eruthros

Remember the super-sekrit massive vidding project that thingswithwings and I have been working on for more than eight months?

Well, it is super sekrit no longer! We now reveal:

One-Night Fandoms: a tribute to yuletide by eruthros and thingswithwings. You can watch it and read more about it on the main post, linked above.

Brief details: It's not a vid for the yuletide challenge, it's a vid of the yuletide challenge. 191 sources, all of them yuletide fandoms.

I still can't believe we did this. We spent eight months on it, combing the yuletide archive, finding source, watching entire television shows in a single week. We looked at more than 230 sources, many of which we'd never even heard of before we began the project. And we fell in love with yuletide over and over again in the process.

Or: we smoke crack so you don't have to.

1. There is nothing more awesome than coming back from class + long day of class + other class and meetings and things to awesome thinky comments on a post. However, I now have to spend time doing class-related things, so. More thinky later.

2. graycastle and I got together to watch "Travelers," right, and we were meeting at a cafe. I actually saw her on the way there, though, walking a half block behind her. "graycastle!" I called. No response. "graycastle!" Nothing. "John is a robot!" She turned right around, though she swears she couldn't consciously understand what I was saying.

3. Alsoalso: here is the danger of hanging out with graycastle: cracked out story ideas. These now include:
- The one where John's father is an itinerant tuba player living in an apartment in the Castro, and John walks his two ten-years-younger half-sisters to school all the time and ties his sister's Punky Brewster shoes. Also, John has tres gay next door neighbors named Davinia and Robert, and he bakes cookies with them. Also, Davinia does his hair and helps him pick out his peg-legged ripped jeans. Rodney and Ronon have to go back in time to save teenage John's life from time-traveling Genii spies, and so they take the apartment across the hall. Rodney teaches math at John's high school, and John thinks he's stalking him and tells Davinia, just in case; Ronon discovers leather stores, buys many assless chaps, and discovers marijuana. graycastle has declared this a TOTALLY sensible and reasonable story idea, not AU at all, and part of her personal canon. She swears that every story she writes from now on will have this as a quiet background.

- The one where Rodney's mother is a Lacanian and his father a Jungian therapist. His homework included Lacanian algebra and a dream journal. (He's kinda screwed up.)

- The one where they get turned into pineapples. (Prompted by my despair at drawing John accurately in the margins of my notes: I don't get the hair spiky enough! I said. And then I try to make it more spiky! And then he looks like a pineapple!) John gets his wristband stuck on one of his fronds. Also, he likes to roll down hills. He and pineapple!Rodney must escape the villagers who want to eat them. They move by rustling their greenery. Rustlerustlerustle.
- Aside: The one where they all get turned into plants. (Rodney, fyi, is an apple tree.)

- The one where John is wounded and stuck in the infirmary and then he and Rodney begin playing crazily competitive cribbage on an Ancient board that rearranges statistics in favor of the winner. (For example, Rodney is thinking that he wants a pudding cup when he wins, and the next thing he knows one of the cooking staff with an ATA gene brings him an extra pudding cup! And the more they concentrate on the cribbage, the bigger the things they get! Like, the ancient pegboard thing makes Zelenka's database search algorithm turn up a bone-healing device for John. Etc.)

- The one where we manage to turn John into one of the members of graycastle's dissertation committee, whom she describes as "kinda a robot." Me: "oh, like John!" *pause* "Can we turn John into him?" Of course we can! See, Teyla's in a relationship with Kate Heightmeyer and doesn't know why she can't talk about it, and finally Kate just gives up all exasperated and tells Telya look, read this gender theory. And Teyla, being Teyla, reads it carefully and seriously, perhaps taking notes, and then returns the ten books to Kate all "this is all fascinating! and I feel that I understand your people better, and also I understand why John must act the way he does. Though I do not think it is a good thing. But I still do not understand these references to Derrida." (bad aca-joke alert!) Anyway, she then continues to read Earth philosophy and theory -- Kate starts her off, at that point, with Kant, and then Hegel, which she apologizes for, but who Teyla finds much more comprehensible and straightforward than Kant. And then John is forcibly outed, see, and as he's being hauled off Atlantis Teyla rushes up to him, and hands him Epistemology of the Closet and says "you must read this now, John!" and of course John does, because he misses Teyla, and then he reads some more, and then he becomes an angry grad student writing about the Air Force and the queering of homosocial space, and then he becomes a robot on somebody's dissertation committee, the end.

