Keep Hoping Machine Running

Dear Yuletide 2025 Author

Mon, 13 Oct 2025 18:30:58 GMT

Dear Yuletide 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!

(And if you're not my writer, thank you for looking at my letter! I am entirely open to treats of any length.)

( Likes/DNWs and General Stuff )

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

( blink-182 )

( Blue Prince, Worldbuildling, Simon P. Jones )

( Nomads, Eileen Flax, Veronique Pommier )

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Dear Yuletide Writer 2024

Sun, 06 Oct 2024 03:11:20 GMT

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 )

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Earthling Update!

Thu, 26 Sep 2024 22:36:23 GMT

The earthling is 16, unbelievably enough. And the earthling is also she/her! This has been true for a while, but she's now comfortable letting all her internet aunties and uncles and nuncles and auncles know. So please update your pronoun database! And if you know her deadname, please text or email or DM me on Bluesky for her real name; she'd rather you think of her only by that from now on.

This is a post where you can leave congratulations for her if you want to! (Also suggestions on high femme looks. Neither of the earthling's parents are femme enough for her, sad to say.)

(This post will likely be access locked in a few days.)

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Dear Yuletide Writer 2023

Fri, 13 Oct 2023 19:30:03 GMT

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 )

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A Tabula Rasa Meets Buffy the Vampire Slayer

Sun, 28 May 2023 04:07:14 GMT

Recently, the earthling’s gaming group got invited to a game using a system called Monster of the Week. He accepted because he loves tabletop RPGs, but there was a tiny problem: he didn’t know what a monster of the week was. He has no memory of watching a show like that, because the last one he saw was Doctor Who when he was like six. (Recent earthling faves: Dimension 20, The Good Place, Are You Being Served? These are not exactly monster of the week shows, unless capitalism, moral philosophy, and customers can be considered monsters. And having typed that out, I realize there’s an argument to be made there. But they aren’t classic monsters, anyway.)

The description of Monster of the Week, demonstrating how au courant the game designers are, namechecks Supernatural, X-Files, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, all shows that, to the earthling’s gaming group, exist in distant prehistory with the dinosaurs and the Hittites and poodle skirts.

Our parental duty was clear: we had to educate this child. And that is why we sat down with some DVDs to show Buffy to someone who was born well after the last episode of Angel aired, someone who knows nothing about its history or fandom, someone who has never watched a TV show that didn’t autoplay the next episode three seconds into the closing credits. I was not a tabula rasa when I first watched Buffy, and neither was Best Beloved. We had no idea what to expect.

( We figured he probably wouldn’t like it much. Spoiler: he did. )

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Yuletide Dear Author Letter 2022

Thu, 13 Oct 2022 19:31:30 GMT

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 )

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You Can Absolutely Remake Reality, Philip Roth. It's Called Fan Fiction.

Fri, 04 Mar 2022 22:59:39 GMT

This was initially going to be a set of small fandoms, and then I looked at my bookmarks and went: wow, that is SURE a lot of random RPF you read last fall for whatever reason. Maybe do that? And I am throwing in some fandom explanations, because I don't expect every person who reads this to be an avid fan of, you know. The YouTube show Just Puddings. For example.

Like That Ring I Never Won, by nahco3. Men’s Basketball RPF, Kevin Durant/Russell Westbrook.

Let me fill you in on the big drama here. Kevin and Russell were the core of the OKC Thunder for years, and they were this weird duo that shouldn’t have worked but somehow did. (Russell is all fashion and style and wild, on and off the court. KD (his nickname, which I sometimes enjoy calling him because due to overexposure to Canadians, I think for a second about Kraft Dinner, a thing he would never, ever eat) is pure control, all about discipline.) They were close! They loved each other! They were stars! But they never quite had the right team behind them to get a championship. Then Kevin’s contract was up, and the question was -- would he re-sign with OKC to stay with Russell?

Friends, he did not. He went to go win championships with the Golden State Warriors and left Russell alone and losing in OKC. Russell, when it was his turn to move on, chose the Houston Rockets. (There wasn’t room for him on the Warriors anyway.) And my heart broke, just a tiny bit. Because they were so great together and it was very sad.

So what this is is fix-it fic for real life. I love it because it’s got all the pining and all the yearning and also it has James Harden, Meddlesome Best Friend, living his best life by absolutely destroying Kevin Durant’s. Plus, Russell Westbrook gets to be happy, which is all I really want from this pairing. (No, that’s a lie. I want them both to be happy. Together. Which this fic delivers.)

