twicet | Reading

After a couple of years of really struggling with mood and creativity, between burnout and family issues and god knows what (and I know I've been hard to deal with in fandom, at times), things are suddenly ... good! I can write again, I'm signing up for exchanges, whatever has been blocking me has gotten a whole lot better.

July is my birthday month, therefore Best Month, obviously, and I would really like to try to do some kind of "post a short fic every day" thing if I can make it work. Unfortunately I'm suffering a dearth of appropriate challenges, because of course now that I want one and have the mental bandwidth to do something with one, daily month-long prompt challenges and/or bingo card challenges for July are nowhere in sight. The closest thing is July Break Bingo, but I've asked for cards for this before, and I just ... never really do anything with them; I appreciate that it exists, but I think I need more of a - I don't know, social element to it, I guess? Less open-ended, more directed? Their cards just don't really click with me somehow. And I can't find a Tumblr prompt/whump/whatever themed promptfest thing for July.

So I'm kicking around a few different ideas. Why not throw it out to a completely nonbinding poll?

Poll #33243

Open to: Registered Users, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 13

View Respondents

What should I do for July?

View Answers

A custom bingo card/prompt list created (by me) from all my favorite tropes
7 (53.8%)

A personal challenge to finish older inbox prompts/unwritten prompts from past fests
5 (38.5%)

Find a prompt list from a previous (non-July) fest that I didn't do at the time, and use that
3 (23.1%)

Ask my flist for new prompts until I get 31 of them for fresh inspiration
4 (30.8%)

Run a comment fest over at the Biggles comm
3 (23.1%)

Something else that I will suggest in comments
0 (0.0%)

sholio

whumpex revealed tonight! (And H/C-ex is supposed to in a few days, if it's not delayed. All the hurtcomfort all the time.)

I got:

Staying Power (Babylon 5, Londo & Vir, 4200 wds)

I asked for (among other things) Londo reacting to something bad happening to Vir, or Vir taking a hit for him, and my Mysterious Gifter took me up on it most delightfully!

As usual, there is a fic or two of mine running around loose in the collection as well.

sholio

justmarriedexchange nominations close tomorrow (the 10th).

I will almost certainly be signing up for this one, I'm just saying. And you do need three distinct fandoms for this exchange.

*my existing assignments side-eye me*

sholio

I like Ken Follett's books, and I like airplanes, and I like historical books, but this one was just kind of lackluster for me, unfortunately. It kept me reading, and parts of it were very engaging, but I ended up feeling kind of "That was it?" at the end. I mean, to be fair, this book is set early in WW2 and there's a lot of war still to go, but it feels like we didn't quite get the full plot or the amount of airplane that was promised by the title. The airplane-promising title manages to be a big spoiler while not actually delivering on its promise. (Although, to be fair, I guess it did get me to read the book.)

( Spoilers in general )

sholio

The recent "only one bed" meme (which I still haven't finished, as per usual) led to only-one-bed thoughts and this missing scene for B5 5x16.

One Safe Harbor (also on Ao3 - G'Kar/Londo, 2300 words, explicit)
Missing scene on the flight from Babylon 5 to Centauri Prime in 5x16. Two people in a very small sleeping space. Also, some feelings are had.

( One Safe Harbor - 2300 wds )

sholio

I watched the first 15 minutes of "In the Beginning" back in May, and finally watched the rest last night. I enjoyed it, despite not being that interested in the 10-years-earlier part of the timeline (or the Minbari, for the most part). Annoyingly, the audio/video was a little out of sync for most of it, and I'm not sure why.

( Spoilers for a 25-year-old TV movie )

sholio

This was written for one of last year's prompt fests - Whumptober, I think - and never posted. At the time, I was really struggling to get words out, feeing pretty insecure about the words I did write, and I could tell this needed editing and didn't feel up to dealing with it. Also, it was too long to just post as a snippet of fic like most of the others. I sat on it for a while with the idea that it might be possible to clean it up and use it in an exchange, but it didn't fit anything I was writing for, and I finally got around to editing and posting it.

