thelaughingmuse

wavesagainstrocks on how you do fandom, I said the following:

I do sometimes feel I am too narrow-minded in my fandoms, because except for yarncrafts and Final Fantasy, I don't really venture out of those areas? I keep saying I'm going to play more single-player games on my own, but it's so EASY to default to FFXI or FFXIV or replay a comforting game. Earlier this year I was playing Epistory (Typing adventures!) which I was enjoying, and I don't think I have much more left so I should probably finish that. I also played about two hours of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and immediately was interested... but the activation energy to do something new to me is hard to find. So easy to just... not do it.

WELL FOLKS! I am away from home watching my sister's dog. My PS5 is back home, so no FFXIV - neither potato computer or mom's laptop can handle it. I could play FFXI on potato computer, but I left its gaming pad at home. Which means either fumbling with keyboard controls (and I am NOT good at them) or seeing if my Switch Pro controller would work.

But that, for once, sounds like too much effort.

So what to do? Well, I brought my Switch along! Now, I could replay FFXII. I was supposed to be doing a random job challenge of it recently, but only played an hour. As much as I like FFXII, I think... I think I don't want to replay a game right now.

Which means I am going to start FINAL FANTASY TACTICS today!

Okay, okay, it's another FF game. But I've never played it. And I have long felt that lack of experience in it as a hole in my gaming knowledge. There's a REASON it's way up there with the Zelda series as a "most wanted to play" game.

I know surprisingly a lot about the game, for not having played it. First, I have an idea of what the gameplay is like, because I've played the shit out of FFT: Advance. Seriously! My game file had like 180 hours put in it.

Second, I know many of the characters already, from them having shown up in first FFBE/WOTV and then when I did the Ivalice raids in FFXIV. This also means I know many of the bigger enemies, too.

I also helped R51 at Caves of Narshe update his FFT section for its recent re-release. This means I know EVERY SINGLE item, weapon, and armor in the game, because I proofread those pages. I know where stuff drops from, or is poached from. I know all the locations, because I checked their map pages for correct links.

My posts will be FULL OF SPOILERS but I ask that you PLEASE not spoil me for anything I haven't talked about yet. Thanks in advance!

( here spoilers start )

skygiants

I have often read single-person biographies where the biographer is very obviously in love with their subject; I have also occasionally read have also read Couple Biographies where the biographer is really invested in the romance between their subjects plural. Ilyon Woo's Master Slave Husband Wife is a really great, thoughtful, thorough exploration of a particular moment in the history of American slavery around the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 and the defiant abolitionist movement. It is also very definitively a love story that Woo believes in with her whole heart and is ready to champion all the way to the end, which I honestly think is quite charming even when I myself looking at the evidence was sometimes like "well, I too would like to believe that all through their many years together William and Ellen Craft were indeed fully and romantically on the same page and had each other's backs about everything, but I think it's possible there are other interpretations of some of these events and that in many cases we simply can't know for sure --"

The Big Headline about Ellen and William Craft, the story that made them famous and that the first part of this book recounts in detail, is their daring escape North from slavery in 1848: Ellen disguised herself as an extremely sickly white gentleman who needed her loyal slave with her at all times, and in this guise they managed to navigate 19th-century public transit all the way from Georgia to Philadelphia. They themselves wrote a book about this, which I do plan to read, because it sounds extremely cool and romantic and indeed everyone they met as they made their way from Philadelphia to Massachusetts was like "that's extremely cool and romantic!" and promptly pulled them onto the abolitionist lecture circuit to general wild applause. Ellen, in particular, had major abolitionist propaganda value for forcing empathy out of white people. She was often billed as the White Slave (a label that she did not enjoy.)

