Uffish Thought

I already did most of these two challenges as part of my end-of-year tidying, but here goes.

Challenge #1: Update your fandom information. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

I already keep a list of my social media platforms in my profile (and in my AO3 profile), but I did add a few things to my interests: more recent fandoms, some new practices. I did a minor clear-out in December of access/subscriptions - mostly to pare down my reading list, for I rarely post anything private locked. (I rarely post anything but recs these days at all! Working on changing that.)

Challenge #2: In your own space, set yourself some goals for the coming year. They can be fannish or not, public or private. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Again, I did my New Years Resolutions list last month - mostly pulling things from last year's list to continue or try to do more consistently (like volunteering at the food bank). I did make a list of Small Adventures to go on, places nearby that I haven't visited in ages or always meant to go/do/see, which I will try to post about here (see: effort to post about my life and not just fandom; I do like seeing other people's, and should not listen to the part of my brain that tells me it's not interesting when it's me).

I didn't set any particular goals for writing, though it's generally on the list - I find the pressure counterproductive - but I did complete one of my bookmarking goals last year, to catch up through 2018, though I fell just short (5 fics!) of my stretch goal of 2019. I'm going to try and post things on Pinboard more concurrently with my monthly recs, but we'll see how that goes.

( Challenge #7: Fandom resources )

( Challenge #8: Personal win (plus poll about recs!) )

I'm going to claim #11 Interact With Someone as done, since I've been commenting more, and #12 Fancast Someone as done with my imagining Element of Fire's Thomas Boniface as Diego Luna.

Challenge #14: In your own space, post your pictures of your fandom scavenger hunt results. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

1. a fannish item


Rogue One art by pentapus, commissioned by leupagus (and this framed copy was a gift from her as well!)

2. something round


A coaster that inmyriadbits brought me from her trip to Istanbul! So pretty!

3. something that is your favorite color


No one is surprised, it's something green.

4. the last game you played (video, phone, table top, etc.)


I have won every Wordle game I've played except the very first one, which mildly infuriates me every time my stats pop up at the end. I only started playing this month, though.

5. a book you are currently reading


If by 'currently reading' you mean 'lives on my coffee table where I can read a chapter those times when I can't decide what I want to do'. The Parade's Gone By by Kevin Brownlow is a collection of oral history interviews about the early silent era in Hollywood - fun stuff, albeit definite grain-of-salt territory given the age and proclivity of film people to elaborate their stories.

6. album art of the first song that comes up on shuffle


Ahhh, high school nostalgia.

7. the last movie you watched


Finally watched this during a movie night with my mom last week, since I'd been putting it off because I KNEW I was going to cry. (I was right.) Leslie Odom Jr.'s face in this splash is cracking me up, tho.

8. TV show you're currently watching


9-1-1 has been eating my brain, I'm writing fic, send help.

9. the homescreen, lockscreen, or desktop wallpaper from your device


Today's desktop wallpaper! My cycler program tells me this camel was photographed on Socotra Island, Yemen, which Wikipedia informs me has been described as "the most alien-looking place on Earth." Pretty normal looking camel here, but a spectacular sand dune.

Challenge #3: In your own space, put some favorite characters into an AU, fuse some favorite canons together, talk about your favorite AU/fusion tropes, or tell us why AU/fusions aren’t your cup of tea.

I DO love AUs! A quick spot-check showed that they're...about 20% of my bookmarks, damn, and 18% of my published fic (...let's not talk about the WIPs). My favorites are canon-divergence AUs: I love the puzzle of how one small change (or a large one) can alter events, both as a reader and a writer, the question of what parts of a character are essential and what shift with circumstance. Plus, fix-its! I'm not great with tragedy.

Setting AUs are dicier - I'm a sucker for competence, so a lot of my fandom are full of highly capable/dangerous/competent/talented people. So while I do actually read a fair number of coffeeshop/mundane life/university AUs for the mindless fluff, they rarely move me as strongly as fics where my characters get to keep that aspect of themselves. Like, a Leverage AU where they're all baristas is never gonna compete with 'international Robin Hood team of cons and thieves', you know?

Fusions are trickier ground. For one thing, the language around them has gotten increasingly confused. Like, an Anastasia AU (♥) is technically a fusion but no one calls them that anymore. Most people just call something an AU whether it's a fusion or not, and fusions can be combined with more direct crossovers as well as technically being a type of crossover, and. yeah. It's messy, and I've fallen into calling everything an AU unless I'm figuring out how to tag things on Pinboard just because that's the standard language now.

Both fusions and canon-divergences have the same fail point for me: sticking too close to canon events. If I wanted a flat retread of that story, I'd just re-visit canon. I ended up picking this icon because one of the places the Temeraire series really falls down is sticking so closely to the actual path of the Napoleonic Wars - and conversely, is strongest when it diverges and has France invade Britain. I can definitely understand not wanting to reconstruct a decades-long war as an author, and Novik certainly did a lot more on the social side of changes, but it was frustrating. Dragons would change things!!! It's a hard trap to avoid when writing in fandom as well, because our urge is to keep the scenes and moments we love, or that are formative to our characters, but the whole point of an AU is to see how things went differently as well. Finding the right balance can be very difficult, but I definitely prefer the end of the spectrum that takes the original premise and runs away with it.

