Friday open thread: ask me anything
Feb. 4th, 2022 02:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dolorosa_12Hello, and welcome to the end of another working week! I hope the first week of February has been kind to you.
This week's Friday open thread is inspired by the![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
snowflake_challenge friending meme: given I've subscribed to a bunch of new people, and a bunch of new people have subscribed to me, I felt it would be nice, rather than doing a new introduction post, to instead offer a space for more general questions. With that in mind, the topic of this week's Friday open thread is: ask me anything! Is there something you'd like to know, or something you'd like me to talk more about?
As a starting point if you have no idea what to ask, my intro post is up-to-date in terms of who I am, my fannish interests, and general approach to Dreamwidth and internet community. My fic is on AO3:![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
Dolorosa. 'the via dolorosa' is the tag I use in posts talking about my day-to-day life, if you want an overview of things that have been happening to me recently (although there are hundreds of these posts, so be warned).
If you don't want to ask me anything, please do feel free to use the comments to tell me something if you feel you'd like me to know about it.
This week's Friday open thread is inspired by the
snowflake_challenge friending meme: given I've subscribed to a bunch of new people, and a bunch of new people have subscribed to me, I felt it would be nice, rather than doing a new introduction post, to instead offer a space for more general questions. With that in mind, the topic of this week's Friday open thread is: ask me anything! Is there something you'd like to know, or something you'd like me to talk more about? As a starting point if you have no idea what to ask, my intro post is up-to-date in terms of who I am, my fannish interests, and general approach to Dreamwidth and internet community. My fic is on AO3:
If you don't want to ask me anything, please do feel free to use the comments to tell me something if you feel you'd like me to know about it.
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Date: 2022-02-04 03:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-05 10:58 am (UTC)When it comes to retellings and reworkings of fairytales, I particularly like the ones that dig into the darkness and give back the words and power to the characters who are somewhat voiceless or powerless in the original stories (Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik is a great example of this: it takes an incredibly antisemitic fairytale — Rumplestiltskin — and reclaims it as a celebration of Jewish life, community and survival).
What about you? Do you like fairytales, and do you have any favourites?
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Date: 2022-02-06 07:06 am (UTC)I love fairytales! My favourites are Cinderella variants and Beauty and the Beast variants; if I had to pick a favourite of each, I think I'd go with the Grimms' Aschenputtel for the former and Madame d'Aulnoy's "The Green Serpent" for the latter (though I'm tempted to kind of cheat and say the myth of Eros & Psyche is my favourite BatB).
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Date: 2022-02-06 02:54 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2022-02-05 11:07 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-12 04:13 am (UTC)I also adore Kaz and Jesper—Kaz for his grit and, despite his prowess at reading people, his inability to read and understand and even show his empathy and compassion for his friends, and Jesper because he's the designated funny guy who hides his insecurity behind his charm.
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Date: 2022-02-13 02:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-13 09:49 pm (UTC)Us, but Gob is everyone but Inej.
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Date: 2022-02-05 11:07 am (UTC)I tend to latch on to characters who are women, survivors of trauma, and whose journey towards survival and reclamation of self is complicated, slow, and filled with moments of genuine fear, and I think for that reason that Inej will always be my favourite. But one of my other favourite character types is 'male character whose world was upended, who was forced into a situation of terror and vulnerability, and who in response will burn down the world and destroy his relationships with everyone around him so he will never be afraid again' (it's an extremely specific character type; the protagonist of one of my favourite TV shows, Tommy Shelby from Peaky Blinders, is this type of character as well), so obviously Kaz is a close second to Inej. But honestly, I love all six of them!
Who is your favourite Six of Crows character?
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Date: 2022-02-05 03:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-05 04:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-12 04:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-13 02:39 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-04 05:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-05 11:18 am (UTC)I also had this amazing bagel as takeaway from the local bagel bar yesterday, and it was really delicious!
Have you eaten anything particularly delicious recently?
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Date: 2022-02-05 07:44 pm (UTC)And I had a pineapple custard bun on Tuesday for lunar new year. (Despite the name theirs no pineapple -- its named after the crunchy sugar topping that looks like pineapple)
I might have to try making duck soup because that sounds delicious!
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Date: 2022-02-06 02:57 pm (UTC)The duck soup is really easy if you know how to make Chinese-style noodle/broth soup. I used the leftovers of a whole roast duck, but you could easily make it completely from scratch as well.
