rsadelle

How This Works: If you want something, or several somethings, leave a comment telling me what you want (titles as well as numbers will help me gather them up more easily) and email me your address. I'll cross things out as they get taken. I'll be sending things media mail or priority mail depending on how much you want and how many boxes I have in the house and/or can scrounge up. I'm still willing to pick up the postage, but since I'm unemployed, I won't turn you down if you want to contribute to the postage for the things you want.

As always, if you have any questions about anything, just ask.

Please feel free to point your friends this way if you think I have something they'll want.

Anything not claimed by July 20 will be donated elsewhere.

Special Item of the Book Persuasion: Pink Box: Inside Japan's Sex Clubs by Joan Sinclair - signed by the author, also has the previous owner's name on the inside cover. (The story behind this is that when my grandparents downsized from their condo to an independent living facility, we went through the books they were getting rid of and picked out what we wanted. I took Pink Box with the idea that one of you might want it. My grandparents had it because they know the mother/grandmother/other relative of the author. When they first showed us that they had it, my step-grandmother had it hiding at the top of a bookshelf and was somewhat embarrassed to admit to owning it.)

( Books )

( Miscellaneous Fannish Items )

( Miscellaneous Item )

I read this story on Monday and really wanted to talk to someone about it. I've been wanting to talk about it off and on since then, which means it wasn't just a passing impulse. Telling the people I sent the link to, "I'm not even sure I like this whole story," was probably not the way to entice them to read it (although I'm not sure they would have anyway), so I thought, "Why not just make a post about it?"

The story is "Punk Rock Princess" by alex_boylove. It's always-a-girl!Gabe/William, and the author's summary says, "Gabriela Saporta isn't some pop princess. From Humble Beginnings to Midtown to Cobra Starship, she lives life her own way and damn the consequences."

My dream would be for you to go read the story and then come back here and talk with me about it.

The rest of this post contains spoilers for the story.

( Summary )

( What I Liked )

( Things I Found Iffy )

Okay, so I know Cobra Starship has done some less than amazing things recently, and the way some of the people I love and respect are done with them makes me feel a little guilty for how much I love them, but I'm new to this whole bandom thing and haven't had time to get sick of them yet. There are three Cobra things in particular that I've come across and loved over the last couple of days.

"Good Girls Go Bad" Video

In case you haven't seen it:

( Video! )

I love every single thing about this video. I have a whole not-it plot bunny post (contains spoilers for the video) over at the newly resurrected not-it community on Dreamwidth. Suffice to say, it sets up an awesome Leighton/Vicky-T AU that someone who is not me should write.

Promo Pictures

Then there are some new promo pictures. Here's my favorite one:

( Picture! )

Here's what I imagine is going on: Ryland just said something funny, but kept a straight face while doing it. Alex was maybe involved. Nate knows he's not supposed to be laughing and is covering it up. Vicky-T is laughing, but she's keeping her eyes on the camera because it's a photo shoot. And Gabe doesn't care; he's cracking the hell up because it was funny, but he's also carefully/casually holding onto Vicky-T so she doesn't fall off his lap when he laughs so hard he has to bend over.

Fic Rec

Oh, come on, I wasn't going to make a fannish post without a fic rec! The rec is "We Use Our Wings To Swim" by formerlydf, which is an awesome GSF/wingfic story.

( Fic excerpt! )

I picked up Mary Roach's Spook: Science Tackles The Afterlife off of the "what people are reading" display at the library. I wasn't particularly interested in the subject, but I remember hearing that she's a good writer, and everything I felt like reading off my Amazon Dewey Decimal Project wish list is in the 300s, and I've already covered those this year.

Having read the book, I'm still not particularly interested in the subject, but Mary Roach is a hilarious writer, and I would definitely read something else by her. Of course, some of the funniest parts of the book are her asides and footnotes.

A surgical technique recently perfected at the Swallowing Center at the University of Washington* stops rumination in its tracks.

*As opposed to the Swallowing Center at Northwestern, or the Swallowing Center at the University of Southern California, or the one at Holy Cross, or the Rusk Institute, or the Nebraska Medical Center. Of course, the original "swallowing center" is a chunk of your brainstem that coordinates chewing, gagging, vomiting, coughing, belching, and licking, all with minimal fuss and no funding from the NIH.

