Arduinna

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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

Apologies for being so late with this letter /o\

Thank you so much! The thought of a story or art in any of these fandoms is already making me happy. These prompts probably lean toward fic, just because that's how my brain is wired, but I also asked for fanart for everything because art is awesome.

I love all of these fandoms unreservedly, so if you have a yen to explore the universe, or bring in additional characters I didn't list, it's all good.

If you want more information about my requests, read on - but please don't worry if your ideas go in a different direction. I would much rather enjoy what you wanted to create than think you felt obligated to do something just because of something I said. As long as it's for one of these relationships, I'll be happy. \o/

( My fanwork tastes )

Why I love these fandoms

(Alphabetical, not ranked by preference! I love them all. :)

( Burn Notice )

( Good Omens )

( Hair )

( Person of Interest )

( Wiseguy )

I adore all these fandoms, and will be happy with absolutely anything you write, as long as you enjoy writing it.

And thank you, again!!

Day 3: In your own space, share a favorite piece of original canon (a TV episode, a song, a favorite interview, a book, a scene from a movie, etc) and explain why you love it so much.

This is hard - so many choices!

But I'm going to go with a pivotal moment in Haven: the first ep in season four. It tears down alllll the walls between Nathan and Duke, and it makes me incredibly happy.

I actually have a post mostly written up from, uh, 2013 that I never got around to wrapping up or posting (it was meant to be a post-YT reveals post, and I just never went back to it in January), so am just going to plunk that in here to 'splain. There are going to be spoilers for most of the show here: caveat lector.

