melannen | This is an entry title

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1. I updated my journal layout. :D The crack in my screen means I needed to devote less space to decoration, plus I was getting tired of staring at that old fanart and the off-green - not that most of you have looked at it recently, I hope. I'd been putting off changing it because I kept saying I was going to switch to a proper, standard-compliant S2 style instead of the hacked-together S1-mimicking thing I threw together way back during closed beta.

The thing is, DW layouts are hard. It should not be this hard! Granted I've been slacking on keeping up my programming skills, but I'm pretty sure if I want to be able to get anything like the style I want, I am going to have to block out, like, two weeks just to figure out how all the bits fit together before I even get into learning how the language works. Seriously. I realize the main reason it's so hard is that, a, they wanted to make it flexible and useful for serious developers, and, b, inherited from LJ, and, c, CSS, but nothing about it makes any f*sking sense and the documentation and customization areas - and I know there are probably people reading this who worked on the documentation, so I want you to know it's not your fault, it's systemic - suck.

It's also hard because everybody who puts in the time to learn the system are people who really care about styles. Which is fine, but it means all the built-in system ones are, well, intended for people who care about style. Stylish is not what I want! Dammit. I want to be able to paint the walls, move in my comfy old furniture, and maybe slap up a poster or two. I want my old LJ style, which does only and exactly what I need it to, with no "design elements" cluttering the place up.

So I'm sticking with the hacked-together old layout until I have two weeks with nothing else to do, because I can actually make it do what I need it to do. Sorry, anybody using technology that doesn't like my tables.

(The new colors are scarlet and gray to express my unironic love of the Tropo Red site scheme, and nothing to do with any other fandom thing I'm currently into that uses scarlet and gray. Nope. The header image incorporates no reappropriated zodiac symbols and has nothing to do with that fandom thing either, I just like jewel-toned rainbows and knotwork. yep.)

2. And don't let my taking down the old header image convince you I've soured on cracked-out Star Trek crossovers! Why just yesterday I was talking with

sineala at length about how one could easily write wonderful Rosemary Sutcliff/Rihannsu-verse crossovers, following on her revelation that Rihannsu-verse is basically Rome in Space.

The interesting thing there, though, which we really didn't touch on in the conversation, is that Rome - at least in Sutcliff's narrative - was the Empire bringing Civilization to the Barbarians. The Rihannsu never had the luxury of being surrounded by Barbarians - they're trapped behind a demilitarized zone, and have been for most of their spacefaring history, three-quarters surrounded by the Federation, and the rest by Klingons. You could do some cool things there with the ways the Federation is - or at least pretends to be - a loose confederation of tribes; and the way actual!Rome wasn't actually bringing civilization to the Barbarians either, along most of its borders, and of course you could do a lot of interesting things with colonization, imperialism, and hegemony in general, but I'm mostly just staring cockeyed at all the ways it changes the meaning of Empire when you're bottled in the Neutral Zone and vaguely patronized by everybody around you. Which actually had always fascinated me in a worldbuilding sense about the Rihannsu, but putting it explicitly as a parallel to Sutcliff's Roman Britain--

Anyway. Which is why I will not be writing the extensive Eagle AU I outlined there where wounded former Subcommander Aquila, (a relative on his father's side of a certain nameless Romulan Commander) and his slave Esca are sent undercover into Federation territory to retrieve the Sword from the Empty Chair, because I really, really don't have the energy to dig into all that right now.

...I am almost tempted to start writing the one where Erei'Riov Llaekh i-Aerl - who has no house-name, because he has no house, because Hellguard - has long been assigned alone to a largely-automated monitoring station on the Neutral Zone, where he has been running a highly lucrative operation smuggling Romulan Ale across the border (with the help of some connections on the Federation side, especially an incredibly reckless Human tramp pilot named Connla and his extended family) which gets disrupted when a new Commander shows up - some disgraced nephew of a Tribune, sent there to rot alongside Llaekh - and starts being entirely too competent.

