Aurora's Sundry Notes

I haven't been very active lately. The past few weeks have passed in exhaustion, as well as persistent cold which hopefully is now finally going away. My brain hasn't been up to much and my concentration has sucked. Because I haven't really managed to post, I also haven't managed to show off the pretty autumn-themed icons that tinnny made for me by request, such as this one. The post with the icons is here, if you want to have a look, and there are many nice ones I didn't take.

Now, admittedly, it is suddenly winter, with snow covering the land and decorating trees like we're in a postcard. I'm surprised if this snow will stay throughout the winter, but there's hope for it staying for a while now. It's so pretty, white and powdery and Christmas-card-like everywhere. It makes the northern darkness so much lighter. Still, while most trees are bare already, there are a few still blazing yellow, which creates a delightful, strange effect with the snow. October was spectacular this year, with bright yellow and orange and red colours everywhere. While it wasn't exactly a good month for me otherwise, at least it was pretty. Haven't had so many lovely autumn mornings in some time.

Also my fannish/cultural activities have been kind of down for a while, but slowly I'm picking up energy. Last Thursday, my copy of Becky Chambers' A Closed and Common Orbit arrived in mail, the independent sequel to The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet which I loved so much. By Saturday afternoon I had read it. Oops. I loved it nearly as much as I loved Planet. It follows two side characters, rather than the main cast of the first book, and the setting and the story is very different, but it's interesting, warm and engaging, and full of that humanity and emotion which I loved about the first book as well. And damn it, the world she creates is so full and real that one of these days I'm going to go to a café and order mek and be confused that they don't serve it.

Now lately, I gathered enough focus to continue with my TV series watching, too. Finished Torchwood S1 - I'm going to write more on that soon, loved the last episodes - and just now I returned to Doctor Who. Rewatched Runaway Bride - damn, I'd forgotten how much fun that was! The Empress is not the most convincing villain, but whatever, it's fun, and I love Ten and I love Donna and I love the sparkling sensation that is David Tennant and Catherine Tate acting together. I remember the first time around I wasn't exactly sold on Donna, but now that I know what she becames later in the show, I can better see the beginnings of what makes her so awesome, and such a great Companion to the Doctor.

I feel like that gave me a new dose of energy, so I'm certainly going to keep watching. But now I think I need to get off the computer and start considering sleep.

PS. Forgot to say. LJ has recently added a 'like' button, and I haven't yet figured out how to turn it off my layout. I do not approve of it. If you want to react on my posts, I prefer actual comments, which don't need to be long or elaborate. At least then I can react, and know someone really meant it, rather than just clicking it by accident. And then I don't feel like I'm suddenly on Tumblr. There are reasons why I'm on LJ rather than Tumblr. Thanks. And I don't plan to use it on anyone else's posts, so if I do, it'll be by accident.

Hello there! I want to get started with this journal, and feel like doing so with a little introduction.

I started this because I've been longing for a place to be unabashedly fannish and talk in detail about fandom things and other objects of geeky interest, and hopefully find other people who want to talk about them, too. I used to do that in the old times, back when LiveJournal and message boards were the place to do fannish things. And I miss it, oh, do I miss it. Proper conversations instead of just retweeting and reblogging and whatnot. A chance to really get to know like-minded people in the same fandoms. I don't know how well it's going to work out anymore, now that people and fandoms have moved mostly away from LiveJournal, but this is still the kind of fandom participation I do best, so I'm going to give it a try. What is inspiring me is that I've now got a fandom that's big enough there might still be some people around who do LJ - namely, Doctor Who. But I probably will write about other fandoms and interests than just Doctor Who, if I keep going on at this.

I'm going to do a separate post about my Doctor Who obsession soon, but just to get started: I am awfully late to the party, I started watching the show a little over a year ago, and now have watched all of Ninth and Tenth Doctor, no more yet. So most likely much of the fandom who still is around has already had all the discussions I want to have, years ago too. But who knows, maybe there still are people who'd love to talk about these things, or at least read my ramblings. Maybe there are other latecomers like me, or people who've been waiting to get some new blood into the fandom. I'm going to give it a try. At worst, I'll still have a place where I've put my ramblings and can look at them later. At best, anything could come out of it.

So, a little about me before we start. The basic info: I'm a woman in my thirties, eternal fangirl and not feeling as grown-up as women in their thirties are supposed to be. I live in Finland, and I speak Finnish as my native language, but I'm comfortable enough using English a lot. I've done LJ before, I've done other fandoms before, but I felt like a fresh start with this journal, because it's been some years and I don't want to feel like I'm going back to the old thing, especially since it'll be all new fandoms I'll talk about here.

