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I wrote a fic! Something in the AirVictor Gideon/Leon Kennedy Rated: M Content Warning: The big three are non-con, sex pollen, power imbalance. See the tags for the full list of CW. <3 I'm SO HAPPY guys, I haven't written fic in so long and certainly not with this enthusiasm! I have two more fics about halfway finished, and a lil plot summary (there is no real plot) for a fourth one. It's been a VERY long time since I've been like this. It's SUCH a nice place to back in. Especially for written porn, gosh. Apparently all I needed with a horrible dead lizard man. <3 Although not everything I'm working on features Victor Gideon. Just...half of it. XD; I also went through and locked all of my fic to AO3 logged in users only. I had it so only logged in users could comment but then decided, nah. If you can't comment, you don't get to read! Sorry, not sorry, normies who go to consume fic on A03, don't comment, but then talk about it on tiktok or whatever. :P (fandom has become so big, so present, so known, and I hate it hate it hate it) EDIT: And a fifth one! \o/! | |
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 The Sixth Annual May Trope Mayhem Starts Soon! What is May Trope Mayhem? It’s Duck Prints Press’s annual multi-fandom/original work creation event! Our creators have shared their favorite tropes, and we’ve picked 31, one per day of May, to make an awesome, fun, diverse list of prompts to inspire your creativity. Come May 1st, we invite everyone to create a ficlet, artwork, gif set, photo montage, or whatever else they feel like, inspired by the trope of the day. We’re open to any fandom or no fandom at all, original characters and old faves, any ship (yes even that one) or no ship or reader inserts or, or, or… If you can imagine it, we’d love to see you create it! Check out past May Trope Mayhem’s… No changes are being made to the rules for 2026, so you can get the gist by checking out the past challenges. | |
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It's mild and sunny today, although it was cloudy and threatening to rain this morning while I was out running. I think it's in the mid 50s/mid teens. I went for a run at parkrun time even though there are no parkruns here, and I liked knowing that I was running while people were doing parkrun. I'm not a fan of DST and one of the things I don't like about it is that the mornings stay cold until later at this time of year than they would on standard time, and then it gets warm in the afternoons. I much prefer to get my exercise in the morning, so I have to put up with the cold. | |
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I talk with my hands. This amuses A. to no end: She's the one who's part-Italian and yet I'm the one who can't talk without gesticulating. Whether I'm talking about sending an email (fingers typing on a keyboard), sending a fax (hands palm-down, fingertips guiding the paper into the machine), or chopping vegetables (left hand moving the knife up and down, right hand advancing the the vegetable toward it), I don't even think about it, but my hands accompany my words.
Yesterday, we got some small cucumbers and I was talking about using some of them to make oi muchim (a Korean cucumber salad with thinly sliced cucumbers in a gochugaru-seasoned dressing). I was talking about slicing the cucumbers, and she looked at my hands and asked "What's that?" I looked at my hands and saw that my right hand was flat, palm-up, while my left hand was palm-down, in a claw grip, moving back and forth over my right hand. And then it hit me: When I make oi muchim, I don't slice the cucumbers with a knife. I slice them with a mandoline. And without even thinking about it, my hands were doing to the correct motion for the action I would be doing.
