Babylon 5 fanfic: One Safe Harbor

Jun. 6th, 2025 12:04 am
sholio: Londo from Babylon 5 smiling (B5-Londo)
[personal profile] sholio
The recent "only one bed" meme (which I still haven't finished, as per usual) led to only-one-bed thoughts and this missing scene for B5 5x16.

One Safe Harbor (also on Ao3 - G'Kar/Londo, 2300 words, explicit)
Missing scene on the flight from Babylon 5 to Centauri Prime in 5x16. Two people in a very small sleeping space. Also, some feelings are had.

One Safe Harbor - 2300 wds )
sholio: (B5-station)
[personal profile] sholio
I watched the first 15 minutes of "In the Beginning" back in May, and finally watched the rest last night. I enjoyed it, despite not being that interested in the 10-years-earlier part of the timeline (or the Minbari, for the most part). Annoyingly, the audio/video was a little out of sync for most of it, and I'm not sure why.

Spoilers for a 25-year-old TV movie )

Biggles fic: Old Words

Jun. 4th, 2025 11:42 pm
sholio: two men on horseback in the desert (Biggles-on a horse)
[personal profile] sholio
This was written for one of last year's prompt fests - Whumptober, I think - and never posted. At the time, I was really struggling to get words out, feeing pretty insecure about the words I did write, and I could tell this needed editing and didn't feel up to dealing with it. Also, it was too long to just post as a snippet of fic like most of the others. I sat on it for a while with the idea that it might be possible to clean it up and use it in an exchange, but it didn't fit anything I was writing for, and I finally got around to editing and posting it.

Old Words (1978 words) by Sholio
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Biggles Series - W. E. Johns
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: James "Biggles" Bigglesworth & Erich Von Stalhein
Characters: Erich von Stalhein, James "Biggles" Bigglesworth
Additional Tags: Post-Canon, Friendship, Developing Relationship, Secret Messages
Summary: Some time after Buries a Hatchet/Looks Back, Biggles and Erich find an old message in an abandoned dead drop.

Also posted under the cut.

Old Words - 2000 wds )
sholio: (B5-station)
[personal profile] sholio
I haven't rewatched more B5, but I was watching various early episodes earlier this week for vid clipping purposes, and I'm still thinking about that.

Full series spoilers, mostly Londo related )
sholio: (B5-station)
[personal profile] sholio
Okay, I found someone on Reddit who went through all the script books and typed up a summary of ALL the different Babylon 5 plans/plot/changes, and ... I can't believe I'm saying this, but if this is accurate, it sounds like the almost-cancellation/having to compress most of the plot into season 4 actually may have been an improvement over the original.

(It also sounds like JMS was constantly changing major details / long-term plans on the fly throughout all the seasons, which makes the cohesion of the final version even more impressive, even without taking into account all of the network meddling and cast changes! One reason why I've been going down a rabbit hole on this is because I really do think this is one of the most impressive creative feats I've ever seen pulled off, I want to understand it from a creative perspective myself, and the more I find out about it, the more impressed I am.)

Link and details under the cut )

It's June! And I'm vidding again!

Jun. 1st, 2025 11:50 am
sholio: Text: "Age shall not weary her, nor custom stale her infinite squee" (Infinite Squee)
[personal profile] sholio
It is really interesting how my interest in visual media has spun up again over the last six months or so. It's not that I physically couldn't watch for a while, it's just that over the last couple of years, say since 2022 or so, I wasn't really interested. I would have said it was just because I was happy with the stories in my head and didn't need more stories, but I was also completely uninterested in watching vids and similar, and now suddenly that switch has flipped the other way and I'm back to finding them fun and fascinating to watch, even for source canons I barely know.

(For me and vids, I'd say song choice is *the* big driver of whether I'll watch a vid or not - I'll nope out in seconds if I don't like the song, but I'll watch one even for a source canon I've never seen if it's a song I like.)

Anyway, in a shocking twist, last night I finally got around to subscribing the things I need to subscribe to in order to get vidding source for Babylon 5.

I capture vid source like no one else I've ever met (though maybe people who do this just don't talk about it) - I screencapture from the video window playing on my computer screen. I can do it other ways, and in fact have done it a number of other ways (from ripping DVDs to ripping DRM'd MP4s - I did all my Agent Carter vids that way; it does look very crisp and beautiful - to simply using the *cough ahem* broadcast downloads back on the 2000s; a lot of people did that for vidding back in the SGA/White Collar era, although it meant dealing with watermarks on the video). But I keep coming back to capturing video from screen because it's just so easy. I can get exactly the clip I want and only the clip I want without any extra trimming work, it's easy to skip around, and it means not having to rip and store a kabillionty episodes for a long source canon.

This stopped working for a while because of software measures to prevent it, but I figured out a relatively easy workaround for vidding MASH (disabling graphics acceleration in Chrome) and now I'm doing that for B5 as well - I just need a relatively clean streaming source without commercials. I was genuinely really amazed at how crisp MASH turned out for the vids I made for Festivids. The obvious downside to screencapturing video is that the quality can suffer, and there's also the possibility of the playback stuttering - I used to have this happen occasionally when I tried to capture too much video at once on older computers (circa 2006 or so), where it would drop frames when I'd save it if it was too much for the memory buffer to handle. These days, modern computers can handle quite a lot of video at a time (I do it in Quicktime, I think it's saving directly to the hard drive as I go, whereas before it was definitely doing some kind of intermediate working-memory storage) ... buuuut capturing from streaming is limited by the streaming source, and those often stutter or glitch. It has been hard to get good video quality in B5, not really helped by the source itself being kind of potato-quality to begin with.

