the sun and the moon and the stars

Rewatching Shang Chi (let's be real, mostly for the bus fight scene and for Xialing being a badass throughout) and it occurs to me that I want the version of the story where Katy is actually an escapee Black Widow and she's just never pushed Shaun as to his background because she's worried about tipping her own hand.

It doesn't quiiiiite stack up, but it's so close, it'd work if you pushed it.

Someone linked me to this, and it's great. :)

Empty Graves (6539 words) by Unpretty
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Superman - All Media Types, DCU
Summary:

Time travelers who plan to kill Superman never account for Martha Kent in their plans. She may not be the World's Finest, but she's a mother with a shotgun, and all told that might be scarier.

It's late, and I'm tired, so let's meme!

( current viewing )

( my preferences )

( pick a show, any show )

( my favourites )

( viewing habits )

Swuiped from deird1.

I remain deeply bemused by the way the discourse around healthy relationships has warped over time. It is, of course, a good thing that people have grown to recognise that an older person grooming a younger (less experienced, more naive, more shape-able) person is generally a bad thing, and often predatory in the context of romantic relationships.

But I've genuinely seen people arguing that any age gap in relationships other than a few years is inherently predatory, that the older person is always taking advantage of the younger person, that they're "creepy pedos". Even when the youngest person in the couple is in their thirties or forties. Leaving aside the inherent lack of understanding of what a pedophile actually is, it seems so closed-minded to assume that people can never have anything genuine and valuable to offer each other unless they're at exactly the same stage of their life.

And of course progressive discourse and purity culture and the internet commentariat being what they are, I've seen multiple people arguing - apparently entirely sincerely - about why older and younger people would even be friends? Why would a sixty year old want to hang out with a forty year old? What could they possibly have in common; how could they possibly find each other interesting?

(Thankfully, I was reading the worst offenders from my phone, and the obstacle of trying to thumb-type a polemic saved me from falling into the But Someone Is Wrong On The Internet spiral.)

I don't think I'll ever get over being surprised about the inability of a great number of people to imagine that other peoples' lives do not look exactly like their own.

Almost by accident I've started playing DC Universe Online again, a game I last played before the Great Sony Hack of 2011 that took all their games and the PSN down for a month or more. I remember enjoying it at the time, but having mixed feelings given the shoddiness of the UI and UX (console ports ftw) and the lack of transparency in the game mechanics.

Well, none of that has changed, but maybe my opinions have, about what an MMORPG should look like. I reinstalled it just for kicks (and because now Australia has slightly less-slow internet, it's not a chore to do so!) and logged in intending just to have a fly around, and got distracted changing my outfit (my main hero now looks incredibly badass) and then sort of got interested in the content and now here I am a few days layer, re-subscribed and getting stuck in.

The engine is still clunky and the graphics are certainly showing its age (but for all of that, the environments are prettier than World of Warcraft which had a graphics upgrade much more recently.) But what I'm impressed about is the quantity of content they've released. In the, what, nine and a half years since the game launched, there have been 39 "episodes", periodic updates of playable content which advance the storylines and provide character progression.

For the last four years their model has been to release a new episode every few months (anywhere from 2 to 6) which contains a new open-world zone with repeatable quests, new levels of instance content for various sizes of group, and at least one full raid, often two. 21 new raids in less than four years. Admittedly none of them are huge, but when you're getting three or four new episodes a year, that doesn't matter! And, as a bonus, it's all included in the subscription, or if you're a free to play player you can unlock specific episodes for a one-off payment.

Dear Blizzard, this is how you drip-feed new content - you know, that thing you've been saying you want to do for over a decade.

It's also kinda interesting because I've read a lot more DCU fanfic since I first played, thanks largely to musesfool and her recs at unfitforsociety. So I feel a certain amount of interest in the setting that I didn't when I first played. Bumping into Superman or Wonder Woman in game does nothing for me (exacerbated by the fact that Superman is voiced by Adam Baldwin, whose crappiness has kind of tarnished everything he's touched, for me) but flying around in the Justice League Watchtower kind of does.

