★ the saltmaster extraordinaire

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Chapters: One-Shot
Fandom: Trigun
Rating: M
Relationships: William Conrad & Vash the Stampede
Characters: William Conrad, Vash the Stampede, Rem Saverem (mentioned)
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon: Trigun Maximum (Manga), Grief/Mourning, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Night Terrors, Suicidal Thoughts, sharing a folding bed with a matricidal plantling, Conrad's life as a piece in the theater of the absurd

Summary:

Something awful and acidic like bile rises up in his throat and Conrad swallows it back as he looks down at the small, slight form next to him. This being beyond true human understanding. This ahriman, a spirit of wrath come to claim its due.

This murderer, his dear friend's blood all over his hands.

Additional Notes: Conrad and a young Vash on the World's Worst Road-trip. Read here @ AO3.

Chapters: One-Shot
Fandom: Oban Star-Racers
Rating: T
Relationships: Don Wei & Original Robot Character
Characters: Don Wei, Original Robot Characters, Eva Wei (mentioned), Aikka (mentioned)
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Post-War, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Artificial Intelligence, Mortality, Character Study

Summary

“So I should ignore any and all future threats to take me apart and sell me for scrap as well?”

It’s remarkable, how a vaguely feminine voice in a metal shell surrounding a blue mechanical eye, can look and sound cheeky. And yet, somehow, STELLA manages it. Isn’t that just like Eva, to give him the gift of a personal assistant with an attitude problem?

Additional Notes: Finally edited and properly posted this little scene. Read on AO3.

At first I wanted to write up a title referring to the meat of this post (ableism, the endless infantilization of neurodivergent women by individuals who view themselves as progressive), but I decided to be both sharper and more tongue-in-cheek about it. Because if there's a trend I've noticed in the last fifteen years or so, it's that the people most likely to do what I outlined above are the ones who also bandy about the word "gross" as if it's going out of style. There's a dark connection between ableism and responses rooted wholly in knee-jerk discomfort that never get questioned or challenged.

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It just hit me that I now have enough October Daye & Simon Torquill fanart (via the ever-lovely Yinza, go commission them!) for a small picspam (and doesn't that word just stir up nostalgia?)

So here it is, then, the Simon & Toby (of Seanan McGuire's October Daye urban fantasy series) picspam:



Nota Bene: While I'm the first person to admit that I've got shipper-goggles bolted on when it comes to these two, none of these pieces were intended to be romantic in nature (I very much enjoy their canon platonic dynamic as well). All of the drawings are based 100% on book passages I sent to Yinza. So the fact that their canon interactions can read so ridiculously shippy amuses me to no end.

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Just what it says on the tin! The long-awaited Kickstarter for the Blu-Ray edition of Oban Star-Racers (an excellent French-Japanese animated co-production that I've preciously recommended here) is finally live and already past the first stretch-goal (as of this writing).

I've pledged 110€ to this project, which secured me a Collector's Edition of the Blu-Ray and several other extra goodies. However, the tier I really wanted was the 250€ one, which also included a figurine of Eva that's been out of production for years and effectively impossible to find. Alas, all 50 slots for that one got taken so fast that I never stood a chance. 😅

It's Dragon Age Day (or, rather, it was yesterday and I'm just slow) and I got a lovely work from Yinza: Loghain Mac Tir, my favorite character in the Dragon Age universe and my Warden, Elaine Amell. They're my longest-running DA ship (for all that Loghain isn't actually romanceable in the games themselves; Bioware are cowards). This, in particular, is a scene from the last stretch of the campaign, when the assembled armies are marching upon Denerim, to halt the advance of the Blight and strike down the Archdemon.

