magibrain: This alt text intentionally left blank. (This icon intentionally left blank.)

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...)
magibrain: A revolutionary new world awaits you bastards inside these school walls. (Upupu)
You know, the worst part of this White Collar/Dangan Ronpa crossover is how everyone is so goddamn cute at the beginning, what with organizing into teams to explore their Super High-Level Office Dormitory Building, and, like, there's Elizabeth with a freaking label maker so they can label all the buttons in the elevator and Mozzie is theorizing about nanobots and Hughes has taken control of the rolling whiteboard and June is holding court in the conference room and you just know that in a chapter it's just going to be murder, murder everywhere.
magibrain: Peter Burke would like to know where you are at all times. (White Collar)
So, What Happens In Burma has this exchange:

Peter: In the last year, it was held in a secured vault at a state mining facility, under army guard, in the middle of a jungle.
Neal: Not exactly a prime location for a college kid to just walk in and grab it.
Peter: No. The mine is in the Mogok Valley.
Neal: You can get there by a helicopter or a seven-hour jeep ride over some nasty terrain.
Jones: You just know these things?
Neal: Yeah, that's why they keep me around.
Peter: Mm.
Neal: You'd need some muscle, a cargo plane, and a few grand in bribe money just to get started.
Peter: You would?
Neal: And who knows what else? Because I've never considered stealing gems in Burma.


(Emphasis added.)

In Forging Bonds, when Mozzie walks in with the information on Kate's whereabouts, Neal is doing some red-ink work on a map. The conversation there:

Neal: Hey. Rubies in Burma. I'm gonna need a bush plane to get–


–and then he sees the look on Mozzie's face and asks him if his pigeon died.

Tongue-in-cheek examination of probably-unintentional canon implication. )
magibrain: Hope you like eels. It's EEL SEASON out there. (It's EEL SEASON.)
Someone please tell me not to cross over White Collar, Live Arcade, Magic for Beginners (the short story, not the entire collection), and Candle Cove. At least, tell me not to try it until I've finished some of my other projects.

I just think it would be terrific, slightly-brain-melty fun to have Neal up at odd hours, watching a television show nestled in the snow of a dead channel or twenty, which seems to keep predicting, altering, or crossing over with Neal's life, but which no one else can see.

In related news, wow has my mental image of Neal's loft deviated from the actual set. I could have sworn that couch was red and claw-footed.


[ETA: Okay, and now it also wants to be an Alphas crossover (on a more literal than thematic level), and it is entirely the fault of this fic.]


[ETA 2: Son Of ETA: Oh, brain, we're also crossing over Dangan Ronpa? Oh, so we're also crossing over Dangan Ronpa.]
magibrain: There ARE no tunes. It's TALK RADIO, Torg! ALL TALKING! (Still just talking.)
I occasionally feel kinda odd about maintaining two blogs – this one and [personal profile] magistrate – because I post so infrequently that it occasionally feels like I don't have enough content to reliably keep one blog interesting, let alone two. But I do feel like separating my fannish content stream from my more real-life stream is a good pragmatic decision; in how I conceptualize my own life, they represent different spheres of interest.

(I toyed briefly with the idea of separating my original fiction/professional writing into a third stream, but then I noticed that I never posted in it at all, so to [personal profile] magistrate it went.)

Being someone who grew up as a writer in fannish spaces and is now also trying to get somewhere in the big, bad world of original fiction, I think a lot about how skills and paradigms do and don't translate. The different genre structures and conventions, the different skills each type of writing emphasizes or strengthens. (I notice that in my original writing, characterization is something people continually call out as one of my weakest skills. Which is still kind of a mindscrew for me, because in fanfic, a lot of people seem to enjoy my characterization. Then, with fanfic, I have something pre-existing to riff off; one of the consequences of growing into writing through fanfiction seems to be that I have less experience in how to establish and differentiate character in my own work.)

Anyway. Given the amount of time I spend musing about fannish vs. original spaces, I kinda have to raise an eyebrow at myself for needing to discover (and rediscover, and remind myself of, again and again) the fact that the criteria for success for fanfic and original stories are often wildly different.

I think it's something of the same way in which the criteria for success for a TED talk and an awesome discussion in a group of friends is different.

In original fiction, I have to spend a lot of time thinking about arcs and structure and pacing, and how the plot and the story inform each other, and how themes are deployed, and how to create a polished and technically competent work. And, I mean, don't get me wrong, those things are great to pay attention to in fanfiction, but I find that fanfic rises or falls on something more like, broadly oversimplified, its ability to be an efficient delivery mechanism for squee.

