Here is my 2024 yuletide letter, in its final form! Text below the cuts is the content of my signup.

I am one of those people who comes to Yuletide mostly just wanting any fic for my small fandoms, so I'm really wide open about what you write for me. I will never be upset with ODAO as long as you write me the story you really wanted to write and that comes through, so if you saw one of these fandoms or characters in the tagset and immediately knew the story you wish there was a prompt for, write me that one instead.

I put a couple of fandom-specific DNWs in the signup but I don't really have any general ones, and I really did think that through. If the characters and the canon and the story you're writing cry out for something, I opt in even if it's something that's a common DNW (just tag for it if I might need to brace myself).

I like crossovers (I didn't prompt many this year, but an Aubrey/Maturin - Mairelon crossover would be amazing, so would Mairelon - Goblins in the Castle, or Scipio and Hannibal meeting characters from other fandoms/elsewhere in history, or any universe overlapping with Maupin, or anything else that strikes your fancy), I like setting-swap AUs that are interested in what the canon and the new setting have to say about each other, I like unusual prose formats and POVs and I like non-text treats or mixed media stories. (I allow treats.) I have a lot of other likes too, and perhaps I will edit this letter to add some more? If I don't get to that before you see this, this tag has my yuletide posts going back to 2003 and feel free to mine those for old likes! Some of my likes also come through in my prompts, and if you see something in a prompt for one fandom that you'd rather apply to another, go for it.

This year's "completely unintentional theme" is historical settings, so here we are in vaguely chronological order:

Symposium - Plato, Punic Wars RPF, Mademoiselle de Maupin - Théophile Gautier, Goblins in the Castle - Bruce Coville, Aubrey-Maturin Series - Patrick O'Brian, Mairelon the Magician - Patricia Wrede

Fandom: Symposium - Plato, Any

Plato's Symposium is one of the Socratic Dialogues, possibly one of the most analyzed, discussed, and relitigated works in all of history. It's wildly important to queer/LGBT history as well, with some of the most detailed discussion of male/male relationships in the ancient world that echoed up through the next thousand+ years of European thought. But it's also basically an RPS story about a bunch of famous people Plato knew when he was younger hanging out, getting drunk, and talking about gay shipping, having a good time before all the tragedy that befell them later. If you've heard people talk about the ancient arguments over whether Achilles topped - that's in here. (There's a theory that this was published as an advertisement for Plato's later Academy, by showing it as a place where you get to hang out with your frat bros, meet famous people, have fun and talk philosophy, and it definitely makes sense as that.)

It's one of the shorter dialogues and one of the more accessible, and I would love to see fic that treats it for what it is as a stand-alone rps canon without having to drag along all that millennium of commentaries on top - you don't need that to understand most of what it's doing on a basic level. There's a bunch of English (and other) translations online, although the most common one is a mid-19th century one that's not the clearest (but most of the newer ones seem to be available as pdfs on professors' websites if you go looking.) That said, they are discussing sex from the POV of upper-class ancient Athenians where relationships with age gaps, power differentials, and young teens were more common; they don't all take the same moral position on it, but none of their positions line up with modern norms, so if you aren't interested in other cultural views on that, maybe skip this one.

( Fandom: Symposium - Plato )

Punic Wars RPF, Any

Hannibal Barca and Cornelius Publius Scipio Africanus were two opposing generals in the
2nd Punic War. Hannibal was famous as the world's greatest general and started inflicting defeat after defeat on Rome, but didn't have the backing to bring the war to a decisive end; and meanwhile Scipio showed up in the provinces and started making a serious attempt at earning the world's greatest general title from him. It all came to a head when Scipio led a Roman army on Carthage and won a decisive victory and then, against both common practice and the desires of Rome, let both Hannibal and Carthage survive their defeat, only for both the generals to attempt to retire, end up in politics, completely refuse to play the political corruption game, get exiled for it, fake their own deaths and run away together.

I love a pairing that's between two extremely competent people who know they're each other's closest chance at finding an equal but have no choice but to be opponents; add in the bit where the thing they're the best at is a terrible thing they both come to despise, and the equivocally tragic endings, and I'm there for all of it. I'm not completely unaware of Roman history generally but I am happy to admit I ship this because of dhampyresa's primers and I'm happy to get fic written pretty much entirely from them, if you don't know the history much either.

( Punic Wars RPF )

Mademoiselle de Maupin - Théophile Gautier, Any

This is a 19th century French novel that is some times considered a famous "dirty" book, about a man who sometimes wishes he was a woman, a woman who loves women, and a woman who is also a man, who all love each other dearly while all telling themselves they are incapable of love, and also have fursuit sex sometimes. Also it has all the Gender. All of it. It's one novel and it's set in a deliberately only sketched out "romantic past of France" which is fun to explore. It's on Project Gutenberg in two volumes in the standard translation (and French). It needs all the fanfic.

( Mademoiselle de Maupin - Théophile Gautier )

Goblins in the Castle - Bruce Coville, Karl

This is a mostly stand-alone kids' fantasy novel from the 90s, one of my favorites of childhood, and isn't free online that I know of but should be reasonably easy to get your hands on. It's about a cursed castle and a quest to free the world's wild joy again, and also about Granny Pinchbottom and an Igor with a teddy bear. The author used to have Igor himself visit his elementary school classrooms every year to read it out loud to them, complete with teddy bear. (It was also not a surprise to me at all when I learned that the author had recently come out as bi.)

