if she'd gone senile in her old age. But then she said slowly, "You. Is it really you?"

Melody's stomach squirmed at the wistful tone. "As you see me," she said lightly.

"How did you get the TARDIS?"

"Don't you remember? I know you and Dad lead a busy life, but I thought killing the Doctor and stealing the TARDIS would leave some impression." A flicker of understanding lit Amy's eyes, and something like sorrow. Hastily Melody continued, "What are you doing here, anyway? Of course I knew you'd get out of Berlin: stuck in a time machine, hardly rocket science -- but why here, just when I was about to arrive?"

Amy smiled wryly. It shouldn't have suited her, but her old face wore it as naturally as she wore her patchwork armour. "Wrong question," she said, pulling herself to her feet. "You should be asking what you're doing here."

"Saving you, apparently," Melody pointed out. A thought struck and she added, "Do I have to save Rory too?"

"No," Amy said flatly, and turned away. "He's safe." While Melody was trying to figure out what to read into that, she trailed her fingers along the console and said, "Long time no see... sexy. What do you say?" she added over her shoulder, with a flash of the impishness Melody had known so many long, long hours ago. "Girls' night out?"

For a moment, Melody thought she had never heard anything so sad in her life. But then she shook herself again and flashed back a wicked grin. "I'm game if you are," she said, and the TARDIS whooped in agreement.

(to be continued whenever necessary, by anyone so inspired)

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Fanfic: Really Slowly. In the Right Order. (part 2/9-ish?)

2011-09-06T06:32:24Z

Brief notes, spoilers, trigger warnings, and part 1

*** Part 2 ***

It was months later before Rory went back. Tony wasn't even sick, he was just being a poophead. Actually he'd been a poophead all week, and Rory had been going to the library after school all week, which he didn't mind exactly but yesterday the librarian had said, "Hello again, Rory," and it was just too embarrassing.

The house was even spookier in the rain. A tabby cat watched him from a bare silver birch and Amelia didn't appear from around a corner. He hoped she was there. He hadn't been able to talk to her during the day and he wasn't sure this was a good idea.

He stood on his tiptoes to ring the old doorbell. It echoed inside, and then all he could hear was the rain. She was probably at the shrink in town, he thought, and he'd have to go to the library after all. Maybe he could slip in and hide in a corner without the librarian noticing.

But then the door opened -- just halfway. "Hello," Amelia said. "Is Tony sick again?"

"Yea-- No, he's gone to Jeff's house again. Jeff's got a PlayStation."

"You need more friends."

"Yeah, I guess." That was what his mother said, but he didn't want more friends. But Amelia was just standing in the doorway, and this was a stupid idea. "Well, I guess I'll get going..."

"I didn't say you had to go," she said, sounding offended. "Just you need more friends. Come on, I'll get you your clothes."

He closed the door behind himself and struggled out of his dripping raincoat. As Amelia clattered up the stairs he heard someone talking, but when he ventured to look the door was closed.

Amelia came back down with the gigantic shirt and tie. Rory joked, "Is that the Raggedy Doctor in the kitchen?"

She rolled her eyes. "No, that's the babysitter. She'll be on the phone until Aunt Sharon gets home, don't worry about her. So you're eating fish custard, and you ask where's my aunt."

Fumbling with his buttons, Rory dutifully said, "So, where's your-- Wait, how do I know you've got an aunt?"

Her face fell and he had the terrible feeling he'd said something wrong. "Okay," she said, "you ask where's my parents."

"Oh. Um..."

"Go on," she said impatiently.

In a rush he said, "Where're your parents?"

"I don't have any parents. I've only got an aunt."

"You're lucky," he said. "I've got two parents and four brothers and sisters and sometimes aunts and uncles and grandparents and cousins, and they're always shouting at each other, or shouting at me, and then the dog next door starts barking and the man starts shouting at the dog to shut up, and there's never any quiet."

"But then you know they're there."

"I wish they weren't."

"Don't say that!"

He stepped back. Her fists were in white balls by her side. "Okay..."

She took a few quick breaths, then said, "You're supposed to say 'I don't even have an aunt.'"

He repeated the line, and waited for her to go on, but she seemed to be suddenly hesitating. She was chewing on her lip, and he almost thought she looked like she was going to cry.

He shifted uneasily. She really was crazy, he thought, but it wasn't funny like how people always laughed about it at school. It was kind of... wrong instead, and it made his stomach hurt. After a long silence he said, "Um, maybe I should go..."

"No! You have to fix the crack in my wall."

"Okay, well... Let's go and look at the crack in your wall then."

