Pinch Hit Bingo

I have had it with winter. I mean, I'd had it back in November. But I've still had it. At least three more months to go. 😕

In other news, I managed to pop a capillary in one of my eyes, so I've got a bruise, but since it's eyeball, it's just BLOOD, so it looks like I'm possessed by a demon or something. You'd think this sort of thing could happen around Halloween when it's convenient, but no.

I've also made what is possibly the best decision of my entire life. I went to the good bakery in my area, and I saw they had these cinnamon pull-aparts, and I was hungry so I got one on impulse, and the woman behind the counter asked, "Do you want large or small?" LARGE WAS OBVIOUSLY THE CORRECT ANSWER! This thing is fucking delicious! Good thing this bakery isn't too close to my house, or I would be buying these fuckers non-stop. Highly recommend!

Also, Christmas has passed, which means I got my usual assortment of gifts: a stack for jigsaw puzzles and next year's Fantastic Fungi wall calendar. Good times!

Here's fandom stuff:

• Exchanges due in January/February (fffx, candyheartsex + mystery pinch-hits and treats + future sign-ups): I think it's time to switch this over. I'm currently at 0/1, unsurprisingly. FFFX is kind of kicking my butt, alas. I'm still in the 2k range and not for lack of effort. This one just isn't crystallizing, and I worry my idea is not solid enough to hold the word count. Oh well, I'm going to keep trying for 3k a week, nonetheless! Candy Hearts is starting sign-ups soon, and I definitely want to do that one. I'm hoping threesentenceficathon will crop up again, too. I did skip au5k and will probably skip highadrenalineexchange, too. There's a Just The Tip flash coming up, which I sort of want to do, but I can't think of what I'd sign up with at the moment. Maybe just treat? I'll think about it.


• Yuletide! I got two really nice gifts this year:
  
  
  • Propagation - A fantastic horror story for Far From Any Road, wow, so cool!
  
  
  • From the dusty bookshelf - A cute Edwin/Robin story for The Last Binding series, with crossover magic from Far From Any Road, spot-on character voices and also delightful!
  
  I've quite lucked out on Far From Any Road these last two exchanges, I have to say. Such a great haul!


• For my New Years resolution, I hereby absolve myself of Femslash Salad Bar!


• BNHA: I've finished the Team-Up Missions manga, so now I might be complete done with all the canon material? 😭 This is currently the fandom I'm most fannish about, so hopefully I'll write a good amount for it still.


• The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi - Finished this, it was fun! Not sure I'd ever write something for it, but it was generally a romp (with only the slight mishap that it was written between Trump's two terms, so a lot of the "whew, we survived that asshole!" jokes are now, alas, quite grim, but obviously not the author's fault).


• Heaven Official's Blessing by MXTX - I'm about halfway through volume 1 and obviously severely underestimated how long this will take me, lol. I am 99% sure our OTP have met now, although I'm puzzled how one half is disguising his powers, but I'm sure I'll find out what's the what soon!


• The Deer and the Cauldron by Louis Cha - Slow progress continues.


• Dear Door - Slow progress also continues. I've been staying at my parents' house, so I'm not in much of a mood for porn, lol.

Goals for next week: 1) Make my New Years post! 2) Write 3k on FFFX. 3) Keep reading Heaven Official's Blessing.

A quick update, since I'm currently holidaying my heart out. Not working is awesome! I finished my new program with my choreographer yesterday! I've eaten sooooooooooooooo much junk food this week, it's absolutely terrible (it's wonderful).

Here's some stuff:

• Exchanges due in November/December (fffx, ficinabox part deux, yuletide_admin + mystery pinch-hits and treats + future sign-ups): I'm still at 6/7, and did my final proof read for YT. I'm trying to work on FFFX, but it's not going so well at the moment. I have 1.5k, and it's like pulling teeth. I debated scraping the whole concept and starting something new, but that went even less well, yikes. I'm going to assume I'm just in A Mood and not abandon hope yet. Sticking to my goal of 3k per week, even if it's rough going!


