There's a meme going around for sparking posts for Three Weeks for Dreamwidth:

What kind of topics/entries would you like to see me posting about? Any particular questions you've always wanted to ask me but have resisted because the answer would be a huge essay? Ever want to wind me up and watch me go on a particular topic? Anything you've heard me say "I should write that entry about _________ I've been meaning to write" and have been patiently waiting for?

This is only sort of relevant to me, since it's not like I've ever posted that much, but I'll go with the spirit of it: since I plan on trying to post at least semi-regularly for 3W4DW, does anyone have any requests? Fic prompts, etc., are also fine. I make no promises about answering everything, but I'll give a shot at what I can.

As usual, I watched Doctor Who over at therienne's and merryish's place on Saturday.

( spoilers under the cut )

From there somehow we moved on to Dead Zone, SG1, and Due South, and spoilers therefor. I don't even know. Also ep one of the second season of Being Human, woot.

They've finally set a release date: July 13th. (My sympathies to anyone vidding this for Vividcon, ouch.)

Details on tvshowsondvd.com, including box art and suggested prices.

Still sorting away at the zines (it takes a while - I'm a packrat, it's hard to let things go!). Tonight was sorting through Pros printouts - circuit stories I'd copied (or printed off, if I got them via Proslib) and put in binders. I'd actually done a purge of these five years ago as well, clearing out a lot of the random stuff I'd kept. But I still had a pile left.

Some of them were easy to put into the recycling bag, because they're online now - Of Tethered Goats and Tigers, Rediscovered in a Graveyard, Suitable Gravity. There are a few that aren't online (or that I only have txt files for) that I can't quite bring myself to recycle - The Die Is Cast; Kind Hearts; a whole slew of Meg Lewtan historicals that I adore for their unabashed, unashamed wallowiness.

Then I found a whole stack of loose paper, and thought I'd missed something in the first round of purging - this had to be about 25 stories that I'd meant to recycle.

Except not so much. It was a two-inch, two-pound, double-sided stack of a single story: Waiting to Fuck Fall.

I didn't even remember that I had this; I know I never ordered it through the Circuit Library, never made my own copy. And this copy looks like it was created at different times - different paper, different toner quality, etc. I think I inherited it from the_shoshanna when she moved to Canada. (Shoshanna, do you remember? Was this yours?)

I never read it on paper; I wasn't kidding about the two inches and the two pounds. That was a lot of loose paper to contend with, and I just never got up the gumption, especially since I'd largely begun drifting away from Pros. I did eventually read it - online, when it got put up a year or two back. (Yeah, never think to yourself, "Oh, I know it's long, but maybe just the first few paragraphs to see what it's like, and then someday I'll get around to the whole thing..." unless you're willing to lose an entire weekend -- it's 350,000 words.)

Thing is, I'm never going to read this paper copy. It's loose, the quality isn't great in many places, it's hard to hold and read; I like paperback-sized things for reading these days (and preferably nice clear print). If I ever want to read it offline, I'll put it on my Kindle, where it will weigh a few ounces and fit neatly in my hand, and where the cat can't accidentally destroy the pagination by chasing a dust mote across it, and where I can resize the font when my eyes get tired.

I should recycle it.

But. What a piece of Pros history, this cobbled-together printout, passed from fan to fan! Maybe I should put it in the donate pile. (Although then some poor archivist will have to deal with it. *g*)

I am awash in nostalgia right now. I'm sorting through some old zines with an eye to selling and/or donating a bunch of them, and came across my copy of Twogether, the Due South zine that was the sequel to Two, both put out by IIBNF Press.

Due South was my first real zine fandom, such as it was; my first zines were ST:TOS, but I only had a handful, bought used out of a box at a dealer's room at an SF convention back in the mid-80s.

But after I got online and found FK fandom (omg people other than me watched FK! and taped it! and talked about it! *\o/*), I found out about DS fandom. I'd been watching DS since the pilot movie, and loved it, and was over the moon to realize it had a fandom. It even had a slash fandom!

It even had slash ZINES. omg.

So somewhere around 1995, I ordered my first-ever brand-new zine. I'm pretty sure it was Cry Wolf, from Ann O'Neill in England. I had to wrap up my cash very carefully to mail it off, and I had no idea if it'd made it until a month or two later, when suddenly there was a package for me, with a digest-sized zine full of Fraser/Ray stories. A (tiny) book of Fraser/Ray stories! It was to swoon.

