Yeah, instead of working on my summer_of_giles story like a prudent person, or instead of working on work stuff like a responsible person, I have worked on completely kinky Giles/Xander sort-of-slavefic. 24K words. That means it's 4/5ths done, according to my 30,000 word estimate. Except it's going to be longer.

It is very kinky. And despite all my best attempts to be completely without redeeming social importance it has character development and a running meta commentary about smutty books, romance novels, and real relationships. It's about as meta-fictional as I'll ever get, while remaining a straight readable conventional narrative.

That's the plan, anyway. Disaster may yet strike. If I fail miserably it'll just be a fun prawny romp. Well, actually if I fail really miserably it'll be a dull prawny thud. Worst kind.

Random: Best solar eclipse photo I saw today. Though there were probably lots taken and I have seen only 0.1% of them.

PS to previous: "Summer! of! Giles!" is pronounced like "Pigs in space!" Hope this helps.

You all signed up for summer_of_giles, right? That's the only thing I care about right now fannishly. Summer! Of! Giles!

You'll get my current WIP then. It should be plotty and id-ficcy at the same time. Well, fannishly trope-ish. I hope that I'll be reading or looking at [eta: or listening to!] something cool from you this summer.

What else have I got for you? Not much just now.

Um, weekend. This is a weekend. That means I don't work. Right. Nor do I get up at 5am, head to the gym, lift, then climb onto a train to the city and fall asleep again. Instead I get to sleep in just as long as the cats are willing to let me. Yesterday morning Ms Inky Blot joined me for my morning extra snooze, which was sweet of her.

I have already had the experience of Getting on the Wrong Train, aka the one that Doesn't Stop at My Station. Also the experience of standing in the station at San Francisco reading on Twitter all about how a train crunched a pedestrian at such-and-such stop and all tracks are halted until they haul the guy to the hospital. Just some idiot trying to jump the gate & cross without waiting. Yay. Yay trains. I am going to dream of them for years after this experience.

I would just like to answer my own question from my previous post, and report that yes, indeed, Bruce Banner is played by a new actor in the Whedon Avengers. Banner is played by the young Peter Falk.

The movie was stand-out excellent. By far the best movie in the Marvel collection. The plot didn't once make me roll my eyes (though perhaps the "archery" did), the fight choreography felt like comic book fights in the good way, Loki was loathe-able, Nick Fury kicked ass, and the movie belonged to Natasha Romanoff (Black Widow) and Tony Stark (you know who). Whedon does well with women & action as usual. Also, his dialog was completely in place. The movie was funny and the audience loved it.

Thumbs up! Might help to watch Thor first, though. I was pleased that Stellan Skarsgård reprised his role.

I hereby predict re-releases of Buffy, Firefly, Serenity, etc, with "from the director of The Avengers" plastered all over them.

My week was crazy-busy and quite stressful and now it is the weekend and I am still stressed. My to-do list for the day is very long. Coffee beans, cat fud (as I like to say it), grocery shopping, laundry, dishes, cook for the week as far as possible, make it out to see the Whedon Avengers movie at last. That should happen later this afternoon.

Last weekend we watched all of the existing Marvel comic-book-superhero movies as preparation. Note that in general I find comic book plots kinda amazingly stupid and eye-rolling, so I have to be in the mood for cheese to sit through these movies. In order of goodness, best to worst:

* Thor: compelling villain with believable conflict & motivations; the only one of these movies to feature acting instead of mugging at the camera
* Iron Man 1: RDJ plays himself, but it's entertaining and charming; marred by muddled politics
* Captain America: a waste of Hugo Weaving; loltastic idiotic comic-book portrayal of WWII that failed various believability tests; predictable script that had us calling out events before they happened; almost saved by a pleasantly beefy male lead with an earnest anti-bullying message
* Iron Man 2: a completely tedious retread of the first Iron Man movie, featuring more RDJ mugging at the camera being a star; almost saved by the Tony/Pepper smooch

I didn't watch The Hulk because I had had enough stupidity for one weekend. Mr P liked it. Am I to understand His Nortonness doesn't play Bruce Banner in the new movie?

Kinky GX fic: 21K words.
Plotty BG wingfic: 14K words.
Origfic: pushing 70K.

