thedeadparrot

Look at me! I am posting a fic! Written as part of fandomtrumpshate

Goodbye To You (8615 words) by thedeadparrot
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Glee, The Social Network (2010)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Blaine Anderson/Eduardo Saverin
Characters: Blaine Anderson, Eduardo Saverin
Additional Tags: Crossover, Age Difference, One Night Stands, Singing Your Feelings, Karaoke
Summary:

Eduardo starts the night in a diner and ends the night at a karaoke bar and maybe falls a little bit in love along the way.

London was great! Exhausting in a good and bad way, but great!

The parkour event was both inspiring and humbling. I'd forgotten how great it was to just train with other women. It reminded me of how far I've come and how much further I have left to go. I'm almost always too aware of the latter, so getting a good taste of the former as well was really important to me. Plus, I got to meet some really delightful other women from around the world, and got to be coached by some amazing women, who I definitely want to convince to come to Boston and coach here as well. :D

Less fun: got hit by a car in Central London, partially because I was looking the wrong way. Apparently, I decided to be that sort of American stereotype. Luckily, the car wasn't going fast, and my body knows how to take impact. I walked away with some ugly scrapes, bruises, a mild bump on the head, and a very slight sprain in the elbow. I got to experience the NHS first-hand, so that was an adventure.

Visited Camden Market, which was a delight. I even went back for a second day. Lots of cool shops. Lots of good food. It's like a maze.

Also had a delightful time crashing with cesy. We watched some Eurovision semi-finals and some BBC home reno show specifically about making homes more accessible and also Stumped, a doc about about paraclimbers that is HILARIOUS and also deliberately avoids and mocks the whole inspiration porn aspect of talking about para-athletes. We also went up onto a heights/rope/zipline course, which was fun. I felt comfortable up there mostly because they tie you into a harness and it turns out that several years of climbing has made me comfortable at heights if I'm tied into something. Go figure. I didn't fall off of anything, thankfully, but I did spend a lot of time grabbing onto things for balance to the point where my forearms started feeling a little pumped from all the gripping I was doing.

Anyway, I'm back home! a little jetlagged, probably. I guess we'll find out when I try to go to our work community day thing today. And also while I do a whole bunch of things this weekend.

First up, I signed up to do a parkour women's jam thing in London in May! Some of the awesome ladies in the local community were also interested in going to it, and because it wasn't me sitting on my hands waffling for months on end, it's actually happening. I'm excited. I still need to figure out flights and logistics. (How much time do I want to spend in London afterwards? What do I want to do then besides sleep forever and eat everything?) I haven't been pushing myself as hard as I have in the past, and that's okay. One of the joys of parkour is finding new challenges and new methods of expression. Even if I'm not pushing myself to break scary jumps, I can still work on fluidity and flow or balance or even just falling a lot (which I did at Friday's class).

I've been neglecting yoga and my body is making that very known. Everything is weird and tight, more than usual, especially my back and shoulders, though my legs and hips are also not pleased with me. I have to get better at stretching while sitting in front of the TV.

Climbing has been going well. I can climb V2s! Sure, it will take a few tries, but I have been getting to the top! I think stepping back and spending a few months focusing on endurance has really helped me with the top roping too. I need to make sure I keep that up and not just do what I always do and just throw myself at things that look difficult and terrible and sit in front of the wall trying to do the same move for 10 minutes straight while my hands fail me. Do more longer, easier climbs! Have fun with the weird climbs that take advantage of my parkour skills! Stop getting distracted by numbers and get better at reading the climbs myself! A friend of mine insists that she'll take me climbing outside at some point, and I will have to badger her until she does so. I have a hankering to watch climbing movies and to go climb a mountain. Or on a mountain. Whatever.

I haven't been twittering or journaling or doing much of anything at the moment, but I'm around! I m trying not to just sort of turtle and ignore everyone.

I have even been making things! I am super happy with this TARDIS cowl I made. It's reversable, and I'm super in love with his pattern.

( Cut for images )

Semi-related, but I signed up for fandomtrumpshate. Bidding isn't open yet, but my offer of fanfic is available if anyone is so inclined.

I was also considering offering up knitting commissions for donations to one of the FTH charities. Would anyone be interested? I'd limit it to smaller things like hats/mittens/cowls, and I'm not sure how best to deal with color/yarn selection, but I like knitting things for other people! Hell, I was even thinking of making another TARDIS cowl because what else am I going to do with all this weird sparkly yarn?

It's a great TV show about drag balls in the 1980s that doesn't wallow in misery porn and has a lot of found family feelings and cast trans women of color as their leads. All of the ballroom scenes are fucking fabulous. It explores issues of race, class, gender identity with a lot of nuance.

It's also fun. There's some frothy soap opera drama between two rival mothers of drag houses trying to compete against each other and the family dynamics within both of the drag houses.

