"The volunteer fire department, the ambulance squad as well, rely on contributions to their monthly pancake breakfast, to raise funds for a new engine."

-from Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer, 6:47:15

Arya made a face and hugged the wolfling tight. Nymeria licked her ear, and she giggled. (Arya I, AGoT)

--

“Girls don’t shave,” Arya said. “Maybe they should. Have you ever seen the septa’s legs?” She giggled at him. “It’s so skinny.” (Jon II, AGoT)

--

"Stay away?" Mercy giggled. She was a giggly sort of girl, was Mercy. "No. I've got to get closer." (Mercy, TWoW)

Mercy was a giggly sort of girl...and so was Arya, once upon a time.

mmmmrgghh something something mei nianqing's two cups of water xie lians two starving men and hua chengs cutting off pieces of yourself to give to others

mei nianqing asks "who do you save when you cannot save everyone?"

and xie lian asks "what happens afterwards? what if they want more? what if you have enough to save them, but not enough to satisfy them?"

and hua cheng asks "do they deserve it? is your suffering worth their ingratitude?"

Film & TV I Think About A Lot » I May Destroy You (2020) writer/dir. Michaela Coel

Your birth is my birth, your death is my death. This book is dedicated to Terry, my best friend.

Gave into the FOMO and dropped everything to reread the Hunger Games series, then read the prequel, and now I can't find anything else I want to read

I’m really interested to see how the permit-based economy is going to work out throughout the new hermitcraft season. It seems like a really interesting way to do shops, especially with the interaction between “every shop is by definition a monopoly” and “anyone can make their own farm if they don’t like the prices, because minecraft.” Considering that irl we’re experiencing the effects of monopolies in real time, it’ll be v v cool to see how they play out in a minecraft world, where the economy works on very different principles (such as people making their own farms, collecting their own resources, or mining their own diamonds)

It’s even more cool because we’ve already seen people making farms they’ve never done before because of this, and then we also have people like Tango and Cub who are using this as an excuse to go absolutely hog wild on something they’re already super interested in (e.g. Tango’s redstone factory and Cub’s fireworks)

It seems like the hermits are all respecting the permit rules for now, which is gonna foster some really cool server-wide effects as the season progresses. And then at some point it’s all gonna escalate to insanity and come crashing down like Ren’s kingship, which I also can’t wait to see

Overall a really cool idea for this season’s shopping district!

A book asks the reader to imagine any sensory input of the story, whereas a film or TV show provides both sound and visuals. Audio fiction lives in the space between these two approaches. I think there's a unique power to that middle ground. I love how audio drama asks the listener to co-construct their sensory experience of the story.

Audio drama allows me to simultaneously experience 'This character feels real to me because I've heard their voice' and 'This character feels real to me because I've pictured them myself'.

What the characters are experiencing is both directly presented to me and left to my imagination. There's no page or screen between me and the story. It's there in my ears. It's there in my mind's eye.

There's a strange sense of intimacy to that, the intimacy of feeling like a fly on the wall during a conversation or of hearing a character speaking as if directly to me. Perhaps it sounds contradictory to say that experiencing a story only through sound allows me to feel uniquely connected to that story, but that's one of the reasons why I love audio fiction so much.

RICHMOND I AM LOSING MY MIND!!! PLEASE START PEOMOTING THE KICKSTARTER! I WILL GIVE YOU SO MUCN OF MY MONEY FOR BILL ITEMS

Did anyone else like solangelo more when it was just Rick writing them or

Dear God, help me. Where are my nameless saints? Where are the angels with their feathered wings to carry me down into hell? When they do come, are they the last beautiful thing that you see? As you go down into the lake of fire, can you still follow their progress heavenward? Can you hope for one last glimpse of their golden trumpets, and their upturned faces reflecting the radiance of the face of God? What do I know of heaven?

For long moments I stood there, staring at the distant night-scape of pure clouds, and then back at the twinkling lights of the new hotels, flash of headlamps.

A lone mortal stood on the far sidewalk, staring in my direction, but perhaps he did not note my presence at all-a tiny figure on the lip of the great sea. Perhaps he was only looking towards the ocean as I had been looking, as if the shore were miraculous, as if the water could wash our souls clean.

Once the world was nothing but the sea; rain fell for a hundred million years! But now the cosmos crawls with monsters. ~ Lestat, TotBT

Her brother laughed a little. “Ah, Shae, if you decided to betray me, what could I do? What’s the point of life if you can’t even trust your own kin?” He kicked her foot under the table, a teasing, childish gesture. “For you to hand my head over to the Mountain, you must really hate me. I must be such a terrible brother that I’d deserve to die. So there was nothing to be done about it.”

- Jade City, Fonda Lee

just finished system collapse and i literally almost CRIED reading the last two paragraphs, not because anything bad or upsetting happened, but simply from the power of murderbot & ART's friendship. what the fuck!!!!!!

Zhu Yilong’s reactions to OTRF Author Yu Hua (Laoshi) praising his acting, his character, his dedication, and saying he’s a true artist. [X]

A little while ago I remember seeing a post about These Old Shades that talked about ... sort of the eroticism of hiding/revealing one's sex and the just. Overall horniness of the whole thing. At the time I hadn't actually read the book, but now I have and want to reread the post ... was it you???

I have never read These Old Shades, but I vaguely recall @glintglimmergleam discussing it---I believe she's out celebrating for the next few days, but I'm sure she'd be down to discuss Heyer once she gets back!

not fic related but you and your wife seem so happy! any advice for a couple of newly married queer ladies?

