a conspiracy of cartographers

Boston is buried under several feet of snow! HAPPY WINTER. (I ... don't mean that too sarcastically, but I'd really love to get my serious snow December and January, not February and probably March.)

Things I am currently feeling fannish about:

+ Highlander, which I've been watching with thewrongkindofpc. We did the Methos watch, as one does, and had lots of messy feelings all over each other; then we made the mistake of watching the '80s movie and realizing how much we actually like Duncan MacLeod too! (Um. In comparison to Connor, and also for himself.) Spiraled into watching the pilot of the show, have now made a horrible pact to actually do a Complete Best Of rather than just a Methos watch.

+ Planeshift, ie our D&D campaign, which as of this last week is over! WE ALL SURVIVED. Last week we had a coronation and a wedding, and then a postmortem to ask Housemate A about plot threads and to tell the epilogues for our own characters. I'm a bit verklempt about the whole thing, and also need to write weird poly futurefic because of course I do.

+ Avatar and Korra! I'm watching Avatar with Amiel, and Korra with Coworker E, which is cool to do concurrently! I also have complicated feelings about the ending of Korra (which can be summarized with "I'm so glad they went there but I wanted TEXT, not word of god, I'd rather have a textual queer kiss with not enough buildup than almost enough buildup with the implication that queer kissing will happen soon"); but what a good good world. Maybe I will end up writing some Korrasami.

+ Uhhh so A and I are watching anime together? Right now we're in the middle of this gorgeously-animated super homoerotic high school swimming anime called Free! and there are apparently 7764 fics for it on the AO3 because the gods love me or at least have a weird sense of humor. Will I actually go down some sort of fic rabbit hole for a ridiculous sports anime? POSSIBLY.

+ Marvel as ever. I am SO BEHIND on my various Thor and Loki comics, oops, although the tumblr scans I keep catching look wonderful. I am all caught up on Agent Carter and am only hearing the echoes of the tumblr wank (where ... people are pulling the "if it's feminist how dare you say it's racist" thing or something?) but idk, all I know is that it's a Marvel show that's better than SHIELD and I ship Peggy/Angie like burning. (And also damn is it white.) I also accidentally outlined a whole post-Thor 2 fic with Amiel yesterday, as one does, and I have no idea who the audience for it is, because it's a Thor/Jane fic that is mostly political thriller and has weird incest overtones that never get resolved. OOPS.

+ The Silmarillion! Amiel and I are doing a readthrough together, assigning ourselves ~50 pages a week, and mostly having lots of Melkor feelings at each other. I'm considering also doing a Lord of the Rings reread alongside it; I like to do occasional rereads, and I think the last one was in 2009, so it's very much time. (And then maybe I will finally write the Frodo/Sam fic that's been struggling to get out since I was ten if only I could figure it out properly.)

Anyway, it's very nice to feel cozily polyfannish right now, but this month I intend to WRITE things about it.

Re: the Hobbit: I ... am really not that thrilled it's three movies now! MORE is not necessarily BETTER, and I legitimately just want a lovingly filmed version of the book that was my actual favorite thing when I was five. Two films, excellent, no need to leave anything out! Three films, I am suddenly concerned about pacing issues and what they will add and ... ahh, I don't know. I am still quite fond of Peter Jackson, but like many directors/showrunners/other wildly successful creative people, he kind of needs someone to tell him when to stop.

Re: Beasts of the Southern Wild: SO GOOD, YOU GUYS, SO GOOD. I don't have anything particularly coherent or spoilery to say, just that I loved it lots and Hushpuppy is the best six-year-old in the entire universe, and possibly also if you're going to see it you should 'ware shakycam if that sort of thing is an issue. But really just. SO GOOD. (And for afters Amiel and I snuck into the middle of The Dark Knight Rises IMAX Experience the next theater over, and spent about five minutes in silent hysterical laughter at Batman and Bane doing DEEP DRAMATIC GRAVELLY VOICES at each other before we snuck back out again to get dinner. Good times!)