Begin old post:
~~~
Things about Duke and Nathan I sorted out in my head (read: turned into headcanon) while rewatching (most of) Haven:

Duke is a romantic pragmatist. He likes being in love, he doesn't seem to really stop being in love (he never trusted Evi again after whatever happened between them, but I never got the feeling he'd stopped loving her, at least a bit). But the heart of him is about pragmatism and practicality, and using the tools at hand even when those tools are people (within some limits -- I suspect Evi's limits on that were different than his, and hence the breakup). Within those limits, he just doesn't take things personally, and he doesn't understand why other people do -- especially Nathan.

Nathan is a romantic idealist. He likes being in love, also doesn't really seem to stop being in love (he was still very fond of his HS gf, etc.). He's not a pragmatist at heart; he will use people if he has to but he doesn't like it, and he's bad at it (like, say, Jordan -- Duke could have charmed his way out of that reveal, because he would have played it lighter and looser out of sheer pragmatism, but Nathan doesn't know how to do that, and wound up hurting her badly as a result).

But they're both romantics; they both genuinely believe in relationships, genuinely value relationships - genuinely value each other. So they get pulled together along the planes where they align, and then something happens -- usually Duke doing something that to him is utterly normal, that reads to Nathan as something a user would do, something you just don't bring into a relationship you value. So Nathan shoves Duke away, in a move that seems utterly random to Duke, because why would anyone get that mad over [thing]? [Thing] is just... [thing]! It's no big deal!

But it's a huge deal to Nathan, who feels like all his trust has been thrown back in his face, because how could someone do [thing]?

And then they have a period where both of them feel like the other one has randomly and for no reason blown up their friendship, and they can't trust each other. And with every cycle of that, the barriers between them get a little bit stronger, because they're both Charlie Brown, trusting Lucy not to pull the football away, and crashing down harder every time she does.

And here's the other sticky part of all that, amplifying it: Duke's pragmatic approach to affection and relationships is almost identical to Garland Wournos's. So Nathan is super-primed to feel like the people he loves and wants to trust most just can't be trusted to put him first, ever. While meanwhile they're just baffled, because of course they put him first! It's just this other thing that has to get done right now, so what's the big deal?

(The day I figured out that Garland and Duke approached Nathan almost identically, I think I actually squeaked.)

So, anyway, back to Duke and Nathan and their push-pull relationship. We know that Duke came back specifically because of the Troubles; he already knew they were back when he arrived in Haven, because that was his only reason for coming back. Nathan didn't know yet. Duke and Nathan run into each other, Duke makes friendly overtures and invites Nathan to go fishing, Nathan says sure, okay, thinking they're reviving their friendship. Nathan then discovers that Duke asked him because he wants Nathan to flash his badge at the Coast Guard; Nathan is furious, they "beat on each other for an hour", Nathan's Trouble manifests during the fight (implication is that it's the fight that triggers it), Duke "doesn't even care".

All of that is Nathan's version of the story. But here's the thing: Nathan also says, at a different point, that he's never heard of a Trouble manifesting because of physical stress. It's always emotional stress, something huge.

Which means that Duke's "betrayal" is what actually triggers Nathan. Duke's friendship means that much to him.

I think from Duke's eyes, that whole thing looked a little different. I think to him, he had to go back to Haven, he ran into an old friend and invited him out fishing, with the added bonus that this friend could even wave off any curious Coast Guard cutters if need be, making for a nice relaxed day for both of them (because why wouldn't Nathan want to do him an easy favor like that? It's not like he was asking Nathan to help him smuggle something specific - just smoothing the way in case anything happened, like flashing a badge at a traffic cop and promising to make sure Duke drove more slowly). Then that old friend loses his temper for no reason, and they get into this ridiculous fistfight and now Duke's angry too, because wtf, this was supposed to be a nice day! Then Nathan's Trouble gets triggered, and Duke, who knows full well the Troubles are back, doesn't really blink; he knows all kinds of Troubles are being triggered, and he's extremely familiar with Nathan's. Also dammit now Nathan *can't feel Duke's punches*, and how is that fair?

Then Nathan stomps off and stays angry at Duke for two years, while Duke decides screw it, he didn't need Nathan as a friend anyway, so there. He doesn't even like cops.

Then Audrey shows up and smacks their heads together a few times, and starts letting them past that point. They start relating to each other on a more grown-up level; they find out things about each other that they don't turn around and use against each other; they start trusting again. Slowly, carefully, and with some backsliding, because their pattern is so well-established now -- but they're breaking it every chance they can.

Except third season, which is the point at which Audrey's been in town a few months and has started to trust Duke as much as she trusts Nathan -- and Nathan is still hugely aware that Duke betrayed him so severely that Nathan's Trouble manifested, so he warns Audrey, explicitly telling her that as best he can, and she... pays no attention, and keeps right on trusting Duke. Nathan's falling more in love with Audrey every day, and sees her setting herself up for a betrayal of some sort, and he's just so angry at both of them -- that Duke is probably setting her up, that she won't trust that he knows what he's talking about (he's known Duke for 30 years; she's known Duke for what, 4 months? 5 months?).

Nathan spends most of third season braced for Duke's next big betrayal -- and Duke doesn't betray him, or Audrey. (Which is because his pragmatism is aligned with their goals, pretty much, but also because he really is more willing to just help now, and Nathan has had to learn something about pragmatism since he became Chief [not to mention how his handling of Jordan was basically him trying to channel both Garland and Duke through himself, with wretched results, but he can't really throw stones about using people now].)
~~~
End old post!

So, yeah - there's just so much history between these two, going back forever. There's the first three seasons of the show, which took 3 years in real time but only about six months in show-universe time (so everything that happens in the first three seasons is still pretty fresh and raw all the way through).

And then at the end of s3, Duke and Audrey vanish into the Barn. *poof*

So s4 starts up, and we find out it's months later. Duke is thrown out of the barn in another state, thinking it's only been a few hours. Things Happen and he makes his way back to Haven, looking for Nathan; the Teague brothers tell him where to look, but warn him that Nathan has changed.

Duke goes off and finds Nathan in the midst of a group of burly men, scruffy and bruised and careless, taking money off these guys by betting them he can take whatever punch they throw at him. The woman Duke has been traveling with is all, "... that's your friend?" Duke sort of winces and says, "We're... complicated." Then he borrows a $20 and walks up behind Nathan, who's taking a break to have a swig of beer.

And I interrupt myself to say - I love that borrowed $20. They are complicated, and Duke is a pragmatist, and he's totally prepared to buy a few minutes from Nathan if he has to. <3

Anyway, so Duke says something, and Nathan recognizes his voice, and his eyes go so, so hopeful. He spin around and grabs Duke by the arms, lighting up all over his face, and then pulls Duke into the fiercest, happiest bearhug ever, tightening his arms even more when Duke hugs him back, and making little noises of pure joy.

