pedanther

A while back, on a whim, I signed up for a fic prompt bingo card at genprompt_bingo. It turned out that this kind of prompt is not one my brain finds particularly useful, so it took me a while to complete a line: almost exactly ten years, in fact. But I did it!

( Bingo card )

. At the board game meet, we played Lovecraft Letter, Flip 7 with a Vengeance, and Concept. ( Read more... )


. I blew off Parkrun this week because there was a forecast of rain. Another time I'd probably have gone anyway, and likely been fine (the rain didn't start really coming down until after Parkrun had concluded), but it was closing night of the short play season that evening and I decided I owed it to the audience to stay dry and warm and not catch the flu or lose my voice.


. The short play season went very well, with good audiences for a short play season, especially on closing night. The cast and crew all got on well, too, which is always nice. We start rehearsals for You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown tomorrow.


. I've been intrigued for a while by the no_true_pair fic challenge, in which you choose a set of characters and are given fic prompts for each pair of characters in the list, but the sticking point has always been that I can't make up my mind what characters to do it with. I waffled about joining the latest four-character round for ages, and eventually signed on literally five minutes before the posting phase was opened with a set of characters picked more or less at random. So far, I've written a vignette for one prompt and started on another, and it's been an interesting exercise in thinking about what the paired characters have in common, but I'm not sure it's going to result in anything I actually consider publishable.


. I've completed the jigsaw puzzle I've been working on. In the end, I liked it a lot more than the previous one I tried from the same manufacturer, although I still think the engineering of the pieces could stand to be a bit tighter.


. The latest addition to my daily puzzle routine is Glyph, a Wordle-like game in which you have four guesses to identify a word with the assistance of an image showing the letters of the word stacked on top of each other. I'm enjoying it, and doing pretty well; the only time I've needed all four guesses was the first time I tried it, and that was partly because I'd got the explanation of the letter-order hints back to front.


. I'm not sure what it says that I've been only vaguely aware of NASA's Artemis II mission -- which plans to send a human crew on an observation pass around the Moon, closer than any humans have been in fifty years -- and it was only by chance that I saw a notice that lift-off is scheduled to take place this week (early Thursday morning, Australian time).

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.)

. At the last board game meetup of the year, I played Uno: Show 'Em No Mercy, Guillotine, and Cockroach Salad. I don't remember if I'd played Guillotine before; it's a card game where you're trying to collect French aristocrats, and play cards to manipulate the pool so that you can gather the ones that are worth high points and avoid the ones with penalties.


. It's getting to the time of year where I'm feeling the pinch of having signed up for too many year-long reading challenges, with half a dozen challenge prompts (including the final link of the Book Chain) still to tick off in the next ten days. I'm fully capable of reading six books in ten days, especially since I'm now on holiday, but some of the prompts call for specific books that I'm not currently in the mood to read. One book I've at least started is Lies My Teacher Told Me by James W. Loewen, which is about the gulf between how history is taught in schools and the messy complexity of history itself.


. I haven't helped matters by also signing up for a book club that's reading Susan Cooper's classic wintery novel The Dark Is Rising on a Dracula-Daily-type schedule over the next few weeks, kicking off just as Around the World in Eighty Emails finishes. I'm not sure how well the wintery mood is going to come across in my case; it's summer here, and in the past week the very coldest it got was 14 degrees above freezing. The precursor novel, Over Sea, Under Stone – which I finished re-reading this morning – is much better suited to an Australian Christmas, being set during a summer holiday at the seaside.


. I went to see Wicked: For Good. I didn't like it quite as much as Wicked: Part I, but then it's been quite a while since I saw a movie I liked as much as I liked Wicked: Part I. I was interested to notice that one of the changes made for the movie, to fix an issue with one of the character arcs, also goes a fair way toward fixing something else that had bugged me about the plot of the stage version; I'm not sure if the writers had also had that in mind, or if it's just a happy coincidence. A few days later, after my thoughts on it had been simmering for a while, I found myself committing fanfic. I still have to figure out where the fic is going to end up, and I'm not going to make any definite decisions until the movie hits home video and I can rewatch a few scenes, but I'm feeling good about it.


