I always gets strange feels at people leaving kudos at an old archive - I think it uses a branch of ao3 code? WWOMB archive -  for a really old obscure fandom on a WIP that may never get finished. I like that they enjoyed but will I ever finish it? It makes me feel a touch sad when I was so into that fandom briefly, but it wasn’t one that was ever big and I didn’t have much fandom connection for it to keep that excitement going.

It’d be cool to finish that story - it was for an obscure scifi show 7 Days, anyone remember that? - but I don’t know how to rewatch in order to refamiliarise myself with the characters. I had a hard time watching most of the episodes because BBC2 only aired 1 season (or part of S1 possibly?) and I had some torrented rips at some point to watch s2 and s3 but they got lost or I ran out of HDD space to store them.

Anyhow, can’t find it on streaming sites and it only got a region 1 dvd release that’s over £50 for 3 seasons (in 2018! For a show that aired 1998-2001. No clue why they suddenly decided to release one) . :(

So "Smoke And Mirrors" (lyrics here) was released in 2011 and Alias finished in 2006 but surely someone has done a fanvid to it already? I just haven’t found one yet but finding vids for old fandoms can be difficult.

I keep hearing it, because both YouTube and Amazon Music want to play it for me, and each time thinking it just so fits the main arcs. Of Sydney being forced to deceive not only on missions but her whole working life as yet another mission and how that affects her sense of self. Of everyone who knows things aren’t as they seem but is keeping themselves in the game. The costs of staying in the game too and keeping people safe (like discrediting Will to keep him alive). The issue of her mother watching and waiting to make a move.

This also reminds me that Alias started with the unusual plot of male fiance to the lead female character gets fridged. I’m not sure if I can think of another example of that (rather than the all too common reverse) off the top of my head. The Rambaldi mystery wasn’t done satisfyingly IMO - not too surprising now looking at J.J. Abrams’ track record with Lost now - but he does seem to do well at starting shows with interesting female leads.

There’s too much other stuff to watch in general but this does make me wonder if rewatching would be good. I watched the first few seasons as a teen and then rewatched those + watched last seasons too back when I was actually in good health. I’d do WiiFit jogging with it switched to the other channel for the show. High octane fight scenes was good motivation for my indoor jogging. :D Although I only did 20-30 mins jogging and would recover for the last 10-20 mins of the show.

Looking back over the cast list, there’s so many actors I recognise from other stuff now too. For anyone who liked Blaine in iZombie, David Anders playing Sark in Alias was sort of cut out of the same sort of cloth from what I recall. S5 even had Amy Acker and I can’t remember who she was in it, oops. Lena Olin was iconic. Plus quite a few other kickass female agents as well, like the rival spy Gina Torres played. And Victor Garber was in it too, a very complicated character but who wasn’t on that show.

Sometimes I think it would be cool to have a small fandoms discord server. Like, I already have a server for Fringe that has barely any chatter in but I think is nice to have there so people can find it if they want it. Finding small/old/dead fandoms after their time is sad but could be kept alive with new spaces to allow for that possibility still.

And I thought about setting up a The 4400 server too but it’d be the same, rarely used. And yet I want there to be modern spaces - like with discord - for older fandoms. I keep thinking maybe a server for multiple old/small fandom could work well with an A-Z of fandoms and role gated access to only the fandoms you want to see.

It’s technically possible but that could end up so much work to setup and run... so I keep thinking ‘nah’ while my fannish heart is like ‘but why not?’ (fuck tonnes of help and need for per fandom moderation is why not though).

4400 feels

I had a guest on ao3 kudos several The 4400 stories which meant I went back to look at what got kudos and reread a few. Now I am remembering why I adored Diana/Marco - the sweet, patient physics geek courting the more statistically/bio minded geek at a pace she can deal with. The show went there but then decided to take it back, though Diana and Marco were nice as friends too.

And Diana’s adopting Maia, navigating the new family relationship was fab. I also found the strained sisterly stuff with April pretty interesting. It felt like a very family focused show given there was also Tom, Kyle and Shawn, plus Lily and Richard and Isabelle. So many recurring characters who were exciting to expand with fic too. Maybe I should rewatch but I held off rewatching because really I wanted to rewatch it with someone else and so far no one I know had been enthused to.

The character related arcs for people gaining powers were one of the things I loved most about the show, it was powers-of-the-week but I liked that. They did try to mix it up later on which is why the latter seasons I enjoyed less with plotty arcs - that had one too many plot holes - but still I liked it and it had so much potential for more with the cliffhanger. I miss it and I never did get round to reading the follow-up books. Anyone read them and got non-spoilery thoughts on how the novelisations resolved things? 

Doubt this would be of interest to many people I know, because it's really more relevant to older fandom content that was on there, but it looks like yahoo groups is shutting down on October 21st! :(

I think the yahoo group I’d most miss would be fanfic_med. I was still hoping to be able to search the archives of that for whump advice. Dunno if there’s gonna be any plans to archive any of the groups anywhere else.

I also remember having a good time over on the SGAHC yahoo group, where they put up politely with my inexperienced fannish arse not knowing certain fannish etiquette at first, especially about posting fics. I’ll have to see about saving anything interesting from my two groups - I ran weirmckayship and weirmckaysmut over there although those mostly went inactive once we had the mcweir.com fansite I used to run.

I had a count up of my moodboards and I'm at 135 now. Didn't notice I'd surpassed the 100 mark. Might do something special for the 200 mark if I notice.

My current rule for posting moodboards is I can only post a shippy board if I also post a gen board same day, to encourage myself to do more gen boards as they were getting a tad ignored by me. So far working well. It's inspiring me to do more boards for favourite characters and older/other fandoms of mine. :)

Been going over my old Primeval stories to upload more of my primeval100 drabbles to the Ao3 fic for it and discovered 3 drabbles I never posted anywhere other than LJ...oops? Anyhow, this prompted me to go look over my LJ posts for Primeval fic, incase there were any more only up there, and upload a whole load that aren’t on Ao3 yet. Sorry for the notifications spam anyone who is following me on Ao3.

Rereading the comments on LJ for the old fics is just lovely. I’m reminded how tightknit the community for the fandom was, and still is! The main comms I used to partake in, primeval_denial and primeval100, are still going fairly strong 10 years on. Primeval_denial still has challenges and daily chat posts etc - it’s very much not too late to join the fandom if anyone is tempted to give the show a go.

And unlike modern fandoms can tend to be Primeval fandom always was very accepting of shipping whatever you wanted and embracing writing about all the characters if people wanted to. They had a lot of OC love too. I even found a comment on one of the old fics where I was discussing what a high ratio of feedback people seemed to get in the fandom compared to other small fandoms, people were pretty good at leaving feedback really, which was so encouraging for me as a writer at the time.

Also, I found a story where I wrote about characters being mind controlled by prehistoric moths. Which honestly probably could have happened on the show. Plenty of scope for weird and wonderful creatures, and more time travel than they did in canon too. The fandom might have gotten a bit ignored by me for a while but it still has a very special place in my heart.