thedeadparrot

I had a blast doing the December posting meme last year.

Send me things to write about this year!

for larissabernstein

The funny thing about my Trek feelings is that they're something that comes to me in bursts, depending on what I'm into and what I've just watched. The Trek universe is so large and so sprawling that tiny bits at a time is all I can seem to manage. Star Wars got me at the right time as a kid, and Trek was too odd and too cerebral for my tiny brain in comparison. But I've kept trying. And bit by bit, things have stuck with me.

So here's list of embarrassing things I can admit about the Treks that I've loved:

- That time I picked up Imzadi at the local K-Mart on a whim, and it was basically all the terrible longfic shippy fanfic feelings before I even knew what fanfic was. In retrospect, it's probably terrible, and I probably shouldn't be shipping Riker/Troi, but it was the first real introduction to Star Trek that stuck.

- Catching Voyager reruns and shipping Torres/Paris. This one, I did find fanfic for. There was this super long AU about Paris being an American soldier during WWII and Torres being a French rebel or something? It was based off a goofy holodeck adventure that was canon. I will probably be sad if I go look for it and I don't find it.

- When the rebooted Star Trek movie came out, I was all about Spock Prime feelings and his feelings for his Kirk, and it sparked a desire to go back and read and write TOS Kirk Spock fic. The purple prose in some of the older stuff is amazing. AMAZING. Also, Shatner/Nimoy RPF apparently was a thing I did. idek. My brain is pretty weird and difficult to make sense of, even to me.

for merisunshine36

I am terrible at being a product person, so I am terrible at answering this question. But here are my thoughts on this. Mostly off the cuff and pretty arbitrary. I'm a little too wedded to what I know of existing internet communities, I think. So. I'm sorry that this is probably not too inventive.

The Basics

Posting content. I guess this is first and foremost. Be able to post content without having to worry about hosting (lol, I know). Be able to post different types of content (text, videos, links, audio). Be able to separate out the transient sort of content (what I had for breakfast today) from the more permanent 'archived' content (that super awesome fic I wrote last week).

Discussion. Space to discuss things directly person-to-person. Comments. Nested comments. It's so easy for things to disappear as the streams go by. Let things remain on people's radars if they're still active. Keep active discussion floating back to the top with the option to ignore rather than the other way around.

Subscription to content. Content made by specific creators. Content that has certain tags. Content made by specific creators that have a certain tag. Any granularity that you can think of.

Finding things! It would be nice to be able to do sophisticated searches in an easy, accessible way. I'm thinking AO3-style here, though a lot less curated and a lot more freeform. Just being able to get the intersection of two tags would be super baller.

More complicated/sophisticated things

Community. Central places to find like-minded people who are interested in a certain topic. Removes the problem of finding people interested in your new shiny fandom and also the problem of finding content in your shiny new fandom. Or that one kink that five people in the universe also share. Or food discussion. Mmm. Food. These would be lightweight to create and would be moderated.

Filtering content. Like the Tumblr blacklist, sort of. Maybe even better. Maybe more like the LJ groups where you can separate out certain fannish tags and/or people into their own list so that you can follow people who post a lot and not have them take up half your stream for the day. Make archived content a separate stream from the transient content.

Make things go viral. There's a certain terrible beauty to the reblog button, I think. It makes sense to remove the effort of creating links to other content when you could just get the content to show up with just a few clicks. There's also an addictive quality to watching the notifications come in as well. Reblogs are inherently transient and would be treated as such. Unless you're a rec list. Maybe.

Public/Private. Fine-grained control on who can see what content. Private, locked-to-certain-people, public.

Sophisticated recommendations system. Noninvasive and totally optional. A separate page that shows you new content (archived and non-archived) based on content you've kudosed and content you've reblogged and content you've commented on.

Curated groupings of content. A little like Youtube's playlist functionality. Not just your own content, but other people's too. Would probably be useful for reclists and keeping track of series. Can subscribe to these (to show up in your stream) separate from subscribing to the original creator.

Posting autoplaying videos is verboten. This is non-negotiable. Seriously. What kind of monster are you?


Also, okay, I missed out on the part you actually cared about because I have been spacey for a while. *facepalm*

In terms of who could build it, I think I would say that I would love it if the OTW could be the ones to make the next great fannish platform, but I don't think they would ever be able to. They've done a great job with the AO3, don't get me wrong, but I think in order to keep up with the new evolving social media landscape, they'd need to be able to function like a startup and not like an open source project. They're just extremely different software development models, and without a team of coders willing to your bidding 40 hours a week, you won't get any of it done fast enough to compete with something like Tumblr.

