Recent Entries

DMZ returns to Pegasus

My most prolific fandom was not MCU, it was Stargate. But my SGA days were on LJ and I had a personal website for the longer things. I moved a lot of it to ao3 once that became a thing, but not all of it. Not the OC-heavy stuff (because I was under the ‘made sense to me at the time’ impression that that wasn’t what ao3 was for) and not the gazillion little drabbles and vignettes and bits that I felt were too short for individual ao3 posts. So a lot has been missing from my canon over the last eighteen years as both LJ was abandoned and the website died. Open Doors offered repeatedly to help me out and I… just never did it. I also knew that while I could give them my HTML files, I was still going to have to be the one to scrape LJ.

https://archiveofourown.org/collections/DMZ_SGA

The way to backfill on ao3 without sending out a gazillion notifications is to put everything in an unrevealed collection and then keep adding until you’re done and then ta-dah! So that’s what this is. It’s 20+ stories plus one ginormous catch-all full of the vignettes and drabbles (it’s a drabble if I want to call it a drabble) and bits in one document.

Additionally, I added POV shifts or postscripts to already-there stories:

Eat Your Heart Out, Peggy Fleming
Entaillen
The Pegasus Galaxy Presents: George Romero’s Alice in Wonderland

There are still gaps; it’s hard to scrape LJ when you can’t log in and need to go back twenty years via loaded tags. But a lot less is missing now.

podcast/audiobook recs?

It's July and my hockey podcasts are all on hiatus until September and the Mets podcast I listened to is kaput and I need something to listen to for the summer. Does anyone have something they love?

For podcasts: I am not a fan of true crime as a species or political/activist stuff. I'm not looking to get mad about anything. I love food, history, hockey, baseball, Hollywood sausage-making (I have a subscription to The Ankler), and grew up listening to Paul Harvey's The Rest of the Story and Car Talk. I love learning new things, I hate audience participation shows. I have my alarm clock set to Bloomberg Radio because I don't have any particular interest in the markets but it's important to know.

I don't have a great history with audiobooks, but I keep wanting to try again because maybe this time it will stick. I read a lot of nonfiction -- the top of my holds lists at the library are Maureen Ryan's Burn It Down and Alex Joske's Spies and Lies. I like historical fiction and have been told that Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell gets better after the first third and might be worth it as an audiobook. I made it through the end of Dune, almost all of Neal Stephenson and Daniel Silva, and will read any good murder-mystery but you will have to sell me on fantasy and I generally Cannot with teen or younger protagonists no matter what the premise.

So now that I have established my bona fides as a Difficult Customer... anyone have recs?

persistence is the enemy

I am going to try to not disappear for months on end, so a post about nothing!

* I survived the Great Smokeout of 2023! I spent almost two days in AQI Code Red, although I had a weird feeling watching NYC become enveloped by that orange haze while I was a few hundred miles away. ("Worst air quality since 9/11!!" and I remember that smell.) I missed the local Code Purple by a few miles, but I got to work from home on Thursday because I was miserable at work on Wednesday and my boss is pretty lenient about these things considering we're federal employees. I'm a 'sensitive' person because I have chronic sinusitis and need sinus surgery and the smoke just added to the crazy pollen -- I've never lived in a place where the pollen is visible before! -- and I'm rolling up to the pharmacy in the supermarket going "please give me the good antihistamines I have to promise not to make meth with." (And yes, that is absolutely how I say it. Gets a laugh every time.) But Thursday was terrible and it took hours to get the taste of the air out of my mouth when I went out for milk.

* Sportsball: My Mets are terrible and I've resigned myself to them being terrible and not living and dying with every game. There are 162 and it looks like most of them will be losses and I'll be okay. I lived through 1993 and this won't be that bad. I went into the Stanley Cup Final thinking that I was agnostic, but I might actually be rooting for the Panthers and that's bad because they're going to lose. I've had a soft spot for Vegas since the beginning, so I should've been fine... but Keith Tkachuk was one of my all-time faves and I'm fond of Matthew and I have liked Paul Maurice since he was the child coaching the Hartford Whalers. But I have no dog in this hunt and I'm still griping because my actual rooting interest team is apparently choosing between two very safe and uninspiring choices for head coach and so it goes. But I honestly think it's terrific that the Final is Vegas-Florida because it makes the 200 Hockey Men clench their panties instead of looking at what sort of future the NHL could have.

