#jaelijn talks

[jaelijn]

I've been... busy elsewhere, but I guess a quick update for tumblr purposes:

The Untitled PGP Longfic is very near first draft completion. I thought maybe I could get the first bits out by PD's birthday, but it's getting a little tight due to unforeseen circumstances. I might finish the writing, but I can't promise the editing will be far enough along to start posting. Maybe it'll be here by July 2nd, instead. (Remember why that date is of interest?)

I really, really want to update the fandom wanted list. I have a fairly clear sense now of what zines I am missing that I wish I had, but again... no time.

I have been reminded that I set up a tumblr B7 community that... nothing ever really happened with. But I guess here's the invite link if you want to join and maybe do something there. https://www.tumblr.com/join/Hj3qMngv

The @rebelsandfools discord is still around, if you prefer that, though things have been pretty quiet there, too.

If tumblr dies, I guess I'll be on dreamwidth first and foremost for the longform posts and the fan-run space. I have a pillowfort as a fallback, but never really did anything with it. But in case this place should vanish, I might give it more effort. The username is the same everywhere.

[rebelsandfools]

Rebels and Fools: Issue 7

It's time for the grand finale - the final, sparkling new issue of our digital Blake’s 7 fanzine, Rebels and Fools, has arrived!

Seven issues - what a fantastic achievement, at last complete. If you're new, you now have the full set of R&F issues at your fingertips - if you've been here forever, here's the final piece for your collection.

One last time a massive THANK YOU again to all contributors, without whom this zine wouldn’t exist. As our readers, please be vocal in your appreciation, in public or in private. You will find ways to contact the individual contributors in the zine, but I’m also always happy to take messages on this blog (ask box!), and appreciation posted into #rebelsandfools is most welcome and will be reblogged here (unless Tumblr eats the tagged posts because, well, Tumblr). And if you happen to be in the mood for a review - there is still space on R&F’s fanlore page!

Click here to get to the pdf download of the zine, or find the link for copy-pasting under this issue’s cover image by yours truly the editor, @jaelijn.

Here is the link to the zine again, and for copy-pasting: 

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/l889fts4u35tqfm0l4pcd/Rebels-and-Fools-Issue-7.pdf?rlkey=85bggvwjr1ikf5x90k38tnl5p&dl=0

Enjoy the zine!

Sharing and Promotion: You are absolutely encouraged to talk about and promote the zine to Blake’s 7 fans anywhere and everywhere! If you wish to publicly share the zine off Tumblr, please link to the original of this Tumblr post, not the direct Dropbox link. I will be maintaining the link on here, but cannot guarantee that the download link won’t change over time.

One caveat on promotion: you cannot use the cover image or any content that is not your own in full or in part for the promotion of the zine (or any other purpose, really) without the explicit permission of the editor (me) and the creator of the content in question - if you plan a bigger piece on/promotion of R&F, contact the editor. You are not permitted to profit financially from this zine in any way, including but not limited to promotion and/or sharing of the zine.

Contributors: You are absolutely allowed to post your own work elsewhere, as long as you don’t submit it to another zine. I would, however, ask you to wait just one little week until August 30th 2023 before doing so, just so people have time to appreciate the zine in full first, and that you mention the zine and link back to this post when you do. There is also an AO3 collection, if you want to add your works there. For now, you can absolutely point people to the full zine and highlight where to find your content, if you want. Please do not use any submissions to the zine to make financial profit. And finally: thank you again for your wonderful submissions!

[jaelijn]

It's my 11 year anniversary on Tumblr 🥳

So this was yesterday apparently. I've more or less unintentionally gone full hiatus at the moment, with progress on the Untitled Longfic also stalled due to RL, but I promised myself I would finish it before the year is out, so we'll see how that goes!

[jaelijn]

Thought I had a good buffer on the queue with the slower posting but I Did Not. So it's practically empty again. Will fill it up again when I feel like it.

