So far with my new smartphone I have: texted my sister, accidentally called my friend, been sent a picture of a cat, set the picture of the cat as my wallpaper, downloaded two apps and wishlisted a bunch more, taken a photo of some candy, transferred my contacts, uploaded an icon for myself, listened to the radio, and played 333 games of Flow.

***
Anyway! So, my fellow Librarians people, if you were one of the Librarians, which Librarian would you be?

I ask this because about 10 minutes before tonight's episode, an old family friend called my mom out of the blue to say he and his wife had been watching it and Cassandra reminds them of me.

Which.

I personally think I am less the sylphlike math genius who hallucinates, and more the dude who decided to waste all his potential living at home with his mom and posting about obscure facts on the internet.

I also think that ( minor spoilers for tonight's episode )

Anyway not a bad way to end it if that is the end, I may even write fic for it, who knows!

Oh right, Yuletide was a thing that happened, wasn't it.

Let's talk about this week's episodes of The Librarians, shall we? It continues to be gloriously predictable in a very enjoyable way. Also I'm finally starting to get properly fannish feels about the Librarianettes, so yay! I can't believe the season is almost over already? But that's probably good because let's face it this is about as long as I can manage to keep up with a currently-airing TV show these days. Maybe I'll actually pick up Agent Carter next?

( shippy spoilers )

So for yuletide I wrote about the conspiracy of evil Librarians who are trying to keep magic from leaking back into the world. ^_^

Five Times Leavenworth Smedry Was Late Returning A Book (And One Time He Wasn't) (5257 words) by melannen
Chapters: 6/6
Fandom: Alcatraz Series - Brandon Sanderson
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Leavenworth Smedry, Shasta Smedry, Himalaya Smedry, Bastille Broadmoor, Alcatraz Smedry, Kanchenjunga Sarketjåkkå, Attica Smedry
Additional Tags: implied Alcatraz/Bastille, Future Fic, pov: librarian, Libraries, Yuletide 2014, implied Kanchenjunga/Leavenworth, Tentacles, librarian in-jokes, Dinosaurs, Books, Sexual Harassment, 5+1 Things, Lateness, Time Shenanigans
Summary:
Ranganathan's Five Laws of Non-Evil Library Science are:
Books are for use.
Every reader its book.
Every book its reader.
Save the time of the reader.
The library is a growing organism.

Dealing with Smedry talents, however, can make them difficult to remember, even for a Reformed Librarian.

This story has feathered dinosaurs, librarian in-jokes, grandparent shipping, a documentary framework, and a metatastic frist person POV, so basically everything you'd expect in a story by me. You may have seen it without the "(And One Time He Wasn't)" in the title because, of course, Leavenworth was late returning the sixth part, so it didn't get posted until right before reveals.

..so I signed up for that fandom at the last minute because the_rck mentioned that nobody had and her prompts looked fun, and I'd seen it cross the desk at the library and had been meaning to read it. It's just four kids' novels so I figured it would be an easy enough canon to pick up, I can read a longish kids' novel in two hours or so.

I should have remembered - it was right in the title of the books - that libraries are evil. We did have the whole series, but books two and four were only available as e-audiobooks. In a format incompatible with my audio player. So it ended up taking me way longer than it should have to get through canon and there was some mild panic there at a few points.

But I'm glad I offered it! I really enjoyed the series, I had a heck of a lot of fun writing the fic (mild deadline panic aside) and the_rck either didn't hate it or did a really good job hiding her dislike, so I thnk everything turned out ok.

The Alcatraz Smedry Series - for the vast majority of you who have never heard of it - is about ( a preteen boy named Alcatraz in foster care who suddenly encounters a strange old man who claims to be his grandfather. )

I kind of want these books to have a large fandom just so I can BS with people about what our Smedry talents are and strategize on how to use them. (Mine is that I can't get laces to stay tied. Since my shoelaces are never tied it has all the advantages of the tripping talent plus I can make other people trip. Also tripwires aren't much trouble and never try to tie me up. If I was in really serious trouble I might even be able to do terrible things to the Threads of Destiny but don't test me on that.)

I got two fabulous stories for yuletide:

Lucky Starr and the Ambassadors of Eris (4259 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 8/8
Fandom: Lucky Starr - Isaac Asimov
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: John Bigman Jones/Lucky Starr, John Bigman Jones/OFC
Characters: Lucky Starr, John Bigman Jones, Ben Wessilewsky, Hector Conway, Gus Henree, OFC
Additional Tags: Space Flight, Emotional Baggage, Unresolved Emotional Tension, Human Biology, Science, Sexual Tension, Canon Compliant, Mild Sexual Content
Summary:

A mysterious ship has been discovered entering our solar system. Lucky doesn't know that Bigman keeps a ring in his boot. Will Conway survive the stress of it all?

