starlady38

[starlady38]

#the sacred texts #lil wayne

[starlady38]

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a slapping,

As of some one gently flapping, flapping at my chamber door.

“’Tis some fairy,” I muttered, “slapping at my chamber door—

            Only this and nothing more.”

#fairy vs walrus

[starlady38]

This is amazing, thank you for sharing.

It's 2024. I have been participating in fandom for 40 years. This is a ramble commemorating some history I've experienced along the way.

In 1984, I attended my first convention, and made a beeline for the one long row of covered tables in the Dealer's Room that was, according to the whispered lore of my friends, 'the one'. "um", I said, very suavely and coherently, except for how it was totally the opposite of those things, "I'm here for the... for the, uh. For-"

"Come around here," the man behind the table said with exhausted ennui, so I went around, and he lifted up the table skirt next to him and pointed to rows and rows of boxes underneath the line of tables. "It's all under here."

It was all under there. Along with about five older ladies with glasses, graying hair, cardigans. Flipping through slash zines and chatting in whispered voices like old friends (which of course they were). I noticed one of them had the good sense to be wearing kneepads. I was still too young and ablebodied to need kneepads when crawling on a carpeted floor, but I immediately found her preparedness skills to be both impressive and hot. "You're new," one of the ladies whispered to me--a bit warily, which made sense. "Are you sure you're in the right place?"

In the faint light (the kneepads lady had also come prepared with a flashlight, additional practicality hotness points for her) I grabbed a comb-bound book with a heavy line art piece on the cover, featuring a musclebound Captain Kirk getting righteously and enthusiastically plowed by a stern-yet-ebullient Spock. "This," I said, pointing helpfully at the cover, like I was trying to make myself understood in a language I had only the vaguest knowledge of. "I'm here for this."

Outside at the convention, most of the attendees were wearing large homemade circular pins that shrieked 'K/S is BS!!!'1. But underneath the table, we reveled in the forbidden.

***

In 1985, I fell very hard for Starsky & Hutch fandom. Which was simply referred to at the time as 'the other fandom', because there were only two. We were upstarts. Many fannish elders predicted that it was just a phase.

***

The 'circulating library' was a massive stack of barely-legible pages that smelled strongly of mimeograph ink. When you were on the list, you would write stories while you waited for your turn, and when the big box was mailed to you, you would read everything (new finds, old favorites), add your own sloppily-typed or hastily-mimeographed stories, and then mail the whole thing to the next person. For me, at the time, it was an extremely expensive indulgence--but my favorite one.

***

By 1990, slash fandom had grown enough that I no longer knew everyone in it, which was both thrilling and a bit daunting. A young woman at a convention waited for me after a panel I was part of (I think it was 'writing impactful smut' or something like that), and said she had a question she didn't want to ask in a group setting. I'd heard that before. I said that's fine, go ahead and ask; and she came out with: "Why do you have to be gay?"

I blinked. "Is... that a problem?"

She looked annoyed. "Yes, because your stories are on all the recommendation lists and in all the top zines, but if you're gay and I read something you wrote and I get hot from it that makes me gay, and I'm not gay."

"Wow." I grinned, I couldn't help it. It probably made me look very predatory-dyke-about-to-score-a-toaster. Whatever, it was enough to make her back away from me fast.

When I thought about it later that night, I wondered what it would be like not to be the only queer person in slash fandom.

***

By 1997, slash started appearing on the internet. Many fannish elders claimed it was the death knell of slash fandom, or dismissed it as 'just a phase'.

***

Anyway, I wrote all this for myself as a commemoration of sorts, but if you took the time to read it--thank you. Love you, fandom. I always will.

1 In those days, m/m fandom was known as 'slash', which grew from the fannish shorthand where 'K&S' meant a story of Kirk and Spock having adventures or tribulations or what have you, and 'K/S' meant a story of Kirk and Spock getting it on (Kirk divided by Spock or Spock into Kirk--it was mathy fannish humor and I was into it then and I still am now). Slash was decidedly unpopular in the fannish world in 1984, and there was a concerted effort to force slash authors, artists, and fans out of 'mainstream' fannish public life. Hence, under the table.

#fandom #star trek

[starlady38]

Canaan house/ tower theory

Okay I���m doing a Gideon audiobook listen, and just got to chapter 29 - when Harrow and Palamedes are discussing the possibility of a megatheorem.

Harrow dismisses the idea and focuses instead on how all the trails/ experiments requires a continuous source of thanergy that is hidden somewhere in Canaan house.

