I wrote one story for Yuletide this year, in one of my oldest and most favorite fandoms, I Spy. My recipient, sarahenany, wanted Scotty-focused hurt/comfort, and listed off some of my favorite episodes as examples of the sort of thing she was looking for, so all in all I was pretty stoked about this assignment! I kept going back and forth on what to call it, and in the end tagged it both gen and m/m; really I think it's pre-slash, in that misty in-between area.

SERE (5468 words) by Arduinna
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: I Spy (1965)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warning: Author Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Kelly Robinson/Alexander Scott
Characters: Kelly Robinson, Alexander Scott
Summary:

Survival, Evasion, Recovery, Embrace

Many thanks to dorinda, therienne, and mollyamory for beta!

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I also got a story. \o/ My author was slipshod, who matched me on Person of Interest, and gave me a lovely story full of unspoken concern, h/c, and protectiveness that slides into a careful first time.

Give (1704 words) by slipshod
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Person of Interest (TV)
Rating: Explicit
Warning: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Harold Finch/John Reese
Characters: Harold Finch, John Reese
Summary:

"This is fun. This is what you and John do all day long?"

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I'm still reading my way through the archive; there are dozens of fandoms I haven't even looked at, and more I've started in on but not worked my way through. So much good stuff to read!

In the meantime, I'm slowly building a recs set in my AO3 bookmarks; these are my Yuletide 2012 recs, which will keep getting updated as I keep reading.

In summary: Yuletide! \o/

First off, I spent the weekend adding a bunch of new people from the friending meme, and with a bunch of new people subscribing to me. Hiya! It's very cool to see the new voices on my reading list. If you haven't checked it out yet, you should; the word spread pretty far, and it's up to more than 1,200 comments over 11 pages. A big chunk of that is people responding to each other, but that still leaves hundreds of entries.

And if you're thinking damn, you should have jumped in -- jump in! It's still going, with new entries and new conversations. I started tracking it early on so I wouldn't forget to go check for new people, and then it hit a tipping point on Friday night and whoosh. It may have finally started slowing down a bit, but it hasn't stopped. I suspect the mention it got on f_fa is what did the trick, so yay to whoever did that!

I'm about a hundred comments behind at this point (by dint of ignoring basically all the side-chatter, which is a pity because I bet there was some good conversation, but -- 1,200 comments! oof.)

Meanwhile, I took a break from DW last night to watch ( the Amazing Race finale. )

Thank you so much! The thought of a story in any of these fandoms is already making me happy.

I'd really like something that falls on the warm / happy / fluffy / vanilla end of the spectrum, if possible. If that isn't something you can do, I understand! Just please no deathfic or loss of a loved one, including pets; and no terminal illnesses of any kind as an h/c or angst trope. Thank you. <3

I love all four of these fandoms unreservedly, so if you have a yen to explore the universe, or bring in additional characters I didn't list, it's all good.

If you want more information about my requests, read on - but please don't worry if your ideas go in a different direction. Optional details are optional! As long as it's for one of these fandoms, and uses the characters, you totally win at Yuletide. \o/


( my fic tastes )

Why I love these fandoms

(Alphabetical, not ranked by preference! I love them all. :)

( Burn Notice )


( Elfquest )


( Night Court )


( Person of Interest )

Truly, I adore all these fandoms, and will be happy with absolutely anything you write, as long as you enjoy writing it.

And thank you, again!!

There are a bunch of Disney references scattered throughout the season, and probably lots more I missed since I haven't watched that many recent Disney movies (where by "recent" I mean "in the last 25 years" ahem).

But I did catch some, and more on my vidding rewatch. This one needed a couple of videos to cover the stuff I saw, so some of the cuts have embeds as well as still shots.

( Wish upon a star )

( Fantasia )

( Mickey Mouse )

( Cinderella castle fireworks )

( the dwarves from Snow White - pic and video )

( Snow White and her bluebirds - pic and video )

Next up, the final post, with bits and pieces of things that didn't fit into any of the themed posts.

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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: You are here!

Part 6: Bits and pieces

Okay, I blame Tom and Lorenzo for this entirely. I started reading them for Project Runway recaps ("Project Rungay"), then started poking at other stuff they write. One of their favorite shows is Mad Men - which I don't like, so was cheerfully skipping the recaps for, till I stumbled over their followup Mad Style recaps, which looks at each episode through the lens of the clothing people are wearing, the rooms they're standing in, body language, color, things like that.

I was fascinated. I wound up reading a lot of them, and I've been reading them ever since. Other than a few basic things I've never really noticed the underlying meaning in things like clothes on tv (honestly, mostly just that SG-1 has always, always dressed in identical uniforms but equally always worn in four different ways, to clearly mark them as individuals who make up a solid unit).

But just as vidding makes you notice things like color, TLo can make you notice things like clothes. And once I started watching OUaT closely for visual cues, they started leaping out at me here, too.

Focusing on Storybrooke here, there are a few people on OUaT who dress individually -- Ruby is always in bright red, Archie is always in dull greens and other muted fall colors -- brown, rust. But the main characters are almost always dressed to reflect the interactions they're having that episode. Some of it's blatant (... for certain values of blatant), some of it's subtle, but it's there in pretty much every episode.

I will spare you screencaps from all 22 episodes, I promise.

But I won't spare you screencaps from *some* of the 22 episodes...

( Meet Mary Margaret, Emma, and Regina, together in the same scene for the first time )

( Regina and Mary Margaret, Regina and Emma )

( Mary Margaret, Emma, and Henry )

But it's not all about the women (er, and children). Entirely. Sometimes a boy shows up to entertain them.

