rionaleonhart | Entries tagged with red dwarf

Tem has been showing me Star Trek: Deep Space 9! I have very little prior experience of Star Trek - I'd only previously seen a handful of original series episodes and the 2009 film - so this is an interesting experience.

I'm not currently experiencing any desire to jump into the DS9 fandom, but I am enjoying the show. We're in early season five; we've just seen 'Looking for par'Mach in All the Wrong Places'. Here are some scattered thoughts:

- This show feels surprisingly contemporary! There are a few entertaining details, e.g. the fact that every document appears to be on a separate electronic tablet (very much in the vein of Red Dwarf's 'VHS tapes are triangular now, because it's the future!'), but it rarely feels dated. It also feels a lot more intentionally homoerotic than I tend to expect of shows from the nineties!

- Sisko is probably my favourite character. I really like his relationship with Jake, and how much he cares for his crew, and the insubordinate streak he has to keep carefully masked with surface courtesy in his position as the station's commander.

- I really enjoy the friendship between Sisko and Dax, but also I sort of ship them a little, largely because introducing a romantic or sexual element to their dynamic would be so deeply weird for Sisko. I just like it when characters are unsettled and confused by their own feelings!

- Nobody on this space station knows how to stand a normal distance from each other. This was also an issue on Lost, come to think of it: whenever two characters are in the same shot, it feels like they're about to make out. I say 'issue', but in fact I am absolutely not complaining.

- We started this watchthrough when I was very much in Death Note mode, so it was weird to learn that DS9 includes a character called Kira! Both DS9 Kira and Death Note Kira are strong believers in solving problems through the power of murder, too. ('Kira is so violent,' Tem commented, 'and she thinks that's morally bad of her, whereas I think it's morally cool of her.')

- I find it very funny that everyone's into Kira. Kira may not be the protagonist of the show itself, but she's the protagonist of a dating sim going on off to the side. Has anyone made a dating sim in which you play as Kira Nerys? Someone should.

If I played the hypothetical Kira dating sim, incidentally, I'd be most interested in pursuing the Odo route (Odo's crush on her is very sad and sweet), the Gul Dukat route (their 'mutual hostility, but also Dukat is really into her' dynamic is incredible), and the O'Brien threesome route.

- I'm going to linger on the subject of a Kira/Miles/Keiko threesome, because Kira being pregnant with Miles and Keiko's child is the storyline that finally made me go 'okay, I have to write an entry about this show now'. The show dealing with the real-life pregnancy of Kira's actor by transferring Miles and Keiko's foetus into Kira's womb: insane, incredible, I could never come up with such a stroke of genius. And then Kira moves into the O'Briens' quarters!

- I mentioned earlier that I love characters being unsettled and confused by their own feelings, and 'Looking for par'Mach in All the Wrong Places' was iiiiiincredible for that. Miles and Kira having weird feelings about each other in their already very weird 'cohabiting while she's carrying his child' situation absolutely delighted me. Perfect episode.

Tem: DS9 is the Star Trek where I'd be least surprised to learn that all the main characters had had an orgy.
Ginger: Sisko doesn't seem as horny as the others.
Riona: But he'd still be part of the orgy, I think. He wouldn't cry if he missed out on it, in the way Bashir would, but he'd be up for getting involved.
Ginger: Oh, wow, Bashir would be heartbroken. You should write the fic where everyone except Bashir has an orgy, and then Bashir finds out.
Tem: No! That would be so sad! You can only write it if it ends with everyone making up for it with a gangbang focused on Bashir.

For each of my major fandoms, I do a short writeup talking about how it fits into my fandom history. A fandom qualifies as 'major' if I've written five fics for it, or ten thousand words across at least three fics.

It's only just occurred to me that Red Dwarf technically qualifies. It's the only fandom in which I've permanently lost all copies of a fic I wrote, so I only have four surviving Red Dwarf fics, but I have written and posted five Red Dwarf fics in total.

Red Dwarf

Red Dwarf is the first television series I remember really enjoying. To be clear, I loved Red Dwarf even before I loved Pokémon. I'm pretty sure I first watched it when my age was in single figures.

