friendship (n.)

I threw together some Battleship recs for the last two weeks' recthething community rec posts (mostly art but a little fic) and just remembered I should share it here too (creators will still be anon until Wednesday):

Art recs:
Carmilla
- Art: Your Sleep Demon (delightfully creepy)

DCU
- Art: Just a little more, Superman... A young Jason helps Clark to safety.(gorgeous, particularly the lighting)

Dracula
- Art: Midnight The scene after Dracula leaves Jonathan and Mina's room. (the emotions in this!)

Dredge (Video Game)
- [Art] Sunset Scene Summary: A small atmospheric piece.(absolutely beautiful, no canon knowledge needed digital art piece)

Moby Dick - Herman Melville
- [Art] The Ghost Hunter AU Summary: No-dialogue comic imagining if the events of the book were loosely adapted into a found footage horror piece centered on Ahab's quest to prove the existence of the spirit Moby-Dick. (so many details in this comic and so well done!)

Original Works
- [Art] She was a fairy This art was inspired by samiabenchaou_ on Instagram. She’s a hijabi fashion influencer. (beautiful)
- A Regency grape angel enjoying some tea with her pets (so sweet)
- Art: Madame Poire A woman wearing a pear-themed historical dress. (wonderfully detailed)
- The Fruit Heist Glorbo, Barry, and Pearry stealing fruits. (All of the teams' mascots and friends, so cute!)
- [art] Glorby Be (Manuscript art! Amazing)
- Battleship 2025: Paper Dolls (A series of paper dolls of Glorbo and others that can be cut out with clothing and whatnot to add, so neat!)
- [Art] The Tower Sumary: A mermaid is... happy to see the lighthouse keeper she's been watching. (beautiful, if slightly creepy charcoal/chalk/pastels on paper piece)
- [Art] Monster in 8B Summary: The shadows aren't cruel. (amazingly creepy)

fic recs:
Eureka/Stargate SG1 crossover
- Bugs in the System Summary: SG-1's visit to Eureka has some unexpected results. (Jack Carter and Sam Carter are cousins and amazing in this)

Leverage/DCU crossover
- https://archiveofourown.org/works/68406316" target="_blank">They Meet Again Summary: At a charity gala, Bruce Wayne meets a beautiful woman he's run into many, many times before. (great Bruce voice and so many neat little details)

Star Trek Lower Decks
- Battlesheep Potemkin Summary: First officer's log, stardate, uh, computer, add the stardate in. The Cerritos is responding to a distress call from the USS Potemkin, an Excelsior-class starship that was exploring the Gra'pe-2025 system. Upon arrival, we found Potemkin adrift in orbit of the third planet, which is currently surrounded by an ion storm. There is no sign of the crew. However, the ship is filled with hundreds of strange mammalian life-forms. (hilarious)

The last team, Lemon, cleared their final board today and those works will go live tomorrow. I will be very interested in hearing from their team (and everyone else) when the feedback post is put up. I don't usually comment on those posts but I might this year, depending on what the mods say in the first place about how the game might change for next year (there was already mention in the discord that the tag count will drop back down to 400 from the 574 of this year which is such a relief). Without some mod changes (or at least issue acknowledgements) I'll have to think very hard about signing up again next year, which is a shame since I'm one of the very few who've done it every year but the things I love about it are starting to be outweighed but what I find stressful or outright dislike. Sigh.

Now that battleship's winding down hopefully I'll have time to tackle a few things on my to-watch and to-read lists. I would really like to get through the official Guardian translation before the Guardian-read-along finishes up but I am just not sure I'll manage it. (And then there's my poor MDL to-watch list. So long despite efforts earlier this year to work my way through it. Somehow, I keep adding to it. Too many good shows/movies out there I guess.) I also have to start thinking about Yuletide and what I'll want to nominate for it.

