compersion & limerence

cql 43 / grief / domesticity

2021-02-13T07:08:07Z

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... )

:) good night i love them :) if you feel so inclined to drop me fic that is safe up to ep 43 i will kneel at your feet in gratitude for ten thousand years (literally...anything? anything.)

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magnus AND untamed, you say

2021-02-04T04:49:02Z

I am at:
- Ep 34 of the Untamed, I watched seven episodes today and cried for at least half of them, I have SO MANY FEELINGS
- Mag 176 ("Blood Ties") so I'm just skimming the mag 170 and 164 tags a LOT
- going to get SO MUCH FANDOM pumped into my brain whenever I hit the end of either of them and I am just. Peachy keen to get going.

Man, though, the untamed is so good [if nightmarish about women]. I want to SCREAM forever, fannish obsession feels amazing.

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magnus archives s5

2020-12-13T22:57:06Z

I! Listened! To! The! Premiere! Of season 5! I want to scream for four thousand years! I have! Nobody! To discuss with!

Honest to God, what an opening 5 minutes. jawdrop.gif, happy holidays to me etc etc.

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magnus archives x sarah waters/affinity

2020-04-18T18:15:12Z

one of those aten't dead things, hi, god, how are we all doing? Bad, I assume, I wouldn't know because if I think about it too hard I will stop functioning and this bitch is an essential worker (not the direct-patient kind, though). Have we thought about how taboo it will be to kiss another person in [some number] of months?

Anyway, I listened to the entirety of season 1 of The Magnus Archives over the past week, and wow fuck did I love it. Meta archival narrative? Self-deception? The translation between mediums? Dubious record keeping? Fickle memory? The things that live in the cracks of the world?! A deep voiced British academic with big skepticism vibes being mean!?! I have been swooning and getting chills in equal measure.

I'm on season two (translation: I am 10 minutes into the first episode), and Millbank Prison has come up for reasons, and now I'm just...obsessing over Sarah Waters and Affinity and the para/normal dis/belief &first person narrative dubiousness, of both stories. I love that I already have fictional context for Millbank, as it deeply adds to the contextually skin-crawling creep vibes. I just!!! I don't wanna spoil stuff but I want this fic to exist (I always want the fic to exist). Like -- Jonathan Sims reading me an excerpt from Affinity, sort've vibes. The overlap is just...just there and I so hope it gets more fodder, tangential as it might be.

Perhaps my Affinity fix it is just...The Magnus Archives? Oh boy, I feel genuinely great about that.

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ao3 stats 14 months later

2020-01-21T02:10:39Z

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.

( to do list! )

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dragging the twitter discourse on not-twitter

2019-11-25T19:22:57Z

I can't wade into Purity Discourse on Twitter, or rather I won't (and not like DW is better, given that it's primarily a fandom space, but I do seemingly need to say somewhere publically): oh my fucking GOD the TWITTER DISCOURSE about Tamsyn Muir's old fic is driving me so far up the wall I am taking up residence on the fucking roof, could everyone....stop..........with it. Would that I had something smart or new, but I have been in fandom for circa 1.5 years, which is not very long, and I can tell it's the same ring-around-the-rosy and it's so boring. Tags are great, archive warnings are great, taking works down is shitty, 'glorifying pedophilia' is a bad take, free market of fanfiction!

( did nabokov glorify it, anyway? )

anyway: have you seen the trailer for Portrait of a Lady on Fire? wow does it look fun.

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[fic rec] "violet"

2019-11-04T23:21:24Z

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.

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dearest yuletide 2019 author

2019-11-04T00:37:14Z

hello, author, i'm so excited to crack open my phone on christmas morning for whatever you write for me! I absolutely love Yuletide, and the fact that you ALSO at minimum one (1) of the pieces of media that I also love is, whew, a gift all on its own. I really love all of these canons more or less equally.

