I haz a meme. kelemvor givez it me. And he gave me age 17. TEENAGE ANGST GO!

I was dating:
Expect this to be complicated; I was seventeen. Let's see. For most of it, I was dating Gopi Flaherty, who was a year above me in school and ended up going to college in Pennsylvania while I was doing my last year of A-levels. There was a lot of off-again, on-again, both during the long-distance phase and not. But at least he was a waaaaay better kisser than my age-16 boyfriend...

I wanted to be:
Ah, that was when the big sea change happened. For most of my life prior to that, I wanted to be a veterinarian - or, more specifically, a marine zoologist as decided when I was about ten. Age seventeen was around when I was slogging desperately through a Chemistry A-level and a Maths AS-level that I could not get to grips with at all and I realised that I was not really cut out for this 'science' thing. Of course, that was also around the time I started writing anything other than diary entries. I don't even remember why I started, though I'd been writing things for as long as I can remember. I think my mother still has my first clumsily-written stories and a few copies of the newspaper I wrote, illustrated and sold around her office when I was little. Anyway, that was the point at which I decided that I wanted to be a writer. Thankfully, when I put my mind to it, I took to typing a lot better than I did to maths.

In terms of anything other than future plans, I wanted to be away most of all. That was the year I begged my mother to let me be a boarding student at the school I was in at the time, citing 'I'll be able to focus on my studies better' as a reason. Really, I just couldn't take ... well, her and David, mostly. Having every aspect of my life controlled (right down to diet and exercise regime, thank you; 45 minutes on the exercise bike every day, gods-awful microwave diet meals for dinner, and let's not talk about the time I found my mother reading my diary and having her tell me that I didn't have the right to think that way about her...) got really old, really fast.

My best friend:
Ah, the dream team. The concept of a singular best friend was pretty freakin' difficult once I moved to the UK the year previous. Mostly I was hanging around with Louise Baxter, Bryony Watson and Finn Pollard at the time. I guess at the end of the day, Louise was the best friend, if I had to choose. If there's a female equivalent of the term 'epic bromance' ... that was us.

I lived:
In Letchworth, Hertfordshire. Specifically, in a not-too-bad room in the house owned by my mother and now-stepfather. Though again, if I could have lived at my school, I would have leapt at the opportunity. At least by then I'd been allowed to redecorate the horrid place; when I moved in, it was peach carpet and this hideous wallpaper. The peach carpet stayed but I got to paint the walls, at least. The furniture was cheap crap and I had little privacy, but it was a place to lay my head, anyway. I was not sorry to leave.

So ... who wants in on this meme-thing?

Magically meme-licious for just before bed:

Give me three fictional characters, and I'll respond with shag/marry/push off a cliff.

In other news, actually been having fun with another Horde alt, this time Troll. *shrug* I guess I see why so many people prefer playing Horde. The start-up stories seem to be way better. I have no idea why. Though I found that my fondness for the Trolls means that starting up an Orc is a little difficult. Trolls? Not so hot on Hellscream. Orcs? Really cool on Hellscream. Fuck, I have no the hell idea. I honestly don't remember how the other races feel about their Warchief but I do vaguely recall that the Goblins mainly like the Orcs because ... well, hell, the Humans on the Alliance side blew them out of the water and the Orcs were kind of nice to them. Tauren are having their own shit going on, as are the Forsaken and the Belfs. I didn't pay much attention to Alliance politics; there wasn't a whole lot of connection between the races, really. Meh. I should probably start again, actually paying attention to the starting points this time. And maybe get some variation in my classes, 'cos right now it's Shaman, Shaman, Shaman, Hunter, Shaman... I tried Priest but that got old. Fast.

In other news, I gave up and watched A Game of Thrones. I liked some bits. The opening sequence is cool. The soundtrack is awesome. I love playing "I've Seen This Face Before". I do, however, have some problems with it. I like it a lot better when I can divorce it from the book. (And I still don't see the Theon/Jon/Robb OT3, guys; sorry.) I'd rant, but it's too late in the evening and it's work tomorrow. Woo.

So I'm going to try this meme that mitchy came up with. 30 days of movies. I have a bad track record with these but ... well, you never know.

