Arctic Light

Throwing a question out there to the room: What do you think are some of the qualities that results in some piece of media, any piece of media, picking up a let's say small to medium-sized fandom? (Not necessarily juggernaut-sized, which I think is The Claw as much as anything.)

I'm asking partly just because I haven't been talking on here much lately and this is something to talk about, but also because I was thinking tonight that it might be fun to craft some future project with the intention in mind of seeing if I could pick up a little bit of a fic fandom for it, in the same way that the Zoe Chant books are intentionally crafted to appeal to romance readers - so this would be a project that was dangling a lure in front of transformative fic fandom, not necessarily what people's wish lists are (I have my own wish list, which would almost certainly feature heavily), but what people tend to write fic about.

I realize it's a broad question and varies hugely based on individual preferences and what part of fandom you're in (e.g. slashers want one thing, gen people want another, everybody has their own personal preferences, etc), but I do think there are some broad trends: e.g. ensemble canons typically do better than canons focused on just one or two characters; canons with multiple open-ended installments typically do better than those with one self-contained installment.

What do you think some of the qualities of such a canon might be? Would it be different for books vs. a visual medium like TV/movies, do you think?

Orion has been trying to get me to watch The Expanse for years. YES I KNOW IT'S GOOD. I do want to watch it! However, apparently season 4 is coming out in a few days and since there's no time for me to marathon the rest of the show beforehand (plus, I'm not really up for something large and heavy right now anyway), he's switched to trying to get me to skip straight ahead to season 4 and watch that first. I'm resisting because I've always gotten the impression that this is the kind of show where things develop over time and it's more fun watching from the beginning not knowing where it's going and watching the characters blossom (and I've been actively avoiding spoilers because of this). Orion claims that it is not actually like this, that most of the setup in the first season is ditched because it goes in a different direction anyway, and that by this point there are few enough of the original characters left that it'll be easy to pick up everything you need to know about them from the beginning of season 4. He also claims that season 4 is an unusually good jumping-on point because there was a near-total change of premise at the end of season 3 (which I now know; good job helping me avoid spoilers, Orion).

So here's my question: knowing that I do like being surprised and I really love the whole trope where characters start out as strangers and become close, do you think I'd be happier starting from the beginning? Or do you agree that season four is a pretty good jumping-on point and the previous 3 seasons are not really necessary to understand and enjoy it?

With minimal spoilers, please! Actually, let's have a poll. You can elaborate in comments if needed.

I need music recs! (It's for a vid.)

Can people rec me some fun, bouncy pop music, preferably 80s music or something with that general kind of style (light pop with a brisk beat) with a friendship/"working together"/"having fun"/"people doing stuff together" vibe to the lyrics? The big problem I'm having is, it's not that I can't come up with plenty of that kind of thing, it's that coming up with ones that aren't love songs is difficult, and I need something that isn't a love song. It can even technically be a love song, as long as it's not so obviously a love song that you couldn't make a gen vid to it.

I have some ideas already but I'd love more ideas for songs that I overlooked, haven't heard, or just didn't think of.

Do any of you guys have any experience working or volunteering at a pet rescue place? (Specifically, a cat rescue.) The book I'm currently writing has a main character who works at a place like that, and I have some questions about what the daily routine would be like and that kind of thing - with the caveat that it's a tropey romance novel so there's going to be a lot of plausibility handwaving going on for plot purposes. :P

Could someone who uses the Tumblr mobile client please go to http://suncutter.tumblr.com on your phone or other mobile device, and tell me if you see a link to the first page of the comic at the top of the page, and if it actually works?

Since Tumblr's mobile theme overrides all other theme settings on the mobile client, my webcomic navigation doesn't work -- you have to scroll through the pages backwards to read it. I've known about this for awhile, but I'm still struggling to figure out what to do about it. This is about the best (stopgap) solution I can think of, but I can't test it since I'm the blog owner and when *I* click on it, it just takes me to a page for editing it. So I need to know if the link is live.

ETA: I now have an answer, and unfortunately it's the answer I was hoping it wasn't. (But thank you!) I'm leaving this post up just in case anyone has ideas for getting links at the top of Tumblr's mobile style. I mean, I don't HAVE to (obviously the comic hasn't had it for the last year+) but I hate the idea that I'm in essence shutting out a lot of potential readers by not having that. At the very least I wish I had a way of letting people jump to the start.

