And today is the fandom the word "shipper" was coined for!

I remember way back meeting a few old XF-only fen who thought "shipper" meant liking buddy pairings and "slasher" meant liking enemy pairings, because in XF "shipper" meant Mulder/Scully and "slasher" meant "Mulder/Krycek". (I know, there were some people who "shipped" Skinner too, but let's face it, Skinner fans weren't the ones reshaping all of fandom.)

It must have been a trip to be watching along as the Krycek storyline originally aired, and not knowing if the fresh-faced young agent who had just been assigned to Mulder was trustworthy or not. And then get it confirmed for sure that he wasn't!

My first big reading jag in this fandom must have been c. 2003, when my sister sat me down to make me watch the whole thing, and I barely even had an LJ and definitely wasn't keeping track of things anywhere (After all, there's only so much fanfic, I can always find it again....) so choosing recs for this was not easy. I have so many vivid memories of stories! And they are so not things that are googleable! And diving back into the archives I was reading in then is a journey. All the sturm und drang about headers and limiting people to 75 tags per story, back in the days where you had to post to alt.tv.x-files.creative to make sure your stuff got archived, you were lucky if a story had a pairing. Much less a summary!! Warning tags, pfeh.

If you're interested in pre-lj fandom and you weren't there for it, the Gossamer archive is still up, and I recommed just. Poking around. Exploring. Seeing if you can find anything.

(That said, Mulder/Krycek as a ship needs a warning. Because Mulder is constantly beating Krycek up. Which is canon from the show! And to be fair, everybody beats Krycek up. But a lot of the fic dances along the line to partner abuse, and doesn't always acknowledge that's what it's doing, or expects you to follow along as Mulder slowly realizes who he's become. I remember finding a lot of it uncomfortable but visceral twenty years ago; the uncomfortable is a bit stronger now. For me at least it's sometimes worse to read than some of the stuff in Hannibal/Will fic, where at least they *know* they're crossing lines.) So if you're a person who's sensitive to partner abuse, have someone trusted pre-vet Mulder/Krycek fic for you.)

• The Gift of an Enemy (125000 words) by sylvia
  Chapters: 6/6
  Fandom: The X-Files
  Rating: Explicit
  Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
  Relationships: Alex Krycek/Fox Mulder
  Characters: Alex Krycek, Fox Mulder, The Consortium
  Additional Tags: Witches, Aliens, Case Fic
  This is on the AO3 via the Open Doors import from The Basement, but it's archive-locked, so I'm linking to the off-archive non-locked version the author points to from the Ter/Ma Open Doors import. (There is a LOT of messiness on AO3 with old XF fic and Open Doors imports, unfortunately. On the plus side, Open Doors means nearly all if it *is* there *somewhere*, which is amazing.)
  
  Because sometimes you need to read a novel-length 90s slashfic where the assassin cuddles his FBI nemesis, who is catatonic from angst, and murmurs "You're like a silver blade. It burns my soul to look at you."



• Truth or Dare (6969 words) by Jane Mortimer\
  Fandom: The X-Files
  Rating: Not Rated
  Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
  Relationships: Alex Krycek/Fox Mulder
  
  Sometimes you need a story about two grown men playing truth-or-dare in the dark.



• Approaching Concinnity (66160 words) by Verily
  Fandom: The X-Files
  Rating: Mature
  Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
  Relationships: Alex Krycek/Fox Mulder
  Additional Tags: Romance, Angst, Fiction
  
  I don't remember anything about this except that I liked it fifteen years ago.

I did in fact read Silence of the Lambs, decades ago in college, in my earliest X-Files phase when I was reading everything profiler-related I could find, but honestly it did not make much of an impression on me. The serial killer stuff I could get by reading Mulder whumpfic and actual profiler memoirs was better anyway. And by that point Hannibal's cultural impact was already enough that the book could never live up to what I'd imagined.

I suspect the Hannibal TV show has more of what I want in serial killer stories! It sounds like a show that knows exactly what people are there for and goes hard for it. But I also suspect I would be really bad at watching the show, in that I would be annoyed by the lack of useful lighting in the cinematography, unable to follow what was going on at any given time because it expects its watchers to pay attention, far more interested than the show in the killer-of-the-week puzzles, and frustrated at what happens to all the secondary characters I like. So I haven't even tried it.

I do read fic though! An urbane cannibalistic serial killer and a scruffy profiler hanging onto sanity with his fingertips, mutually obsessed with each other in an unfinishable homoerotic chase that switches polarity at unpredictable intervals: what's not to love? Well. I guess some people can't take the gore and cannibalism and torture and manipulation and, okay, I suppose it is kind of a fandom for very particular tastes. Even I have a problem with a lot of the fic because I don't *mind* if the food (in a story) is people, but I want to *know* if the food is people, and you can't always *tell*.

