marycrawford | Recent Entries

I got a comment on my single Dutch language fanfic on AO3, from a university research assistant working in the Netherlands. They don't speak Dutch. They want to feed my work to a "computational model" (that means AI, in case you were wondering).

The project is meant to "train computational models to explore what readers value in a story".

"For his research, Pianzola will use artificial intelligence to analyze millions of stories and their responses, from sites in five different languages -, English, Spanish, Italian, Korean and Indonesian - collected from countries on all continents. That analysis provides a wealth of information about the characters in a story, the genre, what a story is about, how a story is constructed, what themes are covered, as well as what readers from different countries and cultures find important in a story."

This project got more than a million euro from the EU. It's called GOLEM.

You can't make this shit up, at least not if you're an AI.

I'm so mad. Fuck off and leave us to write our stories in peace, can you?

I painted this for

mumblemumble's fandomtrees post at the very last minute - the deadline for this gifting challenge always gets extended and it was helpful for me this time.

"fanart of beach concert fun times" was a great prompt and I love Zhu Yilong's whole look during this event. Though I did make up most of the blue in his hair, to reference his role in the Land of Broken Hearts movie.

Side note: taking pictures of fanart in a sketchbook and then trying to get the colors in the photo to match what you're actually seeing is quite a ride. I did already know that the camera is never as good as the human eye (especially not a smartphone camera) but it's weird. I would welcome tips on how to photograph art stuff on your phone.

(fountain pen, brush pen, watercolor)

Earlier, for

guardian_wishlist, I asked for Zhu Yilong pics and moodboards and all that, as well as Guardian fanfic, and I got many fabulous things that you should check out:

- beautiful pictures and a few clips/gifs from the Land of Broken Hearts premiere in Beijing, the beach concert, and the roadshows, carefully curated by

mumblemumble. And I used one of those photographs as reference for this fanart, so it's a full circle of fannish joy.

- a fabulous Zhu Yilong slideshow (and download link) created by

sakana17. I keep this slideshow open in a tab in my browser, for fannish joy and inspiration.

- a lovely evocative short fic by

nnozomi about Shen Wei riding the trams in Dragon City, which is so relevant to my interests as I take trams every day and adore them very nearly as much as I adore Shen Wei. (I'm going to a sketch outing in a dutch train museum next weekend and I can't wait.)

- a Zhu Yilong/Ocean moodboard by

yue_ix that is pure art. He really is a sea creature, and the fic inspiration is lying in wait for me every time I look at this. It's so gorgeous and brings so many ideas into life.

Sometimes when I haven't had any comments on fic for a while (and well, I haven't written much in the past year, so the comments dry up accordingly) I go and look at the bookmarks people have left, and it often cheers me up. Like today.

Dear person who bookmarked a small snowy weilan story with

AAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHFUCKHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHFUCKHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
HHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

I see you, and I appreciate you XD

I'm slowly (of course, I do everything slowly) rewatching Nirvana in Fire and it's so satisfying. An absolutely perfect show for rewatching - the vibes, the resonance of knowing everything that's about to happen, or picking up on stuff that you never noticed - so satisfying. Also all the costumes and sets are so good.

I love how prince Yu is so ostentatiously dressed, he's so Extra but in a serious way, and in the first episode could easily be mistaken for the protagonist. It spells out so much about him that he is more elaborately dressed than the crown prince and sometimes also the emperor.

I've just arrived at ..I think ep 15?.. where Mei Changsu is giving him increasingly dubious but plausible advice, and it's so good to watch it unfold. Also wow, MCS was incredibly rude to Banruo but in a deniably austere way, ignoring her polite gestures ('Please sit down') and not speaking to her at all until the prince arrived. I'm not entirely sure why he did that but it was fun to see.

There are some scenes where I am becoming convinced that the lighting and the blocking is deliberately done to show Hu Ge's facial scars when he's speaking about (or denying) his past. It's not like they are all that noticeable, and I'm sure they could have been completely covered if so desired.

