Dark and Divine

Mind-blown by this beautiful piece of art, I reblogged it on Tumblr and retweeted it on Twitter and posted in on Facebook and drowned the author, Sixtus/Gladius, with repeated outpourings of praise and glee. But I still have more!

Muddy Middle

Recently, I bragged about having completed the first draft of my Mass Effect fanfiction novel seven years after starting to write it, and boldly stated that I wouldn’t mind spending another seven years polishing it. But several months into it, I’m ready to go nuts.

(There will be no spoilers. This is about craft and whining. Your suspense is safe with me.)

Platinum Solos Hall of Fame

This is the second in the series of posts about the Mass Effect Multiplayer Challenges and Halls of Fame.

The ME3MP Platinum Solos Hall of Fame (PHoF) is, I believe, the oldest community archive. The earliest entries in it date back to July 2012, possibly to the same day when the platinum difficulty was introduced with the Mass Effect 3: Earth DLC. Back then, even the best players needed about an hour to complete a platinum solo. Nowadays, veteran soloists can do it in under 15 minutes.

A New Mass Effect Fic: After Hours

Six years after abandoning an unfinished draft and six months after starting to work on it again, I’m finally ready to publish After Hours.

This is the story I was talking about in Writer’s Intuition. It’s another Saren/Nihlus thing, set between Signal to Noise and the events of Mass Effect 1. It deals with issues of trust in a passionate but troubled long-distance relationship. It’s the first overtly adult story I’m publishing on this site, and I believe the first I’ve ever written to come with a ‘dubious consent’ content warning. A dark story that was difficult to write. Even talking about it makes me edgy.

But it’s done now, and I’m satisfied with how it turned out. It’s a great relief to finish one more work that’s been on the back-burner for years. I hope my hypothetical readers will enjoy it.

You can read it here, or on AO3.

Image: “Unity”, by a dear friend who gifted me this unfinished work of art a long time ago.

After Hours

Content warning

This story includes explicit depictions of sex between two male characters, themes related to BDSM and dubious consent. It is intended for adult audiences only.

Note

This story includes a slightly modified version of Misfire Fills 35 and 36, reproduced here with the permission of the author and my beloved friend, Misfire Anon.

After Hours

“Look at them.”

Saren ignores him.

“You don’t see Alliance looking this relaxed much. Or this hot.”

He’s doing it on purpose.

“They almost got the asari good looks.”

He isn’t drunk, but more than half of the way there.

Mass Effect Multiplayer Challenges and Halls of Fame

I have been a part of the Mass Effect fan community for a long time. But while my fanfiction writing is in evidence everywhere on this site, I’ve not written much about my involvement with Multiplayer Challenges and Halls of Fame, although I’ve been working on development and maintenance of that project regularly since the summer of 2016, when Bioware shut down their official forums. This is because what I have to say on the subject is largely technical and thus of dubious interest to the hypothetical readers of this blog; and writing about technical things requires more premeditation, structure and overall effort than my usual ramblings. I’m finally taking the plunge now because I plan to make all the data collected by the project publicly available some time in the next few months. The series of articles starting with this post will detail the project, the material and the process of wrangling it into shape, both as a manual for potential contributors and as homage to a long-lasting, fun and challenging hobby that taught me a great deal.