Okay, as part of "post to DW every day in January" I decided that if I couldn't think of anything, I would pull a comic off the pile, read and review it.

This one is from the library so it doesn't really count, but it was still there on the pile!

Star Wars: Guardians of the Whills: The Manga
Adapted by Jon Tsuei Illustrated by Subaru
Viz Media, 2021

I thought this was an original manga when I checked it out but I think it's actually adapted from a novel by Greg Rucka. Anyway, it's a perfectly cromulent Star Wars adventure in which Baze and Chirrut, always the best, get to shoot a lot of Imperials while saving orphans, so I have no real complaints. My main takeaway is: for something that purports to be a backstory book set on Jedha about Baze and Chirrut called "Guardians of the Whills", it sure manages to give us absolutely no new backstory about Baze and Chirrut and Jedha and the Guardians of the Whills! Okay, it explains how they met Saw and where Baze got his giant gun. Because that was definitely the burning question about Baze and Chirrut's backstory that everybody wanted answered. Otherwise, it's just more of what we saw of them in the movie - which is great, don't get me wrong! It made a fine comic. I'm not sure if I'd've had patience with it at novel-length.

(To be fair, I don't think you could do a good Baze and Chirrut story at anything other than surface level while maintaining even a little plausible deniability about the fact that they're married, so my main complaint is probably corporate's fault.)

Hmmm if I'm doing reviews I should have like, stars and categories, right?

*** Writing: perfectly cromulent, as stated above, no complaints except what was probably Disney's fault.
**** Art also perfectly workable manga style, I did not fall in love but also it never detracted from the story. The extra point is because so many recent media tie-in comics do a terrible job on visually translating the screen characters to paper and this one does great (Basically every character in this comic looks like they give great hugs, which is exactly what you want in a Rogue One spinoff), and the fact that it uses black & white really well, a rare skill in American comics. (Which is going to be an issue if I move on to the rest of the stack, because I'm usually reading at night with a red go-to-sleep lamp that basically washes everything monochrome. I have in the past reviewed based on 'is it legible under the red lamp' though. We'll see.)
**** Stand-Alone-Ness: It would probably help to have minimal knowledge of like, what a Jedi is, but it's a complete story in one volume and you probably have to know much more than that.
Keeper? n/a it's a library book, but if I had it I would probably keep it, if only to be able to look at Chirrut's face whenever I wanted to.
Will I be seeking out more? Meh. Probably not until Disney admits they're married. Might go look up and see if there's any good fic for them I missed last time I looked! I feel like I might remember a long one that was, in retrospect, confusing because it used canon from this book maybe I'll try to find it.

I know Mandalorian canon because I have read the junior novelization of S1, which I am assured told me everything I needed to know about canon (I can just fill in the scenery from various other Star Wars movies and, like, the Mariachi trilogy.)

However, the Season 2 Junior Novelization is not out until January, so I'm a bit behind. I think I basically have my bearings though!

Post-S2-Mandalorian fandom is about Din Djarin and Luke Skywalker. (Luke Skywalker has appeared in maybe five minutes total of the show? and I wouldn't count on there being a lot of him in S3, given I haven't heard anything about recasting. But who knows, and also that never stopped fandom. Also, the Luke characterization in these stories tends to be way better than in either the sequel trilogy or Legends or most other SW fic I've read. So much broody drama queen sunshine child, it's great.) They have a lot in common, post-S2: they each have the weight of an entire culture resting on their shoulders, Luke as the unsure Last of the Jedi and Din as the reluctant King of Mandalore. They're both facing a transition in their own lives from being an adventurer to being someone with responsibilities. They're both facing the challenge of rebuilding a culture and people that was almost entirely destroyed by the Empire, in a galaxy that is still in turmoil from the Empire's fall. Also, they're kind of raising a kid together?

This is, however, complicated by the fact that the Jedi and the Mandalorians have been enemies for generations. And that Luke and Din were both given incomplete histories when they were taught the ways of their people, and don't know this. But the people they have to work with absolutely do. Which is, like, catnip for me. "What do you mean, we're hereditary enemies? Well if it's important why didn't you tell me this before I got engaged to him?? It's too late now!"

(Also, given that I have pretty much ignored all the post-Legends non-movie canon, and also basically all of the Legends Mandalorian canon - because let's face it, the only interesting thing Fett ever did was fall into the Sarlacc pit - I really appreciate a Star Wars fandom where neither of the main characters know, or frankly care, about most of that either.)

Anyway, I've been reading the fic kind of scattershot and there's a lot of it and I haven't been keeping track at all, so here are three fairly random recs of things I have liked lately or recced elsewhere!