NiF is such a good show to rewatch in winter, with all the handwarmers and charcoal fires and the way every character speaks with frost plumes, even indoors. I ordered a heated pad for my feet, this may be related.

The long-awaited update for Stardew Valley on mobile (Switch, iOS, etc) just released tonight and I was happy to dive in, but I ran into some immediate bugs and I think I'll hold off for now until bugfixes are released.

My own observed bug was a second house that is visible on your Meadowlands farm from day 1; it's obviously a multiplayer house, even has the package inside that you can't open because it's for 'someone else', but there is no actual multiplayer option on mobile. Spooky.

The bug I've seen reported that made me decide to quit immediately was that your first two chickens (you start out with those on a Meadowlands farm) can disappear overnight. No thank you!

ETA I do love the dev's response:

PSA: there is currently an issue, if you start a new farm on the meadowlands farm and open the animal door on the coop day 1, your chickens will disappear. If you leave the door closed for one day, it should save them. We will fix this. Lore: There is a wild coyote on the farm…
— ConcernedApe (@ConcernedApe) November 4, 2024

I was having blood drawn today and was asked "Did you eat or drink anything today?" and it occurred to me as it always does that the official word for not having drunk or eaten yet in Dutch, the one they check off on the form, is so incredibly confusing. It's "nuchter" which ALSO means "I am not drunk, I have not consumed alcohol".

So full props to the nurse for asking me that sensible question instead of "Bent u nuchter?" which I've heard before.

But now it occurs to me that I don't know an English translation for 'nuchter' either. 'Sober' yes, but that doesn't cover the have you eaten/drunk part. (or does it? in that case, English is just as confusing...)

I don't participate in Yuletide as such, these days, but I like to write a treat now and then, and since the signups just opened I had a look at all the fandoms in the tagset.

At first I thought Lost Tomb Reboot was excluded, which made sense because it has a lot of fic, but it turns out it's available for Yuletide requests after all, under its new official AO3 name: Reunion: The Sound of the Providence (TV 2020). 🧐

I haaate the new name and I don't understand the need for it, either. We're fans, we came up with a better name, let it stay! This is unrelated to Yuletide though, probably. Maybe it's been live for a while and I only just noticed?

There's a couple days left to sign up for

guardian_wishlist, and I managed to get my wishlist done too. It's a fun very low-key Guardian and related fandoms event where you can comment on someone's wishlist to give them something they requested (fanart, fic, picspams, podfic, all kinds of goodness) and then it all goes live at once in a month's time. And you don't need to sign up for anything if you just want to give a gift to someone else, it's a free for all.

Much like Zhu Yilong's movie promo - it's such a typical Long-ge fandom experience that there's no news for months except for maybe some commercials, and then BOOM a firehose of content. He grew his hair, he dyed it blue, he gave a concert on the beach! And on it goes.

New weird meta-romcom movie will be shown in the US and I am very jealous. I really doubt this one will make it to Dutch cinema - I know I said that about the last one too, but that one made it to Cannes and that must have helped enormously.

Only the River Flows, Zhu Yilong's latest movie, had two showings in the Cinemasia film festival in Amsterdam and I picked the second showing, because the first one was late at night on Friday and the second a much more comfortable Sunday afternoon. The second showing also had a Q&A listed on the program, and I enthused to

mumblemumble about this, saying "I'll have to think of a decent question to ask that isn't just 'What was it like working with Long-ge?'" She told me that in a similar situation during a film festival showing in Germany, the Q&A turned out to be a prerecorded Zoom call, so I assumed it would be the same here.

It was not. The director Wei Shujun showed up at the end with an interpreter, and fielded a bunch of questions with flair. There were a lot of stylish young Asian women in the audience, and half of the questions were in Chinese.

