I'M SORRY GUYS I'VE BEEN INACTIVE DUE TO BEING ON HOLIDAY

but I have been playing a little game. And that little game is Merry Gear Solid 2. And that little game has singlehandedly restored my faith in MGS, Christmas, fanfic, MGS4, Father Christmas and -

- look, just play it, now, before the season is over. Here's a list of reasons why:

• It's the perfect sequel. Merry Gear Solid 1 was fun and diverting, but 2 just takes everything good about it and capitalises on it. It is fantastic. Getting rid of Santa as the main character and making it Old Snake and Otacon is to the game's infinite benefit, because it makes the game feel more familiar. The kid sprite from the first game is back, but he's voiced by what sound like actual children this time, and is therefore IMMEDIATELY ADORABLE.
  
  
• It's technically stunning. The level designs are great - maybe the game as a whole is a bit too linear and there's a double backtrack, but that's nitpicking considering what the canon Metal Gears are like. The graphics are gorgeous. And there is an awesome fourth-wall puzzle at the end which will make your brain skip around with glee.
  
  
• It's a damn good parody and funny as hell. Lots of parodies just use the trappings of someone else's work and then launch themselves off into their own stylistic stratosphere, and many others imitate the other work without commenting on it. But Merry Gear Solid 2 gets it perfect. There's maybe one point where a character repeats a joke that was in the canon almost ad verbatim, but it's really not big enough to be annoying and the reference becomes important later on in the game. The rest of the jokes are new. Most of them fit in with the MGS-style humour - innocent and slow-paced, cute rather than hilarious. The rest are some of the most excruciating puns you will ever hear in your life.
  
  The more explicit parody elements are astute and genuinely funny. I don't want to spoil too much, but at a certain point Snake gets stripped naked and the game turns into MGS2 (and MGS4) in a way that's creative and absolutely hysterical, rather than a few obvious 'wtf who is this naked woman i'm playing as THIS GAME MAKES NO SEEEENSE~' gags.
  
  
• It works as probably the most extreme crackfic in the fandom, really. Snake and Otacon really never break character - they're just a tiny bit more aware of the fourth wall than they are in canon, but that's about it. Some of the more subtle humour is character-based and comes from their interactions, like Otacon acting awkward around Snake when he puts on a reindeer mask because he thinks Snake is into furdom; or overly describing completely random weaponry.
  
  While it's vicious, there's too much love and care taken to make it a straight skewering. There's jokes about some really obscure bits of canon, including a reference to Ghost Babel (not a funny reference, but a reference nonetheless). I still haven't figured out if the 'all your Christmases must have been soul-crushingly terrible' joke really is a reference to Metal Gear 2, but it doesn't matter because there's enough mentions of that game in there already including a puzzle lifted basically straight from it and the fact that the 'little girl' is obviously modelled after the female Zanzibar orphan. And most people forget about those games. And it makes me happy that they were put into a silly parody game. Because it's nice knowing there's someone else out there as pathetic as me. (UNRELATED - I decided recently that Metal Gear 2 is actually my favourite Metal Gear in terms of what it brought to the table. It's terribly flawed, but it's easily the only most original game.)
  
  
• The identity of Who. Oh my god. Best plot twist ever. Shat brix.
  
  
• EASTER EGGS. There's several rooms which only exist for jokes. The creator made up an entire fictional game so he could make an MGS1 visual parody in one of the optional menus. Some of the kids have little setpieces - my favourite is the Australian kid in the restaurant.
  
  
• The music. I wish there was a way I could describe to you what my face was doing around the time I realised that the music in Galuade Gardens was a remix of Jingle Bells in the style of the Caution music from MGS3, but I couldn't see so you'll just have to imagine it. Some of the remixes are really, really subtle, and I didn't notice the 'Merry Christmas (War Is Over)' mix until I saw it in the credits and listened to the song again.
  
  
• Voice acting. Not only are the impersonations really, really careful, but the actors don't concentrate on impersonation at the expense of, you know, acting. I want to cuddle the guy playing Otacon. He was amazing.

Poll #1503806 just because i wank to ennio morricone
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 17

If I decided to host a Dollars Trilogy marathon on livestream, would you be interested? (note - livestream is a streaming site which has a chat function so we could all comment on the movies)

Considering the marathon will be about six and a half hours long, do you have any suggestions for a good time/date if I do it?

Oooiooioooooooo~!

