Okay, "fail at shitposting february" is over! Where was I in December meme?

noxelementalist requested "A story you'd never want to write, but would love to read!"

This one is actually tough, because I exist at all times balanced on the knife-edge between "Wanting to write literally every story" and "Never wanting to write anything at all ever".

(This balance may be familiar to some of y'all.)

There are some situations where the "don't want to write/want to read" balance leans more toward the one side than usual, though. They tend to fall into the categories of: I know it's not something I currently have the skill to write well; I know it would be a lot of effort and I am that lazy; I am too chickenshit to write it.

( Some exposition and examples. )

Also there are some stories where it's the opposite, where I want to write them but not read them, at least if you interpret that as "don't want to read them as written by anyone else, because anyone else who wrote them would probably do them WRONG". Those I usually do actually write, though, because I am filled with the righteous fury of "even if I do screw them up, at least I won't screw them up as bad as THOSE OTHER PEOPLE WHO HYPOTHETICALLY MIGHT WRITE THEM INSTEAD would screw them up." (A significant % of all my kinkmeme fills in my kinkmeme days were like this.)

What kinds of stories do you want to read but not write, or write but not read?

For the December Meme, skygiants asked for me to talk about my favorite pre-20th-century literature.

So on one hand, it's easy : I do not think I will ever quite make it all the way back out of Les Mis fandom.

Nor will I ever stop attempting to get people to read Hans of Iceland (if only because Hugo would so very much rather I didn't.)

But other than that it's harder than I expected - especially since I ran a panel on really old fandoms at con.txt! - because for most of my oldest fandoms, part of what draws me to them is that canon works differently when you have that much time; I like the fact that they have centuries of interpretations and reinterpretations built up, so that in going back to 'canon' it's hard to deny what's lost in taking the original as the 'real' thing and scraping off all the transformative work done on it. Even something as relatively concrete as Shakespeare - I like certain productions of the plays; I like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are dead, and that everybody from now on who encounters MacBeth for the first time will remember Tolkien and think Shakespeare should have gone all-out on his prophecies; that my first exposure to the Bard was on Sesame street.

...Also it's hard because when I think of some of my very favorite old stories I go 'oh yeah, I should probably get around to reading the original at some point'. I am not. Actually. As well-read as I give off the impression of being.

In terms of really old literature - I keep coming back to Tao Te Ching, but I haven't yet found an English translation I like well enough I'd recommend it, though I've read six or seven; I keep coming back to Ecclesiastes/Qohelet, but I haven't read any translations from outside the Christian tradition so I don't know if the ones I have are really any good.

But! In honor of Shitposting February, there is one Very Old Fandom where I have Very Strong Opinions about the "canon", and that is that @$#P%@#$ Chretien de Troyes ruined Arthurian fandom forever with his annoying OC 'Lance-a-Lot The Perfectly Perfect' and his soap opera, and the only good stuff is the stuff that came out before Lancelot ate the fandom and ruined it. :P

So here, poall:



ETA: Also I forgot, what prompted this is that they just found some new Arthur fanfic! It's from after Lancelot but pre-Malory so it's still pretty exciting!.

This was actually really tough? I feel like, on the one hand, I'm pretty easy-going in real life (and probably willing to tolerate many things in actual people that I nope out of pretty fast in fiction) and on the other hand, this might require a kind of self-knowledge I'm really bad at, because I feel like I enjoy the same things in characters and in real people, but maybe I'm just not very good at understanding what I like in real people? Because I don't tend to analyze that very hard? and also I'm terrified that I will describe something I can't stand in RL people and everyone will go "...but that's you."

The best I could come up with is: I am really not interested in dealing with people who go for violent emotional outbursts in real life; and by that I mean not just emotional outburst of violence, but also outburst of violent emotion. I don't have, like, trauma reactions to it, the way some people do? But I don't enjoy it at all and if there's something that's going to make me actively avoid trying to engage with a person at all, it's that kind of reaction. (Like, the extremely occasional extremely justified cursing/screaming/rant is fine, but not people where dealing with that is a regular part of interaction with them.) (I mean, if there was somebody I already cared about who is doing this regularly because of extreme justification, I am going to extremely awkwardly try to support them? But I definitely don't go seeking more of that in my life.)

I wouldn't say it's something I look for in fan characters either, but I have enjoyed characters who do this, if only because it can be entertaining from a distance. Also, I think I tend to ... edit that kind of thing down, when it's coming through by text? Probably also when it's real people I know writing on the internet who are trying to express a real violent emotional outburst but because it's text, I'm not actually hearing the shouting or anything like that, I can just dial it down subconsciously to the level that doesn't make me cringe away.

Also, not so much character-specific, but I can certainly enjoy reading about romantic overtures in fiction that if they were aimed at me in Real Life would make me want to exit the room at approximately the speed of sound. (Also in fiction, I do tend to enjoy the "comfort" part of hurt-comfort, where one character is taking very good close care of another one, whereas when I personally am in that situation I go hedgehog and attempt to hide in a burrow and stab anyone who comes near.) (Also I tend to go on a lot about how important relationship conversation and stuff like that are in the fictional stuff I enjoy but in RL relationship conversations give me hives and nausea.)

