Nice convo with Slidecage on twitter last night, but if you know anything about the show Sliders, you can spot the curse here.
The Dream Masters was actually a pretty scary episode. This wiki briefly explains why, and this review shows why this ep is actually a thriller classic along the lines of thriller parody for realz hallmark kind of thing, and probably one of the reasons Syfy picked it up the next season when Fox dropped it. Jerry O'Connell had much more to say on that controversy last spring. Jerry O'Connell Reveals the Checkered History of 'Sliders' and a Potential Reboot
There's actually quite a lot written and archived about this old series because it was such a groundbreaker in scifi at the time, so if you want more info, just search it.
Btw, Jerry O'Connell saw the convo and liked one of the tweets. If you loved Sliders and want to see more, that convo starts here.
I've come out as the original YabloVH, which was one of my first aliases in fandoms. Me and Sliders go waaaay back. I would so love to see the original roles reprised in a reboot series.
But what was your nightmare? some of you are asking. Srsly. Long ugmo nightmare short, some idiot woman I can't stand (but can't remember at all now that I'm awake???) tried to have me thrown in jail over something ridiculously stupid (some kind of arson, but actually, I was much guiltier than she imagined, she'd have had a field day), and I only escaped by hiding out with Eugene from Preacher, and we wound up making out in a cattle water tank with me on top wondering if I could get away with drowning him.
Yes, one of those holy cow waking up thingies. I'm all wth and wtf and sipping coffee trying to distract myself with last night's convo and the minecraft post I'm working on for Bluejacky blog.
Wait, hang on. I think I'm awake enough now to handle a Lexx fanfic someone linked me to in the night. THIS IS NOT AN INVITATION TO SEND ME FANFIC. Ok, here you go. It's not too long, just click it. btw, NOT linking any more. And beware- the Amish have cats.
For those who don't know, this is Valdron's disclaimers for use with fanfic. Simply stating "Valdron's disclaimers" without even linking to it isn't a valid disclaimer.
Stanelle was the very first Lexx fan who contacted me with a serious question when I first started fan blogging Lexx.
See what I did there? I distracted ALL of us from my painfully stupid nightmare. I will srsly be facepalming all day over that one.
That's code. I think there are probably ten people on the planet who remember what DALTSU was on what we fondly called purple list. No, this isn't a reveal post about DALTSU.
A little over a year ago I wrote My name is Pinky, and this is my Haus where I started sharing how far back I go in fandoms. I had a flashback today that sent me on the kind of hunt that has a person wading through piles of boxes and dredging out the contents, and nothing inside has been touched in so long that you can't believe it's been 20 years, or just shy.
Among the contents of one box, I ran right into the old Darkwing Duck / Joxer crossover story I wrote and submitted to a fan book for Ted Raimi's birthday one year (still don't know if it ever made it in), and now I can copy it here.
click for more Xena pins
Let's Get Dangerous
Quick note: In a recent Tedlist post I wrote 'I am a HUGE Darkwing Duck fan, and I think it would be really cool to see Joxer get more into the spirit of his self perceived heroism.' I was blown away at the number of responses I got; Rob asking if I was "PROMISING" to do this crossover, Phil offering to post it, Purple Lemon sending me fabulous Darkwing Duck artwork, JJ and others saying I should post it to Ted Tales, and Lana herself telling me Darkwing Duck was one of his favorites. So, *NOW* to get our intrepid hero into a cape...