Hey, I love any excuse to talk about being gay and happy! Congrats on being newly married! I dunno, my advice is always really straightforward. Like. Keep prioritizing communication, keep talking to each other about your day, your headspace, the stuff you love, the stuff that freaks you out. Keep that line open no matter how long you're together, because I really do think marriages fall apart when you start just assuming you can read one another's minds. My wife and I are always really careful to be honest with one another; for example, in the event that one of us is having a bad day and the other person's jokes aren't landing, 'cuz we're just sensitive that day, we talk about it. it soothes hurt feelings before they can really take root.

And find ways of making your own fun. Try new foods together, travel if you're into that, remind yourself that intimacy (if that's your bag) is an excuse to just play with one another and learn about the other person. Cherish the comfort of knowing your person is there for you no matter what, make sure you're on equal footing together, make sure you're allowing each other the space to change and grow and learn. And just take as much joy as you can out of being in love. It's not an easy thing, living in the world right now, but love makes it a damn sight more bearable. Queer love is awesome, queer joy is awesome. I wish you all the best, friend.

i finished tell me i'm worthless... boy, was that disappointing.

i'll put this under a break because it's long and tw for antisemitism

most of my original criticism still stands. overall i feel like this majorly missed the mark. it's a shame because i think the core idea is interesting, but rumfitt didn't have the skill to pull it off.

one, i think this book is way too edgy. obviously i read and enjoy extreme horror so i'm familiar with it and i understand the purpose of it here (how could i not, she tells me a billion times directly in the book) but it did feel gratuitous and almost silly. i get that this was the house's influence - the characters are all breaking under FascismTM - but yeesh. this book could have existed entirely without most of this gratuitous writing and would have been better for it.

two, again, way too online. embarrassingly online.

three, some of the choices were.... Interesting. ila in particular was not working for me. it was obvious that ila existed just to counter alice's racism and antisemitism and that resulted in it being so incredibly forced - literally felt like the guy racist people online make up to get mad at. "well what if a jewish pakistani lesbian who is actually a closeted trans man was a T*RF and called me a slur?"

whatever rumfitt was trying to do with these characters, it failed. both characters are just empty vessels. alice feels like the main character, a white trans woman that hides her racism and antisemitism behind leftist speak and performative gestures. meanwhile ila was just a guy that was made up solely to foil alice as a T*RF and weakly attempt to counteract her white womanhood and ila was the flatter character because of it. of course ila is a person that could exist in real life i guess, and i do understand what was trying to be discussed here - this kind of intracommunity conflict, the way marginalized people will turn on each other & become complicit out of fear and desperation (the book literally calculates "intersectionality scores" for the three characters, for fuck's sake) but... come on. yes these people are horrible and the house is bringing it out of them, but could you be a little more subtle, have a little finesse? one of the girls literally has her body broken into the shape of a swastika. come oooonnnnn......

i wish this was a better book. the idea behind the house and the house being its own character is what interested me the most. the house as this symbol of their trauma, this haunted thing that is always looming over them. the walls of the house as the constant crushing pressure that marginalized people feel to conform under fascism. the house is a monster with roots that spread through the entire country. but this was wasted. i wish the book had focused more on that, i wish it was more of a haunted house novel instead of, again, a twitter call out speedrun. this book mentions twitter, 4chan, and tumblr, ila gets "cancelled" on twitter, and i cannot stress enough that the book calculates intersectionality scores. but there is no real commentary made, there is no real reflection or criticism of the "oppression olympics" on display here. it just points it out for us in case we didn't get it, and then later there's a chapter-long ramble that tries to take another swing at it and fails, in my opinion.

it's disappointing that both of rumfitt's novels revolve so heavily around twitter/the internet. i undersand its significance, as a gay person online, but these books are so limited in scope. they will not hold up to the passage of time, and anyone that is not super online will not connect with these stories. of course i'm not trying to say that everyone should be trying to write the next Great Classic, and i don't expect anyone to write something just to appeal to a wider audience, but in my opinion this reliance on twitter and 4chan and "cancel culture" is extremely detrimental and honestly embarrassing to read, and i also feel like i know way more than i should about alison rumfitt and how she spends her time online.

and rumfitt really needs an editor to tell her to pull back on the overexplaining. she seems to be really logged in so maybe she thinks her readers have the reading comprehension of a twitter user, but the overwriting is awful. the few times she does something interesting she immediately undermines it by overexplaining it or fumbling desperately to justify it for the next five pages. she takes quotes and ideas from other authors - audre lorde, shirley jackson, isabel fall, just to name a few, but she seems to fail to grasp what actually made their work so compelling. it's all very flat. she directly states the entire metaphor of the novel within the first chapter - the house is fascism and we're all haunted and possessed by it. and then she beats you over the head with it for the entire rest of the book.

i will say that i can appreciate her attempting to grapple with this conundrum of forgiveness (though i detest that it was presented through a lens of "cancel culture"). ila and alice both do horrible things, and we know why - they were desperate and afraid. but (supposedly, we don't ever see this on the page) they change and become better people by the epilogue. they resist the house, they resist fascism. this needed to be shown on page to work, but instead the book ends abruptly and we are given a single page summary of ila and alice getting together afterwards. where was the character development? what about all the people ila and alice hurt? what about hannah? i'm not asking for a happy ending, but give me something. these characters were literally empty. there was nothing there except the hateful ideologies they represented. ultimately i did not care enough for either of them to be invested in this question of forgiveness or what happened to them after the house. i just wanted the book to be over.

i'm honestly kind of baffled by how recommended and hyped this book is. though i do find this problem pretty often in the indie horror space; if something it gratuitous and shocking (here it's just racist and antisemitic and transphobic) people will rate it higher just because they think it's "transgressive" and that automatically makes it good and smart. it's not. this book is trying very hard to say something but somehow it says nothing to me.... there is no real substance.