• parry, parry, strike (18893 words) by AlchemyAlice
  Fandom: The Mandalorian (TV)
  Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Din Djarin/Luke Skywalker
  Characters: Din Djarin, Luke Skywalker, Grogu | Baby Yoda, Leia Organa, Bo-Katan Kryze, Koska Reeves, Ahsoka Tano
  Additional Tags: Post-Season 2
  
  Din has a decision to make about being King of Mandalore. Leia has opinions. Luke tries not to.



• Good Idea (19529 words) by spqr
  Fandom: The Mandalorian (TV), Star Wars Original Trilogy
  Rating: Explicit
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Din Djarin/Luke Skywalker
  Characters: Luke Skywalker, Din Djarin, Grogu | Baby Yoda, Leia Organa, Chewbacca (Star Wars), Mara Jade, Han Solo, Breha Organa, Bail Organa, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Anakin Skywalker
  Additional Tags: Fake Marriage, Kid Fic, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Lawyers, Misunderstandings, Daddy Issues, ManDadlorian, 中文翻译 | Translation in Chinese
  Series: Part 1 of dinluke lawyer au
  
  The one where Luke's a public defender and Din owns a biker bar.



• Separate Ways (80919 words) by PepperPrints
  Chapters: 13/13
  Fandom: The Mandalorian (TV), Star Wars Original Trilogy, Star Wars - All Media Types
  Rating: Explicit
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV)/Luke Skywalker, The Armorer (The Mandalorian TV)/Cara Dune
  Characters: The Mandalorian (The Mandalorian TV), Luke Skywalker, The Armorer (The Mandalorian TV), Baby Yoda (The Mandalorian TV), Cara Dune, Finn (Star Wars)
  Additional Tags: Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Courtship, Slow Burn, Marriage, Found Family, Happy Ending, Adoption, Yearning
  Series: Part 1 of Separate Ways
  
  AU where Luke doesn't meet Din until after he's already established a new Mandalore, and has to prove himself as a Mandalorian before he can train the child.

Ah, Han/Lando. Another one of those pairings that everybody is vaguely aware of, and yet nobody writes. It is a travesty and an injustice that this has not been one of the largest slash pairings since about 1981. The dynamic between Han and Lando in ESB? Where they don't trust each other a bit (for good reason) and yet they utterly trust each other (for good reason)? Where Han hasn't seen Lando in probably years and they parted on fairly bad terms and yet the minute he sees his name he knows that's a place where he can go? Where every time Han runs into Lando he doesn't know if he's going to get kissed or punched and isn't sure which he'd prefer? Where Lando betrays Han to the Empire without a second thought and also betrays the Empire for Han without a second thought? It's all so good.

The only thing you can possibly have to say against this pairing is that Lando deserves better, and this is true, but so does Leia, and at least if they are metamours they can commiserate about their shared terrible taste in men and impeccable taste in everything else.

• tell me, get my shit together (5310 words) by paperclipbitch
  Chapters: 1/1
  Fandom: Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018), Star Wars - All Media Types
  Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Lando Calrissian/Han Solo, Lando Calrissian & Han Solo, Chewbacca & Han Solo
  Additional Tags: Post-Movie, Enemies to Friends to Lovers, Mild Language, Mild Injury, Languages and Linguistics, Slow Burn, Reluctant Bros, Mild Peril, Shenanigans, Alcohol, Sabacc, Run-On Sentences, everyone is terrible
  
  The one with Wookiee linguistics.


• On Tilt (3521 words) by 13th_blackbird
  Fandom: Star Wars Original Trilogy, Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)
  Rating: Explicit
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Lando Calrissian/Han Solo
  Additional Tags: Gambling, Strip Poker, Rivals to Lovers, Banter, constant one-upmanship, Confidence Games, han and lando calling each other baby is my kink apparently, fashion - Freeform, Insults, Hand Jobs, Blow Jobs, the millennium falcon is the silent third in the threesome
  
  The one with strip Sabacc.


• But It's the Only Game in Town (3862 words) by scioscribe
  Fandom: Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)
  Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Lando Calrissian/Han Solo
  Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Flirting, Antagonism, Developing Relationship
  
  The one with the cape.


• my standards are pampered (5216 words) by gloss
  Chapters: 1/1
  Fandom: Star Wars Original Trilogy
  Rating: Explicit
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Lando Calrissian/Han Solo, Leia Organa/Han Solo, Lando Calrissian/Leia Organa/Han Solo
  Additional Tags: Threesome - F/M/M, Porn with Feelings, Plot What Plot/Porn Without Plot, Post-RotJ
  
  One with the threesome.

I spent much of my snow day cleaning, and as a result, I found the USB drive I lost several months ago that had all my writing on it! This wasn't as much of a disaster as it could have been, because I have been writing so slowly that there were only a few things that had been changed since my last backup, but one of them was the Force Ghosts story with the Taoism.

