Sophinisba Solis

Whoa how did two months go by, I was doing such a good job of posting for a bit there.

Okay, Dreamwidth, I want to let you know that I did most of the Fandom Snowflake Challenge (13 out of 15 tasks/posts) in the first two weeks of January. I did them over on Tumblr and I thought that tagging them all would make it easy for me to link to them, but when I click on the tag it just takes me to all the posts with that tag on Tumblr.com and not on my Tumblr, so idek.

Also Dreamwidth, I want to let you know that I posted a ton of podfic last month. Specifically I made 15 podfics, each with a different author and a different femslash ship, adding up to a little over 3 hours. You can find them over on the AO3, where I made the series Femslash February 2018. It starts off with some Star Wars sequels, then there's a bunch of other stuff, then there's some Merlin. The last one is an hour and 23 minutes, so that knocks out two of my fannish goals for the year. Hooray! Maybe I will do another Dreamwidth post sometime where I actually list all of them.

Meanwhile my offline life has not gone especially well. Specifically I have had some stress and drama at work, but the last two weeks have been a little better and I'm feeling hopeful about the next two weeks.

I haven't seen Black Panther yet, but I'm planning to go see it tonight.

I did see the Chilean movie A Fantastic Woman yesterday and then was pleased when it won the Oscar for best foreign film last night. (I love the Oscars, as frustrating as they are. I watch every year.)

Hello, here is some meta for the “leather/latex/rubber” square on my kink_bingo card. Some of the post is negative about leather.

( thoughts )

It's possible I've written fewer words of fic this year than any year since I've been in fandom, and most of that has been short PWPs (plus a few other ficlets that didn't have porn or plot). However, I would never skip the fic year in review meme because I love it, plus it is nice to compare from year to year.

( List of fics )

( Numbers and graphs! )

( Questions meme )

I have written most of a personal update type post. Maybe I will finish that sometime. Things are going well though!

Also I have started watching Mad Men (all four seasons available on Netflix streaming) and I love it.

Now here is that NPR SF/F book meme! This is a list of Top 100 Science-Fiction and Fantasy Books as voted on by more than 60,000 people at npr.org. For the meme, strong the ones you've read, emphasis the ones you intend to read, underline the ones you've read part of, and strike the ones you never intend to read. (I'm not really bothering with the strike because I don't have strong feelings about most of the ones I haven't read, but I probably will not read them.)

( a bunch of books mostly by white guys! )

I've been enjoying reading this meme and reactions to it on other people's journals and I liked Glen Weldon's explanation/commentary. (Glen is part of the NPR Pop Culture Happy Hour so it is is fun to imagine it in his voice - especially the line "Be a dude.") eruthros is starting up a top 100 speculative fiction works as chosen by people in fandom list, now in the nominations stage.

As I had hoped would happen, frigg (so much more knowledgeable about Merlin fandom than I) has left an awesome long comment on my recs post from yesterday, including a bunch of additional recs and links, and thoughts about visual representations of subby Arthur. Do check out the comments if that's something you're into! And turns out there's a whole arthur_submits comm on LJ that I didn't know about! Maybe I will post a link there and more people will comm and share their recs. (Or maybe I will be too shy.)

Speaking of LJ comms, camelot_knights is running an Elyan Week starting tomorrow!


Elyan Week will run from Monday 24th January - Sunday 30th January at camelot_knights!

Schedule:

Monday: Prompts
Tuesday: Icon Pool
Wednesday: Picspam
Thursday: Discussion
Friday: Kink Meme prompts
Saturday: Shipping
Sunday: Free for all!

Click the banner for the prompting post, which is already open!


There is also a new Porn Battle running at oxoniensis's journal now through February 3rd, with zillions of prompts in Merlin and many other fandoms, and a separate listing for prompts featuring characters of color. It is open to everything porny including fic, art, vids, and songs. (I've always found the Porn Battle kind of overwhelming with all the prompts and intimidating with the injunction to create hot porn, and I've never written anything for it, but maybe if I look at some of the smaller fandom prompts I'll come up with something.)

