Like a dandelion up through the pavement, I persist

Challenge #13

Make a rec list! Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

I think I've mainly recced fics for this challenge, or similar ones, in the past, and I remember regretting not reccing any vids, so I am here now to remedy my past self's oversight there. In no particular order, here are ten vids that I give my strongest possible endorsement to. There are content warnings for several of them that are listed in the AO3 works themselves that I have linked here, but, all other things being equal, I would absolutely recommend that you watch all of them whether you are familiar with the canons in question or not.

Fun, Fun, Fun by cosmic_llin

Fandom: Lower Decks (Beckett Mariner character study vid)
Song: Fun, Fun, Fun by the Beach Boys

This is a Beckett Mariner vid about her relationship to responsibility that cosmic_llin gifted me for festivids last year. Full disclosure, many of the vids on this lists were gifts to me, and of those four were gifts I specifically got for Festivids 2022/2023, because it was an absolute banner year for me in terms of both the quantity and quality of vids that were so kindly gifted to me.

It's such a gorgeous, joyous vid that captures so much of what I love about Lower Decks in general and Mariner in particular. It's funny, irreverant, fond, and never afraid to be silly. Llin did a wonderful job with creating a strong narrative in this too about Beckett's relationship with her captain (who is also her mother) and fitting into the structure of Starfleet's hierarchy as an anarchic free spirit who will become a square peg to avoid fitting into round holes out of pique. I love her so, so much.

Get This Podcast Started by findmeinthealps

Fandom: Only Murders in the Building (Mabel Mora & Oliver Putnam & Charles Hayden-Savage ensemble vid)
Song: Get the Party Started by P!nk

This is another vid that was gifted to me last year for festivids and was, I think, the first one of the vids I received that I watch post-reveals. It's an ensemble vid and an absolute non-stop riot. Alps is an amazing vidder and, like everyone I've recced here, I could honestly have a rec list of just their work, but to keep things trim I'm limiting myself to this one as an introduction to their oeuvre.

I love humour in vids so much and I think that ironic pairings of clips and lyrics can be so effective, which this vid just absolutely nails. It's also visually such a treat and marries the visuals and the music in such a satisfying way, with so many satisfying little moments that land on exactly the write musical cue, and the editing is as smooth as butter. If you're not familiar with the fandom, I also think it's a great sales pitch for it and what makes it so fun, as it centres on the central trio from the show and their various amateur (and amateurish) murder investigations

Be Okay by cosmic_llin

Fandom: A League of Their Own (2022) (Shirley Cohen character study vid)
Song: Be OK by Ingrid Michaelson

And now for something completely different! This Shirley Cohen vid was another gift that the lovely cosmic_llin made for me for festivids last year and it was the second vid I watched. Even hot on the heels of the giddy fun of Get This Podcast Started, I welled up watching this within like a minute. I also cried again rewatching it when I was putting this list together and it hit me every bit as hard.

Llin is the only person who got two vids on the list, but I hope my naked partisanship can be excused here because I think that including both of the vids I've recommended here show her range really well. She's, of course, not unique in being able to nail more than one tone, but she pipped everyone else to the post by giving me two lovely vids last year and I wanted to include all my festivids 2022 gifts, haha.

Tubthumping by usuallyhats

Fandom: Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (ensemble vid)
Song: Tumbthumping by Chumbawamba

The summary on AO3 for this vid is:

"If the existing plan fails, I make a new plan."
"So you make plans that fail."
"No!"

This is an ensemble vid and it is non-stop laugh a minute fun, very much in keeping with the tone of the movie. I saw this in the room when it premiered in vidukon_cardiff last year, and it was a huge crowd pleaser. If you are a fan of plans ganging agley and people getting knocked down and getting up again, I cannot recommend this vid highly enough.

I won't spoil it for you, but the choice of clips for the "Oh, Danny boy, Danny boy, Danny boy" section makes me almost cry laughing no matter how many times I see it.

Pray Be Silent, and Join Me in a Dance by theletterelle

Fandom: Pride and Prejudice (1995) (Elizabeth Bennet/Fitzwilliam Darcy)
Song Shut Up and Dance by Walk the Moon, covered by Eric Wuest

Using this instrumental cover of Shut Up and Dance on strings was such an inspired choice for this vid and I am stunned to this day by how effective it is. There are several parts cutting to musicians at the various dances and balls featured in the vid and I find it very immersive. And fun!

'Shut Up and Dance' is also just such a fantastic song choice as-is for a P&P vid, given how much of the stop and start development of Lizzie and Darcy's relationship and their mutual fascination in each other, in all its cautiously spiky glory, involves dancing together and using this almost neoclassical arrangement of it just elevates the vid even further.

I Can Cook Too by Tafadhali

Fandom: Big Eden (Pike Dexter/Henry Hart)
Song: "I Can Cook Too" from On the Town, performed by Alysha Umphress

The last of the recs from my wonderful pile of the Festivids gifts I got last year! This is such a charming and fond little vid for a charming little movie I am so hopelessly fond of. It is just under a minute long, but feels exactly the length that it needs to be.

It centres Pike, the sweet, shy love interest of Big Eden, and his understated, modest courtship of Henry through cooking for him and does such a good job of showcasing Pike as the unqualified dreamboat that he is. Very sweet, very swoony: both the character and the vid.

I Want You to Want Me by hartknyx

Fandom: Much Ado About Nothing (1993) (Beatrice/Benedick, Claudio/Hero)
Song: I Want You to Want Me by Cheap Trick, covered by Letters to Cleo

Well, the last vid in the list was the last of my Festivid gifts from last year, but this vid is one that I got in Festivids 2020/2021, haha.

I will always hold the Kenneth Branagh adaptation of Much Ado very near and dear to my heart and I was unspeakably thrilled to be gifted this vid by hartknyx. It encapsulates everything I love about this adaptation so perfectly and it's so fun and makes such wonderful use of the physical comedy and delightful facial expressions and acting choices in the film. It's also really effective in how it shows Claudio's deep and profound regret over wronging Hero. I did watch this film very young, so maybe I was softer on Claudio then than I would be on a first viewing now, but I do think that Robert Sean Leonard is one of the more redeemed-in-my-eyes Claudio and I think this section of the vid shows why very well.

