Playing with words

Wishing you all a wonderful New Year! 🥳🙌 This will be another many updates at once post because so much has happened but I've been too busy to sit and compose a post!

First! Thank you to spikedluv for more DW points via holiday_wishes ! So much appreciated!!! 🥰

Second cool thing: I've won a few Discord Nitro giveaways ever since I started entering lots of them? Law of averages, so I've been cruising along with Nitro Classic (which is basically just Extra Emoji Powah - it's the discount version of Nitro) and I have a few months of classic credit stored up now. Then a couple days ago I basically won the jackpot: one year of Nitro Boost! 🙌🥳This is the fully souped up version of Nitro that costs $100! So I can boost the little B2 server again, which is awesome! (It means all members on the server can use more of our custom emoji and stickers and our icon can be a GIF one, plus a few more perks.)

Third: I spotted a new gift on AO3 and went rummaging through the tags at fandomtrees and ooooh! Can't wait!

And finally, the person translating my fics into Vietnamese has finished An Exchange of Kings now and the link is here!


In not so cool things: tumblr is basically totally non-functional for creators right now. 😭 It's probably them trying to fix their banned tags issue, but now any tagged post doesn't show. 🤨 So I'm not making any more GIFsets until they figure out WTF they're doing. Really sad that I might have to redo the tags on all the sets I've posted - that is at least a hundred sets.😭 I have two more weeks of work, so maybe after that?


November/December media

TV shows: So much quality content! I have been very happy with the TV offerings lately. I think I'll be trying Wheel of Time next, since the people in the Gendrya server are talking about it. (I read the books ages ago, so I don't think I'll be offended by the "narrative diversions" that husbands everywhere are complaining about!😂) 

Squid Game- I totally get all the hype over this series - it was sooo good! I started it one night, just to see why everybody was talking about it and flooding my dash with people in tracksuits. Watched two episodes, and then binged the rest the next day! It is very intense though - I can see why people just can't take the strain of it, and the seemingly cynically violent narrative. This show breaks your heart on purpose? I do like what it says about capitalism and human nature in the end though. I have caps for icons, so I will be working on those sometime!

explained S3- There was a chess ep and one on dogs! Awesome season!

The Mind explained- The last ep on brainwashing was uncomfortably relevant. 😖 Radicalization in small groups: it can happen to you! I want to watch the one on personality again - the different traits are really interesting! 

Lost in Space S3- I can't believe it's over! And I liked where the characters ended up, mostly, although I am sad it wasn't a little bit shippier for the pairings I was rooting for. 🥺 

Arcane- OMG this show blew me away! I think I actually like the love triangle on this show because it's such a fresh take on the trope and sooo heartbreaking?! Plus what a corruption arc! And the character designs and artwork and music were all just stunning together! Definitely going to re-watch just to be wowed all over again. 

Hawkeye- I did not expect this show to make me ugly sob because I'm going to be honest: I went into this not giving a damn about Clint. My fave was Natasha and I have been bitter for literally YEARS. This show had everything though - humourous banter, great character arcs/plot, awesome action sequences and emotional catharsis like whoa. 😭😭😭 So well done, and it totally blew away my expectations. Plus the holiday setting was perfect - my kiddo and I watched it all over Christmas and it felt so sublime! 

The Witcher S2- I liked it for the most part although Jaskier should have had more songs! Having Ciri a lot more central at last was great, and I also like the time spent with more of the minor characters like Fringilla, whose choices and struggles I find a lot more relatable than say, Geralt's? Although I don't like what they did with Yennefer since it was so contradictory and also not in the books?! 🤨(Yes, I am the annoyed husband here: what was that?!)


Movies: Only watched a couple. I'm hoping to see No Way Home in theatre soon though! It comes out here on the 7th!

Shang-chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings- This was such a fun romp and I kind of ship Katy/Shang-chi now. I loved how they were so solidly each other's person. 

Don't Look Up- I found this so depressingly realistic that I had to stop watching in the middle for a day. Like maybe it's satire but it felt terribly plausible.  


