#star wars big bang 2020

[sineala]

Are there ANY stony/Star Trek AUs?

Okay. Um. I'm just going to assume this is a legitimate question and not actually a way to express frustration about my progress on the sequel I am writing (I stared at this ask for a while), so I will just conclude that you must have missed the Steve/Tony Star Trek AU I wrote, um, back in 2016:

Straight on till Morning (109848 words) by Sineala Chapters: 6/6 Fandom: Marvel (Comics), Marvel 616, Avengers (Comics) Rating: Explicit  Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply  Relationships: Steve Rogers/Tony Stark  Characters: Steve Rogers, Tony Stark, Carol Danvers, Janet Van Dyne, Hank Pym, Wanda Maximoff, Pietro Maximoff, James "Rhodey" Rhodes, Clint Barton, Donald Blake (Marvel), Jocasta (Marvel)  Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Star Trek Fusion, Action/Adventure, Romance, Hurt/Comfort, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Pining, Angst, Secret Identity, Identity Porn, Sex Pollen, Fuck Or Die, Caves, Sex In A Cave, Technobabble, Happy Ending, Cap_Ironman Big Bang 2016, Community: cap_ironman, Podfic Available  Summary: 

Tony Stark resigned his commission in Starfleet five years ago, after a disastrous away mission, and he swore he'd never go back. He just wants to be left alone to build warp engines in peace. But the universe has more in store for him than that, as he discovers when Admiral Fury comes to him with an offer he could never have expected and cannot possibly refuse: first officer and chief engineer aboard the all-new USS Avenger, a starship of Tony's own design. What's more, the Avenger's captain is Steve Rogers, hero of the Earth-Romulan War. Believed dead for over a century, Steve is miraculously alive... and very, very attractive. 

But nothing is ever easy for Tony. As he wrestles with his secret desire for his new captain and his not-so-dormant fears, another mission starts to go wrong, and Tony becomes aware that Steve has secrets of his own -- and the truth could change everything.

So, yeah, if you actually haven't read that one, that'll keep you busy for a while. It's a Trek fusion with comics Steve/Tony, set in the era of the later TOS movies. (This is important so that you can picture the correct uniforms, and also because it actually matters that the events of Star Trek II, III, and IV have happened.) It was a Big Bang fic, so it's got some great art by Ran and Phoenix -- embedded in the story -- and also M_Samro made a really amazing podfic of it, if you like podfics.

For a charity auction in 2017, I promised I would write a sequel, and I plotted the whole thing out and started writing this extremely epic sequel, which was unfortunately, about a plague threatening the galaxy, and I got about 120,000 words in and then 2020 happened and I decided I needed to not be writing it right now. So it went on an extended hiatus.

But the good news is that I've actually gotten back to it! I picked it up again last month and I've put 40,000 more words in it since then and at this exact moment I am currently working on the last scene of Chapter 4 (out of six total)! I swear it is happening! I've been putting in about a thousand words a day for the past month! It is really happening this time! The sequel is coming! I promise! I know it has been years but it's happening!

See? It's happening! (I would include a screencap of the part that is happening, but all of Chapter 4 is pretty spoilery.)

So that will exist! Someday! I mean that!

And if you're asking about Steve/Tony Star Trek AUs by people other than me, there are some! If you filter the AU - Star Trek Fusion tag by Steve/Tony, there are 25 matches. Several of them are related to my fic (remixes, art) but there is some stuff that isn't my fault! I haven't read a lot of them because I was trying not to read things that seemed like they might be similar to mine while I was plotting my series here, and also I have never finished watching DS9, so I skipped the DS9 ones.

Under Stars by vulcanscully: A fun fusion that I thought was interesting because Steve is an ensign and that's not how this usually goes.

Discovery of the Century by DepressingGreenie: More 616 in flavor than a lot of the Trek AUs, this is basically Finding Steve In The Ice but Make It Star Trek. As far as I am concerned, Finding Steve In The Ice is great every time.

and so we rebuild by raeldaza: I'm probably biased because this one was inspired by my fic, but I also really enjoyed this one for not being how these things usually go. A lot of Trek AUs in many fandoms are written through a TOS/AOS kind of lens and will often do a Kirk/Spock thing and make one of them a Vulcan or half-Vulcan. In this one that's Tony, but also he's a terrible Vulcan! He's found a new way to disappoint his father!

Stellar Love Affairs by AvengersNewB: I honestly had never imagined a Star Trek fusion that was also A/B/O but I think it really works here! It's like bringing pon farr full circle.

Xenophilia by Captain_Panda: Captain_Panda has several Trek AUs but I am reccing this one because it's the longest. And also the whumpiest. Everyone loves some good away-mission whump!

So there you go! Live long and prosper! I promise I am still writing this Star Trek AU sequel!

[catastrxblues]

articles and news on what’s happening in west papua are so appallingly scarce that i could rarely find any except a few before this. as an indonesian, i didn’t even know any of this is happening in the first place until a few months ago because rarely any of the big news outlets have ever brought it up, much less in a scale that is necessary to gain the world’s attention. SO PLEASE CHECK THIS OUT, one article at a time if it seems too much (which is what i'm currently doing too).

i think it’s important to note that while indonesia has been loudly advocating for palestine’s freedom, it has also been committing silent acts of violence against the people of west papua and exploiting them for years and silence those AND others who have tried to bring it to light.

things included in the thread ->

ARTICLES :

freewestpapua.org *the link isn't working at the moment but op has included screenshots in the tweet!

west papua : a history of exploitation (al jazeera)

courtesy of amnesty international

OTHERS :

amnesty international - "sudah, kasi tinggal dia mati" pembunuhan dan impunitas di papua (in bahasa)

BOOKS TO READ :

'the road : uprising in west papua' by john martinkus

'an act of free choice : decolonisation and the right to self-determination in west papua' by pieter drooglever

'merdeka and the morning star : civil resistance in west papua' by jason macleod

’see no evil : new zealand’s betrayal of the people of west papua’ by maire leadbeater

‘freedom in entangled worlds’ by eben kirksey

‘poisoned arrows’ by george monbiot

‘papua blood’ by peter bang

’west papua and indonesia since suharto’ by peter king

pdf available :

’the united nations and the indonesian takeover of west papua’ by john saltford

’west papua : the obliteration of a people’ by carmel budiardjo and liem soei liong

FILMS TO WATCH :

rebels of the forgotten world (1991)

blood on the cross (1999)

freedom for west papua (1999)

papua merdeka (2002)

west papua — the secret war in asia (2007)

forgotten bird of paradise (2009)

strange birds in paradise — a west papuan story (2010)

west papua — a journey to freedom (2011)

mama malind su hilang (our land has gone)

benny wenda — oslo freedom forum (2012)

isolated (2013)

courage is contagious — TEDx sydney (2013)

the road to home (2015)

punks for west papua (2016)

run it straight (2016)

act of no choice (2019)

paradise bombed (2023)

investigative tv reports :

inside indonesia’s secret war for west papua — ABC news (2020)

selling out west papua — al jazeera (2020)

INFOGRAPHICS :

amnesty international

brief history

2017

2018

[celinamarniss]

Year in Review

In 2023 I posted 4 fics at 58,153 words.

Previous years:

2022: 4 fics at 45,096 words.

2021: 3 fics posted, 55,788 words.

2020: 7 or 10 fics posted, 125,738 words.

2019: 7 fics posted, 72,149 words.

2018: 7 fics posted, 87,752 words

2016: 9 fics posted, 51,643 words

2017: 9 fics posted, 115,336 words

2016: 9 fics posted, 51,653 words

In total, 49 fics posted to Ao3.

We Can't Keep Meeting Like This

34,355 words, gen, Din/Luke/Mara

The Din/Luke/Mara fic I told myself I wasn't going to write! As these things tend to do, it expanded into a much longer fic than I expected. The "five things (plus one)" structure helped to keep it from spiraling even further, but those individual chapters ended up being much longer than I expected and took much longer to write. At first, I serialized the first couple of chapters in smaller excerpts for WIP Weds on tumblr. It was fun to get a little feedback and the weekly deadline compelled me to write those chapters quickly. But when engagement dropped to basically nothing I stopped posting updates and waited to post each chapter to ao3 when it was done. My progress slowed down considerably, but the chapters got longer. I had fun, most of the time.

The Girl Who Traveled the Ways Between the Walls

4,938 words, gen, Animalis verse

Written for the 5k AU fic challenge. Luminous Creatures begins with Mara and Luke's daemons settling, and I regretted never writing a story with an unsettled daemon character. I wanted to write a fic with a fairy-tale vibe and I wanted to explore the weirdness of the Imperial Palace. The Palace becomes a fairy tale wood, and Mara sets off on a quest in which she encounters strange people who aid her or demand aid. Does she learn the right lesson in the end? Perhaps not.

Echo, Revenant, Targeter, Phoenix

15,431 words, gen, Winter Retrac character study

I wrote this one for the Star Wars Big Bang, an experience that ended up being so stressful that I dropped out. I still finished the fic on time and posted it. The fic attracted a modest number of readers (unsurprising given Winter has been basically forgotten these days), but their enthusiasm was very gratifying. I've always liked Winter and I wanted to give her a chance to shine.

However, while I love the worldbuilding and individual scenes and images in this fic, as a whole I don't think it's very gracefully written and I've never been very happy with it.

Cascade

3,429 words, mature, Luke/Mara

I wanted to include A Non-Zero-Sum Game in Vol II of my printed fic collection, but the series felt unfinished without the fourth and final story that I planned to write after Tether. So five years later, I finally wrote it. It was interesting to go back to those old fics and try to write a story that fit the series. I wanted to post it before the new year broke so that I could count it in the 2023 list, and I rushed to get it out. It could probably still use some work.

As the year went on, I failed to meet a lot of the arbitrary deadlines I set myself, and that made writing frustrating and unfulfilling. I don't want it to be like that! I want fic to be fun.

However, I have a lot of non-fandom projects coming up in 2024, and I'm going to have to shift my focus away from fic, at least a little bit.

GOALS FOR 2024

(almost exactly the same as the goals for 2023)

Triumvirate Finale! (explicit, very) The big finale of the Triumvirate series, in which the trio returns to Coruscant to face the Emperor. Doesn’t have a proper title yet. Progress so far: three chapters drafted, 15,410 words.

A Smuggler’s Guide to Joining the Rebellion (gen) The sequel to The Things You Find on Tatooine. Progress: the first chapter finished, 2,241 words.

Lando Calrissian and the Jewel of Andara (gen) The Lando and Mara heist romcom I’ve been promising forever. Progress: three chapters drafted, but in need of heavy revision, 6757 words.

Other fics on the backburner:

Courtship remix

Experiments

Daughter of the Rain and Snow

More daemon fic! 

