Yeah, every so often I do a meme. :D

This is the "list 101 things you like to see in fiction" meme. stultiloquentia has a list of people's lists following the spread of the meme.

These are not all sex-related, in fact most of 'em aren't. And they're not bulletproof: most of them make me as unhappy when badly done as happy when well done, unfortunately, and many of them are very frequently screwed up. (But I still give people credit for trying!)

( 101 Fic Kinks )


...yes, we are still snowed in, what gave you that idea? Also, wow, my list of kinks seems to be considerably more upbeat than most of the other lists I'm reading! I like stories where people get to be happy and functional. D:

(I was actually planning to try to make the Holmes vid that's currently haunting my dreams, but after I did all the clipping, I realized that trying to make a narrative-heavy, 8-minute-long constructed reality vid about a character for whom there is less than four minutes of footage total *might* be a tad ambitious when I haven't vidded in five years. So I got an insane Mary/Irene pre-movie bunny instead and have been re-reading "Sign of the Four" by candlelight.)

So, as I do live in, you know, the place that has just broken about half of their all-time snow records, we were without power for about twelve hours today, and we're now hoping it will stay on.

I was expecting that when I got back online you would be flooded with snow pictures and sick of them! But no, there hasn't even been anything on urban_nature. So you get to look at mine.

We got very close to exactly 24 inches before it stopped in late afternoon, as near as I can tell, though it's drifted as high as three feet in a lot of places. The landscape passed Thomas Kinkade levels of threat quite a while ago and is now well in to what can only be described as Seussian.

*Nice* snow-fort making conditions, too. I think we may be attempting to build a full-domed snow shelter tomorrow if the freeze holds like it's meant to. Today was half shoveling and half just wandering around marveling at things.

( 20 photos under cut + 2 more )

Hi! I am still lacking energy to do anything serious online, but here are some things anyway:

Signal boost via zvi: If, like me, you recently got weird malware on your system that tried to get you to install anti-virus software, and couldn't figure out where from because you'd only been on trustworthy sites, you probably got it from an ad running on Livejournal. Just so you know. ETA: a thread about it on lj news - if you think you got hit, drop in and leave a comment, it might help.

(I think I got my system clean - I have Spybot running to stop unauthorized registry changes, and cleared out a bunch of suspicious files - but will probably be doing a format + reinstall as soon as I have time to think anyway.) When is DW going to be able to syndicate flocked lj posts so I never have to go back there again? Plz?

*****

I am one of those boring old fans who's been around long enough that the slash-misogyny argument just seems tired; yes it's important, but it's the same thing I read about in 2003. And 2005. And 2007... So instead, here are some awesome Sherlock Holmes stories about women:

Commonplaces, by Astolat. Irene Adler goes to visit Holmes after "The Final Problem."

Thoughts Without Words by Katie Forsythe. Holmes goes to visit Irene, and a conversation is had. (If you've been reading Holmes fic, surely you've found Katie Forsythe's work already, but this one is just *amazing*. It's full-on unreliable narrator - SCAN is given an entirely new interpretation, as is Holmes' history - yet the Holmes and Adler here are so amazing that I get it confused with canon. And I almost suspect the naked!Adler scene in the movie was based on this story.)

Five Times John Watson Quite Unintentionally Saw Irene Adler Naked, by flowers4ophelia. Irene and Holmes carry on together and annoy Watson a lot. Movieverse, though not necessarily contradictory to bookverse.

An Ideal Husband by Irene Adler. Irene Adler and Sherlock Holmes both receive the same visitor. (this is also heavy on the Violet Hunter, who was in "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches" and seems to be the third-most-loved-by-fandom female from a case.)

Enclosed by Recessional. Mary Morstan receives a visit from Sherlock Holmes. Recessional has been writing a lot of really excellent Mary Morstan fic of late: you should read.

Blood Shift by Toft. Mary Morstan and Watson find something necessary in each other.

five times Mary suspected Holmes and Watson were more than friends and one time she knew it to be so., by Lady Paperclip. Mary Morstan is visited by certain inescapable deductions. And also Irene Adler, which is sometimes the same thing.

Leaving, by Telanu. Holmes visits Watson and Mary.

Congenital Defects, by Branwyn. Mary Russell is visited by a series of increasingly wodehousian mishaps as the result of an inconvenient aunt.

Honeycomb Series, by LizBee. Lizbee has written most of the Mary Russell fic that I actually liked; this series deals with Russell's Jewish identity and her marriage to Holmes.

Suppressed, by Jane Turenne. Mrs. Hudson visits Watson.

Miss Madelyn Mack, Murderess, by Flourish. Miss Madelyn Mack is visited by sudden and unexpected violence.

...in other words, Holmes fandom and its subsidiaries are full of amazing female characters, and people should be writing more stories about them. Especially Mrs. Hudson, who I suspect has a lot of unplumbed depths. (I know there's a published series where she solves the cases and secretly feeds the clues to Holmes - it even sounds sort of good; I'm keeping my eyes out for it - but I am suddenly convinced that Mrs. H has been in the employ of Mycroft - aka M of what will eventually be MI-6 - for a very, very long time. Pre-dating the time at which she was assigned to keep an eye on his brother.)

****

And on that note, I just picked up the first Irene Adler novel (well, okay, the second, because why read a series in publishing order when you can read it in the order you find it at the public library). I'm only about ten pages in, and I'm provisionally liking it. But I can't get past the fact that this Adler is apparently a soprano. Adler's a contralto, isn't she? This is actually very important to her backstory, considering the different expectations of a contralto and soprano in classical opera!

