the mermaid cafe

June recs update ahoy:

unfitforsociety has been updated for June 2021 with 25 story and 3 vid recs in 8 fandoms:

* 13 Batfamily stories and 1 JLU vid
* 3 Six of Crows stories
* 1 Ted Lasso story and 2 vids
* 3 Star Wars stories
* 2 Avengers stories
* 1 Old Guard, 1 Raven Cycle, and 1 White Collar story

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And the final June Something questions:

Day 19: What is something that you associate with a character in fandom, but aren't sure if it's canon or fandom?

There's a bunch of Star Wars stuff that I'm still unsure of whether it's canon or fanon or old Legends stuff that was de-canonized but people still use in fic. Some of it I've ascertained the fanon or Legends origins of, but some I still don't know.

Day 20: A random character shows up at your doorstep at dinnertime saying a friend sent them. Why did your friend send that person, how does it go, and what do you talk about?

This is kind of a weird question isn't it? Maybe Wendy Watson? She seems very down to earth even though she's a superhero sidekick and in training to be a superhero herself, and we could talk about comics!

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More June Something questions:

Day 14: What fandom broke your heart?

So many. Too many. I think the one that cut deepest was the one that was my comfort show - nothing bad was supposed to happen in Stars Hollow, so I could rely on Gilmore Girls to not fuck me over AND THEN IT DID. Without even touching the "Rory sleeps with married!Dean" mess (which I hated so much), getting Luke and Lorelai together and then KEEPING THEM APART and THEN THE APRIL SHENANIGANS and breaking them up - it was SO DUMB. SO AWFUL. It made rewatching impossible for a while, though eventually, several years after the show ended (but before the sequel miniseries) I did go back and watch seasons 1-4, and a judicious selection of episodes from 5-7. And I can now put the earlier episodes on in the background and enjoy them, but arrgh. It was so dumb and pointless and badly written and absolutely unnecessary. It didn't produce good drama, it was just dumb.

Day 15: What fandom pairing took you over like Venom took over Eddie?

I came out of my first viewing of the X-Men movie back in 2000, hopped on chat and demanded to know where the Logan/Rogue fic was, and began writing my own.

Steve/Bucky also jumped up and down hard on my BFF-to-lovers buttons, and since I knew at the end of CATFA that Bucky would be back (or at least, I made that assumption based on comics osmosis and also thelostglove telling me I would love it), I came out of that desperate for fic as well - and I know I've mentioned it before (insert Captain Holt gif here), but when I went looking, back in August of 2011, there were only 23 completed stories in the Steve/Bucky tag on AO3 and no small percentage of those were actually Steve/Tony stories, so I had to write my own in order to have things to read. Not to say that there wasn't a small handful of dedicated writers at that time because there was. But it took a few more years for fandom to catch on. I still laugh that it became a juggernaut ship, because I was there, Gandalf, back before that was the case.

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Ever since old boss2 bought me a sponge cake from Kam Hing Coffee Shop in Chinatown the night she drove me home from the office back in April, I have been thinking about trying to make my own. I'd never made a real sponge cake before, with the egg whites as the only raising agent, but it seemed like it was time to try.

I chose this recipe because it seemed straightforward if fussy (why yes, I did sift the cake flour + corn starch mix twice). It's not a one-bowl proposition, and whipping egg whites is always fraught, but it all came together and they turned out pretty well, though I might have cooked them a titch too long (even though I cooked them 4 minutes less than the recipe calls for) (pics).

I bet they'd be really good split open and filled with whipped cream and lemon curd. Or sliced and macerated strawberries. Hmm...

And then linked from that recipe, there was a recipe for Dalgona coffee, which I had never heard of but needed to try once I had. So I just made that, and it's okay? I don't know if it's that I bought the brand of instant coffee(!!!) that the recipe suggests (Folger's Decaf) and it's only okay coffee-wise, or if my expectations were too high. But it does whip up quickly - I used an immersion blender with a whisk attachment in a tall metal milkshake cup so it didn't spray everywhere - and looks very impressive. Maybe I need it to be colder? It does remind me a little of coffee ice cream (which I have been eating a lot of recently - Tillamook coffee almond fudge to be exact (and tbh, could use more fudge but the ice cream is so creamy) so I will probably make it again sometime.

All of which leads quite nicely into the June Something, Day 9:

Drop the cast of a fandom you follow into a reality tv show - who/what/why? If you need a list of reality TV show examples, click here.

