Bookmarks

Archive of Our Own recently did a feature update that now makes it possible to sort one's collection of bookmarks (links to fics one is interested in revisiting) by the length of the fic in question.

The shortest fics I've bookmarked that consist entirely of normal text are several drabbles; the sorting gives priority, apparently on the basis of age, to rabidsamfan's Calvin and Hobbes drabble Introduction.

(Works that don't consist entirely of normal text, and thereby confuse the word counter, include embedded videos, comic strips and other works told entirely in images, and ysobel's I am Groot (Groot's Story), where the bulk of the story is in the footnotes.)

My two largest bookmarks are both series: Motion Practice (by an author who has chosen to remain anonymous) and Don't Look Back by this-acuteneurosis.

Motion Practice is a series that reimagines the Avengers (the American superheroes, not the English crimefighters) as a team of lawyers, with various other characters in associated roles including Loki as that one slimy defence lawyer you always get in legal dramas who will do anything to get his client off as long as his client has money; there are over forty works in the series, including seven entire novels.

Don't Look Back is a Star Wars story in which Princess Leia is sent back in time to before the Empire, and sets out to prevent the Empire being created -- which, unlike in many works with similar premises, doesn't just meaning assassinating the would-be Emperor but also dealing with the social and cultural forces that enabled his rise to power. I've seen the author say somewhere that when they started writing it, they expected it to be a single work under a hundred thousand words long; it's currently over 750,000 words and counting, and with luck may be finally completed some time next year.

The longest individual fic I have bookmarked is Sansûkh by determamfidd, in which the events of The Lord of the Rings are retold from the point of view of a group of dwarves (the late Thorin Oakenshield and his companions) watching from the afterlife and commentating on the action. I've been re-reading this one over the past few days, since I first did the experiment of seeing what the longest fic I had bookmarked was, and am about a quarter of the way through. I have mixed feelings about it, because some of the worldbuilding is interesting, but the fic uses the characterisations from the Peter Jackson movies, which means that sometimes the author's priorities and decisions have significant areas of non-overlap with mine, including when it comes to what the author has chosen to make one of the main emotional threads of the narrative. (If you know what the word "bagginshield" means, you likely have an idea of whether this is a story you're likely to be willing to spend 570,000 words with.)

Week in review: Week to 24 January

. At the board game meet, I wasn't interested in the big game of the week, so I stayed on the casual table, where we played Cockroach Salad, The Mind, Ingenious, and Tacta. The person who suggested playing Ingenious was actually one of the people I'd played with a few weeks ago, who'd enjoyed it enough to want another go.


. I started a new game of XCOM 2 with the difficulty setting moved down a notch, and have been having a much better time in the sense that I've been zooming through it with no serious difficulties, but I'm not sure how much fun I'm having. It's allowing me to avoid the unpleasantness I was getting mired in when things went badly wrong, but I'm not feeling particularly elated when things go well; I'm not sure whether that's because it now feels insufficiently challenging for the victories to feel significant, or just because I've been having a down week in general.


. I still have a few chapters left to go on the Raffles book, and haven't decided whether it's worth pushing through for the sake of ticking off a reading challenge prompt. For now, I've put it aside to read other more enjoyable things, including Stephen Briggs' stage adaptation of Monstrous Regiment (I've been thinking about proposing one of his adaptations to the Rep Club, but if Monstrous Regiment is typical we're going to have trouble finding a big enough cast).


. The Traitors finale was suitably dramatic and I think the victory was well-earned.


. There was a screening of a documentary film about George Orwell and what he had to say that was relevant to the current state of the world. I was interested enough to get in the car and head to the cinema, but on the way I had second thoughts about whether I really wanted to spend my evening watching a documentary about the current state of the world, so I turned off a couple of blocks early and refueled the car and then went and did something else more fun.


. thedarlingone is doing a series of blog posts where they organise their digital music collection by going through the tracks in alphabetical order and post capsule reviews of each. My digital music collection could do with organising, too; I have not yet made up my mind whether I want to do the same thing, but I've got as far as opening an alphabetical listing, looking at it, and then going in search of an app to fix the metadata on a bunch of tracks.