sholio

Those of you who've been around for a while have heard me talking about my SF webcomic, Kismet, which has been on hiatus for the last *mumble* while. It's updating again, as of this month - link to start of new pages on Tumblr which will make absolutely ZERO sense without the context of the rest of it - but since both the sites I'm updating it on (Patreon and Tumblr) kinda suck for reading through the archives in order, and some people prefer to read plotty webcomics in batches anyway, I now have a batch update mailing list!

https://subscribepage.com/kismetlist

(Please let me know if anything doesn't work. You should get a confirmation email that you need to click to confirm that you want to be on the list, and then a welcome email afterward. If that doesn't happen, let me know and I can put you on the list manually.)

I'll send out an email whenever I update the website archive with a batch of new pages, ideally about once a month. Emails will also include any new Kismet news, such as new interesting things posted publicly at the Patreon. (It's definitely not an advertisement for the Patreon, so it won't link to locked content - it's more of a free alternative.) After the current story arc, Sun-Cutter, wraps up, it will be an update list for keeping people up-to-date on when the comic is likely to resume and where to find it.

If you haven't read Kismet and want to, here it is on the website archive with my ancient hand-coded HTML.

Book One: Hunter's Moon (complete)
Book Two: Sun-Cutter (in progress)

I will just say up front that a) the early art is rough, and b) there are some things I would write differently if I were writing it now. But honestly, I feel like it's worn pretty well given that I posted the first chapters in 2002 (and wrote the first draft of the novella that became Book 1 all the way back in 1995, with more or less the exact same plot). It's certainly aged better than anything else I was working on at the time!

I also still can't get over how much Expanse reminds me of it in some ways. This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1427309.html with comments.

Three Sentence Ficathon is happening again over at rthstewart! This is always fun!

The last thing I need right now is more prompts, probably, but I'm still eyeballing it for tasty prompts showing up in my fandoms. This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1426728.html with comments.

In other words I watched the Expanse finale tonight.

( SpoilersCollapse ) This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1426542.html with comments.

Today, for the heck of it, I rewatched the pilot movie of Lexx, a Canadian-German cable sci-fi show from the late '90s/early 00s that I distinctly remember as one of the most bizarre things I've ever watched. I was curious if I would still think that.

The answer is ... yes and no. It is still utterly bananas (details to follow). But it's more evidently a descendant of the general batshittery of 1980s low-budget sci-fi and fantasy. It's very much that kind of thing, just with more comedy and sex.

It is still, however, bonkers. I remember watching the original run of TV movies on VHS tapes from our local indy video store (which had a lot of this kind of thing) and it's definitely got that sort of feel, the "discovered on a dusty shelf of low-budget sci-fi in the back of a video store in 1998" kind of vibe.

It's set in a gothic-Thunderdome space dystopia, a gloomy bureaucracy ruled by an immortal demigod called His Divine Shadow. Most of the tech looks like insects (paging Adrian Tchaikovsky! - visual reference of the main spaceship, a planet-destroying experimental ship that looks like a dragonfly). Most of the characters dress like they're auditioning for an 80s music video. The protagonists - a disgraced prison guard, a half-human-half-lizard space hooker (more on her in a minute), and an undead assassin who is the last survivor of a race of singing space warriors - escape with the ship, more or less by accident, and are catapulted into the Dark Zone, where things are somehow even more terrible than in the space dystopia, but in a whole new way. It's an hour and a half of towering citadels scored with ominous music and built on a budget of $2, sex jokes and boobs, weird hairstyles, and fights set to rock music. There's just enough found-family-in-space character development that I can remember why I liked it, while also remembering why I found it endlessly frustrating, because this show never met a touching moment it couldn't torpedo with a stupid boob joke.

Okay, so ... Zev, the half-human/half-lizard. I feel as if telling you Zev's backstory will give you an accurate idea of what the entire show is like. (Her backstory is also extremely fatphobic, which either didn't register on me in the late 90s, or I had forgotten about.) Zev is from the Wife Bank, raised for the purpose of being a wife, but suffers from a couple of problems - she's mentally noncompliant (stubborn and opinionated), and she is overweight. When she first meets her approximately-12-year-old husband for the first time, he calls her ugly, she punches him in the face, and she's sent to a dystopian prison world for the crime of "failing to perform her wifely duty." She is sentenced to be body-sculpted "beautiful" (read: thin), mentally brainwashed for compliance, and sent to be a sex slave.

