Lokifan

The five questions meme! If you would like questions, say "Jacobins!"

I've got some great questions from sabethea and oursin ( under the cut )

drazzi asked ‘When you were a child, say under 10, what were you obsessed/fannish over??’

Reading! I was a horse girl and did some riding which I was pretty obsessed with, and a couple of TV shows fired stuff in my brain in a kind of fannish way (especially Randall and Hopkirk, Deceased, for some reason) but definitely books is the main one.

Enid Blyton, Gillian Cross, Malorie Blackman, Jacqueline Wilson, Anthony Horowitz, Philip Pullman, C S Lewis, Tamora Pierce, Dick King Smith, Roald Dahl. I reread Malory Towers over and over, and Pig-Heart Boy, and the Demon Headmaster books. Philip Pullman! Certainly The Northern Lights, but also of course his more standard kids’ books - The Firework-Maker’s Daughter especially.

As a small bookworm I adored Matilda, as well as other Dahl, especially the underrated imo Danny The Champion of the World. Anne Fine (Charm School! The Angel of Nitshill Road! I already mentioned The Tulip Touch once this meme) and Eoin Coulfer. Terry Jones! OMG the sound I made when I found out that there was a new The Knight and The Squire book. Frances Hodgson Burnett was a favourite; I ended up doing my undergrad dissertation on The Secret Garden (and Colin as a Gothic Other). And Gobbolino The Witch’s Cat still has pride of place on my bookshelf.

And a lot of stuff that was slightly sideways on, lol, in the way that happens when you’re a kid discovering stuff basically by chance. Like I read King of Shadows by Susan Cooper over and over again without hearing about The Dark is Rising; Tamora Pierce was basically me rereading The Magic in the Weaving over and over for like 5 years before I found anything else she’d written; I had one beloved copy of Eva Ibbotson’s The Secret of Platform 13 and nothing else. Lois Lowry I loved but I didn’t have that many of her books, and I hadn’t even heard of The Giver, let alone read it, until I was at university - I think being British was a factor there, lol. To some degree I’m not sure it occurred to me to go hunting for authors’ other books unless they were in front of me in the library.

Which changed with Diana Wynne Jones. I found Charmed Life when I was 9 or 10 and reread it over and over that year; it’s still one of my favourite books ever. It has so many of the things she’s great at - fantastic magic that combines excitement with ordinariness so it feels real; fabulous, funny side-characters; a great twist; complex, messy family relationships, especially ones between siblings and cousins. It’s also got a fantastic ending, which isn’t guaranteed with DWJ, much as I love her. But omg when she has a great ending (The Lives of Christopher Chant, The Merlin Conspiracy, Year of the Griffin) she REALLY does.

I started hunting down more Diana Wynne Jones over the next few years; it’s what made me decide I was a fantasy fan, having been genre-agnostic. When I was 13 we went on a school trip to France and I discovered two new DWJs in the ferry bookshop (Homeward Bounders and The Power of Three) and promptly spent 25 of the 30 francs I’d been given for the week.

For all Amazon’s depredations… god I love buying books in the twenty-first century.

(More days available over here if you'd like to ask a question.)

alley_skywalker asked what fandoms (if any) are you into these days? Any current OTPs?

My main fandom these days is FFXV. Video games = not traditionally my thing, but FFXV overcame that with the power of friendship. (And kidnapping - sodsta introduced me to it by showing me the bit where one of the main characters gets kidnapped and there’s some level of off-screen torture).

I’m still like, delighted to see a choice bit of Buffy/Faith art, etc, like I never really leave old fandoms. But FFXV is definitely the main one; I’ve done a ton of RPing there, which I never did before this fandom, and that got me through the first lockdown. I hope to write more fic!

( just me blathering about FFXV ships )

ysabetwordsmith asked “what thing from any fancanon would you most like to manifest in local-Earth? Why? How feasible would it be to replicate at least part of that with extant resources?”



Haha not plausible at all, because my immediate thought was the TARDIS -- and even on deciding that was probably cheating, I thought of Howl’s castle. (The book version; Diana Wynne Jones is my favourite author of all time. I've seen the film version but remember nothing.)

Basically, I want the ability to be in my cosy home, with my fire and my hair dye and my friends, and travel to far distant lands, all at the same time.

( if I had the moving castle )

Pick a number and get an answer! Or suggest a different book question.

( Read more... )

Challenge #1

In your own space, introduce yourself!

I’VE STILL GOT TIME. And since I’ve got a bunch of new friends and have been pretty quiet on Dreamwidth for quite a while, an intro post seems like a great idea.

The basics under the ( cut )

My favourite getting-to-know-you/catch-up meme seems appropriate here: ask me a question, any question, fandom or RL. And I'll answer and ask a related question, and it goes back and forth until one of us forgets or gets bored, haha.

Went back to being quiet, obviously… it’s predictable, unfortunately, cos summer is when I work ALL THE HOURS. Life is a bit unpredictable rn. My flatmates are horrible. I’m gonna move out, but it may not be until September; I’ve already moved three times in the last twelve months, so I want to (a) have time and energy to find somewhere good to stay and (b) money for moving again, which is… questionable. Although my parents will probably lend me the money if they can, because in addition to the horrible flatmates, there’s black mould in one of the kitchen cupboards.

ANYWAY.

At the end of May, after moving and Expo, I went back up to sodsta’s with him on Monday night. LIVERPOOL YAY <333

( a good time )

Gonna do a solo trip to see Ocean’s 8 this afternoon, I think! I want to do something fun and my focus is too scattered for writing. Especially so I can go out and show off the newly redone hair!

I missed my sister’s housewarming yesterday to go to A&E. I’m fine, thankfully, but UGH. I was gonna meet her baby-queer flatmate who is apparently desperately in need of older queer role models, lol. (I know. But I’m 28 and a teacher and overall happy, which is sooooo far away from 22-and-unemployed-and-was-recently-kicked-out-by-parents, which I know from experience.)

Let’s do my favourite I’ve-been-away meme: you ask me a question (fannish or RL) and I’ll answer, and also ask you a question that’s somehow related to what you asked me. Then we continue chatting until someone gets bored or forgets to answer :D

So I never did this last year, and it has basically been annoying me for a year. And I only wrote like… two or three fics in 2017, because one of them took me five months. So I’m gonna do two years at once! DEAL WITH IT.

( Year In Review Meme: Fic, 2016 and 2017 )

I’ve somehow never done this meme, I think, but I love reading other people’s and get good recs out of it, so here we go!

( fannishness this year )

My LJ icons package is about to expire ;_; I have almost 300 icons over there but I’m not giving them any more money, so very soon they’ll mostly go. (The paid account itself doesn’t expire til August, and then I’m back down to the basics.) On the other hand, I’m in the middle of uploading a bunch more Dreamwidth icons, now my premium account’s got me up to 260. I have put quite a bit of energy into curating my icon collection, guys, you don’t even know.

So this seems like the perfect moment to do a userpics meme. Basically, pick 3 userpics (or more) from here or here, and I’ll tell you something about why I have it. (You can post the icons in the comment box or give me the keywords I chose, e.g. ‘Thor: space princess’.) If you include the word CONVERSE in your comment, I’ll pick 3 of yours to ask about.

Real post coming soon.