Why did he pick the Albert Camus quote at the beginning? He got a laugh because he'd forgotten the exact words, but the gist was that he wanted to signpost the absurdity of the story at the beginning. I think he used the word 'absurd' (or whatever it is in Chinese) three or four times in all.

Why did Ma Zhe insist on smoking when that would have been so bad for the baby? This made me laugh, and the director apologized for the bad influence but it didn't feel like a heavyhanded moment, and he added that it was both a stylistic and a historical touch.

Then I screwed all my courage to the sticking place and asked my question, which was along the lines of “In this role Zhu Yilong seemed to play a very interior character - was that due to your direction?” My head was red as fire during this but the audience lights were still low, good for me.

Wei Shujun said that Zhu Yilong had read the book and arrived on set with a specific idea of how to play the character, and they worked on it together. They rehearsed a lot, even for moments that might look spontaneous or like they would only need one take, because they kept adjusting how many words Zhu Yilong would say and how much movement he would show. Basically wanting to do a lot with very little. Also because film is expensive, they couldn’t shoot a lot of takes. He mentioned the moment Ma Zhe discovers the suitcase under the bed, and the moment he lies down on the bed, as examples.

My thoughts on the movie: I didn't fully get what the story was doing, and possibly that was the entire point, but I really enjoyed it anyway. Seeing it in a slightly dilapidated theatre (my chair seat cover was ripped into shreds and so was my seatmate's) added to the ambiance and the vibe. There were a lot of beautiful little human moments as well as stylish set pieces, and I thought Zhu Yilong absolutely pulled off the minimalist, interior acting that still made me feel intensely connected to his character. Also I'm glad I went into this movie unspoiled because I feel like that's part of the experience, watching it unfold, so I'm hesitant to give any details.

I want to see it again and I'll watch it on the Spanish streaming site I mentioned earlier. As a first experience of seeing Zhu Yilong in a theatre, this was a total joy.

Sooo I was going to watch Only the River Flows on the Spanish streaming site I mentioned previously, but I looked up the movie again and it turns out it's playing at an Asian film festival in Amsterdam next week!

I bought tickets and I'm excited to go - this will be the first Zhu Yilong movie I see on an actual movie screen. Which seems especially fitting for this one (it was shot on film and in chronological order, apparently. What a rare experience that must be for an actor.)

Quick headsup (thanks to wenella's feed and

lunarriviera pointing out that this service is accessible outside Spain) that Zhu Yilong's latest movie Only the River Flows is available streaming on this Spanish streaming service: https://www.filmin.es/pelicula/el-silencio-del-agua

With Chinese audio and English subs available, hooray. I was hoping to get to see this in cinemas, but the trek to Germany to see it there was too much for me right now, alas.

You pay 8 eur for a monthly subscription, which you can then immediately cancel (I don't speak any Spanish but it was easy enough: go to top right for your profile, hit Configuracion, and you'll get an option to cancel your subscription) and still have access to content for the next month.

I joined Yuletide the way I've come to prefer, same as last year: I didn't sign up, I browsed people's prompts and wrote a story as a gift fic. In this case it was for

thefourthvine, and it was for Hikaru no Go, which I've never written in before. Perfect timing for the fandom to rejoin Yuletide, since I recently watched the anime and was full of feelings.

with the moon the heart (3220 words, rated T, no warnings)
Shindou always leaves, and Touya always runs after him, but not today.
Today, Touya has stolen Shindou's fan.

for my own mental health, I haven't been following political news particulary closely, and when I voted yesterday I had the sincere hope that it was finally time for a leftist coalition to rise to power in the Netherlands. welllll...nope.

I am sad, mad, worried, and disgusted. The only thing to keep morale bolstered is that we have a multiple party system and there will not be a single party ruling the country, but a coalition, and other parties to vote against their plans. But this is a massive step back in almost every way imaginable, and one I'd hoped we would never take.

