Oh. How to summarize this one. This is a ship that I can't ever remember *not* shipping (along with Doctor/Bessie, another ship that it just seems like I always believed in.) I'm a second-gen Who fan and I probably overheard adults talking about the show in such a way that I knew what I liked even before the adults realized I was old enough to listen. I didn't actually watch any episodes, to my knowledge, till I was 10 or so, but I already knew the basics before then somehow.

The basics are: once upon a time (for a certain definition of 'once' and 'time'), two young people went to school together, and they were the best of friends: they were learning about all the wonders of all of time and space, and also how they were never allowed to go out and experience it themselves, and they promised each other that one day they would run away together and visit everywhere. But somehow by the time they did, everything had gone wrong; somehow they were no longer in alignment with each other: one of them stole a timeship and left with just his granddaughter (leaving the other behind), and the other one, with no reason to stay, or to do anything else, without his friend beside him, stole another ship and left too.

By the time they met again, one of them had become the Doctor, living in a different body, recaptured by his people, stripped of part of what made him himself, and trapped on an insignficant planet named Earth. The other one, who had become the Master, turned up to keep him company in his captivity. I mean, came to conquer Earth! That's definitely why he's there. To conquer Earth, and to defeat the Doctor, and also to rule the galaxy with him side-by-side as consorts? if that's a thing he'd want? No? Are you sure? He can ask one more time if it helps??

And things went from there. The Master comes up with evil plans in order to get the Doctor's attention, but he can never keep it; the Doctor seeks out evil plans all over the galaxy in hopes that the Master is waiting for him on the other side of them. Are they ex-spouses? Is the whole thing just an extended, millennia-long Time Lord courtship? Are they bound by some sort of destiny beyond time? Difficult to say. Probably they don't even remember the real story at this point. But that never stopped them before. They are the enemy ship of all enemy ships, older than time, and really, really bad at talking about feelings.

Doctor/Master is sort of like Star Trek movies, except it's the odd-numbered Doctors that get the good foeyay. (But you have to count the War Doctor, so it skip to evens starting with 10). If that made no sense to you, good, get out while you still can.

I did a recs set for this pairing once before! In 2008. So have some very old recycled recs for some 13+ year old fics about One, Three, Five and Seven. I have not reread some of them in at least a decade.

• Killing the Groundhog: A Controlled Outcome by x-los
  Notes: Mid-length; Three/Delgado; PG; time-loops
  Summary: "In which the Master does not enjoy time paradoxes, Jo's opinions on fashion, Agatha Christie's later works or the Doctor's proclivity to resort to date-rape drugs to get out of talking about their past. In which the Master does enjoy pungee pits, Pimm's Cups and winning."
  Notes: Awesome, sweet, hilarious, evil, and so very them. Only about two notches up from the wacky things they did to get each other's attention in canon, though with a slightly higher proportion of kisses to marriage proposals.



• Waterloo by aralias
  Notes: Mid-length, Five/Ainley, PG-13 for the Master being the Master, blatant hurt/comfort fluff.
  Summary: "Ainley!Master nursing Five back to health with chicken soup."
  Notes: So ... yes, it's more or less just what the summary says, but yet stays very much in-character, because really? Five and Ainley!Master had basically this for their onscreen relationship, only with slightly less kissng, at least up until the point they let the angst get out of control. If it weren't for the giant otters, this could have slotted into canon right before "The King's Demons." (Five held the title of "The Pretty One" until Tennant took it, btw, so he gets a lot of the fluff and h/c in this pairing, but he wears it so *well*.)



• The Monster in the Dark by Nemo_the_Everbeing
  Notes: Long, Seven/Catboy!Master, Ace. PG-13 for violence and mental illness, no sex
  Summary: "Some things must be dealt with, and Ace put off dealing with the cheetah virus until it was almost too late. The Doctor must enlist some unconventional and unwanted help to pull her through."
  Notes: No out-and-out slash, but lots of chewy Doctor and Master relationshippy stuff, which is close enough. The Doctor and the Master have to fight their way through Ace's mindscape, and learn some things about themselves on the way. Heavy on the Seven plot-spoilers, but you don't need to have seen the episodes. And Ace is awesome. And so are Seven and Catboy!Master (Catboy!Master is canon, which is why canon is awesome.)