In some respects, I was too young for Red Dwarf. Most of the jokes probably went over my head, and I remember that the episode 'Demons and Angels' really disturbed and upset me. Lister being forced to kill the angelic versions of the crew was horrifying. Trying to warn them, trying to apologise, but being unable to control his body!

My other main recollection from watching Red Dwarf as a tiny child is how much I enjoyed 'Mr Flibble's very cross.'

The first series came out on DVD when I was fourteen, and I had a blast revisiting it. I watched the episodes over and over again. I watched the cast commentaries over and over again. At one point I apparently attempted to handwrite a transcript of an episode for unclear reasons, a project I was confused to rediscover twelve years later.

Still at the age of fourteen, I wrote a short Lister/Rimmer fic - my first fic for a live-action TV fandom - and posted it to fanfiction.net. Princess Lauren E Scavenger, who I believe was one of the group's founders, left an encouraging comment with a link to a Yahoo! group called the Red Dwarf Slash Society, which I joined.

This group was where I posted my lost fic, Me³, a Rimmer/Rimmer selfcest fic set during the Rimmer-duplication episode 'Me²'. It was my first ever attempt at writing sex; I think one of the Rimmers gave the other a vaguely implied handjob. I suspect it was probably dubcon.

The feedback for my Rimmer/Rimmer fic wasn't in any way unkind, but it was as lukewarm as you'd expect from people trying to be polite about the fact that it was clearly written by a fourteen-year-old with zero sexual knowledge or experience. I was a little embarrassed, which is probably why I made no effort to keep the fic backed up.

My second ever attempt at writing sex, incidentally, was also selfcest with consent issues. Come to think of it, I also wrote a dubcon selfcest fic this year, two decades after my first. Start as you mean to go on?

Favourite character: Rimmer is terrible and petty in a way that makes him a lot of fun. Possibly the first entertainingly terrible character I ever developed a fondness for.
Favourite pairing: Lister/Rimmer, one of my earliest ships. They have such an interesting 'we drive each other mad, we know each other more intimately than anyone else could, we're isolated together in unfathomably deep space' dynamic.
Number of words written: I don't actually know! I have 8,270 surviving words of Red Dwarf fanfiction, across four fics, and I suspect the lost fic was under a thousand words long; most of my fics at that age were very short. About 9,000 words, I suppose.

We've torn through all the Taskmaster in existence, alas! I'll miss this ridiculous show, but at least there's more to come.

( Rambling about series ten and eleven of Taskmaster. )

There are over a hundred episodes of Taskmaster, and somehow it still isn't enough. If I could trade episodes of other shows for more Taskmaster, there would be no other shows left.

(What if sacrificing episodes of other shows resulted in episodes of Taskmaster where the characters of that show competed? I'd love to see the Red Dwarf boys on Taskmaster. Rimmer accuses every task of discrimination for requiring a corporeal body. He might not be wrong, but he's still not going to get any points.)

I finished the Pokémon Shield postgame!

The first time I faced Hop in the final battle against him, he actually defeated me: the first and only time I've been defeated in this game. His Zacian took every Pokémon I had down in one shot, without even giving them a chance to attack.

I was weirdly proud of him. Hop! You were a joke at first, and now you've come far enough to beat the Champion! (Good of him to go 'well, obviously you can beat me, come back and we'll battle again' rather than 'I'M CHAMPION NOW.')

( Rambling about the rematch, cut for being of absolutely no interest unless you're into Pokémon. )

I'm very charmed by Hop's lines just before he sends out Zacian: 'I want to see which of us comes out the victor, and yet I also don't ever want this battle to end... That's the kind of strange feeling I'm having! You feel it, too, don't you, Riona?' And then, when I said, 'Yeah!': 'I knew you must! It's kind of embarrassing, but I'm glad it's not just me!'

(You can say 'not really' instead of 'yeah', but I didn't have the heart. Apparently, his response is 'What? It's embarrassing if I'm the only one who's so into this!')

Hop's extremely endearing. I like him so much more than I thought I would. I'm glad; Pokémon games are a lot more fun when you like your rival!

Having finished the game, I celebrated by looking through all my Pokémon, most of which I'd caught too long ago to remember what I'd named them. My favourite discoveries: a Croagunk named Shady Steve, a Timburr named Tim Burton and a Gurdurr named Gur Durton.