Testing out the new Create Entries beta for DW before it goes live seems like a smart idea, let me know if anything looks odd on your end.

I've been in hibernation mostly, fannish and otherwise, but I wrote a small addition to the ongoing Dreamtime podfic that

sef1029 is organizing and recording. It's an impression of Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan's evening, told in fragments by multiple authors, with the express intention of sending the listener to a peaceful sleep. I really like this idea and I hope it has some benefits to anyone who has trouble sleeping.

So I fell down a Hikaru no Go rabbithole. The plan was to watch the new Chinese live action, which I haven't done yet except for an episode or two, because I read the manga and watched the anime instead.

Did I learn to play Go? No. What's so fun about HnG is that it's still appealing even when you don't know the game.

I'm also fascinated that the mangaka, Takeshi Obata, went on to work on Death Note. I know he was the artist and not the writer, but I love the idea of Ryuk in Death Note (nightmarish demonic shinigami accompanying our protagonist, invisible to everyone else) as an alternate version of Sai in HnG (charming, brilliant, puckish, only occasionally ruthless ghost accompanying our protagonist, invisible to everyone else). Or the frenemy/rivalry of Touya and Shindo at a Go board turning into a similar relationship between a serial killer and a detective.

Mostly, having just finished the anime, I want to sit with Sai and make him ghost tea and listen to his stories about Heian court life. It's mentioned in canon that he played with Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shonagon, but what did they talk about? Did Sei Shonagon try to flirt her way out of defeat? Did Murasaki base any of her Tale of Genji characters on him?

goss posted: Signal boosting: OTW Membership Offers

once again I am mesmerized by Zhu Yilong even though he's in a commercial for awful looking fast food pizza (it has mashed potatoes on it??)

rude of him. why does he have to look like that. "Do you know the taste of longing?" is quite the slogan for, I have to repeat myself, a pizza that features mashed potatoes as a reasonable topping.

Here's the video and yes I did link it to start at the best moment, you're welcome. i am not responsible for the way his cheek hollows out.

I was rewatching some of Nirvana in Fire in the laziest way, on Youtube, just snacking on half an episode (and I really really miss being able to rewatch Guardian in the same way), and good grief I don't think I've ever seen another show where a quiet conversation between two people has me on the edge of my seat this much.

Right now I watched the conversation between the Emperor and Consort Jing where he's almost falling asleep on his big bed and she's seated beside him, gently holding his hand. He looks sleepy and their voices never go much above a murmur, but when he asks her 'do you ever dream about her?' and she deflects because she knows he means Consort Chen, but still doesn't dare mention her--it's riveting, and she also knows the perils of lying to this man.

Every single thing he says to her, even seemingly kind things like 'Don't let the Empress bully you' is lined with rusty nails and boobytraps, and she navigates every single hazard with such skill. It's the equivalent of an especially vicious tomb in Lost Tomb Reboot, but here none of the hazards are visible, it's all in the character work.

And after she deflects, and he says "You know I wasn't talking about the Grand Empress" she does give him his answer, that she dreams of Consort Chen (though I don't think her name is ever mentioned by either of them?) and the emotional tension gets more intense, even as the actual 'will he murder her for saying this' tension eases up a bit. Seeing Consort Jing wince and get tense and visibly react to what he's asking of her is such a moment, because she hardly ever lets anything unbalance her.

In short: Consort Jing 💕

I posted the final chapter of my Guardian AU today:

Close Your Eyes and See Me (88053 words) by marycrawford
Chapters: 17/17
Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV 2018)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan
Summary:
It seemed like a good idea to Zhao Yunlan at the time. Take a job as a life drawing model, observe the students, try to figure out if one of them murdered the previous art professor.
Get paid to sit on a chair, basically. Piece of cake, right?

It was a whole new thing to me, posting a story in chapters, and I enjoyed it (people yelled at me about the cliffhangers, which was delightful).

