Electromagnetic Candy

An FYI for LiveJournal Peeps

astrogirl2 — Wed, 02 Feb 2022 02:34:27 GMT

As you may perhaps have realized, I've been posting on Dreamwidth rather than on LJ for quite a while now, and just crossposting things here so those of you still on LJ who'd rather keep track of me here could continue doing so. Well, it turns out that crossposting from DW is no longer working, and that there seems to be little prospect of it doing so again in the near future, or possibly ever. So for anybody still lingering here (who hasn't been completely put off by my current obsession with writing fic for a video game that literally no one else I know has played), I'd advise checking out my Dreamwidth journal instead. Hope to see you there!

Some Three Sentence Fics

astrogirl2 — Tue, 18 Jan 2022 15:06:39 GMT

The Three Sentence Ficathon is well underway, and I've been having a fun time with it, as usual. I may still do a few more fills for it, but I probably really ought to turn my attention back to working on my Chocolate Box story, instead. So I figured I'd post what I've done for it here now. I think a couple of these, honestly, are ideas I've kind of already done elsewhere, but I'm refusing to care about that too hard. Condensing stuff down to three sentences is a fun challenge! Well, OK, technically one of them is three sentences plus a title, but that's more than good enough.

Any, Any, "But demons can't feel love, can they?" (Good Omens, Crowley)

God is love, that's what Heaven says, and Heaven claims the power to define everything. But Crowley has seen how Heaven loves: with flood, and threat, and sneering condescension. He will not label what he feels with such a tainted word.

any, any, "Better a pig than a fascist."

(h/t Porco Rosso) (Disco Elysium, Harry)

Fascism Quest: Uncompleted

In the end, he can't make himself look in the mirror. He knows he won't see the savior of Revacholian Nationhood there, any more than he'll see the man who inspired that apricot-scented letter. He can only be what he has made himself now: a damaged man, a decent cop, someone who has been granted a single, precious chance to leave the past behind for good.

any, any, tell all your friends I'm crazy and drive you mad (Disco Elysium, Harry/Kim)

Kim has worked his entire life to present a smooth, featureless professional surface to the world, to leave only the most superficial, unconcealable parts of him open to their judgment, to keep all the secret strangeness in him safely hidden away.

It's bad enough, a voice inside him warns, that he admits to being homo-sexual when he's asked, but it is unthinkable, intolerable, deeply frightening to let the world see that he is capable of losing his heart not just to a man, but to this man: ridiculous, disheveled, larger than life, completely insane, and utterly incapable of keeping any part of his life a secret.

"Ah, well, fuck it," he says, and he kisses Harry anyway.

Disco Elysium, Harry &/ Kim, maintenance on the Kineema

He takes such good care of this vehicle, a voice in your head tells you as you turn the wrench under Kim's calm and watchful guidance, because he loves it deeply, and wants the best for it, and hopes to keep it with him for as long as he possibly can.

Kim flashes you a smile, a real, full smile as you finish and says, "Your hands are so steady now; it's clear that all those changes you've made are really paying off!"

Much of that is thanks to him, another voice says, because of course it's Kim who dumped out all the booze in your apartment, who drives you to your meetings, who brings you lunch when he knows you've forgotten to eat again... and suddenly you find yourself internalizing a new, and startling, and terrifyingly hopeful thought.

Undertale, Toriel/Asgore, I'll sing you a song of a love gone wrong

Even after the worst happens, Asgore never stops humming to himself, and at first Toriel is glad to know that he, at least, can still find some residue of cheerfulness in his soul. But in the end, it is the humming that breaks her. She can love a man who hums to comfort himself after the death of his children, but not one who does so as he plots to murder others'. This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1022607.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.

!!!

astrogirl2 — Mon, 10 Jan 2022 04:24:38 GMT

So, Chocolate Box assignments aren't even out yet... and I already have a treat! !!!

I feel weirdly special now, considering how many people are signed up for this thing. Also, clearly this is an exchange I'm going to have to do more often! This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1022423.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.

Oh, Look, It's Yet Another Bingo Card

astrogirl2 — Sat, 08 Jan 2022 01:13:11 GMT

Still got a couple more squares to do on my genprompt_bingo card, but I couldn't resist signing up for trope_bingo as well.

Behold, my new card! Not a bad one at all, I'd say, if a bit heavy on the sexy stuff. It's also got a couple of "AU" prompts, but I no longer run screaming from those since I realized you don't actually have to write them as AUs. (Hey, I already have a fandom that totally qualifies as noir, if I wanted to do that one. And you can put a circus in anything!)

I really don't know which line I'm going to go for, though. Maybe the middle column? Nothing like mixing it up with death and fluff, right?

MIND GAMES	DEAL WITH THE DEVIL	DEATH FIC	LOSS OF POWER	UNEXPECTED FRIENDSHIP
TELEPATHY / MIND MELD	METAFICTION	FUTURE FIC	SEX POSITIONS	CURTAIN FIC
ACCIDENTAL STIMULATION	EPISTOLARY	FREE SPACE	SEXUAL FANTASIES	SLEEPING ARRANGEMENTS
QUARANTINE	AU: NOIR	FLUFF	EVERYONE THINKS WE'RE A COUPLE	DARK FIC
AU: CIRCUS	RIVALS WORKING TOGETHER	GETTING TOGETHER	TORTURE / INTERROGATION	FROTTAGE / GRINDING

This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1021975.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.

Dear Chocolatier

astrogirl2 — Wed, 05 Jan 2022 02:05:16 GMT

Hello, Chocolate Box creator! I'm AstroGirl, here and on AO3, and I'm very much looking forward to seeing whatever you come up with!

First of all let me assure you that I have really broad tastes, and enjoy everything from sweet, happy fluff to full-bore tragic angst. For fic, plot is certainly welcome, but I regard it as entirely optional, and I can and will be 100% satisfied with something that's purely character-based (two people having a conversation, someone being introspective, whatever). Note that any prompts I might have are just suggestions. If they're appealing or useful to you, feel free to take them anywhere you'd like to go with them, but if you've got a different idea, go for it! I love surprises. I am fine with any rating, but when it comes to sex scenes, I prefer them to feel like they're strongly based in the characters, rather than the characters mostly just being there as a vehicle for the porn, if that makes sense. Honestly, I don't have a lot of preferences about what the characters might be doing in bed, as long as they feel like themselves while doing it.

DNWs: Any kind of AUs except canon divergence. I'd include in that anything that assumes the universe works in fundamentally different way than we see it working in canon, e.g. everyone-is-born-with-a-soulmate-mark AUs, when people clearly don't have them in canon. (Canon divergence is very much welcome, though, as is fun with parallel universes or changing things through time travel.) Underage sex. A/B/O. Violent "on-screen" non-con. (Non-explicit references to sexual assault, bad guys manipulating or non-violently coercing others into sex, and dubconny scenarios, including sex under the influence of drugs or alcohol, are all specifically OK.)

Some general likes: Complex and flawed characters, complicated emotions or relationships, good dialog and banter, humor, little world-building touches, unreliable narrators, time travel, Sex with Feelings, characters who have interestingly weird or alien perspectives/cultures/biologies/sexualities, big emotions getting expressed in small or quiet ways.

Some stuff I am explicitly okay with: Character death. Unhappy endings, including ships breaking up. Experimental or unusual formats or POVs. (I'm picky enough about poetry that you might want to avoid that, but otherwise feel free to go wild). Subverting or playing around with familiar tropes. Crossovers between requested fandoms. Setting things at absolutely any time before, during, or after canon, or in a canon-divergence AU. Also, characters other than the requested ones are always welcome (including other incarnations of the Doctor and other Time Lords in Doctor Who), and if they play a big part in the fic along with the requested character(s), that's perfectly fine.

Some notes about art: I love fan art, but I'm not an artist, so it's a lot harder for me to talk about what I do or don't want/like for art than for fic. But I will say that I like both art in which the characters look (more or less) realistically like themselves and cute, cartoony art, as well as more abstract/symbolic/conceptual kinds of art. I'm less keen on art that deliberately tries to make the characters look hotter, or younger, or things like Good Omens art that gives Crowley pointed ears so he looks more demon-y. Sexy/NSFW art is definitely welcome, but I'd prefer if it's more character-based or evoking a mood of some sort, rather than just being about putting some genitals on display.

On to the specific requests! I think the trope requests can pretty much speak for themselves here, so I'll just add some general remarks for the various pairings/fandoms.

REQUESTS:

Disco Elysium

Harry Du Bois & Kim Kitsuragi & Lawrence Garte
Harry du Bois & Revachol
Harry Du Bois/Kim Kitsuragi
Harry Du Bois/Kim Kitsuragi & Lena/Morell
Harry Du Bois/Kim Kitsuragi & Revachol
Kim Kitsuragi & Members of Precinct 41

I'm happy with any take on Harry and Kim's relationship, from buddy cop partners to full-bore shippiness, or anything in-between. I love a Harry who's trying to get sober and get better, but I'm also very interested in one who's a hot mess and failing badly, so anything from hopeful fluff to painful angst is welcome here.

Some possible ideas: Kim POV on things that happen during the game. Aftermath of the Tribunal when Harry is recovering and Garte is cleaning the room. Harry/Kim first kisses or friends-to-lovers. Harry and Kim working a new case together. Telling Lena and Morell about the phasmid. Kim's first day at the 41st. Harry being given important warnings from Revachol, or telling Kim about how the city speaks to him, or Harry and Kim on the streets of Revachol being watched over by its spirit (who might or might not Ship It).

Doctor Who (1963)

Ace McShane & Seventh Doctor
Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart & Third Doctor
Barbara Wright/Ian Chesterton
Barbara Wright/Ian Chesterton & First Doctor & Susan Foreman
First Doctor & Susan Foreman

One thing that strikes me about all these character combinations I've requested is that there's real affection in all of them, even if the characters might come into conflict or disagree with each other.

Some possible ideas: Canon-typical adventures featuring an alien invasion or something, or canon-atypical adventures featuring something weird even for Who. Little domestic or mundane moments between adventures. Developing friendships, or in the case of Barbara/Ian, something more than friendship. A glimpse into how the Doctor feels about these humans, or his relationship with his granddaughter, and maybe into how that changes with time.

It should be noted that I haven't listened to many of the Big Finish audios, so I'd appreciate avoiding anything I'd need to be familiar with those to understand.

Doctor Who (2005)

Amy Pond & River Song & Rory Williams
Eleventh Doctor/River Song
Jenny (The Doctor’s Daughter) & River Song
Missy/Thirteenth Doctor
River Song/Thirteenth Doctor
River Song/Twelfth Doctor
The TARDIS/Thirteenth Doctor

A lot of different possible relationships here! I suppose the one thing they all have in common is the possibility to be interestingly strange and complicated, in ways that range from the warm and lovely, to the affectionate but snarky, to (in the case of Thirteen/Missy) the deeply messed up, to the just plain weird.

Some possible ideas: An adventure, canon-typical or otherwise. A pause for a quiet or domestic moments. Unexpected reunions. Feeling some kind of family bond, even when that family is very bizarre and very timey-wimey, and perhaps sometimes kind of exasperating. I'm also always here for messy love-hate Doctor/Master interactions and for explorations of the eternity-spanning love story of the Doctor and her TARDIS, in any form that might take.

It should be noted that I haven't listened to many of the Big Finish audios, so I'd appreciate avoiding anything I'd need to be familiar with those to understand.

Good Omens (TV)

Angels & Aziraphale
Aziraphale & Crowley
Aziraphale/Crowley
Aziraphale & The Bookshop
Crowley & Houseplants

I love both Aziraphale and Crowley so much. I'm interested in their relationships with Heaven and Hell, their relationships with the people and things they love on Earth, and, of course, their relationship with each other. For that last thing, I'm happy with any take on the nature of their relationship, from a completely asexual bond to them thoroughly enjoying this human thing called sex.

Some ideas: A/C first time or friends-to-lovers. Adjusting to life post-notpocalypse and to being on their own side (and maybe having complicated feelings about it). Canon-divergence AU where the apocalypse did happen, after all. Something set in the distant future, or in some interesting historical period. Aziraphale's early days with the bookshop, or his feelings about it as a place that's comforting and purely his, or about it maybe becoming his and Crowley's. How Crowley started cultivating plants, or the plants' perspective on him, or just fun with his unique methods of gardening. Aziraphale happily realizing that he can now tell other angels to buzz off, or maybe discovering there are some who feel sympathetic to him.

This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1021868.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.

And Now, The Year-End Fic Roundup Meme

astrogirl2 — Sun, 02 Jan 2022 06:00:39 GMT

All righty, now that all the Yuletide fics are non-anonymous and claimable, it's time to actually do this thing. I'm just recycling the same one I did last year.

