Arctic Light

You know, I think tomorrow I'll be ready to start working again, but the extent of my brain just Going Down this week has been really something. In retrospect it's kind of amazing how blitzed I was mentally by the end of last week; I remember one day where it took me something like half the day to write a mailing list email. Note to my future self: take breaks before it gets that bad! Your brain is not a machine, and even machines need to cool down sometimes! Anyway, I am very fortunate to have a job where I can take a week off when I really need it, and I really needed it.

By way of muccamukk, a post at selenak's on why MCU's Secret Invasion miniseries was so bad: Secret Invasion, or: How Not To Do a Spy Or Any Other Miniseries. I watched the first couple episodes of this back in June, because I love spy stuff and I love Nick Fury, but it was just awful - draggy, slow-paced, and egregiously stupid on nearly every level. The MCU doesn't do politics very well most of the time anyway, and espionage really needs to lean into politics, so that was probably never going to work out well, but even apart from that it was terrible! Nothing made sense, they squandered every opportunity for cool spy stuff and for shapeshifter identity porn, it was just bad. (Also, every spoiler I have picked up since I stopped watching makes it sound like things did not improve even slightly.)

And I found this link at Tor.com really interesting: What Do We Want From the Bookish Internet?, talking about the demise of Twitter and where to go from here. It was an interesting read in part because it doesn't jibe with my experience of being an author at all (but clearly everyone has a different experience). In particular, the article bemoans the loss of blogs, as I sit here typing about it on a blog, and talks about how authors need to find something new to market their books without Twitter, when I have never marketed my books on Twitter and I'm doing just fine; the phenomenon of authors-on-Twitter as this big thing pretty much passed me by entirely, as Booktok is continuing to do now. Maybe I'll jump on whatever the next big thing is, maybe I won't, but I'm entirely confident there'll be a next big thing. I think it always feels terrible to lose whatever your Big Thing was, though, as a lot of authors are losing Twitter now.

Writing Rainbow Rocks (flash exchange) was this past week, and I adore my gift!

I Just Want You (Biggles books, Biggles/EvS, 1200 wds)
Absolutely lovely slice-of-postcanon-life in which EvS is injured in a minor accident, everyone else helps out, and Biggles has a minor epiphany. Sweet and tender and adorable.

Also check out the other works; there are several for Biggles!

highadrenalineexchange nominations open on Monday, I'm just saying. (10K in 2 weeks.)

There's also prisoner_exchange currently in nominations, a captivity/prisoner themed exchange - everything from noncon kink to more general rescue/escape, cat-and-mouse, and post-captivity recovery. Also including such intriguing tags as Attitude - Cheerful prisoner and irritated captor and Attitude - Prisoner happy to be their captor's prisoner which obviously don't make me think of anyone in particular. Nominations run through April 15.

--

Completely unrelated to the above, a really interesting article on the dire wolf discusses recent DNA evidence that suggests it wasn't actually a wolf, couldn't interbreed with wolves, and may actually have looked a bit like a large reddish short-haired coyote. It is absolutely fascinating how much we don't know yet about the past, including things we thought we knew, and how new discoveries open new windows onto it all the time.

I have to admit that as someone who lives in a town that's too small to have the kind of artisanally designed coffee drinks that you get in big cities (I mean, we obviously have a billion coffee shops and drive-thrus, but mostly it's just the basic espresso menu) - I really enjoy Starbucks' seasonal Weird Fancy Latte flavors. I just tried the pistachio latte and it's good, not too sweet and very rich. They also accidentally gave me a 16 oz when I ordered (and paid for) a 12. I tip well, so I'm not going to mind a little free coffee.

(I live in hope that the dark chocolate mint slushie will come back one of these summers. That was great.)

A couple of links:

Scientists decode a proto-writing system suggesting an early calendar in Paleolithic cave paintings, showing when different animal species mate and give birth:
https://www.sci.news/archaeology/upper-paleolithic-proto-writing-system-11546.html

An unusual green comet may be visible in the sky from mid-Jan through early February:
https://earthsky.org/astronomy-essentials/new-comet-might-get-bright-enough-for-binoculars/

New coffee icon from this fresh icon sampling at sallymn!

A total mishmash here.

• Places to donate to help southern Lousiana posted by yhlee.

