amyhit

Agh! Stupid, stupid, stupid ethics, I HATE them. I just found a nice cellphone and an envelope with $65 in it in the bulk foods section of Save On. And like the moronic yet essentially ethical person that I am, I marched my find up to the customer service counter and explained the situation. Well no, actually, I stood in the bulk foods isle for a couple of minutes first, yelling internally at myself to TAKE THE DAMN MONEY AND WALK AWAY while trying not to look like someone who was in the midst of a debate between her opportunistic avarice and dumbass empathy. I really think that if it had been $100 in that envelope, it would be in my pocket right now, because there is only so much temptation one can be expected to withstand. But damn it, I turned everything in, and now for all I know the girl behind the counter is just going to keep the money for herself, and my "doing the right thing" will have accomplished nothing but depriving me of a whole bunch of wonderful, delicious money. The worst part is that found money is the BEST kind of money. Money that I've worked for always feels so pleasureless and inadequate. The amount is never enough to be worth the time I had to spend to earn it, and there's always something practical and joyless that the money ought to be used for. But found money is different. It is free and frivolous money, a gift from the universe, an invitation to indulge, to buy something luxurious that I wouldn't be able to derive pleasure from buying with earned money because it wouldn't feel worth the price.

My only consolation is that I have a journal in which I can pat myself on the back for Doing The Right Thing. If I'd taken the bills I don't actually think I'd feel guilty, but I also probably wouldn't be in a hurry to hop on the internet and announce that I'd pocketed some poor forgetful person's money. Besides, the universe has been fairly kind to me so far this year, and while I don't really believe in karma, I do think there's something to be said for paying it forward in a cosmic sense.

Okay, I feel a little better now. Marginally.


In other news: OMG MARTIN FREEMAN WAS THE EUROPEAN JIM HALPERT?!!*

Up until a few days ago I was not aware that Martin Freeman's role in The Office was Tim Canterbury, the UK's equivalent of Jim Halpert. God that's unnerving. Jim is one of my favorite male characters, so the fact that Martin Freeman played the character who became the prototype for Jim is pretty brain-breaking. Especially because I first found out that Martin played Tim when I was on tumblr and I came across a bit of fanart featuring John-as-Tim and Sherlock. My brain went, "Hang on, why does John look like a short Jim Halpert in this picture?" and then I asked Wiki and Wiki informed me about Tim, and suddenly the whole "made of kittens" thing made sense on a whole additional level. I took The Office UK S1 out of the library and watched the first four episodes, but it's just too uncomfortable, and only makes me want to watch the US version over again. Besides, I don't think I can bear to watch Tim be heartbroken over Dawn; Martin Freeman's face has me too conditioned to care.

*Yes, I know that technically Jim is the American Tim Cavendish, not the other way around. It's not my intention to be a North American chauvinist, it's just that the American version of the show is the version I saw first so for me it takes precedence.

Also, writing this tempted me into watching some Jim/Pam vids on youtube, like the cliché of a fangirl that I am, and really HOW ARE THEY SO WONDERFUL? They have the best canon shippy moments I've ever seen. Their shippy moments are as good as the shippy moments in really good fanfic. I feel like there is some kind of emotional law that dictates maximum shipping potency in a canonical context, and somehow Jim and Pam manage to surpass the maximum limit of that law. I know it has a lot to do with the way the show is filmed. The way the cameras are active voyeurs, and spies, and unbiased observers all at the same time, and the way the characters will reveal themselves by acknowledging or ignoring the camera. It creates a kind of intimacy with the characters that wouldn't otherwise be possible. They react to situations by glancing at the camera to check if they've been caught out, or if the camera is following the situation. Or conversely they forget about the camera and presume they aren't being watched, and their faces speak plainly what they would otherwise conceal. I definitely need to rewatch at least the first two seasons.

I am now the proud owner of a D!college student ID card. (Er, yes, about that: I think D!college is what I will be calling the college I'm going to be attending for the next indeterminate length of time. Not like I'm being extra super secrit, considering how easy it is to figure out which college in the Vancouver area begins with a 'D'. But it'll have to do.)