A later footnote tells us:

Further Ometer abuse comes from the Centers for Disease Control (the Flu-O-Meter), the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds - their Splatometer tracks the abundance of flying insects, whose decline spells trouble for birds - and Gary Ometer, former Director of Debt Management for the U.S. Department of the Treasury. I was hesitant to phone Gary, for his title led me to expect a man of, shall we say, high scores on the Shirley Stiffness Tester, but he was a good sport about it. Gary blames shabby Ellis Island bookkeeping for his family's contribution to the Ometer situation.

I was also amused by her description of meeting Alison DuBois:

Perhaps because I'd been reading a biography of the slovenly and bellicose Helen Duncan on the plane to Tucson, it did not cross my mind that a medium could look like a beauty pageant winner. DuBois has long, obedient rust-red hair that turns up just so on the ends and complements her coppery lipstick. Her blush and foundation could have been applied by airbrush, so perfect is the blending. She manages to look made-up at the same time as she looks completely natural and beautiful without device. I can no more understand how a woman does this than I can understand how a woman communicates with dead people. DuBois is paranormally good-looking.

I have to say that the first time I ever saw a picture of the real Alison DuBois, I was shocked by the way she's much, much more glamorous than her TV counterpart.

The weakest chapter in the book is the one wherein "The author enrolls in medium school." I got the sense that she didn't get much out of it but had to say something about it because she'd put in the time and money to attend.

For all that her writing is wonderful and many of her asides are entertaining, there's a spark of irritation in much of what she says about her own experience that made me think that as much as I might like to read Mary Roach's writing, I might not like spending time with her. I was also fascinated by the occasional British-sounding turn of phrase, since she's solidly American.

One of the things I've talked about with people in my writing group is how to describe people, and the subject of eye color always comes up. I keep thinking of it off and on, and since I'm reading something where one of the characters just mentioned another character's eyes, I think it's time to find out what the reality basis for this is.

( One-Question Poll: Eye Color )

I keep rereading this story and thinking how amazing it is, and it's more than worth a random kink rec post. The story is "Pull Your Tangles Out" by boweryd. It has some of that same feel as "Tell me to stop" with Spencer feeling his way around what it means to have that kind of responsibility for Brendon. I also really like the way that Spencer, Brendon, and Ryan just accept Brendon doing what Spencer tells him to as normal and it's only when Jon notices and then says something about it that things change:

"Brendon, seriously, bed," Spencer says, pushing at Brendon's shoulder where it was resting against his leg.

"Dude, no, come on, I am about to kick Jon's ass on such an epic scale. Seriously epic. Someone will write songs about the ass kicking I am about to deliver."

Jon snorts, and on the screen Brendon's character's head explodes in a spray of gore. "Owned," Jon says evenly. "So owned."

Brendon gapes at Jon, then the screen, and twists around to gape at Spencer. "No. No. Rematch!"

"Bed," Spencer says, firmly. "We have an interview tomorrow. I'm not asking you." Brendon grumbles in a cursory manner before standing up and shuffling toward the bunks, and when Spencer rises to follow, he finds Jon staring at him in this even, measuring way.

"What?"

"Nothing," Jon says, but Spencer can practically feel Jon's eyes boring into his back as he turns towards the bunks.

So one day I woke up and thought, "You know what the world needs? A story where Gabe's dad marries William's mom, and there are wacky hijinks and eventually true love." And then I wrote 1700 words of plot bunny over ten hours via Twitter. My dream would be for someone to write that as an actual epic story with more wacky hijinks. (This is light on wacky hijinks, slightly heavier on true love.)

( Rest of the Bunny )

So schuyler linked to this post (for anyone reading this in a future where it's gone, it's Pete Wentz's blog post with this picture of Gabe and Bronx) and said, "Someone needs to tell Pete that Gabe will steal his baby. Bitch has a loudass biological clock." To which I said, "OMG, do I want fic about Gabe plotting how he's going to run away with Bronx and teach him the way of the Cobra." And then I wrote this instead. Wacky hijinks are not my forte. This was also written via Twitter in 140-character bursts (See what you miss by not following me?), and is ridiculously self-indulgent.