[beril66]

Heyo folks! So here's a list of this for another fic I am going to workon. I am writing here the rules so I don't forget and I would love to see people give me their opinions on what I can add! This time it IS a crossover series with Cuthulhu Mythos! (Mostly lovecraft lore and some other writer's take on it sprinkled in. No Other gods vs Great Old Ones nonsense though that was a stupid adition to Mythos I will DIE on this hill)

Our skele bois and everyone really are going to learn the HARD way there are being infinitely scarier and powerful than measely star parasites or amalgamation of emotions :D

This came after a delightful conversarion with a friend in space battle. So some heads ups;

Other gods or Outer Gods as people know them are the undisputed strongest things for what I hope obvious reasons. Put an unshattered C'tan or a chaos god in front of Nyarlathotep and they'll beg for their life

Azathoth DID NOT create 40k or any universe. Its a fan theory. It was Yog-Sothoth ;)

The races such as Elder Things and Great Race of Yith are among the oldest and most advanced (they are basically the Xeelee's since thats what they are meant to be in OG mythos Lovecraft was just shit at math and science) creatures in the verse. Remember how Mep'het'Ran bitched to the Necrontyr about how they also fought with the cruel old ones and lost and turned into celestial fart gases...well he didn't TECHNICALLY lie.

It just wasn't the 'Old Ones' Necrontyr were thinking XD (for real though in the ONLY alliance these two races ever forged they kicked the shit out of C'tan and destroyed their OG bodies) for these races, species in 40k galaxy might as well be monkeyd hitting each other with sticks. The difference between them are that great.

That war happened not 200 million year into the big bang btw. Yeah...when the first stars were babies. Elder Things and Yith are that old...they might be that old in OG mythos too now that I think about it 🤔

Remember Nihilakh Yyth seer? Yeah that thing is another unfortunate race Yith used as bodies and left long before necrons ever came...unfortunately the inhabitation caused the race to develop clairvoyance. And we all know what happened to the poor bastards.

The Elder things came to earth was basically an amish community got tired of ultra advanced tech XD they are the reason earth has life. They came waayyy before the billion year mark Lovecraft gives. First one celled organisms on earth appeard around 3.7 billion years ago. Yeah.

Randolph Carter is/was a friend of Big E's and still kicking in 40k with his silver key. Fully living in dreamlands with his friends and boy-ahem eternal headache Nyarlathotep though. He and Trazyn will become GOOD friends...maybe Orikan too. Tech wizardry isn't just belong to necrons after all.

Magic other than warp exists and it is both intransically bound with tech and seperate enough. Mostly safe too if you manage to keep your head while learning.

Assume all weird creatures in mythos exist.

Deep Ones have their own planet and allied with Big E around 2020s. They have full on STCs under their planet and still can build and understand DAOT tech, they are just smart enough to hide it really well. And since all of them are immortal most of the ones on the planet (pure and hybrids both) are over 30.000 years old. And remember EVERYTHING. Rest of the Imperium thinks they are filfhy mutants to be avoided. Deep Ones and hybrids mostly bleakly amused seeing most were alive in 1920s America how humanity seems to abandon one type of racism then immediatly embracing another.

Lost 2 Primarchs taken a worship of the Other Gods...this is magnetitudes more dire than chaos worship.

Orikan, Trazyn and Phillias will meet an interesting human who knows more than she ever should...if they are nice to her she might even draw them when they were necrontyr. She A LOT to say about their relationship during flesh times...revelations might or might not cause eternal sense to loss , pain and horror to what was lost...and maybe hope. 🤷‍♀️ (yes during Trazyn's bubble confinement)

Except Nyarlathotep to pop on Song of Oblivion and taunt Szerakh. Randoph migh or might not put the fear of actual gods in Szeras too

Anrakyr and Zulthanekh (don't ask me how they will ever meet I am just taken by the idea of their friendship because of ghostinthegalleries) will get a history lesson of the galaxy from Nyarlathotep.

Shoggoths are allies of humanity. As they lived only the really intelligent and sentient ones survived and after their ACTUAL discovery humanity (DAOT) have been not only nice to them but give them human rights Elder Thing colony never thought of. Surviving ones are fiercely loyal to humanity but few know their existance.... for obvious reasons. They are a hard counter for tyranids and help preserve Big E.

Big E was aware of other gods and there was no stopping them. Thankfully the only one who was invested into the galaxy was Nyarlathotep and Big E just pointed out sitting back and watching the inevitable clusterfucks all races cause would be infinitely more entertaining. (Randoph also threathened Nyarlathotep with sleeping on couch in Ilek-Vad XD)

...AND thats it. Thats all I got for now. I would love to see your suggestions Lovecraft and 40k lovers!

[denimbex1986]

'In some ways, Oppenheimer, Christopher Nolan’s biggest non-superhero movie, was a product of the pandemic. Until the winter of 2020, the director had been loyal to Warner Bros., and their logo was to be found on every film that Nolan either wrote, directed or produced.

While he was never formally tethered to that studio, Nolan had been monogamous as its cornerstone tentpole filmmaker, ever since his 1999 breakout indie film Memento led him to create Insomnia there.

That year, however, everything changed. The usually mild-mannered director was outraged by the decision of former WarnerMedia CEO Jason Kilar to perpetrate a blindside dumping of the studio’s entire slate onto its HBO Max streaming service. This attempt to build subscribers for its streaming service at a time few were going to theaters incensed Nolan and many others. The filmmaker was still wounded by the studio’s decision to release Tenet while the world had yet to fully emerge from lockdown.

In fact, he didn’t even have a film in the bunch being dumped, but he was nevertheless upset to see films made for the big screen — like Dune, The Matrix Resurrections, Wonder Woman 1984 and future Oscar-winner King Richard — drop day and date. As much a warrior for the traditional theatrical experience as Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino, Nolan decided he would look elsewhere; no idle threat when you consider that the movies he directed there grossed north of $6 billion (more when you consider the DC films he produced or godfathered).

When Deadline revealed that Nolan would make Oppenheimer, and that Cillian Murphy — still riding high on the success of showrunner Steven Knight’s period gangster series Peaky Blinders — would likely play the title role, the news landed like a bombshell. Every studio responded by chasing it, and there were rumors that Warner Bros. might not even get a meeting. The lucky winner was Donna Langley, NBCUniversal Studio Group Chairman, who, like several other studios, agreed to Nolan’s ask for $100 million to make his movie, along with creative control and a massive global theatrical release.

“I’d wanted to be in business with Chris for a long time,” she says, “and he was always near the top of my blue-sky wishlist of directors. Just as movie fans, whose movies do we love? Chris’s name was always close to the top of that. And from a strategic standpoint, as we were coming out of the pandemic, it was very clear to us that the cinematic experience needed to be undeniable in order to get people back into movie theaters. Chris’s work is undeniably cinematic. He makes films for the audience to see in the movie theater. And so that became a strategic imperative for us.”

Her determination to land the project increased when she read the script. Juggling multiple timeframes, Oppenheimer explains how the work done by scientist J. Robert Oppenheimer in the early 1940s — the top-secret Manhattan Project, based in Los Alamos — led to the creation of the atomic bomb and the end of the Second World War. It also deals with Oppenheimer’s guilt, and how the American establishment turned on him once he’d served his purpose.

In there were two career roles, one for Irish actor Murphy as Oppenheimer, and another for Robert Downey Jr. as Lewis Strauss, the bureaucrat nominated to be Eisenhower’s Secretary of Commerce. Strauss was so insecure about being snubbed by Oppenheimer, Einstein and other geniuses while a member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission that he would try to play silent assassin to Oppenheimer’s reputation by staging a controversial hearing to revoke his security clearance and render him a pariah.

“I was just transported by it,” Langley says. “I was so relieved that it wasn’t a mind-bending, twisty-turny, science fiction extravaganza that I needed an encyclopedia to understand. This was a story about a living person and a moment of time and history. It’s one of the best screenplays I’ve read in my career.”

It was a script with all the trappings of a Christopher Nolan movie — shifting timeframes, complex characters — and it had an emotional core that struck Langley deeply. “It’s very intimate on the one hand, but it also has a giant scope,” she notes. “The world is on the point of collapse, there’s technology and innovation being chased after by multiple countries, and America has to be first in the race to get there. At the time, being deep into the Ukraine war, I was really struck by how resonant and relevant the story was. And as Chris put it to me, ‘This is the greatest American story never told in cinema.’”

Kilar is long gone now, and Warner Bros. is a more theatrical-friendly place, as theatrical has become the priority for event films once again. Nolan won’t say whether this was a one-time fling, but it is hard to deny he saved his best film for Universal. Unusually for a three-hour, non-franchise film released in July, it has made a near-billion-dollar gross, won seven awards at the BAFTAs (including Best Film and Best Director), and is widely believed to be the Oscar favorite, receiving 13 Oscar nominations that put the film in the frame for the same key categories, while recognizing Murphy, Downey Jr. and Emily Blunt for their work in the acting categories.

Nolan vividly remembers the time first he ever saw Murphy: it was a photograph in a newspaper, probably the San Francisco Chronicle. The director was staying in a hotel in the Bay Area, writing and rewriting the script for Batman Begins, while at the same time scheduling screen tests for the lead role. At the time, he didn’t know who was going to play Batman. He was, he says, “just looking to see who was out there.”

What caught his eye was an image from Danny Boyle’s apocalyptic zombie thriller 28 Days Later: though Murphy was covered in blood, the actor’s bright blue eyes provided stark contrast to the bleakness of a new reality spent eluding flesh-eaters. “It was a cool photo,” says Nolan, turning to Murphy. “You could see your eyes, and your presence. I was just very struck by it.”

“Had you seen the movie then?” asks Murphy.

“No,” says Nolan. “I literally just saw a picture. I then watched the movie, but the truth is, I already was interested. These things are very instinctive, and that’s the relationship that an audience has with an actor as well. It’s an instinctive and instant connection. So, yeah, love at first sight. I see the picture and I’m like, ‘Man, that guy’s got something.’”

Nolan invited him to LA for a meeting. They met, connected, and suddenly Murphy was on the Caped Crusader shortlist of actors Nolan tested for the role that ultimately went to Christian Bale. “But I think at the time you were quite a bit… more slight than you are now,” recalls Nolan. “You walked in, and I remember thinking, ‘Are you really going to be able to be Batman?’”

Still, Nolan was interested to see what Murphy was capable of, shooting a screentest with the actor reading some of Bruce Wayne’s scenes. He shot them in 35mm on a Warners soundstage with full, professional lighting — “Because I really wanted the studio to really be able to see what this was going to be” — and the results surprised him. “I just remember a sort of ripple of excitement going through the crew,” he says. “Hollywood crews, particularly, they’re very professional, but quite jaded. They’ve seen a lot of stuff, so you don’t often get that kind of thing where you feel everyone is paying attention.”

Murphy wasn’t expecting to get the part. “I remember knowing it was a test,” he says. “From my point of view, I was already a fan of Chris’s work and I just wanted to get in the room and audition. That would have been enough. I was totally content at that stage of my career just to say, ‘Oh man, I was in a room with Christopher Nolan, and we worked on some scenes.’ And then he called me out of the blue. I did not expect him to say, ‘Well, how about this other part?’”

That other part was the film’s main villain, the Scarecrow, which marked a significant shift in the Batman franchise. “I don’t remember having any resistance whatsoever to having a relative unknown take on a big part like that,” Nolan says. “And previously all those villains were played by actors like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jack Nicholson. They were the biggest stars in the films. But no, [the studio] got it. They were all blown away by the test.”

So, what made him right for the villain but not Batman? “I don’t think he had the physicality at the time,” says Nolan. “We tested everyone as Bruce Wayne and we tested them as Batman, and the thing that Christian had that was so striking was that he understood that so much of acting is about reality. So much of acting is about emotional truth. And when you put on a costume like the Batsuit, you have to become this icon. Christian had this crazy energy that he just directed. He’d figured out how that worked and what that would be — the way Bruce Wayne does in the film. He adopts this persona. It’s a very specific thing. And he tore a hole on the screen as Batman. It was like, there was no question.”

