Beyond Selidor

This has been a weekend blissfully free of any plan or activity. Originally, the idea had been to go to the annual street fair in Cambridge, which is held along one long road, lined with restaurants, cafes, and shops (mainly things like South Asian, East Asian, Eastern European, and Middle Eastern grocery stores) on the first Saturday of December. However, the storm put paid to that — the event was cancelled due to the safety risk — and the cancelled plans and weather led to two days of much needed rest at home.

I finished another book in my Benjamin January reread, worked on Yuletide stuff, watched biathlon with Matthias, and spent ages writing and replying to long comments on Dreamwidth. It was an utterly lazy Saturday, with no gym (since I hadn't booked the classes in expectation of being in Cambridge during that time), and no time outside the house apart from a quick run to the bakery first thing (before the storm began) to get pastries. By about midday, the storm had arrived in earnest, but it wasn't too bad in this part of the world — just lashing rain, and strong winds. I know my friends in Ireland, Wales, and the west of England had it much worse, including at least one friend in Wales who lost power briefly, but for us in the east, it was basically just a cosy day at home.

The weather's still pretty miserable here, so I'm not planning to do much today — a longer yoga class after I've written this post, a bit more comfort rereading, and slow-cooking tonight's dinner for most of the afternoon. Otherwise, I will carry on what I've also been doing for much of yesterday, and the previous week, which is glue myself to updates and analysis of all the extraordinary political events taking place around the world.

( Cut for some mention of global political events — Korea, Romania, Georgia and Syria )

I hope everyone in my part of the world stayed safe this weekend, and that the consequences of the storm weren't too severe.

It's another long weekend here in the UK, although this time around I have to work on the Monday, so it's just a regular old weekend for me. We've managed to pack quite a bit into the two days nonetheless.

On Saturday morning, Matthias and I headed off fairly early into Cambridge in order to see Furiosa in the IMAX cinema. I'm glad we did so from an audiovisual perspective, since it was a great spectacle, and was served well by the format, but my feelings about the film as a whole are quite mixed. When I first heard George Miller was making a prequel about Furiosa, my immediate reaction was one of Do Not Want — and all those misgivings were confirmed. Fury Road was pretty much close to flawless (it's my favourite film), precisely because it left so much about its world and its characters unexplained, operating in an almost mythic space in which viewers fill in the blanks according to their own experiences. I didn't need Furiosa's backstory, I didn't need to know every little detail about the social structure of the lives of the inhabitants of the wasteland — and in general I'm kind of fed up with this perception that fannishness of a particular fictional universe equates to a desire to see every blank spot fleshed out and every plot hole filled in. The chase scenes, as always, were incredible, visually it was beautiful, the world felt vivid, three-dimensional and lived-in, and Chris Hemsworth was clearly having the time of his life playing a character who was essentially Thor, but evil — but overall, this was not a film that I needed to exist.

We were out of the cinema in time for a late-ish lunch at a Korean restaurant, then sat for a while under the trees in a pub beer garden before heading back to Ely. It was warm and clear enough for us to eat dinner outside on the deck, which was wonderful.

I'm writing this post a bit earlier than I would usually do on a Sunday because we will be heading out after lunch for the monthly walk with our walking group. Unfortunately the lovely clear weather of Saturday has blown away, and it's been raining on and off all morning, with thunderstorms promised. We'll see how that goes. The walk itself will be flat and easy (there's no other kind of walk in this area, given the landscape), along the river and through fields in a loop of about 5-7km. An easy Sunday stroll, and hopefully without rain!

The other thing that happened this weekend was author reveals for once_upon_fic, so I'll stick my recs for the collection in this post, now that I'm able to give credit to the authors.

I must start, of course, with my lovely gift, which gave me exactly what I wanted in terms of character dynamics from Tochmarc Étaíne fanfic:

Carried by the Wind (1468 words) by Nelja-in-English
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Irish Mythology
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Étaíne/Fúamnach (Tochmarc Étaíne)
Characters: Fúamnach (Tochmarc Étaíne), Étaíne (Tochmarc Étaíne)
Additional Tags: Canon Rewrite, Love Potion/Spell, Metamorphosis, Dreams, Magic, Temporary Character Death, Mentions of Midir and Aengus
Summary:

Fúamnach tells the story, this time. And when it gets away from her, she gets help.

