flemmings | Entries tagged with fandom

In odd moments I've been watching youtube videos about Encanto and basking in the nostalgic fannish energy. Granted it's largely guys doing the talking, which is not fandom as I'm used to it, still. It's been so long since I've read people poring over a source and zeroing in on little details to construct explanations about who actually knew about Bruno and why the casita is actually the avatar of abuelo Pedro.

(How do I turn off autocorrect on this thing? Not knowing fandom is one thing, not recognizing Spanish is quite another.)

And then there's the production guys going through the ideas that they rejected, which is like being given AUs by the writers themselves. Which the fans then discuss in detail, arguing about why this would have been good and that would have been disastrous. Ah, good times.

Rain was forecast and it certainly looked like rain but I went out to the laundromat anyway, go me. Except that I *of course* forgot the two items that I specifically wanted to wash in hot water, and forgot them because I use them daily and didn't put them in the laundromat hamper. Chiz curses.

Sent the collection of Aickman stories back to the elibrary, having made it through a grand total of three, or one quarter of the book. He's not quite as bad as Ishiguro, whose sense of menace is diffuse and unfocussed and may for all I know be peculiar to me. I mean, he doesn't rank as That Kind Of Author, so the uneasiness I feel may never resolve into horrors. I just don't feel like tackling any more of his books because, after all, they might. (See: Never Let Me Go.) With Aickman you know things will be unheimlich, you just never know how, so my nerves are always stretched taut, waiting for the blow. This is not pleasant.

Having run out of cozy Ann Grangers for the moment, that would take the taste of Aickman out of my mouth, I started Nghi Vo's The Chosen and the Beautiful. Bad move. I've never read Gatsby and don't want to read Gatsby because everything I've heard about it makes it sound nasty, brutish, and far too long. Vo may ring changes on it if I give it enough time, but so far the Gatsby bones are showing through, and I need something much blander or at any rate completely different to be going on with. I suppose I could take up Bleak House again...

Didn't go out yesterday. Instead sorted through a ripped paper bag full of VISA statements and ancient tax returns needing to be shredded, separating out utility bills that can just be recycled. Did a lot of bending to do this- everything was on the floor- and today I have deep aches on the inside of both legs.

Also yesterday I began feeling utterly vile in an all-over nowhere-everywhere fashion. So I cancelled today's massage, hoping it wouldn't turn out to be IT, the more so as the night before I went to bed at 1 and slept straight through till 11:30. This morning the malaise was gone completely, so I'm ascribing it to the codeine I took mid-day for rainy weather aches and pains.

Because I misread an email from my accountant, I thought my tax form would be coming by courier on Monday and have been fretting ever since. No, he couriered it on Monday, and I'd normally expect it today. But it's tax season and Fedex pleads high volume. Of course, if they'd work on weekends they could reduce that, but they won't. So even if it comes tomorrow and gets sent back same day, I'll be filing late. Which is a nuisance, given that they had my tax info on the 6th.

Also does anyone else find Amongst Our Weapons to be too tightly bound? The pages will not stay flat, or even flattish, no matter what I do, and I have to hold hte book open by main force. Publishers getting slack, Horsefall.

Actually, Petronia herself put her finger on why I prefer online friends to meatspace ones. The latter think I'm weird and I have to fake nonweirdness around them. The former are all fans, and as P said, 'weird is what we came for.'

Lying with one's legs up against a wall can get very boring unless you're an experienced meditator which lord knows I'm not, so I rousted out my luddite's walkman and listened to a random tape instead. (I can't do mp3s or whatever the latest digital is. Most of my tapes were made from obscure records in the 80s and 90s. Best I could do now is get one of those players that records to digital, but the state of my records after 30 years is not to be considered, and I have nothing to play the files on even if I did.)

Random tape turned out to be the Harlock sound track. That dates to the late 90s, that half decade lost to reverse culture shock, but references a much earlier fannish golden age. Not that I was personally involved in it. My sister was, and American friends in Tokyo, and I caught sideways glimpses of those mid-80s glorious days from her APAs and their conversation. The reality may have been excruciating- raw tapes if you were lucky, appalling butchered dubs as the norm- but the ethos, as reflected both in the fans' recollections and, oddly, in the gung-ho Harlock music itself, is of a brave new world and an immense buoyancy.

The complete ending theme is at
https://youtu.be/u7BFIAn9wug

Translation text here, from .mit.edu. Fannish, as I say.
http://www.mit.edu/~rei/MANGA/harlock-song

* More Than a Feeling was roundly panned when it first came out-- lightweight, lacking musical complexity, blah blah blah, as if anything 70s had depth-- but now it's a locus classicus of some kind.

Stayed up to 2 last night reading an old semi-formatted Eroica fic from 1995. Left a bad taste in the mouth for Reasons, most of which had to do with the fact that I wasn't writing it for my own pleasure but to try to appeal to the Eroica slash fandom. Whoever was talking over on tumblr about the early days of fandom and the joy of being all thieves together in this pocket universe that only fans knew about is, well, maybe that's the fandom she knew. I just kept running into gatekeepers with a rigid definition of what's permissible-- like that other famous essay that likened slash fandom to a potluck where everyone wound up bringing hummous because that's what was expected when you brought stuff to a potluck.

