a conspiracy of cartographers

I got TWO Yuletide fics this year!

Okay, Then, The Wicked & the Divine -- a lovely little post-canon fixit fic for [spoilers redacted, but it's the only part of canon I was unsatisfied with]

& as a treat: Excerpt from Book 22 (lost) of The Noniad by Ortus Nigenad, Locked Tomb Trilogy -- Ortus/Nonius, IN TERRIBLE EPIC VERSE, I was absolutely dying laughing (the best part is that my Locked Tomb request was for literally any character and for the author to follow their heart, and by god they DID)

Family FaceTime was lovely; we've received many holiday cards this week; it's dismal and raining out, but we baked tons of cookies yesterday and there's a whole Yuletide archive to deep-dive into. Also I seem to have said this everywhere but dreamwidth, but: Amiel and I are engaged! I probably have a longer post in me about that, but today is for lounging and reading. Happy Yuletide and whatever winter festivities you celebrate, everyone <3

Happy December 25th! Under the virtual tree I still have a mystery Yuletide Madness gift, and I woke this morning to a lovely little offering:

The Most Worth It, which is, indeed, Worth It fic -- Steven and Andrew go on three dates at three different price points, Steven is enthusiastic, Andrew slowly comes around, it's adorable.

This morning I did small family present exchange with my parents, and this afternoon we're ... going to take a break from the usual Christmas tradition of Muppet Christmas Carol and/or Love Actually to instead watch The Mask? and maybe Muppet Treasure Island? Apparently once a year is too often for the same movies over and over eventually! In the meantime, I'm tearing happily through the Yuletide archive and compiling a small recs list.

<333 hope y'all are having nice quiet days.

And then today I woke up to a Yuletide treat!

More than Gold, Road to El Dorado, a lovely little post-movie Chel/Miguel/Tulio fic! Chel is great at grifting, Tulio is maybe jealous of Miguel and Chel kissing, Miguel is maybe jealous of Chel being in their con partnership, everything works out very well and is what I always want from my El Dorado fic.

Christmas Lord of the Rings marathon, incidentally, was AMAZING -- by now we've seen it so often that we talked through the whole thing, mostly about our endless feelings and about several AUs where Boromir lives, though I did also make the mistake of early on saying "Name of your sex tape!" I think in response to Saruman's portentous "the union of the two towers," and by the back half of Return of the King we were all yelling NAME OF YOUR SEX TAPE at every viable opportunity. I'm just ... so happy about that? Lord of the Rings was deeply special to me when I was twelve and alone in a small town, and now I have friends who come over and make many weird inappropriate jokes and love it with me, and it's the very best.

My birthday this year has been very weird! I intended to have a leisurely morning, go for hot chocolate and the Into the Woods film, and grab birthday drinks with Verity after. Instead I woke up, was promptly ill, grabbed a heating pad, and went back to bed until 2. I'm feeling loads better now, though, and I will still see Verity today, albeit when she swings by my apartment to give me a hug, because I am not going for drinks today. And then I'll probably go see evening Into the Woods after all! So today is fine, just ... weird.

It did make me realize, though, that on this the anniversary of my birth I have ... become an adult who can take care of herself? I absolutely wished someone else was home to bring me water and pet my head soothingly, but I have kept myself hydrated and fed and rested! I know this is a little silly; it's not the first time I've done this. But it's about a larger pattern. When I was visiting my parents last week, telling them about my job, and my sweeties, and how the roomies and I are going to start looking for a new apartment soon, and the various creative projects I'm working on, I realized that the flavor of seeking advice and approval wasn't there any longer. I am (family cell plan excepted) a financially independent human! I don't really need my parents' help! (Okay, except with taxes.) I ... really need to make a doctor's appointment! But I do feel like I've leveled up, in a way I haven't since college, and thank goodness, it was about time to stop feeling like I was muddling about and start to feel like I'm properly managing. Adulthood!

I will now use my adulthood to go to the movies and probably cry all over everything, the way I always do at musicals. Yes good.

Happy Passover! Gondor is hosting a sedar tonight for our D&D group, though as far as I know we won't be holding it in character.

Meanwhile it's spring. The weather this week, as I understand it, is going to get miserably cold again, but at the moment we have the sort of blustering spring rain that makes me crave summer thunderstorms. I was walking home with my jeans and shoes soaking wet and I didn't even care, because summer is coming! At the cafe we're running through all our cold brew before noon and the poor ice machine can't keep up with demand, but all the customers are so happy, which is incredibly pleasant.

