Trabia Garden

Went to karaoke on Sunday! (At an actual karaoke place, rather than singing at home.) As ever, it was a lot of fun. My song picks:

- Busted, 'What I Go to School For'. I always try to do something ludicrous for my first song; it takes some of the pressure off. Everyone joined in on this one!

- Ricky Martin, 'Livin' La Vida Loca'. It is, it turns out, absolutely impossible not to dance while singing this song.

- High School Musical 3, 'Can I Have This Dance'. This was a duet with Rei; Rei played Troy and I played Gabriella, with all the sincerity we could muster. 'That was so cute,' we were informed afterwards.

- I did a few duets with Rei, actually! The other two, very tonally different from each other, were 'I'll Make a Man Out of You' from Mulan (my pick; Rei at one point grabbed my shirt collar to inform me I was unsuited for the rage of war, which is admittedly true) and 'Turn Back Time' by Aqua (Rei's pick; it's such an interestingly atypical Aqua song!).

- The Offspring, 'The Kids Aren't Alright'. Fun, but a little overwhelming, especially as most of the room didn't know it, so I had to do the 'whoa's as well as the lines! I lost the thread and dropped a couple of lines in the second verse.

- Vengaboys, 'Boom Boom Boom Boom'. There's always one song that gets stuck in my head for days after a karaoke session, and this was the culprit this time. At one point the whole room rebelled and added another chorus in a break, having apparently decided there just weren't enough booms.

- Of Monsters and Men, 'King and Lionheart'. Unexpectedly, nobody else knew this song, so I found myself doing an unanticipated solo right at the top of my range! Extremely intimidating. It went well, though; people were really nice about this one!

- Lady Gaga, 'Paparazzi'. Everyone joined in on this one, which was fun, but it really strained my voice!

I also joined in on a few picks by other people: 'In the End' by Linkin Park, 'Lay All Your Love on Me' by ABBA and 'Shake It Out' by Florence and the Machine. ('Shake It Out' was also quite a strain on my voice, it turned out, but it's a great song!) We all sang along to 'Gimme Gimme Gimme' by ABBA, and the entire room made a spirited attempt at 'Dragostea Din Tei' by O-Zone, despite our general inability to speak Romanian.

I really enjoyed Rei's dancing during 'Rasputin' by Boney M. Rei also performed 'Never Had a Friend Like Me' from Aladdin, which looked absolutely exhausting.

One member of the party picked 'Carry On, Wayward Son' by Kansas, which got the kind of reaction it can only have in a room full of Supernatural fans. Playing that song is a great way to expose everyone in the vicinity who's ever had a feeling about a Winchester. Later, in a second personal attack on Supernatural fans, Rei performed 'Bad Moon Rising' by Creedence Clearwater Revival.

(We're contemplating a Supernatural rewatch. Feels like a bad idea. That's not going to stop us.)

Here's my final instalment of questions from this fandom question meme!

Name a character that you’d like to have for a friend.

Being a weird fandom person, I tend to get along well with other weird fandom people, so Charlie Bradbury of Supernatural or an older Futaba Sakura of Persona 5 would probably fit comfortably into my social circle.

I think I could get along with Elena Fisher of Uncharted. I don't know if we'd be close friends, necessarily; we might not have enough in common to find a foothold! But I can see us talking whenever we happen to cross paths at events held by mutual friends. I'd probably be troubled if I ever learnt how many people she and her partner have killed, though.

Your rarest fandoms.

I've been in a lot of tiny fandoms over the years! Exit/Corners, Forgotton Anne, Zanki Zero: Last Beginning, Derren Brown RPF, that weird time I became fixated on the idea of RPF for The Real Hustle.

I think the most impressive and puzzling example was the time I wrote over forty ficlets for the BBC ShakespeaRe-Told modern-day adaptation of Macbeth, set in a restaurant and tragically not called MacChef. Literally nobody else was in this fandom. But I was going to write forty ficlets for it anyway.

A fandom you’ve abandoned and why.

I loved the Harry Potter books. I grew up alongside them. That fondness for the characters and the world is still there, but I don't really talk about Harry Potter any more, because the author has dedicated herself to hurting people in a way that's given the canon painful associations.

Do you have any hard and fast headcanons that you will die defending?