It was such a relief when there started to be yaoi fandoms over here because there were no rules in yaoi.

This is doubly odd because my comfort reading for the past six weeks has been another unfinished Eroica story that I started in 1996, worked at with increasing difficulty through '97 and '98, and gave up because I wanted it to be yaoi-- and as far as it went, it certainly was-- but Eroica fans wanted it to be slash, which it wasn't and couldn't be. I thought it a hot mess when I finally dropped it but now it reads better than any other of my Dorians including the ones I sweated blood to give a plot to.

Of course, now I skip the sex scenes because the hormoneless don't see the point of them, which leads to the odd experience of reading a yaoi fic, which is all about the sex, but skipping the sex when it happens. Such are the paradoxes of age.

Ah, ok. So the trans character in Kafuka that I didn't notice was trans when I first read the book (or at least didn't remember as a salient detail of their character) might equally be intersex. The no breasts and no periods ever are suggestive of that, a detail one notices more when reading the Japanese.

That 'oldest thing' meme going around got me thinking what the oldest thing I own is. Thought it was the early 19th century Chinese vase I inherited from my father until I remembered the neolithic pot shard a Saiyuki fan sent me once. Then I tried to remember who that was. Old ML names after 20 years... but I think it was lorelei who might also have been figbash. Figbash I actually met, though I'd forgotten the fact. Must have been after the second Shoujo-con in New York. And I think she was the one who lived just up from the twin towers and watched the deadly dust rise up. But that would have been two months after the convention. And was she the same as lorelei? I thought lorelei was earlier...

And then I remembered that I have still messages in my old OE dating back to the late 90s so I went looking there. Still don't know if I'm conflating two people but boywas that a lot of instant time travel. Have been disoriented ever since. Adding happily to the disorientation is that my knees and back have miraculously stopped hurting, or at least stopped hurting any more than they did in mumble mumble 2016. Don't expect this to continue but right now I'll take it.

There's Lot's wife and then there's 'twenty years ago was a really nice year, why can't it be twenty years ago again?' But yeah, 2000 was a nice year with a nice fandom and nice friends and I wouldn't mind having it back again, even in a facsimile version. I know this has a lot to do with the fact that the twenty-teens was a lost decade for me- no travel, no fandoms, no writing to speak of, and remorseless increasing debilitation. But still.

Much of the present melancholy may be due to a FB group I'm a member of getting together to reminisce about Markham St, reminding me of certain restaurants that passed away in the 90s and others I frequented weekly right to the end of 2016 when everything closed down. Ohh, Trattoria Giancarlo, the Butler's Pantry, the Beguiling, David Mirvish Bookstore, the Victory, Suspect Video, and Ed's itself. All gone for good. (Especially the Pantry. Crab cakes, boeuf bourgignon, scones and weekend brunch. It was never outstandingly good but always solid.)

Once again it monsooned on my acupuncture day (three Mondays out of four) but at least it tapered off by the time I left. Also the stationery store below is open again and I was able to stock up on pens. But alas! Midoco is where I often bought my regular Christmas present calendar for next door, and now next door isn't there anymore to buy for sniffle sniffle snerf.

Allergies, age, whatever. Left eye is unhappy. Gone are the days when I could function without a lens in it, alas, so either I read nothing today or I keep the eye drops handy.

Danger of funnel clouds forming today. Not in the downtown, I hope.

Rather an unlovely person who shows up in my FFLs is being loudly and plaintively unhappy all over the FFLs because no one understands their pain and no one will solve their dilemma for them and and and. I hope people continue not to solve their dilemma for them because I am indulging in a rare-these-days episode of schadenfreude and couldn't be more pleased by this. In general quarantine has sweetened my soul amazingly. I'm no longer chronically scratchy and itchy and downright furious at people in my immediate vicinity, which argues that I was never cut out for society in the first place and really should have become a contemplative nun-of-some-ilk. (Except that nuns live in communities that cause 'a martyrdom of pinpricks' and no one supports anchorites any more.)

"But sometimes, sleeping in the open
I think back"-- to when I was active in fandom and daily incensed because Someone Is Wrong on the Internet. Revisiting the old neighbourhood, my hairdresser used to call it. 'But I realized I don't have to live there.'

Yet another Eroica fanfic dream last night. This time it was Dorian and a pair of maybe-vampires (but maybe not.) And definitely a fanfic, with punctuation and quotation marks.

City has withdrawn property tax for this month but the same sum as always, without the +300 they promised. This is annoying, since I don't know when they're going to start making up the three monthly installments that they skipped.

Tree company apparently sent me a quote (for trimming the cherry) on the 5th that I never got or, possibly, didn't notice in my spam report. They re-sent the quote today which I got at once. Have said Go ahead, and am now waiting for them to answer. I have a feeling something's up at their end.

Finished The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday, which was fine as far as it went, and am now reading Alif the Unseen, which is much meatier. Weather grows hot and I lose ambition. Also knee is back to being obstreperous.