They went upstairs to her bedroom. She showed him the wall above her desk, but there wasn't any crack in it at all.

"Is this the Raggedy Doctor?" he asked, picking up a crayon picture from the desk.

She snatched it back. "Yes."

"Was that when you were supposed to be drawing the animals at the zoo?" He'd heard some girls giggling in the playground about how she'd got in trouble with Miss Banford.

"You're not paying attention," she said. "We need to move the desk so you can look at the crack."

It was heavy and all her crayons rolled off as they shoved it out of the way, and he still couldn't see any crack on the wall. But he pretended there was one, and followed her lines, and when she pointed to the glass by her bed he knew what to do without prompting. He tipped the water out the window and put the glass against the wall and listened to the humming of the fridge downstairs. "I can hear something," he said slowly, "but I'm not sure what it is."

"It says 'Prisoner Zero has escaped,'" Amelia said from behind him. "I hear it at night. What does it mean?"

He put the glass down and squinted at the wall and thought. "I think... it means there's a prison in there. And maybe a monster. But it's just a crack, so... so if we fix it then it can't get out, and then the police in there can catch it and you won't have to worry about it again."

"How do we do that?"

He felt pleased that he'd said it right, and he thought maybe she wasn't crazy, maybe she was just scared, and if he could make her think the monster had gone away then she'd be okay again. "Well," he said, and thought hard. "Do you have any polyfiller?"

She giggled. "Polyfiller won't stop Prisoner Zero. You need to use your wand."

"I have a wand?"

"Yes, here." She gave him a grey crayon. "You point it at the crack, and that opens it."

"But we don't want to open it, we want to close it." She looked at him and he said quickly, "But first we have to open it. Right." He pointed the wand at the crack and said, feeling a little silly, "Abracadabra!"

"It's not that kind of a wand," she said. "But it doesn't matter. It's opening."

"Can you see Prisoner Zero?"

She shook her head. "Only black, and the voice keeps saying 'Prisoner Zero--'"

"Prisoner Zero has escaped," he echoed, looking back at the wall.

She pulled at his arm.

"Ow! What?"

"There's an eye," she half-whispered. "It's bigger than the crack -- it's bigger than you are, and it's looking at us. Is it Prisoner Zero?"

He opened his mouth to say yes, but she was shaking her head. "No," he said. "I think it's... the police? A prison guard?" She nodded. He looked back at the eye and demanded, "Why are you scaring Amelia? You should be catching Prisoner Zero."

"The crack's closed," Amelia said.

"Oh, that's good. Isn't it?"

"But there was a light first. Look at your wallet."

"Um..." He dug in his pocket for something that could be a wallet, but he only had a bit of string and some gum.

"Your other pocket," she said impatiently.

"Why--" Then his hand found the piece of paper, and he pulled it out and read its crayon scrawl: "'Prisoner Zero has escaped.'" He blinked at her. "How did you do that?"

She didn't answer. "Why is it telling us that?"

"Well, maybe..." he started, but then he thought it wasn't a good idea to tell her maybe Prisoner Zero had escaped into her bedroom.

She gave him a stern look. "Maybe what?"

"Maybe... Maybe Prisoner Zero came through here and is running away really fast and the eye wants to know if we saw what direction it went in."

"But if it came through here we'd know," she said. "There's something you're missing."

He frowned, then shook his head. "Sorry, I can't think of anything."

"Go out to the landing and look."

He went out and looked. "You've got a really big house? We could look for it in the other rooms."

"No, just look. In the corner of your eye."

He stood still and tried to look from the corner of his eye, but it made him go cross-eyed and the house felt even spookier than ever.

"Can you hear that?" Amelia said suddenly. "It's like a grandfather clock. Your time machine's going to explode."

"Oh, that's not good. I'd better..." He gestured at the stairs.

"Run."

"Run," he repeated, and ran clattering down the steps with Amelia clattering behind him. "Hurry up!" he shouted, and yanked the back door open and ran out into-- "Oh yuck, it's still raining."

He dashed back inside and stood in the doorway with Amelia, looking out at the shed as the rain poured down. "Did your aunt get it fixed?"

"Yep," she said, and reminded him, "It's his time machine now."

"And it's going to explode."

"Yep."

"I'll get my raincoat," he decided.

"It's okay. He just said he had to go five minutes into the future and then he'd be back and I could go with him. And then he jumped down inside, and then the box disappeared. And then..."

He waited. The babysitter was still talking in the kitchen.

Amelia shrugged and shut the door. "He's coming back at Christmas," she said, and headed for the stairs again.

