hangingfire's adventures in fandom

Other places where I have fic:

The Pit of Voles (I'm a sucker for reviews, even there)
A Teaspoon and an Open Mind
Yuletide Treasure
fanfic_luckydip on LJ

On NPR this morning: a story about pregnancy and the role of the spine. Seems that women's backbones are evolved such that they can support the baby weight not just through their back muscles, but with the spine itself. And it turns out that men's backbones aren't structured to function that way.

Where fandom comes in: I had to restrain myself from exclaiming, "HAH. SUCK ON THAT, MPREG WRITERS."

>.<

1. To see Captain Jack burst into song at some point in Torchwood S2. This is why.

Not so crazy about this cover of the song, and in fact I prefer his performance of "Night and Day" in De-Lovely for delivery and interpretation. But come on, guy's a total song and dance man, and a singing Captain Jack would make me ludicrously happy.

Having been seized with a desire to get a tattoo of the Seal of Rassilon (still in the thinking-over phase, but it's looking increasingly likely as a birthday present to myself), I spent some time yesterday afternoon digging around the Doctor Who pages of Wikipedia.

And remembered, suddenly, something else that pins down my entry into Who fandom in yet more detail.

( Embarrassing childhood confessions within )

I own this.

( Scan behind the cut )

It was published in 1986, and there are scribbles in it that indicate that I brought it along on a trip to England with my family. Which goes a fair way towards narrowing down the year in which I started watching the show; the trip was in the spring of 1987, which means I started watching the show around 1985 or 1986.

No, I'm not telling you how old I was.

Here's an excerpt, which should be amusing to any old-school Who fan:

( Quarries We Have Known And Loved )

Thanks to this "Blackpool" fanvid, I can now no longer listen to the song "I Want Candy" without thinking of David Tennant licking ice cream cones.

I suppose there are worse fates.

Hi there!

So. I'm a total n00b at this Yuletide thing. I'm not sure what else to say, really; you've probably seen my propensity for tl;dr when it comes to the Wimseyverse (for which I apologise), and I have very little to add to the preferences I noted elsewhere.

I like stories that fill in the gaps, that answer questions left behind by the author. I like insights into heads that don't usually get the insights. I like to know what makes people tick.

Anyroad. Thank you for doing this, and whatever you do, I'm really looking forward to it.

Best wishes, happy holidays, good luck, and thank you. ^_^
hangingfire

From birene over on LJ.  I'm still thinking over my answers and may change them or add to them, but wanted to toss it out there for others to play with if they so desire.

Which fandom is...

• The one(s) who seduced you and fucked you over and broke your heart in a million pieces and laughed about it:
• The old flame(s) you don't see very often any more but whom you still really enjoy getting together with for a few drinks and maybe a pleasant nostalgic romp in the sheets: Star Trek: TOS and Star Trek: TNG.
  
• The mysterious dark gothy one whom you used to sit up with talking until 3 a.m. at weird coffeehouses and with whom you were quite smitten until you realized s/he really was fucking crazy: Harry Potter. (Although despite the crazy, I still hang around with this one.)
  
• The one you spent a whole weekend in bed with and who drank up all your liquor, and whom you'd still really like to fuck again although you're relieved s/he doesn't actually live in town:
• The steady: Discworld, Lord of the Rings, Sherlock Holmes
• The alluring strangers whom you've flirted with at parties but have never gotten really serious with: Firefly, Veronica Mars
  
• The one you hang out with and have vague fantasies about maybe having a thing with but ultimately you're just good buddies 'cause the friendship is there but the chemistry ain't:
• The one your friends keep introducing you to and who seems really cool except it's never really gone anywhere:
• The one who's slept with all your friends, and you keep looking at him/her and thinking, "how the hell did s/he land all these cool babes/boys?": Torchwood
  
• The one your friend has fallen for like a ton of bricks and whom s/he keeps babbling to you about on the phone for hours, and you'd be happy for her/him except you just know it's going to end badly: Supernatural. Don't ask me why I feel that way; it's just a hunch.