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There was only one other time he could remember feeling this miserable, and come to think of it, he'd RATHER be tied up naked in a bale of wool in a hot barn, dang it. He could see it as clearly as yesterday, hanging out around the sheep pen at the annual shearing; crusty old farmers muttering curses and grunting in the heat while the pretty little sheep girls (really farmers' daughters, but they were so much cuter thinking of them as sheep girls for one day), anyway, while the pretty little sheep girls cut out ewe after ewe for the next shearing. Joxer had attempted to wade into the milling flock with them, mainly to show off a few manly skills without his shirt on, but after they spooked and mowed him over in whatever otherworldly terror only sheep can see, he sorta crawled, then sorta limped back to the fence and managed to flip over it before an especially fattish ewe could butt him right through it. He stood up and leaned nonchalantly back on the fence as soon as he'd been able, looking discreetly around to see if any of the sheep girls were laughing, but they were busy dodging and diverting and apparently hadn't seemed to notice, thank Zeus. But Jett had... There was just no escaping a twin. Well, triplet, really, but they hadn't been counting Jace ever since Jett depantsed him in the town square at the tender age of twelve and found him wearing one of Mom's corsettes and several garters. After that, Jace basically hung out with milk maidens and sheep girls, so Joxer was careful when he scouted this particular pen. "Thought you were Jace there for a minute." Jett had perfected that sneer to a fine art, but he still hadn't gotten the glint in his eye down. He was practicing it right now. "Hey, we don't mention his name in public, remember?" For some reason, Joxer was the only teenager around for miles who still talked back at him like that, and Jett wasn't quite sure if he liked that or not. Brother or not, though, Jett had a reputation to nourish. "We're not in public, brother." The sneer got sneerier. It was true to a point. The din of bleating sheep pretty much muffled nearly everything the farmers were yelling at the sheep girls, who simply ignored them anyway and continued sorting one ewe out here, one there. "So!" Joxer tried sneering back. "Besides, when's the last time you saw Jace without something lacy over his chest? Gimme a break!" and with that, Joxer had squared his shoulders, jutted his jaw, and puffed his chest out for a little manly emphasis. Big mistake. Jett had snickered and twisted him into a headlock before Joxer could get a breath out to yell whichever password they were using for "I give up" at the time. He wasn't terribly clear on how the rest of what happened came about, but it was a couple of hours before enough sheep were sheared and turned out for the din to die down so his voice could be heard filtering through a mountain of wool. By the time they'd untied and unwrapped the big ball of wool from around him, he was woozy with the heat and soaked slippery with sweat. He did remember the sheep girls giggling, though, and one of the farmers yelling at them to run find his pants. They never did find them, no telling what Jett had done with them, but somehow they'd gotten something else put on him and carried him home. He'd broken out in a beautiful case of hives after that and hadn't been able to wear wool since. And this had to be every bit as bad. Worse! Dang ticks! If it wasn't an itchy bite up one leg, it was a crawly sensation up the other, and no telling how many times he'd had to dart off the path behind a tree to shake out his trousers and check his legs, then get all his gear readjusted and run to catch up again. It was getting pretty ridiculous, this shortcut through THESE woods in THIS heat, and on top of it all he'd blundered right through some poison oak catching up last time. Well, actually, that was the first time all day he'd appreciated having all those hot clothes and armour on, but it still slapped across his face and promised all kinds of hell on his nose and lips the rest of the week. "Ok, let's take a break! Gabrielle, refill the water skins while I check Argo's hoof again. Joxer, I need you to help me out here." Great, just when he was enjoying the word "break" he had to go and let the horse lean on him again. Why the beast couldn't just lift a leg up was probably another curse from the Tick God. But she'd started limping a couple of hours before, and Xena discovered that not only had she picked up the tip of a blackjack thorn in the right fore, she'd also managed a hairline split sliding off a rock as she suddenly shifted to her left fore when the thorn slipped in. Consequently, they were now traveling very slowly through the evilest forest Joxer had ever experienced. He didn't know whether the slow part was a good thing because it allowed him time to take off his pants every 15 minutes to look for ticks or a bad thing because the slower they went, the more ticks he seemed to pick up. He wondered if Argo was as miserable with ticks as he was, then decided Argo had him beat with her sore feet. Joxer noticed, however, while Argo was leaning heavily on him and slowly crushing him down, that Xena's bare legs moving around somewhere on the other side over there didn't have a single tick on them. Hmm. "There's still a little drainage, but it's running clear, so at least there's no infection setting in." Xena let Argo's hoof down gently, but that didn't stop her from continuing to use Joxer as a crutch. With a big "umph!", Joxer dug his shoulder into Argo's armpit, if there was such a thing, and she thankfully shifted over before Joxer fell flat with the horse on top