cahn

We are 24 hours into tag approving! We began with 6078 individual fandom nominations to sort (where if two people submitted the same fandom, that would count twice towards the total). We have 3687 fandom nominations still to sort. Please review the questions below to help us sort them quickly and correctly!

Please link your nominations page if telling us what to do about your nomination - thank you! Please either sign in to comment, or include a name with your anonymous comments, including replies to others' comments. Unsigned comments will stay screened.

If we've processed any of your nominations and something doesn't look right, please comment (with your nominations page) to tell us about the problem and how you think it should be corrected. Questions are welcome.

Aliens (1986) - These characters are also nominated under the broader fandom Alien (Original Movies 1979-1997), so we would like to merge your nominations in with the rest of the original movies.

Bibi Blocksberg (2002) - Nominator, do you specifically only want the first movie, or may we approve this as the canonical Bibi Blocksberg (Movies 2002 2004)? Please link your nominations page when you reply.

Book of Night - Holly Black - We also have evidence for this fandom as the Charlatan Duology, and another participant has nominated it under that name. We’d like to combine your nominations, but please get us in touch if there’s a reason that won’t work. Please link your nominations page when you reply.

Clocktaur War Series - T. Kingfisher, Swordheart - T. Kingfisher, Temple of the White Rat Universe - T. Kingfisher, The Saint of Steel - T. Kingfisher - We have some overlap in these nominations. The fandom as a whole is eligible, so we could combine them under Temple of the White Rat Universe, or the Temple of the White Rat Universe nominator could have their characters split into the other fandoms if you are willing to do that. Please comment with a link to your nominations to help us sort this out!

Cousin Bette - Honoré de Balzac - Nominator, you may see some oddities as we get this set up separately from La Comédie Humaine. Pardon our dust, and hopefully you’re used to it by now! Let us know if anything looks wrong when the final tagset is released.

Designing Women - Nominator, please email us (see contact information in the footer).

Dragonfly - Ursula K. Le Guin, Earthsea - Ursula K. Le Guin, The Tombs of Atuan - Ursula K. Le Guin - Our understanding is that these are all in the same continuity. We are planning to combine Earthsea and Tombs of Atuan, especially as there is character overlap in those nominations. Dragonfly nominator, do you have concerns with folding that nomination into Earthsea as well? If so, we would appreciate help understanding exactly what you’re looking for and how to differentiate the larger Earthsea universe.

Enchanted Forest Chronicles - Patricia Wrede - We won’t approve the character nomination Morwen's Cats (Enchanted Forest) as they are all individually named. Nominators, could you please each choose a cat? (Scorn has already been nominated.) Please link your nominations page when you reply.

MAIJO Otaro - Works - We don’t approve fandoms consisting of all of a creator’s works, and the nominated characters appear to come from at least 2 novels. Nominator, could you pick one of Maijō’s works to nominate, along with the associated characters? Please link your nominations page when you reply.

夢中さきみに。| Muchuu sa Kimi ni (Manga) - We also have a nomination for the Anime; the nominator of that fandom says they have not read the manga but believes these could be combined if needed. Does the Manga nominator have a preference? Please link your nominations page when you reply.

Mystery Science Theater 3000 - Nominator, please email us (see contact information in the footer).

Nescafe Advertisment - While this is a canonical fandom on AO3, it’s under review to be renamed, so we’ll approve this as Nescafe "Arctica" | "Polar Explorers" Advertisments (Russia) which is the likely new name. However, we’d like more information on the characters. We’re not sure which of the men is “First Polar” and which is “Second Polar”; some works in the fandom use Ivanov and Petrov. Also, we haven’t seen a polar bear in the 3 ads we’ve found - can you link us to the one that has the polar bear, please?

老洞 | The Old Miao Myth (TV) - Nominator, for the character Jin Bong, are you looking for Chin Pong? We’ve checked several sources and want to confirm whether this is a romanization issue or something else.

Outcast (Video Game series) - this has been nominated with character 'Any' and no other characters. If you mean you are interested in any characters, we will approve this without characters, but we wanted to check just in case there is a character actually named Any. Please link your nominations page when you reply.

Phantom of the Paradise (1974) - Nominator, please email us (see contact information in the footer).

Prophet - Sin Blaché & Helen Macdonald - could we please get more information about 'Prophet' as a character (aside from being the title)?

Spinal Tap II: The End Continues (2025) - Nominator, please email us (see contact information in the footer)

Tennis RPF - We have separate nominations for 2020's Men's Tennis RPF (characters: Alejandro Davidovich Fokina, Alex de Minaur, Taylor Fritz, Terence Atmane) and 2025 Grand Slam Season (Tennis) RPF (characters: Carlos Alcaraz, Jannik Sinner) - may we combine these under the former fandom name? Please link your nominations page when you reply.

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psocoptera

Metal From Heaven, August Clarke, 2024 fantasy novel. I am not shy about how much I like a book with momentum and this is definitely not one - after a promising (and intense) opening, I spent a good two-thirds of it slogging my way through. It took until midpoint for anything like a plot trajectory to develop (along with a sudden dump of new characters) and I don't even know now what the hell was happening between 10% and 50% and why there was so much of it. And then even when the plot emerged, it was disjointed and muddled. But! I can't simply disrecommend it, because there's good stuff here too. It's a big ambitious book and I appreciate that; Clarke does some nice work with details of setting and place and aesthetic; when the geopolitical plot shows up, this is the kind of book where all the world's key players happen to be queer women and that doesn't feel forced. If you get tired of cozy and its sometimes-lean into twee, this is a book where people are messy to the point of being awful, and sex might be a way of genuinely wanting to hurt each other (or hurt oneself). There was a wildly funny gonzo sequence around the 80% mark that felt worth a lot of the slog and then a development around 90% that gave the last arc of the book all the motivation and urgency that had been missing. Recommended for fans of Catherynne Valente, the Locked Tomb series, and people who are faster readers than me, who will take fewer weeks wading through the slow parts.