When I was looking it up pre-Yuletide I learned that the author has since worked it into his wider fantasy universe; feel free to use that or not, if you want to. There is also a direct sequel, and I tried to read it before assignments went out but didn't quite make it. So far I'm not as enchanted with it as with the first, but that may change once I finish? If anything in my prompts is contradictory with the sequel, feel free to ignore, and don't worry about spoilers.
( Goblins in the Castle )

Aubrey-Maturin Series - Patrick O'Brian, James Dillon

This is a very long series about the British Navy in the Napoleon Wars featuring a ship's Captain Aubrey and his learned companion Dr. Maturin. I'm re-reading to it in audiobook on my commute because the radio news is scary, but it's a very short commute so I'm going very slow. I only just got through Book 1 and I'm enjoying it, but if you have ever wanted an excuse to start this series, Book 1 is all you will need to write my prompts. It's a classic enough series that it's always still in print, if you want to try. James Dillon is the ship's lieutenant who is secretly going through some personal and political crises and doesn't outlive the first book, and he's my only request.

( Aubrey/Maturin )

Mairelon the Magician - Patricia Wrede, Renee D'Auber

This is another kids' novel with a sequel, about a regency Britain with magic, and a gentlemanly wizard who picks up a street rat while working undercover for Runners. I'm sorry if the prompts here feel a little sparse in comparison to the others; it's not that I want this one less, just that I have re-read it far less recently. If that comes through in the prompts I apologize; please ignore any inaccuracies and write want you want!

If you want more detailed prompts the best I can offer is this old comment by me when I was nine years closer to the last time I'd read it through..
( Mairelon the Magician - Patricia Wrede )

I didn't really know what to do with this one, because: emotions? connected to memories? Look I'm lucky enough to be able to connect an emotion to the present ok. Plus - and this has tripped me up before with prompts like this - I feel like most people expect a "favorite memory" to be a thing that you enjoyed while it was happening, but the emotions I have connected to remembering a thing aren't necessarily the same emotions I felt while experiencing a thing? So one memory that sticks is the teacher in fifth grade telling me "the assignment said to write about a good memory, but these are all about times you cried and were sad!" Well yeah, the day I had wasn't fun but the memory I made out of it is, what don't you understand?

(Not to say that I don't also have terrible memories of terrible days when bad things happened and I was sad. But I also have memories of good days when I was happy that are bad memories because of what they're connected to. And when I'm prompted for a "favorite memory" good days that I have good memories of are never the first things I come up with.)

Anyway! That's way off topic so let's just say this prompt is hard, which is why it's one I got stuck on, so here's something that doesn't really fit the prompt, but I had it on my mind, and it's about imperialism, avoidable tragedy, death, rotting ice mummies, and cannibalism, all the sort of things that immediately come to mind when somebody asks me for good memories.

Four reasons I know more than anybody ever should about the lost Franklin Expedition (and one reason I don't.)

1. When I was in elementary school, there was an annual event where the Girl Scouts got to have a campout in the big science museum, and the year I was old enough, I went and I was very excited! As you would be. Unfortunately, when it came time to lay out our bedrolls, the room with the neato physics deelybobbers and thingamajics was already claimed, and so was the room with the models of the Solar System, and the one with the gorgeous math sculptures demonstrating topology and tesseracts, and the one with the jellyfish. So we ended up in the room with the exhibit on mummies. No, this was not the ideal place for a bunch of nine-year-old girls to try to sleep. On the plus side I don't remember any actual mummies. On the other hand, it was one of those exhibits that was mostly giant backlit signs on the walls, and they stayed lit all night. Specifically, I was positioned so as to spend the entire night looking at a blown-up backlit image of one of the Beechey Island ice mummies (Do not google for those photos! Please! it was the one of William Braine that's on Mummipedia I recognized it immediately) alongside text about how the expedition had gone mad with mercury poisoning and then eaten each other.
   
   I didn't sleep that night.


2. Reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture


3. Several of my friends from the heady days of post-movie Les Miserables fandom have spent several years deep in the fandom of AMC's The Terror. This kind of makes sense, if you were in Les Mis fandom because it was a historical costume drama about a bunch of attractive people forced by circumstance into bad choices who all die tragically in the end. (That wasn't why I was in Les Mis fandom.) Weirdly I don't think any of them were even aware of the dS connection and nobody active in that fandom on Tumblr seems to even know who Stan Rogers is??
   
   As a result while I was never particularly interested in watching the show, too much horror in the wrong way for me, I am in fact all in for terrebus-fc fandom (which is one of the only reasons I was able to follow what's going on in Ted Lasso fic.)


4. One of my non-DW fandom friends has a long-standing interest in the Franklin expedition - unrelated, as far as I can tell, to either childhood trauma or dueSouth fandom. I think it might have started with her picking up Lady Franklin's Revenge on a whim? Anyway, she reads all the books that come out and follows the archeology news, and since I was possibly the first other person she mentioned it to who had any idea what she was on about, I am her Talking About The Franklin Expedition person. (Yes, she knows about the childhood trauma, it's fine.) In return she puts up with me telling her all about the lost apocryphal Mallory/Irvine photos, the mysteries of Green Boots, and the Rainbow Valley, so it works out.


