1. Ebook piracy: the latest hot topic. I have been staying out of this discussion, mostly because: I have been listening to pirated audiobooks since before I could *read*, since pirated audiobooks meant "check the LP out of the library and copy it on to reel-to-reel tape." I worked through all my moral and ethical questions about the issue by the time I had hit kindergarten, with the assistance of the fact that *all* of my peers and authority figures did the same things; I had picture books that were photostat copies bound with brads; I had Boxcar Children books that were bookstore remainders with the covers stripped.

My father was a math and programming teacher in the early 80s; the county-wide department inservice days were the best thing ever, because Dad would come home with 5.25-inch discs holding pirated copies of all the latest Apple II games that all the teachers were trading around under the desks. (True story: I once asked Dad what the "kracker" did in programming, since all the programs we had at home had a "kracked by" credit before the opening screen.) In fact, I have never met a single teacher, at any level, and growing up a TK I've met a lot, who has taught for more than five years and doesn't routinely make illegal copies of things for her classes. When a law is that widely flouted (by pretty much everyone who doesn't directly benefit from its existence, and also often, quietly, by them as well), what you need to do is change the law, not human nature.

Which is to say, I got over this topic two decades ago. Can we move on and stop acting like fainting flowers about it? ^_~

2. Still listening to (pirated) Dresden Files! 3.5 books in have reached Step 10 in the getting-into-a-fandom timeline. Current fic bunnies: A Day In the Life of Father Forthill; 5 Times Harry Dresden Narrowly Avoided Learning About Slash; and Ray Kowalski Dances With The Winter Lady. Also did another meme fill, which was probably obvious to anyone who knows me and is reading over there. However, I've reached the point where I know just enough canon that I no longer feel comfortable writing fic without knowing it all, sigh, so that's stalled, mostly.

Luckily, the anon meme is keeping me in fic for now! Actually I was just thinking that maybe Dresden Files has finally cured me of politics RPF, given the relative numbers of times I've been reloading the two memes, but then Dresden Files fandom decided on its own to adopt Rahm Emanuel as a character, so I suspect I'm just cursed to read politics RPF forever. (Oh, Rahm, oh.)

3. I am almost finished with my mending basket! Which means time to start a brand-new sewing project, maybe! (Or go back to a years-old retired one.) The last thing in the basket was the Madelyn Mack dress I wore at con-txt and ripped the hem out of. It's 100-year-old black silk, so thin it's translucent in sunlight. I have a picture of my grandmother wearing it, c. 1930, in an "Old Hometown" history pageant; I have a picture of her grandmother wearing what might be the same dress, 30 years earlier. I was really, really nervous about attempting to repair a dress that's practically an artifact and such fragile fabric, too - until I actually started the repair.

I am at *least* the fifth person who has attempted to repair the hem of this dress! (And a better seamstress than at least two of them.) That makes me feel a lot better, and, somehow, love the dress a lot more, too. In fact, its value as a historical artifact may not so much be its value as a dress, as it is a record of Edwardian and early-20th-century home clothing repair techniques; this dress wears its scars proudly, and I'm learning things about effective and efficient repair just from studying it that even my mother's generation seems to have forgotten. (I never did get a picture of me wearing it last summer. Maybe once the repair is done I'll attempt a photographic record. Repair being done make take awhile - there is literally six yards of hem around this skirt.)

4. Last Thursday was the first 10 O'clock Live! It was not terrible! It could use some settling-in time, but it was legitimately good. It actually feels like it's kind of halfway between wanting to be the Daily Show and wanting to be something more like W$W - a serious but irreverent real current events magazine. Am looking forward to more.

...and then the next day Keith Olbermann signed off for the last time. D: D: He wasn't always right and he wasn't always good, but he almost always said the things that the American left needed said but was afraid to, and shouted them when they needed shouted, and now who's to do that?

5. I joined inkitout - the DW community to challenge yourself to keep writing all year - and so far, thanks to Dresden Files, am doing okay. But! This week's support post was to introduce one of your characters, and I was like hooray! I always want to talk about my original characters! Until I tried, and realized I couldn't do it. ( original character wibbling )

OMG, this was clearly the right time to get into Dresden Files fandom, it seems like everywhere I go there is somebody who is just getting into it or starting something new.

Look, there's even a Dresden Files anon meme as of, um, yesterday! And just when I finally got caught up on the politics one. And I offer free whuffie to anyone who can guess which fill I wrote! Not for which prompts are mine, though, because they're probably painfully obvious.

There are way more I want to fill, but I am hampered by being less than 1/4 of the way through the canon, on a lot of them. I am so tempted to skip to the end. But. I think I have just realized something about myself: Audiobooks are the *ideal* way for me to consume any fandom that I'm writing fic in. They take a lot longer for me to get through, but it's worth it. Because when I'm writing fic for a non-text-based fandom, the stories don't unspool in my head as text - I'm thinking in terms of camera angles or panel layouts instead of phrases and paragraphs, and it gets difficult to translate onto the page, especially if the story needs a close POV. But one thing I need in order to really feel good about my characterization is a strong sense of voice, being able to hear the intonations and accents of the characters when I put their words on the page, and I don't get that when the canon I'm working from is just text.

Good audiobooks combine the diction and structure of text with the strong voices of TV, and it's actually working for me. And I'm remembering that the first fandom I did a really steady amount of fic in, HP, was a fandom where I knew the audiobooks better than the paper books by the end, too. So right now I'm rationing out the Dresden audiobooks by forcing myself to put in 1000 words on fic on write-or-die immediately after every hour I listen. So far, it's kind of working. (The fic is blatant id-spill so far - I am currently whacking it hard with a stick in hopes of stopping the mpreg - but at least it's *progressing*.)

Also I am finally getting my quilt repairs done. ^_^

Anyway. While I was off being all proud of that, my sister went and wrote over 7,000 words of AMAZING and AWESOME Q/Captain Jack Harkness crossover slash, which is brilliant and which you all should read:

Qniversal Constants by stellar_dust.


Also, poall in last entry is still open. Please vote! I meant it about not caring if you knew the fandom or had any intention of reading it.