Did I in vain spend all that time looking for pieces for contralto and violin solo? (Well, no, it wasn't in vain, because I found Yehudi Menuhin playing Erbarme Dich, which I fell in love with instantly and only wish he had a better contralto to play for. I want Madelyn's secret recording of Holmes and Alder performing that to exist in RL. Please.)

****

While I'm asking about minor canon points, here's some more, in various fandoms:

1. So a veteran of the second Anglo-Afghan war naming his dog "Gladstone" is roughly the equivalent of a veteran of the *current* Afghan war naming his dog "Gordon", right? People who know more about Victorian politics than me: What statement exactly is that making?
   
   I only know as much about Gladstone and Disraeli as anyone who's read "The Annotated Alice" far too many times, but the longer I watch Holmes-movie-fandom without *anyone* mentioning that the dog's named after the PM, the more I notice its absence.



2. Sarah Jane Smith currently drives a lime green Nissan Figaro, and used to own a bright red Volkswagen Beetle named Ethel. Does anybody know what model Volkswagen she was driving in "School Reunion"? And did she have a car during her Old Who appearances, and if so, what was it?



3. Can anybody get access to a copy of the article "A Pocket Telephone," Literary Digest, Vol. 44 (March 30, 1912) p. 639 ? I can't, not even after stealing my sister's JSTOR login, but I would really really really like to read it!



4. Is there anything anywhere in primary or secondary Star Trek canon about the cultural significance of male Vulcan hairstyles and/or beards? (Other than the obvious.)



5. I swear that within the last several years there was a find somewhere in England of items related to witchcraft that included what was probably a prosthetic phallus: does anybody else remember this? For obvious reasons it is difficult to google. Or any citable links to archeological finds of life-sized false phalli in England in the last century?

***

And on the off-chance you haven't found it yet: asexual_fandom now exists! And I didn't even have to be the one to start it!

So first! Apparently the poll numbers about most slashers being queer struck a chord with people. (yay!)

As a result I have acquired numbers for several more polls now, with no effort on my part!

( four more polls with numbers on slashers' sexuality )

Also! I have been corresponding in email with Anne Kustritz (theorynut, she who wrote the 2003 paper that Wikipedia cites. She wrote that paper while working on her Master's, has since gotten her doctorate, and wishes it to be known that I was far kinder to her 2003 paper than she is to it. Her doctoral dissertation was titled "Productive (Cyber) Public Space: Slash Fan Fiction's Multiple Imaginary," and it used an actual, rigorous ethnographic survey to argue, among other things, that, er, THE MAJORITY OF SLASHERS IDENTIFY AS QUEER.

The diss isn't published (yet), or freely downloadable, but you can read some of the front matter of the dissertation. She was also kind enough to send me both a full copy of her dissertation and the numbers for the two polls cited in the 2003 paper, and give me permission to post about it all! And I had a wonderful write-up, but then my stupid computer crashed and DW didn't save the draft and it is far too late to write it up again coherently! I will try to do justice to it soon, but I cannot guarantee it, because there's this job-type-thingy I am starting tomorrow afternoon at short notice, and I will probably not be online much as a result.

(Which also means that I will probably be very, very slow at both modding and answering comments for awhile: be warned. But have fun without me!)

( Here is the short, short version of that post. )

Anyway! That in no way does justice to the data, but it's what you're getting, because I sleep now and don't know when I'll be back.

ETA early morning jan 18: a short follow-up with more poll numbers + things /ETA

I was going to wait and post this later, with a much more elaborate stastistical work-up, population variables and meta-analysis - because I think it's interesting in its own right - but the ongoing conversation I'm seeing, and the extremely clear result I'm getting, is making me think it's more important to get the facts out there, than to make them pretty.

So: Are slashers straight?

I spent an afternoon and evening finding all of the polls & surveys of slash demographics I could that included a question on sexuality. Some I already had bookmarked, some I found through google, delicious, and following citations in academic papers. I'm sure there are more out there, and if you have links to more more polls I would love to add their data to my analysis. But you know what? The results of the ones I've found are pretty consistent, across a large range of survey population. And it is, to be quite honest, not the result I was expecting, even as a slasher who does not herself identify as straight, and is used to finding people like her in fandom.

Are slashers straight?

( Over half of slashers self-identify as somewhere on the spectrum of lgbqqa. )

So, over 9 polls, in a variety of slash subfandoms from the late-teens yaoi set to the mid-thirties meta fans set, dates ranging over 7 years. Only onetwo polls had less than 50% queer participants, and that wasone of them the earliest one, and even they were at 37% and 47%. The median percent of queer participants was 59.7%, and the mean was 61.5% 60.8%.

SO when people say things like "slash fans are appropriating queer experience", what THE MAJORITY OF SLASHERS, WHO IDENTIFY AS QUEER hear is either "you aren't queer enough, your queer identity isn't real" or "male voices are the only ones qualified to speak for the queer community."

I think the question of how queer women can appropriate queer men's identity, and the damage that can be done when gay men speaking about themselves are drowned out by women, are valid discussion topics, and worth addressing. That is not a conversation that is going to happen as long as THE MAJORITY OF SLASHERS, WHO IDENTIFY AS QUEER, are being erased from the discussion. fyi.

And SO when people say things like "slash is a legitimate way for straight women to express their sexuality", what THE MAJORITY OF SLASHERS, WHO IDENTIFY AS QUEER hear is either "you aren't queer enough, your queer identity isn't relevant" or "straight voices are the only ones qualified to speak for the slash community".