So yahoo groups is closing in December and deleting all their content. I'm half tempted to use one of the download devices to save bits of AMLA and the Saiyuki mls, but those belong to a past so distant that even Lot's wife me isn't sure she wants to be reminded of it. Especially AMLA, which was lovely talky fun in the day but now is probably embarrassing in its revelation of our ignorance.

Odd thunderstorm early this morning, sounding exactly like garbage bins being rolled out. No sudden crashes or cracks, never got very loud, but woke me all the same and may account for my extreme tiredness and aches today, in spite of massage. Or maybe that was the rain that continued to midafternoon. Or maybe it's the sleep apnea I'm sure I have but don't want to know about.
( Cut for reading Wednesday )

Crossposts: https://flemmings.livejournal.com/992445.html

Long because Canada Day is a Monday. Next year it'll be a Wednesday and, for the first time since 2015, a singleton holiday.

Tumblr is getting on my nerves. Posts from people I'm not following show up randomly on my dashboard, over and over again, and it seems the only way to get rid of them is to block the poster. FB at least has a 'hide this entry' function, which amazingly puts it one up on tumblr. Equally, I understand that 'fandom is on tumblr now', but judging by the second hand noise I hear (people I follow reposting someone else's answers to a third party's posts), tumblr fandom is a) very young and b) wankier than anything seen previously, GW and HP included. Because now it's youth plus self-righteousness, slamming Neil Gaiman for gay-baiting(!) and Rowland for associating with TERFs (and therefore being a TERF herself, since youth has never heard that guilt by association is a fallacy.) Fandom Wank, thou shouldst be with us at this hour.

Am slightly cranky because my body woke me up, irrevocably, at 4:15 this morning for no good reason. Eventually took an antihistamine and went back to sleep ca 7 a.m. Body then proceeded to cough all day from draining sinuses choking my throat. It's a bad allergy year, and probably about to get worse with next week's heat. Is also the stink time of year when the fragrant flowers of May give place to... oh, I don't know what: lilac wannabes and linden droppings and mock orange.

Incidentally, my front lawn tree was supposed to be an ironwood, but the arborist says it's really a basswood , ergo a linden. 'Fragrant flowers', the webpages say, which is one word for them. Could make a soothing tea from them, or put them in my bath to reduce hysteria. Yeah, sure.

Cherries are red red red and the noisy birds feast on them all day long, which makes me happy, because sweeping up pits is much easier than sweeping up half-rotted fruit. Gorge your fill, little birdies. Now, at the end of my seventh decade, I realize that I can't tell birds apart by their cries but am newly aware that they do make different sounds. None of them strike me as melodic, mind : I'm especially puzzled at Shelley's 'profuse strains of unpremeditated art.' Shelley was smoking the good dope. As for nightingales singing in Berkeley Square- well, someone posted the sound of a nightingale to the Rivers of London FB group and, er well, I'd be tempted to chuck a stone at something that made a noise like that. But then I have little use for birds at the best of time. They're still dinosaurs by me.

Crossposts: https://flemmings.livejournal.com/975869.html

There's a corollary to 'if solitary, be not idle', which is, 'if solitary, do not waste time talking to people who aren't there' ie the ones in your head. Recently I started noticing exactly how much I do this, and it's a lot. And now I remember why fandom came as such a relief to me in Japan. Instead of yelling at the folk who cause me pains, as D Parker put it, I was meditating on the motivations and emotions of various anime characters. I mean, they were quite as non-corporeal as those various roommates, classmates, coworkers, and Japanese businessmen who smoked under the No Smoking signs whom I was mentally castigating, but at least I wasn't *angry* anymore. Being no longer fannish, I don't have that recourse now when I'm arguing with my mother (dead these forty years) about something she said in 1972, but I think I should try to find one.

(Didn't realize there were three verses to Parker's Frustration:

If I had a shiny gun,
I could have a world of fun
Speeding bullets through the brains
Of the folk who give me pains;

Or had I some poison gas,
I could make the moments pass
Bumping off a number of
People whom I do not love.

But I have no lethal weapon-
Thus does Fate our pleasure step on!
So they still are quick and well
Who should be, by rights, in hell. )

Crossposts: https://flemmings.livejournal.com/969514.html

I never got the hang of tumblr, never figured out how people had actual conversations on it, and am not crying because it's going belly up. FFLs are full of 'welcome tumblrites this is how DW works!' posts. Nice if tumblr had ever done the same for us old codgers. "What this post is actually about is, with people from Tumblr joining in droves: How does one get a Dreamwidth reading page that's full of interesting people writing interesting things?"

Simplest thing in the world to me- find a user, look at their friends page, pick anyone interesting to friend, look at *their* friends page, and so on. Whereas tumblr always seemed to be happening somewhere else, with any single entry followed by a useless list of people who reblogged that entry without any sign of further comments at all.

Which said, I did find some good tumblr RoL commenters whose posts were interesting, even if there seemed no way to join in the discussion. Hope they come over here.