• Over Time by evilawyer
  Notes: Long; Master/Rani, Master/Doctor, Doctor/Rani; R for sex and general dark themes.
  Summary: The Doctor ruins you. If you let him.
  Notes: This story spans the whole history, from school days on Gallifrey to post-LotL, and it's the epic story of figuring out how you recover from ever being loved by the Doctor. Bringing in the Rani, the missing third leg of the Time Lord Renegade Trio, who has a wonderful, terrible relationship with the Master in this fic. Which has single-handedly turned me into a Rani shipper.

I will do my last two December meme posts... soon. Right now I am just trying to catch up on comments on the old ones. Meanwhile, I have barely dipped into the Yuletide archive (and probably won't before reveals), but I have read all of the Madness works that are over 100 words and up to 1000 words in fandoms I care about, so here are 20 recs for short Madness stories (and two sonnets, a sestina and a vid.)

( In more-or-less reverse wordcount order )

Also, my Madness gift has got me thinking about vids again. And when I was clearing stuff out, I found an old mix CD from c. 2008 that was labelled "to vid". So let's play a fun game! Can you match the song to the fandom/pairing I wanted to vid it to in 2008?

1. A Weekend In the Country from A Little Night Music 2. All This Useless Beauty - June Tabor 3. Black Velvet - Alannah Myles 4. Bohemian Rhapsody - Queen 5. Cabaret from Cabaret 6. Don't Need the Sunshine - Catatonia 7. Finale from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamboat 8. Hotel California - The Eagles 9. Is That All There Is? - Peggy Lee 10. It's A Small World After All - The Sherman Brothers 11. Light Up My Room - Barenaked Ladies 12. Little Miss Can't Be Wrong - Spin Doctors 13. My Heart Will Go On from Titanic 14. Nine Inch Will Please A Lady - Robert Burns/Traditional 15 Paradise by the Dashboard Light - Meatloaf 16. Postcards from Mexico - Girlyman 17. Que Sera Sera - Doris Day 18. Sixteen Tons - Merle Travis/Traditional 19. Son of a Preacher Man - Pansy Division 20. The Band Played On - Guy Lombardo 21. The Way - Fastball

A. Doctor Who, All the Masters B. Doctor Who, Doctor/Master C. Doctor Who, Jack/Rose D. Doctor Who, Peri and Five's regeneration E. Doctor Who, Shalka!Doctor F. Doctor Who, the DoctorDonna G. Free Space (I don't remember) H. Harry Potter, McGonagall the ladies of Hogwarts I. Highlander, Joe/Methos J. Pirates of the Caribbean:At World's End, Ensemble K. Sherlock Holmes (RDJ version, but BBC would work), Everybody/Everybody L. Superman Returns, Lois Lane M. Supernatural, Dean N. Supernatural/Bones, Dean/Temperance O. The X-Files, Alex Krycek P. The X-Files, Byers/Suzanne Q. The X-Files, Mulder/Krycek R. The X-Files, Mulder/Scully S9 S. The X-Files, Teena Mulder T. Torchwood, Jack Harkness U. Stargate : Atlantis, Ensemble

...We're not even going to talk about the other old CD I found, which is labeled just "TARDIS: The Musical". It starts with House Prydon singing "All That's Known" and features such gems as Delgado Master singing "If I Loved You" from Carousel and Nine singing "Everything's Comin' Up Roses." The real mystery, though, is: I made this mix CD no later than 2009, so WHY, after the big LotTL climax, did I decide to end it with the Master singing "Now that I'm A Woman, Everything Has Changed" from The Last Unicorn? Time travel?

Some random headcanons from the Doctor Who anniversay special (yes, I am still thinking about this, give me a Master and/or Romana back and I may fall back into this fandom all the way again, oops.)

( spoiler cut )

...oh good, there are already people vidding it to Johnny Cash's 'Hurt', I don't have to attempt to do it myself.