• Twitter thread summarizing an interesting large-scale study on effects of community masking on COVID in Bangladesh. A few interesting takeaways from looking at the graphs: with community-wide masking in the real world (i.e. masks as actual people use them, which probably involves some people being diligent and others not), the demographic where they mainly found significant differences in COVID rates and symptoms was in elderly people wearing surgical masks. Cloth masks appear to be overall pretty useless but may reduce symptom severity somewhat. They found no statistically significant difference for masking vs. not masking in the non-elderly, possibly due to either low mask compliance or low rate of symptomatic cases. The thread has a lot more information on methodology and results.

• And for something totally different and much more fun, Whumptober is back and here is the list of 2021 prompts. I still preferred the old style where they had just one prompt per day and then an alternate list that you could swap into any day where you don't like or can't write the prompt; now there are three prompts per day to choose from, plus an alternate list. Last year I took one look at this and noped out due to choice paralysis. This year I might try it, though probably not the whole thing.

Found via twitter:

NESTFLIX

A fake streaming site for "nested" TV shows and movies, i.e. the ones that only exist within another TV show or movie. They even have detail pages! This is tremendous fun to browse through. I love how many of these I can actually recognize where they're from.

(And naturally my eyes went straight to the Daniel Brühl in Inglorious Basterds one, because of course they did.)

Cleaning out tabs here ...

Fanfic

Any Other Day by Amand_r (Torchwood, team with Gwen/Jack & canon pairings, 84K)
Gwen and Jack bodyswap fic. This is from 2011 and there is a scattering of gender stuff that feels dated now (not ill-intentioned, just ... things you'd see in a 2011 fic with a man and woman swapping bodies that you probably wouldn't see now), as well as some perhaps mildly questionable consent, but, I mean, it's Torchwood. Anyway, I really loved it otherwise; the plot is excellent (and very Torchwood) and there's lots of great character stuff, including some surprisingly sweet Owen & Ianto friendship in the background, and just some good Owen bits, generally. Everyone is very sympathetic and gets a lot to do. I really enjoyed it.

Too Good to Be True by BricklingGhost (Torchwood, team, Gwen POV, 3200 wds)
Gwen gets her team back, or does she? A painful-sweet post-canon fic focused on Gwen's reactions to getting back her dead teammates as part of an alien plot.

A Reaction, a Repudiation, a True Act of Self-Creation by Secret_Pizza_Party (Hell's Library, team, 3800 wds)
There is exactly one fic for these books on AO3 but ... it's so good! Set after book 2, with abundant spoilers, and great character voices and insights as everyone settles into their new normal. The details are so well-drawn that I keep slipping up and forgetting that some of this isn't from the actual books.

Non-Fandom

How to Make a Horse a Friend (youtube video)
Cowboy dude teaching a young horse to be ridden. This is almost magical, with no animal cruelty, at least as far as I can see. It was very soothing to watch.

A really interesting article on the late 1800s/early 1900s tamale fad, which I didn't even know about. It's specifically about Alaska but there's a lot of general historical context too. Might be paywalled.

The Chicken House by Jenny Fried (on Strange Horizons). Lovely, bloody, horror-tinted fairy-tale-esque short story. It's about gender dysphoria, in an emotionally messy way that really worked for me, though obviously YMMV.

Vintage cigarette Christmas ads from the 1950s sure are a thing. I fell down this rabbit hole after I came across one on Tumblr. There are just SO MANY and they're all like a freaky, Christmas-colored peek into another universe.

There's nothing like Santa smoking to make you feel like you've jumped to an alternate reality.

Give cigarettes to everyone you know!

The holiday cartons that look like boxes of candy are weirding me out.

Nothing says 'festive lung cancer' like a tree decorated with cigarettes!

"There is nothing under our tree but cigarettes and Jim says I'm not allowed to complain about it."

Enjoy more festive cigarettes here, here, and here, if you can handle that much holiday spirit.

From naye I learned about vexercises, a new community for vidding challenges! It is designed so anyone from a beginner to someone who has been doing it for a while can participate. The first challenge (running 'til the end of the month) is:

Create a video edit of exactly 60 seconds consisting of precisely 10 video clips from your chosen source text, each lasting precisely 6 seconds, assembled with straight cuts. Make two versions, with 1 minute excerpts from two different songs as audio. Fade in and out on your audio at the beginning and end of the audio clip.

You can see people's vids and examples on the challenge post. See also all exercises here.