It was also such a fun choice to use a song from the 10 Things I Hate About You soundtrack for a vid to another film adaptation of a Shakespearean play! And, as I said at the time, even though there are a lot of repeated refrains in the lyrics, the vid never for one second feels anything but fresh and lively in how it rattles along. It also, as with the P&P vid, uses diegetic elements like showing a character playing a drum over the drum solo section that really, really work and marry the song to the visuals beautifully. Ten thousand out of ten stars, no notes.

Notice Me by lilly_the_kid

Fandom: Cobra Kai (Daniel LaRusso/Johnny Lawrence)
Song: Notice Me by Alexa Ray Joel

It does not matter how many times I see this vid, I fall in love with it again every time. It's so wonderfully adolescent and dumb in its portrayal of these fifty-something-year-old guys who re-light the flame of their teenage karate rivalry with each other almost four decades after the fact and become, once again, completely absorbed by thoughts of each other. Don't pretend you don't see me, baby!

This is just an all time favourite feel good vid for me and I love it to distraction.

Parachute by thingswithwings

Fandom: Leverage (Alec Hardison/Parker/Eliot Spencer)
Song: Parachute by Ingrid Michaelson

I almost cut this from my shortlist a few times, not because it is not phenomenal, but because I wondered whether there was anyone left in fandom who was not already well acquainted with its majesty. This is an absolute classic fanvid that everyone I know who I've mentioned it to, even if they're aren't into Leverage, even if they aren't into vids, has seen and was stunned by. But it will no doubt be new to some of you, so it would be a crime not to include it, and not the fun and morally-just kind of crime.

Parachute is such a wonderfully dynamic and active vid, both in terms of its use of movement through the visuals and its overall narrative arc and how each section flows into the next and progresses the central theme of the vid.

There is this wonderful bit near the start that transitions a section about Hardison and Parker's relationship into including Eliot and his relationships to both of them, where it cuts from Parker and Hardison jumping off a bridge onto a moving train, to Eliot landing in the middle of a brawl in a warehouse. The editing is utterly sublime and it's such a rewarding vid to watch closely every time I go back to it.

Batter Up! by videobaths

Fandom: Succession (Gerri Kellman character study, Gerri/Roman)
Song: Swing! by Ellie Dixon

Gerri alert! And, I mean, okay, do I think Gerri Kellman effectively utilised girl power by funneling money to cover up the worst abuses that occured under Logan Roy's leadership? No, and if she was real I would not be remotely sympathetic to the misogyny she faces as a cog in the machine of late stage capitalism and serving the interests of the richest people in the world. But also... she is a fictional character and she is baby girl and I love her very much and everyone who has ever patronised or overlooked her at WayStar or thrown her under the bus as a scapegoat should be publicly executed for crimes against Blorbo.

This wonderful vid was gifted to me by videobaths for the womansplace exchange in 2023 (which I feel very bad about defaulting from and which I hope comes back this year so I can have another crack at it).

The pacing is so effective in this, both in how it builds the momentum of the vid from an excitement per second perspective and also in how it captures the fast pace of the world Gerri operates in and how sink or swim it is to survive in the waters she has been a shark in for decades. It is not constant go, go, go though and has great peaks and valleys in how it handles the pace and the length of each clip to reflect tone in the song.

The lyrics are also just... such a perfect fit for this vid "thought I left the oven on, 'cos your such a gaslight" and "if you're gonna play these games, I'll join in" are just so perfect for Gerri and the narrative thrust of this vid in particular.

The Gerri/Roman shippy sections are also just such an unparalled delight and it is always so fun seeing how actively she chose the awful series of decisions that led to their thing and how into it she is. "Now I'm lucid" oh, girl, are you? But I'm glad you had fun, you deserve it. Not... many of the other particulars that this particular relationship involved, but you deserved the fun part of a thrillingly terrible idea like getting involved with Roman Roy in the manner in which you did.

I pretty much rewatch this vid three times through every time I go back to it because it's so exciting, and it never, ever gets old.

Challenge #9

Rec Us Your Newest Thing. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Content warning: Discussion of prison, abuse of prisoners, sexual assault, IRA hunger strikes, homophobia (including internalised homophobia), queerness being closeted/repressed, racism, and systemic injustic (especially classism).

This is, um, about a lighthearted sitcom, lol. Oh, which one?

Porridge

Click to expand

Intro

So my 'new' thing is not really new, either to me or in general, but I have been revisiting the 1970s British sitcom Porridge recently and, having had a lovely windfall of Yuletide gifts and written a couple of my own fics, am now absolutely in its thrall with no clear endpoint in sight. The show is generally remembered fondly by people in the UK and Ireland (and, I think, some other Anglophone countries) who are of an age to have seen it, but there is not much of a transformative fandom presence per se, which, of course, means that I have to do my level best to drag a few of you, who it may or may not be new to, down with me 😉

Porridge stars the late Ronnie Barker in the lead role of Norman Stanley Fletcher, a small-time career criminal who has been sent to serve a five year prison sentence in Slade Prison. This is far from his first time on the inside and, as an old hand, he takes the other lead, Lennie Godber, a young first-offender from Birmingham, played by the late Richard Beckinsale (father of Kate and Samantha Beckinsale), under his wing. Fletch and Godber are cellmates for most of the show, despite Fletch's attempts to finagle a single cell, and many of the scenes are set in their cell and mostly, or only, feature them.

