Entry tags:
This post appears to be mostly about poly. HMM.
First, two general notes:
My laptop power cord/socket have reached the point of non-working that it's generating more heat than power, so in the interest of not setting another motherboard on fire, I am going to be opening it up this afternoon and attempting to replace the parts. I have never sucessfully soldered on a motherboard before, so if I unexpectedly go silent, it is probably because I have melted my laptop, jsyk.
Also, I will be going to Boston at the end of this week, and then bringing![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
stellar_dust and her cats (and all of her stuff) back to Maryland after. Any Boston people want to hang out or go see Avengers again or anything? :P I'll be free... um, Friday. I will even have a car and everything this time!
Five slightly more interesting things:
1. I fixed my radio yesterday (the power of rubber bands!) and turned it on just in time to discover that Jim Packard had died. ): The world of radio quiz comedy shows has lost a luminary. (I had to change the channel while I was waiting for the radio to wind down, I couldn't take listening to Michael Feldman trying not to cry anymore.)
2. I have read Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, courtesy of a very kind person who loaned me a copy of the e-ARC! It is as if LMB read all the fanfic, and then sat down and said, "The last book tore everyone's heart out, I think I'll be nice this time. What does the fandom want? Hmm, they want:
1. Ivan
2. By
3. Ivan and By flirting with each other
4. All the fanfic tropes
5. Outsider POVs on Barrayaran weirdness
6. Random bits of worldbuilding filled in
7. Hijinks and shenanigans
9. People getting to be uncomplicatedly happy
I shall give this to them!"
...and so she did.
I am not sure how successful it is as an SF novel, but as fanservice I am enjoying the heck out of it. If LMB has decided that after making Miles Count she doesn't have any more novels in the series left, and just wants to keep writing fanfic like this for it for another ten or twelve volumes, I would honestly be okay with that! (Not that I would object to more heartbreaking works of staggering genius, either.)
...Also there is probably something wrong with me that I was more excited about the Aral/Jole than any of the actual ships, but YES, CORDELIA, segue from your traumatizing description of Alys and Simon's trip to the Orb into a discussion of your and Aral's delightful boating holiday with Commodore Jole, Ivan won't suspect a thing!
...she totally ships it.
Meanwhile, let's take fandom's favorite slash pairing, and have them marry sisters, because that isn't a tradition that goes back past Austen! Even better, have them marry sisters who come from a culture that is extremely flexible about monogamy, has no sexual taboos, and has slightly different notions of family. :P
(I have a friend who is male, not into online fandom, not much of a reader, but really into SF and has recently been going through audiobooks like candy; he loved Dresden Files so I recommended Vorkosigan as another long series the library would almost certainly have all of, that he might like. ...it is interesting to hear his reactions as he goes along, from a very different perspective than I usually get on that series.)
3. Oh and speaking of writers who should definitely keep listening to the fans, one of the ways I know that I have assembled a very good network here is that when I go to my network page, I always find interesting things based on what you all are reading. Yesterday, I learned thatdduane ships Nita/Kit/Ronan.
DIANE DUANE HOW ARE YOU SO AWESOME. (not going to follow her tumblr though, tumblr still scares me.)
/me continues to believe that bit at the end of Spock's World where Spock and McCoy head off to bed and ask if Kirk is joining them really was intended to be what it sounds like.
4. Speaking of poly ships, somebody at the poly panel at con.txt (I think it wasviklikesfic) recommended the Polyamory Weekly podcast as a good source for people writing poly fic who wanted to learn more about the ways people do poly in RL, and I've started listening to it, and really enjoying it.
It's exactly what I wanted - not advice or how-tos, but a glimpse inside a wide cross-section of the poly community - because when I think about poly fic, I often want to write people who identify as poly, and not write them in ways that would make poly people cringe; but all the people whose poly lives I know anything about are in fandom, which might skew things a little. Poly Weekly give me that! And "from a kink-friendly, pansexual point of view" which is even better.
Anyway, highly recommended, and it has me thinking about poly ships in fandom, and that one of the reasons I like explicitly poly fic (and in a different way than plain OT3/OTTeam fic) is that to be good at polyamory, you are expected to communicate openly with your partners, to be self-aware and responsible for your own feelings and needs, to be adult and compassionate, to think in terms of networks of many kinds of important relationships instead of One Person Who Matters.
