Ten Little Chances to be Free

Open call to anyone still listening - archiving old LJ comms

2022-03-08T21:20:04Z

If you modded LiveJournal communities back in the day, please consider archiving them to Dreamwidth NOW. So much 2000s internet history lives there, and if LJ falls off the internet (as it very well might, depending on how things go in Russia in the near future), links will break and vast amounts of it will be lost. Wayback Machine only captures public posts; a Dreamwidth import can pull in locked posts and comments, and allow people to view them by joining the comm.

If you don't want to go to the hassle yourself, I will happily do it for you - just DM tenlittlebullets on DW and temporarily add 10littlebullets on LJ as a community mod. I can do it under this account, a catchall archivist account, or a specific one created just for the comm. If you want the Dreamwidth version to be co-maintained or transferred to your DW account, I can also do that.

If Dreamwidth's importer locks up, as it might if there's an archiving stampede, this Tumblr post (+reblogged mirror just in case) has instructions for exporting comments in XML format. LJ still has a built-in page that lets you do the same for posts. Dreamwidth won't let you import from these XML files, but they're still human-readable and can probably be imported to Wordpress if you want to host an archive later.

(Pre-emptive permission: Feel free to link, copy, repost, and spread this post wherever you want. Also feel free to translate it into any language you want. I would be both gratified and extremely relieved if any Russian speakers want to spread it around to people who were active on ЖЖ back in the day and are in a position to safely back up their old content; the offer to help with importing is still open, even if we have to communicate through Google Translate!)

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Well, be the change you want to see and all that

2019-04-22T01:39:52Z

I made a comm for casual MCU discussion! No srs bsns, no content aggregation, just homegrown grass-fed USDA-certified organic shitposts.

mcu_shiptoasting

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HTP bookmark collections

2019-04-21T10:45:35Z

By the way, this may not be a shitpost but it is going to be a bunch of drive-by links: I've been using the slightly-worrying number of Hydra Trash Party fics in my AO3 bookmarks as guinea pigs to play with the Archive's bookmarking features. In particular, "bookmark external work" for kinkmeme fills and Tumblr ficlets, and "add bookmark to collection" to create... I refuse to call them rec lists if I can't pick what order they start in. Subcollections of interest. IDK. Picking the order would be nice because the ones I bookmarked first--usually the ones I most wanted to hang onto--are now at the end by default.

All the usual HTP noncon/torture/abuse/mindfuckery warnings apply, bookmarker is not liable for mental scarring should you click on something you can't unsee, etc. Totals may change as I trawl the kinkmeme archives.

HTP bookmarks parent collection (84 works)
All-time best/worst faves (17)
Fics that aren't in the canonical HTP tag or aren't on AO3 (45)
Terrible things happen to Steve Rogers (32)
Terrible things happen to the Winter Soldier (29)
Terrible things happen to some Hydra fuckface or other (8)
Steve/Winter Soldier and other unsavory variations on Steve/Bucky (18)

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I miss LJ comm culture

2019-04-21T05:48:00Z

Was thinking earlier about why I read my Dreamwidth friends list regularly but never seem to participate. Part of it is that I have some notion I'm supposed to post, like, life updates and "things I accomplished this [time period]" roundups and mini-review catalogues of Things Read/Watched/Played. Which seems to be what most other people on my flist use theirs for. But Christ that sounds like homework to my brain, and also a great way to kick off a depression spiral even though RL is going fine right now, so I lurk rather than show my face without having done the homework.

I realize, rationally, and also in my gut now that I've written it out, that that is dumb. Blogging is freeform. I could hit-and-run with random shower thoughts every two weeks, say nary a word about life or activity roundups, and pass it off as ~maintaining my mystique~ if anyone says anything, which they won't. But the other thing I'm realizing as I haunt various platforms in the wake of the Tumblrpocalypse is that the culture of a platform matters. You can post whatever the hell you want, but you get more out of the space if you use it in dialogue with what the existing userbase is doing there.

Back when the Tumblr exodus was still actively underway, I found myself in various Discord servers trying to Explain Dreamwidth to stressed-out Tumblr users. These were smart people who were happy to explore the features, but unsure how those features translated into norms of interaction, content discovery, and what-to-post-where. And I remember being baffled by how intimidated many of them were about posting to communities. To them, friending individual blogs was the natural first step, but comms were A Whole Fucking Thing they were wary to intrude on, like submitting yourself for the approval of judgemental classmates. And I was going "?!?!?!" It's a complete inversion of how seriousness and intimacy worked on LJ, right? Your journal was your combination front porch/living room/blanket fort in the bedroom, a personal space with varying degrees of privacy and choosiness about audience, because it was About You. One of those degrees was "public," but a version of "public" that rude guests would still be intruding on. A "public" where introductions weren't really required, but it still wasn't uncommon for random strangers who'd stumbled across your post to preface their comments with "Hi, I found you through X, hope it's not creepy that I'm butting in," and in fact friendships were frequently made that way. Comms were where you slapped your fandom shitposts and casual discussion about topics of common interest, where random people with no prior acquaintance could interact with it on the basis of shared interest alone. Where it wasn't About You, it was about the thing everyone was there to talk about.