"Is that what he said?"

"No, but I asked Santa to bring him back at Christmas."

"I... Um, I don't think Santa can bring people."

She turned angrily on the step and told him, "He brought the Raggedy Doctor when I asked. Only that was an emergency, and if it isn't an emergency it has to wait for Christmas. Santa's very busy, you know."

Rory shuffled his feet. He didn't think anything he could say would be a good idea. Amelia thumped on upstairs and after shuffling a moment more he went to the front door where he'd left his bag and his raincoat.

He took off the Raggedy Doctor shirt and tie, then looked around. It didn't seem right to just leave them there. He sighed, and put on his backpack to make sure she knew he was leaving, and took them upstairs.

Amelia was trying to push her desk back into place by herself, but it was way too heavy for her. Rory dropped the shirt and tie by the door and hurried to help her. She didn't look at him until they'd finished, and then she said, "If you wait until Aunt Sharon gets home she'll give you a lift."

"That's okay," Rory said, but he glanced across at the rain lashing the window.

"She's giving the babysitter a lift anyway."

She started picking up her crayons, and Rory remembered the grey one in his pocket. He put it on the desk and put the orange and black ones there too. Amelia sat down and started drawing, so he sat down on the floor and got a book out from his bag.

He'd never realised it could get quieter than the library. It was wonderful.

*

He looked up with a start when he heard steps on the stairs. He'd finished one book and started another and kicked off his shoes and now he was sprawled on Amelia's bed with the last of the grey light. At the desk, Amelia was stuffing her drawings in the bottom of a drawer. She shut it, darted for Rory's discarded book, and was sitting pretending to read when her aunt came in.

"Hello, Amelia. Michelle said you had a-- Oh, not a friend. Hello... Rory, isn't it?"

He smiled weakly while Amelia shut her eyes as if in pain.

"What are you reading?" her aunt added.

"Pandora's Box," Amelia said promptly. "It's really good."

"What's it about?"

Amelia hesitated. Rory said quickly, "It's thousands and thousands of years ago, and there's a god and he has a special box, and he likes this girl so he gives her the box, and there's demons--"

"Shh," Amelia said, "I haven't got that far yet."

"Oh, sorry."

Her aunt looked happy, and changed the subject. "Michelle said you were playing a game before...?"

Amelia sucked on her lip, then said firmly, "I was telling him about the crack in the wall."

Her aunt took a breath. "Amelia, you know there's no crack in your wall, don't you?"

"Yes," Amelia said, but insisted, "but there used to be one. You saw it too. You said--"

"Amelia," her aunt said, and then smiled brightly. "Rory, would you like a lift home?"

"Yes, thank you, Ms Pond. I'll just put my shoes back on."

"I'll see you two downstairs, then."

When she was gone, Amelia said, "Can I keep the book?"

"It's from the library," Rory said, struggling to unknot his laces.

"I know. I mean to read, and then I can take it back."

"Oh, okay then." He pulled his sneakers on, then thought of something and looked up. "It's not about the Raggedy Doctor, you know. The box isn't a time machine."

"I know," she repeated, exasperated. "I just want to read it."

He wasn't quite sure, but when he kept looking at her she narrowed her eyes back at him, so he said, "Okay," and concentrated on tying his shoelaces.

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In which she gets a new water system

2011-03-05T09:15:23Z

It looks like my water is in fact settling into the "works at night, is turned off during the day while water folk work on faults" routine. Before I was quite certain of this, however, it started raining and I grabbed the bits of fencing that the neighbour's chimney had knocked down:

At first the rain was light but it grew heavier; I emptied one bucket a) doing some non-essential cleaning b) with the byproduct of cleaning the bucket of accumulated dirt the rain had washed off the fencing into it. I've put the bucket back out and am hopeful the resulting rainwater will be clean enough to wash dishes in (I wouldn't drink it - I don't know what's in that paint). The other bucket wasn't quite full and I had nothing to do with it right then and it was dark, so I left it there while pondering the opportunities overnight. Maybe wash my hair? kyhwana also suggests the addition of a tarp for cleanliness and greater coverage; I've got a good sheet of plastic in the garage which I'll dig out tomorrow if it's still raining.

In other news, I'm disappointed by the Sandbaggers DVDs: every time I try to convert the DVDs to my region I get told the disks have "Bad Sectors". I know, I know, I'm supposed to be playing them on my all-region DVD player which just happens to not have a working TV connected to it. I'll try them on my parents' tomorrow and see if it's a general error or some cunning new DRM technique.