( Tick Tock )

Title: Alternate Scenes from "Five Romance Novel Beginnings Gabe and William Never Had"
Author: Ruth Sadelle Alderson
Fandom: Bandom - Cobra Starship/The Academy Is
Pairing: Gabe/William
Rating: FRT
Word Count: 750
Disclaimer: Not real, never happened.
Summary: Outtakes from "Five Romance Novel Beginnings Gabe and William Never Had." This may make more sense if you read that first.
Notes: In my original draft of "Five Romance Novel Beginnings Gabe and William Never Had," the Pretending To Be Together section ended differently and the Barista section was altogether different. I liked them, but they didn't quite fit with the feeling of the other sections.


( Alternate Scenes from Five Romance Novel Beginnings Gabe and William Never Had )

Title: Five Romance Novel Beginnings Gabe and William Never Had
Author: Ruth Sadelle Alderson
Fandom: Bandom - Cobra Starship/The Academy Is
Pairing: Gabe/William
Rating: FRT
Word Count: 3500
Disclaimer: Not real, never happened.
Summary: Five romance novel beginnings Gabe and William never had.
Notes: I've been reading my way through the Gabe/William tag on Delicious and lamenting the fact that so many of them are things where Gabe and William are the "of course they're getting together in the background" couple. I want an epic romance novel AU for them! This is not really that. Instead, it's five ways that story could start. You may also be interested in the Alternate Scenes for this story.
Thank-yous: Thanks to schuyler for naming the snake and M for advice on coffee shops.


( Five Romance Novel Beginnings Gabe and William Never Had )

First of all, even though I often find William Beckett and Gabe Saporta hot, the hottest boy in bandom is hot baby dyke Spencer Smith (that last one is less dykey and more just because it's one of my favorite Spencer pictures). One Spencer picspam I ran across had the comment, "Patrick Stump made me straight, and Spencer Smith turned me into a lesbian again."

Before that, though, I was reading fic, and I kept coming across things where Ryan Ross has a big cock. I asked schuyler if there was a canon basis for that or if it's a fanon thing that grew. She said that the canon basis for it is that Ryan, despite wearing girl jeans, apparently hasn't learned to tuck, and that Jon said, suggestively, in a making of the "Nine in the Afternoon" video thing that Ryan has the biggest clock.

I remembered this a few days after our discussion and thought I'd go look at a picspam to see for myself. The Delicious ryanross+picspam tags led me to teainagarden's Bananapants picspam. I scrolled through it and thought two things:

1. If it weren't for the picspam pointing it out, I would never notice.
2. In the pictures where he's wearing black pants, how can you tell? All the lines and shadows blend together.

(Sky appropriately laughed at me when I told her this.)

Then I stumbled across quettaser's Salute to Crotches picspam. This time, even knowing that was the point of the picspam, what I notice most is not their hips, thighs, or crotches, but rather their faces. (Also, I find it hilarious that the actual pictures of Pete Wentz's naked crotch are no longer there and I had to google them.)

One of the pictures there and elsewhere is this one:

( Picture! )

which Tom Conrad took of The Butcher and William Beckett. In at least one place, I saw it captioned with, "Why are the Butcher's pants undone?" This is a good question. One might also ask, "Whose bed is that?" or perhaps, "Is that a candid shot or did he pose them?" Of course, none of those are the questions I ask. No. My question, every time I look at it, is, "What is William reading?"

(And that's not even to mention how embarrassingly long I had to stare at June 5's Penny Arcade before I got the joke.)

I've decided that today should be a five things Friday. So prompt or ask me whatever you want. This can be a fic prompt (five pick-up lines that didn't work on Jensen) or a getting to know you question (five movies I love) or anything else you can think to ask (five alternate uses for pipe cleaners). If you want to ask/prompt more than one five things, uh, thing, I'm cool with that. Anyone who gets their prompt/question in before 7 pm Pacific Time will get an answer before I go to bed (unless it gets so long it needs to be its own thing, but if that happens, I'll tell you about it).

I downloaded a fic soundtrack I will definitely talk about when I get around to doing another "here are the mixes I've downloaded recently" post, and there's one song from it that catches my ear every time I hear it. For the longest time, every time it came up either in the soundtrack or in iTunes on shuffle, I would think, "I love this song. What is it?" I eventually learned the name of it, but my love for it hasn't diminished. The song in question is "Colorblind" by the Counting Crows. One lyric in particular that catches my notice is "coffee black and egg white."


