#diehellarache

[elucubrare]

⚔️ for the pure joy of honorable combat. honor optional

how dare you suggest I would fight without honor! a double duel! with even bigger swords! 

[elucubrare]

🎨 📚

what do you always doodle when you’re bored?

considering my Very Bad Art Skills, I don't (and also am not in very many situations where i've got a pen and paper), but when i do have pen and paper and time, I write various phrases - in high school it was "timor mortis conturbat me" [the fear of death disturbs me] and the rest of it; now often "forsan et haec olim meminisse iuvabit" [perhaps it will be pleasing to remember even these things one day]; or "je meurs de soif en couste la fontaine" [I die of thirst beside the fountain] 

share 3 books that you love and your favourite quote from them.

I actually can't do quotes, but here are three books I like: 

Kage Baker, The Anvil of the WorldUmberto Eco, The Island of the Day Before Mary Renault, The King Must Die

[rolameny]

⭐star⭐

HELLO, THANK YOU FOR PARTICIPATING IN THE FIC COMMENTARY MEME,

For this I picked a section out of Momentum, which was my first longish Destiny fic.

Cix peers over his shoulder, holding her hair out of her eyes. “Why is there a gum wrapper in your book, Rust? A gum wrapper and a... dead Martian beetle?”

“I've been trying to find that out for about an hour,” Rust says. “I found someone's scrapbook in the library and Tertiaire-5 made me take it. She said it's probably a Hunter's. Asaamu, do you recognize it?”

So this chapter of the fic was 50% “let’s fuck around and write some goofy friend interaction” and 50% “let’s fuck around with worldbuilding through ephemera”

Most of the characters we see are tinkerers or journalers or creators of some kind, and so many quests come up in the form of “o we found this mysterious scrap of knowledge let’s hunt down the rest” I like the idea of just, like, people leaving even innocent mysteries around. a romance novel someone used as a commonplace book for conspiracy theories and anatomy studies! why not!

Asaamu unfolds a paper flower made from a receipt. He flips it over to find a drawing of a psion's jawbone and a theory on Cabal machine intelligence, and frowns down at it. “Nope, but there's a lot of people who keep this sort of thing nowadays. If you put it back they'll probably come pick it up eventually.”

Cix squints. “Wait, The Exo's Reefborn Lover? What kind of a scrapbook is this?”

“The deeply weird kind,” says Rust's Ghost. He hovers overhead and shines a point of light down onto the pages. “See, half of this person's notes are bizarro theories about Tower cafeteria food and half of them are yelling about the book's ignorance of exo anatomy.”

Asaamu sits up straight. “Exo anatomy, you say,” he says, and something in his voice makes Cix turn to him and say, strangled, “Don't you dare.”

“Don't I?” Asaamu asks, grinning hard. He holds the book away from Cix and starts reading from it in a booming voice:

“Encephal-2 held Artyomov to herself, even as Artyomov reached for their gauntlets. 'Surely the Queen can spare you for an hour,' she said – no, this part's boring, we can definitely do better, oh yes here we go: Encephal gazed at her lover with eyes shining with electric charge, and Artyomov's eyes caught that fierce blaze and returned it threefold. Encephal felt like that look was burning her up, her circuits overheating, her cooling fans unable to keep up. She took Artyomov's hand in hers and guided it down, down to the secret places she'd never shown anybody else–”

DID I WRITE THIS ROMANCE NOVEL SCENE BASED OFF MY EXPERIENCE IN TRANSFORMERS FANDOM? DEAR READER,

obviously lmao

the Destiny setting has both magical blue space humans (called Awoken) and robot people (called exos), and listen! what’s better than this! what’s better than romance novels!!!

“I'm going to kill you,” Cix mumbles from behind him, face sunk into her hands.

“Is it accurate?” Asaamu asks. “Tell us, Cix, did–” he checks the spine “–Beatris Chriqui, of hallowed name, get this right?”

Every Time I Mention A Throwaway Character I Give Them A Sephardi Name, the first law of my writing

Rust looks back and forth between the two of them, lost.