I don't even notice that I'm doing this until she points it out, so I don't know if I could stop it if I tried.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6e0b54hH2JU Today is World Poetry Day! I celebrated by reading the first three parts (of many) of I Sing the Body Electric by Walt Whitman. If you’ve ever wondered why people describe Whitman as a queer poet… just listen, or you can go read the poem yourself here. I’d love to hear about your favorite queer poems and poets! Do share! Here’s the ID and transcription of the part I read aloud for this recording: (Video ID: a white person with short reddish hair and gold-rimmed glasses sits before a book case and reads a poem aloud. /end ID) 1 I sing the body electric, The armies of those I love engirth me and I engirth them, They will not let me off till I go with them, respond to them, And discorrupt them, and charge them full with the charge of the soul. Was it doubted that those who corrupt their own bodies conceal themselves? And if those who defile the living are as bad as they who defile the dead? And if the body does not do fully as much as the soul? And if the body were not the soul, what is the soul? 2 The love of the body of man or woman balks account, the body itself balks account, That of the male is perfect, and that of the female is perfect. The expression of the face balks account, But the expression of a well-made man appears not only in his face, It is in his limbs and joints also, it is curiously in the joints of his hips and wrists, It is in his walk, the carriage of his neck, the flex of his waist and knees, dress does not hide him, The strong sweet quality he has strikes through the cotton and broadcloth, To see him pass conveys as much as the best poem, perhaps more, You linger to see his back, and the back of his neck and shoulder-side. The sprawl and fulness of babes, the bosoms and heads of women, the folds of their dress, their style as we pass in the street, the contour of their shape downwards, The swimmer naked in the swimming-bath, seen as he swims through the transparent green-shine, or lies with his face up and rolls silently to and fro in the heave of the water, The bending forward and backward of rowers in row-boats, the horseman in his saddle, Girls, mothers, house-keepers, in all their performances, The group of laborers seated at noon-time with their open dinner-kettles, and their wives waiting, The female soothing a child, the farmer’s daughter in the garden or cow-yard, The young fellow hoeing corn, the sleigh-driver driving his six horses through the crowd, The wrestle of wrestlers, two apprentice-boys, quite grown, lusty, good-natured, native-born, out on the vacant lot at sun-down after work, The coats and caps thrown down, the embrace of love and resistance, The upper-hold and under-hold, the hair rumpled over and blinding the eyes; The march of firemen in their own costumes, the play of masculine muscle through clean-setting trowsers and waist-straps, The slow return from the fire, the pause when the bell strikes suddenly again, and the listening on the alert, The natural, perfect, varied attitudes, the bent head, the curv’d neck and the counting; Such-like I love—I loosen myself, pass freely, am at the mother’s breast with the little child, Swim with the swimmers, wrestle with wrestlers, march in line with the firemen, and pause, listen, count. 3 I knew a man, a common farmer, the father of five sons, And in them the fathers of sons, and in them the fathers of sons. This man was of wonderful vigor, calmness, beauty of person, The shape of his head, the pale yellow and white of his hair and beard, the immeasurable meaning of his black eyes, the richness and breadth of his manners, These I used to go and visit him to see, he was wise also, He was six feet tall, he was over eighty years old, his sons were massive, clean, bearded, tan-faced, handsome, They and his daughters loved him, all who saw him loved him, They did not love him by allowance, they loved him with personal love, He drank water only, the blood show’d like scarlet through the clear-brown skin of his face, He was a frequent gunner and fisher, he sail’d his boat himself, he had a fine one presented to him by a ship-joiner, he had fowling-pieces presented to him by men that loved him, When he went with his five sons and many grand-sons to hunt or fish, you would pick him out as the most beautiful and vigorous of the gang, You would wish long and long to be with him, you would wish to sit by him in the boat that you and he might touch each other. | |
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So, a while back S learned that there was a capybara cafe in our area. We always meant to go, but never got around to doing it for various reasons. Then, when she started making real steps toward moving, we decided to go when she got an interview for a job. Well, that happened pretty damn quick. Then again, so did everything with her moving. She signs for a house at the end of the month. Anyway, today is capybara day! :D We're going this afternoon and I'm so excited! I might have pictures, but I'm not entirely sure on that. However, because I was thinking about images, I did get fresh tattoo pictures! ( Tattoo pictures! ) | |