Click for more background on the show

Other characters include:

• Mr Barrowclough, an easily taken advantage of and ineffectual prison officer.
• Mr McKay, a more punitive and harsh prison officer.
• Mr Venables, Slade prison's governor, a tropical fish enthusiast who likes to think of himself as enlightened in his approach, a belief which may or may not be justified.
• Lukewarm, an affable gay trusty^* who knits and lends his dubious cooking skills to the prison kitchen. Jokes are often made about his sexuality, but they are generally not meanspirited, especially when compared with other casually homophobic jokes and language in the show, but this is something to be aware of.
• Jim "Jock" McLaren, played by a young Tony Osoba, a cagey prisoner who hasn't had many breaks other than the fractured bones he's inflicted on others, but who is generally on good terms with Fletch and Godber and who, under his defensiveness, is pretty easy going. Just to flag this as a 'buyer beware' thing, there are a number of jokes made about McLaren's ethnicity, nationality, and race (his is Black and Scottish, his biological parents being a West Indian woman and a white Scottish man, although he did not grow up with either of them and was "found wrapped up in a copy of the Glasgow Herald in a Greenock housing estate" and grew up in an orphange) which would not fly today and shouldn't have then, as well as outdated terminology that is not (usually) intended offensively, but which is by almost universal consensus considered racist today. Although some of the homophobic language in the show is, arguably, harsher, as they were used as slurs then as well as now, I think the racism in Porridge, both in its treatment of McLaren and in other incidental dialogue, is more overt and harsh than the homophobia.
• "Bunny" Warren, a prisoner who often goes in on schemes with Fletch and who gets him to read his letters from his wife for cigarettes, since he himself is illiterate.
• "Genial" Harry Grout, a prisoner who the rest of Slade, inmates and staff alike, lives in terror of and has fingers in many pies relating to blackmarket goods and gambling.
• Ives, a horrible little man and frequent antagonist who, among other offenses, commits the cardinal sin of stealing from other prisoners.
• Cyril Heslop, a prisoner who came in with Godber and Fletch who is slow and thoughtful, but not one of nature's great intellectuals, and often several steps behind in a conversation when he chimes in with a contribution.
• Blanco Webb, a 63 year old prisoner serving a long sentence who is old before his time and who Fletch is very caring toward and reserves most of his sarcasm from.
• Harris, another horrible little man along similar lines to Ives. As far as I know, the same actor played an almost identical character "Norris" in one of the other episodes, but I may be conflating two different actors.
• Ingrid Fletcher, Fletch's daughter, who he conceived out of wedlock in Highgate Cemetary on the grave of Karl Marx (he was going through a political phase, and it was as handy a place as any). Ingrid is friendly and cheerful, but a little flakey.

Most of the plots involve harebrained schemes that go awry, like an underground high-stakes game of snakes and ladders, or a pineapple chunks heist. It is very silly and, while aspects of the humour are now dated, a lot of it stands up and I enjoy it a lot. Something I really like about it is that Fletch often repeats jokes in a nudge-nudge-did-you-get-it way, or looks around to see if people are laughing at them, which feels very true to his character, who is very prone to off-the-cuff wordplay and holding forth, and not a little show offish about it. He's very charming and funny and well-spoken, albeit in a way that includes frequent malapropisms, and he clearly bases a lot of his self-esteem on being seen as such. Also, being funny and irreverent is a large part of how he keeps the bastards from grinding him down.

Aside from the aspects of the show that have not aged well that I mentioned above, I really love the humour of the show and I find it very charming. As well as the wacky sitcom shenanigans, the dialogue has a lot of punning and wordplay, largely from Fletch, and the way Barker performs Fletch is extremely winning. A lot of the time he'll repeat jokes in a nudge-nudge-get-it way, or look around to see if people have reacted to a witticism, and I find that just such a lovely and real layer of characterisation. Fletch is rarely serious, often joking, loves playing with language and often holds forth, all of which he is pretty vain and show-offish about and it's clear that being thought of as funny and well-spoken or clever is a big part of his self-image. His irreverance is also a big part of what keeps him sane and stops the bastards from grinding him down, because, while the show is mostly a light hearted take on incarceration that does not really square with the realities of British prisons in the 1970s, at the height of IRA hunger-strikes and at a time rife with human rights violations of prisoners, it is not entirely rosy and uncynical or uncritical about the criminal justice system and prison. There are a lot of elements that focus on how class and marginalisation plays into who ends up in prison and the show is very much on the side of most of the prisoners in Slade over the system that put them in there even if they are as cheerfully unrepentent as Fletcher, although some crimes are framed less sympathetically than theft, notably white collar crime.

*A trusty is a prisoner with special responsibilities and privileges. Also, per the Wikipedia page on the prison trusty system, apparently trusty rather than trustee is the standard spelling, so the more you know, I guess.
[return to where you left off.]

The show has three series and two Christmas specials, two spin-offs—Going Straight, which follows Fletch immediately after he's released from Slade, and a reboot from 2016 where his grandson is the lead, which I have not seen and don't really intent to—a semi-canonical movie from 1979, and a once-off mockumentary set in-universe—Life Beyond the Box: Norman Stanley Fletcher—which came out in 2003.

My crackpot shippy slant on the dynamic between the leads, which is actually very reasonable, how dare you, I don't have to stand here and be insulted like this

Click to expand

Godber: I'm fed up with crime. I wanna go straight.
Fletch: How old are you, son?
Godber: Twenty-three.
Fletch: Twenty-three and you wanna go straight? What kind of talk is that, eh? You've got your whole life ahead of you!

So, yeah, I ship Fletch and Godber, because of course I do. Here is a graphic I made and posted on Tumblr in 2023 when I started rewatching the show:

This is not a recent development or a revelation I've only had upon rewatching the show, because I also shipped them a LOT when I saw the show first as a teenager. It was, however, extremely arresting (aha) to revisit it and be hit by the shippiness anew. Given my much-touted love of roguish con-men and crooks, and shipping them with wide-eyed younger men who adore them, this is extremely on-brand behaviour from me, to the point where a friend, after I told her that I was rewatching Porridge and having a great time sexualising Ronnie Barker through the proxy of Richard Beckinsale, said, "That makes total sense as a ship for you." A statement which remains the funniest way I have ever been called out in my entire life.