And re-reading it on the recovered drive, I realized that I'd actually gotten to a pretty natural stopping point, and the odds of me finishing the entire planned story were fairly low at this point, so I cleaned it up and posted it! Here it is. (There may be more in this universe that gets written someday? I really want to write something with Han and Finn, if nothing else. But there may not be more. At least not before the next movie comes out.)

a gate to many wonders (3643 words) by melannen
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Characters: Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Yoda (Star Wars), Anakin Skywalker, Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Additional Tags: Force Ghost Luke Skywalker, Force Ghost Han Solo, Force Ghost Yoda (Star Wars), Post-Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Force Ghost Anakin Skywalker
Summary: "Dying, for a Jedi Master in the line of Yoda, was a gentle thing"; or, "Hi, Not Listening To This Anymore," Han said, appearing suddenly. "I'm dead."

My writing files became a confused mess during the period the drive was lost, so I'm hoping in the next few weeks to go through the WIPS and sort them into "Never going to write any more of this, clean up what you've got and post it as a forever-WIP"; "This was supposed to be the start of a 100000 word epic but you are never going to write the epic so get it to a stopping point, cauterize it, and post it"; "This was meant to be a short thing and you were only a thousand words short when you lost your nerve so just do it already"; and "actual WIPs." So hopefully maybe you'll see some results from that coming through soonish.

On the Star Wars front, I have been reading the Doctor Aphra comics, because lesbian chaotic neutral archaeologist during the Rebellion era written by Kieron Gillen, yes please. And it is very good but now I have run out of her solo series and I am at serious risk of getting sucked into the Darth Vader comics she first appeared in and if I go that far, then who knows how far down in the pit I will end up? If I start posting about Grand Admiral Thrawn or something, somebody throw me a rope.

It occurred to me that "learn to read ancient Chinese Seal Script" is actually not probably a reasonable amount of research to do for a Star Wars fic, so here, have what will probably be the epilogue to the fic if I ever actually finish writing it:

Three Translations of the
First Chapter of
Force Powers Codex¹
of the Old Master

( As preserved in the Temple on Acho-To )

Hello, Purim gifter!

Sorry this is a little bit late; I made up my mind to sign up at the very last minute and didn't have a chance to write until now.

I would love anything about any female character, or Jewish character, or person being persecuted by evil viziers, in any of the fandoms I requested. I don't have any particular DNWs for any of these, and I love the kind of silly and/or fluffy fic that Purimgifts is good for, but I would also be okay with something that went dark (as long as it's appropriate for Purimgifts in general, of course - nothing along the lines of the bad fandom example in the faq.) I listed my top rating as mature because I didn't want you to feel pressured but anything at any rating is fine if that's what calls to you.

I'm okay with basically any ships in any of these fandoms, but please don't break up any ongoing canon ships to get there (turning canon ships poly is ok though.)

I requested a bunch of SF/Fantasy-ish fandoms that have very little canon Jewish content, but for any of them, I would love any AU or OC or worldbuilding-based stuff that looks at what it's like to be Jewish in that universe, and I also love everybody-is-Jewish AUS. (Or anything expanding on the Judaism canon there is, for the ones that have some.) I have some ideas (that I have been saving up every year I considered doing Purimgifts) below, but I am not Jewish, so some of them are probably Wrong, and feel free to ignore them and write me something else entirely.

I only requested fandoms where I could think of things I wanted for women OR evil viziers OR Jewish characters, so there's a lot under here, but feel free to ignore it all if that helps.

( Discworld )
( Good Omens )
( Highlander )
( Imperial Radch )
( Rivers of London )
( Star Trek:TOS )
( Star Wars )
( Thor movies )
( Wonder Woman )

Also I came back from watching the movie and, to continue the tradition from TFA, wrote a post-movie ficlet about Rey's parentage. Because I do REALLY REALLY love that ( spoilers ) But ( spoilers ) So I made this.

Also it's a Thor:Ragnarok crossover. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯



( 'Oh, really?' the person on the other ship said brightly. 'We're with the Rebels too! That's awesome, how did you find us, I should have known you were out of Sakaar, in that hunk of junk you're flying--' )

I went to see the new Star Wars movie today! I had not tried particularly hard to avoid spoilers, but the entire internet had tried so hard to protect me despite myself (thanks internet!) that it just seemed ungrateful to put it off until it was too late.

So, ( everything even vaguely spoilery under cut )

My sister is taking all of the old-EU novels back to Chicago with her after break, which is great, because that means I won't be tempted to fall back into the Sarlacc pit after her.

1. The sheet music offer is still open to people in my circles, since I didn't exactly get overloaded with requests. (and I haven't gotten around to putting the scanner away yet.)

2. The reason I haven't posted anything substantial here since con.txt is... *drumroll* .... I am feeling guilty about not doing the con-txt followup I said I should do. So if there's something I told you I would do at/after con-txt and I haven't done it yet, pls poke me again? Either I've forgotten or I've been marinating in procrastinator's guilt and need somebody to kick me in the reset button.