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Nicholas Brendon passed away. This is honestly devastating. It's sad knowing how deeply troubled his life had become. I don't always pay that close attention to the personal lives of actors, however every time I heard about him over the years it was something revolving around his constant struggle with addiction which got him into various legal issues, and I kept on hoping that somehow he'd get himself better and back on the right track. I also recently learned about his health problems, too. It's just so sad and tragic. Aside from his small roles on shows like Criminal Minds, I mostly only knew him from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and, while Xander Harris wasn't my favorite character, Nicholas did fantastically in the role, providing much needed comedic relief along with emotional moments with the rest of the Scoobies. Rest in peace. | |
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- mood:bouncy
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Fandom: Stargate Atlantis Characters/Pairings: Dave Sheppard, John Sheppard/Rodney McKay, Ronon Dex, Teyla Emmagan, Sam Carter, Radek Zelenka Rating: Teen Length: 7998 Content Notes: no AO3 warnings apply Creator Links: busaikko on AO3Themes: Siblings, Family, Post-canon, Outsider POV Summary: Dave Sheppard learns more about his brother and gets drawn into a tangle of secrets and truths. Reccer's Notes: This is from Dave's POV, as he and John cautiously reconnect via emails, then more, after their father's funeral. I really like Dave here, separated from his wife and still in love with her, baffled by John and wanting to understand him better. They do gradually reconnect, and eventually some Trust shenanigans lead to Dave meeting all John's team and being read in about the Stargate program. The characterisations of Dave and John are excellent, with Rodney's relationship with Jennifer Keller, then with John, happening in the background. One of my favourite Dave Sheppard fics. Fanwork Links: Just So Long and Long Enough on AO3 And there are two podfic versions: by juniperphoenix and by cookiemom6067 | |
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I finally received an email from the IDme people saying my documents had been reviewed and I could proceed to the video call. The email said wait times are usually shortest between about 7 am and midday, but I had also seen that it's a 24 hour service so I decided to do it early this morning - at around 5:30 am. This worked well as I only had about a minute to wait, and now I'm all set to file my tax return. It's a relief to have this done and it will be more of a relief when the tax bill has been paid. The call itself only took two or three minutes as all I had to do was verify a few pieces of information and then physically show the guy my driver's licence and passport. | |
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Taken from ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png) thefridayfive: ( LiveJournal and Dreamwidth )Bonus Questions:06. If you have a LiveJournal, are you currently able to access it?Well, I obviously had one, but once transferring all my entries to DW I deleted my LJ account. This was thankfully before all the shit that recently went down over there. 07. Do you have any information about why one would be unable to access LiveJournal?I talked about it some while ago along with links with further information, but to put it simply the current owners are trying to divide its userbase and gatekeep the site. Some might still have access to their journals while others not, I haven't seen anything more on what is going on since this came to light, regardless though it's been advised for anyone who still has access to their LJ accounts there to save/transfer their journals and communities as soon as possible. | |
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- For fic reasons, I've been watching the first night of Knebworth 1996, and gosh, the footage is gorgeous. Incredible that they sat on it for almost thirty years. Here's an example: - Speaking of Oasis, did you know the mangaka of Chainsaw Man also wrote a one-shot about two young female mangakas? And more importantly that the title Look Back is a direct reference to the Oasis song Don't Look Back in Anger? Yes.- Have a silly video about the Oxford comma, among other punctuation. Really takes it up a notch in the second half. - Trailer for Dune Part 3!! My perspective of the Villeneuve Dune movies is that the visual spectacle is incredible, but they're a little too self-serious and not weird enough. The books also take themselves very seriously, but make up for it via frequent batshittery. However, I'm definitely interested to see how Villenueve finishes things up, especially since he'd started going off the map by the end of part 2, and part 3 appears to all be taking place in the gap between the end of the first novel and beginning of the second. Here's hoping for lots of Jessica. 🙏🙏🙏 - They cast Jason Momoa's son as Paul and Chani's kid. Let the Paul/Duncan mpreg headcanons begin. - You can now filter your AO3 bookmarks by wordcount!! - IDK how it never occurred to me before that the bugging scene in The Matrix would spawn a whole new kink, but it absolutely did, and I stumbled across that corner of deviantart earlier this week. Bless. - I'm not going to do a whole Oscars postmortem, but horror movies got EIGHT awards, which has got to be an all-time best, including two of the four acting awards. I'm especially happy for Michael B Jordan and Sinners cinematographer Autumn Durald Arkapaw. - Tough week for Buffy fans. I'm relieved that the reboot appears to be DOA; I was going to watch it, but I wasn't hopeful. Meanwhile, sucks about Nicholas Brendon. Losing him and Michelle Tractenberg a year apart, when they were both so young, is fucking rough. | |