Being Human season 3 started/starts tonight whoo! And wtf I don't have a journal tag or any icons for it. Well, I guess I watched the first two seasons really quickly and not while they were airing so I never really talked about it. But this is one of my favorite shows! I can't wait to watch!

I notice that almost all my posts lately are either fanworks or cheerful links to fanworks and challenges, and I haven't been making many f-locked posts. I have been feeling mostly good about my writing (three fics already this month, two of them longer and porny! After only four shorter fics in the previous four months) and podficcing lately and not as good about the rest of my life. I will say though that today I did a load of laundry and washed ALL the dishes, so those are two things to feel good about.

ETA: Oh gosh I forgot to say festivids!! That was my whole day yesterday, alternating tears of heartache and squeals of squee! (I should go back tonight and maybe that will put me in a better mood.) Well, I will try to do a separate recs post later but look just go check out the masterlist and luxuriate in the vids! And claudia603, the one Homicide vid is Lewis-centric and it's wonderful.

I've never done one of these, but this one seems to be especially lovely and I'm in an Internet-social mood, if not a real-life one, so, um, yeah! Here is my thread at the Be Excellent to Each Other meme on petra's journal! Say nice things about me if you feel so inclined! Start a thread for yourself and then tell me about it!

I feel bad that so many of my journal entries lately have been these boring RL things. :/ It makes me embarrassed to friend new people, even, because I'm afraid they'll think I'm self-centered and whiny all the time.

When I complain about rl stress, I feel bad admitting how much TV I'm still watching. But I'm enjoying watching the first season of Legend of the Seeker and rewatching (sort of - I never did watch all the episodes in order so I might run into some I've never seen before) the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I didn't look very closely at swatkat24's Legend of the Seeker pimp post or the Illustrated F/F Edition because I'm a bit spoilerphobic, but I was pretty well convinced by the list of reasons at the top of the first post. Actually I'd been pretty well convinced already by other friends saying the show was like Merlin only more so. It is. I'm liking it a lot, especially the Kahlan parts.

I have these two movies out from Netflix right now, I feel bad for not watching them. I'm sure they're both great and uplifting and all, but they're both long and foreign and just seem too heavy every time I sit down to watch TV lately, so I've been watching these TV shows instead.

I feel bad that I didn't write anything for picfor1000. The deadline's tonight and seeing all the new entries going up gives me this little feeling like, "Aw, it's just 1000 words. What if I just rushed and wrote the whole thing tonight? It could be a great adventure!" but that thought usually dies within a few seconds. I suppose I could try to write something and turn it in late, but I never did get inspired by that pic and my creative energy is just really low right now.

I feel only a little bit bad that I haven't written anything for the prompt fest at camelot_fleet, since that fest was supposed to be low-stress and I feel like I did my part by compiling and coding the prompts list. I do wish I'd managed to record a podfic though.

I feel okay about not having signed up for purimgifts this year. I can still do some reading without dealing with the stress of the deadline or trying to write in a fandom I'm not into (or dropping out).

I really enjoyed this Purimgifts ficlet that went up today: so many colours it nearly broke my heart, by anon, 750 words about the Patil twins.

Here are three fanvids about women that have made me cry in the last month (the first one also made me cry in January but then I watched it again in February and cried some more, so it counts):

-Lullabye for a Stormy Night by barkley, the Vienna Teng song and Maria from The Sound of Music. Oh my God.

-Harbor by kaydeefalls, more Vienna Teng, about Gwen and the people who love her.

-Wild Child by calapine, "a multi-fandom vid for halfamoon's celebration of female characters." I went to this on zahrawithaz's rec (actually a bunch of lady-centric vid recs in that post - check them out) and I wanted to echo her comment, which is that there are a lot of great "women are awesome" vids out there (as there should be), but it's really great to see the diversity in this one, both in terms of including women of color and in highlighting lots of different ways of being awesome, so there's wielding a gun but there's also being a capable doctor, or supporting your friends, or being curious about the world. I really loved this.

These pictures of the Obamas are not new but they're sure to brighten your day or evening or whatever. I mean seriously, I can't believe how adorable this family is.

