I have kind of been indulging myself in Homestuck fandom lately. cypher posted a thing about troll romance and asexuality in Homestuck, and then I started thinking about it, and about this thing I kind of wanted to write, and then I decided the time had come to go back and try to figure out where I'd got lost in the comic (and catch up with Act 6) and, well, yeah, so that's where the last few days went. ^_^;;; And probably why I have this headache that won't go away. (Unless I caught the Death Ill from a friend on Sunday, which come to think of it would also explain why I haven't felt up to doing anything but read webcomics since Monday night.)

And then I somehow accidentally tumbled into the land of Fan Adventures, which are text/art/multimedia/user interaction things just like Homestuck itself, only by fans, of course. There is Be The Sea Dweller Lowblood, which is 1100 pages of hemospectrum-reversed worldbuildy joy! There is Hoofstuck, which is exactly what you think it is! There is Whostuck, the Doctor-Who-Plays-Sburb crossover that is, dammit, almost entirely unlike the one I want to exist which means I'm still tempted to try mine. And doing it as a fan adventure would solve the "omg where does the plot go next?" problem.

The thing is, large parts of Homestuck fandom, including nearly all the Fan Adventures, and most of the aggregation of all the other stuff going on elsewhere, seems to happen on the MSPA Forums, and hanging around there makes me feel SO OLD. ALL OF THE YEARS. ALL OF THEM. Webcomics message boards are where I started (in interacting with fandom and in internet life) and it is all so very much exactly the same as it was, only moreso. It's like going back home, only discovering that you can't go home again, because of meteors some time travel shenanigans that mean you aren't 18 any more, dammit, being a fangirl and getting old is hard.

It's hard and nobody understands.

ANYWAY. I also kind of overdosed on stuff about that House episode today, so in order to cleanse my brain, I went ahead and wrote some asexuality-related Homestuck fic.

It is not at all what I wanted to write. It is probably not at all what cypher wanted to read.

It is not in any way a sensitive and thoughtful exploration of how having the 'wrong' sexuality would work in troll society.

Actually it's a Roxy/AR chatlog of silliness/tragedy. But it cracks me up every time I look at it so I'm posting it anyway. (With slightly-off-canon text colors, because omg my eyes, and canon alcoholism, and consider that your warnings.)

( di-stri are you there )

...writing Roxy chatlog is way too much fun.

also in completely other news, I baked and iced a cake! (Using all Betty Crocker stuff, but bluh bluh, whatever!) and it turned out really well, so here's a picture:

( Fire )

So synecdochic has this post up asking people for lists of, in their opinion, the fifteen best albums of the past thirty years.

If you're like me (and several of the other people I've seen comment about it) your first reaction to seeing the lists that were generated was along the lines of "Ugh, Radiohead? Really?" So much of the music listed in those comments is by white American rock guys, it's kind of oppressive. And boring.

(Not that I have anything against Radiohead. I just don't have anything for them, either. I can put on an entire Radiohead album and come out of it unable to remember a single thing about it, nor able to come up with any reason why I'd want to. I can't actually listen to it long enough to dislike it before I get distracted and zone out.

Perhaps it's an influence thing, and OK Computer was just a new and amazing thing that defined music for a generation! And if I'd been listening to anything in the mid-'90s except Tom Lehrer, the Muppets, old Moog albums, They Might Be Giants, and the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Tapes, I would know that! But I've been spoiled by all the stuff that's come after Radiohead that they influenced and can't understand how important they are.

...which is possible but you know I came to Johnny Cash and Howlin' Wolf and, I dunno, Karlheinz Stockhausen at least as spoiled, and yet I was still able to recognize them for the brilliant trailblazers and great musicians they were. So I think it is just "Ugh, Radiohead? Really?")

Anyway, sara egged me on. I consider myself completely unqualified to name the "best" albums of anything, (well, no, okay, Songs By Tom Lehrer is the best Tom Lehrer album. And I have an original 10" LP of it! And I bet you don't! :P) but there were actually a lot of good albums by people other than white American rock guys scattered among all the Radiohead and Greenday and MCR, so I have gone and pulled out a sub-list.

I could have gone all out and really complicated! But that would have been too much work, considering how busy I was today not cleaning the house, so instead, I only pulled out the list of albums on there which are not rock (regardless of whether or not they are by white American guys.) Which was what I was most interested in, because I feel like I have a pretty good handle on what the important and influential rock groups are - I can't really help it, given the people I live among (Radiohead? Why?) but learning about all the other amazing musical subcultures and histories out there will never not be interesting to me.

Specifically, I put an album on the list a) if someone included it in their top 15 in a top-level comment on that post; b) if the sidebar on the artist's wikipedia page did not at any point use the words "rock," "pop," "alternative", "indie" or "new wave" to describe the genre; c) if the artist works in several distinct genres including pop/rock, but the page for the specific album had none of those words in the sidebar; d) if the artist had no wikipedia page at all or the page had no sidebar (points for obscurity regardless of genre).