I was almost tempted to start writing that because I thought I might be able to do it without it turning into a epic novel-length thing full of plot, but then the Arcani wanted to get involved, so maybe not.

Luckily I don't have to, because

sineala is already not writing the Frontier Wolf crossover. :P

3. Con.txt panel suggestion time is almost over! I threw in a few last-minute ones and now I'm done, but anybody else going to con.txt should put in their own! -- right now there's only about 60 nominations for something like 45 panel slots, which means there's way too much risk of most of mine getting in. You don't have to be able to mod them! And even if you do, modding con.txt panels is dead easy and not scary at all.

(I am also being amused at the fandoms that are showing up this year! You know slash fandom is in a weird place when the fandoms that get the most panel suggestions are two BBC shows, a movie about Roman Britain that had seriously limited release, and a movie that isn't out yet.

...or possibly you just know that the part of slash fandom that goes to con.txt is awesome. One or the other.

...still. man. It's weird, Slash has gone a really long time without having a new American-network-show that ate fandom. Times they are a changin'.)

4. Went to the dump today, after spending last weekend tearing all the rotten bits of roofing off the woodshed. Is it weird that I really like landfills? I mean not that I have vast experience with them, but Deer Island in Boston is just refreshing, and today at our local place we had to drive up Trash Mountain, which is the highest point in the county, and the views are amazing. And all the recently-filled-over places have that look of fresh new land about them - they're meadows, unmowed but not yet overgrown, which you only get around here in very specific circumstances - and, anyway, I know that six inches under the grass it's probably horrible, but on the surface it's just really airy and sunny and pretty. And then there's all the stuff! All the human detritus, taken as far out of context as it can be, and yet still trying so hard to impart meaning to itself. I want to go back with no trash and just a camera. Would they think that was creepy? They would probably think that was creepy.

5. I accidentally deleted everything in my DW inbox in the course of trying to figure out how to customize a style (don't ask.) On the plus side, "clean out inbox" can now be crossed off the to-do list! On the minus side, uh, if you ever sent me a PM, I no longer have it.

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I keep telling people around here that we need to learn how to excavate garbage dumps because THE FUTURE. And they just look at me weird.

...you mean we don't already know how to excavate garbage dumps? You mean that old issue of Kids Discover lied to me? D:

Anyway forget "excavate". We need to learn how to mine garbage dumps. For exploitable resources.

No way, we need to protect them as archaeological heritage parks! Someday the giant dump next to Cahokia will be as big a tourist draw as Cahokia itself!

.. although we could mine them for methane, that is probably a good idea.

(Captcha: "The 5th number from 25, thirty nine, 8, six, and 11 is?" I have no idea what that is even asking, here's hoping I guessed right!)

...look it is not like there will be any shortage of ruins from 20th century America! There may, however, be a shortage of petrochemicals, metals, and rare earths.

No seriously, I thought people were already doing archeology in modern landfills?

If we start mining the ruins there will quickly become a shortage! Especially if we do it on a major industrial scale!

There are, but people should do more. And in the meantime you should go take pictures!

...we are already both excavating them AND mining them for methane.

No, really. Google the garbage project. The methane thing, I recommend back issues of the Wall Street Journal.

(To an archaeologist, every problem is a shovels-and-graph-paper problem.)

I think the problem is more about interpretation? The garbage project looked at individual people's trash, right, so they had all that great information about who dumped which items when. There are some people at my school working with material from a large urban communal trash pile spanning the 17th-19th centuries, so they're wrestling with things like, what can we learn from an aggregate assemblage like this that we don't already know from other sources, is it possible to address questions like identity at ANY scale much as we might be able to for a backyard midden, etc. I think developing a theoretical framework to deal with this kind of thing in historical archaeology is super important, because it's going to be the bridge between middens and dumps, which we're going to need to understand in order to do good archaeology past the late 19th century.

I know there are some people doing really interesting things in "contemporary archaeology" but I think there needs to be more done on how to really solidly bridge the theoretical and methodological gap between "historical" and "contemporary." Which is why I keep telling my friends that what they're doing is exciting and important and they roll their eyes at me. :D (Of course we also have to work on a similar gap between "historical" and "prehistoric" ...)

