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Master Fic Post

Master post of fic and some Mass Effect meta from the Way Back Times of Headcanon Wednesday. I’ve starred what I think is the best of the best. Hope you enjoy!

Sam Shepard Meta Tag | The Yang Gang Meta Tag | World building & biotic headcanons | LE Screenshots | Opus Fanart

Sam Shepard/Kaidan Alenko

Cantata – set pre-ME1. Long fic, complete

Concerto – Virmire. Novella, complete

*Sonata – set post ME1, pre-ME2. Long fic, complete.

Fugue – set post Alchera, pre-ME2. Long fic, complete.

Mezzo – set during ME2. Long fic, in progress.

Sam/Kaidan one shots & ficlets

Sam/Kaidan AU First Kisses

Sam/Kaidan kiss prompts

Campfire | Snow/Life or Death | *In the shower/sad | Missing the other in the snow | *Longing for someone in the street | kisses meant to distract the other person from whatever they were intently doing | *routine kisses where the other person presents their cheek/forehead for the hello/goodbye kiss without even looking up from what they’re doing |starting with a kiss meant to be gentle, ending up in passion |

Sam/Kaidan, wordless ways to say “I love you” prompts

Folding their clean laundry and putting it away | Letting them warm their cold hands under your shirt | Staying up half the night to finish a game | *Holding their hand while they’re shaking | Sharing a soft smile across a crowded room | *Getting them a coffee just the way they like it | Mending an item of their clothing that was ripped |

Sam/Kaidan Winter Prompts

* Hot Chocolate | Caught in a Snowstorm | Sledding | Drunk Snowman | Santa Baby

Ensemble Fics

*Exordium – ME 1 novelization, mshiara. Complete.

*Noel | Wishes

mShenko

Reflex |*Celestial Navigation (Explicit) | Better Angels (incomplete) Part 1 – Part 2 – Part 3 | Holy Night | *Plans

mShenko drabbles/prompts

Shenko

mShiara

Ashley & Kaidan

Coffee | Reparations | Instead | Are You Fucking Kidding Me | The Sangria Problem (background mshenko (Sam Shepard)

Gen/Friendship/Shepard Backstory

Miscellaneous

Headcanons

#fic master post #wow there was more then i remembered when i started going through my fic tag #it was a pleasure to rediscover a few of these

swaps55

Reblogged the-hwaelweg

i-will-write

Alright, I'm gonna put y'all on the spot

i-will-write

Not the results I was expecting lol, let's try to narrow it down a bit more

awhimsicalwhirlwind

whoever is saying more than 50 you deserve so many gold medals but also how the fuck are you doing that are you okay

galadriel1010

We're old. 200 feels like a rookie number when I've been writing over 20 fucking years.

#One shots do exist!#Only one of my posted fics is unfinished #And it's eating me up inside

swaps55

From illlumxnated

hi there swaps :) i’ve been a longtime lurker and occasional anon in your askbox. first of all, i am so sorry about the cancer diagnosis. getting medical news like that is never easy, and i am wishing you well through this difficult time.

speaking of difficult times, opus has helped me through one. around the time i was playing mass effect for the first time, one of my good friends passed away. i think i mentioned this in a previous anon ask, but your depiction of grief—feeling it, accepting it, and moving forward—helped me process my own grief. i really can’t thank you enough for all the entertainment and FEELS you’ve put into the world with your work, but i hope a small gift will suffice <3

in my last semester of college, i took a class on digital art in blender. for our final project, we were instructed to create an animation that showcases the character and depth of a world/location/space in some way, whether it be fictional or real. a living space, growing and developing alongside the beings that inhabit it. and i knew that the space I wanted to show was the ssv myeongnyang, 2178-2182. cantata is absolutely the fic in opus i go back to the most, so i wanted to show how that ship could be a living space. one thing i loved about cantata was that the yang grew along with the gang—it was decorated with cross-stitches and poker cards and darts games and robots that chase you to steal your rank. i hope my depiction aligns with how you imagined the ship :)

i spent a lot of time on this, and I truly enjoyed every second of it. though, there are some things I wish I could have spent more time on (the character models! i would have loved to sculpt the yang gang, but i needed to graduate on time so i just used open source ones LOL). consider this a small repayment for the many hours you’ve spent giving us an amazing story to read!

anyways, i hope you know that a random stranger on the internet wishes you well, and cares enough about your work to spend a semester animating your fic haha. much love and stay strong!

I cannot put into words how astonished and touched and floored I was to get this in my inbox last night. I had my second surgery in 13 days yesterday (it went well!) and spent the day feeling a lot of things that weren’t exactly joyous.

And then I saw this.I could not even believe my eyes. What an incredible gift. What love YOU have so clearly put into it! Oseguera’s guitar. The capoiera! Stabby on the hunt! The cross stitch wall! The table in the mess, the darts. Oh my goodness.

This is even more special than you know - I am a terrible visual thinker. I don’t have a concept layout of the ‘Yang, because I just don’t think that way. I’m a terrible scene-setter by nature, and if this surprises you at all, you have my fabulous betas to thank, because over the years they have worked hard to get me to come up with a better answer to “where are these characters, Swaps?” than “I dunno, a room with stuff in it.” XD

So having someone visualize the ‘Yang is an absolutely incredible gift. What a work of love, and that it was based on something I made is truly mind blowing. The music combined with the changing scenes gives it that extra sense of nostalgia with just a hint of melancholy - we’re looking through the window of a happy time and place we can remember but not go back to. Which is exactly what Cantata is, to me. I wanted it to be the foundation that Sam could root himself in when things were at their most desperate - the lit candle in the dark. This just captured that in spades. The echoes of laughter in the background, the happy people living their lives untroubled by the reapers. What magic you have made with this!

