Anon message on tumblr: One of your fics made me feel less alone

My response on tumblr: Thank you for telling me! I'm so glad.

Me in my own head: *incoherent happy screaming*

in a conversation on tumblr I just said

"But (butt) I feel like, since many old-school bicycle racks are short and Amethyst is short and has a big butt, you could, probably, park a full-sized bike in her ass"

My tumblr and ao3 icon images are now a picture of my legs in stripe-y socks (green and purple, for my current otp, natch) with one foot up on my Linus bicycle's rear wheel, and ages ago I meant to change my LJ icon, but at this point it seems silly to bother.

I mean that LJ icon is me, naked on a bicycle--but the photo was taken in 2008! I haven't had that hat, bicycle, or messenger bag in yeeeeears. It's nostalgia at this point.

I should change my sticky post--so much of it just isn't true anymore.

WHO KNOWS, THOUGH. The new season of Sherlock starts ...well, technically today. WHO KNOWS.

Season three was okay--I watched every episode twice, but that was it. And then the fandom became a goddamn dumpster fire. And between that and not having a functioning computer of my own, I started spending more and more of my online time on The Toast. I watched The Abominable Bride all of once.

And then I started watching Steven Universe, and a few months later The Toast ended. I joined the Slack for it but stuck around less than a month. (I technically am the admin of the facebook group for the local Toast group. I should transfer that to someone who actually cares. I attended one meetup, about a year ago.)

I keep going to 221b con (I'm gonna buy my con pass for this year tomorrow), but it's mostly to see friends. I wish I'd suggested an SU panel for this year--good lord, they still have panels for Cabin Pressure and Kingsman and Merlin (which was canceled five years ago, and doesn't even have any Sherlock actors in it). I plan to bring my canon (as opposed to human au) Amethyst cosplay, though god only knows how long I'll manage to keep it on--that wig is heavy, and face paint and arm socks are such a pain in the ass. But I was standing up on a concrete floor nearly the whole time at Rose City Comic Con, so it'll be easier at 221b con.

I really like cosplaying Amethyst, but I have plans to put together a canon Peridot cosplay before Beach City Con in October, because all the Peridot cosplayers I've seen on tumblr--and there's not many--are Lapis/Peridot shippers, and I would fucking kill for photos of me in any Amedot photos, as well as Jaspidot (Jasper/Peridot) photos, plus honestly my body proportions are closer to Peridot than Amethyst. I know damn well some of the people planning to attend Beach City Con are into Jaspidot and i know of at least one woman planning to cosplay Jasper and I wanna photo of me, as Peridot, in a Jasper cosplayer's lap, DAMMIT.

Peridot is much trickier to cosplay. With Amethyst the actual outfit was normal clothes I messed with--I painted stars on the knees of the leggings, for instance. But with Peridot I have to MAKE her wig (I can't just slap one on and call it good), and the face paint is trickier, and good lord; her outfit is basically a (very specific) leotard and leggings!

(This is why not many people cosplay her.)

I've already decided to just pay my friend Nickey to make the outfit--she's got a lot of experience with both knits and cosplay. But she lives in Minneapolis so fittings are gonna be me sending her my measurements, eek.

BEACH CITY CON THO. I mean I was already thinking last year would be my last Sherlock Seattle (which usually happens in October); and then the person who runs it said she was probably done.

Beach City Con is in Virginia Beach. As in, the place I moved to Oregon from, over twenty years ago, in late 1995 just after I turned 16.

Fuckin' surreal. My original plan was to have Seamus come with me and rent a car for a day before or after to drive around and look at some of the places I grew up--I spent four years in Norfolk, then two and a half years in Iceland, then four years in Virginia Beach; and I literally thought there'd never ever be a reason for me to go back to south east Virginia aka "Hampton Roads."

But I dunno that Seamus actually wants to go. We got into SU together, but he's not in the fandom so to speak. I have plans to make an SU Cards Against Humanity deck that's heavily fandom in-jokes, for instance--and I don't think he'd get half the references. Also that whole "I wanna kiss girls at con" and "I wanna talk about SU fics and porn" thing. *shrug*

The one friend from high school who still lives nearby and whom I'm still actually in touch with--Kenny! My 9th grade boyfriend! Though he goes by Ken now--lives in the area and likes board games and stuff, and has promised me a game night with him and his wife if I'm in town. (He always was a sweetie, honestly.)

Do I want to show up a day early and still drive around alone and just take pictures? Maybe? I might have to rent a car no matter what--seeing as the area has no functional public transit to speak of and the con is on the fuckin' beach. But it's one thing to drive around with Seamus and chat about "oh wow this looks different now" and tell stories, and it's another to just...drive around alone and stare at shit.

My main fear about Beach City Con is that it's mostly gonna be, like, teenagers. 221b Con is mostly adults, chatting about porny fanfiction and fandom injokes and being a little tipsy. But the SU fandom just skews so young (for obvious reasons!). The entire crewniverse (aka the people who make the show), including the fuckin' voice actors! --are younger than me. I've found, like, a handful of women in the fandom my own age--literally 36 to 38. I've yet to meet anyone in the SU fandom older than that, whereas in Sherlock there are lots of women older than me, sometimes by decades!

That's what I get for getting to a goddamn cartoon.

ANYWAY two fics I'm following updated today so I wanna go read them.

ALSO I fucking finished one of my fics at like three am yesterday. Just over 19,000 words. Twelve chapters. It's a human au and requires no previous knowledge of SU if you're curious. And it's the most personal thing I've written so far. Also they fuck in the first chapter, hey-oh.

HAPPY 2017. THANK FUCK.