It sure is a fun time to be a fan in SFF at the moment. /s

In the last week, survivors have come forward about abuse, harrassment and predation they suffered at the hands of:

* Cameron Stewart (comics artist)
* Warren Ellis (SFF luminary)
* Chris Avellone (video game designer, comics writer, RPG writer)
* Noah Bradley (MtG artist)
* Jason Latour (comics artist)
* Shane DeFreest (RPG designer)
* Sam Sykes (SFF author)
* Myke Cole (SFF author)
* Mark Lawrence (SFF author)
* Scott Lynch and Elizabeth Bear (SFF authors)
* Matt McElroy (RPG studio manager and DriveThruRPG manager)
* a shitload of names in the video game streaming community here

This week has been approximately 83 years long.

Out of idle curiosity, and looking for more fic to read, I went randomly searching on the AO3 today, and found the the work with the single highest number of kudos. It is this gem, and I can see why it's rated so highly. What an amazing concept.

In the ongoing list of Things I Want To Make But Probably Never Will: I have thought on-and-off that Raise Your Weapon by deadmau5 would make a fantastic Natasha fanvid, but it's never felt. quite. right. Well, the other day I heard a live version of it, from deadmau5's Creamfields 2019 set, and it's pretty much perfect; the live vocals are sparser and... realer, somehow, despite being a lot less perfect. I just have no vidding mojo these days, that's all, so it'll just have to sit on the list of Fanvids I'd Love To Make Someday and I can pretend one day I'm going to do it.

(Along with Seeya for a Jupiter Ascending vid, Puscifer's The Humbling River for Ziva David, and A Perfect Circle's cover of Fiddle and the Drum for John Crichton. Those three really are the fanvids of my heart.)

I may not be up for intelligent content generation (this situation, you guys, it's doing my head in) but at least I can provide recs.

I'm going to be saving these recs in my recs: longfic tag -- hopefully I can make this kind of a habit.

I don't know what's widely considered 'longfic', but honestly, I tend to think of anything longer than 10K as likely to have the qualities I look for in longfic (i.e. movement of plot, not just character study or vignette.) For these recs I'm setting the floor around 30K unless I hit something really great that deserves an exception.

Anyway, on with the recs:

--

The Queen Susan in Tashbaan, Part 2 of The Stone Gryphon (174583 words) by rthstewart
Fandom: Chronicles of Narnia - C. S. Lewis
Series: Part 2 of The Stone Gryphon
Summary: Queen Susan and Lord Peridan of the Gryphon Aerial Corps aid the British war effort in 1942 America – a dodgy tale of espionage, seduction and garden insectivores.

I love this fic so much. rthstewart has done a huge amount of Narnia worldbuilding which shows through in all her stories; The Stone Gryphon tells the stories of the Pevensies in England as they all struggle with the problem of how to navigate the work you feel you're called to do when you're in wartime England and the world still thinks you're a child. (It also, eventually, brilliantly handles The Problem of Susan in a way that finally makes sense.) Of all the parts in the series - and they're all great - The Queen Susan in Tashbaan is my favourite for the plot, the intrigue, and most of all for Susan herself.

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the cammieverse (92310 words) by synecdochic
Fandom: Stargate SG-1
Summary: I've always been fascinated by always-a-different-sex AUs, especially the kind that take a cis dude and flip him into being a cis woman and then ask: okay, to get her into the same place he was in canon, how is she going to have to be different from her male counterpart?

Turns out, to get Cammie Mitchell into the same place as Cam Mitchell, she has to be twice as good and twice as agreeable. But she winds up about the same amount of stubborn.

synecdochic's Stargate stories are rightly lauded, and the broken wings-verse usually gets most of the love (especially A Howling in the Factory Yard). I, however, love the cammieverse - the always-a-woman take on Lt. Col. Cameron Mitchell. Cammie is smart, ferocious and incredibly capable - but far from perfect, and all the more interesting for it. This one is a series rec - it's not a longfic without it, but it flows smoothly as a single overall story, so that works for me.

mezzanine (225468 words) by synecdochic and ivorygates
Fandom: Stargate SG-1
Summary: this is an AU mashup of two AUs: the one in which Cameron Mitchell was more injured in his 302 crash than he was in canon, and the one where Cam's a woman. It's sort of our take on the "we're not gay, we just love each other" trope. Us being us, it did not come out in the least bit like what you'd expect.