Spoilers: ( Read more... )

psocoptera

The Nefarious Nights of Willowweep Manor, Shaenon K. Garrity and Christopher Baldwin, 2025 YA SFF graphic novel. Sequel to The Dire Days of Willowweep Manor, and despite opening with a charming little recap, I think you will want to have read that one to appreciate this one. If you have read that one you know it was delightful and this one is as well - fun new characters and an expansion of the premise, some excellently silly moments, Baldwin's adorable art, great stuff.

Spoilers: ( Read more... )

primeideal

Saw this as a recommendation for the pirates square, enjoyed Hardinge's "Unraveller" enough to try her again!

Premise: an archipelago setting (the "Myriad') where, until thirty years ago, terrifying and unknowable sea monsters ruled as gods. Now, the gods are dead, and humans are trying to move forward, mostly by salvaging the dead gods' corpses and using them as fantasy tech. So in that "arms race" respect, it's very reminiscent of "Shadow of the Leviathan," and having read those books kind of primed me to guess a couple of the twists along the way.

Frecht was the old word, a harsh word ragged with superstitious awe. It was an ugliness and otherness that could only be holy, a breach of the rules that echoed those that no rules could bind. The ancient, sacred buildings aspired to that sublime distortion. Frecht transcended beauty and carried you into a realm of awe and terror. It demanded your slavish devotion. Nobody used the word anymore, for it dripped with the memory of the gods. However, sometimes people said beautiful and meant frecht.

Our protagonist is Hark, a teenager who comes from poverty and makes his way in the world by scamming and bluffing people.

He’d never been captain of anything in his life. He hadn’t even been captain of his own life.

Hark's parents died when he was young; his best friend/found family is Jelt, a boy his age who keeps dragging him into schemes. Unfortunately, they have what to the readers is clearly a horrifically abusive relationship. Pretty soon, a scheme goes awry, and Hark winds up being sold into slavery/indentured servitude, a way of life that the characters are all cheerfully blase about. His con artist skills come in handy, though, and he winds up as the part-time assistant to a mad scientist (there are shades of Ana and Din if you squint, although I probably wouldn't have made that parallel if I hadn't already been primed by the setting to think of "Shadow of the Leviathan"), and part-time caretaker at a nursing home for elderly priests who couldn't cope with the "Cataclysm" a generation ago.

Because of the pervasity of diving, salvage, plunder, etc. on the Myriad, divers needed to evolve a rudimentary signing system. And then being underwater for long periods of time can cause hearing loss, so the signs evolved into full-fledged sign languages; there are a lot of people with various levels of hearing loss, and a thriving Deaf culture. The other main character, Selphin, is the daughter of Rigg, the pirate captain; Selphin is deaf, and as fearsome and swashbuckling a pirate as any other, except that her misadventures have left her with a phobia of water.

There are a lot of layers of complexity here. Some deaf people can read lips, some remember how to speak spoken languages well, someone who has a community of fellow signers around them is not necessarily socially disabled, but there are times when Selphin resents not being able to hear and wouldn't mind being "cured" of this condition. On the other hand, she's very averse to having any treatment for her mental health issues; it feels like it would be altering her deepest self. All of this felt very thoughtful and true-to-life.

About halfway through the book, one of Hark's priest friends challenges him:

“Perhaps you need to work out which parts of yourself are essential to your nature. Who are you? What aspects of yourself would you fight to protect, as if you were fighting for your life?”
Hark’s mind went blank. What could he say about himself?
Hark is Shelter-bred. Hark tells stories. Hark lies. Hark can haggle in fifteen languages. Hark is Jelt’s best friend, closer than blood. Hark holds the Shelter record for the longest time holding a racing crab with bare hands . . . None of these sounded right. They were true, but they didn’t describe the heart of him.

But we, the readers, don't really have any better answer than he does. Basically most of what we've learned about him so far is "Hark tells stories, Hark lies, Hark is Jelt's best friend, closer than blood." By the end of the book, he finally seems to have figured out what's most important to him, and I'm not sure that was entirely earned.

But for fast-paced adventure, cool worldbuilding, and nuanced disability rep, overall this is a fun read!

