Keep Hoping Machine Running

Dear Writer,

Hi!

I am going to provide you with all the details I can, because that is who I am as a person. Thank you so, so much for writing in one of these fandoms. See you on the 25th!

( Likes/DNWs and General Stuff )

( Between Silk and Cyanide -- Leo Marks, Leo Marks, Forest Yeo-Thomas )

( Desk Set (1957), Peg Costello, Bunny Watson )

( The Good Place, Michael, Janet. Shawn, Tahani )

( Men’s Basketball RPF, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird )

( Nomads, Eileen Flax, Veronique Pommier )

( WWI Flying Aces, Frederick Libby, Stephen Price )

Dear Writer,

Hi!

I am going to provide you with all the details, because that is who I am as a person. Thank you so, so much for writing in one of these tiny fandoms. See you on the 25th!

( Likes/DNWs and General Stuff )

( Between Silk and Cyanide -- Leo Marks, Leo Marks, Forest Yeo-Thomas )

( Dimension 20: Escape from Bloodkeep, Leiland | Kraz-Thun, Markus St. Vincent )

( Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, Edgin Darvis, Xenk Yendar )

( Hikaru no Go, Touya Akira, Shindou Hikaru )

( Men’s Basketball RPF, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird )

( Nomads, Eileen Flax, Veronique Pommier )

Dear Writer,

Hi!

I am going to provide you with all the details, because that is who I am as a person, but if you are not an all-the-details type writer, you don't have to read all this! Thank you so, so much for writing in one of these tiny fandoms. See you on the 25th!

(And should there somehow be two people in the world willing to write one of these tiny, tiny fandoms: treats are VERY welcome.)

( Likes/DNWs )

( Between Silk and Cyanide RPF, Leo Marks, Forest Yeo-Thomas )

( Clipping Chair - officialjadenwilliams (Tiktok), Ron, Greyson )

( Nomads, Eileen Flax, Veronique Pommier )

It is a movie series about a ... clown-spider-alien-god (frankly, the DM should NOT have allowed that multi-class) that infests Derry, a town in the cursed state of Maine, rising every 27 years like a homicidal cicada to kill children. (Evil gonna evil.) And also there is a human serial killer involved somehow? Which really seems like piling on, frankly, but there might be some kind of good reason for it. I will never know. I am absolutely incapable of watching the movies. I am a wimp. I do not do horror. My personal limit is four jump scares per calendar year at the outside.

(Yes, I could also read the book on which the movies are based, except a) there is still a murder clown b) I am still a wimp and c) I understand it ends with thirteen year olds having a fuck or die orgy in the sewers so no.)

So why is a noted horror hater and general wimp in love with this fandom? I'm glad you asked. See, It fic is largely about how you survive, rebuild, and recover after horrible, fucked-up experiences that ate a huge chunk of your life and made you question everything you once believed and hoped. For some reason that just feels relevant right now!
( This Way to the Fandom )

This one is for Frostfire, who expressed interest in hearing about my weirdest job ever.

I applied for my first college work-study job just before getting my wisdom teeth removed. I got called to interview for it while I was waiting for my oral surgeon to call me back after I woke up with my head basically a pulsating orb. And I interviewed for it with antibiotics and painkillers coursing through my bloodstream, still so swollen my speech was slurred. I wasn’t exactly coherent, so possibly I missed some of the warning signs.

The university library system happily hired me despite my disjointed mumbling (work-study jobs required essentially no qualifications, skills, or education), and I was enthused. I liked the libraries! I had spent much of my life since the age of 12 in those specific libraries! (I did research and literature reviews for grad students in my mother’s department. If you gave me a topic and a bunch of copy cards and some money, I would return absolutely every available paper on your topic within a week. Should I have been doing that? I do not know, but a lot of the grad students used my services. Should I have been writing the literature review chapters of their theses and dissertations? Absolutely not, but I didn’t realize that until I started college myself, so that particular university awarded a number of degrees to people whose dissertations were partly written by, well, me. I still feel extremely guilty about that.) I got assigned to the main library’s Gifts Department. I was going to get to go behind the scenes! And maybe ... open gifts? I wasn’t sure.

I showed up on the first day, before classes actually started, and met my fellow Gifts work-studies: Harley, who I would be working with, and Carlos, who I would be replacing. (Carlos’s entire comment on the job was, “I guess it’s fine,” accompanied by a giant eyeroll.) Gifts, it turned out, was a small fiefdom of tables, desks, and bookshelves in the giant, sprawling country of First Floor, which is how everyone referred to it. No article, just “You’ll have to go to First Floor,” or “Check in First Floor.” On one side of our cubicle walls was Cataloging. On the other side was Shipping.

We were very, very far from the Offices, the actual rooms with windows that contained important librarians, and several floors below Administration, the heart of all real power in the library. This was extremely significant, since the main library was like an ancient city, and your proximity to the Offices and the Administration showed your status. Our status was: I guess they’re here, too?

Harley told me all this, and then said, “Jean’s going to show you around, but don’t worry. I’ll train you.” (Harley, with a semester and a summer of experience under her belt, was extremely motivated to not be the only work-study in Gifts, and she knew if I quit early I would not be replaced for months.)

At exactly nine o’clock, Jean arrived. Jean was in charge of the Gifts Department, and also its sole full-time employee. She gave me a tour of the area, which took much longer than you’d expect given that it was maybe 300 square feet total. She showed me the computers, which lurked under giant sturdy plastic dust covers. “Don’t ever touch them,” she said, and embarked on a ten-minute, utterly bewildering explanation that involved lost data, security risks, and expensive equipment. She showed me the shelves with donated materials. “Don’t touch these,” she said, “until you know what to do. These are very important. We cannot lose any. I worry all the time about this, with so many new people in here every semester, and we have misplaced things before, and that cannot happen, so don’t touch this until I tell you you can. Don’t touch anything here. Not anything, don’t touch it. If you don’t know what you’re doing, you can do something wrong, so don’t touch anything.” That was just how Jean talked.

“Okay,” I said. It was one of three times I spoke during the entire tour. I had said “Okay” after the computer speech, and I said it for the final time after she explained to me that I had to be exactly on time and leave exactly on time. “You can’t be early,” she said. “Not even by two minutes. The thing is, we could get in trouble. If you’re early you’re not supposed to be here. You’re not supposed to be here, and we could get in trouble. If you’re early, I’ll have to write you up. Because you’re not supposed to be here.” This was not, let me note, official library policy; it was a strictly Jean policy. She had many, including “Don’t touch your own hair” and “Don’t mention anything negative because it could cause me to get cancer.”

Later, Harley explained to me what the Gifts Department actually did. People donated items to the university library system all the time. Often they were items the library didn’t want or already had, and those were easy to deal with -- if we had the item, but the gift was in better shape, it was added. If we didn’t want the item, it was given or thrown away. (Most donations were thrown away. Ideally while Jean was at lunch, because she could agonize for up to an hour about throwing away a moldy newspaper.) But sometimes they were rare items -- some professor donating all his volumes of a German journal that ceased publication in 1967, say -- and then someone who knew the subject or the language had to decide if they were useful enough that the library should add them. So they were placed on a shelf in a given evaluator’s section, and when the evaluators came by, they looked through their section and told us what to do with the items.

The evaluators, most of them professors in the relevant fields, generally had to be harassed into coming by, because -- and if Jean is still alive, please don’t tell her this -- the donated materials were basically never interesting or important, and no one cared about them at all except for Jean.

The philosophy evaluator was our most discussed evaluator, largely because we yearned to lay eyes on him. He never came by. His section covered one entire bookcase, with donated items on it that had been waiting for up to a decade. He never answered his office phone or his email. Harley and I both walked past his office a dozen times in the year I was in Gifts, and he was never there. I suspect he was actually a thought experiment that got out of hand.

The material arts evaluator was our most popular one, though. He did come by -- regularly, once a month, without reminders. And when I said no one cared about the donations at all, that wasn’t entirely true -- that specific arts evaluator did, in the same way he seemed to care about literally every other thing in the universe. He sometimes brought in cool stuff he’d found on the walk over, like an interestingly shaped twig or a shard of broken mirror or, once, a live beetle. (Technically, according to a Jean Rule, we were not supposed to talk to him, but, well. It would have been rude not to admire his twigs and beetles, and he always timed his visits for Jean’s lunch, so it was safe for us to talk to him.) He was punished for his diligence and general good cheer; we put every single thing that could even tenuously be related to art on his shelf, although he never seemed to mind. “Hey,” he would say, flipping through a sales pamphlet on pencils, “listen to this!” And he would read it out loud to us before saying, “Someone might find this valuable. Let’s add it.”

The second thing that we had to do in Gifts was obtain any existing basic information on them and put it in or on the item for the evaluators to ignore. Now, we could have done this by looking the books up on the computers, printing out the OCLC information for them, sticking that in the book, and calling it a day. We could have done that.

But Jean really wasn’t kidding about not using the computers. Only IT was allowed to turn them on. They were updated twice a year and replaced from time to time and otherwise they sat in pristine condition under their dust covers. Just touching the dust covers made Jean incredibly nervous, and unfortunately being nervous made Jean angry, and when she was angry she lectured forever and made new rules, so we never did it. (Jean never checked her email, which meant she, and we, missed out on a lot of stuff. She was very hurt, for example, to be left out of every gift exchange, but they were organized by email.)

So instead, we had to go to the card catalog. Now, the library didn’t use the card catalog. It hadn’t in quite some time. But they hadn’t thrown it away, probably because it was so pretty. Instead, it was stored in sections in the lowest basement in the library, several floors below the publicly accessible basement and one floor below the only basement with offices in it. To get to it, you had to take the special elevator down to the lowest office floor, walk through it, and then take the unlit emergency stairs down to the very lowest basement.