I don't know if I've quite interpreted 'headcanon' correctly, but here are some character interpretations I will stand by with complete certainty, even if they may not be outright stated in the text.

Danganronpa V3: Shuichi 'I shouldn't be talking about another boy like that' Saihara is bisexual and I will fight anyone who tries to claim otherwise. I'm looking at you, Reddit.

Death Note: Light genuinely loves his family. He doesn't have a lot of room in his heart for other people, I'll admit! And he likes to pretend he's above being swayed by emotion, so he tells himself that the choices he makes to protect his family are motivated by practicality, rather than love. But he does love his family.

On a related note: Light is constantly lying to himself about his own motivations. A lot of the fandom just takes his claims at face value! 'Oh, Light makes a smart and considered decision to let L know he has access to police information, so L will get closer to him and therefore become easier to kill.' No! Light makes an impulsive decision to give that information away as a 'fuck you' to L, and then he persuades himself that it was a very smart move in their chess game.

To be fair to the fandom, Light is very persuasive! But he cannot be trusted, even in his internal monologue.

A trope which you are virtually certain to love in any fandom.

Weird memory bullshit. Characters being unable to trust their own perception of reality. Characters being trapped or otherwise isolated together. It's no wonder I took so strongly to Lost and Severance.

A trope which you are virtually certain to hate in any fandom.

I like kids well enough in real life, but I tend not to enjoy fanfiction about characters having children, or being deaged to children. One of my cowriters on the Visitorverse really enjoyed writing about kids, so we ended up arranging trades: I'd get to throw in my weird ships she wasn't a big fan of if she got to write about the resulting offspring.

Have you ever tried to write for a fandom or ship, and found you couldn’t?

Jeff/Annie from Community is one of my favourite pairings, but I find it really challenging to write for. Their chemistry is off the charts! But I struggle to envision either of them actually making a move.

I enjoyed Homestuck, but I've never written for it because, let's be honest, it is far too confusing to get a foothold. Umineko is tricky for similar reasons.

Name three things you wish you saw more or in your fandoms.

More people who are openly willing to ship things that are kind of messed up! In recent years, I've noticed that shippers of controversial pairings often end up being driven into private Discords (sometimes with definitions of 'controversial' as mild as 'there's an age gap' or 'this character is seventeen and would therefore be under the age of consent if they were Californian, which they aren't'), which is a shame. We should be out there in the world; it's good for the ecosystem! I know it's easier said than done, though, especially for younger fans who run the risk of being ostracised by their peers or even their friends, whereas older fans are much less likely to feel that depicting unhealthy relationships in fiction is somehow an immoral act.

I would love to see more Dreamwidth/LJ-style commentfic promptfests in pretty much every fandom. I love low-pressure events with no obligations or signups; all you do is show up, look around and see whether any of the prompts inspire you.

And, finally, more discussion on Dreamwidth! It's always such a thrill when I see a post on my reading page about something I enjoy.

Last night, I dreamt that four women (Kate and possibly Juliet included) made out in front of Jack Shephard of Lost, leaving him feeling confused and left out. My apologies to Jack, but his little wounded 'I'm not going to tell them they can't do this, but I don't understand why they have to do it right in front of me' expression was extremely funny.

While I'm thinking about dreams, I'm going to archive a few of my other dream notes from my phone. I tend to assume people aren't that interested in hearing about other people's dreams, so this is mainly just for my benefit, but feel free to read if you're curious!


( Some recent dreams. )


I didn't really register until putting this entry together that I've had multiple dreams about singing to animals recently. I suppose it's more fun than waiting for trains or being chased, which are the usual recurring themes in my dreams.

When I watch things with my housemates, I don't always write about it on here because, well, you can't really pause episodes to scribble down your thoughts while other people are watching them with you. I thought I'd try to pull together a few lines each about some of the things we've watched over the last couple of years, though. Here we go!


Gargoyles (1994): Rei remembered this cartoon fondly from their childhood, but I had never seen it before. It was an interesting watch! Darker and more complex than I tend to expect from nineties Western cartoons, and Elisa and Xanatos are great characters; I'd have loved to see the two of them interact more. I'm annoyed by the 'Macbeth was just misunderstood' plotline, though; don't take away everything that makes Macbeth interesting as a character!