3. So I finally watched Pacific Rim! It came in at the library, and people were still excited about it at con-txt, and also I acquired this DVD projector I wanted to test, so we watched it projected on a sheet taped up to the screen porch, because that seems like the right way to watch a movie like that. (Then I watched it on my laptop so I could actually catch the details. Like Raleigh's drivesuit scars that there is NO FANFIC AT ALL ABOUT, wtf fandom.)

Anyway not going to bother with a spoiler cut since it's a year old and I'm not discussing plots, but here are my thoughts:

Both the worldbuilding and the plot are 100% incoherent, the giant monster fights were okay but I kept getting distracted from the awesome by trying and failing to make them make sense, they really really really dropped the ball on diversity otherwise even though Idris Elba is amazing and Mako is also amazing, but don't let anyone tell you her story was groundbreaking, it's pretty standard and it's mostly about the men in her life.

BUT

This will probably remain a favorite of mine, because it is approx. 0% heterosexuality by weight. And that doesn't mean it's particularly queer either - there's just no portrayal of sexuality in it at all. This is a movie where you can easily argue that not only all the protagonists, but also the entire society, is asexual and aromantic.

And for a movie that is almost entirely about close, intense relationships, that's astonishing - but all the relationships, from Newt and Hermann's working partnership, to the various family relationships, to Mako and Raleigh's adorable bffs-at-first-sight, this is a movie that glorifies the nonromantic and nonsexual to the extent that it seems to forget that romantic and sexual exist. Other than one line in a flashback where a tertiary character casually mentions a semi-successful date, there's nothing - no offhand attempts to establish the heroes' het cred, no background advertisements selling sex, no casual references to attractiveness, not even any mentions of, like, people having parents who were a couple, that I can recall. (Even the Kaidonovskys, iirc, aren't mentioned as a couple in the movie canon, and don't interact in any blatantly romantic ways - taking the movie as a standalone, they could be, you know, cousins.)

And that was - it was so restful, you can't even imagine. Finally a movie that felt like home, it was so great.

..so then I went back to the fanfic and of course it's like 90% shipping by weight. I know I almost always end up dissatisfied with the shippy fic once I watch canon, but in this case it left me ... itchy, probably because of the way the canon just felt so comfortable in its total lack of shipping and sexuality.

So I read some of the Newt/Hermann fic I'd been saving until I saw the movie, and it still did what Newt/Hermann fandom does so well - body mods, soulbonding, relationships with long histories, social maladjustment, disability, extremely smart people who like showing off, competence porn, snark hiding affection, xenophilia, unconventional domesticity, weird telepathy stuff, people two feet beyond the end of their rope who can't even remember how to fall, etc. -- all things I like in a pairing, and it left me deeply unsatisfied.

So then I checked out the novelization because I'd heard it was good and it seemed like it might be what I wanted in terms of More Of Canon, but I still get too antsy to have gotten very far, because something in me knows exactly what I wanted out of Pac Rim fandom, and that's not it.

So finally I sat down and asked myself, okay, what is it you do want out of this fandom that you're not getting?

I want some fanfic that's novel-length, about the doomed, hotshot pilots who risk their lives fighting to protect the defenseless, in the last days of the Resistance, with an aesthetic of abandoned WWII bunker + neon and tattoos + sweeping vistas + SF technology taken for granted, in a war where the stakes are so high that entire planetary ecologies are just minor collateral damage, and a society's been torn apart so long that nobody hasn't lost something, heart and home. With a cast that's blatantly, in-your-face diverse on a bunch of axes, dealing with disabilities and scars both mental and physical and loss after loss of loved ones, but resilient and idealistic despite that, drinking their pain away in makeshift dive bars deep in massive, hastily-assembled military installations. Most of the important relationships aren't romantic, and there's lots of stuff with organized crime intersecting the resistance, plus aliens and robots and maybe some poorly explained psi powers.

..and then I went "oh crap, I know what that is" and started re-reading the X-Wing novels instead.

So there's that.

I did start a Newt/Hermann fic where one of the side effects of Drifting is that you are no longer neurologically capable of finding your Drift partner sexually attractive - because that's the other thing that I *definitely* wanted out of this fandom - but even odds now if I'll finish that before I finish the one about Master Pentecost and his motley band of Jedi Pilot trainees and washouts, one last holdout on the Planet of the Kaiju in the decades after the clone wars, and how former Knight Beckett showed Mako Mori the way to her Jedi trials.

(The X-Wing novels hold up surprisingly well, better than I feared! I'm noticing some of the really awful stuff with how the universe handles aliens-as-metaphor-for-race more now that I did fifteen years ago, but the X-Wing novels try really hard to give you real diversity anyway, even if you do know that one of the nonhuman female pilots is always going to die first.)