Crossposts: https://flemmings.livejournal.com/947221.html

Last night with the autumn cold and rain outside and the purring space heater and duvets in, and me reading the unchanging Meiji world of Rainy Willow Antiquities Store, I found myself suddenly time-slipped the mid-oughties somewhere. Today, because of climate change, it's summer again, or at least a warm September that needs no jackets, and the nostalgic instant has vanished.

On a much more mundane note, why does Ovaltine powder melt in the heat? Cocoa remains a powder at all temperatures, but Ovaltine becomes a hardened shiny unmeltable enamel at the bottom of the jar.

Crossposts: https://flemmings.livejournal.com/935082.html

Slept in to 11 again in order to enjoy a dream which I have now forgotten. The previous dream that I was hoping to continue was a convoluted thing about living in a residence with various girl students, some nice and some mean and all more complex than I can now recall. It was winter and dark, and the rooms owed something to Drearcliff Grange, but beyond that deponent knoweth not.
( Continuing )

Crossposts: http://flemmings.livejournal.com/805340.html

Acupuncture is good for providing insight, or at least mine is, because it involves lying in a comfy lazee-boy reclining chair while wool-gathering music plays in the background. (Cannot stress the difference it makes, lying on one's back instead of one's stomach when there are pins stuck into you.)

And my insight today is that I'm only really happy when I have two places to live in. This was easy enough when there was the family house in addition to whatever apartment I was living at, or when I had a room in Japan and a house in Toronto, or even when I had my real house here and another fannish world I could go off to live in mentally. The sense of lack I've had for the last six and a half years, the feeling of the world gone narrow and sparse, no doubt has something to do with the physical limitations that make travelling much harder than it was; but mostly, I think, from not having that Other Place to retreat to on a regular basis.

Crossposts: http://flemmings.livejournal.com/785603.html

Alright, maybe I totally hallucinated those three or four books about the Three Musketeers by a single female author. In desperation I googled 'three musketeers fan fiction', and was presented with the following suggestions as a follow-up:

Searches related to three musketeers fan fiction

three musketeers fanfiction d'artagnan hurt
three musketeers fanfiction d'artagnan shot
three musketeers fanfiction d'artagnan sick
the musketeers fanfiction athos
the musketeers fanfiction d'artagnan hurt
the musketeers ao3
the musketeers fanfiction d'artagnan fever
the musketeers fanfiction aramis hurt

Nothing has changed in fanfic in the last fifty years.
( Abbreviated memeage )

Crossposts: http://flemmings.livejournal.com/782055.html

A pleasant evening with the Little Girls last night, who are not as little as they used to be. M seems always to have grown another inch every time I see her, even if it was only six weeks ago, and L has suddenly added a mental year or two. She's moved into the front bedroom, formerly her parents', meaning she has maximum floor space for all her tiny plastic toys, books, notebooks, pencils, and you name it. "L, when you get up in the night to go to the bathroom, how do you avoid stepping on all those sharp edges?" She gave me a haughty eight-and-a-half year old stare. "I have excellent night vision," she informed me. "And my room is very bright because of the street lamps." This is true; but then she decided to lower the blinds, leaving the room in darkness, and I cleared a path to her bed so her parents wouldn't puncture their feet when they came to kiss her goodnight on their return.
( JS&MN )

Crossposts: http://flemmings.livejournal.com/720746.html

Time was I wasted time reading the comments on wank communities, but they're all dead now. Time was I wasted time reading the comments on newspaper articles, but the local ones are behind paywalls and the Guardian's layout hurts my eyes. Time was I wasted time playing online solitaire and I still do. What these have in common is that they're all really depressing activities.

Which is to say, it's a cold rainy Sunday and I hurt from the cold and rain and I don't want to read anything that I have on the go-- Pico Iyer's deep study of the Dalai Lama or Joan Didion's Year of Magical Thinking-- because both are depressing. The LM Montgomery I just finished was depressing- the airless caste-ridden insular (literally) world of 1920s PEI. So I'm reading a gruesome police procedural murder mystery modelled on the Black Dahlia killings.

This is why I've come to dislike weekends.

I now have my new ten-year passport, with grave doubts that I'll ever get to use it. But it's handsome enough, with pale colour illos of Canuck this-n-thats backgrounding each page. I wonder if I have the eastern Canada version, because it seems awfully heavy on eastern Canada Stuff: Quebec City, Halifax, Newfoundland. One page for 'the Prairies'; possibly Nellie McClung as prairie content, though she was born in Ontario; the west coast nonexistent AFAICS.

My cousin's kid makes a dish by putting uncooked vegetables under a chicken which she then slow-roasts for several hours. Tried this the other day; wish I'd doubled the veg part because yum so good. (Would still have parboiled the little potatoes.) Cooked up a bunch of veg yesterday with the chicken bits I don't care for- drumsticks and legs mainly- but didn't get a chance to eat because an afternoon with the Little Girls turned into dinner with The Little Girls. Lunch tomorrow if no one calls me in to work.