This doesn't go as anyone planned when an equipment malfunction merges her DNA with that of a cluster lizard, a vicious reptilian alien predator. She emerges looking human, but is super-strong, can bite off people's faces when they annoy her, and can intimidate the other cluster lizards as a sort of dominant alpha lizard (this mostly involves screaming).

If you feel like you've just gone on some kind of acid trip while reading this, you now know what watching the show is like. This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1426247.html with comments.

( Spoilers (mostly about Drummer)Collapse ) This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1425944.html with comments.

Thank you so much for making a gift for me! If you'd like more prompts and inspiration, check out my exchange letter tag, where you can find more requests for most of these fandoms, any of which I would still be happy to receive. I'm equally happy to get any of the fandoms I've requested!

I'm requesting fic for my main gift this year, but would be happy to receive art treats.

( General likes and DNWsCollapse )

Fandoms:

( Agent CarterCollapse )

( The AlienistCollapse )

( Crossovers (MCU/Defenders)Collapse )

( The Defenders (TV)Collapse )

( Island of Ghosts - Gillian BradshawCollapse )

( Joyeux NoëlCollapse )

( MCU (The Falcon & the Winter Soldier)Collapse ) This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1425824.html with comments.

I'll round out 2021 with a short little write-up of this sweet, occasionally funny, and often heartbreaking WWI movie - philomytha, you might want to add this to your WWI watch list, because it's very good! I watched it as part of my Watch All The Daniel Brühl Things project, but it's entirely worth watching for reasons that have nothing to do with Daniel Brühl (though he is excellent in it).

Joyeux Noël is a fictionalized retelling of the Christmas Truce of 1914. The movie follows several different characters representing three different nationalities (Scottish, French, and German). Brühl plays the Jewish-German lieutenant in charge of the German side at this particular section of the war front, and is characteristically adorable. The other primary characters are a Scottish soldier who enlisted to join his brother and then lost him to the war, writing letters home to his mother that pretend they're both still alive; a chaplain who followed his parishioners to the front; a French lieutenant deeply worried about his pregnant wife, who is in the German-occupied part of France; and a pair of separated German lovers, a drafted opera singer and his girlfriend.

The movie is brutally, unrepentantly anti-war, as it should be. It opens and closes with wartime propaganda that the other side is Just Not Like Us, while the central core of the movie is pointing out that the primary thing dividing them is an arbitrary front and their superiors' orders to kill each other. It's not an ideological war; it's a war being fought over political issues that none of these characters have anything to do with. And when that barrier is temporarily removed, they cautiously and then more genuinely get along fine, and even start to forge tentative friendships, until the war comes crashing back down on them.

Totally requesting this for Chocolate Box, because I desperately crave postwar fic that gives them all the happy ending they deserve. This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1425649.html with comments.

The power is back as of Wednesday night! Thank you to everyone for the well-wishes and support. <3 I have mostly just been relaxing for the last couple of days and relishing light, heat, and unlimited use of appliances.

2021 sure was a year, wasn't it? I already posted my publication roundup and plans (at least the portion of them that I make public; I have a much more detailed writing to-do list that constantly changes on the fly). 2021 was otherwise notable for me skipping through a few different fandoms before falling hard for Falcon & Winter Soldier, and developing possibly the first hardcore celebrity crush of my adult married life. This has been tremendous fun. Someday I'll catch up on the rest of the MCU I haven't gotten around to yet, but I'm happy staying here for the time being. I did some exchanges and posted my annual New Year's story (as well a lot of prompt-based fic and iddy h/c, only some of which I've been crossposting here, but it's all on my AO3 page). I'll do a roundup of the shorter promptfic soon.

It hasn't been a bad year for me personally, aside from some weird and partly self-inflicted family drama, but I know it's really sucked for a lot of people. I hope 2022 will be better for everyone. ♥ This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1425264.html with comments.

I've been working on several Falcon & Winter Soldier vids this year, and wanted to get at least one of them done before the end of the year!

Vimeo's embed style has changed and I had to fight with this a bit to get it to display, so let me know if you have any trouble.

Song: Heavy Stone by Kyla La Grange
Footage from: Falcon & Winter Soldier, Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Age of Ultron

Password: zemo



Download: 108 Mb MP4 (zipped)
Lyrics: here
Tumblr: here
AO3: here This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1425017.html with comments.

