throbbing light machine

I've been making The Boy watch through Classic Battlestar Galactica on Hulu with me, and falling in love with the show all over again. I had a thing for it back in high school; somehow it totally feel through the cracks in my fanbrain until now. I've got tiny little hearts love for it. Love that is full of sighs and nerdery. Seriously passionate love.

( Apparently, I've got surprising amounts of things to say about this show. Who knew? )

I love Solstice. Maybe it's a function of a Northern Michigan childhood, I don't know - but somehow I always feel, Solstice morning, as if a tremendous weight has been lifted from me, as if I am free, as if I can fly.

And this year it coincides with my post-yuletide-uploading happy, so I'm all smiley. Seriously, you guys, do you all have any idea how wonderful you are? Today I'm amazed by fannish power and ingenuity: not only did we write all those bloody Yuletide stories - not to mention recording all of the podbangs! - but we built the sites that hold them. This year, Yuletide is on our own servers. And I'm just overwhelmed by how cool this entire enterprise is. Not only are the sisters doing it for themselves, they're also ridiculously smart, innovative, and artistic.

Hay guise? I've got spare Dreamwidth codes for anybody who wants to come over to the sane/nondiscriminatory place.

Ho wow! I has an AO3 account!

Fwrrrr! New TWC issue! Yay yay yay! (Congrats, everybody with published articles, y'all rock hard)

Okay, so apparently deadlychameleon established here that Ogas and Gaddam do not have either IRB approval or the support of Boston University. Which removes them from the academic sphere.

So here's my question: tactically speaking, what do we do now? I mean obviously we flame them and spam them and people are starting to write some kinda awesome RPS and that's all happymaking, but can we do something to kill their book deal? If this had been an academic matter, the protocols on that would have been clear. Who do we need to be emailing at Dutton? Can we put a stop to this, or do we have to settle for just doing as much damage as possible?

I keep feeling like I'm not the fan everybody's looking for, at least wrt the warnings debate. Because while I'm fortunate enough to not have any real-life triggers, I also prefer my fic plastered with warnings and spoilers of every sort.

I do this with all narrative, actually, because I don't like suspense, and I find the first reading/viewing/hearing of a piece to be the least interesting. I connect much harder to characters once I know where they're going - and often I love sequences in hindsight that bored me the first time around, because I've since fallen in love with the people in them.

I also have fairly ironclad characterizations and interpretive patterns - so what ratcreature's been talking about with the deeper issues relating to the Blair Sandburg haircut warnings definitely applies to me. I often have a very inflexible vision of canon - I'll read exceptionally good fic that falls outside it, but I'll put up with a lot more mediocrity when my preferred tropes are active. So my Daniel Jackson needs to be a gentle civilian geekboy, and my Jim Kirk is really damn smart and personally withdrawing, and my Frodo Baggins is unquestionably an adult as opposed to a teenager, and my Faith Lehane is something more than an evil bitch, and my Edward Elric is weird about his little brother.

Most fics that deviate from those characterizations get closed out of - they have to be really, really good for me to keep reading. And I like it when it's fairly obvious from the outset what character facets particular writers subscribe to, because I hate it when I read far enough in to get invested in the plot before I find out that an author's characterizations are just too different from my own for her story to work for me. And when warnings, descriptors, summaries, and author's notes give me such information right upfront, well, the happier I am.

I realized, in talking with my beta about my (almost finished I swear!) big postquest LotR fic, that the direction of the ending is not actually obvious in the narrative climax. And I thought about trying to hide the outcome, to keep any eventual readers in suspense. But then I realized that I would absolutely hate it if such a thing were done to me - particularly, in this case, because the question at hand involves the Grey Havens, which are traumatic enough that I need to have fair warning going in if they're going to happen as read. If I read through a whole novella thinking that there was hope only to have it snatched away from me - or vice versa - I remember, about two years ago, reading Middlemarch for the first time having only previously done Eliot's depressing stuff. I was sure until the end that everybody was going to die horribly, and I was shocked when they didn't. And I was less involved in Dorothea/Will than I might have been otherwise, because I was bracing myself all the time for a blow that never fell.

At any rate. As a rule, I don't click through to stories that don't have posted summaries, warnings, and indicators as to length. I want specific data before I commit! Am I really that unusual?

eta: just to make clear, I'm not making a political argument, or one of social responsibility, though I think those are important. I'm arguing from the practical - if your story doesn't have information tags all over it, why would I click that link? I'm arguing that information tags are good for fanwriters and fanreaders, as advertisements.

Oof. Okay, that hiatus was unexpected sry. The psychology of moving is so weird - I've been being isolative because I've been just waiting down the days, but considering that I still have two weeks to go that may not have been the best idea.

I have, however, been consuming huge amounts of media. Last week we watched through all of Fullmetal Alchemist again, and made a move toward picking up Brotherhood - the new series being animated in Japan at the moment. Not sure if we'll watch it regularly, because I attach hard to voice acting and we watch FMA dubbed. (My personal rule for dub/sub has to do with the nature of the culture being portrayed, so Anglophiliac stuff like Howl or FMA is watched dubbed. I mean, Japanese doesn't really have the phonology to pronounce the main characters' names!)

Fic rec: In Living Memory, by cryogenia. Elrics-centric prison!fic AU. The good stuff.

Regarding DreamWidth - I expect to get a code on the 30th, and I do think that I'll eventually move over there. I'm not really worried about subscribe/access, because I very rarely flock and I don't use filters, and when I do flock it just tends to be for emo stuff or employment info that isn't 100% yet. When I do move, I will be redirecting comments - but since I don't flock, it should take the exact same number of clicks to comment there as it would to comment here. DW says that they'll have it worked out so that I can integrate flists, so I'm not dropping anybody either.

But I am moving, because I believe in DreamWidth. And I guess because I feel like it's time. But also because of what afterthree says here about monetization. I am sick of being their user-generated content. I don't like it when people try to sell me, instead of selling to me.