all my keysmash are belong to you

HAHA SMITH IS DEMOTED DOWN THE LINES AND PAILLE IS PROMOTED UP THE LINES.

By HAHA I mean HAHAHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARGHHHRGHRGRGH. It's nothing we're not used to seeing from Smith nowadays, and that is the unfortunate thing, the depressingly unsurprising thing. Paille missing open nets has become the punchline to a long-running and very stilted joke, but at least Paille shows up. Smith is a non-entity. Smith is losing his job to this guy. SMITH. SMITTY. WAKE UP, SMITTY. You can't do this to us, man. Not like this. NOT LIKE THIIIIIIIS.

So yeah, that was some tragic hockey last night, so naturally the perfect antidote is to watch a movie about hockey tragedy. ESPN's "30 for 30" last night was called Of Miracles and Men, about the 1980 Miracle on Ice from the Soviet POV. It's been widely compared to Red Army, but that one's still on the to-watch list for me, soooo Of Miracles and Men it is, and we loved it.

I had Smith not!fic I wanted to burble out, but I'm tired and hungry, so I will get to it AT SOME POINT, maybe. Also, sign up for hockeyexchange on LJ.

I hadn't realized that we're playing against Dallas next hahahahahahahahAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

is it baseball yet

I've got attempts at Marchand/Seguin fic scattered all over my laptop, in like three-sentence increments. I don't have the attention span right now to write something longer and more cohesive.

( stuff i want in a bos@dal brad/tyler fic: an outline )

lol, y'know the Krug/Marchand notfic I wrote last post? I turned it into an actual fic, because. Post-game sex and trade anxiety, y'know?

Doesn't Change Much | hockey RPF | Torey Krug/Brad Marchand | Mature | ~900 words
"There's nothing to hold on to. Soon, he suspects, there will be even less."

Also, come read the Lackadaisy webcomic, guys. It's beautifully illustrated, with clever dialogue, taking place during Prohibition in St. Louis. My favorite character is everyone, but after reading The Midnight Special by prodigy, I may have a giant soft spot for stoic, stubborn, ornery Viktor Vasko and his partnership with irascible, particular Mordecai Heller, and how good they were at--uh, getting rid of problems~ once upon a time.

And, also, thanks to the internet, I'm watching this Russian TV show on Hulu called Junior League, which is like Friday Night Lights but Russian and hockey. I'm only on episode 2, and I might watch a bunch more up in my room shortly because I like the feelings it gives me. Future Yuletide fandom? QUITE POSSIBLY.

Krug and Marchand got into a fight during practice. Oh little children, is the pressure of being a complete train wreck GETTING TO YOU? LOOK, WHAT'S THAT IN THE DISTANCE? Is it your wild card spot? It seems to be flying south for the winter, heading straight for Florida. The projected probability is that Boston has a 28% chance of making playoffs. What is the algorithm on this? There's a lot of hearts scraped raw, the silences a little heavier, Kells' pep talks a little razor-edged, and Tuukka has no patience for anyone or anything, except maybe Sveddy, who as a backup goalie is kind of off to the side and has a bird's eye view that no one else has. Sveddy's just trying to stay out of everyone's way. He's just trying to help. During TV breaks, Tuukka skates over and strategizes with him in a vindictive voice, and Sveddy adjusts his Bruins cap and listens.

( notfic o'clock, Marchand/Krug || someone underwater looking up at the sun )

This weekend was the first time the band practiced without special guests. It's been a veritable parade of relatives and high-school friends, and on Friday night, after Jack and I wound our way back from the Cape in a new car we bought from a little old lady on the cheap ("just drove it to church and back on Sundays", and the dome lights don't work), the three of us coalesced together again. Jason, Jack, and me - half-ragged hypostases, triune god of going nowhere fast. Here we are again, we said to each other. If ever I end up waking up grimy-eyed at 5 AM in the backseat of a car speeding across the southwestern desert, pursued by the law, I have no doubt that Jack's gonna be the one behind the wheel and Jason will be riding shotgun. They'll be arguing the details of a decade-old memory, what happened back in high school, that one time in Mr. O'Brian's class. Something completely innocuous. Cans of Red Bull in the footwell, and the constant battle to quit cigarettes currently put on hold.

We are, I suspect, becoming a little codependent. Are we musicians who just get fucked up? Or are we fuck-ups who like playing music? We call it band practice but we never practice for anything. We're not pursuing gigs, not even open mics. Come weekend nights, we're squeezed into the guest bedroom tangled up in each other's wires, two beers in and singing other people's heartbreak. Every so often, we remind ourselves that we're better than this. The sentiment never lasts, but the inertia does.

