Nenya Kanadka

My small contribution to the current kerfuffle, based on a comment by sara over at synecdochic's:

We built this city on porn and law! And then we won a motherfucking Hugo. And somewhere along the way oh that's right we did kind of engage in a vigorous creative reorganization of speculative fiction.

I couldn't decide if it scanned better as "porn and law" or "law and porn" so I made both, plus some with just "we built this city."







Icons obviously shareable, credit sara for the excellent quote!

❤

Holy shit. A03 won the Hugo for Best Related Work!

It feels kind of like the big fancy official people, the public face of the genre of my heart, have just acknowledged that the way I have done fandom for 20 years exists. And is important.

That feels pretty good. ❤

(And, of course, reminds me that all along many of the Famous People have also been my kind of fan, too.)

I'm proud to share this award with the other hundreds of thousands of you who make up the transformative works fandom that I call home. Fic-writing, slash-writing, often queer, largely female-centric, and full of so much creativity (and wank, and silliness).

I love everyone in this bar.

Yay, new fic! I wrote this for the small but lovely Cornwell Fanworks Challenge December 2018 organized by pixiedane over the holidays.

Title: The Feather At The Pivot Point for lodessa
Fandom/Pairing: Star Trek: Discovery, Katrina Cornwell & L'Rell
Rating/Word Count: Teen (for mentions of violence), about 3300 words
Summary: From this prompt:
As the new head of the Klingon Empire, L'Rell only agrees to initiate diplomatic relations with the Federation on the condition that she is allowed to name the ambassador assigned to Qo'noS: Katrina Cornwell.

Notes:
This turned out to be less about what it's like being an ambassador to the Klingons and more Kat's inner journey from "Ohhh fuck no" at the suggestion to deciding that it could be what she's meant to do next. It was satisfying to me to try to hold in tension the fact that Kat's experienced quite a lot of trauma at the hands of the Klingons (both directly and indirectly) and that she does have that personal connection with L'Rell--a connection that seems to bypass all the differences between them but that was forged in the middle of all that trauma in the first place. Plus I think Kat's someone who would always be trying to understand and who really does want peace. This isn't shippy exactly but I feel like it's step 1 in perhaps a long series of events that eventually ends in Kat/L'Rell.


After fic reveals for the Cornwell Fanworks Challenge we were all guessing who'd written what, and apparently I am super easy to guess? Kat having angsty internal monologues about another woman was apparently pretty obvious even if the woman in question was L'Rell instead of Georgiou. :D


Ooh! AND: I got fic! Two amazing stories, both variations on Kat/Georgiou (it's like people know me):

Loyalty by R_S_B: Mirror Cornwell/Mirror Georgiou, 1200 words, Teen
Inquisitor Katrina Cornwell is brought before her Emperor, suspected of collaboration with the treacherous Gabriel Lorca.
Reads like a prequel to my Non-Regulation Uses. :D Loyalty, betrayal, and the teeniest bit of bloodplay.

Darling, Dearest by Oparu: Katrina Cornwell/Mirror Georgiou, 1500 words, Teen
Katrina Cornwell undertakes a dangerous diplomatic mission and is assigned a top Section 31 operative to keep her safe. Posing as a married couple is one of the oldest covers in the spy playblook, but Kat is not at all prepared when her 'wife' is former Emperor Philippa Georgiou.
I need like 75,000 more words of this concept, three seasons, and a movie. :D Kat and Georgiou are wonderful here, with Kat simultaneously freaked out by and drawn to Georgiou, and lots of spiky back-and-forth about what they think of each other and of their other-universe counterparts. Gorgeous and just slightly unsettling--like you would expect from "undercover as married" with Emperor Georgiou!


There were some other really great fics in the fest (two standouts were lizbee's Rainfall with Kat and Amanda on the eve of the season 1 finale, and mselliejane's Live Bait in which Kat eats gagh while imprisoned) and I'm really enjoying these tiny fests for my corner of the fandom (cf the Disco Hiatus Exchange 2017 that Lizbee ran last year) and hope we do another one in 2019. <3

Yay, my Fandom Stocking went up!

Nenya's stocking for 2018
Comments will be screened until the grand reveal. Please leave (or link) drabbles/make icons/good wishes and such in comments at the link above.

At signups I felt like I'd put in a ridiculous number of fandoms, but I don't think seven is that many? (If you count Star Trek as one fandom.) I did leave a bloody lot of prompts/ideas, but hopefully that's helpful rather than tl;dr.