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 Forever Rose by Janet WellingtonMy rating: 3 of 5 starsView all my reviewsToday, I finished my ‘at work book’ while at work! Ta-da! The book was Forever Rose, a time-travel romance by Janet Wellington. The main character is Taylor Rose Martin. While taking a train home to San Diego, Taylor falls asleep, and when she awakens in time to disembark, she finds herself in the right place but the wrong time. Taylor has somehow traveled back in time to San Diego in the 1880’s. Since she’s dressed in trousers, a vest, and wearing a hat, people mistake her for a boy. The first person to see through her disguise is Ida, the madame of Sherman House. She offers Taylor room and board in exchange for acting as her gardener. When Taylor inadvertently learns that the handsome bartender she met is secretly plotting to kill Wyatt Earp, she realizes this is what she’s been sent back in time to prevent. Now she must convince Jackson Hoyt not to throw his life away to avenge a father he never met, even as she’s falling in love with Jackson. For the most part, this was a charming time-travel romance with a feisty, likable heroine. However… SPOILERS!!! - Taylor and Jackson fell in love after only a few, brief meetings. Yawn. - Before going back in time, Taylor has a tarot reading that predicted her unanticipated journey. One thing the tarot reader mentioned was to beware of a false friend. I literally spent the entirety of the book keeping a sharp lookout for this dastardly character...but it never came to pass. I was and remain vexed. - The ending of the book was a major disappointment. (SPOILER!) At the same time Jackson was dying in the past, Taylor was returning to the present, where she met a new incarnation of him. She recognized him, but I was thinking, wow, this is not the same man she met and fell in love with. I would have much preferred if Taylor had the choice to remain in the past, or if Jackson had come forward in time with her. Way to ruin a good story in the last two pages, Ms Wellington. Favorite lines: Being judgmental was the greatest hindrance to happiness.This was headed for a solid four rating, but the shoddy ending knocks it down to three. | |
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RAYE - "Click Clack Symphony" I didn't think I could love her new album as much as My 21st-Century Blues, but... this is looking like I might. | |
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( Hello. I'm Nanno. Nice to meet you. )My Comments: My recent obsession has been Girl From Nowhere, specifically our delightfully unhinged main character Nanno. I've been looking at various fanvids being made, and these two stood out to me, with their respective song choices and editing. The first (which captions are to be turned on for dialogue) mostly is around the first season and just her various revenge plots, while the second just centers around Nanno at her best: being brilliantly deranged in the best way. No spoilers are given in either, just Nanno being Nanno, and just a glimpse as to why I enjoy the character so much. - tags:television
- mood:accomplished
 - music:NEONI - Darkside
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 This spooky ghost story has a central pairing that I feel like I may have requested as an original work: Widow/Female Fake Psychic/Ghost of a Female Bog Body. My Darling Dreadful Thing is set in the Netherlands in the 1950s, which is a selling point all by itself as I love unusual settings. Roos is a young woman whose abusive fake psychic mother forces her to participate in her fake seances. But though Roos does not communicate with the spirits sought by the desperate, grieving customers, she actually does have a spirit companion, a bog body whom Roos has bound to her and named Ruth. Roos is delighted when Agnes, a biracial (Indonesian/Dutch) widow, takes her as a companion and spirits her away to her neglected Gothic mansion in the middle of nowhere. The mansion is otherwise occupied only by Agnes's sister-in-law, Willamine, who is dying of tuberculosis, and has a marvellously bizarre Gothic history. Roos falls hard in love with Agnes, with whom she has a surprising amount in common. But this whole story is being told in retrospect, as a series of interviews Roos is having with a psychiatrist who is trying to determine whether she's mentally fit to stand trial for murder. Something very bad happened at the mansion... ( Read more... )Very enjoyable, very gothic, very atmospheric. I'm excited to read van Veen's other two books. I looked her up to see if she's actually from the Netherlands (yes) and learned that she's one of a set of non-identical triplet sisters! I don't think I've ever read a book by a triplet before. | |
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Once again, I have failed to post anything beyond once a week. Ugh, I suck. Sorry, everyone!
