Fandom: Symposium - Plato, Any

Punic Wars RPF, Any

dhampyresa

Mademoiselle de Maupin - Théophile Gautier, Any

Goblins in the Castle - Bruce Coville, Karl

Aubrey-Maturin Series - Patrick O'Brian, James Dillon

Mairelon the Magician - Patricia Wrede, Renee D'Auber

Wow, it's been awhile, huh, and what a post to leave up as my last one. Um, sorry? My laptop is not dead (yet) although the graphics card seems to be failing fast so I do still need a new one. I was really sick for about two weeks right after I posted that though (theoretically not Covid??) and worn out afterward, and had to get a FAPA zine in and behind on everything because of that and then Thanksgiving holiday happened and there was just a lot, mostly not bad. But I've been around! I've been cuddling my cat and writing fic and working on Yuletide along with everything else! I'm even like 80% sure I didn't default on Yuletide!

I'm five days into my winter time off and starting to feel like I am catching up on life again, so as evidence that I've still been around I have done my 2023 AO3 wrapped (reading) stats. ^_^

(I did this using the extremely unfinished AO3.js on Github, which gave me a CSV of my 80 pages of reading history for the past twelve months, and then loaded it into Google Sheets to go wild with UNIQUE() and FLATTEN() and COUNTIF() and SUMIF() to get stats. I don't understand AO3.js or Google Sheets enough to teach other people but in theory you can do it too.)

AO3 History pages have some issues for this - they record every fic you visit while logged in on AO3 whether you read it or not, they remove all data for deleted works, and works only show up the most recent time you read them (so if you read the same fic multiple times in a year it will only count once.) And of course they don't show if you're reading logged out or from downloads. But in terms of total wordcount I'm going to assume those mostly balance out.

So, from Dec. 1 2022 to Dec 1 2023:

• Works: 1593 (Avg. 4.3 per day)
• Total wordcount: 29,975,729 (82,125 per day)
• The equivalent of approx. 300 full-length modern novels, which makes me feel a bit better about my much lower Goodreads stats for the year. (I'll do Goodreads and podcasts at year end, they're a little easier to get.)
• Average wordcount per work: 18,000
• Median wordcount per work: 5,144

( More tag stats, at detailed length )

....and in theory the next step is to go through the list and find stuff to make an all-year recs list but we'll see if that happens.

• cool weather
  
• a cozy house set back in the trees
  
• a strong small-town sense of place
  
• soft clothes and warm food
  
• assholes with well-earned trust issues affirmatively deciding to let someone else in for once
  
• ~50000 words

1. Tridents as very rare chest loot in large ocean ruins.
   
2. Totems as very rare chest loot in woodland mansions.
   
3. Wither skulls as very rare chest loot in Nether Fortresses.
   
4. Froglights as very rare chest loot in ruined portals, since that's the mostly likely place for a frog to have encountered a magma cube in the past.
   
5. Ghast tears as cat gifts at the same frequency as phantom membranes (since *Earth* cats can fight ghosts in other dimensions I don't see why Minecraft cats couldn't.)
   
6. Blaze powder is craftable from one magma cream + one fire charge (with some loss of powder).
   
7. Blaze rods are craftable from blaze powder (with some loss of powder.)
   
8. Nether stars are craftable from four wither skulls + four netherite blocks + one end crystal.
   
9. Wither skulls can be smelted into wither roses.
   
10. Prismarine crystals can be smelted into prismarine shards.

1. Go to https://neocities.org/ and sign up for an account. It only needs a username (which will also be your website address), password, and email. Pick a username that will be related to your archive's title!
   
2. Choose the free account option (if you ever need more than what the free account offers for a text-only archive, you should probably look into graduating from neocities.) This should take you to a menu of "how to make a website" tutorials. You should do them! They're useful skills. But let's get your archive running first.
   
3. Hit the big red Edit Site button, or open the menu under your username and select "Edit Site".
   
4. Select the "Index.html" file to edit. You're now in an HTML Editor. Congrats, you're a web developer c. 1999!
   
5. Find where it has text between the <title> </title> tags. Delete the filler text, and put in the title of your new archive. This text will be what shows on the tab when people go to your archive.
   
6. Find where it has text between the <h1> </h1> tags. This will be big header text at the top of your page. Put the title of your archive here again. If you have no experience with HTML, you should read over the other sample text. It covers the basic basics very well! Once you've done that, you can delete everything else between the </h1> tag and the </body> tag. Save your index.html file.
   
7. Get an HTML file for a fanfic you would like to add to your archive. If it's on AO3, you can use the html download option built into AO3. If you have it as a word processor/google docs file, you should have the option to save as an html file. Save that html file to your computer.
   
8. Go back to Edit Site on Neocities and go to "upload". Find the html file you saved and upload it. (You can also drag and drop files to upload.)
   
