Welcome to the weekend

[jadesfire]

I have been so ready for Saturday, since about Tuesday morning. Having worked 3 12 hour days this week, I've now got a day of cleaning, hoovering, dusting, sorting and cooking. Happy happy joy joy.

It's not that bad actually, and we do need to get the flat sorted out so we're living in somewhere inhabitable rather than something that looks like the backroom of a busy charity shop.

Ooh, although speaking of happy joy, someone nominated Movie Night in the episode tag category at the Children of Time awards! Considering I think of myself as being 'out' of Torchwood fandom nowadays, I'm chuffed to bits. Thank you, whoever you are!

In other news, my writing-fu has finally returned, after deserting me for most of Christmas and the holiday. The bad news (for most of you, or not, you know) is that the story is Criminal Minds. I still have some Atlantis loose ends to finish up, as well as a couple of Torchwood stories that I must write, but I think they're now going to have to be juggled with CM as well. We'll see how well my brain handles that... But there is a distinct lack of good gen in Criminal Minds, and possibly of fic full-stop. It's in its fourth season and only has 17 recs on crack_van, only a couple of which are Gen. What's with that? It was like this the last time I fell out of the fandom - these fans (as a group and not counting my flist) are probably the nicest and least prone to drama that I've ever met, they just don't seem to churn out the fic like SGA or the Whoniverse or SPN. Weird. I can see I'm going to have to pick up my rec list again.

Also, through this year, some people have friended my journal, some just to lurk (*waves and passes cookies*), some to chat sometimes and possibly some who are now wondering why. Every day is unfriending day around here etc etc but it also occurred to me that I don't know some of you that I talk to regularly as well as I might. So I'm nicking this from kristen999:

You can ask me any question or two and I'll try to answer them. (I also reserve the right not to if it's too sensitive) This is your chance. What do you want to know? My favorite movie? What do I listen to? What were you thinking of when you wrote.......?

What the hell are you thinking about right now?

The red or the blue pill?

Fire away.

It's going to be a long, slow Saturday, folks. Come talk to me!

Comments

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

I've only just woke up and the first question that springs to mind is: read anything you liked, recently?

[luthien.livejournal.com]

*delurks and waves*

How did you get into your first fandom? What drew you to it?

[jadesfire2808.livejournal.com]

Hmmm. I don't read that much, and I'm terrible about actually finishing books. Fanfic-wise, I read even less, so I'll stick with printed stuff.

Three spring to mind:
- Georgiana, Duchess of Deveonshire. No idea what the film's going to be like, but I read the book at 14 and fell in love with her. Reading it again recently, I'm still crushing hard.
- The Knife of Never Letting Go. This is a distopian YA novel (although I'd emphasise the 'A' in that). It's written in 1st person present, which I hate, but the story just sort of sucks you in, and despite strongly disliking the main character, I have to know where it's going. Not yet finished.
- The Music of the Primes by Marcus du Sautoy. Yes, my fancrush is showing, but it's a fascinating read.

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

I grow ever more intrigued by The Music of the Primes, having read a lot of articles about du Sautoy recently. And your I have to know where it's going is pretty much driving me through Glass Books of the Dream Eaters at the moment - I normally have a hard time finishing books because I'm easily distracted, but that one really is effing GRIPPING.

[jadesfire2808.livejournal.com]

*waves back* Y HALO THAR!

Ooh, good question. My first fandom was X-men (comics) or rather Gambit was my fandom. He just happened to be in X-men. I'd seen the animated series and thought it was awesome, so I picked up the comics and got totally hooked. That year was the first where I'd had my own computer and unfettered internet access, and I just plunged right in. There's a wonderfully bad WIP (complete with Mary Sue - go me!) that lurks somewhere in my fanfiction.net account, and I wrote one Gambit story that I still love, but the fandom as a whole scared me, and I dropped out again pretty quickly. I didn't really come back until I discovered House, and Livejournal and. Well.

It was all downhill from there ;)

What about you? How does SGA compare to other fandoms you've been in?

[dune-drd.livejournal.com]

How and why did you start with LJ?