My theme, this year and all years, is: queer girls fighting & betraying each other and/or with massive grudges against empire. In space, in the Pacific Northwest, in nebulous fantasy worlds. Wherever, really.

contents:

housekeeping & general details
Baru Cormorant - Dickinson
The Best Bad Things - Carrasco
Gideon the Ninth - Muir

( generalities )

fandoms

( Baru Cormorant )

( The Best Bad Things )

( Gideon The Ninth )

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[fic] "emotional, sexual, necromantically charged bender"

2019-10-27T07:00:16Z

Read Gideon the Ninth last night & have read fully half of the available fics (27 as of last count), decided that my contribution as the 28th fic on AO3 would be 1k words of Gideon Nav and Harrowhark Nonagesimus getting off and nothing else.

No canon knowledge really necessary, no major spoilers.

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.

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"in the men's room(s)", marge piercy

2019-09-12T17:18:35Z

Poetry circulating on Twitter today that delivered a 5 finger death punch to...just, everything, I think.

When I was young I believed in intellectual conversation:
I thought the patterns we wove on stale smoke
floated off to the heaven of ideas.
To be certified worthy of high masculine discourse
like a potato on a grater I would rub on contempt,
suck snubs, wade proudly through the brown stuff on the floor.
They were talking of integrity and existential ennui
while the women ran out for six-packs and had abortions
in the kitchen and fed the children and were auctioned off.

Eventually of course I learned how their eyes perceived me:
when I bore to them cupped in my hands a new poem to nibble,
when I brought my aerial maps of Sartre or Marx,
they said, she is trying to attract our attention,
she is offering up her breasts and thighs.
I walked on eggs, their tremulous equal:
they saw a fish peddler hawking in the street.

Now I get coarse when the abstract nouns start flashing.
I go out to the kitchen to talk cabbages and habits.
I try hard to remember to watch what people do.
Yes, keep your eyes on the hands, let the voice go buzzing.
Economy is the bone, politics is the flesh,
watch who they beat and who they eat,
watch who they relieve themselves on, watch who they own.
The rest is decoration.

Marge Piercy

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wednesday

2019-09-11T17:46:29Z

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

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

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reading Wednesday: boxing is very hot

2019-08-15T03:14:31Z

Am reading The Best Bad Things, Katrina Carrasco. Would write more, but am too busy being riveted by how extremely:

A. Bisexual B. Gender Mood C. Detective-y D. Crime-y E. Just ridiculously fucking fun

it is and continues to be. Boxing and fighting is very hot, y'all, I have not been so invested in the sensuality of a published novel maybe ever.

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book resources

2019-08-10T19:29:54Z

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

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

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"mercilessly insistent upon life"

2019-08-08T18:11:30Z

The innumerable trees she’s seen over the course of all her life, the undulating forests that blanket the continents like a heartless sea, envelop her exhausted body and lift her up. Only fragments of cities, small towns and roads are visible, floating on the roof of the forest like islands or bridges, slowly being swept away somewhere, borne on those warm waves.

There’s no way for In-hye to know what on earth those waves are saying. Or what those trees she’d seen at the end of the narrow mountain path, clustered together like green flames in the early-morning half-light, had been saying.

Whatever it was, there had been no warmth in it. Whatever the words were, they hadn’t been words of comfort, words that would help her pick herself up. Instead, the tree’s words were frighteningly chilling, mercilessly insistent upon life. Even when she turned about on the spot and searched in all directions, In-hye hadn’t been able to find a tree that would take her life from her. None of the trees would accept her. They’d just stood there, stubborn and solemn yet alive as animals, bearing up the weight of their own massive bodies.

- The Vegetarian, Han Kang (emphasis mine, for skin chills)

WHEW.gif; I don't think I understood this book at all but it did make engage my whole body in visceral resonance, so. Points.

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wednesday

2019-07-31T15:18:28Z

Had an actual ask that I will put up top: I am soliciting recommendations for media about Iran! Books, movies, comics -- although books are preferred, fiction or non-fiction.

Media report, in no particular order:

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+++

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

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).

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!

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

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.

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i seem to have been reading a lot about the childbearing recently (why?)

