The Turtle Jourtle

I sometimes visit the r/FanFiction subreddit. Today I brought up my practice of reviewing fanfic there, and another user said that, in their opinion, writing unsolicited negative reviews is "tacky" because fic writers are not professional authors.

What do you all think of this? I suppose that people who follow the journal of a person who writes such reviews might be a biased sample, but I'm still curious.

Personally, I see it as one of the things engaged fans do. I know there is plenty of precedent for it in fandom, and the reviews of the past, as quoted on Fanlore, are often much less gentle than I try to be.

It's 2006. Shakira is on the radio. Here in the USA, the year's top film is Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. New terms coined include: agender, birther, bucket list, crowdsourcing, demisexual, dumpster fire, gamification, SCOBY, and YouTuber.

For 2006, I read five fics: three Professionals fics, one Sentinel fic, and one Sentinel x La Femme Nikita crossover. (Apologies to the Man from U.N.C.L.E. fans among my readers. There are no MFU fics this time.)

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It's 2005. James Blunt is on the radio. Here in the USA, the year's top film is Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. New terms coined include: butt-dial, glamping, locavore, microblogging, paleo, rage quit, ransomware, sexting, and truther.

I read five fics from 2005: two Professionals fics, two Man from U.N.C.L.E. fics, and one Sentinel fic. I also read a third Professionals fic that turned out not to be from 2005 after all. (Oops.)

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It's 2003. Outkast is on the radio. Here in the USA, the year's top film is The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. New terms coined include: binge-watch, dad bod, eggcorn, flash mob, level up, manscaping, muffin top, SARS, Skype, and unfriend.

For 2003 I read five fics: two Professionals and three Man from U.N.C.L.E..

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It's me again. My output of write-ups has fallen off a lot lately, but for happy reasons. Over the past two months I've been putting most of my energy into reviewing math. I have a bachelor's degree in math, but have been unable to engage with the subject for about fifteen years due to mental and physical illness. Lately, circumstances have finally aligned so that I'm able to work on recovering some of my missing knowledge. It is a very important development for me.

Now, on with the show...



It's 2001, and I'm starting high school as the Twin Towers are destroyed. Linkin Park is on the radio. Here in the USA, the year's top film is Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone. New terms coined include: ack, anti-vaxxer, bromance, captcha, chiweenie, dubstep, forever chemical, Internet of Things, lean in, and twerking.

For 2001, I read five fics: two Man from U.N.C.L.E., two Professionals, and one Sherlock Holmes x Quantum Leap crossover.

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I've read around 200 works of fan fiction this year, totaling roughly 2.5 million words. Many of them have been excellent, but I thought it might be fun to pick some highlights on this New Year's Eve. Below are the fics that stood out the most in each of the categories listed, along with the comments I wrote after reading them.

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Happy New Year, everyone! I hope you enjoy my fanfic ramblings (because there are going to be a lot more in 2024).

It's 1998. Britney Spears is on the radio. Here in the USA, the year's top film is Saving Private Ryan. This is also the year I saw the movie As Good As It Gets (released on Christmas Day 1997), which marked the first time I remember seeing a gay person portrayed in media. New terms coined include: amirite, bit rot, camgirl, cyberbullying, dark energy, distributed denial of service, gayborhood, microgreen, and neurodiversity. (An amirite is a type of fossilized stand-up comedian.)

For 1998, I read five fics: one Professionals and four Man from U.N.C.L.E..

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It's 1996. The Spice Girls are on the radio, and I'm hearing their song "Wannabe" ad nauseum while practicing for my school's talent show. Here in the USA, the year's top film is Independence Day. New terms coined include: cromulent, embiggen, face-palm, fist bump, flip phone, live streaming, trans man, trans woman, phishing, and turntablism.

I read five fics for 1996: two Man from U.N.C.L.E., two Professionals, and one A-Team.

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As I discussed in a post a year ago today, I usually use text-to-speech software to read fanfic.

Recently, I acquired a new piece of text-to-speech software called Speechify that I'm very pleased with. (I made a post about it a while ago, but deleted it because I wasn't happy with the included videos.) Speechify comes with a wider variety of high quality voices than I had previously, and one of the things I've been doing since switching to it is using US voices for fanfic based on US media (such as The Man from U.N.C.L.E.) and UK voices for fanfic based on UK media (such as The Professionals).

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It's 1995. TLC is on the radio. (Among the songs I've featured in these posts, their "Waterfalls" is the first one that I remember being aware of at the time of its release.) Here in the USA, the year's top film is Toy Story. New terms coined include: anti-globalization, cap-and-trade, eurozone, genderqueer, jack in, lawyer up, meatspace, mom jeans, noob, and subprime.

I'm still helping my mother move and it is still exhausting. I've found energy for reading fic here and there, so that I've now finished my five fics for 1995. I have very little energy for writing them up, though. I'm just going to start and see how it goes.

For this year, I read one Man from U.N.C.L.E. fic and four Professionals fics. I hoped to read another Man from U.N.C.L.E. fic to make up for having none in the past two posts. I just couldn't get into the other one I had queued, though, and I ended up abandoning it. I also abandoned The Cat Came Back by Taz, a crossover between The Professionals and a 1993 movie called Hard Target. The fic seemed promising, but it spent a lot of time on characters from the movie, and I decided that, without seeing that, I didn't have the background to really appreciate the story.

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