a suspicious absence of penguins @icebluecyanide - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
a suspicious absence of penguins
@icebluecyanide
Cyan (he/him or they/them). Always here for family stories. Actually a penguin blog in disguise. Sidebar gif by the amazing @bikatniss.
One Piece sideblog: @oceanofstardust.
It’s already 2026, so I thought I might look back and create a wrap-up post for the writing I did last year!
In total, I published 27.9k words last year, spread over 8 fics, all for the Alex Rider fandom. It wasn't the best year for writing, unfortunately, but I still managed to post some fics I'm proud of, and I did actually write a fair bit that didn't get posted (but hopefully will in the future).
As always, thanks so much to everyone who took the time to read and leave kudos and comment on my fics, it always makes my day <3
Yassen & Alex
Drinking Lessons (T, 4.8k) - Devil!verse fic where Yassen teaches 16-year-old Alex a lesson about alcohol.
After Alex drinks a bit too much at a New Year's Eve party, Yassen decides to get Alex drunk to teach him about his limits.
Domesticated (T, 8.1k) - Hurt/comfort fic where Yassen takes care of a concussed Alex and his cats.
Alex wakes up with a pounding headache to find that not only is Yassen Gregorovich apparently alive, but he is sitting in Alex’s armchair with a purring cat in his lap, quietly reading a book. It's a lot to take in.
Written for the Spyfest 2025 Gift Exchange.
Yassen/Alex
The Benefits of Friendship (E, 1.2k) - 3x06 AU where Yassen gives Alex a handjob, with implied past John/Yassen.
Set during episode 3x06. Alex and Yassen have to share the only bed in the safe house. When Alex struggles to sleep, Yassen decides to lend a hand.
The Rooftop Revisited (E, 1.1k) - Movieverse yalex PWP.
Another rooftop, another conversation.
"This doesn't change anything," Alex insisted as he let Yassen push him against the wall, already fumbling with Yassen's belt.
Yassen sounded almost amused. "As you say."
The Affair at the Wedding (E, 3.9k) - Post-S3 Yalex where Alex tries to hide he's been drugged with an aphrodisiac.
It’s just Alex’s luck that the next time he sees Yassen after Invisible Sword, he ends up hurt, stuck in a storage cupboard with Yassen, and fighting the effects of a rather potent aphrodisiac.
Exchange treat for @proodence for Spyfest After Dark 2025.
Miscellaneous
Death in Paradise (John & Alex, T, 2.2k) - Ark Angel AU where Alex is saved his father.
A slight change in timing means there is no Tamara Knight to rescue Alex from the Mary Belle. Trapped twenty-two metres below the surface and with his air supply running out, Alex finds himself saved instead by a man who's supposed to be long dead: John Rider.
like ashes in your mouth (Ash & Alex, T, 2.7k) - Snakehead told through Ash's POV.
There are times, during that final mission, when he considers killing the boy in his sleep. It would be a kinder thing to do than this, the way Ash lies to his face while leading Alex to his grave.
Ash's POV on his deception of Alex during the Snakehead mission.
Game Over (Alex, T, 3.9k) - Whump mission fic where Alex gets used as a dartboard before he manages to escape.
When Alex is caught on a mission, the guards come up with a cruel game to torment him. Not for the first time, Alex finds himself hurt and tied up, and with no one to rely on but himself.
The Scorpia board meeting in Scorpia (book) is so funny because they really are just so cartoonishly evil. Dr Three is like 'ah Mrs Rothman can I just check that the victims of Invisible Sword will be all children?' and Mrs Rothman is like 'yes, will that be an issue?' and he's just like 'oh no no just checking 😊'
Meanwhile Mrs Rothman (who designed this plan to specifically target children) is all like 'I adore children. So glad I didn't have any of my own tho'. Honestly she was quite funny for that
The Scorpia board meeting in Scorpia (book) is so funny because they really are just so cartoonishly evil. Dr Three is like 'ah Mrs Rothman can I just check that the victims of Invisible Sword will be all children?' and Mrs Rothman is like 'yes, will that be an issue?' and he's just like 'oh no no just checking 😊'
Weather talk/bonding is so real honestly, it rains for five minutes and suddenly total strangers in the supermarket will be like 'it sure is raining isn't it' at you lmao
my problem is if i enjoy something enough i will be nitpicking. i Will have things to say about where and how it failed. out of nothing but love straight from my heart. unfortunately this often makes me indistinguishable from a hater who has never experienced joy or kindness. such is the amateur critic's burden.
all of my favourite things are like beautiful racehorses that trip over their own feet a hundred times. but they get back up again. and goddamn, you should see them run.
I will always take the cat's side. "she's drooling on me" you're so lucky "he always wants to be petted" then pet him "he's mad I won't let him on my desk" make room on your desk for him. I am your cat's defense lawyer and the cat is always innocent on the grounds of them being A Little Kitty Cat.
I think fanfiction as a medium is different enough from mainstream literature in the tools it offers writers that it's a shame that it's not talked about more often. And it's not me saying "fanfic is better than books xD" because that sort of mindset is a symptom of people who aren't particularly well read in either medium. I'm just speaking of like... The little things you get to do with a fanfic that you genuinely can't really do in an original story.
