rossetti

Of course it makes me sad that Panic(!)-that-was won't tour again, won't provide me the pleasure and the experiences I've enjoyed in the past. I think it's disingenuous for a band to plan and announce a tour then go on tour with a different lineup, but I think the genesis of that outcome is understandable and reasonable. Looking back through all their Twitters, through their press appearances (I'm not the only one who did that yesterday, right?), it's pretty clear this has been in the works since at least Africa, and the three month time lag has been for the grind to catch up with their decision.

As much as yesterday felt scrambled and crazy and heartbreaking, we essentially had statements from both sides of the band within hours. The contracts and royalties and legal have caught up with them, now they can move forward in honesty. Brendon and Spencer alone at the launch party make sense, Ryan saying he wasn't playing 8/8 makes sense. As much as it's been easy to say we wish those fools would get back into the studio and get their acts together, they couldn't, or at least they couldn't talk about it, with the split solidified but the public unaware.

This band recorded their first album over four years ago. Their success was phenomenal and overwhelming, on any scale. The split in aesthetic and direction on Pretty. Odd. took us all by surprise; this change does, too. This band has a history of jumpstarting and jumping straight into shit, of achieving huge things and churning at a breakneck speed. It's never looked seamless on the outside, how chaotic must it have been on the inside?

Ryan Ross drew me into this band. I've always been most fascinated by him, if most appreciative of Brendon's breadth of musical amazingness. Ryan Ross is the father of self-reinvention, the master of moving on, the most likely to live in the moment and conveniently forget parts of his past. There's a part of that that's a mystery to me, there's a part of that that's appealing to me. There's a part of that that's potentially problematic for a man in his position.

I think there's a general sense that Ryan and Jon will have to eat some crow now, will have to truly (finally) pay their dues. I don't think that's true, exactly. I'm not sure they care about having an audience for their music and that makes me excited for what they're going to put out. It's nice a band to know is thinking of you, yes, certainly, omfg yes, but when you think of distribution before you think of aesthetic I get worried. I like experimental music, I like progressive music, I like it when bands push themselves past comfort. You can call Ryan Ross a lot of things, I don't think comfortable is one of them.

Undoubtedly recording and touring for them will be a completely different experience, undoubtedly their audiences will be smaller and the majority of fans who fell for asymmetrical emo Ryan will move on with their lives. Jon's been recording and touring since high school, I'm not sure he ever expected (or wanted) success and attention at this level. Ryan has always seemed to be missing some element of fear, that rational fear that pushes people into wanting security and long-term plans. He's got something loose in his head, sure, but it's not the part that makes music.

My little tribute to Ryan and Jon aside, the only way I could fall asleep last night was after I listened to 3 little birds. Spencer's ability to subtly take charge of the pr / fan outreach in this band has always impressed me. With Pete and Mark Hoppus on his side, as his advisers, I'm pretty sure he's going to turn into one of the last powerhouse people of the music industry as it is, as and before it changes. He's smart and he loves Brendon's music (and Brendon) and he's approachable and he's a really damn good drummer.

This is the breakup you have with your highschool friends or your college friends, when you hit that next era of your life. It's the tenseness you have from your parents when you realize you've become a different person than they knew before you moved out, created your own life. Spencer joked about asking Ryan for guitar lessons, and it's a bittersweet joke now but it's a connection. I believe both sides of this band, I think there are reason to be excited for the future.

Title: Don't turn away
Authors: rossetti and sloganeer
Fandom: Panic at the Disco
Pairing: Brendon/Spencer
Rating: NC17
Words: 50210
Disclaimer: These characters do not belong to us.
Notes: Daily stories, in order; beware inconsistencies.

They'll probably have sex tonight.

one | two | three | four | five

I won't be on LJ much (outside of reading and deliciousing Jess's diedandreborn offerings) until after the fourth of July.

I think posts asking people to keep one apprised of goings-on are rather annoying, if one isn't willing to go out and keep oneself informed, but I would like to know if huge things happen in your lives or in fandom. I'll try to catch up with journals when I get back, I will!