Nolan turns to Murphy. “But it was interesting watching Peaky Blinders years later and seeing you play Tommy Shelby,” he says. “Whatever it is we’re talking about here, you’d figured it out. That’s an iconic character with an oppressive presence, where he walks into the room, and everything goes quiet, and he owns that space. In the way Batman does, or an iconic character of that kind. There’s a physicality that’s extremely confident and strong in everything he does, in every gesture.” He pauses. “Is that a conscious thing you’ve developed over the years, or was it just looking at that part and thinking, ‘How do I do that?’”

“I think it was both,” says Murphy. “But I also think I felt, back then, that that was a part I hadn’t really explored before, that kind of physically imposing character. I’d never been offered those parts. But I always think, Chris, that one of your underrated strengths is casting. Everyone knows all of your amazing strengths, but you cast things exquisitely. And I think the Scarecrow was the right part for me to be in at that time in my career.”

So, what makes an actor right for the type of role he was wrong for earlier? “I’ll tell you a story,” says Nolan. “I was talking to one of the crew, Nathan Crowley, who designed the Batman films. He told me he had seen Peaky Blinders. I hadn’t. And he said to me, ‘Yeah, Cillian put on all this weight for the part. He’s big.’ I watch it, and I’m like, ‘That’s not what it is, it’s not that.’ I mean, maybe he did put some bulk on, maybe he’s just getting older and more filled out. But that’s not what I saw. I was like, ‘No, this is physically the same guy, but he is using his gift, his instrument, to project scale in a way that I hadn’t seen before.’”

While it took him time to summon that presence, Murphy agrees that it had more to do with craft than physical bulk. “When I was a kid, about 16, I had the great privilege of seeing Jonathan Pryce play Macbeth at the National Theatre in London,” he says. “I had only seen him in films like Brazil, and he was a fairly slight guy. I watched him in real life play this huge role and he just seemed like this enormous force. It was about projecting.”

“I don’t know how you do that,” says Nolan. “And it’s probably something you don’t like to be too self-conscious about, but what I saw you do, what Tommy showed me, that’s what I saw, was an ability to transcend your own physicality, your body, and work beyond that and make people see this character in a different way. I mean, that’s the gift of great actors. And I don’t know how it works, but I’ve seen it.”

“I don’t know what it is either,” says Murphy.

Whatever that elusive quality was, Nolan knew he needed it to tell the story of Robert Oppenheimer. From his feature-length debut, the sleight-of-hand thriller Memento, to the Dark Knight Trilogy, and the boundary-bending likes of Inception, Interstellar and Tenet, Nolan has always been unafraid to tackle ambitious and complex narratives. But framing Oppenheimer’s story was to be the biggest challenge of his career.

Nolan grew up in the U.K. in the 1980s, during the Cold War and the continued concern over the danger of the arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. His curiosity about Oppenheimer began with a lyric in Sting’s 1985 song “Russians”, in the which the singer asks, “How can I save my little boy from Oppenheimer’s deadly toy?”

“I’m a little older than Cillian here, but he probably remembers growing up in the U.K. in the ’80s,” says Nolan. “It was a time of great fear of nuclear weapons. I talked to Steven Spielberg about this. It was like growing up in the ’60s, with the Cuban missile crisis. The ’80s were a very similar thing. There were protests, and there was a lot in the pop culture about nuclear weapons. But it was Sting’s song ‘Russians’ where I first heard Oppenheimer’s name, and there was this very palpable fear of nuclear Armageddon.”

The 2005 book American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin, captured Nolan’s interest further (in Greek mythology, Prometheus defied the Olympian gods by giving man the gift of fire). “It was after reading American Prometheus that I started to see a way in which you could tell this as a story, by taking on Oppenheimer and seeing it really from his point of view. And everything else followed after that. With something like the fear of nuclear weapons, you have to have a human way into that, and, for me, that was Oppenheimer.”

What struck Nolan in reading the book was hearing that Oppenheimer and his brother would go to Los Alamos as children to camp. “The connection between Los Alamos and the nuclear weapon he was developing, that comes from Oppenheimer’s childhood,” he notes. “He wanted to combine his interest in New Mexico — playing cowboy like he did, that love of the outdoors — with physics, and that’s what he did with the Manhattan Project.”

More so than the propulsive elements of the story, that the Americans were in a race against time to beat the Nazis, it was that element that convinced Nolan he, indeed, had a movie. “Once I’d read that, that’s where I started to see a personal connection,” he says. “And once you have the personal, then you start looking at the events, this thriller aspect to it that just kept coming in with everything that happened to Oppenheimer after 1945. It was a bunch of different things coming together.”

Indeed, Oppenheimer was later subjected to a politically charged tribunal that stripped his security clearance and rendered him a pariah, adding to his burden of having unleashed a weapon that, in the wrong hands, could destroy the world and had already cost over 100,000 lives when the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end WWII.

“American Prometheus is such a remarkable book,” Nolan muses. “Martin Sherwin worked on it for 20 years before Kai Bird joined. They did another five years. It’s a quarter of a century of research and interviews. I got the benefit of that, which was wonderful.”

Key to the story’s attraction was Oppenheimer himself, and Nolan was determined to unravel the scientist’s enigma. We’ve seen depictions of the fragility of genius in films like Shine, A Beautiful Mind, even Good Will Hunting, and how the brightest intellects can come unstuck. But Oppenheimer seemed to enjoy his post-WWII fame on the covers on Time and Life magazines, and in speeches. Was he a narcissist or a hero?

“I think he was definitely a hero, definitely a narcissist,” Nolan concludes. “He was a lot of different things. Very theatrical. What I got from American Prometheus, and what I started to get interested in is, he was someone who had a lot of neurosis and a lot of trouble very early in life, as he came of age at the same time that he was wrestling with these incredibly abstract concepts. We tried to fuse those things, show this kind of energy inside him and show how he masters that. And all the imagery of atoms and splitting atoms to me, they’re very related to his internal state, as a young man in particular. There’s a lot of dangerous tension inside this guy. A lot of dangerous mental energy.”

Murphy proved to be a strong physical match for Robert Oppenheimer; his handsome looks lent themselves to the theoretical physicist’s status as a womanizer, and those blue eyes were an ideal cipher for the wildness of those early scholarly years, when Oppenheimer was trying to harness his genius. All this came as a surprise to Murphy, back when Deadline revealed that Oppenheimer was Nolan’s next secret project and that he wanted Murphy to be number one on his call sheet, after five other movies with the director.

“I tried to ignore your story because I hadn’t heard from Chris or Emma [Thomas, Nolan’s partner and producer],” Murphy says. “It came out, everyone was texting me, and I said, ‘No, there must be some sort of mistake,’ or, ‘It’s just a rumor,’ because I hadn’t heard from those guys. A day or two later, Chris called me. This was out of the blue. Because Chris doesn’t write the script with actors in mind, which, when you think about it, is really, really smart because he doesn’t put any limitation on himself as a writer, or on the actor. So, it came out of the blue, and in the best way possible because I was unemployed. I hadn’t any work lined up.”

“It was perfect timing,” says Nolan. “He could have easily said, ‘Well, I’ve got a thing…’”

Murphy remembers that he had just finished up work on Peaky Blinders. “Bear in mind I said yes before I read the script,” he says, “because I always do that with Chris.”

Then it was Nolan’s turn to sweat, when he showed Murphy the script. “I said, ‘How about it?’ After Cillian said he was in, I flew to Dublin, and he came to my hotel and sat and read the script. I went off to the Hugh Lane Gallery and looked at Francis Bacon’s Studio, which I’d always wanted to see. And then we came back, and we had a chat about it. I remember doing this with Heath [Ledger] on The Dark Knight. He’d signed up for it, and then I showed him the script. There’s that moment of, like, ‘Are you going to feel good about that commitment?’”

He turns to Murphy. “But you seemed very into the script. You seemed very… I wouldn’t say relieved, I’d say you seemed excited.”

At this, Murphy breaks into a big smile. “It was one of the greatest scripts I’d ever read,” he says. “It was just astounding. But I knew it was huge. I knew this wasn’t just a part you could turn up at next week and get going. I was immediately going, ‘All right, f*ck, f*ck, f*ck. I’ve got to do all of this. This is huge.’ And, in fact, I was already working, getting going before I read the script. I knew I just had to go at it meticulously and make a strategy to go at it because there was just so much to do, emotionally, physically and intellectually.”

Murphy did more than just try on Oppenheimer’s signature hat. “I immediately started reducing calories,” he says, “which was a stupid thing to do, like, six months away from shooting. But I wanted to start feeling like him. I watched all the historical materials. I read the book, obviously. I started looking at all his lectures online. Any other stuff that was around. All the accounts from people that knew him were really, really interesting to me. Talking to [physicist] Kip Thorne, who was the scientific advisor on it. He had been lectured by Oppenheimer, which was really, really useful.”

Nolan interrupts. “That was a good thing,” he says, “because I’ve done a couple films with Kip; Interstellar was Kip’s original idea. I’d called him because I needed his help on the whole quantum physics thing. And in the course of the conversation, I realized that when he was at Princeton, he’d attended Oppenheimer’s lectures at the IAS. So immediately I was like, ‘Well, will you get on the phone with Cillian and talk to him about how he taught?’

Those testimonials helped Oppenheimer capture gestures and mannerisms that most of the audience for the film wouldn’t register.”

Says Murphy, “Kip talked about how Oppenheimer held his pipe on stage, and how he had the cigarette in one hand and the chalk in the other hand; We talked about how he was very aware of his presence, his legend, and his theatricality, all of that stuff.”

“I remember you telling me after you spoke to Kip, and we incorporated it into the staging as well,” says Nolan, “that Oppenheimer would let people talk. He was very good at summarizing a discussion. Which I think became absolutely key to the whole, to all of the Manhattan Project scenes.”

“He was an excellent synthesizer and manager,” Murphy agrees. “He didn’t seem the obvious choice for it, but he was.”

Together, Nolan and Murphy found the physical style for the lanky Oppenheimer, and one of the style influences was David Bowie, circa 1976. “Everything about him was constructed,” says Nolan. “Oppenheimer constructed his entire persona, his entire self. That’s why I threw the David Bowie photographs at you, Cillian. This was the Thin White Duke era. David Bowie has these crazy high-waisted trousers that were very, very similar in proportion to what Oppenheimer would wear at the end of Los Alamos. Bowie was always the ultimate self-constructed pop icon, and I think Oppenheimer was similar, in his own way. Obviously, it’s a completely different world, but he used his persona to achieve a mass of things.”

Murphy, who started out with the intention of a music career until he turned down a record deal and chose the acting life, sparked to the influence. “When Chris sent me that, I printed that picture out and I put it on my script,” Murphy says. “He sent it to me with no context, and I knew exactly what he meant, because I’m a music nerd and I could see the crossover. So, it was there in the back of my script for the whole shoot.”

