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Vids Resurrected - Uno, Dos, Tres

Tue, 14 Apr 2026 04:17:43 GMT

I've managed to get another two vids up this past week, for Star Trek and Sharpe.

Old Friends/Bookends

If I'd found fandom in my teen years, Kirk/Spock would have been my first slash pairing. And Simon & Garfunkel were one of my favourite music groups in high school. So making a bittersweet K/S vid to S&G's Old Friends/Bookends just made sense to me. Footage is mostly from The Motion Picture and The Wrath of Khan, so fair warning that it doesn't exactly have a happy ending.

The Soldiering Life

Sharpe and Harper are another pairing I adore, and The Decembrists' song The Soldiering Life seemed made for them.

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Vids Resurrected: Part Deux

Sat, 04 Apr 2026 20:25:56 GMT

I'm slowly proceeding with getting all of my vids online. Next up are two vids for a couple of early 2000s TV shows, Life on Mars (the UK one) and Spooks/MI5.

Television, Television

First up is the Life on Mars vid, to an OK Go song. Mostly it's a showcase for Sam & Gene and the scary TV girl.

Real Great Britain

Second one is for Spooks (MI5 in North America), a spy show with a pre-Severance Matthew Macfadyen. The vid focuses on an episode guest starring Alexander Siddig as an asset infiltrating a Muslim extremist group. As with so many Spooks episodes, it does not end well for anyone.

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Vids Resurrected!

Wed, 18 Mar 2026 03:15:45 GMT

Since I took my vids site down years ago and then had my vidding machine crash on me, my vids have been spread scattershot in various places. A few on YouTube. A few on the Internet Archive. Most MIA. But I was poking around the basement and finally found the disk backups of a lot of them, so I'm going to start putting them back online and up on AO3.

First two show the fully crazy range of my vidding: wacky hijinks to existential dread.

The wacky hijinks part is on display in the first one:

Pop a Boner

A multifandom vid using every instance of male nudity I could get my grubby little paws on.

The song is from the Zero Patience soundtrack. (Zero Patience is a Canadian musical about the alleged first AIDS patient. It's funny and uplifting and fuelled by furious outrage. You should watch it.)

And for existential dread, have a little Withnail and I:

The Fear

The song is by Pulp, and I used every moment of dread and depression in Withmail & I. (Withnail is a really funny movie with a high angst quotient, and I chose the angst over the humour for this one.)

This is the vid I'm possibly most proud of, and I'd feared it was lost forever, so I was so happy to find it in my disk backups.

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Yuletide News: High and Low

Sat, 01 Nov 2025 13:50:11 GMT

The high: For the first time ever, someone asked if they could podfic one of my stories!

The lovely speakwithmagic reached out about recording my 2010 Yuletide story, Down a Dark Desert Highway, my crazy crossover of A Knight's Tale and Hotel California. Yes, the song. It's one of the stories I'm most proud of, quite possibly because it was such a nutty idea, so I was very chuffed by the request.

The podfic is now up here, and it's wonderful, bookended with two different versions of the song. So, if you've got 12 minutes to spare, give it a listen!

The low: after nominating fandoms and mulling and debating, I decided not to sign up for Yuletide this year. I've been doing the challenge since 2009, have only ever missed one year before, and even in years where I haven't been writing much, I've managed to get my assignment done.

But this year felt different.

I think it might be partly that I'm still dealing with the grief of my mother's death (still miss you, Mom), and partly because I've got several big projects at work, writing a ton of not-at-all interesting technical manuals that have burned out my writing brain. Whatever it is, at the last minute I decided to give myself the grace of not landing that kind of pressure on myself.

I have, however, looked at the tag set and read a few Yuletide letters, and I'm hoping I have the energy to at least do a little treat or two. Fingers crossed!

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TIFF 2025

Mon, 08 Sep 2025 16:33:18 GMT

Another film fest, another year when I swear I'll keep up on the film reviews. I didn't manage any last year. (Last year sucked.) This year, I'm hoping to be better.

Going into day 5 of the fest, I've seen 8 films, all good, many great. Here's the roundup, in order seen.

