clo_again

So Twitter isn't working and I cannot share my every pointless whim with the entire world (or at least the unfortunate part of it that follows me). Curses!

And yet it made my open an LJ entry box which I've been meaning to do for about two four some months now. Maybe Twitter needs to break every day. For about an hour at 7pm GMT would usually work for me Twitter bird, thanks. I think the world would manage not to spontaneously combust with missing an hour of pointless celebrity death hoaxes every day.*

Sadly, this is not a proper entry. It's not a proper entry even though I have an epic Avengers Weekend DVD Marathon entry With jesse_kips that I should've made about three weeks ago (with pictures!) entry sitting half-written in a private draft post, or a I Hate My Job So Much Because The Stupidity of People Makes Me Want To Smash All The Things entry sitting half-written in my head, or a Here Is Amazing Avengers Fic That You Must READ READ READ IMMEDIATELY Rec entry that is sort of in the vague planning stages of non-existence-procrastination. It's a Twitter Is Broken And I Had Five Minutes to Say I Aten't Ded Before I Wash My Hair in Time to Watch Robot Chicken Star Wars (On the SyFy Channel @ 9pm FYI) entry.

I aten't ded. I will post something - anything, dear god anything - soon. I'm still reading every day! I love you all. In a totally non-creepy non-zombie-brain-eating way, I promise.

Now go and read some amazing Avengers fic so I can wash my hair.**



*Disclaimer: I love Twitter but seriously people, y'all need to stop fake!killing celebrities. Coming back from the dead probably generates a lot of paperwork. Think of the trees!

**Ahahahahaha in going to find the link, I accidentally closed the tab with this post in it. If not for LJ's save drafts feature, I'd be the one needing Back From the Dead paperwork because I wouldn't have posted again for six months (or until Twitter broke again) in frustration and y'all would have had it officially declared.

edit the thingy: Months of not posting and I still remember how to fuck up my html. It's like riding a bike, I swear.

edit the other thingy: Oh god I went back to fix a typo and it lost my edit and my extra tags and I CAN'T CONCENTRATE FOR MORE THAN 140 CHARACTERS NOW APPARENTLY WHAT. Epic fail, zombiefood brain.

Yeah okay so I was kind of ambivalent towards the whole idea of Suits at first (despite /report insisting repeatedly that it was amazing and slashy and ridiculous and MUST BE WATCHED) but I caught the first episode on Dave the other night and, almost by accident, found myself on the right channel just in time for the second episode yesterday. And I've since spent two nights reading Suits fic and alright, I'm sitting here wondering how I'll wait six days for episode three. It really is kind of amazing and ridiculous and MUST BE WATCHED. Seriously, I bet Dave's repeating it a lot. Go catch up.

It's also super super slashy. I'm linking anything good I find on LJ under my 'Fic Recs: Suits' tag in my Memories but this one was on AO3 and I just had to:

Grande Soy Triple Dirty Chai by friskaz, Mike/Harvey AU along a believable-almost hypothesis of 'Mike became a barista instead of a fake!lawyer and he's the only one who makes Harvey's coffee exactly right', except there's baseball and pie and messages scribbled on coffee cups, and a whole lot of beautiful flirting over 38301 words. It's like sinking into your sofa under a fluffy blanket comfort-fic.

Plus it has 248 kudos which may actually be the most kudos I have ever seen a fic garner on AO3. If my word's not enough, trust the masses on this one.

~

I actually have to go to bed now (should've been there an hour ago but hey, fic called). Stupidly stressful day today and tomorrow looks set to be similar, but it's looking like I pretty much have a agreed job offer there for the next year. Different department but that could be a good thing. Honestly, right now? I will take a guarantee for fulltime work for twelve months over a lot of things; suddenly a trip to Venice for my birthday in October doesn't seem like such a ridiculous notion.

Anyway, bed. Tomorrow should bring my shiny new copy of the Stargate: Atlantis fic anthology that I put together. Expect more pictures.

This isn't really finished - I got lazy after all the Gwaine/Merlin rec coding, so there's minimal Arthur/Merlin - but you can find a few more things under the Fic Recs: Merlin tag in my memories.

These links vary between LJ, A03 and individual websites; authors have been linked wherever possible. Pairings include: Arthur/Merlin, Arthur/Merlin/Gwaine, Merlin/Gwaine, Merlin/Gwaine/Lancelot, Lancelot/Gwaine and Gwaine/Leon, plus various background pairings such as Arthur/Gwen, Gwen Lancelot etc.



( click for recs (it got slightly over-long )

Whoever came up with the concept of the kinkmeme was an unquestionable genius. Not only do they provide delicious fic but every so often you find the sentence "Bonus points for including a motorcycle!" in an otherwise innocuous prompt and after I'm done laughing, I'm reminded of just how much I love the internet.