Clearly it's the Batfamily on GBBO. Alfred eventually wins, of course, but Jason and Steph, and, somewhat surprisingly, Damian, give him a run for his money, though Damian does not fare well during pie week. Bruce is out the first week, despite his actual best efforts - cooking is like chemistry why is he so bad at this??? - then Kate, Cass, and Tim (no, Tim, your attempt at Dorito-flavored pastry cream was not "GENIUS!"), Babs, and Duke. Dick lasts longer than anyone expects him to, but pastry week knocks him out.

It's for charity, so nobody complains too much, and they all end up having a much better time than expected.

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Last night around 7 pm, I got an email from the cleaning service asking if it was okay for them to bump my appointment from its usual 9 am slot to 2 pm today. I said sure, and then I thought about my calendar and was like oh shit, I have a meeting at 2 pm I'm supposed to take notes for! What the hell was I thinking?!? so of course I busted out in stress hives ON MY FACE bah.

So this morning when I logged on, I texted my boss and was like, "I won't be on video for the P3PR call today, the cleaning service will be here" and she was like, "no problem." And then I looked at the calendar and the meeting wasn't until 2:30 pm, and then they arrived at about 1:40 and I mentioned that I would have to be on call at 2:30 - what would work best so I wasn't in their way? And they (it's a team of 2 ladies) were like, "We can do the living room first so you can be in here on your call while we do the bedroom/bathroom." Genius! And then they were done by 2:30 so it didn't matter anyway, and I hopped on my call without any problems whatsoever. Sigh. I really do do it to myself sometimes.

Anyway, here's the June Something, Day 7:

What's the longest time you've been in a fandom. Not necessarily your oldest fandom, but a fandom that you started and still continue to read/write/create content for in some way.

Oh this is kind of funny - the answer is either technically Marvel - I was in XMM fandom from 2000-2003, and then a little bit for Iron Man in 2008 and then a little bit of Thor in spring/early summer 2011, and then BAM Captain America: the First Avenger came upon me like a ravening beast and I wrote in that fandom regularly from 2011 - 2016 and I still read in it and occasionally write something. - or DC, where I joined Smallville fandom for a short while in 2001 and would occasionally read comics fic without much more comics background than being familiar with the old Superman and Batman movies/shows/cartoons, and then in July 2010, I watched "Under the Red Hood" (I know I've told that story a million times) which led me to watching a bunch of Batman animated movies, Batman Beyond, JL/JLU and the animated Teen Titans before diving into comics proper. (Yes, I was in fandom for the big two superhero comic producers for 10 years before I deigned to read a superhero comic that wasn't a one-off. There were reasons. Let's just say fandom changed a lot between X-Men in 2000 and Iron Man in 2008.) And while I didn't write much fic for it, I was also into reading Arrowverse for a while (and just last summer marathoned all of Legends of Tomorrow, which I have to catch up on now that it's airing season 6), and I keep coming back to writing and reading about the Batfamily even now. *hands*

So yeah, I honestly think by this metric, comics/comic book movies is my longest running fandom. That's hilarious.

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As I said on tumblr last night, I know I shouldn't get my hopes up, but every time deGrom pitches this season, I think he's got a chance for a no-hitter, so I get sad when he gives up a hit. Sigh. And then he left the game after 6 innings last night with flexor tendonitis(??) but today they say he's okay and probably won't miss his next start. He actually has more RBI this season (5) than runs he's given up (4), which is pretty unheard of. #MVP #LFGM

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June Something, Day 5:

Compare and/or contrast your very first fandom obsession and your very latest fandom obsession.

Hmm... by the use of "fandom" here instead of "fannish," I'm going to go with the first fandom I sought out online content for/joined online fandom for¹, which was Homicide: Life on the Street. I didn't write fic at the time - it was all discussion on alt.tv.homicide on usenet. Until it went bad at the end (as many things online tend to do), it was a really great place to start out online, I think. I learned a lot about how to behave on the internet (it was 1997 - a very different time). I lurked for a few months before posting, and eventually became a regular poster there.

Content-wise, I guess HLotS and Batman are both about detectives to some degree? I mean, Pembleton could be Batman, you don't know. (though tbh he would find vigilantism in his city insulting to him as a professional homicide detective.) I don't think Bayliss had the legs for the scaly panties though.

I don't have a current burning fannish obsession - I'm still reading and writing in a couple different ones, like Batfamily, Shadow & Bone, and Star Wars, with occasional forays back into the MCU or Lucifer, but it's not the same as being in the grip of a white-hot fannish obsession.