I read fic in this fandom when I am in a very particular mood and have recs to lead me to the specific kind of fic I want to read, so here is another Extremely Specific Recs set, being 'Hannibal/Will AUs summarized by the old joke about the man who picks up a hitchhiker and says "Don't you feel unsafe? How do you know I'm not a serial killer?" and the hitchhiker says, "Because the odds that we're *both* serial killers are astronomical!"'

• Astronomical Odds (2562 words) by xzombiexkittenx
  Chapters: 1/1
  Fandom: Hannibal (TV)
  Rating: Mature
  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
  Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
  Additional Tags: Serial Killer Will Graham, Pre-Season 1 AU, Hitchhiking
  Series: Part 2 of Bad jokes and alternate professions
  Hannibal may be traveling for work, but he can stop for an intriguing hitchhiker.



• Black Rock Mountain (23964 words) by bokunojinsei
  Chapters: 1/1
  Fandom: Hannibal (TV)
  Rating: Explicit
  Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
  Relationships: Will Graham/Hannibal Lecter
  Characters: Will Graham, Hannibal Lecter
  Additional Tags: Explicit Sexual Content, Explicit Language, Alternate Universe - Serial Killers, Blood and Gore, Minor Original Character(s), Murder, Rough Sex, Disturbing Themes, Cannibalism, Dark Will
  Series: Part 1 of Hitchhiker's Guide to Murder
  
  Hannibal may be traveling for pleasure, but he can make a stop for an intriguing hitchhiker.

(Only two more fandoms with a Hannibal left on the list after this.):

I've spent the last couple of days, in my spare time, playing around in the invisible_ficathon tagset and learning about how to be a tagmod in an AO3 ficathon. (It is an amazing tagset so far, and you still have time to nominate, if you're lucky! ^_^

I finally put my own nominations in last night, and now I get to convince all of you to sign up to write them! As a lot of the fandoms in this fest will be, most of mine are pretty light on canon, so you should be able to sign up even if you didn't know them already

Here are the four of mine that have the easiest canon - all you need to write them should already be in this post!

1. Howard Goldberg, Frontiersman is a book that appears in a couple of Daniel Pinkwater novels. It's the story of the first Orthodox Jewish Indian Scout in the US. The longest description of its contents is in Yobgorgle, as excerpted below: ( It was a pretty interesting book. )
   I know there are people reading this who have just been waiting to do justice to the story of the first Orthodox Jewish Indian Scout. Perhaps you are one of them?


2. Wonder Wombat: This is another one that appears in several Daniel Pinkwater novels, as an old comic that people collect. (It is *not* related to the DC animated character or the video game character.) We know almost nothing about their contents - only that by the late 1970s, they were very sought after, and it was very difficult to collect a complete run of Wonder Wombat. Surely you all would like to volunteer to flesh out the story of Wonder Wombat! Come on. WOMBATS. OLD COMICS. What is not love?


3. The Stonebender Family Stories by Jubal Harshaw: Jubal was a writer who was a character in some of Robert A. Heinlein's novels, and toward the end of The Number of the Beast, we get to hear a few paragraphs of one of his stories, written collaboratively by himself and an AI. Here is what we get: ( Uncle Tobias we kept in a bucket )
   
   That's it, that's all there is to know about the Stonebender family. Aren't you burned up with curiosity about why Uncle Tobias needed that bucket, or what exactly unsympathetic magic involves, or how Cousin Julius came to fit into the family, or who exactly the narrator is, or any number of other things? Yes, so am I. We should all offer to write this!


4. The Jack Colquitt Adventures by Raul Bloodworth The Jack Colquitt Adventures were written under a pseudonym by the Cigarette Smoking Man from the X-Files. They are only mentioned in one episode, 4x07 "Musing of a Cigarette Smoking Man", which is often taken to be not-entirely-canon by the fandom. We know very little about them, except that they are adventure stories about aliens and assassinations, and that the published version was heavily altered from original manuscripts. Here are some excerpts:

   "Jack Colquitt sat alone in his apartment at Christmas. He believed in sacrifice. Yet, some nights, he longed for a second chance..."

   "I can kill you whenever I please... but not today"

   It's implied that the events of the episode, as narrated by Frohike, are loosely based on the Jack Colquitt story that was published. There's a transcript of the episode up at inside the x (hurrah for oldfandom and their episode transcripts!) and it's pretty easy to find the episode online to watch. You really don't need to know anything else about XF to write about Jack Colquitt - frankly, the less you know, the better, I suspect, although if you are as fond as I of CSM, you could also do glorious things with the possibilities.