I never did find out what the people in the basement offices did -- I assume, from their location, something even less valued than Gifts -- but they were nice to us. Sometimes they gave us cookies, and unlike everyone on First Floor, they were not involved in any of the endless interdepartmental wars. Mostly, they felt sorry for us, because the lowest basement was a terror. As a cost-cutting measure, half the lights were out in there, and it was full of random old furniture and mystery boxes and precarious stacks of paper and spiders who didn’t appreciate our arrival.

So we’d go down with titles and authors written on a sheet of paper, and we’d copy out whatever information we could glean from the many-years-out-of-date card catalog, and then we’d climb back up the stairs and walk through the offices and wave cheerfully to the people who worked in the basement and take the elevator back up to First Floor.

Then we had to type up the information we’d written down. On special cards. We were not allowed to handwrite anything, as Jean worried our handwriting would cause problems for the evaluators. (In my case: fair enough. Harley’s writing was nice, though.) And that was really unfortunate, because the library system did not acknowledge the existence of typewriters. They had all been officially phased out. So IT wouldn’t service the Gifts typewriter. Purchasing wouldn’t buy typewriters or typewriter supplies. No one would touch our typewriter. It was the only one left in the entire building, and it was ancient and cranky and way past retirement, and we had to use it, and it could not be replaced or repaired.

Jean had two work-studies for two reasons. One was that she could no longer use the stairs down into the spider basement, and the other was the typewriter. It took forever to type anything. Jean got impatient with it, so her work-studies had to do that. (Jean did have another typewriter, but it was her personal typewriter, and she used it only to type thank you letters for gifts; she didn’t want to risk harming it with the thicker cards we had to type on. She locked her typewriter up when she was not using it, and made it clear she’d cheerfully kill any work-study who looked at it too closely.)

The typewriter had so many quirks that we compiled a cheat sheet. We also had to become amateur typewriter repairpeople -- ones who weren’t allowed to use Google, because that would involve the computers in those days before smartphones -- even though prior to our arrival in Gifts, neither of us had ever touched one before. Harley and I were among the most successful work-studies Jean ever had, because we had a great willingness to open up the typewriter, and one guiding philosophy: Well, it’s not like we can make it worse.

You can do a lot to a typewriter with a paperclip, a screwdriver, and a complete willingness to fuck shit up, and we did. That kept it running. But still you had to hit return four to six times to move down a line, and we never knew why. (Each use of the return key moved the carriage down a very small and variable amount. You just had to eyeball it.) You could not type certain keys after other keys without a two-second cool-down period unless you wanted to get your paperclip out. (We kept a box taped to the typewriter table, since Purchasing was happy to supply those.) Sometimes the letters typed over or partly over the other letters, and you had to watch like a hawk for that to happen, then hit the spacebar after each letter you typed until it stopped. You also could not just crank the cards into the typewriter; whatever part was supposed to allow that no longer existed. Instead, you had to pry open the typewriter with the screwdriver (attached to a long string of rubber bands, which was also taped to the table) and put the card in, then close it quickly (being careful of appendages -- the typewriter had many sharp spots and drew blood at least once a week) and hope the card ended up in the part of the typewriter where it was possible to type. (Sometimes it got lost in the bowels of the typewriter. Dealing with that was a two-person job, and both people would end up covered in weird stains.) I could go on, but you get the point.

We could have accomplished just as much writing just as quickly if Jean had supplied us with wax tablets, a stylus, and a cuneiform dictionary. (If you’re wondering if we could just go into the public part of the library and use the computers there: no. Jean checked. And if we went into the public part of the library while working we’d be fired, another Jean Rule.)

But the most dangerous part of the job was not the typewriter, even though we were the only department that had to restock their first aid box every month. The most dangerous part was after the evaluators had been dragged into the library to read our slightly bloodied cards and review our carefully sorted materials. Because then we had to take the materials to be added to Cataloging.

Jean was at war with Cataloging. I only ever heard some of why, but my best understanding is that -- well. Remember how we shared a cubicle wall with Cataloging? Following a First Floor rearrangement that occurred at roughly the same time I was in middle school, Jean decided that Gifts had been shorted some space, so she decided to handle that by gradually shifting the shared cubicle wall over, just an inch or so a day.

Do not try this on catalogers, that’s my advice. They will notice, and they will be pissed, and they will never, ever get over it. (In fairness to them, Jean was incredibly annoying basically all the time, and they were close enough to Gifts to hear her talking, and she never stopped talking.) The catalogers refused to speak to us, except for one of them, and she would only speak to the work-studies, not Jean, and only when the other catalogers and Jean weren’t around. Instead, they communicated with us by note. (Keep in mind the departments were separated by one four-foot cubicle wall, and you will understand how impressive it was that they never even looked at us. To them, we were a blank void, even though that required them to create, through sheer force of will, a blind spot that took up at least 25% of their field of vision.)

So we would drop off the selected materials on their book cart, to be met with pointed, bone-chilling silence and an absolute refusal to acknowledge our existence so intense that I swear it inflicted actual psychic damage. We’d go to lunch or go home and come back to all the materials on our “In” table with a note indicating that we had failed to provide the requested information in the appropriate format. The information we did provide would be attached, annotated in red ink. Harley and I would try again, fighting with the recalcitrant, semi-sentient, vengeful typewriter, and get something that was a closer approximation to what the catalogers wanted. We would take everything back to Cataloging, enduring yet more frostbite-inducing chill and hostility. The next day, the materials would be back again with a note, this one perhaps saying they could not accept them as the information card didn’t have the appropriate evaluator’s signature on it. (The original offending card had, but of course we couldn’t copy that.) We’d staple the old card and the new card together and try again.

They never ran out of reasons. Ever. It usually took about eight rounds of notes for our materials to be cataloged, and 90% of the time that happened because the One Cataloger took pity on us and did it after the work day was over.

And, yes, there were occasional meetings about this, but nothing ever got resolved. Jean started every single one by repeating, at length, her belief that Cataloging was somehow responsible for the decreased space allotted to Gifts in the remodel, and she had a carefully-kept history of every movement of the cubicle walls since then, with measurements, and basically she never got to the actual problem, which was that Cataloging wasn’t cataloging our materials. The catalogers just sat there silently in the meetings, letting Jean talk herself out of any assistance from the people in charge. And for reasons that I imagine are obvious, the actual librarians and library managers did not want to have those meetings. So it just kept being that way.

I lasted a year in Gifts, and Harley and I quit together, so we wrote up an incredibly detailed guidebook to the typewriter, the Cataloging War, the spider basement, and where to get more bandaids, among many other things, and left it under the typewriter. We figured Jean would never find it there, and the new work-studies would the first time they had to do a card removal. I hope it helped.

My next work-study job was in Publications in the university’s computer and internet department, and while that did involve both a vicious, endless cheesecake war and a t-shirt grudge so legendary that the very first item covered during my training was “NEVER mention t-shirts in ANY way and honestly just steer clear of talking about clothes at all on Fridays,” it was so, so much better, largely because I worked for Cathy and Danny, who actually looked after their work-studies. (We always got pieces of cheesecake in the cheesecake war, for example.)

I tell you what, though: my time in Gifts was incredibly educational. I learned how to deal with difficult people. Even more, though, I learned how to function in a world with different rules, where absolutely nothing makes sense or happens logically, and where no improvements can ever be made. I already had a significant amount of training in that from going to public school, but this was the college-level class in it.

And, as a final note -- Best Beloved and I were together during this period of my life. When she read through this, she said, “Yes, this it true, but it ... doesn’t really capture how weird it all was.” But doing that would require a whole book. (And if I’m going to write a book about this, it’s going to be a fantasy novel, maybe about work-studies who find a portal in the spider basement. It would turn out everyone in the whole building knew about the portal and just never mentioned it, and also on the other side of the portal would be the library that actually made sense.)

Dear Writer,

Hi!

I am, as always, going to provide you with all the details, because that's what I hope to get from my recipient. But if details aren't your thing, please tap out of this letter now. Just know that I really, really cannot handle child or animal harm or death, and I love you for volunteering to write in one of these tiny fandoms. See you on the 25th!

Or, if you want to know more, read on.

( About Me )

( The Cardsharps – Caravaggio, Pink Feather Cardsharp, Black Feather Cardsharp, Innocent )

( Footloose (1984), Ren McCormack, Willard Hewitt )

( Men’s Basketball RPF, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird )

( Nomads, Eileen Flax, Veronique Pommier )

( Ticket to Ride (Board Game) )

Someone on Twitter asked people to say what the most "them" thing they did in school was, and I knew my answer immediately.

The most me thing I did in high school was not really go to it.

Midway through my freshman year of high school, I had a doctor’s appointment at lunchtime. My mother dropped me back off at school, but I was too late to go to my class; my school had a strict "if the bell rings and you’re not in the classroom, it’s the tardy room for you" policy. It was up to the tardy room teacher to determine if you had an excused tardy or an unexcused tardy, but either way, you couldn’t go back to class.

I had never been to the tardy room before, but I found it pretty easily. It was a small cold classroom with most of the lights turned off and a series of cubicles facing the walls, some of which were occupied by students. It was also completely silent, because the teacher in charge, who I will call Coach because he was mostly the wrestling coach (we had a top-ranked team or something and it was a Big Deal), ruled with an iron fist.

That first day, he did not so much demonstrate his iron fist as confuse the shit out of me.

“I’ll call your doctor and check, you know,” he said when he heard my explanation. (This was back when you could still call a medical professional’s office and ask if a person had been there and they were allowed to answer.)

“Okay,” I said. “His number’s —“

“Oh no,” Coach said, sounding oddly smug. “You tell me his name and I’ll look it up in the phone book.” (Because this was also back when phone books were a thing.)