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It's that time of the month again and here's another art-piece by the lovely Yinza, for my fusion AU fic between Oban Star-Racers/ATLA& LoK, songs of surrender. This one is an illustration from the first chapter, depicting this particular scene:

Molly is still on her feet, albeit barely. The way she's moving tells Rick that she's got a couple of bruised ribs, at the very least. Her head-guard is moving around, the strap weakened when she hit the water at a wrong angle. There's blood dripping out of her nose, where it collided with the loose headgear, in her face-first fall to the floor. But she's not giving up, raising her right hand, palm-side up and curling her fingers, in the classic "bring it!" motion.

Here are a few AO3 RSS feeds that no one had ported over to Dreamwidth yet. Cue "this must be rectified, immediately!" on my part. 😂

Ship Feeds:

• Zutara AO3 Feed
• Viravos (Aaravos/Viren) AO3 Feed
• Loghain Mac Tir/Warden Feed
• Sheith AO3 Feed

Canon Feeds:

• Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind AO3 Feed
• Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
• Oban Star Racers

Some of these tags see content so infrequently that the feed might look empty before someone decides to post the one-fic-for-the-month (the joys of being into small canons / rarepairs, 😭), but I want to have them on-hand regardless. 

I'm back with another lovely piece of fanart by the great Yinza! This is a sister-piece to this one right here, both from the upcoming chapter 3 of songs of surrender, my Oban Star-Racers / ATLA & LOK fusion AU. This one is meant to represent the duality of Don Wei in this fic -- Waterbending Master and innate Bloodbender from Yakone's genetic line, protector and murderer, famous businessman and member of a shadowy death-cult dedicated to a spirit of eternal darkness. Korra's last disciple/son and Canaletto's hunting wolf.

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Here's another art-piece by the lovely and very talented Yinza, of a scene from songs of surrender, my Oban Star-Racers / Avatar The Last Airbender & Legend of Korra fusion-fic. This one is a moment from chapter 2 -- Aikka, Prince of the Northern Water Tribe, meditating in the Foggy Swamp. He's in the middle of a world tour, keen on studying as many Waterbending styles as possible, with a variety of masters. In this case, the tribesmen in the swamp. (Not in the image but very much present, is Canaan, his first teacher and mentor, who unlike Aikka's calm openness to learn, is complaining about the mud, the biting flies and the locals).

Aaaaah, here it is! An illustration from the upcoming chapter 3 (after I manage to edit and post both it and chapter 2) of songs of surrender, my Oban Star-Racers / ATLA & LOK fusion AU. This particular scene is a flashback sequence that takes place seventeen years before the main canon events and involves Don and his mentor, Avatar Korra, after they barely managed to survive a Red Lotus terror-attack. Korra is helping Don through his shock, so they can both start aiding the injured and those buried under the rubble. 

The art is by the lovely and very talented Yinza -- here are links to their Tumblr and Pillowfort accounts. Take a look at their Patreon as well, they do fantastic work. Here is their commissions page and I 100% recommend commissioning them if you need anything from your original characters illustrated all the way to seeing scenes from your fics come to life.

I'm honestly amused that even Dreamwidth (slow, small, homely Dreamwidth) ended up with spam-bots. I realized something was up when I got followed by two accounts out-of-the-blue, a few days ago.


One was completely empty, but the other one had clearly been an active fannish account at one point, many years ago. I got suspicious when I saw that both accounts had links to Russian sites in their bios (spun up a quick virtual machine and clicked on one of them out of curiosity, got redirected to a shady adult site, though thankfully nothing worse). I banned both accounts from my journal.




What's interesting to me is that, as can be seen in the screenshots from these profile pages, I suspect that both journals were once legitimate ones -- certainly I wouldn't expect Russian spammers to make a bevy of accounts in 2010 and then just sit on them. It only serves to confirm what denise said in this post in the dw_news community, that this is a case of people's genuine accounts getting hijacked. What I'm still unclear on is what other site got hacked to facilitate this. My guess is probably LiveJournal, for it to be a case where people's fannish usernames and and passwords could be so easily matched across sites. It would also explain why the affected accounts seemed to be roughly ten years old, from back when people still frequented LJ and DW in almost equal measure, before the mass-exodus / mass account-deletion of 2017.