Because yes. Yes please to all of that. And you don't have to be poly to have that, but you have to have most of that to make poly work.
...which on the surface makes it kind of hilarious that I am having so many polyamory feelings about Avengers movie canon right now, given that the people I'm working with include an awkward man-out-of-time with no romantic experience, an alien with zero emotional depth, two trained assassins with a history of brainwashing, a guy who's so bad at feelings that he turns into a giant green rage monster, and Tony Stark, who manages to make the rest of them seem well-adjusted by comparison.
But. The thing is, canon is explicit about all of this - and a huge part of of most of their character arcs is about becoming more responsible about their emotions and self-aware and capable of communicating effectively in relationships. Just for example, Iron Man I Tony would not be capable of poly; he can barely maintain a working relationship with his own AIs, much less any human people. But Avengers Movie Tony is working so heartbreakingly hard to figure out all that stuff, and doing it by way of things like communication skills and being honest about himself, and he has come so far in two years, I just want him to have all the people who can hug him and help him and take him to bed.
5. Oh and speaking of stuff from con.txt, I posted about the QUILTBAG on the new![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
contxt_lounge community. I was going to post a general crafting update here that included all that, but just the QUILTBAG part got way too long, so I threw it up there instead.
Also included in that post is the current draft of the Dalekling crochet pattern from two years ago, if anyone was still waiting for that. :P
Here's the photo and basic description, copied from that post:
The picture is kind of shoddy because I didn't get around to taking one until about five minutes before the auction started. Sorry!
It's a variation on the classic three-by-three ninepatch design, with each of the nine patches as a pride flag that corresponds to part of the acronym, clockwise from upper left:
Q is for genderQueer - I was going to just put the rainbow flag here, and leave the center square blank or something, but then I found the genderqueer flag, and decided to go with that instead, mostly because I liked the colors. (And because I knew that there's a fairly large number of fandomers who ID as genderqueer somewhere, and this was going to con.txt, and it would be nice to explicitly include them.) I'm not sure how widely adopted this flag is, but I saw photos of at least a few people flying it.
U is for undecided/unsure - AFAIK there is no flag for this, but I knew it was going to be a question mark; the rainbow patterned background was last minute (it is supposed to look a bit like the seventh Doctor's but I'm not sure how you could tell.)
I is for Intersex - I was really wavering on this one; I couldn't find any origin for it other than "somebody posted it to the pride flags article on wikipedia". But the intersex pride bloggers I found all seemed to be at worst apathetic about, and there weren't really any better options here, and I really didn't want to attempt to applique a ring with multiple arrows coming off of it, and also I really wanted a chance to use the blue/pink blotchy fabric, so flag it was.
L is for Lesbian - SPEAKING OF NOT WANTING TO HAND-APPLIQUE. Oh my god, that ax and triangle, I think it took me almost as long as machine-patchworking all the stripes on the other flags put together. On the other hand, the purple-white-black ax lesbian flag is badass, so I had to.
T is for Transgender , and it was way harder than I thought to find the fabric scraps for this, the blue is actually cut from an old set of Quidditch-themed bedsheets.
B is for Bisexual - not much to say here except yay this one was easy to do, only three stripes! Colors I had, mostly! \o/
A is for Asexual - When I first started thinking about this project, there was no asexuality flag, and I was trying to figure out where to find gray-gradient fabric for an AVEN triangle. Hooray for the flag! Much simpler, even if I still had trouble finding plain gray broadcloth for some reason.
G is for Gay - I hadn't made up my mind about whether to do the pink triangle point up or point down, until I realized I had absent-mindedly already sewn it in point-up, so point up it was!
Center square: Rainbow LGBT pride flag! I got the impression some people were confused with eight letters and nine flags, just consider the center your free space.
I am being grumpy-looking and off-kilter and out-of-focus because it was approx. 99 degrees out when this was taken, and therefore TOO hot to be wearing a huge gray fleece cape, even if it does have adorable nubby horns on it, but I did it for YOU, okay. (besides grumpy is in character for the Sufferer.)