Day 10: Create a fanwork.

I''m going to use archiving all of my Mad Max: Fury Road meta on AO3 yesterday for this one.

MMFR was a very unusual fandom for me, in that I probably spent more time on fannish discussion than I did with fic (although I still wrote a few and beta'd a few and read many more). Tumblr's ability to easily combine visual and text media was absolutely essential for this fandom, imo - how could you easily dissect the micro-second flashes of Max's hallucinations, or squint to figure out what kind of produce was hidden in the War Rig without fuzzy freeze frames to argue over? So when Tumblr started imploding, one of my first reactions was distress that the central part of that fandom was going to disappear. In fact, one of the most prolific writers already got her blog deemed NSFW and you can't access her original posts anymore, which is deeply enraging.

I'm definitely a tortoise rather than a hare, so I collected a bunch of posts about archiving and procrastinated and eventually came up with a fairly easy method of preserving the pages with images intact, and archiving them (or at least access to them) on AO3. I started it for MMFR fandom specifically, but it should work for anyone who has gifsets or photosets or moodboards that they want to archive without having to rehost all the images.

( for those who are interested )

If anyone has additional clever ideas, or thoughts about how to make it easier, please comment to let me know!

Day 6: In your own space, create a list of at least three fannish things you'd love to receive, something you've wanted but were afraid to ask for - a fannish wish-list of sorts.

1) I've been so enjoying having icons again, but I'm feeling the lack of ones for Temeraire and Nirvana in Fire. Icons, or links to places that have icons, would be super awesome.

2) More podfic of my fic would be so cool. I've got a few already and they make me happy.

3) Uh. Um. Why is this so hard. Oh! For Naomi Novik to spontaneously decide to put her writing timeline for Temeraire up on the internet somewhere, because Crucible of Gold *must* have taken place from late 1810-early 1811 except wtf were Iskierka and Granby doing for 18 months??? (other than getting into trouble, obvs) and other questions that *can* be handwaved in my quest to write this damned Tharkay story, but which are slowly driving my curiosity mad. Fannish attempts have been made, but if we're talking pie-in-the-sky fannish wishlists, I want some word-of-god canon, pls & thx.

Day 3 - Share a favorite piece of original canon.

I decided to go with something light today, and talk about my favorite dumb slashy action film, Banlieue 13. Set in the dystopian future of 2010 (yes, I know, shut up), where Paris has built walls around its ghettos to isolate them, a cop and a local have to team up to fight a crime lord who's stole a MacGuffin advanced bomb and then accidentally armed it in the middle of the city. TOTAL nonsense, paired with some of my favorite fight choreography ever.

The local guy, Leito, is played by David Belle aka one of the founders of parkour. The cop, Damien, is played by a professional stuntman, Cyril Raffaeli, who Americans are more likely to recognize as the French parkour mercenary from Die Hard 4. They did ALL of their own stunts in the original and most of the sequel iirc, and the movies are chock full of creative fights and chases.

More importantly, the fight choreography is beautifully character driven. Damien is very straightforward, grounded, highly trained, and Lawful Good; Leito is improvisational and anti-authoritarian and thinks laterally. Once they team up and start fighting *together* instead of against each other, they'll have these amazing broccoli moments where they move or fight at the same time, but the choreography still underscores how they're different. For example, when they get spotted on a staircase and have to fight their way up, Damien starts bulling his way straight up the stairs, taking out a ton of guys on the way with his superior martial arts skills. Leito, on the other hand, climbs over banister and parkours across the stairwell and around, tipping out a handful of dudes trying to stop him down the well along the way. They meet at the landing at the same time, like badasses.

I'm not remotely doing them justice, but I do highly recommend the movies -- as long as you're aware going in that these movies are definitely problematic (I can explain how in the comments if you need trigger warnings or squick avoidance) and you're willing to ignore that shit in favor of the awesome action and INCREDIBLY slashy main pair.

I can't find any videos of the two of them fighting together, but the opening parkour chase with Leito evading a gang whose drugs he's just stolen and destroyed (while inexplicably but delightfully shirtless) is justly famous:

Day 1: In your own space, talk about your Happy Place — the thing(s) that gives you joy, calms you or keeps you sane.

Physically, my living room is incredibly cozy and soothing. I have a couch -- it's technically a "chair and a half" -- that was promptly dubbed The Nap Couch after on multiple occasions inmyriadbits and I fell asleep on it. I have another massive comfy armchair from my aunt and uncle, and I spend most of my time at home on one of them.

Mentally, stories are always my Happy Place: fic, books, TV and film, comics, all sorts of stuff.

Emotionally, I have a chat with leupagus, inmyriadbits, and a cluster of other fangirls that is funny and lovely and full of awesome, supportive ladies.

I'm gonna leave it at that for today -- I just finished reorganizing all of my closets in a fit of New Year's cleaning, which went surprisingly easily (probably because I moved in just over a year ago) but still was a few hours of shuffling things around. Time for leftover cake and fic!