[rebelsandfools]

Rebels and Fools: Issue 4

It’s here! It’s live! It’s alive!

Wait, what?

It’s time for a neatly packaged bundle of sparkling, brand new Blake’s 7 fanworks! Rebels and Fools: Issue 4 is ready for your viewing/reading pleasure!

Once more a massive THANK YOU again to all contributors, without whom this zine wouldn’t exist. As our readers, please be vocal in your appreciation, in public or in private. You will find ways to contact the individual contributors in the zine, but I’m also always happy to take messages on this blog (ask box!), and appreciation posted into #rebelsandfools is most welcome and will be reblogged here (unless Tumblr eats the tagged posts because, well, Tumblr). And if you happen to be in the mood for a review - there is still space on R&F’s fanlore page!

Click here to get to the pdf download of the zine, or find the link for copy-pasting under this issue’s cover image of the ever lovely dangerous Servalan drawn by @jaelijn.

Here is the link to the zine again, and for copy-pasting: https://www.dropbox.com/s/4lblz9i5ui3pz47/Rebels%20and%20Fools%20-%20Issue%204.pdf?dl=0

Enjoy the zine!

Sharing and Promotion: You are absolutely encouraged to talk about and promote the zine to Blake’s 7 fans anywhere and everywhere! If you wish to publicly share the zine off tumblr, please link to the original of this tumblr post, not the direct dropbox link. I will be maintaining the link on here, but cannot guarantee that the download link won’t change over time.

One caveat on promotion: you cannot use the cover image or any content that is not your own in full or in part for the promotion of the zine (or any other purpose, really) without the explicit permission of the editor (me) and the creator of the content in question - if you plan a bigger piece on / promotion of R&F, contact the editor. You are not permitted to profit financially from this zine in any way, including but not limited to promotion and/or sharing of the zine.

Contributors: You are absolutely allowed to post your own work elsewhere, as long as you don’t submit it to another zine. I would, however, ask you to wait just one little week until August 21st 2020 before doing so, just so people have time to appreciate the zine in full first, and that you mention the zine and link back to this post when you do. There is also an AO3 collection, if you want to add your works there. For now, you can absolutely point people to the full zine and highlight where to find your content, if you want. Please do not use any submissions to the zine to make financial profit. And finally: thank you again for your wonderful submissions!

[rebelsandfools]

This is a general reference post for the ongoing work on a digital Blake’s 7 fanzine (issue #1?)!

This is completely fanmade, for fun and not for profit. Once the zine issue is done, it will be a full-colour pdf free to download (and home-print for personal use, if so inclined).

Project tag (tracked): #rebelsandfools

I’m @castielslight / Jaelijn.

GETTING IN TOUCH:

For now, use tumblr ask or submit to get in touch. If needed (and it probably will be for submission), I will set up an email address specifically for zine business.

And please do get in touch! I want this project to be as collaborative as we can possibly make it.

(I try to answer queries as quickly as I’m able. Bear in mind that my “battery” sometimes runs low.)

A note on promotion: If you want to promote the zine on tumblr, just reblog any posts - this is a good one for it! If you want to promote the zine on other sides, please contact me, the editor, first. I will let you know how to go about it.

WORKING SCHEDULE:

Ambitious / ideal deadline for content submissions: end of July 2017.

Absolute deadline for content submission: end of August 2017.

This gives you 5 months. You can submit at any time before then.

This schedule is to allow me to finalise editing in the course of August and get the zine out before my RL gets chaotic in September and I have no idea when the editing might be done after that.

If this turns out to be completely undoable, we can talk about pushing the deadline back to October, and hope that I might have time to get the editing done by the New Year.

WHAT CAN I SUBMIT?

Short answer: any self-created B7 content that fits into a static format. I want this to be a zine for which everyone can find *something* to contribute.

