Why a whelk...

I went to post a comment somewhere and found I'd been banned from someone's journal. I've never been banned from anyone's journal before, and I quite like the person in question and don't recall ever having had a disagreement with them of any kind. Random defriendings by people who I thought were my actual friends I can deal with, but banning? Wow. Ouch.

Speaking of which, this is kind of where I am at the moment:

• There's not a lot of joy for me left in Whovian fandom. I'll probably post something later about how much I hated Waters of Mars. I have no desire to watch anything RTD has produced or DT stars in, and I am only just managing to hold on to a scrap of enthusiasm for when Moffat and Smith come in. I hate Russell, I hate everything he's ever written, I think he's awful. His insistence on bringing all this emotional manpain and trauma into these shows that used to just be a joyful experience for me and, in the case of Who, for my kids, has ruined my fannish experience. I want the last three years of my life back, I wish I'd never started watching Torchwood, I wish I'd stopped watching Who. I don't need television that pisses me off and makes me sad, that's not what I watch television for. Fuck you Russell, I hope LA chews you up and spits you out and fucks you in the ass with a pointy stick.


• Ianto did make me happy for quite a few years, which is why I'm working on a last epic picspam of my favourite teaboy doing shit. I hope to have it done in a week or two.


• I'm also working on something of a personal project celebrating Torchwood Series One and Two, which I hope to tell you more about in the coming weeks. Or maybe I'll just abandon it.


• I was hoping to do a Christmas push on the Ianto Jones Wants a Pony campaign, but the Lluest Horse and Pony Trust's continued inability to update me is starting to annoy me a bit, so maybe I'll leave it. After Christmas, I'm done promoting it because I think I've done enough. I'll leave it up, of course.


• Any takers for ninja_teaboy may give me shout here or in PM. I'm putting it up for adoption per January 1st. If there's no-one interested, I'll close it down.


• Oh, in case you were wondering, no. If there is a new series of Torchwood, I won't be watching it, as I don't really like Gwen, or Jack. I liked Tosh and Ianto and I quite enjoyed disliking Owen. I liked Ianto, I liked Tosh, I liked the Hub, the embossed SUV, the pteranodon, the old ladies, the poodles, the victorian lesbianism, the cyberbikinis and that stupid fucking invisible lift. In fact, I loved all those things. Apparently I loved those things far too much. Those things are all gone, so there's nothing for me to come back to. Not that there will be a new series.


• It's been really fun, people, but if you've friended me for Torchwood content, please, feel free to defriend me in the coming weeks, I won't be offended. I am completely spent. Done. Thanks, Rusty.

CAPSLOCKTIEM!

THE SHEER AMOUNT OF WHATTHEFUCKERY INDUCED BY THESE PICTURES,




(Gaaad! Jack's profile! It's hilarious.)

THE NEVER-ENDING MARY-SUE FIC THEY ARE ADVERTISING, AND THE WHAT-I-HOPE-TO-GOD-IS-A-12-YEAR-OLD-BUT-FEAR-MAY-WELL-BE-AN-ACTUAL-SO-CALLED-ADULT-WHAT-WROTE-IT HAS MADE ME DEFRIEND torchwoodcoffee FOR GOOD. I JUST CAN'T TAKE ANY MORE.



Actually, I lie, it's that and this one:



Because I need a fucking 500 chapter crossover fic like I need a fucking hole in my head. And no, I don't know what animated awfulness it is crossing Torchwood over with, nor do I wish to. In fact, if you even dare attempt to tell me I will shun you forever.

All names have been removed to protect the delicate sensibilities of the artistes involved.



THE PURPLE MAKES ME ANGRY. Come back, black, I miss you!!

Yeah, yeah, I know, this is the sort of thing I should post on the anonmeme, because that's where you're supposed to bitch about people and their godawful fic because then you can pretend you're not you, and are therefore nicer than you actually are. Or something. Hey, whatever. Sue me.

Random:

• I wasn't ever really serious, initially anyway, but eventually I did actually briefly find myself pondering the morals of creating a sock to infiltrate what's-her-face's friendslocked Torchwood photoshoppery. I came to the conclusion that while I believe it's no more morally wrong to do such a thing than it is to paste real life actors' faces onto gay porn stills, the balance was swayed against doing it because a)it would involve me actually putting in some effort into searching out pornographic photomanips, and I despise photomanips, especially pornographic ones, so that didn't really make any logical sense to me and b)I couldn't really work out what I'd do with them once I got there because obviously they're f-locked and all I could really do would be to laugh at them on my own, or repost them here, which would be a wanky thing to do and of course c)thankfully, used_songs sent me a bunch of links to some freely available doozies. Of which more laters.


