what may or may not be hard reality

So this is my Top 10 vote for AfterEllen's Hot 100 2012, but *dammit* this year they allow for voting once every day. As if it wasn't difficult enough already! But Lana, Amanda, Chely, Jaime, Joanne, and Lucy have still been voted for every day. Dina, Christina, Mercedes, and Tina have had to make room on different days for Viola Davis, Rachel Shelley, Claudia Black, Gina Torres, Jennifer Beals, Catherine Bell, Annabeth Gish, Angie Harmon, Stephanie Zimbalist, Mariska Hargitay, Natalie Lisinska, Elizabeth Mitchell, Anna Silk, Zoie Palmer..... and goodness, the list goes on and on and on.... I wanna make some kind of 'fa's Hot 100' actually... so much pretty going around.

(compare: 2008, 2009, 2010)

Have YOU nominated your Favourite Female TV Characters for AfterEllen's Top 50 Favourite Female TV Characters list? Here are my picks (So hard! So painful! So many awesome ladies who didn't make it!):

So we spent 2 weeks on Mallorca and in that time I managed to take somewhere over 2000 pictures. *sigh* Under the cut are 28 of my favourite 'views around the island'!

( Mallorca pic!spam! )

This started out from 'Hey, wait a minute, didn't Claudia Black say she was gluten intolerant? Why is Vala eating waffles??' (Not that there aren't gluten-free waffles. There are plenty. But being gluten intolerant myself I generally find it to be both an unnecessary bother and an unnecessary expense to find the 'substitute gluten-free' items so I tend to stick with regular food items that just don't contain gluten in the first place. WAY easier.)

However, uhm... it turned into Vala + Aeryn + random food!pr0n instead. Hey, don't judge. Eating is sexy! (Just me? Uhm...)

( Pic!spam this way!! Includes bonus cleavages and old pics with perms! )

There are all these pic!spammy lists I wanna make, but I never get around to it... however, every year (or at least every other year) I try to make a pic!spam of my Top 10 Hottest Ladies. The limiting thing is that I already have a relatively solid Top 10 list, and there's rarely room for more than one or two new faces whenever I make it (compare 2005, 2006, 2009, and my votes for the AfterEllen Hot 100 in 2008, 2009, 2010), and because the last year has been very good to me in terms of new interesting ladies, I'll do it a little bit differently. So here goes!

[1] - List your top 10 celebrity crushes that have come into your life in the last year.
[2] - Put all of them IN ORDER of your lust for them. (10 to 1, 1 being your number one fixation)
[3] - Say which movie/show/thing it was that hooked you.
[4] - Supply photos for said people.

( Pictures under here!! )

So uhm... you know, playing gay or not is not the be-all end-all of actress crushes, but sue me for liking it when my crushes do! :P Awesomely enough, most of my actress crushes have played a lesbian or two over their careers, but the closest I've seen Joanne come so far was Bianca the omnisexual vampire on The Dresden Files (which is of course completely awesome!) but she's still mostly getting it on with Dresden. (Has anyone seen Going the Distance? There's a brief moment in the trailer where she's holding another girl's hand in a vaguely gay way. :P Why yes, I wear slash goggles? I'm pretty sure I've had lasik surgery to permanently imprint them on my lenses.)

Which brings us to Diamonds, a little miniseries about the diamond trade from a bunch of different interconnected viewpoints, wherein Joanne plays Stephanie Dresser, a geologist who specializes in looking for diamonds in the Congo. Now, there's absolutely no conclusive evidence that Steph is gay, but the circumstantial evidence is piling up real thick. I couldn't resist making a pic!spam out of it.

( Stephanie Dresser ♥ Sarah Cameron a whole lot! Pics and quotes! (Uhm, and spoilers.) )

It simply doesn't get more summer than this:

I have the prettiest screen saver in all the world! Bubbles! Shiny bubbles that change color!


[click to enlarge]

According to tradition, on the first of May you're supposed to take yourself outside for a grand picnic. As it happened, rain was pouring down all of yesterday, so we postponed it for today instead. But here are some pictures - most from today, some from previous days.

( some artistic attempts at leaf buds, clouds and birds, and a crocus or two for good measure )

Helen Precious IV - inaugural wallpaper:



or THIS or THIS or THIS... I can't make up my mind. :P Pretty pretty!
(caps from Sanctuary-caps.com)

I just voted for the AfterEllen Top 100 2010, and per usual spent inordinate amounts of time looking at pictures of pretty ladies... bloody difficult to choose. Gah. Pictures under the cut. (Icon with Claudia Black because she was one of the last to get cut, and I feel bad...)

( Brunettes, anyone?? )

Who did you vote for?

...and the surrounding area. I spent today outside with the camera. I need a spring-themed LJ layout.

( Lots of croci under here, the occasional artsy pine, and a bumblebee )

Yay Home! I've actually been home since yesterday, but I've been busy watching Stargate unpacking and stuff.

Christmas was lovely. I received several gifts that I had no idea I wanted, which is rare. (I truthfully prefer to buy my own gifts and then sell them to select family members. Leaving a list of article numbers might work, but it would be a bit impractical since I'm the one who does all the online shopping in this household.) A lovely music book, and one of those mobile internet USB sticks thingies, and that 'Lord of the Rings in photographs' book... all things I had no idea I wanted as much as I love them now that I have them. The questionable sci-fi movie from '02 called The Void starring Amanda Tapping I had to buy for myself, but my mother gladly bought it off me and wrapped it. Yay! And seeing family and friends was very nice as well.

But home is also nice. I have a new electric blanket for my bed, which is incredibly awesome, and I've been missing it while we were away.

And going home was gorgeous. It was insanely cold and everything was covered in a thin layer of snow, the individual branches of the trees covered in thin layers of frost, the sun was shining, and occasionally there was this amazing snow mist (is there a word for it?) floating just above the ground. It's hard to take pictures from a moving car, but I tried...

( A few snapshots from the road under here! )

I don't fall for blondes. This is not a conscious choice, but rather something I realized several years ago when I first started making lists of my favourite ladies and realized that on any given list there was one, maybe two blondes top. Ever. Brunettes were in overwhelming majority, and the redheads were definitely more than their proportionate share. So inspired by fran___'s brunette list, here's my list of 'something different'.

( List complete with pictures under here! )

So lore_85 made a really inspiring list with her favourite lesbian couples, and I just had to make one of my own.

( List under here, complete with graphics and comments! )

I really really love soup.

At some point this spring we forgot a bag of potatoes in the fridge, and then when we rediscovered them they were well on their way to walking out of there by their own powers. Shrugging, we threw them into an empty corner of the herb garden, and voilá! 3 months later we could actually harvest potatoes... quite cool!

( A few pictures under here! )

Spent the morning watching season 2 of The Guild, and drinking out of the cup on the left. It felt apt, and it's one of my favourites. Then I saw the rose on the right, and took a picture of that too, because it was pretty. [click either to enlarge]



I gotta say, though, that for all that I like The Guild, I have to wonder when it became ok to portray child neglect bordering on abuse as something comedic? If spousal abuse was portrayed similarly that would never be acceptable.