Like I'm Born To Be.
Sunday, August 17th, 2025 07:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rionaleonhartI loved Kpop Demon Hunters; what a fun film! But I also thought it was a bit of a mess, so I'd like to note down my thoughts about it while they're still fresh in my mind.
( Thoughts on Kpop Demon Hunters. )
Even if I think this film was a bit of a disaster thematically, I had a great time watching it. Sony Pictures Animation has been doing some fantastic work; The Mitchells vs the Machines was also great, and I'm waiting impatiently for the next Spider-Verse film!
( Thoughts on Kpop Demon Hunters. )
Even if I think this film was a bit of a disaster thematically, I had a great time watching it. Sony Pictures Animation has been doing some fantastic work; The Mitchells vs the Machines was also great, and I'm waiting impatiently for the next Spider-Verse film!
I'm So Glad I'm On Earth, Where There Are Pianos.
Saturday, August 16th, 2025 01:03 pmrionaleonhartJust realised I've written two different fics within the past two months - Communication (Deltarune) and Common Ground (Star Trek DS9) - that conclude with an arrangement to play the piano between a person and the intangible, inescapable part of themselves they have a complicated relationship with. I know I have a tendency to revisit themes, but this is ridiculous.
Come to think of it, I've also got a couple of earlier fics that conclude with the protagonist deciding to play music, or reaching a point where they're able to play music again. I just like making characters play music when they're in a dark place! It feels like such a hopeful thing to me.
The piano's been on my mind lately; somehow I keep encountering it in fiction! Kris of Deltarune plays the piano. Verso of Clair Obscur plays the piano. I started watching Your Lie in April on a whim, knowing very little about it, and it turns out it's largely about the musical development of a young pianist. When I was writing my DS9 fic, I looked up Joran and went, Oh, he's a musician? Maybe I could use that in this fic. What does he play? Probably some sort of weird future instrument, right? ...no, he's a pianist, of course.
There are other canons I've experienced that involve the piano, of course! (Omori comes to mind. Omori always comes to mind. I cannot escape or forget Omori.) But I feel I've run into a real concentration within the last couple of months.
This is nice because it's got me playing the piano again, after neglecting it for a little while! I'm not a masterful player, largely because I rarely have the patience to learn a new piece - my repertoire mainly consists of songs I've been playing over and over again for a decade or two, with the occasional clumsy and simplified attempt to play by ear - but I do enjoy it. There's something so calming about sitting down and letting instinct and muscle memory carry you through a piece of music.
I wonder how Kris of Deltarune would react if, while controlling them, I played the piano in a way that made it clear to them that I actually know how to play. I wonder if that would change our relationship.
Is this piano rambling going anywhere? No. The rest of this post will be an account of my recent dreams.
( Assorted dreams over the summer. )
Last night, I dreamt I posted a fic to AO3 and tried to title it 'Little Talks' (you've used this title before, Riona!). I did not notice until the next day that I'd accidentally called it 'Coggled Sprogs', which I have at least not used before.
Come to think of it, I've also got a couple of earlier fics that conclude with the protagonist deciding to play music, or reaching a point where they're able to play music again. I just like making characters play music when they're in a dark place! It feels like such a hopeful thing to me.
The piano's been on my mind lately; somehow I keep encountering it in fiction! Kris of Deltarune plays the piano. Verso of Clair Obscur plays the piano. I started watching Your Lie in April on a whim, knowing very little about it, and it turns out it's largely about the musical development of a young pianist. When I was writing my DS9 fic, I looked up Joran and went, Oh, he's a musician? Maybe I could use that in this fic. What does he play? Probably some sort of weird future instrument, right? ...no, he's a pianist, of course.
There are other canons I've experienced that involve the piano, of course! (Omori comes to mind. Omori always comes to mind. I cannot escape or forget Omori.) But I feel I've run into a real concentration within the last couple of months.
This is nice because it's got me playing the piano again, after neglecting it for a little while! I'm not a masterful player, largely because I rarely have the patience to learn a new piece - my repertoire mainly consists of songs I've been playing over and over again for a decade or two, with the occasional clumsy and simplified attempt to play by ear - but I do enjoy it. There's something so calming about sitting down and letting instinct and muscle memory carry you through a piece of music.
I wonder how Kris of Deltarune would react if, while controlling them, I played the piano in a way that made it clear to them that I actually know how to play. I wonder if that would change our relationship.
Is this piano rambling going anywhere? No. The rest of this post will be an account of my recent dreams.