I was deeply confused about why he’d want to go to all that extra trouble when I had memorized the phone number just so he could avoid it, but I figured maybe he liked using the phone book. He was the wrestling coach, after all. He wasn’t a real teacher. Possibly phone books were an exciting skill development opportunity for him.

He went through a whole elaborate thing: looked up the number, copied it out on a Post-It, pulled the phone towards him, and put his hand on the receiver. He looked up at me at each stage of this process for what felt like too many seconds. I assume my face was a picture of puzzlement. I could not figure out why he was making such a production out of dialing a dang phone number. Like, yes, he was the wrestling coach, but surely even he could use a telephone without all this drama.

After he stared at me for a few seconds with his hand on the phone, he said, “I’m going to call now.”

“Good?” I said, completely lost but trying to be supportive.

He made the call. After my doctor’s office confirmed that I had indeed been there, he hung up the phone and said, “Okay, so you did have a doctor’s appointment.” He sounded surprised, and I finally realized what was going on.

“If I had just been late, I wouldn’t have lied about it,” I told him. “I don’t care enough to lie about it.”

He studied my face, and I deeply wished I could read expressions, because he was obviously thinking a thought. “Understood,” he said. He told me that since my tardy was excused, I didn’t have to do the work my teacher left with him in case of tardies. I told him I might as well, since I was there, and took it to my assigned carrel, right between two guys who reeked of weed and who were making very limited progress on their work but great progress on tracking individual dust motes.

Fifteen minutes later, I handed it back to him. “I have an answer key,” he told me, but did not make any move to open the file drawer and actually get it out.

“Okay,” I said. A few seconds passed in which he just watched me, chin propped on his hand. “Do ... you want me to check it?” I guessed.

“Nah,” he said. “Are your answers right?”

I blinked at him, because that was not how this conversation was supposed to go, but I answered him. “Yes,” I said, with the serene confidence in my own personal rightness that was possibly the most obnoxious thing about teenaged me.

He nodded and wrote 100% at the top of the paper without even looking at my answers. Then he said, “Mrs. [Name] didn’t leave anything else with me. Let’s see how long this takes you,” and handed me a word search.

I liked word searches, and also it was a very easy one, and also he’d challenged me, so I finished it standing at his desk (being somehow both incredibly shy AND a terrible show-off was another of my annoying teenaged traits, of which I had an abundance) and handed it back to him.

He watched me do it. “So how about you do some other teacher’s assignments?” he suggested, in experimental tones.

I agreed. He laughed out loud, badly startling several stoners, picked out a work packet from a history teacher, and sent me back to my carrel. I turned it in a few minutes before the bell rang.

“It’s been interesting, Miss [Lastname],” he said as he handed me my official excused tardy note. “I don’t expect to see you again.”

But he was absolutely wrong about that, because I had learned two things:

1. The tardy room was quiet. Like, no sounds were allowed at all in the part of the room where the carrels were.
   
2. The work in the tardy room was at your own pace and if you finished early you got random other work as a surprise bonus, meaning you could basically snoop on classes you hadn’t taken yet.

Since my entire school career to that point had been a mostly unsuccessful attempt to avoid both boredom and noise, I was very, very sold on this place.

A few days later, I decided I did not want to go to Communications class, which was taught by a hideously peppy (and loud) woman who, a few weeks before all this, had reported me to the school nurse as a troubled and potentially dangerous student. (She assigned a Christmas poem. I, a Jewish kid, wrote an anti-Christmas poem. The poem she liked best and read to the class as an example of How To Poetry featured the line “Money, money, money, give me more,” so I felt like my poem was extra justified, but I still had to sit through several lengthy sessions with the school nurse and the guidance counselor because of it, and I was embittered.) I waited in the hallway as it emptied out, and then walked through blissfully clear and quiet halls to the tardy room.

“I was in the hallway when the bell rang,” I reported to Coach when he asked what happened.

“Why?”

“Because I didn’t want to go to class.”

He covered his mouth with his hand for a second. “Okay,” he said. He pulled out the Communications teacher’s work folder and looked at it. Then he snorted. “Well, this is an unexcused tardy, so you absolutely have to do this work,” he said, and handed it to me.

It was a word search. When I looked up from finishing it, he was working on something with one hand while holding out another wad of history stuff to me with the other, and I took that to my carrel.

The next day, I was already halfway to the tardy room when the bell rang for Communications class to start.

A few days went by like that. Then, on a Monday, I walked into the tardy room right as the bell rang, and Coach had a hefty stack of work set out for me, neatly squared away on the corner of his desk — it had a post-it note with my name on it and everything.

I looked through it. “What class is this for?” I asked, because none of it looked like anything we were doing in Communications. Or in any other class I was taking that semester. Or any of the work I’d sampled in my random tour of Coach’s file drawer.

“I went down to the university and got some coursework for you,” he said. “Since I’m seeing you so much.”

“I’m a freshman. In high school,” I pointed out.

“Oh,” he said. “Well. I guess it’s just too hard for you, then.”

“IT IS NOT,” I snapped, and I spent the next two weeks working determinedly through a bunch of sociology coursework on criminal justice and social control, because I was going to prove him wrong.

At some point in there, Coach asked me, “Are you ever going to go to Communications class again?”

“No,” I said.

He nodded like he had expected nothing else. I did sociology and psychology coursework and read chapters of textbooks that he checked out of the university library for me, and I was happy. So happy that I started skipping other classes to go to the tardy room.

Within a month, I was in the tardy room more than I was in the whole rest of the school. My stack of work on Coach’s desk grew ever larger and developed colored tabs and labels. (His, not mine. I was never that organized.) When I stopped going to US History, Coach introduced me to the concept of primary sources and had me read diaries of American women from the 1800s from different social classes and parts of the country and compare and contrast them. When I stopped going to Civics, I became the possessor, only in the tardy room, of a politics textbook and a bunch of photocopied readings, and I was expected to write lengthy responses to questions about both sides of current contentious issues, which Coach read, underlining logical fallacies and factual errors and inadequate transitions and poorly-selected quotes and anything else he didn’t like. After a while, I was spending twice as long on them for the smug hit of satisfaction I got when he couldn’t find anything to underline. I was getting away with SO MUCH, and I loved it. I mostly didn’t even have to have a teacher anymore! (Yes. I actually thought that.)

But, of course, I still wasn’t actually going to most of my classes, or doing any of the work for them, so I was very surprised when I got my grades that quarter, the third quarter of my high school career, and I had As. When I got to the tardy room after my English class homeroom that day, Coach asked to see my report card, glanced at it, and handed it back to me. “Wanted to see what you got in Language Arts, German, and Chemistry,” he said. (Those were the classes I was still going to.) “I gave you the rest of these grades.” I have no idea how, but he’d somehow persuaded the teachers of the classes I was no longer attending to let him grade me. I didn’t even have excessive tardies on my report card. He told me, “You won’t go to your assigned classroom, fine. I don’t believe anyone here can make you. But you’re still going to class. I don’t count you as tardy anymore.”

I did not, at the time, realize how incredibly weird this was, that everyone had just accepted without any discussion or even notifying my parents that I would spend my school days mostly in the tardy room, doing work selected for me by a teacher whose job was supposed to be barking at stoners to stop giggling and scaring the crap out of kids who threw stuff at their teachers. All I knew was that I liked this way of doing school better and apparently no one was going to try to make me to stop.

At one point, I told Coach I would not be in the tardy room in the afternoon the next day, as I had signed up to take the ASVAB, a test intended to determine your aptitude for the military, and which you could take in any grade at my high school. (Almost everyone did, because you got out of class for it, which even at the time I found dodgy. I just couldn’t resist the allure of the test.)

His whole body went tense. “I did 20 years in the Marines,” he said. “I loved it. And I am not telling you, I am not ordering you, I am asking you. I am begging you. Please don’t join the military.”

“Oh, I won’t,” I told him. “I just thought the test sounded fun.”

“Recruiters are going to call you,” he told me. “Please do NOT listen to anything they say. You are NOT right for the military. It is not the place for you.”

I didn’t really understand why he thought I wasn’t right for the military, but, after all, I didn’t want to join, so I promised. I took the ASVAB (he was right; I would be talking to recruiters for the next six years, which made the whole "getting out of classes for an afternoon" thing much less of a good deal, but I kept my promise and listened to absolutely nothing that they said) and went on with my policy of only going to the classes whose teachers I felt had earned my attention and time.

I enjoyed this freedom to set my own educational rules. A lot.

The next year, I had to go to a different school (because the first school did not want me back), and there was no tardy room teacher at the new school. Also, by then, because I lived in a state where you could basically get a learner’s permit in the womb and be fully licensed to drive approximately seven minutes after your birth, I had the use of a car and could go wherever I wanted to. Also, I was very good at forging my mother’s signature.

This was exactly as bad a combination as it sounds like it would be.

Very quickly, I formed some innovative new policies about school attendance. I was supposed to go to school to learn things, right? But my classes all followed the same pattern: on Monday, new material was introduced. Tuesday through Thursday, that material was discussed or elaborated on, or there were worksheets on it. Friday, there was usually a quiz or a homework thing or a movie or something.

So, if I understood everything presented on Monday, my reasoning went, then I didn’t really need to go to class on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. I wouldn’t be learning! Surely no one would want that. More to the point, I did not want that, and I didn’t actually care what anyone else wanted.

So I went to school on Monday. On Friday, I went to school with an excuse note for the previous three days with my mother’s forged signature on it. The other days, I skipped. (And, yes, my school district had a mandatory attendance policy, and you were supposed to get in trouble with the district and the truancy officer if you missed more than 11 days. I missed more than 11 days every month. No one ever reported me to anyone. I assume that’s because I was a middle-class white girl and also incredibly annoying to have in class and they actually preferred it when I wasn’t there.)