List of Completed Fic

"The Process, the Expression, and the State" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 502 words, written for Fandomtrees)

"The Patron Demon of Everybody's Embarrassing Youth" (Good Omens, Crowley, 870 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)

"Defying All Description" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 347 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)

"On the Verge of All Things New" (Good Omens, Anathema/Newt, 1,969 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)

"An Angel, a Demon, a Bench, and Some Ducks" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 648 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)

"Out Here in Front of God and Everybody" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 1,465 words, written for Trope Bingo round 16)

"Sometimes a Snake Is Just a Snake" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 1,465 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)

"...and round she goes..." (Doctor Who, 13th Doctor, Yaz, Graham, Ryan, the TARDIS, 3,919 words, written for Past Imperfect, Future Unknown and Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)

"A Distant Harbor, Briefly Glimpsed" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 3,390 words, written for Trope Bingo round 16)

"A Bright Dividing Line" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 1,652 words, written for Trope Bingo round 16)

"The First Last Time" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 890 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)

"Free as the Birds" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 2,719 words, Trope Bingo round 16)

"The Heart That Keeps Us All Alive" (Umbrella Academy, Ben, 315 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)

"I Think We're Alone now" (Umbrella Academy, Number Five/Dolores, 100 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)

"Mightier" (Good Omens, Agnes Nutter, 562 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)

"The Four Hundredth Anniversary Is Stars" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 1,713 words written for Trope Bingo round 16)

"If at First You Don't Succeed, Steal Somebody Else's Completely Inappropriate Apocalypse" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 324 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)

"Don't Call It a Comeback" (Good Omens, Pestilence, 100 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)

"The First of the Poets" (Good Omens, God, Aziraphale/Crowley 621 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)

"A Watched Pot, Boiling" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowely, 1,704 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)

"An American Bibliophile in London Reviews: A.Z. Fell & Co." (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, OC, 1,487 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)

"Just a Few Bonecalls" (Undertale, Sans/Toriel, Papyrus, 2,026 words, written for Unsent Letters and Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)

"Which Is Harder: Armageddon or the Junior Jumble?" (Undertale, Sans & Papyrus, 246 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)

"A Question of Interior Design" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 1,551 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)

"Pride, No Fall" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 497 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)

"Only as Old as the World" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, 600 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)

"Stupid Cute Tragic Dead Kid" (Umbrella Academy/Undertale, Klaus, Asriel, 4,031 words, written for A Ficathon Goes Into a bar and Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)

"Perennial" (Undertale, Flowey, 100 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)

"Undone" (Undertale, Undyne/Alphys, 1,973 words, written for Summertime Sadness)

"Fail Until You're Good Enough at It That It Starts to Look Like Hope" (Disco Elysium, Harry/Kim, 1,950 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 20)

"A Time You May Embrace" (Good Omens, Aziraphale/Crowley, Gabriel, Beelzebub, 24,351 words, written for Just Married)

"Detective, Interrogate Thyself" (Disco Elysium, Harry/Kim, 378 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 20)

"Self-Acceptance (The Hey, That's One Way to Address an Identity Crisis Remix)" (Doctor Who, Thirteenth Doctor/Fourth Doctor, 3,484 words, written for Remix Redux)

"Funerals Are for the Living" (Disco Elysium, Jean & Harry, 473 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 20)

"Paper and Wind and Streets and Skin" (Disco Elysium, Harry, Kim, Revachol, 100 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 20)

"Borrow My Authority When Your Volition Fails" (Disco Elysium, Harry, Kim, 1,012 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 20)

"In Common" (Doctor Who, Third Doctor/Delgado!Master, 3,854 words, written for Multifandom Tropefest)

"Unexpected Shelters" (Disco Elysium, Harry/Kim, 3,879 words, written for Multifandom Tropefest)

"One More Thing Chewing on Your Heart" (Disco Elysium, Harry, 1,075 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 21)

"Something Scarred, and Strangely Dressed, and Yours" (Disco Elysium, Harry/Kim, 1,183 words, written for Gen Prompt Bingo round 21)

"Groundhog Day Rules" (The Good Place, Michael, Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, Jason, Janet, 3,293 words, written for Yuletide)

"The Cracks Are Where the Air Comes Through" (Disco Elysium, Harry/Kim/Revacholl, 488 words, written for Yuletide Madness and Gen Prompt Bingo round 19)

Interesting how you can kind of track my Year in Fannishness from that list. It starts out with my continued outpouring of Good Omens fics, which I seem to have finally worked out of my system at least somewhat, possibly in the course of writing that 24k Just Married fic. (Or maybe my brain is just waiting now for S2 to give it some more to work with. ) We then get some smatterings of Umbrella Academy, although, honestly, that's not a show I see myself writing a lot of fic for, no matter how much I enjoy it. Apparently it's at leat good for a couple of (not very exciting) bingo ficlets and an Into a Bar crossover, though. Then, somewhere in there, there's a nostalgic Undertale revival that lasts for a little while, until my new Disco Elysium obsession suddenly kicks in. And, of course, there are also a few Doctor Who fics scattered across the year, Doctor Who being, as I believe someone once described it, my "forever fandom."

Stats

Total number: 42. Which is one more than last year! And last year, I added a whole bunch of exclamation points after that total, too. Well, I guess this is what happens when nobody talks me out of doing blackout bingos, two years in a row.

Total word count: 81,824. I find it really interesting to look over the word counts for stuff this year. So many of them are short, even by my standards. Indeed, there's only one over 4,000 words, and that only barely... Except, of course, for that 24k behemoth which is now officially the longest thing I've ever written. Even with that one, though, the average word count this year is less than last year's, when the total was over 89k -- a number that still astonishes me.

Ship/character breakdown:

Ships:

Aziraphale/Crowley: 18 (although the shippiness in those ranges from extremely explicit to extremely vague)

Harry/Kim: 6 (Including some some vaguely UST-y stuff, plus that one that I've somewhat fancifully -- but not, I think inaccurately -- labeled as Harry/Kim/Revachol. Look, they both love that city, and it is canonically mutual, at least for Harry!)

Anathema/Newt: 1

Number Five/Dolores: 1 (Yes, that does totally count!)

Sans/Toriel: 1

Alphys/Undyne: 1

Doctor/Master: 1

Doctor/Doctor: 1 (Yes, that also counts.)

Well, the detectives clearly still have a way to go if they want to give the angel and the demon a run for their money, shipwise.

There are also some other minor or ambiguous or vague or backgrounded pairings in there, too, probably: the Doctor/TARDIS elements in "...and round she goes...", Eleanor kissing almost everybody in "Groundhog Day Rules," a bit of Ben/Jill pining in one of the Umbrella Academy ficlets. I was going to say "and maybe some other stuff I'm forgetting," but I think that does actually cover everything.

Characters:

Aziraphale: 16

Crowley: 16

Harry Du Bois: 7

Kim Kitsuragi: 5

The Doctor: 4 Or 5, if you count being in the same same story twice as two appearances.

Sans: 2

And one each for: God, Agnes Nutter, Newt, Anathema, Pestilence, Gabriel, Beelzebub, Yaz, Graham, Ryan, The Master, the Doctor's TARDIS, Ben Hargreeves, Klaus Hargreeves, Number Five, Toriel, Flowey, Undyne, Alphys, Papyrus, Asriel, Jean Vicquemare, the City of Revachol, Michael, Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, Jason, Janet, and some unnamed OC.

Although, honestly, those totals are all extremely fuzzy, as there are a lot of cases where I genuinely can't say whether I think a particular character is present enough in the story to count or not. Especially as I seem to write a lot of fics that boil down to "Character A spends the entire fic thinking about Character B, who might then appear for two seconds at the end or something."

Specifics:

Best/worst title?

I think the best title might be "A Time You May Embrace," just because it seems so completely perfect for that story. It's nice and simple, but it does, I think, work on a couple of different levels, and I think there should be bonus points if you use a Bible quote in the title of a Good Omens story.

I don't know if it's the worst, but "The Heart That Keeps Us All Alive" irritates me a lot, and I don't even know why. I think it may just be that it's one of those titles I way overthought, and that's even less excusable for a story that short. I also think anyone who uses "I Think We're Alone Now" for an Umbrella Academy fic deserves all the eye-rolls in the world, but, hey, at least I didn't overthink that one. I'd say apparently I just can't title UA stories, but "Stupid Cute Tragic Dead Kid" isn't actually too awful.

Best /worst summary?

Hmm. There are a lot of very short, not super informative summaries this year, mostly because there are a lot of very short fics, and it's always seemed weird to me to write a big, informative summary for a fic that's only, like, 300 words long. You might as well just read the thing, really. So there are a lot that are just very small suggestive little sentences meant to give you a general idea of the tone or something. Which aren't bad, I don't think, but I can hardly call them good, either.

But never mind those. Let's see... Well, for best, I rather like the one for "...and round she goes...": "That little spark from the wiring was probably fine. That seasick feeling is probably fine. The way time keeps repeating itself is... Oh. Wait. That might actually not be fine."

Worst? Well, I don't know about "worst," but I do worry a bit about the one for "A Watched Pot, Boiling": "Aziraphale loves humanity, that's all. He's interested in everything they do, even the more... intimate things. The fact that the being he's interested in doing them with isn't human is just an inconvenient but unavoidable side-effect." Because the whole point there is that Aziraphale tells himself that, but it's not exactly true, and it does occur to me to wonder if that unreliable-narrator irony comes through there for every potential reader, or if a summary is even quite the place for that.

Otherwise... I don't know, I'm not fond of the one for "In Common": "The Doctor walks into a psychic trap set for the Master. And now they can both sense everything the other one thinks and feels about the situation." It certainly tells you what the story is about, but it doesn't really do it with any style.

Best first line?

Annoyingly there aren't any that really leap out at me as being particularly good. If I have to choose, I guess I might go with the one from "Undone": "It's very early still, but when the day's first rays of sunlight slip in through the open window and hit Undyne in the face like a friendly punch, she's instantly up on her feet, friendly-punching it back." Just because, well, that's very, very Undyne. I also like the fact that, if you know the canon and are paying attention, it immediately tells you where in the game's many possible timelines we are: sometime after the good ending. Which, for that particular fic, is a good thing to understand from sentence one, I think.

Best last line?

There are more here to choose from than in the case of the first lines, and I'd actually have a hard time deciding on one, if it weren't for that one little drabble, "Don't Call It a Comeback," with "Muttering under his breath, Pestilence prepares to show them all." Because... yeah.

General questions:

Looking back, did you write more fic than you thought you would this year, less than you thought, or about what you predicted?

More! I was genuinely astonished by how much I wrote last year, and this year I wrote even more than that, by number of stories if not by word count. Even if only just.

What pairing/genre/fandom did you write that you would never have predicted last year?

Well, there's a lot of answers to that. I hadn't started watching Umbrella Academy last year, so I wouldn't have expected to write even the tiny things for that that I did. And I didn't really expect to go back to Undertale again, certainly not to that extent.

But the big one, really, is Disco Elysium. I'm pretty sure I hadn't even heard of that game last year. And it's funny. I remember, not all that many years ago, feeling sort of befuddled by the question of how people could write fic for video games at all, when the story itself can vary from playthrough to playthrough. Then I started writing Undertale, and it made a bit more sense to me, but that's mostly just because, well, you can play that game and watch a few Let's Plays, and browse through the fan wiki, and actually get quite a thorough handle on everything in the game. There are multiple endings, but not that many, and most of them are just variations on each other. And it's entirely possible to see all the dialog in the game, one way or another, without too much difficulty.

But DE is different. So, so, so different. Play with a skill leveled slightly higher or lower, or get a different dice roll on a skill check, or do things in a different order, or say or don't say a particular line of dialog somewhere along the line, and you might learn something entirely new about the world or the main character or the people he meets than you would otherwise. Even with the searchable database of game dialog someone helpfully put together, there's still no way one I'm ever, ever going to see everything there is to see. It's sort of requiring me to get over the feeling I've long had that it's not OK to write fic for something unless you know everything there is to know about the canon, but it feels like maybe it's OK, because everyone else is in more or less the same boat, too. Mind you, there's still the fact that, depending on how you play, the main character can turn out very differently. Honestly, I still don't know how anyone writes fic for this sort of thing, but here I am doing it, anyway.

What's your favourite story this year? Not the most popular, but the one that makes you the happiest.

I'm ridiculously fond of "Unexpected Shelters" for some reason. (It was also surprisingly popular, too, given the size of that particular fandom.) If nothing else, it's the story that made me realize that I'm not irredeemably meh about the "And There Was Only One Bed!" trope. Turns out I just needed the right pairing in the right circumstances to properly appreciate it.

Okay, NOW your most popular story.

By kudos, it's "An American Bibliophile in London Reviews: A.Z. Fell & Co." Which seems a bit odd to me, but then, I have seen it recced a place or two, and it got included in someone's collection of outsider POV fic, too. Actually, every time I've written Good Omens fic from an OC's POV, it's become way more popular than I expected it to. Apparently this is something Good Omens fandom wants!

Story most underappreciated by the universe?

I'm gonna say "Undone." I really like it, but it comes in fourth from the bottom on the sorted-by-kudos list for the year, ahead of two tiny ficlets even I don't much care about and the embarrassing explicit porn, which always gets a skewed hits-to-kudos ration on account of being embarrassing.

It's not surprising, though. Sad endings are not especially popular, and the tastes of Undertale fandom in general are... not something I exactly understand.

Story that could have been better?

I mean, probably all of them, in one way or another. I'm not sure I'm capable of pure and flawless perfection. I will say that I keep feeling like I've fallen down somehow with "Groundhog Day Rules," without knowing quite how, but I suspect that may have less to do with the story itself and more to do a fear that (deliberately or otherwise) I've recycled a bit too much from the canon, and with my worry that what I was capable of writing and what I vaguely suspect my recipient actually wanted just weren't quite the same thing. Which is probably ridiculous, anyway, as they left me a very nice and seemingly sincere comment on it, and quite a few other people seem to have liked it, too.

Sexiest story?

Well, yes, that would have to be "Self-Acceptance." It is to blush.

Saddest story?

"Undone." Which was, after all, written for Summertime Sadness, the whole point of which was sad fic and unhappy endings.

Most fun?

Maybe "Sometimes a Snake Is Just a Snake?" Humorous Aziraphale/Crowley bantering is never not fun.

Story with single sweetest moment?

Hmm, there are a lot of sweet moments scattered through these, I think. "A Time You May Embrace" in particular has several of them, but my favorite, I think, isn't any of the more obvious scenes, but rather the bit where, as they're going upstairs to have their wedding night, Crowley quickly works a little miracle to keep the cake fresh so Aziraphale won't be disappointed to find it stale later. It's just so perfectly, adorably them. At least, I think it is, anyway. So I'm going to go with that one.

Hardest story to write?

Also "A TIme You May Embrace." There was so much of it! And I had to put so much thought into making all of it work.

Easiest/most fun story to write?

It may have been the hardest, but "A TIme You May Embrace" was also fun. There was a scene or two in there that I was definitely chuckling at even as I was writing.

Easiest? Well, some of the tinier ficlets were pretty low-effort, I fear, but that is perhaps not quite the same thing. In one sense, "Unexpected Shelters" may qualify as easiest, as once I got started with it, it just happened sort of effortlessly and very quickly. (An excellent thing in a pinch hit!) Except then I kept constantly coming back to it, over and over, right up until the exchange reveals, tweaking things and changing little details and then changing them back. So that part was less easy.

Most overdue story?

Not overdue, since there's no actual deadline, but I was very late in getting to work on stuff for round 20 of Gen Prompt Bingo, almost entirely because it took me forever to finish the silly blackout bingo for round 19.

Did you take any writing risks this year? What did you learn from them?