I had a big fanfic in a previous fandom where one of the big reveals was the involvement of a kind of infamous villain, whose presence was built up to and foreshadowed through the whole fic until his reveal without ever mentioning his name, so that the name drop would be a gut punch. It worked especially well because of who the villain was and his presence in that fandom space specifically (it's very complicated) and if it was an original story this reveal wouldn't work at all the way it was written in the fic. Because if you don't have a predisposition to think about that character and his relationship to the hero in a very specific way, then just seeing their name won't do much to you; the reveal and the recontextualisation it pushes upon you hinges on your previous knowledge of the source material.
I think it's an interesting tool fanfic authors are given. One of my favorite fanfic of all time is partially a re-imagining of its source material's canon, and something it does is introduce antagonists much earlier in the story or deepen npcs' stories. It then works to evoke a tragic irony that again wouldn't work if you didn't know the source material, and it's something the author obviously has a lot of fun with.
You could call it cheap or a crutch and I mean, yeah, sure, it is a little bit: the fanfic relies on previously established emotional bonds and stakes to achieve its goal, and in some cases it saves the author from having to 'properly' build up its stakes. But I think it's INTERESTING that it has that tool at its disposal. I think it's a fun thing to play with and I think these built in expectations and emotional bonds are especially why I find story driven aus in particular to be fascinating in the amount of ways you can play with them. You know??
THIS!!! One of my favorite things to think about when writing is how you create tension to drive the narrative forward. Of course this can be done in a number of ways with interpersonal dynamics or the "surface plot" as it were, but where fanfiction really shines in this regard is DRAMATIC IRONY! Like in Romeo in Juliet where *we* as the audience know Juliet is only sleeping but Romeo thinks she's dead. As a fic writer you can operate under the assumption that your audience has a certain familiarity with the source material and you can absolutely play that to your advantage in ways you never could in original fiction.
OP's example of having a big bad we all know haunt the narrative until their reveal is a classic. One of my other faves is (especially good in an AU) recontextualizing events or dialogue from canon in unexpected ways to either give catharsis or to create an ironic plot twist.
I suppose I've seen it done where it can read as a storytelling "crutch" but in the really solid fics I've read, my all-time faves, the author does this so elegantly. In some ways I dont consider it THAT different from when a lot of 20th century and earlier authors assume their readership came to the table with a knowledge of the classics & so could be assured they would "get the reference" if they drew parallels to the Odyssey or something. Or when authors have little references or intertextuality that shows their piece is clearly in dialogue with their contemporaries. Anyway I love fanfiction as viewed as its own genre of fiction.
Something nobody prepares you for is that the better you get at writing the harder it becomes. beginners write freely because they don't know enough to know what's wrong. then you learn. and suddenly you can see every single flaw in real time as you're making it and you have to write anyway while your own brain is in the corner going "that's a weak verb. that transition is lazy. you've used that word three times." getting good at this is mostly just getting better at ignoring yourself.
The thing that always strikes me about that conversation at the end of Scorpia where Alex gets told the truth about John is that like. MI6 are basically like 'yeah he worked for us and we faked some of those assassinations he did. Not all of them though, we didn't care about the corrupt police guy etc and he was pretending to be a killer.' And idk there's just this sense of yes, John Rider wasn't as evil as most of Scorpia and wasn't actually working for them, but he was still willing to kill in cold blood for his job, and Alex is basically the only one in the book who has a real issue with that. Scorpia obviously don't care, but MI6 also aren't too bothered by it as long as it's not 'innocent' people.
hey can everyone do me a favor and put in the tags why they chose their name? even if you don't go by a chosen name irl, you can put why you chose your online name.
I'D LOVE TO ELABORATE because this is one of my favorite astronomy stories.
Okay. So in the field of Radio Astronomy, there's this phenomenon called a "fast radio burst", a very short, strong radio pulse picked up by a radio telescope. They're still poorly understood, and are considered very exciting to radio astronomers because of how rare they are.
In the 2010's, astronomers working at Australia's Parkes Radio Observatory identified a number of radio signals picked up by the telescope that appeared to resemble fast radio bursts, which they called Perytons.
However, they quickly realized that the signals had to be terrestrial in origin due to the strength of the signal.... as well as the fact that they always occurred during weekdays, around the same time.
The signals tended to be clustered around midday... hmm...
Further evidence that the signals were man-made... this trend also followed daylight savings!!!
(Unless aliens also follow Australian daylight savings conventions, which is highly unlikely...)
It took the astronomers several years, but they eventually tracked down the source to a microwave oven in the facility's break room.
They were unable to recreate the signal, until they tried opening the microwave door before it beeped. Turns out the microwave was letting out a tiny amount of radio emissions when the door opened, which the nearby telescope was sensitive enough to detect.
The Peryton signals had been popping up in the data for over a decade, presumably because astronomers taking their lunch breaks had been opening the break room microwave prematurely for the same reason cited by OP.
I imagine they must have a big sign reading "LET THE MICROWAVE FINISH BEFORE OPENING" hanging in the break room now.
TLDR: If you work in radio astronomy, let the microwave beep before opening it and removing your lunch.
(PS: I highly recommend reading the paper explaining the origin of Perytons, it's short and also pretty entertaining.)
