somniloquence

I actually dusted off my unused twitter account (because I haaaaate twitter with the white hot fury of a thousand burning suns) to reblog this tear-bringing PSA from Leslie Odom Jr that I saw on kass 's journal.

Like all of you, I'm a giant ball of stress, and am just trying to focus on writing and not watching anything on TV or online outside of safe places like DW. But writing is a bit hard right now, for obvious reasons, but also, someone left a really shitty comment about my WIP that I had made the interesting choice to make Shuri an evil bitch, and it really threw me for a loop. I don't usually get really shitty comments, just mildly shitty stuff couched within praise so there's not a lot to say about it, or just plain weird comments. I don't really have enough commenters in general to have to deal with waves of people being awful. But when I have had terrible ones, they were for one and done stories, not WIPs, which lends it a whole other awfulness. minim_calibre, who is beta reading for me, insists Shuri's not evil (I mean, this person ranted about hating T'Challa too because he was mean to Bucky, so massive eye-roll there), but it's just...never pleasant when you're struggling with things and trying to be creative in the face of what feels like insurmountable odds to hear someone say things like that. Obviously, I'm not going to respond, but I can't decide if I should just delete it, since that sometimes sets off a chain of bad shit, or leave it there so it doesn't start drama with a psycho. Why are fans like this?

Yuletide assignment is...interesting. I can say no more, but this might end up being a tough one.

There's now a translation into Russian of my Bucky-secretly-cooks-for-Steve-with-Clint's-help fic Dream of Caramel: or, A Recipe for Disaster, if you read that sort of thing! It was done by Loki (secretlytodream), and I can't even imagine what a challenge that was, because it was so idiomatic and full of weird expressions, not to mention all the food.

There didn't seem to be a lot of interest when I posted about doing a Justified rewatch, but I'm persevering anyway, even if it's just a couple of us in comments. I figure I'll start posting at the beginning of September, and I'll try to do it on Tuesdays if I can, which was Justified night when it aired on FX.

If you've never watched it before, I hope you will consider joining us, I intend to make this accessible for people who weren't familiar with it! I will be interested in seeing how well (or not) things have held up. The series is available for free if you have Amazon Prime, and by payment on Apple and YouTube, among the main players. All six seasons are on DVD, individually and with a complete series set, so possibly your local library might have it available. And I'm sure there are still active torrents for ahem-ing.

So look for the pilot episode on September 3, and I'm excited about discussing this modern-day Western! If you think someone on your circle might be interested, feel free to pass this along!

Unfortunately, all I've been able to find is a crappy-quality trailer for season 1 at super low res. But here it is

Long time no...post. I still read through my flist every day, but posting just seems to be an endeavor I have trouble mustering the ability for: I think of things to say in my head, but they never make it on to the screen. It's been mostly stress and fear around here, anyway, and no one wants to read more of that, all things considered out in the world.

( fun with healthcare )

( and then there's the emotional rollercoaster of fandom )

Whew! That's a lot and I don't blame anyone for not wanting to read any of this. I'll spare you the sometimes awful and hilarious story about my Cap RBB fic writing adventures. Maybe when it's done I'll tell it. I should probably stop comments, but I guess I'll leave them on just because I'm tired and lazy.

I wasn't sure I'd be able to go to Escapade this year because my usual travel partner wasn't going, but I did find a roomie and so I bought a plane ticket--unfortunately right before all the financial stuff came down hard on me and boy did I regret that, but it's nonrefundable, so. I'm glad the hotel has a huge breakfast buffet, because I think I can stock up on stuff for the day and they also have refigerators in each room, so I can kind of scam my way through (as well as make the very long walk to In-N-Out Burger, because OMG I love INOB like crazy and it's cheap, too).