The owner of the saiyuki_yaoi ML has been asking if anyone's still in the fandom to warrant keeping the ML alive. Went and looked at the archive, which is not laid out as usefully as it used to be. Was reminded of those busy days when MLs were in swing, and why I used to feel there were a lot more people in my life than there are now. Five or six posts a day with several people chiming in made you feel part of a group conversation; not even active LJ communities do that, and most are far from active. Fandom doesn't just fragment, it narrows: down to 140 characters thrown into the void. Interaction is the essence of fandom, but where does that happen?

Tuesday night I dreamed about H and her family leaving, all of us in tears and H a good ten years younger than she is, and their golden retriever running away and having to be corralled (except in RL they have two youngish... beagles, I think) and then riding with them part of their way, but we were in train tunnels that passed through bookstores, the larger than life shelves right by the windows, and the titles of Japanese books were flashing by and I thought 'Oh I wanted to read that one- and that-'

Woke to a cool placid Autumn Preview morning and

daegaer talking about the Gaiden and suddenly it was a dozen or more years ago in the calm happy days of fandom. Realize now that one thing that makes fandom calm is having one's attention focussed on fictional people and situations, not RL ones. Also the using another language thing. Time was I needed to have my dictionaries all handy here by the computer. Not any more.

(The H dream followed one about

petronia and her elegant Chinese friends, probably inspired by the cover of Full Fathom Five.)

1. Dreams feel the same as 100 Demons stories: a larger place with diffuse lighting and odd details that don't survive waking/ a first read.

2. My Japanese has deteriorated some, but three times through any of Ima's 'first glance meaningless' sentences usually tells me who's saying what about whom. Note that not all Japanese authors or mangaka are as (deliberately) obscure as this.
( Read more... )

I believe that was Ole Golly from Harriet the Spy talking about being proposed to, but Harriet thinks later that reading makes the world feel bigger too. And reading something as personally and fannishly resonant as Fairs' Point in an out-of-time cool summer (that alas my scrambled brains won't recall, even if it was just this morning) also makes the world feel bigger. The other world of the book, the other world of fandom itself: a great big room with a blue ceiling large as the sky.

Am a little sad it's finished, though one could go back and reread to get the names straight (really wanted a dramatis personae, there.) But am happy there's a spring Ghost Tide, because I've always felt April should have one as well as November. Am happy to see the Prince-Marshal back, even if no one explains how or why he's a prince and a marshal. Really hope there's more coming in this series because I love it so much.

And if I want more fandom, my 100 Demons 23 arrived with great dispatch, a week after it was shipped (air mail all the time for me now.) Let me get through tomorrow's 8-5 day, as I got through today's sleep deprived 9-4 and back for an abortive meeting, and ah! how I shall indulge.

My, what a long month that was. I remember it as rather nice on the whole, as any August must be that sees me sleeping, occasionally, in a hoodie and socks, and that gives me a lovely series like The Parasol Protectorate to read. Equally it was a month that saw me practically move in to my acupuncturist's studio-- left shoulder, left knee, right knee, and last night left shoulder again in a different place. Plus mysterious but perennial leg and thigh cramps that stretching doesn't relieve. I put it all down to warm weather swelling and hope it goes away when the cold returns.

But right now we're in the grey washy humid mode: too warm for just the window fan, too cool for the AC; too warm with covers on, too dank with them off; and the house smelling of the basement's mold that creeps up the vents. This too is Ghost Tide weather; the Ghost of Augusts Past crowd my livingroom: the Saiyuki one of 2000, the Barnes and Scott one of 2001, the manga one of 2003, the 100 Demons one of 2006, and all the Japanese ones I described in this story, even if I wrote that one in June-- happily for the most part but a little bittersweet still.
( Cut for August stats )

Twenty years ago today I became a fan. Possibly I'm still one: one shouldn't confuse fandom with production, though production is one of the nicest aspects of fandom and its lack always feel like the thrill has gone. On my fifth anniversary I wasn't feeling very fannish and wasn't writing much, but on my tenth and fifteenth I was deep in dragons and Woxin, respectively, and as far as I can recall only vaguely noticed what day it was. Now, well, I lack the hormones that gave such impetus to my first becoming a fan, but sometimes I can almost remember the vision of erotesis that burst on me on that drizzly Saturday night in Tokyo-- the shift into a new and different universe completely.

It seems meditation has taken the place of anime/manga hawtness. Time was, when I woke in the morning and lay half-awake in my snuggly bed, I'd turn into a character or two and watch them interact and listen to their conversations, which sometimes I'd remember enough of to work into the current story. Now I count my breaths and think of nothing. And sometimes this leads to the same sense of Elsewhere as before and sometimes it doesn't; but like story-telling it gives me something to do in the lulls of life.

(Walking too-- used to plot stories, now I watch my breath. Walking is good though-- lets me hear crickets and cicadas, and watch orange full moons rise over the currently heat-hazy city, and occasionally remember other summer nights, reading the kappa manga in '03, or walking to Tasty's in '01, or other times even longer ago than that.)
( Cut for Wednesday meme )

When there is major Wrong Stuff in life, as there is now, even though I have no connection at all to the SFWA, minor frets tend to fade in importance. That they aren't doing so is, oh well, something to do with head colds and June. Thus, Something Nice to offset the latter:

Ayalesca will be updating her Madness of Angels/ Sherlock fusion fic weekly from now on. Didn't know how a fusion differed from a crossover, discovered precisely at the end of ch 1, think this is perfect. Bonus appearance by the Rivers of London. What more could one ask?