I'm going to be scarce online for a few days because we're in the middle of an extended power outage - going on 30 hours now, likely to last until Wednesday (if we're lucky) or more realistically Thursday or later. We have a generator, but are running it intermittently to save fuel and also to save wear on the generator, since a replacement can't be had in this town right now for love or money. The entire area had a blizzard and ice storm this weekend, so there are widespread outages and ones like ours - a single-household outage caused by a storm-related blown fuse on our power pole - are understandably at the bottom of their priority list. (Honestly I have nothing but praise for our power company. They have always been excellent with communication, easy to get hold of, rarely have extended outages despite having to deal with some of the worst winter weather around, and are normally very fast to respond to outage reports. They're overwhelmed right now for reasons beyond their control.)

Meanwhile, we're doing fine. We have lots of food and a generator that's capable of powering the household essentials (heat, fridge, device recharging, etc), and we can go to town for anything we need - or even move into a hotel or AirBnB if it really comes to that, though we're hoping not to have to.

However, I only have laptop internet when the generator is running and otherwise I'm on my phone, so I'll be slow responding to emails, comments and the like. This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1424857.html with comments.

Cards (in yesterday's mail batch, just now sorted) from rissaby, scioscribe, and nny! They're lovely, and my card display looks lovely; thank you so much to everyone who sent one, and any whose cards are still in the mail!

We're supposed to get a foot of snow today and another foot tomorrow. I'm skeptical about the amounts -- Fairbanks just doesn't tend to get snow in those quantities -- but it definitely will snow, and we're still digging out from last week's storm. The roads are awful. Yesterday I got to watch Orion spectacularly spin out on ice in front of me and hit the ditch at highway speeds in a giant cloud of snow. (We were caravanning into town in separate vehicles, because he'd offered the loan of our truck to a coworker over the break.) He was fine, the truck was fine, and a passing good egg pulled him out while I was home getting shovels and a tow strap. Still, we stocked up on supplies yesterday and don't plan on going anywhere for a few days.

This morning I scrambled eggs in butter with peppers and avocado and some of the delicious cheese ellenmillion gave me, and had it over rosemary bread toast, and I'm enjoying a little quiet time before the inevitable deluge of family phone calls and Zooms later today. This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1424558.html with comments.

And the reveals are out, with their absolutely unshocking results! Here's what I wrote, both Falcon & Winter Soldier:

Break and Reset (gen, 14.9K)
Forced to relive the worst day of their lives over and over again, Bucky, Sam, and Zemo are each trapped in their own personal hell.

you ought to give me wedding rings (Bucky/Zemo + Sam, 12K)
A SHIELD mission sends Bucky, Zemo, and Sam undercover in the suburbs.

So yeah, that was fun! Next year apparently it's moving to spring - not 2022; spring 2023 - to avoid running into Yuletide season as it did this year, which might affect my ability to participate, but I'll see! I've really enjoyed it the last couple of years. This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1424360.html with comments.

Sneaking in under the wire ahead of reveals ... I got two absolutely lovely gifts, both Falcon & Winter Soldier!

Rocks Fall (gen, 13k)
A routine mission to search an abandoned HYDRA building goes wrong when the place gets demolished ahead of schedule--with Sam, Bucky, and Zemo still inside. Good thing none of them have any traumatic memories this could bring up.

SO much gorgeous character insight and h/c!

In Name Only (Sam/Bucky/Zemo, 11k)
“I could always marry the guy, if it helps you sleep at night,” Bucky snaps in jest.
Ross takes him seriously, and it’s all downhill from here.

Arranged marriage to actual relationship with glorious piiiiiiining.

As usual, I haven't read as widely as I would have liked, but I did really enjoy these:

wrecked all along (Dark Matter, Six/Three, 16K)
Really sweet getting-together with cool use of virtual reality, set post-season-three.

Don't Let Me Down (TFATWS, Sam/Bucky, 10K)
Nice plotty getting-together fic. This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1424093.html with comments.

Several of these are reprints, but here's what I had out in 2021:



I don't actually think this is sane, sensible, or recommended, but once I realized I was putting out roughly a book a month this year, I decided to see how long I could keep it going, just as a personal challenge to myself. As it turned out, I had something out every month this year except for March. (And I literally just noticed I used the exact same type treatment on the Horses and Wolf Country covers. Oops.)