This evening continued to gather data on the relative startlingness of big vs small aftershocks.

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In which she creates an impromptu recipe

2010-11-29T08:31:40Z

(aka throws things in a pot and calls it dinner, but with sufficient success that she may repeat the method some other lazy evening)

Two eggs and a serving-sized amount of pasta in a pot with cold water, boiled while doing overdue dishes. [All the recipes say to boil the water then add pasta, but it seems to work my way too.]

When almost ready, chopped green stuff (spinach would have been perfect but I had bok choy and that was just fine) and added to same pot until a nice bright green.

Drained water out. Shelled and mashed eggs. Sprinkled on lemon-pepper seasoning. Mixed together.

Ate from the pot. I really like minimising dishes.

I think I shall have an apricot for dessert.

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Fanfic: The Trouble With Lipstick

2010-10-16T00:45:33Z

Title: The Trouble With Lipstick
Author: Zeborah
Fandom: Doctor Who
Spoilers: New Who season 5 (but only minor points)
Summary: On a mission, River Song starts questioning her taste in makeup.

The trouble with hallucinogenic lipstick was that a lot more of it got on your lips than on the person you kissed. River had wiped it off as soon as she could, and she was fairly well acclimatised to it by now anyway, but the giddiness lingered as she sprinted through the ancient Erinian cave complex.

It was the kind of giddiness that made her take risks. Risks that seemed perfectly reasonable at the time, like drawing stick figures on a wall or throwing herself out an airlock. Risks that had always paid off brilliantly.

So far.

The edges of her vision were an iridescent kaleidoscope, and she was having trouble remembering the sequence of turns to get to the Erinian treasury. And now the Doctor was running along beside her.

"You're going the wrong way," he said.

"How do you know what way I'm going?" she retorted, proud of managing it in a single breath.

"Well, obviously I'm a hallucination so I know everything you're thinking."

She looked at him despite herself and silently cursed his knowing smirk. "Then why should I listen to you?"

"Because you're headed straight to the Erinian treasury. I told you to stop using that hallucinogenic lipstick."

"That's where I want to go," she pointed out. "And no, you didn't."

"Well, I should have. Because you really--" For a moment she flattered herself that he was pausing for breath, but he spent even more time running than she did and it was only for emphasis after all: "Really, really don't want to go there. Unless you particularly want to find yourself splattered across ten point five square kilometres of cave wall and then crushed under twenty-three point four kilometres of fossilised dragons. You know it's addictive."

"It's not addictive," she said, quite patiently under the circumstances. "The adrenaline is addictive. And you're in no position to lecture me about that. What in sanity's name are you doing here?"

"I'm saving you from a messy death," he said smugly -- "while Amy and Rory blow up the Erinian treasury."

"What?" She stopped and rounded on him, gasping for breath. "I need the accounts ledger!"

"Too late, it's already hatched. Technically they're imploding it."

"What are you talking about?" she demanded.

"Your pupils are dilated."

"We're in the Endless Caves of the Sixth Moon of Erinia. It's dark, and you're not making any sense."

"We're in the Endless Caves of the Sixth Moon of Erinia, and the lights are thriving," he said with relish. "So either you're high..." He leaned forward to whisper, "or I'm hot."

Or both. His pupils were dilated too, and full of iridescent galaxies turning and turning and endlessly turning, and at the edge of her vision was that distracting aura and his oh-so-infuriating smirk.

She was a hairsbreadth from his lips when he jerked aside and put a hand up between them. "Do you hear that?" he asked, his eyes fixed somewhere over her shoulder.

She couldn't even hear the airpipes' soft whistle for the pounding of blood in her ears. "Hear what?"

He pirouetted and pointed back the way she'd come. "Go that way, take the fifth left, next two rights, then up twenty-three point four kilometres. Now run!"

"What about you?"

But he was already sprinting towards the imminently imploding Erinian treasury.

"Ngggh!" she shouted after him, and ran for the surface.

*

"Okay," she gasped as she hauled herself into their getaway ship, "we're going for plan B."

"The Triumvirate's not going to like it."

"So we'd better hurry." She slammed the hatch shut and swung into the seat beside her spiny copilot as he completed liftoff procedures.

"What happened?"

"Act of God," she gritted in disgust, grabbing the stabilisers. "I don't want to talk about it."

They were too busy to talk anyway: this thing was almost as finicky to fly as the TARDIS. It was quarter of an hour later before she remembered the moon below. She brought it up on the nearest screen. The surface was as smooth as the day the lava had flowed, and seismographic readings were nil.

River rested her head briefly on the edge of the console, then stood up.