I am not actually experiencing Yuletide stress but I use this icon out of sympathy for those of you who are and because I think it's so great. With help from claudia603 I finished and uploaded a third story this afternoon, and got a screencap of my name with story number 200. \o/ I know it's pretty meaningless but it's neat to see a big round number like that.

The weather here is very icky tonight. I was out running in the afternoon just as the rain was starting to freeze. A lot of other people were also at the grocery store stocking up since it's going to get worse tonight and tomorrow. Luckily I shouldn't have to go out at all tomorrow. My roommate and I are in for the night and planning to heat up some frozen pizza and maybe make some mulled wine and watch a movie, about which I may or may not then try to write another Yuletide story. o_0

Ooh, and last night I watched the first episode of Merlin! I like it okay so far, will need to watch some more to see whether I really get hooked or not. Merlin is certainly a cutie. I enjoy staring at him and am a total sucker for both his sweetness and his "omg why am I like this?" angst. On the other hand I'm afraid the show in general might be a little too cute for me. ( Read more... )

Ah, the end of the long weekend. I was freaking out just a little bit as I was writing the rent check this morning – how did it get to be December 1st already? There were important serious real-life things I had intended to get done by December 1st and I am nowhere close! :(

On the other hand, I had a great fannish month in November. With help from wrisomifu I did some fan writing every day, including all those ficlets for remixthedrabble, the crossover ficlets I'm still working on, and a lot of writing on several different fics for Yuletide. For the last day of the month I woke up with an idea for an extra Yuletide story and actually managed to write a whole first draft by noon and send it to beta in the evening. That never happens to me! I was so pleased!

Then also yesterday I got an e-mail from benebu, whom I'd met through the remix, offering to translate my remixed HP fic Let No One Put Asunder into French! OMG! I've never had someone do that before and I'm so excited!

And speaking of honors, congratulations to all you MEFA winners out there! And thanks to everyone who helped out by volunteering or by reviewing stories. I think I understood correctly that they had more reviews this year than ever before. It's awesome to see a part of LotR fandom growing like that after all this time.

I've now had my new iPod Nano for a week and I totally love it! It is so delightfully small but it holds all the songs I have in my iTunes so far. (There are still a lot of CDs I haven’t saved yet but whatever.) It is blue and really very pretty. I’ve never had an iPod before and I’m just so pleased.

I've taken it to the gym for walking and (a wee bit of) running on a treadmill a couple times and found that works pretty well but not perfectly. I have this armband that is designed to carry a classic iPod so it was a little big for the Nano but mostly okay. More of a problem is that it's always slipping down on my arm, sometimes even wanting to slip past the elbow, which makes me want to bend my elbows more, which is not great when you're trying to relax your arms and save your energy for the running and all. Plus it’s in a bit of an inconvenient place as far as adjusting the volume and skipping songs. I don't think it would work to just hold it in one hand because I'm always having to press buttons on the treadmill and I'm scared I'll get confuzzled and fall off (as I once did years ago while holding a Discman – not fun!). Anybody have advice or ideas for this?

Speaking of music and technology, I've also been having some fun with the website Pandora.com. The way it works, you tell it the name of a song or an artist that you like, and it makes a "radio station" with similar music. You can add more songs or artists as "seeds" to influence what kind of station it is, and for every song that they play you say whether you like it or not, so it keeps refining as you go, and meanwhile you're usually listening to a lot of music that you like, some of it familiar and some new. If you like a song you haven't heard before you can get more information about the artist really quickly and there are always links for you to buy the song from Amazon or iTunes.

I’ve found that it works especially well for finding artists that match other artists, not quite as well for the feel of a particular song. The variety is not as big as it would be with an actual radio station but sometimes that's okay. The most pleasant surprise for me has been how quickly it figured out my tastes for my Latin American rock station, and after that I was disappointed with how little African and Arabic music they seemed to have.

The other thing I've been doing for music lately is borrowing CDs from the public library and copying them to my iTunes. I know this is not especially ethical but it's just so easy I don't really want to stop.