Arctic Light

It is finally summer, or at least summer-ish. (Never mind the frost warning two days ago.) I took a drive this evening and took this picture from a boat launch at a nearby river.



I also drew a birthday card for my sister and mailed it today.

( Under the cut )

I finished that Season 5 AU WIP! Finally!

The Living and the Damned (23K, Londo/G'Kar, mature-rated)
Fixit (of sorts) going AU in 5x18.

Some thoughts on writing WIPs under the cut (not spoilery for this fic in particular, more like general musings).

( Under here )

I don't know - what do you all think? Do you post WIPs? Do you read WIPs? It's been a long time since I've been in a fandom that had a lot of WIPs, prior to getting into Murderbot last year, which is almost like old-school ffn/LJ fandom with its very high number of WIPs. Including a lot of unfinished ones! And that's part of what got me back into posting some of my longer fic in WIP form, because there is a certain excitement and energy to it that I miss. Plus, in non-fandom spaces, I've enjoyed serialized media for a very long time (comics, webcomics, TV shows, etc). But it is obviously not without its down side, and I don't think I was prepared for how much trouble I was going to have finishing things when they're being written WIP-style.

I picked up "The Living City" by Des Fitzgerald at the bookstore a few weeks ago because it sounded interesting - the book's core premise is that trying to make cities "greener" (in the sense of more trees, more connection to nature, more intentional planning of green spaces within urban spaces, etc) is antithetical to the purpose of a city. So I wanted to see what he had to say about that.

The answer is: very little. This is essentially a book-length manifesto about how the entire concept of a green city is rooted in early-20th-century racism and fascism. There are some interesting ideas in here, but for a book whose entire premise is that trying to change cities into something else is wrong, bad, and also fascist, there's a surprising lack of actual positivity about cities as they currently exist. He just doesn't like the concept of planned cities, and especially city planning with the intent of introducing more nature into cities, based on the idea that green spaces are a more natural human environment. But he rarely brings up existing cities except to talk about how much he hates them, specifically. Paris? Awful. Copenhagen? Worst city he's ever been in. New York? Soulless grid. There's one chapter that opens with several pages dissing on Melbourne, Australia, for wanting to preserve its self-image as "a genteel outpost of European colonialism" because the residents are upset about all their trees dying in a drought. He doesn't seem to hate London as a whole (I GUESS) but mostly talks about it in the context of "fuck these specific neighborhoods in particular."

In case you're thinking this is because he'd rather be in the country - definitely not! He also hates the country. The worst thing about making cities greener is that it makes them more like the country. He refers to the part of Ireland he grew up in as "a bog" which he was glad to escape. The country is also terrible and the last thing cities want to do is be more like the country.

The truly baffling thing about this book is that it contains exactly zero content about the main thing I picked it up for: to find out what alternative he's proposing. Trees and other green spaces have obvious benefits that even he makes a nod to every now and then (cooling things down, trapping water, supporting wildlife, beneficial effects on the mental health of their residents, etc), plus most people who live in cities like them, and I was wondering what he was going to propose as an alternative, and he just - doesn't! What I knew from reading the blurb on the back of the book - that he feels cities are meant to be chaotic, grimy, full of machines and people but lacking in plants - is exactly as much as I know after reading 2/3 of the book. I guess I was expecting a paean to how cities in their modern chaos are flawed but great, and instead I got a book about how cities are almost uniformly terrible, but planned, green cities and the country are even worse, and also planting trees is a fascist tool to pacify the working class.

I didn't really DNF on purpose, so much as I put it down because I was reading other things and just never picked it back up again because the more time that went by without dealing with this guy's relentless negativity, the less I wanted to go back to it. So I guess it's a DNF.

A brief roundup of fic I've posted on AO3 in the last couple of weeks.

Cadence (Babylon 5, Londo/G'Kar, gennish ship)
Resulting from the realization that I haven't written hair-care kink for these characters before. Season 5.

Ate a Bug (Murderbot, gen)
For the Murderbot May Maladies prompt "swallowed a drone."

Treasure in the Deep (Babylon 5, Londo & G'Kar + others)
Gen (I guess) soulmate AU.

Eyes Wide Open (Falcon & Winter Soldier, sleep deprivation)
Finishing up a fic I started four years ago for a prompt/discussion on the old Winterbaron discord.

The first half of this month was A Lot - mostly family stuff, mostly not bad stuff, just A Lot - and I kept thinking I was going to summarize things, but in the end, I was too tired, and there was too much. (Basically a number of relatives were in town, some staying with me, and I was so peopled out past a certain point that I just sort of collapsed when everyone left.)

Things are much better now! I do have in-laws to deal with this upcoming week, but I'm looking forward to having more time to be online and more mental bandwidth.

So naturally I tripped and signed up for an exchange.

Outside POV Flash. This is a flash exchange - 300 wd minimum, 1 week writing period, 1 fandom request/offer minimum. Signups close tomorrow.

Yes, this is a shameless attempt to lure in more fandom-compatible people. It's only a week! It's only 300 wds! Maybe someone might want a warm-up for IPQ, you never know ...

Other things currently ongoing - summerofhorrorexchange is in signups! This exchange has slightly unique rules so see post here. (I don't think I can do this one this summer, because I also have assignments in both Whumpex and IPQ, but I've really enjoyed it all the times I've done it!)

