ABC Fic Title Meme

30 October 2025 03:46 pm
arcanetrivia: (info not asked for (100% helpful))
[personal profile] arcanetrivia
(via [personal profile] delphi, here)

Rules: How many letters of the alphabet have you used for [starting] a fic title? One fic per line, 'A' and 'The' do not count for 'a' and 't'. Post your score out of 26 at the end, along with your total fic count.
(I assume that the intent was also that "An" should not count, even though it doesn't say so, although that turned out to be irrelevant for me.)

Drabbles are marked with an asterisk. I've only ever written for two fandoms, so there was no question of trying for breadth as [personal profile] delphi did, but I've tried to tilt this away from Harry Potter (the first fandom, up through 2011) as much as possible, and within that to go for a little variety. (I tend to get fixed on a particular character or ship or two and do little or nothing but that! Although that said, the Monkey Island drabbles that range further afield were done for a Thanksgiving week smut-drabble challenge last year, so I was doing all kinds of random things I usually wouldn't.)

A - all blue and honey gold (Monkey Island, Guybrush/Elaine)
B - Bottled (Harry Potter, Severus/Harry)
C - Cold Hands, Warm Hearts (Harry Potter, Severus/Aurora Sinistra)
D - Dress-Up (Monkey Island, Guybrush/Elaine)
E - Electric* (Monkey Island, Guybrush, LeChuck; warning: torture, unwanted sexual response)
F - First Time's the Charm (Monkey Island, Guybrush/Elaine)
G -
H - Heavy Wizardry (Harry Potter, gen)
I - Inspiration* (Monkey Island, Guybrush/Elaine)
L - Lilies are Red, Roses are Blue (Harry Potter, Severus/Lily)
M - Make Believe (Harry Potter, Severus & Lily friendship)
N - Night Music* (Monkey Island, Iron Rose/Flair Gorey)
O - Oil Slick* (Monkey Island, LeChuck/Largo)
P - Precision (Harry Potter, gen)
Q -
R - Really?* (Monkey Island, Guybrush/Elaine)
S - Starshine* (Monkey Island, Guybrush/Elaine)
T - Thirty-Three and a Third (Monkey Island, Guybrush/Elaine/OMC)
U -
V -
W - We Now Join Monkey Island 2, Already in Progress (Monkey Island, gen)
X -
Y -
Z -

17/26, from a total count of 90 (I think) including three ineligible "untitled"s, one that started with 20 ("20 Random Facts About..."), and 9 that were in a collection of the "Five Things" format, so they also all started with a number. (That makes 77 instead of 90 if you just discounted all those.) I had 5 starting with "A" and 14 starting with "The", so that really took a chunk out of it.

Almost 20 Monkey Island fic recs

28 October 2025 11:48 pm
arcanetrivia: (monkey island (guybrush))
[personal profile] arcanetrivia
Some of this is very old stuff (like, 20 years old in some cases) I found digging around in searches on LiveJournal and InsaneJournal, and a bonus one on FFN of even older vintage than that; also including some current stuff from this half of this year. Ranging all over the place in content and style--adventure, humor, friendship, whump, angst--and featuring a whole bunch of folks from Carla to Voodoo Lady. Read more... )

BTW, does anyone know why the "userhead" for AO3 profiles hasn't been loading lately?

fic recs: MST3K, HHG, Rocky Horror

28 October 2025 09:55 pm
arcanetrivia: (doctor who (ding when there's stuff))
[personal profile] arcanetrivia
Roll Opening Credits by [archiveofourown.org profile] sleepymarvel
Fandom: MST3K
Characters: Joel, Crow, Tom, GPC
Rating: General
Words: 2238

Author's summary: Joel's first moments on the satellite and the five stages of grief.
Author's notes: Takes place during the first few weeks Joel is in space.
Author's warnings: None
Additional tags: Five Stages of Grief, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Character Study

My comment: "I like the device of the stages of grief. Neat idea."

Quote:
Joel sits on the floor in the center of the bridge and decides he won't cooperate. He'll wait until everything returns to normal. He'll wait till Dr. Forrester explains exactly what's going on. There has to be an explanation.