I am also now the proud owner of a credit card. (OMG I AM SUCH AN ADULT!!1!) It is entirely possible I applied for this horrible little rectangle of consumerist shrapnel for the soul purpose of being able to order myself a bunch of "I Believe in Sherlock Holmes" merchandise online. And maybe a bit of XF merchandise as well. (But please, nobody feel they need to caution me about the dangers of credit card debt. If there's one thing in the whole world that I am extraordinarily good at, it's clinging to money the way a small, tenacious squirrel who is neurotically convinced that winter is going to descend at any moment and starve it to death in a matter of days, clings to its one lone hazelnut.)

Speaking of XF merchandise, I was downtown having lunch earlier and a guy walked past my table wearing a white-on-black "I Want to Believe" t-shirt. I just caught a glimpse of it as he passed, otherwise I would have said something to him like the true geek I am.

I took this screencap from a YouTube vidoe about the making of Sherlock S2. (click for somewhat bigger version)


Don't they look exquisite? And I think it's amusing that the production people actually built a bed that would tilt from horizontal to vertical and then machine lifted it out into the middle of a field. I definitely would have presumed it was an effect achieved by computer.

For a while now I’ve been trying to figure out exactly what it is about Sherlock (BBC) that makes seeing its characters in alternate universes so delightful and compelling. Before I got into the Sherlock fandom I don't think I could’ve imagined a fandom in which so many of the fics were full blown, drop-the-characters-into-a-radically-different-context AUs. I definitely couldn’t have imagined enjoying that kind of AU story so much. For the massive amount of X-Files fanfic I’ve read, I can only think of a small handful of fics which are that kind of AU. I also find that once the novelty wears off, I just don't enjoy a story about Mulder and Scully existing in the absence of their basic canonical context. The same goes for any other fandoms I’ve been in or browsed through.

So anyway, I’ve been a bit baffled by the way Sherlock AUs tend to work, charmingly well, a great deal of the time. The fandom has a fairly large number of skilled writers, which helps, but there still has to be something about the show that’s making people want to read and write these AU stories in the first place. Eventually I sat down, thought it through, and came to some conclusions, which I shall now share if for no other reason than because there are few things I do better more frequently than over-analyse my favorite subjects in a public setting:

( In which I make up terminology and eventually devolve into J/S shipping, as I am wont to do. )

There is a fic. It is called The Theory of Narrative Causality, and I think reading it is what going insane feels like - or would feel like, if going insane were hilarious and felt really good.

The premise-- oh man, the premise-- *breathes into a paper bag*

The premise is that John and Sherlock are BNFs in the Sherlock Holmes fandom. Together, they fight crime. (Always.) And write porn, incidentally.

What the premise doesn't divulge is that the entire fic is formatted as a series of Fandom Wank posts, geek discussions in LJ comments threads, IMing sessions, PMs traded back and forth, sock puppets being trolls, links to actual Sherlock Holmes related webpages, and snippets of the fanfic John is currently writing, including the modern day(!!!) AU fic he's writing for the Sherlock Holmes Big Bang, which is going on as part of the plot of the story. Plus, all of the secondary Sherlock characters are Holmes fans too, and they all have LJ accounts of their own, where they post and receive comments from their fellow Holmes fans.

ETA: and now people in the story are writing fandom secrets and kink meme fills about Sherlock and John. BAHAHAHA!

And it's all so well coded that at first I didn't notice the fic had ended and the actual comments on the fic had begun.

So meta it hurts.

Now usually this would not be my thing. I don't like it when people make the characters I love more like normal people (more like me), because the fact that they're significantly more awesome and brave and everything than I am is a big part of why I love them in the first place. So yes, there was a time, long, long ago, in January, when I would have passed right by this fic without a second thought.

But clearly the Sherlock fandom has infected me with some kind of cracktastic alternate universe virus, because I started reading "The Theory of Narrative Causality" this morning, and OH MY GOD FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THINGS GEEKISH AND METATEXTUAL I NEED MORE OF THIS. It has derailed my brain with its sweet, sweet insanity.