Yeah, it cribs liberally from Paris is Burning, but it's still its own distinct thing, and it brought on board a ton of people involved in the ball scene as well as the trans community to help with the writing, so it doesn't feel creepily voyeuristic. It feels like queer POC getting a chance to tell their own stories.

Anyway, highly recommended if any of that sounded interesting to you. It's a world that's really cool and fascinating and that doesn't get a lot of airtime. I had some passing familiarity with the terminology and culture and such from watching Drag Race, but this is about capturing a particular time and place.

I was productive at the beginning of the year, and then I kind of decided that caring about hockey was more stressful than it was worth, and so I wandered off and didn't write much of anything until the latest monster took me (but I didn't finish it in 2018, so it doesn't count).

Hockey RPF

The Werewolf Prince's Husband (14252 words) - Everything about this fic is ridiculous. It started out ridiculously tropey in concept and then I kept adding in more and more tropes as I was writing it. It is a collection of tropes masquerading as a story, and I'm not sad about it at all.

The Werewolf Prince's Bachelor Party (4116 words) - Written in part because silverandblue knows the easiest way to convince me to write something is blatant flattery and asked me to write something for her to record for pod_together. Not as tropey as the original, but it does feature dudes being very bad at feelings and hopefully enough zingy dialogue to make reading it and listening to it a blast.

push and pull like a magnet do (5309 words) - Sometimes your id just asks you to write things. This was one of them.

H₂S (The Five Rings Mashup) (2195 words) - Kamikaze Remix story. I got this story to remix, and I was like 'wait, who?' But then I used Google and found out this former Pens fourth liner went to the Olympics, and the world-building of hockey witches was fun to play with, so this was cool.

X-Men

Knives Out (3980 words) - Rescued from the drafts folder. I just wanted more fanfic that explored how creepy Charles's telepathy really is, and so I just had him captured and drugged up a lot. I did try to shape some of that into an arc of some sort at one point, and it hung around the fic hoard because I felt like it needed more plot scaffolding. But then I reread it and was like 'nah, it doesn't.'


( superlatives )

I haven't done this in a bit, but here's some stuff I read and enjoyed from Yuletide this year.

Gentle Slice Of Life Fics

Somehow I managed to read these one after the other, and they were very thematically linked, two quiet stories about finding contentment in a new normal and being in love. Of course their normal is radically different from what we'd consider normal, but that's what fiction is for, no?


It's a Curious Thing (1853 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Broken Earth Series - N. K. Jemisin
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Relationships: Alabaster & Damaya | Essun | Syenite, Damaya | Essun | Syenite/Innon
Characters: Alabaster (Broken Earth), Damaya | Essun | Syenite, Innon (Broken Earth)
Additional Tags: between, Happy Times on the Island, Bit of Might have Been
Summary:

It's a curious thing to be happy.

Syenite does not have the trick of it. So she scowls at the rare warm beautiful day. She scowls at the sunlight that reflects brilliant gold on the blue water and the white capped waves. Like a burst vesicle spilling everywhere.

From Santa With Love (2795 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Genghis Khan - Miike Snow (Music Video)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Gold Nose Villain/Secret Agent (Genghis Khan - Miike Snow)
Characters: Gold Nose Villain (Genghis Khan - Miike Snow), Secret Agent (Genghis Khan - Miike Snow)
Additional Tags: Redemption, Christmas, Christmas Fluff, Reformed Villains, domestic life
Summary:

Being a reformed villain isn’t easy. Not when there’s faking your own death, administrative bullshit and staff Christmas parties to deal with.

SQUIRREL GIRL

Less shippy than the tags might indicate, which, tbh, I was happy about. Full of madcap Squirrel Girl enthusiasm in all the best ways.

Nat Geo (1102 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Doreen Green/Kraven the Hunter
Characters: Doreen Green, Kraven the Hunter
Additional Tags: Yuletide Treat
Summary:

Kraven needs a plus one to the National Geographic Anniversary Gala. Doreen was born for this.

Boston Feels 'R' Us

Good Will Hunting is still one of those movies/fandoms that I have too many feelings about, even if it's hastag-problematic in a lot of ways. Anyway, this is a lovely getting-together fic between Will and Chuckie which gets Boston right even if it calls it Dunkin instead of Dunks.

but we carry the weight (5720 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Good Will Hunting (1997)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Will Hunting/Chuckie Sullivan
Characters: Will Hunting, Chuckie Sullivan
Additional Tags: Drunk Sex, Friends to Lovers, Future Fic, surprise feelings about moving across the country, handjobs, Anal Sex, thanks aliza, pornetry
Summary:

“Come out and visit,” Will says, next time they’re on the phone.

