a conspiracy of cartographers

Yesterday was lovely! We had Hanukkah food for lunch, and Thanksgiving food for dinner, and a silly lazy day in between, inventing new rules for dreidel (eat one of your coins every time you get nun! and that, kids, is how we ate two entire bags of gelt right after lunch), and making a found family vid show.

I thought it might be nice to reproduce the vid show here, so I've written up the playlist. I am not entirely happy with it as a found family show -- I tried to make it mostly gen, but there are some shippy vids; I've overrepresented a couple vidders and don't have any vids by several more whose vids I love; I wish it included things like Buffy and Sleepy Hollow and Star Trek, all of which I have lots of found family feelings for but couldn't find appropriate vids. So this is not prescriptive at all, and I would love additional recs.

( 16 found family vids under the cut! )

1. A DRAFT A DRAFT I FINISHED A FUCKING DRAFT. It is 32,000 goddamn words long. I ... am not quite sure what to do with myself while it is with the betas, but I am fairly sure the answer is "Be a productive member of society," not "Write Sif/Darcy fic."

2. There is apparently a wine that tastes like red velvet cupcakes? I am not at all sure how anyone has managed to create such a thing, but it does exist, and it is delightful. Alas I do not have proper red velvet cupcakes to eat while I drink it, but I am fairly sure I will be able to survive this sad lack.

3. Vid recs!

a. Set Fire to the Rain, a Thor/Loki vid that makes me laugh a lot but also gives me FEEEELINGS, because I am ridiculous. You should watch it because it is the most happy-making thing possible.

b. Along with the rest of my rlist, I am here to tell you to run, not walk, to watch The Price and to read the accompanying meta about manpain. I actually like the meta more than the vid, if only because it makes me think about things in depth rather than just wanting to PUNCH THE SCREEN. But the vid is also excellent, and a bit hilarious at the end.

I have always possessed a weird sort of envy for those entries on my flist that say "You guys are all fired for not telling me about [x]!" I'm not sure why; maybe it's a weird mix of delight that my own flist does tell me when cool stuff is happening, and envy that this person's flist usually does the same. Or maybe it's just a great sentence! Either way, I finally have the opportunity to use it.

You guys are all fired for not telling me about The Ship's Closet. I distinctly recall at least a solid two weeks at the end of August when I would talk about almost nothing but Star Trek TOS and Kirk/Spock, and somehow I didn't come across this! The Ship's Closet is a YouTube show by brittanyksduh; she goes through bits of TOS Trek, some of the films, and occasionally things Roddenberry has said, and analyzes them for Kirk/Spock. Now, some of the things she says seem self-evident to me, or she hammers a point home for slightly too long, but I will allow that this is because I have been queering the text for ages and she doesn't have to do a lot to convince me. She also has great comedic timing, made me repeatedly choke with laughter, chooses some excellent clips, and argued some points that I hadn't thought of before. Let's face it, my analysis was mostly limited to, "And then they exchanged another LOOK, it was AMAZING," whereas now the glass in Wrath of Khan is even more likely to get me to burst into tears, and all of Amok Time is even more likely to make me clutch at my face, because HANDS, guys, HANDS.

This has put me in a very good mood, compounded by the fact that we've just had a blizzard blow through, the world is gorgeous, and I have barely crawled out of bed all day. My mum called a little while ago to find out how much snow had come through; I ended up telling her that we've had about six inches and that I was watching someone explain the Kirk/Spock love story to me. I don't know if she thought this was a perfectly normal way to spend my evening because she knows me or because Kirk/Spock is self-evident, but either way, I'm ridiculously happy right now.

This being polyfannish thing is still disconcerting. I am just not used to being excited about five things at once, but I suspect that this is my brain's way of coping with the fact that it suddenly has all this free space that is not taken up by juggling classes. Also, I am pleased to report that working through my guilt re: indulging in Highlander now means that I am completely unapologetic about Smallville! I'll probably move on to something else in a few days, but in the meantime:

i. My haphazard and arbitrary Smallville watch hit Shattered/Asylum from season three last night. I spent a lot of it clutching my face and crying a little. Yeah, that's right! LEX LUTHOR GIVES ME FEELINGS.

ii. I discovered this fic, Demarcation, which [a] is about identity politics, we all know how easy I am for identity politics, and [b] reminded me that actually Clark is an alien. I like Clark about fifty times better now! Shut up, my kinks are totally okay.

