Arduinna

December 2 (whoops): princessofgeeks: What got you interested in doing your amazing comprehensive Stargate canon encyclopedia?

I wanted to know what Jack's medals were. ... Seriously, that's what started it. Combined with the fact that I wanted to write SG but was kind of intimidated by the canon, much though I loved it. So I figured hey, slap together a reference page with info I might want to have handy!

And at first it was purely a resource for myself, just bits of info categorized in ways that were useful to me that I couldn't find elsewhere. Which I should clarify: a lot of the information I originally put on it was stuff I found elsewhere, I just wanted to change the categorization, so I could find things like "how many times has Daniel died, anyway" directly, instead of having to hunt through episode information. When I started out, almost all of the info I had came from other sites, just rearranged. (rdanderson.com, which is still going strong, was my go-to place for info.)

After I had some info cobbled together I told a few friends who were writing SG in case they needed to check something, and apparently the word spread from there, as word tends to. :) I discovered it was being used generally by other fans when someone recced it as a resource on a mailing list, and had to decide whether to take it down (because it was not properly sourced or in any way clear that I was getting info from existing places) or take it on as an actual project, tightening things up and expanding what I was doing to be more broadly useful.

By that point I was already doing a lot of my own note-taking and such, and was having a blast, so I revamped everything into my own words/research and kept going for several more years, expanding steadily as I went.

I look back on it and it was kinda bananas? I was basically living and breathing SG all the time, but in a facts way rather than a transformative-fandom way. But it was also SO MUCH FUN. I love being useful, and I love organizing things, and I love SG, and it was a perfect combination. I went a bit overboard with the level of detail I was looking at as time went on, but otoh that level of detail was there if you looked for it, which was so cool.

I never did really wind up writing anything other than a few tiny pieces, after all that; my brain was just too solidly engaged on the affirmation side of things to do much transformative work. But man, it was such a great trip while it lasted. ♥ ♥ ♥


Go here for the full list of prompts and open dates -- more post prompts always welcome!

I need some sort of prod to get me active again, so December meme it is! (hat-tip to resonant for mentioning it and reminding me about it)

Ask me questions, give me prompts/ideas for fic or meta or nattering, point me at an article or story or vid you want me to talk about (mine or anyone else's) -- basically whatever you want (although as ever no promises on results...). Pick a specific day if you want, or I'll pick randomly.

December:

01: I'd love to just hear about how you've been filling your time, what's been interesting you lately (or challenging you, if you want to talk about that), your basic Christmas-letter kind of update, I guess? (the_shoshanna)

02: What got you interested in doing your amazing comprehensive Stargate canon encyclopedia? (princessofgeeks)

03:

04:

05:

06: Rec some books you enjoyed recently? (ratcreature)

07:

08: Which Stargate character turned out to stick in your memory the longest and why? (princessofgeeks)

09: favorite tropes and clichés! With an ODAO of which ones you think fit which fandom. (torch)

10:

11:

12: I'd like to hear you say a little something about the characters from "Invisible Man", which you have both vidded and written. What is it that makes Darien, Darien, to you, when you're either characterizing him yourself or reading/watching something from someone else? And the same for Bobby Hobbes--what makes him feel like him to you, in your work or others'? What aspects of both characters feel crucial, no matter what genre/approach/circumstances they're in? (dorinda)

13:

14: What about your day job? What did you learn? (princessofgeeks)

15:

16: is there a canon that you aren't fannish about and you don't really know why? Or, alternately, one that you ARE fannish about and don't know why? (resonant)

17:

18:

19: Have you noticed great similarities between the canon/characters that draw you into fandom? If so, is there a canon/characters that would seem to be right up your alley but it just didn't happen. (corvidology)

20:

21: Why do you think Stargate is such an enduring canon? (princessofgeeks)

22: And yet it never made it into the pop culture in the same way as Supernatural or other shows? (princessofgeeks)

23:

24:

25:

26:

27:

28:

29:

30: A fandom you love and would like to squee about to other fen. (We're here, take advantage of this!) (rhi)

*waves*

Seems like a good time to jump back in to posting! I'm happy to do December meme stuff if anyone has any questions/ideas/prompts. (no promises at all on fic, as my fic-writing muscles appear to have atrophied, but who knows)

It's been a heck of a year (or so) - family deaths, moving for the first time in 25 years, moving in with people for the first time in 30+ years, living with a dog for the first time ever, losing that dog a few months later to a degenerative disease :(, watching five cats try to sort out their suddenly merged territory... Interesting times, man.