Re: Teen Wolf: I ADMIT IT I SUCCUMBED. Enough people whose opinions I find interesting had started to talk about it, so I gave the first few episodes a go, and probably would have stopped except that Polaris follows a lot of the same people I do and was also curious. We watched season one together, a few episodes a night; it was all good silly fun, and then one evening we were cooking dinner or something and started wailing "STIIIILES" at each other. Now I am soldiering forward and enduring the HORRIBLE PAIN of season two alone because [a] I cannot stop or wait and [b] this way I can warn Polaris of the trauma to come. I keep legitimately screaming at the screen! I am SO INVESTED. I have no idea how this happened, but Teen Wolf is a DISEASE, the main symptoms of which seem to be CAPSLOCK IN EMPHASIS and anguished wails of "STIIIILES."

Re: Avengers: ahahdslkfsjkf okay so this fic I am writing. It is my long Avengers found family fic, of course, because I absolutely have to write that; having batted it around with various people, I've narrowed it down from being about absolutely everyone to ... still being about everyone, I guess, but entirely from Thor's POV. This will be an exciting journey! in which Thor and I figure out how the hell to deal with lots of fraught emotions when Thor doesn't have the vocabulary for most of them. Hopefully it will be fun and rewarding and full of unreliable narration and will not drive me totally up the wall! Meantime it's at about 5000 words right now, we haven't even begun to leave Asgard yet, and Amiel laughs at me whenever I venture the hope that this fic will come in under 50,000. Ahaha. Haha.

It is pouring rain, which is not the midwinter snow I always desire but is still comfy sweater weather, and I have painted my nails gold, just cos. Today I think is a day to curl up and talk about fandom things!

i. HOBBIT TRAILER. I love everything about it! I love all the dwarves (distinctive enough that I have tried to resolve to learn which is which by the time the film comes out, although I'm fairly sure that as long as I can keep track of Thorin, Fili, Kili, Balin, and Bombur, I'll have my important bases covered). I love the clear determination to tell the dominoed events that culminate in Lord of the Rings, because that's apparently everything I've ever wanted from an expansion of the Hobbit; WHITE COUNCIL, PLZ. And I love Bilbo so, so much. I loved him more than anything when I was four, and I don't think I've ever managed to stop. This time next year I'm going to be a delighted sobbing mess of Hobbit emotions, I suspect.

ii. Four new Sherlock trailers, while we're on the subject of Martin Freeman In Everything. Despite having felt tetchy with Sherlock ever since Blind Banker was made of fail, I am quite willing to be excited. Mostly because ( cut for spoilery trailer things. )

iii. End of the year fandom meme! ( My ability to remember what fandoms are from what years is terrible at the best of times, but I'll give it a go. )

And now LUNCH. Also, I will attempt to not be too amused at everyone's alarm over the latest LJ debacle. Come to the Dreamwidth side, guys, it's nice here and you don't even need an invite code right now.

Another round of the Home Team Awesome Women Vote-Off! Pretty much all the women here are awesome; I had a couple quiet wails of despair when I saw things like Luna vs Brennan or, god help me, Martha vs Eowyn -- because, you see, Martha and Eowyn are contenders for a spot in my top five or so fictional crushes, and they fight and they win, and I want them to save the world together, and now that I have thought through the parallels I would be very happy if Tom Milligan was the Who universe's Faramir. In any case, go vote! Molly Weasley is losing out to M, of which I approve because M is a magical being whose awesomeness trumps everything (yes, even Martha and Eowyn and probably Zoe), and Kara Thrace is losing out to Elizabeth Bennet, which makes me think that possibly a lot of the people voting are more familiar with Austen than with BSG, although Elizabeth is pretty awesome, and now I kind of want Pride & Prejudice in space. I am not sure who is Darcy, but I am pretty sure it is not Leoben. Maybe Anders. Or something.

Vaguely speaking of, I had a dream that CKR found my blog and wrote me a fucking essay in response. (What's up with this? Last time there was a Home Team vote I dreamed I was having an affair with Paul Gross. And I haven't had any comparable dreams in the intervening time. Anyway!) It started out quoting the Lord of the Rings in Elvish and talked about outer space!! and it was actually a very sweet letter but I didn't read all of it because I was terrified of getting to the part where he'd be all "Oh, and then I read your Ray Kowalski porn." And I just. What. I think I need a new fandom. Mumble mumble I'm going to get some breakfast and listen to Hugh Dillon on the bus. /o\