I was hooked. I bought the next Cry Wolf, and two volumes of Pack Mates, all from England, and hey all of a sudden, I was a real zine fan! I had a collection.

And then Bernice advertised Two, and I bought it, and wow. It was amazing. Twice as thick as the Pack Mates zines, beautifully laid out, chock full of stories, like my old ST zines. I was still very much in my fannish honeymoon phase, and read pretty much anything and thought it was all good, but my memory of that zine is that it was aces. I mean - how can a zine with fuzzy stickers of moose in it not be awesome? (I'm not kidding. Random fuzzy stickers. I loved that zine so much.)

It even inspired me to write my first-ever LOC to a zine; I'd sent comments to online writers before, but I'd learned that part of the deal with zines was that if you read one, you were supposed to send a LOC. So after I finished it, I wrote... the stupidest LOC ever. *g* I had no idea what I was doing!

And it's not that I remember writing the stupidest LOC ever; I'd completely forgotten that I LOCed the zine, and if I had remembered, I probably would have thought that I wrote something reasonably coherent and useful.

But (here's where I tie in the first paragraph) tonight, when I looked at my copy of Twogether - the sequel to Two, remember? - I flipped through it to the back, where the letters of comment were, and there's my name. omg. (I had the same omg reaction when I got the zine, thinking back; for some reason, I hadn't expected the letters to be printed. *facepalm* I'd thought Bernice would just pass the feedback along to the authors. Total newbie, me.)

None of which is what triggered this post.

What triggered this post was looking at the other letters, and having a jawdrop moment. See, some of the names in there I remember from back then. Most I don't. Three in particular, I don't.

One right after the other, I saw letters from sakana17, sherrold, and movies_michelle -- all women I became friends with a few years later via other fandom means, and whom I'm still friends with. (*waves!*) And there we all were, sitting in the same LOC column together in 1997, in a zine printed in Australia and shipped halfway 'round the world.

I really love seeing how far back fannish connections actually go. <3

(Also, man, DS was some kind of mega-vector. Freakish.)

A couple of weeks ago, paian linked to a nifty little greasemonkey script that has made Dreamwidth so much more usable for me, I can't even tell you. The script is attached to your computer, not your account, so you don't have to be logged in to DW to make it work.

It's here: Dynamic and persistant DW reading/network page expand/collapse/hide.

If you're on Firefox and you have Greasemonkey installed, what this does is add two things to the subject line on each post you see: (-) (x) . That's it. They are WONDERFUL.

If you click the (-), the post you're looking at shrinks down to just the subject line and the comment count/reply links line. (You also then get a (+) in the subject line, for if you want to re-expand it.)

If you click the (x), the post you're looking at vanishes utterly, and the space where it was closes up so you don't see any gaps between posts.

Whatever you click stays clicked no matter what page you're on; if you collapse a post on your Reading page and go to that person's journal, the post is collapsed there, too. It's also collapsed if it shows up on your Network page. Likewise for anything you hide completely; it's gone everywhere. Really freaking handy for NSFW posts that scroll by at work that you don't want accidentally showing up again!

If you hide something and you want to unhide it, you just go to Tools | Greasemonkey | User script commands | Clear hidden entry values, and boom, you've got your hidden entries back. (You can also clear your collapse/expand entry values).

( Here, have some screencaps )

One of the things I have always disliked about LJ-type journaling is the lack of control over what I see; I want to be able to mark things as read, and delete them if I don't want them, and flag them to go back to later. This doesn't let you flag things, but with this I can finally see at a glance what entries are new, and I can get rid of ones that I just don't want to see.

It makes the Reading and Network pages so much cleaner, and so much easier to keep track of. <3

I've been poking around Dreamwidth for a couple of weeks now, looking for communities, and figured this would be a good Friday to start sharing the wealth. And since I've been happily catching up on the last few eps of Burn Notice*, here, have some comms:

bn_sparks - adult fanfic, both het and slash

burn_notice - discussion

burn_notice_fic - all genres, all ratings

burn_notice_graphics - fanart and graphics

winter_deaddrop - prompt-based flashfic comm

Some of these aren't very active yet, but hopefully if more people are interested that will change. (And that Fanlore entry I linked up there could use some love, too, now that I look at it...)

---
Follow Friday (followfriday): Here's the plan: every Friday, let's recommend some people and/or communities to follow on Dreamwidth. That's it. No complicated rules, no "pass this on to 7.328 friends or your cat will die". Just introduce us to some new things to read. You can see all the entries on DW that have been tagged Follow Friday here.