Mostly what I've been doing this week is having awful wrecking Winter Soldier feelings. I am not going to deny these feelings! (After Thor came out I spent this precious week going "Huh, what an interesting flash-in-the-pan investment I'm having! I'm sure it'll end soon," and this is the SAME LEVEL OF INTENSITY, by which I mean, lots.) I've read a post-film fic where a line of Natasha's made me tear up, and I've been making vids in my head and tearing up more because I just love Sam Wilson so much, and I really definitely cannot hold all these feels, so instead I'm reading Black Widow comics and feeling cranky about Hydra and trying to think of an action plot to hang my OT4 story on. (I'm also not going to make it 100k. I just. Nope. I'm hoping wistfully that it'll be under 50k instead, hahaha you fool it's never under 50k when you have this many feelings.)

I'm also. Hm. ( I'm having some complicated Bucky feelings? )

And I'm genuinely excited for new SHIELD /o\ I still think they haven't decided where they want to come down on the morality scale, but at least CAtWS made the question actually interesting, and I'm pretty psyched for the version of the show where these losers are running around like headless chickens trying to figure out who the hell their allies are. WE SHALL SEE.

This year I'm not at my parents' house for Christmas, I didn't attend the UU holiday service, and there is no Yuletide fic waiting for me. Instead I was back from my parents' place in time for a sprawling hours-long gift exchange with my friends earlier this week (from which I emerged with a beautiful paper lantern and nice knitwear; Polaris also got a jar full of chocolate, and since both she and Housemate A are now halfway across the country with their own families, the chocolate is mine, all mine). We did a small apartment Christmas before they both left a few days ago. I spent a lot of yesterday at work, caffeinating people through their last desperate burst of holiday shopping, and various of us got small gifts from regulars; then I went home, and watched the Community Christmas episodes, and because I was far away from the UU holiday service, I asked YouTube to play me a choir singing Silent Night.

Today I'm going over to scribe's for Chinese takeout and a Lord of the Rings marathon, as one does. And I've had texts and calls from various friends and family, so even though it's just me, and I'm somewhere new and doing different things, it still does feel properly like the holiday.

Hope you all have a lovely Wednesday. <333

I caught myself thinking "I have so many things to tweet about, but I don't really want to limit myself to soundbites," and then remembered that I have a Dreamwidth, c'mon, self. So here are some things I was going to tweet about, in more than 140 characters:

i. I have completed 90% of my holiday shopping for my parents! As usual I have fifty gift ideas for my mum and very few for my dad, so I'll try to just locate some nice chocolate for my dad and not go on some sort of tea and mugs and earrings rampage for my mum. I also have wrapping paper! And I should find some nice things for my housemates, and Jessie & co's white elephant gift exchange, and ... maybe for some other people? Idk, my general policy is to get physical gifts for in-person friends and bang out a few giftfics for fandom friends generally, but I actually have a lot of friends in the area this year, and lots of nice wrapping paper. Only my parents' stuff was urgent, though, as I'm going to see them next week. This weekend, though, the tree! (I really love December, and festival-of-lights gift-giving style Christmas. I would like some snow, though, c'mon, let's get winter up in here.)

ii. I have a new laptop! The old kind of broken one (m key hasn't worked for aaages, lid will no longer close because it was winching off slowly) is called Methos, which was apparently a terrible idea, because it kept dying but never stayed dead. I think I'm calling the new one Frigga, and it will hopefully be a much better-behaved immortal until its time comes. I haven't set it up yet, though, because that really feels like a day-long task to transfer all my files and get my music in order and make sure it has the right browsers and useful programs like VLC &c. It is also going to have much better processing power than my current one, which means it is time for me to LEARN HOW TO VID. Seriously, I want to try this! So, vidding friends: anyone know what vidding program would be good? Keep in mind that I'm still on a Windows OS, so all the nice Mac-only programs are right out.

iii. Speaking of vids! The Aims vid project, in which vidders are making a vid to each song on said Vienna Teng album. The latest is The Breaking Light, a Pacific Rim vid by such_heights, which I knew was going to slay me going in, because anytime she vids a Vienna Teng song I basically become a sobbing mess. That it's also Pacific Rim just made everything 1000% betterworse.

iv. And speaking of Vienna Teng, I had this theory that the song Never Look Away is just one of those great songs that is applicable to basically any pairing one is currently having feels about. I was fairly sure of this when I was having lots of Thor/Loki feels about it, and now I am entirely sure of it, because I've started showing Housemate A due South and suddenly Never Look Away was this ridiculous amazing torrent of all my old Fraser/Kowalski feelings. So yeah! I am showing Housemate A due South! We're still only in first season, and I'm enjoying it immensely; it's been at least two, possibly three, years since I watched it last, and oh gosh I just love it so much, what a perfect show to watch in the drawing-in of winter.

v. I hear there is a meme going around where you suggest topics and then I post a response to one a day! I ... really don't have the wherewithal to be that diligent, but if you like, please do comment with a topic, anything you like, and I'll choose some to talk about!

