eruthros

1. I have this problem with reading things that make me angry on the internet - if they show up in firefox's url bar when I start to type something else in, I'll go "oh, I should check that" or "oh, I should see if there are new comments" and then I'll read them even though I know they'll make me hate the world. Like, I'd start typing some other url with an s, and then I'd end up at salon.com, even though I knew there would be nothing good there except maybe Glen Greenwald and that I'd read some lifestyles article and it would make me cranky, and then I'd read the comments even though I shouldn't and that would make me despair for humanity. And cranky.

But the thing is, I only do that when I see the name of the site in the dropdown; if I don't see it, it's much easier to resolve not to go there. So I use a handy firefox keyboard command to take things out of the suggestions - I highlight the suggested url that I want to avoid and shift-delete on it, and it is gone. It will reappear if I go there a lot anyway, but since mostly these are places that I don't want to go to, places I just end up out of habit or fear or something, it works for me.

Anyway it is a great tool and I <3 it.

2. Readability! If you use(d) readability, you probably know that they disabled their old bookmarklet in favor of their new browser applet in February. I hate the new applet - it doesn't play well with noscript, it tracks pageviews, it disables printing and saving to pdf, it doesn't work on locally saved html pages or on many secured sites, and it's basically no longer really about quickly getting me a version of a site that I can read - it's about content-management for other people. HATE.

However! There are places to get the old readability bookmarklet hosted elsewhere - Readabilitude (which on my system doesn't require me to temporarily allow scripts every time I want to use it) - and there are also alternatives that have other style features - e.g. Readable (which I haven't used because it does require temporarily allowing js every time).

I was just doing without it for a while, so I was glad when I found those a couple months ago.

3. Unrelated to computers! Many people I chat with have been reading or rereading Harry Potter fic in a burst of nostalgia. But it can be hard to find that exact story, you know, the one where Harry owned a owl-order bookstore, or that one where Snape rescued him from the Dursleys, or that other one where Blaise was a fashion designer, so in case y'all don't know about it I will link here to painless_j's themed lists, wherein ze links to all the fic ze can find for various tropes and plot devices. It's handy both for the purposes of finding that one story you lost and for the purposes of reading all the HP fic featuring glory holes or someone being sorted into a different house or someone taking up a career in mediwizardry.

4. And for anyone who's dealing with too-hot weather, sparkymonster made a post a while back with tips for dealing with hot weather; there are also a bunch of comments full of tips. It's pretty fucking hot here, so I appreciate those.

Recently I've been rewatching Star Trek: Voyager, and reading a lot in the Vorkosigan-verse, and the combination of those two things means that I've seen a lot of recs for two particular stories. And it made me think about the stories that get widely recced or read outside of the fandoms for those sources - the stories that many, many people have read with minimal canon knowledge, or without having read any other stories in the fandom, or without caring about the characters, or whatever.

To explain what I mean more clearly, here are some of mine:

1) Vorkosigan-verse, A Deeper Season by lightgetsin and sahiya

When I first read A Deeper Season, I'd read the Vorkosigan books but had absolutely no fandom knowledge - I didn't know where communities or archives or stories were - but basically the instant I told people I'd been reading the books, I got this rec. And I'm pretty sure that many of the people reccing it had only read this one story in the fandom, too, because I would usually get people who said "I don't read in the fandom, but ..." and "I don't even know the canon, but ..."

It is, in fact, an awesome story, and I love it to pieces. But the point here is not really about the story per se, it's about that kind of shared fannish experience without even being in the fandom. I suspect that it's still (one of) the stories people read despite not being in the fandom, because I occasionally see people on my rlist who say "I just read some Vorkosigan, where's the fic?" and there, in the first couple of comments, is "I don't read in the fandom, but A Deeper Season!" (Unless the post is about Ivan, in which case the recs are from a different fandom than the one I usually read in.)

2) Star Trek: Voyager, Talking Stick/Circle series by Macedon and Peg.