I also enjoyed these other fics in the collection:

Gold Tree by water_bby (I assume the user has archive-locked it so I can't embed it)

Blush-Rose (2893 words) by RussetFiredrake
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Craobh-Òir agus Craobh-Airgid | Gold Tree and Silver Tree (Fairy Tale)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Craobh-Òir | Gold Tree & An Darna Bean | The Second Wife (Craobh-Òir agus Craobh-Airgid), An Darna Bean | The Second Wife/Am Prionnsa | The Prince (Craobh-Òir agus Craobh-Airgid)
Characters: Original Female Character(s)
Additional Tags: Fairy Tale Retellings, First Kiss, Curiosity, Bisexual Female Character, implied threesome
Summary:

A prince's new bride fears she is in a story where her curiosity will be her downfall. She finds herself in a different tale altogether.

A Rose of a Different Form (1438 words) by BardicRaven
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: La Belle et la Bête | Beauty and the Beast (Fairy Tale)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Belle | Beauty & La Bête | Beast (La Belle et la Bête), La Bête | Beast & Belle | Beauty's Brothers(La Belle et la Bête), La Bête | Beast & Belle | Beauty's Sisters (La Belle et la Bête), La Bête | Beast & Le Marchand | Merchant (La Belle et la Bête)
Characters: Belle | Beauty (La Belle et la Bête), La Bête | The Beast (La Belle et la Bête), Le Marchand | The Merchant (La Belle et la Bête), Belle | Beauty's Brothers(La Belle et la Bête), Belle | Beauty's Sisters (La Belle et la Bête)
Additional Tags: Redemption
Summary:

As soon as sundown came on the day that the merchant was to have brought his daughter and no-one had darkened his doors, the Beast knew that the merchant had lied

Grant Me Clemency (4039 words) by silveradept
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Relationships: Bertilak de Hautdesert & Gawain
Characters: Bertilak de Hautdesert, Gawain (Arthurian), King Arthur - Character
Additional Tags: time loops, A Game of Questions, Rash Actions Lead to Rash Consequences, Ruminations
Summary:

Sir Gawain is trapped in an endless cycle of repetition, from Arthur's hall to the green chapel, attempting to find a way out of his predicament, but he has no earthly idea what he is supposed to change, or who is responsible for this cycle. So he plays the game again, hoping this time might be the one that finally breaks it.

when you return, go to the sea (14840 words) by celaenos
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Selkie Bride (Folk Tale)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Selkie's Children (The Selkie Bride), Selkie Wife (The Selkie Bride), Human Husband (The Selkie Bride), Original Characters
Additional Tags: Once Upon a Fic Exchange 2024, Sister-Sister Relationship, Mother-Daughter Relationship, Family Feels - Struggling To Be A Good Guardian, Family Feels - Fraught Sibling Relationship, Fairytales & Folklore, One Shot, Original Character(s), Fic Exchange, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Abuse
Summary:

She learns about her ma three days after her seventh birthday—but she doesn’t learn the whole of it until many years after that.

My own assignment was another fic for 'The Selkie Bride' folk tale. Women/the sea: my ultimate OTP.

Ripples (2035 words) by Dolorosa
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Selkie Bride (Folk Tale)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Selkie Wife (The Selkie Bride), Selkie's Children (The Selkie Bride)
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Selkies
Summary:

The sea takes, and the sea gives back its own unexpected gifts.

Two of the selkie's daughters try to find their way through uncharted waters in the wake of their mother's departure.

And now the sun has come out! Let's hope the weather holds during our walk.

Today's post is going to be a quick one — just answering the current snowflake_challenge prompt, which is: In your own space, rec three fanworks that you did not create.



I'm going to use this post to rec three of my favourite fanvids of all time. By way of preamble, I'll clarify a couple of things relating to how I define 'favourite.' Firstly, I'm not an avid consumer of fanvids, and far less a creator (as I said in a previous post, any kind of fanwork involving graphics is basically like witchcraft to me) — I tend to engage with fanvids when someone I know has either a) created or recced a fanvid and b) it's in a fandom with which I'm familiar, so my engagement is somewhat haphazard. I have pretty clear things that I look for in a fanvid: I have to like the music, I have to feel that it fits well with the focal character(s) and the story being told in the vid (or is so outrageously incongruous that that's basically the point), and the editing has to be smooth enough that errors are unnoticable to my untrained eye. I also personally dislike fanvids that have dialogue from the source spliced into the video — I want it to tell a complete story with music and images, without needing source dialogue as a scaffold.

There are some well-known, beloved fanvids that get recced to everyone wanting to know the greatest hits of the medium, and I like them a lot, but I've steered clear of them here as most people will have had them recced before.

With that in mind, here is my totally biased, subjective, created-from-a-place-of-complete-ignorance list of favourite three fanvids:

( Vid recs )

Do you have any particular things you like in fanvids? Do you have any particular favourites?

The current snowflake_challenge is one that I always find incredibly stressful: I don't really collect fannish merch (other than ... physical books? Dreamwidth icons?), and I'm completely incapable of taking decent photos of anything that isn't a) a tree or b) a body of water.