( Modern Whore )

( Sirāt )

( Youngblood )

( Carolina Caroline )

( BLKNWS: Terms & Conditions )

( Ky Nam Inn )

( Rental Family )

( The Furious )

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Into a Bar, Slipping in Under the Wire

Mon, 30 Jun 2025 03:20:21 GMT

Since I've been fighting a migraine for the last four days, I didn't think there was anyway I was going to finish my story by the intoabar challenge deadline.

But somehow, I did!

So, here it is, Illya Kuryakin walks into a bar and meets...Bucky Barnes!

Two of my biggest fandom collide! I couldn't have picked a better pairing myself.

Title: Jazz and Vodka
Author: P.R. Zed
Word count: 8,879

AO3 Link

The assignment let me pull out a fragment I've had kicking around forever with young KGB agent Illya Kuryakin getting pulled in as a last minute replacement for the Winter Soldier's handler. Which turned it into a multi-timeline 8K mini-epic. (When I told him what my word count was looking like, my husband just said "Of course you did.")

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Into a Bar - Progress

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 03:24:12 GMT

Five days to go until the intoabar deadline, and I've just crossed 7,000 words on my mystery story. Two scenes, a title, and an edit to go, and I may actually finish this sucker on time.

Fingers crossed.

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Into a Bar We Go

Fri, 16 May 2025 21:46:06 GMT

I've signed up for intoabar a couple of times, and have gotten terrible assignments, but I'm trying to get myself back into writing so I thought I'd give it one more go.

And I got the pairing of my dreams!

I'm not going to say what it is quite yet, because I could still screw the pooch. But seriously, if I'd had to pick my own match, this is exactly what I'd have picked.

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Book Bingo 2025

Wed, 19 Feb 2025 02:03:42 GMT

To motivate myself to read more and doomscroll less, I thought I'd borrow the book bingo card dorinda found on Tumblr.

My first book of the year is for the category I thought I'd struggle with: literary fiction. I've long since lost patience with a lot of books that fall under literary fiction. I've wanted to wing more than one Booker Prize-winning book across the room. (How Late It Was, How Late and Possession, I'm looking at both of you.) It's not that I don't like experimental fiction. Absalom, Absalom, as effed up as it is, is one of my favourite books. But there's a certain brand of self-serious fiction that just irks me.

Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu is not one of those books. It's very experimental, but in a playful way, but also has a lot of ideas going on. It follows the story of Willis Wu, a Generic Asian Guy in the world of a TV cop show who just wants to be Kung Fu Guy. Sometimes the book is in screenplay form, when Willis is playing a role, and sometimes it's like a regular novel. And it digs into both the history of the Chinese in America, and what kind of representation Chinese Americans have been allowed. That makes it sound too serious, but it's also a lot of fun.

Taika Waititi's production company also made a mini-series of the book that's on Hulu/Disney+ starring Jimmy O. Yang, who is a standup comic I very much adore (I've got tickets to see his show in April!), so I'm curious to see what they've made of the book.

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Yuletide Reveal

Tue, 07 Jan 2025 03:03:19 GMT

Yuletide reveal was almost a week ago, but I'm just now finding time to post about the stories I wrote this year. I wrote two, a main assignment and a pinch hit.

The main assignment was for Bullet Train, a ridiculously fun action film. Brad Pitt may be top billed, but Brian Tyree Henry and Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the Twins, smart-arse English assassins, steal the show.

I love character backstories, so I decided to figure out why everyone in the film totally accepts that these two guys are twins.

Family Rules is from the POV of the foster mother who takes the boys in and forges them into a family. She let me tell the Twins' back story, but also save them from the movie's ending.

The pinch hit was for the 2016 version of The Magnificent Seven. The stars of this are Denzel Washington and Chris Pratt, but I much prefer the pairing of Ethan Hawke as sharpshooter Goodnight Robicheaux and Lee Byung-Hun as knife fighter Billy Rocks. (They are canonically together, and you can't convince me otherwise. They light each other's cigarettes! They pull each other through PTSD attacks!)

I went down a historical rabbit hole for this one, trying to figure out how a Korean dude could possibly end up in the Old West, and found all sorts of interesting side facts. (Did you know the U.S. invaded Korea in 1870?! Neither did I!)

The Destiny of Man is the first meeting of Goody and Billy, and I tried to work in all of the things I love about the characters and how they fit together.