9. The file you uploaded should now be showing with your other neocities files. Right-click on the title and select "copy link".
   
10. Go in to edit index.html again. Under where you put your header text, type <br><a href=" and then paste the link you copied. Then type "> . Then put in the title of the fic. Then type </a> . Then save index.html again. It should look like
    <br><a href="http://username.neocities.org/title of page.hml">fic title</a>
    when you're done. Save the page again. You can do this for every fanfic you have.

Melannen's Fanfiction Archive

I have written a lot of crossovers, but most of them I just put together for fun for a story. There are certain ones that get stuck for me, and make so much sense, and often make canon make so much more sense, that I 100% believe them to the extent you can assume anytime I'm playing in a world, that crossover is active, even if I never explictly mention it in the story. I've run into a few of them talking with people lately, so I thought I would make a list! (I have probably forgotten some that I'll have to come back and add later. And I've left out ones like "Ms. Frizzle is a Timelord" that everybody knows are true.)

• There are no Young Wizards crossovers. Every universe is canonically part of the Young Wizards multiverse (though they may seem more or less so, depending on their own laws and the needs of their inhabitants) so every fic is a Young Wizards fic and none are crossovers.

• Not every universe has Highlander immortals, but a lot of them do.

  • Mad Max is an immortal whose memory gets super messed up every time he takes a Quickening. (Or, well, maybe more accurately: a Quickening that messes up its winner's memory whenever it gets taken.)
  • The Old Guard is a Highlander movie; the people who invented the Game were just barely smart enough not to tell Andromache of Scythia about it.
  • People with the Ancient gene are usually pre-Immortals (unless they're already Immortals) Also, the reason you don't mess around with quickenings on "Holy Ground" is that Quickening energy reacts really poorly with even trace amounts of Naquadah. In fact the whole Quickening thing was originally a defense against becoming Goa'uld hosts that was put in place by the last remnant Ancients on Earth during the first Goa'uld invasion, although that's almost entirely forgotten; descendants of Ancient people who left Earth before then don't have it. (This doesn't quite line up with all the lore but the Naquadah-Holy Ground part makes so much sense that I stick with it anyway.)
    • (Also, everyone on the Leverage team has the Ancient gene.)

• Tolkien's Middle Earth is the universe from Diane Duane's Wounded Sky. Which makes K't'lk Ungoliant and assorted other powers the shadows of various Enterprise crew. (Someday I'll write the fic where they get a chance to visit.)

• A Night in the Lonesome October gives the AU backstory of A Study in Emerald.

• Sister Simplice from Les Miserables is the French vampire from They Who Hunt The Night. She is bleached-white with cool waxy skin and no detectable age, but she lived through the Great Plague, so it makes sense she'd go into nursing. (Honestly any time I mention vampires they're probably Hambly-style unless they explicitly aren't because they make so much more sense than any others I've read.)

• The Earl of Red Gloria is friends with the Dukes of Denver.

• Machineries of Empire and the Locked Tomb take place in the same universe, but quite far apart. Look the magic in Machineries isn't not necromancy-adjacent and a myriad is plenty long enough for a whole society to grow up that doesn't remember Earth.

• The M25 is a demonic sigil in every universe where it exists. Not sure this counts as a crossover as opposed to a true fact that happened to be popularized by a book, but a lot of people assume it's a crossover when they notice it. Most bypass ring roads are demonic sigils actually; if they weren't before they were built they are after people have been driving them awhile. (The bit where CDs or cassettes left in a car turned into Best of Queen is also a thing that's just true that only happened to be popularized in a book.)

• Good Omens is set in the same universe as Mark Twain's Adam and Eve Family Papers.

• Indiana Jones and The X-Files take place in the same universe. They also share the same government storage warehouse. (I haven't seen the Indy movie that has aliens in it but also I don't care.)

• San Fransokyo was built by refugees after the end of the Kaiju threat and disbanding of the PPDC. Apparently it's now canonically a post-1906 earthquake alternate history but I prefer my version.

• Due South and Dresden Files are set in the same Chicago (it's just that the Due South characters understand the magic better.)

• Every mysterious invisible island in Lake Michigan is the same island, connected interdimensionally (I've collected three so far, but I suspect a lot of worlds have them, it's just nobody's found them yet.)

• All large libraries and small twisty bookstores are connected via L-space.

• If you need a place where the air is sweet and everything's A-OK badly enough, then from any city in all the worlds, I can tell you how to get to Sesame Street.

• The Minecraft "multiverse" is actually a very old Dyson swarm (or possibly a cluster of them.) Bedrock is scrith. You can fit about a quadrillion average-sized Minecraft worlds into a 1 AU full-sphere Dyson swarm, or 70000 max-sized ones, more if they're not completely flat. Yes I've done the math¹, if you assume scrith and artifical gravity this explains everything about Minecraft worlds. Of course there are many more than 70,000 Minecraft worlds but most of them are orders of magnitude smaller than the maximum. The respawn mechanic is that player characters are all cloned ancillaries. (I dare someone to either write Tisarwat and friends visiting that version of the Radch or your favorite Minecraft people making it outside the Radch for the first time.)

