I am dog! I drive car!
In my first 700 days working at a major publication, I received over 800 threats. They’re tucked away in an archive folder, hopefully never referenced. I consider this an unfortunate but normal part of my job, a risk of science communication.
Not everyone who does science in public runs into this problem, but it’s almost impossible to predict the triggers. The reasons I deserved to die included aliens are real, the Earth is flat, Pluto is a planet, and of course, anything to do with women in science.
Sometimes I should die for making a homonym slip, or for using Canadian spelling. Once, I was condemned because I called the Cygnus spacecraft “cute” as an excuse to talk about its newly-designed yellow umbrella solar panel.
As science communicators go, I’m fairly low profile. My best articles hit a quarter million views – nice, but nothing compared to the science superstars. My beat is equally innocuous – very few people get riled up by gorgeous astronomy, and I’m careful about when I venture into politically hot topics.
Q. Bi the way?: I recently came out to my parents as male-to-female transgender. They were understandably shocked, and it took a while for them to come around. At the time, one of my father’s primary comforts was that I identified as a lesbian. I wouldn’t be dating a guy. At the time it seemed true—any interest I had in guys was purely sexual, nothing romantic. Now, after months of hormones under my belt, it’s fuzzier. I feel like I could develop romantic feelings for a man. I generally prefer other women, but could fall for the right guy. Do I come out to my parents as bi, and steal my father’s silver lining? Or should I wait to cross that bridge if or when I get to it?
A: There’s something tragically comic about your father saying to himself, “Well, at least she’s a lesbian” as some sort of solace. I’m glad that your parents have come around. I’m of the opinion that it’s better to come out before a relationship “forces” your hand so that you and your family have time to adjust and discuss it before introducing a new boyfriend into the mix. “Mom, Dad, I’m actually bisexual” is a challenging enough conversation; “Mom, Dad, I’m actually bisexual, and this is David” is varsity level. Tell them as soon as you feel ready to introduce the subject. Your dad will cope. Plenty of men have daughters who aren’t lesbians, and they’ve all survived.
Friend of The Toast Jess Zimmerman wrote a FICTION.
Rembert on Hillary’s recent attempts to woo black voters:
“I thought we’d get that talk from Bernie, but it was Hillary,” the woman said as she took her seat in the restaurant. The man with her nodded his head in agreement, and then they sat in silence, attending to the world in their cell phones.
“Hey, soror,” a woman half-shouted a few minutes later, as she scooped food into her Styrofoam takeout box. The seated woman looked up, smiled, and responded, “Oh, hey, soror, you see Hillary?”
“She was real good, right,” the woman making her plate said, now at a different food station. All three nodded their heads, almost causing me to join in even though I was not a part of the conversation. All of this took place at Manna’s, the self-anointed “Best Soul Food Restaurant in the Village of Harlem.” I religiously get a four-vegetable plate there whenever I go to an event at the Schomburg Center, the New York Public Library’s hub for black culture, which sits on the corner of 135th and Malcolm X.
The People v OJ Simpson, Nicole’s favourite show, which she watches in REAL TIME every Tuesday night, continues:
This episode really presses upon the cliché that lawyers can’t be trusted, particularly when it introduces Alan Dershowitz (Evan Handler) and F. Lee Bailey (Nathan Lane). Both start out vehemently (and publicly) asserting that O.J. is guilty, but are easily persuaded to join his defense “dream team” with nothing more than weak flattery from Robert Shapiro. It’s almost as disconcerting as Robert Kardashian constantly referring to O.J. as “Uncle Juice.”
Both the defense team and the prosecution are wrapped up in trying to combat the onslaught of tabloid press. Tabloids — and the fact that O.J. has become a mainstay in their pages — seem to fuel the fire from all sides of the case. Everyone is concerned about “cash for trash.” The confident and cocky Marcia Clark quickly loses steam after an ace news conference when she realizes that witnesses like Jill Shively, who claims to have seen O.J. driving away from the scene of the crime, are damaging the district attorney’s credibility by taking money to appear on tabloid TV. She’s trying to keep the media from defining the narrative, to keep the “tail from wagging the dog,” but it might already be too late.
oh wait broad city is my favourite show and it’s BACK:
Even while indulging in the things about millennials that are kind of terrible — Ilana, in the premiere alone, demonstrates both a tendency toward under-informed, self-righteous outrage and a passionate, deeply inconsistent code about what is and is not racist — Broad City taps into something positive about the most maligned, trend-storied generation of our time. Abbi and Ilana sprint all over New York with so much naive, ridiculous optimism. The series is a weekly shot of effervescence. Straight joy, no chaser. It’s a lovefest between two women who are unreservedly supportive of each other. (Ilana, to Abbi: “You look sexy and vivacious and artsy and like, young-wife material, but taut and tease-y still. It’s a perfect combo!”) It’s hilarious, weird, and vital.
Pizza’s strategy was brilliant: When a random Tumblr would write about “pizza”—either the food or herself—she’d reblog the post to her huge audience. Once, when a user wrote “so is tumblr user pizza god or beyonce,” she dug up the post and reblogged it with the comment “I’d like to confirm that i am both.” Users marveled at how quickly she responded, how you could “summon Pizza.” It made her seem all-knowing, but not superior. After Ellen DeGeneres ordered 20 large pies at the 2014 Academy Awards, Pizza dashed off the line “did u guys see me at the Oscars.” The post received almost 500,000 notes and was reblogged by John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars, with the comment “You looked great, pizza. Congrats on everything. I love you.”
I have only every cared about Mystrade fanfic, but Buzzfeed has rounded up some VERY delightful looking fics (rec your own in the comments!):
5. Twist and Shout by Gabriel and StandByMe
Word Count: 97,997
Completed: Yes
Author Summary: “What begins as a transforming love between Dean Winchester and Castiel Novak in the summer of 1965 quickly derails into something far more tumultuous when Dean is drafted in the Vietnam War. Though the two both voice their relationship is one where saying goodbye is never a real truth, their story becomes fraught with the tragedy of circumstance. In an era where homosexuality was especially vulnerable, Twist and Shout is the story of the love transcending time, returning over and over in its many forms, as faithful as the sea.”“I usually don’t cry very often, but this fic still brings me to tears a year after finishing it.”
Submitted by haleymdavis1652 and others
Please enjoy this thread:
Comment deleted for caring too much:
I imagine this is fake, but what. if. it’s. not.
This didn’t make it into the roundup last night, but SBNation’s deleted Holtzclaw profile is a real fiasco.
Maybe I don’t read enough really bad long-form pieces, but that profile was so weird! It’s in the uncanny valley of naive and deliberately obfuscating. Like, the journalist clearly figured out that these sorts of pieces often use the dramatic juxtaposition of people’s impressions with reality, but he hasn’t figure out how that actually works. So he just sort of strings together feeble defenses of the “but he was such an upstanding athlete — I mean, except where he probably definitely used steroids and continually lied about it — but I mean, what a gentleman! There must be a mistake” as if they are serious objections, with a couple of weak sentences about what Holzclaw was actually convicted of doing interspersed here and there. It kind of read like an Onion article, to be honest.
No, it’s just garbage. Compounding the shittiness is that SBN has actually done good work in the vein of “complex profiles of shitty people” in the past; this Mel Hall piece was great.
“He probably didn’t do it, because there are a couple of people in the world who don’t believe he had it in him, but if he did do it, it’s probably because he didn’t make the NFL.”
Maybe I don’t read enough really bad long-form pieces
That seems like a solid life choice, tbh.
That was a real huge fuckup, and tremendously disappointing coming from SBN (by which I really mean, tremendously disappointing coming from Spencer Hall, for whom I have a ton of respect). I thought Spencer’s apology was good, but the fact that that article made it to print at all is a serious problem for the entire editorial staff there, especially if, as he says in the apology, it did so over the protests of senior editorial staff (I’m not even entirely sure what that means, or how that would possibly be overruled).
That’s the part I found most interesting! Was it just one person? If it was, why was that person not listened to when another person might have been heeded? If Spencer was on vacation (as I’ve read but am not sure if that’s true) was there confusion over what to do in a case like this?
I only saw a few tweets about it and was horrified. Love this quote from the article Nicole linked: “[The profile] makes the mistake of thinking the unremarkable amateur football career of a vicious criminal is worthy of inspection, or tells us anything about the man.”
For the brave, the link to the cached profile: http://archive.is/O3Gub
I said on Twitter that this is what happens when your masthead is entirely white dudes, but it appears from that apology that people did protest and were ignored/overruled. (I have friends who’ve worked at SBNation, and I have no problem believing that to be the case.) The apology is good, if only for how unequivocal it is, but I’m more interested to see how they go forward and (hopefully) learn from their failure here. There’s definitely an interesting and in-depth piece to be written about rape culture, football, and the Holtzclaw case. But that definitely wasn’t it.
To be fair, this piece was written by a freelancer, but still! What were the editors thinking?!?
Which one would think would mean more oversight, not less.
One would think!
Sadly, one has thought many thinks which were wrong.
If yours is the response I read there were some people then responding to you implying that there were non-white-men on the masthead or was I misreading those? (I agree with you and also think it indicates a masthead of people without a lot of experience/actually aren’t that good at the “what do the readers want” part of editing.)
My Twitter name is the same as here, and I don’t remember getting responses like that, but this is my source on their masthead. Oddly enough, it’s now showing no one at all in charge of the site. Which explains a lot. (Or, more optimistically, shows they’re making some changes to leadership.)
SBN writers wrote in the comments thread to Hall’s post that the masthead was outdated, so they’re probably just updating it now that they’re getting flack for it.
I’m interested in how stuff like “Serial” and especially “Making a Murderer” affected it. MaM in particular didn’t even spend 10 seconds on the evidence against Avery — and it feels like this was trying to do something similar, but didn’t know how to, or didn’t realise that there’s a difference between “maybe Avery is guilty but WOW is there a lot of shitty stuff done by the police and the prosecutor and this disabled kid’s lawyer, and he’s been pretty consistent for a decade and also was wrongfully convicted before let’s focus on that part only” and “but he says he’s innocent and has friends and played football and there are no records of assault then”.
What’s also interesting, and I haven’t seen discussed and what could have made an interesting piece, is how rapists can appear to be nice guys who would never do these things — but it didn’t go there either.
No, it went into how sad he was that he didn’t have a chance at the NFL, how his parents love him and believe he’s innocent, how someone hired for the defense thinks he’s innocent, and how now his dreams are all gone. It’s so totally absurd.
There are so many problems here, and I’m pretty sure they’re perfectly encapsulated in this marvelous, mysterious sentence:
“Recovery, if there is any, appears to be something deserved only by the victims of a man whose belief in his innocence will apparently be, like the way he once pursued his dream of playing in the NFL, unrelenting, despite all evidence to the contrary.”
Did SBNation hire Tristan Tzara as an editor?
This sentence should be put in a museum. Classes should be held about this sentence. Frankenstein himself couldn’t have created a better monster out of innocent parts. Those poor commas.
It works better if you replace all the commas with line breaks and recite it at a really crappy open mic.
recovery
if there is any
appears to be something deserved only by the victims of a man
whose belief in his innocence will apparently be
like the way he once pursued his dream of playing in the NFL
unrelenting
despite all evidence to the contrary
Did SBNation hire Tristan Tzara as an editor?
I think Tzara would have made the sentence no more intelligible, but much more rhythmically interesting.
*contemplates what would be involved making an app for Tzara-ifying prose*
I agree with Deadspin that the piece was “an exemplary failure of the longform economy.” The author apparently covered Eastern Michigan U. sports while Holtzclaw played there, and that appears to have been his sole “qualification” for writing the piece.
I don’t know much about college or pro football, nor do I really care to, but I do happen to know a bit about Enid, Oklahoma, having lived there for a short time around the time that the Holtzclaws lived there, and the profile’s description of it as a “relatively prosperous city” certainly wasn’t true twenty years ago; it existed primarily as a garrison town for the nearby Air Force base (a fact oddly missing from the article, even though it explains why his dad, an AF vet, moved the family there), and does have its problems with drugs and prostitution. I’m also flabbergasted that the opinion of someone running a site called “JohnTV” is cited as a character witness for the rapist.
The article sure sounds like it was a piece of nightmare garbage, but mentioning SBNation on The Toast makes me feel like we’re just thiscloser to internet nirvana, a Jon Bois/Mallory Ortberg interview or joint piece.
***///MAKE IT SO, INTERNET GODS***
My Mom is a huge fan of broad city cause she says it reminds her of being young and reckless with her female friends in LA in the late 70s but with less easily available speed (if you want to know what my mom is like imagine Leslie Anne Warren from The Limey but worked a government job for 30 years)
Friends, if you like to read about random things on Wikipedia, may I recommend this entry on le Chevalier Saint-Georges? The first classical western composer of African descent, an accomplished fencer, also he was friends with the Chevalier d’Eon (often described as a transvestite, because a lot of our language about gender fluidity was not available in the 18th century, the Chevalier’s relationship with gender was complex), and also Pierre Choderlos de Laclos, AND the Prince of Wales, whom he befriended while trying to abolish the slave trade!