While my sister was here, we went through and cleaned out a lot more of the Star Wars junk, so all that's left now fits on and around one bookshelf. (The junk we cleaned out is now sitting on the back porch, while we figure out what to do with it. I was in favor of just emailing the Star Toys museum about another mass donation, but sister wanted to see if anything was worth trying to sell, and meanwhile I'm trying to decide if I can bear to open all the mint-in-box action figures so I can play with them (and store them better), or just donate/sell them as mint in box, and also trying to convince our cousins to take it all.

...so uh anybody want any Star Wars junk?)

My sister gave me a list of the books we have that I haven't read that I should, starting with Jedi Apprentice, so I started with those.

You guys. Jedi Apprentice. I know that I've previously been told, when asked why Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan blew up into a giant fandom, that the reason was Jedi Apprentice, but somehow I was still assuming that most of it came from the fandom. NOT SO MUCH.

( Destiny! Soulbound! )

What I am saying is that these books are very silly, and I can't find any Qui-Gon/Obi-Wan on the AO3 that is quite as gay as them.

***

I also had some crochet I needed to get done, so I decided to start watching Community. It is you guys's fault. Yes, you. YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE, Community people.

I am watching in silly mixed-up order, starting with the five legal free online streaming episodes (all from later in S3) and then at the beginning of S2. (since I have already read ALL THE FIC - and wow, Community people, that didn't take long, get on the ball there - and been to the con-txt panels, and been subjected to many people discussing it - I had already been spoiled, so that seemed like a good order to go in.) I'm about a third of the way through S2 now. Here are my comments:

1. JSYK, if somebody had told me that John Oliver had a brilliant recurring guest role on this show, I probably would have started watching two years ago. :P

( some more things that surprised me )

(There is nothing in the above about Troy and Abed and the general geek-friendliness and Annie and Britta and Pierce and Shirley and the Dean and postomdern magical realism and the episodes themselves and etc. because the fandom did prepare me adequately for how awesome all of that is. Yay!)

***

Oh, so the last part of the Avengers-are-geeks fic went up on AO3 a few days ago, and so did that not!fic I posted on here a few months back, The One Where Tony Stark And Princess Leia Hook Up, since I was writing about Avengers and Star Wars anyway.

My writing has been going interesting places this year! I signed up for inkingitout with a wordcount total for the year, and it's the last half of July and I'm actually ahead by a comfortable margin!

The main thing I am learning about my writing is that writing hard things is hard, and writing silly crossovers is easy. So while I have a bunch of Hard Things that I am still pounding away at (including the Avengers fics I was talking about at con-txt, and some Homestuck things, and the next bit of the October megacrossover, and a couple of DF WIPs, yes, before you ask), it makes it easier if I am working on something silly at the same time, to turn to when all writing seems a pit of despair and failure.

Unfortunately once I let myself decide that I immediately got overrun with silly crossovers, so I need you guys to help me out.



...okay, I'll be honest, regardless of the poll, it's probably going to be the Avengers/Star Wars one, if only because it only needs about five hundred more words of snappy dialogue for a complete first draft. Unfortunately, despite being a silly crossover, I am filled with angst about what to do with it then.

( Completion and pairings )

(While I was working on this lettered wrote a much more coherent post on the topic of pairing tags, which covers the same ground, you should go read that instead.)

I have been reading a ton of Avengers-y fic lately, and I have learned that in certain places in Thor movie fandom, it has been decided Nick Fury, Director of Shield, is Jormungandr the World Serpent, condemned to enwrap all Midgard in his mighty coils until the end of days.

This fact is so self-evidently true that I keep forgetting it's only fanon; I was re-reading some old post-Civil War fic and I was like, "Of course Tony couldn't manage SHIELD effectively; he's not a Son of Loki [he only thinks he is]."

I kind of desperately want movieverse fic where Fury and Thor go fishing now, but I'm not in that fandom, so.

Also, due to an interesting concatenation of friendslist posts, I now find myself wanting Tony Stark/Leia Organa fic,¹ and if there is any, I can't find it in the post-AVOS era.

And there are so many possible way to do this and they are all awesome. But.

So a a week or so back I posted about the Star Trek TOS barista thing, and I used the term "notfic" a few times? Notfic is a concept that seems to have come out of bandom, or, at least, most of the people on my reading list that I've picked it up from are bandom-y people. (Any of you want to speak up usage of the term?)

It seems to refer to - well, you know when you've got a fic idea, and you kind of love the idea, and you know exactly how the story would go, but you also know you don't care about it enough to put the necessary work in to turn it into a real fic, or maybe you don't care about the fandom enough to want to do the research? And yet it is an awesome idea that you want to share with the world. (Or sometimes you have a story you started without realizing that you were never, ever going to finish it, and yet you still want to let everybody know how it ends, or what the sequel is.) So you write out a kind of stream-of-consciousness synoptic thing that occasionally lapses into dialogue or even proper scenes (for the really good bits) but most of it's just a pretty bare-bones summary? And then you've got the thing out and you can stop having it nag at the back of your brain, and other people can enjoy it too. And a good notfic can be up to a couple of thousand words (but it's telling a story that in decompressed form would be a couple of hundred thousand.)