( Mary Margaret and David )

( Emma and Sheriff Graham )

( Regina the seductress )

There are tons of little connections and cues all over the place in this show, and the more you look, the more you see.

Next up, more clothes, but in a different vein: clothes that make a point, specifically about episode 8.

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OUaT s1 picspam series

Part 1: Season one takes place in a forest

Part 2: Regina and Rumple: colors and castles

Part 3: You are here!

Part 4: Clothes make the point

Part 5: Disney references

Part 6: Bits and pieces

I was hoping to get this done before season 2 started up, but I'll have to settle for getting it done before season 2 gets too far in.

This past spring, therienne found a song that would be perfect for OUaT, and we started vidding it. (You can find the vid You can find the vid here on Dreamwidth or here on AO3.)

When you vid something, you're looking at it completely differently. Usually the sound is off so you're not distracted by dialogue, and you're looking specifically for visual information and cues.

So I started getting hit with these cues, and being boggled at how much I'd missed. And figured I'd share!

This is really image-heavy, fair warning.

The first thing I realized was that everyone in Storybrooke still lives in the forest.

( Starting with Granny's diner )


( And Mary Margaret's school )


( And the vet )


( Jefferson, too )


( And there's Regina's office )


( Even Rumpelstiltskin is in the forest )


Not every place is in a forest; some are in gardens.

( Like, say, Granny's bed & breakfast )


( And Kathryn, who lives in a bower because she's a sheltered princess )


( Mary Margaret is also a princess... )


The only prominent secondary character who didn't seem to follow this mode was Archie. He has stripes on his office walls, much like the stripes on Henry's bedroom walls -- but Henry isn't part of the story, and Archie is, so this was confusing.

( Until I figured it out )

I never noticed any of that when I was watching live. I'm really impressed with the set people on this show. Like, did you notice any trends there?

( Look at the birch branches and trunks )

I've got a series of posts like this, which I'll spread out a bit. Next up, Regina and Rumple and their castles.

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OUaT s1 picspam series

Part 1: You are here!

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: Bits and pieces

I'm on a Person of Interest reading binge, and hit a summary that mentioned an OC named Daisy Buchanan, causing me to go very cranky and muttery, because dude, you can't just steal your OC's name from literature and expect people not to notice! Come on!

But I start reading anyway, just because. And it's well-written, so I start to go hmmm, and then I find out that the author isn't stealing names after all, she's specifically referencing The Great Gatsby in multiple ways, and dropping other literary allusions around to boot.

\o/

I hereby publicly retract my private cranky muttering!

*dives happily back in*

If I sign up for hc_bingo enough, eventually I will actually manage to pull off a bingo, right?

( This year's card beneath the cut! )

(If you want to link to this and keep the cut tags intact so it isn't overwhelming, link to the archive page: http://arduinna.dreamwidth.org/2012/05/24/ )

So I have a tumblr (as aka-arduinna), and have been trying to figure it all out. Which is a whole lot less easy than it should be.

Tumblr in general takes the attitude that it's so incredibly intuitive that nothing needs to be explained, even in the Help pages that you'd think would be, you know, helpful. But if it's intuitive, it's for people who aren't me; I find it ridiculously opaque and cumbersome and illogical, and it's taken me months to figure out and/or remember what to click to do what. I wind up doing desperate web searches hoping someone somewhere has explained things, since the Tumblr help files are largely useless for the basics.

I've been frustrated with the fannish tutorials I've stumbled across, since most of them seem to be "First, get a tumblr. Second, here's a list of tumblrs I follow to get you started!" without actually explaining how to use the site. My impression is that once you're comfortable on it, you just forget how freaking opaque it is to start with. (Or they're people for whom Tumblr really is intuitive and simple, and don't realize that for some of us, it's really not.)

I have found some posts about specific things that have been very useful, for things like "how to get a permalink for a post" and "how to add a tag cloud", which is great, but the lack of a basics post was really getting to me.

So I figured, well, I should do something about that.

First, a GIANT CAVEAT: I still pretty much suck at tumblr. I've been poking tentatively at it for months, badly hampered by the speed, the lack of convo, my cultural conditioning not to pass other people's content along but rather to either respond directly or link back to it, and the rampant flashy animations that make my eyes hurt. But otoh I figure that means I still have a pretty good grasp on what stuff may be confusing, so.

(You can't avoid the flashy animations, as far as I can tell. Figured I should say that upfront.)

Second, a smaller caveat: my tumblr is in the default free theme, at least for the moment. All my images and instructions relate to that; I have no idea how they may change with other themes. But hopefully this will be enough to at least point you in the right direction.

So! Let's talk tumblr.

( Using tumblr without an account )

It's still going to be easier to learn and play with tumblr if you have an account and are logged into it, though, since you'll be able to participate and do things like save your searches. So the rest of this tutorial is still based on "get a tumblr and go from there".

So first, sign up with tumblr. Once you've got an account, you can start customizing.

( Customizing your tumblr )

( Adding the things tumblr left out: tag lists and comments )

Okay, so now you have a tumblr, and it looks the way you want it to. Time to start doing things with it!

( Navigating tumblr )

( Finding content )

( Producing content )

( Avoiding content )

( Communicating with people )

Annnnnd I think that's it. Hopefully people will stop by and correct any errors!

Also, I would love to see pointers to people's favorite tumblrs, to help folks get started once they're set up!

A million thanks to therienne and mollyamory, who betaed the first draft of this when I sprang it on them out of nowhere, and pointed out broken images and incoherence like champs. ♥ I've added more since then, and any remaining incoherence or bustedness is all on me.