Hurrah! I see no reason why those can not get many sign-ups. ^_^ Next up: the ones that require a bit more canon knowledge.

In response to my friend, who when I made a comment about how, according to Mulder and Scully, we have until Saturday, responded with "The X-Files? Wasn't that show in the '90s? What does that have to do with anything?"

...I give you two XF WIPs of mine, both set in late December, both untouched by me for about eight years. (They are never going to be finished, so I am giving you plot summaries of the big plans I had.)


( A Last Illusion )

( Old Familiar Carols Play )

...okay, that hypothetical crossover meme has reached levels of ludicrosity previously unattained on this journal.

Here is a list of fills so far:

Dresden Files/Vorkosigan Saga for isis (consisting of some extra bits of canon for the crossover I already wrote for this.)
Temeraire/Princess Bride ideas for finch
Pinkwaterverse/Cthulhu mythos for seekingferret (in which I fail miserably; surely *somebody* can come up with a better one?)
--seekingferret does Major League Baseball/The pirate Rabbi and Thor/Star Trek to my prompts
White Collar/Pirates of the Caribbean and DCU/The Lone Gunmen for elf. (Somebody needs to write a pirates/white collar crossover actually. Desperately. Also need fic now where Frohike tangos with Barbara Gordon, but that's a given.)
some flailing as regards Temeraire/Sherlock Holmes for ellen_fremedon
British Comedian RPF/Vorkogisan Saga for marginaliana (This one got kind of out of hand after lannamichaels tapped in. It probably helps to note that we were borrowing some of the characterization from a previous conversation regarding Aral Vorkosigan, Epic Troll. Also: this article on how traditional Chinese stand-up has fared under communism which I incidentally already had bookmarked, yes I did background research for this bit.) marginaliana asked for a British Comedy RPF crossover and I'm afraid in the elaboration we focused almost entirely on the Barrayar part, but I promise if I actually wrote it there would be a bunch of scenes of David and Charlie and Jimmy and Dara and so on meeting in hidden, poorly-lit back rooms at the university and playing at revolution.
Avengers/Sesame Street for lannamichaels. An excuse to write fic for the Teeny Little Super Guy! Yay!
Homestuck/Colbert Report for erinptah, featuring unbridgeable idealogical differences. And stabs. Mostly stabs.
Homestuck/Vorkosigan Saga for biichan. In which there are fantrolls.
Homestuck/Ranma 1/2 for terajk, featuring brownbetty and biichan contributing their own versions as well, which we must encourage them to write. yes.


Unfilled, still to do (list mostly for my reminder):
Avengers/Young Wizards and Vorkosigan/Avengers (I really need to watch that movie, I guess)
Something Sutcliff/Rihannsu-ish (Every time I poke at this I just come out concluding I need to re-read Rihannsu more. Tragic!)


This is actually an interesting way to find out what fandoms my commenters care about! Avengers yes (kind of obviously) but there's lots of Vorkosigan and Homestuck and Temeraire on there too, hmm.

And yes, I will still fill prompts if people leave them. Not crossovered out yet!

And as usual, all bunnies and notfic posted by me here are completely available for other people to pick up and run with, if you should chance to be so inspired.

(Finally) posted my Ace Manifesto last week: Fox Mulder, Ace.

(Note to self: you have run into this before, you should remember it by now, if you post an intro post to a very old, very quiet fandom, and mention that it is old and quiet, you *will* get one of the two-dozen still active people showing up in your comments being deeply offended that you didn't mention them specifically.)

And vaguely connected to that, here are two fic recs: zortified has written asexual!Ivan Vorkosigan: Uneasy Lies The Head. I'm not sure how he's done it - that seems even *less* likely than ace!Jack Harkness - but it makes me happy that it has been done, and well. :D

And to prove that vanity googling sometimes works, I just stumbled on a fic that was written based on some old meta of mine, by aria: All That Remains. It is Highlander, Methos genfic, and it is everything I want in Highlander fic. Sometimes I feel like, even if I never write anything again, the amount of awesome fic that's been written based on ideas I just threw out justifies my existence on its own. :D

***

I have been writing a bit, though. And I've just been reminded that earlier this year, I made a commitment on 12in2010 to finish at least 12 stories over 2000 words this year. I think I might actually manage 12 over 1000 words this year, which is shocking enough on its own! But a lot of it's been anon, so it is difficult to keep track of. Here (mostly for myself) is my fic accounting for the year:

( 2010 fic round-up )

The other thing I pledged to do this year was read and review at least 100 books. I think I've managed the 'read' part, given a broad enough definition of the word 'book.' Review... well, I still have almost a month to finish the reviews! (I post my book reviews on LT, where they get just enough upvotes to assure me I'm not posting into a vacuum. Would anybody be interested in them being crossposted here? I've though about it, but never gotten motivated.)

