Magic is always impossible.

I am a world of not up to date on LJ or DW, because I am neck-deep in such a ridiculous level of depression that I don't even want to talk about it because I find it boring. But I had to come here today to post, because two things are VERY IMPORTANT.

(1) YULETIDE. Oh my gosh, Yuletide. I got TWO stories, you guys. TWO. And they're both A-Babies fic and they're both BRILLIANT.

Sharon's Christmas Pony is about the origins of Bucky Bear. SPOILER ALERT: it involves Peggy and Sharon Carter, and also Paddington Bear. ALSO IT IS PERFECT.

The Sensational, Inspirational, Celebrational, Muppetational Babysitting Show is a crossover between Muppet Babies and Avengers. YES YOU HEARD ME. At least a few throwaway details from that fic are going to be my headcanon forever now, because they make so much SENSE.

While you're there you should read the third A Babies vs X Babies fic, I Always Need to be Sure of You, which is Bucky Bear's POV about being Steve's favorite toy, with bonus Pizza Dog Plushie and also Star Wars action figures.

Basically the three fics in this fandom combine to be everything I could have possibly wanted from Yuletide and you should all read and enjoy them.

As for me, I wrote one story and one treat, and I am happy to exchange ficlets for guessing which are mine, even though that's basically shooting fish in a barrel because I am the most obvious human being on earth.


2. PARTY. I have decided to have a MUPPET HOLIDAY MOVIE CELEBRATION TIME. More to the point, I have decided to have it TOMORROW (12/27).

If you would like to watch MUPPETS for CHRISTMAS and are free to join, email me or DM me or whatever for my address! I will be showing Muppet holiday movies from 3 PM on. I have a lot of Muppet holiday movies and also pretzels shaped like Christmas trees. Probably we will order dinner at some point. Likely it will be served on paper plates with Captain America on them. Definitely there will be Muppets.

...I am great at planning, shut up.

The 500th episode of Big Brother aired this week (EW article about that, h/t latxcvi), and I feel like I should make some kind of an post about it, because it's been my fandom for seven years now (even if I'm not watching this year) and it's a milestone and all that.

( cut to spare your reading lists, but I talk about BB and narrative and suspense and why I love it and why I'm not watching this year. )

Happy 500 episodes, Big Brother. I miss what you used to be for me, and I hope that someday, you become that again. If not, well, you deepened the way I watch media, and I'd happily wish you 500 more episodes for that alone.

I spent half of Rosh Hashanah services thinking about that High Holy Days Avengers fic I wrote last year. (I am finally responding to comments on it now. A YEAR LATE. Whatever, I'm great.)

Given the rabbi's sermon was about how we need to stop our over reliance on technology, which he illustrated with a youtube video, during a service that was livestreamed on the internet, I feel like I made the right choice.

Except now I am back to wanting to work on the Passover sequel. /o\

First I should probably make my yearly High Holy Days post, though. Although maybe I should do that on Tumblr instead, where more people will read it? Or possibly less, IDK.

Social media is hard. :(

I started watching Elementary around 8:30 PM and now it's 2 AM and I can't sleep because Joan Watson exists.

Here are two things that are not connected, except for both being discovered last night. I am going to pretend that's a theme to this post though, okay?


(1)

WINTER SOLDIER ALL BUT CONFIRMED FOR SDCC!

Twitter, for the past month or so, has had a lot of gossip about how Marvel has D23 so they won't be showing up at Comic Con. APPARENTLY THAT IS INCORRECT. BRB working on my completely sane camping-out-overnight plans.


(2)

I posted fic!

Just Close Your Eyes and Make Believe (6622 words) by Amy
Fandom: A-Babies Vs. X-Babies, Marvel 616, The Avengers (2012), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers - Ambiguous Fandom
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Bucky Bear & Steve Rogers, Bucky Bear & Natasha Romanov, Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov, Bucky Bear & Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov, Clint Barton & Natasha Romanov, Bruce Banner & Natasha Romanov
Characters: Natasha Romanov, Steve Rogers, Bucky Bear, Clint Barton
Additional Tags: Red Room, Winter Soldier - Freeform, why isn't Bucky Bear a recognized character tag?, this is a pre-school retelling of the Winter Soldier storyline, i'd apologize but i'm not really sorry, playing fast and loose with various marvel canons, does this count as age regression fic?, it's Muppet Babies but with Avengers instead of Muppets, gratuitous cameos from Marvel comics
Summary: Natasha found a battered teddy bear at the playground and took him home to fix. She didn't realize he'd belonged to anyone else first.