....I seem to have descended back into the headspace where I lose a day and a half to sitting on the couch reading extremely long fanfic one after another. Augh? Augh.

Anyway, one of the things I was supposed to have done today instead was finish my new cloak!

My old cloak is 20 years old this year. It's emerald green wool/polyester blend on the outside and with a Lothlorian grey heavy knit lining. I made it when I started high school because I wanted a cloak like the ones they had in The Lord of the Rings (the books - there were no movies then). BUT I wanted it to look like a cloak that had been to Mordor and back, and I figured the only way to do that was to start getting wear onto it as soon as possible.

It worked! That cloak definitely looks like it has survived a few epic quests and journeys through the slough of despond (and it has, too; some more metaphorical than others.) It is my magic cloak that protects me in dark places.

But. It is still the first thing I will grab if I'm called to an adventure, still warm and waterproof and trusty, but it isn't exactly presentable these days, so I'd been planning for awhile to make another one - I still had the original pattern and I'd been hoarding heavy wool fabrics. And then I acquired an already-sewn lining to the same pattern, so just before Thanksgiving I sat myself down and made the new one. It is just as warm and comfortable as the other one, if not quite as magic yet!

The new one is a blue/grey/rust plaid that I really like (and was also the only heavy wool I had 4 yards of - there is a lot of cloth in a cloak.) It still needs pockets, though; I ran out of time to add the pockets, and I really need pockets. Also, I am debating adding secret pockets. Every magic cloak needs secret pockets, right?

A couple of weeks ago I did a fanac research survey advertised on Tumblr (one of cfiesler’s surveys; it’s closed now but they’ve put up a few results already), and one of the questions was how likely you are to ship canon het, and then if you said not likely, it asked why.

I said something like “because canon almost always screws up canon het,” which I acknowledge is not a super helpful answer, but it was also a very small text box.

So just for fun I sat down and listed out ( all the ways canon screws up canon het. )

Which isn’t to say I never ship canon het. You can usually sell me on it in fanfic if you try, and I usually don’t actively anti-ship it or anything, I just don't get invested. And I haven’t been watching most of the recent shows that are supposed to be really good for canon het (like B99). It’s just that canon het is very rarely going to be the ship I get super invested in or go looking for. Often I read the fanfic until they become canon and then re-read the old fanfic from before they were canon.

But here’s some canon het I am 100% there for, just for fun:

( Not comprehensive! Just the first few I thought of! )

This one was surprisingly tough! I can think of things I wish fandom would STOP and very specific stories I would like someone to write repeatedly, but trend-wise? Hmmm.

Okay, here are some things I used to really love that don't seem to come up as much anymore:

--Kinkmemes. I know there are still some of these hanging on, but I miss when every fandom, even tiny ones, had a really active kinkmeme, especially when they were really discussion-heavy and had as much meta as fic. I wouldn't have the time to spend on them that I used to but I wish I could.

--Canadian shacks! Okay it doesn't have to be Canadian, or a shack, but I would like more of "Stick your favorite characters somewhere isolated with inadequate shelter on the flimsiest pretext you can devise and make them cuddle for warmth in front of a wood fire."

--In general it seems like gleeful tropefics haven't been around as much lately? We've got all the soulmate-adjacent stuff like Hanahaki and a/b/o and geese, but what happened to random animal transformation and wingfic and truth serum and all that? (I wonder if part of this is that AO3 had to stop canonizing tags for that kind of thing a few years back, and so it's been harder to find and build momentum for, especially as AO3 becomes more dominant.)

Things that never really became a trend that I would love to see more of:

--Following on from tropes: I would like more area-affect tropes. Sure, your favorite character getting sex-pollened is fun! But what if the WHOLE TOWN got sex-pollened? One character getting de-aged is great! All but one character getting de-aged is EVEN BETTER. And so on. There are fics here and there that do this really well but I would love to see it become more of a trend.

--From the same era as Canadian Shacks but never as popular: Inappropriate Elves. Or, more broadly, the sort of not-actually-an-AU-because-it's-canon-compliant-AU that Inappropriate Elves exemplified so well: the kind of story where $Character is an elf but has been an elf all through canon and nothing changed. Or the Harry Potter AU where it isn't that they're all going to Hogwarts, it's that $Character went to Hogwarts back in the day but they were keeping it a secret! Until now! (Buzzfeed Unsolved has been very good for this because there's a trope/joke(?) in the fandom that one of the characters is actually a demon.) This doesn't necessarily have to be about secret identities - I am fine if most of the other characters also knew, as long as the audience doesn't - but about seamlessly fitting the new concept into canon as if it had always been true. (And it doesn't have to be magical/SF - I found one where a character had quietly been a CPA all along, and it was great.)

--More non-contemporary-setting setting-swap AUs. So, like, the historical/SF canons that take the "mundane" AU premises but keep the canon setting: Les Mis coffeeshop AU that's still in 19th century France. Or the Star Trek college AU where it's Starfleet Academy. For canons that do have mundane settings, do a hospital AU but the hospital is IN SPACE. And so on. (I realize that half the point of mundane AUs is that you don't have to bother with worldbuilding the setting as hard, but I don't care, I want all the non-mundane mundane AUs.)

