all my keysmash are belong to you

The megexchange sign-up post is open for business! ASK NOT WHAT MEGFANDOM CAN DO FOR YOU BUT WHAT YOU CAN DO FOR MEGFANDOM. Actually, ask both. Do you wanna consume some Meg-centric fics, fanarts, and vids? You wanna make some?! HELL YEAH YOU DO. JOIN UP. We have colorful promo banners, as such:


A MEG-CENTRIC FANWORK EXCHANGE
rules & timeline / SIGN-UP POST / sign-up deadline: february 10

I have not yet had the time to post my thoughts on the past two SPN episodes but I LOVE THEM. I LOVE THIS SEASON, and it deserves more flailing and narrative speculation than I've been giving it because NAOMI and KEVIN'S DESERT and of course THE INDOMITABLE CHARLIE BRADBURY, oh god. I have so much ahfjlaksjfsld at Naomi and the golden spiral of miracles that bloom outwards from an angel's suffering.

THE ONLY THING IT NEEDS NOW IS MEG.

It's multifandom!

And not that the following has anything to do with summer, but here is a snippet about Dean shortly after 7x03 where he's sad about Sam and Cas. Action-packed stuff, I know. Explosions, car chases, etc.

( gen, 364 words, manpain )

1. Here's the stuff I wrote for the 3-sentence fic meme. ( Captain America, Narnia, Skins, Novakcest, Mary Poppins, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Supernatural )

2. Are you guys watching BBC's 'Frozen Planet' series? FJSLFJLKD SO BEAUTIFUL, the dry valleys where the boulders are hollowed out by the wind, the underwater icicles killing the starfish, and that's THREE TONS OF SNOW ON THAT TREE, SON. THE SNOW IS THE ANGEL AND THE FOREST IS THE VESSEL, and then and THEN: the auroraaaaaaa. *______* PS: orcas are dicks.

3. I respect your argument, but Misha Collins tweeted in Indonesian and I'm going to roll around in my own rainbow tears for a couple of hours in order to recover. ("Good question," he says. "This will begin at night after dinner.") YES, MISHA, YES, I ACCEPT YOUR OFFER OF MARRIAGE. SHALL WE HONEYMOON IN BALI?

4. Pippin Took, Lana Lang, Helen Magnus, and Will Zimmerman walk into a bar and bring space boys to their space yard. WHATEVER THE HELL IS GOING ON HERE, I WANT IT NOW. :-OOOOOO

5. Looks like it's that time of year for anonymous holiday love memes! Here is my thread. Start your own so I can anon-love you too!

1. What is an erasure? This is an erasure, pretty much. The multifandom erasureathon fest is open for sign-ups for one more week! Sign up here.

2. Pan-Fandom Tinyships Commentfest, for the extra rare ships, because a commentmeme containing an Alan Grant/Ian Malcolm prompt is OKAY BY ME. <3

3. SPN Femslash Week 2011 has begun! There's nothing on spnfemslashweek yet, but the tumblr equivalent is reblogging some really lovely stuff.

4. ( I'm a few eps into the Jensen season of Smallville, which I am watching mostly in a vacuum and armed only with fannish osmosis. )

5. Helen Magnus is probably a Time Lord ( and other deep thoughts about season 1 of Sanctuary, and also Kate Freelander. Nothing very spoilery. )

1. Sign-ups for erasureathon are open! The profile page has a good explanation of what erasure poetry is. Last round, I erased be_themoon's Narnia zombiepocalypse fic into this thing that isn't even really fannish anymore, which is part of the fun - the erasure doesn't have to be about what the original fic was about. gallifreycalls went above and beyond and not only erased but turned my Merlin remix into art, holy wow. Erasures are fun, COME JOIN THE PARTY.

2. You know what's even more fun than writing things? Enabling other people to write things for you. jimmybigbang (or rather, Novak Big Bang) has a plot bunny playground and WIP adoption center. Similarly, dc_dystopia (or rather, Dean/Cas darkfic in general) has both a prompting post and a plot bunny grooming post.

3. In TV news, I keep meaning to make posts about Parks & Recreation and The Good Wife, but it keeps boiling down to "my favorite part was all of the parts". The Leslie/Ann friendship on P&R, man. It resonates with me in exacting and genuine ways. I recognize it. Actually I think what I appreciate the most about both these shows is the characters' diversity of successes and how unexpectedly empowering that is. Success and confidence look like a lot of things, but TV shows are rarely the place I go to be reminded of that. But suddenly Leslie Knope!

4. Sons of Anarchy is not a show I'd recommend to everyone, but I'm enjoying the crap out of it and can I get a WOOOOOOOO for Gemma, who is perfect? I really appreciate the Gemma/Jax relationship here because you don't get that many good mother/son relationships on TV. You usually get a crapload of father/son and mother/daughter - and some father/daughter - but I feel like mother/son gets the worst rap and is the most maligned. Gemma and Jax are strong characters who love and respect each other very much, and it's really heartening to see. I also have a bunch of capslock regarding the evolution of Gemma and Tara's friendship, but that is for another time. Unrelatedly: this show is like a Deadwood cast party or something.

5. Updated the masterlist with 8 new SPN fics, all of which are at different points of the Dean/Castiel shippiness spectrum, ranging from "gen fics inspired by shippy prompts" to "post-apocalyptic blowjobs". So yeah.

