A Fan's Playground

one

since I've gotten to the episodes of the Master of Demon Gorge podcast where the host has abandoned the format of telling things off-the-cuff to a friend, and instead it's polished and prepared explanations of the topics at hand, it has easily become my favourite chinese history podcast. Interesting topics, well-explained, by someone who has thought about the ways in which the past is relevant to today but without overdoing that aspect. and it's by someone who thinks critically about questions of empire, which I particularly appreciate.

some podcasts excel at the conversational banter between hosts and some excel at straightforward lectures and it's good when podcasts figure out how to do what they're best at!

I have lots of MoDG archive to go through yet and I'm looking forward to listening to all of it


two

body things I've successfully re-trained myself on: how to sit/stand up straight without rounded shoulders, how to hold a pen in a better grip, how to stand/walk without pronating my ankles

body things I have not successfully re-trained myself on (yet): using my glutes as evolution intended.

SOMEDAY I will properly harness their power and then I will be unstoppable


three

my svsss extras zine fic is finished and submitted!!! final word count: about 4.5k. I love it very much and I can't wait for folks to get to read it. and I can't wait to read the rest of the zine myself!

I have immediately started working on a new fic, about a character I haven't written before. I say that like it's not the norm lol, most of my fic writing history has been me writing something about a new-to-me character, it's unusual actually that I just wrote two fics in a row about the same ship! (for both mdzs remix and svsss extras zine, I wrote bingqiu)

My new fic is about mo xuanyu, and I really need to review all the mxy parts of mdzs more closely, taking notes of any relevant details, before I continue working on this fic. I'm sure that there are things in my mind that are misremembered details, and that there's interesting stuff that hasn't stuck with me

I do always like it when I can ground things more fully in the context of what the canon actually says!


four

please consider this very important wangningxian thought: https://www.tumblr.com/gravitywonagain/718830771835666432/the-thing-about-wen-ning-being-a-fierce-corpse-is


five

this week I discovered that musicolet is very diligent about finding all audio files on my phone and has integrated all my Merlin Sound ID recordings of birds into my music library. yes, a file that's, say, 23 minutes of listening to me walk interspersed with the calls of canada geese and red-winged blackbirds is exactly what I want when I put my music library on shuffle 😂

I started to put together a list of things that I currently find it rewarding to spend time doing or thinking about or learning about, or am interested in getting into, and um. that is too many put some back.

• birds
  
• plants and insects
  
• rocks
  
• rock climbing
  
• hiking, camping, canoe tripping
  
• dinosaurs and prehistoric natural history
  
• human history
  
• queerness and queer history
  
• fashion and clothes history
  
• sewing and mending
  
• fibre arts
  
• drawing and art and art history
  
• reading
  
• sff, romance, wuxia, xianxia, danmei
  
• the Hugo awards
  
• writing book reviews
  
• fanfic and fandom
  
• folk & fairy tales and mythology/religion
  
• folk music
  
• singing, playing trumpet, playing other instruments I don't know yet
  
• theatre and musical theatre
  
• interpersonal dynamics
  
• friends/family/partner/community
  
• engaging with local politics/activism
  
• databases and information organization
  
• languages
  
• gongfu cha
  
• home canning and preserving
  
• baking
  
• home decor
  
• bicycle repair

orz

EDIT: how could I forget that I deeply want to try book binding! and pottery making! and I love doing jigsaw puzzles!

Yesterday evening I watched Eurovision with a couple friends! We watched the stream a few hours later than live, because that's the time that worked best for us, so it wasn't IN THE MOMENT but it was still extremely fun. As you can see above, I tweeted my thoughts as we watched.

I've never actually watched all of a Eurovision program before, only seen individual songs that people have linked as being particularly good/fun/hilarious/amazing/enjoyable/whatever. So seeing the entirety of what Eurovision had to offer was actually in some ways surprising to me: I'd only ever seen the cream of Eurovision and wasn't expecting so many boring slow love songs with no fire or sparkles or weird costuming choices or anything. But there were still enough acts that really brought what I understand to be the spirit of Eurovision, and overall I enjoyed myself hugely. And I loved the little intro segments they did before each country's performance, that briefly introduces you to the country and then the performers go to Austria to participate in some sort of Austrian activity; they could also be pretty gloriously weird, though some of them were also just boring.