I suppose "An Angel, a Demon, a Bench, and Some Ducks" was a writing risk, with its bizarre formatting. And from that I learned how to mess with style sheets on AO3. Which I then promptly forgot again, unfortunately.

This year's theme and the story that demonstrates it most:

It feels like there's probably some sort of interesting theme to be discerned in there somewhere, but damned if I know what it is. I suppose a lot of them could be said to be about love, of some kind or another, but that seems pretty vague and generic, really.

What are your fic writing goals for next year?

To finish my current Gen Prompt Bingo line. I've got two squares left, and an interesting possible idea for what to do with one of them. I'm also definitely going to snag a Trope Bingo card for their next round. I think their prompts often generate more interesting stories for me than Gen Prompt's do. I'm also going to keep doing exchanges. I see Chocolate Box is open for signups now, and their tagset does have a lot of stuff I'm interested in. I considered doing it last year, but kind of gave up in disgust when I couldn't even find where their rules were posted. I'm still annoyed by the fact that they're nowhere to be found on the comm. It's extremely unfriendly to new participants, to put it mildly. But since I've finally been able to figure out basic things like the minimum word count now, I may sign up this year, anyway.

No more blackout bingos, though! Never, ever ever! Hold me to that, people.
This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1021525.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.

New Year, New Exterminations

astrogirl2 — Sun, 02 Jan 2022 03:59:16 GMT

I'm still not used to Doctor Who being on at New Year's instead of Christmas. I'm kind of wondering now whether it'll keep this schedule under RTD2 or go back to the old Christmas specials or do something else entirely.

Anyway!

I enjoyed that one, in a pleasant, refreshingly uncomplicated way. A time loop is a very fitting plot idea for New Year's, somehow, and the whole thing was just good, simple fun. Decent enough story, really great quest characters, and quite a few moments where I laughed out loud. It's not particularly deep or anything, but that may be pretty much what I was wanting out of the show right now, so I'm happy enough.

A few random thoughts:

I spend about the first 20 minutes trying to figure out who that Irish lady was and where I knew her from before I realized that it was Aisling Bea, and I knew her from Taskmaster. She was great on that, and great in this. Just delightful.

I do wonder a bit how, if the time loop was only affecting that building, Sara was able to communicate with her mother elsewhere and have those interactions change (if only slightly) from loop to loop, but as far as elements of time travel plots that don't make logical sense go, that one was fairly minor.

After the Significant Looks following that comment about weirdos with good hearts being keepers, I found myself saying, "Wow, they're not even pretending they're not leaning into the shippiness now, are they?" And, sure enough, by the end of the episode the subtext was fully textual. I must say, I'm not in general a fan of the whole human-companions-pining-after-the-Doctor thing, but of the examples of that we've seen so far, I think this one works the best and is the least annoying. Although I reserve the right to change my mind about that if it goes badly from here, in whatever time we have left. (Although, hmm. It occurs to me that I've been sort of vaguely assuming we'll get a complete change of companions when we change Doctors and showrunners, but I suppose that's not remotely guaranteed, and I haven't heard any announcements on the subject yet one way or another.)

One very tiny uncomfortable note for me: the stuff about how everyone else is partying and Sara is annoyed at being left out, and the Doctor's remark about how it's New Year's Eve and they can find a party somewhere... It all just feels a bit to me like we're awkwardly tiptoeing around an elephant in the room, given what year it is. I know people have, indeed, been having parties, but it's hard to ignore the voice in the back of my brain screaming that they're probably all better off staying away from big gatherings, anyway, and one of them really ought to bring that up. (Although admittedly, this was probably filmed a while ago and it's not exactly reasonable to expect anyone to have anticipated the omicron surge.) In any case, though, this does strike me as a very nice way to deal with filming in the age of covid. You just take five people and some Daleks running around one large-ish building and create something clever and cute around that.
This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1021410.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.

Disco Madness!

astrogirl2 — Sat, 01 Jan 2022 23:53:24 GMT

And, of course, it being my current fannish obsession, I had to write at least a little something for Disco Elysium for Yuletide, so here's a little Yuletide Madness thing I did as a treat.

Title: The Cracks Are Where the Air Comes Through
Fandom: Disco Elysium
Characters/Pairings: I am, more seriously than not, calling this one Harry/Kim/Revachol
Summary: They are hers.
Rating/Warnings: Rated G. No warnings.
Length: ~500 words
Author's Note: A small Yuletide Madness treat for Delgaserasca, who had some great Disco Elysium requests. I'm also using this for a Gen Prompt Bingo card, for the prompts "Deities and Followers." A genius loci is close enough to a deity, right?

The Cracks Are Where the Air Comes Through

This one is hers.

All of them are hers, of course, because she is all of theirs. She is made from them. From their movements and their choices, their tearing down and their building up, their stability and their change. She is in their lungs with every breath, she escapes from their lips with every word. They create her and she creates them, and she loves them all, even those that injure her the most.

But this one is special. This one listens when she speaks. When she touches him, he shivers, the hairs on his neck rising to meet her, his skin quivering under her caress. He does not pull away from her, even when the wind that carries her to him is foul with the scent of rot and the news she has to whisper to him is sad. Even when he fears to know himself, he has never shrunk from knowing her.

He has made a hole for her here in his room. It's left him cold and vulnerable. She brings the sound of an engine through it, and with it raises him back into life, into wakefulness, into her.

The other one has come.

He, too, is hers. He does not hear her voice. His skin does not answer to her touch. His vision of her is blurred and imperfect. But he speaks to her, sometimes, when there is no one but her to listen. He stands on a balcony at night, and breathes her into his lungs on a path of smoke, and tells her, sometimes in so many words, that he loves her, for all her faults. He cannot interpret the reply she gives him, the swirl of air that brushes his cheek or, for an instant, brightens the glow of his cigarette. But he has faith in her anyway. He loves her without belief in the possibility of reciprocation, without the expectation of reward.

Soon, they will be close enough for one breeze to caress them both. She will do what she can for them then, her beloveds. And one day, they will return the favor. She is certain of it. The knowledge circulates endlessly through her streets, carried to her on the cold, stale winds that blow ceaselessly from the Pale.

One day, they will save her.

And perhaps, some day before that, another miracle will happen. Perhaps they will reach for each other, as she reaches now for them. Perhaps their breaths will mingle, and she will be there to join them as they kiss. Perhaps the taste of her will linger on their mouths and they will know that she is with them even when the wind is still, just as they are with each other.

It may or may not come to pass. The Pale has whispered nothing to her of this. But it is no matter.

Revachol, as she has always done, will live in hope.
This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1021112.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.

Welcome To Yuletide! Everything Is Fine.

astrogirl2 — Sat, 01 Jan 2022 23:43:44 GMT

So, Yuletide authors have been revealed now, and I can admit to the things I wrote. First off, my regular assignment! Which marks the second time I've written The Good Place fic for Yuletide.

Title: Groundhog Day Rules
Fandom: The Good Place
Characters/Pairings: Michael, Eleanor, Chidi, Tahani, Jason, Janet, mild Eleanor/Chidi, mild Eleanor/Tahani, mild Eleanor/Jason
Summary: Michael snaps his fingers, and nothing happens.
Rating/Warnings: Rated Teen. Contains a lot of talk about orgies, but no actual orgies. Also contains Eleanor not being the greatest role model when it comes to getting people's consent before kissing them. And spoilers through early S2.
Length: ~3,300 words
Author's Note: Written for ofunaq for Yuletide, although I'm afraid I only used about half of their prompt.

Groundhog Day Rules

"This is the Bad Place!" all of them chorus at once, having apparently gathered in his office specifically for this purpose.

Michael runs a hand through his hair and sighs. He can't even be all that upset, really. Much as he hates to admit it, this time it probably was mostly his fault. "I knew the mimes were too much," he says.

"Aww," says Jason. "Don't be so hard on yourself, homie. My mime was really nice! Once I got her out of that box, anyway." His eyes go unfocused as his mind drifts off in directions even a transcendent being like Michael can't possibly follow. "That was so hard," he says.

"Oh, well," says Michael. "Six hundred and twenty-seventh's time's the charm, right?" He snaps his fingers, wearily.

Nothing happens.

He tries it again. Again, nothing. How is this possible? Six hundred and twenty-five reboots, and it's never not worked before.

He tries the other hand. Nothing. Both hands at once. One after the other. Nothing, nothing, nothing. And now everyone is staring at him.

"I... I can't believe I'm asking this, given everything we just figured out," Eleanor says, "but, dude, are you okay? Do you need..." She trails off, as if grasping desperately for inspiration as to what an immortal being who can't stop snapping his fingers might possibly need. "I dunno. Vodka?"

"No," he says. "I'm fine. I'm just... Enjoying the beat!" He shakes his body a little, coordinates his snapping into a samba rhythm. "See?"

"Oh, yeah," says Jason, smiling brightly. He starts snapping along. It's actually a pretty good accompaniment.

"I'm sorry," says Chidi. "What is happening here?"

"I think possibly he's having a stroke," says Tahani. "Or possibly I'm having a stroke? Wait, can dead people have strokes?"

The neighborhood stubbornly continues not to reboot, and Michael's fingers are getting tired. "Doggone it," he says, giving up. He doesn't know why he was trying to look cool in front of these people, anyway. They're just going to forget this ever happened, as soon as he can get the reboot to actually work.

Jason continues snapping, while making bobbing gestures with his head, apparently trying to encourage him to join back in again.

Yeah, that's not happening. "JANET!" he shouts. Probably he should have done that immediately.

"Hi there!" says Janet.

"Janet," says Michael, with what he thinks is really, really admirable restraint and patience. He snaps his fingers in her direction. "Why is this not working? Did I accidentally change the settings? Do I need to do something else to stop things now? Like, whistle or something?" He tries it. Nothing happens. But then, it's not really a very good whistle. Maybe he needs to whistle better?

"I'm sorry," says Janet with a cheery smile. "All neighborhood administrative systems are currently down for regularly scheduled maintenance."

"Regularly scheduled...? Aww, crap. Is it dot-over-the-i already?"

"That's right," says Janet. "Happy Tuesday!"

"Wow," says Michael. "Time really flies when you're repeating different versions of it six hundred and twenty-six times in a row."

"Wait," says Chidi. His eyes have gone wide. Like, really wide, even for him. "We've really been through this six hundred and twenty-six times?"

"What can I say, Chidi," Michael replies. "You're incredibly stubborn."

Chidi blinks. "No one's ever said that to me before."

Michael decides to ignore him. "Fine, Janet. When will the maintenance be finished?" He waves a hand. "You know, subjectively speaking."

"It should be all done by midnight tonight," says Janet. "Subjectively speaking."

"Right," says Michael. "Okay. And then this version of things should just automatically stop, right? Since I've already sent the signal? And the humans' memories will be reset?"

"Correct!" says Janet. "My reboot function will come online, then, too, so you'll also be free to kill me again." Neither her smile nor her chirpy tone wavers in the slightest. Michael wonders whether her self-preservation programming is offline, too, or if she just doesn't care because he isn't close enough to the reboot button.

"Wait, you're gonna kill the robot lady?" Jason says, his forehead wrinkling.

"Not a robot," Janet and Michael respond simultaneously

"Never mind the robot," says Eleanor. She turns to Janet a little. "No offense."

"None taken!" says Janet. "Also, still not a robot."

"Yeah, yeah," says Eleanor. She sounds excited now. That always makes Michael feel slightly nervous. "But guys, listen. Do you know what this means?"

"Yes," says Tahani. "It means we're in Hell, being tortured endlessly, without even being able to remember it." Suddenly, her eyes grow as wide as Chidi's and her hand flies to her mouth in horror. "Dear God! Have I... Have I been wearing the same clothes over and over and not even known it?"

"It does mean that, yes," says Eleanor. "Well the Hell thing. I don't know about the clothes thing. But you do realize what else it means, right now?"

The humans all stare at her blankly. Well, except for Jason, who probably isn't following the conversation well enough to know when to be confused.

"It means," says Eleanor, "that we are operating under Groundhog Day rules here. Think about it! At midnight, this is whole place is going to be reset. All our memories, erased. The command's already been sent, and there's nothing we can do about it." She looks at Michael. "There is nothing we can do about it, right?"

"Nope," says Michael. "At this point, there's not even anything I could do about it. If I wanted to, that is. Which, of course, I don't. Believe me, I'm counting the minutes until you all forget about this. It's really, really embarrassing."

"Right," says Eleanor. "And when it does, it'll be like none of this ever happened. And that means, whatever we do until then? One hundred percent consequence-free!"

"I mean, I'll remember it," says Michael, but Eleanor doesn't appear to have heard him. Or hasn't chosen to. Or just doesn't care. Either way, it's a little hurtful.

"We can do anything we want," Eleanor says. "Because nothing matters!" She looks positively triumphant about it.

"Actually," says Chidi, "that's a particularly complex and interesting philosophical question. According to--"

Eleanor makes a "Pffffffft" sound. "Listen, man, no disrespect to Aristotle, or Nietzsche or whatever boring dead guy you were about to quote, but none of them hold a candle to Bill Murray. Groundhog Day rules, baby! Let's eat so much shrimp we literally can't move, and then, I dunno, have an orgy or something. Or, no, wait, the other way around. You probably don't want a full stomach for an orgy. Whatever. Point is, it's time to live like there's no forking tomorrow!"

"I don't think that's actually the moral of that movie," says Chidi. "In fact--"

"Yeah, well," says Eleanor, cutting him off, "I really don't see any of us finding true love with Andie MacDowell, do you? I mean, I think it's pretty clear soulmates don't actually exist, right? Michael just made up all that stuff about everybody having a mime." She looks back and forth between Tahani and Jason. "What do you think? What's the first thing you'd want to do, if there would be absolutely no consequences?"

"I don't know," says Tahani. "Punch my sister?" She does look like she's enjoying the thought, but also like she feels weird about enjoying it.

"Oooh!" says Jason. "I wanna plant a tree!"

They all look at him for a moment.

"I... I genuinely can't tell whether that was idiotic or deeply profound," says Chidi.

"Fork it," says Eleanor. "Let's do the orgy. You guys up for an orgy?" She rubs her hands together excitedly. "Come on, it'll be amazing!"

"Yeah," says Chidi. "Think I'm gonna pass on the orgy."

