I went to Nashville and it was great. Good food, good hockey, fun times. I went to two independent bookstores, and according to the woman who owns the second one, those are the only independent bookstores in town. SO.

First, Parnassus Books. This was a fun mid-sized store in a strip mall with an amazing doughnut shop, so definitely check it out if you're in town. It was laid out well, with lots of feature tables, the staff were friendly and chatty, and there is a store dog. Can't go wrong with that.

I bought: The Tiger's Daughter, by K. Arsenault Rivera. This has been on my to-read list forever, I'm excited to finally do it.

Then, The Book Shop, a teeny tiny little space with a carefully curated selection. The owner was very friendly as well, and they had some great book-adjacent art and knickknacks for sale along with the books. I got a little art piece to hang on the wall that's an image of LM Montgomery.

I bought: the art piece, and also The Resurrection of Joan Ashby, by Cherise Wolas. This has also been on my to-read for a bit, though not as long as The Tiger's Daughter.

Both books are decently long, so I need to dedicate some time, and also read a few short, fast books first so I can beef up my yearly count before I throw it off with longreads.

or so I've been told.

I bought a small, cute purse because I was tired of carrying around my big, kind ugly purse. I figured having a small one would force me to cut back on carrying around junk I didn't really need.

Well, now I can't fit a book in my purse for trips downtown on the Metro, I have to carry it around. And I still end up with five tubes of lipstick in the bottom, making it impossible for phone + wallet + keys to fit without making it lumpy and ungainly.

Gonna have to shop for a medium purse, or a less-ugly big one. I browsed at Macy's the other day and ended up making eyes at designer purses, but I could never convince myself to actually spend that much on a bag. I am a Target pricepoint and always will be.

shitpost #1 unlocked

This is an extremely important post, obviously.

John Tortorella is a high-strung, abrasive hockey coach who once tried to attack the opponent's locker room during intermission, in a game that has been immortalized in song. Jack Johnson is a hockey player whose parents stole his paychecks and made a fool of him publicly.

One thing about Torts is that he loves big bruiser-style hockey player. The larger the better. Jack is one of those! The direction that hockey as a whole is going on is NOT those. I came up with a totally reasonable theory that he loves that kind of guy because he has some repressed desires to be dominated and topped by a large musclebound man. Jack was one of Torts' favorites in Columbus, even though Jack was neck-deep in his legal troubles with his parents, understandably distracted, and also undergoing a decline in his play.

And yet Torts put him on Team USA for the 2016 World Cup of Hockey! Keepin' Jack close, you know.

Anyway most of this was just to amuse myself until Jack requested a trade off the Blue Jackets and ended up going to the Penguins, at which point Torts exploded like, uh, a salty ex.

"Reached by The Athletic for reaction to Johnson's apparent slight, Tortorella said, "All I know is this organization, from the lawyers, the front office, J.D. [John Davidson], the managers, the coaches, players ... has done nothing but try to help Jack. And for him to backhand slap us like this is utter bulls---, and he should know better.

"No one wishes anything bad to happen to him and his family. We wish him the best. But for him to put it the way he put it today is bulls---. And to have a general manager question our decision-making from three hours away, he must be a f---ing magician.""

no one... wishes anything bad to happen to him and his family... uh. nobody brought that up but you, Torts, why are you protesting too much

""Jack and I had an open, honest conversation all through this. Jack and I have known one another forever, and I love the guy. There's no agenda here. You think that's an easy decision for me, after what Jack Johnson has been in this league and what he is?"

NORMAL. VERY NORMAL.

Anyway Torts was in love and Jack left him and Torts probably has his home address and thinks about standing under his window with a boombox, sometimes, to this day.

Ha ha, today's topic. All right. Let's begin at the beginning.

When I latched on to Aaron Ekblad as My Person in current hockey fandom, I had to explain him to many of my friends. One friend, when she said his last name half-distracted because she was looking at her phone, and with her particular accent, said Ekblad in a way that sounded like Eggplant. He became Aaron Eggplant, or just Eggplant. (Since that time, I've noticed several hockey announcers tend to say his name in a way that sounds like Eggplant, too. It's a thing! IT REALLY IS.)