Colorblind - Counting Crows

As I reported before, we went to Chicago to see Empires on Friday night, which meant we (a) didn't go to Madison on Friday and (b) were up late and slept in on Saturday. Consequently, we didn't get to WisCon until Saturday afternoon. We also skipped the slash panel, and didn't go to anything on Sunday morning. This made for a really different congoing experience for me. I didn't go to near as many panels as I have in years past, although the panels I escaped from as a percentage of those I attended was probably about the same. There were also panels where I was interested in the topic, but I severely dislike one of the panelists and refused to go to them, which means I didn't make it to any YA panels.

True Names: Would A Fan By Any Other Handle Smell As Sweet?
We didn't get to Madison until shortly before 1:00 panels were starting, and I needed real food, so I ended up coming into this panel late. I'm kind of sorry I didn't come in earlier, because what there was was interesting. Someone in the audience pointed out that fandom is not the only community where chosen names are the norm - I think her example was specifically the trans community. Someone else in the audience asked if there are always problems when you start mixing your legal name identity with your chosen/fannish/whatever name identity. karnythia said, "Maybe not if you're talking about something like knitting," which caused a great uproar from the knitters in the audience, and she had to change her answer to it's always a problem.

Ask A Pro
I went to this panel for a while, but it was (a) boring and (b) depressing, so I left.

Bisexual and Pansexual Characters in SF/F
I went to this panel for two reasons. First of all, I usually try to go to the sex panels. (Are you really surprised?) Secondly, Charlie Anders and Annalee Newitz were on it, and I very much like them. I got some good book recs out of this. One person from the audience, in talking about the surprise factor bisexuals can provide in a story said, "They could date anyone at any time!" Another interesting audience participant said that most bi reveals in books/media/stories are of the type where the straight person has a same-sex encounter/love story, whereas for many people, it goes the other way: they consider themselves gay/lesbian and then fall for someone of the opposite sex. I think it was the same person who also said that for many people, that experience isn't discovering something they never knew about themselves but rather that they have actually changed as people.

Part of the discussion was also about the relative acceptance of male and female bisexuality, which led Annalee to describe fanfic/slash fandom as a "giant female gaze that lives only on the internet."

Fathers and Daughters in Science Fiction and Fantasy: Does Anyone Get It Right?
I wasn't sure if this was going to be a good panel or not, and I was iffy about it because it was on the sixth floor, and sixth floor panel rooms are harder to sneak out of unnoticed. Luckily, it turned out to be really good. One audience member proposed the idea that the male trope is that the protagonist earns the father's respect/right to take his place where the female story might be dealing with loss in that your father doesn't love you the same way, which was interesting, but a lot of women in the room said that wasn't their experience with their fathers. I wonder if that's a product of the kind of people who come to WisCon and the families they come from or if that's really more of a norm.

Someone brought up Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games as an example of a book where the father is absent but his influence makes him very present in the female protagonist's life.

The most fascinating book I heard about, possibly at the whole con, is an upcoming one in which Camille Alexa, who was one of the panelists, has a story. Her story is "Gretel," a "Hansel and Gretel" retelling, and the collection is an anthology about living under the threat of being eaten, which sounds awesome.

Wish Fulfillment in Fiction
As a fan fic writer, this seemed like a great idea, and Caroline Stevermer, who I loved in panels last year, was on it. I had some reservations because I knew I wasn't particularly fond of one of the other panelists. It turns out I don't like two of the panelists, and I left pretty early on. The one interesting thing Caroline said before I left was that she wants "the wish beneath the wish" where the story takes you somewhere better than what you would have though to wish for.

Media vs. Book Fandom
This was my favorite panel all weekend. It was fascinating to watch people come in and see that they were media people. (The whole front row on one side of the room was bandom people.) I was wrong about one of the panelists who I would have picked as book fandom but is big in Doctor Who. I think he's the one who made the good point that fandom specific shorthand starts out as a way to not type so much and ends up being a barrier to entry for new people/exclusionary to outsiders.

Part of the discussion was about RaceFail 09. The first time norwich36 told me about it, I asked, "How much of this is about people not knowing how to use the internet?" The panel seemed to think that, aside from other faily aspects, that is a large part of what was going on. They said that fandom_wank, for whatever its other issues, has really taught media fandom how to (a) archive and (b) read online discussions, and that sci fi book fandom hasn't quite caught on to either of those aspects of online discussions.

