wanderings

A follow-up to this post.

I am still failing out of dramas continually or setting them down and forgetting to come back to them forever. (I am watching two right now that are both doing the "stupid character is manipulated into stirring shit up for the leads" and I can't with them. Like, everything else is fine, but that fucking trope. I'm like 4 episodes away from finishing another series and they've introduced a jealousy plot - we're like 90% of the way through? Jealousy plots are supposed to be short second plot arcs. Whyyyy. I have not watched episodes of those series in months and have started like 13 other shows and finished two of them in the meantime.) Finishing shows continues to feel like an accomplishment, so, a record:

( 10 Modern )

( 3 Historical )

In your own space, tell us about 3 creative/fannish resources, spaces, or communities you use or enjoy. (One or two is fine, especially if you're in a smaller fandom or like many people at the moment, fannishly adrift right now) Leave a comment in this post saying you did it. Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

iNaturalist "is an online social network of people sharing biodiversity information to help each other learn about nature. It's also a crowdsourced species identification system and an organism occurrence recording tool." (What is it, 2022.)

I use iNaturalist for that, and also for creative projects. Sometimes I filter all of the observations that have been made globally to find out something like what the most common birds recorded in January in Seoul are, or I'll filter all of the photos of a species by their photo licensing type if I want to find a reference to use.

I can also search for sounds and find a cricket on Jeju Island in September. The songs of birds, insects, and amphibians vary by region and season. iNaturalist can be used as a tool to help you find the right bird song to include in your podfic, whether your characters are birders or not. You can know that your wildlife sounds are accurate, whether or not anyone else does.

InsectSingers.com is another great resource. It has "[s]ong recordings and information on acoustically signaling insects, especially cicadas of the United States and Canada." - there's a lot of variation in cicada song between species. You can listen to a sampling of different songs here to get a bit of an idea.

The Cornell Lab of Ornithology's Macaulay Library is a good resource for photos, audio, and video recordings of birds, and you can find a lot of amphibian sound recordings there, too, because some frog sounds are pretty similar to bird sounds. The Cornell Lab also has eBird and Merlin, which are both useful for exploring birds and bird identification.

The Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation is an excellent resource if you're into invertebrates, birds*, gardening, or life on this planet. They're an international nonprofit focused on science-based conservation work. Among other things they've got region-based guides for protecting pollinators and publications on things like mosquito management, conserving plant stems for native bees, and insectary cover cropping in California. If you want to write a character into these things, or if you're interested in these things yourself, Xerces is a good place to start.

*roughly 96% of terrestrial birds feed their young insects (Are declines in insects and insectivorous birds related?, 2021)

In your own space, promote three communities, challenges, blogs, pages, Twitters, Tumblrs or platforms and explain why you love them. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it.

I keep a very minimalistic reading list on dreamwidth - if I am not always about the thing it is not on my list, basically. I am reccing three things that I have been following for years and all produce a lot of content:

fancake - year round, multifandom, thematic recs community (January's theme is five things)

smartbitches_feed - feed for Smart Bitches, Trashy Books ("all of the romance, none of the bullshit") - book reviews, book-finding posts, episode reviews of shows I don't watch, posts that are basically sales flyers, round-up posts of books they've advertised for on their site, cover snark...

ladybusiness - creative fandom feminist blog collective? - has won a Hugo Award - contributors have MLP avatars and write about media and feminism. They did a rec roundtable this past December and have excellent cut skills.

I did a rec set of Hallmark Christmas Movies for snowflake_challenge a couple years ago and it was really good for me, so, I am doing it again, without the Christmas theme*, for which we are all profoundly grateful, I think. Except for those that have already fled, probably - cowards.

*It's too early for that shit; Hallowe'en hasn't happened yet. That's a lie. It's not too early but I refuse to be restrained by so rigid a theme. This time there is no theme, there is only the glory that is Hallmark. Glory.

Let's fucking do this thing.