But then the shitposts, and memes, and shower thoughts, and reactions to newly-released canon, and casual discussion threads... moved to Tumblr. And the people who were attached to LJ-style fandoming moved to Dreamwidth. And trickled away by attrition as more and more fans sucked it up and moved to where the center of gravity was, no matter how hatefully obtuse Tumblr-as-a-platform was for their (okay, our) purposes. The more this happened, the more overwhelmingly DW got skewed towards people and activities that relied heavily on the LJ features Tumblr lacked. And the more that happened, the less DW actually resembled old-school LJ in the ways it was functionally used. Which I didn't notice, or didn't see the full implications of, even as it happened under my nose.

So those stressed-out Tumblr refugees were reading the room way better than I was. If all the low-friction, casual fan activity has migrated to Tumblr, what's left in Dreamwidth communities? Mostly things that Dreamwidth has the infrastructure to support and Tumblr is iffy for:
- Events with lots of logistics and participant-wrangling: fests, bangs, exchanges, etc.
- Structured mod-run activities like weekly prompt challenges and roundup newsletters.
- "Submit stuff on a particular theme in a specified format" communities like fandomsecrets and scans_daily that had built their momentum in the LJ days.
- (Kinkmemes and anon memes, which depend on unorthodox use of a very specific set of comment features. And also need to be checked on their own rather than having their activity integrated into your feed, so even though they're major activity hubs, they don't really function as comms.)
- And promos. Promos for comms, for events, for fic and fanart and graphics, for friending memes, always for ways to find and produce content somewhere else than the comm they're posted to.

Dreamwidth comms are a communal noticeboard and sign-up sheet for structured, supervised activities. Of course Tumblr-native fans were intimidated and clocked them as a formal, official Thing. I missed it, because LiveJournal comms skewed more towards rowdy after-school sci-fi clubs. But the culture of a platform resides in how it's used.

I don't know where I'm going with this, except that I miss LJ comm culture and it doesn't exist on DW. The features exist, but the critical mass of people using them that way doesn't. And the old LJ norms of public/private, intimacy, openness to public comment, what to post where, and where to look for what... just don't apply anymore. They haven't for a long time, thanks to modern social media. It's seductive to assume DW is a holdover version of oldschool LJ culture because it looks and sounds familiar, but the surface continuity masks huge changes in the norms of everyday usage.

My point here is not that any particular group of fans--Tumblr natives, DW holdouts, LJ-to-Tumblr migrants, Tumblr-to-DW migrants--is "to blame" for the most off-putting differences between the various platform cultures. People went where they went, and usage was most heavily shaped by platform features in combination with what kind of activity was concentrated there. I guess it's more... wistfulness, that LJ along with forums were my native mode of fandoming, to the point where following the center of fan activity over to Tumblr and adapting to its alien methods of interaction was extremely painful and frustrating. And now the DW mode of fandoming that evolved away from the center of activity turns out to be just as alien to me.

I can't do activity round-ups and regular mini-reviews of my Recently Read/Watched list. I'm not up for RL updates that are actually meant to keep anyone up-to-date. I can't do structured fanwork exchanges. I'm not wired for it--it's the most efficient way to turn what I do for fun into one massive stress/guilt/inferiority complex. Yeah, blogging is freeform, be the change you want to see, etc, and believe me if I end up with a project burning a hole in my head that's suited for Dreamwidth, I'll be delighted to post it here. If half a dozen other people want to make a DW comm just for fandom shitposting and casual discussion, I'll give it a go.

But I'm starting to accept that there's a reason I don't post here anymore. I don't like that that's so--I want a fandom home. Discord as the emerging hub of casual discussion is an ephemeral, undiscoverable nightmare, even though it's a really good chat system. Dreamwidth is open-source, self-funded, somewhat interoperable with other sites, has both personal and moderated-communal spaces, balances discoverability with privacy controls, is fantastic for durable threaded discussion... but I can't do fandom the way it seems to be done here right now. And I'm not sure how hard I want to swim against the tide.

(Comments welcome, you are not butting in, etc. But bear in mind that this is more personal musing than any kind of coherent declaration about fandom cultures. If it gets linked to as meta, so be it, but indignant attempts to rebut whatever axe you imagine I'm grinding will be accorded exactly as much patience as they deserve.)