Books:

   Scythe, Thunderhead and The Toll by Neal Shusterman

In an overpopulated world where an ubiquitous, omnipresent AI has solved all mundane human problems like death and disease, there have to be those who must reduce the population instead. This was such a neat dystopian concept and I think the first book in this series was definitely the strongest, although all of them have several gut punch twists. The weakest part of the series was the romance - I just didn't feel it between the two main (young) protagonists. (Maybe I am over YA romance? IDK.) The third book is strangely structured too, because one of the minor characters from the second book gets a leading role for most of the first third of it - it's a jarring change when you're so used to his chapters being the occasional interlude instead of the main focus! I have a bunch of fic bookmarked for this, but for the mentor scythes, who had the most tragically separated for eternity soulmates story ever. It still makes my heart break a bit to reflect on it. 🥺

 A Psalm of Storms and Silence by Roseanne A. Brown

Ooooh this was such a good finish to this duology! I feel like anything I say will be spoilers for the first book, but the great worldbuilding continues out into the world around the city in the first, with a wonderfully diverse range of characters, and some realistically motivated characters? Like at first it seems like the author is playing to a romantic trope, but noooope, character was motivated by something deeper! 😅
A great YA fantasy read - I'm reccing this series to my kiddo for sure.


Finally, here's my last fic of the year for newyearcntdown 

Title: Cold Hands (Cold Feet) (Joy and Harmonny for the Season Chp 3)
Fandom: The Queen's Gambit (TV)
Characters/Pairing: Beth Harmon/Benny Watts, Jolene DeWitt & Benny Watts, Benny Watts & D.L. Townes
Word Count/Rating: 2424 words, T
Summary: Counterpart to the previous chapter: Whatever did Benny get Beth for Christmas?
Link to AO3 here

This was expanding on the backstory of the last chapter of Exchange too - I wasn't planning to write that in when I first saw the prompt, but the more I thought about that other meaning of Cold Feet, the more I wanted to add it. I was originally going to write eight stories for this community and only finished three, but I am keeping the option open to post a couple more on AO3 even though the community on DW won't be open for cross-posting!

It never rains but it pours and I'm really loving this, universe; keep it coming! 😁🙌

The holiday_wishes comm is just amazing - I've gotten some points towards my account here from two people now, and I didn't even get to thank them because DW doesn't send you a link when they do that! So thank you very much, kind elves! 🙇‍♀️

And I won another nitro giveaway a couple of days ago! So I will have Sweet Emoji Powah for another month after this one expires! *dancing* I can't believe I won - I'm only in that server because they have cute emoji, so it was a totally unexpected windfall! 😅

The lovely person fantranslating my B^2 fics into Vietnamese contacted me yesterday and said they had put up chap 1 of An Exchange of Kings (Openings and Tactics). Link is here! I really wish I could understand the nuance of the language - I am dying to understand how they translated the title, since it's actually an impossible concept in chess (but I wanted that metaphor of them both resigning at once and then playing out a new, unfamiliar kind of game instead).

Finally, this morning I got a notification that somebody had gifted me a Tedbecca fic as a prize for participating in a comment-a-thon last month! I started late and only got out 7 comments, so I didn't expect anything, actually, I just wanted to contribute to the fun! 😅 But one author whose fics I love still wrote me (and two others) a story with that kind of perfectly pitched angst of getting what you desperately want and knowing it might get snatched away at any second. 🥺🥺🥺 It hurt so good and feels so hopeful in the end and Ted is such a beautiful person in it and I love it to bits. 🥰🥰🥰


Anyway, I hope you guys are all doing well! Work is craaaaazy for the next two weeks for me and I've committed to 8 things (probably mostly B^2 holiday fics, although one prompt is dying for a Tedbecca set) for newyearcntdown. First fic is here for the prompt Snuggle (Huddle for Warmth):

I love that we got so many Vault tracks on Red (Taylor's Version)! I am mostly listening to them, actually - I feel like her vocal control and maturity shows a little too much in the re-recorded tracks? This album is all about the headrush, spinning-out feeling of falling wildly in love and then getting your heart absolutely crushed. The desperate edges in her younger self singing these feel more authentic to me still, but maybe it's just because I'm so used to hearing them? So my fave tracks to play on repeat right now are New to Me ones: The Moment I Knew, Come Back...Be Here, Nothing New, Better Man, Message in a Bottle and All Too Well (10 minute version).

