I don't mean to nitpick, Tom, but is this really your plan?

Vid for me! Murdering Stravinsky, Farscape, lithiumdoll: YouTube, AO3

Look, ever since I realized that “dressing up as fascists” was perfect for this fandom, I’ve wanted this vid, and LithiumDoll does it great justice. The internal motion and even internal lighting changes are perfect for the disorientation and cruelty of the song. And there’s so many canonical references that are perfect—all the things they do that hurt others, and each other, by meaning to or by meaning to be good or both. The nuclear bomb and the beautiful, horrible wormhole equations that represent both art and death.

A very good bad review of a Netflix animated sff series, Love, Death and Robots.

Casey McQuiston, Red, White & Royal Blue: ( political romance )

KJ Charles, Proper English: ( f/f in high society )

Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire: ( palace intrigue with colonialism )

Seanan McGuire, Middlegame: ( it's a chess metaphor )
Laurie Marks, Earth Logic: ( winning the peace )

John Birmingham, The Cruel Stars: ( military sf, mostly )

Robert Jackson Bennett, ( mid-colonialist fantasy ) 

Seanan McGuire, In an Absent Dream: ( more wayward children )
Ted Chiang, Exhalation: ( the best kind of sf )

Rebecca Roanhorse, Storm of Locusts: ( monsterkiller on the road )

Theodore Sturgeon, Microcosmic God, vol. 2 of the complete stories:( misanthropy/misogyny )

Jessica Khoury, The Forbidden Wish: ( Aladdin! )

New icon on DW from a piece of art that is way too expensive for me, but that I love anyway (because of the X-Files, of course).  It's made from a crumpled dollar bill.

I got a delightful Sleepy Hollow story for Yuletide! Three Gifts is the kind of Ichabod/Abbie pining that really does it for me.  This is a relationship with real barriers and I respect that greatly. 

Yuletide Madness also brought me the equally delightful Covert Affairs story Away, which is Auggie/Eyal as part of an established threesome with Annie. It went directly to my own personal cravings for them. 

Others: Excellent multimedia in this Galaxy Quest story, which is as affectionate towards fandom as its source. And GQ fandom also got the amazingly tender/pleasurably painful Alexander Dane story I didn’t know I needed, The Space Between,  in which there is also a reboot.

Charlie Stross’s Laundry universe: Violins at Work, from the perspective of Mo O’Brien, Bob Howard’s extremely dangerous wife. Very Strosslike: “Is there a word for an appetite and some kind of understanding without a mind to do the planning? Kind of like a cat deciding that this human will just about do as a servant, because it smells of food, but without the sensitivity and consideration for which all felines are well known.”

Non-Yuletide: my J2 story Full Service Firm now has a Russian translation, which I think is a first for me. As always, I remain impressed by the archive’s growth: the translation’s work number is an order of magnitude greater than Full Service Firm’s.

Also, randomly, anyone who really wanted to rock my world could make a Vampire Diaries Damon vid to Diamond Ring’s Wait and See. He’s chancing on situations and he’s out of his league! He just needs some provocation and he’s down on his knees! (I am so serious here: this would be my Lord King Bad Vid of great commitment if I did such things.)

Personal note: the new scar on my arm reminds me way too much of the Eye of Sauron. Or any eye really. Scars should not look like eyes, is what I’m saying here.

And finally: This is the best pickup conversation ever, and the fact that it comes from a Dean Winchester sex dream is only icing on the cake. 

Podfic of my Sam/Dean short story Cave-In, read by eosrose. (Wow. Look at the different work numbers there: I posted Cave-In before there were 10,000 works on the Archive, and it’s pretty clear that the year will end with work 1,000,000.)

A fanvid made Harry Knowles of aintitcool.com into a fan when he was a kid! It just goes to show that we all invent fandom for ourselves.

What Flourish Klink says about Amazon’s new fan fiction monetization project is all worth taking seriously, especially the parts about incremental change and bringing in people who weren’t traditionally “fan fiction writers.” I think that’s actually the riskiest part (and I don’t think she argues otherwise); the internet grew to its present point in a context in which it was much easier to go from inventing fan fiction in your own bedroom to finding a community of people who’d made the same invention than it had been when you had to find a convention or a round robin or the like. I’m skeptical of Golden Age thinking, but at the same time I do want to make sure that people who find fandom through places like Amazon can also easily find some non-walled gardens to play in. I also don’t think this is going to be a model for many franchises/works other than those created using the Alloy Entertainment model of monetizing a concept for teen audiences, though I’ve been wrong before!

(Flourish also points out that it’s standard white folk cluelessness to ban “racism” in Vampire Diaries fan fiction given its canonical basis in chattel slavery, though I’m pretty sure Amazon’s enforcers will be defining that term differently than many who might be reading her work; others have noted the ironies in banning excessive brand placement in Gossip Girl and Pretty Little Liars fic. I guess the official versions have that covered?)