I think the question of how straight women's sexuality interacts with queer sexuality, and the ways straight women's sexuality defines slash, are valid discussion topics, and worth addressing. That is not a conversation that is going to happen as long as THE MAJORITY OF SLASHERS, WHO IDENTIFY AS QUEER, are being erased from the discussion. fyi.

Can I say that one more time? I like saying it. Science makes me happy.

THE MAJORITY OF SLASHERS IDENTIFY AS QUEER.

ETA: People in comments have pointed out math errors that change the numbers slightly: I've added corrections in the relevant places. The conclusions still stand, however (for now.)

ETA 2 early morning jan 18: a short follow-up with more poll numbers + things /ETA 2

con_txt has their first call for panels! Hooray!

Con.txt is a small slash con held near DC every two years, if you haven't heard of it. (badge prices go up at the end of the month!) It is my happy place.

I ran an utterly ridiculous number of panels at con.txt two years ago, and I have, um, kind of been thinking about panels I want next time ever since then. The first call is for panels that might require extensive preparation by the mods. Here's what I'm thinking about submitting: any thoughts or suggestions?

1. Ducks!: From Star Wars to Good Omens and beyond, ducks permeate all of our fandoms. What is their sinister plan of total domination? And is there still time to stop it? Your moderators will present extensive evidence of the conspiracy, including handouts, followed by group discussion about such important questions as "Jensen Ackles and David McCallum: Double Agents?" and "Did Bert and Ernie curse Slash fandom?"

2. GIMP graphics workshop: Offering another Fannish Graphics in GIMP, the open source graphics editor, this year; either a "basic crop & text icons" like last time, or even a slightly less basic one (easy photomanip techniques or getting started with coloring scanned lineart.) Or *possibly* a basic & a less basic, if there's demand.

3. How To Build a Community: How to start a fannish community, gather a tightly-knit membership, and keep posting active in the community; strategies, methods, and examples. You don't have to go viral to thrive. (Preferably, have at least one moderator who has done this successfully!)

4. Cosplay: why is there so little visibility of costuming in (most of) media fandom? Where is the cosplay for these fandoms? Can we have some at con-txt please? (Also, come to the panel in costume! Show off!) Plus, cosplay & crossplay basics for newcomers to the art, fannish fashion, and perhaps a box of dress-up clothes. ETA: with emphasis on cosplay strategies for people who don't have Hollywood-standard bodies.

5. Vidding for the Technically Inept (and Flat Broke): How to start with a DVD or download, and rip, clip, and synchronize to music. Overview of free or cheap software for clipping and video and audio editing; making do with limited hardware; good resources for self-teaching.

6. Finding deep time: Sometimes it seems like all of fandom before 2003 is invisible these days - and even more recent events are more difficult to document than they could be. Resources & techniques for learning and/or sharing about pre-lj (and pre-internet) fandom; ethical questions in informal fandom research; and a beginner's guide for contributing to Fanlore & TWC. Aimed at non-academic contexts but aca-fen welcome.

I volunteer to mod 1 & 2, unless someone else wants to; will mod 3 & 4 only if they can't get someone better-qualified; and am totally not qualified to mod 5 & 6, but I could flip flip-charts!

(Ideas I have for less-prep-intensive panels for the later call for panels: Fanmixer's round table; when RPS isn't real aka "Stephen" vs. Stephen; attempts at defining this thing we call 'fandom'; "Boston Marriage", or, when the subtext goes too far; and discussion circle on asexuality & slash )

I feel like I want to talk about Sherlock Holmes now.

Sherlock Holmes was one of those stories I was into before I really knew what fandom was (which in my case means before I turned 11 and read "The World of Star Trek", so Holmes must have been around age nine. A very good year, nine.) I found some kids' paraphrase paperbacks in a library, and read them all, not realizing that they were actually paraphrase until I ran out of kids' paperbacks and turned to Mom's big hardcover anthology with the tissue-thin paper and six-point type in columns, and stumbled upon Holmes shooting up.

...that was also the first time I ever felt betrayed by a fandom.

Anyway I got over it pretty quick and read the whole anthology in one go, and have read it through several times since, and come back to favorite stories. I'm not the sort of fan who can tell you details of things that happened in CREE, but I know the classic stories pretty well.

And I've never been much for reading the fic, published or otherwise, but Holmes/Watson is one of those pairings (like Doctor/Master) that's just always *been* there for me: I can't recall a time when I didn't know about it, and know the stories and meta would be there for me when I looked for them. ...I have finally started seriously looking.

So I'm very much a bookverse girl, and generally Watsonian in outlook. (I've really been enjoying the fic I've found that extrapolates the published stories as a deliberate caricature of Holmes and really play with the "three-point characterization" idea - ignoring everything Watson tells us in exposition and rebuilding a Holmes based on what he does (and giving him believably extrapolated backstories as everything from sex-toy builder to professional violinist to rent-boy). But I've never been that interested in any of the filmed versions I've met in passing; they tend to be insufficiently cracky and melodramatic compared to the books, and Watson is not awesome enough. (On those grounds I suspect I will quite like the new movie.)

