#sanspatronymic

[oldshrewsburyian]

Fic Title(s): Once in a Blue Moon (and/or) A Wednesday Matinee

Ooh, how lovely! I think that Once in a Blue Moon, or, A Wednesday Matinee would be a Foyle’s War fic. 

“A Wednesday Matinee” on its own could be a gentle little mid-canon Sherlock Holmes piece about Watson taking Holmes to Gilbert and Sullivan (as revenge for the Covent Garden Wagner nights? it can’t be legally proven.)

[fic title thing here]

[therefugeofbooks]

For the author asks: Beatrix Potter and Langston Hughes?

Beatrix Potter: Do you like reading inside or outside?

I have very much read inside for the most part of my life (except for reading on the bus). But last year, I decided to acquire™ the taste for reading outside and I was doing a very decent job to read in the park. Unfortunately, we all stuck at home now and I live in a apartment. I wish I'd have a garden or something like that so I could read outside again :(

Langston Hughes: If you could be part of a literary era, which one?

Be a part in what sense? Being a writer? Living in that era? Being a character in a poem? Well, assuming it's being a writer, it's kind of a cliche, but I love Romanticism. Specially, the second period of Brazilian Romanticism. Melancholy, escapism, sentimentalism, the macabre? All that my angsty teenager self loves. Gimme all that!

Thanks for the ask 💜

Classic Author Asks

[marypickfords]

For your Anon who was looking for films with sympathetic/empathetic depictions of schizophrenia, maybe Bergman’s Through a Glass Darkly or Hour of the Wolf? Also The Snake Pit (though big ole content warning—it’s about mental institutions). You could also argue for Carnival of Souls...

[educatedinyellow]

For the vidder meme: 26 and 32 :)

Yay, thanks so much for asking! :)

26. Share three of your favorite vidders and why you like them so much.

1. Oh, this is tough! First of all, I’d like to raise a glass to one of my favorite vidders, humansrsuperior (HRS1812 on YouTube), who vanished off the internet along with all their vids some years ago. This is a depressingly common phenomenon among fan vidders, and *many* of my favorite vids live only in my memory. Some of my favorite of humansrsuperior′s vids included: Two hilarious BBC Sherlock ones dedicated to celebrating The Coat, both set to 1940s swing music, they were swishy bundles of pure joy!; an incredible multi-layered puzzle-box of a vid called “I Don’t Know,” which I gushed about over here; a hilarious behind the scenes Dr. Who vid celebrating Karen and the Babes; a couple of fantastic BBC Sherlock character studies called “Mind Palace” and “Hello” (the latter of which had the most perfect character song for BBC Sherlock that I’ve ever heard -- the fanvid is gone, but I’m going to link you to the official music video for that song because the music’s excellent AND it’s got creepy-cute stop motion animation, I think you’d enjoy it!); and she also made a seduction-by-deduction charmer of a S1 Sherlock vid set to the velvety song “Show Me What You’re Made Of.” Gosh, so many wonderful vids. I did not know her personally, but she added so much to my S1-S2 Sherlock experience. She is missed!

But moving on to favorite vidders whose work is actually still available...

2. I only recently discovered Rhoboat’s vids, but I am bowled over by this vidder’s talent, and she has such a pleasing variety of vids in her catalogue, both in regards to source material and musical style. She can do funny, she can do intense, she can do heartwarming. She knows when to hold back from directly matching lyrics to images and when to go for it. She’s great at editing action. Her visual storytelling is so confident and fluent, and there’s originality in her vidding voice and in the concepts she chooses to create for -- she just makes a lot of vids that I’m interested in watching. I love her stuff. Let me share some personal favorites:

One of the best Ritchie Holmes vids I’ve ever seen: Poker Face [remastered]

The Wallace & Gromit song of eternal devotion that we all deserve: Wherever You Will Go

Okay, even though I personally like J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek movies, this is the most hilarious, clever, and on point hate-vid for them I ever hope to see!: Star Trek: This is a Trent Reznor Song

A BAMF, punchy-in-more-ways-than-one Agent Carter vid where we party like it’s 1941: 1941

A kinetic, feel-good vid for A League of Their Own: Va Va Voom

An intense, action-y and angsty vid focusing on the relationship and parallels between Bond & Judi Dench’s M (I love the split screens! & the scorpion under glass! well played): Supremacy

A pitch perfect crossover vid in which the events of Joss Whedon’s Firefly/Serenity and the Star Wars spin-off Rogue One take place in the same universe: House of Mercy

A bracing sea shanty of a Master & Commander vid: Leave Her, Johnny

And if you’ve ever wanted a Red Shoes horror vid -- and I bet you have! -- congrats, here it is: The Red Shoes (1948) - Toxic

And she has many more vids in her catalogue! To sum up: check out her YouTube channel or her tumblr @rhoboat77, she’s great.