• Exchanges due in January/February: candyheartsex is coming up; au5k I'm skipping; and I'm pretty sure I'm not up for highadrenalineexchange at the moment. If I recall correctly, threesentenceficathon should start up January-ish too.


• Okay, so ficinabox has revealed, and I went a little bit crazy this year. I volunteered for extra assignment during swaps to start out with, so I started with 13k due, and then picked up 9k in PHs over the course of things (in all fairness, some of these were for assignments I'd already filled and went over the limit, and then some k cropped up on the PH list, so I'd pre-filled), and even then I didn't get to do everything I wanted, medium-wise. Let us just say that this exchange is 100% my jam. I just wish I'd had more energy for reading and commenting - I got a good chunk in before my brain dissolved into a jellyfish, but I'd wanted to run through the OWs too and didn't get the chance. In any case, here's what I wrote:
  
  
  • Doomsday Eve - 4k of 8k for my assigned recip, Bakugo/Deku for BNHA, my first attempt at writing Deku's POV (and not having Bakugo swear non-stop) in a clever attempt to hide what is obviously my writing style for this fandom, lol. Some nice handjobs the night before the final battle!
  
  
  • Columbo Takes Dog to Work - A 1k swap-assignment + 4k PH I picked up, Dog and Columbo. My first attempt at a Choose Your Own Adventure story! I knew I had to do Dog's POV from the start, and outlining this was SO much fun, figuring out all the paths. And I also knew from the start that every single path had to end with Columbo giving Dog a cookie, because Dog is such a good dog! Also, of everything I wrote, this one was the biggest bitch to edit, because it was SUPER hard to keep track of "I'm only checking SPAG now" vs. "Did I get all the paths linked correctly?" And also I had to follow each branch a gazillion times and it was tricky to keep track of which ones I needed to re-re-re-edit. Plus, y'know, CSS-coding!
  
  
  • Eureka! - A 1k swap-assignment, Frankenstein/Rai for Noblesse. Okay, this is the one where I started to go crazy with the CSS. I knew I wanted to do Frankenstein's lab notebook, so I pulled out my own old notebooks for the format and style. The fic for this one was a breeze! Figuring out how to get the look I wanted was...a labor of love, let's just call it, lol. Which leads us to...
  
  
  • Grid/Graph Paper Work Skin & Tutorial (Variant of How to Create Notebook Lined Paper on AO3 by La_Temperanza) - The "extra" thing that sprung up, when I realized that my CSS adventures were getting so over-the-top that I really should create a tutorial for all the bullshit I was doing, even if it was only for my own future reference. I think I spent 2 days total futzing with CSS, and even then I wasn't entirely happy with it: I really wanted to get it work with p tags, so there was no need for the br nonsense, but everything I did with that messes up the alignment with the horizontal lines. I also really wanted to see if there was a way to do it without having to put everything inside of a table, and I got pretty close, but there were still a couple bits of wonkiness I couldn't quite get right, and by that time it was taking absurdly long and I had other actual assignments. However, I am very happy with the final look-and-feel, even if the coding isn't as clean as I'd have liked! And I didn't get a chance to use the blueprint variant this year (other things intervened), but now I've got that in my back pocket for future years, so I'm overall very happy! I ended up with a couple of really powerful workskins out of this year's FIAB that combine a bunch of different classes (for my personal use, this one is combined with a whole collection of notebook/paper effects, see also below), and I plan to have fun with them going forward!
  
  
  • Someone Likes You - 3k more of 8k for my assigned recip, Bakugo/Deku for BNHA, more fun with Bakugo swearing at everything, and I swear he is my favorite character to write right now. Like, I would write him 24/7, deranged angry shouty boy who secretly has a brain. ❤️
  