Most fannish migrations happen because one thing is better than the thing we are on right now. Maybe not in every respect, but in aggregate. Tumblr enables visual fannish content and sharing of said content in ways LJ couldn't. LJ was enabled content and personal interactions that were more difficult in the days of mailing lists. Mailing lists were more accessible than zines. The next fannish migration will only come around when something significantly better than Tumblr comes around. The OTW will have to dream big in order to be able to make it. I don't think they'll be able to do it. The AO3 is in and of itself is inherently conservative. It was, at the time, a throwback to the days of giant archives that supported the mailing lists. It was an established pattern that they could figure out how to build off of. Creating a brand new social platform for fandom is a difficult, risky, and nearly impossible task for them in comparison.

I am worried, as I have mentioned before during this December Posting Meme, about the fact that fandom is constantly, constantly willing to host their content solely on platforms that we have zero voice and stake in. We build our infrastructure around an uncaring system, and the system is more than willing to completely revamp itself without talking to us first. It makes me sad. I understand the short term gains of just dumping things in one place vs. having to cross post everything everywhere.

But it still makes me sad.

for merisunshine36

I know this is kind of a boring answer, but New York City will always have a place in my heart. I grew up in its orbit, about two hours out by train, and it imprinted itself. My love for it runs deep.

I'm a city person. There's something about the density of cities, not just of people, but of things, things to do and know and learn, that I love. I grew up in a pleasant suburb, and it was fine, but every time we would travel into New York City, it was like magic. You could walk everywhere, and on every block, there would be something new and interesting to look at.

I applied to Columbia for undergrad. Didn't get in. Not hugely disappointed in that overall, but if they had let me in, I might have had a moment of indecision based on the location alone.

I still go back to New York every so often. It makes for a convenient central location, and one of my close friends just moved there. Every time I go back, I remember why I loved it. Boston is my home, but it's far sparser, slower, smaller.

New York isn't afraid to smack you in the face with information overload from the first moment you step outside. It speeds along, dragging you along with its rhythms. I feel different when I'm in New York. The city transforms me. I still love it a little for that, and I think I always will.

for nomelon
Posting Schedule

I think the high point in my fannish lifetime will always be, to me, SGA.

It's probably not true that it's the objectively best fandom that has ever lived. It had its problems: the utter dominance of McKay/Sheppard, the occasional flare-ups of wank, the obsession with convincing people that Joe Flannigan is the most beautiful person who has ever lived. My reflections on it are always going to be colored by the fact that it was a particular type of fandom that I hit at a particular time in my life.

But, seriously, it was a fucking awesome fandom. It was a fandom that made me hopeful about what fandoms could be. It was so full of thoughtful meta, ambitious sci-fi stories, fanworks that had the ability to be both deeply critical and celebratory about the original canon. It was also happening at the same time as racewank, which was both difficult and important to me. Race wasn't something I had been comfortable thinking about, growing up, and it was a rude and necessary awakening for me to go through. Acafandom became visible, and the discussion of fanworks as criticism came to the forefront.

It was a fandom that taught me so much, about how to write stories, how to think about stories, and how to think about myself. I don't know if we'll ever see the likes of it again, because it was just this confluence of super interesting things.

So how has fandom changed for me? The death of metafandom was kind of gutting, if only because it created a space for cross-fandom discussion, and it made it possible to feel like there was a singular Fandom, spread across our little fiefdoms. It was also an important space for discussing and policing fannish norms and offering advice on writing and posting and everything.

Tumblr obviously became big, and with it, I think I've lost a lot. We've gained things, GIFs and fanart and a more unwavering sense of social justice. But I feel like that sense of purpose I felt in SGA, that fic didn't just have to be fun and feelings-pleasing, but that it could mean things as well. Fan art could and should mean things. Fandom was a taking back, not just a leeching off of, the canons that it was based off of.

I wonder if something as depressing and as aching as Freedom's Just Another Word For Nothing Left To Lose could or would be as big a hit as it was in the Tumblr era. I don't know, and it makes me sad.

for vass
Posting Schedule

I am super cranky right now because I am damp (stupid rain) and tired (blergh, work stuff) and have been bombarded with various reminders that dudes can be pretty darn shitty (not even going to attempt to list all these out), so I am going to start out with an inflammatory statement.

Fandom is kind of terrible at building things.

Okay, so what do I mean by that? I have always liked the analogy of cultural scavengers, scouring the media landscape to find things that we can turn into narratives and stories that we find more pleasurable.

That's what we do with technology, too.

Think of the Yahoo mailing lists, filled with the announcements for the new story you just put up on your Geocities site.

Think of the webrings, a third-party service for linking together like-minded sites.

Think of the fic exchanges, built off the back of LJ's ability to screen comments to everyone except the moderators.

Think of the kink memes, a weird hybrid of anonymous LJ comments and Delicious bookmarking.

Think of Tumblr, however the fuck people manage to use it.