Ginger's started playing Disco Elysium, and I've been wandering into their room occasionally to watch them play. The protagonist is an absolute disaster, which I enjoy.

At the beginning of the game, Ginger made the decision to lick a rum stain off a table. The lieutenant looked calmly from the window to Ginger licking the table, then back out of the window. 'What are you doing?' he asked. Ginger's response was 'Investigating.'

You may have heard this already, but there are rumours that fanfiction.net is no longer being actively maintained and may not last much longer. I have no idea whether this is true, but, if you have any writing that only exists on fanfiction.net, I'd recommend backing it up!

Looking back at my earliest writing has made me think about how glad I am that it hasn't been lost, even if it's terrible. It's still an important part of my development, and it still has value, even if a large part of that value is unintentionally comedic. It's worth holding on to your creative efforts, including the ancient and dire ones you can't look at without blushing.

And, hey, even if your older writing doesn't seem great to you, it might still genuinely mean something to somebody. I've been rereading some of my favourite turn-of-the-millennium fics lately, so I'm feeling particularly passionate about the preservation of writing.

There are a handful of fics I deleted from fanfiction.net years ago, Rachel's Pokémon Journey included, and I regret it; what if someone enjoyed them? It's hard to believe anyone found meaning or inspiration in my early writing, but who knows?

(Incidentally, if at any point you're trying to find a particular fic I wrote and you find yourself unable to, let me know and I'll see if I can dig it up for you. Most of the things I've written are publicly available in at least one place, but there are a few that are hidden in dark corners.

As far as I know, of all the fics I've finished and posted over the years, only one has been permanently lost: an extremely bad Rimmer/Rimmer Red Dwarf fic I posted to Yahoo! Groups at the age of maybe fourteen. I don't really remember it at all, but I think I was attempting sexual content well beyond my fourteen-year-old abilities and the results were probably unfortunate.)

Crossposts: https://rionaleonhart.livejournal.com/557377.html

More Red Dwarf fanfiction! This one's set during series eight, because I'm slightly fascinated by the way Lister's forced to spend time with a Rimmer who's not the one he remembers.

Title: Second Best
Fandom: Red Dwarf
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: Lister/Rimmer
Wordcount: 2,500
Summary: Apparently, it’s not enough to be sent to the brig. Oh, no. Apparently, Rimmer just has to share a cell with a man who won’t shut up about how he’s not the right Rimmer.

( Second Best )

I conquered the mountain in Celeste! It took me twelve and a half hours and I died 3,557 times.

The Celestial Resort was particularly good at killing me: seven hundred and thirty deaths. Given that I died there, you could say it was my last resort. You could say it seven hundred and thirty times.

I wasn't expecting to enjoy this game nearly as much as I did. On the surface, it doesn't sound particularly enjoyable to play a game where you're dying, on average, every thirteen seconds. But I genuinely had a great time. There were a handful of points where I started to lose patience, but I usually felt I was constantly improving and making progress, which made the game feel satisfying rather than frustrating.

(Also satisfying: going back and redoing the early levels once I'd beaten the game, just to see how much quicker I could do them now. I'd improved so much!)

Celeste is hard, but it's rarely unfair. It's not just hard as a 'screw you' to the player; it's presenting you with a challenge that can be overcome with determination. It earnestly believes in you and wants you to succeed.

And it's so charming! I really wasn't expecting that! I like that there's a boss battle where you're just trying really hard to give the boss a hug as she earnestly tries to murder you.

I'm a big fan of physical locations that reshape themselves to reflect the psyche of whoever passes through them. Much like Silent Hill, Celeste Mountain looks inside you and tests you by forcing you to confront yourself.

If you're curious about Celeste, it's included in the itch.io Bundle for Racial Justice and Equality. A few tips:

- If you're playing on a keyboard, you can remap the controls in the options. I'd recommend remapping jump/dash/grab so they're not all in a line, as the default setting means it's really hard to remember which is which. I put them on S, W and A respectively.

- If a level seems to demand impossibly perfect timing, there may be a simpler solution that you're missing. Often, when a level started to frustrate me, I ended up realising that my approach was wrong.