Between getting things done in RL while listening to Dresden Files, and finally making those two recs posts, I am in that place where I've done too many of the things that had been sitting for ages on the top of on my procrastination list, and now I am at the loose ends of maybe having to do the really scary important stuff. So, instead, here is a very scattered post of things-I-have-not-been-posting-about in the form of a list:

1. I still need to write more of fenellaevangela's yuletide fic. Because she deserves better than she got. ): I know exactly what to write, I even bought myself the offline version of write-or-die with Christmas money, I just need to make myself sit and *do* it.

2. I also need to post at least another couple of pages of How The Master Stole Christmas, but I appear to have lost my copy of the original in the post-holiday cleaning, so I get to defer that until I find it again. :P

Instead, I drew an illustration for philomytha's Vorkosigan fic The Earring, featuring Lord Regent Aral Vorkosigan going slightly native on his first visit to Beta Colony. (Going slightly native in this case = wearing nothing but sandals, a tiny clingy sarong, earrings and body glitter.)

( image under cut )

Want Dresden Files/Vorkosigan crossover fic now

3. Way back before the holiday, I posted my second entry in the Ace Manifestos Project on asexual_fandom: Charlie Weasley, the closest we will get to canon, and I don't think I ever linked it here, so here it is.

The ace manifestos project is still chugging along! And still taking sign-ups; we just had people claim John Sheppard and Castiel (finally!) but there's plenty more to go. I am debating what I want to claim for a third one, but all my first ideas would be hard, and I want to keep doing something I can just chuck out a few paragraphs of meta and some links on. The rest of you should sign up though, if you haven't yet!

4. I've seen that audio/dialect voice meme going around, so I thought I'd link to this: North American Dialects Survey, a study being currently run out of Yale that's looking for voice samples from people all over North America. It's just about as simple as the meme version, only For Science! And then you can do the meme one and share with your reading list. :P

5. I'm still behind on catching up with various fandoms I'm in that have current canon (the BBC RPS ones in particular. Ten o'clock live starts next week!!) I just started catching back up with lolitics, and OMG, the role-players have been on a roll since Christmas!( Cut for British Politics RPF stuff )

Also I want a Dresden Files crossover where Mandelson, Bercow, Cable, and BONE are all on the White Council together

6. RE: posting to the lolitics comm on lj: apparently I have been over on DW long enough that I have officially forgotten how to do lj tags. I had to actually look up how to do an lj user tag after failing on my first four tries.

7. CENTRAL MARYLAND IS GETTING CHEATED OUT OF SNOW. Like, three times so far this year, they've predicted a major storm in our area, and then gone "well, actually, it looks like the heavy stuff will be to the north, south, east, and west of us." !!! Not fair.

...on the upside, though, they are starting to talk about the Chesapeake Bay freezing over, and if that happens, I am okay with lack of snow.

(I know, I realize that severe winter weather can be very difficult and even disastrous for a lot of people - especially a major bay freeze, which can paralyze the ports, lead to shortages on the islands and Delmarva, and damage infrastructure - but it's also part of the climate and the culture here, and something we need. The Bay regularly froze over every 10-50 years, and it's something of a needed 'reset' button for the ecology. And, given climate change, I never expected it to happen in my lifetime - this may be the last time this interglacial that it does.)

8. Still listening to Dresden Files! Still enjoying in that trashy genre fiction sort of way! (The audiobooks also let me drag it out, since there is no more pairing!fic left for me to read, sigh.) Apparently, listening to Dresden Files right before sleep makes me have dreams about Pennsic War, and no, idk either, but it's consistent so far.

(Although, the night I put up stellar_dust's recs post, instead of Dresden Files I read two new Merlin AUs I'd missed before. One of them was about Medieval LARPing, which you'd think would trigger SCA dreams if anything did, huh? But instead I dreamed about the one with Sedoretu instead, which is okay, because I will take dreams about Le Guin poly marriages anytime.)

9. ( Here are some longer posts that I want to do soon, if I ever manage to find my round tuit. )

...okay, I suppose now I need to go work some more on the actual scary stuff, mutter.

I was going to save this to post after I had done some of the other things I am supposed to be doing (finishing up yuletide, making those two recs posts I owe people, answering comments, etc and so on) but it is becoming increasingly clear that I need to post this now so that I can at least attempt explain why those other things aren't getting done.

So, here it is:

How melannen Gets Into A New Fandom

( A Case Study using The Dresden Files )

Hi yuletide writer person! And whoever else is nosing around!

I am not a scary person to write for. Seriously. Write me a story in one of the fandoms I asked for, and write it with love, or at least sympathy, for the characters and the fandom and the art of story, and I will be over the moon regardless.

I know a lot of people mention things they don't want, in their letters, but the only things I consistently don't want are things nobody does on purpose anyway, so I don't see much point in mentioning them. But if you are worried that you might write something I don't want accidentally - in my opinion, yuletide is about having fun, and about stretching yourself by writing in new fandoms: I don't expect my present to be a 10,000 word epic that involves all my kinks, fixes everything wrong with the fandom, ends injustice in the world, cures HIV and brings world peace. I mean, I would not be upset if you did manage that, but in general, if you feel uncomfortable writing something in one of my prompts, or worried that you're screwing it up? Don't worry about it. Write me something that makes you happy and it will make me happy too.

Also, you can cheat: earlier this year, I posted a list of 101 of my bulletproof narrative kinks. If you include at least one of those in your story, use proper dialogue punctuation, and double-space between paragraphs, then seriously, you can do no wrong.

Some general notes: I love crossovers, and I don't care if I know all the fandoms. If you get struck with a crossover idea, please, write it! (If you don't that is also okay.) And if you get stuck on the matched fandom, please look at the other fandoms I requested, you never know, you might fall in love - and I won't mind if you don't know all the details of canon. My DW is almost entirely unlocked, and feel free to rummage around among the tags and old posts if you feel like stalking me more.

Also, if for some reason you need to know more, stellar_dust is my sister, she groks yuletide, and I am hereby volunteering her as a go-between, explainer of things, and general dogsbody for you. :D

On the other hand, if you don't feel like stalking me more - if this letter is already too long for you (it is, objectively, already too long!) - feel free to ignore it. Everything you actually need to know is in the official request. And if you're somebody I already know - as I suspect you might be, for several of these fandoms - good luck, and cheers. :D

Under the cuts I am reposting my requests, adding short intros and resources on the fandoms I requested, and then going into more detail on ideas for stories (which is one thing I am never short of.) I am going to natter on at length, because OMG, a chance to natter on about my small fandoms and maybe even have an audience!