5. Here's the thing though: Shackleton and Amundsen were both immeasurably cooler. Scott's expedition was more tragic and everything Vilhjalmur Stefansson did more entertainingly shambolic, not to mention those guys with the hot air balloon for sheer ridiculousness, or Matthew Henson and his crew for a complicated story of heroism, imperialism, and race. And if what you want is ice mummies, unsolved mysteries, and Englishmen dying with a stiff upper lip for an abstract ideal of exploration and honor, let me tell you about Mallory and Irvine.
   Okay, admittedly none of those have the "going mad with mercury poisoning and then eating each other" aspect, but I think the childhood trauma has ruined that for me, and the mercury poisoning probably didn't happen anyway.
   
   I think the most interesting thing about the Franklin expedition - and it's one of the things that fascinates my friend - is that it's still interesting. The lost expedition, and Lady Franklin's dogged attempts to keep it unforgotten, gripped the public imagination in a different way than any of the others firmly enough it keeps bobbing back up to the public consciousness in odd new ways every decade or so. It's a pointless tragic disaster that's always had a fandom, and that's so strange and uncomfortable and interesting.

The thing about the famous Complaint Tablet to Ea-Nasir is not just that we have, preserved, a nearly 4000-year-old customer complaint that reads exactly like a modern one, it isn't even that it wasn't the only one one found in the man's house, it's that most clay tablets were not intended to be archived, and they were difficult to store in large numbers, so the only reason we have a library of letters sent by angry customers to a copper merchant in Ur 4,000 years ago is that he went to a serious amount of trouble to preserve them for posterity.

So I feel like, honestly, he would have been delighted to learn that he and his disgruntled customers have, 4000 years later, become a global in-joke.

• A Scam Artist in Ur (1109 words) by MarlynnOfMany
  Fandom: Ea-nasir - Fandom
  Rating: General Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Characters: Ea-Nasir (Mesopotamian), Nanni (Mesopotamian), Arshaka (Mesopotamian)
  Additional Tags: Ancient Sumerian Customer Complaints, Con Artists
  
  Ea-Nasir makes a lot of people angry, and gets cursed for his trouble.



• Pay me Baby, Treat me Right. (1803 words) by tricatular
  Fandom: Ea-nasir Tablet RPF
  Rating: Explicit
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Ea-nasir/Nanni
  
  Additional Tags: Yuletide Treat, Ancient Sumerian Customer Complaints
  
  An angry customer gets a different kind of satisfaction than he asked for.



• everything you say has water under it (1683 words) by tricatular
  Chapters: 1/1
  Fandom: Ea-nasir Tablet RPF
  Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Ea-nasir/Nanni
  Characters: Nanni (Ea-nasir Tablet RPF), Ea-nasir (Ea-nasir Tablet RPF)
  Additional Tags: Yuletide Treat, Epistolary, POV Outsider
  
  An archeaologist realizes that sometimes, copper ingots aren't just copper ingots.

Hannibal Barca and Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus were opposing generals in the Second Punic War fought around the Mediterranean around 2200 years ago. Hannibal was a general of Carthage, who led crushing victory after crushing victory against the Romans, taking the war to the very gates of Rome. Meanwhile a Roman general named Scipio, who as a young soldier had barely survived his first few battles against Hannibal, had taken an army to Hannibal's home ground and was busy defeating all the other Carthaginian generals. With Scipio's army approaching their city walls, Carthage finally recalled Hannibal, and they met for the first time in a parley before the battle of Zama. We have records of what they said at the parley, words of respect and admiration for each other - though who knows if they are true. It could not stop the war: they fought: Hannibal lost: and still-undefeated Scipio, to the consternation of pretty much everyone, let Carthage go dignified and intact into defeat, and left Hannibal free to become its political leader after the war.

Hannibal didn't last long in power - he appears to have been a principled and honorable reformer type, so he ended up having to flee in exile to Ephesus a few years later, where he became an advisor to the king there in his wars against Rome. Where Scipio also showed up, part of a delegation of Romans to the king. We don't know what happened there, only that they played games with each other in the gymnasium and laughed together. The Ephesians did not take Hannibal's advice, fought undefeated Scipio, and lost. Hannibal ended up farther exiled; but Scipio was having his own troubles at home, partly due to his mercy against Carthage, and mostly-voluntarily exiled himself from Rome after his return from Ephesus. (I've read he spent much of these later years trying to convince the Romans to leave poor Hannibal alone.)

In the year 183, Scipio died in "mysterious circumstances", and what became of his body is unknown: it is said he had his tomb inscribed "ungrateful fatherland, you will not even have my bones". In the year 183, Hannibal also died; nobody knows how or of what - there are contradictory stories - but there are also no reports of his burial; his tomb is unknown; it is said he left behind a note that read "Let us relieve the Romans from the anxiety they have so long experienced, since they think it tries their patience too much to wait for an old man's death".

I am not saying they faked their deaths and ran away together. But I'm not not saying that. All we have left of them is the few historical accounts written a generation later that happened to be lucky enough to survive 2000 years of copying (and some elephant poop in the Alps, I guess.) And most of what did survive those 2000 years is about how Hannibal and Scipio shaped each other's lives around each other, and kept showing each other mercy and respect and friendship even when they were fighting epic battles on either side of a horrific war. And both just happened to die mysteriously and sarcastically in exile at the same time and there were no bodies. History is what's remembered. So if we spend enough time telling the story of how they both faked their deaths and ran away together, perhaps in another 2000 years it'll be as true as any of it! (except the elephant poop. you don't get much more concretely factual than elephant poop.)

