The More You Know!

[x-losfic.livejournal.com]

I'm not your mom (unless I AM, but that'd be some wibbly wobbly there), but without becoming her, I'd like to do one eensy PSA of General Links of Interest to Fandom: a resource post of Stuff You Should Probably Know.

Who-speific:

* Teaspoon / 'A Teaspoon And An Open Mind'

Teaspoon is a large archive of Who fic, divided into categories by Doctor. While I personally find the searching mechanism a bit unwieldy for D/M, there's no denying Teaspoon's utility as a centralized pan-pairing archive and as a historic center of online fandom that persists when landmarks like Outpost Gallifrey (lost homeworld of the Boy Fen) have perished.

In the past there's been some controversy over what you could post on Teaspoon. While I wasn't there to have a personal opinion, there's a paper about the conflict that might interest people who share my geeky fascination with fandom as a culture and alternative publishing model. The paper concludes that this epic wank was caused by an evolution in online fandom from an entrepreneurial to a communal mode of ownership and organization.

* Calufrax

Calufrax is an eminently respectable reccing community that exists exclusively to dredge Teaspoon for gems. Despite being hosted on lj, it's not interested in promoting the reams of fic there: something I've often rued not because I think that's Teaspoon's job, but just because of the lack of a comparable solid, reliable source of good lj fic recs for this fandom. Crack Van ain't cuttin' it. Reccers take turns at delivering several fics over the course of a week, in the model we've borrowed for our own recs.

There's a bit of a deficit of D/M recs as opposed to some other pairings, but that's not an institutional bias--there just haven't been a /ton/ of interested reccers.


General Stuff:

* Fanlore

Re: interest in fandom as a culture, Fanlore's a wiki that details the State of the Union and documents the history of various fandoms. Its accuracy and depth, however, depend greatly on whether someone from within that segment of fandom has bothered with it recently. It can be rather unsystematically edited, so that it SEEMS as though, say, Aladdin Fandom is all about Jafar/Iago, just because someone who primarily knows that segment edited last, even though Iago/Sultan is the major pairing, and the Gazeem/Aladdin shippers a not insignificant contingent.

Right now it REALLY needs edited to keep apace of Who Online fandom, it's VERY Age of the Archives up in there.

* tv tropes

Useful as a source of excellent and useful terms as much as anything--lampshading, Xanatos Gambit, foe-yay (of which D/M is listed as THE prime example). Often also useful as a quick and dirty guide to what people /mean/ when they invoke a character you've not met, in a way staid, afraid-to-be-wrong wiki can't afford to be.

Their Authors/Websites/Fanfics section is rather thin and uneven (people/fics you genuinely Should Have Heard Of mixed with complete fly-by-night randomers), and D/M light. As in, I see one. It could use a clean up, and as it's group-edited, you could help if you wished.

* crack van

Per Fanlore, "Crack Van is a multifandom recs community on LJ with the goal to pimp the featured fandoms to new fans through recs of fanfic and vids. It recruits members of a given fandom to create primers about a given fandom (typically, these describe the source and characters, popular pairings, and story types, and include recommendations for fanworks and gathering spaces for the fandom) and to post regular recommendations."

Its Who section is, again, thin on the D/M.

* encyclopedia dramatica  NOT WORK SAFE

A satirical encyclopedia/wikipedia clone that, amidst its random annoying/amusing collected 4-chan slough, sometimes says Sharp Shit. Here is a Drama Llama.

zero_ac describes its function as "making fun of loved/hated shows/books/fandom itself/etc." In that capacity: the NOT WORKSAFE Doctor Who Article.

* fandom wank

A digest and archive of Great Wanks in Many a Fandom, with offshoots for political!wank! RL!wank! etc. If you don't know what 'wank*' is, you're probably due a quick perusal.

Here are some of our wanky fandoms' most embarrassing wanky moments.

* "Self-aggrandizing posturing. Fannish absurdities. Circular ego-stroking. Endless flamewars. Pseudointellectual definitions."--> quoth FW

A/N: We can never. never. never. end up here. Seriously, this living in infamy: it is the bane of coms, the shattering of tribes, the influx of people from f_w to /rightly/ mock you. Let us bear its harsh examples in mind, that we many never replicate them.

* metafandom

A digest and collection of meta from many different fandoms. The quality ranges from terribly insightful (if you like debate and a more academic approach) to shrieky repetition of the same 'omg RTD hates poor/black/gay/furry people because Ianto and Jack didn't have a baby with Martha in a bearsuit as the surrogate!!!' armchair indignation that regularly wanks all over Who fandom.

Please rec more in comments!

Method Acting

[the-redjay.livejournal.com]

Title: Method Acting
Word Count: 594
Rating: NC-17
Fandom: Doctor Who
Characters:  Tenth Doctor/David Tennant, Simm Master/John Simm
Pairings: Doctor!Master
Warnings: Slash, RPF/canon crossover
Synopsis: It's all about getting into character. (written for the prompt Doctor/Anyone - "I was just looking at your mouth..." at sizeofthatthing)

( Relax, for me, Doctor. )

Tagging Guidelines

[blackletter]

Ladies and gentlemen and non-dichotomous gendered persons, the Happiness Patrol proudly presents:

( TAGGING GUIDELINES! )

This is a comprehensive guideline and I urge everyone to read through it, but if you're in a rush to save the world and don't have time to read the whole thing right now, I suggest you at least look at the guidelines for the pairing tags and the master tags. The Happiness Patrol will be slowly retagging old entries in accordance with the new guidelines, but any retagging of your own old posts that you wish to do is greatly appreciated by us.

Also, the comm still allows members to create their own tags, but before creating a tag please 1)verify that there isn't already an appropriate tag 2) consider whether a tag is really needed (eg, since this is a Doctor/Master comm, we don't need a "doctor/master" tag. *Everything's* Doctor/Master. Or, on the flip side, if Paris Hilton were to mention the Doctor/Master subtext in an interview (just go with the hypothetical scenario) and a member posted a link to the interview, we still probably wouldn't need a "paris hilton" tag as the chances of us ever needing to use such a tag a second time are slim.) and 3) try to create the new tags in the same format as the existing tags (eg, if you have a post that requires a ninth era tag, create the tag as "era: 9" instead of "era: ninth" or "ninth era").

If you have any questions, now or in the future, feel free to comment on this post. (Questions about tagging, that is.)