My laptop power cord/socket have reached the point of non-working that it's generating more heat than power, so in the interest of not setting another motherboard on fire, I am going to be opening it up this afternoon and attempting to replace the parts. I have never sucessfully soldered on a motherboard before, so if I unexpectedly go silent, it is probably because I have melted my laptop, jsyk.
Also, I will be going to Boston at the end of this week, and then bringing
stellar_dust and her cats (and all of her stuff) back to Maryland after. Any Boston people want to hang out or go see Avengers again or anything? :P I'll be free... um, Friday. I will even have a car and everything this time!Five slightly more interesting things:
1. I fixed my radio yesterday (the power of rubber bands!) and turned it on just in time to discover that Jim Packard had died. ): The world of radio quiz comedy shows has lost a luminary. (I had to change the channel while I was waiting for the radio to wind down, I couldn't take listening to Michael Feldman trying not to cry anymore.)
2. I have read Captain Vorpatril's Alliance, courtesy of a very kind person who loaned me a copy of the e-ARC! It is as if LMB read all the fanfic, and then sat down and said, "The last book tore everyone's heart out, I think I'll be nice this time. What does the fandom want? Hmm, they want:
1. Ivan
2. By
3. Ivan and By flirting with each other
4. All the fanfic tropes
5. Outsider POVs on Barrayaran weirdness
6. Random bits of worldbuilding filled in
7. Hijinks and shenanigans
9. People getting to be uncomplicatedly happy
I shall give this to them!"
...and so she did.
I am not sure how successful it is as an SF novel, but as fanservice I am enjoying the heck out of it. If LMB has decided that after making Miles Count she doesn't have any more novels in the series left, and just wants to keep writing fanfic like this for it for another ten or twelve volumes, I would honestly be okay with that! (Not that I would object to more heartbreaking works of staggering genius, either.)
...Also there is probably something wrong with me that I was more excited about the Aral/Jole than any of the actual ships, but YES, CORDELIA, segue from your traumatizing description of Alys and Simon's trip to the Orb into a discussion of your and Aral's delightful boating holiday with Commodore Jole, Ivan won't suspect a thing!
...she totally ships it.
Meanwhile, let's take fandom's favorite slash pairing, and have them marry sisters, because that isn't a tradition that goes back past Austen! Even better, have them marry sisters who come from a culture that is extremely flexible about monogamy, has no sexual taboos, and has slightly different notions of family. :P
(I have a friend who is male, not into online fandom, not much of a reader, but really into SF and has recently been going through audiobooks like candy; he loved Dresden Files so I recommended Vorkosigan as another long series the library would almost certainly have all of, that he might like. ...it is interesting to hear his reactions as he goes along, from a very different perspective than I usually get on that series.)
3. Oh and speaking of writers who should definitely keep listening to the fans, one of the ways I know that I have assembled a very good network here is that when I go to my network page, I always find interesting things based on what you all are reading. Yesterday, I learned that
dduane ships Nita/Kit/Ronan.DIANE DUANE HOW ARE YOU SO AWESOME. (not going to follow her tumblr though, tumblr still scares me.)
/me continues to believe that bit at the end of Spock's World where Spock and McCoy head off to bed and ask if Kirk is joining them really was intended to be what it sounds like.
4. Speaking of poly ships, somebody at the poly panel at con.txt (I think it was
viklikesfic) recommended the Polyamory Weekly podcast as a good source for people writing poly fic who wanted to learn more about the ways people do poly in RL, and I've started listening to it, and really enjoying it. It's exactly what I wanted - not advice or how-tos, but a glimpse inside a wide cross-section of the poly community - because when I think about poly fic, I often want to write people who identify as poly, and not write them in ways that would make poly people cringe; but all the people whose poly lives I know anything about are in fandom, which might skew things a little. Poly Weekly give me that! And "from a kink-friendly, pansexual point of view" which is even better.
Anyway, highly recommended, and it has me thinking about poly ships in fandom, and that one of the reasons I like explicitly poly fic (and in a different way than plain OT3/OTTeam fic) is that to be good at polyamory, you are expected to communicate openly with your partners, to be self-aware and responsible for your own feelings and needs, to be adult and compassionate, to think in terms of networks of many kinds of important relationships instead of One Person Who Matters.
Because yes. Yes please to all of that. And you don't have to be poly to have that, but you have to have most of that to make poly work.