I know genre is squishy and also wikipedia is not always entirely accurate (believe it or not) so this might not be the same list you'd come up with, and the genres I listed are approximate, but it's informative anyway! And I kind of want to listen to most of these albums now. (I still don't want to listen to OK Computer. I've tried, okay? Lots of times. I think. I may have blocked some of them out of my memory.)

( To be honest there were more than I expected! )

As of when I posted this, there were 80 top-level comments on that post, and there are 140 albums on my list. Assuming each commenter averaged around 10 albums, that means that a ballpark of 80% of the songs on that list were something in the family of rock music. synecdochic said "Wildly Divergent Tastes"! Live up to it, people! :D

...I would also like to note for the record that even this list is leaving out a lot of diversity to really be any list of the "best". Nearly all of the albums on it are in English, just to start with. (Most of the not-in-English nominations were jrock or jpop.)

Dear Sherlock fandom: Just to let you guys know, he's not really dead.

(No I haven't seen the newest episode or been spoiled beyond the title, I'm just being a brat. That one's even older than 'Vader Is Luke's Father.' But not quite as old as 'there's a flood, everyone dies except the MC.')

****

When I lack the brain to do other things, I've been reading through Escher Girls and Boobs Don't Work That Way since somebody or other linked to them, and here are three things:

1. I want a superheroine called Escher Girl now. Who has super-flexibility, minor shapeshifting powers, and detachable body parts. And she should be in a comic book where all the other female characters are drawn realistically.

2. Is there a blog/tumblr anywhere that's the inverse of this - showcasing examples of mainstream comic book art where women look and move like human beings? Because I really need a palate cleanser now. Of course I'm starting to doubt that there are enough examples for that to work.

3. In a moment of weakness I thought to myself "okay, there's about a dozen tumblrs now that you check with some regularity, it might be nice to have them aggregated, maybe you should just get an account" ...and OMG people, when you have a dashboard, tumblr is even harder to use and uglier than it was before. I think I am going to forget I did that and keep checking them one at a time, thanks. *shudder*

Edit to note on this bit: I should say that there is a certain amount of disablism/body image enforcement going on in those blogs; it hits me because actually, my feet do look like I'm wearing high heels when they're at rest, and yes, I can bend my ankles like that painlessly, because I'm a toe-walker; and there are women with bodies that naturally do some of the other things people complain about in comic book art. Even if the body image you're enforcing is closer to reality, you're still excluding some people, and some of the language on those blogs does bother me. However: even women who do have bodies that can look like that aren't going to act the way the comic-books show it. I wear boots that give lots of ankle support when I'm going adventuring, personally...

Hmm. That last post wasn't really in the spirit of today being More Joy Day, was it?

So here is some joy: lannamichaels is talking about Ezar Vorbarra/Aral Vorkosigan arranged marriage AUs. And I started talking about it with her in comments. And now she has written a bit of it in comments! There should be more of it. There should be epics. It is full of joy! And glitter! And conquest!

Also there is a digression about how Simon Illyan should just have sex with everybody, which is also full of joy. Come join us!

I watched The Hounds of Baskerville last night. Yeah, yeah, I know I said I was done with that fandom, but it was only two more episodes, and it was one of my favorite Holmes stories, so I figured I might as well finish. (Plus I wanted to finish another row on my quilt.)

I...

Okay, I've done some more thinking about why I can't enjoy Sherlock for the fun, brightly-lit romp it's meant to be.

I have strong feelings about Holmes: I first read the stories when I was, mm, 8 or 9, and of the stories of my pre-net years that still have active fandoms, it's the earliest one I was actively engaged with. And Sherlock Holmes meant a great deal to me then, and still does: he was the first character who told me, explicitly, without talking down, "it's okay to be too smart, even if it's not in the ways you're supposed to be smart," "it's okay to be uninterested in sex and romance, and you don't have to grow out of it, ever," "it's okay to process and experience emotions and relationships differently from the way other people do, and it doesn't make you inhuman," and "you're allowed to forge your own path in the world, you don't have to fit into a box."

So yeah, Holmes fandom means a lot to me, but actually, my issues with Sherlock don't mostly have to do with that? I mean if they had really screwed up on the above I would be actively avoiding, not just bored, and I really liked the first RDJ movie as an adaptation.

And bored is what I am. I actually paused Baskerville during the pivotal reveal scene and went to do something else because I was so unutterably bored by it. And then I forgot I hadn't finished the episode until I noticed half an hour later that my video player was still open. BORED, Sherlock, your deductions are boring.

I think what it is, it's the same reason doctors I know can't watch doctor shows and lawyers I know can't watch lawyer shows. I'm not a doctor or a lawyer, but what I do do is know massive amounts of random knowledge, put it together in interesting ways, think I'm awfully clever, and process feelings poorly. And no, I don't think I'm better at any of those things than Sherlock Holmes, but that's the point: I shouldn't be better at any of those those things that he is. And yet watching Sherlock, I am. He should be at least two steps ahead of me all the time; instead, he's usually about ten steps behind, and usually wrong anyway.