For all that I love the cammieverse, I love the first half-a-dozen stories of mezzanine more. Cammie is still ferocious and smart and capable - and dealing with a shitty hand and some scary realities. Mezzanine has a lot of personal resonance for me, and I found it for the first time right when I needed it.

--

have you heard (42166 words) by peradi
Fandom: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Series: Part 1 of once there was
Summary: "I heard FN-2187 was a Stormtrooper."

 

 Finn sparks a revolution.

(Written post-TFA, not compliant with TLJ or ROS.)
This is a truly tremendous story, about hope and humanity and choices. I cry like a baby every time I read it. (I am rereading it for this rec. My screen is blurry.) It is also occasionally hilarious, in a dry sort of way. Ugh. *flaps hands*

On the one hand, insomnia sucks. On the other hand, tonight's bout of it provided the perfect opportunity to watch the new Birds of Prey movie, which is entirely misnamed since it's 95% Harley's movie, and characters like Cass (and Dinah?) owe basically nothing to their comics namesakes.

It was a frenetic, chaotic shitshow of a movie, and thoroughly enjoyable. The structuring (flashback-heavy) was actively confusing; I'm not sure whether it was written that way or whether it was restructured in post-shoot editing, but it made the middle third of the movie (what should have been Act 2, I guess) nigh-incomprehensible. Or maybe it was watching it at 3am that did that. But, still, it was splashy dumb fun with a few great character beats for Harley. (Then again, I actually didn't hate Suicide Squad, and I thought the extended cut in particular made it a substantially better movie.)

I mean, god only knows what DC is doing with their movie continuity these days, and I think BOP suffers for that because as an ensemble movie would have been much stronger in a strongly-drawn and comprehensible setting. But that's not gonna happen with DC any time soon, so... it is what it is, I guess.

Still, given the givens, it was fun and I'm glad I watched it.

(Edit: Also, Ewan McGregor was fucking great.)

I had to watch a bunch of it on tenterhooks because although it mostly wasn't gory, there was a looming threat of violence in so many scenes (mostly anything with Sionis or Zsasz in it, both of whom were like unstable explosives) so I did watch bits of it with headphones off and peeking through my fingers. I've seen it compared to John Wick, and I don't actually feel that worked for me - the majority of the action was way more comic-book-y and cartoony than John Wick, while the notable minority was (IMO) way more gruesome. (( one comment is spoilery ))

So, that fic meme going around - why not! Of course, these are all really about romance-genre stories; in established relationship stories my preferences are quite different (and half the questions aren't relevant).

Slow burn OR love at first sight: Definitely slow burn, because it allows for interesting story to happen. If it's love at first sight, the obstacles to success become external and frustrating rather than character or relationship growth, and that's a downer.

Fake dating OR secret dating: Fake dating, because of all the same reasons as the above question. :)

Enemies to lovers OR best friends to lovers: I like them both, honestly, provided the writer does the necessary work to show the build. I think a well-done enemies-to-lovers is more satisfying, but best-friends-to-lovers is easier to pull off well.

Oh no there's only one bed OR long distance with correspondence: Correspondence. a) I have slept next to someone I had a crush on (who also, I discovered later, was interested in me) and it caused very little angst, drama or sleeplessness for anybody. maybe some concern about "uh oh, what if I fart in my sleep?" but that's about it.

Whereas correspondence, oh please yes gimme. I love epistolary stories in general, and stories told through something other than straight narrative - "reconstructions of ancient texts", chat logs from the backchannel of the USS Enterprise, hard-hitting journalistic exposes of Tony Stark, whatever. It is very very much my jam.