"Really?" says Eleanor. "Come on, man. How often does a total nerd like you get a shot at something like this?" She gestures at her body and does a little shimmy. Do humans really find that sort of thing appealing?

"I don't know!" says Chidi. "Someone keeps stealing my memories!"

Eleanor lets out a little frustrated groan. Then she steps towards Chidi, reaches out to tilt his chin towards her in one swift motion, and plants a small, and, in Michael's opinion, surprisingly restrained kiss on his lips.

The look on Chidi's face has Michael wondering, now, about that question of whether dead people can have strokes. But before Chidi's brain comes back online sufficiently for him to move or speak again, Eleanor is already turning to Tahani and planting a kiss on her, too.

Tahani makes an interesting squeaking noise, pulls away for a moment, looks Eleanor in the eye, says, "Oh, fine, why not?" and dives back into the kiss.

Goodness. They're... they're really going at it.

They don't break apart until Jason taps Eleanor on the shoulder, giving her a big, bright expectant smile when she turns to him. He gets a kiss, too. It looks pretty sloppy to Michael, but they seem to be enjoying it.

Wait. Oh, crap. If she's kissing everybody, does that mean Michael's next? What should he do? He's never kissed a human before. Or a demon. Or a Janet. Or... what does that leave? Animals? Wait, does it count if a dog licks you? What if it's a fake dog created by Janet? No, that's probably not even relevant. She's not going to lick him. Is she? Humans do all kinds of weird stuff with their tongues...

He's still trying to come up with a cool, above-it-all response for when she tries it on him when Eleanor grabs Chidi by one elbow and Tahani by another and pulls both of them, unresisting, out the door of Michael's office, with Jason trailing behind.

"Wait," he says, at their retreating backs. It comes out limp and barely audible.

The door closes behind them.

"Fine," he says. "I didn't want to go to your stupid orgy, anyway." Which is true.

But... what is he supposed to do now?

No, no. Stupid question. He knows what to do now, obviously. He should take advantage of the extra time to come up with something new for the next attempt. Something really good.

He sits down at his tape recorder, picks up the microphone, and presses the record button, waiting for inspiration to begin flowing forth. Think, think. What has he learned from this attempt? Well, that mimes are a bad idea, obviously. Also that Eleanor, left to her own devices, may base entirely too much of her personal philosophy on a flawed understanding of 90s movies. Neither of which is all that surprising. Or especially useful, unless he wants to go with a Titanic theme next time. He can't think up any really good punny restaurant names for that, though, so probably not.

Eventually he realizes that he's been staring at the wall pondering things -- well, mostly pondering restaurant names, if he's honest -- for over an hour, while the tape recorder has dutifully recorded nothing at all.

He sighs, turns it off, stands, and looks around the room for inspiration.

Janet is long gone, no doubt blipped off to do catering for the humans' orgy. What do you even need for a human orgy? He has the vague sense that masks are involved, somehow, but he has no idea why.

Stupid humans. Are they even sparing a thought for him, and his difficulties, and the terrible case of Architect's Block he's suffering? He bets they aren't. Stupid humans and their... masks.

He picks up his guitar and tries to distract himself that way, but all the lyrics he comes up with turn out to be about mimes and inconvenient maintenance schedules and not being invited to things, and that's really not the vibe he's going for with "The Purple Train to Goovy City."

He tries to go back to planning. Tries pacing. Tries solitaire. Tries having a very one-sided conversation with his picture of Doug Forcett. But he still can't seem to settle on anything.

"Janet!"

"Hi, there!"

"Janet, show me the humans. I want to see what they're doing."

"Okey-dokey!" Janet produces what looks like a CRT television on his desk. The screen flickers into life and brings up an image of Eleanor's living room.

Michael, who, despite this boredom- and desperation-fueled request still isn't at all sure how he feels about spying on human orgies, claps his hands over his eyes and peeks through his fingers. It's hard to tell exactly what they're all doing like this, but Michael does note a distinct lack of the writhing and flailing he imagines you get at orgies. Not to mention the smoke and sizzling of acid as it dissolves flesh, but that's probably just fire squid orgies.

He removes his hands from his eyes, sits down, and stares at the TV.

It doesn't quite look like an orgy. He's pretty sure. The humans are all sort of puppy-piled up together, it's true. And a few items of clothing have come off. Chidi is shirtless, which is always a rather startling sight, and Eleanor's feet are bare. Her toenails are painted pink.

They're definitely not doing any squishy human sex things, though. Instead, they're cuddled up together like they're expecting the contact to bring them some kind of comfort. Or maybe they've just gotten distracted by a different kind of comfort. They do all look distinctly glassy-eyed, and Michael counts at least nine different varieties of empty alcohol containers scattered around them.

"I've never told anyone that before," Eleanor is saying. "Ever."

Michael wonders what it is she's just said. He could probably get Janet to rewind the image for him and find out. It could be a useful clue for torturing her more effectively, and he desperately needs all the ideas he can get right now.

He doesn't, though. He's not really sure why not.

"Right," Eleanor says. "Now it's somebody's else's turn. "Anyone got a secret you've always wanted to get off your chest, but couldn't tell anyone who'd actually remember it? Now's your chance."

No one says anything.

Eleanor shakes her head. "Jason," she says. "What about you? You've got to have some fun secrets, right?"

"Oh, yeah," says Jason, from where he's sitting half in Tahani's lap. "Like..." His voice drops to a whisper. "I'm not actually a monk."

"Yeah, buddy," says Eleanor. "We kinda figured that when you lost that not-talking contest with the mime. What else you got? Something you've never said to anyone. You know, something from the heart." She thumps a fist against her chest, directly above a roughly heart-shaped cocktail sauce stain on her shirt.

He looks thoughtful for a moment. "I sometimes wish I had a mom," he says, almost matter-of-factly.

That gets little "awws" from all of them.

Eleanor follows hers up with a sigh," Yeah, me too," she says, even though Michael knows for a fact she had a mother her entire life. In a literal sense, anyway.

"Oh," says Jason. "And once, I spray-painted 'Bortles rules!' on the public library. Only..." His face becomes strangely melancholy. Haunted even. "Only I spelled 'Bortles' wrong. I left out the R." He shrugs. His voice becomes normal again, or at least normal for Jason. "Probably that's why I ended up in Hell."

"I really don't think that's it, buddy," says Eleanor.

"Thanks," says Jason. "That's really nice of you to say."

Eleanor tilts her head to look at Tahani, whose own head is resting on Eleanor's shoulder now. Given the height difference between them, it looks pretty uncomfortable. "Your turn," she says.

Tahani frowns a little. "I don't know," she says

"Come on," says Eleanor. "I know you have one. Everybody does. Spill it, girlfriend. That dress you're wearing is actually some kind of knockoff, isn't it?"

"No!" Tahani straightens up, looking affronted. "And I... I don't have any secrets."

Eleanor looks at her, dubiously. So does Chidi, from where he sits on the other side of Eleanor, his arm slung across her waist. Jason... looks at a distracting spot on the carpet.

"Come on," says Eleanor. "You can tell us. Literally none of this actually matters."

"I don't!" says Tahani, her words slurring a little. "A secret would be just one thing. And it's..." She gestures broadly with one arm, nearly hitting Jason in the nose. "Well, it's just everything, isn't it? All the... everything. All the time. Inside. Everything that's not bloody perfect, no matter how hard I try, and try..." She lets her head loll back, resting it against the wall now. "And try," she concludes.

Eleanor hands her a half-empty margarita glass. Tahani downs what remains of the drink in one long, inelegant gulp.

"Yeah," says Chidi. He peers across Eleanor, at Tahani. "I know what you mean, sort of. It's like... You know how I get stomachaches when I have to make a decision."

"Oh, yeah," says Eleanor.

"Well, I don't just get stomachaches. I have them. Like, all the time. Every moment of my life, there's that... that wrenching feeling that whatever I do, however I decide to live, it's probably going to be wrong."

"I don't think that's really a secret, man," says Eleanor, but she says it gently, and rests a hand lightly on his knee. "Believe me, we can all pretty much tell."

"The thing is," Chidi says. "The thing is, all those times I worried about doing the wrong thing... I was right, wasn't I? About being wrong. I must have been, because there's a reason I'm here, and it's not because I misspelled 'Bortles.' I think... I think I may be looking forward to being reset, or rebooted, or whatever it is. So I don't have to know that anymore. Philosophically, I don't think I can justify that feeling, but..."

Eleanor just turns and hugs him. He hugs her back, and then the other two are hugging, everyone is hugging, and everyone is crying, and Michael feels the strange, stupid urge to cry, or hug, or something, himself, as if he, too, has that ridiculous human secret inside him, that hidden, aching need to feel... what? Worthy? Lovable? Good?

He shuts off the TV. That was way worse than an orgy. Even the fire squid kind.

He opens his desk drawer and pulls out his papers. Plans for the neighborhood, scribbled notes outlining innovative new tortures, strategies for breaking the humans once and for all. He should go over them again. He needs to come up with good ideas. Everything he cares about is depending on it.

Instead he just stares at it all, as time slips steadily along and the edge of the dot grows nearer and nearer.

Ah, to hell with it. Maybe he'll put it all away, just this once. Give them one reboot off. No torture, no manipulation. Just... let them enjoy themselves for a bit. Maybe even let them have some actual ice cream instead of frozen yogurt. He could use a rest, himself. A little vacation, to let himself come back to it fresh next time. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good idea.

And then, without any noise or warning or fuss, Michael feels the neighborhood around him freeze, as the Beremy twists itself around and Time falls softly into the downstroke of the "i."

Well, that's it, then. Attempt #626, over and done with, as if it never happened. Except for him, of course. Sitting here, still remembering everything.

Huh. Does that make him Bill Murray in this scenario? What does that even mean? It feels as if it should mean something.

Never mind. He'll probably figure it out later.

For now, Michael shrugs, and leans back in his chair, and tries to think of a suitable name for a really good ice cream shop.
This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1020752.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.

December Book Log

astrogirl2 — Fri, 31 Dec 2021 09:57:52 GMT

Welp, I am forced at this point to admit that I am not going to finish the interminable chunkster of a novel I'm currently making my way through before the year ends, so I fear my 2021 reading list ends with a little bit of an anti-climactic whimper, in the form of the sparsest month of book-reading (or at least book-finishing) for me in recent memory.

Still, here's what it looks like:

110. The Adventurists by Richard Butner

A collection of short stories all with a fantastic or slightly surreal feel to them. Which is something I often like, but most of these, despite the obvious recurring theme of people returning to places where they grew up, just didn't feel like they had any real point to them. Lots of buildup with very little payoff, emotional or otherwise. I honestly wouldn't be remotely surprised to learn that the author just built them all around random elements and images from his dreams, although the prose itself is clear and matter-of-fact and anything but dreamlike. The overall result is plenty of stuff that's perfectly readable and mildly interesting but seldom very satisfying.

Rating: 3/5

(Note: This was a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book.)

111. The Circle by Dave Eggers

A dystopian satire (although at times it feels barely satirical) about social media and tech companies, featuring a corporation called The Circle, which is sort of like Google, Facebook, and Twitter all rolled into one and then made even more cult-like. The folks at The Circle not only fail to value privacy and cheerfully subordinate it to the desires of capitalism, they actually regard it as something akin to a moral evil. And they see it as their mission to make the world a better place.

It's a good premise, very Black Mirror-ish, and I appreciate the way Eggers carefully avoids straw-manning his targets (even to the extent of being willing to stipulate to some of the positive effects of the Circle's approach that I really don't personally find particularly creditable). But I'm afraid I never liked it anywhere near as much as I wanted to. The whole thing just feels entirely too heavy-handed. Certainly we did not need 400 pages to get the point, and I can't help thinking that it would have been far, far more effective if cut down to the length of a novella.

Rating: 3/5

112. The Princess Diarist by Carrie Fisher

Carrie Fisher talks about being cast in Star Wars, the affair she had with Harrison Ford while filming (which she had previously spend decades not talking about), and the awkward legacy of fame that the movies left her with. She also includes excerpts from diaries she kept at the time, which she'd recently rediscovered, most of which center on her relationship with Ford and the turmoil it caused her.

Fisher's writing is a bit unpolished, often kind of rambly, and sometimes a little too self-conscious, but there is real charm and honestness to it, too. The diaries contain some painfully sharp writing, and some poetry that ranges from surprisingly good to, well, less so. And they present a picture of a very, very young woman wrestling with her own insecurities and her feelings for a married man who never seemed to express any kind of feelings of his own. Honestly, I can't exactly say I enjoyed reading them, just because they made me feel far too much like a voyeur, emotional and otherwise, even though she never goes into any of the gory sexual details.

Rating: 3.5/5

113. Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente

Humanity's first contact, unexpectedly, comes in the form of fish-flamingo creatures (or, more accurately, lots of projections of the same fish-flamingo creature) who have come to invite Earth to participate in the intergalactic version of Eurovision. They've also picked out our contestants: the remaining two-thirds of has-been glam rock group Decibel Jones and the Absolute Zeros, who are no longer even speaking to each other. And they'd really better not come in last, or our species will be deemed to have failed to prove its sentience and be exterminated.

This was a lot of fun. The plot's pretty thin, with a somewhat rushed-feeling ending and probably as much time spent on describing the various weird aliens and their history as on advancing the story. But I honestly don't think I care very much. The various weird aliens and their history are interesting, in a way that's half genuinely creative SF worldbuilding and half utter ridiculousness, blended together surprisingly seamlessly. There's a lot of laughs, some sardonic philosophy, and a bit of real heart, and ultimately it does a decent job of scratching that itch left behind by Douglas Adams.

Rating: 4/5

114. A Lost Lady by Willa Cather

This short novel was published in 1923, but it begins several decades earlier, in the American West. The lady of the title is Mrs. Forrester, the wife of a man who amassed considerable wealth in the railroad business, but who, in the course of the story, finds himself in what such folks might call "reduced circumstances." It's told from the point of view of a young friend of the family, who idolizes her as having all the virtues considered most fitting to a woman of her social class: beauty and charm and a certain air of purity. But, through his eyes, we also see tiny glimpses of the woman behind that exterior, someone flawed, and much more complicated, and sadder.

I'm really impressed by Willa Cather's ability to make a character like Marian Forrester feel so much like a real, complex person in such a surprisingly minimalist way. Everything about her is more suggested than explored, and it doesn't feel like that should work remotely as well as it does.