( 30 Days of Movie )

1. Favourite movie (or Top 5 Faves, Top 10 Faves, Top Oops I Got Carried Away)?

Yeeeeeeeeeah. This one's always a tricky one because so much is dependent on genre. I think Pump Up the Volume probably wins for sheer inspirational quality, though. It illustrates perfectly the teenage need to talk and break boundaries that has led to the blog generation. A lot of people take it for granted, really - the whole thing where they can say whatever they want to say on a public forum and not have anyone but a bunch of trolls come down on them. Back in the day, there was no forum like that and I imagine a lot of people didn't feel listened to at all.

Plus, some of the lines are just plain amazing.

In other news, back from Brighton and sometimes I just gotta wonder about my mother. I love her dearly, don't get me wrong, but ... well, I wonder, is all. I mean, she has some serious hypocrisy issues sometimes. But we had a good time notwithstanding. There was shopping and nice food and chatting and now I'm just kinda tired. Not in a bad way, mind.

Some of the shopping was books. I finally picked up a copy of Cory Doctorow's Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. Which was awesome, by the way - I recommend it. Though our trip to the Brighton Waterstone's lacked the awesome I found in a London branch of same, wherein I found a couple of copies of Mur Lafferty's Playing for Keeps. I also picked up a copy of Feed, by Mira Grant. One of you charming lot blogged about it and piqued my curiosity, and I am enjoying it immensely. I also see that it appears to be a series or at least a trilogy, with a second book coming out in May next year. We'll have to see whether I devour Feed (no pun intended) and wail that I have to wait too long for the next one.

As to my own writings ... I got hit by inspiration on Friday afternoon, when I was entirely unable to work on it. I've jotted down the basic premise (which kicks the arse of the last one, in my view, particularly in terms of overarcing plot - really the idea I had for the third book is better sub-plot somewhere else) and a few bits of dialogue that need cleaning up but I wanted to start it and longhand was all I had. Mum said something about a laptop for Christmas - one of the tiny ones, mayhap - so that's all good. She also said something about helping out with deposit and first month's rent on a flat, once I've got some money behind me to actually move. This is thrilling!

So yeah, there's been a lot going on and I'm sorry I've had radio silence. This shall be remedied. There are rants to be had!

I can't answer this one. I can't. I have never been obsessed with a show. Not really, deep-down, 'cannot miss it or I will die' obsessed. So ... sorry; this entry is going to be short. I mean, there's never really been an "I love this show and want its babies" show. I reserve that for book series, I guess?

HR Lady is supposed to ring me tomorrow to sort out my CRB checks and everything. Fingers crossed!

Okay, this one is allllllll kinds of tricky. When I think "OMGWTF?!?", I think the sort of thing that gets the reaction that, say, Lost did, or The Sopranos, or that last thing with Supernatural. The ones that get wank, I basically mean. Most of my shows? They don't go out that way. ...Well, mostly.

I'm also wondering if I can count Neon Genesis Evangelion as 'TV', but that kind of comes under the heading of 'Mini-series, a couple of movies and guaranteed 100% mindfuck'. Soooooooo ... not so much TV, then. Then again, that's anime all over - or at least, the sort I generally watch. Lain and Eva and Boogiepop Phantom and suchlike ... dude, that's just all over OMGWTF. But it's mostly awesome OMGWTF, so it can be forgiven. Encouraged, even.

So for the sort of OMGWTF we're talking about here, it's a tie. Both by the same man, more or less. Two words; Toclafane and Abbadon. Yep, for me, crappy ending = a tie between Torchwood S1 season finale and Doctor Who S3 season finale.

I'm never entirely sure what happens when Davies writes the Master. There are moments where Simms-as-Master have such gravitas and terror and feeling and awesome. And then there are the atrocious puns and the gurning fits and I thought that Davies was supposed to admire the Master! So why does he reduce him to puns about the Master Race or that horrible bit of business with the journalist screaming behind the door? It was supposed to be a horrible scene! But it was "close door - silence. Open door - screaming. Close door - silence descends. Open door - still screaming. Close door - silence descends again" and it was appalling! The plot itself promised great things but eventually degenerated to Doctor Messiah Complex and dear gods what ham-handed scripting.

Meanwhile, we have the finale of Torchwood S1. We have the thing coming from the darkness - coming for Jack. It had such potential. It could have been something subtle and horrific and shudder-worthy. What it was, in the end, was bad CGI. Bilys was awesome. Abbadon ... less awesome by a very long way. It was a shrieking disappointment and gyeh.