I think the fanfics I'm personally most proud of manage to hit both notes; they extend and expand beloved aspects of canon, but they also work as well-structured, polished and tuned-up technical works. But I also find myself, a lot of times, flailing over posting something because its pacing is a mess, the structure is lopsided, there's that one horribly awkward phrasing at the beginning that I can't think of a good way to get rid off, the theme is a contortionist, and the arc thinks about arcing and then veers sideways into a wall, and I have this horrible urge to apologize to everyone for punting it out into the world, and then no one seems to care. Which is reassuring, at times, and then at other times it's just a boatload of cognitive dissonance and the vague suspicion that everyone's just being nice because... some... nefarious purpose of their own? I think a lot of writers share this anxiety. I think this anxiety enjoys the fact that it doesn't have to make sense.

I used to produce a lot more fiction. I mean, that was something like a decade ago, when I was bouncing all around my million FFVIII fics, but I remember being significantly more prolific than I am right now. I think a major factor in my slowdown is the fact that I started turning my attention to craft, and really struggling a lot with the places where I could see something wrong but I didn't know how to fix it.

(Or where there wasn't a plausible way to fix it. If I go back through my braintics scraps collection, for example, there's a ton of stuff which flat-out does not work on a logical level, but which amused me enough to put scenes down. There's also stuff where the tone is too wildly self-indulgent for my sense of propriety, or where it's clearly just me working out my beef with a certain character, or where I looked at it and just went "Nope, not going to write that, because I'm not going to typecast myself as that author who only writes stories where horrible things happen to Sam Carter and the boys go D: and then the whole rest of the fic is only there to showcase how tough and embattled Sam is." (Yes, I have enough of those braintics to make it its own genre. I'm not proud. I also regret nothing.))

This is, of course, not entirely a bad thing: it lets me continually improve my writing, even if I'm not aware of the improvements as they're happening. (But I can go back and look at works from a few years ago – works that represented the best I could do at those times – and see immediately how I could improve them, and that's a humbling and kinda nifty feeling.) But it is, I think, something I also need to become more aware of. Because the other great thing about fanfiction is that it provides a space for me to play around with ways of telling stories in this fantastically open and engaging and forgiving environment, and that's also a fantastic resource for growth. Letting my internal editor set up roadblocks there isn't actually helping me.

(Besides, you people don't mind if I completely shed my dignity now and again, right? Maybe I'll clean up the ridiculous angstcrack scene where Neal is vaguely suicidal circa As You Were and discovers that Peter has an invisible dragon living in his house. Or the wtfery of the braintic where Sam Carter's consciousness gets transposed across a universal boundary and put into a partially-uplifted mountain lion who's a working animal with the USAF. I once heard the Pern books described as "tapping into the 'I want a PONY!' instinct, except for people who liked fantasy." You can probably tell which kind of kid I was.)
magibrain: The gateway to the stars stands waiting. (Stargate)
Just finished reading S.M. Stirling's Island in the Sea of Time, which I had a few quibbles with, but which otherwise danced merrily on so many of my happy buttons that I would have forgiven it much more. (And one of the main characters is a badass Southern black lesbian who commands a Coast Guard vessel and later an army. (And our love.) I just want to draw hearts all around her, and I am very much not a heart-drawing person.)

I don't know if any of the Stargate folk on my list have read the book, but if you have, please tell me whether you also desperately desire a fic with Ian Arnstein, Doreen Rosenthal, Sam Carter, and Daniel Jackson all hanging out and being amazing. I'd write it myself, but I think the four of them combined may exceed my ability to write smart and informed people. At the very least, I'd have to gloss over half of what they said or spend a long, long time doing research.

On a slightly wider fandom note, I feel like the crossover potential of this book is high. (A quick synopsis: an unexplained Event occurs over the island of Nantucket, carrying the island and some of its surrounding waters – including a Coast Guard training vessel – into the Bronze Age. As you can imagine, this complicates life somewhat for the island residents.) The Event could be centered over Cheyenne Mountain or Manhattan! (Either only over those places, or over those places in addition to Nantucket, which could lead to some really interesting ham radio discussions and expeditions to re-forge connections through miles and miles of wilderness.)

Anyway, there are more books in the series and apparently a parallel series from the other side of the Event (where you have a densely-populated modern world in which suddenly no technology works; also likely to dance merrily on all of my buttons), so I suppose I know where a whole bunch of my money is going next time I have any to spend.
magibrain: A radiation symbol. It appears to be a little bit on fire. (Default)
Random question, but I need it for reasons research.

If you had to sell me on two characters – gen or ship – and you only had 500 words or a 30-second video clip to convince me that they were the best no seriously really... what clips or works or excerpts of works would you point me toward?

I am going to think on this and see what I can come up with... after I sleep for a while.

(Context is that I'm playing with a story-in-the-background-of-a-story in one of the things I'm working on, and I want to pick apart some mechanics of what makes for minimum effective doses of getting people engaged with characters.)

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magibrain: A radiation symbol. It appears to be a little bit on fire. (Default)
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