#so much better than the clunky decade-old work computer my whole family shared

[lilydalexf]

Old School X is a project interviewing X-Files fanfic authors who were posting fic during the original run of the show. New interviews are posted every Tuesday.

Interview with Sophia Jirafe

Seven of Sophia Jirafe’s fics are at Gossamer, but more of her X-Files stories are at AO3 (as sophiahelix). I’ve recced some of my favorites of her stories here before, including Stones and Bones. She was active in the fandom during the show’s run and has never strayed far from fandom in general. She co-founded Glass Onion, a great multi-fandom mailing list that now has nearly 1,000 fics from 100 fandoms at AO3. Big thanks to Sophia Jirafe for doing this interview.

Does it surprise you that people are still interested in reading your X-Files fanfics and others that were posted during the original run of the show (1993-2002)?

It did initially, but so many old shows are on streaming now and getting discovered by new people, it makes sense.

I did get a comment from someone who said my first story under this name, posted in early 2000 when I was a college freshman, was older than her by a couple of months, and THAT took me aback.

What do you think of when you think about your X-Files fandom experience? What did you take away from it?

It was my first fandom, discovered when I was 17 and searching for info about the show on the school library computer, and it really shaped my whole life! I met a lot of people I still know today (mostly in non-fannish venues like FB, though I do still have some connections in fandom), and learned a lot about writing and just life generally, since I was younger than most of fandom at the time.

Social media didn't really exist during the show's original run. How were you most involved with the X-Files online (atxc, message board, email mailing list, etc.)?

I started off on a tiny forum at a website called Squirrel’s Nest, but I kept seeing people thanking Scullyfic in fic headers and eventually I was able to join the mailing list (which was capped to 500 members). Scullyfic was everything to me — I made friends, betas, discussed the show, learned about all kinds of things on Off-Topic Fridays, etc. A lot of those friends, I would email with or more often chat on AIM (individual or these sprawling group chats that would go on all day), and then at the end of 2001 we started migrating to Livejournal. I was getting into Buffy more by then, but it was still mostly the same crowd of people I knew from Scullyfic.

What did you take away from your experience with X-Files fic or with the fandom in general?

I feel like it started me on a whole life path really — finding that my deep obsession with fiction could be channeled like that and shared with other people, as well as deepening my writing. Online fandom has been a major part of my social life for over 20 years now, and I love the mix of getting excited about things with friends and also the creative outlet.

My corner of X-Files fandom in particular was just very calm and enjoyable for the most part, full of older professional women who were happy to be friends and give me advice about all kinds of things, and it really set the bar for me with my online interactions. Now I’m almost 40 and trying to be that person for my younger friends, as well as having no patience for toxicity and in-fighting in my fandom spaces.

What was it that got you hooked on the X-Files as a show?

A combination of the creepy conspiracy angle and just adoring Scully. I remember how mysterious and fascinating the show seemed when I discovered it right before S5, and there was no way to find out more except to keep watching and hoping they explained. Scully was so smart and tough and beautiful and interesting, and as a teen I was just captivated by her (and the UST, though I didn’t care about Mulder as much).

What got you involved with X-Files fanfic?

I ran across it a couple times early on but felt embarrassed by the concept, but then I read the first in Karen Rasch’s Words series and suddenly it clicked for me. After a while I started daydreaming my own conversations between them, very similar to what happens to me now when I’m getting into a new pairing, so after reading tons of recommended fic by big authors, I started writing my own (the 3-4 stories I posted in high school are all wiped from the internet now, though).

What is your relationship like now to X-Files fandom?

Good memories, though because it was my senior year of high school and college, I know a lot of it is just tied to that time in my life, and also being in my very first fandom. I will rewatch episodes from time to time, but I basically never revisit former fandoms because they’re kind of like exes, even if I finished on a good note. I also think my taste in fic has changed (and there isn’t the same novelty of “characters I like getting together omg!”)

Were you involved with any fandoms after the X-Files? If so, what was it like compared to X-Files?

