Reccer's Notes: This is a post-canon fic from the point of view of Maggie, Ben's sister. They didn't grow up together and she appears in exactly one episode of due South before disappearing back up to the Arctic Circle. In this post-canon fic they end up working together and get to know each other better. See also Sixthlight's short AU fic about Benton and Maggie from dS Ladies Fest!
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis Characters/Pairings: Jeannie Miller, Teyla Emmagan, John Sheppard, Rodney McKay, Ronon Dex Rating: Gen Length: 5000-10,000 (best guess) - the individual postcards are mostly text-based, in different fonts, but it's too hard to add it all up. There are 8 or so sets of postcards/images, plus two longer narrative interludes. Content Notes: Not all of the postcards or notes have text equivalents, so it's not fully accessible. Rodney at one point talks about a relationship he had at uni with an older woman he describes as a "sex addict". Creator Links:Sholio on AO3, Sholio's own site Themes: Siblings, Epistolary, Friendship, Family, Team as family, Unconventional format and style
Summary: (more notes than a summary) Contains spoilers for the Season 3 episode "McKay & Mrs. Miller". I might be taking a certain amount of liberty with the timeline; let's assume that a few months went by between "M&MM" and "Return". This is a very image-intensive story. Illustrations and photos are all by me, aside from one or two photos taken by my husband. A couple of the postcards utilize (heavily Photoshopped) patterns that I got off the Internet to represent fabrics and such, because I didn't have anything suitable.
Reccer's Notes: This is a heartwarming epistolary story in which Teyla and Jeannie (Rodney's sister) write to each other. Eventually the other team members are brought in as well, especially John and Rodney. It's a mix of tales about Jeannie's life, and of the team's, especially Teyla's, adventures, and although the format as a series of postcard/image pages is a little awkward to negotiate, it's very much worth reading. The postcards start off somewhat formally, and quickly become more personal, and one theme is of the correspondence bringing Rodney and Jeannie closer together. It's touching, funny, tinged with the realities and sadnesses of life in the Pegasus galaxy, and an excellent read.
I'm going to be doing a little maintenance today. It will likely cause a tiny interruption of service (specifically for www.dreamwidth.org) on the order of 2-3 minutes while some settings propagate. If you're on a journal page, that should still work throughout!
If it doesn't work, the rollback plan is pretty quick, I'm just toggling a setting on how traffic gets to the site. I'll update this post if something goes wrong, but don't anticipate any interruption to be longer than 10 minutes even in a rollback situation.
When I was a kid I had two artillery games: Tank Wars and QBasic Gorillas. Left: Tank Wars. Right: QBasic Gorillas Both games share the same basic concept. You and your opponent sit on opposite ends of a battlefield and take turns lobbing projectiles at one another in parabolic arcs, adjusting the angle and power of each shot to try to land a hit.
Tank Wars, created by Kenneth Morse, allows you to customize a myriad of game options, from windspeed to the color of the sky. You can play hotseat multiplayer, or if you have a keyboard and a mouse (fancy!) you and a friend can huddle around the computer together and split the controls. If your friends are unavailable there are CPU opponents of various levels of skill, from "Mr. Stupid" to "Wind Master". As you rack up points you can buy bombs with different blast radii, and when you win the terrain blows up in a satisfying crater and rains back down on the field in an elaborate shower of pixels.
QBasic Gorillas came with MS-DOS 5.0 and was created by Microsoft as a demonstration of the capabilities of the QBasic programming language. You and your opponent are gorillas who throw exploding bananas, and when you win, you do the Monkey.
Tank Wars is, I suppose, the "better" of the two games, in the sense of having more sophisticated graphics and gameplay. But does it have dancing gorillas? Does it have exploding bananas? Does it have a cartoon sun that makes a face like 😮 if you manage to hit it? I ask you. I did play both games a lot, but I know which one was more appealing to my sensibilities as a child of 8-9 years of age.