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Date: 2022-02-04 06:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-05 11:34 am (UTC)I have others, but those are the first that immediately spring to mind. Do you have any particular favourite literature/cinematic conceits or tropes?
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Date: 2022-02-05 07:42 pm (UTC)For me and movies:
~ Competent women being accepted as such by the men around her (see Ripley, specifically through Hicks' eyes)
~ Big bad dangerous person has the capacity to give a damn (See Riddick, specifically toward Jack)
~ Smart ass kid... is really on top of it? (See pretty much all the protags in kids' sports movies like Bad News Bears and Little Giants)
more for fictional reading:
~ competent person not seeking to do more than their duty still rises above and beyond (See Moreta for Pern)
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Date: 2022-02-06 02:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-04 07:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-05 11:58 am (UTC)However, in terms of fandom as a group activity, I think I was scared off megafandoms (or even just medium popular fandoms) by negative experiences in the brief period I tried to do fandom on Tumblr. There were moments when I briefly dipped my toes into things like MCU, Star Wars sequel trilogy, and Teen Wolf fandoms (as well as stuff like Sleepy Hollow, which was briefly very popular, but not on the same level as the others), found them to just be full of wank, drama and thin-skinned people who would fly off the handle at the slightest provocation, and backed away slowly. (I found the dying days of Livejournal-based megafandoms such as Inception to be similarly offputting — I was initially interested, then realised that I didn't ship the juggernaut and would be constantly surrounded by this assumption that everyone was in the fandom due to shipping the juggernaut pairing, and decided I wanted no part of that.)
In contrast, my experience being in small book fandoms, whether on message boards/forums, Livejournal, Tumblr, or here on Dreamwidth, has always been consistently wonderful. People tend to be calmer, more accepting of people being into different pairings/characters, and because there are so few of us, and every fanwork is greeted happily (rather than people ignoring/being annoyed by fic focusing on characters they don't like or pairings they don't ship). And although fanworks by their nature are going to get less engagement than something in a megafandom (for example my most highly kudosed work only has 144 kudos, and some of my other fic only has 2 or 3 kudos — but it's also only been read 10 times or so), it's also not at any risk of being drowned out by a deluge of other fic in that fandom/for that pairing or whatever: anyone who wants to read that fic is going to see it, even if that's just ten people.
So since I realised that (for all the above reasons) I find small book fandoms much more fun, I've consciously chosen them, and deliberately avoided participating in bigger fandoms.
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Date: 2022-02-06 02:05 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2022-02-07 06:16 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-05 12:04 pm (UTC)The book I am most looking forward to reading, and which I've saved for a while in order to increase my sense of anticipation, is the final (so far) book in Barbara Hambly's Benjamin January mystery series. I started reading this series at the start of the pandemic, and it ended up becoming one of my most intensely loved new-to-me fandoms, and is definitely the most recent thing that I fell fannishly in love with. But as I say I'm not going to start on it straight away, even though I already own it.
Do you have anything on your own to-read/to watch list?
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Date: 2022-02-07 06:23 am (UTC)Would you recommend that series? I am always looking for new mystery books to read.
I got a few things on my list that I got recc'd when I asked for them for a Snowflake challenge and there are some TV shows I've got my eye on, like Only Murders in the Building. I'm terrible at actually watching things though so we'll see. :D
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Date: 2022-02-07 01:27 pm (UTC)The Benjamin January series is set in 1830s New Orleans, and the eponymous protagonist is a free black man whose family is part of the French-speaking free black community of the city. A lot of the mysteries he ends up solving hinge on fraught issues of racism, race and slavery in the US south at that time, and he and his family often end up in danger as a result of their ethnicity. So on that level it's dealing with quite heavy subject matter and doesn't shy away from it (or excuse the white characters who inflict it or who enable it due to obliviousness or inaction). On another level, it's a celebration of the tenacity, resourcefulness and survival of the black characters (and black people in the US in that time period more generally), and shows how people were able to carve out spaces of joy, community and success in the margins of a world trying its utmost to deny them these things.
I really love it, because that kind of tension — between injustice and joy in the margins — really works well for me on a storytelling level. But if you feel that that's a bit intense for historical mysteries, you may prefer to give the series a miss.