Crafting-wise I've been working on a blanket my daughter 'commissioned' from me (aka she bought the yarn). I'm about 3 skeins into the 7 I think it'll need for the length she wants. It's turning out nice, but will still take a while to finish. After that (or maybe during a break from that) I need to do another bread/bagel bag rug because my stack of bags is starting to get unwieldly. Not sure what I'll do with it/where I'll put it once I make it, but that's a future me problem. I also have a string bag I was designing that I ran out of crochet thread for that I need to get back to now that I've bought more. (Here's hoping my notes still make sense)

Anyway, hope all of you are doing well and August is being nice to you! :)

Whelp, got swallowed by Battleship as usual. The teams have been hilariously/horribly poorly determined/set up this year with one steamrolling away, clearing boards usually 24-48 (or more) ahead of anyone else, two teams pretty much neck and neck and then the last team days behind them. When team placements were announced I assumed the front-running team would lead due to who was on it (the majority were on the team that blitzed through most of the game last year) but had no idea it'd be this bad or uneven. Oh well. By focusing on only my team's chats and trying to write the best/most interesting things I can write I am still mostly enjoying myself.

It's fruit themed this year and my team is Grape and each team has its own emoji of the yellow blob blorbo thing hugging the team's fruit and the grape team got very silly and after a poll named ours glorbo and tons of people were drawing it so I decided to immortalized it in crochet even if I couldn't put it in the collection so behold .... Glorbo the Glorbnificent! (Glorbo + a rough pattern for making it)

Since my last post the h/c exchange authors were revealed. I wrote:

Embers Seeking Flame. Untamed fic, 4,208 words. Summary: Lan Sizhui did not often find himself reminiscing on the past. It was what it was. Or was it? (LSZ&WWX fic, rated G)

Reaching That Inevitable Horizon. The First Shot fic, 1162 words. Summary: No matter how much Zheng Bei wishes it wasn't the case, there is only one way this can, and ever could, end. (JXH/ZB, spoilers for drama's end, T rated, see warnings)

It's interesting, because I usually write in past tense but every so often a fic just *needs* to be in the present tense to get a better feel for the tension and action. Reaching That Inevitable Horizon would have read and felt very differently if it hadn't been in present (as would my long Under the Skin fic, Gently Toward a New Bright Morn). The immediacy and sense of pace required them to be present tense.

Oh! And once h/c revealed I passed the 500 work mark on AO3! (yes, I could have passed that ages ago if I'd actually put all my drabbles up there from pre-ao3 days or if I combined my EAD birthday sock with donutsweeper's stuff but whatever, still, 500!)

Have a bunch of recthething recs! (MDZS/Untamed fic and tumblr art for DMBJ, Great Mouse Detective, Old Guard, SPN, Under the Skin, and WoH)

MDZS/Untamed fic rec:
- A Change of State by Toshokanin (36k, squidgeworld fic, not AO3)
Summary Snippet: senior citizen LQR whose nephews have gone off to college and jobs, leaving him alone in the house where he raised them. (delightful story where LQR wanders into the bookstore where WWX works and discovers BL manga (which happens to be volume 1 of the story of Hanguang-jun and Yiling-laozu) and the friendship that grows between the two while they read/discuss the books)

tumblr art recs:

DMBJ/Lost Tomb
- 🕶️🌸 (Gorgeous Heihua- Hei Xiazi/Xiao Hua- art)

The Great Mouse Detective
- Mouse Detective Again (Some adorable doodles)
- a domestic Toby moment (Very cute Toby, Dawson and Basil moment)

The Old Guard
- Quick ipad sketch while watching old guard2 (spoiler free sketch of Andy)

Supernatural
- my favorite part was doing the book (Dean in 'Faith', gorgeous)

Under the Skin
- Craft time an Under the Skin dangling paper dolls tutorial with template you can DL and print out to make (these are darling!)

Word of Honor
- For your consideration. Princess Bride/Word of Honor AU (perfect and utterly hilarious comic)