To be fair to me, Ramadan has only just ended (happy Eid to those of you celebrating today). Ramadan has meant several late nights for me, as I've been doing anti-ICE patrols--though one of my groups actually had people patroling in the wee hours of the morning--like, 3:00 am! I wish I were the sort of person who could have done that? I bet the Dispatch calls were fascinating. And, maybe it would have inspired a vampire story or two, who knows?
Part of me will miss this. In particular, I will miss the Night Owls.
The Night Owls (which actually start at the fully normal hour of 8 pm) are an interesting group. It's a group resistance Signal call for anyone up and about until dawn, no matter where they are located. So, I've had people on with me that were coming in from exo-suburbs and even nearby small towns.
The culture of a lot of the Signal calls is that commuters and stationary/foot/bicycle patrolers say pretty quiet and only turn their mics on to do a plate check. This varies from community to community, of course, with some dispatchers encouraging more back and forth or doing round-robin check-ins. It really depends on who your "Guy/Gal/Enby in a Chair" is. There's things specific to specific groups too? My hyper-local community always signs-off with "Have a great night, Fuck ICE" in the same sort of casual tone you might tell a partner "Love ya!" before hanging up. I joke that I can always tell people from my area when they show up on the larger calls because they still do this even when its not the culture of the call? Other dispatchers sound a little thrown to hear folks from my neck of the woods just casually signing off with a happy little swear. There are also cool acronyms that I'm not fully privvy to, like some folks from the other side of the river apparently say: SSFI for Stay Safe, Fuck ICE. I tried to say that today since there are lot of little ears around the mosque during Eid, but my dyslexia was like... UH GO SLOW... so totally outed myself as NOT one of the cool kids, after all. :-)
But the Night Owls are their own special crew. Their chat is actually vetted, but the call is open to anyone commuting, etc., late night. Once daylight savings time hit, my stationary patrols started at 8:30 pm so I joined the Night Owls. The Night Owl folks are just chattier? Largely, I think because it is often the same crew--people who do the late shift UberEats or whatever other driving gigs they might have.... people who are just up all night. They will talk about their favorite energy drinks or talk about the usefulness of jumper cables or sometimes even awkwardly attempt to flirt over Signal voice chat. Ocassionaly, someone will break in with a startled, "Y'all, I just saw the world's biggest rat run across west 7th! And I used to live in Mumbai!" There was a whole discussion that spanned several nights about the ICE agents on Grindr (a gay dating app).
I got invested, you know?
These people became some Real Life version of my own personal soap opera. I am going to admit that I have clearly formed some parasocial relationships with certain code names.
That being said, they were really there for me when I needed it. There was an incident that I haven't blogged about a couple of Wednesdays back where my plate check came back hot, or shall we say VERY COLD, possibly even icy if you get my drift. I was stationary (on foot), alone, and dispatch very kindly asked me if I wanted a drive-by from one of the other commuters in the area. This icy vehicle was also stationary? We had clocked each other? Like, they were parked and the three of us had made eye contact. So, my voice jumped an octave higer than I intended and I was like, "Uh, yeah, I would not hate that, dispatch. Thank you!"
Y'all, within MINUTES rescue arrived.
Rescue was a gender fluid person on bicycle patrol. This fully bearded, beautiful human being rolled up in 10 F/ -12 C degree weather in a skirt and Wicked Witch of the West striped tights. They had a high-powered telephoto lens camera with them and, I kid you not, the sight me--this tiny, fat lesbian on a phone--and this amazing person arriving on a bicycle caused my icy van to decide THE THREAT WAS TOO BIG (which, honestly, was the most ICE-like move they made). They fled. I reported that my sus van was on the move to dispatch and I could hear commuters everywhere leaping into action. I am sure my sus van had a tail before they turned on to the next biggest throughfare.
When I had to sign out, I heard the Night Owls making sure someone would continue to swing by to keep an eye on the mosque. I was so thrown by this experience that I didn't remember to text our contact inside the mosque until I got home, but I only live minutes away, so they got the word out for people to be extra careful that evening, too. I don't know, of course, for sure the folks we chased off were who we were afraid they might be, but I'm just as happy to have freaked out any other potential bad actors, you know? I swear that right now, in the Twin Cities, you do not want to be a "local, independent pharmaceutical entrepreneur" because some commuter has eyes on your business!