I watched the early seasons of Voyager sort of casually, and without much interest in fic, so IIRC I hadn't read much of anything before this story. Like most of the other things on this list, it was recced by someone; in this case, when I was complaining about the way that the Maquis-Starfleet tensions rarely came up on the show, and the way some of the Chakotay episodes made me flinch, somebody (sineala?) said "you know, someone has fixed that," and recced this series. And then I read it, and it was indeed great, and influential, in the sense that I often forget that Macedon's Chakotay backstory is not canon Chakotay's backstory, and then I started doing the same thing: people would say "I've never read any Voyager fic" and I would rec this story and nothing else because I hadn't read much else.

Much later, I read a bunch of other Voyager stories (Janeway/Seven! strange crossovers! Harry/Tom!), but Talking Stick/Circle remained the only thing I'd read in Voyager for two years or so. And now that I'm rewatching Voyager, I still see a ton of recs for it.

3) Harry Potter, A Most Disquieting Tea series by telanu.

This is kind of funny, now, since I've read a ton of Harry Potter fanfiction since, and since HP fandoms are so giant and sprawling and whatever. But back before I knew anything about Harry Potter fandoms, I had just read the books and maybe a couple of Harry/Ron and Harry/Draco stories by authors I'd followed in other fandoms. And then at least two people on my flist recced "A Most Disquieting Tea," and I went and read it, and I went "oh, all right." I think when I was linked to it there were only three or maybe four stories in the series, and I haven't actually read all of the sequels since, but at the time I could talk about it with many, many people who had read no other Harry Potter fanfic. (A couple of years later I went through Walking the Plank with serious dedication, and "A Most Disquieting Tea" is far from the best Harry/Snape story I read then, but it was still a big deal in my circles of not-in-the-fandoms earlier.)

I suspect that for other people, Cassandra Claire's Draco Trilogy was That Story from (a different part of) HP fandom, but I never managed to read more than a couple chapters of it. It was widely recced around me, but I never really got it in the same way.

So the interesting thing about this is, it's basically impossible to think about it for fandoms I was in when I was reading the fic. Like, Stargate Atlantis - I read a million stories, and I followed a bunch of recs, and I watched all the vids, so I have no idea what story or stories were widely read outside of the fandom. Was it one of the early ones, like maybe astolat's A Beautiful Lifetime Event? Was it helenish's Take Clothes Off As Directed? Or maybe cesperanza's epic Written By the Victors? But on the other hand, maybe Written By the Victors requires too much canon knowledge, and Take Clothes Off As Directed is, after all, a bdsm au, which is perhaps not as likely to be widely recced, and who knows which of the season one or two stories would be most popular. Or maybe it's something I didn't even really notice at the time, or something different from the stuff that was widely recced on my rlists. I have no idea.

Anyway! I'd be interested to hear about any of your experiences with that one (or two or three) stories that were widely read and recced by people not in the fandom.

So, you know, I've been crap at updating LJ. And the thing about not updating for weeks is that then you go "omg! but there is so much to say!" And that sounds like a) work and b) a really long, boring post, so you don't say any of it. ON THAT NOTE: forget the last couple weeks! Probably they were mostly boring, except for Doppelporner. (Dopornganger? Pornelganger? graycastle and I can't decide which is correct.) And my family was here this weekend. That was cool.

So! Onward, we find ... look, guys, it's Tom Lehrer in his youthful misanthropy! Before his full-blown misanthropy!



Aaand? The guy who uploaded that to youtube? Also uploaded a bunch of other songs from the live performance! Awesomeness!

AND and... apparently Tom Lehrer is on myspace. I have hope that it's entirely an impersonation. Remember: he liked that people thought he was dead! So it had better be an impersonator.

Otherwise, fiatlouis and I have no excuse for not being on myspace.

***

Other news: I now have a purple, white, and gold striped flag with purple and gold stars hanging in my office. It commemorates the nineteenth amendment in the US (women's right to vote) and comes from the Seneca Falls museum, which I visited on Friday with the family. I am quite happy with the placement above my desk, because it makes me slightly less cranky about articles like the one apple_pi talks about here.