For my main gift I finally got Lucky Starr fic after all these years! \o/ It's like a new slice of canon only with more women and more three-dimensional relationships. And up-to-date-science. It's wonderful. (This now makes two Yuletides in which I have gotten fanfic that is about how Pluto is not a planet. I think that means I win.)

Five Numbers That Got Munched (And One That Can't Be Proven) (2777 words) by Anonymous
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Munchers
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Characters: Munchers - Character
Additional Tags: 5+1 Things, Mathematics, Food Issues, Dialogue-Only, Yuletide Treat, Yuletide 2014
Summary:

Throughout history, humans have turned to mathematics to express deep insights.

Throughout history, Munchers have been trying to eat things.

For my treat I got a NUMBER MUNCHER. MUNCHING THINGS. While a poor mathematician tries to teach the muncher math. It is adorable and full of math geekery. It is great.


And then! Unexpectedly! I got a Madness gift, that was marked as a Les Mis/Top Gear crossover, and I had no idea what to think, since I hadn't requested either of those fandoms? And like, Jeremy Clarkson is really not much like Jean Valjean. But then it turned out it was a vid.

A vid of the Top Gear Botswana special to "One Day More".

TBH I thought I was over Top Gear fandom, but the minute Oliver came in, singing Cosette's part in the song, I realized I would never, ever be over Richard/Oliver. Plus this is basically EXACTLY the kind of vid I like: shamelessly literal interpretation of a song that really shouldn't work with the fandom and yet does. It's beautiful.

My own story is full of obvious giveaways that it's me, but it's a super-obscure fandom so hardly anyone has read it. (I will just have to get you all into the fandom after reveals....)

***

Meanwhile, I did really amazingly great on the giant to-do list (well, for me, anyway) until about dinnertime yesterday, and then, uh, not so much, including a break for staying up till 5 AM reading fanfic *sigh*. I did manage to watch this week's Librarians after missing the previous one, though!
( I guess if I'm trying to actually watch I will keep doing weekly reaction posts like I did back in the day when I had shows? )

sineala asked: Young Wizards crossovers! Why are they awesome? Can everything be a YW crossover? Discuss.

These are both excellent questions. I am going to answer the first one via answering the second one, otherwise this will get even more too long than it is.

The answer to the second question is, of course, simultaneously yes, everything, and no, nothing at all. For if you define a 'crossover' as a story that combines several different, unconnected universes, nothing can be a YW crossover, because the story of Young Wizards canonically encompasses all other universes that there are, and therefore, no matter what you are writing, whether you know it or not, you are writing a YW crossover.

...but if you define "crossover" more broadly as entangling two pieces of story that previously didn't formally coincide, then everything can indeed be a Young Wizards crossover! After all, canonically, the YW multiverse includes them all, so there must be a way to cross them over.

That said, some universes are harder than others. And it is curious, given that all stories flow to Timeheart one way or another, that relatively few of our other canons acknowledge the presence of wizardry outright, even those set on worlds that ought to be astafrith. But I suppose that's part of keeping Earth's dominant colonialist/capitalist culture safely sevarfrith, for now.

It is tricky to find the wizards who serve the Powers in some stories, it's true, especially those which have a system of wizardry that is very definitely not the wizardry that Kit and Nita and Rhiow and Ssaash practice. And it's also true that wizardry, as we see it through Kit and Nita's eyes, is very heavily influenced by the way American Christian culture sees the world, and how it sees stories.

( But we know - from canon - that the way wizardry comes out in the world can very a lot from place to place, from universe to universe. )

Basically, there are several ways to do a YW crossover: one is your basic "okay, if wizardry here works pretty much how it does for Kit and Nita, who would the wizards be, and what would they being doing?" For worlds where that doesn't work - where Kit and Nita's wizardry would not happen - you can have a character from the YW universe fall through into their world, or vice versa, and use them to figure out how wizardry in their world will work. And even without YW book characters, you can always take a world that's deep in the Lone One's power and give a few characters the Oath, so they can start to pull it out...

Although I'd also love to see more worlds that do the crossover by playing "find the wizardry" also take into account the ways in which wizardry might feel very different for those wizards, on very basic levels, even if they're on an Earth that looks like Kit and Nita's, even while following their recension of the oath. Not everybody's "growing and living well in their own way" will look like that. Of course, that's a lot harder to do! And really I just want all the YW crossovers in general.

(btw this is one of the reasons I side-eye the way AO3's tags, in practice, have been leaning toward labelling all fusion crossovers as AU. My story where Sitwell is a wizard may or may not be a crossover, but there's absolutely nothing about it that's AU. :P)

Anyway, I think it's time for another round of "Who in your fandoms is under the Oath, and how?" Who has new fandoms since last time? Who has new wizardy headcanons? Who's new here and missed the last round and wants to play?

My super-duper-new fandom is the Librarians! Because so far it's basically Leverage dropped in a blender with Stargate SG1, as you might expect, given the showrunners! And who doesn't want that, c'mon.

( So. Librarian wizardry )