I’m Gonna Keep You in Love with Me (for a While), by beethechange. Buzzfeed: Unsolved, Ryan Bergara/Shane Madej.

The deal here is that Ryan and Shane had a successful Buzzfeed show in which, uh, Ryan told Shane ghost stories and then they explored various “haunted” locations. (No hauntings were ever observed.) Ryan is the big-eyed believer in all things paranormal, and also, uh, all things. Shane is the mostly skeptic trying and failing, because it’s literally impossible, to convince Ryan that there are simpler explanations than “a goat demon is infesting this bridge.” (Don’t ask.)

No, really. This whole show concept is way more entertaining than it sounds, mostly because Ryan absolutely loses it any time they’re on location, so you have Shane trying to sleep in a bed in a haunted hotel and Ryan next to him, truly and perfectly high on fear, unable to blink or think. But it’s also entertaining because of their dynamic, because they fuck with each other and are good friends and have A+ banter. (You may have seen them in such notable gifs and memes as “hey there, demons, it’s me, ya boi” and “I’ve connected the dots.” Seriously good banter.)

So, yeah, the key unsolved question of the canon is obviously “what if they woke up married?” and that is something beethechange asks and answers extremely well in this fic. It has everything you want from a woke up married fic: panic, unfortunate Instagram posts, awkward conversations with friends and coworkers, awkward bed-sharing, and, of course, true love forever (eventually). And, given that we’re talking about Ryan and Shane here, also truly amazing banter. It is what I want! All the time! Honestly just the best.

Learn to Beg and Learn to Say Please, by likecharity. British Comedy RPF, Ed Gamble/James Acaster.

These are two British comedians who have a podcast together about food, where James is the magic genie server (the word “server” is used advisedly here; James gives off a Certain Vibe, by which I mean “he toured the country with a show that involved him kneeling for the first chunk of it, because I guess he’s just more comfortable on his knees?”) and Ed is the nominal normal adult (he is in fact barely managing the “adult” half of that phrase), and their guests order their perfect meal. (Which is then described at length, so it can either be an absolute sensory delight, or it can be Joe Thomas telling the world’s longest story about how he failed to roast a lamb and it was gross, because Joe Thomas is Not Like the Other Large-Eyed Waifs and may not even be human.)

They -- we’re back to James and Ed now -- also have a YouTube show together called Just Puddings, where Ed, a type one diabetic, tells James, a confirmed sugar lover, what desserts to eat for him. Yes, that’s how they phrase it. I have to think that Ed, at least, is fully aware of how that sounds, but he definitely does not give a fuck. And James certainly likes being told what to do and what to eat! Which is just a normal thing that everyone enjoys! Right?

So clearly there was an identified need to investigate this whole situation. Like. Someone had to get to the bottom (and also the top) of it all. And likecharity took on that burden and did a frankly amazing job. This is essentially that Just Puddings dynamic, but taken one step further, in that Ed tells James what to eat. And then he gives him some other orders. And it’s pretty great. The end!

The Real Thing, by sevenfists. Men’s Hockey RPF, Evgeni Malkin/Sidney Crosby.

Look, I had to.

A quick background for people who didn’t get subjected to nine million drafts of my Sid/Geno stories (or to those who did but have blissfully had the whole thing wiped from their memories): Sid and Geno play for a hockey team called the Penguins! They are different people who work together amazingly well! Sid’s very controlled and incredibly superstitious, which actually makes him sound like a mashup of Kevin Durant and Ryan Bergara, but that is a horrible thought and I am never going to think it again. (Sorry to inflict it on you, but if I go back to delete it, I might read it, and that would mean I have a permanent -1 on my saves against psychic damage.) Anyway, Sid was predicted to be a superstar from childhood, raised to be a superstar from childhood, and became, you guessed it, a hockey superstar. Meanwhile, Geno, also a hockey superstar, is more relaxed, more funny, and more freewheeling, and also you do get the sense that he is an actual human when he talks. (Sidney had a personality on/off switch installed by Hockey Canada, as required by Canadian law.) Together, they work well when they shouldn’t.

