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request

2011-09-20T22:02:50Z

Hello, all. I am here to make a request. I am suffering somewhat at the moment from an attack of Life, and I'm numbing my mind by watching vids. I'm here to ask y'all for recs of whatever vids you're watching at the moment, with one caveat: I have no brainpower left. Not a single bit left. So if it's a vid with a deeply thoughtful constructed reality, or one that explores complex social and political issues - maybe not, mmm? I can handle vids that express "yaaay, I heart [character/show/that thing those characters do in that show]", and I can handle vids that are "yay, ladies!" or 'yay, geeks!" But more than that - anything that involves propositional content - and I have to hide. So sorry, I don't mean to.

To be helpful, here are some I do like and am watching a lot lately, with my current interpretations in square brackets:

-Ground Beneath Her Feet, Sapphire & Steel. [My favourite vid of all time. Atmosphere! Pretty people! Show lovely seventies weird-as-fuck show!]

-Rolling In the Deep, X-Men First Class. [Charles/Erik! <33333!]

-The Test, Star Trek. [Kirk and Spock's love is TWU FOREVER TWU kthxbai.]

-Past In Present, Chak De! India. [Brown girls! India! THERE IS SOMETHING IN MY EYE.]

-Space Girl, multifandom. [oh my heart, my heart]

...etc. Thank you all for your patience during these Troubled Times.

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all irregularities will be handled

2011-06-03T01:06:28Z

If you wanted to be charitable, you could say I spent this week doing grown-up, house-hunting assessing-relationship things - or you could just say I spent this week lying on Shim's bed watching Sapphire & Steel. (And occasionally taking a deep breath and closing the laptop and not watching it, especially just before bed.)

I am at a loss to explain why I have suddenly fallen in love with a faintly clunky British sci-fi show from the seventies. Because, okay, I have watched lots of classic Doctor Who and lots of Star Trek TOS. And I love them both - I do love them. I love them because you watch TOS and think, huh, this is pretty derivative. And then you think: no, actually, everything else is derived from this. I mean. I love "Amok Time" and "Mirror, Mirror" and "The City at the Edge of Forever". And I love old Who - I love, love, love that here is this show that people, not just sci-fi fans sort of people, watch, and it's full of warmth and sweetness and oh yeah it's been going since 1963. In both of them, I love the scale of imagination - the way they set out to draw on these huge canvasses, these layered and multi-layered plots (Caves of Androzani, anyone? Does everyone else understand it, or am I not the only one?) and quite often they don't have the budget or technical ability to match, but they have the vision.

But... I'm a child of the nineties. Very sad and unfortunately true. Somehow my suspension of disbelief never quite works out when faced with matte-painting alien worlds and monsters made of bubble-wrap. And I think it's perfectly okay, actually, to love shows not just because they are of great cultural import but also because they are camp and fabulously endearing and sometimes the sets fall over. Red Dwarf would have been no fun at all if they'd not, you know, filmed on Crosby beach in the winter time and invited you to believe it was a tropical paradise.

But Sapphire & Steel is different. It didn't have the money or the technology for alien worlds or monsters, so it didn't have them. Instead it has.... well. It has whole serials against the background of one set, with three or four-member casts, with nearly no specical effects. It's entirely PG-rated. And somehow, through the writing and the acting, it's compelling and it's also seriously fucking scary. I mean. Okay, so in one episode there's some sort of evil presence moving things around. A coat drops off a peg, cushions fall off sofas. One of the characters gives voice what the audience is thinking and says, big deal, what harm can that even do?

Behind him, almost unnoticed, a pillow falls into the baby's crib.

That's it, that's what it does. It has a kind of deathless creepiness that I really, really like. And, okay, one of my issues with really getting into old Who is the veeeeeeery slow pacing. I know it was a serial, it's how it was done, but I just... I flag. And this is the same format, and someone on tvtropes describes Sapphire & Steel as having the pacing of "Star Trek The Motion Picture on thorazine", which is probably true - but it works. It really does work. It builds up the tension and foreboding that way until by the last episode you're properly jumpy.

And couple that with the fact it makes a religion of never telling you what the fuck is going on - who are Sapphire and Steel? Well, they wander the universe fixing stuff that's gone wrong. They are not futuristic detectives, as Amazon apparently thinks they are. They are not Time Lords. They are "medium atomic weights" - but no one ever seems to point out that neither sapphire nor steel is an element. They're telepathic between themselves, but not generally. They don't sleep and they don't age. They're very aware of and tied to time. And, while I'm at it, they're played by David McCallum and Joanna Lumley and it's 1979 and I am so grateful for my own bisexuality sometimes I can't even tell you. I mean. Come on. Just. How is this quantity of preternatural beauty even possible.

