That was... intense. Granted, we live in an era where no type of show has an excuse to have bad writing (which isn't the same as saying that they are all well-written), but I did not expect that intensity. Props to Gina Rodriguez and the animation team.

Posted to AO3 my Wayback Exchange and Be The First! fics. The challenge reveals won't take place until April and May — I'll post the links then — so at least this time I'm not precisely cutting it close. (The risk, of course, is that I'll suddenly decide the fics are awful and I have to rewrite everything.)

They were both tricky, though. The Wayback Exchange one because I had to work my way around, or rather with, a very important piece of canon with all sorts of consequences and implications for the story I had to write. The Be The First! story was difficult not due to an excess of canon (there's only a handful of issues), but rather because a couple of details in there, if taken seriously (under Watsonian conditions that I think I can assume but aren't spelled out by the source material) force you to do a huge reframing of the whole situation. It feels weird to do that in the *first* fic in a fandom, but you do what you have to do.

Non-spoilery:

• Loved it. Straightforward superhero awesomeness, and very funny. At no point you feel that something is a drag.


• Marvel casting keeps batting it out of the park. Brie Larson is Carol Danvers as much as RDJ is Tony Stark, Chris Evans is Steve Rogers, etc.


• I don't know of many people who enjoys her life as much as Carol Danver enjoys hers most of the time. When things are going well, because they are going well, and when they aren't going well because that often means there's something dangerous and/or violent about to happen, and if nothing of that sort is scheduled, she'll very much go and seek it. And she'll smirk all the way through it. And she's a genuinely good and caring and reasonable and *funny* person.


• Also: best, sanest, most loving family in the story of super-heroics.


• Also also: Nick Fury is pretty good in this one (you can see how he's Nick Fury but not yet *the* Nick Fury, yet well in his way from point A to point B.)

Single historical detail spoiler, and a single generic sort-of-spoilery plot observation:( Read more...Collapse )

It's a very nice, very reasonable, and actually not at all a niche request, but the more I thought about it (after reviewing the source material, which wasn't at all a disagreeable task), the more I realized that it's an unexpectedly tricky one. So I ended up going to bed late because I was jotting down notes for something of a "bible" for the fic, copying the idea from series/comic books/etc. — not something I usually do.

Anyway, I think I have it. It's not really a solution to the unique trickiness of the specific scenario, but rather an enthusiastic embracing of it. I hope it works for the requester. (Well, first I hope I can make it work in the text...)

(There are many reasons why not, and therefore I'm going to do it anyway.)

Just signed up for Be The First 2019. Somewhat surprisingly, I looked and I don't think I've done it before. Perhaps the explanation is that it took me a long while to find a fandom to be the first for (Fandom. Kinda scarily impressive when you think about it). I ended up choosing Cemetery Beach — Warren Ellis minis seem to lack fics somewhat more reliably than others, which might be a function of his often going off-script, so to speak, or just a smaller readership than my liking of them would make me believe. I am very annoyed, though, that there are three fics for Injection. Three. Either zero or a lot would've been more acceptable numbers.

As subliminally suggested by minoanmiss and gingicat, I just signed up for the Wayback Exchange. Although I must note that, due to my age well-practiced not-getting-killed-so-far skills, my reaction to most fandoms was "What do you mean wayback, this fandom is still active (in my heart)".

I mean, I was trying to get some friends to watch Ninja Assassin a couple weeks ago, there was a TNG episode as background TV during the weekend, my light Tumblr lurking is leavened by a ready stream of apparently new TOS posts, and calling Hamlet or Sherlock Holmes an old fandom is both obviously true and obviously false.

Anyway, Old Man Yelling At Cloud Aside aside (do we still pretend The Simpsons is a live thing, I wonder), yay! This could be fun.

A couple days ago I went to a nocturnal guided visit to the gardens of the Museo Larreta. The place was crowded and the guide was rather bothersome, but the place was beautiful.

I don't want (or could afford) to own a place like that, but I'd love to have access to a place like that, if I could comfortable take my laptop there, have a cup of tea, etc.

In what's possibly a reductio ad absurdum of some sort, I just posted a handful of my old Simon Spector fics to AO3. As apparently there were no previous fics for the character, as far as I can tell I'm now the most prolific publisher of Spector stories in the world, Warren Ellis included.

This would feel a much emptier achievement if I didn't like the setting so much. I don't care if everybody else has forgotten about him, he's still one of my favorite Pulp characters.