The Turtle Jourtle

I find myself enjoying this photo manipulation tonight. It is the last MFU manip I ever made (and the only one I made outside of the intense depressive episode during which I created the others). I never did get around to posting it on AO3, partly because I liked having my farewell to Robert Vaughn as the last item in that album. I did post it on DeviantArt, though. Here's the copy I wrote at that time:

"In dreams, impressions and memories run together to create new worlds that are nevertheless familiar. Illya is dreaming of his childhood as seen through that kaleidoscope."
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Some of the photo manipulations I made during 2016 impress me quite favorably now. I made some new manips earlier this month for the Professionals seasonal card exchange, and I found that I had forgotten many of the techniques I learned then. I also found that I did not have the seemingly infinite patience that I had during that spurt of single-minded productivity. (Not that I didn't spend hours on each of the Pros manips during which I could have been making a start on Moby Dick.)

I got a Pros seasonal card today, all the way from the UK. Very exciting!
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Unfortunately, I can't let its sender know it arrived because there is no LJ handle on it. (At least, none that I can read.) Thank you, though, whoever you are. I have propped it up on my nightstand so that perhaps I will have Pros-y dreams. So far I have only had a dream about a creepy homicidal doll, though. Oh well.

(I've blurred out the signature, which appeared below the word "and." Also, in case anyone's curious, the back of the card really is browner than the front. That's not an artifact of the photos.)

Well. Yesterday I began work on my Pros fandom seasonal cards. As part of that project, I tried to install a new program to make it easier to export video frames. Hours later, after a cascade of technical issues and user errors, I had thoroughly borked my computer, and I will now have to reinstall the operating system completely. So be careful, everybody. No running by the pool, don't cut toward yourself, always hold the handrail, and in the name of all beloved tropes, don’t do anything silly whilst working on your fannish holiday projects.

There were some problems with the reposts to my journal of my Professionals vids, so I'm indexing them in this post. In reverse chronological order, they are:

"Cover Me"

"Keep Me From Blowing Away"

"Just a Little Light"

"Who'll Stop the Rain"

"We Are the Champions"

"Life During Wartime"

"You Baby"

"Behind Blue Eyes"

Enjoy.

A bit of prattle from an obscure corner of the Internet:

Olly says, "In Act One, our heroes can't stand each other."

Olly asks, "Will they have a fistfight and then become fast friends, or will they slowly realize their attraction to each other and live happily ever after? What genre is this?"

Olly says, "Well, this is slash fiction based on a macho action show. So maybe they will have a fistfight, become fast friends, then slowly realize their attraction to each other and live happily ever after."

Some thoughts of Bodie's during the sleeping bag scene in Mixed Doubles.

Faith and Reasons

"No, you gotta have another reason. You gotta have a better reason than that."

He can't believe I'm that mercenary. Of course he can't.

He might be right. Maybe I like wearing a white hat—well, a light grey hat, anyway. Maybe I like it better than the money, even. I could tell Ray I do—he'd like that—but I won't, because what he's wrong about is that it changes anything.

He ought to know better, by now. After years of last week's terrorists blurring into this week's mobsters, until all you can remember is which direction they pointed their guns, he ought to know. It's actions that touch the world, that send out consequences like ripples on water. Motives never come close.

You can't explain that to Doyle, though. He may not read the lesson like Cowley does, but he's a believer, too, in the ways that matter. He thinks someone out there's keeping score, awarding points for noble intentions. He thinks that if I shoot someone tomorrow, the world will be different depending on whether I did it for money or for justice.

But the reality is, Parsali will be just as safe protected by a mercenary as by an idealist, and whatever my reason, the man I shoot will be just as dead.

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