A five things post to make myself post

[melannen]

1. I have been seeing everybody's posts about the heat waves striking everywhere and I send you lots of sympathy. But also, I am tired of all the "you people from warm climates like the American South know how to handle the heat, it's different," comments. Americans do not know how to handle the heat, we just know how to throw more air conditioning at the problem until the entire world burns down.
   
   As someone who *is* acclimated to hot summers without relying on A/C, I have been sitting in my work, with me and all my coworkers in winter layers, wrapped in a fleece blanket, with my hands literally hurting from the cold as I type, reading the bit from our facilities people about don't worry, we're going to recirculate inside air instead of bringing new air from outside to save strain on the a/c (in the middle of an airborne pandemic) while being desperately jealous of those of you getting to spend time in nice old insulated brick 35 deg C buildings with ventilation and windows that open. (I go outside for lunch to enjoy the lovely 35 deg C weather and occasionally hide in the mechanical room to warm up.)
   
   I know that's not really a consolation when you're broiling. But please try not to be jealous of the large part of the US where everyone spends half their income trying to get cooler by burning fossil fuels and will immediately melt and die if their A/C ever fails (which it probably will because the ventilation systems are also badly designed) because their buildings aren't designed for their climate even before global warming and they don't know how to live in it. Save that for countries that actually do know how to handle heat.
   
   (I'm working on a post on ways to learn to happily live in 35 deg C summers without relying on A/C but it keeps getting longer so maybe it'll be up by next heat wave?)
   
   (For those of you hitting 40 deg C today though yeah sorry, *nobody's* jealous of that.)



2. On that note I just started writing a modern Southern Gothic Locked Tomb AU based on that agonyaunt post about the guy who married his daughter's bridesmaid but all either of them actually care about is the High Victorian house, because anything that will get me writing these days is worth a start and this is definitely the time of year for southern gothic, but then I realized I was basically writing "Rebecca but what if everybody except Mr. de Winter was a lesbian and Mrs. Danvers was actually Rebecca's ghost but only the protag could see her and also she was best frenemies with Mr. de Winter's illegitimate daughter who was living out her own separate Gothic plot in the background with her new wife's family".
   
   And there's absolutely nothing wrong with that but I feel like I oughta read (or at least watch) Rebecca first, so I'll be able to catch it when I reference it involuntarily, and I don't want to read and or watch Rebecca, so me and this fic are at a stalemate.



3. Which got me thinking a lot about how I really like Gothic (and its subgenres) in *theory* but I actively dislike or avoid most of the classic Gothics and a lot of newer ones, as part of my ongoing attempts to try to figure out what I think about horror, and I think with Gothics maybe it comes down to:
   
   
   • I like the aesthetic
     
   • I like the claustrophobic, stifling, incestuous mood
     
   • I like the focus on small-scale, women's concerns, and the actual acknowledgement of class that often shows up
     
   • I like the focus on setting and personification of setting! Give me a love story about a house or a town any day!
     
   • I like the ambivalent way it tends to treat with the supernatural.
   
   I don't like:
   
   • the misogyny (and parallel misandry, that often doesn't believe there are non-terrible men.)
     
   • the compulsory heterosexuality (or, well, I like it when it's part of the claustrophobia, but not when the story doesn't seem to realize any alternatives are even options)
     
   • the way the misogyny and misandry and compulsory heterosexuality often combine to put the heroine in a fucking awful happy ending
     
   • the frequent humorlessness
     
   • the horror elements when it leans on them
   
   
   So basically I want queer as hell gothics where people are terrible people but in ways completely delinked from their gender, and also who are willing to admit that sometimes you just have to laugh. Which I guess explains why I always want it in fic but am very chary about actual published ones…



4. A huge amount of my fandom time lately has been with Minecraft streamers, and I haven't talked about it here because at first I felt like I didn't know enough about it and then I felt like it was *too much* to talk about, and then I figured I could at least do an enemy fic recs post about it even if it really doesn't do 'shipping' like most fandoms do. –and then Technoblade, one of the most popular content makers and also probably one of the best people in the fandom, died of cancer way, way too young, and I just didn't know what to say. It's the first time I've ever been this deep in a fandom when someone who was still actively part of telling the story died, much less an rpf-adjacent one when the real people are so centered, and since I haven't really been talking about the fandom I don't really even have people who are also in the fandom to talk about it with. I was still working through his back catalog from a year ago when he passed so even the people who are fans aren't really in the same story place I am.
   
