Babylon 5 2x07 "Soul Mates"
Jan. 15th, 2026 10:19 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sholioI rewatched this one tonight, mostly for the Timov of it all, but also ...
( Spoilers for the episode )
( Spoilers for the episode )
sholio
I left my mind behind in 2015
Jan. 15th, 2026 10:14 pmsovayToday was the yahrzeit of the molasses flood. I was last at Langone Park for the centenary, since which time the field has been renovated and a new marker erected in memory of the disaster and its dead. Seven years ago feels nearly a century itself.
Speaking of man-made needless awfulness, I have been made aware of the locally vetted aggregate of Stand with Minnesota, a directory of mutual aid, fundraisers, and on-the-ground support against the onslaught of ICE. All could use donations, since internet hugs are of limited efficacy against tear gas, batons, bullets to the face and legs. Twenty-three years ago feels like several worldlines back, but the Department of Homeland Security sounded absurdly, arrogantly dystopian then.
The fourth and last of this week's doctors' appointments concluded with an inhaler and instructions to sleep as much as possible. My ability to watch movies remains on some kind of mental fritz which upsets me, but I liked running across these poems.
Speaking of man-made needless awfulness, I have been made aware of the locally vetted aggregate of Stand with Minnesota, a directory of mutual aid, fundraisers, and on-the-ground support against the onslaught of ICE. All could use donations, since internet hugs are of limited efficacy against tear gas, batons, bullets to the face and legs. Twenty-three years ago feels like several worldlines back, but the Department of Homeland Security sounded absurdly, arrogantly dystopian then.
The fourth and last of this week's doctors' appointments concluded with an inhaler and instructions to sleep as much as possible. My ability to watch movies remains on some kind of mental fritz which upsets me, but I liked running across these poems.
Krampus, by Brom
Jan. 15th, 2026 09:55 amrachelmanija
Brom was a fantasy illustrator before he started writing his own books. They all contain spectacular color plates as well as black and white illustrations, which add a lot to the story.
Krampus opens with a prologue of the imprisoned Krampus vowing revenge on Santa Claus, then cuts to Santa Claus being chased through a trailer park by horned goblins, one of whom falls to his death when Santa escapes on his sleigh drawn by flying reindeer.
But he left his sack behind, which is promptly picked up Jesse, who just moments previously was considering suicide because he's basically a character from a country song: he's broke; his wife left him, taking their kid with her, and she's now with the town sheriff; Jesse never had the music career he wanted because of poor self-esteem and stage fright, AND he's being forced to do dangerous drug smuggling by the crime lord who runs the town with help from the sheriff. Santa's sack will provide any toy you want, but only toys; Jesse, not the sharpest knife in the drawer, uses it get his daughter every toy she's ever wanted, so now his wife thinks he stole them and the corrupt sheriff is on his ass again. And so are Krampus's band of Bellsnickles, who also want the sack because it's the key to freeing Krampus...
This book is absolutely nuts. The tone isn't as absurd as the summary might make it sound; it is often pretty funny, but it's more of a mythic fantasy meets gritty crime drama, sort of like Charles de Lint was writing in the 80s. Absolutely the best part is when Krampus finally gets to be Krampus in the modern day, spreading Yule tidings, terrorizing suburban adults, and terrifying but also delighting suburban children.
wednesday books has edwardian girl musicians with unconventional upbringings
Jan. 14th, 2026 09:14 pmlandofnowhereThe Devourers, Annie Vivanti Chartres. I've been getting into the archives of Emily E Hogstad's blog The Song of the Lark recently, which has some really good deep dives into forgotten woman in music -- after reading The Devourer and the Devoured about child prodigy Vivian Chartres and her mother, ex-prodigy poet Annie Vivanti, who wrote this semi-autobiographical novel about a poet mother of a violin prodigy: as Hogstad says, "One gets the impression that three-quarters of the novel is, in fact, a memoir. But which three-quarters? ". The writing in this novel is really good, and I generally enjoyed the panoramic family saga aspects, but ultimately the worldview and the thesis that geniuses destroy everyone around them is just too depressing. Also the novel has an interesting combination of realism in its setting (which spans Europe and New York) and a plot which defies the laws of probability. Some racism, including a few uses of the n-word (though no characters on color are portrayed) lots of not-very-examined classism, and the Italian characters lean into unflattering stereotypes sometimes. I have mixed feelings about this novel but unreservedly recommend the essay I linked above, which has some of the better quotes quotes.
Rooftoppers, Katherine Rundell. Read because ofskygiants' review which sums it up pretty well. I too would have adored this book at age 10! This pairs interestingly with The Devourers in terms of setting and theme, but ultimately it's not trying to do serious social commentary, it's trying to have an adventure with fun hijinks.
Rooftoppers, Katherine Rundell. Read because of
skygiants' review which sums it up pretty well. I too would have adored this book at age 10! This pairs interestingly with The Devourers in terms of setting and theme, but ultimately it's not trying to do serious social commentary, it's trying to have an adventure with fun hijinks.Reading Wednesday
Jan. 14th, 2026 09:58 pmtroisoiseauxIn War and Peace, Count Bezukhov has died, leaving - after some deathbed wrangling over multiple wills by grasping relatives - his illegitimate and bewildered son Pierre a wealthy noble, which surely will cause no one any problems. Interesting, in terms of narrative structure and the famous first line of another Tolstoy novel, that this is followed by an immediate smash cut to a different unhappy family, the Bolkonskys.
Poking along in Damon Runyon's Guys and Dolls and Other Writings; the "other writings" in this collection apparently include his 1920s-30s trial reporting, but I'm still on his 1930s-40s comedic gangster stories, which so far have universally ended with an impromptu marriage, except for the one that ended with the doll seducing and drowning the gangsters who killed her husband. I'm not sure that Runyon supports women's rights but he does support women's wrongs.
Also started another short story collection, China Miéville's Three Moments of an Explosion; I'm two stories in, both of which have had the feel (which I'm really liking so far!) of picking up a concept— a future where brand logos can be coded into "the mottle and decay of subtly gene-tweaked decomposition" (or detonation, per the titular flash fiction), or long-melted icebergs return to float over London while coral blooms across Brussels— and turning it around to see the way light reflects off of its different facets, and only just long enough to see each different flash of light.
Poking along in Damon Runyon's Guys and Dolls and Other Writings; the "other writings" in this collection apparently include his 1920s-30s trial reporting, but I'm still on his 1930s-40s comedic gangster stories, which so far have universally ended with an impromptu marriage, except for the one that ended with the doll seducing and drowning the gangsters who killed her husband. I'm not sure that Runyon supports women's rights but he does support women's wrongs.
Also started another short story collection, China Miéville's Three Moments of an Explosion; I'm two stories in, both of which have had the feel (which I'm really liking so far!) of picking up a concept— a future where brand logos can be coded into "the mottle and decay of subtly gene-tweaked decomposition" (or detonation, per the titular flash fiction), or long-melted icebergs return to float over London while coral blooms across Brussels— and turning it around to see the way light reflects off of its different facets, and only just long enough to see each different flash of light.
(no subject)
Jan. 14th, 2026 08:28 pmskygiantsOn the first weekend of January genarti and I went along with some friends to the Moby-Dick marathon at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, which was such an unexpectedly fun experience that we're already talking about maybe doing it again next year.