• All are pretty violent. In the UK, FoD is a 15 certificate and FaFDM and GBU are 18 certificates, but by today's standards they're really tame. Think about Metal Gear level - violent, but not extensively so and not gornographic. More specifically for each movie:
  
  
  • A Fistful of Dollars is the tamest. There's some torture (beating) and someone getting blasted with a shotgun.
    
    
  • For a Few Dollars More has a fairly graphic rape scene and a suicide, and is therefore the most brutal of them, in my opinion. It also has some non-graphic torture (beating) and drug use (either cannabis or opium).
    
    
  • The Good, The Bad and The Ugly has a pretty graphic torture scene (beating, strangling and a non-graphic eye gouge), and an extended and very tense scene where a character's airway is slowly being cut off. There's a very quick and descriptionless mention of one of the sympathetic main characters being a rapist (which is pretty easy to write out of your mental headcanon), a character is forced to walk in the desert and ends up with severe blisters, and one character is killed by having their head bashed repeatedly against a sharp rock.

psst, those six of you who understand my brief and embarrassing fascination with the film. I wrote a little Tuco/Blondie-type thing over here in flashslash.

Dear RTD:


Thanks to the most recent episode of DW, I'm now counting down the days until you leave. ♥

( spoilery rambling )

FORTUNATELY this is an RTD episode so we know all he has to do is make The Doctor push the Magic Button and save the day.



This, and a PM I recieved which I won't expound on here, was not what I needed on Christmas.

Merry Christmas! I'm sneaking on before Christmas dinner.

We went to church, which is usually a very awkwaaaaard turtle experience anyway since both my father and I are athiests and my brother is slowly bending that way, but it was bearable. My brother got given a pipe for Christmas. A real pipe. He loves it. My parents are useless.

My father has just buried a bottle of Coke in the remains of mine and cockpuppet's snowman because there's no more room in the fridge.

I leave you with the worst lyrics in any carol, ever -

[21:06] fireholly99: i hate it when you are so desperate for fic you have finished searching LJ
[21:06] fireholly99: you have finished searching other archives
[21:06] fireholly99: you have finished searching FF.net
[21:07] fireholly99: and you are now searching google
[21:07] fireholly99: and the first ten pages are false hits because it just so happens that people like to use the title of the movie to describe things they're going to wank about
[21:07] fireholly99: and the eleventh page is a link to your own LJ
[21:07] fireholly99: does this ever happen to you?
[21:07] explodingdinos: not that I remember, no
[21:08] fireholly99: ....oh



[21:12] fireholly99: OKAY SERIOUSLY I AM LOSING PATIENCE WITH THE INTERNET
[21:12] fireholly99: IT'S A MOVIE ABOUT THREE GUYS CONSTANTLY BACKSTABBING EACH OTHER AND YET I'M NOW FINDING SOMEONE'S ~ANN COULTER~ FANFIC
[21:12] fireholly99: ANN
[21:12] fireholly99: COULTER
[21:12] fireholly99: WHAT
[21:13] fireholly99: WHY IS THAT EVEN SHOWING UP ON A GOOGLE SEARCH WHEN I AM GOOGLING FOR FIC ABOUT A MOVIE ABOUT -THREE GUYS CONSTANTLY BACKSTABBING EACH OTHER-
[21:13] fireholly99: i have to laugh
[21:13] fireholly99: i have to laugh or i'll cry
[21:13] fireholly99: it contains the phrase 'But Ann Coulter is the only celebrity I’ve ever spotted at Farmer’s Market that I wound up fucking in the ass, hard.'
[21:14] fireholly99: there's an F!S if there ever was one



[21:17] fireholly99: alright
[21:17] fireholly99: i have found VIDDING META
[21:18] fireholly99: for SPN
[21:18] fireholly99: which has fallen under this banner
[21:18] fireholly99: i am contemplating murdering the internet
[21:18] explodingdinos: why not search for the character's names
[21:18] explodingdinos: instead of the title
[21:18] fireholly99: ....it's a movie about THE MAN WITH NO NAME
[21:18] fireholly99: you tell me why not



[21:19] fireholly99: OH WHAT THE FLYING BALLS
[21:19] fireholly99: I JUST FOUND athena_crikey'S PERSONAL WEBSITE
[21:19] fireholly99: WHICH LISTS HER SNAKE/OTACON FANFIC
[21:20] fireholly99: I DON'T EVEN KNOW HOW THE HELL THAT HAPPENED
[21:20] fireholly99: small world

Amazon yesterday recced that I read a book. It's ridiculously expensive so I just read the first three pages of it on that previewy thing.



