( The fandom )

( Leading up to the finale )

( The finale )

A BRIGHTER NOTE

The finale doesn't really feel like an end, because I've been "out" of the show for so long. (I also missed a bunch of episodes in the middle of season eight, so there are still new episodes to watch.) But it is an end, and I know many people are anxious about the fandom dissolving, about losing their LJ/DW friends. I don't think we need to worry—because we're all still here now. Like me, a lot of you have migrated away into new fandoms and retreated into RL activities over the past few years. House fandom has been atrophying for a while. Yet we're most of us still reading one another. Why should that stop just because the show has stopped airing?

♥



You are, as always, welcome to engage and disagree with me in comments. This time, though, be warned that I might not be able to say anything more profound in response than *shrug*!

Watched the House finale last night. Was not thrilled. Am trying to pull my thoughts together for a proper post about the final arc and the retrospective, and about looking back at how my online life has changed since I started watching the show and participating in that fandom.

Until then, some things that are of the good:

Vids. Found out this afternoon that Soccer Practice will be showing at con_txt in June! This will be the first time that vid shows at a con and the first time I'll be present at a con where a vid of mine is showing. Quite excited for that.

Writing. Wrote 1,400 words of fic today! That's 1,400 more than I've written in the past few months. Never mind that when I appended the new text to the file it belonged to, I discovered that it should have been in past tense instead of present.

Friends. Visited synn over the weekend in beautiful weather, with two new cats, lots of movies, a little work, and an Amish farm store. Mm, strawberries and sugar snap peas. Surprising, quirky delights in the form of The Host (Gwoemul) (is it horror? comedy? drama? social commentary? spoof? answer: all of the above) and Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant (what the hell age group was that intended for? also: one million famous people, including Ken Wantanabe with a giant head). Then got to stop by deelaundry's on the way home and enjoyed conversation along with playground swings and barbecue.

Radio. Good podcasts during the road trip: Radiolab episodes "Guts!" (fun times; I especially liked the story about the fistulated man) and "Help!" (what to do when you are your own worst enemy, with examples such as quitting smoking and overcoming writer's block; discussion of the Ulysses bargain, where you enlist others to help you resist future weakness/temptation as he did with the Sirens, and the …Xenophon? X-somebody-Greek scenario, when you back yourself up to a cliff and have no choice but to do what the rational part of your brain wants you to).

Summer. With luck, this summer will see me take a proper vacation for the first time since I quit my last job to go to grad school. With extra luck, that'll involve Iceland and Finland with friend A. and husband. Also looking likely that my mom will come down for a long weekend on the Eastern shore of Maryland/Virginia, where I am told there are beaches and wild ponies. And, eep, I'll be turning 30; I'd better start thinking about something special to do, if it's not one of the above.

Clean things! Impromptu emptying and wipe-down of the refrigerator yesterday; laundry's running right now.

The week ahead. Happy hour on Friday. Yann Tiersen in concert on Saturday. Dee & family. Sister in town on tour one evening next week.

Thing that cracks me up: The trailer for Dark Shadows quotes a critic who calls it "wildly original."

(See, that is better than the "ugh, someone is going to make the same vid as my Club Vivid one and post it before August!" angst of a few nights ago.)

40 space-themed movies and TV shows. 9 evenings and 2 Sundays of effort, consecutive. 3 minutes and 36 seconds of Club Vivid vid: COMPLETE. 4 hours before deadline, even. \o/

I have done nothing but go to work, vid, and sleep for the last week and a half. Now it is done, and I like it, and if all goes well people will dance to it at Vividcon, and now I can have my life back. ...And worry about the likelihood that someone else will make a similar vid before it premieres because the song is a new chart-topper and the concept is not a stretch from the lyrics, so by August it's not unlikely people will be tired of it. Whatever! At least it's not by Ke$ha, right?

I can't think of another fan project I've worked on with that length of sustained intensity. The one that comes close is probably A Princeton Odyssey, the 300-whatever lines of heroic couplets; and even that I only had about a week to do. I'm proud that I powered through on this despite source-acquiring challenges and a stressful couple of weeks at the office. I'm proud of my computer, too, for handling all the ripping, importing and editing with minimal errors; my last computer would have died five times over. This one deserves a hug. Or at least a break.

And so do I. :) Hello, celebratory scoop of ice cream and not sitting in the vidding chair anymore.

(At some point, dishes, food shopping [no more subsisting on takeout!], contacting family to confirm I'm still alive, catching up on TV shows, and putting away and/or returning to various loaners the explosion of DVDs across the apartment.)