I've been floating around without a real fandom for years, which continues to feel odd. I'm watching plenty, just not settling all the way in to anything, and not quite wanting to sink into old fandoms either.

The last time I posted was about Leverage; I kept going with that rewatch and it made me really happy. If you're thinking about revisiting it, I highly recommend it!

Stuff I'm currently watching: The Good Place, Killjoys (although I'm behind on the latest season), The Expanse (show only, haven't read the books yet), Great British Bake Off, Grey's Anatomy (through part of s12, working my way forward to live. I blame mollyamory entirely for this one), MCU, Grace & Frankie, and a bunch of other stuff I'm forgetting. Finally saw Venom this past weekend!

Anyway, hi, am alive!

Still catching up, and these two make a nice pair. Cutting them because combined they're a little long.

gwyn asked: ( How did you start vidding, what prompted you to make that first vid and say to yourself, we could do this? How did you start vidding with therienne? Was it like a magic moment of creation for you both, or did one of you have to convince the other? )

And for marycrawford: ( talk about a vid that you (with or without Therienne) wanted to make, but for some reason, it didn't work out. A head-vid can be a beautiful thing too, so help us see it! )

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Full list here, with one spot still open!

for BEARS.

I'm behind again, and am going to stay that way for a few days -- I'll shift the questions out a bit and tackle them after the Yuletide deadline.

(I'm behind on comments, too, but hopefully won't have to push them out quite so far *g*)

Another make-up post! This one was meant for December 13.

for princessofgeeks: How you came to compile your absolutely kickass and indispensable handbook for the Gateverse.

Believe it or not, it was kind of an accident.

And oh, hee -- this has morphed in my head over the years to just "I wanted to write SG-1 and was intimidated by the sheer amount of information in the show, and wanted to have a way to look things up by subject rather than episode (which is how existing sites, like the fantabulous rdanderson.com, tended to organize things)." But I've been poking at old versions of the site and just came across a note that says that I started it because I wanted to know what Jack's medals were, which sounds... exactly right.

But the other is also right, if less specific. I'd never been involved in a military-based fandom and didn't have a strong grip on the military stuff, and for all I've been an SF fan forever, I'd never written any before. Plus there were lots of characters to keep track of. I wanted information at hand to look things up as I needed to when I started writing, and going by episode was too cumbersome for me. I wanted things organized by subject so I could see at a glance all the times Jack got injured, or whatever.

So just for myself, I started organizing some vital stats on a webpage so I could get at it from anywhere; I think the very first one was just a plain list. Eventually I organized that into a nice little table, and I think that's the point at which I told a few friends about it, since I knew they were also writing SG1 and thought it might be useful for them.

Then a while after that, someone on a list asked a question, and someone I'd never heard of linked them to my page. Oh dear god. *g* I'd never actually intended it for broader public consumption; it wasn't that good! I'd never even linked to it from my main page. But clearly it was public now, and I had two options: buckle down and make it better, or take it down quietly (at that point, there was still some info on it basically taken directly from other sites -- when this was a personal project, I wasn't worried about that, since I knew I was using those sites for reference, just reorganizing the notes a bit. So I didn't have disclaimers or whatever up.)

I enjoyed the taking notes and organizing info, though, and honestly it was really happy-making to see people getting use from the site, so I decided to keep going with it. I reworked everything that I'd borrowed with my own notes/observations, I expanded things, I started putting updates pages up.

Note-taking got steadily easier and more complicated at the same time: I went from tapes and a pen&paper to a TiVo (pause and rewind, omg yay) and eventually a laptop (no more transcribing!), then DVDs and a better laptop. Easier and easier! I built myself templates for as much as possible, so I could just plug things in as I went through episodes. But the easier it got to focus on tiny details, the more tiny details I wanted to focus on.

I went from tracking major things happening to the main characters to tracking everything that happened to everyone, every race, every planet, every Earth-based organization, every bit of technology, every scrap of alien language. It originally took me a couple of hours to take notes on an ep, I think, and then another couple to transcribe and format the info to put up. By the end, it was taking me 5-10 hours per ep for notes, and several hours for formatting/inserting into the site (which meant not just putting the info in its own slot, but crosslinking it anywhere it needed to be crosslinked, keeping the Site Index updated with new terms or additions to old terms [like new SG teams, new people in established races, new tech], repeating everything in a structured, easy-to-read format on the Updates page -- there was lots of detail work).

I revamped and/or relocated the site every couple of years, trying to make it easier to navigate and more useful for people. I was really set on keeping it all on one page for many years, though; I didn't have a search engine, and I think I wanted people to be able to just ctl-f to whatever they needed. When I started breaking things out, it was sloooowly.