(How is there no Peter&Colin&Sylvester BroTP on the Archive yet? How is this possible? (And why is the only Pertwee & Delgado fic in a language I don't read?) Fandom, you are causing me pain.)

I have finally posted more of How the Master Stole Christmas! The next two pages (both double-page spreads) are up at doctor_and_master: How the Master Stole Christmas Episode 2. It's also up at my dA account, in the SeussWho gallery, if you'd rather read there, though without the extra text-only pages.

But I am reposting the latest page on this journal anyway, because I am proud of myself and want to look at it some more :P
( Why for nine hundred years I've put up with it now! )

...I finally finished that update because I told myself I wasn't allowed to draw any lolitics girlband!AU fanart until I finished the Who-Christmas-Sing. I know, I know, normal people are motivating themselves around their yuletide at this point, but whatever, I have my plot, I have a very clever way to cheat and quadruple my wordcount, and I know I can churn out a few thousand words as soon as I make myself sit down and concentrate.

And in the meantime there is girlband!AU. :D This is the latest shared-world AU of awesome to take over the lolitics meme. I don't know - do other anon fic memes do these amazing shared AUs? The other ones I've followed haven't but then I haven't followed them as immersively. Anyway, girlband!AU involves taking the democratic leaders, past and present, of Great Britain (and occasionally other countries) and re-casting them as members of Spice-girls-esque girlpop bands. And they make so much more sense that way, OMG, just.

Plus it is helping with my ongoing feelings of guilt about being all into British politics and ignoring the US! By turning them into genderswapped shallow pop-culture celebs with zero actual relevance, instead of people who are supposed to be FIXING THE WORLD DAMMIT, I can finally get detached from policy enough to think about US politicians without wanting to stab myself in the gullet! \o/

(Yes, I know, sarken did it first with Disney Band PRT. But still I am in love! And also I have discovered Sleevage, the blog for people who are more interest in the art of album cover design than in the actual music. I just wish its search engine worked better. ... I really need to attempt to organize my blogroll again.)

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

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

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

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

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


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

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


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

( Ramble about labels and categories and communities )

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

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

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

I signed up for kink_bingo this year! I love how accessible they're making it: low pressure, the minimum is one 500-word story in a year, and they've emphasized that you don't have to be able to write explicit sex or sexual characters in order to play, so I'm fairly sure I can do it. My card:
( My Card )
So everybody's going on and on about their kink_bingo cards, and how lucky they are, and I looked at mine and went "huh."

I don't think *any* of the kinks I was really excited about ended up on it, and the two stories-in-progess I'd been planning to use at cheats - each of which have so many kinks they could conceivably blackout a card on their own, with no overlap - are barely represented on the card at all.

I guess that serves me right! Anyway it'll be fun, even if I only end up managing one meta post or something.

I would like to note that as I was going through the kink_wiki yesterday, exploring my options, the questions I was coming up with were things like "Would a story about someone whose erogenous zones are primarily tactile negotiating a scene with someone whose erogenous zones are primarily aural (involving sonics that person A can't produce) work for the 'silence' square?" and "does crossdressing have to involve gender, or can it involve someone whose species doesn't wear clothing dressing up as a human?" and "is 'accidental soulbond with a mechanical life-form due to shoddy safety measures during repair work' suitable for the 'electricity' square?" and "Can I do 'wrist/ankle restraints' on somebody whose limbs don't exactly fit those categories?"

... which just goes to show what pairings I have been getting bunnies for lately. Actually, having gone down the entire kink list, there are only four kinks which require somebody to have a humanoid or vaguely humanoid body (five, if you count 'shaving', which requires a mammalian one at least) and I got three of them...

I also went out to work last night without actually remembering what was on my card, and I ended up plotting out in my head an amazing story - for a kink that's not on my card. But now I really, really want to write "How Bran Tse-Mallory and Truzenzuzex Invented Strip Personality Chess, And What Happened Afterward." (Does kink_bingo give out prizes for "most stories written for the wrong card"?)

...I may at least have to write a Bran/Tru 'ship manifesto, since Mymy/Vyssu/Mav has been such a hit. :D ...and I'm so tempted to try for a bingo with all non-human or cross-species pairings.