Being an escaped slave on the abolitionist lecture circuit was obviously pretty dangerous in 1848 but not as dangerous as it was about to become. In 1848, the Fugitive Slave Laws up north were pretty toothless and unenforceable. In 1850, in an attempt to staple the rapidly-fracturing country back together, significantly stronger laws were passed that essentially forced abolitionist states to cooperate with returning escaped slaves to their masters. Ellen and William Craft, who had so publicly escaped in a way that was very cool and also very embarrassing for the slave states through which they passed, inevitably became one of the first major test cases as to whether Massachusetts would indeed fulfill its Obligations to the South.

Woo writes a compelling narrative, but more importantly she does a really wonderful job balancing that narrative with the complexity of the broader context; from the opening chapter, where she ties the Craft's escape in 1848 with the 1848 revolutionary movement in Europe, I already knew I was in good hands. She does occasionally I think overuse the Ominous Foreshadowing Chapter Ending, but as nonfiction author sins go that's a minor one. She says that at one point in the text that as part of telling their full story she wants to complicate the idea of a happy ending, but it's very clear that in her heart she wants the Crafts to have been very in love and very married all throughout their long and interesting lives, and who can blame her for that?

violsva

Two somewhat short smut fics!

New Doors (512 words) by Violsva
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Roaring Twenties Magic - Allie Therin
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Wesley Collins | Lord Fine/Sebastian de Leon
Characters: Sebastian de Leon, Wesley Collins | Lord Fine
Additional Tags: Post-Proper Scoundrels, Oral Sex, First Time Topping, Sexual Inexperience, Mild Smut, Mostly Just Sebastian Having a Lot of Feelings Honestly
Summary:

A snippet of Wesley and Sebastian sharing a bed on the boat trip to New York between Proper Scoundrels and Once a Rogue.

Friends With Curses (920 words) by Violsva
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Edgin Darvis/Xenk Yendar
Characters: Edgin Darvis, Xenk Yendar
Additional Tags: Camping, Curses, Friends With Benefits, Oral Sex, Single Syllable Smut Challenge, Experimental Style, Explicit Sexual Content, Post-Canon
Summary:

Xenk and Ed take their minds off the hard part of their quest.

Non-writing-wise, I have been spinning so much yarn. Tumblr | Ravelry

rionaleonhart

My usual policy is that, if I write fanfiction in the comments of someone else's journal or community, I'll repost it in an entry over here. If I write fanfiction in the comments of my own journal, though, I won't make an entry for it; it already exists on my journal in some capacity, after all.

However!

wolfy_writing's prompt in the comments of this entry ('Robert's ideas for seducing every other member of the drama society') launched me into writing eight separate short fics in response, one pairing Robert of The Goes Wrong Show with each other member of the drama society. I think that's an ambitious enough project to warrant its own entry!

Do these fics technically fit the original prompt? Let's... let's not worry about that.

( Much Ado, Robert/Annie, 900 words. )

( With the Camera, Robert/Sandra, 700 words. )

( In Position, Robert/Trevor, 1,100 words. )

( Imparting Wisdom, Robert/Dennis, 1,200 words. )

( Problem-Solving, Robert/Jonathan, 700 words. )

( Hands-On, Robert/Vanessa, 2,200 words. )

( Chemistry Testing, Robert/Max, 1,000 words. )

( Rehearsals, Robert/Chris, 2,300 words. )

rachelmanija

This sequel to Annihilation takes an unusual approach. Rather than returning to Area X, almost the entire book takes place outside of it, focusing on the scientific/government agency, the Southern Reach, which has been sending expeditions into it.

Most of the book is bureaucratic shenanigans with creeping horror undertones. The main character, unsubtly nicknamed Control, is slowly losing his mind trying to figure out what the hell happened to his predecessor and why she kept a live plant feeding off a dead mouse in her desk drawer, what is up with the bizarre incantatory literal writings on the wall, and what's up with the biologist, who has seemingly returned from Area X but says she's not the biologist and asks to be called Ghost Bird. There's parts that are interesting but also a lot of office satire which is not really what I was looking for in this series.

About 80% in, the book took a turn that got me suddenly very interested.