This video is restricted for Canada:



So I made these for Jess. I think I narrated appropriately:

( Auto-Tune the News #4: spa regulation. serbians. sotomayor )

( Lady GaGa's newly released video for Paparazzi )

( Torchwood: Children of Earth trailer )

visually epic morning or MOAST visually epic morning?

Look, look, I know I have a thing for Spencer Smith and children that's getting a little clichéd but I can way write Spencer-as-Pete's babysitter (or "babysitter") now, right?

And is it just me or is Ryan Ross hanging with his artsy, bohemian crew (you got a crew? I got a crew, too) more and more right as Spencer is hanging out with Ryan's teenage idols? I like angst (kinda, I like existentialism and h/c and light angst), but I won't touch that with a ten foot pole.

In other news, tonight I had a plot breakthrough on a story I abandoned months ago. It was really rather exciting.

I don't live in NY anymore but this brought tears to my eyes.

Reposted here in its entirety:

The New York State Assembly just passed a bill to allow same-sex marriage.

In a sign of how opinion in Albany has shifted on the issue, several members of the Assembly who voted against the measure in 2007 voted in favor of it on Tuesday.

The final vote was 89 to 52, including the backing of five Republicans.

Supporters of the bill aggressively sought new votes, particularly from Assembly members whose districts lie within Senate districts where a senator’s vote is believed to be in play. As a matter of strategy, same-sex marriage advocates said that they hoped to use those votes as a way to leverage support from senators who are worried that supporting the measure could cost them politically.

“The margin of victory and the balance of where the people come from who voted for this is broadening,” said Daniel J. O’Donnell, a Democratic assemblyman from the Upper West Side who led the effort in the Assembly to gain support for the bill. “The state is demanding that we provide equality, and that’s the message here.”

The bill still needs to get approved by the Senate. So here's where you come in. If you live in New York State, please write your Senator (look them up here, or use this convenient email form) and tell them that you want equal rights for all New Yorkers, regardless of sexual or gender identity.

I can't promise I'll update it often, but - I'm crossetti over on Twitter.

-I want a bunch of Brendon-centric fic around the theme of SUGGESTS A GOOD TIME.

-Spencer was the first person Brendon friended on Twitter. The first person Ryan followed was Alex Greenwald. The first person Jon followed was Zack.

-Spencer assembling flatpack. GO.

-RYAN AND ERIC, STFU.

-JON WALKER, STFU.

-Zack is the best poster of rarez. Also, Zack and Spencer have some type of douchebro bond going on, I'm thinking of it as a older-younger frat brother type thing.

-Thank you, Alex Greenwald. I can now happily imagine Ryan Ross as the inspiration for Impressionistic paintings. Or, what the hell, Renaissance ones, I'm not picky.

Please tell me someone else's brain functions like this, too.

I had a huge entry written up about media I'm excited about right now but dreamwidth ate it when I had to restart Firefox. ::shakes a fist in anger:: (I do recognize this is largely my fault, btw)

Summary:

- Ashes to Ashes comes back on Friday! Thank fucking god, I need me some new Keeley Hawes.
- I'm having a Black Books and Green Wing renaissance, sparked in part by the BB fic on Yuletide. My delicious has a few of the marvelous rarities I've read lately.
- thassalia loaned me Howl's Moving Castle and Fire and Hemlock. Diana Wynn Jones has long been one of those authors I know I'll love. It's like I've been storing her in my back pocket, to break out as-needed. Boy were those books needed, let me tell you.
- Bones. <3<3<3. Bones, Bones, Bones.

Ok, this has been open most of the day, waiting for me to finish it. Bam.

I was planning on putting together a few other feeds before I posted this, but now I have no clue when I'm going to do that, so!

Google reader of all the panic (&shane&zack&blackgoldmusic) twitters.

Atom feed of the same group of twitters.

And then! Discotwits feed! If you want to view all their nonsense in LJ.