Actually the last track (and the accompanying short film) is mostly what I want to talk about, because it's brought up a lot of talk about age gaps in relationships in a couple of different places for me, and I had some very different conversations about what the film depicted:


Taylor cast these two very deliberately - the ten year age gap is the same as the one between her and Jake Gyllenhaal, and this song is famously autobiographical about their relationship when she was 20. Back when ATW was the 5 minute version, it seemed like a song about great love found and lost, but it's morphed into something a lot darker and expository in its new iteration. So he's been trending on Twitter since the album dropped.

Jake Gyllenhaal calling Tom Holland ‘kid’ for the entirely of the far from home press tour

Tom Holland being the same age as Jake’s girlfriend… pic.twitter.com/SCvaihqKcF

— jess (@ripcowstoenails) November 13, 2021

Sorry for this one #RedTaylorsVersion pic.twitter.com/hLJpFD5T4S

— Meredith Cash (@mercash22) November 13, 2021

"I'll get older but your lovers stay my age." OUCH. Taylor dragging him full out, spelling out a few more memorable incidents (like him standing her up on her 21st birthday), this noticeable relationship pattern of his and his emotional withholding power games. On a personal note, my mother was in Uni when she met my (24 years senior) father, who had gone back to Hong Kong after his divorce expressly for the purpose of finding himself a young, new wife. She never finished her degree: he took her back to Canada, where he isolated and abused her (and us kids) for almost 15 years. And my SIL is mid-divorce right now from her 10 years older husband, who she met while he was coaching her club at Uni. You know the thing I remember most about her talking about him? "Kenka shinai," she said, absolutely beaming. (We) don't fight. It took her literally years to realize it was because she was just doing everything he told her to. And yes, he followed the pattern too: they're getting divorced because he was cheating on her with his new girlfriend, a university student. 


I'm glad Taylor is speaking up about this? Like it's a dynamic that our culture and media reinforces as Absolutely Fine and even Ideal - see how hard it is for a 40-something year old actress to be cast as a love interest for a 50 year old actor. 🙄 And I am absolutely not saying all men are serial predators, or that all age gap relationships with this specific age gap are doomed. But I'm glad she's putting the full truth out there now that she can look back at the relationship from a distance and go, "yeah, that was fucked up." Just look at her new album cover. It's her in the driver's seat now.

Icons from both seasons! GIF icons should work on both DW and AO3, stills will work everywhere. Please credit me if used!

 

 

Stills:
 

So here we go again, but this time I'm going to C/P the whole thing to a doc first because it sure is annoying to lose a long post I made all pretty with image links etc. 

( TV/Movies )



( Books )

Hopefully this posts okay! Let me know if you guys have any recs or different thoughts about any of these! 

I tried to post my September media a few weeks ago and then my draft just up and got eaten, which?! Why DW, why?

So I gave up on that but here is a fic I wrote that I did not expect to! Somebody mentioned wanting it on the B^2 server and I went from: "Huh, that's actually plausible in book canon," to three thousand words in about a day. 😅 Also I tried a new thing with the GIF header - it was fun punching a black queen out, which is the color she was playing in the game I reference throughout.



Playing the Rush (7464 words) by NRGburst
Chapters: 1/2
Fandom: The Queen's Gambit (TV), The Queen's Gambit - Walter Tevis
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Beth Harmon/Benny Watts
Characters: Benny Watts, Beth Harmon, Jolene (The Queen's Gambit)
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Rating May Change, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Mutual Pining, Poker Lingo, Actual Chess game
Summary:

vb: playing loose and aggressive on a hot streak of wins.

TQG x Rounders: Benny gambles his way to Moscow AU



Also! ToT is live and I got TWO fics this year! *dances*

This is soooo good with how it captures Ted's hyperverbal tendencies when he's upset. And how he would absolutely believe that he was to blame for somebody else's hurtful choices.🥺 Spoilers for S2!