Except for my dilly-dallying over the final chapters, which I started rewriting back in October as I posted the first chapters, and then...kept going. Or rather, not so much going as opening the file and closing it again before running away in a complete collapse of confidence. Without a

dorinda to gently poke me into actually Doing the Thing, it might never have gotten there. But now it's done, happy sigh, and I can start poking at other ideas that have been lying fallow (and the other AU that I wrote 20K of in the before times, do I even remember where I was going?)

Stardew Valley basically got me through the pandemic and it's half price at GOG right now - 7 eur or the equivalent in dollars.

I support buying it at full price, because it's made by a single, fabulous developer, but it's not like it would go on sale without his full approval (and also he made a bunch and deserves every red cent.)

In essence, it's about growing your farm but also about getting to know the villagers you meet, and it's made with love and care that none of the monetized clones that came out after it got popular will ever be able to replicate.

I'm still trying to figure out who I will marry this run - my last farm I didn't want to marry anyone at all and lived with cryptid monster Krobus instead, who only comes out when it's raining and makes me poppyseed muffins to express his affection.

So I wrote a very short story for

mumblemumble for fandomtrees, about Chu Shuzhi at a slave auction, being put on display by his Lord Envoy for Reasons.

And then

mumblemumble wrote a sequel that goes into more detail about the things Chu Shuzhi would do for his Lord and what his Lord Envoy would ask of him, and it is glorious and you should all read it:

Aftermath (2360 words) by A
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV 2018)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Chu Shuzhi/Shen Wei
Characters: Chu Shuzhi, Shen Wei (Guardian), Zhao Yunlan
Additional Tags: Slaves, Submission, Loyalty Kink, And About Fifteen Other Kinks, Aftercare
Summary:

"Quiet," his Lordship commands, and the room falls silent. His finger settles under Chu Shuzhi's chin to tilt his head up, his gaze heavy on Chu Shuzhi, his eyes dark as a storm underneath the mask. "This one isn't mine to discipline anymore," he says coldly, causing a victorious murmur among the crowd.

Chu Shuzhi doesn't flinch. He doesn't move at all. He has to remind himself to breathe.

I didn't sign up for

fandomtrees this year, but I browsed the various prompts and made two small gifts:

- a pencil/crayon drawing of a Nirvana in Fire festival lantern for

mekare

- a Guardian story (snippet?) for

mumblemumble: "The Auction" on DW or AO3. (Chu Shuzhi/Shen Wei, loyalty kink, rated M)

killabeez posted: K/S Archive news—Please share!

I haven't done Yuletide in its true form since 2013, but I do like writing a treat now and then.

dorinda pointed me to

raspberryhunter's excellent prompts for Nirvana in Fire, and I thought hmmm. Post-canon, consort Jing free to roam, a possible fix-it for Mei Changsu's whole everything? Yes please.

I've never written for Nirvana in Fire before, and I love the show so much in all its complex glory that it felt pretty intimidating, but this idea was compact enough to make it manageable. I wanted to evoke the breathless feeling of the show, where two masterminds drinking tea together can have all the lethal energy of a cagefight.

and remains quiet (1711 words, rated G, no warnings)

She picks up her cup and sips delicately of the chrysanthemum tea she brought. It is cooling and calming. She doesn’t need calming, but Mei Changsu might. She is about to administer a medicine that the patient will find disagreeable.

The patient looks fevered, at the moment. “What is wrong with Jingyan?”

lunarriviera posted: second grace: a mo sanmei/bai sanwan fic

This is such a good story, and provides Mo Sanmei (Zhu Yilong's character in his movie Lighting up the Stars) with the best boyfriend, somehow - even though he is doing okay by himself, mostly, and he doesn't know how to be close with anyone, and anyway, it's more important that his kid gets the noodles she deserves...?

Also, it made me cry.

If you get a string of random letters/numbers followed by a suspect link in your AO3 comments, you've been hit by a spambot that's been targeting the site. Obviously, don't click the link.