Fantasy AU OR modern AU: I don't have a strong preference, but probably modern AU if anything. Of the various types of AUs, my favourite type are those that are AU due to storyline deviation (What if Qui-Gon lived? What if Darth Vader was a double agent? What if Harry Potter was Sorted into Slytherin? What if Tony Stark didn't have wealth and privilege?) that then explore the consequences, that paint the picture of what that world would be like. Much more interesting (to me) than just finding ways to shoehorn every Avenger-adjacent character into working at a coffeeshop. (Also, why is Darcy Lewis always such a good baker in these stories? Is it a 2 Broke Girls thing?)

Smut or fluff: Fluff. I rarely read fic for the porn, and in fact will very often skip over sex scenes entirely, unless they're relevant for character-building or relationship-building.

Mutual pining OR domestic bliss: Pining. Occasional domestic bliss is fun, but mutual pining is crack.

Alternate universe OR futurefic: I like specific kinds of AUs (see above) better than anything, but overall I'd probably take futurefic.

Oneshot OR multi-chapter: I don't mind, provided I don't have to wait too long for fulfillment. I understand why people post WIPs but not only are they hell when you're impatient and want to read the story nowwww, they also mean that later chapters are written in reaction to peoples' comments, and that often warps a long running story away from the path that interested in me in the first place.

Kidfic OR road trip fic: I don't really have any strong preferences here; kidfic needs to be done well, but often is, and there's some kidfic I've really loved, while roadtrip fic can be pleasant but rarely stirs strong emotion.

Reincarnation OR character death: Reincarnation, largely because I'm mostly not a huge fan of character death (unless it's the point of the story and I'm ready to have a crying day.) TBH though I haven't seen much reincarnation-fic -- is this a Thing in some parts of fandom?

Arranged marriage OR accidental marriage: I like both okay to be honest, but if I had to pick one I'd say accidental marriage, mostly because I have found some hilarious examples of same. I tend not to read in the fandoms where arranged marriages are a thing, so I've encountered less; are they typically well-done?

Time travel OR isolated together: again both good; I would have to pick time travel, I think, because I've read a couple of amazing groundhog-day-ish fics lately (one about Killmonger redoing the events of Black Panther over and over again, very badly, and one about Hera Agathon saving a whole lot of lives and a couple of civilisations) and I am full of love for the concept.

Neighbors OR roommates: Neighbours, I guess, because it allows for more mystery and more gaps for the story to close.

Sci-fi au OR Magic au: Sci Fi, if the writer puts the work in. Magic is easier, because we all have a bunch of shared assumptions about what a magic setting (i.e. probably historical fantasy) looks like, whereas sci fi could be anything from near-future cyberpunk to far-future high-tech transhumanism. Magic is probably Lord of the Rings (or D&D, or Magician, or Game of Thrones, or w/e) whereas Sci Fi looks a lot different if it's Altered Carbon or Star Trek or Jupiter Ascending, y'know? (I have a lot of thoughts about this, because this is a problem you get in tabletop gaming when introducing people to new game settings - fantasy is just easier because of the shared cultural assumptions.)

(All of the above presupposes that the Magic AU in question is White Western High Fantasy. But let's face it, it almost always is.)

Bodyswap OR genderbend: woof. Both of them can hit a bunch of body horror squicks, which makes them both minefields. If they're both done well, I'd pick genderbend, especially the Always A Wo|Man variant which lets you explore a bunch of really interesting stuff. (Even if most writers usually just use it for a different flavour of porn.)

Angst OR crack: Both are sometimes foods for me. I don't have a high tolerance for angst in general because if it's done well it tanks my mood and if it's done badly I sprain my eyeballs rolling them at the wangst. Crack on the other hand is usually a safer bet, provided I share the writer's sense of humour.

Apocalyptic OR mundane: I'm not really into apocalypse, so I'd pick mundane. Post-apocalypse, on the other hand, I am THERE for, provided it's not a wangst-fest. I adore stories of people building something new with the wreckage of the old.

The perils of not keeping up with laundry: pile of laundry + dark bedroom + socked feet + slippery wooden floors = Eleanor goes "whoops" and falls over and smashes her face into the bedside table. Thankfully the bruise shouldn't be too eye-catching.