- Zipping through a level is satisfying when you get the hang of it! When you're struggling, though, calm down and slow down. At one point I threw myself unsuccessfully against one level for half an hour, took a break, slept, came back to the game, tried taking it slower and beat it within five minutes.

To my surprise and delight, there's a small but enthusiastic active Red Dwarf fanbase! I really thought the fandom would be a wasteland by now.

I've never confessed this anywhere online before, but I actually had a mild crush on Dave Lister when I was a kid. Apparently his unfortunate personal hygiene caused me no concern.

Anyway, I've located the exact moment in my rewatch that brought my crush on Lister straight back to me, and it's this scene from 'Holoship'. I'm slightly concerned.

(If you're wondering: the actor actually did do the ridiculous thing Lister does at the end of this clip, it was not scripted, he immediately regretted it.)

Crossposts: https://rionaleonhart.livejournal.com/531222.html

I can't believe I'm writing for Red Dwarf again, seventeen years later. One of my first ever fandoms! It's all coming back to me.

Here's a fic inspired by 'Thanks for the Memory', episode 2.03. This is perhaps slightly less self-indulgent than the 'Rimmer asks Lister to cause him pain' Red Dwarf fic I posted a few days ago, but it's still pretty self-indulgent.

Title: No Thanks for the Memory
Fandom: Red Dwarf
Rating: 15
Wordcount: 2,200
Summary: Lister was just trying to give Rimmer his memories of an old girlfriend, honest. Giving Rimmer all his memories? That was a mistake.

( No Thanks for the Memory )

This is EXTREMELY EMBARRASSING, but apparently I've written it, so I might as well post it. This fic idea came to me at five in the morning. It turns out that five-in-the-morning me is incredibly self-indulgent. (The document I wrote this in was just called 'red dwarf pain.doc'.)

This is basically porn without plot, but it's also without porn.

Shamelessly stealing 'someone's hypersensitive to sensation after newly getting a physical body' from Vargas, because, come on, you can't expect me to resist that.

(EDIT: Just had the terrible realisation that I may have misremembered the bunk arrangement on Starbug. I suppose the occasional continuity error adds to the authentic Red Dwarf experience.)

Title: Across the Spectrum
Fandom: Red Dwarf
Rating: R
Pairing: Lister/Rimmer
Wordcount: 2,200
Summary: Set after 'Legion'. Rimmer's curious about all he can feel, now that he has a tangible body. All he can feel, pain included. But he's not great at inflicting pain on himself, so he's going to need some help.
Warnings: Weird pseudo-sexual self-harm. Don't try this at home, unless you're a hologram. In particular, 'touch me when you want me to stop choking you' isn't safe; it can be hard to move when you're oxygen-deprived.

( Across the Spectrum )

Crossposts: https://rionaleonhart.livejournal.com/530621.html

I mentioned this in the comments of my last entry on this show, but Red Dwarf's visuals have aged surprisingly well, save a handful of ropey special effects. Series seven and eight use CGI for the ships, but the model ships in the earlier episodes are actually more convincing. The set design is great. I'm impressed that I can watch this eighties/nineties sitcom and genuinely believe that the characters are in space.

Some of the humour's aged poorly, as you might expect. (Surprisingly, series eight, the last of the original series, is the one that's most dodgy in retrospect, possibly because the larger number of characters enables situations that weren't really possible earlier.) Most of the show still holds up, though! The characters are still very strong. And it never really struck me as a kid, but half the cast is black, the protagonist included, and nothing is made of it; that'd be considered progressive in British television today, let alone in 1988.

Some details, meanwhile, have aged hilariously. I love that they have VHS tapes, but they're TRIANGULAR, because it's the FUTURE.

Here's a line that's aged extraordinarily:

Rimmer: Maybe you haven't noticed this, but we're going to be spending the next two years in the brig. Two years with the scum of the universe: hardened criminals, deranged droids. People so unbalanced and debauched they couldn't even get elected as President of the United States.

There's got to be fanfiction material in series eight. Lister's been locked up with a version of Rimmer who's not quite the Rimmer he remembers; it must be incredibly strange for him!