The way the marathon works is that people sign up in advance to read three-minute sections of the book and the whole thing keeps rolling along for about twenty-five hours, give or take. You don't know in advance what the section will be, because it depends how fast the people before you have been reading, so good luck to you if it contains a lot of highly specific terminology - you take what you get and you go until one of the organizers says 'thank you!' and then it's the next person's turn. If it seems like they're getting through the book too fast they'll sub in a foreign language reader to do a chapter in German or Spanish. We did not get in on the thing fast enough to be proper readers but we all signed up to be substitute readers, which is someone who can be called on if the proper reader misses their timing and isn't there for their section, and I got very fortunate on the timing and was in fact subbed in to read the forging of Ahab's harpoon! (genarti ALMOST got even luckier and was right on the verge of getting to read the Rachel, but then the proper reader turned up at the last moment and she missed it by a hair.)
There are also a few special readings. Father Mapple's sermon is read out in the New Bedford church that has since been outfitted with a ship-pulpit to match the book's description (with everyone given a song-sheet to join in chorus on "The Ribs and Terrors Of the Whale") and the closing reader was a professional actor who, we learned afterwards, had just fallen in love with Moby-Dick this past year and emailed the festival with great enthusiasm to participate. The opening chapters are read out in the room where the Whaling Museum has a half-size whaling ship, and you can hang out and listen on the ship, and I do kind of wish they'd done the whole thing there but I suppose I understand why they want to give people 'actual chairs' in which to 'sit normally'.
Some people do stay for the whole 25 hours; there's food for purchase in the museum (plus a free chowder at night and free pastries in the morning While Supplies Last) and the marathon is being broadcast throughout the whole place, so you really could just stay in the museum the entire time without leaving if you wanted. We were not so stalwart; we wanted good food and sleep not on the floor of a museum, and got both. The marathon is broken up into four-hour watches, and you get a little passport and a stamp for every one of the four-hour watches you're there for, so we told ourselves we would stay until just past midnight to get the 12-4 AM stamp and then sneak back before 8 AM to get the 4-8 AM stamp before the watch ticked over. When midnight came around I was very much falling asleep in my seat, and got ready to nudge everyone to leave, but then we all realized that the next chapter was ISHMAEL DESCRIBES BAD WHALE ART and we couldn't leave until he had in fact described all the bad whale art!
I'm not even the world's biggest Moby-Dick-head; I like the book but I've only actually read it the once. I had my knitting (I got a GREAT deal done on my knitting), and I loved getting to read a section, and I enjoyed all the different amateur readers, some rather bad and some very good. But what I enjoyed most of all was the experience of being surrounded by a thousand other people, each with their own obviously well-loved copy of Moby-Dick, each a different edition of Moby-Dick -- I've certainly never seen so many editions of Moby-Dick in one place -- rapturously following along. (In top-tier outfits, too. Forget Harajuku; if you want street fashion, the Moby-Dick marathon is the place to be. So many hand-knit Moby Dick-themed woolen garments!) It's a kind of communal high, like a convention or a concert -- and I like concerts, but my heart is with books, and it's hard to get of communal high off a book. Inherently a sort of solitary experience. But the Moby-Dick marathon managed it, and there is something really very spectacular in that.
Anyway, as much as we all like Moby-Dick, at some point on the road trip trip, we started talking about what book we personally would want to marathon read with Three Thousand People in a Relevant Location if we had the authority to command such a thing, and I'm pitching the question outward. My own choice was White's Once And Future King read in a ruined castle -- I suspect would not have the pull of Moby-Dick in these days but you never know!
genarti and I went along with some friends to the Moby-Dick marathon at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, which was such an unexpectedly fun experience that we're already talking about maybe doing it again next year.The way the marathon works is that people sign up in advance to read three-minute sections of the book and the whole thing keeps rolling along for about twenty-five hours, give or take. You don't know in advance what the section will be, because it depends how fast the people before you have been reading, so good luck to you if it contains a lot of highly specific terminology - you take what you get and you go until one of the organizers says 'thank you!' and then it's the next person's turn. If it seems like they're getting through the book too fast they'll sub in a foreign language reader to do a chapter in German or Spanish. We did not get in on the thing fast enough to be proper readers but we all signed up to be substitute readers, which is someone who can be called on if the proper reader misses their timing and isn't there for their section, and I got very fortunate on the timing and was in fact subbed in to read the forging of Ahab's harpoon! (
genarti ALMOST got even luckier and was right on the verge of getting to read the Rachel, but then the proper reader turned up at the last moment and she missed it by a hair.) There are also a few special readings. Father Mapple's sermon is read out in the New Bedford church that has since been outfitted with a ship-pulpit to match the book's description (with everyone given a song-sheet to join in chorus on "The Ribs and Terrors Of the Whale") and the closing reader was a professional actor who, we learned afterwards, had just fallen in love with Moby-Dick this past year and emailed the festival with great enthusiasm to participate. The opening chapters are read out in the room where the Whaling Museum has a half-size whaling ship, and you can hang out and listen on the ship, and I do kind of wish they'd done the whole thing there but I suppose I understand why they want to give people 'actual chairs' in which to 'sit normally'.
Some people do stay for the whole 25 hours; there's food for purchase in the museum (plus a free chowder at night and free pastries in the morning While Supplies Last) and the marathon is being broadcast throughout the whole place, so you really could just stay in the museum the entire time without leaving if you wanted. We were not so stalwart; we wanted good food and sleep not on the floor of a museum, and got both. The marathon is broken up into four-hour watches, and you get a little passport and a stamp for every one of the four-hour watches you're there for, so we told ourselves we would stay until just past midnight to get the 12-4 AM stamp and then sneak back before 8 AM to get the 4-8 AM stamp before the watch ticked over. When midnight came around I was very much falling asleep in my seat, and got ready to nudge everyone to leave, but then we all realized that the next chapter was ISHMAEL DESCRIBES BAD WHALE ART and we couldn't leave until he had in fact described all the bad whale art!
I'm not even the world's biggest Moby-Dick-head; I like the book but I've only actually read it the once. I had my knitting (I got a GREAT deal done on my knitting), and I loved getting to read a section, and I enjoyed all the different amateur readers, some rather bad and some very good. But what I enjoyed most of all was the experience of being surrounded by a thousand other people, each with their own obviously well-loved copy of Moby-Dick, each a different edition of Moby-Dick -- I've certainly never seen so many editions of Moby-Dick in one place -- rapturously following along. (In top-tier outfits, too. Forget Harajuku; if you want street fashion, the Moby-Dick marathon is the place to be. So many hand-knit Moby Dick-themed woolen garments!) It's a kind of communal high, like a convention or a concert -- and I like concerts, but my heart is with books, and it's hard to get of communal high off a book. Inherently a sort of solitary experience. But the Moby-Dick marathon managed it, and there is something really very spectacular in that.
Anyway, as much as we all like Moby-Dick, at some point on the road trip trip, we started talking about what book we personally would want to marathon read with Three Thousand People in a Relevant Location if we had the authority to command such a thing, and I'm pitching the question outward. My own choice was White's Once And Future King read in a ruined castle -- I suspect would not have the pull of Moby-Dick in these days but you never know!
Your spirit watched me up the stairs
Jan. 14th, 2026 02:54 pmsovayMy schedule for Arisia this year is minute, but a fairly big deal for me since the state of my health last allowed me to participate in programming in 2021. I mean, at the moment the state of my health is failed, but I'm still looking forward.