• Everyone's moving to Dreamwidth now? I have no idea why people are doing this, a few people on my flist seem to be involved with the thing, but nobody seems to have ever really taken the time to adequately explain to anyone what the point to the whole thing is, and so the whole Dreamwidth experience feels like some huge meeting that I somehow managed entirely to miss. Rather like Twitter. Having said that, does anyone have a Dreamwidth code going spare that they could PM me? Also, I tried to set up a main account there, just so I could pretend to play with the cool kids, but my PSP just shows a bunch of empty boxes with no clue as to what they're for, so I don't know how to import my LJ into it, nor do I think I can be bothered to find out, I'm busy enough as it is without having to sit behind my laptop and actually do computer things. But anyway, I'd like another code if there is one because I'd like to set up a secondary account as well, just to stake my claim and that. Not that it really matters. Can you sense my ennui filtering through in this post yet? Yeah, that's basically how I feel about life at the moment.


• As you've probably noticed, I've dropped out of TW fandom pretty much lately, not because I hate it, but the wait for S3 is really getting on my nerves and frankly I have nothing more to say on the subject of that cracky show until I've seen something new. And I'm too busy watching and ENJOYING Dollhouse (yeah, so sue me, I like it) and, embarrassingly, kind of obsessing a little bit about watching The Big Bang Theory and maybe actually shipping Sheldon/Penny. Shenny? Pendon? I don't know, I don't move in those circles, as much as I might be tempted to. While we wait, though... ( Moar TW spoilers? )


• Anyway, back on the topic of naked men.( SHIELD YOUR EYES! )

That's it from me. Move along.

For those of you who have expressed an interest: Yes, I'm fine, thank you for asking, RL happened and I suffered from a bout of interwebennui. I'm still alive.

News in brief from my lengthy absence:

• GDL is getting married. (I'm so old and cynical, whenever I hear of anyone under thirty getting married, a voice in my head says "Oh. Pregnant, is she?" Irrelevant, but true.) So, yeah. Good luck to him and all that. I'm always vaguely squicked by people who express anything more than a kind of meh-that's-nice-good-luck-to-them attitude to celebrity couplings and such, whether it be of the OMGNOOOO! variety, which is fucking scary in and of itself, or the equally bizarre kind of SQUEEEEE!They'resocutetogether!!11!! overreaction, which just creeps me out in a different way. I mean, what are you basing this squee on? You think they look good in pictures? You've seen them in the flesh and they looked happy? What? You don't fucking know these people. They're getting married. Move along now. Next!


• Planet of the Dead. Planet of the Fucking Dead. Ummm, yeah. I liked Malcolm, will that do? It's not so much that I HATED Lady Christina de Souza as a character, it's the fact that the whole idea of Lady Christina de Souza made me HATE the writing. I mean, I suppose she was okay in a way. Except that she kept telling us how wonderful she was. And she was wearing lycra. And had a bag of tricks that was so fucking predictable it made setting number 354689 on the sonic screwdriver look positively groundbreakingly original. And she had a name that came straight out of the sort of stories eleven year olds write when they first venture into writing Mary Sue romance fiction. It's not so much that I HATED the woman I was seeing on screen, but that, while watching I hated the writers who brought her into existence, because they had to be A) mocking us or B) mentally deficient. No. And, apart from anything else, it comes back to that whole thing that Rusty and co are so good at doing, which is Bigging Themselves Up and telling us all that they're going to concentrate their efforts on making not a whole series but a few HUGE HAPPENING episodes that will be MIND-BOGGLINGLY GOOD AND BLOW US ALL AWAY WITH THEIR AWESOMENESS. And then we get a kind of mid-series story about a bus and the only really mind-bogglingly exciting thing about it is that it was filmed IN DUBAI for no apparent reason other than that it was quite obviously sponsored by the Dubai tourist board. See, the thing is about mind-bogglingly AWESOME episodes, guys, is that they're not AWESOME by virtue of how AWESOME a time you had on your various free holidays prepping/scouting/filming in Dubai, but by how AWESOME the story is and how much we as an audience are blown away by it. And I'm not generally BLOWN AWAY by a reasonably entertaining story, the moral of which being that if you're a lycra-wearing aristocrat, the Doctor will think you are awesome, snog you and let you off for your criminal behaviour, leaving you to go on your merry way and wreak more upper-class havoc on an unsuspecting public, but this time with the aid of a flying bus. It's my own fault, of course. Upon hearing of these SELECT FEW SUPER-SPECIAL SPECIALS, I kind of got carried away in my thinking and went "OOOOH!! I bet one of them's about the Time War and has Eccleston in it! Maybe there'll be a Ten-Doctors-type-thing! Whatever it is they'll be SUPER SPECIAL!!!" Which, of course, is a stupid thing to think. They'll just be normal episodes, except marginally longer and filmed in exotic locations that could have been a studio and we wouldn't have cared. Perhaps the next one will be sponsored by the country of Writing-An-Awesome-Companion-Who-Isn't-Just-Awesome-Because-She-Says-So-And-Also-Is-Not-Solely-Awesome-By-Virtue-Of-Her-Having-Met-The-Doctor. Maybe then I'll be happy. (Yeah, yeah, I know, Donna was AWESOME. But she doesn't count because her awesome was tainted by A)us constantly being told she was old and/or unattractive and B)her awesome being removed at the last minute, thus reducing her awesome to an awesome that was bestowed upon her and then taken away again by the Doctor, leaving her back at the slightly objectionable and vapid state of unawesomeness she was in before she met him.)