-----

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Transexual, Transylvania by [archiveofourown.org profile] atrovel
Fandom: Rocky Horror Picture Show, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Pairing: Frank N. Furter/Everyone, Frank N. Furter/Arthur Dent
Rating: Teen
Words: 2523

Author's summary: Arthur Dent meets an alien he can actually sort of relate to.
Author's notes: i doubt this appeals to anyone except myself. it doesn’t really matter though, because myself is who i wrote it for. (also i haven’t brushed up on my h2g2 knowledge in quite a while so apologies for any inaccuracies or mischaracterization! frank on the other hand i have no excuse for i’m just not that great at writing him i think)
Author's warnings: None
Additional tags: Post Rocky Horror-Canon, Except Frank didn’t die, Crack Crossover, Crack Treated Seriously, Light Angst, Hurt/Comfort, but only kind of, Unexpected Bonding, I don’t know what this is, Frank is Zaphod’s ex-situationship, Bisexual Freak Ford Prefect, Frank just went back to Transexual instead of being killed

My comment: "Neat concept. I quite like it. From what I remember of Rocky Horror, I think you nailed Frank's tone of speaking, like that he made Arthur's name sound "thick and sticky"."

Quote:
Arthur perked up, not unlike a dog upon hearing the front door opening. “I’m sorry, did you say Earth?”

“Yes.” Frank looked at him. “Tiny blue-green planet. Fun little people with all these silly rules. Fascinating culture, really, because it’s ridiculous how-“


-----

On the 125th Story by [archiveofourown.org profile] Random_Guise
Fandom: Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Characters: Arthur, Benjy Mouse, Frankie Mouse
Rating: General
Words: 2439

Author's summary: Arthur Dent has another encounter with Benjy and Frankie Mouse shortly after arriving with his group at Milliways. I don't own these characters, and even if I did I would still follow good advice and Don't Panic. Written as my 125th story (at the time).
Author's notes: For my 125th story, a tale that ends up ON the 125th story, with a few stops at earlier stories along the way. The building has a bit of inspiration from the Heinlein story "...and He Built a Crooked House".
Author's warnings: None

My comment: "Good one, very Adamsesque tone!"

Quote:
"That's the easy part. We've brought you to a special building; you're in the basement of a building 125 stories tall" Benjy explained. "Actually, none of the floors exist together but thanks to an extension into the fourth spacial dimension…"
"…it's amazing what you save on property tax by doing it that way…" Frankie interjected.

Supercomputing and Affirmation

27 October 2025 08:49 pm
tcpip: (Default)
[personal profile] tcpip
Every so often, there is a slight glimmer of light in my world where my usual state of driven dysthymia changes due to the affirming words and actions of others. Such an experience occurred last Friday when I organised a researcher tech talk with Dr Tomasz Wozniak, a senior lecturer in economics at UniMelb. Tomasz has recently been published, as part of an international team, in a Bank of Canada paper and in the prestiguous Journal of Econometrics on Structural Vector Autoregressions (SVARs) and time-series models that analyse the relationships between multiple economic variables to identify and isolate the effects of exogenous economic shocks. It's actually important stuff to keep people in jobs when (for example) there's a massive negative disruption to trade (hello, US tariffs).

Tomasz had been kind enough to provide a repository of his presentation, which also points out that in the course of his research and his use of Spartan he has become an editor of the R Journal and developed the R packages, bsvars, bsvarSIGNs, and bpvars. He had many extremely positive comments to make about Spartan, both in terms of the infrastructure that we offer and the support that we provide to researchers. Two comments particularly stood out; first was the effects of our optimisation of the software that we build from the source code, especially (in his case) the GNU compiler suite and the R programming language. As a result of our optimised installs, he reported that his jobs would run four times faster on Spartan compared to his own machine, despite the fact that he had faster processors. Further, he mentioned that a few years ago, after attending one of my introductory training sessions, he learned the advantages of using job arrays instead of a looping logic. Suddenly, his computational improvements were hundreds of times faster than what would be the case on his own system; we call it "high performance computing" for a reason.

