neveralarch

Drove from New York to Minnesota on Sunday/Monday, which was TONS OF FUN. Sunday I had to stop early in Ohio because blinding snowstorm. Monday I drove on snowed-in turnpikes most of the day, then into ridiculous cold+wind once the roads were clear. Best traffic I've ever dealt with in Chicago, though.

Anyway, I am back and working again, which is sad in the short term (I already miss family and sleeping for nine hours a day), but in the long term this is good. Classes don't start for another week and a half, but in the meantime I have coaching and research responsibilities, and I'm studying for my first prelim exam, bluh. On Friday I'm driving with a bus full of teenagers to Indiana for a huge high school competition, which is freaking me out a little. Hopefully it will be chill - I'm an anxious competitor, but I usually do pretty well with strip-coaching.

How is everyone else handling the new year?

Tweedymcgee asked me to sort Doctor Who characters into fencing weapons over on tumblr, and I did! At great length. You can see all my ridiculous headcanons here.

Basically, it's going really well! Weekend before last I was at a Big Ten competition that was a lot of fun. My team didn't win against many other schools (there were only two of us against three-person teams, so), but we did beat at least a couple places. As as individual, I won 19 and lost 6 so that was pretty awesome. Overall, it was a great time and I enjoyed hanging out with the other fencers.

Last weekend was a local competition, and I took third in sabre both Saturday and Sunday. Also fun! I think I could have done better than I did, but I'm still pretty happy with it. In general, I feel like I'm calming down. Partly that's because I'm better (I still get really upset when I'm losing and frustrated), but partly I'm also not reacting as strongly to losses. I think that's good, haha.

I started coaching at a high school yesterday, and it's going fine so far. It's all footwork atm - we hand out gear next Wednesday - so I'm not super hands-on right now. The other coaches are super nice, though, and all of the kids are really into it. Hopefully it'll work out once I start having to actually give drills and remember people's names.

Fencing! So much fencing! It is everywhere.

Also, I've been catching up on Who in preparation for the 50th. It's weird because I'm watching very critically and I can't turn that off, but I also want to be able to enjoy the 50th and not just be mad at people, so... idk. I guess we'll see what I think about the most recent series.

Gonna fence tomorrow and then sit around and watch other people fence on Sunday. Wooooo.

I started the idfic summer planning to write a lot of short and silly BDSM porn. Instead I've just written 8k of mostly-gen fencing fic. I feel like I could have predicted this outcome.

Anyway, it's about one third silly roadtrip stuff, one third intense fencing, and one third Villard and Suba angst. Apparently this is what my id wants - hopefully it's readable. (This fulfills the roadtrip and fencing AU squares on my idfic bingo, even though it's not an AU. There's a lot of fencing.)

Change of Engagement
By the Sword
Rating: pg
(canoodling, swearing)
Characters/ships: Max Suba/Rachel, Alexander Villard, Danny Gallagher, Erin Clavelli, Jim Trebor, Johnson, Tanos, Hobbs, and Tatiana. (A note on minor characters if you need to remind yourself who they are.)
Wordcount: 8200ish words
Summary: A year after their big confrontation, Suba and Villard run into each other at the same competition. It doesn't go that well.
A/N: There's a lot of fencing stuff in here - while I've tried to make it accessible to the non-fencer, I've also put together a few notes on some of the more obscure points, which you can find here.
Also, this fic comes with a soundtrack, because idk what I'm doing with my life. You can get it here.

( fic and notes under the cut )

Have people gotten tired of daily posts yet? Spring break is about half over, soon I will go back to posting once a month or so, don't worry.

Two pieces of news: I've just read all of Zen Cho's work that's available online and it's wow, incredible. Prudence and the Dragon is my big rec, but I love it all.

Also Congress just decided to eliminate NSF funding for political science unless the NSF head provides written testimony that a given project is vital to national security, ahahaha I'm so screwed. Everyone is going to get crunched for funding all of a sudden, and I have no idea what will happen with a travel fellowship I applied for last month.