I'm also cranky, speaking of cranky, about the whole Dumbledore thing. Once again, other folks have said it way better than me: toft_froggy, here, and marythefan, here. Suffice it to say that "Celluloid closeting" appeared as a verb when I sputtered at m_shell about this. I mean. GOD. Hey guys! I've decided that Dumbledore is gay, had a big tragic gay affair that blinded him to Grindelwald's faults, and never loved again, and then died! That's novel and innovative and freeing and will lead to the acceptance of gay people, especially the part where I didn't put it in the book!

In short, I am wearing my crankypants.

***

My family was here this last weekend; we went out to dinner rather too many times, really. And we ran around a lot. And looked at fall color, and went to ABC, and went to the farmer's market, and walked at Taughannock Falls and Buttermilk Falls, and went to Seneca Falls and the Erie Canal and I took redphotoframe out to the awesome espresso that is Gimme! Coffee. (She was like "okay, so, how can we get their coffee again tomorrow?") Also, my dad and sister took many photos of campus and of downtown and of fall color and waterfalls and things, which I hope they will post so I can continue lazy.

We also discovered, in the process of driving the two extra miles north of Seneca Falls that you need to drive to see the Erie Canal? That there is an amazing wildlife preserve up there! It's called the Montezuma Wildlife Refuge (no, really). It's this amazing, huge wetlands restoration and protection project, through which the NY Thruway and the Erie Canal run (weird!). We saw a ridiculous number of birds, including a pair of extremely well-fed hawks. (They looked kinda kestrely, but it was a long way off.) And apparently in the spring they have ospreys, and bobolinks, and tons of other cool things like muskrats. And they have islands! And canals! I am charmed by marshes, if not by mosquitoes.

Embarrassing admission: So I was showing graycastle "The Gathering," the B5 pilot, the other day. (And wincing at Takashima constantly -- man, I always forget how stilted her delivery is.) And so then I sent her a link to the Lurker's Guide, because the Lurker's Guide is awesome.

... and then I ended up happily reading the episode analyses for all of season one. For, I don't know, maybe the tenth time. And these are episode notes that don't contain any plot summary. Just notes. (Bear in mind that I haven't watched season one for at least five-six years.) So there I am, reading about character backstory and analysis of why people do the jobs they do and going all "Oh, man, Londo's song!" and "oh, oh, the conversation at the end of Infection that is the only reason to watch the episode!" and whatever. It's kinda sad.

Also, we were talking, as one does, of those "when I totally hypothetically learn to vid..." ideas. (You know, when I'm going to vid Harry Potter fandom -- fandom, not canon -- to Ani's "As Is" with every verse from a different POV and Snape as the "as is." This would require all of the most sneering, hideous moments from the movies. Whee! Or, you know, when I'm totally going to vid Girlyman's "On the Air" for Lex. Or the Headstones doing "Cemetary for Buffy/Spike seasons six and seven. With an Angel flashback on the line "these kinda things deteriorate.")

I mentioned this Stephen Sondheim song, written for a movie instead of as part of a musical. A song that I still can't believe made it into a movie; I figure the MPAA was only listening to the chorus. I Never Do Anything Twice.

And I think it should totally be viddable, but I can't quite decide what. I mean: Harry Potter fandom? Because that would permit some AWESOME shot selection, especially *coughs* from PoA for the first verse. Except Harry Potter fandom does every vice at least twice. Probably ten, twelve, times. The archives probably even have a genre for it, too!

Or graycastle suggested using Farscape source, but a kinda meta take on it, because they really would do absolutely anything once. (Also, as she pointed out, the "baron who came at my command / and proffered me a riding crop and chains" totally = Harvey.)

And, I mean, there's always SGA fandom: I could clip from the discovery channel for the first paragraph, and there would be dolphins! And penguins passing each other stones! But it's not really cracktastic enough.

[Poll #998430]

Speaking of crossovers (as I'm sure we all were), take a look at this. Someone recommended this to me.

So. Wrong. I mean, the writing is pretty bad, but there's something else that's even more wrong. Hint: one of the members of SG-1 is sekritly Harry Potter.

Aiiya.