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So, Vidukon! I had a lovely time - spent my morning on Friday writing in Starbucks at Paddington; headed westwards in a train carriage with two hen parties and nine fangirls, it was great - and we got to Cardiff with far less incident than last year; Cardiff itself is lovely, it has bilingual signage and smells like the sea, which is all I ask from of a place; and we piled off the London train and ran straight into fray_adjacent, which was super. Vidukon is a lovely little con - emphasis on the little; I think I knew almost everyone at least by sight, or through having met them last year - and the atmosphere was way more collegiate than some other cons I've been to.

I didn't go to everything, but I went to most things. Some brief notes:

-My favourite vidshows were the Pride vidshow (because, once again, Vidukon is the same weekend as Pride); the Same Song, Different Source vidshow (because, wow, I am kind of vid-illiterate, but a show like that really helps - it helped me draw out parallels and interesting themes where maybe I wouldn't've been able to otherwise) and Constructed Realities, which was probably the most fun vidshow. My suggestion for that show was "Closer", and it was fun seeing that on the big screen; also one vid of mine appeared, "we were born in a summer storm", which was also nice to see; but my favourite favourite favourite times eleventy million thing about that vidshow was "Papa Don't Preach", in which Jack Harkness is keeping his baby. I'm so happy about that vid. So, so happy.

-So, having only begun vidding as a result of last year's Vidukon, it was a major kick and blessing for me to see my vids on screen! As above I had one in the constructed realities show, and "Landsailor" of course appeared in the Aims Vid Project show. I very much enjoyed being part of that project, especially as such a new vidder - "Landsailor" was the third vid I made - and getting to see them all on the screen one after another was part of the whole community building thing I think is so important in fandom generally. It was great. I also got to see "Unsteady Ground", the vid I learned how to vid to make, on the screen in the Vidders' Choice show, and that was amazing: I mean, really, really amazing. Even a year's worth of experience makes me think I'd do it slightly differently now, but nevertheless, that was the vid of my heart and it was so so nice to see people's reactions to it in real time. Aaaah.

-And, finally. Premieres. I didn't have a premiere myself - I thought until the last minute I was going to make a Queen Arachnia vid for the lulz, but it never worked out - but I knew cosmic_llin had one and I'd been hearing static about that vid since April. It's a vid, they all told me, very obliquely, that is relevant to your interests. silly_cleo wanted to sit next to me for it. It was all very intriguing.

The vid is "Long Live" (by cosmic_llin), no content notes, all of Star Trek. Long live the magic we made.

Go watch it. I'll still be here when you get back.

Yep.

I think that it was out of consideration for my feelings that such_heights put it at the end of the show? When the lights came up I couldn't talk for a while. I just can't.

Actually, cribbing mostly from the comment I finally got myself to write on it (after the broken-hearted keening was over, natch), ( more on this )

I just... yes.

-I also made a vid myself and posted it during the con - not a premiere; I'm not that organised, though I did finally finish the vid on Saturday afternoon - and in case you missed it, here it is: we came to learn the sea, also about all of Star Trek! This has been the vid of my heart the last couple of months or so; like Long Live, it's a love song. A little sadder, as is my wont, but still.

-And though I had rather a miserable train journey home - drunks! smelly people! ticket shenanigans! - I had my laptop and a surplus of enthusiasm, so I vidded! I made 30 seconds of a vid, anyway. I have a lot of vid ideas at the moment - I'm still going to make an Arachnia vid at some point; I have a half-formed idea for a vid about sad robots - but the one that got made is this odd little creature, a vid about Star Trek, mind control and violence.

(As per, I have all the happiest fanwork ideas.)

Right. Work.

One of last week’s prompt fics has made it into the big leagues, I've decided: call the roll of the blacked-out lands, M*A*S*H, dystopia fic, Hawkeye/BJ.

What frightens me about M*A*S*H is... well, okay. So, very early on in the show, when Hawkeye and Trapper make up Tuttle ("You might say that all of us together... made up Tuttle!") - actually, can you leave that there? No, you can't. Hawkeye and Trapper make up another unit surgeon out of whole cloth so they can draw his salary and use it to buy medicines for the orphans on the black market, and then are surprised when everyone keeps telling them about the fascinating conversations they've had with Tuttle in the mess tent, and it kinda makes me hurt laughing.

