After seeing it on
andrea_deer's journal, I've just signed up for a fannish festival/challenge/event/thing that I think is a great idea.
Rectober aims to have people posting recs for all sorts of fanworks during the month of October. I love sharing the delight of my favorite fanworks with friends and hopefully sending some loving feedback to the creators. I hope some of y'all will join in, because I'd love to see what you recommend.
If you participate, you get to choose how much you want to post. Some people are setting daily posting goals, while others are only committing to two posts the whole month. For myself, I'm setting a goal of seven rec posts over the month of October. That's about twice a week with one built-in skip. I may try for more if the posts go quickly, but seven seems like about the maximum that I can reasonably promise.
I'm probably going to do themed rec posts with a mix of fic and vids. I'm still trying to work out what those themes will be, but some candidates include:
-Excellent Ensembles
-This Broke Me Into Tiny Pieces, Please Share My Pain
-Golden Oldies (fics/vids more than 4-5 years old...obviously fandom goes back much farther than that, but since I started bookmarking fic in 2007 this is a good cut-off)
-Three (or More) Cheers for Poly Ships
-Avoid Beverages Or Risk Keyboard Destruction (crack/humor/general silliness)
-Long Reads Worth the Time Investment
-Fanworks Other Than Fic and Vids (meta, fan art, crafts, fanmixes, etc.)
-Awesome Ladies Being Awesome (focus on one or more female characters saving the day...this may have too much overlap with what I'd rec for everything else)
-Fairy Tales & Fantasy
-Crossovers of Great Win
-This Doesn't Fit My Other Categories But It's Too Awesome To Ignore
Obviously this is more than seven categories, so I'm either going to whittle it down, make some rec posts include one or more categories, or just make more posts. Feel free to comment if there are some of these categories you're especially interested in seeing or if you want to suggest others.
I hope some of you will join me in making LJ lively with the celebration of fannish creativity this month! Click the banner if you want to officially sign up.
Meanwhile, the good news is that
Doctor Who is getting a spin-off. The bad news is that this spin-off is NOT about Madame Vastra and Jenny as Victorian interspecies lesbians who fight crime accompanied by sidekick Strax and a pack of plucky street urchins. It's also not flashback/prequel Doctor Who starring Paul McGann. It's not a revitalization of Torchwood, or any other form of spin-off that fans have been asking for. Instead, the spin-off is about teens at Coal Hill School dealing with aliens/monsters, with no mention of characters from previous shows appearing. I will certainly give it a try, but this just feels like a missed opportunity.