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Yuletide Gifts!

Wed, 01 Jan 2025 19:40:16 GMT

I'm a bit late on posting about my Yuletide gifts this year. In my defense, I've spent most of the holidays relaxing and staying off my computer.

I was fortunate to get two wonderful Yuletide gifts this year, for the Enola Holmes movies and Batman: Wayne Family Adventures. I can totally recommend them both!

The Enola Holmes story concentrates on Enola's (and Sherlock's) mother, Eudoria Holmes, and the growth of her friendship with her best friend and radical suffragette, Edith Grayston. Told from Edith's POV, it's a wonderful story, and really gets into the details of how a working class Black activist could befriend a posh white woman in Victorian England. (Thank you beatrice_otter!)

Women's Will (2046 words) by Beatrice_Otter
Summary: 'Mrs. Treven' was not the first wealthy woman gone slumming with radicals in search of adventure. They were not terribly common, given the sort of social consequences polite society would heap upon them if it became known, to say nothing of the other sort of consequences their male relations might dole out.

But they did happen. Edith cast a cool eye over the newcomer.

The Batman: Wayne Family Adventures has Jason and Damian bonding over reading books in the Wayne mansion library and contemplating what they'd do if they weren't vigilantes. It's got a wonderful sense of both their voices.

Fragile and Unprovable Things (1780 words) by Rivulet027
Summary: Jason tries to cheer Damian up. He wasn't ready to question what he wants for his future.

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Well, That's Refreshing

Thu, 19 Dec 2024 05:08:55 GMT

Not only did I finish my main Yuletide assignment (now with an actual title) well ahead of time, but I also finished a pinch hit with a day to spare. Yay!

There is polishing to be done on both stories, but I'm one of those tweak until the last minute kinds of people, so there's always polishing to be done.

I'm also off work from now until January 2. And boy do I need the rest. Though the first few days are going to be full of me running errands and buying Christmas gifts and seeing friends. But I'm also hoping for some lounging around reading books and comics time.

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Thank You!

Fri, 06 Dec 2024 04:50:43 GMT

To whoever it was who gave me a year's paid account.

I appreciate it! And will try to post more!

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Yuletide Good News and Bad News

Tue, 03 Dec 2024 04:12:57 GMT

The good news is I have miraculously finished my Yuletide assignment, well ahead of the deadline. And I even think I stuck the landing! I have time to do treats! Or a pinch hit!

The bad news is I just realized I haven’t come up with a title for the sucker yet. (I hate coming up with titles.)

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Dear Yuletide Writer

Tue, 15 Oct 2024 02:14:54 GMT

It's another Yuletide, and I could not be more excited that you're going to write a story for me. If you already have an idea, I'm sure I'll love it. But if you'd like some guidance about the things I like, here it is.

Also, if you're wondering if I'm up for a treat, yes, I am!

( Things That Make Me Happy )

( DNWs )

And here, again, are the details about my requested fandoms:

( Summer Lovers )

( Challengers )

( Batman: Wayne Family Adventures )

( Enola Holmes )

In the end, I hope you write something that gives you joy. That's sure to bring me joy as well.

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It's Been a Heck of a Year

Mon, 07 Oct 2024 04:35:39 GMT

I haven't posted here in forever, and though a lot of you who follow me probably know why, I feel like I need to actually post the words before I can think of posting, or writing anything else.

So, my mom died. In the beginning of May. After a very sudden, very catastrophic illness.

( Cut for those who don't want to see discussions of dying & grief )

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The Way WAY Overdue TIFF 2023 Post

Sat, 13 Jan 2024 04:49:28 GMT

Life rather got in the way of me doing posts for the films I saw at TIFF this year. (Most of my vacation was taken this year with getting my mom to medical appointments, and then spending a week with her when she was recovering, successfully!, from surgery. Which meant I didn't take any time off during the fest. Which means I saw 18 films whilst also working full time.)

It's so long ago, I didn't know if there was any point in putting up reviews. But then dorinda and msmoat recently encouraged me to do it anyway. So, here they are.

Of the 18 films I saw, 17 of them were good to great. A few were just utterly gorgeous.

( Best of the Fest )

( The Good )

( The Not-So-Good )

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Yuletide Reveal!