of him. He straightened up with a groan and a drip of sweat in his eye and happened to glance over just in time to see Xena make a little flick motion with her fingers on her thigh. Ah-HA! So THAT'S how they did it. No clothes, no ticks! After Gab got back with the water he kept a careful eye on her, too, and counted several flicks by the time Xena said the break was over. Meanwhile, Joxer was itching like the demons of Tartarus, and couldn't WAIT to get a move on again so he could drop back a little and try out an idea... "What's wrong with your face?" Gab was suddenly looking very intently at him, but it certainly wasn't one of those looks he'd always dreamed of-- maybe more on the slightly what-a-gross-bug side of of the spectrum of Gabrielle faces, and it make him squirm with embarrassment. "Looks like poison oak." Xena had glanced up and gone back to rubbing Argo's fetlocks and pasterns down with a mint salve to help ease the pain radiating from her hooves. That was the best thing about Xena- she never gawked or smirked no matter how stupidly Joxer flubbed up, so at least he could keep a little dignity. "Well, you look like a duck," Gabrielle announced. "Not a wood duck or a mallard. More like one of those fat white farm ducks," she nodded decisively. "Great, now she thinks I'm a duck!" Jox muttered, and crabbed off to be more alone with his demons while the girls gathered stuff up so they could move on. As soon as they were out of sight, Joxer tore off all his armour and every stitch of outer clothing he had on, leaving a pair of baggy boxers covered with little smiley faces that his mother had embroidered for him. It wasn't like anyone would see him HERE, in these stupid woods. He tried the flick thing a few times and decided it was fun flicking the little buggers off like little catapults. He flicked off a good 20 or so, then wadded all his gear and clothes together. He had to unroll the wad and grab his blanket out to whack a few ticks off his back that he couldn't reach, and decided that if he tied one end of his blanket around his neck and let it hang down his back, the ticks back there would crawl on the blanket instead of him. He put his helmet back on, girded his sword around his boxers, picked up his gear, and strode much more happily through the now much less evil forest. And quickly discovered that he'd waited too long to catch up... Not a problem. They were probably just getting up and over the ridge about now... a ridge. What ridge? He'd been so busy itching and cursing the evil woods that he hadn't noticed whether they were sorta going up, or sorta going down, or sorta staying somewhere in between. Rats! Well, he'd just have to use his superior tracking skills, that's all. He bent down a little, looking this way, squinting that way, and found several obvious signs that a horse had been through recently. After he finished scraping his boot off with a stick, he stuck out his chin and squared his shoulders and marched resolutely onward. Marching with resolution is weary work, and an hour of it eventually had Joxer stumbling up and over another ridge. To his surprise, it ended in a tumble of bracken and rocks and stretched into a beautiful valley that would have made an ideal backdrop for a picnic with a beautiful girl, had Gab and Xena not gotten lost somewhere back in those evil woods. The idealness was preempted, however, by a mob of crazed sheep who were caught in a tangle of thorns, and they were both so embedded that the little boy herding them home couldn't pull them out. It looked like a couple of thieves had come along to offer the boy a hand, sheep prices being what they were these days, and they kept knocking him down while they tried to cut the wiry blackberry branches enough for the sheep to be able to at least move forward. There was no time for contemplation. Joxer threw down his bundle, checked his helmet, brandished his sword, and charged down the rocky slope in full battle cry with his blanket flapping wildly. It was magnificent- he heard himself yelling, "I am the shadow that swoops in the night! I am the radish that sticks in your throat! I am the tick that woaoohhohoooohhhhh!" Joxer slipped, um tripped? Stumbled... no, a warrior catapults, definitely. Joxer catapulted off a loose chunk of rock and for one brief, exciting moment was as airborn as any bird, arms outstretched with his terrible sword, blanket flapping like a thunder god, mouth open in full battle cry. Well, that was all the sheep needed. They surged hard enough to pull the brambles out by the roots and took off with the little boy chasing close behind. The thieves didn't wait for a second look and took off in another direction, yelling something about leprosy. Joxer hit the ground and slid with his bare body into what remained of the blackberry thicket. When Xena later found him, he was so covered with bites and thorns that Gabrielle gave him a teeny sympathetic peck on his forehead where his helmet had protected him. She didn't want to risk getting poison oak from the rest of his face. They had Joxer tell his story of daring-do several times that night, and the more he embellished it, the more Gabby smiled at him and ducked her head and whispered to Xena, so she must have been pretty impressed with the Mighty Jox. The little boy had quite a story to tell the villagers that night, too. It had been a rather boring growing season, so the story grew with each telling, about the mighty Tick Man who wore a cape and came swooping out of the forest to save a little shepherd boy and his flock from two swarthy giants. This story became so popular in the region that soon, all the heroes in all the stories had to have a cape and be able to fly or it just wasn't a good hero story.