So many! None of them had quite the same combination of excellent central architecture (especially pre-AO3) and a really high level of discussion and friendliness without being enormous, but I’ve loved them all in their own ways. I’ve done fandom on LJ/DW, Tumblr, Discord, and now on Twitter, and I think I miss the mailing list days the most. You didn’t have to repeat yourself so much in multiple conversations, you weren’t character limited, and the discussion was all in one place, with personal stuff more confined to your side conversations. Discord is a little like that, but it moves too fast and there’s too much noise for my taste.

Who are some of your favorite fictional characters? Why?

Heh, after X-Files I went through a whole phase of faves in the Scully vein — Buffy, Aeryn Sun, Kara Thrace, etc. Like many people I’ve shifted primarily into m/m in the last decade (Sherlock, YOI, and recently The Untamed have been my major fictional fandoms, along with a lot of sports RPF), but for non-fannish shows I’m always looking for awesome new female characters, like Elizabeth on the Americans, Peggy on Mad Men, Nadja on What We Do in the Shadows, etc. And I do LOVE Killing Eve and have written a little f/f over there.

Do you ever still watch The X-Files or think about Mulder and Scully?

I’ll rewatch favorite episodes occasionally, and I keep thinking about a full rewatch but it takes so much time! I never saw the second movie, and I didn’t finish the first of the new seasons because I was hating it, so it’s a little hard for me to think fannishly about them when I disliked basically everything after “Je Souhaite” so much (as far as I’m concerned the show ends there).

Do you ever still read X-Files fic? Fic in another fandom?

X-Files no, but yeah I’m still very active in fandoms.

Do you have any favorite X-Files fanfic stories or authors?

I lost all my saved fic several computers ago, but I recall loving “Blue Christmas” by Plausible Deniability and “Diamonds and Rust” by MustangSally (obviously everything she wrote was great).

What is your favorite of your own fics, X-Files and/or otherwise?

Looking at my X-Files fic, I can’t believe how short it is and how comparatively little of it there is (I have lost track of a few ficlets). It felt like such a big deal to finish anything back then! I think my favorite remains Alphabetum, which involved a tricky structure and 5 elements given by people as part of the Scullyfic Improv challenge, where you had a week to write a story around those elements.

My favorite of my recent fic in fictional fandoms is probably the GoT/YOI crossover novel I wrote a couple years ago, for a completely opposite experience to this (and proof you can grow as a writer with a lot of effort!)

Do you think you'll ever write another X-Files story? Or dust off and post an oldie that for whatever reason never made it online?

It’s honestly hard to imagine going back (like I said, I usually don’t), but I guess I could get inspired by something.

Do you still write fic now? Or other creative work?

I certainly still write, and I do have to give credit to XF fandom and Scullyfic in particular for giving me the start I got, where I really wanted to be writing good fiction. The few things I wrote in high school were just me jamming out romantic cliches, but the people I was lucky to know in XF fandom showed me that “just” fanfic can still aspire to be high quality. I am a much, much better and more disciplined writer than I was back then, but I might never have started on this path without fandom friends encouraging me.

Where do you get ideas for stories?

Usually just daydreaming about emotional dynamics between characters/people, but sometimes something specific in canon or real life (I write a lot of RPF) gets me going, or maybe something I read.

What's the story behind your pen name?

When I wrote for X-Files, I picked “Sophia Jirafe” combining my favorite first name with a fancy spelling for my favorite animal (I was 18! Don’t judge!) Over on Livejournal, my friend Jintian and I initially shared an account with the same name as our website, double_helix, and when she got her own account I changed to sophia_helix, which is now sophiahelix just about everywhere. A little clunky, but I like the continuity (and I do run across old friends who remember the name).

Do your friends and family know about your fic and, if so, what have been their reactions?

The friends I’ve known for a very long time know about it, but we have never talked about it in depth. My husband, who I met not long after getting into fandom, also knows about it, and he’s encouraging and also a writer so we talk all the time. I told my mom in college and she was pretty dismissive, so we haven’t talked about it since (but my younger sister knows and is cool about it).

When I was younger, it was something I shared readily (I bonded with a new friend in law school I saw looking at LJ), but now I don’t really bring it up with new acquaintances.

Is there a place online (tumblr, twitter, AO3, etc.) where people can find you and/or your stories now?