2019-07-14T05:53:11Z

Part -1. Wooooof, I feel like I have not been on the internet for weeks, hi, internet! Predominantly this is because I have been cranking on experiments at work the last bit, which means the past two weeks have been of approximately infinite length, and because of the very particular data set has required me to be at work at 8 am every day. This is...earlier than usual.
( cw for cool maternal science / horror / fetal microchimerism )

In any case, yes, am excited about results and data, and sounexpectedly intrigued by this field, and I am also totally 100% exhausted mush; you could just pour me into a jello mold and "wait until congealed." (The real way they wrote recipe books! god, why??.)

Part 0. I am SO excited about my femslash after dark assignment, my word, my WORD, and all the rest of what will be gifted to the collective femslash-consuming community come August. I am worried I didn't write a detailed enough letter; er, rather, I didn't list all my kinks comprehensively, what if my writer thinks those are my only kinks and therefore limits themself?!
But still, really really really looking forward to writing (oh god when??) and reading. Yum.

Part 1, books recently completed (now a woefully out of date list):
( Fanny Howe, romance novels, Mary Oliver, Good Omens )

Part 2, ~~Currently~~Previously Reading

Sarah Waters, The Night Watch, per comments from when I read Affinity -- ty to breathedout for the recommendation; it was ridiculously on brand for you, and thoroughly enjoyable.
( some thoughts )

So I guess I liked it, all in all, though!

Part next, whatever part I'm on, currently reading (actual):
Finished Le Carre's Single & Single, a day or two ago, which featured too many names and a plot that was...fine; not as fun as the Smiley novel I read a few years ago. It was a found-on-vacation deal, so that's alright.

Picked up H is for Hawk, which caters quite precisely to my niche of gay + grief + nature, thank you very much. It's lovely, just as expected.

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femslash after dark letter, 2019

2019-07-01T23:01:17Z

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?

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fandom tourism since 1899

2019-06-16T01:39:10Z

hi, pals! I have a fandom update for you, and it's this: I was in Switzerland, and I remembered that our good man Arthur Conan Doyle frequented Switzerland. As well as, clever minds may have already guessed (or been spoiled by Twitter), our ~~good~~ boys S. Holmes and J. Watson.

So: I was in Switzerland, and I had a few hours of driving time to spare, and so of course I took the fucking detour to Reichenbach Falls, because, you know, fandom and being unbearably enthusiastic at all times, as I am. I did not expect to have any feelings, but....look. Just. How much fannish energy has been invested in John Watson being absolutely wrecked in the Swiss Alps? To Holmes grieving/rejoicing/reacting to this one particular choice? How much fannish energy has been devoted to this one authorial choice 100+ years ago? How many alternate interpretations?^ How many people have visited Reichenbach with my same fannish energy? How many fics have I read about post- or pre-**Reichenbach^^? (Answer: [mumblemumbleI'mgladhistoryisn'tpublic])

Reichenbach is practically an entire genre in and of itself, we all know that, and the experience of simulaneously projecting every single one I could remember onto that landscape was a trip, emotionally speaking. I did not cry, but I did look longingly out the window at the rain and radiate emotion.

Cool things:

the little cable car guy ("funicular") that takes you up to the falls themselves was installed in 1899; this completely blows my mind, and I am obsessing over the fact that a billion Victorians made the exact same little pilgrimage for the exact same reasons, and it's been going strong ever since.
there is a Sherlock Holmes statue in the middle of town, along with a Sherlock Holmes Lounge, a Sherlock Holmes hotel, a Sherlock Holmes Museum. The local bookstore had a poster listing which Holmes stories they had in which languages. And an entire display of Holmes adaptations.
It was raining, so the line to take a picture with the statue was mercifully short and my extreme embarrassment muted. There were many pictures taken of me looking thoughtful and deductive. They are my greatest pride and deepest shame. I have shown them to everybody who will look.
NEXT to the Holmes statue, they have a mountaineering one! Of...drumroll, please.... the delightful overlap of it being Sir Leslie Stephen, one parent to V. Woolf. Pro mountaineer, which I did not know.
The valley has a trillion other waterfalls and they are all fairly spectacular; it looks just like you'd imagine a Swiss countryside to look. It's about an hour from the region of Gruyere, so one could maybe toss some cheese commentary into a next Reichenbach fic.

Technically, I didn't go up to the falls for time/weather reasons, so I did not see the little white star that marks the spot but. You know. Not half bad, overall.

