ignore that i've been home for almost a week already
i'm home from the wars, if by "the wars" you mean "florida", where my sister got sick, the weather was crappy, we had no plans so we didn't do much, and i met mom's boyfriend. the best i can say about him is that he's a genuinely decent guy, he doesn't have an agenda (mom: "he's not after my money." me: "what money?"), and even tho his excessive expressions of love and devotion are so cheesy you need some wine and crackers, i think they're sincere. but he's not curious, he's not adventurous, and my sister and i both think mom can do better. he's catholic altho no one cares except my sister, but while my mom was interested in going to midnight mass when they visited his kids for christmas, he's "uncomfortable" sharing any equivalent jewish holidays. mostly what this means to me is that he's never going to join us at my cousin's for passover, which is FINE WITH ME. it also means mom has something in her life that's just hers and that is likewise FINE WITH ME. (i think he wants to fold her into every aspect of his life which i think is partly just the way he is and partly because he's a widower in his eighties and he comes from a time and place where men depended on their wives for their social life and their happiness.)
let's just say my sister and i were not impressed. but he makes her happy, so.
on the other hand i got to stuff my face with key lime pie three separate times (yum) and the two good days were taken up with the chihuly collection (it's not just tentacles!) and dinner out and the brutalist, and then a farmer's market and art fair (i bought art! i never buy art). and then i came home and there was snow on my car! \o/ \o/ \o/ which was very exciting. the weather wasn't good enough for the beach on a day we could go and i think florida owes me like three days of vacation but it did get me out of the house and i did get to see some really fabulous glass.
on the flight down i watched a different man because i wanted to see the movie that netted sebastian stan a golden globe (not sure how i feel about it but he was good) and on the flight home i watched wicked little letters which was fun altho they blanked out all the swearing which seems counterproductive for a movie that's about, you know, swearing. it has olivia colman who i love and jessie buckley who i like a lot and anjana vasan from we are lady parts who is so cute and if you can get your hands on it i recommend it.
this past week was marked by excessive amounts of procrastination - not just at work but in everything - and one of the admins m is starting a writing group and asked if i wanted in. i said yes. (i guess you can be in more than one.) first meeting is next week, probably just for administrative setting-up. should be fun.
i missed like two weeks of snowflake what with all the procrastion and i think it's already been put to bed for this year but whatever, better late than not at all.
challenge #6 - share your favorite piece of original canon!
raiders of the lost ark. :D yes, the entire movie. also marcus gets lost in his own museum and they named the dog indiana.
(if this movie doesn't come up at least once during snowflake assume i've been replaced by a pod person.)
and because someone posted a clip from spn, two of my most favorite bits of spn canon - that dean is afraid to fly ("why do you think i drive everywhere, sam!") and that a lot of the angels (at least in the seasons i watched) were dicks. i was never a fan of the heaven, hell, and the end of the world storyline(s) but i legitimately really, really loved that angels were assholes in nice suits. my favorite episodes came in s1 and s2 - faith (forever after every time i hear don't fear the reaper on the radio i picture that runner and the reaper) and nightshifter (oh, ronald).
and because someone else mentioned leverage, the rundown job and not just for all the really fabulous ot3 goodness, but for the scene where hardison is practically decompensating about the spanish flu (which is valid! the spanish flu killed millions of people!) and eliot grabs his neck and tells him "i'm not afraid because you're the smartest person i've ever met and you got this" and it cuts through hardison's panic. eliot is just... so calm about it.
and! possibly not original canon because it's movie canon based on book canon, but in the two towers, when aragorn convinces theoden to ride out of helm's deep to meet saruman's army, the contrast between theoden going "for death and glory!" and aragorn being all "well, actually, i meant so you could give your people hope...." two very different ways of looking at the world - if this is to be our end, let us make such an end! vs maybe don't act like it's the end already, dude.
and also, of course, theoden in front of the rohirrim on pelennor fields - a sword day, a red day, ere the sun rises! i've seen that movie approximately half a million times and the entire battle, from that to the ghost army swarming off the corsair ships - i'm just on the edge of my seat the entire time. that and the beacons being lit are probably my favorite scenes in the whole four and a half hours. [1]
like any fan worth their squee is just going to have one favorite piece of canon. i mean, seriously.
challenge #7 - post a wishlist!
