Jo Z Pierce

Prompts can be used for any fandom, pairing, or even original fic, if you like. (Yes, any.) All I ask is that you credit me with providing the prompt and comment with a link to the entry.



Prompt #343


When I think of all the times I've tried so hard to leave her
She will turn to me and start to cry
And she promises the earth to me
And I believe her
After all this times I don't know why.


Girl-The Beatles
Written by John Lennon and Paul McCartney
From the album Rubber Soul

( OK, I was wrong )

ASPEN, Colo. – Charlie Sheen spent the better part of Christmas Day in a Colorado jail cell after being arrested on domestic violence allegations.

I know there's nothing funny about this, if it turns out to be true, but I find the idea of being arrested for assault and "menacing" to be somewhat amusing.

First recs! The Giver, Babysitter's Club, Ramona series, The Simpsons, Homestar Runner, Viva la Vida and Captain Planet.

So since I've been cackling like a mad dolphin, I thought I'd share my (even pathetically short) list of recs so far...though I really should wait until after Madness opens. I'm eying the fic counts there with minorly manic glee.

But all the same, six fics, The Silmarillion, Doctrine of Labyrinths, Temeraire, and A Song of Ice and Fire over here at my personal journal. /skips off again

Happy Yuletide to all!

I have 26 fandoms to plow through just to start but I thought I'd drop off my first batch since I had enough!

Big Bang Theory
**The Comic-Con Costume Conception Caper - Sheldon's costume as Spock Prime gets him a little action. ;)
**Two Times Sheldon Kinda Met Leonard Nimoy and One Time He Really Did - The third time is the one that sold me.
**A Number Of Attempts At Bringing Penny Into The Fold Of Geekdom, With Varying Success - As a Marvel girl, I highly appreciated the scads of references.
**The Melodic Holiday Impossibility - Imagine Sheldon Christmas caroling? No? Just read.
**The Cheap Trick Acceleration - Author? You should know that this one just produced a chain reaction of squee on Twitter after I recced it. ♥ Everyone else? Time Traveling Sheldon visits Penny.
**Thursday Lunch Cafe (BBT/Leverage) - Sheldon and Parker meet! :D
**Through the Eyes of 3B - The downstairs neighbor watches the 4th floor residents while he deals with his own life.

Chuck
**When He Catches His Reflection on Accident - An exploration of "when Ellie finds out."

Community (it was so hard to choose, Community is my favorite new show this year, and they were all awesome! But if I have to...)
**Fundamentals of Chemistry - Troy doesn't really start to notice Annie until after she stops liking him.
**The Sum of Educated People - When everyone comes back for a reunion of the study group, some things have changed, some haven't. Jeff/Britta.
**Common Knowledge An ensemble piece with Jeff/Annie.
**Ragged Edges - Annie, multi-shipped throughout her college career and beyond.

Jonathan Coulton
**Drugstore Sushi - (my gift) Ever wonder how Jonathan Coulton came up with a new song every week during Thing A Week? Based on Skullcrusher Mountain.

Crossposted from my journal, at elyn's suggestion:

I wanted to thank elynross and astolat, the amazing administrators of the Yuletide challenge, as well as the coders at the Archive of Our Own, who kept slogging under heavy fire. The previous software was held together with spit and baling wire, neither of which are pleasant to work with (ick and ow). Given that the transition to the AO3 coincided with the continued uptick in participation, surviving was its own Yuletide miracle, and offers the prospect of easier future years.

Since a lot of people are doing "the decade in review" things, here's a retrospective of Yuletide challenges (pun intended): We begin with 300+ participants!  Yuletide was huge in 2003! Too bad the software couldn’t handle smart quotes.  .txt only to be sure it was right, no takebacks!   In 2004, with over 500 participants, the site was hacked due to the host's failure, despite astolat's warning, to correct a security vulnerablity. Result: server move mid-uploading crunch,  with extra fun propagating a new domain name, and resulting comment glitches. 2005: Growth continues apace, with ~850 participants. Still no editing without modly intervention.  2006: Delays due to server load; incrementally backing up after every single story was uploaded, necessary because of creakiness of database, took time.  There were bizarre uploading database issues, the kind of things it takes a computer to screw up.  Last minute archive lockdown!  Still no editing without modly intervention. And who else recalls the spam comments flood of 2006?

2007, with over 1200 signups: Remember having to save your emailed comments, because otherwise you couldn’t respond after the author reveal?  Heavy server load issues are scary.  Yes, modly intervention still required for edits.  This one’s just a well-titled post: We’re working on the problem! (At one point, a couple hundred stories were stranded in database hell.)  I wrote you a story but the server ated it. Strangely prolific author, whose name just happens to be the first on the list.  The archive goes down Dec. 28, and not in the good way.