And they're not human. I really love how well that's done, too: through a mixture of good writing and acting, you're really made to believe that while they look human, they're not. They're alien and amoral and kind of sinister and the relationship between them definitely consists in something but not something you can understand. It's loving and alien and sexually charged and kinky as all-get-out in a lot of ways - okay, obscure, but even so I was amazed to discover that no has ever written it for kink_bingo.

And, there is a fair bit of fic on the AO3 but no actual Sapphire/Steel, which baffles me. The funny thing is, I wanted to find a fic that gets at this whole kinky-sexually-charged-but-inhuman dynamic - and I didn't find it, but I did find a vid, of all things: Ground Beneath Your Feet (on youtube - couldn't find it anywhere else) and I totally love it and have watched a redacted number of times in the last couple of days. (And me, you know me, I'm vid-illiterate, there's a tiny handful of vids that have had enough of an effect on me for me to watch them more than once.) But it's amazing - gets at all that, the relationship between them, the way-creepy-cool vibe the show has, and gives it some actual pace and as a bonus it's very pretty to look at.

And yes. It's Britain in 1979. Sometimes the haircuts remind you of this fact. Sometimes the interior decor does. But, it impresses me by having a non-white character - Lead, who neatly subverts the stereotypes - and by doing interesting things with gender power dynamics. On first gloss, Steel is the dominant half of the pair... but it's not actually quite that simple. I like it.

On the whole this isn't an unreserved rec - if you're not me, for example, and thus maybe don't have a thing for deserted underground stations and urban ghost stories and understated creepiness and all of those things together, it might not be to your taste, and I should mention again that it can be really very disturbing - but. But, I like it better than old Who. Shush. Don't tell anyone.

The DVDs can be had for not that much, so I was going to get them, but on second thoughts, I think I will wait till the house-move is over and then get them delivered to a new address. It is a little ridiculous how exciitng I find this. Hi I am grown up honest.

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love will always be larger and different from our plans

2011-01-09T00:39:21Z

This is a little early, but what the hell, I'm buzzed and mellow and I want to talk. Today is January 9th, 2011 - another day, nothing special, perhaps. Ten years ago, I was thirteen, nearly fourteen, bright and lost and looking for something; ten years ago, less six weeks, I discovered a fanfiction archive, a television show and a friend.

Ten years ago I met hathycol; today I am twenty-three, nearly twenty-four, and next year I'll be bridesmaid at her wedding. Here's to you, fandom: here's to everything I found, everyone I met, everyone I've loved; everything I've watched and read and seen; every alien city I've slept in among friends. Here's to you, and thanks for everything.

A quiet day, today. Colleen and I went to Manchester with tau_sigma; we went to Afflecks, and sighed for our rapidly-receding days as teenage goths; we went to Forbidden Planet, and bought doughnuts and drank coffee and talked about everything and nothing. I bought a coat. Tali and I made fun of Colleen's passion for Cardassians; we made hen party plans and cackled with laughter. Colleen and I got through a bottle of mellow wine over dinner, and I am happy, so very happy. Perhaps I don't say this as much as I should, but here it is, anyway: fandom is no longer as important to me as it once was. It's no longer my only passion, the only thing I really care about. But that's because when it was, when it shaped my ideas about community and storytelling and what gives people value, it drew out my talents, and it gave me the strength of that community. I care about other things now - like social justice, law, my career and relationships - because I am what fandom made me, because it made me grow up feeling like I could contribute to what I care about. That I can shine as bright as I see everyone else shine.

And I still care about stories. I always will.

fandom_stocking went live today. I had lots of very sweet greetings, but some people have been especially kind: thistlerose wrote me a sweet ficlet, Unpathed Waters, Undreamed Shores, about McCoy and Spock, whom I adore, and if that weren't enough, she also made some very pretty icons. And icepixie made me a vidlet, Sea-Changed, which is Slings & Arrows, Geoffrey and performance and evolution and applause, and it made me cry while simultaneously being very happy. Oh, it's lovely.

It has been a beautiful ten years; the next ten will be different in their own way, but I am so happy to have grown up here.

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