subdee

I'm getting married on Saturday!

...hopefully, we just booked the ceremony but the licensing to make it official is separate. (Edit: all good! It's a zoom meeting these days, you don't even have to travel... The ultimate in marriage convenience :D)

To quote something I saw on twitter, "Well that escalated suddenly for four years."

I was matched with mildred_of_midgard on Cryptonomicon, a book I haven't read in 15 years, and I definitely paid the price for my hubris ahaha.

Through this extremely lucky match (Mildred is awesome :D) I found rheinsberg, a community for the small but extremely active Frederick the Great fandom on DW, so rather than re-read Cryptonomicon... I decided to learn some history instead. :P I read this book and also parts of this one, as well as some of the summarized primary sources research on rheinsberg to write my Yuletide fic:

Frederician Space AU

It's Frederick II of Prussia and "three of his more serious boyfriends" in a character study told backwards from the perspective of the boyfriends:

Katte - Hans Hermann von Katte - the Kircheis to Frederick's Reinhard; the one who's supposed to have said death, for such a charming prince, is indeed sweet while being paraded past Frederick's prison window at the fortress where they were both imprisoned for plotting to flee the country together. Crown Prince Frederick was 18 and Katte was 26 at the time of the execution.



^^Katte in real life was supposed to have been tall (like Kircheis), but not that handsome, because his face was scarred from childhood smallpox. Frederick was also, supposedly, not that handsome; but he was blonde and blue-eyed, and won (or at least didn't lose) a bunch of military battles, which is why the Nazis liked him (obviously they just ignored all the gay parts).

Fredersdorf - Michael Gabriel Fredersdorf - Frederick's longtime valet, spymaster, probable lover, "first prime minister of Prussia" (unofficially), in charge of programming for the opera, etc. Wikipedia says "The two young men met when the future Frederick II was still in prison for having attempted to run off with his former companion, Hans Hermann von Katte. At the time, Fredersdorf was four years older than the heir to the throne and served in the army, being the son of a peasant." There's a romantic story that Frederick hated and avoided speaking German, which he associated with his abusive father, the king Frederick Wilheim, preferring to speak French and also signing his letters with the French spelling of his name as Federic; but Fredersdorf only spoke German, so just for Fredersdorf he'd speak the hated language <3 <3 <3 (on reinsberg they researched this, the truth is more complicated but still a nice story).

Keith - Peter Karl Christoph von Keith - the other lover in the escape attempt, who had previously been banished to Wesel (a border fortress) for an earlier plot to escape the country. He doesn't even have an entry on English wikipedia, so I have linked to the entry on German wikipedia instead. Unlike Katte and Frederick who were caught, he actually got away to England and from there, Dublin and Portugal, where he lived an apparently highly eventful but sparsely documented life, eventually finding his way back to Prussia to serve as the head of the Academy of Sciences under Frederick II (now King). I personally think he was a spy! XD But he's only one year older than Frederick, they hooked up when he was 17 and Frederick, 16.

My space AU is more or less just a character study that retells the historical events but uhhhhhh In Space. XD. I had a lot of fun doing the worldbuilding on this one, and trying to find science fictional reasons for why The Future might still resemble The Age of Letters (spoilers: it's an AI-enabled and post-encryption future, where no electronic transmissions can be trusted... so it requires people to meet in person again).

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I've been writing about yuletide on my tumblr under the "yuletide" tag, so here's a few quick crossposts:

*18th Century CE Frederician RPF recs - which yeah, it's pretty much every single story submitted this year. They are all great.

*Knives Out recs - Knives Out fic on ao3 was uhhhh not what I expected it to be, but I enjoyed these two.

*Machineries of Empire (Yoon Ha Lee) recs - yhlee himself was my match for yuletide and wrote a story for me :D :D :D I'm still reading through the other stories in the tag.

*Palm Springs (2020)and Booksmart (2019) recs - convinced to watch Palm Springs (2020) after reading this brilliant fic.

Back to work tomorrow. Boooo.

Yes... Seven years after I drifted away from fandom, working way too hard as a long term sub and then new teacher at various urban schools to have the energy for anything besides going home and watching YouTube bullet planner videos and maybe commenting on omonatheydidnt.. I'm officially back in fandom, *and* involved enough to be a moderator on a fandom exchange!

The zine I'm in is an all-ratings Killugon (Killua/Gon from Hunter x Hunter) zine, so we are right in the eye of the fandom culture wars, haha. I liked a bunch of the contributors from AO3 and figured it would be a good way to make fandom friends on tumblr, and it worked :D It's actually my first zine in 15 years in fandom, unless you count the Death Note doujinshi telophase drew based on a script we wrote together back in 2005, so that's exciting too.

Anyway, I know you guys being from the old school of nonjudgmental fandom will not give me grief for this. If you have a little extra cash, you can show support by buying a copy at https://gumroad.com/milestoneszine.

Speaking of old, nostalgic fandoms though... did you guys realize that in this Year of our Lord 2020, there's a new chapter of Death Note out???

I turned in my master's thesis. It's kinda weak - I wrote the conclusion in 24 hours including searching for supporting references - but it's a personal milestone for me since it's the longest thing I have ever finished, more-or-less on time. It's 50 pages without references or appendixes (but including graphs). Before this year, I don't think I ever finished anything I couldn't write in a single sitting! So I am happy about that at least.

 If I could do it over again, I'd try setting more deadlines in the middle. Because no matter what, I'm always going to be rushing at the last minute, right. ^^ I'd also go somewhere with more sun in the summertime.

And I'd put in more crazy stuff!  Pierre Bourdieu's The Field of Cultural Production and Barabara Ehrenreich's Bright-Sided are in there, but I also wanted to include Reality is Broken and this Berardi book Sabina linked me to about blue-collar-style quotas creeping into white-collar work.  Well, I might still include those things, because the plan right now is to revise so I have something decent to show employers. I'm setting a personal goal to have all the extra references in by the first of November.

My dad read it, and his major complaints were that I didn't spend enough time on the analysis, and that I used "FYROM" and not "Macedonia" when referring to the country of our people.  Which, you know, is fair.  ^^ Won't know my grade for a while, am just chilling at the moment, watching Youtube videos and making travel plans.

Apart from that, I'm reading The Game of Kings, watching Dance Academy, and writing an article for thehoodedutilitarian about a comic I hate. Which means I had to go back, like, five years because I don't really read comics I "hate" anymore.  I decided to write about Bakuman, the manga by the Death Note artist-writer team about being a Shonen Jump artist-writer team / how pretty girls are stuck up but ugly girls aren't worth your time. It's a sort of "I would love this if it weren't for this one thing I hate" article.

I am also (casually) seeing someone. She's awesome. Thumbs up!