Blame Game (1617 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Ted Lasso (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Ted Lasso/Rebecca Welton
Additional Tags: Angst with a Happy Ending, First Kiss, Emotional Support, Trick or Treat: Treat, Season/Series 02 Spoilers, Nathan Shelley Discussed
Summary: Is this what has had him so talkative, so attentive, so all things to all people? Ted can't be blaming himself for this.


Also this spot on drabble (and a REAL DRABBLE GUYS) for Bucky/Ayo. It gets his cocky flirtatiousness (from the original Captain America movie 🥺) and Ayo's characterization down PAT. It's such a rare-pair too, I am all asqueeeeee

Like Attraction (100 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Falcon and the Winter Soldier (TV)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Ayo/James "Bucky" Barnes
Characters: James "Bucky" Barnes
Additional Tags: Drabble


I'm still making my way through the collection, but here is another insta-rec because the characterization and dialogue are just so damn good:

you can't go home again (but let's just try) (780 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 10 Things I Hate About You (1999)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Kat Stratford/Patrick Verona
Characters: Kat Stratford, Patrick Verona
Additional Tags: Established Relationship, Post-Canon, Returning Home, Halloween, Breaking and Entering, Banter, Flirting
Summary:

On a trip back home, Kat allows Patrick to talk her into revisiting their old school.

Hope you are all having a marvelous Halloween, guys! 

So the kids are back at school, and my classes haven't started yet, which gives me a bit of a breather for a couple of weeks. It's just such a relief to have the house to myself again in the mornings? 😅 Even doing chores is nice. One neat thing: the kids came back from school with Chromebooks just in case the current State of Emergency turns back into full on lockdown. Aren't we all glad we are hosting the Olympics and COVID is now raging through our mostly unvaccinated population? 🙄 

I just went through my f-list and did a little housecleaning - I'm guessing if you haven't posted in more than a year (or you know, ever) you probably don't even remember your password to your DW/LJ, nonetheless care that I revoked access to my locked entries, but if this assumption was all wrong, please let me know! 

Fall love meme going on here! Here's my thread. 💜

Also got a Keeley/Rebecca fic in my fandomgiftbox that I didn't get a notification for but was somehow revealed anyway? It's sweet and sexy and deliciously in character: go read it! (T, 1106 words, no warnings)

Finally, I made a GIFset to celebrate Moses Ingram's Emmy Nomination (Best Supporting Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series) for The Queen's Gambit. Not sure I have the spoons to do TBS and ATJ too, although they also received first time Emmy nominations as well! (I also want to do the Ted Lasso cast but sooooo many of them got nominated that I've given up on that preemptively! 😅)  I actually had to replace my laptop because I borked the old one (blue screen of deeeeaaath) trying to update the drivers. 😭 Silver lining: PS now runs like a dream because I got an i5 instead of my usual Celeron but having to screencap stuff all over again really bites. Fingers crossed the old drive is recoverable, since the tech guy sounded pretty positive I could fix it myself, but I'm still too chicken shit to try. 😬

I've been seeing lots of discussion about tagging recently on tumblr, discord and my f-list, ever since AO3 announced its decision to limit tags to 75. I think most of it is thoughtful and productive - I think awareness leads to people acting more thoughtfully (although as wheatear  has pointed out, there's no such thing as perfect tagging, though I'd argue that being aware of how and why people use tags in your fandom can certainly lead to "better" tagging. And I think the reason that AO3 made this decision is obvious: there's actually such a thing as "bad" tagging. 

