Shut Up, and Let Me See Your Jazz Hands

New Anne Bishop! Really liked it (not as good as the first, better than the second), and I freaking loved Hope. Actually trying not to think about it too much, because it's another year before the next book. I 100% had a private midnight release party, though, where I set an alarm for a quarter to midnight so I could hunt it down ASAP and read it immediately. Ugh, I just love this worldbuilding so fucking much.

I housesat for my dad last week, which afforded me the opportunity to play Saints Row IV. I bought the game of the century or whatever edition for like $8 in January only to realize, after two days of downloading, that hey, this game is not compatible with XP. That game is fucking awesome, except for the number of missions that require me to drive cars or motorcycles. Tanks and aircraft I can totally handle, but the "steer with A & D" mechanic is BULLSHIT. I failed Matt's loyalty mission upwards of eight times before I started clawing at my own face and had to stop, because I COULD NOT keep close enough to Nyteblade. Playing as the bisexual Latina President of the United States is seriously the best, though. And I would play the main Asha quest again just for the dialogue. ♥

I also got to spend the week hanging out with my cat and y'all, I keep forgetting how goddamn weird he is. Like, don't get me wrong, I couldn't have ended up with a cat better suited to me if I had designed him, but seriously. Giant fucking weirdo. He does this thing? Where he steals my elastic hairbands, but only if they're used and smell like my hair. And then he will carry them around and play with them and place them in the center of his food and/or water bowls. On the other hand, he is the chillest cuddler of a cat I've ever had. Most cats, you move more than twice and they are out, they can find a better place to sleep. With Fred, I can move me, I can move him, I can lean the chair back, whatever. He will legitimately lay on me for 6 hours or more. I say 6 hours because that is pretty much the longest I can have a cat on me and not fall asleep, but I have spent 12 hours in the recliner and woken up to find him in the same spot, so.

Just surfacing from a deep dive into Hobbit fandom. Or into Bilbo/Thorin, really. I kind of have a fandom hangover? From a poor dismount?

It's like you acquired a fuckton of delicious chocolate and then after you ate a bunch and it was amazing and you went for more, you found out that actually, you had eaten all the chocolate and all the enticing stuff you were staring at was in reality CAROB.

In other words, that feeling of "why does this story have so many fucking kudos when it is blatantly a poor imitation of the awesome story I read earlier" times a bunch of stories in a row = bitterness and ennui. And stalking keelywolfe and scarletjedi for updates.

Can't wait for Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt on Friday! Also excited for: Battle Creek (first ep free on Vudu), Community (March 17!), and CSI: Cyber, because I have a weirdly deep affection for James Van Der Beek? It's not even mostly Dawson's Creek related (I was definitely a Pacey girl); he just seems so willing to laugh at himself and it's really fucking charming.

I've been watching various episodes of QI and the Big Fat Quiz on youtube and being jealous of British game shows. American game shows do not get to tell that many dirty jokes. Noel Fielding requesting "a blowie from the puppet" to participate remains the best.

Currently looking through old ebook recs for authors I need to check for new books. Mary Calmes has something that looks awesome, but after her last few, I'm trying not to get too excited. Spotted an interesting looking Robin Roseau scifi on Amazon and am torn between "space trade and culture clashes are two of my favorites! ROWNT FOREVER" and lingering "it's a TRAP" feelings from the Madison Wolves series (FUCK that series, SO hard).

Fingers crossed for something good, because I am like...three disappointments away from a long cranky wallow in "shit I have read before that I know won't hurt me".

Am I the only one who feels like visiting the AO3 without a specific story/pairing/fandom in mind is a lot like grocery shopping when hungry? Like, you just end up throwing everything in the cart because it sounds good at the time.

Brought to you by a massive downloading binge that included The Social Network, Homestuck, Haven, Leverage, hockey, Lost Girl, and Oglaf.

I am back to burning through fandom after fandom, btw. My attention span is always fucked up when I'm sad; I'm either obsessive or unable to settle.