This is hardly the first time that this has happened. For every dollar invested in high performance computing, the estimated social return on investment is $44 (in Japan, for example, it's c$75:1 due to alignment with national objectives). In a world where so many are in well-paid "bullshit jobs" whilst other struggle as part of the precariat class with low-paid insecure work, I have been fortunate enough to find a career that has stability and fair renumeration, interesting and challenging work, and actually produces socially useful outcomes. For almost twenty years, I have believed this with utter sincerity, but it is still very pleasing when the affirmation comes from others.

Database maintenance

25 October 2025 08:42 am
mark: A photo of Mark kneeling on top of the Taal Volcano in the Philippines. It was a long hike. (Default)
[staff profile] mark posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance

Good morning, afternoon, and evening!

We're doing some database and other light server maintenance this weekend (upgrading the version of MySQL we use in particular, but also probably doing some CDN work.)

I expect all of this to be pretty invisible except for some small "couple of minute" blips as we switch between machines, but there's a chance you will notice something untoward. I'll keep an eye on comments as per usual.

Ta for now!

Quality Experiences

23 October 2025 09:11 pm
tcpip: (Default)
[personal profile] tcpip
I have argued for a while that Epicureanism is a refinement of Hedonism and Stoicism is an advanced development from Epicureanism; "To live, to live well, to live better" (Whitehead, "The Function of Reason"). Each of these represents a qualitative change and, as one learns in the business of Quality Assurance, that is defined as improved precision and is differentiated as a continuum of accuracy, ultimately from "high quality" to "low quality". I find that this applies to people as well as processes; inconsistent people, who fluctuate between emotive extremes, can occasionally be enjoyable and exciting, but ultimately are hurtful and exhausting and are thus best avoided, no matter who is enticing the good times are. Such people invariably are unsuccessful in life; quality requires both a degree of consistency and reflective, tested, improvement.

Over the past few days, I have been fortunate enough in life to experience a few examples of high-quality experiences. The first was an evening of music, which I attended with Kate. This was headlined by the Paul Kidney Japanese Experience, and supported by The Black Heart Death Cult and Cat Crawl. All performed with great competence in accordance with their particular style. "Cat Crawl" (who describe themselves as "a three-piece tantrum in the form of a band") provided early 1980s-style feminist punk with humour, whilst in comparison "The Black Heart Death Cult" were a gloomy-shoegaze fusion, reminiscent of the French "blackgaze" from the 2000s. Finally, the Paul Kidney Japanese Experience gave something akin to a Japanese version an extended Hawkwind space rock concert. All in all, a great night with a great variety of styles. As a radical contrast, the following day Nitul invited me to the end-of-semester Baroque Ensemble Concert from the students at Unimelb's Faculty of Fine Arts and Music. It was an admirable selection from Lully, Bach, Vivaldi, Schein and more, and in total included over fifty performers of music and song. I found myself, as I often do in such music, drifting off to another world.

As more culinary experiences, Kate and I attended the Melbourne Italian Festival the following day at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre. The building is beautiful, but despite my heritage, I find a great deal of contemporary Italian culture pretty gaudy at best, especially in the field of fashion, homewares, and music. Of course, in food and film, it retains a very high level, the latter with a decidedly leftist influence. Apropos, last night I had the delight of being cooked for by the Minister for Climate Change Action and Energy Resources, etc, Lily D'Ambrosio, who provided an astounding Calabrian feast for some twenty individuals whilst showing off the capabilities of induction cookers. Lily deserves high praise for the quiet revolution she has led in Victoria, changing the production of electricity towards renewables and, more recently, with the phaseout of fossil fuels in domestic appliances, all with significant success. Quiet revolutions too, can be an example of quality.

AWS outage

20 October 2025 10:11 am
alierak: (Default)
[personal profile] alierak posting in [site community profile] dw_maintenance
DW is seeing some issues due to today's Amazon outage. For right now it looks like the site is loading, but it may be slow. Some of our processes like notifications and journal search don't appear to be running and can't be started due to rate limiting or capacity issues. DW could go down later if Amazon isn't able to improve things soon, but our services should return to normal when Amazon has cleared up the outage.

Edit: all services are running as of 16:12 CDT, but there is definitely still a backlog of notifications to get through.

Edit 2: and at 18:20 CDT everything's been running normally for about the last hour.

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delphipsmith

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