So, I think this is why I feel kind of connected. Like, these are my comrades in arms (or by phone, as in the case of the Minnesota Resistance).
Happy Eid, but good-bye my dear Night Owls! SSFI*!
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I'll still be doing rapid-response work, but probably no longer at night. | |
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Today it's somewhat quieter even though the girls are still all here. They are keeping themselves occupied up in their rooms more than hanging out in my basement. Eden and Aria have asked me to walk them to the pond and I said I would go after lunch, but now it's after lunch and they are off doing something else. I'm sure they'll come down soon enough and beg me to go.
Our weather is on a warming trend so I went for a good walk this morning. There are still not really any visible signs of spring although I can hear the birds getting busy when I'm out walking. It's a bit surprising to me how much later spring occurs here than it did in my old home; being a few degrees further north seems to make a big difference.
I am working on the final block for the granny square blanket I started at the beginning of the year (I think - I don't actually remember exactly when I started it), so now I have to decide how to join the blocks. The blocks are green, burgundy, and white, and I'm planning to join them with the white because I think it makes a nice contrast.
I've also got some cream yarn which I wanted to use in this blanket but it turned out to be the wrong gauge (it was too thin - the square I made was smaller than the squares in the other colours) so now I want to use it to make a smaller, baby-size, blanket in a nice lacy pattern. It's a lovely soft drapey yarn. | |
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https://www.tiktok.com/@duckprintspress/video/7619369329506684190?_r=1&_t=ZP-94qnI54ltjq (video ID: a white person with short reddish hair and gold-rimmed glasses speaks while sitting in front of a bookcase. /end ID) Transcript: Question today is – why did you (me) get into doing this specifically? Which is to say, running an indie press focused on publishing the original work of fanfiction authors? So, when I started doing my own original fiction writing and publishing, I had to learn a huge number of skills to self publish. And it seemed really wasteful and counterproductive to learn all of those skills only for myself and to note share. It’s like every single self-published author has to reinvent the wheel in a lot of ways and that seemed really silly to me. And the same time, I was getting into writing fanfiction as a sort of tension release and I was meeting all these really awesome, amazing people who, for various reasons, wanted to publish their original fiction, but found that the barriers to doing so were too high. Either they weren’t enough of a jack-of-all-trades to learn the skills, or didn’t want to learn the skills involved in self publishing, or they didn’t want to market, often because of privacy concerns. You know, there’s the idea that, you know, you have to be your own marketing department to publish a book. Well, there’s a lot of reasons people can’t do that, quite aside from not wanting to do it. There are reasons they can’t do it, especially when we’re talking about queer authors and queer fiction. A lot of people have challenges that make it difficult to stick with a specific schedule and meet deadlines – including me, I have a lot of those challenges. Such as physical disabilities (which I don’t have, but many of the authors I work with do – and artists). Mental disabilities, mental neurodivergence, mental illnesses, like, for me, I have depression. And of course, also, life commitments. Many people are caring for elderly family members, or caring for disabled family members, or caring for children, or doing multiple of those. I know I have two children, and I also – my father also lives with us. So, there’s – you know, the more complicated someone’s life is, it harder it can be to go in a traditional publishing, but that doesn’t mean that our life dreams of publishing original work have gone away. And so I wanted to make this because I’ve met all these amazing, really skilled people, and I wanted to help us all accomplish our dreams. Including my own, which has also always been to be a published author. And, you know – we’re – we’re doing it, and that’s really really exciting. So if you have any questions for the owner of an indie press, I own Duck Prints Press, queer fiction, queer creators. Everybody was originally a fan creator. Feel free to hit me up with questions! Bye. | |
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 In the Northern Hemisphere, spring is just around the corner: bears awake from their naps, birds return from the long travel, trees regain their leaves…and we’re celebrating Gardening, Nature, and Ecology Books Month (I swear we do not just make these events up for our lists)! We asked our contributors for queer books that focus on nature, whether they’re about living in harmony with it or surviving in the wake of environmental disasters. This resulted in a list of 9 books and one academic article. The contributors to the list are: Shannon, hullosweetpea, Rhosyn Goodfellow, Nina Waters, Rascal Hartley, Puck, and an anonymous contributor.