( Here, have a detailed summary of every thing that was wrong with the Baskerville casefile. )

The fanfic is still fun, though! And usually does better casefiles than the show.

...So if you were recasting BBC Sherlock with Lamviin, which characters (other than Watson, obviously) would be surmales? Mrs. Hudson has to stay female (so she can pretend to be the third part in their trine if people complain, though of course there's nothing wrong with pairing off these days, she thinks they make an adorable couple), and Irene has to stay female so she can fill out the trine eventually and I like the idea of keeping Harry a lesbian, though possibly with two ex-wives. I'm really tempted to make Mycroft surmale, it would do interesting things to the sibling relationship and rher in-the-shadows positions of power, but then again, his careful and knowing manipulation of his privilege is a fundamental part of Mycroft's character, and I can think of equally good reasons why-and-why-not to make Lestrade or Moriarty surmale. (What? :P I had to think about something to get to sleep last night other than how annoying the casefile was.)

¹Okay, now I'm tempted to write a Lonesome October/Study in Emerald/Hound of the Baskervilles/Lovecraftiana sequel to my Yuletide story where it turns out to be a Hound of Tindalos.

So has anyone written Steve Rogers/Betty White yet?

And if not, why not? And if not now, when?

In which I spend all morning messing with spreadsheets again. :P

Basically, I took my old wordcount tracking spreadsheet and made it a lot prettier, more functional and more elegant. So at that point I figured I might as well share it.

Words by Story Spreadsheet (click to download)

This spreadsheet is designed for people who want to track their writing goals for a year primarily by story rather than by date. (kate's awesome 2012 Wordtracker spreadsheet does everything you need for by tracking by date anyway.) It's also designed for fanfic writers, people who tend to have a lot of different stories on the go at once, and people who like to watch the numbers dance. :D (Last year I found I was way more motivated by "watch the numbers dance" than "I made daily wordcount.")

Basics for using this spreadsheet: It's an Open Document Spreadsheet, which means it works natively with OpenOffice, LibreOffice, StarOffice, or pretty much any other open source office suite of your choice. (It will only partly work in GoogleDocs, and probably only partly works in Excel - they choke on the array formulas, which means most of the fancier statistics give errors. But the basic stuff will still work.)

Every time you work on a new story, you insert a new row at the top, and then fill in the columns for that row. If you update a previously worked on story, just change the values that have changed. Gray-background cells are automatically calculated and you should not type anything in them unless you know what you're doing with the formulas.

( More notes on optional stuff )

(Also I needed a 2012-only story to test it with, so I posted the silly Sherlock thing from t'other day to AO3. I now have fics up titled "Inconceivable" and "Unbelievable". Clearly I need to come up with a story for "Irretrievable".)

Because sometimes a girl just has to get her spreadsheets out on a Friday night.

In 2011, I:

Added 418 items to my LibraryThing catalog;
of which 289 were new acquisitions;
acquired from at least 25 different sources;
and completely failed to track my reading (but it was a lot fewer books than 289.)

Went yard sailing on 14 Saturdays between March and November;
bought things at 29 separate sales;
spent $150 almost exactly (assuming my spreadsheet is finally right);
on 220 separate items;
for an average cost per item of 68¢ (this is why I say my standard of pricing is very, very off)
of which 140 were books, at an average price of 50¢ (this is why ebooks are not yet in my price range);
with an average total spent per sale of $5.17;
had a ridiculous amount of fun making the spreadsheet.

Posted 23 complete works to AO3;
With a mean/median word count of 3533/1729;
Including about 35 different fandoms;
With a mean/median feedback ratio ((kudos+comments+bookmarks)/hits) of 7%/6%;
With two stories over 10,000 words (for the first time ever!)

Worked on 35 distinct fanfic stories (plus Nano, several long bits of not!fic, some original fic, lots of journal entries, and some fragments too short to be separately counted);
for a total of 164,658 fannish words written;
of which 31 stories were posted, somewhere;
26 stories are complete, 4 are unposted works in progress, and 5 are languishing as WIPs on some kinkmeme somewhere.
4790 of those words are het; 14246 are slash or femslash; 9825 are gen; and 88924 are things I don't feel confident about putting in any one of those categories.
14 are crossovers; 6 are on the borderline of being crossovers; 15 are not crossovers;
which allows for me to have written 30 fandoms this year (I count fandoms differently from AO3.)
19 of the posted stories, and 79,000 of the words, were originally posted anonymously.
The average length of a story, finished or not, is 4207/1991 (mean/median) words; the mean length of a finished story is 3053 words; of an anon meme wip is 5277 words.

And there is much more data to be mined from the spreadsheets. What else would you like to know? :D

ETA: OMG, we took down the holiday decorations today, and the Three Wise Men left a ridiculous amount of cash in my stocking last night. :O We need to stop Mom from learning about other Christmas traditions, it's dangerous. I guess that's my 2012 yard sailing money.