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scattered post-Tumblr migration stuff

2019-01-17T06:23:10Z

Been checking out Mastodon: catch me at tenlittlebullets[Bad username or site: fandom @ ink] and asset[Bad username or site: hydratrash @ party], doing... not a whole hell of a lot, but still lurking. It's... OK? It lacks the parts of Twitter that are radioactively toxic, but still has all the parts of Twitter that replicate the things I found unsettling or obnoxious about Tumblr's interaction structure, and lacks Tumblr's ability to post longform.

Hubzilla shows promise (and can federate with Mastodon-like sites) but so many rough edges. I don't even get what half the apps do, how they're supposed to be different from each other, or where to go to get more than a five-word summary of what they are. Potentially incredibly powerful and flexible, with LJ/DW type settings granularity? But so many rough edges.

Fucking around with custom sites/domains, Tumblr->Wordpress backups, integration with IndieWeb-style interoperability, etc. Apparently there's a lot of IndieWeb type stuff that can be added to a Tumblr blog, which I guess is wildly Not In The Spirit Of The Thing but more integration never hurts.

Current pet project: fork Wordpress's official Tumblr-import plugin, which is a noble tool but hasn't kept up with Tumblr's fuckery. Video embeds get eaten, single-image photo posts get imported as galleries with a sucky default thumbnail view, god knows what else. It also doesn't go quite as far as it could in terms of all the stupidly site-specific metadata you can extract from a Tumblr post, which means it doesn't keep up with certain aspects that became important for fandom use. Preserving tags in the order you entered them, for example, rather than alphabetically. Preserving reblog-via and reblog-root data when Tumblr can be coaxed into coughing it up. Preserving the sources of ask and submission posts.

But the big dream is to separate the "import Tumblr data into Wordpress" step from the "actually hit up Tumblr's API for said data in realtime" step. Because so far I don't think there's a durable way to preserve all the blog backups that were done via tumblthree, tumblr-utils, similar Python scripts, frantic Pastebin patches for scripts that were choking on some unexpected way Tumblr's API data is garbage, etc. The existing plugin's data-fetching and preliminary import steps are all mashed into one function. So what started as "lol I'll just do one pull request to fix the YouTube embeds" has turned into invasive surgery and a forked version of the plugin that'll be wildly different under the hood. Which, hahahaha guess what:

1. My PHP experience amounts to, like, one dinky toy gizmo I wrote for a fansite back in 2013 and one AWS integration I pinch-hit for this summer.
2. My Wordpress experience amounts to running one site and fucking around haphazardly with its theme. WP plugin development experience: nil.
3. On the plus(?) side, I am painfully overfamiliar with Tumblr's API. And the many, many different kinds of garbage it will spit out at you. Let me tell you, internet, there are so many coding horror stories lurking in that data.

So... this is gonna be fun.

Let me know if you've run a Tumblr->Wordpress import recently and have feature requests. Or notes on stuff that's broken.

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Happy dumpster diving?

2018-12-10T22:24:29Z

FYI for Hydra Trash Party folks: I kicked a few bucks towards gifting hydratrashmeme some paid-account time. Call it a present for the winter holiday of your choice, or a small consolation for the Tumblrpocalypse.

The biggest benefit: if you scroll down to the search box in the community's sidebar, you can now natively search the full text of every comment ever posted there. Doesn't change the fact that kinkmemes are organizational clusterfucks by nature, but it does improve the discoverability of old prompts quite a bit, without having to wade through fickle half-collapsed site: results on Google. The sidebar also has more information on recent comments and recently-commented posts, which seems to have started displaying automatically.

If this is relevant to your interests and you want to pay it forward, use comment search to dig up an old prompt that hits a bunch of your kinks and write a few hundred words of porn for it. Everyone gains! ~~...except Bucky and Steve, who are unlikely to have a good time of it.~~

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Welcome-back-to-Dreamwidth placeholder

2018-12-10T17:51:53Z

Hello fellow Tumblr refugees and longtime Dreamwidth stalwarts! I am currently a bit swamped with migration stuff, backups, modding the Hydra Trash Party Discord server during a Tumblrdämmerung-related upsurge in activity (join us! ...if you're into that sort of thing), and holding down a full-time development job with a book/comic/RPG store. I may take a little while to friend you back or respond to pings. But I'm totally here for Dreamwidth as fandom refuge once Tumblr gets done shooting itself in the nuts, and hope to start interacting more regularly once things get less hectic.

If you have a HTP sideblog or blog tag you want backed up before Tumblr purges it, let me know the URL--I have a pile of stuff saved locally already.

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on my oldest Tumblr pairing tag

2015-11-08T23:42:56Z

(Archived from a Tumblr post at http://shinelikethunder.tumblr.com/post/102324449261/just-wanted-to-say-that-your-unsafe-insane-and)

punnyknitwit asked:

Just wanted to say that your "unsafe insane and nonconsensual" tag popped into my head the minute I saw our new Doctor/Master pair on screen. You really have summed the relationship up very neatly.