[jadesfire2808.livejournal.com]

du Sautoy pops up on In Our Time (which I'm addicted to) and is in the "Five Numbers" series (still on the R4 website), so I can recognise his voice pretty much at once. A friend of my husband's was a fellow at the same Oxford college as him for a while and said he was really, really lovely, but a true genius. Whatever your field of study - from English to Anthropology to Astrophysics - he'd know something about it and actually be able to say "have you thought about doing this?" which you hadn't but you should have. Scary, but lovely ;) And he can really write, which definitely helps.

I'll add that one to my list then. Like you, have terrible trouble finishing books, so I'm always looking for recs.

[jadesfire2808.livejournal.com]

House, MD. It's pretty much that simple. I knew about fanfic, so when I started getting into the show and wanted to write/read some fic, I googled for it and came across LJ that way. My House-friends - who held my hand and put up with my daft LJ questions - are still some of my closest friends around here, which makes me very, very happy :)

What about you?

[apiphile.livejournal.com]

See, when I said "there are no true polymaths any more, boo", my mathematician-ex threw a strop and cited one of her friends who was doing Good Works in deprived areas of Africa and studying for his PhD in biology. SHE DIDN'T MENTION DU SAUTOY and I have no idea why she didn't! He sounds very much the polymath. :D

[dune-drd.livejournal.com]

Technically it was Farscape fandom - or the rest of it - migrating to here, practically it was the outbreak of my Who love that made me become active. It's all hmpf's fault, really ^^

[luthien.livejournal.com]

Fandoms based in different media can really have a different feel, can't they? In addition to the "every fandom is different" thing, I mean. I've never really had a whole lot to do with comics-based fandom, apart from one manga fandom that was totally the fault of a friend of mine. *g*

SGA's got a lot of good points to it. When I first got into it, it was just nice to be in a TV show fandom again, which is where I started out. All my other TV fandoms had been pre-LJ, so I hadn't done the TV fandom thing on LJ before. But I suppose the main differences, more than anything, have been more to do with me than with the fandom itself. Getting into SGA coincided with the start of a long period of being particularly unwell, so I haven't been anything like as active in it as I was in HP, for example, though that's changing a bit for me now - just as the show has finished. Curses! Apart from the personal stuff, it just feels like a nicely medium-sized fandom to me. HP is/was massive in comparison (well, in comparison to any other fandom, too), while fandoms like Petshop of Horrors (the aforementioned manga) and Devil Wears Prada are just tiny.

[jack-magic.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking I've been up all night and I'm running out of movies to watch :(
I'm also thinking that I shouldn't have blown through the Sookie Stackhouse books so quick, as I now have nothing new to read. I'm thinking that if I try and finish Republic I might not make it to junior year, and I'm thinking that when/if I DO make it to Junior year, the GRE tests are going to be even easier then the SATs, and what kind of sense does that make?

Hmm...blue I think. It's the color of sky, and water, and viagra.

My questions for you...do they have GREs or SATs in the UK? Why is all of your television so blatantly homoerotic and yet never explicitly gay? What color do you like to paint your toenails?

Mine are black, because it exasperates my mother.

[naye]

What are your thoughts on anime/manga? I'm really curious - I've noticed I tend to assume people I meet in Western fandoms don't know anything at all about Japanese stuff, only to be proven very wrong on several occasions. (Which is awesome! There's such a huge difference between the fandoms focused on Western and Japanese source material, moving back and forth between the two is giving me some kind of weird fandom-lag. I almost feel like I have to choose between the two, because there is so little overlap compared to the overlap between different Western fandoms...)

[crystalshard.livejournal.com]

Congrats on the nomination! And yay for the return of your muse, it's always nice when they come back off holiday.

[jadesfire2808.livejournal.com]

The real nutty stuff with X-men fandom in particular is the sheer weight of history. The only thing I can think of that's vaguely comprable is Doctor Who - when there's 30 years of history to argue over, people really know how to argue ;)

It's funny that SGA seems medium-sized to you - to me, coming from the House fandom, it was huge and absolutely terrifying. Fortunately, most of the folks are lovely, but still. It seems to have so many niches and off-shoots, that I got scared posting anywhere. This would also be why I never ventured into HP fandom.

Criminal Minds is what I'd consider medium-sized. The fans are very, very active, but they just don't seem to do much writing. I'm going to have to see what I can do about that :D

[jadesfire2808.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a lot going on in your head! I've heard of SATs, but not GREs. There is testing younger than 16, but it was introduced after I'd left the education system, so I don't know much about it. The big ones are GCSEs at 16 and AS and A2 levels at 17 and 18. They're your last stop before University, so they're the ones that really matter.

