Soon and Direction rhyme in our fandom

++ After seventeen years since the site launched, Archive Of Our Own is finally exiting its beta testing phase. They announced this the day after April Fool's when they did the hilarious joke of changing the "beta" on the site to "omega" (as part of the A/B/O, a.k.a. Omegaverse, trope), which was a clever way of announcing the transition from finally getting out of beta the day after. Bless AO3, truly.

++ Everything involving the Artemis II mission around the moon has been utterly captivating.

I actually wasn't aware this was going to happen, so when I heard about that they launched people to the moon I unfortunately thought this was something in relation to SpaceX, but I was thankfully corrected that this was a NASA mission and my mood shifted to being utterly delighted. Just every single update we're getting from their mission thus far has been amazing, because while we've been to the moon before this is the first mission since Apollo 17 in 1972. I'm someone who loves space, and any kind of space exploration where it favors science and the human curiosity of understanding what lies beyond the stars is worthy to be excited about.

++ Over the last several days a long lost early episode of MST3K was found and uploaded (you can watch it here), and some of the missing old Doctor Who episodes were found in a ramshackle collection. "Keep circulating the tapes", indeed.

Stories like this make me happy, because there is a lot of genuinely lost media out there that can miraculously be found in someone's garage sale or random collection. As someone who used to record a lot of things onto VHS back in the day and still have them stored in numerous boxes upon boxes in her own garage, I hope that someday I'll find the method of transferring all of those digitally and uploading it somewhere or keeping it available on DVDs to continue to be passed around. It's why I'm fascinated by watching others who have done similar, not just with lost episodes of shows but just anything, commercials and other programs that have since been lost to time and memory. It's such a time capsule, honestly, and it's something that in this age of streaming we need to appreciate and treasure more when finding these kinds of things. Don't throw away your old DVDs or even VHS tapes, there are ways of preserving them and keeping them because streaming will not last forever.

++ Stephen Colbert is writing a new Lord of the Rings movie. As described in the article:

The Lord of the Rings: Shadow of the Past is set 14 years after the passing of Frodo. Sam, Merry and Pippin set out to retrace the first steps of their adventure. Meanwhile, Sam's daughter, Elanor, has discovered a long-buried secret and is determined to uncover why the War of the Ring was very nearly lost before it even began.

On one hand, Stephen Colbert is notoriously known for being a massive Tolkien nerd and if there was going to be anyone to take on anything Middle-earth it would be him, especially after the cancellation of his late night show this would be a dream come true in terms of his career. On the other hand, however, I can see how this might be viewed this as a cash grab and we've seen franchises be drawn out and milked to death. On the other other hand though, considering that the Tolkien Estate still owns the rights to The Silmarillion and The Unfinished Tales, I do like that they're taking liberties on chapters from the LOTR books that were omitted from the previous films and adapting them in a completely different way. Tolkien wrote chapters and even just paragraphs that could be its own movie alone, so it's not inconceivable, it's just a matter of having the right people involved to make it work.

Also, I do like this idea better than The Search for Gollum.