Bingo: Pirates, probably Biopunk, Gods and Pantheons?

regshoe

Walking with Murder: On the Kidnapped Trail by Ian Nimmo (2005). Ian Nimmo is a serious Kidnapped fan who has traced out the entire route of David's wanderings across Scotland, walked it himself twice—once in 1960 and once forty years later—and done a lot of research besides into the history and geography of the novel; this book is the result. There's a lot of fascinating material in here, including much that brought parts of Kidnapped to life in new ways for me and some original investigations into the Appin murder, and it's highly recommended for all fans. I did think the book could have done with making clearer and more decisive choices about its subject matter: as it is it's a book about the geography of Kidnapped which turns in the middle into a book about the history of the Appin murder before turning back again, while making occasional digressions into general Scottish geography and changes to the country over time, and while all the material was interesting it could perhaps have been better organised. Also there are parts where Nimmo should have chosen between quoting verbatim from Kidnapped or broadly paraphrasing, because doing something that's not quite one or the other really doesn't work. Also I dislike his decision—having explained that RLS's one-L spelling of Alan Breck Stewart's name distinguishes the fictional character from the historical Allan—to continue using the two-L spelling throughout, even when clearly referring only to the fictional character. But I nitpick like this because the book was so interesting! I do recommend it. I was especially impressed by Nimmo's identification, independently corroborated by two other people, of a plausible specific spot on the hillside in Leitir Mhòr wood from where the murderer of Colin Campbell might have fired the shot.

Jane's Island by Marjorie Hill Allee (1931). This was one of

osprey_archer's recommended Newbery Prize winners, which means it's a very good classic American children's book. I enjoyed it a lot! Zoological research and the power of cooperation and friendship across cultural and national boundaries are an excellent set of subjects for a children's book, and I loved all the scientific and natural-historical detail as well as the characters. Some observations:
1) The main character—Jane, the twelve-year-old daughter of a zoologist and keen naturalist herself—is the typical 'same age as or a little older than the target audience', but the story is told mostly from the point of view of a slightly older character, seventeen-year-old Elsie, who's looking after Jane for the summer (not quite a nanny or a governess; I would have described her role as 'au pair, but not foreign'; was that a thing?), and I thought that was an interesting choice.
2) A fairly important plot point involves rival researchers' teams of field workers gathering wild planarians (flatworms) from the seashore for their experiments; the characters worry that one team will gather too many and there won't be enough for the other, but no one ever appears to consider the planarian population itself a potential issue. The nature conservation movement definitely existed by 1931, but apparently it and scientific zoology hadn't met yet!
3) Yes, this book is both generally pro-tomboy and not quite entirely comfortable with gender non-conformity in girls and women in an also interesting way. It's admirable to encourage scientific careers like this, but all the same there are a couple of bits I'm glad I didn't read when I was Jane's age.
4) Why do all the American books I read from around this period go on about people from Boston spending their summers in the countryside/on the coast? Why is that such an important thing to keep coming up??

The Sirens Sang of Murder by Sarah Caudwell (1989). After reading this book (the third of four) I like the series enough to have nominated it for Yuletide—and specifically Julia and Selena, because a) if Julia is going to keep getting mistaken for a lesbian the least she deserves is actually to get to be a lesbian and b) I'm sure Selena would treat her better than any of these men do—so I'll have to read book four by sign-up time and I hope there's no very major continuity for those two in there. This one is a murder mystery about tax dodging, and gets a lot of humour out of its subject matter but also some genuinely cool and evocative settings (second most notable book set in the Channel Islands, I reckon, after Sir Isumbras at the Ford). As with previous books it's partly narrated in first person by Hilary and partly epistolary—this time in the form of messages sent by telex, which was a new word for me, which just goes to show how technology progresses. I did think it was pretty badly let down by the (rather Arthurian) rape-by-deception played for comedy; the comedic treatment of sex in these books is a bit of a thing—sometimes it's hilarious, sometimes it goes too far. I have bought book four and it's due to arrive tomorrow, so we shall see.

skygiants

VOYAGER CATCH UP. I said I wanted to post about the first half of S6 before we were actually done with s6 and have not .... quite achieved that, technically, but TODAY we start the seventh and final season so I feel like if I post today it more or less counts, spiritually, emotionally, etc.

( Voyager Season 6, episodes 1-13 )

Overall early S6 not a high point in our Voyager experience, with some exceptions; it feels like we're on a little bit of a downward arc after the highs of S4/S5, but we will see what the future holds!

troisoiseaux

Read Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood, her second work of autofiction (after her more or less autobiographical novel No One Is Talking About This and straight-up memoir Priestdaddy), based on her experience with long Covid and her husband's own serious medical crisis a few years later. The first half of the book is written in a disorienting, fragmented way that evokes the narrator/main character/Lockwood's (novel alternates between first and third person) experience of illness and brain fog (or "Brian fog"); I found myself frequently having to re-read passages a couple of times to untangle what was happening. There is a whole chapter about doing mushrooms and reading Anna Karenina and honestly it might be the least convoluted part of the book.

There's a meta sort of intimacy about the way Lockwood writes obliquely about very specific, often recognizable people and occurrences, a sort of if you know, you know. Per the Guardian, "Will There Ever Be Another You assumes a fluency in Lockwood. Fandom is the price of entry here: not just a familiarity with the cult author’s work, but with her life" [x]— I was actually startled by the details of her life that I recognized from the internet, such as the time her cat (the Miette, from the meme) ate a lizard and tripped balls. And not just her life: I immediately recognized the reference to an author named Susanna who spent "{t}en years in a dark room, writing about a man in a maze" while also suffering from a disorienting chronic illness (i.e., Susanna Clarke, Piranesi, chronic fatigue syndrome); I finally figured out that the "Heidi" referred to throughout is Heidi Schreck of What the Constitution Means to Me fame, who is(?) indeed working with Lockwood on a pilot of a TV show.