• MY PHOTOSHOP MUSE HAS LEFT ME!!!! In other words, the woman who made the hugely offensive and objectionable photoshop Jack/Ianto monstrosities with the big cocks has friends-locked her journal and will only accept friending applications from simpering well-wishers whose arsekissing comments are love. Can I really be bothered to create a sock account for the sole purpose of seeing her godawful manipulations? And how long would it take her to sniff me out of the well-over-a-hundred friend applications she's had since flocking and find her way back here? She certainly doesn't come across as hugely intelligent or technosavvy. Could I call it a social experiment if I were to do such a thing? Is there a law against reposting photomanips for the sole purpose of animating the huge, veiny cocks involved? Is there a moral objection? Stay tuned while I ponder these issues.

I now return you to my regularly scheduled no-updates-unless-the-world-collapses.

• I feel personally responsible for perhaps pointing one or two Torchwood people towards who_anon. Please tell me this is not the case. I have NO idea what's going on there anymore, but the wank on my friendslist continues unabated. My two cents: Seriously, I think the kind of hive mentality on who_anon polarises opinion when it comes to fannish things, I think the entire place puts people on the defensive (which sometimes translates as attack, sure, it's the best form of defense, right?), which carries on not just there, but elsewhere, in other communities and people's personal journals as well. I think the place causes wank and relishes in prolonging it, and that's why I'm staying well out. I'm MUCH HAPPIER staying well out. I LOVE EVERYONE, remember? I posted once about Torchwood fandom being a happy friendly place full of fuzzy bunnies, and honestly, deep down, I know this is still the case. Let's all have a hug. Even you meme-goers, I love you guys too, I just don't want to play over there no more because you keep hogging the swings and throwing sand.


• GRATUITOUS PIMP: Anyone in possession of a reasonably scrawny boyfriend of the River Island "medium slim fit" variety? Fancy dressing him like Owen Harper? ( Okay, so this shirt hasn't got the bestest associations for Owen fans, but still... )


• Where do I start looking to find the cool kids into Being Human, dudes? I think I may well have decided I liked that show lots. Iconworthy lots. May well fire up photoshop.


• Speaking of photoshop, is it tasteless of me to start a kind of running meme in my journal involving animated gifs that feature Ianto and HUGE cocks? It's just that there was another godawful manip that kind of... inspired me. I thought I might give it a go later in the week.

That is all.

First off, let me clarify the point I was trying to make in my last post (apart from the LOVEME! pic, that's just a picture I was mocking HARD.)

These icons (I don't know these two people, and I don't think I've ever ventured near their fic) tell me something:



What they tell me is that the people they belong to don't give a toss about aspect ratio. Or clarity. Or legibility. It tells me these people pay precious little attention to finer details and aesthetics. And as such, they put me off reading those users' fics. Because I assume that they also pay no attention to detail in their fic, don't care much for spelling or punctuation or characterisation. Care more about quickly and dirtily getting a basic point across and don't really put much thought into honing that point so that we can all share in its wonderfulness. I judge people on their icons. And yes, that probably makes me a bitch, but it comes back to that basic Nice thing we're all supposed to do when we say to ourselves "Aww, poor diddums, they probably put a lot of work into that icon, we should leave them be." No. Just because you've put a lot of work in, doesn't mean it's not shit. And the same goes for fanfiction. It's one of the reasons I hate lengthy author's notes. I don't want to know what your inspiration was, or how long it took you or how many beta readers you had who still managed to ignore basic grammar mistakes, I just care about the finished product. If it's good, it's good, if it's shit, it's shit. End of story.

ANYWAY...

THIS PROMO PICTURE:



A few things. Gwen's in the middle because the other two are significantly taller. Putting Jack in the middle would require raising both Ianto and Gwen up to a higher level to balance out the picture, and I think they probably tried it, but the end result would more than likely have caused anyone looking at it to remark "Why is Jack a midget?". Or they would have had to put Jack higher than the other two, resulting in midget Ianto. Why Gwen is waving two guns IN THEIR FAYCES, I do not know. But from a design point of view, the picture makes sense to me, and I don't think it's part of AN AGENDA of any kind. Having said that, it looks like it was a leftover from a novel shoot, and the smokey effects are cheap and nasty and yet again, it's a pathetic excuse for promotional material, I don't think there actually IS a design person working on Torchwood, I think it's something they got an apprentice in for or something, their pics are uniformly awful. In fact, the misty photoshop filters on this one tell me that the person doing Torchwood's promotional material is probably also the person who made this:



And if any of you reading don't know what the bottom half of that manip looks like, then you should count yourselves very lucky indeed. I was thinking of cropping it in such a way that left just a wee bit of cock poking up into the bottom of the frame, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. But look, the style's very similar. As is the level of talent. Enough said.

Here you go then. Tell me how hawt it is.

( Shitty manip checklist, it's almost too beautiful to cut, worksafe )

TELL ME NOW! IS HAWT, YES??!!!