More important, however, was getting Murphy ready for the emotional toll that playing Oppenheimer would bring, particularly after his triumph in Los Alamos. History hasn’t been kind to war heroes, as was seen when British mathematician/computer scientist Alan Turing cracked the Nazi enigma machine code — a breakthrough that shortened the Second World War — only to be punished for his homosexuality, which was illegal at the time. Similarly, Oppenheimer became a punching bag in a politically charged kangaroo court.

“I’m plagued by a line from The Dark Knight, and I’m plagued by it because I didn’t write it,” says Nolan. “My brother [Jonathan] wrote it. It kills me, because it’s the line that most resonates. And at the time, I didn’t even understand it. He says, ‘You either die a hero or you live long enough to become the villain.’ I read it in his draft, and I was like, ‘All right, I’ll keep it in there, but I don’t really know what it means. Is that really a thing?’ And then, over the years since that film’s come out, it just seems truer and truer. In this story, it’s absolutely that. Build them up, tear them down. It’s the way we treat people.”

Murphy believes that the security of 20 years working together emboldened him. “If you don’t have that history, or that level of trust, with a filmmaker,” he says, “I don’t know if you can be as brave or can dive in like I was able to on this one.”

Nolan has his own theory. “Maybe I’m wrong,” he says to Murphy, “but I feel like, after finishing Peaky Blinders, you were in a peculiar place in your career, because you’d been playing the same character for a lot of years. Very, very well with massive success, creative success and artistic success, and also people recognizing the success. You must have felt very comfortable in that character. Steven Knight’s writing is beautiful, and is always challenging the character, but it’s still a second skin that you’d developed that you were slipping into. But then you’re moving to an arena where all that’s gone. This was a true ‘out of the hot tub and into the cold plunge’ moment.”

Nolan appreciated the effort it took. “For me, particularly with such a big cast, Cillian was the element I was able to completely take for granted,” he says, “to the point where on Downey’s last day, he came up to me and said, ‘Do you understand how hard this guy is working for you?’ It was towards the end of the shoot. He was like, ‘He’s exhausted.’

And I said, ‘Thanks, Robert, he’ll be fine.’ And he was fine. But the point was taken that, yeah, I was able to take what he was doing on set for granted because I knew how great the work was. But the reality is, I didn’t realize the magnitude of the performance until I put it together in the edit suite. This is true, I think, of all great performances; you see what you see on set. But then, in the edit, you actually see it the way the actor has performed it. Even though you have been shooting in a crazy order, he’s figured out how all these pieces go together, and then you start to see it come together. It’s a really pretty magical thing.”

One of the first filmmakers Nolan showed the film to said something that really stuck with him. “There’s never that moment where you see the actor realize how great the part is,” he recalls this director telling him. Nolan knew exactly what he was talking about. “Because that’s the thing,” he says. “Particularly with serious movies, or when an actor has a great opportunity, you see them enjoying the taste of it a little too much. There’s always that moment. And that is not in this performance. This performance is totally pure. To me, this performance is much more about the real world, the way people are flawed, continuously flawed. There’s not one little thing they do wrong — we’re all good and bad, and there are layers of that. Oppenheimer is the absolute essence of that. The performance embraces that and carries the audience. But if the performance didn’t unselfconsciously embrace that, it wouldn’t work at all.”

Murphy is flattered. “It’s the nicest thing you could say,” he smiles. “But for me, I remember when I was doing it, if at any point I ever felt, I don’t know, anxious or insecure, I would always think, ‘No, Chris has seen something in me, and he’s drawing something in me out that I didn’t know was there really before.’ And I remember saying to him before we started shooting — because he’s always really pushed me in the best way, and he pushes all his performers in the best way — ‘Push me as hard as you possibly can on this one,’ because I knew we had to do that.”

The payoff comes in the ending, when the audience learns what Albert Einstein (Tom Conti) actually says to Oppenheimer. Strauss looks on, but Einstein walks past and ignores him. That Strauss was insecure and petty enough to believe their chat was about him, instead of being an intimate moment between geniuses who each bore the burden of creating weapons of mass destruction that pulled the world into a dangerous new age, is… Well, let Murphy describe it.

“I’m all about third acts and endings,” he says, “and when I read the script, that time in Dublin, knowing that’s one thing Chris always nails, I remember thinking, ‘What a f*cking ending.’ It’s extraordinary. And that’s from Chris’s imagination. It’s not from history, but it’s just genius. You can write an extraordinary script, but you can write yourself into a corner and the audience feels shortchanged if you don’t nail the f*cking ending.”

Says Nolan: “We talked very carefully about the moment where Kitty [Emily Blunt] says, ‘Did you think if you let them tar and feather you the world would forgive you? It won’t.’ I love the way Cillian performs in that moment, it was so important to me that it hit this exact note. And I didn’t know what that exact note was. I just knew that I’d know it when we hit it, because it needed to be sort of self-conscious in a slightly more open way.

“In the rest of the film, everything Oppenheimer does that’s a little bit vain or a little bit self-conscious, it’s almost as if he’s unaware of it,” Nolan says. “And I feel like in that moment, he opens up to the audience just a hair more, and says, ‘We’ll see.’ Because he puts the question to the audience, in a way. ‘Do you think the world will forgive you?’ ‘We’ll see.’ And I think the jury’s still out very much, but I think he’s definitely better thought of than he would be if he hadn’t been made to suffer.”

To Nolan, putting Oppenheimer, and Murphy, through the wringer in the latter part of the film evoked many higher themes. “When I showed it to Kai Bird for the first time, I said, ‘Look, this is my idea of who he is. This is who I feel he is. I feel that he’s ahead of those people in that room who are torturing him. I feel like he does have a vision to the world beyond that. And it’s partly a vision of fear, and a vision of the idea of the chain reaction. But it’s also partly how history will judge him. And if he fights too hard, or even if he won that fight…’

“It’s a bit Christ-like really, isn’t it?” he suggests. “It’s sort of knowing that the way to win is actually to lose. That was what I felt was inside him, and then the way you played it, Cillian. But there’s also great suffering. And I thought, I mean, Jason Clarke does such a wonderful job in the scene. And what nobody knows, because they weren’t there, but when we were filming your side, he just went nuts.”

Murphy interrupts. “Well, you f*cking made him go nuts! I thought at one point he was actually going to punch me out. It was like this big push in on me, each one, and I said to Chris, ‘I don’t know what you said to him, but he was like a f*cking animal, man.’ And then you used that take.”

Nolan lights up at the memory: “He was throwing stuff, and that’s mostly the take we used. It’s a combination of different takes, but that one was absolutely key. I just thought it was wonderful, but he hadn’t shot his side yet, and I worried he was going to lose his voice. But we came back the next day to do his side.”

“This is a case in point,” says Murphy, “where we were doing that big push. I remember going, ‘Do you think we got it, Chris?’ And you were like, ‘Eh. Let’s go again.’ I love that. You could say, ‘We can all go home now,’ but instead, you said, ‘Let’s just go again.’ Sometimes it doesn’t work, but that time it did.”

When the atomic bomb test succeeds, Oppenheimer is carried on the shoulders of others like a football coach who’s just won the Super Bowl. There’s even a scene in which Harry Truman (Gary Oldman), the president who dropped Oppenheimer’s bombs on Japan, is shown to be disgusted by the physicist’s remorse. But his role in the destruction and massive loss of life in Hiroshima and Nagasaki must have left Nolan with a real balancing act.

“As you put a script together,” he says, “you try and focus in on things like, what’s the key idea that has to work here? What are the key shifts that you need the audience to be struck by? And in the case of Oppenheimer, it was very clear to me that the whole purpose of the screenplay is to go from the absolute highest high of triumph, with Trinity, to the sheer lowest low of the realization of Hiroshima, in as short a time as possible.

“That was always going to be just a crazy shift,” he continues. “We talked about this a lot, in the moment where, earlier in the film, the atom is split. And then when Luis Alvarez [Alex Wolff] reproduces the experiment, in the script Oppenheimer immediately, as he did in real life, jumped to the idea that, you could make a bomb from this. The way in which Cillian performed that, it was very precise because it couldn’t be portentous. Obviously, he’s playing an intelligent man and he’s talking about bombs, but we couldn’t signal to the audience the negativity of where that was going to go, in terms of his frankly existential dilemma, the burden he’s going to carry later. You don’t want to foreshadow that in the performance. It was very important that the performance not foreshadow that, that it’d just be part of his journey that he’s interested in. To him, it’s actually exciting.”

In Nolan’s mind, the job is to paint a picture to help the audience form its own opinion about nukes, rather than betray his own morals and have it amount to feeding the audience cinematic spinach. “For me,” he says, “cinema can never be didactic, because as soon as it tells you what to think, you reject the art, you reject the storytelling. You see that a lot, particularly this time of year. It’s like people want movies to be able to send messages. But the truth is, I’m with whichever mogul who said, ‘Call Western Union if you want to send a message.’ In taking on Oppenheimer’s story, I don’t think there’s anyone who thinks that nuclear weapons are a good thing, so there’s not much point in telling the audience that.”

He pauses. “I’m sorry I’m going on a bit about this, but it’s a really interesting question. I had to explain this to everybody very early on: I’m not interested in making a story about how naive scientists accidentally created something that’s terrible for the world and then felt bad about it. Oppenheimer was one of the smartest people who ever lived. He knew exactly where this was going. The point is, they had to do it. They were put in a position where they believed that if the Nazis got the bomb, it would be the worst thing imaginable for the world. And so, they had to do what they had to do. But they did it knowing that the consequences would be potentially awful.

“That’s what makes the story so compelling from a human point of view. It’s not that they didn’t realize where this was going. It was that they felt they had no choice.”'

[black-diamond1329]

⭐ Name: Sandra, but you can tell me Sandy 😉.

⭐Age: I feel like I'm 15 years old, I stopped counting at 19 and my friends say that I act like I'm 5 years old XD hahaha ... Nah! I just turned 23 years old this August n_n.

💔 Occupation: Being a universitary girl XD ... Yes! It's so fun! (sarcasm).

🩷 Some things that I love it: Read (I read all kinds of books and about my favorite ships on Ao3! 🤭), cook desserts, listen to music while I do other activities like my homework or when I read, Greek mythology (The love between us will never die! 💗).

⭐Saint Seiya (or Knights of the Zodiac). I found this beautiful serie when I was 7 years old. My favorite is the original serie, although I also like the Lost Canvas a lot and Episode G (because Aioria is the protagonist). Soul of Gold gives me mixed feelings. From Omega and Next Dimension, better don't ask me; my mind lives in denial. My favorite characters are the Golden Saints, especially Aioros and Aioria, being Aioria my super favorite.

Thanks to Saint Seiya I developed a great love for the stars 💫 and I have many scientific books on the subject, as well as books of myths and legends about the constellations ✨.

💥 I'm a Marvel Girl. I love those tormented superheroes and antiheroes. I basically grew up watching Marvel since Iron Man came out in 2008 and I immersed myself fully in the world of the comics, I have a lot of comics and books on my bookshelf 🤭. My favorites are: Iron Man ♥️, Captain America, Spider-Man, Loki, the X-Men, Black Widow and Scarlet Witch, in all their presentations and with all their charms and defects!.

🍿Series: Friends, Full House, The big bang theory, How I met your mother and How I met your father, Modern Family, Mom, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel... I love it K-Dramas like Goblin: The lonely and great God, Crash landing on you, Tale of the Nine Tailed 😋, I have also watched many animes like Sailor Moon, Ouran High School Host Club, Toradora, Code Geass, Inuyasha, Kaleido Star, Shaman King, Attack on Titan... it's a long list and I don't remember everything at this moment 🤔. Miraculous Ladybug (I know it's for kids, but ... there is Chat Noir 🖤).