I think the most obvious offenders are like manspreaders on trains - it's not egregiously harmful that they're taking up more space than others, but it can still be a real nuisance (and may present significant obstacles to some, like those using a screen reader, who can't "just keep scrolling" past). And I think a lot of it can be attributed to ignorance? I think most of the people tagging their fics like it's an ingredient label, listing every character, setting and trope that appears, however minutely, are usually newbies to the whole fandom thing. Ditto those uploading every single shortfic they write as "chapters" of a single fic and tagging every iteration of fandoms and characters - I think they're unaware of how much of an annoyance it is to have this massive, mostly irrelevant "description" appearing in whatever tag users have clicked on and of how readers actually use tags; they're just labelling, like a kid decorating their fic with stickers. It's not deliberately malicious, but it can still be damn irritating? Those are the garden variety Wall-o-Tag offenders, though: the full context of what actually forced AO3 to crack down is the site clogging trolling of STWW, a fic with several thousand tags (and its copycat trolls). It was such obvious abuse of a system that relies on the good faith tagging of authors (and one that affected millions of users at once) that it led to AO3 finally setting up this tag limit before it even introduced a long promised block function. 
 

At the other end of the "bad tagging" spectrum would be under-tagging, which basically functions in a way that "underadvertises" a fic and is detrimental to authors who were hoping to reach a wider audience or worse: "underwarns" for triggering/unwanted content and leads people to click on fics that will upset them. 


So what can be done to combat bad tagging/promote better tagging? 

Well, ao3commentoftheday has published this little flowchart of questions that I think are a great guide! And I think the better you know your fandom, the easier it will be to judge what you want to be tagging and how. For example: I know to tag background pairings in other tags in GoT fics, because there is so much content that people get annoyed when they find their OTP relegated to the background if you've tagged them in the character tags. TQG in contrast: such a small fandom that people are happy for whatever scraps of a pairing they can get. 

Listen to what people are complaining about on your shiptag on tumblr, or on your relevant discord server. Remember you can always add or delete tags - AO3 lets you do both with ease, so if you get complaints or suggestions, take them into consideration. 

Any other thoughts, oh f-list? 

What exactly is a Seinfeldian conversation? One that goes nowhere with lots of protesting? Also Stationery, what. LOL I am going to do all KNNW and Ted Lasso this round, I think. 

RITES OF PASSAGE / COMING OF AGE	LEADERS AND FOLLOWERS	UNIFORMS	STATIONERY	FORK IN THE ROAD
TWENTY-FOUR HOURS TO LIVE	SEINFELDIAN CONVERSATION	EVERYONE THINKS WE'RE A COUPLE	INSPIRED BY POETRY	MEANS OF COMMUNICATION
MATCHMAKER	SONG (INSPIRED) FIC	FREE SPACE (MINOR CHARACTER)	TORTURE / INTERROGATION	FASHION & STYLE
ELEMENTS (CHEMICAL / CLASSICAL / ETC.)	CELEBRATORY KISS	FOOD AND COOKING	SECRET IDENTITIES	HUDDLE FOR WARMTH
FORBIDDEN FRUIT	SUPERHERO	PATTERNS	KISS	FULL BODY

TV:

進撃の巨人 (Attack on Titan) S1&2: First off: that English translation of the title is terrible. I thought for years that the plot would have something to do with giants attacking some sort of base on Titan, one of Saturn's moons. Nope! It's not sci-fi at all, but more action/adventure fantasy. TBH I don't really understand why it was so incredibly popular here? 😅 I'm not really loving the main character because he's of the belligerently reckless young Chosen One variety, and he only seems to keep moving forward in the episodes because of his friends' protection/smarts and his genetic superpower/plot armor. I really wish he were smarter or more charismatic or something other than that guy who is always upset and indecisive while ridiculous numbers of soldiers die every single episode before he actually does anything.

I've heard S3 and 4 are disappointing in the Game of Thrones kind of way, so I'm not in any hurry to finish, either. 

Loki: I am really enjoying this series, and I love Mobius and Sylvie! Kiddo is watching with me and not enjoying the constant cliffhangers. 😅 You can really tell they have been growing up in the era of Netflix binging: "What?! That's it?! But that means we have to wait until next week to find out what happens!" 😱 
I really hope the last ep of the season is satisfying - I heard it was getting a S2, but if this one ends on a cliffhanger, I will actually be annoyed! LOL I am so over the network TV format JUST FINISH YOUR GODDAMN STORIES ALREADY.


