the fandom librarian

I just got home today from an extremely exhausting trip (sorry I haven't been responding to correspondence, btw, that's why) so I'm not really going to say much, this is just to let any interested parties know that I've finally updated the football recs. new stuff in all categories, keep clicking on through! I haven't even got through reading the latest issue of cornerflag, let alone reccing it, but hopefully there'll be something new for everybody anyway.

oh, and I had no idea how to do a disclaimer for this, but everybody knows that I modded for santjordi, right? so if you feel that a bit of salt needs to be applied to my recs for fics written for that, go on ahead and apply it; they're all clearly labeled as such.

um. I think that's it? I'll hopefully be able to deal with emails and stuff tomorrow morning; I had great intentions but I just couldn't get to it while I was away and I went straight from the train to work to home without even getting groceries today. nag me about things I'm supposed to do, flist! I still have to do ladyballer and WAG primers, I know. and comment on cornerflag. ahahaha the things you would think you'd do so easily when you're co-editor... but yeah, sorry I'm such shit at commenting in general, I always realize when I'm putting together recs how many of the fics in my tabs I just haven't commented on.

hope you all had a nice weekend and are enjoying the Olympics! thrilled for Andy Murray and pleased for Laura and Big Masha (and Little Masha, hey, lots of love to go around) in the tennis, gutted for Team GB in the ladies' footie and still deciding who I'll be rooting for in what's left of the tournament since my usual teams are out. Nadeshiko for the ladies and maybe Brazil on the men's side, I guess. and now I am going to finish eating my orange juice concentrate and fall on my face. g'night!

ok so cornerflag is finally up, thank God and stickmarionette, and y'all should go read all the stories which are here (you get three guesses which is mine and the first two don't count) but far more importantly: OH MY GOD LOOK WHAT LEAH GAVE ME AHHHHHHHH FEELINGS SO MANY FEELINGS!!!

I had to leave for work almost immediately after I got the email notification and I spent the entire shift gleefacing over THIS STORY OH MY GOD EVERYTHING I LOVE and unable to tell anybody why I was so happy but I know you understand me without even an explanation, flist.

ALL MY RAFA/NOLE FEELS.

I'm going to go back to livetweeting the experience of reading this fic now. ilu all but especially stickmarionette who saves me from myself and aramley who always gets me the best presents! I miss you, fandom twin. ♥

In fulfillment of a vow to khoshgeleh_16, I am hereby spamming the fuck out of you all with the lovely and potentially lesbian ladies of Athletic Bilbao.

( Out of some vestigial sense of mercy, I spare your flists. Click if you love beauty! )

-Neka/Irune(/Joana) spam for khoshgeleh_16 since she is a goddess and did a favor for phoenixflare for me
-primers for ladies (you think I forgot but I didn't! I am collecting pictures... slowly...)
-ladyballer blog posts
-recs? idk guys, it's basically just the Sant Jordi stuff and maybe five fics since then and I feel weird about it but maybe...
-watch all of Coffee Prince, because I fucking feel like it, that's why
-oh also homework

what am I forgetting, guys?

a conversation with dreamofthem (I think? mysticaltramping is you, right?) and aramley on tumblr went a bit haywire, and thus... here, have some tennis players as football players. now playyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy with meeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee!

( if Rafael Nadal were a footballer... )

failed miserably at writing my fic for netcord, though the only person I really feel like I should apologize to is aramley since all my tennis fic is, of course, for her. I can't tell if I've lost my feel for Novak in my hiatus from tennis fandom or I was just trying too hard to wrestle an idea into submission, but either way. this post is just so I can have a place to put a few articles I dug up while researching, don't mind me.

Serbian may join British ranks, The Telegraph

China crisis as Murray falls to friendly fire, Daily Mail

Djokovic still in Britain's sights but Serbia digs heels in over switch, The Guardian

guess what the fic was supposed to be about. XD ah well, maybe next time. it's funny how I can go entire months not particularly caring about tennis and still get sucked right back in as soon as Rafa's winning. and today was insane even without Rafa, of course. wherever he is, Stephane Vidal must be smiling down today.

thank you to everybody who commented on that meta post! you have given me many things to think about and I am trying to reply to all the comments as thoughtfully as they deserve but I'm kind of exhausted by work right now so it may take a little while--I'm not ignoring you and I definitely will reply as soon as I can make my brain say anything other than "ugh back hurts please can we sleep now".

...and there was something else I wanted to say but now I can't remember what it was. :( I was clearly not cut out to be a proper grown-up.

on a scale of one to Rick Santorum, how horrible a person would I be if I nominated Foreign Desk / Los Corresponsales as a yuletide fandom? just... thinking out loud.



blame the cameraman who made the entire Happy New Year episode look like Martin Ainstein was about to start making out with Sid Lowe. those are some awkward angles, bro.

gonna try and update the rec list before I have to go back to school (wah, wah, I DON'T WANT TO DO WOOOOOORK), but in the meantime, let's have a discussion about something I've been pondering lately!

has the emergence of Twitter (and Facebook, and all those other social media platforms where celebrities can talk directly to each other in public) fundamentally changed the nature of RPF? we used to be completely dependent on the reports of others about how celebrities felt about and interacted with each other, whether a gossipy anecdote on TMZ or an interview published in the Guardian. writers had no choice but to extrapolate huge things from small actions: a hug during a press junket, a quick kiss to celebrate a goal. but now we have all this source material available, only it isn't in a very convenient format, so I think most of us don't use it as much as we could. and of course there are problems of how seriously to take the persona a celebrity chooses to present; Misha Collins' twitter is obviously not a full portrait of Misha Collins, to give one glaring example. and Gerard Pique's facebook is not really helpful if you want to know what Gerard Pique is like, since it's clearly run by PR minions.

but with less famous figures (and now I'm getting into my own area of expertise), to what extent should we take things like Twitter conversations into account when thinking about RPF? Iker Muniain has however many thousands of followers, but I don't know how much he's thinking about them when he tweets David De Gea or Javi Martinez to say hi or let's go to the movies. is it fair to say that any publicly available information is part of their media persona, and therefore fair game? at what point does it become intrusive? and at the other side of the spectrum, at what point is it bad characterization to contradict information that is publicly available but maybe not commonly known? I try to research as much as possible to avoid the but that just isn't true reaction, but I still wrote a fic about Pique and Cesc trying to get Leo into social media when he's had a Weibo account since before either of them had heard of Twitter. he's obviously not the social media luddite I portrayed him as; I just didn't know that at the time.

I sometimes wonder if there's a generational gap between pre-Twitter and post-Twitter RPF writers. I fall very firmly into the post-Twitter party, so it's hard for me to judge. if you're writing about someone who has a twitter, I think you should read it, and I think conversations on twitter or facebook are a great way to figure out how two people interact. (and the absence of interaction when two people are both capable of interacting is a pretty good clue, too. anyone remember the kerfuffle over how Rafa never followed Novak on twitter?) it's kind of elitist to say that good characterization should take all available material into account, because not everybody has the time to do that sort of research, especially when it isn't in English, but I do side-eye characterization that is contradictory to what I know from doing research into how someone presents him/herself online, so...

well, maybe I'm just a snob! (no one is surprised.) what do you guys think about my latest crackpot theories?