3. Di Wey is an older vidder (by which I mean, a lot of her work that I love is 7-12 years old). If you go back as far as a decade plus, she was working with older technology and lower quality footage, so her vids don’t look as sharp and clear as many more recent vids. But that doesn’t matter. Her editing is so joyous, & her songs so insightful and fun. She made a lot of vids that are really dear to my heart, including:

My favorite Granada Holmes vid, it’s just so full of energy, love, joy, panache, the whole thing (”you never returned that call,” rotfl!!): Read My Mind

A great vid examining the Martha/Ten relationship (Doctor Who). It’s insightful and captures with such clarity the way the many bad things in their dynamic co-exist and are powerfully interwoven with the good things, and it’s one of those rare vids that’s ABOUT a ship without being either shippy or anti/bashing. It’s about saying: this relationship will never work, but it’s still important, without being the only important thing either, and anyway I love Martha and this vid: Foundations

And now that we’ve done the angst, please accept the floofiest goofball geeky-sexy chic Ten vid, its charm is probably visible from space: I Am A Scientist

This constructed-reality fake trailer for a Sherlock/Who episode crossover is still satisfying to watch: A Study in Time

Oh hey it’s my favorite Eleven character vid, sweet! Focused entirely on his first season. She chose a really great song for the Doctor, it just GETS the most important things: Eleventh Dimension

Okay, thank you very much for letting me ramble, I’m done now! Since this got so long, I will save question #32 for a separate post. I appreciate getting to play the meme, thank you <3333

[educatedinyellow]

sanspatronymic replied to your post: 2, 10, 46!

RAY HARRYHAUSEN–ACK!!!! (sorry, I died from Excite. in lieu of flowers, please send details of every Harryhausen encounter and whether or not you got to see original claymation models at any con)

LOL, I’m delighted that you’re excited by this little bit of personal trivia! :) Just for you, I have dug around for some fun stuff to share...

So, my dad first met Mr. Harryhausen in the 1970s, before Star Wars came out and made special effects artists more widely known and admired. At the time, Mr. Harryhausen was not particularly surrounded by fans and admirers (though very well-respected in his profession, it wasn’t a very public sort of career at that time, though that changed greatly in later years), and he was touched by the time and effort my dad had put into the magazines he’d made about Ray’s work. When my dad was on a trip to England, they got in touch and dad visited Mr. Harryhausen at his house. He got to see some of his models at that time, and was so glad that a personal hero of his turned out to be such a nice man in person.

In the 1990s, when Mr. Harryhausen was retired, he began to come to some conventions in our area. My dad was asked to be on a panel with him at a convention in Dallas, and he made what we would now consider a fanvid to start off the panel. I have happy memories of helping my dad to make this vid: we had no computer editing software, Dad made it by cutting together the clips from his laser discs by ear while I sat on the floor with a cassette recorder and kept replaying the music he was trying to match, and rewinding it, and starting it over again. A few years ago my brother put up a copy of this old fanvid on YouTube (I’m not sure if this is the original quality or if my Dad redid it over the years), but anyway here it is:

I remember the audience at the convention burst into applause at the end of this vid, and Mr. Harryhausen was visibly touched and delighted by the response :) He had brought a number of his creature models to the convention, but I remember my dad emphasizing to me that they were not toys and that we were not allowed to touch them (they were so delicate, and deteriorated over time, handling them could be damaging. Some of the models Mr. Harryhausen brought were just the bare wire skeletons of earlier creations, the exterior of which had worn away already. That’s what the Cyclops from The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad looked like.) Forgive the low quality images, but here’s a picture of my dad and Mr. Harryhausen around that time with some of his models:

And here’s a picture from that same convention of me and my brother with Dad, Mr. Harryhausen, and his wife Diana:

Mr. Harryhausen was a very sweet, gentle man with a deep, slow voice. I remember thinking that Diana Harryhausen was very elegant. At one point we were at lunch with them and Mr. Harryhausen mischievously stole french fries from my plate, telling me very solemnly that he was trying to save me from nutrient deficiency :) I also recall that he was mildly disappointed when I told him my favorite of his creatures was Pegasus from Clash of the Titans. It was a predictable choice for a 10 year old horse-crazy girl, but I later learned that he had done very little of the Pegasus animation himself; it was mostly handled by one of his colleagues on that film.