Long answer:

art, fic, meta, filk, poetry, crafts, recipes, fic recs, zine recs, character-themed song rec lists, etc etc etc (whatever else you can think of!)

no gifs (they move and therefore can’t be printed), videos (they also move), or stand-alone screencaps (we don’t want to invite copyright issues beyond the usual for fanworks; elaborate edits, photomanips and caps as meta evidence are all fine)

all work should be new for the zine (i.e. not previously published).

theme-wise, I would exclude nothing, but ask that visual submissions be SFW (some light nudity etc is fine, but let’s avoid the very explicit things)

there will be a separate post with more specific rules for wordcounts, file size etc and for what I need from artists and writers in terms of “meta data” - e.g. summaries, titles, ratings, warnings…

as this is a digital zine, I see no reason why we should limit ourselves in numbers of submissions, but if we get a lot of material, there might be an issue #2 (or #3…)

OTHER THINGS

You’ll see that I have titled this project “Rebels and Fools”, which is the title I picked for my B7 livestreaming. This does not have to be the title of the zine unless people like it; I think of it primarily as the name of the “publishing house”. Feel free to suggest a title for the zine!

If people would like a specific theme or themes for the zine or for elements of it (such as optional themes for art and fic), I’m happy to take suggestions!

If you want to collaborate on fic and art, or write a joined meta, it is up to you to organise it in a way that it’ll be ready by the deadline. I’m happy to fascilitate via this blog - i.e. if you’re an artist looking for someone to fic your art, I can give a shoutout etc.

I’m absolutely serious about the ficrecs. This should be something everyone can contribute a favourite to, and we’d end up with a whole list of great B7 fic to explore after we’ve read through our own zine! I imagine this to be quite simple in format, so it doesn‘t require reviewing skills (though if you want to submit a page length fic review too, knock yourself out!). Details HERE.

Remember to refer to the detail post (HERE) re: specifics for different types of submission.

If you have your own beta, please please use them. Or if someone is willing to offer proofreading services for this zine specifically, please let me know. I will casually proofread for spelling and grammar as I edit, but I won’t have the time to give a detailed proofread to every submission.

Want to help with editing / handling submissions / answering questions? Let me know. This is a sideblog, so I can add multiple users to it.

[jaelijn]

I’ve yet to find a gif(set) of Percy lying awake and playing with The List from the 4-6 episode set of TLOVM, but that scene is important to me For Reasons, so if anyone sees/makes one, feel free to point me that way.

[jaelijn]

We don’t talk enough about the fact that of all the characters, Vila was the only one who really had a chance to leave and choose to stay anyway.

[jaelijn]

Look what I found in a second hand bookstore!!!

I’m still sniggering about this nearly an hour after I picked the book up. XD

For context: https://fanlore.org/wiki/Kill_the_Dead

[jaelijn]

I vaguely feel that I should be writing meta about Vila but I’ve always felt that there is nothing I can add to the conversation that hasn’t been said time and time again. But after having looked at the fanlore page, I feel that maybe I talk too little about Vila.

[jaelijn]

The worst thing about the “Intergalactic Space Crusaders” song is that if Blake had actually said that to Avon on GP, Avon wouldn’t have shot him!!!

[jaelijn]

So I was making this gif for the bottom right corner on my theme, and...

Avon is typing with his middle finger.

[jaelijn]

I think this is the first time I’m gif-ing the beginning of “Rumours” and seeing that frame by frame is surprisingly painful.

Avon does look terrible.

[jaelijn]

The new Red Dwarf series is getting better with every episode, to be honest.

[jaelijn]

Thoughts on The Thing in the OFMD finale under the cut because I need to articulate this somewhere and I haven't seen anything similar expressed, though at this point I'm not going into the tags anymore. Spoilers obviously.

And because Tumblr no longer lets you effectively keep things out of the tags/search even though I would rather no one but my followers saw this: If you hated the finale, move on. This post is not for you.

I feel like people are forgetting that this isn't primarily an escapist realistically historically pirate show, it's a queer narrative.