Specifically, this one:

Melissa G. Hunt, Rachel Marx, Courtney Lipson, and Jordyn Young (2018). No More FOMO: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology. free preprint on Researchgate.

For quite awhile I've had a recurring desire to start a blog that was just me reading whatever scientific study was hitting the mainstream media that week, summarizing/analyzing the paper for a layperson's perspective, and then pointing out what the media coverage should have been saying instead. I tried doing this on a tumblr sideblog for awhile; what I always forget is that it takes a long time to do. Even if I pick a simple paper that's available open access or preprint, isn't super long or technical, don't look up any of the citations, and just accept any math I can't figure out, it still takes more free time than I seem to consistently have these days (I say, as I look down my long trail of excessively long journal entries from this week...)

But this paper - about how social media is very bad for your psychological health - hit the media a few weeks ago, and the coverage made me so mad I either had to write this up or stew over it all night silently instead, and it seemed like a topic y'all would be interested in, so here we go, let's do this!

Abstract:
Introduction:
Given the breadth of correlational research linking social media use to worse well-being, we undertook an experimental study to investigate the potential causal role that social media plays in this relationship.
Method:
After a week of baseline monitoring, 143 undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania were randomly assigned to either limit Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat use to 10 minutes, per platform, per day, or to use social media as usual for three weeks.
Results:
The limited use group showed significant reductions in loneliness and depression over three weeks compared to the control group. Both groups showed significant decreases in anxiety and fear of missing out over baseline, suggesting a benefit of increased self-monitoring.
Discussion:
Our findings strongly suggest that limiting social media use to approximately 30 minutes per day may lead to significant improvement in well-being

Okay, let's go down the actual paper point-by-point, looking at what they're actually doing here. You may want to pull up the paper I have linked above and read along, it's pretty readable as these go, but you should be able to follow along without that.

( Methods )
( Results )

( Analysis )

...so that is what I do whenever I see a "new scientific study" being reported in the media. It is probably something you could learn to do as well! Even if you don't want to make a hobby of it as I have, it's useful to remember that pretty much any scientific study that is supposed to be giving "amazing new results" is really just somebody saying "I tried a thing and this result looks kind of interesting and maybe worth following up but I dunno really," only with stats, and with grant money on the line.

I leave this study apparently claiming that women think with their wombs for someone else to analyze. :P

This one depends a lot on how you define fanfic.

If you're going by "transformative work in conversation with other transformative works based on a shared canon," it was probably some fairy-tale or bible-story picture book from before I can remember. (Honorable mention to Monsterpiece Theater which probably shaped more than I will ever realize I ever learned about storytelling, but it's theater not text, so it doesn't count.)

The first things in the sense of "derivative work of a specific copyrighted canon" that I interacted with in what I now recognize was a fairly fannish way were Heidi's Children and Heidi Grows Up, by Charles Tritten, which were continuations sort-of-with-permission after the author's death. In particular they taught me that just because one particular author thinks something is canon it doesn't mean it actually is. :P It also taught me that it's 100% legit to respond to a book you like by writing your own sequel, so from somewhere around that time there are scribbled bits and pieces of the continuing story of Queen Amethyst and King Peregrine of Ambergeldar.

By later elementary school, I'd decided I wanted to be A Writer, and was subsequently exposed to enough "how to write" advice to make me self-conscious about originality (and self-inserts. and femininity), but shortly thereafter I fell into Star Trek and Star Wars and was reading all the published tie-ins I could get my hands on, so that didn't last long. (I learned about 'slash' from authorized published Star Trek fandom books. And Kirk/Spock from the movie novelization...) Some of the authorized anthologies were culled from zine fic and had all the requirements for fanfic (written by fan authors for fan authors, full of fandom tropes, etc) except that they were (sometimes retroactively) approved by TPTB and published. Most notably for Star Trek: the New Voyages anthologies, and I swear there was at least one Star Wars anthology in the 1990s that included fan content, because I don't think I could have possibly have imagined that incredibly trippy Corellian pastiche of Der Erlkonig, but nobody else seems to remember it? The main thing I remember about these is that the fan-written works, while often not as polished, always felt way more intense than other books, and at age twelve or thirteen I didn't know how I felt about that.

Anyway, it was also around this time that I read my copy of Heinlein's "The Number of the Beast" until it literally fell apart, because crossovers + queer poly. I have weaknesses, okay. (And after that, any pro sf author talking crap about fanfic was going to get hit over the head with said falling-apart book until they stopped.) (I don't care what your objection to fanfic is, Heinlein did it in that book) (including exposing children to it at a probably too-young age...) (It's okay, it was a pretty soft book by that point.)