2008, 1599 signups: Pre-Dec. 25: Various small but nervewracking bugs, heavy server loads, representative database crashes, including one when astolat herself had crashed, leading to database nervous breakdown, and up and down again (note that these aren’t even all the instances, just a representative sample: something needed to change). Post-Dec. 25, server load still heavy, links still wonky due to size of database, server load so heavy that the quicksearch links couldn’t even be fully generated. Slowness due to heavy server load continues through the author reveal. 

From what I observed from the outside, this year there were the kinds of bugs one expects on new software with a new posting interface, but what I didn't see--characteristic of past years--was a database overloaded and broken down merely by attempted uploads as the deadline approached.  The server's definitely been hammered today with people reading, just as the former server was last year, but at least there are greater resources available now. I’m exhausted just thinking about the huge amount of work, under extraordinary time pressure, the switch to the AO3 represents. I’m really glad there are more wonderful coders around now to share some of the load.

I've read barely anything so far, but!
 

There are recs on my journal for 3 fics from The Dark is Rising, and for 1 massive Doctor Who-Lord Peter Wimsey crossover

Also, if anyone else in Yuletide has read "The Girl Who Owned A City" by OT Nelson other than me and my writer,here is an amazing fic READ IT. Seriously, consider reading it even if you don't know the book (and pick up the book!)

I haven't had time to make the thorough browse I want to, but quickie squee on my rec journal. Warehouse 13, Bernard and the Genie, and the Dirk Gently books.

One thing to keep in mind is that when you use the filters on the right side of a results page, what you're doing is telling the archive, "Show me any stories that have all of these things in them".

The filters work as ‘AND’ conditions, rather than ‘OR’, so if you select multiple fandoms (or categories/pairings/warnings/etc.) you will only get results if there is a crossover for those fandoms. If you select only a single fandom, you should get resullts, or alternatively you can also browse via the Yuletide ‘Fandoms’ page and view a single fandom at a time.

(thanks to Cal for the explanation and wording!)

This post is meant to give the Yuletide Community a place to shower elynross and astolat and the AO3 coders and tag wranglers and all, who helped with the structure of the thing with the gratitude (and flattery) they so richly deserve. Particularly given the difficulties of rangling the ever increasing Yuletide Horde and the new AO3 archive.

So comment with words of praise and gratitude and let them know how much we appreciate the Yuletide Challenge and all their hard work.

If you want to post a thank you art piece, other fanwork, or just a link to a Post of Gratitude you've already made please post a description of the item (even if its just to say Art or Vid) and  a link.

Thank you all for making this such a great Yuletide!!!

First run through the archive, and I have 18 stories that stand out for me, in 18 fandoms.

This is in addition to the wonderful gifts for me showcased in this entry.

( 13th Warrior, A-Team, Addams Family, AvP, Appaloosa, Dragonriders of Pern, Fast and Furious, Forever Knight, Masters of Rome, My Fair Lady, Near Eastern Mythology, Quantum Leap, Terminator, Pretender, Tombstone, Victor/Victoria, and Where the Wild Things Are )

This is mostly working off the stories I opened in tabs early early this morning before the archive started freaking out, so I know there are SO MANY stories still to read, but I thought I'd post some of the great ones I've read so far.

some recs for: Public Service Announcements, Mythbusters, Black Books, Hot Fuzz, Like Water for Chocolate, Moon, Polly and the Pirates, and If On a Winter's Night a Traveler

Just a quick observation after poking around in a few small corners of the new Yuletide:

I'm seeing a decent number of comments, but almost no bookmarks -- which folks may want to think about, because in the AO3 structure, bookmarks can be tagged as recs, can include a text comment, and -- while not (or not yet) filterable via the right-column sorting engine as yet -- are a top-level way to get a look at what people like to read in a given fandom.

Which is to say, AO3 bookmarking is not just about finding things you like again; it's also about setting pointers/recs toward stories you want other people to squee over.

Having said this: as I poke at the archive, it looks as if the bookmark-compiling features are not yet fully in place (or else I'm not figuring out how to make the bookmarking engine work properly, which is also possible). Still, the bookmarks are going to be a useful tool, and I'd encourage Yuletiders to consider making use of the bookmark feature as they wander through the storyweb.

Some great Yuletide stories this year, for Quantum Leap, BSG/Wall-E, and Stephen King's Dark Tower:

My mystery author wrote Mission Parameters [Quantum Leap] for me; it's a missing leap right after The Leap Home, Part II. I really love how much goes unsaid.

Merry-Go-Round is a Wall-E/BSG crossover. And it's frakking amazing. That pretty much says it all, doesn't it?