Let's see how xposting this to dwj works. Hrm.

I haven't posted to LJ since I started my dreamwidth account, but I do plan to crosspost when I have stuff to say. I don't, right now, not really. diedandreborn takes up most of my fannish energy.

Ok, how is crossposting of comms and users supposed to work? I've tried a few iterations and am failing.

ETA: Got it. What a remarkably helpful FAQ!

Update just for LJ: From what I can tell most people who want invites are getting them, but leave a note here if you're interested. I'll invite people as more roll out.

( tonight's episode. )

I think it's safe to say there are going to be spoilers under the cut and in the comments.

My Brendon/Ryan remix month is starting over at diedandreborn!

It's going to be an interesting month, I guarantee you.

Title: Ends at the Shore
Authors: rossetti and sloganeer
Fandom: Panic at the Disco
Pairing: Jon/Ryan
Rating: NC17
Words: 41470
Disclaimer: These characters do not belong to us.
Notes: If you've been following diedandreborn as we've been writing, you'll know all the bits of this story. Jon and Ryan make music and tell stories. This isn't an epic romance, it's a pieced-together story of two dudes, three albums, a handful of blowjobs, and too many pots of coffee and joints to count.

"I like the way you tell my stories."

one | two | three | four | five

---

What else does this mean? Well, it means we've started a new pairing, Brendon/Ryan. For those of you waiting for us to get to Brendon, you're in luck: six months of Bden, starting . . . two days ago.

can we get a 'ryan the conflicted grifter' au now?

it could even be romcom style, where he's in a band named conflicted grifter. or maybe that's pete's band?

whatever, gimme some ryan ross the THIEF.

I'm going to write fic based on Ryan Ross's blog entries more often if he's going to continue to post stuff that makes my heart expand in my chest.

Precious little stoners, go hiking more often. And post pictures from the beach, too, k?

thirteen ways (of looking at a blogpost)
brendon/ryan, ryan/spencer, brendon/spencer, jon/spencer, jon/ryan, brendon/jon
panic at the disco, R, ~1800 words.
thanks to Wallace Stevens, Jess and Jon Hemingway Walker.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen, or played music with the guys so we had quite a glorious reunion. Jon filled me in on snow-football in the backyard while Brendon, Spencer and I filled him in on 75 degree sun and fun in California. As of now I live in Brendon’s guest room on a very small and uncomfortable  air mattress. So does Spence but I think he has some sort of deluxe model, very nice. Right now all three of Brendon’s dogs are climbing on me and my laptop. Soon Hobo will be over for many play-dates and bbq’s.This one is called Bogart.  I’m not sure where anyone is, and they don’t answer their phones much so the dogs and I are holding down the fort today. -wsb

( He buys the air mattress at a Target somewhere between San Bernardino and Rancho Cucamonga, after Brendon texts while he's filling his gas tank. Brendon opens the door in his bathing suit, dripping wet and grinning. )

I am reading fic and watching television. I haven't sat down to do this for a while, I miss it! Fic, dinner, television, yay. I meant to catch up on my tivo but there's a special on demolition experts on and it's amaaaaaazing. I love NatGeo! Speaking of - how awesome is their rebranding? Oh, ha, I just realized the dude they're using as de facto narrator reminds me of Zack. Oh dudebros who use excessive handmotions.

This season of Burn Notice is so good.

In a meeting today a coworker made a face and talked about how she didn't understand how people got online while they were watching television and I had a flash of feeling like a crazy internet addict but, seriously? Yes, there are times I'm just online and yes, there are times I just watch television but I'm pretty comfortable with doing both at once.

I'm completely addicted to this True Lime stuff. I've been drinking it as a water additive and it gives me that perfect tang on my tongue, it keeps me drinking water and has no sugar, etc., since it's just crystallized lime. This stuff is different, I think, to the little packets you see at liquor stores, it's not intended to be a mixer-on-the-go. It really helped me burn through the cold I had last week, making endless rounds of water more appealing and having vitamin C but not crazy amounts of it. Oh, hey, they have a free sample page! Yes, please!