This is also an interesting glimpse into a small piece of American history. A history, it must be said, that invites judgment from 21st-century readers with its causal racism, its ingrained classism, and its musings on the whole Manifest Destiny thing as a lovely, idealistic dream, albeit one now giving way to a sort of degraded banality. Such things can sometimes be uncomfortable to read, but in this case I felt mostly a sort of anthropological fascination with it all.

Rating: 4/5

115. Brainiac: Adventures in the Curious, Competitive, Compulsive World of Trivia Buffs by Ken Jennings

Ken Jennings talks about his experiences being on Jeopardy! (over and over and over...) and what his life was like before, during and after his unprecedented run of wins. Interspersed with that, he talks about trivia: its history as a pastime, why it's interesting and whether it's worthwhile, and what kind of person turns that pastime into a full-blown obsession. (Jennings himself honestly seems to have been born to it. Some of the stories about what he was like even as a small child do kind of make me feel much better about the fact that I haven't won seventy-four games of Jeopardy! in a row. I like trivia, but I think I'm lacking some gene for it that this guy was born with.) He also talks a lot about particular trivia contests and events, including college bowl quizzes, rigged 1950s game shows, and a weird town in Wisconsin where the biggest event of the year is an insanely nitpicky fifty-four hour trivia event.

I found some of the trivia-obsessed people and places he visits a lot more interesting than others, but overall this was an entertaining read, and I love the way he peppers the book with trivia questions to challenge the reader in a way that makes them part of the narrative. And his descriptions of his Jeopardy! career are especially interesting, and much more exciting than I might have expected from the fact that I already knew perfectly well how the whole thing went.

Rating: 4/5
This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1020487.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.

Let The End-Of-The-Year Fic Memes Begin!

astrogirl2 — Fri, 31 Dec 2021 03:22:00 GMT

I've been working on the regular year-end fic roundup meme, but I don't want to post that one until after Yuletide reveals, so I can actually include all of the year's fic in it.

So, in the meantime, let's instead to this one, which I am also recycling from last year:

Share the first line for the first fic of each month (for the past year, that is).

My Results:

January: It starts out not meaning much of anything. ("The Process, the Expression, and the State", Good Omens)

February: The wiring under the TARDIS console sparks, and the Doctor jerks her hand away with a little hiss of pain. ("...and round she goes...", Doctor Who)

March: It's one of those evenings where they've had just enough to drink that the conversation seems to take on a life of its own, words spilling out between them without bothering to check in with their conscious minds first, and Aziraphale would like to think that's why he phrases it the way he does. ("A Bright Dividing Line", Good Omens)

April: Suddenly, he's in. ("The Heart That Keeps Us All Alive", The Umbrella Academy)

May: From the blog, "An American Bibliophile in London": ("An American Bibliophile in London Reviews: A.Z. Fell & Co.", Good Omens)

June: ""Wouldn't have thought this was your kind of thing," Crowley says, as they watch the parade winding its exuberant way through the streets. ("Pride, No Fall", Good Omens)

July: Nothing!

August: You are waking up. ("Fail Until You're Good Enough at It That It Starts to Look Like Hope", Disco Elysium)

September: You can do this, logic tells you. ("Detective, Interrogate Thyself", Disco Elysium)

October: They shouldn't be here, like this, together in the same place.("Self-Acceptance (The Hey, That's One Way to Address an Identity Crisis Remix)", Doctor Who)

November: The Doctor stands before the old country house, the sound of Bessie's cooling engine ticking gently at his back, and rubs his chin thoughtfully. ("In Common", Doctor Who)

December: You stagger away from your new best friends, sailing off into the Tequila Sunset, or maybe just looking for a place to take a leak. ("One More Thing Chewing on Your Heart", Disco Elysium)

"An American Bibliophile in London" is in kind of a weird format, so maybe you could argue that the actual first line, after the header stuff, is, instead: I know a number of you were waiting for me to get around to reviewing this one, after some of the things I've said about it in passing before.

In any case, this is a rather motley collection of first lines, and perhaps not a terribly inspired one. I'm not sure there's much to be said about finding patterns in them, other than that many or most of them, I note with at least some tiny amount of satisfaction, do seem to be formulated in such as way as to hopefully make you want to read the next sentence, if only to find out what was going on in the first one.

This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1020248.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.

Happy Sigh

astrogirl2 — Sun, 26 Dec 2021 04:00:04 GMT

This is just me popping in very briefly to burble happily about the fact that I got not one but two Disco Elysium fics for Yuletide, and they are both freaking fantastic and so utterly, perfectly my kind of thing. I feel all warm and fuzzy and smiley about it!

Man. Every year I kind of think I might be about done with Yuletide now. I'm not necessarily into enough small fandoms to feel confident making offers, I don't love the "and" matching, I've had frustrating instances in the past of being assigned to people who don't seem to quite get how things work, yadda, yadda... But, aww, how can I abandon it forever when it treats me so nicely?

I do still wish I felt nearly as good about the fic I wrote, but it's at least gotten some nice comments, so clearly it's not, like, universally hated or anything. Hey, I'll take it! This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1020042.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.

Happy (Or Sad, Or Deliciously Angsty) Gauda Prime Day!

astrogirl2 — Tue, 21 Dec 2021 19:00:10 GMT

At least two people on my friendslist (or whatever it's called on DW) today have pointed out that it is not only Guada Prime Day, but the 40th Gauda Prime day. I am constantly amused, and surprised, and delighted that this is a date that remains marked in fannish memory even now.

And for those who have no idea what Gauda Prime Day means, I will point out that Blake's 7 is currently available on Britbox, and I am currently available to explain at length why you should watch it. This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1019688.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.

An End-Of-The-Year Fannish Memey Thingy

astrogirl2 — Tue, 21 Dec 2021 05:21:46 GMT

It's been ages and ages since I did this particular year-end meme. I'm not sure why. But this year, I return to it!

1. Your main fandom this year?

Well, for much of the year it was still Good Omens. Not, I hasten to add, that I have gone off Good Omens since then. Perish the thought! But I do think my brain may be kind of switching over into some sort of waiting-for-season-2 fannish holding pattern now.

And then somewhere in the last few months Disco Elysium ate my brain, which is... I don't know. Weird? Confusing? I mean, my previous Undertale obsession notwithstanding, I barely even play video games! And I am, generally speaking really, really not good at them. Although with Disco Elysium, you can, in fact, be a massive, clueless fuck-up of a gamer, and it will only enhance your experience, since failure is such a fundamental part of it all. Also it requires no hand-eye coordination, only lots of reading, which does make it 100% my kind of game. Anyway, the whole thing really is a billion different kinds of awesome. I genuinely don't know how anybody is remotely able to write fic for something this changeable and interactive and complicated, though, despite the fact that I've somehow done it multiple times myself.

2. Your favorite film watched this year?

I seem to have hardly watched any movies at all this year. Well, the most memorable one (as well as the only one I saw in the theater) was Dune, although, while visually impressive and kind of interesting, it honestly didn't excite me all that much. What can I say? I have mixed feelings about the book, too. Maybe I don't really have a favorite film from this year? If I have to pick one, gun to my head, from among my meagre options, l guess I might say Behind the Curve. It's a documentary about Flat Earthers, and was definitely worth watching.

3. Your favorite book read this year?

Picking one is never, ever possible! Well, since I give all the books I read little reviews and mostly meaningless ratings I can look over the results from the year and note that there are four books I gave a full five stars to: The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories by Angela Carter, The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green, There There by Tommy Orange, and Friday Black by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah. Of course, the year's not quite over yet, but I'd be surprised if I read another five-star book by the end of the year.

Mind you, highest-rated and favorite aren't exactly the same thing, and there are some 4.5 star books are are pretty good contenders for favorite. Piranesi, maybe, or Circe, or Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory, or... Well, no, I should probably stop there.

4. Your favorite TV show of the year?

The Umbrella Academy, which I had an absolutely delightful time binging towards the beginning of the year. When is there going to be more of that?

5. Your best new fandom discovery of the year?

Disco Elysium again! And The Umbrella Academy should probably get an honorable mention, even if it didn't dominate my fannish brain in anywhere near the same way.

6. Your biggest fandom disappointment?

Honestly, probably learning that Jodie Whittaker was leaving Doctor Who along with Chris Chibnall. I was really hoping we'd get to see what another showrunner might do with her.

7. Your TV boyfriend of the year?

Does it have to be a TV boyfriend? Can I have a video game boyfriend? Because I feel like Kim Kitsuragi and I really bonded while I was being his insane, smelly alcoholic partner. Also it is scientifically impossible not to fall in love with the guy.

8. Your TV girlfriend of the year?

I don't know. Perhaps I'd like for it to be the Doctor, despite any differences Doctor Who and I might have these days.

9. Your biggest squee moment of the year?

Well, it has to be the announcement of Good Omens season 2, doesn't it? I mean, what else could possibly compare?

Biggest squee moment that was part of a work of fiction and not an announcement about a work of fiction, though, would have to be the moment in Disco Elysium when I got Kim to dance with me. And then I DANCED SO HARD I SAW GOD. Well, OK, that second part is maybe an eeensy bit of an exaggeration, but still! That was just a moment of such pure and utter joy for me. A joy that, in context, also felt incredibly meaningful.

10. The most missed of your old fandoms?

I've been feeling nostalgic for Farscape again lately. But that's not all that unusual.

11. The fandom you haven't tried yet, but want to?

There are a million of them. A million. There are just not enough hours in a day to watch all of the things that I'm interested in. Ah, if only my teenage self and her single-digit number of crappy TV channels could see me now, drowning in a sea of amazing viewing choices. She'd be sooooo jealous. And here I am, just feeling overwhelmed all the time, and also miffed about how much stuff is only available on streaming services I don't want to subscribe to.
This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1019545.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.

Just An Ordinary Average Fic Meme

astrogirl2 — Sun, 19 Dec 2021 08:18:32 GMT

Here's a ficcy meme stolen from (and, indeed, originated by) thisbluespirit. I did this one before, actually, but somehow it turns out that that was three years ago, and none of the answers are the same now. It's an interestingly different one, because it picks out not your most kudosed fics, or whatever, but your supposedly most average ones.

I calculated the averages, by the way, by taking the totals listed on my AO3 stats page and dividing them by the number of fics to give the mean. Which arguably isn't the ideal criterion for "most average" anything, as for all of these metrics there were a few massive outliers dragging the total up. But, eh, who cares. It works as a fun way to pick out a few of your midrange fics and amuse yourself by imagining the sampling says something about you, and, really, what more can one ask?

Average word count: 2,059
Average hits count: 510
Average Kudos count: 58 (a number that surprised me so much I had to double-check it)
Average no. of comment threads: 5
Average no. of Bookmarks: 12

Work(s) closest to the average word count:

"Zoosemiotics" (Blake's 7) at 2,055 words. A very old one, this. It's a Cally-centric story that was apparently written for a B7-specific exchange on Livejournal that I barely remember doing. Having just read over it again, I think it holds up pretty well, though.

Work(s) closest to the average hit count:

"Only Here to Do the Job" (Good Omens TV) at 516 hits. This one's about Crowley and Warlock, and I wrote it in 2020 for one of those gazillion bingo cards I've done.

Work(s) closest to the average no of comments (/+ kudos if too many):

So, this one is kind of messy, as I realized after I'd found these five stories with five comments each that that stats page shows comment threads, and I was sorting by total comments. And maybe I could have somehow found which ones had five comment threads instead or something, but that would have been a lot of work. Which I was definitely not up for doing, especially as while I was trying to do this stuff, my mother called and kept me on the phone for about three hours trying unsuccessfully to do tech support for her and thoroughly fried my brain. So screw it. Stories with five comments, it is. I'd say they're average enough, anyway.

"It's Always Awkward Shopping with Your Dad" (Discworld). A drabble featuring Death and Ysabell, which served as another bingo fill.

"Inner Voices" (Farscape) A short character piece featuring Stark and Crichton. Well, kind of featuring Crichton, anyway. Apparently I wrote this for Yuletide's New Years Resolution collection in 2004? I have no idea why.

"The Light From the End of the Tunnel, Reflecting Into the Dark" (Once Upon a Time) A Regina-centric story I wrote as a pinch hit for the time travel-themed exhcange Past Imperfect, Future Unknown in 2019.

"Don't Call It a Void" (Undertale) A weird little meta-ish thing featuring W.D. Gaster, whoever the hell he actually is. This one was another bingo fill.

"Brain Man" (Farscape/Futurama) A crossover written a million years ago for the late, great Multiverse exchange. Featuring Farscape's Harvey, various members of the Planet Express crew, and some gratuitous Stargate references.

Work(s) closest to the average no of bookmark (/+ bookmarks):

Five stories with twleve bookmarks each:

"Still Just Us (The Two Adrift Remix)" (Torchwood/Doctor Who) A remix of "How to Save a Man from Drowning" by Poetry, featuring Jack Harkness and the ganger Doctor from "The Almost People"/"The Rebel Flesh." Written for a Doctor Who-specific remix exchange in 2014, apparently.

"However We Arrived Here, We Are Home" (Good Omens TV) An Aziraphale/Crowley thing I still can't help worrying is just a smidge too sappy. Written as yet another bingo fill.

"A Stranger in the City" (Torchwood/Star Trek: TOS) Another old Multiverse crossover, in which Jack Harkness finds himself in the middle of the TOS episode "The City on the Edge of Forever." I still can't believe I had the audacity to do that. Or that it worked.

"Just Another Hero" (Mad Max movies) Another bingo card fill, and an odd one-shot fandom I never would have expected to write anything for.

"Fail Until You're Good Enough at It That It Starts to Look Like Hope" (Disco Elysium) The first of my current run of Disco Elysium fics, featuring Harry Du Bois/Kim Kitsuragi.

Work(s) closest to the average no of kudos (/+ bookmarks):

"Time in a Bottle" (Sapphire & Steel) My "what happened to Sapphire and Steel after the last episode" fic, written for Yuletide 2011.