* I've signed up for a fannish thing! I'm doing Pod Together, which is a typical fannish teamup project except it's an author and a podficcer instead of an author and an artist. T and I teamed up years ago for A Symposium on Personnel Management with a Focus on Intra-team Dynamics (the We Don't Need No Civil War remix) which came out amazing despite me going so far over the suggested word count -- yes, yes, look surprised -- and T wanting to kill me for it. That was MCU and this time we're doing 9-1-1 with Michael-and-Bobby shenanigans and this is going to get a readership of four and a listening count of three, but it will be fun. I have a better sense of what to do this time, which is to remember that I'm really writing a radio play that can be comfortably read. I've already decided that ABBA is going to be one of the musical cues.

How is everyone doing?

I live?

This seems to be "I haven't posted in forever" amnesty time on my flist, so I suppose I should sign up because it's been almost a year.

I have been busy. I've moved twice in fifteen months. I've bought a house -- an actual house; I've been a homeowner before but it's been an apartment. I drive in rush hour now after not driving at all two years ago, but still not at night if I can avoid it. I am not where or who I was three years ago and probably less of it is due to the pandemic than it should be considering I lived walking distance from all of the mobile fridges full of corpses in Queens.

My fannishness has been at low ebb for a couple of years now because of the tumult -- new job, new geographical region, new life -- and I wish that were not the case. I don't want to be too tired or too busy to be fannish, but I have been. I have the Disney Bundle not because I want to catch up on the several SW series or MCU movies I've been meaning to watch, but instead because ESPN+ is the only way to watch my hockey team now that I'm out of market and the pirate feeds are not always reliable. I would rather watch the Mets pratfall than try to get myself back in the headspace of picking up one of my massive WIPs. I miss it all, but the effort of trying to get it back seems enormous and anything I'm current in canon on (say, 9-1-1) I'm not the right kind of author for. I feel a bit like Wendy kicked out of Neverland. I've never been the kind of fanficcer who can stay in their little happy place and just pretend canon isn't happening around them and it's never bothered me before now.

And I've also never been the kind of fannish person to talk a lot of about what's not fanfic and this space has never been either diary or therapist, so I wonder if this post is even necessary. Is my absence noticed or do I just turn up on someone's cruise through their AO3 bookmarks and "oh, hey, I remember that author!"...

911 fic!

I am still wading around in the 9-1-1 fandom like a nomad and it's weird to be without 'people' -- it has been 25 years since I have gotten into a fandom without someone dragging me into it and being excited with me and for me. I have no people. I don't know where to find people. Or, at least people who are interested in stuff that's not the main pairing because here I am writing genfic and nobody really reads that anymore without being pointed to it and told it's okay. Is there a Discord I'm ignorant of? Is there a group somewhere here or on Tumblr? I don't know. I am being fannish in a void.

(I am honestly willing to 'ship Buck and Eddie because I haven't seen this kind of canonical full-life devotion since Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin and I wrote a lot of Steve and Bucky. But that's not where I'm gonna start writing because I'm me.)

Anyway, you all will be shocked to hear that I wrote a 11k word story essentially about food. Because DMZ/food is my true OTP.

Heart on a Plate
11k words | Chimney and everyone else

Chim and his love/hate/love relationship with Korean food and how that draws him close and pulls him away and pulls him right back toward the people he loves and who love him. From tofu stews to Buff-Fridays to a Juk-O-Matic that travels cross-country twice. Comfort food and who it comforts. Kevin Lee and Jee-Yun Buckley Han, Anne Lee and Bobby Nash, and getting perp-walked out of that teppanyaki place with Hen.

(Five times Chimney Han ate his way into a family.)

three things make a post

1) Sportsball! My baseball team is finally ridiculous in good ways instead of #LOLMets ways. They scored a touchdown in the ninth inning to turn a 7-1 impending loss into an 8-7 win and I'm glad I kept the game on while my attention was primarily on my hockey team. Which managed to win last night despite getting outshot because Igor was Igor and was dispensing indulgences for defensive sins like a Medieval pope with a cash shortage. The bookmakers still favor Pittsburgh in the series despite the Penguins needing to use their third-string goalie, so I'm not prepared to be optimistic, but it's been a few years since the Rangers were in the playoffs and I'm trying to enjoy it.