Old Words (1978 words) by Sholio
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Biggles Series - W. E. Johns
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: James "Biggles" Bigglesworth & Erich Von Stalhein
Characters: Erich von Stalhein, James "Biggles" Bigglesworth
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Friendship, Developing Relationship, Secret Messages
Summary: Some time after Buries a Hatchet/Looks Back, Biggles and Erich find an old message in an abandoned dead drop.

Also posted under the cut.

( Old Words - 2000 wds )

duskpeterson

The royal sactuary is arguably the most important chamber in the palace. It is here that, in former times, a sanctuarian priest held daily rituals designed to uplift the spirits of worshippers and – I am sorry to say – crush the spirits of slaves. The Emorians, rightly appalled by the Koretians' treatment of their slaves, built part of their new palace over the burning ground just outside the courtyard, which lay within easy sight of the sanctuary.

Despite its despicable misdeeds of the past, Koretia's priesthood has survived to the present day. The Jackal, who is also High Priest of Koretia, holds annual services to honor the slaves who served and died in Koretia; these services are often attended by the few slaves who survived their treatment. Some of these slaves remain dead in mind but come willingly to this service, drawn here by the Jackal, who is the god of death and who therefore watches over their spirits in the Land Beyond. To witness these dead-in-mind men and women gather around the Jackal is a deeply moving experience - a living monument to the Koretian belief that the gods can transform evil into good.

The royal sanctuary was desecrated at the time of the Emorian invasion of 961; the sanctuary was used to stable horses in the years that followed. After the Emorians withdrew from Koretia in 976, the chamber remained empty for many years. In 987, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the liberation of Koretia's slaves by the Emorians, the chamber was rededicated under the name of the Royal Sanctuary of the Living Dead. It is now a memorial to the suffering of Koretia's former slaves.

Conveniently for visitors, the royal sanctuary can be visited separately from the rest of the palace. The sanctuary now has its own entrance, unconnected to the royal residence or any other portion of the Koretian palace.

[Translator's note: The Royal Sanctuary plays a dramatic role in Death Mask.]

me_ya_ri

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Current Mood: bouncy

sholio

I haven't rewatched more B5, but I was watching various early episodes earlier this week for vid clipping purposes, and I'm still thinking about that.

( Full series spoilers, mostly Londo related )

me_ya_ri

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Current Mood: silly

sholio

Okay, I found someone on Reddit who went through all the script books and typed up a summary of ALL the different Babylon 5 plans/plot/changes, and ... I can't believe I'm saying this, but if this is accurate, it sounds like the almost-cancellation/having to compress most of the plot into season 4 actually may have been an improvement over the original.

(It also sounds like JMS was constantly changing major details / long-term plans on the fly throughout all the seasons, which makes the cohesion of the final version even more impressive, even without taking into account all of the network meddling and cast changes! One reason why I've been going down a rabbit hole on this is because I really do think this is one of the most impressive creative feats I've ever seen pulled off, I want to understand it from a creative perspective myself, and the more I find out about it, the more impressed I am.)

( Link and details under the cut )

sholio

It is really interesting how my interest in visual media has spun up again over the last six months or so. It's not that I physically couldn't watch for a while, it's just that over the last couple of years, say since 2022 or so, I wasn't really interested. I would have said it was just because I was happy with the stories in my head and didn't need more stories, but I was also completely uninterested in watching vids and similar, and now suddenly that switch has flipped the other way and I'm back to finding them fun and fascinating to watch, even for source canons I barely know.

(For me and vids, I'd say song choice is *the* big driver of whether I'll watch a vid or not - I'll nope out in seconds if I don't like the song, but I'll watch one even for a source canon I've never seen if it's a song I like.)

Anyway, in a shocking twist, last night I finally got around to subscribing the things I need to subscribe to in order to get vidding source for Babylon 5.

I capture vid source like no one else I've ever met (though maybe people who do this just don't talk about it) - I screencapture from the video window playing on my computer screen. I can do it other ways, and in fact have done it a number of other ways (from ripping DVDs to ripping DRM'd MP4s - I did all my Agent Carter vids that way; it does look very crisp and beautiful - to simply using the *cough ahem* broadcast downloads back on the 2000s; a lot of people did that for vidding back in the SGA/White Collar era, although it meant dealing with watermarks on the video). But I keep coming back to capturing video from screen because it's just so easy. I can get exactly the clip I want and only the clip I want without any extra trimming work, it's easy to skip around, and it means not having to rip and store a kabillionty episodes for a long source canon.