So, with that disclaimer out of the way, here is the prompt:

In your own space, post the results of your fandom scavenger hunt. earch in your current space, whether brick-and-mortar or digital. Post a picture or description of something that is or represents:

1. A favorite character
2. Something that makes you laugh
3. A bookshelf
4. A game or hobby you enjoy
5. Something you find comforting
6. A TV show or movie you hope more people will watch
7. A piece of clothing you love
8. A thing from an old fandom
9. A thing from a new fandom

My photos can be found on Instagram. Edited to add that the bad-quality photos were stressing me out so much that I deleted the whole photoset from Instagram, so the link here will no longer work. The descriptions of the photos remain below.

I have merged several categories.

1. A favourite character — Noviana Una from Sophia McDougall's Romanitas trilogy. This is the back of a t shirt which is possibly the only piece of fannish merch I own, a quote from McDougall's book referencing Una. (A picture McDougall drew of her own character, plus this quote, forms my default Dreamwidth icon.)

2. and 3. Something that makes me laugh + a bookshelf — a small portion of the Terry Pratchett section of our bookshelves. This is only a small portion of our collection as a whole — my copies are all still at my mum's place in Australia, and many of Matthias's copies are still in Germany. At some point, we will have all the copies in the one place and may have to discard the duplicates.

4. and 5. A game or hobby I enjoy + something I find comforting — swimming swimming swimming. I am, as I have said many times, half woman half ocean. Swimming is the only thing that stills the sea inside.

6. A TV show or movie I wish more people would watch — Babylon Berlin

7. A thing from an old fandom — the final lines of Northern Lights, the first book in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. This isn't my oldest fandom, but it was my first experience of fandom as an online community, and the HDM forum I joined still remains my gold standard for online fannish spaces. It was the perfect welcome and introduction to fandom-as-shared activity.

8. A thing from a new fandom — the extant books from Pat Barker's Briseis-centric Iliad retelling trilogy.

I read three more short stories yesterday. All are free and online at the Tor.com website.

( Short fiction )

I finished four TV shows this month, which is a bit less than my normal average, but the second half of the month was kind of a black hole on terms of media consumption. Each show ended up being wildly divergent in terms of tone and genre, so that was nice!

The absolute standout show of the month was the second season of The White Lotus. I'd been dubious when I heard it was making a return — the first season was perfect, and self-contained, and this felt like cynically cashing in, but I shouldn't have worried. Season 2 moves the action from Hawaii to Sicily, and again has a death at its heart which we discover in the first episode, but do not know who has died and how until the final moments of the show. If I had to sum up this series, it's a black comedy about all the different ways wealthy American tourists can be awful, in idyllic locations where there is vast income inequality between tourists and locals (whose economy is largely based on tourism). The world is full of such places, and in fact Matthias correctly predicted that a third season should take place in Thailand (rumoured to be in the works) — my suggested location was somewhere in the Caribbean where cruise ships dock. If you don't mind a lot of secondhand embarrassment and humour based on cringeworthily awkward scenarios, and a show where — barring a handful of local Italian characters — everyone is awful, it's a whole lot of fun.

The Handmaid's Tale, on the other hand, needs to really wrap things up. The first season, which was basically an adaptation of the book, was great, and several following seasons which created new material after Atwood's had run out were also pretty good, but it's getting to the point where it's hard to believe that any of the main characters are still alive, and they seem to take turns at having total personality tranplants. There were some interesting moments (elements of Serena's arc this season were very cleverly done), but a lot of the writing seemed merely designed to manoeuvre different characters about so that they ended up in specific physical locations at specific times. They've got a great cast that does a good job with very uneven material.

Entrapped is a follow-up of sorts to the Icelandic crime drama Trapped (the reason for the name change being that the previous two seasons worked with a contrivance of characters having to solve a mystery while trapped by the harshness of the Icelandic landscape and unable to receive any kind of outside help; this season featured no such constraints and characters came and went at will from the northern town in which the murder took place). As in the previous seasons, the show has an almost saga-like quality, with everything hinging on family tensions, ownership of land, and cycles of revenge and violence.

Warrior Nun is a very silly Netflix teen drama about a secret order of — you guessed it — demon-fighting warrior nuns locked in an endless cosmic battle against the forces of evil. The second season was as ridiculous as the first, with handwavy science, cosmology, and Catholicism. None of this matters — the silliness is the point.

I'm feeling pretty run down in both mind and body, but poking my head back into Dreamwidth and seeing so much activity is lifting my spirits. I'm very pleased, in particular, to see so much love for Andor in my circle — I thought the finale was amazing, and it's honestly pretty close to being my favourite Star Wars anything, film or TV show.