*raises an eyebrow* I think I've been doing good archaeology past the late nineteenth century since sometime in the late 90s, and I'm hardly the only one. It's not all about garbage. Refuse is only the fraction of material culture which is discarded.

But then, I don't really see a divide between historic and prehistoric, either. Or, inasmuch as I do, it's very wibbley-wobbly-timey-wimey.

And the garbage project wasn't breaking things down on just a traced-from-individuals level, either. There's also some interesting stuff being done at Berkeley about things people leave behind while they're migrating across the US-Mexico border, but it's being done by a grad student with a tendency to get artsy in a way which I think distracts from his actual work.

I also tend to think that massive collective middens are not generally providing us with much meaningful data until we start contrasting them with one another...which is a level at which the discipline is going to be resistant to operating at, because that would mean actually collaborating, which academics are shit at and contractors aren't compensated for.

Ooooh, if you write anything Rihannsu I will love you forever! Particularly if it is long and epic!

I... maybe! Someday! It's one of those canons where I have the ideas but I'm too intimidated to actually write anything. (And, yes, it all wants to be epic, and I'm still working on figuring out how to do epic.)

I'm pretty sure that the only way to figure out how to write an epic is to do it. I mean, there isn't really a half-way mark to epic that I can think of. Either it is, or it isn't.

If it helps with the intimidation factor, I will love anything you do in that canon. Just so you know.

Me, I have thinky thoughts about Saavik and her mother, and the fanon (I think fanon?) trope of how her mother has tried to have her assassinated a couple of times over the years, because she is a mark of shame. (Originally, these half-Vulcan bastards were supposed to be a mark of honor because you were bringing telepathy to ch'Rihan, but then the project failed and it was shameful to be associated with it, and Saavik's mother is trying to get rid of the evidence.) Anyway, besides Saavik and her mother, I have this idea that Saavik's Romulan half-sister (not knowing who Saavik is besides a Starfleet officer) was one of the Commanders assigned to the DS9 area during the Dominion War, long after Saavik's mother has given up trying to kill her and instead is trying to pretend she doesn't exist. The sister is on the station for some reason and is injured (which may be part of a larger action plot, I suck at action plots) and Saavik is there too. Maybe it's a strategy planning gathering, or something. Anyway, the sister needs blood/something else tricky to replicate and Saavik offers. Sister asks why she would do that and how she knew, Saavik tells her to ask Dear Old Mum, and skeletons start tumbling out of closets.

But I don't remember enough about DS9 to handle the chronology of it, and while I know what the beats need to be emotionally I have no plot that works to hang them on yet, and so this is just one of the many Vulcan plots that keep tumbling around the back of my brain. I love Vulcans. And Rihannsu Romulans.

Anyway, if you need any cheerleading or betaing for a Rihannsu fic, I am your girl.

Well, see, the "do it" is my problem. I mean I've made it - well, not even to the halfway mark, but to the 1/4 mark - a few times, just not, you know, to the end.

I've actually been getting a lot closer in the last year or two! Figuring out ways to chop it up into smaller pieces that don't trigger my anxieties, ways to keep from getting stuck, ways t make myself sit and write, ways to lengthen my attention span, etc. - but. well. I am not someone to whom epic comes naturally!

I sadly know very little about either Saavik backstory or later DS9 (I stopped closely following Trek canon, outside very specific bits, by which I mean Rihannsu-verse, over ten years ago) but that story sounds awesome!

When I set out to Write A Novel in college, a very wise person gave me this advice: if you write a page a day, in a year you will have written a novel. If you write two pages a day, in a year you will have written two novels."

Personally, for most of my longer fics, it works like this: I write as far as I can, get stuck, move on to writing something else ... but keep coming back, every few months, to reread, polish a bit, think about it. (In this period of time, my backbrain is chewing over the problem.) Eventually, I figure out what got me stuck and fix it and go on from there.