Someone in the audience said she doesn't care about books versus other media, "I just want it all," books, movies, TV, comics, video games. One of the panelists ended by agreeing with the "I want it all" perspective. I've been thinking about this because I don't want it all, and I don't want the things I want in the same ways. I'm not a gamer. I used to read comics but don't anymore. I want to be fannish about TV shows, real people, and sometimes movies, but not about books. I might want to discuss books with people, but not to the extent that I do with TV.

The other thing I've been thinking about a lot in connection to this panel is the idea of access and cons. Someone in the audience said she didn't have the time/money to come to WisCon when she was a college student living five blocks away, but now that she lives two time zones away, she can make it. I made my usual book vs. media point about how Escapade ceased to be interesting to me in terms of panels but were still my people where WisCon has awesome panels but are not my people, and ladyjax (who is one of those people I could just listen to for days on end; I knew this panel was going to be good because she was on it) said bring your friends to WisCon. I don't know if media fandom is really young or if I just think of it that way because I was most active when I was in college, but I think those two things are connected. I don't know if we can ever have a con realistically representative of media fandom specifically because of the college student time/money factor. (Not to mention the way that most cons I know about take place during the school year.)

Someone else on the panel talked about having a conversation with someone who asked, "Is WisCon getting older?" and she said, "You're just going to the wrong panels." M and I were talking about this later, and she said she thinks there's a real separation at WisCon between consumers, who are there to talk about books/media/whatever, and producers, who are there for the how to write aspects.

Not Enough Tricksters
This panel sounded interesting, and Charlie Anders was supposed to be on it. I stuck it out for a short while, but only the moderator and one of the other panelists who I didn't find interesting had shown up, so I left. The panelist did have an interesting point to make that we usually think of Odysseus as the trickster, but Penelope is also a trickster character.

The Food Report
As usual, we had excellent food all weekend. We ended up eating at the Nepali place and the Himalayan place on the same day, which made for an interesting contrast in two different bowls of dal (verdict: both yummy). I also tried green jackfruit, which the menu said is a common meat substitute. It tasted a lot like something you would use to replace meat and soak up the flavor of everything else. That's not to say it was bad, just not anything spectacular. We also went to Mother Fool's Coffehouse for soup on our way out of town. They post their soups to Twitter every day. They also had vegan hot chocolate, which was okay, but not quite as creamy as I like my hot chocolate.

Next Year
I told my Escapade/WisCon comparison to schuyler and eleanor_lavish on Friday night, and they told me I should come to CON.TXT next year because it would be both good panels and my people (plus them!), so that's what M and I are tentatively planning on doing for Memorial Day weekend 2010.

People always look at me strangely when I talk about folders in iTunes, so let's have a poll.

( One-Question Poll: iTunes Playlist Folders )

So here's what I want: when I have iTunes on shuffle, I want it to display the list of songs in the order they're playing. It will do this for an individual playlist, but not for a folder or for the entire music library. Is this just something it does not do, or am I missing an option somewhere?

(I also still wish it would put the song name in the window title bar so I could hover over minimized iTunes and find out what's playing without having to switch windows, but I've wanted that forever and Winamp was the only player that ever did that anyway.)

Some enterprising friends (accidentally, I think) recently got me into bandom. I was jokingly thinking that I was always three years (or so) late to every fandom party, and then I started to think about it more seriously. I think the only fandoms I've ever been in just as they were taking off were DamonAffleck and lotrips. (Also, what you may not know because I spent a lot of time resisting popslash is that I read popslash way before it was in for fangirls. I have no idea why I started reading the boy bands category at Nifty, but read it I did, and before I went abroad for the summer of 2000, which means before it really became a thing with fangirls, and I stopped after it became a fannish thing. What can I say? I can be stubbornly opposed to other people's fandoms for no real reason other than that I'm contrary that way.)

The good thing about coming into a fandom late is that there's a lot to read. And bandom appears to be a gigantic fandom with a lot to read. The same thing was true of J2, Sentinel, Buffy, etc.