It was the three of us again this weekend and we had been waiting for it, it's so easy, litany of things we can sing in our sleep, and all we want is easy. Let's play this song, let's play that song, and the indecision in-between that leads to noncommittal noodling and a rambling jam. It's not that we're good. It's not that we aren't offensive and lazy and inconsiderate to each other. We're a well-oiled machine that does nothing much. We will simmer and give up and control, but there's some feeble light of dawn when the dust clears. We are in our simplest form. We love each other. This solves nothing. Love is no panacaea, but neither is the dawn; you just know that both are inevitable, that's all.

It has become a running joke that the offensive production of teams I become a fan of turns to dust, so I guess, you're welcome, people who hate the Bruins. I accept gratitude in the form of monetary donations, please message me for further details. Meanwhile, I am forbidden from becoming a Patriots fan and currently instructed to root for Denver. Go Broncos!

I have this Hilary Knight/Julie Chu fic that's been sitting in my drafts that I should stop procrastinating. Also, I guess, my DCBB? But Christmas is a few days away, and I'm going to spend all day tomorrow making macaroons. This clarity of mission feels so good to me. For one day, I don't really need to worry about job applications and whatever. All I have to do is make macaroons and put them in cute bags. I will be so at peace.

Hey, do you guys watch Scandal? I'm halfway through S2 and I am digging the shit out of Mellie Grant. What a ferocious, sharp-toothed woman. Weaponize the performative femininity of a first lady like the BADASS YOU ARE. I don't really ship anyone, but I get strong king/lionheart feelings from Olivia/Harrison. The president needs to stop pooping his pants though, like sir you are an adult, you must stop defecating in your drawers, or at least buy your own diapers, like have you learned nothing?

Being that I haven't been active on LJ/DW for a while, I also haven't been posting my new fics here. Well, here is a compilation of fics I've written since the last time I posted here about a fic I wrote!

( SPN, Pacific Rim, SPN RPF, hockey RPF, baseball RPF, baseball/Teen wolf RPF yes you read that right because did you know Ike Davis and Tyler Hoechlin were college roommates/teammates/BFFs? )

I leave you on this note of Hoechlin always having a special place in his heart for Ike Davis baseball, even when being asked about what superpower he'd like to have:

Meanwhile, in Marchand/Pastrnak news:



ping pong all night long oh yea is that what the kids are calling it these days. Don't worry, Brad's gonna give it to him a lot more frequently now amirite ladiez

On another note, sports fandom has gotten me thinking again about how to write stories where the characters have language barriers. What's the best way to do that? In SPN fandom, I dealt with it a few times by racebending characters into Indonesians, specifically Sundanese Indonesians because that's the cadence I'm most familiar with. (BANDUNG REPRESENT.) But like, take baseball - I don't know Japanese or Spanish. Hockey, I don't know Russian or any of the northern and eastern European languages. I don't really know how to do the broken English in fic and be confident that I can pull it off.

I was thinking, then, maybe write a fic from say David Pastrnak's POV and narrate his thoughts and try to cheat around dialogue. English is not my first language either, but it's become the language I'm most comfortable in, whereas my grasp of Indonesian kinda stalled at around the age I was when my family emigrated. I know there's an English-language novel out there about a POC family in which when they're speaking in their native language, the dialogue is still written in English with us understanding it's not, but when other people are speaking in English, their dialogue is italicized, and maybe not in quotations, or something? There has to be a way I can do this without learning Japanese/Spanish/Czech/Finnish/Russian/Swedish.

I'm fascinated by the intersections though. I have this scene I want to work into baseball fic at some point where Christian Vazquez is, like, idk, eating a sandwich while Xander Bogaerts is nattering away on the phone next to him. Vazquez and Bogaerts, BFFs extraordinaire, usually talk to each other in Spanish, but Bogaerts is on the phone with his brother and they're talking in Papiamento. Vazquez doesn't know Papiamento, but he recognizes some words simply because he's been hanging around Bogaerts for so long. Stuff like that. But I'd be writing all this in English 'cos that's the language I know, so how do I balance that!

Like check out Ichiro Suzuki and Munenori Kawasaki, who have picked up the obscene variety of Spanish from their teammates. Another thing I want is a scene where Koji Uehara, David Ortiz, and Mike Napoli are hanging out shit-faced enough that Koji speaks Japanese more often than not, and Ortiz speaks Spanish more often than not, and Nap's just blabbering along in English, and they all get along merrily and understand each other just enough in this grand adventure. basball frans