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.)

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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 )

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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.)