- The one where Zelenka is sekritly teaching Ronon Science throughout season four, and Ronon is teaching Zelenka, like, lyric poetry or something, and then Rodney's "I can't get it finished in time! I don't have enough hands! Colonel, hold this -- no, that -- no, god, can't you -- stop moving!" And then Ronon just sorta shoulders in all "not a problem, McKay, I can reverse the polarity of the neutron flow while you swap crystals." HOT.

And also, a random tangent sent us of on the set of silly transformational fiction:
- The one where they all get turned into DIFFERENT animals, thus queering the text even further! John is an easily-startled gazelle. Rodney is a badger. Teyla is a mink. Or maybe a mongoose. And Ronon we couldn't decide. Rhinocerous?

- The one where they all get turned into REPTILES, then! Where, naturally, Rodney is a turtle, John is a snake (graycastle said "boa constrictor!" I said "then he's hugging people all the time!" she said "yes but they're bad hugs!" and we decided to agree to disagree), Ronon is a Komodo dragon, and Teyla is a lizard.
- Digression: the one where they get turned into Lisa Frank folder-cover type animals in a far corner of Atlantis (John and Teyla big-eyed cats, Rodney and Ronon floppy-eared dogs, all, of course, appearing in a magically-created pink converse high top). Then they reenact An Incredible Journey to get back to the control tower. They ford rivers! They run up flights of stairs! They are attacked by strange ancient machines! Big-eyed-black-and-white-cat John jumps on little-golden-retriever-puppy Rodney and bites his ears! etc.

- The one where they're not even all organisms! Teyla's a dolphin, Rodney's a unicorn, John's a rainbow, and Ronon's a breeze. Everyone tells John and Rodney that they can't get together because they're, hello, a rainbow and a unicorn, and sometimes the rainbow has to shine somewhere else. It is sad. Woe. (NOTE: This now exists. No, really.)

- The one where they're all items at a Pier One store. (See previous SGA-related post.) John is a red velvet throw pillow with tassels at the corners and a gold thread border. Rodney is a nice simple square chair. Ronon is a round wicker table. And Teyla is an elegant and understated table lamp. DUH.

- The one where they're all nineteenth century literary figures. (Teyla is George Sand.)
- This also led to:
- The One Where Teyla is George Sand And Wears a Top Hat Because That Would Be Hot, and Ronon is Chopin and Plays Awesome Piano Because That Would Be Hot.
- The one where Rodney is Henry Fielding with his authorial insert thing. (Possibly John is Tom Jones. HA.)
- The one where Ronon is James Joyce and Rodney is T.S. Elliot
- The one where they're all 60s drug culture figures. (This features John as Ken Kesey, Rodney as Timothy Leary, Teyla as Neal Cassady, and Ronon as Hunter S. Thompson. We agree that Neal Cassady is perfect for Teyla.)
- The one where Teyla is Shakespeare and John is Christopher Marlowe (who, for the purposes of this story, was OF COURSE a spy who faked his death in the bar brawl.)
- The one where Teyla is Gabriel Garcia Marquez.

I should not be permitted to get together with graycastle when I am trying to avoid work, because two things happen:

1. We invent a system of kin and gender relations for the Athosians that focuses on reproduction but still permits Teyla to be awesome and have lots of sex. (This largely involves declaring Teyla a "sworn virgin" in the Balkan sense, tacking on "on Athos" and making it a diplomatic position, declaring the Athosian hunting camps to be made up of two sodalities who are responsible collectively for all children, and then getting distracted and talking a lot about how Teyla would ask John for a child. And then about her subsequent pregnant lots-of-sex. And the fact that Jinto is totally her first son, two years after her blood. And Halling is the on-Athos kind of sworn virgin, responsible for keeping track of the brothers-of-blood (which is the only kin terminology we're using except mother: you have brothers-of-blood you can't sleep with, and your family, which you can. because we decided reproductive-obsessed people probably had incest taboos). Also, we got distracted a lot by imagining hilarious conversations between Teyla and John.)

