Arduinna

I am at !!BEARS!! so will distract myself with doing the Yuletide meme that's going around.

( Yuletide! )

I'm guessing that by this point most people have seen the links to kouredios's friending meme for folks who want to talk more on DW & LJ, but if not, you should check it out. Lots of people showing up from all over, into all kinds of fandoms and non-fannish things! (And here's the LJ version, for the LJ-inclined!)

I continue to fail to post because I get bogged down by wanting to say ALL THE THINGS, so I never finish anything.

So in the spirit of just freaking posting more, dammit, I will not wait till I have a huge post about Leverage to post this bit of Leverage news:

A letter from Dean Devlin

As of the writing of this letter, we still do not know if there will be a season six of our show. Just as we didn’t know when we created the last three episodes which are about to air. Because of this uncertainty, John Rogers and I decided to end this season with the episode we had planned to make to end the series, way back when we shot the pilot. So, the episode that will air on Christmas is, in fact, the series finale we had always envisioned.

This is not to say we would not do a season six should we get the opportunity. Everyone involved with the show, from the cast, the crew, the writers and producers, would like nothing more than to continue telling these stories. But, in case we do not get that opportunity we felt that, creatively, after 77 episodes, we owed it to you, our fans, to end the show properly.

I sincerely hope you watch these last three episodes. They build to our conclusion. And the finale, I believe, is the most powerful episode we’ve ever done.

From all of us who make the show, thank you for watching, supporting and encouraging us. I’ve never experienced a fandom as intense, loyal and wonderful as you all.

Let’s go steal a series finale!

Dean Devlin

Executive Producer/Director LEVERAGE

I'm torn on the possibility of cancellation; I love Leverage a lot and want it to keep going, but I also feel like they've started to wander sort of far afield recently in some eps, and it's tough to keep a show fresh past five seasons.

But man, I'm glad that if they're going out, they're going out the way they want to.

Final post! ...for now.

There's lots of sort of random interesting things going on in the background of this show that didn't really fit anywhere else, so here's a grab bag.

( Jokes )

( Hidden clues about the curse )

( Emma arrives and things change )

( Emma SWAN )

( Timey-wimey stuff )

( Dimensional portals )

( The Mad Hatter )

( Jiminy Cricket )

And I will wrap this thing up with a quote from Grumpy to Snow, as she disarmed herself for a meeting with Queen Regina in one episode:

"Keep the little knife between your tuffets."

*dies*

And thus endeth the season 1 picspam series.

-----
OUaT s1 picspam series

Part 1: Season one takes place in a forest

Part 2: Regina and Rumple: colors and castles

Part 3: Clothes make the match

Part 4: Clothes make the point

Part 5: Disney references

Part 6: You are here!

Short one this time! And all the text is going under a cut, because I can't explain this without spoilers.

( spoilers for episode 8 )

Next up, some visual Disney references.

-----
OUaT s1 picspam series

Part 1: Season one takes place in a forest

Part 2: Regina and Rumple: colors and castles

Part 3: Clothes make the match

Part 4: You are here!

Part 5: Disney references

Part 6: Bits and pieces

(Image-heavy!)

Regina and Gold both still "live" in castles -- really they work in them, despite their very nice, very large, houses. But their castles are very different from each other, in both worlds.

Regina likes contrast and starkness, with as much black and white as she can get -- she'll take grey in a pinch, too. The only non-neutral color she likes is red, which is her passion and anger.

( Regina in Storyland )

( Regina in Storybrooke )

Rumple likes softness and shadows, with as much red and gold as he can get, and where Regina's "medium" color is usually a cool grey, his is usually a warm brown.

( Rumple in Storyland )

( Gold in Storybrooke )

And obviously, on top of the actual colors, the lighting & filters used heighten all of the effects.

But the interesting thing is how all of this reflects them both.

( Their spaces encapsulate their entire worldviews. )

It's going to be interesting to see what happens with the colors this season, if anything.

Next up in the series: clothing connections.

-----
OUaT s1 picspam series

Part 1: Season one takes place in a forest

Part 2: You are here!

Part 3: Clothes make the match

Part 4: Clothes make the point

Part 5: Disney references

Part 6: Bits and pieces

I had planned to do grown-up, responsible things this weekend, and that is still my plan, but now, as a reward for being a grown-up?

I am totally going to go watch superheroes bond and blow shit up (thanks to devildoll for the heads-up!)