Anyway I was going to try to make this short, but this *is* me, and it's an excuse to talk about kink and about ideas for stories I'll probably never write, so here's ( some brainstorming for every square )

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

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

( Panel Fun )

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

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

Here are some posts I have made to DW communities in the past week:

asexuality: Queering the Census: We ALL Count, in which I gripe about the Queer the Census campaign, which is about greater visibility for LGBT people but erases everyone who isn't heterosexual but doesn't fit it one of the L-G-B-T boxes.

common_nature: Welcome!, In which elke_tanzer and I have started a community that is all about nature, and you all should join it! And post stuff there! And leave comments!

create_my_comm: Little Details, in which we are all agreed that DW needs a community that is like l_d only awesomer, and none of us want to be the one to start it! (So you should!)

starry_sea: Anybody still here?, in which I apologize abjectly for abandoning my own community, and talk about how to get it active again.

tarot: An Amazing Tarot Blog, in which I rave at length about Pre-Gebelin Tarot History, which discusses tarot from a strictly historical and rational perspective, a perspective which is deeply awesome and far, far too hard to find.

treknovelfest: Illustration for "Three T'kay Stories", in which I have done a lot of research in the Starfleet Archives and found photographs & descriptions of the original ancient Vulcan artifacts that were used to illustrate ljc's treknovelfest entry based on my prompt, From The Terran Coyote to The Klingon K'Ortar: Tricksters of the Alpha and Beta Quadrants.

...there, that can be my followfriday. :D (What posts have you made to DW communities in the past week?)

Most of those were posts I have been procrastinating on making for months! Having them done is like breathing clear air again. (Also, omg, I might actually have to change my to-do list now - I'm afraid the dry-erase marker might have set in on some of them.) There's several more I've had on hold, though - maybe now that I'm on a roll I can scratch even more of them off.

In the spirit of getting things done, how about that WIPs meme that was going around awhile ago? One paragraph from everything in my "In progress" folder, was it?

( This includes fics, meta posts, vids, fanmixes, and various stranger things, in all states of completion, fyi. )
...it says something about me that my reaction to all of that laid out is "That's less than thirty things! Not at bad as I thought!" If you ask for more information about any of them in comments, I will probably give it to you. (At length! ^_^ )

Also while I am doing random meme-y things, poall:

Hi! I am still way behind on internets stuff (I have something like twenty fic tabs up, and yes, damned_colonial, I'll do those AoS posts eventually), but I did at least catch up on comments to my own posts, and related things.

It's been ages since I had a post with collapsed comments; I forget how much sheer *time* it takes to stay abreast, not to mention social energy. And I now have more people watching this account than I had watching my LJ at any point over the five years I had it. So - hi? I have no idea how people with hundreds of circle people do it.

I also read a bunch of the other 13th Child posts, and all the ST responses I had open, commented on a bunch of them, and then rapidly lost track of which ones I needed to reply back to. Oops.

But! The poll has spoken! starry_sea exists! If you want to get in on me trickling out fair copies of all the pirate TOS e-books I torrented, you should join. Also you should join if you want to talk about ST:TOS, the Star Trek books, why the new movie missed the point but was fun anyway, and the other sorts of ST things I tend to maunder on about. Also if you would like to come on as a co-mod, please speak up; I tend to be very laid-back about modding and co-modding. I will hopefully have an intro post up by tomorrow, and some book re-read stuff shortly thereafter.

Also, one thing I kept seeing in the movie reaction posts was people who liked the movie but had no inspiration to write fic about it. I had the opposite reaction: I never had much inspiration to fic for the original continuity (well, except in Rihannsuverse), partly because there was so much already there. But the movie hit that balance for me of "this is fun and full of interesting bits, but it's actually really terrible" that makes me want to fic it.