2) I have a car. It was a miserable experience to acquire except for the part where I have patient and generous friends who coached me through it. There was no haggling, no discussion of options or trims or colors or anything. There was instead a sticker that said "dealer profit markup: $1100" and I took what was on the lot that wasn't white. It's a Kona. I am not driving it as much as I should right now because I am still WFH and don't want to practice driving during rush hour, but I have gone out. And had a few misadventures because I'm still learning how to listen to Google Maps directions and Google Maps occasionally doesn't know where the hell I am. So I've seen a bit of Howard County that has a lot of farmland and golf courses and no place to pull over or turn around. And gone to Wegmans. I also finally went to the Maryland DMV... which is the MVA because DMV means something else here. And despite having an unrestricted NYS license, I had to surrender it in exchange for a Maryland Provisional License because I've been driving for less than 18 months. So now I have a clearly labeled teenager license, although I am allowed to drive after dark because I am not a teenager. I am not driving after dark because I am still a new driver and driving in daylight is stressful enough.

3) I wrote another 911 fic. I think what I find most appealing about the show is that there are actual 'books' on the characters that the show writers consult, that these writers favor not only continuity but also thrill to callbacks to earlier seasons and creating symmetry with earlier arcs and between characters. I come out of comicsfic, SGA, and the MCU and none of these canons had any use or capacity for character continuity -- it's impossible in comics with a gazillion writers and books, the MCU didn't really do character development, and SGA reduced every character to a single trait and then re-set them when growth and experience threatened that trait and then pretended past events didn't happen. And here's 911 last week explicitly mirroring old tragedies for Bobby and Chimney (allowing them both to avoid repeating it/a better ending), putting another single brick in the rebuild of Eddie's foundations that they spent the first half-season-plus blowing up, and showing Buck reacting exactly as he said he would a long time ago when Bobby is in danger. I like that every character beat in the show is essentially Chekhov's gun -- it will get used later, sometimes a few seasons later. Also, family-by-choice for reals, not the way MCU fandom tried to fanon it with the Avengers, who barely knew or tolerated each other.

Anyway, the fic:

Paterfamilias
Bobby, Buck, Eddie | 2300 words ; 5x13-14

“Eddie isn’t someone we can save like we do when the alarm rings and we ride out,” he goes on. “He’s not someone we can decide isn’t making clear decisions and override them.”

“He’s not making clear decisions,” Buck bites out.

“He’s not,” Bobby agrees. “But we still can’t force better ones on him because they wouldn’t stick. He’s not ready to acknowledge the problem – he’s still looking at the symptoms and not seeing the disease. And until he’s ready to do that… We have to wait. And be ready to catch him when he falls.”

Buck fights his own frustration, shifting around violently in his chair as he tries to swallow down the futility.

“I fell so many times,” Bobby says softly and Buck stills. “I still dream of falling. But I know – really know – that if I do fall again, I have so many hands who will help me up and hold me until I can stand. Yours among them.”

Buck gives him a ghost of a smile.

“If Eddie falls, we’ll catch him and we won’t let him go.”

the void

I don't know how many of you go back with me to comicsfic and Outside the Lines, or go back to mailing-list-era comicsfic at all, but if you do in any capacity, then you knew Alicia McKenzie, the Grande Dame of everything to do with Cable. I met her in the mid-late 1990s when I sent her an email out of the blue asking if she could look at the first couple of chapters of my Cable-heavy story, and she was gracious enough to not only respond but also encourage and beta-read what turned out to be a 170k word epic. Over the subsequent twenty-five years we were co-authors and beta readers and universe-builders and most importantly friends and that lasted long after she faded from active fandom. We went from pondering what to do with certain characters in her Pantheon universe to pondering about jobs and life trajectories and never quite finishing our Ph.Ds and colonoscopies and plague. She'd found a passion in teaching and was brilliant at it, as she was in almost everything she did. She passed away this past weekend at the tender age of 46 and I am heartbroken. She was my first fandom friend and one of my most long-standing friends of any variety and she modeled generosity and compassion on a level I will never be able to match. She was a very proud Canadian, a lover of good cheese, and a worrywart and I adored her.