Sure, there are exceptions. But the AO3 is pretty much the only big ongoing technology/infrastructure project that I can think of in fandom right now. And it came out of a specific desire to control our own future. How much fannish history was straight-up lost when Geocities went down? How many people freaked out when LJ's new commenting system didn't support comment subjects anymore? How many rec lists for fandoms went nonfunctional when Delicious was sold to a new company? How does fandom manage to function on Tumblr at all? (Okay, I'll try to stop taking cheap shots at Tumblr. Mostly.) The AO3 is important, but it almost entirely stands alone. (There is still stuff like FF.net, was stuff like the Automated Archive. We are willing to do archives, apparently.)

Okay, so why? Why doesn't fandom do more things like this? Sure, writing code takes a lot of specialized skills that aren't easily developed, but so does vidding. Sure, organizing a lot of people takes a lot of work, but so does running a fic exchange.

I think it is part of the nature of fandom. We're not, by our nature, planners. We are distracted easily by the nearest, most interesting shiny thing. It's virtually impossible to see things in fandom planned one year out, much less five years out. How many WiPs have been lost to time?

Building software for fandom is tireless, thankless work. How many current AO3 coders can you name off the top of your head? Building software is also extremely time consuming. Code projects staffed by multiple experienced software developers working full time can take upwards of months, and after that, there's still bug fixing and maintenance and server costs.

And why bother in the first place? There's all this other stuff out there, given away for free. Why not just use that instead? We can repurpose it, of course, cut it up into scraps and figure out how to make it work.

But we didn't build it. It's still not ours.

for stultiloquentia
Posting Schedule

This is not going to be a coherent post. If I were feeling metaphorical about it, I would say the weird jumps are representative of the Dim Sum itself, a lot of different, tiny plates of food. But mostly it's Sunday and I'm not feeling up to the task of organizing my thoughts.

I had a friend in college who refused to eat Dim Sum unless it was served in the most traditional style: on little carts that circle the room, piled high with anything and everything: dumplings, sesame balls, chicken feet. I am inclined to agree with her. There's something to be said about how you're served food changing the way you eat it. There's no challenge to eating a la carte Dim Sum, no impulse decisions, no sour-looking woman lifting up the covering of a plate to show you the hidden treats within, no frustration at having the same cart go by your table five times while the cart you really want gets stuck all the way across the room. Dim Sum isn't really a type of food. It's an experience.

I am super sad that Dum Sim never turned into a real thing. I would seriously play that game all the time.

We didn't have Dim Sum in my hometown growing up, but my parents taught me to love it. Whenever we'd end up in a new city while on vacation, the first thing my parents would do is find the Chinatown, and the next thing we'd do is find a Dim Sum place. Dim Sum is a Sunday morning food to me, around brunch, when your stomach is already starting to growl.

My favorite dumpling growing up was the shrimp dumpling. It's mostly just shrimp and probably some pork stuffed into this thin, clear, rice dumpling skin. One of my cousins and I used to get into weird fights about who could eat more of them. We'd have four bamboo dumpling trays (four dumplings each) arrayed on the table, and we'd eat as many of them as we could as fast as we could. This was probably a terrible idea.

My favorite dumpling now is the Xiao Long Bao, which literally translates to 'Little Dragon Bun', but most of the time it gets translated into English as 'Soup Dumpling'. It's not something you find in Dim Sum restaurants, because Dim Sum is Cantonese/Hong Kong food, and Xiao Long Bao are from Shanghai, but I thought I'd mention it here anyway, because dumplings are delicious.

Once, my parents and I brought a whole bunch of our extended family with us to Dim Sum. My mom thought this might mean that we'd have a longer meal -- it's very easy to feel full when the food is so greasy, so it usually takes us about half an hour -- but it only took all nine of us twenty minutes to order and polish off our food. People eat faster when they know they need to beat someone else to the dishes they want. Fact.

Dumplings are the real reason you go to Dim Sum. This is also a fact that I just made up right now.

Turnip cake was something I ate at home before I ever had it as part of Dim Sum. You can buy it in these giant frozen blocks at Chinese supermarkets, and then after you thaw it out, you slice it and toss the slices into hot pans to get a nice, crispy skin on it. My mom doesn't like heavy sauces, so we'd eat them plain, still very tasty. It wasn't until I went with friends in college that I discovered how amazing they are when you dip them into Hoisin.

Don't bring vegetarians to Dim Sum. I learned this the hard way.

My parents, even more than I am, are creatures of habit, so they almost never branch out and try new things. That is the danger of Dim Sum, to only ever eat the same 4-5 dishes you always eat. One of my coworkers has a rule that he will always try new thing when he goes out for Dim Sum. I envy his dedication.

Man, seriously, isn't Dum Sim the best name for a Dim Sum simulator ever?

for stultiloquentia
Posting Schedule

Sex Criminals is a comic book series about sex.