But this fic, though. This is Sid and Geno not working well together off the ice (at first)! Which I deeply enjoy. And also it has the greatest, most horrifying central concept: you can be visited by your past self. And the thing is, uh. I would honestly rather have oral surgery than spend any time with teenaged me. (Although she’d probably be pretty happy to know that life has worked out well for me so far, something she absolutely didn’t expect.) There are just some mirrors we should not have to look into, basically. But in this one, Sid has to. And Geno has to deal with two Sids, which is more than anyone should have to, especially when one of them has decided to go full jailbait sexpot.

I tell you what, though: younger Sid is an absolute brat in this, and I’m so happy for him every time I read it. Go live your best life, young Sid! Make your own future self’s life harder! It’s for the best! Also it’s fun.

So: angst, two Sids, time travel fuckery -- I genuinely don’t know what else you could possibly want. I definitely do not want more than this. (Not true. I will take a hundred more things exactly like this, thanks.)

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[FIHL] IT: If We Can Live Through This, We Can Do Anything

Mon, 21 Feb 2022 06:42:24 GMT

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 )

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Yuletide Dear Author Letter

Thu, 14 Oct 2021 16:12:11 GMT

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 )

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

( Burning Kingdoms -- Tasha Suri, Worldbuilding (Burning Kingdoms) )

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

( Moneyball, Billy Beane, Peter Brand )

( Nomads, Eileen Flax, Veronique Pommier )

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The Library Job

Fri, 04 Jun 2021 21:37:38 GMT

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.)

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Testing: A History

Sun, 28 Feb 2021 04:58:55 GMT

When I was in fourth grade, my teacher stood in front of the class one day and introduced a Special Teacher. “She’s going to show you her big book of words,” our teacher said. “And you’re going to read them. It’s important to do your best.”

One by one, kids were called to the back of the classroom. They spent ten or fifteen minutes back there and returned to their desks. It seemed like no big deal, but I was still eager for my turn. A big book of words! To me that seemed like by far the most exciting thing that had happened since the day of the Worst Substitute Teacher, the one who showed us that, indeed, a teacher can just walk out in the middle of a day and never return, and there will be drama when he does.

Eventually, it was my turn. I inspected the setup with interest as the special teacher explained the process. The book of words was designed to stand up on its own, with the ring binding facing up, and the teacher said she would flip pages over so I could read the word on the page facing me. I prepared to Do My Best. She flipped the first page over.

The page was entirely blank except for one giant word: CAT. I looked at the word and tried to figure out what I could possibly be expected to do with it. I could not imagine any combination of “doing my best” and “just the word ‘cat’ by itself on the page” that made sense. I hesitated. Anagram? Hidden word? What was going on with this test?

“Can you tell me what word that is?” the teacher said, in a very gentle, sweet, encouraging tone. “Can you sound it out, maybe?”

“It just says cat,” I said helplessly.

“Good!” the teacher said, and flipped the page. I decided maybe there wasn’t a trick here.

We progressed to multiple words on the page. Then many words on the page. The teacher stopped saying “good!” after each word. She started having me skip words. A short time after that, she began making little huffy noises after I read the words to her. These seemed like potentially unhappy sounds, but she was still giving me new pages, and I knew I was reading them correctly, so I just kept on. I was Doing My Best!

The teacher began having me read just one randomly-chosen word per page. I continued to Do My Best.

Finally, the teacher looked at me over the top of the ring binder. “Have you taken this test before?” she said.

In the classroom, every other kid was packing up to go home.

“No,” I said. I was not very into this conversation thing; I just wanted to get back to the book of words.

She tapped her fingers on the desk. “Did someone give you words to memorize for this test?”

“No,” I said again.

She studied me for a minute as my classmates filed out the door. Then she said, “Try THIS,” and flipped to the very last page in the book.

Now, I need to explain here that my parents had a “read whatever you want and on your own head be it” policy with me, largely because it was extremely challenging to keep me in books (or, for that matter, away from books). Also, they had a collection of Erma Bombeck books that I was very into at that point. And one of my favorite sections of one of those books was about Bombeck’s attempts to provide sex education for her children via fish tanks. I had read it many times, and I had asked about the word in it that I didn’t know, and my father had helped me look it up in our giant unabridged dictionary.

So when the teacher told me to read a specific word on that last page, yes, I am sure there were ones that I didn’t know there, but the one she picked out, I read confidently. “Enceinte,” I said carefully, closing my eyes because the word was said nothing like it was spelled.

The teacher looked at me flatly. “There is no way you know that word,” she said.