Hah, glad to hear it! It’s the kind of phrase that once it drops into your head, it’s too apt to not make repeated use of it. Because yes. Them. High-stakes, high-octane power play with no safeword whatsoever.

(Well. I say “no safeword.” But one of the twisted, compelling things about their interactions in Utopia/SoD/LotTL is that both of them use “nope, time out, I’m done playing games with you" as a move in the game–an assertion of ultimate power over the situation. Which, in the end, neither of them truly has. God, I will never stop being fascinated by these two jerks.)

Quick LJ/Dreamwidth note: I'm checking the 'do not show on friends page' tickybox for the vast majority of my backdated Tumblr meta so as not to spam, but I'm letting a few through in case anyone's interested.

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Agreeing with supervillains, in a meta-narrative kind of way

2015-11-08T23:26:42Z

(Archived from a Tumblr post at http://shinelikethunder.tumblr.com/post/98935764901/stoatsandwich-when-you-start-agreeing-with-the

[Scan of Steve Rogers gazing out on the NYC skyline, with superimposed villain-monologuing in the captions]
[panel 1]
Red Skull: I could put a bullet between your eyes anytime I want, and you'd never see it coming.
[panel 2]
Red Skull: But that would be too easy. I need to make you suffer.
Red Skull: Because you do it so well, Rogers... suffering, I mean.

stoatsandwich:

When you start agreeing with the supervillains, maybe it’s time to reconsider your life choices.

I have this theory that supervillains who lovingly plot the best, most fitting, most personally painful ways to make the hero suffer are basically just avatars for the writing process itself.

And that goes double for self-sabotaging villains who pass up a zillion chances to just drop a nuke on the stupid bastard, and instead craft elaborate traps that test him and ensure that his suffering is beautiful and make him look awesome when he inevitably thwarts them.

#my problem with cap vol. 5 (besides the sharon carter mess) #is that brubaker writes amazing steve!suffering but his bucky!suffering leaves me cold #and haha guess which one he fell in love with #also #WOW does this trope pick up a d/s-y vibe when pushed far enough #the Master needs to just fucking admit that he enjoys a good hard thwarting #as much or more than he enjoys tying the Doctor up and leering at him

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whistles

2015-11-04T04:40:36Z

In other news, Netflix is a horrific enabler and I'm now midway through season 5 of the X-Files. We will see whether anything comes of this. Trashchat is trying to enable me into writing an Agents of SHIELD crossover that sics Mulder and Scully on a sinister government conspiracy that turns out to be Coulson's team at work. Probably far too much plot for me to ever write, but man, would it be satisfying.

(At the very least, I want a gag about Coulson enforcing a zero-tolerance no-smoking policy on the Bus. When pressed about it, he mutters something evasive about a boss he had back in the 90s and pointedly changes the subject.)

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Let's try this Tumblr/Dreamwidth thing again.

2015-11-04T01:24:00Z

Okay. I'm going to try something. Since Tumblr seems to be going the way of LJ in terms of finding ever-more-pointless ways to piss off its userbase and make the site functionally unusable, I'm going to take a stab at a hybrid approach a few people have floated. The basic idea is to stop using Tumblr's semi-broken read-more feature and instead link to a full version posted on Dreamwidth--the other main benefit being that anything you'd use a cut for probably belongs somewhere with a comments section or somewhere with friends-lock controls or both. I'm going to combine that with going back through my meta tags and starting to copy old posts to Dreamwidth.

What does this mean if you're following me on Tumblr? Not much of a change, hopefully. You can still like/reblog/etc the Tumblr post with the pre-readmore intro in it. Clicking the link will take you to the full post in a slightly different layout, that's all, hopefully with a link back to the Tumblr version. (Also, if you start clicking around or backreading, bear in mind that you will probably stumble across some very old posts. This place is a mirror of a LiveJournal account I've had since I was a dweeby 15-year-old in 2003 and actively maintained until 2013.)

What does this mean if you've got me added on Dreamwidth or LJ? Fingers crossed, a small uptick in actual activity. Mostly in MCU fandom, so apologies to Les Mis or Doctor Who people who have no interest, and no hard feelings if you decide to drop this blog. The archiving of old meta posts will be backdated, so hopefully it shouldn't flood your f-list.