Every time I think I know what to expect from this fandom, it goes and does something that is even more brilliantly mad, and I have to reassess my conclusion. Ultimately I think perhaps there’s just no limit to the delicious lunacy the Sherlock fandom is capable of.

"At this period of my life the good Watson had passed almost beyond my ken. An occasional weekend visit was the most I ever saw of him. Thus I must act as my own chronicler."

--Holmes, in The Adventure of the Lion's Mane


Me:




( Shipping. It is a drug. )

Seriously, if anybody wants to share their methods for embracing cognitive dissonance that would be cool. Not that it’s necessarily going to work on me. I’ve come to the conclusion I am terminally rational. Okay, okay--about most things.

For the last couple of months I've had a fixation with the song Mistaken for Strangers by The National, stemming from the fact that in my head it’s totally a Mulder song.

Make up something to believe in your heart of hearts
So you have something to wear on your sleeve of sleeves

I don't think of it as an X-Files song, per se, but as the kind of song that Mulder himself would really resonate with. Like if you could bring Oxford-student Mulder into the present day, he'd definitely have this on his MP3 player. It's the sound and the energy of the track that makes me think of him, as much as anything. It's not as though all of the lyrics are fitting, but the overall impression is moody and cynical and a bit manic; a song about feeling strange and isolated and surrounded by things you can't connect with, but also about wanting to be aloof, and having a sense that picturesque normalcy is what's expected of you.

And then there's this- arguably the track’s central lyric:

Oh you wouldn’t want an angel watching over
Surprise, surprise they wouldn’t wanna watch

-which is basically my concept of pre X-Files Mulder in a nutshell. Cynical but sensitive, dismissive of both the value of others and of his own value. Full of unconfronted ambivalence. Plus, despite the gender-neutral pronoun (which I like), guardian angels are most often characterized as female, and Mulder’s life is nothing if not pervaded, and really shaped by, the presence and absence of women.

The WIPs! They call to meeee! I need them in my liiife! Or else I need to make them STOP.

There is a Vampire!Sherlock/BAMF!John-the-mystery-fae-type-creature fic, IN MY HEAD. It has been there for several weeks. I want it to GO AWAY and STOP TORTURING ME with its ridiculous hotness and its surprising lack of suckiness, and its magical soul-bonding (now with a bazillion percent more pheromones!), and its stalking-each-other-like-animals-totally-equals-foreplay scene, and its even-sort-of-having-a-plotness.

Also, there is another fic in my head involving Werewolf!Sherlock (who is actually some kind of as-yet-unspecified creature) and Fearless!Protective!Doctor!John, and a mysterious curse, and a road trip, and epic refusal to act on UST (John), and epic refusal to acknowledge UST’s existence (Sherlock), and deciphering hieroglyphs, and visiting Sherlock’s childhood home, and- and- THINGS! Fun, addictive things! And now every time I see a dog larger than a terrier my brain is like, SHERLOCK! *facepalm*

My sanity is not equipped to deal with WIPs! For days now I’ve been flailing around (in my head; there is flailing in my head), all, “But- but I’m an X-Phile! My fandom is old. I’d never read a WIP in my ENTIRE LIFE before this. I don’t know how to HANDLE IT.” I think I should probably have built up some kind of WIP-tolerance before I went and read 250 pages of a fic that hasn’t been updated in FIVE WEEKS, and might never be finished. NEVER. La la la, I can't think about that.

Seriously, the acronym IDEK could have been coined specifically so that it can be used in conjunction with Sherlock fanfic. I really -don’t- even know.

I guess I should actually acknowledge the fics I'm going on about. Not that this is a high-traffic place, but nonetheless, it's only fair to the author, especially since I haven't actually left her any feedback, um...yet. So there's Always Miss Something, which is the one with vampires, and then there's When The Impossible Refuses To Be Eliminated, which is the one with Sherlock the WereCreature. Oh random_nexus, you and your strange, hot Creature!fic WIPs.

Okay, it's official: my favorite feeling - seriously, favorite - is the feeling of reading a really brilliant, really epic, impossibly thrilling piece of fanfic and just, like, freaking the fuck out every second sentence, and maybe some of the sentences in between too, and basically just feeling like this fanfic is what my brain exists for- duh, of course the evolution of human intelligence was all about getting to the point where one can read fanfic and be rendered a quivering, fanfic-junkie mess at all of the FEELINGS that are being FELT EN MASSE.