. I have been playing Spirited Thief, which was massively discounted in the Steam Summer Sale right after somebody commended to me as a game similar to Invisible, Inc.. The player controls a group of thieves doing a heist, one of whom is a disembodied spirit; each mission has two phases, with the spirit going in to case the joint and locate valuables, map guard patrols, and disable alarm systems, before the actual heist is carried out by the members of the team capable of lifting solid objects. I'm enjoying the gameplay so far, although I'm not entirely clicking with the writing of the story that ties the various missions together.

Inside Job, my random book for January, is one of an ebook bundle of Subterranean Press chapbooks I got a while back. It has a striking and atmospheric cover that completely fails to convey the tone of the contents; if I'd known it was a comedy, I might have skipped it, because historically I have not got on with Connie Willis's comedies. I didn't get on with this one, either; there's potential in the premise of a professional skeptic and debunker being forced to come to terms with two apparent impossibilities, but Willis's approach didn't work for me.

I also read a Bony novel, The Bachelors of Broken Hill, which I have mixed feelings about, and have started reading Down and Out in Purgatory: The Collected Stories of Tim Powers.


The annual Three Sentence Ficathon is on at threesentenceficathon. I have consequently written six sentences of fic already this year, which is more than I wrote in all of 2024. (It might actually be seven sentences: I had to jam two sentences together to fit one of my responses into three sentences, and the result just doesn't flow right and bothers me every time I look at it. I'm thinking of changing it back to four sentences when I put it on AO3, if I get around to doing that.)


Board game club has started up again for the year. This week I played Deception: Murder in Hong Kong (I was the murderer twice, and got caught very quickly the first time but managed to eliminate the inconvenient witness and win the round the second time) and Mayan Curse (which I enjoyed and would like to play again, though I'm iffy about the way it uses some old-fashioned tropes).


I've signed up for a free trial subscription to AVCX, an online crossword thing that publishes a few new crosswords each week. I heard about it independently in two different places recently (one of the compilers was a guest on the Lateral podcast, and it also got plugged on a puzzle-related Youtube channel I follow), so I decided to take that as a sign to check it out. I'm enjoying the puzzles so far, and have been finding them to be at a satisfactory level of difficulty. (Not counting this week's cryptic crossword, which I've only got about three answers on so far because I've forgotten most of what I used to know about how cryptic clues work and haven't got around to brushing up yet. And I seem to recall I did better at cryptics when they were on paper and I could doodle possible solutions in the margins.)


Dance rehearsals have started for Guys and Dolls. I've had an easy time of it so far; my character moves around in time to the music, but doesn't do anything that rises to the level of Dancing.


I spent the entire week continuing to not play XCOM 2. I did occasionally find myself thinking that my mental state had improved and maybe I could have another go at it, but usually there was something I wanted to get out of the way first, or it was late enough in the evening to be too late to be starting a new campaign.

Stats

List of Completed Fic

Like falling off a log, only perpendicular (Good Omens, G, 136 words) for believerindaydreams in a five-sentence prompting meme

You'd Swear The Dice Were Doing It On Purpose (Marvel Cinematic Universe, G, 62 words) for WingedFlight in the Three Sentence Ficathon

The Limericks of the Ancient Mariner (The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, G, 271 words) for leecetheartist

Total number: 3

Total word count: 469

( Read more... )

. Apart from the regular gaming group meet-ups, I've also been drawn into a smaller group who meet sometimes on weekends to play the kind of board games that take hours to get through and so don't usually get brought out at the more casual meet-ups. Among other things, that's meant I recently got a chance to play Fury of Dracula again for the first time in years. I played Dracula, and I started well but the hunters found my trail just as I was about to slip through their cordon and get away into the area they'd already searched, and after that I never quite managed to shake them off until they eventually cornered me in Madrid. Everybody had a good time, so perhaps it won't be years again before I next play.


. 'Tis the season to look wistfully at fic exchange sign-ups and then decide not to get involved. Lately I've been particularly wistful about Remix Revival (which I enjoyed a lot the first time I did it, but I'd feel weird doing it again when I haven't written anything else substantial in the interim) and FEAR Buddies, where instead of matching on people to write fics for it matches on people who need cheerleading/motivation to finish a fic they were already planning to do. That one seemed like something that would be useful, and where I could be useful, but signing up would have involved, like, figuring out what kind of motivation I need and writing it down and stuff. I'd sign up for a lot more exchanges if the sign-up forms could read my mind and make these sorts of decisions for me.