Fest Name: Wolf & Prince Fest 2026 Links:Tumblr |The Snupin Server on Discord Type of challenge: Anonymous prompt fest Description:A Snape and Lupin fest welcoming fic, art, podfic, translations, craft etc etc. Prompting starts soon, self-prompts welcome! Claiming/sign-ups start 4 April. Dark fic/dead dove allowed if tagged thoroughly. AI generated submissions are not allowed. Creators must be 18 or older as of 4 April. Ratings restrictions: General to Explicit.
Length restrictions: Min 100 words, no max
Wolf & Prince 2026 Timeline Times in Eastern Daylight Time (EDT)
🌿Prompting begins: 21 March 2026
🌿Prompting closes: 3 April 8:00 PM EDT
🌿Claiming begins: 4 April 8:00 PM EDT
🌿Claiming closes: 27 June 11:59 PM EDT
🌿Submissions due by: 30 June 11:59 PM EDT
🌿Work reveals first day: 3 July
🌿 Work reveals last day: 24 or 31 July (depending on amount of enteries)
Continuing my list of fifty Canadian songs I love from the past fifty years, 1979's is one that's probably popped into my head at least one morning a week since I was five:
subtitle that didn't fit in the subject line: On Being Both, Beyond, and In-Between
I'm going to say this prominently because I think it has caused some confusion among reviewers: This is a book by two nonbinary authors and the title is Life Isn't Binary, and it is NOT (primarily) about nonbinary gender identity! If you want a book that is primarily about nonbinary gender identity, this book may not give you what you're looking for!
Instead, it is about problems with binary thinking in all areas of life. There is a tendency for people to view many things in terms of two categories in opposition. Male/female and cis/trans, yes, but also Black/white, straight/gay, privileged/marginalized, body/mind, emotion/logic, friend/lover, us/them. The book examines and deconstructs these binaries and more, and encourages thinking about who currently benefits from their resultant flattening of nuance, and what we could gain from framing concepts in a less polarized way.
The book is short but extremely densely packed with ideas. I read it as a two-person book club with dragonque, and every chapter elicited fruitful discussion about its points and how they related to our own lives and experiences. I have known dragonque for a long time and I feel like I got to know them much better through talking about this book!
I do think at times it can feel too dense and too short for the vast scope of its thesis. The authors can state in one sentence an absolutely massive idea that could itself be an entire book, and that's the only thing they say about it because they're already on to the next point. (The authors have in fact collaborated on several other books which sound like they may elaborate on some of the things where I was like, "so, that's all you're going to say about that one? okay!")
But I found the book very worthwhile and thought-provoking, and after returning it to the library I bought my own copy because I expect I will be re-reading it, referring to it, or wanting to lend it to people.
Every Thursday, we have a community post, just like this one, where you can drop a rec or five in the comments.
This works great if you only have one rec and don't want to make a whole post for it, or if you don't have a DW account, or if you're shy. ;)
(But don't forget: you can deffo make posts of your own seven days a week. ;D!)
So what cool fancrafts/fanart/fics/fanvids/other kinds of fanworks/podfics have we discovered this week? Drop it in the comments below. Anon comment is enabled.
BTW, AI fanworks are not eligible for reccing at recthething. If you aware that a fanwork is AI-generated, please do not rec it here.
The pro-shot of The Importance of Being Earnest, starring Ncuti Gatwa, Sharon D. Clarke, and Hugh Skinner, will be streaming on Youtube from March 12th to 18th!
National Theatre at Home has been one of my favourite streaming services for a long time now, with the way it bring UK theatre to someone like me (not in the UK, also not living in a place that gets much in the way of touring shows), and I'm really happy they're releasing this one for free on a bigger platform.