Also, not in the original meme, but here's a couple more of my own:

• The high school sweetheart who you outgrew, but who you still check up on every now and then just to make sure they're okay: Mysterious Cities of Gold
• The one to whom you're still really attracted, but don't really like the crowd they hang out with nowadays: Doctor Who
  

A wank report about Bayreuth. In particular this season.

There's got to be some message boards or newsgroups out there wailing about it and being horrible and wanky. These are opera fans we're talking about, after all.

(Alas, I have neither time nor patience to go digging, at least not until things settle down a bit more at work.)

Language Log discusses what's wrong with this sentence:

"My wand of yew did everything of which I asked it, Severus, except to kill Harry Potter. "

I don't have a dog in the MsScribe fight, and I don't have the time or patience to wade through all the teal deer of what's gone before. It's all kind of mindboggling, really, and makes me glad of my continued placement in the bin of Fandom Is Just Another Fucking Hobby.

That being said, when I read this comment? The first thing that popped into my head was:

"What time is it?"
"It's 4:15 AND MSSCRIBE STILL SUCKS."

...which will be meaningful to exactly one person reading this, I think, but what the hell.

After reading this puff piece, a terrifying phrase just shaped itself in my head, mostly in response to this reader comment: "Bourne has the skill, but no style. Bond is style but needs gadgetry to save the day. The two as one - devastating".

The phrase? "Bond/Bourne slashfic".

With Daniel Craig!Bond, of course, and Matt Damon!Bourne.

GAH. My knowledge of Bond canon is shaky at best, and I only know movie!Bourne. (This is clearly some kind of cosmic comeuppance for my snottiness about people who only know the film versions of LOTR and V for Vendetta and who write the fic without reading the books.)

Dammit. I don't even write slash! Well, hardly ever. But particularly not for canons I barely know. It's probably just best to leave this one as an amusing idea. (And hell, maybe someone better qualified will get to it first.)

I've successfully replicated the Firefox-based websurfing and journal management system documented in the original Firefox Follies post on my Mac laptop, running OS X.

And there was much rejoicing.

ETA: And GJ Login is broke on Mac Firefox. Feh. No idea why, either. Still works on PC, though.

Is that it's not what you think it is.

(Via various sources; at least two of you on my list here have already read it and commented on it thoroughly.)

There's a lot of well-considered stuff in here. I've said to several people that fandom is probably due up for its very own Furries on CSI! moment, and having articles about Strikethrough and Boldthrough on CNet and Der Spiegel (something which never stops making me go HOLY FUCK O_O!) is potentially only the tip of the iceberg. The section "Fandom is not acceptable to the mainstream" in particular says something that's been on my mind but which I haven't been able to articulate. (ETA: Okay, on consideration, "perversion" is rather strong language, but nonetheless, it might not be going too far to say that people on Straight Street would find certain things about fandom to be anything from eccentric to aberrant before even getting into the scary stuff.)

Also, the trademark/copyright thing. It's worth noting that Alan Moore's Lost Girls can't be sold legally in England until the copyright on Peter Pan runs out, and his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier is going to be hit with the same problem. Even the great Alan Moore is not safe from copyright law; the rest of us get away with this shit because we stay comfortably under the radar.

A good friend of mine is a genuine lawyer-in-real-life, and I've been wanting to get his take on this whole mess. The only reason I haven't asked is that I don't really want to pull him into the sucking mess that is the current debacle. He is, as far as I know, blissfully unaware of Strikethrough/Boldthrough and of the funkier sections of fandom, and I would like him to remain a good friend, you know?

Documenting all this here for the benefit of anyone else who might need this kind of assistance.

