Saudade de Mim

Title/Link: The Perfect Soufflé
Fandom: Hey Arnold!
Character(s): Helga Pataki, Phoebe Heyerdahl
ladiesbingo prompt: wabi/sabi
genprompt_bingo prompt: cooking
Rating: G
Summary: After a big pre-holiday move, Phoebe helps Helga unpack.

Go me!

Title/Link: Partners
Fandom: Hey Arnold!
Character(s): Phoebe Heyerdahl, Helga Pataki
Rated: G
halfamoon prompt: the explorer
ladiesbingo prompt: journalist/chronicler
Summary: When Phoebe and Helga decided to collaborate and pool both their talents, they were unstoppable.

Title/Link: Time Heals
Fandom: Quantum Leap
Character(s): Donna Elesee, Original Female Character
Rating: G
halfamoon prompt: the scholar
ladiesbingo prompt: midnight
genprompt_bingo prompt: eclipses and other astronomical events
Summary: The loneliness and unhappiness she'd felt from his sudden, never-explained leaving had finally dissipated. She only pitied him; he'd missed out on watching his bright daughter grow up to be a brilliant young woman.

It's a tiny ficlet of 250 words so unfortunately not enough to fulfill a prompt on either of my bingo cards. I'll be posting it tomorrow for halfamoon.

Challenge #14

In your own space, create a promo and/or rec list for someone new to a fandom. Leave a comment in this post saying you did it and include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so.

Continuing the theme from Day 13, Shakespeare! And by the way, socialshakespeare, which I recced yesterday just posted their sign-up for the next play they're reading Antony and Cleopatra, for those who might be interested in getting involved.

For those of you who appreciate The Bard of Avon and would like to get back into reading his plays and/or watching performances of them, or dive deeper in, I've got sources of all kinds!

Folger Shakespeare Library, of course, where you can download all of his works for free.

Links to Video Performances!
YouTube Shakespeare Network

Twelfth Night: 2025 Shakespeare in the Park production starring Lupita Nyong'o and her brother Junior playing the twins Viola and Sebastian. You need a PBS sign-in to watch online, but this is a particularly great production of this play and well worth it. Sandra Oh plays Olivia, Peter Dinklage plays Malvolio.

Fandom!
Here is a link to all posts in my #shakespeare tag on Tumblr, which includes all kinds of goodies, including: the usual fandom works (art, mood boards, gifsets, etc. for different plays); reprints of his sonnets; links where you can watch recorded performances of various plays; descriptions of performances that people have seen; descriptions from teachers of their students' class projects; fantastic meta on the various plays, including short clever posts, and even shit-posts that manage to speak volumes.

Some excellent recent posts include:

Meta: The Role of the Plague in Romeo and Juliet

Meta: Macbeth and Parental Grief

Student Projects: some highlights from my students’ romeo and juliet modern interpretation projects

Excerpt from Professor David Daiches' A Critical History of English Literature, Vol. 1: this is a screenshot with image ID by me. A fantastic excerpt on Hamlet and Othello, and moral outrage.

So much good stuff to explore!

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Day 13

Challenge #12

Make an appreciation post to those who enhance your fandom life. Appreciate them in bullet points, prose, poetry, a moodboard, a song... whatever moves you!

Thank you to all of fandom. The creators, the cheerleaders, all the mods of all the communities. You're all amazing.



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Challenge #10: Big Mood (Board)

CHOOSE SOMETHING YOU LOVE AND CREATE A MINI MOOD COLLECTION OF THREE (or more) ITEMS THAT EVOKE YOUR FEELINGS ABOUT IT. You don’t have to limit yourself to visual media, or collect the items into a special format like a square (though you can if you’d like).

I'm not exactly a visual person, so the mood board is kind of out, lol. I went with music instead.

Anyone who has ever watched Hey Arnold! knows that when it comes to music for it, it's all about the jazz. So here are some tunes!

(1) Jordu by Irving "Duke" Jordan

Here is the version by Clifford Brown and Max Roach. This upbeat song, or at least parts of it, could definitely have been background music for an episode.