So that's awesome.

The rest of this post is also kind of negative, I am going to talk about fencing. Tomorrow I will post fic, I think! Something to look forward to.

( cut for negativity and swearing, basically I just typed about my fencing problems for a while and now I'm going to hit post without looking at it )

ANYWAY, word dump over. I'm going to go work on my uncoventionalcourtship fic some more (5k and counting, I'm pretty sure it's going to be twice that). If anyone wants to ask me questions about fencing/life/just questions in general to distract me HAVE AT IT, otherwise thanks for being an f-list, you are very good at f-listing :)

Early birthday present to me: while on a grocery run today, my car engine turned off about a quarter mile from home and refused to restart (in the middle of a snowstorm, while I was in the far lane of a three-lane highway entrance with no shoulder). I was halfway through talking to AAA when a guy pulled over and offered to tow me - he got me back to my building and we pushed my car into a parking space.

He also put up with my nervous confusion, refused to take any money from me, and drove off with "Be nice to Arab people!" I feel like I should write in to Reader's Digest/similar.

Aaaanyway, I am Not Thrilled. I'll probably have to try and take it into a shop later in the week (I have solid class days tomorrow and Tuesday, can't reschedule or do anything). This past week has been inexplicably and kind of absurdly terrible in terms of not-actually-disastrous-but-still-terrible-happenings, so I'm just hoping next week is better.

Good news, though - the fencing meet went well, I was 9th out of pools, got a bye for the round of 32, then fenced my coach for the 16, won (after being down 11-14 and then making four touches in a row to get 15), then lost in the 8, bah. The guy I fenced was REALLY GREAT, it was just astonishing. My coach was kind of mad (in a kidding way, sabre's not even his weapon), but he signed up for all three weapons and then delayed sabre for about an hour while he was busy WINNING FOIL, so I have no sympathy for him.

Oh, and the guy I lost to managed to actually cut under my mask while we were fencing, nobody has any idea how. No permanent damage, but I got a red scrape along my throat that I'm hoping lasts until tomorrow so I can freak out my friends who I keep telling that fencing is TOTALLY SAFE, you know.

Drove over 1000 miles Saturday and Sunday, and made it back to grad school land. It's -20 windchill out there. I can't really say I'm pleased, but everything's unpacked and I am become human again instead of a driving machine, so that's awesome.

Tomorrow is my first (only) class of the week! And tomorrow evening I'm directing sabre at a highschool competition, for which service I will be given Money. So my outlook on life is pretty great :)

ALSO, on the drive I was listening to the Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell audiobook, which is rad. I guess some people complained about how the footnotes interrupt the story, but I'm not sure how they could have gotten around it. Skipping the footnotes could have gutted some of the chapters, and I didn't find them that distracting. But I have also read the book twice? three times? so it's probably easier for me. I do wish they had gotten a woman to do the reading though, since I've always felt that the strong (and female) authorial narration was great in Strange and Norrell. But audiobooks always seem to be read by dudes, for some reason. I love the guy who's doing the audiobook now, his voices are excellent, but... dudes.

The main thing I am getting out of this relistening is that this book is ridic long. Which I knew, obviously, but I just drove 18 hours and I'm not even halfway through the audiobook. I will persevere! I love listening to audiobooks, because I'm way more active than when reading - I shout at the tape and laugh more and try to give the characters advice. My current favorite exclamations are "Poooor Mr. Norrell," "Strange, your life is so hard, I'm sure," and "CHILDERMASS."

Which brings me to the other main thing I am getting out of this relistening - I love Childermass. And Norrell. They're such terrible people. And I really really want to write Childermass/Norrell, that's probably going to happen soon.