( Read more... )

I kind of want to know what happens next but I'm not sure Vandermeer is interested in giving readers what they want.

oursin

Dept rus in urbe: A prickle of hedgehogs and an armada of newts: wildlife settles in at London’s new Queen Elizabeth garden

***

Dept of, why not work with creating opportunities for the mute inglorious already there....? (sigh): Creating Baby Geniuses to Thwart the AI Threat? (Yes, Really.) Honestly, these people.

Possibly relevant here....: State school kids do better at uni

***

The Rise and Fall of Jukeboxes: where are the grooves of yesteryear?

***

Women artists in the Georgian era: a constant, delicate calibration to keep the balance between personal reputation, artistic success and the need to earn a living.

umadoshi

( years-ago pet loss; old grief and random thoughts )

Current Mood: melancholy

rocky41_7 posting in

fffriday

Wednesday night I plowed through most of The Unworthy by Augustina Baztericca, translated from Spanish by Sarah Moses. This is a horror novel about a woman living in an isolated cult after climate change has ravaged most of the planet.

This was one of those books that had me going “okay just one more section and I’ll put it down” and then it was five sections later and I was still there. It just hooked me. I wanted to know more about the cult, I wanted to know more about the narrator’s past, I was so eager to see what was going to come next.

This book goes heavy on gore, mutilation, and cult abuse, so if those are not for you, you may want to give this one a pass. I found it fascinating; the world of the narrator is so grim and tightly controlled, but it’s all that’s left (as far as they know). The book also leans hard on things unspoken: things the narrator knows are so taboo she crosses them out of her own (secret) writings (such as when she wonders if maybe the earth has begun to heal); things she has forcefully blocked from her memory because they hurt so much to think of; the deep current of attraction she feels towards various other women in the cult which is easier to express through violence than sexuality.

In the claustrophobic world of the cult, it becomes so easy for the leadership to pit the women against each other, and they have grown shockingly cruel and violent towards one another in their quest for dominance (each of the “unworthy” dreams of ascending to the holier status of a “Chosen” or “Enlightened”). With virtually no control over their day-to-day, they fantasize about opportunities to punish each other, their only ability to enact their will on the world.

The hints from the beginning that the narrator questions her role in the cult create a delicious tension in the work. Her mere act of writing her experiences down is a violation of cult rules and she frequently keeps her journal pages bound to her chest under her clothes so no one will find them.

The translation was excellent, the writing flows well and Moses captures the descriptions and the narrator’s backtracking on her wording without anything becoming awkward.

The book isn’t long, but I was riveted, and I would like to read more of Baztericca’s work in the future. This was also the second Argentinian horror novel that surprised me with queerness, so another win for Argentinian horror.

xkcd_feed

https://xkcd.com/3234/

Before resurfacing, they promise to inspect the ice for any evidence of hockey-playing life.

https://xkcd.com/3234/

glowingfish posting in

addme

I made a post in this community at the beginning of 2025, and now, we are getting close to the middle of 2026, so maybe I should post again.

I don't see a specific reason to use the template, as this will be quick...

46, Male, United States, I post once or twice a week on average. I don't have any contentious beliefs or opinions, and my journal is mostly personal notes, with a few thoughts maybe about the world and culture. I am not heavily into any of the "fandoms", but might make a comment or two on related things.

I don't really have any specific "types" I am looking to follow on here, although journals that are too contentious and difficult might not be what I am looking for. Adult content is okay, as long as it is not totally pornographic, and also behind a cut. I am looking to build up a community in general.

delphi

Fandom 50 #10

When I was putting together this list of Canadian songs I love from the last fifty years, some years had a clear favourite jump out at me while others had too many bangers to choose between. (Seriously, 1993 turned out to be the keystone year whose ultimate selection affected everything from 1987 to 2001.) But 1986 was the first stumper.