Here's where I steal from another post I actually did make that same year:
~~~
This season has been a Duke/Nathan slasher's dream, from the moment Nathan turned around to see Duke and reacted with completely nonverbal sounds and one of the best hugs I've ever seen anywhere. ... I may have watched it a few times since then.

That hug makes sense from Nathan's POV, where he's spent six months thinking Duke was dead and it was his fault, but for Duke, it's been a few hours, maybe a day tops, since he's seen Nathan, at which point they were at their normal levels of semi-grudging trust and working together. But he sees Nathan's face light up at the sight of him, and that triggers an identical reaction in him; he lights up right back, and he may not quite be trying to crawl into Nathan the way Nathan's trying to crawl into him, but he doesn't let go, even though Nathan smells bad.

And they never go back from that point. They've had other moments of relative peace and harmony in the past, but they're just moments, and then the protective walls go back up. This time, it's like they both decided oh well, the cards are all on the table now -- they really do mean that much to each other, and they both know it. So they just move forward from there.

I'm tempted to go all gushy and say all they ever needed was one moment like that, of pure trust and love, but I don't actually think that's true. I think they needed the last few years of history to make that moment possible in canon.

And then we get things like Duke backing Nathan's play in a heartbeat, even though he first doesn't believe him, and then thinks Nathan's out of his mind and tries to keep convincing him it's a bad idea. But even then, publicly he's still backing him, even if it means coming up with yet another lunatic plan later, to the point that other people tell him outright they know he's just doing or saying whatever to protect Nathan, which. ♥

We get Nathan trying to stop Duke from risking death to save Nathan, with the weird angry living blood trouble thing; and Duke whapping his arm away and then absorbing all the weird angry blood anyway, because he knows what that blood wants to do to Nathan, and at least he has a shot of surviving it.

We get that fantastic moment on the hill, with all the Guard around wanting to kill Nathan, and Duke absorbing some Troubled blood and yelling "Run!" and Nathan just BOLTING, without a blink, totally trusting Duke to have his back and to know what he's doing.

We get Duke just assuming the role of Nathan's de facto partner in the first part of the season (and again later, when Audrey's out of commission), with both of them accepting it as perfectly normal (and again, not just them, but everyone else; the vibe between them is so relaxed and simpatico at this point it's amazing). He even makes sure that Nathan's coffee can't accidentally scald him before he hands it over.

We get that moment when Duke actually tells Nathan he's good at his job -- not mockingly, not even teasingly, just a straight-up "the thing you're good at is solving cases and finding people" -- and even though the way he does it sounds like it could be a setup, Nathan doesn't think he's being set up, he trusts that this is a genuine conversation. We get Duke and Nathan having a nose-to-nose, heart to heart convo about how Nathan wants Duke to protect "Lexie" when he's gone, while earnestly telling Duke that he *will* stop the Troubles, and Duke quietly and sincerely saying "I know you will". Oh my heart, the trust, the belief.

And later, when Duke has killed Wade and is grieving and angry and freaked out and lashes out at Nathan and Audrey, Nathan doesn't go defensive or angry; he acknowledges that Duke's saying some true things, and then when he realizes that Duke's Trouble is gone and figures out that Duke must have killed Wade, he just sort of absorbs it; he doesn't go all cop on Duke, he's just there for him. (... which, okay, is sort of being a terrible cop, but in Troubled Haven terms, makes me kinda melt.)

We get Duke, who for seasons now has been saying he doesn't want to help people, eyerolling at the sky and plaintively wanting to know why everyone always thinks he wants to help, telling Jennifer that when he was a kid, he's the one who carried Nathan to the hospital when he broke his arm -- and even more tellingly, that's how he differentiates himself from Wade, who freaked out and didn't help at all. That childhood moment was defining for Duke.

And most of that is just the first few eps of the season, as they turned themselves into this tight little unit of two, even with the other people swirling around them, even as they made room for Jennifer and "Lexie", even as Duke's brother showed up trying to reconnect, even as Dwight tried to reintegrate Nathan into Haven PD.

I have been eating this season up with a spoon, man.
~~~

So, yeah. Haven S4E1, where Duke and Nathan drop their prickly facades and embrace the relationship that'd been lurking under the surface the whole time. Making me an incredibly happy fan in the process, heh.