Aside from time to reread the entire series again, I mean.

1. Snow is for the young. It makes my feet hurt, my ankles hurt, my knees scream, and for some reason gives me cramps on the inside of my thighs the way nothing has done since riding a horse when I was 11. And I walked in it all today and all yesterday, and will be walking in it for quite some time to come. The only good thing about snow is being able to shovel it away. And I can't do that because a very little careful cleaning makes my neck nerves twinge warningly. So I shall be sliding over many people's churned-up slush as well.

2. The BBC Sherlock is marvellous for taking me Elsewhere. I have no idea why this should be so. I'm a little discomfited that it's also made the original impossible to read. Maybe the taste for Holmes will come back when the taste of Cumberbatch has left my brain.
( Read more... )

Bicycling to work today a penny dropped in re latest 100 Demons and I thought 'Ah-hah-ha! OMG! Ima-sensei misleads again!' Which I think she does. But a perusal of the story shows no point at which the segue that, if I'm right, must have happened could have happened. And yet something is definitely happening. And I shall be very interested to see if it comes through in Chinese, because it involves an anomaly in the way Aoarashi talks to people who aren't youkai or Ritsu. (And quick, how often have you actually heard human-Aoarashi talk to someone who isn't either of those?) From what little I know, I think Chinese could do it better than English, at least; but... but...

It's the sort of thing that makes me want to start buying Nemuki episodes again, even though I *know* she likes to drop her great cliff-ending points once she's made them. Like Saburou's metamorphosis, f'rinstance. There's the whole crow episode, and next you know, Akira's off to meet-a-date gatherings.

Say 'Avengers' to me and I think Steed and Mrs. Peel.
( Which is odd )

Happy New Year, those who celebrate.

So this year I've had a Discworld dream and a 12 Kingdoms dream and last night I topped it with a Papuwa dream. Papuwa! From eighteen years back, before Shibata retconned everything into total buttock destruction err that is to say a meaningless mess. Young lieutenant Magic on an overnight campout with the young recruits, preparing to reveal three separate secrets to three separate people, one of whom was of course Servis, the other of whom was maybe Takamatsu, or maybe Gunma *about* Takamatsu (some muddling of the generations here) and the third who knows. But at the same time this was based on a Japanese dj I'd translated and was going to show to my Japanese class, and at the same time it was a fanfic I was writing and being unsure if I should incorporate 'that long unfinished Papuwa WIP of mine' right into the middle of it, or if that would make the .doc file too long to be easily downloaded. Woke up desperately trying to figure which WIP that could be, because I was sure I had one, lost to memory after all these years. (I don't, of course. The concept itself came holus-bolus from A Study in Scarlet and its interpolated Mormon narrative.)

Still, nice to see old friends from far away like that. Other earths and skies than these, indeed.

AMLA has disappeared from yahoo groups. Or possibly I, the list maintainer, have somehow been bounced from AMLA. But so far it appears to be gone.

In other news, I have two Hasui calendars hanging on my walls. Well, four, actually, because 2009 and 2010 have been turned to my favourite prints therefrom. The other two, 2011 and 2012's, arrived from

kickinpants earlier this week, which is commendably fast (it usually takes two weeks plus to get anything here from Seattle.) I suppose it was because she sent them traceable and requiring signature. She also gifted me with a personally dedicated volume of Connie Willis short stories (where have you been, TTG?) and Havemercy. I take it this is Lady Jaida turned pro? It is all very lovely and I am extremely happy, especially with Hasui's Meiji Iris Garden and the rainy hot springs. This outfit rather tends to fixate on Hasui's snow and temple scenes-- there's four each in both calendars-- which I think is a mistake. Seen one red temple in snow with umbrella-carrying kimono-clad woman and you've seen them all.
( Cut for earworms )

I will say this for Donald Thomas-- unlike other American authors of Holmes pastiche, he doesn't make his main characters American, or half-American as the case may be; he doesn't make his English characters naturally think in terms of Edgar Allen Poe and naturally reference American slang; and he doesn't make an English character say 'He hung himself' when any English person, then or now, would say 'hanged.' A pity he's not as entertaining as the other writers, but still. He doesn't commit that beginner's fanfic error, writing what one knows: so that Dorian Red Gloria and Heero Yui alike must visit Oklahoma City, and Holmes must visit San Francisco, because the author wants to see the beloved character in the streets of her home town.