And anyway, I can introduce you to some people here on DW who know way more about Rome and Carthage than I do, and they will swear that the two of them definitely faked their deaths and ran away together, and who am I to disagree?

There are, tragically, only a few dozen Hannibal/Scipio fics on AO3, but it's one of those tiny fandoms where every single fic is a pearl of delight, so you should definitely look beyond what I am rec'ing here!

• Fulmina Belli (1229 words) by sevenofspade
  Fandom: Ancient History RPF
  Rating: Not Rated
  Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
  Relationships: Scipio Africanus/Hannibal Barca
  Additional Tags: Psychic Wolves
  
  Scipio meets Hannibal for the first time at the fields of Zama, before the battle. (this is a psychic wolves AU but it's also just a really good portrait of Hannibal and Scipio at Zama. Don't let the wolves stop you; the wolves are a metaphor.)



• Ossa tibi bene quiescant (4064 words) by spacestationtrustfund
  Fandom: Punic Wars RPF, Ancient History RPF, Classical Greece and Rome History & Literature RPF
  Rating: Mature
  Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
  Relationships: Scipio Africanus/Hannibal Barca, Scipio Africanus/Aemilia Tertia
  Characters: Scipio Africanus, Hannibal Barca
  Additional Tags: Battle of Zama, Second Punic War, Identity, Linguistics, Flirting, Power Play, Diaspora, Enemies With Benefits
  
  The meeting at Zama with fewer wolves and more kisses.



• Libyssa (5438 words) by dirtybinary
  Fandom: Ancient History RPF, Punic Wars RPF, Classical Greece and Rome History & Literature RPF
  Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Scipio Africanus/Hannibal Barca
  Additional Tags: partial Epistolary, Not Really Character Death, Suicide mentions
  
  In which Scipio and Hannibal fake their deaths and run away together.



• Days of Sand (1248 words) by joyeusenoelle
  Fandom: Ancient History RPF
  Rating: General Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Characters: Hannibal Barca, Scipio Africanus
  
  Hannibal and Scipio, after they faked their deaths and ran away together.

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.

I would say the unifying themes of this post, to the extent it has any, are Victoriana, costuming, and crossdressing. Also, Things I Have Scanned. So let's get on it, shall we?

( First, people wanted to see the pictures of the 1890s silk dress I was fixing last week, so here they are. )

( And while I was scanning those I went ahead and scanned a few other things. )

Meanwhile, I have acquired another supply from my secret-source-of-free-comics-in-return-for-reviews! And they seemed to fit the theme, so, hey, since I have read them all already,a here are scans and reviews:

( ADELE BLANC-SEC by Jacques Tardi. )

( The CBLDF 2010 Liberty Annual )

( Scarlett Takes Manhattan )

( And, okay, the other comics that didn't fit the theme. )

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 )

I went to a holiday party at chez kyabetsu & boytoy yesterday - okay, Saturday - okay, it was a full 24 hours of party, don't judge! - and it was brilliant, as parties usually are at their place. As a part of my ongoing quest to be geekier than thou (though winning the math contest at math camp is still my zenith), I missed out on singing along to The Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny on Rock Band in order to sit in the basement and discuss early 20th century technology (for a Top Gear/The Secret Garden crossover fic) with a former curator of the Edison Museum NHP.

Like I said, brilliant party. :D I am so lucky to find so many amazing geeky fannish people around me in 3D space as well as you all in the magic box.

On the other hand, I am so, so behind on answering comments in various places. And updating the Dr. Seuss thing, and the lolitics WIP (and have unwisely started another one--) and my yuletide story. And holiday gifting, too, which takes talent considering I buy for less than half a dozen people.

Downloads of early sound recordings from the Edison Collection. Early cylinder recordings -> as always making me want more Madelyn Mack, people! (Specifically the story where she and Irene manipulate Holmes into recording himself on violin that I started last year about this time.) But I have so much other stuff I need to do first.

And once Yuletide is over I have to decide what I am writing for the Top Gear Big Bang I signed up for: finishing the Doctor Who crossover of doom like I originally intended (which is looking at more like 10^6 words than 10^5); the prequel to the Doctor Who crossover, set during The Sontaran Stratagem, in which many things are set on fire; or the Secret Garden crossover where young James, c. 1909, is sent to live at a glass factory in Yorkshire with an old friend of his Mum's, and discovers first the spoilt hypochondriac son of the family, and then Richard the street kid with his amazing motorbike, and then a rusty, neglected old Daimler hidden away in a secret garage that they proceed to fix up together. I should do one of the first two, but Dickensian steampunky Secret Garden crossover! It is calling me! Even if the research involved would be ridiculous.

...this post is very random. To continue the randomness, why did nobody tell me, back when I was desperately looking for a good mp3 of The Green Hills of Earth that Rhysling had "borrowed" the original from a Russian cosmonauts' song? Heinlein would be annoyed. :P

Those of you who are also in lolitics fandom can probably guess what led to me discovering that. Those of you who aren't probably don't want to know. And are wondering when I will go back to writing fic about something other than middle-aged British men.