(... so much for combining days to catch up. I think I'll be doing this thing till February at this rate!)

*waves*

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, hi, am alive!

kass asked me to talk about my first fannish love, and I've been mullling that over since she mentioned it. I'm not entirely sure how to define it.

It could be Lord of the Rings; I read it for the first time when I was 12, and wow. It was an annual re-read for me for years; I learned some Elvish; I memorized some of the poetry. It sparked my interest in Nordic legend and myth, and shoved me full-tilt into the SFF side of genre. ("It's just a phase," my parents thought. "She'll grow out of it." Hahahahaaaa not so much...)

Or it could be ST:TOS, which I watched in reruns starting god knows when, and bonded with my soon-to-be sister-in-law over when I was 13-14. I could recognize episodes from the first few seconds; I bought the novelizations and the fotonovels and the tie-ins as soon as they started appearing. I discovered my embarrassment squick through Plato's Children when Spock was forced to behave ridiculously; I started down the path of seeing humanity as a whole and being totally confused by nationalism. I found the Star Trek Concordance at the library and read it cover to cover, marveling at the stories about the first Star Trek conventions in New York and wishing I was brave enough to go to a con. (It really did have that little moving wheel on the cover, too – so cool!) TOS zines were the first I ever bought, and were my introduction to slash. ♥ No other ST series ever worked for me as well as the original.

It could be Star Wars, which came out when I was 12 and oh my GOD was I the right age for that. I wanted as much as I could get and then some; I saw it many times in the theater that summer and dozens of times in the theater over the next year or two. When my family got cable for the first time a few years later, I got up at 6am to watch it on HBO. (Dad: "... haven't you seen this before? Why are you awake?" me: "shhhhh!!!!!") I wanted the novelizations and the calendars and the t-shirts (... I still have the t-shirt *kof*) (... and the novelizations). I dressed up my dolls and stuffed animals as Star Wars characters. (You haven't lived till you've turned a stuffed skunk into a stormtrooper with careful application of tissues and scotch tape.)

It could be Battlestar Galactica (the original). This is the first canon for which I consciously made up stories, mostly about how Apollo and Starbuck were meant to be together, or how one of them needed to rescue the other, so that makes it a first as well. I hadn't quite gotten all the way to slash on my own yet, but I was right there on the verge.

Or it could be Forever Knight, which I watched religiously no matter how hard it was to find, and taped regularly (first show I ever taped for keeping!), and went looking online to see if anyone else watched it, too, when I first got online. I've talked about my early FK days here before – hah, actually, because Kass asked about it a few years ago. <3 That was what pushed me from being in SF fandom proper to being in media fandom, and man, I loved it. I loved the people, the energy, the creativity, the fan theories, the riffs and in-jokes, all of it. It was the first time I'd interacted with people who were writing fanfic, and it made me think that this was something I could maybe do? It wasn't the first fandom I wrote fic in (hah, I checked this time – usually I get this wrong and say FK was the first), but it was the second, and I made some really strong connections with people in that fandom.

So, uh. My first fannish love was sort of ... everything? Heh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

Full request list here, still open!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

♥ FK ♥

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

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Full request list here, still open!

For james:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Full request list here, still open!

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

I've been hearing about Wattpad for the past year or two, generally in the context of "there's this GIGANTIC ARCHIVE that all the kids are using now, it leaves even ff.net in the dust". And earlier tonight, I was link-hopping and saw it mentioned again and thought okay, I actually want to look into this now. So I did; I went to Wattpad to see what was what. And, ugh, it's one where you have to log in to see anything. I hate that; you shouldn't have to be a member unless you want to post content. But by now I was really curious, because lord knows the non-logged-in front page was kinda useless. So I made an account and logged in, and went searching.

... Okay, seriously, why do people complain about the AO3's search*, when this is what's out there as the shiny new face of awesome?

There is a search bar, at least, into which you can type keywords. You can also pick a category (of which "Fanfiction" is one - you can't narrow any kind of fannish category beyond that), a length (... in "pages", not words, and I have no idea how many words make up a page in Wattpad terms), and a language. You can also tick a box for "completed" or "mature".