So, does all of that in fact say anything about me? Oh, who knows. I would say that's it's a reasonably good sampler of my writing over the years. It does at least hit most of my major fandoms, although it also showcases some much rarer ones, and the dual appearance of Torchwood is probably extremely misleading. And while it's hardly the set of stories I'd have picked out for the purpose, if you read 'em all you'd probably come away from the experience with a pretty good feel for what to expect from me as a fic writer in general. (And also with a lot of confusion, probably, unless you happened to know all those fandoms. God only knows what some of it might look like to a complete outsider.)
This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1019325.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.

A Dispatch From My Weird Fannish Brain

astrogirl2 — Mon, 13 Dec 2021 01:00:15 GMT

OK, I mentioned a while back that I might at some point make a post reflecting on some things I've noticed about patterns in my fannishness, and since I find that I keep thinking about this, and since that last little story I posted illustrates the dynamic in question so well it's kind of amusing me, I figured now might be the time. I mean, what the heck. I never feel like I post enough meta or fannish rambling stuff here these days, anyway. Certainly not compared to the amount of that stuff that's in my brain.

So, right, here we go... There is something I've realized recently, much to my shock, about patterns in my shipping preferences in recent years. (And not just the fact that my preferences seem to be a lot more shippy in general than they once were, a change I still don't remotely understand.)

The pattern is something like this: You've got one character who is just some kind of... chaos. Someone who often behaves strangely, anyway, and doesn't exactly conform to expectations. Who does some odd shit, maybe because they don't care much about social convention or because they don't understand it, maybe because they have a bizarre sense of humor or genuine mental/emotional issues, or maybe all of the above. And then you've got the other one, the person who is much more proper. Dignified, even. Who has a role in the world and a strong sense of how they should fulfill it. Who might often want to make it very clear that they do not have time for whatever kind of nonsense is in front of them. But who also, perhaps not very deeply buried, has their own streak of wildness, unconventionality, ridiculous humor, or rebellion.

This is Crowley and Aziraphale, of course. It's Disco Elysium's Harry and Kim to a freaking T. It's Sans and Toriel. It's Isaac and Claire from The Orville. (Claire, admittedly, seems to have less of a weird streak than the others, but she was still willing to date a weird alien robot, so, you know.) And this dynamic is hardly entirely new for me, because it's also Stark and Zhaan from back in the Farscapean day.

Honestly, the only exceptions I can think of, among ships I've been seriously invested in in maybe the last decade or so, are Doctor Who ships actually involving the Doctor. Doctor/Master, Doctor/River, Doctor/TARDIS. Because those are all chaos/chaos instead, really. Although maybe you could even argue that Doctor/Master is a similar sort of dynamic, just with everything slid way down to the very end of the chaos scale? I dunno.

I genuinely don't know what any of this means, really. All I know is that I want all of these wonderful odd couple pairings to live happily ever after, even the ones that are already dead or broken up. Except for Doctor/Master, obviously. That one is and always should be a trainwreck. (And, of course, wanting the others to live happily ever after doesn't remotely mean that I don't also want tragic angst for them, too. I mean, I'm always a sucker for some well-done tragic angst.)

Anyway, yeah, I do know this sounds a lot like Ye Olde Manic Pixie Dreamgirl sort of thing, but I don't think that's quite it. Maybe in large part because all of those chaos agents are (if, in at least a couple of cases, only nominally) male. But also, perhaps, because your standard manic pixie doesn't usually seem to get much out of the relationship beyond the satisfaction of a job whimsically and chaotically done. Whereas I think all these loveable weirdos can and do get just as much from their more straight-edged counterparts. Hell, for several of them, it's a lot easier to see what they get out of it.

So, there ya go. Weird fannish patterns. And that's without even getting into the weird character patterns I've been noticing lately, in the context of considering who to write for A Ficathon Goes Into a Bar. Which totally hit me a little while back, when I started wondering when the next round of Into a Bar might be, because unless Disco Elysium stops eating my brain by then, I really want to do Harry du Bois for that next time. Hmm, I said to myself, while considering this, wait, who did I do last time? Oh, yeah! It was Klaus Hargreeves.

And I stopped and thought about that for a moment, and realized that apparently my criteria for IaB-worthy characters now is, very specifically: weird emotionally traumatized chaotic bisexual alcoholic drug-abuser with psychic abilities, no social boundaries, a willingness to sport some very interesting facial hair, and a (past or present) job fighting crime, who may possibly be found warning people about the apocalypse, talking to a dead guy, or attempting to start a cult of personality, and who lives in a universe that has a lot of resemblance to ours but is much weirder and has a level of technology one can never quite get a handle on. (And, OK, fine, some of those list items do kind need asterisks next to them, but STILL.)

What makes this even funnier is that it comes on the heels of my previous two Into a Bar character choices, both of which feature an ancient immortal supernatural entity whose ordained purpose is to be an agent of a stultifyingly bureaucratic cosmic scheme that totally dicks over over humanity, but who really deeply loves human stuff, and who eventually just can't do his job anymore and chooses humanity and the power of loving friendship and meddling in the cosmic plan instead, oh and also he wears bow ties and is incredibly enthusiastic about his terrible stage magic act, which he insists on doing the hard way even though he could do actual magic if he wanted to. So... yeah.

I dunno, I think all I can do with that is laugh. And then keep on going where my weird fannish heart leads me, ridiculously specific tastes and all... This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1019070.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.

And Another Bingo Fic

astrogirl2 — Wed, 08 Dec 2021 04:15:40 GMT

Title: Something Scarred, and Strangely Dressed, and Yours
Fandom: Disco Elysium
Characters/Pairings: Harry du Bois/Kim Kitsuragi, the Kineema
Summary: Harry has a surprise for Kim, in the garage.
Rating/Warnings: Rated G. Bizarrely, it's a Disco Elysium story with no warnings whatsoever.
Length: ~1,200 words
Author's Note:Written for Gen Prompt Bingo, for the prompt "beautiful." Which is a bit tenuous, maybe, but I think it does work for this.

Something Scarred, and Strangely Dressed, and Yours

"Kim! You're here!"

Harry comes bounding up to him the instant Kim enters the precinct door. He seems quite excited about something. Indeed, he's practically quivering. Kim wonders if perhaps he ought to be nervous. "Good morning, detective," he says, in a tone of carefully calibrated calm.

"I've got a surprise for you, Kim! It's in the garage. Come on!" He doesn't grab Kim's arm and pull him along – a wise choice on his part – but manages to give off the impression that he would very much like to.

"A surprise?" Kim says, a little skeptically. Coming from Harry, an exciting surprise could just as easily be anything from the solution to a decades-old cold case to a particularly hideous new pair of pants. Or even... "Is it a cryptid?" he asks, noting with a sort of detached amusement that he half-expects the answer to be yes.

"Even better!" says Harry, and with that, they're running – of course running, always running – in the direction of the repurposed silk mill's awkwardly grafted-on garage.

"Better than a cryptid?" Kim says, matching his pace. "Impressive."

"I know!"

Harry slows to a walk as they enter the mildew- and oil-scented interior of the garage. "Over here," he says, leading Kim past the work benches and Jean's shamefully poorly maintained Coupris 40. "Ta da!" he calls out, throwing his arms wide.

Kim stops.

And stands.

And stares.

In front of him is a... No. Not a Coupris Kineema. The Coupris Kineema. His Kineema. Even if it was never legally his.

He would know this machine anywhere. The angle of the mirrors, positioned to be forgiving of a driver with defective eyesight. The reupholstered seats, their color noticeably different from factory-issue and, in Kim's opinion, a great improvement. The many still-discernible places where he's had to tend to damage sustained in the line of duty, and malicious vandalism, and holes from bullets that might just as easily have found Kim's body instead.

Harry is humming to himself, happily.

Kim should say something. You would think Harry would have stopped finding ways to render him speechless by now. "I... Harry. How did you...?" He drags his eyes off the motor carriage and turns towards Harry. "Wait. You didn't steal it, did you?"

"Nope," says Harry, unbothered by the question. "Interdepartmental equipment transfer. We were down a vehicle after..." He waves a hand, sheepishly. "...you know. And the 57th had four other carriages when we only had three, and since we are the bigger precinct." He shrugs. It's not a modest shrug. He looks quite pleased with himself. "I had a word with Pryce about it, talked to some people who talked to some people... and here we are!"

It cannot have been that easy. Kim imagines Harry putting all his eccentric persuasion skills to use, up and down two nearly separate chains of command. Imagines him cashing in all the goodwill he earned with Pryce from solving the Hanged Man case and the PR triumph of the phasmid. "You shouldn't have," he manages to say, but he finds himself stepping forward as he does so. Touching the vehicle as if he's saying hello to it. A foolish thing, but he can't quite bring himself to stop.

"I had to," Harry says. He steps forward, too, and lays a hand on the carriage, next to Kim's. Normally such an action would make Kim feel possessive, but under the circumstances he is more than happy to share. "It told me that you cherished it," Harry adds, matter-of-factly.

Kim no longer even questions such things. "Thank you," he says. To Harry, of course, not to the Kineema. Because that would be ludicrous.

And then, because something else has been demanding his attention all this time, something perhaps even harder to credit than the miraculous appearance of the carriage itself, he finally focuses his attention on the wheels. "Are those... Are those the rims I pawned in Martinaise?" If they're not the same ones, they are indistinguishably similar. And thus no doubt fantastically expensive.

"Yep!" Harry regards them with immense satisfaction. "Aren't they disco?"

They are not "disco." They are ridiculous and over-the-top and inappropriate. And beautiful. "How? I looked for them in Roy's when we went back. They weren't there. He'd obviously sold them."

"Yeah, and it'd take a really awesome superstar detective to find out who he sold them to and go and convince the guy to sell them back... Oh, wait!" Harry's grinning so wide his muttonchops now appear to be trying to escape his face. He shoots Kim his trademark finger guns to complete the effect.

"I don't know what to say." He really doesn't. He doesn't know if he has words for whatever is happening inside him right now. Perhaps if he tried to write it down he could figure it out.

Harry's face shifts a little, into something more serious. Or perhaps just something softer. "I know you think they're unprofessional, or frivolous, and all those kinds of things people judge you on," he says. "But I also know you like them. So..." He shrugs. "Now you can tell people I put them on there. You know they'll believe that." He smiles crookedly. "Probably earn you some sympathy points for putting up with it."

He's probably right. Everyone in the precinct and much of the population of Jamrock knows what Harry's like. Ridiculous and over-the-top and inappropriate. And... "They're beautiful," Kim says. "Thank you, Harry. For all of this. It is incredibly kind of you."

"You love that MC. And it loves you. You deserve to be together," Harry says. Unconnected to anything, the word yes floats dizzyingly through Kim's brain. "Plus," Harry continues, "I owe it one for waking me up that day, to meet you."

For a moment,something happens in Kim's throat that seems to be trying to keep him from speaking again, but Harry is standing there waiting, and how could anyone not respond to him? "You know," he says at last, clearing his throat, "I still have those helium headlights at home." He does. He paid for them with his own money. He'd considered leaving them at the 57th for the Kineema's next driver, but hadn't quite been able to give up on the improbable hope that he'd find another opportunity to use them. "If you'd still like to install them together?"

The answering gleam in Harry's eyes is as bright as any headlights, but his voice is strangely low and quiet. "Yeah," he says. "I'd like that a lot."

Ah. Kim recognizes what this feeling is, now. It's the feeling of barreling down the 8/81, more than a little recklessly but fully at home in front of the controls, of turning Speedfreaks up on the radio, surrendering your hair to the wind, and letting your engine take you as far as it can, as fast as it can, wherever it wants to go.

He hadn't realized just how much he needs that feeling until now.

"Good," he says. He reaches out, and touches Harry's arm, and, ever so slightly, he smiles.
This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1018853.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.

Done Fluxin'

astrogirl2 — Tue, 07 Dec 2021 01:57:29 GMT

Well, there we have it: the finale of this whole Flux thing!

And, taken by itself, that was pretty cool. It actually had the vibe of a lot of Moffat's season-enders, which I generally tend to enjoy. Lots of crazy complicated stuff coming at you a little too fast, which might or might not make great logical sense if you stop to think about it very carefully, but which is entertaining and engaging enough that in the moment I don't necessarily care, so it ends up working.

Taken as a wrap-up to this whole season-long story, though, it's a lot less satisfying. Exactly how much sense that story does or doesn't make as a whole, I think I'd need a careful rewatch or two to evaluate, although I suspect that's not happening for me any time soon. It was mostly kind of fun, though, so that's good. But, yeah, I can't call it "satisfying," and that's only partially because we're clearly leaving a lot of things unresolved and open-ended that seem likely to be addressed in next year's specials.

First and foremost, the whole Ravagers storyline proved to be disappointing in the end, and even more so for me because I did think they were pretty cool in the beginning, and despite all the things I absolutely failed to trust Chibnall with, I apparently was trusting he had some cool revelation in mind for them. Azure does at least get a pretty good little speech to the Doctor here, as nihilistic omnicidal revenge-driven villain speeches go, but otherwise they turn out to be sheer plot devices, and their deaths are as arbitrary and unfulfilling as any Chibnall villain's ending. Ah, well.

On the plus side, though! Having two Doctors around for a while was a lot of fun, and the climactic Stuff Happening in Space scenes looked really cool and were genuinely pretty exciting. And the guest characters were all freaking fantastic. This may even be my favorite appearance by Kate, even if her part was fairly small. Bel and Vinder could have had more to do, but they were still likeable, and it was pleasant to see them reunited. Di was freaking marvelous, and I am still holding out hope for her and Dan, because I think they could both do way, way worse. And Jericho is The Freaking Best. I can't even be sad he's dead because that death scene was so utterly perfect and right for him. All the respect, sir. All of it. And a new entry high up on the list of All-Time Best Doctor Who guest characters. Not an easy thing to achieve, really, with nearly six decades of competition.

Other thoughts and stray observations:

Doctor Who really does not understand antimatter, but that's hardly new. At this point, it's practically a tradition. So I feel like I can't really complain about it.

OK, I have to say it. I haven't really been a Doctor/Yaz shipper. They're great and have chemistry and all, and I've been genuinely happy for people who do ship it that it's working for them so well, but, I dunno, I'm never entirely comfortable shipping the Doctor with a human companion. (Unless it's Sarah Jane.) But watching the two of them in this one... Geez, you almost can't not, can you? Which isn't, I hasten to add, a complaint! Just a thing I will accept now.