🐉In my House of the Dragon era 🖤: Like many people, I was also terribly disappointed with the horrible ending of Game of Thrones, but I really loved Fire and Blood when I read it in 2020... so I decided to give the serie a chance when I saw the first trailer... and I don't regret it! 🥳. I liked Daemon and Rhaenyra so much in the book and absolutely loved them in the TV Show! (Matt and Emma are incredible! ❣️). Another character that I loved in the book and the one I always wanted to know more about was Jacaerys Velaryon and I must say that I am very pleased with the choice of Harry Collett 😍 (oh yeah baby! 🔥).

I really hope that the directors and writers do justice to this wonderful crown prince! 🥰, because for me he is already one of my favorite characters of all time! ❣️.

🎥 Favorite Movies: Troy 2004 (did I mention I'm a Greek mythology lover?), the Star Wars saga 💫 (1-6 only), The Great Gatsby, A Walk to Remember, Harry Potter 🪄 (books and movies), The Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Hobbit trilogy, The Hunger Games saga ❣️(books and movies), The Twilight saga 😊 (books and movies).

I love Studio Ghibli movies with all my heart 💗 since my dad bought me the movie of Kiki Delivery Service when I was a 6-year-old little girl.

I love everything Disney and Pixar does 💗😘. (think of the happiest things, It's the same as having wings! 🎶)

🎧 Music: I have a very varied taste in music, some would say strange 😅, but if I like the rhythm and lyrics of the song I will surely add it to my playlist (mainly I like rock), AC / DC, Queen, Guns N' Roses, Bon Jovi, Linkin Park, Evanescence, Within Temptation, Imagine Dragons, Beyoncé, Ed Sheeran, Lana del Rey, Taylor Swift and Katy Perry. I enjoy classical music too 🩷.

⭐ Something more about me: I am an inveterate dreamer and extremely perfectionist. I express myself better by writing than talking 😚.

I haven't drawn anything in almost 5 years and when I did I used to draw with traditional media (watercolor, charcoal, colored pencils, gouche and acrylic paints 🖌️).

But since October (from last year), when I saw Harry Collett as Prince Jacaerys, I felt a desire to draw that I hadn't felt in a long time ❣️.

This is my first time trying to draw in digital media, I hope you like what you see! 😘 (YouTube tutorials don't fail me now! 😭). I spent the whole summer practicing🥺.

P.S: Sorry if exist some error, the english is not my firts lenguage.

[smoshgoshbefosh]

Could you do October 3rd?

Revali! Another of my hyperfixations it's like two worlds colliding

What Smosh Videos were Posted on Your Birthday?

2008:

Life as Ghosts Episode 4- Smosh Main

2009:

No videos October 3

2010:

No videos October 3

2011:

Ash Ketchum In Our Mail?- Smosh Pit

2012:

Star Wars First Assault and Halo Flood Mode- Smosh Games

Little Big Planet Two- Smosh Games

2013:

Every Heist Needs a Fall Guy (Versus)- Smosh Games

Shadow Warrior Review- Smosh Games

2014:

Your Dumb, I'm Dumber- Smosh Main

Gang Beasts Kool-Aid Challenge (Game Bang)- Smosh Games

2015:

Sexy Girlfriend Machine w/Ian and Anthony- Smosh Pit

Strip Smosh Bros (Smosh Smash)- Smosh Games

2016:

More Money in Our Mail?- Smosh Pit

Amazing Race in Survivor (Maricraft: Outlasters Part 3)- Smosh Games

Ball Busting Wheel Toys (What're Those?!)- Smosh Games

2017:

Elks Drug Awareness Makeup Transformation (Squad Vlogs)- Smosh Pit

Metroid (Honest Game Trailers)- Smosh Games (All Honest Game Trailers have since been deleted)

2018:

No videos October 3

2019:

Horror Maze Prank on Courtney- Smosh Pit

2020:

No videos October 3

2021:

Who Would We Blank, Marry, Or Kill? (Board AF)- Smosh Games

2022:

Elvis, Chris Rock, Stan Lee, and Mister Peanut (Dead Table Talks)- Smosh Main

2023:

Can You Spot the Good One? (Eat It or Yeet It)- Smosh Pit

How Did She Pull This Off? (Shorts)- Smosh Games

[april-is]

April 15, 2023: Dutch Elm Disease, Valencia Robin

Dutch Elm Disease Valencia Robin When Danny Johnson's big brother was killed in Vietnam, Danny ran around the block five times. I counted. Ran as if when he stopped his brother would be back in their driveway washing his car. But nobody knew anything about time travel back then, Star Trek hadn't even come out, Lieutenant Uhura still on Broadway doing Blues for Mr. Charlie. And even if Danny did understand the space-time continuum, his parents weren't having it, his mother on the porch yelling his name, his father tackling him on the front lawn, all us kids, the whole block standing there on pause. Which didn't exist either. No fast forward, no reverse. We weren't even Black yet. Was Milwaukee even Milwaukee? Is the Lincoln Park Bridge still there, do boys like Danny still climb over the rail, hug their bony knees to their narrow chests and plop into the river as if there's no way his parents could lose two children? Which is all I know about Vietnam, that and the way the sun hung in the faded sky as Danny ran around and around and held the air hostage, that and the way the thick August air ignored the leaves of all our doomed elm trees and let itself be held hostage. The streets were like ghosts when they cut down those trees.

--

Also:  // On Being Asked To Write A Poem Against The War In Vietnam, Hayden Carruth // An Ordinary Composure, James L. White // Paralysis, Peter Boyle // Things That Have Changed Since You Died, Laura Kasischke

Today in: 

2022: More Bang for Your Buck Running Scared, Brennan Bestwick 2021: Rain, Peter Everwine 2020: Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale, Dan Albergotti 2019: Prayer, Galway Kinnell 2018: Egg, C.G. Hanzlicek 2017: Well Water, Randall Jarrell 2016: For Desire, Kim Addonizio 2015: The Coming of Light, Mark Strand 2014: Flying Low, Stephen Dunn 2013: The Envoy, Jane Hirshfield 2012: Red Wand, Sandra Simonds 2011: Trying to Raise the Dead, Dorianne Laux 2010: Asking for Directions, Linda Gregg 2009: A Blessing, James Wright 2008: New York, New York, David Berman 2007: Waste Land Limericks, Wendy Cope 2006: There Are Two Worlds, Larry Levis 2005: America, Allen Ginsberg

[lurkinglurkerwholurks]

a fanfic writer questionnaire that you should absolutely do

Filling out my own questionnaire :) For funsies.

THE BASICS

Name(s): Lurkinglurkerwholurks

Where do you post fic? AO3, with Tumblr crossposting

Primary/current fic writing fandom: BatFam

Secondary/past/rotating fic writing fandoms: MCU (3 fics) with secondary tags on the BatFam posts to Stranger Things, Tenet, and Queen’s Thief.

Are there fandoms you write for but don’t read, or vice versa? I don’t read any of those secondary tags. I don’t write but very selectively read Star Wars, Star Trek, and FMA. (I used to read TAZ but don’t anymore.)

THE STATS

How long have you been writing fics? Since March 2018. I posted my first fic that April.

How many have you written? 91 (holy cow)

How many have you posted (complete or incomplete)? 91. One of those is incomplete and one is in progress. I have fragments of a couple more, but not enough to even count as half fics.

What’s your word count by year? Not totally sure because my two big fics stretched across multiple years. According to AO3:

2018 - 83,394

2019 - 102,244

2020 - 164,370

2021 - 114,915

2022 - 79,981 (so far)

But with the understanding that Nature and Nurture (109,065) started in 2018 and ended in 2020 and The Return (52,589) started in 2020 and ended in 2021.

What was your first posted fic? Mother Bruce and His Baby Birds

If you write in more than one fandom, which is your most popular? BatFam. By far.

What is your most popular fic by bookmark? The Return. 2,496.

What is your most popular fic by subscription? Also The Return, lol. 1,171

What is your longest fic? Nature and Nurture. Word count listed above.

How long did it take you to write it? Published dates are from 5/3/2018, to 3/5/2020. SYMMETRY. I can’t remember how long that first chapter took me to write, though, and I had the last chapter written at least a week before I posted it.

What is your shortest fic? Choose - Lose. 699 words.

How long did it take you to write it? Less than a day. Maybe less than an hour, even. I kind of went into a writerly fugue state and banged it out.

How many series do you have? 14. That is so many.

Who’s your most commonly tagged character? Bruce Wayne (66)

What’s your most commonly tagged relationship (slash or &)? “Tim Drake & Bruce Wayne” and “Jason Todd & Bruce Wayne” are both tied at 16. I... don’t think I have any /.

What’s your most commonly used other tag? Whump (26). Thanks, Whumptober.

THE EMOTIONS

Was there a fic or writer who inspired you to start writing your own posted works? @audreycritter​ and @unpretty​. Unpretty intrigued me with a Batman I didn’t hate. Audrey reeled me in with CEC. But also @starknjarvis27​ because I wanted to surprise her.

What do you remember about writing your first posted fic? Nerves. So many nerves.

Is there a fic or fics you’re most proud of, and why? I answered that here and the full answer is way too long!

Is there a fic you would redo completely if you could? Mother Bruce. Not because I don’t like it (I do! very much!) but because it was my first fic ever. I’m a better writer now, for one, and also while I think that BatFam is a nice BatFam, it may not necessarily be my BatFam, you know?

Is there a specific detail (setting, interaction, quirk, dialogue) you stole from your own life to use in a fic? Oh gosh, so many. I steal little bits and pieces from people I know all the time, because those tend to be the things that give the fictional people I write about texture. “How did you ever think to make up ____.” Eh, if it’s a small things, odds are I didn’t. I can’t come up with an example right now, but when I do, I’ll ETA.

Is there a line in your fic that makes you smile/snicker/chuckle every time you remember it? I give most of my best lines to Jason, but Tim’s breeziness never fails to delight me. “His therapist would call that a red flag, but que sera sera, YOLO, and so forth” is a classic. Also Bruce’s flummoxed “Did you just try to batarang me… with me?”

Is there a line in your fic that makes you sad every time you remember it? lollllllllll. Well. I have 6 works tagged “I Made Myself Cry,” so. But Damian’s I’m sorry I was difficult. I’m sorry I didn’t know how to be a good son. I’m sorry I was such an awful brother. I’m sorry I made you so angry. Please don’t be sad for too long. Please don’t forget about me. still hits hard.

Are there any story ideas you’ve considered but are too nervous/intimidated to attempt? What are they? Yes. No spoilers, but one of these days I’m going to recreate a specific scene from a specific non-DC show that has stuck with me for years.