100 Demons comes out one tank a year and pretty much always has. That I feel obscurely shortchanged by this, I now see, is down to the great catch-up of 2006-2007. The loonie was high then and I ordered the wide-han volumes I didn't have, in French or Japanese, in bunches here and there, and then proceeded to read and reread them many times. At the same time I was getting current and back issues of Nemuki. So yes, for about eighteen months I was swimming in 100 Demons. And then there was Woxin and Pratchett and the twists of the Gaiden to distract me, so it was 2009 before I began to feel 100 Demons starved. And now-- well, same as last fall: this is the one thing that can make me remember what the fannish thrill is all about. The sense of heightened reality and heightened emotion and simple happiness, to be in someone else's world reading what one's old friends are up to now. Dreams are the only thing that comes close to the same feel-- same as fandom and same as Ima Ichiko, both.

Fandom is a drug, yes, and a very good drug. Worked for fifteen years. Does not work any more, alas. Must try religion now.

I know very little about steampunk, and surely steampunk should involve more than just trains. That said, FMA sure feels steampunk to me.

Any week in which one encounters both a female shogun Yoshimune and the frighteningly brainy Major General Olivier Armstrong is a very good week. (Why FMA would not be a happy romp in Japanese: army titles. 'Nuff said.) That anent this metafandom post on authorial intent and female characters. The answer to the problem posed in that post seems to be having series created by women, if FMA and Oo-oku are anything to judge by.
( Cut for failure of the imagination and shogunate gossip )

Truly, I used to fly to Japan with fewer lists and less anxiety than attends a train trip to New York. Mind, when I went to Japan I could see-- or rather, read maps-- with no difficulty. That may be what makes the difference. But I suffer a new and 21st century anxiety, which is that when I get there it'll all be so difficult and I won't speak the language. And yes, I'm talking about New York.

Otherwise, I keep mourning that no one here shares my fandom, and then mourning that other people elsewhere do share my fandom and oh how I wish they didn't.

Some forgotten summer in the last decade I'd regularly sit at my computer and smell hamburgers barbecuing in the back yards beyond the window, and then feel compelled to bicycle over to the one restaurant that had reasonably priced hamburgers-- and glacier-slow service-- and have one myself. (Somehow I never realized that Pauper's across the street had them too; I assumed my choice was between Incredibly Slow Restaurant and By the Way's organic burgers with a schmeer of hummous on them, quote-unquote.) Not that any restaurant gives me the pickle relish I really want, which is why I want barbecued hamburgers, not restaurant ones.

Am smelling hamburgers now. But the whirligigs of time allow me no more than a bulgogi's serving of beef, which might come to a third of a burger, and no fries at all. Sic transit etc. Am a little sad about that. The By the Way burger was what I ate the evening of Sept 11, as a means of asserting to myself that fundamental things in my universe were still the same. However. What we left them, trains inherit/ Trains go on and we grow old.
( And speaking of trains )

I agree with what this entry is saying, but I do have to wonder. Down in the comments someone asked 'after the first hundred comments, was it necessary for people to keep on telling her she was wrong?' and they replied, 'she didn't get it after the first hunded comments so yeah, people do have to keep saying it.' And I half-agree. For the uninvolved, who're more likely to be using their heads, it may be useful to read many posts before they get the one that pings with them, as in fact musesfool's entry did with me. But the actual OP? Will they be able to hear the content the hundredth time if they didn't get it the fiftieth, or will they register and react only to the level of outrage on display?
( Cut for considerations of how change works )

Ohh! The cut sublime! The cut infernal!

The cut sublime, is to admire the top of King’s College Chapel, or the beauty of the passing clouds, till (the obnoxious person you wish to avoid) is out of sight. The cut infernal, is to analyze the arrangement of your shoe-strings, for the same purpose.

It doesn't work if the OP doesn't recognize it, of course; and who recognizes the cut direct these days? They come up and talk to you anyway.

(PS- I too was sorry that 'fan language' wasm't the other kind of fan.)

Oh stay away from TV Tropes, especially Better than it sounds. But still. Whoever described Leviticus as 'You no can haz cheeseburger' has made my day. Thank you, sir or ma'am.

(Found a cherry woodblock print. Koitsu's Benei Bridge in Kyoto. Invisible at my gamma resolution but maybe others can see it. Reminds me of those thick spring nights in tourist Kyoto in '89, never seen since.)

1. Carl Macek was younger than me?

2. Robotech was only released in 1985? Then pray tell, what anime was my sister watching on what TV station to get into anime in 1983 or '84? Yes yes I know-- go ask her. But everyone else?

Today I learn a new word- epicaricacy. Close to a neologism, brother to the better-known schadenfreude. The trilogy is completed by that familiar feeling, nemesetikos, defined as "disposed to indignation at anyone's undeserved good or ill fortune." Indignation (or even better, umbrage) may well be the default fannish emotion. (Personally I think Nemesetikos sounds like an Egyptian god as filtered through Herodotus, but don't mind me.)

Anent this post and its interesting side convo about applying fannish reflexes to historical fiction.

(The other trouble with DW is that you can't apply style=mine if you don't have an account.)

Does anyone have an extra dreamwidth invite? If you do, could you go over to

paleaswater and mention it to her? The thanks of a grateful nation will be yours. A *small* nation, but grateful nonetheless. Her work blocks lj (boo hiss British banks) but not dreamwidth; and dw will cross-post to lj, and huzzah we'd get to hear from

paleaswater again!