So as you can see, it's completely accessible to someone with minimal experience - but actually hella challenging for someone who does have experience! I think I'm gonna try it. :D

--

Also, signups are open at SSR Confidential, the Agent Carter fanworks exchange I run, now in its fifth year. Signups are open 'til March 30.

2020 AO3 collection | Signup page | Tag set | ssrconfidential | ssrconfidential

The tag set will remain open this year throughout signups, so if there is a relationship or character you want but don't see, you can add them! Nomination instructions here.

genfreeformexchange is having signups now! AO3 collection here. I am 1000% on the fence about this one - it is SO MUCH my thing, but I'm definitely doing HurtComfortEx, and I'm running SSRC in March, and I still haven't started my Id Pro Quo assignment, so ... yeah. Also, thus far I would be completely unmatchable. But the tagset looks so good, and it's being run by the lovely snickfic, and I am Indecisive. Signups are open 'til March 5, so I still have lots of time to decide.

The HurtComfortEx tag set continues to entertain and delight. Current favorite off-the-wall tag: Sunburn from Perineum Sunning. (ETA: Oh my god, this actually happened to Josh Brolin. I'm sorry, it's probably terrible, but I can't stop laughing.)

ANYWAY, the tagset is still open for nominations until Friday, and signups open next week!

--

I am very entertained by this Iron Fist edition of the "tag yourself" Tumblr game.

For the non-Tumblr people, these are graphics done in an intentionally rough "made at 2 a.m. in MS Paint" collage style with descriptions of the characters that are meant to read like they were written by someone with only a vague osmotic knowledge of the canon, except they manage to hit all the points that you would want someone to pick up on because of course they're written by someone who knows it inside and out. It's hard to describe; it's a very Tumblr thing.

Anyway, "looks like he would kill you but actually can't" (regarding Ward) is going to make me giggle for ages.

--

Speaking as a feral watercolorist, this tutorial on painting simple leaves in watercolor looks super useful and I'm linking to it so I can find it again later.

I'm looking up links on the 1964 Alaska earthquake tonight because I was thinking about using a picture from it to illustrate one of the mailing list stories. This story about a little girl who had to watch two of her brothers swallowed by cracks in the ground while she tried to rescue them - holy shit. (And the poor mom! Do not read if child harm is a triggery issue for you.) There are also some good pictures of the post-quake rubble here, including a 1960s newsreel with video footage I haven't seen before.

During the earthquake, several oceanfront subdivisions in Anchorage collapsed and slid into the sea, and were later made into a wilderness area called Earthquake Park. When I was a young child, which was only about 15-20 years after the earthquake, there was still a lot of debris in the park, random holes in the ground and big chunks of concrete and that sort of thing. These days, 55 years after the earthquake, all of that is gone and it's just woods networked with bike paths and hiking trails. I remember climbing on big pieces of concrete and boulders there when I was a little girl, and my mom explaining that it was because of the earthquake. I had no idea, at the time, that there were unrecoverable bodies buried under the park, which was one of the reasons they made it into a park.

Festivids is live, with 97 vids in 70 small fandoms! If vids are your thing, go go go!

I got TWO vids, an embarrassment of riches! ♥ Someone made me a treat! I am absolutely thrilled with both of my gifts; they're wonderful.

I Will Never Let You Down (Simon & Simon)
A wonderful, upbeat, feels-filled trip of '80s nostalgia! The hugs/worry/hurtcomfort montage at the end is worth the price of admission alone. I want to go rewatch all of this show now. <3

Written in the Stars (Iron Fist)
A Colleen-centric Danny/Colleen vid focused on the parallels/mirroring of their storylines and Colleen eventually growing into the superhero she was always meant to be. Kinetic and full of energy and FEELS (and Jessica Henwick's beautiful face!).


Also, MCU Spaceships is revealed now - a cosmic MCU rarepair exchange. (I didn't officially participate but I do have a fic in there.)

Unrelatedly, some other interesting links:

Seven Steps to Moderating a Fanworks Exchange by muccamukk

Muting, Filtering, and More on Dreamwidth by kalloway at fictional_fans ("Or: Some Advanced Reading Page Curation Techniques")

Low Key Handmade Exchange, to "work down your existing stash of materials and/or get motivated to make something by doing something small and nice for someone."

#BPFandomAppreciation2k20 for celebrating the Black Panther movie's 2nd anniversary.

Also, fandomtrumpshate and fandomforoz (Australia brushfire fundraiser) are both still open for creator signups.