[thelonelybrilliance]

10 Years of TolkienGirl

This December marked ten years of my posting fanfiction online. Between ff.net and AO3, I've shared more than a thousand fics (some best forgotten, at this point). On AO3 alone, I've posted well over 2 million words of writing. I feel that I've learned so much about the craft of writing, the essentials of character development, and limitless range of interpretation. My favorite accomplishments are the completion of several novel and novella-length works, and of course, my collaborative AU project with @abadpoetwithdreams and @wearetakingthehobbitstogallifrey. To celebrate, I'm sharing fifty personal favorites/milestones below:

25 One-Shots:

an imaginary line (2020) - The Silmarillion - What if Maedhros, in Himring, taught the ravens to speak?

and one to call home (2021) - Friday Night Lights - It’s the fear. It’s the hope. It’s the dream, the beginning of everything, head coach of the Dillon Panthers, so much riding on the choice to stay and stay and stay—

half omen, half hope (2019) - The Guest - This is what nobody ever tells you about fear: sometimes, you survive it.

the darkness drops again (but now I know) (2017) - Star Wars - Everything that Kylo Ren ever was is breaking like a wave.

as old as your omens (2018) - Queen's Thief series - Lose a hand, love the sword that took it. (She is the sword.)

sorry about the blood in your mouth (I wish it was mine) (2018) - Stranger Things - Steve is hanging by a thread. 

time, a maniac scattering dust (2018) - MCU: Avengers/Iron Man/Captain America - "I am" is so much easier to explain than "I am not."

we are not traitors but the lights go out (2018) - Queen's Thief series - Attolia feels as if she alone kills in cold blood.

the best lack all conviction (2016) - Daredevil - Matt’s first fear, when the world is stone-still and silent around him, is that he’s going to die. His second is that he’s going to live.

I will be a gun (and it's you I'll come for) (2019) - The Guest/ �� - Do priests wear black because they carry sin, or so that they can hide it better?

lonely as a cloud (2018) - MCU: Avengers/Thor - “How much of it is real?” Thor asks, because he always, always wants to know. Loki’s brow furrows. The flowers falter and fade. “None of it,” he says flatly.

never all at once (2017) - MCU: Captain America - Bucky never stops falling, and Steve never stops running, and worst of all is that both of them keep living, on and on, as though the train that ran that mountain pass still has them by the hands, metal and metal.

a blur of conquerors (2019) - My Country: The New Age/ 나의 나라  - For Bang-won, stillness is an art.

we are truth-speakers (2016) - Supernatural - Sam and Dean discover J.R.R. Tolkien.

if gold rusts (what then can iron do) (2016) - MCU: Avengers/Captain America - He doesn’t know where this leaves him. He doesn’t know why everyone leaves him.

the blackbird's tale (2017) - Scarlet Heart Ryeo/ 달의 연인-보보경심 려 - She is a princess before she is a girl, a queen before she is a mother.

land of the living (2017) - The Chronicles of Narnia - Susan had thought that this would be the simplest place to start.

here is my hand that will not harm you (2021) - Big Little Lies - Perry seemed like the answer to everything. Sometimes he still does.

his skin barely keeping him inside (2018) - The Vampire Diaries - Somewhere between trying to be a better man and snapping Jeremy Gilbert’s neck, you lost your way. That much is obvious. Less obvious is how you can come back from it.

let us love him at right angles (and each other not at all) (2018) - The Lord of the Rings - "They were so alike, him and my father."

we shall have spring again (2016) - The Chronicles of Narnia - Winter is long, long ago. Edmund doesn’t know why it just won’t leave him alone.

Penultimate (2016) - MCU: Captain America - Steve wonders what would happen if he never stopped running.

it does not do to dwell on dreams (and forget to live) (2016) - White Collar - Sometimes, Peter wonders if Neal only smiles when he lies.

praying with a gun (2018) - Sherlock - All the dates are wrong, and all the data.

all love is time travel (2021) - Once Upon a Time - Killian has long been a captain, and so he does not show weakness or indecision unless he wishes to. 

5 Multi-Chaps:

Fixing on the Hour (2018, revised 2021) - Pride and Prejudice - In which Darcy Williams meets Eli Bennett, tries to be the best at everything, and maybe loses the chip on her shoulder.

Match (2018) - Emma - Emmett Woodhouse returns home from college, and sets about fixing everything but himself.

nor are we forgiven (which brings us back) (2018) - Star Wars - Sometimes going back to the beginning is farther back than you expect.

the way it all melted (like ice melts) (2016) - Supernatural - In January 2001, the Winchesters hunt Grendel, and Sam's life begins to take him away.

what our hearts used to be (2019) - Scarlet Heart Ryeo/ 달의 연인-보보경심 려 - Maybe she dreamed of an ancient kingdom so that she could save a modern empire.

10 Fics from 2022:

The Figurehead (WIP) - Stranger Things - When the first flakes of living ash begin to fall, Steve isn’t ready. He’s never ready. That’s not what counts.

the second hand unwinds (Multi-Chap) - Stranger Things - Steve will be damned if this is the end. Steve is damned already if he has to watch Nancy die in front of him.

love is not a victory march - Friday Night Lights - Fear is something that has always been tied up with Tyra’s understanding of home.

tide me death, betide me life - Stranger Things - Robin’s something of an expert in the business of looking at Steve Harrington for the wrong reasons.

see my heart burning in the distance - Friday Night Lights - For now it’s enough to be free. It’s enough to be unrecognizable. Most of the time, it’s enough to leave.

the heart is slow to learn - Stranger Things - It’s the day after the end of the world, and Nancy can’t sleep.

of green fires lit on the soil of the earth - Friday Night Lights - It’s just been so long since Eric had anyone to talk to about this.

and last year's leaves are smoke in every lane - Stranger Things - “A classic,” Robin says, though no one asked for her opinion. She has the tape in hand. “I always thought Laszlo gets short shrift, you know? He’s so heroic. And Bogart was short. But the heart wants what it wants, right?”

staring into all man's plateglass, faces, questioning after who loves - Stranger Things - Jonathan quirks half a smile in her direction. “Do you want to be right, or do you want me to have lunch with you?”

and yet shall mourn - MCU: Spiderman- There are times when MJ is sure she’s splitting in two, self and not-self, or maybe, self and truer self. Which—what the hell, again? Who is she, if she isn’t herself?

10 Gold Rush Silmarillion AU Fics:

no better hope - Fingon sets forth on his impossible mission.

within the hollow crown - Maedhros' life ends in every way but death.

steadfast as the hills of stone - Fingon is not done healing his cousin. His cousin does not particularly want to be healed.

between the jealous mountains (shall we mourn) - Vengeance is a long road--longer for some than others.

in their eyes (shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes) - Gwindor thought it would be enough, to love in a place of safety.

the tabernacle (reconstructed) - This is the land of plenty (or something like that).

chase winter from the human face - What sort of budding doctor am I?

our possible life - On Christmas Eve, Maedhros asks Estrela a favor.

the song I sing again and again - The night may not be young, but they are.

shatter my dream (with the aid of reality) - Who is he? Pater noster, he whispers to himself, of himself.

[wipbigbang]

Story Title: Scoundrel

Fandom: Star Wars Original Trilogy

Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24676918/chapters/59633551

Summary: In the victorious aftermath of the attack on Death Star, Han Solo finds himself hanging around Yavin IV. Why? Much as he wished he could admit otherwise, his attention was captivated by the hero of the rebellion himself, Luke Skywalker. But pining after a farm boy yearning to get out of moisture farming was much different than pining after the star pilot with the galaxy at his feet.

And a smuggler like Han catching his eye now? Just not in the cards.

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Characters: Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, minor Chewbacca, minor Leia Organa

Pairings: Luke Skywalker/Han Solo

When I Started:* 2020 (apparently I did write something during the pandemic)

How I Lost My Shit:* I think at one point I put it aside and kept saying, oh I'll get back to it later. I've always known how I wanted to end it, but I just never sat down and finished it.

How I Finished My Shit:* I didn't know how else to make the time to finish this fic, because I keep getting caught up in big bangs and reverse bangs. So, this is quite literally the perfect event.

[nimata-beroya]

End of Year Wrap Up

I was tagged by my bestie @takadasaiko Thanks dearie!

Total number of completed works

6 in total: Welcome to Yavin IV (Part of Road to Lira San series); Running Out of Air, Something in the Dark, Ramaanla, and The Tables are Turned (as part of Whumptober); and High Above the Ground (for Foxiyo Week).

Total number of WIPs worked on this year

3 new works plus 1 old one. The Enemy Within (from Road to Lira San series); How to Save a Life (for Whumptober); and Deconstructed Reality (Kalluzeb minibang) are the new ones. I also updated Sandawuni Va Umtidagir (Unbreakable Bond) that it was first published in 2020.

WIPs neglected this year

The only one that I truly neglected and was first published in 2022 was Deconstructed Reality, but I have Rough Awakening from the previous year that is even more neglected. Oops 😅

Fandoms I've written in

1 (Counting Star Wars as a whole, or 4 sub fandoms)

Total word count

37,083 words published (+ over 15k words written for unpublished new works/updates)

Looking back, did you write more than you thought you would this year, less, or about what you expected?

*sighs* A lot less 😞 I thought 2022 was going to be the year of my comeback to writing, big time! It was not.

Did you take any writing risks this year?

I think I did in 2 instances. I started writing for my own OCs in a massive project that will expand to at least 4 multichaptered fics, if not more (Yikes 😬), and I did a little experiment with changing the type of narrator in one of my Whumptober fics.

Do you have any goals for the new year?

My goal is updating the WIPs I neglected last year and continue on the ones are still halfway in the story, and write and publish the 2 first installments of my "Insurrection" series, and work on the third, which is the longest on the series. If I can manage, I'll post that as well if I finish writing it.

Biggest disappointment?

The lack of inspiration brought up by the writer's block that hit me a large part of the year. I thought I was going to write a lot more, since I got my new laptop at the beginning of 2022, but it never happened.

Biggest surprise? 

How the idea of participating in febuwhump (which I never actually did) with a single multichap fic, stringing up all the prompts together, turned into the "Insurrection" series. How 28 whump prompts turned into not less than 4 long fics, I don't know. I guess it was my head adding plot points after plot points. This project seems daunting but I'm determined to pull it off.

Most popular story of the year?

Welcome to Yavin IV, definitely. It's the one that has more hits, likes, and bookmarks of all the works I published in 2022. Although, Deconstructed Reality is the most commented and with more subscriptions, but being for a mini-bang, that it was expected.

What's your own favorite story of the year? 

Oof! That's hard to decide. There's always something special in each of my fics, for a reason or another. I can't choose, so all of them 😆

Story of mine most under-appreciated by the universe, in my opinion

I think it might be The Tables Are Turned. If I compare its stats with that of the rest of my Kalluzeb fics, it has a noticeable less engagement from readers. I think that since I hinted at kink stuff very mildly in it (and tagged it as such), people were scared off. It's a shame, because the kink stuff I mentioned in the story is so mild, and it's not even smut, which is probably what people think they'll find inside. To be honest, I knew this could happen. I knew that by tagging BDSM in it, some people would run. It's a risk I took because I'd rather tag correctly and not having as many comments than not tagging and receive hate comments for not doing so. I do my part in facilitating that everyone can curate their experience to their liking.

Other story of mine that I could say it's underappreciated is High Above the Ground, which has about the same stats than The Tables are Turned, but being a fic for a rarepair, it's not exactly surprising that has less than 200 kudos.

Most fun story to write

Again, The Tables are Turned. I had so much fun writing it, because for the first time I put the good guys as whumpers and the bad guy as whumpee. It was hilarious to me having an imperial officer sweating in fear.