I remember you telling me about your friend, and I am so glad that I could have helped in even the smallest way. You have done a tremendous thing for me in return, and I am giving you the BIGGEST hug. <3

#submission #mass effect #opus!verse #ssv myeongnyang #the yang gang #'shoot it again sam' shepard #cannot overstate how floored i am #i was just agape with tears in my eyes when i hit play #RLRO came down the stairs partway through and i rewound it and told him he HAD to see this #we were both amazed #thank you so much for sharing this with me

swaps55

Reblogged thisnewjoe

jacobwren

"But AI can't do your job. It can help you do your job, but that doesn't mean it's going to save anyone money. Take radiology: there's some evidence that AIs can sometimes identify solid-mass tumors that some radiologists miss, and look, I've got cancer. Thankfully, it's very treatable, but I've got an interest in radiology being as reliable and accurate as possible. If my Kaiser hospital bought some AI radiology tools and told its radiologists: "Hey folks, here's the deal. Today, you're processing about 100 x-rays per day. From now on, we're going to get an instantaneous second opinion from the AI, and if the AI thinks you've missed a tumor, we want you to go back and have another look, even if that means you're only processing 98 x-rays per day. That's fine, we just care about finding all those tumors." If that's what they said, I'd be delighted. But no one is investing hundreds of billions in AI companies because they think AI will make radiology more expensive, not even if that also makes radiology more accurate. The market's bet on AI is that an AI salesman will visit the CEO of Kaiser and make this pitch: "Look, you fire 9/10s of your radiologists, saving $20m/year, you give us $10m/year, and you net $10m/year, and the remaining radiologists' job will be to oversee the diagnoses the AI makes at superhuman speed, and somehow remain vigilant as they do so, despite the fact that the AI is usually right, except when it's catastrophically wrong. "And if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist's fault, because they are the 'human in the loop.' It's their signature on the diagnosis." This is a reverse centaur, and it's a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it's what Dan Davies calls an "accountability sink." The radiologist's job isn't really to oversee the AI's work, it's to take the blame for the AI's mistakes. This is another key to understanding – and thus deflating – the AI bubble. The AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job. This is key because it helps us build the kinds of coalitions that will be successful in the fight against the AI bubble." - Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI

Source: pluralistic.net

#fuck ai #This article is well worth reading #Not just the except

swaps55

Reblogged pushingsian

pigeontheoneandonly

Celebrating little victories and posting what I did manage to write tonight:

“You should be less cavalier. You may not care now, but I guarantee—give it ten years, and you’re going to regret every one of these injuries.” She was very exhausted, and her mouth was running on autopilot, without any interference from her customary filters. “Yeah, I’m not going to be alive in ten years, so I’m not concerned.” And then Chakwas stopped her work and gave her that look, the one she saw whenever she let out a real thought. Quinn rubbed her forehead. “Fuck, it’s not like that. Just, statistically. The spectre thing is not going to improve those odds.” “Do you feel this way often?” She groaned. “Can you just fix my shoulder? Please?” “You aren’t mistaken that you involve yourself in undertakings that carry exceptional risk.” She was conversational, but she was also slow-walking her continued debridement. Quinn had been through this enough to be sure. “But that sort of cavalier attitude towards your own wellbeing does nothing to reduce risk.” That was where everyone went wrong. The more she cared about something, the more likely it was to fall apart, or die, or get taken away. The inverse relationship had been proven out many times. It was practically a law of nature, or at least, a law of her nature. Not giving a shit—that was the key to survival. Saying that out loud was not going to get that look off Chakwas’ face. It never did. “Look, I always pass my psych evals when I recertify in Rio.” It was a weak shot, but the only one in her chamber.

#fic rec #ooooh

swaps55

Fandom is such a fascinating place because even in small fandoms we all exist within our own microclimates. The weather in one is dramatically different from the weather in another, and you may have no inkling that each other even exists, by accident or careful, curated design.

Which is what can make posts like, 'I'm so surprised no one talks about X' so funny, because chances are extremely high many someones have been very passionately yelling and creating and developing painstaking headcanons about exactly said thing no one supposedly talks about. They're just over there in a different biome.

#fandom #I saw a post that was very funny to me #Declaring exactly one of these 'no one ever talks about ideas'#About something I and several others in my microclimate #Have explored rather extensively

swaps55

Reblogged forlornmelody

pigeontheoneandonly

Weekly Shepard Poll

Every week I ask a basic question about your Shepard, vote and elaborate in the tags!

#'shoot it again sam' shepard #Despises weather

swaps55

Reblogged

inadvertently-biblical

RIDE OR DIE - 1.03

#ride or die #queue continuum

swaps55

So, last week I got a cancer diagnosis.

I had surgery a couple of weeks ago to remove a suspicious mass out of what we thought was an abundance of caution, and it turned out that caution was well warranted.

The good news: We have caught it early, and it should be very manageable.

The bad news: Well, cancer is never good news.

I'm having another surgery next week (yay.) to remove more tissue before we determine next steps for treatment, but I think it's safe to say I will have a few things to juggle in the coming months.

This wasn't totally unexpected. I'm extremely high risk for this type of cancer, which is why we've been monitoring for it so closely and why we caught it in its early stages. I feel fine right now outside of the usual burnout and despair brought on by late stage capitalism and the doom of living in the darkest and dumbest timeline.

Basically, this is now a Thing I have to deal with. Which I will with the help of my incredible Real Life Romance Option and my amazing, phenomenal support network of friends. It sucks, but I've been through It Sucks before.

If you've got some spare good vibes to throw my way, I will take them! In the meantime, I intend to continue bothering everyone with Sam and Kaidan and my obsession with geysers and national parks.

#adventures with swaps