I just completed a flist-trim... maybe because it was so hot today? I don't know. I don't often do them, but sometimes enough time passes that I realize, oh, I've had this [perfectly nice] person friended for years, but I can't remember the last time we interacted at all - or we've just drifted and don't really connect any more. There aren't any hard feelings on my end at all, but every so often I find myself with a too-long friends list, and very little personal connection. It's largely my fault, because I'm a really bad commenter, but after five years here, my flist has evolved enough times that I'm used to the process. Not to gaze too long at my LJ-navel. Thought I'd leave a heads up!

Emergency Icon Post.

( the new still )

Here's why I'm annoyed about the set visit report stuff.

( The following contains spoilers - just from the set visits - and systematic speculation. If either bothers you, don't click! )

Two things led to my idea for this post.

1) There has been more and more XF fic written on LJ in the past few months, what with the movie coming out, and that's exciting!

2) It's not easy to find. There isn't an active, comprehensive XF fic community on LJ, and the only way you can really know that it's there is if you know people, or know people who know people. That makes it harder to get momentum, and authors get less feedback, and readers don't know what's out there, resulting in LESS FIC. Less fic is no good. We want MORE.

So, I thought I'd do a modest survey of the XF fic currently¹ being written on LJ. ( cut for the list )

Alright, you people on my XF filter who haven't seen the WonderCon explosion yet -- I AM HERE TO GUIDE YOU.

1. The whole thing on video. The link-picking incident was off-camera in the big file, so here is a clip!

2. THE TEASER. (aaand, oops, the YouTube file is gone, so I better link you to the mirror file from Leelee)

3. Backstage VIDEO interviews with Chris, Frank, David, and Gillian:
(all links are to xfiles entries, not the source links)
- IESB.com
- About.com
- TV.com
- IGN.com (plus screencaps)

4. Transcribed/written interviews:
- Joint interview with David and Gillian
- An interview with Frank Spotnitz and Chris Carter, wherein it is said that the movie is going to be "emotional, romantic."
- Another David/Gillian joint interview - Gillian talks about watching an MSR video on YouTube (RUN!)
- And another joint interview with some repeats but also a good deal of new material.

5. Pictures: An awesome hi-res collection. professional shots - Wireimage Hi-Res. Pictures and video from a blogger. Lots of others scattered everywhere! And leucocrystal will dump her awesome collection on us soon! ETA: Here they are!

6. For fun fan reactions, just go have fun with all the posts on xfiles. It's a pretty complete list of anything you might want to look at. I didn't sleep for two nights.

Fandom hasn't been this fun in yeeeeears!

Okay, are you ready for the NEXT Vancouver picspam? That's right, less than a week after finishing that one, we we on another, this time with marikology, who came to stay with us from Wednesday to Sunday. It was really fun to have her here, and talk XF together! We even showed her around Bellingham, hee, and then headed up over the border on Friday morning.

I forgot to say that on the last trip, as on this one, we drove past the motel they shot in during Aubrey, notable only because it has a big TEEPEE out in front. What? Teepees? The Indians here didn't even LIVE in teepees!

In other unpictured locations, once upon a time Courtney and I also found the other house from Aubrey, the one that belongs to the old lady, because we got it mixed up with this one (and we didn't know it was the same as in Home.)

I apologized last time for the crappy screencaps I have to link to to show you things, but this time I've decided to blame leucocrystal, who is making a cap site that will be awesome and show all the right things, but IT IS NOT UP YET. Go and poke her some! (Just kidding. She's working on it!)

( Friday: )


( Saturday: )

First off, I'm sorry for the lack of commentary! I'm pretty tired, but I wanna get this posted because I'm working tomorrow. Just because, I've posted the most recent pictures AND the pictures from when Courtney and I went the first time - on our trips in Feb 05, Feb 06, Jan 07, or July 07. It makes me nostalgic! I can't believe it's been almost three years since our first time, though. Yeesh!

( Saturday and Sunday - XF locations picspam )

AND THAT'S IT. Are you impressed? I am impressed - but tired. Time for bed!

Very briefly because I need to get to bed!