Mon, 01 Jan 2024 17:38:51 GMT

This year I got matched on Real Genius. Which, if you've never seen it, is an '80s comedy starring a very young Val Kilmer about a bunch of physics students at a CalTech-like college who get tricked into building a laser weapon by a cartoonishly evil professor and then take revenge on him with science and popcorn.

I adore this movie. I was finishing up my first year of astrophysics when it came out, and in spite of the over-the-top comedy of it all, it felt really true to my experiences and I recognized more than one of my classmates in the characters. So, I was happy, and a bit terrified, to get matched on it.

The story I ended up writing was A Physicist's Guide to Love and Lasers (2900 words)
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Chris Knight/Mitch Taylor, Jordan Cochran & Mitch Taylor
Characters: Mitch Taylor, Chris Knight, Jordan Cochran, "Ick" Ikagami
Summary: Dr. Jordan Cochran (you can call her Jordan) knows all the history of her Pacific Tech classmates, including how Mitch and Chris finally got together. If you ask (or even if you don't) she'll tell you the whole story. (A hint: Jordan may have had something to do with it.)

In the movie, there's one girl physicist in the class, Jordan. (This is the one thing that wasn't true to my experience in uni. There were a bunch of other women in my class - though our profs told us we were a statistical blip and had a much higher percentage of women, 30%, than the cohorts both before and after us.) Jordan is a motor mouth, clearly has ADHD and is in constant motion. She knits a sweater for Mitch, the newest student, overnight, and is always building some new contraption.

My Yuletide recipient asked for me to pair up Mitch and Chris, Val Kilmer's character, but I knew I wanted Jordan to play a key role. So, I wrote the start of Mitch and Chris' relationship from Jordan's POV, which meant I got to write in her voice. Which was challenging and fun.

Another fun piece was finding a bit of real science to salt into the story. Mitch and Chris both work with lasers, and I remembered that a Canadian woman physicists, Donna Strickland, won the Nobel prize for an article on lasers that came out in the early '80s. If you're interested in the science, you can read her Nobel lecture here.

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Yuletide Gift!

Thu, 28 Dec 2023 04:21:03 GMT

I have been horrible at posting this year, but would be remiss if I didn't highly recommend the gift story I received this year.

Elevator Going Up is an utterly delightful story in the Batman: Wayne Family Adventures universe. (Still probably my fave ongoing comics series, probably due to the fact that the world is still an ongoing trash fire.) Jason Todd and the rest of the Batfam help Damian wreak his revenge on a couple of bullies in his class.

The character voices are perfect, there are some nice twists in the plot, Alfred demonstrates ninja-like skills, and somehow the section titles are a character unto themselves. I love it so much.

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Dear Yuletide Writer 2023

Thu, 19 Oct 2023 03:05:02 GMT

It's another Yuletide, and I could not be more excited that you're going to write a story for me. If you already have an idea, I'm sure I'll love it. But if you'd like some guidance about the things I like, here it is.

( Things That Make Me Happy )
( DNWs )

I am open to treats.

And here, again, are the details about my requested fandoms:

( Summer Lovers )
( Hawkeye Freefall )
( Batman: Wayne Family Adventures )
( Enola Holmes )
In the end, I hope you write something that gives you joy. That's sure to bring me joy as well.

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Art!

Tue, 10 Oct 2023 12:27:03 GMT

I've been largely absent here for far too long, but I've got a little burst of fannish joy I definitely want to post today.

I bid on the lovely artist pennydrdful in Marvel Trumps Hate last year, and she's now completed her illustration for my story Captain America Finds His Fella.

You can click on the image for a glorious full-sized version.

I'm an absolute sucker for stories where Bucky learned ballet while under control of the Red Room, and this story is my take on that. It's part of my Captain America Has a Fella series, where Steve reconnects in the present with one of the USO girls from the War Bonds Captain America show. Audrey is now an elderly ballet teacher who helps Bucky recover from his time as the Winter Soldier. The illo is from the scene where Audrey takes Bucky through a ballet class, while Steve watches in amazement.

You can go show pennydrdful some love on Tumblr here.

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Sports Ball...I Mean Puck!