But where did I go on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays? What terrible trouble did I get in? Well, I got into all kinds of trouble as a teenager and made all the bad choices in the world, but I didn’t get into any of it during school hours, because in school hours, I was at the university library. (Or sometimes the public library. I varied it, because back then I thought librarians would actually maybe care if someone was in the library who should be in school. Tip: librarians did not care then and they do not care now. They did occasionally suggest I check out some materials instead of using them exclusively in the library, but that was as far as it went.)

And I was, again, happy. The library was quiet! There were nice carrels to sit in where no one would interact with you! You could decide to read the complete works of Thomas Hardy! (Tip: do not do this, as much of his fiction will remove the soul from your body and replace it with a black hole into which hope and joy and all things good get drawn, never to be seen again.) You could research anything and cover pages and pages and pages of your notebooks with details of extremely sketchy early psychological experiments, or find out the most dangerous chemicals, or learn much, much too much about the treatment of suspected witches between 1400-1700. (Tip: do not do this last, as I learned things that I would pay large sums of money to forget.)

Eventually, this did come to the notice of someone, but because I was a privileged white girl, the person who noticed was the guidance counselor, Mrs. T.

She called me into her office and said, “Why are you missing so much school?”

Now, in retrospect, I realize this was my cue to lie. But, as with so many other cues in my life, I blew right past it. Instead, I explained to her, honestly and sincerely, with many supporting examples, my theory of only really needing to attend class on Mondays and Fridays and for tests. She listened quietly and occasionally nodded like I had said something interesting. After I was done, she spent some time looking through my file, which was sitting in front of her.

“What do you want to do after high school?” she said, after a few minutes of contemplating whatever terrible things were in there.

“College,” I said confidently. After all, I spent a lot of time at the local university already, both during school time and after it. In addition to looking random shit up, I was also doing research for grad students in my mother’s department and teaching new students in her lab how to do lit reviews and doing data entry for various experiments. (This was, let me just note here, a fairly bad idea, for a variety of reasons, but I enjoyed it, except the parts that involved other people. No one should ever have had preteen or teenaged me teach anyone ANYTHING, but that is another story.) I felt pretty sure I was going to enjoy college a LOT more than high school.

Later that week, Mrs. T called my parents and told them that high school was not a good fit for me.

I am pretty sure my parents responded, “We know. We know.”

And then Mrs. T changed my life forever by suggesting that maybe, just maybe, I should not finish high school, and instead go right on to college, given the whole bad fit situation. She was right, and I did just that. I remain extremely grateful to her. (She got in a BUCKET of trouble with the administration for it. Although I assume they were mostly angry that she made the same recommendation to my friend Boris, who was not nearly as difficult as I was and both smarter and better for the school’s stats.)

College, as I had predicted, proved to be way more fun than high school. It was basically a place where you were encouraged to set your own educational policies! And you could randomly sample any field you wanted just by signing up for a class; you didn’t even have to finish your work early so you could get a random draw from a file drawer! I was much happier in college.

And all of that is a very long-winded way to say that the most me thing I ever did in school, and the thing I did over and over again, was not really go to school, and somehow still end up doing more work than I would have if I had just gone.

Basically, my teenaged specialty was playing myself.

Dear Writer,

Hi!

I am, as always, going to provide you with all the details, because that's what I hope to get from my recipient. But if details aren't your thing, please tap out of this letter now. Just know that I really, really cannot handle child or animal harm or death, and I love you for volunteering to write in one of these tiny fandoms. See you on the 25th!

Or, if you want to know more, read on.

( About Me )

( Chunder and Honks Poems - K. R. Fabian, Chunder, Honks )

( Historical Farm (UK TV), Ruth Goodman, Alex Langlands, Peter Ginn )

( If You’re Over Me - Years & Years (Music Video), no characters )

( Men’s Basketball RPF, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird )

( Nomads, Eileen Flax, Veronique Pommier )

Over on Twitter, afrikate asked me why buying an actual paper comic book was so hard for me. As it happens, I wrote up what it was like the last time time I did it, but then as usual I didn’t post it and it went to join the giant family of unposted things on my hard drive. But I’m posting it now, for two reasons:

1. It would take me all day to explain this in tweets.
   
2. This post is now a time machine! It can take you back to visit the blissful days of 2015, and honestly that is something I dream about these days, so. Time machine post it is! (With a 2018 coda.)

A 2015 Adventure

Recently, I went to a comic shop.

Several years ago, I discussed my history of shopping for comics, so I'm not going into all that again. It's enough to say that I did not approach this with enthusiasm or any sense that it would go well. But one of my friends got her hands on the Rivers of London comic, and after she showed me some scans from it, I knew I was going to have to try to find it.

I do know how to shop for comics, so I was in luck there. (Comics industry, possibly think about the fact that to buy your stuff, people have to already know how to buy your stuff.) Like, for example, I knew better than just to head off to a store in naive hope. Instead, I opened up the comic shop locator website. Then I picked up my phone, despite my profound loathing of phones, and started dialing. (Number of things I buy that require multiple phone calls before purchase: …at this point, pretty much just comics and real estate. And when we bought this house I think I made about as many phone calls as I did to find this one comic book.)

Shop #1:

Woman who answered the phone: "We're sold out of #1. We have #2."
Me: "Thank you!"

Hey, I thought as I hung up. Maybe this is going to be easy after all!

Shop #2:

Dude who answered, disdainfully: "We don't carry Titan comics. They're media tie-ins."
Me, in my head: So your shop is entirely free of, say, Star Wars stuff? I bet.
Me, out loud: "Thank you!"

Shop #3:

Dude who answered: "The what now?"
Me: "The Rivers of London comic, published by Titan."
Dude: "…I have no idea. Let me find someone to ask."
[Several minutes pass. I am not put on hold, so I can hear distant voices. One occasionally says "London."]
Dude, returning from his journey: "No, we don't have the London thing."
Me: "Thank you!"

At around this point, I ceased to feel like maybe this would be easy.

Shop #4:

Woman who answered: "You'd better talk to Troy."
Troy: "Oh man, no, I don't have that. But let me give you a phone number. You call this guy, okay? He knows all this stuff. He might have it and if not he can tell you how to get it."
Me: "Okay, thank you!"
Troy: "Definitely call this guy. Are you ready? [Number.]"

Shop (I hope, although to be honest I might have just randomly called a guy on his personal phone; he answered with "Hi") #5:

Guy who knows all this stuff: "Rivers of London, yeah, the miniseries, right? Why do you want it? What did you need? Like, digital, or a studio copy, or for a collection?"
Me, feeling like I have perhaps bitten off more than I can chew: "…I want to read it?"
Him: "Yeah, I get you, you just want the book. I wish I could get it for you but I probably can't. Titan didn't print a lot, the distributors didn't buy a lot, and it's sold out as far as I know. Titan's kind of hard to deal with." [pause while typing occurs] "Yeah, I can't get it. You know what, you should try online. Amazon or eBay. That's your best shot."
[This interests me, because physical bookstore employees are shot dead on the spot if they so much as mention Amazon when talking to you. So either comic shops don't have that policy, or Troy really did give me the phone number of a random comics enthusiast who welcomes phone calls from strangers.]
Me: "I already checked Amazon. They don't have it."
Him: "Wow, really? Uh, you could wait until they publish the collection, usually with Titan I just wait and get the compilation."
Me: "Yeah, but that's not until April 2016." [Of course I checked before I embarked on this odyssey; I don't seek out suffering.]
Him: "Oh, okay, yeah, that's pretty far off. EBay, that's what you need now."
Me: "Thank you!"

Time elapsed: fifteen minutes or so. I then proceeded to eBay, where I bought Rivers of London #1 in under a minute, for approximately twice its cover price. (But it came promptly and with its own bag and board. And it was easy to buy and I didn't have to go to a special store or talk to anyone on the phone. I don't regret the purchase, is what I'm saying.)

But wait, you may be thinking, assuming you've made it this far. Didn't you say you went to a comic book shop? I did! Remember Shop #1, where they had the second one but not the first one? I went there.

I had to bring my son, the earthling, with me. Last time I took him to a comics shop, he was quietly terrified, but he's seven now, so I had faith in his ability to weather the experience.

Comics Shop #1 is close to my house geographically but, it turns out, not temporally. I live in 2015. The shop lives in 1999. It was dark and slightly overwarm, just the way comic shops used to be in the '90s. It was stocked and organized by arcane, secret means, just like in days of yore. It had a lot of irritated handwritten signs up on topics like reading without purchasing; I'm pretty sure I saw those exact signs in a different state in 1999. And you had to know more about comics than I do these days to shop there, or else you had to know exactly what you wanted and ask someone who had been inducted into the Dark Comic Shop Arts.

But! There was a woman working at the counter. (And a black guy patiently flipping through a long box as the only other customer. That was fairly new, too; I don't remember seeing very many people who weren't white at comic shops -- or in comic books -- in the '90s.) And there were no hideously objectifying posters of mostly naked ladies on display. (The last time I went into a comic shop, it had a life-sized Slave Leia, heavily enhanced in the boob region, opposite the front door, so I was very pleased.)

Something I noticed that I wouldn't have before I had a kid: the display facing the door -- what someone would see when they first walked in -- was labeled "ALL AGES COMICS." And someone had made a mostly-successful effort to get all the really kid-unfriendly titles (and breakable items) up above the height of your average seven year old. (The earthling did find one that had a cover that is going to haunt me -- pictures of zombie clowns should be straight-up illegal, folks -- but he was unbothered.) I suspect these people genuinely expect to have small children in their store.