It also meant I didn't put in any suggestions for panels, but I ended up doing a write-in alt track panel for Cap fandom once I knew I could go (also, jeez, snowmageddon here made me really nervous that I'd never make it to the airport; here's hoping we don't get any more snow). It was kind of difficult to deal with the signup form, so the only day I could see available was Friday at the lunch hour--which means it may not be well attended, but if you're interested in talking Cap fandom specifically (as opposed to the Saturday panel with a wider focus on phase 4), I'd love to have you join me:

Friday, Feb. 22, Noon-1 p.m., Marina del Rey room

Captain America MCU: The End of the Line
Captain America fandom has taken a lot of hits lately: we didn’t even get a real third Cap movie, the Cap Family barely existed in Infinity War, and the end of Chris Evans’s contract means Steve Rogers as we know him in the MCU has left the building after A4--and a lot of fans are convinced Steve will in fact be killed off. Will Cap fandom wither and die the way most closed canons do, or will things like the Bucky and Sam streaming series and the comics help keep it alive in some form? Can we keep the Cap love alive?

Featuring me, your hostess.

Well, this has been...a day. I woke up this morning to an email from the person doing the new meta fandom newsletter--which I sort of had read about, but not really paid attention to but thought it was very cool that someone was doing--asking if I had a linking policy, because they'd posted about a fanlore post of one my old LJ entries and a couple commenters had mentioned that it might be good to check with me about it.

I've never formulated any kind of policy because I'm a no-name fan and to be honest, I don't really pay attention to these sorts of things, not to mention that I hardly ever lock my posts, and I wasn't even sure what the post in question was. (And I want to make it very clear before I get into this longer thing that I have no issue with the meta fandom newsletter person, I appreciate her thoughtfulness and willingness to work with me.) But I went to the metafandom journal, and found the post, and started reading through the comments, and got kind of upset. I didn't even know what post this was talking about, because she'd kindly taken the link down while waiting to hear from me, but I started to grok from some of the kind of mocking comments that it was a personal rant about entitled kids these days.

From 2006. That someone on fanlore called mrs. potato head put up last fucking year, with absolutely no context or background. And never once asked me about, even though I'm still active in fandom and they could easily have written to me on LJ or in PMs. And the thing is, I was very upfront that I was writing a personal rant (I still haven't gone back to look at the post, I simply don't have time), but the fanlore person basically used so many excerpts and pejorative content descriptions that I don't need to, it seems like most of the post is there, along with a bunch of comments, many of which I think the commenters would be as upset as I was to find them there. I wrote that post in the assumption that it was my personal journal that I was making a personal rant about fandom in, and I wrote it less than a year after my fucking TWIN SISTER DIED, and after the death of a fandom friend whose absence I was keenly feeling at the Escapade con.

I was a really different person in 2006 from what I am in 2018 and 2019. I've changed a lot in 13 years, and fandom has changed, and really, the Internet has changed. Back then, LJ was the primary game in town, and the way we interacted with it was different from how we interact with tumblr. I've been profoundly affected by my sister's death, my friends' deaths, knowing the people I know now. It never would have occurred to me that someone would be combing through my LJ, which I don't even use anymore because of the whole Russia thing, looking for posts I made about fandom and culling them to post in completely contextless history posts, opening me up to attack or ridicule when someone else finds them and links to them.

And I'll restate--I have nothing against the idea of keeping fannish histories about meta posts, or linking to them in a kind of historical way. I think documenting fannish history is vital, and it's one reason I was active on fanlore when it first started (I have lots of reasons for not staying active, but this is sort of one of them). And I'm really glad they thought I had something of interest to link to! One of the comments was from kore, pointing out how uncomfortable she'd be if a personal vent she'd made 13 years ago in her own space after the death of a friend was linked to without making sure it was okay. I really appreciated that, because the me 13 years ago was such a different person, and that was a time when we weren't really locking things a lot, or at least, in my sector, we weren't. And again, there was no context for this fanlore post, nothing that explains why it's there.

But the thing is, not every single piece of fandom meta has historical value. (I hear the archivists yelling NO! Samuel Pepys! All those old APA zines and newsletters and stuff! How would we know what the daily life of fans were like otherwise or what the hot topics were! I hear that, but again, sometimes we're not writing these things wanting them to survive in a time capsule. Sometimes it's personal venting, sometimes it's us trying to work stuff out, and we don't want them to survive.) I wasn't given a choice by the fanlore person. They never asked me, hey, I'm going to comb (stalk) through your LJ that you don't even use anymore and take so many excerpts from this ancient rant of yours that I might as well publish the whole thing, and I'm going to open you up for ridicule in the future, and also the people who left comments who might be horrified by language they used casually back then they'd never ever use today, and I'm going to do this 12 years after the fact for no particular reason, 'kay? All they had to do was PM me, so I could have ruminated on that, and looked at the post, and then maybe said, hm, you know, not okay, I didn't remember a single thing about that post and it was from a bad time. And I could have gone back and locked it.