At some point during his first NHL summer, he posted on Instagram from a cafe in Canada that serves all plant-based products. I said something on twitter about him eating plants and another friend replied "He is a plant." And so.

Ekblad-->eggplant-->plants???--> the plant.

The plant is anxious and stupid and not developing into the player he was supposed to be. r/hockey considers him to be a first-overall bust ala Nail Yakupov. This makes me sad inside! It's partly because of the number of concussions he's had, partly because the Panthers rushed his development by throwing him into the NHL right away (you don't DO that with defensemen), partly because the Panthers didn't have a d-coach for his first few years and when they hired one it was Jack Capuano. Etc. There's gossip on r/hockey that he's lazy and doesn't want to have to work, because he was always the biggest guy on the ice and had raw talent when he was a kid so he never learned to work in the first place, but I take that with a grain of salt.

He has a very pretty girlfriend, Dayna, who is also from Canada, and is currently a med student in Florida. They have a tiny fluffy dog named Archie. They're very cute and romantic together.

He lived with the team captain, Willie Mitchell, his rookie year, and his friendship (MAYBE IN LOVE) with Willie and his wife has continued and is very cute and sweet. And dorky. Very dorky.

All the reports I've seen from people who've met him, either back when he was in juniors or since he got to the NHL, is that he's very polite and nice and not egotistical. I hope that's true! I want a nice plant, even if his team is garbage and dead set on ruining him and his career.

This is a tragic place to end this post, but I've got nothing else. FREE EKBLAD. Trade him to Dallas.

Fred and Gunn are my forever OTP! From Angel: The Series, the first show I was really, actively fandom fannish about.

They were a sweet, uncomplicated relationship that came out of two characters just organically falling for each other. Like Tara and Willow, and of course like Tara and Willow, Joss had to ruin everything. I refuse to acknowledge what happened with Wesley, which tarnished ALL THREE OF THEM. Never happened. It was Wolfram & Hart.

Fred and Gunn are somewhat a precursor for Wash and Zoe on Firefly; she's the Wash and he's the Zoe, though, and now I just realized that pattern is the black character is stoic and the white one is quirky-fun and ugh, Joss, you and your patterns.

But whatever, I love them, I love the version of them I fell for and hold on to despite whatever happened later. Eating pancakes and going to the ballet and being ridiculously beautiful. Season 5 never happened, they ran away together after Jasmine and are living happily in a small town somewhere, hunting vampires on the weekends and being in love. Maybe with a couple of cute babies: Alonna, Cordelia, and Angel.

Amy Acker and J. August Richards are still adorable, supportive friends to each other on Twitter, and I shamelessly use that as Fred/Gunn shipping by proxy.

I spent the holidays in Texas with family, except for New Years Eve, which was spent in Dallas with a friend, shopping and eating and going to a Stars game. It was a nice visit and a pretty good week, except that I was more worn-down than I thought and kept hitting the end of my cope at inopportune times.

Got a Jamie Benn throw blanket piece of Stars merch. So soft! So nice! So cow!

One stop in our shopping tour of Dallas was The Wild Detectives, a bookstore in a renovated house in a residential neighborhood that bleeds into a hipster neighborhood to the extreme. It's a bar and a bookstore in a small house, so the selection is very curated; maybe 50 fiction titles, 30 nonfiction, and 30 or 40 children's/poetry combined? Still, the selection is interesting and the whole vibe is pretty nice.

I bought: After the Winter by Guadalupe Nettel


I need to retire Santa Gritty and roll another icon into the default spot. This will take some thought.

Loyalty Books is a temporary pop-up bookstore in Silver Spring, MD, as a project of Upshur Street Books, which is based in DC. This was a holiday season experiment that they might try to turn into a full Silver Spring bookstore depending on how it performed.

Today was actually my second visit to Loyalty; on my first visit, I didn't buy a book. I bought a mug, because the mugs were cute and I wanted to support the bookstore somehow. As a pop-up, their selection is really limited. I think they were just kind of bringing boxes of random assortments over from Upshur Street every few days and seeing how it went. Which meant the stuff on the shelves was a fascinating, unpredictable mixture.

