sundries

[rm]

We got our lease renewal and the rent went down.

More than a bit swamped right now, especially with WriterCon coming up.

I am disappointed in the lack of romantic impulses in Torchwood fandom. Y'all started a ton of charity efforts (yay!), mailed coffee to the BBC (without comment I note that apparently over 300 letters and parcels with such have been received), left flowers at the Tourist Office (okay, that was actually romantic, you big, beautiful freaks -- see comments for the pics!), came up with some really creative threats and invective against show creators (boo!), and no one, NO ONE, thought about the nature of storytelling and myth and wondered if Ianto really would be remembered in 1,000 years or what you'd actually have to do technically, to make that happen. Maybe I was just involved in too many shitty time capsule projects in grade school, but no one had this fleeting thought? BOO! Not my project, but someone should roll this around in their head a little, it's interesting as a thought exercise.

Getting paid to write an article about Rachel Maddow. This is less cool than you think.

When I have time, I need to write a long thing about my wacky Anubis thing.

HOW FUCKING GREAT IS THIS TOTALLY WEIRD BAND ON COLBERT RIGHT NOW?

The Do-it-yourself Mad Men Makeover is perhaps a little too fascinating to me.

Feeling a little tense about my flight to MN, as this is the shittiest possible weather to be flying it -- summer air is turbulent and we've been having freak thunderstorms and hail the last few days. I'm a baby about turbulence, and blech!

We freeze water in little souffle dishes that we then sit on their sides in the cats' water bowl. The ice just fell out of the one in there now, and Little is staring it with this hunting intensity that is hilarious.

There was other stuff, but lord knows what it was!

Comments

[lefaym.livejournal.com]

left flowers at the Tourist Office (okay, that was sort of Romantic, you big, beautiful freaks)

I hate to say this, but I think that was a myth. :( I asked at torchwoodcoffee if anyone had photos of it, and the only person from Cardiff who responded said that she'd been there a couple of days after Day Four aired, and there was nothing. Which is too bad, because it was a lovely, romantic idea. I totally would have done it if I'd been there.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Boo! Although someone I know who is going in two weeks swears she's gonna do it and send me pics.

[tod-hollykim.livejournal.com]

Your rent went *down*!??! Damn, what sort of photos do you have of your landlord?

[rm.livejournal.com]

Bad economy!

[lefaym.livejournal.com]

Oh, good!

And you know, sad as it is that it didn't really happen, there is a certain beauty to the way it evolved as a myth anyway.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Right! That's what I'm sort of becoming interested in, once I dig under the various types of anguish people are doing.

[sykii.livejournal.com]

The cats love the ice! Ours is riveted by it as well.

[rm.livejournal.com]

She is killing the ice! Killing!

[lefaym.livejournal.com]

It'd be really interesting to take a look more broadly at the way that fandoms create their own mythologies. I'm a relative newbie to fandom, but I suppose you've seen it happen before, in different ways?

[rm.livejournal.com]

Not quite like this. I think the Whoniverse has unique properties that allows sane people (as opposed to people who think they are married to Snape on the astral plane) to declare Truth in fiction, which makes me very happy, and is the worldview that I think allows some of the sweeter yet more intense reactions to the Ianto think to be transpiring.

Have you been reading the essays going around on how Doctor Who has no canon (true fact, and several of the pieces are by show writers, including Paul Cornell).

One had this quote: "The Doctor remembers every Doctor Who story ever told. Every episode, target book, comic strip and every game of companions and TARDISes that you played as a kid. The universe he lives in has no record of it, because of paradoxes and divergent dimensions and the Time War have reset things... but the Doctor remembers and sometimes when he is sad it's because you've stopped being 8 years old and he can't run around the school playground with you anymore."

[rexluscus.livejournal.com]

Somebody showed me this picture (http://www.flickr.com/photos/ben_salter/3749400363/), but I can't vouch for authenticity...