The scene with the Sontaran and the chocolate reminded me somewhat painfully of why I think the Sontarans are stupid, or rather why their stupid stupidity levels are stupid. But I did get a great big laugh out of the bit where they're offering an alliance to all other baddies... but not the Rutans, because the Rutans are still the worst. Which is actually even funnier in retrospect, because they were just going to betray everybody anyway, and the Rutans clearly aren't even good enough for that.

That Grand Serpent guy seemed totally extraneous and I'm genuinely not sure why he even had to be in this story at all. Or what exactly he was doing in it, for that matter.

No great revelation about Bel and Vinder's baby! I am relieved.

On one hand, I am glad the Doctor decided against restoring those memories because that's really, really not something I want the show to deal with, and would surely mean a change that I don't want to see in the Doctor. On the other, I do wonder how truly in-character it is, given that a desire to know things has always been one of the Doctor's major traits. On the third hand, it is, of course, now just sitting inside the TARDIS somewhere hanging metaphorically over all our heads, and I don't trust it.

And, of course, we are left with vague, ominous implications of Things to Come. All I can say is that I really, really, really hope that that line about the forces amassed against the Doctor "and their master" in fact features a big ol' capital M, or I'm going to be very disappointed.

And that's what I've got! Honestly, I was half expecting that come the final episode of this thing, I'd be screaming "Chibnall, NOOOOOOOOOOO!", and I don't currently seem to be doing that, so I guess it went at least reasonably well, my various complaints along the way notwithstanding.
This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1018507.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.

Oh, God, I Was Not Only The First Person To Ask For A Card, I'm Also The First To Post A Fic

astrogirl2 — Fri, 03 Dec 2021 20:56:24 GMT

One of the things I already had in my head turned out to fit with one of the squares on my new bingo card, in some sense or other, so, hey, why not get this thing started?

And, yes, it's Disco Elysium again. Sorry, what can I say? The fannish heart wants what the fannish heart wants.

Actually, I am quite amused by the patterns I'm seeing in what my fannish heart wants these days. Maybe I'll even make a post about that at some point. In the meantime have... whatever the heck this is.

Title: One More Thing Chewing on Your Heart
Fandom: Disco Elysium
Characters/Pairings: Harry Du Bois
Summary: In the church you've stumbled into, there is nothing. And you want it.
Rating/Warnings: Teen. Warnings for drinking, referenced drug use, attempted (or, arguably, partially successful) suicide, a bit of cosmic horror, and general messed-uppedness.
Length: ~1,100 words
Author's Note:The more I think about the idea that it was the Swallow that took Harry's memories, not the booze, the more it just seems to fit. (On the other hand, the more I think about Harry's lost weekend, the more I wonder how the hell he got back across the canal. But you won't find the answer to that question here.) Written for Gen Prompt Bingo, for the prompt "Mutation/Transformation." I'd say this qualifies as transformation, right?

One More Thing Chewing on Your Heart

You stagger away from your new best friends, sailing off into the Tequila Sunset, or maybe just looking for a place to take a leak. You pass a payphone and feel the familiar itch in your fingers, your muscles remembering her number. Call her, call her. Tell her how much you need her, how much it hurts to be this animal you are alone. Tell her about the corpse you've ignored and your crashed motor carriage and the beautiful metallic taste of your gun. Tell her it's her fault, that she's the only one that can save you. Tell her that no one can save you. Tell her goodbye.

But your feet have kept you moving, stomping and stuttering, and the payphone is behind you now, lost in the past, and in front of you is...

You squint.

...is a church. The smallest church in Saint-Saëns, like the song playing in your head, over and over. You would often go there, but none of it matters. At all.

Inside, there's Her. Dolores Fucking Dei in broken stained glass, and you remember now why you stopped going into churches, because She still looks like her. Your Dora Dei, your very own Innocence. You used to call her that, and she'd smile like she wanted your worship, but she was fallible after all, just like you. Neither of you could make your two-person suzerainty work.

She looks down at you with monstrous compassion. As if you're the one who's shattered.

The Mother of Humanism, who will never push your own children out from between her stained glass thighs. Because you're a fuck-up. Because you're human. Because you're poor, and sad, and strange. You failure. You victim. You absolute asshole.

You're still holding a bottle. You toss it away from you, hurl it as hard as you can. A pathetic throw, but it still arcs halfway across the church.

The sound it makes when it smashes is... wrong. Muffled. As if half the sound gave up before it got to you. Or as if it was taken away somewhere. Away, away... Maybe somewhere better?

And now you're thinking again, analyzing, wondering, even through the haze of chemicals in your brain. The curse of the cop, the curse of you, to never stop thinking, even when stopping is the only thing you want.

You follow your bottle, stand in the glass-strewn place where you sent it to die. You clear your throat, and the sound seems to cross a thousand miles before it reaches your ears. You take a step to the left. You sing. "Life gets haaaaard..." It's louder here, a little. You step the other way. You sing the same line again. Again. Until you find the center of the silence.

You sing the next line at last, and you hear nothing. Pure, reified silence, like the absence at the end of the world.

The end of the world. It might be. It might fucking be.

You've thought about this a lot, this end, these theoretical world-chewing holes. You've always been drawn to the places where reality eats itself, from the time you were a kid dreaming of exploring the Pale, of scouring it for lost history the way you scoured the catacombs of Jamrock for treasure. Before you realized that the past is exactly like the present: an endless sea of shit. Before you realized that street kids from Jamrock don't become entroponauts. Before you realized the Pale only had one thing to offer you.

You want that thing now. You want it more than you've ever wanted anything. More than speed, or sex, or love, or answers. You want that oblivion. To erase yourself so thoroughly that not even the Pale itself will remember you. To sink into the nothingness that lies beneath everything. The deep, eternal empty. Maybe then you can rest, when there's no you for you to get wrong anymore.

You're climbing, somehow. It's above you, and you're climbing up among the rafters, your muscles loose and boozy but not failing you, not when you need them.

And then you're reaching out for it. You don't know how, don't know where, exactly. The silence is so absolute, so strange, and something seems to be wrong with space, with time, with you. But you think it wants you. Or it would want you, if it could want anything. If it weren't nothing, and incapable of desire.

You desire, though. Still. And you desire this. This, not murders and streetlights and art and beauty and pain and the impossible responsibility of living. You want to dance into the arms of the Apocalypse and disco til you drop.

You want that. You want it. You... Oh, god, oh god, no, I've changed my--

But it's in you now. It's inside you. You're not falling into it, it's falling into you, and it's eating you, swallowing you, but not whole, not whole at all. There is darkness flowing down all the cracks in your mind, breaking you apart into pieces and eating up the parts that connect them, eating that thing you call Harr--

Ha--

That thing you call--

You don't know. You don't know. You've lost something, and you don't know what it was. But it's all right. It will all be over soon. You don't know how you know that, but you know. Something, or someone, has promised that to you. Soon there will be no pain. Soon the entity that feels the pain will be gone. There will be warm primordial blackness forever, and nothing will ever hurt again.

You let yourself go.

And you fall

But not into the nothing. Not into the end.

There is still a you, and you are falling, and something might be catching you. Is there a figure with strangely bent limbs, skittering in the dark? Is there a cushioning updraft of wind? You can't tell. You don't know.

But you're on the floor now, a living human on the floor of a church, and there still is a you of some kind, loose and disconnected, speaking to itself in half-familiar voices.

You raise your head. There is a glass woman above you. She is looking at you with so much pity, so much despairing love.

You wish you knew who she was. You wish you knew who shattered her. You wish you knew why she hurts so much.

You wonder if you'll remember in the morning. This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1018165.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.

Also, New Bingo Card

astrogirl2 — Wed, 01 Dec 2021 22:38:59 GMT

Also, I just got a new genprompt_bingo card. And a truly excellent card it is! There's so much here that seems immediately applicable to my current fannish obsessions that I'm going to have to sternly remind myself of my resolution to NEVER DO THE BLACKOUT BINGO AGAIN. Heh. Alas, none of them quite fits one of the current things I've got in my head that I want to write soon, but I suppose I could use that for the wild card spot. Maybe. Hmm....

Canon Themes	Formidable	Heliocentrism	Pro Patria Mori (to die for your country)	Northern / Southern Lights
Signs and Portents	Horribly Misunderstood Villain	Phobias	Biography / Autobiography	Daily Rituals (Morning Routines / Nightly Prayers / Meal Times)
Boats and Ships	Stream of Consciousness	Wild Card	It was a Dark and Stormy Night	Drunkeness and Inebriation
Mutation / Transformation	Past, Present, Future	Beautiful	Things that go Bump in the Night	Deities and Followers
Civilisation	Humiliation	Candles	Shopping Together	Dystopias

This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1017976.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.

November Book Log

astrogirl2 — Wed, 01 Dec 2021 22:28:52 GMT

I have no idea how it's December of 2021 now. Time has entirely lost its meaning somewhere, somehow. But apparently it is, so here's my November's book log post.

100. Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History by Erik Larson

An account of the 1900 hurricane that devastated Galveston, Texas, with a particular focus on Isaac Cline, who was an officer of the US Weather Bureau in Galveston, and who lost his home and his wife in the storm.

The second half of the book, describing the events of the storm and their aftermath, is pretty engaging, in a horrible and depressing sort of way. The first half, however, which has a lot to say about things like Cline's life, the state of weather forecasting at the time, the personalities of people in the Weather Bureau, and the growth of Galveston, is a lot more dry. (Horrible, tasteless pun very much not intended.) And Larson sometimes way overcompensates for this fact by over-writing in an attempt to make such things feel DRAMATIC and OMINOUS, an approach that backfires a bit for him, at least as far as I'm concerned.

Still, there are a lot of interesting tidbits of information there. And there is a low-key but pervasive thread of commentary through the whole book about how the state of weather forecasting at the time was just good enough to foster overconfidence without being good enough to actually prevent this sort of horror, and about the ways in which ego and politics got in the way of acting properly on the information that was available. Although, since this book was published in 1999, the relevance of all of this to any 21st century hurricanes and other climate problems must remain as an exercise for the reader.

Rating: 3.5/5

101. Things in Jars by Jess Kidd

It's 1863, and Bridie Devine, a detective of sorts with an unusual and interesting medical background, is investigating the kidnapping of a child. She's accompanied by the ghost of a dead boxer who latched onto her while she was walking through a graveyard, but that fact seems almost mundane when compared to the strange, violent, watery nature of the child herself.

This is a weird and fascinating novel, dark and magical and very hard to categorize. The writing is particularly remarkable, because it often seems as if it should come across as contrived, silly, even purple. And yet somehow it really, really works. I don't know how Jess Kidd pulls that off, but my hat's off to her for managing it, and for creating something this weirdly compelling with it.

Rating: 4/5, but I'm seriously tempted to kick it up another half star.

102. Cosmogramma by Corttia Newland

A collection of science fiction stories of various types, usually with an edge of social commentary.

The stories are mostly decent, and feature some intriguing ideas, but with one or two welcome exceptions, they never quite landed for me with anything like the impact I wanted them to have, and by the time I was done with the collection, I was feeling more than a little frustrated with that. I'm not even sure what it was that was causing the general failure to click with me. I think maybe I just didn't get along very well with the writing style, which somehow felt, most of the time, as if it was telling me about the worlds the author had created rather than immersing me in them.

Rating: 3/5

(Note: This was a LibraryThing Early Reviewers book)

103. Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us, from Missiles to the Moon to Mars by Nathalia Holt

A history of women at JPL (NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory), from its origins in the 1940s, through many decades of exploring the solar system, up to the present day (or very nearly: the book was published in 2016). For much of this time, most of the women there were employed as computers, calculating complex engineering equations and rocket trajectories by hand with pencil and paper. If you've seen the movie Hidden Figures, or read the book it's based on, this is the same type of job the women featured there were doing elsewhere at NASA. (And, yes, not all of the women at JPL where white, either.) Later on, as electronic computers began to replace human ones, they became computer programmers, as well. And by now, of course, there are many female engineers working there, although still not in the same numbers as the men.

I wasn't always exactly engaged by the writing in this particular volume. It wanders back and forth between being a straightforward history and trying to go for a "narrative nonfiction" approach of dramatizing things from various women's POV, and the two things are grafted rather awkwardly together. (This seems to be a common structure in non-fiction these days, and too few writers, in my opinion, pull it off especially gracefully.) The subject matter is certainly interesting, though. Holt covers a lot of the space missions fairly quickly and not in immense depth, but as a general overview of what JPL has done in its history, it works well enough. And the lives and careers of these women provide a really vivid illustration of what life was like for working women in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, when equally qualified men and women were seldom hired for the same positions and a woman could be summarily fired for getting pregnant. These are worthwhile stories to hear and remember, and even if I have slightly mixed feelings about the writing here, I am unambiguously glad to see these intelligent, dedicated women getting the recognition they deserve.

Rating: 3.5/5

104. Treasury of Aesop's Fables

This collection of fables, which I bought at a library sale somewhere a while back, was published in 1973, but based on the writing, I'm guessing these particular English-language versions are a fair bit older than that, and the (hagiographic and not especially enlightening) "Life of Aesop" essay at the beginning may be older still. It also features small woodcut illustrations by Thomas Bewick (1753-1828).

I was interested to revisit some of the familiar fables from my childhood and maybe discover some more obscure ones I hadn't seen before, but I have to say I found this volume rather disappointing. They're not particularly engaging versions of the tales, are sprinkled with not-very-good poetry, and have appended morals that are often surprisingly hard to parse, and which sometimes seem to have little to do with the fable itself or even to flat-out contradict their apparent intent. I mean, I have certainly never seen the fox in the "sour grapes" story lauded as a paragon of wisdom before! Very often, too, these tales, in their references and sensibilities, seem to have much more of, say, 19th century England than 600 BCE Greece. Admittedly, different times and cultures adapting ancient stories to suit their own needs is fairly natural and perhaps not to be begrudged, but it's not really what I was looking for here. There also seems to be at least one odd omission: I have no idea where the tortoise and the hare might have run off to this time, but they are certainly nowhere to be found here.

All that having been said, though, at least a couple of these stories did give me a bit of a smile, being, as the kids these days say, #relatable. Like the one about the donkey who always longs for it to be whatever season it currently isn't. Who is, of course, being held up as a model for what not to do, but, man, I feel ya Mr. Donkey. I feel ya.