Reading this concurrently with Grief Is For People by Sloane Crosley was interesting, because the effect was kind of like standing between two stereos playing different songs with just enough of a similar beat— both chronicle the experience of being unmoored by loss (in Lockwood's case, the loss of her infant niece to a genetic disorder and her sense of self to long Covid; in Crosley's, the loss of a close friend to suicide and family heirlooms/jewelry to a home invasion and everyday life in New York City to the pandemic), with secondary themes of writers on writing/the publishing industry/art and, of course, the pandemic— that they started to blur together; I was going to say that my takeaway from both books is that I should finally get around to reading Joan Didion, but no, having double-checked, besides a passing name-drop in Will There Ever Be Another You the Didion references were all Crosley's. Other books this reminded me of was, in the very, very loose sense that both are memoirs where the author's close platonic relationship with a male colleague turned friend plays a major narrative role, Hope Jahren's Lab Girl and, for more obvious thematic similarities (suicide, books), Sarah Chihaya's Bibliophobia— sort of a flip side of that coin.

dolorosa_12

My four-day weekend has reached its final day, and although it hasn't been quite as relaxing as I intended, it has been a lot of fun. Matthias and I just came back from a little Sunday market wander in the rain, and I'm now curled up in the living room in my wing chair, a takeaway coffee in hand, watching people walk by and the raindrops fall. The sky is white, rather than grey, and it feels as if we are under cotton wool.

This weekend has involved two trips into Cambridge. On Friday night, Matthias and I had booked to attend a collaborative event between the upmarket wine sellers and one of the restaurants, with wine from Bordeaux and a French-ish five-course dinner. We've been to several of these types of events, although all the others have been in one of the wine seller's shops and more like a wine-tasting with canapés, rather than a full sit-down restaurant meal. I was amused to discover that the restaurant was actually run by the guy who used to manage the wine cellars and catering at my old Cambridge residential college (on one memorable occasion, I was invited on a tour of the extensive underground cellars, led by him, by virtue of the fact that I lived in a share house with a woman who was the head of the college's postgraduate student committee). He was already an older man when I knew him in college, so I'm amused that he's elected to spend his 'retirement' doing something as stressful as running a restaurant! In any case, the food was good, the wine was excellent, but the people organising things had clearly failed to consider the fact that not everyone attending actually lived in Cambridge — things went on until after 11pm, and we had to dash out to make the last train (which was inevitably delayed by half an hour), and didn't get to bed until close to 1am. I was not super thrilled to be waking up at 7am on Saturday morning to go to two hours of classes at the gym, that's for sure!

Our second trip in to Cambridge was somewhat spontaneous, as

misshoijer announced on Thursday that she'd be in the city for a flying visit, and would anyone like to meet up on Saturday afternoon. She's a friend from my postgraduate days in Cambridge — she did her undergrad degree in the same department where I did my MPhil and PhD, and for three years, I sat in on her undergraduate medieval Welsh classes (by the third year, it was just her, one other guy, and me, and we grappled with medieval Cornish and Breton as well). She moved back to Sweden a couple of years ago and I hadn't seen her for ages, so it was good to catch up — and all done in a logistically straightforward way that meant I didn't have to go into central Cambridge on the same Saturday when all the students moved back in for the start of the new academic year: she, Matthias and I met in a pub that was literally on the train station platform, we had one drink, and then she went on to London and we went back to Ely, where we tried a new Indian restaurant for dinner. This restaurant is in somewhat cursed location on the high street — it used to be a nightclub (so the space is big) which closed down at some point during or immediately after the pandemic lockdowns, then it got turned into an extremely mediocre cocktail bar (we went once and were basically the only people there in a cavernous space — very depressing), which then closed down, and it had been sitting empty for several years when suddenly I saw that it was alive and kicking as an Indian restaurant. The food was excellent (and absurdly cheap) — southern Indian food from Kerala, which is probably my favourite. We were home by 9.30, and I was asleep by 10pm.

I've only finished one book this week, but what a book it was: Tori Bovalino's adult fantasy debut, The Second Death of Locke, which was much anticipated on my part, and definitely exceeded my high expectations. I should warn everyone that my enjoyment is entirely due to the fact that it is very much My Kind of Nonsense — self-indulgent in a way that really suits my particular tastes and preferences when it comes to character dynamic. (Amusingly, it also manages to involve two separate ideas that teenage me had for fantasy novels that never saw fruition at my hands — when I say it is my kind of nonsense, I'm not kidding.) This is a world in which magic springs from intense bonds between mages and their human sources (called 'wells'); the former draws on the latter for all manner of supernatural outcomes. It's also a world in which the source of magic is running dry, due to an act of betrayal some years previously in which the titular island and dynasty of Locke (from whence springs all magical power) was annihilated, save a lost heir whom all other powers in the land are fighting to locate and control as their magical power source puppet.

Into this chaos step our two focal characters: Kier, a mage fighting in the army of one of these countries, and Grey, his well and childhood best friend (she's an orphan and was in effect raised by his family; she's also secretly in love with him and has been pining unrequitedly for many years). When they're tasked with escorting a captured hostage teenage girl to a potential ally, this perilous quest risks exposing the pair's many dangerous secrets, with implications for the wider political and supernatural context in which they find themselves. The characters' absolutely intense bond is at the heart of the novel, and if you like stories where characters are loyal to one another to absurdly self-sacrificing degrees (barely a few chapters pass without either Kier or Grey putting themselves in life-threatening danger in order to save the other), you will find lots to enjoy here.

