#dirigibleplumbing

[dirigibleplumbing]

it's my birthday on Tuesday! help me celebrate by leaving a comment on my fic, reblogging my art, or sending me a nice ask!

[angelinthefire]

Not only is Cas + Dean + honey unfluffy, it can be downright angsty. I think that Dean, like fandom, could latch onto this one known interest Cas has, and while he'd hate being reminded of Honey Cas he'd totally try to "bribe" Cas with bee-related gifts. Dean is always interested in things that make Cas more reachable, touchable, and human. Cas, who may not even remember what happened when he was dealing with Sam's Hell memories, could easily think Dean is just taking him to a beeswax candle store because Dean likes doing human things together. It would be deliciously hurtful and unsustainable--maybe one day Dean thinks Cas is watching a bee (in fact, Cas is thinking about Dean's eye crinkles) and freaks out and after the yelling and stomping is over, they start to figure things out, but it takes a while.

I don't want to tell you not to have fun with this concept if you want.

But if you're asking for my opinion I'm going to give it, because, again, I want to keep the anti-bee discourse going. And I have to say that I disagree with you.

A large part of my objection to the bee trope is not just that it's bad characterization for Cas, but that it's also incredibly out of character for Dean to play a part in it.

Like it's not just a question of being reminded of how Cas was at that time. I think the end of s7 was such a negative experience that Dean would outright reject conceptualizing honey-Cas as a component part of Cas at all.

I could go on about "Nobody cares that you're broken, Cas, now clean up your mess". There's layers to that line (including guilt and projection on Dean's part, but also just plain anger and frustration) but this is not the post to get into that. Right now, I'm just raising it because that is the sentiment people unintentionally call back to every time they use the bee trope. That is how Dean felt about honey-Cas. So no, I don't think it's at all believable that Dean would do anything that invokes Cas' behaviour from those episodes.

(And yes, there was the "I'd rather have you" speech and Dean starting to be willing to take Cas as he is. But almost immediately after that, Dean and Cas get sucked into Purgatory and separated, so Dean never has to follow through. When he meets Cas again, Cas is "better" and Dean gets to make a clean break with honey-Cas and leave it in the past. Which he does.)

I agree that Dean is interested in bringing Cas down-to-earth, but whenever he does, it's on his terms. Dean shows Cas his own favourite movies, he makes him a mix-tape of his own favourite songs, he invites him to hang out at diners that he likes, he encourages behaviour (like flirting with waitresses) that Dean considers fundamental to his own specific experience. For Dean, making Cas human means making him relatable to his own life. It's something that I really enjoy because on the one hand, there's a kind of narrowness to it, Dean doesn't really have a curiosity about the kind of semi-human that Cas could become on his own terms. On the other hand, it's Dean sharing pieces of himself with Cas. It's Dean making Cas more his own, in a way. (also, as we know from the mix-tape, Dean is not generally in the habit of giving gifts to Cas. The mix-tape is an exception.)

That all being said, I would be glad if I started seeing the bee trope being used as a source of angst instead of as some fluffy thing. (but I'd be even happier if it was excised from the fandom entirely)

[findingstony]

hello! thanks for all that you do. I'm looking for a fic that was inspired by Baldur's Gate 3 when the game was still in early access. (I should say I'm only 70% sure this was a Steve/Tony fic and not another pairing I like...) I think it was 616 but it could've been a different universe. the main thing it took from the game was the particular mind-reading mechanic. I remember an author's note referred to the game was "EA BG3" and at the time I had no idea what that meant and had to have a friend explain it to me. I read it on AO3.

Request 2,628! Send us an ask if you know this fic!

[sineala]

director's commentary for Double Time? anything you have to say about it, or if you're looking for something more specific, on the structure and POV? it's so masterfully put together, I'm impressed every time I read and would love to hear about how you accomplished it

Honestly with that one I think I just got real lucky.

I knew that I wanted to write a 616/Noir crossover that was a fixit for Civil War but it was rattling around my brain for a long time specifically because I didn't know how to make the structure/POV work.

(This is honestly the fandom where I have learned the most about handling POV. I think it's all the identity porn. To write identity porn you have to be very conscious through the entire story of what facts your narrator knows about reality and how they line up with the actual truth. Sort of like an unreliable narrator, I guess. Anyway, this was definitely a skill I had to develop.)

More POV nerdery under the Read More!