Here is a good paragraph:
“Early in July, walking home from Greenwich, a man armed with a pistol demanded his purse. The Chevalier disarmed the man… but when four more rogues hidden until then attacked him, he put them all out of commission. M. de Saint Georges received only some contusions which did not keep him from going on that night to play music in the company of friends.”[53] The nature of the attack, with four attackers emerging after the first one made sure they had the right victim, was obviously an attempt on his life disguised as a hold-up, arranged by the “Trade” to put an end to his abolitionist activities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chevalier_de_Saint-…
(someone posted this on tumblr):
and I thought John Boyega would be a good Chevalier Saint-Georges
in 1787, the Prince of Wales arranged an exhibition bout between Chevalier Saint-Georges and the Chevalier d’Eon, which some suspect that Saint-Georges threw, on account of how he already knew d’Eon from when they’d fenced when d’Eon was a captain in the dragoons.
My brain somehow read that as “Captain of the DRAGONS” and you got my immediate and complete attention
you’re thinking of the Chevalier d’Aeon, who is one of the main characters in my sweeping far-future Napoleonic space opera.
So I sent this to MrChouffe, and somehow it ended with him Googling “napoleonic x-wing” and finding out there’s a tabletop miniatures game for Star Wars spacecraft fights, so I’m never going to see my husband again, THANKS
I dream of a sweeping space opera with a late 18th century / early Napoleonic aesthetic. I think that maybe that is all I want to see in life.
Just out of curiosity because sometimes I think you and my husband share parts of brain, how many Patrick O’Brian editions do you have
hahah I have only got three or four of them I think, but I watched Treasure Planet roughly one thousand times, I don’t know if that has bearing
All of them, why do you ask?
Hey, it’s me, le Chevalier Saint-Georges, just wrecking suckers and playing my violin at the Queen’s private concert salon, what did YOU do with your life?
Yes please and thank you
The Stuff You Missed in History podcast has a really good 2 part episode about the Chevalier d’Eon.
Ooo, thanks for the rec. I only just JUST started to listen to Stuff You Missed… because I’ve had other podcasts I listen to & I kept putting it off. Now I feel like I’ve stumbled onto this abundance and I hardly know where to begin (of course I began with Elsa Lanchester and Bela Lugosi).
Thank you, I need to know more. I am hearing the largo from his concerto no. 11 as I write. (thanks to youtube). I did know about George Bridgetower, but this man had escaped my knowledge before this morning.
Sansa is too little to drive a car and that baby Napoleon lion is TOO LITTLE FOR WORDS
He just can’t wait to be king!!!
But his ROWR is BIG.
He’s so roly-poly! RWAR!
KITTY
(how much do I want to hug that kitten? too much to describe)
My lifelong dream is to hug big cats (lions, tigers–BIG CATS!) but I will happily start small with this little buster.
I don’t have much on my bucket list but “hug a cheetah” is definitely on there.
There’s actually a wildlife park near my Grandpa’s house where you can do that with lion cubs.
I once spent WAY TOO LONG watching a bunch of videos from The Lion Whisperer’s YouTube channel.
WHAT
My interest in hugging mammals is directly proportionate to the likelihood that they will then immediately eat me.
I have watched that video 10 times because he is 100% my cat: https://www.instagram.com/p/_K-F3jDlBO/
Sansa’s innocent face as her breath fogs up the window! “I am not wolfbear, I am friendly family dog! You can open window, is safe, will not eat you.”
Death by slobbery dog smooches possible. Even probable.
Is maybe best way to go. Happier than by hypothermia. Happier even than by chocolate.
Truth!
Not eating you.
Is chewing of love!
I saw such a wolfbear at the park yesterday it was amazing. I say this as a man who grew up with both wolves and bears (black and brown) wandering through my bark yard as a kid. I know when some one has mistakenly adopted a wolfbear.
We started watching People v. OJ last night and it was good and also surreal to watch? I was 12-13 for the original trial, so my memory is vague, but definitely there. I watched the verdict read during Spanish class, because it was a bigger deal than conjugation. I remember names of the people but not who they were or why they were important. Except Kato, because I will remember his weirdness until my dying day.
We just re-watched Clueless last week and I had completely forgotten Cher calls Josh Kato when she’s making fun of him for always being at their house! I wish that had caught on as slang for a hanger-on wastoid.
I use that line as a rejoinder for most any A Man says something nonsense! “Actually, Kato, that’s EXACTLY what it means.”
Lol, did you go to my Catholic school? They took us out of class for the verdict too. Why? Why do that? I still don’t understand!
Because it was a big deal! And probably because the adults wanted to watch.
Actually, I think it was because this was the very beginning of the ‘breaking news’ cycle, when TV would just stay on a news story for HOURS, and inspired the 24-hour news cycle and Wolf Blitzer making us all insane to this day.
The verdict was announced over the intercom at my high school, we got literally nothing done in typing that day.
We watched it in glee class! My thoughts on the matter were less that it was a miscarriage of justice (as everyone else, parroting their parent’s opinions, espoused) and more: why are we watching this in glee class?
I was the same age, but it was French class!
I do remember vaguely thinking Marcia Clark was probably getting a bad deal, in my nascent “girl power!” kind of way.
I don’t think I was aware enough, but I read that article yesterday someone linked about Clark and the sexist bullshit that went on, and am (2 decades too late) totally enraged.
I do remember during the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill thing (so I was maybe 9 or 10), I parroted some nonsense I’d probably heard from a male news anchor about her not being able to take a joke. And then I thought to myself…’why on earth did I say that? That’s not how I feel, when I really think about it.’ It was one of my first eureka moments about how the patriarchy/dominant ideology seeps into your inner monologue when you’re not looking, and you end up spouting bullshit you do not believe, especially if it seems like you will get approval from peers for it. Eye-opening. Now I’m hyperaware of how the media is presenting a story, rather than how the facts present it. Which has become a much more important skill since the advent of Fox News.
TBF, what use is a wedding dress after the wedding? It’s not like you’ll ever wear it again.
Pass it down to your kids/nieces in case they want to get married in it!
What if they’re completely different shapes then you, or the fashion has changed hugely? (My mother did not bother with a wedding dress, preferring a red blouse and skirt combo which she has since got rid of, although my sister did wear the skirt now and again in her teens.)
Well, you don’t *have* to (I’d only fit into my mom’s by means of clever alterations) but it’s nice to have the option. I mean, I know “family puts pressure on woman to wear mother’s or m-i-l’s wedding dress” is a trope, but sometimes it’s really what people want and it saves some money!
That is true! I think it’s just that my parents are super unsentimental about wedding stuff, so the thought of a wedding dress as a cherished heirloom that you wear for (partly) sentimental reasons is a bit alien to me. (If I get married, I suspect I will either get a charity-shop wedding dress or just wear somethng I already have.)
I wore my mom’s prom dress. Twice. She’d made it herself in the late 1970’s and I fit into it perfectly. And NOBODY had the same dress I did!
My mother got married in a weird, grey ruffly slip and a long wool skirt, which I borrowed to dress up as Edith Wharton on Author Day in 5th grade.
You and your mother are my heroes.
(She also told me that they got married at City Hall at 9 a.m. “when the hookers were getting arraigned”).
I wore my mom’s (floral, puffy-sleeved, long) bridesmaid dress from my aunt’s wedding to dress up as Martha Washington for a class presentation in 4th grade.
I intended to put mine on and prance about the house in it, but have never done so. Should get on that this weekend.
Things I will be doing this weekend. Although I have managed to wear my fascinator to vacuum.
this is why I bought a simple blue dress! It’s gonna be a fancy anniversary party dress for all the, uh, fancy anniversary parties we’re definitely gonna have instead of sitting at home alone drinking beers, hmm, yes.
By a dress you’d wear again? Or get it dyed/re-worked into something you can wear again?
(I say this, but then I know i’m gonna want the biggest fruffiest dress I can find and it will be impossible to wear again, I’ll just hang it in my wardrobe and admire it like I do with all my fancy clothes)
My grandma, who was relentlessly practical, got married in a dove-gray skirted suit and got a lot of use out of it. Gram looked very happy in all the pictures, possibly because her mom, who’d protested the engagement strenuously (“He’s going to be a missionary! Who’ll look after the farm? You’re going to move to China! I’ll never see you again!”) had finally accepted that this was happening, and managed to stop crying for the duration of the ceremony.
Re: big and fruffy dresses, my sister-in-law is a total barefoot hippie in spirit, whom I seriously thought might wear a long tie-dyed t-shirt for the occasion. And yet, she went with a floofy cupcake dress with a corset bodice. The siren song of the wedding industrial complex is a real thing.
My sister had hers cut down and made into my niece’s first communion dress, which I thought was a nice idea.
My mother had hers remade into a baptismal gown for my daughter. It was lovely.
BTW, I don’t even remember what I wore to city hall when we got our registered partnership, so I’m on team why-buy-a-wedding-dress-anyway.
Save it for kids or grandkids to be married in. Have it cut down to make a baptism gown or First Communion dress or use it to make other sentimental remembrance items. Donate it to a group that provides bridal gowns to impoverished women or sells them to raise money for other worthy causes, etc.
I initially wanted a non-white dress for that reason. But then my now-wife decided she wanted a white dress, and it was important to me that no one would think that only one of us was “the bride.” And I love my dress and am glad I bought it.
Mine hangs in my office closet, looking like a movie still from “Waiting for Miss Havisham.”
Also things I plan to do with wedding attire: Miss Havisham costumes FTW.
I really enjoyed thinking of an office *outside* the home for this scenario. Something with cubicles, maybe.
Get it shortened to cocktail length so you can look amazing like Jaya: https://twitter.com/jayasax/status/51563497257802…
Whatever I wear, I’ll reach the height of “amazing like Jaya” *sobs*
I know you were probably being self-deprecating and meant to put a “never” in there, but I love this comment the way it is.
I was, and it really bugs me that I messed it up.
This way it sounds like a belting anthem singing “I know I’ll make it someday!”
I haven’t actually had my wedding yet but I totally wore my dress to vaccuum the other day, because WHY NOT.
Imagine you answered the door to a courier or someone that, and they were completely thrown.
If only! I’m going to have to do it again on a day when I’m supposed to have a package delivered!
my wedding dress is a mid-thigh length shift made from this crazy silver and white italian fabric. i can wear it to parties if i ever go to any again.
My mom went and “preserved” mine while I was on my honeymoon, so it’s stuffed in a box looking like a life-sized headless torso. Best use is putting it in weird locations in order to spook people who aren’t expecting it. Like all my crap, it will probably just become my children’s problem someday.
(I seriously considered wearing my mom’s wedding dress, but she got it cheap at Sears in the 70s when Sears apparently sold wedding dresses, and she hated it. Despite saving it all these years, she basically forbade me from wearing it. We also still have my dad’s mom’s wedding dress, which is totally unfashionable shiny satin, but it’s really cool to have because it’s homemade and has a zipper down the front. My knowledgeable best friend tells me that zippers had basically just come into widespread use and my great-grandmother probably put it on the front to be braggy, like, “hey, fancy zipper over here.”)
I’ve always liked the idea of having a dress you can wear again with or without alterations. I’m short, anyway, so floor-length doesn’t work too well on me, so I always figured I’d go for tea-length. My mom did keep her dress, but she really didn’t get a say in anything about her wedding and is still bitter about it, so I wouldn’t ever wear the dress.
I think that the gift of a story like that to keep giving your sister a hard time about is the greater gift.
Plan a wedding dress bowling party with your friends, that’s what my sister did!
My mum cut up hers to make our baptism gown.
I’m not deeply attached to my wedding dress so I plan to sell it on kijiji.
Oh man though, have y’all ever seen one of those trash-the-dress sessions? I hate them so much because the attitude behind them is so privileged and wasteful but still oddly fascinating.
The only one I’ve ever seen is someone who did a photoshoot with her horse and it was an off the rack dress she got for like £200 anyway. And it didn’t even get ‘trashed’ in the end. And the photo’s were epic.
Make a SUPER FANCY quilt.
(I actually have no idea where my wedding dress is and I don’t really care.)
Mine sat in a bag for a couple years and then finally got “preserved” but they couldn’t get the giant red wine stain out of the back, and I ripped the armpits of the sleeves out while hugging everyone. I have no idea what to do with it since I have two boys and am not catholic.
Craft Projects!!!!!
zombie bride dress-up playtime.
pieces for a memory quilt.
comfy place for a cat to nap.
I’ve worn mine 4 times! 1) actual wedding, (2) wedding party for family held in my parents backyard so relatives wouldn’t be mad we got married in HI, (3) my friend had a fancy dress party I have photos from this one because another of her friends is a photographer, and (4) in the bridal party of another friend’s wedding which was her idea. Currently need to lose 15 pounds to fit in it again, but maybe someday. It is the prettiest dress I will ever own and I love it, so why not wear!
I got a crazy blue dress that looks more like I’m a runaway from a flamenco circus. However, I also managed to spill something (beer?) on the silk bodice at the wedding that didn’t come out in cleaning.
Still, I managed to wear it for Halloween this past year, and have plans to do an aerial dance routine in it at some point.
A wedding dress isn’t a dress, it’s a costume. Its “use” is to costume you for this occasion. Now, you may decide that you don’t want to spend $5 zillion for a one-use costume, but it’s still kind of pointless to think about it in terms of “how does this work out in terms of cost per wear?” like you would for another expensive item of clothing.