1.A standard minecraft "world" ( Read more... )

• I've been reblogging fandom/geek/tumblr holidays to my tumblr this year (I have them queued until the end of the year) and this is the middle of the biggest week in holidays all year! The 7th was Purim, and then Mar 10 is MAR10 day for gamers; yesterday was the Eleventh of March for those who will always remember the Eleventh of March; March 12, today, is GNU Terry Pratchett day for SF/Fantasy fandom; 3-14 is of course Pi Day; and then it's the Ides of March, followed by Leprechaun Day on the 17th. And this year Ramadan then starts the 22nd. So happy holidays everyone who celebrates any of those! (If you celebrate none of those, happy March, I guess.)


• I FINALLY read Nona the Ninth. My brain was doing the thing where I had to put off reading it because I'd staked to much on it and then I kept putting it off, but it was way beyond due to the library, so I finally did (by staying up till 2 AM) so now I am having all the feelings the rest of the fandom had six months ago. The flashbacks filled in *exactly* the story I wanted them to, which is always a weird feeling as you read something you're overinvested in, what do you *mean* this isn't disappointing me?? It was supposed to disappoint me!
  
  Anyway I wanted to post my Blood Of Eden name here just so I don't lose it again:
  Greetings And Defiance Fairest And Fallen ἄνδρα μοι ἔννεπε, μοῦσα, πολύτροπον It's Not Made Of Fire Forget What You've Been Told In The Past
  
  (what would your Blood of Eden name be, if you know what that is?)


• I made a sort of low-key resolution to post fic to AO3 once a month this year whether I'd actually written any or not, so there may be a bunch of old unresolved fic showing up backdated there this year. I'm also going to try to actually keep up with comments on them, we'll see how *that* goes. This is February's (shhh. it's still February.)
  
  Lacunae (2234 words) by melannen
  Fandom: Highlander: The Series, The Murderbot Diaries - Martha Wells
  Rating: General Audiences
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Characters: Pin-Lee (Murderbot Diaries), Dr. Gurathin (Murderbot Diaries), Methos (Highlander)
  Additional Tags: Crossover, Community: intoabar, Post-Book 1: All Systems Red, image recognition software
  Summary: Pin-lee first noticed him because he wasn't there.


• Still both playing and watching too much Minecraft! Got weirdly stuck in sand yesterday and thought I was going to die of suffocation, which would have been my first death in months, because I couldn't move and couldn't break blocks, but then I didn't die and didn't die and didn't die, didn't lose health even though I had the "taking damage" sound and animation, so I thought I might have lost the whole world, and then I got desperate and just walked out through the solid blocks. Dunno what was going on there but hey I didn't die! I might be almost ready to finally light a portal and go to the Nether soon. There's an island-based extra-large ruined portal really beautifully situated under a natural arch that's part of a giant dripstone cave system that's centrally located on the water route between my two main bases, hopefully the nether on the other side is just as cool!


• I keep recently seeing people - fans and actual journalists - being extremely upset about shows coming down from streaming services that own them, which means they will be GONE FOREVER! And treating this like some horrible injustice and some new thing that is going to totally upset how the creative industry works.
  
  And. I mean, I get why people are upset, they won't be able to easily access favorite shows anymore! But your beloved shows won't be gone forever? As long as a single person has a pirated copy and either a torrent client or a CD burner and a mailbox, they won't be gone forever. It's especially weird from the POV that I'm still doing the in-period Star Trek watchalong, where it's 1968 and Star Trek has just been officially renewed for a third season after a massive fan campaign, which was extremely important not just for new canon, but because having less than three seasons would have meant it wouldn't go into syndication - which would mean, really truly, it would be gone forever and nobody would ever be able to see it again, only listen to fan-made audio recordings and look at photos and scripts.
Gideon Marcus, who runs the watchalong, attempts to also give us the 1968 shows that ran before and after Star Trek - and only about 50% of them still exist in any form at all, even in locked film and video archives. (And, tbh, this is generally not a great loss to culture the way Trek would have been.)

So, on the one hand, if you really want it have it forever, save your own physical copy (on media you own!) And on the other hand, "make this available to everyone who wants to watch it, forever" has never been a goal of any media producer, even a little bit, and anyone who thought that, even in the age of streaming, hasn't been paying attention. Also: sometimes things are ephemeral, and all you have of them is your memories of the experience, and that's ok. I've been trying to write fic for the watchalong without cheating and using sources I wouldn't have had in 1968 (even the ones around in 1998) and it's such a different experience, and freeing in a lot of ways!