iii. The Clark/Lex Bad Romance vid; I don't know if I've linked it before, but it is what is to blame for this inexplicable Smallville watch in the first place. Unfortunately I still haven't managed to discover the context for most of the clips. Wiki episode summaries are not helpful, because apparently wikipedia seems to believe that I want to know about actual arc plots, when in actual fact what I want from my summaries is "The one where Lex is compulsively playing piano and bleeding all over everything" or "The one where Clark catches a bullet like a goddamn inch from Lex's face" or "The one with wacky airplane stunts and FLYING oh my god." I would probably watch quite a few more episodes if they had honest summaries like "Clark and Lex eyefuck a lot and then Lex bleeds on things." Because that is the show I have been watching!

...To be honest, I suspect I am doing fandom backwards. I am mostly going through the shows that are Slash's Greatest Hits out of anthropological fascination (and also because, did I mention, Spock and Methos and Lex!) but my wide-eyed enthusiasm is perhaps slightly outdated.

I have a weird fondness for Friday the 13ths! They always seem to be full of awesome. For instance:

i. My moving stress has been greatly reduced by a potential bed! Ugh, furniture. If I could, I would renounce all material possessions. Except for my laptop, which is basically a part of my brain. And my books, because, books.

ii. Still on that notion of Cumberbatch!Master: a manip for your enjoyment. It mostly works, but I have spent too much time staring at John Simm's hands to not be a little freaked out to see them disembodied from John Simm's face. Also, I suspect that Cumberbatch!Master wouldn't have laser.

iii. On the Prowl, a VVC vid that is fascinating me. I ... don't necessarily recommend it, because I don't know where anyone's line is. (In short, warning/enticement: it's 3+ minutes of pretty boys being hurt in increasingly graphic ways.) It's an amazing observation of fandom, and fandom's enjoyment of these scenes, and it's definitely something of which I'm culpable -- if "culpable" is even the right word; I'm going back and forth on whether it's a reclamation or if it's just as goddamn creepy as it is in Women's Work.

It's especially interesting to me because I was raised in a household where any media that had a high rating for sex was totally okay, and any media with a high rating for violence was totally not. (The reasoning explained to me by my father, in summary: "It's not okay that we live in a society where two men walking down the street holding guns is acceptable, and two men walking down the street holding hands isn't.") I deeply approve of this philosophy, but it necessarily means that it took me until my involvement in media fandom to even stumble across the concept that there could actually be overlap in the Venn diagram of sex and violence. I still really notice it -- I think it would pretty much take an act of god to get me desensitized to violence -- but I was still amazed when I watched this vid and discovered that my line isn't until the three minute mark. Only thirty seconds of that footage make me uncomfortable.

Now I'm really curious where everyone else's lines are.

The problem with going out and getting things done is that I now have a backlog of things I want to talk about! Anyway, the best thing I have discovered recently: Six Things from History Everyone Pictures Incorrectly. Dazzlingly glittering pyramids! Technicolor Parthenon! Sneaky historical clothing! It makes me want to write all the fic warms my geeky heart.

My currently-open wikipedia tabs are pretty great. What do the deluge myth, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and the University of Paris have in common? Three guesses, and the first two don't count. I am now tempted to click the 'random article' link and then make myself write Methos fic about it, actually. Trying it, the first article that comes up is on Beryl Davis. I have never heard of Beryl Davis before, but apparently she was a singer during WWII and knew both Glenn Miller and Frank Sinatra. The fic writes itself. I could do this for hours.

More importantly, though, because I have talked through my shame for loving Highlander (no more shame! yay id show! \o/) I think it is high time that I recced some fic. Alphabetically and with enthusiasm:

Adam and Joe by genteelrebel, Methos/Joe & Duncan/Methos. I don't actually know where to begin talking about this one, because it is kind of amazing in its scope: it's a recounting of Methos' life from 1986 to 1998. In certain ways, this fic is downright evil. It blends canon so seamlessly, turns it into such a coherent emotional arc, and explains Methos so damn well, that it is threatening to rewrite all the personal canon in my head. It has a pretty unique and fairly creepy (but awesome, so awesome, and about as kinky as I have never known I always wanted) take of Methos and Duncan's relationship, complete with a really different interpretation of the Double Quickening than is the norm. It also has an OC I am quite a bit in love with, and an actually happy ending for Cassandra. And Joe is the best Joe ever; I want to take him home and keep him. Caveats for this being one of those deliciously long fics (we're talking in excess of sixty chapters here) that are probably best savored over the space of a week or so.