three things make a post

1) I wrote a fic for the first time in a year, in a fandom I'm not 'in' and with a topic that... The 911 fandom, near as I can tell, exists for one pairing and one pairing only despite having a really remarkable set of main characters. And here I am writing genfic that fandom can't squint and call pre-slash because it's also pre-series. It's a character study and I think I did okay because my goodness, if there's one thing I can do is write a military backstory that makes sense of canon developed without a military advisor. But it has a readership of six. I can write stuff that fandom will like and call pre-slash because if I can write Steve and Bucky as brothers I can write Buck and Eddie as platonic soulmates, but.. what do you do when you like a designer but none of the clothes fit? Or is it the other way around and I'm the designer without a clientele?

But It Often Rhymes
2k | Eddie Diaz

He has no idea how to be a civilian anymore.

During the day it’s trying to get used to being responsible for his own plans and actions – getting used to a life without a routine outside of PT appointments three times a week. He doesn’t have a work purpose anymore, a set of professional expectations, and it’s not freeing at all. He doesn’t see “possibilities” (his mom’s word) or “opportunities” (his dad’s), he sees a void where his sense of accomplishment used to be and no way to fill it. Trying to find jobs that don’t require a college degree or vocational training but that somehow still pay a living wage...

It would be hard if it was just him and his failures, but it’s not. Everyone wanted him to get out, but now that he’s out the goalposts have moved and he’s letting them down all over again. He’s around but he’s not “present” according to Shannon and his parents. He’s out all the time for a patchwork quilt of jobs, but he’s still missing while he’s actually in the room. He’s not a father to his son even if he’s no longer a stranger to him. He’s not a partner to Shannon, whose frustration is no longer something she bothers to hide. She’s kind to him in the darkness of night, when his nightmares and flashbacks wake them both and he can’t hide what has been done to him by war, but her patience fades with the dawn.

He can see the man she wants him to be, that his parents expect him to be. He wants to be that man, too. It’s not that he wants to be a selfish husband or a shitty father; it’s that he isn’t any more whole during the day than he is in the dark and he needs some time to get himself back in one piece. He’ll get there, he will, but it’s not fast enough for anyone including him.

(He misses being around people who understand what slithers beneath his skin because they feel it, too. Who get that the bullets that hit him were merely an exclamation point on a statement that began with the first time he’d breathed in the talcum dust of Afghanistan. But despite El Paso crawling with guys who’d once had Property of the Department of Defense stamped on their asses, he’s cut off from the communion of faith. He’s out now.)

2) I am still living the car-free life, which is occasionally frustrating but honestly only really stressful when I consider how the hell I am going to get to work when actually go back to the office some time next month (they think). I live by good highway access, but Google Maps says it takes 2.5 hours and 3-5 buses to get from my apartment to my place of employ and that's... a lot. Speaking as someone who lived for a very long time in a Two Fare Zone in NYC. I'm good for food between delivery from Weee! and the supermarket because Giant is much more generous and available than Stop & Shop/Peapod despite literally being the same company, but I guess this is what happens when you live in car country.

I would like to get a car. I have money saved to get a car. But getting the actual car is proving to be the problem. Used cars are now essentially the same price as used cars -- a 2018 Kona with >50k miles is $2k less than a 2022 Kona, which is obscene and absurd. The local Carvanas don't have anything less than $20k for used vehicles. New cars don't stay on the lot a week and I've encountered one dealership that won't sell me a car at all without an MD license even though I am a MD resident. (And I need a car to go to the DMV to flip my NY license!) And I'm wary of ordering stuff online that I haven't at least sat in because this is a bit more expensive than risking a dress online from a place with a shitty return policy. But I can't get to dealerships without a lift. So exhausting.

3) It's baseball season! Well, almost because the Mets-Nats game keeps getting pushed back for rain. I find it deeply amusing that I am affected by the local weather delaying the game instead of turning on the game and wondering why it's not there. (The Rangers are playing, I can multitask, but it's Opening Day.) The Mets are starting the way the Mets always start, full of hope and also full of harbingers of what happens when you are Mets fan (hint: it's never good). I am paying for MLB Audio this year so I can listen to Howie and Wayne; I can *ahem* the TV side, but radio's harder and Audacy won't let me listen legally anymore.

the year(s) in review

Happy New Year everyone! I spent it playing Civ6 while my cats dozed. Living large, I tell you...

