Off the prompt "cuddles."

made a status update about my personal life, one bit was about how I've watched Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood 2.5 times in as many months. brought the fannish blathering to a public post.

FMA/B is currently my primary fandom! I've been reading a ton of fic--mostly Roy/Ed, although I also read some Riza/Roy when it came up in the 'bottom Roy' tag because lolyes. I have two main plotbunnies I want to write--one is a specific idea about Roy being FTM and getting an automail dick (at Ed's urging, because Ed is an automail evangelist) with lots of headcanons about how automail works and is installed. The other is like, the kitchen sink plotbunny, where Roy is extremely poly and the polycule includes almost everyone in the conspiracy to make him Fuhrer, and also Roy semi-accidentally catches Hughes's soul in the phone system and Ed helps him grow a body to put it in, and also Ed is working through being grey-ace and agender and trying to have a relationship with Roy while Roy is trying to very gently ask him what he even wants, because so many mixed signals. The automail dick plotbunny is pretty firmly in the FMAB continuity but I love FMA '03 a LOT and have been working with a frankencanon for the kitchen sink story (fitting? the canon is also a kitchen sink?).

Features of the frankencanon: ( fairly extensive spoilers for both? or at least assumption you know the spoilers for both? )

I also have a couple of vid bunnies! one is the resurrected vid bunny I had back in 2005 about Roy after Hughes's death, to Green Day's Holiday, which could easily work to either canon. or both. or i might *yet* make a constructed reality AU vid about Roy's attempt at human transmutation. The second is a crossroads deal with the devil song that I wanted to vid about how Ed ends up working with all these people who were or should have been enemies on Promised Day, up to and including the Thing in the Gate itself. I started listening to the band that wrote the song a fair amount and now I'm gravitating to vidding a different song of theirs, called Hangman (although it contains some.... possibly Latin, possibly gibberish parts that the band's fandom's translation of makes little to no sense, which might make it hard). But it's such a good atmospheric song for the epic tragedy of it all.

Post the names of all the files in your WIP folder, regardless of how non-descriptive or ridiculous. With the variant from torch: Upon request, I will quote a random line from any of these files.

Roughly in order of most recently touched to hasn't been touched since 2003 with a small amount of by fandom (my WIP folder is actually sorted by fandom, so you know, the ones that only list one fandom and say 'crossover' are not meaningless in context. But also when I sorted by my recent date it was imperfect because I've had overlapping/longterm fandoms).

ivan and gregor
lady bel vorkosigan
secret agent ivan
V60
the john and ruby show
The surfer dudes came up to the house...
Kurt's Dad Dies AU
studio60/trust me xover
Kryptonian Neal
Archer and T'Pol
rubyverse snippets
Ruby decides to set Dean up with the ...
Once, in the middle of a fight about ...
The Other 179 Steps
five AUs
The beginning was easy, mostly becaus...
superhero neal
beautifulthings
"Man, I could go for some pie right a...
rubyverse outline
clairefic
kitty MerlinShared
Untitled
the once and future king
Chuck epic AU outline
wrongwrongOMGwrong
epic AU sequel B
Chuck vs the Intersect, Once more with Feeling
Uther's ghost
Zoe A
otherdisasters
misshornblower
ghostsoup
OatTyule
joeled
trashyvulcanromance
danielhauntsjack--revisions-8-13-08
AmitaAtlantis
michael
housesga
lightsout
magicathosians
simonnarim
AP
teylaliz
lesbiansperm
meridanfix
klausG
eroicaimmortal
poly60sketch
vanityfair
mistresspepper
tonysmorningafterfreakout
ironmaiden
electricsheep
owensgoon
clone
martharose
marthasarahjane
dextorch
pwjack
fuckingbipolarthreesome
danielrose
postroseten
jackremembers
diefdeaf
ghostvictoria
dsfranniekids
arrayfic
hugheshome
royhugheslies
salamander
gracieis
winryroy
4fingers
carnivale
3impossibletasks
kierastory
delivery
loioshpern
cawti
oat-xover
book1
book2
book3
book4
lomyw
ladiesaux
Ghinfidelity
GHfamilyrelations
topaya
toaster
ayaaya
ghmx
dreamau
wb-laby
wb-hl
kenneth-joan
jackivan
theboys
piotrAU
fishing
kml3
allgay
au
qlb5
circuit
memory
mpregdon
agentramunjan
randompr0n
threetwo
riverxover
wingwilson
wilsoncooks
efcxover
amandabday
prize
hlbtvssnippetybippet
ats-hl
OUaTiM-hl
deathamanda
marryjoe
kingsransom
joeknows
notmethos
bastardmethos
mythseeker
salzer
neitherservenorreign
GGslash
gilmoreslayers
storyofbanandginji
twinloss
fcwk
malriver
auofdoom
wkff
sixthport
lgmalt
universe-hop
7dayscross
green
7u
lettersfromtelemachus
DRverse
lenivan
santaclauseAU
valentomb
lomsopadoom
fragments