But to finish a post that seems to be themed around "random music and fannishness", everybody should go listen to nextian's Ballad of the Lone Centurion. (I support the interpretation where it's some kind of sovereignty myth; hidden sleepers and lone guardians usually are, in British myth. Also I really want to draw that cartoon now where Horton and the elephant-bird go to visit Rory and reassure him "There is the Long Watch, and then longer watches; but oh is it worth it when she finally hatches!" I should probably actually watch The Big Bang first, though.)

Oh and speaking of sovereignty symbols: Whoever on my reading list is watching the Mad Hattery blog and got it onto my network page, I salute you. Ruefully. :P It is at least partly your fault I am so behind.

ETA: I knew I was forgetting something! Per a conversation with lindentreeisle at the party, I am going to attempt a proper fanlore page for the D/s AU shared universe - does anybody have any advice, or links to stories in the 'verse that aren't on AO3 that I should know about?

ETA2: OMG, the Library of Congress has a ton of old sheet music online, how did I not know this?

...shut up, appendices are totally not going overboard.

( A Mobile Phone from 1912 )


( Years of all Halloween full moons from the start of the Gregorian calendar to the 22nd century. )


...and now I feel like this post belongs as a missing chapter of Areas of My Expertise. A theme, I has one.

And since Bucketeers and Hodgman are feeling left out, here is an mp3 that will do for both: Jonathan Coulton sings Furry Old Lobster

Now that my laptop is mostly working and I have free hard drive space, I can do things like digitize more 33 RPMs again! hooray.

So I have digitized some 33 RPMs. :D This post is a birthday present for my sister, who has said I should do some of these, but the rest of you are welcome to share them too.

( Man On The Moon/CBS Enterprises/Narrated by Walter Cronkite + Sounds of the Space Age/National Geographic/Frank Borman/1969 )

( The In Sound from Way Out: Electronic Pop Music of the Future created by Perrey-Kingsley )

...and finally, this isn't a 33 RPM rip, it's a .zip file that contains both of Nichelle Nichols' vocal albums. Because stellar_dust once gave me a giant mp3 torrent/archive that had "all the albums ever put out by Star Trek people", and it didn't include these, which was a crime on several levels. And so I found them, and have been meaning to share them more widely for some time.

The .zip includes Down to Earth, produced in 1967, which is a collection of Ms. Nichols singing '60s lounge/pop/standards, and is unsurprisingly really very good if you like lounge/pop/standards (which I do. Why didn't they have *her* be the TNG holodeck crooner?) It also includes Out of This World, a later album of original songs themed around space and Star Trek, and is (perhaps surprisingly?) really bad. I mean, worse that Shatner's albums. Her voice is still excellent, but the songs they gave her to sing are cringingly bad; the music direction somehow even managed to screw up her vocal cover of the TOS theme.

Uhura.zip

(...also there will be cakes later. Under lock.)

So, a long, long time ago, before I had an online journal or interacted with fandom in any way, back before Wikipedia ruled the internets, I used to post on Everything2, which is a wikipedia competitor with a very different structure, ethos, and culture. (As much as I do like the Wiki system, I wish more sites used an E2 framework instead - I think it would've worked really well for fanlore, for ex., with its emphasis on multiple voices and automatic flow.)

Anyway, one of the things I posted there, over eight years ago (!!!), was an attempted translation of the Old English poem Wulf and Eadwacer into poetic Modern English. I'm no Anglo-Saxon scholar, but I go through phases of reading lots of early English poetry and poking at the language, so it may be a bad translation, but I like the poem, and I like my version better than any of the other translations I've found, and I have nothing at all staked on it being a good translation, so critique it all you want. (I am, oddly, very fragile when it comes to criticism of my fiction - I can get scared into writing nothing for months even by *effusively good* feedback - but have a very thick skin about my poetry - say whatever you want about it, it won't change what the poem means to me.)

So there's this translation, that's been sitting pretty much ignored on a website that's been slowly dwindling in readership, until shanaqui with her riddles on poetry inspired me to look it up again and repost my Wulf and Eadwacer there.

And what should I discover but that someone has quoted my translation in an academic paper, as far as I can tell from Google pretty much in full, and published it in the journal "Language and Literature" only this month.

I am trying to articulate why this pisses me off so much. Given that I generally approve of fair use and quotation and derivative/transformative work with or without permission, and am pretty radically anti-intellectual-property in general, and strongly support acafandom in using internet postings in published papers, I ought to just be happy that somebody (somebody who I rather admire as a writer and scholar) has noticed my un-expert little translation and thought it worth talking about.

But, well, what pisses me off? Is that the journal's publisher wants 25 dollars from me in exchange for the privilege of looking for only 24 hours at the article about my work that they published without even notifying me.

( <I>That</i> pisses me the hell off (pardon my Anglo-Saxon. And Old French.) Cue rant. )

Short version: if Transformative Works and Cultures was pay-only, I would be a lot less supportive of it, that's for darn sure.

(I tend to think that fanacademia, even beyond TWC, tends to be fairly good about freely sharing info - even when papers are published behind pay-only, it's been fairly easy for me to get copies for free - but that might be because accumulated fanmeta rep has gotten *me* inside several locked walls of access that I don't even see any more.)