However! In my own defence, I don't think this is shipping goggles forcing a romantic dynamic that may not exist onto two characters who tick enough boxes for me that I'd like to imagine them kissing. I mean it's not not that, but it's not just that. There is, of course, Godber's general open admiration, sometimes almost to the point of awe, of Fletcher, and Fletch's protectiveness over Godber, and their little domestic squabbles and stuff like Godber darning Fletch's socks and nicking tins of pineapple chunks for him at great personal risk, but the first thing that piqued my interest came from their first scene together.

Godber: Know all the form, don't ya? You been here before?
Fletch: No, never been here. But it’s all the same; porridge is porridge innit?
Godber: First time for me. Don't know how I'll get through.
Fletch: Oh, cheer up, could be worse. State this country's in, you could be free, couldn't you? Stuck outside with no work and a crumbling economy. How horrible that would be. Nothing to do but go to bed early and increase the population.
Godber: Won't be doing that for a while.
Fletch: No, that's true, hmm. No, I shouldn't have said that, it's a tasteless joke, innit?
Godber, with an expression like butter wouldn't melt in his mouth: I'm gonna feel ever so deprived.

Like??? I cannot overstate how easy it is to read a lot of scenes in the first few episodes as Godber trying desperately to signal in every way that he can think of that he's up for it to this older, more experienced man who's done time before and has taken him under his wing. Tragically, Fletch doesn't pick up on these hints. I imagine that he hasn't quite got it right yet, per this quote from the pilot:

Godber: Hey, Fletcher, what does he mean by 'practising homosexual?'
Fletch: One who ain’t quite got it right yet.

Ah well, better blatant than latent, but better latent than never, eh? And, like, again, I feel like it is an extremely small stretch to read Fletch, a man who has spent most of his married life in prison and who got married very young to his also-very-young girlfriend after an unplanned pregnancy, as someone who is gay and just hasn't spent enough time outside prison to reflect much on not being that interested in women sexually/romantically.

Fletch, talking to the hens in the prison farm as he steals eggs: Now then, girls. This is what's known as one of the perks of the job. Now, with these eggs I'm smuggling in 'ere, I can get meself a quarter ounce of shag, or two tubes of toothpaste, or... three bars of Fruit 'N Nut! Or I could take them down to E-wing and see Smutty Garland, the king of the porn, exchange 'em for two of his dirty books, yeah, full of full-frontal naked nubiles...
Fletch: I think I'd rather have the Fruit 'N Nut meself.

He also says at various points that 'carnal thoughts' are a bad idea in prison and you should try your absolute best to suppress them—although he also plasters the cell with pictures of topless Page 3 girls, so he's not entirely consistent here, at least on a surface level reading where you do not assume that this choice of decor is performative. I am, however, equally open to readings of him as not gay but otherwise queer and attracted to men, but deeply repressed about it, perhaps in part because of having spent so much time in prison, where there is a lot of homophobic violence and sexual assault, which queer prisoners are disproportionately the victims of. Fletcher himself expresses a lot of casual homophobia, often in the form of jokes about sexual assault, which could just be read at face value as bad-taste homophobic jokes, but could also take on a more sinister undertone if you scratch the surface of it, particularly since Fletch's primary coping mechanism is humour.

Fletch is pretty fond of Lukewarm, who is gay and out, and textually treats Lukewarm's boyfriend on the outside, Trevor, and their relationship as basically equivalent to other prisoners' relationships with their wives, with the only caveat that Trevor also has to worry about Lukewarm having wandering eyes while they're apart, so I don't think he's a unilateral bigot. I do absolutely think he needs some practice to get the hang of one or two things though. As it were.

Where you can watch it

Click to expand

There are some different options to rent or buy various parts of the canon as well as a few streaming services that have it available in certain regions. What I've been able to find online are the following:

• Porridge S1-3 (TV 1974):
  • DVD
  • Britbox
  • BBC iPlayer
  • Prime
  • Apple TV
• The Christmas specials:
  • No Way Out:
    • DVD
    • Britbox
    • Apple TV
  • The Desperate Hours:
    • DVD
    • Britbox
    • Apple TV
• Going Straight (TV 1978):
  • DVD
  • Apple TV
  • YouTube
• Porridge (Movie 1979):
  • YouTube
  • DVD
• Life Beyond the Box: Norman Stanley Fletcher (TV 2003):
  • YouTube

I also think there were some episodes released on VHS at some point, if you have a VCR. I don't think any part of the canon has been released on BluRay, and as far as I know the 2003 mockumentary is only availabe online on YouTube. It doesn't seem to be on the iPlayer anymore and I don't think it ever got a physical release.

The digital options above may or may not be available in your region and there may be others that I am unaware of.

In terms of the DVDs, you can buy the individual series/seasons by themselves, or in one of a few different boxsets (one with S1-3, one with S1-3 plus the Christmas specials, a few miscellaneous Ronnie Barker DVD boxsets that have some of his other work), but something to bear in mind is the DVDs I've seen online seem to all be Region 2 or Region 4. If you are not in those regions, and you don't have a multiregion DVD player, VLC can usually play DVDs regardless of region if you plug a USB DVD player into a computer in my experience, but I think it depends on the drivers in your DVD player. It may be possible to change the region of your DVD player (although sometimes you can only do this a fixed number of times before it gets locked to one region) or install firmware from the internet that will allow it to play DVDs from any region, or you might also be able to use one of a variety of programs online, such as HandBrake, to rip a region-locked DVD (sometimes with some workarounds if it is not working in a straightforward way, but there are how-to guides that I can put you in the way of it you would like).

For what it's worth though, in my experience a USB DVD drive and VLC will play any DVD I throw at it, which I think is the case for most USB DVD drives and laptop DVD drives, and I've never tried to rip a DVD and then been prevented by region, regardless of the software I used (and I have tried a few), but your mileage may vary and there is a chance you might buy something that you can't play, or can't play without voiding your DVD players warranty or wandering into what you may consider to be legally grey areas (although I believe that ripping DVDs you bought legally for private use is legal in most juridications, which, again, is just my impression and may be wrong). They generally seem to be going fairly cheaply though, so it could be a relatively inexpensive gamble to pick up a single Region 2 DVD to test it out if you felt up for it.

