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Peace and happy late winter season to all!
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The post-Snowflake Friending Meme has been such a rousing success that we’ve made it a permanent fixture here at the Fandom Snowflake Challenge, so come and make some new friends!
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After you've done that, go through and read other people's comments and either strike up a conversation here, or take your mutual interests to each other's journals and new, shiny friends.
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WEEK FIVE: On Thursdays We Try Tropes Get back to fannish basics: create a work inspired by a trope, or mix it up and do a trope inversion.
I love tropes, but still haven't made up my mind on what I want to create for this week. (perhaps not astonishingly, spending hours reading fanfic hasn't actually provided an answer)
Characters/Pairings: Benton Fraser/Ray Kowalski, Ray Kowalski & Ray Vecchio, Diefenbaker, Buck Frobisher, Maggie McKenzie
Rating: Mature
Length: 26,124 for the main fic, 28,647 for the series
Content Notes: Creator chose not to warn. This has at least a hopeful ending, but the fic is about zombies and Ray kills and eats at least one victim, plus there are some slightly gross descriptions in places. Way less gore etc. than most zombie stories, though.
Creator Links: mizface on AO3
Themes: Crack treated seriously, Friends to lovers, Friendship, Complete AU, Zombies, (Not really) character death, Epistolary fic
Summary: Ray Kowalski thought he had an okay existence: he had a place to call home, didn't have to worry about a job, and nobody bothered him. If it wasn't for the fact that he was a zombie, things would have been pretty good.
Then he met very much alive Benton Fraser, and his whole world was turned upside down.
Reccer's Notes: And the trifecta of cracky fantasy creatures: zombies. This story's based on the movie Warm Bodies, which also takes the cracky zombie premise kind of seriously, in a romantic way. Zombies are usually shown as mindless ravening hordes, but in this story both Rays have been zombified but haven't completely lost themselves. Here, zombies are called "the infected", and both Rays begin to mysteriously improve across the story, regaining more speech and cognitive ability. Apart from the relationship with Fraser that develops - and we also access Fraser's POV from his journal entries - there's a nice friendship between the Rays. There's one major story, followed by a number of short fics adding to the 'verse. A rather lovely and poignant take on zombies, that more seriously explores a possible at least partial recovery from that state, and developing relationships.
Fanwork Links: Ch-ch-changes, and the series
Characters/Pairings: John Sheppard/Rodney McKay, Katie Brown, David Parrish, Elizabeth Weir, Bates
Rating: Explicit
Length: 6499
Content Notes: No AO3 warnings apply
Creator Links: Hth on AO3
Themes: Crack Treated Seriously, First time, Friends to lovers, Humor, In vino veritas
Summary: Rodney toked pot that one time, but it never made him one of the cool kids.
Reccer's Notes: Okay, I'm stretching it a little thin in terms of the prompt, but any excuse to rec this charming, hot, and funny fic. The cracky premise is that Colonel John Sheppard, the military commander, is the drug czar of Atlantis, and Hth actually does sell it, while still keeping Sheppard in character. I'm very fond of "under the influence" stories, and this is lovely, as Sheppard inveigles Rodney to smoke pot with him and Rodney transforms from a pining nerd to being almost as cool as Sheppard. As so often, they've both been secretly attracted to each other for ages, and a bit of disinhibition (hitting Rodney harder as he's less used to it) speeds things along. It's a favourite story of mine with great dialogue, and a very fun read.
Fanwork Links: Be Cool
See them here.
I am in limbo – I just finished my SISC socks, they’re off the needles and gone for a bath, and I don’t pull the next bag until the 1st of the month so I’ve got the littlest of sock breaks. I’m working on that Craghill Shawl but it doesn’t have a deadline and I’m under-motivated. The rows are getting long and I think I’m into a cheaper thrill right now.
I am really, really motivated to make a baby set but the yarn hasn’t arrived (I think it might today) and once that happens I am all in on that, since the baby might have gotten slightly ahead of me there. I need to start a sweater for Elliot (he has a special request) but the yarn for that is en route as well. I was about to wander aimlessly upstairs and turn my attention to one of the multitude of projects I’ve put down over the last months, when I thought to have a look at “The Big Plan.”