Fandom: Stranger Things Pairings/Characters: Steve Harrington & Dustin Henderson Rating: G Length: 2,489 words Creator Link:insignificant457 Theme: Siblings, Gen
Summary: "See, the problem is this: in the past few weeks there's been a distressing increase in the thickness and darkness of the peach fuzz on his upper lip, to the point that it's becoming noticeable and also gross. He should be happy about it, really, because it's a sign of manhood, isn't it?"
Sometimes, not having a dad around really, really sucks. But recently acquiring a big brother does have its perks.
Reccer's Notes: As the author says, "They're brothers your honor." I love the way Steve and Dustin adopted each other in the show, and this fic feels like it could be a missing scene. The voices are spot on, and the vibes are good.
You can find a list of shows by date or you can browse by category. Shows are running both in person in Los Angeles and as live streaming events that are also available to view up to two weeks afterwards. I tuned in a while back for their fundraising show, a chaotic live runthrough of the Ocean's 11 script called Gender Heist, and it was a heck of a good time.
Fest Name: A Cauldron Full of Love Links: Tumblr | SnapeShifters' Guild | AO3 | Rules | Claiming Type of Challenge: Anonymous prompt fest Description: A Severus Snape multi-ship fest. Your work can focus on any type of love (romantic, platonic, familial, unrequited, tragic, etc.). Claiming is open till May 10. AI generated submissions are not allowed. Ratings Restrictions: All ratings allowed Length Restrictions: Fic: Minimum 1000 words; no maximum Art: Demonstrate approximately 2 hours worth of effort Timeline: Prompting Open: Feb 21 Prompting Closes: March 7 Claiming Opens: March 8 Claiming Closes: May 10 Submissions Due: May 24 Posting Begins: June 1
Fandom: Stargate Atlantis Characters/Pairings: Ronon Dex/John Sheppard, Rodney McKay, Dave Sheppard Rating: Teen, Gen Length: 3158 (Homework is 963) Content Notes: no AO3 warnings apply Creator Links:Rheanna on AO3, busaikko on AO3, susan_voight on AO3 Themes: Siblings, Friendship, Going home, Established relationship
Summaries: Ronon starts his e-mail correspondence with Sheppard's brother more or less by mistake.
For some reason, after his father's funeral Dave Sheppard keeps getting e-mail from Ronon Dex.
Reccer's Notes: This is a remix of Homework by busaikko, and they can be read in any order - this is basically a rec for both fics, Fieldwork being from Ronon's POV, and Homework, which is just as good, from Dave's POV. Ronon's in a relationship with John and as part of learning English he starts emailing John's estranged brother, Dave. Rodney then gets involved as Ronon goes to him for help. The characterisations of Ronon, John, and Rodney here are spot on, and it's both funny and moving - a wonderful set of stories.
All right, here I'm going to have to concede that my usual strategy for disambiguating game titles has broken down. This post is about a game called 2025 that came out in the year 2025.
It's a puzzle where you're presented with two thousand and twenty-five items that you have to group into 45 categories of 45 items each. This is a much bigger version of the New York Times daily 4x4 categorization puzzle Connections (which you can play on a third party site if you don't want to deal with the NYT), which in turn is inspired by the British quiz show Only Connect.
2025 is not as conceptually difficult as Connections, which goes out of its way to trick you into thinking items go together that don't. I figured out what the 45 categories in 2025 were relatively quickly, and then spent a long time with most of them almost full (40+) and staring at a couple hundred uncategorized items that I had simply never heard of. I was able to guess some of them by what sort of a thing they sounded like they could plausibly be, but I also used a lot of brute force, especially towards the end. Yes, the first category I successfully filled was spoilersbirds. The last one I filled was legal doctrines, which are very hard to tell apart from mixed drinks and logical fallacies because all three are mostly ridiculous-sounding nonsense phrases. You can play 2025 for free on the website of its creator, Thomas Colthurst. His whole site is worth looking at if you are fondly nostalgic for '90s era web sites made by geeks of a certain generation who want to share their filk about linear algebra and lists of puns they and their friends came up with on Usenet.
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