   
   
   The recent Minecraft Youtube stuff I've actually been keeping up with is the Double Life SMP, in which somebody modded Minecraft for - you ready? soulbond AU, and fourteen streamers have voluntarily come to a world where they will be randomly paired with a partner whose life is irrevocably linked to theirs, and they are having the time of their lives with it. (And yes, they could have just played with it as a game mechanic, but they are all 100% bought into the soulbond life partner roleplay instead.) I'm behind because fourteen streamers with weekly episodes = fourteen hours of new content a week, but I'm not super behind, because it's great to put on in the background. Anyway if you feel the need to introduce fourteen hours a week of canonical soulbond rpf rpg into your fandom repertoire, it's a limited series and a really good starting point for Minecraft fandom.
   
   Most of the people in that series aren't directly involved with Technoblade's close friend group, but a few of them have posted tributes attached to their Double Life videos anyway, and one of them really struck me, talked about how Technoblade's life should inspire you to work for your dreams and goals as much as you can, and that's a good sentiment, but I think he missed something important. What Technoblade taught me is that you should chase your dreams and goals with all you've got even if those dreams and goals are ridiculous and objectively a pointless waste of time, if it's what you want to do, do it anyway.
   
   This is not just about the idea of being a professional Minecraft player in general, though that's really a proof-of concept of the idea. But Technoblade was already fairly successful as a youtuber in 2020 when Minecraft really started to take off again, and during that period - when most of his peers were busy putting out as much interesting content as possible, networking and cross-promoting, putting nose to the grindstone on building their brand.. Technoblade was farming digital potatoes on Hypixel for 16 hours a day, because he had decided he was going to be the top potato farmer on Hypixel. This left him no time to do any marketing or make any videos or even do any streams (because the streams would just have been him repetitively farming potatoes, and he couldn't do those streams anyway, or even explain why he wasn't doing them, because it might give away his strategy to his potato-farming rival. His singular rival, because literally only two people had ever cared about farming potatoes on Hypixel.) It's not that Technoblade didn't do the research about how to be a successful streamer, learn all the techniques and strategies to game the algorithm and hustle effectively and get his content out there, the stuff all the other successful streamers were doing - he knew all that, he just decided he'd rather farm potatoes.
   
   Anyway it was objectively a pointless and useless and seriously time-wasting thing to do even by the standards of professional video game players, he would be the first person to admit it. But he did, and while some of his contemporaries may have gotten more subscribers or higher viewerships, nobody was more admired, and he will be always remembered as the winner of the Great Potato War. Nobody can ever take that away.
   
   So: do the stupid pointless time-waste-y stuff you wanna do in life because you've only got the one life, and it's not wasted time if you did stuff in it. Even if the stuff is the equivalent of farming digital potatoes for sixteen hours a day.
   
   Anyway to vaguely tie this up to the earlier topics, here's a really good Southern Gothic AU MCYT fic that wouldn't fit in an enemy recs post:
   
   devil town (100526 words) by hoorayy
   Chapters: 18/18
   Fandom: Dream SMP
   Rating: Mature
   Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
   Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Eerie vibes, Angst, Toby Smith | Tubbo and Wilbur Soot and Technoblade and TommyInnit are Siblings, Mystery, Horror, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Character Death, small town horror, sbi family but they’re dysfunctional as hell, none of them are bad people though. they’re just all a bit fucked up, religious trauma, mind the tags! this is a dark story pls be aware of that when/if you read, Murder, Blood, Hallucinations, kinda. it’s complicated., Implied/Referenced Skeppy, for legal reasons that was a joke, Angst with a Happy Ending, i promise it will be okay. you’ll see, Alexis | Quackity and Toby Smith | Tubbo are Siblings
   Series: Part 1 of we’ll make it another night
   Summary: The night Tommy disappeared, it went like this: Tubbo screamed the words that became his goodbye. He can’t accept that Tommy is gone, because that would be accepting that the last words they exchanged were angry and intended to hurt. So he doesn’t accept it. He’ll search for years if he has to.



5. Today is the quarterfinals of the fandom brackets on fictional_fans! Down to eight fandoms, and it looks like the final four will probably be Star Wars, Star Trek, Doctor Who, and Yuletide. Not exactly a surprising result, and yet somehow I'm still surprised. But you still have just over an hour to vote! Anything could happen!