There are some youtube vids I generally avoid. The weird ships are ok, they mostly make for great protagonist forays with good action music since action/violent scenes lend such a good visual companion to sexual subtext, but the parent/child AU smashes are completely opposite and rather devastating. There are a lot of those. It's rather stunning to realize how well each actually understands the other when it comes to vid story construction, but still can't break out of whatever vicious loop they might have going in real life. Or maybe it's just that I so rarely stop and think about these things.
Yes, up at 1:30 a.m. again. I go in for 6-month psych follow-up (the one who prescribes and can't get me to commit to meds) and I'll have to come clean and say no, I'm not sleeping that great. Totally split shifting again for several weeks now. At least the total is still coming up to 6-8 hours in every 24. I'd so much rather just get up and move around and then go back to bed than zombie out solid and not be able to move in the morning.
So this was my first October in over ten years where I managed to keep some kind of real time cognitive involvement going pretty much daily without bombing into complete distraction to survive. No teeter-tottering through emotional shutdowns, no significant time disorientation bubble breaks, no angsting over a daily plan...
The daily plan thing is a toss-up. I feel like I'm bombing because the angst of stuff piling up is visible on my kitchen table, but even the least amount of reflection recognizes I'm easily keeping up with daily living nowadays as meals and chores and writing automatically happens without much conscious thought, much less having to create daily planning around them. Same with simple grocery shopping. I spent several years making elaborate lists of places to go, errands to run, things to pick up, and would still come home with it mangled up. It's nice being able to remember a few things now without having to write every little bitty thing down. Still, the daily planning was a very good habit, the root command under all the crawling back up the mountain stuff, but I think my conscious discipline is becoming an unconscious automatic routine.
Enough quickie psyche assessing. I'm stalled on the Mantrid post for good reasons. I've already spent every day in town this week, and not all of it over my own stuff. Bunny has something going on that we're watching, other people close to me have stuff, plus holidays and family birthdays and their baby stuffs have started popping in and out of scheduling, so I'm generally just not even on the computer much lately. I see several people are still wondering why I'm not personally responsive online, well, I'm actually functioning better in real life, so yeah, juggling 100 people means prioritizing and it's taking some of you a really long time to accept that. If I were a good cartoonist I'd create a panel visualizing calamities galore dive bombing all around and me holding a hand up and saying "Wait a sec, someone I've never met needs me online" while I'm bent over a failing phone or glitchy laptop. Social media is fantastic, I'll never say different, but the hilarious idea of aspienado being on-demand for people who've never met me in real life hasn't quite sunk into a few heads yet. My empathy is sketchy, and my time is extremely restricted. I apologize.
But you're blogging. You have time for blogging. But I'm not sleeping. I should be sleeping. If I'm up working on my own head/life stuff while I get through a pain problem that won't allow me to sleep, I don't owe anyone a pleasant conversation. I've spent incredibly long sleepless hours in the past online with people who were actually in hospitals or getting through other people being in hospitals, many hours logged keeping people company online sometimes right up to their last hours, and to grind my head back down to people demanding interaction of me simply because they are ~*~bored~*~ or restless (not being more forthcoming) kind of twists my head up. I'm saying this as kindly as possible to several people. The reason I'm public is so people can talk to me publicly. And having said that, if you do tag me, I can miss it because I'm tagged a lot, and if I still don't 'like' every single thing I'm tagged in, it doesn't mean I'm not paying attention or hate anyone. It just means I'm not going to slow down and hit the 'like' button a hundred times. In case anyone still feels left out or put off because I haven't personally acknowledged your presence lately, just wanna say you don't see anyone in my family complaining about me paying more attention to people I don't know than I do them.
