(no subject)

Fic Rec - It's Jackie saving the day in dark_aegis' Last Defense.

Shifting her shopping onto one arm, she marches across to the TARDIS and knocks on the door. "I know you're in there, Doctor! You can't hide in there for ever, y'know! You're coming to tea an' that's final."
...
[A]n image flickers to life before her. It's grainy and lined, like someone forgot to adjust the controls on an old telly. It's also unmistakably the Doctor.

He turns his flickering gaze towards her. Eerie, that is. Definitely not right. If he's an image, really an image, how can he know where she's standing? "Jackie Tyler. Only you would blunder in here without a key. Good on you. Fantastic. Now shut up and listen."

Shelf-Stable Bento Challenge

As I make a list of the things I need for ChicagoTARDIS, the question of provisions is a pressing one. At the con I'll be okay, but getting there is a hell of a haul on the train - and if I'm going to be eating chips and sandwiches for two days straight, I want them to be *my* chips and sandwiches!

So the challenge is to come up with meals that will be shelf-stable without refrigeration for at least 4 days (Thursday-Sunday), fill me up, and cover enough of the food groups to keep my brains from scrambling. (They'll be packed in disposable containers, so I can toss as I go.) I'll keep a bottle for water that I can keep refilling, so drinks aren't an issue.

What would you pack? (And do you know of any cheeses that won't go off after a day?)

( My ideas, so far )

A steady diet of all this wouldn't do me good, but eating like that for few days won't give me scurvy either, and I can get real food at the con.

(no subject)

Sorry about the spam, but this is worth the passing on:

Woman accuses man of having a teeny tonker. Man proceeds to prove it.

Sometimes, You Just Have to Forgive Yourself

Sometimes, you just have to forgive yourself for not being psychic. For simply using what you had at the time to do the job you wanted to do.

I'm dealing with the difficult job of clearing the library by taking it one task per evening. Tonight, I went through several mountains of videotape.

Unmarked stuff was tossed. Some marked stuff was too. But then I hit the stuff that gave me a pang. The commercial VHSs of the Hardy Boys show. The carefully cataloged, labeled, and stored-in-their-own-special-containers tapes of Buffy, Angel, Beauty and the Beast, Remington Steele, Avengers, Quantum Leap, Alien Nation, Gilmore Girls.

Part of me looks at the mounds and mounds of tape and thinks, "what a waste." And the rest of me has to remind it that once upon a time, that was how you did it. There was no Internet, much less downloading, when the show was on (Steele). DVDs came out years later, so if you wanted to check something for fanfic, you needed your own copy now (Buffy). Nobody knew for ages and ages if it would ever come out on DVD (Alien Nation). There is no sin in upgrading your copies to a smaller-sized, more-stable, fully completed version of what had been only partially available (Beauty and the Beast, Hardy Boys).

Heck, there are some that still aren't out: Probe, Timeline, She-Wolf of London/Love & Curses, and Real Ghostbusters are all going upstairs for stopgap archiving, although if/when it's possible to get the commercial versions of their season sets, I doubt I'll have any nostalgic pangs for the homemade DVDs as they hit the can. There isn't the trading culture behind them that there was for videotape (nor is there the price! You wanna know how many DVDs you can get for the price of a single blank tape back in the day?)

But times have changed. I never tape anything anymore - not the way I used to, with the labels and the collections. I'll timeshift something if I'm going to be out that night, but there's no drive to lovingly collect an amateur archive when the high-quality, uncut DVDs will be out at the end of the season - with extras to boot.

*squints at the Internet* You kids don't know how good you have it, with your torrents and your downloads and your YouTube and your almost-instant season boxset releases! *shakes virtual cane* We had to watch 50th generation copies of bad videotape to propagate our fandom!

I wouldn't go back for anything. But... there's a lot of personal history and a lot of fan culture that's sitting out there on the porch waiting for trash day now. And that seems to call for a memorial.


ETA: Although, y'know, I should dig through the Quantum Leap tapes and rescue "Good Morning Peoria" if I have it. Because the filler music they used on the DVDs was utterly bogus.