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julietk · 5 days
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Look at this GORGEOUS book that @brunheiffer made! So utterly beautiful.
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The adorable bookmark! Marbled endpapers!
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Title pages for each story! And even the contents page is pretty.
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Artwork and lovely headers…
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It’s just completely stunning and I am thrilled. Such a massive honour for someone to go to all this trouble for my stories - it has honestly made my entire year.
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julietk · 17 days
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It's 2024. I have been participating in fandom for 40 years. This is a ramble commemorating some history I've experienced along the way.
In 1984, I attended my first convention, and made a beeline for the one long row of covered tables in the Dealer's Room that was, according to the whispered lore of my friends, 'the one'. "um", I said, very suavely and coherently, except for how it was totally the opposite of those things, "I'm here for the... for the, uh. For-"
"Come around here," the man behind the table said with exhausted ennui, so I went around, and he lifted up the table skirt next to him and pointed to rows and rows of boxes underneath the line of tables. "It's all under here."
It was all under there. Along with about five older ladies with glasses, graying hair, cardigans. Flipping through slash zines and chatting in whispered voices like old friends (which of course they were). I noticed one of them had the good sense to be wearing kneepads. I was still too young and ablebodied to need kneepads when crawling on a carpeted floor, but I immediately found her preparedness skills to be both impressive and hot. "You're new," one of the ladies whispered to me--a bit warily, which made sense. "Are you sure you're in the right place?"
In the faint light (the kneepads lady had also come prepared with a flashlight, additional practicality hotness points for her) I grabbed a comb-bound book with a heavy line art piece on the cover, featuring a musclebound Captain Kirk getting righteously and enthusiastically plowed by a stern-yet-ebullient Spock. "This," I said, pointing helpfully at the cover, like I was trying to make myself understood in a language I had only the vaguest knowledge of. "I'm here for this."
Outside at the convention, most of the attendees were wearing large homemade circular pins that shrieked 'K/S is BS!!!'1. But underneath the table, we reveled in the forbidden.
***
In 1985, I fell very hard for Starsky & Hutch fandom. Which was simply referred to at the time as 'the other fandom', because there were only two. We were upstarts. Many fannish elders predicted that it was just a phase.
***
The 'circulating library' was a massive stack of barely-legible pages that smelled strongly of mimeograph ink. When you were on the list, you would write stories while you waited for your turn, and when the big box was mailed to you, you would read everything (new finds, old favorites), add your own sloppily-typed or hastily-mimeographed stories, and then mail the whole thing to the next person. For me, at the time, it was an extremely expensive indulgence--but my favorite one.
***
By 1990, slash fandom had grown enough that I no longer knew everyone in it, which was both thrilling and a bit daunting. A young woman at a convention waited for me after a panel I was part of (I think it was 'writing impactful smut' or something like that), and said she had a question she didn't want to ask in a group setting. I'd heard that before. I said that's fine, go ahead and ask; and she came out with: "Why do you have to be gay?"
I blinked. "Is... that a problem?"
She looked annoyed. "Yes, because your stories are on all the recommendation lists and in all the top zines, but if you're gay and I read something you wrote and I get hot from it that makes me gay, and I'm not gay."
"Wow." I grinned, I couldn't help it. It probably made me look very predatory-dyke-about-to-score-a-toaster. Whatever, it was enough to make her back away from me fast.
When I thought about it later that night, I wondered what it would be like not to be the only queer person in slash fandom.
***
By 1997, slash started appearing on the internet. Many fannish elders claimed it was the death knell of slash fandom, or dismissed it as 'just a phase'.
***
Anyway, I wrote all this for myself as a commemoration of sorts, but if you took the time to read it--thank you. Love you, fandom. I always will.
1 In those days, m/m fandom was known as 'slash', which grew from the fannish shorthand where 'K&S' meant a story of Kirk and Spock having adventures or tribulations or what have you, and 'K/S' meant a story of Kirk and Spock getting it on (Kirk divided by Spock or Spock into Kirk--it was mathy fannish humor and I was into it then and I still am now). Slash was decidedly unpopular in the fannish world in 1984, and there was a concerted effort to force slash authors, artists, and fans out of 'mainstream' fannish public life. Hence, under the table.
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julietk · 1 month
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Working all week long (because I'm an artist).
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julietk · 3 months
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hope is a skill
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julietk · 3 months
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You may wish to wait and respond to the consultation in the new year when Stonewall, Gendered Intelligence, and Mermaids have all promised they’ll have guidance up to help you respond.
guys why the fuck aren't we talking about what's happening in the uk right now
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nobody outside the uk is talking about this. why is nobody talking about it
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julietk · 3 months
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julietk · 3 months
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think it's a deep consolation to know that spiders dream, that monkeys tease predators, that dolphins have accents, that lions can be scared silly by a lone mongoose, that otters hold hands, and ants bury their dead. that there isn't their life and our life. nor your life and my life. that it's just one teetering and endless thread and all of us, all of us, are entangled w it as deep as entanglement goes. v neat i think.