So here, for sharing, are the stories I now want to write about ST:Reboot. Please write them (or link me to them), so I don't have to:
( Six stories, and shockingly, only one is about McCoy. )

So I just announced to the rest of the Interrobang Studios crew that I had, for the first time ever, posted stupid fanart to my DeviantArt account, and roommate Kevin misheard and thought I had said Scrooge fanart, so I had to admit that I had *written* Scrooge fanfic, because my 2003 Yuletide fic was Scrooge/Marley slash (and it got highlighted on the lj comm today!), and they made faces at me and said "You know I meant Unca Scrooge, right?", so I told them that as far as I knew, I was one of only two people who had written that pairing, and the other one was Henry Jenkins, Director of Media Studies at MIT, and other roommate Sarah said, "Wait, Professor Jenkins? I think he taught my Science Fiction class there. Why didn't I know he did fan studies?"

Ah, geekdom.

Anyway, yes, I have posted stupid fanart at my almost-empty deviantart account. Remember how I mentioned that there are a few LJ comms for pairing I still hang out on? One of them is best_enemies, the multi-era Master/Doctor community. (And we mean multi-era: the community is currently trying to fill in the chart of all 216 possible Master/Doctor pairings.) And ages ago, wingedkamui posted fanart of Shalka!Doctor luring Catboy!Master into the Tardis with a mouse.

Since Shalka!Doctor already has a Sexbot!Master of his very own, and since Shalka!Master goes only to doomed planets, it would be perfectly canonical for him to pick up Catboy!Master, and Saxon!Master has access to hammerspace by way of the Toclafane, and hey, planets don't get much more doomed than Professor Yana's .... the phrase "Gotta Catch 'em All" may have been used, and Tenchi Muyo was mentioned.

So I have been in possession of a Doctor/Master As Harem Anime comics bunny for the past year or so, and I finally got through the first set of character designs, and there be postable art:

(click for larger versions.)

This is a promo poster for Who Needs a Doctor? the (existing only in my head) American manga based on the (non-existent) Japanese anime that was very loosely based on the (really real) spin-off Shalka cartoon of the British Doctor Who television series. There are a few (very minor, of course) variations from the original British show, as you may have noticed. (I'm claiming that the crappiness of the art is intentional because I'm parodying bad American manga-style art. ...yes.)

The poster shows the Doctor's "travelling companions" circa the end of season one of the anime: (vaguely left-to-right): Magister-san, Snake, Cheetah, the Master, Harry, Kosch-chan, Yana-Sensei, a Kitling and a Toclafane, Crispy, the Chief, and Vworp the baby TARDIS.

But I also do have a three-season-long plot outline, two 24-page comics scripts, a brand new deviantart account, fortyleven bookmarks from TVTropes, and a bunch more character designs (Time Lady Beautiful President Romanadvoratrelundar! Sexy Time Agent Captain Jack! Dalek Caan, because every anime needs a tentacle monster, and who also accidentally gave me a way to make this CRACK tie in with canon! Rani the Zaftig!)

Will I ever get around to drawing any of the actual comic? ...Rassilon knows!

You know what? I think the absolute most appropriate thing I can possibly put in my first-ever-Dreamwidth post is a rec for my sister stellar_dust's just-posted DW ficlet (DW as in Doctor Who, not DreamWidth, although the reason it's so appropriate is that the DW could, totally, also stand for Dreamwidth, because it is a story about the unspeakable eldritch horrors that lurk in the hearts of web-page-coding and the awesomosity of women and computers, all in just 325 words):

A Perl of Great Price.

Go read it.

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.

Okay, so why didn't anyone let me know that Sean Pertwee (yes, son of Jon) played Hugh Beringar in the Cadfael mysteries?

*now knows who she is rooting for to be the eleventh Doctor*

*among the white male possibilities, anyway.*

is totally not imagining the Hugh/Cadfael Doctor/Master fic that would result

(Also, if they get Sean Pertwee as Eleven, they had *better* bring Jenny back with him.)

So I have been trying not to get to emotionally involved with the politics (though I still want to do that "Sarah Palin or TGP: Who Is More Qualified?" point-by-point comparison), but I have been following fivethirtyeight.com pretty closely. And OMG, if Obama takes the South? That will be not only win, it'll be the most important thing to happen in American politics in my *lifetime*.