I'm upset that the fanlore person picked this crap to post 12 years after the fact--like, WTF?--and now I have to, at a time when I'm absolutely swamped, deal with all of this and don't really have the spoons or the time. It took me a long time to unravel this morning. And I could have said, hey, you know, I have a number of nicely aged, oaky, pleasant vintage rants about fandom that don't have that unpleasant terroir of grief and misery and unhappiness. Shit, I have a vertitable SMORGASBORD of ancient ranty meta posts that people could ridicule me over, do you prefer a booth or a table?

But I didn't get that chance. I knew nothing about the fanlore post till today, and I don't have time to search out how many other posts this person might have culled from my goddamn LJ that I don't use anymore and they never bothered to ask me about. And now they're forcing me to a) spend the time coming up with some kind of links policy (which, I'm old skool, I've always believed that public posts are public and people can do what they want up till now) and b) trying to decide how to handle locking in a journal I don't even use--do I lock down the whole thing, which means people can't access the public posts like vids and fic or do I have to invest the ridic amount of time to read through nearly two decades of postings to find the individual ones I'd never have wanted to be made historical documents in freaking 2019?

I'm not thrilled at being forced by someone else's lack of thoughtfulness to do something, but now I have to. And I have to see what other things fanlore might have there that'll surprise or piss me off. Not everything is a historical document, not everything we've done as fans was created with the intention of surviving more than a dozen years to be discussed like it's something new and noteworthy. Sometimes, we're happy to let things die in the past--that's okay. There's lots still that could live on. I don't really want that thing to be my legacy, or lots of other things--there's plenty of better stuff for a legacy. I could have even pointed that out, if they'd bothered to ask, and I might even dig some of it up and see if the meta newsletter person would be interested, since I sort of caused them a lot of bother today.

The changes I've gone through in 13 years, a lot of them have come from wounds and scars and loss, but you know, that's life. Hopefully, I'll be here in another 13 years, and I have no idea what fandom will look like then, but I really hope that we don't have to fear the stuff we say now coming back to haunt us or that we can't control our own spaces. I love fandom, I love its history, but I hope we don't forget in our efforts to document that history that individual people are the ones behind it.

I mentioned a while ago writing out some of the process notes for creating Dream, and then just kind of settled into ennui and entropy. Even though it's faded into the woodwork now, I figured I should write it down at least so I don't forget later, more for my own benefit than anything else.

As I said in the original post here, I've had this song for quite a few years, since I first heard it ten years ago on a commercial for a vaccines campaign sponsored by Pampers/UNICEF (this piece of information always makes people titter or sneer, IDEK). I recognised the singer, who is a longtime fave--I was like, "Is that Angela McCluskey? Oh my god, it is!!" and I went in search of the song. Fortunately there was a full length version with full production values on iTunes, so I downloaded it and knew immediately it was a fabulous vid song. It had everything you could hope for--great hook, tonal changes, hopeful and inspirational lyrics, great chords and beats...it was perfect, only I just didn't know what the theme was. For years I would ask people, and they'd offer some idea or other, and while those were interesting, they were never right. When the con comm announced the last Vividcon, I knew that I finally had my theme.

( long and not especially coherent thoughts on Dream )

Hey fam--this is the first of two posts that I have about plans for Vividcon, specifically crowd-sourcing information and help.

For this one, I need help with the ancient history of vidding--I'm doing a retrospective show on vidding from before the Vividcon era. ETA: I should clarify this: It's not the lists of cons or fandoms or whatever I need help with--it's recommendations and ideas for actual vids I could include. Just having lists of vid names or vidders is not really any use if I have no idea what the vid is like, so personal recommendations or people who can give me those is the most useful.