Oh, but that wasn’t the point of the question – it was in relation to the twitter conversation about Mallory forgetting to pick up her sister’s wedding dress at the cleaner’s, leading to it getting lost. I wondered how terrible that would be, since a) probably never wearing it again and b) her sister didn’t even notice that it was missing for year. But this thread has certainly enlightened me as to post-wedding uses for wedding dresses! I love all the stories and plans 🙂
Ah–the things I miss by not doing Twitter… though I do think it’s useful to think of a wedding dress as a costume rather than a piece of clothing.
My mother got married in a light blue kinda business looking dress. I wore it in a high school country musical.
The horror. The horror.
I bought an 80s wedding dress at Goodwill to use in my “Gothic Heroine” Halloween costume. The woman behind me in line kept asking if “I had a man”.
I wore my Nan’s wedding dress. She got married in 1946, when there were shortages of EVERYTHING, so her sister also wore the dress when she got married, as well as a friend of theirs. After my wedding my cousin, who works in fashion, took the dress and it gets worn in a touring historical fashion show she’s involved in, where they tell the story of the dress. It’s all pretty lovely.
This might be the best place for me to ask this question! My grandmother got married in a beautiful blush pink satin (I think) gown (“That dress was NOT white,” she said to my fascinated now-sister-in-law). They moved into assisted living last year and I grabbed the dress so it didn’t get tossed out because it’s still in amazing condition and is really beautiful fabric.
I want to have the fabric made into something for us 8 grandkids (3 girls, 5 boys), something that we could all wear or use. Something that could be special occasion but doesn’t have to be. I’d be outsourcing this as I am not talented in that direction myself, but I know there are likely to be many Toasties who might have great ideas.
A couple of my friends have re-worn their wedding dresses for cosplay purposes. Another dyed theirs purple and kept wearing it, but it wasn’t an obviously-bridal dress.
My current plan, which may change, is to find an ivory Gunne Sax dress from the 1970’s in one of the styles I like in my size and, if one doesn’t pop up on ebay once I start looking, having a seamstress friend of mine make one.
Worst case scenario, if I get my hands on the Gunne Sax, I have it cleaned and then put it back up on ebay for someone else to wear to THEIR wedding!
Dog, you can’t drive a car, you silly puppers!
I’m utterly fascinated by “The People vs. OJ Simpson”. I’m old enough that I was a young adult at the time this bonkers horseshit was happening, and it’s been quite a trip to be reminded of how bizarre all of it was. Bizarre and, at the end of the day, sad.
I’m fascinated too. I think a lot of my fascination comes from viewing the whole debacle through an adult lens–there is so much I misremembered, forgot, or just didn’t grasp when it was all actually happening. I had just started high school when the verdict was announced (watched it on an old-school big-screen TV, which was in the library for some reason?). I don’t think I began to understand the racial implications until that day in my lily-white Catholic school. Everyone was aghast at the verdict, except for a very, very small group of African-American girls–I can still hear their restrained cheer of “Yes!” and I can still see the dirty looks shot in their direction. I was a weird kid who followed the case pretty closely, and would watch all the OJ coverage when I came home from school, but there was so, so much I didn’t understand back then. I mean, I know the Riots happened in 1992 and the murders happened in 1994, but it took the opening scene in the first episode for me to finally be like, “Oh. There is a connection here!” I think a lot of the humanity of the case was lost on me back then, which, to be fair, was lost on the media as well. I had no recollection of Nicole’s children sleeping in the house when she was murdered, and that shot in the first episode just made me so sad that two people were brutally murdered and their lives were just sort of eclipsed by this whole circus.
On a lighter note, Schwimmer’s various line readings of “Juice” are my favorite part of this whole thing, so when he came out with “Uncle Juice” I had to rewind because I snorted so loudly.
The Conspira-sea Cruise is gloriously real! As a public librarian, this makes perfect sense to me. Sometimes you just spend the afternoon trying to track down references to Nikola Tesla’s involvement in the Philadelphia Experiment, and that’s just fine. (For the record, the idea that Tesla’s science was involved in making warships invisible is extremely fringe even among the conspiracy community. I think the patron might have been mixing him up with Einstein.)
Anyway, click my name for a recent Wired article about a skeptic going on a Conspira-Sea Cruise.
Yes, it’s totally real- I work for a travel brand and this company is certified by all the big guns.
It sounds entirely thematically appropriate to link Tesla (with a reputation for weird science and death rays) to the Philadelphia Experiment. If you were writing sci-fi, it would hardly raise an eyebrow. Not that I’m saying there would be any truth to it, mind.
I know! I suspect that Tesla is more popular these days than he was when lots of books were being written about the Philadelphia Project. I caught quite a few tantalizing references in blogs and sketchy websites, but not a whiff of him in any book or magazine article. Certainly nothing I could have plausibly cited, not even for this kind of topic.
There’s a graphic novel of this exact thing! It’s called RASL.
http://www.amazon.com/RASL-Jeff-Smith/dp/18889633…
I love that the cruise features list is going on about the buffet and entertainment and all of a sudden you hit: “UFO starwatch with night-vision goggles.”
if that’s not entertainment i do not want to be entertained.
(i’m still trying to convine my partner to go camping on a public-land moutaintop closest to the are 51 property line so that we can UFO watch. he does not think this sounds romantic OR fun. *pout*)
My favourite juxtaposition is “Enjoy fun in the sun on pristine beaches and marvel at native wildlife and sealife” immediately being followed by “Enjoy 7 days of awakening, as we sail into the truth that sets us free”.
My thought whenever I see something like that is I want to write a screenplay about the adventures of one of the employees just there to get paid. Rom-com, thriller spoof, Macguffin heist–I just want the guy folding the napkins or replacing the towels on the Conspir-a-sea Cruise to be in the middle.
There is a ‘false flag’ conspiracy? (I mean yeah, probably fake but what…)
*falls into Wiki hole*
Isn’t that the phrase the KIA/GGers use all the time?
As another not-famous science communicator, it is bonkers what people will get infuriated about. I was told in grad school that a journalist should be easy to reach, so keep your email public… Yeah, I don’t do that. Just yesterday my Twitter mentions were full of Holocaust deniers for no particular reason.
Not quite the same thing, but when I started working at the ACLU, the first thing they told me was to get an unlisted phone number.
A big part of my job was reading the incoming mail, and we got SO many letters from… interesting people.
Oh boy, I bet you got some doozies.
I was actually rather touched that so many schizophrenics trusted us to sort out their problems with the government.
Oh my goodness, the testimonials for that cruise:
“I liked the fact that we were a microcosm–this presented challenges as well as beautiful opportunities.”
“I loved it all I didn’t do any excursions it was awesome!”
“The exceptional service, quality of our room, and the ease of getting food when hungry were great.” They didn’t let us starve! It was great!
Gosh, I hope it is fake because otherwise I’ll feel really bad for laughing at these quite so much.
“I enjoyed being Mayan.”
WHAT
Also, “I asked God to see dolphins and I saw dolphins. I asked God to see whales, and they appeared, jumping into the air!”
I saw “I loved it all I didn’t do any excursions…” too and I’m just picturing that person deep down the rabbit hole of conspiracies, sitting in her cabin wearing pool floaties, with papers and clothing strewn about so you can’t see the floor.
dirgewithoutmusic writes my very favourite Harry Potter fanfics.
Bad-ass ladies of HP universe: http://archiveofourown.org/series/136245
What if Harry would’ve been in Slytherin? What if Neville had been the chosen one? What if…: http://archiveofourown.org/series/285498
She(?) also recently posted a couple of amazing Star Wars fics: Luke/Leia backstory swap
and
Padme lives!
And she (I think) has several books here!
http://ejadelomax.com/
Ooooh, I’m definitely checking those out.
said it before, I’ll say it again. the best one is The Family Evans
he’s gonna be a mighty king, so enemies beware
mm, i’ve never seen a king of beasts with quite so little hair, tho?
I would recommend my most popular fanfiction but it would probably only be appealing to anyone who 1) watches TWD (which I would not judge anyone for not watching as I no longer watch it either) and 2) liked Beth/Daryl and was furious and heartbroken when Beth died. Which tbh kinda means it’s a niche fic even within the TWD fandom, alas.
I WOULD READ THIS FANFICTION. Usually when Daryl is on screen, my mind drifts to daydreams (?) about him and Beth. So.
Hah! 😀 Well it’s possible you’ve already read it if you read Bethyl fanfiction, but in any case it’s: She’s Breathing, a post-Coda fix-it fic. (There’s a sequel but I’m a failure who abandoned it 10 chapters in because I lost the ability to write, so, fair warning.)
Same but with Inception hetfic. WELCOME TO THE NICHE CORNER.
The person who doesn’t care about running out of toilet paper is the person who wins. She has nothing to lose. You have already lost.
ilu Mallory
(I’m generally the person who loses)
That reminded me of a period in college when my roommate and I got into an argument about who had a higher tolerance for filth that culminated in both of us refusing to clean anything for about five months. (Look, I don’t have any good explanations for this period in my life. I made a string of really remarkably terrible decisions for a period of about three years. College-aged men should be kept in cages far from real humans.) He eventually caved, so I won, but really, in retrospect, neither of us won that.
I continue to admire Mallory deeply as Prudence. This week I had a relationship/crush dilemma, and I thought about what she would advise, and I did it. It was the right choice, and probably not what I would have done in the past. Prudie is the angel of my better nature, thank you Mallory.
I am always trying to be passive-aggressive about cleanliness issues like “They will come to their senses!” but I’m *always* the one who caves in the end because my tolerance for waiting things out and living amongst the filth is far lower than other people’s tolerance for not giving a single fuck.
No one ever comes to their senses because they have no senses. Otherwise they’d see and smell how terrible and immoral it is to live amongst the filth, with herds of dust bunnies freewheeling across hardwood floors and mountains of musty laundry.
My boyfriend tried that when he was living in a flat with people who were completely filthy. I went to visit once, was alone in the flat for a bit, and took it upon myself to empty the kitchen bin because it was overflowing onto the floor. It was terrible. (There was foul-smelling liquid in the bottom of the bin and some form of rotting food in the recycling bin. I was not happy.) Stopping cleaning in the hope that other people will cave never works.
I was in this exact same situation in grad school. I dealt with it by still buying the huge packs but keeping the extra rolls in my room, so my housemate wouldn’t know how much was left and would need her own backup supply. I was definitely still the loser.
LOL. That is sneakier than I managed to be. Then again, the conflict between my ex-roommate and I was not about who would buy the toilet paper–I conceded that one at the onset. No, it was whether she would deign to tell me when she’d used the last of it so that I could buy more before *I* discovered the deficiency while stuck on the toilet.
(I probably would have kept a personal roll that I brought to and from the bathroom with me if I trusted myself to, you know, remember to bring it.)
Ha! I did just that. My second grad school housemate would use the last of the TP, then only tell me as she was on her way out the door, “We’re out. I don’t go grocery shopping often; can you go get more?” So I started buying the 24-roll pack at Target, keeping the extra rolls either in my room or in the trunk of my car, and carrying one back and forth to the bathroom with me.
Turned out she was too embarrassed to buy toilet paper. Which…okay, I’m not judging whether it’s embarrassing. But if ya live with someone else, ya can’t use it all and then hope they’ll always keep you supplied because you can’t steel up once in a while to buy something pretty much everyone uses.
If she was too embarrassed she could have just paid you for her share of the toilet paper!
——– Original message ——–
I did this when I was sharing a house with four people and it seemed like I was the only one buying toilet paper. It got to the point where there hadn’t been any toilet paper in the bathrooms for weeks, so I assumed that everyone else was also hoarding a roll in their rooms until one of my housemates walked into the bathroom empty handed, used it, and then walked out unconcernedly. I will never again underestimate how gross some people can be.
D: D: D: D: D:
I hope you kept your bath towels in your bedroom.
I read this aloud to my mother. It is Truth.
TINY LION. SO TINY. SO FIERCE.
I want to hug him SO MUCH! And he’s just a baby and already around people so my hugs won’t warp his wild animal brain.
My BIL might have written the Rand comment.
This Atlantic interview about a woman who left the Amish community was pretty interesting: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/201…. There are quite a lot of Amish moving into the Genesee Valley and Southern Tier. Some of them use a phone for like 2 hours on a Wednesday night to set up carpentry jobs. The daughters ride bikes to church.
Oh wow, the person in the article grew up very close to the town where my grandparents used to live. Driving to their house we would always pass by lots of buggies, or if we stopped for gas maybe an Amish family is in the parking lot selling jam or tomatoes. Actually I went to college in an area where the same was true, used to see lots of dour ladies speaking Pennsylvania Dutch while they sorted through the racks at thrift stores. Strange that you can live so close to a completely different culture and just not know anything about it. I would occasionally exchange like 3 words with an Amish person working as a cashier (they’re usually buying ice) but other than that it’s pretty certain that you will never interact.
I am here for any and all stories about people leaving and/or joining restrictive religions. (I was raised nonreligious, so this aspect of the human experience totally fascinates me.)
My grandparents lived for while in Penn Yan, NY, which has a lot of Amish and Mennonite folks nearby. There’s a lot of variation, in terms of the technology that they allow themselves to use. Some of them drive, or use electricity at home (though I guess usually just in the barn, for work, not in the house). They also really like going out for ice cream– I used to see them there a lot.
