Letterblade

Bleh.

In part, I suspect, because my recent fannish activity has actually been on LiveJournal. (The kink_las challenge that I've been involved in. Which seems to have stalled out for the moment.) And in part because I've been trying to diminish my fandom involvement. Apart from kink_las, I've barely written fic in a while. I haven't really been involved in active fannish discussion and general geeking/squeeing, outside of a few in-person friends, for years.

I miss it.

At any rate. I'm going to be trying to make use of this journal again. For fandom stuff. As was its intent. I also need to scrape together an update of my fic archive, as it's been several years. (Which means I need to re-acquaint myself with the slapdash PHP code I put together to streamline the indexes. Here's hoping I remembered comments.) In the meantime, I'm considering uploading to Archive of Our Own. Because that's an archive that I like and actually seems to be active. Skyehawke used to be my secondary archive, but I haven't used that in a while. I also can't quite decide whether to put up everything at AoOO, or just the stuff that I'm proud of and/or is popular. (i.e. do I bother with all my old FMA drabbles and crap like that?)

I defaulted on kink_bingo this year, because as the deadline was coming up, I was feeling overwhelmed with the concept of being involved with fannish stuff again. And not having much luck writing something. And I wanted to give myself an excuse to not sign up next year and get pummeled by the challenge again (as happened the first year I did it.)

And...yeah. Fandom. Of course, the two fandoms I'm currently most interested in either don't exist (Xenosaga) or seem to have faded considerably with time (Kingdom Hearts). Such is my luck.

I have things to attend to. :D

So I signed up for kink_las because, well, I'm insane. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept (which included me, until somebody on the flist mentioned it), it's sort of a reality show style fanfiction contest. Every two weeks, we get a prompt--in this case, a kink to include in our fic--and we submit the result anonymously for public vote. Every round, somebody gets voted out. (Or I think two somebodies, with how this one is set up.)

The first round of submissions is available for reading and voting. All 37 of them. (This is going to take a while.) Obviously I can't tell you which one I wrote, or even the fandom or pairing, because that would invalidate the idea of anonymous evaluation of quality (which is one of the reasons I signed up for this thing; people are encouraged to judge by talent, not by fandom knowledge, shipping preferences, or reputation. Which I like, because I tend to write obscure/unloved fandoms and pairings.)

(As an aside to the parenthetical aside, writing *specifically* for an audience of people who may or may not know the fandom is interesting, especially when aiming for something more emotionally involved than Random Pr0n. I found myself deliberately adding some exposition that I might not normally have added. Not much, really; I had to make a lot of cuts to get the fic to the right size to begin with, as I'm a wordy bitch. But little clarifications. There are some aspects which will be kind of meaningless to somebody who doesn't know canon details, but hopefully overall it will be at least somewhat interesting to the canon-clueless.)

So yeah, if you feel like reading 37 kinky ficlets and trying to decide which is best and worst, go vote! :DDD

...and looking at to the rest of the month.

Pledges for Blogathon this year are now closed. In the final tally, I raised $175! Sponsor thanks to usernamenumber, jennaria, rivenwanderer, novelfriend, darkoni42, thesilentpoet, nevacaruso, natbudin, and freetobeme18.

If you have not yet donated and forwarded confirmation, please do so within the week. If not, I shall harass you. Annoyingly.

Would like to get all the Blogathon post-op sorted out soon, because I am going be swamped this month. Short version: packing everything I own, costuming a cast of 21 when I've never costumed a show before, and writing about twenty things. Stressballing about all this right now, and trying not to.

The long version, which I did out mostly out of morbid curiosity.

Practical life stuff:
- Packing everything for the move. Aiiiiiiiii.
- Going through the rest of my custom jewelry request queue.
- Trying to actually make and sell some more jewelry, custom work aside. I could use the money.
- With everything else on this list, I am not even THINKING about looking for part-time work right now. After the move, I keep telling myself. Don't worry about it until after the move.

Superstar stuff:
- Rehearsing for performance. Which takes up a fair bit of time in rehearsal, as I'm called practically every night. Off-book deadline is in a few weeks, though I'm not particularly worried about that, as I memorize music like a sponge. Actually a little more worried about getting all choreo and blocking under my skin, though I think that'll come in time.
- Designing costumes for all performers. Soon.
- Organizing construction of all costumes.

LARP stuff:
- Writing a fair chunk of A Crown of Hearts.
- Arranging new run date and gamespace for the same. Shooting for sometime in October. More later.

Fandom stuff:
- One fic for areyougame.
- At least five fics for kink_bingo.
- Journal and profile creation for various characters for a multi-fandom Dreamwidth RPG that mllelaurel and I are booting up soon.
- Participation in said RPG, which will, if all goes well, boot up on August 15th.
- Would like to get more Xenonovel written, as that should be an ongoing, regularly-updating project.