In short, here is a Fright Night kinkmeme post. A fairish bit of fic across all pairings so far, some of it good, some of it average, a lot of it not finished but it's still active at five pages of comments and counting. I wish there were more fills for the Charley/Peter-form-a-kick-ass-vampire-hunting-team prompts though*.

Is it bad form to prompt for actor-RPF on a movie kinkmeme? There's no mention of it in the rules. Mmmm.


*I would watch that movie. Dear god, would I watch that movie. Someone call Hollywood!

This is not that post. As my Twitflisters will know (and probably wish they knew less about by now), I got hit by stupendously bad toothache on Tuesday and have spent the last three/four days crying into my pillow, calling my dentist with crazed demands and abusing non-prescription painkillers. BUT. A day and half after my dentist appointment when he informed me it was very infected and he'd try a root canal instead of just yanking it out, I can actually sit in front of the laptop for more than ten minutes without having to run for ice/hot water bottles/warm milk/toothpaste/painkillers so I figured I should actually do a post to cover a few things I'd been meaning to LJ about.

First! Yes, I have done more Softer World remakes. I was bored and in toothache!pain; it was a great distraction. So, a few tennis and a few Johnny Weir/Stéphane Lambiel SW remakes...

Teaser:



( more )

~

Second! A few (very) random figure skating recs:

The Surface of the Sea by neery, Johnny/Stéphane merman AU, PG.

Okay. I know; I read the words 'merman AU' and when I stopped laughing I scrolled onto the next post. Then I remembered that I was bored and had nothing better to do, and considered that 17,000 words was a bit long for a terribly written crack bunny. I scrolled back and clicked.

Oh my god. Oh my god. This is a crazy idea that shouldn't have worked seriously and yet, somehow, it works brilliantly. Stéphane's natural crazy translates wonderfully to seeing the world from the slightly-skewed perspective of a merman and her Johnny's the best blend of excited-snarky-sweet.

But it really works on the detail; it's told from Stéphane-the-merman's perspective instead of the much easier Johnny-the-human-meeting-a-merman perspective and while it's a choice that could've gone horribly wrong, it's clear neery's actually thought about how a merman would think, specifically a Stéphane-merman (his joy on being introduced to sequins is both adorable and hilarious) and just how little they'd know about people. The fish scene is absolutely wonderful, all the better because Stéphane's confusion is as understandable as Johnny's horrified reaction. I love that Stéphane's insistence that merpeople aren't fish, they're the people and how that's kept up throughout. Little things, that make this totally not crack and make it an actual fic.

And it just gets better, even with a few bits where technicalities are glossed over (one of the few things that bugged me is the complete lack of of a mention for Stéphane not having a passport or any documentation to prove he exists, so travelling anywhere would involve shady underground dealings that would prove complicated and perhaps impossible. But I get why it's been left out; this is not that fic. I would love to see that fic but I love the fic that this is too and really, it doesn't need it).

Just- don't pass this over at the mere mention of merman AU wtf, like I almost did. It's so much better than you're imagining and the bits that are meant to be funny are hilarious and the bits that are serious are beautiful and just occasionally heartbreaking an oh my god, this is a lesson to me not to write off a fic based on the summary. Read it. And learn how that insanely silly idea you think would never work can be made into a brilliant fic.

~

From the kinkmeme, Johnny is an Idiot aka How I Made ZebraSwan Canon by Paris Childers by anon (I hope they deanon sometime so I can worship appropriately)

This is the complete opposite of the merman fic (though funnily, it does briefly reference said fic! I has a theme!) in that it has a perfectly sensible (if hilariously written) prompt of basically 'Johnny loves Stéphane, whines about it, annoys Paris' and the anon who filled it chose to run with that as a fic written exactly as if Paris himself was writing it on the kinkmeme. Only, I don't think real!Paris could be this spectacularly funny; I suspect very FEW people could possibly be this funny and still write so brilliantly in tone and character the whole way through.

It's so hilariously fannishly-aware that it does border on crack, I think, but it is fantastically comically written and deserves every single adoring comment it's received so far and then some. I swear that you will laugh* like a cray cray person. I'm on my fourth re-read and I'm still cracking up.

*caveat This may be a fic best enjoyed with some exposure to the figure skating fandom, (specifically, I suspect, the ontd_skating branch of humour) because some of the humour is almost in-jokes and might lose newcomers in wtf. It also probably helps to have some idea who Paris is and what he's like, though you can probably guess most of that from the first paragraph.

Also, 'Paris' does not like Evan. It's not a big part of the fic, just a few lines but in case there are any Evan-lovers out there you have been warned.

Oddly, I am mostly ambivalent about real!life Evan but I dislike any sort of Johnny/Evan fic pairing with a hatred bordering on the excessive so I laughed. A lot.