Movies:

Molly's Game: I just love Jessica Chastain, and Idris Elba was great in this too! I mostly watched this to get a better idea of poker things for Benny Watts, and all the poker lingo and psychology was fascinating! The tension in it is top notch as you realize more and more that Molly is a gambler herself, only the stakes have been her own life the whole time, and they keep going up. 🥺 I loved that final scene with her dad unpacking what had driven her to do it all in the first place. I actually got the book after, and this was the rare case where the movie was an improvement, though the book is decent, too. 

The Martian, Coyote Ugly (re-watches) Just needed some comfort movies. Uggghhh, I'm so freaking disappointed with people right now. 😥


Books:

 The Rose Code by Kate Quinn

How much did I love this book? How much did the lives of these incredible women break my heart and then put it back together? 😭😭😭 I've already bought the hardcover so I can read it again. The love letters are TO DIE FOR. The friendships you just have to keep rooting for even when they run horribly aground. And all of it wrapped in a mystery (in the after) and the tense backdrop of the war. 

 The Duke who Didn't by Courtney Milan

I really wanted to love this, but didn't? I don't know, the emotional/social cluelessness of both the main couple (even though they are both supposed to be clever) just really started to annoy me? Lots of historical details about Chinese living in England and talk about Chinese food, but without a compelling love story to go with it, it fell a little flat. 

 Three Thousand Stitches by Sudha Murty

I don't even remember why this was on my to-read list, but it was okay? She makes some interesting observations about human nature as she talks about her life and work as a philanthropist, but again, this was not a book that really grabbed me. Maybe it was the preachy tone - I felt like she was judging the addicts in the last chapter more than trying to understand how to help them, for example?

 One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston

I really liked Red, White and Royal Blue and this is also an awesome queer romance but the conflict is so utterly different that I would not have suspected it was the same author! This one is time-travel/memory/stuck-on-a-train loophole rather than political/media machinations, but she sells the romance just as well. Swoony stuff - I might buy this one for the shelf too!

 Tithe by Holly Black

Honestly thought I would like this book better because I loved her Folk of the Air series so much but I really didn't like the protagonist. I've been trying to figure out why, since I loved Jude so much, and I think it's because this protagonist doesn't act, supernatural stuff just happens to her. Like, there's no sense of drive or questing curiosity, just a kind of "I'm bored and entitled to act like a brat and have people do stuff for me". Maybe it's more realistically teenaged POV? But I am not dying to read the next one, although the whole series is supposed to fill in some of the background for TFotA. 

 Dear Girls by Ali Wong

I absolutely loved her Netflix comedy specials, and this autobiography is a lot like them: she's funny, incredibly frank to the point of being grotesque in her details and talks a lot about the experience of growing up Asian American. As an Asian Canadian, I found it all incredibly relatable, even (especially?) the parts where she talks about that kind of reverse culture shock of being that "white on the inside" Asian while she was on an exchange program in Vietnam for a year. I don't know that this is a book that I'll buy for the shelf, but it's one I'd rec for sure! 

 A Song of Wraiths and Ruin by Roseanne A. Brown

Okay, to be completely honest, I was a little skeptical just because of how the title complies with that Fantasy trend of: _____of _____and _______ (Insert Dramatic Imagery Words) BUT I had heard really good things on the Jurdan server about this one. And it was utterly refreshing and compelling and so freaking good! The worldbuilding and vivid, diverse characters and sense of history/mystery/connection was just A+++. I can't wait for the next one in the series, which is out this November! Probably buying this one and reccing it to the kiddo.

 Molly's Game by Molly Bloom

Just wanted a more in-depth look after being wowed by the movie and was honestly a little disappointed? The romance parts were probably the worst - I am thrilled somebody made the decision to cut those for the film because it was possibly the LEAST COMPELLING depiction of a soulmate I have ever read. 😅 The ending is also much less triumphant - Molly's life was still very much in limbo when she was writing the end of this book, and it actually feels rather sad and almost defeated, though her words claim otherwise? I need to google what actually ended up happening in court. 

Have you guys been reading anything good? Always looking for recs that you think might be up my alley! 🥰