Arctic Light

I've been traveling/dealing with heavy family stuff, so I've been posting my B5 reaction posts locked to avoid having to deal with moderating outside my flist. However, I never really meant to post my whole tour de show locked, so now that things have calmed down a bit, I went back and unlocked a bunch of them tonight.

Rules of engagement on these posts:

1. Please do not spoil me for future episodes, including hinting at future developments, characterwise, relationshipwise, castwise, or otherwise. If you aren't sure, please use rot13, the html details tag, or otherwise hide it.

2. If you want to debate with me about things you think I'm misinterpreting, please wait until I've seen the whole show. Part of the fun of watching someone liveblog a first time viewing is that you know more than they do - they don't have all the context you do, and they're still figuring out how to feel about things, especially on a show this twisty where events get recontextualized a lot.

Thank you!! Meanwhile I'm up to 4x17 and having an absolutely fantastic time. I don't think I've enjoyed a show this much in AGES.

(Using this icon mainly to entertain myself by imagining the absolute horror that would be Avon the message board moderator.)

July rolled in cool and rainy. After a string of hot dry weeks, I'm glad; we really need the rain. The smoke has been terrible - I should caveat this by saying that we are in absolutely no wildfire danger ourselves and these are mostly burning in unpopulated areas, but there are large fires to the north, to the south, and a small one to the east, so we're getting massive amounts of smoke from almost every direction. The rain knocked down both the smoke and the fires, and it's pretty clean out there right now, which is nice. It's supposed to rain all week, and I welcome it.

However, it's not great weather to be outside in, and the garden (which I got nicely weeded over the past few days) mostly takes care of itself when it's wet, so I decided to spend some time this evening dealing with what we might call "the AO3 inbox situation."

I read and love and wallow in every comment I get, but actually answering them is sort of ... a problem. It was about to cross over 7600 unread (read: unresponded-to) comments, and I decided that since I'm clearly not getting very far at tackling it from the front end, I would tackle it from the back. I am OBVIOUSLY not going to go back and answer comments from 15 years ago, and I have no emotional attachment to most of those fics anymore, so mass-deleting comments shouldn't be too much of a problem. And at least I could knock it down from that end and maybe get it into a more manageable state, on a similar principle to how it's easier to keep a mostly clean-ish house clean than to cleaning one that's a complete mess to begin with. With the inbox filtered by unread messages, I went back to the very last page, and started deleting.

It's so interesting to go that far back! I can see the point where my inbox-keeping really went off the rails, because the first few pages of unreads were just replies to my own comments on other people's fic from 2009-10, but my comment housekeeping started to take a nosedive when I got medium-fandom-popular in White Collar in 2012-13, and then I got into Captain America in 2014 and it went off the rails completely and never recovered. In a way it's a relief to just accept that I am not going to answer multiple pages of comments on fic from ten years ago and delete the notifications, with a few trips down memory lane along the way.

Lots of "account deleted," lots of names from old fandoms that I vaguely remember. Early appearances by people I didn't realize that I had interacted with so long ago. People I used to be close to who vanished from my life completely. Fandoms I had literally forgotten I was ever in, or at least that I was ever in them to the point of writing and commenting on fic for it. (Legends of Tomorrow took me so off guard that I had to click through to the fic itself to even remember who those character names were!) Fandoms I miss, regular commenters I miss, regular commenters I don't miss ... (There was one person in White Collar who used to comment on every single one of my fics primarily to tell me how much she disliked Peter. But she seemed to actually like my fic! It was deeply weird and I don't mind one tiny bit nuking all of those that I never got around to answering.)

And it's interesting how some fandoms were so much more meaningful and, I guess, formative for me that they don't seem nearly as long ago as ones that came after them - like, technically I know that I fell into Guardians of the Galaxy after Agent Carter (2017 vs 2015, more or less), but Agent Carter seems so much more recent and so ... there, still, in my head, whereas Guardians I just seem to have floated through without feeling like it made all that much of an impression. It was fun, but when it was gone it was gone, whereas I still like to go back and reread even my earliest AC fic now and again.

I knocked it down from 7600 to 3950 comments* and made it to mid-2019, and I'm starting to get into fandoms I have more of an emotional attachment to, which makes it harder to ruthlessly delete page by page; there's more of an urge to stop and reread things and respond to some of the longer comments and so forth. Which isn't bad, but does slow me down a lot. I did save a few comments along the way (early appearances of people I'm friends with now, long meaty back-and-forths about character meta, that sort of thing). It was also just fun to be reminded of the enjoyment I've had over the years. There were certainly ups and downs, fortunately the comment record doesn't preserve most of the worse parts, but on the whole, what a nice way to spend a rainy evening. <3

*Now 3200 2930 because I deleted a bunch more, but at the risk of finding quite a lot of fic I want to reread...