So many words. So little finished fic. I need to pick one of those to finish for Summer of Giles. Probably the wingfic because it's chewier and has broader appeal. I think I might make it a SoG tradition. Next year, all four Scoobies will get wings!

Semicolongate: the wank that keeps on giving: Hacker News is still arguing about semicolons in javascript. This is awesome. My own opinion on the wankstorm is close to that of the poster of the original article. But at this point I'm just amazed to find myself running out of unpopped popcorn kernels over semicolons.

Space: This link's going around, so you probably already saw it, but just in case! Pursuit of Light-- a NASA promotional video set to a Moby track.

Music: You know "Linus & Lucy", of course. Here is it slowed down 600%. Hello ambient music?

Reading: "In Which Latin Is Abused" by amusewithaview. "In at least one universe, Rupert Giles became a fighter pilot. ...ahem. Sort of." Fusion with the Temeraire books, which is a horribly disappointing series about sentient dragons in the Napoleonic Wars. Read the first book (which is good), stop there, be happy, then enjoy this most intriguing Giles ficlet with its awesome final line.

The problem with stories like this-- and the original Patrick O'Brian slash AU conceit that kicked off the Temeraire books-- is that they are tantalizing beginnings, all zoomy with potential. I end up wanting to read the rest of the story. I am greedy.

Also, am in the grips of this exact problem with my current fic project. I wrote a few thousand words of self-contained story that was a really great setup. And then I wanted to know what happened afterwards, because awesome as that setup is, I wanted even more to watch what happens with Giles & Buffy afterward, when they have to cope with the consequences. Slog slog. Plot plot. Write write. See you in a couple of months, when I will emerge with a 40K-ish medium-sized fic that will keep about a hundred people on AO3 entertained for a couple of hours.

I really hope the exploration of What Happens Next will be worth the work. Sometimes potential and possibility are more fun than the collapse of the multiple universes into a single reality-state.

Dinner last night included roasted sweet potatoes, which are my new shameful food obsession. Also I eat yams now too. Don't ask me why it took me so long to decide these things are delicious. But they are!

I fiddled with my fic site a little and gave Buffy/Giles, Giles/Xander, and Giles/Ethan stories their own splash images. Season 4: full of the good screencaps. I think I might randomize them and add some more pairing-specific headers. For the fun of it.

shibela gave me a pile of excellent Sherlock recs the other day. I am reading through them steadily. First callout: "you'll never be alone in the bone orchard" by Sarah T. "John Watson meets Mycroft Holmes one day early." Gen, AU. Two thumbs up.

Music: the new Solar Fields recording Random Friday, is out this week. Delicious psy-chill-trance from the delicious Ultimae label. This guy also did the Mirror's Edge game soundtrack, if you enjoyed that.

I have no fresh recs for you today, though I did a great deal of speed-reading through a lot of Mycroft + gen tagged fic on the AO3. This experience was miserable. Oh the badfic! Oh the fic that wasn't at all relevant to my interests despite its appearance in my searches!

I'm going to rant. Brace yourselves.

There is no way to search for Mycroft-centric genfic on AO3. None. You can search for fics with his character tag and the "gen" category tag, but this is a nearly useless filter. Here. Check it out.

Some observations on the results:

Mycroft isn't necessarily the main character in a listed story. He gets tagged as present even when he's an incidental character.
Relationshippy fic is tagged as gen. The presence of pairing tags with slashes between the names (Sherlock/John) is not at odds with the "gen" tag as far as the archive is concerned.
Crossovers are included with the default search; there's no way to get rid of them.
The "Case Fic" tag looks very useful. I'll start searching for that.
Why is a "mystery work" that I can't even click on to read shown in the search results? Talk about useless.
Phrase-length free-form tagging is lovely as an indicator of which stories to not bother clicking on at all, but neither a help nor a hindrance in the search. I wouldn't bother suppressing it.

In the end, I'm left doing a FF.net-style browse down the list, reading summaries to figure out which stories I want to read. However, there's far more noise in the list because FF.net allows at most two characters to be attached to the fic. So if somebody marks a story as featuring Mycroft, it probably does.

In fact, here's the FF.net Mycroft listing. Dude, why the hell was I bothering with wading through the AO3? That list is obviously far more relevant to my interests, right there on the first page. There's a significant content overlap between the two archives but FF.net makes it easier for me to find what I want. Yeah, it doesn't let me filter out gen vs shippy fic, but as we've seen, AO3 doesn't really either. It merely makes me hope that I can.