And while I'm at it, might as well post, this year for Christmas ( I got: )

Oh, did I mention that I was forced to watch all of BBC Sherlock this week? It was not bad, as Holmes adaptations go, and the acting/production values were pretty good, and the characters are great, but somehow I am no more enthralled by it than I was just by way of the fic.

Basically, I think, if you want to sell me on a series that is supposed to be about the solving of puzzles, you need to be better than that at writing puzzles... (I am told that thinking about the cases is missing the point and I should be looking at the pretty people, but, dammit, the cases would be interesting! If they weren't shot through with massive plotholes and total impossibilities.)

( Five things about Scandal in Belgravia )

( My reaction to the rest of the series )

( Reactions to the series as a whole )

and I come full circle right back to where I started in July 2010, when I first heard about the BBC doing an updated Holmes.

...or wash up on verity's Madelyn Mack AU.

And on that note, I think I'm done being in BBC Sherlock fandom now.* Three days was long enough! :P Off to read the other Madelyn story from Yuletide. Or maybe some Phryne Fisher.

*except for the rest of those werewolf AUs that lindentreeisle linked me, of course. I do need to do research for my Night in the Lonesome October fic, after all.

I have been totally over-socialized since we got back to computer-land - stellar_dust is still home - she is staying for the SHA conference, so we are doing ALL THE THINGS while we have her. (and she has been too shy to contact any of the other dreamwidthers who are going to be there, so if you see this, SHA people, you should totally go find her and say hi) This means that in the past week there has been one all-day visit with cousins, one 24-hour New Years party, one trip to see Anglo-Saxon gold, one yuletide meetup (which she punked out on), and one Sherlock BBC watching party, plus old family friends over all day today, and (hopefully! although I'm kind of assuming there will be a natural disaster or something, given recent attempts) a fannish stitch'n'bitch in Baltimore this weekend.

I plan to spend the rest of January sitting at home working on a quilt and playing with computers, no fear.

Anyway, yuletide reveal: I didn't go to much effort to keep it secret, but I wrote

A Lesson in Natural History (4529 words) by melannen
Fandom: A Night in the Lonesome October - Roger Zelazny, Dream Cycle - H. P. Lovecraft
Rating: General Audiences
Warning: Author Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Jack/Jill, Graymalk&Snuff
Characters: Jill, Snuff, Graymalk, Growler, High Purring One, Gl'bgolyb, Iranon
Summary:

or, Through the Catflap of the Silver Key: in which Graymalk, the Witch's Cat, travels the Dreamlands, and meets a Tomcat, a Watchdog, an Old Wolf, and a Great Many Squirrels; there are two Carcases of Rats (both dead of replete old age), some Riddling, and much Nappery; and an Original Wormius Edition of the Book of Dead Names is most profanely Misused.

...which is an A Night in the Lonesome October fic that really pulls out a lot of the things related to Lovecraft's Dreamlands that were in the book, per lispeth's request and my inclination. (I am afraid though that the Purring One and Growler may have drawn at least as much from the Old Tom and Ponch, because I read ANitLO long before I read any Dreamlands and I already had their characters set in my mind...) It also throws in some random bits of Homestuck mostly because I madly wish that Homestuck fandom would do more with the Lovecraftian elements (does the average Homestuck fan even know who Lovecraft is?)

And then the other one:

Not Made For Any Man: (the moon's last quarter) (17001 words) by melannen
Fandom: Blossom Culp Series - Richard Peck, A Night in the Lonesome October - Roger Zelazny, Indiana Jones Series, Princess and the Frog (2009), Mary Russell - Laurie R. King, Tarzan - Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Study in Emerald - Neil Gaiman, Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Cthulhu Mythos - H. P. Lovecraft
Rating: General Audiences
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Blossom Culp, Alexander Armsworth, Graymalk, Snuff, Marion Ravenwood, Original Snake Character, Prince Naveen, Manu the Monkey, Lady Jane Clayton, A Hive of Bees, Jill, Mary Russell, Tiana, Irene Adler
Summary:

Alexander Armsworth is home from college. Blossom Culp hasn't changed nearly as much as he might have hoped she had. A lot of strange visitors are in town, and a lot of strange mutterings. There will be a full moon this Halloween, and a small cat named Graymalk just said "Hello" to Alexander in the middle of the street.

When lispeth requested Blossom Culp, and also requested a Night in the Lonesome October story that told a different game with crossover characters from any fandom I wanted, I knew ... well, I knew I was getting exactly what I deserved, since I basically requested that last year. So I decided to try. I thought I would be able to write about 500 words for every day in October, and finish a short-ish sequel in the same format as the original in about 15,000 words. 17,000 words later, I was exactly 1/4 of the way through.

So I went ahead and put up what I had (it does come to a sort of an ending place, even if very little has been resolved yet) and I am going to try to push on to day 31 by next Yuletide. I have it all outlined, and the structure I borrowed from Zelazny's book actually made it very easy to write - I have it all set up in Scrivener so ANitLO is divided up, one chapter per day, and then I read his chapter to get in voice and get some idea of what I should be working on and where in the story I should be, and then go write the TNMFM chapter for the same day. So HOPING I will be able to finish it, although according to the outline there's some pretty difficult stuff coming up in the moon's first quarter.

