Whumpex reveals!

Jun. 10th, 2025 11:19 pm
sholio: (Cute cactus)
[personal profile] sholio
[community profile] whumpex revealed tonight! (And H/C-ex is supposed to in a few days, if it's not delayed. All the hurtcomfort all the time.)

I got:

Staying Power (Babylon 5, Londo & Vir, 4200 wds)

I asked for (among other things) Londo reacting to something bad happening to Vir, or Vir taking a hit for him, and my Mysterious Gifter took me up on it most delightfully!

As usual, there is a fic or two of mine running around loose in the collection as well.
lannamichaels: Astronaut Dale Gardner holds up For Sale sign after EVA. (Default)
[personal profile] lannamichaels


Title: And If You're Under Him, You Ain't Getting Over Him.
Author: [personal profile] lannamichaels
Fandom: Vorkosigan Saga
Pairing: Ges Vorrutyer/Aral Vorkosigan, Ges Vorrutyer/Serg Vorbarra
Rating: R
A/N: The title is from New Rules, sung by Dua Lipa, written by Caroline Ailin, Emily Warren, and Ian Kirkpatrick.
Archives: Archive Of Our Own, SquidgeWorld

Summary: Ges Vorrutyer has ex-boyfriend problems.


This has languished in Scrivener since 2019... )

A quick note for me and others

Jun. 9th, 2025 11:32 pm
sholio: Text: "Age shall not weary her, nor custom stale her infinite squee" (Infinite Squee)
[personal profile] sholio
[community profile] justmarriedexchange nominations close tomorrow (the 10th).

I will almost certainly be signing up for this one, I'm just saying. And you do need three distinct fandoms for this exchange.

*my existing assignments side-eye me*
lannamichaels: Astronaut Dale Gardner holds up For Sale sign after EVA. (Default)
[personal profile] lannamichaels
Somehow we got a spring this year -- after so many years of maybe a week between winter and summer -- and I am so so so happy and relieved. Summer is certainly icumen in, but we have had spring. An actual spring. Yay.

Hornet Flight - Ken Follett

Jun. 8th, 2025 08:07 pm
sholio: several WWI biplanes flying (Biggles-biplanes)
[personal profile] sholio
I like Ken Follett's books, and I like airplanes, and I like historical books, but this one was just kind of lackluster for me, unfortunately. It kept me reading, and parts of it were very engaging, but I ended up feeling kind of "That was it?" at the end. I mean, to be fair, this book is set early in WW2 and there's a lot of war still to go, but it feels like we didn't quite get the full plot or the amount of airplane that was promised by the title. The airplane-promising title manages to be a big spoiler while not actually delivering on its promise. (Although, to be fair, I guess it did get me to read the book.)

Spoilers in general )
lannamichaels: Brachos 2a, caption: "There's a debate about that" (daf yomi)
[personal profile] lannamichaels


Notes on the first 4 prakim of Tractate Oaths, of which two of them were not about oaths at all.

Read more... )

Babylon 5 fanfic: One Safe Harbor

Jun. 6th, 2025 12:04 am
sholio: Londo from Babylon 5 smiling (B5-Londo)
[personal profile] sholio
The recent "only one bed" meme (which I still haven't finished, as per usual) led to only-one-bed thoughts and this missing scene for B5 5x16.

One Safe Harbor (also on Ao3 - G'Kar/Londo, 2300 words, explicit)
Missing scene on the flight from Babylon 5 to Centauri Prime in 5x16. Two people in a very small sleeping space. Also, some feelings are had.

One Safe Harbor - 2300 wds )
sholio: (B5-station)
[personal profile] sholio
I watched the first 15 minutes of "In the Beginning" back in May, and finally watched the rest last night. I enjoyed it, despite not being that interested in the 10-years-earlier part of the timeline (or the Minbari, for the most part). Annoyingly, the audio/video was a little out of sync for most of it, and I'm not sure why.

Spoilers for a 25-year-old TV movie )

Biggles fic: Old Words

Jun. 4th, 2025 11:42 pm
sholio: two men on horseback in the desert (Biggles-on a horse)
[personal profile] sholio
This was written for one of last year's prompt fests - Whumptober, I think - and never posted. At the time, I was really struggling to get words out, feeing pretty insecure about the words I did write, and I could tell this needed editing and didn't feel up to dealing with it. Also, it was too long to just post as a snippet of fic like most of the others. I sat on it for a while with the idea that it might be possible to clean it up and use it in an exchange, but it didn't fit anything I was writing for, and I finally got around to editing and posting it.