I have this vague plot idea that involves a strategically important island intermediate between two bigger land masses that are experiencing escalating tensions. (It could also be a small country between two bigger countries, but I'd rather have it be an island for various reasons of plot and also because I want to have my own island, damn it.)

This is going to sound completely ridiculous because the project is still so unformed that I have total carte blanche to do whatever I want with the geography, but I'm having trouble coming up with ideas for why this little island, or country, would be important enough that it would be pivotal and have large nations fighting over control of it. I'm thinking I'd rather have it be something to do with location rather than ancestral land claims or a particular resource that's on the island (the story involves politics and spies and stuff like that) -- but I'm drawing a blank on good ideas for how to set up the geography so that it works out that way, or, for that matter, real-world examples to use as a model. Most of the ones I can come up with are ports occupying a bottleneck point, like Istanbul or various river-mouth port cities. I can't think of anything to do with strategically important, oft-fought-over islands. Cyprus as about the closest thing I can come up with to something vaguely similar to what I'm thinking of, although as I understand it, that's more of a land-claim issue and less of a strategic-location issue (not that I am well educated on Cyprus).

Do any of my history- or geography-minded flistees have any thoughts on this? Suggestions for historical examples I might look at? I'm sure I'm being stupid and overlooking all sorts of real-world examples, since people fighting over islands is NOT A RARE THING, but I'm blanking on ones that are similar to what I want to write. Maybe it's just that I'm defining my terms too narrowly.

This has to do with the story I posted earlier ... but it kinda made me wonder how other people handle this issue on AO3. The story has most of the major characters in it, but not in major roles, and all of them were hovering right around or below my "enough of this character to tag for it" threshold. I ended up tagging just for Neal and Peter, the most pivotal characters and the only one who are in the whole story, mostly because I figured that if someone is looking for a Mozzie story and clicks on the Mozzie tag, finding out that he's only in one scene would be really frustrating.

But now, for people who look at tags as a guide to content, the tags are somewhat misleading, because while the story is focused on Peter and Neal, it's not just them and has quite a bit of ensemble as well. Tagging just for the two of them implies a different story focus than tagging for the whole set. But tagging for the whole set doesn't convey that some characters have a far more prominent role in the story than others.

... I guess this whole issue would be solved if AO3 eventually implements major/minor character tags (note: not a complaint; I know they're busy and it's not an important feature, just a nice bell'n'whistle!), but in the meantime I'm wondering -- how do other people handle it?

For your viewing enjoyment, a White Collar fanart I ran across on Tumblr. SO CUTE. (No spoilers.)

I also have a White Collar-related legal question for the flist. I may, um, be thinking about writing tags for 4x16, and there's something I'm wondering about. This is quite spoilery for the end of Season Four, so the question itself is under the cut.

( The question is this: )

1. There is a new scene in my urban fantasy novel that deals with Native American mythology (specifically a Seneca/Cayuga folktale), and I would feel more comfortable if I could have someone take a look at it for me who might be able to tell me if I'm being disrespectful without realizing it. I'm aware that there is next to no chance I'm going to find someone who's specifically Cayuga or Seneca in a random, small subset of Internet fandom, but is there anyone out there among you who has a cultural background that'd make you more conscious of indigenous people's issues than (white girl) me, and would be willing to take a look at it for me? Please email me at layla@ravenschildren.com. I'd prefer to fish among fannish people before I go bothering the mundanes. :D

2. I need to give my character a crappy car, the sort of hilariously awful beater that college students buy, where things randomly fall off and the engine makes funny noises and one of the doors is held on with duct tape, etc etc. I had stuck a placeholder car in there until I came up with something better. The problem is, I'm perusing auto listings on Craigslist, and most of the vehicles that were considered dreadful lemons when I was in college ... just aren't around anymore; they've beaten themselves off to the scrapheap! True, I could probably give her anything that's 10-15 years old and has been in a couple of wrecks, but I want something that's entertainingly bad, but preferably not old/rare enough to have attained collector status. Ideas? Personal experience? (This is based in the US, fyi, in the current year.) The very BEST beater car from my and my husband's shared youthful experience was a 1984 Plymouth Turismo (it's exactly the kind of thing I want, where stuff would just randomly break when you're driving down the road) but those don't seem to exist anymore, for reasons that are probably self-evident to anyone who's owned one.