(Also, said fan network has already gotten me a copy of the paper about Wulf and Eadwacer that discusses me. I am now officially recorded in the ongoing conversation of Western Thought as "Melannen, a kind of 'groupie' for wit and wisdom" --- I'll take it! Could be worse. Also, my e2 post is "not exactly post-structural exegesis," but rather "a crude recommendation" to "make the empty room exciting with your own furnishings". Hmm, you know, I don't have any titles on my DW journal pages yet... :D But seriously folks, it's a reasonably good paper which is doing pretty much the same thing I tried to do in my e2 post but better - the quotes are actually a compliment, because I'm the only one of six translators - including Burton Raffel - he actually discusses at any length whatsoever. Even if he is baffled by the internets and the way learnings happen there. And he got the date of publication of the E2 entry wrong by five years somehow. And altered my translation in a fairly significant way without, apparently, noticing.)


...er. Speaking of the value of a public domain, last weekend I was at Farpoint - my first ever sci-fi con! - and spent most of the time trying to pretend it was con.txt, which meant hanging around the do-it-yourself panel rooms and figuring out how to talk about fanfic in them without outright admitting I'm a fanfic writer. (Panels I either gave or attended: Writing SF Erotica, DIY Social, SF Worldbuilding, Webcomics 101, Sex and SciFi, Not Everyone's a Pro, Copyright/Copywrong, Convention Sales for Creative Types, and Sherlock Holmes. I want to talk more about the con later, but this post is going to be long enough already.)

One of the coolest ones I attended was ( The Copyright, Copywrong panel, which was recorded and is available as a podcast. )
...anyway it also features me as "person in audience who wouldn't stop talking". Hear! Me attempt to talk to Marc Okrand without getting squee all over him! Hear! Me slip slash discussion in under the radar by casually mentioning the OTW without explaining what it is! Hear! Me get scolded for talking too much and not letting other people participate! Hear! Me completely fail to mention Interrobang Studios, which is ostensibly why I was at the con!


(and for the record, if I was not so lazy I would officially put all of my work under a creative commons share-alike license, the share-alike being most important and the attribution being least.)

Smithsonian Magazine has a section called "The Image At Hand", where they publish a short article about an iconic historic photograph, usually a portrait, and print the photograph, frequently with full bleed. Since college, I've been tearing these out when they strike a chord with me, and putting them into an ever-changing collage in a poster frame in my bedroom.

(It currently features black-and-white photos of Winston Churchill, Zorah Neale Hurston, Charles Darwin, one of the the Cottingly Fairies shots, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, and Ladybird Johnson dancing barefoot on the cabinet table.)

Anyway, this months had this picture of Bonnie Parker, of Bonnie & Clyde. Which I of course pulled out, for future rotation into the collage.

Only while it was laying on the table, I looked at it way to fast, and for a minute I thought it was Parker, not Bonnie Parker. Bonnie was storter, but other than that, she could totally pass for Parker!

Cool. Even though Bonnie was about as far as it's possible to get from "expert cat burglar".

(And then, of course, I ended up looking up Eliot Ness on wikipedia...)

Part two of copying my sister's post: photo update.

I haven't taken many for awhile, because my camera is only partly working. And the bits that seem to be really going bad (as opposed to just needing to be smacked around a bit to behave) are the lighting adjustment and the flash, so a lot of these needed a fair amound of futzing after I got them on the computer, and are still slightly pink, but they came out suprisingly okay for all that.

Also, I decided to play with Flickr as my host: I've had an account for years, because it's the default on LT, and doing it through my webspace has gotten substantially more annoying since they made it impossible to see directory indexes on the web. So you can see all these pictures at my flickr account, with slightly different descriptions and more image sizes.

( Colonial Williamsburg, cute puppies and kitties, and Native American sites in Ohio. )

The reason I decided I want to go see the mounds again was that I was going to continue my yuletide story by having Jane and Lambert (of the College of Magics books) autocamping down the National Road and visiting moundbuilder/Fort Ancient religious sites along the way, learning about how Native Americans did their own sort of magic within North, South, East, and West. But as usual I got distracted by the fun of doing the historical research and only got the first bit of the story written. I bought a book at Hopewell Culture National Park, though, Mysteries of the Hopewell: Astronomers, Geometers, and Magicians, which should be excellently helpful if I ever *do* write the story about European magic meets the Moundbuilders.

So today at the sale, I got to talk to the lady who knew the lady who was married to the guy who owned the awesome thing, and she says that it was bought about twenty or thirty years ago while he was in Suez for the Navy, and it's over two hundred years old. (She has a really cute assistance dog, too.)

I'll buy about half of what she told me (it may have been bought somewhere in the Near East by someone who was told that it was over 200 years old) but I don't believe it could actually be that old; it's not *that* cool, and the textiles used really say 20th century to me. But this adds another level of possibility: instead of being made by an American who didn't know much about Egypt, it may have been made by an Egyptian to sell to Americans who don't know much about Egypt. Though that still leaves the question of why it was being sold, in the '70s, in a very aged condition. (If it is close to two hundred years old, it would pre-date Champollion, which would at least excuse the symbology being off and explain why there are apparently random heiroglyphs scattered around. Though I find it hard to believe it would be even as accurate as it is in that case.)

...more hearteningly, I now have an e-mail address for the actual lady it was donated by, so maybe I can get a more direct version of the story.

So tommorow is our church's big fall rummage sale, so I came home today to help Mom set up and price, and in the big pile of STUFF THAT WAS DONATED was this:



It is not it great shape - some of the fabric is deteriorated and some of the dyes have run as they faded - but it is *old* - my conservative guess would be 1940s - and over five feet long, all hand-appliqued on heavy canvas - and did I mention it is made of pure awesome? (Possibly quite literally.)

