shadowscast

I just made a comment on a post by yourlibrarian, and when I looked at wall-of-text comment I'd written, I thought to myself: "hm, I guess that could've been a post in my own journal." So now it is!

Here's what I wrote:

Your mention of the (everything old is new again) ephemerality of TV inspires me to mention: LAST NIGHT, thanks to Netflix, I finally managed to watch an episode of Due South that I missed when it aired back in March of 1998. "Mountie on the Bounty"! It's an incredibly famous episode within the fandom, being both one of the slashiest episodes of the whole series, and an absolutely bizarre delight. So for the past 25 years I've been aware that I'd missed out! I even bought a DVD set at one point in the early aughts, only to discover that what I'd bought was season 4, and the episode in question (well, actually two episodes, it was a two-parter) was the finale of season 3. DVDs were expensive and I didn't have a lot of disposable income back then, so I didn't go back and buy season 3.

Now, obviously if seeing this episode had been a TOP priority for me, I could have found a way to do it sometime in the past decade for sure. And I didn't. But I guess it was simmering away at the back of my mind, because a few weeks ago when I saw that Due South had appeared on Netflix, the first thing I did was play the first minute of the episode so that it would pop up in my "recently watched" menu. (I didn't have time to watch the whole thing immediately, since the end of the college semester is a busy time for me—I had a lot of final assessments to mark). And then, last night, I finally watched it!

And was it worth the wait? YES. :D It was wonderful.

It was also an unexpectedly emotional experience. When Due South was first airing on TV, I watched it with my mom, and it's been just a year and a half since she died. So watching the episode made me think about her, and how she adored the main character, the impossibly polite and handsome Mountie.

So, ephemera. Nothing lasts forever, including us. But I'm very grateful to live in an age of miracles and wonders where I could finally, 25 years later, watch this wonderful episode of TV.

I received abrupt, sad family news yesterday from my dad: my aunt (my dad's brother's wife) was killed on Thursday in a traffic accident. She was 61.

I'm posting about it here, in particular, because she was fannish: back in the Livejournal heyday, she blogged there as suchthefangirl.

She and my uncle got married when I was 9 years old. They lived on the west coast of the United States, and I lived on the east coast of Canada, so I didn't get to know her very well when I was a kid. But then when I was in my mid twenties I decided to fly out and visit them for a week. When I arrived at their apartment, my aunt was watching an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer with her two daughters, my cousins (who were 8 and 10 at the time). "Hi! We'll greet you properly at the end of the episode!" my aunt said, and I knew instantly that she was my kind of people. :D

Later that day, my aunt and I got talking first about Buffy, and then about fanfic, and we discovered that we had a mutual love of fanfic in general and slash in particular. After that, for the rest of the visit, whenever we had a spare moment, she showed me episodes of her beloved show Sports Night, which she loved for the slashiness. We had wonderful discussions about Buffy, about Due South, about Battlestar Galactica. (Including some lively debates about the new vs the old; I'd come in via the new show and was in love with Starbuck; she'd never warmed up to the new Starbuck because she was in love with the old Starbuck/Apollo as a m/m slash pairing.)

She was the first of my relatives of my dad's generation who I really connected to as a friend. I can't believe she's gone.

Hello world!

I know I haven't posted in ages. I'm enjoying hanging out on Discord chatting fannishly about The Umbrella Academy on pretty much a daily basis, which is fun, but a very different kind of mode of interaction than what we do here. Conversations there are in real-time; they're fleeting and ephemeral (everything is archived but scrolling up is a pain in the ass, so it's generally not tempting to back-read very far).

Anyway, I do have some news! I've now completed my third TUA fanfic (although it's not all up on AO3 yet; I'm posting a chapter a week and I still have two chapters to go).

And I ended up commissioning a fan artist who I knew through the Discord server to make artwork to accompany one of the chapters! This is something that I'd never done or even thought of doing before. It occurred to me a) because I knew they were taking commissions and trying to save up for a new iPad, b) because I loved their art style, c) because I knew they were reading the story, and d) because there was a particular moment in the story when one of the characters took a selfie, and it was supposed to be very cute, and quite a few people commenting on that chapter mentioned the selfie, and I suddenly thought "Hey I wonder if that could actually work as an image?" So I presented the idea to Squish, the artist, and she said that it was feasible, and here we are!

The process itself was even fun; she sent me sketches while the art was in progress so I could give feedback, and it was so cool to see the image taking shape.

Anyway, the art is behind the cut if you're curious.

( The image is moderately nsfw, just so you know! )

And if you're curious about the story, here's the info and link!

Title: Roll For Damage
Rating: Mature
Pairing: Klaus Hargreeves/Dave Katz
Summary:

Dave is new in town, and looking for a way to make friends. His coworker, Vanya, invites him to join the Dungeons & Dragons game she runs for her siblings.

She warns Dave that her family can be a bit much, but nothing could have prepared Dave for the experience of meeting her brother Klaus.