Tumblr version: http://shinelikethunder.tumblr.com/post/132507316276/lets-try-this-tumblrdreamwidth-thing-again

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gonna get tinnitus from the tocsin ringing in my ears

2014-03-31T17:26:02Z

omfg, buried in Saint-Merry stuff up to my eyeballs. There's the translation of the public-domain portions of À cinq heures nous serons tous morts, the trial transcripts (which fortunately are just a matter of picking over Google's versions for weird OCR errors, but dude, I'M NOT TRANSLATING THEM SOMEBODY ELSE DO A HIGHLIGHTS VERSION OR SOMETHING, the whole thing runs to like 100,000 words), similar OCR-picking for Rey-Dussueil's novel Le Cloître Saint-Méry, and chasing down more primary-source accounts (most of them by famous authors, so hopefully already available online in translation) in Sayre & Löwy's L'insurrection des Misérables. Plus hemming and hawing over some of the amazing in-copyright print sources (mostly Sayre & Löwy and the explanatory notes for À cinq heures...) and how much I could share/translate without (a) getting dinged by the publishers, and (b) taking bread out of the mouths of the excellent people who've managed to study this stuff professionally. I almost wonder what would happen if I approached the publishers about doing an official English translation? Because I think there are a number of people in UK and American Les Mis fandom and assorted other historical interests who would be happy to shell out money for these books, but are being held up by the language barrier or the cost of importing books from France, which is ridiculously high even compared to other European countries.

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Oh dear, almost a year since I've posted here.

2014-03-29T16:10:18Z

I'm not gonna lie, my favorite part of the "threaded discussion on Dreamwidth!!!" push in Les Mis fandom is that I can subscribe to so many more people than I can on Tumblr. (Yeah, I'm still in the LJ-acquired habit of needing to backread my dash to the point where I left off last time, which severely limits how many people I can follow.) Threaded discussion! Non-redundant content on my flist! Not having to stare wistfully at posts from cool people and wish I could follow them without making my dash completely unmanageable!

So: whether or not we are mutual-following on Tumblr, if you add me and your journal is not 95% made up of Fandoms I'm Not Into, I will probably add you back, and be very happy to be able to do so.

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Hide

2013-04-21T07:16:17Z

Eeeeee. Best Doctor Who we've had since A Town Called Mercy. Maybe better? This one was certainly doing more stuff and doing it well, but suffered from some writing problems that Mercy didn't have. Neil Cross needs to keep better track of who knows what and when, and how they find out, because this is the second one he's done in a row where the Doctor goes in not knowing much about the main mystery but apparently gets a series of psychic telegrams over the course of the episode detailing exactly what's going on. However! While that particular weakness completely undermined the climax of Rings of Akhaten, this time there is a lot more packed into the plot and it is better-developed and doesn't throw a big speech at you out of nowhere and demand that you have feelings about it, so the Doctor Magically Knowing Things from time to time is more easily excused as plot expediency.

And I had feelings about it. A lot of feelings. ( Spoilery )

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The Rings of Akhaten

2013-04-08T14:10:17Z

Well, that... wanted to be a much better episode than it really was? It was cute. Eleven and Clara are adorbs. It also didn't even try to have a plot that made sense, which would be more forgivable if it didn't try to shove forward into a big melodramatic climax that I guess was supposed to give us lots of feelings, but it felt cheap and not earned at all and I was still too busy trying to figure out basic elements of the plot and what things were even supposed to mean. Most of which were never made clear at all. Not earning your big emotional climax is a bit of a stupid error to fall into when you have an entire subplot about using objects of personal value as currency, but then again maybe that's what Neil Cross was trying to do, cash in on our feelings about the show's history in a cheap and exploitative manner.

Also, Who fandom seems completely divided between "Murray Gold is awesome" and "Murray Gold should be dragged out back and shot for crimes against good taste," and I think this is the only time I've jumped ship into the latter camp since the choirs of angels sang Ten to his angsty drawn-out rest.

Perhaps I am being overly mean. It's just that I very very rarely outright dislike an episode of Who right after it airs, normally I am all over defending them and pointing out their redeeming qualities even if the execution was botched, and this time I just... can't. It's making me cranky.

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[fic] As I Would Not Be a Slave

2013-03-27T02:08:08Z

Title: As I Would Not Be a Slave
Fandom: Les Misérables
Pairing: Enjolras/Grantaire
Rating: NC-17
Wordcount: 2531
Summary: ...so I would not be a master. Enjolras the reluctant sadist, meet Grantaire the all-too-willing masochist.
Notes/Warnings: For a prompt on the kinkmeme: "the reason Enjolras doesn't have sex is that he can only get off when dominating/degrading/hurting someone (and I mean seriously actually hurting someone), and he hates that part of himself so much he completely bottles up his sex drive. However, Grantaire loves Enjolras so much and has so little self worth that he actually likes Enjolras treating him like shit." True to prompt, so tread carefully if necessary.

( He more than anyone has reason to loathe the very idea of man on his knees before man. )

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[fic] A Fundamental Misconception

2013-03-27T01:33:54Z

Title: A Fundamental Misconception
Fandom: Les Misérables
Pairing: Enjolras/Grantaire
Rating: NC-17
Wordcount: 3204
Summary: Grantaire would recoil before the very thought of undermining any of Enjolras' principles. Except when he discovers that sleeping with a 25-year-old virgin means debunking certain over-hasty assumptions—in which case Grantaire is happy to deliver a very thorough undermining indeed.
Notes: Gratuitous PWP for a prompt on the kinkmeme: "Grantaire fucking Enjolras with his fingers until Enjolras is reduced to a whimpering, shaking, begging mess."