What's up, internet? It's May somehow!

summerofhorror is currently taking nominations (until May 5). You may notice a familiar one or two has slipped in there.

rarepairexchange is currently in signups (until May 11). I am terribly tempted to do this one; I could definitely get 3-4 fandoms out of the tag set.

I don't know how many people here follow smallfandomfest, but they have been going on since the LJ days and are still running. They have periodic rounds of prompting and small fandom promo, and a new round has just started, in case any Biggles people (or other small fandom folks) are interested!

Biggles Cuddle Fest has some new prompts and a fill!

hurtcomfortex just posted a countdown timer to the deadline at the end of May, in case anyone else wants to quietly panic along with me.

For US people who pay self-employment tax, the third-quarter deadline is this week, in case you almost forgot like I did.

I *love* my FIAB assignment, and I'm also considering signing up for trickortreat (signups close the 18th!) with a bunch of fandoms I haven't offered or requested lately. Kind of a simple signup without a lot of prompts, maybe? I just kinda want a low-minimum exchange with a lot of uncertainty about what I'll receive or get assigned to write.

I'm simply having a lot of fall and spooky-season feelings lately. I can't wait to get my spook_me prompts. I love the colors and the brisk feeling in the air and the anticipation of October.

summerofhorror is looking for a few post-deadline pinch hits.

I told myself I was definitely not signing up for anything new in July, but I appear to have noticed there's a Soulmate Flash running this week (signups close Tuesday; everything is due a week from Tuesday) and it's a minimum 1 fandom/1 ship for requests and offers. INTERESTING.

Here is a list of some other things with signups right now courtesy of snickfic.

Kind of open-ended, I know. But I ran across a mention of the original Homestuck flash animations tonight, and that made me think about the whole experience of spending three or four solid days bingeing it back in 2010 or 2011, whenever that was - when the series was unfinished, when it was kind of a niche thing that was starting to snowball rather than overhyped to the point where there was such a thing as having a "Homestuck phase" in fandom, and basically just the whole experience of discovering it as this unfolding, non-sequential multimedia experience that wasn't quite like anything I'd ever read before.

I'm never going to do that again, for a variety of reasons. You basically can't without the Flash (though apparently there are archives that replicate the Flash animations), but also because there is no way I'm either devoting several solid consecutive days of my life to rereading a webcomic, or sustaining a reread of something that dense, convoluted, repetitive, and occasionally downright stupid over the number of weeks or months it would take to read it at a sane pace. Not to mention that half the fun of it the first time was having literally no idea what new bonkers tangent it was going to go off on, and I don't know how much enjoyment I'd actually get out of it without the element of surprise, now that I know where it's all going and how disappointing some of it was.

It's not even that Homestuck was ever influential or life-changing for me, because it wasn't. At all. I never even got into it in a fandom way, aside from watching some vids. I was just struck by the complete unrepeatability of that reading experience, which was probably the only time I'll ever read it from the beginning and might even be the only time I read it at all; I don't know if I'd even enjoy it if I read it now. But at one point in my life it fascinated me enough to spend the better part of a week doing literally nothing else but reading it.

There are probably a lot of experiences like that in most people's lives, and I know I have others - those times when you find a book or movie at exactly the right time in your life, when before or after wouldn't be the same, or the times when the actual surrounding experience of the thing is the special, unrepeatable part. You can always reread or rewatch, but you only ever get one first time with any show, book, or movie - and yet, sometimes the special, unrepeatable time isn't even the first time; it's some other aspect that makes it that way.

What are some of yours?

Oh, this looks fun: fixedthatforyou_fest - Prompt submission post. An old-style multifandom prompt fest, for any canons you want a fixit for. Open for prompts 'til Oct. 5.

(Oh hey, I just had an idea. I am going to post a prompt thing of my own in a minute here.)

Of the various places that one can spite-donate, this is one I donated to yesterday: Get Mitch. They split your donation between competitive Senate races in an attempt to flip the Senate and knock Evil Turtle Mitch McConnell out of power. (Apparently the Democrats set an all-time donation record in the last 24 hours. Which is good news! But it doesn't mean anything whatsoever is won or done - you KNOW this is going to galvanize the Republicans too.)

fandomgiftbox is delaying reveals for another week because they still have a bunch of needy giftboxes. Details here and needy giftbox list here.

Hurt/Comfort Exchange will run again in 2020! \o/ VERY EXCITE. They just announced their schedule here.

There's a master list of all the Daredevil/Defenders exchange gifts that just went up, and also a list of everyone's unfilled prompts for inspiration.

Speaking of inspiration, trickortreatex is doing a community challenge this year as usual, and their list of challenge prompts is marvelously inspiring for Halloween/autumn fic ideas. (It's really not so much a prompt list as a list of things that, if tagged for in works in the fest, will get everyone a little closer to "winning" the challenge. And some things are fairly, er, specific. But overall it's actually quite a nice list of prompts!)