I saw the Harryhausens again years later, when I was in high school. They came down to attend a convention in Omaha, Nebraska celebrating the memory of Willis O’Brien, Harryhausen’s mentor, and King Kong, O’Brien’s most famous film and a watershed for special effects animation that had inspired many of the artists in Harryhausen’s generation. Dad and my brother and I drove up to Omaha for the celebration, and that’s when we met Mr. Bradbury and Mr. Ackerman as well. It was lovely to see them getting to spend time together, reminiscing about how excited they’d been in their own childhoods to see the amazing ways that film could make their imaginations come alive.

My Dad went to California in 2003 to attend the ceremony where Mr. Harryhausen was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame:

In later years, Dad would call Mr. Harryhausen on his birthday to offer his best wishes. Mr. Harryhausen didn’t always remember who he was right away, but eventually he would exclaim, “Oh, Sam! With the robots!” My Dad had invited the Harryhausens over to our house at some point, and Ray was astonished and deeply amused by the fact that Dad had a giant model of Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still in his living room:

(Disclaimer: Gort had nothing to do with Harryhausen; Dad had other SF/F loves, too!) It came with a remote control that would lift the visor and shine a light out, leading to much hilarity among us:

I grew up in a memorably kitschy and fannish household, suffice it to say. Mr. Harryhausen was amused :)

[educatedinyellow]

14, 20, 47!

I’m doing this ask meme, thanks for playing, @sanspatronymic!

14. Favorite mug you own 

I don’t own a single novelty mug, I’m sorry to say. The one I use most often is a nice lime green tea mug. But I am full of admiration for my best friend’s Doctor Who mugs, which have a TARDIS that becomes visible when hot water is poured in and gradually disappears into the starscape as the drink cools or empties! They’re awesome, and I always snag one when I visit :)

20. Do you match your socks?

All my socks are black, so technically yes.

47. How do you top your ice cream?

I normally eat my ice cream plain, but there are some glorious exceptions on special occasions. My best friend makes the most delicious blueberry crumble that she takes warm out of the oven and pours over our ice cream, and it’s to die for. And my grandmother used to have a tradition on our birthdays of soaking a sugar cube in some kind of lemon juice extract, I think, setting it atop our bowl of ice cream and lighting it on fire. It would burn blue and melt its way down while everyone sang happy birthday, and as a kid I thought it was the most badass thing I’d ever seen.

[mostweakhamlets]

For the identity asks: 3, 29, 30

3. list your fandoms and one character from each that you identify with.

Already done!

29. three songs that you connect with right now.

I don’t really know if there are many songs rn that I “connect with” or if I want to reveal them, so I’ll list three songs I vibe with

“Boss Bitch,” by Doja Cat; “I Touch Myself,” covered by Scala & Kolacny Brothers; “Psycho Killer,” by Talking Heads

30. pick one of your favorite quotes.

“Il ne faut pas toucher aux idoles: la dorure en reste aux mains. (Never touch your idols: the gilding will stick to your fingers).” -- Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

[sanguinarysanguinity]

@sanspatronymic replied to your post: Happy birthday to me! Want to play a birthday game?...

Happy Birthday! How about “delicious”?

Thank you! My only hit for ‘delicious’ was in a secret project, so you get a custom-written snippet:

* * *

I did not sleep soundly that night, having forgotten the trick of sleeping with another body in the bed. I repeatedly woke in the act of turning over to find the path of my knee impeded by a hip, or his elbow prodding into my ribcage, and once more I would have to solve the jig-saw puzzle of two bodies in a bed before I could sleep again. But I could not be put out through all these interruptions to my sleep, for whenever I woke, there was also the delicious, long-missed sensation of his skin under my hand -- the gentle curve of his bicep, the softness of his inner knee, the tender warmth of his torso. Sometimes he would stir and reach for me in return, and I would know a moment's communion as his hand clasped mine in the dark, before he, too, turned over and rearranged himself in the bed. If we had forgotten how to fit together, it was no matter: Holmes was there, and as glad of my presence in his bed as I was of his in mine.