Had a ridiculous week, stretching into two - last Wednesday I had two papers and two presentations due, and managed to get through it all on a minimum of sleep and a surprising amount of coherency. Then I drove to a fencing competition in Chicago with my team on Friday, found out that I needed to fence epee on the weekend because of logistics (not enough people for either a sabre or an epee team, so we consolidated to a two-person epee squad). Then spent Saturday AND Sunday alternately trying to learn epee and actually competing. I won some bouts! We actually beat another school's squad, despite automatically dropping three bouts for our missing person! It all went pretty well, in general (although I was in my usual terrible competition mindset). Then we all drove back Sunday night and got in at 4 am, and I had about five hours of sleep before class on Monday. Made it through in some sort of haze, finished up my reading and homework last night and today, and tomorrow I have two classes and then I drive out to Kansas for Thanksgiving.

RIDICULOUS.

But the competition was actually a lot of fun - two solid days of 12 hours of fencing, which was absurd, but fun. Women fenced in the morning, and then men fenced in the afternoon/evening while I tried to get through the literally 600 pages of reading I had this week. I had a lot of conversations about racial redistricting and intersectionality with bored fencers. And I do love my team - I've been incredibly lucky to have three different school teams that have all been really awesome, but this one has a wider range of people and ages (because it's a club team at a state school), and it also has the best college coach I've ever had, so that's great. I just wish there were more women so I could build a sabre team, but the president of the club and I talked a lot on the way there and back, and we're going to try hard to recruit in the next couple of semesters and make it happen. I'm optimistic.

I also have a bunch of videos of me trying to fence epee, which is bound to be weird-looking. I think I surprised a lot of the people I beat because my footwork was just so much faster than they're used to dealing with (and I'm very slow for a sabre, as the coach likes to tell me). I've now competed in every weapon. And I randomly ran into the woman who was my undergrad team's captain when I was a freshman - she's a law student and fencing epee for their team, and I actually ended up fencing her? If you told me when I was a freshman that I was going to go 3-5 against her in her weapon, I definitely wouldn't have believed it. I still don't believe it.

What a weird couple of weeks.

What have I been doing in the last tennish days? Work. All of the work. I am just keeping up with grad school and the ren faire, which I think means I'll be in a really comfortable place after this weekend, since the faire is closing. Right now is a huge pain, though - I think I'm going to have to miss a fencing practice this week, and probably some sleep too. Did I say that I started going to the club fencing here? It's fun, very chill, but with some good people. I'm still rusty from my summer doing nothing, but I'm getting more into it. Last week I fenced this guy and lost 0-5 doing dumb stuff, but I recognized that and asked him if we could fence again at the end of practice, and I won 5-0 by... not doing dumb stuff. So that's good! I worry about falling into a rut, especially when I'm tired so often.

But I do have time to do some fannish stuff! I did Yuletide nominations, with arts and sciences RPF (Kahneman and Tversky), By the Sword (obviously), and The Non-Adventures of Wonderella (because my noms needed more badass women). All approved, because I only pick fandoms that are totally out there/nonexistent.

I've stalled out a little on watching the Wire, due to lack of time, but I'm planning on picking it back up after the weekend. In the meantime, I'm reading Fullmetal Alchemist about 2-8 years late. Which is, wow, bringing back memories. Like, I hadn't read FMA before, but it was pretty much my first reading fandom way back when. I was so into Archer/Kimblee and Greed/Kimblee. Hanging out on Y!Gallery at 17, feeling guilty about hitting the 'over 18' button and compulsively searching out the Kimblee artists. He just showed up in the manga (at chapter, what, 50? Out of about 100?), and I squeaked a little.

( cut a little to preserve your flist. Basically, I have developed a theory of my own fannish attachments. )

I'm actively really upset about what happened to Shin A-Lam during the Women's Epee Semi-Finals. I'm two days behind on watching fencing events, but I skipped ahead for her when I heard about the controversy (short version: she lost a critical bout because of a time-keeping error). It's tripping every 'bad director, bad call' instinct I've developed over four years of disagreeing with the ref, and aagh. I feel so bad for her.

I'm incoherent, but this is a good tumblr post. After being really mad at the Christian Science Monitor and a couple other news outlets, it was a good surprise to see that the Shin A-Lam tag on tumblr was full of support for her.

