Welcome to my perfumed garden

Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Characters/Pairings: John Sheppard, Rodney McKay, Stephen Caldwell, Elizabeth Weir, Laura Cadman, Radek Zelenka, Lindsay Novak - the usual Daedalus and Atlantis suspects.
Rating: Teen
Length: 100,449
Content Notes: Contains descriptions of serious injuries, animal attacks, extreme environmental conditions, violence, murder. No AO3 warnings apply.
Creator Links: Sholio on AO3, Sholio's old SGA website
Themes: Working together, Action/adventure, Competence, Hurt/comfort, Novel-length, Epic work, Genfic, Worldbuilding

Summary: When a scientific mission goes wrong, the Daedalus crashes on an ice planet along with Atlantis's top scientists and a ruthless saboteur. Will rescue come before injuries and the elements take their toll? Roughly season two era.

Reccer's Notes: This is a gripping, full-blown novel. The Daedalus crash-lands on a Gateless, uninhabited, icy planet while carrying a number of Atlantis personnel (Rodney, Radek, Elizabeth and Cadman), while back on Atlantis, realising something's gone badly wrong, John, Simpson, Carson, Lorne, et al try frantically to locate them, then to reach them by puddlejumper. It's a thriller about surviving both a disastrous crash and the freezing, inhospitable planet, plus searching for the saboteur or saboteurs who caused the crash. There's tons of detail about how the two groups separately work together to survive, and to find and reach the crashed ship, and then once the relief party arrives their troubles aren't over, with the saboteur still working against them and the logistics of only having puddlejumpers to perform a complex rescue. Sholio weaves it all together masterfully and it's an extremely good read with excellent worldbuilding, better than most pro thrillers. Highly recommended.

Fanwork Links: The Killing Frost on AO3, or here

Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Characters/Pairings: Teyla Emmagan, John Sheppard, Rodney McKay, Ronon Dex
Rating: Gen
Length: 1934
Creator Links: Punk on AO3, DesireeArmfeldt on AO3, DesireeArmfeldt on Audiofic Archive
Themes: Working together, Teams, Friendship

Summary: The sun is high overhead, the sky a brilliant, cloudless blue.

Reccer's Notes: This is told from Teyla's POV, on a somewhat frustrating off-world mission where John and Rodney are being particularly dense and snarky. Luckily, Ronon's there to unexpectedly save the day! I especially love the strong sense of place and of the natural world in the story.

Fanwork Links: A Hundred Hundred Bolts of Satin on AO3, and the podfic read by DesireeArmfeldt

Fandom: Stargate Atlantis
Characters/Pairings: Genfic. John Sheppard, Rodney McKay, Evan Lorne, Ronon Dex, Carson Beckett, Teyla Emmagan, Original characters
Rating: Teen
Length: 79,623
Content Notes: no AO3 warnings apply. Grim at times, as it depicts an aspect of WWII.
Creator Links: kristen999 on AO3, everybetty on LJ
Themes: Working together, Action/adventure, Teamwork, Friendship, Genfic, AU: historical, Novel-length

Summary: WWII-based AU. The Team as we know it has been transplanted to the South Pacific.

Reccer's Notes:
This tour de force is a novel-length story by kristen999, assisted by everybetty, an historical AU set in Papua-New Guinea, in WWII. It's pretty male-centric because of that, but does include Teyla as a local liaison with intel about the enemy. It's got lots of plot, great action and adventure, and an excellent sense of place - you can almost feel the tropical heat making you sweat and hear the mosquitoes whine. The story is illustrated throughout with lots of period photos from the time. It's told from all of the team's POVs, particularly John's (he's a pilot, of course, with Rodney and Ronon on his flight crew). Naturally, John gets thoroughly whumped, in the best genfic tradition. There's tons of atmosphere, friendship and teamwork, and it's a really great read.

Fanwork Links: Long Ago (and Far Away)

 

I internet-know a guy who's really struggling; he's fighting cancer, his wife is on dialysis for kidney failure, and his mother-in-law is dying, but the hospital she's in wants to send her away. Todd writes:

I don't know what to do. It seems that Valerie's Mom is beginning the dying process but the hospital is trying to force her out and into a nursing home which isn't covered. She doesn't have the funds, but nor can she qualify for Medicaid.

We have funeral costs that we have set aside-we tried to be frugal and she even chose to do cremation to save costs but there are still a couple of thousand left.

We planned for that. But the hospice process I don't understand. That is hundreds a day I guess upfront, we are trying to figure that out now. If we do in-home Valerie and I will have to be responsible for something she we aren't trained for and with her on dialysis, that is scary. The hospital doesn't seem to care. I don't know what to do. I am sad, and scared, and need advice. Any help is much, much appreciated but I really need to know who to talk to. And please share this, if you can. I will be doing an update later on detailing everything we have been through, and it is just so much..so much.