01. The Seven Year Hitch. The reason that you're getting this rec set today is that this one haunts me, still. The Seven Year Hitch is a terrifying film about best friends ending up together. Jen and Kevin have known each other since they were kids, they went to school together, post-college Jen bought a house and since Kevin wasn't doing as well financially he moved in. They're on different career paths. Jen is dating this guy named Bryce who is awful (of course) and things start to get serious so she starts talking to Kevin about him moving out and... that is about where we leave normal human behaviour behind. Kevin realises that his world is ending and decides that he's not moving out because he's a child, basically, and then, because he's a dick, decides that she's already married to him instead. Common law. Because they've been living together for so long. So she can't get married again and he doesn't have to move out. This is amazing; it is wonderful, brilliant, and hilarious. I love it because it feels a bit like something that Bruno and Boots would do, but it is just such an asshole move that I am still angry about it two or three years later. I want to be clear: Kevin does not start this shit because he realises he loves Jen; this is not a wooing attempt via fake marriage. Or is it. There are shenanigans and sniping including a childish war that they embark on against each other. Jen does yell at Kevin and spends a lot of this film pissed off at him, rightfully. Kevin grows or shrinks as a person (who can tell, really; things are batshit and skeevy as hell) and Jen faces a choice of monumental importance, or maybe somehow in the face of her fiance turning out to be an asshole her childhood bestie's still a good fallback - who knows. Tropey and filled with domesticity, shenanigans, and that terrible terrible mindfuck of a premise. (You do not retroactively marry your best friend against their wishes because life is scary Kevin what the fuck is wrong with you it's her fucking house you asshole. Also your plan is terrible how is this working. Why.) It's that fic you read where you alternately hiss "yessssss" and "noooooooo" to yourself, basically.

02. Remember Sunday. He has amnesia. He's also played by Zachary Levi and his love interest is played by Alexis Bledel and the amnesia is slightly more scientifically accurate than usual, maybe - he can't form new long-term memories but has all his old ones. He used to do astronomy things but now he works in a jeweler's and his name is Gus. Her name is Molly. They're adorable. He has an elaborate system of post-its to allow him to function and a tape recorder and he keeps a log and he tries to conceal his amnesia. She wants to open a flower shop. Both of them have plot things unrelated to the romance happen to them.

03. Love Comes Softly. 1800s marriage of convenience in rural/frontier-y America starring Katherine Heigl. I think this is based on a Janette Oke novel and it's part of this whole series if you get into it. They're raising two kids together. Heigl's character - Marty- is new to living on a farm and is dealing with that on top of having a newborn, a kid who isn't hers that's old enough to have personality and be non-cooperative, and a new husband who talks about god in a way that I'm pretty sure is supposed to make us all see the light. It's pretty Christian. It's also tropey as fuck. There's a lot of, like, farm-type humour born of Marty being a newb and ready to crankily face down whatever gets thrown at her. She's also really into books and will correct your grammar out loud, thanks. Marty is a delight, basically.

04. Cloudy with a Chance of Love. She's a meteorologist and has a really great face. She's got this earnest nerd thing going on and gets excited about the weather and maybe also broadcasting. Maybe she also has a rival but not so much? Maybe they just misunderstand each other at first and need to get to know each other better. Look, I haven't seen any of these recently and all I've got on this one is that she's super pretty, basically. Sometimes I am shallow. I am reasonably sure I was in this entirely for her face and the part where they would sometimes talk about the weather - it was appealing, somehow? It's a solid Hallmark film, unless it isn't, and nothing too strange happens in it. (Probably.) Also the lead is super pretty.

05. A Ring by Spring is set in a factory, maybe, with a non-conventionally handsome hero and an adorable woman who desperately wants to get married (and there is probably some bullshit with a "gypsy fortune teller" FYI). Stuff happens, it's cute, and things fall into place - all you need. (Also Ali Liebert is in it. Score.) I'm pretty sure this is the film that sent me on a Hallmark spiral, so there's definitely something there, even if I can't remember what it is and I'm not re-watching it. (I can say that I was recced it via a Sterek fic and that my past self referred to it as a gem. I didn't really leave myself a lot of context in the brief note I found from myself but I'm reasonably certain the "gem" bit wasn't entirely sarcastic, and I am under the impression that, as Hallmark goes, this is about as good as it gets, so, really, if you're gonna watch something - and if you're reading the fifth rec on this list you probably should - this is a decent choice.)