And ff.net is faster.

In the end, I think relying on a trustworthy rec list is the best option. I was willing to read every single Giles story in existence hunting for good ones, so I was writing some of those rec lists. I am not that much into this fandom. I read a story last night and was out the very instant I saw the writer use "taught" when they meant "taut". No patience.

I'm writing post-Cruciamentum Giles/Buffy right now, by the way. Yes, that demon-transformation soul-bonding wingfic is post-Helpless. Have been challenged to include knotting in it, but no, it's not that sort of story.

Thank you for your notes yesterday. I will say so more personally this evening, I hope. I am spending my day AFK running around madly. This is my moment of coffee-drinking pause before I launch myself into motion. Rocket-propelled motion.

Speaking of rockets: Apollo program source code! Linking to the Hacker News discussion not the source link, despite the HN-ness of HN, because the discussion has additional interesting links & tidbits.

Reading: A BBC Sherlock + His Dark Materials fusion (aka people have daemons) that I enjoyed right until the sex scene at the very end: Asteroidea by etothepii. (I am only enjoying the exceptionally written or exceptionally unusual fanfic sex scene these days. Mostly I skip them. I have my pickiness in mind every time I write one. This is why you don't get much smut from me these days: I have to convince myself first.)

At the moment I'm into reading Mycroft-centric gen in that fandom, mostly. Not that I've read much. Your recs gladly sought.

More on network storage: The Google Drive terms of service & the Dropbox terms of service, compared on a key point. I wonder why Google's lawyers haven't figured out yet that people care about who owns their stuff.

I love IFTTT, by the way. i hope they have figured out a way to make money, because I have wired IFTTT tasks into my life.

Mr P lost a friend in a motorcycle accident this weekend. Single rider accident; veered off the road. When I hear that I always think "asshole car driver forced him off the road", which is an accident that happens more than is nice to think about, and is also deliberate on the driver's part more than you want to know. Every rider has a story. But it might equally be "well-trained rider who did track days and racing simply screwed up at something where there is no margin for error". So often you never find out what actually happened in these accidents. The guy is dead; there is no fix for it.

Meh. Life. It continues until it ends.

I seem now to have spent a month writing fiction instead of writing software full-time and I have nothing finished. I have about 40K more words written total, just scattered across several projects. It would be great if I could concentrate on something until I finished it. It would be great if I could just grit my teeth and do what's necessary on the software. I am really flinching from this next task.

I am also feeling very gloomy right now.

Publishing industry foofahrah followup: Tor's going DRM-less. See also Scalzi on the topic. This is good news. Tor is the big-name SF&F imprint, more prestigious than Baen (which has consistently been a tech leader for the industry).

Dropbox et alia: The Verge compares the services. I'm going to remain a Dropbox user for the foreseeable future. iOS syncing is the #1 thing I do with my synced data, so Google Drive is a non-starter for me. Plus there's the whole not trusting Google any more problem. Nice pricing, though. Will beat the Amazon cloud-service-based services for a while.

I think I am gonna try to salvage the day in a creative sense in some way by hacking on the demon-transformation soul-bonding wingfic BG thing that is my response to the poll-winning prompts from last week. Hack. Hack.

Have been discussing my latest fic project on twitter. Sort of. I once again have like five projects in motion at once and I jitter from one to the next like a jittery thing that jitters. And cannot maintain focus. And has had too much coffee.

Random: If you enjoyed werfing flammen yesterday, you will perhaps also enjoy these other fine weaponry-related activities.

Discussion topic: Your OTP. You have one. Given my flist, for many of you this will be Buffy/Giles, but I know at least one of you OTPs Giles/Ethan and many of you OTP in other fandoms. And some of you are sort of multi-shippers in the sense that you have a couple of ships you feel strongly about.

Rec one fic for your OTP(s).

I'll go first. Buffy/Giles. Kris Wahlberg, "Transformations". Angst-o-matic and possibly more hurt than any one Watcher can bear, but I care not. I imprinted on this fic.

You next!

