magibrain

This is a placeholder!

V is for Vellum, by magibrain (T)

Summary: Heimdall holds the past close.
Word count: approx. 750 words
Characters: Heimdall, Freyr
Era: Season 5-6, just post-Revelations
Categories: Character study
Author's notes: I miss the Asgard.

Excerpt: Heimdall regarded him. The controlled mutations in their genome manifested in such strange and curious ways, sometimes – his own significantly divergent voice, Freyr's tendency toward cynicism. That faint pessimistic outlook made him a conservative military commander – adaptive, in its way.

Still. He missed much of the... wonder that Heimdall could see. He was not temperamentally suited to the sciences, as Heimdall was.

---

( V is for Vellum )

Final Fantasy VIII! Anything about Final Fantasy VIII!

Oh, FFVIII, my first great fandom love! This will contain spoilers, but if you haven't played the game, I'm going to guess it's not high on your priorities list.

I feel like addressing this one is going to delve into my early sexual confusion, the methods by which I could successfully interact with friends, the computer I had as a tiny magi, and the hilarity of an unexpected NORG.

( Also, snipers using shotguns. SNIPERS USING SHOTGUNS. )

In writing this, I realized that I didn't have an FFVIII icon on this account, and I uploaded one. Then, as I was scrolling down my icons page, for an instant I thought my Sam Tyler icon had Balamb Garden in the background. I'd say I really need to write that fic now, except that I already did.

• An SG1 fic set in Ancient Egypt, wherein it turns out the Goa'uld are terrible at architecture and engineering (because of their habit of, you know, stealing all of their technology and not innovating), and so they have no idea how to actually build pyramids beyond going "Rargh! Humans! Build us a great platform!" So it would follow all the Egyptian engineers who had to design the Pyramids, solve the resource management issues, and manage conscription and labor. Because fuck you, alien conspiracy theories, the Egyptians were-too smart enough to pull that off and occasionally I come up with braintics to give agency back to people whom plot convenience has casually robbed of agency.

• A White Collar fic where some criminal trolls the police and eventually the FBI, in part by making latex fakes of Al Capone's fingerprints and using them to leave bewildering evidence at crime scenes.

I still plan on eating the plums that are in the icebox, and which you were probably anticipating for Halloween – no. Wait. That's not right.

I still will be getting to all of the Trick or Treat meme ficlets! This week has just been ridiculous, and I'll be travelling from Friday through Monday. But I will write them. And people who haven't asked for a ficlet are still free to do so. I don't hate all of your prompts or anything, I've just been busy. :)

You know the drill! Prompt me, and I'll write a snippet of fic for your candy bag. (Y'all should know the fandoms I write in now, and if you want an original snippet, I'll be happy to provide.)

Additionally, as I'm now staying with the former editor of a podcast, I have access to a fancy microphone which is no longer being used in the household. So if you'd like me to read something – say, up to 500 words? Flashfic, snippets of fic, my fic, your fic, poetry from around the web, Shakespearean monologues – you may request those, too!

[EDIT: I have a braintics pseud now! Now we'll see how utterly ridiculous it gets. (For example: do I want to put the 10K RP fanfic tic up there? I... I might.) ]


H'okai so.

I have a crapton of scribbledy braintics, written out to varying degrees of incompleteness, which for one reason or another (vastly unconquerable scope, logical/logistical/self-indulgent problems inherent in the premise, loss of interest halfway through, etc.) will never actually turn into complete fics. They generally exist as patchy bits and bobs (and artefact of my nonlinear writing process) which I occasionally compare to ancient, fractured stone tablets from which you have to reconstruct the full story. Like the Epic of Gilgamesh. Or something.

For the most part, these languish in the depths of my Scrivener files or Gmail, and I occasionally share snippets. But it seems like a lot of them are in the most complete form they're likely to get into, and it seems like a shame that all that work results in nothing sharable – I mean, they routinely get up to many thousands of works. (Something like 30K for the ridiculous Sam Carter And Her Goa'uld Conquer the Galaxy thing; over 7k for the Angsty Neal Caffrey Almost Gets Eaten By Peter's Invisible Secret Dragon Friend thing.) And I imagine that they might tickle someone, so I've been tossing around the idea of archiving them somewhere. AO3 seems like the natural choice.