There may be other more dubiously legal methods of seeing Porridge, or its various spin-offs and extended canon, but this is just an observation and not a recommendation, and I certainly would not advise anyone to send me a message asking me to make MP4s from DVDs that I've bought and ripped available to them.

As ever, please let me know if any of the links are broken and I'll fix them

Search in your current space, whether brick-and-mortar or digital. Post a picture (a link to a picture will be fine!) or description of something that is or represents:

1. Something your favorite character would like
2. Something that makes you laugh
3. A fandom place you would like to visit
4. A fandom creator (pro or not) you'd like to meet
5. Something you find comforting
6. Something from a favorite TV series or movie from your childhood
7. A piece of clothing you love
8. A book or song with a color in the title
9. Something only someone in your fandom would understand

1. Something your favorite character would like
   This one was tricky! For one, I have so many characters who I love it would be hard to single out out as my absolute number one favourite, and for another I am quite different from a lot of my favourite characters in the things I like, or at least am a bit short on stuff they'd like at the moment. So, in the spirit of a well-intentioned relative doing their very best:
   It's the thought that counts, Blorbo...

   

   Who doesn't love nice, warm hand knitted socks? They're made from 100% alpaca fibre yarn! Well, almost 100%, there's a bit of polyamide in there to make them more hardwearing. But all the better, really, less darning! Really, Blorbo, you could be a little grateful.

2. Something that makes you laugh
   This one was a lot easier, because I was in the middle of laughing at it when I first read today's challenge on the snowflake_challenge community.
   You gotta make your own fun sometimes...

   

   This is a once-off single episode podcast I recorded with my fellow trek-rarepair-swap co-mod cosmic_llin recently for voiceteam's Mystery Box 2023 event. The challege was Temptation and bluedreaming tempted people to record a mini-podcast or oral not!fic about their favourite overlooked fandom/rare ship/etc., which I all but jumped at and immediately asked the mods if it would be okay to record something with a non-Mystery Box participant if I did the rest of the work of creating the audio work, i.e. organising, editing and cover art, etc., and fortunately they gave me the all clear.

   It was really lovely to record this with Llin and reminisce on the magical four years we spent modding trek-rarepair-swap together, the amazing community that built around it, the many wonderful fanworks that were created for it, and the Star Trek rarepairs of our own that inspired the creation of the swap.

   If you're interested, you can listen to the pod on AO3 via an embedded stream, or you can use the download link on the work to get a copy of the MP3. Or not, this is not intended as a hard sell, haha. But in my subjective opinion it is a pleasant 51 minutes of listening to two Star Trek nerds being silly.

3. A fandom place you would like to visit
   Now, to be clear, I am not saying that this would be a good idea, but:
   All roads lead to...

   

   or rather away from, the Big Wahoonie itself: Ankh-Morpork! More specifically, the offices of The Ankh-Morpork Times to visit William de Worde, who in many ways is The pedantic, morally scrupulous, yet often a bit of a dick, OCD/autistic character of all time. Also, going to visit a newspaper office at a place that's vaguely analogous to a Gutenberg-era print shop is too good a chance to pass up.

4. A fandom creator (pro or not) you'd like to meet
   I am going to cheat here and pick two...

   

   I went to World Con 2019 in no small part to see both of these creators. Sadly, Lindsay Ellis overslept, I think due to jet-lag, and missed the panel she was supposed to do on the day I had a ticket for, but I did get to go to two things where Naomi Novik spoke, which were both fabulous. In one, she read the first chapter of the then-upcoming A Deadly Education. She was a very engaging and funny speaker and had both sets of crowds in the palm of her hand.

   I've loved Novik's Temereaire series for years, and reading Spinning Silver was what finally got me to get my drop spindle out again after having it for a full year before then but not being able to figure out how to use it from videos, and I at long last managed to crack how to get the first bit of fluff to catch onto my leader thread, which has brought a great deal of fun and quality of life to me in the years since. From reading Novik's work, I really like her sense of humour and her ideas, and I think she'd be fun to chat to in a low stakes sort of setting.

   And, regarding my cheat-y second pick, it would be nice to see Lindsay Ellis speak in person at some point, even if I didn't get to "meet" her, since I didn't get the chance to see her panel in 2019.

5. Something you find comforting
   This one was a doozy...

   

   I've blurred most of the handwriting here to protect the innocent, or myself at any rate, but this is a kind of three, or perhaps even four-for-one thing that I find comforting. Firstly, I find planners and journals very helpful in terms of using pen and paper as a better memory than my fallible meaty brain and in helping me unplug a bit and do something tactile to stop my eyes from getting too square from looking at a screen. Secondly, I also like printing out digital photos on either of my two Polaroid printers, because I so often lose my photographs when I change phones, or I never back them up, and it's nice to just have them somewhere printed out and maybe stuck down. Even, and maybe especially, silly fandom-y ones. Thirdly and fourthly, in the photo-in-the-photo here, you can see my current knitting project, which is another non-digital hobby I am trying to give more time to, and the show that's paused on my laptop in the photo is Porridge, which I've been finding to be very comforting to revisit recently.

   More specifically about journaling though, I have found that with my five-year Hobonichi journal, I've been trying to talk about the things, which so far this year have mostly been silly little fandom things, I'm doing that I want to remember five years from now, and that I want to remember how I felt about them at the time.

   It has been kind of interesting having a five-year journal for the first time, because I've been finding myself very hestitant to be too optimistic about looking ahead, knowing that I will be looking back on what I'm writing, because historically with journaling it has been a bit dispiriting reading about things I wanted/intended/thought I would do that never happened or didn't work out.

