Snowflake challenge 8: rec 3 fanworks!

First up, I gotta put credit to the Snowflake challenge for basically teaching me how to dreamwidth, last year. I haven't been keeping up as well this time, but the regular prompts and welcoming feedback went a long way towards my initial comfort here :)

This time: Three recs from last year, because I love reccing! For extra fun, here's one medium each ;D

1) songs the equations sing, by AlchemyAlice: novel-length, novel-scale au/sequel to The Man From UNCLE. 

 

“Watch his eyes,” Oleg had said to Illya, before Illya flew to Berlin. His cigarette had hung like a crooked fang from his mouth, the smoke of it cloying in the briefing room, making strange tremulous shadows in the light of the projector. On the screen across from them, the arresting image of a man in an immaculate double-breasted suit, half in shadow, had flickered. “It’s only hearsay at this point, but we know this much: it’ll be almost impossible to tell, but if you watch the eyes, you’ll know it isn’t a he at all.”

Illya had stored that information away, just as he was expected to.

He knows far before he ever gets a glimpse of Napoleon Solo’s eyes, however, that what he is up against—what has beaten him across the Berlin Wall with prize physicist and roboticist Udo Teller’s daughter in tow—isn’t human.

Not at all. 

So I keep saying I don't mean to go into AI, but I also I am in the SF bay area and keep studying ethics and epistemology so ‾\_(ツ)_/‾ here I am lmao. And just when I got particularly bogged down last spring, here comes a monster of a story to keep me excited and interested in cognition! This is a beast and I love it. As an AU, it springboards off of canon and develops the basic themes that the movie presented into something huge. The angst is great on everyone and the responding comfort everyone gets? 💯. And the historical / political / technological footnotes? oh you know I'm about that!!! I love this one, if I had bookbinding opportunities I would want to make a hardcopy. 

2) Painfully gratefully ourselves, a Terror fanvid by zhestern

Watch on YouTube

In a year where I watched The Terror, Nirvana in Fire, and Chernobyl HBO, I actually think that The Terror might just take the cake for single saddest show. I've compared NiF and Chernobyl before, and I think what sets them as unified vs Terror is that they end with a whisper of hope. Not for their heroes, maybe, but with the idea that, when people come together, they might have a way to make things better. There's a chance that we have that power. 
Not in Terror. Even before they knew it, there was no way for them to be rescued, to go home, to survive. That's the excitement and curse of history; the first episode opens with the title card informing us that they will all be lost. We just get to watch how. 
And the amazing thing is that the show is still something compelling and even beautiful. Even when they're dying of cold and lead and scurvy and monster and each other, there's still so much of a point made of the kindness everyone shows each other. And it's all worth it. Yes, it says, tomorrow we may die, but today, we will be gentle. First, they live to the best of their abilities, and futility doesn't erase that. Nothing about death makes life less meaningful. 
Which leads us to this vid. It would be easy to say that these scenes of camraderie and joy are taken out of context, and so they're less than relevant. Instead, I think they're exactly where they should be allowed to be: each moment holding weight on its own. You can absolutely see the toll that it's taking on them, but even only with a tent over their heads, the officers can celebrate Jopson's promotion. Fitzjames has only just woken up from a swoon, but he can still smile when Crozier comes to him. Crozier can trust Goodsir just as well with a broken nose as ever. And Blanky will never walk again, never tell anyone, but he can still exeult at finding the passage. They have a right to that, I think. And this vid celebrates that resilience, the refusal to let a harsh world reduce them to harsh people. All men must die, but first, they'll live. I love it.

3) Little Rover, a song for Opportunity by The Stupendium

Watch on YouTube

Under the law of filk, I think this counts as a fanwork!
The thing about Oppy is that, to be honest, and I expect like many people, I had ended up taking it for granted. I saw it go up, and then ...for the next 15 years, it just kept beeping back to us. It felt like it would always be there, and I'd find another tweet from Mars and smile because somewhere out there a robot was sharing rocks with us. 
Like yeah, I'm not a scientist, I'm not anything to NASA. But Oppy was someone to us, and finding out how many other people were also affected by its end was really something to experience. We don't grieve well, in this day and age. Or even if I'm just speaking to Americans, we're collectively too interested in being tough and moving on and 'getting over it' to pause and spend a sincere moment mourning as a society. We don't usually know how to express that emotion, and it stunts us. So when one of our greatest modern myths closes a chapter, I was so glad we got to catharsize that, and in such a lovely way!