Once upon a time, mander3_swish asked me if I wanted to write a QAF fic to raise money for the Ali Forney Center for LGBT homeless youth, and I said DUH OF COURSE HOW CAN YOU EVEN ASK?

Then she said maybe742 would be raffling off a custom QAF video and reeface a Brian/Justin doodle, and I thought, HAS EVER A FANGIRL BEEN SO HONORED TO BE INCLUDED IN THAT COMPANY?

So you should totally go read about it here here here and then see how many pennies or other currencies you can find in your sofa cushions and the pockets of last summer's sexiest jeans, and then donate them and maybe I will write a fic to your prompt, or you'll get a nice video or doodle, and the homeless queer childrens will not be cold and alone this winter, amen.

Did I mention you should read more here?

Love always,

Xie

Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto To Officiate Mass Wedding At Gay Pride

Now that sufficient time has passed, and older social networks are seeing their once great services lag behind the new startups, the desire to reboot is strong. But given that services like MySpace and Bebo are trying their hardest, and maybe not doing so well, why inject all this effort?

It seems that LiveJournal’s current 60 million users are happy to frequent the service as it is. Pushing hard to bring an older service up to speed may just alienate fans, and be ultimately destructive to the brand you’re trying to save.

Read the rest...

Whedon advises getting the fun stuff done first. “Some people will disagree, but for me if I’ve written a meaty, delightful, wonderful bunch of scenes and now I have to do the hard, connective, dog’s body work of writing, when I finish the dog’s body work, I’ll have a screenplay that I already love. I used to write chronologically when I started, from beginning to end. Eventually I went, That’s absurd; my heart is in this one scene, therefore I must follow it. Obviously, if you know you have a bunch of stuff to do, I have to lay out this, all this dull stuff, and I feel very uncreative but the clock is ticking. Then you do that and you choose to do that. But I always believe in just have as much fun as you can so that when you’re in the part that you hate there’s a light at the end of the tunnel, that you’re close to finished.”

The second direction taken by fans writing post-513 fiction is more consistent with canon but still pushes the characters toward romantic closure. This variation, exemplified by Xie's Only Time (2007) series, gets the couple back together, but only through a lengthy and complicated process of secret visits, sex, hesitation, and angst that follows the patterns of the various breakups and reunification of the couple in the actual series. These fictions generally end in the same place as the other variation—with Brian and Justin together—but they usually do so with greater complications and with a cynical, tongue-in-cheek tone consistent with the characters in the series, rather than the romantic comedy tone that characterizes the former version.

[...]

As a result of the series' refusal of a clear resolution, a fan fiction with any variation of an ending for the couple that moves toward closure would be inconsistent with the canon's own ending. How canonical or legitimate it is to reunite the couple is beside the point. Instead, what must be examined is how closure is achieved, and the extent to which the relationship is restored by either a traditional heteronormative wedding or by the much more complicated and volatile variation evidenced in series like Xie's.