I don't think it's the case that 1986 was a mid year for Canadian music. It's more likely that it's just the first year I was properly conscious of music, with the releases getting replayed throughout my early childhood until they became background noise. These are third-favourite albums from artists whose later eras hit stronger for me, songs I slept through during my first concert as a toddler, and snippets from radio bumpers that earworm me to this day.

So, without a stronger personal preference, the clear choice was the Canadian song of 1986. The one that everyone loved and then became so inescapable that everyone hated it, and which is probably on schedule for a revival soon if it gets used in the right commercial or CBC show. However you feel about it, it's hard to find something more Canadian than this.

Patio Lanterns by Kim Mitchell

Watch on YouTube

sonofgodzilla

Title: Black!! Transformation
Universe: Kamen Rider Black, Kamen Rider Geats
Character(s): Minami Kotaro, "Ukiyo Ace", Joe the Haze, Otohime, Kugimiya Licht, Tsurumi, Girori, General Jark, OCs
Rating: U
Warnings: N/A
Summary: “Congratulations! From this day forth, you are a Kamen Rider.” In the calm of the dark night, with the sound of the fairground attractions in the distance, she had held out a small, plastic box towards him, black and white like her dress, the stylised imprint of a grasshopper encircled at its centre.
Length: 8005 words
Author's Notes: external link.

Black!

( Black!! Transformation )

Current Mood: okay
Current Location: somewhere
Current Music: Höstblod - Winter

rachelmanija

One day every adult on Earth gets a box that contains a string that measures out the length of their life.

This premise seems designed in a lab to create a book to be read for book clubs, where everyone gets to discuss whether or not they'd open their box and how they'd react to a long or short string. It worked, too. And it is absolutely about the premise. Unfortunately, the book is bad: flat, dull, sappy, American in the worst possible way, and emotionally manipulative.

It follows multiple characters, all American, most New Yorkers, and all middle or upper class. Some get long strings. Some get short strings. The ones with short strings agonize over their short strings. The ones with long strings who are in relationships with people with short strings agonize over that.

One of them is black, a fact mentioned exactly once in the entire book, and one has a Hispanic name. One set is an old right-wing politician and his wife. But all of them have identical-sounding narrative voices. Other than the Hispanic-named dude, who is mostly concerned about job discrimination, and the politician, who just wants to exploit the issue, everyone is worried about having a relationship and children with someone who will die young/worried that they'll get dumped and not be able to have children because they'll die young.

Ultimately, isn't everything really about baaaaaabies? Shouldn't everyone have baaaaaaabies no matter what?

The book is so bland and flat. The strings are a metaphor for discrimination, as short stringers are discriminated against. It explores some other social issues, all extremely American like health insurance discrimination and mass shootings, but only peeks outside America for brief and stereotypical moments: North Korea mandates not opening the boxes, China mandates opening them, and in Italy hardly anyone opens their box because they already know what really matters: family. BARF FOREVER.

It was obvious going in that the origin of the boxes would never be explained, but no one even seemed curious about that. Once all adults have received them, they appear on your doorstep the night you turn 22. Video of this is fuzzy. No one parks themselves on the doorstep to see if they teleport in or what. No one has a paradigm-upending crisis over this absolute proof of God/aliens/time travel/magic/etc that the boxes represent. No one comes up with inventive ways to take advantage of the situation a la Death Note. No one is concerned that this proves predestination. No one wonders why they appeared now and what the motive of whoever put them there is.

The point that life is precious regardless of length is hammered in with a thousand sledgehammers, to the point where it felt like a bad self-help book in the form of a novel. The romances are flat and sappy. In the truly vomitous climax, someone pedals around on a bicycle with the stereo playing "Que Sera Sera" and it quotes the entire song.

It's only April but this will be hard to top as the worst book I read all year.

oursin

(Reporting in vaxx-boosted, by the way.)

