Shortly after I found myself unemployed due to the company I worked for going under, I had this idea for a fic. And, for the first time in a much too long while, I actually had the mental energy left over to write it.

It's a Buffy the Vampire Slayer story. It's femslash. It's pretty much just plain porn with a thin excuse for a plot pasted on. If you don't like explicit descriptions of young women having sex, this is not the story for you.

The pairings involved are Buffy/Cordelia, Buffy/Faith and Buffy/Willow. The setting is some time after Wesley shows up but before Faith goes overtly off the rails. So, around "Doppelgangland" somewhere. The entire story is about eleven thousand words, which LJ thought was too long for one post, so you'll get it posted by chapter. This is the first.

Enjoy. Or not, as the case may be.

(If you'd prefer the get the entire story in one go, or get it as PDF or plain text, you can find that in my personal archive.)

( Demon Sword, part 1 of 5 )

Here is a report on the first actual real-life scientific conference held in Azeroth, the virtual world of World of Warcraft.

I now have two level 70 characters. One troll warrior, and one tauren druid.

I leveled the druid as feral, and had originally planned to run her as a tank. But now I'm thinking of respeccing her resto and see if healing is any fun.

Flight Form is the bestest thing ever.

This year it appears I will write a femslash08 story for someone who has me on their friends list. The prompts, not so surprisingly, include more than one series and pairing I like.

Now I just have to actually write something.

This Sunday games designer Erick Wujcik died from cancer.

I suspect most of you reading this have no idea who he was. While he worked in the roleplaying games business for a long time, he never really had any successes that reached outside the hardcore gamer market. His ideas tended to be offbeat and interesting rather than mass-market-appealing. The game of his that people are most likely to have seen is his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles game (which predated the first TMNT movie by several years).

But the one that made me notice him, and which eventually led him to visit my flat in Linköping, Sweden, was the Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game. It was based on Roger Zelazny's Amber books, and at least for a certain kind of player an amazing amount of pure undiluted fun. The game is very light on rules, extremely high-power (for example, a private universe for your character is a very cheap item and pretty much an expected accessory) and hugely slanted towards rewarding creative players. From 1993ish and on, I got badly hooked on that game, and we spent a silly amount of time playing it. I also got involved in the nascent Internet-mediated gaming community, and it was via that that my flat eventually became one of Erick's stops the summer he travelled all over Europe. About a dozen people had gathered in my living room, and he ran a short ADRPG scenario for us. I was impressed that he actually managed to GM for that many people at the same time. After the game, he hung around for a while and talked (among other things) about ideas he had for other games. I've never seen any of them published, which is a pity. Some of them were very original.

Well. I guess they have a blast of a day in the Summerlands now.

At about 3AM this morning, jennyaxe more or less ran out of the flat. A couple of hours later, this image landed in my phone.

( Image )

Being stuck at home with the sudden cold from Hell, I've spent some time over the last few days finally watching the last fifteen episodes of the fourth and final season of the TV series Lexx. So, at last, I have seen the entirety of the series.

It truly is a series unlike any other. If one wanted a short phrase to sum it up, I think the one most suited for the job would be "batshit insane". With, as a subtitle, "really not made in the USA" (actually, was the fourth series ever aired in the US? Because they seriously make fun of a lot of US institutions, from the president on down).

For those out there unfamiliar with it, the series follows four characters: Xev, a love slave who got the body modifications but not the mental programming for the job; Stan, an old unattractive cowardly traitorous loser of a security guard; Kai, an undead indestructible assassin for an evil empire; and finally 790 the robot head, who got the love slave programming meant for Xev and is (by season four) obsessively in love with Kai. These gain control of the spaceship Lexx, the most powerful weapon of destruction in the two universes. In this, they wander randomly around in space, while Stan and Xev try to find people to have sex with.

By the end of the first season, they've accidentally toppled the evil empire. By the end of the second season, they've managed to destroy an entire universe. Season three is pretty dull, unfortunately. in season four, they end up on Earth, and someone turned up the batshit-insane-o-meter to eleven. Seriously. Here, have som examples:

In episode 4:11 A Midsummer's Nightmare, the Stan, Xev and Kai get captured by Oberon, the king of the fairies, who is looking for a new bride. He's accompanied by an over the top gay Puck, and a Titania played by a male midget with a serious five o'clock shadow. And it all takes place in a tent in a parking lot outside Battersea Power Station in London.

