bironic

Remix and Remix Madness are live. The collections went up last night after I'd gone to bed, so I haven't paged through many entries yet.

1.

Of course, the first one I did read was the remix written for meeee. My lovely anonymous remixer ishafel produced Professional Jealousy (The Black Propaganda Remix), based on a McKay/Sheppard ficlet that took place shortly after "Brain Storm." Anonymous ishafel presents Sheppard's point of view with humor ("as much as John likes him he's well aware that if Rodney were replaceable he'd have been murdered a long time ago") and detail (I love that Jeannie's English-major husband Caleb won the Booker Prize), sketching out a story of all the ways in which he manages a stream of potential disruptions for the benefit of McKay and those around McKay. It quite effectively embodies Wikipedia's definition:

"The major characteristic of black propaganda is that the people are not aware that someone is trying to influence them, and do not feel that they are being pushed in a certain direction."

Probably no one in real life would want to discover they were being manipulated in such a way, but this story is not meant (I believe) to be taken in that serious kind of light. And the graphical postscript just puts a cherry on top.

1a.

Funny story: Challenge rules state that remixers can't change the pairings in the stories they're remixing, to reduce the risk of upsetting their remixee. "Professional Jealousy" is one story where I wouldn't mind seeing the pairing changed, from John/Rodney back to Rodney/Jennifer; it is the only ficlet I've written where I afterwards regretted going with a popular pairing because it was a popular pairing. I almost wrote a note about the pairing flexibility during signups. But what are the chances someone would pick this story to remix? thought I. And lo, here we are!

That is not at all intended as a criticism of the remix, nor did it detract from my enjoyment of it.

2.

Remixes I have particularly liked so far:

The Future Is Now (The Time Traveler's Remix) (Inception, Arthur/Eames, background Mal/Cobb) - Mal is from New Marseille and when she dreams it's of Paris before the Atmo War: the Eiffel Tower a tall iron spike in the sky, the Champs-Élysées solid beneath her high heels. A cool turned-it-inside-out sort of remix.

Roses in December Smell of Blood (The Hunger Games, mostly Haymitch and Peeta) - "Here's a little game," Haymitch says. "Make a list of forty-six dead children, fast." Trauma, the failings of memory, the stirrings of recovery.

3.

The remix I wrote turned out more or less as I'd envisioned, and the recipient seemed to like it, which are the two things that matter most. It's not great, but hopefully it's not bad. I had a good time trying some less familiar-to-me remix techniques. We'll see if anyone else cares. :)

I was tag-surfing on the AO3 last night, like you do, and with no great expectations gave an SGA story called Harem Girl a try, because it promised noncon of the Sheppard/OFC and Sheppard/OMC variety. I confess I skimmed some parts—huh, apparently the story was 43,000 words, which would explain it—but I finished it today and overall it was quite an enjoyable fic! Lots of kinks (shaving, chastity device, corsets and cross-dressing, group fellation practice, chains, harems, sex slavery…) that eventually combined to suit my tastes quite well, distinctive OCs, hot descriptions of building sexual tension and pleasure even when Sheppard's mind is scattered from gender-bending captivity, and the ending didn't take any easy ways out. Specific recs: deelaundry—it's full of forced feminization! synn—it's got some Sheppard/Ronon, not Sheppard/McKay! rubynye—sex slavery consent issues!

So that was nice. Also, out of nowhere that I can discern, last night I had an AU sort of dream in which the Inception team had gone corporate and I was Ariadne. We were gathering around a brainstorming sort of conference table in a warehouse to hash out the plans for our next job. No one looked like they did in the movie. Arthur was drunk and kept repeating some sing-song phrase. The mark's partner/boyfriend looked like Shepherd Book from Firefly; this was remarked on. Cobb was there. Eames was being flirtatious, which I/Ariadne loved, only he was also being a self-serving jerk, which I/she discovered when we were walking and he pressed a set of keys into my/her hand just before a police officer stopped us, which meant that if he'd noticed that something was wrong with the keys (they were stolen? it was something bad), I/she would have taken the heat and not Eames.

Oh—maybe because nightdog_barks posted that pic of Joseph Gordon-Levitt? Eh, I won't look a gift sexual-tension dream in the mouth.

