come inside the air I breathe...

Because I am absolutely terrible at accounts and trying to consolidate (and because I'm trying to get back into journaling - again - and I'm tired of being adrift in the sea of Twitter), I'm moving everything over to linzeestyle (on Dreamwidth). I even moved my Livejournal, finally. Come friend me over there? :)

The X Files premiered twenty years ago today, which I find absolutely ridiculous and a little bit terrifying. XF was my first fandom -- I got into it pretty late in the game (late season five), and into fandom after the movie came out -- back when I was a relatively tiny Linzee (well, 90s internet-tiny -- I feel like there are nine year olds on tumblr now so apparently fourteen would not be all that young? YOUTHS). For better or worse it shaped most things about my fannish experience, but the one thing XF did for me is give me a group of friends that I've had for over a decade now. Most of them aren't in fandom anymore, but we've all kept in touch. I always joke -- most people have high school friends, I have XF friends, but it's true and I am grateful for that. The show gave me a sense of belonging during my teenage years I wouldn't have had otherwise. Which is perhaps a weird memory to have of a show and a fannish experience, but, well...XF was weird.

Tonight I re-watched "Field Trip" and "All Things," because "Field Trip" is one of my favorite episodes and because I hadn't watched "All Things" in years. Miscellaneous thoughts on both include:

( This is not long, but it is mindless. )

I was going to come up with a "top ten X Files episodes" list or something for the occasion, but every time I started I ended up getting distracted watching episodes. One day I will triumph and come up with that list though. One day.

Life update: travelling across the country with two cats is unnecessarily difficult. Actually impossible, if one of the locations on your itinerary is Phoenix. I can't cargo one of the cats because no airline will accept animals as cargo if the temperature is above 85, even if their cargo hold is air conditioned. Which -- okay, I appreciate this as a safety precaution, but they also won't let me carry on two cats even if I buy one of them a person-ticket, which is a touch more frustrating. Cat ladies travel, too! The solution I ended up with after great deliberation is just to fly back to Arizona for a long weekend in mid-October and pick up the second cat then, for all of four weeks until I fly back to Phoenix for Thanksgiving, at which point I'll be bringing back one cat, and then the second one comes with me, yet again (and for good) for Christmas. My mom suggested I try to smuggle on a cat like Lucy Ricardo with the cheese, but cats aren't quite as edible, nor am I in possession of convenient hideout tubas.

ANYWAY. Second point of order: earlier this summer my older of two external hard drives died, and as a result I lost basically every fanvid I have ever saved. It was horrible -- at least a decade's worth of fanvids, including quite a few old XF and SV videos that aren't online anymore. I don't think I'm ever going to get entirely over this. I was able to rescue my 13 year old Matchbox Twenty mp3 collection, though, as well as my Train mp3 collection that's about that same age, so at least there's something. Since then I've been trying to start a new fanvid collection, but it's still pretty scarce. Anyone have any fanvid recs they want to send my way? *huge eyes*

I will start with two!

Light Em' Up - Team Free Will [Supernatural] - there's another SPN video to "My Songs Know What You Did In the Dark" that was ubiquitous on Tumblr a couple of months ago, but I wasn't much of a fan of it. This one, on the other hand, is absolutely incredible. This song is so wonderfully over-dramatic in the glorious, over the top way that made me fall in love with Fall Out Boy in the first place, and the video amps that up to 11. I honestly like this video so much I've just accepted it as the music video for the song; the editing is better than the editing for the real music video/music video series-thing.

Getaway - Dean/Benny [Supernatural] - I feel like everybody secretly, deep down inside, shipped Dean/Benny. At least once, for at least a couple minutes. This video pulls those couple minutes out of you and turns them into a massive pile of feelings that you will want to crawl under and die (okay, that might just be me). Things I am still not over, apparently: that time Dean had to decapitate his vampire boyfriend to save his baby brother. Supernatural is why I don't have nice things.

Title: Napoleon in Rags
Author: Linzee Style
Rating: NC-17
Pairing: Dean/Castiel
Word Count: 42,365
Warnings: canon-typical violence and themes; temporary character death (it IS Supernatural, after all).

Summary: “So,” Dean says eventually, breath ruffling Castiel’s hair. “You gonna tell us about this place?”