Anyway, all of that was building up to the fact that I've been reading Mary Russell fic, in hopes of being able to contribute to flourish's Mary Russell & Mary Marston & Madelyn Mack & Harriet Vane & Irene Adler & Nora Noraker & Miss Climpson's SUSSEX DOWNS LADIES’ SEWING CIRCLE, DETECTION DISCUSSION GROUP AND TERRORIST SOCIETY. I have two things to say about Mary Russell, now that I have at last been exposed to her beyond the barest of descriptions:

1. Okay, let me get this right: she has very little family and a mysterious past that would make any Mary Sue proud, and she has a preternatural ability to get 'round Holmes as if she's known him for years. Meanwhile, Watson's role is minimized, to the extent he even shows up at all. And Mary Russell has a *scar* on her shoulder and arm from an old injury and an intermittent limp. ...are we sure it isn't just that Watson got tired of waiting for Holmes to notice him and found a convenient genderswap-ex-machina? :D

2. I really don't like Holmes/Russell as a pairing. I like the idea of Russell and Holmes, I just really wish that / weren't in there (which is why I've never been that tempted to read the books.) I would have told you, before I started reading fic about the two of them, that it was because I have plenty of canon pairings for Holmes. Or it was because I'm really bothered by the "older man meets young girl in vulnerable circumstances, mentors her, as soon as she's just old enough to not be utterly squicky they get hitched." Don't get me wrong, if it's done well enough I can enjoy it - and there's a certain het teacher/student vibe that I gobble up like candy - but it's not that one. That one bothers me partly because of the power issues, partly because it's just so ubiquitous in certain genres, and partly because of the implication-through-repetition that a man and a woman can't have that sort of relationship without it turning romantic.

But I've realized, upon actually reading some Holmes/Russell that was set in such a way that I could ignore their backstory, that no, it is much simpler than all that. It is simply that a core pillar of my Holmes characterization is that he is completely uninterested in having sex with women - so while I'll happily buy Holmes, Demon-slayer or Holmes, Porn-star; in order to read Holmes the happy heterosexual I have to imagine him as being a completely different Holmes who is from an entirely different universe than Conan Doyle's Holmes. I am okay with Holmes the totally asexual, Holmes the celibate gay man, Holmes the gay man who goes out to "special clubs", Holmes the gay man in a committed relationship, Holmes the asexual in an epic platonic romance with The Woman, Holmes who shares Watson with Mary, even Holmes who got badly burned in relationships as an adolescent and has walled off that part of himself so firmly he's forgotten where he left the key (which seems to be Doyle's opinion). I would probably even be able to buy "Holmes meets a woman who is so awesome he is forced into a crisis of sexuality by way of her teaching him that bodies aren't important but they're still fun" but I don't get the impression that's how Holmes/Russell was done. (and if it is, given that Russell was forty years his junior when they met, eewww.) I'm usually fairly flexible on 'shipping, but I think I found Holmes at a point in my life where I *really* needed a story with non-heteronormativity at the forefront, and Holmes did that for me admirably.

So anyway. Yes. I continue to wish that the Mary Russell books were gen, in which case I would probably adore them beyond reason, and meanwhile, I will have to console myself by reading flourish's gen fic about Madelyn Mack (my evil plan, it is working), because Madelyn is who Mary might have been if *she* were immune to men.

All of which is by way of saying that "Silver Buttons" commentary is indefinitely postponed due to my realizing that I could say most of what I wanted to say in it by instead just writing the prequel story in which Holmes washes up on Madelyn's doorstep, mid-"His Last Bow", at the end of his tether, and there is a certain Jersey Girl contralto on the phonograph and a borrowed Stradivarius violin. :D

I haven't had time to do much reading in the yuletide archive yet, but I want to talk about the fandom I wrote in, which was Miss Madelyn Mack, Detective.

When I was hinting around about what it was, elspethdixon guessed "a steampunk comic about superheroes fighting crime in 1890s NYC, that being the most awesome madlibs example I can think of at the moment."

She was incorrect: it's actually a collection of short stories and two mostly-lost silent films, not a comic; and they were written between 1909 and 1914, not in the 1890s.

...the rest was pretty much right. I was going for "A hundred-year-old book about lesbians fighting crime in gaslit New York City."

Since it's mostly only steampunk in that Madelyn carries a pocket telephone, and in that it's set in the era when most of the steampunk technology was actually becoming real; and it's mostly only superheroes in that her dear companion Nora is a girl reporter working for the Daily Bugle, and in that they are both very good at fighting crime.

But then, they're only lesbians in that ... no, actually they're fairly obviously lesbians to anyone who's read the book, and my yuletide feedback agrees with me on that :D

cinaed, my assigned recipient, describes the fandom as " - it's pretty much a genderswap of Holmes and Watson". It's not the fandom we matched on (there will be a post about that one later), but how was I supposed to resist at least looking it up with a summary like that?

The complete Madelyn Mack story collection is available for free download through archive.org, and the PDF is illustrated with stills from the films. The Alice Joyce website also has contemporary reviews of the lost films.

I started reading ...three pages in, and Madelyn telling Nora how she's a greater detective than "our old friend Sherlock Holmes" because women are naturally better at that sort of thing, and I was pretty much a lost cause.

So is it really just a genderswap of Holmes and Watson set in gaslight New York City? I have prepared a convenient comparison chart so you can judge for yourself!

( Convenient Comparison Chart for Sherlock Holmes and Madelyn Mack )

Final score: Sherlock 4, Madelyn 12 Madelyn wins!