I've been trying to channel the butterfly phase positively by working on finally getting my mobi files into a proper archive. It's been a mixed bag. For one thing, I have a bunch of stuff that I've downloaded, but I also have fic from at least three other people's collections and I only know where I got two of those. For another, it is fucking four gig of fic in ~215 fandoms.

I've also been working on the thisisalovesong thing and it is...daunting. Fandoms like Andromeda or Avatar or That 70s Show are easy, because there's that one defining fic, but then there are fandoms like Homestuck where I have multiple pairings I love, all with fic I love, and it gets hard.

Just got Hannibal out of brackets (Della19 narrowly defeats emungere and hito). Staring at Naruto in despair, because it has the best tropes, and that is the worst for me (peggy sue vs. sudden game interface? WHO CAN CHOOSE).

Relatedly, michealsuave just updated The Adventures of Harry Potter, the Video Game: Exploited and it is pretty amazing.

Knotting, that is. Also, for anyone who wishes there was more het knotting, apparently Inuyasha fandom has got your back?

Seriously, I got all nostalgic and started reading some Sess/Kag fic I downloaded like three years ago and bam! And now I'm apparently into it. Yay for a new awkward google search.

But seriously, how awesome is Kagome? SO AWESOME. I just want GIGS of Inuyasha treating her badly and her not taking it and falling for his hot older brother. Canonwise, I ship Inu/Kag, but ficwise, I am 98% Sess/Kag.

Awww, first fandom. It makes me all squishy inside.

I really want the AO3 to have a "download series" option. Because ~20,000 words spread over ten fics is just irritating.

I'm 39 stories into the Teen Wolf list. People need to write more fic so I can finish it. I am fishbowling so hard. Like, I've opened my in-case-of-emergency Teen Wolf longfic (I highly recommend keeping similar on your Kindle, btw) and tapped out four times this weekend. It's so long and the tags are so good, you guys, but the first word is literally "harken" and I cannot even deal with that stylistic choice. That is why it's the in-case-of-emergency fic. It's really, really yes, but at the same time, really, really NO.

Not gonna lie: I spend a significant amount of time after uploading new icons just staring at the expanded icons page and going MY TASTE IS AMAZING AND I WANT A COLLAGE OF THESE BEAUTIFUL MOTHERFUCKERS. Also, I have some very definite patterns in taste. It's kind of weird to be like, huh, I...really prefer close-up shots only after staring at a page where more than half of my 250 icons ARE CLOSE-UP SHOTS. Also enjoy: saturated colors and text only. Do not enjoy: animated icons or icons with many effects - I apparently feel the point should be made through your cropping and/or text, or not at all. Like, I save a lot of icons that don't fall along those lines? But those are apparently not the icons I end up using.

All I want to eat is IHOP, but IHOP is a cool 40 minutes away. Chickasha is a terrible town. Although it does make googling shit easier - there is only one. Anywhere.

Fucking store inventory. It is a once a year shitshow. We are missing $1200+ in jewelry that never leaves its locked case. For real, somebody's got sticky fingers. Also, I work six days next week. The money's good, but oh, chances of me flipping out on someone are high.

Relatedly, nothing makes you feel great about your life-choices like seeing an old news article about migrant workers and their slave-wages and seeing your ACTUAL FUCKING WAGES there. Legitimately, after five years and a "promotion", I make $9.00/hr.

I want season 3 of Lost Girl so baaaad, you guys. They are so good at ladies being friends and having adventures! Bo/Kenzi is my brotp forever, y'all. Like, if I want girls being friends as a major part of the storyline, it's mostly Lost Girl and Cougar Town and maaaybe Big Bang Theory (Penny and Amy? legit my favorite part of the show). Relatedly, I need the new season of Cougar Town.

I feel weird about Avengers fandom, in that I love Tony Stark THE MOST, HE IS MY BELOVED, and I could kind of give a shit about Steve Rogers? Which is not the way most of fandom seems to have come down on the issue. It's not the first fandom where that's happened to me (hi, Star Trek TOS! hi, DS9 and Naruto and HIMYM and and and), but it's still fucking weird. There's also some weirdness because I got deep into Avengers right after the first Iron Man movie and imprinted on a lot of comics stuff and apparently my head-canon is very definite about where comics-verse and movies-verse can blur and where they CANNOT. Basically? Movies-Tony and Extremis = NOOOOOO.