Also, my mother works at a large hospital in Rochester, NY, and transfers a lot of Amish and Mennonite patients from the Southern Tier and Central NY. (A lot of farming accidents, unfortunately). They often have to tell people “Don’t take the buggy!!” to the emergency room and send in a helicopter instead.
”Plenty of men have daughters who aren’t lesbians, and they’ve all survived.”
But can we REALLY be sure of this?
Yeah, a lot of people with not-lesbian daughters are dead now. Probably most of them. HMMM.
100% of all men have died or are dying, I can’t PROVE it’s for lack of lesbians but I would bet life expectancy and percent of population out as lesbians correlates pretty well.
So lesbians save men’s lives? Is it because when women pair off together, they save men from being drained of life force by these devious succubi?
I know I’m deviating a bit from the official Toast Stance here, but I don’t read fanfic. Nothing against it, it’s just not For Me.
However, last night I did read a “biography” of “big name fan” “msscribe” from the Harry Potter fandom on the wayback machine and it was engrossing and horrifying like literally one step below “watching Salo” on the things-that-have-kept-me-awake-at-night scale. Will happily provide a link after work to anyone who is interested.
Oh my, this sounds like the same one that came across my tumblr dash a few days ago. I haven’t finished it yet, but what I have read is amazing. So many sockpuppets! So much bitterness and fighting!
I found it on tumblr too, so yep, probably the same one! I had to skim a lot of it because I couldn’t keep all the usernames straight. The afterwords are great, though.
I don’t read fanfic anymore; I got super into it as a teen and then just grew out of it. I know there’s exceptions, but generally the quality of the writing annoys me (I also can’t read Twilight/50Shades et al because of the fanfic-ness of the writing.) and it always feels weird and wrong to me when they try and fill in bits of back story or give new character traits. (Whhyy with the need to fill in unsaid/unexplained elements, I liked it the way it is, I have my own ideas of what happened in Budapest, I don’t need hear your clumsy version.)
I’d much rather stay over here with my own, private, headcanon that no one else can sully.
That said, I will read this womans work until the day I die http://archiveofourown.org/users/Deepdarkwaters/p…
Please tell me there are some other Stockholm Syndrome fangirls out there… If they’re going to be anywhere, they’re going be here. (SS is Mighty Boosh/Bank robbers/mills & boon and is the only reason I find Julian Barrett sexy and there’s a chance I’m going to name any son I have Lindsay because of a gay porn fic.)
Also her original work is brilliant too.
I’VE KNOWN HER SINCE WE WERE IN HP FANDOM TOGETHER 13 YEARS AGO
sorry I’m just very excited
I FUCKING KNEW IT.
I’ve been following her since the LJ days when the Boosh fandom was still good and active (before the 12 year olds moved in and it just became all ‘Omg Noel is sooo hot!!111’)
I feel super creepy these days because I stalk her on twitter and I’m actually the biggest fan of her writing… but that doesn’t stop me. Tonight I’m re-reading SS again.
ETA: I don’t think she’s on The Toast and I feel like that’s a tragedy as she is definitely one of Our People.
I loooove her Kingsman/Hartwin fics. (Am I the only Hartwin person here? Probably. That’s OK.) I have talked with her some about her fics and mentioned that I know you from here. Maybe we can gang up and get her here.
I am HERE for Hartwin! ❤️❤️ I ship that so hard!
oh nooo 🙁 we had a huge falling out years ago, so that would suck for me.
O_O
I’m so curious but I will refrain from asking for details.
The fandom world is freakishly small, even when you don’t frequent the big (HP/SPN/Anything on tumblr these days) fandoms.
I’m kind of meh on the Kingsman film, but here for her Kingsman fics. Stuffy british people who are secretly badass and also gay. hot.
Hi yes, I may have converted that biography into ebook form because classic fandom wanks are my SHIT
upload plz?
hxxps://www.sendspace.com/file/cbrcje
Sorry if the formatting is weird, but I tried my best! Just wanted to make sure it got preserved for posterity, since I didn’t get a chance to save all of my favorite fanfics before they disappeared
Thank you!
Msscribe really did some A+ writing on fandomwank.
Oh god, the Msscribe saga. I was active on Fandom Wank back in the day and I lost so much sleep over the week or so that was being posted – reading the updates, reading every link, reading the comments where everybody was sharing their own stories. So very, very strange.
Also on the same community: the Cassie Claire plagiarism expose. Good times.
I keep seeing Fandom Wank mentioned. What was it, exactly? Forums? A sort of electronic newspaper written by fans for fan?
Fandom Wank was a community on Journalfen, a Livejournal clone site. (It may have started out on LJ and migrated to Journalfen later? Not sure.) Anyone who joined the community could post on it, and reading it was both entertaining (the msscribe revelations were RIVETING, and also really well told) and informative (what’s controversial in fandom at the moment? what big arguments are brewing? who’s taking what sides? etc.). Honestly, I kind of miss the informative function now that fandom is largely on Tumblr — every now and then a post will come across my dash that starts out like “I’m not even going to link to THAT POST but I know you’ve all read it. Well the REAL story is…” and I would really like someone to link to THAT POST but there’s no hope of tracking it down.
What Elsajeni said – it did start out on LJ and got banned for violating the site’s ToS (which I BELIEVE was due to Cassie Claire wank, but I wouldn’t swear to it). People would post writeups of fandom brouhahas with links and corroborating screencaps, and folks would comment about it (and sometimes get in their own fights in the comments.) There were spinoff communities as well – otf_wank for wanks that weren’t strictly about fandom, wankity_wank for the commenter infighting. bad_penny, where the Msscribe and Cassandra Clare plagiarism writeups happened, was a similar spinoff. (It may not have been officially affiliated? IT’S BEEN A LONG TIME.)
Some of the writeups wound up taking on a life of their own, with thousands of comments and memes being spawned from them. (“His wife? A horse.”) (“his hed is pastede on yay”) There were strict rules about not posting wanks where the offenders were under 18, and about not trolling the wanks by going over to stir the shit. Sometimes it was a vicious cesspool and sometimes it was really, really funny. Sometimes both.
That sounds amazing. Do you think something like that could work now, or are fandoms too many/too splintered?
I don’t think it could for a few reasons.
One of them is that as fandom moves to different media platforms it’s much more difficult to track this sort of thing. Discussions on Dreamwidth are almost all friendslocked. Tumblr users change their names at the drop of a hat, which breaks links to posts, and they delete their blogs quite frequently too. A lot of writing happens on Wattpad but do they even have forums? Linking to Twitter conversations is a mess and creating a Storify for a good wank is kind of a pain.
Another is that the climate of fandom has changed. I think you’d get a lot of people calling it bullying, which wouldn’t be entirely groundless, and a lot of people trolling both sides. I am finding it hard to describe what I mean on this point.
And the other thing is that people keep trying to make fandom “mainstream” and I for one would never want Fandom Wank to be a source for actual news articles and bringing in non-fandom people to gawk at the freaks. (Yes, I’m looking at you, Daily Dot.) I think we’re too exposed now for it to work.
Yes, the things you’re saying are a large part of why it started to slow down so much and eventually mostly died out. Plus, a lot of the Wankas were there for years and with anything that lasts that long, you’re going to have turnover, but new Wankas just weren’t filling in, and there was so much history and in-jokes to learn anyway.
I miss it a lot, though. I tend to crave some kind of gossip-type socializing, but don’t really care about ONTD stuff, so fandom was a good one for me. Also, it was pretty informative (as Elsajeni said above), and I honest-to-god grew so much as a person partly from the comments.
ALSO i miss it because I’m dying to know what happened to the Snapewives last month and I know F_W would help track that down.
oh my god, the Snapewives. that brings me back…
(I’m going to be a broken record, but my comment below about Mina de Malfois has Snapewives manque! Marriages on the astral plane!)
“I think you’d get a lot of people calling it bullying, which wouldn’t be entirely groundless…”
Yeah, when people were getting accused of molesting their own kids (with no basis) and having their personal information outed, it actually went just a little bit beyond bullying. I didn’t keep tabs on it for its entire existence, but if you tell me you were a happy participant back in the day, my opinion of your judgment diminishes a great deal. That community had zero ability to distinguish between people who were genuinely doing harm to others in fandom through fraud and the like and, well, everybody else they targeted, and no sense of proportionality of response. Plus, there’s something just so pitiful about people at the bottom of the social totem pole (fandom at the time) trying to find some people below them to point and laugh at.
This.
Especially as time went on. I followed it at the beginning, and you’d see genuinely crazy stories – plagiarism, faking deaths, etc. – but by the end, iirc they ended up with separate communities for specific fandoms because they’d chased off so many people that they were left with your basic ‘There are people in my fandom who like stuff I don’t!’
google “fail fandom anon.”
Also, I can’t hear talk about Fandom Wank without reminiscing about Mina de Malfois. SO GOOD, you guys. Fandom references and literary jokes, a genuinely touching developing F/F story, and funny as hell.
http://mina-de-malfois.livejournal.com/
This is late but I always thought it was banned from LJ during that time when LJ banned a bunch of journals and communities because of stuff like their interests (which was in part understandable since some communities were messed up, but it affected lots of support groups and fandom communities).
How would it get banned over a single wank? I’m always here for conspiracy theories about BNFs, so I need to know more about that.
I really desperately need to find a central place to learn about the most recent plagiarism thing with Claire. I’ve only seen offhand references, but no central discussion or schaden-lolz. 🙁
I was at a Mortal Instruments event for work, chatting up a publicist from Cassandra Claire’s publisher and I mentioned her fanfic and they were like, “We’re not allowed to talk about her fanfic.” Which CRACKED ME UP.
My brain legit started playing “Tale as Old as Time” when I saw “msscribe.” Such a great throwback story of fandom insanity, one of the few that keeps getting passed around periodically even after the demise of Fandom Wank.
YESSSS THE MSSCRIBE SAGA SO GOOD. isn’t it still on LJ?
It was on JF, which I think has mostly shuttered? I stopped checking a few months ago to see if they’d managed to get it functioning again…
I dunno; my “favorite” fan-drama still has to be Andrew Blake, aka Amy Player.
After that article by Aja came out last year, I read some of the stuff kumquatwriter has written and WHOA. I only heard bits and pieces because it was a few years before my time, and I was never really in LOTR fandom, but so, so unsettling.
It’s such a sad story. He really did a lot of damage to so many people.
That story is seriously the best! (The one by charlotte lennox, right?) It’s just so amazing and bizarre and such ridiculous meanness for such low stakes! I send not-really-fannish people there all the time, with a warning that once you start reading you cannot stop.
Ohhhhhhhh man, the msscribe story!
If you want some great MCU fic, check out sevenfoxes. I especially love the Marry, Fuck, Kill stories and when you wake stories. Mostly Steve/Darcy because that’s my jam, but there are other pairings in there too and they are PERFECT.
Welp, there goes my productive morning.
She’s so fantastic, and she’s a great person as well. I love her so much. (hi, I’m the person who was the gift recipient for the MFK stories, I’m the luckiest)
OMG SO JEALOUS YOU ARE THE LUCKIEST PERSON ON EARTH. I may or may not have the podfics on my phone so I can listen to them whenever I waaaant
YES, these are all great!
(she may also have some excellent RPF that I have totally not read.)
Oh god,I repressed when you wake fic from my memory. Reading that was like having someone repeatedly stab me in the chest.
Whoa, that Tumblr article was crazy. And illuminating. I got a tumblr in 2011, and the quality of that site has definitely gone down in the last 2-3 years. Now I understand why all the new followers I get seem to be spam/porn blogs!
But also, it was strange to read this practically anthropological account of “how tumblr/millenial jokes work”. Like, I’m only a few years younger than the writer, and c’mon, are *~TheTeens~* really that hard to understand?
I read the Tumblr article yesterday (linked through Tumblr), and was hoping it would be in the link roundup today! I definitely agree that the quality of the site has gone down (I also joined in 2011), between the addition of ads to my main dash and the surge of spam/porn blogs it’s not been great (I still use it though…)
I was fascinated by the article though! I didn’t follow any of those blogs when they were big, but I definitely remember them coming across my dash. I didn’t even realize they had been shut down! I mostly found it an interesting look at how ads work on sites like Tumblr. And I agree, their attempts to analyze teen culture wasn’t great. I didn’t have a Tumblr as a teen, but they’re not really that hard to understand as an adult.
It was jarring to read about the author’s almost-30 dinner-party compatriot who thinks teen girls no longer have “an inner life” because they don’t write in diaries anymore, dontcha know. I thought we had at least another decade or two before people my age started being embarrassingly ridiculous about The Youth.
Yeah that was a particularly weird comment. I rarely if ever wrote in a diary as a teen, not even in blog form, and my mom was never a diary person as a teenager, so it’s not exactly a new thing for teen girls to not keep a diary.
I feel like that woman must not have been too nerdy/weird in high school. Given her age, she was probably a teen when LiveJournal/Xanga/other online diaries were just getting big. Obviously she wasn’t in on any of that.
yeah, that’s the impression I got. And this: “In the dark ages—the 1980s, ’90s, or even the early 2000s—kids had to wait for nerd camp to be among their own kind. ” at least in the early 2000s, LJ and Xanga were HUGELY popular among a certain subset of teen girls (likely the same ones who flock to tumblr now).
