Look if we're doing all of my fannish history here we've gotta start somewhere!

Bert and Ernie are actually possibly the best example we've had on here so far of the classic "odd couple" trope, which is one of the purest expressions of enemyship! One of them's messy, one of them's neat. One of them's quiet, one of them's loud. One of them's repressed, one of them's emotional. One of them goes to bed early, one of them gets up late. One of them's annoying, one of them's annoyed. And they were roommates!!!

And Sesame Street took it on themselves to carefully teach generations of children that if you are roommates with someone who gets on your nerves, it definitely means that actually you like them a lot and you are perfect together!

There is a sad shortage of actually good fic for this pairing, for some reason people tend to write a lot of deliberate badfic as if it's not a real canon pairing in a real fandom, so here is a vid to start us off.

• What's the Distinction? (1599 words) by MortalAnonymous
  Chapters: 2/2
  Fandom: Sesame Street (TV)
  Rating: General Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Bert/Ernie (Sesame Street)
  Additional Tags: Originally Posted on FanFiction.Net
  
  Ernie learns about different kinds of love.

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.)

This is dancesontrains's fault: she said "crossover", "Charlie Brooker" and "Keith Olbermann" in the same comment.

I am never, ever going to write story that follows, because it is epic in both length and scope and I am not good enough at voice to pull off even half the characters in it, since it has in it pretty much anyone in either Pundit or BBC RPS fandoms. But since I appear to have accidentally written an outline of it anyway, I share! :D

( ...by this point, the ongoing Keith/Charlie transatlantic pigtail-pulling contest had become a running joke... )

..and while I am on the topic of obscure RPS crossovers that maybe two people in existence actually know all the fandoms for, here is the other BBC/America RPS epic crossover that I shall never, never actually write.

( I call it the Top Gear Pledge Week Special. It has Andy Wilman/Doug 'the subway fugitive, not a slave to fashion, 'Bongo Boy'' Berman slash in it. Among other bits of horrifyingness that haunt my dreams. )

1. So one of the things I do to kind of keep my finger on the pulse of fandom is to check Popular Slash Bookmarks on Delicious every couple days. That usually lets me see any fic that's sweeping fandom slightly before I first see a rec for it on my circles, and it's a great way to just know what people are getting excited about.

Because of the way delicious calculates "popular", sometimes a story will stick around on the list for a long time, and sometimes an older story will suddenly pop back up, but generally, stories stay there a few days and then something new knocks them off, and you can watch fandoms slowly rise and fall.

For the past three weeks, the delicious popular slash links had been *static* - three CWRPS stories and one Merlin one. I'd *never* seen it do that before, and I've been watching it a couple years now, on and off. It was puzzling.

Then, yesterday, suddenly, they were all gone, and now the entire page is Star Trek Reboot.

I think fandom has a new obsession ...not that I couldn't have guessed that anyway. :D

2. The chain of events that led me to them is convoluted, but I want these: Teeny Little Super Guy shotglasses! Yes.

3. kate posted, last week, an essay about the music of Star Trek, and how that explains what's wrong with the reboot. Strongly, strongly recommended to read. (Since then I've been desperately searching for other quartal film scores to write Star Trek to.)

4. On recommendation of half my circle here, I read Uhura's Song over the long weekend. It was a fun read, very goodfic-feeling, and had one of the better first-contact scenarios I've found, and all the canon characters had a chance to shine. And there was flintknapping, so there's that. I suspect that the reason I never got around to reading it before, though, was that I read the back, and was like "Catpeople. Yawn. Can't you be a little more creative with your aliens?"

Also ... it didn't actually have that much Uhura in it. In fact, it was rather upsetting: Uhura does a fair amount in, oh, the first 1/4 of the book. And then Magical OC White Girl Doctor shows up, and immediately outshines Uhura so much that, despite the fact that she's one of only five people in the landing party, and has skills essential to the mission, you can go chapters at a time *forgetting that Uhura is even there*. WHAT.

5. I got to read the new (and very last) Tek Jansen comic! It had more Commander Valentine in it! That means more icons for me. Also, Meangarr was awesome, I <3 Meangarr.

6. Bill of Rights-verse update: I've officially offered it in the summer shared universe challenge at fakenews_fanfic. And pinkpolarity unlocked the post she made about the starship Enhanced Interrogation, crewed by the Fox News folks. She's a Star Wars person, so she wrote it as an Imperial Star Destroyer, but I think it's also the mirrorverse counterpart of the USS Bill of Rights. :D (Somebody, somebody write the mirrorverse crossover with the ISS Enhanced Interrogation crew!)

I'm going to put up a Bill of Rights index post at some point, but I want to actually post more fic for it first. :P

Every time somebody posts on dreamchasers that they have "won the open id lottery", my brain translates that as "I wrote/found some really hot and shameless smut! And it was easy!" And then I'm disappointed.

