The Fandomening

Whumptober ficlet status: 12/31 (4 Biggles, 2 Bab5, 6 Murderbot)

I put in a tentative signup for trickortreatex. This is the first time in at least 3 years that I'm not requesting Biggles, because greerwatson (of "Unrequested Nazis Are Awesome, Actually" fame) usually does this exchange and I don't want to accidentally summon her. :P However, it's early yet and I'm still adding fandoms, so I'll see if I feel like it's worth the risk later on. (I don't really mind so much being assigned to her as a writer; I can always write the minimum and leave it anon. But ugh.) Also, while my motivation is - let's be real - mostly avoiding Greer, it made me realize that I've requested Biggles in every exchange since spring 2022 and it might be fun to cast my net wider this time, and request some fandoms I haven't asked for in a while.

Also, I put in a signup for spook_me, the annual Halloween/horror challenge with art prompts that I've been doing every year, or at least most years, since their very first round back on LJ in the late 2000s.* True, my years of finishing anything for it are relatively rare, but it's genuinely one of my favorite events of the year, and I will be very sad whenever they stop doing it.

*(Edit: their first year was - HOLYSHIT - 2006, I found their master list on LJ, and I did actually write for it that year. I thought I remembered participating in the first one! This means this is their 20th year, and I've signed up for most of those years. What even.)

**(Edit2: The first spook-me signup post from 2006. I completely forgot that early on, they asked you to veto what you *didn't* want to write for, and then assigned you a creature and art prompt!)

In other news, Casefic Exchange revealed! I wrote Smuggler's Beach, a 13K post-Buries a Hatchet Biggles/EvS fic that is basically Biggles Goes Alone but with Erich along this time.

Tumblr meta on 90s TV

I fell down a rabbit hole this evening reading the comment reblogs on this Tumblr post on 90s TV. I ended up deciding to copy some of them here to save them from the inevitable linkrot and post decay.

https://www.tumblr.com/laylainalaska/794609119262900224

Original post:

I don't know what those '90s sci Fi TV writers were putting in their shows but I wish they'd start doing it again

#they de-escalated the stakes every once in a while so that you can see what the characters are like when they're not under duress
#they made statements about the world through allegory
#they invested in depicting developing friendships and relationships between their characters
#they assumed that their audience was paying attention to the screen and wanted to be there
#and that their audience has enough intelligence to follow narrative clues and even sometimes to predict the ending
#dont even get me started on this i will go ALL DAY

I don't agree with every single point in every reblog. I also think there's quite a bit of TV now that still does most or all of this, though usually it's the dramas and procedurals rather than scifi, and a lot that's not great about 90s and earlier TV. But there is also a lot of food for thought in here, so I just threw a bunch of the comments into this post to mull over.

The asterisks separate out each different reblog; basically each is its own separate comment, generally in dialogue with the original post rather than each other.

Thoughts are welcome!

( Under the cut )