I'm cheating a bit with the last one, because it's just a free Lauren story that's been on my Lauren Esker website forever and I finally got around to putting up on Amazon, but I made a new cover for it, so I'm counting it. Free version downloadable here.

Things to do for the rest of the year:

- Edits for Tor (my next Zoe) & ARCs.
- Much-needed website cleanup/update.
- Mailing list maintenance and redoing the onboarding sequence. (Or at least make a plan for it.)
- Color some Kismet pages with the hopes of restarting it in January.
- My annual New Year's Eve story.

Any of this that doesn't get done this month (well, except the last one) can be pushed into January; I'm planning on taking it easy between now and the end of the year.

Next year's primary goal is consistency. I can write fast, but what I'm not very good at is planning to work on specific projects and then sticking with those rather than bouncing to new things. I'm not entirely abandoning my usual "mayfly on crack" working process because it's just part of how my brain works, but in general I want to get better at reliably delivering books in a series by a particular deadline. This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1423766.html with comments.

The shortest day of the year! I posted some pictures at my realname blog.

New cards from goss, oracne, and silverflight8 (sealed with real sealing wax!!). They're lovely; thank you so much! ♥

WE STILL HAVE NOT DECORATED THE TREE. We set it up on Thursday. This is becoming a travesty. I plan to get some ornaments hung tonight. On the other hand, having a bare spruce tree obtained from our own place is kind of pleasantly pagan for the solstice, I guess?

Speaking of such things, I accidentally plotbunnied myself with the idea of Zemo as a Sokovian genius loci/spirit-of-place. It's just such an interestingly fitting idea and full of angsty possibilities having to do with the destruction of the country.

I also posted a TFATWS Christmas story featuring the usual suspects.

Further posts coming with end-of-year book roundups and the like! This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1423378.html with comments.

A couple of days ago, I watched the first episode of Knight Rider on Netflix for nostalgia value/cheesy entertainment, after noticing that it was streaming. If you grew up in the US (or US-adjacent) in the 80s, you almost can't not know about this show, in which David Hasselhoff is consistently upstaged by a talking car; I was head over heels for it when I was about 8.

It is definitely everything I expected based on my hazy childhood memories - "awesome" is not one of these things, but "ridiculous" and "hilarious, although not necessarily in the intended ways" certainly apply.

One thing that has become much funnier with the passage of time and the development of David Hasselhoff into a cornball pop icon is the reactions of everyone in the show to David Hasselhoff's face. So basically, he's played by a different actor at the very beginning, then gets shot in the face and experimental plastic surgery turns him into David Hasselhoff. As it does. This means that you get a "IS THIS ... MY FACE???" scene which is everything you would expect of a BUT MY FACE!!!!! scene played by David Hasselhoff. (I have to say that if experimental plastic surgery turned me into David Hasselhoff, I would also be upset about it.)

The mood whiplash between a guy losing everything and everyone he cares about, getting his face shot off, being presumed dead, and having PTSD about it vs. wacky hijinks with a talking car is certainly a thing. Also, a car that talks and drives itself was highly futuristic in the 80s and is much less so now. However, I was sufficiently entertained that I may watch more of it. I seem to remember a) the first episode is probably as close as the show gets to competently written, and b) there is later h/c with the car and also an episode in which David Hasselhoff plays his evil twin with a mustache.

In further mood whiplash, I continued my intermittent "watch all the Daniel Brühl things" based on the extremely scientific method of observing which movies he appears to be hottest and/or most adorable in, based on Tumblr gifsets, and then watching those. Woman in Gold (2015) appears to score quite highly on the Daniel Brühl Hotness Scale (exhibit A) and he is indeed very hot in this movie, and also very adorable, as his character is extremely sweet, although sadly not in it very much. The actual plot - based on real events - concerns the deeply odd team-up of Helen Mirren and Ryan Reynolds as, respectively, an elderly Jewish woman trying to reclaim art that was stolen by Nazis in WWII, and a family friend who is a lawyer and is helping her. The core friendship between the two of them is very sweet, although it's very weird seeing Ryan Reynolds in a dramatic role, made even weirder because every now and then he slips into campy Ryan Reynolds mode, which is extremely tonally jarring in a movie about the Holocaust. Tatiana Maslany plays a surprisingly convincing young Helen Mirren. It feels Very American in some ways (e.g. everyone speaking English in most of the Austria scenes, though they do have subtitled flashbacks), but I liked it. This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1422730.html with comments.