Thank you, thank you, thank you to those of you who went out of your way to help, either with ideas or with footage: cincodemaygirl, ellen_fremedon, deelaundry, thingswithwings, nightdog_barks, synn. Did I get everyone? You are in the vid credits ... as you will see in a few months. Wow, it will be weird to wait.

perspi clued me in that Remix Madness is happening again this year -- an opt-in, no-obligation, week-to-write-it accompaniment to the main Remix challenge where you can remix the fic of anyone who's signed up (assuming you have signed up as well) regardless of whether you are participating in Remix proper. I've offered my stories for remixing (comments page 7). Lord knows whether I can wring out a fic by next Monday, but I'm having a good time picking through other people's sign-ups and brainstorming.

Life lately:

(1) Hosted synn for a day of wandering around the annual Sakura Matsuri cherry blossom street festival, snacking on sushi and soba and mochi, sipping bubble tea -- well, bubble slushies; there was no tea -- and perusing various craft booths. A favorite was http://www.stuffedsushi.com/ with its salmon roll pillows and Team Tesla t-shirts. Then we enjoyed a few temporary exhibits at the natural history museum, such as the fish x-rays room, a mix of art and science from the Smithsonian's fish library (because saying "fish library" or "fish pickles," i.e. fish preserved in formaldehyde, will never stop being funny), and the Nature's Best Photography gallery, which made us wonder more than once why some shots earned Grand Prize or Winner status while other Highly Honored shots held us more in thrall; see for example our favorite, the shallow-depth-of-field green snake photo all the way on the right in the Flash gallery at the link above. Also we had a tasty Ethiopian veggie sampler and enjoyed Jude Law and Robert Downey Jr. heavily flirting on a rerun of the Graham Norton Show (starts at about 17:30, but hey, Eddie Izzard before that).

(2) Have watched a season and a half of Battlestar Galactica. Am enjoying it as much as I anticipated, which is to say very much, helped by having remained unspoiled for almost everything, but I wasn't expecting the onslaught of religious themes. I am told it'd be best to quit after season two, but I probably won't have the willpower to look away until I'm as mad as everyone else at whatever happens after that.

(3) Was there anything else? Going to see The Hunger Games this week with a coworker and celebrate National Grilled Cheese Month at dinner beforehand. Weather is beautiful. Allergies suck when they strike. Daffodils are pretty? So is Katee Sackhoff? (I get it now. I totally do.)

It seems china_shop is coordinating a fandom appreciation challenge whose first assignment is to "rec three fanworks by people you don't know and whose works you haven't read/watched/listened to/looked at before." Tougher than it sounded! I scanned through a bunch of fandoms on the AO3 today but didn't find a lot to rec by authors I wasn't familiar with. It's hard to take chances when you have limited time and want a quality story - which I guess is part of the challenge, to take that chance, because you may uncover someone new (to you) and good.

I did find this little slice of delight: Quantitative/Qualitative by norah, a short and humorous anthropomorfic:

"I love thee to the depth and breadth and height / My soul can reach," Qualitative continued, when Quantitative interrupted.

"Wait, how deep is that? How high? How broad? In metric or Imperial measures?" it demanded.

And, if you'll allow a bit of cheating, I recently (but not today) discovered these two new-to-me writers in Vampire Diaries fandom:

The Shortest Distance Between Two Points Is A Curve by Sandrine Shaw (Sandrine) - Elena/Klaus, rated Mature - in which things progress from canon to a relationship of sorts, and the voices are right.

"I'm sorry. For throwing the stone at you. That was out of line."

Another man, a better man, would tell her, No, it wasn't, you were grieving and I was intruding and I'm sorry about Jenna, but she harbors no illusions about Klaus, and it doesn't surprise her when he only shrugs and says, "Don't worry about it, sweetheart. It's not like you could actually harm me."

I'm Crawling on Your Shore by smithereen - Alaric/Elena, rated Mature, warning for underage and father figure - in which they sleep together, and then they sleep together.

He's still wearing Stefan's t-shirt. She rubs her cheek against the familiar material, worn soft. His body feels so hot underneath the fabric, fever hot. Not like Stefan. She can hear his heart beating.

Ric's arm tightens around her waist, his fingers pressing. His eyes slit open, his whole body going tense against her for a second. He relaxes slowly, like it doesn't come easily. He unwinds his arm. "Sorry," he says. He moves like his neck is stiff.

Not sure what the other challenges will bring and if you'll see me there, but any excuse is a good one to find and rec new stories.

1.