^ 6631 AO3 works tagged "Post-Reichenbach", soo...
^^ I will confess I am extremely partial to the high-key everybody-is-a-gentleman romance of Katie Forsyth's Birds to a Lighthouse, but GOD even that has some Swiss bits ^^^ icon is...the most appropriate I have on hand, I think

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"gulls fly like sparks up the face of clouds"

2019-05-30T11:41:56Z

...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.

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The worst part about my job...

2019-05-28T17:59:43Z

...hands down, is that the email address for the lab admin is very similar to the email address for the whole lab mailing list, which means it is not uncommon for emails to the administrator (often sensitive ones!) To instead get sent out to, like, 100 people. (Yes, my lab is the size of a midsize company, it's bizarre).

Recent whole lab emails:

me, about being out for a root canal (humiliation on top of pain, a thrilling Thursday take)
But also, someone much higher up forwarding a discussion about someone who felt they'd unfairly been laid off, which, WHEW, did we all silently feel bad about that

In this case, it means I just spent a solid fifteen minutes scrutinizing the address, and ended up getting someone to double check, and am still slightly panicking about it. (Also, because all of my admin emails are "sorry I forgot to do this on time,, but here is...", sorry to all admin people that I'm like this).

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please watch: "wild nights with Emily"

2019-05-25T00:09:05Z

I know we all know about Wild Nights with Emily, right? Here is the trailer in case you missed it.

I saw it a bit ago but JEEZ YOU GUYS, I LOVED IT SO MUCH I RECOMMEND IT SO STRONGLY, and now I am going to gush about it!

It feels like the movie version of a fanfiction that caters to aaallll of my buttons: the business of artmaking, girls (ok, yes, women, but also girls!) in love, excellent jokes about the Brontë sisters, effective meta-narrative on history's pliability and who-tells-your-story, caretaking of the body. It also has a super tight running time (1h24m!), and some serious belly laughs. The only important characters are women. And they are killer.

In addition to catering to the "jokes about English lit" crowd, it features a truly astounding ending—devastatingly dignified. I went from giggling to silent crying in the span of about 30 seconds, and it didn't...feel weird? It felt marvelously paced and sincere and powerful.

Not only is it girls! in love!, but Molly Shannon's Emiy worked unexpectedly wonderfully for me—her Emily feels fun and quirky and, you know, a touch melodramatic. All thatr eturned a measure of joy to her poems that I'm not sure I ever had before. (I have not, historically, been a major E.D. fan but I am doing a real 180° on that). That's also why it feels a bit like fanfiction; fic has rescued or illuminated a number of canons for me, and Wild Nights, in it's bawdiness, counterweights the traditional E.D. narrative.

It was SO GOOD and so worthwhile; absolutely adding to my ad-hoc lesbian film collection. Again, the ending was just....stunning.

( Iwhisperspace?: I'm also losing my mind; have ANY of you seen Wild Nights **and** Black Sails? [spoilers ish] )

This was also illuminated by a tweet from Joseph Fink about the ending of GoT, which I think highlights why Nights and Black Sails are SO satisfying, in the end:

"So the anger [at the ending] comes not because the story ended badly but because we were reminded at the end that it was only a story, nothing more, and that feels like a loss.
— Joseph Fink 🐞 (planetoffinks) May 20, 2019

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a multi-week reading wednesday

2019-05-16T04:11:54Z

Hello, hi, I have been so absorbed by Real Life Stuff: work has been very busy but very productive and good, sample cross contamination be damned, and my social calendar has been...obscene in its busy-ness; can anyone explain how to have friends and hold down a job and do creative work and cook yourself meals? But in honor of it being 20 minutes into Thursday, the collated drafts from 3 weeks of Reading Wednesday Official(TM).

( Middlemarch )

( books of essays x 3 )

Annnnndddd I finally read Nimona—or finished it, technically. V good. <3 Noelle Stevenson.

I am currently starting Becky Chambers' Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet, which is SO MUCH FUN and I am going to go read it way too late into the night and then be tired for work, oh well, so it goes.