That's notfic.

I approve of this becoming an accepted form of fanworks, obviously. I think the first full-on one of these I posted was the Jess Has Agency SPN AU, four (urgh) years ago, but that's partly because there was a certain amount of shame I had to get over, there's this idea I internalized somewhere that an unfinished story is a private thing, and talking about it before it's polished and prepped is, well, at best deeply impolite, at worst just gross

I don't think I'm the only one. Hence all the NaNo filters.

Well, screw that. Not!fic a go.

Which is only to say, ( So Tony Stark has to be from Alderaan, )

Um. And now to do the NaNo writing I was supposed to be working on today. :P


¹Actually what I'm shipping is Tony Stark/Carrie Fisher as OTP of trainwreck, but somehow Carrie Fisher RPS still trips my shame circuits.

1. I am going through today and subscribing back to a bunch of people who've been subscribed to me for a while; I've been letting my reading list sit, partly because I'm lazy, partly because my reading list is already very close to Dunbar's number*, and partly because quite a few of the people who subscribed to me recently are folks who I've gotten used to thinking of as way out of my league, too smart and too popular for me. But I have got to the point again where I am spending time reloading my list saying "why are there no new posts?" (I realize the answer is 'holiday weekend already' but I am ignoring that.) So. Um. Hi?

*I have issues with Dunbar's number as a hard limit, but for a single network, it does seem to make sense. And to be about where I settle naturally when it comes to active posters on a reading list.

2. Three fics which I recently found which I must share! And one of them isn't even my fault in any way!

• Sherlock Holmes, Petticoat Detective by verity, which I linked in my yuletide letter, but deserves to be seen above a cut. Remember how back when BBC Sherlock was first gaining steam, I posted about how my issue with a modern!Holmes AU is that without Victorian!Holmes, modern culture would be very, very different?
  
  Apparently while I was off ignoring the fandom for my own sanity, some of them decided that the answer to that problem was that, instead of Holmes being the trope maker and archetype of the genius detective, in that universe, Madelyn Mack was. THIS IS BRILLIANT AND MAKES MY HEART SING.
  
  And verity has actually writ fic about it! Linked above is just a short ficlet, but what she manages to cram into the ficlet about what this means for Holmes - that the archetype he's built his self-image onto is one that pop culture thinks is a girl's - is amazing and I am in love with it. And verity tells me that more is coming, yay!


• The Lambda Quadrant by peapods24. I repeat my comment to the author: OMG Bill of Rights fic! With Rachel/Ana! Luring Keith into a gay bar of shiny! !!!! This is sheer beauty! ...and I love particularly (well, after Keith getting pinched by the bouncer. And Anderson's drooping anntenae.) the commentary you've worked in here on what being gay means on this Earth. I think it's a bit fluffier than I would have written it, but it's definitely the way things *should* be on TOS!Eearth. Proving that Earth understands IDIC better than Surak does, one glittery gay bar at a time. :D


• The World That You Need by dira. This is a Vorkosigan-verse series, up to about 50,000 words total, set during the first half of Vor Game, about how Cordelia Vorkosigan talked her husband into seducing his (male) secretary, because his happiness delights her. It is the best exploration of what it means to be homosexual on Barrayar that has ever been written; it is one of the best stories about poly relationships that I have seen in fandom, period; it is just a really good story about Cordelia and Aral and their marriage, and about Jole, the minor canon character that Dira has given amazing depths to; and it is just full of joy and love, even as it delves into some really dark and painful things on the way to happy-ever-after. This fic is now canon to me, but I really recommend it even to people who aren't Bujold fans, if you like reading fic that addresses LGBT themes deeply - it's just that good, and I want it to go on forever. I have read it about six times since it was posted.

3. The other day I went to The Star Toys Museum and donated five boxes of Star Wars crap to them, ( in exchange for a tour )

4. I finally finished listening to the audiobook of A Wizard Of Mars, after being unable to acquire a copy of the written book without using money. I was... kind of disappointed in it? Maybe it's partly because it was on audiobook, which meant that when I came to the bits I disliked, I had to just slog through, instead of skimming or skipping, so they seemed even longer. But the reason it took so long was that there was a long section in the middle where Nita and Kit aren't telling each other, or their supervisors, things that they really should, by their established character from previous books, be telling them. It is one of those annoying "if they talked to each other there would be no narrative tension, so they are just going to keep secrets for no reason other than angst" things. DD seemed to expect people to buy it just because Nita and Kit and proper teenagers now, and hormones do strange things? Maybe it's just that I was never a proper teenager, maybe it was hitting my embarrassment squick a bit, but I didn't buy it at all, even though ( spoiler cut )

5. Last night, seeking to prove that there really *wasn't* anything good on any of her hundreds of FIOS channels (she was wrong from the outset, 'cause there was a Top Gear rerun on BBCA, but still), Mom put on an episode of the old live-action Hulk TV series. It was - bizarrely - not terrible. It was actually really fun, in that seventies-TV way. And I am thinking of submitting Dr. David Banner to the crushes of shame on hot_daily, because wow, if there was ever a character designed to appeal to little fangirl hearts! And I love love love the oldschool special effects, too. Where is the fic for this?

