Rat Creature's Journal

I've seen some fans say that these days they primarily use delicious to find fanfic to read rather than following fic comms or watching archives directly. I also do that when I search for specific stuff and look for tags, but I don't really use the social network functions. Every now and then I try adding someone, especially if a rec comm also keeps track of their recs on delicious, but somehow I never really stick with it. (And only part of the reason is that delicious often tends to crash or freeze my browser if I view it with javascript enabled, which I suspect is because it can't deal well with my large number of tags or something. It's really quite pathetic -- ~4900 tags is not that many.)

So do any of you use delicious' network feature? Which people (or comm accounts) do you follow to find new fanfic? Currently I'm particularly interested in ST:AOS (though TOS also to some degree), SGA (*clutches*), Merlin, Supernatural (non-Wincest, non-RPS only), and Numb3rs, but as I'm really multifannish and fickle in my interests I'd be interested in what you follow for other fandoms too. Do you have any recs whom I should follow there?

ETA: And please feel free to point out your own account if it fits what I'm looking for.

I know I have ranted about the usage of "Spock Prime" in the narrative and dialog just a few days ago, but since then I've come across this far more often. Like every day I see stories doing this. More than one. It occurs even in stories that I found on rec lists, not through random, at-your-own-risk browsing. (In case you're wondering, musesfool recced this offender.) Just, WTF? This is getting out of hand if you can't even trust recs to protect you.

Please tell me that some fan somewhere has written a Greasemonkey script or something to do word replacements on the fly in your browser to fix epithets, and I can adapt this to replace every "Spock Prime" with "Ambassador Spock".

ETA: Thanks to the awesome gnatkip I have now indeed found a script that will do this word replacement for me. Greasemonkey to the rescue.

It drives me absolutely crazy when in ST:AOS fic the older, time-traveling Spock is called "Spock Prime" within the story text, assuming the story is told from a POV character withing the fictional universe rather than some jokey outside parody narrator or omniscient meta fiction narrator. It's fine for a pairing label, but please, please find some other way to distinguish the character from the younger Spock in the text. I am usually not that picky about narrative voice, but this just throws me out of the story in a way from which I can't recover. It's one of the few things that will just make me stop reading immediately in this fandom.

I've recently watched The Listener, and quite liked it. So naturally I'm now wondering whether there is any fanfic to be found for it. I've tried del.icio.us with various likely tags without success, asked google, looked on ff.net... and nothing turns up. Not a single story anywhere. An interest search on LJ yielded a single community the_listener_tv (no comms on DW or IJ), but the only fanfic posted were two very short comment ficlets.

I just can't believe nobody has written anything for it. It has a main hero Toby who is pretty, angsty (with some past trauma), orphaned and a telepath, and can be easily shipped with both his on-and-off again girlfriend Olivia, but just as well slashed with his paramedic partner Oz thanks to Toby and both Olivia both being somewhat waffling about their relationship, or paired with any number of other people. The whole series is like a fanfic blueprint what with the mix of mild supernatural SF elements, crime/medical drama, tragic mystery past and relationship options. And yet, thirteen episodes of this and I can find no fanfic anywhere? How can that be?

Up to now I've thought that "Snermione" was the most unfortunate smooshed pairing name I've seen "in the wild" (i.e. used by someone unironically just to name the pairing rather than in posts mocking the most hilarious potential name combinations), but I think I may have to revise this in light of having just seen "Spirk" on a story search. I'm not completely sure what I object to in particular, except that calling it "Kock" would be as easy to pronounce, even funnier and comply with the traditional K/S order. Seriously though, "Spirk"?!?

I have been awfully quiet lately for no particular reason except feeling somewhat down and uncommunicative, and incapable of producing interesting content. Also, public commitments to fanart projects -- now already ages ago in internet time -- don't really seem to counter sloth sufficiently in my case, sorry about that, I kind of suck wrt creative output right now.

Anyway to come back to my subject line, besides squeeing over the SCC finale -- but feeling too much like "flail!!" to produce any interesting or coherent thoughts about it, but there better be a third season or at least a lot of long fanfic exploring things -- and playing online flash games, I have also rewatched a whole bunch of Joan of Arcadia episodes recently. I've never read fanfic for the series when it first aired, but now I'm wondering whether anyone on my f-list knows where to find good JoA fanfic or has any recs. I looked at crack_van but don't see any there. I thought it can't hurt to ask before I venture on my own to look whether any of the JoA on ff.net is good.