Only semi-relatedly, I really want movies-Asgard to end up in Oklahoma somehow because 1) that is fucking hilarious and 2) they might actually film some stuff in Oklahoma, which excites me because a) Oklahoma is actually really fucking pretty and does not really get credit for it and b) I could totally drive to see that.

There is nothing like picking an old fandom on the AO3 and playing with the sort by hits option. THE LOVE OF A GOOD WIZARD IS ONLINE AGAIN, YOU GUYS! It is purest fluffy idfic where Harry Potter and Pansy Parkinson go back in time to stop the war (through cunning use of HONEYTRAP) and they end up dating Tom Riddle and Minerva McGonagall, RESPECTIVELY, and Pansy is an awesome Slytherin and Harry just entirely fails at stealth all over the place, which actually makes him appear MYSTERIOUS and DAMAGED and ALLURING to protoVoldemort and IT IS DELICIOUS. Also I found a copy of Train to Nowhere and some NEW things, primarily one of the so-popular Harry's-secret-family fics that is a crossover with Hawaii Five-0 (it had better be RIDICULOUS or I will so sad) and a monstrously large Harry/Slytherins threesome mpreg creature fic, because I am feeling nostalgic for my ROOTS.

I LOVE YOU, HP FANDOM. YOU ARE STILL SO FUCKING CRAZY.

NEVER CHANGE! ♥ ♥ ♥

YOU GUYS, THIS SHOW. I AM HAVING A RENAISSANCE.

I JUST SPENT TEN HOURS WATCHING SEASON FIVE. OH MY GOD ARE YOU KIDDING ME.

I feel like I very much need a soulbond AU verse of some sort for this show, because there was Derek for Meredith and Denny for Izzie and now OWEN FOR CRISTINA and there is just very much a theme of bam, you, for me, for always. I'm not gonna lie, I spent something like twenty minutes mentally mapping out the dynamics of a BDSM-verse (I am still undecided); that remains pretty much my brain's version of a love letter.

Also, I very much want spoilers for next season IMMEDIATELY, because it totally felt like Someone Particular was going to die after all the "we're so happy" stuff back at Seattle Grace and I cannot even deal with that.

I kind of miss the days when I loved something and then discovered the fandom was awesome, too. Now I am very much looking at stuff, going "I bet there's a fandom for that", watching/reading/playing stuff, and then triumphantly reading the fic.

Saturday, I gave up on finishing Dragon Age before diving into the fic. That is a weird fandom, you guys. If you go by the normal Mary Sue rules, you don't get to read anything, so I dumped them, and I am so very lost. I just read Loghain/f!Cousland (btw, take note of the last names of the various origins or you will be so very confused) and it started out pretty good? And then I kept wanting to yell at the author to shut up about Loghain and give me more of the (crazy, bloodthirsty, steals-everything-she-can-carry-and/or-bring-a-wagon-back-for) OFC. IDK, y'all, IDK.

So I read enough Homestuck today to find stuff like
">WIPE SOME OF THE RAIN OFF BROCAPTAIN'S FACE
>HETEROSEXUALLY"
totally fucking hilarious, but not enough to have ANY fucking idea what is going on with the trolls and the time travel and everyone-dies-but-not-really-but-MAYBE-REALLY nonsense.

I AM SO CONFUSED, BUT I CAN'T STOP READING, THE FIC IS FULL OF SHENANIGANS AND WEIRD POLY ALIENS (like, I've got redrom/blackrom figured out? and flushed romance is the almost like human love one and I think ashen romance is the three people mediation thing, so pale romance is best friends and caliginous romance is archenemies, RIGHT?) AND XENOSEX AND SUPERPOWERS AND RAMPANT GEEKERY AND HONESTLY GUYS, JOHN IS KIND OF A DINK BUT I LOVE HIM (CON AIR IS AMAZING, HE SPEAKS TRUUUUE).