Toxic Summer by Derek Charm Best friends Ben and Leo are ready to celebrate the summer after graduation by patrolling the beaches of idyllic seaside town Port Dorian as lifeguards—allowing them to also check out the hottest hunks and snag invites to the best parties, of course. But they arrive to find that a mysterious toxic spill has turned the water unswimmable and littered the shore with rotting fish carcasses. Their jobs become beach cleanup and the hunks are nowhere to be seen—like hermit crabs. When they save a local historian with suspiciously glowing eyes from the water, and tentacled monsters begin snatching people in the night, Ben and Leo have to team up with the only other teens in town to uncover the cause of the spill, save their new friends and family, and try to get this sexy summer back on track before it’s too late.
Hurricane Diane by Madeleine George Meet Diane, a permaculture gardener dripping with butch charm. She’s got supernatural abilities owing to her true identity–the Greek god Dionysus–and she’s returned to the modern world to gather mortal followers and restore the Earth to its natural state. Where better to begin than with four housewives in a suburban New Jersey cul-de-sac? In this Obie-winning comedy with a twist, Pulitzer Prize finalist Madeleine George pens a hilarious evisceration of the blind eye we all turn to climate change and the bacchanalian catharsis that awaits us, even in our own backyards.
Poison Ivy: Thorns by Kody Keplinger There’s something unusual about Pamela Isley—the girl who hides behind her bright red hair. The girl who won’t let anyone inside to see what’s lurking behind the curtains. The girl who goes to extreme lengths to care for a few plants. Pamela Isley doesn’t trust other people, especially men. They always want something from her. Something she’s not willing to give. When cute goth girl Alice Oh comes into Pamela’s life after an accident at the local park, she makes her feel like pulling back the curtains and letting the sunshine in. But there are dark secrets deep within the Isley house. Secrets Pamela’s father has warned must remain hidden. Secrets that could turn deadly and destroy the one person who ever cared about Pamela, or as her mom preferred to call her…Ivy. Will Pamela open herself up to the possibilities of love, or will she forever be transformed by the thorny vines of revenge?
Fieldwork: A Forager’s Memoir by Iliana Regan On her family’s farm in rural Indiana, Regan was the beloved youngest in a family with three much older sisters. From a very early age, her relationship with her mother and father was shaped by her childhood identification as a boy. Her father treated her like the son he never had, and together they foraged for mushrooms, berries, herbs, and other wild food in the surrounding countryside—especially her grandfather’s nearby farm, where they also fished in its pond and young Iliana explored the accumulated family treasures stored in its dusty barn. Her father would share stories of his own grandmother, Busia, who’d helped run a family inn while growing up in eastern Europe, from which she imported her own wild legends of her native forests, before settling in Gary, Indiana, and opening Jennie’s Café, a restaurant that fed generations of local steelworkers. He also shared with Iliana a steady supply of sharp knives and—as she got older—guns. Iliana’s mother had family stories as well—not only of her own years marrying young, raising headstrong girls, and cooking at Jennie’s, but also of her father, Wayne, who spent much of his boyhood hunting with the men of his family in the frozen reaches of rural Canada. The stories from this side of Regan’s family are darker, riven with alcoholism and domestic strife too often expressed in the harm, physical and otherwise, perpetrated by men—harm men do to women and families, and harm men do to the entire landscapes they occupy. As Regan explores the ancient landscape of Michigan’s boreal forest, her stories of the land, its creatures, and its dazzling profusion of plant and vegetable life are interspersed with her and Anna’s efforts to make a home and a business of an inn that’s suddenly, as of their first full season there in 2020, empty of guests due to the COVID-19 pandemic. She discovers where the wild blueberry bushes bear tiny fruit, where to gather wood sorrel, and where and when the land’s different mushroom species appear—even as surrounding parcels of land are suddenly and violently decimated by logging crews that obliterate plant life and drive away the area’s birds. Along the way she struggles not only with the threat of COVID, but also with her personal and familial legacies of addiction, violence, fear, and obsession—all while she tries to conceive a child that she and her immune-compromised wife hope to raise in their new home.
