I Read Your Post and/or Story and Enjoyed It

Title: Visual Acuity
Rating: PG
Pairing: John/Rodney
Word count: 8800
Spoilers: Minor through 5x20
A/N: Major thanks for various efforts at betaing, audiencing, and cheerleading to beadattitude, fish_echo, kimberlyfdr, winkingstar, and M. (It takes a village, heh.)
Also, thanks to le_mot_mo for her support throughout the process, and for the absolutely gorgeous art.

For artword Challenge 16: Colors.


Art by le_mot_mo; to see the beautiful full-size image and leave her comments, go here!


Summary: ( 'There's not a cloud in the sky, Colonel,' Rodney said, and John had just enough time to register Teyla's look of concern, Ronon's frown, and Rodney's suddenly colorless eyes before everything went black. )

Oh, how I love mcsmooch time! It never fails to get me into a writing mood. (Now if I could only find the law school paper equivalent). This round's offering (posted over in the comm):

Title: Mission Planning
Rating: PG-13 (I guess?)
Word Count: ~ 1325
Spoilers: minor for 4x04 Doppelganger
A/N: Set post-canon (late season 6, by my reckoning); beta by my lj-less sometimes-roommate M.

John hadn't really meant to schedule it.

Got a hankerin' for some Ruus wine or lemon (death) bars? Curious to see what Earth-equivalent ingredients tava bean and tuttleroot soup might include? Dying to know how to make a proper Salisbury steak?

Then check out De Re Coquinaria Pegasi, the extensive Pegasus galaxy/Atlantis Expedition cookbook, assembled by winkingstar and contributions from her minions. The cookbook contains dozens of recipes (including drinks, sides & salads, main dishes, and desserts), as well as photos, captions, and recipe-inspired fic (all gen or Teyla/Kanaan, which there needs to be more of in the world, IMO).

The above link takes you to the noticeboard post, which has links to the wiki-based online version as well as the download links for the PDF. I highly recommend looking through the PDF, which has 40+ pages of photos with captions that aren't on the wiki.

So check it out, try out some recipes, and if you've got your own ideas to contribute, we'd love to see them!

Title: An Eighth of a Mile Isn't That Far Away (but an Eighth of a Kilometer's Even Closer)
Rating: PG-13
Pairing: John/Rodney
Word count: 3,617
Spoilers: vaguely for 5x14 - The Prodigal
Summary: Rodney discovers the joys of the collaborative process.
A/N: This is for newkidfan, to thank her for her amazing work running the artword Round Robin challenge. Originally posted in the newkidtastic comm, now somewhat revised and betaed by winkingstar and M.

( For a set of runners k running at distinct speeds around a track of unit length . . . )

And the other three stories I worked on for artword are up!

There's Lost In Communication, where siriaeve left off her section with the incredibly fun idea of John thinking Lorne thinks Rodney's a spy. (For a time, I was plotting out a very farcical exploration of who thinks what when, and why, with the big reveal at the end being that it's actually Chuck who's the spy and disappears from the gateroom in a cloud of smoke, ninja-like. But that would've been several thousand words long, not right for this challenge, and trinityofone's done it already.) The title's very apt, and the resulting artwork is wonderful.

Then there's Everything John Never Wanted To Know About the Wraith, and Rodney Should Have Been Afraid to Ask. My first thought was to go in a cracky direction, with John reluctant to go back to the planet because the naked Wraith remind him of his two greatest fears: bugs and clowns (all that pasty white skin!). But I got distracted by Rodney undressing John, and instead hyperfocused finished the story up in a very sincere and touching way, which is reflected in the art.

Discoveries is the story I started. I began with the idea that John and Rodney get trapped in a VR room that keeps cycling through different scenarios that the city's pulled from the multimedia that the expedition members have uploaded to the central servers -- mostly, I wanted someone to have saved one of those Olde Timey Photos on their computers, so that at some point in the story we'd see Teyla in one of those floofy dresses, sitting in a bathtub with a Tommy gun, wearing a really wide-brimmed hat. Also, there could be a Buffy fusion, in which John is the Slayer. (I want to hear him make comments about his kicky boots.) But I got up to the first phowm and realized that it was probably more fun for the next person to write if I didn't specify what the room did. I wouldn't have thought of the incredible-shrinking-room aspect, or the garden-of-self-discovery angle, and those are really neat, so I'm glad I left it where I did. The art process for this one is really cool -- you can see the shifting tone of the story in what the artists create, and the end result would be a really gorgeous banner/journal header. :-)

And we've still got a few days of posting to go! newkidfan did a phenomenal job organizing all of this, and I'll be sad not to have a new story to work on every week!

So I don't have Photoshop or any other fancy image editing software, and my art skills are somewhat limited, but there was that scene in 5x11 - The Lost Tribe that's begging to be manipped, and I, uh, took a shot at it. In MSPaint. (With a side of Photoshop Express, the very limited version of Photoshop available online.)

( Results behind the cut due to minor spoilers for 5x11, and also amateur image editing. )

So I saw this image on Joe Mallozzi's blog, and I couldn't resist charting out my own wishful-thinking season 6.

( cut for ridiculously large image. how do I resize things? )

A few notes on the episode:

( spoilers for 5x08 - The Queen )

As I'm sure you've all seen already, the winners for McShep Match were announced, and the Home Team was victorious! (Well, by 12/100ths of a point, so it's more like "the Home Team squeaked by on a statistically insignificant margin!" But still: !!!)

I contributed the Home Team story For Future Reference for the "chapter and verse" prompt. It's a fairly fluffy piece -- I caused myself much consternation trying to figure out what kind of epic, angsty story I should write, and then I thought, "Wait, why did you pick this prompt in the first place? Oh, right: boys making out in libraries."

Huge thanks to winkingstar for betaing this 10 hours before the deadline. I promise that no library materials were harmed in the making of this story.