Dramatic Readings from the Ig Nobel Prizes
Saturday 3 pm, Amesbury AB
Marc Abrahams et al.
Highlights from Ig Nobel prize-winning studies and patents, presented in dramatic mini-readings by luminaries and experts (in some field). The audience will have an opportunity to ask questions about the research presented—answers will be based on the expertise of the presenters, who may have a different expertise than the researchers.
Cursed Literature
Sunday 4:15 pm, Central Square
Mark Millman (m), Alastor, Kristina Spinney, Sonya Taaffe
Some literature describes haunted houses; other books seem like they are haunted, as though the act of reading the book is inviting something vaguely unclean into the reader's life. Whether considering the dire typographical labyrinths of The House of Leaves, or the slowly expanding void at the heart of Kathe Koja's Cypher, some works leave a mark. Panelists will explore books that by reputation or their own experience, produce a lingering unsettled feeling far beyond the events and characters of the story.
SFF on Stage
Sunday 5:30 pm, Porter Square B
Raven Stern (m), Andrea Hairston, Greer Gilman, Sonya Taaffe, Stephen R. Wilk
Science fiction and fantasy have long been mainstays of live theater; William Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1595. Peter Pan introduced one of the 20th century's best known characters in 1904. In 1920, R.U.R. gave us the word "robot." Universal Studios' famous version of Dracula was adapted not from the novel, but the wildly successful Broadway play. That's not even getting into modern musicals like Wicked or Little Shop of Horrors. What does it take for genre to work in a live setting, and where have we seen it succeed (or fail)?
Anyone else I can expect to see this weekend? The ziggurat awaits.
Dramatic Readings from the Ig Nobel Prizes
Saturday 3 pm, Amesbury AB
Marc Abrahams et al.
Highlights from Ig Nobel prize-winning studies and patents, presented in dramatic mini-readings by luminaries and experts (in some field). The audience will have an opportunity to ask questions about the research presented—answers will be based on the expertise of the presenters, who may have a different expertise than the researchers.
Cursed Literature
Sunday 4:15 pm, Central Square
Mark Millman (m), Alastor, Kristina Spinney, Sonya Taaffe
Some literature describes haunted houses; other books seem like they are haunted, as though the act of reading the book is inviting something vaguely unclean into the reader's life. Whether considering the dire typographical labyrinths of The House of Leaves, or the slowly expanding void at the heart of Kathe Koja's Cypher, some works leave a mark. Panelists will explore books that by reputation or their own experience, produce a lingering unsettled feeling far beyond the events and characters of the story.
SFF on Stage
Sunday 5:30 pm, Porter Square B
Raven Stern (m), Andrea Hairston, Greer Gilman, Sonya Taaffe, Stephen R. Wilk
Science fiction and fantasy have long been mainstays of live theater; William Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream in 1595. Peter Pan introduced one of the 20th century's best known characters in 1904. In 1920, R.U.R. gave us the word "robot." Universal Studios' famous version of Dracula was adapted not from the novel, but the wildly successful Broadway play. That's not even getting into modern musicals like Wicked or Little Shop of Horrors. What does it take for genre to work in a live setting, and where have we seen it succeed (or fail)?
Anyone else I can expect to see this weekend? The ziggurat awaits.
They're All Terrible 1-3
Jan. 14th, 2026 11:22 amrachelmanijaA Bad Idea comic by Matt Kindt, Ramon Villalobos and Tamra Bonvillain. A swords and sorcery parody/pastiche about a group of badass, backstabbing, greedy, terrible people tasked with saving a peaceful city from invaders. I picked this up based on the art, which is spectacular - I especially love the unusual color palette.
Unfortunately, the story is both cliched and kind of edgelord, and I didn't care about any of the characters. Also, the art is extremely gory - the panel above is mild. So I won't be continuing this series, but I may look into what else Ramon Villalobos, the artist, has done.
Unfortunately, the story is both cliched and kind of edgelord, and I didn't care about any of the characters. Also, the art is extremely gory - the panel above is mild. So I won't be continuing this series, but I may look into what else Ramon Villalobos, the artist, has done.
(no subject)
Jan. 14th, 2026 08:31 amsummercomfortOkay, I need to figure out a better time in my day to post, because what's been happening the last few nights is that I get home, there's some sort of Thing (Monday night was HOA meeting, Tuesday night was game store and then getting Miss R set up for her minecraft playdate), and then I'm Le Tired and then just sink into Fic Zone instead of doing anything mildly productive or helpful. I think part of it, too, is that I usually manage the muster some energy to steward Miss R through her Chinese homework around 8-9pm, and then after that I'm like... Done.
I think one of the benefits of posting is really collecting my thoughts, reflecting on my day, and then figuring out what I should do next, which is great for preventing me from sinking into the Fic Zone. I'm really tired of drawing a blank when someone asks "how was your day?" or "how's it going", because usually it just feels like "things happened, but I no longer remember what they were." Which kinda sucks. I swear I'm, like, mentally cognizant during the day! Yesterday I did a lot of great Quest prep and trip prep work, taught class, voiced opinions about girls+stress in the faculty meeting, and did a rough plan of the semester for 9th grade! But by the time it's 9pm, everything is a haze. Blech.
So it seems like I need to figure out how to either not fall into the haze, or how to effectively rise from the haze. It might be that I need to post in the morning, when my brain is most actively planning. Or I need to post before I start the drive home, when I'm wrapping up my work and thinking about home tasks. Or I need to post the moment I get home, so that I decompress by reflecting and planning instead of by reading fics of Tim Drake being sad. The last few days it'd be like, 11pm and I'm like "oh, I should post" and then I'm like "too tired", so that clearly doesn't work.
Anyway, I'll try a couple of different times and see what happens. Now that I'm writing this, I'm recognizing that part of what adds to my exhaustion at the end of the day is having to be "on" again after I get home, to help get Miss R through her homework. Which... I hope is just a temporary, next year or two sort of situation. Usually after she gets home, both of us need some down time to not think about Chinese homework, and then it's like, a whole Thing to get both of our energies back up. I feel like, ideally, Chinese homework will eventually require less cognitive effort (become more rote, her getting better at the basics of character recognition and writing) that it won't be as much effort. Also, starting next school year, she no longer has aftercare, so I think our afterschool rhythm might change.
I just scribbled a rough chart of my energy levels between 4pm and midnight, and ... yeah, I think after I get home, I crash from the drive, and then I muster the energy for homework stewardship (or HOA meetings, or whatever else) out of a sense of obligation, so then after that obligation is done, I crash even harder. Poor spouse has been trying to engage me in more exciting post-Miss R-bedtime activities like reading a book together, and I want to, I just don't have the energy for it.
I think in the long run, this will be less of an issue once next school year hits and my drive home either shortens, or transforms into a train ride. (plus all of the reasons stated above). In the short run, I think I can mitigate some of the first crash that happens when I get home by having some task there that is at a higher energy level than "lying down and reading fic" -- knitting, or writing a post, or putting on a show and drawing for an episode. And maybe if I have something queued up for post-homework, it would also make it easier to get to a productive state.