(Or, the one where victoria_p did that "tell me what story you think I should write!" meme so I did and she said no, I should write write this one. And then I did. And that is this.)


Apparently- thoroughly accidentally- today is a Winter Soldier-y day! Go read maybe? :D?

Fandom March Madness did not go as hoped for, but I still enjoyed my two days of campaigning! I haven't really been able to for five years because my primary fandoms are (A) real people and (2) not fandom-y.

Having feelings about stuff the rest of fandom has feelings about is AWESOME. Except now that I've seen people's arguments against Natasha, I want to write a long blog post about how I think Natasha's characterization in Avengers and Iron Man 2 was not only consistent, but good and solid and respectful, not just "good for a female character in an action movie" (because lolololol lowest of bars), but good for her greater comics characterization and also simply as a character who has probably had less than 2 hours total on screen time.

This would be fine, except there are so many other things I want to write about too.

Like Survivor, which raised a lot of really interesting questions about reality television and mental health and where the line is between good drama and exploitation and why I think last night's episode crossed it, but which I am hesitant to post about because frankly the second you start talking about problems with reality TV it prompts ten million YES REALITY TV IS THE DEVIL responses when it's a lot more complicated than that.

Or like Veronica Mars, and how much it influenced me fannishly, and all the reactions I'm having to the current kickstarter, and how I'm at that weird precipice where I want to be excited but I have been hurt before, which ties into my thoughts about the bravery of fandom, of being willing to commit emotionally to something that will eventually either disappoint you with what it does or disappoint you by ending.

Or like Lost, and how I don't actually want to rewatch it (I put on an episode the other day and was bored out of my mind) but I want to re-experience watching it, if that makes sense. Lost to me will always be those ads for season 4 with the trees in the background reflecting in the water as buildings. I find this unaccountably serene, particularly considering how many people die in any given episode.

So of course I waste so much time trying to decide what to post about that I don't write any of them out. SELF THIS IS NOT PRODUCTIVE.


Arrgh. I wanted to write a sequel to my Avengers Yom Kippur fic to post before the first seder. I haven't started it yet. I may need to reevaluate this goal.

Why isn't there a crossover between Code Name Verity and Captain America, where Peggy hangs out with the other competent badass ladies who are fighting Hitler, and/or where Steve is intrigued by their sheer awesomeness?

Because every time there's a flashback to WWII in Cap (I'm 39/50 in Brubaker's run) I'm like "needs moar Maddie and Julie."

(And in the present day, "needs moar Sharon and Natasha," but that isn't really surprising to anyone. Although seriously, there are basically no Natasha/Sharon fics on AO3, EVEN THOUGH "Captain America and the Secret Avengers" exists. There are also basically no Natasha/Yelena, despite EVERYTHING THEY HAVE BOTH BEEN IN. I assume this is part of an elaborate plot to torment me.)


...ghost_lingering and I are celebrating National Margarita Day as one ought to. But I cannot blame the alcohol for any of this, because I've been wanting each of these for at least a week. I likely would have started writing one, but I suggested something to musesfool and then decided to write it myself. I am a terrible influence on myself.

Also now that I've seen both Fantastic Four movies I feel like I should write the Parent Trap fic I desperately want, where movieverse Steve and Jonny trade places to make their dads Tony and Reed work together again, but as I have now declared on Twitter several times, REED RICHARDS IS THE WORST, HE DOESN'T DESERVE TO HANG OUT WITH TONY STARK, AND YES I REALIZE I'M DEFENDING TONY STARK BUT THE OTHER OPTION IS REED RICHARDS. Apparently in the 616verse, being a douchebag is a prerequisite for being a genius scientist.

If you told me a year ago I'd have this many feelings on comics, I would have laughed in your face. Fandom should come with warning labels.

The story I keep thinking about, which I will never write but which someone else should, is the one where Kate Bishop is Peter Bishop's cousin and after they meet Olivia gets recruited for SHIELD and/or the Avengers and brings Astrid and Broyles with her and possibly one of them hooks up with Natasha. I feel this would solve like 90% of my problems with Fringe being over. (I have still not watched s5. I don't want to watch it til I'm fully spoiled and know ahead of time how much it will break my heart. I have a lot of Olivia Dunham feelings.)