I loved it; it had become my main form of fannish engagement (I wound up barely ever writing a word of SG-1, I was so caught up in the canonical details of the show), and I just really loved being useful to people. I tried hard to keep the site shipping-neutral, and tried hard not to present my opinions as facts; I included them when I felt strongly about something, but I tried to make sure they were clearly marked as opinions in that case. When it got too unwieldy to include SGA information, I revamped the entire site into CSS and created two versions, one for each show (oh my god, coding a site that big and sprawling, all written in plain html, into CSS -- it is not fun. But for a while there, I was really good at coding basic CSS! Okay, it wasn't good CSS, it was kludgy and odd in spots. But it mostly worked, and I think the site looked cleaner and easier to read.) That took months (I was starting from less than zero, and there were a lot of failed attempts), and that put me months behind on eps. So I spent the next year trying to catch up, and failing, and burning out. Which made me cranky, because seriously, I cannot tell you how much I loved working on that site.

At some point I decided, okay, instead of just failing to catch up, I'm going to take a break, and let myself not worry about it for a month or two. I was clearly burned out and needed to recover. I spent the next several years absolutely convinced I was going to go back to working on it, any day now, and just utterly unable to face starting, because in the meantime I'd rediscovered the rest of fandom. I was reading fanfic again; I was watching vids; I was watching tv and reading books. And I had so much to catch up on in terms of notes for SG-1 and SGA that I knew it would take over my fannish life again. (I was also suffering from an undiagnosed sleep disorder that meant I was beyond exhausted all the time without even realizing it, so looking back on it, it's no wonder I couldn't face the effort it would take to pick it back up.)

And by that time, there were SG wikis, and all kinds of other resources out there. My site was no longer necessary the way it had been originally; people could easily find out whatever they wanted. So it languished, and I've largely stopped feeling guilty about it.

But hey, for what it is, it's pretty complete and useful, and it's not bad for something I started completely by accident, because I didn't want to forget how many times (and when) people got injured. *g*

Every now and then I've had a moment in other fandoms where I wanted to start it all up again for something new; the urge to catalog ALL the details can be really strong for me. But I think the SG Handbook is going to stand alone. <3

( Okay, I'm hijacking this a bit for my own purposes here - I'm figuring how and when I changed things, with links to old versions where I have them )

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Full request list here, still open!

For cesperanza: Why one vid a year, why??? How do you know what fandom? Is it compulsion? a list? the song?

Sometimes it's two! One year it was three! ... Okay, that was the first year we made anything, and it was a fluke. *g*

But yes, okay, most years it's one vid. We don't do it on purpose. It's more a combination of things: we're hugely deadline-driven, we're entirely song-driven, and we have limited vidding time.

We basically only vid for cons, which works out to "we vid for Vividcon"; I think we've released two vids at Escapade in 12 years, and everything else has been Vividcon. It's also really hard for us to vid for a con we're not going to be at; we want to see the reaction. So years that we don't go to a con, we may very well not produce anything, despite making the attempt; there's just not enough push to finish if we start having problems.

We can't start until we have a song; neither one of us understands how people decide on an idea and then go looking for a song that matches it. We do have a small pile of songs we've collected over the years that we want to make a vid to someday, but mostly we get inspired by things we hear during the year. We send things back and forth to each other, and at some point something sticks. But because we're deadline-driven, we usually really only start *focusing* on songs in February or March, when we start thinking about that year's VVC. It's completely normal for us not to have a song, and thus no idea for a vid, until March and sometimes even April. (We start getting twitchy if we don't have anything by April.)

We never know the fandom till we have the song. The odds are extremely high it'll be something we're currently invested in, but we watch a lot of stuff and it could be any of it. We generally both gravitate toward the same fandom for a given song; sometimes we don't, but one person's idea will match it better, or they'll have a better story idea, or whatever, so that fandom takes over pretty fast. I think there's only ever been one where we went back and forth on the fandom almost up till the moment we started vidding (Haunted, which could have been a Dead Zone vid instead of Odyssey 5 - but I think we made the right call there).

We also do sometimes hit the barrier of one of us loving a song, or loving it for a particular fandom, and the other one just not really feeling it. Those vids tend not to get made, just because it's easier for us to vid together, and generally there's *something* we can agree on out there. We're lucky in that our fandoms overlap to a ridiculous degree, as does our idea of what makes a good vid song for us to work with.