Have been noting hither and yon stuff about blokes 'looksmaxxing' and 'mogging' (which apparently does not involve cats? is there some reference to tomcats facing off and fluffing out their fur? probably not. Who knows.)

This is yet another of those things That Blokez Do apparently in order to attract the opposite sex and I do not think it is because I am Old, and my tastes were formed in A Different Day, that I feel that there is a significant Failure To Do The Research about What Actually Pulls The Chixx.

Not that this is exactly a new phenomenon, when I was reviewing those books on yoof culture in the 60s/early 70s, I was thinking that various of the paths being pursued by (presumably) cis het men, because Teh Gayz were in separate chapters, did not seem to me necessarily terribly productive - maybe being a great dancer, but not if it was all about him showing off moves, ditto the being A Mod Face.

And after all the idea that women only go for men who look a certain way is to laugh at, cites yet again the instance of The Late Rock Star Historian, who was a scruff who was not perhaps quite at the John Wilkes level of having serious disadvantages in the way of appearance to overcome but was - well, I suppose it depends on the artist you're thinking of and there were painters who would have turned out an excellent oil-painting of him but was hardly of male-model looks. But was if not of universal appeal, considerably popular with the opposite sex.

We are frankly not surprised at reports that young women are eschewing the dating game, because what it turns up is very likely young men blatting on about their self-maintenance regime and probably trying to shill for supplements and peptides.

Am also given to wonder whether the people who follow these creatures are all acolytes of their maxxingmessage, or whether at least some % are treating them as the modern equivalent of the old-style freakshow. (Though for all I know, in the darker reaches of the internet you can find videos of men biting the heads off chickens and so on.)

While I was thinking that it would be preferable for them to contemplate upon the natural world and build bowers for, or offer particularly attractive stones to, the objects of their interest, I also became cynical as to whether female bower birds and penguins are quite so appreciative of these efforts as naturalists would have us suppose. ('Him and his bloody bowers' - 'Not another pebble')

pauraque

While collecting the necessary materials for my Le Guin reading project, I found she had a story which appeared only in the 1973 anthology Clarion III. This was a product of the 1972 Clarion Workshop, an annual six-week course for aspiring speculative fiction writers, taught by a rotating slate of guest instructors. Le Guin was a Clarion instructor that year, and while most of the instructors contributed essays on writing or on the workshop itself, she instead wrote a story.

Since I'd bothered to acquire the book, I figured I'd read the whole thing. But I took my time about it since Le Guin's story didn't seem important to the general arc of her career, though obviously it's significant that her stature had grown to the point where she was invited to teach. So although my reading of her work has progressed in the meantime to 1979 (and will continue from there if the person who currently has The Language of the Night checked out ever returns it to the library!!) we're going to take a short trip back to 1973 here.

Le Guin's story "The Ursula Major Construct; or, A Far Greater Horror Loomed" is a fictionalized version of an exercise she gave the students, using them as the characters and reimagining the whole thing as a SF experiment. I guess in reality she built a mobile out of found objects (the titular construct) and told the class to write about it. I'm sure her story was amusing to the people who were there, but out of context I found it impenetrable. (And hold that thought, because I'm gonna circle back to it.)

As for the student stories, I liked a handful of them, but most were either not to my taste, or seemed underdeveloped in some way, or were so steeped in 1970s gender politics and/or sophomoric "dirty joke" humor that the generation gap was too wide for me to cross. To be fair, these are student stories, but none of them sent me running to look for the authors' later work.

( discussion of selected works )

( full list of included works )

osprey_archer

I watched the Alec Guinness Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy with

skygiants and

genarti when I visited Massachusetts (a month ago now; where does the time go?), and I’ve been procrastinating writing about it, because how does one review perfection?

It’s so good. Quite possibly the perfect adaptation. Alec Guinness makes an amazing Smiley. Possibly not as plain and tubby as Smiley ought to be, but he’s projecting that as hard as he can nonetheless. And he’s just so good at Smiley’s style of sympathetic understatement where he might not actually be sympathetic to whatever line of bull his horrible loser interlocutor is trying to feed him, but it would take an awfully attentive listener to realize that, and most of the people around him never seem to listen at all.