In episode 4:13 769, part of the plot involves finding the soldier in the combined US armed forces with the largest penis, and having said organ transplanted onto a body controlled by 790. We see the soldier getting a Purple Heart for his sacrifice.

All of episode 4:18 The Game is a twisted version of the chess game played between the knight and Death in Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal, with Kai as the knight and Prince (a recurring bad guy who may be the Devil, sort of) as Death. The pieces they play with are the heads of characters from the show. Who talk. A lot.

Episode 4:20 Apocalexx Now is probably the craziest episode of the series. One of the several insane plot threads involves the (female) pope trying to expand the Vatican's real estate holdings by torturing Stan and the president of the United States with a deadly game of golf in a ruin in the jungles of Vietnam.

Episode 4:23 Lyekka vs. Japan sees Tokyo assaulted by a Godzilla-sized man-eating plant shaped like a beautiful woman. Then, after she's been dealt with, by an asteroid on legs.

They do turn the insane down a whole bunch of notches for the final episode, and produce a really good ending that quite beautifully refers back to the beginning of the show.

If you enjoy oddball Science Fiction TV and you haven't seen Lexx, you really have to give it a try. There is nothing else at all like it, and I very much doubt there ever will be. Oh, unless you have a problem with blatant (and not seldom quite gross) sexual imagery. This series deserves its "Ages 14 and up" rating.

Spending six hours waiting in an emergency room to be told if you're going blind or not is not really all that fun. At least the verdict turned out "not". That is a considerable relief.

jennyaxe ordered stuff from ThinkGeek. So now she has a USB hub shaped like a little TARDIS (complete with flashing blue light and sound effect), and I have a titanium spork.

There are rumours about Blake's 7 being remade. It's far from the first time we hear such rumours. The main new thing this time is that it's someone with the resources to do something that's spreading them, and remakes have been doing quite well lately. Even so, I fully expect that a new B7 will suck horribly. Or, at best, it will like Battlestar Galactica be an entirely new thing that only has some superficial connections to the original.

But anyway. Say that someone was to remake the old series, only with new actors and modern special effects. And, since this is a fantasy casting thing, a bottomless budget. Who'd get to play which character?

To begin with, since this is my post, all the actors will be women (we want a fertile ground for the slash). So:

Blake will be played by Claudia Christian. She can certainly pull off the charismatic single-minded leader thing, and she's about the right age for someone who's been around this rebellion thing once before.

The role of Avon we give to Hudson Leick, mostly because she's really good at the playing borderline psycho, and it wouldn't be B7 is we couldn't spend the next three decades debating if Avon is insane or just a bit stressed out.

For Vila, we give Alyson Hannigan a call, since we probably need someone who's actually pretty good at this acting thing.

Jenna, to be true to the old series, should be some serious eye candy (not that any of the previous three are exactly hard on the eyes...). I'd say Charisma Carpenter, but she's a bit old for the role. Tricia Helfer is a bit thin for my taste, but since that certainly seems to be a minority opinion we'll go with her.

Cally's role in the original series was random enough that just about anyone could do. Let's give it to Milla Jovovich, and hope whoever gets to direct uses her remarkably strong action talent.

Servalan will be played by Scarlett Johansson. Hot enough to distract anyone, and a good enough an actress to pull off the casual menace and evil that seemed to come so easily to Jacqueline Pearce.

Travis will be played by Renée O'Connor and Lena Headey, in that order. If you don't know why we need two actors here, go watch the original show :-)

Dayna should be played by someone actiony and non-European-looking, so we happily give that role to Rachel Luttrell.

Tarrant needs someone young, pretty and perky. Morena Baccarin should be able to pull that off in her sleep.

The actor who gets to play Soolin for season four also inexplicably appears as a mutoid in season one. We're confident that Summer Glau can pull off both the murderous robot and the cold-blooded assassin (perhaps a bit too easily, actually).

That's all the main ones, or did I manage to forget someone?

Tonight I had a dream with a minimap in the upper right corner of my field of vision.

Still, not as bad as that time I dreamt in ASCII graphics after playing waaaay too much nethack.

Poll #1170479 Battlestar Galactica
Open to: All, results viewable to: All

Who is the crazier?