So, yeah. August will be CRAZY IN THE FACE.

So in between mad work on finishing LARPs in time for Intercon and various other Things I Must Do, like more request ficlet foo, I shall of course take time to procrastinate on LJ.

Presenting: Kingdom Hearts Pairings I Like!

Sora/Riku/Kairi: For the overwhelming cuteness and fuzziness that, despite my aversion to cuteness and fuzziness and popular het (or partially het) pairings, I LOVE. Fast becoming another OT3 of mine, for realz.

Axel/Roxas: For the canon-stop-punching-me-in-the-heart PAIN. And awesome, and sexy, and PAIN.

Larxene/Marluxia: For the kinky, torture-ridden, non-heteronormative politisexing het WIN. Now with bonus electroculture.

Ah, heck, I can take nearly any Org[y] XIII pairing happily. Zexion/Lexaeus, Xemnas/Saix for the obvious ones. Xigbar and Demyx are my little black dresses and I <3 them both. (Demyyyyyyyyyyx! Stop killing me wetly!) Marluxia/Axel or Marluxia/Larxene/Axel are win.

Roxas/Riku is hard to pull off but awesome. I have maybe a tiny kink for Axel/Sora. (Bonus threesome with Roxas, somehow?) Kairi/Namine makes me DIE OF KITTEN CUTE.

Bonus HOT-WRONG? Marluxia/Sora. HOT-WRONG, I say.

Marluxia seems to get in this a lot too. Hmm. Xigbar/Marluxia/Demyx black dress OT3?

Also, we're not even going to get into the results of the random pairing generator I hacked together in Rails...

So my new crack these past few days--besides, of course, the FFX replay, which is to the last save point--is reading the archives at, say, Feministing. Or this crackin' blog (that particular link is image-heavy, maybe NWS, but I love it for containing the line "[I'm] wondering if fangirls are the future of feminism.")

I have never really considered myself a feminist. More of a of-course-men-and-women-are-equal-now-let's-get-over-it-and-talk-about-new-stuff-ist. And, yeah, I've lived in enough of a privileged liberal bubble for my entire life that I could get away with it. Hell, I've barely experienced any discrimination/hostility/put-downs for being queer, never mind female; it's one of my basic assumptions that the answer is always "yes, I can, and should," or "yes, women can, and should." I entertained presidential fantasies. You know.

And I never really had any direct interest in feminism or women's studies or that general intellectual area. (Which I would now, after extensive study reading two blogs, categorize as "what this world, as it is, does to women--who, btw, do kick ass, thank you--and how we can go about making things better in that regard.") It was pretty much a "you people and your quaint little categories" reaction.

That started changing--because you will never escape fandom with me!--when the idea for Stars bit me in the ass. Because--I've rambled about this extensively before, but will condense--what drove me to write that thing was not just "oo, shiny" or "oh fuck, Stella's HOT" (well, some of the latter), but the fact that this fic, rare for me, seems to be Saying Something. And the ideas and the characters started catalyzing when I stopped and thought, "wait a minute, how would people react to an independent female superhero at X time? Or to a woman beating up Nazis/being a doctor/running an international munitions firm in 1942/1966/1972?" And the answer was generally "not well."

And that started me thinking--mostly at the hindbrain level--about how society shapes women as opposed to men. Which I'd never really thought about before. And then it kind of all exploded to the front when I randomly clicked through to Feministing from a general political blog, and...

...now I find myself sitting here thinking, "I'm a feminist."

That's new.

I have always had a vague aversion to the word. Mainly because I vaguely associate it with female chauvinism, which is one of my major pet peeves. I happen to like men; of the people I've known personally, I've had far more quarrels and abuse issues with women than with men; and my general goal with this sort of thing is equality. I get pissy when either primary gender treats the other like second-class people who think only with their dicks/uteri/wallets/cars/mall gift cards. It strikes me as defeated the point.

And that association--is the sort of thing one just sort of osmoses from the culture. Along with the idea that feminism has done its job--hey, look, we can vote, we don't have to take our husband's name, there are ovaries present in sports and politics well, sort of, and we're all over the workplace making less money.

So, yeah, I didn't consider myself a feminist, because the culture has tacked a miasma of "radical man-hating" around the word. (I did know enough to know that there's sex-positive feminism, versus the old all-sex-is-rape trope that gets trotted out now and then by people who don't like Firefly, but I admit that that was pretty much it.) And I like my bras, because otherwise they bounce and it hurts; and I have a decent prospect in life; etcetera. Mostly you'd just hear me ranting from time to time about how I believe in equal-opportunity consensual objectification, thank you. (Which I blame on reading Elfquest at a young age, where all the hot elves of both genders are half-naked and horny.) Or the bits of annoyance that, yeah, it's not exactly fair that possessing one set of genitals gets you held to a beauty standard that entails spending massive amounts of time and effort and money, not to mention starving yourself and wearing uncomfortable shoes, while possessing the other set of genitals entails you to shave only the visible bits. Especially the starving yourself bit; that I get cranky about, especially after reading another blog. But.