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Date: 2022-02-05 02:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-05 01:20 pm (UTC)The alternative would be something with lots of shades of inky dark blue, with accents in silver, and the blue, green and purple colours you see in nebulae, and in the aurora.
Do you sense a theme here? I always dress as either a garden, or the night sky, in real life, and my doran cloak would be no different!
What colour scheme would you choose?
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Date: 2022-02-07 05:06 pm (UTC)I think I would try to look as much like a buckeye as possible -- silvery pale grey and green, and that luscious glossy brown.
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Date: 2022-02-08 12:17 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2022-02-05 02:32 am (UTC)1. Do you miss anything about Australia?
2. Has your partner had Vegemite?
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Date: 2022-02-05 01:45 pm (UTC)In the early years when I lived in the UK, I missed the Australian attitude towards (good) food: the idea that it was a normal thing (at least in my various Australian social circles) to care about food, to be interested in cooking and eating a wide variety of things, and to shop for ingredients outside of big supermarket chains when necessary. When I first moved to the UK, this was considered — even in the fairly middle-class social circles that I spent my time in — to be an incredibly snobby, weird attitude. Thankfully that has changed a lot over the past decade and although stereotypes about British cooking persist, there's actually a really thriving food scene here, including outside the big cities.
On a related note, I used to really miss the lack of good, Australian cafe-style barista coffee. It used to be impossible to get outside of a handful of Australian/New Zealand run cafes in London, and antipodean immigrants would pass on details of these cafes as if it were super secret classified information. (And when I complained about the lack of good coffee, British friends would respond with bafflement: 'but can't you just go to Costa/Starbucks/Caffe Nero?'. Those kinds of chain coffee shops were considered to be the expensive, good quality coffee! I'd try to explain how Starbucks in Australia actually failed and is generally only drunk by tourists and teenagers, but it made no sense to my British friends!) Again, thankfully the cafe situation here is way better than when I first arrived!
Above all, what I really miss is the sense of having a set of common cultural references. Obviously there is a lot of overlap between British and Australian pop culture (and for example the British got a lot of our children's TV — British kids watched shows like Round the Twist, which really surprised me when I found out!), but I miss that sense of knowing that pretty much everyone I meet from my generation grew up with the same set of children's TV, popular books and games (by which I mean playground outdoor games rather than video games), or even just common childhood experiences like school swimming carnivals, 'slip, slop, slap' campaigns, and so on. And I grew up in Canberra (I sort of grew up in Sydney simultaneously, but that's a bit complicated to explain here so I'll leave it at that), and Canberra, at least in the 1990s and early 2000s, had its own really oddly specific subculture and childhood experiences and insularity, and being taken away from that has always made me feel unmoored. It used to be the case that I could meet anyone roughly of my age from Canberra and we'd be able to figure out connections within one degree of separation after five minutes of introductory conversation!
I wonder if the fact that most of my friends in the UK are fellow immigrants (although not a lot of Australian immigrants) was a way to compensate for this, since we're all very much in the same boat of lacking common cultural references and can all feel unmoored together.
Regarding your second question, Vegemite is actually something I miss (Marmite is no substitute!) and my mother sends it to me in the mail! I couldn't remember if my husband had eaten it, but he thinks he has at least once on toast. However, he's German and in Germany they use the same product that Vegemite is made of as flavouring in two-minute noodles and cheap cups of dried soup (the kind that you add boiled water to). It comes in little packets of dried seasoning, and you add it to flavour the noodles or soup. It also comes in liquid form as a condiment — he says he typically had it as a sauce to go with dumplings, in homemade soup, and so on. So for him the flavour profile of Vegemite isn't weird, it's just weird to eat it as a spread on bread or toast, and in hot main meals he would find it completely normal.
I've never experienced anyone trying Vegemite as an adult and liking it, though. Even my closest friend in high school, who immigrated to Australia from Russia when she was eleven, couldn't stand it. It really has to be something you basically eat from birth.
Is there anything you think you would miss if you lived overseas?
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Date: 2022-02-12 04:37 am (UTC)Are swimming carnivals not universal!? 🤯 The more you know and the more you take for granted. I always kind of thought British pop culture would be very close to ours, especially since I know there's a huge Neighbours fanbase there, but it's so interesting how there's very minor but significant differences. (I take for granted that "slip, slop, slap" is just something we all know as Aussies. Surely, the person next to me would-be grown up with such an iconic campaign!?)