I considered keeping the POV to one specific character but then I couldn't figure out who, because no one character is present for all the events in the story -- the 616 guys don't get there until partway through, so it can't be one of them, but if I have one of the Noir characters narrate the whole thing, it'll be hard to make it a convincing CW fixit because they won't be privy to enough information about Civil War. (I was going to say "it's not like 616 Steve and Tony are going to have a screaming fight about Civil War in front of other people" but then I remembered that they have canonically done this more than once, so, uh, they actually would. But I still don't think that would be the best way to go here.)

Then I thought about alternating POV by scene, so that if something happened that would be best narrated by a particular character, they could take the POV for that scene. And that has the advantage, obviously, of making sure that the most suitable character would be narrating each scene. But it also has some disadvantages. One is that making sure each character has what feels like a fair amount of POV would be a big mess with four possible narrators, and I know people who write, like, epic fantasy doorstops don't seem to mind doing this, but there's a reason I don't write epic fantasy doorstops. I didn't want to sit there color-coding scenes by narrator -- I can totally do this in Scrivener and I did it for Slipping Off The Page and Devil In Us All, actually -- but I just... didn't want to. It's a lot of work with a lot of narrators. The other disadvantage is that switching POV character frequently is both jarring and difficult. Whose head are we in now? Does the reader know? Are we really clear? Does it feel like this character? Whoops, new scene, time to establish POV all over again.

Then I realized I was thinking too hard and the answer was right in front of me. Just take whoever shows up next!

Chapter 1: This has to be either Noir Tony or Noir Steve. I went with Noir Steve because I knew I needed Tony later. At the end of the chapter, 616 Tony falls out of the sky.

Chapter 2: 616 Tony has just gotten here. He is fucked-up and grief-stricken and misses Steve and he can sit here and compare Noir Steve to his Steve who by the way is Dead. And at the end of the chapter, he brings 616 Steve back to life!

Chapter 3: 616 Steve! This way, 616 Steve and Tony can get over their Civil War issues and one of them is the POV character which is great because you really do kind of want that from one of them rather than the Noir people.

Chapter 4: Noir Tony is the only one left. He's been here all along, yes, but I figured that the big villain showdown was a big enough difference from the rest of the plot that no one would mind me switching. Also, the villain is Baron Zemo, and Noir Tony is definitely the guy who knows the most about Noir Zemo and I wouldn't really have wanted that confrontation from anyone else's head.

Epilogue: A little scene from everyone as they all live happily ever after!

This means that I don't need to juggle narrators for every single scene, everyone gets their own chapter and no one feels slighted, and also it means that I only really have to establish POV really firmly at the beginning of every chapter, which might not be noticeable but it was definitely a conscious choice.

Chapter 1 is Noir Steve, and because he's the first narrator I don't really have to put in a lot to distinguish him because as far as the reader knows he's the only one:

Wide-eyed, Bucky's staring at him like Steve's said he's gotten Glenn Miller and his Army Air Force Band to come play for them—which, Steve thinks, would probably be more likely than what he has actually managed to arrange, because there are celebrities and then there are celebrities, and Tony Stark is the latter.

"You're pulling my leg, right?" Bucky asks. His voice has gone high, cracking with excitement, and even though he's eighteen now and the Invaders' sniper, someone who's seen more than anyone his age should, suddenly he seems very, very young, like the excited kid he'd been when the Army had assigned him to Steve. "Tony Stark? Really? Tony Stark, who used to be in Marvels magazine? Not some other fella?"

"Tony Stark from Marvels," Steve confirms, and Bucky whistles in admiration. "No joke, Buck, I swear. You meet a lot of interesting people when you're Captain America."

But at any rate, we're clearly in the 40s, and the narrator here is clearly military, and in fact because Glenn Miller is alive you know it's before 1944. Anyway, this is obviously a WWII Steve, right? The slang! The diction! You can tell!

Chapter 2 is 616 Tony, and he is a very different experience, because he is modern and he has Extremis in his head:

With a single thought, Tony mutes the Extremis error message that whispers in his ears. His satellite network is gone. There are no satellites. It's 1943. It's four years before transistors. Fourteen years before Sputnik. And thirty-two years before Tony should have been born.

Here we have a modern guy who has a computer in his head, he is knowledgeable enough to have a bunch of dates of modern inventions memorized, and just in case you didn't know this was 616 Tony Stark he is already mourning the fact that he doesn't have his transistors. You know how he loves his transistors.

