Beyond Selidor

This one's been doing the rounds again, so I thought I'd jump in. muccamukk gave me the letter B.

Something I hate: Bullying.

Something I love: Books! Babies! Baked goods (especially pastries)!

Somewhere I have been: Brussels. Berlin. Bali. Brisbane. Budapest. Barcelona.

Somewhere I would like to go: Bucharest. Belfast. Beirut. Bratislava. (Or, if we're going by the names of countries, Bulgaria.)

Someone I know: the wonderful bethankyou, who I first met on the Philip Pullman forums eighteen years ago, and who went on to become one of my dearest friends. She's a friend for joy and for sorrow: she was one of the bridesmaids at my wedding, we've both helped each other survive some very difficult times, and I'm so happy to know her.

Best Movie: Brick

If you'd like a letter, let me know!

I am practically vibrating with anxiety, these days, and it seems to be a permanent state of affairs, unfortunately. Let's try to distract me from this with a meme (via a friend on Facebook):

How many times have you moved house, and what was the reason for moving each time?

( 19 moves behind the cut )

Today's snowflake_challenge prompt is Tell Us about a Personal Win.



Mine is something that exists on the bordery, blurred space between fandom and personal lives: last year I left Twitter, and I didn't join any similar social media platform to replace it.

It sounds like such a silly and minor thing, but the burden it had been placing on my mental health and just general ability to manage my emotions was immense. I would see things pass by my feed that left me enraged and despairing for days (usually people quote-retweeting terrible things in order to argue with them, but sometimes just people sharing tweets whose content aligned with their own beliefs on a particular issue — but the tweet originated from someone who had otherwise terrible beliefs on other issues, or from someone I knew to be a harasser or bully — would be enough to send me into a spiral of despair*), and it would completely suck all the joy out my life and render me incapable of doing anything. Worst of all was when I saw people I otherwise liked or admired sharing what I knew to be blatant misinformation, or deliberately selective information, and the various large-scale disinformation campaigns that I witnessed unfold and take effect. This sort of thing genuinely rendered me incapable of doing anything (exercising, reading, cleaning, writing, non-work projects) that wasn't immediately essential for my survival/ability to earn money for days or weeks at a time. I was locked in this endless cycle of spiralling despair/rage/inactivity, shaking myself out of it by avoiding Twitter for long blocks of time, rinse and repeat.

By the end, the value of being on the platform (which for me was getting information and context on unfolding current affairs events from people who weren't normally afforded a permanent space in English-language mainstream media — Arab Spring activists, Belarusian opposition politicians, refugees trapped in Australia's offshore detention facilities, Ukrainian journalists, Hong Kong dissidents and so on) was by far outweighed by all the stuff that so debilitated me. I remember when I finally had wiped my entire 15-year archive of tweets clean, and deleted the account for good, vague conversations about some new round of SFF publishing drama started circulating on Instagram, I had no idea of the details, and to find out I would have had to have joined BlueSky — and I didn't join, and felt this sense of sheer, overwhelming relief that I wasn't party to whatever endless petty infighting was going to unfold over the next few weeks.

Unfortunately, I am seeing similar waves of large-scale, deliberate (geo)political disinformation campaigns circulating (and finding willing root) on Instagram, and I possibly need to do a cull of the accounts I'm following there, but it certainly feels a bit more manageable, and I have no regrets about leaving Twitter.

I'll end this post with a couple of links. After mentioning in my previous post about the Hugos kerfuffle that I feel people in democratic countries misunderstand how state censorship tends to operate, Ada Palmer (who is writing an academic book on the history of censorship) wrote a fantastic post explaining how it does tend to operate. I think it's definitely worth a read.

Edited to add a new link: wearing_tearing has started up watcherscouncil, a comm for all things Buffyverse. The description is: a community for anyone interested in embarking on a Buffyverse rewatch and discussing other Buffyverse-related content. Join and subscribe if it sounds like your kind of thing!

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*I'm too much of a journalists' daughter: it matters just as much to me who is saying something and why they might be saying it, not just what they're saying in that one single instance. But unfortunately I feel this is a futile, losing battle: my impression is that most people using social media treat the contents of any individual tweet/post as something that exists in complete isolation from any broader context. Does the content of that individual tweet/post align with their own beliefs on an issue? If yes, they'll share it, even if every other thing that person ever posted is in service of an extremely objectionable agenda — but most people won't have attempted to investigate the broader social media output of a person whose individual tweet/post they want to share, and will therefore never see this broader context.

I mean, I saw people sharing what appeared to be livetweeted breaking news about protests in China that came from a pro-Orban/pro-Polish far right propagandist. I'm currently seeing people share material in support of Palestinians in Gaza that comes from individuals who a) were supportive of Assad in Syria, b) regularly give interviews on Russian and Iranian state TV, including one individual who mocked and psychologically tormented Ukrainian prisoners of war on TV broadcasts and who is to my knowledge the only British citizen actually sanctioned by the British government in relation to Russia's invasion of Ukraine, c) have denied the Uighur genocide, etc etc. As I say, it feels entirely fruitless to fight against this, but all the above makes me want to lie on the floor in despair. Forget fannish wishlists: if I had one wish for 2024, it would be for people to stop, investigate the broader output background of the people whose pithy posts or emotionally affecting Instagram videos they're poised to share, and only share said material once they're convinced that the person's broader outlook beyond the content of that individual post is one they're comfortable endorsing.

Until snowflake_challenge is over, I'm going to piggyback on their prompts and use them for my own each Friday. Today's prompt is:

Choose Your Challenge: we will give you the challenge of making a list (who doesn't love lists?!?) and then you get to choose what list to make.