Today's workout was one of those bread-and-butter workouts. I did exactly three lifts, but I did each of them a lot. The details:

5x5 (means 5 sets of 5 reps) low bar back squat at 165 lbs (75kg)
5x5 bench press @ 85# (38.5kg)
5x3 deadlifts @ 215# (97.5kg)

The demonstration videos feature a very nice shirtless guy. Most of the time I prefer to pick vids that show women doing the lifts, but I was dazzled by the chest and delts today.

The squat weight is starting to get up there, but it's not yet what I'd call respectable. I was dripping with sweat by the end of the fifth set, however: 25 reps is a lot. It demands endurance. The deadlift weight is, to be honest, very light for me. I can rip that up off the floor over and over. The deadlift is my lift! I have legs of doom!

Random Public Health Advocacy: Werf some fucking flammen at that measles shit. Get vaccinated. Punch a homeopathy advocate today. Flammenwerfer. Oh god. I cannot stop laughing.

Meme of the day: Find your stories on an archive that does hit counting. Look at the top 10 and observe any patterns. firefly124 did this and I found the exercise interesting, though the patterns I noticed are different from hers because my writing habits are quite different. I'm essentially mono-fannish, for instance. Anyway, here are my AO3 & FF.net top tens.

( Table cut for tabularity... )

Conclusions:

• I am an obscure & unread fanfic writer.
• Nobody is reading on AO3. FF.net has an order of magnitude more traffic. Hell, my static website has more traffic.
• Remix can get an obscure 2nd Doctor gen story some readers, but it can't get a Buffyverse remix readers (that was one of my least-read stories).
• FF.net readers are as averse to comments as AO3 readers. They seem slightly more likely to favorite, aka leave kudos.
• AO3 reads more slash.
• FF.net & my archive readers prefer Giles/Buffy.
• Everybody likes Giles/Xander angst.
• I should post more stuff on AO3 just because it's a stable archive, even though nobody is reading. Such as "The Elevator Problem" and the kinky Giles/Buffy.

The soundtrack for today's post is Elderly Yorkie squawking in outrage over her nightly fluids injection. Also cat #1 meeping at me in hapless protest that cat #2 is occupying his cat tree. Oh. Cat #1 has just flung himself up onto my lap in cat #2's usual manner. I call that appropriate revenge. Now the soundtrack is purring.

drsquidlove is passing through town! I had a very nice chat with her yesterday that was ended early by the migraine from hell, which is still lingering with me more than 24 hour later. Yes. Miserable. There I was, sitting with a witty person, unable to do more than hold a hand over my eye and wish that someone would drill a hole in my skull or something. My conversation was limited to "oh god I think I'm going to puke" and no more.

Tune in tomorrow for the exciting excerpt from "Poppies Will Make Him Sleep", as requested in my last post. Will finish when headache subsides.

Semicolongate: …has spawned some new programming languages. This was a very satisfying wank all around.

Tools: A giant list of iOS text editors, with tons of feature information. Great for picking your new Markdown-aware iPad text editor with Dropbox support. (Just get Byword.)

Give me the title of a story I've never written, and feedback telling me what you liked best about it, and I will tell you any of: the first sentence, the last sentence, the thing that made me want to write it, the biggest problem I had while writing it, why it almost never got posted, the scene that hit the cutting room floor but that I wish I'd been able to salvage, or something else that I want readers to know.

And because a meme does not a proper post make, here are your amusing links for the day.

Reading: The Green Blade by verityburns. Sherlock casefic, gen. Features Sgt Donovan in a manner I approved of, about which I am being deliberately vague. Check it.

As it turns out, I really really really really cannot read slash in that fandom because I just can't buy it with that Holmes and that Watson. The friendship is, however, as epic as ever for me.

Random Age of Sail: 100 years of ocean travel, visualized. Patterns emerge in this animation of ship's log data. So cool. This is a serious "computers woohoo!" moment for me. We have 100 years of ship location data all together in one place that this guy can access (computers!). He can sort it by time & plot ship locations on a world map (computers!). And then he can animate it so we can watch the progress of ships through their voyages (computers!). He can do this and it doesn't take expensive university computing resources to manage the data & do the rendering-- recent computers! recent software!

Whee!

Random destruction of the publishing industry: In case you haven't read it already, Charlie Stross on Amazon's ebook strategy. A must-read. I really really hope he's right that the major publishers wise up and dump DRM to defeat Amazon, because defeating Amazon on this would be good. Unless you like monopolies.