The conclusion of 'Only the Good...' is one of the best endings to a television show I've ever seen. (Well, yes, there was technically more Red Dwarf to come, but not for another ten years. 'Only the Good...' was definitely written to be a finale, so I still consider it one.) It's an abrupt conclusion, yes, and it leaves a lot of questions open, and it's a little strange that it focuses solely on Rimmer (and not even the Rimmer who's been around for most of the show), but it's so brazen and so magnificent that it manages to pull it off. I love it.

I have a considerably more genuine emotional investment in Red Dwarf than I feel I should. I really do care about this ragtag bunch of stupid gits.

Crossposts: https://rionaleonhart.livejournal.com/530307.html

I just checked my phone and discovered that I'd apparently written the line 'You'd think, with all Rimmer's interest in military history, he'd be keener to be executed by firing squad' on it, with no context, at six in the morning.

Did I think this was a line I could use in a Red Dwarf fic? It's hard to imagine a context in which it would be appropriate, given that Rimmer is already dead for the vast majority of his screentime.

Here are a handful of notes I've made here and there while watching Supernatural, between seasons nine and twelve, because apparently I'm still slowly working through Supernatural!

Supernatural 9.02, 'Devil May Care': that was a pretty hot scene between Dean and Abaddon. (I made this note so long ago that I cannot remember this scene at all, but I'm going to trust my past self on this one. Knowing myself, I suspect it involved blood.)

When speaking to Ezekiel-in-Sam's-body, Dean always looks like he's painfully aroused and really uncomfortable with it.

I'm confused by how much I wanted Ed and Harry to kiss in '#Thinman'. It was a lot!

There's almost no Ed/Harry fanfiction! What?? I'm genuinely surprised by this. I thought Supernatural fandom had everything! It's not as if Ed/Harry doesn't have a solid basis in canon!

I can't believe it took so long for anyone to call Castiel 'Asstiel'.

'Everything you have, I will watch it burn,' Rowena says to Crowley. Rowena, it's Hell.

I'm predictably fond of Claire, the angry teenager making terrible decisions.

11.11, 'Into the Mystic': I love Eileen and Mildred, I love that they defeated the banshee together, and I hope they end up becoming a hunting duo. (Also, I was mildly disappointed that Dean and Mildred didn't bang.)

Season eleven has managed to perk up my interest in Supernatural a little, when it had struggled to engage me since season eight! I'm liking the writing of the boys more than I have in a while.

Season twelve: I like Mick a lot more than I expected to at his first appearance! He kills people but feels very bad about it, which is exactly what I want in a character.

( And some spoilery notes. Spoilers up to Supernatural 12.17, 'The British Invasion'. )

The trouble with Supernatural is that the stakes have been so relentlessly high for so long that I've more or less run out of emotional investment. Can't we occasionally just be trying to save a person? Does it always have to be the whole of creation?

I think this might be a preference of mine for stories in general, actually; small, personal stakes tend to grab me more than save-the-world tales. I'd like to see small stakes more often in JRPGs.

Crossposts: https://rionaleonhart.livejournal.com/529521.html

We finished our household rewatch of Community! It's still such a good show, and Jeff/Annie still has such a hold on my heart. Put a cynic and an idealist in the same room, have the cynic glance at the idealist with a little fond smile, and I will have an OTP for life.

I love Jeff Winger so much. Earlier in this rewatch, I said he might be 'ten favourite characters of all time' material; now that I've finished it, I have to wonder whether he's actually a candidate for my all-time favourite character from any medium. This charming, self-obsessed, intensely loving disaster of a human being, who wants to be a cool loner but is absolutely terrified of abandonment.

The 'rewatch comforting, familiar sitcoms' strategy seems to be a good one for coping with lockdown, so we're following Community with Red Dwarf!

Rimmer is, inevitably, my favourite Red Dwarf character. Put any cast in front of me and watch me make a beeline for the worst person in it.

Rimmer actually sort of reminds me of Scriabin, in some aspects. Angry and petty and insecure. Completely powerless, able to see and hear the world but unable to interact with it. Isolated; there are almost no people he can speak to, and he doesn't get along with them at all, but it would be worse to be alone.

The similarities particularly struck me in 'Bodyswap'. Psychologically needling Lister until he agrees to swap bodies, then abusing the chance!