The Big Plan
is far less fancy (or big, or trademarked) than it sounds, but like the Self-Imposed Sock Club (SISC) and The Long Range Planning Box for completed items, it’s one of my better ideas. You know how you’ll be minding your own business and you’ll see a project or have an idea or remember there’s an occasion coming up and you think “oh, I’ve got to get on that this year”. When that happens to me, I open my phone or computer and go to a note called “The Big Plan” and jot down whatever it happens to be. On there right now is a sewing project I don’t want to forget to get ahead on for next Christmas, and a note that a friend who makes soap could use some hand knit facecloths for her birthday, some ornaments I want to give as a Hallowe’en gift that it would be smart to make in the summer, that I need to gather pinecones for something else -whenever I see them through the year, and that (and this is that part that is relevant to this post) this is a year I have to knit and make another Advent Calendar, and that it would be super smart to knit a few of the ornaments each month so that it can’t get on top of me. (There’s also a note to buy the felt to make it when I see it on sale but that’s not as important to you.)
So- in this perfect moment of in-betwixt idleness, I’m going to fill my needles with a few of those little things and tuck them away (in The Long Range Planning Box, obviously) so that November Stephanie has only nice things to say about me.

If you’d like to play along, today I’m making a teeny hat and a maybe a tiny sock. I bet the baby sweater yarn is here when I’m done.
“Now, everyone get comfortable, you’ll see the roster for rooms in your emails. You might notice that instead of your usual roommate assignments we’ll be doing a rotational. Who has been on a team that has done rotationals before?”
(aka: post-The Long Game, Centaurs road trip)
( Read more... )
Characters/Pairings: Benton Fraser/Ray Kowalski
Rating: Teen & up
Length: 1782
Content Notes: No AO3 warnings apply
Creator Links: dance_across on AO3
Themes: Crack treated seriously, Friendship, Humor, Pining, Post-canon
Summary: Ray and Fraser discover that someone's been writing stories about them. Slashy, slashy stories.
Reccer's Notes: This is set after canon, during Ray and Fraser's quest. They've become minor celebrities in the wake of the big submarine/terrorists drama and when they briefly hit an outpost of civilization (a motel with internet), Ray checks his email and finds Frannie's sent him a link to a fanfic someone's written, called "Snowfall in Summer". Hilarity then ensues as they decide to read it together, and it leads to Ray making a big decision. The cracky premise is the existence of fanfic about them, and as far as possible, dance_across shows us how that might actually pan out. In a romantic way, of course, with a hopeful ending! It's a lot of fun.
Fanwork Links: Twenty Cents a Page
A while back,
I appreciated her warning, and have refused the update 2 or 3 times. But I knew it would keep bugging me, so I went looking for a way to avoid the update permanently.
I found this article, which explains how. The guy says that switching to the "18" track will avoid the "26" track permanently. And if you've already updated, and dislike it as much as PrincessofGeeks does -- if I'm reading it right, setting your iPhone on the "18" track will delete the 26.2 update.
There are probably plenty of people who will like the update. But if not, now there's a remedy. I already have an uneasy relationship with my iPhone. I don't need an update that makes me change how I do old stuff, and learn new stuff, so I've rejected it sight unseen.
If any of your peeps have been unhappy about this latest update, feel free to link to this post.
How many times a day do you . . .
1. Brush your teeth?
2. Shower?
3. Check your E-mail?
4. Check LJ? (or DW?)
5. Eat?
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!
Remember that there is no official deadline, so feel free to join in at any time, or go back and do challenges you've missed.
( Fandom Snowflake Challenge #15 ) And please do check out the comments for all the awesome participants of the challenge and visit their journals/challenge responses to comment on their posts and cheer them on.
And just as a reminder: this is a low pressure, fun challenge. If you aren't comfortable doing a particular challenge, then don't. We aren't keeping track of who does what.