The bad thing about coming into a fandom late is that there's a real loss of fannish interactivity. First of all, I've missed out on a lot. My source for all things bandom (read: schuyler) pointed me toward Panic's Rolling Stone interview, and there are at least two moments in there that fangirls must have flipped out about (Brendon trying to cajole Ryan out of being mad, which must have been the basis for at least a dozen fics about how "Brendon never remembers the difference between public and private," and Spencer and Ryan looking at each other in a way that, if you separated them horizontally just a bit, is the exact same look in every engagement announcement ever), and while I'm entertained now, I know what I'm missing by watching it in isolation.

Secondly, I've been reading mostly J2 for a couple of months, and I've gotten in the habit of emailing story recs to the friends who I know read it, but three of them have been in bandom forever and have probably read everything already, and the other one is not into bandom. (I've sent her a giant email of fic links, but I don't think bandom is going to be her thing.) I really liked being able to pass recs back and forth and talk about them.

Thirdly, I feel vaguely guilty about it all. I keep thinking that people are going to be like, "You've been ignoring everything bandom for years, and now you're interested?" (Even though schuyler assured me that it's always fun to share it with someone new.) I also just want to make lists of questions and ask them (like has anyone ever asked Spencer what's up with the beard?), but I know I should just google for myself first, but I'm not quite invested enough to make that kind of effort.

I have to stop reading books without knowing anything about them ahead of time. I knew that a lot of people liked Sherman Alexie's The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, but I didn't know it was going to break my heart pretty much from the first page.

The book is about Junior and what happens the year he decides to leave the reservation school and go to Reardan, a small-town white high school twenty-two miles away. Junior is a cartoonist, and the book also includes his cartoons, from artist Ellen Forney. In a lot of ways, the book is ultimately hopeful. Junior navigates his way into life at Reardan, makes friends there, and reconciles with his best friend on the reservation. But it's not an easy road. Probably the most heartbreaking part was this:

Jeez, I've been to so many funerals in my short life.

I'm fourteen years old and I've been to forty-two funerals.

That's really the biggest difference between Indians and white people.

A few of my white classmates have been to a grandparent's funeral. And a few have lost an uncle or aunt. And one guy's brother died of leukemia when he was in third grade.

But there's nobody who has been to more than five funerals.

All my white friends can count their deaths on one hand.

I can count my fingers, toes, arms, legs, eyes, ears, nose, penis, butt cheeks, and nipples, and still not get close to my deaths.

I kept being reminded of a video (I think) I've never seen but have read descriptions of. The video is of black men and white men talking about racism, and one of the white men doesn't believe the PoC experience, and they keep pushing, and eventually he says something like he can't believe it because he can't live with the idea that our world can be like that. I felt like that guy reading this book. The first couple of times Junior talks about what it means to be Indian and poor, I felt myself resisting it. I don't want to believe that our world can be like that. Once I noticed myself resisting, though, I was able to let go of it and listen to Junior tell me his story.

I listened to Empires' "Spit the Dark" (acoustic version at their MySpace or download Howl with the album version I was listening to from their website) on repeat the whole time I was reading the book. (Yes, I'm the kind of person who will listen to one song on repeat for hours and hours and hours.) The lyrics that catch my ear are "I will guide you in the night" and "will you join me?" I also read the vision statement of To Write Love On Her Arms yesterday. Both of those things were in my head, and by the time I got to the end of the book, I felt opened up and full of love. It reminded me that one of happiness commandments is Love.

On a more intellectual note, part of why I wanted to read this is that one of the characters in my paranormal mystery novel is Native American and grew up on a reservation, and one of the things I'd like to do someday is write a prequel novel that tells her story. This book certainly gave me a lot to think about.

My instinctive white privilege/child of a social worker response to the issues of alcoholism and poverty was to think, "How could this be fixed?" And then my anti-racism resources reading/family support/strengthening side kicked in and said, "This is not your place to come up with a solution." I'm still left curious about what the perspectives of Native Americans are. The conclusion the book comes to is that what Junior has to do to break the cycle is to leave the reservation. If everyone leaves, what happens to the culture? Do other people have other solutions or is this the accepted solution? I don't expect anyone reading this to answer my questions, but they're certainly something I'll be thinking about to direct more of my reading.

In a different intellectual direction, the book design is awesome. If you're at all interested in books, I suggest taking a look at this for the design alone, even if you don't ultimately read it.