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

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

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

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

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

( I am a fan of genre fiction. )

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

( I am a science fiction fan. )

( I am a comics fan. )

( I am an anime/manga fan. )

( I am a media fan and a slash fan. )


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

Nothing in particular grabs me about December 3rd, so let's start in on fandom songs!

Have Yourself a Shiny Browncoat Xmas.mp3
I've had this since track, like, before I even watched Firefly. So yeah. Have yourself a shiny Browncoat xmas, everybody! (There will be many more versions of this tune appearing later. I adore the original beyond all reason. Christmas is, after all, a season of melancholy.)
Neil Hannon (written by Murray Gold) - Song For Ten.mp3
My sister refuses to file this away as a Christmas song, but it so totally is. It's actually a fairly touchingly complicated Christmas song. As long as you don't spoil it by playing it the rest of the year. (Or, like, watching the Dr. Who episode it was written for. Which I still haven't done. Because that would mean accepting that David Tennant is actually the Doctor now. Euuugh. :P )
The Twelve Days of Christmas at Sacred Heart mp3
...somehow, any time there is Scrubs + singing, there is awesome. (Okay, anytime there is Scrubs anything there is awesome, but you know.)
Meco - What Can You Get A Wookiee for Christmas (when he already has a comb).mp3
Yes, Virginia, there was a Star Wars Christmas album. Titled "Christmas in the Stars." Why yes, I do own a copy on CD. Why? Well, whyever not?

I am off tomorrow for an extended weekend in Colonial Williamsburg (+the Smithsonian Mall + Leesburg) with Sister, which ought to be amazing, and on which I had *better* get a very good start on my Yuletide story. There will be internets, if all goes according to plan. But I have to get up at 6 o'clock tomorrow morning to get there. Blahhh.

So last weekend, since our mother wants to be able to acually use her basement, stellar_dust and I cleared out the collection of Star Wars Crap (yes, that is the official name of the collection.)

( Before and after shots )

There was also a clearing-out of her Rainbow Brite crap.

On the off chance that anybody who reads this and not her journal is interested:

We are offering to send the cleared-out stuff to internet friends for the shipping costs. If you want to see the picture-posts of stuff that's going, let me know and I'll get you on the filter before her lj people claim it all :D

(At some point, once I am done dithering over it, there will be a similar post RE: approximately 1000 books, but that is still preliminary.)

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, this is what I did last night:

Me, kyabetsu, and some other friends got in to the gala opening of the Star Wars exhibit at Geppi's Entertainment Museum, and of course we went in character. :D It was weird to wear that and *still* get called 'normal people'. (By Rebel Legion Organizers, who granted have a somewhat skewed idea of "normal", but, y'know, just because people aren't obsessive Star Wars cosplayers doesn't mean they're not obsessive cosplayers.

Not that I'm really a cosplayer. I am less likely, on my own, to waste the effort on making a weird outfit to wear only to special events when I can put the effort into just dressing weird ALL THE TIME.)

Unfortunately the Anakin costume is all storebought - I was smartchicken enough not to want to wander around in Maryland June weather in tons of makeup and a heavy headdress, unlike some people (kyabetsu in that picture) so I just used one of the costumes they had in storage instead of the one I made. (More pictures here.)

Crossplay is fun. Even if I totally suck at it, even when playing one of the femmier guys in my canon. :D Remembering to walk like you have the family jewels between your legs is not too hard, but otherwise my body language is about as butch as John Sheppard's. And my voice is squeaky. :-P

I had a very busy weekend, to the extent that this is the first time since before SciFi Fri that I've been online at all.

Part of that weekend involved being in a car for two hours with nothing to read but Tag & Bink Episode 2: Revenge of the Clone Menace, which is only the *best* Star Wars comic ever published (and that includes the ones with Plif the Hoojib.)

I say this completely disregarding the fact that tiny younglings Tag and Bink are the cutest litle Jedi possible to exist, even though they are. I want more little-tiny-Tag-and-Bink adventures, hurrah! Like the three years they spent hitchhiking home from Naboo and got all adolescent and scruffy!

Anyway, did I mention that as well as the awesome story, the art rocks? I managed seven icons before GIMP froze on me and dumped all my unsaved scans:

(If anyone by chance wants to snarf these, I don't care what you do with them. Although it'd be nice if you credit the art to the Tag & Bink team, Rubio & Marangon.)