Connie Willis's Remake continues to predict the future, an ongoing series: Tupac "performs" at Coachella.

Semicolon followup: In a tragic example of people doing the right thing all around, the Twitter tyro added the semicolon and the Javascript expert updated his minifier to handle that case correctly. Amity ensued.

Is there any word so unsexy as "lave"? I am curious why it keeps recrudescing in fanfiction, for it is so very unsexy. And also one of those sixty-four-cent vocabulary words that draws attention to itself because it is unusual. Like "recrudescence", which is also unsexy but that's okay because its connotations are negative.

Other words in this category: Ministrations. Manipulate. That second one is less unusual and more just startlingly unsexy sounding.

Aside from reading the (entertaining overall) fic that used this unfortunate word (no, not going to name the fandom, because I just maligned a perfectly nice longfic that entertained me for several hours) I have been spending my time doing two things: One, playing Kingdoms of Amalur, a gigantamous Western RPG that is fairly mindless, and two, writing my novel. Which has once again caught fire in my head. Well, okay, three: the prawntastic GX fic is now at 20K words, which means it's about 2/3rds done.

Also, um, oh dear, I suspect the origfic novel is going to be long as novels go. I feel like I'm just settling in and understanding the story and it probably needs about twice the prose it has right now. Minor characters who do things important to the plot need some development so we understand why they do what they do and what they want and all that, you know? People wanting things and setting out to get them is the engine of story, after all. Um. If I ever manage to finish this and if it ever gets into the hands of you all to read, I will have fun post-morteming the project. On a sentence level it's a lot like writing fanfiction. On a story construction level it's not, because there are more variables. Who the characters are can change at my whim to satisfy the needs of the rest of the story, for instance.

Random historical: Omnes Viae, the Roman travel planner. All roads lead to Rome, but you might want to visit all three parts of Gaul along the way.

Programming 1: I am sort of on the bleeding edge at the moment, and also pushing forward my personal skillset & knowledge with every feature I implement. Here's an example of the kind of work that's happening in the web app field at the moment. Neither of those frameworks are finished yet. Knowing what I know now, I'd ditch Sinatra & the ruby side of my project to use them. But they're not done. So… oh god, I trudge forward. One feature at at time. Preferably in Javascript, oh dear.

Programming 2: Githup pull request flame war continued in Hacker News comments. About automatic semicolon insertion in Javascript. Starring one of the famous experts on the language (wrote the book on writing good JS, sits on the technical committee) versus a pair of tyros at Twitter. (Oh, did I just take a side? Oops, I did.) There were popcorn macros in the comment thread last night, so it looks more reasonable now than it was. Semicolons.

Poll results are in and they say that you people like snark. Whoever could have predicted that? Not me, no way. You guys never vote for snark in these polls.

Let's see, what else? Buffy won by a landslide, with the next contender being the library-era Scooby ensemble. Most of you want romance, though a sizeable minority want action/adventure. You want scorching snark with no fannish tropes. The resulting fic will get tagged with magic and tea for sure, and maybe swords and rain.

Also, you put butter on your toast. Maybe with jam.

This story specification puts it firmly in my wheelhouse. You guys are throwing me a breaking ball that doesn't break! You didn't even vote for mpreg! Well, two brave souls voted for mpreg. <3

Prompts! Some chewy ones here: ( Cut to spare your flist page… )

I am very tempted to combine those last two prompts. Very, very tempted. Massively. You can't stop me, bwahahahahah!

Today: watching poll results, rewriting my pre-alpha to-do list in as much careful detail as I can. I would like to be able to pick up a single small task & do it whenever I'm stuck on something else. To reach that point I must remind myself what those single small tasks are.

I have been having one of those "wtf was I thinking this project is huge give it up moron" weeks. You know, those weeks. The metaphor people use is measuring the coastline of England. Here's an example.

( Even small things require thought… )

Fun fun fun.

Okay. Am deeply stuck because I cannot recover the headspace in which I was writing this GX story just recently.