On Thursday Courtney and I met up with all_shine_on and leucocrystal (they are awesome!), and we bashed around the GVRD for the day, hitting up Riverview Hospital (which Court and I'd been to before), where they filmed exteriors for "Pilot" and interiors for all KINDS of hospital/prison/court/etc scenes), the quarry-they-painted-red from "Anasazi" (sorry, no pictures! we didn't get close enough because they were working), Simon Fraser University, where Mulder met with Deep Throat (and all_shine_on went to school!) as well as

Buntzen Lake, aka Lake Okobogee and that lake in "Quagmire"


and the bridge from "End Game," although sadly they've redone it!


Sorry for the screencaps - the ones online don't have the right shots, and I don't have time to cap my own, at the moment!

Tomorrow we're leaving for another hunt, and we come back on Sunday. Wish us luck at the border! It's a weekend, so the traffic might be terrible.

Sometimes XF fandom makes me sad. Consider: I'm on my laptop at 2:00 am, reading a moody little piece of fic that was written ten and a half years ago. It takes place in a roadside diner, one of my favorite crack!fic genres. The person who wrote it is a long way away - two or three new fandoms away, actually, but I skim around to her LJ sometimes and check in, just to see what's up. There's a good dozen or so of them on here, mostly Scullyficcers, who wrote lots of my favorite fic a long time ago, and are still around in other fandoms. I don't know them personally, for the most part, and that's the way I prefer it.

I discovered The X-Files in the summer of 2003, in between my freshman and sophomore years of high school, during the week I turned 15, a few months before my mom died. Actually, Courtney found it. She watched a few and I ignored her, but at night she came into my room at around 1:00 and told me she'd just watched this episode about the man hearing voices and the woman finding a space ship on the beach - and that earlier in the day she'd watched this one where there was something dramatic happening on a bridge, and the woman and man had been talking, because there was some deal with his sister and the woman was reassuring him - and she was hooked. The next day so was I. There were TNT reruns twice a day back then, rerunning different strings, so the first episodes I saw were The Calusari in the afternoon, and later that night, Amor Fati. I think that illustrates pretty well how I came into XF - completely upside down and out of order.

At the beginning I told Courtney I wasn't going to "do" XF online, because I knew there had been other fans for a long time, and it felt like digging through their garbage - or their underwear drawer; it felt presumptuous. But eventually there was no choice, and that is more or less exactly what I've been doing for the past four and a half years - digging through USENET discussions, OBSSE newsletters, and lots and lots and lots of fic. I read it once and then I read it again, because I forgot. I read it on Gossamer, I read it on Geocities, I read it on personal sites, I read it on the Internet Wayback Machine archive, I read it in neat columns of text format, I read it in html with badly photo-shopped dustjackets at the top of the page, and I even read a little of it on LJ. Reams and reams of it. I'd had fandoms before (Court and I just called them "obsessions"), but books are different and all of my movie/TV obsessions had never lasted longer than a month, at most. XF has lasted four and a half years, and it's not going anywhere yet - it is a unique love affair for a lot of reasons, but I won't go into all of that. Anyway, it's well known to most of us that it's a difficult show and a difficult fandom to measure up to. It wasn't my "first love" - it was like the crown of all previous loves.

Meanwhile the only fandom I had (or wanted) myself was Courtney and a handful of friends on LJ. There are times when I am very nostalgic for the golden years - that time when all the old BNFs and fic-writers had their discussion circles, and episodes actually AIRED, and everything perched precariously on Chris Carter's shoulders! But then I think about that for two more seconds and became mostly relieved that I missed it. I like my ghost ship well enough the way it is.

But still, some nights I surface and realize I've just gotten upset about meta written five or seven years ago, and I'm frequently struck by the date stamps on the top of all of this fic. It's sad to inhabit something and run up against this wall again and again: because most of the people I share this world with have left a long time ago, and if they haven't forgotten it, time and distance has rendered it a bittersweet nostalgia at best, an indifferent memory at worst.

I've been making this mix for a long time, and now seemed like a good time to post it!

It's an X-Files, MSR mix set after the series ended. It's half road-trip and half love song, with appropriate angst and weariness. There's nothing more X-Files-y than Mulder and Scully wandering around the country, waiting for the end of the world. So I made a mix!



( download and lyrics )

And after that terribly good news - terribly bad news.