Thanks to everyone who stuck around through the last 28 days of kink recs. (Surprisingly, only one person unfriended me because of this. That one person is from the same RL friend group as the one person who unfriended me when I was doing music recs.) For those of you who read fan fic/ebooks/kink fic, I hope you found something worth reading. For those of you who don't, I hope you didn't mind seeing this on your friends page every day, and I appreciate the way you waded through these posts and still talked to me about other things I had to say.

This was an interesting project to do. At first, I was really into it. After a while, though, it became just another chore, which you could probably tell by the way my posts quickly got shorter.

At some point, I figured I'd already revealed so much about myself that revealing any more wouldn't make much difference. However, there were a couple of recs that felt more revealing than others. The day I recced "Iterations," I walked around blushing all day. The rec for "Whatever Makes Him Happy" felt very revealing to me, even though I didn't say much about it. (This tension between what I think I'm revealing and what I'm actually revealing is part of what made me rec "And Then They Came On Brendon's Face, The End.") The rec for "Whoopee Cushion" was another that made me blush a little for what it revealed about just how kinky my sex scene preferences can be.

It struck me partway through this that for someone who likes sub kink so much, a lot of the things I recced were told from the top's point of view. I did a quick tally, and I recced 20 stories from the sub's pov to 15 from the top's pov. (With 9 alternating povs, one in third omniscient, and 3 I tallied as "other," but which are really sticking with one character who's a switch. Statistical notes: I counted each series as one story, and somewhere I did not do something right because I have a tally of 49 stories total, but only 48 in my pov tally and 46 in my attempt to track slash/het/bisexual threesomes.) So sub pov edged out top, but not by much. My superstars divided themselves up into two from the top's pov, one from the sub's, and one with alternating/both povs.

This is the last of my kink fic recs for this series, and this is the superstar to end all superstars. If you read only one story out of this series, read this one. Even if you don't read kink fic, read this one. Even if you don't read J2, read this one. It's not only my favorite of all of these recs, it's quite possibly my favorite piece of fan fic of all time.

The story is technosage's Break Loose Ranch series. The main story arc is J2; there's also some Chris/Steve, Chad/Steve, and Chris/Dave.

Break Loose Ranch is a half-AU in which Jensen became an actor while Jared has a ranch in Texas. They meet when Jared's right-hand man Chad drags him to a Kane show. It's not particularly kinky on the surface, but there's a beautiful d/s undertone to Jared and Jensen's relationship:

Jared splays his palm over his lower back, steadying. "Where's the lube, baby?"

Not, do you have any? Not, did you bring? Quiet, confident, knowing - because, whether he's saying it or not, Jensen is his, and he always carries slick for Jared. For them, so they can have each other wherever and whenever inspiration strikes, because Jared, fucking Prince Charming, won't take him without - not unless he's got time to lick him wide and wet.

"Jacket...pocket," he pants out, and Jared doesn't ask which. Right, always right. Jared's right-handed and so is he. Make things easy, easy for Jared.

But even if d/s isn't your thing, you should read this series because the language and the tone are so beautifully perfect:

In Jared's experience, you can tell a lot about a person from what they eat and how. Take Jared, he prefers flapjacks for breakfast, straight up, nothing fancy in them, just a golden brown batter with a hint of nut, real creamery butter with salt for just the right mix of flavors -- and a spill of thick maple syrup worth pushing a stack of pancakes around a plate to catch the last ever-loving drop of. He figures that says a lot about him, like he's a good 'ol boy, appreciates life's simple pleasures, but he wants what he wants and he'll go to some serious lengths to get it.

Now Jensen, on the other hand, well, Jensen eats about as pretty as he does everything else. Prefers waffles to pancakes, which don't make no never mind, like his mama always says. Jared's got batter for both in the fridge and about now, he'd make Jensen chicken cordon bleu if he asked for it. But when Jared sips his cinnamon-laced chicory blend and watches Jensen cut each bite two squares by two squares, bisecting the ribs of the waffle so the syrup won't run, now that's something worth noting. He figures it means Jensen's had plenty of rough times and takes his happiness where he finds it, always expecting it to run out on him. Not like Jared hadn't figured that out already, but somehow a stack of waffles eaten neat and tidy as you please kinda cements it.

Sunlight streams through the window, kissing Jensen's fresh-showered chest and biceps like Jared wishes he was. Fact is, Jensen looks good in his kitchen, damned good, like Jared could see every morning for forever and never get bored.