Last post about movies for a while, I promise. I just wanted to put in a quick plug for When Do We Eat? (2005), a dysfunctional family Passover Seder comedy that I watched last night after my little seder-for-one and a phone call to my mom still left me feeling a lack of satisfying connection to the holiday.

First: A Passover movie exists! Second: It was not terrible! I mean, all the characters were stock/caricatures, but somehow they nonetheless came across as people. And it was funny, even more so if you've sat through your share of sulky Four Questions recitations, rushed/monotonous/sarcastic Haggadah readings, stupid family fights, interruptions that extend an already endless pre-dinner ceremony, tales of afikomen adventures from years past, etc. Also, I confess I teared up when the grandfather talked about the family he'd lost in the war.

Plot: druggie son in an extended stepfamily slips his overbearing father some E in his antacid at the start of the family's first Seder in three years for a little revenge and in the hope of some excitement. Drama, spiritual connection, hijinks and the beginnings of reconciliation ensue. There are rabbi jokes and incest jokes and a random Israeli hunk with an eye patch. There is the world's oddest plot with an autistic sibling. There's a borderline offensive moment when the black lesbian not-quite-sister-in-law turns a Haggadah reading into gospel, saved by the fact that she means it, that the grandfather connects to it, and that it highlights some parallels between Christian and Jewish joy (as it illustrates one of the brother's [and also Eddie Izzard's] point that religious readings in America generally could use some joy). Some moments fall flat, and the ending is a bit packaged/sentimental, but a coda confirms that there will be backsliding before the family achieves true improvement. It's a typical quirky family-holiday comedy, except there aren't many about Passover, and that made it great (for me).

Happy Passover, my Passover-celebrating friends. Happy Easter. Happy weekend. Happiness to you in general.

2.

Here, here is a non-movie thing. There was a meme going around recently where you post seven lines from the seventh page of your most recent work in progress? I skipped it because my WsIP aren't that long, ha. But then I worked on one last weekend and lo, it now has seven pages. So:

"Bashir!"

On the table, Karin looked like she was spacing out. A blessing, perhaps.

"Five seconds before I turn this on again," Rothka warned.

"Enough," said Kovan. "This has to stop."

Bashir at least had the decency to have broken out in a sweat and look half as anguished as Kovan felt. "We can't."

*suspense*

3.

Also! While watching this week's Community, I was trying to figure out what the format reminded me of (beyond PBS history documentaries, that is), and somewhere around the texts between Annie and Jeff it hit me: Written by the Victors! Multiple accounts of events from scholars/participants with their own biased perspectives. Ha.

Relatedly: Did you know today is/was International Pillow Fight Day? I wonder if the air date was a coincidence. Possible post-hiatus decision, that is.

I finally got around to watching Cruising (1980, Al Pacino), the "disturbed gay serial killer stalks NYC's S&M scene in the late '70s" movie that, if I recall correctly, generated an ambivalent reaction among the people interviewed in The Celluloid Closet (which is where I first heard of the film) because it's at once exploitative, voyeuristic, sensationalized, misrepresentative, stereotyped, seductive and revealing for the ways in which it portrays an S&M leather subculture that most audience members of the time wouldn't have known about. ( It was definitely remarkable for the amount of kink displayed on screen. Unfortunately predictable in that most of the kink was portrayed as weird and abnormal. )

Not to compound the exploitation here, but Cruising would have been perfect for that Kink Bingo "all you can kink" mini-challenge, and if it's okay with you I'm going to share a whole bunch of screen shots that prove it.

Bingo-defined kinks portrayed include: anonymity, authority figures, begging, bites/bruises, blades, bloodplay, bodies and body parts, body alteration/injury, bondage, collars, consent play, crossdressing, danger, domestic/tradesman kink, dressup, drugs/aphrodisiacs, exhibitionism, exposure, fisting/stretching, food, foot/shoe fetish, gags, gangbang, gender play, guns, humiliation, in public, leather/latex/rubber, masters doms slaves & subs, medical kink, mirrors and doubles, nippleplay/tit torture, oral fixation, orgies and decadence, pervertibles, pictures, roleplay, sensory deprivation, service, sex toys, shaving/depilation, smacking/slapping, subspace/headspace, suspension, uniforms/military fetish, vanilla kink, vehicular, voyeurism, washing/cleaning, watersports, whipping/flogging, worship.

Note: A few of the pictures can be interpreted as non-consensual. You may not want to click through if that will bother you.


