Alchemy Alice

In the spirit of yelling about it far and wide: last week, I finished a thing:

songs the equations sing

I've finally gone back and read bits of it, and while there are a lot of things I'd change about it (and will change about it, when it takes another form) I'm pretty pleased on the whole. It's certainly a cracking read, at the very least. 

I'm really hoping the radio silence from the European office means that I don't have to do anything further for the entity liquidations they're working on. I realize it's evening over there so they've probably just gone home, but also I don't know what I'm doing, they're bad at explaining, and so I've just been shoving paperwork their way and yelling, "FILL IN THE STUFF I DON'T KNOW PLEASE" and hoping for the best.

I had more to do, and less idea of what was going on for the dang closing of a credit facility, and yet somehow this is more tenuous and annoying. Probably because it feels like no one knows what's going on, and not just me.

Also, the sound quality on their calls really sucks, so I can't understand a thing. We're supposed to be a technology firm. OH IRONY.

ETA: I remain in the purgatory of not knowing things. Asked my manager for help, and he gave me the perfectly reasonable advice of "it sounds like they haven't explained things to you well, maybe ask them for a better explanation", which is unfortunately TOO reasonable, as I would prefer they just take it out of my hands entirely so that I can just finish writing my last chapter at work instead. BOO on actual paying work!

I started watching Myths & Monsters on Netflix last night, because you can leave academia, but academia never truly leaves you. 

It's a reasonably scholarly series, if a little Masterpiece Theatre-esque in its presentation. Entirely Eurocentric (which is acknowledged, so fine) and sometimes lacking in nuance, and one of the commentators straight up said that no one knew how to swim in the pre-industrial age, which...what.* Nevertheless, not a bad survey of a lot of myths I didn't know, and it focuses on recognizing the historical context and use of myth alongside (and in place of) historical record for the purpose of teaching and enforcing social/cultural structures, which is very very much my jam.

But anyway, it got me thinking about Hero with a Thousand Faces, and whether there have been any direct inversions of the whole hero narrative, and what that might look like. And I think it might be quite cool as an experiment to attempt a reverse hero's journey, as an examination of female versus male narrative.

The hero's journey is coded male, and that's only been reinforced by pop culture's adoption of Campbell's model, e.g. Star Wars, The Matrix, and roughly 80 billion other things. A big part of that male arc after the call to action is the learning, gaining all the skills necessary to confront the big thing at the end, before returning to a new and better status quo back home. But what if the process is one of unlearning bad things? A heroine's journey could be the shedding of hierarchy and social trappings and coming out the other side with a call to action not to herself, but to her society. Could be cool, if it's done well enough.

Don't know if I'd write it personally (indeed, it seems likely that someone already has done it - it doesn't strike me as a particularly revolutionary idea) but hey, I'll put it on my list of things I could maybe attempt sometime in the way off future. 



*I have now googled this for my personal edification, and the commentator may have meant that swimming was not a leisurely or encouraged activity in the pre-industrial age, given that pools didn't really exist, and so only boatsmen and other sea-adjacent people learned to do more than wade. This was definitely not clear from the way she said it, though, nor was it clear from the context of the discussion.

it's 2018, and long-form blogging is BACK, BABY

welcome to the jump-off, i don't know how much i'll use this

but i gotta bury my old LJ import posts, so i'll be active on here for at least the interim

if anyone's got some leads on where the memes and shitposts are at, drop me a line, because I can already tell I'm gonna miss them terribly

Title: The Art of Order
Pairing: Pepper Potts/Phil Coulson, background Bucky/Tony/Steve
Rating: PG
Word Count: 18,766 (HOW DID THIS HAPPEN)
Summary: The alternate title to this story is, ‘How Pepper Got Her Groove Back (Not That She Ever Lost It To Begin With): A Story in Cocktails’: In which Pepper rules Stark Industries with an iron first in between drink breaks, there is way higher than Level Seven clearance at SHIELD but Phil trusts her with a lot more than that, and the Avengers really have no idea how much work has to be done to keep them afloat when it doesn’t directly involve explosions.

Notes: This story starts at the beginning of Chapter 3 of Reflexes, but you don’t really have to be familiar with that to get this story. All you need to know is that Tony/Bucky is happening in the background, and is building to Tony/Bucky/Steve. Also, there’s still some Avenging going on.

Also, I envision Ian as looking like Ben Whishaw because that trailer for Skyfall was badass. And the Alban Berg Quartet are real, and probably way too awesome to just randomly open their rehearsals to concert-goers, but their renditions of the Beethoven string quartets are quite good.

Chapter One 
Chapter Two

( Chapter Three )

Title: Reflexes
Genre/Pairing: Action/Adventure/Romance, Tony Stark/Bucky Barnes, eventually Tony/Bucky/Steve Rogers
Word Count: ~6,500, this part
Rating: PG-13
Spoilers: None, this was written pre-Avengers knowledge. Given that, it's also quite AU.
Warnings: This is mainly movieverse, as that's what I'm most familiar with; however, I have picked up some stuff from Marvel-616 as I've read more, so some of that trickles in. 
Summary:  Bucky meets the team and manages to survive the experience, Tony is his usual dysfunctional self, and Steve pouts with deadly force. Also, there is some avenging going on. And tech porn.

Author Note: This is the second part of the Armed and Dangerous 'verse, and as such follows directly after Impulse, so if you haven't read that yet, do so before starting this one. This is a work in progress, though hopefully not for much longer!

( Read more... )

I just pulled an all-nighter to get my sleep schedule back on track, and to help me survive, I churned out a bunch of comment fic on Tumblr. Huzzah! Now if I can stay awake through the rest of the day, I'll be golden. 

In any case, it's almost all Avengers related, with some Steve/Tony, and some Steve/Tony/Bucky, and a lot of Tonyfeels, so if you're interested, you can find all of it here.

Fandom: Marvel movies, Nolan!Batman, Avengers, Justice League-ish
Rating: PG for language
Word Count: 5,424
Pairing: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark, barely
Summary: In which Tony Stark went to boarding school with Bruce Wayne, and the road to becoming a superhero is not smooth.

Notes: This plays extremely fast and loose with chronology, canon, whatever. There are elements of Batman Begins, Dark Knight, and the Iron Man movies, but also has stuff from the comics and then randomly converges at some amalgam of the Avengers movie and the Justice League I-have-no-idea-what. There is a real sequence of events that makes sense—I made a timeline!—but it’s pretty extravagantly not accurate to any particular canon, and time between major events is dilated/contracted as needed to get said events to line up in a meaningful and fairly reasonable way. I claim artistic license?

Read it at AO3.