As with many current ostensibly adult fantasy novels, although the characters are in their twenties, it still does feel a bit YA in terms of the relationships, and the whole thing is a bit of a teenage girl power fantasy (at least for the kind of teenage girl I was), but I had an absolutely fantastic time reading it, and won't apologise for that! If I had read it slightly sooner, I would possibly have nominated it for Yuletide.

This morning has been absurdly productive — I've already been to the pool, done a load of laundry (hanging inside, much to my disappointment, due to the rain), done a yoga class, and, as previously mentioned, strolled around the market. I'm looking forward to a few hours spent lying around and doing very, very little. I picked up a copy of Half of a Yellow Sun (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) from a free book exchange outside a house near the river, and I imagine it will feature heavily in this afternoon's plans. Next week is the start of the busiest few months of the year for me at work, and I'm hoping this weekend was enough of a reset in terms of my energy levels to leave me equal to the task.

snickfic

First: for my belly kink exchange that I ran in August, I ended up writing:
scenes in a stilltent, Dune (movies), Paul/Duncan, 1200 words, mpreg. This did not have nearly as much belly kink as I intended, but Duncan turned out to have so many feelings about the whole thing that it was a struggle to get to the kink. The recip seemed to really like it though. <3

And then, today I finished posting that WIP I've been nattering about for ages! \o/

postcards from, Oasis RPF, Liam/Noel, 15k!!! of vignettes from first contact to the first gig of tour. Title is a riff on the video summaries like this one they've been doing at the end of their run at each venue. (They're less annoying on Instagram. IDK why they feel the need to do that stacked vertical thing everywhere else. ;__;)

I've never written anything quite like this before. There is obviously a general emotional arc from "not spoken in 12 years" to "going on stage together," but most of the scenes are intended to stand alone. There are very few callbacks between scenes. I also specifically set out to write only the vignettes I wanted to write, partly to avoid just getting totally overwhelmed, but for example that means that at no point during this fic do we seem them really hash stuff out or have big conversations. Presumably they had some, but those happen off screen.

I also mostly avoided writing denouments to scenes; they mostly end in the middle, or unresolved. Partly I was trying to write the opposite of one big scene where the characters work all their shit out in one long conversation, which I am sometimes prone to. And I think writers in general or prone to? It's convenient to take care of the whole conflict at once. Whereas here I kind of wanted to give these snapshots along the way, showing that repairing a relationship is a long process over time, often in the small moments. (But also I was lazy/intimidated about writing all the connective tissue, and if I'd tried that I wouldn't have been able to finish a fic, so.)

I also wrote this so fast, at least for me. I wrote the first 10k in three weeks, mostly in August, and then wrote the remaining 5k in the four weeks since.

Also, I decided to post a vignette a day, which was fun. I've never been able to do that with a fic before, but a lot of the vignettes were very short, some in the 200-word range, so one a day felt right. I accidentally timed it so the final chapter went live this morning, a few hours before Oasis performed their first gig in a couple of weeks. A commenter congratulated me on my deliberate timing, but no, that is definitely just how things fell out. (Nerdily, my priority was to get the fic all published within one calendar month for the sake of my stats keeping.) Also, look at me, posting fic outside an exchange!!

I'm still not sure what I actually think about it as a fic, because it's so different from my norm, but I had fun writing and posting it, and that's the whole point, right? There are a lot of lines I'm really happy with. Also it's my second fic this year over 15k, which feels fantastic after last year.

huberthubert posting in

little_details

Hello everyone!

I am writing a oneshot essentially set in the Zhangjiajie National Forest Park. My character is so surprised and overwhelmed by what he is seeing that I am introducing his senses one by one, but I couldnt quite imagine what it would smell like being in his position.

I know its quite humid, so thats probably the bulk of the experience, but are there any other, more subtle undertones I could include to make the scene feel more alive?
Even if you havent been to the exact location, any experience in a subtropical, humid climate would already be quite helpful.

Thank you!

skygiants

Q: So, did you expect to like Lev Grossman's The Bright Sword?

A: No. If I'm being honest, I did not pick up this book in a generous spirit: I haven't read any Grossman previously (though I watched some of The Magicians TV show) but my vague impression was that his Magicians books were kind of edgelordy, and also he annoyed me on a panel I saw him on ten years ago.

Q: Given all this, why did you decide to pick up his new seven hundred page novel?

A: I saw some promotional material that called it 'the first major Arthurian epic of the new millennium' and I wanted to fight with it.

Q: And now you've finished it! Are you ready to fight?

A: ... well ... as it turned out I actually had a good time ........

Q: Ah. I see. Did it have a good Kay?

A: NO. Kay does show up for a hot second and I did get excited about it but it's not for very long and he's always being an asshole in flashbacks. It has a really good Palomides though -- possibly the best Palomides I've yet encountered, which is honestly not a high bar but still very exciting. Also, genuinely, a good Arthur!

Q: Gay at all?

A: No, very straight Arthur. Bedivere's pining for him but it's very unrequired, alas for Bedivere. There is also a trans knight and you can tell that Lev Grossman is very proud of himself for every element of that storyline, which I thought was fine.

Q: What about the women, did you like them? Guinevere? Nimue? Morgan?

A: Well, I think Lev Grossman is trying his very best, and he really wants you to know that he's On Their Side and Understands Their Problems and Respects Their Competence and, well, I think Lev Grossman is trying his very best.

Q: Lancelot?