AO3 support is aware:

AO3 Status on Twitter: "Spam in your comments? First: don't follow the link! But do use the "Spam" button on the comment to report it. (No need to send in a separate support or abuse report! And please don't mark it as spam in your email, or your provider might start thinking all AO3 emails are spam.)"

Long ages ago, I picked Mary Crawford (or nowadays,

marycrawford) as a fannish pseudonym because there were some writers I admired who had literary pseuds, like Emma Woodhouse and Flora Poste - it's been so long that I can't quite remember, but I think they were all K/S fandom zine writers. And so I chose Mary Crawford, because nobody had chosen her yet, because I love her, and because she was the only character to make a gay joke in all of Jane Austen.

There are some advantages to a 'real name' pseud - it's easy for people to call me Mary when we meet, online or offline, and I like that. The disadvantages are largely that I can't search for my own work when I'm feeling blue and want a pick-me-up, hoping to find someone saying something nice, because any links are inevitably Austen-related. And another issue is that I can't namesquat my pseud on any other type of social media, except if I get there very early, which is rare. (I don't have a twitter, and I'm sorry for everyone who's going to miss using it.)

I was in time for cohost, not that I've used it at all yet, so I'm marycrawford there.

I recently picked up Tumblr again, and I'm

mcvices there. I've used it so rarely because it overloads my brain easily and I hate tagging, but the gifs are pretty. And for me, a major upside of the Twitter breakdown is that fandom saint

wenella has made her way to tumblr and is posting Zhu Yilong photos and interviews she translated there, so I can see them more easily. (He is too beautiful and this is a fascinating interview.)

A while ago, I wrote two stories that featured Shen Wei's very ~~opinionated~~ skilled tailor, the man responsible for all those tightly tailored suits (yum). And then

mumblemumble came in and wrote a sequel! It was such a cool surprise, I've never had an original character appear in someone else's work before, and it's a fantastic story.

clean shirt, new shoes (1395 words) by A
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV 2018)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan
Characters: Zhao Yunlan, Shen Wei (Guardian), Original Characters
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Fluff, Suit Kink, Lollipops, Academia
Series: Part 6 of Higher Education
Summary:

"You like it?" Yunlan grins, taking the lollipop out of his mouth to do a little twirl. "You have to like it, I'm not getting changed."

I started posting my long Guardian art AU, yay! It's about 85k which I'm still cutting into chapters, and I need to fix and expand some scenes toward the end so it's not quite done yet. But posting once a week or so will give me time to work on that.

Close Your Eyes and See Me (4006 words) by marycrawford
Chapters: 1/?
Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV 2018)
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan
Characters: Shen Wei (Guardian), Zhao Yunlan
Additional Tags: Art School, Alternate Universe - No Powers, except the power of Art, Drawing, Painting, Professor Shen Wei (Guardian), Detective Zhao Yunlan, Undercover, Nude Modeling, Identity Porn, Romance, Slow Burn
Summary: It seemed like a good idea to Zhao Yunlan at the time. Take a job as a life drawing model, observe the students, try to figure out if one of them murdered the previous art professor.
Get paid to sit on a chair, basically. Piece of cake, right?
Well.

This all started from a delightful prompt by

cyberbrain in the Guardian Prompt Fest in May 2020. Yeah. It's been a while, but this story kept me company through the upheaval of the past years.

It was really nice of Zhu Yilong to record another one of those Thermos ads in what feels like a very fannish setting - a cozy cabin in the snow, quite an idyll, complete with piano and cat and a raging snowstorm outside. I'm not sure why he would want to leave it for CGI land, all he needs is someone to knock the snow off their boots and join him in the cabin...

Meanwhile, we're having ridiculous late-summer weather over here: 21C tomorrow, or 68F. Which is incredibly welcome, since we're also in an energy crisis and any excuse not to turn on the heating is welcome. (It's frustrating that I want to write 'gas crisis', but the US uses the word for the stuff they put in their cars.)