Brothers and Other Strangers by Valentin, Duncan/Methos. After Bordeaux, Methos takes avoidance to really impressive new levels. (On reflection, Methos-with-amnesia is a weirdly more common fandom trope than one might expect.) I love this one because I love stories about Adam Pierson the defense mechanism. Caveats for the usual frustrating treatment of Cassandra and a, ah, early-2000s website background. Can't do much about the former, but setting a blank page style should fix the latter.

The Fourth Son by Lanna Michaels. This is everything I have ever wanted in a fic about Methos and Kronos, and it's just them talking for a few pages. I spent most of it clawing at my face with joy anyway. But then, I can be a bit strange about Methos and Kronos. (Didn't I say? Id show. Also, pairing type. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry.)

Sacred Trust by Lanning, Duncan/Methos. All my favourite fics are necessarily ones that I think understand Methos, but this one really gets it; there's such a depth and intricacy to the bits of Methos' past we do see that I've been many things suddenly starts to make sense as a concept. This is another one of those fics that I find difficult to separate from canon; of course this is the true story of Darius' Light Quickening, and of course the Watchers are terrified of this particular Immortal, and &c. Caveats for length, a narrative that is quite angry with Duncan, actually, and for the general unpleasantness of Methos' past.

And lastly, a vid: Commercial for Levi by Gianduja Kiss, wherein she was actually awesome enough to put my Theory of Methos' Boyfriends into vid form. (By which I mean that it feels like she reached straight into my head, not that she actually knows me from, heh, Adam, and did it with any particular intent.) Actually, hell, this is a blanket rec, just watch everything this woman has ever vidded. It's all fabulous.

Real life processing post coming at some point when my brain and my body are actually in the same place long enough that I can do it without flipping out. In the meantime, This Is Why I'll Never Be An Adult more or less sums it up. It didn't actually occur to me that I had this cycle, but when I started typing up my explanation of the ways in which mine differs, it ... doesn't. Huh.

I am currently in the middle of a "clean all the things?" moment, but I need to keep metaphorically cleaning or actual dire things will happen. I am taking, like, a half hour to REBEL WITH INTERNET, though. So, some related fannish things:

1. Stonehenge Apocalypse is pretty hilariously awful, guys. I am not willing to ever rewatch it without the aid of alcohol, I do not think the poor people of Vancouver should ever be made to do British accents, and a small flat bit in the countryside outside Vancouver does not look remotely like Salisbury Plain (made even more painfully evident by an almost back-to-back watching of Pandorica Opens) -- but I now know that Peter Wingfield can act for reals, not because they gave him anything good, but because his body language was completely different.

2. Somehow this did not satisfy me (or scare me off), as I appear to be doing a bit of Canadian Actor Bingo, like I did last summer -- only last summer, it was by way of Callum and therefore (mostly) Toronto Bingo, whereas if I follow Peter Wingfield around, it appears to be Vancouver Bingo. I'm now watching this cute and incredibly short-lived show called Queen of Swords; I have no way of knowing if it's objectively any good, because they had me at "Basically it's Zorro, only Zorro is a gorgeous intelligent kickass woman." Goddamn. And the main villain of the piece is played by Valentine Pelka, who is Kronos -- and I knew Kronos was attractive, in an evil sort of way, but without the scar and with the addition of a goatee, he looks really freakishly like a young Roger Delgado, be still my heart. And Peter Wingfield waltzes into town as an adorable doctor who has been traumatized by the Napoleonic Wars, and although his name is Robert Helm, I keep on being convinced that his name is supposed to be Benjamin Adams, because he is clearly Methos in disguise.

3. A vid rec! Unbelievable, a Highlander vid for which you ... probably need the context of the show to fully appreciate. I spent about the first minute giggling, because Duncan's hypocrisy is transparent and funny, right? I spent the second minute going "...huh." And I spent the last minute making the same faces as Methos, because 178 confirmed kills, sdfklfdjfd. It makes me go YES YES EXACTLY and is great.

4. New tag. /o\

Last useless spam of the day, I promise! My god, I really need to start packing.

BUT FIRST: Brokeback Babylon. You know that Brokeback to the Future vid from ages ago? And how everyone else did one too? THAT'S THE LONDO/G'KAR ONE. And, uh, possibly my favourite thing about it is that ... not that much is really out of context. WIN.