It's relatively easy for me to go back through the DVDs from Escapade and from individual vidders dating to before 2002, but not so much before the DVD era, because I can't view tapes any longer and most of the folks I know who kept tape collections with run lists and liner notes are either gone now or the ones still alive haven't kept their tapes. And I'd really like to include some things beyond my sphere of influence (eg Escapade, mostly, and the vidders who used to hang out with the Media Cannibals in some form or another). I'd love to not have them all be clustered in the very late '90s/early aughts.

So that would be places like RevelCon, and MediaWest and Zebracon, and the East Coast cons I never really knew much about and whose names I can no longer remember, as well as some fandom-specific cons like the S&H one, I think there were a number of Trek ones, and at least one Professionals one I recall. And there were groups like Cali Crew and others who put out collections or vidded together, but again, just trying to figure out where and when is a little overwhelming for me right now to do solo. Actual concrete info would be most helpful here--I have a pretty good memory but more people telling me what those vids are will help jog my memory.

Not that I necessarily know how I'll get my hands on some of the vids even if anyone has some suggestions, but I'd love to at least have a giant list of suggestions I can research from. I have a few I know I'd like to include, but I think this will be a tough one for me to do.

Also, if you think some of your flist might have ideas, and you wouldn't mind posting a link here or tweeting it or whatever you do social mediawise (I don't twitter or facebook), I'd absolutely love to have people drop by with some ideas. The more the merrier (at least merrier me).

This year, my word count was down from previous years, although there was a nearly 20,000 word push there at the very end with Yuletide and a Christmas fic. A lot of it was that I was working on one thing almost all year: Celluloid Hero, which took a lot of my time, then there was the reverse big bang, and the other thing was, well, cancer. Stupid cancer. I can't say anything was what you could call successful if you're judging by stats, because most of it's pretty abysmal, but I'm still very happy with a lot of my writing, so whatever.

I won't list month by month, since some months I didn't have anything but a new chapter of Celluloid Hero, these are just the stories in one lump:

Celluloid Hero The Steve Rogers Goes to Golden Age Hollywood and makes the movies we see little snippets of in CA:TFA

To the Rescue Part of the War Dogs universe, about Bucky and Gretel the Howling Commandog rescuing a kidnapped Steve, written for Bucky's 100th birthday

Four Times Quinn Encountered the Winter Soldier, and One Time the Soldier Engaged A Captain America/Homeland crossover. I wrote this as a birthday present for a friend who is the only other person I know who loves Peter Quinn on Homeland, and fantasizes about him meeting up with Bucky

Save my life and I'll save yours My entry for the Captain America Reverse Big Bang, a kind of Civil War fix-it where characters get to act like intelligent individuals and not credulous morons

We Could Just Run Them Red Lights A little War Dogs universe fic for Steve's birthday, with Rita their sort of service dog

A Bullet in the Barrel of Your Best Guy's Gun A sequel to Man With a Plan, the "you're keeping the outfit" uniform porn I wrote a few years ago, for the Pod-Together challenge

This Is Not Some Kind of Meet-Cute My main Yuletide assignment, for the movie Gifted

The Light You Give A Christmas Carol style fic where Steve has only been back for a few months and just wants to be alone to hate the 21st century, and is that really too much to ask? (the answer is yes)

And the whirlwind A Yuletide treat for Logan, about my little murder cupcake Laura after the movie

( Thinky thoughts part of the meme )

my final word count wasn't in the same range as previous, but it's not too shabby:

The fandomlovespuertorico auction is live! SO MANY amazing offerings and creators, guys, it's like the world's best fandom farmers market.

My fanfic entry is here, and I'm pretty sure you will be able to purchase me for a very low price, with this many amazing people participating.

My vidding entry is here, and while my minimum bid is a little higher at $40 (because vids are a lot more work and involve more equipment), I'm also sure that will not get bid up much, so you can have me for a lot less than the VVC auctions usually go for!

Tomorrow I have to start the first steps for getting ready for surgery--they make you drink this Ensure-type drink called ImmunoBoost or something, three cartons a day for five days before the procedure. I guess it's supposed to help your body recover faster or something. Then by end of weekend I have to start a small diet change, and then take antibiotics, before I have to do the insane ritual special soap shower, which I bought today, and take the vile liquid they make you drink to clean out your colon (it's like drinking gatorade-flavored cooking oil). I'm confused about why you take antibiotics when you're just going to shit them out, but whatever. I also have to get a very specific carbohydrate drink for the day of the procedure. Just the laundering everything/special shower stuff is going to drive me crazy alone. (Also, I can't find any of the Popsicle flavors I want/am allowed to have, anywhere, and you can't eat these modern fancy pops because they're not clear liquids, they have pieces of stuff in them.)