And then, what I would really love, is for someone to offer to co-mod a Night in the Lonesome October journal RPG over the month of October, where all the players pick an appropriate crossover or original character, a place and year, and we play it out in real-time. But that's for the future!

Meanwhile, I had to read up on so much canon for this (eight different fandoms, I think, plus the one I haven't brought in to the story yet. Plus Captain America which I watched in between) that I really wanted to talk about but couldn't because YULETIDE, so I will have to work on some of that backlog later.

[I just answered all my comments on the yuletide stories (I think) and somebody left one where they complimented me on my "command of various cannons" and I wanted to reply, "Yes, I enjoy using them to shoot down ships" but decided that was not the appropriate tone, so you get it posted here instead. :P]

I am home again, and cradled once more in the bosom of my darling internets!

And I have read my yuletide gift stories, and they are glorious. I don't know what people complain about, how everybody only writes m/m, I got two femslash + poly fics, and they were everything I could have wanted.

Variations On The Word Love, Miss Madelyn Mack, Detective, ~9,000 words, Madelyn/Nora, Thorny/Nora, poly

This is that fic I wanted set after Nora and Thorny's marriage where Nora and Madelyn can't stay away from each other and Thorny is understanding! You know, the direct equivalent of all of those Holmes/Watson fics where Mary doesn't mind them being together. :D And it is, like most things, a dynamic much improved by the canon genderswap. (And by having Madelyn in it, obvs.)

There is a casefile, which is the sort of mystery story where it doesn't matter if you already guessed how it ends because the satisfaction comes from the fact that you know it's going to end exactly how it should, which is so Madelyn Mack. There is a documentary framing story! There is a cover image featuring Alice Joyce! There is stealth crossovers (it is as if this person has read my Madelyn story and decided to pay me back with everything I put in it. *g*) There is lots and lots of Madelyn being Madelyn (which who could ask for more really?)

I could go on and on but pretty much you should all just read this. :P (I am assuming the reason that the other known Madelyn devotees on my list haven't all kudos'd or commented on it yet is that you all helped write it, that must be the reason.)

And then there was a treat! Just for me! where you go, I go, ~500 words, Liberty/Justice wedding fic! Featuring Progress as the officiant! And the bestest ending for a wedding fic ever! You know you want to read it. (And maybe if people show there is an audience for this, there might be more?)


Now: to catch up on the rest of the internets, to figure out where to put my Christmas loot (54 new(used) books. So much good stuff to read! So little shelf space!), and to read the rest of yuletide. ALL OF IT.

Life sucks, I totaled a car yesterday (I'm fine, insurance is covering everything, not even a driving citation, I don't want to talk about it, I am never driving in the week before Christmas ever again), I managed to screw up my yuletide upload bad enough that it requires personal attention from the coders to figure out how I broke the archive, and I'm pretty sure they're not going to get back to me about interviewing for that job I really wanted.

Pretty much the only thing that's bringing joy into my life right now is the story I'm writing. Luckily, there is lots and lots of joy left in the story I'm writing! Also all sorts of people who I had given up on ever being lured to Dreamwidth are finally talking about coming over here. Never say schadenfreude doesn't make life better!

People are posting lists of communities they follow on DW, so here is my list, trimmed of ones that are private communities belonging to one person, or ones that never post:

( And people say DW isn't active! )

ETA: Oh! Another happy thing! siegeofangels, your yarn scraps came! They are beautiful! And there were tentacles (not the sexy kind), which is exactly what I needed.

ETA2: I got the interview! I should have known that "we will notify you on the 21st at the latest" meant "we will start notifying people an hour before close of business on the 21st" - it is a gov't job. :P And my yuletide is in, all non-borked and stuff! And I'm within a gnat's crotchet of having a treat up! Car is still totaled though.

You guys, you guys, you remember the Cordelia Vorkosigan Flimsy Dolls, right? And if you followed the comments, you may have seen me and sara and carmarthen discussing the politics of the Vorhartung Castle Gift Shop, and how somebody should write that story?

Well, miss_lanyon wrote it! As a sequel to Ship Duty, already one of the best recent Vorkosigan fics out there, no less! And you should all go read it because it's brilliant and it's everything it should be. There are old Vor ladies! And stuffed Stegosauri! And Byerly being competent! And Ivan being traumatized by pictures of his mother in her underwear! And discussions of white collar crime and accounting! And many other wonderful things!

A Charity Case: In which Byerly gets a job, Ivan fills in for his mother, the Emperor polishes his retail skills, and the Vorhartung Castle Gift Shop ladies embezzle every mark.


Also, everybody, seriously, you should totally get in the habit of throwing all the random plot bunnies you have out in the open, because I have been doing that, and people keep writing the darn things. It is making my given/recieved ratio on AO3 look completely out of whack, but I don't care, because they are all awesome stories. This is fandom doing what fandom is for! (That is, providing me with a custom drip-feed of the stories I need in my life with minimal effort on my part. ...I mean, um, building new heights of creativity through collaboration and conversation and an ethic of openness of ideas. Yes. that.)