1 soup recipes! (caveats: i don't like cauliflower and i want to be as low sodium as possible and i have white girl spicy tolerance, which is to say not much. but! if your delicious spicy soup is flexible in its heat, lay it on me. i can adjust as necessary.)
2 book recs! (caveats: i'm not into romance or hard scifi or horror, but romance as the b or c plot is ok as long as the characters aren't stupid about it, and if your hard scifi has really neat worldbuilding i'm game to try. i really do have to pass on the horror tho. i mean, i'm a wimp.)
...yeah, that's about it. it's soup weather out here - share your favorite soup.
challenge #10 - fannish firsts!
have two. :D the first first is my first winchestercon, which was the first winchestercon, and was held in nashville because one of the women on the con comm lived there. (there were two women on the con comm. i think the other one lived in la which is where it was the second year.) it wasn't my first fan-run con - i'd been to connexions - but it was the one that stuck. i got fangirl on
poisontaster in the registration room and i got fangirl on meredevachon in the elevator (and i think freaked her out a little) and sang carry on wayward son with a bunch of fangirls at a karaoke bar and there were a whopping five vids at the vid show (the show had been on all of one season plus three episodes so it's not like there was a lot of source material to work with) and i was on the wincest/nocest panel (i was a nocester altho i had no problem with wincesters, it just wasn't how i saw the boys) and on sunday wrenlet drove me to the airport and i made her take a detour so i could sneak inside the school i went to when i lived there (i lived in nashville until i was fourteen) and wander the hallways at speed. there was a scrapbooking convention in the hotel at the same time which was highly entertaining altho i don't think we crossed paths with them at all except one of the scrapbookers asked researchgrrrl who we were and why we were all there. i do not remember what she said. it was such a fun time that i went to every win(chester)con after that. (at wincon pittsburgh which was the last one there were only three fen who'd been to all of them and one of those fen was me.) fangirls (and the occasional fanboy) are seriously the best.
the second first is my first bigbang and first rps, dillinger's got nothing on us: the short life and interesting times of the jay gang, aka the gangster story. it was the longest fic i'd ever posted all at once and might have been the longest fic i'd ever posted, period. (nano doesn't count.) it took nine months to write and i did the most ridiculous research for it and there are probably things i'd change given a chance and i'm still stupidly proud of it.
challenge #11 - favorite trope/cliche/kink/etc!
i like a good found family and understated competence really gets my motor going but my favorite which i wish there was more of is the platonic ship. in a canon where you'd expect a particular couple to hook up and be undone by the (sometimes forced) ust and sexual tension, they... don't. see: morgan and garcia from criminal minds (perhaps the otp by which all others are judged), and margo and eliot from the magicians. ok, yes, margo and eliot are only ever going to be platonic on account of eliot being queer as hell, but they were my otp in all timelines and i wish there were more platonic couples like them.
like, steve and bucky, ok? at some point steve's motivation is going to be at least partly "bucky's in trouble, time to fuck shit up". even when i had nothing i had bucky. you can ship the hell out of them and i will 100% back you up but at the same time i lovelovelove when people read their relationship as the purest entirely platonic love.
it's ride or die turned up to eleven - between characters who aren't interested in fucking each other - and i love it a lot.
challenge #14 - create your own challenge!
1 the next fanwork you engage with - fic, vid, meta, craft, podfic, primer, whatever - leave a comment for the creator(s). an actual comment. like, a full sentence. with or without keymash. a kudo does not count.
2 try something new. maybe it's a show that someone pimped that you haven't watched yet, or a different artistic medium, or a new author, or a new food (shoutout to the snowflake who ate raw oysters for the first time last year), or just a new thing. if you try it and you just don't vibe with it, no worries, at least you tried.