Rating: 2.5/5

105. Any Way the Wind Blows by Rainbow Rowell

This is the final book in the Simon Snow trilogy, which itself was a... spinoff?... of sorts from Rowell's novel Fangirl, Simon Snow being the Harry Potter-esque character the titular fangirl was writing her fanfiction about. And I will never cease to be tickled by the way Rowell basically ended up writing fiction based on her fictional fan's fictional fanfiction. Heh.

This one honestly maybe feels a little too strongly in touch with those fanfictional sensibilities when it comes to the relationship between Simon Snow and his vampiric frenemy-turned-boyfriend Baz, which gets a touch overdramatic for me in places. But it's at least an interestingly messy relationship. And there's plenty else going on here, too, including a guy who claims to be Simon's replacement as the prophesied Chosen One, a bit of difficulty involving a contract with a demon, and a couple of other budding romances, as well.

It didn't sweep me along quite as quickly or entertainingly as the first two books, I will admit, but it was still fun, and I still really like the way it addresses questions of what happens after the epic saga ends and everyone is left to figure out who they are in the aftermath.

Rating: 4/5

106. Bats by Phil Richardson

Yep, it's a book about bats: their anatomy, behavior, and senses, their place in Earth's ecosystems, and their many varieties, complete with lots of colorful photographs of bats whose appearances range from adorable to freaky. It's pretty short -- about 120 pages -- so it's really just a brief layman's overview of the subject, but apparently that's exactly what I needed, because I did not even realize until now how many really basic things I didn't know about bats. The writing, I will say, is pretty pedestrian, but I did not care about this at all, because I was busy happily learning all kinds of Fascinating Bat Facts. For example! Did you know that bats' feet are constructed in such a way that they are clenched when the muscles are relaxed? It takes an actual effort for a bat to uncurl its toes, and that's how bats are able to hang securely from a perch above them even while they're sound asleep. OK, maybe not everybody is going to find that sort of thing interesting, but I sure did, and I spent a lot of my time with this book just thinking "Wow, evolution is neat."

Rating: 4/5

107. Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout

This sequel to Olive Kitteridge is structured much the same as the first book. Olive herself -- a woman I find a little bit difficult to like, but remarkably easy to love -- sits at the core of it, but many chapters barely namecheck her, focusing instead on on some of the other residents of her town on the coast of Maine as they live their own weird and mundane lives, lives we dip in and out of over the course of several years.

Some of these chapters worked better for me than others, but always I am impressed and moved by Strout's ability to capture some very complicated and profound human experiences in very simple language. Most particularly, in this case, the experience of aging and everything that goes with it.

Rating: 4/5

108. The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

This is the story of Cora, a young woman who escapes from slavery in Georgia and into a complicated and often brutal fugitive life by way of the Underground Railroad. Except, here, the Underground Railroad is a literal railroad, underground.

It's a rough, rough read, one that forces the reader to stare directly into the dark, ugly heart of America. But it is undeniably effective.

I'm a little uncertain what to make of the ahistorical/magical realism element of things. When I try to intellectually detach myself from the novel a bit, take a step back and think about it, it seems like such a strange, unnecessary conceit, one that feels as if it somehow ought to detract, or at least distract, from the painful realism of everything else. And yet, in the experience of reading it, it works. I scarcely found myself even questioning it. And it does, perhaps, provide a rather powerful metaphor in the form of that subterranean darkness.

Rating: 4.5/5

109. Semicolon: The Past, Present, and Future of a Misunderstood Mark by Cecelia Watson

This little volume is exactly what the title says it is: a book about semicolons. Watson looks a bit at the history of the semicolon, where it came from and how its usage has changed over time; examines the ways in which various writers have used the semicolon; and tells some interesting stories about how ambiguous punctuation in written laws has had surprisingly big effects. But it's about more than that, too. Watson's central idea here involves changing how we think about grammar rules and the way we apply them. She's also not remotely shy about voicing plenty of other opinions on related subjects ranging from linguistic snobbery to the proper way to approach the interpretation of laws. It's all very thought-provoking, and Watson's writing is lively and fun to read. She picks great examples of other people's writing to talk about, too.

All-in-all, it's much more interesting and entertaining than you might expect any book about semicolons to be, even if you're the kind of person who's interested in reading books about punctuation to begin with. (Which I am, obviously.) It's also gotten me to think a bit differently about semicolons. I confess, I've long felt reluctant to use them even when I've really wanted to, out of some sense that others would find them pretentious or distracting, but I'm remembering now how fond of them I once was and how useful they can actually be.

Rating: 4/5

This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1017606.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.

Who Gives A Flux

astrogirl2 — Tue, 30 Nov 2021 03:22:56 GMT

Just watched yesterday's Doctor Who.

So that's several story threads coming together now, I guess, and at least some actual explanations for what's going on and why, even if a lot still remains pretty mysterious. I feel like I should have more to say about all of that than I actually do.

Things I do have to say:

Yaz, Dan and Jericho's globe-trotting Dan Brown-esque adventures seem like they could have made for an entire six-part series all by themselves. I'd watch! Especially as that format would spare us all the as-you-know-Bob dialog we get here. Mostly, though, I'm delighted Jericho is still around and getting to participate in all of this. I love him.

I still do not love the whole Timeless Child thing. I have also decided I do not love the Division. It really is just too much. Oh, Time Lords have been manipulating the whole universe through all of of time, with every species in their employ, and now they're destroying the whole entire universe just to get at the Doctor. Yeah, somehow, all I can think of is my D&D-playing days, when we used to do these dungeon-crawling adventures, and constantly it was "And this cave is a thousand feet long and a hundred feet high, and the next cave is two thousand feet long and two hundred feet high, and..." And I just kept thinking, OMG, why. Guys, just increasing the scale does not automatically make anything more interesting. It really doesn't. In this case, it probably makes it less interesting, as there's not exactly any suspense about whether they're going to destroy the entire universe for good. Seriously, give me the Celestial Intervention Agency over the Division any day. A society with an official non-interventionist policy quietly, hypocritically interfering when they regard it as in their interests to do so is genuinely more interesting to me than this Secret All-Pervading Evil Universe-Destroying Puppetmaster stuff.

I do note that the possibility is explicitly raised that the Doctor didn't actually come through that mulitversal wormhole thingy as a kid, but was instead just hanging around near it for some reason, which does invite all kinds of wacky speculation. Honestly, the "Bel and Vinder are the Doctor's real parents" theory is looking... not impossible. I don't even know what to do with that thought. It just makes my brain kind of seize up. Possibly because I genuinely don't want to ever actually know who the Doctor's parents are.

By the way, is it just me, or was that not actually the most satisfying resolution to last episode's cliffhanger?

I did enjoy seeing the UNIT stuff, if just for the massive nostalgia hit, even if at the same time I was maybe feeling just a teensy bit impatient at getting yet another new character and seemingly unconnected storyline. Well, mostly seemingly unconnected, I guess. I am sure we've heard the "Grand Serpent" referred to before, although I can't actually recall where and when. Did one of the Ravagers say something about him? [ETA: Oh, wait, he was the evil guy Vinder was bodygaurding! Which explains why the camera totally seemed to expect me to recognize his face. Well, joke's on you, camera! I'm terrible with faces! So. OK. OK. I.... still don't know how that fits into anything whatsoever.]

Also enjoyable: the fact that, unlike any of the previous episodes of this thing, I was actually able to clearly hear all the dialog. Either my ears have mysteriously de-waxed themselves since last week, or they've actually fixed the stupid sound mixing, finally. Either way, it was a relief.

And, yeah, I think that's all I've got. Mostly, right now I'm feeling a bit nervous about next week. I think I'd lay about 50/50 odds on Chibnall pulling out some new Super Epic Retconny Revelation that's not going to work for me, but we'll see.
This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1017387.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.

The Angels Have The...

astrogirl2 — Mon, 22 Nov 2021 03:09:40 GMT

New who time again!

OK, first off, I do have to say that I've been increasingly of the opinion that the Weeping Angels would have been much better off as one-shot villains, even though I do understand the hard-to-resist desire to keep bringing them back. That said, they can, at least be interestingly creepy/spooky when used well, and this episode did a pretty good job with that. The overall look and feel of it was fairly cool, although at the same time I was finding it a little hard to just relax and enjoy it on its own terms, as I may be getting a bit impatient at the pace at which the overarching story is playing out, and how little we saw this time out of the Ravagers and whatever the hell they're up to.

Various disconnected thoughts:

I had kind of wondered what would happen if an angel got the same person a second time, and "No one survives it twice" was a satisfyingly chilling answer to that.

Professor Jericho was marvelous, and marvelously acted.

The idea of a rogue angel was kind of interesting, as we've had little sense of them as individuals before now.

So, The Division apparently is an incredible omnipresent boogeyman of an organization that operates through all of time and recruits even Weeping Angels (who, up until now, have seemed more like forces of nature than anything, y'know, recruitable). Cool, epic, impressive, and scary? Or over-the-top and suspension-of-disbelief breaking even just by the very fact that we've never heard of them before? I genuinely don't know, although my ability to choose to see it as the former is annoyingly hampered by it being tied up with the whole Timeless Child thing I still don't like.

I do, however, still like Dan, with the endless barrage of questions and his "I have very dry eyes!" I am finding him increasingly relatable.

OK, so... the Doctor apparently just turned into an Angel? I have no idea what to make of that, but it at least looked very impressively dramatic.

Also, go, Vinder. You got this, buddy.

And, yeah, that's all I've got really. Somehow, having just a bunch of disconnected thoughts at this point seems appropriate enough. Will they all come together eventually? Will this story? Stay tuned, I guess! I'm still not entirely sure how I feel about any of it, but for the moment, I may be feeling impatient, but at least I'm not feeling bored.
This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1017128.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.

A Zhaantastic Blast From The Past!

astrogirl2 — Wed, 17 Nov 2021 04:15:48 GMT

Many thanks to khakigrrl for pointing me to So Farscape, a Farscape podcast in which a couple of people -- one new to the show, one not -- are watching through Farscape and also sampling some fic for it. It seems they've just gotten through "Wait for the Wheel" and were looking for Zhaan-related fic, so someone steered them to the Zhaan ficathon I ran on LJ waaaaaaaay back in 2005. So they're now reading through the fic from that and commenting on it on the podcast -- in a very sweet, complimentary way, I should add! The main reaction to everything so far (which includes my own little fic, "The Thermodynamics of the Soul") seems to be "awww." This also appears to be the first time they've encountered the idea of a fic exchange, and I'm really quite tickled by how surprised and delighted they seem at the idea.

The whole thing really makes me quite nostalgic. Both for Farscape, and for those tiny, ultra-specific LJ fic exchanges/ficathons from back in the day. Does anybody but me kind of miss those? They had their problems, certainly. The lack of any systematic way of dealing with defaults and pinch hits could be a massive headache. And the hand-matching, while it allowed a nicely personalized touch when it came to fitting assignment to writer, could be a real challenge. But they were also wonderfully intimate and freewheeling in a way that I don't think you see much these days. Well, maybe Tumblr exchanges are similar. I have no idea.

Anyway, it was a lovely blast from the past, and I'm very glad they're enjoying the stories. It's good to see people still revisiting this old stuff, and even better to see people still getting into Farscape, even now! This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1016979.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.

Actually, Despite What That Icon Says, I Think My Head Might Be Surprisingly OK

astrogirl2 — Mon, 15 Nov 2021 03:12:59 GMT

It's Doctor Who day again!

Yet another episode that was complicated and weird and demanding of patience, but mostly, I think, in a way that was intriguing and cool. My final feelings about everything in this multi-part story is, of course, going to depend very, very much on how it comes out -- and I'm still more than a little trepidatious about that -- but for the moment, I'm enjoying it well enough.

I am wondering, though, whether all this stuff about the planet Time and the Mouri and what is actually happening with time in the Flux and so on is going to be explained in a way that makes something approaching coherent sense, or if I'm meant to just nod my head, think "Right, mystical time weirdness, got it" and just sort of go with it. Because I probably can do that second thing if I need to -- hell, I watched all of Sapphire & Steel, I have practice -- but it would be really, really nice to know what parts of my brain I should or should not be employing here.

That aside, though... OK, look. I still hate the whole Timeless Child thing with a passion, for a host of reasons (many of which, I admit, are down to my own personal issues). But I will at least say that if we have to have it as a given, the stuff in this episode, with the intriguing interactive memories and little glimpses of Jo Martin, is at least a cool thing to do with it. So far, anyway. I can at least acknowledge that much. (And will refrain from going into a tedious rant now about how, dammit, we probably could have actually had this forgotten-past-Doctors stuff, which I feel weird about but could certainly accept if the show does interesting things with it, without all the Doctor-isn't-actually-a-Time-Lord stuff that I irredeemably hate. Well, any more of a tedious rant than that.)

Anyway. There was some nice character stuff in this one. More background on Vinder, which makes him even more interesting and likeable, and the introduction of yet another character in the form of Bel, who also seems very cool. I'll admit, by the way, that one of my first reactions to her was "Really, yet another character who doesn't have any obvious connection to things yet?" But, in retrospect, I think I like that she got to have her own story before we found out who she was to Vinder, rather than being defined by her relationship to him from the beginning.

And then there's the Doctor. With the exception of maybe one or two moments in there where her expositing to herself about what she was about to do got a little clunky, I thought the various instances of her talking to herself -- in the usual way, in the mirror, as a voiceover -- worked pretty well. The Doctor continues to be very Doctorish here, which I do love, although I think I may be wanting just a little more intensity from Whittaker's performance. But maybe she's saving it up. I imagine things are only going to escalate from here, and an actor's gotta leave herself somewhere to go.

Also, wow, this really is continuing to look amazing, visually. Seriously, no matter what I think of the plot as a whole when this is all over, nothing is ever going to stop it from being impressive on that level.

So, do we have any nutty speculations yet about who the mysterious old lady is? My first thought was the White or the Black Guardian, but she seemed a little too keen on universal destruction for the former and a little too free of black clothing and birds on her head for the latter, so probably not.
This entry was originally posted at https://astrogirl.dreamwidth.org/1016663.html. Comment here or there, whichever you like.