I guess the main difference is the platform - alt.tv.homicide was pretty okay with off-topic posting, iirc, at least during the summer, but newsgroups as a whole weren't necessarily and mailing lists were very frequently not at all okay with off-topic posts - and now there's no such thing as off-topic, it's all mish-mashed together with stories about daily life, cooking, whatever I happen to be watching etc. We've even finally managed to implement some version of a killfile/blacklist, though it's not quite the same as it was in the usenet days.

¹I was tempted to be flip and say Star Wars and Star Wars but it wouldn't be quite truthful in either direction, though it would be much easier to talk about the differences from 1977 to now.

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I used to be much more tolerant of the heat than I am these days, and I am still more tolerant of it than a lot of people I know (except when I need to sleep - then I need it cold), and this whole working from home thing in 90°F heat often means running the AC all day as well as all night (whereas if I were going to the office, I'd only turn it on when I got home, or set the timer to turn it on about an hour before I got home) and that is both expensive and bad for the environment. So mostly I try to keep it off during the day until I can't take it anymore - usually around 3 - 4 pm - though if it starts pouring and I have to shut the windows, I will turn it on then as well.

When I spoke with my brother recently, I asked him to let me know what his vacation plans were and if he needed me to dog-sit again, and he said not only did he, but he'd just had a generator delivered, so if the power goes out again, I won't be stuck for days without AC and having to run out to the car to charge my phone etc. My sister-in-law was afraid I wouldn't do it again this year after last year's power outage, and had started preparing for boarding the dogs, which wouldn't be a problem so much for the small one, but the big one is old and creaky now and he doesn't like many people but he does like me), but my brother was confident I would, so I am glad to have lived up to expectations. I didn't mind it so much - see above re: my tolerance for heat and also the fact that I could sit out on the back deck for a lot of it, which I can't do at home - except that 1. they had no books (a slight exaggeration but not as much as you might think; thankfully my niece brought me some) and 2. it was impossible to get the windows open in the room I was sleeping in.

Anyway, hopefully it won't happen again, but at least there should be auxiliary power if it does.

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June Something Day 3:

What's a favorite, or at least memorable fandom meeting/interaction that you've had?

Oh wow, I've been lucky enough to meet so many of you over the years, and it's always a joyful memory. I think though for my answer today I will say seeing the first Avengers movie 4 times the weekend it opened with DevilDoll, chicklet_girl, and girlinthetrilby was pretty freaking fantastic. We'd all seen THOR together the year before for DevilDoll's birthday, so it just made sense to see Avengers together when it finally came to fruition. That was peak MCU fandom, you know? So much potential! So much fun! Good times.

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Lately, I feel like my life is basically load the dishwasher, unload the dishwasher, reload the dishwasher, with a side of do laundry, fold laundry, do laundry, fold laundry. Sigh. So exciting.

I've seen this around the ol' flist and thought I'd give it a shot:

The June Something (originated by squidgiepdx):

Day 1: What's changed about your fandom life in the last 365 days?

I feel like I write even less than I want to, though I still do post fic sometimes. It's just harder to get motivated without a lot of other people getting excited about the same thing at the same time. It's not that I need to be sure there's an audience for what I write - I have learned to manage my expectations and that hasn't changed; if I get excited to write a thing, I'm gonna write it, because my ideal audience is still me - but I miss having the atmosphere of squee that used to be as prevalent as oxygen and just isn't anymore where I am. (I know, I know, discord, but I am old and socially anxious.)

Because I've watched a lot of things over the past year that in the olden days I feel like I would have been sparked to write something. Legends of Tomorrow, She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, Lucifer, Ted Lasso all struck me in the heart-place in one way or another, but since I marathoned all of them, there's no accrual of canon/meta/squee/spark.

Idk, idk, it's probably just me, but even when I have loved a thing and written for it previously and have an hardcore OTP, like Six of Crows/Shadow and Bone, it's still so hard to sit down and write. I would like to finish some of my Kanej wsip, and my Star Wars wsip, and my Batfam wsip but it's hard to get excited by myself all the time. I can get excited and it can carry me through the first couple thousand words, but after that, when it gets hard and sloggy, it'd be nice to have somewhere to feed that excitement. It's not even that I think DW is too quiet or whatever - I just think my flist/circle/whatever is no longer predicated on squeeing over the same show week after week, so I have to motivate myself, and I am really bad at that.

Eep, that's kind of a downer answer, sorry. On the upside, when I do get sparked up to write, the words come pretty easily - see my yuletide output! - and I have watched so many great shows over the course of the pandemic.

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