Anyways, I've spent about an hour of work time just writing this post (oops), but I think it's worth it. Now onto school things, like figuring out what I want to do for this upcoming unit, getting my prep work done for the rest of the week (esp tomorrow's classes!), and maybe writing some Trip-related emails (lbr that's going to happen Friday morning)
I think one of the benefits of posting is really collecting my thoughts, reflecting on my day, and then figuring out what I should do next, which is great for preventing me from sinking into the Fic Zone. I'm really tired of drawing a blank when someone asks "how was your day?" or "how's it going", because usually it just feels like "things happened, but I no longer remember what they were." Which kinda sucks. I swear I'm, like, mentally cognizant during the day! Yesterday I did a lot of great Quest prep and trip prep work, taught class, voiced opinions about girls+stress in the faculty meeting, and did a rough plan of the semester for 9th grade! But by the time it's 9pm, everything is a haze. Blech.
So it seems like I need to figure out how to either not fall into the haze, or how to effectively rise from the haze. It might be that I need to post in the morning, when my brain is most actively planning. Or I need to post before I start the drive home, when I'm wrapping up my work and thinking about home tasks. Or I need to post the moment I get home, so that I decompress by reflecting and planning instead of by reading fics of Tim Drake being sad. The last few days it'd be like, 11pm and I'm like "oh, I should post" and then I'm like "too tired", so that clearly doesn't work.
Anyway, I'll try a couple of different times and see what happens. Now that I'm writing this, I'm recognizing that part of what adds to my exhaustion at the end of the day is having to be "on" again after I get home, to help get Miss R through her homework. Which... I hope is just a temporary, next year or two sort of situation. Usually after she gets home, both of us need some down time to not think about Chinese homework, and then it's like, a whole Thing to get both of our energies back up. I feel like, ideally, Chinese homework will eventually require less cognitive effort (become more rote, her getting better at the basics of character recognition and writing) that it won't be as much effort. Also, starting next school year, she no longer has aftercare, so I think our afterschool rhythm might change.
I just scribbled a rough chart of my energy levels between 4pm and midnight, and ... yeah, I think after I get home, I crash from the drive, and then I muster the energy for homework stewardship (or HOA meetings, or whatever else) out of a sense of obligation, so then after that obligation is done, I crash even harder. Poor spouse has been trying to engage me in more exciting post-Miss R-bedtime activities like reading a book together, and I want to, I just don't have the energy for it.
I think in the long run, this will be less of an issue once next school year hits and my drive home either shortens, or transforms into a train ride. (plus all of the reasons stated above). In the short run, I think I can mitigate some of the first crash that happens when I get home by having some task there that is at a higher energy level than "lying down and reading fic" -- knitting, or writing a post, or putting on a show and drawing for an episode. And maybe if I have something queued up for post-homework, it would also make it easier to get to a productive state.
Anyways, I've spent about an hour of work time just writing this post (oops), but I think it's worth it. Now onto school things, like figuring out what I want to do for this upcoming unit, getting my prep work done for the rest of the week (esp tomorrow's classes!), and maybe writing some Trip-related emails (lbr that's going to happen Friday morning)
Writing update
Jan. 14th, 2026 08:58 amcyphomandra2025 has been my most productive year for sometime! I posted ~37K of fanfic, 7 Final Fantasy and 2 Yuletide. I posted earlier about the FFVII fics I wrote for candyheartsex and ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
seasonsofdrabbles, and I've done Yuletide, but here are the others:
I picked up a pinch hit for the Whump Exchange and then had it bounced by the mod for containing a recipient DNW, which was non con. What I thought I’d written was rough sex, which the recipient explicitly did want and I thought it was quite clear the characters did too, so I was a bit miffed and even more so when the mod reassigned the fic to someone else without first giving me the chance to fix mine but fine, I sent regrets and an apology to the mod in a mature adult fashion and then sulked for DAYS until it was less than 24 hours before author reveals, at which point I cut all the sex out and tweaked the fic to make it work as a recipient treat. I wanted to focus on Genesis’s degradation (this has a specific medical meaning in FFVII) and one particular image that got a hold of me, and it still works for that; Genesis and Sephiroth shoving each other against walls and being bitey will just have to wait for another time.
Ripping Myself Off (1317 words) by Cyphomandra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Genesis Rhapsodos/Sephiroth
Characters: Genesis Rhapsodos, Sephiroth (Compilation of FFVII)
Additional Tags: Body Horror, Serious Injuries, Whump
Summary:
My lingering irritation at this meant that when I then saw another pinch hit (for my Chocolate Box recipient) for a non con exchange I pounced on that just to prove I could write non con intentionally. I wrote 3.6K of yes totally definitely non con for the deadline and then added another 15K (!) before the collection opened because I felt bad for the characters and wanted to get them to a slightly better place, which does possibly indicate that I am still doing the challenge wrong. Back in the lab again with Zack and Cloud, and it was interesting because I went into the fic expecting Cloud to be the one to do all the suffering, but it’s actually Zack who ended up the most tormented. Despite that, it’s still more upbeat than canon. I am currently resisting the urge to add more (not least because I think Cloud is going to fall apart spectacularly a few more days after the fic ends).
Exposure Protocol (16852 words) by Cyphomandra
Chapters: 5/5
Fandom: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth (Video Games 2020-2024)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Relationships: Zack Fair/Cloud Strife
Characters: Zack Fair, Cloud Strife, Hojo (Compilation of FFVII)
Additional Tags: Warning: Hojo (Compilation of FFVII), Human Experimentation, Mad Scientists, Bad Guys Made Them Do It, Rape/Non-con Elements, Whump, nobody expects the seventh infantry, Love Interest Rapes Them to Prevent Something Worse, canon AU
Summary:
In the 24 hours or so before the collection went live and before I did final edits, I wrote two drabble treats for the Summer Season of Drabbles, both FFVII again, one Cloud/Rufus and one Cid/Vincent; I can see where shippers for both pairings are coming from but I haven’t tried to write them before, so this was fun. I then almost had another DNW moment when I did a casual last minute check and found that one prompter DNW’d present tense, necessitating a rewrite of that treat - followed by total panic until I checked my non con recipient as I’d written the whole thing in present tense, but fortunately they only DNW’d sensible things like het.
Handover (100 words) by Cyphomandra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth (Video Games 2020-2024), Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Rufus Shinra/Cloud Strife
Characters: Rufus Shinra, Cloud Strife
Additional Tags: Glove Kink, Flirting, Treat, Drabble
Summary:
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth (Video Games 2020-2024), Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Cid Highwind/Vincent Valentine
Characters: Cid Highwind, Vincent Valentine
Additional Tags: Get Together, Drabble, Treat
Summary:
(I then plodded slowly onwards with another Zakkura long fic, but although this is now pushing 10k the ending is still very far off and I could not get momentum. I signed up for wip big bang in the hope it would help, but noooo.)
Writing goals for next year: finish something that's not for an exchange. Try and match/exceed word count.
candyheartsex and seasonsofdrabbles, and I've done Yuletide, but here are the others:I picked up a pinch hit for the Whump Exchange and then had it bounced by the mod for containing a recipient DNW, which was non con. What I thought I’d written was rough sex, which the recipient explicitly did want and I thought it was quite clear the characters did too, so I was a bit miffed and even more so when the mod reassigned the fic to someone else without first giving me the chance to fix mine but fine, I sent regrets and an apology to the mod in a mature adult fashion and then sulked for DAYS until it was less than 24 hours before author reveals, at which point I cut all the sex out and tweaked the fic to make it work as a recipient treat. I wanted to focus on Genesis’s degradation (this has a specific medical meaning in FFVII) and one particular image that got a hold of me, and it still works for that; Genesis and Sephiroth shoving each other against walls and being bitey will just have to wait for another time.