Saavik ... I only have one of the novels she's in, and that's Pandora Principle, which I highly recommend. It can be read as fitting into the Rihannsu universe. I've read all the other novels she's in, but it's been some time. ANd anyway, they aren't really compatible with Rihannsu, which is my canon, so.

Edited 2012-04-13 03:35 (UTC)

See, I know myself, and if I do that, I'll just keep starting new ones, and never get the time to go back to the old ones, because there is always a newer shinier one I could be starting. (I. Yeah. The ideas, they come.) Also, if stop immersing myself in a fandom/story, I stop being able to do the character voices to my satisfaction, so I can't really switch back and forth between several disparate stories easily. So I'm figuring out ways to get over being stuck quickly, to keep things rolling.

Also I've tried to do the page-a-day type things repeatedly since I was about twelve, and it just doesn't seem to work for me. It's not *just* a question of discipline, I have maintained the page-a-day thing for months several times, but what I get when I do that is unbearable dreck. Several pages every few days, or a bunch once a week, works a lot better for me - but of course that doesn't really work with the "need to keep things rolling" part. So I'm figuring out strategies to compromise between the two, at the same time I'm working on the habits that make it harder for me to do it your way. Someday I will be able to sit and do a couple of novels a year! I hope. It took me a long time just to figure out why it wasn't working for me, I'm learning more every time I sit to write.

Hey, could I send you a fic to look over? I'm writing for trekreversebang, and I think I talked to you a little bit about it before, but I'm about 2/3 of the way done with it and it feels really overwrought and dramallama and even after re-reading the Rihannsu stuff I just am not getting any of the feel for the language in the Rihannsu sections, and I was hoping for advice from someone who knows Rihannsu. Help! If you have time and would be interested, email me at beatrice _ otter @ haugensgalleri . com

Oh, crap, I never got back to you about brainstorming on that, did I? Now I feel terrible. ):

I just finished a re-read myself and I'd love to read it over for you, but I'm just about to go completely off-grid for the holiday weekend, so I wouldn't be able to get back to you until Tuesday at the earliest.

Cofax just responded, so I've got someone for now. I may still send it to you again on Tuesday (hopefully the rough draft will be done by then, and hopefully Cofax will have ideas about how to fix the problems. Or tell me it's all in my head, it's fine as-is.

I don't know anything about those canons other than a vague familiarity with the ST stuff due to TNG, but, wow, I would love to read things that flip the Rome narrative upside down and inside out. I blame this on being Jewish.

You have made me realize I would be fascinated with any Jewish reading of the Romulan story. Because yeah they have all these Roman aspects, but I bet one of their big national holidays is the one where they sit down to a meal that is supposed to resemble ship's rations and tell the story of the Exodus from Vulcan. (And they always leave an Empty Chair at the table.) You could go really fascinating places mixing that with the inside-out Roman stuff.

OOOOOH. Oh, wow, I really, really hope someone writes that one! That is one I could write myself, with some research, actually, if I weren't completely swamped. Well, and wary of writing something about Passover, as most of what I know about it either comes from the Exodus story itself (which only vaguely looks like what a modern Passover meal looks like) or various Christian versions of it people do for Maundy Thursday or when teaching kids about the Last Supper. Basically, I know enough to know that I don't know what would be appropriate and what would be appropriation, and that is a problem.

That is basically my problem, too.

On the other hand after leaving that comment I went and read all of the Passover fic on AO3 (well re-read, it turns out I'd read most of it already), and it turns out that one-third of the people who have written some are already subscribers to this journal. So maybe we can talk somebody qualified into doing it. :p Or if not, at least get a sympathetic beta reader...

... that is awesome, I hope it works!

I wonder if the people with more mainstream fandoms figure "Oh, someone else will nominate that" and don't bother with panel suggestions. Whereas I know my fandoms tend toward the obscure, so if I don't get them out there, who will?