“It means the wall of a fort or the inside part of a fort,” I told her, exactly as my father had told me, “but it used to be a euphemism for being pregnant.” (I knew all about euphemisms by that age, which is what happens when you have a father with a rich, varied vocabulary and zero interest in self-censorship. I also knew about, for example, bowdlerizing, which my father had explained to me several years before, along with the editorial comment that it was “fucking bullshit.”)

The special teacher said, in a very different tone than she previously had, “Good.” Then she slammed her book of words shut, picked it up, and stalked over to our teacher. “I am going to have to come back tomorrow,” she snarled. “Because SOMEONE took FOREVER because she had to be a SMARTY PANTS.” I was not great at people or feelings, but I sensed that, just possibly, the special teacher was mad at me.

My teacher looked over at me, now packing up my things, and sighed ruefully. “She’s one of our problems,” she said.

And so I learned two very important lessons:

They tell you to do your best on tests, but they don’t mean it.
I was a Problem. (I already kind of knew this – there was a lot of evidence piling up – but this was the first time I had ever heard the word for it.)

( The Problems -- and the tests -- had only just begun. )

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Dear Yuletide Writer 2020

Thu, 15 Oct 2020 03:26:38 GMT

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) )

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A Testing Experience

Sun, 27 Sep 2020 03:51:55 GMT

My mother is an experimental psychologist, and there are many delightful effects of being the child of an experimental psychologist. One of them, at least in my family, was an absolute obsession with analytical instruments. You know those tests where you circle or bubble in A, B, C, or D, and at some point it tells you if you’re a psychopath? Those. My sister and I grew up so into those.

Like, you know the people who subscribe to Playboy for the articles? I am totally convinced they exist, because my sister, Laura, subscribed to Cosmo for the tests – those quizzes that told you your interior decorating style or if you were too much of a real human to ever earn the love of a man. We spent so much time taking those quizzes and then ripping them apart, because, after all, they were not well-designed. (Note: Cosmo is a very useful thing to have around the house if you’re raising daughters. I remember my dad bringing in my sister’s latest issue, which had a cover story about Top Ten Mistakes to Avoid When Your Husband Comes Home from Being Important or whatever, and he asked, as he handed it to his quiz-seeking daughters, “You notice how there’s never any articles like that in men’s magazines? Why do you think that is?” I tell you what: that settled in my ten-year-old mind like lead, and I thought about it for the next decade. It’s probably why I’m a lesbian. Thanks, Daddy!)

But my point is: we were pros. We took a lot of actual normed, validated tests, too – I, in particular, spent a solid chunk of my life bubbling in those tests. (I had weeks of testing every damn school year. I was a Problem, and my schools’ solution – one of them, anyway – was “let’s just give her every single test we can find and hope one of them tells us what to do with her.” I would like to say in my defense, given everything that went down with those tests, that if you put someone through that much testing, you absolutely deserve everything she does to and with them.) We also watched my mother design surveys, and helped her do data entry and statistical analysis on them, and were test subjects in basically every pilot and small-scale study that went on in her lab. (Science tip: You don’t need IRB approval if your subjects are all relatives of the experimenters!)

We were steeped in the assessment lore, is what I’m saying here.

So one day, the summer before I started college, Laura and I were driving somewhere, and we passed a sign that was up every single day outside a strip mall. FREE PSYCHOLOGICAL TEST, it read. I wondered about it every time I passed, yearning to see this mystery test. But this time, Laura turned to me. “Let’s take it!” she said, excitedly.

I am not normally spontaneous about anything, but: I had been wondering about this for years. And it was a free psychological test! How could I say no?

The place offering the test was, of course, a Scientology – office? Church? Branch? I am not sure what to call it. We walked in, and they lit up (and I am aware now that that’s because we were their shot to not have whatever it is that happens to Scientologists who do not convert people every second happen to them). And then they saw me, and realized they had a problem.

“How old are you?” the dude behind the counter asked.

“Fifteen,” I said.

He was crestfallen. “Is that your mom?” he tried next.

“I’m her SISTER,” Laura said, extremely annoyed.

“Are you over 18?”

“Yes,” she said.

After some discussion between the Scientology people present, they agreed they could test me, as long as we got permission over the phone from a parent. Laura could act as a sort of pretend parent or guardian. That would be extremely legal and aboveboard!

So I called our father at work and explained where we were and what I wanted to do.