That was probably a little self-obvious, right? It's in the title after all.

I had a discussion with some of my coworkers yesterday about comic books, ironically enough, and one of them talked about the distinct divide between superhero adjacent comics and comics that come out of the indie scene. Sex Criminals is definitely one of the former. When you're used to the language of superhero comics, how do you write a comic book about sex? Give people magic powers when they have orgasms, of course.

Of course.

Sex Criminals is a comic book series about a man and a woman robbing banks with magical sex powers.

Sex Criminals is a comic book series that uses magical sex powers as a way of talking about sex in a way that's sharp, nuanced, and funny.

Sex Criminals is a comic book series about confused teenagers trying to muddle their way through understanding how sex works.

Sex Criminals is a comic book series about adults falling in love with one another.

Sex Criminals is a comic book series that contains a long-running joke about a sex shop named Cumworld.

Sex Criminals is a comic book series that you clearly should read based on that criteria alone.

Have I mentioned that I want Sex Criminals AUs to be the new, hip AU in fandom? People should write all of them for me.

for stultiloquentia
Posting Schedule

I had a hard time deciding what to write about here, because there's a lot of different foods that could fit this slot. But then I figured that I would go one level deeper: a particular nostalgia spice.

When I was younger, my parents had a grill on the back porch, and we would grill chicken on it. But it wasn't the same kind of grilling that the Irish-American family next door did, bland hamburger patties and store-bought hot dogs, where the real interesting flavors had to be added later. No, my mom would steep the chicken in a marinade overnight, so that you could eat it as soon as it came off the grill, and it would be delicious.

The components of the marinade were mostly familiar to me at the time -- soy sauce, garlic cloves, scallions, sliced ginger root, sugar -- but there was always one component that she used that was unfamiliar to me. It was a spice that she kept in a unlabeled plastic container in the cabinets, and she told me that she had gotten it from her own mother, my grandmother, who lived in Taiwan.

I guess it always had this air of mystery about it, then, this strange spice that came from the East. The smell of it would linger on my fingers for hours afterwards when I would help her with the prep work, even after I washed my hands.

I never did ask her what the name of it was, or if I did, I forgot it soon after. I didn't even realize how strongly the smell had imprinted on my brain until many, many years later after my parents moved and my mom got busy and we didn't grill chicken anymore.

When I was in college, I used to cook a lot more than I do now. Part of that was roommates, who I could fob my leftovers at and who could usually be counted on to be an extra pair of hands or eyes if I needed help in the kitchen, and part of that was having a schedule that was less rigidly enforced than that an office job. The thing about that was that I could be ambitious with my cooking adventures. One of my cooking adventures was an attempt at Chinese (Char Siu) Roast Pork, which could be a nostalgia food post in and of itself, and one of the ingredients of the marinade was Five Spice Powder.

It was extremely expensive at the local supermarket, I remember. But I did buy some. They say that smell is the sense most strongly tied to memory, and it really was true this time around. When I cracked open that seal and smelled that spice again for the first time in at least six-seven years, I was back at home, helping my mom turn those chicken legs while they were soaking in their marinade.

I made it a mission to find cheap Five Spice Powder after that, though now that I don't cook that much anymore, I don't really use it for anything. So it's mostly just taking up a comically large portion of my spice shelf. Oh well. Maybe I'll figure out how to cook with it again. Or maybe not. Maybe I'll just take it down from the shelf every once in a while and take a sniff, just so I can remind myself what it smells like.

for escritoireazul
Posting Schedule

I'm going to talk about specific food that I love that I think other people should try immediately: Dolsot Bibimbap.



Here, have story about the first time I ate some:

It's a Korean food, which isn't super common yet, so I hadn't tried it until I was in college. I was at a Korean restaurant with a few of my friends, and only one of them had been to a Korean restaurant long enough to know what she was doing, so she ordered for us.

When the food arrived, she was away from the table answering a phone call, so we had no idea what we were doing. We all took spoonfuls of the Bibimbap, and it was okay, just vegetables and rice, still sizzling in a stone pot. When my friend came back, she looked at all of us like we were crazy. "That's not how you eat it," she said, and then proceeded to show us how it was done. She poured in the hot sauce and then mixed it, the rice and the vegetables and the meat all together, and all of a sudden, this previously bland, previously boring dish had flavors! and textures! and color! It was crazy good.

Nowadays, it's pretty much something I order every time I go to a Korean restaurant. I love the fact that it has so many different components. I love the weird DIY part of having to mix it yourself. I love being able to make it really spicy or not really spicy. I love the crispy rice thing that happens at the bottom if you don't mix it super thoroughly.

So yeah, definitely recommended that you try it out yourself the next time you're in a Korean restaurant. Make sure to get it in a stone bowl.

And don't forget to stir it before you dig in.