(Now somebody needs to write me the Lord Peter Wimsey/Harriet Vane AU set in the Study in Emerald universe. In which Peter is of course a distant descendant of royalty down several lines. Go on. You know you want it now too.)

ETA: btw, terajk is still writing heartwarming Ranma + Ryoga + Akane fic, if you were wondering.

This is probably going to be my last journal post this year, because, well, yuletide status update: WINDMILLS. WINDMILLS IN MY MIND.

(That music video has the distinction of being one where I knew the video by heart from having read it in a book before I'd ever heard the song. Like You Are My Sunshine, but unlike Mahna Mahna, which was actually on the LP as well as being in the book. ...the Muppet Show Book was really awfully amazing in a lot of ways; I've never seen anything do a better job of translating music videos into printed pages, and I suppose with the age of videotape the art has been lost. I should totally go see the new movie. And the new Holmes movie. After yuletide is over.)


Things I should have added to my Christmas list:

11. A way to use my NaNo discount to buy a paid copy of Scrivener without having to figure out a way to use GODDAMNED PAYPAL. AAARGH.

12. Dark blue denim scraps. Yes, before I designed a patchwork that requires light, medium, and dark blue denim I should have thought about the fact that no denim in this house goes in the scrap basket unless it's medium-pale at the darkest, but maybe somebody has cut-off hems from where they shortened a new pair of jeans or something?

13. The new Jonathan Coulton album. Okay admittedly mostly because it has a love song for kismesissitude on it - no, that's not the title, but it might as well be. So the thing about putting this album on my list: usually if there's some music out that I sort of want to try listening to, I will just torrent it. But this is JoCo, so I went to the website to see if he had any of it for free download? And he doesn't - the new songs are $1 each or $10 the whole album. And they're creative-commons licensed, which means that if I torrented it, it would be legal. And somehow that killed all my desire to torrent, and I'm like, 'hey, it's only 10 bucks, I should just give the man some money.'

...that didn't work with the Baen Free Library admittedly, but it probably would've if they'd had the whole Vorkosigan series for $10 before I'd bought all the paperbacks used.

1. So lately there seems to be a lot of Clint Barton fic in Avengers movieverse fandom, and you know what I want? I want a story where movie!Clint likes the purple costume. Where they have to talk him out of it, not in to it. Why is fandom buying in to the idea that purple makes you unmanly? Why is fandom writing a Clint who can be in an open and loving relationship with Coulson, or who is Darcy's sensitive, feminist boyfriend, but who can't handle the idea of, *shudder*, wearing purple in public?

I will grant you that Hawkeye's costumes have been among the most consistently terrible in comics history, but it's not the color that's offensive. (Actually a mix of dark colors is better for blending in at night than pure black anyway.) Fandom! Give me a purple-and-proud-of-it Clint! Preferably a purple-and-proud-of-it-Clint who has zero taste in clothing!

2. I finally [redacted for yuletide] and now [redacted for yuletide] asexual threesome of awesome, even though [redacted for yuletide].

3. Also I [redacted for yuletide] and threesome AU, because if [redacted for yuletide] canon would have gone there, yes? And of course [redacted for yuletide].

4. I am falling in love with [redacted for yuletide], who is even awesomer than I expected, if you [redacted for yuletide]. I kind of want to throw together a [redacted for yuletide]-parts-only version of canon, because that's how I'm [redacted for yuletide].

5. Why do I do this to myself every yuletide? AAAAHHHH [redacted] [redacted] [redacted]

6. Going to the DC yuletide write-in today! Maybe I will actually be able to talk about some of this there. :p

7. terajk wrote a tiny bit of Ryoga/Ranma/Akane genderqueer polyfic like I still really want the epic of! And she managed to somehow pack an entire epic's worth of implications into less that two hundred words. It is awesome. You should go read it.

8. I finally got around to watching the Peter/Harriet BBC miniseries over Thanksgiving. It was brilliant! Almost as good as the books, and part of the reason I waited so long to watch them is that I didn't believe they could be as good as the books. I wish there was some way to make every film adaptation as good - they have proved that it is possible. (I suppose "not made in Hollywood" is a good starting place, though.)

9. Now I am re-reading the Lord Peter books again! Because! There still needs to be Sayers femmeslash out there. Also, usually when I read a published novel, I have one of two reactions: "Wow, that wasn't all that great, I could write something that good" or "Wow, that was amazing, I could never do that, I should just give up on writing now." (They are not necessarily accurate statements, or reflecting well on me, but at least I know that?) Gaudy Night, on the other hand, makes me go "Wow. What do I have to do to make myself into somebody who could write that?" I need to find more books like that.

also somebody should write Sayers RPF where she's being investigated for murder while writing Strong Poison. And then be investigated for murder while writing the RPF. A story by a female mystery writer being investigated for murder about a female mystery writer being investigated for murder while writing a story about a female mystery writer being investigated for murder while writing a story about a female mystery writer being investigated for murder! It would be the best ever.

