snippets

Interesting Salon article about the Save Farscape campaign, and about what kind of power fans have or might have in relation to the shows they love.

And a piece of silliness which I link here purely for sidewinder. <g>

Fluffy Mackerel Pudding???

Those who love The Gallery of Regrettable Food must--must--check out this. Scroll down a ways and click the link for the tour/slideshow, would be my advice. I don't know if I'd counsel doing this before dinner, though--you may never want to eat again.

So, this is weird ...

So, I'm sitting at work today, messing around, and I check my private e-mail, and there's something with "Roots Rain" as the subject line. I think "Woo-hoo! Feedback!", and I open it up, and it's from someone saying, in effect, "I found this story, and was wondering about it. How did you come up with the concept? How did you pick the name Vecchio? Are you from Chicago?" And I look at the "from" line, and see that it's from some guy whose last name appears to actually be Vecchio, with an AOL account.

So I ponder a bit, and then I send a nice friendly though impersonal response briefly explaining the nature of fanfiction (inwardly thanking the gods that this was not one of my more NC-17ish things and hence I don't have to explain slash as well), and giving a quick precis of the main characters and basic premise of due South. A few hours later I get a reply; the guy explains that he was doing a vanity-google on his name, and the story popped up, and he read it, and since his name is Vecchio and he comes from Cicero, and -- well, specifically, he said "I was wondering if you were writing about things you heard."

I laughed, as they say, like a drain; I quashed the temptation to write back "Yeah, in fact, you tell your Uncle Ray I heard about the ten kilos of heroin and he's in a world of trouble!" And now I'm just sitting here shaking my head and giggling. It's very odd to think back through one of one's pieces of fanfiction and try to imagine how it would come across to a completely naive reader, one wholly unfamiliar with the source material ("Wait a minute, this guy's a Mountie? What the hell's the deal with--a wolf? And who's this Victoria chick??"). And I'm really flummoxed as to why that story would google up ahead of the masses of RV-centric fiction out there.

Ah, the weird glories of the internet.