I didn't think a hospital would do this when she is in this much distress.

Todd has a GoFundMe; I don't know if it's possible to contact someone through that.

If you have any suggestions, and can't contact Todd through the GoFundMe, leave your suggestions in a comment, and I'll send it to him via email.

 

 

You all know Murphy's law, right? (Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong.) It's so apt that many corollaries have been written for it. Like: "Anything that goes wrong will go wrong at the most inconvenient time and in the most difficult manner." Or: "Any job you plan will take twice as long as you expect. Even if you plan for a longer than expected time, the job will take twice as long as that."

(Google Murphy's Law corollaries; there are lists of dozen. Here's a fairly comprehensive example.)

I ran afoul of the last one I listed. Went out to check the water level in the pond, discovered that the pump that feeds the birdbath wasn't running. <sigh> The pump is encased in a homemade filter (one of these days I'll make a long, explanatory post about it), but some mud oozes through and clogs it up once in a while. I suspect the mud is about 50% duck poop (the neighbor has free-range ducks and geese) which is [a] more liquid, so [b] easier to ooze through the filter, and [c] much yuckier.

If I just change the filters, it takes about 10 minutes -- cut the twine that holds two round filters in the top of a bucket, put two new filters in, tie them in place. But last time, I tried to devise a filter around the output hose; it doesn't fit tight in the exit hole, and the pump draws water through there as well as the filters. It was obvious that the hose filter wasn't working as I'd hoped, so I tried to modify it by sewing the slits tight at the sides of the hose. (I had thought the suction of the pump would draw the slits inward, but no, they seemed to have separated instead.) Sounds easy enough -- but I was working in a restricted area (at the end of the hose, so I couldn't lift it up to a higher working area), in 95^o temps (35 for those who use Celsius), with flies swarming my legs and arms. GAH!!! So, the 10-minute job took 80 minutes.

But I'm cautiously hopeful that I've make the filters more efficient. We'll see...

 

Fandoms: Stargate: SG-1, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Characters/Pairings: Jack O'Neill, Teal'c, Sam Carter, Daniel Jackson, Sarah Connor, Cameron, John Connor
Rating: Gen
Length: 1886
Creator Links: cofax on AO3
Themes: Working together, Action/adventure, Crossover, Time travel, Teams, Robots and Androids

Summary: SG-1 meets a very intense woman with two heavily-armed teenagers in a warehouse in Modesto.

Reccer's Notes: A short fic about Sarah Connor's team helping Jack's team while on a mission in the past, dealing with a Terminator. Gripping action - and an intriguing and worrying AU in terms of the future of this crossover Earth. As Jack says: "That's just ... great." (Need to log in to AO3 to read it)

Fanwork Links: Temporary Alliances

Please join us for the weekly TS chat on Saturday, July 19th, at 7 pm Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)/19:00 UTC. That could be as early as 12 pm if you’re on the west coast of North America, or 3 pm if you’re on the east coast, or 8 pm in the UK, or early Sunday morning in Australia or New Zealand.

 

We’re in the usual place: http://us25.chatzy.com/81935648447483. There’s nothing to download or install, just choose a name and a color and click on “join chat.”

 

Our topic this week: is there a character in TS that you feel got the short end of the stick or was otherwise treated unfairly by the show/the writers?

 

Next week we’re going to do some timed writing sprints – that involves chatting for a bit, then writing for a specific period of time (usually 20-25 minutes), and then chatting, and then writing, and so on. Bring something you’re working on, or get some inspiration from the last ep we watched, Vow of Silence, or ask us for another prompt.

 

See you there!

 

Fandom: Doctor Who
Pairings/Characters: Twelve/Missy/Jack
Rating: M
Length: 11,681 words
Creator Links: Trobadora
Theme: Working Together, time travel

Summary: This is what it takes to hold together what has been sheared apart.
Or: The Doctor, Jack Harkness and Missy encounter a weapon from the Time War.

Reccer's Notes: Jack visits the Doctor to berate him for releasing the Master from the vault. While he's there, something terrible is happening to time itself.  The Doctor and Missy have to work together with Jack's help to stabilize their timeline.  The author does such a great job showing you these little snippets of possible timelines, and giving you just enough that you want to know more.  There is a sex scene between the three of them, but it makes sense in the context of story, and is about so much more than just sex.  If you like Twelve and Missy and have always wanted to see what it would have been like to throw Jack into the mix, then please read this one.

Fanwork Links: Ao3

August will be a Flashback round where we revisit a classic theme from the early years of the comm.