Arctic Light

I guess if I'm going to post any Yuletide recs before the reveals, I had by golly better do a few, huh? I haven't read everything that's on my want-to-read list, but here are a few I liked:

( Recs for Chronicles of Amber, Discworld, Dresden Files, Ex Machina, Lonesome Dove, Vorkosigan Saga, Invisible Man, Red Dwarf, Quantum Leap, Yuu Yuu Hakusho, Zombieland )

This entry is also posted at http://friendshipper.dreamwidth.org/306429.html with comments.

So I recently discovered the community vidding, which has been, uh, bad for my productivity in general. XD

But, here: have some happymaking vid recs! (These aren't all from vidding, though most are; the links go to the creators' pages, though.)

These Are My People by colls - Firefly vid set to a Rodney Atkins country song (perfect for Firefly, I might add), for the theme "family"; it's fun, happy, bouncy, wonderfully edited, and just generally makes me miss all the things I loved so much about the show. :D (DL & streaming.)

What About Everything by fizzyblogic - This is set to the ever-popular "What About Everything" by Carbon Leaf, and it is an awesome multifandom female-character vid -- female characters from many TV & movie fandoms, kicking ass and taking names and hanging out with other women. (Download & streaming)

Hugging time by shortnudel - Set to "Right By Your Side" by the Eurythmics, this is a multifandom hugging vid. *meeps* Includes SGA/SG1, Supernatural, NCIS and a bunch of others. (Streaming only)

School's Out by leanwellback - A multifandom vid of schoolkids being troublemakers, silly punks, and just plain kids, set to "School's Out" by Alice Cooper; clips from live-action, animated and computer-animated sources. Fun! (DL & streaming)

Take On Me by greensilver - Fast, bouncy, nifty Doctor Who vid set to the A-Ha song (of course), with footage from all Doctors. (DL & streaming)

Run With Me by chaila43 - A tribute vid for River Song from DW, lovely and awesome as River herself! (spoilers for River's episodes; DL & streaming)

Open Your Eyes by derry667 - DW Eleventh Doctor vid (Rory/Amy + Doctor); beautiful song choice, beautifully edited! I love Derry's vids and I'm so delighted that she made a new one! (very spoilery for season 5; DL & streaming)

Let It Rock by tarryfairy - Tribute vid for Zuko from Avatar; fast and bouncy and I can't stop watching this; help. (Spoilers for the whole series; streaming only)

Wild Child by calapine - Multifandom female-character tribute vid set to an Enya song; beautiful editing and clip choices! (DL & streaming)

This entry is also posted at http://friendshipper.dreamwidth.org/274595.html with comments.

I'm still loving the comic Ex Machina (and desperately hoping that the ending doesn't totally fall flat and/or kill off a bunch of characters, since the last issue comes out later this month), but fanfic for it is really thin on the ground. On the off chance that anyone on my flist is interested (and for my own reference), here are a few I've found that I liked - no spoilers under the cut, though the stories themselves may contain light spoilers for earlier parts of the series.

( Four Ex Machina fic recs, gen and Mitchell/Bradbury )

I need to remember to put this one on my request-for-Yuletide list, assuming that I don't hate it after finding out how it ends.

Over the last few days I've read through the archives of Freakangels, and now I have to wait for new installments with the rest of the world (woe!). Twelve psychically gifted teenagers cause the end of the world ... we've all heard this one before. But the story begins six years later, when they're trying to atone for their actions by picking up the pieces and restarting civilization in the post-apocalyptic ruins of what used to be London. It's not destroying the world that's hard ... it's fixing it. Especially when you have the powers of a minor god and have to struggle with the temptation to use them. The archive starts here and it updates with new installments on Fridays.

On a more fannish note, fkficfest is posting stories in the Forever Knight Ficfest. FK is a fandom in which I've never written or been socially active, but like TOS, it seems to be one of my touchstone fandoms -- every so often I'll rewatch a few episodes and dip back in to see if there's any interesting new fic around. They're posting two stories a day 'til the fest is over, and I've been really enjoying them. Two I particularly liked so far: A Contradiction in Terms by hearts_blood is a wonderful Nick & Nat character piece with a lovely Natalie and a light, graceful handling of the complicated and conflicted relationship between Nick, Nat and Janette. And Sugar and Spice by malinaldarose is a gen casefile story in which Jenny Schanke gets drawn into a murder investigation after she finds a classmate's drowned body; it features a wonderfully brave and resourceful Jenny, and an interesting mystery. (The fandom's handling of Jenny and Myra was always one of my favorite things about FK fandom, really; as characters, they never even appeared in the show itself -- well, we saw Myra from a distance one time -- but fandom does a wonderful job of fleshing them out and making them into sympathetic, three-dimensional people.)

ETA: Another rec, this one for SGA - Germination by thingswithwings (Jennifer/Rodney, NC-17, light kink) is a really enjoyable "Seed" tag, with great character voices, that worked beautifully for me in the context of the episode. I especially liked the characters' open negotiation of their sexual boundaries, which isn't something you see much in fic.

Signups at sga_genficathon have been closed! I will be sending out assignments this weekend.

And purimgifts is live! Here are links to fic, fic, fic! There will be new rounds of fic reveals for the next two days as well. See if you can guess which ones I wrote. :) My first (of three) gift fics is the first part of a Leverage/Dresden Files crossover (yes, really!) that promises to be a lot of fun. I've only had a chance to read a few of them so far, but I've really enjoyed all the ones I've tried, especially this one: California Girls - Star Trek: AOS; Uhura & Gaila; really fantastic Uhura POV.