EDIT: I recommend the use of a password-logging service such as LastPass (the one I use), since "a unique password for every site" is easier said than done without such a little program. The most important part is to keep your master-password safe and to make certain you always keep track of it. I have it written down on a piece of paper and locked in a drawer next to my bed.

In less utterly dismal matters to talk about, remember this post, from November last year, when I found someone who, for some utterly unfathomable reason, started uploading the entire content of a translated Chinese BL novel (Mo Dao Zu Shi -- very much recommend it, there's a very good reason for its popularity) to the Oban Star-Racers fandom section on AO3? I sent a report to AO3's Abuse Team and got a pretty prompt reply (at the end of November) but forgot to post about it, in the general chaos of the coming holiday season.



The idea that someone thought Oban fandom so dead that it seemed like the best place in which to post an unauthorized reproduction and get away with it is hilarious to me. Particularly when there actually are fics getting posted and updated in that section of AO3, now and then.

Know that feel when you're in a tiny fandom and you get excited for every new fic, only to be disappointed in plenty of cases? (No commentary on the quality of the fics, just my own personal tastes). Well, take that and multiply it by about a factor of ten, because I just found someone whose 'new fic' is nothing but a word-for-word reupload of the English-translated version of one of the Chinese BL novels that have been very popular lately. To make matters worse, it was posted in a fandom that has absolutely nothing to do with Chinese BL!

I'd probably be less annoyed if I hadn't set up a RSS feed reader for my small fandoms, to be immediately notified of new fics. The only reason I missed this one and only saw it now, while scrolling back, is because it got posted on the same day as my birthday party, two weeks ago. My reaction can be summarized as "this fandom gets fic once in a blue moon and you post this?"

Sent a report to the AO3 Abuse team. Particularly when the translation team even asked that people not re-post / re-upload their translations onto other sites.

So! I promised that I'd be posting some of the choicest bits from the OSR artbook, since there's some very interesting info in there, among all the gorgeous images. And here's the first thing, taken from Rick's character profile page:



First reaction: Oh for fuck's sake, here they go, No-Homo'ing yet another one of my favorite M/M ships!

On further reflection: No, no wait, this is delicious and so wonderfully messed-up! I can actually work with this!

Because here's the thing. I can actually see Don developing a kind of paternal affection (however stunted) toward Rick, everything in him screaming to fill that jagged, still-bleeding hole he made with his own hands, when he left Eva in Stern. It would be an almost unconscious process, because Don repressed himself so badly, both in terms of his own emotions and his effective memories of the past, that, for the most part, he wouldn't even be aware of that gaping hole (or, rather, wouldn't let himself be aware, because that particular wound would entirely undo him, if he permitted it).

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This morning I got a review that had me on cloud nine for the whole day!


Yes, I know the age-old advice of first-and-foremost writing for yourself and your own satisfaction (why else would I have gone ahead with seemingly such an out-of-the-blue crossover, if not for my own satisfaction?) But my God, does it ever feel good when I get even the smallest hint that my effort isn't for nothing, that I'm not just tossing my writing out there in the void and that others can and do find joy and merit in it. Also, it's always very nice to be complimented on characterization, since that is the source of my greatest anxiety -- the notion that I either don't have a good grasp on the characters' personalities, voices and patterns of thinking or that I'm totally off-base in my interpretation.

Reviews like this one are the lifeblood of a writer and I'm still smiling like an idiot, well over twelve hours later. 

Found an excellent resource post on LJ by trovia, detailing how to get rid of AO3's automatic numbering of chapters via work-skin (very useful if you're in the habit of posting prologues and/or intermissions and can't deal with the constant annoyance that is 'Chapter 1: prologue'). It's a bit frustrating that AO3 doesn't have any sort of option for the user to define how chapter titles display, without having to resort to skins (Mediaminer, which is an absolutely ancient fic site, actually has the option to designate one chapter as the story prologue, something AO3 hasn't implemented to this day).