Am I seriously claiming it's better than Holmes? No, of course not. Nora and Madelyn and the world they inhabit are fabulous and fabulously drawn, and as Edwardian genre stories they are certainly still eminently readable, and I am so very, very glad they exist; and a blatant Holmesian pastiche that consistently fails the reverse Bechdel is just so much *fun* to play in, and I really do wish they had a living fandom like Holmes has (or, failing that, they were part of Holmes-universe fanon!) But realistically, the mysteries aren't nearly as clever, as a writer Hugh C. Weir is no Conan Doyle, and with only five stories and two lost film shorts to work with, there's not nearly as much there.

And then there's the last and longest story, The Purple Thumb. TPT is ... problematic.

( Extensive notes on 'The Purple Thumb' and its problems )

( An outline of the fixit fic I would have written, had I world enough and time )

As for the story I actually wrote, as opposed to the one I dreamed about:

Silver Buttons All Down Her Back, 4300 words, explicit Madelyn/Nora first-time, gratuitous Sherlock Holmes crossover and clapping-rhyme references. I think it's possibly the best fic I have ever published, certainly the best I've done for yuletide. Damning with faint praise, I know.

( Notes on 'Silver Buttons' )

I really feel like I want to talk more about why Miss Madelyn Mack is so deeply awesome, but really, the story I wrote is 4,300 words of me showing you all why, and after staring at this entry for several hours days, I realize that what I actually want to do is a line-by-line director's commentary of my fic. So...there is going to be another entry up shortly with that.

Anyway!

If you didn't feel like wading through all that, here's what you should know: Miss Madelyn Mack and Miss Nora Noraker are genderswapped Holmes and Watson in New York city; they are awesome and every bit as slashy as their counterparts, only with petticoats; and you can read the entire book at archive.org legally: Miss Madelyn Mack Detective; and you should. Also I will so be cosplaying her at some point: I already have a vintage 1914 black gown and black lace petticoats a Victorian adventurer's magnifying glass and stompy boots and an awesome hat; all I need is some cola berries and a locket to put them in! (I really want to find & try some kola nut, actually, it sounds interesting.)

Here is a picture of Miss Madelyn Mack:

The internets has refused to cough up a proper cocktail recipe for scumble, and so I wish to inform them that 80-proof apple jack mixed 50-50 with ginger beer is yummy, and it's also lethal, because my body seems to think it's apple soda and I drink entire gulps before I realize that it's actually rather distinctly alcoholic.

(The stash of drinks has no vodka, but my sister and Rachel Maddow together have made me interested in cocktails. So sister had sonic screwdrivers with tequila instead of vodka & I had moscow mules with applejack instead & called them scumble.)

(Actually we had vodka, but it's double-caffeinated espresso vodka. Our hostess has been drinking it straight for several hours and is now both lit and wired. How festive, just like her non-demoninational holiday shrub!)

We watched A Colbert Christmas and then have spent the past several hours watching DVDs of all the Otakon vid shows for the entire decade of the nineties (because the parties I go to are just that cool), including the very first vid I ever saw (which was Ryoga Hibiki doing I Would Walk 500 miles in 1995. btw.) I am thinking about how much those old-school AMVs, especially in the humor vids that had a particular way of using literal matching of lyrics & images while completely (deliberately) mismatching tone & mood, shaped my vid aesthetic. Or I would be if it wasn't three o'clock in the morning and I hadn't drunk quite so much scumble.

Also I appear to have crocheted a mauve Dalek.

Everybody who is here tonight drew a party spink. Three guesses which was mine and the first two don't count! Hint: it is the Doctor Who one.

Now I am waiting impatiently for yuletide reveals. Perhaps I will drink some sherry and then attempt to write fic!

My resolution for the year: I am going to start actually finishing creative projects instead of just talking about how awesome they would be if I actually finished them. (To aid me in doing that, I am going to do more talking about them, too.)

Also I am going to get a job. And make some money.

So I am back from the Land of No Internets and starting to get caught up.

The most important thing, of course, is yuletide!

I got seven yuletide stories just for me. And they were (of course!) all for the anthropomorfic LJ/Fandom/DW prompt.

Serves me right for requesting poly: now I have to write feedback balancing how much I love all seven of my anon writers without making any of them feel left out or less-loved or like I'm comparing them with each other. But there is so much love to share around! Seven stories, all of them amazing and beautiful and great and full of the good crack. And I do adore you all, all seven of you (or however many there were.) I suspect I may know several of you, at least by network; if I don't, I'm missing out. Thank you so much for helping to make this the Best Yuletide Ever. :D I love you all in your own ways for exactly who you are, yuletide writers. I am blessed.

This is mostly c/p from what I left the writers for feedback, but I had to share the joy with my network:

( Four full-length stories: )

( Three Madness ficlets: )

...um. I may have somewhat over-used certain effusive adjectives up there. I plead the court it was entirely justified. Did I mention that the stories I got for yuletide were awesome and brilliant and lovely and gorgeous and perfect and fantastic?

(eta:the story I wrote has gotten a few comments and one rec, but as I'm fairly sure that's several times as many people as actually know the fandom, I am delighted by the response. and I think the story I wrote ended up being possibly the best fic I have ever posted. and I will still be promoting the canon at you guys like mad as soon as I'm allowed to. yuletide=yay : I think I need that on an icon.)

I just saw my Yuletide request go by on the new pinch hit list (it's #250, if you're interested in claiming....) so hello to my pinch hit writer, if you drop by! Dear Writer letter is here, but the important bit is that I will be quite happy with anything you write me.

And to whoever defaulted - I do understand, I don't hold it against you, and I have had such fun writing this year that nothing could possibly ruin it for me at this point anyway!

