The process of reading fan fiction at work

Funny thing, technology.

Archive Of Our Own (henceforth AO3) has the option to download stories as .mobi files which can be read on a Kindle. Usually I download them in the .pdf and read them on my laptop but the other day I decided to give the e-reader version a try.

So, there I say, reading a fan written story downloaded from the internet onto my laptop and transferred by USB cable to an e-reader. The odd additional step, qualifier and lack of financial transaction aside that's exactly the same process as any other book on my Kindle. The most astonishing aspect, for me, is how portable fan fiction becomes under these circumstances.

Up to now my own personal stash of fan fiction has been a series of increasingly labyrinthine folders on my laptop divided by series, ship or whatever other method occurred to me at the time, sometimes in open contradition of one another. To be honest, aside from a rather sizable folder of Weiss Schnee/Blake Belladonna stories (shut up, I like me some Love Across The Barricades enemies to lovers action, add in the high probability of Jacques Schnee getting slapped and I'm in) there isn't much sense of order there.

The important here, though, is that its all on my laptop in a format my Kindle makes impossible to read because of screen size and the laptop is actually rather unwieldy. Now, I can simply save these files as .mobis and transfer them to the Kindle at need.

And there's a practically unlimited supply, for free. Payment will be offered, of course, in the form of comments and praise. This process feels, from my rather ostentatiously luddite perspective, very much like magic and anyone who benefits from magic without paying the price is rightfully doomed.

Plus, if the format of the one I downloaded to test the system is any indication they include the archive warnings at the beginning of all the .pdfs so I won't find myself reading something unexpectedly explicit in public. 

The Warhammer Armies Project

I game with a pretty laid back group and I'm glad of that. There's been at least one occasion when an old rule we assumed to still exist turned out not to but it was too good to drop so we all came to a gentlemen's agreement to let it stand (for the sake of clarity, the rule was the one allowing Bretonnian Damels to sit in the middle of a lance formation and use the unit's line of sight for casting).

So having discovered Mathias Eliasson's Warhammer Armies Project I'm relatively confident I could make use of one of his fan-made army lists with the minimum fuss. He's so far written Army Books for Albion, Amazons, Araby, a Bretonnia update and expansion, Cathay, Chaos Dwarfs, the Cult of Ulric, Dogs of War, Estalia, Halflings, Hobgoblins, the Kingdoms of Ind, Kislev, Nippon, the Norse and the Pirates of Sartosa. All available for free as PDFs at the link above.

And I am amazed by the production values on these things, they more than match the official publications. I haven't read all of them but I went straight to the Cathay book. There was a time when the original Ogre Kingdoms book came out and it had so many references to the Chaos Dwarfs and Cathay that we all assumed there was going to be a push east and we'd see new armies springing up to represent places and peoples missing from the game since second edition.

It never happened and I've always wanted the option of a Cathay army or an Araby army like the one in Warmaster (because elephant cavalry!).

Anyway, I checked out the Cathay book and it seems pretty well-balanced. Just about every unit has obvious strengths balanced by significant actual weaknesses. Elite units have low armour, horde units have low weapon skill and so on. Pretty standard but I've seen some horrendously unbalanced fan lists in my day.

I want to build a Gong. You can have a Gong in this army and its useful. It acts as a sort of super-musician to the units around it.

It would be a ton of conversion work but, to be honest, I think the bodies of most units could be easily made using various elf kits since a lot of those models use Asian influences. Low armour units could easily be represented by strapping the right weapons to High Elves Archers, high armour units by High Elves Spearmen and Wood Elves Eternal Guard.

I just have to somehow source or create appropriate some Han-style heads and work out a kitbash for Cathayan longswords since all existing human greatswords are very chunkily German.

I'm trying to concentrate on the Lizardmen and the Orks but this is damned attractive and it'd consciously be a very slow build. Damn it, I'm convincing myself. Oh well.