I've not been doing super great for various reasons, but one third thing that cheers me is that I'm making progress on finishing the long Guardian AU I've been working on intermittently since...somewhere in early 2020, apparently. I'm thinking of posting the first chapters once a week or so, while I work on the back end, as it were.

I've never actually posted a serial on the AO3 before - anything I should be aware of? I presume you can still change tags, ratings, etc, as the story progresses?

Today (20 August) is the last day to sign up for

guardian_wishlist by posting a wishlist there, so if you've been meaning to do it, here's your reminder.

But if you'd prefer to look at people's wishlists (here's mine) and see if anything strikes your fancy, you can do that until September 10th and you don't need to sign up for that.

The

guardian_wishlist event has started, and I signed up here. It's a lovely lowkey little event where you post wishes related to Guardian and adjacent fandoms (anything the actors have appeared in) and people comment on your wishlist to fulfill some wishes. You don't have to be signed up to the event to comment, you can just wander along the wishlists once they're live and see if anything sparks your imagination.

ETA: as

trobadora says below, in a fest like this it's just as important to provide prompts for other people as it is to make gifts. For me personally, an event like this is a fic prompt and deadline generator, and the more prompts there are, the more likely it is that one of them will spark an idea for a story. So if you're thinking "I want to post a wishlist but I don't have time to do anything else" that is 100% okay and encouraged.

In the wishlist, you can ask for fic and fanart, but also things like screencaps from that one episode, or translations, or recs for things you would enjoy. This year I asked for fanart for other people's fic, because I have some favorites that would be fun to see illustrated. (This is where a transformative works policy on one's AO3 profile comes in handy.)

You can sign up until August 20th, and then comment on other people's wishlists right until September 10th, where all the comments get revealed at once.

Vividcon challenge vid: Swing

I made this vid in 2009, and the download links for it still work. (Sorry, no streaming, I don't want to deal with the hassle.)

Nichelle Nichols still shines in every scene she's in. 💖

In the hottest week of the year so far, sitting indoors and waiting for better times, I wrote some self-indulgent fluff:

the day of harvest
(Guardian, Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan, 3k words, rated Teen)

“You buying Shen Wei a kitchen appliance was already a terrible idea,” Da Qing says, with a slowly increasing look of horror. He backs away from the countertop, eyes wide. “You messing with the thing before Shen Wei gets home is an even worse idea. You should just return it and get him…I don’t know…a watch or something.”

“Yeah, because that’s romantic,” Zhao Yunlan scoffs.

I've been in a weird headspace re: fandom where I've mostly stopped reading Guardian fanfic because I love it so much, and it has such good writers, that reading anything awesome will do my head in as far as writing goes. (And I'm inching closer on finishing the AU I started, whoops, two years ago? Still a way from the finish, and then there's beta, but things are looking up.) I want to get this story out and catch up to everything I missed, damn it.

But here's a story from a while ago that lit my imagination on fire:

Follow You Everywhere (5091 words) by achray
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 镇魂 | Guardian (TV 2018), Kuroshitsuji | Black Butler
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Shen Wei/Zhao Yunlan
Characters: Shen Wei (Guardian), Zhao Yunlan, SID team
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Kuroshitsuji Fusion, Canon-Typical dark content for Black Butler canon, Canon-typical violence for Black Butler canon, black humour, Constant Innuendo, Demonic Contracts (Kuroshitsuji), Shen Wei and Zhao Yunlan as themselves
Summary:

Never had Shen Wei known such enjoyment, in fulfilling the duties a demonic contract required.

It's a crossover with a manga/anime series I had never heard of, and it doesn't matter because I found the story entirely comprehensible and deeply delicious. And then I fell into a hole and read a whole bunch of the manga, and watched the anime as well. Good times.