Ripping Myself Off (1317 words) by Cyphomandra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Genesis Rhapsodos/Sephiroth
Characters: Genesis Rhapsodos, Sephiroth (Compilation of FFVII)
Additional Tags: Body Horror, Serious Injuries, Whump
Summary:
Genesis and Sephiroth, after the incident in the training room.
My lingering irritation at this meant that when I then saw another pinch hit (for my Chocolate Box recipient) for a non con exchange I pounced on that just to prove I could write non con intentionally. I wrote 3.6K of yes totally definitely non con for the deadline and then added another 15K (!) before the collection opened because I felt bad for the characters and wanted to get them to a slightly better place, which does possibly indicate that I am still doing the challenge wrong. Back in the lab again with Zack and Cloud, and it was interesting because I went into the fic expecting Cloud to be the one to do all the suffering, but it’s actually Zack who ended up the most tormented. Despite that, it’s still more upbeat than canon. I am currently resisting the urge to add more (not least because I think Cloud is going to fall apart spectacularly a few more days after the fic ends).
Exposure Protocol (16852 words) by Cyphomandra
Chapters: 5/5
Fandom: Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth (Video Games 2020-2024)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Relationships: Zack Fair/Cloud Strife
Characters: Zack Fair, Cloud Strife, Hojo (Compilation of FFVII)
Additional Tags: Warning: Hojo (Compilation of FFVII), Human Experimentation, Mad Scientists, Bad Guys Made Them Do It, Rape/Non-con Elements, Whump, nobody expects the seventh infantry, Love Interest Rapes Them to Prevent Something Worse, canon AU
Summary:
“…rate of mako uptake and binding to DNA-linked receptors can be predicted via measurement of specific pharmacokinetic parameters (see table 1). In individuals with poor profiles (predicted uptake <5% of normal), toxicosis is common. Typically high dose oral has been used in this setting, but the failure rate remains unacceptably high. In this article I outline, with detailed case studies, three new methods of achieving effective levels without such shortcomings; rectal adminstration, externalisation of the large gut with mesenteric perfusion, and removal of at least 50% of dermis in conjunction with mako baths. Note is also made of the role of partially pre-metabolised mako sourced from high-mako individuals…”
from Overcoming mako toxicosis: a paradigm shift. Hojo et al. Research and Development, Shinra Electric Power Company.
[in submission]
In the 24 hours or so before the collection went live and before I did final edits, I wrote two drabble treats for the Summer Season of Drabbles, both FFVII again, one Cloud/Rufus and one Cid/Vincent; I can see where shippers for both pairings are coming from but I haven’t tried to write them before, so this was fun. I then almost had another DNW moment when I did a casual last minute check and found that one prompter DNW’d present tense, necessitating a rewrite of that treat - followed by total panic until I checked my non con recipient as I’d written the whole thing in present tense, but fortunately they only DNW’d sensible things like het.
Handover (100 words) by Cyphomandra
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth (Video Games 2020-2024), Compilation of Final Fantasy VII, Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Rufus Shinra/Cloud Strife
Characters: Rufus Shinra, Cloud Strife
Additional Tags: Glove Kink, Flirting, Treat, Drabble
Summary:
Rufus wants to send a message.
Regular Maintenance (100 words) by CyphomandraChapters: 1/1
Fandom: Final Fantasy VII Remake and Rebirth (Video Games 2020-2024), Compilation of Final Fantasy VII
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Cid Highwind/Vincent Valentine
Characters: Cid Highwind, Vincent Valentine
Additional Tags: Get Together, Drabble, Treat
Summary:
Cid gets some assistance with the Bronco - and offers some in return.
(I then plodded slowly onwards with another Zakkura long fic, but although this is now pushing 10k the ending is still very far off and I could not get momentum. I signed up for wip big bang in the hope it would help, but noooo.)
Writing goals for next year: finish something that's not for an exchange. Try and match/exceed word count.
my empty halls to echo with grand self-mythology
Jan. 13th, 2026 07:35 pmwychwoodToday I discovered that it is possible to add Too Many new games on Steam! It actually locked me out and I had to wait an hour before I could add the final items from the Humble Bundle I was working on. It did take fifty games in 25 minutes to hit the rate limit, though, which doesn't seem too unreasonable. I think I have now added every game I bought via Humble Bundle to my Steam account, which is a nice (small) milestone.
My cleaner came today for the first time since before Christmas, and my house is so pretty now! Also once she was gone I could start the laundry going again (I try to have all the laundry dry and away before she arrives, so she can e.g. vacuum the floor instead of having to work around the drying racks). I've hung three loads already, there's a hoodie in now and a second to go in when it's done, and the only things left that need washing are the half of the bedding that will need a drying rack. That will have to wait until the weekend. I would say "then I'll be all up to date!" but then I'll be at Mum's and will need to catch up again once I return from there! Still, I'm closer than I was.
There have been workpeople outside my window all day dismantling the next block of garages for replacement, which includes mine; I'm quite excited by this, since at the end of it I will hopefully have a garage with a door that I can open! and close! all by myself! without crowbars and ropes and enough equipment that I could really use three hands. Not that I have much to keep in it; the only thing in there before was my bike. Still, it would be nice to get that out of the spare room again.
My cleaner came today for the first time since before Christmas, and my house is so pretty now! Also once she was gone I could start the laundry going again (I try to have all the laundry dry and away before she arrives, so she can e.g. vacuum the floor instead of having to work around the drying racks). I've hung three loads already, there's a hoodie in now and a second to go in when it's done, and the only things left that need washing are the half of the bedding that will need a drying rack. That will have to wait until the weekend. I would say "then I'll be all up to date!" but then I'll be at Mum's and will need to catch up again once I return from there! Still, I'm closer than I was.
There have been workpeople outside my window all day dismantling the next block of garages for replacement, which includes mine; I'm quite excited by this, since at the end of it I will hopefully have a garage with a door that I can open! and close! all by myself! without crowbars and ropes and enough equipment that I could really use three hands. Not that I have much to keep in it; the only thing in there before was my bike. Still, it would be nice to get that out of the spare room again.
The Hike, by Drew Magary
Jan. 13th, 2026 10:17 amrachelmanija
Ben is on a work trip, away from his wife and three young children, when he decides to take a hike through the woods by his hotel. Ben sees a man with a Rottweiler face disposing of a corpse, and flees into the woods with the dog man pursuing him.
The next thing he knows, he's trapped in a surreal world halfway between a nightmare and a video game. It often involves distorted reflections of his own past - Ben has a scar on his face from a Rottweiler bite and he keeps getting attacked by Rottweiler-faced men, an old lover appears at the age she was when he last saw her, and he befriends a talking crab that knows a suspicious amount about him. He has to stay on the path, or he'll die. A mysterious old woman gives him tasks and tells him the only way he can get home is to find the Producer. Things appear and disappear in a very dreamlike manner, the scene shifting from a cannibal giant's castle to a hovercraft to a desert. After each ordeal, he gets a banquet with champagne.
