It's been so long since I've posted something that wasn't a recs dump that I had to look up my tags for this sort of thing.
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runpunkrun prompted me with three of my
interests to write about, and I decided that one of them had a timing component, so here they all are in this calendar month:
cwhl: Candian Women's Hockey League aka the thing that made me fall in love with hockey and then ripped my heart out, a bit. In 2010 a combination of things, including only consuming fanworks about women in February and the Winter Olympics in Vancouver with Marie-Philip Poulin's gold medal game goal, made me wonder where, exactly, women's hockey players were. The answer in 2010 was college teams, the CWHL, Europe, and men's teams. The CWHL was the option that players had after they'd left school if they wanted to continue to play competitive women's hockey in North America.
I gradually fell in love with it.
I started following games as best I could, looking at stats online. I figured out who my favourite team was (Stars de Montréal) and bought merch. I made friends with a Toronto Furies fan and went to some of their games with her, cheering them on (except when they played Montréal). I have fond memories of the little "TF" the tickets volunteer would scribble on your hand at Furies home games, listening to Nicco Cardarelli's commmentary at home in my apartment, watching Sasky Stewart rocket down the tunnel at the ACC to fix an announcer's gaffe, being with and seeing other queer women knitting in the stands at the final in Ottawa in 2016, and watching it in a local pub with a friend the next year, gloriously happy that they were
on tv.
I miss the CWHL. In 2019, less than a month after the Clarkson Cup final and with no real warning, the league announced its dissolution. Montréal lost to Calgary in the final, and weeks later the CWHL was gone.
The CWHL was founded in 2007 to replace the National Women's Hockey League* that ran from 1999-2007. The
Professional Women's Hockey Players Association was founded in 2019 to replace the CWHL and pursue a sustainable professional women's hockey league in North America. They have a showcase in
Ottawa, ON February 26-27 and another in
Arlington, VA March 4-6.
* not to be confused with the US league of the same name that ran from 2015-2021 before re-branding as the Premier Hockey Federation in 2021In the meantime there's the Olympics in Beijing:
• The quarterfinal matches are scheduled for February 10 11:10 PM EST (USA vs. Czech Republic), February 11 8:00 AM EST (Canada vs. Sweden) and 11:10 PM, and February 12 3:40 AM EST.
• The semifinals are February 13 11:00 PM EST, February 14 8:10 AM EST.
• The medal games are Febraury 16 6:30 AM EST (Bronze) and 11:10PM EST (Gold).
• If you're in Canada or otherwise have access to the CBC you can watch there why I am nervous about a probable Canada-US gold medal match
in Eastern Cree,
in English,
in French, or
in Inuktitut.
merlin: Old timey fantasy shenanigans fandom of my heart. Merlin was my first big fandom after SGA ended, and it is beautiful. The show is "hey, so what if we did the story of Arthur and Merlin but they were teenagers, so Arthur's like
Nooooo I don't want to be his friend, he's a nerd, why doesn't he love me back?, and Merlin's like
ugh, I hate the Monarchy, why am I polishing his boots. Right. Threat of death. and a talking dragon tells him Arthur's his destiny. Yesss."
The fandom is vast and sprawling and is full of shit that is basically my comfort food, like modern AUs where they flirt with post-its and are also voice actors playing dragons on a children's animation program, or a Potter-style political AU where Arthur is the muggle prime minister, or made up or resurrected for comedy tradition they are forced to undergo for hilarity. There is femslash that falls into my comfort food genres, which is amazing, for me. There's well-written porn on a variety of themes. There's pointed meta and epic tragedies. There's beautiful art and crafts and vids and podfics and...
I'm incredibly fond of it.
tripod: Tripod is another beloved, the comedy nerd dad band of my heart.
Ghost Ship is one of my old favourites from something like fifteen years ago when some youtube algorithm sent me their way. I'm also really partial to
Stockpiling Weaponry for its dark lyrics mismatch. They did a dnd concept album/show in 2011 called
Tripod vs. The Dragon with Elana Stone and
Bard is a really lovely song off of that, with a completely different tone to it than
Ghost Ship or
Stockpiling Weaponry; it's not a stand-up routine or a comedy skit.
They're Australian. They do vocal harmonies and everyone - there's three of them, hence the name - plays at least one instrument. (It's been a few years since I mainlined everything I could find by them, so I don't remember exactly how many instruments each.)
There was an element of anxiety, looking them up again after a while. Some stand-up comedy does not hold up and the extent to which it doesn't can be very jarring. There were no surprises with the songs that I re-listened to; they've held up well. ...and they had a
gig last year it turns out. Putting the nostalgia into words is difficult.
...and I have successfully posted an actual journal entry and have a whole half hour before the next hockey game starts.
Let me know if you want me to pick three things from your interests or tags for you to write about and I will do so.![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