My time in anime fandom was actually fairly fanfic-free, but shortly thereafter I got into webcomics fandom, which at the time was a place where the lines between fan creators and canon creators were very blurry, because pretty much anyone could attempt to create a webcomic (and did), and the fandom activity all took place on official forums that were modded by the canon creators, and it was all very slipstream. I'm sure I read some webcomic fanfic on the Keenspot forums, but if I did, I cannot tell you anything about it, except that it was almost certainly more heavily influenced by anime fandom than Western media fandom. (I also had my only experience with forum-based roleplay there.)

At the time, most webcomics had a sort of proto-blog where the comic creator would post life updates and behind-the-scenes stuff about the comic, and at some point, some webcomic I was reading (Queen of Wands, maybe? That sounds right but it probably isn't) posted their Favorite Fanfic, and it was for a book I'd just read and desperately needed more of, and that is what I usually consider officially My First Fanfic.

It was And When He Falls, by torch, Aziraphale/Crowley. I have just re-read it and it is still good; a better First Fanfic I could not have possibly found! (It must have been pretty new at the time, too.)

I didn't go on from there and read more in media fandom stuff. Not sure why, except that torch didn't have anything else for fandoms I knew, and I was spending pretty much all the internet time I could get keeping up with about 75 webcomics on dial-up.

So I didn't really fall headfirst into being a fanfic fan until several years later, when I was at college, and a bunch of us were going to see the new Harry Potter movie, but I hadn't brought my copies of the books to college with me, so I couldn't re-read them in preparation for the movie, but I certainly wasn't going to go to the movie without reinforcing the buttresses of book canon in my mind, so I decided to read some fanfic instead.

I ended up on this archive that I can't for the life of me remember the name of. It had a name based on a place in canon, like a lot of them did at the time, but it wasn't any of the ones on the fanlore list of Harry Potter archives. It was specifically aimed at adults, but more 'adult themes' than 'NC-17' and I don't think it was the Restricted Section - RS.org would have been very very new at the time, and I don't think this was, and I didn't have to register an account to read, and also I'm pretty sure RS was an efiction archive, whereas this one gave off the distinct vibe of everything being hand-coded (and possibly of being invite-only.) It only had a few dozen stories on it, by a dozen or so authors, nearly all of them novel-length, but darned if I can remember any of the specific stories; I think a lot of them were crossposted other places too. Multiple pairings and eras, including slash and het and even gen iirc (Is this ringing a bell for anyone else? No?) (ETA: Hah, never mind, it was Diagon Alley, it was on the list after all, I just skimmed it over because the name seemed *too* canon to be the right one. But it was that.) (ETA2: Fuck me, the Draco Trilogy is still readable in its wayback link from fanlore. *eyes first ever archive* *eyes giant to-do list*)

Anyway, I burned through that archive in about a weekend, and after that it was all fanfic, all the time, forever.

(I ended up not going on the computer at all yesterday; I'll make up the missed day on one of my free days.)

The first fanvids I ever watched were on a VHS tape that a friend of my sister's brought over to our house in the summer (or maybe early autumn) of my freshman year of high school. I'm fairly sure it was a vid show from Otakon 1997, or maybe a premiers vid from the previous Katsucon, because the only vids I remember (probably because they were the only ones I recognized both the canon and the song) were this Ranma 1/2 vid to the Proclaimers' "I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles)" and this Dragonball vid to TMBG's "Particle Man". We watched them on the VCR in the downstairs sitting room, the one where the remote control wasn't wireless.

In a way that was also my intro to real life organized fandom - I wouldn't have enough internet access to be involved in online fandom for several more years, and before that I'd been limited to things like pro-published accounts of the history of Star Trek fandom. But now I had met someone who had been to actual cons! Watched actual fanvids! (He still has all his old tapes, we re-watched them a few years back, I could probably track down the exact one if I needed to.)

My taste in fanvids has not noticeably improved since then. (My current strong desire is for someone to vid the Venom movie to "I came in like a wrecking ball")

On that note, all the people wanting a home for vidders: AMV.org (ETA: actually http://www.animemusicvideos.org )has been going for nearly 20 years, has been the undisputed hub of AMV fandom nearly that whole time, and it took me literally five minutes to track down copies of vids I hadn't seen in 20 years. Why aren't more people talking about AMV.org? (...probably because it doesn't stream, embed, or allow comments. It does a very good job of making vids findable, though!)

So I pretty much took today off the internet in order to do a whole bunch of errands and finish the pinata (it is not finished, I got through about 3/4 of the errands) and also gave myself a couple of hours to go see Venom in second-run (there were three of us in the theater! I got a ticket and an entire bag of popcorn for less than $5! I mostly go second-run just because I never get around to it before first-run is over, but also, it's a really nice experience...) (I will probably also take most of tomorrow off the internet to actually *be* at the pinata party.(

Anyway the main things that came unexpectedly seeing the movie after reading a bunch of fic:
--Carlton Drake is not a white dude? Why would you cast Riz Ahmed as Carlton Drake when you could have cast him as Eddie? Why is there not more fic with him - its Riz Ahmed!
--It was both less action move and less romcom than I was expecting it to be - it was more half indie romance and half monster movie 😶with Eddie as the manic pixie dream girl and Dan as the hero scientist.
--Fandom has picked up on the fact that Dan is absolutely solid in his relationship with Anne, but I'd love to see more stories pick up the fact that Anne seems less secure about it (...presumably due to bad experiences in other relationship...)
--Less obvious monster kink than I expected, more obvious Eddie-is-kinky than I expected.