I wanted to embed the post here, to preserve it for myself in case something happens to LJ (can't say I have much faith in it being around for longer, as ad-infested and unusable as it's become) or the account is ever deleted, but I can't get the embed function to work on DW. So I'll copy the contents instead.

If this is useful to you in any way, do leave a comment on trovia's journal!

When you post fic with multiple chapters to AO3, AO3 automatically adds a "Chapter 1 / Chapter 2" etc. to your chapter title. That sucks a little if you've got a prologue, because you end up with such titles as "Chapter 2: Chapter 1 - Title Of Chapter". Asked the AO3 folks about it and got the following suggestion to circumvent this problem, thought I should share:

1. Log in to the Archive and go to http://ao3.org/skins
2. Select "Create Skin"
3. Change the Type to "Work Skin".
4. Enter a unique name for the skin.
5. In the CSS box, type or paste .chapter.preface h3.title {display: none;}
6. Select Submit

When you post a new work (or want to change an existing work), make sure to select the skin you just made in the Associations section. You can add in your own chapter titles by placing them within h3 tags as part of the text of the chapter. One thing to keep in mind though, work skins will not transfer over to downloads or subscription notifications, and users can override them by choosing the 'Hide Creator's Style' option. You can find more information about work skins here.

Haven't played the game myself (and probably won't until it comes out on PC, since I don't own a PS4) but Death Stranding made me remember something that's always served me well, in fandom and otherwise:

Don't get hung-up on what reviewers say.

Some of the very first reviews I saw for the game were trashing it backwards and forwards (with one reviewer going so far as to imply that game-developers should never be given the creative freedom that Hideo Kojima currently enjoys). And yet, every person in my circle of friends and acquaintances who has gotten to play the game so far, has been more or less raving about different aspects that appealed to them.

There's a very good reason I keep insisting so firmly on the notion of the fundamental subjectivity of art and why I have no patience for certain Big Geek Media types and their obsession with labeling art 'objectively X / Y' ('objectively good' for what they enjoy and what appeals to them, 'objectively bad' for what they don't enjoy and doesn't appeal to them). Meanwhile, I'm sitting there, quietly scoffing and going "there's absolutely nothing objective about you labeling this as 'good' because the tone and the aesthetics happened to be on-point for you." When I say that something is 'good', I judge it so from the point of view of my own subjective perception and personal tastes, rather than any sort of universal litmus test that would never actually be 'universal'. Even when I'm unhappy with something, I also acknowledge that my own individual expectations are in play (for example, I don't expect others to be as critical of She-Ra's storytelling as I am, if 'building believably military operations and a believable military hierarchy' isn't a priority in their own suspension of disbelief).

Which brings me back to reviews and reviewers. My rule of thumb has always been to use reviews as a loose guideline at best and, particularly where video-game reviews are concerned, to focus on those highlighting actual technical issues with a game. I say this because I would have missed out on many things that I dearly loved upon watching or playing, if I had let reviewers' opinions about tone or story or characters influence my own decisions.  
 

Sketching ideas for two 10k-ish length fics:

• "five realities that never were" [Oban Star-Racers, gen-fic] Events happen differently after Maya's horrific death. In some realities, Don never descends into depression and alcoholism. In others he takes Eva with him, into a life of drifting. In yet others, he gives her up for adoption, recognizing his inability to care for her in his current state. But each and every time, Canaletto carefully and subtly steps in to 'correct' the flow of destiny, so that his grand plan, unfolding for ten thousand years, still comes to fruition.

• "the shadow that devours the world" [Oban Star-Racers, gen-fic] A subtle horror fic about Canaletto and his long influence over the genetic lines he followed, in order to reach Eva. Focuses on three generations of the Wei family as young children and their murky nightmare of a terrible and frightful, many-armed monster + Don and Eva finally talking about Canaletto and beginning to properly heal after Oban.