…That sounded better in my head.

+ I wrote some stuff today! 2,650 words of stuff, even.

- Said stuff was not the article I have to write for work nor anything for alpheratz's birthday nor a fill for Kink Bingo's adorable mini-fanwork fest.

+/- Have been watching Vampire Diaries season two instead of crossing anything off my weekend to-do list. Still a surprisingly smart show, for a CW drama. Characters grasp what is going on most of the time without needing three episodes and a speech, and plots move along at an impressive pace so that what would be cliffhangers on other shows instead happen half- or three-quarters of the way through an episode.

+ Also read a couple of good fics: Promises by bluflamingo (SGA/SG-1 Big Bang from a while back, sequel to a previous Big Bang, John Sheppard/Cameron Mitchell, domestic/kidfic) and You Can Be as Loud as the Hell You Want by toomuchplor (Inception, Arthur/Eames, hot and interesting).

'Twas a week full of parties for your typically minimally social correspondent.

+ First, over Thanksgiving, there was the long-anticipated NYC "brunch crew" fannish potluck, complete with screenings of X-Men: First Class and The Eagle, neither of which I had seen, and the latter of which the attendees helpfully and hilariously narrated for me while fast-forwarding to the "good" parts (I must report that the narration was far better than the script), as well as a chance to catch up a little bit with scribblinlenore and pun, in addition to the previously mentioned peoples whom I miss a lot. I have to say, though, that for the first time since I moved away, the longing was tempered by having a few good groups of friends here now in D.C.

+/- Some of those friends having been present for alpheratz's birthday, which featured among other things a delicious chocolate raspberry cake and roasted sweet potatoes and beets and oh yes, good company, but also unfortunately a big fluffy cat that tried to kill my respiratory system. All better now.

+/- And then last night, there was a multi-occasion party at a friends' apartment, at which I met a young woman named Chaya (pronounced like Sheppard's Chaya, not the Hebrew name) and a guy who had been in a band with Bear McCreary, whom I believe some of you adore for his work on the Battlestar Galactica soundtrack? Anyway, my crush also made an appearance, and since I haven't worked up the guts yet to actually ask him out I can only report that the outlook appears to be dimming. Or maybe that is vice versa.

+ The surprise delight of Thanksgiving weekend was getting to meet up with ignazwisdom for a little while. We overlapped in Boston and then hadn't seen each other in… wow, maybe two years.

- There may or may not be a mouse that occasionally inhabits the wall behind my kitchenette and comes out for a visit. I have heard rustling/chewing on two nights in the last month but have not yet seen the critter. Traps and answers forthcoming.

+ Playing Scrabble Slam with deelaundry yesterday and watching her kids be cute, as usual.

+ Dinner! Which is about to be consumed.

Et vous, flist?

Does what it says in the title: These are many of the stories I've read over the last few years that have memorable shaving, waxing or other kinds of depilation scenes in them performed on male characters—face, body or private areas; characters shaving themselves, shaving their friends or romantic partners, being shaved or groomed by strangers; depilation that's sensual and arousing, or nerve-wracking, or endured, or watched or experienced with interest; shaving as preparation, as kink, as connection, as part of a cross-dressing transformation, as assistance after injury or trauma, and most of all, as a demonstration of love and trust.

For my Kink Bingo shaving/depilation square.


( Links and excerpts this way )

And the usual follow-up question: Any others I'll kick myself for forgetting?

Inception (etc.) recs bingo!

Square 1: Ageplay Recs
Square 2: Food Recs
Square 3: Vehicular Recs
Square 4: Subspace/Headspace Recs
Square 5: Verbal Humiliation Recs


Once again, I found myself having to delineate what got included for this square or I'd never stop looking for fics. This time we are focusing on consensual verbal humiliation. One character verbally humiliating the other for one or both parties' sexual satisfaction. That includes consent play, because humiliation is so easily and intricately bound up in things a person wants-but-does-not-want—ashamed to want something, wanting to be told it's wrong to want it, wanting to revel in wanting it or doing it even if it's frowned on by their culture....