(Strangely, last night I had a Jedi Apprentice dream featuring Xanatos, despite not yet having read Jedi Apprentice, and having read no fic for years. So apparently I have Padawans on the brain right now.)

And speaking of the other fandom that I need to do a comics-icons set for soon, one of the links I found several places when I caught up today was Henry Jenkins's comments on vidding. The vidding comments are interesting, but what caught my eye was his using a fandom term that I hadn't heard before, which is very unusual these days, language magpie that I am.

The word is "ose". A quick Google tells me that it originated in SF filk fandom circles, and comes from the phrase, applied to the mood of a song, "It was all ose, ose, and more ose." It seems to be largely pejorative there, and I think Jenkins is using it a bit differently, to refer not just to a "downer" mood, but to a mood where the angst is developed through distance rather than through loud emotionality.

I think this is a very useful word and I'm adopting it. I think many of the non-humor stories I write end up being ose. They're not emotive enough to be angst, and they aren't quite depressing enough to be more-ose, they're just ose. Ickle Aayla Secura in my new default icon? She's rather ose, I think.

It reminds me of the cold & prickly vs. warm & fuzzy thing that came up back in the day in SGA, which I still find myself using from time to time (Was that a year and a half ago already?). But since "ose" doesn't set up an opposition, just a description, and it invites explanation rather than argument, it may be more useful in casual discussion. And it's a fun punnish backformation in the old SF tradition. And getting it adopted to fanfic will be a subculture mixing of just the sort that Jenkins is discussing in his post, so it'll be all meta-meta-y!

It also (for me at least) calls to mind the River Ose from the Riddle of Stars trilogy, the river that Raederle and Lyra and Tristan sailed up on the spring melt, icy-cold and murky with the spring flood, but running fast and dangerous and every so often, things can be seen rising from the depths, for just a second, before they're washed away. Riddle of Stars is kind of ose, too, come to think of it.

I hereby adopt that word, and declare that I like stories that are ose. Now, you big fandom melting pot, it's up to you to finish defining the word for me!

(Speaking of Riddle of Stars, I really should send wickedwords the feedback I promised her for Unanswered Riddles before *this* year's yuletide rolls around, shouldn't I?)

Sala Eilelan
Writing in 1967 ARR
Talasea

... the Jedi Order, since the extermination of its traditional competitors the Dark Lords of the Sith, has faced far too little opposition, and thus for the past thousand years, lightsabers have been used in the field primarily as weapons of terror and mayhem against unarmed opponents. Still, the skills of the saber duelist are highly prized among the Jedi, although, as befits a decadent tradition, they are used almost solely in tournaments for sport. Yet as one who hopes that a time will again appear when Force users must battle equals, I cannot say that I wish to end the teaching of the art of the lightsaber. But there is more to a lightsaber fight than mere swordsmanship, although you will never hear these rules stated as such in the Temple on Coruscant. Let me share some advice about saber duels, gleaned from Jedi histories during my years of captivity in the Temple:

The primary goal of a lightsaber duel is not to kill, but to disarm one's opponent. Literally disarm.

All duels must be carried out in the most complex arena possible, preferably involving columns, catwalks, and bottomless pits. Moving parts and anything molten are also good. Collateral damage is encouraged.

Combatants are expected to use only their innate ability with the Force and their lightsabers. Using a projectile weapon, a shield, explosives, or any sort of supplementary weapon is unheard of, no matter how intelligent such a strategy might seem.

The only way to win a lightsaber duel is not to get in one.

Failing that, cheat ...

This morning, I had a dream. It involved a lot of things, most of which I don't remember, but the relevant part is that my sister and I were in some sort of ancestral home, watching the Star Wars movies on a tiny TV on the dusty screened-in porch. The first movie finished and I went to get The Empire Strikes Back, but then I asked sister which copy she wanted to watch. (The copy taped off the air in the mid-80s? The copy from the late-90s box set? The special edtion DVD? The original 1984 VHS tape? The special edition VHS? The spare original tape? ... and so on.) An important emphasis here was that we had many more copies of TESB than any of the other movies, and I dreamed of *every one of them*. Got that? I was amused when I woke up, because despite the ridiculously large amount of Star Wars junk in our basement, we only had two copies each of the movies.

Until this afternoon when I got to Katy's, and she took me to the big thrift store in Sterling, and they just happened to have very old VHS tapes of *all* the original Star Wars movies, including *four* copies of TESB, for two bucks each. So she bought them. And now my dream is true!

I have prophetic dreams about Star Wars videos!

Man, what a superpower.

ETA: I bet Hortas and Hoojibs would get on really well! Hoojibs eat energy and Hortas eat matter and between them, they could DEVOUR THE UNIVERSE!