So, I appear to have disappeared for three months - oops?

In fact, the last three months have been hectic and draining, although not unenjoyable. I've been seconded to a project role in my organisation's head office, which is full of interesting challenges - although it's always a bit of a startling reminder how disconnected the corporate branch is from the frontline work, and how different are their concerns and priorities. Still - it's great on the resume, it's interesting on a personal level (I've finally realised that to be happy in a job, I need to have growth opportunities) and I managed to negotiate a 10% payrise.

(I was very proud of myself - I've never negotiated my pay before, and it's substantially more than they'd intended to pay me.)

Buuuut -- I'm working in the city which adds nearly an hour of commute to my day (with considerable extra expense, but whatever), and I can't cruise on autopilot, and there's a shit ton of meetings and workshops. So I end every day exhausted, which means my evenings are a combination of some desultory gaming (Exalted! Shadowrun! Dungeons and Dragons! Exalts Fall Into the Wyld and Land In Faerun! Fun times) and staring at the wall trying to recoup some energy. Oh, and I'm no longer able to do my 9-day fortnights in this role.

So. Tired Eleanor is tired. Happy, though.

How y'all doing? ;)

It's December already, and my brain is convinced it's way earlier than that. Like, some time in 2015. Or maybe 1997.

I dunno, I feel like this year has just galumphed past, and I know everyone says this every year but it's truuuuuue. On the up side, it does make for really easy small talk - for the next three weeks I can replace all instances of "so, any fun plans for the weekend?" with "OMG HOW IS IT DECEMBER ALREADY" and be guaranteed of mutual "I KNOW WTF". Also, being smug about being done with xmas gift-buying (thankyou online shopping) is a great way to get conversational reactions from others. ;) (Up to and including a death-glare from my boss that practically set me on fire.)

In other news: fuck Tumblr. This change squarely impacts how I use Tumblr, and I have zero interest in giving them any more of my effort.

And their smarmy "oh there's other sites for porn", oh my GOD. Why do people not get that it's not about OMGPORN, it's about sex being a normal, healthy part of life (for people who want it to be) and excising every thought or mention of it from allll of our spaces and cramming it into the one box that's allowed to hold it... is totally unhealthy and totally antithetical to how people actually live, and thus how they want to engage with the platforms that narrate their lives.

"There's other sites for porn" is like being told "enjoy your marriage for companionship and love, but if you want sex you've gotta go to an escort". That's *fine* for people who negotiate their lives to be that way, but for many (most?) people it's a totally unrealistic and unreasonable expectation to divorce something so intrinsic from the entire rest of their lives.

I hope tumblr crashes and burns, I really do.

I'm in a Star Warsy kind of mood, and man, the Star Wars fandom does AUs really well.

If anyone has any recs for Qui Gon Lives fics, particularly ones that focus less on his relationship with Obi-Wan, and more on the effect of Anakin having a master who was a better fit for training him - I would be very appreciative!

Hell, any fun Star Wars AUs (particularly of the "what if X was different from canon history" variety) would be great.

Recs welcome!

I ... still haven't seen Infinity War? I think I'm going to go see it today, if the housemate and I can coordinate our windows of having-enough-spoons. Mostly at this stage I want to see it just so I've seen it, and can read the fic and peoples' reaction posts with proper understanding.

I have come to the conclusion that it's not that I'm over the MCU, it's that my ideas of sense and good storytelling diverges wildly from the PTB, who meddle with the ensemble movies in a way that they don't seem to with the single-character movies.

I've enjoyed basically all the standalone movies - some I merely enjoyed, through to some I adored - whereas the ensemble movies have been largely a hot mess. (Though I did enjoy the first Avengers at the time, I think it holds up less well under scrutiny, particularly once you're already disenchanted.)

The up side of missing the release of Infinity War, though, was that I finally got to watch Black Panther now it's out on iTunes (it being the first MCU movie I missed at the cinema). I have to admit, I was a lot less impressed than I expected to be, though that may be because of people talking it up before I saw it. I mean, I did enjoy it, but...