That's it. Typing in a fandom name while filtering for fanfiction will probably get you at least some fanfic in that fandom, but will also potentially bring up non-fanfic, people whose names match your fandom's name, summaries that include your fandom's name, etc. (This is not a good place to be a Supernatural fan, in other words.) And there's no way to filter down from your results; all you can do is go page by page.

This is awful; we had more control over archive searches 10 years ago on basic, early-days automated archives like AA or efiction.

I know it's not purely a fanfic archive; it's meant to be a clearinghouse for all writing everywhere. But it has to be miserable trying to find something in *any* category. Is this seriously something that pro writers think is awesome and a great way to reach readers?

Searching is bad enough that I'm starting to think that those stories that have nearly 2 million reads get them just by virtue of being the first results to show up.

Man. I do not think I'll be using this account much. Or at all. I honestly feel bad for the people who think this is the best thing there is.

*This was a rhetorical question.

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Unrelatedly, I think this makes 30 posts in 30 days. \o/ I've never managed to do that, ever. I may keep using the tag just to see how long I can go without breaking the streak. *g*

So since I posted my list of comms two days ago, a couple of people have created a new Person of Interest discussion comm: pofinterest_chat -- looks like it just got created today, in fact. Check it out!

Lifehacker had a post today about video conversion programs that looked interesting; I've used three out of their top five, but it's always good to have more options. All the programs they list are free and will convert multiple formats back and forth.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to write up a decent con report, and keep getting buried in the fact that I want to report on everything, which is a lot. We'll see how it goes. It wasn't helped today by digging out my panel notes from Friday and seeing the audio editing stuff, and promptly haring off to Adobe Audition to stare at waveforms for a while, and go "ooo" a lot. Time to start looking at how-to videos for that, too.

I haven't done one of these in ages, but I've seen folks reviving it recently, so what the heck. Have some comms!

Recs:

vidrecs Just what it says on the tin, and a good place to post those VVC recs burning a hole in your pocket... It's a low-activity comm right now, and I'd love to see that change. (note to self...) Anyone can rec. Basic rules: no self-reccing, one rec per post, two posts per reccer per day, publicly available vids only.

fanart_recs Again, just what it says on the tin. This runs mainly on a sign-up basis, where people sign up in advance to make at least 4 recs in a month in a particular fandom. They're always looking for more reccers, but I've never seen a month go by when there wasn't at least one person reccing things. Not always in my fandoms, but I've found some fantastic art this way.

fancake Okay, I rec this one a lot, because it's one of my favorite recs places. Themed recs, themes change every month, anyone can rec anything they want in that theme, one rec per post, three recs per reccer per day, amnesty period once a year for all themes. I need to get off my duff and start making recs again.

Fic prompts:

fic_promptly is a pan-fandom prompt comm that has a different theme every Monday through Thursday (Fridays are free-for-alls, post any prompts you want). This isn't an anon meme; every weekday there's a new post. The comm went silent for a while so may have fallen off people's radar, but it's been revived, and it's back in business.

meme_of_interest is the Person of Interest kinkmeme; it allows both anon and non-anon prompts and fills.

grimm_kink is the Grimm kink meme, which you can probably tell from the name. A little slow at the moment, but still active; the most recent comment on the prompt post is from yesterday.

Panfandom fannish chat:

tv_talk is a fairly new comm, where people can sign up to be Captain of a show -- which just means you agree to put up a new discussion post for people to talk in within a week of an episode's airing. Right now only two of the shows that people have asked to sign up for are currently airing, so it's a little heavy on the Teen Wolf and Falling Skies, but I'd love to see this take off as the fall season starts up. Oh, also anyone can post a "General post" about whatever they want, whenever they want - it's not just for official discussion posts.

The comm doesn't allow character or ship bashing, and the spoiler policy is one that works for me (no spoilers of future shows, no spoilers outside of cuts, no spoilers for episodes airing a week previously in general posts).

allfandom_chat is an anon-meme-style comm where you don't have to be anon unless you want to be, where you can talk in comments about any fandom or fannish thing you want. Brand new, set up this week.

whumpable For all your hurt/comfort discussion needs, whether finding h/c canons, talking about h/c tropes, making or asking for recs, etc.