( Compendium of World Knowledge - John Hodgman )

( Miss Madelyn Mack Detective - Hugh Cosgro Weir )

(  Their Majesties' Bucketeers - L. Neil Smith )

(  A Night in the Lonesome October - Roger Zelazny )

Signed up for yuletide yesterday! Wow, that was an hour and a half of hell. I ended up offering a lot fewer fandoms than I was going to, just because waiting two minutes for the autocomplete gets really tedious after about fifty fandoms. (I know I could have tried copy/paste, but considering they weren't really clear on how to do it in the first place - the only way to get the instructions is a video with no transcript, really, yuletide, really? - I didn't want to take the risk of doing that and having it come out wrong and having to start over.)

On the upside, you can now edit your signup without having to start over! So I might add some back if they come up needy. And the if summary page ever starts working again. 6_6 I have to say, it is hard to imagine that the old site could have been more broken than this... Also, this really pointed out that there's something seriously borken about AO3's autocomplete. I mean, not just it being slow, the ways in which it responded to being slow made it clear that the thing is not very smart compared to every other autocomplete I've used, which is probably part of why it's slow. Surely they didn't have to program the thing from scratch?

I suppose I should write my dear yuletide letter already. And update my journal tags, since I linked to the tags instead of a placeholder post in my sign-up. In the meantime, though, I went and tortured the AO3 more by uploading two other recent fest fics I've done:

Title: All We Know
Author: melannen
Prompt: Leonard Neeble walks into a bar and meets ... Jeremy Clarkson!
Fandoms: Top Gear UK, Daniel Pinkwaterverse (Alan Mendelsohn the Boy From Mars)
Word Count: 3200
Content Notes: G, gen with background pairing. Possibly contains spoilers for recent events involving the Stig.
Summary:Apparently being married to the Deputy High Commissioner for Extra-Martian Transport means, like it or not, that Leonard is the go-to guy for all the assorted fugitives, refugees, entrepreneurs, castaways, and very lost tourists that wind up stranded on Earth.

Read at All We Know at intoabar
Read at All We Know at AO3


Title:Within, Enemy (The Breathe Through Me remix)
Author:Melannen
Remix of: Within Enemy by astrogirl
Characters:Ainley!Master, Four, Tremas, with Doctor/Master and Doctor/Tremas heavily implied
Categories: PG-ish, slashy gen, 1100 words
Notes: This story is about the Master, and what he did with Tremas's body, so while there is no sexual content in it, there is, sort of inherently, severe violation of bodily autonomy.
Summary:This is what happened, the time the Master tried to steal himself a body, the time it actually worked.

Read Within Enemy at doctor-and-master with bonus meta
Read Within Enemy at AO3


One thing that crossposting those to communities pointed out to me was that the one thing that makes AO3 home to me, above all, is that AO3 takes everything. AO3 lets you design your own categories, and choose how to use theirs. Every time I post fic somewhere other than AO3, I have to spend precious cycles trying to figure out how to label it.

( Ramble about labels and categories and communities )

( Ramble about writing in small fandoms when it isn't yuletide season. )

Anyway, the other interesting thing I noticed in doing the crossposting: I treat DW communities much differently from LJ ones. In that I'm much more comfortable posting to them. Maybe because, for some reason, I feel a greater sense of ownership of them here? I dunno, but I'm not the only one - intobar had an lj and a dw mirror, and looking down the masterlist, on the lj side, 29 out of 40 people chose to post to a personal journal rather than an external archive or directly to the community. On the DW side, only 9 out of 38 did. Which is an interesting commentary on the perception that DW is all about personal journals.

...which immediately brings up the question of whether I want to repeat last year's statistical analysis of yuletide letter hosts. Hmm. Have a while to decide, anyway.
29/40

1. I refuse to write, or post, or even start, a dear yuletide letter when nominations aren't even open yet. Sorry! (Well, I did do the relevant astronomical calculations, but that doesn't count.)

I have gone through and figured out what I'm offering, though. Since the time is significantly shorter this year, I decided I'm only offering fandoms that make me go "Ooh, yes! I want an excuse to reread/rewatch that in a hurry!" (as opposed to the usual criterion, which is "Ooh, I wish that had more fic, I bet I could acquire canon by the deadline." As a result, I'm only offering somewhere around 115 fandoms this time (depending on how the final list handles duplicates.)

2. A couple of days ago I got my sign-ups and induction stuff to be an AO3 tag wrangler. Which, yay? But I thought they weren't signing anyone up until after yuletide? And in fact wrangling is closed until after yuletide? So other than read through the docs, I am not sure what I am supposed to be doing about my new tag wrangler status. Other than continuing to lurk the chatroom, obvs. (Oh, AO3, your communication skills at the moment are so inspiring.)

3. I don't know how helpful this will be, but the long-running rift between two segments of fandom (with other segments chiming in from the sidelines) which has suddenly broken off the scabs and started bleeding again, hurts. I see it in a split down fandom communities; down my own circle of friends; and down my own self. So, I want to do this, if only for myself; and I would love to see other people do it, too; I don't know if it will help heal the rift, but it might help some of us across it.

I am a fan, I am a geek. I have always been. You may, reading this journal or my comments, get the impression that I am a slash fan and/or a media fan - and I will admit, my primary allegiance is to that community. But that's not all I am. That is the last, and in some ways the least, of my fannish IDs. What else am I? Well, in roughly chronological order:

( I am a fan of genre fiction. )

( I am a math, science, and tech geek. )

( I am a science fiction fan. )

( I am a comics fan. )

( I am an anime/manga fan. )

( I am a media fan and a slash fan. )


...wow, I totally didn't intend that to be the effect, but I am kind of filled with love and awesome and sparkles now after writing that. Love and awesome and sparkles to all fans everywhere, regardless of what kind of fans you are!

I just had a dream that there exists an episode of Star Trek: The Animated Series in which certain department heads on the U.S.S. Enterprise (headed by Captain Kirk) had taken to buying antique hardcovers of classic novels and leaving them lying around the Engineering break rooms in an attempt to wean Scotty off his technical manuals by giving him books that are beautiful hardware in their own right, with the result that Scotty and Cupcake and several other Engineering redshirts have started an enthusiastic book club that is reading the Valdemar novels.

