ANYWAY SO EPISODE 43 OF CQLIS REALLY A HEAVY HITTER, HUH. REALLY. A LOT. THERE. GOING ON.

Putting a cut in for reading pages & brief black sails references; mostly FEELING things. ( Read more... )

So like, a year ago (14 months, OKAY, it's been a year), I drafted some thoughts on how to make an AO3 stats retriever. Briefly: I read a lot of fic, I'd like to know how much and any other stats, I'm extremely lazy about tracking my reading.

I have MADE PROGRESS as of this weekend, which is to say I am tweaking somebody else's unofficial Python API from here—they solved the authentication token problem, enormous round of applause to the code being clean and readable and adaptable. And to me, for someday making my first my first pull request in a public repo around the issues that have come up so far

So, the to-do list (lol), updated and for future reference, but with some of the hardest parts done.

violets (1227 words) by decalexas
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Harrowhark Nonagesimus/Ianthe Tridentarius
Characters: Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Ianthe Tridentarius, Gideon Nav (Mentioned)
Additional Tags: Angst, Angst and Porn, Biting, Masturbation, Toxic Relationship, with a taste of your lips i'm on a ride
Summary:

She doesn’t look, but she can feel them at even the slightest touch. The bites. The bruises. They haven’t fully formed yet, but when they do they will be purple, an ugly, mean purple far darker than Ianthe’s eyes.

Harrow aches.

Gideon The Ninth is almost exactly as silly as it says on the tin: lesbian space necromancers. Worldbuilding is there but minimal; mostly it's just two mortal enemies ragging on each other into affection. It is a delight.

This fic is not that; this fic is all of brutality and viciousness of the canon rendered without the gloss of banter. This is somebody in crisis who is fucking instead of dealing with that crisis. I LOVE IT. I think it works even without canon background, and isn't spoilery really at all. It's very good!!! I mean, seriously, just read this line --

Sometimes she pretends it’s Gideon—throws her head back and screws her eyes up and lets Ianthe’s cruel, colorless little mouth with her sharp little teeth worry at her neck while Harrow pretends it’s Gideon who has her up against a wall or pinned on a bed.

emotional, sexual, necromantically charged bender ( words) by sternerstuff
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Gideon the Ninth - Tamsyn Muir
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Additional Tags: amazingly talented given their level of human socialization, author was not as successful their first (several) attempts, PWP unless "confronting your fear of sexual inadequacy briefly" is a plot
Summary:

Fighting is just like fucking, Gideon of the Ninth thinks, and blesses every magazine of impractically-armored Cohort captains for setting that association up early and proper. Or — and here she twists her hand into Harrow's overgrown hair, pulls it down sharply as Harrow yelps — fucking Harrow is just like fighting.

------
Some good old-fashioned explicit smut, tending towards PWP; set nebulously post-pool talk.

A whole bunch of book-adjacent bullshit, prompted by #1 on the list:

1. I am sick and the DayQuil wore off, I do not like it.

2. A couple people in my IRL circle have been recommending Rosenberg's Confessions of the Fox to me. I feel complicated about this, because I have reason to believe I won't like it (sea_changed 's commentary from last year, and Bogi Takac's review, among others). I read Maggie Stiefvater's Raven Cycle books under similar circumstances (important and queer to someone I was close with), and I found them adequate, at best, and really hardly even that. I don't feel like I'm good at dealing with that -- "I know you loved this book but I did not care about the things you cared about in it at all." Although, that friend, in retrospect, was really pretty shitty about me not being into Raven Cycle, so maybe that isn't me after all. In any case, it makes me concerned about Fox, and having to generate excuses about why a meaningful-to-trans-people trans narrative is not meaningful to me.

3. That said, my other reading material has been great recently; I'm pulling from the Lambda Literary awards list for quality books to order from the physical library (particularly excited about Disoriental, Négar Djavadi) and a metric ton of romance novels from Libby for "I'm tired" books, and some Tamora Pierce re-reads.

4. I am moving to a new city quite soon (!) and both of my future roommates are queer librarians (!!) with three cats (!!!) and are upsettingly cute (!!!!) (we follow each other on Instagram).