   But I suppose that's all part of life, really, and I do want to be able to capture how I really feel in part because I know it will change and I don't want to fall prey to thinking that I don't change my mind and that I've always thought X, Y or Z. The only constant is change, but I like to keep in touch with my past self and write my future self letters about how I'm getting on, you know? So I have, at the very least, been writing down that I'm worried about being optimistic and that it feels foolish, because I don't want to forget that's how I felt. I don't want to put on a brave face to my future self and hope the shame of having over-promised how well I'd do will keep me on the straight and narrow, but I also don't want to self-censor out of some kind of misguided PR-motivated impulse to not look foolish to myself.

6. Something from a favorite TV series or movie from your childhood
   I actually had another plan for this one, until I saw this during the IRL portion of my scavenger hunt...

   

   It wasn't actually the Boom! comics that got me into my brief, but intense, summer of writing Bulk/Skull fic and talking about Power Rangers on Tumblr in 2016, but it was this intense revisitation of my childhood favourite that led me to read the first few volumes of the MMPR and Go Go Power Rangers comics. I sort of fell off around Shattered Grid, and did intend on catching up again at one point, but there has been a lot of lamentation and rending of garments about writing choices that the comics have made from the people I follow on Tumblr who have kept up, so I may or may not at this point.

   Regardless though, it's nice to be reminded of my summer of Power Rangers, because that felt like a very pure and unabashed expression of fannish joy and I want to do that more often for whatever niche corners of fandom I find myself in. It was also around that time that I was revisiting a lot of stuff from my childhood again and allowing myself to just be self-indulgent and juvenile about liking what I liked, up to and including campy '90s shows with questionable monster costumes, which is another thing I want to remember to do more often.

7. A piece of clothing you love
   In the context of #3, this one is kind of funny...

   

   I coveted this Beach Boys-print Aloha shirt a lot before I bought it, because I was, at the time, trying very hard to be better about not buying things on the other side of the world impulsively and wanted to a) buy less new clothes in general and b) buy fewer clothes that weren't 100% natural fibres (this is 50/50 cotton and polyester IIRC). However, after about 5 weeks of sitting on my hands and Thinking Seriously about if I Really Needed it, I bought it. Just in time, really, because my size was very nearly sold out and it's a limited edition print that wasn't going to be brought back in stock. But I absolutely love it and I feel that it is very representative of me as a person, so I think that counts as mindful consumption, haha.

   I have been trying to be more comfortable with the fact that I am not ever going to be able to pull off the willowy androgyne, or tall lumberjack, take on masculinity just because of my basic body type, which even with HRT can only change so much. I will always be short and round with small hands and feet, but that's okay because there are lots of short, round-faced men (and otherwise masculine-of-centre people) and they are great, so if I'm more of the Justin McElroy school of masculine gender presentation then I want to do that very hard and on purpose instead of living in bland unisex clothes that I try to hide in. I've fallen off a bit on this fashion-effort lately, so this is a good reminder to keep persisting in trying to get better at this.

   And, regarding what I said about the relationship to #3, I wore this shirt when I was going to visit some friends in North Wales, one of whom happened to be wearing a Rincewind shirt when I got off the train. The friend wearing the Rincewind shirt took my luggage for me and my other friend remarked, shortly after I got done taking a photograph of the sign for Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch,^* "Um, so I've noticed something here..." and we all had a good laugh about me doing touristy things while I was doing an unintentional closet cosplay of Twoflower and my friend was channeling Rincewind at the same time. I, fortunately, did not leave my luggage in Wales, however.

   *Which, incidentally, is a request only stop, so I had to tell the conductor that it was where I was disembarking ahead of time, a task for which I prepared by relentlessly drilling myself with Welsh language tutorials on YouTube and getting Welsh friends at vidukon_cardiff, where I was travelling from, to tutor me on the pronunciation before I left the hotel. All told, I spent almost a full day on this preparation (remember what I said about finding William de Worde relatable?), only, after all that, for the conductor to tell me he was getting off at Chester and I would have to tell the next fella.

   Should you ever be in this situation though, I have been reliably informed that you don't have to say the whole name, and would seem like a bit of a try-hard if you attempted to, and all that you need to do is say "Llanfair-PG" or, if you really want to seem like you're in the know, "Llanfairpwllgwyngyll." I tried the latter the first time pretty successfully with conductor #1, but stumbled at the fence by not taking a long enough run up to it with conductor #2, and had to resort to shamefacedly saying that I'd meant Llanfair-PG.

   The rather unfortuante thing is that even with an abbreviated version of the name in question, I'm really bad at the ll sound in Welsh (to say nothing of other sounds in Welsh that weren't there to trip me up on this occasion, like the trilled r), so I run into issues straight away. But, as an Irish person who gets very irate about tourists on the train who do not even attempt to learn how to say Irish language place-names and just blithely and confidently mangle them by assuming they should be pronounced like English, I wanted to do my best and make a genuine attempt. Which, unfortunately, was not amazing. Better luck next time, I guess, lol. At least I knew that written Welsh has it's own phonetic conventions that are not identical to written English, I suppose?
   [return to where you left off.]

8. A book or song with a color in the title
   
   This is very cheeky, but...

   

   I also recorded this filk for voiceteam's Mystery Box event. It's based on Under a Blanket of Blue, as performed by Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald. I was taking part in a Filk Broken Telephone and the work before mine was 'Meet me in the blanket fort' (based on Meet Me in the Battlefield) by irrationalpie, so this seemed like a good lead on from that and I liked the opportunity for green as a reference to BrickGrass's browser extension that highlights the usernames of users on Rindle's directory of creators with blanket permission statements for transformative works of their fanworks in green, because an audio fanwork event seemed like the right venue for a work about blanket permission statements.

   I do a fair bit of amateur singing and other kinds of music in a non-fannish context, but this is the first time I've made an attempt at a musical fanwork, so I hope it turned out okay. If I was doing it again I'd use my other mic, because this sounded a bit tinny, but I think it's listenable.