And this animated episode I was watching even included a fairly long segment of what was actually happening in the novel they were discussing, in which Vanyel was drawn to quite closely resemble Spock in a glittery lavender version of Vulcan robes, and spent most of his time crying. In the rain. (As basically all I know about Valdemar is that Vanyel is gay and tragic, there are soulbonded horses, and the covers of my copies are pink and purple and sparkle, I'm kind of impressed with my brain for coming up with that. And traumatized.)

I'm not sure if I want to write that story more or less than I now want the Hot Fuzz story where Danny lends Nick the Valdemar books.

****

Anyway, I've been kind of vaguely following the FictionAlley vs. Pepsi controversy, and while it would probably be smarter of me not to, I feel compelled to add my $.02 American. (Look, me reading up on the intersection of neoliberal capitalism and self-enforced gift economies totally counts as research for my NaNo, okay? And sadly, that's actually true, and I only just now realized that part of what the economics in my novel is commenting on is fandom.)

( This whole meta section here is just so I don't feel like I made a post just to talk about Scotty and Vanyel, because my subconscious thinks you guys expect more than that of me. If Scotty and Vanyel is a sufficient post for you, please do skip this section. )

1. Everybody who knows anything about British politics in the last 20 years should go read the THoC shared AU on the lolitics meme.

The House of Commons is an AU that postulates that BBC Parliament is in fact Britain's longest-running sitcom/drama, and the AU exists entirely in the form of press clippings with behind-the-scenes articles and interviews with actors on the show.

It encapsulates everything that draws me to RPF fandoms: the fact that things happen and characters get starring roles that would *never* happen in a fiction verse, because they would simply be too overdramatic and too unlikely and to difficult to sell; the way we use RPF both to comment on real events, and to re-write them into a better world; the layers of reality and unreality, that wrap public figures' personae, both in RPF and in the mainstream press; the alternating detachment and overinvestment that come with modern media coverage, the way press information is filtered and turned into a story; and also the sheer collective fun of it all, of course, all wrapped up in a lovely package of fluffy fourth-wall-breaking meta fic.

It currently exists as six "articles" on the anon meme and growing, and they are all, universally, brilliant. Even if you usually squick on RPF, you should still go read; the stories are all about the fictional 'actors' who play the RL characters and their experiences, so it shouldn't trip anyone's privacy buttons (and it's g-rated, of course.) I love it so much.

(The other really amazing group AU currently going over there is the Strap!Verse, which postulates that party loyalty in the British Parliament is really enforced with whips. And canes. And straps. And bare-hand spankings. But I don't suggest you try that one unless you are already comfortable with RPF kink. And have an afternoon free - it has about 30 heavily interconnected stories already.)

2. 10 O'Clock Live is really happening! 10 O'Clock Live is the new weekly British fake news show starring David Mitchell, Charlie Brooker, Jimmy Carr, and Lauren Laverne. As someone said on the Charlie Brooker community, this is either going to fail miserably or turn into the next Top Gear.

In the meantime, the new trailer on Youtube is making me very very happy. :D

Also HIGNFY is back, and I am totally writing a boarding school AU where Paul and Ian are classmates and make life hell for all of the teachers, because they can't be expelled now that Ian has photographic evidence of Headmaster Deayton's little coke-and-whores problem. (Causing trouble in Mr. Clarkson's chemistry class is difficult, though, because he usually manages to accidentally set something on fire himself before they get a chance to.)

3. Oh, if anybody wants an invite to the SEKRIT TORRENT SITE for British television, I have two to give out now!

(I believe the SEKRIT TORRENT SITE for Australian/Canadian/occasionally another Commonwealth country television is still in open membership; if you want to know how to sign up I can tell you.)

Also, if anybody wants an invite to Demonoid, I am not sure how many I have? But probably enough for anybody here who asks for one. Lots.

I also have an AO3 invite and lots of DW invites, while I'm at it.

Drop a comment here or a PM and I'll PM you with a code if you want any of those, first-come-first-served, no questions asked.

4. I am still not doing NaNo with a barely-disguised lolitics RPF sci-fi AU, but I did reactivate my NaNo account. With its less-than-10,000 user number. I may try to find any of y'all who are doing it this year and buddy you there, if I can figure out who.

Also I went and drew a cover image for it. Because I'd been staring at lots of great old SF paperbacks covers from the '70s while cleaning the things, obviously, and not because I'm actually going to write the thing.

But, I know a couple of times on gimp_gate people have asked for tutorials with scanned art and comics-style work. Would anybody be interested in a detail tutorial on my method for taking a pen-and-ink drawing and turning it into something that looks like this - computer colored and shaded and vaguely slick - using nothing but freeware, a digital camera, and a laptop touchpad?

You guys, I feel like a fic-finishing and obligation-meeting machine right now.

Not that I actually am, but I got my remix_duello fic in on time! I was going "OMG REMIXING IS HARD FOLKS" but then I realized, hey, wait, it's a remix, that means whenever I get stuck I can just crib from the original, which is *awesome*. It is probably not great by the standards of real remix connoisseurs, and I may have stretched the boundaries of what counts as a remix too much, but I'm (mostly) happy with it, and hay, meeting of deadlines happened, which means, because the AO3 challenge set-up is awesome, I now have a couple of no-pressure weeks to keep tinkering with it. Also I am looking at the melee prompts and trying to convince myself I don't need to start stories for any of them, no matter how much I want to, because I still have way too many other works in progress, plus kink_bingo and who knows what else.

I did, however, finish a five-month-standing WIP on the lolitics meme! And guys, guys, OMG, this is the first time I have *ever* finished something I started posting as a WIP and didn't finish within that first push of energy. I usually try to stay anon on these things at least for awhile but I kind of want to just strew sparkles around in general.

Also said story was coming-out and GLBT-activism themed, so it seems like a good segue into talking about Coming Out Day. Coming Out Day, as a day set up to help people claim a GLBT identity, always left me feeling left out and confused even as I was happy for the people who did come out. Because it took me a long time to find an identity I felt like I could claim. And even now that I'm fairly comfortable with it in myself? I still feel like I can't come out, like I don't belong in the coming-out narrative.