This stopped working for a while because of software measures to prevent it, but I figured out a relatively easy workaround for vidding MASH (disabling graphics acceleration in Chrome) and now I'm doing that for B5 as well - I just need a relatively clean streaming source without commercials. I was genuinely really amazed at how crisp MASH turned out for the vids I made for Festivids. The obvious downside to screencapturing video is that the quality can suffer, and there's also the possibility of the playback stuttering - I used to have this happen occasionally when I tried to capture too much video at once on older computers (circa 2006 or so), where it would drop frames when I'd save it if it was too much for the memory buffer to handle. These days, modern computers can handle quite a lot of video at a time (I do it in Quicktime, I think it's saving directly to the hard drive as I go, whereas before it was definitely doing some kind of intermediate working-memory storage) ... buuuut capturing from streaming is limited by the streaming source, and those often stutter or glitch. It has been hard to get good video quality in B5, not really helped by the source itself being kind of potato-quality to begin with.

And as if that wasn't enough, Final Cut really struggles with the concept of 4:3 video that's not absolutely tiny. All of its large video presets are widescreen, but even forcing it to 4:3, it'll still make it widescreen in export - blah. The biggest that I can get it to make a 4:3 vid isn't very big. So it doesn't really matter that my source video isn't that high quality because it's potatoing it on export anyway! Final Cut, why are you like this.

THAT being said, the main reason I don't call myself a serious vidder is because I just sort of ... don't care? I'm not overly fussed about image quality and frame rate and codecs. I am DELIGHTED that it's no longer necessary to fuss around with codecs for the most part, now that everything seems to have standardized on MP4s and uploading to streaming sites. A ton of the vids I've downloaded and rewatch over and over are snagged from Youtube or are ancient WMVs from the era of making vids as small as possible for download, or are someone's first vidding efforts - and I *love* them. I appreciate crisp clean large video as much as the next person, but I mostly just want a fun viewing experience, and when I'm making vids, I simply like making them for myself and I'm happy if other people like them too. I'll work harder to get it looking nice if it's an actual gift for someone, but for the ones I make for myself ... eh. It's a lot like my approach to fanfic as a creator - I do care about craft to an extent, but mostly, I don't care if it's great, I just want to feel things.

(So the long and the short of it is that I'm making Babylon 5 vids now. Yay!)

pushkin666

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Current Mood: busy
Current Location: on my Chandler/Joey chair
Current Music: The Rock 100 of the 80s

sholio

I know there are a few people around here currently or formerly in Guardian fandom, and

whumpex is trying to fill some last-minute pinch hits that include one for Guardian - in case that sounds like your thing!

Find them here:
https://whumpex.dreamwidth.org/5724.html

I also posted some Murderbot + Gurathin recs over at

recthething.

sholio

I wrote this for

fan_flashworks "Underwater" challenge back in early May and finally got around to editing it (the first version was pretty rough; this has been cleaned up a lot, tweaked for word choice and clarity).

One thing rolling around in the back of my head when I wrote this is something I've noticed reading fic for this show - there's not really a lot of typical tropey h/c for these characters. It's understandable, because canon is so tightly plotted, and so much of the fic is just fixing and/or dealing with their various canon disasters and tragedies. But sometimes you just want to put someone into a classic h/c situation and make them deal with it, you know?

The Drowning Deep (5500 words, gen)
Takes place between 5x09 and 5x10. An attempt on Londo's life in the palace gardens.
Also posted on AO3.

( The Drowning Deep )

pushkin666

( You're about to view content that the journal owner has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

Current Mood: accomplished
Current Location: on my Chandler/Joey chair

magicalthings posting in

snarry_ficfind

( You're about to view content that a community administrator has advised should be viewed with discretion. )

hamsterwoman

Too many axes for doomscrolling, this is the escapism post.