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julietk · 3 months
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"the club" isn't a real place. "clubs" are real. I've been to clubs, with their loudness of talking and loudness of music and actually pretty good cocktails and drinking until you think you can dance. none of them have ever been "the club." the club is erewhon, utopia, a dream of finding a reprieve from suffering and loneliness in pleasure. maybe he should be at "the club," but he cannot. we can none of us be there. also the cocktails were probably overpriced.
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julietk · 3 months
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Imagine … Russell T Davies: The Doctor and Me (2023)
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julietk · 3 months
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“long hair on guys doesn’t make them less masculine. think keanu reeves, jason momoa, danny trejo, or the guy at your local dive bar who rides a motorcycle”
*the crowd nods*
“so long hair doesn’t necessarily determine masculinity”
*the crowd, more hesitant, still nodding*
“butches can have long hair—“
*GUNSHOT*
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julietk · 3 months
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the internal tension between being a prickly judgemental cunt and someone who loves people to the point of tears has resulted in a maxim i like to call Everyone Is Beautiful and I Hate Them So Much
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julietk · 3 months
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Cities need to stop using so many e-bikes and e-scooters they make cities inaccessible with how much room they take up on the pavement
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julietk · 3 months
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Headlights are just too bright now. We gotta regulate them.
(And before anyone says it’s just an aiming problem - no. Like I apologize to the headlight aficionados clearly lusting after lighthouses, chernobyl, or the death star, but no amount of aiming is gonna fix the fact that the moment your car encounters any kind of hill, curve, or bump, my retinas are vaporized by a shade of blue-white previously known only to god. Just accept your limits and settle for a soft orange like the rest of us)
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julietk · 3 months
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You like Doctor Who AND Black Sails???? Absolutely chef kiss, cannot believe we share a brain
yeah, I did for a hot second have a separate blog for Black Sails because I actually made this one to be specifically not fandom-related (3 years on and... well.....) so I'm slowly bringing my black sails posting over here instead, fuckit!
thing about Black Sails for me is that on the whole I find it such a perfectly constructed bit of storytelling, with critique that has already been formulated better by other people, that I never know quite what to say about it that hasn't been said, youknow?
it's the show that I've watched that has felt the most like reading a book, with every season leading into one another and the themes introduced in s1 wrapping up in s4, and every piece interacting with one another, and you have to trust that the questions and thematic concepts raised at the beginning have real weight and will go places, which in this day and age of TV is a big ask, because most of the time a TV show has to work one season at a time/doesn't plan that far ahead, lest it get cancelled and/or stretches into depressing perpetuity
(or it's Doctor Who of course, which is just its own monster/mythology at this point, moreso than perhaps any other show, I'd say including Star Trek perhaps...)
but yeah, Black Sails. that's a journey that really matters, you get to the end and you've been holding your breath since probably s2, and you're realising that this is something that TV can do -- I think other shows that have manage the closest (for me) have been miniseries like Chernobyl or Pride & Prejudice and the like, because they've had that clear knowledge that this is the episodes they have, this is where it starts and ends, these are the ways everything talks with one another (Chernobyl and Black Sails especially have in common that the ending makes one want to go back to the beginning, because it's a realisation of OH THIS IS WHAT YOU'VE BEEN SAYING FROM DAY ONE!), but I've not seen it as strongly or as well-constructed (or... finished for that matter) in anything that had multiple seasons like this
+ youknow. multiple polyamorous relationships in different structures, multiple ways of discussing connection and love none of which are more important than the other for being a specific kind, multiple deconstructions of masculinity in popular mythology (pirates), banging sea battles and sword fights, plot moments that take your breath away, political commentary that makes you punch the air, and bits that have you going "OH I READ THIS BIT IN TREASURE ISLAND!!!" (but also you don't need to have read treasure island to watch it... potentially OH YEAH THIS GUY WAS A CYBORG IN TREASURE PLANET 😂)
Black Sails is kind of special. Truly one of a kind
EDIT: ALSO WANTED TO SAY HELL YEAH HIGH FIVE FOR BLACK SAILS AND DOCTOR WHO!
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julietk · 3 months
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José Olivarez, from my therapist says make friends with your monsters
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julietk · 3 months
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OFMD is so fucking earnest and that's still my favorite thing about it I think.
So often nowadays, whenever a piece of art dares to be weird, it has to be all quippy and self-referential about it. If you look at any MCU movie it's just full of characters being like "wow that was weird" because they're too scared to let it stand on its own.
And OFMD doesn't bother with any of that shit. Ed sees Stede as a mermaid and it's fucking beautiful. They kiss under the moonlight and hold hands like teenagers and play sweet little thumb wars and it works perfectly because it never tries to dilute it with humor where it doesn't fit. Ed and Stede get to cry and lean on each other for support and be their weird, goofy, cringey selves, and that's never presented as anything other than wonderful and beautiful. OFMD gives us everything with all it's got and it never flinches away from being heartachingly earnest.
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julietk · 3 months
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HAROLD PERRINEAU as Mercutio | ROMEO + JULIET (1996)
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