Also of interest to me: there was a display shelf that seemed to be maybe geared towards women and girls. Or it might just have been built around the interests of an employee; the selection, as apparently required by this particular shop, was somewhat idiosyncratic. It had My Little Pony and Nimona and various manga, but also some Avengers and Captain Marvel and something to do with Hawkeye. (If you're wondering how anyone is supposed to find anything in this shop: I have no idea. I spent twenty minutes in there and could find no better method than randomly wandering around and picking stuff up. Nothing was labeled, or alphabetized, or grouped by publisher or common characters. Issues of titles were not near other issues of the same title. And I have no idea what stuff was hiding in the long boxes stored under every shelf. Could've been tentacle beasts in there for all I know.)

The earthling went off to look at Star Wars stuff -- his interests have started to overlap with the average comic book shop customer's -- and I went to inquire about my book.

And they had it. Excitement! Success! Triumph that took only an hour of my time! (This seems like less of a triumph when I think about how it took me an hour to hunt down and purchase a single four-dollar item, so I am in fact choosing not to think about that.) Eventually, I managed to chivvy the earthling out of there, at the cost of a Star Wars comic book that I later read and realized I had to hide from him for a few years. As we left, I asked the woman at the counter if they would reserve a copy of Rivers of London #3 for me. "Okay," she said, and pulled out a scrap of paper, on which she carefully wrote my name and phone number, promising to call me when it was in. And they did in fact call! So I guess the -- um, slip of paper system? -- works.

Conclusions

1. It's always the 1990s in a comics shop. Technology has not really affected them. Yes, I could use a website to get a list of all the comics shops near me, but I still had to pick up the phone and talk to a bunch of them, until I found a shop (or, I greatly fear, just a random person) that could tell me what I needed to know. And none of them had what I wanted; you still can't decide you want a comic book at any time, even weeks, after its release date and be able to count on getting hold of it just by going to a store, even if you, like me, live in a major metropolitan area with dozens of stores nearby. Also, at least one store potentially maintains their customer list on small scraps of paper, which is a truly inexplicable decision on their part. Computers exist, people!
   
   
2. But it's a better 1990s than it used to be. There are women behind the counter and people of color in the stores. The shop I went to sure wasn't accessible (in any sense of the word -- anyone who uses a mobility aid isn't getting past the front door of that place) or easy to browse in, but it had made a noticeable effort to appeal to customers who were not white men aged 15-22. And, frankly, that's a major improvement. I realize "not actively unwelcoming" is a low bar, but it's one the comics industry didn't pass the last time I tried, so I'll take it.
   
   And, hey, clearly the industry can change. So maybe someday they can figure out how to make buying comics as easy as buying basically anything else at all except certain brands of luxury purses and radioactive materials. I believe in you, comic shops!

2018 Coda

I did finish buying the Rivers of London series from that shop. I have not been back since. When I wanted to read Squirrel Girl and Hawkguy last year, I bought them from Comixology. Nice clear beautiful digital copies, right on my tablet, for not much money, and it took me approximately 30 seconds to buy each one. So at some point comic book shops may finally arrive in the present day, and I hope they do, but I won’t be there to notice it.

(Trying to get back into the habit of posting, so this is a random piece of personal telephonic history!)

Lately, I’ve been in a bemusing battle of wills with my phone, where I tell it to sync certain songs and only those songs, and it does grab the ones I tell it to, but also randomly adds other songs from my music library, often ones I’ve never listened to. When I told Best Beloved about this, her take was that I should just live with it. I questioned the Queen of Solving Problems Right Now, Immediately, Using a Hatchet as Necessary on her surprising stance and she pointed out that she knew me in college. When I had the Let Me Call You Sweetheart phone.

See, my college did not have voicemail for landlines in the dorm, and this was back when people still used landlines sometimes. My parents, who were sending a 15 year old off to college, thought they might like to leave messages for me at some point, and so they bought me a combined phone/answering machine to take with me. And for a while, it worked as advertised: people called, I did not answer, they were invited to leave a message, they did, I sometimes listened to the message, I very occasionally called them back. (This is as good as it ever gets with me and telephones. Our relationship can best be described as “mutual disdain.” That’s also why I didn’t have a cell phone back then; smartphones hadn’t happened yet, and I could think of exactly zero reasons why I might want to be MORE available for phone calls.)

At some point late in the first semester, though, people who left messages started to sound a little amused. And then, after a month or so, they began sounding more … annoyed. I checked my outgoing message to make sure no one had recorded weird stuff on it, because, you know, college, but it was still normal and fine. So I shrugged and accepted it, until one of my friends suggested I call my own phone.

I did. The outgoing message played, exactly as recorded. But after it, I was treated to an extremely tinny instrumental version of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” that sounded like it was played on the buttons of a phone, followed by the customary leave-a-message beep. Bewildered, I checked the box, which I had saved for moving convenience. No mention of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” No mention of it on the manufacturer’s website, either. My phone had apparently developed a musical mind of its own.

Huh, I thought, and went about my life.

A few weeks after that, people started sounding really annoyed in my messages. I called my phone again. It now sounded like this:

Me, in a recording: Hi! You’ve reached me, and you know what to do.
Phone: Let me CALL you SWEETheart/I’m in love with YOU/Let me hear you WHISper/That you love me too
[Pause, as though the phone is about to emit that life-giving leave-a-message beep]
Phone: Let me CALL you SWEETheart/I’m in love with YOU/Let me hear you WHISper/That you love me too
[Pause, which only serves to raise hopes that will soon be dashed]
Phone: Let me CALL you SWEETheart…
[Repeat a painful number of times]

Eventually, it broke off in the middle of a line and beeped.

Well. There are only so many times that you want to hear that song, that way, and my phone had begun exceeding people’s lifetime limits in the course of a single call. I apologized, but what could I do? You can’t reason with a phone.

The year ended. I packed the phone into its box and took it home with me for the summer, which it apparently spent plotting. Then I brought it back to school.

Shortly after the school year started, I discovered that my phone had developed a new glitch. If I did pick it up when it rang, I couldn’t hear the person on the other end. On the other hand, if I waited until the answering machine got it and then picked it up, I could hear them, but they couldn’t hear anything I said. However, after extensive experimentation, I discovered they could still hear the beeps if I pressed buttons on the phone. So, as any reasonable person would, I changed my outgoing message to:

“Hi! My phone is broken. If I pick up, I can hear you but you won’t hear me. I’ll beep to show I’m there. Ask yes or no questions and I’ll give one beep for yes and two beeps for no. Thanks!”

(If you are now going WHY DIDN’T YOU BUY A NEW PHONE? – it never even occurred to me. Technically, some communication was still possible with the phone, after all, and I inherited from my father a gene that makes me very anxious in the presence of new objects. This is why my family had a garage door that you could only make work by inserting a penny into the innards of the opener, and that often went up and down on its own, sometimes as many as 60 times in an evening. It’s why I kept, for over a year, a computer chair that would occasionally just collapse, dumping me on the floor, and why I’m sitting on a partially broken chair as I type this. It’s … just who my people are, I guess. We are not so much “make do and mend” as “it’s fine, everything is fine, please stop talking about buying new things because that is the worst thing in the world to do and I’d rather just sit on the floor in the dark forever.”)

This led to a period of my college career where, to call me, you had to:

1. Sit through what was, by then, up to 15 minutes of “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” (I know because people timed it, since there wasn’t a lot else to do, and then shared the times with me. I think maybe they were trying to suggest to me that I should buy a new phone, but that kind of subtlety was never going to work. I mean, I come from a family that could afford a new toaster and willingly chose to keep the old one, even though it caught fire from time to time, enlivening many a morning. “Let’s just get a new one” is not a phrase in my vocabulary.)
   
2. Listen to my outgoing message.
   
3. After the first beep, say, “Hello? Are you there? It’s me, please pick up.”
   
4. Wait for the beep that would indicate that I had in fact picked up.
   
5. Hold a séance-like session with me wherein you were restricted to yes or no questions or, in cases where that just would not work, you had to count beeps for each letter of the alphabet. (You know: A=1, B=2, etc. Let me tell you from grim experience: it takes a LONG time to beep out even a single word, and also you tend to forget where you are halfway through letters like M and T. I honestly take my hat off to the fraudulent mediums of old. They worked for their money, by gum.)
   
6. Hope that the phone didn’t just cut out altogether in the middle of the séance, as it was known to do.

Basically, communicating with spirits was, overall, probably slightly easier than talking to me. I for real do not know why anyone bothered. They did, though, which shows you what excellent and patient friends and family I have had in my life.

If you’re wondering about the resolution of this odyssey of disintegrating telecommunications technology: eventually my parents got tired of only being able to communicate with their youngest child via beeps. My mother (who does not have the “hates new things” gene) suggested several times that I buy a new one, but I beeped twice for no each time, so she, in direct violation of our precious familial traditions, went out and bought a new one and sent it to me at school. I kept it in its box in my room and avoided looking directly at it for a week or so, but then word spread among my friends that I had a new phone and was still using Mr. Beepy, and they basically held a technological intervention until I installed the new phone. (It worked fine for a year and then developed a glitch where it clicked a lot and would only record the first 15 seconds of a message, and no one minded at all because at least it wasn’t playing “Let Me Call You Sweetheart.” My life motto: I can always get over the bar, because I dug a hole in the ground and buried it.)

But times change! Humans age and progress and develop workarounds for their flaws! Which is why, when BB and I were attempting to explain this telephonic family history to our nine-year-old earthling (challenging, as he has never known an answering machine or a time when humans made phone calls to humans other than their senators), we had this conversation, which tells you everything you need to know about the people we’ve become:

Me, thinking back: You know, I probably should have just bought a new phone instead of beeping at people for months.
BB, also thinking back: I should have just broken your phone completely after it started playing “Let Me Call You Sweetheart” more than once per call. I can’t believe I didn’t think of that.