Yeah, in 2000 I had a blog and a huge group of friends I made through online Sailor Moon roleplaying games. And then we all moved to LJ. I’m still friends with some of those people!
I first got a Tumblr in 2008/9 and it was because I kept seeing Tumblrs linked to on LJ. Not only are the teen girls flocking to Tumblr now the ones who would have been on LJ, that whole teen girl Tumblr culture was built by those of us who migrated over from LJ. It’s like the next generation of the same culture. I also wrote in my diary too, so it’s not like the two are mutually exclusive.
Someone posted their dissertation (I think) on here a while ago about Tumblr-speak, and there was a hilarious quote in it from someone on Tumblr being like ‘we have our own language! All these fandom words!’ and it’s like – you didn’t invent fandom guys, it’s been around a while.
This bugged me too and it’s the second article I’ve read this week that has basically implied the internet wasn’t really a thing in the 90s.
I was definitely combatting the horribleness of high school through chatting in late 90s X-Files chat rooms.
Hahaha. Nope. It’s like as soon as you cross the Rubicon into your third decade of life, you suddenly forget everything except for the rosy bits of the previous decades and are issued a set of silly opinions about The Damn Kids These Days.
“Don’t trust anyone over 30” has always been depressingly accurate and is my primary regret with turning 30 this year.
it is utterly distressing watching so many people in my age group hit 30 and transition seamlessly from talking like they’re 15 to talking like they’re racist Grandpa who fought in the war and has lots of opinions on the “music” kids listen to these days with no intervening actual adulthood in between.
I got weirded out by the anthropological vibe too. The way she tries to break down some of the jokes was BIZARRE.
That article on Tumblr is super interesting but gah, the backgrounds, my eyes.
I didn’t know there were so many conspiracies!
” During this incredible, mind-blowing, truth-telling, spiritually enriching event, we will do our best to uncover the truth about things conspiratorial, such as:
GMOs, Monsanto, bee colony collapse, ecology, global warming, climate change, fracking, HIV, autism, big pharma, medical suppression, vaccinations, flouridation, political corruption, government corruption, forbidden archeology, Federal Reserve, truth about money, World Bank, strawman, property title, admiralty law, martial law, Bohemian Grove, Skull and Bones, JFK, cover-ups, September 11, Star Wars agenda, nuclear plants, chemtrails, HAARP, crop circles, IRS, MK-Ultra, Fukashima, NASA, NSA, Bilderbergs, sustainability, military industrial complex, pentagon, Waco, Malaysia 370, Pan Am 103, TWA 800, Gulf Oil Spill, Halliburton, Obama, Ruby Ridge, OK City, Vatican, New World Order, false flags, Montauk, privacy, surveillance, Area 51, Dulce, Project Rainbow, Nazi Bell, Vrill, U.S.S. Eldridge, Iron Mountain, psyops, population mangement, subliminal ads, Nibiru / Planet X, Cointel Pro, entity possession, technology suppression, electoral fraud, identity chips, 2nd amendment, and so much more.”
I hate that as I read through that list, I was able name the theory (or theories, or at least some of them) associated with almost every single one of those.
Yeahhhh, where’s jade helm, tho? I also enjoy how “cover-ups” is included.
These are clearly more classic conspiracies. I mean, they’ve got MKULTRA and Iron Mountain on there. The Jade Helm whippersnappers’ll just have to make their own damn cruise.
It sounds like a lot to get through. Or do you just pick the events on subjects that you’re into?
I’ve heard that the key to be a conspiracy theorist is to link together everything into one massive tangle, and then if any part of it is discredited, you can just cut it loose without affecting the whole crazy mass.
This reminds me of one of my all time favorite Ghostbusters exchanges:
WINSTON (and Janine) 4LYFE
um sorry if they’re not going to discuss lizard people i’m not going
these are a few of my faaaavorite things
If I were writing/editing that website, I would be so tempted to just slip in some random words to see if I could start a conspiracy that easily. Ferrets. Keurig cups. Truth about earbuds. Tamarind Hill.
Wait, there isn’t a ferret conspiracy?
it’s not a ‘theory’ if it’s just established fact.
“… 2nd amendment”
Wait, what? The 2nd Amendment is a conspiracy?
Oh. Wait, now that I think about it, I can see that.
“Strawman,” on the other hand, has me completely baffled. Since I can’t see how a flawed debate tactic can be a conspiracy, I’m going to assume it’s more of a Straw Man conspiracy, like Sasquatch.
THE STRAW MAN IS OUT THERE. I WANT TO BELIEVE.
Charlie P. Taters had his first bath last night. This is post refloofing, but you could still see the betrayal in his eyes… if you could see his eyes, of course.
He’s going to get muddy again IMMEDIATELY because it’s so warm here but he was getting pretty gross, I had to do something. It was very upsetting for both of us and involved him frantically licking me while I lathered him up and managing to soak every single piece of clothing I was wearing. I feel like a TRAITOR because he wanted me to STOP but I had to keep going once I started. He also was terrified of the hair dryer. 🙁
The worst thing about having a larger dog is that I can’t physically force him into a bath. The one time we tried, the entire bathroom was covered in water and fur. It was stuck to the ceiling! It took hand feeding him an entire breakfast next to it to get him to even go near the tub again!
Dogs and baths, man.
Large dogs + claw foot tub = I pay the groomer for baths. My lady with hip dysplasia cannot climb into the tub, even if she were willing.
My dog’s only in the 40lb range, but I have to take her to my parents’ house, where they have a glassed-in shower stall, and get in there with her and close the door and just take a shower with her.
I have never seen convincing evidence that Mr. Taters actually has eyes, don’t even try to pretend he does. #TaterGate
He’s a potato, of course he has eyes.
YESSS
jet fuel can’t fry fake spuds
SO MANY EYES
As an old hand at dog-bathing, may I suggest a swim suit or nakedness during the process? Also a supply of dog towels (don’t toss the old ones, keep them to line the floor. The dog can roll on the clean terrycloth after the ordeal and may forgive you sooner.) I’m quite fond of Mr. Taters. Thank you for the pictures.
YES. Wearing a swimsuit and climbing into the shower with my grandma’s dog was *the way* to get her to stop struggling. Also, I worked on making shampooing feel as much like petting as possible. I did lots of soothing talking, including during the floofing with towel (though she was short-haired and didn’t need the noisy scary hair dryer as Mr. Spud does). And I gave her copious treats at the end.
*stifles squeal of glee so I don’t out myself as not working while at work*
I’m not a dog person generally, but I absolutely LOVE seeing pictures of your dog!
We had a dog who hated the hair dryer so much he tried bite the hot air. A small, formerly floofy dog turned half drowned rat dog trying to attack air is a sight to be seen.
I found this article in today’s Guardian, about a person who looks into internet hoaxes, very interesting: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/feb/18…
(Internet hoaxes are so weirdly interesting and sad and gripping. I was on a forum many years ago with one member who had all sorts of implausible-sounding stories – her boyfriend had died and she had a brain tumour and she went to Cardiff and bumped into John Barrowman and his partner, and became friends with them and stayed at their flat all the time – but nobody ever said anything, because it would be awkward.)
I…. feel like I dated that forum member in high school. Or at least her Pirates of the Caribbean obsessed-brain twin. (It was a poor life decision all around, but high school, so I give myself a bit of a break on that.)
This person may have been into Pirates of the Caribbean, although I couldn’t swear to it.
Yesss I love this stuff…..
Thank you for the article! It was a fascinating read, especially for someone who has been interested in hoaxers since Livejournal days. My First Hoax (TM), which thankfully involved no money changing hands, involved a high school boy named Sebastian who slowly realized he was falling in love with this new boy. Of course they became soulmates and then died abruptly very young and tragically on the way to do something charity related. People were crushed, and only three years after their “death” did people start to wonder if they’d actually existed at all (or whether they’d been created by the lovable goth best friend character instead).
Anyway, it is easy to hate people when they lie, but I really like Wright’s compassion toward the hoaxers and the fact that she has befriended some in real life. It’s a pity she’s had trouble finding a job because of her internet life. She seems like a very interesting person.
They really are fascinating! I visit a lot of beauty/makeup/swatch blogs and a few years ago there was some huge drama with a blogger who seemed to be running a scam (people would pay for stuff and never receive it, but things were always in the mail, or she was dealing with health issues and would have it soon etc.) that all culminated with the revelation that she had previously run a similar scam on Ravelry by FAKING HER OWN DEATH and having her partner ask people to give them money so that they could donate it to a lupus foundation.
What?! I must know more about people running scams on Ravelry. I bet it’s really easy since everyone is always trying so hard to be nice.
The whole thing was bizarre!
Links:
https://cockamamied.wordpress.com/2012/01/30/the-grey-debacle/
http://lillianfunnyface.blogspot.com/2012/01/follow-up-to-last-post.html
http://toxid-lotus.net/2012/01/20/what-happened-to-grey-indie-style-awesome-box/
Oh my gosh, the reference to Jesse Jubilee James. I remember that from stupid_free. That article got under my skin–the writer is so ick with his constant references to being friends with Harlan Ellison and the intensity of the body shaming and just the general douchiness.
What kind of conspiracy theorist goes on a cruise advertised for conspiracy theorists? Wouldn’t you think it was a plot to strand EVERYONE WHO KNOWS THE TRUTH on a desert island where they can’t SHARE THEIR INFORMATION WITH THE REST OF THE WORLD? I can only imagine the long “if you don’t see me again…” letters left behind by departing cruise passengers.
Yeah, if you get on this boat, you’re not taking your paranoia to the level it deserves. If you honestly believe the government can manufacture 9/11 and blame it on Bin Laden, while brainwashing you with fluoridated water, and keep all that totally quiet, they can probably adios one cruise ship without much effort.
EXACTLY what I was thinking! This is obviously a false-flag operation covering an vast alien-abduction Bermuda Triangle trafficking ring.
Seriously thought this sounds like the perfect way to start a cult:
This cruise will not only uncover the lies. It will show us the truth. As we dispell the darkness, and shine the light of wisdom, we enter the true light of consciousness.
And we are set free.
ALL are welcome to discover the real truth, together.
ten thousand hypotheses about the terrible things malevolent powers were plotting to do to the world and not one of them called conspiracy theory hobbyists being made into a viable corporate marketing demographic
In real life, women are warned every second of every day about the ways in which the world can, and will, cause us harm. We are commanded to employ constant vigilance to keep this inescapable danger at bay; anything less will court violence and agony for which the woman will be solely responsible. Watch your drink, don’t drink too much, don’t dance like that, don’t walk there at night, don’t walk there ever, don’t go out alone, don’t go home with that guy, don’t have sex with that other guy, maybe never have sex, don’t do drugs, don’t dress like that, no, not like that either, don’t be too loud, don’t be too quiet, and God, would it kill you to smile more? Because it might kill you if you don’t.
To this colossal Kilimanjaro of sexist bullshit, Broad City gives the finger. Two fingers, actually, pulling up the edges of a smile.
To which I can only say… YAS QUEEN. Can’t wait to see the new season!!!
Jess Zimmerman has entirely freaked me out. Not that hard to do, but still- well done Jess!
I’ve been reading a lot of Miss Fisher fics recently, and here’s some of the best I’ve found:
A Glass Splinter (AU in which the Fishers never inherit): http://archiveofourown.org/works/5745655/chapters…
Fighting vainly the old ennui: http://archiveofourown.org/works/2770337
Oooh, are there some good Phryne/Jack ones? Specifically ones where he doesn’t pressure her into monogamy?
“The Glass Splinter” above is like that and does it really well. (“Ennui” is also Phryne/Jack but in an AU and monogamy doesn’t really come up).
But, seriously, 90% of the fics out there have Phryne just “choosing monogamy” because it “feels right.” Some authors do a better job than others in grappling with it.
Here’s one where the author does a pretty decent job in teasing out the non-monogamy tensions: http://archiveofourown.org/works/5767351/chapters…
(Edit: “One Gaudy Night” has a fair number of smutty scenes, as a warning)
Have you come across any good Phryne / Mac?
No!! And it’s so disappointing!
I’m two seconds away from writing some myself to fix it.
Please please do. And link it here.
Here’s some of the best I’ve found, but they’re only really snippets: http://archiveofourown.org/users/whiskeyandjack/g…
I want a lengthy, satisfying Phryne/Mac fic.
Nothing makes me feel like an Old more reliably than Tumblr.
If anyone is going to have weirdly specific fanfic taste its Toasts
Is anyone familar with this author http://archiveofourown.org/users/Deepdarkwaters/p…
And if so, who has read her Stockholm Syndrome Boosh fic and wants to squee with me? I know their like 10 years old, but I re-read it every so often still.
Mallory telling off the man who believes he has found a logical loophole making infidelity okay made my day. I lol’d at “don’t pretend you’ve ascended to a higher plane of existence because you like to periodically fling your genitals at strangers.”
She said on Twitter that she wanted to use “get your dick wet” but decided that was not up to standards.
She was originally going to write ‘get your dick covertly wet’ but the big ol’ party pooper editors wouldn’t let her: https://twitter.com/mallelis/status/7000324216982…
“The majority of the time, you’re not cheating at all! Plus, you do laundry. Laundry. If that doesn’t earn you some strange, I don’t know what does.”
Ortberg for president.
I gained so much joy and glee from that response. So much.