Because this gets asked for quite frequently on sgagenrefinders (like here, here, here and here...), I figured I'm not the only one with a soft spot for wereanimal stories, and a thematic list might be useful.

This is a SGA thematic list (i.e. not recs) for stories in which an SGA character becomes or already is a wereanimal. 'Wereanimal' here is not all that strict, but refers to any supernatural animal-shapeshifting as long as is not another kind of magical animal category, such as centaur!fic or dragon!fic. It is sorted by character, which kind of wereanimal is listed with the story.

As usual, if you know of any story that I've missed, please tell me about it.

Link: SGA thematic list: Werewolves and other wereanimals.

Sometimes fanfic is really weird. See, I've been reading an X-Files story, which started normal enough. It was a Profiler!Mulder story with an X-Files twist in that Mulder forms some sort of psychic connection with the killers and victims, and so on, cue to Mulderangst. Which was the kind of story I wanted to read. Only then suddenly out of nowhere some green, winged horse shows up and brings Mulder to a blue anthropomorphic cat shapeshifter alien who starts talking about fighting interdimensional demons. What? Just, what? I have no idea how this continued, because the story rather lost me at that point.

What irks me most is was that I read over half of this long novel, which I thought was one thing, and then without warning it turned into something completely different. It had a summary and warnings for all kinds of things which indicated that this was a serial killer story with child molestation, but nothing mentioned mystical furry aliens fighting evil on psychic planes. Gah. What a waste of time.

Does anyone know good places to find Don-centric Numb3rs recs? Or has any recs? I don't read Don/Charlie incest, and most of the crack_van recs so far are that, though the current reccer is inclined towards gen, but hasn't posted many recs yet. I only read Numb3rs occasionally so I don't really know where to look. Gen and het are fine, as is non-incest slash.

I tried browsing numb3rsficfind but much like its SPN and SGA counterparts this seems more of a hit and miss way to find stories, also it lured me (in that "curiosity killed the cat" way) to follow a link to a multiple fandom crossover in which people turn into dragons, which could have been kind of cool only there were also souldbonds and it got worse from there, at least as far as I could tell from skimming it.

When people link to their journal posts containing stories or art, some link not the "plain" entry, but to the "reply mode" version, i.e. you get an URL with "?mode=reply" at the end, a comment form below, and don't see any previous comments. Also, and that is the main reason why I hate the practice, the title of the browser window will be "Post Comment" rather than the subject line of the entry, which commonly is the LJ name plus the title of the work. I get the idea behind linking to the reply form-- people think it encourages comments to have the comment field right there, but the downside is, one, that if you open links in tabs (like when you click several potentially interesting links on your f-list while scrolling down) you can't see in your tab what you have open to easily click the tab to pick it to read, and two, even more annoying for me, if you bookmark the page you won't get the subject line as link text but will have to edit that link text line manually, and edit the URL manually to get the plain one, though that is quicker as you just have to delete a bit.

I bookmark almost every story I finish reading and tag them. Normally I can highlight the summary, click the bookmark button and get the right link text (provided the author didn't put "yay! fic" or something random in their fanfic subject line, which is another annoyance) plus the highlighted summary as description, and just add the tags, whereas with the reply mode link, I highlight the summary, click the bookmark button, then get the wrong link text, have to edit the URL to get a plain bookmark, click back to the window itself to copy the subject line, click back to the tagging dialog, delete the "Post Comment" link text and paste in the right subject. So it is two clicks, two deletions and one c&p action more effort, which, unless the story or art was very nice, puts me in a frame of mind to skip the commenting this was meant to encourage.

Is anyone else annoyed every time they land on a reply page when clicking a link rather than the journal entry proper?

Because it is such a common, recurring request on the SGA genrefinders comm (and because I love Bug!John stories), I decided to compile a proper thematic list for stories relating to Wraith/Iratus bug transformations. The majority is Bug!John, but I have included sections for stories in which another human character is transformed into a Wraith or Iratus bug hybrid, as well as a section for stories dealing with the reverse, i.e. Wraith transformed into humans. Currently it lists about forty stories, but I'd love add any fitting story that I missed. I did not include those Conversion tags that are set completely after John reverted, unless there were at least some remaining transformation related aftereffects.

To avoid having to update the list in multiple journals I maintain it on my website, like with my other thematic list:

SGA thematic list: Wraith/Iratus bug transformations