Much is made in the books of Smiley’s amazing spy skills, and I have accepted this without ever exactly being able to put my finger on what those skills are, except maybe the patience to deep-dive in the files. But the miniseries suggests that Smiley’s other secret weapon is the ability to listen, and not only listen but radiate the aura of attentive, thoughtful, sympathetic listening that makes people want to keep talking.

His not-at-all secret weakness is his adored wife Anne, who is sleeping with a Who’s Who of all the important men in London. Just about everyone Smiley meets taunts him with this in not-very-veiled terms. (“Give my love to Anne,” says an obnoxious acquaintance in the first episode. “Give everybody’s love to Anne!”) Amazing example of a character who is hugely present despite not actually showing up till the final episode, during one of the rare sunny moments of a show that takes place mostly in clouds and rain and darkness. Anne actually is one of the bright spots of Smiley’s life despite also being the bane of his existence.

But it would be a mistake to focus too closely on Smiley, because the whole ensemble cast is excellent, and the production really gives the characterization room to breathe. The first scene simply consists of four men assembling one by one around a table, smoking cigarettes, sipping coffee, flipping through folders of papers, clearing their throats… until at last the final man arrives and the meeting gets started and you see, “Ah, that’s the one in charge.”

That’s Bill Haydon. You don’t learn his name yet, and you also don’t learn for a while that he’s not technically the boss, but also you already know most of what you need to know about him.

The adaptation hews quite close to the book, but not slavishly so; clearly the product of people who love and admire Le Carre’s work but also recognize that the challenges of adapting a written work to a visual medium can require some tweaks.

They did make one change I absolutely loved, which was ( spoilers )

Just gorgeous. Absolutely amazing. I want to watch the sequel Smiley’s People, which has a reprise cast, but I’m also not sure that I’m strong enough to watch two Smiley adaptations in one year, especially since this is the one adapting the book with the most Karla (played by Patrick Stewart) (did not write about the scene in this series where Smiley and Karla face off and Karla just sits there, absolutely silent, and dominating the room in that silence) and I feel they may add a Karla bit that will bring me to my knees like the part under the spoiler cut above.

Clearly I’ll simply have to wait until I visit Boston again to watch Smiley’s People.

rionaleonhart

A final batch of questions from my Tumblr, mainly about The Goes Wrong Show! (Well, final unless more people ask me things; I'd be delighted to receive more questions about this stupid show.)

Anonymous: do you have any headcanons for personal issues that cornley crew might struggle with outside the ones that are presented in canon?

Oh, hmm! Here are some scattered thoughts on the Cornley crew's personal issues. Some of these are veeeery obvious (wow, Chris has mother issues and Dennis struggles with socialising, can't wait to get my character analysis trophy), but I might as well throw all of them together.

I've tried to speak in general terms rather than giving clinical explanations for anything; I certainly wouldn't be surprised to learn that, say, Dennis is autistic or Robert has narcissistic personality disorder, but I don't really feel qualified to give diagnoses!

( A handful of Cornley personal issues. )

the-red-thread-that-strangles: Who among the Goes Wrong crew gets injured the most, and who gets injured the most severely?

I feel the answer is probably Trevor in both cases! Vanessa is pretty accident-prone, but, as the one responsible for the set and props, Trevor is actively obliged to throw himself into harm’s way when things go wrong. I think Trevor falling through the roof in Harper’s Locket is the most severe canonical injury I can think of off the top of my head. Wait, second most severe; I just remembered Jonathan’s piano.

(As a follow-up Dreamwidth-exclusive thought, Jonathan also has a serious fall in Peter Pan! He might rival Trevor for the 'most severely' crown.)

Anonymous: Thoughts on a Cornley school/college au but it's set in 2010s/2020s??