3 this should go without saying but i say it every year anyway - embrace your weird. ignore anyone who mocks you for the fannish shit that makes you happy, even if they're a fellow fan. love what you love and hold your head high.
challenge #15 - unexpected joy!
so last year my sister and i went to italy on an organized tour - we were supposed to go in 2023 but had to cancel - and learned that even tho there are toilets on the tour buses you're not supposed to actually use them except in an emergency, because the bus has to stop when someone's in the bathroom. so our tour bus would pull into a rest stop after like an hour and a half or two hours on the road between one city and the next so everyone could pee and get a snack. the rest stops on the highways in italy have coffee bars and they all have the same thing - tiny cups of cappuccino for like two euros. (they also had a large assortment of snacks, not just local to wherever the rest stop was but also in frankly absurd sizes. like, you could get three feet of toblerone and a bag of popcorn the size of a small child.) i discovered that while i don't actually like coffee i do in fact like the tiny cups of cappuccino at italian highway rest stops. one tiny cup, one pack of sugar, and i was good to go. was it the water? the beans? the way italians make coffee in italy vs the way people make it in the us? the ratio of coffee to milk to water to sugar? the tiny cups? the fact that i was on vacation in italy and standing at a counter drinking my cappuccino next to actual italian truck drivers? who knows! they were surprisingly delicious and i drank a lot of them.
i love snowflake. i fall behind every year and i feel bad about it because reading about other people's fannish (and non-fannish) lives is fun. even if i don't know someone's fandom at all - or i do know it but don't love the same things they do - we're all fans, right? and in a way all fans are the same regardless of fandom - they all love a thing and want to share that love with other people.
so, like, the person in the football jersey in line behind you at the grocery store and the friend who texts you excitedly about a band and the coworker with the anime figurine on their desk are at bottom all the same. they just want to share their squee.
have an interview with kevin smith, wherein he talks about among other things sneaking into showings of raiders of the lost ark - which was a thing you used to be able to do in us movie theaters - eighty-two times. paid for the first one, snuck in every time after. dude's my hero.
apparently those danish butter cookies in the blue tin are a popular lunar new year gift in hong kong. and when the tin is empty moms and grandmas use them for sewing supplies. a couple generation of americans are nodding their heads going "yeah, that tracks".
so hey, happy lunar new year! i plan to celebrate by eating my body weight in shrimp dumplings and hopefully a moon cake.
[1] ok, so who watched stargate: atlantis? if i remember the episode right, dr lee is trying to explain how earth and atlantis can talk to each other without a wormhole by kind of bouncing signals from planet to planet, and he uses the midnight bark from 101 dalmatians as his metaphor. and all he gets are blank looks. so he switches to the beacons of minas tirith and all these nerdy scientists go oh, ok, yeah, now i get it! but he's so disappointed no one recognized the midnight bark - "my kids love that movie!" - and that's what i always think of when someone mentions the beacons.
let's just say my sister and i were not impressed. but he makes her happy, so.
on the other hand i got to stuff my face with key lime pie three separate times (yum) and the two good days were taken up with the chihuly collection (it's not just tentacles!) and dinner out and the brutalist, and then a farmer's market and art fair (i bought art! i never buy art). and then i came home and there was snow on my car! \o/ \o/ \o/ which was very exciting. the weather wasn't good enough for the beach on a day we could go and i think florida owes me like three days of vacation but it did get me out of the house and i did get to see some really fabulous glass.
on the flight down i watched a different man because i wanted to see the movie that netted sebastian stan a golden globe (not sure how i feel about it but he was good) and on the flight home i watched wicked little letters which was fun altho they blanked out all the swearing which seems counterproductive for a movie that's about, you know, swearing. it has olivia colman who i love and jessie buckley who i like a lot and anjana vasan from we are lady parts who is so cute and if you can get your hands on it i recommend it.
this past week was marked by excessive amounts of procrastination - not just at work but in everything - and one of the admins m is starting a writing group and asked if i wanted in. i said yes. (i guess you can be in more than one.) first meeting is next week, probably just for administrative setting-up. should be fun.
i missed like two weeks of snowflake what with all the procrastion and i think it's already been put to bed for this year but whatever, better late than not at all.
challenge #6 - share your favorite piece of original canon!
raiders of the lost ark. :D yes, the entire movie. also marcus gets lost in his own museum and they named the dog indiana.