Also I am apparently posting a thing, in parts, to doctor_and_master for their December fanfest, which is apparently How the Master Stole Christmas, complete with anapests and illustrations. <_< The next bit should go up late tonight, hopefully, now that I've found my stylus (again.)

Last night I dreamed about Lord Peter Wimsey buying pot. I think it was a direct result of being trapped in a small room with both Harriet *and* Diana Villiers. Luckily, he had Elmo to back him up.

...right, no more reading crossovers before bed.

And before you ask, no, I have not yet found any crossovers with Diana and Harriet. Or Lord Peter and Elmo. Though if you know of any, let me know.

I have been reading a lot of crossovers, though. Because damned_colonial mentioned on age_of_sail that they needed someone to take over recc'ing AoS crossovers, and saying that around me is like saying to my roommate's cat, "Hey, Yzma, someone needs to eat that piece of paper on the carpet!"

So, yes, I have been looking at AoS crossovers. Because I am a sucker for crossovers. Way back in 2004, when I was just starting to be polyfannish, I was getting into PotC and XF at the same time, and reading Austen and Aubrey/Maturin, and I was like "Oooh, why isn't there an MSR Regency AU?"

(I did start to write one. But then I started wondering if the only way to explain Mulder's first name was to give his family Quaker connections, so I started looking into whether he could have a Quaker parent and still be a peer, or at least a wealthy landowner in high standing with the Crown, and what I learned is that the people who do British history on little_details don't even know who George Fox was, much less William Penn. Then I realized that what was going to be a silly crackfic would require figuring out how to write a romance between the disgraced bluestocking crypto-Catholic daughter of a Navy captain and an American Quaker aristocrat who was secretly a spy, and decided this might be a bit much. I did ponder changing the names and trying to sell it as an original romance and seeing if anyone would notice. Especially if I left in the crashed saucer. And the giant squid.)

Anyway, I never did find the Regency AU, but stellar_dust did find me a crossover with the Aubreyad, in which Mulder somehow ended up injured, disoriented, and in Dr. Maturin's cabin on the HMS Surprise. (This isn't as unlikely as it seems, given Mulder's tendency to take stupid risks in the middle of the Bermuda Triangle.) I tried to find it for the crossover recs post. Google was unhelpful. Searching my LJ and e-mail were unhelpful. It pre-dates when I started keeping bookmarks. I vaguely remember it being on a specialty archive, which means it was probably in the un-indexed 'deep web', assuming it's even still up.

So. This is when I ( sailed off the edge of the map, mate )

ANYWAY.

/me goes back to looking for that story where Mary Bennett helps build a Zeppelin.

(this is why we need an Archive of Everything. Where we own the damn servers. And there is full-text search. Or at least really good tagging & folksonomy.)

I dreamed an XF casefile last night.

Not that I'm complaining, mind you - it was a deeply adorable XF casefile that hung together suprisingly well for a dream, with a beautiful New England town in the fall, an evil monk, mushroom-hunting, a lake monster, a werewolf love triangle, Scully playing baseball, our Agents stuck staying at a very frilly B&B and Mulder being very smug.

I just don't know *why* I was suddenly dreaming XF. It's not like I've done anything particularly XF related for, like, *months*.

Have now watched Victoria's Secret (after a short hiatus caused by MY SISTER BREAKING MY LAPTOP.)

My primary reaction -- and I realize I am not normal, and of course it doesn't help that I was thoroughly spoiled, although how did I not know about Ray's dad from the fanfic! Anyway I now want EmperorOfTheArcticNights!Fraser fic. (And if you actually have the right fandoms to get that reference, I love you forever.)

...Because, dude, when he's with a woman he's actually *interested* in, he's /smooth/, and he didn't get that way from one week in a snowstorm and some adolescent hockey fumblings. I want the story where the only thing that made Victoria different from all the others was that he had regrets about how he ended it. I want "Well, Ray, one thing you quickly learn in the territories is that when there are opportunities around, you make the most of them" and "a gentleman doesn't tell, Ray," x about 300. I want the story where the reason he doesn't mind spartan quarters is that he only rarely spends the whole night in them. I want the stories where he calls back all the women who give him their numbers, and makes it very clear that for reasons which don't need to be explored at this juncture, he can't offer them more than a companionable night or two, but if that's what they're looking for--.

Pls to be telling me where this fic is. (And no, the post-Victoria-letting-loose stories, while awesome, are beside the point. I want the story where's he's *always* been that way.)

Er, as for feminist shtuff - it was better than I expected but not as good as I hoped on that front. I quite like Victoria, though. Where are the stories where Victoria gets to be sympathetic? I mean, she's basically what Faith would've turned into if Angel had slept with her instead of listening to her, and she's hot (and not just because she reminds me of Cuddy), and she's tragic and she's no more evil than half the characters fandom falls for. But I think the best I've seen her get in fic is "I think she might've actually loved him, in her way" followed by painting her as a sadistic psychopath, which there is no evidence for in the episode, since everything she does is carefully, minimally plan to find her one way out of an impossible situation. (And she could have been so much crueller to Fraser. She could have treated him like Ray treats women...)

Of course, I liked Phoebe Green, too, and she probably *is* a sociopath. :P (Ooh, fic where Phoebe is tracking Victoria! And they run off together and have hot sex!)

So, RE: discussion about monsters and mutants and humanity in vescoiya's LJ t'other day, I went back to my old notes for A Time of Dark, Dark Despair (which I may even write more of. In another three years,) and finished filling them out.

The result? A spreadsheet of all human-like Monster of the Week characters ever to appear on the X-Files.

They are listed by full name, episode number (production number/DVD number, I hope), how they qualify as an x-file, how they got that way, what criminal things they did, and their status at the end of the episode. Full of spoilers, obviously.

It's up on my webspace as a .csv (spreadsheet) file and a very ugly HTML table. Download them and have a look. (The .html is sorted by episode number, the .csv file you can open in your spreadsheet program and sort by whatever.) Sources were memory, re-runs, and a variety of XF sites around the 'net, none of which provided a complete resource.

( clarification of spreadsheet categories )

( Some very shallow analysis of the stats: )

You could probably mine more data (especially if you did more than just back-of-the-envelope stats.) Please do! And discuss! And write thinky fanfic! Please? Especially the fanfic. Who wants to help me start an RPG where they all team up and fight aliens? :D

(BTW, not in the spreadsheet, but racial stats, to the best of my assisted memory? Hispanic: 2 episodes. Black: 2. Asian: 1. White: 61. Go you, XF. *sigh* oh, and gender? Female: 10, male: 46, unknown or mixed-gender groups: 11.)

Hello. I have been having a very dragonish day today. And by "dragonish", of course, I mean hoard-gathering, and by hoard-gathering I mean GEEKY.

enemy_anime called to say that the comic shop had just acquired a bunch of XF stuff, and did I know if stellar_dust would be interested?
Three hours later, I brought home a longbox *entirely filled* with XF ... stuff.
Including:
A complete numbered run of the Topps comic, from #-2 to #42, including duplicate copies of -1 and -2, and copies of 1/2, and 0, and including all variant covers, or at least all variants known to me.
Also: Two copies of each of the annuals, three copies of the first digest, Special (omnibus) Editions #1-5 with several duplicates, two copies of the Special Ashcan Edition, the complete Ground Zero miniseries, the "Fight the Future" graphic novel/adaptation/illustrated storybook/whatever the heck it is, Season One adaptations of Pilot, Deep Throat (+Variant cover), Squeeze, Ice, Space, Fire, Beyond the Sea, and Shadows; also Special Numbered Edition copies of #2 and #3, and Special Numbered Editions of #1 to the order of: 069561, 069465-069469 consecutive, and 119478-119481 still in shrink-wrap packaging with what appears to be the same run of Special Numbered Editions of #2.
Also: two issues of "The X-Flies" from Twist and Shout Comics, and "The Axed Files" #1 from Parody Press! Comics (which actually has a fairly awesome cover - too bad the interior art kind of sucks); also 8 issues of the Official X-Files Magazine, 4 TV guides with XF covers, half-a-dozen or so more fannish magazines with XF covers and feature articles, a small amount of various trading-card related ephemera, and two sets of Official X-Files Fan Club membership premiums, still in their original mailing envelopes.

It's nice to be occasionally reassured that there are people out there geekier than you are. (IF this were stellar_dust's lj, that list would surely be accompanied by offers to send stuff to people; but I am completely incompetent at sending people stuff***, so just rest assured that she will get her sticky little hands on it all eventually, and I am sure she'll share the love then.)

...of course, that's just the stuff I acquired *after* 7 PM.

This morning, I bought 3 Star Wars books (unfortunately I guessed wrong and 2 were duplicates; I need to start carrying a list in my wallet) and 1984 Han and Leia action figures (unfortunately the Leia one seems to have escaped on the way home, but I'm pretty sure she was a duplicate anyway). And those were the *least* geeky things I bought.

I also got a copy of "Tales from Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean" (which predates the movie by a good 8 years); Pamela Dean's "The Secret Country" (it was on a table with a *bunch* of HP merchandise, and I did give in to the temptation to ask if there was a relationship between the two, but the people manning the table knew nothing about HP much less fandom; it was a daughter's stuff. Then Mom asked why *I'd* bought it, and I was .. at a loss to explain); the 300th Anniversary Colonial Williamsburg Comic Book (which quite unexpectedly turned out to be an anti-materialism screed); an anthropology monograph on potlatches, and an Infamous Women of History Paper Dolls book.

But wait! I also bought some LPs: the Charlie Brown Christmas Soundtrack, and a Smothers Brothers album that on reflection I think we may already have, and "Comic Strip Favorites" and also "Batman and other Super Men" by the Revengers, which with track names like "Meet Mr. Solo", "The Man From THRUSH", and "Robin 2" I had high hopes for, but turns out to be just kind of lounge-y sounding remixes of theme music. Plus, the sound quality was pretty bad, although that may be because our record player has finally reached the point where you have to give it a couple good whacks before it'll play.

"Comic Strip Favorites" was actually better, I think - it's also mostly theme tunes, but it has theme tunes like "Alley Oop", "Flash Gordon", "Richard Tracy, Esq.", "Popeye the Sailor Man" and a rather interesting "Superman". It's not good exactly, but it's definitely *weird*, and I actually liked it enough that I was going to try to rip it to share with ya'll, only some industrious person who is much groovier than I has already done so, and it's still available to download from his blog (Alongside a couple of ... interesting '60s Batman-themed albums, and Hogan's Heroes and Get Smart LPs, and many other tuneful things...)

I also bought the Complete Sports Night on DVD. I have no actual *desire* to watch this show - sports shows are pretty much my definition of heck, I can't abide commentators ruining a beautiful contest, and a show *about* sports commentators is *really* hard to sell me on - but it was hard to turn down the complete DVDs of one of the seminal slash fandoms when I could get it for well under $5, like-new condition. At the very least I can toss it on a swap table unless a better purpose for it comes up in the next fourteen months q:

Mom, on the other hand, bought stuffed animals of Sam I Am, Go Dog Go, a Sneetch, Woodstock, and a 4' tall Foghorn Leghorn.

***Yes, I know I still owe some of you guys maps! I'll get them sent out! Soon! I swear!

David Duchovny directed tonight's episode of Bones.

And it was awesome in every way.

Booth got called a pain in the ass by the deputy director of the FBI *and* a pouf by the punk kid. I told you he was like Angel crossed with Mulder. :P

Also I even more so want to write the Bones/Supernatural crossover. ( Spoilers for the first five minutes, among other things. )

I don't know anybody who watches both of them, do I? So I should be safe from people egging me on.

Okay, if you wanted to give me just one episode of Supernatural that would convince me to keep watching?

The one where Sam and Dean argue over which of them gets to be Scully MIGHT JUST DO IT.

Also, Dean namechecked Mysteries of the Unknown! (Not that I would recommend Mysteries of the Unknown for any actual demon hunters, as it's indifferently sourced and full of CRACK. Of course, anyone watching SPN is already someone who clearly likes their parascience indifferently sourced and full of crack, so.)

I'm posting this from Seshat, my old linux-running desktop computer that hasn't been turned on for at least six months and hasn't been 'net connected for even longer. And, wow. It's like stepping back into my brain as it existed years ago. It's *freaky*.

Among other things, one of the files that was left open the last time it was on was some preliminary work for the story that's become my NaNo novel which is *so good* that it's leaving me in despair that I'll manage anything that good ever this month.

And the backdrop is a UFO picture that once appeared on APOD.

(Also a bunch of mp3s that I forgot existed. And half a season of unwatched FMA episodes... And there's the fact that the root password is *almost* but *not quite* entirely like my current lj password.) Now I have to decide if it's worth the trouble to try to get Seshat to show up on the house's intranet - or at least figure out how to ssh into it from one of the other computers, which might be less hassle overall.

Anyway, speaking of unwatched episodes, ( TV yay! )

And then there's yuletide. Assignments just came out, and mine is *clearly* a case of karma coming back and kicking me hard. But, y'know, in a *good* way. *grin*. I know what novels I'll be re-reading this month.

And if the poor person who got my assignment is poking around, well, ( Dear Santa: ).

Happy slightly belated birthday, stellar_dust!

Thinking about that number is making *me* feel old, so I can only imagine how you feel. :D

Have some several-years-late birthday fic:

Title: Coyote's Track and Serpent's Tooth
Notes: X-Files; William, futurefic, gen, no adult content.
Part 1/2 (I *swear* Part 2 will be up by this time tomorrow.)
Possibly in need of fact-betaing. Go to. Author notes will be at end.
Summary: The year Billy is 12, the Van de Kamp family's summer vacation takes an unexpected turn.
( Anasazi Canyon National Monument. August, 2012. The noon sun beat down on the parking lot ... )

Sometimes I sore regret that I grew up with a language which makes no distinction between formal and informal pronouns.

This comes up because I seem to be writing Boston Legal fic as a Sir Thomas Malory pastiche, and while Late Middle English *grammar* I can manage pretty instinctively, I keep having to stop and think about whether to use 'you' or 'thou'. Okay, so it's not as hard as it *could* be - clearly King Dennys uses 'thou' to *everyone*, because *everyone* is inferior to Dennys of Cranepool. Sir Alain du Côte, by contrast, always uses 'you', because Sir Alain is familiar with nobody - except with Dennys, and occasionally with whatever damosel he's sleeping with. I have a feeling that Sir Jeraint, the Knight of the Hands, uses 'you' with absolutely everyone, except when he's very nervous and forgets, because it seems like that's one of the social things Asperger's would make difficult. It's when I start with the characters who are more or less normal that I run into trouble.

I suppose that this isn't that big of a difficulty - after all, many modern languages still make the distinction, English being one of the first to drop it, so translators must handle the issue. But when I speak Spanish I usually just go with 'usted' for everyone, because none of my teachers bothered to explain how to choose (and since they all spoke different dialects anyway, they'd probably have contradicted each other), and anyway it's one less set of conjugations to remember. I have a feeling I sound comically old-fashioned, but then my grammar sucks so bad they'd be laughing at me anyway, and better too formal than too informal - anyway usted is the direct translation of English 'you'. And in English I only fall naturally into 'thou' when cursing people.

This is actually the *second* Arthurian pastiche I've attempted in the past few months. The first was an SGA retelling of the romance of "John, the Knight of the Lion", (because who other than John Sheppard would go on adventure, get manipulated into marrying a lady, and then go back to his city and get distracted and completely *forget* that he'd married her?) John uses 'you' graciously toward his men and ungraciously toward his superiors but 'thou' promiscuously towards people he considers his equals. Rodney, by contrast, thous everybody indiscriminately until they earn his respect, at which point he switches to 'you' and sticks with it, even while he's calling them idiots. Elizabeth is scrupulously correct, using 'thou' to inferiors and 'you' to superiors and equals, although she tends to fall back to 'thou' in private, even with Caldwell. Ronon uses 'thou' on everyone except those above him in his direct chain of command, because that's how they did it on Sateda. Teyla and the Athosians only use the formal (except in prayer), although she's been picking up the informal a little with people who use it to her, mostly John. Ford uses 'thou' with his inferiors and equals and 'you' with his superiors and has always felt slightly odd about the Major calling him 'you'.

And, hey, since I went there *anyway* - Mulder thous everybody as a direct affront to his aristocratic background, except when he's being manipulative. He was being manipulative when he met Scully, and then never got around to switching back. Scully is very correct in the same middle-class way as Elizabeth, but the longer she spends around Mulder the looser she gets. House uses thou exclusively except with his parents. And with Wilson's wives and Chase's father, and other attempts to be deliberately obnoxious with it. It took him almost six months to get Chase to stop using 'you' on him, and he still hasn't broken him of being polite to Cuddy and the patients. Cameron switched from 'thou' back to 'you' with him after their date, and Foremen always uses you, except when House suceeds in provoking him. Wilson also uses 'thou' with everyone, but somehow with him they assume it's affectionate rather than contemptuous.

Harry Potter uses 'thou' with everyone he calls by their first name and 'you' with evereybody else, except for Dumbledore and Snape whenever he thinks he can get away with it, and Mr. & Mrs. Weasley because they insist, and Slytherins when he wants to make trouble. Bones uses 'you' with everyone, even small children, except the people she considers hers, which is basically just the stooges and Booth. Hodgins considers 'you' to be a tool of the patriarchy; Zack calls everybody 'you' because whenever he tries to 'thou' somebody he gets shot down, except Hodgins and Bones and (when she's feeling generous) Angela. Booth takes 'thou' from Bones and his army buddies but nobody else.