6. OMFG YES YESSSSSSSSS

POETRY PROMPTS FEST 2011

THE NEW SPN EPISODE. ( THEY DON'T EVEN HAVE IMPALAS IN FRANCE. THEY CALL IT L'IMPALA. )



A gen-oriented, horror-themed Comment Meme
[Click on the image to go to the meme.]
Banner courtesy of animotus

In other news, I wish this WW2 AU would shut its face already. I don't even know how to spell 'lieutenant' before I spell-checked this sentence, so why do I have this rambling outline threatening to turn into actual fic? Ugh, weatheredlaw, this is all your fault. You and your WW2 AU Wincest graphic, DAMN YOU.

OH MY GOD OH MY GOD OH MY GOD. Stop. Everything.



worldwide_spn
A fanworks challenge inspired by 50states_spn - but focusing on culture, traditions and myths from the rest of the world instead.
This is for non-American SPN fans to introduce the countries they come from - or simply for everyone to introduce a country they love.

AJDLAJFKLJDFKLSJFLDJ!!!!! EVERYTHING I LOVE AND CHERISH. IT'S LIKE THEY TOOK MY M.O. AND MADE A FEST OUT OF IT, hahahaha. Like, I have multiple fics already written that would be eligible for this challenge, if they weren't already posted. I told myself I would take a break from writing challenges after DCBB, but how can I when the internet keeps doing COOL AS FUCK SHIT LIKE THIS?? GEEZ, INTERNET. LEAVE ME ALONE.

OMG. What should I write?! Do I write about them hunting wakwak? lol, what if it's just food porn where I write about them eating my favorite foods? What if Dean gets brainfreeze from halo-halo? THE WAKWAK THOUGH, IT'S CREEPY AS SHIT. "If the sound of the wakwak is loud, it means it is far from you. Otherwise, it is near and worse yet, it is about to attack." I mean, FUCK. Also, what if polyglot!Bobby also speaks Bahasa Indonesia and Sundanese? What if Rufus is like, "Hey, Bobby, don't you guys have like an angel friend that flies you places? Can he zap us to Sumedang? Agus called in his favor." Or maybe instead of Bobby and Rufus, it's Ellen and Jo?! And Cas and Ellen have bemused friction while Jo rolls her eyes.

Balthazar hedonism world tour 2010.

ANGELS AND DEMONS SKIRMISHING ALL OVER THE GLOBE. What if Cas and Meg have met before, fighting over that seal in West Papua? HEY, REMEMBER JESSE? Little demon god child growing up and remaking the world wherever he goes. What if he becomes a surf rat in Bali? What if Anna hid on various islands in Visayas in S4? WHAT IF CLAIRE IS LOOKING FOR HER FATHER and she's smoking a cigarette looking out over Manila bay, exhausted but not deterred, and still as angry? What if during the post-5x16 bender, Cas drank ALL THE EMPARADOR?

LOL U GUISE WHAT IF THERE ARE SWAMP MONSTERS IN THE PASIG RIVER? Those beds of vegetation that just float down it, WHAT IF THEY COME TO LIIIIIIFE?

WHAT IF ON DEATH'S DAY OFF HE GOES TO ENCHANTED KINGDOM

WHAT IF SAM TRIES TO FIT IN A TRICYCLE FJKLSJFLKJFLJF omg

ok i'll stop

SERIOUSLY THOUGH

yvi is hosting a discussion for the creation of a non-English language fest. I'm not quite on board with a couple of their points or the way some points are articulated, but I love the basic idea of flexing our non-English-speaking muscles.

Ever since I moved back to the Philippines, I've been pondering the monolingual bias more. I've talked about it on my LJ before, so bear with me if I'm being repetitive. In Manila, people switch back and forth between Tagalog and English pretty much all the time (and then there is Taglish!), so if I were to write a story in English that was set here, how would I deal with the multilingual aspect? Not everyone in Manila is equally fluent in both languages, but it's still not just a matter of slipping into one language for a while; it's both the languages all the time. Someone on my flist was talking about a book -- the title escapes me, forgive me -- where the whole story is in English, but one language uses regular quotes, the other language uses italics, etc. in order to show the way the different languages interact in the protagonist's story. This strategy has the right idea. The thing about compressing everything down to one language, no matter what language it is, is that it stunts the nuances of codeswitching and social cues.

For example, let's approach it from the opposite side: I tried writing SPN fic in Indonesian one time. Not Indochesters -- just canon Winchesters and Jimmy!Castiel, except it was in Indonesian. A thing that stuck out to me was that whenever Dean cursed, I felt an impulse to switch to Sundanese (a language in West Java). My family slips into Sundanese from Indonesian when they're excited or surprised, so it's become a language I associate with high emotion and intimacy. There are systemic reasons for this association. Indonesian is the language of commerce/government/media in the country, and this keeps regional languages like Sundanese to the informal spheres, such as between family and friends, or traditional spheres, often shorthand for 'folk'.

In the USA, this kind of multilingualism seems to be associated almost exclusively with immigrant/multicultural families. In Indonesia, people who also speak Sundanese, Javanese, Balinese, Batak, etc. are not immigrants but have been there for like forever. However, their language has been minoritized and deemed informal anyway. When I write in Indonesian about American Dean cursing, can I switch to Sundanese for these couple of sentences? The sociolinguistic foundations between Indonesia and the USA aren't the same, and the implications of being multilingual are different.

As far as writing in one language about characters who don't always do goes, my favorite solution thus far is alt-text. The first fic I've seen that does this is Promise of the पुरवाई by dhobikikutti, which is about racebent Mary Poppins. She uses alt-text for transliteration in the fic, but I used it for straight-up English translations in my Indonesian!Novaks fic. It makes translations available for those who only do English, but also keeps the nuances for those who also understand Indonesian. This is one more argument for e-publishing also, I think. Modifying alt-text in e-pub technology to help popularize multilingual writing, y/n?