(no subject)

[thedarlingone]

memed from thisbluespirit I have made a list of 50 foundational media things of mine... it's quite a mixed bag and I don't know that I'd say I recommend all of them at this remove but they all certainly left a mark on me. I have a massive sinus headache due to changing weather so I'm sure there are a lot of things I've forgotten all about. Also most of them really ought to be "this entire series or this author's entire oeuvre" but we make do. Anyway consider letting me know which ones you've experienced or whatever. (It's got everything from music to video games as well as the expected books and movies so who knows.)

Comments

[bookblather]

Almost half! Might be completely half, I can't remember if I ever read The Swiss Family Robinson or just encountered it via Ursula Vernon. Granted, a good chunk of them I encountered THROUGH you so there's that.

[thedarlingone]

I have infected you with AWESOME. XD

[fred_mouse]

31! There were a couple I didn't tick (Mass Effect) for one because while I'd heard of it, I knew nothing about it other than 'that's a computer game, right?'

And there were some that I was pleasantly surprised at, although at this point the only one I can think of was one of the musicians (if Gordon Lightfoot was there it was them).

[thedarlingone]

Gordon Lightfoot was not on there, but Stan Rogers was! Different sometimes-morose Canadian folk singer whose most famous song is about a shipwreck on the Great Lakes -- it's just a cheerful song about a shipwreck. XD

Mass Effect is a series of video games! (I do play them on computer but I feel like "computer game" is to be contradistinguished from a game also available on console? Which they are.) The ones I've played are a trilogy that tells a single story, an epic nearish-future space opera spanning about 260 hours per playthrough if I do everything thoroughly.

There's also a... another game, which I haven't played, Mass Effect: Andromeda. Spinoff sounds odd because to my ear it implies some change in genre or format rather than just "here's a similar story in a related setting" (maybe I'm too picky there), but it's not a sequel because Mass Effect 3 famously fucked up their ending so badly that they had to take the fourth game to another galaxy and leave the Milky Way before the events of the ME3 ending to avoid dealing with continuity from it. (That was not the official reason, but when a company has to release a canon story patch for the ending of their own game based on player backlash, and ending changes are still one of the most popular categories of story mod, it's not surprising they'd be quite concerned with not bringing that controversy into the next game.)

[fred_mouse]

D'oh, Stan Rogers, who I would have discovered about the same time as Gordon Lightfoot, possibly from the same person. Did you see the Yuletide story about "Barrett's Privateers"?

Thank you for the info on Mass Effect. That bit about the ending of the third one is fascinating, and concerning.

[pedanther]

Approximately half (I'd ticked 26 out of 50 at the point that I hit the "show results" button, but I also kept changing my mind as I went through the list about the best way to interpret the stipulation 'familiar with'...)

[thedarlingone]

Yeah, the list-making site demands some question of that format, expecting it to be a list on a single category like books or movies, and I couldn't think how else to cover all the sorts of media I mishmashed in here. (Especially since I included a couple of video games, and relatively nonlinear ones at that.)

[thisbluespirit]

17/50, which is pretty impressive considering our usual tendency to only meet in very specific fictional places and then diverge again wildly in interesting ways, often even inside those spaces. <3

*hugs*

[thedarlingone]

That is impressive, especially given how many things I was also picking from the middles of serieses and stuff!

[sovay]

I have made a list of 50 foundational media things of mine... it's quite a mixed bag and I don't know that I'd say I recommend all of them at this remove but they all certainly left a mark on me.

32 of 50 and I should like you to tell me about Howard Pearse's Fog Horns, please.

[thedarlingone]

I am having a sinus headache due to weather system which is preventing me from being able to think how to explain Howard Pease (it is Pease like pease porridge hot, not Pearse) but I am hoping to come back and talk about it when I can. I credit him largely for why I kept my head during the rightward tsunami of opinion after 9/11/01 and through the years following, and I picked "Fog Horns" to represent his oeuvre partly because it's the one I think I was reading on 9/11 which materially shaped my initial reaction.

(I really do not know how he got onto the lists of approved YA authors for right-wing youth that guided my teenage reading. A marker of how drastically the Overton window has shifted from the '90s, maybe. He certainly had the 1930s boys' adventure thing down, and his contempt for the viewpoint of "tender-minded old women" -- to use his own words -- did fairly permanent things to the direction of the Newbery Medals through the midcentury, which puts him on my shortlist of Problematic Faves to consider when other people are grappling with having been formed by Harry Potter; but he was vehemently pro-union and heavily political, anti-isolationist as early as 1935, talking about the Holocaust in 1946 pretty much as soon as the news spread, even anti-gun in a tactful way. I suppose it might have been because we were much more anti-peer-pressure in those days? He's got a focus on "think for yourself and question propaganda" that... in retrospect, almost reminds me of DWJ, now I think of it. The sort of, oh wow have I ever been a young idiot, time to grow up and look unpleasant reality in the eye, take on the YA narrative of what becoming an adult means.)

Anyway I have put a lot of words here but I don't know if any of them make sense. Also none of them are about "Fog Horns" specifically. I'm going to try to nap. Hopefully I can be more coherent later.