I just made a Carrd the other day with all my various fannish addresses (Twitter, locked fannish Twitter, AO3, Tumblr)

Is there anything else you'd like to share with fans of X-Files fic?

Just that it really was a high quality fandom — so much excellent long casefic, so many cool down to earth people, just generally a great launching place for a young fan. The friendships I made with older people were really important to me, and it makes me sad to see a lot of younger people now getting upset about the idea of anyone over a certain age being in their fandom spaces. I hope someday fandom can get back to appreciating that people of all ages can be the fandom type, and that everyone brings something different to the community.

(Posted by Lilydale on December 1, 2020)

[coachkaushal]

The value you value is the value you create.

Entrepreneurship is about creating value. Period.

Any product, service or idea you’re selling to the world means nothing unless it creates value for them. Mind you, the biggest problem you’re going to face is convincing these guys that the value you’re creating for them is valuable enough for them to buy.

So the simplest thing to do if you’re looking to stay an entrepreneur long time or just survive the initial struggle and make it to the big leagues some day down the line…

Stick to your value system.

If the work you’re doing isn’t creating a value you don’t count as your highest value, don’t do it. Yes, I didn’t say one of your highest values, I didn’t say one your greatest values.. I said highest value as in a singular value that you could swear by or live or die proving the worth of.

Let’s take an example starting from Steve Jobs again continuing forwards from the last part.

Do you think Steve Jobs would’ve been able to build a company like Next and arm twist Apple into buying it just to have him on board if he had let’s say.. suddenly decided to go chasing profits instead of innovating? Nope.

And let me tell you in the long term, the investors and stakeholders know this and can see this and call you on your BS point blank if they see you diverging from your core values.

That has happened so many times!

Take the example of Microsoft.

Tell me why the ‘idea’ of a Windows Phone failed?

No Steve Ballmer wasn’t the Trojan Horse who supposedly invaded and subsequently drove Nokia to the ground as we would like to believe. It isn’t that simple. It was simpler.

Microsoft has always been and still is a company that caters to Enterprises and businesses. That’s what they’re good at and that’s the value they’ve been creating for decades. Suddenly people saw them focusing on mastering the consumer game trying to lap up some of the neat profits Google and Apple had their hands on with the entire ‘personal ecosystem’ thing going on and just like that.. everyone called them out.

To tell you the truth, Lumia wasn’t even that bad. Seriously, it looked good and they could’ve done a lot more with it if they had just decided to create value the way they had been creating it forever: By thinking about the enterprises as a priority.

What did they do? They went about experimenting with something completely different and way out of their market image and brand image. The whole move had ‘competition’ and ‘profit’ written all over it.

Now look at how they’ve returned to the market running as the OS in these new design ‘yoga’ laptops that are also tablets you can turn them into by unhooking the screen from the keyboard and swiveling the screen both ways.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed but those are actually selling these days. Yes not a lot of them but quite a bit. Why?

Simple, if I’m manager running a team of marketing professionals who could use something that doubles up as a display during meetings and lets me work on them when I’m making reports at the end of the day, I would prefer these new Microsoft laptops really. What’s not to like? MS Office is something we’ve been using forever. The first question we ask people over here when hiring them for data entry or accounting jobs is “Can you work Excel?”

Now you may say to me: “C’mon Jay, India isn’t the whole world. Damn right it isn’t but we have 1/7th the population of the entire planet and we’ve got more people hunting jobs, working jobs and running around doing jobs this moment than the entire workforce on the continent of Europe!

Think about why Apple gradually shifted its focus away from the laptop segments to making better tablets?

Remember this “Computer? What’s a computer?” commercial?

Well make as much fun of it as you want, joke’s on you. My 6 year old niece may well grow up unable to recognize what these clunky things are that I’m hammering away on at the moment.

You want to know why?

Because podcasts are the future, vlogs are the future, ebooks are the future, mobile first platforms are the future and picking those things out from iTunes is the future!

Apple did the smart thing by realizing it wouldn’t always be able to adjust the size of the screens on their flagship offering to keep up the pretense of ‘innovating for the future’. Well they made other changes in that area like the airpods but you see the point I’m making?

