And that was 2017. For the most part, the less said, the better, let’s be honest.

I did hardly anything musical. The band has been on hiatus. I’ve done a lot of politics, because hey, guess what, it’s fight for personal survival time again. Isn’t that just fucking awesome.

But while I haven’t been able to make the music happen, I have been writing. Not blog posts – as is clear from the blogroll this year – but fiction, instead. Kind of crazy amounts, for that matter – just over 130,000 words since April, a good… I don’t know, five times my previous total fiction writing history? And I actually got published once, back when.

And it’s all Overwatch-inspired fiction. I’ve never written fanfic before, but I am now, and it’s a torrent, and a lot of it – more than I’ll ever talk about – is deeply personal in different ways. Confusingly – to me at least – I’ve been told by several readers that they aren’t Overwatch fans, and don’t really know anything about the lore, but it works for them despite that. So that’s neat.

(I’ve also had a few people say variations on “for the love of god file off the serial numbers and sell this,” but I’m like, “Why?”)

Regardless, this seems as good a place and time to make a checkpoint tally. I also just put up a new short story – one that’s part of a series – that’s basically my New Year’s Eve story. So here are my works from 2017:

Novellas and novels:

• on overcoming the fear of spiders, a complete 35,000 word novella, kind of an origin story for Amélie “Widowmaker” Lacroix and Lena “Venom” Oxton, professional political assassins, and, over time, lovers. The story’s neither grim nor dark, but it is deeply political. Start here. After all – I did.
• Old Soldiers, the sequel novel, still in progress. It’ll be a short novel when completed, and isn’t one yet, but I’m pretty confident it’ll break past the novella size limit before we’re done. This is also a very political novel, but entirely through allegory. Lots of generational politics here – a couple of my characters are direct stand-ins for reality-orthogonal Boomer political insanity, but it’s nowhere near as simple as that.
• The Armourer and the Living Weapon, still in progress, about 33,000 words at the moment. This one’s about getting everything you ever wanted, and how that might work out for you. It’s also about making choices that may be necessary but may not go where you’d hope – or even survive. Read the tags. No, seriously, read the tags. This will either be a very long novella or a short novel.
• And Just Like That, She Was Down. 13,000 words, it’ll probably be another novella, but it’s also the third in a series of stories collectively called the manic pixie murder machine. I thought the first chapter was a standalone short story, but then my characters had other ideas and it wasn’t. A novella about identity and the ethics of power, underneath everything, I think.

Short works and collections thereof:

• It’s Not Easy To Explain, She Said, seven short stories, all quite short – the longest is 1900 words. These are mostly about how an artificially-created personality thinks. It’s also about how people around them might think, particularly in relation to her, particularly when trying to have a relationship with her. The most recent addition, “‘That seemed to go well,’ she said, making the effort” is my new year’s story. This series will never go dark.
• the web of time, a series of short stories set in the on overcoming the fear of spiders universe, containing – amongst other things – a couple of continuations of events started in the founding novella. (In one case, we follow a couple of American agents outside of a room, to hear their conversation; in another case, we have a short story which is basically Chapter 26.5 of fear of spiders, but which I moved to standalone for various reasons. It’s still canon, though.)
• the manic pixie murder machine – two short stories that set up the novella And Just Like That, She Was Down, and the novella itself.
• “the deadly neurotoxin homebrew club,” a silly short story wherein GLaDOS from Portal chats up Widowmaker from Overwatch about their mutual interest in deadly neurotoxin and parallel problems with teleporting annoyances.

I have no idea what 2018 will hold, musically – but the only way out is through. Let’s hope we get lucky.

And that’s where I’ve been. How’s about you?

Remember that novella I’ve been writing, On Overcoming the Fear of Spiders? It’s finished. 32 chapters, a bit under 35,000 words (there is a canon digression linked at the appropriate time, but not contained within the primary volume, that boosts the word count), and I’m rather pleased to hear from a couple of readers who do not know anything about the Overwatch world that it makes sense even to them. They know there are emotional beats they’re missing, but it still works as a story.