Huh, this is a tricky one for me! School or university AUs serve two main functions: a) they put all the characters in the same place if they’re scattered across canon, and b) they let you explore what characters from other worlds would be like in a real-world setting. But the Cornley crew are already in the same place and in the real world, so it’s hard to think of where to take an AU where they’re in education! (I suppose they are in education in early canon, come to think of it, given that it’s a polytechnic drama society to start with.)

Anyway! In a ‘they’re all at university and there’s no drama society’ AU, Chris, Robert, Sandra and Vanessa are all drama students. Annie and Trevor are doing engineering and have been roped in to build a set. Max is not a student, but he likes to sneak into university classes because he thinks it’s funny. Dennis is also there, although nobody quite understands why; he is not doing the drama course and doesn’t seem certain of what he’s actually meant to be studying. Jonathan is an economics student who wanders into the drama room by accident and cannot open the door to leave. They all end up trapped in there overnight and bond extremely weirdly.

I need you to know that I am trying really hard not to take this in the direction of If We Were Villains, a novel about a close-knit group of theatre students who end up murdering one of their own. I don’t want the Cornley crew to murder one of their members! (Who would get murdered, though?) (Robert impulsively murders Chris in order to get the lead role and then goes '...it’s possible that I’ll regret that’?) (I DON’T LIKE THIS CONCEPT)

marysue_thesparkle: Assign your current blorbos an animal pretty please :3

Robert Grove of The Goes Wrong Show is one hundred percent a rhinoceros. He’s large and aggressive and powerful and, much like a rhinoceros, will unintentionally cause a lot of destruction when you put him on a stage.

Thinking about it, a couple of my longstanding blorbos are already assigned animals by their canons: Squall of Final Fantasy VIII is a lion, and Ellie of The Last of Us is a moth. Personally, I think Squall is more of a domestic cat than a lion, but don’t tell him that; he won’t be happy about it.

As for Light Yagami of Death Note... hmm. He’d think of himself as a raven, something winged and impressive and associated with death. In fact, the moth fits him better, for the same reason it fits Ellie; they’re both inescapably drawn to the flame, unable to stop battering themselves against the promise of their own destruction.

(Dreamwidth-exclusive addition: I cannot assign James Sunderland of Silent Hill 2 a non-human animal. I've tried! But he is inescapably a sad man. Human through and through, for better or worse.)

oursin

Happy birthday,

linzer and

shezan!

skygiants

As I mentioned on my last Pern post, Dragonsdawn was always the most memorable Pern book for me -- for my sins, and sins indeed they are. That said, having reread it, I can understand exactly why I found this so compelling. This was the book that sold me on the fantasy of planetary exploration and colonization as a delightful and desirable experience! You could go to a beautiful new world and discover baby dragons and have random islands named after you! You could build a new Utopian society! Is Anne McCaffrey's vision of a Utopian society uncomfortably libertarian? Sure, but I was ten, I didn't know what libertarians were, I just understood that Sorka was having a very cool time as a happily free-range child exploring the Pernese landscape. I don't think it was until I read Mary Roach's Packing for Mars as an adult that I fully came to terms with the fact that going to space actually sounded like a deeply unpleasant time, logistically speaking, and let the faint wisps of the Dragonsdawn dream of First Feet Down on a beautiful new planet that's functionally just like Earth with bonus charming telepathic fauna dissipate into the ether.

I mean, it is sort of an open question though: early Pernese culture, potential paradise or libertarian cult? I do think McCaffrey knows that the colonist's blissful vision of If Everyone Has Enough Land For Themselves We Can All Just Be Chill And Not Actually Bother Society-Building is doomed to some degree of failure on account of bad actors, even before it's interrupted by Thread. She could have just made it a book about dealing with Thread and developing dragons about it, and it would probably be a better book if she did, but she's so grimly determined to put some bad actors in just to demonstrate she knows they exist. This at least is my theory of how we got Evil Sexy Avril Bitra, perpetrator of history's most inexplicable heist. "If I go on this fifty-year mission, I can steal some diamonds, steal an escape pod, launch myself back out into space, and get picked up back in a society that's moved on a hundred years from the one I left! Probably they'll still want diamonds and I'll re-adapt just fine!"