(if this movie doesn't come up at least once during snowflake assume i've been replaced by a pod person.)
and because someone posted a clip from spn, two of my most favorite bits of spn canon - that dean is afraid to fly ("why do you think i drive everywhere, sam!") and that a lot of the angels (at least in the seasons i watched) were dicks. i was never a fan of the heaven, hell, and the end of the world storyline(s) but i legitimately really, really loved that angels were assholes in nice suits. my favorite episodes came in s1 and s2 - faith (forever after every time i hear don't fear the reaper on the radio i picture that runner and the reaper) and nightshifter (oh, ronald).
and because someone else mentioned leverage, the rundown job and not just for all the really fabulous ot3 goodness, but for the scene where hardison is practically decompensating about the spanish flu (which is valid! the spanish flu killed millions of people!) and eliot grabs his neck and tells him "i'm not afraid because you're the smartest person i've ever met and you got this" and it cuts through hardison's panic. eliot is just... so calm about it.
and! possibly not original canon because it's movie canon based on book canon, but in the two towers, when aragorn convinces theoden to ride out of helm's deep to meet saruman's army, the contrast between theoden going "for death and glory!" and aragorn being all "well, actually, i meant so you could give your people hope...." two very different ways of looking at the world - if this is to be our end, let us make such an end! vs maybe don't act like it's the end already, dude.
and also, of course, theoden in front of the rohirrim on pelennor fields - a sword day, a red day, ere the sun rises! i've seen that movie approximately half a million times and the entire battle, from that to the ghost army swarming off the corsair ships - i'm just on the edge of my seat the entire time. that and the beacons being lit are probably my favorite scenes in the whole four and a half hours. [1]
like any fan worth their squee is just going to have one favorite piece of canon. i mean, seriously.
challenge #7 - post a wishlist!
1 soup recipes! (caveats: i don't like cauliflower and i want to be as low sodium as possible and i have white girl spicy tolerance, which is to say not much. but! if your delicious spicy soup is flexible in its heat, lay it on me. i can adjust as necessary.)
2 book recs! (caveats: i'm not into romance or hard scifi or horror, but romance as the b or c plot is ok as long as the characters aren't stupid about it, and if your hard scifi has really neat worldbuilding i'm game to try. i really do have to pass on the horror tho. i mean, i'm a wimp.)
...yeah, that's about it. it's soup weather out here - share your favorite soup.
challenge #10 - fannish firsts!
have two. :D the first first is my first winchestercon, which was the first winchestercon, and was held in nashville because one of the women on the con comm lived there. (there were two women on the con comm. i think the other one lived in la which is where it was the second year.) it wasn't my first fan-run con - i'd been to connexions - but it was the one that stuck. i got fangirl on
poisontaster in the registration room and i got fangirl on meredevachon in the elevator (and i think freaked her out a little) and sang carry on wayward son with a bunch of fangirls at a karaoke bar and there were a whopping five vids at the vid show (the show had been on all of one season plus three episodes so it's not like there was a lot of source material to work with) and i was on the wincest/nocest panel (i was a nocester altho i had no problem with wincesters, it just wasn't how i saw the boys) and on sunday wrenlet drove me to the airport and i made her take a detour so i could sneak inside the school i went to when i lived there (i lived in nashville until i was fourteen) and wander the hallways at speed. there was a scrapbooking convention in the hotel at the same time which was highly entertaining altho i don't think we crossed paths with them at all except one of the scrapbookers asked researchgrrrl who we were and why we were all there. i do not remember what she said. it was such a fun time that i went to every win(chester)con after that. (at wincon pittsburgh which was the last one there were only three fen who'd been to all of them and one of those fen was me.) fangirls (and the occasional fanboy) are seriously the best.
the second first is my first bigbang and first rps, dillinger's got nothing on us: the short life and interesting times of the jay gang, aka the gangster story. it was the longest fic i'd ever posted all at once and might have been the longest fic i'd ever posted, period. (nano doesn't count.) it took nine months to write and i did the most ridiculous research for it and there are probably things i'd change given a chance and i'm still stupidly proud of it.
challenge #11 - favorite trope/cliche/kink/etc!