'That series of named days', as

mauvecloud said, not referring to Nix but to Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday, and Al. For this ex-Catholic the Easter cycle has always felt oddly-- very oddly, given the doctrine involved-- unchancy and disquieting. You don't get nice babies in cradles and fun music and snow; you get weather that's either bad-tempered or oppressive, and empty tombs and winding sheets, and someone who looks like the man you knew but who isn't quite and who says not to touch him. Or maybe I'm the only one who finds the risen Christ as uneasy-making as the risen Gandalf? (There's also the weirdness of a Friday holiday. Puts the time sense off badly.)

I've been time-travelling again, back to the mid and late 90s. Time-travelling is bad for the health, along the lines of 'The counsel of the dead is not profitable to the living.' However time travel reminds me why LJ is a good thing. You get to see people in something more of the round than you do in email and mailing lists; you can check them out for signs of notable batshittery. It would have saved a lot of grief if I'd been able to do that in, say, 1995 or 1998.

But to happier things.

octopedingenue has an entry about Sherlock Holmes that not only traces Death Note L's chair-perching back to the Master, it reveals what a fanboi P.G. Wodehouse was.

The following poem is copied from an Oxford collection of some Sherlock Holmes short stories by Arthur Conan Doyle. At the back of the collection it was apparently deemed appropriate and scholarly to include old-school Holmes fanfic.
( Under the cut )

mikeneko sends me a virtual sugar bunny to brighten my morning. Thanks, mike. I was just thinking 'I wonder how the comrades of my youth are getting on?' ("

mikeneko,

luxetumbra,

kickinpants and Robinson") and am glad to know that you're still with us. But where do people go from lj? AIM? Texting? Old fashioned email?
( March stats )

As one who (cough) had a werewolf viewpoint character in an endless head RPG when I was ~~young~~ not that young at all, I was interested by this post. Everything about werewolves makes sense if you consider that they're based on what humans think wolves are. True. And true also the lack of 19th century literary backup to the werewolf image, that makes them so much the red headed stepchildren of the fantasy world.

That said, I have to admit I found Tanya Huff's werewolves who act like wolves somehow unsatisfactory. Possibly because werewolves to me *aren't* wolves entirely: they're humans who turn into wolves, who therefore are symbols of innate human violence. The same way that vampires act as symbols of seductive sexuality /power, rather more elegant traits that IMO contribute to vampires' alpha status in the horror hierarchy. I mean, I'm all for non-violent werewolves if you can do them; not fond of E Bear but her wolves were the best part of whatever that book was called. But no one has quite pinged my werewolf sweet spot yet.

Then there's an entry on dreams, recurring. I'd forgotten that I too occasionally have the 'more rooms in the house than you thought' one. I like that one-- the rooms that open off the ordinary ones are always lovely.
( Cut for my own list )

Vote Temeraire!!! Go Temeraire! Sweet philosophical inquiring Chinese dragons rule 好!!

Found my paper 2000 diary while rummaging around for something else. Discovered a Saiyuki story I'd forgotten I wrote, probably the second one started and the first finished, that I'd somehow failed to note in the index.htm file for my story page back, oh, six years ago when I coded the thing. This feels very odd.

I will note that the fall of 2000 was a very nice time indeed, as drugged episodes are wont to be.

My personal mythology says 2003 was the best year of the decade, maybe even better than the Saiyuki heydays (August 2000- May or thereabouts '01); and that nothing afterwards even came near. But that's not true. I have extremely fond memories of 2008, even with all the snow-- the Woxin natter, the Pratchett reads, the Chinese films I was watching around this time in the bright March sun. But that was a calmer kind of happiness, more adult by comparison to either '03 or '00. And high time too, I suppose. 'You're not a giddy fifty year old any more.' Alas. Giddy fifty-year-old-dom was such fun.

(I have a sinus infection, again; hence the melancholy.)

On an obscure impulse I went looking for the famous 'I will have to sing show tunes' entry. It's now f-locked, as is the whole of that livejournal, which makes all the many many links to it useless. Finally tracked down an extant entry: a still extant entry. Vita longa, lj brevis, so I've put the full text below the cut, not unaware of the irony that it too is on an lj.
( Read more... )

How can this be the tenth Yaoicon? *How?*
( Texty-translations of the subject line )

I know Canadians have a reputation for polite low-key inoffensiveness, but I think it's one of those statistical distributive things I don't really have a handle on. You know, like the one where intelligence in one group tends to split between absolutely utter genius and slightly duller than normal, while the other group occupies the python's bulge in the middle of the graph? Yes, well. Doubtless the mass of Canucks are polite and low-key, but I observe too often that if someone is being an infuriating smite-worthy fandom ninny all over lj, when I go to her user info there she is occupying space above the 49th parallel. Much too often, in Toronto. As in Japan, where the people who made me swear on a day to day basis were usually Americans, but the two most obnoxious gaijin specimen I had to deal with came from fair TO. And not even the 'burbs: from those bastions of privilege, Rosedale and Forest Hill.

Which probably goes to prove that the rest of the country is right, and Toronto is not Canada.

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