10. Someone tell me that nobody needs to vid Thor/Loki to I Want A Cold Cold Christmas.

I want to post but I am all full of yuletide! And I can't talk about yuletide! yar.

So instead you will have to make do with a post that acknowledges the existence of Christmas. Sorry.

***

Next, here is my Christmas wishlist, mostly for RL people who sometimes read this journal:( ten things )

****

Meanwhile, there was a list of things I promised myself I could do if I won NaNo this year (which I did! sort of! after ten years of trying!), and since the Scrivener winners' discount still isn't up, I'm going to have to settle for another one:

I would like for Dreamwidth to have a community called showandtell which is exactly what it sounds like: a place where people can make entries to show off that really interesting thing they own! And talk about it! And have people ooh and ah about it! Because I don't know about you, but there is a lot of interesting old junk crammed in this house that I would love to have some justification for continuing to hold on to. :P I'm visualizing that we could assign people weeks to post but have it also open to anyone who wants to post, kind of the way poetry works.

So would anybody else be interesting in taking part in a community like that? I don't want to make it if I'm the only one...

The following is the sort of thing I would visualize as belonging there, plus if I started a comm I wouldn't have to post this sort of thing here :P

( Meet my Angstbunny! )

***

There's a yuletide write-in at a Teaism in downtown DC this Friday which I am very seriously considering, because I haven't been to a local fannish meetup in ages (synecdochic has been very carefully cancelling every one of hers that I might be able to get to :P) and if I went I could, I dunno, TALK ABOUT MY YULETIDE. Also it's quite near the National Geographic Museum and I do kind of want to go to the Staffordshire Hoard exhibit while it's there, so I could go in earlier and do that before tea... and I could even drop by the local Occupy encampment, which is also within a couple of blocks. Anybody else thinking of doing any of those things?

***

And finally, here are some Yuletide-ish icon bases that I made for sharing last year and never posted, some of them from a very old greeting card and some of them from Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy From Mars book covers, and also one of the giant chicken of Hoboken (you can probably figure out which are which):

I was going to make an interesting entry full of interesting things, but then I stumbled across the National Jukebox, and my brain is full of nothing but NO.

The National Jukebox sounds like it's really cool - it's a collection of streamable music from the early years of recording (1901-1925) made available over the internet through the Library of Congress. Sounds awesome, right?

The thing is, none of the songs are downloadable. It's streaming only. Why?

"Recordings in the Jukebox were issued on record labels now owned by Sony Music Entertainment, which has granted the Library of Congress a gratis license to stream acoustical recordings."

NO. NO. NO.

There is no reason on God's green Earth why the Library of Congress should be accepting conditions from Sony on how they distribute music that was recorded and published 110 years ago.

NO.

I am at stellar_dust's for the holiday week, and she has loaned me one of her archeology books, which has led, through an interesting series of links, to me reading a research paper from the Seventh Korean-Japanese Symposium on Medieval History of Europe. I love living in the future!

Of course if I was actually living in the future I'd be reading the actual paper I wanted to look up, instead of a paper translated from Japanese to Korean to English that happens to cite it, but, well, we can't expect our intellectuals to keep up with the times. /not bitter at all

Anyway, on to actually relevant stuff: stellar_dust's flatmate sailorptah, having watched through her SG1 DVDs and then attempted to watch SGA only to realize it was the one where the fic was better than the series, wanted a "good parts" list of Stargate Atlantis seasons 1-3, so I said I'd post one here. (Limited to s1-s3 because stellar_dust stopped buying the DVDs after that.) Kibitzing in comments welcome. She says she likes Rodney McKay, time travel, and mystery/exploration type stories.

( List of episodes )

Hi yuletide person! And anyone else who is nosing around.

Sorry if this letter turns out to be a bit late - sign-ups caught me a bit unexpectedly this year.

If you followed the link in your assignment, it should have taken you to my fandom:yuletide tag, which has author letters going back years and years, which is convenient, because vast swaths of this letter are cribbed from previous ones. Nearly everything in my journal is unlocked - feel free to poke around.

First things first: I am not picky at all. I'll read and enjoy pretty much anything, as long as you punctuate your dialogue correctly and double-space between paragraphs, and I only pick yuletide fandoms where I'd be delighted with anything at all in the fandom, so if you don't want any more information, you are encouraged to stop reading now. If you write something you enjoy writing about characters you love, I know I'll enjoy reading it, too.

If you want more advice: I have a list of 101 Near-Bulletproof Narrative Kinks which you are more than welcome to mine for ideas. I am also a sucker for crossovers of all kinds, and no, I don't particularly care if I know the other fandom(s) (though of course that helps.) I've also been rather mooning over AUs of all kinds lately - not sure what that's about, but there it is - so if you have an AU idea, no matter how far out, go for it! Of course if you want to write something perfectly canon-based and sedate that will also make me happy. Slash/het/other/romance/gen; explicit, non-explicit, kinky, vanilla, cracky, realistic, humor, character death: it's all good.