In fact, I had to go look up "humiliation" in the dictionary to see exactly what it encompasses. Merriam-Webster says: "to reduce to a lower position in one's own eyes or others' eyes : mortify." The synonyms it lists include: abase, chasten, cheapen, debase, degrade, demean, discredit, disgrace, dishonor, foul, humble, lower, shame, sink, smirch, take down. So, indeed, we are covering name-calling, shaming, dirty talk, kneeling, crawling, begging, uncomfortable confessions, you name it. And the character(s) get(s) off on it.

I have trouble sometimes with humiliation kink fic. Often fics assume that at least one character gets off on humiliating or being humiliated, assume that the reader can sympathize, and run with that, so you get a lot of name-calling and blushing etc. but not necessarily a lot of understanding (on this reader's part, anyway). I forget that humiliation is threaded through my noncon-fantasy Mary Sue stories and that I've written at least two dirty-talk fics and a physical exposure fic. I forget that I have a kink for humiliation directed at a character being a sexual creature or wanting sex at all.

One thing that has helped clarify what erotic humiliation means and what it can do for people is thingswithwings's essay, The Riches of Embarrassment: Or, Why I Don't Have a Humiliation Squick. If you haven't spent much time thinking about it, or even if you have, I highly recommend it.

Humiliation kink, for me, does that wonderful thing that only kink can do: it allows me to wallow pleasurably in a feeling that, in other circumstances, would make me feel bad. It eroticizes the thing that makes me feel bad, and makes the feeling-bad feel good.

[...]

It's such a wonderful snarl, that kink, wanting to be humiliated and being ashamed of wanting to be humiliated and enjoying the shame of wanting to be humiliated and being ashamed of enjoying the shame of wanting to be humiliated, and on and on, all that beautiful recursiveness, the kink just endlessly compounding itself.

( And 9 fic recs in addition to the essay. Inception, SGA, House. With excerpts. )

The end. Additions? I was talking with deelaundry about humiliation and House, which is like the proverbial ducks and water, only I can't say that the humiliation that pervades the show and crops up in fic is appreciated by those on the receiving end. That's why her math tutor-prostitute fic is so much fun.

My Bingo card

I went to three car dealerships today. I earned this post.

Square 1: Ageplay Recs
Square 2: Food Recs
Square 3: Vehicular Recs (not wrecks)
Square 4: Subspace/Headspace Recs
Square 5: Verbal Humiliation Recs


If you'd asked me last week what I thought of "vehicular kink," I'd have gone straight to Crash. Not the racism one; the David Cronenberg one with people getting off on crashing cars and injuring themselves. Literally, that is people having orgasms because of cars, and in cars, and on cars, and while thinking about or talking about cars and other people who've died in them, etc. etc. If you did not know, James Spader + Elias Koteas (+ car) = hot.

Fic-wise, vehicular first of all made me think of characters having sex in and on cars, and on motorcycles, and in the back of cabs (vehicular + exhibitionism), and in spaceships and on planes. And certainly there are some hot-and-heavy PWPs in this vein:

( Fic and art recs: 5 Inception, 5 House and 2 SGA (1 of them silly) )

So that got me thinking about characters like House, who loves his shiny Mafia convertible and his rad motorcycle (see deelaundry's post for pictorial confirmation), and John Sheppard, who loves 'jumpers and F302s and, presumably, helicopters. Cameron Mitchell, too, I'm sure, if I watched much SG-1. Wolverine and motorcycles. James Bond and... everything. Supernatural's Dean Winchester and his Impala.

And suddenly a whole class of vehicular kink opened up: ( characters who love one specific vehicle. )

A sidestep, and there are car-centric canons like The Fast & The Furious, which I haven't watched but gather are all about sexy cars and sexy people. And there are car-centric TV shows like Pimp My Ride and—ah! went my brain. Top Gear.

Top Gear. A British show featuring three witty men who have incomprehensible amounts of spending money hard-ons for top-of-the-line cars and arguably for one another as well. Watch any episode and you are guaranteed a sexual remark from Jeremy Clarkson about either a sports car or a co-star. Richard once declared his love for a car he named Oliver; it was actually a touching story. Besides which, the series is full of lingering, sexualized, male-gaze-type shots of cars and specific portions of cars. But instead of re-posting episodes here, how about some vids that draw out the love between hosts and cars? Yes.

