1) Saturday was an odd weather day. Although it hasn't been what you could call warm lately I'm trying to remember if we've had more than a few flakes of snow since Christmas. What we were not expecting was for a day predicted around 40 and rainy (which it was most of the night) to suddenly turn cold enough mid-morning to turn to snow instead. Oddly, I was reading a fic the night before where weather had unexpectedly turned stormy completely against predictions. (Turns out Thor was arriving from Asgard).

Well, we didn't get Thor but we did get a lot of birds suddenly turning up for the relative shelter of our balcony. They're apparently foul weather friends.



I mentioned to Mike it looked like we had a bird tree.



The tree is the closest to our balcony railing as you can see here. So birds go back and forth a lot.



The smarter birds decided to take up spots on the tomato cages we're storing on the balcony, which is away from the wind and much of the snow. Note the snoozing mourning dove in the front right.

I'm including the photo below because it amused me that I caught the bird on the left just as it was leaping off its perch.



2) I rarely do memes but I nabbed this from silverusagi because I started wondering about my own answers to it.

1. What's the largest fandom you've ever been part of?

It kind of depends on definition, such as was it a huge fandom when I was actually in it? I don't know how many people are still ST:TOS fans but that has been a massive ongoing fandom and I was in it before the films came out. There's hardly anyone who doesn't know what the show was, even today, whether they were a fan or not. So that would have to be it.

2. What's the smallest fandom you've ever been part of?

Again it probably depends on definition. I don't think I've actually ever been part of a small fandom. But I was a fan of The Monkees during their first "lull" period when none of them were touring and before their comeback in the mid-1980s. I don't think there were a lot of active fans back then but there were newsletters and cons during this period of mail, paper, and in-person gatherings. So it wasn't like the fandom had disappeared, it was just either poor timing by those fans (like me) who missed both their high periods or were people who were diehards and kept things going since the 1960s.

3. What's your oldest fandom love?

I'll say fannish love because while I'm sure there's a fandom I was 4 years old and not part of anything. I was captivated by Peter Pan –- flying sounded like the best thing ever.

4. What's your newest fandom love?

Probably The Good Place. I haven't gone looking for fanworks (though I've watched/read some) but it's a canon I'm really into right now and I could see it developing into more.

5. Do you mainly read/write/draw/vid Gen, M/F, F/F or M/M?

It's mostly M/M though this is largely by default and it varies by fandom. For example I most enjoy Buffy/Spike stories in Buffy fandom though I read a variety of ships. In Supernatural there are few choices for het or femslash ships but I've read a lot of gen which I rather prefer at this point, though with RPF there's really little choice there. In Sherlock I'd much prefer to read Gen but it's not as easy to find.

In MCU I started out looking for gen, and I do enjoy it, but the fandom is made up mostly of slash ships. I'd love to read more het in both that and Merlin but it's thin on the ground and, I'm sorry to say, generally not as satisfying. Also, I'd most like to read threesome fics (either M/F/M or F/M/F) but even in fandoms which are tailor made for them (like White Collar) there are fewer than one would expect and very few long fics, which is my preference.

6. If you ship, are you more of an OTP, Little Black dress or multi-shipper type of shipper?

Again it rather depends on the fandom. In some, like Merlin, it's pretty mostly an OTP (or OT3) though I'd really enjoy more options in Merlin/Morgana fics. In Buffy and MCU it's more of a Little Black Dress. In SPN and Sherlock it's a none-of-the-above. In QaF and Trek it was definitely an OTP and although I was quite fannish about BSG I don't think I've read even 5 fics in that fandom so I'd probably be open to a variety of possibilities.

I've noticed that while I sometimes go into a fandom wanting to see/read about a particular ship, often times I develop a favorite as a result of stories I come across. So overall I'd say it's about 50/50 as to whether or not I'm influenced by the fandom itself.

7. What's your favourite genre/type of story?

It's probably easier for me to say what I prefer to avoid than what I prefer. I don't need to read fluff all the time but I prefer to stay away from stuff that is depressing and characters that are going through addictions or illness or abuse. Especially these days, I feel like that's just piling on.

I love long, plotty stories. Outside of fanfic my favorite genres have always been mysteries and historical fiction so those are certainly preferences but they're not that common. I also prefer stories that balance interiority with dialogue. And humor never hurts.

8. What rating do you prefer your stories to be?

I don't think it's ever mattered to me what the rating is. If I like reading about a pairing, I'll enjoy it even if it's gen. While I've read a lot of PWP in the past, I stay away from them now. I just want more from the stories and I'm afraid all the sex just seems repetitive to me. In fact, it's rare that I bother reading sex scenes now. There are some writers that write such a great burn for the couple that I'm interested in seeing how the sex takes place, but for the most part I just skip past it. And on the other side I stay away from stories that are particularly violent or gruesome (which, when it comes to text, kind of takes something extra as it is), so I guess a lower rating is probably my preference but I never pay attention to ratings when I'm downloading something.

3) I imagine most have seen these charts about fanfic professions, but I'm curious what things amuse you or stand out to you?

4) This sounds like a rather interesting movie. I was struck by how different the story of her making the film was to what many men's stories are.

5) Clue’s editorial site officially launched earlier this month. "The medical establishment has made women feel like their health issues aren’t real. That their pain is imagined, that birth control side effects are inevitable and to be tolerated. Diagnoses for very common conditions and illnesses like PCOS or endometriosis come too late or not at all...We use the best available evidence to dive into topics that have long been ignored or misunderstood. Any health information we publish here has been rigorously fact-checked and edited...Content on the site is divided into four categories: Cycle A-Z, Life Stages, Culture, and Sex.

Also of interest, when trying to get funding for the site "the men sitting across from her in pitch meetings said, 'I only invest in products I can use myself.'” She wasn't alone. The inventors of a medical test kit using menstrual blood were told:

“Someone told us that the product would only help women, and women are only half the population — so what was the point?” Ms. Tariyal said. Other potential funders wanted to reimagine their technology as a product for men: Was there some way to re-engineer it so that it would measure testosterone? And one guy suggested they develop a machine that a man could use to covertly test the health of his sexual partners, because “women are liars” who spread venereal diseases."

That's a snapshot right there of why we get the products we do, and why we're missing so many others.