On this second visit, I bought: The Queen of the Night, by Alexander Chee. Excited to take this with me as vacation reading.

Stories this year:
written in salt (Thoroughbreds (Movie)) Amanda/Lily
white chocolate space egg (Hockey RPF) Jamie/Tyler
take your time on me (Hockey RPF) Barkov/Huberdeau
Pregame Routine (Hockey RPF) Holtby/Wilson
two sticks of butter, softened (Ant-Man) Scott/Jimmy
sunrise, sunburn, sunset (Hockey RPF) Jamie/Tyler
born and raised in an earthquake state (Star Wars universe) Han Solo, background Lando/Bodhi
Catbird (Hockey RPF) Panthers gen
Yuletide Assignment
Yuletide Treat

…2k19 goal, stop doing no-caps titles.

( The meme! )

via umadoshi.

first canon I felt fannish about: Either Star Trek: The Next Generation or Star Wars

first canon I wrote fanfic for: ST: TNG, breathless handwritten nonsense Riker adventures, probably

thing I've been most obsessed with/fannish about without ever being even adjacent to its fandom: I’m really not sure. RENT, for a while, I guess; I really loved it but it didn’t occur to me at the time that there were other people I could talk about it with.

first online fandom: Dragonriders of Pern message boards and play-by-email RPGs on AOL

online fannish trajectory: Pern, Buffyverse, Firefly, Hornblower, BSG, bandom, hockey, with scattered small fandoms and one-offs throughout

online platform trajectory: AOL message boards, LiveJournal, Dreamwidth/AO3, Twitter, Tumblr, currently a blend of the last three.

first fic posted online: Boondock Saints twincest

fandom with the most fics written: Bandom, by far.

OTPs over the years: Fred/Gunn, Kaylee/Jayne, Horatio/Archie, Pete/Gabe, Pete/Mikey, Beckett/Carden, Ekblad/Mitchells, Benncest

thing I feel closest to fannish about without having written a word of fic (posted or not): the late-90s/early 2000s Red Wings

my weirdest unfinished fic: I had a really epic bandom slavefic with turns into revolution planning and erotic art that I never finished.

my weirdest finished fic: Oh god, take your pick.

fandom with multiple abandoned fics and no finished ones at all: I’m not sure, honestly, hard drive crashes have wiped that slate clean several times.

most upsetting research topic undertaken for fic-writing purposes: I don’t do a lot of research, tbh.

oddest purchase for fannish research: I don’t think I’ve bought anything for research purposes. I'm not doing great at this meme.

longest-held primary fandom: Star Trek and Star Wars go back about the same distance in my life and I will luv them forever.

geekiest possession/expenditure: Ekblad jersey. Or maybe Team Finland jersey. Or the various 24-hour trips I made for bandom shows.

single geekiest activity: All… of… this…

fannish activity I've never done and would like to: I think I’ve done the ones I want to. I even did vidding, back in the day, with Windows Movie Maker and a CD of ripped Firefly episodes.

random geeky bonus: I’m probably going to buy the Geno and Pekka hockey funko pops this year. I don’t know why. I just know I’m gonna.

I'm going to log the independent bookstores I visit! Originally I was going to try to do that on Instagram but this is much better. I respect the people who use Instagram as their blogging platform, but I don't understand them.

Greedy Reads is a corner shop in Fells Point, Baltimore. It's on Aliceanna Street, which also has a comic book shop, a knitting store, and a very good little extremely hipster coffee shop. I could live there and never leave that street.

The books pulled out for particular display at Greedy Reads were about 50% ones I had recently read and enjoyed, or ones on my to-read list, and about 80% of the other 50% looked amazing, so clearly I am simpatico in some way with the owner. She wasn't there today, her sister was running the store, so also clearly I have to keep going back until I can meet her and become book-friends with her. But not in a creepy way.

I bought: The Mirror Thief by Martin Seay.

At the comic store I got the first issue of DIE, Kieron Gillen's new thing. I tried to get the trade of Eternity Girl, from Gerard Way's little comic pop-up for DC, but they didn't have it.

At the hipster coffee shop I had two excellent doughnuts and a very disappointing cappuccino.