( 3 Top Gear vid recs, embedded )

At the end of this mental wandering through some different aspects of vehicular kink, a fabulous vid came to mind that reminds us that it's not only men who love their cars and planes and bikes and broomsticks. Around the Bend by danegen, which premiered at Vividcon last summer, is an energetic celebration of women through the decades—fictional and not—and how they love their vehicles and love each other in them. Highly recommended.

Kinks, explicit or gen or anything in between. The more you think about them, the more they telescope outwards.

My Bingo card

Wow. It's the end of an era.

...

Last night's Jonathan Coulton show was good. He did some fan favorites (Skullcrusher Mountain,* zombies, Mandelbrot Set) and a few that I didn't know (Creepy Doll, one about a giant squid, one about a sad vampire with vitamin D deficiency, a heartbreaking one about the dog from Russia who went up in Sputnik II) and some new material. Plus an electronic mashup of "Mr. Fancy Pants" that layered the Super Mario Brothers theme over Beyoncé. *Someone had sewn together a half-monkey half-pony monster to please him. It neigh-screamed.

Still, I actually -- kassrachel, hide your eyes -- enjoyed the opening band/comedy duo more, Paul and Storm. Highly recommend their Nun Fight and a few of their parody imitations that you can stream if you scroll down on the link above: "If James Taylor Were on Fire," "If Bob Dylan Were Hiding at the Bottom of a Well" and "If Aaron Neville Were Waiting for a Parking Spot at the Mall, But Someone Else Snagged It" (which was better live but is still funny on the site).

All in a venue full of nerds. Including a table of fangirls and a few more friends of mine I got to finally introduce to one another.

...

Happy preemptive Mother's Day, all of you who will be observing tomorrow. I have made a last-minute decision to go visit my own, so I will be gone in an hour or so and back on Monday. Don't know when Madness author reveals are scheduled, but I left my mini-DVD commentary on my work computer so you'll get it Monday regardless. Heh.

...

And, if I may take a moment to rec a Remix, try Dear John (WIP Remix) - a post-"The Hive" enzyme-jacked Rodney writes and edits and rewrites and re-edits a letter to John trying to express just how angry scared in love angry he is about John's tendency to risk his life to save the ones he loves. Did I mention it's done as scans of handwritten and marked-up copy on coffee-stained sheets of paper and that it's full of copyediting marks? With SF references?

1. My Jurassic Park vid showed at vidukon this weekend, and at least three people liked it. :) Neat-o.

2. Speaking of Sheppard, which we were yesterday:

2a) Excellent SGA kink meme fill that transforms the "magical healing cock" cliché into a thinky and sexy story in which Sheppard has to deal with consent and privacy issues when his semen acquires actual therapeutic power. It features John/Jennifer with a lovely sprinkling of dom/sub dynamics; plus many other John couplings and a hefty dubcon warning. As I was writing in my comment that I loved the way Sheppard's bisexuality and submissiveness were simply part of the story instead of being treated with a huge amount of fanfare or angst, and ditto for the sexual preferences of two officers, just nicely done, understated, effective, it occurred to me that the author could be bluflamingo, as that's something I tend to like in her fics, and she has also handled consent issues well in the past. But who knows.

2a.1) I've already recommended the other sexy John/Jennifer story with even more medical kink and dom/sub dynamics and less dubcon, where John keeps showing up with things up his ass and eventually Jennifer puts them there, right? Right.

2b) I had this dream last night where I'd kidnapped Sheppard and had his wrists tied with an elastic hair band and was trying to get him to wear this mismatched pair of shoes, and actually it was all very heartwarming, but that is about all that will translate without becoming boring, so here, have some more recs.

3. Meanwhile, in the fandom I'm still not talking about, there was hot Eames/17-year-old!Arthur in Vegas. And another Eames/just-underage!Arthur fic, Making Partner. Both of these work just as well if you don't know the movie.