Holy crap, I wish I had a better memory, or at least a better sense of "LIFE-CHANGING EVENT! WRITE THIS SHIT DOWN."

I am once again trying to map my fannish timeline, if you're wondering.

I mean, some people can track their first foray into fandom back to the day, but I didn't get pimped in by a friend. I went looking for spoilers and found fic completely by accident. Then I spent an indeterminate while as a monofannish het-OTPing feral fan before I even found Fanfiction.net (in March or April of 2003 - I joined 05/03, but I remember it took me a while to figure out how potentially awesome Author Alerts were). There was a forum? And the Dog-Eat-Dog Archive, which I can't even find referenced anywhere anymore.

And all this went down four computers and three email addresses ago, so CLUES ARE SCARCE.

And it's not a big deal, I guess, it's just. Fandom, you know, this giant amazing ball of crazy where I'm my most honest, my most engaged and passionate and joyful. It deserves an anniversary, okay.

So I'm reading a Devil Wears Prada fic set in a Merry Gentry/Anita Blake fusion 'verse and I have to keep stopping to grit my teeth because THAT WORLDBUILDING IS INCORRECT. It's not even the hand-wavey collision-of-three-worlds stuff, it's stuff like using "fey" and "sidhe" interchangeably, which, no. Like, I am ALL KINDS of excited to read descended-from-sex-deities Andy, but IDK how I feel about reading fic where I'm more familiar with canon than the author. IT IS NOT A SITUATION I HAVE ENCOUNTERED MUCH. But I'm going to be really weirded out if my personal canon-versus-fanon stumbling block is a LKH fandom.

Just saying.

1) Ariadne pegging the hell out of Eames.

2) Pegging, period.

3) Dream-based genderplay. Do you know how sad it made me to see that inception_kink's genderplay tag was overwhelmingly for always-a-girl!Arthur? Not to be down on always-a-girl or anything, but y'all, REALLY. IF I HAD THE OPPORTUNITY TO TEST-DRIVE A FLESH-AND-BLOOD, ACTUALLY ATTACHED DICK, I WOULD BE ALL OVER IT.

Like, I want loads of Eames legitmately enjoying himself as a lady - not even as called for by a job! the mark just needs to meet a stranger and be distracted and Eames decides he's going to rock it as a girl because he feels like heels that day - or sometimes he has private time with the PASIV and enjoys himself as '30s starlet or an 19th century ingenue (loves the corset, hates the petticoats, and the one time he tried a hoop skirt he broke his ankle and shot himself in mortification). Or the time he decided to try dreaming himself as an entirely gender-neutral person. Oh, and also loads of Ariadne test-driving a cock, with and without partners, and eventually decides it's nice sometimes, but screw accuracy, losing the breasts just makes her feel off-balance - and a million bonus points if someone hooks into her dream and she's all their futanari fantasies come true.

I want to read an unequal open relationship, where one partner is allowed to see other people and the other partner very much isn't, because Person A is jealous and Person B just isn't, and there is no value judgment attached to that. People are different and that's okay! People who are different can be in a relationship without having to compromise or agree on everything! They can have two sets of rules without it being unfair! Sometimes, two sets of rules is the MOST FAIR YOU CAN BE.

That sounded ranty? But mostly it was relevatory; I hadn't realized that was a thing I thought about until I saw the exchange in No Finish Line (“You’re still allowed to see other people, though,” Adam says into Kris’ shoulder. “Yeah, well,” Kris says, “you still aren’t.”) and went HEY I WISH THAT WAS A THING.

Like, it kind of shows up in a lot of mostly-slash-minor-het fic, where Kris or RDJ or Peter or Watson or whoever is married and also dating a guy and that's okay because his wife just isn't jealous! She's down with his bisexuality! And dude, I enjoy that trope WAY more than most other ways fandom has of "dealing" with the wife (and also I enjoy the poly for itself - see icon), but I really want less "she gives him permission" and more "this is the relationship we have negotiated - you can do this but not that, I can do that but not this".