~

I have other kinkmeme stuff I'd like to rec - I can't memory comments and there's pieces of stuff everywhere now with the new kinkmeme comm so it's getting tricky to follow things - but that's a whole separate post. I will say that the Summer Camp councillors AU, contin here and the Viking AU which starts here, continues here and then here are the two fills-in-progress that are absolutely worth catching up on. Both are updated regularly enough that I'm fairly sure they'll be finished, the Summer Camp one more so than the Vikings but there's still enough brilliance there to be worth reading. Everything else Johnny/Stéphane is still being tracked on this most excellent list.


And now it is almost 1:30am, my tooth is starting to ache and tomorrow brings my aunt and uncle to stay which means I need to be awake early enough to tidy my room. I doubt they'll even look in there but my mother's been twitching like a fly on crack all day so it has to be done if I'm to avoid her OCD cleanliness wrath. Sigh.

I will actually catch up with old comments and such this weekend, now that life is calmer and I'm not convinced I'm about to die of toothache or a Neurofen overdose. I'll also make a proper RL post at some point. ILLUSTRATED WITH PICTURES. Be excited! ;-) Or not.

On A Winter's Night by jocondite, Johnny/Stéphane Cinderella AU. Walks the fine line of crack but it's so well-written and so brilliantly funny that it works. My face looked exactly like :D the entire way through, except for the times I burst into actual laughter. Which was a lot.

Excerpt of WIN:
Johnny was so focused on his wrongs he didn't notice the clear, hard light that began to touch the winter garden, turning the frost into something lambent and alive. When he looked up, he was still blinded by tears, and the light was a painful blur that finally resolved itself into a very cross-looking woman when he blinked.

She stood looming over him, splendid in white fox fur and staring down at him disapprovingly, her thin red mouth turned down at the corners. "You are strong man!" she snapped. "No sulk! You will go to the ball."

*


black and white except the city light by battleofhydaspe, Johnny/Stéphane, PG-13 that feels like a NC-17 until you look back at the end and realise nothing happened. Yet. Johnny and Stéphane dancing in a club and sharing shots. I could taste the tequila (I need to buy tequila, dammit).

Excerpt of WIN:
Stéphane dips his fingertips in his glass, then runs them over the inside of Johnny’s elbow and pours salt over it. His fingertips fit against Johnny’s knuckles like puzzle pieces slotted into place when he brings Johnny’s hand up to his mouth. He still needs to lean down, and Johnny watches the top of his head while Stéphane licks the salt off of his skin. He’s warm and a little tingly, and Stéphane maybe lingers a little longer than is strictly necessary to complete the task.

Stéphane knocks back the shot, bites into the lemon and Johnny laughs when he shakes himself out.

“Your turn,” Stéphane says, offering up his body with a wide sweep of his hand.

*

Other recs can be found in my memories, as usual. That's nothing like all the Johnny/Stéphane out there (I am rather picky) but I'm hunting the good stuff down one by one. I'm wondering if I'll get bored before I collect the set but not yet. ;-)

One last note: there is a Winter Olympics Kink Meme going on and the Johnny/Stéphane fills are being kept track of here. I can't memory individual ones because I can't work out how to memory comment threads and not the entire post, but I especially recommend this one for being delicious and beautifully written in an unusual way and definitely worth a read.


Crap, I'm missing Bones! Laters.

Wow. Just- wow and ouch and fuck it, I didn't need another reason to want to hug Crowley ever, not least because he'd probably turn me into something mildly unpleasant if I tried. But yeah, if he was standing in my room right now there'd be clinging (followed swiftly by mild unpleasantness) brought on by this particular fic:


The Sacred and the Profane by afrai.

Good Omens rewritten with a small what-if that when you think it through might make no difference or a whole lot of difference. Like it does here. Wow. Spectacular logic and a style that is freakishly close to the original while somehow managing a tone that's full of heartbreak and darkness and yet with too many hilarious lines to be depressing. I'm particularly fond of: "YOU, said Death gravely, ARE SO FUCKED."

Because it's true but it also cracked me up.

Go! Read!. Though not in public. There's slash but not graphic. Violence that's slightly graphic. But it's more that you'll probably cry (I did) and then need several minutes to mull it all over at the end.

Then when you've finished mulling, read this drabble-sequel:Death is no parenthesis. It helps. I think.


Still broken. Possibly I need a stiff drink.