( Does exactly what it says on the tin. )

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Good problems to have

2013-03-21T16:23:55Z

And now we come back to the exact question that plagued me at about this time in 2011: halp how do I multi-fandom? I am so laughably bad at sustaining obsessive interest in more than one thing at once, which usually ends in me feeling guilty for dropping one thing in favor of another (see: disappearing from Les Mis fandom because Doctor Who ate me), but that is not actually possible right now because I've done a hard 180 back into Les Mis fandom just as a new (half-)season of Who is about to air. And this time I love them both to pieces with active fangirl joy, am not burned out on either of them, and want to keep participating in both. *flaily hands*

Les Mis kinkmeme now bigger than eleventy_kink, heading into Round 4 soon, will probably hit 24,601 comments before Barricade Day, about to get a Big Important Rules/FAQ Organizational Post, and getting me to write fic again. Even if it is all shameless porn. And now a digitized copy of Hugo's original manuscript has shown up, which is not exactly dissuading me from falling right back down the research-and-Brick-geekery rabbit hole. But before I embark on any new translations or anything I should probably trawl through back archives of my LJ tags, dig around on my hard drive, poke through old Abaissé threads, and compile a few massive HERE LET ME SHARE YOU A THING BECAUSE YOU MIGHT NOT HAVE SEEN IT BEFORE link posts for people who weren't here in 2009 or whenever. And ahaha oh Christ the DVD is coming out tomorrow, which opens the possibility of vidding once I'm done watching it sixty bazillion times and weeping.

And then Doctor Who season 7b starts at the end of the month. Am still v. v. interested in Clara, still convinced she's already dead and her brain's in a computer somewhere and she doesn't even know it, still not sure how that connects to Already-Dead People The Doctor Might Be Married To Whose Brains Are Also In Computers Somewhere, still vaguely suspicious that the Doctor might not be going through s7 in broadcast order. But my interest in Moffat Who is still largely cerebral--which, given the way my brain works, is enough to sustain quite a lot of interest! But I'm not sure I have Feelings about it the way I have Feelings about Ten, or Seven and Ace, or One and the Original Team TARDIS. And there is a lot of classic Who for me to go develop Feelings about. (Turlough? I don't know if I have Feelings about Turlough. I like his stupid face a lot, and he hits the same "dysfunctional fuckups who suffer way too prettily" pervy buttons as Ten, but I've only really seen Frontios and Mawdryn Undead--and Planet of Short-Shorts but I was watching that for the Doctor/Master and knew zilch about Turlough at that point--so I will have to reserve judgement until I've seen more.)

Gallifrey One has come and gone, was AMAZING, Happiness Patrol cosplay was a hit, and holy god I met my doppelgänger. We were both running around being Simm!Master and looking scarily alike, except that she's a foot taller and twice as good-looking. Freema Agyeman is the loveliest human and so so nice in Q&A sessions, Sylvester McCoy continues to be a ridiculous man, Philip Hinchcliffe has v. interesting things to say at panels, Frazer Hines is Frazer Hines and he and Deborah Watling make a super-entertaining double act, Nick Briggs miiiight have been at the Big Finish merchandise booth while I was busy giving them all my money and I was too tongue-tied to say anything to him. But HNNNGH I love Big Finish; a few weeks before the con I stumbled upon the "Doctor Who scripts that were never produced" Wikipedia article and almost cried with longing for what could have been, and then I found out BF does audios of some of the lost stories and look, I'm not saying I dropped ridiculous amounts of money for One, Barbara, Ian, and Susan meeting Alexander the Great in a dropped season-one script by a Turkish playwright, except for the part where I totally did.

And then on the last night of con I somehow wound up at the bar with Neve McIntosh, aka Madame Vastra, furtively talking smack about Moffat's writing problems in between mutual fangirling of Vastra & Jenny. She is... pretty much the awesomest, and spent that whole evening drinking like a sailor and flirting with everybody and generally being the life of the party.

Then after Gally work took over my life and I wound up crossing eleven time zones in four days (LA to DC Monday, DC to the Comoros Islands Thursday). And that trip was long and stressful and way too busy and I didn't even really get to go see anything outside a quarter-mile radius of the hotel, which sucks. Because coral reefs and crater lakes and active volcano and I'm really going to have to devise a way to go back there for vacation rather than work sometime. And now I am back. And not really recovered. Because Air France lost my luggage and still hasn't got it back to me, and Air Kenya completely jerked me around and almost caused me to refund my ticket and hop on the next flight to Antananarivo in a panic through sheer boneheaded lack of communication, and I came back to find the Les Mis kinkmeme erupting in its very first honest-to-god wankstorm. It is impressive that it took 15,000 comments for anyone to start snarling at anyone else, and kind of hilarious that the thing that finally broke the kinkmeme's tolerance was a request for a Confederacy AU, but fuck it couldn't have been more ill-timed.