The hosts were, you know, hosts: awkward jokes, overly-large smiles, but they were competent at what they were doing.

And then the reveals of the votes! THAT TOOK FOREVER. And given how LONG that takes, did they really need to take so much time in between the end of the show and the beginning of the vote tabulation? I got pretty bored and ended up staying up definitely past my bedtime, and I didn't even make it to the end of the full Eurovision experience; I skipped out as soon as the last country had provided their votes.

This part was particularly fun to watch with my friend B. For many countries, he made guesses based on history and politics as to who each country would give top points to, and almost every time he wagered a guess he was right. Magic. The only one that he got really wrong was saying Ireland would give UK 12, and they in fact gave UK like 1 or something. He was flabbergasted.

I was interested to see how many votes Russia got; for a while there they even looked like they were going to win. Between their extremely mediocre act and the current political situation with their expansionist tendencies, I really didn't think they'd do well at all. The lead Russian singer though was super adorable in how emotionally overwhelmed she was by everything.

The actual winners, Sweden - well, I did actually enjoy their act, unlike Russia's, but I also thought it wasn't nearly the stand-out that most of Europe apparently did.

I felt kind of bad for Austria that they got zero votes after having won last year, but then I wouldn't have given them any points either, so. Their one redeeming quality was setting the piano on fire.

My top five acts:

1. Serbia (that glorious majestic singer with amazingly sparkly hair singing about being beautiful when being different) (unfortunately this youtube version doesn't actually capture the true sparkliness of her hair)

2. Belgium (idek, it's just great)

3. Latvia (ooooh a song that doesn't just sound like your standard pop!)

4. Georgia (look at that outfit!)

5. UK (it is fun and charming and involves glow in the dark outfits! though it felt like the man was doing more telling the woman how to behave than the other way around, which I was less fond of)

Reading the lyrics of The Marseillaise today, I was kinda struck by it -- because yeah it makes a lot of sense as a song of the revolutionary period, but as the national anthem of modern-day France? It just seems kind of....incongruous. Really? You're still going to sing about watering furrows with impure blood? Really?

But then, hell, I've always felt a bit uncomfortable even with my own country's national anthem, and that's about as unbloody as national anthems get --

OH WAIT NO

BREAKING NEWS

I definitely didn't just spend way too much of my afternoon reading through the wikipedia list of national anthems until getting bored somewhere in the H's because they all start sounding kind of the same, what are you talking about, but if I had, dude, there's a lot of REALLY GOOD ONES out there that don't mention any kind of violence at all, not even obliquely! I think my fave is Cape Verde's, because it is a) successfully poetic, b) nonviolent, c) super into freedom, d) hopeful in tone, and e) not just all "my country is the BEST country".

But idk, I'm bad at patriotism, so reading most of these national anthems just made me either go "lol so cute" or roll my eyes. I have trouble thinking of myself singing ANY of them with any kind of genuine sentiment, really. And Canada's is actually rather mediocre when it comes to all the awesome that other countries have for their national anthem. I mean, Australia's, for example, is all "Australia's a super great place to live and everyone knows it, and we welcome anyone who wants to come hang with us!" It's a "lol so cute" anthem but in a really endearing way, and I could get behind having something more like that, instead of the sexist language, and the unnecessary reference to God, and the military-language-in-disguise of "we stand on guard for thee" that Canada has.

BUT ANYWAYS THAT WAS NOT THE ORIGINAL POINT OF THE POST. The original point was that one of these days I'm going to have to try to figure out how to reconcile my pacifist upbringing/inclinations and my deep love for Les Miserables despite its glorification of Just War.