A: I have arguments with the Lancelot. Can we stop going down a character list though and talk about --

Q: God?

A: Okay, NOW we're talking. I don't know that I agree with Lev Grossman about God. Often I think I don't. Often while reading the book, I was like, Mr. Grossman, I think you're giving me kind of a trite answer to an interesting question. I don't actually think we need to settle this with a bunch of angels and a bunch of fairy knights having a big stupid fight around the Lance of Longinus. BUT! you're asking the question! You understand that if we're talking about Arthurian myths we have to talk about God! And we have to talk about fairy, and Adventures, and the Grail, and the legacy of Rome, and we have to talk about the way that the stories partake of these kind of layered and contradictory levels of myth and belief and historicity, and we don't have to try to bring all these into concordance with each other -- instead we can pull out the ways that they contradict, that it's interesting to highlight the contradictions. You can have post-Roman Britain, and you can have plate armor and samite dresses and the hunting of the white stag, and the old gods, and the Grail Quest -- you don't have to talk to just one strain of Arthuriana, you can talk to all of them.

Q: Really? All of them?

A: Okay, maybe not all of them, but a lot of them. I think that's why I liked it -- I think he really is trying to position himself in the middle of a big conversation with Malory and Tennyson and White and Bradley and the whole recent line of Strictly Historical Arthurs, and pull them into dialogue with each other. And, to be clear, I think, often failing! Often coming to conclusions I don't agree with! Often his answer is just like 'daddy issues' or 'depression,' and I'm like 'sure, okay.' But it's still an interesting conversation, it's a conversation about the things I think are interesting in the Matter of Britain -- how and why we struggle for goodness and utopia, how and why we inevitably fail, and a new question that I like to see and which Arthurian books don't often pick up on, which is what we do after the fall occurs.

Q: Speaking of the matter of Britain, isn't Lev Grossman very American?

A: Extremely. And this is a very American Arthuriana. It wants to know what happens when the age of wonders is ending -- when life has been good for a while, within a charmed circle, and now things are falling apart; but the charmed circle itself was built on layers of colonial occupation and a foundational atrocity, and maybe that did poison it from the beginning. So, you know. But I don't think any of this is irrelevant to the UK either --

Q: Well, you also are very American and maybe not best qualified to talk about that, so let's get back to characters. What did you think of Collum?

A: Oh, the well-meaning rural young man with a mysterious backstory who wants to be a knight and unfortunately rolls up five minutes after the fall of the Round Table, just in time to accompany the few remaining knights on a doomed quest to figure out whether Arthur is still alive somewhere or if not who should be king after him, in the actual main plot of the book?

Q: Yeah, him. You know, the book's actual protagonist.

A: Eh, I thought he was fine.

schneefink

I want to make a longer Murderbot rec post eventually (shout-out to

sholio who did that already, part 1 & part 2), but I'm very busy right now ~~and already procrastinating way too much - the bug game is very good okay~~ so this is a short one.

The Art of (Flame) War by

sholio
0,7k, TV-verse, gen MB & Gurathin, post-canon
Summary: A dispute on the Sanctuary Moon future chat boards.
Why I like it: Aww. MB has many feelings about Sanctuary Moon! So now does Gurathin, but he is less happy about it, but it does have upsides.

Down with the Ship by

ramshackle_fey
5.5k, book-verse, gen
Summary: Sometimes people are Just Wrong about your favorite media serial on the feed. And sometimes, if you're very lucky, you've got human friends and a giant asshole research transport to back you up in a fight.
Why I like it: This story did such a good job portraying terrible fandom discourse about aspec characters that it made me wince to read at times. It is good to have friends to back you up! I enjoyed Ratthi especially. And ART is scary.

RADIOACTIVE by Murderbot (vid) by

pollyrepeat
vid, TV-verse, Sanctuary Moon
Summary:A vid or fanvid is a video edit, often set to music, produced by fans, known as "vidders."
Why I like it: Yess Muderbot would make a great fanvidder, excellent.

yuletidemods posting in

yuletide_admin

Thank you for your nominations! Nominations are now closed. We have 6078 fandom nominations to sort through: that means that at least 1216 people nominated, but probably more. This is lower than our highest ever number of nominations received previously - 6257 - but higher than last year's 5950 nominations.

So, what happens next?
First there's a pause. We review the information we have already and get our ducks in a row. Then, when we begin to approve your nominations, it won't be in any obvious order. The approvals interface shows us fandoms at random, rather than according to who nominated them or when the nomination was submitted.

Help us get through approvals faster - please keep an eye on this community for questions about nominations we find confusing. In turn, if you are confused by how we've approved your nomination, you can ask us about it. If you submitted evidence close to the end of nominations, we may also have follow-up comments for you; however, we won't be accepting any evidence for new canons now that nominations are closed.

While we approve fandoms, you can:

Promote your rare fandoms here at a promo post!

Start writing your letter, if a letter is part of your approach to signing up!

When your nominations have been approved, let other participants know at the nominations coordination post on DW!

Subscribe to the pinch hit community yuletide_pinch_hits! (Pinch hitters are creators who put their hands up for extra assignments so everyone can get a gift.)

yuletidemods posting in

yuletide_admin

We need your fandom & character nominations by 1pm UTC 27 September. That’s 12 hours away!

See countdown!

If your fandom requires evidence, please also submit it by that time.

Please check previous posts in this community for guidance on what can be nominated.