Anyway. That was the start of my long and complex adult relationship with phones. I wended my way through many glitches and minor disasters to arrive where I currently am: in possession of a phone that has its own opinions about music. And, upon reflection, I am prepared to be satisfied with that.

Dear Writer Person,

Hi!

I am, as always, going to provide you with all the details, because that's what I hope to get from my recipient. But if details aren't your thing, please tap out of this letter now. Just know that I really, really cannot handle child or animal harm or death, and I love you for volunteering to write in one of these tiny fandoms. See you on the 25th!

Or, if you want to know more, read on.

( Me )

( Basketball RPF, Earvin Johnson, Larry Bird )

( The Devil Went down to Georgia (song), Johnny/Devil )

( Mars Evacuees series - Sophia McDougall, Any )

( Murder Most Unladylike Series - Robin Stevens, Daisy Wells, Hazel Wong )

The One That Proves That What Actually Felled the Roman Empire Was a Lack of Sartorial Adaptability.Chosen Man, by Sineala. The Eagle, Marcus Flavius Aquila/Esca Mac Cunoval.

Can you love a ship without ever knowing the canon? Well, if you can't, this project is in some serious trouble, because, uh, I don't watch a lot of canon. (I have now reached the point in my life where I'm getting judged by my own son for not watching enough canon. Child, I did not bring you into this world so you could say in wondering tones, "You've only seen NINE episodes of Doctor Who?" And anyway it's more like 11, thank you.) But in some cases, I don't need to see the canon. And by "don't need," I mean, "Shhhh, just let me sit here and pretend that this is canon, because it should be. It should be."

So, the Canon, to the Best of My Knowledge: there are these dudes named Marcus and Esca. Marcus is a Roman soldier. Esca is his slave. And...I think they're in love? I don't know. I read a couple of recaps of the movie and was like, wow, if there's another explanation for this than "they're committed life partners," it's not coming through here. And to be honest, even if you take it as read that it's Marcus and Esca, sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g, the recaps of the movie aren't the easiest thing in the world to follow. I'm guessing it probably makes more sense if you watch it.

But I am okay with not understanding it, because the fic, well. The fic makes it all so clear! And this is the perfect, Platonic ideal of Eagle fic, at least for me. Ridiculous devotion? Yup, we have it. Culture clash? Indeed. Being really good at stuff? Present! Working together to do important things? Hail, hail, the gang's all here, let's get this show on the road. And, yes, okay, it does take like 100,000 words of longing and adventure and lying the mud for them to get the show on the road, but that is a plus. I like slow burns, okay? We already discussed this. I am Team Slower Is Better, and If It Takes Five Years I Am Fine with That, Maybe They Can Have Adventures While They Pine and/or Yearn.

(I have a sneaking suspicion that this whole Ships I Have Loved project is going to reveal a lot of terrible things about my id. Which – like – I am braced for that, but to be honest I am hoping I don't notice and nobody tells me. I definitely don't want to look into the abyss, but I also don't particularly want it or anything else to look into me, if that makes sense. My id probably cannot stand up to abyssal scrutiny.)

So, this fic – yes, I am now back to that – is an AU in which Marcus and Esca are both soldiers in the Roman Army, with Marcus in command of the Actual Worst Unit in the Entire Empire, except really they're not; the Roman Empire is just not prepared to deal with their kind of awesomeness. So there's competence and learning the ropes and a slow burn and battle and complications, and basically if I could I would read versions of this story every day for the rest of my life. Like, this story, but in SPACE! Or this story, but with DRAGONS! What I'm saying is that this should really be a genre all of its own, and I shake my fist at the publishing industry for not understanding that.

But unfortunately it is not a whole genre, so I have no choice but to re-read this one. A lot. But carefully, so I don't wear it out. I assume everyone in the world has already read this story, but if you have, now is a good time to read it again! And if you haven't, good news: now is your time to be alive.

The One with the Matchmaking Robots. Pro Tip: Everything Everywhere Is Better with Matchmaking Robots. Nice Work If You Can Get It, by astolat. Mike Donovan/Greg Powell, I, Robot (book).

So. Harriet and Peter set my expectations for het romance. What did it for queer romance? It should have been Jeeves and Wooster. I spent years obsessively collecting everything PG Wodehouse ever wrote, and I read each of his books at least twenty times and giggled helplessly through every reading. But somehow they never tripped the ship circuit in my brain. No. What did that – and this is so stereotypically me I can hardly stand it – was I, Robot.

Specifically, Greg Powell and Mike Donovan. Twelve-year-old me did not understand precisely why she was re-reading the Powell and Donovan stories so obsessively; she just knew she couldn't stop.

But adult me knows why.

The Powell and Donovan stories taught me that fictional queer romance occurs between two people who depend on each other, care about each other, and look after each other, and that there will need to be robots and also me to imagine the kissing part for any kind of consummation to be achieved. So, yeah, thanks, Asimov. You formatted my brain for fic. (And robots. And fic about robots.) In fact, I discovered while writing this rec that one of the things I spent my adult life believing was I, Robot canon is, in fact, actually fic I told myself at the age of 13. Proud of you, teenage me!

Sadly, telling myself fic was for many years the only way to get my fix for this pairing. For mysterious reasons – or, okay, possibly for the entirely understandable reason that it's a book of short stories first published in 1950 – there's not a whole lot of I, Robot fic out there. But what is there comes mostly from Yuletide, and one of those stories was written for me. I love it helplessly.

See, Asimov had many good traits – amazing work ethic, solid scientific knowledge, an entirely reasonable dislike of wide open spaces – but many of his stories are kind of, um. Forever locked in the world of 1950. So I deeply love how this story is so very much an Asimov story – it has the messed-up robots, the frantic problem-solving, and the feel of the canon - but it's also a story with an actual human relationship between actual humans, something Asimov did not always remember to put in his stories. (Fun Asimov fact: at least two of his most human, likable, realistic characters are robots.) And, of course, this story has the kissing that Asimov inexplicably forgot to put in.

Basically, when I read this story ten years ago (holy shit, an actual decade ago), my inner teenager smiled blissfully, finally satisfied. And when I read it now, I feel exactly the same way: all's right with the world. Everything is as I always knew it should be. The ur-ship is manifest at last.

Do you need to know the fandom to read this? Oh my god, so much no. Here's a complete primer: there's these two dudes. They work on robots in remote locations in the solar system. Shit always goes wrong and they always fix it. And they should kiss. There. That's the whole fandom. And this is a before-the-canon story that gives you considerably more background than Asimov ever managed. Go! Read!

The other night, I told this story to my sister, who had somehow never heard it before. She demanded that I write it down. (I sincerely hope she's not planning to use this as some kind of college life advice for my nephew.)

There are three things you need to know to understand this story, provided you are not my sister:

1. I started college at 15.
   
2. I almost immediately got mono and didn't realize it, assuming that I was sleeping 16 hours a day because sleep was the best thing in the world and I'd suddenly gotten really good at it.
   
3. I made most of my bad decisions – like, most of the bad decisions I would ever make, and almost all the ones I could think of – before starting college.

These were not things I had in common with my freshman cohort. Any of them, as far as I could tell. They were all older than I was, they seemed to have all the energy in the world, and they had come to college to make those bad decisions they'd been dreaming of all these years but apparently couldn't quite commit to until they were away from parental backup and support.

( Bad decisions this way. )

I am an extremely lucky Yuletider once again, because this year I got four gifts. (Thank you, wonderful writers!) Three delightful Historical Farm stories:

Wizardry Most Humble & High (1007 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Historical Farm (UK TV), Kate and Cecelia - Caroline Stevermer & Patricia Wrede
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Ruth Goodman, Alex Langlands, Peter Ginn
Additional Tags: Historical Reenactment, Alternate Universe - Magic, Footnotes, Yuletide Treat
Summary:

Fragments of Tudor Monastery Farm: With Magic Edition. Now with extra footnotes and my 'I co-majored in history and at the moment I am Really Into The Tudor Era' feelings. Thank you oh thefourthvine for the opportunity to write this treat - I hope it is enjoyable and non terrible. Happy Yule! Note: This particular magic au is a crossover with a book series but it's not something you need to be familiar with to read this story (there are some little things in here for people who have though)

Marstober (1861 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Historical Farm (UK TV)
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Peter Ginn, Alex Langlands, Ruth Goodman
Additional Tags: Historical Farm RPF in the Future, Not much farming unfortunately, Peter is from Earth, Ruth is from Mars, Alex is from Space, preslash
Summary:

Mars is stripping the suavity from Alex's bones.

Alien Invasion Farm (1041 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Historical Farm (UK TV)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Ruth Goodman, Peter Ginn, Alex Langlands
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction
Summary:

Historian Ruth Goodman and archaeologists Alex Langlands and Peter Ginn go back in time to relive the day-to-day life of a farmer during the alien invasion.

So if you share my love of Ruth Goodman, Peter Ginn, and Alex Langlands being extremely them while farming on Mars or with magic or during the alien invasion that is just around the corner, go! Read.

And if you share my love of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson soulbonding (and how could you not?), let me introduce you to my wonderful fourth gift, which I am entirely sure is documenting what really happened:

No-Look Pass (1138 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Retired Basketball Player RPF, Basketball RPF
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Larry Bird & Earvin "Magic" Johnson
Characters: Larry Bird, Earvin "Magic" Johnson
Additional Tags: Soul Bond, Basketball, Yuletide Treat
Summary:

Blind Pass: Also known as a no-look pass, the blind pass is performed when a player looks in one direction but passes the ball to his target in another direction. Blind passes are risky and infrequently attempted, but when done correctly, can confuse the defense.

- “Basketball Moves: Blind Pass,” Wikipedia.