Thing is, I don't really want these mingling with the rest of my fiction; I'd like to offer the stuff that's actually a complete story on my profile, and have all of this ridiculousness somewhere partitioned off from it. A click away, p'raps. And I haven't used all of AO3's various features enough to know how to do that sort of thing. So.

How would I go about that? Would a pseud do what I'd want it to? Would I need a second account? Collections and the like would still show up in my main list of works, if I'm not mistaken – am I? Or am I just thinking of series, and confusing myself?

Elp?

For the next few days, I'm doing a prompt call at my (more) professional journal. Free snippets of fiction for prompting, and flash fiction/scenes of potential longer stories for donations.

As an added bonus, stories written for donations will become part of my Shared Worlds project, which aims to create a body of work that encourages transformative works and supports authors who want to write them commercially.

Basically, this is all part of my continued efforts to port some of the cool communal aspects of fanfiction into original fiction. Because c'mon, fandom has the right idea about some things.

Today, in an effort to avoid actually writing anything (because writing is scary), I programmed functionality into my demographics/random sets generator which let you import comma-delimited lists of values. This, combined with the option I worked up a while ago which let you import random sets from the demographics generator into the bingo generator, means that I can do wacky stuff like working up a bingo card with a bunch of randomly-generated sets of things like fandom, trope, and wordcount. See below:

( I sound my fearsome procrastination across the land. )

Now, the demographics generator (unlike the bingo generator) is still in alpha, is desperately ugly, and lacks a ton of stuff that would make it easier to use – like, say, paging down to show you that your options have, in fact, been added when you click the button in the comma-delimited list options. That's because I'm a back-end developer by trade, and just getting jQuery to play nicely enough that it would import the comma-delimited list in the first place meant an hour of hand-to-hand coding. Nicer stuff will happen later, once my urge to procrastinate on writing exceeds my frustration with front-end technologies again.

But, you know, if this sort of challenge appeals to you, there's now a clunky interface on my site that allows you to set up bingo cards like this.

In other news, today I have learned that jQuery does not like passing data out of its AJAX scope, and that you have to tell it not to run its AJAX asynchronously if you actually want to provide its information to another part of your script. Even if that part of the script comes after the AJAX call. ...I feel like that one, I should have known.

Title: Fire and Calm
Rating: T.
Genre: Character study.
Beta: Only in spirit.
Continuity: So far as I know nothing directly contradicts canon, but I'm fuzzy on my Seasons 8-10.
Prerequisites: Maternal Instinct, assorted Bra'tac episodes here and there, Full Circle.
Summary: Daniel wasn't the only one who began a journey at Kheb.
Disclaimer: You must renounce evil to achieve oneness with Oma Desala. Likewise, MGM et al would have to renounce their copyright on Stargate and its associated characters before it had half a chance of somehow belonging to me. The opinions expressed herein are the properties of the characters and not of the tradition of Buddhism. Fic has not been proven to cause discarnation of laboratory mice. I wish I could have given you this beautiful moon. Questions, comments and confessions can be left in replies or directed to magistrata(at)gmail(dot)com. Thank you for reading.

Wordcount: About 4000.

---

Sleep frightened Bra'tac at first.  Perhaps it was because he knew that final sleep was approaching, the one from which he would never open his eyes; perhaps it was the theft of those precious hours he had used to spend in kel'no'reem, returning again and again to the center of himself to face the truths there.  Bra'tac had heard it said – heard even Teal'c say it, seeming to echo the words of Daniel Jackson – that dreams could teach, that dreams were messages from that place hidden beneath the surface of self. But neither Teal'c nor Bra'tac himself had ever been accustomed to traveling there without control.

It made it even more important to meditate when he could.

( Read more... )