In addition to being able to refer to events of 616 canon that he experiences, Tony uses a bunch of metaphors and similes in his head that mostly involve technology that the Noir people don't have and that even 616 Steve wouldn't be calling by these names:

Ice curls around Tony's heart. The image feels like it's seared into his vision, leaving traces of itself everywhere he looks, like burn-in on a bad CRT—Steve bleeding out on the steps, over and over and over. "I don't want to talk about him."

Of the four narrators in this story, only one of them is going to use the word "CRT" to describe a television and you know who it is.

Chapter 3 is 616 Steve, and he knows all the things 616 Steve knows, and also he's super angry at Tony:

Six months? He's been gone for six months? And look what it's done to Tony, he thinks, but no, he doesn't care, he can't care about him. He can't forgive Tony for what he did. Tony picked accountability over liberty. He hunted down everyone who didn't agree with him. He threw his friends, their friends, in a prison in the Negative Zone. He's probably been running a police state for superheroes. Steve can't just brush it off. He can't smile and shake his hand and offer easy platitudes.

"Well, I'm still alive," Steve points out, a little more roughly than he has to. "Just unstuck in time."

This is an extremely Steve-centric summary of Civil War. It is very unflattering to Tony and it is full of rage. This definitely not how anyone else is going to describe that arc.

Steve is really angry. He's angry and he's mean.

Tony snorts in derision. "Captain America is disappointed in Captain America. This is a new low, isn't it?"

"Shut up," Steve says, because he has really had enough. Couldn't he have come back to life somewhere nice? Maybe with his actual friends?

Tony studies him in the moonlight for long seconds.

"I came to you with my hand extended," Tony says, very quietly. He bites his lip. "I wanted to talk. You could have stopped this. We could have come to an agreement. None of this had to happen. And you reached for my hand, and you stuck an EMP in my palm, and then you tried to kill me. So don't you dare say this is all on me. Don't you fucking put that on me. I didn't do this alone."

"No," Steve says, "but you sure tried your best, didn't you, Director?"

616 Steve is not usually this mean, no, but this is a Steve who Tony last saw alive in The Confession, and I would like you all to remember that half of The Confession involved Steve telling Tony he thought he (Tony) was sick, unwell, and had powers he didn't understand, and yelling at him about his feelings. Like, this is that guy and he just woke up and he is pissed.

Chapter 4 is Noir Tony!

This is going to make one hell of a story someday.

Tony just hopes he'll be alive to tell it.

This is a Tony who does exciting things and (crucially) tells stories about them, and that's Noir Tony. That's not any other Tony.

"Hey, Iron Man!" he calls out, and Stark turns his head. "You said you could talk to machines?"

Stark must see where he's going with this, because he shakes his head. It's a huge movement in the suit. His stare is impassive and disconcerting; Tony can't see his eyes behind the shining eyeslits. "Not guns. Gunpowder's chemical. My powers are electrical. I can talk to computers. Which mostly don't exist yet. So I'm. Uh. Mostly useless."

"Tony!" Rogers snaps, in reproach, and Tony wonders what the hell happened where he came from to make Stark think he's no better than dirt.

"Electrical?" he repeats, just as the green beam fires again. It's closer this time. "So you could switch that ray gun off?" He'll bet anything there's electricity powering it. Why wouldn't aliens have electricity? "You could buy us some time and cut the power for this whole damn place at the generator?"

His diction is a little more like Steve's (either of them) but he's clearly a Tony Stark, and he does tactics like Tony Stark but his conception of technology is of course from the 40s and he conceptualizes Skrull plasma weaponry as "alien ray guns," which, I mean, fair.

Also he doesn't really get why 616 Tony has poor self-esteem and that means he's definitely not 616 Tony.

So that's how I did this one.

I mean, I don't know that the reader is consciously aware of any of this but I was definitely consciously aware of doing it. This was me pulling out all my POV tricks to try to differentiate four different characters who are really sort of just two characters.

[warmlightzine]

Contributor Profile - DirgiblePlumbing

We have @dirigibleplumbing joining the zine as one of our amazing writers!!

[copperbadge]

junker5 replied to your photo “Dearborn demands your entire attention, all the pets you are capable...”

Have you braved a second trip to the vets yet?