Can I get a hands up on the Merlinish people out there?

Let's not get too far into the concept of fannish self-identity here. I had an insomniac evening this weekend where I might have watched a few eps and read some fic and finally admitted I was a wee bit interested after the boys-with-vidcams clips. I know I've skimmed over posts on my friendslist with Merlin! type things in them but I'm also betting there are people like me who haven't fully transitioned over but have either dabbled or considered dabbling. I'm kind of fascinated.

eta: sloganeer's comment when I sent her the post: let's not dilly-dally around and just admit we like pretty boys with accents. and what's wrong with that?

If there's one song I've been playing on repeat lately - well, after this last week, that one song would be Dr. Dog's "The Rabbit, The Bat, and The Reindeer," but if you went back another week, it would be The Kings of Leon's "Use Somebody." I swear to god this song got me through Christmas, OK?

I don't know when the video came out, but I just ran across it and it's everything I could imagine:



Eta - just - where is the kings of leon fandom? Uh. Or crossovers, since intraband would be pretty all-incest-all-the-time, wouldn't it? Just - group hugs! And boys in showers!

The most recent we're so blogging inspired two reactions:

1) Ryan probably IS contemplating pet merch. He bought Hobo a doggie stocking to go with the doggie Santa outfit! Pampered and spoiling his dog is cleary his MO, and I love it. Just don't have kids yet, pls.

and

2) Aww, I had a "Street Fighting Man" phase, too! I was willing to lay down money he'd choose the Stones so my knee jerk reaction was to mock him a bit - but, seriously, hot damn, Street Fighting Man is a fucking amazing song, raw and angry and young and heady. I have really great memories of playing it during DJ sets and getting compliments from the hipsters, the drunk, and the punks alike, united in their love of this anthem. So, go you Ross.

Title: Mysteriously saved
Authors: rossetti and sloganeer
Fandom: Panic at the Disco
Pairing: Jon/Spencer
Rating: NC17
Words: 40130
Disclaimer: These characters do not belong to me.
Notes: If you've been following diedandreborn as we've been writing, you'll know all the pieces of this story. We've reordered those daily stories into what we believe is the greater narrative, which unexpectedly emerged as we wrote. We only saw the greater story because we lived inside of it, because we wrote each day's story in a document that had the rest. The individual pieces haven't been changed (except for mistakes we missed the first time) and we've added nothing extra, so this won't read as a traditional, cohesive fic. We wanted to show everyone how it could fit together.

come + save me walker

two | three | four

New favorite New Year's Eve activity?

Reading popoffacork stories as they're posted.

Well, let's be honest here, there's no way I could read all of them exactly as they're posted, there's just too many to keep up! But I was certainly opening links and reading the shorter ones and enjoying and happily eating a crumpet and contemplating how great life is --

and then MY story was posted. And it's MAGNIFICENT. I mean - I'm falling short of descriptors here because it's not just objectively a great Ryan/Spencer story, it's also chock a block full of things that make me, in particular, a very happy Rossetti. Title by Paul Simon, Responsible Spencer, Stoners at the Disco, SANDRA LEE. Manipulative-little-shit Ryan who is also insecure, anxious, determined artiste Ryan who is also making the first move Ryan.

There are way too many good lines for me to choose a favorite, but this made me choke on my crumpet: "The fact that you could make this meal out of things we can find in a truckstop is a bad sign. But I do like the tablescape."

Go readdddd: I'm On My Way, I Don't Know Where I'm Going

When will Panic at the Disco start their own pet food line? Or, oh man, start selling pet merch. They're all avowed, obvious animals lovers. Why can't I buy a Reinvent Love dog sweater?

Although, they should probably stay away from collars, yeah.

be your voice
Brendon/Ryan, Panic at the Disco
PG-13, 1208 words

"yeah that was a really tough kind of thing to figure out." -ryan "i don't know if i can do it justice. these are your words. how am i going to be your voice?" - brendon. live in denver dvd.