. I've just finished re-reading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. It's the first time I've re-read them all the way through since before the Hobbit movies came out, so I spent quite a bit of time noticing differences between the books and the adaptations. One thing that struck me particularly this time through is about travel times; in the adaptations, journeys tend to be "travel montage of indeterminate length" or "cut to them arriving", but in the books Tolkien always gives a definite idea of how long a journey took, so there's more of an impression of how big the land is and how far apart things are. There are places in the movies where it seems like the characters are getting somewhere the same day but in the books it's several days travel, or in the movies it seems like a few days but in the book it's weeks.


. Another thing I've read recently is "All Systems Red", the first novella in the Murderbot Diaries series by Martha Wells, which has been on my to-read pile for ages but I never got around to before. Now I have a decision to make, because the second book in the series is significantly more expensive (maybe it's a full novel? I'm not sure), but the current wait time on the library system's copy is two months.


. I've occasionally noted the progress of the local paper's rerun of the Modesty Blaise comic strip, so for completeness there is one more development to note. (This actually happened a couple of months ago, but I didn't hear about it at the time because I stopped reading paper newspapers during the coronavirus restrictions and haven't restarted.) It's not carrying the strip any more, having decided that some of what passed as acceptable when the strip originally ran is no longer suitable for a family newspaper. Looking back, it's not exactly that I was unaware of the strip's shortcomings, but I never really thought about it because it was such a familiar presence; I might have gone "well, it was written fifty years ago" but I never got from there to ask the question "so why is it being given space here and now?". Apparently whoever was responsible for the content of the comics page was in a similar headspace, at least until the rerun got up to the story set in the Australian outback, at which point the problem started hitting close to home and the question was forcefully received from multiple directions and received the only possible answer.

. I wrote something! In fact I have now written several things, all thanks to the 3 Sentence Ficathon. They might be hard to find amongst all the action on the ficathon itself, so I've started copying them over to my AO3 archive.


. Auditions have happened for this year's musical, which is to be Hello Dolly!. Now we're waiting to find out what the results are. In the past few years, I've usually had a solid idea which role I'm going to get in the musical, because the club's pool of male talent for musicals is not large and most of the people in it have particular character types that they gravitate toward. In the case of Hello Dolly!, I don't know the show well enough to have a firm opinion, and the director said at the audition that she has me in mind for a couple of roles and was keeping her options open until she saw who else was available.


. I went to see Jojo Rabbit, Taika Waititi's new movie, and I'm glad I did; it's an experience I would not want to have missed.

(One of the reasons I considered not going is that I'm susceptible to getting ferocious second-hand embarrassment on behalf of fictional characters, so I'm always very cautious about comedies with the premise "protagonist talks to someone nobody else can see or hear"; I'm pleased to be able to report that Jojo Rabbit doesn't go in that direction and nothing in it set me off.)


. In the foreword to her most recent book, Lois McMaster Bujold talks a bit about her writing process. One thing she says that struck me, and gives me hope for my own writing, is that she starts by accumulating ideas and for a novel can have as many as fifty pages of notes before she knows enough about the story to begin writing the actual words.


. One of my relatives has acquired a new kitten named Ivy, who is adorable and very friendly. I forget whether she was always named after the comic book character Poison Ivy, or if that was something my relative decided retroactively upon acquisition, but in any case I find it an appropriate name because if I let her come and nuzzle me I itch for the rest of the day. Totally worth it.

I don't usually make any significant inroads into the Yuletide collection before reveals, but this year I was in need of distraction.

( Part one: The Big Episodic Crossovers: 2 works, 19 fandoms )

( Part two: Everything Else: 14 works, 11 fandoms )

(memed from thisbluespirit, who did it properly, unlike what I'm about to do)

This is probably going to be very short this year, because I have only one completed fic, my contribution to this year's Remix Revival.

It's still going under a cut, because the fic I remixed had strong language in it, including the title and summary, and so does the remix.

( Read more... )