2. We invent an Ancient device that turns ATA-having people into the opposite sex ... but they revert naturally (after at least an hour for the body to recover), but only at the point at which they are uncomfortable in their bodies. So the first few times, it's an hour even, and everybody's freaked out, but maybe the sixth or seventh time Rodney's so distracted by Science that he doesn't notice and become bothered for an hour and ten minutes, and then an hour and a half, and then he starts to get used to it... Which means slowly increasing Rodney and John's time as a girl, as they become more used to the body, but which also means that the experience of two-bodiedness (and the transition from "Lorne" to "Lorne as a girl" to "Lorne in any guise" ) will itself prevent two-bodiedness. As they become more comfortable as women, they stay women longer and longer and longer...

ALSO it means that every fannish genderswap trope would in fact be a stimulus to end the body swap: Cadman shows up with a bra? bamf! (1) goes Rodney, back to a boy; but maybe the next time he puts the bra on. Attempting to have sex? bamf! Menstrual cycle? bamf! Also, the device goes off randomly, which starts the process again. But it takes a different amount of time in every individual, depending on available caloric energy.(2) So Rodney, with his endless powerbars, is like a ten-minute-warning for the rest of the expedition. "We've been evaluating the procedbamfures for use of the ZPM, and ... *presses button for radio* attention, please, we are having another Stupid Ancient Device Episode."

Anyway, clearly hijinks ensue.

(1) We imagine this as a bit like Nightcrawler in the comics. No, you know, heading to the infirmary or anything. Just... walking along and bamf!

(2) Because Rodney as an early warning device is hilarious. Also, this permits them to sometimes change offworld. Which is also hilarious. Imagine, if you will:

Rodney off with scientist, exploring... grain bins or something. John et al doing meet-and-great. John hears Rodney's voice over the radio: "Colonel! Colonel! I need you to come here right now!" (Attempting, of course, to act as his early warning system.) John, attempting to be placating at Chief Whosits: "We come here as peaceful bamf! traders."

*

Also, from rusty76, the most awesome pride parade photo ever.

So! graycastle and I have decided that we need to do a project. A very important project. A project that will represent the spirit and ideas of individual fandoms.

We want to find two-second clips from shows that say what those shows really mean. Ideally only one character.

This thought, see, was precipitated by me trying to explain the premise of the Sentinel, and then playing the first few minutes of the Sentinel, and then pausing it on a certain line to say "... well, actually, that kinda sums it up right there."

The line was Jim, talking to the SWAT guys at the beginning of the episode. He looked anxious and armed, and he said "Do you smell that?" That, my friend, is the Sentinel.

We decided that Fraser's first-came-to-Chicago was too obvious for due South, and graycastle voted for "Ray. Ray. Ray. Ray. Ray. If you don't mind." I voted for "Hi, dad. How're you?" "I'm dead, son. Other than that, do you mean?" Except it's two characters, woe.

And my Buffy choice is, of course, "All right, I get it, you're evil. Do we have to chat about it all day?"

graycastle talked about Dalek carolers, and this sparked in me a desire to make an album of Dalek choirs singing Christmas carols. Featured songs: Silent Night, Joy to the World, Carol of the Bells, What Child is This... and other stuff we haven't thought of yet. (Obviously these are new series Daleks, with a Dalek god and Dalek heresies.) It would be GREAT.

No, seriously, imagine for a moment a Dalek chorus doing Joy to the World. Especially that last verse. "He rules the world with truth and grace, / And makes the nations prove / The glories of His righteousness, / And wonders of His love, / And wonders of His love, / And wonders, wonders, of His love." AWESOME.

ONLY! I don't have a Moog MF-102 ring modulator, which is the modulator BBC Radiophonics used to do Dalek voices. I just have a VST ring modulator plugin, and no idea what the Dalek Voice settings would be (fiddling got me a sorta-cyberman, but not the exact right lag for Daleks). And my google-fu has failed me.

You know you want to help me out! Because then I will make a whole album. And we can share and glory in Daleks singing "Angels we have on heard high / Sweetly singing o'er the plains / And the mountains in reply / Echoing their joyous strains." And it will be kinda scary, because the coverart will include scenes of flying Daleks from "Doomsday," but also it will be hilarious awesome.