So once we've got a deadline and a song/fandom/idea we're both on board with, we start vidding. But we do our vidding at therienne's place, which has always meant I have to physically be there. So between our offset work schedules and the fact that I'm a raging introvert who needs lots of down time, that means that most of our vidding happens on Saturdays. On top of that, we're usually only good for about six hours of vidding in any given day (flat-out or broken up into chunks, doesn't matter -- it almost always adds up to six hours max). At six hours a week, it takes a lot of weeks to get a vid done! (Okay, it takes us a lot of weeks. I know other people can produce an entire vid in six hours, but we're slow.)

We do ramp up more as the Vividcon deadline approaches; I start going over both days on the weekend, and in the last couple of weeks, I go over after work more and more as well to get in at least an hour or two of tweaking things and working out technical issues. By the final week, I'm there basically every day for at least a few hours, more if I can manage it. But by the time we're done and uploaded, we're both so burned out that we don't want to see each other for a while, and then we get out of the habit of vidding. And then it's Yuletide, so it's writing time, and vidding gets punted till the next year.

A lot of years, we have more than one vid in mind, and will even start working on more than one. This past year, we had three going at once. It was very ambitious! But as the deadline approaches, we have to decide which one gets the most focus, and put the others aside. Some years we can still manage to get two out; most years, it's just the one. (If it's two, it's likely to be one more complex/involved one and one much simpler one. The one year we produced two complex ones -- Jerusalem and Walking on the Ground -- nearly killed us.) We don't forget about the ones we put aside; some stay on the back burner. But some were really only viable for the particular season we were in, and we never really touch them again.

So we sort of only vid for 4-5 months out of the year, a few hours at a time, usually on just one song (or narrowing down from several to one as we go), and then we take a really, really long break before we start up again. *g* Despite our repeated best intentions to not stop this time, which we say every year before we collapse from VVC deadline stress.

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Full request list here, still open!

for kass: reminisce about your first fandom. What did you love about it?

This ties back into the first post I did, about the people I encountered first in fandom: my first online fandom foray was Forever Knight, and I adored it. Part of it was the fandom itself; I really had a blast, met some great people, wrote my first fanfic there*. Part of it was just that it was the first time I realized that hey, I really am a media fan -- and wow, other people liked this weird little show that I loved! Cue fandom honeymoon phase. *g* I should say upfront, though, that this was nearly 20 years ago (wow, seriously -- next spring/summer will be my 20 year online-fandom anniversary), so I've lost a lot of details, and a lot of what's left has turned rosy in memory.

I kept going off on tangents here about my pre-FK background, but suffice to say that I didn't know any media fans, and was always surrounded by people who thought it was weird to want to watch a tv episode more than once, or tape it so you didn't miss an ep, or talk about a show in any depth. So to find people who not only liked to watch tv the way I did, but loved this one particular oddball, late-night show, was amazing. I only had a computer at work for the first year or two, so I would stay late and go in on the weekends to keep up with everything. I looked like the world's most dedicated employee. *kof*

Then I started going off on more tangents, because my remembered love of FK is inextricably linked to my delight in finding the internet and online fandom at large: the lists, the shared culture (and the bits that weren't shared), using tools like IRC and FTP, putting fannish images into a rotating screensaver, realizing that the lists were full of women -- not exclusively, but there were a lot of women, and it was so rare for me to find women who liked the things I liked.

So all of that was also great, and is a huge part of my memory of FK fandom.

I loved the way the fandom structured itself. The main list was Forkni-l. Basically everyone was on that list; that's where the fandom lived. There was also a fic list, fkfic-l, for gen fic, and an ftp archive to store the stories that got posted there; an erotica list, JADFE, for het or slash erotica (this kinda blew my mind, that you could get erotica so easily, and slash, too! that wasn't about Kirk and Spock!) (not that I was specifically looking for non-K/S, just that the only slash I'd seen in almost 15 years was K/S, and it was a revelation that people were writing it for other characters. IDK, I was sheltered or something.). And partway through second season, another list was created, FKSPOILR, for spoilery discussion, to keep the main list safe for people who didn't want spoilers. I actually joined the spoiler list! ... For about a day, then realized nope, I really didn't want to know. I was happier on the now-spoiler-free main list. (No, I didn't imprint at all on the idea that spoilers should be kept completely separate from general conversation, why do you ask?) And the different factions would form off-list "loops", where they could focus more intently on the characters or pairings they liked, without taking over the main list, which then got to stay for general show discussion that everyone could participate it. It was the best of all worlds, IMO; a really centralized place where the entire fandom hung out together, and lots of smaller offshoot areas where people could focus on their own thing.