***
Anyway.
1. Comment on this post.
2. I will give you a letter.
3. Think of 5 fictional characters and post their names and your comments on these characters in your blog.

stellar_dust gave me "D".
...I had a list of twenty-five characters to pick from, and that was before I checked my notes. So, um, have the short list as meme x 3.

And hey, while I'm at it, why not give me two numbers between 1 and 15 and I'll write you a comment-fic where those two characters meet. :D (Random or calculated, I don't even care.)

( Five Large Fandoms )

( Five Small Fandoms )

( Five Nonexistent Fandoms )

...Yeah, I should probably stop there. Even if it means I have to leave out David Starr, and Mike Doonesbury, and Dick and Dorothea (the D's), and Diana Fowley, and Dick Grayson**, and Dickon Sowerby**, and Daystar, and Death**, and Doli the Dwarf, and ....

(** marks characters I have either written in fic or tried to write.)

So I am now partway through downloading the entirety of Frobisher's run in the Doctor Who Magazine comics, because also_not_a_pipe made me realize something:

If Ray from dueSouth is actually a Time Lord who came to Earth as a refugee from the Daleks and, for reasons which don't need exploring at this juncture, remained as a cop in Chicago --

Then Diefenbaker is obviously a Whifferdill. See, he's an animal, but he's of at least human intelligence, and he changes what variety of animal he is from time to time, and he's a detective, *and* he's named after one of the great men of Canadian history. ... clearly a Whifferdill.

So now I have to read the Frobisher comics too before I write the crossover, but that's okay, because I think it gives me the first beginning of a plot hook for the crossover (and an excuse to use Six or Seven as the Doctor! Yay!)

So my newest Early Review book for LibraryThing is The Art Of Darkness, about undercover work; and there's been all this talk about the far north lately; and I had a whole bag of mending to do, and needed something to watch. So (as could be clearly deduced from that list of circumstances) I pulled out the tape I got at con.txt of the dueSouth pilot.

Several things:

No amount of fanfic, icons, picspam, or squee posts can possibly prepare you for just how indescribably, irrepressible-grin-inducingly cute Constable Fraser is.

No amount of fanfic can prepare you for how *bad* Ray's fashion sense is. I am more convinced than ever that he's actually a Time Lord. (Though another thing that fanfic hadn't conveyed is that Ray is apparently already doing primarily undercover work, which does make that whole two-Rays thing make a lot more sense without having to bring in regeneration.)

(Ray is also indescribably cute. And Dief is a much better actor than I was expecting him to be. Remember when I was talking about watching Old!Who, and it's like being a historian who's heard all the myths and read all the theories, who gets a chance to actually *be there* and *see it happen* and it's so much more amazingly amazing than any reconstruction? Yeah, like that.)

Also, this song will *get stuck in your head*.


Undercover book is also making me really want fic exploring the Master's tendency to go into deep cover at the slightest pretext. And making me want to re-read A Howling In The Factory Yard, again, but, y'know, that's kind of a given.)

Somebody needs to vid this song around Five's regeneration into Six. (Especially if they're clever enough to work in references to what's coming with Seven. But yes.)

...why yes, I do have all my MP3s on the same computer now, why do you ask?

So, with lack of laptop, and possibly more relevantly, lack of any way to play pirate online video, I have been reading more actual printed books this week. And catching up on my LT reviews, which I was several months behind on.

I have been learning a lot!
For example: When one is pondering writing Miles Vorkosigan kidfic, do *not* read Gordon Korman novels.

Also, when one is pondering writing S4 Dr. Who crackfic, do not do NOT read books of old Charles Addams cartoons....

So one way to tell I'm really properly in to a fandom is that when I listen to one of my old CDs I mentally vid *every single song* to that fandom.

...sigh.

(But seriously? This song? Somebody needs to do a Ten vid to that song. Like, this song was *written* for somebody to do a Ten vid to it.)

The Tiemlords picspam now has me badly wanting the story where Joanna Lumley!Doctor shows up in the 18th century Caribbean in her TARDIS to take her granddaughter, young Susanna Wilhelmina Turner, adventuring with her, but then gets distracted by pirate king business and ends up retrieving the Master from Davy Jones's locker.

...I should probably actually watch "The Curse of Fatal Death" first.