Anyway! So, when they're trying to produce fake papers for him they need to give him a fake birth date, and naturally give him the same birth year as themselves - 1925. And I'm like - 1925. Seriously. Yes, the Korean War was a long time ago, but that little detail really brings that into relief - in the year Hawkeye Pierce was born, the Depression, Prohibition, Nazi Germany, the Cold War, basically the political body of the twentieth century, were all in the future. But the thing is, Hawkeye, barring accidents, could live right into the twenty-first century (and I wrote a fic a couple of years ago where he did just that). He is uniquely temporally situated to know, to really know, there is no war to end all wars.

So that's the dystopian part, I guess. That you can tell this story set now - make it about twenty-five year old surgeons born in the 1980s, and you can tell the same story. That's the idea M*A*S*H engaged with throughout, and it hasn't stopped being relevant.

Anyway, some notes on trying to make a M*A*S*H vid on a rainy weekend when you're trying not to think:

-( truth, freedom and the American way of plumbing )

Notes on also spending your rainy avoidant weekend trying to write a Vorkosigan story about all the lady spies that were totally secretly in ImpSec all along, I am not writing this story to hit my own kinks, why would you say such a thing:

-Making up characters’ names is hard. So far I have called them all Vorone, Vortwo, Vorthree and Vorfour in lieu of inspiration. Though the canon does this too – I think it’s A Civil Campaign where Miles makes up some rhetorical Counts and calls them Vorenlightened and Vorstodgy. (Maybe I’ll be passive-aggressive and call them things like Vorbharat and Vorshah and Vorkumar. Someone told me – told me, mind you, not suggested or theorised or interpreted – that “Vorpatril” was some sort of variation on Patel and therefore how could I possibly suggest there wasn’t much in the way of brown people in Bujold’s universe. She’s done a bit better in recent years.)

-So is trying to impose some sort of narrative structure on a story that is basically “lady spies! lady spies! my id let me show you it!” Although speaking of ladies, I came across the most amazing fusion the other day: Vormarlow’s Honour, by Ankaret, in which Antonia Forest’s Marlows are reborn into Bujold’s Nexus. I read Autumn Term a long time ago (and found the other books a little too bizarre to get through), so can’t say much to the Marlows, but I love this idea so much, I wish people would write space opera girls’ own boarding school stories. Imagine the Chalet School as a girls’ finishing school for minor Vor in the Southern Continent. Joey Vorbettany has adventures saving Elisaveta Vorbelsornia from kidnappers trying to make a claim to the Imperium. After Robin’s father, an ImpSec agent, dies on assignment in Jackson’s Whole, they send her away to school for her own protection. They have a special school holiday for the birthday of the District Count. I could do this all day.

-Lady spies! Yes. I’m watching The Americans, which is sort of shaping my plots at the moment, but it’s no bad thing. At this point I am a little too avoidant to watch actual TV that’s on TV now, but if I ever decide to engage with my life again I’m going to pick that back up, alongside Orphan Black. Ladies and plots and espionage! Yes.

Here, lovely flist! Have a list of things that are on my mind that are not doom and gloom.

1. Vidding! I was at Vidukon last weekend, which was a lot of fun - I had a day off work, hung out with a lot of awesome people (after vaguely intersecting with cosmic_llin for years it was great to finally meet her) and I also met isagel and carawj and lots of other people. And I had a lovely time, and saw a lot of vids, and I sort of vaguely tried to start vidding a couple of years ago before my computer got stuck on permanent beachball and now I have a new computer and... you see where this is going. I have started to try and learn to vid, mostly by opening up the software and poking stuff until it goes swoosh or beep or ram-a-lam-a-ding-dong, and I have learnt some terribly basic things. I sort of hope I will keep on learning terribly basic things until I know enough of them to learn not quite so basic things? I hope. I'm not someone who's ever had any hobbies which require actual stuff - me, I write, I read, my real job can be done with a pen and an open mind - so learning how to use actual tools is quite new to me. such_heights pointed out that you learn because you have a vid in your head and you learn everything you need to know get the thing on the screen to look like the vid in your head - you won't learn in the abstract. Which I think is true, and so I can't decide if it's a blessing or a curse that the vid in my head is a multifandom vid about land registration.

(Yeah, I know. I know. One day I'll sit down and articulate why I sincerely believe land registration is important - and I suppose the vid is that, too, it's not about land registration itself but why I spend my whole life doing it, why land and people are the same thing inside themselves. In the meantime, swish, beep, ding.)