( Assorted dreams over the summer. )
Last night, I dreamt I posted a fic to AO3 and tried to title it 'Little Talks' (you've used this title before, Riona!). I did not notice until the next day that I'd accidentally called it 'Coggled Sprogs', which I have at least not used before.
REC: Long Live by Llin (Star Trek, Ensemble)
Thursday, August 14th, 2025 07:42 pmdelphiFandom 50 #25
Long Live by![[youtube.com profile]](https://youtube.com/favicon.ico)
llintrek
Fandom: Star Trek (TOS through to AOS)
Characters: Ensemble from TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT, and movies
Medium: Vid
Length: 5:19
Rating: SFW
My Bookmark Tags: drama, slice of life, happy ending, established relationship, celebration, legacy, nostalgia, friendship, family
Song: "Long Live" by Taylor Swift
Excerpt:
Long Live by
Fandom: Star Trek (TOS through to AOS)
Characters: Ensemble from TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, ENT, and movies
Medium: Vid
Length: 5:19
Rating: SFW
My Bookmark Tags: drama, slice of life, happy ending, established relationship, celebration, legacy, nostalgia, friendship, family
Song: "Long Live" by Taylor Swift
Excerpt:
You held your head like a hero on a history book page / It was the end of a decade, but the start of an ageThis vid is a warm bowl of good soup, nostalgic and comforting. I love the conceit of starting out following one character who shares a scene with a second, and then following that character, and so on, through the crossovers between the different series, and then across the themes that unite them. This is one I go back to often when I need a smile.
The Friday Five for 15 August 2025
Thursday, August 14th, 2025 02:53 pmanais_pf posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
thefridayfiveThis week's questions were suggested by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
aforkintheroad.
1. What is your favorite experience in your life so far?
2. What motivates you to keep going every day?
3. Where do you want to go in life? What do you want to accomplish?
4. Is there anything that you regret? Do you try to change it?
5. What is your most cherished gift you have received? Why do you cherish it so much?
Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.
If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!
aforkintheroad. 1. What is your favorite experience in your life so far?
2. What motivates you to keep going every day?
3. Where do you want to go in life? What do you want to accomplish?
4. Is there anything that you regret? Do you try to change it?
5. What is your most cherished gift you have received? Why do you cherish it so much?
Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.
If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!
Fanfiction: Common Ground (Star Trek DS9)
Thursday, August 14th, 2025 07:09 pmrionaleonhartI've watched Star Trek DS9 fairly idly for the most part; I've enjoyed it, but I haven't been passionate about it. I certainly wouldn't consider it one of my fandoms.
And then I hit episode 7.13, 'Field of Fire', the best episode of television ever made. Intense selfcest sexual tension! Between Dax and a past version of herself nobody but she can see! While that past version tries to groom her into becoming a murderer! Absolutely incredible. I had to keep reminding myself that this was mainstream television from the nineties and these two were unlikely to launch into the vicious hatesex they constantly felt on the verge of.
This episode single-handedly smashed straight through my writer's block, and here's the result (although it's regrettably not vicious hatesex).
Title: Common Ground
Fandom: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Rating: 14
Wordcount: 1,100
Summary: After they catch the killer together, Ezri lets Joran linger for a while.
( Common Ground )
And then I hit episode 7.13, 'Field of Fire', the best episode of television ever made. Intense selfcest sexual tension! Between Dax and a past version of herself nobody but she can see! While that past version tries to groom her into becoming a murderer! Absolutely incredible. I had to keep reminding myself that this was mainstream television from the nineties and these two were unlikely to launch into the vicious hatesex they constantly felt on the verge of.
This episode single-handedly smashed straight through my writer's block, and here's the result (although it's regrettably not vicious hatesex).
Title: Common Ground
Fandom: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Rating: 14
Wordcount: 1,100
Summary: After they catch the killer together, Ezri lets Joran linger for a while.
( Common Ground )
(no subject)
Wednesday, August 13th, 2025 06:15 pmstaranise😔 Another month when I have to ask for help with rent again. (My landlord lets me split it into two payments, but uh the second payment is coming up fast)
A GoFundMe for keeping my business (and me) afloat.
A GoFundMe for keeping my business (and me) afloat.
What I'm Reading: Boys, Beasts & Men by Sam J. Miller (2022)
Tuesday, August 12th, 2025 11:21 amdelphiBoys, Beasts & Men by Sam J. Miller is a 2022 speculative fiction short story collection themed around male coming-of-age and queer male sexuality*.
* Okay, can I still use an asterisk if I'm just going to immediately elaborate on that?