So, I can understand, I guess, why Avril Bitra. I don't understand and don't think I will ever understand why Avril Bitra's narrative foil is a would-be tradwife who nonconsensually aphrodisiaced her way into marriage with a man who has never shown any romantic interest in anything except cave systems and then spent the next eight years making a shocked Pikachu face about the fact that he continued to not be all that into her. Why is Sallah Telgar's plot in this book? What is it doing here? Why is Avril Bitra evilly torturing Sallah on the spaceship given so much page space and weird psychosexual intensity when literally nothing about this plot actually impacts the colony's situation IN ANY ACTUAL WAY? I thought a reread would leave me less confused about all this than I was when I was ten and in fact I think it did the opposite. Anne, please ... you must have had some thoughts about this, thematically, structurally ... I'm coming to you, hat in hand, asking for answers.

I do think it's very funny that in the years between 1968 and 1989 Anne McCaffrey decided that it was a bit embarrassing that she'd built biological differences into her dragons such that the queens don't breathe fire, and decided to blame it on the fact that the dragons were genetically designed by an Extremely Traditional Chinese Grandma instead. Is it also racist? Yes, extremely. But if we start talking about all the unfortunate well-meaning racism in Dragonsdawn we'll be here all day and I don't have that much day left. Racism aside I did find myself unexpectedly somewhat moved by the subplot I did not remember at all in which Kenjo Fusaiyuki, a guy who has made a Profound Mistake in moving to an isolated colony planet that's dedicated itself to being low-tech and abandoning spaceflight, desperately hoards fuel for as long as possible to put off the time when he will have to at last give up for good and all the thing he loves most and is best at in all the world.

And you know who could've saved Kenjo Fusaiyuki's life, if she had stopped to help the two guys Avril Bitra clonked on the head instead of uselessly pursuing her into space? YES, IT'S ANOTHER SALLAH TELGAR CRIME. Sallah Telgar, you have so much to answer for.

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thelaughingmuse

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althea_valara - Final Fantasy Tactics Liveblog Part 1
skygiants - (no subject)
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rionaleonhart - Fanfiction: The Robert/Everyone Agenda (The Goes Wrong Show, Robert/everyone)
rachelmanija - Authority, by Jeff Vandermeer
oursin - Rounding up stuff
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rachelmanija - The Measure, by Nikki Erlick
oursin - What IS the point
pauraque - Clarion III: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction and Criticism, ed. Robin Scott Wilson (1973)
osprey_archer - Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
rionaleonhart - Jonathan Suffers Surprisingly Frequent Stage Injuries For Someone Who Barely Makes It On Stage.
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anais_pf in thefridayfive - The Friday Five for 17 April 2026

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Final Fantasy Tactics Liveblog Part 1

(no subject)

(no subject)

Fanfiction: The Robert/Everyone Agenda (The Goes Wrong Show, Robert/everyone)

Authority, by Jeff Vandermeer

Rounding up stuff

Six years on (CN: far-from-fresh pet loss)

Book review: The Unworthy

Europa Missions

I have been on here for over a year, so time to add more friends!

Post and Jam: Patio Lanterns by Kim Mitchell [1986]

FIC: Kamen Rider Black, Kamen Rider Geats - Black!! Transformation

The Measure, by Nikki Erlick

What IS the point

Clarion III: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction and Criticism, ed. Robin Scott Wilson (1973)

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Jonathan Suffers Surprisingly Frequent Stage Injuries For Someone Who Barely Makes It On Stage.

(no subject)

(no subject)

The Friday Five for 17 April 2026

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