Firstly, I'm glad your mum has your back and is supplying you regularly with Vegemite!
Secondly, wow—that's so crazy how your husband has experienced what essentially makes Vegemite in a different way! (He definitely needs to come around to eating it on toast. How else will you start your day on the right foot!?)
Thanks so much for answering! It's so interesting seeing the familiarities and differences between how we grow up in our Aussie bubbles vs the British bubble vs the Geman bubble.
Why did I ask you such a hard question! 😂 I think what I would miss most is what I take for granted. I went to America a few years ago for a holiday and really learned that even though they're another English-speaking country, the cultures are so, so different. I take for granted our meal portion sizes and our taste profiles. Aussies know what I mean when I say I want tomato sauce over BBQ.
Along with Vegemite, I would miss our Cadbury chocolate. (I think we have the best chocolate. Full bias.)
This is a bit random
Date: 2022-02-05 08:22 pm (UTC)Re: This is a bit random
Date: 2022-02-06 03:06 pm (UTC)Older stuff I think you might like: the TV series SeaChange and Rake (which is set in a highly fictionalised version of the part of Sydney where I used to live and where my family still lives), and maybe Cleverman (although I can't remember if you watch scifi TV shows). And I always recommend Strictly Ballroom to everyone because it's just cheesy good fun (although very of its time).
Is there any Italian media you'd recommend?
Re: This is a bit random
Date: 2022-02-06 04:08 pm (UTC)I asked because the previous night I'd watched the tv adaptation of one of my fave crime books (The Broken Shore), which is of course Australian and it made me realise some of the tv series I've enjoyed the most are Australian (off the top of my head, East West 101, The Circuit, The Principal, The Code, Secret City, Wanted, Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries, The Letdown). I mean, I'm not a person who's into films and I hate horror as a genre, yet the only horror film I've ever liked is Australian too (Martin Freeman's Cargo). I'm trying to work out what about Australian media works for me in particular. Mostly I like stories with a strong sense of place and possibly the Australian tv shows which make it internationally do it also on the strength of the setting?
I jotted down the two series and the film, thank you!
Ha, Italian media. I don't have your excuse, I haven't emigrated but I haven't watched Italian television regularly since 2005. And I don't go to the cinema. So, I'm the worst Italian person to ask this. How embarrassing. With this caveat, I can recommend most of Ferzan Optek's films, I love how choral they are and that the theme of (found) family and queerness are prominent. My favourite is The Ignorant Fairies. A more recent film I'd liked, which gets a lot right about my generation in Italy today is Every Blessed Day, a romantic comedy with Luca Marinelli of The Old Guard fame (he totally plays my dream man in there). As for tv series, a classic is the police procedural Inspector Montalbano, which will make you want to book a holiday in Sicily stat. I think this is the easiest to find for you, the BBC has had the rights for years. If you like your crime a bit more gritty/hardboiled Romanzo Criminale is a cult series about a crime gang in 1970s Rome. It was originally a film, btw. I talked about this new animated series called Tear Along The Dotted Line on Netflix here on my journal. The Italian version of the internationally-acclaimed Norwegian teen dram, Skam Italia, is pretty good too. It held my interest and I'm not the right target. It was so refreshing seeing a high school drama set in a school that looks like a real Italian school! Last night I've started watching Blanca, a new police procedural set in my own city!. It's nothing groundbreaking but I like the way it tackles the protag's blindness and it is so much fun to play 'spot the location'. Man, I never knew Genova could look so pretty. It's had good ratings and has been sold in France and Spain already, so I hope it'll make it to your corner of the world too.
Re: This is a bit random
Date: 2022-02-06 04:47 pm (UTC)Thanks also for all the recommendations — I have seen episodes of Inspector Montalbano here and there over the years, but never consistently. The others are all things I've never even heard of, but all sound great — Matthias and I watch a lot of police procedurals together, and I think we'd be interested in both Blanca and Romanzo Criminale. Both the films sound great as well, and I remember you talking about Tear Along the Dotted Line on Dreamwidth a while back. The Norwegian Skam completely passed me by and I've always somewhat regretted that (teen dramas set in high schools are my guilty pleasure) so I'll have to check out the Italian one. Of course a lot will depend on whether I can access them easily via the various streaming services I'm signed up with, but I look forward to checking out whatever I can!