Possibly related topic! Today's December prompt was: What's your favorite physical non-living object?

There was really only one possible answer, but I wasn't sure if he really counted as non-living, so I asked him, and he reminded me that one of his superpowers is becoming inanimate at will, therefore it was fine. So, here he is:

The amazing, the fantabulous
SUPER DROP-BEAR


(The reason this is a portrait instead of a photo is that I've done a series of portraits of him, dating back over thirty years, and it was past time for another one. Is it reasonable for me to go 'oh, a simple prompt this time! Time to learn charcoal portraiture? No. But did that stop me? No.)

SUPER DROP-BEAR does in fact have a secret identity as a mild-mannered teddy (koala) bear named K.B., but let's be honest, a koala bear named K.B. was never much of a secret identity. And these days, like most elderly Batmen, the supersuit serves partly as life support; he can only take it off under carefully controlled conditions (and then has to be sewn back in.)

He roams the night, protecting the endangered. The wicked beware - he will drop down on you from above, sharp claws at the ready, and rend yours ears bloody! In his pouch he carries the most powerful weapon of all - his library card (yes, he has a valid library card of his own! They told us to make one for a pet or stuffed animal or something in training, and they never told us to cancel it.)

He helps, in particular, small children, refugees, immigrants, trafficking victims, and anyone who is far away from home and feeling lost and alone - partly because of his heritage; Australian by blood, Korean by birth, and American by nurture. When he was young and lost and alone and in a strange country he was lucky enough to meet me, also lost and alone in a strange country (I'd only been here three days), and we helped each other, so he has made it his mission to help others. (I have made it my mission to one day be able to take him on a visit to Australia, even though he claims he doesn't mind if we never make it.)

(You might think the focus on immigrants and refugees and trafficking is recent, but I'm pretty sure everything in the previous paragraph is covered in a creative writing assignment I have somewhere, from first grade, where he was helping stuffed pandas and lions who had been unexpectedly shipped to America get back to their homes or find new families.)

(He is a dae-kor Potbelly bear. They came in various sizes and breeds; we have collected and adopted others we found in dangerous situations. The most relevant of the others is only known as Big Bear, because he is exactly the same size and shape relative to me as an adult as K.B. was when I was four, so now that K.B. is a little to fragile for most cuddles he has taken over the job. I highly recommend finding a scaled-up version of your favorite childhood hug and trying it; there is no comfort like suddenly having that again exactly like it was.)

Okay, so this is a post I've had in my WIPs for over four years (under the title "how ot get comment", if you want a glimpse of my working methods...), and I think I have finally figured out how I want to say what I want to say in it, and this seems like a good time to get it out there. But of course I gave myself a deadline to get it posted and now it's after 2 AM so it's probably not as polished as that four years of drafts deserves!

Also, I remember the last time december meme happened, my reading page suddenly got so busy I could barely keep up, but now we've got that and tumblr returnees at the same time, and I am actually behind on my DW reading page! This hasn't happened in probably half a decade! It's great, but also AUGH, I am behind on my DW reading page and I've also got so much stuff to do.

So, this is basically fifteen years' of trial-and-error learning on how to make dreamwidth posts that will produce good comment discussions involving lots of people. After fifteen years, I am at the point where if I'm sitting at home feeling depressed and in need of human conversation, I can make a DW post and have enough comment notifications to keep me in ego boost for several days. And a lot of what makes this work is just fairly simple strategies that I wish more people knew.

There's two basic principles to bear in mind going in. The first is that leaving a comment requires both effort and risk on the part of the person commenting, and your goal is to lower that threshhold of both risk and effort as far as possible. Anything that makes it easier, or makes it feel safer, for someone to take part in the discussion is good. Anything that takes work, risk, or cognitive load away from them and shifts it to you is good (for the comment count, at least.) If you're coming from sites where there are like/reblog/bookmark sorts of options, it's important to note that on Dreamwidth, the simplest possible interaction with someone else's post is still considerably more effort than that, and you will get a whole lot less comments than likes, universally : but a lot of people find this style is worth it anyway, including me.

The second thing is that when you make a post with the specific goal of generating lots of discussion, you are essentially inviting people to a gathering in your space. ( You are host a discussion, and you have the duties of a host. )

So, hopefully I haven't scared you away!

Here's some specific concrete things I try do to in any individual post that I'm hoping will get good discussion going:

1. ( Only one topic per post. )

2. ( Everybody likes to be asked. )

3. ( Make your post accessible to everyone )

4. ( Use cut tags wisely. )

5. ( Answer your comments promptly )

6. ( Be ready and able to deal with bad comments. )

7. ( Timing )


Beyond what you do in an individual post, the single most important factor in getting lots of comments is that you've collected a readership who feel comfortable commenting on your discussions, and that happens over time, as part of things you do in a ongoing basis.