I am doing "book rec cleanup" today, which means collecting various book-rec tools.

1. Queer SFF Recs: this is a very nifty little catalog of queer SFF, organized by sexuality & SFF type & do-the-queers-die & lots of AO3-like tagging.

2. did u kno, you can search your library catalog for books on goodreads? I have been making a concerted effort to do paper books (partially also because the waitlists are not 10 months long, and partially because ebook terms of service for libraries make me incandescently angry.

3. Unfortuately this means I must visit several different library branches all weekend, woe is me.

4. Am looking forward to moving (which I'm doing soon!) with a limited library of unread books + comfort books + common lending books (Annihilation, Mrs. Dalloway)) and seeing how rapidly I fill up a new bookshelf (expected: quickly.)

1. H is for Hawk deserves every ounce of praise it got. Contents: hawking, grieving, complex relationships and projections with the natural and human world, historical queers. A+++



2. I am re-watching Black Sails with housemates, who are watching it for the first time. HOO BOY. S1 is very good, on rewatch; I'm, as always, 500% here for Miranda and Eleanor, and this time for the religion/forgiveness themes. My Flint feelings are inextricably bound up with my breakup feelings, which really complicates Media Analysis(!). We are now on to s2(!!) I



3. Sara Farizan's YA If You Could Be Mine; Iran, present day, girls in love and also coming of age. It features some Iran-specific trans v queer politics, which are really fascinating to illuminate how sexuality and gender can and do occupy very different idealogical spaces. That said, I felt pretty dubious about the trans politics, which in an American context would have been quite upsettingly transphobic & TERFy. All that said, I would really appreciate it any other recs about Iran—compelling histories or modern fiction or anything in between! (I've also read Greg Egan's Zendegi, which also had a plot point revolving around Iran's transsexual politics, and I'm v. much side-eying the way the trans people are used, but not as the main characters. Farizan is Iranian-American and Egan is not, although I don't know much about Farizan's stated queer politics).



4. Have now finished all of Murderbot; I found them thoroughly delightful sci-fi/space hijinks, but not quite the trans gut identification that I'd hoped for. But: hella fun!



5. Also binged all of Stranger Things S3. I cried, although I'm not sure I really feel it was totally earned.



6. I'm moving in the fall and I went to visit my new city! I am freaking out a little bit about, you know, moving away from my entire social support system, but also excited about the ~opportunities, professionally and in terms of time freed up for solo hobbies.

hello, beloved assignee,

The first obligatory and extremely sincere disclaimer: I am already so stoked to consume the fanmedia you make for me; please run with whatever strikes your fancy, as far and as wide as you like. I am gonna like it, because of how I like girls, and because of how femslash is like...70% of my fanfiction motivation. It's going to be amazing, and I'm going to faint on my AO3 page when reveals happen, because of you. What fun!

This is mostly geared towards written fandom, because I haven't done art-avaible exchanges before, but screaming I would LOVE art for any of these fandoms, my fucking word.

Likes & DNWs

addition: I totally forgot that M or E could also mean dark as opposed to just smut; I prefer smut with a flavoring of dark, rather than the other way around, but this letter is predominantly written with smut in mind.

I like when my M or E ratings occur at cross purposes; when sex is a distraction from themselves, an emotional lure, a misguided attempt to accomplish emotional resolution. No need for the characters to know what they're trying to accomplish or acknowledge their desires, although I also very much enjoy some straight up manipulation. And I don't need anyone to get off, if those goals fail! I also like sex that hasn't happened yet, or was but won't be again, or occurs in the next room. I also really like queer mentorship, done badly or well. Basically, sex with narrative/competitive drive.

A more specific set of kinks, somewhat: voyeurism and denial (both of orgasms and emotional), sort've-dub-con-but-we're-all-happy-now,-aren't-we?-arcs, more-than-twosomes. I like fisting and nipple tweaking and giving head and strapons and gentle-yet-toppy touching and well-used sex toys of all sorts; I like when people manage to maintain a semblance of control over lust and convert it into raw focus on the other person's sensation. Obsession is good. Knives and similarly fear-inspiring is good. I like science and the particularly faux-objective scientific mindset.