And I could assume that if you're interested in this ~mysterious unnamed fandom~ that you're reading helenish's stuff, but just in case, she did an amnesia fic in which forgetting allows the couple to remember and/or realize some things about their relationship; and a pair of older stories I'd missed one of, wherein Arthur (in one story; Eames in the other) had to pretend to be Eames' (ditto) boyfriend to avoid arousing the ire of serious criminals; and also today I finally read through her ongoing snippet series and found several parts to be quite sexy, either because there was sex (Arthur/OFC called Liesl) or because there was angst about not having sex when both of them (Arthur/Eames, that is) actually wanted to. Nice to be literate once again in a fandom helenish is writing in.

4. Yes, that ended on a preposition. The current essay in DF Wallace's book is about grammar snobbery and is both fun and interesting, even if he lambastes descriptivism. Today at work there was a prime example of his point that norms-based prescriptivism can never die because we'd be left with ambiguous sentences like the one in a summary I was reading: "[Woman's name] has a son who is 8 years old and has a part-time job in a hospital as a surgical technician."

Coworker One: Doogie Howser?
Coworker Two: He'd better go full-time or he'll never make surgeon when he's 10.

5. Aimee Mann concert tomorrow with cincodemaygirl and gblvr, hooray. Tidbit of the day: I would have used an Aimee Mann song for Festivids had my assignment been different.

Dude. Framing stuff is expensive. I mean, I knew it was expensive, I just didn't know that a 60% discount amounts to around what I thought it would cost full-price.

Dear self: This is why you've been doing extracurricular jobs. Stop freaking out.

I also just signed up for an Irish dance class. It's been three years since I last did it (other than last night, when I put the shoes back on and tried to remember, like, the basic steps of a hornpipe) and I have forgotten most of what I ever knew, but the instructor still recommended intermediate level. I really hope it's not embarrassing. I hate not being great at things, hate being lost and confused and behind. But I'm looking forward to learning again, and getting off my computer-addicted butt, and maybe meeting some new people.

It'll mean having to watch House on Tuesdays, but even I know that's a bad reason not to sign up for something.

And tomorrow I am on mandatory telework, so I do not have to get dressed! At least until it's time for Yom Kippur services. Or time to walk down the hall to do laundry.

Hm. It may be tough tomorrow to refrain from adding to one of the three WsIP on my list while working from home. Speaking of which: Here are some stories I have enjoyed lately.

I wish House were the kind of fandom that embraced a kink meme.

In conclusion: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtVh8kVZ_XM (Zooey & Joseph's bank robbery dance)

Well, that's interesting. It's not a big leap to restricting access to sites that offer fan-produced work.

In less worrisome news, turns out my weekend was spent in gorgeous fog on the bay in southern Jersey instead of nowheresville northern Jersey:


There's a bridge back there, lost in the mist. (click for bigger)

Alas that now I'm back in D.C., it's 90 degrees. And barely April. It is -- *checks* -- 79 degrees in my apartment. Time to get out of this town.

You may have seen that House Big Bang went live. I made some art for it: two covers and a pinch hit. The first one is what I worked on the most, and turned out, I think, the best.

Misc.: Saw and greatly enjoyed Naissance des Pieuvres (Water Lilies). The comment thread by Ediane at AfterEllen's review is the closest I've found to my own thoughts. Bizarrely, neither NY Times nor Variety discussed queerness in their reviews, when the movie is about a girl who falls in love/obsession with another girl, who may or may not be attracted to her in return.

Lastly, have a rec: spike21 and harriet_spy's From the entrance to the exit, it's farther than it looks -- SGA, post-series, very NC-17, and hit so many of my soul-deep kinks in the first half to two-thirds that there was this thrill running through me I haven't felt in a long time, reading. It's John/Todd/Teyla, too, and has pretty much everything you could hope for in that grouping. IMO. I'm not sure what to make of the ending yet, and there's an iffy bit in the beginning equating alienness with monstrousness, but the story is absolutely worth checking out.


p.s. Even in the company of 7 non-fannish people and making no attempt to turn conversation or channels in that direction, some subjects and programs are apparently unavoidable, such as SGU, the Merlin episode with the slash dragon, Top Gear, and my friend's brother's discussion of the attractiveness and sexual preferences of Anderson Cooper.