I can't decide between the two as my worst foam-at-the-mouth about a season finale. So ... I won't try. I have other things to natter about anyway. Namely ... JOB! *ahem* Seriously, I got two phone calls - one from the office manager, one from the HR department over at Hospital - saying that pending references and CRB check, the job is miiiiiiiiiiiine! No having to compete with someone else for a consultant's affections when I don't even know the criteria! Just "We will clear your paperwork and then you start work, okay?" I don't know how long the CRB check is going to take or how long it'll take my references to come through but it can't possibly be that long, right? Well, I'll probably stress like crazy until my name's on a contract (I honestly don't know what could go wrong at this point but I don't want to tempt fate by relaxing too soon, y'know?) but I'm tentatively going YAY!!!!!!! a lot.

Yeah ... that one's a pretty big question for someone who's still feeling the tail-end of migraine from hell. A lot of it depends on mood, of course, and even more on context and in-scene action.

Y'know what? Because I'm a little behind schedule, I'll go for, not the classics, but something that has existed in one form or another for ages:

"Hello. I'm the Doctor. Basically ... run."

It'll do. I mean, given it was coming out of the mouth of a Doctor that looks like what I might call Fetus!Registrar...

Okay, so the reason this didn't get posted yesterday was because mitchy's computer came down with a bad case of the Shutdown Blues. Basically just switched off and wouldn't switch back on again. We cleaned it out, we tightened connection cables ... nada. So I was offline for the forseeable future. The computer seems to be working for the moment but I am still watching it with a wary eye.

Tricky, tricky question. Again, I haven't been back into watching TV for long; there was a pretty huge gap in which I wasn't watching TV at all. I don't actually remember a lot of series finales from when I was a kid, and now? Well, either I'm lucky enough to be a fan of shows that are still going, and thus haven't had a real series finale yet, or I'm unfortunate enough to be a fan of a show that either a) ended before its time or b) went on a couple of seasons too long. So I ask myself whether I can count season finales as well as series finales ... and then decide that pulling that shit is just going to make the choice a lot harder. Broader scope, you know? Too many possibilities. So I'll stick with genuine, bona fide, 'I absolutely know it was the last episode' series finale.

And I'm going to go with Angel. But I'm not going for it because it was particularly good television, exactly. I'm going with that that particular series finale because it was good for what it was. And 'what it was' was a brilliant piece of last-minute television to tie up loose ends.

I'm the sort of Whedon fan who, while not actively loathing S6 and S7 of Buffy, thought that the series would have been much better had it ended with "The Gift". In my view, Whedon has what Stephen King refers to as 'diarrhoea of the word processor'. He came up with a brilliantly satisfying point of narrative closure with "The Gift" (S5 finale, for those not in the know) and ... sure, how he progressed from there started pretty cool but ended up as the start of a horribly preachy season of television. Not that it didn't have moments ("I'd like to test that theory" being the main one), but ... yeah, spoiled the shiny narrative closure. I wasn't a fan. Joss Whedon needs to learn when to call it quits.

In the case of Angel, Fox made that decision for him. He didn't have a lot of time to come up with an ending, as Fox told him that he had three episodes to wrap it up. For a last-minute finale, it was damn good, in my view. And as last lines go, "Personally? I kind of want to slay the dragon. ...Let's go to work" is pretty awesome, I feel.

(I am ignoring the comic. I refuse to pay attention to 'After the End'. You can't make me.)

Tomorrow? 'Most Annoying Character'. Ooooooooooooh that's going to take some thought.

So in other news, I had a job interview today. Getting there was relatively easy (train to Fins Park, bus to Hackney), but getting around the hospital ... I had main reception send me to Outpatients. I had Outpatients send me to a nurse's station. I had a nurse from said nurse's station send me to an outpatient clinic upstairs in another building. I had a secretary from that clinic send me back downstairs and to an entirely different building - again. And finally, when the department I was supposed to find (Rehabilitative Neurology, in point of fact - counterintuitive when you're interviewing for gastro-enterology, but they were probably short on interview space up in gastro) turned out to be poorly marked and not actually on the site map, it was only a lovely porter pointing me in the right direction that saved me from throwing something at a wall. From five minutes early, I ended up ten minutes late. Lucky me, the interviewers were running late themselves. My actual interview came an hour after I finally arrived at the unit, and I don't think they even realised I ran late. This is why I bring a book to these things. On the whole, leaving aside the issues with being pointed hither, thither and yon around the hospital, I think the interview went well, and I hope to hear from them soon. *crosses fingers*

...*incoherent sputtering*

See, my problem isn't exactly having a hard time picking a favourite. My problem is that I have a hard time actually remembering any. The kissing is not the part that sticks in the mind for me, when I'm watching any given show. And if it doesn't stick, I can't really remember it to tag it as 'favourite' in the confines of my head, right?

