recs and links

HILARITY

Aziraphale sells a book (shock! horror!), but Crowley makes sure it doesn't happen again. Adorable.

Beautiful, sad story of Mary and Dean during his first three years, the things she teaches him, and the things she doesn't. Heartbreaking.

Wonderful story of John with wings, and the Winchesters staying with Bobby until they go away. Funny and sweet and a little heartbreaking.

Dean finds out Sam's keeping some secrets of his own, and it just might break him. Heartwrenching. It’s your fault. You were the one who was supposed to stop this from happening. You. No one was doing your job while you were gone. There’s no steno pool for big brothers of the potential Anti-Christ. So it all comes back around to you. You want to feel betrayed, angry. Instead, you just feel like you let him down again. Where did you go wrong? The potential points in time and space form constellations.

Dean needs to understand the big picture, needs to understand how Castiel lost six brothers this week and the war is still raging. Lovely look inside Castiel's head through the first three episodes.

Read insights and observations about how to become happier and change your habits. Gretchen Rubin shares ideas from her own Happiness Project.

Move the tag chain to the left and left-align it, and move all the various things that end up in the "meta" div to the right. What the meta div holds depends on the page you're viewing

Supporting Obama, the rock legend takes a swing-state tour, once again.

Azazel never believed Dean would be the one to kill him. Really cool YED pov, spun out from the conversation he has with Dean in "In the Beginning."

She deals with the bare facts that are left when you strip away everything else. Booth deals in the everything else, not just flesh and skin and sinew, but the messy reality of thought and motive. Brennan understands the differences between her and Booth. Beautiful.

yes. this. (though I like shuffle a lot more than he does)

Lovely series of snapshots showing how Max's feelings towards Alec change and grow.

Ficlet that deals perfectly with one aspect of 4.03, and also with how Dean ends up with John's leather jacket. Oh, Winchesters...

Dean loses his voice, and Sam discovers things about him he never knew. Full of lovely brotherly interaction and a sweet, visceral first time. (wincest)

“Dad told me once that I might have to kill Sam. You should know here and now that I never will. Not even if your God commands it.” Short,, sharp look at Dean post-4.02

AU in which Dean is a replicant an Imitant. I have really mixed feelings about the premise, because reducing Dean's love for Sam to programming makes me unhappy, but this story is heartbreaking and well done, with John not really warming to the young robot commissioned to watch after Sam, and Sam being aware and yet unaware of how he takes advantage of the situation, and Dean, after all of it, still being Dean.

Short but beautiful glimpse at Castiel just before and after that last scene in AYTGIMDW.

Oh, Neville. Lovely look at him after the war.

Engrossing story featuring a casefile set in season 3, and an intersecting story from when the boys were teenagers. Nice tension between the boys as the clock is ticking, and nice parallel between them and the people they're helping.

The movie theatre in a small town is being haunted. Sam and Dean work the case, or, really, the case works them. Smart, funny, full of prickly season 1 boys trying to find their rhythm together, with a really fun use of movies to propel the story forward.

Pepper meets Christine Everhart at a poetry reading, and despite the awkwardness, they bond over literature and job stress. Really well done.

Absolutely heartbreaking story of Dean finding an old notebook of Mary's in John's storage locker, detailing the first few months of his life. Beautifully evocative and the ending is a real punch in the gut. Have tissues handy.

He tries not to think too hard about the ways Sam's changed since he last saw him, but it's difficult not to notice when it's everywhere: in the set of Sam's jaw and the hard glint in his eyes and the way he holds himself. He's still Sam, that much is clear, but it's been four months and Dean still has no real idea of how his little brother spent all that time. Lovely coda to 4.01, showing Sam and Dean trying to figure each other out again.

So, his mind is wandering and he glances down at their shadows for a second, stretched thin because of the dying light of the day. His shadow has a long sword in its right hand and Sam's shadow is holding a sickle. They're two dimensional and pulled out of true by the angle but Dean could almost swear that the two shadows are looking at each other. Spare, beautiful set of vignettes that form a lovely coda for 4.01.

Sam snorts. "My brother is dead and you brought me chick flicks and ice cream. You know I'm not a girl, right?" / "You could have fooled me," she says, putting in the DVD. "I'm pretty sure your hair is long enough to braid now." / "It is not," says Sam, but he looks kind of worried that it might be. It beats the hell out of his other expressions. Hee!

Dean, uncomfortable in his body post-4.01, and going through the motions of pretending to be himself. Lovely and sharp.

A Gram Conversion calculator for accurately converting recipe ingredients from metric grams to U.S. ounces, teaspoons, tablespoons, or cups for 7000 ingredients.

Post-ep for 4.01. Pam gets a visitor in the hospital. Nicely done.