Devotions: The Selected Poems of Mary Oliver by Mary Oliver Throughout her celebrated career, Mary Oliver has touched countless readers with her brilliantly crafted verse, expounding on her love for the physical world and the powerful bonds between all living things. Identified as “far and away, this country’s best selling poet” by Dwight Garner, she now returns with a stunning and definitive collection of her writing from the last fifty years. Carefully curated, these 200 plus poems feature Oliver’s work from her very first book of poetry, No Voyage and Other Poems, published in 1963 at the age of 28, through her most recent collection, Felicity, published in 2015. This timeless volume, arranged by Oliver herself, showcases the beloved poet at her edifying best. Within these pages, she provides us with an extraordinary and invaluable collection of her passionate, perceptive, and much-treasured observations of the natural world.
What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher When Alex Easton, a retired soldier, receives word that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying, they race to the ancestral home of the Ushers in the remote countryside of Ruritania. What they find there is a nightmare of fungal growths and possessed wildlife, surrounding a dark, pulsing lake. Madeline sleepwalks and speaks in strange voices at night, and her brother Roderick is consumed with a mysterious malady of the nerves. Aided by a redoubtable British mycologist and a baffled American doctor, Alex must unravel the secret of the House of Usher before it consumes them all.
World’s End Blue Bird by Anji Seina After a meteor hits Earth, Tokyo is saved by a powerful sorcerer. Years later, the city ends up split between the haves and have-nots — with the sorcerer’s descendants ruling over them all. Ray, a handyman from the slums, will take on any job for the right price. One day, he meets Guang, an extraordinarily pretty, secretive, and arrogant man from upper society. After spending a night together, Ray finds himself protecting Guang, which may cause him more trouble than the money is worth…
A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers It’s been centuries since the robots of Panga gained self-awareness and laid down their tools; centuries since they wandered, en masse, into the wilderness, never to be seen again; centuries since they faded into myth and urban legend. One day, the life of a tea monk is upended by the arrival of a robot, there to honor the old promise of checking in. The robot cannot go back until the question of “what do people need?” is answered. But the answer to that question depends on who you ask, and how. They’re going to need to ask it a lot.
A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys On a warm March night in 2083, Judy Wallach-Stevens wakes to a warning of unknown pollutants in the Chesapeake Bay. She heads out to check what she expects to be a false alarm—and stumbles upon the first alien visitors to Earth. These aliens have crossed the galaxy to save humanity, convinced that the people of Earth must leave their ecologically-ravaged planet behind and join them among the stars. And if humanity doesn’t agree, they may need to be saved by force. But the watershed networks that rose up to save the planet from corporate devastation aren’t ready to give up on Earth. Decades ago, they reorganized humanity around the hope of keeping the world liveable. By sharing the burden of decision-making, they’ve started to heal our wounded planet. Now corporations, nation-states, and networks all vie to represent humanity to these powerful new beings, and if anyone accepts the aliens’ offer, Earth may be lost. With everyone’s eyes turned skyward, the future hinges on Judy’s effort to create understanding, both within and beyond her own species.
Queer Theory for Lichens by David Griffiths (academic article) An article published in The Quarterly Review of Biology in December 2012 ended with the sentence: “We are all lichens.” The article discusses symbiosis in organisms such as lichens as well as in humans, to argue that humans cannot be thought of as individuals by any biological criteria. In this article I follow this argument and offer a brief naturalcultural history of lichens to illustrate their argument and the work of biologist Lynn Margulis on symbiogenesis. Following this, I ask: if we have never been human – if we are all composites like lichens – then what does this mean for sexuality? I argue that lichens and other symbioses can open up a queer ecological perspective that can help counter the privileging of heteronormativity and sexual reproduction, and that this has consequences for both science and society.
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And every one of those recs is better than the books. Well, I've shared my opinion on the books, the problems and characterization are insufficiently balanced for dual viewpoints. But anyway, that's not what I'm thinking about. What I'm thinking about is Fabian and his generically shitty parents who clearly don't care about him very much. ( Read more... ) | |
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