Specific fandom comms:

pofinterest_fic This is the DW mirror to the most active Person of Interest comm on LJ. The _fic part is misleading; it allows "fanfic, icons, screencaps, any other fanart, fanvids, fanmixes, recs, links, discussion posts, news, etc. -basically anything that is related to the tv show Person of Interest" It's basically the only POI comm on DW right now, other than the kink meme, and with the new season coming up...

havenfans For all your Haven needs! Discussion, fic, vids, you name it.

grimm_daily A daily roundup of Grimm fic - originally meant for rounding up kink meme fills, but now lists fic from all over -- the kink meme, various LJ comms, AO3, ff.net. Which I just found, and have now added to my reading list. \o/

I went to Vividcon! \o/ And premiered a vid with therienne and everything! Which occurred to me tonight I never did announce here, because omg I came home and just collapsed.

It's Person of Interest, team gen, called "Some Nights". Streaming, downloads, lyrics etc here on our vidding journal

or if you prefer AO3:

[Vid] Some Nights (38 words) by Flummery
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Person Of Interest - Fandom
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Author Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: John Reese, Harold Finch, Lionel Fusco, Joss Carter
Additional Tags: Team, Vividcon, Fanvids, Embedded Video
Summary:

Team Machine

"Team Machine" really pretty much does sum it up. ♥ POI ♥

But one vid does not a con make, and the con itself was loads of exhausting fun, as usual. I traveled, also as usual, with therienne and mollyamory. The trip went the way it generally does, with one fabulous exception. I always check a bag just because it's easier having the extra room, and then there's always that doubtful moment of "okay, so how do we get to the labyrinth of dark, dingy, endless back corridors, with the weird sports-team elevator hiding around behind things as inconspicuously as possible so you're never sure you're in the right place?"

Usually we just wander around trying to find it, but this year were having issues that mean less wandering is much better, so I actually asked an airport employee what the best way to the shuttle buses was, just to confirm our instinct that we wanted to go thataway.

He pointed away from the direction I thought he would and said, "Go to door 1-F and go outside, cross all lanes of traffic, and it'll be right in front of you."

Which, for the record? Is a great shortcut from baggage claim! It takes you to the sidewalk in front of the parking garage, which is indeed where the shuttle buses are. The Springhill Suites shuttle picks up at Door 2, which is almost all the way down that sidewalk, but you're certainly not doing any more walking than you are in the labyrinth indoors, and it's all nice and bright daylight-y with your goal more or less in sight at all times. \o/

So a very auspicious start to a good con.

I'm hoping to do a more detailed writeup or two later, but wanted to get some general impressions down while they're fresh, and as a way of kickstarting this 30 days of posting thing (which I'm going to attempt, although I've never managed 30 straight days of posting anywhere). (I do write posts nearly every day, though. I just don't finish and post them. So maybe this'll work after all.)

I was really pleased by the Critique panel on Saturday morning (which was very well-attended); it kept drifting off into beta instead of public review, but that's to be expected these days, when the default is not to say anything critical (or I should specify: negatively critical) in public. But public crit was definitely part of it, and there seemed to be a general sense that people missed it, especially at the con itself. VVC has always been a haven for public crit, but there's been less of it in recent years.

I think the panel paid off on Sunday; Vid Review felt like it had more constructive crit than I remember it having lately. We're not back to where we were 10 years ago (and may never get back to that level, especially without Snady to be the voice of reasoned honesty), but it felt like maybe we're starting to recover the ability to give and take crit. This makes me ridiculously happy, as that's one of the things I most love about VVC; you can learn so much!

What else -- Premieres continued its recent trend of having lots of tiny-to-small-fandom vids; almost 40% of the show this year, by my count (compared with about 20% in the 2002 Premieres show I was talking about a few weeks back), in a vidshow where only one fandom had more than one vid (Person of Interest \o/).

And in 2002, there was really only 1 vid that risked not being recognized by more than a handful of people in a fannish context; this year, I'd put that at more like half a dozen.

It's an interesting trend. I miss the days when I knew more of the fandoms - but otoh I wouldn't have missed this year's Lego Batman and Wicker Man vids, in particular, for anything. (... don't watch those back to back, though.) Not to mention the gorgeous Queen Seondeok vid, and Little Miss Sunshine... And it's no bad thing to be past the days when a single fandom dominated the show; it was always great in the years when it was your fandom, but not so much when it was that fandom you couldn't really stand (people who disliked Stargate, Supernatural, or Buffy had it rough for a few years there).