But, screw it. If I can write a fictional character's coming out, I can write my own. So, hi! You've probably already figured it out, but I don't know if I've ever exactly announced it before, so: I'm asexual, which means I have never experienced sexual attraction to anyone, male or female or other; and I'm aromantic, which means I've never particularly wanted to have a romantic relationship, or really understood what the point of them are.

( On coming out as asexual )

Anyway! I am also well in to finishing my intobar fic, weeks and weeks before the deadline! ...is there anybody who knows both Top Gear and Alan Mendelsohn, The Boy From Mars who wants to be first reader for ~3000 words worth of crossover? Since I actually have breathing space for a first reader, for once? (I suspect there *is* nobody else who's in to both Top Gear and Alan Mendelsohn, though.)

All of the above means I'm officially better off in terms of deadlines and missed deadlines hanging over my head than I was at the beginning of the summer! \o/ (By any sane standards, I'm still about to be buried, but I'm so used to that state of affairs that any lessening feels amazing.)

Also, common_nature seems to have picked up enough momentum that it might just keep rolling on its own, so I don't have that hanging over me as much either! Now I have to resist the temptation to start more communities. (The rules is no starting new communities until scheduled posting happens. No matter how much I want there to be materiality, the common_nature sister community for man-made stuff - and more_cowbell, the music sharing community for people whose main criteria for acquiring music is "I can't believe somebody actually thought it was a good idea to record that!")

And I'm, like, 75% caught up on my LibraryThing Recently-Read Reviews! Amazing. There's still, like, a whole pile of cryptozoology books, and a whole pile of Star Trek novels, and the read-not-owned list, and a huge pile of started-but-not-finished, but I am amazed that I actually broke through the block and did it at all.

Also, while I was organizing files & stuff around my new hard drive, I went ahead and updated my AO3 account and my DeviantArt account. My dA account has about a year's worth of mostly fanart added, most of which I never posted to this journal. There is some Top Gear and some Doctor Who and some of my original characters and some fiber crafts and etc.

I waver back and forth on doing more with my dA account; on the one hand, it is nice to have a place that's for visual art the way this place is for textual, and wandering there inspires me to work on my own drawing more, but on the other hand, dA's administration is pretty damn faily and has a long history of it, and it feels hypocritical to be getting more into dA when I've stormed out of LJ over much the same issues.

Does anybody know if there's a site that is to dA as DW is to LJ? At least as much ease of use, committed membership, and less admin fail? 'cause that would be nice. (Then all I'd have to do is find my stylus and maybe I'd finish more art and post it!)

Also if anybody's got a dA account and wants more watchers, let me know? I am bad at finding people but I do like having galleries to watch.

...I was going to post about the new stories on my AO3 account, but this post is already too long, so, um, later. Also, I need to stay strong and not take a week or so's worth of being on top of things, and spoil it by signing up for NaNo.

1. If you want to know where I am in terms of fandom-ness at the moment, I did finally post a polished (and much abridged) version of The Guide To International Fake News (English-language edition) at punditfic - that pretty much covers it. October approacheth with alacrity, which means new Have I Got News For You soon! Quite Interesting is back already! I am writing a Paul/Ian schoolboys AU! And there is a march on Washington to go to!

2. Also, I need to print out a copy of Balanced Conversationalist so that I can roll it up and be thwacked on the head with it when necessary. (I have actually been where liberal!Stephen is in that strip. Except I have gone past "ritual suicide is cultural appropriation" to "you having persistent suicidal thoughts at all is ablist appropriation of actual depressed people's lives, anyway!" Yeah. That's actually kind of why I suddenly fell into BBC RPF; for awhile there it was the only thing I could watch or read that didn't trigger severe liberal guilt spirals. (That's not why I'm still in to it, mind; the cure has mostly worked - I'm still into it because it's lovely and topical and gay, and US news is currently making me depressed for entirely different reasons.)

3. And for something completely different, here are Paul McDermott and Mark Trevorrow singing a duet of "Stop in the Name of Love" like the 'old show-biz pals' they are (complete with crotch-nuzzling), from Good News Week several weeks ago. You're welcome.
( My first video embed ever! )

4. Oh, speaking of small punk-ish boys doing stagegay! Everybody is all excited about the new MCR shenanigans! And I am puzzling over why I can get into fandoms for everyone from slightly pathetic Australian comedians to Swiss figure-skaters to British wine critics but I remain largely uninterested in bandom, despite the fact that I *want* to like MCR. I think there are several factors, but the one I can't get past is that I can't listen to their music. :/ It's not that I dislike their music, it's just that there's something people can do with electric guitars that makes me filter all of their music out as mental static, and whatever it is, MCR does it a lot. I literally can't listen to it. And 90% of media interviews with celebrities of any sort trip my embarrassment squick. Bandom has its own canonical term for embarrassment squick, which is one of many reasons I want to like it. But if I can't do the interviews or the music, it makes it very difficult to get more into the fandom than just reading the more highly-recced crackfic.

...in summary, you should all read River Rats by Caroline Stevermer, and then we all can write book-based cheerfully post-apocalyptic rockstar gutterpunk epics instead, and I won't have to listen to the music. ^_^ (Although Loitering With Intent I can actually listen to! Though probably not the River Rats' cover. I should totally throw together a River Rats fanmix. With nanananananana in it, yes, I'll just have to skip that track.)

5. I watched Hot Fuzz last night! Only a few years after everybody else was over it! Okay, I sort of get the Simon Pegg & Nick Frost thing now, although I also need more Bill Bailey. (Good thing he was just on QI!) And I kind of want to watch it again :D (And, wow, it is really obvious which scenes were originally written for a female love interest.) Please tell me somebody has written crossover fic about Nicholas Angel and Sam Tyler? I mean, it must exist, right? I just haven't been looking for it the right way?

6. I need to stay firm. My yuletide requests are Miss Madelyn Mack, A Night In the Lonesome October, Their Majesties' Bucketeers, and Hodgmanverse; I decided than months ago. NOBODY LET ME CHANGE MY MIND.

Hi all! I am working on a Fanlore entry (I figured it was past time), and am running into the fact that terms that I thought were established don't seem to give Google results for anyone but, um, me. Pretty much.