...You know, I think my faith in Amazon's recs are renewed.

It's interesting the theory that action movies are a way of feeling homosexual desire on the part of the intended male viewer that's both non-threatening to the societal definition of masculinity, and subconscious - and I love that it identifies the male-male relationships as the point of the genre, which I think is correct, and I don't think it's out of a malicious or patriarchal idea to remove women from the equation. We need more films about female friendships in general; I don't think it's right to attack a single genre for ignoring women when ALL THE GENRES DO IT and the action movie genre is just more shameless about it - and therefore less subconsciously damaging - than most.





ALSO IF YOU ARE IN THE MGS FANDOM OR IF YOU LIKE MGS AND FANCY YOUR CHANCES, GO HERE. IT IS INTENTIONALLY RIDICULOUSLY HARD SO HAVE FAITH AND IF YOU GET THE HIGHEST SCORE AT THE END YOU WIN A PRIZE.

TODAY INSTEAD OF DOING ANYTHING CONSTRUCTIVE cockpuppet AND I BUILT A SNOWMAN, AND THEN WE WATCHED THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY AND LOLLED HEARTILY AT ANGEL-EYES' CREEPINESS AND THE PLOT-SENSING CANNONS

But seriously. That. Film. I need for it to have a fandom. Out of all the works of media I have ever liked, nothing has ever left me with such a desperate, hollow craving for MORE. MGS? If all of the fandom suddenly vanished off the face of the planet it'd kind of suck but I'd have enough awesomestupid in the games to last me for a long time loving it. FF7? I'm craving less. Doctor Who? I seriously have absolutely no need or want for anything besides the canon. But with GBU, I want so much more. More of all the characters. More characters. More backstabbing. More backstory. I have seen it about five times over the space of about six months and every single time it's like watching it the first time and every single time as the credits roll I just want to put it on back from the beginning so it never has to end, like listening to a song on loop. I want the sequel that will never be, I want the prequel that will never be, I want Blondie to put Tuco on his horse and travel off with him on awesome Wild West adventures. this is why i am waiting desperately for 2010 because then I can go back to Leedshome and READ THE GBU COMIC

Basically, I don't think I have ever craved fanfic to read as much as I have for that movie. And naturally, there is none for it. I love reading MGS and FF7 fic, it's completely amazing, but I like producing it more. But for this, I want to read something, and THERE. IS. NONE.

Weirdly enough I'm not craving long plotty fics like the one I'm writing. I'm craving PWP. Not necessarily porn, just - vignettes, anecdotes, drabbles, okay maybe porn a little, oneshots.

It kind of makes me realise just how much I take the ability to find fandom porn for granted. And it sucks that I've fallen so mad in lust for a fandom that doesn't exist.

OH WELL I'M GOING TO HAVE TO CHANGE THAT SOMEHOW WITH MY MASTER COWBOY MANIPULATOR PLAN THAT I HAVE COME UP WITH BUT NOT TOLD YOU BECAUSE THAT'S MY SECRET PLAN

Sorry about uncut Snake/Otacon MGS4-related drabblefreakout yesterday, it was 1AM and I didn't know what I was doing.



THINGS TO BE HAPPY ABOUT

1. Rage Against The Machine's Killing In The Name is the UK Christmas Number 1 instead of Whatsisface Xfactor McThing. Simon Cowell is hopping mad (always a good sign, even though I actually like Cowell), justice = prevailed. I love legal music downloading for making these things possible. (Also - I downloaded a copy myself. :) )

2. I finished writing that first chapter of that fic! I just need to go through it, fix the misspellings, rearrange some incoherent sentences, take out bits of random worldporn prattle that aren't relevant or interesting, and then go and write the other chapters the first one was 10000 words and nothing happened in it oh god ;___;

3. SNOW. I feel curiously vindicated about this because during last year's Snow Week, when the papers were going on about HOW BRITAIN HAS COME TOGETHER IN THE FANTASTICNESS OF SNOW ALL OVER THE COUNTRY ALL WEEEEK, Parenthome was the only bit in the country that got no snow at all. Not a sausage. It was like all your friends had been invited to a party and you hadn't.