So I seem to remember something about a way for an archivist to request to upload a pre-existing collection to AO3, and I can't find anything about it in AO3's FAQ, which says that only the author of a work can add a work to a collection. I wanted to put up the valabars archive, which held the Dragaera ficathon from... 2005-6, and hasn't been on the actual internets in a couple of years, but which I have all the fic from. But I can't figure out if there's a way for me as an archivist to do that, as I thought there was, or if I would need to create a collection on AO3 and then email all the participants to ask them to post, which would be... not ideal.

(I am also giving consideration to whether I want to put up a militarydogs collection. Given the inauspicious circumstances under which that game went belly up.)

I've been slowly loading all my finished fic onto AO3 and somehow this morphed into poking at WIPs I have thousands and thousands of words and wondering if I could ever find the wherewithal to finish them.

I have 9800 words of a From Eroica With Love story--it's Klaus/G and while it has cute moments, I clearly didn't finish it because it's doomed to tragedy. It was supposed to be for a zine and I missed that deadline by a lot. I feel certain I talked at people (probably grey_bard and keelieinblack) about this story, but I can't find chat logs for it. I mean, it is like, three years old now.

I have so much Andromeda Rhade stuff scattered over so many files--I started writing that like fifteen times, and never really got around to finishing my version of Rhade's AU because the show eventually provided. But the biggest file is 8850 words which seems like I might be interested in working out how that ends and committing it to the ether.

Or, here's a good one, I have 9570 words of Firefly-Serenity Mal/River fic and wow, the inside of River's head is an interesting place to write from.

I have a few Fullmetal Alchemist WIPs that reached ridiculous proportions. There's the Hughes Home For Children of Wayward Alchemists, wherein Hughes laughs at Roy and takes the Elrics home personally and essentially adopts them. That hit 5200 words. There's the Roy/Maes/Gracie story that all the segments I've written add up to 16,000 words. Hughesmunculus is around a paltry 2000 words.


I should note that I'm deliberately only mentioning WIPs in fandoms that I can look out with running into the night. So if it's on this list, there is... moderate cause for hope. I saw this as preface to bringing up Iron Man WIPs, because echan will be ALL OVER ME, but I did tell her to expect more writing when the new movie came out. So: there's the Electric Sheep story, of which there's about 2400 words. Mistress Pepper, I, uh, apparently have not written any actual prose on, but the collected, edited chat logs clock in at 5300.

I have a Kyo Kara Maoh story called Carnivale that was mostly a style experiment that's around 3400 words. The part I didn't get around to writing was the ugly question of who was wearing the Maoh mask on night three of the carnivale.

In Numb3rs, I had a story where Amita is a secret agent, up to 1500 words. And over a thousand words of the random mpreg story (I don't even know). Also, there's a story where Amita joins Stargate Atlantis that's up to 4750.

The Stargate SG-1 season 6 AU has what, 11,870 words of draft and outline.

There's a Taltos story that's kind of back and forth about Kiera and Kragar, and I've got 8800 words of that.

I appear to have 5100 words of a Glass Houses story, too. Wow. I'm so behind on GH it's not even funny.

There's also 4970 words of a Torchwood story where Jack gives into temptation and clones Ten from the hand.

So yeah. um.

17,751 / 30,000 (58.0%)

305 words from late in the chronology of Alchemy and Other Lies, archived on AO3.