( Fandoms I'm requesting )

Since stockings are going up as late as they are, mods are extending the reveals date to January 19.

For those unfamiliar with fandom_stocking, how it works is ( like so ) It's a really low-investment fest but pretty fun in my experience.

(Very glad there's a couple extra weeks this year--means I might have time to write some things!)

Mucca is home!

😍😍😍😍😍

(Post I've been meaning to make for the better part of a year--finally getting around to it! Title after Stephen Colbert's "I Am America, And So Can You.")

In my front yard I have a meditation labyrinth that muccamukk's mom created years ago. It's also an orrery for the planets of our solar system. Whenever I mention it people think it's pretty cool, so I thought I'd do a writeup.

An orrery (quoth Wikipedia) is "a mechanical model of the solar system that illustrates or predicts the relative positions and motions of the planets." It does not have to be to scale (and in fact usually isn't) and it may or may not be set up to move under its own power. This one is human-powered in the sense that every ten days I go out on my lawn and move the various planets around to their latest relative positions.

A labyrinth is a maze-like pattern you can walk for meditation purposes or just for fun. Many of them are laid out more or less as concentric circles, which proved handy when Mucca's mom decided to use the big labyrinth on the front lawn to set up her orrery.

You can obviously have a labyrinth without an orrery, or vice versa, but in our case they are two tastes that taste great together. :D

My Labyrinth Orrery

We have two labyrinths on our lawn, built ages ago by Mucca's parents (who are labyrinth experts and enthusiasts). The one on our front lawn is a Chartres-style labyrinth, and looks like this:



( more about the labyrinth, + 5 pictures )


....And So Can You!

If you're interested, you can make something like this pretty easily.

( what you need & what to do, + 2 pics )


The neat thing about all this is that you can fairly easily set up a system that illustrates where the various planets are in relation to one another and the sun, and how fast they're moving, in terms of degrees of a circle. In other words, you can know if Mars is on the same side of the sun as Earth is, and how fast Mercury goes around the sun, and whether Venus is passing in front of Jupiter. And since you have markers set out for each planet, you can then go stand at Earth and look around to see where the other planets will appear as seen from our perspective.

The even neater thing is that it's all in motion, and as you update it, you can actually watch the solar system move in more or less real time.


Bonus Sock Doll Pics:

I have a little doll I made out of a sock last year, the "proof of concept" for a string of dolls I ended up making later. Her name is Anna and she's a little alien with naturally blue-green hair. Here she is exploring our solar system.

( 4 pics of doll )


Feel free to ask any questions in comments! :D

Me, last week: Everything is Georgiou and nothing hurts

Me, this week: EVERYTHING IS GEORGIOU AND WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE

Okay, so there are a couple of major ways that fiction tends to handle antagonists/villains.

( Here there be spoilers for 1x13 What's Past Is Prologue. No seriously, do not pass Go or collect 200 credits. )

And that is why I am screaming internally over Star Trek: Discovery and may never stop. ❤❤❤

For anybody on my flist who's watching Discovery and wants people to talk to, there's a brand new shiny ST:DSC comm over at spacefungusparty. It's like three hours old and we are all giving our serious/ridiculous/??? plot predictions. You should come play.

(So far the show has got me going "Aahh what will happen next??" which is a major step up from my deep dubiousness after the double-pilot. Michael is fantastic, Lorca is a dick but pretty riveting bc Jason Isaacs, and all the supporting cast are great. It's pretty clearly a counter to the "shoot first, torture everyone" school of thought, Vulcan is fuckin' gorgeous, and the trees are the right height the starship corridors are the right shape, so the moral of this story is that either it doesn't suck or I'm super easy for Star Trek. I'm enjoying myself, either way.)

So watching the show the first time, it seemed to take years and yeaaaaars, because of course IRL it showed over the course of five years, most of which was spent pining for the next season (at least for the viewers).

But! In-world, the show took place over a lot less time than that. Because of ( spoiler for people like Mucca who haven't seen past season 1 ), we know it can't have been more than ten months max between Sarah stepping off the train and "Shite fish in shite lake." Which means that if Beth died in the last week of November 2012 (we see paperwork on screen with this date), the final showdown in season 5 can't be any later than September 2013.

Which makes sense--I spent a lot of time wondering how Team Sarah managed to escape the clutches of their multi-tentacled multinational enemies for so long, but it really wasn't "so long." Less than a year, and they did a LOT of running around in that time.

Huh.