The family will be leaving in about sixteen hours for a week in the land-of-no-internets, so while I will try my hardest to get feedback to you before reveals, it might be a few days late. On the upside, this means you can keep sneaking edits and expansions in for a good long time! :D

I will be doing some massive yuletide squee posts *after* reveals, when we're home; I am so looking forward to that.

...And as a result of doing laundry for our trip, we have just had our septic system back up and fountain black water out of all the downstairs plumbing. \o/ \o/ And since we've still got over a foot of snow on the ground, we had to shovel the entire driveway and much of the yard so a sewage truck can get in. Tomorrow. While we're gone.

...So I probably won't be doing a pinch hit myself.

( ded melannen is ded )
We have decided that picture makes me look like the crime scene photos of the murder of a Jedi master. :D

More snow pictures in stellar_dust's journal.

Yes, we have gotten at least 18 inches of snow in the past 24 hours and will probably get a bit more. Being snowed in is fun, as usual!

But no, I still have not started writing my yuletide story. (There is Top Gear and Dr. Who on BBC America, and the other people I am snowed in with have put in on the tv machine...)

I just went through and gave access to basically everyone who I have reason to believe is reading this journal - if I missed you and you want access, let me know in comment. No obligation to give access back, of course.

I'm still not really planning on using access-lock much if any, but my *burning desire* to talk about yuletide has made me realize that I do kind of miss having the ability to lock if I want to, even if I don't ever bother doing it. If I do start locking things, it will probably be mostly wittering about wips, assuming I keep working on the wips I'm playing with, or to very specialized filters.

(Oh my god, folks, my yuletide canon has a [noun phrase] in the [noun]! Can you really put a [noun phrase] in the [noun] and have it be [adjective]?? Dude. And [proper name] [verb]s [noun]! [noun]!! And [another proper name] thinks it's [adjective]! How utterly awesome is that? And I'm going to have to figure out how to deal with [part of speech] - yes, in the next six days, thanks - it could be amazing (I'm thinking about using [Linnaean binomial] as my starting point) or I could fail utterly, and I am scared.

I may post that un-redacted under lock tonight. Or not, depending on how daring I feel. Feel free to play mad-libs in the comments. :P)

I also am considering finally importing my lj here, due mostly to the #$%@$^% annoying page-covering video ads they have on LJ now, but also the gender!fail. Haven't decided yet, though.

(also, I committed action figure porn over on jf.)

Reasons I should not be allowed to go to synecdochic's monthly stitch'n'bitch:

1. The Enoch Pratt Free Library is almost exactly halfway between lindentreeisle's place and synecdochic's place, and they do things like have everything-you-can-carry-for-$1 used book sales.

2. It's a room full of fangirls, and I do things like volunteer to write JD Nielson crossover fic, and then I'm expected to follow through on it.*


Also, here is a trick that LJ (and DW and JF do) that I have been using a *lot* since I learned about it - and I didn't learn about it since I started visiting DW headquarters: if you append &view=flat to the end of an entry URL, it turns off comment threading, so that every comment is top-level and the most recent comment is always at the end. I usually love threaded comments, but it comes in *really handy* for things like anon memes and fic battles and community modding, when you want to see the most recent posts regardless of topic without having to monitor everything or check every thread. And especially on DW, it's really easy to get to the original threads from the flat version.

*yes, I do still owe someone the story where they discover that Donna Noble matches Deety and Libby Long. I'll get to it! Swear!

Okay, I said I'd link to John Hodgman on QI, so here's John Hodgman on QI. It was deeply disappointing, though, alas. He didn't get to do much - they stuck him in as the fifth wheel without even a buzzer, and he spent most of the show getting talked over. I guess it kind of makes sense that he wouldn't work on the show - the over-socialized, over-educated, Northeastern child of the ivy league that Hodgman plays is essentially the same character as Stephen Fry's, only without the inbred superiority complex, shared cultural references and almost complete lack of an offensiveness filter that lets Fry do what Fry does, so Hodgman was just sort of pallid and unnecessary. The people they've had on to be American before have gone for the loud and obnoxious sort of American, which is probably what you'd need to be heard over the overwhelming Britishness, but is so not Hodgman (and so not the only way to be American.) I totally 'ship Fry/Hodgman now though.

(It also explains why I'm having so much trouble fitting John Oliver into the BBC RPS world - the character he plays is essentially the counterpart of Rich Hall's, and at this point would probably read as British to a British person about as much as Hall's reads as American to me - that is, yes, sure, but somehow slightly off-tone.)

***

Anyway! Meantime, I have caught my AO3 account up to all the fics that are listed in my LJ memories, which takes me to the end of 2006 and exactly 30 stories. I added 18 fics in 15 different fandoms - though as almost half of those were crossovers, it's not quite as scattered as it sounds. (I still don't qualify for remix in anything other than HP, though.) Now I have to find the ones I've scattered around over the past two years as I've moved around, and any others that got lost in the mix - probably half a dozen or so - and, um, finish some of the ones I'm 90% done with from the last ten years :P.

Here are four stories from the 2005-2006 period that I still like and wish had gotten more readers:
( BTVS/It's A Wonderful Life, SG1, SGA, and Heinlein novels. )

...and happy new year! Well, the new year was actually Sunday, but I am not good at updating when I plan to, hah. As has become traditional, Commander Valentine (the woman in my icon) has decided to give up smoking as a New Year's resolution, and thus will be sucking on a candy cane instead until she inevitably backslides in about a month. :P (If there's any place where the Christian liturgical calendar would be the official state calendar, it's Commander Valentine's home planet, Stephen Colbert's Alphalon.)