I don't know! I'm sure that's part of it. And con.txt has always had a strong vein of small fandom love - I think there's been a Barrayar panel every year. The thing is, though, I'm having trouble with coming up with what the "mainstream" fandoms *are* right now! Sherlock (BBC show, never shown on US network television), Dr. Who (50-year-old BBC show, also never shown on US network television), Avengers (movie that isn't out yet) and maybe XMFC and Inception? I guess there haven't really been any new shows that hit the fandom zeitgeist recently - it's like in the 2000s there was this huge glut of SF-ish TV series, and now we're in a drought.

Well, going off AO3 and the thousand most recently posted m/m and f/f works, the most popular seem to be:

Sherlock (TV) (131)
Marvel Avengers Movies Universe (60)
Supernatural (53)
MS Paint Adventures (52)
X-Men - All Media Types (44)
Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling (36)
Bandom (30)
Hawaii Five-0 (2010) (29)
DCU (28)
Fullmetal Alchemist (26)
CW Network RPF (25)
Star Trek (21)
Mass Effect (21)

A lot of old classics, the new ones you mentioned, and . . . Hawaii Five-O. Is Hawaii Five-O really that big a thing? Now I feel behind the times. Anyway, I'm not surprised not to see Hawaii Five-O on the con.txt list, but I am surprised that X-men, DCU, and bandom are missing. (The lack of any anime panels is disappointing but not surprising, given the way fandom self-segregates. Although the existence of an "anime's easy, let's talk about other animation!" panel does kind of highlight its lack in flashing neon.)

Hawaii Five-O *was* a pretty big thing, but it sort of tapered off, I thought, after they did some fairly stupid stuff at the end of the season. On the other hand I think it recently started with new episodes, which might explain why it's up there?

I'm fascinated that MS Paint Adventures (which is Homestuck, of course) is so high - it's even above X-Men! It doesn't rank that high in any of the other metrics I'm using, but then Homestuck is a fandom that, despite being made up mostly of people outside the conventional media fandom circles, has wholeheartedly adopted AO3 as its primary fanwork archive. (I suspect if other 'outsider' fandoms - like say Twilight or Glee - had done that, we'd be seeing them on the list too.)

Bandom's in a weird place right now, I think, with so many of the bands broken up. Although actually, I'm kind of surprised that there aren't any RPF panels at all this year - not even hockey! :D There is a general superhero comics panel, which sort of covers those?

I was tempted to throw in a "screw it, con.txt needs at least one anime/manga/jrpg/etc. panel" general nomination, to match the "con.txt needs more old school slash fandoms" one, but I am still only interested in really old anime, so I might not be the best person to write that one up. Maybe I should anyway! I know quite a few anime fans are going.

Yeah, I would have gotten a different breakdown if I'd checked ff.n, I'm sure! Just figured AO3 had the greatest overlap with con.txt attendees. (I did kind of laugh to see the "We need to jumpstart Hunger Games fandom!" panel. It's got 15,000 stories on ff.n; I think we're more at the harvesting stage than the "making it a fertile ground for fandom" stage.)

There's one RPF panel for J2 and other CW network stuff, which matches with the AO3 numbers, I guess. But yeah, I'm surprised that's the only one.

...how did I miss the CW RPF panel? Oops.

And yeah, AO3 is definitely the best metric for the segment-of-fandom-that-might-be-interested-in-Con.txt. I'm just amused that Homestuck gets in there anyway, because my feeling is that it's not so much out of that segment-of-fandom (any more than Hunger Games or My Little Pony is.) It will be interesting to see how much more non-slash-mainstream fandoms start picking up on AO3 - I'd say Mass Effect is also one of those, off your list.

I'm kinda assuming Mass Effect is just getting a bump from ME3 having come out last month. I'd be surprised if it doesn't drop out of the list in another month or two, once the new content effect has worn off.

Man, someone should track this stuff. Stats are fun!

I used to use the Popular 'slash' page on Delicious for this stuff - it gave a really good idea of what the top two-four most read slash fandoms at any point were - but then Delicious broke it, and the Pinboard popular fandom bookmarks page doesn't really have enough different people tagging to work the same way. (By the Pinboard page, Teen Wolf is one of the most popular slash fandoms at the moment... but I suspect it's just that the entirety of Teen Wolf fandom uses Pinboard.)