"What are you doing?"

"Just a minute," she said, tapping buttons on the eject chute.

"We're going to warp in twenty seconds!"

She made it back to her seat in time, strapping herself in as the Sixth Moon of Erinia and her hallucinogenic lipstick fell behind them at seven thousand times the speed of light.

"By the Blessed Ansible--" her copilot muttered in bewilderment.

"What?"

"Just as we entered warp -- I thought I saw the moon... implode." His spines rippled in his version of a shrug. "Trick of the light."

The straps held her too tight to bang her head on the console again. She settled for a quiet and unsatisfying thump against the padded headrest instead. It had been the Doctor after all. Or else a manifestation of her subconscious without which she would now be buried under twenty-three point four kilometres of fossilised dragons.

The trouble with hallucinogenic lipstick was it was only manufactured by one particular enclave of the Order of Lapidary Quietude, they had a strict embargo against trading with outsiders, and this time their sensors would be set to alert several thousand cybersparrows the moment her DNA showed up in their forest.

River Song smiled slowly: this was going to be fun.

END

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In which cracks appear

2010-09-08T04:37:13Z

Aftershocks during the night gave me the opportunity to discover by experiment that "Oh thank goodness I can just pull my pillow over my head" wins out over force of habit. Also that it's a lot easier to get back to sleep that way.

There was a big aftershock this morning that everyone (twitter, radio, Civil Defence, etc) thought was the long-feared 6 (rule of thumb is that aftershocks can be up to 1 magnitude less than the original) but it turned out to be a mere 5.1, just really close and really shallow. Afterwards people started reporting sulphur, and bear in mind that the area the shock came from is not so far from old volcanoes. I dismissed this as power of suggestion until the reports apparently became so widespread that Civil Defence felt the need to reassure us that we've got nothing to worry about.

After that one there was news of fresh cracks in Lyttelton Tunnel (now judged sound again), and more buildings being evacuated and/or collapsing, and, curse it, libraries that were going to open today now need to be checked again, and the university which was going to start allowing staff in to cleanup is now delaying that another day too. I thought I was going to be able to go in tomorrow to move a million books back onto shelves, but apparently I get to sit here going mildly crazy for another day instead.

Had a lovely phonecall from a colleague saying I was welcome to go visit her if I liked. And then I went out to bring in my empty rubbish bins (rubbish was collected before that shock! but word is that mail delivery was cancelled after it) and met a neighbour and we chatted for a bit and she said I was welcome to go visit them if I liked. At some point I also assured her that my house is wood so awesome resilient. And then it occurred to me that my garage, by contrast, is concrete blocks and plaster so maybe I should go look at that.

...So yeah, then I phoned a friend who's keeping a car in there in case she wants to rethink that plan, and then I took photos, and then I took increasingly suspicious photos of probably-just-surface-but-who-knows? cracks in my house's foundations, and then I filed a claim with the Earthquake Commission (webforms mean never having to wait on hold) and left a message on my insurance company's answerphone to let them know I'd done so. It's minor stuff so won't be high on anyone's priority list but at least it's started.

Then I felt the need for a whine on Twitter and some chocolate.

Then Mum rang and we had a nice chat while I looked upwards and thought, "You know, I don't think the light fixture used to have that crack where it joins the ceiling." So, mental note not to stand underneath that until I can get a proper look at it.

And then I felt the need to create a silly icon, and lo, here it is:

So I've gone and updated all my DreamWidth earthquake entries to include that, and now I feel a little bit better. Though more chocolate probably won't hurt either.

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In which doggerel is for the birds

2010-08-22T00:18:42Z

Four little starlings sitting on the gutter:
Cat jumps up and sets them all aflutter.
Four little starlings sitting on the aerial:
Cat jumps up and they fly to realms ætherial.

(No aerials were harmed in the making of this verse. The cat in question was actually sitting, oblivious, on my lap.)

Hey, everyone, it's sunny today! The wind's still coming from the vicinity of Antarctica but the sky is blue and the sun is casting shadows! It makes me look at a car and go, "Squee, it's so blue!" and look at rhododendrons and go, "Squee, they're so red!" It's probably for the best that there are no double rainbows in evidence or I might explode of squee.

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In which she gets a round tuit at least as far as cat vacuuming is concerned

2010-08-19T03:56:39Z

Inspired by a conversation my siblings and I had a month or so back:

Modified from Duty Calls (aka "Someone is wrong on the internet") under its CC-BY-NC-2.5 license; itself licensed CC-BY-NC (New Zealand 3.0).

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