It's finally spring here, and I'm so ready. Except for the sudden but inevitable pollen.

There are three of these books, the latter two are basically out of print, but I did get my hands on a copy of the first one from back in the 2000s. Some things I found interesting are below, but the book stops before (I gather) the TNT meddling really got underway.

( A few bits and pieces from the book below )

Season of Drabbles is revealed! I wrote 5 things, and enjoyed being super sneaky about at least a couple of them for a change.

As Sholio:

Orchestral (Biggles, 200 wds)
Biggles/EvS on a music-related "date."

Time and Tide (Star Trek TOS, 700 wds, Spock/McCoy [sort of])
I was hunting around for other people to treat, saw this person mention time loops among their interests, and realized it would be really interesting to try writing a drabble sequence in which each drabble was an iteration of the time loop.

(This was also one of the ones I mentioned that was a fandom I've never written before. Particularly neat in this case since this is far and away one of my oldest "fandoms" - I use that in quotes because I'm not sure if you can call it that when you're as young as I was when I first watched episodes on TV a very long time ago, but it's definitely something I've had feelings about since an early age.)

As AltSholio:

A New Normal (Agent Carter, 100 wds, Jack & Peggy)
My actual assignment, and I had fun with it! Just a bit of post-canon adjustment and banter.

Stay (Biggles, 100 wds, h/c)
H/C fluff for the win.

Second Contact (Project Hail Mary, 300 wds, Grace & Rocky & Adrian)
Grace meeting Adrian. This would be the other fandom I hadn't written before, and probably wouldn't have under my main because there's not likely to be any more of it, but I enjoyed writing this little treat!

I signed up for Season of Drabbles on an impulse under a new account called AltSholio (note my A+++ socking skills). In the past I've been slightly inhibited about signing up for some kinds of exchanges that I would've been more likely to try back on LJ - drabbles, fanart, that kind of thing, stuff that's a bit out of place on my main account - so I created this new account so I can play around with things that I might otherwise hesitate to try.

Anyway, I had fun and I ended up writing 5 things across both that and my main account - two of which are for fandoms I've never written before! And I got two delightful gifts as AltSholio:

Bygones (Agent Carter, 200 wds, Jack & Peggy)
A sweet little season 2 coda, very much in character.

We'll Meet Again (Biggles, 600 wds)
Slightly AU next meeting for Biggles and EvS, set in the early 1920s. Great characterization and a delightful concept!

Author reveals will be on Tuesday.

If anyone wants to read me ranting extensively about the Crusade episode "Visitors From Down the Street" you can read it at Tumblr here. (Or Tumblr logged-in link.) Feel free to disagree in comments, I'm fine with that but GOD I hated this episode so much.

I'm reading a book on recent research on dinosaur evolution (The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs by Steve Brusatte - apparently he has a book on bird evolution coming out soon and I'm definitely picking that up when I can) and it is blowing my miiiiiiind.

For example!

Did you know birds don't have hollow bones because they evolved them to fly? Birds have hollow bones because dinosaurs (saurians in particular - like Brontosaurus type creatures - but some of the other lineages as well) evolved them because it gave them an edge on growing large without being overly heavy, cooling themselves, and efficiently extracting oxygen from the air to support their enormous bodies. The super-efficient lungs that birds have were also a dinosaur adaptation to being big in hot climates, not a bird adaptation to flight. So basically, birds have ultralight bones and efficient lungs not because they evolved them to fly, but because dinosaurs needed these things in order to grow huge, and this turned out to be incidentally useful in radiating out into aerial niches when they began to evolve wings.

I also find it a fascinating experience to read this paleontology book when I've done so much reading on archaeology as a hobby interest. Archaeology books go into great depth on careful excavation techniques, sifting all the tiny bits of material and keeping everything in its proper location, and how incredibly tragic it is that so many sites of the past were excavated carelessly and so all of that information on the relative positioning of discoveries and small bits of material is lost ...

Meanwhile, paleontologists: so we took our hammers and started hacking up this rock formation to get the bones out. :D Also a local rancher sold us a dinosaur skeleton he found!!

(I mean I'm exaggerating a bit and the huge time difference is important, but also, lol.)

Another thing I was thinking about in one particular chapter, though the book doesn't address it specifically, is something I've thought about before, which is that we assume some creatures are primitive representations of what their kind used to look like, when in fact they are perfectly well adapted to their current niche, and their ancestors looked nothing like that. Alligators and crocodiles are the thing I was thinking of here - they look primitive, with those sprawling legs and inefficient means of walking, but in fact, early crocodiles hundreds of millions of years ago had their legs under the body and could sprint like a greyhound. (Which is terrifying, by the way.) They look like they do now, not because they could never run - they could! - but because other, more efficient dry-land runners out-competed them and they lost the running ability and retreated into the amphibious predator niche that they currently occupy.

Another example of this, not from this book - recent research on the human evolutionary tree suggests (at least according to one book I was reading a while back on the Miocene period) that the ancestor of both humans and chimpanzees was a sort of generalist creature, a couple of tens of million years back, that could both climb trees and walk upright. Humans ended up adapting to the walking/striding niche and losing the tree climbing, while chimpanzees did the opposite, adapted to climbing trees and became much less efficient at moving about on the ground. So rather than descending from a chimpanzee-like tree climber, we and chimpanzees are both specialized creatures who do not resemble our common ancestor all that much.

I just love this kind of thing.