Cowboy Bebop (1998): This was an interesting anime, very stylishly directed, but it felt a bit like two different shows clumsily jammed together. I think it could have benefitted from cutting most of the 'bounty hunting procedural' aspect and becoming a shorter, more focused series. Spike is a fascinating character who feels severely underused, which is perplexing, given that he's the protagonist.

Wynonna Earp (2016): This was fun! It felt a bit like a version of Supernatural from an alternate universe; if Supernatural had been created by women and had female lead actors, I suspect it might look a bit like Wynonna Earp. Wynonna, in particular, feels very like a female equivalent to Dean Winchester; she's a wisecracking disaster who's incapable of coping with anything healthily. She's great. I love her.

Milo Murphy's Law (2016): A cartoon by the creators of Phineas and Ferb, about a boy who's plagued by misfortune. I loved this! In particular, I find Milo himself very endearing; I like his resourceful nature and positive attitude in the face of the certainty that everything's going to go wrong around him. Also, lumberjack-themed boy band song 'Chop Away at My Heart' is a banger.

Trinkets (2019): I'm a little sad that, although the ending was beautiful and perfect, the rest of the show wasn't quite good enough for me to run around recommending it. It's about three girls who meet at a programme for recovering shoplifters. Their friendship is great and I had a lot of feelings about it, but the show as a whole is so Constant Teen Drama that it's slightly exhausting. The finale was wonderful! I cried! The show as a whole is okay.

Batwoman (2019): We only watched the first series of this (and, in fact, I can't remember whether we finished that series). I really enjoyed what a catastrophe Kate Kane was, and her love-hate relationship with Alice was delightfully intense and messy; I feel it's a sort of relationship you don't often get to see between female antagonists! The show felt relentlessly miserable in a way that wasn't that fun to watch, though. We didn't make an active decision to stop watching it, but we drifted away.

The Owl House (2020): I really enjoyed this! Very cute and fun; very Gravity Falls vibes, which makes sense, given that it was created by Alex Hirsch's partner. It does seem like a disproportionate number of the episodes focus on teaching Luz that she shouldn't lie to impress people, though; if your protagonist learns the same lesson in half the episodes of your cartoon, I think you have to accept that she's never going to internalise the lesson! King is very reminiscent of our cat Zuko, who is a beautiful, perfect boy with absolutely no brain.

We Are Lady Parts (2021): A sitcom about an all-girl Muslim punk band. I got much more emotionally invested than I was prepared for; I thought this was just going to be a silly comedy! But then I met angry, self-sabotaging disaster Saira, and obviously I was doomed to love her.

Arcane (2021): A fantasy series based on League of Legends, a game I know absolutely nothing about. This is the most engaging show I've watched in a very long time. It genuinely surprised me on multiple occasions; I quickly gave up trying to predict what would happen in it, because I clearly had no idea! Every character is a disaster and it's great. An excellent series if you enjoy characters screwing up and tearing themselves apart over it. Gorgeously animated, too.

Queer Eye Germany (2022): A heads-up for anyone who enjoys Queer Eye: the German version is just as delightful! Ayan, the interior design guy, is my favourite of the Fab Fünf; he's extremely earnest and sweet.

pict demanded to know all my ambitious fic ideas, which reminded me of something I've been thinking about doing for a while: archiving the fic ideas I've been scribbling down in my diaries.

Every year, I buy the same style of diary, which has a couple of blank pages at the back. I've been using these blank pages to note down fic concepts since 2013. Some of these get written! Many of them don't.

If I type up the unwritten concepts, maybe one of them will inspire me? (Or indeed inspire someone else? Feel free to let me know if you're interested in writing any of these!) At the very least, they'll no longer be languishing in old diaries I rarely look back at.

These are sorted in alphabetical order by fandom; the notes under any particular fandom may contain spoilers for the canon. Some ideas are extremely vague; some are very specific. Crossovers are filed haphazardly under whichever fandom feels right in the moment. The tags on this entry should give you an idea of which fandoms are represented, if you're wondering whether anything you know is in here!


( A huge pile of unwritten fanfiction ideas. )


I'm not sure this exercise has actually sparked any inspiration, but it's good to have all these ideas in one place. If any of these would particularly interest you, let me know!

HardNoctLife and her wife recorded a podfic of Life Imitates, my silly Prompto/Noctis Final Fantasy XV fic! I'm honoured and delighted. This absolutely made my day at a time when, much like all of us, I needed some cheering up.