Most unintentionally telling story

Maybe High Above the Ground. It turned out to be very differently than what I first had in mind when I started writing it. I love the result though ☺️ even if nobody else thinks so.

My favorite part of fandom this year

That I became more confident in writing in this fandom, mostly because I've expanded my lore knowledge watching old shows I haven't watched before and getting very slowly into both canon and legend books. Also I made more good new friends.

Tagging anyone who wants to do this!!!

[brookston]

Holidays 12.18

Holidays

Answer the Phone Like Buddy the Elf Day

Arabic Language Day (UN)

Australian Christmas (Team Fortress)

Baranth Do (Elder Scrolls)

Final Fantasy Anniversary Day

Flake Appreciation Day

Founder’s Day (Qatar)

Hug a Soccer Player Day

International Migrants Day (UN)

Minifig Day

National Crime Junkie Day

National Deborah Day

National Harry Day

National Jeremy Day

National Scrooge Week begins (according to Mr. Ed)

National Twin Day

Nutcracker Day

Nyempa Guzom (Sikkim, India)

Pink Panther Day

Play Bingo Day

Republic Day (Niger)

Sunday Newspaper Day

Truffle Day (French Republic)

Tulya’s E’en (Beginning of Yule Season; Orkney Island)

Voice From Space Day

Wear a Plunger On Your Head Day

World Minorities Rights Day (India)

Yuletide Lad #7 arrives (Hurdaskellir or Door-Slammer; Iceland)

Food & Drink Celebrations

Bake Cookies Day

Let's See What We Find in the Fridge Day

National Ham Salad Day

National “I Love Honey” Day

National Muffin Day (Brazil)

National Roast Suckling Pig Day

National Stilton Day (UK)

3rd Monday in December

Christmas Lunch Gift Exchange Day [3rd Monday]

Design Wall Monday [3rd Monday]

Free Shipping Day [3rd Monday] (Also 12.14)

National Emo Day [3rd Monday]

Independence Days

New Jersey Statehood Day (#3; 1787)

Qatar (1878)

Feast Days

Eponalia (Feast of Epona; Roman goddess of fertility)

Expectation of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Christian)

Fantastic Finkleman (Muppetism)

Feast of Our Lady of Expectation

Feast of Our Lady of Solitude (Mexico)

Flannán (Christian; Saint)

Gatianus (a.k.a. Gatian) of Tours (Christian; Saint)

O Adonai (2nd O Antiphon or Great Advent Antiphon; Christian) [2 of 7]

Paul Klee (Artology)

Priestley (Positivist; Saint)

Rufus and Zozimus (Christian; Martyrs)

Running of the Roboderos (Church of the SubGenius)

Saturnalia Day 2: Saturn’s Release (Pagan)

Sebastian (Eastern Orthodox Church)

Unusual Music Instruments Day (Pastafarian)

Urdhyauli Parwa (Festival of the Animals; Nepal)

Willem van de Velde II (Artology)

Winibald (a.k.a. Winebald; Christian; Saint)

Lucky & Unlucky Days

Butsumetsu (仏滅 Japan) [Unlucky all day.]

Tycho Brahe Unlucky Day (Scandinavia) [37 of 37]

Premieres

Anchorrman 2: The Legend Continues (Film; 2013)

Another Round (Film; 2020)

Avatar (Film; 2009)

Baby Buggy Bunny (WB MM Cartoon; 1954)

The Ballad of the Green Berets, recorded by Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler (Song; 1965)

*batteries not included (Film; 1987)

The Big Blast or A Many Splintered Thing (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S2, Ep. 81; 1960)

Boris Lends a Hand or Count Your Fingers (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S4, Ep. 188; 1962)

Boris on a Broomstick or The Flying Sorceror (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S4, Ep. 187; 1962)

Born to Boogie (Music Documentary Film; 1972)

Brazil (Film; 1985)

The Bridge on the River Kwai (Film; 1957)

Broadcast News (Film; 1987)

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (Film; 1968)

Cinderella Liberty (Film; 1973)

The Color Purple (Film; 1985)

Doctor Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe (Play; 1592)

Dragons of Ashida (Animated TV Show;Jonny Quest #14; 1964)

From All of Us to All of You (Animated Disney TV Christmas Special; 1958)

Her (Film; 2013)

The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun (Film; 2015)

Last Train to Christmas (UK Film; 2021)

The Lion Sleeps Tonight, by The Tokens (Song; 1961)

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (TV Series; 2020)

Mary Poppins Returns (Film; 2018)

McCartney III, by Paul McCartney (Album; 2020)

Moonstruck (Film; 1987)

More Kittens (Disney Cartoon; 1936)

The Nutcracker, by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (Ballet; 1892)

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (US Film; 1969) [James Bond #6]

Out of Africa (Film; 1985)

Overboard (Film; 1987)

The Prince of Egypt (Animated Film; 1998)

Twistin’ the Night Away, by Sam Cooke (Song; 1961)

The Two Towers (Film; 2002) [The Lord of the Rings #2]

September in the Rain (WB MM Cartoon; 1937)

Sisters (Film; 2015)

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Film; 2015) [Star Wars #7]

The Steal Hour or A Snitch in Time (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S2, Ep. 82; 1960)

A Symposium on Popular Songs (Disney Cartoon; 1962)

The Yearling (Film; 1946)

You’ve Got Mail (Film; 1998)

Today’s Name Days

Philipp, Wunibald (Austria)

Bosiljko, Dražen, Gracijan, Malahija (Croatia)

Miloslav (Czech Republic)

Lovise (Denmark)

Neeme, Neemo (Estonia)

Aapo, Aappo, Rami (Finland)

Briac, Gatien (France)

Esperanza, Gratian, Luise (Germany)

Floros, Sebastianos (Greece)

Auguszta (Hungary)

Graziano (Italy)

Jordisa, Klinta, Kristaps, Sarmis (Latvia)

Eivilė, Girdvilas, Gracijus (Lithuania)

Kate, Kristoffer (Norway)

Bogusław, Gracjan, Gracjana, Laurencja, Wilibald, Wszemir (Poland)

Daniil (Romania)

Sláva (Slovakia)

Esperanza (Spain)

Abraham (Sweden)

Griffin, Griffith, Ruff, Rufina, Rufus, Russ, Russell, Rusti, Rusty, Ty, Tyrus (USA)

Today is Also…

Day of Year: Day 352 of 2024; 13 days remaining in the year

ISO: Day 1 of week 51 of 2023

Celtic Tree Calendar: Ruis (Elder) [Day 21 of 28]

Chinese: Month 12 (Jia-Zi), Day 6 (Geng-Xu)

Chinese Year of the: Rabbit 4721 (until February 10, 2024)

Hebrew: 6 Teveth 5784

Islamic: 5 Jumada II 1445

J Cal: 22 Zima; Oneday [22 of 30]

Julian: 5 December 2023

Moon: 38%: Waxing Crescent

Positivist: 16 Bichat (13th Month) [Priestley]

Runic Half Month: Jara (Year) [Day 8 of 15]

Season: Autumn (Day 86 of 89)

Zodiac: Sagittarius (Day 27 of 30)

[celinamarniss]

2022 Fic Year in Review

Word count, writing review, and planned fics for next year.

In 2022 I posted 4 fics at 45,096 words.

Previous years:

2021: 3 fics posted, 55,788 words.

2020: 7 or 10 fics posted, 125,738 words.

2019: 7 fics posted, 72,149 words.

2018: 7 fics posted, 87,752 words

2016: 9 fics posted, 51,643 words

2017: 9 fics posted, 115,336 words

2016: 9 fics posted, 51,653 words

In total, 45 fics posted to Ao3.

2023 FICS

The Things You Find on Tatooine

24,338 words (subject to change if I do another edit of the last two chapters)

I technically posted the first part of this story series in 2021, but I'm counting it again this year, because I wrote most of it in 2022.

What started as something of a rare pair dare—haha, Chewie/Mara, what an absurd off-the-wall pairing, but! what if I figured out a way to make it work?—became a series of ficlets that I wrote on whenever inspiration struck. It became something of a comfort fic whenever things were a bit much—and things were a bit much a lot this year. 

I’ve capped the series at 10 chapters. Next year I’ll be writing the next stage of the story: the New Hope remix, currently titled A Smuggler’s Guide to Joining the Rebel Alliance. I can’t wait to throw Luke and Leia into this nonsense. 

Souveniers

2,059 words

The fic most likely to get me canceled, lol. 

The inevitable punchline of Things on Tatooine is going to be that Chewie and Mara were never romantically or sexually involved, but only faked the relationship to make her feel safe (and to torture Han). But jediMordsith egged me on until I wrote the explicit version. I honestly can’t believe I did it! As I said in notes to the fic: one day you start cracking jokes on the group chat about Chewabacca's fuckability, and the next thing you know you've written 2k of Wookiee smut. 

something electric in your blood

6,532 words

Once again, the Fic Whining Circle goaded me into writing up a crazy fic idea I had. This idea probably came from thinking too much about how to bring Luke into Things on Tatooine (not like this!) An AU of one of my own AUs (how indulgent!) My most popular fic of the year, no question, currently at 1287 hits.

Memoria

12,167 words

I talked a bit about the genesis for this fic in the notes. Thrawn isn’t my favorite character, and I mainly write him for evilmouse and jediMordsith’s amusement. I struggled with this series of stories and I’m not really sure I did them justice. I had the most fun with the final story in the Emperor’s lair, which sets up a few things for the final Triumvirate story. 

GOALS FOR 2023:

Triumvirate Finale! (explicit, very) The big finale of the Triumvirate series, in which the trio returns to Coruscant to face the Emperor. Doesn't have a proper title yet. Progress so far: two and a half chapters drafted, 15,410 words.

A Smuggler's Guide to Joining the Rebellion (gen) The sequel to Things on Tatooine. Progress: A few half-drafted scenes, 1,673 words.

Echo, Revenant, Targeter, Phoenix (gen) A character study of Winter Retrac. I'm thinking of submitting this one for the Star Wars Big Bang. Progress: three chapters drafted, some major restructuring needed, 7,271 words.

Lando Calrissian and the Jewel of Andara (gen) The Lando and Mara heist romcom I've been promising forever. Progress: three chapters drafted, in need of heavy revision, 6757 words.

Other fics on the backburner:

Courtship remix

Experiments

Daughter of the Rain and Snow

More daemon fic! 