“I don’t have to,” Castiel says, pushing himself up on his elbows. “If I’m right, it’s nearby. Near something called Tucson.” Dean looks at him incredulously and Castiel scowls. “I was hiding an invaluable relic, not purchasing real estate.”

Or: There's no such thing as a hunter retirement plan.

[Read at AO3]

Tonight was night two of two on my Matchbox Twenty Extravagnaza, thus named because tonight marked my twentieth Matchbox Twenty/Rob Thomas show. Which is not actually that many shows, but you have to keep in mind that (a) they do not tour that often, (b) this is a span of time during which I was ages sixteen to twenty-eight, which are tragically not prime 'travel long distances to concerts while remaining fiscally responsible' years, and (c) they took a goddamn ten year break between albums three and four I don't even want to talk about the fact I only got one Matchbox Twenty album in my entire twenties I mean really.

Nonetheless! I have now seen Rob and/or Matchbox Twenty, twenty times. I've been a fan of the band since I was fifteen years old -- ongoing, non-stop, they have always been my favorite band. They're not "fannish," in the sense that there is no Matchbox Twenty fandom, but my love of them is certainly as intense as any fannish affection I've ever have, and yet whereas every fannish love I've had has waned fairly quickly (after one to two years at most, a month or so at shortest), I've felt this level of affection for Matchbox for thirteen years and counting.

This isn't of course to say that I don't still love some of the things I was once fannish about -- I mean, I still like The X Files. But it took a long time before I could watch it again after it ended. The same is true of Fall Out Boy: it was a long time after I left bandom before I could listen to bandom music, and ultimately the only artists that survived the cut were Fall Out Boy and Cobra Starship. I'd never go see any of those bands live again, though. And then there's the shows I was fannish about and don't survive or net a rewatch, like Smallville or (I feel like I should tell people to cover their ears here) Buffy.

Sometimes I genuinely wonder if fandom improves or hinders the experience of text. There are many, many people who would argue that you should never study the literature you genuinely "adore" because it ruins it; more and more I think that's true of fandom. Sometimes I think that just means I am Getting Old (kids today get off my lawn), but driving back from the Matchbox Twenty concert my friend and I were brainstorming potential wank Tumblr would create in an imagined Matchbox Twenty fandom, and my god by the time we were done even the imaginary fandom had made me want to listen to something other than "North." It also made me want Tabitha's Secret-era Rob/Paul fic but we're not going to focus on that part right now shh.

Then again, it's possible there are different kinds of affection when it comes to the things we love. Maybe fannish love is different for me than "true love," or maybe they just became a part of me at such a point in my life that I've stuck them in emotional bubble wrap, and Rob Thomas could kill a man and I'd just shrug and get a tarp and some borax. Or maybe I'm looking for an excuse to delete my tumblr. At any rate, I realized tonight that this is very likely the last Matchbox Twenty show I will see in my twenties, which made me feel horrifically old and also made me realize just how intense that hiatus business actually was. Dear Matchbox Twenty don't do that again.


In conclusion, I did buy the USB so in the next few days I'll upload both shows to my web space.  We got two fucking amazing set lists, including "You're So Real," "All I Need," "All Your Reasons," "How Long," "Mad Season," "Jumping Jack Flash," and "Waiting On a Train."  The last one leads me to believe I have some sort of untapped psychic ability, as I told my friend while we got drinks before the show that if I could choose any song for them to play it would be that one, but it's a B-side from Europe and I strongly suspected that wasn't exactly going to make the American cut.  And lo!  When the music started she smacked me and told me I should've used my powers to get "Busted," which is fair.  I WILL one day achieve that song.  ONE DAY.

My oldest external hard drive is in the process of dying, or just generally being an asshole for no reason -- I'm unclear on which, but while I can see the folders in which my media is located, I cannot click those folders or enter those folders or get at my media in any way. I'm currently trying to get a fanvid collection that has twelve years' worth of vids in it, but I do not think I am going to have much luck and that makes me sad in ways I cannot describe to you. I had X Files videos on there that don't even exist on the internet anymore.

On the plus side, I rescued all of my Matchbox Twenty mp3s. I'm sure that's a thing you were worried about.  Now I just have to once again procure an amount of television and cinema that we aren't going to talk about.