Rei and I resumed our rewatch of House a few months ago. It is, I'll be honest, a slightly odd thing to be watching now that we're in the middle of a global health emergency, but we're still going! And I'm not going to let said global health emergency prevent me from talking non-stop about every work of fiction I consume, so here are some notes I've made here and there, from late season three to early season six.

'House Training'/'Family': Foreman's a really interesting character, and I love it when he tries to atone for killing a patient by essentially torturing a kid to save another's life. (That whole plotline was agonising.)

'Dr House. I've heard your name.'
'Most people have. It's also a noun.'

It's an extremely stupid joke, but it made me laugh aloud.

In 'Last Resort', we get to see House worrying about Thirteen. It's a pleasant change to see House caring about anyone; I'd probably like him more as a character if he had moments like that more often. (I'll be honest: I also slightly wanted House and Thirteen to bang in that episode.)

Kutner: You slept with Foreman?
Thirteen: Sorry. You were busy.

I remember Thirteen being a fairly unpopular character in the fandom, but I always liked her a lot. Her combination of sarcasm, closed-offness and constant desperate denial really works for me.

I feel like, the more the show pushes towards House/Cuddy, the more I ship Wilson and Cuddy. I really liked the scene in 'Big Baby' where Cuddy confided in Wilson about her lack of maternal feelings.

I also like Wilson/Cameron, I'll admit, although Foreman/Cameron remains the OTP. I think I might ship Wilson with every woman in sight. And also with House, naturally.

Wilson and House's relationship is so interesting. It's so crucial for House! It's so bad for Wilson. (That said, Wilson has his screwed-up moments as well. Don't secretly try to gather a sample of your friend's urine, Wilson.)

I really liked how Taub handled the events of 'Simple Explanation', or rather failed to handle them. Just determined not to care until he breaks down. Terrible coping mechanisms! My favourite!

Yesterday we went straight from House to Supernatural, and I found it very hard, in the opening of the episode ('The Prisoner'), to remember it wasn't supposed to be a House opening. No, Riona, you're not expecting someone to dramatically fall ill before the title sequence; you're expecting someone to get killed.

In that particular Supernatural episode, the opening death involved a plastic bag being rammed over someone's head. Had it been a House episode, the team would have spent the entire episode debating what could cause low blood oxygen, and forty minutes later House would have diagnosed him with a plastic bag over his head.

I keep trying to write 'House' and my phone keeps thinking I want to write 'Horse'. Horse, MD would be a great show.

There's a twenty-minute gameplay preview of Life Is Strange 2! It takes a while to get going and then gets extremely going very quickly. I'm already invested. (And it's already upsetting, which is very Life Is Strange.)

I was a little sorry at first to learn that Life Is Strange 2 was going to focus on male protagonists, when the original Life Is Strange was about young women, but then I watched the trailer and went '...siblings? on the run? I'm in so much trouble.' Someone's baiting a Riona trap and I am going to walk straight into it.

(Rei commented on similarities to Supernatural and then made the mind-shattering observation that the sibling protagonists of Life Is Strange 2 are named Dan and Sean.)


I watched American Animals last night! It's an excellent film. I don't often get very into films, but I hugely enjoyed this one all the way through.

The story American Animals tells is true; it's about the Transylvania University rare book theft of 2004. A group of students decided that their lives needed more excitement and romance, and that the best way to achieve this was by carrying out a heist. The film is cut with interview segments with the actual people who were originally involved, which I think work very well. (If we hadn't seen the real Warren in the film, I'd have gone 'pfft, obviously Warren's character is hugely exaggerated, some "true" story.' But no; the real Warren seems just as larger-than-life as the character.)

It was a preview screening (the official UK release date is the 7th of September), and the writer/director, Bart Layton, did a Q&A afterwards. I was impressed by how much thought had gone into the film. A few interesting details from the Q&A:


( Spoilers for American Animals. )


American Animals is fun and interesting and stressful and I recommend it!

The final entry in this adventure through my fandom history! I've really enjoyed this.


The Last of Us

The Last of Us came out just before I turned twenty-five. I wanted to play it, as I'd loved Naughty Dog's other work, but couldn't afford to buy it new. My brilliant plan: tell th_esaurus, with whom I lived at the time, about this game where a middle-aged man and a teenage girl travel through the apocalypse together (this concept is absolute catnip for her), then sit back and wait for her to buy it. It worked like a charm.