i like a good found family and understated competence really gets my motor going but my favorite which i wish there was more of is the platonic ship. in a canon where you'd expect a particular couple to hook up and be undone by the (sometimes forced) ust and sexual tension, they... don't. see: morgan and garcia from criminal minds (perhaps the otp by which all others are judged), and margo and eliot from the magicians. ok, yes, margo and eliot are only ever going to be platonic on account of eliot being queer as hell, but they were my otp in all timelines and i wish there were more platonic couples like them.
like, steve and bucky, ok? at some point steve's motivation is going to be at least partly "bucky's in trouble, time to fuck shit up". even when i had nothing i had bucky. you can ship the hell out of them and i will 100% back you up but at the same time i lovelovelove when people read their relationship as the purest entirely platonic love.
it's ride or die turned up to eleven - between characters who aren't interested in fucking each other - and i love it a lot.
challenge #14 - create your own challenge!
1 the next fanwork you engage with - fic, vid, meta, craft, podfic, primer, whatever - leave a comment for the creator(s). an actual comment. like, a full sentence. with or without keymash. a kudo does not count.
2 try something new. maybe it's a show that someone pimped that you haven't watched yet, or a different artistic medium, or a new author, or a new food (shoutout to the snowflake who ate raw oysters for the first time last year), or just a new thing. if you try it and you just don't vibe with it, no worries, at least you tried.
3 this should go without saying but i say it every year anyway - embrace your weird. ignore anyone who mocks you for the fannish shit that makes you happy, even if they're a fellow fan. love what you love and hold your head high.
challenge #15 - unexpected joy!
so last year my sister and i went to italy on an organized tour - we were supposed to go in 2023 but had to cancel - and learned that even tho there are toilets on the tour buses you're not supposed to actually use them except in an emergency, because the bus has to stop when someone's in the bathroom. so our tour bus would pull into a rest stop after like an hour and a half or two hours on the road between one city and the next so everyone could pee and get a snack. the rest stops on the highways in italy have coffee bars and they all have the same thing - tiny cups of cappuccino for like two euros. (they also had a large assortment of snacks, not just local to wherever the rest stop was but also in frankly absurd sizes. like, you could get three feet of toblerone and a bag of popcorn the size of a small child.) i discovered that while i don't actually like coffee i do in fact like the tiny cups of cappuccino at italian highway rest stops. one tiny cup, one pack of sugar, and i was good to go. was it the water? the beans? the way italians make coffee in italy vs the way people make it in the us? the ratio of coffee to milk to water to sugar? the tiny cups? the fact that i was on vacation in italy and standing at a counter drinking my cappuccino next to actual italian truck drivers? who knows! they were surprisingly delicious and i drank a lot of them.
i love snowflake. i fall behind every year and i feel bad about it because reading about other people's fannish (and non-fannish) lives is fun. even if i don't know someone's fandom at all - or i do know it but don't love the same things they do - we're all fans, right? and in a way all fans are the same regardless of fandom - they all love a thing and want to share that love with other people.
so, like, the person in the football jersey in line behind you at the grocery store and the friend who texts you excitedly about a band and the coworker with the anime figurine on their desk are at bottom all the same. they just want to share their squee.
have an interview with kevin smith, wherein he talks about among other things sneaking into showings of raiders of the lost ark - which was a thing you used to be able to do in us movie theaters - eighty-two times. paid for the first one, snuck in every time after. dude's my hero.
apparently those danish butter cookies in the blue tin are a popular lunar new year gift in hong kong. and when the tin is empty moms and grandmas use them for sewing supplies. a couple generation of americans are nodding their heads going "yeah, that tracks".
so hey, happy lunar new year! i plan to celebrate by eating my body weight in shrimp dumplings and hopefully a moon cake.
[1] ok, so who watched stargate: atlantis? if i remember the episode right, dr lee is trying to explain how earth and atlantis can talk to each other without a wormhole by kind of bouncing signals from planet to planet, and he uses the midnight bark from 101 dalmatians as his metaphor. and all he gets are blank looks. so he switches to the beacons of minas tirith and all these nerdy scientists go oh, ok, yeah, now i get it! but he's so disappointed no one recognized the midnight bark - "my kids love that movie!" - and that's what i always think of when someone mentions the beacons.