Actually, kinda rambling while I listen to the latest SNews. Just put coffee on. It's about 3:15 a.m. now.
Ok, where was I? AU parent/child youtube ship smashes.
I grew up fantasizing having different parents. I imagined so many different scenarios and how many ways my childhood could have turned out. I've imagined having other kids, which I've discovered in 2012 is actually common for parents who've either lost or never managed to have babies or children.
Fantasizing relationships is a form of problem solving. It can get weird, yes. People can seem like creepers when they share what's going on in their heads. Exploring situations and conversations that never happened irl (in real life) is no different from imagining doing other things we either enjoy or don't normally do, like riding a horse or skiing or decorating a cake. Brains are pretty awesome for projecting scenarios.
But it's possible to get stuck in scenarios without resolving why one is there in the first place. Getting stuck in fanfictions, either in our heads or in actual print, without moving on to new or different material seems like a red flag. I've read some really excellent fanfiction, and I've tried writing some, but in the long run, I don't find it satisfying. I do find it helpful, but youtubes go way faster getting ideas across. I like the kind of anguish I can zip through, like ripping bandaids off with lawnmowers or something. I feel like I don't have time to slow down and lolligag around feels.
It hit me yesterday while I was driving around again (driving way too much lately) that part of my problem processing emotions in real time might be that it takes too long, so half the time I just shut it off. Emotions are really different from absorbing myself in technoweenie garble, a completely different kind of jigsaw puzzle. It's probably an apple and orange thing, like soduku and crossword puzzles. I'm not crazy about either one, but I'll take the crossword puzzle over the soduku if I'm desperate and there is no other distraction available. I think AU shipping vs real life is like that. Whether it's coworkers or significant other or family structure probs, it's just easier to turn to the distraction of puzzle solving scenarios than actual puzzle solving.
There are games that are never over. Chess and checkers definitely have an endpoint. Monopoly gets a little fuzzy, especially with rule-bending that allows credit. I'm a repeater, I like gaming for the fun of gaming, playing for the fun of playing, thinking for the fun of thinking. I think that's what the vids are, emotional game playing that never really has to end. Like soduku. It doesn't matter if you've solved a block, you just keep moving on for the sake of doing soduku.
I'm not good at feels, so I shut mine off and watch other people grind through theirs. I learn all kinds of stuff way faster than I ever did in real life. That SNews show I linked up there is the same thing, going over and over a scenario and outcomes, taking sides and leveling up in the debate arena with facts over something that is fiction. It's good practice, and provides interaction opportunities, just like shipping vids and twitter do.
Sooner or later, I can tell, I'll need to tackle the parent/child stuff. Since I've reached the point where I'm starting to deal with glitchy/missing memory stuff, this kind of struck me. There is more about the story setup in the youtube description, if you need it.
I have absolutely no interest in this pairing, nor the reason for it (back to regular shipping), but it's just a really well done vid story. A show we were watching on TV last night quite bored me for a long five minutes and prompted me to blurt that I never went through that poor me love stuff in high school (asexual aspienado's so facepalmingly aspie), and it hit me I'm sitting next to a guy who's managed to stay married to me for more than 20 years despite me so epic failing in the whole relationship department. This kind of video actually helps me 'get' stuff about other people that I otherwise don't normally even notice or go through myself.
For someone who doesn't get romance and can't flirt to save my life, much less even look like a girl half the time, I've been amazingly lucky. What really struck me about that last vid was the idea that part of the relationship revolved around a traumatic incident. Most of my life is one long traumatic mess of incident after incident, but I know that's not uncommon. What is uncommon is winding up in a successful relationship in spite of that. What's even more uncommon is having no idea how and having to look back to figure it all out.
I'm the sort of aggressive person who triggers into extremely destructive violent thoughts if I go into the angsty places too long (don't worry, just my style of fanfic shipping, if I had one), so it's time to spring back into the mockery I make of normalcy and get all over my day. I told someone earlier this week (or last, maybe) that I credit being pissy with getting me through the hard stuff, and since this week has gone a little further off the rails getting hard again than I projected, I wound up making another playlist to deal with it.
And if that doesn't do it for you, I like the softer stuff, too.