There was a pause. I assume my father was considering his options. On the one hand, his daughters were apparently attempting to join a cult, and that was not good news. On the other hand, telling me, in particular, that I was not allowed to take the test would be the one way to guarantee I did in fact become a Scientologist, because I was a teenager and also notoriously contrary. In the end, he decided to trust my unwillingness to agree with any authority ever about anything. All he said was, “Do not sign anything. If you promise me that, you can take the test.”

I promised, and he gave verbal permission for me to take the test to the Scientology people, even though for all they knew he was a random dude at a McDonald’s pretending to be our father.

Laura and I were escorted into separate tiny windowless rooms with desks and strangers sitting behind them, and this all seems very, very sketchy now, but at the time I was perfectly fine with it. I was taking a psychological test in a strip mall across from the place where my mother sometimes purchased fudge and fruitcake. I was in my comfort zone. What bad thing could happen? (Aside from my mother suddenly materializing and forcing me to try fruitcake, which she still insists I will learn to like someday.)

As I took the test, and automatically tallied the questions and mentally sorted them into different scales, I noticed problems. Like. This was just not a well-designed instrument. In fact, I realized as I reached through the middle portion of the test, it was almost like it was designed to yield biased results.

Weird.

Also, certain key scales, like the validation scale, seemed to be entirely lacking.

Something was not right about this psychological test.

I should note that at this point, in her separate tiny room, Laura was coming to exactly the same conclusion. (I mean, of course she was. We had inadvertently spent our lives training for this moment. But the Scientology people did not know that.)

So I finished, and the scoring occurred, and then I got my results, which – mysteriously – did not agree with ANY other test I had taken, and keep in mind that at fifteen I had taken basically all of them. As I expected given the construction of the test, the results indicated that I was a person with many, many problems, and that was unquestionably true, but I did not see how you could take that test and not get that result, one way or the other.

I was even more concerned. I definitely needed to explain to these folks why they should not use this test anymore, especially with so many superior ones on the market.

After the presentation about my many flaws that I definitely needed so much help to fix, the test-giver asked me what I thought.

“I think something is wrong with your test,” I told him.

He smiled at me patronizingly and said something about, I think, the truth being hard to hear.

“No, really,” I said, and proceeded to explain, in unfortunate detail, all the things I thought were wrong, including the weird Barnum Effect phrasing of the results, as well as the many flaws in the test itself.

I did not know it at the time, but off in her own room, Laura was doing that, too, but with the full force of her psychology degree behind her analysis.

After I finished my explanation, my test dude left, shutting the door firmly behind him. I am not sure what he did, but I assume it involved conferring with Laura’s test-giver, because when he came back, he was pissed off. And I realize now that this whole thing sounds scary, a teenaged girl locked in a soundproof room with a furious religious extremist, and probably it was intended to scare me, but I was so very solidly in a familiar place: I had taken a test, and now the testing psychologist (note: I am very sure he was not a real testing psychologist) was mad at me. This happened to me every year!

I knew exactly what to do, and tuned out while he lectured me and got it out of his system. I didn’t hear a word he said to me beyond “conspiracy,” which was the second word out of his mouth. (He said “conspiracy” because he thought we’d planned this, and were a team of evil sisters out to … honestly, I’m not sure. I cannot imagine what steps go from “Take poorly-designed psychological test” to “Defeat Scientology.” But they thought we had a whole scheme going on.)

After a while he wound down. He took my picture, and told me I was not allowed to come back on any Scientology premises ever again, and I was not downcast. They didn’t even have good tests, after all.

I assume Laura had roughly the same experience with the same terrible consequence of Total Scientology Ban, although she actually listened to the angry speech and possibly also got angry herself, because she likes arguing a whole lot more than I do. Anyway, she eventually collected me and we departed, fully accepting that we were not cut out to be Scientologists.

“That was a really bad test,” Laura said as we got into the car.

“I know!” I said. “There’s no WAY they’re getting valid results with that test.”

“Wish we could have taken a copy home,” she said wistfully. “Anyway. Do you want to get some fudge?”

(Later, we called our father to tell him that we had not joined a cult, and he was relieved, so really I think he had by far the worst afternoon of the three of us. He didn’t get to take the test, after all. And we didn’t even bring him any fudge.)