2. TV with gay detectives! I am watching the Donald Strachey series of TV movies, after seeing this gorgeous vid at Vidukon. They’re a series about a gay private investigator in Albany, NY, who largely (but not always) gets involved with crimes relating to the queer community, and they’re just delightful: funny, warm and comforting. Strachey is in a lot of ways a typically hard-boiled private investigator protagonist (his office in particular is hilariously clichéd, down to the glass panel door with ‘Donald Strachey Investigations’ in peeling letters!) but he is realistically and unremarkably queer in a way that’s both refreshing and rings very true. In her review, thingswithwings said everything I'd want to say about how much I enjoy this: a queer story that's about queer people, living their lives with kindness and realism and without melodrama. But even if is as much about the cases and crimes as the queerness, I still think having Donald Strachey be a queer, hard-boiled, hard-drinking, loner PI wouldn’t have been an awful lot of a step up from dead queer people or offscreen queer people – it has minimal impact on the narrative – even though that’s indisputably how the genre works.

But he's not a queer loner PI, he's a queer, happily married PI, and I have been flailing at T'wings a lot about this recently but Timothy Callaghan, Strachey’s long-suffering long-term partner, hits a number of narrative kinks for me in ways I wasn’t able to articulate before. (They're not legally married but as-close-as - the canon is set a few years before marriage equality in New York). There is a scene in one of the movies – I’m yet to find out if it’s in the books – where Timmy can’t fire a gun. Not as a matter of physically being able to, of course – it’s just that even with Donald’s and his own life at stake, he can’t pull the trigger. Strachey’s response to this is ( a minor spoiler, which kills me ) Now obviously it’s no surprise to anyone that I adore this trope, and the broader trope that it’s an instance of, too: the single voice of dissent against the exercise of power. Like Daniel in SG-1, and Toby in The West Wing, and Hawkeye Pierce in M*A*S*H (“Hawkeye Get Your Gun” is the episode about how Hawkeye, too, can’t fire a gun – even when drunk and having shells dropped on him (“Why are they bombing us? We’re already bombed!”)), Timmy is, explicitly and implicitly, the moral compass of the story – like T’wings says, he’s what stops Strachey being like Batman. But I did not know until now how much I needed to see that role queered, and the thing is, it damn well ought to be queered. Timmy is a senior aide to a liberal senator, and the canon likes playing with that – it likes leading you down the garden path of telling you that this cute, entirely non-aggressive, wandering-around-barefoot-with-his-hands-in-his-pockets man is the comic sidekick to his super-cool private investigator boyfriend, and then Timmy finds out that funding for one of his anti-poverty initiatives is being withdrawn and manages to secure $200,000 of charitable donations in five hours – because of course it’s engaging with the idea that there is more than one way to fight. To lead a queer life is in itself a political act; to live in public by a clearly-defined set of beliefs, informed and framed by queerness, is a political act. And Timmy does, and I needed to see that on television. (Basically the only thing that could make me like this more if it were the other show, the flipped-up version about the queer senator’s aide with the PI boyfriend.)

(Also, one of the movies has land registration as a plot point. I'm just saying, this is a thing that happens.)

3. Trying to find a new fandom! I just got to the end of Fringe, a show I like a lot, but even given that I’ve been more in the ebb than the flow of fandom recently. (It’s frustrating for me that basically every big fandom of the last couple of years has passed me by, or I’ve given it a try and not been into it: witness Community, Avatar: the Last Airbender, The Avengers, etc). The last big fandom I had any involvement with was the last Star Trek movie and that was 2009, for heaven’s sake. (As for the new movie: I saw it, I liked it, but musesfool’s review here basically hit everything I didn’t like about it. ( spoilers )

Anyway, new fandom! I am watching various things on and off. Haven’t managed to get into Warehouse 13 – I’ve tried the pilot and a couple of other random episodes, and it’s okay I guess? I like the idea more than the execution so far and haven't really picked it up again. Ditto Defiance, the new Syfy show – I watched the pilot, because hey, show with aliens! Yay! – but haven’t yet been inspired to watch any more of it. I’m told the aliens do start acting a little more alien later on, but, hmm. I am enjoying Orphan Black, the new Canadian thing – at least I think I’m enjoying it; I keep getting really tense! and pausing it! and thus not watching it terribly fast, but I think that means I do care about what happens to these people. So. So. Life notwithstanding, I'm still here.