This extremely weird book is a bit like a dreamlike, horror-inflected Alice in Wonderland for bros. I almost gave up on it halfway through - it was so "one random thing after another and the whole thing is clearly not real" that I got bored - but that's when something happened that intrigued me enough to continue. It doesn't need to be as long as it is - it's a short book that would have been better as a novelette - but the ending, while not explaining all that much, still manages to be satisfying.
I wouldn't re-read this - the actual reading experience often felt like a slog - but it was definitely different and had some good twists, so I'm not sorry I read it. I suspect there's some overlap in readership between this and Dungeon Crawler Carl.
Don't read the spoilers if there's any chance you'll actually read the book.
( Spoilers! )
Probably it's all a metaphor for life.
Content notes: Horror-typical gore and gross-outs.
the word fear did not and does not exist in my vocabulary
Jan. 13th, 2026 03:55 pmphilomythaThe Dark Invader, Kapitänleutnant Franz von Rintelen (available on Gutenberg Australia)
The autobiography of one of Germany's most successful secret agents in WW1. One of the good bits from my previous book was the mention of this autobiography in the author's note at the end, since Rintelen appears as a minor character in 'The Spies of Hartlake Hall'. So I looked it up and read it, and what a read it was. Rintelen is an absolute lunatic; what he most reminded me of was a German Miles Vorkosigan, including the bit where his superiors ship him off to cause problems for the enemy instead of having him meddling in politics at home. He likes coming up with wild ideas and carrying them out, he has bucketloads of chutzpah, he's not above creatively delaying his obedience to orders, he's not afraid of wading into just about anything and he's very cocky. He is exactly who you don't want as a coworker in headquarters, but exactly who you do want to send off to sabotage the enemy.
And since he spoke excellent English - the memoir is written by him in English, not translated from German - the Germans sent him to America to do something about the fact that America, though neutral, was supplying huge volumes of ammunition to the Allies. And so he sets about arranging the manufacture of time-bombs to put in the holds of cargo ships carrying munitions, he looks for ways to sabotage harbours, he tries to send money and weapons to Mexico to encourage them to invade the USA, he gets involved in organising strikes among dock workers and munition workers, and he makes friends with Irish nationalists and encourages them to help him with all of this. And, because this is real life and not fiction and he's not quite as lucky as Miles Vorkosigan, eventually he gets captured by the British on his way back to Germany, and put in a POW camp, and then later was sent for trial and imprisonment in the USA for his crimes there - he doesn't get back to Germany again until 1921, after four years of hard labour in pretty grim conditions which he makes plain in his memoir that he felt was extremely inappropriate as an enemy soldier.
But he did very obviously adore the British officers who captured him, he's incredibly Anglophile and the whole description of his being captured is interleaved with a description of him spending Christmas with one of the officers involved years later and how well they got on ('dearly beloved ex-enemies' is his phrase); he loves England and the British. He found that Germany wasn't the place for him when he got out - not least because von Papen, the Weimar chancellor, was his fellow naval attache in the US embassy while he was carrying out all this sabotage and they hated each other's guts and, according to Rintelen, Papen deliberately let his name leak out so that the British knew who he was and could arrest him. So Rintelen moved to London and settled there, and according to the Wikipedia article about him, it's possible that when WW2 came around he helped train SOE operatives in sabotage work, this being something of his area of expertise.
The memoir is very obviously written with his own biases and interpretation and grievances about various things, but it's a fantastic read and honestly even though he was clearly a complete nightmare in so many ways, I couldn't help but like him.
The autobiography of one of Germany's most successful secret agents in WW1. One of the good bits from my previous book was the mention of this autobiography in the author's note at the end, since Rintelen appears as a minor character in 'The Spies of Hartlake Hall'. So I looked it up and read it, and what a read it was. Rintelen is an absolute lunatic; what he most reminded me of was a German Miles Vorkosigan, including the bit where his superiors ship him off to cause problems for the enemy instead of having him meddling in politics at home. He likes coming up with wild ideas and carrying them out, he has bucketloads of chutzpah, he's not above creatively delaying his obedience to orders, he's not afraid of wading into just about anything and he's very cocky. He is exactly who you don't want as a coworker in headquarters, but exactly who you do want to send off to sabotage the enemy.
And since he spoke excellent English - the memoir is written by him in English, not translated from German - the Germans sent him to America to do something about the fact that America, though neutral, was supplying huge volumes of ammunition to the Allies. And so he sets about arranging the manufacture of time-bombs to put in the holds of cargo ships carrying munitions, he looks for ways to sabotage harbours, he tries to send money and weapons to Mexico to encourage them to invade the USA, he gets involved in organising strikes among dock workers and munition workers, and he makes friends with Irish nationalists and encourages them to help him with all of this. And, because this is real life and not fiction and he's not quite as lucky as Miles Vorkosigan, eventually he gets captured by the British on his way back to Germany, and put in a POW camp, and then later was sent for trial and imprisonment in the USA for his crimes there - he doesn't get back to Germany again until 1921, after four years of hard labour in pretty grim conditions which he makes plain in his memoir that he felt was extremely inappropriate as an enemy soldier.
But he did very obviously adore the British officers who captured him, he's incredibly Anglophile and the whole description of his being captured is interleaved with a description of him spending Christmas with one of the officers involved years later and how well they got on ('dearly beloved ex-enemies' is his phrase); he loves England and the British. He found that Germany wasn't the place for him when he got out - not least because von Papen, the Weimar chancellor, was his fellow naval attache in the US embassy while he was carrying out all this sabotage and they hated each other's guts and, according to Rintelen, Papen deliberately let his name leak out so that the British knew who he was and could arrest him. So Rintelen moved to London and settled there, and according to the Wikipedia article about him, it's possible that when WW2 came around he helped train SOE operatives in sabotage work, this being something of his area of expertise.
The memoir is very obviously written with his own biases and interpretation and grievances about various things, but it's a fantastic read and honestly even though he was clearly a complete nightmare in so many ways, I couldn't help but like him.
Am I just a phantom waiting to be ripped around on shady ground?
Jan. 12th, 2026 11:24 pmsovayRunning this many days without sleep, I find it hard to tell whether I had an insight about creativity this weekend or just reinvented a 101-level objection to LLMs and so-called generative AI, but it ocurred to me that such technologies are not capable of allusions. Their algorithms are not freighted with the same three-dimensional architecture of associations which accrete around information stored in the human cold porridge, all the emotional colors and sensory overtones and contextual echoes which attend the classic example of a word like tree when you throw it out across the incommensurable void between one human mind and another to be plugged into their own idiosyncratically plastic linkage of bias and experience whose least incompatibility may be the difference between a bristlecone and a birch and Wittgenstein has to lie down with a headache, but all of these entanglements form as much of the texture of a writer's style—of any human communication—as the word cloud of their vocabulary or their most commonly diagrammed sentences. It has always interested me to be able to detect the half-rhymes or skeletons of familiarity in the work of other writers; I have always assumed I am reciprocally legible if not transparent from space. I've seen arguments against the creativity of LLMs based on intentionality, but the unintended encrustrations seem just as important to me. By way of illustration, this thought was partly sparked by this classic and glorious mashup.
I was delighted to find on checking the news this morning that a new Roman villa just dropped. Given the Iron Age hillforts, the twelfth-century abbey, the Georgian country house, and the CH station, Margam Country Park clearly needed a Roman find to complete the set. I have since been informed of the discovery of a similarly well-preserved and impressive carnyx. Goes shatteringly with a villa, the Iceni tell me.