I know it may be a tad petty, but part of me hopes that guy’s wife is cheating on him 24/7 and having the best sex of her life while he’s congratulating himself for doing laundry.
ugh, and there was so much of “well, all the other kids are doing it” bullshit too! Just because all his friends are cheating as well doesn’t make it any less asshole-ish.
Also I don’t know if anyone wants to know about this, but the NSA has an algorithm that it uses to target people with drone strikes called Skynet, that they believe is only wrong about 0.008% of the time — meaning that we (America) have probably killed about 15,000 people after incorrectly labeling them as terrorists.
In fact, though, the NSA’s algorithm is likely much, much less accurate than that, which mean’s we’ve killed many, many more people.
http://nymag.com/following/2016/02/nsas-skynet-ma…
They call it Skynet?
get it, it’s a clever joke about genocidal robots
Does Sarah Connor know about this?
I’m not sure how the math in the article works. 0.008% of 55,000,000 is 4,400, not 15,000. And that’s misidentifications, not actual killings.
sadly, this doesn’t make me feel any better about it
I’m rather more worried about the prospect of super-human A.I. than I am about replacing F-18s with drones. So I see that point. (Generally, do you want the U.S. to fight the Taliban or not? Don’t substitute complaints about methods for what should be the initial question.)
But it’s frustrating to me when writers miss order-of-magnitude-level errors in the numbers in their articles. Like, if you don’t care about getting the quantities at all right, how can I trust the accuracy of the narrative parts of your piece?
I am mostly worried about a bombing campaign that is killing civilians.
Well, maybe I’m complaining about someone else, then.
Constructing a fact-based, coherent argument is a completely different skill from making sure all the details are correct. We don’t have to act like a minor miscalculation (that doesn’t even undermine the argument) is spoiling the entire piece. That’s just as mistaken as only focusing on spelling mistakes. Perfect attention to detail is something that human brains are bad at. But when we do our best, we can be brilliantly insightful. A computer is the other way around – it would have gotten the numbers right, but would never ask the moral question.
I was gonna say the CIA’s bad news and all but I’m p sure if they’d killed more people than Hitler I wouldn’t be learning about it from nymag.com
Honestly though being wrong .008% is probably two or three orders of magnitude better than having humans decide. The problem (well one of many problems) is that you know they are using the union of the two sets instead of the intersection.
I think the problem — well, I think that one problem out of many — is that the NSA is probably lying about its accuracy.
Sure, but even the inverse: being right .008% of the time probably puts it on par with humans.
they probably are (and absolutely, unquestionably are if you count ‘redefining words to mean whatever makes it so you could be construed as not technically lying’ as ‘still lying, basically’), and won’t be called to account for it because they’ve held all the actual evidence from anybody capable of outside review as state secrets, which nobody’s challenging, which is still a separate issue from whether the NSA’s machine-based system for deciding who to kill specifically is somehow worse than the prior, equally unaccountable, CIA-run alcoholic-based ones.
Yeah, I don’t aim to let the CIA off the hook for their program, either.
yeah I’m just real uncomfortable with some of the complaints about the NSA going on because as genuinely horrible and totalitarian as their insane technical panopticon is, it’s the foreign policy replacement for the CIA’s humint-based assassination and control schemes which harmed tremendously more people, which was the replacement for their old habit of just staging coups everywhere which killed an insane, unbelievable number of people, which was the replacement for direct military invasion and colonization…
if what you actually object to is the government murdering random innocents what you’re objecting to is a national government with an interventionist foreign policy and a military (or, domestically, cops with guns), which is expressly something so many of the people who are up in arms about the NSA are completely fine with. Like, it’s cool so long as it’s done the old-fashioned way our parents did it or something
Yes, I agree. But in other areas (and probably in this one as well) people prefer human mistakes to computer mistakes, even though humans make more of them. I guess it just seems cold to accept a known error rate? Like, when humans fuck up we don’t see it as a known pattern, we see only that someone failed here and now, and we know that they’ll try to do better in the future, so we can feel like no one CHOSE that there would be mistakes? The computer doesn’t care, it doesn’t try to learn.
You might want to take a closer look at the Ars Technica article that the New York magazine article is piggy-backing off of. Dig down deep into it, and the author admits that the process whereby Skynet identifies possible terrorists is only one step in an unknown process that ultimately results in drone strikes, and even the NYMag article notes that the number of estimated drone casualties is more like 4,000 total, not 15,000 or higher. Which is not to say, of course, that innocent people haven’t been killed by drones, because we know that they have been. But, despite the name (which is a really bad idea, of course), it’s not a matter of this program autonomously sending the birds into the air; for one thing, its #1 “suspect” is al-Jazeera’s Islamabad bureau chief, who is very much still alive.
So there’s a Bull Durham musical coming to Broadway?
This might answer my lifelong dream of there being a good baseball musical out there. (I know there was Damn Yankees, but I don’t totally love Damn Yankees.)
Aaah, I knew it was being workshopped in Atlanta, but I hadn’t heard anything about Broadway! Mayhap by the time rights go out for regional/community theatres, I’ll be able to fulfill my dream of actually becoming Annie Savoy…
You’re right, though–there’s a dearth of good baseball on the stage. Take Me Out is the best (though not a musical), but I agree–Damn Yankees leaves something to be desired.
I hadn’t heard anything about it until today, but according to mlb.com, it’s coming to Broadway in 2017: <a href="http://m.mlb.com/cutfour/2016/02/17/164800048/bull-durham-musical-coming-to-broadway
http://m.mlb.com/cutfour/2016/02/17/164800048/bul… />
I have really really wanted to see Take Me out since I first learned of its existence, but alas, it was after it left Broadway and I haven’t come across a production of it anywhere vaguely near me yet.
Yaaaaaaaaaayyyyy. I’ll have to make it a part of my annual pilgrimage to NYC (this year’s trip includes, obviously, Hamilton.)
I have also missed Take Me Out in various incarnations–I was in college when it was on Broadway, and then a few years later, I didn’t find out about a local theater doing it until 24 hours after it closed 🙁 I think the nudity probably gives a lot of theaters pause.
As of last year, I am apparently also making an annual pilgrimage to NYC to see a play. Last year was Hedwig and the Angry Inch with John Cameron Mitchell, and this year (almost exactly a year to the day later) is Hamilton. Next Friday. In eight days. (I might slowly die of excitement between now and then.)
Anyway, I think I’ve just settled what next year’s is gonna be.
I think I also missed a theatre near me doing Take Me Out by finding out not too long after the fact too 🙁 SOMEDAY. Someday I will see it.
This seems like an excellent reason to watch Bull Durham tonight!
WHAT ASDKFLHDSAOIHNJASDF983590327509J*&%&^t78
This is my parents’ favorite movie of all time and my family quotes it endlessly to each other and I’m pretty sure Crash/Annie role-playing was how my sister was conceived. AND we’re a family of musical theater geeks. If this thing sucks it will break my parents’ goddamn hearts. It better not suck.
I really really hope it doesn’t suck too.
I didn’t see the movie until my best friend and I watched it in my senior year of college, but it became kind of an insta-favorite. (I’m a sucker for a really good baseball story. Also a sucker for Single A minor league ball in general.)
We may have taken a road trip down to Durham to see the Bulls play at the game that commemorated the 25th anniversary of the movie a couple years back. I.e., we might have very strong feelings about this movie.
My opinion of Damn Yankees is irretrievably tainted because I saw it with Jerry Lewis and I hate that shitbag asshole so much.
I think that is a very fair reason to dislike Damn Yankees. (The only time I’ve ever actually watched anything with Jerry Lewis is when someone put on Cinderfella for me when I was a kid with scarlet fever, so I sort of associate the idea of watching Jerry Lewis with the feeling of maybe slowly dying . . . I have admittedly done pretty much nothing to get over that association.)
That lion was really exactly what I needed
Here for the fic discussion today:
I’m reading to the sky without wings by leupagus in Star Wars fandom and would highly recommend. It’s Luke/Poe, which is an unusual ship, but the author sells it well. (Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5609887)
That Buzzfeed article was great, but I was holding my breath for GoT/ASoIaF recs. SO relieved they picked an Arya/Gendry fic instead of other, more terrible options.
And if you need additional GoT recs I got GoT recs:
If you like femslash you need to read eyes like wolves teeth like thorns: http://archiveofourown.org/works/902146, and honey_wheeler’s (http://archiveofourown.org/users/honey_wheeler/pseuds/honey_wheeler) entire catalogue though my personal favorite is thoughts of pretty you and me.
ASoIaF het is sort of a wasteland but SecondStarOnTheLeft has good stuff.
I know I have mentioned this before on the Toast, but I will second any and all recommendations for “to the sky without wings” because that shit is SO GOOD. And apparently she’s writing a sequel!
It is SO SO GOOD. It’s good to see a beautifully-written, very offbeat fic getting attention too.
Ooh, I like SecondStarOnTheLeft.
I also ship Sansa with… Literally almost everyone and there is some really good stuff out there if anyone actually wants some recs.
I would love some! So much of the ASoIaF fanfic I’ve seen seems to get pretty creepy with the whole “Sansa is an innocent little bird” thing.
So if you feel like you could handle reading Sansa/Tywin, there is a writer who now goes by AllTheDances on ffn and her Pride and Pack series is really excellent, I think. There’s another author on FFN, justadram, who has a lot of Jon/Sansa (which isn’t my favorite), but also a few nice Jaime/Sansa pieces as well as a collection of drabbles called Small Songs of Ice and Fire which heavily feature Sansa, but also some other stuff.
Thank you!
I am here for your Sansa recs, please and thank you.
They are in my reply to grace_adieu!
<3 Sansa forever
For the podcast listening toasties, both Only Human and The Longest Shortest Time have had interviews with doctors that provide abortions recently, and they’re both super interesting listens, especially together- Only Human interviewed a male doctor in the South whose practice is now exclusively abortion, and Longest Shortest Time interviewed a female ob in the bay area that does terminations as an integral part of her practice.
I really enjoyed the Only Human piece, strongly seconded!
Thanks for the rec!
If anyone wants to read some very fluffy Stormpilot, Clint/Coulson (Avengers), or a half-done Mystrade, I’ll DM them my AO3 username on Twitter.
Twitter handle?
haha whoops, it is also @jwhittz
NAILED IT.
I believe I’ve already read something of yours, but I don’t think I saved the link, so… yes please?
yes please! I am @grace_adieu_ on twitter and I am definitely here for all the fluffiness.
You’re not following me–if we follow each other then I can message you! (I’m admiralchristy there.)
I appreciate Broad City for its use of what I feel like you could call magical realism. Can’t think of any other TV show that does that as much.
TV TALK!
1. OJ — I was really into the first episode, but my interest is waning a bit? It felt like this last episode had so much filler, so many fabricated scenes and conversations to fill in gaps, and nothing much really happened? Maybe it was just in light of the first two episodes being such powerhouses of Shock and Things Happening, but I was a little underwhelmed by this latest episode? (And even the Bronco chase episode felt a little over-long, to me? By the end?) I know there’s a necessary amount of set-up required, and that the trial itself should pick things up again, but it felt like this week’s episode fizzled a bit for me.
2. Broad City!!! I love it so much — my husband and I were just discussing this last night: first, it’s a show about women??? Women in comedy??? That alone is amazing, and so needed — and then Abbi and Ilana as characters do get to be so open, so experimental of who they are and who they wanna be — and just plain GOOFY, which we need more of. They’re completely supportive of each other, and try not to take any shit from anyone. Sometimes they fail and sometimes they win, and that, to me, as a twenty-something, feels so good and fresh and necessary — sometimes I am really strong and I don’t back down, and then sometimes I do, and this show just feels more relatable than a lot of other shows geared towards women tend to be. THIS is more like me — not Gossip Girl or Pretty Little Liars. Just goofy and smart and a little wackadoo at times. And also — it just cracks me up. I’m so glad it ‘s back on.
Oh man, Methods of Rationality, that guy is INCREDIBLY FUCKING STRANGE. He runs a site called LessWrong that’s all about rationality as a movement, and they’re maybe best known for the Roko’s Basilisk…. thing: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko's_basilisk
Also from what I’ve heard the ending of HPMOR is completely fucking bananas.
Yes to all of this. I read MoR (well, however much had been written up to that date) a while ago because it kept getting weirder and I wanted to see what happened next. All I remember is that some characters (Harry and Hermione, and maybe some others?) started leading opposing armies of students? And Hermione’s faction was named something like The Super Happy Fun Army?
He’s also written some other stuff, like the story with the baby eating aliens.
I don’t remember opposing armies. I wonder if they were written after I quit reading, which was not long after I finished what had already been written? Or possibly I was just distracted by the whole thing with Draco Malfoy.
What was the thing with Malfoy? I don’t remember his place in the story… Wait, I think I remember something. Was there some sort of research into whether Purebloods were really as awesome as they think they are?
——– Original message ——–
Yes!
Harry did something I forget that impressed Draco, and Draco was all “will you teach me the ways of this great and powerful force you call RATIONALITY?”, and Harry was like, “I will, but you must take it super seriously and we must meet in secret and I will give you homework.” And at some point they ended up discussing something about purebloods, and Harry made Draco do a genealogy project about squibs for his RATIONALITY homework, and then something something Mendelian genetics something, and then Draco begins to see the error of his bigoted ways, all thanks to RATIONALITY and SCIENCE and also Harry being manipulative.