So, I thought I'd try a poll. :D



ETA: I am also interested in whether people include things like interview canon and behind-the-scenes extras, drafts and outlines and subtitles, things someone involved with the production once said informally, prop canon, and merchandise packaging under the same umbrella as authorized media tie-ins, or consider them a different level of canon, and whether different terms include different things to them. But I couldn't figure out how to phrase it as a poll question in a way that wasn't overcomplicated.

People are invited to add comments expanding on this!

Back from con.txt! I survived! Okay, I came home on Sunday, fell in to bed at about 6 PM, and slept though until Monday morning, but still, I survived!

...and now there are two years to wait until the next one. ):

I went to sixteen panels (and modded or co-modded six of them); still managed to go out to an excellent lunch with starlady and an excellent dinner with zana16, erinptah, and nakedbee; taught my self to fold dirty origami at the dance, then some stitch'n'bitchery downstairs with synecdochic, sarah, and some of the other usual suspects; then there was the vid show, the Dr. Who viewing party, and the late-night trivia quiz; cosplayed, dropped off and took some stuff at the swap table, sold something at the art auction; got a lead on Dr. Who slash 'zines from a dealer, stayed for Dead Duck, and even did a little bit of freeform socializing.

I think I used up all my extroversion points for about two months. There's a reason I've spent all my free time the past two days basically lying on my bed watching UK Parliament.

Also, my laptop didn't *technically* completely die! I had to stop using the heavy-duty replacement power cord (which now emits sparks and smoke, and never quite fit the socket) and go back to using the original power cord (which atm transfers current only through creative placement of electrical tape and bulldog clips) but at least the cooling fan motor didn't actually burn out like I thought it had! I mean, unless I'm wrong about that and the whole thing's going to melt into my lap as soon as I post this - I'm not sure how I'd tell, given ambient temperature around here.

( A few more details under the cut, through Friday )

Anyway. That's Friday. I think I'll stop here - there's a werewolf book I pulled off the swap table that's calling to me. And precious sleep, of course.

This is the handout I wrote for Sunday's panel on fandom and copyright. I am posting it here because it is fifteen freaking pages long and I hope some people will read along on their netbooks and I don't need as many paper copies. But people not at con-txt are welcome to enjoy.

This is html-converted using OpenOffice; I apologize if it's ugly, I cheated because it's, um, 5:30 AM the day of the panel and I haven't slept yet. If you would rather download a .doc file, click this link: Copyleft and Copyright Handout.

( Fandom, Copyright and Copyleft: The Basics of Intellectual Property for Fans )

arglflgul.

Does anybody know of a way to download The Bugle podcast without installing iTunes? I refuse to install iTunes *just* so I can get the Bugle - partly because I don't really have the system resources for it, partly because I viscerally hate the thing, partly because the iTunes store needs to *not* crash my browser every time I go there, thanks. But the Times website has finally put it under pay-only lock (and now it turns out that the Times was several episodes behind what itunes has anyway.)

I recently acquired an ipod and was forced to install itunes just long enough to flip the bit that lets you use your ipod as an external drive (though it still doesn't work right) and I really, really don't want to have to put it back on. :/ Dear Apple: if I can buy an $8 mp3 player that has all the capability and more of my iPod shuffle and can, oh, use software that doesn't try to malignantly take over my computer, surely you can design one that does the same for eight times the price.

I suppose I can just wait for the new season of the Now Show to start for my Andy Zaltzman fix, because oh look, BBC Radio Four streams internationally! -- but I can't wait until after the World Cup for my next Andy Zaltzman fix!1!! D:

Why yes, whinging about the evil of Apple does count as working on my copyright primer for con-txt, shut up.

Anyway. Since I'm asking for help about the Bugle already, I shall just make the post I've been playing with for a few weeks now, about Fake News (and "Real" News and Politics) fandom around the world and around the web.

The goal here is to get a guide to 'canon' sources and fandom sites for that somewhat-expanded RPF fandom that is, really, one of my most abiding loves. (My earliest datable memory involves Reagan giving a campaign speech. I would have been two.) I'm reasonably competent on the American ones (though my attention there is ... sporadic, and I might have missed something) and on the British ones (though, not being British, I've probably missed something.) I have a vague idea of where to start for Australia and Canada. I've no clue whatsover beyond that, and if there's anyone on my reading list who does know of other awesome fake news sources - English language or not - I would *love* the contribution!

This is meant to be video, audio, and text sources that I think everyone into current events from a fandom perspective ought to be at least minimally familiar with. (either because they're fundamental to the current fandom community, or because they're so awesome everybody should know about them.)

Here's what I've got so far. What have I missed? What should I cut?

( Too Awesome To Be Bounded By One Country )

( The United States of A )

( The UK )

( Places that are neither the US nor the UK )

What else should be on those lists? Help. Especially from people not living in the US.

So, con-txt is coming up! Sooner than I want to think about!

And I am modding or co-modding five panels!

(sometimes I hate myself.)

These are the five panels:
Fandom, Copyright, and Copyleft (with lightgetsin)
Fanmixes and Mashups (with Erin Ptah)
Procrastinators' Party (with Dee Laundry)
Sinister Ducks (no co-mod)
What We Talk About When We Talk About Slash Fandom (as a panel)

Procrastinators' Party should be easy, as a total lack of any sort of preparation for it is part of the fun! (although. Um. I have just noticed I apparently have a co-mod, and I have no idea who she is. I should shoot her a note, probably.)

Fanmixes and Mashups should be fairly easy, as I assume erin_ptah is doing any necessary prep work. :P (And if she doesn't, I can just ramble about fanmixing for as long as necessary, and then toss in a few extra handouts from the copyright panel.)

WWTAWWTASF requires me to, like, communicate with individual people on a business-correspondence level, and this terrifies me. Letters out tonight! If I have tie myself to the keyboard in the process!

And then the two panels I would like to do real prep work for, and for which I am begging for help:

Fandom, Copyright, and Copyleft: I am planning to make up a web post/handout which covers a) the basics of copyright & intellectual property in general, b) copyright issues as they apply to fanworks and fandom, c) current issues in copyright and fandom, d) intellectual property resources online and activism opportunities. lightgetsin will use her newly-minted LAWYER POWERS to check it over, if I get it to her in time, and if I don't get it to her in time, will at least be there at the panel to stop me if I say something very wrong. If any other fan-lawyer types would like to volunteer to beta it, I would be well pleased.

