Punk-Ass Book Jockey

The Great Delicious Migration spreadsheet [public Googledocs doc] is amazingly useful. I'm impressed. If I had a bookmarking service on which I could update my tag bundles, I would absolutely be using it to sync user names across the board.

Confession: I secretly read your friends' pages when there's nothing left on mine, and it's late at night, and I've had three mochas.

GUESS WHAT I'M DOING RIGHT NOW.

*jittery!Rachel is jittery*

Hey guys,

Go encourage casirafics to mount that Bechdel Fic Challenge she's come up with.

The Bechdel Test is how Alison Bechdel determines if she wants to watch a movie: it has to have a)more than one woman in it, b) the women have to talk to each other c) about something other than men.

The idea behind a Bechdel Fic Challenge is to take fandoms that normally fail the Bechdel test, and write fic that makes them compliant.

GOOD IDEA, RIGHT?

So, there's a comm called strangefandom where people try to figure out the plotlines of fandoms with which they're unfamiliar... by watching and analysing songvids.

(If you fail to understand why this is hysterically genius, imagine if Closer was all the information you had about the relationships and story arcs of ST:OS.)

Anyway, today I found the entry for SG:A. Excerpt:

Specifically, it's about the torrid love affair between Tough and Cuddles. Tough isn't sure he really is gay and keep rebuffing Cuddles's advances. [...] Since Cuddles is a genius and in love with Tough, he asks Pink Lady (I think I'm going to call her Grace Kelly :p) for advice. Grace Kelly does her best to make Cuddles the prettiest darn Stargatey guy that ever wore a uniform. Nothing seems to work though; no matter how many times he asks Grace Kelly for advice, Cuddles just keeps getting turned down. So he decides maybe he's better off becoming a better fighter to impress Tough. He chooses to shoot things and wave at Tough, and it works! Tough grabs him in a suitably manly fashion and they're off! There's kissing! And meeting excitedly in the hangar! And strolling through forests. Strolling is very important.

I AM HOOKED.

I should be at a housewarming party, but my tummy is acting up. So. At home, seriously lacking ice-cream, and thinking about UnShelved's assertion that a group of Browncoats is called "a closet."

I'm skeptical, but I like the idea of fannish collective nouns. So I poked around, and have discovered the following:

Dr. Who fans are sometimes referred to as "a good of Whovians," although googlism also tells me that "rassilon is what you call a collected group of whovians who gather once a month for pizza." (What if they're gathering for sushi? Do you call them something else then?)

Your online reading (well, mine, anyway) is "a vanity of blogs."

The unofficial name for a group of editors is "a scrutiny."

There's a dearth here! Admittedly, I gave up googling after half an hour, so there are probably lots of fan-identified terms that I don't know about. However, since I don't know about them/can't find them, I am hereby suggesting the following coinage:

A Bender of Fen

A Trap of Flans

A Beam of Trekkies

A Determination of Whedonites

Why yes, I do think myself very clever. :-) But I also think you very clever, o my flist. So. What terms do you suggest? What exists that I didn't find? What are Stargate: Atlantis fans called? And are Buffy/Angel fans "an armful of bangels"?

I'm watching the profile page for fandom_counts, just to watch the member count go up and up and up.

Stand up and be counted indeed. It jumped 50 places in three seconds on my last check.

I've conceded that I've run out of entertainment, and have, thus, started watching Supernatural.

I was avoiding it because I am not down with shows where women have to die in order for men to go out into the world and be heroes. I KNOW. IT'S NOT SO VALID A COMPLAINT IN THIS CASE, what with the fire demons and, oh, I don't know, the supernatural shit. I'm still watching with a jaundiced eye, because fire-demons or not, it's still the (non-Jo & Jess) women who are consistently the vulnerable ones, threatened by lake monsters or Bloody Mary or skinshifters or whatever, and who need to be saved.*

I understand that tried and true dynamic (sexual tension! heightened stakes! save the pretty girl, for god's sakes, we need those genes!), but I miss Buffy! I miss Buffy a lot! And BtVS/A people are showing up in this show, and it only makes me miss Buffy more. Where are the fierce women? Where are the girls who can damn well save themselves, thank you very much Winchesters?

I'm still watching because idle elljay reading has led me to suspect that they show up in later seasons, and I am incapable of skipping forward without feeling wrong about it.

I am also still watching b/c the banter is awesome. And Jensen Ackles? Is that level of hotness even legal? Srsly, that has to slow him down. How does he get anything done, what with the rest of the world turned to drooling mush at the power of his intensely beautiful eyes and mouth? (Dude, it cannot just be me.)

Lastly, fanon has made me totally impatient with Dean for not being more proactive about Sam's nightmares. I think that a blowjob would really have helped out there. I mean, except for the fact that Sam's feeling guilty over his girlfriend's death and is emotionally unstable and probably couldn't deal. STILL. Comfort sex: the phrase exists for a reason, people.

*At least, in the first six eps, which is as far as I've watched. I recognize this is not a large sample size.
--

On an unrelated-to-SPN note, o fandom: I am down with novellas, but I am not going to read 83 chapters of fic. I don't care who you are, you cannot sustain a story through 83 chapters. Sequels are your friend. Other stories set in the same universe -- also your friend. Short pieces are harder to write, it's true, but they make you a better writer because there is no space to cheat.

In case you missed it, there's an action figure Superman with a pole up his ass.

Up. His. Ass.

*loves*

So yesterday at work, a Very Enthusiastic Young Fanboy came into the store eager to get his hands on the copy of the Firefly Companion, Volume 1, which was in the window (because we don't mess around, yo'.) And so I placed it carefully in his covetous hands and we talked whedonverse, and then BSG, and then SGA, and my manager was rolling his eyes, and then, as he was paying for the book, his cell rang.

And the ringtone was... the Star Wars theme.

It was five minutes of intense geekery, matched only by today.

Because today, also at work, a customer came in looking for the Serenity novelization. And I have that, but it's not in stock at the store, and I don't want to encourage the publisher to print more because it's NO GOOD.

I'm really really sorry to say that, because the author seems all Browncoaty (he hung around the boards at the official site for ages, username KRAD), and it's not his fault that it's no good - I mean, it's hard to write someone else's story with any juice (exhibit A: the non-Frank Herbert Dune novels). But. It's an exceptionally boring read.

Anyway, I said all of that, because when I'm on about my fandom? I have no filter. It wasn't good or even adequate bookselling behaviour. The guy seemed disappointed, but he also said that he had a covetous swag thing going on, which I totally get, and I offered him my copy of the novelization.

It was fortunate that my boss was paying no attention to me when this went down, or I would be so fired.

So my copy of the Serenity novelization is going to a better home. And I've had my fill of being a fangirl at work.

I am bored, and I just read a hideous sex scene, so...

( Five Things That Will Make Me Stop Reading A Piece of Fanfic )

Other people! Tell me what makes you scram!