I get these funny ideas and start snickering, and @bonenado hears me from the other room and has to come ask what's going on, which is interrupting his psyching up for his next fantasy football draft (only four teams this year, last year he had seven), and then I stumble all over myself trying to explain why a silly idea is so funny. Stuff like that can take up to 20 minutes and wind up in what feels like frustrating massive wastes of time to both of us, so I actually put my hand over my mouth and snicker as quietly as possible, because once I start laughing, I can't stop for beans.
I'm always popping on and off my blogs for something, sentence here, paragraph there, and as I cruised through again this morning I screeched to a stop and thought, "Not one person on this planet doesn't look awesome in a pair of sunglasses." I linked that back in case you're interested.
Anyway, every little bit I get funny thoughts twisting fandom stuff into real life, so this morning I was musing again on how easily fans automatically leap to assumptions that people working together on a job must have a real life relationship beyond work, no matter how platonic, they must still think about each other unceasingly because the fans do. And I see this all the time on twitter, Bradley can't show up without a virtual swarm of fans asking point blank about Colin, as if his life still revolves around a former coworker and he has the same warm fuzzies for him that that fans do. What really brought this idea home was an interviewer mentioning to Martin that he'd recently interviewed Ben, and Martin said "Who?" because they hadn't seen each other in months and there are plenty of Bens around, so why should he automatically assume which Ben, right? But once actors are coupled up in fandoms, it's basically married for life, whether they have a clue that's happening or not.
I've had a variety of jobs, everything in and out of food, hospital and hotel services, radio sales, worked up in retail. I've been offered hospital administration and teaching at one of the local colleges and told I really should finish my certification in professional counseling or nursing (or what the heck, my thesis in resource planning), but I have this habit of turning down salaried positions, God knows why (I do have reasons), so it's not hard for me to cross pollinate funny visuals of celebs working menial jobs.
So imagine those two up there working a department store. They have separate lives, they only know each other through work, they're not pals outside of work. They simply work in the same building, probably run into each other because the floor plan requires it or they wind up at register together or cover for each other on breaks.
Now imagine a few other coworkers in the store going home and shipping them into fanfics. Does anybody really do this in real life about their coworkers? I've not seen it, but surely they do. I was thinking how long something like this could go on without the two guys even being aware of it, until, say, a little gang of 5 other coworkers grouping up on break was giggling every time one of them went by, or asking one about the other on his day off, or bringing up weird convos about the two of them, and the guys going Huh?
At first I thought this seemed silly, but it's kind of occurring to me how stress relieving this could be, actually. Say you have a manager you hate, and a lead over you driving you crazy, you go home and ship the two of them into these wild dirty flings and laugh yourself silly because they reeeeeallllly don't go together in real life. And you could completely reorient them sexually and have them carrying on steamy affairs on the dock or something, and wind up pulling several other coworkers into your stories (both in the stories and in real life) and really have a ball with it.
STRESS RELIEF.
Except don't get caught. I have a suspicion if you hit too close to home with shipping people you could wind up in some kind of legal entanglement.
When I retailed, there was only one other person in the whole store out of 150 people who knew what Lexx was, and I was very careful not to tell him who I was on the webs. He'd have died. (That was before I ever put a real pic of myself up on my fansite.) But every little bit a group of us would get 8-8'd to bunch up and blitz a messy area together real fast, and it was fun driving other coworkers crazy shooting Lexx quotes back and forth. It wouldn't be long until the rest joined in shooting other scifi show quotes around, everyone anteing up, and I loved it. That was probably the closest I had to actually having friends in real life, except outside of work I never saw them, and they had no idea who I really was.
That was it. I really need to get back on my day. Hope you guys are having/have had a good weekend.
Long ago in a galaxy far, far away, I was contacted in a forum by a nurse in another state seeking a fellow writer to have a little fun smashing Star Wars and Star Trek together. Since this was back in the Dark Ages when smashing fandoms was still considered heresy, I shouted Hooray! and gleefully jumped into emailing back and forth.