(Dave might be falling in love with a manic raccoon nightmare boy.)

(This is a no-powers AU in which Dave somehow exists as a 29-year-old person in 2019.)

So hey, I've joined an Umbrella Academy fannish Discord Server.

That's been quite a delightful time-suck for the past three evenings.

Also, I am amused at how my fannish life has come full circle somehow.

When I posted my personal fannish history post last year, I traced my history from mailing lists to message boards to LiveJournal to Dreamwidth, and placed the start in my early 20s.

I joined the Discord server a few days ago, and looked through the intro thread where everyone was posting their ages (it's an 18+ server), and I discovered that I was literally the oldest person there by at least a handful of years (I'm 42; the next-oldest person on the thread was 36, and there were a whoooole lot of 18, 19, early-20s folks). So that was a little head-trip. And it reminded me of when I joined my first fandom, Once A Thief, and I was in my early 20s, and I felt so young because most people in the fandom were in their 30s or 40s.

I was discussing this with some people on the Umbrella Academy Discord (after one of them told me that I was the same age as her mom, LOL), and some of the early-20s folks were saying that they felt old in fandom, because there were a lot of high-schoolers in their fandom. They expressed surprise about my first experience, where I was the young odd one out while in my 20s, and somebody suggested that it might have to do with the fandom. Which is for sure at least partly true, but then I realized a bigger factor, which is that: back then, teenagers weren't in online fandom because they didn't have internet access! (I got my own private internet connection for the first time in grad school. And that's when I started posting fic.)

Anyway, I went away and pondered all this.

And then I remembered something.

I discovered fan fiction when I was in university, and started posting fic when I was in grad school. So I tend to mark that as the beginning of my participation in online fandom.

But when I do that, I'm forgetting something.

When I was fourteen years old, my family got internet access. (This was in 1992; we were early adopters, because in fact my dad was a computer programmer; that was his job.) And on the shared family computer, I was allowed to go on irc. And what did I do on irc? I talked about Elfquest comics.

Yes indeed. Let me repeat this for emphasis: My first online experience was in 1992, when I was 14 years old, going on irc to share my Elfquest theories and headcanons with strangers on the internet in ephemeral chatrooms.

So ... 28 years later, I land on Discord and look around and realize: oh my gosh, this is basically still irc.

(I shared this insight on the server too. And mostly everybody was like, "what is this ancient irc technology you speak of?" But one person was like, "omg, you are riiiiiight." Heh.)

So hey! A short little bit of speculation under the cut; spoilers for The Umbrella Academy season one (specifically S1 E9).

( Read more... )

Now that I've finished writing my own first Umbrella Academy fic, I'm interested in diving in and reading other authors' takes on the universe.

Do any of you out there happen to have any recommendations for fics in that universe that you've read and enjoyed? (Post-season one is fine; I know that most of the currently-existing fics will have been written before season two came out!)

If you do, please leave them in the comments!

Behind the cut: links to a couple of Umbrella Academy fanvids I just watched and enjoyed!

( Spoilers for Umbrella Academy Season 2 )

As I've mentioned before in this space, I've been doing a Sense8 rewatch with the_shoshanna.

Today we watched the first half of the two-hour special that went in between season 1 and season 2, "Happy F*cking New Year". Which included the birthday dance party sequence.

And it occurred to me: I don't think that any other show I've seen has ever achieved such incredible sustained periods of transcendent joy. Like, going on for minutes and minutes, and bringing happy tears to my eyes and giving me ALL THE FEELS.

(I think this show also had the most complicated filming situation of any show ever. Filming not episode-by-episode but continent-by-continent, flying the entire cast from city to city to film the ends of sentences that they'd started months ago in different time zones. I am in awe.)

So, you know the phrase "What you lose on the swings, you gain on the roundabouts?"

I know that its idiomatic meaning is that losses in one area are generally offset by gains in another. But I just looked up its more literal meaning (see this Quora thread) and I was terribly disappointed to learn that it's not actually about conservation of momentum, as I had always assumed that it was!

Hey there, world! I'm doing something that I've done only 3 times before in my life: starting writing in a new fandom.

I watched S2 of Umbrella Academy over the past week, read some fic, and started to have a plot idea of my own.

Tentatively, carefully, I gave myself permission to write a few sentences. What would it be like to write in these new voices? These new locations? Other than a brief foray into That '70s Show twenty years ago, every fic I've ever written has either been Buffyverse or Once A Thief.

Well, 48 hours later, I'm more than 11 thousand words in. That's how I roll, apparently!

When I finish it—if I finish it—I'll post it to AO3 and link from this journal. WIP-posting is not a thing I'm up for at this stage of my life. For one thing, I like being able to go back through the whole text to massage it and/or change serious plot details at any time; for another, the guilt I would inevitably feel after posting a bunch of chapters and then stalling is not a thing I want to do to myself. (I've enjoyed many a stalled WIP as a reader, in my time. But as a writer, I feel awful about them.)

Anyway, for now this is a fun ride.