My boss gave us each a bottle of wine today (this totally has relevance to the title, I promise). Eight months that I've worked there and she doesn't know that I hate wine, which is somewhat depressing but pretty much what I've come to expect... but that's another story. Anyway, it made me wonder if my boss in Waterstone's gave us any Christmas/thank you presents that I'd forgotten; I went back to my January LJ entries to check (she didn't) and instead found a link to ninjasnano and a six-part Torchwood fic. It was locked just to me so clearly I'd found it one day, either by rec or fic trawling, I don't know and stuck it there to remind myself to go read it when I had time. The post was just the link, no explanation. And I must've forgotten to go back to it, because as far as I can remember (I'm usually pretty good when it comes to fic, even if it's just insignificant details that stick in my head) I never read it.

And that sucks, because it's fantastic. Bitter but really fantastic.

Kingdom of Air by lookninjas (link to final post with all previous links; start with the prologue obv.), a Ianto-POV fic set around the end of series three of Doctor Who. The Torchwood team got a throwaway line on the show I think, in the grand tradition of 'Who's handwavey-dismissal of everything they can't be bothered to explain but this, this is what happened or might've happened or should've. And it's amazingly well written and researched in the way that makes words like crampons and places in Nepal seem natural rather than dropped in for effect, while Ianto looks after everyone and I remember why I really should read more Torchwood fic because done well, this show can be awesome.

I really really loved this as backstory for what the TW team went through while Jack was off being pointless in Doctor Who (to the point where I printed the second half out to read on the bus on the way home and was so engrossed that I would've missed my stop if my mother hadn't called me). I wish it hadn't taken me almost a year to go back to it.

~

Today one of the supervisors at work called me a liar. A liar or lazy or just incompetent, or all three; it was implied but blatently so. I didn't tell him where to go jump under a bus because really, they are so not worth the time or effort. However, if he happens to call me on my last day in just over a month... I make no promises.

Bah. Asshole. I do my lousy job properly, thanks very much.

While searching the podfic archive (I love it; have I mentioned that before? I really do) for some in-work entertainment to get me through the day, I spotted that there was a Merlin category and went scrambling to download the solo podfic for it. When I listened to it in work with my headphones on, it was hard not to grin like an idiot the whole way through because it's lovely. I really wish it was longer than seven minutes.

So, go download it here: Whims by entangled_now, read by winkingstar (who has the most beautiful voice for reading aloud). Hinted Merlin/Arthur, with fantastic in-character voices and a lovely little plot bunny. I dare you to listen and not find yourself grinning idiotically by halfway through, though I wish there was more.

The original text version (which led me to think; is there anyone in fandom who writes specifically for podfic? Are there podficcers like there are slashers or fanvidders? Hm) is here but I was sad to see it hit my annoyance-buttons with the overload of one-line paragraphing that really isn't necessary and as the podfic proves by eliminating that particular problem, can spoil an otherwise perfectly lovely fic. Just listen to the podfic over a few times instead.

If you want more podfic, I also recommend rageprufrock's Cartography by Touch (Atlantis, John and a whole lot of beautiful writing around an uncomfortable subject) and synecdochic's Freedom's Just Another Word For Nothing Left to Lose (do I even need to say what this is about anymore? Is there anyone who hasn't read it? And if there is, go immediately. Read or listen) just because I really don't need a reason to rec something (again) that is that damn awesome.

And now I'm going to bed. I will actually answer comments tomorrow, and sort my Christmas card post. I promise.

I've spent today on and off, trawling Google for good Daniel/Jack recs which, to be honest, didn't take me much past the second page because it's a pairing with a longer history than some, maybe most. No idea what set me off on SG-1 again because it's been nothing but Atlantis repeats on TV for forever but a whim or randomly sparking neurons or something kept me at it all day, through some great post-apocalypse Sam/Daniel/Jack and a few old favourites like Shalott's beautiful Reveille until, just now, I hit this:


The Cost of a Used Spaceship by Marie Blackpool. Oddly gen Jack/Daniel, Daniel's pov through a talk with the replica!Jack from so many seasons ago I'd almost forgotten them. It's a subtle, quiet fic that eases you on through Daniel's thoughts until you're realising right about the time he does that you're left grieving for someone who isn't even dead; one of the things I love most about AU and parallel worlds is the deaths of familiar-but-AU characters and how can you grieve for someone you saw die when they, your version, is still standing right next to you? And it's one of the rare fics out there that does just enough to leave you hopeful rather than confident but still happy it ended there because another word would've been one too much.

And I cried. Would've done even if I didn't miss this pairing more than I care to admit often and any day now I'm going to remember how much I still love this show when I have the spare cash lying around to start buying it on DVD.

~

Now for a cheap 'n cheerful meme, since lillyv tagged me. :)

Rules are easy, just post 10 things that recently made you happy! Tag 10 people to post this meme on their LJs.

( the 'wow this turned out long' cut )

There should've been 'good fic' on that list somewhere. Though maybe that goes without saying by now.

edit: And I forgot to tag people but I've lost track of who Lilly tagged and who's around, so I tag everyone! Which means, do it if you feel like it. :)