Old Words (1978 words) by Sholio
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Biggles Series - W. E. Johns
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: James "Biggles" Bigglesworth & Erich Von Stalhein
Characters: Erich von Stalhein, James "Biggles" Bigglesworth
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Friendship, Developing Relationship, Secret Messages
Summary: Some time after Buries a Hatchet/Looks Back, Biggles and Erich find an old message in an abandoned dead drop.

Also posted under the cut.

Old Words - 2000 wds )

(no subject)

Jun. 4th, 2025 11:45 am
beatrice_otter: Han and Leia--Kiss (Han and Leia)
[personal profile] beatrice_otter
[community profile] justmarried exchange is currently in the nomination phase, and I have been having trouble because they allow you to sign up with ten fandoms but you only can nominate seven. And my favorite marriage trope is the sedoretu, which is a specific type of poly marriage invented by Ursula K. LeGuin, and requires four people. Which means that I need to have foursomes nominated! (Although I can just go with a pairing and say "I love sedoretus, if you want to write this pairing as a sedoretu you can choose who to have be the other pair in the sedoretu.")

Anyway, the reason I have not nominated is that I am waiting to see what else got nominated to help me whittle down what I want to nominate, and I just checked the nominations and I think that [personal profile] tielan has nominated! (Thank you!) Because the BSG foursome I was going to nominate (Lee/Kara/Sam/Dee) has been nominated, and so has the Steve/Maria/Bucky/Natasha foursome in MCU fandom, and both are foursomes I have written as sedoretus for [personal profile] tielan before. Which means that not only is there someone interested in the same characters, there's someone who's probably going to sign up who is interested in sedoretus, specifically. That is really exciting to me! And it does free up some nomination slots.

Here are some nominations I am planning:

TGE: Maia/Csethiro/Csevet/Vedero (there are a bunch of TGE ships already nominated but they are all suuuuuuuper rare)

DS9: Sisko ships, Worf/Jadzia, Miles/Keiko/Kira/Bashir

TOS: Spock/Uhura and some foursomes (although someone on the Yuletide discord may be nominating sedoretus in this fandom, which would mean I don't have to nominate them and could free up a slot)

B5: John/Delenn, John/Delenn/Lennier, Delenn/Neroon, John/Delenn/Lennier/? (I don't know who I'd put with those three to complete the sedoretu--Anna, maybe? a Minbari OC?)

Peter Wimsey, sedoretu with Parker and Mary? Or Bunter? (Although I can't think of who would be the fourth in a sedoretu with Bunter, so I may just leave that as a poly threesome.

Rivers of London--I think just Peter/Beverly here, because I can't think of any sedoretus and ever since we learned that Nightingale was ace (in the novella Masquerades of Spring) that has completely killed any desire to ship him, for me. RoL is the only one on the list that's iffy, because much as I love it I'm not sure how much I'm into RoL + marriage tropes.

That's six, and with BSG taken care of I can look at some of my other fandoms for the seventh slot. Here are some options:

SW Legends, Han/Leia/Luke/Mara, Han/Leia/Lando, Lando/Luke/Mara. Han/Leia/Lando most properly belongs in SW OT, but that would mean using a second Star Wars nomination slot.

TNG: nobody's nominated this yet, and I can't think of any sedoretus, but I would probably do something like Picard/Guinan (my TNG rare pair OTP), Picard/Ro, Riker/Ro, Troi/Worf, and Data/Geordi

Random Harvest. Look, this movie is just so tropey and melodramatic it would be amazing to pile even more tropes into it.

 


sholio: (B5-station)
[personal profile] sholio
I haven't rewatched more B5, but I was watching various early episodes earlier this week for vid clipping purposes, and I'm still thinking about that.

Full series spoilers, mostly Londo related )
sholio: (B5-station)
[personal profile] sholio
Okay, I found someone on Reddit who went through all the script books and typed up a summary of ALL the different Babylon 5 plans/plot/changes, and ... I can't believe I'm saying this, but if this is accurate, it sounds like the almost-cancellation/having to compress most of the plot into season 4 actually may have been an improvement over the original.