06. I do, I do, I do Ali Liebert is also in this film, along with Antonio Cupo and Shawn Roberts and they play the bride's sister, bridegroom, and the groom's brother, respectively. It's Hallmark's version of Groundhog's Day. (Hallmark Groundhog's Day.) The bride is in a time loop. It's actually pretty solid, considering - she tries to make her wedding perfect, she skips her wedding, she goes and hangs out on the beach, she learns new skills with her time, and falls in love, because she wasn't in love before. Another sweet film that's Hallmark-style magical, but with at least one genuinely funny bit. You could do worse. I certainly have.

07. The Counterfeit Contessa is the film of my heart. Seriously. Fuck everything else on this list. Fuck it all because this film is goddamn poetry. It is so firmly grounded in the 90s that I can tell you that this is a het romance with token gays, that it reminds me of that Sandra Bullock one with the brothers and the coma, only- this predates that one and it is better, better than While You Were Sleeping. The entire thing is a romp. Téa Leoni is great in this as a working class Italian American who accidentally falls into assuming the identity of an Italian Contessa to capture the attention of a dashing high society WASP character. There's a brother. They both have fantastic families, actually, but the brother is kind of a shit-disturber, which endears him to me tremendously. The whole thing is tropey as fuck. The plot twists are tropey as fuck, and tend towards delicious comedy. The lead is in love with old black and white romances. Side characters get their day. Like, I am fucking up writing this thing right now because I love it so completely and unironically, like, yes, it is terribly 90s, it is like a dumpster of cheesy romance shenanigans, but it is all that it is so completely and without irony that I just, yeah. Watch this film. It is ridiculous and satisfying and fun, full of excellent tomfoolery and beautiful 90s ballrooms and unlikely friendships. (Fuck yes.)

...and that's it. I'm done for now. This post already suffered a terrible accident where I discovered on completion that I'd half-written it before, so I had to half-write it again, putting both versions together and basically couldn't make myself cut anything; there were too many things on this list before I did that and there are more now and I think this time I might actually be sorry. There may be regrets, though not about The Counterfeit Contessa, so, you know, you're welcome?

glitteryv prompted me with "A media (book, movie, etc.) that you like reccing to people all the time." This is probably Slings & Arrows for me, just because it feels like such a solid rec to make to a lot of different people. It's smart, earnest, and funny.

You're into Canadiana? Hoo boy. So it's about a theatre festival that bears a striking similarity to Stratford; it's amazing. Jackie Burroughs is in it. Sarah Polley. Paul Gross. \o/ You know, the mountie from Due South, yeah, he's the lead. Ranger Gord from Red Green is in it. Colm Feore. Sean Cullen. Rachel McAdams. William Hutt is in it. Seriously, it's like - anytime you find yourself walking through any kind of photo collection of people in Canadian theatre, you are going to be finding someone from this show, possibly multiple someones. It's a delight.

You like theatre? This is a love letter to the theatre. It's about the Stratford Festival, and each season of the show is a season at the theatre and they focus on two productions that they're putting on - so you get to see them performing bits of Shakespeare and having meta discussions about that performance and talking to the stage manager and about ticket sales and funding and all of these different details, and some of it's pretty cynical. But there's also theses little moments where the show goes there, right there, that's why the theatre is magic, that's why we're doing this it's great.

I'm Canadian and like the arts. Those are the two pitches that tend to come up the most.

It's three seasons of six episodes. The season arcs are well structured. They play with themes really well.

I requested it for yuletide a few years back.

Paul Gross is having a ball in this series, that is something that is so evident watching it. He spends a fair amount of time arguing with a ghost that only he can see. There are amazing characters in this. People feel incredibly, incredibly real - wonderful and awful in such mundane, human ways.

The series is made up of so many moments, so many things big and small, that I am in love with. The first performance they put on of Macbeth. Maria, drunk and surly at a party. Anna, wounded and strong. Ellen, happily dating young things. Darren Nichols, adjusting his scarf. Geoffrey, putting on a show.

I love it, so I recommend it.