1. The Spring Equinox Vidding Exchange archive is now open. Their theme: "Sources from the 90s." (I had other things I was going to do with my afternoon than watch vids, but you know how it goes ...)

2. The Space Swap archive is also open for reading! I have a fic in there, because I picked up a pinch hit for it awhile back.

3. Signups for Not Prime Time, a midsized-fandom exchange, are open. I am probably going to sign up for it, but haven't gotten there quite yet. All the Netflix Marvel shows, Agent Carter, Stranger Things, Umbrella Academy, and Schitt's Creek are all eligible and have tags in the tagset, just to name a few.

4. I have not yet stopped being completely gone for Iron Fist, as my latest fanfic offerings no doubt reveal.

Me in chat to sheron earlier: "I SWEAR the next thing I write in this fandom is a) going to have a plot other than "random goons kidnap people for h/c purposes", and b) is going to involve characters other than Danny and Ward."

... You wouldn't think getting tired of h/c would be a thing for me, but I'm really starting to get the urge to write something with an actual plot that's not just 5K of feels. That being said, I think the last fandom that made me go this head-over-heels for just writing endless words of h/c and feels was White Collar. I'm also slightly amazed that in just 6 months, or so, this fandom has jumped up to #3 on my AO3 stats page for most fics written. (Though technically it should be #4, because I haven't ever gotten most of my SGA fic onto AO3 and there is A LOT OF IT.)

Since I linked someone to this on AO3 today - for anyone who wants to be dragged kicking and screaming into this fandom join me in my current shiny place, allow me to refer you back to my so you wanna watch Iron Fist? post from last year, a.k.a. a guide to getting past the first few episodes for people who bounce off them. (I understand that not everybody likes or is going to like this show. I don't expect you to. But you know, just in case you were interested ...!)

Incidentally ... over the last year or two, I've mostly stopped crossposting fic or even fic notifications here, unless it's for an exchange, and just putting it on AO3 with notifications posted at sholiofic. I am writing a lot more fic than you'd know from reading my journal. I think I kinda just got out of the habit during a time when I wasn't writing a whole lot, but I've been fairly prolific lately. Lately it's been largely focused on Iron Fist and/or the Marvel Defenders shows, with some Agent Carter, Stranger Things, and various other stuff I'm into. Should I start posting those here again? Actually, because everyone loves clicking little boxes ... let's do a poll.



There are no right or wrong answers here, and I'm not going to feel bound by the poll results. I'm just curious if there is still interest in reading fic here or not.

There's a small Iron Fist exchange running this week, and I could not be more thoroughly delighted with my gift, the color purple, a teamy genfic about board games and banter and friendship that is EXACTLY what I was hoping for from my prompt about characters hanging out and doing friendship-type things. ♥

Another thing from the exchange I really loved was this Luke/Danny high school AU fanart (includes the supporting cast from both shows and Defenders), which is ADORABLE and full of delightful details. I love how readily recognizable all the characters are and how their personalities/styles are translated to their high school selves. I also look forward to finding time to read as long as we're together (does it matter where we go?), a long between-seasons Danny/Colleen fic that looks really good.

I wrote Sunflower, a Defenders fic for my recip's prompt about Danny collapsing after healing someone and needing to be looked after. Like most of my Defenders fic, it includes a lot of grouchy-concerned Jessica because she's far too much fun to write.

--

Signups are running 'til April 13 for Marvel Femslash Exchange. I am still in dither mode on signing up for this; in the interests of not completely overloading myself, I was thinking I'd leave it up to how far along I'd made it by that point on my other exchange assignments, and, uh. I still have a LOT of unfinished (*cough* unstarted) assignments. Still, I'll see how things are progressing before signups close.

Not Prime Time (medium sized fandoms exchange) is taking tag nominations 'til the 15th: Tagset | Nominations instructions | Eligibility instructions. Most of my current/recent active fandoms are eligible (Agent Carter, Iron Fist, Punisher, Defenders, Stranger Things, White Collar, Umbrella Academy, etc). I'm optimistically hoping that by the time signups open for this one, I will have made more progress on the other stuff I'm currently signed up for, because I would like to get in on this one!

It's particularly interesting seeing NPT come around, because back in the day, I used to be really excited about this one - it was the only non-Yuletide multifandom exchange that I knew about, and often the only chance at ALL to get an exchange fic for non-Yuletide-eligible fandoms that weren't big enough to have their own exchanges. There are just so many more exchanges now, it's interesting to look back on how excited I used to get about NPT when it was the only one of its type.

ETA: Oh, and Gen Prompt Bingo is running again! Because I totally need another source of prompts. AAAAAAAA someone stop me.