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[RL] High School and Me: A Very Bad Fit

Fri, 22 May 2020 23:14:47 GMT

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:

The tardy room was quiet. Like, no sounds were allowed at all in the part of the room where the carrels were.
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.

comments

Yuletide 2019 Letter

Fri, 25 Oct 2019 17:13:37 GMT

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 )

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

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

( The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins, Lucy Yolland, Ezra Jennings )

( Nomads, Eileen Flax, Veronique Pommier )

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Yuletide 2018 Letter

Wed, 10 Oct 2018 14:44:11 GMT

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 )

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Yuletide 2017 Reveal!

Tue, 02 Jan 2018 22:58:28 GMT

This Yuletide, I got two amazing stories, both about Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and their obsession with Very Manly Manliness and also each other’s dicks:

prizefighter the frenzied pace (2238 words) by indigostohelit
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Jazz Age Writer RPF
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: F. Scott Fitzgerald/Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald/Zelda Fitzgerald
Characters: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Zelda Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Alice Babette Toklas
Additional Tags: Paris (City), Jazz Age, Jealousy, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Pining, Love Triangles, Writers
Summary:

Hemingway is drunk.

This isn't worth remarking on.

This story is beautiful, and glorious, and full of Hemingway being drunk and his own worst enemy, which is a) how I like him and b) how I genuinely think he was. Bonus: Zelda and Gertrude Stein being way better than Ernest and Scott, as is only right and just.

And

Five Conversations with a Drunk Hemingway (1267 words) by tuesday
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Jazz Age Writer RPF
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: F. Scott Fitzgerald/Ernest Hemingway, Ernest Hemingway & Zelda Fitzgerald
Characters: Ernest Hemingway, Josephine Baker, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Zelda Fitzgerald, F. Scott Fitzgerald
Additional Tags: Anachronistic, Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Background Alice B. Toklas/Gertrude Stein, Background F. Scott Fitzgerald/Zelda Fitzgerald, 5+1 Things, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Functional Alcholics, Yuletide Treat
Summary:

Plus one party of 20s expats in Paris. In which Hemingway writes his slam book early, events happen all out of order, and all his friends are done with his shit.

This story is an AU in which Moveable Feast came out much, much earlier, while the subjects were all in Paris and could read about it. Hemingway spends a lot of time drunk and being yelled at (by Jazz Age luminaries) because he’s terrible, which I deeply appreciate.

I wrote one story:

13 Genuinely Awful Things About Steven (9905 words) by thefourthvine
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Buzzfeed: Worth It (Web Series)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Andrew Ilnyckyj/Steven Lim
Characters: Andrew Ilnyckyj, Steven Lim, Adam Bianchi
Summary:

Andrew’s learned to like cake, he’s learned to like oysters, and he’s learned to like Steven.

This was one of those years when my assignment was right in my wheelhouse. Panpipe’s prompt was basically “first times and realizing they’re in love,” and yes. Yes, I can write that. (Yes, I will write that in basically any fandom I know, in fact.) And I did.

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Comic Book Shops and Temporal Instability

Tue, 02 Jan 2018 22:29:18 GMT

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:

It would take me all day to explain this in tweets.
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

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!
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.

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Yuletide 2017: Dear Writer

Tue, 03 Oct 2017 22:52:11 GMT

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, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird )

( Jazz Age Writer RPF, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald )

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

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[Real Life] Telephones

Sun, 06 Aug 2017 02:13:31 GMT

(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:

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.)
Listen to my outgoing message.
After the first beep, say, “Hello? Are you there? It’s me, please pick up.”
Wait for the beep that would indicate that I had in fact picked up.
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.)
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.

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Yuletide 2016 Reveal!

Sun, 01 Jan 2017 20:25:32 GMT

For this Yuletide, I was the delighted recipient of three stories! Two were for the song Devil Went Down to Georgia:

All Seven (1330 words) by Llwyden ferch Gyfrinach
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Devil Went Down to Georgia (Song)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: The Devil/Johnny (Devil Went Down to Georgia)
Characters: The Devil, Johnny (Devil Went Down to Georgia)
Additional Tags: Seven Deadly Sins, Gambling, Pride
Summary:

Pride is the father of all sin, and the devil knows pride.

Johnny's got it in abundance.

The Devil went down to Georgia (and totally got off with Johnny) (4659 words) by wendymarlowe
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Devil Went Down to Georgia (Song)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: The Devil/Johnny
Characters: The Devil, Johnny (Devil Went Down to Georgia)
Additional Tags: Yuletide Treat, Yuletide 2016, because this song deserves ALL THE SMUT
Summary:

The Devil went down to Georgia and got a lot more than he bargained for. (What he bargained for, in this case, being Johnny's soul. And what he got being sex. It was a good deal.)