Letters from Titan has a great post too, raising what seem to me to be exactly the key questions. Sure wish I had answers:

Question 1: To what degree does Kindle Worlds suggest that the fanfiction can only be legitimized through the eradication of fan culture’s gift economy?
Question 2: Fanfiction has significantly changed our media culture. Kindle Worlds isn’t just capitalizing on it, but arguably represents an attempt to shape it. Is this a feedback loop in action or an attempt to stop the catalyst that is fan work?
Questions 3: The contractual terms of Kindle Worlds are the sort traditional professional writers would be strongly advised against signing on to. Is fannish work worth less? Should it be?
Question 4: Fanfiction has, arguably, always been about the option to use use all the tools, particularly those often discouraged by corporate content production (e.g., sexuality), to tell story. If the toolbox is limited, whether a given writer would choose to use all the tools or not, is it fanfiction or is it some other form of derivative (vs. transformative) work?
Question 5: How will fan readers view/treat fan writers who use a tool like Kindle Worlds? And how does that impact our communities, hierarchies, and barriers to entry?

I also said some stuff on tumblr. Hi tumblr, I’m trying you out.  And wow are you terrible for conversations!

Relatedly: like vids? Vote in the US? Call your representatives and tell them to support DMCA reform so that vidding stays lawful. There are a variety of proposals, but only one bill that is any good and that fixes anything but cellphone unlocking.

Thanks to shoofus for the virtual panda!

I’ve been listening to Alanis Morissette’s Jekyll & Hyde, a delightful bonus track on the iTunes version of havoc & bright lights. That album, plus the new Pet Shop Boys, made me realize that putting together b-sides is getting to be as complicated as it was in the bad old days, what with Amazon and iTunes having different versions (and often enough different prices, though Amazon is going to $1.29 on some tracks too).

eBay wants to force you into arbitration (which you will never be able to afford a lawyer for, much less win) unless you opt out. ( details )

The awesome Steve Burt (disclosure: I’m proud to call him a friend) gets a full story in the NYT, in which his practice of focusing on the poets he likes and not spending time on criticizing those he doesn’t gets some attention.

Not unrelatedly, George Orwell on “Why I Write."

My favorite vid from Vividcon was bradcpu’s Ride to California.  I love how it uses “California” as a metaphor for the heroism of the Avengers; I can’t explain exactly why I love that so much, but the vid is great fun.

( Charles Stross, Richard Morgan )

Mainstream pop-culture/remix-savvy media: have a Woody Allen supercut.

Fandom, specifically thingswithwings: have a manpain supercut.

The bonus meta post is well worth reading, and to my mind bears some eerie similarities to the reasons given by Jeff Koons for why he copied fashion photos in his painting Niagara, reasons which led a federal court to find that he was engaged in fair use.  As thingswithwings points out, there were dozens of examples to choose from without thinking hard, and that's what makes this such a useful commentary.  Also, I like excluding John Crichton for the reason given!

Your internet is not my internet: I read about this new Facebook stuff and it just makes me confused. Filters are exotic and nobody knows how to use them? And so Facebook is going to let other people decide what my Groups are? Why can’t I manage my friends myself and filter out specific people when I need to? (I take it that hidden somewhere in the bowels of Facebook settings, deeper even than privacy controls, you can do this, but that they expect Groups to become dominant.)

The LJ/DW solutions seem so intuitive and elegant, whereas Facebook’s prompting for me to add people to various Lists has been terrible. Am I just wanting those kids to get off of my lawn? (I should also note: I declared LJ bankruptcy and gave up on updating my friendslist/filters there. I haven’t been filtering at DW, though I also have not been adding back journals that seemed to be for reading purposes only. I expect I will have to start filtering soon, though. So it’s not as if manual filtering is easy. It’s just so much better for what I want to do than automatically being added to groups!)

( reviews: Ilona Andrews, music in Buffy, and digital images )

Four and a half hour delay on a cross country flight. So tired. And then it’s so late that ground transportation was… tetchy. Or sketchy. Possibly the fatigue poisons are confusing me, since I didn’t get to bed until after 6 am internal time. Working on 10th hour of conference on 3 hours sleep. Poor poor pitiful me!

I am having incredible SV nostalgia based on sisabet’s Bad Romance. Lex Luthor doesn’t want to be friends! I’m looking forward to the SV prompts for Eight Crazy Nights.

hollywoodgrrl’s Boom Boom Pow for Fringe: why you should watch Fringe, because it is awesome. There are a lot of explosions! And grim X-Files stuff! And Olivia laying down the law!

dualbunny’s If I Had You is great fun. As someone on my reading list said: Legend of the Seeker m/m: who knew it existed? And yes, Richard is just about as pretty as Kahlan and Cara.

Milly’s Party in the Midlands (also LoTS)—hilarious! Kahlan nods her head and moves her hips like yeah.

( Tom the Dancing Bug, YA paranormal romance, being a prosecutor, moral rights )

Made for me: merryish made Murderer -- Fandom: SPN; song: Low; lyrics. Theme: someone to do Your dirty work.  Or, as Merry puts it, in the war between Heaven and Hell, Dean's on Sam's side.

New vid for me! giandujakiss made Pioneers, a Torchwood vid (key line for me: "a sense of purpose and a disregard"). I think she is more sympathetic to the Torchwood crew than I am, and I think it helps the vid.

copracat linked to this great interview with Bridget Regan, who plays Kahlan Amnell -- I usually don’t like actor interviews but I’m really glad I read this one; she’s sweet and thoughtful and loves Kahlan like I love Kahlan. Also she loves vids!

Very interesting post on what it means to be a fan on Facebook versus what it means to like something, another facet of the denigration of fans/fandom while at the same time our money is sought unmercilessly,