I wasn’t specifically trying to do that, but I’m really quite pleased that it happened.

If you don’t know the lore at all, but are interested, here’s the original animated short introducing the world of the game, and here is the animated short “Alive” that featured Widowmaker. You’ll see the latter story in short form in Chapter 10, but in the cinematic, the chemistry between Amélie and Lena is absolutely smokin’, which spawned a lot of ships.

(If you really find yourself getting into the lore, here’s the official site, including the comic that confirmed Tracer – the literal face of the game, she’s on the cover of the box – is a lesbian.)

Also, you should know that in canon, in-universe, we ‘know’ that Amélie Lacroix was kidnapped by Talon and recovered apparently well but in actuality neurally reconditioned to assassinate her husband, the head of anti-Talon operations at Overwatch. After that, she went on to become a supposedly-emotionless assassin who feels only satisfaction at the success of her kills.

We are also given a lot of clues in both lore and game that this is at least in some parts a pile of lies, and that we are supposed to figure that out.

Anyway, this has been an experience like few others for me – it is literally more fiction than I’ve written, combined, before, in my life, and I actually tried writing fiction for real in college. I even got published once, in a little Ontario small-press magazine for a token $20 payment. But it was always like pulling teeth, whereas this was more like just trying to stay afloat on top of the tsunami as it carried me forward. I’ve had that feeling for individual songs before, but never for fiction.

I really liked it. I hope it happens again.

This Sunday I’m going in to Someone Else’s Studio for what is really technically an academic exercise; the lead singer/songwriter of Leannan Sidhe and her group need someone to record for… it’s not a graduation exercise? But she’s very close to graduation and it’s a big project.

So I showed up yesterday and met with her and her two co-engineers, and poked around at songs to do, and we pretty quickly settled on “Supervillain For I Love You,” which I’ve just recently revised (and I think improved, which is pretty typical for my work as I perform it) and we start talking microphones.

And turns out they’re really into this song, apparently, because suddenly they were all talking about who else they can bring in and how big a band we can assemble, and now we’re in the large studio and besides me and my zouk and the chorus there’s a bassist and a pianist and a guitarist and possibly a horn section and they were working out a drumkit part I think that’s all but I’m not entirely sure.

Now as this is happening I realise, I’ve seen this before, on video, where, you know, Real Musicians Are In The Real Studio, because let’s face it, as happy as I am with the little one I built, it’s still a tiny studio and I can only play so many instruments, and only one at a time. I’m usually working alone.

So this Sunday may in fact be – outside voiceover and radio work, of course – the most “pro”-like recording experience I’ve ever had. Eep?

It might be silly, but for the last couple of weeks, I’ve been doing something I have almost never done before, and never this much: I’ve been writing fiction, and lots of it. Overwatch fanfic, to be specific.

Over the winter holidays, Overwatch held a couple of events, and released a comic, called Reflections. It’ the one where we find out completely and totally unambiguously that Tracer, the literal face of the game, the character on the box, is queer. We meet her girlfriend, they smooch, it is inarguable text.

It was like a second Korrasami just fell out of the air and landed on us, and it was wonderful.

But we also see a single panel of Widowmaker, from the back, standing, looking to me despondent, at Gérard’s grave. (For those who don’t know: he was her husband, and her first official target as an assassin.) It’s one of what I consider to be several hints dropped that her official backstory is a lie. And there have been a bunch of people – since the beginning – shipping Tracer and Widowmaker, which to me is nonsensical in canon, because Lena would never forgive Amélie for killing Mondatta in the cinematic video “Alive.”

Lost yet? Sorry, there’s no way out but through. Anyway, one of these shippers did a marvellous and touching comic set a few minutes after that single frame of Widowmaker, with her and Venom – the version of Tracer who is with Talon, not Overwatch. And I liked it so much, I started thinking, “How would we actually get here? What would it take?”