Dear Writer Person,

We matched! So first know that I am extremely fond of you already, because clearly you are a person of taste and discernment, loving one of these small fandoms as much as I do.

I am, as always, going to provide you with all the details, because that's what I hope to get from my recipient. But if details aren't your thing, please tap out of this letter now. Just know that I really, really cannot handle child or animal harm or death, and I love you for volunteering for one of my tiny fandoms. See you on the 25th!

Or, if you want to know more, read on.

( Me! )

( Historical Farm (UK TV), Ruth Goodman, Peter Ginn, Alex Langlands )

( Retired Basketball Player RPF, Magic Johnson/Larry Bird )

( Schusev State Museum of Architecture Discover the Full Story ad campaign, Any )

Last year, I went to a con in Chicago. On Saturday morning, I took the elevator from my room (fourth floor) to the con suite (second floor). Also on that elevator: a dude taking it to the first floor. As soon as I pressed the button, he said chidingly, "Two floors! Should've walked it." And then he literally, actually tutted at me. "Tut tut tut" went the arbiter of everyone else's body and abilities. Just so I'd know for sure that I'd been bad and been judged for it.

Now. There were a couple of conversations we could have had at this point. I could have told elevator dude the truth: that I have lupus (please please don't make the House joke; you have no idea how many times I've heard the House joke, and I promise you that sometimes it is in fact lupus), so I keep an eye on my energy and pain levels and try to save some of whatever ability I have for later. That I'm especially careful to do that when I'm at an event or traveling, because I don't want to be in my room exhausted or in pain when a thing I really wanted to do is happening two floors away, and I really don't want to be in pain and out of energy while traveling in modern American airports (apparent motto: "If you can't stand for four hours and run two miles full-tilt while carrying two weeks' supplies, lol no go fuck yourself"). So I'm careful. I don't push it. In the mornings, I might take the elevator, which the hotel did, after all, install for people to use.

I could also have told elevator dude to go fuck himself, which is the other honest conversation we could have had at that point. It is seriously none of his business whether I use the stairs, or the elevator, or rappel down the outside of the building, or maybe just dissolve into primordial ooze and drip down the walls.

But, you know, confrontation is another energy burner. I wanted to save my energy for having fun with my friends, the people I came to see. So I said something non-committal. Elevator dude wasn't done, though. "You should always find the stairs, first thing when you check into a hotel," this dude who was maybe ten years older than me and in no way my father said. "Did you know you're not allowed to use the elevator during a fire? Whenever you check into a hotel, you should think: what if there's a fire?"

Indeed, elevator dude. What if? What if, in my second decade of staying alone in hotels, you had not come along to tell me how to do it? I might have done it wrong, and then I would surely have burned to death in a fiery inferno, just as I have at least once a year throughout my adulthood, despite my mother giving me pretty much exactly those instructions back when I was seven and actually needed them.

Fortunately, at that point, we arrived at the second floor. I headed to the con suite and settled in. Some minutes later, I mentioned the mansplainer in the elevator and his profound concern for my well-being in case of fire. I didn't complain about the "should've walked" comment, largely because I didn't expect any support for it; I know an apparently able-bodied (and fat!) woman taking the elevator is cause for judgment in this world. (In some places, going by the general response, it's borderline actionable.) And most people at that particular table didn't know the details of my medical status, since in general, when given the choice between talking with my friends about lupus or talking with them about people banging, or being unicorn space eagles, or both, I tend to choose the pointy space birds and their sexytimes.

"Why would anyone say that to you?" one of the women at the table asked, in that mystified dudes-why-are-you? tone. "How does that even come up?"

So I explained about how we got on the topic of elevators. As soon as I said, "He said I should've taken the stairs," ten women around the table looked up and angry cat hissed in unison. It was like they'd rehearsed it for weeks after months of watching angry cats and studying their motivations. Truly a beautiful moment.

From this experience I learned some things:

1. Support matters. Those women and their instinctive and audible anger didn't just make me feel better; they actually changed the way I remember the event. They became what was important about it rather than elevator dude. His judgment has become small and insignificant to me, and in fact I smile when I think about him, because he's inextricably linked to that moment ten people became Team Angry Cat for me.
   
   
2. A lot of times, I don't reach for support because I don't expect it. I don't talk about the random elevator dude type aggravations of life, because I assume there's a good chance most people will side with the elevator dudes of the world. It's worth it to find the places where that isn't true. And it's worth it to reach for support when I can.
   
   
3. I need to look for more chances to be on other people's Team Angry Cat. I don't need to know about that person's life or judge their worthiness; if they've experienced harassment or microaggressions, I'm gonna try to support them.
   
   
4. I'd pay significant money for a YouTube series that was just ten women angry cat hissing at ability enforcers and mansplainers and dudes shouting "smile, baby!" at random ladies and so on.

Oh, yeah, and to the ten members of that particular Team Angry Cat: thank you. You're the best, and I will hiss for you anytime.

You guys YOU GUYS I have been the recipient of a Yuletide miracle! Let me tell you my awesome Yuletide tale.

Okay, so some months ago I started playing 80 Days, the amazing interactive fiction game (on iOs and Android, not that I am suggesting you go download and play it immediately, except of course I totally am), and it was great. So great. So so so great.

I tried to convince all my friends to play it, as is the custom of my people. Most of them were like, "Well, uh, it sounds…interesting. I will definitely play it. Sometime." But that's mostly what happens when you try to persuade people to try the things you love, so I wasn't downcast. I just waited like a sea lion (although I hope I was slightly less annoying), ready to casually insert 80 Days into any conversation that seemed even marginally relevant. (I was probably not actually less annoying.)

One of the people I thought would love it immensely was norah. I've known her since I was just getting into fandom, and she is my real-life and fandom BFF, and I know her tastes, just as she knows mine. But, sadly, she did not bite on my delightful hook, baited with inclusive steampunk and robots and joy.

Well, she's very busy. Later, I figured. Someday I'd persuade her. I vowed not to give up. (Being friends with me is awesome, folks.)

A couple of months later, I requested 80 Days for Yuletide. And I got it, and it was amazing. I think I got two paragraphs in before I said to Best Beloved, "Wow. This is really good." Halfway through, I corrected myself: "This is really, really, really good. This is great." It was. Also it seemed tailored for me, well beyond Yuletide typical, as I noted in my incoherent and flailing comment to my Mystery Author.

There was much Yuletide joy in my heart.

And then. And then. Today, at 4:25, I got a text from Norah. She said, essentially, "Hey so stories are revealed and GUESS WHAT I WROTE YOURS."

I texted back, entirely coherently, "UM OMG WHAAAAAAAAT EEEEEEEEEEEEEE!" (Text with me and get all the extra letters, free of charge!)

See, Norah and I exchange assignment emails every year, and support each other through Yuletide, and generally are all up in each other's Yuletide-y business. (One year we ended up co-writing both our assignments.) So I knew she was writing Moby Dick this year. I knew her recipient and everything! Her recipient wasn't me!

Except I did not know. She got a fake assignment from the Yuletide mods so she could conceal her true one. And then she spent two months pretend-complaining to me about her pretend assignment while actually writing her real assignment. And -- seriously -- sending said real assignment TO MY WIFE.

About two months ago, my wife apparently got a phone call at work from Norah. ("At first I thought someone had died," BB told me today.) Norah said, "Hey, I have TFV as my Yuletide assignment, so can you alpha-read?"

BB said, "I don't keep secrets from her! I'm really bad at keeping secrets from her! But -- okay, yes, I will. I will do my best." AND SHE DID. For two months, as she read and my actual Yuletide gift and cheered on my actual Yuletide writer, she gamely acted like she had no idea who was assigned to me or what I would be getting. (She even emailed Norah a play-by-play of me reading the story for the first time. Recruit your recipient's spouse(s) and profit, Yuletiders.)

Tl;dr: TWO OF MY MOST FAVORITE PEOPLE IN THE WORLD CONSPIRED TO MAKE ME THE PERFECT YULETIDE GIFT AND I AM SO HAPPY.

It's a great story. I mean, it's lesbian robot airship pirates, which is, honestly, basically everything I look for in fiction and also would be my entire bucket list if I had one. (So far I've only managed the lesbian part, but look out, airships. I'm coming for you.) And now, every time I read it, in addition to reveling in the gorgeous story, I'm going to remember that I am loved, and by amazing, talented, kind, and generous people.

Truly, it is a Yuletide miracle, wrapped in secrecy, with a sweet and chewy lesbian robot pirate center.

My heart grew three sizes today.

Beside me singing in the Wilderness (15998 words) by norah
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 80 Days (Video Game 2014)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Characters: Behiye bint Kasim, Bulbul, Manussiha
Additional Tags: Steampunk, Robot Harm, Character of Color, Action/Adventure, Misses Clause Challenge, Pirates
Summary:

The adventures of Behiye bint Kasim, Captain of the pirate ship Canavar, and her engineer and companion Bulbul.

Dear Writer Person,

We matched! So basically know that I am extremely fond of you already, because clearly you are a person of taste and discernment, loving one of these small fandoms as much as I do.

I am, as always, going to provide you with all the details, because that's what I always hope to get from my recipient. But if that's not you, please tap out of this letter now. Just know that I really, really cannot handle child or animal harm or death, and I love you for volunteering for one of my tiny fandoms. See you on the 25th!

Or, if you want to know more, read on.

( Me! )

( 80 Days, Manussiha )

( Retired Basketball Player RPF, Magic Johnson/Larry Bird )

( Tour of the Merrimack -- R. M. Meluch, Augustus/John Farragut )

A long time ago, I had a lot to say in rants about how people were DOING IT WRONG and should NOT WRITE THIS WAY but rather THIS OTHER WAY. (And, if I'm gonna be honest, those rants are all still there, just waiting for me to type them. Let me tell you about the Should You Use the Pluperfect? flowchart I made the other day. Or not, because honestly, TFV, nobody wants to hear that.) I was all, "People! Write better!"