If Rimmer and Scriabin ever somehow met, they would absolutely loathe each other.

Writing fanfiction about Scriabin recently has been a blast; I'd forgotten how much fun it is to write a character who's just the absolute goddamn worst at all times. I think Arnold Rimmer might be the first 'absolute goddamn worst' character I ever developed a fondness for; Red Dwarf is the first television series I remember enjoying, after all. I'm fairly sure I loved Red Dwarf before I loved Pokémon, even though a lot of the jokes probably went over my head when I was a kid.

The end of 'Terrorform' genuinely breaks my heart a little. Everyone being uncharacteristically nice to Rimmer helps to revive his long-dead sense of self-worth, and then he realises they were just doing it to save their skins and they really do think he's a git! I mean, to be fair, they think that because he is a git, but it's still slightly tragic.

Of course, even though Rimmer and Lister don't get along, there's still a strange intimacy between them. They're isolated together; they're each the other's only form of human contact. I was struck by Rimmer's genuine panic when he finds Lister unconscious in 'Confidence and Paranoia', and by Lister speaking at Rimmer's trial in 'Justice':

Kryten: Would you describe the accused as a friend?
Lister: No, I'd describe the accused as a git.
Kryten: Who would you say, then, is the person who thinks of him most fondly?
Lister: (pause) I do.

'Quarantine' is an extremely weird episode to watch in lockdown. When I first saw it, as a child, the idea of being isolated together for twelve whole weeks to prevent potential infection seemed ludicrous.

When I first saw 'Demons and Angels' as a child, meanwhile, it absolutely terrified me. Lister being remote-controlled into doing terrible things was really upsetting! I seem better able to handle it now, fortunately.

I'd thought Scrubs was the first sitcom I ever watched without audience laughter; I'd forgotten that series seven of Red Dwarf dropped the studio audience. At the time, it seemed like a bizarre decision. Looking back, I think series seven of Red Dwarf was ahead of its time. It still feels strangely silent when you've just blasted through the six series preceding it, though.

Also: not enough Rimmer. What a great, awful character.

My teenage efforts at Red Dwarf fanfiction have been lost forever, which is perhaps for the best, but maybe I should try writing some now.

WAIT, NO, I just managed to dig the Lister/Rimmer fic I wrote when I was fourteen out of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine! And it's SO BAD. It's so bad! It's awful! I can barely bring myself to look at it. But it's still a part of my writing history, so I'm glad I was able to rescue it.

...oh, wow. For easy backup purposes, I have a copy of every fic I've ever written stored in a single Word document that I occasionally e-mail to myself. I just pasted this recovered Red Dwarf fic into the master document, and the wordcount now stands at 1,000,319. I guess I've written over a million words of fiction!

It's a nice time to hit the 'million words' milestone, actually. I started writing fanfiction in October of 2000, so this year will be my twentieth anniversary.

Five hundred of those million words are the word 'blood' or 'bleeding'.

Crossposts: https://rionaleonhart.livejournal.com/529018.html

For the first time in a decade, I've replayed the Jak and Daxter games. By which I mean I've replayed Jak II and Jak 3, because I can't go back to the original Jak and Daxter now that I've played its sequels; it's just too jarring.

The original Jak and Daxter is a light, cartoony platformer about a boy and his friend who's been turned into an otter-weasel hybrid. Jak II opens with Jak being captured and tortured for two years, and now he's DARK and ANGRY and BENT ON REVENGE, and suddenly you're playing a wildly difficult mission-based open-world action game with GUNS.

Jak II and Jak 3 could fairly be described as Naughty Dog's edgy teenage phase, but they happened to coincide perfectly with my edgy teenage phase, so I absolutely ate them up. I'd written fics for other canons here and there, but Jak and Daxter was one of the first fandoms I really felt I was part of.

The animation in the Jak games is so good! The characters are so expressive in cutscenes, and all of Jak's movements lead so smoothly into each other. (I love the character that Daxter, sitting on Jak's shoulder, adds to his animations, too. When you do a spin attack as Jak, you'll sometimes see Daxter clinging frantically onto Jak's hair to keep himself in place.)