*snort* UK TV has a long history of campness. There's a theory that it goes back to the pantomime dame, and certainly cross-dressing is a very common thing in British comedy.

I don't paint any of my nails - not only am I very bad at it, it makes my nails feel like they're suffocating. If I get enthusiastic, I use one of those buffer things to make them shine. But since I don't wear sandals really - not even in the summer - I tend not to worry about my toes.

[jadesfire2808.livejournal.com]

To me, anime/manga seems like this huge huge thing that it would take me a lifetime to get the hang of. I get that it has its own language (not just Japanese, but visual and traditional tropes that you only get by regular reading) but the plethora of stories is a little...intimidating to the newbie. I used to be in a comic fandom (X-men) and loved the run of manga-inspired artwork, so it's not the form that keeps me away, more the sheer size of it. It's like getting in HP fandom - I'm sure I'd be fine, but there's just So Much I can't bring myself to start. Does that make sense?

[jadesfire2808.livejournal.com]

Thank you!

It was such a relief - I don't quite have 200 words yet, but I know the character point I want to make, so I'm sure I'll get there.

Just a shame it's not in a fandom that more of my friends share :S

[jack-magic.livejournal.com]

But they look so pretty poking out from under jeans! The wonderful thing about painted toenails is that you can't tell how bad they are from way up at your head!


GREs are what you take at the end of college to get you into graduate schools. I looked at some samples the other day and was appalled at the easyness of most of the questions. America. Bah.

[crystalshard.livejournal.com]

Am still available for beta-ing. :)

[donutsweeper.livejournal.com]

While I've never really looked, I've never found decent CM fic. Just scary violent crap or horrible slash/het stuff (and we all know Hotch is really a violent Dom, right? *shudder*) I'm not all that familiar with the canon but if you need someone to check your Americanisms give a holler.

Congrats on the Children of Time nom!

and for the random question of the day... do you think you're going to bow out of the SGA fandom now that the show is over?

[luthien.livejournal.com]

The only thing I can think of that's vaguely comprable is Doctor Who - when there's 30 years of history to argue over,

Hmmn, yeah, I know how that can bring them out of the woodwork. I've been a Doctor Who fan since 1977, though I've never really been much involved with the online fandom. ;-)

HP is... well, it really *is* unlike any other fandom in certain key ways. It's so big that each corner of it operates almost as a fandom in its own right. When I was in HP fandom I was vaguely aware of the really huge things, like all the stuff to do with Cassie Claire, but otherwise the Snape side of things *was* HP to me. It was entirely possible for someone to be a hugely famous writer in one part of HP fandom but for their name to be only vaguely familiar or - quite often - completely unheard of by people in other - equally large - parts of the fandom. After that, SGA seemed quite cosy to me. *g*

Good luck getting the CM people moving on the fic front.

[azure-chaos.livejournal.com]

Also, I think a big problem with the X-men fandom is that you have the history and then the alternate universes history, spin-off comics, and then movieverse and the cartoon. lol. It's all a little insane. I started out like you (Gambit fan) but couldn't even tell you how I actually did stumble into the y!group that launched it lol.

SGA seems relatively small to me too (after X-men and then Buffyverse).

nate

[azure-chaos.livejournal.com]

Hmm... What fandom(s) did you think you would get into but didn't/haven't?

ETA: YAY for CM fic :) There just isn't enough of it.

nate

[jadesfire2808.livejournal.com]

I have this theory that the quality of the fanfic is inversely proportional to the quality of the source. So when a source is patchy *coughSGAcough*, people write lots to compensate. But CM is very, very smart, very consistently written, and hitting that tone just right is *hard*. It's a crying shame, especially because it puts people off writing Gen :S

Thanks!

Hmmm. I don't consider myself to be that into SGA fandom - I write, but in a little niche where no one really notices - so it feels more like taking a step back than bowing out. Also, S5 was such a *searches for word* let down, that I'm finding it hard to get my squee back. I've got stories still to tell, but I'm going to take it easy on the writing front this year. Fewer, better stories is what I'm going for, and if that means just writing 6 in a year then so be it.

So I think that's a "maybe?" ;)