The Avengers is back in US theaters for a week, starting this weekend. The studio is apparently telling people to be sure to sit through the credits, so there are suspicions flying around that there may be an additional post-credits scene -- maybe an Iron Man 3 tease?

\o/

Almost two months ago, I asked for today off from work, because I know what Vividcon deadline day is like, and there is no way a few hours in the evening is enough time. This was meant to be a day of panic and flail, with last-minute fixes to the vid (or, worst-case, still filling in black space), and then dealing with exporting and aspect ratios and tech fail.

Instead, it's day of rest*, because therienne and I finished our vid last night, exported it, and uploaded it more than 24 hours before the deadline.

Vidding Deadline Threat Level: KITTENS.

Unfortunately, Vidding Deadline Threat Level Adrenaline Reaction: BEARS

So we spent the next hour having little bursts of panic at each other, because how is it possible to be done and uploaded before the deadline? Vid farr is not over till the deadline passes!

Then I went home and we got on the phone and panicked at each other more. See above, re: vid farr and bears.

Then I fell asleep in my chair before I could manage to write a post. I may have been a little tired.

And now? I am home, lounging about my apartment with my cats for the first time in weeks. I can clean my pit of a place, and buy groceries omg, and maybe watch some tv, or read...

I still don't quite believe it, and am braced to find out that therienne has gotten word from Lum and Ian that we screwed something up horribly, and need to fix it right damn now.

But until that email comes in, it is kittens all around. Yay!


* It is not actually that restful a day so far. I got home last night after midnight to the sight of a van from my oil company pulling away from in front of the house, and the scent of oil in my apartment, but no message from my landlord's son, so I figured it was a problem with his tank that had been handled.

Then this morning I got woken up a bit after 10 by a call saying that he'd found a leak in my tank last night (just a tiny pinhole leak), which had been plugged, but today they were coming to drain & remove the old tank, and install & fill a new one.

So now the basement under my feet is full of oil-company guys yelling and banging and drilling and otherwise using implements of destruction to scare the hell out of my cats.

But still. I am not at work! And I am not over at therienne's! I am HOME! \o/

( So have some kittens )

Somewhere on my network, I found a link to this webcomic, "Little League", which I then spent a while reading all the way through. It's little-kid Justice League, and it is one of the cutest things I have ever seen.

Case in point: wee Bruce gets sent to timeout for misbehaving in class

<3 <3 <3

I'm a JL fan from the cartoon rather than DC comics, and this isn't quite a match (no Hawk Girl; Barry Allen instead of Wally West for the Flash; Hal Jordan instead of John Stewart for Green Lantern; and the addition of Power Girl), but it's adorable anyway.

I started reading backward from the link above, then realized I wanted the whole thing in order, because this is a storyline, not standalones.

You can read the whole thing via the little league tumblr's archive, or by paging back to the first strip and moving forward, which is probably going to be a lot easier (definitely easier if you're reading on mobile, where you can't mouseover to see the dates on the archived strips).

As of right now, it starts on page 5 -- scroll down, then start reading forward.

I'm following it on tumblr now, but tumblr moves so fast and I didn't want to miss anything, so I checked and it turns out there's already a DW feed for it:

littleleaguecomics_feed

The cartoon has better music (or rather,had better music, before they butchered it this season, sob), but despite that, I went to the movie Sunday with therienne and mollyamory. Which, thank god, because now we can all stop squinting and averting our eyes from the intarwebs.

( random spoilers ho! )

Relatedly, wooooooo we're gonna get Black Widow backstory!
'Black Widow' movie will focus on the heroine's origin

I was sure they wouldn't give us a movie for her at all, because, you know, she's female. But yay, already confirmed! \o/

Images:

There's currently a smallbatchicons request fest going on for Three Weeks for Dreamwidth; anyone can request up to five icons on any theme (show, character, color, emotion, object, whatever), and anyone can fill those requests.

If you're the requester, you leave a comment with screencaps/images you want the icon-maker to use, or if you want text, leave that instead.



Fanfic:

Not Prime Time is open for signups. "Not Ready For Prime Time (Fandoms), or otherwise known as Not Prime Time, is a gen, het, femslash, and slash multifandom secret fiction exchange for medium sized fandoms. This is for the fandoms that are no longer eligible for Yuletide but are not megafandoms."

This looks like a lot of fun, and I'd probably be signing up if the deadline wasn't four days before the Vividcon deadline. Woe.