And now Guardian has been removed from Youtube, again, which sucks, since it's just so handy to rewatch a scene or an episode through Youtube for a quick fix. And to attract new fans.

But fandom has access to all the beautiful HD files with fan-curated subs. (That link goes straight to a Mega download site that I share with permission!)

I found this so charming, both the story behind the last minute collaboration and the feedback loop where the music makes the audience happy, which makes the organist happy, which makes me happy to watch:

"I often do middle-of-the-night practice sessions at the Royal Albert Hall , and have grown rather fond of hall staff calling up to the organ with requests. At 1am on Friday 20th, someone called up asking me to play Bach's Toccata in D minor. It turned out it was Bonobo's band. 12 hours later they had written me an organ part, and 18 hours later I was helping them close their show to an audience of 5000. This was, undoubtedly, the best moment of my life so far...!"

(warning for strobe lights and general light FX)

Watch on YouTube

sef1029 posted: One day left for Ukraine auction bids

I feel like this auction sort of bypassed my small area of fandom - I hadn't heard of it before signups were already closed, and there are three Guardian creators to bid on for fic and podfic, which is awesome, but feels like a low number? And no Lost Tomb Reboot offers, for example. Anyway, go bid!

sef1029 posted: Sunflower auction (for Ukraine) now open

Thanks to lovely anon who gave me a DW subscription! 💖
I have been keeping my head down, trying to avoid checking the news more than five times a day. The one fannish thing I've been doing is work on the Guardian AU I started pre-pandemic. I really want to get it done so I can have some time off writing and read all the fic in my Marked for Later box.

Some links for cheer:
- a Zhu Yilong burger ad that shows no product whatsoever, just a classy art installation (ie: his face, especially at 0:07) telling us to imagine something "THICK and JUICY". 😹

- I've been watching people's video content for the new Star Wars hotel in Disney World, the one that's really more of a 48 hour roleplay experience with a bonkers pricetag, and the guy playing First Order Lt. Croy is killing it. Love him.

- this week I learned about the artist who made a shark crash into the roof of his house as an anti-war message. "Without the approval of local officials, because he didn’t think they should have the right to decide what art people see." 36 years later, the shark is still there, and the message still matters.

Twitter is now choosing to let me see about five tweets from any account before I get a "log in to see the rest" popup. I can kill the popup, but the entire page freezes so I can't scroll, anyway.

You may ask "why do you care, if you don't want to be on Twitter" but the thing is, all through the pandemic I have kept a single Twitter tab open to wenella's feed of wonderful Zhu Yilong pics and gifs and it has been a real mood-booster. Ditto for the links to fanart and Guardian-related content on twitter that I can click on, thanks to @clevermanka and @plingo_kat posting them here.

So I want to be a ghost on twitter, and clearly they don't want to let me waft around anymore. Anyone got any way around this? (I know, I could open an account and that would solve it, but that is exactly what I want to avoid.)

Related news, I can't believe that Zhu Yilong made a Lenovo ad in 2018 that looks like it was meant to snare Guardian fans, with Z1L saying "I promised you that we will meet again" against a suspiciously glowy, spacy background... (If they hired Bai Yu to make the counterpart ad, fandom would have told me, right?)

Edit: suggested workarounds in comments, thanks all! I haven't tried out Incognito mode in Chrome yet (since I use Firefox and a bunch of ad blockers, add-ons, etc) but what does seem to work is deleting all the twitter-specific cookies from my browser. Which I will probably have to do every day, then.

Edit II, brother of Edit: nitter.net is an open source front end for twitter - very low key, type in the account name you want to look at and go. Thanks to @trobadora for linking me to this!

The developer has also created browser extensions - there's the Nitter one, but there's also a more nuclear option that "redirects Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, Google Maps, Reddit, Medium, Google & Google Translate requests to privacy friendly alternative frontends for those sites". That is the kind of thing I am here for.

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