Roy heard Gracie say, "Orchids? Honey, these are beautiful, where did you get them?"

He poked his head around the doorway just in time to see Alicia answer, beaming, "Fletcher showed me how to make them," and hold up a sheet of paper with an array inked on it in sparkling purple marker.

"Thank you," Gracie said to Alicia, but she was grinning at Roy.

Roy glared at Fletcher Tringham. Fletcher had the grace to blush but looked otherwise unperturbed. It was possible Roy had been overusing his glare on the boy if that was all the response it got.

"You're welcome," said Alicia. She smiled shyly at Roy. "Do you like them?" she asked.

Roy took the array from Alicia and said gruffly, "You shouldn't use sparklers for this kind of thing. Non-continuous arrays have unpredictable effects."

"Says the man who embroidered accents in gold thread on those famous gloves of his," Gracie reminded him cheerfully. Roy had always thought you were supposed to embarrass your offspring in front of their potential mates, not your husband.

"Which lasted for about two days," Roy said patiently. "Because it didn't work."

"Sorry, sir," said Fletcher, twisting his hands behind his back in earnest apology.

"I'll use regular pen next time," Alicia promised.

Roy sighed and rubbed his forehead. Next time? "Alchemy's dangerous--" he began.

"No, it's not," Alicia said, frowning at him. "Not this kind. Just making flowers? There's no harm it. You worry too much."

Fletcher said, "I promise we won't try anything risky without running it by you, sir."

"But--" Roy said.

Gracie stopped him with a kiss on the cheek. "Can't be helped," she said. "If she's an alchemist, she's alchemist. Like father, like daughter."

Roy glared. "It's a recessive trait!" he declared, and went off to fireproof the house.

Does anyone know if Hughes ever flashes his and Gracia's wedding pics? I would dearly love to know if she wore a white dress. White dresses for weddings were popularized by Queen Victoria's wedding to Prince Albert; before then, people tended to buy a dress they could use as a fancy/formal evening gown later on. And does the world of FMA have a Queen Victoria? And would she have worn white?

ETA: Does anyone know what hand Hughes and Gracia wear their rings on? Germany's one of those weird countries where you wear it on the right hand, not the left; I wonder if Amestris is the same./ETA ETA2: The answer to that seems to be left hand, but I'm wondering if he didn't wear it when he was on duty, because the thing is so damn tricky to find./ETA2 ETA4: Heh. By complete and total accident (ie, changing my google prefs in the middle of image-searching Gracia), I discovered that "moderate safe search" blocks ponderosa121's site. Even though the Gracia pic she's done is not remotely risqué. But you know. We might find other things of nekkidity on her site. *snicker*/ETA4 ETA5: OMG, this is the scariest thing ever. BTW, why is Scar's brother called Bruce?/ETA5

ETA3: A lot of places have laws now that marriages have to be conducted in a public forum. (Australia is one that doesn't.) *ponder* /ETA3

Before about the 1540s, pretty much all marriages were common-law marriages. Apparently a lot of them did occur in churches out of expectations of family, but it was not required. Hell, witnesses weren't required. Specific vows weren't required. Marriage license, not required. You and your sweetie just agreed you were married, possibly with your parents' consent if you were like, 14.

In the mid-1500s, the church took an interest. Roman Catholic church started demanding its members have church weddings (not sure of the date on this one) and in England, there was a law passed that you had to be married by the CoE for it to be legal (unless you were a Quaker or a Jew).

But in Amestris... in Amestris... *taps lip* ( yeah, yeah, end of series spoiler )

Stuff I worked out talking to stariceling and niqaeli:

I previously posted on even-pointed, bound arrays versus odd-pointed, unbound arrays, and that's going to inform all the following theory on alchemy.

I'm going to go ahead and post the spoilery list of odd-pointed arrays that that entry eschews.

( arrays )

My current theory of the development of alchemy is that ( series end spoilers )

Questions:

What happens if you put an array inside an array? (And when can you tell if you have, because the larger arrays have multiple circles.)

Does size matter? Current theory on this is that the only effect a larger array has is that you have more room to draw detail into, so larger and more detailed arrays are for more complex or precise transmutations.