At any rate, while I fuck around with this stupid external hard drive, I'm reduced to only watching things that are on my other, newer drive. This has led me to re-live my Smallville days, which -- alright, like everyone else I left in season four, because season four made no sense whatsoever. Rewatching does not help. In fact, the show actually makes more sense if you just stop trying to fit season four into the plot of Smallville and pretend Dean Winchester is having the weirdest year ever while Sam is still off at Stanford.


I do appreciate, as always, that at any given time I can never tell if I'm looking at a promotional still or the first five minutes of a porno.  Thank you for that, Smallville.

And now if anyone has any idea how to get files off of an external that is giving I/O errors and won't let me open, explore or run recovery programs on any folder with video in it (though I can see the folder and my computer says the device is working properly), or alternately, if anyone has a huge-ass repository of fanvids they want to share with me to help rebuild my collection, any and all help would be greatly appreciated because oh my god I am going to punt this thing to the moon.

One of the hardest realizations for me in the fandom shift from LJ/DW to tumblr has been having to come to terms with the fact that I no longer have any idea how to disseminate fanworks: either I've become completely out of touch with what Kids Today want in their work (this is entirely possible), or I'm just clueless (also possible), or it's a combination of the two (also likely), but tumblr's fanfic culture in particular is a foreign creature that confuses and at times completely vexes me. I'm just throwing darts in a dark hallway and it is discouraging beyond all belief.

The thing is, and I have always said this because it is true, but I don't necessarily feel the need to post what I write. I write as stress relief because it's nice to work in a relatively low-stakes environment where (under normal circumstances) no one is going to tell you how badly you suck. Bandom took that from me for a while, but eventually I realized bandom was largely a complete hive of scum and villainy and moved on with my life. What I am embarrassingly, humiliatingly susceptible to, though, is radio silence. My biggest fear is posting a fic I've worked on for months and getting no response, or posting fanart or drabbles and hearing radio silence. And the thing with tumblr is - for the reasons mentioned above - this is what happens. Which is fine, because no one owes me commentary, but I do find myself writing things and then putting them away in the Google Docs equivalent of my sock drawer more and more often. Which is a thing I've always done: I wrote about twice the amount of bandom fic that I actually posted, for instance; I have a few extra Adam Lambert stories that never made it to the internet; I wrote for The Avengers and never posted. And now I've got this 40+k Supernatural fic I'm just about finished with that I'm really, really proud of and I'm not entirely sure I'm going to post because while I can handle criticism, I get so embarrassed and ashamed when I publish something online and nothing happens but silence.

The downside of this, and this is where I realize I am being a total selfish asshole, is I still like getting things beta'ed. And that is a hard sell: "hey, do you want to beta 42,000 words of Dean/Castiel with a lot of Sam knowing it will never ever get posted on the internet and all your work will be for naught?" Oh yes sign me up for that!

In conclusion, as long as I'm here, here is a Meg/Cas vid I made a while ago and, uh, never posted. At what point am I in danger of becoming some sort of fandom hoarder?

Steve pushes his hand into his pocket and it closes around cool metal. “You know there are timelines where none of this happened.”

Sam shrugs and sits down on the wall next to Steve. “Yeah, and there are timelines where reality TV doesn’t exist and this job pays. We can’t do anything about that. They’re not ours.”

( Steve stares out at the skyline. )

This is my new favorite way of getting past writers' block, you guys. Because it's easy (lazy) and because it combines my favorite things: photoshop, and not actually writing. I've been working on the same story since July -- it's at over 20,000 words and will probably end around 30-40, when I finally get this stupid thing done. I'm really pleased with what I have so far, but it's slow-going, both because writing is hard (it is!) and because I have approximately five million other things I should be doing other than writing fanfic (my PhD exams are in May, so that's a thing that's happening).

The fic I'm writing is not actually curtain-fic, and this is not actually part of the story. I'm basically just writing extra scenes in my head with all the characters I wasn't able to include in the story proper. Next up: Bucky. Man, you don't even understand how hard it was to not use Bucky. Kill your darlings and all but if I had my way I would just stick Bucky everywhere. He's basically my favorite thing.