I have some (badly organized) bookmarks, some idea where to look for more, some printed handouts from other cons, and a vast collection of uncited info in my head. I would be really, really grateful if other people who are interested in this sort of stuff helped me out with links to resources, to important fannish discussions, and to recent events, especially: both the obvious stuff (so I don't miss it) and things I might not know about.

(especially if they are other fan communities where I could post this request!)


Sinister Ducks : this panel was submitted as a total joke! And now I have to actually make up a presentation for it! *gulp*

So, basically, the idea is that Con.txt's theme and mascot is ducks. And I have to put together a convincing (well, Discordian-style convincing) argument for how ducks are secretly plotting to take over slash fandom (hence their infiltration of Con.txt), and possibly, thereby, the WORLD. Multimedia especially needed!

Here's what I've got so far:
( Warning: contains panel spoilers )

I know there's more than this, I just haven't kept proper track of where they are. I can take a side turn here - either by way of Red Green's giant Duct Tape Duck, and then on to duct tape in general (hello mythbusters!) - or by way of comics, everything from Darkwing Duck to Talespin - or veer off into swans (the Swan Boat Of Doom on Top Gear! Anything involving J.Weir! Hot Fuzz! The Pirate King!) Also there is a Creepy Duck Puppet that will be watching you. But it would be much more convincing if I had more video footage from classic slash fandoms.

So! Internets at large! I call to you for help! Where are the scenes in your fandom of choice (of any sort of fandom) in which ducks appear? It doesn't have to be pivotal, it doesn't have to be sinister, it doesn't have to be slashy (though any of those would be great, of course) they just have to be there. Were there ducks on the Starfleet Academy grounds, or in the holodeck? Have any of House's patients ever been infected by a duck? Is there a video game with ducks in that I should know about? Has Merlin ever turned into a duck? Are there "atmosphere" scenes with Vs of ducks traveling overhead that you wouldn't even notice unless you were visually oriented and watching very closely? Is there a sound effect that is eerily ducklike?

...help.

The reason I haven't posted on DW for awhile is that I, basically, only have the time, energy and emotional stamina to make one substantial post/comment a day, so when I'm doing a lot of posting elsewhere, my personal journal tends to go quiet.

And for the past two weeks, instead of larking around DW talking meta and coming up with creative excuses for why meta is all I do, I've actually been *writing* and *posting* fic on a fairly steady basis with reasonable output - I've written and posted something like 12,000 words, which is more than I usually manage in a year, and I'm so astonished at this fact that I've just kind of been stepping back and trying not to do anything to jinx it.

...unfortunately it's all for the British Politics RPS kink meme, and it's all anon, so you lot don't get any benefit out of it. (Unless you're also on that meme, in which case, secret handshake!)

I'm staying anon about which of those are mine not because I'm unwilling to admit to writing politics RPS - first of all, this isn't my first go-round, and second of all, I had a birthday party right at the height of the coalition negotiations, so pretty much all my RL friends have probably figure it out anyway. But I really do think anon memes work better when most of the people on them stay anon, so, anon I am staying. (I will note that a disproportionate number of the unclaimed fills with SamCam in them are my fault, but you probably could have guessed that.)

So. British Politics RPF. What the heck, self? And as a consequence, while there are as usual wonderful and insightful meta discussions going on around here, all I really want to say is "In this RPS fandom they really do send secret messages through color-coded accessories!" and "even Michael-Freaking-Feldman ships it!while being even more couple-y than usual with Jim Packard" and "I like the Speaker!" (Warning:streaming rm audio at the second link, youtube video at the third. )

The problem with this fandom is that reality keeps outdoing the fic. I mean, the fill I was hoping to finish tonight had a line in it that I was debating taking out, because I kept thinking "The Prime Minister would never actually say anything *that slashy* on television", and then -- he did. Which is the nice sort of being outdone by canon. But the reason I'm writing a journal post instead of that fic is that we've had the bad sort of canon, too. This story centers around a character publically coming out, and tonight, one of the more likable people we're writing about just got forcibly outed in a fairly awful way. :/

And it's one thing to glee over a hypocritical homophobe being forced out, it's another thing entirely when it's someone who's repeatedly turned down opportunities for real power in order to stay true to pro-glbt principles.

(And can I just pause the rambling about RPF here to say: I am completely incapable of taking the MPs' expenses scandal seriously. Do you know how much I wish my politicians were just spending public money to split the mortgage with their boyfriend or get the moat cleaned, instead of, oh, accepting free housing at a Dominionist Christian brainwashing center that requires them to go to "counseling" sessions in which they're taught that everything they do is moral because they've been chosen by God for power? SO MUCH I WISH.)
( More thoughts on RPS. )

So. Anyway. That is why I am writing meta tonight instead of fic. Perhaps tomorrow I will spend my post-writing energy actually writing one of the other DW posts I am backlogged on doing! Or put in some real work on prepping the con-txt panels I'm modding! Or go take refuge on that other anon kink meme I've been haunting and write another Charlie/David kissing on panel shows fill (because there can never be too many of those!)

...or perhaps I will spend the day just obsessively following the David Laws coverage and trying not to cry. Or write fic where he is a tiny cheerful dragon teaching Boris how to fly. :)

(I feel like I should have something to say about this story other than D: and putting it in a fannish context, but my Thoughts on the ethical complications of being in a politics fandom for a country I am not in or from is another post at least as long as this one was.)

So, 3w4dw is happening, yeah? I'm not changing my crossposting because I already don't post anywhere except DW and sometimes JF, and I seriously doubt anybody is staying away from DW because JF is too active. :P

(well, and a certain anon kink meme I can't stop refreshing, but I can't give that up. This is how much I can't give that anon meme up: as you may know, I have had javascript turned off on LJ for quite some time now, because the crufty javascript they've been pushing in made the site stop working with my browser. With javascript off, I can read my flist and post signed comments, which is usually all I do. Until I got tempted by this anon meme.)

( This is what you have to do to leave an anon comment in LJ if you don't let the site use javascript: )

...yes, I have fallen for current tiny RPS fandom hard enough that I go through that voluntarily anyway. And no, it is not the least bit exaggerated. (and yes, it's almost as annoying to do with js off in DW - but oh, look, I don't have to turn js off in order for DW to function! Amazing.)