Aurora is not my real name, though I might wish it were. I feel vaguely silly about the username I chose, because it sounds a bit like something I would have taken back when I was 16 years old and still had unicorn posters on my walls. But want to know how difficult it is to find a decent, pronounceable and memorable username without random numbers that hasn't been taken? I came upon this name one evening when I was walking home, there was a most gorgeous sunset on a partly cloudy sky, and I thought about how much I've always loved sunsets and sunrises with clouds, painted all sorts of blazing colours by the sun. The name might be a bit fluffy, but I like it.

And really, I'm creating this for a fandom that includes a character called River Song. How much do I need to excuse myself?

A handful of random or less random bits of information about me before we launch head first into fandom things:

- I'm inordinately fond of tea. A bit of a tea snob I am, too, all about loose-leaf tea and pots and considering my favourite types of green tea and trying to find a delicious enough Darjeeling and so forth. But in a pinch I'll throw the snobbery to the wind and have any kind of tea - well, almost. Not Lipton's Yellow Label. But most others will do to satisfy my addiction if I'm deprived of access to my own substantial collection of teas.

- I'm bisexual, though more likely to be attracted to fictional characters and stories than real people, it seems. Not that I would mind finding a partner who isn't fictional, if it ever works out. As it is, I'm single and ever falling in love with stories.

- Creative writing is one of my biggest passions.

- I have a day job and I'm not going to speak of it here.

- I adore theatre, especially musicals.

- I'm usually quite the bookworm, too. I read most kinds of things, but the majority is genre fiction such as fantasy, scifi and historical fiction. I will occasionally launch into tirades about how genre fiction is not any worse or lower quality or less meaningful to people than fancy award-winning literary fiction.

- I love stargazing and astronomy, though I've yet to become more earnest about it than just looking at stars on dark nights, learning constellations and reading the occasional popular science book on astronomy. I'm thinking of starting by buying binoculars some time soonish.

- I'm generally a bit of an amateur science geek, but very amateur.

- I'm a friendship enthusiast, and the thing I love most is bonding with other people who love the same kind of things as I do and are willing to talk a crazy amount about them, and then do other things together as well. I would say the most important things to me in my life are friends, creativity and fannish obsessions.

- Some other things I love: chocolate, pretty notebooks, music, ballet (watching, can't do any myself), flowers, animals, trees. A non-exhaustive list.

About fandoms: there's no hard-and-fast rules about what I get attracted to, except maybe this one: I'm a characters junkie and an emotions junkie. Anything I love has to have engaging characters, emotional depth and interesting relationships between characters. I want to have interesting, active female characters, and I want to have male characters who are more than just the standard male stereotypes, I want to have three-dimensional characters who matter to each other and who I can care about. I like characters who are more than what meets they eye at a first glance.

I don't usually care about real-world relationship dramas and such - there needs to be some intriguing save-the-world story going around these fabulous characters, and preferably something about the world that's at least a bit off compared to the one we know. Slash potential and queer characters are lovely things when available. I'm a sucker for non-romantic relationships like friendship and family being made much of. I love to see same-sex bonding, whether it's friendship, family, same-sex romance or anything else.

I love things that have a balance between fun and depth, light and dark; neither pure fluff nor pure angsty drama. I guess the biggest deal is feeling that the creators love what they are doing, that the story is made with love and devotion and it radiates out to me. And that it looks outside stereotypes and boxes. I like good, strong stories, but I'm much more likely to forgive plotholes and worldbuilding holes than shoddy characterisation and lack of emotion. Finally, I tend to be a bit of a monomaniac in my fandoms, loving one thing hugely for a long time and occasionally having smaller obsessions on the side. I expect Doctor Who will stick for some time. My interests list can be something of a hint as to what else I love, but well, if I keep writing this journal, you'll see from the posts what catches my attention. I expect most fandom things will be written publicly. If I write more private-life stuff it will most likely to be locked.

To end with, I'll say that if anyone comes along who shares at least some fannishness / interests with me, thinks we might get along and would like to get to know me better, please feel free to start following me! Though I'd prefer to get a comment or a message saying why you do so (provided I didn't friend you first or we haven't talked a lot on some community already), so I know you're really someone with shared interests and such, not just someone who randomly adds people without much common ground. I am doing this to get into contact with people who share some of the same passions.