So here's how the day's experiment in finding a photo-sharing service is shaping up:

At least half the respondents to my last post use (and recommend) Photobucket, but I decided to put it at the bottom of my list because I personally dislike the interface, and while it's possible that it would be less annoying to me as a user than as a casual browser (Tumblr is definitely that way), I figured I'd try some others first.

- Flickr is, by far, my favorite of the ones I've tried so far. I can log in using my Yahoo email (so I don't need to sign up for a new account), and I really like the clean, simple interface, both for using and for viewing. The really big downside to Flickr is that, for the free account, you can only view the most recent 200 photos, which I expect would become a problem really quickly. (Plus there's a monthly bandwidth cap.) However, I realized after noticing Google's 1 Gb limit on their photo-sharing service that you could actually treat the 200-photo limit in the same way that you would treat hard drive space limitations, that is, by paring down old photos or re-uploading them later. Or you could just upgrade to the pro account, but I really would like to stick with a free service since money is kind of tight. So basically, I like it a lot, but there's a de facto 200 Mb file cap on the free account (since, with the settings I use, my photos tend to be around 1 Mb each).

- Dropbox is ... deeply, DEEPLY arcane to set up. elrhiarhodan very kindly gave me an invite, so I downloaded and installed it, and launched it, and ... nothing happened? Eventually I figured out that it was running quietly in the background, so quietly that it doesn't even show up in the Dock. The problem is that I have no idea what to do with it now. The thing that annoys me most about Dropbox so far is that the website is geared more towards telling you how AWESOME the product is than to telling you how to use it. I don't want happy little stick figures showing me how much I'm going to like it; I just want a nice list of steps that tell me how to USE it! I had to resort to Google to find the FAQs, and eventually learned that it is supposed to create a Dropbox folder on your hard drive when you first launch it, except that mine didn't. The Dropbox application is completely inaccessible when it's running (you can quit it from Activity Monitor, but that's about it), which means I can't even guess how to make it do what it's supposed to do -- clearly there is SOME setup thing I am supposed to do that I'm not doing, but I can't figure it out. It doesn't seem to be a system incompatibility thing; I'm running Tiger, an older version of the OS, but the Dropbox website claims that Tiger is supported. I've poked around the website interface and it looks like the specific thing I want it for (creating albums and share them with people) is quite possible, so I might just do it through the website and forget about the desktop-application aspect. Seems quite do-able otherwise, and it gives you more free space than either Google or Flickr.

- Picasa is a NIGHTMARE OF EPIC PROPORTIONS. The first thing it did when I launched it was scan my entire hard drive for picture files. It doesn't let you opt out of this, or even choose which folders to scan. (Well, it CLAIMS that you can limit the scan to the "Pictures" and "Documents" folders, and I have nothing there anyway, so I clicked that and it scanned my entire hard drive ANYWAY.) This not only took forever (with a status window I couldn't hide) but resulted in an impenetrable morass of 12 years' worth of such things as clip art, downloaded anime pictures from 2002, and every comic page or sketch that I've ever scanned in. And when you try to delete something out of Picasa, it thinks you're trying to delete it from your hard drive. NOT ENOUGH "NO" IN THE WORLD. My thoughts on Picasa can best be summed up, at the moment, as DIE, PICASA, DIE.

- So then I checked to see if there was an online-only version. There is, although you can't find it easily from Picasa's homepage (I had to search), and when you go there, it shunts you into Google+ because of Google's irritating "ALL YOUR STUFF IN ONE PLACE! NO, REALLY, YOU WANT THIS!" policy. So that's a little annoying, but otherwise it looks decent, and there's a 1 Gb storage limit for free accounts (which, as noted above, is about 5 times more than what I'd get with Flickr without paying).

So I'm thinking about starting off with Flickr and, when I inevitably run out of space on Flickr, then using Google and/or Dropbox as backups. (Or paying for Flickr, if I like it enough.) Of course, since this is mostly for sharing photos with family, it also depends on what they like, too.