I, uh, haven't posted anything since *checks* August, but I'm still around! I'm still alive. I had a bad few months in terms of anxiety/depression which did not help anything, but I'm in therapy and my brain drugs seem to be doing the thing they should, and I've ditched coaching entirely because I did not need that extra stressor in my life.

My latest jam is writing this Kingsman fanfic about Colin Firth and Mark Strong falling in love and doing SPY THINGS in post-reunification Berlin. I have been doing a ton of research (including reading an entire book!), mostly because post-reunification Berlin is fascinating and all of Berlin is fascinating, tbh. I keep being like 'hmm, I think I need to understand this other X thing about Berlin so I can reference it in the story,' but then falling into a bit of research hole because it turns out that X thing is actually really cool. (examples: the neighborhood of Kreuzberg, queer Berlin in the days of the Weimar Republic) This fic is at 13k words already, and I have a decent chunk of plot and feelings still left to grind through. If you would like to read over my shoulder and cheerlead, inquire within. I have other people reading along, but I could always use more emotional support.

Other things I have done/am proud of:

- Rode my bike in the rain on Sunday, didn't die when my back wheel popped out, spent like an hour outside disgruntled_owl's house fixing it in the dark and the wet. I made it home okay while riding it, though I desperately need to find time to clean it some more.
- Finished my giant Star Wars scarf. It's so pretty and so warm.
- Baked a ton of pumpkin bread this fall. I still have the eggs and pumpkin for one last loaf, so I will try to do that sometime.
- Trained for a 5k and managed to get a 31ish minute time in a race.
- Am up to November in a Pandemic Legacy game with friends. So close! So far!
- Watched a ton of Colin Firth movies, the good the bad and the ugly.
- Read a ton of books and caught up on a ton of graphic novel series for an Autumn Reading Challenge.
- Finally organized a work thing that I've wanted for a while, even though it was one of those things that depression brain made super difficult for me.
- Watched She-Ra! It was great! Reminded me a little of Avatar: the Last Airbender in some delightful ways.

I had fun at con.txt, though I think I am still processing the whole experience. I met some cool fanpeople and got to hang out with some of my long-time fandom buds and talked about a bunch of fannish things for a whole weekend.

I guess some of my ambivalence is that it felt very much like a nostalgia trip for me. It's kinda nice to revisit a time in fandom where I knew all the references and felt connected to a smaller, tight-knit community, but I'm also wary of spending too much time there. I already feel like I'm one step out of touch with the youths, and I'm okay with that because that's just a part of getting older, but I also don't want to live in the past forever. I want to get better at embracing the new shapes and new things that fandom takes on.

And it's not something that I think I would get as much out of if I went to it every year or even every other year (maybe?). It's a nice thing to come back to every once in a while when you're feeling a bit adrift in the seas of New Fandom, but I feel like all the conversations I end up having at cons are very same-y, and I need a good amount of time between cons before they feel fresh and new again.

This has been an overly negative post for what was ultimately a good experience. I did come out of it with a renewed sense of creative joy, a desire to make things and to share them with fandom at large. Posting on AO3 can frequently feel like tossing things into a void and hoping someone catches it and likes it. Going to a con makes you more fully aware of the communities that you're connected to and of the other people who read it.

Of course, I don't actually have any specific things I want to write. Feel free to throw prompts at me.

There was a good thread about gender performance in sport, how the way sport are constructed itself can limit certain types of women's (generally queer) bodies from competing and thereby limiting the ceiling of what female athletes can do. It wasn't a bad thread, really, but what irked me was the way it kind of glossed over just how difficult it is to be female-bodied and athletic, just on a biological level.

I understand why not, because men like to pretend it makes them superior. Blah blah blah, the best women's teams can be beaten by high school boys. There's a lot to be said about how sport itself is constructed to be advantageous to male bodies on top of how much more support and encouragement boys get from the early stages of life.

But I think of every time a dude has said to me, "oh, before I started working out, I could only do one pull up," and I want to punch him in the face.

I can kind of do one pull up. It took me over two years to get to this point. I can't do it that consistently. If I skip a week of training it, it can take me weeks to get it back. Maybe at some point, I'll get two in a row. I'm not super super dedicated to the training or diet parts of getting and maintaining it. But that's the point. I have to put in way more work for my body to build and maintain the muscle mass, for my body to get to the right body fat percentages, in order to make this as possible for me as it does for many of the men I know who have it without even trying.

One thing that gets obscured in this conversation is what sorts of training and work and sacrifices women have to go through in order to even perform at these levels even before we talk about the sociological issues. One thing that female athletes is that dropping your body fat will fuck up your hormonal cycles until you lose your period and then mess your bone density. Not to mention that your hormonal cycles themselves can have a big impact on your athletic performance, to the point where many scientists don't even study female athletes because of the extra work needed to control for where they are in their cycles.

Anyway, the point is: fuck the patriarchy, but fuck biology, too.