So thank the gods for Buffy, which contains most of the memorable kisses. No, it's not the Once More With Feeling thing. No, it's nothing with Angel. In fact, it doesn't really involve Buffy at all. The kiss that really sticks with me is the Willow/Tara kiss at the end of the Season 6 episode 'Entropy'. Also, to be perfectly honest, it's as much because of the pre-kiss dialogue as anything else. So Willow and Tara have been broken up for awhile because of that hackneyed, unutterably annoying "magic = drugs" thing (which, don't get me started) but they'd been hanging out and having coffee and flirting at each other and all of a sudden, Tara turns up in Willow's room, and thus there is dialogue:

Tara: There's just so much to work through. Trust has to be built again on both sides. You have to learn if - if we're even the same people we were. If you can fit in each others lives. It's a long and important process, and can we just skip it? C-Can you just be kissing me now?

It's not the kiss itself, though that is awesome and projects that sense that they're both ferociously desperate to be kissing and trying to be gentle and delicate because they're afraid the other's going to disappear if they mmake one wrong move. It's the acting the two do in that moment before the kiss that always gets me. The look on Tara's face, like she's just about to cry, coupled with the little break in her voice in the last two syllables, followed by how Willow's face lights up and then, boom - there is the kissing. And that, to me, is an awesome kiss.

Tomorrow: 'Favourite Ship'. That's going to be relatively easy. I don't pay much attention to the shipping thing either, but at least I can remember the canon pairings better than I can the kissing. And I don't ship out of canon. *ponders Vaughn Rice/Angie March* ...Okay, I don't ship out of canon when the possibility has been utterly shut down, anyway.

I've given this one a fair bit of thought, as mitchy brought it up last night and it caused a bit of debate. To be fair, I don't watch a lot of title sequences because I watch a lot of my shows on DVD and can easily skip them. Being able to skip the viewing of the same title sequence once every forty minutes or so when one's mainlining a TV show is important to one's sanity.

I admit to adoring the Doctor Who title sequence, but I also admit that a) I mostly had the love for the S1-S4 version (I'm a little 'meh' about the current season's) and b) it's mostly down to the music. I can't really pick a favourite title sequence based solely on the music. If I was simply going for music and artistry, I'd probably pick Carnivale's entry sequence, based on the fact that while it doesn't necessarily give you much of a clue as to what the show's about, it's very good at giving you the mood of the piece. The pictures set a timeline while the audio gives an impression of ominousness.

Objectively speaking, though, the best title sequence I've ever seen is the one on Burn Notice. Not only does it manage to give every bit of background on the show that you could ever need without being overly wordy, not only does it introduce the main characters in a fairly unobtrusive way, but it also fits in with the tone of the show so well that it doesn't necessarily stand out as a 'title sequence'. Nice and unobtrusive, yet still serving the function of a title sequence, and then some. That makes it more watchable than the average title sequence to me. And in the interest of fairness, those criteria put Farscape as a close second for me; Burn Notice only wins by virtue of being a little better at character introduction. I like the Farscape title theme music very much.

Yeaaaaaaaah, it's got to be Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I shouldn't really feel guilty about liking this particular show; it's the lead character I have issues with. The more I watch this show the more I think it ought to be renamed "Psychological Problems: The Series (now with vampires)". It's got its seriously good moments, but mostly it's there for the one-liners and the pretty. I admit to it being a guilty pleasure because it's really such fluff, at the end of the day. It pretends at moral conundrums that it never entirely delivers and peppers it all with the one-liners and the pretty, and calls it ground-breaking television. I don't see the feminism that a lot of people laud the show for, for a start. Buffy herself strikes me as whiny and irritating and, as with most Whedon shows, I watch it for the supporting characters, who have far more interesting character arcs than the broody, morally overweighted, romantically and emotionally crippled leads.

I'm just sayin'.