How AM I going to be an octopus about this?

[lizbee]

attackfish tagged me for this meme, and it is EXCELLENT, except I'm way too lazy to do the bit where I make up 10 new questions and tag more people.

1. Favorite place.

I am fond of libraries, book stores and my house, but choosing one specific favourite is HARD.

2. Favorite fanwork you made.

By a very long margin, "The Princess of the Dragon Flats". I mean, I know everyone goes for the one they did most recently, but I was really happy with the way it turned out. My previous longer fics have always dragged in the middle, and while the pace slows at a couple of points, I don't think this actually drags.

Additionally, I've been getting lovely feedback praising my attention to the tropes and nuances of noir and hardboiled detective fiction. This is especially great because my research consisted of: (1) reading a lot of Raymond Chandler in my early teen; and (2) reading a bunch of essays about features common to the less well-known hardboiled detectives. (Which is how I discovered that a considerable portion of such characters have disabilities as a result of WW1. This cemented my plan to make it a story about Lin without her bending, permanently as far as she can see, and also The Thing That Happens At The End.)

(I did just re-read some Chandler while plotting out the possible-sequel-if-I-ever-have-time, and realised that I did make one genre/setting booboo -- Chandler's detectives drive everywhere, and the car is really important to every aspect of the plot and setting. Whereas I have Lin driving very little, and the plot actually depends somewhat on Republic City's public transport systems. Oooops.)

3. Classical novel you wish you never read.

I can't think of any classical novels I regret reading, but I do wish I could wipe my memory and read Pride and Prejudice for the first time again. I was given an abridged and bowdlerised copy when I was about seven, and I've often wondered what it would be like to read the original and not know how it ended.

4. First fandom.

Officially Star Trek: The Next Generation, but I was engaging in fannish behaviour about kids shows and my mother's soap operas for as long as I can remember.

5. Do you collect anything? If so, what?

Postcards? Here in Australia -- this may be universal, IDK -- cafes have stands of free postcards, some of which carry stylish advertising and some of which are art prints. I have a whole box of them, along with the many, many postcards I buy whenever I'm in a museum or art gallery store. One of my vague plans for this weekend is to actually put them on my wall.

6. Favorite book/movie/tv show/whatever you never managed to be fannish for.

There are lots of things I love without feeling fannish, but I guess the big one is the Marvel Movieverse? I like it, I have lots of opinions about it, I very occasionally read fic, but I've never felt compelled to make anything myself, and I often Tumblr save it just because I get tired of the same faces.

7. Favorite season of the year

Spring and autumn!

8. Mountains, or ocean?

Ocean. It's probably an Australian thing, but I don't like living more than an hour's drive from a large body of water.

9. Has there ever been a book/movie/tv show/whatever that was so bad you couldn't stop watching?

The Last Airbender. Man, that was so bad, but it was like a scab I couldn't stop picking. I couldn't seem to stop myself from first ~acquiring it, and then torturing myself by skipping through scenes. (It didn't help that I have a longstanding crush on Dev Patel, and he and Sean Toub were actually doing decent work with terrible writing.)

Finally I persuaded weaverandom to come over and watch it with me, but that kind of backfired, because she was driving, so we couldn't drink. We made it nearly all the way through, but then Yue said, "We need to show the Fire Nation that we believe in our beliefs," and the DVD player just went, "Yeah, nuh" and died.

(Speaking of Yue, Seychelle Gabriel also worked very hard at not being terrible, and it's really depressing how the few actors of colour were so much more talented than the white kids playing whitewashed characters.)

10. Ice cream, cake, or pie?

This is a big call, but while I was in Canada, I came to the conclusion that pie is the best dessert there is.

Of course, then I found out I'm gluten-intolerant, and I've yet to find a GF pie that isn't terrible, but I still stand by my assertion.

Comments

[kerravonsen]

One of my vague plans for this weekend is to actually put them on my wall.
(nod nod nod)
When I was a teenager, we lived in a house where the front part of the house was old and the back part of the house was newwer. The old part had high ceilings and picture rails. And when I was 14, we went on a trip to Europe. And I bought postcards. Lots of postcards. When we got back, I lined them up on the picture rail in my bedroom. 8-) I think I organized them by colour...

[lizbee]

I have picture rails! But no ladder tall enough to reach them. And I'd have to move all my furniture to get close to the wall.

But now I have a new goal!

[kerravonsen]

8-)

[sassbandit]

I keep thinking about this. I have a similar collection of postcards from museums and from those free stands, but I don't... decorate. Really. I have decorative things but they are useful things. But I am feeling an odd artistic urge lately so who knows.

Cosign on the ocean thing btw. Ballarat is pretty inland but I can look out my window at the storm water drain, know it flows into the Yarrowee Creek, and that that flows to Geelong, and that is enough for me I guess. I felt really confused and out of place when I lived in Ottawa and was never clear at all how you'd get to the sea from there, in terms of waterways. Like you had to go inland first? Or something? Ugh. The Great Lakes just feel so strange to me. They are bigger than Port Phillip Bay, but they don't smell right.

[sholio]

and (2) reading a bunch of essays about features common to the less well-known hardboiled detectives. (Which is how I discovered that a considerable portion of such characters have disabilities as a result of WW1. This cemented my plan to make it a story about Lin without her bending, permanently as far as she can see, and also The Thing That Happens At The End.)

ooooooh! :D I have marked the story to read later (have fallen headlong into a different fandom atm, but Lin + noir = WIN!) - and I was wondering if you happened to have links to any of these essays, or could point me in the right direction? I'm kinda poking at a noir pastiche right now, and I would love to be more aware of the tropes than I am just from reading it.

[lizbee]

I'm afraid I didn't keep any links, because I was mostly googling around at work. I used search terms like "noir tropes" and "hardboiled tropes", "hardboiled detective tropes", stuff like that. There's a pretty big fandom, not that it would call itself that. Oh, and TV Tropes was INCREDIBLY unhelpful.

[sholio]

Still good to know - thank you! :) I had never thought of looking that up specifically. I'll poke around a bit!

[attackfish]

There are always those English pies with mashed potato tops. Wheat being one of the few foods I consistently tolerate, I have not tone extensive research into gluten free desserts. On the other hand, I had such a horrible problem finding ice cream I could eat that I started making my own, and I'm one of the very few ice cream maker owners who uses it all the time.

I wish I had never read Lord of the Flies, and also Catcher in the Rye (the former, because hell no,and the latter because it was a bad time to read that book for me, and I could wish for a different exposure.)

I want mountains AND ocean. It's the one thing I miss about California.

My first official fandom was Harry Potter, but I was proto-fannish about the Dragonball franchise, which makes me not respect ten year old me's life choices at ll.

[fred_mouse]

We have a local gf bakery that does fabulous standard meat pies, and most of the rest are good (I wouldn't recommend the pecan caramel one, unless you can stand having the top of your head blown off with the sugar overload). If you are ever in Perth, let me take you there for lunch, and we can see if they really are fabulous, or if I just have low standards...

[infiniteviking]

...oh man, is "believe in our beliefs" actually a line of dialog that somebody really wrote?

This is indeed an excellent meme. Also I'm (finally) starting to read The Princess of the Dragon Flats and I could hear Lin's voice by the third line.

EeeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEE.

[lizbee]

"We have to show the Fire Nation that we believe in our beliefs the way that they believe in theirs."

(Thank you!)