The thing is, I went through this book twice under two different apprehensions. When I read it the first time, I assumed this was written as a collection. It has a framing device that does a lot of heavy lifting to create thematic meaning and an overt narrative through line. So, while my initial disappointment was that all these stories with different protagonists from different time periods and walks of life felt so similar, I thought: "All right, that's deliberate. It's not really working for me, but I can appreciate the idea of all of these stories belonging metaphorically to one person who's been boy, beast, and man. The 'man' part is a bit of a letdown, since that's almost entirely external straight counterpoints to a queerness that is perpetually young and modern for its day. But 'YA with a higher rating' aside, I can dig what it's trying to do."
Then I realized all the stories were written separately for different publications, and I went back through with that in mind. The knowledge made me a little less forgiving of the samey-ness (and the awkwardness of the few times we did get other voices), but it also made me much more forgiving of the fact that the stories don't actually come together into something coherent beyond their basic shared worldview.
This was a "less than the sum of its parts" collection for me, where the individual entries didn't rise to the framing device, and even the framing device felt more...sanitized and self-conscious than I was expecting. It's the type of dark queer speculative fic that feels like it kept walking me up to the edge of an interesting premise and then carefully staying behind a guardrail that showed me the sights but didn't let me take the plunge. To the point that in aggregate some of those steps back and framing of mundane horror added up to something more conservative than I think was intended, and wasn't what I was hoping for from a collection with this title and a framing device about an anonymous hookup.
There are plenty of good ideas, executed very competently (albeit with a share of clumsiness around handling the diversity it's aiming for). Stories include a boy reckoning with his mother's fallibility through an encounter with a dinosaur on exhibition, a teenager developing mind control powers that he turns against his bullies, a father failing to meet his son in the time and place the son inhabits, and an oral history of events around the Stonewall riots. But none of them really grabbed me, or at least none of them kept their teeth sunk in. I think I felt primed for something a little more visceral, messy, and transgressive in a way I definitely wouldn't have been if I'd just encountered these stories separately in different magazines.
That said, there is a specificity to the viewpoints and language, so I think this is a situation where if you like Miller's use of language, his message, and his ways of conveying that message, you'll probably get a lot of enjoyment out of the collection. I'm aware that this is one of those situations where I'm much harder on a book that starts running in the direction I want but is ultimately heading somewhere else than I am on something that starts and stays miles off. I feel like the book overall expresses what the author is looking to express with a high level of technical ability on most fronts, but it just wasn't for me.
In lieu of an excerpt, here's the entirety of one of the stories up on Lightspeed Magazine's website: "We Are the Cloud" by Sam J. Miller
* Okay, can I still use an asterisk if I'm just going to immediately elaborate on that?
The thing is, I went through this book twice under two different apprehensions. When I read it the first time, I assumed this was written as a collection. It has a framing device that does a lot of heavy lifting to create thematic meaning and an overt narrative through line. So, while my initial disappointment was that all these stories with different protagonists from different time periods and walks of life felt so similar, I thought: "All right, that's deliberate. It's not really working for me, but I can appreciate the idea of all of these stories belonging metaphorically to one person who's been boy, beast, and man. The 'man' part is a bit of a letdown, since that's almost entirely external straight counterpoints to a queerness that is perpetually young and modern for its day. But 'YA with a higher rating' aside, I can dig what it's trying to do."
Then I realized all the stories were written separately for different publications, and I went back through with that in mind. The knowledge made me a little less forgiving of the samey-ness (and the awkwardness of the few times we did get other voices), but it also made me much more forgiving of the fact that the stories don't actually come together into something coherent beyond their basic shared worldview.
This was a "less than the sum of its parts" collection for me, where the individual entries didn't rise to the framing device, and even the framing device felt more...sanitized and self-conscious than I was expecting. It's the type of dark queer speculative fic that feels like it kept walking me up to the edge of an interesting premise and then carefully staying behind a guardrail that showed me the sights but didn't let me take the plunge. To the point that in aggregate some of those steps back and framing of mundane horror added up to something more conservative than I think was intended, and wasn't what I was hoping for from a collection with this title and a framing device about an anonymous hookup.
There are plenty of good ideas, executed very competently (albeit with a share of clumsiness around handling the diversity it's aiming for). Stories include a boy reckoning with his mother's fallibility through an encounter with a dinosaur on exhibition, a teenager developing mind control powers that he turns against his bullies, a father failing to meet his son in the time and place the son inhabits, and an oral history of events around the Stonewall riots. But none of them really grabbed me, or at least none of them kept their teeth sunk in. I think I felt primed for something a little more visceral, messy, and transgressive in a way I definitely wouldn't have been if I'd just encountered these stories separately in different magazines.