I think my train of thought has--not quite derailed, but has paused at an intersection of several tracks and is sitting, mulling, and sending the people out with the blankets for the sleeper cars. But at least it's acquired a shiny new label to add to its collection: feminist.

On an irrelevant note (B-flat!), I give you the "501(c)(3) non-profit organization dedicated to toasters - yes, that's correct, the kitchen appliance."

On a Stars related note (A!), I need to reboot my writerbrain. (kink_bingo fucking exhausted me.) I've been poking at it. Brainstorming. Got my hands on the scans of the old origin stories for Ant-Man and the Wasp, and Hen's past and inner life is finally coming together in my head. And it's also become clear that this fic is spawning sequels. God help us all. Mostly the Yellowjacket arc, which would need to be in a separate thing for timeline and tone issues, and which I'm, frankly, fucking terrified of writing. All issues of huge sprawling writing projects aside, I know how it should go, and I don't know if I can go there.

No, this isn't the Blogathon announcement. Though that will be coming soon!

I'm offering fic on livelongnmarry, which is a community (not all fandom) raising money to defend California's equal marriage laws. They're working on a bidding system, so I only have to write one fic in the end (which is good for me--means I won't flake out!), which means y'all only have one chance!

THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!

Ahem. Ignore the references to a show I've never seen! ^^

SO. GO. Bidding starts tonight at midnight PST.

*selfpimps*

Gacked from fandom_me

(For to get pelted with crack when I'm going about homeless?)

The thing is, when people look for stories, they always make it sound like badfic. Now, often that's because it really is badfic, but sometimes it's good and they just suck at describing the story.

So, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to summarize badly any one (or more!) of my stories, as if you were posting asking for a link you lost to a fic, and I'll try to guess which it is. You could even pretend you don't remember the pairing or fandom to make it harder to guess.

My fic can be found here (most fandoms), here (Myst fandom), and here (WIPs and things I haven't gotten around to archiving yet).

So in my dream last night, I was talking with somebody--likely cktraveler--about random aspects of the Potterverse, and somehow, in dream logic, somebody was asking us what we thought the general computational ability of the wizarding world was. cktraveler asked, "in integer or floating point?"

And I remember sitting for a moment in thought, and then jumping to my feet with sudden inspiration and pointing and yelping, "Maybe THAT'S what Arithmancy is!" (For this is a question we frequently ask--what the hell is Arithmancy?) Because I'd suddenly had this theory of Arithmancy being, at least in part, the fine art of building magical calculation machines, little complicated buzzing and levitating and clicking wizarding computers, with parts all Transfigured and Charmed to do their job, and probably, yes, able to do quite impressive floating point calculations.

And I had the image of the first Arithmancy class, with the mysterious Professor Vector--who remained of indeterminate gender, with short very dark brown hair, and had a teaching style somewhat like a laid-back and friendly Snape, even sometimes cracking a very dry joke. Prerequisites of at least an A in both Transfiguration and Charms, for making the stuff--though of course this was dream logic, as that's OWL grading and you start Arithmancy in third year if you opt for it... Students were in majority Ravenclaw, and also, surprisingly enough, in majority women, with a few Huffles and Gryffies scattered here and there, and in the back corner, two dark-haired, fifth-year Slytherin girls, very dykeish and seriously focused. (Srsly. In this dream Arithmancy was totally the dyke class.) At this point it was like I was plotting a ficlet, though I could not tell whether Hermione or Albus was the viewpoint character...

cktraveler, in the dream, disagreed strongly, in part because she didn't think something as specific as making computers would be a Hogwarts subject in its own right. But I thought, and still think upon waking, that this idea is so bloody cool that it makes me incoherent.

Sorry for the nonexistence, by the way. Have been going through an introvert phase, and also putting most of my non-work energies (and work is exhausting!) into prep work for Hallowed.

Speaking of which, character profile and backstory ficlet for Merope! Go! Bask in the misery!

( DH spoilers; GG, date unknown )

( DH spoilers; OO, 7/21/97 )

And that, at last, would be that.

BREAKFAST.

[entry in the Grindeldore for Goats Blogathon Venture; sponsor me here!]

( DH spoilers; GG, 1/96 )

[entry in the Grindeldore for Goats Blogathon Venture; sponsor me here!]