And Izzy's queer storyline isn't and has never been "discover sexuality, achieve key to self and life happily ever after" (that's Ed's and Stede's), it's "it's never too late". It's never too late to experience queer joy. Even if you're 95 and one foot in the grave, you can still discover the queer community. Even if you spent your whole life hiding it so far, you can still have it now. Even if you die of AIDS tomorrow you can still go to pride today. Even if some bastard might gun you down tomorrow for no fucking reason other than hating queer folks, you can still have this: queer joy and queer community. It is never too late for queer joy.

And the response to one of our own dying isn't to crawl into a hole and be afraid. It's to be even more aggressivley and life-affirmingly queer. It's new starts and weddings and parties. It's a fuck you to every time one of our own dies brutally. When we lose people of our own, the best thing we can do is to celebrate life. Queer life and queer joy and the queer community. This is what queer pride IS.

Does it suck when someone dies? Yes! Yes! It sucks majorly. But it's a part and a reality of queer lifes. Sometimes one of us dies way before their time. Most of the time it's unfair. Sometimes one of us only finds us when it's already late. Sometimes we can't have a full and happy queer life. It sucks. It's tragic. But it's a part of the story that needs to be told, because the worst thing we can do is pretend tragedy doesn't exist in queerness, to erase the tragedy from memory and thought and with it the people we owe most to remember because they are no longer with us. And while we need queer joy, we also need tragedy: If only to remind us to be even louder, even prouder, even queerer! And a show where there is queer characters who continue that queer joy is a place to tell this story - this is not a show where one queer death erases all queerness from the narrative, this is a show where EVERYTHING is queer.

And narratively: I knew Izzy was dead from the moment of the Pinocchio joke. The villain wasn't going to let him get away; it was happening. (Incidentally, it is foreshadowed exactly like Lucius's 'death' was: a life-threatening loss of limb early in the series.). But while Lucius's 'death' was sharp and brutal and unwarranted and unmourned AND caused by one of our own, Izzy's death doesn't come before Izzy can complete his arc, it comes at its culmination and it comes by a villain. It's not supposed to be something to be celebrated, of course not - it's death! It's tragic! But Izzy dies after having let go of his own toxicity, after having experienced the most happiness of his life and while being confident that the people he loves are safe. He can let them go on without him. The fact that it is heartwrenching is the point, but it's in no shape or form a death that is Bad Writing (tm).

And it's cathartic. That's what death is supposed to be. That the crew are able to move on isn't that they don't care - it's that Izzy left them with the legacy of celebrating their community ESPECIALLY WHEN they might die the next day.

I see a lot of people saying that the other characters don't seem to care. I don't understand what show those people have watched. I can only assume they have their heads so far up their arses in the generalised "MCD is Evil" that they can't accept that sometimes a character death is narrative catharsis and that that rage completely blinds them to subtle emotion (and also not subtle emotions: This is Ed "hide in his cabin to have a cry" Teach openly sobbing on the deck of the ship for the love of everything!). They obviously haven't watched anyone's face in the scenes of Izzy dying - nor during the funeral either:

Anyway - yes, the death hurts. It's supposed to hurt. But it makes narrative sense, it concludes Izzy's arc logically and powerfully and his legacy is, to me, a very very important queer story.

I, too, hope to never have a queer friend die, but if it happens, I hope that I'll have the strength to honour their death and their life by LIVING more proudly, more queerly in their memory, not by denying that they have died. Or by denying that I, too, might die at any time.

[jaelijn]

Fitted masks are here!

They have adjustable straps, a nose-wire and three layers, the inner two of which are cotton, so I can finally in good faith recommend them. They also come in two sizes!

You can find them as the option “fitted 3-layer” when you select any mask.

Many B7 designs other than the ones above plus two new pattern ones for all Gishers!

Find them here: https://www.redbubble.com/people/jaelijn/shop