It. Was. Awesome. I love writing words. I love Star Trek and Star Wars. I had often imagined what could happen if the streams were crossed. I floated happily along through initial construction, setting up several plot lines and testing out character interactions, like Q bugging the Emperor, when I realized I was playing ball kind of alone on one side of the court while Riker was making out with Leia on the other side. It was dramatic and romantic and completely left out plot devices of any kind, even bad ones.
That was my first experience meeting Mary Sue. I had no idea what to make of it. I thought we were writing a cool story, but turns out I was a tool for someone else's fantasy role play. It felt weird, like asking a stranger to watch and maybe even join in. I was at a loss.
Nowadays, fans skip the whole writing thing and do this cool stuff.
Next up was Sliders. I had a really good time with that one. I discovered I could write quick comedies in very few pages, and I had a ball cracking myself up over the time all the parallel Sliders wound up randomly sliding onto the same Earth in someone's shower at the same time and stepping out sopping wet having to figure out whose people were whose, and the Colins were a riot. You'd have to be there. Sadly, no one else in the fandom was interested because none of them were having sex with each other. Still, it's awesome running into Sliders fans here and there nowadays. Click pic for awesome.
A year or so went by, I was rockin out in the Xena fandom and had figured out that's basically how fandoms party, so I became a ringleader and took a rowdy Joxer bunch with me over to a crazy list feed before we all got thrown out of an actual fan club. It was a lot of work, but I loved it, and pretty much played it like a Vulcan surfing a wave in a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses. Yeah, I invented party Spock and didn't even know it, way back in the 90s. That is who Yablo was.
Yablo was trubba, but my gang was even more awesome trubba, and I didn't care. Until I was asked to read and comment on some fanfic. I'd already written a couple of 3-page comedies to be included in a fan book to Ted Raimi (never found out if they made it), one in particular that I thought was a genius mashup on Joxer accidentally becoming a Darkwing Duck figure, so I thought Ok, sure, let's see what other people have got.
I didn't expect a submission in a big yellow envelope in my mailbox, and I didn't expect it to be on par with erotica. I'm sure there was love in there somewhere, but since I was unfamiliar with the lingo, I simply fell over cracking up, and from there it became a comedy to me. So when I reviewed it, I had no idea that I hurt feelings quite badly.
Can you imagine if we'd had youtube back then? I'd have been in heaven.
From the frying pan into the fire, they say. My fourth experience with Mary Sue was an entire world fandom eating itself over a dead guy and a love slave, with the show itself instigating the never ending frivolities, and suddenly it all clicked. Marketing.Iunderstand.
No I don't understand, apparently. Stepping back from Mary Sues means we can't be friends, whaaaaa. I have my own tastes and agendas, but being swamped on all sides with singular focus on internet orgies of every conceivable kind had me finally standing up brushing it off in private to a few people. Aaaaand, that didn't go down very well because that was back in the days before I knew I was an asexual person with Aspergers and before you know it, I became a worthless trading card left in the bottom of a drawer. Well, that's a quickie rendition of months of oncoming sadness, but you get the point.
I. Write. Stuff. I can take any writing prompt and turn it into several thousand words of honest to goodness story in minutes. I don't need sex to sell it, I don't need to be a character to feel it, and I certainly don't need validation to keep writing.
I see the fights going on through the years over someone stole my idea thing, and the copyright wars over stuff that's barely even legal to begin with, and I just stopped sharing what's in my head. Until Pinky started publicly blurbing at syfydesigns, which has over 26,700 views now, thank you very much. And then Pinky started publicly blogging on a real blog. And I'm sitting here looking at the view count wondering how in the world that happened.
I love fans. I've always said that. Fans are my coffee in the morning. Fans are my catharsis through rough days. Fans are there in the horrible dark nights when I'm scared and alone. The internet is full to bursting with fans being awesome.
But I'm sorry, I just can't have sex with you guys. I know, I'm weird...
But mostly, I'm busy. It's called a contract. And this blogging stuff is called warm up, you know, like athletes do before big games.
As I write, I am realizing my real life trumps all the fanfic I could have ever written. Maybe one of the reasons I don't Mary Sue fanfic is because I don't have to imagine it. One of the reasons I don't read it is because I've seen it all around me. The vamps. The violence. The slaves. The dead.
I have kept so many secrets. I have been so many scary places.