( Spoilery Black Panther reactions: )

Well then.

( thoughts under the cut, spoilery )

Does anyone have examples of, or links to, quality policies against harassment and abuse? Particularly policies suitable for use by clubs, online groups, et cetera?

(It's high time our MMO guild had a policy for this, and I want to make sure I've covered everything.)

I haven't watched Discovery yet, but I know Trek has been on peoples' minds as a result of its launch.

I have rediscovered, back in 2009, a series of posts I wrote summarising material gleaned from the Star Trek RPG then published by LUG and Decipher, as a primer to help people new to Trek pick up a bunch of canon-ish background material relatively easily.

As it's eight years old, I thought I'd give it a bump since Trek is back in the collective consciousness again.

The posts are on my canon: star trek tag. They generally haven't been updated to incorporate anything relating to AOS (except one bit), and refer almost entirely to the prime universe/timeline. Re-linked, since someone out there might find it useful.

I got another commission back today :)

( art under the cut! )

Yay!

(I'm posting all the art I've commissioned under the character art tag - there's another one of Aspen in there so far, and some other characters, and more to come. :))

I know it's unlikely, but are there any Dreamwidth or compatible apps for iOS?

If you're here from the friending meme, hi! I'm looking forward to getting to know everyone. If I haven't already responded to your adding of me, do feel free to drop me a message if you like :)

If you aren't here from the friending meme, and you haven't already checked it out, and you'd like to meet more people, do check it out -



Do it for the giraffes!

--

In other news, I will shortly be winding down my venerable and long-time LiveJournal, ladyjestyr (and my secondary fandom LJ, eleanorjane, and let's just confuse things by making that my primary username here on Dreamwidth, good job Eleanor). Much of the content there has been crossposted from here since I moved to Dreamwidth, and I'll be investigating import options to capture the earlier stuff and the LJ-specific comment threads. I really don't check LJ any more at all, and with the brouhaha over the servers moving to Russia, it seems like a good time.

If you're a LiveJournal user and I haven't already connected with you on Dreamwidth, please do let me know your DW username so I can read you over here instead. If you're a LiveJournal-only user and you haven't yet checked it out, I do recommend Dreamwidth -- it runs very stably* off a fork of LJ's software, which is much improved from the base IMO, and Dreamwidth is generally an ethical and very user-responsive company. There's no advertising, basic accounts are free, and premium/paid features are very reasonable.

* Is stably even a real word? I sort of think it should be stablely, but that's just as weird. I dunno.

The first commission turned out so well that I went on a bit of a spree :)

This one's of Cathak Korin and Cathak Avila, Fire Aspect Dragon-Bloods and partners in crime. Avila's one of my favourite characters ever and Korin likewise for J.

( yaaaaaaaaaay! )

Yay!

Inspired by settiai's adventures in character art commissions, I took the plunge and commissioned a pic of my current most beloved gaming character, a Dawn Caste Solar by the name of Iron Aspen.

( yaaaaaaaaaay! )

Yay!

I was hi-lariously amused at work today when a colleague talked about having seen the new Ghostbusters and how she really liked Jenny McCarthy in it. Wait, what? But she confessed that she too had an epic crush on Holtzmann, so I'll forgive her.

Honestly, I thought Ghostbusters was fucking great. The editing was a bit shaky, I thought - you could see the holes where scenes had been and weren't any more - but the movie was better without the scenes they took out, and honestly you could have just given me two straight hours of Holtzmann licking her guns and being better than everything and I'd have been happy.

And oh, god, KEVIN. I feel like a bit of a traitor for going to see a movie whose defining feature in the zeitgeist is its female cast and then delighting in the male bit part, but honestly, Kevin was a fucking treasure and basically a rather daffy pet in human skin and I will fight you if you don't agree. (Okay, I won't, I'll just be sad for you.)

It is not often I get a movie that's exactly what I wanted from it. Ghostbusters hit that mark again and again, so I am perfectly content.

Also, jesus, HOLTZMANN. ♥

(Edit: also, I really want a Holtzmann vid to "Timber". That would be aces.)