Seriously I- I think I need to breath into a paper bag or something. I think I need to devote one entire room of my apartment to flailing -- pad it down so that I could go in there and fling myself violently about whilst yelling exclamations regarding the particularly squee-inducing parts of whatever fanfic has me in its grip.

For the record, the fic that has inspired this bout of hyperventilation is the sensation of falling as you just hit sleep by greywash. It's 83,000 words of post-Reichenbach fallout (pun intended), and dizzyingly awesome crap will just not. stop. happening.

Also, how the fuck does one even write an 83,000 word story in under a month and have it not suck? How? How! IT'S THE SIZE OF A SMALL NOVEL.


I've always thought Iolokus was written astonishingly quickly, but at approximately 200,000 words I would guess it still took about eight months to write, divided between two writers, which is still less than a third of the speed greywash must have been writing. Granted, what MustangSally and RivkaT were doing writing Iolokus was rather more complicated than a straightforward action/adventure/drama narrative.

Can anyone else, off the top of their head, think of any fics of decent quality they have read (in any fandom) that they noticed had been written remarkably quickly? This sort of rapid fire, sustained creativity fascinates me. I guess I feel that observing it and marveling at it is the next best thing to possessing it for myself. (A distant second, but I’ll take what I can get.)

I feel the need to comment on (and/or post links to) a bunch of random crap (I say ‘crap’ adoringly) that I have stumbled across in the last several weeks.

Things that are not Sherlock related:

1. The moments ticked by like minutes, This quote taken from a fic I read the other day. It reminded me why I do not, under any circumstances, attempt to read fanfic in teen-demographic fandoms.

2. "They're grownups and so am I, where's the sex?" It's possible you had to be there to really appreciate her delivery, but this is my friend (who I have concluded is much wittier than myself), talking about the way, eventually (if not immediately) one gets to the point where, if a fic isn’t at least R-rated, you find yourself thinking of it as stunted, lacking. Look, fellow fen, the mark of Parental Guidance is upon it! Scroll past quickly, quickly, there is nothing for you beyond those gossamer gates.

( Sherlock related things: )

If the Sherlock fandom were a drinking game, I would’ve passed out under the table quite a while back. So there’s that.

I have read SO much fanfic, watched SO many fanvids, and looked at SO much fanart, I think I might be getting a little bit brainwashed. And I have SO much to say about this insane, yet quite awesome fandom, but I don’t know where to start. I’ve caught up with the show now, I guess that’s a place to start. I walked around like a zombie the day after I watched The Reichenbach Fall, suffering through the kind of withdrawal one does not expect to get from a series that only has six episodes to begin with.

Okay, maybe I should just start with a few basic impressions:

( writers and villains and verdicts, oh my. )

I realize I haven’t said a word about John or Sherlock yet. I think they’re going to need a post or ten of their own. Honestly, all this chatter has barely scraped the surface. I want to talk about the fandom, I want to talk about fanon, I want to talk about fanfic, and fanvids, and fanart, and probably do rec posts for each of those things. I even want to flail about numerous Britishisms, and how I much I love the word “jumper.” *pats John*

On a side note, does anyone have any idea how I can go about attracting Sherlock watchers to my Sherlock posts? It’s just that I’d like to be able to discuss this show with fellow fans, and while I’m super glad that there are three Sherlock fans on my flist already, it would be kind of nice to have, um, a few more than that. But I can’t entice people with the promise of Sherlock fanfic, because I’m not likely to be writing any, and I don’t vid or have any real talent for creating fanart. Is there a Sherlock community for people to just post their thoughts about the show? I don’t want to spam a community with this kind of trifling stuff unless that’s specifically what the comm’s for, you know?

As you can doubtlessly tell, I’m really abysmal at social networking. What I should probably do is just start adding Sherlock fans myself, and then maybe a few of them will add me back. But I’m incredibly bad at taking the initiative with such things. Does anybody have any Sherlock fans on their flist whom they find particularly interesting?