   If you're curious, you can click on the image itself to follow the link to the AO3 work, or for convenience, here's another link here. But absolutely no pressure, and I am linking purely in case people wanted to hear it to save them from hunting it down or asking for a link. My 2024 fandom mission statement is doing whatever I want whether people are interested or not, so if you're not interested then that's genuinely fine.

9. Something only someone in your fandom would understand
   Some more cheekiness...

   

   Once again, the image is a link and here is another one, haha. But also, once again, I genuinely do not expect anyone to make use of either of these links and am just putting them there on the off-chance someone does want a link and, honestly, to scratch the itch caused by the HTML-fuelled goblin that lives in my brain.

   I'm mostly including this at all to show that I am walking the walk re: doing whatever niche bullshit I want as I resolved to as part of my day #2 resolutions, because I've already written another fic for one of the micro fandoms I nominated, requested, and offered for Yuletide,^* in addition to the one I wrote for my assignment.

   I am 10,000% delighted with how well I did out of Yuletide this year—so much in fact that I still wanted to write more because I was all fired up. So I did. Even though it will be completely impenetratible to, I'm gonna say, 100% of the people who are subscribed to my AO3 profile. And I may still write more! I have an idea for a vid too.

   ^*And, happily, which I was gifted two wonderful fics for as well, Long Drawn Sunday Night by twoam and A Bit of Bottle by nomadicwriter, as having the opportunity to write one of my own, What Good Are Cupid's Arrows to a Fletcher Without a Beau?, for my recip Emma_Oz.
   [return to where you left off.]

I got very link happy in this, so if any are broken, give me a shout in the comments and I'll fix them.

P.S. I've screened comments on this because of a minor brain weasels concern about [REDACTED], but I've unscreened every comment I've gotten so far and if yours is screened for a while I'm probably just asleep or haven't checked DW for a bit.

Challenge #3

Create a wish list of fandom things (podfic, graphics, playlists, canon recs translations, research help, vids, sky's the limit!) that you'd like to receive. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Oh gosh! I obviously do not feel entitled to expect any of these wishes to coming true, but in the spirit of blue-sky thinking, here's some things that would make my entire year:

• A shippy Fletch/Godber Porridge fanwork of any variety.
• A synopsis of, or fanwork about, a hypothetical episode of The Muppet Show (1976-1981) where the very special guest is a contemporary 2020s celebrity. Time travel optional, and feel free to use any medium (text, audio, audiovisual, visual, etc.) or format, e.g. meta, notfic, oral notfic, fanart, etc.
• An unconventional soulmate AU, or a fake dating fanwork, about Roman Roy/Gerri Kellman.
• A recommendation of a new-to-me fandom with a canon younger man/older woman ship.
• A Survivor (as in the reality TV show) AU for any of my fandoms (anything I have a fandom tag on Dreamwidth for and anything I've created a fanwork for on AO3, besides Teen Wolf which I'm not really into anymore, is fair game).

I've been signing up for a lot of fandom bingo stuff and feeling Very Bad about how many bingo cards I have signed up for in the past and then never finished (or, in many cases, started), so I guiltily took a look at my 100fandoms bingo card (never updated since I signed up in January 2019 until now) and filled out what squares I could from fic that I have posted since I signed up. Technically, it's not against the rules to use fic you wrote before signing up, but I wanted to limit it to what I've done since then. I was pleasantly surprised that I was able to fill out 23 squares even though I hadn't been actively working on it. Like, sure, it's nearly been five years, but it's certainly more than I expected given how all-consuming Cobra Kai was for me for a hot minute of several consecutive years there, lol.

I think I am going to keep chipping away at it, because going through my works on AO3 for all these various fandoms where I only ever wrote one (or a few) fics made me realise how much I like those works and how good I think a lot of them are. I said this in my update to the post I linked above, but I have often felt inhibited from writing in certain fandoms either because I think No One Will Care outside of Yuletide season, or because I only have 1–3 ideas in me for that fandom and I don't want people to be disappointed if I just breeze through, drop a few things they like, and then leave forever. But, like, that's very silly. I should write things because it's fun and because I like them before I worry about My Public. I am not a professional writer whose livelihood depends on having a wide readership and nor do I have to tie myself down to a specific Brand Identity to avoid confusing or alienating readers who liked my X books but then hated my Y books. It's just for fun! So I should have fun! Which I do, when I let myself, so I think I'm just gonna take this as a sign to give fewer shits and just write the damn thing if I have an idea I am compelled by.

After having a quick review of the fandom goals I made as part of my new year's resolutions, I had a bit of a scout around to see if there were any podfic related comms I could join to help with that portion of my goal.

To that end, I've signed up for communal_creators which has a number of tiers for committing to creating different kinds of fanworks between September 15–October 15 (participants celebrating the High Holidays can start 7 days early or end 7 days late to make up days they will be taking off for religious observance)

I signed up for... a lot of different commitments, because my touching optimism in my own ability to follow through on things remains untouched by years of evidence to the contrary.

Here are some thoughts I've had about the tiers I signed up for, which I've copied and pasted from my intro post on the comm.

Time tier 1: 15 min/day averaged over a week

So this one is fairly self explanatory. I want to make sure that I'm keeping my hand in in general.

Craft tier 2: A moderate project completed

I was thinking of maybe making a little doll based on a character from one of my fandoms along the lines of Star Trek dolls I have made in the past—that link just goes to one set of such dolls (Jadzia and Worf), by the way, I've made some others too (Seven and Sarina Douglas; Worf and Data; Kira and Kimara Cretak).

But I may end up working on finishing one of my (many) non-fandom UFOs instead, depending on how I'm feeling closer to the time.