I remember that, after playing the original Jak and Daxter, I tried to write a magazine-style 'review' of it, and I commented on how smoothly Jak switched between actions. Apparently I was impressed by Jak's animation quality even when I was thirteen and knew nothing about animation, so it must have been a noticeable step up from the other games I'd been playing.

The checkpointing, on the other hand, is so bad. It's better in Jak 3, but in Jak II, which is a very unforgiving game, I can't tell you how many times I died mid-mission and went 'holy shit, are you really sending me all the way back to the start?' Also: too much racing. But the games are still fun to play, even if they can be frustrating.

I'm glad that 'if the player has already got past a tricky part, don't force them to do it again' now seems to be understood by most game designers. I keep meaning to do an entry on the ways in which I've seen videogames change in my lifetime, and that's definitely one thing that's struck me.

I was really upset for a moment when it looked like Jak and Daxter were going to be separated at the end of Jak 3. I was all ready to jump on Dreamwidth and write 'I DON'T REMEMBER THIS, NOOOOOO.' But then Jak gave up his opportunity to see the universe so he could stay with Daxter! Friendship!!

I recently found myself wondering what the first fic I ever wrote involving sex was. I went to check. It was for Jak II, I was sixteen, and it was noncon selfcest. It wasn't graphic at all, but I'm still sort of impressed that I jumped straight from 'never written sex' to 'noncon selfcest'. There was a vast middle ground to explore, and teenage Riona absolutely did not care.

(It's possible my first fic involving sex was actually a Red Dwarf fic that's now been completely lost, but that one was definitely also selfcest and may also have been noncon.)

I've been trying to reread my Jak and Daxter fanfiction, but it turns out it's from exactly the point in my writing history that makes me squirm in embarrassment. I can look back at the stuff I wrote when I was twelve and go 'aww, that's cute'; I can look at the stuff I wrote in my late teens and go 'okay, this could be better, but it's basically readable.' When I'm fifteen or sixteen, I avoid contractions for no reason and my writing is always slightly too dramatic and flowery, and it's absolutely unbearable.

But I suppose these are things I had to write in order to improve, so I shouldn't look down on them too much. You were trying, teenage me. I can respect that.

Crossposts: https://rionaleonhart.livejournal.com/515256.html

Red Dwarf, the finest sci-fi show ever made, is currently available on Netflix, and so I've been rewatching it! The humour's actually aged better than I thought it would; the audience laughter feels very dated, but the characters are still fun and Arnold Rimmer in particular is a magnificent comic creation. Not many of the jokes actually take me by surprise, as I watched my Red Dwarf DVDs several thousand times in my early teens, but I'm still enjoying myself.

(A perplexing discovery: I was recently poking around my bedroom at my parents' house and unearthed a transcription of a Red Dwarf episode I'd apparently done by hand. I have no recollection of this, but I must have done it directly from the DVD. Probably through constant pausing and rewinding to check what the characters said; I have a feeling it didn't occur to me to put the subtitles on. Why on Earth did I feel the need to write out an entire Red Dwarf episode? Was I planning to put it on as a play? With exactly one handwritten copy of the script?)

The writers of Red Dwarf don't entirely seem to know what to do with the Cat. At some point I began picturing him as a normal non-humanoid cat hanging around on the set, and suddenly he made a lot more sense to me; of course he just shows up occasionally to do cat things and then vanishes for long periods.

Rimmer/Lister was one of my earliest 'ships. I suppose it laid the foundations in my heart for Mark Corrigan/Jeremy Usborne of Peep Show: two men, one uptight and neurotic, the other slobbish and laid-back. They live together and they really don't get along most of the time, but ultimately they're closer to each other than they are to anyone else. The difference is that Lister (the slob) is presented as the relatable one in Red Dwarf, whereas I feel you're more expected to identify with Mark in Peep Show, and Lister is fundamentally a decent bloke, whereas everyone in Peep Show is fundamentally terrible.

A few weeks ago, I discovered a men's magazine from 1939 in an antique shop. Flicking through it, I came across a page of tiny print advertisements. Many of them were claiming 'YOU CAN GROW TWO TO FIVE INCHES TALLER IN JUST TEN DAYS', presumably using growth technology that's been lost to humanity since the 1930s.