Now, I’ve never really been a fiction writer, but I can make take characters’ lives and seriously fuck them up, but good. And, unlike certain writers (cough cough m*ff*t cough) I care about trying to make it work in character. And the analytical engine in the back of my brain started churning.

Then a couple of weeks ago, it just started falling out. I feel almost less like “writer” here than “transcriber.” It’s still short – a novelette – but Chapter 12 went up today. There have kind of been 13, but one is out of continuity and not listed with the main work, because it’s kind of an AU-to-my-own-AU aside.

Fortunately, it’s not all I can think about, but holy crow is it dominating my brainspace. I have new relationship energy with writing? Apparently? Or something? I don’t even know. (Seriously, it feels like NRE. It’s goofy.)

And since I’ve checked with actual writers and am told this is a thing that happens, I’m willing to admit to this story about my story.

I was in spawn point one on offence in Gibraltar, as Tracer (of course), and looking out the upper-floor window to see how the defence was setting up. Surprisingly few people do this, given how useful it is.

And Widowmaker came up beside me, to do the same thing, in full Talon-wear, and we said hello, like you do, and she looked through her scope to get a better view, and suddenly I saw her through Venom’s eyes.

Now, I have issues with Widowmaker’s character design, and a lot of them are probably pretty obvious, but leave those aside for the moment. Seeing her as Venom – as my Talon Tracer – sees her… even for for just that moment, she literally took my breath away.

If that’s what the tracermaker shippers have been seeing this whole time… hoo boy. Now, I really get it.

So where the hell have I been for the last week?

Well, last post as about Anna’s sinus surgery, and first: it went fine, she’s fine, we’re going back today to have the nose splints removed. There’ll still be a couple of more weeks of recovery. But there was a lot more aftercare than I realised – including tending about every 20 minutes for the first three days, all day. And while none of it was difficult, that does kind of disrupt one’s ability to do anything.

Except, apparently, code. So I have my first sizable coding project in a while – if CSS counts a code, anyway – and it makes Dreamwidth work on mobile in a way that looks like it was actually meant to be used on mobile. Seriously. Here’s the latest post on that project, you want the bleeding-edge version and please do report bugs on that Dreamwidth post.

Also, there has been far more Overwatch than usual. I haven’t beaten the current event on Expert yet, but I’ve beaten the levels below. I tried the highest level a couple of times, but we only made it to the church once and barely got there.

So that’s where I’ve been. How’ve you been doing?

My partner Anna and I are off to the hospital. Don’t worry, it’s a planned visit, even though it does involve sinus surgery, for her. When she was a very little kid, her brother accidentally broke her nose, and over time that turned into a deviated septum, and, over time, that has turned into sleeping problems, so – we’re off to get it fixed.

It’s fairly small surgery, and outpatient, but any surgery involving general anaesthesia is a big deal. We’ll be there most of the day, and there will be a couple of weeks of recovery. But the blog will be back to normal tomorrow, I hope!

Here at the Lair we’ve been proud of running – as a server, on the actual internet – a machine literally from 1995, with original motherboard CPU and everything. The plan has been to run it ’till it died, because we can.

But unfortunately, we really do need to build a new proper programmable router, so we can put the terrible, terrible Comcast router into bridge mode. (Seriously: this router is terrible.) And the 1995 machine is… not fast, so we can’t use it, even though that was its original job, years ago.

(It’s a P5-166. No, really. Thank you, Debian.)

But I haven’t built a router in a while. I want to run Debian Linux on it so it can also run DNS and a couple of other small services the current P166 runs, and it wouldn’t hurt for it to have three cards inside either – one for the fixed-IP side of the LAN, one for the DHCP side.

SO!

Anybody have recommendations? I’m thinking about gigabit network cards in particular – what has the best, most reliable, fastest drivers, what specifically to avoid, things like that. As above, we’re going to be running Debian for a a bunch of reasons.