"i'm a stray dog sick. please let me in, please let me in." - 20 dollar nose bleed

( he texts Pete, 'u turned his voice into the bullet in the gun aimed at his head,' and goes to get a drink. )

dr dog - fate

the killers - day & age

and then cause i love it and they just got nominated three times:

the kings of leon - only by the night

if you want more dr dog, i have more dr dog. let me know and i'll link.

Jess just admin-posted this over at diedandreborn and I figure it neatly covers everything I'd say on the matter, and decided to repost (with edits) rather than craft an entirely new post:

sloganeer: This project started October 31, and it happened so fast that it seems only fitting that we would only get around to explaining it now. I was thinking about NaNoWriMo and maybe trying a daily writing exercise. Nothing too big. 30 songs, words, pairings, tropes. The list I ended up with I called 30 ways Jon Walker and Spencer Smith had sex (or almost). I was wanting to write some more canon-based Panic stories after starting out with the two AUs (and yet one of the themes was "in an AU"). I'm still so new to this fandom, it was more a chance to play and learn. But it was still only a midnight idea until I talked to rossetti . She made it a real thing, as well as a big thing (hey! she changed this! the last draft i read mentioned my EXCITEMENT!). She agreed to remix my 30 in December (incentive, maybe, to get me to write them in November). We figured we should do Ryan/Spencer, too, since I got my OTP (also cause I kept whining about wanting to do something similar for Ryan/Spencer but I didn't have my own list of themes), and that would be another two months. So why not make it a year (as I said in the first draft: AND THEN WE WERE DOOMED). The 6 Panic pairings fit nicely into 12 months. We have some other ideas for remixes that involve songs and photos and paper, of all things, but, we're in a pretty nice groove right now and eager to keep up the writing momentum. I should mention that the entire reason I got my own section in this admin post is because I kept making edit-comments like these.

rossetti : Jon/Spencer might not be my OTP but they're a pairing I love and am happy to write, when the opportunity arises. Jess's enthusiasm got me re-interested in writing their dynamic, but I didn't have anything coherent or new to add to what's out there. When she suggested this, as a personal writing exercise, it was a vivacious idea so full of promise I couldn't help but jump on it. We're both keenly interested in meta-textual expression and exploration, so we incorporated an audio/visual component immediately. But a strange and marvelous thing happened about halfway through the month: we realized how easy it was to keep writing, every day, when we had a theme and someone reading over our shoulders. We didn't, don't want to lose the momentum. So we scrapped a full month of a/v and negotiated as to who got to write first on each pairing. While Ryan/Spencer is dear to my heart, I choose Jon/Ryan for the Jan/Feb stories, as I've been thirsting to explore that relationship. But, for now, watch diedandreborn  for remixes that flip, twist, re-envision, micro-focus and/or completely distort Jess's work. The intertextuality is mindblowing.

Yes, I talked about this last week, but I need to again. I'm awed by this project. It's ambitious and demanding and I love it and I want to talk with people about loving it.

sloganeer has posted seven thousand words of Jon/Spencer since November first. Seven thousand! That's a lot of great characterization and awesome sex to be writing on the fly! My remixes will go up in December, so I get to cheat and start early -- and, haha, you don't get to see those for half a month yet, but I've written three thousand words, too! -- but she's actually (mostly) writing hers one-per-day.

This is definitely a project that is pushing me as a writer and I love it. We have ideas on ways to remix the remixes, to chop and screw and play with non-textual-based media and different pairings, and all that'll be announced once we're certain of what we're doing, but right now - right now I'm wanting to get an amen.

Because Spencer loves Chicago but Ryan and Spencer are bffs, and Jon and Ryan are, too, in their own way. There's a subdued brilliance to the least divergent AU ever, and Jon's still a photographer at heart.

There's something zany and amazing about this project, something energizing and, just - fic! Every day! Join us!