Not Prime Time (AO3 collection)
Frequently Asked Questions | Megafandoms List
npt_admin on LJ | npt_admin on DW

Fandom

And finally, this is little late, but, there's still just about an hour about 45 minutes to take the OTW survey, if you haven't yet.


I took the OTW
Community Survey!

click to take!

I have watched no tv in days and days, because this weekend is the Club Vivid deadline, hahahaha omg. So now it's not just vidding every weekend, it's vidding every night, until it's done or we kill each other, whichever comes first. (We're not at a killing place, but we haven't hit the point of trying to export VVC-ready files using our new software, or checking the vid on a tv and freaking out over the suddenly awful aspect ratios yet, either. So "finish or die" is still a tossup, really. Sunday's gonna be fun.)

But I must interrupt this tv-free vid farr to say:

YAY fifth season for Fringe!! ♥

I was crossing my fingers that the lure of easy syndication would win out over poor ratings. It's only a 13-ep season, but honestly I think that's perfect; they can hone it all right down without worrying about any filler. Woot!

(If you want to link to these and keep the cut tags intact for people, link to my front page or link to this archive page)

(disclaimer in part 1)

Finding fandom

It wasn't easy to stumble over fandom in the 1990s if you didn't have a specific interest in it. Which doesn't mean it was hard to find!

But fandom wasn't being talked about on tv, or in random newspaper/magazine articles, or being linked to off mainstream sites. Media companies weren't hosting forums to try to corral people's fannishness into appropriate venues, where like-minded people could easily find each other and link off to other more fannish sites; mostly TPTB were sending C&Ds to people who posted pictures of their show, and being very wary of this whole "world wide web" thing that was taking control away from them.


(source: a 1997 cache of the page X-File Fan Fiction Links, found on Wayback If you click that link, it will look different than my image; I made my browser's background black before I took the screenshot, so it would look the way it did originally. There were an awful lot of black-background XF sites around then...)

Most fans were careful never to publicly link back to (or even mention) fan sites, to protect each other. If there was a newspaper article about us somewhere, it got talked about and linked (or quoted, if it wasn't online) all over the place, as something rare and strange and worrying (journalists almost always got it wrong, for one thing).

(Fifteen years later, I still twitch when I see people linking to archives or vid sites or individual fanworks in public forums, particularly media-controlled forums. The instinct to hide was instilled that strongly.)

And really, everything, not just fandom, was out of sight in the very early days. The web was brand new, small, and scattered, and consisted of lots of little pockets of interest that weren't very well connected. Search engines were in their infancy, as well, and not everything was indexed.

But pretty much, all you had to do was look around on the web or Usenet for your preferred source's title, and you would manage to find something that would point you in the right direction.

( Online services companies )

( Links pages )

( Webrings )

( Fanlistings )

Where the fans were talking

Discussion was the primary function of fandom in the 90s, at least in my corners of it; fanfic was great and got devoured, but it was secondary to talking about the show. (Although for that matter, we also talked about the fanfic.) While there were people who only wanted the fic and ignored the discussions, there were also people who only wanted the discussions and ignored the fic. And where today someone watching an episode might think "I wonder what would have happened if he'd accepted the coffee?" and write a 600-word snippet about it, back in the day they were as likely to post the question to their preferred discussion place and start a conversation about it that could last for days. (Or vanish without a ripple. You never knew.)

So fans were talking all over the place, and there was a good chance you could find a format that worked for you; if you didn't want to talk, you could lurk and watch other people talking. Like anything else, it was 5-15% of the people doing the talking in most places, while everyone else lurked.

( Newsgroups )

( Mailing lists )

( Message boards )

( IRC and other forms of chat )

( Personal websites and archives for essays and reviews )

Where the fans were reading fanfic

To start with, if you were on newsgroups, mailing lists, or message boards, you were very probably reading fanfic there as well, either mixed in with regular discussion or on separate fic-specific groups/lists/boards.

Beyond that, the two main ways to find fanfic was on archives and on personal web sites.

( Archives )

( Personal webpages )

( Newsletters )

Monofannish or Multifannish

There's a myth that it was hard to be multifannish in the heyday of mailing lists. It wasn't hard at all, even before Karen's site; it was just that if you didn't have multifannish tendencies to begin with, it was easy to be monofannish and just play in the one sandbox that interested you. You could ignore anything that wasn't relevant to your own personal interests.

( Looking for more fandoms )

( Spreading the cross-fandom word )

part 1
part 3