LessWrong is ostensibly all about rationality as a movement. What it’s actually about is what happens when you bring a bunch of dudes who think of themselves as very rational into one place.
I taught myself all about logic and computers instead of being educated stupid at a college, therefore clearly I’m very rational and also constantly in danger of accidentally inventing Skynet by writing fanfiction etc.
Trufax: The Rationalist movement is a serious contributing factor to the recent death of my long-term relationship. Ex started reading LW about 3 years ago and joined the movement about 2 1/2 years ago. And then he decided THIS WAS ENLIGHTENMENT, started talking in rationalist jargon, went on retreats and camping trips with the community, started ignoring most of his friendships outside the community, got kind of into transhumanism, decided he was polyamorous, etc.
It’s not that we broke up over radical life extension and cryonics exactly. But it’s not a community that buys the idea that intelligent people of good will can come to different conclusions about what the world’s most important problems are (let alone how to solve them). I found parties and events to be somewhere between microaggressive and outright hostile to outsiders, and found the ways he was becoming more like the group unsettling, and he found my lack of faith disturbing.
: /
I had to sit on my hands to avoid responding to the NYT profile on the movement that ran about a month ago.
tl;dr: If I’m going to read a redux of Harry Potter, I’d prefer Sady Doyle’s version, thanks!
For some reason, the thing that sticks out to me about this story is the rationalist camping trips. Surely camping is irrational? I mean, I like camping, but foregoing indoor plumbing for the weekend so I can sleep in a small fabric shelter far from the nearest grocery store is plainly irrational of me and I wouldn’t claim otherwise.
By “camping,” I mean Burning Man, which seems to an unenlightened outsider like me to be Irrationality Central. They’re trying to optimize the Burning Man experience scientifically by figuring out and trouble-shooting the most common factors that keep people’s experiences from being maximally awesome.
The other thing is, there’s some preference, within the group (not shared by everyone I met, but pretty common) for trying to overcome the body’s limitations, for two reasons. The first of those: the idea is that what is most comfortable for a body and what leads to that body functioning optimally are actually different, and it’s in keeping with an interest in radical life extension to prefer function over comfort. (E.g., if actual evidence suggests that cold showers increase your cardiovascular health or immune system functioning, you should be taking cold showers.) This principle tends to result in a preference for extremity. I met a lot of very earnest vegans within the group, and also a lot of equally earnest paleo eaters.
The second is the concept of comfort-zone expansion– growth tends not to be comfortable. Ergo, there is a certain kind of discomfort, like starting a conversation with someone you don’t know, or doing something that has been taboo for you, that probably provokes growth, and you should be doing more of that, even though it seems to be also kind of a tenet that hedonism is rational.
I’m a pretty ungenerous observer of the group, but there are some things I think they get right–
– there are some atheists who are hungry for community with like-minded people
– there might be a way to do charitable giving more effectively, by examining after the fact what interventions made a positive difference (and how big that difference was, and what people can tell about why the thing worked)
– thinking about how you spend your time can be scary and also important
– some life problems can be addressed by using a model roughly based on engineering: trying to figure out what the component parts are, and what parts are dependent on what other parts
And I also think there are things they get (sometimes dangerously) wrong. I see it as less pluralist in a number of ways than the broader culture upon which it is trying to improve. I see it as white dude-centric. (At the first party I attended, there were– I shit you not– a handful of guys barely out of high school mansplaining scientific literature on child development to a woman who was attending with her infant, who– when the woman walked away muttering “This is bullshit,” started discoursing on whether people were too easily offended these days.) I see it as starting from the presumption that depression and anxiety are the result of cognitive bugs that you can hack at home. I see it as dangerously ignorant about how its approaches to identity formation (keep it small! question everything! do you really need that opinion or belief?!) come across to trauma survivors who’ve experienced gaslighting.
The good points do sound good!
On the charitable giving topic, I recently stumbled upon this org, which analyzes charities and recommends the most effective thing for people to donate to currently. I don’t know if they are associated with rationalism at all. My understanding is that they were started by people who made a lot of money from tech startups and took an engineering-ish approach to philanthropy.
Also, I have an engineering degree, and am thus predisposed to think that many problems can be addressed using models roughly based on engineering. But you do have to be careful not to oversimplify, and to justify & check your assumptions. I think a lot of the things you talk about them getting wrong could be due to poor application of engineering models.
Atheist community sounds very nice, and I definitely agree about thinking about how you spend your time. It’s something I’ve been trying to do lately.
But on the other hand, Burning Man. I wonder: if taking cold showers may improve cardiovascular health, but the lack of hot showers at Burning Man makes your experience less than maximally awesome, is it more rational to set up hot showers or not?
Yeah, from what I’ve seen, it looks as if there’s a fair bit of overlap between the effective altruism movement (e.g., Givewell, Giving What We Can) and the rationalist movement (though one’s acquaintances do not constitute a statistical sample).
But on the other hand, Burning Man. I wonder: if taking cold showers may improve cardiovascular health, but the lack of hot showers at Burning Man makes your experience less than maximally awesome, is it more rational to set up hot showers or not?
🙂 I have zero skin in this game, but the tension between hedonism and self-improvement seems pretty hard to solve.
My experience with people in the Rationalist movement is that the charitable giving thing is a way to rationalize not being charitable. Also, that they think all life problems can be addressed by using a model roughly based on engineering and ignore the life problems that can’t be. And also, that there is a lot of casual sexism and racism in the Bay Area instance of that social group that gets ignored due to the presence of some women/people of color combined with a lack of any understanding of social science.
I am not a fan, as is probably clear. Due to some friend-of-friend type stuff, I socialized with the heart of Less Wrong for a hot minute before I was able to find my own social circle.
That was a really well-thought-out and even-handed critique of LessWrong and their movement. I’m really sorry about what happened with your ex. I like to laugh at LessWrong/MIRI/CFAR the same way I like to laugh at other weird internet subcultures, but I forget sometimes that they are a real-life organization that is quite capable of screwing with real people’s lives and relationships. That’s no fun. I’m glad you didn’t get sucked in, and I hope for his sake your ex makes it out okay.
More than any other aspect of LessWrong, it’s the you-should-be-polyamorous thing that creeps me out. That and “polyhacking,” which is what you can do when your partner becomes polyamorous but you still have “natural monogomous inclinations”: you can “hack yourself” to become polyamorous. So your boyfriend wants other sexual partners and you’re not okay with it? That’s easy to fix, you can just make yourself okay with it!
I understand that, for some people, an open or polyamorous relationship is a principled decision that they and their partner make together, with both parties fully enthusiastic about it. I also get that some people consider polyamory to be as much a part of them as their sexual orientation, and they conscientiously make sure that everyone they get involved with knows this beforehand.
But when a community tells its members that polyamory is the way to go, and that their SO’s can just “polyhack” themselves if they aren’t okay with it – and LessWrong is far from the first community to do this – that is not the result of individuals and couples making a thoughtful examination of their own sexuality and ethics. That is the doing of some dudes at the center of the community who realized that they could use their position of trust and influence to get laid a lot.
Thank you, Toft.
For what it’s worth, I contacted the person who wrote the “polyhacking” article and asked for advice on making myself okay with having a poly partner, shortly after my then-partner dropped the poly bomb, because I was in despair and didn’t know what else to do. The writer said roughly, after reading what I had to say, that she didn’t countenance trying to make myself want something other than what I wanted, and that she understood and respected my reasons for identifying as monogamous. She was generally very concerned and decent about the whole thing, and I appreciated that. I do think there are some people in the community who really do treat polyamory as if it is de facto more rational than any other approach to relationships– the guy who wrote HPMOR in particular– but not all of them do.
Re: the ex making it out okay– I don’t think he wants to make it out. He is an adult, pushing 40, capable of making his own decisions. He chose this community. I think he is really not clear on what else he wants in life, and in breaking up with me, he just lost the last roadblock between him and total commitment. If he wants to commit himself to combating unfriendly robots, or death, there is nothing standing in his way.
I have no interest in that life. I’m a theist, and it got really fucking tiresome to defend myself over dinner repeatedly. I will miss Ex ferociously, but I will not miss his friends taking potshots at me while I’m making an effort to be polite and sociable.
I’m glad that I misunderstood the “polyhacking” article. That’s not as bad as I thought it was, since it looks like the author’s not prescribing it as something everybody should do. Still, re-reading the article with that in mind, I think it’s kind of sad; it’s a story about how someone had to change her own romantic and sexual preferences in order to be with the person she loved. I get that there are accommodations to be made in any relationship, but it seems like in this case all the accommodations were on her side.
It’s good to know that not everybody in that community thinks polyamory is the only rational option. I guess I had drawn that conclusion from reading Yudkowsky’s stuff.
Thanks for setting me straight, and props for being unrelentingly fair to a group of people whom you have every reason to be uncharitable towards.
It’s an easy conclusion to draw from Yukowsky’s stuff. *spits*
He’s where my fairness and charity stops. Most of the fantasies I have had in the last couple of years involve that dude sitting in front of me, forced to shut up for once and listen. I see him as a manipulator of insecurities and vulnerabilities. I see him as someone who is so attached to his movement that he has zero interest in the human casualties thereof. My feelings toward him are on par with my feelings toward my abusive parent. I wish him a lifetime of waking up every morning at 3 a.m. shocked with the knowledge of his mortality, as if for the first time, because I think for him that would probably be hell.
(What a boring hell, I think. But what do I know– I’m a #deathist.)
A friend recommended Methods of Rationality to me and I read a few chapters but just couldn’t take it.
I don’t think I even made it to Hogwarts. 11 year old Draco said something about wanting to rape Hermoine when he was old enough and Harry told McGonagall that he wasn’t stupid enough to let himself be abused and I went ‘this is not a story for me’ and noped the fuck out of there.
I LOVED Methods of Rationality at first! Until… I understood that he’s serious.
I THOUGHT IT WAS SATIRE
IT WASN’T
IT WAS MANCHILD LORE
I kind of liked the side of it that is about what is silly about Harry Potter if you overthink it, because I like overthinking that sort of thing. But the side of it that is about what the non-silly alternative would be like is itself very, very silly, and it doesn’t know it, and this is a problem.
Yeah, from what I remember it was bananas in a way that was simultaneously obnoxious and incredibly entertaining. It wasn’t complete when I read it, but I am contemplating trying to finish it off. The last part I remember was Harry deciding that death was irrational and must therefore be defeated. I am pretty grateful to the author for pointing me in the direction of Worm though.
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality…I read only a few chapters, years ago, and remember almost no details. But every once in a while somebody I know mentions it and I want to smash things anew because I remember how much I wanted to smash things while reading those few chapters.
EDIT: it doesn’t help that the context people mention it in is almost always “look how smart it is!” and I want to quote Hermione’s freakout about how there are more important things.
OK, I’ve seen a reference to a “teapot clerk” a couple of times on AAM, and I don’t know what the heck it means. Anyone?
AAM uses chocolate teapots as a stand in for everything. “Teapot clerk” can read “clerk (in my industry)” instead of having to spend a quarter of every letter starting with “I work in the oil and gas industry as a Level 3 admin handling finance.” It adds anonymity and streamlines things.
Instead of explicitly naming the company/industry they’re in, the letter writer (and the whole site) uses “teapot industry”. It is kind of jarring to read in some of the more serious letters!
Oh, OK! Thank you both. I thought it was a UK- or Canadian-ism or something. 🙂
I think it’s an AAM in-joke – lots of people in the comments there say they have jobs relating to teapots so they can talk about work without making themselves identifiable. Some letter writers use that convention as well, especially when asking questions that relate specifically to their job title, e.g. ‘I’m still a teapot clerk even though my manager promised me a promotion to teapot administrator three years ago’.
There was once someone who actually worked with teapots. It was a bit of a shock!
Can we send Caity Weaver on that cruise?
Do they have any all-one-can-eat buffets?
How could we not
If anyone wants to set up a Kickstarter I would contribute to it SO FAST.
It’s been a long-ass time since I was in that particular fandom, but do NOT read Twist and Shout. It’s kind of shitty and everyone is subtly out of character and it uses AIDS as a cheap tear-jerker. Too “sad gays written by straight person” for my tastes.
Thank you! I feel kind of weird about one-size-fits-all fic recs because it’s so YMMV. Obviously whoever wrote the list liked Twist and Shout, but I..would not have based on your comment.
The CanLit premise generator! It has over 900 000 scenarios. http://www.cbc.ca/books/2016/02/got-writers-block…
I used to love Tumblr and I still have many lovely friends there (that’s how I met Nicole in her previous incarnation!), but it’s NSFW and I’m at work a LOT. No matter how I weed, there’s always some surprise illustration of SebStan cheerfully railing Tony Stark at like 2pm on a Tuesday.
I love Tumblr lots, but there are people that I’ve unfollowed because of random (and untagged) porn.
They’ve already invented a service where you can hire someone to break up with you, so when are they going to invent a service where you can hire someone to read “be kind to your bisexual wives and daughters” to your family until they put it together? Why do I ask? No reason.
TAKE MY MONEY.
Is anyone who’s watching and writing about People vs. O.J. addressed the fact that it’s pretty much entirely men who are on his side? Like, it seems like all his female friends and acquaintances are like, “HE FUCKIN’ DID IT!!” |I think men just really, really want to believe their male friends don’t kill their wives.