Anyway. While stellar_dust was in Maryland for the holiday weekend, she gave me a SIGNED PAPERBACK COPY of JOHN HODGMAN'S first BOOK OF KNOWLEDGE, THE AREAS OF MY EXPERTISE. It is inscribed personally to me, and he has drawn the dreaded H in sunrays - the sign for the hoboes to rise up and overthrow the American government - over the "Stephen Colbert Award for the Literary Excellence" badge on the cover.

The paperback edition also has - and I had forgotten, if I ever knew this - the original cover hidden on the inside, the one that contains a DRAGON, a SWORDMAID in a metal bikini, and a flattering portrait of the Author in one of the TRIPLE SUNS. So of course I had to make icons. :D

( 13 shareable Areas of My Expertise icons & descriptions )

ALSO HERE IS MY VERY OWN HOBO SIGN ON the Stephen Colbert Literary Excellence Award medal:

It is not for sharing, it is mine.

(Not that I will be in the least disappointed at anything I get for yuletide, but why did I forget to nominate Hodgmanverse?? --if I get any bookstore gift certificates for holidays I am buying myself "More Information Than You Need" at long last, and then there will probably be quite a few mole-men, furry lobsters, eagles of Hohoq and hoboes appearing in this space.)


PS: John Hodgman is on Quite Interesting this week! I will be posting a link here as soon as it is up on youtube.

...after all, the universe may be ending soon.

That's right - the Large Hadron Collider officially started up again today! And I just happened to have wandered into researching it anyway and noticed when I checked Google News. Who wants to take bets on when it's going to break again? :D

You see, there's a theory that the LHC will never be properly operational, because the fact that at some point in the future it might function means the entire universe wants it to fail. Which is why it has so far spent most of its time broken.

No, really.

Holger Nielson and Hayao Ninomiya, two otherwise respected physicists, have published quite a few papers on this theory. Alas, I have not actually read those papers, because the combination of high-level physics and far-from-perfect English very quickly defeated me. Sean Carroll explains the Nielson-Ninomiya theory (and links to his original papers) in his discovermagazine blog in a way that laypeople might possibly be able to understand, at least a little bit, although it involves imaginary numbers applied to physical properties, which I have not yet figured out how to make comprehensible.

But a) this theory is awesome and science-fiction-y, and b) I think it might actually solve a plot hole in my pet form of fictional ftl travel, so I have attempted to understand it anyway.

( Actual physicists do not read, it will just make you try to explain things to me that I do not understand. )

Okay, this is theorizing *way* in advance of the data and out in left field, but it is (according to above real-physicist's-blog and a few others, and my own vague attempts at understanding it) not *completely* off the wall, and in fact it doesn't contradict anything currently known. And all revolutionary scientific theories theorize ahead of data. The way to tell if a pie-in-the-sky theory is worth considering or not is to see if it is *predictive*: 'we don't have any evidence yet, but if our theory is true, this particular piece of evidence will turn up soon."

The Nielson/Ninomiya papers predict only one verifiable result: that the Large Hadron Collider will be plagued with difficulties, delays and "bad luck," and never actually generate significant numbers of Higgs bosons. The theory was first published in 2007, a year before the collider was scheduled to begin operation, and when everything seemed to be going smoothly for it.

Since then, full operation has been pushed back repeatedly due to difficulties, delays, and "bad luck", and the time at which it will be ready to generate Higgs bosons is not known....

(Do I actually take this theory seriously? About as seriously as I take the theory that the moons of Mars are spaceships that arrived in the Solar System in the mid-19th century. I'm pretty sure even the authors don't take it too seriously, considering the experiment they proposed is to set up an *actual*, calculated million-to-one chance, and bet the operation of the LHC against it, and if that million-to-one chance does come up, well, you've simultaneously proved their theory and the existence of the Higgs boson, and you can shut down the LHC and save a lot of money...)

(But it *could* be real, and that sort of playing around is important in science and nobody does it enough anymore, and also it's dead fun.)

(Plus, I can define magic as being the high probability of the occurrence of apparently unlikely events, which by this theory would be quantified as the effect of "imaginary action". And that's *lovely*.)

(Also, I think it proves Niven's Law backwards. And possibly that the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is nonfiction.)

Yuletide: Today I started reviewing my canon for my yuletide assignment, and OMG, people, I had not reviewed this canon since before I joined online fandom, and they are so together. Not even OTP MFEO together, they're soulbonded-domestic-partnershipped-that-was-an-incredibly-blatant-Kirk/Spock-reference-this-is-my-payback-for-requesting-Henree/Conway-if-this-is-what-they-gave-me-as-a-child-no-wonder-I-turned-out-this-way together.

I was also thinking "ooh, I forgot how much I loved the character designs, I should do some slashy fanart too" and then I realized that, omg, in [major canon art] Character A is totally staring at Character B's backside, in those skintight trousers no less, and can I really improve on that?

And then I remembered that creator[s] are known to be very lgbt friendly, and this is also the first story I can recall encountering that had non-gender-binary characters, and I'm about to go *completely* tinhat. It'll be brilliant!

This is the true torture of yuletide: not the waiting for your story to go up, or the anonymity and reveals, or assignments and requests: it's the fact that you find or rediscover an utterly *brilliant* small fandom that you are full of squee and joy about -- and then *aren't allowed to talk about it* for a month and a half. Being squeeblocked is deeply painful.