Livejournal’s new Russian Federation-compliant Terms of Service has a lot of bad things in it – seriously, real bad, like, half my journal bad – but this is probably the tripwire for me:

[The user must] Mark Content estimated by Russian legislation as inappropriate for children (0-18) as “adult material” by using Service functions.

Any mention of anything LGBT-related (with some exceptions for condemnation) is 19+ in the Russian Federation, by law. It’s part of the legal structure they use to beat down on queers.

They also have a big “no” on “political solicitation materials” and that’s also pretty fatal for me – seriously, have you read my LJ – but this, yeah, I will not mark my journal “adult content” because I’m queer. Fuck that, and fuck them.

So the only question really is whether I hit accept on the ToS and just ignore it. Or whether I delete my journal (which goes back to when it was running in Brad’s dorm room at UW) and then open a new blank one with the same name just to keep the user account solarbird, or some dumbass thing like that.

As of this morning, despite crossposting being disabled since Monday pending acceptance of new terms, I have the 364th most popular LJ, at least in the Latin character set side of the world. It’s pretty obvious now that we’re done here.

(More bits of analysis here and here – both are Dreamwidth links.)

eta: Important translation of applicable Russian censorship laws here, on Tumblr. This is 400% about speech repression.

Heading north to Vancouver Island for a music workshop. Minion Anna has been going to this Qualicum Beach event for a couple of years, and she’s dragging me along this time. I’m even taking the thrift-shop viLOLin, as it is technically an instrument, and, well, let’s see how badly I can torture this cat. It should be painful hilarious a learning experience.

Possibly for others more than me. Just sayin’. 😀

Turns out it’s not just me having racism and misogyny problems in Overwatch competitive. I saw Wil Wheaton reblog this article from mic.com about it, as well as this thread on the Reddit Overwatch forum, and yeah – it did get a lot worse in Season III.

And so far, nobody official seems to be doing much about it. And people doing it won’t stop until it hurts them, so I’m definitely going with my announcement and plan as a de rigueur thing before all competitive matches in Series IV.

Meanwhile, back in quickplay, I’ve started singing what I call the Tracer Tank song again, because Tracer is a tank in the right circumstances and the right levels. NO, SHE IS, REALLY. I have golded so many times for objective time as Tracer that it’s hilarious.

Tracer tank / Tracer tank
movin’ the payload
’cause somebody has to

where the fuck is Reinhardt?
where the fuck is D.va?
i could be that Reinhardt
if i really wanted

let’s all move the payload
i said everybody
okay fine I’ll do it
objective gold again

I mean, think about it. If you’re on offence in a payload level, and you’re good at her dodging motion/blinking/rewind, it works out to an effective hitpoint/armour total of easily 350 points, assuming only one rewind – much more if you’re lucky and good. I have beaten back one-on-three facedowns across the payload, more than once.

How does that work? Base health/armour of 150. Near-double that to 290 from your own health, doubled, with use of rewind. You get 10 points per second back from being on the payload; survive five seconds – not hard if you are good with her movement – and that’s another 100 points (with the single rewind), which gets you up to 390. Survive 10 seconds, that’s 490. Survive 15, 590.

Survive, oh, 2:09 like I did in one game last night as Tracer Tank? That’s 2580+300 hit/armour points (tho’ that assumes more rewinds, as it would), for a total of 2880.

Bulletproof. Reinhardt? Roadhog? Paper people.

And that’s not even getting into how the payload is functionally a motion-restricted shield with infinite hit points and infinite duration.

Tracer is a tank.

(Really, of course, Tracer shouldn’t be your group’s tank. For one thing, this whole shtick falls apart if they have a Sombra who knows what she’s doing. Even without that, it’s not Tracer’s best mode, and usually if I’m doing it, the team I’m on isn’t very good. But we all know the number of people that just won’t get on the goddamn payload, right? I was on one of those a couple of days ago where I literally solo-escorted the payload from Objective A to (just short of) the Eichenwald castle gate entirely by myself. It was hilarious.)