It was a great gateway fandom for me all around. The list was active and full of people who liked all sorts of different things about the show, and that "we all like different aspects and characters" was built in to the list culture in the form of factions. Which I guess might sound confrontational? But they weren't; factions were just a way of letting people know what character or pairing you liked best, and it absolutely didn't mean you were bashing other characters or fans of other characters. (There was even a faction for people who liked all the characters equally.) It made it really weird for me later in other fandoms, when things started turning into "well, if you like that pairing, you must hate this other one!" because -- no? It's just not my thing, and that's okay. And there was never a limit on factions; as the fandom grew, the number of factions grew, as people liked more and more things. There was room for absolutely everyone. Not that people didn't some time get a little over-invested in their factions, but mostly the point was to have a good time with it.

The faction thing was also the first way I learned about fandom wars -- but not like any other fandom's wars. FK wars were giant round-robins where factions competed and collaborated and had a blast. They wouldn't have been nearly as much fun if everyone approached the show from the same direction.

Forever Knight also started me on the road to technical competence, as I learned how to hook two VCRs together to dub tapes so I could swap with other people (this seems so meaninglessly easy now, but it was hard then; I had an idea of what I wanted to do and knew it was possible, but the guys at Radio Shack were utterly flummoxed. And the cables I used were like nothing I've used since; they were specifically for dubbing VCR to VCR, and when I finally unhooked those two original VCRs last year -- no, really, they'd been hooked up all that time -- I didn't even recognize the cables). I learned what IRC was and how to use it, including things like dcc'ing files around, and then made friends with people in the IRC channel who I'm still in touch with nearly 20 years later, and it's still one of my favorite ways to get to know someone. I learned not to be shy about contacting people, whether to see if I could get tapes with the Canadian eps (which I could, and which I still have some somewhere <3) or just to strike up an offlist conversation.

I went to parties and gatherings, mostly with the local slash contingent, where we had a good time. My favorite memory of that was someone trying to figure out the name of the episode where a particular thing happened, and everyone saying no, that never happened, until someone realized she was talking about a Susan Garrett story. *g* (Seriously, very easy to mistake one of her stories for canon -- she created an OC that was so well-drawn that he had his own faction.)

I got my hands on whatever images I could; I just found a folder with a bunch of FK images from 1996 and 1997, although I don't know whether I got these over email, IRC, AOL chats, or what. They're mostly tiny by today's standards, but I loved them; I think I put them into a rotating screensaver. At least one is a digital manip. I'm grinning all over my face looking at them now; I remember them so well!

I got exposed very fast to the idea that TPTB were around and interacting with the fans; we had both actors and behind the scenes folks on the list, and while Nigel Bennett (Lacroix) never said anything publicly that I remember, Fred Mollin (the music guy) used to post fairly regularly. When Sony decided to try tie-in novels, they read the archive and hired three fanfic writers to write them. Really good training for the steady erosion of the fourth wall, when you get right down to it.

FK was the first time I heard people talking about songs that went well with particular fandoms; basically they were talking about vidsongs, although I'm not sure if I quite understood that at the time. I remember a conversation with someone where I was all "oh, huh, it never occurred to me to listen to music like that, to match it to a show" and them saying that once you start doing it, you can't help it, you do it all the time. I think I thought that was a little silly. hahaha. *looks at 'vid ideas' music directory*

Basically, reading that list was my favorite part of the day. I got into huge offlist conversations with people, often because we had different takes on things and it was fascinating to see how other people interpreted things. I found out about other fandoms there as well; there was a lot of overlap between FK and Highlander, especially, and people would mention what was happening on Highla-L or hlfic-l, not to mention all the crossovers. There was a little less cross-cultural stuff with the Due South list, but there was some, and I'm pretty sure FK is how I found the DS lists.

I loved that it was my entry into online fandom, and that it just kept going long after I'd moved on. I still recognize names as I move around fandom, especially if they're faction-based; there's just no mistaking a faction-based name for anything but what it is, and I smile every time I see one.

♥ FK ♥

* ahaha, no I didn't. I just made myself check. I'm always completely positive that I wrote my first fanfic in FK, and I'm always wrong; it was Due South, after which I wrote a couple of FK stories. But FK was such a well of firsts in other ways that it feels like the first one I wrote in, regardless of the truth. It is, however, the only fandom where I ever wrote fic under my real name. *g* At the time I figured I'd do gen under my real name and slash under a pseud, but that was way too unwieldy so I just switched to all-pseud, all the time. (back to post)

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Full request list here, still open!

A day late, but no less sincere! This was for December 6.