---
* I'm not all the way caught up yet! Please don't spoil me for the final two eps of s3; I'm watching those this weekend. TYK!

God, season 16? Seriously? I remember when we expected it to be cancelled every year, and now there's like, three months between seasons. (Also, the racers traveled uphill both ways, in the snow. In Alaska. By themselves. Poor Guidos.)

My love for TAR isn't as intense as it used to be, but I've been enjoying it again for the past few seasons. This season there are no actual assholes that I've noticed, which is really nice. Looking at the field right now, there are only a few teams I would rather didn't make it to the final four, but that's mostly because there are a few teams I hope really do. I'm not actively rooting against anyone, which is sort of refreshing.

Random observations on this week's episode:

( spoilers ahoy )

Author names have been revealed, so it must be time to post. *g* In order: What I got, what else I'm reccing, and what I wrote.

First up, thank you so much to eotu for my lovely Yuletide gift, Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Assignment! It's I Spy, a missing scene for the episode The Seventh Captain, and I love it. *hugs story*

The ep moves very quickly from Scotty being captured and nearly killed (rescued by Kelly, yay!) to him being fairly light-hearted the next day; eotu pulls that back a bit and shows how he got back to that even-keeled place. Which, of course, is all due to his partnership with Kelly, and how they are just always there for each other, and which made me really happy to read. She gave me the Scotty and Kelly I love so much, and that interlude is now canon for that ep in my head.

So that is my first and most important rec! (Which I have just realized I didn't bookmark on AO3 because bookmarks weren't working well that first day, so I have just rectified that.)

More recs are available at my AO3 bookmarks; I'll be adding to these as I keep reading, because wow, is a week not long enough anymore. I don't even know how much more of the archive I have to go through, but it's a lot. *g* At the moment, there are recs in I Spy, Dark Is Rising, Fairy Tales, Anthropomorfic, Dresden Files (tv), MacGyver, Belgariad/Mallorean, the Fire Dancer series by Ann Maxwell, Victor/Victoria, Leverage, White Collar, Invisible Man, and Kung Fu: The Legend Continues.

(Note: I haven't read all the stories in all those fandoms - I've been dipping in and out, and have read maybe 2 Madness stories so far on top of that. There are likely to be more all over the place. God, I love the bookmarking feature.)

---

And now, for the story I wrote:

Beatriz (on AO3), for galerian_ash
Fandom: Gunmen *
Slash - Cole Parker/Dani Servigo
5,228 words
Rating: teen and up
* It's a mid-'90s action flick starring Christopher Lambert and Mario Van Peebles, about two men on opposite sides who eventually wind up (crankily) working together, then protecting each other, then helping each other, then sailing off together into the sunset sunrise while the soundtrack over them sings about how there's nothing wrong with being in love with someone. No, seriously.

I had so much fun with this. I signed up to write it because I've loved this movie for ages, and I've always wanted to see fic for it. Then I was looking through DYW letters before assignments went out, as you do, and stumbled across galerian_ash's request, and had this happy little moment of "that could be my assignment! I could totally write that!"

And then assignments came, and that was my assignment! \o/ Most years I get an assignment from a recipient who wants something a little different than my take on things, which is great because it lets me stretch; this was one of the years where we were totally in sync, which is great because it lets me just sink into the source. So I found my old VHS tape, and I ordered a DVD copy so I didn't completely destroy my tape, and I started watching. And watching. And watching. I was right, I really do love this movie. *g*

My one regret, if you can call it that, is that I had to skip about half my notes, which consisted of all the ways in which Cole (Mario Van Peebles) is gorgeous; I had all these scraps of lines in my head about that, because I really like looking at Cole. But then I started writing, and realized I was solidly inside Cole's head, and wasn't budging. Which meant that all of that description was useless, alas. But I like being inside his head, too, so it's all worth it.

So yay, another fabulous Yuletide, all around!

Thank you so much! The thought of a story in any of these fandoms is already making me happy. Whatever you want to do with them, I'm already grateful, and the happier you are with what you write, the happier I'll be reading it. If you have an idea that you're itching to write, go for it!

If you want more information about my requests, though, 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 )

If you're stalking my LJ or delicious for hints about me, my apologies - I never post much, and this year in particular I've been quiet in both places. But honestly, 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!!