(Also my recipient - who is awesome, btw - also requested a fandom I've never heard of, but has minimal canon and is legally available online, and it's such a brilliant story that I don't know *why* I'd never heard of it, and I know a bunch of you would love it too, and WHY CAN'T I SHARE A LINK WITH YOU? It hurts us, it does, my precious.)

***

Archive of Our Own: I have an AO3, by the way: Melannen @ ao3! Invite courtesy of stellar_dust, and yay! (There is a rumor going around that all yuletide participants will get one, so I probably could have waited, but I didn't want to.)

It is still very obviously in beta, and I am making a list of things that are broken that they probably already know about, but it is still *leagues* beyond the last several multifandom archives I have tried to use.

I have uploaded all of my fic through the end of my monofannish period, which means approximately the year 2003, and that 90% of it is Harry Potter stuff. Going through old!fic, as many of us seem to be experiencing right now, is -- interesting.

( About my olden days in HP fandom )

***

British telly:

I've been posting old Doctor/Master fic recs at the best_enemies community on LJ for the past week. (BTW, if anyone wants a model of how to keep a smallish fandom community active, I really recommend looking at what x_los has been doing there.) The theme for this round of recs was to look for obscure stuff, so I decided that for my recs, I would look for stories that pre-dated New Who. Most of them ended up pre-dating the Web. I spent a lot of time on the Wayback Machine (and am pretty convinced that it's the Doctor's fault it went down over the weekend.)

Hooray for archive.org! Though there's nothing that makes you feel as old as someone saying, "Wow, that fic was written before I was born!" Also, I remain convinced that *somewhere*, somewhere beyond my ken, there is a vast trove of pre-internet Doctor/Master slash - many of the Powers that Be considered it canon, even, so where is all the fic from before LotTL?? I even looked in some online 'zine indexes, and there wasn't nearly as much as there ought to have been (but it was all in multifandom zines, because there were no who-specific ones listed...)

Oh, and there was new Dr. Who yesterday or something? I have been so unimpressed with New Who of late that I haven't even gotten around to watching Planet of the Dead yet - really, my experience of the Tenth Doctor has been that if there's an awesome companion (see: Jack, Mickey, Jackie, Sarah Jane, Martha, Donna, the Master) I will gobble it up, and if there isn't I'll just be bored and skeptical. I think I'm well done with RTD; and the bits I've seen outside of cuts makes me, um, less than eager to rush out and torrent the new episode.

I'll watch the next one, of course, because it's supposed to have [spoiler] and [spoiler] in it. I just wish I could be more excited about Moffat taking over; if only he hadn't picked another too-young pretty boy as the doctor, *sigh*.

But! You know what else started new episodes yesterday? Top Gear!

( More about British Television! It is like eating jaffa cakes: strange, bad for me and clearly low-quality but I can't *stop*. )

(ooh, look, the local library has Jeeves & Wooster in DVD box sets. I bet I could get Mom to watch them. She has to have run out of House and Bones re-runs by now.)

SO the thing to do while waiting for yuletide assignments to go out, apparently, is statistics.

(Have I mentioned lately that I love fandom?)

And since I requested dreamwidth/fandom fic, I thought I'd run some numbers on Dreamwidth and fandom. I moved here at beta, and settled in pretty quickly, and it's been really hard, from my cozy little spot here among you all, to tell what actually *was* going on, in respect to fandom moving here.

But when I was going through all the Dear Writer posts being linked in the yuletide community over at lj, I kept noticing that there were actually quite a *lot* of people who were linking their letters from their DW accounts instead of their LJs, and I was wondering if there really were a lot, or if it was an illusion based around what I wanted, and was expecting, to see. And then it occurred to me that this might actually be a pretty good metric of how fandom actually *is* moving: yuletide participation is probably as close as we can get to a real cross-section of people who are active in the sort of fandom that is on journal sites, and it seems like the site people link in their letters would be the site they consider their primary home, regardless of whether they crosspost and how.

So, since I was looking at them all anyway, I starting tallying which sites they were each on. And then I gave in and took a more-or-less proper random sample.

( The Procedure! )

( The Results! )

( The Analysis! )

( The Raw data! )

And, of course, the other thing that became inescapable is people really *suck* at writing accessible link text. Opera (my browser of choice - which btw worked perfectly with both yuletide signup & ao3, unlike other browsers I can name) has a built-in tool that will pull out all the links in a page, sort them by either text, location, or url, and let you do various things with them. It is very useful; I use it a lot around this time of year, in fact, because I can download large amounts of fic from index posts very quickly in order to read offline.

I am so glad I don't have to use something similar all the time, like people with vision, processing, or dexterity impairments often do. I'm not always perfect with writing useful link text, but I'm trying to remember to be better; someone on my reading page recently linked to a survey saying uninformative link text is the #1 internet accessibility issue, and I believe it now. I didn't run as strict statistics here, but the Opera tool made it very easy to run rough numbers: guess, on average, how many fans out of 25 on a page used link text that actually gives any useful information out of context. Go on, guess!

Something like 80% use some direct variation on "here". Nearly all the rest are something equally unhelpful, along the lines of "My letter" or "Dear Writer" or "on my journal", with a few that are just bare urls with no link text at all, and maybe, if you're lucky, *one* per page that actually says something like "fanwriter1's letter" or "fandom 1, fandom 2, fandom 3" that would actually maybe let someone identify it out of context.

I knew link text was a problem: I'd just never quite been smacked in the face with just *how* useless so much of it is. Put something in your link text that will let people identify it out of context, folks!