They call it her ‘secret door theory’ as she believes that they only have access to 30% of the tower, including the facility.

Makes me keep thinking about how Tamzyn recently said something like ‘we haven’t seen everything at Canaan house and we will return in Alecto.’

What also stood out to me is later when Harrow reveals to Gideon what is actually in the locked tomb, she says, ‘the water is salt and it’s deeps and it moves with a tide it shouldn’t have.’

I have no real theory (so that was a lie) but I need brighter minds to figure it out.

Is the locked tomb really on the First? Was Alecto the battery powering the house? Was it the souls of all of those that John didn’t resurrect that he killed on Earth powering it?

Is Canaan house actually the top half of the Tower in the river?

#the locked tomb #yeah this would make sense

[starlady38]

gonna put the progress of this thing in its own post

so we start with references

then i figure out my layouts and start sketchin, putting the text down first after initial drafting

then i gotta fully flesh out all of the illustrative bits with pencil sketching. we got the holy gritty with his holy hockey staff and flyers pendant, little bits of orange dashed onto there, designing the flyers logo wherever i can

then we get black inking on there, bit more orange as well. normally i get kinda heartbroken when I smear a bit of ink here or there by mistake, even patch to fix mistakes sometimes.

But I'm gonna be real. The small blots match too well with the overall energy of the piece

the next image will be the fully completed piece!

#gritty #art #calligraphy

[starlady38]

KEY UPDATES FROM THE QUEER FANTASY PANEL WITH TAMSYN MUIR AT THE BRITISH LIBRARY

We will find out in Alecto the Ninth whether Kiriona's chest has teeth or ribs.

She cites Final Fantasy and Animorphs as intros to SFF. On Animorphs: "Nobody's safe in that book. Everyone's dead by the end. It was an influence."

The 1.5 page outline of the Locked Tomb was written in the back of a notebook which Tamsyn was using to teach herself Latin. She has (except for the detail of Gideon being a fireman) followed this guide throughout.

She is still writing Alecto the Ninth. She feels tremendous pressure, primarily from herself, to produce a satisfactory ending.

On Tasha Suri saying she still doesn't know what Homestuck is after watching a 2 hour video about it: "Neither do I."

She says she is working through creating the balance between a Catholic worldview and the critique of imperialism. She hopes that the balance will be struck correctly. "I'm kinda worried about being excommunicated. For one scene in particular."

Hope to post a full transcript tonight or tomorrow.

#tamsyn muir #alecto the ninth #the locked tomb

[starlady38]

Sun Tzu is so fucking funny to me because for his time he was legitimately a brilliant tactician but a bunch of his insight is shit like "if you think you might lose, avoid doing that", "being outnumbered is bad generally", and "consider lying."

#sun tzu

[starlady38]

#dril #doing haddonfield proud #palestine

[starlady38]

WTFFF

#good omens 2 #good omens

[starlady38]

PSA: Winterfox/Requires Hate/Benjanun Sriduangkaew/Maria Ying

I'm starting to see recs for Benjanun Sriduangkaew crop up in fandom again, so here's your reminder that Benjanun Sriduangkaew, aka Maria Ying, is actually Winterfox/Requires_Hate, a well-known serial harasser, blackmailer and abuser who decided that the best thing to do with her multimillionaire heiress time and money is to do real and lasting harm to many communities and many writers (especially writers of color) that she saw as rivals.

with how fast things move online right now, I imagine she's banking on people just forgetting everything she pulled: please don't! But even if you won't deny her your attention, at least keep yourself safe and remember that her modus operandi used to be either love bombing people until they let slip something she then blackmailed them with, or literally decades of unhinged harassment.

feel free to share.

original sources:

Mixon report: https://feralsapient.com/?p=889

The letter to Apex editors: https://web.archive.org/web/20170216003240/http://awitin.likhain.net/2017/02/a-letter-to-apex-editors-re-the-intersectional-sff-roundtable/

Zen Cho's report (start here of you never heard of any of this): https://web.archive.org/web/20200808225250/https://zencho.org/being-an-itemised-list-of-disagreements/

Rachel Manija Brown's report: https://rachelmanija.dreamwidth.org/1288081.html

#benjanun sriduangkaew #winterfox #maria ying #psa

[starlady38]

Just like I don't think Crowley is depressed, I disagree that he has some kind of induced memory loss about being an angel. It's perfectly possible for memories to go hazy or be forgotten by deliberately not thinking about them--if you don't use the neural pathways, they wither. It seems pretty obvious to me that Crowley doesn't like thinking about who he was or what he did before the Fall, in a pretty even-handed way: he doesn't remember Furfur just as he doesn't remember Saraqael (he claims). (Remember that the Fall came after the War.) If he's avoided thinking about all that as much as possible, which fits with his general pattern of avoiding/running from his problems--which, significantly, we see him breaking in S2 when he tells Aziraphale he won't leave him alone, then goes back up to Heaven as part of his effort to save him--then yeah, it's perfectly plausible to me that he'd have just plain forgotten.

