(no subject)

I have been betaing last-minute Yuletide fics all night, and I still have not yet packed for my 9 AM bus back to Philly tomorrow, so I'm very glad kate_nepveu gave me a short and easy to answer topic for the 24th: a piece of trivia from my profession I would like everyone to know!

Okay, here's what you all should know: Properly stored, film will last for a hundred years or more. Videotape will usually last maybe forty, if you're lucky, depending on the kind of tape and, again, how you store it. Nobody really knows what the heck is the lifespan of a CD or DVD but everyone's really dubious about them and their high failure rate. And digital files are THE WORST OF ALL, but we still preserve to them anyway nowadays because they're the only thing anybody can access.

~*~now you know!~*~

Oh, another thing you should know that is generally useful -- if you're buying a portable hard drive and a backup to store stuff that's important, you should try and buy different brands! That way they won't fail both at the same time.

(no subject)

I woke up this morning after three or four hours of sleep, dazedly packed my bag, and then even more dazedly went to check the Yuletide archive.

Guys! When I saw that I'd gone out to the pinch-hit list last-minute, I was feeling guilty because I was convinced I was going to be the awful and difficult-to-match person who would hold up Yuletide for everyone else. Instead I got not one, BUT TWO stories, and BOTH OF THEM AMAZING:

Finding Aid, "The Provenance Game"

Amateurs would tell you “Oh, it’s just bits of paper.” Archivists knew better. The critical difference between an archive and a pile of documents was that in an archive, you knew where things were.

GUYS. SOMEONE WROTE ME ARCHIVES PORN. (In the metaphorical sense.) I mean, "The Provenance Game" as a short story is archives porn in and of itself, which is one of the things that makes it so delightful, but this is EVEN MORESO. I'm so delighted! And political archives intrigue, to boot. >:D I'm about 90% sure that whoever wrote this is an archivist themselves -- the reference to authority controls is what convinces me -- and if not, congrats, mystery author, you did an AMAZING job of faking it.

The Queen's Award, The Summer Prince

It's music of a sort, rough and wild but music all the same. The true anthem of our city, though almost no one has heard it, being sung here in the isolated reaches of Tier Ten.

AND THEN I GOT FEELINGS AND ART AND FEELINGS ABOUT CITIES PORN. (Um, and a little actual femslash porn as well.) Someone wrote me the June/Bebel postcanon fic I have been craving, and it's everything I could have asked for. Perfectionist ladies! Artistic partnerships! Finding the balance between politics and art! IT'S SO GREAT, everyone should read it.

WHAT A GOOD YULETIDE. I'm about to go to the movies with the family for the traditional Jewish Christmas ritual so I won't get to dive into the archive properly until later, but I'm super excited to do so!

I also, for the record, received one present from my dad for Christmas -- despite the fact that we don't ACTUALLY CELEBRATE it, he decided to get gifts for us all ANYWAY and surprise us. Which is unfair and we shouted him down vociferously! Then I opened my gift.



Okay, that's fair actually, I guess.

(no subject)

In other news, jinian asked me to write about five cartoon or other fictional characters I've had crushes on for the 25th, and what I think happened to them after canon!

1. Okay, I have to start this one out with Disney's Aladdin, who as far as I can remember was my very first fictional crush at the tender age of six or seven. Look, he's a WISECRACKING PLUCKY THIEF with a HEART OF GOLD and a PET MONKEY who spends much of the movie running around without a shirt. What seven-year-old didn't have a crush on Aladdin? I ask you.

I never watched the Aladdin TV show or sequel films, but I assume postcanon he continued to act as Jasmine's trophy husband, to have nothing to do with politics, and not to wear a shirt.

2. Okay, say what you will about Legend of Korra -- and I have fairly conflicted feelings about Legend of Korra that I really don't feel like going into at this time -- but I think we can all agree that Lin Bei Fong metalbending on her armor in that one episode was basically the hottest thing . . . ever to happen . . . on a children's television show . . . uh. And now I feel awkward.

I have no postcanon opinions about Lin Bei Fong though because her canon hasn't ended yet!

3. Speaking of, I feel really skeevy saying this, because wow, AGE INAPPROPRIATE, the child is SIXTEEN, but . . . uh, okay, let's say age Sokka from A:tLA up ten or fifteen years? But what a perfect cartoon boyfriend. Animated ideal. He even writes haiku!

Postcanon (or in between the two canons, I guess) I believe Sokka maintained a true Renaissance career as a scholar, inventor, politician, and publisher of bestselling and rather terrible memoirs full of bad jokes.

4. You know what, though, I don't know why I should be embarrassed to talk about Sokka when I have already publicly admitted to a crush on an fictional anthropomorphic rat. Wow, Rakushun. What a dreamboat. Rational intelligence is the most attractive thing of all!

I have already written a couple of fics about what I think is going to happen to Rakushun after the canon we have -- which is one reason I have less of a fictional crush on him than I used to, actually; usually the more I write from inside a character's head the harder it is to conceive of them as a crush, per se -- but to sum up, I think he's going to graduate with honors, become a public official, move to Kei, and spend the next several hundred years acting as Yoko's unofficial Queen Consort.

5. All right, guys, I have valiantly tried to keep this to characters who could conceivably count as cartoons for most of these (Rakushun had an anime!), but you knew where this was inevitably heading:

( GRATUITOUS SCREENCAPS OF CHA SONG JOO, MASTER REVOLUTIONARY CHESSMASTER COURTESAN ASSASSIN TROLL, AND MY ETERNAL FICTIONAL LOVE )

After canon, I firmly believe Cha Song Joo came into possession of a magical time-traveling device and went around coordinating revolutions all over the space-time continuum LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOOOOOOOU