Multifandom fic recs (Hellsing, Thursday Next, Labyrinth, Harry Potter, Murderbot)

Sep15
  • Labyrinth | Jareth, Sarah, Worms | T | Formal Separates #2
    It was worth a shot. Maybe one of the instrument cases had a hidden panel. She ran to the nearest wall and started pressing various parts, frantically scrabbling at the paneling. Nothing. She turned to the next wall and though better of it. Well, we can rule out that one over there; there’s only hallway behind it……of course!
    series:labyrinth,genfic,fic:one-shot
  • Labyrinth (1986) | Jareth/Sarah | T | Fading
    There is a forfeit to be paid when you offer yourself to another. He is paying that forfeit now: a slow decay into nothing, a rest he’s at first so ready for. She doesn’t need him to fade the way she used, and when he sees her again after so long, he doesn’t particularly want to. But villains, he knows, aren’t here to get what they want. Villains are here to die.
    series:labyrinth,pairing:jareth_sarah,fic:chaptered
  • The Murderbot Diaries | Murderbot, ART, OCs | T | about what
    redacted note: The SecUnit and Archambeau are still unaccounted for. I don’t think they ever will be, so let’s preemptively put this report in the folder of useless reports.
    trope:outsider.pov,series:murderbot diaries,fic:one-shot,genfic,kink:identity porn
  • The Murderbot Diaries | Murderbot, ART, Mensah, PresAux | T | Stupid Unreliable Magic
    Murderbot has never had a soulbond, (~can~ never have a soulbond. The feature that prevents it is not so easily hacked as a Governor Module.) and it really wishes everyone would stop talking about them, because it doesn’t want them and it’s not interested at all, thankyouverymuch.
    pairing:art_murderbot,series:murderbot diaries,pairing:mensah_murderbot,kink:soulbond,fic:one-shot
  • The Murderbot Diaries | Murderbot, Mensah, Gurathin | T | Neurofeedback
    “Constructs have coding so deep and fundamental, that I think it must be similar to what humans call instinct. And the company had gone in that deep when fucking me over, just to be thorough. I’ve spent months trying to unfuck my brain, in between everything else, and I’m beginning to think it’s just not possible.”
    genfic,series:murderbot diaries,fic:one-shot,trope:hurt-comfort,trope:trauma

Who’s got two thumbs and can do Zoom calls normally again?

Sep12

I gave New Computer another update — this time making a point of backing up a bunch of stuff, just in case I had to do another reinstall from scratch.

Not only did the process go fine, the camera works again!

(This update was only released a couple weeks ago, and the camera-breaking update was a couple months ago, so it’s not like I could’ve just done that from the start. Someone on the development end had to fix what they broke.)

…so, ah, fingers crossed that it’ll fix the other weird problem, where the computer spontaneously decides it wants to reboot into a diagnostic scan. Which always finds no problems, just like all the previous scans.

Plot twist: I paid more attention to when these happen, and the last 3 times were on Thursday afternoon. So this past Thursday morning, I shut down the computer completely, then headed out to work.

I get home, and it’s on this screen again. Something in here didn’t just reboot the OS, it autonomously powered the machine on.

I mean. What even does that?

The camera-fixing update was later that evening, so I guess we’ll find out “did it also fix the spontaneous diagnostics?” next Thursday.

Had an extensive dream that was an AU of The Secret Garden, but Mary Lennox was a tween necromancer, Gideon the Ninth style.

…and now that I think about it, the parallels are there? Not to Harrow, I mean to Gideon’s backstory of “was a small child when a fatal affliction swept through the whole group around her, later retrieved after being discovered surrounded by bodies.”

Maybe I’ll request it for Yuletide, or something.

It’s that magical time of year when I put Kickstarter logos in all my social-media icons, re-re-proofread all my ad copy, and anxiously look up how much it costs to ship a 5-pound box to Germany.

(Just over US $70.)

That’s right, it’s the final-week prep for Leif & Thorn volume 4.

Please click that link and hit the “Notify me on launch” button, if you haven’t already!

And folks, I am so close to the weight where, if someone wants All The Leif & Thorn Books, the cheapest method is to pack them in a Flat Rate box. 4 books isn’t quite there — but at 5 books the flat rate is cheaper, and at 6 it’ll be much cheaper, and once we get up to 9 it’ll be astronomically cheaper.

…when we get to 10, they won’t all fit in a single box. But that’s a future problem.

(Not that I’m going to do this, but: there would be something really satisfying about drawing enough to fill 9 books, and then stopping the comic, just so it’s a perfect fit for the boxes.)

Multifandom fic recs (Enterprise, Madoka Magica, Jeeves & Wooster, Discworld, original)

Sep8
  • Mahou Shoujo Madoka Magika | Homura/Madoka | G | A Red Umbrella
    Homura has been looping time for the past year, and she’s exhausted. She’s so exhausted she hasn’t even noticed that Madoka is in love with her and being really obvious about it.
    series:puella magi madoka magica,fic:chaptered,pairing:homura_madoka,yuri,trope:timetravel
  • Monstrous Regiment | Maladict/Polly | T | The Yunk and the Restless
    Polly spends the night in a nest of vampires. It involves questionable accents, even more questionable nightclothes, and a certain amount of confusion over quite how she ended up classified as Maladicta’s ‘yunk lady’.
    pairing:polly_mal,series:discworld,yuri,fic:one-shot,trope:vampires
  • original | T | Unknown Number
    – Ok you’re saying that you’re me
    – From another timeline
    – contacting me by fucking TEXT MESSAGE
    fic:socialmedia,genfic,original,trope:genderplay

Multifandom fic recs (Disney, Muppets, Animorphs, Murderbot)

Sep1
  • Aladdin | Aladdin/Jasmine, Rajah | G | The Tigers Have Spoken
    Rajah plants himself in the middle of the doorway. He is a solid barrier, but he is also ready to move, should the boy decide to try any of his idiot cleverness. He knows the boy can tell.
    series:aladdin,pairing:aladdin_jasmine,trope:outsider.pov,fic:one-shot

  • The Murderbot Diaries | Murderbot, daemon, team | G | Sense of Self
    Humans and augmented humans tend to assume that constructs have daemons because we straddle the line between true sentience and a bunch of pre-programmed subroutines mindlessly following orders (not that humans are as clearly on one side of that line as they like to think), but it has nothing to do with intelligence levels. It’s just that we have a lot of organic parts mostly made from human genetic material, and where you have life composed of human DNA, you eventually get a daemon.
    series:his dark materials,series:murderbot diaries,genfic,fic:one-shot
  • The Murderbot Diaries | Murderbot, Mensah, Amena, Three | G | Memory
    “All I’m saying is, Aoide is making some choices that you would never consider making for yourself, and maybe you find it difficult to be supportive. But that doesn’t make those choices wrong. And I think you would make it happy by showing a little interest.”
    series:murderbot diaries,genfic,fic:one-shot,trope:kidfic
  • The Murderbot Diaries | OCs | T | Freedom
    Freedom doesn’t like its crew.

    That is probably not a very good thing, considering its function is to protect their lives at every cost. But they simply do not strike it as very nice people.
    series:murderbot diaries,genfic,fic:one-shot

  • The Murderbot Diaries | Three, Amena, Ratthi, kids | G | Three Hugs for Three
    Why didn’t you send me back to Barish-Estranza? Or just leave me on the planet? What should I be doing? Why do you trust me enough to sit here this close to me? Why did you come in here? Why did SecUnit tag you ‘my human friend’ in the files it sent me? And why did you just call me friend?
    genfic,series:murderbot diaries,fic:one-shot,fic:five times,trope:outsider.pov

I put all the nice links in the back half of the post (tech, grifting, COVID, economic boosts, and more)

Aug30

Things to worry about:

June 12: “In 2016, Gun Violence Archive recorded that 241 people were shot and killed or wounded in a road rage incident; so far this year, as of June 7, that number is 212, the analysis found. ‘I don’t think we quite realized how dramatic the change was going to be.’”

“Customers trying to avoid online delivery platforms like Grubhub by calling restaurants directly might be dialing phone numbers generated and advertised by those very platforms — for which restaurants are charged fees that can sometimes exceed the income the order generates.”

“Magie filed a legal claim for her Landlord’s Game in 1903, more than three decades before Parker Brothers began manufacturing Monopoly. She actually designed the game as a protest against the big monopolists of her time — people like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller. […] And yet it was the monopolist version of the game that caught on, with Darrow claiming a version of it as his own and selling it to Parker Brothers. While Darrow made millions and struck an agreement that ensured he would receive royalties, Magie’s income for her creation was reported to be a mere $500. ”

“What do you mean ‘text’? There’s obviously some math text on the blackboard on the right, just like there’s obviously a woman covering almost half of the photograph. Is that woman invisible? Why?” When neural nets try to auto-detect what’s in an image…and what kinds of things they miss.

The Onion, in “this isn’t even a joke”: “Promising to let him know as soon as something becomes available, nurse Janae Howager informed a man having a heart attack Thursday that there was about an hour wait until the next Covid-19 patient died.”

Things to make you smile:

“Despite being lauded by some of the right-wing media’s leading figures, though, the Freedom Phone’s buyers could be getting less than they expect for its $500 price tag. That’s because the Freedom Phone appears to be merely a more expensive rebranding of a budget Chinese phone available elsewhere for a fraction of the Freedom Phone’s price.” But hey, influencers get referral codes, so when their followers buy the phones they get a $50 cut. It’s grifters all the way down.

February 25: “The lawyers working to reunite immigrant parents and children separated by the Trump administration reported Wednesday that they have found the parents of 105 children in the past month.” And that was just the Biden administration’s first month.

““We both started writing grants,” Dr. Weissman said. “We didn’t get most of them. People were not interested in mRNA. The people who reviewed the grants said mRNA will not be a good therapeutic, so don’t bother.’”” (There’s a happy ending! It’s the research that led to the Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech COVID vaccines.)

“A New York City pilot program that dispatches mental health specialists and paramedics instead of police for certain nonviolent emergency calls has resulted in more people accepting assistance and fewer people sent to the hospital, early data shows.” Don’t send cops to do non-cop jobs! It works!

“Cash transfers have arguably the strongest existing evidence base among anti-poverty tools, with dozens of high-quality evaluations of cash transfer programs spanning Africa, Asia, and Latin America and including both unconditional and conditional cash transfer. These studies include many randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and also include studies that measured impacts 4–5 years out,1,2 evidence which exists for hardly any other interventions.”

The Onion again: “Deeming the move unfortunate but necessary to keep his fledgling Silicon Valley dream alive, CEO Jason Ipser told reporters Tuesday that his struggling tech company was almost desperate enough to start making an actual product.“