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!

Comments

[ambyr]

Sympathy from one wool-wrapped library worker to another.

[msilverstar]

I hope you don't let canon Rebecca block you, it would be a shame to suppress your orig-gothick fic creative urge

[thawrecka]

1. Every time there's a heatwave it seems like there are people who think every other place that has ever had heat is more prepared for it than they are, alas. I remember a friend from Seattle telling me I couldn't understand what it was like to experience mid 90s F there (which I'm pretty sure is high 30s in celsius?) because surely everyone in Australia has air-conditioning. Meanwhile, a lot of people where I live in Australia actually have neither heating in winter nor air-conditioning in summer, and back when it was getting up to 45C train tracks would buckle and public transport would shut down. It's always frustrating to hear this stuff.

3. I do like horror elements in gothic, and I don't even always mind the overbearing heterosexuality, but the humourlessness and misogyny really can be exhausting. When gothic lit is good it's very good, and when it's bad it's just blandly unpleasant.

[vriddy]

I wonder how many comments around "you guys are used to this kind of weather, it's different" is preemptive defensiveness to stop people dismissing the ways in which we are struggling. Every time there's an extreme weather event there's always people going "pffft it's like that every year for 3 months for us" or "we have it worse all the time". I remember a recent unusual snowstorm in a country I lived in that didn't have the infrastructure to deal with it (why would they?). Like, yeah, maybe your state gets over a meter of snow every winter and people know how to drive in these conditions, but we don't have the infrastructure to handle it here so half a metre was enough to basically stop the entire country, prevent groceries stores from being resupplied for days, etc. While US travellers stranded with us kept making fun of it because this much snow was "nothing"...

I think your conclusion is the right one though: it does suck for everyone either way!!

[lilysea]

I'm in Australia, where we have 39C and 40C and 41C and 42C days in summer,

and I have multiple complex health issues that mean that, even with aircon chewing through electricity,

I get so debilated by the heat that I can barely get out of bed to get a drink of water or go to the toilet.

I'm 100% in favour of more street trees, more garden trees, more insulation, and better house design to limit how much aircon most people need,

but even with the best design in the world, some of us are still going to need truly ridiculous amounts of airconditioning because our bodies can't thermo-regulate :(

[princessofgeeks]

I hope you will allow yourself to write the fic without forcing yourself to revisit Rebecca.

IMHO you should finish it first and let it sit awhile and then if you need to you can A. check out Rebecca or B. Get a beta who is a Rebecca fan to Rebecca-pick it for you.

Hurray to writing.

And I look forward to your "living with heat" post.

[likeadeuce]

I'm definitely interested in your ideas about getting through the summer without AC, if it's not just 'suck it up.' I don't like being reliant on it but I'm not sure the tradeoff of feeling ill all the time + risking heatstroke for something that has a negligible effect on the overall problem is worth it (which is unfortunately the way we think of a lot of collective action problems, I know)

[hannah]

I'd love to read that post myself. Do you want to do another Zoom accountability session sometime next week?

[schneefink]

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.
Yeah.

[ruric]

I've actually seen a lot less - "you don't understand" posts this time around and a lot more "here's a bunch of tips and tricks for suviving high heat - grab which ones will help you" type posts this time around *G*

Even if there's been some confusion over how to build a swamp cooler and that we don't have easy access to styrofoam containers in the UK and that great though those coolers sound they may not be a great deal of help when humidity hits 50-60%. But all were accompanied by great advice on alternatives and hacks so again - massively helpful.

I've seen a lot more recognition of differences and how to deal with them (and as someone with floor to ceiling windows the tip to cover them in cardboard with tinfoil facing outward is one I'm definitely hanging onto for next time the temps rocket)!

[marginaliana]

1) I totally relate on the office temperature thing. Sweater and shawl for me, after I give myself heatstroke getting there on public transit.

2) The guy! With the bridesmaid! And the gothic house! What the actual fuck.

3) If you find good queer gothics, I would be interested in recs.

[wyld_dandelyon]

Maybe do a series of how to live in hot weather without AC posts instead of trying to fit all of it in one?

[ivyfic]

Omg read Shirley Jackson if you haven’t already. Haunting at Hill House, We Have Always Lived in the Castle, and The Sundial all have the claustrophobic focus on place. Misogyny exists in her books but because it exists in the world—her writing observes and comments on it. It doesn’t think it’s a happy ending. (Hangsaman is also a fantastic horror novel but I don’t think it’s trying to be. It’s a woman coming of age in the fifties at a woman’s college—so, horror novel.)

[azurelunatic]

I have not read Rebecca either, but the entire Locked Tomb cast was made for Terrible Personality based Gothic.

[skygiants]

Rose Lerner's The Wife in the Attic is sort of a mixed rec because I enjoyed it very much but don't think it quite sticks the landing, but it's very much positioning itself in the 'queer as hell Gothics where the people are terrible people and do occasionally laugh about it' space (and is pretty good on class, too.)