For torch: three characters in three different fandoms from your past that you have known and loved, max three paragraphs each (and minimum three sentences, I hope *g*). Pics would be lovely, of course. :)

(Sorry, no pics! I forgot, woe)

So many fandoms, so many characters! I was trying to figure out how to choose, and decided to sort of go by decade. I also discovered doing this that I tend to think in pairs, not individual characters, which I hadn't quite realized before. But I could separate out a few, at least:

Dan Fielding, Night Court (1980s)

Dan Fielding was a mammal. Wait, no, that's the eulogy. Okay, so, the thing is, Dan Fielding is skeevy. He just is. He's a brown-nosing suckup to anyone he thinks has power or authority; he's rampantly sexist and chauvinistic, and mostly only likes women when they're naked; he's a greedy, money-grubbing, manipulative prick; he's coldly indifferent at best to anyone he sees as beneath him (which is a lot of people).

And yet at the same time, I kind of really adore him. Almost all of that (except the "will sleep with anyone, anywhere, any time" part -- he's one of the most highly sexed characters I've ever seen) comes from fear and a desperate attempt to protect himself. He was raised dirt poor by dirt farmers (as he put it [paraphrased], "No, really. They farmed dirt.") who loved him dearly but never understood him; he was smart, ambitious, driven, and desperate to get away from them, down to completely denying his upbringing (until they actually showed up one day and he had to admit to it). He spent his youth and young adulthood scrabbling furiously to fit in with the moneyed class he so wanted to be a part of, and which scorned him. His parents were decent people that he wanted no part of, so he learned to be indecent at the same time he learned how to be proper. It's a weirdly compelling combination.

And over the series, as he learns to trust Harry and the rest of the courtroom staff (but mostly Harry), bits of his decency start shining through. He hates to let anyone know about it, but it's there. He's the only person who has the guts to tell Harry off when Harry goes self-indulgently off the rails. He's there for Roz when she has a really scary diabetic episode. He finds ways of connecting with all kinds of people he thinks he can't stand for one reason or another; he just can't maintain his masks 24/7, no matter how much he wants to believe those masks are the truth. And he loves Harry, so very much, even if it's hard for him to say. ♥

Ray Vecchio, Due South (1990s)

Oh, Ray. <3 I fell for him in the original CBS pilot movie for Due South, and that just never changed. He's another one who's soft on the inside and hard on the outside, but not in a clammish way; he's more like a porcupine, all sharp spiky spines sticking out all over to protect his soft underbelly.

He's sharp, sarcastic, cranky, easily annoyed, brash, endlessly generous, boundlessly loyal, utterly devoted to the people he loves. He's got a smile that just melts me. Watching him take care of his family, take care of Fraser, make sacrifices over and over to help (crawling out of a hospital bed to fly to Canada to help Fraser take down his father's killer; killing his beloved Riv to help Fraser, after giving up his longed-for Florida vacation also to help Fraser; handing his new-Riv money out to total strangers to support Fraser's filibuster in hopes of saving a building; mortgaging his house to pay Fraser's bail...) -- he's just amazing, and he hides it all behind that brash sarcasm, because he doesn't want anyone to know that he's a sweetie at heart.

I don't even know how else to explain him. I could have watched any number of seasons with him, snarking his way through all his deep affection for people, and never gotten tired of it. (And he loves Fraser, so very much, even if it's hard for him to say. *g*)

Bobby Hobbes, Invisible Man (2000s)

I almost didn't include Bobby Hobbes here, not because I don't love him like crazy, but because I named one of my cats after him. It starts to make it weird to type his name and not mean the furry one. *g* But I will just stick with Bobby here. Because Bobby is awesome. <3 <3

You don't think, when you're watching the pilot, that he's the guy you're going to fall for. He's kinda short, he's balding, he's kinda pudgy, he's not very articulate, he's awkward and uncertain and insecure about a lot of things. And yet at the same time, professionally? He's confident, assured, and absurdly competent, and that starts taking over. When he's in a place where what he wants is for people to like and respect him, he goes all wobbly and unsure; when he's in a place where he needs to be able to determine an assailant's location by the sound of the shot whizzing past, he's the best there is and he knows it. He's so self-assured that you think it's idiotic overconfidence -- until no, it isn't, he's really that good.