EDIT: 4. I have a white hat which I, while putting on, pulled over my face. I'd done this and was just admiring myself in the mirror when my brother comes bounding down the stairs, screaming in his best Solid Snake voice, "GRAY FOX!!! YOU CAME BACK!!!" and gave me the most enthusiastic hug I've ever received in my life.

She'd proven her identity by sending a picture of him, naked.

It's not a very good photograph, in terms of either picture quality, artistry or resemblance to the subject. It's probably not even a photograph - it looks more like a still from a camera feed, melting shades of white and pink and red and black, timestamp in the corner. It's blurry and pixellated as hell, because back then that was the dose of Vaseline smeared on the world's lens, making the old look ten years younger - not like these days, when every crease and vein and fold of skin is in shocking HD and there's no way anyone can imagine it away.

But it's of him, and it shows him sitting on sitting on the side of a bed, or something - it's hard to make out, just a brushstroke on a black canvas behind him. His head is bowed slightly forwards, and his shoulders curve out behind his neck like a bull's. One hand is rested on his thigh, the other on his knee, holding the cigarette, mushrooming smoke to the sky in imitation of the worse kind of cancer stick. He is very, very naked and his thighs are wide apart.

After making sure everyone else is asleep, or occupied, or uncaring, Hal who's still Otacon to one person in the world forces himself to open the file. While over the years he'd kept his frustration at bay with a few incredibly strange images and ideas and people, even he wouldn't get turned on by a two-gens-old screenshot of his best friend with no clothes on. But there's something, about the way his stomach is curled backwards so that it catches the light, that makes him interested in the picture in a way beyond the hope that it represents. Hal finds that after these years he has trouble imagining Snake stripped bare of all his old trappings, planted in front of a camera, posing there clean, and naked, and new - sometime since, the old man's life had just turned into an endless forced repeat and now he brings all that weight and expectation everywhere with him. It's the worst nostalgia Hal's ever had, and he can't help himself from taking a backup.

He keeps it in his Printer Settings folder for two days, in an unmarked archive, disguised as a batch process, before he finally puts it in the Trash.

Poll #1501275 don't worry, all your responses are anonymous
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: None, participants: 47

During orgasm, I tend to find myself thinking 'I bet my facial expression looks SO STUPID RIGHT NOW' and sometimes it ruins it

If your list of reasons why I should see Avatar contains the phrase 'it's not a movie, it's ______', then you're not convincing me.

'It's not a movie, it's an experience!' = it's a pretty movie
'It's not a movie, it's childish wonder!' = it's a pretty movie
'It's not a movie, it's a technological experiment!' = it's a pretty movie

No matter how pretty the movie gets, IT'S STILL A MOVIE. THAT IS WHAT IT IS. I don't try and convince you lot to play MGS by saying 'IT'S NOT A GAME, IT'S A PSYCHIC INTERFACE WITH THE EXPERIENCER THROUGH THE MEDIUM OF CONTROLLERHOOD' or 'IT'S NOT A GAME, IT'S AN OTHERWORLDLY EXPERIENCE OF ANOTHER LIFE' or 'IT'S NOT A GAME, IT'S A PICTURE OF A PIPE' or whatever. MGS's mastery lies in that it is a game which exploits its gameyness to underscore and enhance the narrative and atmosphere. Saying 'it's not a game' is an insult to everything it stands for. And I feel the same with Avatar. If it's truly trying to do something new and wonderful as a movie, CALL IT A MOVIE. And say WHY what it does MAKES IT A BETTER MOVIE.

chaos_r, I respect your right to have subversive opinions of the duty an audience pays to a creator and I agree with you to a point, really, I do. But I still have the right to say 'shitluxliekitsux, not interested'. I've been burned by pretty!movies with massive plotfail before, hello Advent Children.

So. THOSE WHO HAVE SEEN AVATAR, PLEASE CONVINCE ME THAT IT'S A GOOD MOVIE.

Tell me what it has going for it - not as an experience or a childish wonder or as a technical experiment, but as the movie that it is. As a combination of story, characters and picture. If it's a highly visual film (which it is), tell me why those visuals are so important, why they work with the story, what about them is special other than that 'they're pretty'.

Please?

...And just how bad IS the racefail?