Taskmaster Oz finale -- That was a fun conclusion! ( Spoilers )

I think this might be my favorite lineup in TM Oz... I mean, I liked most people on the other seasons, too, and it could always be recency bias, but I feel like I actively like 4 of the contestants, while my previous high was 3. Tommy actually ended up being my favorite, surprising the hell out of me -- I expected to find him annoying based on the first impression, but he grew on me with each episode, until I was amazed to discover he was the one I was looking forward to the most. I can't remember that ever happening before... Anyway, Tommy's right at the top for me, followed by Waka and Lisa -- I think those two are tied for me, different as they are -- Lisa is just such a darling! and Waka is such a delightful weirdo! And Emma reliably made me laugh, as well as being a great player of the game. Hughesy was also entertaining; I would rank him last of the five personally, but I still enjoyed him, and his interplay with the other contestants, especially Tommy, Emma, and Lisa.

**

Taskmaster s19e05 -- halfway! wow, this series is going fast. ( Spoilers )

*

North of North --

tinny wrote a rec post, and in addition to the really cool premise (a comedy about an Inuk woman and various people in her life, starring and made by mostly Inuk women), the thing that caught my attention was that it was short (8 episodes of ~25 min each), on Netflix, and did not require subtitles (mostly, as it turned out; there are a couple of short scenes in Inuktitut, but in-universe translation is provided for the pivotal one). Anyway, the length was perfect to binge it in two halves over two weekends. I really enjoyed it!

The thing it most reminded me of, weirdly, was Alma's Not Normal -- I think a similar vibe of, like, a situation that one would more expect to be the subject of a Very Special Episode but allowed to be a proper comedy, with a protagonist who is allowed to be flawed and goofy and not just an object of sympathy/brave in adversity or whatever. There's even a mother who was not very motherly, although Neevee is definitely in a healthier place than Alma's mum during the timeframe of the show.

( More, with spoilers )

Anyway, really enjoyed that, and hope there's a second season to catch up with these folks again.

Also, it reminded me strongly enough of 'Alma' that it served as my impetus to track down the second series of Alma's Not Normal, which I'd been meaning to do for a while, especially after John Robins spoke so positively about it when interviewing Sophie Willan on How Do You Cope. Actually doing so required remembering which source I'd gotten the first series from, trying to download some kind of codec thing from Microsoft to be able to play the videos, and finally downloading a brad new freeware media player -- but I persevered, and then binged all six episodes (they're short, so the whole thing is <3 hours) in one night. And that was really well done, and also I totally see why, in addition to general acclaim (the second series also won a bunch of awards) it appeals to John specifically -- there's a similar mixture of "emotional heft" (to use Elis's phrase) and funny moments that release tension that I recognize from John's work, and it's a combination that works for me really well. I did not realize that the show was complete at 2 series (with a Christmas special potentially to come), so while I kind of knew what to expect from the general progression, since the show is semi-autobiographical, ( Spoilers from here )

*

Hugo homework:

( Related work )

Related Work: (6/6) Charting the Cliff, Report on Censorship (I do hope either one of these wins), Tracking Changes, Star Wars Hotel video essay, Speculative Whiteness, r/Fantasy bingo

*

You may be thinking I've been talking about Elis and John less lately (I was shocked to discover I haven't posted a roundup in 2 months!), but that's just because, delightfully,

sysann has followed me down the same rabbit hole, so I've actually had a person who is also in the grip of active obsession to talk about them with in various comment threads. But I've been continuing to make solid progress through the old 5Live episodes, backwards, and now only have ~40 episodes of that to go. I won't quite have finished them all in a year, but it'll be pretty close.

( March-May 2025 )

( Feb-Sept 2020 )

Clips from the socials:
- John's adorable sneezes
- John seems to have stopped eating chocolate/cake during/prior to the recordings, but this was from before he figured out not to do that: live cake slump and Elis, udeterred by the threat of impending tears (when John says he should feel free to speak Welsh during Cymru Connection).
- John is an outlier
- Discussing John's muscles
- Elis's commentary on a review of John
- Elis's John-centric alternatives to Cymru Conection

*

Fannish goals update: ( progress )