+ THE FIC DRAFT IS DONE. It clocks in at 105k (...roughly 12k of which are porn), and it's off with Olivia right now, being beta'd. I feel really bizarre about this fic! I mean, I woke up today feeling really light and happy and excited because it's done, or done enough that I can actually think about anything else ever again, but -- among other things I've made myself emotionally compromised about Thor for life, so Thor 2 next week is going to be a difficulty. Amiel and I are going to the midnight premiere with a flask of mead, of course; and the funny thing is that, because we've only just made our fic deadline, if we post one a day starting Thursday it'll also be our fic-is-done-being-posted celebration. I really like the symmetry of that, and I also really like that it means this stupid fic is going to be like a bizarre week-long advent calendar countdown to Thor 2.

+ I have had so much wear out of my Thor dress lately! Obviously I wore it to NYCC, but I also wore it to a Halloween party Friday night and then to a come-dressed-in-your-costumes birthday party bowling session on Sunday. (Among the people bowling we had Kirk, Spock, Thor, Loki, and Martian Manhunter. Kirk and Spock took turns and were Team Enterprise; Thor and Loki were not a team. I did spectacularly well in the first game and spectacularly badly in the second, but in my defense there had been pizza and beer by then.) I am also working on Halloween, so ... gonna be barista!Thor. Looking forward to this kind of a lot.

- I got so excited about finishing the draft and having any free time again that I decided to get some finances in order and register for direct pay things! Then nothing would work in Chrome so I had to use Firefox, and one site worked after that but another refused to let me copy-paste anything into the email field, which ... is unfortunate, since I'm still doing ctrl+v every time I want to type the letter m. I'm putting this particular adulting shit on the backburner until I get a new laptop, but the latest in the ongoing laptop saga is that I got an email yesterday saying, sorry, your delivery has been delayed, we apologize for the inconvenience. At least this time they're not ... rescinding the product entirely? But this is fucking ridiculous.

+ On the other hand I finished the draft and I have any free time again! I also have very little work this week, which means I'm going to clear out the slush and catch up on tumblr and play lots of Dragon Age II and, assuming poor Housemate A actually gets home before midnight, make her play tons of Lego Marvel with me (seriously it is the BEST GAME EVER, like, Reed Richards literally turns into a giant tool, and HULK SMASH EVERYTHING, and the cut scenes with Doom and Loki are amazing). And I have plenty of time to do edits before posting, too! This week should be really pleasant.

+ FIC FIC FIC

First things first: Yuletide!! I received not one but TWO Babylon 5 fics this year, about which I am very pleased, because it means that my request and my lovely writers have upped the number of Londo/G'Kar fics on the internet, which is ... one of my sillier life goals, but even so.

In Vino Veritas, a slice of life with drunk Londo and long-suffering G'Kar on Centauri Prime. It is silly and serious and sweet by turns, and very much a Yuletide fic in the sense that it made me feel all warm and fuzzy first thing on Christmas morning.

In Flagrante, three times Londo and G'Kar were caught in the act: one happy, one angry, one sad. Each time is utterly charming, but because I am me and I love how hugely and tragically in love they are, the heart-punching last section is my favorite. Oh, and also there is tentacle porn, which is what Londo/G'Kar is for, really.

Meanwhile my recipient seems thrilled with my offering, so an excellent Yuletide all round! I haven't had time to read any other fic yet, but I'm hoping I'll be able to get through at least a good chunk of the archive in the next few days.

Most of the reason I haven't gone through any Yuletide fic besides my own yet is that I went out to see Les Mis today! Shenanigans ensued and, though I set out for a noon showing, I didn't actually get to watch it until 2:15. But it was totally worth switching theaters and waiting! I cried buckets and want to see it a thousand times.

Christmas Eve service was lovely, and Christmas morning was good too -- after the delight of Yuletide there was leisurely breakfast and the opening of presents. I got practicalish things, and some ornaments, and unexpectedly the first two seasons of Downton Abbey; I was not anticipating the number of gifts and may have to slightly rethink how much book space I'll have in my suitcase for the return journey, but this is an excellent problem to have.

Hope you're all having a lovely holiday/good Tuesday generally. <3

I have posted the first 1000+ words of my Yuletide fic! It is nothing like done, but at the moment my BEARS feel more like ... bear cubs? Something like that. Manageable, anyway.

I have also decorated the tree, and helped various friends cook things for the holiday party this evening. I love this time of year a lot. :D