Sorry, past me -- you were wrong. What I should have been saying was, "People! Write more! (Even if it's really bad!)"

Because, yes, I still think the word sensitized needs to be left to lie fallow for a decade. Where it can maybe cavort with its friend, lave. I still sometimes want to ban thesauruses. I still feel like maybe those weeping cocks should see a doctor, or perhaps a therapist.

But these days, I also think we're lucky to have those stories. I probably won't be reading them, but I'm happy they exist, for three reasons.

Writing is good. People are writing! For fun! Good news! Seriously, if I had spent more time writing down the hideously painful Mary Sue fan fiction I dreamed up when I was a wee teen, I might have spent less time on, you know, drugs and sucking the cocks of random strangers without protection. I'm always happy to see someone making better choices than I made.

Maybe you're now saying, "Okay, fine, but do they have to post those Mary Sue stories where I can see them?" If so, you're being a dick. Cut it out. The Archive of Our Own is not the Archive of Just What You Want to Read. It's the Archive of Fanworks. Is it a fanwork? Then it belongs there! And if you're incapable of scrolling past something, it's not that the Mary Sue writers are in the wrong place, it's that you are. (Also, I'm sorry, but I don't know where would be the right place for you. Everywhere is going to have stuff you don't like, because tastes are individual and all that. Maybe the internet just isn't for you.)

Crap is important. Sturgeon's law is right, but it misses the point. Ninety percent of everything has to be shit. That's how you get the 10% that's good.

Your favorite writers, fan fiction, published fiction, published fan fiction, whatever -- they didn't start out writing that way. There was a time when they wrote unspeakably awful crap. Writing unspeakably awful crap is how you learn to write only moderately awful crap, and then eventually maybe decent stuff, and then, if you're lucky, actually good things. There are not two classes of people, those who are good writers and those who are bad writers, so that all you have to do to have only great stuff is scare away all the bad writers. There are people who used to write bad stuff, and there are people who are currently writing bad stuff, and there's a lot of crossover between the two. Some of the second category will one day be the first category. (Also, tomorrow some of the first category will move back to the second. No one hits it out of ballpark every time.) If you want to read new good stuff tomorrow, encourage the people writing bad stuff today. (And also maybe help them get betas. Betas are great.)

And, no, those people don't have to hide their work away until it gets better. They can share it with anyone who wants to read it. If they want to post it, they should. Wanting to is reason enough. (Although if you want another reason -- posting is how community happens. Which is how things like betas happen. People who share their work get better faster.)

Crap is a sign of life. New bad stories are a sign that this genre -- fan fiction, the genre I adore the most - is alive and well. Bad stories mean new people are trying to write in it, and people are trying to do new things with it, and maybe new people are joining the audience, too. When only the best and most popular are writing in a genre, it's on its deathbed. (See: Westerns and Louis L'Amour.) I want this genre to be here forever, because I want to read it forever. So I'm happy that teenagers are posting Mary Sue stories to the Archive of Our Own.

Does that mean you have to be happy? Nope. I can't make you do anything. (I can think you're wrong, but hey, being wrong on the internet is a time-honored tradition among our people.) But when you start making fun of a writer and bullying her in the comments of her story, simply because she's writing something you think is bad and embarrassing, well, that's when I say: shut the fuck up or get the fuck out. Because she's not a problem. She's just doing what we're all doing -- having fun, playing with words, throwing something out there on the internet to see if other people like it.

But you. You're trying to stop someone from having fun. You're trying to shame people into not writing anymore. And that, folks -- that is the definition of shitty behavior. (Mary Sue fantasies, on the other hand, are just the definition of human behavior.) It's bad for people, it's bad for the future, and it's bad for the genre. So you're a problem.

Please go away, problems, and let all of us write out our ids out in peace.

(And, yes, this was triggered by one specific story and some of the responses it's getting on the AO3. But it applies to all of them, all the fan fiction we don't like out there. Okay, I'm done.)

This story was written for pentapus's Treehouse Reversebang challenge - she drew artwork for me, and I wrote a story inspired by it.

The unicorn came as a mild surprise. The length - the story was supposed to be a thousand words long - came as a more major one, and I'd like to thank pentapus for being patient as I battled my way to the end of this.

This was an incredible challenge, delightful to do, and even if you don't read the story, you should at least visit to see the artwork, which I have mentally titled "Sidney Crosby Confronts an Unimpressed Unicorn."

Highway Unicorn (20133 words) by thefourthvine, pentapus
Chapters: 4/4
Fandom: Hockey RPF
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Sidney Crosby/Evgeni Malkin
Additional Tags: Urban Fantasy, Treehouse Reversebang
Summary:

He saw the horn poking out from the pony's head, golden and straight and somehow delicate-looking despite the empty tuna can hanging off of it. The unicorn horn. "The fuck," Sidney said out loud, his eye skipping from the horn over the greyish-white body to the graceful gold-toned hooves.

Over on Twitter, people had questions about hockery RPF fandom folks, so we put together a poll. (When in doubt, TICKYBOXES. That is my motto.) If you've read/watched/listened to hockey RPF fanworks, please come take the poll! (And if you know anyone who's in the fandom, please tell them about it, too. Some data good, more data better.)

SO. Let us say there is a person who lives in Colorado who really really wants to learn to vid. (This person is not me. I do not live in Colorado.) How - how does this person go about this? Are there Colorado-based vidders who can mentor? Someone who does email or chat support for newbies? Online resources that are helpful? What takes a person from Not Vidding to Vidding? (I really want her to learn to vid because, um, she's going to make a vid I want to see. Look, a lot of fandom is enlightened self-interest, okay?)

All suggestions welcome!

Hey, does anyone remember the greatest Nike commercial ever made? It turns out there's more of it! Like, a whole documentary of it! Except it's set in the past, not the future, and the dudes are some guys named Magic Johnson and Larry Bird.

Or, to put it another way - I have witnessed both cinematic greatness and an actual soulbonding story in real life. And it was called:

Magic & Bird: A Courtship of Rivals

Okay, so the title should already suggest that we are in for something incredibly special here. How often do legitimate sports documentary people select the word "courtship" for the titles of their works? NOT OFTEN is my guess, but I think the discussion around the table immediately after viewing the rough cut went something like this:

Marketer: How 'bout we call it Magic & Bird: A Love Story?
Producer: Accurate, but it lacks punch.
Director: I kind of want a basketball reference in the title.
Marketer: You mean a basketball reference besides the names of Magic Johnson and Larry Bird? You don't think that's already kind of enough?
Director: Well, basketball is one of the major elements of this story.
Marketer: ...I guess.
Producer: I know! Magic & Bird: A Basketball Love Story!
Marketer, cringing: That's a great option, but let's keep looking.
Associate: Hey, how about Magic & Bird: A Courtship of Rivals? See, it's got COURT right in the name, and also it doesn't run the risk of getting shelved in YA fiction.
Director, wild-eyed and feverish: Brilliant. Brilliant. God, that's everything I wanted. It expresses the totality of it, the substance, the quintessence, if you will...
[Awkward pause while no one looks at the director.]
Marketer: So, the next time we make one of these, it's definitely not going to be about two dudes in love, right?
Producer: Absolutely not. Next up is some weird hockey thing involving the Blackhawks.

I really can't see any other way this could have gone; I thought, before I watched it, that the title was over the top, but if anything it was understated.

And know this: it was not my intention to livetweet my viewing of this thing, but I was kind of overcome. Many times. The first time during the opening credits, which was when Magic and Bird began talking about their overpowering love. And I entered some kind of state for the entire last half-hour. I lost control of my ability to punctuate, write in lower case, and, in some cases, breathe. (If you want to view my total collapse, I storified my tweets, with notes. This contains spoilers, although not any spoilers beyond "And really bad stuff happened, but LOVE TRIUMPHED," which is basically a spoiler for like 40% of fiction. And also this totally true documentary.)

If you don't want to read all the tweets, though, I can give you the gist with just two of them. Near the beginning, I said:

Hey did you know Larry Bird and Magic Johnson soulbonded at Worlds? Because I think this documentary just told me they soulbonded at Worlds.

The reason I tweeted this is that LARRY BIRD AND MAGIC JOHNSON SOULBONDED AT WORLDS. (And then Larry Bird rejected his bondmate, that dick. Though the bond endures! He comes through in the end!) The documentary essentially comes right out and says so. Like, I turned to Best Beloved and said, "I've read this story. It was Patrick Kane/Jonathan Toews, but it was this exact story."

And then, towards the end, I tweeted this direct quote from the actual documentary, which is a factual type thing:

“Decades removed from the height of their rivalry, their bond endures. Two impossibly different men with a connection only they can fully grasp.”

I mean, this isn't just a love story. It's also about the rise of the NBA, and about race relations in the US, and obviously about HIV and AIDS. And it's good and informative on all those topics. But also it's about these two dudes, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird, who were awesome at basketball. And, oh yeah, totally soulbonded.

No matter how much I talk about this, I can't do it justice, because you have to see it to believe. Even if you don't like sports. Even if you have no idea who Magic Johnson and Larry Bird are. Even if you are a member of an alien race or an NSA employee monitoring this for exceptionally improbable national security reasons. Watch this documentary. It will astound you. (And my thanks to all the people who insisted I see this. It was even more than you promised it would be. SO MUCH MORE.)

Fastening One Heart to Every Falling Thing (51519 words) by thefourthvine
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Hockey RPF
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Sidney Crosby/Evgeni Malkin, Evgeni Malkin/Alexander Ovechkin
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Soulbond, Trope Subversion/Inversion
Summary:

Geno can't. Sidney won't.