I'm done with finals! All I have to do is submit my (edited and finished) thesis to the library archive, and then that's everything. No more undergraduate career. It all went pretty well, I think, but it was a ridic amount of stuff to get through. I was writing my final final paper on Thursday, took a break to help friends move their stuff, spent five and a half hours moving their stuff, went back and finished drafting that paper at 11 pm, hung out with a friend at a graveyard as a break, went back and finished the second draft at 3 am. Then I got up Friday morning, edited, gave the paper to a friend to check, finished the paper, and hung out with a bunch of my senior friends. And then made cookies. And then went to a friend's voice recital. And then the last fencing party was at my house (it was awesome, very chill), and then another friend came and kept me up talking about her feelings and her sadness about leaving the US to study at oxford, and I didn't go to bed until 4 am. Same friend kept me up last night too, I think she's part of a conspiracy to make me exhausted.

/tl;dr, point is, this is ridiculous. And the rest of the week is going to be more of the same. And the rear-view mirror in my car came unglued, so I need to fix that (and do all my other errands). But the summer is coming, and I am only working weekends so I am going to CATCH UP, I have so many fics in my to-read list, I have so many books I've been waiting to check out, there are new episodes of Community, I have SO MANY wips, oh man.

But it's sad to be graduating, and to face losing touch with all of my friends, because I'm great at making acquaintances and even really close friends, but I am shit at keeping in touch. And I know grad school is going to be way smaller and way less friendly than this, because everything is going to be smaller and less friendly than this.

Okay. To close, a series of texts from the Friday night fencing party:

Mailin, having stolen my phone and sending texts to all of my recent contacts: Hihihnihnihninh
My friend Christian: Hihihi... drinking a little?
Me, having regained my phone: Meilin commandeered my phone
C: So is that a yes or no?
Me: Yes but not that much
C: Ah I see...and what would Meilin like to say?
Me, returning the phone despite my better judgment: Here she comes
Mailin: Its mailin
M: Hi
M: Would you like a aosnnetg
M: Sonn et
C: Yes.
M: Let me not to the marriage biof true minds admit impedients love is not love love which alters when it m
M: Alteration fi nfds
-Mailin gives up in disgust at her inability to manipulate my keyboard-
Me: She tried
C: How sweet...perhaps you should drink a bit more so you can be at her level
Me: Haha, I don't think I could get there

Man, I'm going to miss these people so much. I still get fucking flashbacks to Germany, and I was there for a semester, how long am I going to get flashbacks to Boston?

This has been a maudlin post. I'm going to get started on my to-do list and stop thinking about this for a bit.

A fanvid for By the Sword. Actually, a reenactment of By the Sword's final scene. Basically, I wrote down all of the choreography and lines from the duel, my friend brought her foils, and friend no. 2 brought her camera. It took me a while to edit it all together, but it's done! More or less. We didn't have any crowds to use for cuts, so I used clips of BtS' infamous dream sequences instead.

(Compare with the original scene here.)

So... yeah. I care about By the Sword a lot, you guys, I can't even. Also, I am sorry about how ridiculous and awkward this is, but I'm also not sorry because I secretly think it's awesome, haha.

I've been super quiet lately just because of busyness - last month of the semester means my thesis and all my other final projects coming due, agh. I did have a pair of really good college visits last week! Both of the programs I got into are really good, but I can only afford to do the one that is offering me an actually livable stipend. So I'm going to be moving to Minnesota this fall. Weird.

But the real point of this post is that one of my friends just got me a late birthday present, and it is AMAZING:

( image and stuff about by the sword under the cut )

Um, what else. I'm plugging away at my remix, so I'll probably start hunting for a beta within the next couple days. But in general, yeah - my life is 90.4% school right now, so I'm sorry I'm not around as much atm. I am excited for this summer, when I'll have time to hang around and read/write fanfic and actually leave comments, gosh.

Last fencing meet of the season is over. Also my knuckles are cut and bruised from punching the wall.

But no more practices at 7:30 every morning. I get to sleep in past 6:45.