I wrote precisely one (1) thing in 2021, a snippet for Freezer Burn that features my first Tony POV for the series. It wasn't from lack of desire or lack of interest in writing. I desperately want to write, but I'm sorta between fandoms and I've never been productive in those periods. I am a canon whore and need something to respond to, even if it's to go "yeah, that was dumb and we're going to massage the stupidity away like a cramp."

That said, I did spend a little time in 2021 working on Qui Habitat and, twelve-plus years after I started it, I know how it ends! I have outlined ten chapters and am kind of dithering hitting the point where I have to kill people because most of the ones who are going to die are my OCs and I know you have to kill your darlings but still. It will essentially be final deaths for all of them and that will hurt a little after all this time.

In lieu of having any kind of 2021 fic review, I collected a few random older fics that mostly flew under the radar at the time and I still love:

2020: Entrainment (The Old Guard): Nile in the aftermath.

2019: Particle of Light (Captain Marvel): Maria Rambeau returns to life, too.

2017: Entail (Star Wars): Leia, Luke, Ahsoka, and the definition of family.

2017: Novitiate (Daredevil): Karen Page earns her byline.

2012: Mobius (Star Trek AOS): Christopher Pike and the Kirks

2010: Bad Apple Blues (Justified): Fruit of the poison tree. And arugula.

I live?

It has been nine months since I posted here, apparently, and I didn't mean to make it such a hiatus, especially because I check in every other day or so and have kept up with all of your adventures.

(I post on tumblr because it's generally low-effort, but I also sometimes post meta and other stuff and it's the WORST environment for that.)

It has been a year, peeps. I've finished school, switched jobs, learned how to drive, and am currently failing spectacularly at moving to my duty station. Which hasn't mattered because we're all still WFH, but that will be changing imminently and I'm still hundreds of miles away.

I haven't had much of a brain for fanfic with everything going on, especially when all of my outstanding WIPs are over 100k words and rereading them to figure out where I was is so consuming. And I don't have an active fandom right now to spark a fic surge the way The Old Guard did last summer. I miss writing, y'all.

That said, I kinda did figure out what happens with Qui Habitat and have outlined it through Chapter 37 (it's posted through 28). I have to suck it up and start killing off meaningful people, though, and I dread that. The outlining is still work, though, and then I have to write the story. But someone read through the series on ao3 the other week and commented throughout and that felt SO GOOD. I don't get a lot of comments on any stories these days, let alone one like that.

Time has not at all healed my MCU wounds or revivified my fandom interest. It's not dead officially or intentionally, just... I come from the comics and I've had decades of being able to let stupid canon decisions roll off my back, but it's been hard here. Maybe because it's only one canon and not the "character appears in ten different books with eight different writers and some get it better than others" where I have options. And the end state of Endgame just pissed me off on so many levels, which does not play well with my Canon Whore tendencies. So returning to writing a Steve/Peggy story when I still feel rage at how canon handled that... I can't for more reasons than that time travel is now a completely different thing.

(I suspect the tumblr discourse hasn't helped, where everything is so politicized and it's Team Tony and Team Steve the way it's Team Democrats and Team Trump and each thinks the other is evil and perverted for believing what they believe. I filter proactively and excessively, but you can't keep it all away when sometimes it's not the tags it's the gif selection.)

I'm hilariously behind on consuming media there, too, despite the Disney+ subscription. I can't finish The Falcon and the Winter Soldier because it bores me and the early worldbuilding decisions annoyed me. Loki was good, although I have issues with the last episode -- nowhere near the degree that I had issues with the last episode of WandaVision. I haven't seen any of the movies despite wanting to. I watch hockey instead.

So that's me. How've you all been?

Wandavision

I got an ask over at Tumblr and that spurred me to organize my thoughts on the series:

(Tumblr part one: stuff I liked)

(Tumblr part two: that big problem)

Reproduced here:

I have watched Wandavision and I’m honestly still deciding what my reaction is. Or, rather, I’m still deciding what to do about my reaction. Which is why I’m splitting up my response into two parts because there’s a lot of smaller stuff I would like to address and the Giant Honking Problem that deserves its own post.