Alas we have not. Unless she’s showing signs of actually being sick, I may wait until I can be in the room with her. They’ve never freaked out at the vet’s like that before, and I’m positive it’s because she was separated from both me and Polk. They’re almost always in the same room as me or one another at home, and the only time I’ve seen Dearborn get anxious at the vet’s before was when they took Polk into another room to have her ears washed and Deebs couldn’t see, hear, or smell her. Even when she had to get a shot last time and the vet accidentally hit the wrong place and she let out the saddest wail I’ve ever heard, she didn’t freak out as long as she could see me.  

sfortuna replied to your photo “Dearborn demands your entire attention, all the pets you are capable...”

I don't have any chicken snacks, but I do have shrimpies and fish skin!! It'll make her breath atrocious but man, does it help their coats and skin

They are weirdly indifferent to fish, oddly enough. They’re so un-food-motivated to begin with -- they don’t really like treats, they free feed without gaining extra weight because they rarely even eat a cup’s worth in a day, and they won’t eat salmon flavored wet food. The only food I’ve seen them go bonkers for is chicken (preferably cooked or raw; the dried chicken comes a distant third). And Dearborn fucking loves McDonalds fries and hamburgers, for some reason. 

frystavirki replied to your photo “Dearborn demands your entire attention, all the pets you are capable...”

oh what a face! what paws! how can you torment her so, by doing something besides petting her when she wants to be petted

Truly I am the cruelest cat papa of them all. 

hlahlahlahlahly replied to your post “Man, I’m not even working on the Ozyverse today (I have a schedule –...”

That's so exciting! I love Stealing Harry for many reasons, including the fact that a podfic version kept me company through months of vertigo when I could do almost boring, but Cartographers craft is an all time favorite, and fighting the skeleton is one of my favorite parts

Aw, that’s lovely to hear! I do think CC is not as hobbled by canon as SH, which made it easier to come up with new and fun things to write about. 

dirigibleplumbing replied to your post “chicleeblair: copperbadge: ferrousferrule: copperbadge: I’ve...”

"Chiacago" sounds like a style of lighting in Italian painting

Chicagoscuro! :D

lasrina reblogged your video and added:

*door is kicked open* someBODY once told me

SomeBODY once told me the world was gonna roll me

I ain’t the smartest bear in the forest

She was looking really scared cause I’m a giant freaking bear

And I kicked in the door own it

kissmeagainarthas replied to your link “The 20 best Italian beefs in Chicago”

I am begging you to start drama about this on Twitter. :P

But then I’d have to go to Twitter D: WHY CAN’T WE HAVE NICE DRAMA RIGHT HERE. 

[arukou-arukou]

And also 7, 13, and 15

7 What story/headcanons do you feel the proudest of?

hmmmmmmmm. story maybe crucible. worked real hard on it and ditn’ want t to be quick fix. also gorgeous art from lu. i love you lu. you and your gorgieous art

13. When did you start writing fanfic?

uhd maybe 13? 14? 12? somehwere around there. yu yu hakusho. self-insert. lost to the annals of the geocities purge htnak god

15 What is the fanfic you’ve written that you’re most proud of?

wshop. guess i answered thirteen with this quesioan. um. headcanons. maybe that mcu nat has here redroom story from comics. like hse’s way older than she looks and is enhancedf and had a torrid affair with the winter solider. i think i wrote a asnippet of that and poseted. i defienitely did. don’t remember what ititeld it though

(forgiiiiiiiiiiiive my typeoing)

[findhannibalfics]

Hi! I'm looking for a Will/Hannibal fic I read on AO3. Things I know for sure about it: it was told non-linearly; it took place in a world pretty similar to canon; it was complete; and it was longer than 4k. I *think* it was a one-shot, I'm pretty sure it wasn't part of a series, and I thiiiink it was a post-season-3 story but it might not have been. I've looked through the "non-linear narrative" and "non-chronological" tags but haven't found it. I wish I could remember more details. Thanks

Friend, I have read so many nonlinear, canon-compliant (or more-or-less canon-compliant) Hannigram fics.  SO MANY.  

I know you already said you wish you could remember more details, but… literally anything might help.  As it is, there is absolutely no way I can make a reasonable guess as to which specific fic you’re looking for, I’m sorry  :\

Something I do when I’m looking for a specific fic that I know I read but can’t find with a search - I try to remember what the circumstances I found it under were.  Was it something linked by someone I follow on Tumblr?  Was I just browsing the tag on AO3?  Might it have been a bookmark by another author I like?  Sometimes this helps me re-trace my steps and get to the fic.

(And sometimes I spend hours in my AO3 history.  If I could have one wish for a feature on that website, it would be the ability to search/filter one’s history!)