OTOH, there's nothing like it when the entire room is reacting to a source that almost everyone knows to some extent. <3

And now I am abruptly hitting post, so this goes up on Wednesday and doesn't turn into yet another never-finished draft.

I have been reliably informed by separate sources that I need to stay off the internet for a while, possibly as long as a year, because there are huge honking spoilers out in the open all over the place, in both fannish and non-fannish spaces.

This is very frustrating! Because a) I'm the sort of person who, if you tell me "Don't look at that, you'll get spoiled," actually won't look at it. If you want to surprise me with something, you can put it in the middle of a room under a thin piece of tissue paper and tell me it's a surprise, don't look, and I will find a way to avoid looking at it for as long as necessary. (... Please don't take that as a challenge.)

But also, b) I spend a lot of time on the internet, really. And the people who warned me figure that the rampant discussion of whatever this is will die down in a week or two, so really it's probably okay to look at things again after that -- but that I'm probably going to be spoiled anyway at some point, because these spoilers are so widespread that everyone's going to assume everyone knows them and will talk about them freely outside of cuts until they happen, so basically I'm doomed.

So now I'm in this place of "I should just look. Rip the bandage off, get it over with, get spoiled and be cranky and move on" -- but being constitutionally incapable of doing that. I cannot deliberately seek out a spoiler, it's against my very nature. So I keep taking a deep breath and reaching to click the links for my DW reading list, or Tumblr (I should just give up on tumblr, man; I can't manage more than a day or two every few months, from avoiding spoilers), or ffa, or whatever, then stopping cold, unable to click. It's like telling myself I should just go kick a rock with my bare foot, because odds are good I'll stub my toe accidentally at some point anyway, so why not do it myself on purpose?

It is not easy being a spoilerphobe in modern fandom, man.

On the flip side of that, the Venture Bros team are clearly my soulmates, as exemplified in this interview with io9: Why the Venture Bros. creators want you to know nothing about Season 5

You two have been super-secretive about season 5. It's like you're the Mad Men's Matt Weiner of animation at this point. What can viewers expect coming up?

JP: It's not like we're being secretive. I just don't know why anyone would want to know about something rather than just watching the thing, you know.

DH: Yeah. And you could say for people to watch the show, we're not going to tell you what happens so you don't have to watch the show.

JP: Yeah, the means of delivery are just as important as the package.

DH: We spent a lot of time making sure this stuff happens in cartoons. so why blow by saying it out loud?

JP: And have people form opinions about crap.

Would that extend to like very broad things like "In this season, Dr. Venture is going to go on this adventure" or something like that?

JP: I mean, sometimes we'll say if certain characters are going to be around or not and sometimes we'll say there are a lot of exotic locations.

DH: It's like a crappy sales pitch. You do not want to hear us talk about might kind of happen.

Except that I’m interviewing you, and the whole reason I’m interviewing you is to ask what's happening in this season.

JP: Well, there's your mistake. Why don't you ask what you think you want to know and we'll see if we can answer it or be colorful about answering.

DH: Getting to your original point, I don't think that's really the point of an interview, to find out what's going to happen. You could find out how we write, you could find out what the show is about in broader terms, we could talk about all the past seasons. I'm not sure, I think you might be incorrect. I just want to point that out.

You reject my entire premise.

DH: I think it's a flawed premise that journalism is the art of asking what's happening next.

♥ ♥ ♥

This: "the means of delivery are just as important as the package", is really it for me. The context, the nuances, make a huge difference to me, and once I know something in advance, the ability to see it fresh in context is gone. Either it falls completely flat when I see it, or I don't bother watching/reading it at all, because there's no point.

I'm honestly glad it's easier now for people who want/need spoilers to get them; I just wish so many people didn't assume that everyone must want to know every possible thing in advance.

OTOH, it's vidding season, and most years as June progresses I pay less and less attention to anything but the terrifying looming Vivivdcon deadline (oh dear god, it's June already). So there's that. And if I need a break from that, I'm way behind on the POI kinkmeme, with lots to catch up on, not to mention a bajillion things to read on AO3.

And meanwhile, Venture Bros starts its new season tonight. \o/