[Your estimation of my pop culture knowledge is greatly overstated, for the record. It’s fairly comprehensive to a point and then spotty beyond because when Wandavision hit the 1990s I was lost. I’ve never seen a minute of either Malcolm in the Middle or Modern Family and would not have even known that those were the shows they were riffing on if I hadn’t seen it explained elsewhere.]

If you’d asked me before the finale what I thought, I would have had a very different reaction and tone than I do now. For the record, I watched Ep.1-4 and then 5-8 in separate binges and then the finale on its own.

( part one: stuff I liked )

( part two: that big problem )

Entry tags:

freezer burn

Freezer Burn bit

I haven’t been around these parts for a few months because of ongoing Major Life Changes (all good, I assure, but all major) and I don’t have the brain to work on the WIP I’ve been WIP-ping on for the pandemic. But I had a moment and I’d just reread Freezer Burn (you’re allowed to reread your own stuff, right?) and there’d been that Ask about Tony and so…

I’m not sure where it’s going or if. Major Life Changes are going to be ongoing for a while. But…

___

Tony draws up a list for the therapist Pepper makes him go see after the alien guts are finally washed out of the carpet and the Loki-shaped hole in the floor is filled in. He's not oblivious to his own current lack of cope; he's been in and out of therapy for thirty-five years and he can understand the principles even if he thinks it's a quack racket. He's not over Afghanistan. He's really not over nearly dying alone in an alien galaxy. And Fury's version of the Traveling Wilburys is messing with his ego in ways he probably should have anticipated but are nonetheless being exacerbated by the first two things. It's been a really long time since he's been part of a supergroup and not the featured performer and so while all he wants is the spotlight on his pain, instead he's stuck singing harmony. The therapist tells him that it will take time to heal, which he already knew and nobody wants to hear, so he considers his obligation to Pepper fulfilled and resumes trying to buy Bruce Banner's friendship with the lab of his dreams.

Bruce instead offers his friendship for free, which is weird and Tony's not entirely sure how to handle that because being Tony Stark means nothing's free and friendship's usually darned expensive. The only people in his world who aren't on the grift are Pepper and Rhodey and that's why Tony buys them lots of things; absolutely everyone else is interested in the commodity of Tony Stark and he's had plenty of practice to make sure the exchange isn't too uneven.

"I'm kind of hard to deal with," Bruce tells him with a shrug when Tony asks about the freebie. "Even before the Other Guy. Being in my phone contacts is a mixed proposition at best."

( Tony! Toni! Toné! )

Crossposts: https://miss-porcupine.livejournal.com/498484.html

Entry tags:

qui habitat

Qui Habitat

Chorós

Nancy Clayton, Yoni Safir, et al. | 17k words

A Qui Habitat story that is remarkably indulgent. I meant it to be a counterpoint to the fact that my main narrators are military men of great power in the city and it is that, but I am not sure I'd consider it necessary to the universe. It doesn't cover new ground, just looks at existing territory from a new perspective and I found myself deleting parts to keep from being repetitive. But it has some good lines and some good parts and I wish everyone to read it. :)

Lieutenant Eriksson's entire platoon comes back from a trade mission with food poisoning, which is a problem because they were trading for food. Atlantis could never feed itself off of what comes in the holds of the Daedalus and Odyssey, but it's much worse now and they can't just throw away everything Eriksson's boys brought back with them. And so Medical has to design an experiment to figure it out after Plant Biology can't identify the culprit: they are going to make marines eat things until something makes them sick.

"Gentle poisoning," Carson offers with a shrug. "They've done themselves worse harm with their moonshine experiments."

"Payback for Weapons Company's near-deer stew," Yoni suggests instead.

Eriksson's platoon is not in Weapons Company and is exempted from the exercise. The marines are surprisingly game to eat until they either puke or get the shits, which is kind of exactly what they are being asked to do, but Nancy is reminded that they also volunteer for things like testing out the non-lethal crowd control stuff Engineering comes up with.

"You know what Marine stands for, Doc?" Fletcher, one of the Navy Corpsmen, asks. "Muscles Are Required, Intelligence Not Expected."