  
  • It Takes a (Shinobi) Village... - Technically only a 1k swap-assignment for Naruto worldbuilding. And, oh boy, where to even start with this one? First of all, the only reason I even knew this prompt existed was that the recip advertised it as bait in the EAD discord, which I am very grateful for because I was not monitoring the Naruto requests. As a committed spreadsheet nerd, I knew I wanted to do spreadsheets for some assignment (ideally economic/receipt-type ones), and as soon as I saw this prompt, I knew it was the one! I have several friends who are teachers, so I assume that's where I got the idea of it being the annual school order. It started off just as a series of spreadsheets, but then I got to thinking about the Heqanakht Letters (listen, this is just a thing my brain does, okay?), and the idea morphed into "What would be a neat set of documents for an archaeologist to find so that you could write a PhD thesis off this society's economic activities?" So I started putting in letters and signs and legal documents and all sorts of random shit that struck me as interesting. Writing this was also GREAT for random research stuff! I spent several days buried in various websites on how calligraphy ink was made historically in Japan, and then for the apothecary section I got to lean on all the Stupidly Detailed Plant Knowledge (TM) I've been studying for the last, like, decade. I am very proud for that section that I did the first draft of all the toxins mostly off memory, and then looked up the details and fact-checked sources afterwards! The biggest thing I got "wrong" on my initial guess on what toxins would be useful was that I wanted to use cherries for the cyanide, but when I looked up how much cyanide was in cherry pits, apple seeds seemed the better go-to for practical purposes.
  
  
  • The Only Time Deku Let Dynamight Write the Agency Mission Report - The final 1k of 8k for my assigned recip, Bakugo/Deku for BNHA, and fun with other mediums for this fandom! This one was mission reports (fairly obviously, lol). I think I redrafted this work at least 4 or 5 times, lol. Bakugo's mission report was super easy and came to me immediately, but then I had several competing ideas on what the contrasting v2 of the report should be. I started thinking Bakugo and Deku could go back and forth several times, but it ended up being too monotonous repeating the same events over and over again. Then I thought maybe Bakugo and Deku could argue in the comments of Bakugo's v1, and then they'd eventually huff off (obviously to fuck), and the actual v2 of what happened would be written by Eri who was interning with them. But her POV wasn't particularly interesting, I didn't think, so I scrapped that take too. Then I thought, okay, Bakugo writes v1 and Deku writes v2 (which is ultimately what I ended up with), but I still thought Deku's straightforward version was a bit of a let-down after Bakugo's gloriously ridiculous version of events. It wasn't until after much hair-pulling that I realized that, oh hey, Deku would be doped up on a pain-killers: what if his words were more *ahem* freely flowing because of that, so I could contrast his gooey sappiness of how sweet and wonderful Bakugo was with...that thing that the actual Bakugo actually wrote. And, bingo, that was the version I was finally happy with! 😊 I also initially planned to do a bunch of CSS with this, but I actually thought the various things I tried detracted from the fic, so I ended up just using my usual slightly-tidied-up workskin for tables with no internal borders. (Look, I have a whole workskin entirely of useful tables just in CASE, okay? This is totally normal behavior, really... 😏)
  
  
  • New TattleCrime Exclusive! - 1k swap-assignment + 2k PH I picked up, Hannibal/Will. Freddie Lounds' tabloid articles! I've wanted to do something like this medium with Hannibal for a long time, so I was delighted to finally get the chance! Also, I am obsessed with how weird and over-the-top Hannibal and Will's wedding would be, so I had fun with that. I wholescale borrowed the CSS for this, but I think it's very cute, and I'm glad to have it for future use as well.
  
  
  • Running Commentary - A 1k treat for my assigned recip, Bakugo/Deku for BNHA, and more fun with different mediums: this time character notebook pages! All right, so, I used an existing workskin for this, and it still was the longest/hardest thing to code. It turns out that AO3 just loves to move around bold tags, and if I got the bold tags inside the span tags, it fucked up the text that was at an angle so it was a pain in the ass to read. And then every so often AO3 would just bold EVERYTHING, and I wanted to cry! Part of the trick to this was that I wanted to make it readable both with creator's style and not, and to do that I had to overload the del tags and also created a span class that canceled out the bolding on Bakugo's comments with the custom stylesheet on (and thus they'd turn bold when the custom stylesheet was off). Is anyone ever going to read this fic without my stylesheet? Who knows! But I am proud of the stupid amounts of effort I put into making it all still work the other way. Also, this marks the most 'art' I allowed myself for this exchange. The ring on the final page went like this: I took a ring I owned and taped it to a sheet of paper, took a photo of it, and then traced over the photo in MS Paint to get a rough "drawing" of it, then set the background to transparent, so the notebook page of the CSS would show behind it when I put it on the page. To be clear, all my art classes were before digital art existed as a medium, so this is about the extent of my capability with digital art, which makes me sad.
  