That said, there is a specificity to the viewpoints and language, so I think this is a situation where if you like Miller's use of language, his message, and his ways of conveying that message, you'll probably get a lot of enjoyment out of the collection. I'm aware that this is one of those situations where I'm much harder on a book that starts running in the direction I want but is ultimately heading somewhere else than I am on something that starts and stays miles off. I feel like the book overall expresses what the author is looking to express with a high level of technical ability on most fronts, but it just wasn't for me.
In lieu of an excerpt, here's the entirety of one of the stories up on Lightspeed Magazine's website: "We Are the Cloud" by Sam J. Miller
The Friday Five for 8 August 2025
Thursday, August 7th, 2025 03:03 pmanais_pf posting in thefridayfiveThis week's questions were suggested by sparklesalad.
1. What is one food (or meal) you used to hate but now love?
2. If you had to give up one of your favorite foods (or meals) for good, what would it be, and why?
3. Which food seems like it should be healthy and isn't, and do you eat it? Why?
4. If you were an item of food, personified, what would you be and why?
5. You've seen tomatoes and pies used for this purpose ... now think of a more inventive item of food one could throw at someone. What is it and why would throwing it at someone be hilarious?
Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.
If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!
sparklesalad. 1. What is one food (or meal) you used to hate but now love?
2. If you had to give up one of your favorite foods (or meals) for good, what would it be, and why?
3. Which food seems like it should be healthy and isn't, and do you eat it? Why?
4. If you were an item of food, personified, what would you be and why?
5. You've seen tomatoes and pies used for this purpose ... now think of a more inventive item of food one could throw at someone. What is it and why would throwing it at someone be hilarious?
Copy and paste to your own journal, then reply to this post with a link to your answers. If your journal is private or friends-only, you can post your full answers in the comments below.
If you'd like to suggest questions for a future Friday Five, then do so on DreamWidth or LiveJournal. Old sets that were used have been deleted, so we encourage you to suggest some more!
There's Also One Comment That Just Says 'wHAt?'
Wednesday, August 6th, 2025 04:18 pmrionaleonhartTen years ago today, on 6 August 2015, I posted Visitors, a little Assassin's Creed oneshot inspired by Sense8. It was set in a universe in which Altaïr, Ezio, Edward, Haytham, Shay, Aveline, Connor and Desmond kept popping into each other's lives unpredictably. Eight scenes, one from the perspective of each character; 3,200 words. That was all it was ever intended to be.
A lot of the comments I got said that I should write more of this AU. Usually, as someone who mainly writes oneshots, I find 'write more!' requests a little frustrating. On this occasion, I couldn't help feeling that they were right.
So I wrote a little more. And a little more. And then I started posting a sequel. And then one of the fic's commenters, salanaland, began writing in the same universe; I was surprised and thrilled.
Meanwhile, I had received a comment on the fanfiction.net version of Visitors:
Read the fanfics "Unintended Consequences" and its sequel "Change my Mind" from Vampire-badger. They are just like this oneshot - only with much more humor, slightly different cast of time-travelling characters, and 214 chapters in total. You'll love them!
In retrospect, this comment is one of the best things that ever happened to me, but at the time I was slightly grumpy about it. Not a word on whether they'd actually enjoyed my story; just 'read these fics; they're like yours but better.'
As if that weren't bad enough, the commenter turned out to be absolutely right. I loved them. I was so annoyed.
I left VampireBadger a long and enthusiastic comment, she got in touch to say thanks, we chatted a bit back and forth, she read Visitors, and somehow she also ended up writing in my universe.
With me, salanaland and VampireBadger all working on it, the Vistorverse exploded into a vast, overcomplicated, magnificently confusing series. I woke up every day excited about this universe. The three of us were constantly plotting out new developments and ironing out timeline issues. It's the most ambitious fandom project I've ever been a part of.
There were new instalments almost every day; there were often multiple instalments per day. In the October of 2015, the three of us posted fifty-four(???) new chapters in total. There was always more to read, more to write, more ideas to discuss.
When the Visitorverse finally came to an end, in the spring of 2017, it was over 900,000 words long. (VampireBadger was personally responsible for over half of that wordcount; she is - and I mean this in the best possible way - an absolute maniac. My own contribution was only ('only') about 120,000 words.) But it hadn't quite finished. There was one fic - Revisiting Roots, a collection of scenes by all three of us in the style of the original Visitors - that hadn't yet wrapped up.
It finally wrapped up today. To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Visitorverse - the tenth Visitorversary, so to speak - I've finished and posted the final chapter of Revisiting Roots, seven years after the last update. We wrote most of these scenes years and years ago; it's good to get them out into the fresh air at last!