It's the grapes that are the problem, for the record.

stuff about stuff

* Legit and serious question: where do you gals buy jeans? I need to purchase a pair or two -- I have precisely one pair that fits me and winter is coming -- but it's proving all sorts of unintentionally hilarious. I've looked at Old Navy, Banana Republic, Gap, and Loft and my only options seem to be a laundry list of styles that I absolutely positively Do Not Want. I lived through the 1990s and refuse to experience high waisted anything ever again; I have a short torso and scars by my bottom ribs from the decade of friction burn but almost everything is now "extra-high waist" or "ribcage." I don't want jeggings or really even skinny jeans -- I suspect I'd look fine in them, but jeans are supposed to be an easier and more comfortable alternative to the tights I wear every day to work and I don't want to have to peel them off. (Also, I'm over forty.) I am not curvy by any brand's definition. I do not want ankle or cropped jeans or holes in anything and I spent my high school years doing the fold-and-roll tapering cuff and don't really have a desire to relive that with girlfriend jeans. And I'm snack-sized, so I can't go to most stores to try stuff on even if it weren't a pandemic because petites are increasingly online-only. (The pair that works now is Loft Modern Straight in petite, but they don't seem to sell that anymore.)

* Our republic is stronger than most fannish people seem to think it is and while the 'shouting' part of the "all over but the shouting" will no doubt go on for a while, there will be a peaceful and orderly transfer of power and we will get on with our lives. There will be recounts, as there should be in states that have automatic recount triggers for very close votes, but there is clearly no appetite for anything disruptive. I honestly anticipated a much bigger shitshow with all of the absentee ballots, but I underestimated us. Except Nevada, which rightfully earned every single "all Vegas does is stay up all night and count things and yet here we are" meme.

* Blow a click at the NYTimes for Why I love Women Who Wallop: For our film critic, watching actresses become action stars made her think differently about bodies and the meaning of representation.

I live?

I feel like I should post to confirm my continued verticality, not because I have much to say.

* I wrote a fic and a metafic for The Old Guard. I don't have any ideas for anything right now, but if past form holds true, I'll start something big and finish it a few hours before Yuletide goes live so that it gets lost. I used to do that every year because I have no impulse control and didn't want to wait a few weeks or even a few days.

* I was in one of NYC's lockdown zones, which sucked but not as much as the spring did. My zip code wasn't even on any of the warning lists, but we are proximate to ones that are and so they just decided to make it easy on themselves. It was haphazard and frustrating -- the Little League center a five minute walk from the red zone border was open and parents were tailgating on the sidewalk because they can't sit in the bleachers, but I couldn't get a haircut. I mostly felt bad for the parents inside the lockdown zone, however, because they had something like eighteen hours' notice that their kids were going remote again.

* The latest Martin Walker was a mild disappointment. The latest Daniel Silva was a major disappointment that I honestly regret reading. I'm currently reading The Secret Life of Groceries out from the library, which I can recommend as lively and very interesting and a lot of fun. Early on, Lorr describes in vivid, visceral (literally) detail the bi-monthly deep cleaning of the Whole Foods fish display that's kind of a metaphor but not. He also talks about how a chicken goes on a conceptual journey from "animal" (farm) to "food" (processing plant) to "product" (supermarket) before returning to "food" (consumer) in terms of how the people handling the chicken think of what's in front of them and that really struck me. I'm enjoying it a lot. If you read Mary Roach or like food, give it a try.

* I started running in the summer; I'm historically a recreational distance walker (at urban speeds -- I do 4mph casual strolls, please get out of my way) but started running with new sneakers that alleviated most of the discomfort from my congenitally misaligned knee and lower right leg. Today had a wind chill of 30F after 36 hours of driving rain and let me tell you, running was a much better decision when it was 80 and sunny. But I'm 45 and doing 9-minute miles of urban street running with little training-up and I haven't had to cut out booze or carbs from my diet and I've gotten back to my pre-40 weight and I kind of like that. This was a 2020 goal before all hell broke loose, not some kind of pandemic glow-up. It's been a project: intermittent fasting (i.e., giving up breakfast), exercise, getting off the antidepressants. I come from very rotund stock -- obesity and diabetes are rampant in my extended family -- and now have a BMI of 21.7 despite heavy bones and it was 24.5 and growing at the start of the year. I know that my ultimate shape is a sphere, you can't fight fate and I love food and booze too much, but I want to put it off until I no longer give a crap and right now I still do.