...which on the surface makes it kind of hilarious that I am having so many polyamory feelings about Avengers movie canon right now, given that the people I'm working with include an awkward man-out-of-time with no romantic experience, an alien with zero emotional depth, two trained assassins with a history of brainwashing, a guy who's so bad at feelings that he turns into a giant green rage monster, and Tony Stark, who manages to make the rest of them seem well-adjusted by comparison.
But. The thing is, canon is explicit about all of this - and a huge part of of most of their character arcs is about becoming more responsible about their emotions and self-aware and capable of communicating effectively in relationships. Just for example, Iron Man I Tony would not be capable of poly; he can barely maintain a working relationship with his own AIs, much less any human people. But Avengers Movie Tony is working so heartbreakingly hard to figure out all that stuff, and doing it by way of things like communication skills and being honest about himself, and he has come so far in two years, I just want him to have all the people who can hug him and help him and take him to bed.
5. Oh and speaking of stuff from con.txt, I posted about the QUILTBAG on the new
contxt_lounge community. I was going to post a general crafting update here that included all that, but just the QUILTBAG part got way too long, so I threw it up there instead.Also included in that post is the current draft of the Dalekling crochet pattern from two years ago, if anyone was still waiting for that. :P
Here's the photo and basic description, copied from that post:
The picture is kind of shoddy because I didn't get around to taking one until about five minutes before the auction started. Sorry!
It's a variation on the classic three-by-three ninepatch design, with each of the nine patches as a pride flag that corresponds to part of the acronym, clockwise from upper left:
Q is for genderQueer - I was going to just put the rainbow flag here, and leave the center square blank or something, but then I found the genderqueer flag, and decided to go with that instead, mostly because I liked the colors. (And because I knew that there's a fairly large number of fandomers who ID as genderqueer somewhere, and this was going to con.txt, and it would be nice to explicitly include them.) I'm not sure how widely adopted this flag is, but I saw photos of at least a few people flying it.
U is for undecided/unsure - AFAIK there is no flag for this, but I knew it was going to be a question mark; the rainbow patterned background was last minute (it is supposed to look a bit like the seventh Doctor's but I'm not sure how you could tell.)
I is for Intersex - I was really wavering on this one; I couldn't find any origin for it other than "somebody posted it to the pride flags article on wikipedia". But the intersex pride bloggers I found all seemed to be at worst apathetic about, and there weren't really any better options here, and I really didn't want to attempt to applique a ring with multiple arrows coming off of it, and also I really wanted a chance to use the blue/pink blotchy fabric, so flag it was.
L is for Lesbian - SPEAKING OF NOT WANTING TO HAND-APPLIQUE. Oh my god, that ax and triangle, I think it took me almost as long as machine-patchworking all the stripes on the other flags put together. On the other hand, the purple-white-black ax lesbian flag is badass, so I had to.
T is for Transgender , and it was way harder than I thought to find the fabric scraps for this, the blue is actually cut from an old set of Quidditch-themed bedsheets.
B is for Bisexual - not much to say here except yay this one was easy to do, only three stripes! Colors I had, mostly! \o/
A is for Asexual - When I first started thinking about this project, there was no asexuality flag, and I was trying to figure out where to find gray-gradient fabric for an AVEN triangle. Hooray for the flag! Much simpler, even if I still had trouble finding plain gray broadcloth for some reason.
G is for Gay - I hadn't made up my mind about whether to do the pink triangle point up or point down, until I realized I had absent-mindedly already sewn it in point-up, so point up it was!
Center square: Rainbow LGBT pride flag! I got the impression some people were confused with eight letters and nine flags, just consider the center your free space.
I am being grumpy-looking and off-kilter and out-of-focus because it was approx. 99 degrees out when this was taken, and therefore TOO hot to be wearing a huge gray fleece cape, even if it does have adorable nubby horns on it, but I did it for YOU, okay. (besides grumpy is in character for the Sufferer.)
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(I might give the dalekling a spin... I should say after I make my Hulk, but I won't :oP )
I will make an effort to remember to check out the poly podcast! I ALWAYS forget about podcasts, for some reason.
And OMG when you describe the Avengers like that... it makes me both cringe with how awkward they all are and want to squish them all for that same reason :D
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Not sure I'm up for seeing Avengers for a *fourth* time in the movie theaters, but I'm free after I get out of work at 5pm on Friday and am up for just about anything else.