On the flip side of the detail/precision with which the array is drawn--we often see alchemists hand-draw arrays in high-stress situations, which means they're not regular, perfectly circular, etc. I think the more perfectly the array is drawn, the more exact the transmutation will be. But, say, in an instance like ( end of series Roy )

Back to the size thing--we wonder if Ed could get more power out of his hand-clap alchemy if he had longer arms. Heh.

I think arrays are amps for a process which is mostly mental, because when I take apart something like how Roy controls flame, there's parts that I just can't see how the hell he controls with an array that is always the same. He has to be doing it in his head. Flame control breaks down to: size and heat of flame, duration of flame, and shape of flame. I can see that he could control size and heat by how much power he poured into the array, and he could control duration by cutting off the power he put into the transmutation, but how can he get different shapes of flame, directions and arcs that go just so far and no further to scare people? That information isn't written into his glove, because it's different every time. That's something he controls mentally. Likewise, Al has a six-pointed array that he uses for just about everything--it's non-specific, it's just to boost his power levels to the point he can do stuff with them. But what he actually does with the power, whether it's to make a toy pony or reconstruct a radio, is something he controls mentally.

So, in short: alchemy is mostly in the head. The array acts as an amp to get power levels to the point where you can do stuff, and, if you're doing a complex transmutation, you write the details of what you're doing into the array so you don't have to concentrate on them quite so hard.

I always disliked Scar's claim that Ed was creating a circle with his arms, because it's so not. A circuit maybe, but not a circle. My latest idea is that he's creating a shape that you would inscribe inside the circle--a square or a pentagon.

But what happens if you don't put a regular geometric shape with some finite number of points into the circle of an array? Isn't a circle techically a regular geometic shape with an infinite number of points?

Common media we see for drawing arrays: chalk (because it's easily erasable?), tattoos and embroidery for arrays commonly used by the alchemist in question, scratching the array into a softer surface. We see blood alchemy in a couple of places in the series. Ed says Al's array is in blood to bind to iron, and I think using blood arrays on skin has some effect, but other than that I don't think blood boosts the power of an array. Like, the only reason to use blood to draw an array on a wall or something would be because it's the only thing you have on hand to draw with.

Can Ed draw an array with alchemy? He modifies the array on the floor of lab 5, and then copies it to the ceiling... hm.

I started designing the array Al's going to use to [end of series spoilers] in League of the Four-Fingered Alchemists story I'm writing, and I started noticing almost all the ordinary arrays in FMA have an even number of points--Al uses a six-pointed one pretty regularly; Roy's salamander array is based on a six-pointed star too, though with out the top and bottom points so it's actually four-pointed; the first array Al and Ed ever use is four-pointed... the only ones that are, say, five-pointed (and you'd think you'd see more pentacles, but no) are ah, [spoilery]. And I started getting into the geometry of the thing, and see, all the even-pointed arrays have symmetry along both horizontal and vertical axes--it's called Klein-four symmetry, and it also means that they all have 180 degree rotational symmetry. A five-pointed array, like the one Dante uses to [spoiler], or a seven-pointed array, like the one Ed modifies in [spoiler], will have other symmetries, but it won't have this Klein-four symmetry. I got into this whole theory about bound and unbound arrays and how even-pointed arrays write equivalent trade right into the diagram by their very design.

Then I got off on this tangent about Scar's phoenix tattoo versus the cross in the flammel and competing mythologies of ressurrection, and why Amestrian alchemists might consider human transmutation to be God's realm when they don't otherwise exhibit any sign of religion, the explanation of which involves *cough* Envy's origin, and I'll leave it at that.

Sometimes, I get too involved in these things...

p. s. sky_dark, your girlfriend doing arrays on all your walls was like, six times more useful to my insane analysis than anything else on the web, on account of exquisite exactitude.

Alchemy and Other Lies, archived on AO3.

272 words.

( Roy's other pocket watch )

Just so you know? This is actually the incredibly het story of how Roy comes to marry Gracie.

Really.

1813 words.

Alchemy and Other Lies, archived on AO3.

( Read more... )

Roy/Hughes, pre-series, part of Alchemy and other Lies, archived on AO3. 3,003 words.

I am kind of boggled by that number, too.

By the way, does anyone want to make me a Roy icon?

( Read more... )