( a bit on journaling styles )

But here's some specific things that are important:

8.) ( Make friends. Talk to people. )

9. ( Be consistent. )

11. ( Be persistent )

And if you want an example - when I was doing my FMK poll posts, before I got way too behind on the reading portion, I was pretty much just going down every item in this list in an incredibly blatant way.

( Example: FMK )

Augh these were supposed to be Short and Sweet and Not Take A Lot of Thinking and I spent almost five hours in meetings today and I am just going to post what I have:


So I posted most of my current favorite Sedoretu AUs here a couple weeks ago and kind of wasted my charge! I thought maybe I could expand for the worldbuilding on one of them, but other than the deep dive into Mayan anthropology to see if they had moiety I could steal Poe’s choice of terminology from*, I don’t really have much beyond what’s in the stories? I discover that when I’m playing with Sedoretu AU I tend not to do any really deep worldbuilding, I just declare the AU and then start figuring out who’s getting married. Which is an interesting thing to know about myself! (Especially given the amount of background worldbuilding research I’ve done into Sedoretu AU in a general way.)

*Maya did have moiety, at least some of them, at least some time periods, but best I can tell it was probably already kind of obsolete by the Classical period, and also the best version of the moiety names I found was “White people” and “Red people” which seemed like a bad idea all around.

I suspect that’s why - I’ve done too much background research, so my choices are either “minimal worldbuilding, just go with it” or “spend months thinking about kinship in ways nobody, not even modern social anthropogists, is really that interested in.”

So let’s spin the wheel of fandoms and see what comes up.

Oh look - it’s the Sagas of the Icelanders, which I think maybe three of the rest of you know anything about! But relevant because I want to read all the fic for these but not do the worldbuilding for it. :D Luckily for all of us, I just finally got my hands on a book that does 70s-style kinship analysis for Saga Age Iceland in the way that meshes with Le Guin’s training, so I have a little more of the worldbuilding than I did!

(My conclusion from reading that is that Saga Age Iceland had basically the same kinship system as the modern US - i.e., a mess and a mesh of several different systems overlaid on each other - so I don't have too think too hard about it.)

So let’s look at what’s involved in Sedoretu AU worldbuilding in a general sense. It’s kind of like A/B/O AU in that it’s a bunch of different AU aspects all combined together into one thing, and various authors pick and choose which ones to emphasize or ignore. Except where A/B/O is thrown together out of all the wildest bits of the Id Vortex for sex writers, Sedoretu is mostly about relationships instead - all sorts of relationships.
( Read more... )

SO BASICALLY the conclusion we have come to here is that if I did finally write one of the several Saga sedoretu AUs various people have occasionally talked about wanting, I would probably just go all-out and set them on O. Because then you'd get more or less the right feel, but you wouldn't have to actually do the history worldbuilding because alien planet! Hooray!

And I think that would be a super interesting way to explore the other aspects of the AU, too. Because the base setting is pretty close - and Saga Iceland had the isolation, difficult travel, limited gene pool, and also dependence on kinship networks - that is written into the Ki'O anthropologies as explaining the sedoretu system. And the Sagas are very very much concerned with family relationships, marriage, and kinship. But of course Saga Iceland don't have moiety, don't have four-person bisexual poly marriages, so recasting those stories on O I think would be a really cool way of looking slant at what the originals (in both canons) are saying about love and kinship and human societies.

Also you could make the Sagas have more m/m ships in them.

(And I do thinking recasting the conversion as the recontact with the Ekumen would also be super interesting...)

So next week I am going to my friend's big holiday party (this is basically the only actual, like, real grown-up party, with alcohol and stuff, I go to most years) and the theme this year is that everybody needs to bring a pinata.

I think she was assuming everybody would just buy one and fill it with candy; I think she underestimates her friends.

Anyway, I plan to make one that looks like this, a pokemon go gift:



I have stardust (small glitter tubes), coins (chocolate coins), eggs, and some pompom pokemon and pokeballs, plus a few actual pokemon toys to go in it, and I'm planning to get some candies as well. I may throw in some origami stars as revives too, if I can find directions for something close enough.

Now I just need to make the pinata! I have cardboard, tissue paper in the right colors, clear cellophane, a ribbon and a tag; I'm not going to mess with the LEDs; lots of masking tape, newspaper, string and glue. Now I just need to figure out the dimensions, and how to fasten the pieces together so it comes apart when whacked but not before.

I'm thinking make the top part as one piece and the base part as a separate piece, which would also let me load it upside down, and don't wrap the cellophane around the base, so that probably the base will come off first and spill everything out? But I'm not sure. (I also need to figure out the dimensions...)

But first I need to fold my laundry!

Have you ever thought about just how strange it is that many of us spend almost all our time in spaces where we try to ensure there is no animal life other than humans? And if there aren't any houseplants, no nonhuman macroscopic life at all. Monospecies spaces are creepy and weird and dystopian and I don't like it. The easiest way to fix this is by adding cats.

Anyway, since I am in a cat-free house and therefore reduced to making friends with the spider who lives in the corner of the bathroom instead, here are bad phone pictures of the cats who are currently most important in my life.

( cats )

They are all very warm and snuggly.