I did at least manage to finish another book — Elektra (Jennifer Saint). As you can probably tell from the title, it's another Greek myth retelling, in this case of the horrific, multigenerational family tragedy of the house of Atreus. It's told from three perspectives — Clytemnestra, Cassandra, and the titular Elektra — and like most retellings of Greek myth from the perspective of female characters, its emphasis is on the utter ruin and trauma done to those without power (women, children, enslaved people) by those who wield power in a violent honour culture. It was a pretty good example of the type.

I tried to lift my mood a bit by making a dent in my to-read list, placing holds on books in the library, and using up some of a gift voucher to buy a couple of other books on the list. I'm looking forward to getting stuck into Aliette de Bodard's latest space opera, in particular!

And that's about it, for now.

Today (at the time of writing), Russia bombarded cities and towns across almost the length and breadth of Ukraine with more than 80 missiles, and at least 25 'suicide' drones. The missiles in question are extremely expensive (I've seen estimates of $US 13 million per missile), and are supposedly 'precision' weapons. The places hit by these 'precision' missiles included a children's playground, residential blocks of flats, universities in Kyiv and Mykolaiv, and a pedestrian observation bridge next to a park. They also hit electric power stations, water supply infrastructure, and train stations — all far from the frontline.

From this, we can conclude either that the 'precision' missiles are not very precise, or that this exclusively civilian infrastructure was the intended target. The intent is obvious: to create terror and fear among civilians, when the Russian military is unable to succeed on the battlefield. (In this, they have utterly failed: the reaction instead has been defiant singing in bomb shelters and metro stations, mass donations to military and humanitarian fundraisers, and grim resolution.)

If you've been following me here on Dreamwidth for a while, you'll know what I'm asking you to do next: donate to relevant organisations (you can see my thoroughly vetted list here, with more suggestions in the comments) if you are financially able, and write to your political representatives if you live in a democratic country.

The Ukrainians have been asking for specific things in terms of both military and sanctions/diplomatic aid for some time now. When it comes to military aid, they need air defence (which would have prevented destruction on the scale of what we witnessed today), aircraft, tanks, and long-range weapons. I have written specifically to my MP asking for the government here to provide this equipment if it is capable of doing so, or persuading allies to do so if it is incapable (plus providing/facilitating the requisite training of the Ukrainian military to operate said equipment). In terms of diplomatic/sanctions aid, the Ukrainian government would like Russia to be designated a state sponsor of terrorism, which would lead to specific corresponding sanctions. I have asked for this as well in my letter to my MP, and also asked her to encourage allies in other countries to do the same (since the UK alone doing so is not hugely helpful).

I strongly urge everyone to take equivalent actions if they are able. We cannot intercept missiles, but we can write emails and make phone calls.

I was going to wait until the dust had settled slightly — at least until we knew the full shape of the results, but counting continues. As of this evening (26th May), we still don't know if we're going to have a Labor government with a slim majority, or a minority Labor-led government with some form of coalition or confidence-and-supply agreement with independents and minor parties. The former is more likely, but any result is honestly fine by me.

( Long, long post-election musings )

This weekend, in bullet points:

I'm slow-roasting tonight's dinner, and the house is starting to fill up with delicious smells.

I've managed to read one book this weekend: Medusa, by Jessie Burton, which is a feminist retelling of the myth, richly written, with gorgeous illustrations by Olivia Lomenech Gill. The twist on the myth — an emphasis on the trauma and ruin caused by male violence against women — is hardly a new one in Greek myth retellings, but it's one that I'll generally seek out and read in all instances.

I finally did what I should have done years ago, and deleted my Livejournal. I hadn't logged in for years, and stopped cross-posting around 2017, but for various sentimental reasons hadn't had the heart to actually delete it. This was an idiotic decision from an online security perspective, and I should have deleted the thing years ago. In any case, it's done now. The comm I used to run is deleted as well.

Yesterday, I went to the gardening supply shop, and bought about fifteen different packets of seeds. This morning Matthias and I planted beetroot and spring onion seeds in the vegetable patch. The earth was dark, and rich, and full of worms, and buds and blossoms were starting to be visible on all the fruit trees. It's not a lot, but it's something.

I'm kind of delightedly amused that yesterday, on the tenth anniversary of Ed Balls Day, the New York Times wrote an in-depth article about this meme that will not die. I'm even more delightedly amused that, as per Yvette Cooper, he apparently made a cake to commemorate this important moment of internet history.

Today is the penultimate day of the thirty-day book meme:

29. A book that led you home

( My answer )

( The last day )