Five Things! The five things are totally up to you.



I can never resist making a 'five things' list into a 'five times she did, and one time she didn't' list, so that's what I've done here. Feel free to use my own list topic, or make your own 5 (+1) things list in the comments.

( Five TV shows perfect after just one season, and one cancelled before its time )

The current snowflake_challenge prompt is: Talk about a current fannish project that you are creating or enjoying.



I have one current fandom-adjacent project, which involves transcribing ten+ years of newspaper book reviews — which I currently only have in printed format, and which were published before the specific newspaper had an online edition — onto dolorosa12, my longform reviews blog. The oldest of these reviews is now over twenty years old, and the most recent were published around 2012-13, so they're an interesting (to me) cultural artefact of both my own teenage thinking, and of a world in which both publishing and journalism were very, very different. The transcription is pretty slow going at the moment because the earlier reviews really do just exist on paper, so I have to retype them word by word, but as it progresses I should speed up as the post-2007 reviews exist as Word files that to which I still have access.

This project is, as I say, fandom-adjacent rather than fully fannish, but I don't have anything on the go when it comes to the latter. I've been idly thinking that instead of fruitlessly requesting the same two fandoms, characters and prompts every year since I first started participating in Yuletide, I should accept the inevitable (that no one will write those things but me) and just try to write the fic of my heart, but I haven't made much of a start on that. And I have a long list of ideas that have been in my head for years (in some cases, decades) that I really just should commit to writing, except that I find it really hard to do this kind of thing without a prompt and a hard deadline. (My own prompts, and my own deadlines don't count.) As you can see from the above reviewing project, it's been more than ten years since I've been a paid journalist, and yet it never really leaves me — I need a brief, and a deadline, and then I can write, and without those things, I'm adrift!

Again, I've elected to roll the current snowflake_challenge prompt into today's open thread, since it's a fun prompting question:

Share a favourite piece of original canon (a show, a specific TV episode, a storyline, a book or series, a scene from a movie, etc) and explain why you love it so much.



I always feel a bit weird doing these, because all my fandoms of the heart are fandoms-of-one, the sorts of things that I'd be lucky to get given as gifts for Yuletide, and they have potentially offputting elements (teenage protagonists, a writing style people will either love or hate, divisive relationship dynamics, and so on). So I can talk about why I love them forever, but assume that no one will take me up on the recommendation, or not be hooked by the same things that first hooked me. A lot of these canons are things that I've loved unstintingly for three decades; they're a part of me — they've seeped into my bones, into the story I tell about myself.

I've written a lot of primers/manifestos/gushing walls of emotion over the years!

( I've gathered a bunch behind the cut )

What about you? Feel free to link back to your own posts if you've already answered this prompt for Snowflake.

Reading is off to a good start this year. I've finished three books, and should be done with a fourth by the end of today.

( Three books )



Today's prompt is IceBreaker Challenge! Tell us about yourself.

Since I seem to have started a sort of 'three things' theme to this post, I will list this in sets of threes.

( Three things about me )

Finally, three fandom-related things.

bestof_icons is hosting an event to vote for the best icon makers of 2023. Currently, nominations are open.


ICON NOMINATIONS - JOIN IN!

fandomtrees is still looking for pinch-hitters to fill prompts for needy trees. There are more details on the comm, and a spreadsheet listing participants' requests.

Someone made podfic of one of my fics! This is the first time this has ever happened, and I haven't had a chance to listen to it yet (it seems to be part of some kind of Obernewtyn challenge — I should contact the podficcer and see if there's an active fandom somewhere I don't know about), but I'm very pleased it exists!

[Podfic] Mirrored Flame (29 words) by robinfaipods
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Obernewtyn Chronicles - Isobelle Carmody
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Elspeth Gordie, Dragon (Obernewtyn Chronicles)
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Podfic, Podfic Length: 10-20 Minutes, Audio Format: MP3, Audio Format: Streaming, Audio Format: Download
Summary:

Three years after the events of The Red Queen, Elspeth Gordie returns to Redport.

Podfic of Mirrored Flame by Dolorosa.

This post is getting incredibly long, so I think I'll stop here. I hope everyone's been having lovely weekends!

The second prompt for snowflake_challenge is:

In your own space, set yourself some goals for the coming year. They can be fannish or not, public or private.



I've already talked about non-fannish goals in my end-of-2023 post, so I won't rehash those again. With fannish goals, I've kept it fairly simple:

Make at least two contributions to this year's fandomtrees — I've actually already done this!

Participate in Yuletide, Once Upon a Fic (if it's running again), and at least one more book- or small fandom-related fic exchange (if any are running)

Write at least one non-exchange fic

Continue running Friday open threads (as long as interest remains)

These feel both achievable and enjoyable.

I'm just back from the pool, having done my final swim of 2023, it's getting close to the point where my friends and family in Australia start posting photos of fireworks, and the view from 2024, so let's do this.

In the spirit of breaking routines and habits that no longer serve me, this is going to be the last time I do this meme in its entirety. I think I've been using it as a year-end summary every year since I joined Livejournal in 2003, and I've been feeling for a while that many of its questions are more appropriate to a teenager, or an undergraduate student in their early twenties, and their answers don't really say anything fundamental about the shape of the year when the respondant is closer to forty than fifteen. Twenty years of this meme seemed like a good point to stop, and as of 2024, I'll cannibalise its questions and keep only the ones that I feel are relevant to my life.

( Questions and answers behind the cut )

I spotted this on blackcatofmisery's journal, and it looked like a lot of fun, so I thought to answer it myself!

( Questions and answers from A to Z )