That... is all, I think. Oh, and I am finally on pills that seem to be making headway against the depression-y shit, at least the grey fog of "everything is blurgh" and the occasional downswings into active self-loathing. The "having energy for RL activities and regularly accomplishing basic tasks such as laundry and feeding myself" bit remains to be seen.

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Les Mis kink meme, what even

2013-03-02T19:49:25Z

So within about a week, at current posting rate, the Les Misérables kink meme is going to have more comments than the original Doctor Who kink meme. WHAT. BUH. THIS IS NOT A SENTENCE I EVER THOUGHT I'D TYPE.

For comparison purposes:
sizeofthatthing (est. 2008): 12,924 comments over 3 posts
eleventy_kink (est. 2010): 15,002 comments over 2 posts
LM kink meme (est. 2009): 11,428 comments over 3 posts, ~10,000 of which were posted in the last two MONTHS

I continue to be... just sort of boggled, and at a loss on how to moderate it. Because hahaha guys remember 2006 when there were like three people in the whole of Les Mis fandom and every scrap of new fic was precious? Now there are people going NO GIVE US PROMPT FREEZES THERE IS TOO MUCH ACTIVITY YOU NEED TO PUT THE BRAKES ON IT. The part of me that's been modding the meme since Christmas is nodding vigorously; the much larger part of me that's been in Les Mis fandom for eight years is going WHAT NO WHY WOULD YOU WANT TO DO THAT EVER. Does not compute--error 400 invalid request--this system has encountered a critical error and thrown itself into the Seine.

(Edit: As of the night of March 20th, 16,835 comments and still going. Will we get to 24,601? Will we surpass both of the Who kinkmemes combined? TERRIFYING.)

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Drabble: Golden Hour

2013-03-01T21:41:47Z

Title: Golden Hour
Author: tenlittlebullets
Fandom: Doctor Who
Characters: Nine and Rose
Rating/warnings: G, no warnings
Summary: Golden hour (photography): the last hour before sunset, much prized for the warm diffuse quality of its light. Golden hour (medicine): the first hour after a major traumatic injury, in which treatment is most likely to prevent death. Post-'The End of the World' drabble.

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They linger in the chip shop until they get kicked out. When they step outside it’s almost sundown already, and the light is slanting rich and warm through the streets. The Doctor stops short; his gaze fixes itself westwards, where the sky is just beginning to light up orange, glittering off of windows like a city on fire.

Rose nudges him. They’re blocking the door. “What’s the matter? No wait, don’t tell me, more aliens.”

The thousand-yard stare snaps, the Doctor’s eyes focus on Rose, and he grins an evasive grin. “Nah. Someone just walked over my grave, that’s all.”

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Gally!

2013-02-14T08:17:54Z

On my way to Gallifrey One! (Side note: You know sort of travel anxiety that lingers in the back of your head and goes "What if you can't find the hotel? What if you can't find it because it doesn't EXIST? What if you step out of the plane and your entire destination doesn't exist, and there's nothing but a cornfield or a howling void filled with asteroids or a chillingly empty hole in spacetime?" Yeah, the sentence "I'm going to Gallifrey!" really doesn't do a lot to defuse that anxiety.) Flight gets out of DC National at 5:45 AM, which is pretty much the ass end of EVERYTHING, and the best transport I could arrange was to be dropped off around 1am by my brother. So, close on five hours in Reagan National, sitting on my butt on the very hard floor of the elevator/pay-phone alcove, because that's the only place where the muzak isn't earsplitting. Who the fuck ghetto-blasts muzak at three in the morning, anyway? Well, okay, an airport named after Ronald Reagan, that's who. At least there's WiFi.

Costumes lined up for Gally this year: Simm!Master as usual, Yana!Master, possibility of Ninth Doctor, and--fingers crossed that the last-minute assembly/tinkering at the hotel goes all right--tag-team Happiness Patrol cosplay with a buddy from Tumblr. I realize it would probably be mean to mount a guerrilla "Cheer up, emo Time Lord!" campaign against random Tens, but... well, it's still deeply tempting. I've been too much of a failface lately to rig up a pair of faux-stone wings that could survive an airplane trip, so weeping angel has to stay at home again.

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D'oh. Two and two together.

2013-02-01T17:49:53Z

Following the Doctor Who speculation in the last post: so, Amy Pond's house appears to have an extra story. An extra story with stairs that look an awful lot like the ones in The Lodger. What happened whenever the timeship in The Lodger activated? The TARDIS went all screwy. Where was the TARDIS when it exploded? Amy Pond's backyard.

