The Podfic Big Bang

More pics from the garden - mostly flowers this time with everything in full bloom other than the roses, which are in between. These were taken a few days ago before solid rain set in, so what with a planned power cut 8am-6pm today for maintenance work, a quiet day today. Went for a moderate drive to get lunch out (excellent sushi) and charge my car battery, and now the power's back in time to download a bunch of fics to survive AO3 being down for way too long. I'm feeling virtuous as I made a rice cooker full of bean, veggie, chicken & chilli stew. Very tasty.

I'm still marinating in Heated Rivalry everything and it's helped with creating in other fandoms - an SGA and a due South secret Santa fic in late Dec and several SGA ones more recently for another exchange (will be unanoned soon). Gave myself for-real goddamn eyestrain from too much screen time reading and scrolling tumblr - inflamed, watering eyes, blurred vision, the whole nine yards. I'm being marginally more sensible about breaking up screen time with other activities now and that's resolved it, thank goodness. Too wet to garden, but. Anyway, garden pics follow, and here's hoping you're all doing okay! (Click through for large size)

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A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms - a GoT prequel set some considerable time before GoT, and has a 9.2 rating on IMDB so far (which mostly seems based on fans having loved the book and feeling the show hasn't fucked it up so far in ep 1). Anyway, it was mostly fine, but nothing spectacular. Sir Dunc is a hedge knight's squire who's trying to pass himself off as a knight at a tournament. He's dirt poor so it's all very homespun and common folky so far. Presumably the show's world will get more complex and interesting as we go on.
My main gripe was the shitting scene, to which my reaction was you've gotta be shitting me! Dunc has a projectile shit from a standing position (slightly bent forward), like one of his horses but with way more rearward velocity. Was it supposed to be "gritty reality"? Because no one shits standing up like that ffs, and if they did it'd for sure go all over their legs. Presumably there's nothing wrong with his legs so why the fuck not squat like a normal, limber young person? Stupid nonsense, which I can only assume was supposed to be humorous. I was not amused.

The Pitt - I'm not liking it quite as much as season 1 so far but that's probably me finding anything not HR a bit lacklustre. Very happy Dana the charge nurse is back and in fighting form, and am enjoying all the usual suspects. One major plot point is that Dr Robbie's about to go on sabbatical and is being replaced by a new female consultant with whom there's a lot of friction as they do things very differently. She's a fan of generative AI for note-writing, for example. I can see they wanted the drama of the clash, but did they have to make her uptight, rulebound, female and with a Muslim name? Sigh. I really hope the drama's not going to play out in as stereotypical a way as it's currently threatening to, but the writing was good last time, so they get the benefit of the doubt.

Landman season 2 is on Prime, and is excellent as always. Superb writing, great acting and characters. It's about a Texas oil industry guy who is 2IC to the company CEO, and who does all the hands-on practical management and troubleshooting, including dealing with the local drug runners, wells blowing, and workers getting injured etc. His wife and daughter at first glance seem complete rich dumb blonde stereotypes, but underneath that facade both are interesting and funny, and cunning in the ways of their people (mostly at manipulating men). I enjoy it.

An interesting essay on why Connor Storrie is much more likely to get an award than Hudson Williams (if either of them does). Clarifies a number of things I'd been vaguely thinking about.

And a hockey player from the USA leagues has just come out publicly and in detail, saying his statement was partly inspired by Heated Rivalry. It's not quite that dramatic - he was partly out already (to friends and family and had been playing in LGBTQ+ clubs since 2017) but it looks like this is his first major statement on social media. He never made the NHL but used to play in the USA leagues - the intricacies of all the NHL/AHL league levels baffle me. Anyway, it seems important, and was undoubtedly made a bit easier for him by the reception of Heated Rivalry.

You'll have picked up that there's a lot of sex in the show (and book) Heated Rivalry. And, unsurprisingly, there's a lot in the fanfic.

And one thing I'm having to deal with is a bunch of otherwise perfectly readable authors referring to "cum". It almost knocks me out of the mood, but not quite.

Having issues about spelling come as cum is doubtless linked with me being older than dirt and having learned English not just in school but from reading a hell of a lot of novels (before sinking without trace into fanfic). And I probably associate cum with porn dialogue, so that's partly an embarrassment thing, and partly me being a snob.

Anyway, I did some research on the interwebs and the most frequent viewpoint is:

• cum is the noun
• come is the verb

From etymonline.com, cum dates from 1973, initially used as a noun and mostly in porn, now used more widely and as both a noun and verb. Come is obviously a lot older, but as a synonym for ejaculating it seems to date from the 1500-1600s, and as semen, from the 1920s.

Which is all very well, but I just have a visceral dislike of the word cum. I'm going "ew, gross", like Shane when people use the term "lovers". It looks like a spelling mistake to me, and I doubt I'll ever use it in a fic except in a fake porn video title. So that leaves me stubbornly using come, or writing in a way that avoids the word altogether, because I am also not going to use "semen" or (worse) "ejaculate", except in very specific circumstances. Not to mention "reach completion" or "climax". Nope. Slang terms like jizz, spunk and spooge are sometimes okay in dialogue though, or in the pov of characters where it wouldn't be ooc.

What about you: come or cum? Enquiring minds want to know! Don't feel limited to its use in Heated Rivalry - this applies in most fandoms, and in some profic, I bet.

I finally got around to watching the Empty Netters podcast on YT, their breakdowns of HR eps 1 & 2. It's such fun watching them get caught up in the show while still critiquing the hockey details (two of them are brothers and previously high-level hockey players, now in what they call "the beer leagues". And as they get more and more invested in the show they don't care as much about the minor mistakes and unrealistic hockey-world details. Also, the comments are great, very positive and with no trolling or bigotry at all that I've seen so far (maybe they curate that?).
My initial main takeaways from these first two eps are:

The team logos were analysed. Shane's is M for the Metros (a bottom), and Ilya's is a cannon for the Raiders! (obvious symbolism). That has to be deliberate, right? Also hilarious!

Then these two comments, that added details I hadn't known.



I won't do a full transcript but the first says Reid wrote a bonus chapter on her website (a remix of the Vegas penthouse chapter, end of S2 in the show) with a bit more about Ilya's thoughts and feelings, his conflicts about returning to Russia and why he treats Shane badly. Here's the link.

The second comment clarifies that Putin only cracked down on gay people just before the Sochi Olympics. Before 2013 Russia had apparently become reasonably progressive. So Ilya would have been especially paranoid and freaked out at Sochi and would definitely have cold-shouldered Shane, as in canon. Also a nice pick-up that although Carter Vaughan means well, assuming the ice skater is gay was a microaggression, worse for Shane as Carter blithely assumes he's straight (and for Scott, but the Empty Netters don't know about Scott yet!).

I'm going to watch all the Empty Netters vids, but not right now. Jesus, I have to do something other than wallow in HR stuff all the time!