( 56 pix, more or less in alphabetical order. NSFW, but not explicit. )

Thanks for viewing! Thoughts welcome, as always.

x-posted to kink_bingo

Another excellent film: Take Shelter (2011). This is the NY Times review that made me want to see it. A man living in tornado alley starts having nightmares and waking hallucinations of apocalyptic storms, and the question is whether he's slipping into paranoid schizophrenia like his mother did at his age or whether something extraordinary—"something not right," as he puts it in a particularly discomfiting moment—truly is coming.

Only it's better than that, because he recognizes and fears the possible signs of mental illness and takes steps to diagnose and treat it (even while keeping it from his family as long as possible because of his fear and embarrassment), and soon enough he says, Look, whatever it is, I just need to know how to deal with what it's doing to me; because, as the article said, while the characters and the film struggle between the physical and the metaphysical they're also portraying an era-appropriate metaphor for American economic anxieties (there are explicit references to variable interest loans and credit card debt), and when you think about it that way Curtis' drive to protect his family can seem reasonable; because it's well-acted and beautifully shot; and because it's genuinely creepy. You know you're building to a terrible climax, but you don't know what form it will take: Curtis' mind cracking until he has to be institutionalized, him doing harm to himself or his family, a truly apocalyptic storm striking, a symbolic catastrophe happening like something going wrong with his young daughter's forthcoming surgery, the family going bankrupt and his wife leaving him in a self-fulfilling prophecy... It's scary. It's scary that your own mind can frighten you, and it's scary that a pending, unpredictable storm is going to take away everything that keeps you safe and happy; it's scary when you can't tell which is true.

You can see that some symptoms fit but others don't. You can see some of the signs of how the paranoia and panic attacks began, like the untold recent event that resulted in his daughter's deafness, the TV news stories about disasters, money being tight, living in open sky country with supercells looming on any afternoon. (The whole time I wanted to shout, Don't live there! It's bad for your stress levels! But then when the family talked about vacationing on the beach, I was like, It's not like storms don't happen on the oceanfront either! There's no winning—nowhere you can go to feel truly safe from disaster once you've got fear in you. Which I suppose was the point.) I'm not sure how I feel about the ending—there were some other possible endings that might have worked better—but it could have been worse.

If I had to compare it to any other movie, I'd say Donnie Darko. The trailer certainly made it look quite similar, with the hallucinatory thunderclaps and strange patterns of flying crows, Curtis staring at himself in the mirror as he takes his prescription pills. But it's not as twisted as Donnie Darko. I could compare it to Black Swan, but Take Shelter handles itself so much more subtly. Highly recommended.

…Lots of movies lately. A Dangerous Method: disappointing. Scarface: also disappointing. Flash Gordon (the Dino di Laurentiis version): camp fantastic. I did mention I've had a brief cold and there's not much to do outside of work until the weekend when people start getting back from spring breaks, right?

I am having a bout of springtime ick, but let us not dwell on the phlegm. I just watched and enjoyed Pianomania (Austria, 2009), which follows a Steinway piano technician, Stefan Knupfer, in Vienna as he strives to tune and otherwise customize pianos to suit the needs of their demanding, perfectionistic, artistic, masterful players for specific performances.

Is it bad that for a while in the beginning I was thinking of Steinway!verse Arthur? He would be that demanding of his instruments (specificity above all), and he would never be wholly satisfied with the outcome. And then Ian Bostridge showed up, singing like Steinway!Eames.

But no, it was really enjoyable aside from that. Fascinating looks into the ways in which sounds from a grand piano can be altered, using both traditional and nontraditional methods. Beautiful shots of the inside of the instrument as it's tuned and played. Inviting you to debate whether the requests to make the sound "rounder" or "more like a clavichord" or "more magical" or *rubs fingers together* are the vocabularies of two masters conversing, struggling to put incredibly specific acoustic concepts into words ('If they are neurotic about the way they want the piano to sound when they play, then I am as much a neurotic when I work on it,' he said), or pretentious-sounding nonsense ('You have a knack for making complicated things sound more complicated – why don't you just say 'I loosened it up a bit to make it wobble,'' said one of the recording technicians). A glimpse into the interior life of a concert hall and a recording studio. Of course, many opportunities to listen to—or listen for—the differences in sound qualities, in personalities, in suitabilities, from instrument to instrument. And fun, too. Igudesman and Joo showed up. (Stefan is not only particular; he can be creative and silly.)

So that was, er, as I said, quite enjoyable. If my mental faculties were more together, I'd take a few minutes to compare it to Jiro Dreams of Sushi, which I saw over the weekend with friends: portraits of experts hard at work and in love with their craft, honed over many years, intended in the service of others, often pleased, yet never content.