All of my fics for The Last of Us are over five thousand words long, which is unusual for me! Apparently it gives me ideas that need some space to explore.

The Last of Us is also unusual amongst the things I've written fanfiction for in being really, really good. I'm usually more drawn to write for messy, flawed canons.

Favourite character: Ellie is such a perfectly drawn character. She makes the game so human. It would never have worked without her.
Favourite pairing: This isn't a fandom I'm in for 'shipping purposes, especially, but Ellie/Riley is really cute.
Number of words written: 20,418

Snippet: This tiny thing is all I can find. It was meant to be something about Ellie's perspective on the world before the outbreak, I think. Warning for... discussion of miscarriage?

( The Last of Us unfinished snippet. Ellie and Riley, 2014. )


Assassin's Creed

I tried out my housemate's copy of Assassin's Creed when I was twenty-six. It was a bit repetitive, but I enjoyed it enough to check out the later games in the series, which were great fun.

I've written a couple of Kenway/Kidd fics, a couple of Frye-sibling oneshots, but my main involvement in Assassin's Creed fandom was with a single series. A single, cowritten, extremely long series.

Visitors was originally supposed to be a oneshot. One chapter, containing eight short scenes from a Sense8 AU. I wrote it, and then it was over.

But I couldn't stop thinking of other scenes. So I wrote another eight and posted them as a second chapter. And then I posted a third, and, look, by that point I might as well keep going until I'd written for all twenty-eight possible two-character combinations.

Then salanaland started writing scenes in that universe, and I just kept going, and VampireBadger joined in, and we started making all sorts of plans in Google Docs, and and we all just wrote frantically in this one universe for a year and a half. By the time we drew the Visitorverse to a close, it was 900,000 words long. (Although over half the total wordcount was by VampireBadger, who is terrifyingly prolific.)

It was an absolute blast. We had a table to keep track of who had hugged whom, because it was our duty to make everyone hug and we took it very seriously.

A lasting impact of my time with the Visitorverse, when I was posting a new ficlet every couple of days: I'm now much better at finishing fics. It taught me how to look at what I've written so far and go 'okay, what needs to be added before this is ready to post?' So I've generally got less unfinished fanfiction lying around for my post-Assassin's Creed fandoms; if I start writing something now, I'm much more likely to see it through.

Favourite character: There are a lot of games and a lot of characters! But possibly Haytham Kenway? Repression, sarcasm and fraught parent-child relationships: always good. I wish I enjoyed the gameplay of Assassin's Creed III more so I'd be more willing to replay it.
Favourite pairing: Edward Kenway/James Kidd, for pairings that actually make sense. For pairings that don't make sense: Shay Cormac and Aveline de Grandpré never canonically meet, but I've 'shipped them ever since writing their first scene together in Visitors.
Number of words written: 122,813, of which 116,519 are in the Visitorverse.

Snippet: This was a concept for a Supernatural AU where the Frye twins become hunters.

( Assassin's Creed unfinished snippet. Assassin's Creed Syndicate/Supernatural, 2017. )


Until Dawn

I have no idea what made me think that investigating Until Dawn was a good idea. At the age of twenty-eight I went 'I should watch a Let's Play!' and then 'NO, I HAVE TO BACK OUT, THIS IS WAY TOO SCARY' and then 'NO, I CAN'T BACK OUT BECAUSE THEN I'LL NEVER KNOW THE FATE OF THESE KIDS AND THAT'S WORSE.' I ended up having to spoil myself for everything before I could handle watching. Then I started uncontrollably writing fic after fic where the entire plot was 'IT'S POST-GAME AND EVERYONE'S TRAUMATISED'.

Favourite character: Mike! He combines two character types I have a weakness for: 'confident, kind of a jerk sometimes' and 'desperately trying to atone for a horrible, horrible mistake'. Also, he gets his fingers caught in a bear trap and it's hot.
Favourite pairing: I love Mike/Sam a lot. It's got shades of Nate/Elena, both in their appearance and in their dynamic. I was so happy when they teamed up.
Number of words written: 16,881.