Anyway, as most of you probably know by now, for the past two years I have been journaling almost entirely on journalfen.net rather than on livejournal. This gives me a really upside-down perspective about all of the hand-wringing going on about the TRAUMA of moving to Dreamwidth, let me tell you. So, as one of the couple dozen people who blog primarily on Journalfen, I want to share my perspective on migration.

This is why it was a no-brainer for me to move to DW:

1. ( The site is fan-friendly, fairly small, personal, and not fixated on financial growth. )

2. ( The software here *works*. )

3. ( I like the people who are here. )

If there's one important thing I learned from migrating, it's that when everybody is done moving and settling, you will still have a community. It will be different than before. It will be better. Regardless of which service you wind up on: You'll lose readers. You'll drop people who you read. What you post about will change, and the way it effects the network will change. But each service has benefits that attract different people, and you will settle in to the one that suits you best, and the other people on that service will be people who agree with you about it being the best, and this is a good basis for making new friends. You'll get new readers. You'll find new journals to read. The people who really matter will stick around one way or another, because if it really matters, you'll make it work. And the rest of it isn't the end of the world.

Anyway, I loved it at JF, and I'm not leaving, but I'm glad a lot of the JF people are here on Dreamwidth, too. The people who tough it out and blog on Journalfen are an amazing bunch of people, with a wide diversity of interests. Let me introduce you to some of the JF people who've been posting interesting stuff on DW:

ashenmote has made the best commentary yet on redirecting comments in crossposts.
cyprinella will make you want a bog of your own.
ionized just posted a gay marriage round-up that is possibly the funniest thing I have read all week.
trouble has been running history and thinking about disability.

You'll note that none of those journals really scream "fandom" at first glance. Yeah - here's a secret: Journalfen is supposedly a service just for fans, but most of the people who blog there aren't really mostly about fandom. In fact, a lot of the most interesting things going on at JF aren't just about media fandom; if you've never gone beyond the fandom_ communities you've been missing the best part! By far, the most awesome thing on JF is the hot_daily community, run by puipui, which posts a picture every day of a hot person. What makes the community so much fun is that "hot' is an infinitely variable description - people of every size, gender, age, race, and shape come through, and they are all hot.

At the beginning of every month there's a special giant picspam post, the topic of which is selected by popular vote. This month's poll is almost over, and it's a write-in poll! Muppets are currently tied for first place. If you have a JF account, you should totally go to the hot_daily poll and vote for muppets.

(Why, yes, I did just write this entire meta post just so I could tell you to vote for muppets. ;) Because it's *that important*.)

Today, I went to the beach and flew my kite.

I love the beach. And kites.

You can tell I'm as mellow as I get when Beatles songs spontaneously start echoing in my head.


The tragedy, of course, is that there are no Beatles songs currently on this computer. So I had to go looking. That eventually led, by a bonny road, to me finding the original Sesame Street version of Mahna Mahna on youtube.

Great Shub, that's disturbing.

I -- it's just *disturbing*. Somehow, a song that's only deranged when performed by two pink muppets and a caveman and just kind of silly when introduced by Kermit the Frog is *really effing wrong* when it's sung by two little girls and an escaped convict.

...and that's the version that was on the preschool show. You know, I used to complain about how insipid Sesame Street is these days compared to how it was in my day, but I am more and more learning that my version of the show was but a *pale* imitation of the real thing. When do the DVD sets come out, again?


Then, of course, I found the Star Wars OT vid to the song, and got all mellow again. Mmmm. First off, how did I not know that Cake had covered Mahna Mahna? Second of all, I'm more and more realizing that that's the kind of vid that I just love, unreservedly. I have a list of favorite vids that I like because they're clever, or deep, or pretty, or technically elegant, or make a good point, or wrap canon around their sticky little fingers. But I'm realizing more and more that the vids that I just *love* are the ones that don't have anything more (or less) profound to say than "this story has a song in its heart."

I will never, ever, ever be able to make that kind of vid.


Anyway, I now have a shiny new "Feelin' Groovy" playlist. Pardon me while I try to figure out where I left my mp3 of "A Horse With No Name". (I suppose to balance the karma the next playlist I need to make is a "Revolution" one.)

So it turns out that back in the day, Sesame Street used to have a lot of current pop songs performed on it. And there was a Songs From Sesame Street LP, which I have now held in my own hands.


...Apparently "Yellow Submarine" is 'a song that teaches about colors and making friends', "Good Morning Starshine" 'teaches about distance and space', and "Feelin' Groovy (59th street bridge song)" is about 'learning to be cheerful and good-natured'.

...Apparently the original creators of Sesame Street spent a lot of time stoned out of their minds. This explains a lot.