Also, I'm pretty sure that most people in the McKay/Sheppard end of fandom already know about chkc's adorable chibis, but for everyone else, I came across this little cartoon Rodney, which is ... well, I really don't have words for how adorable this is: Rodney as a hermit crab.

'nother batch of recs. I've never really had time around the holidays to actually read more than one or two of the stories while they're still anonymous ... so I'm making the most of it this year! :D

( Fandoms: Invisible Man, True Meaning of Smekday, Shawshank Redemption (book), Dead Like Me, Madeline L'Engle, Quantum Leap, Being Human, Dresden Files )

(Edited to add a few Dresden Files recs to the rest.)

A few recs for Yuletide fics that I've read thus far! Also proof that I am reading in no particular order.

( Recs for Zombieland, Pern, Forever Knight, Julian May's Galactic Milieu books, The Yiddish Policeman's Union, Red Dwarf, Jean Auel's Earth's Children, Back to the Future, Princess Bride )

Also, edited to add: sga_santa has opened up their prompts for anyone to write something for any prompt 'til Jan. 1 - details here!

I haven't read Good Omens fic in several years, but I came across this rec'd on nomads_gen_recs and suddenly half my evening was gone and I don't know where it went.

100 Things Crowley Would Do Before the World Ended by SheWhoGuards (novella length; PG-ish; Aziraphale and Crowley; gen or at least gen-ish)

I loved this. The characters are just so perfectly, absolutely themselves, and the author has also nailed the book's unique blend of funny, bizarre and profound. It made me laugh and it tugged at my heartstrings, and now I want to go back and re-read some of my favorite bits from the book again.

I have been awfully remiss in posting this, but sga_genficathon is live! There will be about 50 stories posted over the next two weeks ('til May 14). From what I've seen of the stories, there is a fantastic variety of character, theme and subject matter (the stories that are posted so far include everything from a fast-paced team caper story to one about Alicia Vega grappling with DADT in the Mensaverse). And thank you again to tipper_green, kyuuketsukirui and greyias for posting the anon stories ... so I don't have to! (Poor Tipper. She will probably never volunteer to do anything for me ever again.)

team_sga is also live with their Team AU festival -- and my posting day is tomorrow, so you can look forward to my wee!Team story then.

Misc other fanfic I've read lately that's good...

Pamphlets by shati (Good Omens, gen, G-ish, Aziraphale with a bit of Crowley) - I haven't read Good Omens fic in forever, but I read this and was reminded all over again why I love the characters so much. Oh, Aziraphale ... dorkiest angel ever.

Modern Love by penknife (Discworld, PG-13, mostly OCs and various OC pairings more hinted at than seen) - okay, so this has been read and rec'd everywhere by now, but I loved this story so much. Written for lgbtfest, it's a brilliant look at the complexities of dwarf sexuality and how Ankh-Morpork's different social mores are affecting them -- which probably sounds awfully dry, but it's really not; the author's got a great feel for Pratchett's narrative voice and this seriously reads like something that could be slotted into one of the books. I loved the OCs too.

I haven't been around much lately. November has been a busy month. But I'm feeling happily accomplished; I've finished all my holiday gift-exchange fics and a handful of pending original projects (all I have left now is the story I signed up to write at lostcityfound, which isn't due 'till early January) and I did quite a bit of freelance this month as well (because fanfic, fun as it is, doesn't pay the bills). I'll be heading out of town on Friday, and I'm only working two days this week, so my plans for the week basically involve some semi-leisurely Christmas shopping, putting together my holiday boxes and getting them in the mail, baking stuff, and playing with my shiny new MacBook. *pets it*

A handful of recs and links:

Push Until It Holds by zillah975 (SGA, John/Ronon and mostly-onesided John/Rodney, NC-17, contains BDSM)
This is one of this year's sgabigbang stories (thus, it's long, about 50K words) and it's the current featured discussion story at sga_talk. I absolutely loved this story -- even though I don't really go for romance as a genre, I love how sex and attraction can, in a good author's hands, be used as a way of exploring and developing character and culture, and this story is a fantastic example of that. But aside from that, it's just a fantastic Atlantis story; it's as much of a team story as a slash story, and the character dynamics are well developed over two and a half slightly-AU seasons. I particularly loved the story's development of Satedan culture and Satedan/Earth sexuality, including the characters' own confusion about where they, themselves, fall within their own culture's norms.

Five Women Who Hate Fleur Delacour by snegurochka_lee (Harry Potter, gen)
I very rarely read HP stories anymore, but I came across this one somehow, and it's wonderful -- a really fascinating look at jealousy and isolation and how we see our own flaws reflected in other people; it made me view Fleur as a much more likable and complex character than I ever found her in the books, without whitewashing her faults.

Semi-nonfannish stuff: How Not To Write a Sex Scene - the short list for the winners of this year's Literary Review Bad Sex Awards: goddawful sex scenes from actual, published novels. And they are hilariously horrible.

The fiction research community little_details (to which I am addicted) has a recent, interesting (to me) thread on heterosexual male friendships; the OP asked how to depict close male friendship, and respondents chimed in with their own experiences or good examples of realistic male friendships from movies and TV (of which someone mentioned SGA ... of course!). It may be of interest to those who write such relationships to see real-life guys talking about their own close friendships with other guys. I was also intrigued by the link to this article on pre-modern same-sex romantic friendship and the way that the modern world has drawn a somewhat arbitrary box called "platonic" and plunked all non-sexual relationships into it; it ties into a recent conversation I was having with xparrot in interesting ways.

I thought I had more links, but apparently not ... perhaps I'll be back if I find more.