(THIS POST HAS A LOGICAL FLOW OF ARGUMENT IN MY HEAD if not in reality.....)

It's becoming clear to me that music is one of my latest fandoms, separate from the bandom thing. It feels kind of weird. I'm not saying some particular band or genre or something is my fandom, I'm saying music in general. And of course I'm approaching it like I always approach fandoms: that is, by diving straight in and trying to mainline the entirety of everything as fast as possible. (Except that music is such a huge thing that I could never ever ever catch myself up no matter how long I binge.)

As a result I've started wandering through all of Wikipedia's music-related pages. Trying to educate myself, I guess, in all this stuff that I know nothing about. So now I'm in the process of teaching myself utter basics, like "what is rock music?" and all sorts of attendant things.*

It is making it very clear to me HOW MUCH there is out there about this, and also HOW MUCH there is that I don't know. And it's all part of this vast and interconnected world, and it kind of makes me feel like I should have been working on this for YEARS if I want to understand anything at all. (if nothing else, the technical details make me wish I'd payed more attention to the theory parts of my high school music courses....)

I feel like bandom has opened me to a huge and fantastic world that I never before had the guts OR the interest in approaching. And I'm glad I am now. Even though it's huge and intimidating, it's also a heck of a lot of fun, and I'm expanding my horizons and learning stuff and it's all so -- amazing.

And I'm learning a lot about how there's clearly allusions all over the place that I miss because of not knowing any of this stuff. Like, I've got recognizing-biblical-allusions pretty much down, which is important because they exist all over the place, and I'm getting pretty good at Important-Literature-allusions, and the like. But music allusions and pop-culture allusions? They are a BLANK BOOK to me. Like, I discovered accidentally that the name of one of the songs of one of the bands I'm listening to is an allusion to a song by one of the Beatles in their post-Beatles lives. And I know that the Discworld book Soul Music is an extreme example, but it's nonetheless an example of the way that all sorts of stuff about rock music is just...expected knowledge, and I have none of that knowledge. I didn't catch on to the fact that Imp Y Celyn is a reference to Buddy Holly, for example, even when the book practically spells it out, because I'd never heard of Buddy Holly before.

I guess this is all part of my process of learning that I'm allowed to like things that are popular. I used to have a lot of trouble with that. I knew I was uncool, and that the things I liked were uncool, so I sort of took pride in it, and as a result scorned anything that was even vaguely popular (while simultaneously envying the popular people and secretly wishing I were popular, which just made me scorn popular things even harder, because I wanted in). But just because things are popular does not mean that they suck! I'm allowed to like popular stuff without it being a value judgement on me!

But part of my problem now is that I've been ignorant on the subject for so many years that I don't even know enough about popular music to even know what I'm saying with my choices. Like, I wear the clothes I wear because I like them, but I also know enough about clothes to know exactly what kind of statement I'm making with them. I am consciously subverting the expected, in ways I understand. My clothes say something, and I know what they say. But I have no idea what various music says about me! It makes me feel a bit...naked, I guess, and afraid of saying anything about music in front of other people, because I have no idea what conclusions people will draw about me from what music I listen to!

And I could just say "fuck it" and listen to whatever the hell I want and screw the haters, but the thing is, I want to know that I'm doing that. Are there haters I'm screwing? What do those haters think? What is it about the particular song or band or album or genre that people look down on? What do people associate with this music, whether they look down on it or not?

I like my statements to be deliberate, and if I don't know these things, then saying "fuck it" is not productive for me, because it's isolating my choices from the way that other people read them. And the way people read your choices is important, you know?

To bring it back to the clothing example, I know exactly what level of odd is suitable for what occasion -- what to wear to a job interview, what to wear to church, what to wear to school, etc. I can calculate how much "gosh that girl is weird" I can get away with, because I know and understand the statements my clothes make. But with this music stuff I know nothing. I cannot calculate what or how much to say to whom because I don't know how people will read me as a result.