He comes pre-loaded with more issues than anyone should have to deal with; he's been kicked out of job after job as a result of those issues until he's scraping the bottom of the government-agency barrel by working for the Agency. He's known and mocked among other agencies because of his mental health issues; he's on medication and has been for a long time, and it doesn't seem to have always worked for him. But he tries! He sticks to therapy, he takes his meds, he knows the signs to watch out for. And even his deepest issues are about wanting to take care of people, to do good: he gets terribly, obsessively, outrageously, protectively paranoid for the people he loves. To the point that he stalks them to make sure nothing bad will happen to them. Which is not good, and he knows it's not good, and he tries hard to channel all of that into appropriate venues. But it means he's incredibly loyal and devoted, and when he loves someone he really, really loves them. And when push came to shove, when he'd been given a chance at what he considered true greatness, he gave it all up to save Fawkes's life. Because he loves Fawkes, so very much, even if it's hard for him to say. *g*

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Full request list here, still open!

For marginaliana: if you could commission the perfect piece of fiction, what would it be like?

Oh, this one's hard for me. I like surprises and discovery, and commissioning something would take some of that away. So it's not the sort of thing I think about, usually.

Although, oo, wait -- for profic, I'd commission The Door Into Starlight from Diane Duane. There's been a spot for it on my shelf for ages now.

But I suspect this is for fanfic, so. Hm.

If I were commissioning a desert-island kinda story, I'd go for something long -- really long, over 100,000 words, possibly a lot over. *g* Slash, with a slow-building relationship leading to a first time and then maybe establishing itself (or at least starting to), probably woven into a case/mission/other plotty thing -- doesn't need to be complicated, necessarily, just something so they're doing something (preferably together) as well as developing a romance. (I would far rather watch them open a restaurant together for 100k words, slowly falling in love between arguments about decor and bonding over the menu, than watch them go out to dinner on dates for 100k words, IOW. Although the dinner date thing is also good in shorter stuff!) (Also also, I loved The Larton Chronicles, so really, sometimes the plottier stuff just isn't necessary.)

(... I am very bad at this "what specific thing do you like" thing *kof*)

Okay, so, er, long, and maybe plotty and maybe not, but slash and romance. That's a start. I also really like warm stories -- no objection to hot, mind you, but warm is also key for me. I like cCharacters who have genuine affection for each other -- not just lust or even love, but like, too. Mutual respect and trust, either right from the beginning or growing through the story. (Actually, that goes for the like/lust/love, too -- it can grow, it doesn't have to be there from the beginning, depending on the characters; the moment when a character realizes that things have changed is one of my favorite things, done well.) I like fairly even power dynamics; I love competence, and when characters are competent at different things and respect each other for it.

I tend to like canon-based and canon-divergent stories best, but also certain kinds of AU, depending on the fandom; I'm not keen on most of the current popular AUs like high-school, college, barista, A/B/O, but others can really work for me if the characterization is there.

I love happy endings. <3

So: long/epic, maybe-plotty, slash, romance, warmth, affection, trust, respect, competence, a relationship that grows, first time. /tags

Other tropes are welcome in there, but that's probably the core of it. Mostly I'm a pretty vanilla sap who likes characters who like each other and want to make each other happy, who maybe have some (mis)adventures along the way.

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Full request list here, still open!

For james:

the first or one of the first people you encountered in fandom

This is cracking me up, because James is one of the first people I remember coming across online (which is the fandom I'm defining this as). *g* (hi James, I have known you foreeevvvver!) I don't think I ever said boo back then, though, other than probably sending in an age statement for JADFE (♥) So I'm not sure if it counts as "encountered" or not.

The first person I encountered face-to-face was a woman whose name I no longer remember, although I have visual memories of her and her home.

I was all about Forever Knight in those very early days, mostly lurking on Forkni-l, and someone offered to host people for... something. Season premiere night, maybe? Just general tape-watching? I don't even remember, but I decided to go, and showed up to find the house decorated in Raven images because she was a Ravenette. *g* I was pretty charmed, and we had a good time, even though I was the only person to show up, which was a tad awkward what with us not knowing each other at all. Those were the days when people actually did think that if you met a person from the internet in person, they would turn out to be an ax murderer, so it was nice to have that disproved!

I lost touch with her almost immediately, probably because I wasn't in her faction (much though I love Janette), so I wasn't hanging out on her faction loop at all. Someone posted to the main list about the list's IRC channel, I think on Efnet back then. I had no idea what IRC was, but the post included some instructions, so I got a copy of mIRC and logged on one night. It was great! Turns out it's one of my favorite ways to be fannish to this day, although now I tend to avoid public channels.

Back then, #foreverknight (that's an IRC channel, not a hashtag) was full of tons of people (for mid-90s values of "tons of people") chatting away pretty much 24/7. I got to know a bunch of people pretty well, enough that our conversations would start to dominate the main channel and annoy people, so we broke off into a private channel instead, where we hung out for ages.