SG1 always sticks with 'you' except in moments of extreme emotion, except for Daniel, who will at the slightest provocation give you a ten-minute dissertation on why English preserved the informal form, and who likes to randomly switch to 'thou' just to see Jack twitch, and has gotten everybody but Jack to use thou with him off-duty. Jack has never yet called a Goa'uld anything other than 'thou', except that sometimes with General Carter he forgets; and he's been on thou terms with Thor since about ten minutes after they met. The Asgard and the Ancients thou *everybody*, but the Nox don't, even when they're calling us children; the Tollan use 'you' but they make it clear it's only to be polite.

Darnit, now I want to write stories where they really do use middle English pronouns. Oh, wait - there's one open on my desktop right now! What a coincidence! I'll get right to that, then.

That was simultaneously the most x-filesy and most shippy Bones episode ever. I'm still not interested in reading or writing Bones/Booth fic, however, 'cause, dude, they give me everything I want onscreen. I do suddenly want a story where Booth and Scully go out to brunch after running into each other at Easter Sunday Mass and commisserate about partners who insist on calling Jesus a zombie, among other small foibles, like waking up with amnesia and covered in the blood of murder victims. (Heh. Booth made sure they checked her bloodstream for ketamine, too. I bet it's now standard FBI procedure in those circumstances.) And then Booth could tease her about the stupid X-files movie, and it would be yay. And Mulder would be show up to take Scully home and be *totally* jealous. And then Booth would try to make Bones jealous too, and she'd blink and say "I don't know what that means."

Anyway, I would be kind of pissed at how stereotypical it is to make Booth Catholic, except a) SCULLY, b) he's an Irish vampire, of course he'd be Catholic, and c) anyway, they already made Zack Lutheran, so I'm happy.

Oh, and I may not have much interest in Bones/Booth fic, but Hodgins and Angela totally need to team up to get Zack alone and then ravish him. Thoroughly.

I'm also desperately hoping they didn't screw up NoLa as badly as they did Assateague last time, and yet, somehow, I suspect they did.

And every time I watch Bones, I'm all happy about the episode, and then they show the previews for next week, and I feel like barfing, because in the promo clip, Tempe looks like a zombie supermodel. With a hairdryer aimed at her head. *Why* do they feel the need to tart her up? Why do they think that will sell the show? She's barely even recognizable! Aaaargh.

(I zoned out and *forgot* that there was House and BL yesterday. I'm not suited for TV, really. I'm ver-ry slowly downloading House, though, and Sister assures me that BL had almost no Denny in it, so maybe I'll be all right.)

Author: melannen
Rating: Language, mild sexual situations
Fusion: X-Files / LGM / SGA
Pairings: Canon pairings only
Length: 5000 words
Notes: Excuse? There is no excuse good enough. 'They Encouraged Me' isn't a good enough excuse.
Summary: ( And the worst part was, Elizabeth thought, they'd probably manage to make it work. )

Okay, I am still here, but you don't want to know how badly I'm doing on wordcount.

Or maybe you do, if you need reassurance that somebody's worse off than you. But I'm not giving up; I still like the story (most of the time, anyway) and I've managed at least a few hundred words every day, although they're getting harder and less good.

But I did manage over two thousand words tonight, which are actually good enough that I'm not ashamed of them. Too bad they're random x-files fanfiction intead of novel.

Oh, what the hey! I'll post it anyway. I need to prove I can actually write, sometimes.

( There's a rumor that Mulder's really gone crazy, maybe psychic again. There's a rumor that he talks to dead people. Actually, that one's not so much a rumor after John and Monica get Scully alone down in the old office one day... )

Chapter 2: 1-5-05
( think warm thoughts )

Part 3: ( I made this )




Part 4 (snippet): ( In brightest day, in darkest night )

Conflict of Interest
FANDOM: X-files/ political fic crossover
AUTHOR: Melannen@yahoo.com
ARCHIVE/FEEDBACK: Yes please.
KEYWORDS: Mytharc. Crossover. Marita/Alex.
SPOILERS: All Mytharc. The G. W. Bush administration.
RATING: Call it PG, for politics, evildoers and kissing
LENGTH: 2500 words
Notes/Summary: Remember the old, innocent days, when people were looking forward to an administration of honesty and openness and the most we had to worry about was arsenic in our drinking water? Yeah, me too. The science here is dodgy but plausible; the mytharc stuff is all true; the politics are as bipartisan as I could possibly get, and I'll hopefully end up writing something equally cynical about President Kerry.

Conflict of Interest

( A Most Disquieting Briefing, or, That Explains A Lot )