[mellacita.livejournal.com]

Sorry to butt in, but a flister found this on flickr and sent to me: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ben_salter/3749400363/

ETA: Beaten to it, and no, the person below isn't who sent it to me. *g*

[rm.livejournal.com]

Man, even if someone went to the trouble to set that shot up, it's still a bit of lovely.

[msp-hacker.livejournal.com]

Kismet runs over to the refrigerator every time someone goes into the kitchen for the chance that they'll give him an ice cube.

I have seen a few fics that have Jack very, very purposefully remembering Ianto on July 9th, 3009. One of them used the stopwatch as a mental reminder, the other used Cardiff - or an area of another planet reminiscent of the topology and weather that South Wales had in 2009.

[lefaym.livejournal.com]

I have seen some of that stuff referenced around the place -- and I know I've seen that quotation recently, although I can't remember where -- but I don't think I've read any in full; I really need to remedy that.

The Whoniverse definitely fucks with notions of authorship in some really beautiful ways, and I think that part of the reaction to Ianto's death is that... it does, in many ways, feel like a bold assertion of authorship on the part of the writers to kill a character in a way that does feel definitive -- far more definitive that the "deaths" of Rose and Donna, certainly. Of course, there was also Tosh and Owen, but far fewer writers in fandom had invested in them in the same way; with Ianto there was more of a sense that we all share(d) a certain degree of ownership. And I know it should be possible to reassert that ownership through fic -- and that some people are beginning to do just that -- but doing so means altering one's stance in position to canon to a great degree. I think one of the things I really loved about J/I before CoE was that there was a lot of room for radically different interpretations of the relationship, and all of these could flow along with canon quite comfortably. Even though some of these interpretations (picket fences and wedding bells) were not to my personal taste, I loved that it was open enough to allow for such a wide range.

But now, with this big assertion of authorship, I feel like it's lost that sense of flowing along comfortably together, that if we want to maintain that openness, we need to reject canon outright, rather than reinterpreting it in new ways. And it's... disconcerting, to say the least.

[lefaym.livejournal.com]

Oh, thank you! Interestingly, that seems to have been taken a few days after I asked if anyone had taken any photos, so perhaps people who had heard the story (originally a myth) went to add their own, and it became a reality. :)

[dr-is-in.livejournal.com]

Nope, Alun Vega had pics of stuff left at the tourist office door...flowers, letters, even a packet of coffee.

[lefaym.livejournal.com]

I am very happy to be wrong. :D

[tcpip.livejournal.com]

We got our lease renewal and the rent went down.

About time that sort of thing started happening :)

[rm.livejournal.com]

really? any links?

[rm.livejournal.com]

This one was Paul's: http://bit.ly/SPb3E

and this is the one that quote is from: http://teatimebrutality.blogspot.com/2009/07/canon-and-sheep-shit-why-we-fight.html

Aside from the structure of content in the Whoniverse, there is the fact that the legal rights to it are split all over the place, if you're aware of Big Finish as well as the situation with the K-9 show that Australia is getting. So it's both a canon-free universe from a legal perspective as well as a creative one.

I still believe it's possible for us to move freely within the material as transformative writers, at least once the shock wears off and we're not all about addressing or fixing CoE at every second. We don't have to fix it -- all times are now, and all universes are true. For fuck's sake, they blew up Jack ON THE RIFT -- splinter universes, right there!

GIP

[redstapler.livejournal.com]

I found the Mad Men Makeover thing and kinda went squeefull.

Hee!

Re: GIP

[rm.livejournal.com]

Every one I tried to do of me wound up looking like Ianto. So I got up and made dinner instead.

Re: GIP

[redstapler.livejournal.com]

I confess, I went for the "Skirt" option first

But I picked the riding outfit, anyway.

I was shocked they had something even remotely resembling my hair, let alone how accurate what I picked is.

Also, I have 1960s glasses. That was a gimme.

[lefaym.livejournal.com]

Oh, thank you for the links.

For fuck's sake, they blew up Jack ON THE RIFT -- splinter universes, right there!

And thank you for reminding me of this. You actually just made me really happy. :)