And I'm still friends with a handful of them! (waves to eviltammy, ithildin, ninjababe). I've never met Ninj in person, sadly, but got together with Ith, Tammy, and a couple of other friends at Syndicon East in 1997 (that con was a vector -- for years and years later, I'd run across people and find out they'd been there, too); Tammy and another friend came to visit me for a few days at my place; Ith, Tammy, and that same friend and I all went and spent a week on Cape Cod one bright, cold November, where at least one waitress couldn't take it and had to ask us where we knew each other from, because we all had such vastly different accents. *g* And where we accidentally broke into a pirate museum. ♥

Off IRC, meanwhile, I was eventually hanging out with the UFfers, both online and locally. One of the oddest moments was realizing at an UFfish party that I was talking to a woman who went to the church where my cousin had been a priest, and that we'd both been at the same Mass at that church at least once. And she remembered the priest I remembered from my childhood, who'd switched from my parish to hers before moving on again later. It's a small, small world, people. Alas, I've long since lost touch with all of those folks; something about the faction itself, or the faction loop, or something, got less appealing to me, and I just moved on to Due South without much of a backward look at some point, really.

It's really amazing how many people I still know from the 90s in fandom, though. Although huh, thinking about it, I'm still in touch with people from FK, and people from TS (good lord, I still know so many people from TS!), and a few people from Pros, but I think the only people I still know from my DS days are those who moved on to TS about the same time I did. Strange.

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Full request list here, still open!

(I should really get more icons so I can use appropriate ones for these...)

Work is ramping up to ludicrously busy, Yuletide is nothing but bears, and I have backslid horribly into not posting unless I force myself to. So clearly it's time to do this.

At this point I suspect everyone has seen the setup a bunch of times, but just in case: pick a day (or ask me to pick it for you), and give me something to talk about. It can be anything from fandom-related (specific characters, storylines, episodes, recs, etc. -- I think fic isn't supposed to be involved in this, but I'm also willing to consider comment-fic-type prompts, although no promises) to life-related to pizza preferences to whatever you want.

Answers may be brief or not, depending on the subject. Also, I reserve the right to decline prompts that I don't feel equipped to meet.

Feel free to give multiple topics (with dates) if you want; it's not limited to one per person.


December:

01: too late!

02: terrio: probably too late! unless someone wants something short, fast What is your Platonic Ideal pizza? toppings, crust, deep-dish vs. flat, etc. (in under the wire!)

03: james: the first or one of the first people you encountered in fandom

04: dorinda: please talk about fanzines! For instance, maybe the first time you discovered them, your relationship to them, what you liked/didn't like about them, specific zines that might come to mind that were particularly good/interesting (or not)...just anything about zines that you care to share.

05: marginaliana: if you could commission the perfect piece of fiction, what would it be like?

06: torch: three characters in three different fandoms from your past that you have known and loved, max three paragraphs each (and minimum three sentences, I hope *g*). Pics would be lovely, of course. :)

07: eviltammy: cats! With mandatory pictures!

08: kass: reminisce about your first fandom. What did you love about it?

09: heresluck: Of all the vids you've made, which is the one where what you actually produced most closely matches what you wanted to do?

10: cesperanza: Why one vid a year, why??? How do you know what fandom? Is it compulsion? a list? the song?

11:

12: sholio: how about your favorite fannish trope? Or any one of them that you'd like to talk about. :)

13: princessofgeeks: How you came to compile your absolutely kickass and indispensable handbook for the Gateverse.

14:

15: justhuman: Tell me about Duke and Nathan and the fanservice that's gushing out of Haven

16:

17:

18: quarter_to_five: Fringe vs. Person of Interest (delayed a week for YT bears)

19: BEARS

20: BEARS

21: BEARS

22: BEARS

23: gwyn: How did you start vidding, what prompted you to make that first vid and say to yourself, we could do this? How did you start vidding with therienne? Was it like a magic moment of creation for you both, or did one of you have to convince the other? (delayed for YT bears)

24: BEARS

25: BEARS

26: BEARS

27: marycrawford: Pick a day for The One That Got Away: talk about a vid that you (with or without Therienne) wanted to make, but for some reason, it didn't work out. A head-vid can be a beautiful thing too, so help us see it!

28: mollyamory: Build your perfect fannish show (we have the technology!) out of all the things you love in fannish shows, and tell me how the main pairing would develop and progress.

29:

30: astolat: Talk to me about Harold/John! Especially Harold/John right now! (I totally want help with my own rowing.)


31: rhi: Yuletide story/ies you had no idea you wanted to read?