  
  • If It Were Possible to Murder Someone over the Internet… - A 1k PH that went over, Hannibal/Will, and me having fun with forum posts! This started with my obsession with that body that Will told Hannibal was Freddie Lounds, and then they re-murdered it back and forth throughout half of S2. So...seriously, whose body WAS THAT?!?!?! o.O I want to know! (And now this forum does, lol.)
  
  
  • Accursed - 1k of a 3k PH for Worldbuilding for The Old Miao Myth. Okay, so one of the things I did during FIAB was watched the entire series The Old Miao Myth, which was SUPER FUN (justice for Second Brother!), and wrote things for it. This was one of my undisclosed things I was watching for a while. And through the middle of the series, I kept thinking "huh, Lou Dung hasn't shown up for a long time, and these people are fucking up their lives pretty well on their own, does Lou Dung even do anything, or is the curse entirely in the people themselves?" And I was also really hoping we'd get more on Lou Dung's origins (especially once Bong's backstory got revealed), but alas, no. So this fic is a conglomeration on those two topics, and I was very pleased with it.
  
  
  • Counting Arrows - The remaining 2k of the previously mentioned 3k PH, also for The Old Miao Myth, this time Bong/Cho. And, like, look, those two should absolutely fuck. A lot. Except Bong has too many trust issues for that, and also would not go down well with Cho's family. But, like, there is a LOT of repressed tension there. If Bong hadn't gotten killed (along with everyone else, lol), they totally should've fucked, eventually, after probably a bazillion more years of UST.
  
  
  • HousesuoH - A 3k PH that I went way over on, worldbuilding for House of Leaves. I'd been eying the House of Leaves prompts from day one, and I have a SUPER COOL idea for blueprints/design plans for it, which - alas - I do not have the digital art skills to realize. But I still wanted to do something for it, and I saw this PH with the journal/diary option, and figured I'd have fun writing a good, old-fashioned horror story for it. This is one of those fics that practically wrote itself, and I had no idea where it was going as I wrote it, but I was 100% along for the ride. I really like the way this one turned out. Also, the (very minimal) CSS was surprisingly difficult! Mostly because I have never had cause to create upside-down/backwards/whatever text. The hardest part was getting that up/down/right/left to look like a perfect square (and it still doesn't in mobile, but oh well).
  
  So, yes, just a wee bit overboard. I had SO MUCH FUN, though! 😊


• Nope, nothing new on Femslash Salad Bar...


• BNHA: I've finished the last of the movies/OVAs, but I am not ready to be done with Bakugo's shouting yet. So now I'm reading the Team-Up Missions manga, which is fulfilling this important need.


• I got the first of the Benjamin January mysteries out of the library, but it was just not to my taste. Way too much description of people's clothing, and also women being sexual objects owned by men. And, like, I could tell that this was historical and well-researched and all that, but I have limited patience for putting up with that sort of thing in my recreational reading. There's enough oppressive misogyny in real life; I have VERY limited tolerance for it being mixed in with my fun.


• I am now reading The Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi, though, and I'm enjoying it quite a lot! It's a light, breezy read, and I'm currently about halfway through. I should finish shortly.


• Heaven Official's Blessing by MXTX - I've already started this! I have all 8 volumes, and I figured this was a good activity over my break, lol. I'm only a couple chapters into volume 1, so this is obviously going to be a long haul, but (unsurprisingly) I'm enjoying it so far!


• The Deer and the Cauldron by Louis Cha - I continue to make slow progress. Basically, I'm reading a chapter here or there in breaks between other things.


• Dear Door - Some progress. This is another one where I read a chapter when I feel in the mood.

Goals for this week: 1) Keep plugging away at FFFX, let's try 3k again! 2) Read stuff, doesn't matter what! 3) Get my thoughts together for my New Years post.