(2) On Green Dolphin Street

This beautiful, bittersweet song, written by Bronisław Kaper, was actually the soundtrack of the 1947 historical drama/disaster film Green Dolphin Street (there's a ton of drama in this, but it actually has a happyish ending), and although the movie soundtrack is performed in a more straightforward orchestral classical style the song became a jazz standard. There are many great versions of the song, but I like this one a lot. Though there is lots of truly laugh-out-loud humor in Hey Arnold!, there are also many poignant and some truly heart-breaking moments in the show, too. I think this melody captures that mix very well.

(3) L'il' Darlin' by Neal Hefti

A definite choice for adult Helga and Arnold.

The Count Basie Orchestra recorded and performed this song as an instrumental, which you can listen to here. It's a gorgeous tune and arrangement. And so sexy for our favorite OTP.

John Hendrix later wrote lyrics to the song, and his jazz vocalese trio Lambert, Hendricks, and Ross recorded and performed the sung version with Count Basie. You can listen to their version here. The lyrics are as perfect as the tune (of course Arnold is the kind of man who likes to stay home in the evening, if he's with Helga), and Annie Ross's solo in the middle is *chef's kiss*.

And while that trio was terrific, I also want to link this performance of the song by the Seattle Academy Onions, a terrific high school jazz choir. This performance is from over a decade ago, but it's a fantastic arrangement of the song and really worth listening to, especially if you like jazz choirs and vocal ensemble music generally.

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Challenge #8

Talk about your creative process.

Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it.

lol, I don't exactly have a process. Sometimes I've tried the outline method for creating a story, and sometimes that even works. A lot of times it doesn't. Other times something sparks an idea and I'm able to just start writing.

A large part of the time I'm wracking my brain over what I'm going to write for the many bingo card prompts I've collected.

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Challenge #6

Top 10 Challenge. Post your answer to today’s challenge in your own space and leave a comment in this post saying you did it.

Include a link to your post if you feel comfortable doing so. Also, feel free to entice engagement by giving us a preview of what your post covers.

My top 10 film noirs!

(10) The Big Sleep (1946 original)

(9) The Maltese Falcon

(8) Diabolique (original 1955)

(7) M (original 1931)

(6) Key Largo

(5) Laura

(4) Shadow of a Doubt

(3) The Third Man

(2) Sunset Boulevard

(1) Double Indemnity

I was originally writing commentary for each, then I lost the post/it got overwritten and I couldn't piece it back together. So I just did the list, lol.

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Challenge #4: Rec The Contents Of Your Last Page

Any website that you like, be it fanfiction, art, social media, or something a bit more eccentric!

I'm going to add my voice to the Tumblr discussion. I've been on there since like 2013 or 2014, and I'm still there. Yeah, sometimes it's a hot mess, but blocking is easy and I've learned to curate my experience there and avoid the drama. I follow a lot of photographers/curators of photographs there, and they share gorgeous works that they or other people have created. I also still love the fandom gif and photo sets people put together (in particular, there have been a lot of terrific Star Trek:TOS sets lately), I love the cat posts of course, and so much terrific fandom meta and analysis of literature and media comes across my dashboard all the time, especially Shakespeare - there are a bunch of Shakespeare nerds on the site, and a mutual there is the one who organized the Shakespeare summer read that I've been participating in for a few years now. I also love how every year everyone celebrates the Ides of March. Artwork of the stabbing scene from Julius Caesar starts circulating a few days before, as well as pictures of Miette the cat with a knife in her mouth.

And who could forget the April Fool's Day Boop Fest? The Boop Button was an opt-in feature, so if people didn't want to participate they didn't have to, and it was just there for the one day. If you opted in, people could boop you. There was a boop-o-meter that showed how many boops you'd received and how many people you'd booped (with a little design of a cat). Whenever you hit the boop button on someone else's page to boop them, you'd see a cat's paw reach out and boop the screen. You could receive badges once you hit different numbers of boops (the badges all had a cat's paw in them). It was hilarious and a lot of fun.

I'll probably be on the site until the day it goes down in flames, lol.

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