Additional fannishness
In squeeful fannish news: Vallista has a publication date! September according to Brust, Amazon has mid-October, but either way, it's a real book really coming out this year, woo! (And the Paarfi book, "The Baron of Magister Valley" is still under submission. Which is less squeeful, but at least I now know the full title. Is that... a Count of Monte Cristo reference? I looked through the Dumas bibliography, and that's the closest title I could find...)
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Snowflake Challenge:
Day 6: In your own space, create a list of at least three fannish things you'd love to receive, something you've wanted but were afraid to ask for - a fannish wish-list of sorts.
I'm really a person of very consistent fannish tastes, so there isn't much change from what this list looked like in 2014 and 2015. And anything I've mentioned in my fandom_stocking is also a thing I would love, of course.
But if I were to go with a top 3 right now, it would be:
1. Dragaera fic or art, in particular Morrolan centric. (No joy this Yuletide either.) Or, really, just the opportunity to talk about this fandom. \forever alone
2. Rivers of London art or fic that goes beyond Peter and Nightingale. Now, don't get me wrong, I love Nightingale and Peter and I like Peter and (both & and /) Nightingale very much! But there's now a decent amount of it in the fandom. I'd love to see stuff like Varvara interacting with Nightingale, e.g. during Foxglove Summer (and, yes, I've read the Varvara-and-Nightingale-centric Yuletide fic), or Peter and Kumar being dorks, stuff like that.
3. Still all the crossovers between my tiny fandoms, Miles Vorkosigan/River Tam, or Astrid Llewellyn and Peter Grant talking science together, or the Duv Galeni and William Laurence and Hermione Granger high school AU (it came up in a character roulette meme), Nanny Ogg and Uncle Iroh having tea and/or scumble. Or fusions, fusions are great too. Everyone in Hogwarts houses! people and their daemons, their dragons, their wolfbrothers/sisters -- it's all good! It would be especially amazing to have crossover art with Vorkosigan, RoL, or Dragaera characters in AU settings, because I've never seen that. And by now we have a canonical Hogwarts sorting for Peter, hey! ;)
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O and I watched Suicide Squad. Well, O watched it, and I watched the first half, and then got bored and got my laptop and only looked up at the screen when I could hear Deadshot talking. So, yeah, I did not like this movie. Which is a pity, because the trailer had looked quite fun. But I found the movie itself boring, confusing (which, OK, might've been because I was not really paying attention on account of being bored), too enamoured of its own aesthetic, and generally taking itself way too seriously. Deadshot was the only one I actually liked on the squad. I would've liked Amanda Waller in a different movie, I think, but here she just seemed out of place -- too serious for the nonsense all around her. I'm willing to believe that Harley Quinn was true to the character, but I found her mannerisms annoying. And Leto's Joker was just, ugh (and I like the Joker as a character). Everybody else just sort of ran together and I tuned out when they were talking. Oh well. (Even the trailers were boring. How does DC do that? I mean, Batman v Superman being bad is a given, but Wonder Woman looked dull (how does one manage to suck all the charm out of Chris Pine??). The looked only trailers that looked remotely interesting were for The Accountant and War Dogs trailer was actually kind of funny, although less so when one considers that it's actually a true story.
Then, as a palate cleanser, the three of us watched The Secret Life of Pets. We had seen a trailer for it with... something -- Zootopia, probably? I wasn't won over by the trailer, but actually really enjoyed the movie, which was fairly funny and heartwarming and not as dumb as I thought it might be. Mild spoilers from here: Chloe the cat is my favorite (L's, too), especially for the "I'm your friend, okay, and as your friend, I gotta be honest with you. I don't care about you or your problems" line, and other highly entertaining cat behaviour. I also liked Tiberius the hawk, Max was a funny and likeable narrator, and Gidget was surprisingly cute (I thought I would find her shrill, but she was pretty awesome). The whole thing with Snowball was more grating that funny to me, ditto for Mel and Buddy's comic relief, but I liked a lot of the physical comedy of the Flushed Pets, and predictably, Myron the hamster (who helps out Pops). Anyway, cute movie, fairly heartwarming as far as the buddy duo story between Max and Duke, but the bits that really got me were at the end, when the owners come home -- I actually teared up when Norman the guinea pig finally found his way home, to the wall hung with drawings of him; Sweetpea eating birdseed off the bald scalp of his hardcore owner was adorable, as was the master coming up to Pops (apparently he's a pilot, which can be seen from a diploma hanging on the wall); and the commitment to hipsterness on the part of Gidget's owners was impressive. Anyway, cute movie, funny, sweet.