I'm going to go take a shower. And then eventually I will finish any of the three projects I'm working on, and there will be something to post here besides fencing angst, haha.

So, I haven't really posted about how the fencing season's been since... the first competition of last semester! Time to fix that.

(Man, that cut link looks dire compared to my usual FENCING FENCING FENCING thing. Oh well, it's accurate.)

( This is cut for some negativity, swearing, and brief and relatively mild mention of self harm. )

(For those who have just joined us, By the Sword is the movie with Eric Roberts and F. Murray Abraham where they are fencers.)

I have watched this movie now. It's.

I just.

I can't deal.

( no spoilers, just OPINIONS )

I need to shaaaare my confusion/misery/glee. Luckily I am in the last stages of working out why the DVD hates my computer, so hopefully something will happen soon.

So I finished finals on the 21st, drove home on the 22nd, and then have been asleep and/or writing for most of the last three days. Good times, man, good times.

For Yuletide I got a fic about Carnivale! It is basically the best, seriously. From the Dirt is about Jonesy and working at a carnival and what he sees there. There's a bit of Jonesy backstory (hooray!), and a lot about how he sees other people - both the marks and the people he works with. If you know anything about Carnivale I would definitely go and read it. If you don't know anything about Carnivale but you're interested in carnivals and migrant entertainment I would go read it anyway? Because, speaking as someone from that community, the fic is super interesting and accurate.

Also I was really glad to get Carnivale fic that was written for me, because I can't really go dipping through the archives for more. Carnivale as a show has a lot of things that I can't deal with well (body horror, things being alive that aren't, abuse, general horror tropes), and I get nervous about whether people will try to warn and whether they'll be warning for the things I'm worried about. I need to find someone who is sort of 'in' the fandom so I can ask them for recs, haha.

I also have three fics in the main Yuletide collection and eight in Madness, so I'm sort of waiting around for recipients to notice and tell me if it's awful. But the person I was actually assigned to seems really happy, so I am calling this a win. Yes. I won Yuletide.

Also! Christmas was good and there was lots of food, and I got--
( cut for an image and resulting babbling )

Okay! My brother and I are heading out to see the new Sherlock Holmes movie, and then I'm planning on starting edits on the Shalka script and maybe trying to actually unpack. Or I could just lie around and read the rest of this Dresden Files novel.

This week is pretty bleah, and I think it's going to be like that for the foreseeable future. I'm sort of incapable of seeing beyond all these applications and exams, anyway. Also, Yuletide. I'm getting that done, absolutely.

( cut for negativity )

I don't usually post about this kind of stuff, sorry. I think I just needed to type, it's very calming.

The Big One went pretty okay! I ended up winning all but one of my pool bouts, which is pretty good. The girl I lost to was really good - her brother goes to my school, so we chatted a bit. Then I got a by through the first round of eliminations, won in the second round, and then lost to that same girl I lost to in the pools. Bleah. But I did better against her the second time, and I'm still in the top 32, so I'm good. Then I got to watch a ton of fencing, take blurry photos, and be exhausted. I ran into a bunch of people I know (mostly directors, haha, all of my friends are old, apparently), and had to explain my knee brace to everyone. My knickers broke at the zipper and had to be taped together. Fencing!

This is my last year for varsity fencing, which means that was my last Big One. End of an era. Looking at last year's post, I placed about the same, but I do think I got better. I've got the whole rest of the season in front of me, and I'm clinging like hell to my starting place. I think this could be a good year.

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neveralarch

June 2025

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Entries tagged with fencing

quick update

something you may be interested in

here is a post about fencing

I am in Chicago

Fic: Change of Engagement

aha haha ha...

the ongoing saga of everything breaking

Back in the Twin Cities

Life: fencing and so on

update and Fullmetal Alchemist

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Life: finishing up

I made a fanvid

updates

Life: can't decide if this is more constructive than usual

Life: fencing update

By the Sword update!

Yuletide! And other things.

Life: being a being