I joke about this rock I spend most of my time under, but how can I never have heard of Marlow Moss? The Bryher vibes alone. The Constructivism. And a real short king, judging by that jaunty photo c. 1937 with Netty Nijhoff. Pursuing further details, I fell over Anton Prinner and have been demoralized about my comprehension of art history ever since.
Last night I read David Copperfield (1850) for the third time in my life. It has the terrible feel of a teachable moment. In high school I bounced almost completely off it. About ten years later, I enjoyed the dual-layered narration and was otherwise mostly engaged by the language. Now it appears I just like the novel, which I have to consider may be a factor of middle age. Or I had just read the necessary bunch more of Dickens in the interval, speaking of traceable reflections, recurring figures; my favorite character has not changed since eleventh grade, but I can see now the constellation he's part of. It seems improbable that I was always reading the novel while waiting for chorus to start, but I did get through Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) in the down time of a couple of rehearsals that year. I was not taking either of the standard literature classes, but I had friends who left their assigned reading lying around.
I have to be at three different doctors' offices tomorrow. I could be over this viral mishegos any second now.
I was delighted to find on checking the news this morning that a new Roman villa just dropped. Given the Iron Age hillforts, the twelfth-century abbey, the Georgian country house, and the CH station, Margam Country Park clearly needed a Roman find to complete the set. I have since been informed of the discovery of a similarly well-preserved and impressive carnyx. Goes shatteringly with a villa, the Iceni tell me.
I joke about this rock I spend most of my time under, but how can I never have heard of Marlow Moss? The Bryher vibes alone. The Constructivism. And a real short king, judging by that jaunty photo c. 1937 with Netty Nijhoff. Pursuing further details, I fell over Anton Prinner and have been demoralized about my comprehension of art history ever since.
Last night I read David Copperfield (1850) for the third time in my life. It has the terrible feel of a teachable moment. In high school I bounced almost completely off it. About ten years later, I enjoyed the dual-layered narration and was otherwise mostly engaged by the language. Now it appears I just like the novel, which I have to consider may be a factor of middle age. Or I had just read the necessary bunch more of Dickens in the interval, speaking of traceable reflections, recurring figures; my favorite character has not changed since eleventh grade, but I can see now the constellation he's part of. It seems improbable that I was always reading the novel while waiting for chorus to start, but I did get through Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) in the down time of a couple of rehearsals that year. I was not taking either of the standard literature classes, but I had friends who left their assigned reading lying around.
I have to be at three different doctors' offices tomorrow. I could be over this viral mishegos any second now.
(no subject)
Jan. 12th, 2026 10:19 pmsummercomfortoof, another 2 day gap in update.
Was it only yesterday that we had the taiko new year's? Spouse woke up early to make food, and then we went to rehearsal, followed by mochi making, followed by performance. Around 2pm was when I hit a wall re: energy and ability to People, so 2-3pm was pretty miserable because I was still trapped at the taiko thing and there was still more socializing to do. I crashed after I got home, and then crashed even more at night. But at least the event was done, and I got to have freshly-pounded mochi in ozoni soup, which is the best thing ever.
Today was the first day of the semester, so there was a lot of running around getting curriculum pulled together, but tomorrow should be more relaxing because it's doing stuff I've already done before. Whew! Really looking forward to a morning where I get to slow down and plan for the semester and send some emails and update some google forms. \o/
I should also: clean up my car (long-overdue), and get to drawing my comic again.
I think when I'm more tired I can hear more of the electricity in the lights
Was it only yesterday that we had the taiko new year's? Spouse woke up early to make food, and then we went to rehearsal, followed by mochi making, followed by performance. Around 2pm was when I hit a wall re: energy and ability to People, so 2-3pm was pretty miserable because I was still trapped at the taiko thing and there was still more socializing to do. I crashed after I got home, and then crashed even more at night. But at least the event was done, and I got to have freshly-pounded mochi in ozoni soup, which is the best thing ever.
Today was the first day of the semester, so there was a lot of running around getting curriculum pulled together, but tomorrow should be more relaxing because it's doing stuff I've already done before. Whew! Really looking forward to a morning where I get to slow down and plan for the semester and send some emails and update some google forms. \o/
I should also: clean up my car (long-overdue), and get to drawing my comic again.
I think when I'm more tired I can hear more of the electricity in the lights
I got interviewed about Paper & Clay Bookshop
Jan. 12th, 2026 11:45 amrachelmanijaAudio and transcript here.
Kat Spada: Today, I’m talking to Rachel Manija Brown, a writer who’s published over 30 books, and opened up Paper & Clay Bookshop in late 2024. Rachel, will you tell me about why you decided to open a bookshop?
Rachel Brown: I had never intended to open a bookshop. I always thought it was one of those idle daydreams that people who love reading and books have. I never planned to actually do it because I didn’t think it would be successful—they frequently go out of business. But after I moved to Crestline, which is a very small town in the California mountains, the little town did not have a bookshop.
It had a shop that was kind of a bookshop. I would say about ten percent of its inventory was books, but it was primarily gifts and herbs and crystals and things like that. But it had a really great atmosphere, people loved it, the people who worked there were really great. And all the kids in town used to hang out there, especially the queer and trans and otherwise kind of misfit kids. And I used to hang out there.
[When it went] out of business, I was so sad at the idea of the mountain losing its only bookshop. Especially the thought that all the queer, trans, bookish, and otherwise misfit teenagers, like I had once been, were going to lose their safe space.
I started daydreaming about opening it myself, and I thought, I love this idea so much, maybe in a couple of years when I have actual preparation, I’ll open a bookshop. Then I realized it was at was such a good location, that I would never get that good of a location again. It’s smack in the middle of the tourist district, every person who visits Crestline walks right past it.
Unfortunately, this was all while I was in Bulgaria for a month. So, I spent some time frantically trying to take over the lease, which was extremely difficult from another country. I couldn’t take possession of the shop until November 1st, and I really wanted to open it in time to get all the Christmas customers. And I have a tiny house, so I couldn’t really buy very much, because I had no place to put it. So I took possession of the shop on November 1st, and I opened on November 14th.
I've posted the rest of the edited transcript below the cut. ( Read more... )
Kat Spada: Today, I’m talking to Rachel Manija Brown, a writer who’s published over 30 books, and opened up Paper & Clay Bookshop in late 2024. Rachel, will you tell me about why you decided to open a bookshop?
Rachel Brown: I had never intended to open a bookshop. I always thought it was one of those idle daydreams that people who love reading and books have. I never planned to actually do it because I didn’t think it would be successful—they frequently go out of business. But after I moved to Crestline, which is a very small town in the California mountains, the little town did not have a bookshop.
It had a shop that was kind of a bookshop. I would say about ten percent of its inventory was books, but it was primarily gifts and herbs and crystals and things like that. But it had a really great atmosphere, people loved it, the people who worked there were really great. And all the kids in town used to hang out there, especially the queer and trans and otherwise kind of misfit kids. And I used to hang out there.
[When it went] out of business, I was so sad at the idea of the mountain losing its only bookshop. Especially the thought that all the queer, trans, bookish, and otherwise misfit teenagers, like I had once been, were going to lose their safe space.