[brookstonalmanac]

Holidays 12.18

Holidays

Answer the Phone Like Buddy the Elf Day

Arabic Language Day (UN)

Australian Christmas (Team Fortress)

Baranth Do (Elder Scrolls)

Final Fantasy Anniversary Day

Flake Appreciation Day

Founder’s Day (Qatar)

Hug a Soccer Player Day

International Migrants Day (UN)

Minifig Day

National Crime Junkie Day

National Deborah Day

National Harry Day

National Jeremy Day

National Scrooge Week begins (according to Mr. Ed)

National Twin Day

Nutcracker Day

Nyempa Guzom (Sikkim, India)

Pink Panther Day

Play Bingo Day

Republic Day (Niger)

Sunday Newspaper Day

Truffle Day (French Republic)

Tulya’s E’en (Beginning of Yule Season; Orkney Island)

Voice From Space Day

Wear a Plunger On Your Head Day

World Minorities Rights Day (India)

Yuletide Lad #7 arrives (Hurdaskellir or Door-Slammer; Iceland)

Food & Drink Celebrations

Bake Cookies Day

Let's See What We Find in the Fridge Day

National Ham Salad Day

National “I Love Honey” Day

National Muffin Day (Brazil)

National Roast Suckling Pig Day

National Stilton Day (UK)

3rd Monday in December

Christmas Lunch Gift Exchange Day [3rd Monday]

Design Wall Monday [3rd Monday]

Free Shipping Day [3rd Monday] (Also 12.14)

National Emo Day [3rd Monday]

Independence Days

New Jersey Statehood Day (#3; 1787)

Qatar (1878)

Feast Days

Eponalia (Feast of Epona; Roman goddess of fertility)

Expectation of the Blessed Virgin Mary (Christian)

Fantastic Finkleman (Muppetism)

Feast of Our Lady of Expectation

Feast of Our Lady of Solitude (Mexico)

Flannán (Christian; Saint)

Gatianus (a.k.a. Gatian) of Tours (Christian; Saint)

O Adonai (2nd O Antiphon or Great Advent Antiphon; Christian) [2 of 7]

Paul Klee (Artology)

Priestley (Positivist; Saint)

Rufus and Zozimus (Christian; Martyrs)

Running of the Roboderos (Church of the SubGenius)

Saturnalia Day 2: Saturn’s Release (Pagan)

Sebastian (Eastern Orthodox Church)

Unusual Music Instruments Day (Pastafarian)

Urdhyauli Parwa (Festival of the Animals; Nepal)

Willem van de Velde II (Artology)

Winibald (a.k.a. Winebald; Christian; Saint)

Lucky & Unlucky Days

Butsumetsu (仏滅 Japan) [Unlucky all day.]

Tycho Brahe Unlucky Day (Scandinavia) [37 of 37]

Premieres

Anchorrman 2: The Legend Continues (Film; 2013)

Another Round (Film; 2020)

Avatar (Film; 2009)

Baby Buggy Bunny (WB MM Cartoon; 1954)

The Ballad of the Green Berets, recorded by Staff Sgt. Barry Sadler (Song; 1965)

*batteries not included (Film; 1987)

The Big Blast or A Many Splintered Thing (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S2, Ep. 81; 1960)

Boris Lends a Hand or Count Your Fingers (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S4, Ep. 188; 1962)

Boris on a Broomstick or The Flying Sorceror (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S4, Ep. 187; 1962)

Born to Boogie (Music Documentary Film; 1972)

Brazil (Film; 1985)

The Bridge on the River Kwai (Film; 1957)

Broadcast News (Film; 1987)

Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (Film; 1968)

Cinderella Liberty (Film; 1973)

The Color Purple (Film; 1985)

Doctor Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe (Play; 1592)

Dragons of Ashida (Animated TV Show;Jonny Quest #14; 1964)

From All of Us to All of You (Animated Disney TV Christmas Special; 1958)

Her (Film; 2013)

The Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun (Film; 2015)

Last Train to Christmas (UK Film; 2021)

The Lion Sleeps Tonight, by The Tokens (Song; 1961)

Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (TV Series; 2020)

Mary Poppins Returns (Film; 2018)

McCartney III, by Paul McCartney (Album; 2020)

Moonstruck (Film; 1987)

More Kittens (Disney Cartoon; 1936)

The Nutcracker, by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (Ballet; 1892)

On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (US Film; 1969) [James Bond #6]

Out of Africa (Film; 1985)

Overboard (Film; 1987)

The Prince of Egypt (Animated Film; 1998)

Twistin’ the Night Away, by Sam Cooke (Song; 1961)

The Two Towers (Film; 2002) [The Lord of the Rings #2]

September in the Rain (WB MM Cartoon; 1937)

Sisters (Film; 2015)

Star Wars: The Force Awakens (Film; 2015) [Star Wars #7]

The Steal Hour or A Snitch in Time (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S2, Ep. 82; 1960)

A Symposium on Popular Songs (Disney Cartoon; 1962)

The Yearling (Film; 1946)

You’ve Got Mail (Film; 1998)

Today’s Name Days

Philipp, Wunibald (Austria)

Bosiljko, Dražen, Gracijan, Malahija (Croatia)

Miloslav (Czech Republic)

Lovise (Denmark)

Neeme, Neemo (Estonia)

Aapo, Aappo, Rami (Finland)

Briac, Gatien (France)

Esperanza, Gratian, Luise (Germany)

Floros, Sebastianos (Greece)

Auguszta (Hungary)

Graziano (Italy)

Jordisa, Klinta, Kristaps, Sarmis (Latvia)

Eivilė, Girdvilas, Gracijus (Lithuania)

Kate, Kristoffer (Norway)

Bogusław, Gracjan, Gracjana, Laurencja, Wilibald, Wszemir (Poland)

Daniil (Romania)

Sláva (Slovakia)

Esperanza (Spain)

Abraham (Sweden)

Griffin, Griffith, Ruff, Rufina, Rufus, Russ, Russell, Rusti, Rusty, Ty, Tyrus (USA)

Today is Also…

Day of Year: Day 352 of 2024; 13 days remaining in the year

ISO: Day 1 of week 51 of 2023

Celtic Tree Calendar: Ruis (Elder) [Day 21 of 28]

Chinese: Month 12 (Jia-Zi), Day 6 (Geng-Xu)

Chinese Year of the: Rabbit 4721 (until February 10, 2024)

Hebrew: 6 Teveth 5784

Islamic: 5 Jumada II 1445

J Cal: 22 Zima; Oneday [22 of 30]

Julian: 5 December 2023

Moon: 38%: Waxing Crescent

Positivist: 16 Bichat (13th Month) [Priestley]

Runic Half Month: Jara (Year) [Day 8 of 15]

Season: Autumn (Day 86 of 89)

Zodiac: Sagittarius (Day 27 of 30)

[vidoggytv-blog]

Davy Crockett est-il un film Disney ?

Davy Crockett , King of the Wild Frontier est un film d'aventure de 1955 produit par Walt Disney Productions. En conséquence, Davy Crockett est-il sur Disney plus? Davy Crockett est une série en cinq parties qui a été diffusée sur ABC de 1954 à 1955 dans des épisodes d'une heure, sur la série Disneyland. Walt Disney Home Video a sorti les deux films théâtraux sur DVD sous le nom de Davy Crocket - Two Movie Set, le 7 septembre 2004. Deuxièmement, qui était l'ennemi juré de Davy Crockett dans Davy Crockett and the River Pirates ? Se déroulant en 1810, la première moitié de l'histoire traite d'une course fluviale vers la Nouvelle-Orléans entre Davy (Fess Parker) et son ami Mike Fink (Jeff York). La question est également de savoir quand le film Davy Crockett a-t-il été réalisé ? 25 mai 1955 Que faisait Davy Crockett en 1955 ? Davy Crockett : King of the Wild Frontier ( 1955 ) Le pionnier américain Davy Crockett combat dans la guerre des Indiens de Creek, est élu au Congrès américain et se bat pour le Texas à l'Alamo. Disney plus aura-t-il tous les films Disney ?   Disney Plus est conçu pour être le seul endroit où vous pouvez diffuser tous les films de Disney sortis en salles , à commencer par Captain Marvel et Avengers : Endgame au lancement et le reste de sa liste 2019 plus tard.   Disney plus va-t-il avoir des amis ?   Disney offrira aux abonnés Disney +, Hulu (avec publicités) et ESPN + dans un forfait pour 12,99 $ par mois. HBO Max, qui comprend toutes les émissions HBO standard ainsi que plus de contenu de WarnerMedia comme "Big Bang Theory" et " Friends ", coûte 14,99 $ par mois, le même prix que HBO "régulier".   Y aura-t-il une troupe de goof sur Disney plus?   Ensuite, pour compléter sa bibliothèque, les utilisateurs peuvent se gaver de milliers d'heures d' émissions télévisées animées Disney comme " Goof Troop ". Pour les adultes qui apprécient l'animation en tant que forme d'art, presque tous les longs métrages d'animation Pixar et Disney les attendent sur Disney Plus .   Qu'est-ce que Disney plus aura?   Disney Plus comprend tout le contenu familial de Disney et une grande partie de son tarif grand public – en gros, tout ce qui est conçu pour un public jusqu'à une cote PG-13. Il a du contenu de Disney proprement dit, Marvel, Lucasfilm (donc, Star Wars), Pixar et National Geographic.   Quoi de neuf sur Disney+ ?   Tous les originaux de Disney Plus à venir en 2020 - La saison 2 de Mandalorian. - Wanda Vision. - Le faucon et le soldat de l'hiver. - Star Wars : La Guerre des Clones Saison 7. - Lizzie McGuire. - Muppets maintenant. - Le film Phineas & Ferb : Candace contre l'univers. - High School Musical : La comédie musicale : La série : Saison 2.   Comment obtenir Disney+ ?   Comment obtenir Disney+ - Votre première option consiste à acheter le pack Disney directement auprès de Disney. Le forfait est une bonne option pour ceux qui veulent également Hulu et ESPN +, mais des mises en garde s'appliquent. - La deuxième option est pour ceux qui ont déjà des abonnements Hulu et ESPN+.   Que dois-je regarder en premier sur Disney+ ?   Assurez-vous de faire correspondre vos réponses ci-dessous pour voir quelle émission vous devriez regarder en premier ! Vous voulez plus d'actualités Disney+ ? Cliquez ici pour rester à jour avec ce qui est en streaming ! Si vous avez répondu… - B) Je me détends à la maison. - D) Mickey Mouse. - A) Jouer à des jeux de société. - A) Glace. - B) Comédie—J'ai besoin d'un bon rire ! - A) Curieux. - C) Rouge. - A) Binger.   Quel était le vrai nom de Davy Crockett ?   David Croquet   Davy Crockett est-il une vraie personne ?   David Crockett (17 août 1786 - 6 mars 1836) était un héros populaire américain, pionnier, soldat et homme politique. Il est communément désigné dans la culture populaire par l'épithète "King of the Wild Frontier". Il a représenté le Tennessee à la Chambre des représentants des États-Unis et a servi pendant la Révolution du Texas.   Qui était le meilleur ami de Davy Crockett ?   George Russel   Comment Davy Crockett est-il réellement mort ?   Tué en action   Qui a joué la femme de Davy Crockett ?   Le 14 août 1806, après avoir été abandonné par sa première fiancée, Crockett épousa Mary (Polly) Finley. Le couple a eu trois enfants et a déménagé dans le comté de Franklin, dans le Tennessee, dans une ferme Crockett nommée "Kentuck". Après la mort de Polly en 1815, Crockett épousa la veuve Elizabeth Patton.   Qui a chanté Davy Crockett King of the Wild Frontier ?   Bill Hayes   Où est né Davy Crockett ?   Calcaire, Tennessee, États-Unis   Quand Davy Crockett s'est-il marié ?   1815 (Elisabeth Patton) 16 août 1806 (Polly Finley)   Qui est mort à l'Alamo ?   L'armée mexicaine de Santa Anna a tué la quasi-totalité des quelque 200 Texans (ou Texians) défendant l'Alamo, y compris leurs chefs, les colonels William B. Travis et James Bowie , et le légendaire pionnier Davy Crockett .   Qui a joué Mike Fink ?   Jeff York Read the full article