I think you can also make the case that he does remember perfectly well but just doesn't like talking about it with either side, because he does consider himself to have been a different person before. (And he has canonically renamed himself twice! He had a different name in Heaven and in Eden he was Crawly! He has a very strong sense of who he is.) But reminiscing about the old days with either angels or demons reinforces that he counts or counted among them, and he demonstrably has no affection for that idea either. Bonus, his insistence that he has no idea who they are also obviously annoys the shit out of them, which potentially wrongfoots them and gives Crowley an advantage in their interactions. The evidence for this interpretation is him recognizing Metatron right off the bat when everyone else is confused by him being Derek Jacobi rather than a floating head, because Metatron is (and was) a clear and present danger.

#good omens #crowley #good omens 2

[starlady38]

I really think The Magnus Protocol needs to have a giant crab. It's time. Give us the crab that eats people.

#the magnus protocol

[starlady38]

Visiting the Emperor Georgiou Tearoom in Portland, Oregon.

#star trek #portland #i need to go here

[starlady38]

i've been thinking about hobie spiderverse since i came out of the movie theater, about how on a superficial level he acts like every other stereotypically alt character, stealing and instigating and bantering and being chaotic and rebellious and looking Cool™ but on a second look it's so so clear that every single thing he does is motivated by kindness and compassion towards his friends in general and miles in particular, and that's so viscerally truly punk of him

the already famous palm suggestion that makes miles break out of miguel's containment thing. miles initially reads this as condescending but hobie's genuinely trying to help

already he's looking out for miles by trying to keep him away from hq, a place where he knows miles isn't welcome and might be in danger

now, they get to hq and he immediately starts lifting stuff to homebrew a watch for miles, a guy he's known for five minutes (bc you can't convince me he didn't already have a bunch prepped for gwen and the other spider-people he trusts). he even lampshades it with the line above.

he's questioned miles' motives to join the spider society and he knows they're the same as his own: it's literally just to get a watch, to have a means to travel dimentions, to see his friends, to build community. he's already made the decision to grant that ability to miles without subjugating him to the oppressive restrictions and requirements of the spider society. at this point we know he's strongly ideologically opposed to the society and he later in this scene admits he's only there to look out for gwen, just like miles

this one makes me insane. it's a "are you safe at home in your dimension? do you have one? do you need a place to stay?" bc we know he's given one to gwen, who's not safe and does not have nice parents and has been crashing in hobie's dimension for the previous months

and then he tries again to warn miles off the spider society

and when push comes to shove and all the other spider-people are set on stopping miles from going home and changing his timeline he's the only one in miles' corner

btw notice how the palms thing is the first and last thing he says to miles in this film?

anyway. he was in this movie for like 15 minutes tops, showed up exclusively to hype up his friends and protect them by whatever means necessary, adoption papers and illegal interdimensional tech included, and he looked that cool the whole time while doing it. most character ever.

#spiderverse #hobie brown #love him

[starlady38]

Hey Neil! Quick question..

Do you think we'll see custom playlist for Gabriel and/or Beelzebub?

Thank you so much if you answer, bye Neil!

I don't know. They are being made by Amazon Prime Video's marketing department.

#wga strike #sag aftra strike #wga strong

[starlady38]

You know, I actually vehemently disagree with the idea that Crowley is depressed in S2. "What is the point of it all, angels, demons, everything?" is an existential question, but not one that points to mental health issues. He's asking a specific question about God and God's intentions (just asking questions, still) with the universe, one that he asked in another form before The Beginning, as we saw at the start of the episode.

Personally I think there's decent textual evidence in the show that God allowed/caused the Fall because you need two sides to play a pickup game, and I think Crowley has maybe figured that out.

#good omens #crowley

[starlady38]

crowley. crowley’s new hair color is 6.66. That’s the color coding. his hair is literally demonic. i love this show

#good omens #good omens 2 #crowley #yes his hair is redder