The Turtle Jourtle

During my Lookback Fic Bingo game, covering years 1978 to 1985, I read 20 fics. Of those, the three I would most recommend today are:

Dead Bluff by Linda S. Maclaren (Mackie) and Gina Martin (The Professionals; 22,900 words; gen)
Tiger by the Tail by Lillian Shepherd (The Professionals; 21,111 words; gen)
A Time of Certain Solace by Eileen Roy (The Man from U.N.C.L.E. x M*A*S*H; 4,992 words; gen)

All gen! 0_0

(Above: Nena performs music for the partial decade 1978-1985.)

Okay. The past few days have been pretty bad mentally, and I've really been struggling to do these write-ups. Giving it another try.



It's 1980. Queen is on the radio. Here in the USA, the year's top film is The Empire Strikes Back. New terms coined include: differently abled, dis, ecotourism, electronica, high five, killing field, NIMBY, Usenet, voicemail, and yuppie.

For 1980, I read three fics: one Professionals fic, one Sherlock Holmes x Star Trek crossover, and one Man from U.N.C.L.E. x M*A*S*H crossover.

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I had a really good time writing my longish Professionals fic The Wind and the Rain. Pretty much the only parts of the process I didn't like were the parts where I wasn't feeling well enough to work on it. Now I want to write more fanfic. In particular, I'd like to write another Man from U.N.C.L.E. fic. (I posted a short one in 2021.) To do that, though, I need to refamiliarize myself with the show; it's been a long time since I watched it regularly.

That need gave me the idea to do a rewatch of the entire Man from U.N.C.L.E.. All 105 episodes feels like a lot to work through, though, if my main goal is to get to a point where I can write some fic. Also, I don't think it's controversial to say that some MFU episodes just aren't very good. Thus, I'm thinking of restricting myself to the list that I generated some time ago by asking other fans to name their favorite few episodes. (The list was part of my eventually abandoned project to run a regular social MFU watch.) I ended up with 51 episodes, which appear below in filming order.

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At this point, I started feeling sad that I would be watching so much MFU and no Professionals. The number of Pros episodes is also in the 50s, so I could have chosen a few more MFU episodes and maybe weeded out a few from Pros—*cough* Blackout *cough*—then alternated them. MFU is still the show I'm trying to bone up on, though, so I decided maybe I'd do a similar highlights tour of Pros. I was able to find a list I'd made a long time ago after asking LJ Pros fans for their favorite episodes. It contained 22 entries, and appears below, again in filming order.

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Then it occurred to me that if I chose one more MFU episode and three more Pros ones, I could watch two MFU followed by one Pros twenty-five times, then two more MFU at the end. Accordingly, I picked the following supplements:

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And there you are: a detailed plan for what, if I proceed with it, I'm going to call The Little Rewatch (in contrast to a Great Rewatch). I'm not going to set any kind of timetable for this, since consistency is very much not my strong suit. (That's what happened to the social MFU watch, sadly.) As I go along, though, I will probably post some informal thoughts on what I watch. I'm not sure yet whether they should be in my journal or in the appropriate fandom comms.

Let me know what you think. I know I've got a bit of a tendency to try to organize everything, but it's been making me happy in the case of my fanfic reading games, so this seems worth a try. This post itself has cheered me up on a bad night.

Fandoms in this post: The Professionals, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Starsky and Hutch

Hello, and welcome to the first post of my Old and New Project. As I explained previously, for this project I will be reading each fic in my Beloved Collection of favorites, followed by at least one new (to me) fic by the same author.

To start this step of the project, I read the two fics by Rebelcat (myrebelcat) that I had collected in the past. (I'm not sure if I'm always going to read all the fics I have by a particular author at the same time, but I did in this case.)

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It's 2023. Taylor Swift is on the radio. Here in the USA, the year's top film is Barbie. The American Dialect Society's Word of the Year (coined in 2022) is enshittification.

For 2023, I read five fics: two Professionals, one Sentinel, and two Man from U.N.C.L.E..

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It's 2021. Olivia Rodrigo is on the radio. Here in the USA, the year's top film is Spiderman: No Way Home. New terms coined include: rizz.

For 2021, I read five works: one Man from U.N.C.L.E. fic, one Professionals fic, two published Sherlock Holmes pastiches, and one A-Team x Inception crossover.

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I've been done with this year for a while, but I wasn't able to do the write-up because my laptop was out of commission. Happily, it's back now.



It's 2019. Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus are on the radio. Here in the USA, the year's top film is Avengers: Endgame. New terms coined include: large language model and review bombing.

For 2019 I read five fics: one Man from U.N.C.L.E., two Sherlock Holmes, and two Professionals.

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It's (already) 2017. Luis Fonsi is on the radio. Here in the USA, the year's top film is Star Wars: The Last Jedi. New terms coined include: Latine and Zoomer.

For 2017, I read five fics: one Sentinel, one Starsky and Hutch, one Man from U.N.C.L.E., and two Sherlock Holmes. Apologies to the Professionals fans among my readers. Uniquely, I think, there are no Pros fics in this batch.
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It's 2015, and same-sex marriage has become legal throughout the United States. Adele is on the radio again. Here in the USA, the year's top film is Star Wars: The Force Awakens. New terms coined include: aquafaba, edgelord, ghost kitchen, red flag law, and sponcon.

For this year, I read seven works: three crossovers between The Professionals and the film Lust, Caution; one plain Professionals fic; one Man from U.N.C.L.E. movie fic; and two Sherlock Holmes fics.

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It's 2012, and people are talking a variety of nonsense about the Mayan calendar. Psy is on the radio. Here in the USA, the year's top film is The Avengers. New terms coined include: escape room, generative AI, hot take, JOMO, and reaction GIF.

For 2012, I read five works: three Professionals fics, one Battlestar Galactica x A-Team crossover, and one Man from U.N.C.L.E. x Doctor Who crossover.
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