All I know about it is that it belonged to the deceased husband of a friend of a woman who knows someone at our church.

Here's a close-up of Horus so you can see the stitchwork: link. (And a huge version of the whole thing: link)

Hey eleutheria, know anyone who needs a hanging for a Horus altar? :D

(I would like to at least figure out who the other two figures reresent - they're not anything I know offhand - and get a better idea of the age and origin - and maybe figure out how to attempt to properly conserve it. I've gotten ratty old quilts before, but they were all obviously used hard when they were new and intended for it, so I was fine with continuting to use them as ratty old textiles. This one, however, is *awesome*.)

So I got linked to The Ball of Kerrimuir, fandom edition¹, which led by logical steps to Avram Grumer's Denvention sketchnotes², which of course led me to Raiders of the Lost Basement³, which referenced Ah, Sweet Idiocy!⁴, which took me along the primrose path to Mike Resnick's overview of published fan histories, which has me once again wanting to actually work on codifying the history of 21st century fanficdom into something narrative-like and zine-ish⁵. With lots and lots of cross-references to kerfuffles in fandoms of the past, for maximum schadenfreude. ⁶ What do you think -- too soon?

Anyway, there was this meme going around about your five fannish crushes, and why they would never work? Here's mine! Only, bonus: I don't give you the names of the characters, you have to *guess*! (It's made easier by the fact that there are at least three correct answers to each of these...)

( The sad part is, I considered putting things like 'is an evil megalomaniac' and 'anatomically incompatible' on here, then thought, no, if he was willing I could totally work around that. )

1. "Agent Scully she was there / Standin’ on her head / Provin’ tae a’ the boys an’ girls / Her hair is really red." - alas, the contributions by the Making Light commenters aren't really up to their usual standard. This is not the first time I have been tempted to write up a "Scansion for the completely deaf idiot" guide. (The Master could help with the rhythm!) It's not that hard, folks.

2. I want to get good enough at sketching to do sketch-notes. I have a couple of pre-photography "sketch your vacation" how-to guides, I just haven't *read* them yet.

Also, I really, really want to get to a Worldcon. Because, Worldcon. Anybody up for a roadtrip to Quebec next summer?...

3. The first thing that's going on my new wishlist once Librarything gets collections!!! will be The Book of Lies. Well, no, the first-first thing will be The Book of the Damned. *Then* The Book of Lies. Also, why have I never attempted automatic writing? This seems like the sort of thing I would have tried. Maybe ten-years-ago me and I can work on that, too.

4. At some point, I swear, I will make it to a library that has full Merry's Museum archives on microfilm and write up Algebra for fandom_wank. Algebra *needs* to be on fandom_wank.

5. By the way, I'm totally going to be working on that psi-fi space opera thingy again for NaNo this year. Because I want to write it, dammit, and I've never really stopped thinking about it since two years ago. So, yeah. Space opera, dammit! Novel-ish-thing!

6. So, a part of me wants to say that a modern fandom history needs to be hypertext web-2.0 with hyperlinks and community authorship and stuff. Another part of me, though, really likes reading long memoirs and historical recreations. I think there really is a need for history-qua-history - a wiki is never going to be more than primary sources once removed; I want my story told with analysis and correlation and storycraft and blatant personal bias; good old dead-white-guy methods, yo!

I am reading through the free e-book PDF of Writing Boldly, an account of the early days of Star Trek 'zine fandom. Here, have some interesting facts from it!

• Things I thought originated in LJ fandom but actually pre-date ST:
  • The term "fannish", which was used in the first ST 'zine so must have dated back to SF fandom.
  • Tickyboxes. I quote:
    A tradition that Spockanalia carried over from sf fanzines, and which carried over to subsequent Star Trek fanzines, was the check-off list on the last page. The list's introduction stated, "You are receiving Spockanalia because...." A number of possibilities followed. On my issue, the editor checked: "You are in Spock Shock," "We admire you," and "You are totally illogical."
  • Actor RPF. Okay, I knew this had been around from early days, because "Visit to a Weird Planet Revisted" was in one of the New Voyages anthologies, but I didn't realize that "Visit to a Weird Planet" was actually in the first ST 'zine ever (Spockanalia issue 3, while the show was still on the air. Lois McMaster's first published fic was also in that 'zine, btw.)
  • Stupid summary/author's notes from Mary Sue writers aren't an ff.net phenomenon; they actually *predate* the term "Mary Sue": from NCC-1701, 1973:"When I began writing my Star Trek series, I added a character to the crew of the Enterprise. This character is Janine Daniels, an eighteen-year-old with long brown hair—and green eyes. This is how she comes to the Enterprise." (Writing Boldly also contains the full text of the story that originated the term Mary-Sue, from Dec. '73)
• Ni Var was a Vulcan poetic form that showed up in the first Spockanalia issue, and was apparently used frequently in early Trek fandom, in which one is of two minds about something. The first Ni Var poem is reprinted, and man, it's excellent, as fanpoetry goes, and as poetic forms go, perfect for writing fanpoetry. Given I'm a sucker for Vulcan poetry anyway (ask me about Surak's Last Stave sometime) I wanna write me some Ni Var.
• Grup 1, the first all-adult ST 'zine, had a naked Spock centerfold.
• "Pon Farr means never having to say you're sorry", the subtitle of one of the earliest fanfic meta essays (summary: Why We Write Spock Sex) needs to become a fannish catchphrase again. /me is totally still working on a Ponn Farr story.
• The name Michelle Malkin makes me feel icky even when I'm 99% sure the early 'zine editor was not *that* Michelle Malkin. (Although it would be awesome if it was.)
• Why don't we have SMOFs anymore?
• Jacqueline Lichtenberg's Kraith AU, based around the concept that Kirk and Spock are soulbonded but not having sex, started around 1970, has had several hundred people write in it, and is still being written in, which means that it's been ongoing for almost 40 years. Eat that, M7 fans!
• Damn, I had no idea how many current big-name pros got their starts in Trek 'zines.