Recent uploads on AO3 is a good way to do it, though! Someone should definitely look at these stats....

Do you think Pinboard will gain in popularity enough to be useful, given time, or is its nature as a pay site always going to be a choke point for fandom?

Teen Wolf actually would have been the next one on the AO3 list after my arbitrary cut-off point, so maybe it really is up-and-coming?

Well, it's useful *now*! I still get a lot of good fic from there. But the set of users (or, at least, users who are factored in as "fandom" journals - and I don't actually know how an account gets onto the fandom list) is small, so basically a fic only needs half-a-dozen or so bookmarks to be 'popular', which means a group of friends all rec'cing it to each other gets it on the page, and most of the prolific pinboard people seem to read each other's recs, which makes it less useful as a zeitgeist - some weird (but good) niche stuff shows up there.

The pay issue is part of it. And I think unfortunately it's still missing some of the functionality that made de.icio.us so perfect - for me, particularly being able to see popular links for any tag, but also some other stuff. But also del.icio.us was useful because there were so many people, from all different place, on it, and there was so much history there, too - unfortunately that set of people has become fragmented and we've lost most of the history, so I don't know if anything will ever hit the threshhold to being as useful as before.

And it's interesting that Teen Wolf was that high up! I've hardly ever seen it anywhere other than on pinboard, hmm. Maybe I should try reading some! (I had it confused with Big Wolf on Campus for a long time.)

Okay, now I think you need to write *all* the Sutcliff/Rihannsu crossovers. Clearly you can plot 'em, at least.

Also, as regarding Frontier Wolf, I keep thinking someone ought to do something with the idea that -- I can't remember whose journal I saw this on, sorry -- the plot is basically the Great Conspiracy, only twenty years earlier.

Oh, plotting I can do. Hey, if you want to take any part of that plot, you can have it!

It would be awesome to have a story that puts the Frontier Wolf people into the Great Conspiracy; especially given Alexios' relationship to the Dux Britanniorum. It's pretty obvious Sutcliff was thinking about that when she wrote Frontier Wolf, since a history of the Conspiracy is the only place the Arcani are attested.

(also I really need to get my hands on the rett of the Dolphin Ring Cycle books and read them already.)

Oh, thank you for the plot. I am not sure what I will do with it (*glares at piles and piles of WIPs*) but I think they're all really great ideas to just ponder. Alexios (whatever his name is) is probably going to have all the awkward conversations with Hilarion about this black-market ale trade across the border that he knows nothing about, you see, but he would hate to have it become some kind of problem that he might have to officially admit to. Yeah. Meanwhile everyone's heard of Alexios' giant fuck-up with the Klingons and ending up in their space and the bit where he had to abandon his own warbird after losing half the crew. Bad decision, really.

I'm not sure why she didn't just set it a little later and actually do the Great Conspiracy...

(Ha, I have most of them in ebook, I think; I just haven't read them yet.)

Hey, speaking of Rihannsu 'verse, was the Romulan Commander (Ael's former sisters' daughter) ever named? If not, would you be any good at making one up? Because I suck at that.

(Also. Did you get a PM from me a while back about my trekreversebang? It's okay if you're just ignoring it/busy with other things, but if you just missed it I'd still love to talk.)

The Romulan Commander was never named in her episode (and I don't think she was ever named in later show/movie canon), and in Rihannsu-verse, of course, her name was thrice written and thrice burned and never to be spoken, which I always thought was a clever way to deal with her lack of a canon name. I don't remember though, we might have gotten a name for her later, after Ael won - I really need to re-read Empty Chair because details are dropping out.

In other books, back when the books weren't all in continuity, she was given several different names. Memory Beta's entry has a best-case attempt in making them all work together, but tbh none of them sound particularly Rihannsu.

And I did somehow miss that PM! Thank you for poking me - I'd love to talk about it too. I'll send you a reply shortly. :D

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