"She’s not you."

"No. She’s not Rue."

"Yeah. Yeah, she’s not Rue."

every. single. time.

I don't want to, but I love you.

Amy Winehouse - Love Is A Losing Game (2006)

After watching GO ep 6, Amy Winehouse's Love is a losing game has been stuck in my head ~

( Yes I learnt how to make gifs because of this show send help please 😭 )

memories mar my mind, love is a fate resigned

over futile odds and laughed at by the gods

Hello ! I wanted to ask you something for the ask day but my mind seems to freeze each time I try to think of a good question... So, I wondered if there was a question you did not get asked yet but you'd like to answer anyway?

Heya! Thanks so much for sending this, I had to think for a bit to try to figure out what kind of question I wanted to answer. So I'm gonna talk a little about doing research for my fics!

I am pretty much constantly doing research for every fic I write. Unless I manage come up with a scenario in which I know everything about it (unlikely), you can be sure I'm googling everything from fancy kinds of cheese to google image searches of locations to pulling up maps of an area. I tried to think of a fic I didn't do research for and thought maybe Step Into My Office, Baby (office AU, takes place entirely in a fictional office building), except I remembered that I googled Thai restaurants near the south end of Central Park, where it's ostensibly located (the restaurant I name check in that one? Noodies? 100% real).

The single fic that I did the most research was Love is a Losing Game. That sucker was intense. Every chess tournament was real, the games were largely real, many of the tournament outcomes were based on real events, and I spent huge amounts of time reading late-1960s back issues of Chess Life magazine and trawling through these crazy online databases that record every single game these grandmasters ever played. I tell you one thing it did was make me realize how much was completely ahistorical and fabricated in The Queens Gambit, lol.

That is a danger of doing too much research, you find out how often other people just... don't. 😂 I just want things to be as realistic as possible. I want to avoid having someone read my fic and say "that's not how X works!" and have it take them out of it. I know that that's impossible to avoid entirely, but I do my best to minimize it.

Happy 40th birthday Amy, you deserved the world.

10:24 AM EDT June 22, 2023:

Amy Winehouse - "Love Is A Losing Game" From the album Back to Black (October 27, 2006)

Last song scrobbled from iTunes at Last.fm

File under: Blue-and-Bloodshot-eyed Soul

"Though I battle blind Love is a fate resigned Memories mar my mind Love is a fate resigned Over futile odds And laughed at by the gods And now, the final frame Love is a losing game"

And like Amy Winehouse once said

Love is a losing game

One I wished I never played

Oh, what a mess we made

And now, the final frame

Love is a losing game