So anyway, right now the thing I love most about DW is I can post anon comments on it without wanting to commit murder. There are a lot of awesome DW anon memes going on for 3w4dw right now, incidentally. Far too many to keep track of, in fact - just reload the 3w4dw tag on latest - when I am still reloading the lj ones for tiny-fandom-of-doom and also forsciencememe, the anon meme for rock-star scientists, literal or otherwise, which I would be *all over* if it didn't take me about ten minutes every time I try to post a comment on it. Especially I would be all over it requesting epic Othniel Charles Marsh/Edward Drinker Cope hatesex, about which more anon (in the other sense of anon), possibly.

ANYWAY ANYWAY. My actual point, when I started all this, is that there's so much going on for 3w4dw that I have decided, with the exception of a few community events and some anoning, to save most of my effort for after the event is over, where things will probably be quieting down and everyhing won't be getting lost in the rush. (That, or I am bone-idle and/or exhausted). So it will be business as usual here - i.e., long rambling posts every ten days or so.

My contribution to cross-site-ness for the time being is probably going to be going through the flists of the small-fandom lj communities I'm busily stalking and dw-watch everyone who crossposts. :D

---

And now for con_txt! If you have been following this saga, you will know that I submitted an utterly ridiculous number of panels (in the non-david-mitchell sense of panels, though do you know how tempted I am to suggest a fannish panel game for Saturday evening entertainment? So tempted) to the concomm, and I have just gotten the first voting-results email.

...ten of my panels are either in, or possibly/probably in, and by con-txt tradition, they are now asking *me* to volunteer for or find mods for them all. I know some of you are going to con-txt, or know people who are: anybody interested in modding or co-modding any of these if they get in?

( Panel Fun )

( And now for a cute and cuddly baby Dalek! )

If I made a small flock of these daleklings - say, 4-6, in a rainbow of bright cheerful nursery colors - would it be worth submitting to the con-txt art auction? Would anybody bid? I have been messing with the pattern for so long that I've lost all perspective on it, I have no idea if it even looks like a Dalek anymore, because I've forgotten what Daleks look like when they aren't pink crochet. Oh, I know! Poll!
( Because this entry wasn't long and scattered enough already! )

Wow, that entry is almost tied for "most comments I have ever gotten." Clearly people care about this issue! Now, if only I could write some fic that got that much response! ...if only I could write some fic, period. :P

There is a lot of good discussion going on in the comments, too, some of them along tangents I really want to follow up on (I didn't reply to all of them that I meant to, either - somewhere around the point where comments on an entry collapse I completely lose track of what's going on and am mostly lost except for reading the email notifications.) There's good stuff in OTW's follow-up post, too.

Some people asked me to post the specific examples I was thinking of for each poll question, so here they are under the cut, at leas the ones I can link to, along with a teeny-tiny bit of analysis.

( Poll examples )

% of examples currently published as fic that y'all declared original: 3/9, 33%
% of pro-published (non-tie-in) examples y'all declared fanfic: 1/5 as of now, but both "High Wizardry" and the Lovecraft example have been fluctuating right around the 50% mark.
% of examples that are within 20% of a tie: 11/32, 33%

Also, the con-txt panel survey is live!

No prizes for people who manage to guess one of the panels I submitted, because, umm, your odds just for picking one at complete random would actually be pretty good, plus a couple of them are re-posts from previous years. But feel free to guess anyway, and I will confirm yes or no :D

There are currently a couple of debates going around - about the problem of Sue-shaming and about mixing original fic and fanfic in communities and archives - that have combined with other stuff to make me want to write about original writing.

So, re: the debate going around about whether AO3 should allow original stuff in with the fanworks:

There are some people who want to keep a wall between original and fan fiction, and want to keep AO3 limited to fan writers. And I can see their point - I, too, am far less likely to read something if it's original: it's harder work to read, less likely to be id-tastic, when I'm in the mood for fanwork I don't want original, and either the average quality of original fic is less, or I simply don't have good enough filters for finding the good stuff with original as compared to fan work. Plus, many original writing communities are not only very different in culture to fanwriting communities, some of them are openly hostile to fanwriting, or to some of the values that my particular fanwriting community espouses.

The problem I have with that viewpoint is that the separation between original and fan work *isn't* a wall. It is, at best, a long sloping gradient with something on it that might be an attempt at a wall that has fallen over in places and wasn't very straight to begin with (and has only been there for a paltry few decades anyway.) The boundary between original and fan work is not a hard boundary. People have brought up historical RPF several times already, but as far as I'm concerned, it's only the tip of the iceberg.

I write stuff that is definitely fanfiction. I write stuff that is definitely original fiction. And I write stuff that, um, I have no bloody idea if it's one or the other.

And the thing that attracted me, as an author, to AO3, is that it's one archive where I don't have to worry if my fanwork is "enough" for it. Is it slashy enough, or too slashy? Shippy enough, or too shippy? Too porny or not porny enough? Too long or too short, not canonical enough, not finished enough, too crossovery, too script-y or meta-y or poem-y to be a proper story, not angsty enough, too much or not enough... on AO3 I can just put everything up, as a proper archive, without having to stress over categories.

I would love if "not fan-fic-y enough" was one of those categories I didn't have to worry about on AO3. And since - *for me* - the most important role of AO3 is to be an archive for fanwriters to universally preserve and organize their work, I want all the edge cases to be allowed; if that means blanket allowing original fiction (and I suspect it does), then so be it. I would, however, support a restriction that every author account must have at least one definite fanwork uploaded, to preserve the archive as primarily fannish and to filter out people who are hostile to fanfic culture. And a rule that any original work hosted on AO3 must allow derivative work.

And, sheerly out of curiosity (and not intended to be anyone's opinion on what should or shouldn't get posted at AO3): Here is a poll about some of those "edge" cases. What do you think, fandom-at-large? Original or fanwork? (And no, you don't get tickyboxes or third options. You must make a judgement! Like archives always make me do!)

( V. important poll under cut )

(I will stop there before poll gets even longer, but for the record, none of these are hypothetical cases - they are all either things I personally have written, or things other people who identify as fanwriters have done that I could point you to.)