My favourite of the advertisements:

This wonderful invention not only makes the trousers hang straight, but does so in such an ingenious way with immediate results that your own friends forget, and others never know, that you are bow-legged.

Crossposts: http://rionaleonhart.livejournal.com/397413.html

Okay, Avatar is completely awesome. I've seen up to Chapter Four of Book Two now.

Notes!

- The swamp is sort of the Silent Hill of the Avatar world, isn't it? It's calling to you. (I love it when fandoms come with their own Silent Hills built in. Supernatural has 'Asylum'; Avatar has 'The Swamp'; Red Dwarf has 'Terrorform'. There are probably more examples, right?)

- Uncle Iroh is amazing and I want one. Possibly even more than I want a Sokka, and I want a Sokka a lot.

- (Seriously, I love Sokka so freaking much.)

- I just generally love Zuko and Iroh to bits. They may be enemies of the protagonists, but they're layered and they're interesting and they genuinely care about each other. You would never be able to describe them as 'evil'. (I also like that many of the characters supposedly on the protagonists' side cannot be described as 'good'.)

- Hey, what would the adventures of Sokka and Uncle Iroh be like? Forced to be awesome together by circumstance! ...to be awesome!

- To be honest, though, I think that Zuko is probably the perfect counterpart to Uncle Iroh.

- I JUST HAD THE MENTAL IMAGE OF ZUKO AND IROH IN THE TEAM ROCKET UNIFORMS AND SO I AM INFLICTING IT UPON YOU.

- Jeremy Clarkson would totally be a Firebender. James would be an Earthbender, but he'd stay quiet about it. Richard wouldn't be able to bend, and it would annoy him so much.

- And then Sam and Dean would investigate them.

- I'm just saying.

I have been rewatching second-season episodes of House! And I've never really read much House fanfiction, but there are a couple of fics that I think I would pounce on and devour like a starving wolf (that, er, eats fanfiction) if anyone were to write them:

- In 'Skin Deep', when the patient has anterograde amnesia, I firmly believe that the scene should have gone like this:

Alex: Huh. I got the cute doctor.
Chase: (smiles and moves away)
Alex: Are you mad at me, daddy? I let you down. (et cetera, et cetera...)
Chase: (comes back into view)
Alex: Huh. I got the cute doctor.
Chase: (frowns)
Alex: Are you mad at me, daddy? I let you down.
Alex's Dad: What's going on?
Chase: We're caught in a time loop!

(

reipan suggests 'We must be near a white hole!', which also works and has the added bonus of being a Red Dwarf reference.)

Seriously*, every show ostensibly set in the 'real world' would be improved by having at least one episode in which something completely science-fictiony happens with no explanation. But the writers missed a perfect opportunity here, so we must resort to fanfiction.

- In 'Clueless', at the end, when the woman is being escorted from the hospital, Cameron and Cuddy walk up together and watch. As the doors swing closed, they give each other such a buddy-cop look.

CAMERON AND CUDDY AS BUDDY COPS.

YOU CANNOT TELL ME THAT WOULDN'T BE AMAZING. I WOULD READ THAT FIC. I WOULD READ IT A MILLION TIMES.

* I am not actually being that serious. But it would be a lot of fun.

Please don't mention anything about House episodes following the second episode of season five in the comments!

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Riona

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Entries tagged with red dwarf

The Borg Are Very Well Borganised.

Who'd Clean Up The Mess?

I Am Inexplicably Moved.

Having A Champion Time.

Fanfiction: Second Best (Red Dwarf, Lister/Rimmer)

You Can Do This.

Fanfiction: No Thanks for the Memory (Red Dwarf)

Fanfiction: Across the Spectrum (Red Dwarf, Lister/Rimmer)

Not Today.

We Should Call The Internet And Find Out As Much As We Can.

Rimmer Directive 217 States, Just As Clearly, 'No Chance, You Metal Bastard.'

You'd Better Keep Us Alive, Or I Will Never Speak To You Again. Obviously.

Please Rush Me My Portable Walrus-Polishing Kit.

I'd Rather Kiss You Than Die. It's A Compliment.

I Could Be Shaking My Head Right Now.

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