...and I'm up to 1975, "A Fragment Out of Time", and slash, and I promised myself when I got to slash I'd stop reading and go do something useful. :P Like OTW work. But man, I'm regretting that I didn't pick up that free copy of Bjo Trimble's memoir at BookThing when I had a chance. I wonder if it's still there...

(Mind you, my reason for not picking it up is that I still haven't even read my copy of "Star Trek Lives", which I should do, only that'd mean digging into the ST book boxes, and that'd mean nothing else getting done for a week, minimum, while I re-read all my old favorites with modern-fandom context.)

ETA: Crossover fanfic in which Dr. Stephen T. Colbert, astrophysicist, comes to Atlantis and then sets up Dr. McKay with his BFF Jon Stewart: y/y/mfy?

Fandoms you should never, ever get confused with each other:
MASH and Supernatural.
('Ah, it's the famous Winchester stamina,' he says, and I blink.)
I bet Sam and Dean totally have a Great-Uncle Charles up in New England somewhere that Dad never talks about except they went there that once when the thunderbird ripped Sam's leg open all the way down and Uncle Charles sighed and moaned and wrinkled his nose a lot, and then fixed it.


Two things I wouldn't care about at all if it weren't for certain people on my flist:
The Red Sox are going to the Series! wOOt!!
(I wonder if I'll have my multifandom Baseball AUs recs set ready to post for the start of Game One tomorrow?)
Ronnie O'Sullivan lost! Waaaah!!
(I wonder if anyone ever has written a snooker AU. --Lust Over Pendle totally doesn't count, no matter how sexy Neville was bent over a table with a cue.)


Gilgamesh the king of Uruk invented a ball game once, according to the Sumerian story "Bilgames and the Underworld". He cut down a possessed tree to make a bed for Inanna, and with the leftover wood made the equipment for the game. Then the game became so popular among the young men that the women they were ignoring got angry and kicked the equipment into the netherworld, so Gilgamesh's manly life partner Enkidu volunteered to go down and get it back, but Enkidu didn't follow instructions and got stuck down there, and Gilgamesh had to make a deal to let him hitchhike along with the sun-chariot the next day to get him back to the light.

To which I have several reactions:
1. Man, the Gilgamesh stories were much cooler before somebody went and turned them into a tragic epic.
2. So very, very manly.
3. What is this game? How was it played? HOW CAN I PUT IT IN MY NANO?
4. When (and where) on Earth did Gilgamesh meet up with Hunahpu? And which of them was more gay?(Has anyone investigated similarities between Old Sumerian and Quiche?)

Why do modern striptease dancers usually start their shows already three-quarters naked? I mean, sure, Dita von Teese moves like an ancient fertility goddess (I'm totally figuring out a way to put a striptease scene in my NaNo,) but compared to, say, Gypsy Rose Lee or Georgia Sothern or even Dixie Evans, she's mostly finished by the time she starts.

Not that I have any objection to sparkly corsets. Mmm. Sparkly corsets.

...but, but, what's the point of striptease if there's no mystery? I love the long gowns and the diaphanous skirts and the little flashes of leg, the bare wrist that seems like the sexiest thing ever when it's all you're allowed to look at, the elegant girl on the town who lets you see just a bit more than is proper, and just a bit more, and she could stop - any minute - if she wanted to - but maybe she doesn't want to!

Whoever did the cinematography on this vid understood that, but they put in most of the mystery with the camera angles. It's lingerie fetish as much as it's classic striptease. Even when she starts out in a long gown, she steps out of it right off instead of teasing properly like they did in the old days. I'd just as soon watch her be plain old naked --- (She does naked really well.)

And no, I'm not just bitter that I could probably do a tolerable Gypsy Rose but there's no way I could pull off what Dita does. :P And I'm also not bitter that there's so little video footage of the classic-era girls, no not me.


Georgia Sothern was 11 when she started stripping professionally. I'm not sure how I feel about that, except that this video could probably get you in trouble with lj.

Courtesy of narahtbbs on lj, a 1941 fanvid of "Triumph of the Will":

Dance, Hitler, Dance!

And people think fanvids started with the VCR. (From the the British National Archives, if, like my mom, you don't believe it's real.)

ETA: Looking for clips of the original on YouTube. It's fascinating how the vid gets put up officially and linked all over, but I see German youtubers posting Triumph of the Will (which is, after all, of *unquestionable* historical and artistic merit) with "I DO NOT SUPPORT THESE OPINIONS SO THIS IS LEGAL" disclaimers all over the place, in hopes they'll avoid the anti-Nazi laws in germany. Ah, Freedom of Opinion and Expression, such fun we have together.