Schedule, Rules, & Collection [still being tweaked for this year] | Contact Mods | Tag Set | Community DW | Community LJ | Discord | Pinch hits on Dreamwidth

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watersword

An excellent teaching experience today; the kids were more engaged and we had fewer tech snafus (and were better prepped to pivot for almost all of them), the one downside being that I did not act fast enough before the kids descended like locusts on the leftover lunchboxes and therefore I gotta get my own lunch.

But at least I had already prepared to buy myself dinner as a "yay you did a teaching!", so I can just get a gyro wrap and fries instead of bánh mì and spring rolls without any kind of emotional agonies.

A friend's yard sale is tomorrow and I have successfully offloaded a surprising number of things for that — two curtain sets! branded mugs! IKEA plates! — and I need to set up folks to care for the gherkin while I am away, and someone to pick up the corms for a public beautification project that is also happening then, and after a followup call, the Parks Department has finally finally admitted to looking at my pollinator garden plans and has feedback, which I gotta respond to. Also laundry needs to happen.

umadoshi

Woke up to a very classic autumnal bluster that made me just as glad to not have to venture outside, given the humidity. (One local on Bluesky: "It's a rainy day, and VERY warm. Expect individual ecosystems to form in your rain jacket this morning. Un-zipping the armpit holes for ventilation is a MUST this AM" Another local's response: "This is the sort of weather report I want. Not “plan for this temp or that precipitation”. I want “don’t straighten your hair, and make sure you have good armpit ventilation.”")

And our friendly local meteorologist measured 20.5mm of rain overnight--hardly drought-ending, but still very appreciated.

I don't know how widespread this sale is, but at least on Kobo Canada, the ebook of Margaret Eby's You Gotta Eat: Real-Life Strategies for Feeding Yourself When Cooking Feels Impossible is currently $2.99.

I've bought this book twice, when after reading it in ebook I really wanted a hard copy. Have I actually cooked from it? No. (No one is shocked.) But for a second rec,

runpunkrun reviewed it in a more informative way last month. (In comments there,

jesse_the_k noted that this subset of cookbooks--which includes other excellent books such as The Sad Bastard Cookbook--is called "struggle cooking".)

dolorosa_12

I'm a morning person. I have been all my life, to the extent that universalising statements such as 'all teenagers have body clocks that mean they need to sleep in and start school much later in the day,' have been causing me to roll my eyes since back when I was a teenager. In those days, I was getting up at 6 in the morning to do an hour's piano practice, or go to gymnastics classes or piano lessons before school, and that sort of thing! When I was an undergraduate, I used to get up at similarly early hours of the morning, and work a bit on my essays or presentations or Honours thesis before class; on days when I had no lectures or tutorials to attend, I'd stay at home, work on university work and read the books my editor had sent me to review and write the requisite review, and quite frequently finish up everything before lunchtime, after which point I would spend the afternoon lounging on the couch reading novels. Working from home during the pandemic suited me perfectly, because as long as I was around for scheduled meetings and online teaching, my workplace trusted me to manage my own time, so I'd frequently start work around 7am and finish in the early afternoon. I have literally never slept in later than about 8.30am in my entire life — my body doesn't let me.

The drawback to all this is that my energy decreases alarmingly each hour after lunch, and by the time I've got to about 3 or 4pm I'm basically useless. Since I work regular 9-5ish hours, I tend to store up brainless tasks for the last couple of hours of the day, and I've never been able to do much that requires any intellectual effort in the evening. All-nighters — that staple of teenage and university life — are incomprehensible to me, and I'm in awe of people who are able to produce meaningful work in such circumstances.

My prompt today is very much in light of all of the above: are you an early bird or a night owl — or do you switch between both states? Have you always been this way, or did things change at a certain point? How well does this all mesh with your lifestyle?

dolorosa_12

I'm rolling both months into one, as August TV was sparse, and September less so. I finished six shows in total, which were as follows:

Karen Pirie, the second season of a Scottish police procedural in which the titular character investigates cold cases. This one involved the kidnapping of the daughter and infant grandson of an oil billionaire in the 1980s, and as the mystery unfolded, assumptions about the motives behind, and consequences of, the kidnapping slowly became eroded. I quite enjoy this series, while finding the fact that the characters all continue to have jobs completely unbelievable, given all the rules they break in order to uncover the truth.

The Handmaid's Tale, which I stuck with until the bitter end, despite diminishing returns. I really only liked this before the showrunners ran out of book to adapt (i.e. the end of the first season), since what I find compelling about this story is the claustrophobia and the psychodrama taking place within the confines of a single household which represents Atwood's dystopian society in microcosm. As soon as things opened up wider, it began to become unbelievable — not in the sense of the fundamentalist misogynistic Christian dystopia (which is of course all too believable), but that any of the central characters managed to survive the various dangers in which they find themselves. Their plot armour took things to ridiculous levels, and a lot of things hinged on different characters taking it in turn to be stupid and unobservant each episode. By the time we got to the final season ( spoilers ) The acting and interpersonal character relationships remained top notch until the end, but I can't exactly recommend sticking with the show for its duration.

For a complete change of pace and vibe, I also watched the second season of Surreal Estate, which is a very silly monster-of-the-week show about a real estate agency specialising in selling houses that are literally haunted. Our ragtag team includes scientists, exorcists, and a couple of characters with supernatural abilities, which come in handy when communicating with the various ghosts who are hindering the swift sale of the houses for which the agents are responsible. There are a couple of overarching character threads, but I'm in it for the smaller stories, which are wrapped up in a single episode. It's a lot of fun, and I tend to use it as a palate-cleanser after heavier televisual fare.