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contributing nothing helpful and yet

2019-05-12T04:03:35Z

Am (a) slightly drink-happy at the moment(sorry! if you would like a diffent CW for that please let me know)and have gotten a lot of lab gossip and clarified some being-out-at-work-while-queer stuff and (b) am about to watch S3E1 of Sherlock with my partner. On this latter point I will remain more or less mum except for like. I am (was) VERY frustrated by S3 of Sherlock, and thank god for fanfiction. Actual fanfiction, not the..puerile mockery of fic in the episode I am about to watch.

I have like four other DW drafts (various readings, various Sunday Sixes which I will do tomorrow for sure, various ruminations, various "I am proud because..") and am ruminating a lot on this idea that One Must Post Quality; specifically insofar as, when you read letters from 1905, they also are all "I'm so terribly sorry I'm late on responding to you, and that my work is terrible." So clearly it's not a function of The Modern Age And Social Media, it's just...people are really bad at producing ~content in the timeline they set, always, forever, it's just how we are. Which is reassuring to me, always—I am at least failing in known and comprehensible ways.

AND (an unpublished post, this is by far the most exciting part, but I have no head for Proper Post Flow, see above): this writer had (a) their first piece of essay writing accepted !! and (b) made their first pitch to a nonfiction site and (c) found a potential home for a piece that has been brewing since October. I'm going to be a validated fuckin' writer, which. Ackkkkkk. I'm really, really excited.

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almost forgot

2019-04-28T03:12:59Z

HAPPY ONE YEAR BIRTHDAY TO DIRTY COMPUTER, THE ONLY HOLIDAY I WILL ACKNOWLEDGE.

SERIOUSLY, seriously, what an ALBUUUUM.

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Woolf letters

2019-04-22T03:12:45Z

It seems literally unfair to all of you that I did not immediately sprint to my email and send this two days ago. I'm sorry! It was a busy weekend, I had to drink a lot of spritzes in between Friday and tonight. I'm in fact a few spritzes deep, t b h.

ANYWAY, yours truly made a little trip to the Smith College Rare Book Room to look at the Virginia Woolf papers this weekend. It was, holy fucking jesus christ, so cool. Uh. How do I begin to express— that link is the finding aid, so you can imagine—but oh my GOD oh my god oh my god was it incredible. I only looked at box 1, Strachey-Woolf correspondence, 1909-1919ish and Box 3, which included her proofs for The Common Reader; I wanted to look at the proofs of Lighthouse and Orlando, but...I did not (wrong box request, eeee, and also I only had an hour).I don't really have words, still, but it was actually secularly-spiritual to be holding, in my literal hands, a letter from Lytton Strachey from over a hundred years ago reacting to the same piece of media (Voyage out) with the same emotions I did in 2018. And spiritual again to read Woolf, very mundanely, writing "Come visit us at Asheham" and "I'd leave such a good review for your book if only Richmond would allow me to do so."

I sat in the rare book room and giggled out loud at Woolf and Lytton dunking on James Joyce and it was amazing amazing amazing. Amazing!!! Lytton's handwriting is very legible, hers is...not so much. I wish I were more articulate, maybe I will be later with more letters and less spritzes, but for now, here are the letters on occasion of the publication of Eminent Victorians and The Voyage Out (and also, a legible telegram for aesthetic proof).

( images below, enhanced for contrast, I can't believe I was allowed to walk in and look at these. )

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compersion & limerence

cql 43 / grief / domesticity

magnus AND untamed, you say

magnus archives s5

magnus archives x sarah waters/affinity

ao3 stats 14 months later

dragging the twitter discourse on not-twitter

[fic rec] "violet"

dearest yuletide 2019 author

fandoms

[fic] "emotional, sexual, necromantically charged bender"

"in the men's room(s)", marge piercy

wednesday

reading Wednesday: boxing is very hot

book resources

"mercilessly insistent upon life"

wednesday

i seem to have been reading a lot about the childbearing recently (why?)

femslash after dark letter, 2019

fandom tourism since 1899

"gulls fly like sparks up the face of clouds"

The worst part about my job...

please watch: "wild nights with Emily"

a multi-week reading wednesday

contributing nothing helpful and yet

*almost* forgot

Woolf letters

almost forgot