* Food and booze and cats can be found here, for the record.

* I want to start The Mandalorian's new season, but GBBO awaits and with no more sports until Sometime Next Year, I will savor the chance at watching something vaguely competitive. Laura is my favorite, but I know she's the very image of that 'gets cut once all of the eccentrics are culled' types and she's on borrowed time. (I like them all, but I will probably be a little sad if Lottie wins.) I'm enchanted by Matt Lucas.

* The Mets are Wilpon-free and for that we must be grateful. Also that Mayor Putz didn't have the energy or fortitude to be the asshole he is.

I live?

And a happy 5781 to everyone. May you all have good inscriptions in the Book of Life. I think we've all earned a little bit of grace this calendar year. Not enough to cover it all, but some.

I finally watched Jurassic Park for the first time this week because it's leaving Netflix. I'd never seen it, although I'd seen the memes and the Chris Pratt movies. It wasn't as wonky as finally watching Star Wars after having memorized Spaceballs, but it was a little weird. It's held up really well, though. The dinosaurs aren't bad! Laura Dern is still awesome! Jeff Goldblum is still ridiculous but also with a heart! And was this the last movie where Samuel L Jackson could be killed offscreen?

Dallas vs Tampa Bay for the Stanley Cup Final and I have no dog in this hunt. Tampa's not as chock full of ex-Rangers as they used to be and I have much fondness for the Dallas color commentator and that's it, that's my rooting interest. I watch with fascination but no investment.

I'm writing a The Old Guard story, despite my last one sinking like a stone fannish reception-wise, and futzing with Qui Habitat and I dug out one of the old files for the latter that had obsolete outline notes and found this. It's spoilery, perhaps, but...

( disappeared character speaks! )

more The Old Guard fic

Continuum
3500 words | Nile, Nicky, Joe

The start of immortality is like a second childhood, but Nile is already too old to be comfortable with not knowing what she'll be when she grows up.

"Joe and I did not start this journey together with any notion of what we would become and if you'd told us we would not have believed you," he says. "We might have tried to kill you instead because it would have been a terrible insult. So maybe it is for the best that we had no idea - and that you don't, either."

another crossover that shouldn't be

I was writing something more serious last night when the Chadwick Boseman news broke and it put a wet blanket on both my story and my baseball team having a day of ridiculous glory.

Today I am not yet ready to return to introspection, nor is my baseball team returning to glory, plus it is damp and gloomy out and so... more crossover silliness.

I got a prompt for The Old Guard in Atlantis and while I'm sure Andy versus the Wraith would be a battle, I went in a different direction:

( Someone's inability to stop dying and also to stay dead seemed a likely place to start )

I might be possessed

I have no other excuse for the words pouring out of me at this rate.

MCU/The Old Guard (better if you go in unaware)

( another thousand words of story )

stuff about stuff

* I took requests for fic over on Tumblr and there weren't very many but gosh I needed to write, apparently. I left it open to SGA, MCU, and The Old Guard and it was primarily the last.

Confiteor: Booker, after the fact.

Prism: The honest answer to “Are you good guys or bad guys?”

Syzygy: (MCU crossover) Natasha + The Old Guard + the 20th Century

It's been a long, long time since I've had this kind of productivity. It's been mostly inspiration and less timing, but I'm kind of laughing about it now because the last few months have been so insanely busy and I've just got this window of normal that feels like vacation.

(And now back to highlighting my QH outline, I guess.)

* Got caught in the rain yesterday while out for my exercise. I usually walk a mile, run a mile, then walk six more miles but yesterday turned out to be 'walk a mile, run a mile, walk a mile, then run three miles home in driving rain so hard cars were pulling over.' I was not just soaked, I was saturated. Thankfully there weren't too many people out and about and I could make it back to my apartment with my mask off (we need to wear masks in the hallways and lobby) because my mask was as drenched as the rest of me. I left an honest-to-goodness puddle by my apartment door. My sneakers left their own puddle when I hung them up to drip-dry.

And yet today I have to dig out buckets and pitchers because my building will be without water all day tomorrow. I've had to use an outhouse, although I'd rather it not be my bathroom, but one of my cats lives to overturn water vessels and I'm going to need to take precautions.