Bad, depressing stuff out of the way first:

I was going to make a New Year's post but I've been to preoccupied this week with all the bad things happening in the world and Star Wars fandom basically imploding in on itself. The latter was bad enough I changed my usernames on twitter, instagram, and pillowfort in order to distance myself from the property and spent part of yesterday running blockchains. Yet another reminder how the mainstreaming of fandom brings a lot of bad with the fringe benefits. Suffice to say all the stress has zapped all my productivity and creativity for the past three weeks and I'm only just now managing to claw my way back. So watch this space because hopefully I'll be in a much better headspace and talk about and create things for stuff I'm actually enjoying.

Onto the fun stuff:

People really seem to like The Witcher! I'm only a little ways into Sword of Destiny, which is the second of the two short story collections the first season is based off of. My plan is to finish all the books and then dig into the show, but I'm getting through them at a slower pace than I would like (partly because I'm alternating with the His Dark Materials books) so if I get really impatient I may start the show after I finish this book. But considering we aren't going to get a second season for at least another year (ditto for His Dark Materials) it might be better if I just stick to my guns and be all caught up in the order I want to consume them for the next go around.

Speaking of the hot new property, I watched the first episode of the BBC/Netflix's new version of Dracula created by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss and... I honestly have no idea how I feel about it? It was easily one of the most bizarre viewing experiences of my entire life, and there's still two more episodes for me to watch. Like, I definitely didn't hate it? But I don't know if I'd go so far as to say I like it? All I know is that the opening credits look like a pretty blatant ripoff of Hannibal's and it's honestly kind of funny.

I haven't watched the Doctor Who premiere yet because tomorrow (or I guess today since I'm writing this post at 3:30 AM) I'm going to go see the first two episodes together as a complete serial in a movie theater! I'm really excited, and I hope it's worth it since it's going to take me an hour drive to get to the AMC theater where I bought my ticket. I've already been spoiled for one major element because Doctor Who social media is relentless even with muting and blacklisting, but I don't know the context so I'm interested to see how this all unfolds.

I'm also making a concentrated effort to get back into watching anime. I restarted Golden Kamuy from the beginning because I originally took a stab at it all the way back in 2018, and I absolutely adore it. If all goes according to plan I'll be done with season 1 tomorrow night!

Basically, a lot of things in the world and in fandom suck right now (and, to be honest, 2019 was pretty terrible for fandom in general) so in 2020 I'm going to channel as much energy into creating and positive fandom experiences as I can.

The title of this post would probably look better without the Oxford comma, but I'm keeping it in on principle.

I started the Third Doctor's final serial, Planet of the Spiders, during lunch today and I wasn't expecting the Jo Grant scene and it kind of knocked me flat even though she didn't actually appear. I know that, with a couple of exceptions, UNIT largely becomes a non-presence in the series after the Third Doctor regenerates so I'm really glad they seem to be honoring this part of the show's history (except for Liz Shaw... and the Master for obvious reasons.) One of the handful of new fics I was planning to write during NaNo was a Second Doctor-centric Christmas fic where he, Jamie, and Zoe find a way to visit Victoria for the Holiday (with some not-so-subtle Jamie/Victoria content) but now I kind of want to write a Christmas fic for Three's ensemble as well. It wouldn't be that hard logistically and it would help fill the Doctor Who void since I think if we do get a special this year it'll be another New Year's one. Which is... fine. But I really want to see Jodie Whittaker in character wearing a Santa hat.

As far as NaNo itself goes, I'm using it to finish incomplete works from the 2010s so I can start off 2020 with a clean slate, but so far I'm mostly beefing it because I spent last week finishing up some Fictober overrun and recovering from one of the worst work weeks I've ever had. I have a couple of mostly-finished works that I'm hopeful I can polish off today and get posted just to give myself a shot in the arm, and in the end it's not a huge deal since I'm not officially signed up with NaNo or the mini version. But hitting my (revised) Fictober goal of 13 fills really felt good and I'd like to keep that momentum going.

The other project I have going is Buffyverse Bingo, which I've started two fills on... only they're not on the same line. However, they both fall on lines that contain the free space, so I just have to choose which line I want to do and stick with it. One of them is a Willow/Tara fic that I've very excited about, especially since I haven't written a ton of F/F fic, and the other is a Xander/Oz fic that's a homage of sorts to a fic I really liked as a teenager... when I definitely wasn't gay nope I just read it for the art. A challenge I've run into that I wasn't really expecting was dealing with the "Buffyspeak" of it all, especially with Xander (who has a sizable speaking role in the Willow/Tara fic as well). I rewatched a handful of season 3 episodes last week which definitely helped, but I think I'm just gonna have to resign myself to the fact that some of the dialogue is not gonna be up to the standard I want.

Also, speaking to that Xander/Oz fic - it made me really happy that the author chose to archive and preserve their old writing from *checks notes* 1999 so that it was still accessible for fans like me. It motivated me to archive my own, very shitty fanfic that I wrote when I was a teenager on a dedicated AO3 account. One in particular I got very emotional about because I assumed it was gone forever since I wrote it exclusively for a forum that later banned me (and no longer exists) and never posted it to Fanfiction.Net... but it turns out I did mirror it on an old, forgotten deviantART account. Like, it's still very bad in that crappy OC, vaguely self-insert kind of way. But I remember working very, very hard on it at the time so it's nice to be able to have something to show for it.

As an aside, I've been tempted to start my free trial of Apple TV+ so I can binge Dickinson, but I've been holding off because Disney+ debuts tomorrow and I'm already watching too much TV. Once I finished the Third Doctor's run tonight, I'll also be putting Classic Doctor Who on hold for a while - theoretically until after season 12 ends if it's gonna come back in "very early 2020" as has been reported, but I may tweak those plans if that's changed. I'm looking forward to the premiere of The Mandalorian as much as I really can be, since the trailers don't really give away much for what the show is actually about. His Dark Materials premiered last week, but I'm still only halfway through reading The Subtle Knife, so I'm probably gonna hold off watching it until I'm at least finished with The Amber Spyglass. I fear I'm gonna run into the same issue with The Witcher, but I do want to make a concentrated effort to give these books their due rather than simply diving right into the show. And it's not like there isn't gonna be a huge gap between seasons I'll have time to get caught up during.

So much to do, so much to read, so much to write. Thank god Buffyverse Bingo has an Amnesty period in December.