Which means I have a lot to learn! Except that I think this is somewhat divorced from what I was talking about at the beginning of this post -- because learning intellectual stuff about music is one thing, and getting a feel for public perceptions of things is something else entirely. And although finding places to learn facts about music is easy, figuring out the public perception thing is a lot harder. So.

Ongoing project for me, I guess!


*Incidentally, oh my god, I love the totally serious way in which Wikipedia discusses things like ridiculous dance moves. SO GREAT. ("The basic steps allow for a variety of interpretations, some of which might appear quite violent." UH HUH. TELL ME MORE.)

...DUDE. I just realized I haven't really posted about bandom for like TWO WEEKS. Hah, no, this does NOT mean my obsession has abated at all. I'm just...slowing down on New Exciting Things I need to share? Or something. At the very least, I'm getting over how ~amazed~ I am at how amazing everything about bandom is. (For example, the fact that Gerard Way gives me all the feelings is not news. And everything I read about him, whether him the actual person or him the fictional character, just gives me further feelings. But I'm mostly not actually surprised by this anymore. (mostly.))

So have some bandom Things!

Thing One: Today I discovered that since having read this excellent fic about Panic's song Nine in the Afternoon, the song is no longer a cheerful song for me. Huh. Apparently it was a very convincing fic!

Thing Two: The other day I successfully recognized a Cobra Starship song on the radio! I was very proud of myself. Operation: Learn Popular Music is at least partially successful!

Thing Three: So now I like at least one Gym Class Heroes song, as I continue to spread my acquisitive gaze further and further across bandom. I'm not a fan of all their stuff, though. I listened to Stereo Hearts and was like DUDE UNEXPECTEDLY AWESOME, and then I listened to Cupid's Chokehold and was like, I guess that's okay, and then the next two songs I tried were both songs where I did not appreciate the portrayal of women. So I gave up. But I actually and genuinely love Stereo Hearts. And this is not a genre of music that I ever thought I would enjoy! So that's kind of mindblowing.

Thing Four: Have some bandom recs! Because I like to share the love! (and yes, the fic I mentioned in Thing One is also a rec. You should read it too!)

Timê, by airgiodslv. William/Gabe. AU, historical, set during five different time periods. In which William and Gabe have a long-standing musical competition, and everything about it is amazing zomg.

O Canada, by emilyenrose. Patrick/Fraser. Due South crossover. In which Pete finds Canada in Chicago, and I die laughing. (alas, this one is very short. I dearly wish I could read the whole story of what would happen after this!)

Don't Fear the Reaper, by dancinbutterfly. Gerard/Frank, but mostly about Gerard. In which Gerard meets Death, and this fic is just a world of lovely.

Making Other Plans, by skoosiepants. Mike Carden/Kevin Jonas. Disney RPF crossover. In which Kevin quits showbiz, gets a divorce, goes to college, starts a band, and gets adopted by crazy people, and I can't stop grinning for the awesome.

So, uh, last week I kind of got really into reading bandom fics for some reason. As I tend to do with random fandoms I stumble across recs for. I'd tried doing bandom before but apparently I was just reading fic about the wrong band to be properly wooed. But Panic! at the Disco is really adorable so I was having a grand time reading fic about them even though I knew nothing about their music and couldn't tell their faces apart for the life of me.

And then today I ended up on youtube watching a few too many of their music videos and GODDAMN THEY ARE WEIRD. I am kind of mesmerized. There's one where a circus crashes a wedding with an unfaithful bride, and there's one where there's lesbian vampires in high school who turn out to be bi, and there's one about a mime doing a porn show and dating a girl and the lyrics borrow things from the Sound of Music, and there's one where everyone's heads are in fishtanks, AND IT GOES ON. Also half the time the song titles don't seem to have any relevance to the lyrics, and the lyrics don't seem to have any relevance to the video. And apparently I like their music now or something? IDEK. (I have watched Ready To Go possibly more times than is healthy and kind of adore everything about it.)

Also, I still can't tell them apart, but I can at least definitively say now that they're all pretty?