I posted a story today, but not that one. It is an Avengers ficlet, Like Goddamn Rodent Christmas (600 words, gen), because when your fandom has a character named Phil, you are contractually obligated to use that. I was going to post the request as an AvengerKink prompt, but I figured the odds were pretty great they'd go Furry on it, so I opted to handle it myself.

Today has been a day of emotional fragility for me- I'm hoping that tonight I will expand it to emotional fragility and laundry because I am out of clean socks- so naturally the story is just fluff that pretty much ignores feelings entirely, which I'm pretty sure means I can't even count it as a productive use of my time.

Oh, but I did put my name in for the Words and Deeds meme 2.0, because I missed the first iteration. And I spent a while lying in bed pondering exactly what my boundaries are in the hopes that will help me articulate them better, although all that happened was I fell asleep. Can I count either of those as an accomplishment?

I'm never sure how to decide that my weekend has been productive. There should be some kind of helpful graph.

Hello, the internets. I keep meaning to post and just... not doing it. I'm not up to date on my flist or my reading list. I'm not up to date on replying to comments. I'm not really up to date on ANYTHING in my life.

Here is the truth: as much as I love vacations, I am really quite terrible at them, because I spend the entire time in a helpless mildly-hysterical haze of "dear god, I finally have free time and I'm wasting it because I'm a horrible person." If that sounds like an exaggeration, you clearly do not live in my head, because it is actually a toned-down version of my constant internal exchanges. I have gotten a fair amount done this week, but in my head I have just been awful.

(The literally hundreds of unread Firefox tabs do not help. I keep telling myself to close them all and start fresh, but that's working about as well as you would expect.)

But on the plus side, my recipient liked my Yuletide fic! And I received not one, but TWO awesome Yuletide stories: Oscar Season Worst Season, which is Don't Trust the B fic from JVDB's POV and is delightful (IT TALKS ABOUT HIS CRY FACE YOU GUYS), and Survival, which is Lumatere fic that I will not describe because it has SPOILERS FOR QUINTANA SERIOUSLY DON'T READ IT IF YOU HAVEN'T READ QUINTANA YET IT COMES OUT IN THE US IN MARCH. They both made me super happy.

(There's a lot of other awesome fic too. See above, re: unread Firefox tabs.)

Also I started posting to my Tumblr, which was today's big goal (alongside organizing my collaging supplies, which I mostly did before I ran out of boxes, which... is a thing that happens when you're me). I posted the first cardstock self-portrait I've made that isn't ridiculously emo! I also posted some of the holiday cards I've never sent! I will be posting more! Probably. If nothing else, I have a NYE card ready to post tomorrow. I'm trying to do that thing where I don't just hide all the creative stuff I do and refuse to share it with anyone. It's kind of a work in progress.

Tomorrow I am going to try to follow people back! But first someone is probably going to have to teach me how to do that. I am convinced that if I just play around and try to figure it out myself, I'll end up friending Hitler or something. Basically I've technologically regressed to the point of being my mom.


...IDK, internets. My meds-taking this week has been sporadic at best, so my brain is going too fast for me to make much sense right now. I have a party tomorrow night. I go back to work Wednesday. I have two Avengers fics I'm poking at, half a dozen collages I'm working on, and a really soft pillow that loves me. That's got to be enough for a full post, right?

Yesterday was busy and full of ~feelings.

Today I posted fic.


Darcy Lewis's Guide to Lists (2693 words) by Amy
Fandom: Marvel Avengers Movies Universe, Incredible Hulk (2008), Thor (Movies)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Relationships: Jane Foster/Darcy Lewis, Jane Foster & Darcy Lewis & Betty Ross
Characters: Darcy Lewis, Jane Foster, Betty Ross, Tony Stark, Bruce Banner, Pepper Potts
Summary: Darcy's list of famous people she'd like to fuck was actual attractive famous people. Jane's list was scientists who Jane thought were brilliant who Darcy had never even heard of. Essentially, Darcy figured, they were more like people whose brains Jane wanted to eat, but to be polite she'd be willing to fuck them first.

Darcy made a mental note to read up on science, because apparently it turned her girlfriend on.