( FicPoll Mark XIX (Extended Toast Mix) )

Bonus music: Röyksopp playing "Electric Counterpoint" live. Live guitar looping is pretty cool, I think. Have loved it since Eno & Fripp did their "No Pussyfooting" thing. Here you can see how it lets the guitarist improvise atmospherically over himself while the rest of the band does its thing around that central guitar phrase.

We return this blog to normal service.

Whatever that is.

Oh, wait, I know!

( ObFicWittering: )

( ObStrength: )

( ObWhingingAboutProgrammingLanguages: )

ObRandom: Humans are evolved for running. Long, slow distance running specifically.

ObMusic: I less-than-three Steve Reich. Who doesn't? "Electric Counterpoint" is a guitar piece that's long been in the consciousness of electronic music listeners for obvious famous-sample-related reasons. I love Röyksopp's reinterpretation. The unofficial video is lovely too.

Saw the movie yesterday. Read the first book last night and the second book this morning. Am halfway through the third book tonight, but I stopped reading & am not sure I'll finish.

( Some spoilers inside… )

Caught up, commenting, participating, all that jazz. Perhaps even ficcing a little. Don't hold me to that. I have so many projects and so little waking time. Only 16 hours per day. Totally not enough.

Sometimes, in order to rev up the writing engines, I re-read things I have posted in the past. Sometimes this works: I read a story and think, hey, that wasn't so awful, I maybe know how this story construction thing works, I can do this again! Sometimes I read one and think, oh dear oh dear oh dear wtf was I thinking? I just re-read the little sequel to "An Antique Roman" and immediately edited my fic archive to give it the tag "sentimental tripe". Very sweet tripe. Maybe "sentimental trifle"?

Perhaps I should add that to the short list of things I warn for, right after "songfic". That story should also warn for "guitar porn".

I also note that I seem to have a thing about shaggy-haired Xander. I guess I never got into short-haired Nick Brendan.

I think I shall avoid the Internet for the next 24 hours. But this one was funny. Photos of earnest bearded nerds spooning are always funny.

Ooh, thanks to sueworld2003 for this: here is behind the scenes footage for two scenes in "Helpless". BG-ish fans will know one of these scenes very well indeed.

Shooting television seems about as thrill-a-minute as writing software.

I picspammed for the first episode of the 1967 BBC Forsyte Saga over on my tumblr. Well, it was a Soames picspam not a full episode picspam. I'll widen my scope when I do episode 2, "A Family Scandal". There will be Nyree Dawn Porter spam to match the Eric Porter spam.

Thus I demonstrate that I am not as mono-fannish as all that. I am secretly duo-fannish. It's just that there's no active fandom for The Forsyte Saga. No fic, no newletters, no ship wars, no kink meme with people requesting Soames/Winifred dubcon incest or Soames/Young Jolyon hatesex with watersports, Jo tops. Thank goodness. I don't think I could cope.

Apparently the Clarke shortlist sucks: Compare Nina Allen and Christopher Priest, who have the same reaction expressed rather differently. Am possibly out of step with the mainstream of reaction, in that I think Priest was being completely reasonable. His reaction to the Miéville novel is more sadness about unachieved potential than anything else, and he's right about the Tepper. But consider the good news! This means that SF awards wank season is incoming. Look forward to more hyper-literate sniping about the Hugo list soon!

Music: I have episodes 1 to 100 of The Future Sound of Egypt in my collection and I have just been listening to them in order and I cannot complain about it. Great work music.

We also watched The Adventures of Tintin, aka "The Secret of the Unicorn". This was just plain good. Good adaptation, faithful to the spirit and tone of its source material, lots of visual comedy that took advantage of the medium, good voice acting (Daniel Craig! Simon Pegg & Nick Frost as Thomson and Thompson!), and exactly the kind of plot that Spielberg does well with. Recommended.

We ventured into a Hunger Games-crowded movie theater on Sunday to see John Carter of Mars aka A Princess of Mars before it vanished from the theaters. And oh my god, I was reminded of why I prefer to watch movies on my television screen. Ear-bleeding volume, endless advertising beforehand, a succession of idiotic trailers. Gah.

I liked the John Carter movie. It was exactly what it pretended to be: a big, stupid, fun B movie. Cool sets, nifty chases, a big dumb loyal dog-thing, a beautiful princess to rescue, an evil villain to thwart. This movie was so much better-written than that self-congratulatory mess Hugo that I got grumpy thinking about it.