The Turtle Jourtle

Hello, everyone. My journal has been very quiet, hasn't it?

Over the past few months, I've been putting a lot of my fannish energy into writing The Wind and the Rain, the 13,000-word story that is my contribution to this year's Professionals Big Bang. I've been reading a little bit of fic, too, but not in the organized way that lends itself to write-ups.

Last night, I finally posted The Wind and the Rain. I'm elated. I'd been working on it since March, and it's the longest fic I've ever written by a factor of ten. Indeed, I think it's the longest piece of any kind I've ever written, including everything I wrote in college.


As I bask in the glow of my finished fic, I'm also looking forward to having more time for reading again. For the rest of the month, that time will be dedicated mostly to reading the other Pros Big Bang fics, but after that, expect a return to your regularly scheduled program. At least until I have a new idea for a story. :)

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 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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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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(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.

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

Today is National Coming Out Day. This is the first year I've actually remembered on the day, so it's the first time I've had to decide what to do about it. I could make a public post about sexuality in my journal. I have been somewhat circumspect about that issue. (For instance, my belated NCOD post last year was friends-only.) In my most recent multifandom bingo post, though, I used the phrase "as a queer person", so I suppose I've more or less exited that closet without having to wait for the designated day.

Applying the idea of coming out more broadly, there are other things I've been vague about that I could make explicit. Yet, while I think there is value to "someone you know is X" efforts, that stuff doesn't feel relevant enough to my participation in fandom to make the complicated and painful explanations worthwhile for me or for others.

Yet there is one thing that is relevant, that as far as I recall I have never hinted at in any fan space, and that I think might be liberating to make known. That is that I am dyslexic. I find reading slow, laborious, and error-prone, and I do much of my reading of fan fiction using text-to-speech software. That doesn't, in my opinion, mean that I am "not really reading" it. The use of adaptive technology doesn't make an activity less meaningful, it just makes it possible for people who would otherwise be excluded.

I had a dream that I was writing a Big Bang story in which Bodie, Doyle, and the rest of CI5 lived in an isolated military installation amid lots of trees and snow. There was some kind of supernatural threat in the surrounding wilderness that they had to guard against. Then Bodie got married and his wife had an adorable baby that was irresistible to women, only Bodie and Doyle were also both androids. So expect that next year, maybe. *g*

Things Not to Do in the Middle of the Night #241: reread Bodie Lost and Bodie Found

Today I received a very surprising Christmas surprise from macklingirl, who mailed it from Germany a full three months ago, on 3 December of 2020. Much like one of the Wise Men, it has arrived from the east bearing a gift, just not in time for the birth.
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I have a compilation of mid-century Christmas radio hits. Among these, which is the song that makes me cry every time I hear it?

Is it the Roy Orbison tear-jerker "Pretty Paper"?
Is it the wistful "I'll Be Home for Christmas"?
Is it "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas", which is so apt this year?

No. It is the novelty song "Snoopy's Christmas", the hero of which is a cartoon beagle.