I am also hereby volunteering stellar_dust as my go-between again, if you have questions and don't want to go through the mods.

Here's some more about the fandoms I requested:

Miss Madelyn Mack, Detective: I'd love a Madelyn/Nora story. Or a Madelyn, World Traveller adventure. Or a Madelyn & Nora casefile. Or something with Madelyn and Nora and Thorny, which is fascinatingly complicated. Or anything with Ariel and Jacqueline - femmeslash, backstory, character vignette, suspenseful shenanigans... or a Sherlock Holmes crossover, or a crossover with anything else, or something during the Great War, or something steampunky, or any AU, or, well, anything really.

( Meet Miss Madelyn Mack )

The Adventures of Lucky Starr by Isaac Asimov writing as Paul French - I would like Conway/Henree fic, please! It doesn't have to be romantic/sexual (although it would be nifty if it was) but I mostly just want a story about Lucky's two dads and their relationship. Them as working fathers, or their POV while Lucky was with the Sirians in the last book, or Bigman's POV on their relationship, or Conway/Henree/Science, or just a romance vignette, or something about how relationships actually work in that society, or something when they were young with David and Barbara, or anything with them really!

( Meet Hector Conway and Augustus Henree )

QI RPF - I would like something with Stephen and Sandi being adorable and clever together. Or something where you take a one-off fic-bait comment from one of the episodes and take it seriously. Or an AU that brings everybody into a different setting. Or best of all, I'd like an AU based on that conversation from the Girls and Boys episode where Stephen and Sandi are in a marriage-of-convenience, but honestly, anything would be great.

( This is Quite Interesting, tell me more )

19th Century Civic Allegory - This cries out for kinky f/f featuring Justice with her blindfold and sword and Liberty with her shield and shackles. But something fluffy with those two would work, too. Or something with History, who claims to be straight but is bent for Justice. Or Progress, with her spinning ball, who has all the best toys. Or any of this bunch. Something where you bring in political or historical events on Earth would be cool, but so would something that just plays with the personalities and/or femmeslash possibilities.

( Okay, let me tell you about this fandom )

ETA: Oh, and I should mention that I am very probably going to be AFK around the time the archive opens and/or reveals happen - I will make sure to get on at some point between Christmas and Epiphany, but I might not be on right away! So please don't worry if it's a few days before you hear from me as your recipient.

T'other day I was stumbling around ye old internets looking for a good cover of the song 'Drunk With Love' (which I was thinking needed to be on a Steve/Tony playlist if anything did, not that I've got a Steve/Tony playlist or anything) and I washed up on the website Queer Music Heritage, which is so awesome I felt the need to share it with you guys.

Queer Music Heritage is an almost ten-year's-long online archive of a radio show about, you guessed it, queer music heritage, mostly in the US. Every show also has a page on the website that's full of lyrics and extra information and scans of the records and record jackets and primary source material and links to pages full of even more information, most of it put online by the show's host from his own and his friends' collections and otherwise not available online.

I commend you particularly, and especially if you are at all interested in stories where Steve Rogers dates men, to the special double-length May 2010 episode on "The Pansy Craze" in 1930s New York (which is where I finally found that original-artist version of 'Drunk With Love', and is also an excellent overview of the sort of things 'being gay' might mean to a kid who grew up in '30s NYC) and the special double-length June 2004 episode on "Queer Music Before Stonewall", which repeats some of the music from the Pansy Craze episode but also has a lot of other material (wait for the WWII-era song about the little draftee from Brooklyn who taught Fort Dix to swish. :D )

A lot of the music in these episodes is either to modern ears homophobic or was outright homophobic even then, but the host does an excellent job of explaining the history in and around the songs, and the supplementary material on the websites is excellent - I haven't even finished digging around it in yet. Although warning that the website design does tend toward, um, lots of sparkly rainbows and bright purple, and might take some getting used to before you can find stuff...

Also note that access to this kind of music wasn't restricted to people in Greenwich Village and other lgbt enclaves - I even had a Rae Bourbon LP which I had from a highly respectable elderly member of our church who'd lived in the suburbs ever since she got off the farm. (I kind of regret getting rid of it now, except that these podcasts have taught me it wasn't just that record that I found tedious and highly annoying, it is Rae Bourbon's stage persona in general. Although not necessary all Rae Bourbon - the podcast has some songs where Rae isn't in the usual stage persona, although still performing female, and I actually liked those.)



Anyway of course I now I want to write a Steve/Tony fic (and it wouldn't even have to be movieverse, although that simplifies knowing canon so much, which is probably the only reason I didn't start writing this story three years ago, although I should probably still see Cap's movie before I try to write it, and at that point it might not work any more, which is why I'm writing it out here but it's not officially not!fic because I might still want to really write it for real after I see the movie)...

A Steve/Tony fic where they're in an established relationship, but they're keeping it an absolute secret from everybody (except JARVIS and Pepper, obviously ( because JARVIS and Pepper know everything about Tony )