Okay then, let's do this. My goal is to post to DW every day in December. It's also my goal to make a lot of the sort of slight short posts that I'm really bad at - but also post some of the long posts that have been hanging around in my WIPs.

So! I have pre-filled in a few dates with posts I know I want to make, but you should give me topics for the rest! Ask me anything! ETA: Limiting it to two requests each for now, because I pre-filled so many that I don't want to run out of dates early. Here's the list so far:

December 1: kitties
December 2: Pokemon pinata plan
December 3: Sedoretu worldbuilding for the fandom of your choice
December 4: How to make a discussion post happen on DW
December 5: fictional_fans
December 6: on DW, Tumblr, AO3, social media trends, and where fandom is going next
December 7: What's your favorite physical non-living object? So, no people or pets, but could be a piece of art, a book you own, etc.
December 8: a book rec from your FMK
December 9: first fanvid you ever watched
December 10: First fanfic you ever read
December 11: Let's Read a Scientific Paper!
December 12: Fandom trends you miss/Fandom trends you want to make happen
December 13: Thoughts on Canon Het
December 14: DVD commentary on a fic of your choice
December 15: Show and tell time! Tell the story of some interesting object you have in your possession.
December 16: A characteristic you enjoy in fan characters and can't stand in RL
December 17: gender in cross-cultural perspective (somehow)
December 18: what money means
December 19: the story of one wish-fulfillment self-insert character from your teenage years
December 20: Wildcard
December 21: the Gelatin Hektograph Adventure
December 22: a story you'd never want to write, but would love to read
December 23: - Travel Day -
December 24: Finally Post That Christmas Fanfic You Started In 2002
December 25: Yuletide day!
December 26: Rivers of London and/or fun crossover ideas thereof
December 27: 5 headcanons for the character(s) of your choice that will probably never show up anywhere. (It can be favorite song or color or something if you don't have something bigger you want to share.)
December 28: Something about where you live
December 29: Favorite pre-20th-century literature
December 30: Kesh
December 31: year-end media wrap-ups



I'm going to go through and try to fill in everyone else's, but if I miss someone, lmk! (It's going to be the same request for everyone because otherwise I will have an anxiety about what if you read the wrong thing into *me* requesting *that* of *you*. But also because I really want to see what everybody comes up with for this one!)

So! Hamilton an American Musical.

As usual I'm a day late and a dollar short, but hey, y'all voted for this one, so you're asking for it.

So first off: the music is AMAZING in every possible way, so smart so catchy so emotionally evocative so clever so culturally important so beautiful, and I could look at pictures of the male cast (in costume or out of it) basically forever, and Lin-Manuel Miranda may literally be too good for this world, and I love what the colorful casting has done to the historical narrative and the way that's been made an integral part of the story through the music and book, and I love the reaction it's gotten and the way it's changing Broadway and people in general's perception of the history. And I legitimately teared up when young Philip tried to show his Dad he was going to be a politician too by rapping for him, I want to live in a world where ability to freestyle is a prereq for political power, we wouldn't be the first country ruled on that basis and there are much worse ways.

Also there needs to be a Doctor/Master vid to 'I'll Be Back'

( And then my feelings get more complicated )

Anyway.

I REALLY LOVE THE MUSIC. AND I REALLY LOVE THE CAST. And I love that the fandom exists and is writing tons of nobody-dies modern AUs and second-generation shipping. It's so great! And I'm sure my expectations were too high, even if I do firmly believe that if he tried, Lin-Manuel Miranda could write a rap about Hamilton being a dork about accounting that would convince me the Federalists were right.

And I'm probably not going to be in the fandom ever. Unless Burr fandom really gets going. Meanwhile I shall keep writing about Grantaire being drunk on stage during the presidential debate and Toussaint being Valjean's campaign manager.

Possibly if I read Chernow and got more of where the show was coming from, I would have different opinions, but a) reading one entire brick for the sake of a musical fandom is enough for this decade, and b) Les Mis fandom on Tumblr has been posting enough excerpts of Chernow's wrong wrong wrong opinions on the French Revolution that I'm not sure I would trust him on the broad political stripes anyway. I do kinda want to finally read the Federalist Papers now though, so there's that.

So, some wise life advice for y'all: Don't be sick. Being sick is no fun.


Anyway, where were we? Oh right: how to describe clothing in fiction. This came up because there was a post going around Tumblr that listed 'paragraphs of clothing description' as one of the cardinal sins of bad writing, and then beccaelizabeth posted In defence of all those paragraphs about clothing: a cultural studies view, which is definitely worth a read, and the problem is, I agree with both of those.

Because clothing is important to your story, and also, there is nothing that makes me roll-eyes out of a story as fast as clumsy wall-o-text descriptions like that.

The same thing applies to other kinds of descriptions - if you want to want me roll-eyes out even faster, try doing it with paragraphs of descriptions of guns. That happens at least as often, although generally not in the same kind of books that do clothes. And then there's descriptions of food, of spaceships or steam trains, of scenery and nature, which I tend to be more tolerant of, but are just as easy to do a clumsily bad job on.