Podic tier 1: A complete podfic (or combo) of at least 5 minutes

I think that I'm probably going to try and record another chapter of my long dormant WIP, which is a repod of sqbr's Mary Bennet/Anne de Bourgh Pride and Prejudice fic: Wedding is Destiny; and Hanging Likewise (content warning: period typical depictions of sexism, ableism and homophobia (internalised and externalised)—although it is also a pretty atypically optimistic take on a lot of things relating to being a disabled Regency lesbian, by the standards of most fic with those tags, which I enjoy a lot). I started this pod very soon into my ventures into podfic and hadn't really realised that posting things as WIPs was not the usual practice. I've also had a lot of set backs in working on podfic between equipment issues and not having a lot of quiet time to record, so I'd love to get more forward momentum on this project.

Vidding: A completed vid(s) of at least 1 min up to 2 min

So I realised that the idea I had is probably too long for tier one, but I do have A Lot of things on my to-vid list, so I will not be stuck.

I've also had a lot of setbacks with vidding since I started out (I began in 2019 and have posted all of 14 vids since then 👀). I really didn't understand the specs necessary for video editing software when I started vidding, so I very innocently started out with my just-under-4GB RAM laptop and perpetually almost at capacity SSD with all my source on my drive instead of external storage. This has been Challenging, but I have managed to bully Vegas into working within those limitations. 14 times anyway. I've been threatening to get a new laptop for literally years at this point and I am going to really, really try to actually do that within the next week. I basically need to transfer money out of my credit union account and into my current account, which involves going to the credit union in person because I keep forgetting my PIN for online banking immediately after I have it reset, so as you can see: it's basically a near-insurmountable barrier to entry I'm dealing with here 🤣

Writing: 3000 words (fic or meta)

I am currently posting a chapter of a Good Omens WIP every Sunday (content warning: fic linked contains depictions of depression and pregnancy (which is unrelated to the depression)). The last two chapters will be posted within the time span of this event, so those may well count towards/make up my writing goal, but I have also been writing quite a lot recently and I have a few ideas that I've been itching to write, so I don't think I'll be stuck.

Challenge #15

In your own space, opine on the future of fandom.

In your own space, create a quiz or a poll (or tell us your thoughts about answering quizzes/polls)

"Yeah, like, I do not ship this! I think it's a fascinating kind of... deconstruction of teen crushes on authority figures? Or people who they think are safe outlets for burgeoning sexual feelings who turn out to be not that? But I think it's repulsive. And my reading of [movie] is that [character 1] had a crush on [character 2] and the betrayal of him turning out to be literally manipulating him as part of an elaborate revenge plot shut down [character 1]'s tentative exploration of bisexuality for years. Also, I have never thought it was reciprocated, lol. Like, I don't get people who ship it in a fluffy consensual way, and I find the way that I think it is actually plausible to be repellent, but I do get it? Idk"

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

• Write one and post 1K word story a month ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ (✔) ✅ ✅ ✅ (EDIT: 01/09/23 I've managed this every month except May so far, so I'll give myself that as a mulligan and allow myself to count a fic from another month where I posted more than just one 1K words fic for May instead as a one-time thing)✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
• Participate in Yuletide and write at least one treat in addition to assignment ✅ (✔) (✔) (Edit 03/01/24 I wrote two pinch hits, although I didn't write any treats, so I will call this one a qualified success.)
• Participate in one non-Yuletide fic exchange ✅
• Edit and post three fanvids (one festivids, one vidukon_cardiff, one other) ✅ ❌(Edit: 01/09/23 I didn't get it together for VidUKon this year, but I'll all myself to count this as a success if I post two more vids) ❌ (Edit: 03/01/24 I'm currently still working on my assignment for Festivids, but I didn't complete post any other vids in 2023.)
• Typeset and bind a fic ✅
• Record, edit and upload ten podfics (individual chapters count as one) ✅ (⅔) (I recorded some lines for the pod that the podficcer I worked together with for pod_together made for the event and I'll let myself count it for two thirds of one pod towards this goal, since I did have to edit the raw audio a little before I sent it off for her to edit into her Audacity project file)✅ ✅ ✅ (⅓) (⅓) (Edit 03/01/24 I recorded lines in two multivoices that I didn't edit when I went to europodfriends in October) ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅ ✅
• Beta at least one fic ✅
• Leave more comments and kudos (kudos every fic that was enjoyable, comment on at least one out of three fics that were enjoyable). Always leave a short comment on a re-read, don’t forget to kudos if also commenting ❌ (Edit: 03/01/24 Definitely dropped the ball on this one)
• Update Dreamwidth once a week ❌ (Edit: 01/09/23 Categorically have failed this, lol, but I'll try and get back on the horse and not be too all or nothing about it) (Edit: 03/01/24) Didn't really get back on the horse, I am sorry to say.
• Look into bringing back trek-rarepair-swap could be an annual thing for now?) ✅ (Edit 01/09/23 I looked into it with my co-mod and decided it's probably a next year at the earliest thing)
• Write more image descriptions and at least look through the notes of posts to find if others have written descriptions before reblogging undescribed posts ✅ (Edit: 01/09/23 I've actually been doing really well at this! Obviously it's an ongoing goal rather than a fait accompli that I'm going to give up on now that I've technically cleared the bar of doing more than I was, but it's nice to realise that I've committed to this very consistently)

Looking back at these now, some of these seem extremely doable (and, in fact, I have betaed a fic so far this year and signed up to a handful of non-Yuletide exchanges, so well done me! I am also on track with at least four other goals and possibly more?) and others seem very hard. Ten podfics! I certainly was ambitious when I wrote this list in December in some respects. But, you know, sometimes it's good for me when my reach exceeds my grasp. Gives me room to improve the next year.

It feels fitting to be revisiting my resolutions a day after Lunar New Year. Happy year of the rabbit, everyone! It's my sign's year and I'm not going to waste it like I did 2011, lol. Also, I found out the other day, Vietnam celebrates the year of the cat rather than the year of the rabbit! I'm very charmed by this.

Edit: 03/01/24 So, I did better at this than I thought I would, honestly. Particularly with the podfic! Although to be fair, most of that was a third act twist where I recorded and edited five pods for ITPE in late December. It's good to see a baseline for what was easy and what I struggled with.