EDIT: my mother got the New Moon calendar. She showed me all the pages. It's quite nicely made and printed, big production stills, fanservice for both Team Edward and Team Jacob, and so on. I just couldn't get over the irony - it's a New Moon thing which has MONTHS PRINTED ON THEIR OWN ON THEIR OWN PAGES

Please send help, I am considering changing the title of my Secret Santa fic from 'Alaska' to 'Inglourious Zanzibarsterds'.

I'm not totally sold on Big Boss's voice, but considering they're going to be going a Snakeier direction with BB in this one I kind of like it. I don't think it's as EPICALLY HORRIBLE as everyone else is saying even though I'm Team Doyle. Dayter's actual performance and line delivery is excellent, especially since I never felt like he really grasped BB the way he grasped Snake.

I'm not totally sold on Miller's voice. I like Atkin Downes as a voice actor, but I just cannot get over how much like Genesis he sounds. And considering this is the VA who played Genesis, and Miller is later impersonated by the guy who basically is the MGS world's Genesis (posing, crushing apples, monologuing, crazy, envy, SYMBOLISMMMM, retcons, decaying on a cellular level, homoerotic obsession for the world's greatest soldier, etc.) he could STAND TO HAM IT UP A LITTLE MORE. Cam Clarke is my Miller and I can't hear Atkin Downes talking about gameplay ergonomics in a way that I'm going to listen to for hours. But, hey, this Miller is young.

Paz sounds great but Tara Strong is always amazing, I <3 her so much.

And I can't work out if the guy playing Galvez is a bad actor or if Galvez is a bad actor, so I'm withholding my judgement here.

RANDOM SQUEALING UPDATE;: MY DAD RANDOMLY BROUGHT ME A CD BY SOME ARGENTINIAN GROUP AND IT'S COMPLETELY AMAZING, IT SOUNDS A BIT LIKE DANNY ELFMAN TRYING TO SCORE METAL GEAR AC!D 2 WITH A BUNCH OF MARIARCHIS

OTHER STUFF UPDATE: I'm reading a book about a bunch of secret American government-made clones of the same guy who have to join together to kill the guy they were originally cloned from who is trying to start nuclear war. One of the clones is gay; he's a Marine for whom the story constantly stops to talk about how beautiful his muscley body is, and it's making me ship clonecest harder than I thought I knew how. I'm proud to report he's only my second favourite. My favourite clone so far is the neurotic, mouthy criminal psychologist. But I'm also massively moe all over the adorably weepy priest who has nightmares about not having a soul because he's a clone.

MOVIES UPDATE: Also, I watched Trading Places. It's a really good film and surprisingly intelligent for an Eighties class-based screwball comedy, and all three main characters are wonderful (my favourite was Jamie lee Curtis') and I found the romance in it was actually believable and adorable rather than annoying (what I loved about Jamie Lee Curtis's character was that SHE was just as much a quirky caricature as the men, and a lot of comedies forget that women can be funny characters as well). BUT. I did not like the train subplot or how the plot with the security guard was handled - it felt like it belonged in a totally different movie. I also didn't enjoy the increasingly creepy racial symbolism of that subplot (which ended up with one character in blackface and another character dressed up as a gorilla being shipped 'back to Africa for a scientific experiment' when a 'scientific experiment' by a bunch of white people was what got the (black) main character into his situation - I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT IT MEANS AND I'M PROBABLY OVERTHINKING IT MASSIVELY BUT IT MADE ME TREMENDOUSLY UNCOMFORTABLE.)

RANDOM FANDOM THOUGHT UPDATE: In The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, how did Tuco know who Angel-Eyes was when he recognised him in the prison camp? They'd never met, although Angel-Eyes was watching him and Blondie and had the scam figured out by the second hanging scene. And Angel-Eyes isn't really a bounty hunter in the same way Blondie says he is; he's a hitman, so he's not someone Tuco would specifically have to know about to AVOID. It's the little plotholes like that which make me realise just how badly the movie was eviscerated. Is there a translation of the original script available anywhere?

CHRISTMAS FIC WRITING PROCESS UPDATE It's not as good this time around.

GAY COWBOY FIC PROCESS UPDATE So this OFC I created to be basically a plot device has decided she wants to be a woman in a Western who isn't a sexy victim of nasty men, a prostitute or a genderless vigilante, and she's also decided she wants to be manipulating everything from behind the scenes. I JUST WANTED TO WRITE SIX THOUSAND WORDS OF A SIMPLE PLOT BEING RESOLVED WITH BONDAGE, WHAT