I've been really pleasantly surprised by the comments! I wasn't sure whether anyone would remember the Visitorverse after all these years, but the update has had multiple comments from people who have fond feelings about it. I certainly do; writing in this universe was one of the best times of my fannish life. It's been really nice to revisit it, just for a moment.
This entry has no real point besides nostalgia! I just wanted to reflect on the anniversary of a fannish project I had an absolute blast with. I haven't touched an Assassin's Creed game in ages; maybe I should revisit the series at some point.
A lot of the comments I got said that I should write more of this AU. Usually, as someone who mainly writes oneshots, I find 'write more!' requests a little frustrating. On this occasion, I couldn't help feeling that they were right.
So I wrote a little more. And a little more. And then I started posting a sequel. And then one of the fic's commenters, salanaland, began writing in the same universe; I was surprised and thrilled.
Meanwhile, I had received a comment on the fanfiction.net version of Visitors:
Read the fanfics "Unintended Consequences" and its sequel "Change my Mind" from Vampire-badger. They are just like this oneshot - only with much more humor, slightly different cast of time-travelling characters, and 214 chapters in total. You'll love them!
In retrospect, this comment is one of the best things that ever happened to me, but at the time I was slightly grumpy about it. Not a word on whether they'd actually enjoyed my story; just 'read these fics; they're like yours but better.'
As if that weren't bad enough, the commenter turned out to be absolutely right. I loved them. I was so annoyed.
I left VampireBadger a long and enthusiastic comment, she got in touch to say thanks, we chatted a bit back and forth, she read Visitors, and somehow she also ended up writing in my universe.
With me, salanaland and VampireBadger all working on it, the Vistorverse exploded into a vast, overcomplicated, magnificently confusing series. I woke up every day excited about this universe. The three of us were constantly plotting out new developments and ironing out timeline issues. It's the most ambitious fandom project I've ever been a part of.
There were new instalments almost every day; there were often multiple instalments per day. In the October of 2015, the three of us posted fifty-four(???) new chapters in total. There was always more to read, more to write, more ideas to discuss.
When the Visitorverse finally came to an end, in the spring of 2017, it was over 900,000 words long. (VampireBadger was personally responsible for over half of that wordcount; she is - and I mean this in the best possible way - an absolute maniac. My own contribution was only ('only') about 120,000 words.) But it hadn't quite finished. There was one fic - Revisiting Roots, a collection of scenes by all three of us in the style of the original Visitors - that hadn't yet wrapped up.
It finally wrapped up today. To celebrate the tenth anniversary of the Visitorverse - the tenth Visitorversary, so to speak - I've finished and posted the final chapter of Revisiting Roots, seven years after the last update. We wrote most of these scenes years and years ago; it's good to get them out into the fresh air at last!
I've been really pleasantly surprised by the comments! I wasn't sure whether anyone would remember the Visitorverse after all these years, but the update has had multiple comments from people who have fond feelings about it. I certainly do; writing in this universe was one of the best times of my fannish life. It's been really nice to revisit it, just for a moment.
This entry has no real point besides nostalgia! I just wanted to reflect on the anniversary of a fannish project I had an absolute blast with. I haven't touched an Assassin's Creed game in ages; maybe I should revisit the series at some point.
la musica
Tuesday, August 5th, 2025 06:06 pmsidewaysAfter many years, Spotify has un-nuked the Freelance Whales album Weathervanes! Broken Horse rides again. Also We Could Be Friends, which I just find unaccountably charming.
Semi-relatedly (insofar as I used lyrics from Broken Horse for a Finisterre fic one time), I finally tweaked my Finisterre fanmix to the point where I was happy to officially 'release' it. The tipping point was Shawn James finally giving me the Bad Moon Rising cover I needed - there have always been darker covers around, but none with quite the right vibe, and the song is really too appropriate to want to ditch altogether. With this, I am finally content to have a mix with a frontier sound that doesn't cleave too closely to any singular frontier. Also, horses and screaming terror are there.
Semi-relatedly (insofar as I used lyrics from Broken Horse for a Finisterre fic one time), I finally tweaked my Finisterre fanmix to the point where I was happy to officially 'release' it. The tipping point was Shawn James finally giving me the Bad Moon Rising cover I needed - there have always been darker covers around, but none with quite the right vibe, and the song is really too appropriate to want to ditch altogether. With this, I am finally content to have a mix with a frontier sound that doesn't cleave too closely to any singular frontier. Also, horses and screaming terror are there.