Take the example of Jaguar being bought by TATA an Indian company.

I’ll tell you why irrespective of how well Jaguar is or isn’t doing, this move catapulted Ratan Tata, the man in this picture to be among the the most loved CEOs in India or even Asia!

The guy has not budged from the simplest focus his predecessors have laid down that creates exponential value for them across all their businesses:

“Bringing the Pride back to India”

Hear me out seriously! Studying Indian businesses today is among the best lessons in Management you are likely to find anywhere.

The TATAs basically control arterial industries in India. From salt manufacturing to car and steel manufacturing, to owning the prestigious Taj Brand of hotels, this group is practically regarded as the FIRST industrial family of India.

They gave India her first indegeniously manufactured car: ‘Indica’. Then they gave the people the cheapest car in the world: ‘Nano’. They manufacture trucks and buses on a large scale that are all the rage in African countries due to their heavy duty design and robustness.

They bought one of the largest Steel company in the UK, ‘Corus’. Then they bought the biggest tea company in the UK, ‘Tetley’ and got Indians hooked to the taste of Earl Grey and Green Tea…. see where I’m going with this?

Buying Jaguar Land Rover practically immortalized Ratan Tata and the TATA name.

In short, purchases and acquisitions made by them in one area of their vast operations has helped them gain trust and expansion in other arms of their operations. That’s the power of sticking to the value you’re creating. How can we be sure that this value is actually in line with the core values of the TATAs at least as perceived by the masses?

Well, the TATAs practically built independent India and were arguably the only company developing capital goods after India won her freedom. JRD Tata, the father of Indian aviation and scion of the TATA group, was the first pilot of independent India.

Need I point out that the TATAs were the ones to give India her first airline? TATA airlines, which is known today as Indian Airlines.

Create the value YOU value. Simple.

Take the example of Google.

With an initial unsuccessful run in the social media game with Orkut and then Google+, they decided to junk the whole thing completely and move on to perfecting the art of extracting data to sell while making your job easier.

Orkut and Google+ were both neither here nor there as social mediums and it’s a lot easier to just have a paid version of Youtube to drive the additional ‘direct’ revenue.

Facebook on the other hand has stuck to the ‘bringing the world closer’ value and it’s a lot more convenient now to just share Facebook videos on Whatsapp. The ‘picture in picture’ feature ensures that sharing videos and watching them without leaving the application is actually a ‘seamless experience’.

In the same way for Microsoft, acquiring Linkedin was once again a move to overcompensate for straying off their defined ‘value system’. However, you cannot disagree that Bill Gates was always the more ‘expansionist’ compared to his peer Steve.

Why, Bill is the reason most people in third world countries had access to a decent OS at all! You can always source used PC parts to put together a decent machine that can run Windows for you and use it to build websites, write code, do accounts or make your project but you can’t do that with a Mac.

Bill always saw the opportunity in capturing the market and making a profit out of convenience of both parties at the cost of ‘experience’. So coming back on the Linkedin acquisition, what better place to expand into than a networking platform full of people who mostly probably think the same way. Also, it’s not even that I’m sure. It’s the AI engines feeding MS the data they need to gain the lost trust with enterprises.

Does creating value and ensuring it resonates with your own core value mean you never experiment and risk being stereotyped?

Of course not. If that were the case Tesla would have had to shut shop the day Elon Musk came up with the ridiculous idea of flame thrower. However, note the word here ‘Ridiculous‘.

It’s the kind of word that best describes the idea of setting up a human colony on Mars don’t you think?

That’s the point. The proof is in the pudding.

‘Experiment’, in the right direction keeping your core value at its foundation.

Even if that core value is ‘ridiculous’.

I’m including a couple of links below to videos that will help you tap into the mindset of this article and grasp this concept from a more profound perspective.

That’s all for today. Come back tomorrow for part number 3 of 7.

Love,

Jay

Entrepreneur Motivation Day 2/7. The Value you value is the value you create. #entrepreneurship The value you value is the value you create. Entrepreneurship is about creating value. Period. Any product, service or idea you're selling to the world means nothing unless it creates value for them.