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I am INTRIGUED by your Hulk, I hope you post about him at some point. I am so tempted to try doing Avengers myself! But I have so many other things on the list.
If you try the Dalekling, let me know how it goes? That pattern has not been checked as well as I'd prefer, so it may go poorly!
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I actually managed to see Stulti last time I was there! We just sort of had an informal get-together at my sister's place then, but since she will be in the process of moving, that prob. not be a good idea this time. Any ideas? It will probably work better if somebody other than me suggests one!
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I will make a post if he is ever finished. Urgh, the truth is I made the body (it's a basic 'snow man' design) but it turned out a bit wobbly, and I am not entirely happy with it, and ideally I want to redo it, but I already stitched it up, and now I am stuck in Indecision Territory. Unravel, make new, or press on? *hands*
I will definitely let you know. And if I actually commit to it, you'll probably hear from me if I run into trouble.
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Shall we shift this discussion over into an email chain, and maybe *peers upthread* add
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6. Random bits of worldbuilding filled in
Considering what's been rolling around in my head the last ocuple days, I think this is the part I am most excited about. Yummy, yummy worldbuilding and backstory.
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Simon made a hobby of the world's largest porn collection! :D :D (that was in the book, right? I didn't dream that?)
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(and, uh, I still can't convince myself that any Avengers poly would involve Natasha and Tony having any sort of physical relations.)
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So much Simon. :D So happy. :D
(I called Ivan having lots of cousins and got his middle name right! Other people, uh, got a lot more right. ;) Parts of it were definitely "hey, I read this fic!")
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And I... actually really want to see Natasha/Tony in an "all the Avengers are in a poly network together" story?
Not in "everybody in the same bed" fic or whatever, but, like, in a context where Natasha is sleeping with people who are sleeping with Tony, and it just becomes kind of conspicuous that Tony is being very careful around her, so eventually she rolls her eyes and drags him into bed and they work their relationship out (possibly with the aid of bondage. And possibly with no actual sex.) And they still don't become a pair after that, not like they are with most of the other people they're with, or even flirt or anything, or interact sexually if they're both in a multipartner sex scene, but every so often when they can't deal with anybody else, one of them will drag the other one into a dark bedroom for awhile. And their relationship is even more confusing to outsiders than Natasha and Clint's is.
...I told you I had *feelings*.
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...pardon me while I go read everybody's extended reaction posts now.
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IT'S FOR SCIENCE, ARAL.
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ETA: FANFIC ABOUT THE ALLEGORICAL FIGURES ON HQ.
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(ALLEGORICAL: THE SMUSH NAME OF ALLEGRE/GREGOR? NO, THAT WOULD BE ALLEGREGORICAL.)
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Also, now I want to read Capt. Vorpatril's Alliance more than ever!
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And By was never actually canonically confirmed as queer until this book anyway - fandom was banking on stereotype and scurrilous rumours, which always made me vaguely oogy anyway; I would've loved getting By a boyfriend, but I also kind of love that the camp, effeminate guy can end up being bi. In this book, it's pretty much confirmed by an unbiased third party that he's slept with all genders, and the relationship he ends up in is a) non-traditionally-monogamous, and on a planet where that's accepted, and b) with someone that confirms him as, by Barrayaran standards at least, openly pansexual. And his flirting with Ivan (and Ivan's flirting back, actually) gets a lot more textual in this one.
Plus we get a touching story of star-crossed ghem/guerrilla gay romance during the Cetagandan occupation, and confirmation that the ghem think gay is okay! And confirmation that f/f partnerships on Barrayar are now using replicators to have kids together!
And Aral/Jole yachting getaways!So: not nearly as good as it could have been, but better than I expected.
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I just ship. Like. Everything in Avengers. Except maybe Loki.
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And yes. Everything. And not even "everyone in a puppy pile", but "all possible pairings each in their own way, plus additional combinations all the way up.
It's not the first fandom where I've been that way, but it may be the first in which I've had this much company. :)
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Weiss Kreuz is probably the closest I've been, but of course it wasn't nearly this big. Saiyuki and Yami both had their shares of singleshippers who said dumb stuff.