Today I read a NYT travelogue on the remote Scottish island of St. Kilda, which so intrigued me that I ended up following up with more reading on two things.

First: mailboats! The island (inhabited until the last inhabitants moved away in the 1930s) had no mail service, so by the late 1800s, the islanders had developed a unique way of posting mail. They would put them in a makeshift "boat," made of anything handy that would float, and set it loose on the water in the hopes it would make its way to a shore where someone would post the mail for them. (Which apparently happened surprisingly often due to prevailing ocean currents.) This article talks about it in detail. There was also a commemorative mailboat launch in 2010 that turned up in Norway 10 years later.

The other thing I was reading about was the feral Soay sheep, which have lived on the islands for perhaps as long as 4000 years and may represent the last relics of the small, shaggy, hair-coated Neolithic sheep that were first kept domestically on the British Isles. They are hardy and extremely easy keepers, much less delicate than most domestic sheep, and if I ever get sheep, I want these. I bet they'd do okay in Alaska. This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1422439.html with comments.

I still really like it! Though I don't remember Toby Maguire making me think quite this much of a concussed baby deer the last time around.

- "I accidentally fused myself with evil sentient octopus arms" is still one of the most hilarious villain origin stories I have ever seen.

- And yet somehow he manages to be incredibly sympathetic and tragic for all of that. Also still hot.

- I cannot believe the arms are not CGI but were actually built for the movie. They're incredible.

- I also really love how much of a presence the ordinary people in the city have. There are a bunch of very human little moments with various regular people, and also a recurring theme of people doing their best to save themselves. One of my favorite things along those lines was Spider-Man trying to rescue a toddler (like 2 or 3) from a fire, and when he falls through the fire-weakened floor and tosses her up to safety, she tries to help him back up with her tiny little haaaaands. ;____; MY HEART.

I don't anticipate being stolen away from my Falcon & Winter Soldier happy place by any future Spider-Man developments, but we shall see. This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1421777.html with comments.

So far, one part of the MCU that hasn't actually interested me at all is the Spider-Man side of the franchise. It's partly that I'm at a stage in my life where I'd rather watch adults than teenagers for the most part, and it's partly that there is something actively offputting for me about Tom Holland's face (the actor is very sweet, I'm sure! it's just! I don't really want to watch him onscreen!!) ... I mean, it's a lot of things, and they're all idiosyncratic and very Me, but what it does lead to is that at least there's one corner of the superheroverse that I don't care about.

Then I watched the trailer for the new movie, and let me tell you a story about 2000s-era Sholio and why I suspect this movie may come for me in a way the others haven't.

Significant spoilers for the trailer, which in turn appears to be pretty spoilery for the movie. And also spoilers for the Raimi Spider-Man movies from the 2000s.

( Me? Falling for the villain? More likely than you think.Collapse ) This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1421531.html with comments.

Between my actual assignment, pinch hits, and treats, I wrote 45K for this. So that was my September and October, basically.

Falcon & Winter Soldier

Needle Sting (gen, Sam & Bucky & Zemo, 7600 wds)
Exploring a HYDRA bunker turns into a race against time when the team springs a booby trap.

Dancing on the Edge of the World (Sam/Bucky, 2200 wds)
Recovery fic on a boat.

Scorpion Games (Zemo-centric gen, 12K)
Sam's nephews have been taken by HYDRA. Zemo is getting them back. No matter what.

Craving (Sam/Bucky/Zemo, 5100 wds)
In which they all get sex pollen'd.

Iron Fist

Freaky Friday (gen, 6K)
The Iron Fist transfer ceremony in 2x09 ends in bodyswap when Ward interrupts in the middle of it.

Dresden Files (books)

Monster Kicking Boots (Molly-centric gen, 8000 wds)
Teenage Molly sneaks out of the house and ends up tagging along (accidentally) on a monster hunt. Set after Death Masks and before Proven Guilty.

Sleuth of the Ming Dynasty

Questions and Lies (gen, Tang Fan & Wang Zhi, 5000 wds)
Gathering information for a case turns potentially lethal when Wang Zhi is poisoned. This entry is also posted at https://sholio.dreamwidth.org/1421074.html with comments.