“Someone,” Asaamu tells her, “had an excellent night with an exo of our acquaintance. I was just hearing all about it.”

“It was one drink when you bailed on us, I'm going to kill you,” Cix says, and throws the open bag of cococherries at him.

And That’s Friendship

Destiny is set like 700 years into the future and a few times it’s mentioned in canon that a lot of the fruit people eat is just, like, batshit crossbreeds (there’s a line in canon where someone looks at a list of products and goes like, kiwicumber, ok that’s standard, pineapple, THAT’s a weird combination, never heard of that before), so I had fun making my own.

These characters are all Mine OCs and they all pop up again and again in my fic -- I wrote Asaamu a romance with a big bug alien and Rust just turns up wherever I can slide her in.

The moral of all these Destiny fic commentaries is that I’m going as self-indulgent as possible and also that it’s some of the most fun I’ve ever had writing, so I’m going to keep on doing it as hard as I can.

[nomette]

a b k m s!

I thought for a moment that you’d written “a s-k m-e b-s” and thought “yeah, true.”

A. If you could rec a piece of music to accompany one of your fics, what would you pick? Why?

Listen, if you don’t have Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap on your MacCready soundtrack, you’re wrong. Profoundly wrong. You have misunderstood the character; no matter if it’s some banal coffee shop AU or high fantasy, your fucking 12 century swiss guard MacCready better be bumping ACDC. 

Oh, you protest, but I don’t like rock and roll. I don’t like ACDC. Okay, fine, but MacCready does, and he is a mercenary by trade who spends all his time blowing shit up for fun. All of ACDC’s discography is basically the same song, but that song was written about him. Highway to Hell and Shoot to Thrill are also acceptable alternatives.

B. Who’s your favorite side-character from something you wrote?

Probably Ace, my courser OC from SSTH. I can’t believe Bethesda made a race of immortal death robots and fandom didn’t immediately hop on that dick. Ace is like sixty, has been married, lived through her husband dying, joined the railroad, got mind-wiped, joined the railroad again, and is now hanging around the Institute because ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. 

K. Who have you killed this year? Why did they have to die?

my whole family, to gain power  I’m a fan of killing people in general; the most notable one is probably X6. People are pretty cavalier about destroying the Institute, but when you stop and think about it, you’re actually killing a lot of innocent synths. (Well, as much as anyone who is complicit in horrific crimes while brainwashed is innocent. It’s a grey area.)

Runner-up: Davi executing Maxson in front of the entire Institute to initiate her imperial regime. 

M. Meta! Have any meta about a story you’re dying to throw out there?

*Dons Hat of Pretension* Okay, so Shot Through the Head, Season Ticket and The Body Electric are meant to be read as a trifecta. They’re all about love, and the influence love has on your life, because this is fanfic and we’re all thirsty hoes, but wait! there’s more. The Body Electric is a “redemption narrative”; X6 is evil and he is learning about goodness through Curie. Season Ticket is the opposite; it’s a damnation narrative for both MacCready and X6. Shot Through the Head is the middle ground, and it’s got the most “grey” morals and grapples most directly with the question of love and the good and awful things people do for it.

s. What’s the sexiest thing you wrote this year?

Uhhhhhhh, welll. I hate writing sex scenes, so none of them are all that sexy to me, but I’m partial to MacCready and Leigh hooking up on the couch in Chapter 4 of STTH. It’s not like, fancy complicated sex, but it’s the first time they get their hands on each other and both characters come out a little dazed by how much they like the other person. 

[berrysphase]

🔥

oh thanks Rachel, hard mode on

Okay.  My most unpopular opinion has got to be that 2016 is A Pretty Awesome Year.  Sure, world politics is a giant dumpster fire with bonus fascist popcorn, global heating is taking off on an accelerated spiral, iconic celebrities are dying left and right, I have never been more sleep-deprived in my life, but!  I have fulfilled a biological imperative and, behold, it is Adorable, and, look, as far as I’m concerned, 2016 can stay.

(the US election, on the other hand, can be over YESTERDAY oh god make it stop)

[power-handmaiden]

FIGHT ME