> Be me

> Write a Red Dead Redemption 2 oneshot that uses the theology from Lois McMaster Bujold's World of the Five Gods (The Curse of Chalion, etc.)

> Fic has massive game spoilers and no Five Gods / Chalion spoilers

> Tag for massive full-game spoilers

> Get four comments

> All are from people who seem to have read the books but not played the game

> Welp_



(I'm going to guess that the Chalion fandom is just ravenous for fic, so much so that they rejoice even when that fic uses none of the characters, plot events, or locations from the actual books. Now I want to do something nice for them! But I have no ideas for fics in that canon! It didn't leave me feeling restless and irascible or incomplete in a way I needed to remedy with fiction!)

(Though, you know, this may also just be karma for daring to epigraph this using Robert Bly's excellent poem People Like Us. Hello, friends! I am the wrong professor! But I'm honored you think this is a great poem.)

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!

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.

This is the elevator that leads to the White Collar offices.
From this, we know that the floors at least go up to 24.
We don't see whether or not this is the top of the button plate, though.

For ficcing purposes, I need to know exactly how high the buttons on the plate go.

Larger image under cut.

( I just want to do something screwy with the number of floors in this building. LOOKS LIKE HALF MY WORK'S BEEN DONE FOR ME. )

Considering that the sets and props department obviously didn't think I'd ever need to find out many floors were in the building by counting the buttons in the elevator, I decided to just ask the internet how many floors the NYC federal building has.

Cue Wikipedia:

The Jacob K. Javits Federal Office Building at 26 Federal Plaza on Foley Square in the Civic Center district of Manhattan, New York City houses many Federal government agencies, and, at over 41 stories, is the tallest federal building in the United States.

...

Sometimes I don't know why I bother doing research.

(Counting the windows suggests to me that "over 41 stories" means "41 floors of offices and a ground floor that probably has a lobby or something". I can work with that. Though I need to come up with a plausible reason for Neal to accidentally hit a floor button that's twenty floors off his actual destination.) (It would be a lot easier if the federal building were only 24 floors tall, to be honest.) (I wonder if I could just claim that it was. Would anyone except me care?) (I could claim that in White Collar 'verse, the federal building was at 41 Federal Plaza and had 26 stories...)