My current PC-based websurfing and journal management configuration is as follows:

• Mozilla Firefox PE 2.0.0.6 (installed on a USB thumbdrive)
• LJ Login 1.2.1
• GJ Login
• Deepest Sender 0.8.0

I resisted upgrading to Firefox 2.0.x.x for a long time, because the first time I made the upgrade, Deepest Sender flat stopped working. There was some kind of conflict between it and LJ Login, and since I 1) didn't want to install Semagic and 2) loathe the web interfaces at LJ, JF, and everywhere else, I didn't want to give up DS. However, use of certain add-ons made it necessary for me to upgrade Firefox, so I finally bit the bullet and did it.

muridae_x offered a workaround in the DeepestSender comm, one of which (the more convenient one) involves running DS in the Firefox sidebar. At the time the solution was offered, the big flaw in the sidebar solution was that once you closed the sidebar, you never got it back. This issue seems to have been resolved now (on which side, I'm not sure), and I'm running DS as needed in the sidebar with no problems (apart from fugly layout, which I can live with).

I have NOT tested this setup with Firefox for Mac, but I will do so and report back.

From here:

(If you're in two minds about Stardust, about whether or not to see it or even when to see it, please go and see it this weekend. Friday night if you can. Take friends. If necessary, take them at gunpoint. They will love the movie so much they will forgive you afterwards. And if they don't forgive you, you can dispose of them quietly -- you're the one with the gun, after all -- and you will have a wonderful time for the rest of your life with the new friends you made at the Stardust screening.)

(In fact, I am going on Friday. So there.)

This was kind of sad with my name, but the concept amused me enough that I'm tossing it out there for anyone else who wants to play.  Ganked from copperbadge on LJ.

1. Go to fanfiction.net.
2. Seach in Harry Potter fanfiction for summaries with your name in them.
3. Post. Try not to snicker.

Disappointingly, I only got three, and two of the buggers weren't even in English. I'm sure that this is due to the spelling of my name not being very common in the US, and my name not being hugely popular at the moment either.

1. Les deux nouvelles de Poudlard amélioré by okidouki - Ce monsieur Potter aura-t-il la vie plus facile ou plus mouvementée à cause de ces deux nouvelles filles qui sortent d'on ne sait ou? Histoire dédiée à Valérie et à Karine Potter
2.  In Pursuit » by Amanda Mancini  - The tale of an Unspeakable, and her most recent assigment: Tracking down the most dangerous 'Mary Sue' of their time. Follow Agent Karin Airbourne through a world of the deranged Mary Sues we rarely see and try really hard not to think about, either.
3.  Harry Potter y ? » by GilNarNim - nuevo capitulo!!!!!! karin conoce a draco

From the "Spotlight on Warren Ellis" panel, San Diego Comic-Con 2007:

"They handled it very badly, but they're being run by SixApart now, who have all the social skills of an eel."

In which Karin attempts to explain, among other things, why she went ahead and bought the US copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows instead of waiting nicely for her UK copy to arrive.

ETA: Spoilers in the comments, ahoy!

---

( tl;dr like whoa, plus some DH spoilers )</small>

Because I keep getting asked about the Bambi icon, here's the dish.

The quote is from The Apprentice, a novel by I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, convicted perjurer and former right-hand man to US Vice President Dick Cheney. Of all the novels in a lengthy tradition of Bad Sex Writing By Republicans, this is is some kind of insane classic. I first heard about it when I read "Scooter's Sex Shocker" by Lauren Collins (New Yorker, Nov. 7, 2005). Collins wrote:

And, finally:

He asked if they should fuck the deer.

The answer, reader, is yes.

And thus the brain-burning icon was born. Finding an image of an appropriately scared-looking Bambi was something of a challenge, but the payoff was worth it.

Additional digging turned up excerpts in "Dirty, Dirty Politician" (Nerve.com, Nov. 4, 2005). I've C&Ped them below for your enlightenment. Or horror, as the case may be.

( Warning: all kinds of sex-act horror and purple prose follows )