Sat, 01 Apr 2023 15:16:43 GMT

The last few years, I've somehow become the person who plays hockey several times a week. I play in a league and do a couple of lessons. I can't quite believe I've become someone who loves hockey as much as I do, but there you are.

This week was our league finals. Since my team had managed to finish second, we were in the championship game. And we won! It was a tight game, everyone played well, and I made a few moves I'm proud of.

Here's me with the cup (made mostly out of kitchen equipment from the dollar store). And yes, it is nearly as big as me. Not, as I told a teammate, that that's a high bar to clear.😆

And here's my team!

It may be spring, but this is Canada so the hockey continues. My spring league starts tomorrow. I start a new set of lessons on Wednesday. Also, the World's Women Championships is being held just outside of Toronto this year, and we've got tickets to a game next Sunday. (U.S.A vs. Czechia, because tickets to all the Canada games were gone like a shot.)

I've got my fingers crossed that this is the year I finally manage a few backwards crossovers. Fingers crossed! Oh, and that I don't get another concussion. (I may have fallen and gotten a minor concussion, but it wasn't too bad and I took a month off playing and did physio and I'm fine now, honest.)

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Look at This Art

Sun, 05 Mar 2023 04:59:48 GMT

For last year's FTH auction, I wrote a Marvel wild west AU for lou2. (It's sort of a Marvel 1872 mashup, but without the whole everyone dying thing.) Then the two of us went in on a MTH auction and managed the winning bid on Nix to create art for the story.

She's still working on the main illustration, but she's done a little sketch of Steve. And it's fantastic!

Can't wait to see, and share, the rest of the art and get the story posted. (The story is Clint/Bucky/Nat with a side helping of Stony, because apparently I'm going to write every Marvel OT3 I can get my hands on.)

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Yuletide Reveal

Wed, 04 Jan 2023 05:07:08 GMT

I wrote two stories for YT this year.

My main assignment was for The Adjustment Bureau for gwyn. There may have been cheering when I got my assignment. (I've been wanting to write a story for her for that canon for a couple of years.) We've been matched back and forth a couple of times over the years. And yes, gwyn, we clearly should do a mutual subchallenge.

Getting Away With It (4726 words) by PR Zed
Fandom: The Adjustment Bureau (2011), Captain America (Movies)
Characters: Harry Mitchell, The Chairman, Sam Wilson (Marvel), Steve Rogers

Summary: The main problem, Harry realized, was that he'd gotten away with it.

He'd gotten away with letting David slip from the Plan, accidentally at first, and then with intent later. He'd gotten away with teaching David how the doors worked. He'd gotten away with giving David his hat. He'd gotten away with letting David and Elise escape the other adjustors.

The second assignment was the pinch hit, for Buckaroo Banzai, a movie I know very VERY well. My recipient asked for Perfect Tommy's backstory. Tommy is not one of my top tier fave characters, but I gave it my best shot and they liked it, so yay!

How to Become Perfect (1997 words) by PR Zed
Fandom: The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension (1984)
Characters: Perfect Tommy (Buckaroo Banzai), Buckaroo Banzai, Rawhide (Buckaroo Banzai)
Summary: In the beginning he wasn't Perfect. He wasn't even Tommy.

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Yuletide!

Tue, 27 Dec 2022 05:39:20 GMT

I got two lovely gifts for Yuletide this year!

The first was for the thing I most wanted fic for, but figured was a long shot. The Crimson Kimono is a noir-ish movie from the '50s with two cops, one white and one Japanese American, investigating a murder. The cops work together, live together, and are very slashrific. Though the movie has a woman push them apart at the end, I'm a firm believer that the three of them should just form a happy little polycule.

Almost Makes You Feel Alive gives the backstory of the Japanese American cop and how he and his partner met, and gives a nice fix to the ending of the film. It is fab! You should read it! And also watch the film because it is great.

The second was an adorable story for the Batman: Wayne Family Adventures webcomic, my current favourite DC title. (For reasons possibly related to the ongoing pandemic and world-wide trash fire we're all living in, a Bat family title focused on low stakes domestic comedy is very appealing to me these days.)

Curriculum has Alfred getting Jason to help Damian with his English homework, and features Alfred Pennyworth's famous chocolate chip cookies. It is an absolute gem.

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