I wonder if it’ll touch on the jury later on, though; and how they were selected on the belief that WOC would sympathise with OJ and dislike Nicole.
hey friends, tell me about the tiny-ass fandoms or rarepairs you love that fic doesn’t exist for or which you write and no one else cares about. one time I wrote a Three x Aaron Cross thing (The Bourne Legacy) and I’m the only person alive who wanted this apparently and it’s probably my favorite thing I’ve ever written.
I love tiny-ass fandoms and really out-of-date fandoms like nothing else, and am mostly made up of them (I’ve not gotten into MCU at all). Narnia, Tortall, Alias, the tiny Stephen King fandom community (people write really good little fics for The Stand and IT, did you know?)…a few years ago I was there for the sad demise of the Fake News/Pundit community and its various rare pairings which I should probably not mention on a work computer. RIP to the Colbert Report and Daily Show and the PRT+.
Do you have any recommendations for Tortall fics? Tamora Pierce’s stuff was some of my first book-loves as a kid, but for some reason I never even thought to look for Tortall fanfics.
Oh, do I!
A favorite is Lady Knight Volant , about Kel immediately after the end of Lady Knight. It’s not without a few things that irk me, but it’s full of small details, the quality of the writing is excellent, and I learned a surprising number of architectural terms. Eventual Kel/Dom.
Someone else recently recced Miss Atomic Bomb, a modern AU focused on Alanna, that was a lot of fun too.
Someone else who likes Narnia fic! Do you have any recommendations? Have you read burntcopper’s National Service series or…well, anything by rthstewart ?
I think the biggest rarepair I’ve ever had, that I’ve just wanted fic for desperately but that does not actually exist is a crossover ship of Mulder/Dale Cooper mostly brought on by of course David Duchovny’s appearance on Twin Peaks. I want it SO BAD.
I’m actually surprised to learn this isn’t a thing? Dear Internet, please make it a thing. It seems like a thing that is SO OBVIOUS.
I did read one recently where Mulder met Denise Bryson!
I am always surprised there isn’t more Modesty Blaise fanfic out there. She seems so ideal to write about.
It’s not so much a rarepair as a rare crossover but how is there not all the Highlander / Criminal Minds fanfic out there? I need this, and there’s like two stories total
I have a tendency look up fanfic for books when I like the characters, so I’m keeping my eye on a bunch of fandoms that have a tiny-ass AO3 presence.
There aren’t many ships that I feel passionately for or against, though.
Foyle’s War. A tiny, tiny fandom, but so wonderful.
I still dream of finding the exact right fic for Baerd and Alessan in Guy Gavriel Kay’s Tigana. I’m trying to write it myself but that isn’t as satisfying.
One time my bff and I wrote a series of crossover fics where Castiel from SPN hooks up with Kaylee from Firefly in spite of me only seeing three episodes of Supernatural ever.
It took me three reads to get “rare-pairs” instead of “R A repairs” on that word.
My two Dragon Age otps are Female Warden/Morrigan and Hawke/Varric. They may not exactly be rare, but they are certainly thin on the ground (as is most femslash, unfortunately).
Kira and Seven of Nine from DS9/Voyager.
I have this amazing, guilty obsession with a horrendously racist, colonialist nineteenth century boy’s adventure, “Draw Swords!” by George Manville Fenn. The Dick/Wyatt bromance is EPIC. They are MANLY MEN.
“Dick’s heart throbbed with admiration and pride—and perhaps slightly, too, with envy—as the big, manly, broad-chested Englishman drew himself up and spoke in his deep, sonorous tones.”
“I began to like him directly, and I believe he began to like me. He must, or he wouldn’t have been so friendly. It seems so strange, too, for we make a curious pair. I am right, though—big, brave man as he is, he is quite a boy at heart.”
“You mean morsel.” Manly Men can be camp as fuck, bless them.
YOU MEAN MORSEL. Why is no one writing Dick/Wyatt slash for me?
I also am deeply in love with Eli (One Of Us!) Easton’s Tinker and Colin, from her steampunk Crimean War hurt/comfort hospital porn novella, “Caress”. I just ordered Anthony Dawson’s Letters from the Light Brigade so I can research the period, I am that in love with it.
YOU ARE NOT ALONE. I finally saw The Bourne Legacy on tv a while back and immediately went to ao3 looking for the Three/Aaron Cross. I was actually fairly surprised and disappointed at not finding any.
When I wrote fic I wrote Harry Potter/West Wing crossovers. Particularly CJ/Snape with a side of Donna/McGonagall.
I am DELIGHTED by this.
In which CJ hexes Ron and Snape introduces Josh to Firewhisky.
OH. I also wrote a Harry Potter/Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain RP crossover fic. Can’t believe I forgot that one.
re tumblr:
Do you think the woman who said “Girls these days don’t keep diaries; I think that means they don’t have inner lives” was trying to be really witty and has since read the article and feels like a jackass?
I always want to know the anonymous sources of damning quotes!
Re: conspiracies:
Am I the only person who has kept certain acquaintances friended on social media solely because of the number of bizarre conspiracy theories they appear to genuinely subscribe to? Because there is at least one person on my Facebook feed who has remained solely so that I can boggle at his belief in chemtrails and vast government cover-ups.
I’ve been reading fic since I was 13 years old (ahh almost 12 years now…) and I still feel like the odd ball out for exclusively reading slashfics. I know it’s not the case, and lots of people read slash, but I still stop myself from mentioning that I read fic when people bring it up in real life because of my lingering self-conciousness. Now, if people start out just straight up talking Stucky to me, I am HERE for that, but alas, that rarely happens.
I recently made a hilarious joke waiting in line for the bathroom after the midnight showing of Deadpool to a girl who was grumbling about how the movie portrayed Vanessa, telling her “yeah, that definitely was the oddest take on Spiderman I’ve ever seen!” and only got a blank stare and a rude comment about being “one of those people”. Which… we’re both at a midnight showing of Deadpool! obviously we’re both to an extent “one of those people”. Also how can you not have a sense of humor and go see that movie?!
Anyways, the long and short of it is I’m a garbage person that ships garbage ships (not Stucky though, Stucky is a beautiful ship with perfect beings) and I’m here for your worst ships! Mine are probably Mac/Dennis, Matthew Murdock/Wesley, Giles/Spike, etc etc the list can go on forever. What are yours?!
I am ride or die for Chuck Bass/Dan Humphrey and you will not convince me that they weren’t carrying on a secret affair while Blair was engaged to the Prince of Monaco.
Oh my god, YES. I also desperately wanted Chuck Bass/Carter Baizen to be a bigger ship with nothing but a bunch of fics of them having wonderfully delicious hate sex.
If I wasn’t so committed to Wesley/Fisk/Vanessa I would probably be here for Matt/Wesley.
(In my universe the evil ot3 of my heart is permitted to go on)
hello hello hello which stucky fic has made you cry recently? for me it was spitandvinegar’s Ain’t No Grave
This story is full of glee and perfection. Everyone must read it. It’s full of things that shouldn’t work, like kid OCs, and they work SO WELL.
For other stucky, it doesn’t get better than Speranza’s fic, IMO. The 4 – Minute Window short “The Studebaker” made me cry.
I haven’t read that!! Bookmarking it right now so I can read it when I get home from work! Without a doubt, the last Stucky series I read that gave me all the feels is Feathers your blue eyed boys series: http://archiveofourown.org/series/107477. SO good! Two parts to the main story, and it explores Bucky’s ptsd and trauma so so well. Also I’m a sucker for a good slow burn.
One of my favorite AUs though is definitely Kryptaria and rayvanfox’s Critical Feline Mass: http://archiveofourown.org/works/1679630/chapters…. Veteran! Steve + Bucky! Cats! Motorcycles! Leather pants! Sam Wilson being generally amazing! What more could you ask for?
Added to the list! Also: Casual Encounters by MoreThanSlightly (can’t link while at work) is great if you’re into recovering vet-Bucky AUs (with bonus artist Skinny Steve)
I haven’t read DC Comics since New 52 started, but I have a very special place in my heart for Jason Todd/Connor Hawke.
Which I don’t know that I’ve actually read any of, because I might be the only one on the planet with these feelings.
Interesting, I mostly feel like the odd girl out with my friends for reading almost NO slash. Fandom contains multitudes!
I have a real kink for explicit Lindsey/Gunn and Spike/Lindsey for reasons I cannot understand or explain. I have no real interest in any other Angel ships. I am confused.
I refuse to admit any of my ships are garbage!
Sort of related to the fanfiction talk, but not really? I know slash has been around forever and if I looked I could find fic, but sometimes when I watch an old movie I wish it was created now when fanfic is so easily accessible and I know it exists. Wondering if anyone else thinks that and with any particular show/movie/etc? For instance, imagine if the first Point Break had just come out???!!! That would have been glorious.
I would definitely suggest the Yuletide fic exchange archives! If you’re not familiar, it’s an annual secret-Santa-style project where authors are assigned to write each other’s requests, and it’s limited for the most part to small and rare fandoms. Just browsing through and looking for older movies, I’m seeing fic for Back to the Future, Jaws, Die Hard, Ghostbusters, The Thin Man, and–yes–Point Break. (In fact, there are a whole 10 Point Break works in the entirety of AO3, which is small but also kind of impressive.)
I was recently thinking about this for a bunch of old/older movies I’ve watched recently.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Butch/Sundance/Etta)
Rebel Without a Cause (Jim/Plato/Judy)
The Magnificent Seven (You could probably just pull names out of a hat and I’d read it.)
There are a TON of others I’ve thought that about over the years, I’m sure of it.
But, yeah. You are definitely not alone 🙂
psssst…there’s definitely Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid fic out there on A03. Bless Yuletide.
I was recently thinking about this for a bunch of old/older movies I’ve watched recently.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Butch/Sundance/Etta)
Rebel Without a Cause (Jim/Plato/Judy)
The Magnificent Seven (You could probably just pull names out of a hat and I’d read it.)
There are a TON of others I’ve thought that about over the years, I’m sure of it.
But, yeah. You are definitely not alone 🙂
Casablanca. Rick Blaine and Captain Renault have more chemistry than anyone else in that movie.
Wait, buzzfeed does fanfic recs now?! I’m so confused. In fanfiction moving into the mainstream? Is that happening? are adults allowed to admit to reading fanfiction in public/non-extra-nerdy settings? I am SO CONFUSED, what is happening to the social landscape
I’m with you! They’ve been doing this whole fanfic week and the pieces I’ve read have been pretty good, but I still feel SO weird about it, in the same way I always do when fic stuff makes into the mainstream.
I mean, I was introduced to fanfiction at age 11 or so by my dad who saw an article in our local newspaper about some highschool girl who wrote novel-length HP fanfic in lieu of doing her actual English homework, so I think there’s been some level of mainstream awareness for quite a while.
God damn, I can remember when I rarely admitted to reading slash, and when I met a person IRL that did we both felt like we were confessing our dirtiest secrets.
And now, like, even my parents know I read fic, and I know two of my coworkers do (in different fandoms than me), and nearly all of my friends know I read Sherlock slash and several have asked me for recommendations!
“GMOs, Monsanto, bee colony collapse, ecology, global warming, climate change, fracking, HIV, autism, big pharma, medical suppression, vaccinations, flouridation, political corruption, government corruption, forbidden archeology, Federal Reserve, truth about money, World Bank, strawman, property title, admiralty law, martial law, Bohemian Grove, Skull and Bones, JFK, cover-ups, September 11, Star Wars agenda, nuclear plants, chemtrails, HAARP, crop circles, IRS, MK-Ultra, Fukashima, NASA, NSA, Bilderbergs, sustainability, military industrial complex, pentagon, Waco, Malaysia 370, Pan Am 103, TWA 800, Gulf Oil Spill, Halliburton, Obama, Ruby Ridge, OK City, Vatican, New World Order, false flags, Montauk, privacy, surveillance, Area 51, Dulce, Project Rainbow, Nazi Bell, Vrill, U.S.S. Eldridge, Iron Mountain, psyops, population mangement, subliminal ads, Nibiru / Planet X, Cointel Pro, entity possession, technology suppression, electoral fraud, identity chips, 2nd amendment, and so much more.”
How is 7 days enough time to cover all this AND enjoy:
“Afternoon Tea with scones, clotted cream and more
Awesome gourmet desserts created by special five-star chef
Soft-served ice cream and authentic gelato
International Cafe featuring gourmet pastries”
I love that there are ten bullet points in a row all listing food-related things.
“Uhhhhhhhhhh sure, I believe the government is using fluoride to render us sterile and create a race of bionic super-soldiers. Now let me at those scones”.
This is one of my favorite fanfics : https://www.fanfiction.net/s/8433193/1/A-Morbid-T… .its mcu loki/darcy .It’s also on ao3
Suggestion for tomorrow’s Link Roundup… I’m still waiting for my blood pressure to settle down, but would like to discuss this with you guys:
“Abortion ban linked to dangerous miscarriages at Catholic hospital, report claims”
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/feb/18/mi…
I still have multiple friends who keep their fandom life and their fan life really really separate. Like, I didn't know what they looked like or their real names for years and years!
We started watching People v. OJ last night and it was good and also surreal to watch?