HOO BOY YOU GUYS TYPING INTO THIS BOX FEELS....WEIRD.

LET'S DO THIS

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Other years:

I didn't do it in 2003.
2004
2005
2006
I didn't do it in 2007. I did do a first sentence of each month meme, though.
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012, which I did a couple days into 2013!
2013
I didn't do one in 2014.
2015

--happened just a few months ago.

While talking with Seamus one night about what the cable channel Nickelodeon was like when we were kids, I suddenly realized that the intro to You Can't Do That on Television was an homage to Monty Python. Like, not even a subtle one, either.

I was alarmed at myself for just then figuring that out, and posted it to facebook, wherein me and a high school friend started reminiscing about really early Nickelodeon.

For years after it first went on the air (and my dad started stealing cable, because that was a thing you could do with a cable box and a knowledge of circuit boards), Nickelodeon's morning programming was a show called Pinwheel, which they showed up to five hours at a time. Pinwheel was a variety show with a mix of live-action and animation, much like Sesame Street, but unlike Sesame Street, most of it had little-to-no educational value.* Also unlike Sesame Street, the animated shorts were from all over the world.**

So my friend and I are chatting about Pinwheel and some of the bits we liked best and she mentions "bunny in a suitcase." Eh? I don't remember that. So I looked it up on youtube.

And thus followed the most surreal experience I've ever had.



It was the most intense deja-vu, except not from a dream. Because I had completely forgotten this existed, until I watched it, and then I remembered every second of it. I especially remembered the intro--the suitcase falling closed on him, him stretching, the telescope, the way he climbed one of the rooftop air vents--that one in particular because as a kid I didn't know what it was.

I even remember Pinwheel showing this one, specifically, with the rain and wind and the painting.

And yet I had not thought of it once in close to three decades.

Brains are weird. Memories are even weirder.


I watched almost all of them on youtube within a few days after that. I also went looking for a short animation that I do remember from Pinwheel about Room Noodles. I know I didn't make it up because my dad remembers it too. It was hand-animated (in pastels or colored pencils***) and was about huge noodles that floated in your room when it was dark and bumped into things, and were the sources of odd noises in your room at night. I must have looked for an hour, and all I could find was an ancient forum post god-knows-where of someone else who remembered Room Noodles and couldn't find it either. Harumph.



*My mother, years later: "I'm surprised that show didn't make you stupid."
**The Wikipedia entry for Pinwheel has a pretty comprehensive list. The Bunny in a Suitcase, aka A Kockásfülű nyúl (The Rabbit with Checkered Ears), was Hungarian.
***This one is totally different but is animated in a similar style, is from the Film Board of Canada, and is quite charming: The Sweater

Uh....

....is this thing on?

If I actually go to bed "on time" or anywhere close to it, I can't sleep. (For me to get eight hours, I'd have to be asleep by 9:30.) Even with the fan. Even with my favorite ASMR vid.

I regularly get to bed a bit after eleven. By which time I'm stupidly sleepy. And then I pull up an ASMR vid, usually this one, and fast forward about two minutes in to where she's holding the shirt and jacket and touching them and talking, and what is it about the way she moves her hands? I think it's why most ASMR vids don't work for me--it's not just the voice/personal attention, but the deliberate way she moves her hands. Anyway, I almost always pretty much drop dead asleep before she's done and moved on to looking at photos in magazines. I do like the magazine sounds though.

....I've lost most of you, haven't I? A quick google on ASMR will pull stuff up, but this recent article on NYT's blog does a good job. Fucking love ASMR shit. I had no idea, until a couple of years ago, that that feeling had a name or that other people felt it or that there was a whole community of people on youtube making videos designed to induce it.

ANYWAY

I'm averaging six hours of sleep a night. And you can see it in my face--I have circles under my eyes and stuff. Ugh.

1. Fff a whole bunch of my tumblr/fandom friends have come back to LJ/hopped onto LJ, and I promise I'll go down the list and friend y'all back but not tonight.

2. I met Seamus's dad last weekend, he was visiting from Chicago. (For those of y'all who are new here, hi! Also, Seamus is The Boyfriend, we've been together since September, his divorced parents and huge extended family are almost all in/near Chicago.) I'm pretty good, generally speaking, at charming people's parents, so I was nervous but not worried. And I know damn well that Seamus has probably talked me up to the moon, as he has a tendency to do that. (I'm not complaining, mind you.) But even still, it went pretty well; and he told Seamus afterwards that I was "very bright and friendly."

His dad is a retired union plumber who is very pro-union, so I talked about my job and my union for a bit, which was great. National Association of Letter Carriers branch 82 FTW.

But a couple of things that amused me: we were out for dinner and eating at an outdoor table, and Seamus went indoors for a minute, and his dad started talking about the kids of Seamus's sister, and I just thought he was making idle family conversation until he realized Seamus was on his way back and he said, "I'm an excellent grandfather." And I think I managed to hide my startled reaction fairly well. (Apparently Seamus hasn't told his dad that both of us are pretty sure we don't want kids...his mom knows, but his mom's on facebook and the two of them are super close.)

The next day after Sunday Parkways, Seamus and Liz and I were sitting on the fountain at Peninsula Park eating shaved ice and Seamus's dad was looking for us. Seamus yelled, "Hey, Dad!" and I yelled "D--" and stopped myself, and Liz cracked up laughing as Seamus said, "One step at a time, sweetie."

Yeah I know this isn't tumblr but the BBC put out a cool trailer for a bunch of their dramas and there was, like, five seconds from Sherlock and it included this:



and jesus christ aaaaaaaauuuuuggghh

I am dying for season three.

OH GOD THE FICS that will come out of season three I can't wait