Um. I think I might've found what blew up the TARDIS. As usual, it was in the room (or, in this case, the house) with you all along.

None of which explains the who, why, or how, but at least it takes care of the what and the where.

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Misc. fandom

2013-01-29T23:00:10Z

1. I finally caved and got a Netflix subscription, and proceeded to break it in by watching Withnail & I. I am very, very glad I only found out about the drinking game after I watched the movie, because I'm pretty sure there is no variant of that drinking game that isn't a one-way trip to the emergency room. (The drinking game, for the record, has a single criterion: drink whenever the characters do.)

If anyone has W&I fic recommendations--particularly Withnail/Marwood slash, cracky Doctor Who crossovers, or well-done pastiche/missing scenes with the characters being their bad selves--hit me up, because I will read the shit out of it.

Also this gif/macro made me burst into uncontrollable cackling for at least a full minute. And I am so glad to have the sort of living situation where roommates drawn over to the computer by the racket promptly dissolve into cackling as well.

2. Q: What's the difference between an LD50 of Kessel spice and five Imperial stormtroopers deciding to execute you by firing squad?
A: Your chances of survival are lower with the LD50.
(I guess I got sick of making dead Gallifrey jokes and moved on to the impeccable marksmanship of the Empire's finest?)

3. More Doctor Who speculation: I continue to be bothered by the fact that Amy Pond's house doesn't just have too many rooms, it has too many stories. Literally. It's a two-story house from the outside--maybe two and a half if you count room for the attic--and yet there is a prominent staircase on the upper-floor landing. Too nice (and too well-lit) to be attic stairs, too prominent to be a continuity error in an episode that draws attention to the rooms that nobody notices. A too-prominent staircase to nowhere that bears a disturbing resemblance to the one in The Lodger. Given that we still don't know what's behind that proto-TARDIS in The Lodger and the s6 opener, and that we still don't know why the TARDIS blew up on Amy and Rory's wedding day, and that there appears to be a whole extra story folded into Amy Pond's house that isn't there on the outside, I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark and say that just because the Ponds' story is officially over doesn't mean there isn't more to it.

(Edit: Also, sorry for being crap about replying to comments lately--okay, and by "lately" I mean "for a long time now." I've been doing the Depression Turtle act for far too long.)

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tenlittlebullets @ 2013-01-07T13:11:00

2013-01-07T18:47:20Z

Had a good weekend, though very busy--so much social interaction, halp. Among other things, drove kinetikatrue to New York for a concert and got second row at The Mystery of Edwin Drood through the wonders of student rush. I can't say I've ever participated in choose-your-own-adventure theatre before, but it was a very good production and the play is just meta enough that the actors descending into the audience to troll for votes actually worked. And the ending we got worked surprisingly well: Rosa is such a bland ingénue on the surface that I was really dubious when the audience voted her the murderer, but she's also been seething under the attentions of Edwin's rapey uncle the whole time and--crucially--no one ever steps in to help her. The explanation that Edwin had borrowed Creepface's cloak against the weather, and that Rosa saw him approaching her alone in the dark and didn't realize who he was until she'd already taken matters into her own hands and strangled him, actually makes the whole thing more poignant and more interesting.

Less cheerfully, New Jersey roads are a Kafkaesque nightmare that only make sense if you try to imagine someone playing pick-up sticks with cooked spaghetti and deciding to impose order on the chaos solely through the application of "no left turn" signs. New Jersey also ate an astounding amount of my money--ditched the car in Hoboken and took the PATH train into the city, which would've worked great except that (a) the parking garage rates were misleading as fuck, and (b) the entire PATH system was closed overnight, with no notices I could see on the train coming in, and I had to take a cab back to Hoboken. None of which would be ruinous, except that work STILL hasn't reimbursed me for the last business trip they sent me on, leaving me short a chunk of change equal to one-fifth my annual salary. Over a year's worth of rent. Yeah, it all came out of my savings account, but jesus that's a hefty sum to be dragging your feet about getting back to someone over the Christmas holidays, and they're thinking about sending me out again at the end of the month.

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Shameless speculation on Clara

2013-01-03T20:25:54Z

The Doctor Who Christmas special was rly rly excellent; okay, the plot was thin as paper, but CLARA. And symbolism run rampant. And Moffat continuing to write himself fix-it fic of RTD era, this time for Martha. (Along with nerdy backstory fic for Troughton monsters-of-the-week and a dash of interspecies lesbian Sherlock Holmes AU. Moff, let yourself be a fanboy more often, it's fun.) I am excite! Half from the guessing game, and half from I JUST REALLY LIKE CLARA OKAY.

( Guessing game and a dash of abject tinhattery behind the cut )

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