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Snowflake Challenge:
Day 6: In your own space, create a list of at least three fannish things you'd love to receive, something you've wanted but were afraid to ask for - a fannish wish-list of sorts.
I'm really a person of very consistent fannish tastes, so there isn't much change from what this list looked like in 2014 and 2015. And anything I've mentioned in my fandom_stocking is also a thing I would love, of course.
But if I were to go with a top 3 right now, it would be:
1. Dragaera fic or art, in particular Morrolan centric. (No joy this Yuletide either.) Or, really, just the opportunity to talk about this fandom. \forever alone
2. Rivers of London art or fic that goes beyond Peter and Nightingale. Now, don't get me wrong, I love Nightingale and Peter and I like Peter and (both & and /) Nightingale very much! But there's now a decent amount of it in the fandom. I'd love to see stuff like Varvara interacting with Nightingale, e.g. during Foxglove Summer (and, yes, I've read the Varvara-and-Nightingale-centric Yuletide fic), or Peter and Kumar being dorks, stuff like that.
3. Still all the crossovers between my tiny fandoms, Miles Vorkosigan/River Tam, or Astrid Llewellyn and Peter Grant talking science together, or the Duv Galeni and William Laurence and Hermione Granger high school AU (it came up in a character roulette meme), Nanny Ogg and Uncle Iroh having tea and/or scumble. Or fusions, fusions are great too. Everyone in Hogwarts houses! people and their daemons, their dragons, their wolfbrothers/sisters -- it's all good! It would be especially amazing to have crossover art with Vorkosigan, RoL, or Dragaera characters in AU settings, because I've never seen that. And by now we have a canonical Hogwarts sorting for Peter, hey! ;)
*
O and I watched Suicide Squad. Well, O watched it, and I watched the first half, and then got bored and got my laptop and only looked up at the screen when I could hear Deadshot talking. So, yeah, I did not like this movie. Which is a pity, because the trailer had looked quite fun. But I found the movie itself boring, confusing (which, OK, might've been because I was not really paying attention on account of being bored), too enamoured of its own aesthetic, and generally taking itself way too seriously. Deadshot was the only one I actually liked on the squad. I would've liked Amanda Waller in a different movie, I think, but here she just seemed out of place -- too serious for the nonsense all around her. I'm willing to believe that Harley Quinn was true to the character, but I found her mannerisms annoying. And Leto's Joker was just, ugh (and I like the Joker as a character). Everybody else just sort of ran together and I tuned out when they were talking. Oh well. (Even the trailers were boring. How does DC do that? I mean, Batman v Superman being bad is a given, but Wonder Woman looked dull (how does one manage to suck all the charm out of Chris Pine??). The looked only trailers that looked remotely interesting were for The Accountant and War Dogs trailer was actually kind of funny, although less so when one considers that it's actually a true story.
Then, as a palate cleanser, the three of us watched The Secret Life of Pets. We had seen a trailer for it with... something -- Zootopia, probably? I wasn't won over by the trailer, but actually really enjoyed the movie, which was fairly funny and heartwarming and not as dumb as I thought it might be. Mild spoilers from here: Chloe the cat is my favorite (L's, too), especially for the "I'm your friend, okay, and as your friend, I gotta be honest with you. I don't care about you or your problems" line, and other highly entertaining cat behaviour. I also liked Tiberius the hawk, Max was a funny and likeable narrator, and Gidget was surprisingly cute (I thought I would find her shrill, but she was pretty awesome). The whole thing with Snowball was more grating that funny to me, ditto for Mel and Buddy's comic relief, but I liked a lot of the physical comedy of the Flushed Pets, and predictably, Myron the hamster (who helps out Pops). Anyway, cute movie, fairly heartwarming as far as the buddy duo story between Max and Duke, but the bits that really got me were at the end, when the owners come home -- I actually teared up when Norman the guinea pig finally found his way home, to the wall hung with drawings of him; Sweetpea eating birdseed off the bald scalp of his hardcore owner was adorable, as was the master coming up to Pops (apparently he's a pilot, which can be seen from a diploma hanging on the wall); and the commitment to hipsterness on the part of Gidget's owners was impressive. Anyway, cute movie, funny, sweet.