Snippet: This isn't actually a snippet from an unfinished fic; it's a bit from an early draft of a finished fic. My Until Dawn time loop fic, New Game?, was originally going to be much lighter in tone and have Mike and Sam trapped in the time loop together.

( Until Dawn unfinished snippet. Mike/Sam, time loop, 2016 or 2017. )


Final Fantasy XV

What a mess. What a masterpiece. I first posted about my anticipation for this game when I was twenty; I finally actually got to play it when I was twenty-eight. There's so much wrong with it and I love it so fiercely. What a strange joy of a game. The only game I've ever played for over a hundred hours on one save file.

I leapt straight into the fandom and swam happily around in it. I was expecting the fandom to be horrendous, but it turned out to be surprisingly relaxed! Everyone was there to have fun, and I never saw any shipwars or 'you can't 'ship that; it's morally wrong'. I had lots of fun writing for prompts on the kinkmeme.

Favourite character: Prompto! Simultaneously the most fun character in the cast and the most heartbreaking. An absolute joy to write. Suffers extremely well in fanfiction.
Favourite pairing: Ooh, hard to choose. Might have to be the Noctis/Prompto/Ignis/Gladio OT4, although I've got a particular soft spot for Noctis/Prompto. I also like horrible Ardyn/Noctis and Ardyn/Prompto.
Number of words written: 36,651.

Snippet: Here is a Queer Eye AU for Final Fantasy XV, because that's obviously a perfectly sensible fanfiction concept.

( Final Fantasy XV unfinished snippet. FFXV/Queer Eye, 2018. )


Zero Escape

I enjoyed 999 and Virtue's Last Reward well enough, but they didn't capture my attention in a fannish way at all. I barely even mentioned them on here. I certainly didn't expect to write any Zero Escape fanfiction.

And then Zero Time Dilemma happened. I bought it when it was heavily discounted, at the age of twenty-nine, and I played through it at great speed, and I wrote seven fics in the space of a month. I came to the fandom late and there was very little activity (at one point I had written a full third of the fics on the front page of the AO3 tag), but the lack of an audience couldn't prevent me. It was a perfect excuse to write fanfiction about not knowing what's real, which is one of my absolute favourite fictional themes.

Favourite character: Bizarrely, my favourite Zero Escape character is a nice, relatively well-adjusted young man (who I can then make much less well-adjusted in fanfiction). I can't explain why Carlos appeals to me so much. I also think Akane is fascinating.
Favourite pairing: Carlos/Akane. I also love Carlos/Akane/Junpei, but Carlos/Akane is definitely the axis of it that appeals to me most.
Number of words written: 21,136

Snippet: Again, this is a cut scene from a posted fic rather than an extract from an unfinished one. (As I said, Assassin's Creed made me better at finishing fics, so in my later fandoms I have fewer unfinished works and I'm more ruthless about cutting scenes that don't fit.) This was originally going to come in So Close, So Far, my Carlos/everyone fic, at the end of the Carlos/Phi scene.

( Zero Escape unfinished snippet. Carlos/everyone, 2018. )


Detroit: Become Human

I caught a bad case of Detroit: Become Human shortly before turning thirty. I initially put on theradbrad's Let's Play of this for background noise and ended up getting really into this disaster of a game.

My Detroit: Become Human fanfiction is horrible and I'm not sorry. It's got so much awful potential! Android programming raises so many horrible, fascinating questions of consent! Android limbs are so intriguingly detachable!

Some of you have got into this game because I started posting about it, and I'm extremely sorry about that. But I've been rewarded for my evil deeds with great fanfiction by magistrate, so it's hard to feel too much remorse.

Favourite character: Hank! Grumpy, sarcastic, cares more than he'd like to admit, made entirely of unhealthy coping mechanisms.
Favourite pairing: I still haven't really pinned down whether I feel I 'ship Hank/Connor or just enjoy its potential for horribleness, but either way it brings me a great deal of joy. I also like Connor/Kara and Connor/Connor, and magistrate has been sending me extracts of an ambitious fic-in-progress in which I am 'shipping everything, including but not limited to Connor/Markus, Hank/Markus and Hank/Kara.
Number of words written: 12,063.

Snippet: All I have are these few sentences from Hank's perspective, in a document entitled 'detroit feeeeelings.doc'.