I started daydreaming about opening it myself, and I thought, I love this idea so much, maybe in a couple of years when I have actual preparation, I’ll open a bookshop. Then I realized it was at was such a good location, that I would never get that good of a location again. It’s smack in the middle of the tourist district, every person who visits Crestline walks right past it.
Unfortunately, this was all while I was in Bulgaria for a month. So, I spent some time frantically trying to take over the lease, which was extremely difficult from another country. I couldn’t take possession of the shop until November 1st, and I really wanted to open it in time to get all the Christmas customers. And I have a tiny house, so I couldn’t really buy very much, because I had no place to put it. So I took possession of the shop on November 1st, and I opened on November 14th.
I've posted the rest of the edited transcript below the cut. ( Read more... )
A couple of classic horror movies
Jan. 12th, 2026 07:52 pmlucymonsterI haven't watched a horror movie since my slasher phase all the way back in high school. Now I've just watched two in as many evenings. Not sure what's come over me but I'm having fun!
The Blair Witch Project was really, really scary. :D It's about three young filmmakers who get lost in the woods while filming a documentary about a monster of local folklore called the Blair Witch. They go missing and are never seen alive again; the film is ostensibly pieced together from the recently discovered footage they recorded during the ordeal. Everything about it just worked. I loved the shaky handcam, the found footage styling, and the choice to keep the lurking, stalking menace 100% offscreen. I kept expecting jumpscares - we were blundering around in pitch dark wilderness, the setting was practically made for jumpscares - but they never came and the resulting suspense without any catharsis was somehow so much scarier.
Aside from the...you know, horror part...there's something strangely nostalgic about watching movies like this where the premise depends so heavily on a pre-internet technological environment. Obviously I'm not saying you can't get lost in the woods anymore, but the specific trappings here - the characters being so isolated with no way to call for help or for anyone to track their location, filming in low quality with dismal night vision, entirely reliant for navigation on a paper map that can so easily get lost - feel dated in a way that cast me right back to my 90s childhood. If my appetite for horror continues, I'll have to watch some much newer movies next to find out what we're all scared of in the era of GPS and sprawling 5G coverage.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was also extremely scary. Five young adults run out of fuel while on a van roadtrip through rural Texas; seeking help from the locals, they stumble into the hands of a family of deranged cannibals who set about killing them, sometimes with a chainsaw but more often with (false advertising!) a simple hammer.
This film had none of the subtlety of Blair Witch, but it also wasn't the tasteless, mindless splatterfest I'd osmosed it to be (possibly relevant disclaimer: my osmosis dates from primary school, courtesy of my parents and their seething disapproval when they found out that several of my friends had been allowed to watch it). The onscreen blood and gore were actually very muted, with most of the viscera obscured by camera angles or placed offscreen entirely. It was unhinged and suspenseful and intentionally, powerfully gross but just honestly not that gory. I think the single most horrifying moment for me was seeing Pam thrown onto the cattle hook, and we never even saw the puncture, just the look on her face. The production values weren't high but by God, the directors made the most of what they had. The stench of the abbatoir, the taste of that horrible "barbecue", the drip of putrescent corpses and the relentless, baking heat all somehow leapt right off the page. I spent the whole ninety minutes feeling as much queasy and unsettled as frightened.
The Blair Witch Project was really, really scary. :D It's about three young filmmakers who get lost in the woods while filming a documentary about a monster of local folklore called the Blair Witch. They go missing and are never seen alive again; the film is ostensibly pieced together from the recently discovered footage they recorded during the ordeal. Everything about it just worked. I loved the shaky handcam, the found footage styling, and the choice to keep the lurking, stalking menace 100% offscreen. I kept expecting jumpscares - we were blundering around in pitch dark wilderness, the setting was practically made for jumpscares - but they never came and the resulting suspense without any catharsis was somehow so much scarier.
Aside from the...you know, horror part...there's something strangely nostalgic about watching movies like this where the premise depends so heavily on a pre-internet technological environment. Obviously I'm not saying you can't get lost in the woods anymore, but the specific trappings here - the characters being so isolated with no way to call for help or for anyone to track their location, filming in low quality with dismal night vision, entirely reliant for navigation on a paper map that can so easily get lost - feel dated in a way that cast me right back to my 90s childhood. If my appetite for horror continues, I'll have to watch some much newer movies next to find out what we're all scared of in the era of GPS and sprawling 5G coverage.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre was also extremely scary. Five young adults run out of fuel while on a van roadtrip through rural Texas; seeking help from the locals, they stumble into the hands of a family of deranged cannibals who set about killing them, sometimes with a chainsaw but more often with (false advertising!) a simple hammer.
This film had none of the subtlety of Blair Witch, but it also wasn't the tasteless, mindless splatterfest I'd osmosed it to be (possibly relevant disclaimer: my osmosis dates from primary school, courtesy of my parents and their seething disapproval when they found out that several of my friends had been allowed to watch it). The onscreen blood and gore were actually very muted, with most of the viscera obscured by camera angles or placed offscreen entirely. It was unhinged and suspenseful and intentionally, powerfully gross but just honestly not that gory. I think the single most horrifying moment for me was seeing Pam thrown onto the cattle hook, and we never even saw the puncture, just the look on her face. The production values weren't high but by God, the directors made the most of what they had. The stench of the abbatoir, the taste of that horrible "barbecue", the drip of putrescent corpses and the relentless, baking heat all somehow leapt right off the page. I spent the whole ninety minutes feeling as much queasy and unsettled as frightened.
The Left Hand of Darkness - Ursula K. Le Guin
Jan. 11th, 2026 09:59 pmtroisoiseauxRead The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) by Ursula K. Le Guin, because I've been trying to catch up on my neglected sci-fi classics; it was a fascinating read. This book is famously interesting for the way it plays with gender, being set in an "ambisexual" world (essentially, everyone can, theoretically, physically both bear and beget children) narrated mostly by a character from Earth(?) who grapples with this societal genderlessness by referring to everyone as a "man" and using he/him pronouns— which I found threw me off more than, say, the universal she/her in Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch series?— but I was just really struck overall by the way that Le Guin uses language to fling the reader headfirst into this alien world: she uses made-up words for recognizable concepts, and recognizable English words as signifiers for world-specific/made-up concepts, and you've just sort of got to puzzle it out as you go. I was also surprised to discover that the one plot point I'd known about going in - ( ... ) - actually takes up less of the novel, and occurs later in it, than I had expected.
( Read more... )
( Read more... )
B5 color theorizing
Jan. 11th, 2026 11:46 amsholioI FOUND IT AGAIN. I read a post on Tumblr a while back on a particularly nicely done instance of color symbolism with Londo on B5, and I finally found it. (More beneath the cut.)
( Spoilers for the whole show )
( Spoilers for the whole show )
A Prayer for the Crown Shy, by Becky Chambers
Jan. 11th, 2026 11:13 amrachelmanija
Mosscap and Dex's adventures continue from where they left off. They visit human places, including Dex's large and confusing family. Mosscap has a brush with mortality. Dex does not return to being a tea monk, their vocation still up in the air.
I enjoyed this novella for much the same reasons I enjoyed the first one, though I missed the tea service, which was my favorite part of the first book. Mosscap does turn out to be fallible and learns from Dex as much as Dex learns from it, which was nice. My favorite part of this book was the glimpses of the world, which still seems like an extremely nice place to live in.