The Turtle Jourtle

It's 1994. Green Day is on the radio. Here in the USA, the year's top film is Forrest Gump. New terms coined include: bootylicious, cyberterrorism, digital divide, dot-com, metrosexual, MP3, neurotypical, terms of service, upcycle, and webcam.

For the year 1994, I read four Professionals fics and one Sherlock Holmes fic. Once more, there are no Man from U.N.C.L.E. fics. Don't worry, though, I've already started reading one for 1995.

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It's 1992. Whitney Houston is on the radio. Here in the USA, the year's top film is Disney's Aladdin. New terms coined include: civil union, exoplanet, Frankenfood, hacktivism, kumbaya, MacGyver, personal digital assistant (PDA), photoshop, polyamory, transphobia, and woo-woo.

For the year 1992, I read one A-Team fic, one Man from U.N.C.L.E. fic, and three Professionals fics.

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It's 1991, the last year of the Cold War. Nirvana is on the radio. Here in the USA, the year's top film is Terminator 2. New terms coined include: BDSM, carjacking, cybersex, ethnic cleansing, heteronormative, laggy, mixtape, NPC, pescetarian, and SMS. It's also the year I found out that years have numbers.

I read five fics from 1991: three Man from U.N.C.L.E., one Professionals x Star Trek, and one plain(ish) Professionals.

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DALL-E drew a picture of me. I did the color...

I've collected a large selection of fics to read as part of my Lifetime Fic Bingo game. While I was researching and collecting, I kept a list of the fics, with short notes to remind myself what they were. Tonight I've been reading back over those and finding some of them amusing. Here's a selection:

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Today I drove between three and four hours on the highway to visit my mother. This was my first experience of highway driving beyond a couple of practice runs between consecutive exits. It went well, but I am tired out this evening. Nevertheless, I'm going to try to get this post finished so that I can move on to the next year's fics.



It's 1988. Guns N' Roses is on the radio. Here in the USA, the year's top film is Rain Man. New terms coined include: channel surfing, crop circle, emo, gangsta, Kuiper Belt, mommy track, mosh pit, platformer, queer theory, and road rage.

I read five fics from 1988: four Professionals and one Man from U.N.C.L.E..

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I'm currently reading Night Moves, a 1988 Professionals fic by Courtney Gray in which Bodie is an expensive prostitute and Ray a CI5 agent. This kind of AU doesn't immediately appeal to me, but it's a recurring trope in Pros fandom and several people were quoted on Fanlore speaking highly of this particular story. I also thought it might be interesting to compare it to another fic written the same year: Rainbow Chasers by HG, in which Doyle is a prostitute and Bodie is a CI5 agent. (There's another one, Partners by Nina Boal, in the 1993 zine Leather and Blue Jeans in which both of them are prostitutes. I'm thinking about buying that zine. Perhaps if I do, and if the comparison of the two 1988 fics proves interesting, I will read that one, too.)

This trope is not as common in Man from U.N.C.L.E. fandom, which I suppose is true of most types of AU. In that fandom, you more often get either outright prostitution or specialization in honeytrap missions, or both, as part of Illya's backstory. (ChannelD has written a lot of fics like that, of course, but there are some others as well.) I've never encountered a story that has Napoleon selling sex in either past or present.

So...nothing, really. Just some ramblings while I take a break from reading.

(Note: This was formerly an access list only post but is now public.)

For the year 1987 in my Lifetime Fic Bingo game, I have wanted to read the Man from U.N.C.L.E. novella Traitor Within the Gates by D.H. Bryn, which is one of the four hard-copy zines in my small collection. Yet, as I've discussed before, reading physical media is hard for me. This is especially true when the text is closely spaced, as that of this zine is (although it is both larger and crisper than in some zines I've seen).

Tonight I was talking about the problem with some online friends and reminiscing about a (then very expensive) program I was allowed to use in college that did optical character recognition on scanned pages and used text-to-speech to read the resulting data. I said that I'd always fantasized about having a small portable scanner in the shape of a pen that I could run across a line of text to perform this task in real time. (An Internet search later in the evening showed that such a gadget now exists.) One friend commented that cell phones might be able to perform more or less that function these days, which inspired some googling on my part. And lo, as of iOS 15 (2021), iPhones have been able to do instant OCR on any photograph taken with their cameras and then speak the text discovered. Wow! Rejoicing in Turtle Town!

I've tried this out by photographing the pages of my copy of Traitor Within the Gates, and although there is a little fiddling involved in starting each new page, it is working great. It has made the zine much more accessible for me, and it's a technology I hope to use frequently in the future. Maybe I'll even buy some more zines to use it on.

It makes me happy that even fics I hate are often loved by someone. Tonight I've been doing more gathering of stories for my Lifetime Fic Bingo game. This involves visiting the Fanlore articles of fics published in my target years, and those articles often include quotes from past discussions of the fics in various venues. Tonight I was fascinated to discover from these that moonlightmead not only loved castalia's Sunshine, my least favorite Pros story (at least among those I've finished), but described it as the fic that hooked her on the fandom. Whoa!

I have been on the other end of this, as well. At the last Bistocon, someone mentioned Endgame by Tarot as a story she was sorry she'd read. I, on the other hand, like that story very much. I even named it as a favorite in the recs I prepared for the previous Bistocon. This diversity seems to me like a joyful thing. If people love different fics, then more fics get loved.

(Though I admit that I sometimes have difficulty keeping that in mind. I can feel attacks on fics that I like, especially if they come from particular people, as attacks on me, implying that I am stupid or bad.* I'm working on getting over that, however, and the fact that other people love some things that I hate is helpful, since I know that I don't think those people are stupid or bad.)

(*ETA: This is one reason I tend to throw softballs in my fic write-ups.)

Today I am lining up fics to read during the first few rounds of my Lifetime Fic Bingo game. Often when I am browsing for stories this way, I will be overcome by the thought, "All the fic! I want to read all the fic! ALL THE FIC EVER!" Then I will come across a story whose description makes me say, "Er, well, except maybe that one." I always feel a little calmer after that.