DNW: entirely noncon scenes, gender-essentialist notions of womanhood, possessive-jealousy, monogamy-as-an-inherently-happy-ending. Kidfic, incest, stuffing kinks, A.B.O., world-changing AUs

Just remember, my real goal here is to have both of us have a really nice time thinking about adversarial women in bed/alleyways/couches/offices/tents/bars together.

Fandoms

Gentleman Jack Anne Lister/ladies, Anne Lister/Mariana Lawton

This show is basically designed to cater to me (I feel attacked constantly, by the opening sequence), but what I maybe love the most is Anne Lister, heartbroken rogue. The S1E1 breakup with Vere Hobart, for example: I would absolutely 1000000% die for their last time in bed together, with Hobart knowing it was their last time and Anne not. Or how Hobart came to that decision; what is she thinking the last time she has Anne's head between her legs? How long had she known? Similiarly, Mariana Lawton and her, returning to each other again and again; how does that work? When did they learn certain tricks together? Is their routine well worn; how has their jealousy flamed and muted over time? Re: everything I like above, there is so much potential in Anne Lister's exploits for girls lying to each other while kissing. I haven't read Anne's diaries proper, but if you wanted to do additional historical research, I would welcome it on bended knee and coronets of gold. I love footnotes.

( Traitor Baru Cormorant:Baru/Tain Hu )

( **Original Work** )

AND REALLY, thank you, I am SO excited to see this; please please do not feel constrained by the scenarios I've mentioned. I love both canons mentioned a LOT and am very excited to see what your original work looks like; if you have something that is totally orthogonal to these, well...I did ask for adversarial, didn't I?

...The pig was not facing the camera. At the foot of the page was printed, in italics, I will make you fishers of men. This document explained my aunt Molly's departure to my whole satisfaction. Even now I always imagine her leaning from the low side of some small boat, dropping her net through the spumy billows of the upper air. Her net would sweep the turning world unremarked as a wind in the grass, and when she began to pull it in, perhaps in a pell-mell ascension of formal gentlemen and thin pigs and old women and odd socks that would astonish this lower world, she would gather the net, so easily, until the very burden itself lay all in a heap just under the surface. One last pull of measureless power and ease would spill her catch into the boat, gasping and amazed, gleaming rainbows in the rarer light.

Such a net, such a harvesting, would put an end to all anomaly. If it swept the whole floor of heaven, it must, finally, sweep the black floor of Fingerbone, too. From there, we must imagine, would arise a great army of paleolithic and neolithic frequenters of the lake-berry gatherers and hunters and strayed children from those and all subsequent eons, down to the earliest present, to the faith-healing lady in the long, white robe who rowed a quarter of a mile out and tried to walk back in again just at sunrise, to the farmer who bet five dollars one spring that the ice was still strong enough for him to gallop his horse across. Add to them the swimmers, the boaters and canoers, and in such a crowd my mother would hardly seem remarkable. There would be a general reclaiming of fallen buttons and misplaced spectacles, of neighbors and kin, till time and error and accident were undone, and the world became comprehensible and whole.

Sylvie said that in fact Molly had gone to work as a bookkeeper in a missionary hospital. It was perhaps only from watching gulls fly like sparks up the face of clouds that dragged rain the length of the lake that I imagined such an enterprise might succeed. Or it was from watching gnats sail out of the grass, or from watching some discarded leaf gleaming at the top of the wind. Ascension seemed at such times a natural law. If one added to it a law of completion—that everything must finally be made comprehensible—then some general rescue of the sorry I imagined my aunt to have undertaken would be inevitable. For why do our thoughts turn to some gesture of a hand, the fall of a sleeve, some corner of a room on a particular anonymous afternoon, even when we are asleep, and even when we are so old that our thoughts have abandoned other business? What are all these fragments for, if not to be knit up finally?

Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping, ch 5 (p 137 in Picador Modern Classics version)

There is not a single part of this passage that doesn't tie me up into knots of awe and amazement.