(It also sounds like JMS was constantly changing major details / long-term plans on the fly throughout all the seasons, which makes the cohesion of the final version even more impressive, even without taking into account all of the network meddling and cast changes! One reason why I've been going down a rabbit hole on this is because I really do think this is one of the most impressive creative feats I've ever seen pulled off, I want to understand it from a creative perspective myself, and the more I find out about it, the more impressed I am.)

Link and details under the cut )

It's June! And I'm vidding again!

Jun. 1st, 2025 11:50 am
sholio: Text: "Age shall not weary her, nor custom stale her infinite squee" (Infinite Squee)
[personal profile] sholio
It is really interesting how my interest in visual media has spun up again over the last six months or so. It's not that I physically couldn't watch for a while, it's just that over the last couple of years, say since 2022 or so, I wasn't really interested. I would have said it was just because I was happy with the stories in my head and didn't need more stories, but I was also completely uninterested in watching vids and similar, and now suddenly that switch has flipped the other way and I'm back to finding them fun and fascinating to watch, even for source canons I barely know.

(For me and vids, I'd say song choice is *the* big driver of whether I'll watch a vid or not - I'll nope out in seconds if I don't like the song, but I'll watch one even for a source canon I've never seen if it's a song I like.)

Anyway, in a shocking twist, last night I finally got around to subscribing the things I need to subscribe to in order to get vidding source for Babylon 5.

I capture vid source like no one else I've ever met (though maybe people who do this just don't talk about it) - I screencapture from the video window playing on my computer screen. I can do it other ways, and in fact have done it a number of other ways (from ripping DVDs to ripping DRM'd MP4s - I did all my Agent Carter vids that way; it does look very crisp and beautiful - to simply using the *cough ahem* broadcast downloads back on the 2000s; a lot of people did that for vidding back in the SGA/White Collar era, although it meant dealing with watermarks on the video). But I keep coming back to capturing video from screen because it's just so easy. I can get exactly the clip I want and only the clip I want without any extra trimming work, it's easy to skip around, and it means not having to rip and store a kabillionty episodes for a long source canon.

This stopped working for a while because of software measures to prevent it, but I figured out a relatively easy workaround for vidding MASH (disabling graphics acceleration in Chrome) and now I'm doing that for B5 as well - I just need a relatively clean streaming source without commercials. I was genuinely really amazed at how crisp MASH turned out for the vids I made for Festivids. The obvious downside to screencapturing video is that the quality can suffer, and there's also the possibility of the playback stuttering - I used to have this happen occasionally when I tried to capture too much video at once on older computers (circa 2006 or so), where it would drop frames when I'd save it if it was too much for the memory buffer to handle. These days, modern computers can handle quite a lot of video at a time (I do it in Quicktime, I think it's saving directly to the hard drive as I go, whereas before it was definitely doing some kind of intermediate working-memory storage) ... buuuut capturing from streaming is limited by the streaming source, and those often stutter or glitch. It has been hard to get good video quality in B5, not really helped by the source itself being kind of potato-quality to begin with.

And as if that wasn't enough, Final Cut really struggles with the concept of 4:3 video that's not absolutely tiny. All of its large video presets are widescreen, but even forcing it to 4:3, it'll still make it widescreen in export - blah. The biggest that I can get it to make a 4:3 vid isn't very big. So it doesn't really matter that my source video isn't that high quality because it's potatoing it on export anyway! Final Cut, why are you like this.

THAT being said, the main reason I don't call myself a serious vidder is because I just sort of ... don't care? I'm not overly fussed about image quality and frame rate and codecs. I am DELIGHTED that it's no longer necessary to fuss around with codecs for the most part, now that everything seems to have standardized on MP4s and uploading to streaming sites. A ton of the vids I've downloaded and rewatch over and over are snagged from Youtube or are ancient WMVs from the era of making vids as small as possible for download, or are someone's first vidding efforts - and I *love* them. I appreciate crisp clean large video as much as the next person, but I mostly just want a fun viewing experience, and when I'm making vids, I simply like making them for myself and I'm happy if other people like them too. I'll work harder to get it looking nice if it's an actual gift for someone, but for the ones I make for myself ... eh. It's a lot like my approach to fanfic as a creator - I do care about craft to an extent, but mostly, I don't care if it's great, I just want to feel things.

(So the long and the short of it is that I'm making Babylon 5 vids now. Yay!)
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