I'm feeling really depressed, and as I was telling minim calibre last night, I'm having this constant erratic beating or pounding of my heart, and it's freaking me out because sometimes I'm so stressed I feel like I'm having a heart attack, and I worry this could be very bad for the anesthesia. Some of this is worry about my situation, but it's compounded by trying to help people I know who are in bad straits. I feel really alone, and a lot of the people who were there at the beginning are noticeably absent now, I guess it's no longer glamorous two months on--not to mention many of the people who do want to see me or talk to me aren't doing it because I want to, but because it's about making themselves feel good, like if I die they'll have done their duty of being a pal or something and mostly I just would be fine with them going away.

The times when I'm loneliest and most scared are late at night, and there's no one to talk to at that hour. The past few days, my lower abdomen has felt kind of bad, and it's making me worry that maybe the tumor has gotten bigger, that all this waiting's made the situation a lot worse. That's not helping.

Plus I get either the victim blaming or concern trolling (my diet, my weight, my lifestyle, my whatever) or the helpful information version of victim blaming: it's dairy (because it's not like people across many cultures have eaten other types of dairy like sheep or goat or horse milk for centuries, or even cow dairy, and didn't get cancer), it's carbs (ignoring the fact that carbs are actually an important part of diet and for some of us high protein/fat is actually dangerous, and there's a reason they make you drink carbohydrate drinks before and after surgery, and also, millions of people eat carbs without getting cancer), it's refined sugar (which, I admit, I use too much of probably, but since sweet is one of the few things I enjoy taste-wise, and millions of people eat way, way more sugar than I do and don't get cancer, I'm not buying it), it's gluten (which many people enjoy without getting cancer, and if you don't actually have physical conditions or problems with gluten, it's not going to give you colon cancer anyway), it's blah blah whatever thing you are currently believing all the bad press about.

Everyone seems to think I have some kind of team behind me, despite telling them repeatedly that I don't--no oncologist, no therapist, no nothing. I learned really fast that people don't listen to most of what I say, because I have to keep repeating myself. I'm kind of dreading going to the hospital because my ex wants to take me and it makes sense--he lives basically about ten blocks away, but he drives me bug-shagging crazy because he never listens and I have to tell him the same damn shit over and over, and he gets really fluttery and panicky. He texted me last night with "where do I drop you [at the hospital]? Address??" and I was like, okay, I've told you three times that it's Swedish on Broadway and James and you could look up the damn address yourself, and also, just because I said you didn't have to stay does not mean I want to be dumped on the fucking doorstep. If you don't have time or want to come in to the hospital with me till they walk me through reg, then let me know because I want to find someone else." I well remember his selfish, childish hatred of hospitals when I needed him, when we were together and my mom was sick. It was one of many things that led to us splitting.

Anyways. Tomorrow is also the day my fic and the accompanying podfic for the pod_together goes live. I started this thing before the diagnosis, and to say it's been a wild ride is putting it mildly. I absolutely did not want to write the story I ended up writing, but it seemed like my original teammate didn't like the idea I loved, so somehow I ended up writing 6k of metal hand fisting, I don't even know. I never wanted to write a sequel to Man With a Plan, but here we are. The good news is that, because it was such a rollercoaster experience, and lifestuff happened with me and my teammate, reena_jenkins, who has created some wonderful podfics of my stuff before, came in as a pinch hitter a couple weeks ago and she did an amazing job. She suggested we turn Bucky's sexy playlist into a fanmix, so that'll go live with the story--she had some great song ideas to fill in the gaps of my '90s and early aughts knowledge, and it turned out pretty cool, I think.

She also, as a runup to our challenge pieces going live, recorded a podfic of Man With a Plan, the "you're keeping the outfit, right?" porn I wrote a few years ago. Which is so above and beyond the call of duty. If you ever wished you could hear a podfic of Man With a Plan, well, you can now, thanks to Reena's amazing powers!