And one was for the Murder Most Unladylike series:

Polka Dot Skulls (2878 words) by Metal_Chocobo
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Murder Most Unladylike Series - Robin Stevens
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Hazel Wong/Daisy Wells
Characters: Hazel Wong, Daisy Wells
Additional Tags: College, Canon-Typical Racism, Love Confessions, Yuletide Treat
Summary:

The plan has always been for Hazel and Daisy to attend university together.

I wrote one story:

Solid Copy (14668 words) by thefourthvine
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Losers (2010)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Carlos "Cougar" Alvarez/Jake Jensen
Additional Tags: Telepathy
Summary:

Jensen shifted his gaze to Cougar. “I really thought that if I ever had to say the words ‘telepathic disaster,’ it’d be a lot cooler than this is turning out to be.”

I'd like to thank my lovely recipient, minim_calibre, for giving me prompts that were basically a license to go full-bore ridiculous trope on this fandom; writing this was a fabulous distraction from the eleventh circle of hell, also known as the 2016 US election. I originally had plans for a slightly darker take, but then, well, reality occurred. So: froth and tropes! Froth and tropes EVERYWHERE.

It was a great Yuletide all the way around, basically.

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Yuletide 2016: Dear Writer

Wed, 28 Sep 2016 20:25:24 GMT

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 )

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RL: Losing Gus

Sun, 24 Jul 2016 04:59:39 GMT

( Content Warning: Cancer and child death. )

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All the Ships I've Loved Before 4

Tue, 12 Jul 2016 03:12:18 GMT

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.

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All the Ships I've Loved Before 3

Sun, 19 Jun 2016 23:07:39 GMT

The One I Really Shouldn't Have Re-Read While Reading Rick Riordan's Work Aloud to the Earthling. I Keep Waiting for Percy to Manifest His Mutant Powers Now. Pantheon, by Yahtzee. X-Men First Class, Charles Xavier/Erik Lehnsherr. (Plus Emma Frost/Scott Summers and Rogue/Wolverine.)

I warned you these wouldn't be in any kind of order, and we've definitely diverged from my shipping history timeline now. But this is still a very old ship of mine. Okay, sure, XMFC came out in 2011, and, uh, I still haven't seen it. (Look, I'm not going to make any more excuses; let's all just accept that I live in culture-free zone and only know of modern movies/TV shows/comics because people tweet about them.) No matter. I've been shipping Professor X and Magneto since before I knew what fic was. They are one of my original No Heterosexual Explanation pairings, and their many-decades-long thing where they were probably lovers, and then definitely enemies, and then possibly lovers and enemies at the same time, and then there were visits in prison, and battles, and speeches, and elections, and I think someone built a vigilante team and someone else built a country – look, all I'm saying is these dudes have a lot of history together, and in that entire extremely lengthy history, they were always either pining for each other or banging each other, regardless of what else they were doing. This is my firm belief. I wear this tinhat proudly.

It's a very compelling ship, is what I'm saying. It deserves very compelling fic. Fortunately, it has so, so many stories, so many that picking just one wasn't easy. But this fic. THIS FIC.

This a fantastic AU – the characters fit so perfectly into the world of Ancient Rome, but they also stay perfectly themselves. (In fact, given the nature of comics canon, they're probably more themselves than they are in like 90% of their actual canon appearances. Comics: actual published fic since like 1966. And some of it is not such great fic, either.) But, also, I love this story because it doesn't precisely follow any of the canon stories I know about, but it still captures this pairing absolutely – all the ways they fit together (yes, fine, take a moment to be twelve, I'll wait) and all the ways they differ. In short, this is an AU doing what AUs do best: distilling these people and their story to their essence, and making that essence all the more visible.

Plus, I love the worldbuilding. (Show me good worldbuilding and you have my undivided attention, for sure.) I love the way the mutants and their mutations fit into the time's worldview and cultures. It's worth reading for that alone. Or, hey, read it for the 130k words of glorious plot, or the excellence of a slave rebellion, or – look, it's worth reading from pretty much every perspective. I'm always thrilled with I share a fandom with Yahtzee, and stories like this are the reason why.

(If you can read it, that is. Warnings: This story has rape, graphic violence, and animal harm. I'm not kidding about any of that, but for me, this story is worth it.)

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