Fox, Barr and McG Adapting Spaced
Source: The Hollywood Reporter
October 30, 2007

Fox is teaming with writer Adam Barr and producer McG for "Spaced," a comedy project based on the Channel 4 series of the same name from Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz masterminds Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Fox has handed out a put pilot commitment to the single-camera "Spaced," which hails from Warner Bros. TV, McG's WBTV-based Wonderland Sound and Vision and Granada America, which owns the format.

The project revolves around two strangers who pose as a married couple in order to rent an apartment.

Barr ("Will & Grace") is writing the script, which garnered interest from several networks. He is executive producing with Wonderland's McG and Peter Johnson and Granada's Robert Green.

The original series, which ran on Channel 4 for two seasons, was written by Pegg and Jessica Hynes who starred as the fake couple, and was directed by Wright. It earned two BAFTA nominations for best comedy series and an International Emmy nomination.

They didn't.

"No One Would Riot For Less," by Bright Eyes (lyrics)
An X-Files fanvid about: Angst, War, Death, Trauma, Failure, Fear, Doom, Darkness, Hope, Trust, Partnership, aaaand Love.

+ DOWNLOAD (39 MB .wmv)
[re-uploaded 4/2/08]

I have also put it on YouTube, just because most XF vids end up there anyway, and this is an "official" version. The quality is so crappy, though, it makes my little vidding heart want to cry.

I started on this video sometime in late July. The pacing is slow and a little unusual, I think, and I tried to match the pacing of the clips to the music as closely as possible -- you'll have to be the judge of whether it's successful or not! It's my first vid, so I learned along the way - I had the theme and the "feel" and tone of it in mind from the beginning, but hardly did any planning regarding scenes or clips. I had a heck of a time trying to get the last minute or so of the song; and all the tiny little edits for timing just about did me in. Ah, well. I'm mostly satisfied.


"To me that's always been the message -- not fighting the good fight, which is kind of sentimental and cliche, but fighting the... fighting the, uh, the doomed fight."
- David Duchovny

I talked stellar_dust's ear off about Spaced earlier tonight, so as penance I decided to stop surfing around and doing nothing and instead post those icons I've been promising.

I tried as best I could to make sure the color and resolution on these icons was good enough - by and large there aren't high quality images available on the internet for Spaced, and my own caps from .avi were barely serviceable. Anyway! I'm happy with most of them.

I haven't made XF icons in *so long* and I only have a handful to post this time. As I was saying to foxestacado the other day, I feel like other people on LJ are doing it so well, I don't have anything to add! But I have a small new batch nonetheless.

+ 64 "Spaced"
+ 20 "Spaced" cast/crew
+ 6 "X-Files"


( 90 frickin' icons under the cut )

If, a week or so ago, I gave you Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy in icons, this time I present: Protestantism. There aren't as many, unfortunately, because isn't quite as much material to work with. (Blame Zwingli.)


( 15 icons )

Okay! Icons and religious art!

I apologize that I can't credit most of the original artists - I saved most of these pictures several months ago, and only intended them for personal use. I do know that a couple of them came from this guy on Flickr.

Some of the images used are from real icons, both historical and contemporary; some are artistic pieces created in imitation of, but outside of the tradition of, Eastern iconography. By mixing them, I don't mean to denigrate the tradition of icon writing, or the icons themselves, in any way. Some of the Old Testament figures, venerated in the Eastern Church, are not a part of the Western canon.

I went a little crazy about labeling them: if you hover your cursor over the icon, you will get a name and maybe a description. IT TOOK ME FOREVER.



( 75 icons of Christ and the saints )

Lots of icons I made this summer but never posted!


+ 38 X-Files
+ 11 SVU

( cut! )

I caved and made two fanmixes! Enter at your own risk.

Crises during the making of:
1. Every song ever written reminds me SOMEHOW of The X-Files, but how do I choose ones that will actually make some kind of demented sense to normal people?
2. Is there any way I can sneak in Celine Dion without looking like a loser? ... No. But I'm doing it anyway.
3. What's the difference between a song for the XF mix and a song for the MSR mix? NOT MUCH.
4. Damn, I can't include "Walking After You," I know you all already have it.
5. I actually hate West Side Story and "Somewhere," but I LOVE Phil Collins and this version. Therefore it is included.

( The X-Files Mix )


( The Mulder/Scully Mix )