Season 2 of Wednesday was split by Netflix into two drops of four episodes at a time, and I have to say I much preferred the second batch than the first. I appreciate that gothic stories need to have a strong emphasis on the mistakes of the past bubbling up to haunt characters in the present, but I feel that this season overused Wednesday's parents and relied too heavily on events from their generation's school days, and things picked up when the focus shifted back to Wednesday and her gang of teenage supernatural misfit friends charging off on their own to try to solve this season's mystery.

Bookish feels like a show lab-designed to appeal to Anglophile Americans: Mark Gatiss plays the eccentric owner of an antiquarian secondhand bookshop 1950s London, with a sideline in solving mysteries. The tone is decidedly cosy, albeit with an undercurrent of grief due in part to the austere postwar setting, but in the main due to Gatiss's character's backstory: ( spoilers ) It's a very self-indulgent show, and all the actors are clearly having a great time. For me, it was the perfect Sunday night fare: a bit of confectionery with which to close out the week.

Finally, there was the third, concluding season of The Newsreader, an Australian historical miniseries about fictional TV newsrooms in the 1980s, and the cast of outsized, messed up personalities who worked in them. In this final season, we've moved into 1989, and, as before, each episode picks a real-world major news story (mainly global, but sometimes local to Australia), interweaving the characters' attempts to bring this story to air with their own significant individual and communal struggles. The first two seasons of the show were absolutely brilliant, and I think the third stuck the landing, in the sense that every character got what they deserved, in a manner heavy with poetic justice — although the degree to which the two incredibly damaged newsreader characters ended on their feet, in spite of everything, did somewhat strain credulity. For me — someone who grew up with an Australian TV journalist father in the 1980s and 1990s — all of this (including some of the terrible characters) was painfully familiar and achingly nostalgic. Amusingly, early on I expressed a desire to Matthias for crossover fanfic between this show and another fabulous 1980s-set TV miniseries, Deutschland 83, and by the end, such a crossover scenario was, if not plausible, at least theoretically possible!

lannamichaels

-Adventures of buying a serger: I have gone from "the bottom looper always comes out" to "the upper looper always comes out" with the occassional "the right needle always comes out" and yet somehow I did manage to sew a couple seams before this inability-to-keep-the-machine-threaded problem started, I have watched videos, I have called the company, I have not yet wept tears over it but I am so frustrated, so hopefully telling people will make the machine stop unthreading and then I figure out the tension issues and then I can serge.

-Where is a good place to buy desk lamps? The one I had broke and then I spent a while trying to find one including going to a hardware store, and then I found out that home depot has two listings with what appears to be the exact same lamp, but a different company for each and slightly different cost, and this decision has now left me lampless for a month as I figure out which to buy and decide on neither. Lamp is used to be on a timer so it goes on at the time my alarm clock sounds, this is helpful for the time of year when the sun is not up yet at that time, which -- not to worry anyone -- is approaching. So I need a new lamp. Looking for 12-14 inches, not LED, no random bits at the bottom for pens and stuff that'll just collect dust. Not a sun lamp; I tried that and it gave me a headache immediately.

What is keeping me from buying a new sewing machine is falling in love with one that's out of stock and then scrolling down today on my usual check of it's in stock to see multiple complains, 2 and 3 years old, that it's out of stock. Perhaps I should settle on my second choice, rather than falling in love with an out of stock sewing machine with features I do not need. (but! the one I have now is not great and I've wanted to replace it rather than keep fighting it, and all it really does is straight and zigzag, so I do not, in fact, need to replace it with a machine with 240 built-in stitches and two fonts, I just need a machine that has a speed I can set rather than try to be perfect on my foot pressure. But if I'm going to upgrade, I wanna upgrade.)

I have no intention of writing a Tishrei fic. No ideas, nada. Happy to take a prompt if someone has one but this may just be the year where it stops happening, and I'm okay with that.

troisoiseaux

Museum
by Wisława Szymborska (tr. Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh) [x]

Here are plates but no appetite.
And wedding rings, but the requited love
has been gone now for some three hundred years.

Here's a fan—where is the maiden's blush?
Here are swords—where is the ire?
Nor will the lute sound at the twilight hour.

Since eternity was out of stock,
ten thousand aging things have been amassed instead.
The moss-grown guard in golden slumber
props his mustache on Exhibit Number . . .

Eight. Metals, clay and feathers celebrate
their silent triumphs over dates.
Only some Egyptian flapper's silly hairpin giggles.

The crown has outlasted the head.
The hand has lost out to the glove.
The right shoe has defeated the foot.

As for me, I am still alive, you see.
The battle with my dress still rages on.
It struggles, foolish thing, so stubbornly!
Determined to keep living when I'm gone!

***

On the Vanity of Earthly Greatness
by Arthur Guiterman [x]

The tusks which clashed in mighty brawls
Of mastodons, are billiard balls.

The sword of Charlemagne the Just
Is ferric oxide, known as rust.

The grizzly bear, whose potent hug,
Was feared by all, is now a rug.

Great Caesar's bust is on the shelf,
And I don't feel so well myself.

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cahn

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Metal From Heaven

The Nefarious Nights of Willowweep Manor

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