I'm going to stick with clothing in this post, because it's a pretty universal one, and because it gets the gendered complaining in a way the others don't, and because nearly all stories will have clothing appear at some point, but most of this applies to all sorts of things you might need to describe in a story.

Also, pls don't get the impression I actually have answers here, this is just me throwing out Thoughts.

( Thoughts )
( A Writing Exercise For Description )

...Anybody else wanna try that?

This entry is actually less relevant than it was a year ago when I first talked about writing it - in 2014, if you include kids' and YA books over 200 pages, I read a total of 15 novels, a third of which were Yuletide canon review. Which was still better than 2013, during which I read Les Miserables. And some Daniel Pinkwater rereads for Yuletide. (I wasn't tracking them as carefully then, but durned if I can remember any more.) And granted if you're going to read one novel over the course of a year, Les Mis is a good one to pick, but compare that to when I was in high school and reading, conservative estimate, 350 books a year.

This year I have managed 31 novels (11 of them YA) and if I really push to make my goodreads challenge by the end of this month, I'm on track for at least 36 this year. Which is, I guess, good by most folks' standards, but 16-year-old me is looking at my overloaded bookshelves and shaking her head sadly. And adult me is looking at the library patrons who go through ten a week with abject jealousy.

I still read a lot! I read 160 adult nonfiction books in that year, plus comics, picture books, poetry, some novellas and short stories, and this and that other things. Not to mention fanfic - some judicious sampling of my AO3 page says I've read about 9,000,000 words of fanfic this year, an average of 25,000 words a day. And I still read quickly - I can read a 350-page novel in four or five hours tops, with no interruptions. It's just that I seem to have to make a deliberate effort anymore to sit down and read a novel, when it used to be like breathing.

So, what changed? I've made a bunch of attempts to write this post out, and it keeps being an incoherent mess, but I think, honestly, what it comes down to is: ( Because reasons )

I'm going to keep trying to push to read more novels (I'm really enjoying reading more of them, even if it seems to be coming down to 'Sunday mornings and waiting rooms only'). I want to at least have a good enough list that I feel ok about nominating for the Hugos. I think next year I'm going to try to push harder for pro short fiction, though. And catching up on my shelves at home rather than new stuff.

I thought this one would be easy because I wrote it in a comment reply on a post many years ago, and broke the DW comment limit in the process. Twice. I always kind of wanted to expand it, polish it up and repost it here, but then I ended up rewriting a little more extensively than I'd expected, to nobody's surprise.

This is, in rough paraphrase, meant to answer the question: I want to write sexually active cis female characters in a world with pre-industrial technology, without having them be tied to childbearing and childrearing. How can I do that, realistically, without having to rely on "because magic" or "because I say so"?

So below the cuts are various ways people have used to control and limit their reproductive and childcare roles across cultures and histories. It's heavy on historical European and Mediterranean cultures - that's way easier to research if you only read European languages, and also I'm less likely to completely screw them up. But most of these things, at least in broad strokes, would apply to most human cultures more or less. Warnings for... most things you can think of regarding gender, sexuality, reproduction and/or unwanted children, and possibly a few things you can't.

( Ways to avoid the problem )

( Ways to end a pregnancy or prevent conception with PIV sex )

( Things to do with a baby you don't want )

( Things to do with your kids other than become a full-time mom )


...and this just hit 6,000 words, so I'll leave it there. A lot of this is based on memories of things I studied in college quite awhile ago now, so no guarantees on accuracy, but if you want me to try to expand on any particular thing or offer recommended reading I will do my best to either give you something more or admit I don't have it.

I am glad to see there is still so much interest in what's up with the OTW!

The Organization for Transformative Works is a smallish, fannish, entirely volunteer-run community/arts/advocacy nonprofit with a staff and membership who are scattered around the world and communicate amongst each other entirely online.

If you have any experience with grassroots nonprofits that should tell you more that you want to know about what's been going on.

Oh, you wanted more than that?

Okay, then, but disclaimers first: I am a staff member on the OTW's Tag Wrangling Committee, who is writing this instead of overdue staff work. (I also did a very small amount of AO3 coding work, way back in the day.) My only contribution to the recent unpleasantness was reblogging stuff on Tumblr and filking "Do You Hear The People Sing" in chat. Everything I say here is my own opinion, may be various levels of ill-informed, and does not reflect the official positions of the OTW as an org or the opinions of any other staff member.

My usual policy is "if I post it publicly, link it all you want" but I would like to request for this post, as a kindness please don't link it publicly anywhere? Feel free to share with friends if you want but I'm not well-informed enough that I'm comfortable with being The Entire Internet's Source on this.

(Also the above probably gives the impression the rest of this post is going to be way juicier than it actually is.)

( Here's what's up with the OTW )

Anyway, so there you have it, that's what's up with the OTW. A lot of the basics above are covered on the OTW website, and I thought about linkifiyng it, but I'm lazy and you can probably find the information yourself if you want the less colorful versions.

You are welcome to ask questions in comments, but tbh pretty much everything I actually know (and quite a few things I don't actually know) are included above, so I may or may not be able to answer them.