( Detroit: Become Human unfinished snippet. Hank/Connor, 2018. )


And that's the abridged version of how I got here! I look forward to finding out which fandoms await in my future.

I get a lot of misdirected e-mail intended for other people with my name. My new favourite instance: a few days ago, someone accidentally sent me what looks like their design for a porn website logo. They did not, alas, respond to my 'whoops, I think you have the wrong person' e-mail.


I just remembered that Sam Winchester canonically slept with his actor's wife. That is canonically a thing that happened in Supernatural.

Other canonical events in Supernatural that sound completely made up:

- A man slow dances with an alien.
- The Winchesters investigate reports of a yeti and instead discover an enormous, living teddy bear.
- One of the protagonists is trapped inside an advertisement for herpes medication.
- Someone writes incestuous slashfic about the protagonists onscreen.
- An angel rewrites history so the Titanic never sank, because he really, really hates the film.
- The Winchesters attend a Supernatural convention.
- The show introduces a character who represents the show's creator, and a character who represents the show's fandom, and then pairs them up.

Anyway, here is the trailer for the upcoming Scooby-Doo crossover episode.


I have started playing NieR: Automata! Interesting game. Very weird. Switches wildly between 3D and 2D, and between RPG, action, platforming and bullet hell. Lots of interesting mechanics and charming attention to detail; lots of odd fetishistic stuff. You have the option to explode at any point. It won't actually kill you, but it will put you in critical health and burn off your clothes.

I was thinking 'hmm, which Linkin Park lyric should I use for the title of this entry?' and then remembered this line from 'Forgotten', which is weirdly perfect for a post-apocalyptic game with a blindfolded protagonist.

Something it's worth being aware of, if you're planning to play this yourself: there are no save points until you're past the first area, which takes maybe an hour and includes multiple bosses. Don't start the game unless you have an hour to spare (I wish I'd known this before my first attempt!), and it might be worth starting it on Easy, to reduce the chances that you'll get killed and have to do the entire opening again.

You can change difficulty at any point without penalty, which is nice. I switched from Easy to Normal after reaching the first save point, and then I switched back to Easy because I was just so bad at the shooty spaceship sequences. Easy it is!

Important question: why can't I stroke the moose? I bought an item that would keep moose from running away from me, but I still can't stroke them. How is this acceptable?

strangely adorable Linkin Park GIF from linkinparkftw on Tumblr. Some of you may already have seen this, as I put it in the comments of my last post, but too bad; it's cute and I want it in an entry.

Linkin Park is still happening to me. I'm very sorry.

A couple of my favourite short clips from my apparent quest to watch every Linkin Park video on YouTube: I very much enjoyed Chester talking about his most embarrassing experience on stage while Mike cracks up (from this interview, about forty seconds in), and this extremely silly acoustic version of Numb (I'm so sad that the full version is nowhere to be found, but Chester's stupid dancing is brightening my day).

I'm finding it a little difficult to pin Chester down as a 'character', which I suppose makes sense, as he's not a character; he's a person. A few things do stand out. He's very openly affectionate; he talks a lot about how much he loves the band and his bandmates and his family. For all the anger in his singing, I've only seen him express anger in an interview once, talking about fans who call the band 'sell-outs' for experimenting with new styles, and he reflected on his comments and apologised a couple of weeks later.

Chester Bennington is intense and ridiculous and apparently possessed of boundless energy, he's built his career on screaming, and yet one of the first words that came to mind when I tried to list out his characteristics was 'quiet'. Is he quiet? Is that right? It seems unlikely. One of the first non-music videos of him I watched was an interview where the interviewer focused much more on Mike, which started me off with the probable misconception that Chester was shy, when in fact he just wasn't having much directed at him to respond to. Maybe the 'quiet' in my head is a holdover from that?

I'm still not going to write fanfiction. I'm not going to do it. My RPF days are behind me. I'm just trying to pin down the band members' characteristics as an innocent mental exercise. Don't give me that look.

A couple of specific fics I'm not going to write:

- Pokémon AU. Chester has a Loudred and every Pokémon in his team knows Roar.
- Supernatural AU where Dean is secretly a huge Linkin Park fan, he uses a haunting as an excuse to go to a gig, and he is very confused when Linkin Park take care of the haunting themselves. Turns out they're actually a team of hunters, fighting ghosts using the power of song somehow. This is an atrocious concept.