And as if that wasn't enough, Final Cut really struggles with the concept of 4:3 video that's not absolutely tiny. All of its large video presets are widescreen, but even forcing it to 4:3, it'll still make it widescreen in export - blah. The biggest that I can get it to make a 4:3 vid isn't very big. So it doesn't really matter that my source video isn't that high quality because it's potatoing it on export anyway! Final Cut, why are you like this.

THAT being said, the main reason I don't call myself a serious vidder is because I just sort of ... don't care? I'm not overly fussed about image quality and frame rate and codecs. I am DELIGHTED that it's no longer necessary to fuss around with codecs for the most part, now that everything seems to have standardized on MP4s and uploading to streaming sites. A ton of the vids I've downloaded and rewatch over and over are snagged from Youtube or are ancient WMVs from the era of making vids as small as possible for download, or are someone's first vidding efforts - and I *love* them. I appreciate crisp clean large video as much as the next person, but I mostly just want a fun viewing experience, and when I'm making vids, I simply like making them for myself and I'm happy if other people like them too. I'll work harder to get it looking nice if it's an actual gift for someone, but for the ones I make for myself ... eh. It's a lot like my approach to fanfic as a creator - I do care about craft to an extent, but mostly, I don't care if it's great, I just want to feel things.

(So the long and the short of it is that I'm making Babylon 5 vids now. Yay!)

Other random fandom things

May. 31st, 2025 08:22 pm
sholio: Text: "Age shall not weary her, nor custom stale her infinite squee" (Infinite Squee)
[personal profile] sholio
I know there are a few people around here currently or formerly in Guardian fandom, and [community profile] whumpex is trying to fill some last-minute pinch hits that include one for Guardian - in case that sounds like your thing!

Find them here:
https://whumpex.dreamwidth.org/5724.html

I also posted some Murderbot + Gurathin recs over at [community profile] recthething.

Babylon 5 fanfic: The Drowning Deep

May. 31st, 2025 07:41 pm
sholio: Londo from Babylon 5 smiling (B5-Londo)
[personal profile] sholio
I wrote this for [community profile] fan_flashworks "Underwater" challenge back in early May and finally got around to editing it (the first version was pretty rough; this has been cleaned up a lot, tweaked for word choice and clarity).

One thing rolling around in the back of my head when I wrote this is something I've noticed reading fic for this show - there's not really a lot of typical tropey h/c for these characters. It's understandable, because canon is so tightly plotted, and so much of the fic is just fixing and/or dealing with their various canon disasters and tragedies. But sometimes you just want to put someone into a classic h/c situation and make them deal with it, you know?

The Drowning Deep (5500 words, gen)
Takes place between 5x09 and 5x10. An attempt on Londo's life in the palace gardens.
Also posted on AO3.

The Drowning Deep )

Murderbot 1x04

May. 29th, 2025 11:24 pm
sholio: Made by <lj user=aesc> (Atlantis city)
[personal profile] sholio
New episode is out already! At half an hour they are very bite-sized.

Spoilers had fun )

LOLOLLLLLLLLL

May. 29th, 2025 09:49 pm
sholio: Made by <lj user=aesc> (Atlantis city)
[personal profile] sholio
AppleTV posted the full credits for "The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon," Murderbot's show-within-a-show. 10/10 no notes.

sholio: (B5-station)
[personal profile] sholio
The Mismatched Tropes Flash exchange had author reveals while I was traveling, and I wrote:

Last Minute Save (Vir & Londo, 1600 words)
In which Vir gets drugged and almost kidnapped/intergalactically trafficked, and Londo gets to be a Big Damn Hero.

p.s. Incredibly random Tumblr poll on whether Centauri or Narns have a higher body temperature FOR SCIENCE. (And fic.) If you do not have a Tumblr account, feel free to provide opinions in a comment.

Only One Bed meme

May. 27th, 2025 05:09 pm
sholio: Peggy Carter smiling (Avengers-Peggy smile)
[personal profile] sholio
Stolen / respectfully borrowed from [personal profile] rionaleonhart, a Tumblr meme now removed from its native ecosystem and repotted on DW [ETA: now tweaked a bit]:

Give me any two (or more) characters from a canon I’m familiar with, and I’ll tell you how they would cope in an ‘oh no, there’s only one bed’ scenario!

What you get might be anything from brief headcanons/thoughts to a small fic, depending on how much I have to say about those particular characters.

(Currently traveling, staying overnight on the road, would enjoy some fun distraction.)

Update: Based on how the comments are going, I edited the instructions slightly to hopefully bend the requests a little more towards characters from the same canon. (If you want two characters from different canons, feel free to ask for it - there are no wrong answers, it's very open-ended - but I'm really only going to be able to do headcanons for those, as I can't easily write crossovers, and I'm hoping for some of the other kind of prompts too!)

Babylon 5 fic: Gift

May. 25th, 2025 12:08 am
sholio: Londo from Babylon 5 smiling (B5-Londo)
[personal profile] sholio
Currently traveling, but I finished a thing!

I got a prompt on Tumblr earlier this month for a roleswap AU with Londo & G'Kar. I wrote a short ficlet for it a few days ago, then was promptly seized by the urge to write the entire story that goes with it.

Gift on AO3 (2,953 words, Babylon 5, gen)
Mid season four. Narns deliver a gift to G'Kar. He does not appreciate it in the slightest.
(A roleswap AU of sorts, set around the same general time frame as "No Surrender, No Retreat" in canon, in which reconciliation occurs from a completely different and even more fraught direction.)


3000-ish words of chains and reluctant h/c )

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