Rule Number Three is a fourth-wall breaking Dark Tower story in which Roland and Jake get their reunion... or maybe it's the fifth wall by now? Say true and leave a comment.

If you're showing gifts under your name that you don't believe are yours -- make sure that the gift is displaying your full pseud+username, and not just a part that might easily be shared with someone else (that is, someone might have a pseud that's the same as your username, or a pseud that's the same as your pseud).

This is tied to the bugs caused by how AO3 is handling the pseud (username) combination; for instance, if your username or pseud is Anne (username), and a story was posted for username Anne, it's displaying as a gift for everyone with the name "Anne" as either pseud or username.

There are definitely some interesting bugs still to be worked out that were unanticipated because this is the first full shakedown cruise! *g*

We're trying several things to try and improve performance, FYI, so don't be surprised if the site goes down for a few moments or if performance changes over the course of the next couple of days -- sorry!

About posting comments specifically: when you click on an "Add Comment" link, what is actually happening is that a new form is getting generated by the server, so it's like loading a new page -- a new *small* page but still a new page. When the server is bogged down, this slows down too. Unfortunately, there's no indicator the way there is in your browser while you're waiting for a new page. :P

But: click on the "Add Comment" link ONCE, hang out for a bit, and the form will open up.

(We'll be adding an indicator and speeding this up soon, sorry! We're discovering all sorts of new and exciting performance bottlenecks in this process. :>)

I managed to flake out and leave my notebook at the place we had the party for Grandma. It's a friend's house, so I'll be getting it back, no problem, but I had the super-cool card I got for hubby and a print-out of the tickets.

Instead I cranked up The Wizard and I on I tunes and showed him the PDF on my computer.

He gave me a gift card for Sports Basement.

Considering what we've been through this year, I think we both did just fine. Really, all I ask is a year of no broken bones.

We're going to ride Critical Mass and still get to the Westfield Centre for the 7:00PM showing of Sherlock Holmes. This should be interesting.

Yesterday we saw my Grandparents/Aunt/Uncle and cousins plus one cousin's fiancee. Thanks to my cousin Effie for driving us both ways. It was above and beyond the call of duty. Luckily it was a gorgeous day and there was virtually no traffic in the city or on the bridge.

Grandma was fairly lucid. She thought I was blonde, but I'm wondering if she saw my red hair and just couldn't get to that word.

My aunt Peggy made absolutely wonderful latkes.

We opened the presents from my mother, who is notorious for bad presents. She actually came through this year and gave me a set of DVDs with four Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes movies. (I think she got the idea from sister, so thanks to louiseroho if that's the case.) On the other hand, hubby got...a CD of theramin music.

Hubby came with me, which was a lot for him, because he'd been up for twenty-four hours working and got really loopy from fatigue. He wanted to make sure he got to see Grandma, just in case something happened. The rest of the family seems a bit more blase about the possibility, with the statement, "She's been dying for 15 years."

We came home and I made him a steak and we watched some more of Due South, which he really likes, but has dubbed "Touched By a Canadian."

He crashed around ten for some much-needed sleep, while I stayed up to get my yuletide story. Whoooooooo-hoooooooo!!!!!!

Right now I'm practicing my stay calm mantra regarding my own comments and recs. Especially since everyone's still learning their way around the new archive.

Got up this AM, went out for an hour of hills around Dolores Park. Then we got a cab up to Laguna Honda to see Pyscho-sis. You may remember, the last time I saw her, she was wasting away and couldn't stand up. She looks so much better now. She's put on weight, had her hair colored, and generally has a much better attitude and outlook. She'll be moving back to her apartment soon. We did presents and hubby played some songs on the mandolin. He tried to sing, but kept crying. (He was singing 2000 Miles by The Pretenders and River by Joni Mitchell)

We also went outside so that Psycho-sis could smoke. There's a place up there called "Harmony Park" which is the de facto smoking area. It was a gorgeous sunny day, so I was able to enjoy second hand smoke and ultra-violet rays.

Anyway, it was quite pleasant and there were no emotional outbreaks, besides a general feeling of sentimentality.

So that's it for relatives.

YAY!!!!!!!


(I will not obsess about comments. I will not obsess about comments.)

...because I had the opportunity to hang out in the chat room and talk to people and do a bunch of betas. Everyone was a joy to talk to, and I wish I knew more fandoms so I could have written treats for all the hippos.

Here are a few recs:
I received a Dark is Rising fic that is, overall, just what I wanted. I suspect I'd have a lot of fun talking to the author, too. :)
http://archiveofourown.org/works/32348

Others:
Murder She Wrote: http://archiveofourown.org/works/30725
Castle: http://archiveofourown.org/works/34543
Sesame Street! (G-rated slash) http://archiveofourown.org/works/34410

I hope to have more eventually...